In the weight loss, fat loss process, the number one thing, again, just my opinion, is a lack of patience, which causes people to switch from thing to thing to thing, and thinking that nothing's working. And the reality is, the most boring, the most mundane thing works the best, and that is just stay in a caloric deficit. So let's say I'm a man. or a woman, and I want to lose body fat.
How should I assess how I stack up in terms of body fat? And part two of this big question to start with, assuming I do want to lose body fat, I think most people are going to nod yes. The way I think about that, I think of it in three parts.
I think nutrition, resistance training, and cardio. So let's go right there. How should I approach this big question? So the first part of that was, how do they assess? You kind of made it like a context question.
Yeah, like how do I stock? Yeah, I don't know if I can answer that. I want to say, if you want to lose body fat, then you have every right to do so.
And then I have that little voice that says, well, if there's disordered eating or something, so maybe not everybody needs to. So notwithstanding that type of person. So people who...
could lose some body fat and who want to lose body fat. I think you just nailed the major components of the, let's just call it the evidence-based plan. You said a nutrition or a caloric deficit, resistance training, and cardio. So one thing I would like to say here is resistance training should never be the foundation of any type of diet. To me, it's the heartbeat, the DNA of one's fitness routine throughout their life.
So I'm a big proponent of resistance training. I think it's the best form of exercise for changing one's body. It clearly is the best form of exercise for changing one's body.
But we never want to use resistance training as a... method to lose body weight. It's not the goal.
And I'll get into this. I'll kind of develop a hypothesis and then explain where the very important role that resistance training has. So that leaves the other two. Both are extremely effective, whether it's cardio or reducing your calories.
I like to refer to that as a caloric deficit. Both of those are very powerful stimulus for losing body fat. cardio powerful, a caloric deficit powerful.
It really depends on what most people prefer. And most people will find that reducing their calories is a lot easier than performing a quite high volume of cardio to get the same output. But I'm also sensitive to the fact that a lot of people think don't ever do cardio for fat loss. It doesn't work. Well, the fact is it does work and it works well.
It's just easier to reduce your calories. So I'll state something just to start us off, and I'm going to throw in one more variable. A caloric deficit of 25% is a great sweet spot for most people.
So reducing your calories by 25%, lower than what you would normally eat where you're not gaining or losing weight. The other nutritional component to this is making sure that you prioritize protein. I like to say about 0.75 grams per pound is a very good goal when you're in this reduced calorie deficit. So now we have the basic or the blueprint of a stimulus to lose body fat. Now that's not where our mindset ends.
The other important goal here, the primary goal is fat loss, but now we also want to maintain our lean muscle mass as we're losing body fat. When we don't do that, and when I think of crash dieting or people that are just in a massive hurry, what they do is, yes, they lose body weight. Yes, they lose body fat.
But when they lose lean tissue, muscle mass, they are setting themselves up for post-diet failure. And that manifests in a very unfortunate outcome, which is in a very short period of time, people will gain back more body fat. than what they had before they started their diet.
That is what I call, and it's a train wreck of sorts because you're working against what you want when you don't protect the muscle during your diet. So there's where resistance training comes in. And I'll make one more statement. And then I've said a lot and I'll let you respond.
But a diet is when you reduce your calories, that is a global catabolic stimulus on your body. And a catabolic stimulus is good. Catabolic meaning breaking down. We want to break down fat, but we also want to maintain our muscle.
So by introducing resistance training into our diet. phase. That is one area where we are introducing an anabolic stimulus in an otherwise catabolic environment.
And earlier when I said that protein is important, we should prioritize protein in this plan. That is another anabolic nutrient or a stimulus that works synergistically with our resistance training to help maintain our muscle as we're dieting. So I love where you started.
From my personal experience, I made a... some pretty big mistakes here. So I, years ago, got very into practicing yoga and also got very much into intermittent fasting. And so I was not, I was close to being vegetarian.
I was not consuming enough protein, very much lacking, also restricting calories because I felt pretty good on intermittent fasting. I would go 16 hours, sometimes 20, all good. But... wasn't getting the calories wasn't getting the protein and i also stopped resistance training and i started not stop but i i really took it down to like really light like one to two days a week like really not getting the volume or frequency necessary and in my 40s i really started to lose lean muscle mass and i had this moment this aha moment like wow like what am i doing i need to get back in the gym because to your point you I was very lean, but I was losing muscle. And we know today that that's not good for longevity.
So I hear you loud and clear on protein. I think that's one of the PSAs of our conversation. 0.75 grams per pound is a great place to start. And so as we think about resistance training, I think people hear you loud and clear as well. But I think then struggle with like, the next question is, well, can we talk about frequency, volume?
light, heavy. So let's go there next. All right. And let me also send a message to people who just hate lifting weights. If you are willing to do cardio, that's better than nothing.
So being active will act as an anabolic stimulus when dieting. So resistance training is the best. Somebody says, I don't want to do that.
Okay. You're probably not going to maintain as much muscle, but are you willing to do some type of other activity and whatever your favorite type is. So something is better than nothing.
And I appreciate, and I want to say that because if you don't lift weights, it doesn't mean that you just have to throw in the towel to exercise altogether. It happens to be the best, but if you don't want to do that, let's do something else. Now, in terms of resistance training, this depends on a perspective.
So I have a bodybuilding background. So I tend to look at this from a... body part or body sculpting perspective.
So if I'm trying to build up my upper body, I'm going to use exercises that build my body. I'm also, the older I get, I'm appreciating more and more. Now, I'm also a certified strength and conditioning specialist. I'm also appreciating that it's important to train, especially as we age like an athlete, where we're doing some mobility work, let's say like posterior kinetic chain type of things.
So at the end of the day, there's those different philosophies. But as we're talking about this, I'm going to kind of use the perspective of trying to just build your body and happy to talk about the other types of resistance training that you could do, which would be more athlete based. So with the how often the frequency question, generally what we want to do is work out or stimulate each body part. a minimum of two times per week.
I would say two to three times per week. So what's not ideal is having like a back day and a quad day and a chest day. And then you're waiting six entire days to work out those muscle groups again.
So when you go to the gym, if you can go a minimum of two times per week where you're doing a whole body routine, That seems to be the best in terms of building muscle. Now, that would be a minimalist approach. Another option would, let's say you could go three days per week.
Well, maybe it's a three whole body days. And if you, some people want to go four days, two lower body days, two upper body days. So think of this.
I need to stimulate my muscles a minimum of two times per week. And let's, I'll say even two times per week. Once we get more than that. The research is not definitively saying that four is better than two or five is better than three, but we know that one is not ideal.
We know that more than once is ideal. So if you're living a lifestyle where resistance training is part of this, two times per week is a minimal. And after that, what is your available time?
What is your interest? Are you doing other forms of training like mobility work, power work? So hopefully that at least I gave you a baseline to consider. And how do you think about volume? So say we're doing, let's just go with the, I can do four days a week and I'm doing, you know, two upper, two lower, or I'm doing splits or there are a number of ways to think about it.
How should one think about sets, reps per body part? So if we just take, you know, chest, for example, how should I think about that? The most important thing is the intensity of your lift. So before we even get into volume, you're going to pick up a weight.
For chest, you're going to do a bench press or you're going to be in a machine where you're going to move the weight. The most important thing here to stimulate a hypertrophic stimulus on the body or a stimulus for the body to grow, or if we're dieting, a stimulus to maintain our muscle mass. Whatever weight you pick up to use. You want to keep lifting that weight until you can't lift it anymore.
Or this is even better to when you think you could do one or two more repetitions. I call that training to near failure. And when you're taking it to near failure, what that's doing is you're activating all of these motor units and it's causing all of the muscle fiber cells to be activated.
So again, You want to take each set that you do to near failure. So if I can, if I, let's just say I'm bench pressing 200 pounds and I could do it 10 times. And if I tried on the 11th time and it would not get off my chest, I would have to call my wife into the garage, get this off my chest. I can't do it 11 times.
As long as I go to about eight or nine, that's good. There's no added benefit for muscle hypertrophy to going to failure. So there's the most important consideration, the intensity of your lift.
Now, in terms of how many sets, how many reps, the number of sets typically seems to be less and less valuable as you get past three sets. So in my own personal workouts, I never do more than three reps. I'm I, I get bored actually to have three sets or three sets of being not reps. Yeah. Three sets, three sets of an exercise.
Yes. So you can do more, but the. The muscle protein synthesis, which is a measure of the acute hypertrophic potential of that workout really isn't amplified by doing many more sets than this. So, and in fact, for every additional set you do after one, you're getting less and less of a hypertrophic stimulus.
So going to near failure on set one, awesome. If you want to go ahead and do a second and a third set, but after that, You're just doing more sets because you love doing more volume. I don't believe that you're getting a lot of, you're not building a lot of extra muscle mass in that. Now, people will point to, well, what about these bodybuilders stepping on stage?
Well, a lot of times they're not natural athletes. They're doing other things where they can tolerate greater amounts of volume. So that's one set per chest. But let's just say that's bench press. What if you're going to do...
pushups or incline or how do you think about how many sets per body part? So what I like to do is frame this as in a seven day period. So this would be what I call working sets per week. And what we have is we have categories. So we have low volume.
Think of that as less than 10 sets per week for your chest as a muscle group. So if you did three sets of bench press, three sets of dumbbell flies, and three sets of push-ups. That's nine total sets in a week.
That would be considered low volume. Moderate volume is between 10 to 20. And then above 20 would be considered high volume. So I just wanted to put those kind of those frameworks out there, low, moderate, and high volume.
When we look at bodybuilders, let's look at them as a reference. So these are people that are trying to get the largest muscles possible. And when we look at natural bodybuilders, those not taking anabolic steroids, they're usually in the realm of 20 to 25 sets per body part per week.
So that would be the... most upper end extreme. Somewhere between 10 to 20 sets, working sets for a muscle group per week seems to be the best in terms of maximizing your muscle growth potential.
And so for non-bodybuilders, how do you think about moving from call it the beginner, less than 10 to intermediate? How does one assess where they are? How often do you have to be doing training for to move into it?
the intermediate range. Cause I think most of our listeners are probably not going to fall into the bodybuilder category. Yeah. So I think there's two considerations there. One, if you're a beginner, you start on the very, very low end.
Like I would say the first two months you're going to the gym once a week, maybe up to twice per week until your body gets used to this. Um, and then you get less and less sore in terms. And now I would ask. well, what's your goal? Is your goal to build as much muscle as you can?
Well, then you're going to probably want to do a little more volume, more in that moderate range. For myself, I'm happy to maintain my current muscle mass. So I'm on a routine where I'm doing nine sets per week. So bodybuilders look at me and say, wow, that's really low volume.
But for me, given the amount of time I have or that I'm willing to put into my resistance training workouts. It's plenty. And I've monitored my muscle tissue for years.
And even into my 40s now, I've not lost almost in my 50s. Even this nine sets per week per body part, I'm maintaining my muscle mass. And in fact, if I'm being honest, it's going to be very hard for me without HRT to gain muscle, even if I were doing a lot more volume.
Could I gain some? Maybe, but it would be, we're talking minuscule amount or marginal amounts, not massive amounts at this point since I've been lifting my entire life. And so here you are on the volume. The other thing that comes to mind for people who are busy is rest between sets and something that I found effective. I want to get your take on it.
Drop sets. So, you know, I will go to a machine, say a bench press machine. and i'll go to a really heavy weight i'll do like a brief warm-up and i'll do as much as i can for call it five to six reps and then immediately i will lower the weight by 30 percent 40 whatever it is crank out seven to eight reps no rest go to the neck go lower again to 10 to 12 reps and then boom i'm done i move on that's how and i can knock out a workout very quickly so what's your take on drop sets as an effective way to do resistance training.
So you are achieving hypertrophy, triggering muscle protein synthesis, and you're just short on time, like a lot of people. I like that approach for people short on time. The one thing that we would be sacrificing, to some extent, it's not like we wouldn't be getting a strength stimulus, but not resting as much in between and using a heavier weight for all three sets, you're not getting...
as much of a strength stimulus. Now, maybe you don't care about strength. Strength is not that important to me. I'd rather have larger muscles than stronger muscles if I had to choose. Let me give one other option here, which is a strategy that I use with the same goal in mind, in the sense that I'm trying to maximize my efficiency while I'm in the gym.
Now I have the advantage. My research lab is a weight room, so I don't have to worry about other people. And I have a pretty, pretty nice setup in my garage. So I'm always pretty much on my own, but this is, um, some people call them supersets or compound sets. So if I'm doing chest and back in the same workout, I will do a set of my bench press of that example.
And then while my chest is recovering, instead of lowering the weight. and getting higher reps and doing a drop set, I'll let my chest recover completely while I go do a back exercise. So while I'm moving, let's say I'm doing a lat pulldown.
Yes, I'm doing a lat pulldown. Now my chest is recovering. So now I go back to chest. Now I'm not running. I'm still taking, you know, I'm walking back.
And then I do my second set of chest while my back is recovering. And then after that, I'm going back to my second set of lat pulldowns. So that is another way to get a lot more work done in a shorter amount of time, but also allowing me to keep the weights higher than if I were to do drop sets.
And I also do drop sets as well. I usually tend to do them for my single limbs, like leg extensions or triceps. So I have nothing against them, but I personally prefer this compound sets or going, you know, antagonist lifts to max.
to be efficient with my time. I love it. It's very effective. A lot of people don't have an hour to get in the gym or they're trying to do something at home. They're balancing family work and you crank it out.
Don't sit around. It drives me nuts when I go to the gym and I see people just like hanging out. They're on the machine. They're texting. They're watching TV.
I'm just like, I'm moving on. I'm going to the next leg. And I'll tell you, if you ever lifted with power lifters, it's crazy how long their workouts are, like hours.
Now, again. They're lifting very heavy weights, but that is a world that I just cannot live in where I just don't have the time to spend two hours a day in a weight room. I just, I can't do it.
Jason Walkup here, founder and co-CEO of MindBodyGreen and the host of the MindBodyGreen podcast. Please subscribe. You'll never miss a show and you won't regret it. So you mentioned your challenges, the challenge you have with building lean muscle at your age.
Can we talk about like the changes that happen by decade? And then let's also talk about gender and how men or women are different here as relates to lean muscle mass. Sure. Yeah. Most of the research that I've read on this is in your, in males anyway, in their forties and females for that, for that matter, we have, we start to decrease our lean muscle mass and I don't know the exact numbers, but every decade it's more and more and more.
But In your 40s, I think the last study that I remember reading was around mid 40s, like 45 or 46. After that point, that is where it becomes more difficult. Now, as I tried to compare males and females here, there's a big difference what's happening in a female body than compared to a male body. They have more hormonal changes occurring than males.
So males have a pretty obvious. decrease or lowering of testosterone as we age. Females, I don't know how much testosterone changes, not much, I don't think. So their biggest drop is estrogen. One thing that I'm very excited about though, as I look at, as I read this research, almost all of this research that we read now about aging has never really considered people that have been fit for their lives leading into middle age.
So that is a new frontier for people like me, exercise scientists, studying people who have embraced a fitness lifestyle and as they age. Because the data that we're relying on now, we don't have those populations to have studied. So do we actually lose muscle, Matt? I mean, what about people that have kept lifting?
And you didn't ask this, but I'll just I've often said that resistance training is the best anti-aging drug on the planet. It is just, to me, when I look at people who continue to lift weights, they just, they look young. They have more vigor in their body. There's something about it.
A hundred percent. I, I've never felt better than I have in the past couple of years where I've really focused on it. And, and part of it came from this aha, oh crap moment around 45, I'll be 50 in November, but. in my mid 40s i was looking at my legs i hadn't done legs for a long time i never liked legs and i'm like oh wow my legs are kind of disappearing this is a problem i need strong legs and for me and i think a lot of people are probably in the same boat sure some of it's vanity you want to look good i think that that goes for for men and women and i think too it's i think more coming around to this idea that resistance training and being strong is the in my view that the fastest and best way to to being lean, less fat. And then I think from a longevity perspective, as you age, you want to be able to be mobile.
You know, for us, it's about, you know, my kids are young. I'm going to be an old granddad if I'm, if I'm able, if we're, if we're blessed to have grandchildren someday. So like, I want to be able to pick up a 30 pounder and not like worry about falling over and breaking my hip.
I got, I got to be strong. That's exactly right. And so one, one other question for clarification on the resistance training routine, how do you think about rest days?
Is it a minimum of 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours? So in other words, if one day I'm doing, say, you know, chest and back on Monday, and if I'm going to come back to do chest and back, can I do it on Tuesday? Should I wait till Wednesday, Thursday?
How much rest, how many rest days do we need before we're hitting another body part again to maximize growth, recovery, et cetera? I'm going to speak with my opinion because I'm not, I don't think the research has answered this question yet. But if we look at this, let's say you do all of your lifting for a body part on one day.
So if I'm doing, let's say four, 16 sets for my chest bent, four sets of bench press. four sets of incline dumbbell bench press, four sets of barbell decline bench press, and four sets of dumbbell flies. Now, tomorrow, I'm going to go in and do chest again. That doesn't make sense. It makes sense to allow your body to recover from all of that volume.
But here's something I did, I think, about two years ago. I was lifting six days per week. But I really did a little bit of volume for each body part each day.
So rather than doing three exercises for chest each day, I was probably only doing one chest exercise, but six days per week. So if I was doing three sets, that was 18 total sets over the week. So I wasn't getting any rest days from going back to chest. But did I really need much rest for any one body part? Because my volume was so low.
So I think as we consider this, you ask the question, what is my ability to recover from what I was just doing? And a large part of that will be how much volume you've done. Now, let me ask this. Assuming your audience is like me, I often will start with my lifestyle.
So how many days can I realistically, as I look down and I'm honest with myself, how many days will I actually go to the gym? So I will often start if I'm just working with somebody or helping them with a workout routine. I almost have like a lifestyle program.
Let's see what you're going to like. You've got kids, you're running them here. They have sports.
You've got social commitments. You have work. Tell me first where you're going to, what you can commit to, and then let me design the best workout around that rather than when I was in my, you know, twenties. my life was evolving around my workout.
So I know I'm going to be there these days and then I'll work everything around that. So I just want to say, I don't think there's anything wrong with make up committing to what you can actually do and designing some programming around your lifestyle. And what I've often seen is people that don't do that, they end up skipping a lot and then they feel bad and like, well, I didn't go last week at all.
It's like, no, let's. Let's start with a mindset of success where you tell me what you can do, and then let's make sure that we prioritize that because we've already agreed you can fit it in with your overall lifestyle commitments. Well, I love your approach there because if we agree on, okay, I'm an intermediate.
We're going to do 15 sets per body bar per week. What you're saying is how you get to the 15. You've got a lot of flexibility, which I love. So you could slice that up to, I'm going to go. shorter sessions five days a week and three sets per body part or i'm going to do one long you know two longer sessions and split it up seven and seven it gives you a ton of flexibility rather than i think this old school rigid you know you got to do the splits you got to do you know chest chest uh shoulders and tries and then back buys and legs or no you got to do one body bar today per day you're not getting enough volume and i think if you're just take a step back and say all right i'm an intermediate for argument's sake 15 sets.
I don't care how you get there over seven days. Nope. That's exactly right. And I've adopted that myself, not right now, but in the past, I would say, okay, the next seven days, here's my three workouts that I know I'm going to do, or my four, whatever it is.
I've got seven days to get it done. Now, I think I plan to go these days, but inevitably, something happens. And as long as I didn't wait till the end of the week to get all my workouts in. I still met my goal.
And I love that because it's a, again, it's a, I accomplished, I succeeded rather than I missed, I missed. And I'm not an exercise psychologist, but I love, I know there is something to checking a box and saying, I did what I said I was going to do. A hundred percent.
And for me personally, in my life stage between kids, family, and work, I never have an hour. And so My routines have become shorter and shorter where I'm going to the gym and I time it on my whoop. I'm like 15 minutes, 20 minutes, but I go hard and I'm done and I'm out. But I'll go more often because I can always find 15 to 20 minutes.
Once I go north of 30 minutes, 40 minutes, that's going to become challenging. An hour. Eh, not going to happen.
Well, like I said, I find myself getting very bored. So I like to switch things up. Didn't used to have that problem, but that's why, again, more than three sets of anything. I'm over it. And so, okay.
So I just worked out and I'm going to, this is, you know, we touched on protein. Can we talk about protein and creatine in terms of, I just got to work out in what's my window? How do I think about those two? and how they can help me trigger a muscle protein synthesis. Sure.
So which one do you want to start with? Let's go with protein first. All right.
So protein, I'm going to talk about a tiered approach. So the top, the most important thing you can do with protein is focus on the total number of grams you're going to eat in a day. Don't worry about how much per meal.
Don't worry about pre-post workout. How many grams can you eat in it? How many, what is your goal for the day? And let's make the math easy. Let's pretend we're asking you to eat a gram of protein per pound of body weight.
So for me, I weigh approximately 200 pounds. So at the end of the day, did I get 200 grams of protein? The next important, most important thing, if the goal is to maximize my muscle hypertrophy, is I want to approximately equally distribute that protein, those 200 grams, over the day.
So, and that's typically between three to five protein feedings. So let's just say it's four. So I, that means breakfast.
I want to have 50, 50 grams, lunch, 50 grams, dinner, 50 grams, and then maybe 50 grams post-workout. So I've approximately evenly distributed my total daily amount over the course of the day. And, but I will still say that's less important than the total daily amount. Now we're getting down to this third level, which really doesn't have much research support for, but it's something that I still do. It's never harmful.
And that is I prioritize one of those protein feedings around my workouts. Typically for me, it's right after my workouts, but if I don't get it after my workout, it's not a big deal. But I do, I take a protein supplement and take my bottle with me to my weight room.
So there's your hierarchy. Focus on the total daily amount, then try to approximately evenly distribute that over three to five meals, whatever's easier for you. Three's no better than five. Five seems to be no better than three.
And then one of those around the workout. And can you talk, we've had Don Lehman on the show, so we've gone deep on this one, but can we spend a moment on the importance of leucine in terms of how we think about amino acids? triggering muscle protein synthesis.
Yeah. So what was left unsaid with this is most of our protein should come from high quality sources, which would be animal sources. Now, if somebody says, well, I don't want to eat animal sources, great. Plant sources of protein can be just as effective. We just typically need more of them to match the quality of an animal source protein.
And whenever we're saying quality. What we really mean or what we're saying is the essential amino acid content. But what we really mean is the leucine.
So leucine is one of the essential amino acids. It's a branch chain amino acid. And that one amino acid is very unique such that none of the other 20 amino acids have the special feature that leucine does, which is leucine kind of acts as a switch.
So I... think of turning on the light switch in your room, to turning on muscle protein synthesis. So if you were to eat all the ideal amount of protein, but you took all the leucine out of it, your body's ability to adapt to your training would be effectively muted or severely limited. So leucine is very important in terms of allowing your muscle cells to respond respond to the resistance training or any exercise stimulus that you're doing? Anecdotally, I'll share this one and I'm embarrassed to say it, but for years I was taking plant protein powder that did not share their amino acid profile on the back of the bag and I was gaining no lean muscle.
And I switched away and I worked out really hard. And this is still in my forties and I layered on creatine because I will cycle to creatine. Five pounds of lean muscle mass in one month. Wow. In your 40s?
Late 40s. But it was hard. It was difficult. And I was very conscious around protein, but it was almost a switch in my body. I was depriving.
I was consuming a lot of plant protein, but I wasn't triggering MPS because there was no leucine to be like the amount you can get there with plant protein. But it's just you have to consume so much to get there. And I just I wasn't getting there. Probably a reason why that brand didn't disclose. It was probably very low quality.
100%, I think that's a big watch out, whether people buy our grass-fed whey or another whey product, I think. If you're buying a protein powder and they're not sharing their amino acid profile, specifically leucine, there's a reason. So creatine.
Creatine's another one that's been game-changing for me. Let's talk about creatine and how you view creatine post-workout. So let's start with the PSA. Just take...
Five grams per day for the rest of your life, a teaspoon a day. Doesn't matter. Put it in your milk, put it in your coffee, put it in your water, protein shake.
Five grams per day will assuredly increase or saturate your muscle cells because that's what we want to do with creatine. By the way, our bodies make creatine, but we don't make enough. to saturate our muscle cells. And the goal is to saturate our muscle cells because that allows us to lift with more intensity. I don't know how much you're aware of the creatine research.
It is no longer a sports supplement. The amount of research on cancer prevention, stroke recovery, brain health, what else? Autism.
It's incredible. Now, again, that's not the areas that I research, but I'm aware it is so far beyond making you run faster and lift heavier. I give it to my children. And it's cheap. Creatine is not an expensive dietary supplement.
And I remember decades ago, it is just so widely studied. And I think what's exciting to me and I think our audience is it's crossed over to women. So let's spend a moment there. Because I think before there used to be this preconceived notion. women would hear creatine, they go bulky bodybuild.
I don't want to be bulky. I'm going to become a bodybuilder. And it's like, no, like, no, this isn't just for men, men in the gym. So how about, let's talk about creatine for women.
Yeah. So we, we want, and first of all, let's, let's just pretend in this fantasy land that creatine did make you bulky. Let's just pretend from them. Stop taking it.
It's not, you won't maintain that muscle for life. And the reality is my wife always just rolls her eyes at the people who say, yes, if only it were that easy. To build muscle. Because my wife kind of devotes her life to building muscle. She doesn't build a lot of muscle.
But yeah, whether it's for males or females, we have this brain health. And even for athletes, there is, now these are correlation studies. So I don't like relying on correlation studies, but it's all we have. But if you have creatine in your systems, you've been supplementing with creatine. and you've had a concussive event, so you've experienced a concussion, not only is the damage appear to be much less, but your recovery from a concussion is significantly accelerated.
So again, I'll just make a global statement. It seems to be a brain health supplement as much as it is a muscle supplement. Muscle brain connection. So cardio, how does it fit or not fit in? How should we be thinking if...
If... I like cardio. I'll start there because not everyone likes cardio.
I don't really love cardio. I just try to move a lot and go quick and I kind of raise the heart rate in a variety of ways. But if I do like cardio, how should one think about incorporating that into their routine, assuming they have some time, anywhere from 10 minutes to a half hour?
And how does it fit in in a weekly routine where I'm doing resistance training? Do I need to... Can I do both in the same day?
If I do, should I do it after or before training? Or should I alternate? How does it fit or not fit? And just so I'm clear, are we saying it's part of a fat loss goal? I think so.
I think most people, and I also want to say a body recomp slash fat loss. I think if I were to generalize, most people want to maintain or build lean muscle while losing fat. In my view, I think the weight loss conversation, I'll take, we're not going to get into Ozepic and GLP. There's a whole nother segment who need to lose weight, but primarily lose fat.
I think that conversations change in a good way. And it's, it's, it's fat. I think most people, it's not what you weigh on the scale. It's not about the scale.
It's, it's about the body. and recombing the body. So I'll generalize again for everyone listening.
We're assuming that we want to maintain or build lean muscle mass while at the same time, you know, trimming some fat. So I think the role of cardio when trying to lose body fat, again, it's a great complement to a caloric deficit. Now, one thing that I like to advocate for, it's called a sequential fat loss strategy. And that is where we don't, again, earlier, you're always resistance training.
You've, you hopefully you've been resistance training 10 years ago, you're resistance training. Now you'll be resistance training in 30 years. But cardio, other than a base level, because I want people to have cardio metabolic health.
So everybody should have some type of base cardio, whether that's steps per day or some type of cardiovascular activity. So I want to cover that base. But in terms of its role in a fat loss phase, I love bringing it in after a period of time of a caloric deficit, because now what we're experiencing is a new fat loss stimulus that the body has not yet adapted to.
So our bodies will adapt to everything that we do. There's a scientific model called the energy compensation model, which basically says Um, after you diet for several months, your body becomes less responsive. If you use cardio only for fat loss, your body becomes less responsive. So if we can do introduce one stimulus, let it run its course.
And then as the body starts to adapt to that one, now let's bring in a new stimulus. And I really like that strategy for cardio start with just reducing calories. And then we bring in added cardio.
as a new fat loss stimulus, which now our body has to respond to this. And that keeps our fat loss progress going. And then if you look even further into the future, maybe now we bring in some type of dietary supplement that may cause fat loss as well. So you're constantly giving the body something new to adjust to, or even manipulating macronutrients would be another option there.
So cardio is a very effective additive. to a caloric deficit for fat loss. In terms of where does it fit into our routine?
It doesn't matter. So for many years, a lot of people would say you cannot do cardio and resistance training at the same time because it will offset what you're trying to do in the weight room. And the research does not support that. So now if you're running marathons. or your volume gets to be very high, you're doing cardio every day for hours, yes, that will, because that is now tapping into your body's overall recovery ability.
But doing cardio for 10, 20, 30, maybe even up to an hour per day, you don't have to worry about that limiting your body's ability to build muscle. The other thing is high intensity, low intensity. I'm going to start with, if your goal is to lose body fat.
Do the type of cardio that you enjoy. Now, if you say, well, I will enjoy what's best, then I'm actively trying to learn about this now. So I'm just going to say, I'm thinking out loud for females in particular who are in midlife, it looks like I'm seeing more positives to doing higher intensity cardio, some higher intensity interval training. But I also have to appreciate sometimes energy levels are very suppressed for some in this population.
And that might not be the best type of cardio, even if it's the best on paper. They're not going to adhere to that. So I'm actively working on a mind where I can confidently say this is what we should do.
But right now, I'm seeing a little bit more research that I've been reading. Higher intensity may be the older we get in females. And again, for anybody else, do what you want. At the end of the day, it's all going to be a stimulus for fat loss. And how do you define high intensity for those who have a wearable?
Is it zone two, zone three, zone four? Yeah, so zone two. So not that one. So it would be more going very hard for about 30 seconds. And then you're recovering for.
a couple minutes before you do another bout this is where the the research is a little bit frustrating because there's no common definition it's all over the place when you when when researchers investigate this tell me when you say zone four what does that mean like 80 to 80 to 90 max heart rate yeah so That would be great. And this could even be sprint intervals where you're going, you know, whatever zone that would be past that, where you can't possibly keep up that intensity for more than 20 seconds, 30 seconds. But it sounds like there's no hard and fast rule here.
It's find what you enjoy and do it for as long as you enjoy during the week. That is my opinion, because I know that the number one barrier to fat loss. success is lack of adherence. So there's no sense in me. And again, I'm, I'm a researcher.
I'm telling, I'm telling all the subjects, this is the study design. This is what you will do. But in the real world, we, we have to find things that we will actually do.
And what we will actually do is the best prescription. So I love that perspective. You know, I, I find myself saying a lot, it's got to bring you joy. If it doesn't bring you joy when push comes to shove, you're going to shove it aside. It's not going to stick.
And so I don't like running. I'm not going to do it. I've joked on the show, if you find me running, call the police. I'm in trouble.
But I actually enjoy going to the gym. Great gym here in Miami. I go to, it's called Anatomy.
I love it. So I always find time. Even if it's 10 minutes, I get in there.
It's easy. So going back to adherence though, if that's the number one pitfall, what are some of the other pitfalls you see? Because quite clearly, we're not doing so good in terms of metabolic health.
I think it's 92% of us are metabolically unhealthy, and obesity is a big driver. So where else are we failing here beyond adherence? The number one thing, again, just my opinion, is a lack of patience in the weight loss, fat loss process, which causes people to switch from thing to thing to thing. And thinking that nothing's working. And the reality is the most boring, the most mundane thing works the best.
And that is just stay in a caloric deficit. Unless you have a metabolic disease, you will lose body fat. And something that I'm really advocating for is try to monitor your progress in a weigh-in each day and compare what you weighed for a four-month average. one month ago compared to what you weigh now.
So that's, you're basically monitoring your progress in four month blocks. If everybody did that, everybody would realize quickly it's working. But so many people, and I'm susceptible to this, you weigh in every day and you think this isn't working because yesterday I weighed this or last week I weighed this. That is a recipe for having, for letting your mind and emotions get in the way.
Everybody took a four week average of their body weight while they're still following the diet, following their plan. Without fail, you see progress and then your whole perspective changes. Now, it may not be as fast as what you want, but it will quickly eliminate any thought of this isn't working.
It always works. And it's amazing. And again, I tell people, there's not many people on the planet who know as much about fat losses. I do because it's what I do every day. I love it.
I live it. And when I go on diets, I have the thoughts, man, something's not right in my body. This isn't working.
I'm a fraud. I've been telling people. And then I look at the data and it always works. And you look at any published study, ever published, tens of thousands of studies, you'll never find one where people who were assigned a caloric deficit did not lose weight. It doesn't.
exist. Now, I also want to say there are people that have, there are outliers and research reports averages. That doesn't mean that some people individually don't struggle and that really are trying and they do struggle with fat loss.
And in particular, that is a perimenopausal woman. Some of them, a small percentage of them. Others have no problem. So I do want to at least acknowledge that because that's an important distinction. But I want to double click on this because I think it's an important point.
So if we're reducing calories, I think it was by 30%, you said? I think a sweet spot is 25%. So that's actually very manageable.
I'm reducing calories by 25%. I'm prioritizing protein, we'll say 0.75 to one gram per pound of body weight. I think that's really empowering because it gives you a lot of wiggle room. I didn't hear you can't have dessert in there if it fits within those guidelines.
I didn't hear you can't have... you know great a great croissant a great piece of sourdough bread i didn't hear you can't have pasta i didn't hear anything about carbs or sugar i just heard 25 reduction in calories is a sweet spot and prioritizing protein. There's a lot of wiggle room for a lot of fun in that diet. There's, there's nothing you cannot eat. As long as you stick within that caloric threshold, calorie threshold, you can eat any now, should you eat anything you want, but you can now the harm is let's just say, Hey, I'm not, I want to eat a lot of donuts and, um, and potato chips.
Well, you will lose weight, but Highly processed foods are not satiating. So you are making this fat loss process as hard as it can possibly be. And it's just not ideal.
I'll say this. I was particularly troubled about two years ago. I get a lot of questions and a lot of people were just so confused about carbs and dieting.
I have this. mindset of I'm going on a diet. I have to eliminate carbs or you can't even lose weight if you're going to eat carbs.
So I essentially blocked off what turned out to be almost a little over a year of my life. And I did a personal case study on myself where we are now done analyzing this. We're going to hopefully publish this soon, but I ate the type of diet under scientific controls. that I would never recommend.
I ate a really high glycemic load diet. So the most processed carbs you can get, low protein. Again, I violated my own principle, but I made an important point that once this is published as a case study, and I did blood work, we did lab research-based body composition assessments, water metabolism. So this has been done for media purposes in the past, but never has this been done under research controls.
But effectively, my case study shows it does not matter what you eat. You can lose weight. It's the calories.
So don't get hung up on carbs and fats and what my insulin is doing. It doesn't matter. And now, I don't want people to eat a lot of processed foods. I don't think that is a good long-term health strategy. But the messaging that is commonly put out there is not helping.
And I always challenge people, people that are demonizing one thing. There's always a profit motive behind that. What are they selling?
Just always ask that question. What are they selling? There's something behind that. The demonization of carbs.
And again, the funny, there's nobody making money off of low calorie diets. There's no product there. There's no education.
It's so not sexy that nobody can profit. So of course, that's why people are thinking, well, that doesn't work. It does.
We covered a lot of ground, Bill. In closing, where can people find you online? I have a website. It's BillCampbellPhD.com. And if anybody's interested in learning about that, they want to be up to date on the science of fat loss and building muscle.
I have a research review that you'll see on my website. I have a free issue you can go to to look into that. So basically, I just summarize the research every month. on how to lose fat and how to build muscle and on social media bill campbell phd is my instagram handle amazing thank you so much bill yeah thank you for having me on