the end result was that there was an average 600 calorie disparity between the two groups The dietitian guided athletes reading 600 calories more and when you look at the strength and the body composition changes unfortunately there was no statistical advantage of eating those additional 600 calories the only statistically significant difference were jump height and sprint times which got worse folks I'm Dr Mike for Renaissance peration and we have a special guest here today this is Chris Evans you guys have seen him in Captain America and whatever else Chris Evans is done this nothing else yeah nothing else but um today he's using his Ultra ego which is Dr Eric Helms strength conditioning body composition sport researcher at large coach athlete natural bodybuilder the whole thing this guy's list of accolades is kind of like an absurd joke that you would make up a superhero in our field and he's real here he is but he's not here because he's awesome even though he's awesome in his own time just fine he is here because he recently finished um being the head of a study an actual laboratory I just sit in the basement and well touch myself mostly that's how RP makes money I don't know but instead of just blabbing onto YouTube all the time like me he is heading up actual research studies in the actual scientific world and one of these studies recently that you completed had to do with asking the question of we want to see if people try to gain quite a bit of weight per week or very slow gain rate what's that going to result in as far as who gets the most jacked who gets the most pays the most fat guy price and how does that affect strength levels I mean this is exactly the kind of study that I want to know about and since I am Renaissance periodization I'm important it's all about me uh we had you on the channel to try to talk about the study Eric I will now be extra quiet tell us what is going on well first I do have to thank you guys because uh we paid our dietitian who managed the arm of the study that was the nutrition side of it which we were blinded to on the training side of it so we didn't let that influence the results of how we trained explain that in normal people terms really quick absolutely so we had a bunch of people we recruited trained men and women who could at least squat a certain amount of their body weight bench a certain amount of their body weight at least a year of experience training at least two times per week hard people who lift people who lift and we actually got some competitive B Builders competitive PS in there it's a pretty well- trained cohort um and then we randomize them to one of three conditions uh being told to eat at maintenance which we operationally Divi uh defined as not seeing their weight increase or decrease more than 1% over a given time per for an eight-week study eight we study correct um or a small Surplus which was an intended surplus of 5% okay or a larger Surplus an intended surplus of 15% and why I'm saying intended will be important later as I discuss the finix okay and then what we did is they came three times to the week at the sprins labs at aut uh where I work as a senior research fellow in strength conditioning and Sports Nutrition and Physiology it's a nice thing to say on her first date she's like so like what do you do you're like blah blah blah blah blah blah she's like oh my God I would get wet never call back yes they never they never call back um and then we randomized to that and we brought them into train with us three times a week and we did not know those of us running the training study at aut which one of those three groups they were in only the nutritionists knew only our register diean who was paid by RP I didn't pay anyone you paid me and I paid him yes so back in the day we kind of had two I think studies that are representative of some of the trends we saw there's one by rosnick and colleagues in the early 2000s and there was one by As Americans call it G but it's probably like G from Ena Gara from I think uh Norway she Norway have 14 nuclear powered aircraft career battle groups we say American so gu we're going to go with G for this channel that's right so uh G found in Elite athletes not necessarily weightlifting athletes but they're doing strength conditioning they're doing sport work and they had a very applied study each one of these athletes was given individualized weight gain goal yeah we talked about a lot I used it to inform the first edition and the second edition of my books and I'll probably incorporate the study we did to make recommendations on weight gain and they had him gain weight either with a registered dietician giving them more aggressive program or a self-guided hey try to put on some muscle e little bit more than normal you do your own thing and these aren't you know like male bodybuilders reading magazines so they end up being in a smaller Surplus doing ad libidum which isn't what you typically think and also they're Elite athletes they know about maintaining body composition the end result was that there was an average 600 calorie disparity between the two groups The dietitian guided athletes are eating 600 calories more and when you look at the strength and the uh body composition changes is unfortunately there was no statistical advantage of eating those additional 600 calories the only statistically sign significant difference were jump height in sprint times which got worse of course because they got heavy yeah exactly had to drag my own fat ass around yes so there was it sounds terrible five times more fat gain in the group that uh was in the the larger Surplus but there was minuscule fat gain in the group that was you know in a 600 calories less Surplus yes so it was it was modest fat gain but certainly a lot more and significantly more than the other group with no differences in lean body mass or performance except for those negatives so what I remember from that study is that uh on statistical tests there was no significant difference but on the raw comparison of means the group that got the Surplus gained one and a half times within the ability of our instruments to detect which by statistics you know is is not in that window they did gain a lot more muscle but it's such a tight measurement that it's like it's about the same like if I'm looking from space and you launch a rocket and I launch a rocket your rocket goes 150 feet blows up mine goes 75 feet and blows up the person looking for space like yep they both suck and it's like but mine's double like yeah but it could have blown up and the fuse could have it's just random chance at this point the means were higher in the group that was consuming more I don't remember if it was 50% higher and there were a few metrics whether we're talking about the strength on various lifts or just the lean body M it's just people looking for opportunities to justify Mega bulking that's how I felt when I was looking at it I was like how do I justify eating a fuckload of pizza yes yeah I think the important thing to remember for this study though is that it was uh athletes doing a 4day Upp or lower which is great I think that's a more ecologically valid approach but they were also maintaining their concurrent training for their sport um and it's also difficult to conclude something about like the kind of lifters who really wanted to conclude on that like it's handball athletes like some of them were great comparisons others were not yeah yeah so we had that so okay we got limitations here and then we had rosik and rosik is the the the perab bulkers dream this was untrained males in their 20s and they were brought in in three different groups uh one just following their habitual diet and the other two groups who are essentially given weight gainers 2,000 calorie weight gainers per day per day so it's supposed to be 2,000 calories on top of their normal diet now one of them it was pure multitran just carbs the other group was basically a multiex way blend pause there was a product made in Canada which I consumed often back in the early 2000s mid 2000s that was exclusively maltodextrin and dextrose polymers in the ingredients and it was literally branded and called just carbs no joke I I'm not mad because that's accurate advertising accurate you got to love it I love it sorry please continue so anyway there was the just carbs group and then there was drinking the stuff correct okay and then the other group is taking a liquid weight gainer that is a mixture of some protein and carbs and they were seeing which one would be better and the answer was in untrained young men it don't matter it's all amazing because they gained three kilos over eight weeks both of the experimental conditions of body mass and on average they gained three kilos of lean body mass meaning that on average in rosin whether you're just throwing down 2,000 calories of just carbs or it's actually a mixture of say whey and some carbs and you're training hard whoa you can gain nearly a pound a week of pure lean mass now obviously some of that's not necessarily actual tissue but it paints an amazing picture for bulking sure right now the thing is is that in my experience as a coach of many many natural bodybuilders and my own personal experience where I went to this well multiple times without much payoff after the first time I have a few love handle situations from that stretch skin yeah you can go to that well reliably once and maybe if you get things right and you learn a lot and you didn't fully milk out your newbie gains on my experience is sometimes you can get that intermediate kind of late bump or you can get things right you know but it's very difficult to like that magnitude of bulking after your anubi gains are done is going to reliably result in fat gain so when we see rosnick untrained when we see gu trained athletes and then we see our study which is a reasonably trained cohort and we see the relationship that we saw with the biceps it kind of paints this picture of hey training age is very important if you're a late stage intermediate or if you're an advanced lifter you probably want to be very cautious and to choose an appropriate size Surplus or accept the fat gain for what it's probably going to be if you think that maybe at least I'll gain a few pounds of muscle this way don't imagine that you're 500 calorie Surplus is all going to go to your muscles and that's something I want to talk about as well is it really comes down so back to that g study even if there was more muscle gain I think an important consideration is the ratio of lean to Fat Mass gains um for some people it doesn't matter like let's say you're 8% body fat and you're happy with the way you look and let's say you're male and you're happy with the way you look at 22% body fat yeah that is in most cases objectively healthy when we look at population level data sure you know like 23% is is typically where you start to see issues especially if you're car a lot of muscle mass and you're active right yes so if you go from I know the internet says 15% but don't trust the internet in fact stop listening I think we've said 15% yeah we've caveat a show please yeah so anyway yeah I would I would guess for an active person who's who's doing all the things right eating a healthy diet in terms of qualitative inclusion of micronutrients fiber all that good stuff if you were to move as a male from 8% to 20% I'd be surprised if you're active in training that you'd see substantial degradation in your health markers so if you're comfortable with the way you look and you go from 8 to 20% and you are going to stay there absolutely who cares about the ratio right you put on some muscle however for a guy like me or my clients where I ultimately have to get all of the visible subcutaneous body fat off my body how hard is that going to be for me correct do I have to diet longer do I have to diet harder and that met regression I just talked about if a 500 calorie deficit on average is going to stop hypertrophy at a certain point it's going to induce atrophy you know at the very least if you say okay how many 00 calorie Surplus deficit days do I have to put together to take off 21 pounds of adapost tissue and you're like oh that's a 58 we prep exactly otherwise you're like how much muscle am I willing to lose for this and that usually doesn't pan out well in my experience no ultimately this goes back to the parable of the tortoise first the hair and that if you can be patient and extend the gaining phase over more time that's probably going to be better and if I was to if you were to put a gun to my head and say Eric just using empirical data do we know that larger surpluses are better than smaller surpluses I have no data to support that all I can tell you confidently is that being in a deficit is a downside and I will say based on our data though given that it was actually challenging to get people to follow a small Surplus you need to think about what's feasible in the real world yeah so prescribing very very very small surpluses even if it might be technically better if you can't actually reliably follow that it's probably better to go you know what let me make sure that I'm eating enough so I'm not in a deficit 50k Cal Surplus because if you think of a quick thought experiment 250k Cal Surplus let's take some shortcuts mathematically and say that's roughly half a pound of tissue gained per week let's say we're bulking for uh 16 weeks it's a quick qu good consistent bulk let's say 100% of that is body fat like we really up or like God's like hey you ran out of genetics so um you know in the grand scheme is 8 pounds of fat that much I mean man that's like six weeks of dieting and most people will be able to get that off without having to lose any muscle in that short a time frame so it's not the end of the world you know what I mean uh but on the other hand if you're talking about going to Super bulk mode you're okay 750 K Cal yes Surplus it's like you may actually I believe theoretically purely theoretically this is my supposition that you will absolutely absolutely see higher real gains in muscle with an escalating Surplus up until health and discomfort stop you from sleeping properly and then you actually gain less muscle as you eat more but I think up to a th calories definitely 750 you will see higher theoretical gains in muscle but when the gain in fat is triple but the increase in muscle gain is 5% undetectable by modern instruments you got to ask yourself like you did earlier am I really going to diet 18 pounds of muscle off over the next next six months so that I can consolidate my half kilo of muscle gain if you're at that level where that's the only thing that's working and you're trying to finish out your pro career dope if you are a reasonable person if you compete actively in bodybuilding you got to try to get the moderate to low surpluses are you comfortable saying somewhere between 200 kilo calorie Surplus and 400 kilo calor Surplus is where most people probably find their best combination of actual gains not unre reasonable body fats to take off and a comfort with food and lifestyle that doesn't ruin it one way or the other and also a reasonable idea about and at least in some kind of mini Surplus I think so I think that's a pretty good heris super do you use another one you think is more particular I normally I actually like people to work more off of their weight change um rather than necessarily a Target Surplus like you can set that at the start but the way you Auto regulate that is going to be your bio feedback so if you're doing that right you're not going to see precipitous weight gain on a week to we basis so looking at something like a twoe average and seeing your body weight go up at a certain rate I generally would recommend say an advanced lifter to only be gaining say 1% of their body weight per month sure and then you can basically scale that up say half a percent as you come down to intermediate and novice a novice yeah 2% of your body weight per month intermediate somewhere between the two I think that's a nice way to do it as well yes let me present to you another idea here and love to have your take on it right in in the vein of this something that I've taken please tell me if this is wrong something I've learned from talking to you about this in perus and literature myself my butler is really they perusing give me executive summaries I like it when my name is in there a lot they is your butler name Mass I don't know their names I teed you up to help me out there oh the wonderful research review you and your colleagues publish monthly that is available through the mass link yes unbelievable folks that's how you do business but h serious note but mass is very serious so on another note yes um a lot of these studies are seeming to show something that unfortunately you and I both experienced in real life which is that getting irresponsibly fat fast is not Dependable way to gain muscle underneath yep and so we can take this and apply it to a new theistic that I'd like to see what you think about this if I'm looking in the mirror every few weeks and my ass getting fat what I used to be able to tell my myself was like under the hood man this is clear evidence of a surplus shit's happening yep I'm gaining pounds pounds pounds I wasn't getting super strong I wasn't visibly seeing my muscles change too fat for that but like bad news but I was like no no no this kind of CES has to be making big gains now that we know that's not the case is it possible for folks to use a combination of their body weight and their physical appearance to go okay if I'm still lean is but I'm gaining weight a little bit all as well this is probably the best I can do without any more finite measurement but if I'm getting real sloppy looking there's no compelling reason for me to keep looking sloppy unless I just don't give a uh and if I really most people let's be honest Eric most people watching this channel most people who know who we are they kind of give a if they're super fat like man and so if they're getting really out of hand fat would you be okay and saying like look it's probably time to rain it in a little bit and then make another slower run what do you think about that no absolutely Ely the your Surplus size is going to force you into a couple options if you do take a more aggressive approach to bulking it does mean that you're going to reach a body fat limit if as described by your your audience faster faster which means you're going to more frequently have to do something about that yes and you're also more uncomfortable during you do have get to have a lot of fun but you can have like two really fun unbelievable dinners where you eat Buck all every week and by adjusting your other metrics and having a high physical activity you can gain these rates we talking about you don't have these aren anorexic rates to gain at they're totally fine especially after a few weeks you gain some weight you're not really like as hungry as you used to be and you still have to gain that weight so it does allow you to because a lot of people why am I saying this a lot of people look at Super bulk life like just eat 5,000k Cal Surplus and they're like that's a fun dude but you and I both taken it to a place where it wasn't fun anymore yeah like I was eating milk and cookies because it was the only way to physically Jam the calories in that point I didn't even like milk and cookies I as soon as I went on a healthy diet afterwards I went from like four weeks without thinking about cheat food broccoli was delicious that's how unhealthy I was at the time but people think about that like man it's so much more fun but you can have a lot of fun on a lower Surplus just by making special times to eat special things and mostly sticking to kind of whole food healthy options do do you have experience with that personally with athletes AB they hate the slow approach I think that that typically has more to do with how well have they habituated to the bodybuilding lifestyle and I think as you get more and more advanced in the sport uh unless you really are pushing your body weight High um or you're trying to get to body fat levels or you just have a really strong appetite suppression response to to surpluses lots of people like which is true and it does happen it probably happens more in enhanced bodybuilders getting really really bigger than they ever other people from direct administration of antigens will feel approximate reduction in appetite I know multiple people are lucky by the way because it makes pre-contest easy as your boy gets hungry as on gear it drives me nuts well in The Natty World basically it has a lot more to do with where's your upper and lower intervention point or what we locally call your upper and lower body fat set point if you will and when you are pushing over a set point um that is when you really start to find that you get a lot of appetite suppression y so the but you have to question how much value is there getting me over my my upper set point anyway yes so maybe when your body's like hey I'm not hungry anymore you're kind of cool it for a bit maybe even mini cut a few weeks get that hunger back get a little leaner and then go up again what do you think about that yes so here are some of theistic I use um one is that if anything when you're higher in body fat you're more likely and able to put on muscle not only at maintenance but even in a deficit so you're not losing out on much by doing a mini cut but two a decent heris or Safeguard against bulking far too quickly in being the hair and not the tortoise is that you have to earn yourself and this is based purely on an experience no data that says this is science-based you have you're saying it so it is science based I am science thank you I am the law um who is that come on that's Stallone Judge Dread Eric I don't mean this as an insult that was the worst Stallone impression I have ever heard in my life and I knew Sylvester Stallone yeah yeah we had a falling out well I was hoping you'd introduce me yeah he said something like oh and I was like what he's like was that so that was a good stillone impression no it was it was worse okay all right theistic I was going to recommend is a 4:1 ratio so that to earn yourself say a month mini cut you have to at least be in a surplus for four months yeah that's a great point because I think it prevents the um aop phobic Wishy Wash one extra AB line goes away and you're like that's it man back to my pre-contest diet otherwise people will see me more fat in the gym than I'm used to someone will say something un kind on Tik Tok yep you know the rest the world collapses in a flame yep it also prevents people from doing too much because then they're forced in the scen like if you gain 20 pounds 30 pounds in four months and you what are you g to do about that in one month not yeah you're gonna it's it's going to result in this probably too much weight gain or you're going to be doing these mini cuts that everyone would be like what are you doing a medically supervised fast for yes you're very uncomfortable okay so a couple take- homes from this whole thing one if you thought that dreamer buling was going to work it'll work the best it can work when you're a beginner and training with high volumes really hard that it doesn't even on the numbers work so well then it's more of a question of can I get away with this more like if you're a super villain Who police can't shoot to death can you do bank robberies yes probably is it a good idea no there's better ways to use your time so that's the first thing second thing is if you're GNA go into higher surpluses don't expect that to reliably lead to higher muscle gain at least in the short term third idea is yeah really low surpluses are sort of incalculable increase your calories by 30 over maintenance is it's almost like a pro a procedurally nonsensical thing to do and thus you're better off shooting for something like 200 to 400 KCAL Surplus per week while you're bulking and there's another method of just bulking at what you think is a slow Surplus visual inspecting your body manyi cutting are necessary protein sparing modified fast maybe if you're cool with it you don't lose a ton of strength and you can rebound easy but if you had problems with that before and this thing is a disaster just don't gain as much and then when you lose lose a little gently and that tends to be a good process for you there and lastly if you are drug free which almost all of yours are thank god um the looking at body weight is really good in addition to that so you can guess at your calories however much you want there's people like I'm I'm in a 400 calorie Surplus and I'm not gaining like when I got news for you you're not gaining because where is the weight so measuring your body weight consistently don't worry about erratic numbers two week average gain roughly uh a percent of your body weight per month as an advaned lifter and to be honest man as a beginner intermediate unless you're ripped and starving i' say that's also good because then you just make lean gains for forever you don't have to try to get your fat ass into Mor fat say just take the good gains there A lot of times people like all right the not so great gains are this so I can aim for this like just get the gains get the gains just get them for longer what did I miss is that a decent summary of the it's a very good summary I only have a few little footnotes to add to it hit me so on the first point it was uh if you're training high volume and hard that might support bulking but not even that well that is true with the group level because on average you're going to see the things that we see in meta analyses shake out for everybody ultimately on an individual basis you need to be training effectively for you and unfortunately some people are going to respond better to eight sets than 20 some people are going to respond better to 30 sets than 20 and it's difficult to know some people respond better to going to failure with fewer sets and some people the opposite um and even in my circle where we have agreed upon the same principles we see large disparities in that so Jeff and myself respond very differently to training and therefore we train differently there is no one siiz fits-all second Point um about the Surplus size generally also true for everyone it's very difficult to follow a 30 calorie Surplus and be accurate and that goes hand inand with okay therefore you should have a higher Surplus and then use the mirror check I will say that if you are a like a macron nator king and you're an advanced bodybuilder like myself I am able to follow much smaller surpluses than the average person so are my clients so there are cases where not only you're not goingon able to see much visual change over a short-term period And if you have the skill to use those smaller Windows of surpluses and you can have that level of precision it would on paper be better to do so that's probably only about 1% of the people watching totally and also there's a problem there where yes you're uh reliable enough but is your accuracy off and then you can only really confirm that with body weight change that'll take some time so one of my more proximate uh short-term cues I like to use for myself and some athletes is do I feel fed do I feel itic and recovering from training and can I sleep because if I don't feel fed I don't have energy to train I'm not sleeping I don't give a what it says on the paper I probably need more food to get me into that better State what do you think about that I think not only is that true and the same experience I've had and that I use in coaching but those the ability to have awareness of those biof feedback and kind of intuitive qualitative aspects also are present in the people who should have that kind of precision and at that level where body mass gains at least the muscle mass gains are going to come slower so don't if if you're a relatively Advanced lifter with these skills and that awareness uh and the ability to be a little more accurate definitely lean on more metrics because you can use them um but I think the the more generalized advice especially for intermediates is perfect awesome Eric you know a lot of frighteningly high in amount of literal this is an insult it wasn't there uh but um I want to know more of what you know where can I find you do you publish anything I can read about science I want nerd hit me yo if you want to actually read my published papers I do the best I can to publish Open Access excellent now if you are more interested in how to apply the science I also review research so we have what's called mass mass research review which is myself Eric Trexler another person who knows a lot of stuff Lauren Kenzo simple and the other Dr Mike Dr Mike zeros yes the better do there's another medical doctor Mike there's like a trillion YouTube subscribers and he's also a Russian Jew and I think he actually like does MMA even which is like a step off from Jiu-Jitsu he's like the guy I never became and he's beautiful he's like in GQ and I'm Look At Me Jesus he's your Dr Trexler dude it's up Dr Trexler is like me with stats knowledge it's frustrating it's like just better yeah so anyway if you want to follow me the better me Lauren and the better Dr Mike then definitely check out Mass where every single month we go through studies like this that are directly applicable to lifters nutrition training coaching psychology and we review them from the lens of how will this help the athlete or the trainer or the general fitness practitioner so that's something I would highly recommend Mass research review.com and if you don't want to subscribe if you want me to be out on the streets broke at least watch our YouTube channel because every single week we do Mass office hours where two of us that's awesome Eric plus someone else will take live questions and answer questionss that get got deposited to us Live on YouTube for an hour hour and a half every week yeah guys on RP we try to provide you with a ton of really good evidence-based information two things on that one we can't possibly teach you all the sure not in a couple months of videos and so there's tons of other folks like Eric and his team producing unbelievable content that if you really want to be the best trainer the best coach the best athlete you can be you're going to go find him secondarily what we do here at RP is typically a dog meta summary of things these people actually find out on Research so you want that real Nuance you don't want to just repeat that I say not really know is that Dr Mike just making up again or is he actually right you want to go to the source you will typically find that we don't lie too much on this channel though my Butlers do occasionally make me say unkind things about people it's really strange Butlers have a Mean Streak do your Butlers ever get kind of Serial killery how many Butlers do you have let's just ask the obvious question I did not know this is going to be a butler measuring match Eric there's no measuring this is just to tell people how they could be living if they organized their lives better do you have a a recommendation for a a first Butler oh uh we'll talk after this video um other than Butlers this is the place to get a lot of amazing Insight we tell you guys about all great folks meno Hensel is awesome strong brast science is awesome 3dmj and mass are at the top of the pile go check them out learn things and honestly just unsubscribe for me cuz I'm olders I'll see you guys next time