THE OVERLOOKED BENEFITS OF EATING AT MAINTENANCE | METABOLIC, PHYSIOLOGICAL, BEHAVIORAL & PSYCHOLOGICAL ADVANTAGES WITH JEFF HOEHN

What's going on guys, this is Brandon Cruz, host of the Chasing Clarity Health and Fitness Podcast. I'm a good friend with me, Jeff Hane, host of the Mind Muscle Connection Podcast. Jeff and I are back for episode two of our monthly podcast collaboration. For each month, we will answer your questions and dive into topics that will benefit both our audiences. And this is going to be applicable whether you're at coach like ourselves, you're a fitness enthusiast, you're one of our clients, you're just someone that's simply chasing a healthier leaner and more muscular physique. And this series between the two of us is all about bridging the gap between evidence and real world application. So we'll be tackling everything, everything from training and nutrition to recovery, lifestyle strategies. And then anything else that helps you look, feel and perform your best. So Jeff, let's start off by doing a quick catch up on how things have been going from training, nutrition and business perspective moment. Yeah, dude, pumped to do this again. I got really good feedback from the first one. So excited to do this. I just kind of knew for whatever I knew that that was going to be the case. New people are going to love it. So pumped to do this again and keep this going, man, I was looking forward to this, especially the topic we're going to discuss today. But yeah, dude, so from a training perspective, yeah, I think big things is I was doing. So one thing that I'm sure you're this way, I just want to try and like at this point, I want to continue to build muscle, but I also want to kind of just test some things out and see how it works and be able to share that with people on my followers, clients, et cetera. So I want to try this time because I really have kind of gotten the itch to do. I think we kind of talk about this last time to do conditioning to build up my cardiovascular fitness. And so I went deep down that at the beginning of this kind of phase that I'm in. And then I'm like, you know what? I do miss some hypertrophy training. So then I did, I think somewhere around 12 to 16-ish weeks where I was doing four days, kind of went back up to four days from three days. And now I'm like, okay, what I want to try is I want to sort of try a, uh, volume cycling slash frequency cycling of where now I'm going to go into a phase four, like six to 10-ish weeks or so where I'm going to now go back to three days of weight training and bump up the cardio. And my thought here is, okay, this would be, I just want to test this out to see, you know, now that I've been put on some muscle, at least I feel like I feel bigger. I've put on a little bit of weight during this time, like controlled way, like I feel like my body composition is good. Um, and so now I'm like, all right, now I want to see if I can spend a little bit more time if you're looking at a dial towards conditioning to see what that does, right? Like I just want to see if that's something that can help me prolong this phase, feel better, maybe keep metabolic health in a good spot while continuing to build my conditioning. And also potentially get some benefits of cycling volume a little bit from like a hypertrophy standpoint. Um, and so that's what I'm, I'm switching to now for the next six to eight weeks, six to 10-ish weeks, we'll, we'll kind of see how things go. Um, so that's one big change that I'm having there, uh, with that, um, and so yes, go ahead. Now let me ask you, when you're saying cycling volume, right now you're going into your down shifting and decreasing volume due to the decrease in frequency, is that correct? Yep, yep. Okay. Just naturally. When they hear volume cycling, they're going to think of either James Krueger, who is big on volume cycling, uh, Mike Zordos or Dr. Mike Isertel, where it's a volume cycling, but it's a progressive escalation involved. So I just wanted to make sure that the audience is aware you're, you're actually decreasing volume so that you could essentially, um, be able to allocate more of your adaptive recovery and performance resources towards conditioning and towards aerobic training and really making that your one A and then resistant training and hypertrophy training will be your one B for this specific, uh, meso cycle. Yep. And my thought on that is I can give my body a little bit of a break from, not that my training volume is super high and in hypertrophy right now, but I can give my body a little bit of a break. Knowing what I know about hypertrophy, it's like, you can get away with doing less than you, than you think and you're not going to necessarily go backwards, right? So now it's like, hey, I'm just switching that to more, that's closer to maintenance and now conditioning is a little bit more towards like progressing, right? Um, and so that, but again, it also gets my body of break from a stimulus standpoint, right? And is there anything that, you know, is there science behind this and that this is going to work? You know, I don't think that there's necessarily any science around volume cycling for sure, right? Like I think it's kind of mixed in terms of that or maybe not good research around it. But I think there is something to potentially being able to do that not only from like a physiological standpoint, but a psychological standpoint to, right? To kind of switch it up from that point. And, and, you know, doing cardiovascular, like improving your cardiovascular fitness, you know, well, should help with recovery and, and, and whatnot too. So I'm hoping to kind of get the benefits of that too. And, um, all the other benefits of, of building a cardiovascular fitness. So looking forward to, to give that a shot and just kind of testing that that cycling, uh, approach out of like, or I guess there would just be periodization, right? Just kind of periodizing cardio and, um, hypertrophy. And then I'll go back to four days and just kind of see what, what happens there and, and see, see what happens from a, a result standpoint, right? Because like I said, is this going to for sure work? I don't know, but, you know, at this point in time, it's like just testing it out and then seeing if it's something that I can apply and, and obviously share my results, you know, with, with other people around it. And it's just, and it's just fun to, you know, I think something that's really, important to hit on. Um, I'm at this point, this will be my 21st year of training. And there have been many points in my life that I wanted to do what was optimal, what was optimal on paper or what was optimal based on the information that I was gathering, research I was doing, or the mentors that were influencing me. So I've worked with everyone from John Meadows to I've went to training camps at Joe Bennett and Ben Pekolsky. I've done in person, you know, seminars with the likes of Eugene Tio, like people that were very big into the hypertrophy training. One of my mentors is soccer, Scott Siemens in Afforded to Training and I've also done extensive mentorships with Chris Beard and I've tried all these different training philosophies. But I think that one thing that held me back, maybe 10, I would say 10 or 12 years ago, especially like when I was really, really into competing was that if it was in what I thought was optimal in that moment, it almost was like a sunk cost fallacy where I was not willing to experiment and as I've gotten deeper into my training career and have also gotten away from bodybuilding where there is something at stake, you know, in your mind in terms of the stage presence and the stage performance, I've been much more willing to experiment with things to take on different types of training methodologies and strategies because perhaps they may not be appropriate for me. But I can test them out, see my, and I also really what it comes down to is data tracking because I'm very comprehensive in terms of my data tracking. We went through my fat loss phases and all these things I will look at literature behind it, I will test it in the trenches, I will be very comprehensive in my data tracking and then my analysis process. And so it has often allowed me, even these experimental things that may not have been like the most conducive, like if we look at it, I'm like a time scale by time scale basis, 12 weeks of this training versus usually my blocks are 16 weeks. So 16 weeks of this training versus 16 weeks of this training, it may not have been like the experimental one may not have been the most conducive towards muscle growth or physique development. But a lot of times I've learned a lot in that process. So there's been certain training cycles where I've utilized, I'm personally more of an advocate of higher frequency, but I've done decreased frequency and lower frequency and seen that it has had certain advantages or certain upsides in terms of joint integrity, different just not dealing with as much niggles and things that's where and then it's allowed me to utilize it with clients that come to me already predisposed or dealing with those issues. So I think at this point in our career, I'll just speak for myself. My career is much more important than my personal physique progress. Like my clients progress, I put that over anything because I actually get more of a fulfillment and more joy and don't mean hit out of them making gains than myself. Also, I think that also is confounded by the fact that I'm making gains much slower than many of my clients. And so I think that it's great that you're trying something different because this is a learning opportunity for you to be in the trenches to try it yourself and to see what works and doesn't work, but also being able to take notes of these different physiological, psychological and just behavioral changes that you're going through and then being able to walk the walk and also be able to relate to the clients that you may potentially bring through this in later phases. Yeah, dude, absolutely, man. I think we've talked about this a ton in the past too about just like, hey, knowing the research is great, but then also, I think testing things on yourself and being in the trenches is just super important and living through your experiences, I think, in testing it out, I think it's just super important. But yeah, dude, I think also too, real quick, just not, I don't want to keep harping on this side because I do want to quickly go tell you my blood work, just to kind of get your thoughts on it. But, I also think too that as like body weight climbs and you add more and more, so I think it's even more important to like make sure you do some sort of conditioning and cardiovascular stimulus, right? As that continues to go up. So again, that's part of it as well too, right? As to why I want to bring some of this in. And this has come from the guy that literally dude, back in my building phases, I was like, I'm getting like 5,000 steps because if I expend too much energy, that's not going to be good for muscle growth, no cardio, right? So it's like complete 180 from what I used to do in these phases. So, yeah, man, so I got my, I know we talked last time, I think I just got neutral on or I was about to, but I got it back. Overall, everything was like super, super solid. My total testosterone was good. So, so, well above the middle of the range, if we look at the range, it's usually like two something, two thirty, or maybe it might be two sixteen to nine sixteen or something two thirty to nine sixteen at this point, they keep changing it. So it's hard to keep up with, but usually it's like three hundred and nine hundred. We're looking at it. So you're at the upper end of the range, which for someone in their mid thirties, that trains hard, you know, completely natural. I think that's great. Yeah, I was, I was, you know, I, I didn't know what to expect with that, right? I was like, you know, I think as a male, you're always kind of like, oh, I think my testosterone should be higher. So I didn't know for sure, but then free tests came back and it was ten. So when you look at the actual reference range, it's still on the lower end. And I think when you look at the functional range, it's still as kind of on the, on the lower end. Um, that in my SHBG was actually really, was not really high, but it was pretty high. There was you know if that free test was actually taken or was it a back calculation that they provided you. That's correct. Okay. So does that mean those actually taken then right if it says it's direct? That would mean yeah. She tested it because someone was able to do it and they do the same thing with a coma IR, well they'll do a back calculation for a coma IR which is a homostatic model of insulin resistance. They do that based off oftentimes like your fasting insulin and your blood glucose values on blood work. So the same thing could be said sometimes what they'll do is they'll take like you can do this actually online you can look up free testosterone calculator and you could add in the total testosterone and then also the binding protein. So if you have SHBG sometimes you could do it with albumin. So anything that's going to bind up and essentially essentially what we're looking for is the unbound testosterone that can exert its actions on actual cells which is the free testosterone just like the same concept would be with free T3 and free T4. What is the actual what are the active free hormones in the serum that can exert their actions you know in the in the case of thyroid on these cells and do so in a metabolically active way? Yeah yeah right yeah looking at the actual free part of it because because my understanding that is ultimately what's going to kind of draw like how you would actually feel. So in my understanding SHBG you know the higher it is it kind of bounds up makes testosterone kind of bound up a little bit right like potentially there so without a doubt the one thing with what we usually see is that most men will be able to convert on average 2% of their total testosterone into free testosterone. So I just did the calculation so for you based off that you said 707 correct? Yes okay so that would be a little over 14 so you're a little bit low in that range obviously they're going to give you like optimal range as well as like what they see from a reference population perspective. So it just may be modulating that SHBG that can be done through supplementation especially like boron supplementation is quite effective at lowering SHBG specifically. But you also don't necessarily want to drive HSBG down completely too right? No no no so that is a misconception actually if you look in the bodybuilding world a lot of individuals you see so I'll just give an analogy from the bodybuilding they used to try to just like with estralial they used to use a lot of aromateous inhibitors to drive estralial down. Now we know that estrogen or specifically estralial which is E2 which we would get pulled on labs is cardio protective it's renal protective it's brain protective there's so many benefits of estrogen especially in a healthy range and when you are at super physiological dosage testosterone such as in the case of someone that's enhanced in bodybuilding you should have higher than normal estralial so you don't need to suppress that so that's the first thing but secondarily there used to be this I don't want to say this lure but essentially this mindset or this perspective that you wanted SHBG as low as possible. Now this is not something I could speak at that depth with but there is something else called a megalin receptor which actually you need enough of the SHBG to actually circulate your testosterone so you wanted it as with many things in life no one wants to hear this because it's not sexy just like when we say it depends no one wants to hear that but it really is about having these hormones in a gold eloxone we don't want them too high but we don't want them too low but it could be just the simple modification or modulation of getting SHBG down into more of the moderate or low normal range that would help with increasing testosterone or free testosterone but then again we got to go back to you're not your labs that was a one single time point reference so you're not feeling any indices of low energy or fatigue or recovery issues or libido issues this may not be something that you have to modify or really manipulate right now yeah no absolutely I always come back to like how do you actually feel but before because so then looking at my thyroid markers t3 was a little bit on the when you look at the functional range it was on the lower end and then and then reverse t3 was on the higher end of the functional range and so like my because again also like you said you know looking at how you feel but then also it's like looking at the the everything what is what's it pointing towards right and then also you know I this is the first time I got it so it's like are these training up or they train right it's like looking at that too and you know seeing that is super important so like my takeaway from this was you know you kind of mentioned hey how do you feel and like I definitely since having colby I have noticed recovery is probably a little bit slower like I don't like with training I still enjoy it but I do have to get myself up to go and do it a bit more we kind of talk about that last time so it made me think like okay probably my biggest lowest or my lowest hanging fruit here is is sleep and just better like just trying to get a little bit more sleep right because I think all those things that I mentioned there would probably fix their at least get those into that even more functional range on their selfs kind of my takeaway it's just like hey I have to me it just read someone that that is trying to train you know six seven days a week trying to manage business trying to be a father not necessarily getting as optimal sleep as before and that's kind of you know where I'm at and that's what I what I took away from it's like hey I you know I want to train this much but I also need to because of that I need to make sure that recovery is there otherwise you can run run into issues but I also don't have previous labs to go off of so so yeah yes and I think that's the most important thing so if you actually look in the literature on testosterone values the reason why if someone who's going to be hypogonadol so they're going to be labeled as being hypogonadol meaning they have clinical deficiency into Sasha they need to be measured multiple times because there's actually not only a diurnal variation into testosterone so say for instance you got measured your first time at 7 a.m. and your next time at 10 a.m. like there could be differences just based on the diurnal pulses up testosterone throughout the course of the day your values no more you're not going to be the same as your values at night so that's the first thing that we have to essentially standardize the approach that we're utilizing to lab work in terms of how you approach it nutritionally how you approach it from a training perspective how you approach it supplementation wise a lot of supplements especially multivitamines micro nutrients things like that they can alter certain lab values especially from a thyroid perspective so that's something you have to be cognizant of secondarily there I forget the actual percentage points but there is a natural variation between testosterone pulls where even when they've done control trials where they pull labs off the same person the same day and the same time and they tested it in they send it to different labs or even to the same lab but in two samples you will see a difference I forget with the percentages but I believe it was around 5% but let's say it is 5% that means that any of these values could be off by a pretty substantial margin of error so we have to take that in consideration when looking at time points and values across time and really what we're looking for and I think this is why I've been successful in blood I've always been interested in blood work but I've been able to help a lot of individuals is I'm always looking to at patterns first and foremost I'm really good at recognizing patterns and then also triangulating that I'm never looking at one single time point in isolation I'm always looking at the totality of the data and making sure that we are not making preemptive like jumps and leaps towards a clinical deficiency or an issue if we don't have the full picture first and foremost we don't have previous data and we don't have a historical time course of that person's you know changes in nutrition training sleep stress all these things it's an amalgamation so it's never about isolating one thing you know sometimes I have people come to me for consult blood work consults in particular and like they're hyper fixated on one single value and when I look at the entire you know entirety of the lab it's like in everything else is like in a really good place and you're hyper fixated and this could literally be an anomaly or it could be like an error like their labs are just as you know open to human errors we are so I think it's always important to kind of zoom out and look at things in the grand scheme of things especially when it comes to something like your health your fitness is the same thing as if you were to have a performance decrement in a day where you just felt terrible and maybe you didn't have poor sleep the night before it was just an anomaly it was just abnormality that you had this if you were to hyper fixate on and think oh I need a deal like you would be making preemptive and proactive changes that aren't really indicative of where you are in this time this time period nor would it be beneficial to your long-term progression in progress so I think it's really important to not hyper fixate and not hyper focus on singular time points and singular pieces of data. Yeah dude absolutely and like you said looking at the overall pattern and then where is it trending too because like you said that's super important and like you just said there it's like you can get this different testosterone readings depending on which lab it's going to as well too so it's like just so many things man so cool dude that that's an anomaly man I'd love to hear about what's been going on with your training and in life and everything like that. Yeah so I'll keep my update short because we have a lot to get into today but I'm currently 17 weeks into my building phase and I've just been aiming to execute like 100% across the board I'm really dialed in in terms of my training my nutrition my supplementation and especially my sleep and stress management you know this makes sound odd to say but like I'm not someone who partakes in like dopamine driving activities I don't drink I don't smoke I don't do any of these like elicit activities but I will tell you that there's nothing that gives me a larger like dopamine secretion and hit then continuing to stack successful well executed days of my plan on top of one another and I know that really when it comes down to it like on the day to day it's very hard to see progress I mean I'm 20 plus years into this it's not like I'm going to see visual progress I'm like a day to day or week to week or a month a month basis but I really know that as long as I'm continuing to shrink together consistent days and weeks at a time it will pay off especially because I plan to start a cut in June and I want to do like a photoshoot prompt I would really love to do that with my significant other Jane we wanted to do so last year we ended up moving during the same time period that we were going to do the photoshoot and then we ended up at Sam Miller's conference so I prioritized my business over the photoshoot so I want to get that done it. I really want to see some some great pictures done. So I'm looking forward to that first and foremost, but everything on the training and nutrition front are going really well. Then on the business front, man, it's going extremely well. I'm very excited because right now we're already in March, which is crazy because I feel like we just recorded it last week and it was in February. So like the season is really coming towards us in terms of spring and spring has always been a very busy and productive season for me. So especially from a coaching perspective. So for the last, I would say six, eight weeks, I've been trying to get as many podcasts record, especially for chasing clarity, like in advance, but I've also scheduled in multiple podcasts, periods, just per week this winter. As I know that once this spring is here, my time's going to be limited. So I really wanted to ensure that I had a lot of high quality episodes. I've been able to do a lot of guest episodes, a lot of guest interviews. So I had that locked in and loaded. So I'm excited to release those, but overall, man, really excited with how everything has been going personally and professionally. And I'm looking forward to making the most out of the coming months and especially because spring has always just been just such a great season for me. I guess like I'm someone that responds really well to like warmer weather and like especially now that I'm in the greater national area where it is, it'll be 80 degrees, you know, by the time spring comes around. So I'm looking forward to that, but everything on my end is going well and I'm looking forward to having a very productive spring season. That's awesome, Dave. Well, sorry, when did you move down to Nashville again? So that was the fall of 2024, 2024. So you were you were there last spring then. So you were okay. I didn't okay. It was such a difference from now. Just so obviously, you know, but the audience, I lived between Jersey and New York for the entirety of my life essentially and I did travel quite extensively for my corporate career. So I was in different areas throughout the course of the year, but spring and Jersey is super rainy and it seemed to be with New York. It's still cold and like right now. So for instance, I was on the phone with my mom earlier this week and it was 36 degrees and here it was 71. So like there's a massive difference and we're close to spring. So you know, it's it's just a change of weather, but also with the mood that comes along with it. I'm someone that really likes the outdoors. If I'm not like inside on a computer on a podcast, like I'm outdoors trying to do activities hiking, going into trails, going into nature. So, you know, that's something my dog loves. So like it's it's activities like that that I really look forward to and the warm weather just allocates the ability to do that on a work-freak basis. So those are things that I kind of live for. Being able to put away my phone, my laptop for an hour, two at a time and just getting out into nature. Yeah, dude, we you need it, man. It's I definitely like realize that in the last five, 10 years, how important it is getting outside. I freaking love being outside as much as I can too. So I love on the weather changes like this and stuff. So it real quick though. I'm curious. I don't know if you ever talked about it. What and I don't know if you supplement wise, what would it kind of your main? What would you typically take there? What does that look like? Does it depend on again, blood work or yeah, what do you typically take in there? Yeah. So just as a caveat here, I spent over 10 years in the summit industry. So a lot of what I do supplementation wise is very targeted. It is based off of my biofeedback, my blood work, and then also certain things that I'm working towards within a phase. So right now I have very basic things in. So I'm using high dose creatine anytime that I have under six hours of sleep. I will utilize 20 grams of creatine. If not, I'm using a daily dose of 10 grams, which I separated out to two doses. I like to use a lot of supplements that are more so replacements, not for food exactly, but their food first types of nutrients. So for instance, I utilize a lot of highly brain cyclic dexerant in terms of my intro workout. And that is a high molecular weight low osmolarity carbohydrate that helps with increasing glycogen replenishment. It helps with fueling during training. And it's just very effective, especially that it sits so easy on the gut. So I utilize that intro workout with some electrolytes that's something I'm a big fan of. I utilize magnesium, pulse throughout the course of the day. I'm also a big fan just because I have a high stress burden and high stress load. Luckily, I can manage it well, but I do believe in the strategic use of supplementation. So I will often utilize in the morning. If I'm not utilizing nitropics like on a very high workload day, I will utilize something like a rodeola, which helps with stress management, also helps with the lane, where essentially reducing fatigue. I'm also a fan of in the evenings. I'll often, if I have a very stressful day, I will utilize ashwaganda, and specifically the KSM66 version, which interestingly enough, one of the companies I worked for, I pushed for that to come out to, and we were one of the first brands in the US that really got that. So I was able to get, I was privy to the early research on that. And it's been amazing to see how it's transitioned into many other capacities they're seeing. Increases in Tassashe, and increases in, and you know, they are some body composition research on it, but really I was always very focused on the cortisol, quenching effects of KSM, the stress reduction effects. It has some ability to enhance sleep, but that's more so due to helping you downshift into a parasympathetic state. So I utilize ingredients like that, trying to think anything else. Obviously, I do a lot of multivitamin and multi nutrient. I do have hypothyroidism, so I tend to supplement with very specific things like very high quality selenium extracts. I will make sure that I have some type of iodine source, whether that's iodine sea salt, or I'll utilize like an iodine supplement. So yeah, it really is heavily dependent on my blood work. The one thing that I do utilize as my food gets higher because I am so, and that has a very adaptive metabolism meeting. I have to very much increase my food. And you know, right now I'm sitting at about 600 grams of carbohydrate today. Now we discussed last time about blood glucose. I'm very, I am someone that is hyper focused on blood glucose. And that is something I've been tracking for 20 plus years. My father was a type 2 diabetic and people will say, oh, that's a lifestyle disease. Absolutely. But if you have multiple people in your family, I also have diabetics in my family. So if you have multiple people in your family that have been predisposed towards insulin resistance, hyper-lippidemia, hyper-cholestolemia, like these metabolic syndrome criteria, you are more likely to fall in that category as well. And so during times that I'm utilizing higher carbohydrates, I will utilize things like burrine hydroplorid, I actually use a DHB, which is dihydroberberine, which is essentially five times as bio-bill. And so it doesn't cause as many of the GI related effects as burrine. So burrine has many, many uses. We can use that as it's not a glucose disposal agent just independently, but it is helps with glucose control. It helps with insulin sensitivity and things like that. And it works very comparative or very similar to metformin, which is the number one prescribed type 2 diabetic medication as of the last few years, but honestly at this point, GLP ones might be taken that over. So I need to look back into that. But burrine also has antibacterial effects, which can be used in a gut health regimen essentially. And so that I'm not trying to use it for. I am trying to get the benefits from insulin sensitivity, glycemic control perspective. So what I use is a concentrated form that gets absorbed into the actual intestinal tract much easier. So I'm able to use the efficacious dose per dose of burrine is often 500 milligrams. Well, I can use 100 milligrams of a burrine dihydroburber. And now I actually beta tested that before it ever came to market. So I have like extensive experience with a lot of these things. And I actually went through a period where I was purposely trying to induce insulin resistance to see the effects of dihydroburberine. That's an experiment. We'll talk about another day, but it's potent in terms of its efficacy. So that is something that I use during this time period. But besides that, and it comes down to simple things like caffeine. I really like the basics essentially creatine caffeine. Now there are some other sexier things, but you know, that's really on a specific time point basis that I may utilize those products. And oftentimes speaking about them, like I'm the person that I spent a decade plus in cell-man industry, but you'll very rarely hear me talk about or promote supplements. Because I really do, first inform us on the nutritionist. I believe in a food first approach. And I will always prioritize food. And the whole food matrix over anything else. Yeah, do know absolutely. You really don't talk about supplements very much. And what you take, that's why I was kind of asking because you really don't. And again, that's the importance of like you said lifestyle and food first. But yeah, dude, rodeo, I think, is definitely like a undervalued supplement for sure. I use that when Colby was born. I'm definitely going to use it again when baby number two is born for sure. Because I definitely felt better and was able to manage it. And then obviously create team two. But rodeo, dude, don't, don't, don't sleep on that one for sure, especially for like you said. So Colman, well, let's let's dive into the topic. Absolutely. All right. So the main topic for today is going to be the many benefits of eating at maintenance. And maintenance is one of the most overlooked concepts in nutrition and fitness industry. And as a result, very few people acknowledge the many metabolic physiological behavioral and psychological benefits that can come from spending time eating at maintenance. In the fitness space, most conversations revolve around two things. People talk about being in a calorie deficit to lose body fat or they talk about being in a calorie surplus trying to build muscle, but very rarely do people speak about the value of intentionally spending time eating at maintenance. And part of the reason for this is that many people have incorrectly associated eating at maintenance while being stagnant. They assume that if they aren't actively in a deficit or surplus, then they must not be making progress. So being at maintenance calories gets viewed as a period where you're not being productive towards your goals. But in reality, this can be further from the truth. Spending time eating at maintenance can provide a wide range of metabolic physiological behavioral and psychological benefits that actually help support long-term body composition progress. And that's exactly what we're going to dive into today. So Jeff, before I start this off by going over the metabolic benefits of eating at maintenance, I love to hear your thoughts on why so many people in this space neglect to discuss maintenance as much as they do deficits and surpluses. Yeah, dude. Well, like you said, I think the big thing is people think maintenance means that they're not making progress. And like you said, that's further from the truth, right? We kind of, we talk about this off-air, but separating maintenance calories from like maintenance of like a maintenance phase, right? Like that doesn't mean you're standing still in, in anything. And as we're going to talk about today, you still can can make a ton of progress even. at maintenance calories, right? So I think that's the first thing that we need to establish is there's a difference between maintenance not going anywhere and like a maintenance phase versus eating at maintenance calories because you know I don't know how you think of this but like for me I'm like you know for depending on where you're at but for a lot of people like eating at maintenance during a building phase is definitely something that that we would do right at times again depending on you know certain things and what it looks like right. So I think that's the very first thing as people just like you said think that maintenance means they're not going anywhere but it's like man there's that's different from eating at maintenance calories right and so so you know I think that's a big thing too though is and maybe we need to hit on this is like what you know maintenance calories I think people think that it's like you're at this like one specific number and you're at this one specific weight right and I think that that's where maybe people get lost with maintenance and they think that it's just like one specific number and one calorie target right where it's like hey that could both of those could change over time in terms of maintenance calories and also your kind of maintenance there and I think it's a rain I think the weight is a range right your maintenance weight would be a range there and I think it can also and I'm sure we'll hit on this but like it can also like just be you can also see your weight trend up over time at maintenance calories too right if you're adding some muscle and things like that too you know so those are just a few things there that I see and yeah yeah so I'll just hit on this before I get into some of the benefits first and foremost it is very important for us to disentangle the concept or the act of eating at maintenance calories and the concept of maintaining where we are currently they're not one in the same maintenance calories is a time to get you back up to energy balance and to fuel the the goal specific or you know the specific goals that you're looking to achieve that could be restoring after a fat loss phase that could be looking to induce body recombition which is the simultaneous increase in lean mass and decrease in fat mass or it could be that you are looking to have a very strategic lean building approach and and we see in the literature I'm going to be releasing a podcast with Dr. Erick Helms soon so this may have come out by the time that we release this one where we discussed his recent study which was a lean bulking study where they looked at maintenance versus a 5% surplus versus a 15% surplus now in actuality the two surplus groups ended up almost like overlapping with one another in terms of the actual surplus that they induce but when we look at it and we look at all three groups there was no significant difference in muscle mass gains between the three so even that group that that was at maintenance for the entire eight week duration which they actually gained 0.9 pounds during that period they did not see any you know diminish the facts from a actual lean mass accretion perspective being at maintenance and these were intermediate trainees there were some advanced individuals in the cohort but we would say they're intermediate so there are many people and most of the individuals that work with our intermediate trainees that are trying to either get a little bit to a more advanced intermediate or to the advanced stage and a lot of times they're not going to benefit from a massive surplus so what we could do is you know a lot of times I will start off in a primary phase and in priming where a primary phase is essentially I'm trying to improve their internal physiology and get their body to be more responsive and often the best way to do that is to get them at maintenance to improve their habits behaviors really dial in their training drive body composition improvements through training performance improvements and then I start with the modification and the manipulation of energy balance in and of itself whether I'm trying to induce greater lean mass accretion so maybe I'm starting to increase calories and work their calories up as they become their energy expenditure levels increase or if we're looking to more drive that loss then I will tiptoe them into a slight deficit to be able to drive but really the goal is body recombination but anytime I do a body recomb phase or a primary phase I started maintenance and that is one of the phases that often unlocks a level of progress that many people have yet to see so to misextrapily or to misunderstand and really lump one and two in the same in terms of maintenance calories and then maintenance of body composition progress is just really a fallacy of the fitness industry where a lot of times the vernacular that we use is incorrect so a great example of this is we'll often use the term or many fitness professionals I'm someone that I'm very cautious about using this they'll say that we're overtraining you have more of a likelihood of getting hit by lightning outside then you do overtraining from a resistion training perspective there is a great review of 2020 review by grand down colleagues and they put these guys through the fucking trenches in terms of it's brutal training programs and in the majority of studies they're unable to induce any type of overtraining effect and so a lot of times the fitness industry you know people will throw away these these um trite statements like oh you're overtraining you know and it's they're they're misusing the terminology and the same thing can be said about the way that people utilize and then also view maintenance so that's really why we're on this podcast we want to be able to really inform you as educate you and empower you with that education so that you realize that maintenance is not something that you need to turn away from run away from or try to avoid it's actually a period in which you can garner so so many benefits so that is what we will be covered today. Well and again just just to reiterate this like I really I'm almost kind of driving this on my thick we've really kind of beat this down but like just driving the the fact that eating it maintenance calories is just simply you're you're eating around your total daily energy expenditure right it's nothing more nothing less and there's positive benefits that can happen from doing that right and in a pot and you can move forward um at that right and so again just make sure that if you take anything away from this episode you separate those two um uh there I I will say I think many you know the the thing you need to look out for here at maintenance too is uh and especially this is would be somebody who's been like dieting for a while or they're very conscious of their weight is especially if they've been trying to restrict calories is I find that the biggest challenge to getting people to truly be able to to get to a good level of their total daily energy expenditure is actually like being okay with going from lower calorie amount and like your lowest scale weight to seeing it come up just a tiny bit right like I think that's the biggest thing because otherwise you kind of see people get stuck in this no man's land where they're like oh crap wait went up two pounds I'm not at maintenance because my weight didn't stay the exact say now I need to decrease my calories but that is not true so if you actually look at the to find the definition of maintenance it's actually a two two to three percent increase in body weight or a range of body weight so there's a great study by Stevens that looks at what is actually maintenance after a fat loss phase and they don't get really into this specific uh part but this is my interpretation and also just from experience being in the trenches you have to realize that your lowest body weight during a fat loss phase you do not own that weight that is not your true physiological weight that is the depleted carbohydrate you know completely strip the carbohydrate low water weight and low gut residue body weight so you are seeing an artificially low body weight during the end of your fat loss phase when you're on your lowest calories your lowest food volume your lowest if you have your lowest amount of carbohydrate intake and lowest glycogen levels now we know that the average person can store between four to six hundred grams of glycogen in the form of muscle glycogen and about 80 to 100 grams in liver glycogen so if we take the averages of that we could say five hundred let's go with five hundred grams of muscle glycogen and a hundred grams of liver glycogen that is six hundred grams so on the scale right then and there even if you just restored just the glycogen you would be at one point two pounds increase however every gram of glycogen stored on average it's three to four grams so we do the calculation then and we are looking at multiple kilos when i've done the calculations in the past for many clients a lot of times i'll draw this out on map this out and i'll do the maths and it comes out to about six point six pounds from someone's lowest weight until their glycogen restored weight and also what overlaps with that is i have done a lot of contests perhaps both with myself and many other athletes and oftentimes you'll see a swing of four to seven pounds depending on the size of the individual when you carbohydrate load them however it's very important for you guys to realize when i'm carb loading an athlete it is not for them to gain fat it is to get them to the to a level of muscular fullness where it improves your body composition it would actually be counterproductive if we were to take them and get them into a very lean state and then have them gain fat before the competition it would actually be counterproductive so we're not increasing calories and increasing carbohydrates to gain fat you're getting them into a glycogen restored state so realize that often your body weight so say you got down to two hundred pounds in a phallospheres your real true weight is between that two hundred pounds and two oh six because that's a three percent range and the same thing could be said about millions calories it is not a stock standard or static number it is going to be a range and oftentimes it's two three hundred calories depending on the person depending on your activity levels for training history your training intensity um your sleep there's so many factors that go into this so we need to stop looking at things as one singular number in terms of your body weight maintenance and then also your maintenance calorie intake yeah do know absolutely what but in that situation right you see a lot of people that they they see it go up and now they're like oh crap i'm in a surplus i gotta go back and i gotta get my weight back down and then they end up being in this like never-ending cycle of now they're they're at you know i guess we would call artificially low maintenance calories right where it's like yeah you might like like you need to you need to get over that kind of small increase on there because like you said all those things that you mentioned could be why you know you could see happen right so like you said you could be two hundred pounds you go up to two oh six you didn't gain body fats just like you said restored glycogen um and if anything then you like you said we said your your total daily energy expenditure is probably lower than what it could be if you just are okay with seeing it come up a little bit because there's adaptations upwards as well too right um and i'm sure we'll get into that uh but i also think you can see this on the opposite into where you some people may think that like their maintenance calories are too high because they see their weight come up over time but then you look and it's like they're also just not tracking very well or they're are having a lot of untracked meals. And now it's like their calories are, you know, they're trending up, but it's really because of those things that are causing their way to go up, not their maintenance calories are too high, right? And that could also lead to somebody, I think, under eating from a actual maintenance standpoint there. - Absolutely. All right, so we're gonna get into the benefits of maintenance and the first category of benefits that come from eating at maintenance are the physiological ones. But we're gonna break this down a little bit more specifically. We're gonna first go through the metabolic benefits of eating at maintenance. So eating at maintenance allows us to reverse the down regulation in total daily energy expenditure that occurs during a deficit. When someone expense an extended time period in a calorie deficit, we typically see a down regulation in all components of their total daily energy expenditure. And that's due to the diet-induced metabolic adaptations that occur when dropping body fat. But when we return to energy balance and we begin eating at maintenance again, so we increase our calories back up to what would sustain us. We often see these components of energy expenditure begin to increase. So for example, the first thing that occurs when you go back to maintenance is you're gonna have a higher thermic effective feeding. Because when you start eating more food, your body now has more nutrients and more calories to digest absorbent process. And this increases diet-induced thermogenesis or the thermic effective food, which is essentially the number of calories that are burned through the digestion and processing process of nutrients. We also see an increase in non-exercise activity thermogenesis. So during a diet, our movement often subconsciously drops to a significant degree. And this is something that many people don't pick up on unless they're doing step tracking or they're really like monitoring themselves. So I'll give a perfect example. I did a presentation for BodyBuilding.com right after a contest prep season. I literally had gotten off the stage. I drove to the airport the next morning and I got in a flight. And I remember the CEO of my company, they were videoing me 'cause this was a massive presentation in front of 400 people at BodyBuilding.com. And he's videotaping me in the back. And when I get off, I had done many dozens of presentations at this point. He was like, is everything all right? And I'm so animated when I speak. If you watching my video, I'm always talking with my hands. I'm constantly moving. Well, I wasn't moving first and foremost. I did my presentation to the best of my ability, but I wasn't as loud, I wasn't as animated. I wasn't using hand gestures. And also he said I was blinking slower. And that you may not think about that as conscious activity. It is and it's subconscious, but it's still burning calories. So we often see that neat levels, which are not just steps, they're also fidgeting, it's your postural movements. It is ambulation. As calorie intake decreases, oftentimes that will diminish. So we will see a decrease in your non-exercise activity, thermogensis or the calories burn through non-exercise activities. Now what often happens is that will get reversed once we go back to eating at maintenance as our neat levels increase. So that increase in calorie intake causes us to start naturally moving more, fidgeting more and generally being more active throughout the course of the day. And that in and of itself can significantly increase our total daily energy expenditure because that the neat component is actually accountable or responsible for the largest down regulation in total daily energy expenditure during metabolic adaptation. We also see that going back to maintenance can increase the calories we burn during exercise because eating at maintenance provides the body with more energy to allocate towards training. So in my own coaching practice, when I transition clients from a deficit back to maintenance calories, I'm often going to do that through large increases in carbohydrate intake 'cause I really want to support training performance improvements. Now this increase in energy availability is also going to support better training intensity, better work capacity and greater training volume tolerance as compared to being in a deficit. Then we also know that muscle protein synthesis is suppressed during energy deficits, meaning it becomes easier to stimulate muscle protein synthesis, which is the process in which we're able to add new muscle proteins. And that is actually significantly improved when energy balances restored. So this makes periods at maintenance much more conducive to not only productive training, but also to muscle protein. So overall eating more allows you to burn more. And that's like the whole concept behind the energy flux concept that I speak about quite often. On increasing, I always say, we're gonna eat more and we're gonna move more. Titan calories up and then getting movement as a result. And so total daily energy expenditure is increasing from both the increase in food, but also the concomitant increase in activity and we're able to really drive that person's maintenance calorie intake. However, we can do this independently just from getting you outside of a deficit and then increasing your calorie intake. And this creates a situation where someone can eat more food while still maintaining a lean physique because higher energy intake allows for higher levels of energy expenditure. The other component from a metabolism perspective is we see that it helps to mitigate the down regulation and metabolic rate because that is one of the most common things that we see during a deficit. And many people worry about this. We'll hear a lot of myths or misconceptions about dieting, permanently damaging some of this metabolism. And it used to be metabolic damage that a lot of people were worried about, but now it's more this term that people utilize as weight loss resistance or metabolic resistance. But we know from pretty much every well controlled study that the drop in metabolic rate that occurs during dieting is a temporary adaptation to being in a calorie deficit. And once energy balances restored by eating at maintenance, RMR tends to increase. So we're gonna see that restoration and metabolic rate which generally accounts for between 60 to 70% of your total daily energy expenditure. So if you have a massive reduction because you've been under feeling yourself, you've been living in a deficit, we can see quite an uptick over time as you get back to maintenance and restore your physiology. Then the last component that I'll hit on with metabolic increases or benefits of going back to maintenance relates to hormones because during prolonged dieting, we often see reductions in hormones associated with both energy expenditure and reproductive function, especially T3, which is the metabolic reactive form of thyroid hormone. And most of these hormonal down regulations are temporary adaptations to a deficit. So for example, thyroid output and the thyroid conversion. So the conversion of T4 into metabolic reactive T3 is often lowered during a deficit as a way to decrease energy expenditure, conserve calories as T3 is heavily involved in metabolic rate and fatty acid oxidation and then also energy expenditure. However, once we increase energy availability and return to maintenance calories for an extended period of time, we will often see that T3 increase both through greater production but also greater conversion of T4 to metabolic reactive T3. So these are all ways in which getting back to maintenance can have metabolic benefits which will all increase total daily energy expenditure. And thus actually increase your maintenance calorie intake. So what was initially your maintenance calorie intake when you first go back to maintenance may not be later on down the road. And I think it's very important like we were just alluding to. This is a range and many things will impact that from your activity levels to training outputs, your lean mass levels, but also the whole process of getting back to maintenance may increase your maintenance for some period of time. - Yeah, dude, no, absolutely, man. And I think it just comes back to like you said, you know, not only are you now increasing need which is gonna, like you said, that's a huge factor, especially when you drop weight, right? That's up. So you're increasing that, your body becomes more wasteful. So it's like, you know, you can see a huge increase there. You turn it into effective food, like you said, like that's another big one that now you're gonna see that increase. And so you could see where, you know, if you don't ever get to this point, like a lot of things aren't optimized from a metabolic standpoint. And this is where I think people get themselves into trouble long-term. What are we looking at, I guess, two things here, you know, would blood work be the best thing or would we go off biofeedback and maybe we'll hit on that earlier? And then what's kind of the timeline that we're looking at here from this kind of, hey, you've been in a deficit to where you should start to see some of these things kind of regulate. - Yeah, so if you look at the literature, I think the best example of this, in terms of restoration of metabolic rate first and foremost, is a study by Martin's and colleagues. And what they did was they took women and they put them into a fairly massive deficit. I believe over like eight to 12 weeks. And essentially, what ends up happening is they saw a substantial reduction in resting metabolic rate. But this is like the evidence that I'll usually use when I'm thinking about metabolic damage or kind of really disentangling and dismantling that whole debate. They found that even though these women were in a massive deficit to begin with. So I think they were either on an eight to 1200 calorie diet, something in that sort. They lost a massive amount. They were very significant. We lost over 10% over eight weeks. Well, when they restored them and got them back down back to energy balance, they essentially found that within four weeks, that suppression and that down regulation resting metabolic rate was no longer statistically significant. Meaning it was almost evaporating. And so we no longer saw that. And the title of this study was something to the effect of metabolic adaptation is an illusion that which a lot of people misinterpreted. But it was a very catchy title. However, what they meant by that was, metabolic adaptation is only measurable at the level of RMR in an active deficit where you're actively losing body fat and continuing to keep yourself in a deficit essentially. So there's different time courses when you look into literature, even I could say from an experience perspective. Often what I've seen is that the ability to restore a lot of these values is really dependent on the depth of the deficit, how deep that they get into a deficit, the duration of that deficit and how lean that person got. Because a lot of these, if you look at biofeedback, it often goes in an order of how deep and how lean did you get? If someone just got lifestyle lean, you can get them back to maintenance calories and they feel good within two, three, four weeks. Whereas when someone gets into contest prep and they get, and I'll say this from experience, I competed 15 times, you could be a back at maintenance for a month. And it's almost like you're just feeling good meal by meal, but if you're still shredded, you're still not going to have restored all these values. You're still going to be in a down-regulated state. And it may not be down-regulated in the same sense that all components of total daily energy expenditure are lowered. However, you're still not going to be firing them all cylinders. So I think it's really important to disentangle these things. Blood work can always be done, but I will tell you this, a lot of times immediately after a very long fat loss phase or like a contest prep, I'm not pulling laps because I've done that hundreds of times. times with clients. You know, they're not going to be good. I know what it looks like. And so I'd rather wait until we've went through a process, I take clients through what is called a metabolic restoration process. And that is going to be, and this is not a single type of process, but the metabolic restoration is dependent how significantly I increase their calories and how much of either, I get them back to maintenance for a surplus that I give them is based on how lean they got. If they were to the point that they were under their lower intervention point and shredded, eventually, I'm going to have to get them into a surplus and have them regain body fat. Whereas if they got a lifestyle, I can keep them at maintenance and keep them at this leaner state because they have not suffered the same physiological down regulations as someone that is getting into shredded conditions. So that's where really we did a conversation many years ago looking at reverse and recovery diets. It was actually a round table between myself, you and Jeremiah. And I think that we all had different perspectives, but I think that my perspective at that time and I would agree with this still to this day, the intervention that you use post diet is heavily dependent on that clientele, how far away they got from their baseline level and then how deep into essentially physiological nomads land they got. So for instance, if I have a woman that came to me, she's already essentially lost her mental cycle because she got so lean and was in such a low state of energy availability, where she essentially suffered from reds. That's not just maintenance that we're getting back to. You may say a portion of time at maintenance, but we're going to have to eventually get into a surplus, whereas someone that is lifestyle, even we get them back to maintenance and oftentimes in four weeks or so, they feel great and we start seeing now, we'll say thyroid hormones, depending on how significant of a down regulation you had, it often like in the literature on bodybuilding case studies, it often takes like two to three months to see a complete restoration of actual thyroid hormones. So these are different time courses. I think it's really important that when we look at research, I always try to give the caveat like, hey, this was a bodybuilding case study. These guys got 15% to 4.7% body fat, as compared to someone that's going from 20% to say 12 or 13, it may not be the same time portion. Unfortunately, we don't have the literature that actually shows that. What I often like to do is between week eight to 12 posts, fat loss fees were posts, a conscious prep, I like to pull a comprehensive set of labs that are looking at a CBC, a CMP, a complete hormone profile, a complete thyroid profile. And then I'm able to see, all right, we're well on our way to making these improvements, or this person may have more of a bottleneck in this specific aspect of physiology as I see on the blood work. And this is something we really need to maybe push harder and go above me, it's to be able to rectify this. Yeah, dude. And I think body fat percentage is a huge variable to all this, like you just mentioned, right? And again, I think there's generally speaking, we know what's super lean, but there is going to be a little bit of a genetic component to that too of what people can handle. That's where we come back to, hey, what's the person's biofeedback? And then eventually, like you said, getting some blood work to see what that looks like on there. But yeah, I think the body fat percentage is a huge one in terms of where you need to go after and what that looks like. And like you said, how quickly you can return to normalcy there. But I think really to sum up this portion of it, I think you can really maximize metabolic health at maintenance, right? Like in terms of making sure you're firing on all cylinders. And I think when I say that, like long term too, right? Because a surplus, again, may be good for the short term in terms of adding muscle, but obviously, you know, you stay in a surplus too long. Now we're looking at the general population in the Western world where it's like they're in a surplus for years on end, right? And it's like, you know, that's not going to be great from a metabolic health standpoint. So from a metabolic standpoint, I feel like in the long term, being at maintenance really can help, you know, you put you in the best spot, you know, there from from that standpoint. So absolutely. All right. So let's cover some more physiological benefits. I'll start and I'll turn it over to you, but this would really encompass more of like performance and recovery benefits. And this does fall under physiology because essentially when we return or we start eating at maintenance in and of itself, it could be someone that isn't purposely dieting, but they're essentially like underfueling certain days of the week and overeating other days of the week. This is what I commonly refer to as a week they diet or they they over restrict during the week. They overeat on the weekends and they end up, you know, maybe you know, surplus, a slight surplus or slight deficit. They're not really feeling themselves adequately, but when we get them to eat at maintenance consistently and strategically, we can see improvements in training performance and recovery at maintenance calories. We have more than enough fuel to push our training performance to restore glygogen levels and support adequate recovery. And I've seen this help clients train harder, tolerate more training volume and then produce higher quality workouts, which is extremely important for individuals focusing on proving their physique and their performance. Then another benefit that many people overlook is the simple reality that eating more food provides the body with more energy. And that's going to have, you know, down-turing ramifications like as calorie intake increases, many will notice improvements in their overall energy levels. And this extra energy is not only beneficial for our training. I think that sometimes we look at things in a really myopic viewpoint, but oftentimes I'm talking to clients about how they feel not only in the gym, but also in their day-to-day lives. And when I've gotten clients back up to maintenance, they often report that they have more energy for other things, not just the gym. It's like to be more active with their families, or if they have a dog to take them on more walks, or to stay on top of their daily responsibilities, their tasks, their tours around the house. And then to maintain a generally more active lifestyle, and one thing I've often seen is that oftentimes when I return someone to maintenance, or maybe someone comes to me brand new, and they have been underfueling themselves. When I get them to what would be their theoretical maintenance, they're often living a more active lifestyle without us intentionally putting interventions there. Now, there may be things that we do from a habitual and behavioral perspective, but oftentimes we're going to see their daily movement just increase. So I might see their step counts are escalating up because they have more energy in the system. They're naturally moving around more. And considering the fact that daily movement and need make up a large portion of our total daily energy expenditure, having more energy throughout the day can help with maintaining a linear body composition year round. And I think another thing that's really important from a physiological perspective is to think about the improvement that we can have in like health and biofeedback workers. A lot of times when I've taken individuals that have spent years chronically dieting and I bring them back to maintenance levels, I will see improvements in areas such as their sleep quality, their sleep duration, their stress resilience, or even their perception of stress. It may be that they're not dealing with any less stress, but their perception of how much stress they're dealing with is much lessened or it's alleviated. We're seeing better the I see better feedback from a hunger and appetite regulation perspective, and then often a hormonal health which would be through lab work. And this is because spending time at meetings allows the body recover from a physiological stress associated with calorie deficits or with high stress, or with poor sleep. So these are so many downstream implications and benefits that we can have from just getting back to maintenance. Now on the physiological side, Jeff, are there any others that you see in practice that you've read into that you think are beneficial hit on? Well, you mentioned I think for performance and athletes, we're not talking to someone who's trying to necessarily maximize muscle growth from a bodybuilder standpoint, but I do think that this is where you'd want those people to be most of the time. If you have more performance oriented goals, you want to be here for all the reasons we've mentioned so far. So I think from that standpoint, you definitely want to do this. Then I think too, and we may have been hitting on this throughout, but you can definitely, because of all the things that we've brought up so far, it's like this is a great place to build muscle for sure. Again, is it necessarily as good as a surplus? I would say in maybe some situations, maybe, but in most situations, a surplus is probably going to be what you would to to max truly maximize muscle growth, you want to be there, but you can still build a good amount of muscle here at this point. I think if you do have higher levels of body fat, this would be a great spot for you to really maximize muscle growth at maintenance. I think again, and you leave sort of hit on this, but like you said, libido, I think this is where you could really maximize the libido side of things. Again, it comes back to the metabolic benefits of say your hormones and stuff like that being in a good spot. Those are the main ones. I think really hitting on the performance side of things. If you have goals outside of just bodybuilding, this would probably be a great spot for you to be in and probably where most people want their athletes to be in from a sports performance and sport aspect. Absolutely. Let's move on to the behavioral benefits of eating at maintenance, because there's many physiological benefits, but eating at maintenance also provides a number of important behavioral benefits. What I mean by that is that there are different things from the habits and behaviors perspective that we can improve during a time at maintenance much better than we could in a deficit. Many people come to us for coaching. The first thing that you want is fat loss, but they don't have the fundamental habits, behaviors, and systems in place to actually be successful within that. One of the most valuable benefits I found in practice is that being at maintenance helps clients develop better structure and routines around their nutrition, around their training, and around their lifestyle. Many people fall into this pattern. It's a vicious one at that, where they constantly cycle between periods of restriction and underfueling and periods of overeating and overindulging. But periods at maintenance calories provide an opportunity to step out of that cycle and practice eating in a way that is sustainable long-term. This is really what it comes back to. I was telling you this off-air. One thing that I have the most frequent conversation with clients about is what I call mastering the skill of eating at maintenance. I will use periods at maintenance to help teach the skill of eating at maintenance, which is one of the most important skills that I think is overlooked in our industry when it comes to long-term body composition success and managing it essentially. I think a lot of people focus so heavily on body fat loss and don't realize that the goal of a fat loss phase is not simply to lose weight and then to regress and regain it. The goal is to maintain a linear body composition long-term, especially if you have not gotten to an unsustainably lean point. I find that having my clients spend periods at maintenance allows them to gain experience with what their maintenance calorie intake looks like and what it feels like in practice, like how it feels to actually execute upon it. This is really important because They get to learn how to manage and maintain their results without reverting back to the habits that originally led to waking and another component of this and I think that this may be proof that our industry does not discuss this enough is many people have come to me and I'm not their first coach. I mean, there's been years in the past and I coaching where some the average person that came to me had three to five coaches prior to me so their experience training is however they've never maintained fat loss results or they've never taken a period at maintenance many people don't even know their maintenance calorie intake or or a range. And really that is just showing that our industry really only highlights deficit and services and they think of those as the only two statuses of energy balance that can really drive change. But I've found that teaching people how to live at maintenance for a period of time not only helps from obviously a physiological perspective, but especially from behavioral perspective because then they can execute that and they know that they can always go back to that strategy of eating at leanens whether it's because life has gotten very busy or they're really happy with or at or they're not interested in really pushing one side of the vector so they may want to stay lean but they don't want to go into a fallow series they may not have the time the energy or. The interest in allocating their mental and physical resources towards that or they are someone that is at the upper echelon other muscular development they're closer to their ceiling and they no longer see it being conducive beneficial or interesting to push a surplus with the high potential of fact gain whereas they can probably build just around the same amount of muscle being at maintenance or just slightly above. So I think that these are all things that are really important to consider one other thing that I'll say from behavioral perspective is that I found it to significantly improve dietary. So if someone is dealing with excessive diet fatigue or they're struggling with hunger moving back to maintenance calories can make it easier to stay consistent with their nutrition plan and that's not only something that we have to do in a phase like I'm not a huge proponent of very extensive periods at maintenance it's more so like we can utilize for refeed we can utilize a diet break I call this I have this terminology called the deficit deal we can integrate this which. Discuss later but these are just integrating back to maintenance to alleviate some of the symptomology and the decrements in someone's biofeedback that we can alleviate through going back to me then so I think that this is really important to hit on because. It's great to just look at the physiology but we are humans out in the real world this is a free like life is a free living study essentially you're not in the bottom of the word and so we really have to consider what can people integrate and what would be the most beneficial things that we can work on with clientele that when they're a different periods or they're on a vacation or they're you know stressing their day to the lives they can actually turn to and lean upon and that really comes out to have the behaviors and maintenance is a great time to cement those. And that's why I like to call a phase like this even when we're not you know I like to call a building phase because like you're still building habits and you're still building these things right and I think it's more important to continue to build these things outside of a fat loss phase right because it's like you said people just kind of completely lose like they're like oh I'm not an adevist it's I'm just going to do whatever and it's like yeah I mean we still we need to work on these things during that time because you know otherwise you end up kind of being like you said you just go back to that kind of cycle where you just go back to to dieting all the time so. Yeah this is a great time to build your habits keep a lot of those habits like what you know and I think also a lot of people don't realize that this is a good time to we've been talking about how the benefits of performance you know this is a good time to have performance related goals during this time right because we know that one they'll be better but it's also a good thing to kind of like switch your mindset to those right you know you talk about high energy flux like this is a great time to really focus on hey like yeah you're not dieting but let's still keep your roots. You know you're not dieting but let's still keep your movement up high right like there's going to be a ton of benefits from that so continuing to build your your habits during this time I think is is super important because if you can learn how to manage this this period of time like you've kind of nailed it long term right if you can nail on this time and like you said again always come back to the body fat percentage being being super important here because again you know if you're trying to stay super lean you probably are going to going to struggle with that I always told people like outside of fat loss like my goal I want to get you to the to the weight range that you can do it. Get you to the to the weight range that you feel you feel good and like it's not a huge barrier to you sticking to it right and I think that comes to the behavior side of things of building habits around that and living that lifestyle learning how to do that so so yeah man absolutely all right so we are on to our final category which are these psychological benefits of eating at maintenance so the first thing from psychological perspective that I find to be very advantageous is eating at maintenance can help with reducing diet fatigue so fat loss dieting in and of itself often recalp requires. A higher level of decision making higher levels of restraint and mental effort and none of those things are bad because that's actually what allows you to be successful in the fat loss phase themselves but over time this can lead to diet fatigue and one thing that I see are people inducing unnecessary levels of diet fatigue by trying to extend dieting and fat loss approaches for far too long so getting back to maintenance can allow individuals to mentally reset and recover from the psychological demands of dieting and this is very important to me. And this is very applicable whether you are someone transitioning out of the fat loss phase or you're someone that has large aspirational so that could be getting into stage condition or photoshoot condition and you're doing you know a lot of times when I'm taking a newer competitor through a contest prep period we're doing a building phase first but then I'm doing a pre prep phase so it is a dieting phase but then I'm getting them back to maintenance after restoring things and then we're going into the contest prep so I break these up into phases in and of themselves the same thing could be said for someone that has a very large way of doing that. That's a very large weight or fat loss school where doing it in one fell swoop essentially one fat loss phase would just be very disadvantaged teachers it would expose them to a massive degree of metabolic application or biofeedback and most likely would lead to a very poor level of adherence especially towards the end I really think that over 10 to maybe 15% weight loss doing it in one phase is just not advantage I understand that some of the trials. Some of the trials in terms of GLP ones were now seen much higher than that but even if you look at semi-glute tide the wilding trial the average weight loss over 68 weeks which is well over year that is about 14 15 months was somewhere in the realm of 15.1%. So we see even with the some of the most power this was semi-glute tide but one of the most powerful weight loss drugs that we have available to us there are still somewhat of a cap to how much people can lose in one period of time continuously. And so when I've had individuals that have 20 30% of body weight loss that would be beneficial for them we're not talking about just getting them shredded it is that they were living with excess out of posse which is actually hindering their quality of life and their metabolic health. I often will break that up the seizures and one of the benefits of getting back into a period whether that's a 68 week like quote unquote die break or I call it enough to deal with where I get them back up to mean is they practice what it's like living in between those phases. They're not just thinking they're not just matching the skill of restricting themselves and eating less they're matching the skill of actually maintaining maintaining a specific calorie range maintaining the specific habits behaviors necessitated to live leaner than they have previously but it also allows them to drop off that diopathy. And then another thing that I find is once I've helped a client mass reading at maintenance they report that they have an improved confidence around their nutrition which leads to an increase in self efficacy so in practice I find it really helpful to show clients that they can eat more food while maintaining their body composition as it builds confidence in their ability to maintain the results which is something so many people have not been able to do in the past. So they really don't know if it's possible there's a lot of people I'm sure have come to you Jeff where they have a narrative in their head that they're a failure they failed a lot of fat loss fees in the past they've never been successful so they hyper focus on those failures rather than looking at this as learning lessons yes you made mistakes in the past you have extended dieting phases too long or you haven't had a post diet phase in place and so you went from one extreme to the other where you were. You were shaking yourself and then you over and doleds after or you set up a fat loss phase right before crews and you you excessly ate on a cruise and rebounded a lot of people will associate instead of seeing those as isolated incidents or phases that were not successful or were successful to a certain point they essentially associate themselves with that failure and what I really find is is getting a period where I could teach someone to live at maintenance eat more food but realize they're maintained their body composition or even improving your body composition it's almost liberating to them from a psychological perspective. Where they realize that they are capable person foremost that they can do this and then it often spurs greater progress in the future because now they're not scared to go through different. They're not scared to go through different phasic structures of you know these are individuals that are now then bought into hey we're going to go through a building phase and for particular period of time we're not going to worry about your body weight we're going to worry about your training performance and gaining the mass then we're going to transition into you know a holding phase and hold the the upper you know the height and level of muscle mass that you have and we're going to make sure that training performance continues improving and then we'll eventually go into a deficit where and they're not scared to go into different phases of body composition improvement process. Whereas in the past it was either fat loss or bus because they never maintain the results in the past so they always fear doing anything other than fat loss because they they associated that was something that was putting them in a position to fail rather than a position to succeed. Yeah dude absolutely man I think I think the more the flexibility side of things in terms of you know people don't realize how much more flexibility they can have at maintenance again you know we still have to like we talk about you know you still want to maintain good habits but you have a lot more I think people realize I have more flexibility than they think it's like hey you don't have to eat 1600 calories all year long it's like that there's a lot of like like you said you know the diet fatigue of that like that weighs on somebody over time you know and I think also from a diet fatigue standpoint like your brain just literally when you, the leaner you get, the longer you diet, your brain just like everything pushes you towards getting back to maintenance, right? Like everything's just gonna push you and it's like subconsciously, you're gonna wanna eat more, you're gonna not wanna move your body's like, okay, let's freaking get back to it. So I think the psychological benefit of that is super important, so more flexibility, but you also mentioned that, people will try and go through, you know, in one, just try and get it all off at one time and like you said, they can totally do it, but that's where you probably see higher amounts of weight regain following that, and if you're not taking those breaks like you're talking about, that's probably where you see people lose a little bit more lean body mass on the way down and you know, those probably go hand in hand too, right? Where like you're more likely to regain afterwards as well too. So from that standpoint, yeah, dude, I think that that's why we wanna do that and build those into these fat loss phases in between fat loss phases to do these because otherwise you're gonna run into that issue there, which psychologically is gonna lead down to a lot of issues where you're thinking, hey, diet doesn't work or fitness stuff doesn't work and so, you know, it's a huge trickle down effect from there. - Absolutely, all right, so you just let me write into our last hop of my friend and the last hop that I'd like to discuss are how periods of eating at maintenance across the year in between phases can be integrated because I believe it's really beneficial to strategically implement periods at maintenance throughout the year as part of a well structured body-consition improvement plan. So we'll go through each type of phase. I'll start off like during fat loss phases, I will often integrate short periods of maintenance which can reduce diet fatigue. They can restore training performance on a transient level meaning it's temporary, but it could also improve at here and so we see that both in practice, but we see it in the research. When we look at like the diet-break literature, really the most profound improvements that we see are psychological benefits. So, disinhibition or reductions in appetite or essentially downstream implications from psychological perspective that would lead someone to be right here in. So this is where things like diet breaks or refeeds. I do something called the deficit de-load where I really pull back on all physiological stressors. And I really turn at that. I've been utilizing that term for many years because I realized that there was a negative connotation with diet breaks. I understand that in the literature, that is correct. So we look at wing and Jeffrey from 2003, they started the diet-break concept while a friend of mine brought that to the masses. In flexible dieting his book from 2005. But I've just found so many times that even when I give comprehensive instructions about a diet-break or I ask clients at this point, now I don't even assume that they know what these things are. But I have a conversation. I say, what is your knowledge or interpretation of what a diet-break is? And it's like, all bets are off. It's like, going back to my old foods and stuff. So I use a deficit de-load. It's very structured, but it is a time of going back to maintenance for an extended period of time. So that can be seven to 14 days. And really we're trying to restore some physiological markers in terms of how they feel, how they perform, how they're functioning, but really from a psychological perspective, really gearing them up for that next subsequent push back into a deficit. Now, in terms of fat loss phases, are there any other times that you find it to be advantageous during the fat loss phase itself to utilize times at maintenance? Well, like you said, I think the refy days, the diet breaks, like you said, they don't have to-- I don't think they necessarily have to be a certain amount of days. It can literally be as-- as many days as you want and as many days as you need. Now, obviously the downside is we'll just slow down fat loss. But that could be exactly what you need to keep pushing forward anyways. And I really like the concept. I like that you said it as a fat loss de-load, because it really is like a de-load of training, almost in a way, just like you said, you're just taking stress off the body with that. And it does all those benefits that we talk about from the psychological side of things. So within a fat loss phase, those would be the two biggest times that I would use it as terms of a refeed. And again, I don't know if maybe we want to hit on when we would be the signs of that. I mean, I guess if someone's super depleted or they're just feeling super stressed, that would be a time that you'd want to go back to maintenance calories, maybe like a higher resting heart rate, just subjective fatigue, et cetera, would probably be what I would look at there. Yeah, I think those are great points. I think another thing for me is how long has this person been a deficit? What is their experience dieting? And where are we at in the timeline of where we're trying to get? So for instance, a lot of times when I am dealing with someone I am getting in, it's for one of three situations. It's a conscious prep. It's a photo shoot prep, or it is an event prep, which would mean a wedding, a big birthday, something like that. So I always have to back calculate. That does not mean that I can't be reactive in terms of my integration of these strategies. But I always have to be more cognizant of the overall time. So for me, it really is looking how far away are they from their goals? Is this going to be beneficial, or especially in terms of the time length perspective? So deficit de-load, if I have a very long time period to someone's goal, I can integrate that because I can do 7 to 14 days and realize that fat loss progress will not be made during this time. It's not going to cause metabolic magic. But we have the timeline in place. And that's often why I will tell you personally, when I prep competitors or photo shoot clients, I will often-- the timeline I give is always two weeks longer than it needs to be. Reason for that is I often will bring people back up to maintenance. And I really-- I don't use the colloquial reverse diet in terms of my post-diad phases, but I will reverse someone into the show, where I will strategically and quite frequently titrate their calories up, as we get closer approximately to the event, the show, or the photo shoot. And I found that to be really advantageous, because we're essentially dissipating a lot of the accumulated fatigue, both from physical and a mental perspective that was accumulated over the course of that prep of getting them leader than ever. And then I start seeing that their body just looks fresh. As of the increasing-- especially carbohydrates, I'm increasing carbohydrates, they're getting fuller, but it doesn't need to be something drastic, like a massive carb load on a single day or two days. This could be over a two week long period. So that's the only other time that I utilize one of these strategies essentially during a fat loss phase itself. Well, yeah, I think to-- again, the sooner somebody-- or the more recent somebody started a fat loss phase and the higher their body fat levels are, you probably wouldn't necessarily need to do it. It would just simply, at that point, be based on their biofeedback and be like, hey, we don't need to take one, but it could be something from a psychological standpoint that benefits you. But whereas I think somebody, the longer they diet, the leaner they are, probably does become a bit more beneficial to do it a little bit more often. And then, like you said, reverse up from there if you have the time to be able to do that, which is awesome. Because then you get to fill out, you look lean. And that's what I feel like you look your best. Absolutely. No, I think a great analogy to this. I was at-- before we move on to the next-- I was at a conference last April. And it was for the sports nutritionist association. And Eric Trexler was presenting on metabolic adaptation. I've actually had him on the podcast on my podcast since that time. But he made an analogy that when it comes to you, refeeds and diure breaks, it's best applied to those that are getting very lean. And the reason for that, the analogy he gave was that why would you buy B-repellent if you don't have Bs? So why would you utilize one of these strategies? Have you haven't gotten extremely lean or you do not induce great degrees of metabolic adaptation because we are trying to offset these things? So I thought that that was a great analogy. We will now go to aphosphate. So one massive benefit that could be had by spending time at the end of the aphosphate is we're going to help reverse the diet induced metabolic adaptations induced through the deficit. But also, we can help prevent rapid fat. So I really find that getting right back to meatments from any clients is the move first and foremost. But if someone has only gotten lifestyle lean, I can often keep them around that maintenance energy intake. And we just work on improving training performance, improving their sleep quality, and all the other biofeedback metrics, which may have been somewhat thrown off during the deficit itself. But really, during this time period, I'm really trying to continue to reinforce a lot of the habits and behaviors that they developed during the diet that led them to success. So choosing high volume foods and protein forward types of anchored eating, making sure they're going to get their fiber intake in, making sure they're prioritizing whole foods, their nutrient dense that are satiating, not looking at what if it fits your macros creation can I make? And how can I macro hack my way to getting my target macros? These are things that I find to be very advantageous after a phallus phase. But really, the first thing we need to do, or in my opinion, the first thing that needs to be done, is getting back to your needs. And really, being able to restore energy balance, increase energy availability, offset those diet and use meant about adaptation. So you could start feeling better, you could start functioning better, and we can really start driving performance back up. Because oftentimes, if you've gotten very lean, or even if you haven't gotten super lean, your lifestyle lean, but you've been, it's taking you a long time to get lifestyle. You've been in a deficit for a long period of time. You are going to see some type of decrement in your training performance. So we want you to be able to restore that and recover that as soon as possible. Yeah, yeah, getting back to maintenance, and working your way back to that post-fat loss. And again, I think you kind of hit on this, but body fat percentage again, is going to be super key in terms of, like, I think how quick you get back to that point. And probably the psychology of the person that you're doing that, which is well too, is going to be key. I don't know if we hit on this, but I guess another time I would use it would be in between fat loss phases, right? So, and maybe we were going to hit on this, I don't know, I could be jumping ahead here on this, but in between fat loss phases, where somebody has to lose more than 10 to 20%, or, I'm sure you've done this. I've never done this myself, and I want to try it, but I worked on it with some clients where you get them down, and then maybe they are relatively lean, but it's like you want to get leaner. It's like taking a break in between there can be super helpful. So using this, using maintenance calories in between the fat loss phases, like we talked about would be super helpful, and important to, from a body-compt perspective, the psychology side of things, the metabolic aspects, and everything like that, on there. So I will tell you that integrated approach, where we're integrating strategic curi-de-cal. that maintenance in between fat loss fees is something I've done with sequential fat loss fees. That's the best way I can describe them. I've done that for myself in both photo shoot and then also contest prep for myself and then with certain athletes. And why I've done that is when there is a period where I need to get ready for a very important event whether that be a photo shoot or that be a prep or like an actual contest. Earlier on in a season, but it's too long for me to continue in a, you know, linear deficit to get to my next goal and not actually diminish the look. So a few examples for this. I've had certain photo shoot seasons where it was early summer where I had a very large shoot. So I might have landed a magazine or calendar, but my main shoot that was my target date, which was also just as important ended up being eight to ten weeks later. So theoretically, if I need to be in close to photo shoot shape or basically photo shoot shape, it may take me 12 weeks to get to that period and maybe June. But to hang on for another eight to ten weeks of that same deficit, I would be immensely depleted and I probably would look worse. I would probably hemorrhage more muscle. I would look flatter. It would be hard to get back. There is this stringy type of worn out, tired look, especially when you get very low in body fat that it's very difficult to restore and you're not going to do it through carb load or refeed. And so I've kind of taken a linear approach or an undulating linear or nonlinear approach essentially. So what it would look like, and I'm making this graph in my hands is I would do a fat loss phase and get to a certain point where I could be in reasonable shape for the goal of target. So I get here and then I go right back to maintenance and I see there until I'm with you a distance of time or a time length that is within striking distance that I can go back into a deficit for a short period of time and still get an even better condition. What I've noticed with that personally is that in comparison to the times that I have done like 20 week prompts, but hold duration of the diet may be the same. I may have been technically in a deficit that year for 20 weeks, but breaking it up has just made it more sustainable. I've often maintained training performance much better and I've just noticed that the biofeedback indices, especially for me, I'm someone and we've discussed this on our own podcast about my fat loss phase. I suffer quite heavily from a sleep perspective where once I get to a certain body fat percentage, usually under 8% my sleep goes to shit. I can use all the sleep supplementation, all the hacks, all the hygiene. It's just something I'm physiologically, I guess, and maybe hereditaryly, I'm pretty supposed to see my father had terrible sleepy habits. However, when I've done those those integrated and those nonlinear dieting strategies for the same type of condition, it hasn't been as bad. Now getting to 5% body fat and under sucks every time I'm never going to lie to you about that, but that is something that I have utilized and it can be beneficial given someone's timeline. Now I would look at it differently. I think when I used to do that back in the day during the conscious preps, it was because a lot of times I had to qualify for a show in March or April while I had the time to lie to me from work, but then I wouldn't compete on a national show until June. And so there was too long of a timeline. It was 10 weeks in between to just stay in a linear deficit. I had to restore myself, get myself back up, get better training performance, and then get back into it maybe six weeks out. When you're that lean though, do you ever really at that point, you probably don't fully restore things, right? You're probably still in someone of a, you know, you're probably not fully restoring. So in that situation, that's where you'd want to eventually get that person back to a certain plus to get back to better body fat levels, but you could probably pull this off with someone that's, you know, they're going from 15 to 20% down to say 10%, right? And you could just pull that and it wouldn't necessarily be as stressful on the body, correct, right? Right. I will say this, you feel substantially better during that duration. You go back to maintenance and another person that I've actually had conversations about this on the podcast have been aircoms about his preps where he's had very long preps, but he's actually essentially done multiple shows, but they tend to be quite extended from one another because WNBF World is like usually in November, but he'll start a season in July. So this is a very extensive time period and a natural property is very long and he's getting an insured condition for that first show. And then essentially, he's like reversing back up and he's eating a higher intake for the majority and then some months will dip down for like two or three weeks period at a time. He's still in a net deficit, but it's not as significant and severe of a deficit as he was in the beginning of his problem or like in the beginning leading into the first show and you feel substantially better. Now here's the thing. You will feel substantially better in that moment. You'll feel substantially better at through meals and during those days in comparison to where you were at the depths of your diet. However, you'd never notice or I will say this person, I never noticed how still downregulated it was until I went back into maintenance and a surplus. So it isn't until the prep, whether it be for the photo shoot or the actual contest ends that I realized because a lot of times I would be you know four to six weeks back up to maintenance in between those blocks where I would have contest or photo shoots and I felt great in my mind. You know, I mean like I felt great on a date today because in comparison to what I just went through to get lean, it feels amazing. However, when then I'm look at it in retrospect once I'm two or three months post diet and I start having things come back online that I didn't even realize had not come back online in that previous phase. I realized, oh, you were still pretty downregulated. But in that moment, you don't notice on us. Yeah, just just having more calories and you're just kind of pushing through and just the probably active more calories helps offset some of that, but you're not fully restoring especially just because again, it's the body fat levels that are going to play the big role there with them. So that makes that makes sense. Another context in which I would utilize maintenance or spending time maintenance will be during a building phase. If I someone doing the extensive building phase and oftentimes I'll take people six to nine months in a building phase, especially when they have very substantial muscle gain that they want to develop or they're competitive. So we are really spreading this out in terms of that they're not cutting on a frequent basis. And so what I will do oftentimes is I will pull them back to eat at maintenance to restore things like insulin sensitive which improve the nutrient partitioning. And also I found this to be very advantageous to provide relief from the digestive stress that can sometimes come from prolonged surpluses. So this could be done actually in a singular day basis. There have been times I have integrated a low calorie day, whether that be at maintenance or even a deficit on one particular day per week, which is an off-training day during a building phase or I've just transitioned them to one to two weeks. I will literally do almost like a surplus de-load. I actually have not called it that. I should probably call it at this point. Just I will literally pull them down almost to like a surplus free essentially. And just pull them back down to their maintenance calorie intake so that then they're able to get an alleviation from a lot of times it's just the burden like they don't have an appetite. Like I have a guy right now that I just transitioned in the prep, but he was on 4700 calories and 800 plus pounds of carbs higher to today. At one point we were starting to lose appetite. He never got to the point where he was like completely stuffed. But if we had pushed it and obviously I back calculated all the time lengths, but say I had made this phase two or three months longer, we would have hit a bottleneck in which I would have had to bring him to maintenance. So these are just examples where we can utilize maintenance in other ways that many people may not think of. I think the same thing to be said, you know, I think the best usage of maintenance calories is actually used during a body recombosition phase where we're trying to gain muscle and also slowly reduce body fat. And that's going to be most advantageously done initially at least at maintenance because many people do have enough body fat on their frame where they're able to use that as an endogenous energy source that they can pull from to fuel the muscle growth and the recovery processes. And then we can just kind of tap, you know, top them up right back to maintenance in terms of exogenous energy that they're taking in through food. So I think that a lot of times people only look and this is why I really want to go through this. The only look at maintenance is something that we go to like after a fat loss phase, but it could be integrated during a fat loss phase after a fat loss phase during a building phase in between fat loss phases like you brought up during recomb phases. I think that this is something that could be utilized much more frequently and for much more benefits that many people realize. Yeah, dude, those were the two that went over was during a building phase when we could use it there. Like you said, it's like you again, you maybe are in a small surplus for a period of time and then you get to a body weight where again, it's just like you're feeling good, like body comp is still in the decent spot. It's like, and you feel good performance as well. I think that's a great time to transition to maintenance. Like you said, now it's like for all the reasons you just mentioned, you have a little bit more body fat on you. And so you're good to go at that point, right? You don't need to keep pushing body weight up. That's a huge mistake I used to make in my building phases. And I just kept going up and up and up and it's like, wait, I didn't need to do that. And I probably made like I probably just gained a bunch of extra body fat that I didn't need to, right? You know, obviously being careful with that, making sure that if you really have lofty muscle gangles, like, you know, you don't cut that short too early, right? Like I think you could, but again, using it there. But like you also said, I think the huge one is building maintenance app building phases for people that have higher body fat levels. I think that's a great utilization of this because that's where people can get themselves in this no man's land of like they feel like they're not necessarily as lean as they want to get yet. But then they, then they're like, oh, well, I want to build muscles. I need to go into a surplus. So then they gain extra body fat. And it's like, you don't even need to do that. And now you're going to have to spend more time fat loss dieting later, right? So I think those are those are great people to be able to, um, to utilize that with is just higher body fat levels. Um, and I personally believe that, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this. There's always going to be, you know, I think it depends on who you work with. But I think from a female physiology standpoint, I think honestly, the more times you can spend it maintenance throughout the year, the better it's going to be from from that standpoint. Obviously, the leaner you are, you know, you probably want to gain a little bit of body fat to really be good from a muscle building standpoint. But I feel like being around maintenance most of the time is just going to be great for a lot of things from a female perspective on there. Yeah. So first and foremost, maintenance periods at maintenance, I use most frequently with when I'm working with at this point, a little bit more women that I am meant from a, like a statistical perspective in terms of like my percentages on my roster. But I will say a few things about that. First and foremost, many of the women that come to me have a lengthy history of dieting. And it has not served them. They may have been lean in the past, but now they're dealing with hormonal down regulations or poor biofeedback or not enough muscle. Like the biggest thing that I-- maybe the biggest goal that women come to me with, and I've been successful in helping them achieve this, is getting them to look like they lift, but in a way that's actually healthy. Because a lot of times what they've done is they've always hit the fat loss hammer. It's always going into a deficit to improve their body composition rather than realizing that oftentimes, it wasn't that they needed to get that much leaner. It was that they needed more lean muscle mass to actually display the physique that they were looking for. And so being at maintenance is a great period because first and foremost, psychologically, a lot of women are adamantly against the surplus. Unless they involuntarily or they inadvertently fall into a surplus because the recon habits, they're not trying to eat in a surplus. They don't want to feel overly full. They don't want to feel like they're getting body fat. They're fearful of that. And I understand that. What I often try to do is get women back into maintenance. And I see this expression. So many of the women I work with, I want to transition you from a state and a mindset of restriction and subtraction into a mindset of abundance and addition. We're adding things. We're adding in more protein or fruits and vegetables. We're adding reps and sets. It's really like an additive model rather than the normal, female model that is marketed to them, which is subtraction base. It is, let's see your scale weight going down. You should be a smaller, shrunker version of yourself. Many women don't want that anymore. They want to look like they left. They want lean muscle. They want a physique that actually has curves and shape to them. And that requires muscle. So I do think that being at maintenance is incredibly advantageous from the female physiology perspective, the other thing that I think is often overlooked. And I think one day we're going to have to do a body recon podcast. If you look into the literature and I've combed through this quite extensively, I believe based on the evidence, women have a higher predisposition and a higher likelihood of recombinment. Say this for multiple reasons. First and foremost, women have higher starting body fat percentages survivally, like from a survival perspective, in terms of essential body fat, first and foremost, but also behaviorally. They tend to carry more body fat. If we look at the average body fat of a woman in states, it's 40% body fat as compared to men, which is 28%. So women have more exogenous fuel on their body to be able to, or indigence fuel on their body to be able to be available to recomb to fuel that process. Secondarily, many women have under-fueled themselves in terms of total calorie intake, but also specifically on protein. So they're usually eating less protein than men. Third, they've often, they may be very well trained in terms of their actual years in the gym, but a lot of them have not spent time in an actual hypertrophy specific training. So they're more, it's more of a novel stimulus to them where they're usually very aerobically fit. They may be very well trained from a lower body perspective, but often their lover body has a lot of room to actually gain muscle, to gain more back with, especially like in their delts, a lot of them are untrained in those things. And so they had all the factors from a physiological perspective, higher body fat percentage. Even if we look at a protein oxidation perspective, they actually sphere protein better than men do. So there's many physiological reasons as to why women would be more likely to be able to achieve body recomposition, which could be done at maintenance. It just necessitates the right strategy, the right programming, the right push, because a lot of women have yet to achieve that on their own because they haven't sufficiently fueled themselves. They haven't pushed themselves very hard in the gym to the point that they're uncomfortable. You may have to make ugly faces. You're gonna have to push yourself. You may have to sweat. Like these are things that don't worry about who's judging in the gym, because no one cares. Like you are gonna care what you look like when you look at yourself and when you go out to the beach and stuff, no one else cares. No one cares what you look like in the gym, but if you wanna earn that body that you're proud of and that you're confident, you gotta put in the work in the gym. So it's really reframing their mindset, getting them into a state where they're eating appropriately. And I do think that oftentimes it's both from a physiological and a psychological perspective. It's very advantageous to really preach a lot of maintenance. I'll just say this from an experienced perspective from coaching that I will get women into extensive maintenance phases in terms of not maintenance ended up itself. It may be a primer phase, it may be a recomp phase. But I will keep them around their maintenance because I see such vast benefits from a body composition perspective, but also from a mental perspective where they no longer fear food, they're no longer fear in carbohydrates, they don't fear packing 'cause they actually see body composition improvements. And that causes them to not feel like every time they're unhappy with their body composition, they have to go right back into a diet nor does it cause them to think that they are unable to achieve the goals that they've been looking for. 'Cause a lot of times women will come to me and say, "I wanna look like I live, I'm putting all this effort in, "I feel like I'm doing everything right, "but they're under-fueling themselves." So they're in a deficit, they're hindering their muscle growth progress, and they're also not trained sufficiently. So these things all stack up on one another and many times women may think, "I don't have the ability to feel this physical I'm looking for, "when actuality, the deck has not been stacked in their feed." So I do think that it is massively beneficial for everyone to spend time at maintenance, but if I could send a message out there to the demographic that is going to maintenance lease, but could benefit from it most, it's you ladies out there. - Absolutely, dude, yeah, I agree with everything said. I like to, I like that, that they spent a lot of time under-fueling, or maybe it's like a very up and down kind of like feeling strategy, right? Whereas you can get them to fuel enough regularly. It's like they have this whole wiggle room to be able to grow and then your muscle-- - Huge funeral muscle. - From that, and then on top of it, you also brought up a good point of, they also have a lot of wiggle room from a training standpoint to really maximize that. They haven't, and they have definitely not done both those together at the same time on there. And then again, they come back to the body fat levels, right? Like you said, you know, women do need a higher baseline of body fat, but they do have that extra body fat, so it's like we need to use that. And we've talked about this before, but I think it was the Levine study where they just naturally had people get into a surplus and they looked at neat levels. And it was like the women were the, there was like, don't quote me on the exact numbers, but it was like 10 subjects, eight of them were male, two were female, and the females were the two at the lowest that increased their neat. Like they didn't increase their neat or it was like the lowest compared to everyone. - So what we saw in that specific study, and now my view, that's a massive surplus. The Levine study is from the 90s. They put them in a thousand calorie surplus for eight weeks. So every single day, a thousand calories over, that's a 7,000 calorie surplus per week. And what they found was that the average individual upregulated energy expenditure from the non-exercise activity component by 328 calories per day. Now, there was a male that upregulated to the point that he was almost 700 calories just from me. Now mind you, that doesn't mean he just increases total daily energy expenditure by 700. We have to consider that the thermic effect of eating generally counts for 10%. So that's 100 calories out of that thousand calories surplus. Then we also saw an increase in resting metabolic rate. There's a great study by Harris that sees that in a thousand calorie surplus, you can see an upregulation in energy expenditure from resting metabolic rate between anywhere between five to 15%. So let's go with 10. So that person, and this was actually the subject, that male that upregulated needs by 700 calories, he ended up swallowing almost the entire surplus and gained somewhere in the realm of like two pounds. Whereas theoretically, if you just from a mathematics perspective, over that eight weeks, they should have been gaining two pounds per week for 16 pounds over that eight week period. A caveat to that study is that there were two or three females in that study. We saw that particular people in response to an energy surplus of that magnitude, actually downregulated energy expenditure. And two individuals that did so was were females. And one, decrease energy expenditure up to 98 calories. That didn't mean that she netted essentially 1,098 calories because there was still an increase in resting metabolic rate and thermic effect feeding, but she essentially gained a precipitous amount of weight. This isn't to say that every woman is going to, when going into the surplus gained fat, it's just that if you're not training hard, you're not increasing activity and you're eating in excess, women may be more predisposed towards storing body fat. You also see that from an enzymatic perspective. Women have a very interesting fat storage pattern in terms of how they store it. They have a gynoid fat pattern, which is lower body. But even if you look at fuel oxidation, how women take and metabolize nutrients and then re-sequester them after eating or saying their case of like, say you were to break down body fat through the oxidation process. So you go and do low intensity aerobic work and you have essentially increased like polysis, which should be break down a fat from the fat tissue. It's now in these skates transported into the mitochondria to be burned off. Well, if you don't utilize all those fatty acids that have been liberated from the fat tissue, and all that means is like, you have stored fat in fat tissue, in adipose tissue and you break it down and you essentially cleave three fatty acids away from a glycerol backbone. Well, there's three fatty acids floating through the blood treatment. Well, women are better at mobilizing fat and they tend to rely more off of fatty acid metabolism. So that sounds like a good thing. You should burn more fat. But if you're burning less calories for that session as compared to a male because you have a lower body weight and a lower breast and men of all grade, if you're oxper, if you're increasing fatty acid metabolism and mobilization, but you're not actually burning that, those fatty acids that have been liberated now go through the process of re-asterification, meaning they get restored in a fat tissue. Well, here's the thing. Women will tend to re-asterify fatty acids someone from the upper body, they will liberate them from the upper body, store them in the lower body. So that's, there used to be a comment that was one minute on the lips equals a lifetime on the hips. They meant by that was you eat an excess, say, chocolates or things like that, it ends up in your lower body. And there is some physiological basis tonight. So it's just, it's not that women cannot go into surplus. I will see this anytime that I have a woman dual lead, building phase, it is specifically a lean building phase, meaning a small slight surplus. I want to use the smallest surplus that leads to gains over time, both in terms of performance, lean mass. And then I do want to see body weight trying to up over time, but I do not recommend going above 0.25 to 0.5% body weight per week in any way, just because it would be a very precipitous weight gain where A, it's going to lead to psychological effects where they don't feel great in their skin. And often it's going to deter them from completing the phase. And really when it comes down to it, muscle growth is a very long process. So if we try to accelerate it by pushing the gas in terms of how many calories we eat and the rate of gain, most times people are just going to get uncomfortable and call the plug, like plug it and essentially call it before they actually gain enough muscle. So I'd rather have a small surplus, a lot of runway, both from a physiological perspective in terms of your body fat levels, your body composition, and your comfort. And then run that as long as possible while you're still productive training, you're fueled adequately, you're pushing yourself hard in the gym, you're progressively overloading and try to accumulate as much muscle over time in a slow and steady manner. Yeah, dude, no, absolutely. I think with that study, like you said, one, that was just subconscious neat, right? Like if you're actively going out and moving and doing all the things we're talking about and training hard, it's like that's completely there. There was no training in this. No training. No training, right? So that's completely, completely different. And I think it does just go to show though that women, you know, wind, face with a surplus, and this is a physiological thing, right? I just think they're more prone to be cut from a physiological standpoint, right? From a fertility standpoint, like having a little bit more body fat is probably going to be beneficial. Obviously up into a point with everybody, right? But I think that that's just how a female physiology is. And so like you said, definitely, you know, that's not to say you don't ever do a surplus and you're just going to gain a bunch of body fat. But I think it just shows that that's just how, you know, physiology works from a from a female perspective there and it's all about our inputs and everything like that. So to two other times real quick that I want to go over that I would use maintenance calories would be during busy seasons. So if you have like a super busy time going on, like I think that's a great time for it. And finally again, if you are on like a heavy performance period of time where you'd strictly performance, whether that be like a run, like that, or again, if you're an athlete and you have like a season or something like that, like maintenance is where you'd want to be with that look, right? Like you'd want to save your body can't push his and stuff like that for the off season and away from competitions and stuff. So those would be other times I would use maintenance calories. Absolutely. I mean, completely agree with that. All right. So we will wrap this one up here. Jeff, before we wrap this up for sure, let us know, let the audience know where is the best place they can find you. Yeah, man, this was fun. We went a little bit over, but we got into a good topic there at the end. And so we ran with it. Best place, Mind Muscle Connection podcast and then Instagram Jeff, HOE, HN underscore and it's Hane. You got it right this time. I love it. I did prove on it. I took a few years, my friend. Dude, get in bed. No, nobody ever gets it right. So I don't care. I just give you trouble. Awesome. All right, guys. What about you, guys? You guys can catch me. Best places are three, three ways. First and foremost, feel free to check out daily educational content at Brandon DeCruz underscore, which can be found on Instagram. The other is my email, which I'm always available to take questions or to take inquiries that is beta cruise fitness at gmail.com. And then for weekly podcasts, deep dives like this one, you can find the at the Chasing Clarity Health and Fitness podcast is available on Spotify and iTunes. Guys, thank you so much for tuning into the second edition of our collaboration podcasts between the Chasing Clarity podcast and the Mind Muscle Connection podcast. Guys, please feel free to share the show if you do make sure to tag myself and Jeff in your stories. Let us know what you liked from us and also give us feedback as to whether you'd rather us do a Q&A type of episode as we did in the first edition, which was released last month, or if you like these topic deep dives and we will take that into consideration and make sure that we're doing what you guys really are looking forward to moving forward. As always, thank you so much for tuning in and we'll see you guys on the next edition. I'll see you on the next edition of Chasing Clarity. Jeff will see you on the next edition of Mind Muscle Connection. However, we will see you back again for this coaching round table in one month's time. Yes, sir. Take it easy. Peace. See you.