Muscle Building and Fitness Essentials

Why should people be concerned with building muscle and having that be a staple of their workout regimen other than like from a physicality perspective? Well, it depends on what you're interested in. You know, I'm a human performance guy, so I don't deal with the general population much. And I certainly don't deal with anything past that spectrum of health down to the clinical side. So I pretty much work exclusively with professional athletes. And so from a sporting perspective, it's pretty clear why you need to be. We need to have sufficient muscle mass. I think what kind of you're getting at is the other end of the spectrum, which is why does the average person or even ex-professional athlete need to care about growing muscle outside of simply wanting to look a certain way? There's a long list of things you can go about. Everything from most folks probably don't realize skeletal muscle is the largest glucose dump in the entire body. So from a perspective of regulating blood sugar, and we know that that has such a well-rounded diet. influence on your global physiology from inflammation to perception to how you feel to your energy to your general health to your other markers so being able to store and regulate glucose number one the more muscle you have up to a certain point of course the better you're going to be able to regulate your own glucose and that's a really big deal muscle is also a little bit of a reserve for amino acids so amino acids are then used to grow muscle but once you sort of exceed that capacity a lot of your amino acids that you ingest from protein are going to be excreted, but some of them are going to be stored. And then you can use that amino acid pool to then build anything else you need, say an immune cell, say a red blood cell, say an extra kidney cell or brain tissue, whatever, almost everything in your body is made of protein and that requires amino acids. So muscle can store a little bit of that stuff, certain kinds of it anyways, less so of other types of amino acids, but some of them. We also know that just if you look at associations and observations with epidemiology related items. So people that don't have sufficient muscle strength, and a lot of times muscle mass are going to generally age worse. So you need to make sure you have some minimal standard because as you start crossing certain age thresholds, it becomes more and more difficult to put it on. So if you're say 40 or 45, maybe it's not a huge deal. It's not impacting your health yet. But when you turn 60 or 62, it's going to start and it becomes much more difficult to add muscle mass once you cross 75, especially 80. And with a lot of people now talking about living well past these standard years of 75 or 80, and you want to live to 90, 100, 110, 120, like these are conversations people are having right now from people that are in their 40s and 50s. And the general point is, or the argument is, hey, we've got, it's going to be 50 or 60 years before I get there. And the technology we're going to have is going to be so much more advanced 50 years from now, I'll be able to make 120. Reasonable argument. But if you don't put on muscle mass now, it's going to be exceptionally challenging to do it when you're 110. So you need to have a little bit of a buffer. So when you start coming down, you become what we call anabolically resistant. And so the same stimuli generates less hypertrophy, the same amount of protein activates less hypertrophy, and a whole host of other problems that you've got, again, that buffer. So those are just a handful of reasons. I could go on and on and on until your whole hour here with those, but I'll stop now. Thanks for bringing that up. And I'm sure people that are listening to this or watching this are going to hopefully understand that they need to start building muscle in whatever way works for them. So I guess the next layer of this is like, what are a few non-negotiables that you think for somebody who's looking to begin to... lift weights, do some resistance training to put on muscle? What are some things that need to happen in order for that person to build muscle? Well, I think you're going to look at hypertrophy from two global lenses. There has to be some sort of stimuli, number one. Number two, there has to be some sort of substance. So if you're going to stimulate muscle growth, that's not going to happen without the stimulation. But then if you do stimulate, you have to have the ability to actually add something extra to the equation. So if you just think about this from the most basic principle. If your muscle is X amount big and you want it to go X plus something, well, what is that material that's plus something? Whatever that material is, it has to be there, right? You have to be able to add on something. So if you want to add on a garage to your house, number one, you have to have the motivation and the ability and the tools, stimulation, right? You have to be stimulated. But then if you don't have any lumber and there's no metal, like if there's nothing there to build, it doesn't matter how excited and how great of plans you have and permits and it doesn't matter. anything, you have got to have the actual building material. And so what that means is you have to have some sort of training. or similar stimuli, and you have to have some sort of nutritional supply. We're, of course, globally talking about protein there as the supply that we need to actually build. So those are the two fundamental non-negotiables. Outside of that, you know, it's more difficult to add muscle when you aren't sleeping well. It's more difficult when you aren't hydrated and have extra stress, and there's all other things. But those are the two primary things that absolutely have to be there. Some sort of stimuli and some sort of supply. Right. I guess before we get into, like, the frequency and, like, how to maybe... construct some sort of program for the average person when they do enter the gym. I guess a couple of questions I typically get is like for the average person, like, can you build muscle while you're in a calorie deficit? Like, or does it require you to eat an excess of calories to build muscle? It depends on how pedantic you want to be here. In general, you will see people who can lose body fat and gain muscle at the same time. So the equation of can you do this in a deficit or not is really, it's a wordplay game. What people want to know is that, like, can I lose fat and gain muscle at the same time? And the answer is yes. Now, as you go from really untrained to highly trained, that becomes much more difficult to do. Very, very challenging. So if somebody has not worked out in years and they're 35 pounds overweight, it's not that challenging. Now, does that mean they're in a caloric deficit? Well, it's not that simple because calories in, calories out is not that simple. you're actually gaining more calories kind of from your own self at that point. So the entire equation gets changed, and it's really somewhat of a complicated thing that I don't think you really want to go into right now. We can, but as someone becomes more trained, the point is it's very challenging to lose additional fat and gain muscle at the same time. So for those folks that are moderately to highly trained, it's generally far easier to just go through a phase where you are in a big calorie surplus, you eat extra, you gain a lot of muscle, but you're going to bring a little bit of fat along the way. Ideally, it's mostly muscle, and the type of training, the type of nutrition you do is going to influence that difference. So there are ways to gain 10 pounds of muscle with also 10 pounds of fat. You can gain 10 pounds of muscle and 40 pounds of fat. You can gain 10 pounds of muscle and two pounds of fat. So that's when the details start to matter. But globally, that's what has to happen. And then from there, it's easier when you're trying to lose the fat to just acknowledge the fact you're going to lose a little bit of muscle. along the way as well. So for the person, depending on who you're listening, the answer is either like, Hey, don't worry about it or worry about everything because it matters. Right. Right. Yeah. And I'm glad you brought that up because I honestly didn't really know what the actual answer was. Is it just luck for some people that they're able to do it or that people just can do it just when they're more untrained. So I guess people listening to this, if they're looking to build muscle, I think are probably interested in, in the latter. They're looking to go to the gym, gain 10 pounds of muscle and gain as little. body fat as possible. So in your experience and the clients, the athletes you've worked with, and in your research, like what's the most effective way to do that? Well, I don't have a lot of experience with people who want to gain a ton of muscle mass. Most of the athletes I work with are either at a sufficient body weight or they're actually in weight class. So we like, we have to be very careful about going up. So, you know, you could talk to Lane or somebody else. Eric Helms would be a great person to ask about this stuff in terms of physique stuff. It's not really my game. Having said that, if you do look at Eric's stuff, he's done a really nice job. And I think he has a couple more studies coming out soon, looking at how much of a caloric surplus do you really need to be in? So one of the common mistakes we see based on the available evidence so far is people just add way too many calories. And so let's say your baseline caloric intake is 2000 calories. And that's just, that keeps you at your body weight for whatever reason. Well, a lot of people try to gain muscle and then all of a sudden they go to like 4000 calories or 5000. They double or triple their calorie intake. And that looks like that's going to put you in a spot where you're gaining a lot of fat. And that makes sense, right? That's just way more than you actually need. So the number that's probably best, as the literature will show now, is something like a 10 to 15, maybe 20. Maybe you push the pace to 25% surplus. So instead of going from 2,000 to 4,000 calories, you go from 2,000 to 2,500. It's more food. But you don't need to go double. And another mistake folks make is they just go way crazy on poor food quality. And so the numbers of calories get really high and they don't even really realize it. So they do. It's like, oh, I'm just going to, I'm trying to bulk up. So I need the calories. And so I'm just going to go extra pizza, extra ice cream, all the donuts. And you're just like, wow. Like, okay, now your macronutrient ratio just got way out of control. You went from consuming 75 grams of fat today to 350 a day. And now your carbs at 750. grams a day and your protein went up by 15 grams. Like this is, this is a recipe for probably putting on a lot of fat and you don't necessarily want to. So make sure your protein is high. Make sure it's at the minimum requirements or a little bit higher. If you want to go even higher than that, it's probably fine. You can certainly go up in carbohydrates and certainly you can go up in fat, but you don't need to go bananas. You don't need to go in a position where you can't look at food all day, especially if you're not really highly trained. Now, once you get to that pretty trained to highly, highly trained, it becomes more of a chore. But that's how you do it where you don't put on just crazy amounts of weight that you don't want. That makes sense because it's one of the first things that people will say when they start working out is, I'm just working out so I can eat more. And then when the-Oh, you're going to lose that equation every time. Right, exactly. Right. Like it's one of the things I bring up in my undergraduate class, right? One of the first kind of quote unquote myths that we go after. And when you start to look at the numbers here, people think like the fitness marketing has done well. They've kind of got people convinced that every kind of workout burns a thousand calories, right? You hear the promos, come to cardio kickboxing class, burn a thousand calories, come to our Taibo class. burn a thousand. It's like, okay, well, hold on. Most of you are probably in like the 300 to 400 range. Some people might burn a thousand calories in one of those classes. Some of those classes are really hard. A lot of them are really hard. No question. A thousand is a lot. A thousand is a lot of calories and probably not happening. Let's give you the most charitable interpretation. Let's say that you're burning 700 calories and you're doing that three days a week. Okay, great. That's 2000 calories. We'll call it an extra, right? Like a couple of bad meal choices. If you just go, hey, like I'm perfect on Monday through Saturday and I just, I do whatever I want on Sunday. Okay. A little extra butter, a little extra syrup, a little, you've, you've gone way past 2000. Like you've just outkicked that with one day of not even going nuts. Just like I had extra pancakes. I put some sugar cream, my coffee, I got the thing. And then we had ice cream. Well, boy, like you're done. It's over. Like you've gone way past it. So if you look at something, even as simple as like a bagel, like you're at 350 calories oftentimes. Right. And you're like, that's most people's workout. And then you didn't put cream cheese on it yet. And you put the cream cheese on, now you're 550 calories. You're just like, geez, you just lose the equation so fast. And a 550 calorie workout is really, really hard. And that doesn't even count what else you had with the bagel and cream cheese. So it's just really difficult. You're going to lose that equation every time. For sure. And you see that a lot with the marketing of these high intensity fitness classes and these group training classes that have now become popularized over the last few years. And I guess that... is a good place to go into my, the next thing I want to talk to you about, like, like, are these classes in your opinion, as effective as some people claim that they are, meaning some people think they're able to build all this muscle, gain all this endurance, burn all these calories, according to their Apple watch by going to some of these group fitness classes. Like, what do you think? Yeah, I think actually group fitness classes are pretty effective for a lot of reasons that, you know, you tend to work pretty hard. And nobody really leaves those things and is like, eh, I don't really. Like, you tend to be pretty small craft room. And they're motivating. They're interesting. It's the group dynamic is very important. It's much more effective than training by yourself in almost every case. So I think in general, it's a positive thing. Like, do they out sell probably the calorie? Probably. But like, whatever. If that's what motivates you, I'd rather you go in and do the class than not. So I think on the average and the aggregate, they're doing more good than they are harm. Like, no question, probably by a big landslide. Last thing I'll add to it is when you consider kind of the cost, like, hey, like, a lot of people can afford that. It's, you know, 20 bucks a class, like, whatever the thing is, like, they're not thousands of dollars. They're not a $450 a month supplement plan that has, you know, a pyramid scheme behind it. That's like, they're pretty straightforward. You're going to come in, you're going to work a lot. Maybe it's not well-designed and it's just random, but fine. But there's no sales loss there. You're getting what you're going to get, which is an hour of work. And to me, that's like, that's one of the more honest things we have in an industry is it's great. You know what you're going to pay for. You know, it's going to be music and it's going to be lights and you're going to burn. You're going to sweat. For sure. I agree with you. Yeah. I think the intentions are good. What I've found just from in a practical setting with my clients is I've found that sometimes you get these. people that used to be athletes like 20 years ago going into these classes and they got like tight hips, tight backs, and they think they can still do everything that the 20-year-olds are doing. They end up like pulling a hamstring or something and I think it's up to the consumer to like honor your body and stay with what works for you. From a time perspective, like so many people are just short on time now and they're having a hard time finding time to go into the gym and when they do, oftentimes you'll see somebody just hop on a machine, do a few reps, hop on another machine, do a few reps, do some bicep curls. then hit the elliptical for 10, 15 minutes and then leave. But I know there's a much more efficient way to kind of do this. So if you could maybe describe, like if you were training somebody that was just low on time and maybe had 30, 40 minutes to come in and their goal was to build some strength and some muscle, like what kind of things should they be doing? Time thing is going to be a factor, right? So any time. You're going to put a constraint like that on it. You're acknowledging effectiveness goes down the tube. In terms of ability, there's just less things you can do. Okay, fine. So how do you manage time? Well, one thing is to just immediately start reducing or eliminating rest intervals. Okay, just don't break. If you got 20 minutes, don't stop for 20 minutes. Well, fatigue is going to get really high. That's good. But because of that, your ability to put load on the bar, your machine is going to go down. You're tired. You can't lift as much. So you have to ask yourself, what's the real point? What am I really after? Do I truly want to get stronger? Or do I want to kind of get stronger? I want to build a little muscle. I want to get a good workout in. I want to like, that's what most people are after. So in that particular case, you know, I would probably just set someone up on a circuit, pick two to four exercises or something and just run through those things. If you really truly have 20 minutes, I would just not stop. Like you've almost landed yourself in CrossFit, right? Okay, fine. Grab a kettlebell and, you know, do some kettlebell swings and do some bodyweight squats or goblet squats and do some kettlebell rows and do some pushups and, you know, do 10 of those. Do that in a circuit as many times as you can in 20 minutes. That's going to get you, I mean, CrossFit showed that, right? It's going to get you some strength. You're going to add some muscle. You're going to lose some weight. You can be out there in 20 minutes if that's what you want. That's okay. I mean, there's a lot of things that are wrong about CrossFit, but they nailed that one. Like, if you look back across the history of our field, you see these giant swings and pendulum that goes back and forth and swings back and forth. And we go all the way back to Arnold, right? And he was the first real person who changed the culture. in the idea that strength training wasn't bad for your health. So if we have to remember, prior to the 1970s, the vast majority of people, physicians and medical professionals, literally thought strength training was deleterious to your health. The scientists published papers on this. It's going to kill you early, heart attacks, like all these things, right? Arnold broke that. When he came out pumping iron, when he came out with Conan, it was like, holy shit, I can be a superhero. Like literally. And it totally changed. And then the research started coming out. The famous story of... Dr. Karpovich at Springfield. He totally flipped. He was one of the biggest haters of strength trainings from a scientific perspective, actually ran some studies and was like, holy shit, people are getting amazing results here. Flipped everything, which is how science is supposed to work and totally changed his career, right? Changed and brought strength training into academics, really. And then Arnold pushed it forward. And so we went through a couple of decades of bodybuilding being everything, right? So you had two types of scientists in the field. You had hypertrophy. bodybuilding. And then you had most of the exercise physiologists and nutritional scientists were all steady state endurance guys. They were cyclists, swimmers, and runners, and they were 60 minute plus folks. There was nothing in between, right? There was just no scientific consideration for anything besides 60 minutes of cardio or three sets of 10 of hypertrophy, right? So what happened then is we started to realize, okay, great. These workouts are effective. People can get really big muscle. It's important, but I have to train one body part at a time. It's a two and a half hour workout. I got to go six days. And we had this void where people were just like, there's no chance. There is absolutely no way, right? Although all by the way, like I don't, I'm not feeling very athletic because I'm doing these isolated movements. I'm getting, my hips are getting tight or whatever. I'm getting injured because I have so much volume on individual joints. And that left a perfect opening for CrossFit. CrossFit came in and said, we'll do the opposite. You'll be out of here in 20 minutes. We're not doing machines. We're only doing functional stuff. It is big movements. It is high intensity. You'll be in and out, very minimal warmup, and you'll be gone. And everyone was like, oh my God, this is the best thing ever, right? Because it smashed the time thing. It smashed the higher quality movement. It smashed the machine stuff. It smashed isolation. And it got people a ton of fat loss results because intensity was high. The duration was short. People got stronger. And everyone was like, wait, great. And then people started to realize, well, wait a minute. If I only do squats and kipping pull-ups, sometimes I'm numb. actually completely forgetting to train those isolation muscles. And so people started getting hurt. Also way too heavy, way too fast for the sake of endurance, not quality, right? Everything in bodybuilding is quality of the repetitions. That's all that matters. Everything in CrossFit was count, right? So they went the entire other end of the spectrum and both sides have problems is what I hope you see I'm trying to describe here, right? And so people were like, okay, it's great. It's too high intensity too often. The movement quality is awful, like globally, right? And it's totally random. Everything in bodybuilding is specific and precise. Everything in CrossFit is totally random. And so then what happened about 10 years ago is the pendulum started to swing back more to the middle and said, wait a minute, what if we take these CrossFit principles and then we add back some isolation work? So I'll finish my WOD and then I'll go do some tricep extensions. I'll do some hamstring machines. I'll do some calf raises. Okay, great, but not too many. Okay, great. And then what if I like actually start having days where we don't go fully to time and we do more of like a, okay, great. And what you end up sliding back into is. Like what we've been generally doing in strength conditioning, which is like a moderate length, 45 minute workout, a little bit of strength stuff, some isolation stuff to fix your personal limitations. and downsize, like a little bit of volume, a little bit of a pump, a little bit of heart rate stuff, but not too much, and some pure strength stuff, and get you out of here. And we're not going to do it six days a week. We're not doing it two days a week. We'll do it three. And it's like, we end up right back on the same spot that most of us said, which is like, do these nice, well-rounded programs. And that's currently where we're at. The only thing to layer on top of that is the addition in the 90s of high intensity interval stuff. And that really is starting to get popular. And so now we have this blend where people can go. Okay, this is how I do strength. Let me add that piece in. This is how I do isolation stuff. Let me add that piece. This is when I go steady state. Let me add that piece. Let me grab the high intensity. Now, let me put these things in combination with the individual client based on, do they have 20 minutes or do they have 45 minutes? Do they have three days a week? Do they have six days a week? Are they really banged up? Do they move well? Do they not? What are their limitations? And then you can just sort of apply the pieces for your individual clients based on all of those contexts. You tend to get better results. It's much more sustainable. People don't get hurt. Win, win, win, win, win. Yeah, for sure. And I do think that you're right. CrossFit has great principles as does bodybuilding, but obviously there's flaws in both like you just kind of described. So I guess just going back into program design, like for the person, let's just say that isn't under a time constraint and it's just like the average person who goes to the gym and just wants to get a good workout in and they want to build some muscle, like do sets and reps really matter? I mean, I know from the, from the science it does, but some people now. You just see them just completely training until failure with every single movement they're doing. So if you could maybe articulate as best you can, like when somebody goes to the gym and they're looking to get like a good strength workout, like what kinds of things should they include, sets and reps and that sort of thing. What's the outcome goal here? Strength or hypertrophy? Because those are different answers. I would say for the average person, just looking to build more muscle. So hypertrophy. Yeah. Okay. So you have a lot more flexibility with what you do for hypertrophy than you do for strength. There are some things that just have to happen for strength. that you can't skip or avoid. Not the case for hypertrophy. Volume load is probably the thing to land on. And so that is take the number of repetitions, multiply that by the number of sets and multiply that by the actual load you lifted. And when those become equated, it doesn't matter if you necessarily did five sets of five, which would be 25 reps at 50 pounds. So five times five times 50, or you did say three sets of eight, which is 24 reps at a little bit of a lower, right? Or you did a little bit of a three sets of 10. So I did actually five more repetitions, but you actually did it in a lower weight. And so it ends up kind of washing all out, to be honest with you. So it doesn't matter a tremendous amount. What matters most about hypertrophy is that you can continue to provide stimulus and that you can progressively overload. So whether you want to increase the amount of repetition to do and keep it at the same weight, fine. You want to keep the reps per set. You want to keep the weight the same and you want to do one more set next week. Cool. You want to do neither of those things and you want to add a few pounds. Great. You want to add some pounds, take some sets away and add some. You can kind of mess with these things in any order that you want. That doesn't mean just be random. There's a difference we call, there's a difference in randomization and variation. Variation is very important for hypertrophy, especially that does not mean random. So be intentional, have a plan, be judicious with how you're going about. If you don't do that, you almost never really truly hit progressive overload. And that's why people don't see results. So have a plan. It doesn't even matter for most people what that plan is, but have something that you're following for a four to eight week window. Probably for most people, six weeks. Four is maybe even a little short. Six to eight is probably the better number. So you can go at those things. You want to work hard. Hypertrophy is not going to come easy, but you do not have to absolutely martyr yourself. You don't have to take three scoops of pre-workout to the dome, get after it, scream, throw up afterwards. If you get highly trained, you have to work harder. But for most people, you also can't leave the gym. on a leg day for hypertrophy being like, yeah, yeah, like I think I broke a sweat. Like my legs are kind of tight. That's not going to be enough. So it's somewhere between three shots to the dome and throwing up, probably closer to that end of the spectrum. Then, yeah, and I'm like, oh, yeah, that last set, those last couple reps, I got a little burn there. Like that's not going to be enough at all. For the very beginners, it will be. But for these like moderate people. So another kind of an easy way to think about that is a lot of folks will talk about reps in reserve. So this is, imagine you're in the middle of a rep and you stopped, or middle of the set. How many reps did you have left in the tank? Now, you don't necessarily need to empty it every single time. Maybe stop with one left, maybe two. Three is pushing it forward. It's not hard. You should have got heavier, should have done more reps. So a lot of people will land on that somewhere between one to two reps in reserve. The more trained you are, the closer to that edge you can get, the less trained. Maybe stay further away. And then monitor your soreness. Like if you're getting just brutally sore afterwards, you're probably doing a touch too much. If you're not getting sore at all, you probably should push the pace a little bit more. You went a little tight, like, ooh, yeah, God, pecs are kind of sore today. Next day, yeah, God, a little tender. That's probably, soreness is a terrible proxy. for workout quality. But in this particular case for hypertrophy, I'm just trying to help folks understand a little bit about what I should do. And instead of just giving you numbers, it's easier to actually just back calculate results, right? Like if you're not feeling in your workout, if you're not getting sore and it's not growing, then you got to do something different with that muscle group. Probably a different exercise selection, right? You're probably not using that muscle very much in the exercise you're choosing, but it also could be your scheme, right? So if you want to do... Two sets of 25, great. Like you better feel a burn at the end though, right? You want to do six sets of eight, right? All of these things work pretty much equally effectively, at least in the first two to three months. You're going to see equal results in terms of hypertrophy. Now past that, month six, month eight, month year two, year four, I don't know, we don't have those data, but for the moderately short term, it doesn't really matter what you go after. Right. Yeah. I heard you talk about how, I guess like a kind of like a misconception in the fitness community is, is that soreness is like the ultimate like measure of how effective your workout is. And like, really you've said, and I I've learned to, obviously I've learned this myself, I guess, in just in, in years of doing this, that it's not really the case. And that just cause you're super sore doesn't mean it was a good workout. No, not at all. I mean, look, hypertrophy is only one outcome and even that is not tied closely to soreness. So if you look at the studies that have published in these areas, you're going to find basically no statistically significant relevance between amount of soreness and amount of growth. Some people get really sore and don't grow much. Some people don't get sore that much at all and grow a lot. So they're just not a good way to determine it, especially if you're looking for other outcomes. And like you were talking about being at Gabby's house and doing an XPT workout in the pool, and you're out there for hours and you're just completely gassed and exhausted, and you're assuming you're just going to wake up the next day completely train wrecked. And? I wasn't sore at all. There you go. So you can get really, we use the, obviously I've been a part of XPT since before day one. I've used, been using pool workouts like that with athletes and people for years now. And it's one of the things I love to go to, especially for fighters in camp. Cause you just, you just don't get very sore. You can train really, really hard. Soreness is dependent upon a lot of things. So some exercise choices that are even harder, just don't result in soreness. Things that are mostly concentric based, like pushing a sled, like an aerosol bike, like being in a pool. You don't have a lot of impact. There's not a lot of eccentric bracing. So you don't cause as much muscle damage, even though you're exerting the same amount of force and effort or more. And so there's lots of ways you can go about it. That doesn't mean eccentric is bad. You should not avoid it. It's good. You need it in your life. But details matter here. There's a reason this is a giant scientific field. And just because you took a weekend certification, you're highly qualified to do this. You're not. There's a lot of details. I teach an entire semester course at the graduate level on program design. And when we finished that semester, people are just like, I feel like I don't know anything. And I'm like, good, good. Like, this is how complicated this stuff can be. It will take you a decade of studying this stuff to really get to an expertise level. I don't even, like, there's a ton about programs, tons about programs. I don't know. I learn all the time from people. So it's a very complicated field. You can do some basic stuff, though, very easily. Like the stuff we've been talking about, we're going to get you a little bit of the way there. But, you know, for the folks that are, you know, trainers listening, there's a lot here. There's a lot to learn. So. You know, like don't, don't just assume like, oh yeah, you did the thing and you've been training for three years. You got it all. No way. No way. Like first professional athlete I ever coached was in 2005. I've been in this for a long time with professional and I'm still like, oh my God, I didn't know anything about this or wow this or I'm learning a ton. So it takes a long time to really get proficient in some of this stuff. Yeah. Amen to that. I mean, it's funny. I was just having this conversation with a buddy of mine who's been in the field for a long time and that I dove into the NSCA journal to read up on like training seniors because I've. I just started training somebody that is, I've trained older people before, but I just haven't in a couple of years. And I wanted to make sure that I still knew my stuff. And maybe there's been new research has come out on effective ways to train somebody in that demographic. And I was telling him how humble I was like, man, this is humbling to think you have learned so much and you've been in the field for a while. And then you're going back into the journal to like read up on certain things. You talked about like gauging how effective your workout is based on. perceived exertion. If you're sweating, you know that you're sweating good and you're kind of in a way just feeling taxed, you know that you got a good workout. And then on the flip side, if you're just questioning whether you did, you know you probably need to push a little bit more. As far as like volume and designing, like as far as like the design of the actual program, some people will say I'll do total body three days a week. Some people say I'll do push pull legs. Other people will say I'll do upper body, lower body. Like if you found that. that one for like the average person is is the most effective or does it all come down to individuality I would actually say that my personal experience lines up very well with the research and that it's fairly clear. None of those are more effective than the other, which on its face sounds like really annoying. You're like, there he goes again, not answering the question. I actually think it's the opposite. I think it means like you, you actually have the ability to do anyone that fits your client, that fits your personality. I traditionally, typically hedge more towards whole body as often as possible for me personally, not for my athletes per se, though that does seem to be intended to be the case for my athletes, but for the general population, here's why. Splitting like upper body, lower body, or different body parts is great. What happens when you miss a workout? Really hard, right? So you're like, I did, I did chest today and I do chest every Monday. Great. What happens when next Monday's workout comes and you got, your meeting runs late and traffic's bad, or you just, you're exhausted. You get a cold. Well, now all of a sudden you will go two weeks before using your chest. And that's a very real situation. Most people just like you don't, you're going to miss one workout a month. Minimum, right? Like that's a realistic situation. So I don't like that because you end up going big chunks of time and then, man, God forbid, the next Monday you're traveling. Ah, or you end up just like, now all of a sudden you went three weeks without using that body part. It just, it gets very hard. And so I like to be like, look, let's hedge our risk a little bit. We're going to do some stuff. Well, you know, like where you use your legs three days a week, that's just going to be, so you use one of those fine. We'll add in some more sets next, next workout. Cause we're going to do the exam or whatever the case is. And again, if you look at the research effectiveness is the same, as long as you reach the same total volume between the two workouts, it's equally effective. So I tend to like multi-joint movements and I tend to like full body more often for the general population. If those considerations are not, if you're like, Hey, what was we were like, I miss a workout like once every three months. It's very, very rare. My schedule is stable. It's probably means you don't have children. It's also probably means you don't have like, you're not running multiple things. You don't travel a lot, but that's a lot of people. That's fine too. And then, Hey, if you want to do body part splits, I got no beef with that. If you want to do push pull or upper, I got no beef with any of those things. Do you want to work out six days a week? Then you're probably better. You'll do well doing body part splits. If you want to try to get it to four, then maybe you could do a push pull, something like that. It just sort of depends. Do you recover really well? Do you not? Do you recover really well? Maybe. You do the same body part multiple times. If it takes you a long ass time to recover, maybe you shorten it down a little bit. So all those things are, give you the freedom to know you're doing a really effective program and it's going to work if you put the work in and you stay consistent, but you get to do it in the way that best fits your situation. Right, right. I like how honest you are, you know, cause it'd be easy for you to say that like one of these programs is more effective based on what you do, you know, but I love that you're like, you know, like doesn't really matter as long as like. You're doing the things that we've already kind of talked about. You're working yourself to a certain level. You're training the right types of movements. You're getting in enough workouts and so on and so forth. So when it comes to like the right type of movements, I guess if you're, say if you're training total body, for instance, do you recommend then people doing like a horizontal push, horizontal pull, like a lower body push, lower body pull and stuff like that? Yeah, you can split it up however you want, right? You know, it depends on your style. So if you look at the global movement patterns, upper body wise, You've got push and pull, right? Now, what this also means is you've got a couple of different planes. Some people call it two planes, some people call it three planes. So let's say with the pushes, you've got horizontal push, think bench press or push up. You've got overhead push, military press, something like this, handstand pushups, whatever. Some people throw a third, kind of like diagonal angle in there, which is, you know, incline bench, something like that. However you want to split it up, doesn't matter to me. All right. Well, then you got the same thing for pull. You've got a vertical pull, like a lat pull down or a pull up. You've got a horizontal pull, like a bent row, T-bar row, something like this. And then you have more of an angular pull. And this could be any variation of a pull down from a machine. You're kind of sitting at a 45-degree angle. It could kind of go the opposite direction. So you have those there. The legs, it's the same thing. We just, for whatever reason, we like to call, some people refer to legs as push-pull. So a push just tends to be like a squat where you're pushing the implement away from you. And a pull tends to be when you're pulling the implement towards you. So a push is like a squat. or a step up or something like that, a lunge, split squat, rear foot elevated split squat, any of those things. A pull tends to be more things like an RDL, deadlift, stiff-legged deadlift, hamstring curl, Nordic curls, all those things tend to be pulls. So if you want to split them up, that's why it's fine. It's more challenging with the lower body because when you're doing a squat per se, you're using quads, hamstrings, adductors, and glutes. When you're doing a deadlift, you're using the same muscle groups. So you can split it up in your brain, I'm doing push-pull, but in reality, you're doing legs-legs. That's just how it works. When you're pressing with your upper body, just because of the way that the muscles cross multiple joints, you're not using your lats really much at all to do any push-up. You can't do a lower body exercise for the most part unless you do isolation stuff without using the anterior and posterior side. Like it just, it just doesn't happen. So I don't get too caught up in those things because I'm like, oh, it's a pull day. So you think you're not using your quads at all when you're deadlifting? Like, of course you are. So it's like, you just did legs, legs. You just did quad quads. Like you just did a whole bunch of them on one day and like a little bit less on the next day. So you can just put it up that way. Then you have the entire core. So you have rotation, you have anti-rotation, you have flexion, anti-flexion, extension, anti-extension, et cetera. But then like, there's a whole host of other movement groups. Like, what about trans? and rotational stuff. What about multiple movements? What about sprinting? What about jumping? What about a snatch? What about landmine press? Like you have all these ones where you don't have like a category. So it totally depends on the trainer or the coach and how they want to split these movement patterns up. And then what do you do with, again, movements like a clean that are a pull, clearly it's a squat, and then it's an overhead press. Like, especially if you're going to jerk it at least, right? Call it whatever you want. I don't really care because it doesn't really matter. It's what matters is that you have the appropriate amount of stimuli on the muscle groups that you're intending to. And you know, you could argue what those numbers should be, but that's what matters. So I don't get too caught up in pressing on for those instances. It is typically easier to kind of do upper versus lower split. And it's just do I do lower body Mondays and I do all things lower body and I do upper body Tuesdays. Like actually right now, this is what my training looks like. Just happenstance. So like Monday is all lower body stuff, but that's even difficult. Right? So like your upper back works during a deadlift a lot. like a ton. So my upper back is getting stuff then, but you just live with it, right? So I'll do a lot of all things lower body Monday, all things upper body Tuesday. The third day I train is going to be like, in this case, probably like a steady state, 45 to 60 minute thing, typically on a bike, all right, down to the beach, nasal only breathing, things like that. Then probably going back to the next day I train, so day four is now going to be lower body again. some variations. So instead of like doing a traditional deadlift on Monday, on the next time I train legs, it'll be like a trap bar deadlift. And instead of doing like a goblet squat, the next time I squat, it'll be a front squat or like some variation, similar movement pattern, but a variation that's all intentionally picked by the way. Upper body then after that, same thing. So if I did flat bench on day one, I might do dumbbell bench next day, or I might do an incline dumbbell or some small variation. And then the next day after that is going to be a lot of intervals. So really high intensity interval stuff on maybe some kettlebell stuff, maybe a lot of aerosol stuff, a lot of kickboxing, things like that. And then the following day is back to the original. I don't train six days a week. I love to. That's the plan. It just never happens, right? So I don't care what day those end up falling on. I just, that's the next one. So if I skip. If I don't get today's workout in, fine. Like I'm just doing that workout tomorrow. Everything just moves back. So it isn't like Monday is when I do squats. Like it could be Monday this week. It could be Thursday night. Like it's just all over the place, right? So I have six workouts I need to get done. And sometimes it takes me seven days to do those six. Sometimes it takes me nine. Sometimes it takes me 12. Like you just keep going in order so nothing gets missed. And that's how I typically do it now. It's not how I always do it. It's not how I'm going to do it, but that's what I'm doing right now. Well, cool. I mean, thanks for clarifying that. And then essentially, like it really comes down to, like you said, like the the individual and if they're working with a trainer, like what their goal is for the program that they're creating as far as exercise selection and how they're breaking up the workouts. You mentioned cardio. You mentioned how like one of the days you're doing like a steady state cardio and the other day you're doing like an interval training type thing. You see a lot of people that they'll do like a lot of cardio before they lift or they'll do a lot of cardio like after they lift at the gym. Like, do you think that's effective? Can that diminish your returns when you're trying to build muscle or do you recommend like doing it on another day? Oh, the answer is both. It can be effective and it can be detrimental. Yep. Context is everything here, right? So what's the training goal? Number one, how long are you talking about? What type of, are you running? Are you talking about swimming? You're talking about cycling or rowing? The exercise choice matters. Are you talking about a 20 minute dog on the treadmill before you lift? Are you talking about 45 minutes of spin class? Like all these details matter, right? In general, the more fatigued you are prior to your training, the lower the quality of the training, okay? Simple as it is. If you're trying to improve fatigue management, then who cares? Doesn't matter, right? If you're there to burn calories, you want to lose fat, you're in there for general health, it doesn't matter what order you burn your calories in. They're irrelevant. You're just in there getting work done. You're trying to maximize strength, to compete in world championships in strength, well, then you probably shouldn't do much cardio at all close to competition. It's only going to be detrimental to your primary goal of being as strong as possible on every single movement you do. Somewhere in between, well, if you do more... So concentric-based things, like we've talked about, like a rower or a swim, they don't result in as much damage. So they don't take as many of your resources for repair. So those resources for repair can go to the hypertrophy train, right? So if you look at the interference effect, which is the cardio blocking your hypertrophy, there's not much interference effect with cycling. at all. There's more with running. There's not much interference effect with rolling or swimming. So the exercise choice matters. Your total caloric intake, are you at kind of the moderate to low end of protein intake? Well, then you don't have the buffer and the room to start draining supplies using other things. Are you at a caloric hold or trying to be hypocaloric? You're not going to grow muscle then if you're then also burning calories somewhere else. Are you calorically excessive? All these things determine how much of the I mean, in general, I tell people don't worry about it. The reality of it is a lot of people go to the gym and it's like, God damn, all the machines are taken right now. Well, don't just sit there. All right. If you're like, I'll just do my cardio first. It's fine. It's not a big deal, right? Like you'll be all right. Go train. You can do, especially upper body. Yeah. Go do your treadmill stuff. Go to elliptical for 45 minutes, whatever you're going to do, then go hit an upper body lift. Are you going to get the exact amount of gains? Probably not. But most people, like you're splitting hairs. What we're looking at is six months, six, like six years down the road. It's fine. In general. If you're really trying to maximize hypertrophy, then just keep the cardio to a minimum, keep it to off days, do it after. If you can split it up into two workouts, better. That's super unrealistic for most people. So, you know, choose the less eccentric-based, landing-based things. Don't go crazy with the volume. You know, don't go too long, too hard. And just make sure you're eating enough. And you're probably just fine. Yeah. I love how you kind of keep it super simple because I've even heard you say, And one of the things that I learned from listening to you, I think it was on Heberman's podcast, where you talked about how supersetting can be beneficial in many cases. And that I was always, I guess, under the impression that if you're keeping your heart rate elevated too high, it might diminish some of your strength gains. But I remember you putting it in a way that was like, well, what you might diminish in your strength gains, you're also gaining cardiovascularly and you're helping to lower your blood pressure and all these things. So I just love how you put all this stuff in. the context that's not only easy for people to understand, but people to pick and choose like based on their goals. And so when I think a lot of people, as we kind of bring our conversation to a close, like one of the last thing I want to talk to you about is burning fat, because I think a lot of people when they're, they're looking to utilize cardio, it's because they want to burn quote unquote, extra calories. So when it comes to fat loss, I guess from the same context from muscle, like what needs to happen? And then on top of that, can you burn pure body fat without being in a caloric deficit in your opinion? That's not even an opinion. Like that's about the most straight answer I can give you. Now you cannot lose body fat without being in deficit. That's not what most people think it means. In order to understand if you're in a deficit, you have to know what you're actually burning. And most people have no idea. You can't just look that number up. You can get a close idea, but for you, I'll put it this way. Caloric exertion on the population level is close. But on the individual level, it's nowhere in the stratosphere, right? So you and I, let's say we're both 35 years old and we both weigh 185 pounds. You might be burning 4,000 a day. I might be burning 1,800. I mean, it's that much of a difference. So unless you know that number, you don't really know if you're hypochloric or not. And so people will say things like, well, the calories didn't matter because I look and I counted my calories. And no, well, then obviously your equation was off. You estimated how many you were burning. You measured how much you were taking in. You probably messed the measurement up. But let's even say you did it right. Well, then the equation was wrong. You weren't actually burning what you thought you were burning. You simply have to be in a caloric deficit to lose fat. That's just non-negotiable. What needs to happen to burn fat? That's it, right? You just have to be in a caloric deficit. That's as complicated as it gets. It's a similar conversation a little bit, like we talked about earlier, which is like, can I gain muscle and gain the minimum amount of fat? Yeah. If you want to lose fat, just don't eat. Just watch Survivor, right? You ever watch that old show Survivor? They all lose 20 pounds. I promise you, they're not taking any special- thing. They're not doing a crazy diet. They just start eating food. And all they eat is a little bit of rice here and there. And guess what happened? Oh my God, they lose it. Now, do they lose some muscle? Yeah, because they're not eating protein either. So there are better and worse ways to lose fat. If you just stop eating, you're going to lose a lot of fat, but you're going to lose some muscle too. If you tend to keep protein moderate to high, you'll preserve some of your muscle and your calories are low, you'll lose more pure fat. That's the trick, right? So if you stimulate muscle growth, you feed it some protein, and then you take calories down either by a combination of fat and carbs. fat alone or carbs alone, it doesn't really even matter. Quite frankly, you want to go eight meals a day, you want to go three meals a day, you want to go eating in a four-hour window, or you want to eat in a 14-hour window. None of those things actually matter. It's almost totally irrelevant. It just comes down to what do you like better, what's your personal preference. That's all that has to happen. As we discussed earlier, it is far easier to reduce calories by just not eating them. It's far easier. If you like working out and all the other benefits of exercise, that's great. But in terms of fat loss, your primary thing is going to be targeting less eating. Now, just to circle out our chat today, I can make your life easier with that. Add muscle. I talked about how that is a glucose dump. You're going to regulate a lot of things. It's much, much easier to lose fat when you have a lot of muscle. much easier. So one of my first steps actually, if I have like general population or non-timeline stuff, is to make sure we have enough muscle. If you don't have enough muscle, one of the first steps is let's build some muscle. They tend to be high-calorie workouts anyways, so you're going to just be lowering calories. But let's make sure the body has the ability to go through that process effectively before we just start like taking things away from you. It's just really hard that way. So yeah, that's all you have to do is bring calories one way or the other. And exercise is great, but exercise is this. I'll be as frank as possible. It's not a huge contributor to fat loss. It is a big contributor to sustained fat loss though. It is not a huge contributor to fat loss, but a big contributor to sustained fat loss. So that's very important for folks to realize, look, if you want to lose it initially, it's going to come from food. But if you want to help yourself have the chance to keep it off, that's when the exercise is going to pay off. But that's why you need to do both. And so you mentioned that when you have muscle, it becomes like this glucose dump. Is that I guess part of the reason why you hear that the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn at rest. That's true. Look, it depends on how much you matter. Like you're talking about 30 or 40 calories, which you could argue this two ways. You could say it's functionally irrelevant. Or you could say, look, 30 calories multiplied by 900 days, that's a lot. Okay, yeah. So over time, it will matter, but it's not like... it's not like you're burning 500 or 700,000 extra calories a day because you put on three pounds of muscle. It's not that dramatic. For most people, it's probably not. Honestly, it's not as big a deal as I used to think. I used to just push that out. And then the numbers, we started to be able to run calculations, more data came out. And it was like, well, for most people, you're probably talking about 30 to 40 calories a day. Yeah. It's not the primary thing, but hey, over time, why not stack that up? Give yourself every advantage possible. Right. So I guess in closing, the simple steps, I guess, to begin to burn body fat is caloric restriction, like watch your calories, build muscle, and then eat enough protein, right? Yeah. The last thing I'll add to that actually is try to do that in a system that makes you feel abundant, not scarce. Okay. But that's, you need that. Adherence is the number one predictor of fat loss. No question. Adherence, right? Not the plan, just the fact that you're sticking to something, some plan. So that being said, you want to do it in a way, again, that you're feeling will call abundant. So you're not feeling like you're just like, man, I only get to eat eggs and egg whites in the morning and I get to have carrot sticks at lunch and I got to work out six days a week. Like you're not going to stay on that train very long. Right. So you want to feel like you're eating full meals and you're eating mostly with the foods you want. This is Jenny Craig. Eat all the foods you want. Eat everything. We're just going to give you tiny portions. Okay. That works. Intermittent fasting. Eat whatever you want. We're just going to make sure your food only comes in a small amount of hours. There's all kinds of strategies that help you maintain. Like where you don't feel like you're disrestricted all the time. So find the one that you like the most, but there's just going to have to be some level of restriction. You just want, you just don't want it to feel like you're, this is my pushback against like a lot of the 30 day challenges. Part of me is like, I like that. Like, okay, good. Like I think you should be able to do hard things for 30 days. That's good. The vast majority of people don't just right afterwards. Right? Like, so you, you want to be in sustained, not like this is my 30 day thing, but this is, this is a thing I can handle. And like, sometimes I just got to say no at the banquet. And sometimes, no, no pizza tonight. I had a hard week, I know, but you got to say no to something. No, let's just stick with our steak and Brussels sprouts and rice tonight. Like, okay, all right. So at some point, you have to make those choices. You just want to be, you don't want it to feel like it's not that bad. Last thing I'll add, this is habit changing, right? So once you do that, you'll find out those choices are actually easier and easier to make. The analogy I'll give you is, if you've ever had to work on Saturdays, say you work Monday through Friday. And all of a sudden you had to go through four or five weeks where you had to work on Saturdays. Looking at that from the backside, you're just like, oh my God, I have to work the whole day Saturday. In the first couple of times, it's terrible. Then actually after you just get used to it, I don't even think anything about working Saturdays. I've done it for years. I was like, this is what I do. It's not even weird. When I don't work, I'm just like, whoa, what happened? So once those habits are established, the willpower to do them, it goes way down. It's really not that hard. So it's what I call inertia. Just get over that initial inertia and it actually won't be that hard at all. Absolutely, man. I mean, I guess they always say the best workout plan that you'll do is the one that you'll adhere to, right? The one that you'll stick to because consistency is king. Consistency over intensity any day of the week. Consistency over intensity any day of the week. Yeah, true that, man. Well, Andy, this has been awesome. Thank you again for your time and for coming on.

And I certainly don't deal with anything past that spectrum of health down to the clinical side. So I pretty much work exclusively with professional athletes. And so from a sporting perspective, it's pretty clear why you need to be. We need to have sufficient muscle mass. I think what kind of you're getting at is the other end of the spectrum, which is why does the average person or even ex-professional athlete need to care about growing muscle outside of simply wanting to look a certain way?

There's a long list of things you can go about. Everything from most folks probably don't realize skeletal muscle is the largest glucose dump in the entire body. So from a perspective of regulating blood sugar, and we know that that has such a well-rounded diet.

influence on your global physiology from inflammation to perception to how you feel to your energy to your general health to your other markers so being able to store and regulate glucose number one the more muscle you have up to a certain point of course the better you're going to be able to regulate your own glucose and that's a really big deal muscle is also a little bit of a reserve for amino acids so amino acids are then used to grow muscle but once you sort of exceed that capacity a lot of your amino acids that you ingest from protein are going to be excreted, but some of them are going to be stored. And then you can use that amino acid pool to then build anything else you need, say an immune cell, say a red blood cell, say an extra kidney cell or brain tissue, whatever, almost everything in your body is made of protein and that requires amino acids. So muscle can store a little bit of that stuff, certain kinds of it anyways, less so of other types of amino acids, but some of them.

We also know that just if you look at associations and observations with epidemiology related items. So people that don't have sufficient muscle strength, and a lot of times muscle mass are going to generally age worse. So you need to make sure you have some minimal standard because as you start crossing certain age thresholds, it becomes more and more difficult to put it on.

So if you're say 40 or 45, maybe it's not a huge deal. It's not impacting your health yet. But when you turn 60 or 62, it's going to start and it becomes much more difficult to add muscle mass once you cross 75, especially 80. And with a lot of people now talking about living well past these standard years of 75 or 80, and you want to live to 90, 100, 110, 120, like these are conversations people are having right now from people that are in their 40s and 50s.

And the general point is, or the argument is, hey, we've got, it's going to be 50 or 60 years before I get there. And the technology we're going to have is going to be so much more advanced 50 years from now, I'll be able to make 120. Reasonable argument. But if you don't put on muscle mass now, it's going to be exceptionally challenging to do it when you're 110. So you need to have a little bit of a buffer. So when you start coming down, you become what we call anabolically resistant.

And so the same stimuli generates less hypertrophy, the same amount of protein activates less hypertrophy, and a whole host of other problems that you've got, again, that buffer. So those are just a handful of reasons. I could go on and on and on until your whole hour here with those, but I'll stop now.

Thanks for bringing that up. And I'm sure people that are listening to this or watching this are going to hopefully understand that they need to start building muscle in whatever way works for them. So I guess the next layer of this is like, what are a few non-negotiables that you think for somebody who's looking to begin to... lift weights, do some resistance training to put on muscle?

What are some things that need to happen in order for that person to build muscle? Well, I think you're going to look at hypertrophy from two global lenses. There has to be some sort of stimuli, number one. Number two, there has to be some sort of substance. So if you're going to stimulate muscle growth, that's not going to happen without the stimulation.

But then if you do stimulate, you have to have the ability to actually add something extra to the equation. So if you just think about this from the most basic principle. If your muscle is X amount big and you want it to go X plus something, well, what is that material that's plus something?

Whatever that material is, it has to be there, right? You have to be able to add on something. So if you want to add on a garage to your house, number one, you have to have the motivation and the ability and the tools, stimulation, right? You have to be stimulated.

But then if you don't have any lumber and there's no metal, like if there's nothing there to build, it doesn't matter how excited and how great of plans you have and permits and it doesn't matter. anything, you have got to have the actual building material. And so what that means is you have to have some sort of training. or similar stimuli, and you have to have some sort of nutritional supply.

We're, of course, globally talking about protein there as the supply that we need to actually build. So those are the two fundamental non-negotiables. Outside of that, you know, it's more difficult to add muscle when you aren't sleeping well.

It's more difficult when you aren't hydrated and have extra stress, and there's all other things. But those are the two primary things that absolutely have to be there. Some sort of stimuli and some sort of supply.

Right. I guess before we get into, like, the frequency and, like, how to maybe... construct some sort of program for the average person when they do enter the gym. I guess a couple of questions I typically get is like for the average person, like, can you build muscle while you're in a calorie deficit?

Like, or does it require you to eat an excess of calories to build muscle? It depends on how pedantic you want to be here. In general, you will see people who can lose body fat and gain muscle at the same time. So the equation of can you do this in a deficit or not is really, it's a wordplay game. What people want to know is that, like, can I lose fat and gain muscle at the same time?

And the answer is yes. Now, as you go from really untrained to highly trained, that becomes much more difficult to do. Very, very challenging.

So if somebody has not worked out in years and they're 35 pounds overweight, it's not that challenging. Now, does that mean they're in a caloric deficit? Well, it's not that simple because calories in, calories out is not that simple. you're actually gaining more calories kind of from your own self at that point.

So the entire equation gets changed, and it's really somewhat of a complicated thing that I don't think you really want to go into right now. We can, but as someone becomes more trained, the point is it's very challenging to lose additional fat and gain muscle at the same time. So for those folks that are moderately to highly trained, it's generally far easier to just go through a phase where you are in a big calorie surplus, you eat extra, you gain a lot of muscle, but you're going to bring a little bit of fat along the way. Ideally, it's mostly muscle, and the type of training, the type of nutrition you do is going to influence that difference. So there are ways to gain 10 pounds of muscle with also 10 pounds of fat.

You can gain 10 pounds of muscle and 40 pounds of fat. You can gain 10 pounds of muscle and two pounds of fat. So that's when the details start to matter. But globally, that's what has to happen.

And then from there, it's easier when you're trying to lose the fat to just acknowledge the fact you're going to lose a little bit of muscle. along the way as well. So for the person, depending on who you're listening, the answer is either like, Hey, don't worry about it or worry about everything because it matters. Right.

Right. Yeah. And I'm glad you brought that up because I honestly didn't really know what the actual answer was. Is it just luck for some people that they're able to do it or that people just can do it just when they're more untrained.

So I guess people listening to this, if they're looking to build muscle, I think are probably interested in, in the latter. They're looking to go to the gym, gain 10 pounds of muscle and gain as little. body fat as possible.

So in your experience and the clients, the athletes you've worked with, and in your research, like what's the most effective way to do that? Well, I don't have a lot of experience with people who want to gain a ton of muscle mass. Most of the athletes I work with are either at a sufficient body weight or they're actually in weight class. So we like, we have to be very careful about going up.

So, you know, you could talk to Lane or somebody else. Eric Helms would be a great person to ask about this stuff in terms of physique stuff. It's not really my game.

Having said that, if you do look at Eric's stuff, he's done a really nice job. And I think he has a couple more studies coming out soon, looking at how much of a caloric surplus do you really need to be in? So one of the common mistakes we see based on the available evidence so far is people just add way too many calories.

And so let's say your baseline caloric intake is 2000 calories. And that's just, that keeps you at your body weight for whatever reason. Well, a lot of people try to gain muscle and then all of a sudden they go to like 4000 calories or 5000. They double or triple their calorie intake. And that looks like that's going to put you in a spot where you're gaining a lot of fat. And that makes sense, right?

That's just way more than you actually need. So the number that's probably best, as the literature will show now, is something like a 10 to 15, maybe 20. Maybe you push the pace to 25% surplus. So instead of going from 2,000 to 4,000 calories, you go from 2,000 to 2,500. It's more food.

But you don't need to go double. And another mistake folks make is they just go way crazy on poor food quality. And so the numbers of calories get really high and they don't even really realize it.

So they do. It's like, oh, I'm just going to, I'm trying to bulk up. So I need the calories. And so I'm just going to go extra pizza, extra ice cream, all the donuts. And you're just like, wow.

Like, okay, now your macronutrient ratio just got way out of control. You went from consuming 75 grams of fat today to 350 a day. And now your carbs at 750. grams a day and your protein went up by 15 grams.

Like this is, this is a recipe for probably putting on a lot of fat and you don't necessarily want to. So make sure your protein is high. Make sure it's at the minimum requirements or a little bit higher. If you want to go even higher than that, it's probably fine.

You can certainly go up in carbohydrates and certainly you can go up in fat, but you don't need to go bananas. You don't need to go in a position where you can't look at food all day, especially if you're not really highly trained. Now, once you get to that pretty trained to highly, highly trained, it becomes more of a chore.

But that's how you do it where you don't put on just crazy amounts of weight that you don't want. That makes sense because it's one of the first things that people will say when they start working out is, I'm just working out so I can eat more. And then when the-Oh, you're going to lose that equation every time.

Right, exactly. Right. Like it's one of the things I bring up in my undergraduate class, right?

One of the first kind of quote unquote myths that we go after. And when you start to look at the numbers here, people think like the fitness marketing has done well. They've kind of got people convinced that every kind of workout burns a thousand calories, right? You hear the promos, come to cardio kickboxing class, burn a thousand calories, come to our Taibo class. burn a thousand.

It's like, okay, well, hold on. Most of you are probably in like the 300 to 400 range. Some people might burn a thousand calories in one of those classes.

Some of those classes are really hard. A lot of them are really hard. No question. A thousand is a lot.

A thousand is a lot of calories and probably not happening. Let's give you the most charitable interpretation. Let's say that you're burning 700 calories and you're doing that three days a week. Okay, great. That's 2000 calories.

We'll call it an extra, right? Like a couple of bad meal choices. If you just go, hey, like I'm perfect on Monday through Saturday and I just, I do whatever I want on Sunday.

Okay. A little extra butter, a little extra syrup, a little, you've, you've gone way past 2000. Like you've just outkicked that with one day of not even going nuts. Just like I had extra pancakes. I put some sugar cream, my coffee, I got the thing.

And then we had ice cream. Well, boy, like you're done. It's over. Like you've gone way past it. So if you look at something, even as simple as like a bagel, like you're at 350 calories oftentimes.

Right. And you're like, that's most people's workout. And then you didn't put cream cheese on it yet. And you put the cream cheese on, now you're 550 calories. You're just like, geez, you just lose the equation so fast.

And a 550 calorie workout is really, really hard. And that doesn't even count what else you had with the bagel and cream cheese. So it's just really difficult.

You're going to lose that equation every time. For sure. And you see that a lot with the marketing of these high intensity fitness classes and these group training classes that have now become popularized over the last few years. And I guess that... is a good place to go into my, the next thing I want to talk to you about, like, like, are these classes in your opinion, as effective as some people claim that they are, meaning some people think they're able to build all this muscle, gain all this endurance, burn all these calories, according to their Apple watch by going to some of these group fitness classes.

Like, what do you think? Yeah, I think actually group fitness classes are pretty effective for a lot of reasons that, you know, you tend to work pretty hard. And nobody really leaves those things and is like, eh, I don't really. Like, you tend to be pretty small craft room.

And they're motivating. They're interesting. It's the group dynamic is very important. It's much more effective than training by yourself in almost every case.

So I think in general, it's a positive thing. Like, do they out sell probably the calorie? Probably.

But like, whatever. If that's what motivates you, I'd rather you go in and do the class than not. So I think on the average and the aggregate, they're doing more good than they are harm.

Like, no question, probably by a big landslide. Last thing I'll add to it is when you consider kind of the cost, like, hey, like, a lot of people can afford that. It's, you know, 20 bucks a class, like, whatever the thing is, like, they're not thousands of dollars. They're not a $450 a month supplement plan that has, you know, a pyramid scheme behind it.

That's like, they're pretty straightforward. You're going to come in, you're going to work a lot. Maybe it's not well-designed and it's just random, but fine. But there's no sales loss there. You're getting what you're going to get, which is an hour of work.

And to me, that's like, that's one of the more honest things we have in an industry is it's great. You know what you're going to pay for. You know, it's going to be music and it's going to be lights and you're going to burn. You're going to sweat. For sure.

I agree with you. Yeah. I think the intentions are good.

What I've found just from in a practical setting with my clients is I've found that sometimes you get these. people that used to be athletes like 20 years ago going into these classes and they got like tight hips, tight backs, and they think they can still do everything that the 20-year-olds are doing. They end up like pulling a hamstring or something and I think it's up to the consumer to like honor your body and stay with what works for you. From a time perspective, like so many people are just short on time now and they're having a hard time finding time to go into the gym and when they do, oftentimes you'll see somebody just hop on a machine, do a few reps, hop on another machine, do a few reps, do some bicep curls.

then hit the elliptical for 10, 15 minutes and then leave. But I know there's a much more efficient way to kind of do this. So if you could maybe describe, like if you were training somebody that was just low on time and maybe had 30, 40 minutes to come in and their goal was to build some strength and some muscle, like what kind of things should they be doing?

Time thing is going to be a factor, right? So any time. You're going to put a constraint like that on it.

You're acknowledging effectiveness goes down the tube. In terms of ability, there's just less things you can do. Okay, fine.

So how do you manage time? Well, one thing is to just immediately start reducing or eliminating rest intervals. Okay, just don't break.

If you got 20 minutes, don't stop for 20 minutes. Well, fatigue is going to get really high. That's good. But because of that, your ability to put load on the bar, your machine is going to go down. You're tired.

You can't lift as much. So you have to ask yourself, what's the real point? What am I really after? Do I truly want to get stronger?

Or do I want to kind of get stronger? I want to build a little muscle. I want to get a good workout in. I want to like, that's what most people are after. So in that particular case, you know, I would probably just set someone up on a circuit, pick two to four exercises or something and just run through those things.

If you really truly have 20 minutes, I would just not stop. Like you've almost landed yourself in CrossFit, right? Okay, fine.

Grab a kettlebell and, you know, do some kettlebell swings and do some bodyweight squats or goblet squats and do some kettlebell rows and do some pushups and, you know, do 10 of those. Do that in a circuit as many times as you can in 20 minutes. That's going to get you, I mean, CrossFit showed that, right? It's going to get you some strength. You're going to add some muscle.

You're going to lose some weight. You can be out there in 20 minutes if that's what you want. That's okay. I mean, there's a lot of things that are wrong about CrossFit, but they nailed that one.

Like, if you look back across the history of our field, you see these giant swings and pendulum that goes back and forth and swings back and forth. And we go all the way back to Arnold, right? And he was the first real person who changed the culture.

in the idea that strength training wasn't bad for your health. So if we have to remember, prior to the 1970s, the vast majority of people, physicians and medical professionals, literally thought strength training was deleterious to your health. The scientists published papers on this.

It's going to kill you early, heart attacks, like all these things, right? Arnold broke that. When he came out pumping iron, when he came out with Conan, it was like, holy shit, I can be a superhero.

Like literally. And it totally changed. And then the research started coming out. The famous story of...

Dr. Karpovich at Springfield. He totally flipped. He was one of the biggest haters of strength trainings from a scientific perspective, actually ran some studies and was like, holy shit, people are getting amazing results here.

Flipped everything, which is how science is supposed to work and totally changed his career, right? Changed and brought strength training into academics, really. And then Arnold pushed it forward. And so we went through a couple of decades of bodybuilding being everything, right?

So you had two types of scientists in the field. You had hypertrophy. bodybuilding.

And then you had most of the exercise physiologists and nutritional scientists were all steady state endurance guys. They were cyclists, swimmers, and runners, and they were 60 minute plus folks. There was nothing in between, right?

There was just no scientific consideration for anything besides 60 minutes of cardio or three sets of 10 of hypertrophy, right? So what happened then is we started to realize, okay, great. These workouts are effective. People can get really big muscle.

It's important, but I have to train one body part at a time. It's a two and a half hour workout. I got to go six days.

And we had this void where people were just like, there's no chance. There is absolutely no way, right? Although all by the way, like I don't, I'm not feeling very athletic because I'm doing these isolated movements.

I'm getting, my hips are getting tight or whatever. I'm getting injured because I have so much volume on individual joints. And that left a perfect opening for CrossFit. CrossFit came in and said, we'll do the opposite.

You'll be out of here in 20 minutes. We're not doing machines. We're only doing functional stuff.

It is big movements. It is high intensity. You'll be in and out, very minimal warmup, and you'll be gone. And everyone was like, oh my God, this is the best thing ever, right?

Because it smashed the time thing. It smashed the higher quality movement. It smashed the machine stuff.

It smashed isolation. And it got people a ton of fat loss results because intensity was high. The duration was short. People got stronger. And everyone was like, wait, great.

And then people started to realize, well, wait a minute. If I only do squats and kipping pull-ups, sometimes I'm numb. actually completely forgetting to train those isolation muscles.

And so people started getting hurt. Also way too heavy, way too fast for the sake of endurance, not quality, right? Everything in bodybuilding is quality of the repetitions. That's all that matters.

Everything in CrossFit was count, right? So they went the entire other end of the spectrum and both sides have problems is what I hope you see I'm trying to describe here, right? And so people were like, okay, it's great. It's too high intensity too often. The movement quality is awful, like globally, right?

And it's totally random. Everything in bodybuilding is specific and precise. Everything in CrossFit is totally random.

And so then what happened about 10 years ago is the pendulum started to swing back more to the middle and said, wait a minute, what if we take these CrossFit principles and then we add back some isolation work? So I'll finish my WOD and then I'll go do some tricep extensions. I'll do some hamstring machines.

I'll do some calf raises. Okay, great, but not too many. Okay, great. And then what if I like actually start having days where we don't go fully to time and we do more of like a, okay, great. And what you end up sliding back into is.

Like what we've been generally doing in strength conditioning, which is like a moderate length, 45 minute workout, a little bit of strength stuff, some isolation stuff to fix your personal limitations. and downsize, like a little bit of volume, a little bit of a pump, a little bit of heart rate stuff, but not too much, and some pure strength stuff, and get you out of here. And we're not going to do it six days a week.

We're not doing it two days a week. We'll do it three. And it's like, we end up right back on the same spot that most of us said, which is like, do these nice, well-rounded programs. And that's currently where we're at. The only thing to layer on top of that is the addition in the 90s of high intensity interval stuff.

And that really is starting to get popular. And so now we have this blend where people can go. Okay, this is how I do strength.

Let me add that piece in. This is how I do isolation stuff. Let me add that piece.

This is when I go steady state. Let me add that piece. Let me grab the high intensity.

Now, let me put these things in combination with the individual client based on, do they have 20 minutes or do they have 45 minutes? Do they have three days a week? Do they have six days a week? Are they really banged up? Do they move well?

Do they not? What are their limitations? And then you can just sort of apply the pieces for your individual clients based on all of those contexts. You tend to get better results. It's much more sustainable.

People don't get hurt. Win, win, win, win, win. Yeah, for sure. And I do think that you're right.

CrossFit has great principles as does bodybuilding, but obviously there's flaws in both like you just kind of described. So I guess just going back into program design, like for the person, let's just say that isn't under a time constraint and it's just like the average person who goes to the gym and just wants to get a good workout in and they want to build some muscle, like do sets and reps really matter? I mean, I know from the, from the science it does, but some people now.

You just see them just completely training until failure with every single movement they're doing. So if you could maybe articulate as best you can, like when somebody goes to the gym and they're looking to get like a good strength workout, like what kinds of things should they include, sets and reps and that sort of thing. What's the outcome goal here?

Strength or hypertrophy? Because those are different answers. I would say for the average person, just looking to build more muscle. So hypertrophy.

Yeah. Okay. So you have a lot more flexibility with what you do for hypertrophy than you do for strength. There are some things that just have to happen for strength.

that you can't skip or avoid. Not the case for hypertrophy. Volume load is probably the thing to land on.

And so that is take the number of repetitions, multiply that by the number of sets and multiply that by the actual load you lifted. And when those become equated, it doesn't matter if you necessarily did five sets of five, which would be 25 reps at 50 pounds. So five times five times 50, or you did say three sets of eight, which is 24 reps at a little bit of a lower, right? Or you did a little bit of a three sets of 10. So I did actually five more repetitions, but you actually did it in a lower weight.

And so it ends up kind of washing all out, to be honest with you. So it doesn't matter a tremendous amount. What matters most about hypertrophy is that you can continue to provide stimulus and that you can progressively overload.

So whether you want to increase the amount of repetition to do and keep it at the same weight, fine. You want to keep the reps per set. You want to keep the weight the same and you want to do one more set next week.

Cool. You want to do neither of those things and you want to add a few pounds. Great. You want to add some pounds, take some sets away and add some.

You can kind of mess with these things in any order that you want. That doesn't mean just be random. There's a difference we call, there's a difference in randomization and variation.

Variation is very important for hypertrophy, especially that does not mean random. So be intentional, have a plan, be judicious with how you're going about. If you don't do that, you almost never really truly hit progressive overload.

And that's why people don't see results. So have a plan. It doesn't even matter for most people what that plan is, but have something that you're following for a four to eight week window.

Probably for most people, six weeks. Four is maybe even a little short. Six to eight is probably the better number. So you can go at those things.

You want to work hard. Hypertrophy is not going to come easy, but you do not have to absolutely martyr yourself. You don't have to take three scoops of pre-workout to the dome, get after it, scream, throw up afterwards.

If you get highly trained, you have to work harder. But for most people, you also can't leave the gym. on a leg day for hypertrophy being like, yeah, yeah, like I think I broke a sweat. Like my legs are kind of tight.

That's not going to be enough. So it's somewhere between three shots to the dome and throwing up, probably closer to that end of the spectrum. Then, yeah, and I'm like, oh, yeah, that last set, those last couple reps, I got a little burn there. Like that's not going to be enough at all.

For the very beginners, it will be. But for these like moderate people. So another kind of an easy way to think about that is a lot of folks will talk about reps in reserve.

So this is, imagine you're in the middle of a rep and you stopped, or middle of the set. How many reps did you have left in the tank? Now, you don't necessarily need to empty it every single time.

Maybe stop with one left, maybe two. Three is pushing it forward. It's not hard. You should have got heavier, should have done more reps. So a lot of people will land on that somewhere between one to two reps in reserve.

The more trained you are, the closer to that edge you can get, the less trained. Maybe stay further away. And then monitor your soreness. Like if you're getting just brutally sore afterwards, you're probably doing a touch too much.

If you're not getting sore at all, you probably should push the pace a little bit more. You went a little tight, like, ooh, yeah, God, pecs are kind of sore today. Next day, yeah, God, a little tender.

That's probably, soreness is a terrible proxy. for workout quality. But in this particular case for hypertrophy, I'm just trying to help folks understand a little bit about what I should do. And instead of just giving you numbers, it's easier to actually just back calculate results, right?

Like if you're not feeling in your workout, if you're not getting sore and it's not growing, then you got to do something different with that muscle group. Probably a different exercise selection, right? You're probably not using that muscle very much in the exercise you're choosing, but it also could be your scheme, right?

So if you want to do... Two sets of 25, great. Like you better feel a burn at the end though, right? You want to do six sets of eight, right?

All of these things work pretty much equally effectively, at least in the first two to three months. You're going to see equal results in terms of hypertrophy. Now past that, month six, month eight, month year two, year four, I don't know, we don't have those data, but for the moderately short term, it doesn't really matter what you go after.

Right. Yeah. I heard you talk about how, I guess like a kind of like a misconception in the fitness community is, is that soreness is like the ultimate like measure of how effective your workout is.

And like, really you've said, and I I've learned to, obviously I've learned this myself, I guess, in just in, in years of doing this, that it's not really the case. And that just cause you're super sore doesn't mean it was a good workout. No, not at all.

I mean, look, hypertrophy is only one outcome and even that is not tied closely to soreness. So if you look at the studies that have published in these areas, you're going to find basically no statistically significant relevance between amount of soreness and amount of growth. Some people get really sore and don't grow much.

Some people don't get sore that much at all and grow a lot. So they're just not a good way to determine it, especially if you're looking for other outcomes. And like you were talking about being at Gabby's house and doing an XPT workout in the pool, and you're out there for hours and you're just completely gassed and exhausted, and you're assuming you're just going to wake up the next day completely train wrecked. And? I wasn't sore at all.

There you go. So you can get really, we use the, obviously I've been a part of XPT since before day one. I've used, been using pool workouts like that with athletes and people for years now.

And it's one of the things I love to go to, especially for fighters in camp. Cause you just, you just don't get very sore. You can train really, really hard. Soreness is dependent upon a lot of things. So some exercise choices that are even harder, just don't result in soreness.

Things that are mostly concentric based, like pushing a sled, like an aerosol bike, like being in a pool. You don't have a lot of impact. There's not a lot of eccentric bracing.

So you don't cause as much muscle damage, even though you're exerting the same amount of force and effort or more. And so there's lots of ways you can go about it. That doesn't mean eccentric is bad. You should not avoid it. It's good.

You need it in your life. But details matter here. There's a reason this is a giant scientific field.

And just because you took a weekend certification, you're highly qualified to do this. You're not. There's a lot of details.

I teach an entire semester course at the graduate level on program design. And when we finished that semester, people are just like, I feel like I don't know anything. And I'm like, good, good.

Like, this is how complicated this stuff can be. It will take you a decade of studying this stuff to really get to an expertise level. I don't even, like, there's a ton about programs, tons about programs. I don't know. I learn all the time from people.

So it's a very complicated field. You can do some basic stuff, though, very easily. Like the stuff we've been talking about, we're going to get you a little bit of the way there.

But, you know, for the folks that are, you know, trainers listening, there's a lot here. There's a lot to learn. So.

You know, like don't, don't just assume like, oh yeah, you did the thing and you've been training for three years. You got it all. No way. No way.

Like first professional athlete I ever coached was in 2005. I've been in this for a long time with professional and I'm still like, oh my God, I didn't know anything about this or wow this or I'm learning a ton. So it takes a long time to really get proficient in some of this stuff. Yeah.

Amen to that. I mean, it's funny. I was just having this conversation with a buddy of mine who's been in the field for a long time and that I dove into the NSCA journal to read up on like training seniors because I've.

I just started training somebody that is, I've trained older people before, but I just haven't in a couple of years. And I wanted to make sure that I still knew my stuff. And maybe there's been new research has come out on effective ways to train somebody in that demographic.

And I was telling him how humble I was like, man, this is humbling to think you have learned so much and you've been in the field for a while. And then you're going back into the journal to like read up on certain things. You talked about like gauging how effective your workout is based on.

perceived exertion. If you're sweating, you know that you're sweating good and you're kind of in a way just feeling taxed, you know that you got a good workout. And then on the flip side, if you're just questioning whether you did, you know you probably need to push a little bit more.

As far as like volume and designing, like as far as like the design of the actual program, some people will say I'll do total body three days a week. Some people say I'll do push pull legs. Other people will say I'll do upper body, lower body. Like if you found that.

that one for like the average person is is the most effective or does it all come down to individuality I would actually say that my personal experience lines up very well with the research and that it's fairly clear. None of those are more effective than the other, which on its face sounds like really annoying. You're like, there he goes again, not answering the question. I actually think it's the opposite. I think it means like you, you actually have the ability to do anyone that fits your client, that fits your personality.

I traditionally, typically hedge more towards whole body as often as possible for me personally, not for my athletes per se, though that does seem to be intended to be the case for my athletes, but for the general population, here's why. Splitting like upper body, lower body, or different body parts is great. What happens when you miss a workout?

Really hard, right? So you're like, I did, I did chest today and I do chest every Monday. Great.

What happens when next Monday's workout comes and you got, your meeting runs late and traffic's bad, or you just, you're exhausted. You get a cold. Well, now all of a sudden you will go two weeks before using your chest. And that's a very real situation. Most people just like you don't, you're going to miss one workout a month.

Minimum, right? Like that's a realistic situation. So I don't like that because you end up going big chunks of time and then, man, God forbid, the next Monday you're traveling.

Ah, or you end up just like, now all of a sudden you went three weeks without using that body part. It just, it gets very hard. And so I like to be like, look, let's hedge our risk a little bit. We're going to do some stuff.

Well, you know, like where you use your legs three days a week, that's just going to be, so you use one of those fine. We'll add in some more sets next, next workout. Cause we're going to do the exam or whatever the case is. And again, if you look at the research effectiveness is the same, as long as you reach the same total volume between the two workouts, it's equally effective. So I tend to like multi-joint movements and I tend to like full body more often for the general population.

If those considerations are not, if you're like, Hey, what was we were like, I miss a workout like once every three months. It's very, very rare. My schedule is stable.

It's probably means you don't have children. It's also probably means you don't have like, you're not running multiple things. You don't travel a lot, but that's a lot of people.

That's fine too. And then, Hey, if you want to do body part splits, I got no beef with that. If you want to do push pull or upper, I got no beef with any of those things. Do you want to work out six days a week?

Then you're probably better. You'll do well doing body part splits. If you want to try to get it to four, then maybe you could do a push pull, something like that. It just sort of depends.

Do you recover really well? Do you not? Do you recover really well?

Maybe. You do the same body part multiple times. If it takes you a long ass time to recover, maybe you shorten it down a little bit.

So all those things are, give you the freedom to know you're doing a really effective program and it's going to work if you put the work in and you stay consistent, but you get to do it in the way that best fits your situation. Right, right. I like how honest you are, you know, cause it'd be easy for you to say that like one of these programs is more effective based on what you do, you know, but I love that you're like, you know, like doesn't really matter as long as like.

You're doing the things that we've already kind of talked about. You're working yourself to a certain level. You're training the right types of movements.

You're getting in enough workouts and so on and so forth. So when it comes to like the right type of movements, I guess if you're, say if you're training total body, for instance, do you recommend then people doing like a horizontal push, horizontal pull, like a lower body push, lower body pull and stuff like that? Yeah, you can split it up however you want, right? You know, it depends on your style.

So if you look at the global movement patterns, upper body wise, You've got push and pull, right? Now, what this also means is you've got a couple of different planes. Some people call it two planes, some people call it three planes.

So let's say with the pushes, you've got horizontal push, think bench press or push up. You've got overhead push, military press, something like this, handstand pushups, whatever. Some people throw a third, kind of like diagonal angle in there, which is, you know, incline bench, something like that.

However you want to split it up, doesn't matter to me. All right. Well, then you got the same thing for pull. You've got a vertical pull, like a lat pull down or a pull up.

You've got a horizontal pull, like a bent row, T-bar row, something like this. And then you have more of an angular pull. And this could be any variation of a pull down from a machine. You're kind of sitting at a 45-degree angle. It could kind of go the opposite direction.

So you have those there. The legs, it's the same thing. We just, for whatever reason, we like to call, some people refer to legs as push-pull.

So a push just tends to be like a squat where you're pushing the implement away from you. And a pull tends to be when you're pulling the implement towards you. So a push is like a squat.

or a step up or something like that, a lunge, split squat, rear foot elevated split squat, any of those things. A pull tends to be more things like an RDL, deadlift, stiff-legged deadlift, hamstring curl, Nordic curls, all those things tend to be pulls. So if you want to split them up, that's why it's fine. It's more challenging with the lower body because when you're doing a squat per se, you're using quads, hamstrings, adductors, and glutes.

When you're doing a deadlift, you're using the same muscle groups. So you can split it up in your brain, I'm doing push-pull, but in reality, you're doing legs-legs. That's just how it works.

When you're pressing with your upper body, just because of the way that the muscles cross multiple joints, you're not using your lats really much at all to do any push-up. You can't do a lower body exercise for the most part unless you do isolation stuff without using the anterior and posterior side. Like it just, it just doesn't happen. So I don't get too caught up in those things because I'm like, oh, it's a pull day.

So you think you're not using your quads at all when you're deadlifting? Like, of course you are. So it's like, you just did legs, legs.

You just did quad quads. Like you just did a whole bunch of them on one day and like a little bit less on the next day. So you can just put it up that way.

Then you have the entire core. So you have rotation, you have anti-rotation, you have flexion, anti-flexion, extension, anti-extension, et cetera. But then like, there's a whole host of other movement groups.

Like, what about trans? and rotational stuff. What about multiple movements?

What about sprinting? What about jumping? What about a snatch? What about landmine press?

Like you have all these ones where you don't have like a category. So it totally depends on the trainer or the coach and how they want to split these movement patterns up. And then what do you do with, again, movements like a clean that are a pull, clearly it's a squat, and then it's an overhead press.

Like, especially if you're going to jerk it at least, right? Call it whatever you want. I don't really care because it doesn't really matter.

It's what matters is that you have the appropriate amount of stimuli on the muscle groups that you're intending to. And you know, you could argue what those numbers should be, but that's what matters. So I don't get too caught up in pressing on for those instances.

It is typically easier to kind of do upper versus lower split. And it's just do I do lower body Mondays and I do all things lower body and I do upper body Tuesdays. Like actually right now, this is what my training looks like. Just happenstance. So like Monday is all lower body stuff, but that's even difficult.

Right? So like your upper back works during a deadlift a lot. like a ton. So my upper back is getting stuff then, but you just live with it, right?

So I'll do a lot of all things lower body Monday, all things upper body Tuesday. The third day I train is going to be like, in this case, probably like a steady state, 45 to 60 minute thing, typically on a bike, all right, down to the beach, nasal only breathing, things like that. Then probably going back to the next day I train, so day four is now going to be lower body again.

some variations. So instead of like doing a traditional deadlift on Monday, on the next time I train legs, it'll be like a trap bar deadlift. And instead of doing like a goblet squat, the next time I squat, it'll be a front squat or like some variation, similar movement pattern, but a variation that's all intentionally picked by the way. Upper body then after that, same thing.

So if I did flat bench on day one, I might do dumbbell bench next day, or I might do an incline dumbbell or some small variation. And then the next day after that is going to be a lot of intervals. So really high intensity interval stuff on maybe some kettlebell stuff, maybe a lot of aerosol stuff, a lot of kickboxing, things like that. And then the following day is back to the original. I don't train six days a week.

I love to. That's the plan. It just never happens, right?

So I don't care what day those end up falling on. I just, that's the next one. So if I skip. If I don't get today's workout in, fine. Like I'm just doing that workout tomorrow.

Everything just moves back. So it isn't like Monday is when I do squats. Like it could be Monday this week.

It could be Thursday night. Like it's just all over the place, right? So I have six workouts I need to get done.

And sometimes it takes me seven days to do those six. Sometimes it takes me nine. Sometimes it takes me 12. Like you just keep going in order so nothing gets missed. And that's how I typically do it now. It's not how I always do it.

It's not how I'm going to do it, but that's what I'm doing right now. Well, cool. I mean, thanks for clarifying that. And then essentially, like it really comes down to, like you said, like the the individual and if they're working with a trainer, like what their goal is for the program that they're creating as far as exercise selection and how they're breaking up the workouts.

You mentioned cardio. You mentioned how like one of the days you're doing like a steady state cardio and the other day you're doing like an interval training type thing. You see a lot of people that they'll do like a lot of cardio before they lift or they'll do a lot of cardio like after they lift at the gym. Like, do you think that's effective?

Can that diminish your returns when you're trying to build muscle or do you recommend like doing it on another day? Oh, the answer is both. It can be effective and it can be detrimental. Yep. Context is everything here, right?

So what's the training goal? Number one, how long are you talking about? What type of, are you running? Are you talking about swimming?

You're talking about cycling or rowing? The exercise choice matters. Are you talking about a 20 minute dog on the treadmill before you lift?

Are you talking about 45 minutes of spin class? Like all these details matter, right? In general, the more fatigued you are prior to your training, the lower the quality of the training, okay?

Simple as it is. If you're trying to improve fatigue management, then who cares? Doesn't matter, right? If you're there to burn calories, you want to lose fat, you're in there for general health, it doesn't matter what order you burn your calories in. They're irrelevant.

You're just in there getting work done. You're trying to maximize strength, to compete in world championships in strength, well, then you probably shouldn't do much cardio at all close to competition. It's only going to be detrimental to your primary goal of being as strong as possible on every single movement you do. Somewhere in between, well, if you do more... So concentric-based things, like we've talked about, like a rower or a swim, they don't result in as much damage.

So they don't take as many of your resources for repair. So those resources for repair can go to the hypertrophy train, right? So if you look at the interference effect, which is the cardio blocking your hypertrophy, there's not much interference effect with cycling. at all. There's more with running.

There's not much interference effect with rolling or swimming. So the exercise choice matters. Your total caloric intake, are you at kind of the moderate to low end of protein intake? Well, then you don't have the buffer and the room to start draining supplies using other things.

Are you at a caloric hold or trying to be hypocaloric? You're not going to grow muscle then if you're then also burning calories somewhere else. Are you calorically excessive?

All these things determine how much of the I mean, in general, I tell people don't worry about it. The reality of it is a lot of people go to the gym and it's like, God damn, all the machines are taken right now. Well, don't just sit there.

All right. If you're like, I'll just do my cardio first. It's fine. It's not a big deal, right? Like you'll be all right.

Go train. You can do, especially upper body. Yeah. Go do your treadmill stuff.

Go to elliptical for 45 minutes, whatever you're going to do, then go hit an upper body lift. Are you going to get the exact amount of gains? Probably not. But most people, like you're splitting hairs. What we're looking at is six months, six, like six years down the road.

It's fine. In general. If you're really trying to maximize hypertrophy, then just keep the cardio to a minimum, keep it to off days, do it after. If you can split it up into two workouts, better.

That's super unrealistic for most people. So, you know, choose the less eccentric-based, landing-based things. Don't go crazy with the volume.

You know, don't go too long, too hard. And just make sure you're eating enough. And you're probably just fine. Yeah. I love how you kind of keep it super simple because I've even heard you say, And one of the things that I learned from listening to you, I think it was on Heberman's podcast, where you talked about how supersetting can be beneficial in many cases.

And that I was always, I guess, under the impression that if you're keeping your heart rate elevated too high, it might diminish some of your strength gains. But I remember you putting it in a way that was like, well, what you might diminish in your strength gains, you're also gaining cardiovascularly and you're helping to lower your blood pressure and all these things. So I just love how you put all this stuff in. the context that's not only easy for people to understand, but people to pick and choose like based on their goals. And so when I think a lot of people, as we kind of bring our conversation to a close, like one of the last thing I want to talk to you about is burning fat, because I think a lot of people when they're, they're looking to utilize cardio, it's because they want to burn quote unquote, extra calories.

So when it comes to fat loss, I guess from the same context from muscle, like what needs to happen? And then on top of that, can you burn pure body fat without being in a caloric deficit in your opinion? That's not even an opinion. Like that's about the most straight answer I can give you. Now you cannot lose body fat without being in deficit.

That's not what most people think it means. In order to understand if you're in a deficit, you have to know what you're actually burning. And most people have no idea. You can't just look that number up. You can get a close idea, but for you, I'll put it this way.

Caloric exertion on the population level is close. But on the individual level, it's nowhere in the stratosphere, right? So you and I, let's say we're both 35 years old and we both weigh 185 pounds. You might be burning 4,000 a day.

I might be burning 1,800. I mean, it's that much of a difference. So unless you know that number, you don't really know if you're hypochloric or not.

And so people will say things like, well, the calories didn't matter because I look and I counted my calories. And no, well, then obviously your equation was off. You estimated how many you were burning. You measured how much you were taking in.

You probably messed the measurement up. But let's even say you did it right. Well, then the equation was wrong. You weren't actually burning what you thought you were burning.

You simply have to be in a caloric deficit to lose fat. That's just non-negotiable. What needs to happen to burn fat?

That's it, right? You just have to be in a caloric deficit. That's as complicated as it gets.

It's a similar conversation a little bit, like we talked about earlier, which is like, can I gain muscle and gain the minimum amount of fat? Yeah. If you want to lose fat, just don't eat. Just watch Survivor, right? You ever watch that old show Survivor?

They all lose 20 pounds. I promise you, they're not taking any special- thing. They're not doing a crazy diet. They just start eating food. And all they eat is a little bit of rice here and there.

And guess what happened? Oh my God, they lose it. Now, do they lose some muscle? Yeah, because they're not eating protein either.

So there are better and worse ways to lose fat. If you just stop eating, you're going to lose a lot of fat, but you're going to lose some muscle too. If you tend to keep protein moderate to high, you'll preserve some of your muscle and your calories are low, you'll lose more pure fat. That's the trick, right? So if you stimulate muscle growth, you feed it some protein, and then you take calories down either by a combination of fat and carbs.

fat alone or carbs alone, it doesn't really even matter. Quite frankly, you want to go eight meals a day, you want to go three meals a day, you want to go eating in a four-hour window, or you want to eat in a 14-hour window. None of those things actually matter.

It's almost totally irrelevant. It just comes down to what do you like better, what's your personal preference. That's all that has to happen. As we discussed earlier, it is far easier to reduce calories by just not eating them.

It's far easier. If you like working out and all the other benefits of exercise, that's great. But in terms of fat loss, your primary thing is going to be targeting less eating. Now, just to circle out our chat today, I can make your life easier with that.

Add muscle. I talked about how that is a glucose dump. You're going to regulate a lot of things.

It's much, much easier to lose fat when you have a lot of muscle. much easier. So one of my first steps actually, if I have like general population or non-timeline stuff, is to make sure we have enough muscle. If you don't have enough muscle, one of the first steps is let's build some muscle.

They tend to be high-calorie workouts anyways, so you're going to just be lowering calories. But let's make sure the body has the ability to go through that process effectively before we just start like taking things away from you. It's just really hard that way.

So yeah, that's all you have to do is bring calories one way or the other. And exercise is great, but exercise is this. I'll be as frank as possible.

It's not a huge contributor to fat loss. It is a big contributor to sustained fat loss though. It is not a huge contributor to fat loss, but a big contributor to sustained fat loss.

So that's very important for folks to realize, look, if you want to lose it initially, it's going to come from food. But if you want to help yourself have the chance to keep it off, that's when the exercise is going to pay off. But that's why you need to do both.

And so you mentioned that when you have muscle, it becomes like this glucose dump. Is that I guess part of the reason why you hear that the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn at rest. That's true.

Look, it depends on how much you matter. Like you're talking about 30 or 40 calories, which you could argue this two ways. You could say it's functionally irrelevant.

Or you could say, look, 30 calories multiplied by 900 days, that's a lot. Okay, yeah. So over time, it will matter, but it's not like...

it's not like you're burning 500 or 700,000 extra calories a day because you put on three pounds of muscle. It's not that dramatic. For most people, it's probably not.

Honestly, it's not as big a deal as I used to think. I used to just push that out. And then the numbers, we started to be able to run calculations, more data came out. And it was like, well, for most people, you're probably talking about 30 to 40 calories a day. Yeah.

It's not the primary thing, but hey, over time, why not stack that up? Give yourself every advantage possible. Right. So I guess in closing, the simple steps, I guess, to begin to burn body fat is caloric restriction, like watch your calories, build muscle, and then eat enough protein, right?

Yeah. The last thing I'll add to that actually is try to do that in a system that makes you feel abundant, not scarce. Okay. But that's, you need that. Adherence is the number one predictor of fat loss.

No question. Adherence, right? Not the plan, just the fact that you're sticking to something, some plan.

So that being said, you want to do it in a way, again, that you're feeling will call abundant. So you're not feeling like you're just like, man, I only get to eat eggs and egg whites in the morning and I get to have carrot sticks at lunch and I got to work out six days a week. Like you're not going to stay on that train very long. Right.

So you want to feel like you're eating full meals and you're eating mostly with the foods you want. This is Jenny Craig. Eat all the foods you want.

Eat everything. We're just going to give you tiny portions. Okay. That works.

Intermittent fasting. Eat whatever you want. We're just going to make sure your food only comes in a small amount of hours. There's all kinds of strategies that help you maintain.

Like where you don't feel like you're disrestricted all the time. So find the one that you like the most, but there's just going to have to be some level of restriction. You just want, you just don't want it to feel like you're, this is my pushback against like a lot of the 30 day challenges.

Part of me is like, I like that. Like, okay, good. Like I think you should be able to do hard things for 30 days.

That's good. The vast majority of people don't just right afterwards. Right? Like, so you, you want to be in sustained, not like this is my 30 day thing, but this is, this is a thing I can handle.

And like, sometimes I just got to say no at the banquet. And sometimes, no, no pizza tonight. I had a hard week, I know, but you got to say no to something. No, let's just stick with our steak and Brussels sprouts and rice tonight. Like, okay, all right.

So at some point, you have to make those choices. You just want to be, you don't want it to feel like it's not that bad. Last thing I'll add, this is habit changing, right? So once you do that, you'll find out those choices are actually easier and easier to make. The analogy I'll give you is, if you've ever had to work on Saturdays, say you work Monday through Friday.

And all of a sudden you had to go through four or five weeks where you had to work on Saturdays. Looking at that from the backside, you're just like, oh my God, I have to work the whole day Saturday. In the first couple of times, it's terrible.

Then actually after you just get used to it, I don't even think anything about working Saturdays. I've done it for years. I was like, this is what I do. It's not even weird.

When I don't work, I'm just like, whoa, what happened? So once those habits are established, the willpower to do them, it goes way down. It's really not that hard. So it's what I call inertia. Just get over that initial inertia and it actually won't be that hard at all.

Absolutely, man. I mean, I guess they always say the best workout plan that you'll do is the one that you'll adhere to, right? The one that you'll stick to because consistency is king.

Consistency over intensity any day of the week. Consistency over intensity any day of the week. Yeah, true that, man. Well, Andy, this has been awesome. Thank you again for your time and for coming on.

Transcript for:Muscle Building and Fitness Essentials

Transcript for:
Muscle Building and Fitness Essentials