The bulking debate - with Ella, TNF, and Alan Aragon

All right everybody, welcome to today's episode of the Chris and Paul show. The number one hypertrophy and physiology podcast on the internet. I don't give a damn with anybody says. However today my buddy Chris Birchley is not on because we've had this raging debate that's been going across the bro landscape for a couple of months now about bulking. So I decided, even though Chris and I kind of did a little bit talking on it, that's really not what we like to get into as much as like, you know what, let me bring some good smart people on to kind of discuss some of the things I see going on in these debates where there seems to be this disconnect about what the definitions of certain things are and then what the mechanisms are and how this all actually works, what data we have, what data we don't have. And then the practical application of all of this. So I decided that I would bring in a few people here and then also the way I wanted to do it was to have an extra moderator, which I also brought in as well. So I'm going to let them all introduce themselves, we'll start with the moderator himself. Go ahead and introduce yourself, brosky. Okay everybody, it's Alan Ergon. Boy, I guess the one, the two sentence synopsis of me is, I've been doing this since 1992 and had sort of a three phase career with personal training and then nutritional counseling and then now research and education. And yeah man, I'm an absolute dinosaur and this stuff and I probably brought in the evidence based fitness movement along with other old geysers like Lyle McDonald and Will Brink, Brad Phil. There's a name I haven't heard of. Yeah, we have a lot. And then our nephews and children like Lane Norton got born and they continue to carry the torch. So there we go. All right, well there's my moderator for the day. There's only a few guys I hold in super high esteem as far as like nutritional stuff goes in Alan's one of those guys. So I'm really excited to have him on today. The other person I have on is another one of my guys who I consider one of my very close friends that I have nothing but love and respect for. Joel, introduce yourself, buddy. Hi, I am Joel. Obviously a lot of you guys would know me as TNF because that's what I go by on social media. And I am newer to this landscape as far as being in the public sphere, as far as nutrition, bodybuilding, hypertrophy. But my background is mostly, or I should say it was until the last five, six years mostly in athletic development. So I did a lot of power, explosive development. I was always bringing the science into that category. And then when I found that more and more people wanted to hear about hypertrophy stuff for me, that's when I really started to get involved in that stuff. But the nutrition side to stuff has always fascinated me. So that's one that I was in for quite a bit longer than I was in the hypertrophy sphere. But overall, honestly, I think what's going to end up happening out of this conversation is we're all pretty much going to have the same takeaway. But I'm very curious to see, I'm very curious to see because I'm seeing a lot of people who will misquote me and will misquote you guys. And then it's just, it's become a pretty interesting thing. You didn't misquote that. I never get misquote right. Oh my gosh. I know what you're talking about. They'll tell me that one of you guys said something and I'll be like, I know they didn't know what conversation you're referring to. I think we've watched people try to pin us against you, show them, be like, Paul said this and you're like, no, we didn't. Yeah, I think, I think most mostly what happens is it's, I'm actually made a video on the topic that we're going to be talking about. Probably like, it would have been summer of last year. So before this became like kind of a big topic of conversation where I said, stop bulking unless, and I said, I hate the term bulking. I actually want to prefer to call it a building phase because it really has nothing to do with going, oh, we can get into that all later. But it was like, then people were putting this, this idea forward to me. I'm like, we've already discussed this. So it's going to be interesting to kind of definitely come to an agreement on what it is we're referring to. All right. And then last but definitely not least, the up and coming, a shipster, Ella, Ella, and yeah, that's right. That's what I said. Thanks for being on here. I'm glad to have you. If you guys don't know, she goes this scientific snitch. You've blown up a lot the last few months, got on, debated people, taken a lot of heat. I'm not going to say that it's fun to watch everybody else get trolled because people always say like, pause an A hole. And like, most of the time is everybody else just coming at me and I just don't put up with it. And you have it's kind of a similar attitude. But go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself too. So as a thank you for having me on first and foremost. And as as you said, most of you guys are going to know me as scientific snitch, but my name's well, my nickname is Ella. I have a bachelor's in clinical physiology from the University of Michigan. Currently, hopefully, fingers crossed, going to get accepted to the University of Iowa's Physiology program. I'm very new to the industry. I love research with all my heart. Currently working in a cardiology lab. I have a past with powerlifting until I slip my rib. And now I've just been doing a lot of, I guess, looking into hypertrophy and stirring up a lot of drama and too much drama. But anyways, I'm looking forward to this conversation and I'm actually most looking forward to the middle ground that I know we're going to find because as Joel said, a lot of people misquote us and it makes it look like we're against each other when we're really not and we're all the same age. So. All right. So let's get right into it. I sent Alan a list of questions that that I've seen a lot going back and forth where people just talking over each other and their definitions are either wrong or I'll face I'm not talking about you guys. I'm talking about either people say stuff. They've misquoted you Joel. I've seen that or people have argued with you Ella. And then they're just bros talking about a bunch of nonsense. So let's kick this off. Alan, you got the list of questions. Alan's going to run as moderator right now for this part so we can get these definitions out of the way. So we can't have some bro come on and be like, well, that was just these guys. So I've literally got one of the world renowned experts on here to talk about these things. So Alan, get your show ready. Okay. So. The first question is how do you define total daily energy expenditure? How do you define TDE? And I guess some in the spirit of being systematic will go alphabetical. Ella, how would you define TDE? So I would define TDE as the culmination of everything that you expend throughout the day in terms of energy wise. So there's two primary constituents from what I've read is the resting energy expenditure and then physical activity energy expenditure. And we can define the physical activity part as exercise activity thermogenesis. I've seen the thermocepfect of food being thrown into that, but I guess it, I mean, I'm not sure if that can be considered physical activity considering you're just digesting, but it's I've seen it thrown into that category and non exercise activity thermogenesis. So fidgeting and twitching. And then into terms of the resting energy expenditure is just how much you spend in energy wise for each tissue. And that includes basal metabolic rate and the resting energy expenditures of such tissues like muscle, so protein turnovers, muscle protein synthesis, things just everything that your body does when you're resting. Okay. Joel, any any objections to that or did she cover it or did you want to add anything to that? Ella didn't cover? Not yet. I know. I know. Where the conversation is going. So as of now, yes, we would be on the same fundamental baseline. All right. Great. Yeah. Diet and boost thermogenesis. That's like, it's kind of a minor part of the whole picture, but it's probably more accurate to throw it into the resting energy expenditure side. But yeah, whoever wants to disagree is that's fine with me. If you've heard it thrown into the physical activity side, Ella, and that's fine. It's just kind of too small to matter in regular mixed diets, but it certainly is a part of the equation. So all right. We'll move on to the next one. Ella, how would you define maintenance calories? And I realize that these questions are open ended and provocative. Thank you very much Paul. How would you define maintenance calories? I would define maintenance calories as replacing the calories burned in total daily energy expenditure, but with a variance. So obviously, people aren't going to get exactly their total daily energy expenditure. There's a margin of error with the FDA for nutrition labels. So I would argue that it's the total daily energy expenditure with like a margin of error. So when we're talking about what maintenance calories it look like from just an outcome standpoint, it would be no net extreme changes to your body fat because body fat is the energy storage tissue, extra energy that your body is not using for metabolic processes and things like that in your total daily energy expenditure are added on as extra fat tissue. And then those when you don't consume enough, then you dip into your body fat stores. So I would say just relatively maintaining around the same body fat percentage and that pretty much constitutes what I would define it as. Cool. I agree. Thanks for that. Joel, do you have any objections to that or anything that you if you want to add or any sort of twists and turns and contacts and stuff? Yeah, so I've always had at least for myself a kind of a different definition of overall maintenance and it's been more so towards the usable energy side of things. So if we're taking a look at it from a physics standpoint, for example, if you take a look at your energy source that you have readily available to you, your fat stores, you have your muscle stores, and you can use for me either. Right. So what we when we put people into super catabolic deficits, then what happens is they often lose muscle. Obviously if they can keep some stimulus on the muscle, they can keep the majority of it, but it does seem to be that we can experience more catabolism if we go to extreme. So what I would say is muscle is actually a usable energy source, same thing as fat. So my overall definition of maintenance has always been eating at a level that allows you to keep the same overall amount of usable energy on the body. So you could change which usable source is more or less, but as far as your overall maintenance goes, it would be if you were to add up the total calories from your overall protein stores, if you were to add up the overall total calories from your fat stores, as long as those two numbers relative to each other, let's say for example, you had 10,000 calories worth of fat stores on your body, you had 10,000 calories worth of actual contractile tissue. Then what would happen is as long as that overall balance stayed the same, based on how you're eating. So if the muscle goes up, the fat must come down. If the fat goes up, the muscle must come down in order for the overall net amount to stay the same. So it's more of a thermodynamics perspective of it than it is a system's function standpoint. Okay, great. I think you both brought some good points to the table. I think that Ella did a great job in pointing out this margin of variance where maintenance can be looked at as a dynamic state, maybe fluctuating one to three percent across the course of the year, even in somebody who's maintaining it. And you brought the perspective of different body composition components and how that affects the definition of maintenance, which is really cool. So both of you brought really great points there. Okay, so next question and we'll go with Ella. What metabolic processes are included in TDE? You all already covered that in that question. So we'll move on to the fourth question, which is how many calories does it take to synthesize a gram of new functional protein? Man, this question, Paul, you scoundrel. I'm throwing it out there and I did read this. I did read this when you sent this to me and I had the same reaction all day. Man, Paul's a scoundrel. So I want to, I guess, preface or interject by saying that, look, it's okay to say that we don't know but perhaps this is what it might get. So I just want to set it up in that way. So how many calories, at least maybe theoretically, does it take to synthesize a gram of new functional protein? And are, do we have any literature that you can base the speculation on? So go for Ella. This is the first time I'm going to talk real quick. We have an old biology book with some numbers and then I broke down some of the numbers from that interestingly enough. Ella took like a week to go through a bunch of data to figure out if she could figure that as equation. We came out with the exact same number. It was a pretty cool conversation. And because you said, I think we both agreed it was like 18 calories, right? Ella. Yeah. And when I did the numbers they had in the old biology book and Ella decided to go off and use some cross-sectional area stuff and do some mathematical, magic stuff. She's like, I think it's 18 calories. I'm like, you're, did you just say 18 calories? And she's like, yeah. And I'm like, there's an old book that has some biology that figured out, because a pound of muscles about contains about 600 calories. But to actually synthesize the gram of new gram of functional protein, they did some stuff to look at that and figured out it was like so many per pound. And I was like, that's about 18 calories per gram. That was the same figure that Ella came out with. So theoretically, this is my where I would reject theoretically. He would not be very efficient for the body to use a lot of calories to add a small amount of new functional proteins. I don't think that makes much sense to me. Most of the things the body does, it does very efficiently. It doesn't, it doesn't use a lot of energy to do it. That would make sense for us to stay alive in the fact that from the time that we're little and we're growing, until we get, you know, past, we get in a puberty and continue to grow and grow and grow. It doesn't make sense to me that it would take a lot of calories to synthesize just a gram of new functional protein. So that's where I'll hand it off to Ella from there. What do you think Ella? Yeah. So according to what I was kind of looking into, I took a bunch of these studies from advanced lefters that were looking at high muscle hypertrophy and they were measuring how much muscle grew in cross-sectional area. So I took the difference from week one to week eight and I calculated what the difference was and then using the average muscle length, I went to cross-sectional area to, I guess, volume and calculated how much the muscle itself grew on average. Then multiplied that by the number of different muscles that we theoretically quote unquote train, obviously none of this is going to be 100% accurate. And then I did some digging into how much, how many calories does it take to synthesize protein in general? It was really variable. It went from anywhere between seven calories to, there was another study that was saying that it was like 200 or more calories for just synthesizing muscle. But something that I noticed with the higher end of things is they were always talking about higher, like a lot of muscle, like a pound of muscle takes how x, y, z calories and that number would be really, really high. And kind of touching on what Paul said, it makes, it doesn't make a lot of sense, just physiologically for our bodies to use an extreme amount of energy to synthesize just one gram of muscle tissue. And considering we're not growing exponentially from training session to training session, it wouldn't make much sense that we're stimulating more than maybe a couple grams, maybe a little bit more than that, probably a little more, but we don't really have the data. And so I guess this all goes back to its all speculation, but likely it's not as expensive as people make it out to be since we aren't changing so incredibly drastically. Okay. Okay. Joel, yeah, I have no any disagreements with that. Not at all. I think it's one of those things that's been obfuscated a lot by people who don't really understand the way that their body's working. And like, I mean, I coach people through this all the time. So I'll have people who are newbies to gear cycles. I'll have people who have never touched a weight before and they're like, I even had a personal example myself when I detrained for a long period of time. And then I was very, very accurate about tracking my calories and then coming back building that muscle, it took next to nothing, right? So it wasn't like I needed to consume 4,000 calories in order to put that muscle on super fast or anything like that. Like it's not the actual metabolic expense to make it happen is not nearly as high as people think. Okay. Okay. So good points brought by both of you, valid points. I admire Ella's sheer tenacity and endurance in crunching the numbers that she did. I go into those phases myself and then a whole day goes by and I go, wow, how on earth and why did I just do that? It's so, so I told her I can relate to that. And yeah, there's things to be discussed about how this might translate practically, which we'll eventually get to, but yeah, it looks like we can move on to the next question since you both are pretty much on the same page with that. Okay. So this is an interesting question, Paul, and let me know if I'm actually asking it correctly. So I'm just going to verbatim it. What is the mechanism that a surplus of calories would have to show in order for it to be more beneficial than maintenance for muscle growth? So the way that I interpret that, question is what given if we just take it for granted that a caloric surplus is necessary for maximal rates of muscle growth, then what is the mechanism or what mechanisms underpin that caloric surplus? So we're kind of there's sort of a built-in assumption in that question that a caloric surplus if it's optimal for maximizing rates of muscle growth, then what's the mechanism or mechanisms? Am I getting that question right? What would a surplus have to show mechanistically to show that it's more beneficial than eating at maintenance for maximizing growth? Okay, that's different than the question that I'm asking then. Okay, so we want to go ahead and repeat that one and launch it at our surplus. For a surplus, to be more beneficial than maintenance, mechanistically what would a surplus of calories have to show to prove that it's maximizing the rate of muscle growth compared to eating at maintenance calories? All right, we can we'll split this time, Joe. Joe, what do you think? Okay, so nothing, it has nothing to do with the surplus, right? And so what the thing is the problem that a lot of people are running into when they try to quote me back and when they try to quote you guys back is really it just comes down to our definitions of what a surplus is. So I could be wrong on this, but from what I've taken from Ella and yourself, as far as what you guys consider to be maintenance, it's maintaining in a general sense, maintaining body fat levels, right? Well, well muscle is being accreted. Is that is that a safe assumption to say that that is part of maintenance in your definition? I don't want to misrepresent at all. I would say that is part of it. I would say like maintaining relative body fat because if you are growing your muscle mass, your body fat and you kept body fat exactly the same like gram for gram, as you grow muscle, then your body fat percentage will technically start going down because you would be growing muscle while keeping the exact number of body fat. So I would just say like replacing the amount of body fat that you had prior, keeping it the relative the same. So by your definition, there would be no inherent benefit to a surplus at all. You do not need to gain additional body fat percentage in order to continue building muscle. This is actually a very good question because one of the things that gets thrown around bro-wise all over is that you have to gain body fat in order to maximize muscle growth. So I'll talk directly to that point. So technically speaking, that would be correct. But what we're actually referring to is body fat percentage. So when you say you don't need to gain body fat in order to keep growing muscle, definitionally that couldn't be true. It wouldn't be true because of the fact that you would have to continue gaining body fat in order to keep the body fat percentage the same. So if you were to put on 20 pounds of muscle and you were to keep your relative body fat percentage the same throughout that course of time, you would quite by definition necessarily have to gain body fat through that process. Now that doesn't mean that you're gaining insane amounts of body fat. That doesn't mean that you're gaining like you're gaining at like half a pound a week or one pound with you know those typical bulking numbers. I think those are stupid. Like those are hidey-eyed. When you start saying okay you have to gain at this rate a week and that's what's going to allow you to build a muscle, that's dumb because it should be completely dictated off of the amount of protein that you're actually able to accrue. So in the end yes you are gaining body fat but you're not gaining a relative body fat percentage. Now if you didn't gain any body fat let's say we take the extreme end of it. Let's say you're starting at 10% body fat and that's where you hormonally operate at your best. You hormonally operate really well at 10%. You start putting on muscle. If you do not put on body fat to go along with that you will now get to 9.9% body fat, 9.8% body fat, 9.7. If there's no actual body fat accumulation throughout that process your percentage of body fat will actually go down relative to your overall mass. So what happens is yes you by definition do need to continue gaining fat in that circumstance. If you hormonally operate best and you have your best performance add a percentage of body fat that is a little bit higher than that would allow you to go. So in the end you are gaining body fat but you aren't like you wouldn't see it apparently right it wouldn't be like visually speaking oh like you're seeing the body fat accumulate because the more muscle you gain obviously the better you look at the same body fat percentage. So you might even end up actually looking leaner through the process even though your body fat levels are actually going up alongside of it but in order to keep that same relative amount of body fat to bought to muscle you would by definition have to be gaining fat through the process at the same time. You just wouldn't be gaining a relative body fat percent amount. So for me right now I'm around I would say that I'm around like 13 12 13-ish percent body fat feel like I operate pretty well at this point. I don't believe there is any reason for me from this point on to get myself to 14% body fat 15% body fat. I don't view that as giving me any additional gains but what I do view is okay if I do gain muscle obviously it's very slow for me at this point because I'm a little further in my career but if we are starting earlier in my career it'd be like okay yeah I would have to make sure that I gain at least a little bit of fat and try to think about it a little bit more through the process but for at this point it's like I'm putting on muscle so slow that it's like all right we're talking super super slow to maintain the same relative body fat percentage and almost not noticeable so trying to like parse out it down to like okay it's going to be like 13 14 calories isn't is darn near impossible. So I'm going to base far more of what I do off of my gym performance then I'm going to base it off of okay what's my exact surplus but in the end if you're going to maintain relative body fat levels while you're a create while you're actually taking and putting on more muscle mass you would by definition have to gain body fat through that process and the way that I have always defined a surplus and you're completely free to disagree with this is if you are gaining an overall energy amount on the body then that would be a surplus. So if the body fat goes up and the muscle mass goes down but the relative amount of actual calories stored within those tissues stays the same that would be my definition of maintenance calories that's maintenance calories for the system but it's not maintenance calories for your overall biological processes in the sense that you're going to operate just as well at those and that's where we kind of definitionally disagree but in the end our practice way would be the same keep your body fat out of part where you actually operate really well and continue to accrue muscle mass and keep your body fat percentage relatively the same through that process okay it looks to me like Paul wants to say something before we get to Ellis technically Joe didn't answer the question the question was what does a surplus have to show from a neck mechanistic standpoint that is actually if you if you want to go back to what I was saying earlier I did it keeps you in a hormonal positive state that allows you to have your best performance that is the mechanism but if you're not able to have good performance everybody knows when you get down to 5% body fat you're pretty much out of it you're down I'm not talking about I'm not talking about somebody like in single digits for pretend the person is at 10 or 12% already and they start eating in a surplus what is that surplus doing mechanistically to increase the rate of growth that a that maintenance wouldn't the body fat levels are doing the same so it's again it's definitional right you don't you don't have to find having your body what mechanism drives muscle growth what is the mechanism L I think you know what I'm saying don't you what mechanism drives the additional new functional proteins no I know exactly what you're saying I'm saying you can't get that process to work as optimally as possible if you don't maintain those relative body fat percentages where you perform your best and that is that is what I'm referring to so you would have to you would have to lose body fat if your definition is that your body fat goes up at the same time that would be my definition of a surplus and in order to free you to operate your best you need to maintain a certain level of body fat otherwise you actually will not operate your best you won't sleep properly your hormones will be out of whack and that will cause you to not be able to have as good of gym sessions leading to less overall motor unit improvement leading to less actual growth okay we need a we need a response from either you Paul or Ella I'll see if Ella gets a joe was off on this one I've been having so first just to answer the question you would want to see an increased rate of muscle protein synthesis for that surplus to theoretically work however given the understanding that joe defines a surplus slightly different I wanted to ask a question more like a thought experiment if a surplus is where you gain more body fat just overall then how would you end by that I mean like when you're saying like oh yeah you have to add on a relative amount of body fat to the amount of muscle to show you have to remain hormonely healthy and I can agree with that but if you define a surplus as that then what would you define a surplus or sorry what would you define exactly the the process of gaining muscle, but then gaining a super like I don't know the word for it, but more body fat rather than just keeping up with the amount, the rate of muscle gain. So if you define a surplus already is just gaining body fat alongside your muscle, we know that physiologically gaining more body fat than you are muscle or exceeding that rate is going to put you in a different quote unquote metabolic state. There's studies on this as well, so there's one overfeeding study I believe, Hata Moto, Yoichi at all, they looked at this and they saw that there's like an increased rate of leptin synthesis and there's more adipic kinds or proteins associated with the fat itself that were increased. So we know metabolically there's changes when you compare somebody who's just gaining relative to the amount of muscle they're gaining when you're comparing that to somebody who's gaining far more. So that's like the question I would have to that. So what you're asking what's the difference between those two scenarios? It would just be the size of the surplus. So the size of the surplus when I'm talking about this would be by definition incredibly small because of the fact that muscle growth is incredibly slow, then in order for you to keep the same demands going, let's say if you were to able, if you were actually able to calculate out a perfect maintenance, not saying you can, let's say it was 2700, you're averaging that out. If you took and made that surplus into 2700, if you took and you said, I'm going to eat 2718 calories, right? Let's just say something really, really small so that you are doing that gram synthesis that you were talking about. In order for that to happen, that gram synthesis of in order for that to actually happen, you would actually have to take and lose body fat in order to make that happen if you didn't actually go to 2718 calories. So if you'd say that 2700 through that process, what would happen is you would actually start to very, very marginally get leaner at that same point. And then that might start to get you into a spot where you're no longer at the body fat percentage that you wanted to stay at. So you're viewing it from a system standpoint as far as the system operates best at this. And so as long as the system's operating on the same manner as they both go up, then we consider that maintenance. But what I say is, or I should say, the way that I have always defined a surplus has been more from a thermodynamic perspective, where you take a look at a baby growing into an adult, the baby has to actually take an ad tissue onto the body as it grows. I would consider that a surplus. You would just consider that part of the overall function of becoming a larger human being. Alan, do you have anything that you want to clear up between? And then I'll talk about mechanistically what has to happen. Do you have anything you want to clear up? Because I still think there's a little bit of disagreement about what TD or what maintenance is because Ella's kind of defining it one way and Joel's kind of defining it another where Joel's looking at the amount of energy that the body has. And then the amount of calories coming into me, the amount of energy that the body has where Ella's kind of using the TDEE. How do you feel about these two different kind of, they're not huge, but they're different. What do you think? I want to hear you drop your two cents and then I'll better be able to synthesize what's going on. So go for it. This is factually a surplus would have training is the same all this kind of stuff. A surplus has to show that it increases net, mouth, or reproaching synthesis above that what you're getting at maintenance for whatever reason. And there's literally no data on this. So you go in and you train, you do three sets, four sets of whatever. You're going to have a certain degree of elevation of mouth, fibrofructean synthesis. Muscle protein synthesis, I really don't care about it quite as much because I want to know what's going on with my house because that's going to tell us how much repair is going on, how much additional mouth, fibros were going to be adding to the existing tissue. So the amount of calories can all agree there. The amount of calories needed to add just a gram of new functional proteins is probably relatively small. Again, we don't really necessarily have that data. But if we did, I'm going to stand by. I'm going to go ahead and dial in that hill kind of thing that it's going to be relatively few calories to add a gram of new functional proteins. So it's relatively small. You would have to show that a surplus for some reason is increasing my ops, net my ops, even if you're taking a break down, that net my ops is increasing above that that we're getting just on maintenance calories when all things are considered protein intake is the same across both groups. So there has to be some type of surplus coming from, I'll even be nice and say it's coming from carbohydrate intake, which we'll get into later mechanistically. But the surplus has to show that my ops is elevated above just from the surplus itself. Now we can kind of extrapolate data out where they've tried to look at surpluses and protein intake above that of which they were on where they were going from an active state to a resting state or into immobilization studies. And it did nothing to slow the rate of atrophy of muscle loss that occurred. Which tells us that despite the fact that you can down a bunch of loosey and have a, you know, m-torgued spiked up or have muscle protein since it's kicked off, without the stimulus that's happening from the training, we do not keep or we do not add, do myofibral. So nutrition itself, can't do anything to add tissue. You can set it all on a. Yeah, tissue. Yeah. Contract out tissue. When I say tissue, I'm talking about contract, yes, contract out tissue. So nutrition itself can't do anything. Steroids can't. You can take steroids and set it home and add contract out tissue. But nutrition itself can't add contract out tissue, just from the stimulus. So the idea that a surplus is doing something to increase myofibral protein synthesis above that, which a maintenance wouldn't already be doing, is not going to happen. So again, if we're going to be maximizing out the rate of muscle growth, there's a multitude of factors that come to play there. Number one is the training status. If you're untrained and you go into the rate of muscle tissue that you're going to increase going to be incredibly higher than somebody who's well trained like all of us here, and it's a crew in muscle tissue very slowly. So kind of the two ways to look at that is we know if you're a noob and you're overweight and you go start lifting and you can. Alan, we had this conversation years ago, some of those very low. Remember when people, Alan, were going around saying you couldn't eat below BMR and I was kept asking why are people saying, "Member when that was going around years ago, you could not eat below your BMR?" And you're like, "We got studies on people doing 800 calorie a day diets and resistance training and gaining muscle tissue." So we know if you're not trained and you go into your start training, you can basically almost take in very little food and you're going to grow. You're going to grow very fast. Your body is going to use your stored fat because that's what fat is, it's energy to help create those new functional proteins, right? So if you're a well trained person, you're gaining the rate of muscle gain that you're going to get, adding new contractile tissue is going to be so little that you just don't need a lot of calories to come in from that. I see what Joel was saying on the one side is that you would use if you were using some of your stored body fat as energy to create some new contractile tissue that eventually, you know, you're over time, you're getting leaner and leaner and leaner and leaner. That sounds good to me. Let me sign up for that. The thing is, and we'll get to this in the practical standpoint, I think from a practical standpoint, when we're talking, we're just saying mechanistically right now, that is true. From a practical standpoint, I don't think that would actually end up occurring just because of human nature. Okay. So that's what I had to say about the surplus mechanistically. I want to shine a light on a point that Joel made, which was when you're gaining muscle, you're making lean gains, if your body fat mass stayed static while you were gaining lean mass, then your body fat percentage wouldn't progressively get lower and lower and lower while you're gaining lean mass. And that is not necessarily a practical approach or a realistic approach for most people. And so therefore, if you were to maintain body fat percentage and just the same relative portions of body composition in terms of lean mass and fat mass and make gains, like if you were to just be static at 10% body fat, but make lean mass gains, then your fat mass would necessarily have to increase on an absolute basis. And that would require a caloric surplus when all is done. And so I think the easiest way to go about bridging the gap between what each of us is talking about is as far as, and again, I don't want to misreper that anybody. So as far as I'm aware, when Ella defines a surplus, when Paul defines a surplus, it's eating in a way that would actually cause you to gain body fat percentage. And I don't view that as a, like that's not what I view as a surplus, right? So I view surplus more, because when you say it would be necessary to be in a surplus, that's kind of the way that I'm going about things is I'm viewing it from an overall net tissue standpoint. Okay. It's not only as we actually, that's one of the questions we're going to get to. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. All right, go ahead. Go ahead Alan. Get to the next question. Okay, so the next question is, do all calories over maintenance go towards fat gain, regardless of what macronomal dream they are coming from? That's the question. I'll read again. Do all calories over maintenance go towards fat gain? Joe is kind of already on the track, so go ahead, Joe. This is one I'm actually, this is part of the reason why I got so interested in nutrition. Was you guys kind of brought it up earlier? Was the Jose Antonio studies? I find those ones absolutely fascinating. I'm like, I'm like, okay, so we're talking about people who from a, from a, if you were just taking a look at it as a counting calories standpoint, eight far above their maintenance, but somehow weren't gaining additional fat. It's like, I think that's super cool. And I've actually kind of not fully, but partially replicated those experiments with myself. What I did was I was always a person who ate pretty high protein, so like around 200 grams, I decided for a little while myself to just take and bring my protein up to 400 grams, just to see what would happen, right? I kept my calories the exact same. I was at somewhere around like 222,300, so I was in a little bit of a deficit. But then what I did was I brought my protein up to 400 grams, and I kept my calories the exact same. I lost fat so fast, like it was like it significantly accelerated the rate of my fat loss. And even if you were to take and put it as a, just a straight up equation of the thermic effect, I don't think it would have actually bridged that gap. I think that there is something going on there that means that your body has a tougher time converting it into actual usable energy that you can store on your body, than just the thermic effect like people tend to refer to. And I could, that's something I'm willing to be wrong on, but the Jose Antonio studies kind of seem to lean in that direction as well. All right. Hello. How do you feel about that, Ella? Ella, go ahead. I actually agree, and I have a hypothetical theory of hypothesis. My hypothesis? I have a hypothesis about that. So on the base level, we all know here that protein is filled from amino acids, right? So now, amino acids, they can be either, I had a whole class on amino acids. They're unlike to put it simply, there's ketogenic amino acids, and then there's glycolitic amino acids. The glycolitic amino acids are more, they're more, they're going to be turned more so into glucose, which I'm sure it for training and we're using glucose. Then it's probably safe to say that there's going to be, if you are eating at the same exact calories like as you were, more of that is probably going to be going towards just energy and utilization. And then on top of that with the ketogenic amino acids, they're more so on like the fatty acid side of things. So I'm trying to put this into my guess simple words, but it would make sense to me that on top of the thermic effect of food, we've got amino acids that go towards two separate can be converted into two separate macronutrients that it would have a different effect overall, because not only is it going through two steps and takes a lot more energy to actually turn into energy, you're also looking at just literally two different macronutrients that you can get out of it. And then also, there was that one study that was in the metabolic ward that saw like, it was like a peak and then almost basically plateaued off. So it may be even then you're talking about like increased rates of specific peptide hormones or the secretion of them. Like I could see that also being a contributing factor. Okay, so are you talking about Ray and colleagues 10 years ago? Yes. So yeah, so interesting thing and this relates back to Paul's provocative and open-ended question whether all maintenance calories go to Dr. Fat. Braze work is contrasts really interesting with Antonios work. So Braze work involves sedentary, untrained, highly surveilled subjects in the metabolic ward and they hit them with escalating amounts of protein as far as I can. And I'll just read the details because it's really interesting. Okay, so it was an eight week study and there were three levels of protein intake. The low protein was 15% of the diet and then they escalated it to a 30 or a 25%. So there was a low protein at 0.7% grams per kilogram of body weight and this was at 5% of total calories. So that excuse me, 5% of total calories, they compared that with 15% of total calories and then the high end was 25% of total calories. And what happened was, okay, and so the caloric surplus was set at 40% above maintenance requirements. And although all the groups gained net body mass, the composition of the changes varied markedly between the conditions. So the low protein group actually lost lean mass. So they lost 0.7 kilograms of lean mass. Whereas the normal and high protein groups gained 2.87 and 3.98 kilograms of lean mass respectively. So that was the plateau you were talking about statistically anyway. So the two higher protein groups, but the group that gained the most amount of lean mass was the highest level of protein intake, which was in the neighborhood. It was over 3 grams per kilogram of body weight. And so that just kind of circles back to the point that you can take people who aren't even training and feed them different macronutrient compositions and in a surplus and a 40% caloric surplus. But there will be different depositions of lean mass and fat mass. But interestingly, all groups in the braze study, they gained about the same amount of body fat. But they gained varying amounts of lean mass and the low protein group, the 5% of protein from total calorie group actually lost lean mass. And then we have the weird thing about lean mass, right? Lean mass is composed of the water component, the glycogen component, and then the actual protein component. And so it's convenient to conflate muscle tissue with lean mass when we use those terms. But technically they can kind of be different because lean mass is a little bit more of a dynamic type of tissue. But with that said, if I can scoot down another little rabbit hole here, with that said, the components of lean mass, the water component, the glycogen component, they, can contribute either indirectly or directly to how easy or tough it is to gain the protein component of lean mass. So in essence, I don't see this huge conflict of calling lean mass and muscle mass kind of the same thing from a practical and functional perspective. So okay, so let's move on to the next question here. So we've got, this is the final question actually. Would a surplus in a keto diet work the same way as a surplus in a low fat high carbol hydrate diet as far as what we're talking about here? This is a great question, dude. So who wants to take this one? Who wants to tackle it first? So you got identical twins, you know, ones doing 3500 calories in the surplus with a keto diet, ones doing 3500 calories in the surplus with a low fat carbohydrate diet. So I can take a swing at least a little bit of it because I think I know where some of the confusion comes from. So what you'll often have is you'll have people who claim to be on a ketogenic diet, who are building muscle relatively well. And what I find often with those people is they are consuming very, very high levels of protein. Like they call it a ketogenic diet, but really what they mean by ketogenic is they mean high fat, high protein. And so what they're doing is they're consuming somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 grams of protein, right, which is obviously a little bit more than we need in order to stimulate muscle proteins or I should say in order to actually build muscle. And so what I think is happening in some level or another is I think they're actually taking and converting some of that protein into usable carbohydrates. And then what they're doing is they're claiming it's like, oh, the fat is the where I'm getting my energy from and is where I'm actually getting all of this similar stimulus to if I was in the consuming carbohydrates. Sometimes they claim greater, which obviously none of us would agree with. But in the end, I think a lot of these people are actually going through the process of Any other questions? And because of that, what happens is rather than being on an actual ketogenic diet, what they really mean is a no-carb diet. And that's what typically they're referring to, and that's why you can see some of these people building muscle as well as they are, while claiming to be ketogenic. And it's like, is it truly fully ketogenic though, or is it the fact that you are actually taking and converting some of that protein into carbs, and therefore you're actually able to build muscle at least somewhat effectively throughout this process? But Alan, I think that there's a little bit of misunderstanding about gluconeogenesis there, because I do believe that the amount of glucose that you can get in that process is fairly limited. I think it gets overstated sometimes, so you can correct me if I'm wrong. Yeah, but the amount of glucose you can generate from protein is very minuscule. And the percentage is kind of range in the literature that nobody has a definitive number on that, but they're pretty insignificant from a practical standpoint. But I think that the endogenous generation of glycogen can happen pretty well from just lactate as a result of the training. And this is where we see interesting things like the faster study where the keto cyclists are carrying about the same amount of muscle glycogen, as the non-ketocyclus. Because apparently they're really damn good at just endogenously generating glycogen stores. So I think maybe it would be a little bit more towards that pathway than perhaps dietary gluconeogenesis from the other process. Don't you think there's probably some metabolic flexibility, both from an individual variation kind of standpoint that's going on there that's also with the fact that somebody gets like super fat adapted and they're just really fantastic at gluconeogenesis. And they can have that conversion rate. I mean, we see lots of things from an individual standpoint. And then you get some guy, it was like a landsharm shrunk or clear, lack the gas at out at four times the rate of a normal person, for example. And we always have these. And I think that sometimes we end up using those elite level kind of athletes. And we say, well, this happens, or that happens. But the reason why they're in elite level athletes, because they have some type of physiological exception that pretty much the rest of the population does not have. Kind of recent nature. And it's convenient to put to a point to the faster study if you're pro keto guy. But then there's also research you could point to showing that we have quite a few resistance studies. I remember you had brought this one up to start the pot because you like to act like I'm like the potster. Look, you were starting the pot a long time ago before I was ever even a person. The the keto, the keto target group is one of your favorite potsters because you always get and I don't want to hear any of your BS about how you don't, like I said, you don't start the pot and you don't do things to get a rise out of people because we both know that you do and I love it. And it's fine. And I support you. But you had multiple studies that I remember sitting you the mechanism says to why we kept seeing this over and over in the resistance training keto studies as to why they could not gain muscle and keto. Sure, sure. Yeah. So yeah, that you have why wouldn't get you looked over. So if you're training, same thing, 3500 calories in keto, 3500 calories in low fat, higher carb, are the results going to be the same. So before I go, I want to say that the counter to the faster study is is another study whose authors I'm not remembering showing that endurance competitors on the key in the keto group carried about half the muscle glycogen as the competitors who are doing the conventional high carb low fat. So the car of our voting before endurance training to yeah, and it's like it is convenient to point to the faster study, but you can't leave out the other stuff showing about half the glycogen storage in the keto groups. So yeah, I'm not I'm not totally giving the the keto or rather the faster study 100% pass and universal applicability. I just wanted to touch on because Joe was talking about getting into there's another guy that there's a PhD guy that also thought that you could just increase protein up to really high levels and kind of been fit off the gluconeogenesis that's going on there, but my thought has always been, you know, you're going to get some for brain function. So I think a lot of what happens with the gluconeogenesis stuff, you know, one person could be really fantastic at converting a high amount of protein into glucose at a faster rate than another person, but I just I think from the data standpoint, we don't. So I think the amount of protein that I think most people are going to be able to convert into glucose can be relatively low, but anyway, Ella, go ahead and ask you that question. So, what is the versus higher carb, both in a surplus, are they going to gain muscle at the same rate? So, I think the most of the things that I've read, I would have to say no, and I would argue that the high carbohydrate group would probably have a better time with it or high carbohydrate, high protein, if high protein is matched would have an easier time with that. So, I think that is well, skeletal muscle uptakes about, or at least insulin mediated glucose uptake, skeletal muscle is the primary site of that, 80 to 90% based off of the defranzo work. So, I would have to argue that performance wise, the high carbohydrate high protein group, given that the low fat is still meeting like the essential fatty acids and they're nutritionally healthy, I would have to argue the high carbohydrate group might beat out them. Unless we have like genetic phenomes, but that's a whole thing. So, in this sig data, that is really good, that shows there's two problems with low carbohydrate diets, especially when you're in low glycogen stores. This number one, as you might suspect there's a reduction in motor unit recruitment, more than likely your body since it's the fact that I'm kind of low on glycogen. So, you're not able to get as high up on the motor unit recruitment ladder as you normally can if you're kind of functioning with more glycogen in the cells. And the other thing that's the one that I sent Alan over, I found the most interesting is that we have some good data showing that you have a reduction in forced production, something called excitation contract, coupling value that happens when you're in a low carbohydrate when you're in a low glycogen state. Meaning that those fibers at that top end of the motor unit pull also don't even experience mechanical tension. And so, when you have these mechanisms that you understand that are in place on low carbohydrate diets, or you're in a low glycogen state of like training and stuff which keto people are, is that you have two mechanisms that are happening that both reduce motor unit recruitment and reduce mechanical tension at your larger fibers. So, in those surplus, even in the surplus, studies are some of the keto where they've used trained individuals, again, non-training a visual can use the keto and gain muscle. If you're untrained, you can basically go out and eat horse ducy every day if you can tolerate it and train and grow muscle. We know that's going to happen. So, when you train subjects, when they use keto diets, they don't really gain any muscle and they contrast to that against the other ones. So, when you look mechanistically at what's going on there, the reason why I bring this up is because even in a surplus, so it's a surplus of calories, you had interference mechanisms getting in the way of what we need for the accrual of new mouth variables to happen. I remember I sent that over to Ali's like, "Oh, the mechanism, yes, there it is." And then he was able to continue trolling after that. You know, I want to point you guys to the recent position stand that I collaborated on. It's the ketogenic diets position stand by the ISSN. And I'm not sure you guys probably at least peruse that one. International Society of Sports Nutrition positions stand on ketogenic diets. It was published like a less than a year ago. And we have a section on the effect of ketogenic diets on body composition changes. And we, you know, we graphed out the differences between the control groups and the experimental groups. And the section is a really thorough section. And bottom line, through multiple. mechanisms and pathways, the ketogenic groups don't end up performing quite as well, strength-wise or hypertrophy-wise as the high-car groups. And this is especially noticeable when you match protein and total calories. And even in the instances where there's no enclosed statistical significance, there's bottom line differences. Modest says they might be-- I really, I gotta be-- I always hate that word. So, by which there's no statistical significant difference. But then when you graph it out, you're like, bro, but there is. That is. Right, right. There it is. And if we're talking about the small margins and the small fringes and the small differences between, let's say, first, second, or third place, then if there is even a-- this consistent trend towards better performance, greater hypertrophy in the non-ketogenic groups compared to the ketogenic groups, then, you know, bottom line. Hey, look, weekend warriors, soccer dead, soccer moms want to gain some muscle. Love keto, ketoed up, great. But there's kind of levels to this, right? And you have to address the population and the goal first. Okay. Yeah, that's one I've always struggled with is I will show somebody-- I'll show somebody five studies on something. And maybe only one or two of them reach statistical significance. But every single one shows a trend towards a certain direction. I'm like, I'm a bodybuilder here. I'm trying to eke out every single ounce of gains I can if an age is showing a trend consistently, time after time, probably going to go with that one. Oh, yeah. No doubt. And you can even look at what's done, and this is probably more for the practical talk. But you can look at who succeeds when it really counts, right? In competition. And even though these publications are observational, like for example, Andrew Shepel's stuff that he put up in 2018 of the nutritional habits of elite natural bodybuilders who placed in the top five versus those who don't place, then you see some really interesting things with carbohydrate intake, falling in the forward of five grams per kilogram of body weight realm pretty much across the board for these competitors. And so success leaves clues as Jim Rohn is famous for saying. And if you want to kind of make, take the leap and glean what you can from the successful folks at the top tier, none of them are even close to linear ketoing as far as a physique competition goes. There's always that one keto outlier. Yes, yes. I'll see you already know what I was going to say. I'm like, okay, it's one dude who used the keto now that built his muscle mass all using carbohydrate based diets and goes keto, I low keto, I'm jacked and look at me, I eat keto. I'm like, yeah, dude, but you basically just started doing keto like the last two years, and we saw what you looked like to let Joe, you're famous for that. You like to go five dig pictures of a guy from like a year ago and say, but you were doing this a year ago, so you're lying. Yeah. Big of a wish. Do you need to go now? Yeah, I should probably get going. Okay, so just for everybody knows Joe, Joe gave us, he had limited time today, but we appreciate him coming on and it's such a good thing to go because we're getting into the practical standpoint now where I think you'd really have fun. Well, I did want, I wanted to say just one thing before I headed out and then you can rip me apart when I leave. But what I did want to say was when you were asking me is, or when you were pressing on the point of what does a surplus do to actually increase these rates and stuff, I don't think the surplus does that. Okay. Like I just want to make sure that everybody's on the same page there. The only thing is definitionally what I refer to as a surplus allows you to maintain body fat levels that allow you to keep doing these processes. That's the way that I totally got your position on it. Absolutely. And this is the heart that I just want to bring that up is because the bros out there that talk about this, you're after you explain that I'm like, okay, never mind, I understand what Joel is saying. Now, he's saying that if I'm wanting to stay at 10% body fat and I'm gaining mass, I'm and I'm eating in whatever caloric intake I am, I'm simply making sure that I have to add some body fat that I'm replacing. If anybody fat is being used as part of those metabolic processes, I don't have any, I shouldn't say illusions, but there's no sense in which I'm saying you need to go from 12% body fat to 12.5% body fat to 13%. That's not my take. I will. Everybody to hear real clearly what Joel is saying. He's not saying. So when he's saying you have to add fat when you're adding mass, what he's saying is you're replacing any fat that you lost to stay at the same level. I don't think anybody hears your argue with that. When I was getting mechanistically, the bros out there that keep arguing that you have to be in the surplus would have to show me that the surplus is somehow elevating my ops over what we could normally just be getting by eating an adequate amount of protein intake and an adequate amount of carbs so that we don't have any interference mechanisms from a fatigue standpoint. Well, I think the whole myth stems from one very simple thing. A lot of people under eat. And so when people under eat for a long period of time and then they finally start eating enough, they eat enough and more. And then they're like, oh, well, it must have been the surplus. It's like, well, no, you were just, you were sometimes that maintenance, you were sometimes a deficit and you were like, you were hamstringing yourself throughout this process. Before you go, I want to give you this one. Here's my gym, get into the practical application part is this. If you take an advanced guy who's already at what we consider, this is the body fat that I want to be at while I'm in a building phase. I like that term much better than it built in a building phase. In my opinion, it's better for him, thereby pay attention to air on the side of being in a very tiny deficit more often than not. And I will explain why because of the human condition. And here's the practical part because we just went through mechanistically data stuff like that. So the practical part is on the weekends, people go out to eat. They have functions they go to or during the week, if you have people over whatever. So if you're constantly shooting for maybe slightly above maintenance and shooting for a minor surplus, when you have those times where you would I call like calorie clumping where you have like a weekend hour, you go on a vacation or the holidays roll around or whatever, you have longer periods of time where you're actually eating in a much higher surplus than you would normally. So in my opinion, the best way to approach a building phase is to actually shoot for maybe like a tiny deficit because that I think that allows more flexibility within your life each day. And then you keep body fat gains to an absolute minimum during that time. Now somebody will turn around and put words in my mouth like they never do and say Paul said to eat in a deficit all the time. I was like, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying rather than shooting for the tiny surplus, if you're really trying to make sure you're putting on the minimal amount of fat as possible, then shooting for a very tiny deficit might be a better approach for the people who really are like, hey, I don't, I want to make sure I don't put put on any excess body fat. I want to keep it at that 10% or whatever or 12% or whatever that I'm trying to maintain. Because you're going to have those times where here's what happens with most people when they try to do a lean ball. They do a lean ball for three weeks and go, this is really F and hard. I'm just going to eat pizza and hamburgers. Watch the scale is moving so fast that I'm gaining at an exponential rate. And then they just get really fat. And then if you're shooting for a tiny surplus, when I say tiny, I mean, you could be at maintenance or you might even be over a little bit, you just don't know. But if you're kind of shooting for a tiny or I'm sorry, a tiny deficit, then those, when you go out on the weekends, you can have the hamburger and fries or you can have that meal with your significant other or you have a weekend where you're out and you overeat, that allows you a little bit of that what I consider flexibility to not wake up one day when you're six months into your building phase. And you're like, holy crap, I'm really fat now. No. So actually the approach I take with the majority of my clients, the only people that I don't take that approach with are the people that are, you'll look at them and you'll be like, what's wrong with you? Because they struggle to eat. Those are the only people that. I think I think people have been unfair about them. Yeah, I think that's where people have been unfair about this is like when we talk about these things, there's not a one size fits all for every person. So if you get LSC, Ella's not a cause she's like, holy crap. If you get a really skinny guy, none of us are going to say we're going to be like, oh, you didn't make it. So I'm like, guys, you are being argumentative for the sake of it. If when I was a really skinny guy, I stuffed myself all day long as much as I could until I heard. And that was the best thing I could do then because I was underweight. I was really small. So if you brought me a guy that's like 17 years old and he's like 115 pounds, whatever, I'm not going to be like, you list, eat it, maintenance. Come on, guys, we understand how to do this from what really is the most effective and efficient way. And it has, there's an individual component aspect to all of this. What we're talking about, I think often is that we're speaking from a place of where we're living. And it's like, hey, there's no need for me to ever do a bulk again. And people, I've had people say, well, Well, you're being hypocrite now because you balked when you were younger and that's how you put on your mask. Every time I died it back down, I was roughly the same size after I'd gotten to a certain level by the time that I was 18 or 20 years old. And I would balk up really heavy and die back down and I'd be roughly the same size and I would balk up and die back down and be roughly the same size. I'd balk up and die back down and balk up and die back down and balk up the same size. We were talking about Sam Sulaik who was competing today and I said if you go back over the last couple of years of his YouTube channel, Sam got heavier and heavier on his balks and then when he died back down he was roughly the same weight. So there comes a point where it doesn't matter. You're going to have a crude 90 plus percent of the mass you're ever going to have and anything you put on there in terms of fat is just a waste of time. Well, actually, it's been kind of fun because I like proving people wrong. Obviously you guys know that. So what I've been doing over the last little while is I was like, you know what, I'm going to be really, really tight about my calories. I'm going to end my way and it's like everything's just going to be like pinpoint accurate. And at this moment, I've been around like 190 to 191 pounds for probably like three or four months and people are consistently noticing I'm getting leaner. I'm gaining vascularity and stuff like that. It's like if you were to argue that advanced athletes can't build muscle very close to maintenance, I don't know if I can tell you. So guys did they did a really well controlled study or trained people gain. They lost in a deficit. They lost fat and put on size. Now it was small. But the point is is that they did exactly what we talked about. They used some of their storeable storage energy from fat to support the energy needs for new functional proteins. So is it now is that how you're going to maximize your growth? No. You're not going to maximize your growth that way. I think the biggest thing is like these crazy balks we see people do where clearly Ella you have the guy you're always in a fight with somebody every day or this. And the guy just put on tons of fat. Every time he died back down, he's like, well, I put on all this mass after he died it back down. And then Ella shot it over to me and she's like, but this do paint even the same lean this each time he died back down. Did you see that one? Did you say that was the worst thing is hearing them say I lost so much muscle while I was cutting the heat. No, you just. You shouldn't have any. Yeah. I do with that with like guys who haven't been training for a few years and they're like every time I start cutting, I'm just so tiny. I'm like, because you're tiny. It's not there's no you're not like going through muscle loss, bro. You just don't have a lot. And the guys will put on excessive amounts of fat and they'll feel bigger, right? And then they start dieting and they're like, man, I used to hear this all the time. As I hear guys say, they would think when I was in powerlifting, I don't even remember this. And when I was like almost 300 pounds and guys would be like, man, I'm going to diet down and lose like 20 pounds of your rent. And I'd be like, no, you're going to lose like 60 pounds for you to get close to that. And guys would be like depending on where they're carrying body fat or if they're carrying more of that internal body fat. Maybe they kind of look relatively lean. But then they start dieting and then they have to lose like 50, 60, 70 pounds before they got down to being relatively lean. And a lot of guys just are not honest with themselves and looking to mirror and be like, look bro, you're a bust in the size 40 pants right now. I know that you get also confidence about how all your buddies think you are, but you're really just a fat guy at this point. I'll leave on this note, but going off of what you said, I had to give a guy a wake up call the other day because gone through and he'd he built up what he thought was a lot of muscle that was a lot of fat. And like I was just taking a look at things and I said, okay, well, how's your hamstring curl from where it was a year ago? It's like, what do you mean? I'm like, are you moving more, more weight on the hamstring curl? No. Are you moving more weight on the leg extension? No. Like things that are very isolated that you can't really cheat to near the same degree as you can other exercises. And more body and more body stuff. I'm not going to ask on any of them. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to give you a rude wake up call, but you're going to cut back down. You're going to be the same size. It doesn't compute when they're going through the things in their head because the scale is so much higher. Absolutely. Thanks for being on with us brother. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, I appreciate you. We'll have to, well, we'll raise it and do it again when you have more time. 100%. Take care everybody. Nice things as well. All right. So we'll finish up to do the practical stuff. It sucks that Joe can't hear. I think this is the part where Joe was adding even more to it. Yeah. That's a crucial part, man. Yeah. So the part I was like going to get into there from like, like I said, from the practical application standpoint, if you're, if you're, if I'm working with somebody who is a well-trained individual and they're in a building phase, I'm actually going to want to air between potentially more on the side of being in a very minor slight deficit to allow that person to some flexibility just in their life. So they're like, hey, I'm going to go out with my wife or girlfriend or whatever tonight or I've got a trip this weekend or whatever. I'm like, hey, go enjoy yourself. And don't worry about your diet, you know, and do that kind of thing. But then I think some people struggle with that because then they feel like they're constrained all the time. And you should know that is if somebody feels like they have limitations, that's why, you know, the whole flexible diet. Did you, Ellen, did you know Alan was the person who came out with if it fit your macros? No, I did not. He is the guy that invented if it fits your macros. Definitely. It was, it was a guy, it was one of my cronies on bodybuilding.com. But we together used that acronym as sort of a shorthand way to address the questions and news we're asking on the bodybuilding warms when they would say, hey, is it okay for me to have a whole leg versus egg whites? That kind of thing. Oh, that's working. I actually really like it, especially in this day and age because there is so much, like, I get this, I don't know why this has become a thing, but I've been getting dams of people saying, we're replacing the seed oils in our McDonald's with beef talon. Like that's not going to do anything. That's a great topic. That's a funny, that's a funny ass topic. The seed oil thing. Really funny. Alan loves to post about seed oils too. I'm telling you, at first, Alan's like my brother. If I forget Mayor to get, he'll stand in my wedding. That's how much I love him. That's what we're close like that. But I love that he tries to act like he does not love stirring the pot because he's stirring the pot. And he'll tell me in private. He's like, man, I knew it. I've loved, loved, loved, I'm like, I love that. We love that. It's a birds of feather flock together. I was more overt about it like 10 years ago. Oh, two point zero. You don't see me down. I'm settling down, you know? 10 years ago, yeah, you calm down quite a bit. Definitely more diplomatic now. As we get older, we do simmer down a little bit. Me not as much. You used to be like the king of, I'm going to get that chick going. So let's get into the practical side of things we kind of talked about. So for the people who are listening from the practical side of things, Alan, let's first off, let's talk about, I did want to get you to weigh in a little bit. How did you feel about the difference between Ella and Joel's definition? I think it was, it's just really subtle. And just looking at different aspects of physiology for slightly different definitions, like maintenance. For example, you know, yet a third definition of maintenance would be like just energy, energy and energy out being the same with the mass of the human staying the same. I mean, it's like there were different, you know, differences in their definition of maintenance. But I think what is really going to be important is to see whether they have different practical takeaways. So what it's been going around is that maintenance means you're maintaining your body weight. Yeah. Right, right. That's the, that's the mainstream definition. Right. Ella just rolls her eyes because that's the one that she's battling all the time. So if I go and I drink a gallon of water, my, my weights can change. I prefer dealing with maintenance that we're dealing with some type of energy out versus energy and component. And then all of the other aspects that go in line with it. How do you, if I'm going to ask you what is maintenance, how are you going to find it? I would say it's for the most part, maintenance of your fat mass and lean mass. That's, that's, I mean, I prefer kind of that simple, simple definition. And there's obviously there's going to be fluctuations in body water content and stuff like through the day, through the week, through the month. But overall, yeah. So here, so the problem with using a body weight standpoint, it's exactly that is that we were dealing with fat fat mass versus lean mass, the actual amount of weight we're going to weigh day to day. And be as much as five to seven pounds different, like all the day to day basis, all depending on how much I've eaten, how much I drank. So how much I've eaten. move so forth and so on. So I can be 230, 3, 1 day and 242 like the next day. So even my weight has changed. So but the amount of tissue, fat tissue or muscle that I've got from one day to the next day is probably not going to be any different. And then I think it's Joe does describe it the way Ella, she looks at the way Ella describes it and is looking at the the TDE and that you're matching the the calories going out. Calories coming in or matching calories going out and that's meeting that's meeting maintenance. So I think um my biggest thing is that people are paying too much attention to the scale and I don't you don't think you can use the scale to figure out maintenance calories. I think if you split out over a long and a period of time you can get an idea. But day to day, um, um, week to week, uh, month on the month basis, you can get a much better idea. Yeah. Of what's going on. So how do you, how, how do you, if somebody goes out and need to figure out my maintenance calorie intake, how do you figure that out? Well you can do it just a theoretical way where you run their numbers through an equation. That's bits things out theoretically or hypothetically or you can just have them self report what their typical intake is and you can do that in a sort of a lazy way where you do like a 24 hour recall or you can do it the pain in the butt way where you have them write down everything that they eat and have them assure you that they're not going to change their habits, you know, because they're they're writing down everything they eat for one to two weeks. Then you can get an idea. Is this person consuming it over a two thousand three thousand years? It used to be the old way of the seventies. Do you remember that was like the people would say you basically had to track your food intake for two weeks and then, um, if the scale did or did not move, then you kind of figure out from there if you were close to maintenance. But this is, but this is the prerequisite that the person has been maintaining their weight for that their way has been relatively stable. I mean, you can't take somebody who's just haphazardly dieting all the time or just gaining all the time and then have them do that they you have to specifically pick somebody with kind of a run in at least, you know, I want to say three months, three or six months of maintenance scale weight. And you can yeah, this also you have to have really almost very close to the kind of same activity levels each day as well. Like you, you know, like if one day you're spending, you know, two hours, you know, cleaning your house or let's say you work a very physically demanding job, there's a multitude of variables that can come into play that can make that more difficult to kind of fine. So let's get back into Ella. What did you want to say? I had two questions. I wish I had a chance to ask this to Tina or oh my god. So Joel Joel, but there's there's two questions primarily. One, I remember you said that like maintenance for you is no change in lean mass nor body fat. The only thing I kind of feel like I want to push back slightly ever so slightly, not super big differences. But on the lean mass side of things, if training is the number one stimulus of what causes lean mass to grow and lean mass will dip into your own body fat stores and use energy like that. But then on top of that, you know that muscle mass is not necessarily like I know T and F was saying that Jesus roll. I know Joel was saying that muscle can also be used for energy, but it's primarily used for moving and the only time muscle mass does get used for energy or at least based off of what we've seen. And you feel for the correct name of them wrong, but muscle mass is would be used for energy in times of starvation. But physiologically, we don't use muscle mass for just straight up energy when we're in a deficit, which is why we can gain muscle while losing fat in specific circumstances. It's just I I struggle to like if all of the if in total daily energy expenditure were including all metabolic processes and the resting energy expenditure of muscle significantly changes in response to exercise. Wouldn't we be including that in total daily energy expenditure as well? What would Joel say? Who knows? That was not me question because like if we're adding tissue, I get that we're adding tissue, but the resting energy expenditure of muscle also is stimulus, like that's the entire part of like what muscle is is like it's dynamic. It's stimulated by training, which is not stimulated by calories, so to say. That was my point earlier when I was talking mechanistically is that there's there's nothing in calories. We've got to actually quite a few of those studies where we've tried to look at very high protein intake and things like that to see if we can mitigate wasting and muscle loss and there's just nothing that happens. So once the stimulus from training is gone and people don't like this either, but once the stimulus from training is gone, those muscle fibers that were only what we're talking about training, the fibers that were activated and mechanically loaded during training once that stimulus is gone once my ops, which is what we're looking at once that's gone those fibers start to atrophy. Now the rate of atrophy is something that happens different if you're active versus say if you're in the ICU and you're not moving at all or if you're having a mobile is that immobilized limb or something we have different rates of atrophy that we're dealing with. But once you are not moving or active or once that training system because the only time your largest fibers are activated is during resistance training. As far as like them being mechanically loaded, you can if you take off running on a sprint, sure you're going to have high degrees of motor intercrims of their active, but if you don't have a contraction velocity that is predicated on them experiencing high degrees of attention. So if you take five days off from training, Alan, you know this when people were trying to argue some of the atrophy stuff I was talking about, you took like a month off and you're like I turn into Gilligan. And there's no amount of food you could have eaten during that time to save that from happening. And so I think that's a that's I still felt like that's something that people discuss and talk about when I'm like but the stimulus is just from the training. There's nothing in food, losing, amino acids, calories doesn't matter. All of those things are going to be irrelevant in the in the aspect of like can they do anything to increase tissue without the stimulus training they don't that there are supportive calories protein carbs. Those are supportive mechanisms or supportive materials. They're supportive materials to the training in light of that Paul, how do you feel about braze data showing in non training subjects in the in the male and male mass with escalating. I actually support that. So I want to get back to that. So even if you those people would have been eating much higher degrees of protein, then they were eating coming before coming into the metabolic board most likely. They were eating much higher. Uh, certainly the 5% protein group. So the 5% protein. So we still need. So even in the metabolic board, they're still active. Like they're not immobilized or they're not ICU, right? So you still activate and I have to pull this in from the adjuvie data. So when we look at detraining studies, when you look at detraining studies and you look at the rates of atrophy, they happen much slower than they happen and say ICU studies where they've looked at atrophy rates where somebody's literally in the bed and they cannot move. So as long as somebody can really get up and walk around and do stuff and pick something up and whatever and all that kind of stuff, like they I don't know what they were doing all day long in the metabolic board for eight weeks, but they were still moving. So as long as you're still moving, there's a rate of activation that's still happening with all the fibers at the low threshold motor unit pool, right? So they're you're not getting type two fibers that are being activated. So you're so you're considered you're good with the idea that dietary influence can be in play unless you're bed ridden. So the dietary parts in play is you still need to have a certain amount of protein that's coming in to support the retention of the mass that you have, right? So you still have to have those materials coming in. So if they can drop lower than that, then the amount of protein that's going towards just like our daily lives or whatever, it's very late. The people that are taking 5% of protein, they have very low protein index, right? So they can't even support the amount of activity that they're doing that still causes either like the retention of growth, you know, at those. So they're still they're losing some tissue. So this is what I'll give you. This is what I'll give you on this. Because they were all put out of 40% Chloric surplus. And the 15% of total calories from protein group and the 25% of total calories from protein group within that context. So we're looking at like two ish grams per kilogram of body weight and three grams of kilogram of three grams per kilogram of body weight in the high. Good and grams and pounds for me. I'm metric. Yeah, yeah. So roughly a gram per pound and then about a gram 1.4 per pound. And both of those groups gained some heat tissue didn't they? Some lean mass. Yes. Yes. So what I'll give you is that, okay, they didn't necessarily pick apart what that lean mass was made up at 5% what was it? At 5% they dropped 0.7 kilogram. So a little over a pound of lean mass. So what was the protein intake? It was, let me, let me, I actually have that. I also remember them also saying that they gains the equal like almost it was they gain the same amount of weight. They gain their weight gain was the same, wasn't it? And body fat. Yeah. The low protein group consumed 0.7 grams per kilogram of body weight. So a little lower than the RDA of protein and they lost 0.7 kilos of protein. 0.7 grams per pound. Yeah, that was the low protein group. That's really odd because then we just had that study that came out six months ago or so. They said 0.7 was enough to support. Do you remember that? You'd have to link it. You'd have to link it in deep. Anyway, so L is something else. Yeah, it is because L is something I was going into there. If I remember right, they all gain the same amount of weight, the same amount of body fat. So yeah, no, they gain the same amount of body fat each or that. Oddly, the 15% protein and 25% protein groups, which was the, you know, the one gram per pound. 1.5 ish grams per pound groups. They both gain more lean body mass. That was pretty easy. For me, when I look at that is like more than most people are not eating a gram of protein per pound of body weight. Like they, so you bring them in and then they're just doing normal daily activities and then they have more materials to supply for some of that growth. And I think that's why most of the studies did it have an internet upcoming back and saying, you know, a gram, a gram and protein per pound of body weight to support muscle growth. So I'm not taking away from the fact that you have to have enough protein, adequate amount of protein for the raw materials to support growth maximally. What I've always said is that the amount of the calories are plus. And I've always said you got to have the amount and adequate amount of protein to meet the demands for repair and regeneration. And then you have to make sure your carbs are high enough that you don't have interference mechanisms so that you don't have a reduction of motor inter-recruitment or you don't have a reduction in mechanical tension. So those are kind of the three things that I was putting together when I kind of arrived at this. I was like, well, if you, if you have maintenance calories and then you're getting that one gram of protein per pound of body weight and then you're kind of keeping fat to a minimum, we didn't even get around to that because you and I think we think similar about fat intake is that it's a little bit overstated at times. I think we've talked about that is the amount of fat that you need coming in. I think often gets a bit overstated in this hole. I've got to optimize hormonal function. It is so overstated. I feel like it's a lot of people who they'll look at the cholesterol studies and they'll think that it's making increasing testosterone. But when you're looking at the actual study that they drew from, from what I remember, from what I remember them listing out was, oh shoot, actually. You know what? I just lost my turn of thought. Never mind that point. But yeah, no, there was this one study that was like, it was low fat and it was like high vitamin D and they were basically replaced. They maintains the amount of fat that they would need and then also supplemented with the fat soluble hormones that typically come alongside like the fatty foods that people consume. And there was no change in their hormonal health. Alan, how do you feel about the fat intake? I remember you and I had this conversation one time and I'm like, if you're trying to get peeled, man, get you just get your fat intake as low as possible. You're not trying to optimize hormones during that time. If you're literally trying to get peeled, just pull as much fat out of the diet as possible and you're like, yeah, don't, this is not like if you're trying to step on staging, get as least shredded as possible, like you just pull fat out as much as you can. Yeah, no doubt. And that is apparent in Chappelle's data. He showed some low, low, low fat intakes. I could actually a little bit like that. Do you not feel like that? We've had most of these conversations. We've had so many over the years. Do you not feel like there's a little bit of fear mongering that goes on with lower fat intakes at times? There is. There definitely is. But I think that the goals, the goals differ. The context of getting as much fat off as possible. Getting as much fat off? Well, yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, they're pushing the limits of that. Yeah, you know, in fact, I think it'll be productive for me to pull up Chappelle's data real quick. So you guys go ahead, Ella, go ahead and flow for like a minute straight. I'm going to make sure I get Andrew Chappelle's data. I mean, I also, the other question that I feel like didn't get answered from the whole, the Jolz conversation, which I really wish to get answered was the difference between gaining enough body fat that you're kind of equating to the amount of muscle you're growing versus gaining an extreme amount of body fat because that's like saying, okay, I'm in a surplus. But now if I gain too much body fat, I'm in a super surplus. That's super. And I'm like, it's so when I did, I'll tell you this that I don't want to speak for Jol, but when I went out, we have some definitely some some differences when I went out and did the podcast out in Houston that the ECO vision had me out for one of the things I said that man, I don't know if you ever heard this interview when I said this man, people were so mad. And I said, and I think Jol might have moved a little bit on his stance since then, but I said, if you are in a gaining phase, I said, I don't think as a guy, you need to be over 12% body fat. I was like, so one of the things I went back and looked at all the data, we have this collection of data from the 1940s during World War II, and I know things have changed, but they've changed for different reasons. We don't have to get in all that. And like the average guy was like five foot nine, famous today, and he was about 140 something pounds. So you can imagine they were not very fat. And then obesity was not actually an issue until the 1950s. So he was kind of a Paul that I was like telling guys, if you are in a gaining phase, you don't need to get more than 12 or 13% body fat. That in my opinion, if you're a guy that's claiming to be athletic, lifts, does cardio, has an intelligent nutritional approach, then 12 or 13% in my opinion is probably about the upper limit. And people were so mad. I'm like, okay, that's cool. So tell me what extra body fat on your body does for helping to increase muscle mass. Okay guys, I found that the figures I was looking for for fat intake. Hold on a minute, hold on a minute, hold on a minute, we'll roll if you're not listening to this and you can add into this and then we'll get back to it. So I do have like this whole sense of like of cosmic aura, just wash over her with something. I don't know. All right, go for it. So there are so many guys and I asked them this question, I'm like, what is having more body fat on your body above 12 or 13% what is it doing? They'll always come back and say this. They'll say like, well, I can when I gain more weight, I lift more weight. So they clearly have more muscle and that drives me crazy. I'm like, okay. So if I start doing partial ranges of motion, I can suddenly lift more weight. So should I just use partial ranges of motion on my lift because they allow the greatest amount of weight to be lifted? So if I gain weight a bunch of fat and you can anybody can try this if you're listening and you want to do this, eat as much as possible every day for the next month. Put on tons of body fat, you'll watch all your everybody lifts go through the roof, especially your upper body. Because you get better leverages. So when your leverages improve, you can lift more weight. This just means the torque decreases. You have to add weight to equalize the torque essentially. But it's just a mathematical equation. So you're just moving the weight through less range of motion. Believe it or not, an inch off the range of motion is a huge difference. Tell it on a squat. That's the difference between getting buried and making the lift. So an inch or two. So if you gain a bunch of weight, then your leverages improve means you don't have to essentially you're not moving the bar as far. Then you have now less torque with the weight that you were previously using. So yeah, you can slap one more weight, but it's the same amount of torque. Okay, so you just equalize the torque because you're moving the low through a shorter range of motion. So they will say, well, I gave more weight and I left more weight. That means I've gained more muscle. I'm like, that's not what that means. So that one drives me crazy. So I'm like, it's like Joel, Joel kind of addressed that. He's like, if you, if you're not moving more weight though, like a leg curl, let's get away from big compounds. If you're not moving more weight, if you're using something like a leg curl or a leg extension or anything, that kind of stuff that doesn't really help increase your leverage as much, they don't go up. You can put on as much fat as you want. And I know this 'cause I trained with smaller guys that were strong, and they would be depending on the movement of single joint stuff. You can often see the single joint stuff were really strong guys. They can get a lot of muscles involved in a compound lift. They can move a big load. But if you get off in the single joint exercises, all of a sudden, you ever notice that? If you take a bunch of dudes and put them in a single joint exercises, you find out real quickly that a guy that's bigger can move more in the compound lifts 'cause he's got more muscle mass over all. But once you get into just, I'm gonna eliminate this down to mostly just a couple of muscles that are involved in this motion. Things get even pretty quickly. So for the guys who say that, I always say, "Well, let's get away from that argument "because you're not gonna win that one." What does having more body fat on your body do to help speed up the rate of growth? Go ahead, Al, I know like I said, I know if you could see, like this, like just, you were just like washed over by this like, since of relief, I'm saying that. - Because I have, literally, for half of the freaking, okay, so I had just a purpose. I had a conversation with this bro science mead who could not accept that improving leverage was not going to improve the strength of his muscle. So I basically, I explained the whole entire external moment arm, I explained the torque and he just was not getting it. And so I tried to throw out a, well, if you swing the weight around a momentum, you can move more weight. Does that mean your muscles get stronger? No, you're just improving, you're literally improving just how you can actually move the weight. It's not improving your muscle mass. And then on top of that, I actually did a little more digging. There's this one review. I believe I actually cited it in that whole discussion, but it's Tom Linson at all, and I don't remember the year, I think it's 2015, but they found that people who were obese, they were able to, they were almost as strong, quote unquote, as their leaner counterparts, but they were not as strong in anti-gravity exercises, for example, like an isometric or something that was just, just tension, that's it. And they were weaker than their leaner counterparts. So that kind of goes to show that improving leverage doesn't improve your actual strength. That's just you're moving the weight around. Also, what they were doing, an isometric hold at a specific joint angle range of motion, they weren't, they weren't anywhere near strong as the smaller people were. They were actually weaker. They were weaker. Yeah. OK, that made that make sense. Yeah, and if anything, like even when you see people, especially when people do push like the upper, like the upper limits of body fat, and I've seen this in literally the guy had a conversation with, he was talking about his bulk and he's like, yeah, I gained 15 pounds since January. I'm like, that's a lot of weight since January. So January, that's a lot. Yeah, and so we're talking about a lot of body fat. And like when we look at people who do have a lot of body fat, especially intramuscular body fat, insulin sensitivity will likely go down if you don't have the best metabolic genetics. And I've seen the samples with my own eyes where you've got muscle intermingled with fat. And it's just like, it's not going to improve your lift. If anything, if you go go too far, it's going to make it worse. The one lethals tell people I don't do it anymore. But that consistently hurts. You're lifting more weights as the dead lift. If you get, if you get, if you add on a bunch of fat and get thicker through the midsection, it actually makes the pull longer. So it actually, it worsens your leverage. And nobody ever gained a bunch of fat and it helped their dead lift. Nobody, for anybody who says that, I'm like, no, there's something else going on there. Because I promise you that gaining a bunch of your midsection makes your hold longer, which decreases like your overall leverages. Because the shorter stroke that you can get for a dead lift, you can pull the bar as far. You're going to be able to lift more weight. All right, Alan, go ahead. What do you got? OK, so the fat gram intake of elite bodybuilding competitors, males, who placed in the top five, gram-wise. So the start of prep was 64.7 grams at the end of prep, 45.4 grams. And women who placed in the top five, their fat intake at the start of prep was 44.3 grams. And at the end of prep, it was 28.6 grams. And here's the thing. Here's the thing. We have to emphasize that we're literally talking about pushing the envelope of body fat reduction. This has nothing to do with health, nothing to do with that. So I want to do a dress for your question there directly. Yeah, and that was-- when we had talked about that before, you'd said not in private, but it was more like just an off hand conversation we were having. You're like, dude, if you're just trying to get peeled for the show, just get your butt-- your fat intake as low as freaking possible. And that's going to be one of the things that's going to help you. The most is like, you're not trying to optimize hormones during that time. But especially for guys who are on exogenous drugs, it doesn't matter. Right. Really just says, man, they're not going to lose any tissue. So for a natural guy, it probably is different. And I know, like Joel definitely said, he has to pay more attention to his fat intake. Getting ready for a show. But if you're on drugs, there's so much more. And that's also why I want to tell people, I don't really care what Jay Cutler, Ronnie Coleman, or anybody did because when you're on drugs, you can train in the dumbest way possible. And you're going to grow and consider it home, and grow. So from a standpoint of if you're trying to get as lean as possible, going into your cut, if a guy's going into a cut, I have always recommended getting your fat intake as low as possible. Just get it as low as possible as you can get. It's very difficult actually to store carbs as fat, especially if you have almost no fat intake coming in, as long as your carbon intake isn't crazy. We've been through years of that where people like carbs make you fat. And it's like if your body is a walking glycogen store is unit. So you can actually, it's more difficult to store carbs and people realize it's-- if you have a lot of carbs and a lot of fat coming at the same time, you're going to store that fat relatively easy. But it's actually relatively difficult to store carbs as fat. And as we talked about before, it's almost in waterline and possible store proteins as fat. So unless that's changed, this last time we were stirring up the pot about that. To that point, and this is great, I love the Chappelle's work. And when we talk about this topic, the men who placed in the top five, their carbon intake at the beginning of prep, was 431 grams. And at the end of prep-- and these are natural guys-- it was 340 grams a day at the end of prep. So still high. And who placed in the top five? This is really interesting. So at the start of prep, their carbon intake was 243 grams. And at the end of prep, 196 grams. That's high. Yeah, dude. And these are the top five in natural-- That is a little-- --a little, little, little-- --competitive. --we easy. High. That is a crazy high. Right, right. But it's interesting data. And they weren't Titoing. I'll tell you that much. And I don't have anything against Tito. And in fact, I'll say this, man, in the general population, produce who just want to-- I'm not even talking about dudes who want to win the apartment pool complex. Don't steal. You're stealing my stuff now. Well, at least I'm stealing it to you. I'm stealing it to you. I love that so much, he's stolen it. I love it. So I love it like years ago. Look, I'm 50% of the time. I remember different things. And this might be Paul Carter. So-- It needs to be one of my best insults. [LAUGHS] Oh, no, no. I remember some insults from you that-- The other-- No, no. --the night that I should repeat them. I trolled. I don't know how many. I used to be the trolling master. The night that I trolled, what's his name from functional patterns? You literally saved the screenshots of me trolling his like million plus followers. And not a eyebook. Not a eyebook. And I went into his Facebook-- Well, that's back from Facebook was a real thing. And he had millions of followers. And I just started saying, whatever somebody would say to me, I would say whatever they said, your mom last night. So if they-- Oh, yeah, that's right. That's right. Oh, yeah, yeah. You just kept that up. And he-- I literally-- I did it for like two hours. And it was like a swarm of his followers were just attacking me. And no matter what they'd say, they'd say, look at this guy in here acting like a big asshole. And I'd say something like your mom was acting like a big asshole last night. That's amazing. And so like-- It was just your mom-- It feels like-- Just like 50, 50 comebacks with just the mom-- It was just like that. It was like over and over again. And it just frustrated. I knew what you were doing. And I knew you're attacking. But he just kept coming back because he couldn't let it go. and then you just kept digging his whole deeper and deeper and deeper. It was really funny. Really positive. I remember the best one from that was this dude's like this dude doesn't even have good posture and I said your mom didn't have good posture and that's nice. Oh my god. Oh my god. Yeah, that was good times man. So that's really interesting. The carb data, that's crazy because that is incredibly high carb intake. It is high and um, what was the general population? Some of them do really well with keto and they love it and I would encourage them to stick. What was their protein intake throughout the diet? Protein intake for men. All right, so start a prep was okay, grams wise. Yep, grams wise, 254 on average and at the end of prep is 243. And for women, their protein intake at the start of prep and these are just the top five places. 172 at the start and they actually dropped down to 150.9 grams at the end of prep and this represented a range of about 2.7 to 3.5 grams per kilogram of body weight which is about 1.2 to 1.5 grams per pound. That's that's really crazy. That's really crazy. The carb numbers just blow me away. I've been just absolutely great. Wow 400 rice takes and shit. Dude, if I ate 350 grams of carbs a day right now, I would be I'd be 275 again in the end of the month. You'd be swole, baby. I would be so huge. Swole, telling you. By the way, Alan, I wanted to ask, did you have you ever read through some of the defrons or work? Because I always got so fascinated by it because of how much it like it kind of goes to show how like the incredible effect of carbohydrates and spelled muscle. I thought that is work was incredible. Do you have a favorite, if you have a favorite PMID or a favorite study? Yes. That you like. Yeah, send it over because I've read almost everything but sometimes it's been like five or 10 years. It's a very old study. It's the really nice thing. I think some of the Alan, I don't know who you feel about this. Chris and I talk about it all the time. I feel like that they did way better research 10, 15, 20, plus years ago, especially on the physiology side than anything that's being done now. I don't know nutritionally if you feel like there was some of the older data was done better or at a higher level where they they dotted their eyes and crossed their teeth better back a few decades ago. But I know from the physiology standpoint, anytime Chris and I are digging up work, I'll go look at it. I'm like, man, this study is really good and I'll look at it and I go look at the day on this thing. It'd be like 1997. And I'll be like, man, they just did such better from a definitely the physiology is tons better from decades ago than any of the other. There's some really good stuff. There is some really good stuff back there. I also have this touch quickly. This is not necessarily a study, but they have some data in here that's like put into a nice pretty graph. It really shows like the impact of not only insulin resistance, but they also, I believe, touch on the amount of food goes that is uptake. And I love the entire set of like the hyper insulin, you make you glycemic clamp. So it's so interesting. That's something that comes up with the also in this, this, staying in the context of this discussion is like, you know, getting too fat and becoming less insulin sensitive and how that impacts the rate of muscle growth. The only, there's a couple of different, I can depending on I can argue both sides of that. Number one is that immediately post training, you're already in insulin since insulin sensitive state because glucose force highly expressed post resistance training. So you can, I believe there's some studies, Alan, correct me if I'm wrong, where type 2 diet bedics actually have normal insulin since 70 post resistance training. It's like just a person with normal insulin since sensitive levels. There's data in that direction. Okay, that's what I thought. I'm trying to actually find Ella's thing that she sent me in the South Coast studio chat, but I can't get to it. Oh well, you can just email it. You can email it to me. And so that one comes up to and that getting to, so I can argue both sides. Number one, I think it's probably advantageous to stay in an insulin sensitive state from the aspect that you're going to do a better job of moving your carbs that you eat into the cell rather than having it floating around. I guess that's the idea right Alan is like you're if you're not insulin sensitive and you don't get an adequate insulin release, then you don't store the nutrients as well. Yeah, insulin sensitivity is a it's an odd thing, you know. There can be insulin sensitivity at the fat level, which is not great in insulin sensitivity at the muscle level, which is good. Generally speaking adaptations to training, insulin related adaptations to training are always all good. So on an acute basis as well as a chronic basis. I think it's just from the acute basis that we see like we have a window there. Host resistant training where insulin sensitive sensitivity is going to be heightened. Yep, yep, for sure. For sure. You know, I don't know what that's. I don't know what the time frame on glue for coming back glue for expression coming back now, but I'm guessing there's going to be a bit of a hassle. So from resistant training, there'll be an acute expression of glue for right. That's that's my mother expressed and then it's got to come back down at some point. Yeah, time course for that is kind of longer than expected. I mean, there's some interesting data showing how the impact of a single training belt in the day can in the earlier part of the day can positively influence carbohydrate handling of the the later meal. So you mean later later in the day later in the day. Yeah, that's interesting. So yeah, there's some interesting stuff in that direction. But I would I would generally think also just staying relatively later also. That used to be the thing, right? Like the insulin model of obesity and then also the idea that the more insular sensitive that you were was like the more because this one got pushed around by the bros and even like kind of one of my mentors that you loved, you know, Charles Pollock, who was, you know, I'm sure I would have gotten a long load of it. I really hate that you guys had, you guys would really have loved each other, especially in private because you're both sarcastic and witty and funny. I knew you guys would have actually really loved each other if you would have gotten along. That was kind of at a time, especially, you know, with kind of who your company was. I feel like it was a tribal thing. Oh, 100% of tribal thing. But that was that was kind of Charles, he was also, people had one of the other day, you know, Charles passed away, but I actually wrote Charles's eulogy for bodybuilding and he was one of my best friends when he was alive. Doesn't mean that I agree with everything that he said, but his nutritional life was really atrocious. And like I think as people are like, you can't speak ill will of there's things. John Meadows talked about training. Now, Charles was alive, I would roast him for I would absolutely roast John for he was coming around before he died. We had lots more conversations about a lot of the stuff that he did. Those drops sets combined with the isometric colds and all this. I'm like, you know, you just really create metric buttons of muscle muscle damage. You're not really, you're not really doing anything extra. It really come back. John just enjoyed doing that stuff. And that's why he did it. And by the end, he was coming around, yeah, probably doesn't do anything. You're not just getting, he goes, but it's fun. And that was his thing. It's fun. But the insulin thing has never really, it's still in brosircles. Is that more insulin that you sensitive that you are having, like literally having like a like a therapeutic session here. The insulin thing, I'm like, okay, so if you go at a new train, you take two guys, one who's like a type two diabetic. And the other guy that's highly super insulin sensitive. Well, since glue four is going to be highly expressed from the training session, anyway, I don't really think it's a factor. Everything really comes back to the amount of mechanical tension that fibers experience within the training session. That's what's going to happen. So since, as you just said, the time course for being more insulin sensitive from an aerobic session and aerobic session is going to be slightly prolonged. I don't really think it's a huge factor. That's just my, that I'm not giving people an excuse to go get fat. I'm just saying, I don't really think being super insulin sensitive. What's that? Oh, metformin. If that was a thing, then you could take metformin and you would see extra muscle growth, right? Metformin is like a glucose transporter. So you could take metformin and then you would see muscle growth from taking metformin. But you don't see that. And even when bodybuilders, when I was involved in that stuff, and people would ask me, like, what should I take metformin? And it would all come back to, if you, the people who did not see an improvement, or already insulin sensitive enough so that they were storing their carbs very effectively. So if somebody saw an increase in like fullness from taking metformin, that was telling me they were probably slightly insulin resistant. Yeah, there's this weird thing with metformin inhibiting mitochondrial atom. adaptations to a rubric training too. And then also-- If I'm not mistaken-- So it would eventually reduce your resistance training. If that's the case, it would reduce your recovery. Yeah, let me see. I think there's actually effects of chronic form and treatment on training adaptations in men and women. Yeah, yeah. So it reduces VO2 max improvements. And I do believe-- if I'm not mistaken, there's some dirt on metformin and resistance training as well. But either way, it doesn't appear to be something that you want to be loading up on if you want to opt to-- Which means there's something going on there with inhibiting the ability to clear lactate as quickly as you were before. If you don't mind me to quickly jump in, because I had two points. One, I need to find the study for it first. But there is this one mRNA-- RNA-seq study was specifically microarray. So not really RNA-seq as we know it today, but old RNA sequencing. And it found that there is one specific gene-- I dug through the supplemental material that was down-regulated in individuals with insulin resistance. And we're actually waiting-- it was an RNA-seq study. Sorry, I'm comparing the wrong study here. But RNA-seq study found that this one gene was being down-regulated. This gene was involved in the developments and maintenance of muscle spindles. So I was thinking that because there was also a few other data sets that I remember saying from this one presentation, somebody that I knew in a lab was giving that individuals with type 2 diabetes experienced the less beneficial effects of exercise compared to their healthy counterparts. And I was thinking that maybe a potential reason why it could be is because of down-regulation of genes like that one that I can't be. EG something R3, maybe. ETR3. I don't remember the exact gene name. But I remember seeing this one knock down mouse model. I know that mice are not the same as humans, but that one gene-- I don't have a problem with mice models like most people do. When they knocked down that gene, the muscle spindle was gone. Like it just didn't develop at all. It was this nothingness just didn't develop. So what I was thinking, if it's down-regulated so much, that must make a little bit-- it must make it more difficult to even sense the training stimulus. And from that form, and specifically, I don't think that metformin would be the answer because it also inhibits gluconeogenesis, which-- if it was not a really big role, I would say GLP1 agonists would be more. So I guess the resolution to insulin resistant individual is in training. But let me find those two studies that I'm talking about. I actually put in the chat a study-- recent one, semi-recent 2019-- titled metformin blunt muscle hypertrophy in response to progressive resistance exercise training in older adults, a randomized controlled trial. So it's the master's trial where metformin actually messed with resistance training adaptations that inhibited them so. Oh, that is so cool. Yeah. Yeah. To your point, yeah. You'll have to send me that one, though. Yeah, for sure. So what did they do? They kept the muscle spindles from developing? Yeah, I'm looking at the actual-- I made an entire presentation on this, because I was trying to find-- so just a brief-- I was a part of collecting data for an RNA-seq study to compare old lean healthy, lean healthy, and type 2 diabetic individuals. And their response to insulin-- we had samples from all of these individuals who underwent the hyperinsulin. You make you glycemic clamp. And so I sequenced the-- or at least I isolated the RNA going through sequencing. And I had to come up with a bunch of-- we didn't have the data yet. So I used chat GPT and some studies to figure out some mock data that would be realistic. And the one gene that I found played a really big role in muscle spindles. And it reminded me of that one presentation that I saw, where the type 2 diabetic individual just was not responding to exercise the same way as the lean healthy. So I was just-- They were all in metformin? No. Just regular type 2 diabetics. Mm. So I thought that was so interesting how like if a literal gene involved in muscle spindles is just completely suppressed. And there was another randomized control trial in humans that found that in individuals that had type 2 diabetes, that gene was suppressed. So that felt super interesting. That I just posted a link in the chat, Ella, that speaks almost directly to what you were talking about. This is in humans. So this was a 2020 study. So you might want to grab that one too. That is so interesting. Yeah. Yep. Yep. So metformin? Not that great for growing muscle. Not too great. I have always had a bad opinion of metformin. And the bodybuilders have used it. I'm like, if you're getting anything out of metformin, you're getting a bunch of other bad stuff out of it. And it's really just a feedback that, hey, I'm really not very insulin sensitive. So most of the guys that would take metformin, they were like, I don't get anything. If you're not seeing anything from it, then that tells me that you're already kind of functioning in a way that you need to be functioning. Yeah. And that's why it was a real kind of a shit show when Sinclair was pushing metformin for everybody for healthy longevity. And I saw it with a lot of skepticism because the longevity space is full of hacks and pseudo-science and stuff. It turns out the metformin, Porsche, it doesn't really have a huge impact. Well, longevity, Porsche was-- Oh my gosh, it was the blue zone, drinks and red wine. Resvera troll? Yeah, every-- Yes. And then it was-- make sure you're fasting, you'd slather everything down and extra virgin olive oil. Well, it's different-- Different wacky things, man. Alcohol? The alcohol, I guess. Yeah, that gets you. Yeah, the alcohol thing. That's a controversial thing, right? The red wine versus alcohol content, and it's effect on longevity and all that stuff. But-- Steeds from peanuts. Yeah. Yeah, peanuts are magic. So-- In order to wrap this up, let's kind of-- let's kind of go over a couple of things. Ella, since Alan and I've been over talking-- what do you feel like kind of the things that you've had this conversation a little bit more? I think that anybody-- because you've had so many people coming at you-- just going to sit back and I want to say this and then on my hand it opportunity to let you kind of get your stuff out-- is that I've really been a really social media really takes me off sometimes. Because you have this opportunity to have intelligent discourse. And so many people make it about ad hominems, and I've watched you get attacked on a multitude like a front. Rather than people just debating whatever it is that the conversation in that discourse should be about. And it's very irritating. So anybody listed this, if you set anything like misogynistic, I just won't let you know that you're kind of a piece of trash. And also, just like the overall fact that you and Jackson both have had to hear this nasty stuff, it's very irritating to me because I get attacked. You watch me get attacked ad hominems all over the place, too. But I'm like, well, come debate me on the actual meat and potatoes because we know what's going to happen if you do that. I mean, you know you're going to get caught. So I'll just say this is that if you-- and you probably already know this-- if somebody has to resort to ad hominem stuff, then they've already lost. They've conceded the argument at that point. Anybody that's going to be able to willing to have a conversation about this stuff. And even Alan, Alan wrote something one time, I thought was interesting. He said, I try to argue as people in a way online that if some an observer is watching it, that they can walk away from it, having learned something from that discussion. So I always thought that was one of the more intelligent. You don't say a lot of intelligent things, but that was really good. How did you get a stab at you for that offer? It was a lot of work. The occasional moments. It would be hard. I know exactly. I appreciate that. So Alan, what do you feel like that you had to-- one of the things-- taking advantage of your time with Alan here, what do they feel like you are some of the things that you've had to deal with? Conversation-wise, not like just you getting attacked. That's why I want to bring that up. But conversation-wise, that you feel like it's been frustrating for you. Oh, God. I guess the first part is people that I've known, like, for example, Joel, you, even really large, just general health influencers, like Dr. Idz, they all get attacked. And I understand, to an extent, just going people because you've done it. disagree. But like I'll get like the weirdest comments where it's like it's not even attacking the point. It's just attacking me. It's not even specifically attacking me as in like your small or your this because Jackson gets it all the time where it's a lot of like your small, your inexperienced, your this, your that. For me, it's you're a woman. You like this is why women shouldn't speak on this. Your age, your age. In my age and I've never, when I first got on social media, I never thought that that would be an issue. I thought it would always be, oh, you look a weird funny way. You do this or you're not, you're not advanced enough yet. And it really doesn't feel like that at all. So I guess that's my main complaint about people just making like weird wild assumptions, but also misconstruing what I'm saying. So in the very first piece of content I ever made on this topic, I said, if you're at a healthy weight, then bulking and cutting is not necessary and everybody ignored the healthy weight part. And everyone's like, what about me? I'm a 109, six foot three male. Like eat food. So yeah, the misconstruing part definitely is so annoying. But yeah. So what are the, what do you feel like are some of the things that you're still having to deal with from what people don't understand? And maybe Alan can chime in, kind of clarify some of that stuff too. What are the parts about this whole debate? I mean, I said this, I think probably a month before you started talking about it. And I feel like that maybe people like attacked you more than they did me because of all the stuff that you're talking about, you know, your age or being female or being smaller. That is not, I would actually say that's a certain degree of maturity that I've had in my life that I actually recognized months ago when I never say anything about how people look or how much they lift or whatever I look at what information they're giving me. And it's this good information or bad information or does it need clarification? So pad on the back to myself, I don't ever talk about that when somebody brings up, hey, you know, when I see few other people arguing like, you're small, I bench this much and I, you only do this and you're only this size and blah, blah, I'm like, I don't talk that way to people. I actually will address like what is it they're talking about? So from a, I think from an aspect of kind of why I went through some of the questions I did. From muscle growth happens very slowly. I don't think that there's a lot of calories that it takes to synthesize new grams of protein. I think that if you're at a body fat level that you consider to be, hey, I can, I'm good being where I'm at, I think that you, it's a good idea for everybody to figure out their maintenance calorie intake at that body fat level and play within that maintenance calorie intake and then focus mostly on progressive overload in the gym. And that is how you're going to grow maximally, in my opinion. I don't think that especially some of the certain places you still see here recommended where it's like two or three or 400 calories over such as you're just going to be adding fat at a really fast rate. In the other part of the human condition, I talked about earlier where I think especially for advanced guys, it might be better sometimes shooting for being in a very tiny deficit is that you're going to have other times just in normal daily life where you eat above your maintenance or like a weekend where you eat maybe several thousand calories. So I think in a gaining phase, a building phase, especially for an advanced guy, different for younger guys that are under weight, it's still a different conversation. That shooting for maybe I'm in a very tiny deficit and that's going to vary because some people get into a small dose and lose weight really fast. There's a, we know people like that, right? And they're like, if I knock off 200 calories, I start losing weight at a very fast clip. Some people, it's just very weird how the body works that way for some people. But my opinion, especially for well-trained people who are trying to put on the last couple of pounds of mass that they're ever going to get, there's not really much of a reason to ever be anacirc plus in my way. To be at maintenance or in that tiny deficit and then allow yourself to room maybe on the weekends or for just life stuff where you can have slightly larger intakes of surplus that happen naturally. And I think that's where people seem to, they, I guess, don't understand it as much. And it honestly, it's a question that I really would like to figure out as well. And I think this would be a cool little thing to understand is what is exactly like if gaining muscle and an equal amount of fat is considered a surplus? What is it called when you gain more fat than you need? Let's come back to the Joel argument. Yes, that's true. That was the part where he's like, okay, so let's just get, we can discuss that. We'll wrap up on the own clothes. So your idea, maybe we'll have Joel back on so he doesn't feel like we all love Joel. Let's just be clear about that. He's our friend. His idea was that here's where I had a problem with that. You guys can tell me if you think I'm off base, I don't think you're going to be losing fat. Even if you are bartering some energy from your store fat, it's going to be so little to create that grammar too of new functional proteins. I don't necessarily see. I think that gets equalized out because one day you're going to be maybe slightly above your maintenance intake, right? I don't even know how to articulate what I'm saying. I'll try it the best I can. So let's say if somebody knew, let's not use like an exact mechanistic approach. Let's use a human condition approach practical application here. If a person kind of figures out their maintenance is somewhere in the range of 3000 calories a day, right? One day, as you said, there's, you're not accurate on food labels. And then some days you maybe eat a slightly larger portion of this or a smaller portion of that. So let's say you're shooting for 3000 calories a day, but you're actually one day you're at, you know, 3,090. And then the next day you're at 2,900 and then the other day you're at whatever they balance out over the course of a week, right? If you're an advanced person, maximally, you're really only putting on one to three grams of functional new proteins a day. And that's what good training. So where in that range? I just don't think that you're ever going to keep going through stored body fat with the way a person operates on a day to day basis where they have a weekend out or they have like an extra, they have a cheat meal during the week or they do whatever. I think that stuff takes care of itself. So the idea that you're going to be exactly at maintenance calories each day and that you're going to continuously use stored body fat for energy to where you get leaner and leaner and leaner and leaner. I just don't think that's a realistic scenario. Is that did I explain that in the best way? Yeah. And just to add on a little bit, I think what Droll was saying before and we should probably have him back on his again, it's probably his yeah. Anyways, what he was probably saying is like over the course of like, let's say 10 years over the course of that time you did realistically gain a percentage, a very small smidge of body fat to maintain that body fat percentage, which I get. But even so, if you're replacing what you're using, you're not causing like, and I guess this goes into the nitty gritty mechanisms, but you're not causing those fat cells to either hypertrophy or to undergo hyperplasia like they would if you were gaining an actual amount of body fat you would notice. You're just kind of replacing what is going in and out. And as you said, it's kind of like one day you're up one day, you're down and it's like all kind of evening out. But at the end of the day, back to like what I was trying to say is like you're not causing significant hype like, I guess. So in order to for it to happen the way that Joel is talking about it, you would literally have to be almost like in the metabolic ward, everything is supervised. The amount of your maintenance calories is exactly so for and so on. You're expending the same amount of energy each day. And then you're using stored body fat for energy purposes of adding new functional proteins. It would have to be so exact it's never going to happen. It's another word, just not a realistic practical scenario. So even if you were in a slight deficit each day and using some of your own body fat, at some point, right, like you're not just going to keep getting leaner and leaner and leaner. Something there's always a mechanism that will fix that either a gray limit spike so that you're going to be hungrier for a couple of days. The body likes to do stuff to stay in homeostasis, right? So there would be a, in my opinion, from just experience, if you're in a deficit for long enough, what's how it happens? You get hungry. You get really hungry, right? And then yeah, and that's my practical application, which is if you start to feel hungrier. If you do notice that, actually a really good point, Ella. So like if you were starting to go through body fat stores at that kind of rate, so there's something else that's going to naturally just be like you're going to eat more now. A really good example of this, Alan, you may this will be a hot moment of thing too, is something we know in competitors as they start to get near the closer to the show. And they've been in, they've been high book alert for a very long period of time. What often happens, well, there's two things going on there. You're burning fewer calories doing the same amount of energy each day, right? But then the other thing is you tend to see a massive downturn in their knee. If they're not being cognizant of how much need that they've naturally kind of reduced because calories have been so low so long, they will kind of stall on body fat loss. So one of the things that's like super important when you're dealing with competitors that are trying to get very lean is, is that when they start off, I know this from competing. You don't even want to wash clothes the last couple of weeks. You're just doing the bare minimum to get through each day. So your knee takes a massive hit. I just always find that there's always some equilibrium that pans out in these things in real life. So think if you were going through body fat, where he's like, what you're 10% and you're 9.9, 9.8, 9.7, 9.6, 9.5, boom, you're hungry or now. And then you're back kind of back up to 10. So there's, to me, that stuff just kind of, it evens a self out over a period of time, if you're being intelligent with your approaches. What's your thought on that, Alan? Well, there's a lot to tie together. I think that maybe an overarching message that I think we can all agree on is that you have to look at the individual's situation. So like with a question like, OK, bulking and cutting of our surplus or not, we have to look at the tendency for people to think in extremes. Nobody is advocating for just becoming just rapidly getting massive amounts of body fat with a 2000 calorie surplus every day type of thing. On the surplus pro surplus side. That sounds fun though. It does sound fun. It does sound fun. But there's a reasonable surplus side to where you are being cautious, but you are purposely imposing a surplus. So, OK, so just framework wise, this whole question, in my mind anyway, it depends on the population, or better or more accurately, depends on the individual, depends on their starting body fat level. So you take a dude with a massive amount of body fat, of course you're not going to impose a purposeful surplus. I see a lot of the folks that are talking about bulking every day though, they're already way too fat. And they're talking about the surplus. Oh, yeah. See, I'm not on board with that. I don't know who it would be, but hey, so the greater you start in body fat, the less of a candidate you are for in quotes bulking our pulse plus. Right. The higher your training status is, like the greater your training age, the closer you are to your muscular potential, then the more cautious you have to be about imposing a sustained surplus, because you're just much more susceptible to put on a duamount body fat. Even in very, even in very slight surplus is Alan, because you're just not accruing any muscle at a rate that just be hooves you eating, any kind of significant surplus at all. Sure, sure. Good point. Now that that leads me to my next point. It also depends on the nature of the surplus. And but before I get to that, I heard you concede that your classical stereotypical hard gain or bro, we can absolutely like intelligently, incrementally ramp him up in terms of imposed surpluses depending on how he responds. So going back to where I was head at the nature of the imposed clerk surplus, there is a surprisingly consistent amount data from Joey Antonio's lab showing that an imposed or an assigned three, I want to say four to 800 calorie, but it's the 800 one was one study where they did 4.4 grams per pound. Right. Once I put around 400 calories of protein was assigned above and beyond. Above maintenance. Right. Above maintenance. So in the real world, if you take a group of resistance trainees in free living conditions and you say, hey, maintain your intake, we're going to slap 80 grams of protein on top. 80 grams on top. 80 and 90 grams of protein on top of that. Here we go. What happens is that they don't get fat. In fact, they freaking either stay the same or they start losing some fat. And Josie told me whenever they did check in, so they had the one that ran a year. Remember that they ran a whole year. Yes. When they came back, when they were at the year check-ins, they were almost all of them were significantly leaner than when they started. Yeah. And the mechanisms underlying that we can speculate on the relative contributions of these mechanisms. But it's certainly going to at least involve at least these three things. So increase satiety, driving down the intake of the other macros. That increased thermic effect of the diet. Increased thermic effect of either exercise activity or non-exercise activity. And then who knows, maybe increase energy excretion through through the defecation and urination routes. And then maybe another one, just plain all good old fashioned misreporting. So with protein foods, people tend to overreport what they can see. And with carbs and fat, they can come under the under-reported immunity stuff. They can underreport that stuff. And so it's probably a combination of all those things that underpinned the supposed disappearance of the extra protein calories. But the point I want to make there is that when we talk about surpluses and imposing a chaluric surplus for bulking, when it's going to be different depending on the nature of surpluses that didn't do the composition of that surplus that you opposed. So I think that has-- That was one of my questions. Pointed out. So. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yep. And thanks for adding that. That was why I wanted to add that. What were you going to say, Ella, you had something? I just wanted to also put in there like, I think it also matters. And this is-- I feel like it's not talked about enough. But also just the mentality behind eating is so important when we're imposing either a surplus, maintenance, or deficit for the person. You give a surplus to my partner, Jackson, and he's going to gain like 20 pounds because he loves eating. You do the same to me. I'll gain 20 pounds because I love eating. And if you tell me to eat more protein, oh, I'll eat more protein. And I'll also eat more carbs in that. I have never-- I can spit out data all day long about stuff. And Alan knows I've told him this. I don't really talk about nutritional stuff anymore. He used to tell me, but you can't. I'm like, I don't want it. When they talk about satiety, the idea that protein satiate you never applied to me. If I had protein, I wanted to eat more of everything else. You're like that too, Ella. OK, so I'm not alone in that. If you feed me more protein, I will eat mounds of carbs after that, like on the evil of maps. It does the opposite to me. If I had protein, it's like I have to eat either highly relatable foods after that, like dessert, or see, I was like, oh, my god, he's me. So it's like, it does something to me. So if I have like a big steak, even if it's a lean cut, there's going to be a lot of food that's going to follow that. Well, how, Alan, you were-- and the Dominican, you watched me eat one. Remember when people used to not believe my sheet meals? And then you were like, we were to the Dominican. And Alan's like, Paul ate for hours. Like hours and hours and hours. Remember we were out of that, please? The phenomenal-- the lighthouse. And I think I ate for three hours at night. Yeah, like four pounds of meat, man. Amazing. Phenomenon. Jenna won't be quiet though, about the one night we went out to eat. And then-- Oh, he turned your thing up. He turned the-- Oh, dang, I had greenered. I had filled up on something like before that. And she kept eating. But she was eating really small cuts of stuff. I love her so much, but she will not show up about how she supposedly out ate me that one night. She just ribbing you. I know she is. I know she is. She enjoys it. But that's the thing. It's like sometimes like data is really interesting from that side. Then the other times as you were just saying, the individual you have to take into account for it. Like you're saying, Alan, because if you tell Jackson, hey, you're going to get a surplus. Well, now he's like, well, that means a free for all to eat as much as I want. So you have to take the individual into account. And I really have found that to be quite true that people take massive liberty sometimes from one side of the other with this stuff, right? But like the whole satiation thing, every time I read it, I'm like, I don't know who those people are, but that does not work that way for me. Because if you, when you know this Alan, if you give me a steak and I eat a steak, that does not satiate me. I will eat mounds and mounds of food after that. And there's certain foods that people say are not triggering. Like you know, like the whole thing with hyperplated overly processed food with the combination of salt, sugar, sugar, fat, carbs and everything. The way, well, if I eat a steak, it does that to me. It literally sets off, like go eat everything in sight now. So if I, now if I eat chicken, it doesn't do that. - Yeah, and that speaks to the concept of individualizing the program. - Right. - But we can't just issue these broad generalizations that we think is gonna apply to entire populations. You know, you got to individualize. And the point that you make that tiny amounts of new functional tissue are gained like on a daily basis. You know, it's like, it's very minuscule, true. - Tiny. - At the same time, there's also a lot of energy expenditure pathways that have to be overcome with the goal of muscle growth. And so I still lean towards the purpose of surplus, but you gotta be careful with it and you gotta take into account the person's starting status with body fat levels and training status. And also, you know, the nature of how you're gonna structure that surplus nutritionally. I think it's interesting that you have actually put folks through, I guess, an assigned deficit knowing that they're going to let loose on the weekends and they end up in a surplus anyway, that that's an interesting observation. But yeah, I. - Do you not find that to be the case that generally, whenever I've trained, when I used to train people 101, the toughest part of dealing with people 101 was always a weekend. That was just really consistent. I think you know this from having dealt with enough people over the years is where they'll come back and say, "I'm fine Monday through Friday, where life is very organized and habitual." And then you get to a weekend where things relax, they move less. What is it, if I remember, is like the average person to eat something like 20% more calories over a weekend or something like that? I don't remember the exact figure, but I wanna say it's in that range. And so over the course of. I'm saying if that's why I said, I think if it's a very well trained, if they're training status, they're very well trained, I can't find any reason for a surplus. I really cannot find a reason for any type of purposeful surplus because the accrual of functional proteins is gonna be so tiny. I think even if you're a walking bag of energy, so there's gonna be most of those people are not gonna be very low in body fat. So I think at that state, even like I said, trying to dip into deficits more days during the week, probably more helpful for helping to maintain a body fat level where they're not gaining any. I can grant you that for some individuals. I just don't think we can put a blanket recommendation on that. The energy pathways, the energy expenditure pathways that have to be overcome are kind of a multitude of things. And that's gonna vary with the individual situation. So the main thing that I'm getting out of this discussion is that we have to look at the individual and we can't universalize anything. So where as leading into this, I would be more prone to say, hey, look, 10% cooler surplus, see how it goes, and then increase to 20 if it's a freaking impossible hardgain or neat freak situation. I would add to that at this point, a little bit more of an emphasis on, all right, let's look at starting body fat levels. And if the person has a, let's say if it's a male above, it's mid teens, right? Or a woman above high 20s, mid high 20s. Then you have more margin available to you to ride the maintenance experiment, right? Before any sort of increases in, or like imposed color surplus, if you wanna take the careful route. So yeah, that's kind of where I see it. - Here's, I think you hit on it right there. Ella, I think you'll agree with this. My biggest problem is people don't even bother experimenting long enough with something that's closer to a maintenance and focusing on progressive overload. 'Cause at the end of the day-- - Oh, the training side. - Yeah. - Okay, training is driving the truth. That's something I, like, the food does not arrive to growth. The fact that we still have, I made that joke about Rich Piana the other day. Rich is like, I said, if you wanted to make sure that you did everything correctly, basically you're training, you could go watch Rich Piana YouTube's and just either don't do that or do the opposite of what that is you can go have the most perfect training of all time. So, and then people, some people, not everybody, some people were mad about it 'cause he did a lot of stupid shit. But the issue is is that people, food doesn't drive growth. Like, I feel like that we can come away from this two hours. And like I said, I'll dial that hill 'cause we have enough data to show that you can't just grow. - I wanna say that training, the training effect is stronger than the dietary effect. I wanna say that. - When I'm talking about the other time of people that are already eating, I don't think we have a problem with people eating enough protein in the fitness community. I think that's a gin pop thing that existed probably for a long time that needed to be addressed more. But I think in the fitness community, most people probably have adequate protein antics. I mean, they're cognizant of tracking it, looking at it and what it is. So, the food doesn't drive the growth. Without that, if you take the training, it's similar to the way you're gonna add your feet, right? Even if your food intake is the same. You're gonna lose muscle mass. So, most people don't even want to experiment. So, if you're, like you said, if you're overweight, if you're a guy and you're 15, 18, 20 plus percent body fat, it's probably better to get down to a little bit lower, body fat percentage, and then experiment from there with maintenance. If you're not progressively overloading, - I think you and I would differ on that slightly. - How so? - I'm okay with experimenting with surpluses with dudes who are not lean lean. And given that they are not highly trained and are not of a high training agent far along, they're pretty close. - Well, if they're not highly trained and not very far along, then. - And they would have more margin available than to more favorably partition incoming surpluses. - I don't go the opposite way. And look, the reason that what influences my thoughts on that are studies by, well, rosinic and colleagues as well as, rebaro and colleagues also had some interesting stuff on that. Those were experienced guys. But it is the rosinic and colleagues study. And there are actually a couple others that show massive surpluses without these adverse consequences. That for example, Garth and colleagues saw or other work in that direction. - But did they show that there was an increase? 'Cause we don't really have that data. We have the Helm study that shows maintenance first as a couple of surpluses and they didn't show there was any difference. - Yeah, the Helm study, I like it. I like the spirit of it. The design was great. - You think it was underpowered? - Well, I was one of the peer reviewers of that study. And the actual assigned surpluses are very discrepanied from the, then what they actually consume. So for example, the zero percent surplus, the maintenance group, actually consumed 169 calories above and beyond maintenance. And so the-- - I think that I think 100 something calories is gonna fall within that floating realm of, like I said, I don't-- - Floating realm of maintenance. - Yeah, well, that's kind of bear with me first. - That's kind of how I see maintenance. I don't see maintenance as like the static number that's day to day to day. I think I see maintenance as your TD and then kind of the floating amount that you're kind of dealing with each day. Like today, like some days, if I get 15,000 steps, well, my amount of energy expenditure for the day is gonna be much higher on day, only gets 6,000, right? So, well, that's fair, but hang on with me for a second. - All right. - The 15% surplus group, so the moderate surplus group. They actually, and I'm sorry, that was the, let me back up, they compared to assigned 0% plus, versus an assigned 5% surplus, versus an assigned 15% surplus. So the 0% surplus ended up consuming 169 calories in surplus. And so the 5% surplus group ended up consuming a 489 calories surplus above maintenance. So even though they were assigned a 5% surplus, they ended up consuming an 18.5% surplus. Now get this, the 15% surplus group ended up consuming a 28.4% surplus. So their color intake above and beyond maintenance was 719 calories. Okay, so right there, hold on, I'm going to make a point about all that. They all gave the same. The cross-exual area was not different between the groups. So, yes, look at Alice. And then I have a counter to that, though, too. Okay, I want to hear your counter to this. Okay, so the interesting part about the study is these guys, a two to three times more the surplus that they were assigned. The only group that gained a significant amount of strength was the high surplus group. But all of the freaking groups gained a pittily next to nothing amount of muscle. Okay, now here's the thing. If you look at the training program, that was assigned. Did they say which group gained the most amount of fat? Yeah, it was the two surplus groups gained a similar amount of fat and no, in quote significant differences between two. I'd have to look at the data tables for that, but I would imagine there was maybe a greater absolute difference in the highest. I agree. Now, so let's keep in mind a couple things here. They consumed pretty big surplus two to three times more than what they were assigned. And then the other thing is that their training volume dropped significantly from their habitual training volume. And so they essentially, they deluded while pumping up a mass of surplus. I'd have to go back. What was the training arrangement? It wasn't it, it wasn't it three days a week split in the body. Three days a week full body. People body, right? I don't have a problem with that. I think you and I definitely have different thoughts about the way the volume stuff works. I'm going to default to you oftentimes on the nutritional stuff, but the volume stuff I know in and out. So most of the volume. No, I know you do, but think about it from a fat gain perspective. The only way that that would play a part from a fat gain perspective is if they were doing way more volume coming into it and they had a reduction in energy expenditure from doing less volume, then it would play a part in that, but it wouldn't play. Sure. It would not play any part in the muscle, the amount of muscle gain. Right. Forget about the muscle part. The muscle part. It's the fat gain. They all gained. Right. I would have to say the highest group there. I don't think this study does anything but support my stance in this because the amount of cross-sectional area was different between the groups, not even statistically. It just wasn't really different. Like it was pretty much the same. And then the amount of fat gain, the amount of absolute fat gain was going to be greater in the big surplus group, which is why they saw the more significant gains. The strength is something that L and I have, we've been going to talk about some of that. Go ahead, Ellie. You have something you want to went away on this. Okay. So two things. Just for the rosnick, the Ribeiro's pilot study was also a very sizable, small study. If we're comparing it also to the home study because it was a pilot study. As for the rosnick study, I just wanted to like briefly say that when I was looking at the values, it looked at it looked like all of the all the participants were in some sort of surplus. They all gained a certain amount of body fat. So that's not, I wouldn't say it's comparing to quote unquote maintenance. And the only way that we would be able to understand if there is a significant benefit to over estimating and going into that surplus would be to compare both maintenance and an imposed surplus rather than comparing just the imposed surplus and then adding on either a carbohydrate supplement or a protein supplement because then it's still a surplus. And we're not comparing the rate of muscle growth between maintenance and a surplus or comparing the rate of muscle growth between a surplus and a surplus. And then considering the methods of which they measured lean body mass, I would put ultrasounds and MRIs over it, especially when we're talking about like we can fill our muscles with glycogen and see increases in body weight and increases in water retention. So it's difficult to tell whether we're talking about actual muscle mass or just really full tissue in general. And then on top of that, as far as practical applications go, I feel like actually I come into like a middle ground between both of you guys. So my practical applications is to estimate your total daily energy expenditure or maintenance calories. And what I'll say is depending on the person obviously if the person is super underweight then I'm going to say okay, gain a little bit of body fat first especially if you're under fat and then if you're overweight I would say okay let's try to push it into a slight deficit just so we can get you to a healthy body fat. But if they are at a healthy or relatively healthy body fat what I'll say is estimate your maintenance calories and then from there I would say eat a pre-workout meal. So something to replace what you're burning and exercise because exercise costs calories too and a lot of people when we're estimating our maintenance calories we're looking at activity throughout the day and need. But everybody seems to forget that exercise also uses calories and people will do cardio and things that burn calories but they don't even remotely try to account for it. So you'll see a lot of people who claim they're hard gainers eating at quote-unquote maintenance trying to do the main gain and I guess in colloquial terms. But what they'll do is a ton of cardio to make themselves hungry and then they'll forget to actually replace what they're eating what they're burning off. So as far as practical applications go I feel like it's pretty practical to say if you're working out you have pre-workout meal. If you're not working out you don't necessarily need to eat a pre-workout meal and depending on the advancement and the beginner level versus being an advanced lifter of training we can kind of play around with whether you're in at very close to maintenance or in imposed deficit as a policy. Did you guys hear me? I can hear you. Okay. So yeah I mean that's kind of getting back to the Helms one too. Is I wanted to get back to that like real quick all of this that if you have I still think that that weighs in my favor because if you have one group that's eating say roughly almost 200 calories above maintenance and then another group that's eating would you say four? It was the surplus is in the respective groups were 169 489 570 and 719 so basically two two five seven roughly once 169 so if you just rounded it up to two just to make it so in those cases what I'm saying you're looking at what most people would consider a small surplus of moderate surplus is kind of a large surplus and there wasn't any differences in growth between the groups and then the the one group that gained the most strength here's the interesting part I'll let you take this back to the people the group that gained the most strength didn't gain any more muscle that right there kind of helps to in that discussion so it kind of submits that whole point of if you're adding on a bunch of body fat and you're you know full of water and glycogen you're going to have better but our leverages this is not going to equate to your lifting more weight so I'm going to get more muscle that is not a true form of progressive overload so the idea that you're lifting more weight because you added a bunch of fat slop does not actually mean progressive overload but that's also why again I think it's important to keep all that stuff within check because if you put on a bunch of fat slop and you're eating you know 700 calories above maintenance and your lifts are going up you're going to artificially tell yourself I'm gaining muscle because my lifts are going up it's not really truly progressive overload it's you being able to lift more load because you have better leverages and because you're full of water and glycogen um again I think that you have to have adequate carbohydrate intake so you don't have any interference mechanisms that cause that calls fatigue or the cause of reduction in running your recruitment or reduction in force production but and I've done this before it's where I'm like well if if I figure out if I'm 240 I mean 240 grams of carbs a day and let's just say my my maintenance calories each day is 3000 if I do the math real quick 240 times four is 960 calories well less if it was 3000 calories that leaves me 960 3000 minus 960 that leaves me to roughly 2000 calories to play around with so if I have minimal fat coming in I'm let's say I'm let's say I have 50 grams of fat that's 50 times 9 that's 450 calories so now I have roughly something to the take of 1600 calories for the carbs so what do I say 1600 calories in carbs 1600 divided by four 400 grams of carbs so I would never ever I wouldn't nobody would ever convince me to million years that if I was a 400 grams of carbs a day, 240 grams of protein, 50 grams of fat, that I could not grow as maximally fast as possible. See what I'm saying? All right, all right. Yeah, yeah. The, my issue with the helm study is the drop in training volume and that could have impacted habitual energy expenditure. The other thing I would push back a bit on the increased leverages, you know, facilitating the strength gains is that they couldn't possibly necessarily gain enough fat to question the, you know, doing. If they were eating 700 plus over calories a day, I, from powerlifting, I can tell you 100%. I watch my, I could go ahead, Ella. Oh, just, I just want to make this like briefly like even if you're storing a little extra like walk like even if you feel a little more water retention or your arms feel thicker, then you're going to basically fool yourself into going a little bit less than before. And even if it's by a centimeter, you'll get a little bit stronger. I, it, from my days in powerlifting, I did the same thing where I would overeat on the days I really wanted to get big lifts and I decided not to do a weight cut and I would push my food and powerlifting. My list was skyrocket during that time. And I clearly wasn't putting on excesses, about a muscle tissue. It was literally just being so full. When you're, or absolute, when you're gaining body fat and you were that filled out, like, you just don't feel like you're moving the weight very far at all. So okay. Oh, I'll grant you that. I'll grant you that. I just have my issues with potential job and energy expenditure combined with those aggressive surpluses. I think we need to, I think we need to do the study over with some of those jobs. Yeah, I don't think it's a, I don't think it's a no disrespect to Helms. I don't think it's a gold standard type study. I think that study needs to be redone to where it's, it, it would be better if you had four groups. One group in a very minor deficit, one group, and as close to maintenance as possible, one group doing a five percent surplus, one group doing a ten percent surplus. I don't really think you need more than that. And that in my, let's go with the 20 let's, let's, let's include a 20 percent. Actually, if you did the 20, I think you would end up with the same issue as that you're dealing with right there with the highest calorie group. Here's the other part I'm getting out there is that it's clear cut that if one group gained much more strength, but no more cross-sectional area than the other groups, that their strength was not a resultant of a cruel of more malphibral. You that like, you can't argue around that. So you see what I'm saying? So if you have the same amount of muscle grain between the three groups, the one group had significantly more strength increases than that 100 percent tells me that was based off of improvement in leverages because if it was muscle tissue, that would be recorded in the cross-sectional area. Okay. Well, I'm not pushing back heavily against the, you know, the idea that strength gains were facilitated by some back gains and improved mechanical leverages. Yes, right. So I'm not pushing back against that. I'm just still skeptical about them dropping training volume significantly. So what do you think would be the change is if they came in and they were doing a higher volume on a routine? Well, at least or at least maintaining their habitual volume, right? Because even if they were doing an amount of volume that they reported, there's still going to be some issues there in like, okay, like how close to failure or far from failure are they taking, are they just doing a bunch of junk volume and then maintaining it or not? I would rather have just had them maintain your current training program. We just did one. But it wasn't dietary based. It was one where they had them come in and do their current amount of volume and then they had another group do it was, I can't remember, 15 and 30% more extra volume in the group that was just maintaining their current volume gained more strength than mass than the other groups. And that's probably a better idea is to have people come in and just continue doing the training routine that you're doing and then they just change the type of the dietary intake because that way you're not messing with multiple variables. So I can see what you're getting at now with that because you changed a multitude of variables there with energy expenditure along with energy intake coming in. Whereas if we say, hey, we're going to have 40 people come in for this study, you're not changing your lifestyle, you're literally just going to change your dietary intake either you're going to work to make sure you're as close to maintenance as possible. You're in a minor deficit or you're in one of these two surplus groups. And then just make sure that it's evenly balanced between the groups in terms of the volume that they do. You're not going to put a bunch of guys in one group, we're doing 20 sets a week versus a bunch of guys and the other group who are doing like freaking big stuff. You have to standardize it to some degree to where you're, I think you're like, hey, everybody's getting roughly eight to ten sets for each muscle group during the week. And so that way we're kind of working in the boundaries of hey, we're not doing excessive amount of junk volume. So that way somebody's getting a lot more energy expenditure and all that kind of stuff. And so here's my question come back, is it if you have somebody gave you $1 million and this study is going to be done, it's going to tightly control this possible. And they all had a very standardized type of training program. And you're like, you can put a million dollars on one group. Who's going to grow the most muscle? Which group are you going to put that money on? If the study was done like I would like to see it done, I would still, I would put it on I would put it on a slight surplus. But I mean, depending on the population we put in there, you know what I mean, depending it on their starting body fat status and their training age training status. That would that would influence what who I bet on. But it would have to be trained individuals couldn't do it on training, it had to be trained subjects. It had to be people that are well trained. That's another requisite of the study has to be people that have been training for at least longer than five years. I would bet all the money across all of my Bitcoin and all of my various passive income streams on the maintenance. I would put it that it would be the same from the maintenance of the surplus groups. The cross section area I think would be no difference between those if you standardized training program. I think it's like I said, if I look at my mate, if I looked at my mate in his calories and I'm getting 24250 grams of protein in a day and I get 400 grams of carbohydrates, there's nobody on the face of the plant is going to tell me I can't grow as maximally as fast as possible with that intake. I was believe that with you, you know, with your individual case, you know, and I think it just circles back to we have to look at the individuals and see how they respond. And then make the adjustments as the bigger coach or they can make the adjustments on themselves. Like if they find that a maintenance program is not getting them anywhere, well then maybe they have a justification now to ramp up. But generally, Alan, if a maintenance program is not getting them anywhere, it's a problem with the training approach. Well, that this is given that they're, you know, at least they think they've got their training dial, right? If somebody has a problem with training with their training progress, I guess the diet is going to be a part of that. It's going to be a much more minimal part of the solution than looking at what's going on with their training themselves. So it's if you're, if you take away the training, it doesn't matter how perfect the diet is, all the muscle is going to go. If you put in a very poor training program where the person is not recovering and they don't see progressive overload, no matter what they do with their diet, that's not going to change that. I would also like to add, I think this, like if somebody is not seeing progress on a maintenance diet, something that I've seen personally with people who've tried maintenance diets, is they just don't, they don't organize their diet well in the sense that they don't eat before their workout, which is why my, like my practical advice is to always have a pre-workout meal. And that's like kind of like the, it accounts for the exercise, it accounts for the muscle growth. And you won't see the individual gain a significant amount of body weight because they're just replacing what they're burning. And it's, or at least you won't see them gaining a significant amount of body fat I should clarify. But I think it's very important that people who are put on to a maintenance diet, they don't go into, oh my god, I have to conserve all my calories because what happens when we tell people to eat this specific amount of calories and then throw on this one word that has a pre-conceived meaning of maintaining body weight, we're going to freak out and say, okay, I'm not going to eat that much. I'm maybe I won't even eat a pre-workout meal. And that's what I've seen personally from people who are trained is they don't see progress because they don't have the actual, they don't, they're not eating at true maintenance because to them maintenance is maintenance of body weight when maintenance is really just replacing total daily energy expenditure, which brings me to another point which is I think the most practical application of all of this could be eating can be and stress day. in general dietary advice is so individualistic that we can't really provide an umbrella approach for diet, but what we can provide is an umbrella approach for making sure that we're cringing close to or at failure and people can debate volume all the time, but without intensity you need to need the end. Or without volume, sorry, without intensity, volume can't save you. So you can't do a crazy amount of volume with zero intensity and make the same amount of progress as if you were, if you were just doing that intensely. So I feel like intensity of training is peak. Then combining that with ensuring that our body fat percentage is not skyrocketing or going down exponentially and then also ensuring that the individual's making progress in the gym are the three most umbrella things you can provide for every single person is if they are hitting those three things, it is almost guaranteed that they are growing muscle. That's pretty nice bow tie on the whole thing, don't you think? Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it was, I think it's good to get into like the, you know, wrap it up in that we're like we don't all have to be on the exact same page. My, my takeaway is always going to be my approach is that if your body composition is not where you like it to be, that your diet, your cardio, your knee are going to be, that's the three things that you're going to want to approach as kind of the forefront, your biggest weapon is kind of like when people try to use either use cardio or exercises a way to get lean and like that's spitting, like spitting on a house fire and thinking you're going to put it out. It's not the most effective approach. Your diet is going to be the most effective approach in getting your body fat off. But if you're, if the training, if you're actual progressive overload and your training is a problem, then guess I think your diet is definitely a part of, I said before earlier, it's like if you can have some interference mechanisms fatigues, if your diet is not out, and if you don't have enough carbohydrate intake, again, the hormone when I spec a fat intake, I think sometimes it's a little bit overshot. And then if you don't have the requisite amount of protein coming in to both support, repair and mouth April Genesis, then you're not going to grow. So, but the thing is with most people out, and I guess this one guy getting back to is from an individual standpoint, most of the people that are weighing in on this topic are already eating enough protein or already eating enough carbohydrates. When I'm saying like most people like online that are in the fitness space, they already have, in my opinion, more than likely enough calories, carbs, protein coming in that they're not having those issues. And yet, does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. And so, but the general problem, so the general problem, follow up after you. Okay. So the general problem that I see with people is they have poor training approaches. The high volume stuff was pushed for who knows how long it's still highly debated. Why I don't know the volume made a regression, pretty much in my opinion put the nail in the coffin on those high volume studies being nothing more than a demon studies. If you don't have a strength expression to go along with a proposed cross-example area, an increase with it, then you didn't have muscle. It's literally impossible. Like if you're adding the things that produce force, you will have an increased strength and pressure to go along with it, physiological impossibility to have anything else. So, the biggest problem that people are running into is number one, muscle grows very slowly, unless you're on anabolic, muscle grows much faster. And even then, most guys are not growing as fast as they want to when they're their first time. But especially for natural guys, and I approach all this from the natural guys perspective, even though I ran cycles for years, is that muscle growth is very slow, especially after the first, I would say the first five years if you're training intelligent, after about the three to five year mark, it slows to a snail's pace. And then you grow very slowly. So, the reason why I'm so adamant about the fact that most guys need to fix their training is that if you have a problem with progressive overload, not occurring, then the problem is not in the diet. For most of these guys, there are already enough carbs, there are already enough protein. Most of the guys that are having problems, they have poor training approaches. And I know that from running my groups and all the people have come in, that have were stuck for 10 years and they're like, "Oh, are there having gains in their late 30s, mid 40s, mid 50s, that they haven't seen in 10 years?" And that's because the training approach is intelligent is correct. And most of the people that are said, "Well, I gain muscle from the bulk or I gain strength from the bulk." They're gaining fat from the bulk. They're gaining the strength that they get is just due to the increase in leverage from the bulk. But then when they die back down to the same size. So there has to be at some point the proof in the pudding, the secret and the sauce, has to be that there is something consistently showing that when you go into these surpluses, that there's a large amount of new functional proteins being accrued from the increase in calories. And I just don't see any data that's even remotely pointing in that direction. Well, we haven't done the experiments to root that out. What's funny is, you know, when this came up and I called you months ago and I said, "Allen, what study does this?" And you go, "We don't have it." And I'm like, "What do you mean?" "We don't have it." I go, "What do you mean we don't have it?" And you're like, "We haven't done it." I go, "You guys have been sitting around for a couple of decades running all sorts of nutritional data and you don't have this one." And you're like, "No, we don't have it." I'm like, "You don't have." And I even told you that when I was like, "You don't have a study that shows a small deficit to maintenance to a surplus." And you're like, "No, I'm not even one." And you're like, "No." I'm like, "I feel like you're lying to me." And you're like, "No, we haven't done." We literally. No, no, we don't. That feels like that's why we're even having this discussion in part, you know? And that's why there's going to be differing opinions and perspectives on this. Like, I'm coming from the angle of look. We've got to overcome a large proportion of the general training populations propensity to ramp up non-exercise activity in response to an imposed surplus. So I see that as a big issue with so-called hard gainers. And yeah, too. I agree with you that a lot of inkweeds hard gainers don't know how to train. They have real crappy training programs. And if you fix the training programs, then you'll see progress. But I still think that there's room for being like issuing countermeasures against people's tendencies to swallow up imposed caloric surpluses or even to put themselves into caloric deficits with increases in need. If it's a guy that's naturally small and skinny, I'm always going to want that guy to be like figure out if he's weighing the same amount and of course you impose a surplus, right? Because if he's underweight or whatever. There you go. Okay, we're done. But Ella and I never said anything different than that. Well, Ella, what did you want to say? You had something? Like, also, I feel like it's the middle. Like, the literal middle ground here is it's not. I have to say, yes, it's going to be like muscle growth is primarily a training problem. But to your extent, it's also the timing of your meals. Nobody is all batting it before the gym. So what is a surplus doing for you? Realistically, like if you're eating in a surplus and a lot of people like to eat really late in the day and let's say you work out in the morning and you're a hard gainer, what are you having before your workout? That is the most important meal for your training performance. So if they're not properly fueling their training, it doesn't matter what they have. It sounds like one of those things there's probably a study that show a mix of difference. I know anecdotally that my whatever I need to eat probably about an hour before I train and otherwise my training is not definitely not as effective. Alan, you probably have a study that's spout off about this, don't you? Yeah, yeah. I mean, you don't have this shit. I wanted, but you're going to have one on this watch. You'll have some type of free workout meal study. You got one of those, don't you? But is that actually the free workout meal study? Have a mind is not how rude and colleagues which actually supports what Ella is saying. So it's not just it's not the surplus, but it's the timing of the meal and it's not just the, it's not only training, but it's also diet as well. It's just a mixture of both in the sense that people don't structure their diets properly and they also don't. It's funny that okay, so I'll give, I'm usually like throwing a bunch of crap at bodybuilders for too much pro stuff, but they'll get some things right. You know, you know, something else we talked about before Alan, this will run on a close-up suit. Remember when you talk about there's different levels even with like bro, bro diet guys like you're like there's some bro diet guys that are actually really good, like Chris Acedo, like really good at like looking at the anecdotes and dealing with like that. And there's other guys that are really bad bro diet guys. Meadows, because I was talking about John, his training stuff, really had an intuitive way of approaching he would say, Ella, just for your point there. He's the the pre workout meal was the most important during dieting for competitors. It was he was really that one the pari workout and then the post workout. He said from their own, you cut all the calories as low as possible in the remaining meals, but you really push the to count. that you have remaining for the day, kind of into that little trifecta of the pre, the parry, and then the post. And then from there on out, that's when you start pulling the calories that any of those remaining meals. And I think that does support some of the data you're talking about too, is like the pre-workout meal being super important. - And the thing is, I feel like people don't say it enough. Like when you're talking to coaches, they're always talking about cool work intake, but are they talking about the timing of the meal? 'Cause that makes all the difference. If you're in a 500 calorie deficit, if you're eating all your calories at the end of the day and you work out in the beginning of the day, what are you doing? Like that's not gonna help you. You're eating all your food at the end of the day and you're waking up starving. And now you're going to go train. That's a recipe for poor performance in my personal opinion. So it's, I feel like it's a mixture of people, not only misinterpreting, like what the definitions are, but also not like thinking about this from the performance standpoint. What can we do to improve your performance in the gym? Yes, diet plays a role. Yes, 100%. - But I mean, that's the thing is like, I said that like from the outset was like mechanistically, if there's something in your diet that is causing underperformance in the gym, you need to fix that. And that's mostly gonna be related to your carbohydrate intake. And then your growth can't, clearly can't, as we talked about before with the metabolic board setting, your protein intake has to be high enough to support any damage repair that's gonna be going on with my ops or any myelophilial genesis that's gonna be going on for my ops. So you need the protein intake to meet those. And something I think from the practical application is, all of these guys that are talking about this, I don't feel like they're ever under eating. I feel like, you know what I mean? I feel like that if you have 400, Alan, if you had just real basic pull fat down to almost nothing, and if you had a guy eating 600 grams of carbs today and 200 grams of protein, do you feel like he's gonna be growing as fast as possible? Even though, let's say if you got, if you got as, what is that? 600, that's 600 times 2400. And then 200 grams of protein is 800, right? And so he's at 3200, let's say he filled it in with 300 calories from fat, 3500 calories. I, nobody will ever convince me. I've done these numbers so many times before I even made a post about it. I'm like, nobody will convince me. That is not, as long as we don't have interference mechanisms and long as we have an up protein to meet those demands, I can't find anything that's showing me I need stuff on top of that. - I would say that that would be true if we weren't battling, if this guy was not a neat freak, like a hype sort of one of these high responders in terms of non-exercise activity ramp ups. And also, if he was well trained, high training age, then you have a case, you know? But yeah, there's still some, it depends things that I would throw in there. - Yeah, I mean, definitely will always come back to the individual. But again, if there's a study clearly that we need to have done, we need to have one, a couple of really well-done controlled, randomized controlled trials that he's done looking at, what are we doing? - What would be amazing, actually, dude, is this idea that you bring forth, let's look at trained subjects in a deficit versus trained subjects in maintenance and then in trained subjects in a surplus. And that would be super hilarious if the trained subjects in a deficit kept up with the guys in surplus. Then you'll have my attention. I mean, why do you see this? - Why does the deficit group gotta keep up with the guys? And I would think that the guys in the, even in the deficit, they would definitely, it wouldn't be as a dramatic a difference, as you would think. - Well, well, right, if they were untrained, then I would expect them to be different. Regardless, right? We have Don Lee at all with the 800 calorie model with when they freaking gained muscle. - Yep. - 800 calories a day. But yeah, now there's a lot of room for some more interesting research in this direction and maybe homes. - Maybe, guess here, maybe me and you will find a way, we'll go find a study looking at this. And then we'll put a bet down, whoever is gonna be right about the outcome of the group. - It gets to buy the other guy. Like all you can eat Brazilian barbecue. How about that? - Let's do that again. All right, Ellen, did you have something you wanted to close up with? - Yeah, I just wanted to add on, if we do see that study, they better be having the same pre-workout meal. - I will legit point. - I think about potentially finding somebody that could do the study and fund it. Because-- - Bill Campbell, Bill Campbell is open to this. He's kind of a bro. - He could do it. - Stu Phillips could probably do it. His whole lab could probably do it. There's quite a few groups that could probably do it. I think we'd need a big enough, we'd need at least something like closer to 40 people 'cause we'd want more than 10 people in each group. - It's a colossal order. - It would be a lot. - Getting, you know, recruiting and finding-- - Maybe we'd start an online petition for people to sign to have somebody to have the study done. 'Cause we do need it done to fill in the gaps. It's so crazy to me that we have so many nutritional studies done over the decades that we don't have outside of the helm study. We don't have this one, just wild. - Well, we'll see what happens in the future, man. You guys, it was a pleasure, in quotes moderating this. Would have been great. It would have been great if Joel was here to give his side of things. I honestly was not prepared to do any of the debating and stuff. But yeah, no, I like how the different viewpoints kind of came together and we have areas that we agree on, we have areas that we kind of demure for a little bit on, and that's fine. - I think it's very small gaps. I think the main thing, I don't think there's room for anybody to make a case for anything other than a small surplus. I don't think really even from an individual basis, once you can actually figure out. - To that point, and to Ellis Point, the Rossinic study, I read it and I'm like, I want to believe, right? I want to believe in aliens and stuff. I want to believe that they consume 2000 calorie surpluses and didn't significantly gain fat food. Yeah, I do it, dude, look, I freaking read studies and I go, "Oh, that's cool." That's what they reported, but oh, you know. - Yeah, that's, I'm not gonna say, but somebody made some content the other day was like, that's a shit study and then it was like, says the guy who doesn't like the outcome of the study. I'm like, there's shit studies out there, bro, we have them. We've seen them, there's definitely, like the idea that there's not shit studies is, like there is, like it's okay to look at you. This is not a tightly controlled study, it's very underpowered or who took these measurements, you know, there's bad studies, there's bad studies out there. Even peer reviewed studies that get, you know, push through, oh boy, do I know that? - Yeah, the good old boy system. So let's just not act like there's not shit studies out there 'cause there is. So, all right, we're literally pushing on three hours now in 20 minutes. You guys have been wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on and spending your day with me. I hope that the listeners get a lot out of this one. I feel like we've covered so much stuff. Ella, maybe you can just tell people, it's like just shut up arguing with me and go listen to this three hour podcast. We'll revisit it again if we ever get the study done that shows us what we want to see. So thank you guys so much for being here. We'll wrap it up and I'll say good night to you guys. - You got it, man. Oh, real quick, real quick. This is like a situation where we leave the window open otherwise we screw things up. - If you just literally just leave this window open 'cause I'll in the session for all, but just leave this open and then it does like a thing on the back end. So you can just leave it up for a little while. So other than that, we're good. Thanks guys. - Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Ella. - Thank you. - All right.