Do You Need a Calorie Surplus to Build Muscle? | Dr. Eric Helms

0:01 [UNKNOWN]: you have to be in a calorie surplus to build muscle. [UNKNOWN]: That's the rule, well, at least it's been the rule for as long as I've been lifting. [UNKNOWN]: Except if you're new to training, then you can build muscle in a deficit. [UNKNOWN]: And except if you're carrying extra body fat, then you can maximize building muscle in a deficit too.

0:18 [UNKNOWN]: And except if you're coming back off a layoff or if you pick the right parents or the study just measured muscle gain badly. [UNKNOWN]: We've been hearing that rule and its exceptions for decades, and the exceptions are where all of the interesting stuff is. [UNKNOWN]: So today, can you build muscle out of your own body fat?

0:36 [UNKNOWN]: Not transform fat into muscle or muscle into fat, but can you use the energy stored in your own body to pay for the protein going into your quads? [UNKNOWN]: I'm Dr. Jordan Vigin-Mom, and this is the barbell medicine podcast. [UNKNOWN]: Today, we have Dr. Eric Helm's back for his third appearance on the podcast.

1:05 [UNKNOWN]: At this point, he's a friend of the show. [UNKNOWN]: Eric is the director of the Sports Performance Research Institute in New Zealand at Auckland University of Technology. [UNKNOWN]: He runs applied research in strength and physique sport there, and he mentors masters and PhD students. [UNKNOWN]: His doctorate is in strength conditioning on auto regulating powerlifting training.

1:22 [UNKNOWN]: He also has two master's degrees, and one of them was on protein intake and muscle retention and lifters who are dieting, which is going to be very important for today. [UNKNOWN]: Outside of academia, he co-founded the Mass Research Review, he's the Chief Science Officer and a coach at 3D Muscle Journey.

1:38 [UNKNOWN]: He's the lead author of the Muscle and Strength Pyramid Books, and he co-host the Iron Culture podcast, all of which are linked in the show notes below. [UNKNOWN]: The question we're talking about today. [UNKNOWN]: Do you actually need to be in a calorie surplus to gain muscle? [UNKNOWN]: Dr. Homes, welcome back to the show.

1:54 [UNKNOWN]: Happy to have you. [UNKNOWN]: This is going to be fun. [UNKNOWN]: huge honor. [UNKNOWN]: No, I love listening to your guys as a podcast and you guys do a fantastic job. [UNKNOWN]: So thanks for having me back. [UNKNOWN]: I, you know, at some point, I'm going to have a more favorable response when people say, I listen to your podcast.

2:08 [UNKNOWN]: I like it, you know, but always I'm like, you sure there's it. [UNKNOWN]: Is it anything better that you want to do with your thoughts? [UNKNOWN]: No, it's always an honor when people like yourself listen to it, and then especially we get feedback, because that's where this kind of came from.

2:22 [UNKNOWN]: So this topic, energy intake, calorie intake, and muscle growth, I mean, there's a lot of folklore, a lot of broscience, but I think if I can give people a lay of the land, previously the thought has generally been [UNKNOWN]: In order to gain muscle mass, you need to be in a small surplus, or a surplus generally speaking, to maximize the rate.

2:50 [UNKNOWN]: There were various permutations of this theory that like, look, if you had no surplus, you were at maintenance, maybe you could gain a little bit of muscle mass, but not as much. [UNKNOWN]: if you were in a surplus, and if you were in a deficit, sure, maybe if you were untrained, or maybe if you had excess body fat, you could gain some muscle mass but still.

3:08 [UNKNOWN]: It wouldn't be at the maximal rate. [UNKNOWN]: Is that a fair assessment of kind of where most people were landing maybe like five years ago, that same reason we'll do? [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I think if that's a decent characterization of where, like, thinking people are at in this space for sure, I would say.

3:26 [UNKNOWN]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN]: As a, as like a several heuristics kind of like you have emerged in some of them compete. [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, well, I remember even if we go back 15 years ago and people were like, do I need to be in a surplus to gain muscle mass? [UNKNOWN]: I would say, well, if you're not gaining weight, I'm not sure that you're gaining muscle mass, unless you are an individual with excess body fat or you're new to training and those are the kind of get out of jail free cards, but I was having a difficult time with my brain and that's a whole separate podcast and we'll get a different guest to figure that out.

4:01 [UNKNOWN]: There was an essential paradigm there that made sense and conceptually applied to all potential use cases, right? [UNKNOWN]: It wasn't focused in like energy availability, wasn't focused on any sort of particular relationship. [UNKNOWN]: And so it seemed kind of like a patchwork theory, and it never really sat right to me.

4:20 [UNKNOWN]: And then I was like, well, I guess I'm just doing powerlifting now, because if I can't write my head around this, I'll just focus on getting strong. [UNKNOWN]: How recently would you say, I mean, did you use to hold that same belief system and then it's recently changed or were you, are you gonna claim?

4:36 [UNKNOWN]: I look, I was ahead of everybody a decade ago. [UNKNOWN]: I was talking about this, yeah, tell give us a timeline here. [UNKNOWN]: Well, I think for me, obviously, not obviously people may not know, but we kind of talked about my academic and entrepreneurial stuff, but at the core of everything I do, like I've been competing in bodybuilding and strength sports since 2006, and I'm still competing and bodybuilding.

5:02 [UNKNOWN]: So my curiosity and the ways that I've tried to figure this out started [UNKNOWN]: you know, had a solid grasp of even like a pistomology like how we figure stuff out. [UNKNOWN]: So I would say that early on I kind of had this view like listen if you're not gaining weight then you're not making progress and if you can't see visible scale weight change then you're spinning your wheels.

5:29 [UNKNOWN]: But then I became a personal trainer, you know, and then I would regularly see things that didn't fit with that. [UNKNOWN]: And then I started digging into the research, and I would see, I think, incidences of body recomposition all the time, any time you take, not even necessarily, you know, untrained populations, granted trained in a literature most of the time is not super well trained.

5:56 [UNKNOWN]: where you would just see if they don't manipulate nutrition and people are doing a reasonably robust resistance training protocol. [UNKNOWN]: You typically see, you know, a loss of body fat at the same time as again in muscle mass and it didn't necessarily result in scale weight change and there wasn't at least an intentional surplus in many cases.

6:18 [UNKNOWN]: So that was kind of the beginnings of my [UNKNOWN]: And then I started to try to provide advice and academic, you know, informed practice and help people understand things and the equivalent to the 3500 cake out quote unquote rule for, you know, [UNKNOWN]: applied prescriptive fat loss targets when you're tracking calories didn't exist for the surplus on the muscle side of it.

6:47 [UNKNOWN]: And there have been many attempts to try to figure that out, but then as I thought about it more and more and more, the complexity was, [UNKNOWN]: unanswerable with the data we had at the time, and the people's conceptualizations of it were incomplete. [UNKNOWN]: So I think the issue and actually I really like the way you said, you know, my brain and the way you need to think of it, because when my, by my brain, I mean your brain.

7:15 [UNKNOWN]: because I think a lot of people, they look at the space and use the word theory. [UNKNOWN]: And I wish it was a theory, because then it would be far more robust if we're talking with scientific terminology, but most people are operating in heristics, right? [UNKNOWN]: I think they speak with confidence because it works sufficiently well in practice that it becomes something closer to maybe a theory that people think is solid and then people with more literal brains or their clients or people who are being educated by saying influencer.

7:54 [UNKNOWN]: when they put that down that heuristic in their mind becomes a rule and then, you know, researchers and most of us are, you know, maybe a little, a little nerve-divergent. [UNKNOWN]: We, we are literal thinkers. [UNKNOWN]: We look at that and we go, hey, this is what people say and it has been repeated in the literature, but that's not what we observe and we need to talk about that.

8:15 [UNKNOWN]: So I think over the last decade, [UNKNOWN]: I have been trying to come up with kind of what you described as almost like a nice if we had like a unified theory of how does the interaction between energetic status change and body composition and also change and weight. [UNKNOWN]: How do they interact and how can it make sense in all cases?

8:39 [UNKNOWN]: Because [UNKNOWN]: I think a lot of times we have a heuristic related to fat loss or heuristic related to muscle gain or a heuristic related to being a experienced or unexperienced or higher body fat or lower body fat person and some of them conflict with one another and you can see that like when someone's like, hey, [UNKNOWN]: more volume is better in a surplus to a point, diminishing returns all that good stuff.

9:04 [UNKNOWN]: But when you're in a deficit, that is not the case. [UNKNOWN]: Or they go, oh, well, no, you increase volume more to get a higher stimulus to maintain muscle in a deficit and you're like, but hold on, you have less ability to recover. [UNKNOWN]: So I think many of these heristics get us into these logical loops because we're treating a heristic as though it is a relatively finite, like, physiological phenomenon.

9:29 [UNKNOWN]: What I like to do is to help people understand what is going on under the hood. [UNKNOWN]: But for me to do that, I actually have to understand the physiology so that I can get a heuristic that I think is actually more useful than what we had. [UNKNOWN]: And that's taken the last 10 years.

9:45 [UNKNOWN]: So I think this is stuff that I've only been comfortable fully communicating because we have the underlying [UNKNOWN]: data, even if it's not like perfectly empirically validated for the exact numbers, I actually feel like I have an understanding of how this all operates now to the point where I could conceptual explain it to someone, then they can see why these quote-unquote rules that are actually just heuristics that are right, enough of the time to be helpful are actually broken a lot, and when that means for practice.

10:14 [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, no, this was, it was a very satisfying conversation that we had because, yeah, there were, there were too many patches in the, and again, we'll call it a theory it to me, it's a representation of it's like this, do them coin problem. [UNKNOWN]: where you're trying to test in this case a heuristic but we could call it a theory but that stacked on a number of other assumptions and if your theory or heuristic doesn't work right or you're finding an error there well it's one of the assumptions must must be wrong right and you've got it's a stack of assumptions and so there were too many exceptions here it's like okay well you can gain muscle mass in a deficit or maintenance at the same rate

10:59 [UNKNOWN]: or if you're new or if you're a genetic freak and you know just that handful of these things right and you're like [UNKNOWN]: It doesn't really square with any of the assumptions or any of the the heuristic and so it just it was bothersome it was bothersome and so you would either try to explain it away you could say well look the way that they measured muscle mass for example there's too much error and how they were measuring muscle mass gain and so maybe they didn't really gain a bunch of contract out to you you could try to explain away some of these kind of errors or chinks in the in the armor of the of the heuristic.

11:35 [UNKNOWN]: but it still is not satisfying. [UNKNOWN]: And so today we're going to satisfy at least at as my hope. [UNKNOWN]: All right. [UNKNOWN]: So let's define some terms here just to make sure that everybody's on the same page because these get tossed around a lot and I think being accurate and precise about what we're saying is going to be helpful.

11:53 [UNKNOWN]: So hypertrophy, you would agree is the growth of existing muscle fibers, and you can measure this in multiple different ways. [UNKNOWN]: You can use ultrasound, for example, to see thickness increases, volumetric increases. [UNKNOWN]: You can use dexa, which is an imperfect tool as a couple of email threads we've been looped into.

12:13 [UNKNOWN]: But again, it will kind of tell you if somebody is gaining lean mass and then a portion of that lean mass is likely to be contractile tissue. [UNKNOWN]: You can do a biopsy and look at actual cross-sectional area. [UNKNOWN]: All right, maintenance when people talk about being at maintenance for calorie intake, that is the intake at which body weight is stable.

12:33 [UNKNOWN]: Usually over a multi-week window because fluid status can change. [UNKNOWN]: Oh, he's pausing me already. [UNKNOWN]: We have problems in our definitions here. [UNKNOWN]: All good with the definition of hypertrophy, the definition of maintenance being the [UNKNOWN]: the intake of where body weight is stable, that's a great example of a heuristic, because heuristic based upon the limitations that we have access to, right?

12:58 [UNKNOWN]: But I think it's really important to note that if someone wants to gain a kilogram of lean mass and lose a kilogram of fat mass, they would be at neutral body weight, but they would actually have been in a deficit retrospectively. [UNKNOWN]: So, and that's because the energetic content of one is far higher than the other, but they would actually have been an deficit.

13:22 [UNKNOWN]: And the point at which they no longer could gain a kilogram of muscle over the same time frame as they're losing a kilogram of fat mass, that would become apparent on the scale, and that period doesn't last super long. [UNKNOWN]: But I think it's really important to know that that is one of the cornerstone pieces here, where it is not actually, [UNKNOWN]: the intake at which, you know, body weight is neutral.

13:46 [UNKNOWN]: Maintenance is actually the intake at which you are not relying net on body stores to meet your energy needs, right? [UNKNOWN]: Okay. [UNKNOWN]: So yeah, some more specific definitions for calorie. [UNKNOWN]: Yes. [UNKNOWN]: Some physicists or some energetic expert out there is thinking, well, the energy yield, you can you can parse this down, but yeah, I like that, I like that better.

14:10 [UNKNOWN]: So, from there, then a deficit generally speaking, you would have decreased energy intake and set the output would then be decreased on the scale, although as you mentioned, not always perhaps. [UNKNOWN]: And then an energy surplus would be at someone's eating enough calories generally speaking to gain weight, although, again, energy stored in the body can contribute in multiple different ways.

14:34 [UNKNOWN]: So it does get interesting when you try to be very precise there because people will now be, their eyes will be glazing over and they're like, I don't get a man, you're saying a deficit, I might not be losing weight, you're saying a surplus, I might not be gaining weight of maintenance, I might not be maintaining, you know, exactly what's going on?

14:49 [UNKNOWN]: It's like, well, there's some more stuff going on under the hood. [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I think just to briefly riff on that, just so people don't have their eyes glazed over. [UNKNOWN]: It is very much just you should view it as are we relying in net on endogenous sources of energy or in net are we relying on exogenous.

15:09 [UNKNOWN]: So if we are tapping into our various accounts and I think a good way to think of it as like [UNKNOWN]: your fat loss, your body fat stores or your savings account, lean mass as you're checking, you know, and we can include glycogen and they're just for fun, because it's easier in terms of the measurements we have.

15:28 [UNKNOWN]: You know, we've got deeper savings and you know, maybe we're deciding we want to tap into them when we don't have access to, you know, money coming in, and we're, you know, spending money pretty quickly out of our glycogen stores. [UNKNOWN]: It sits in our [UNKNOWN]: we can go through glycogen if with the right training protocol and, you know, a car restrict the diet in a day.

15:49 [UNKNOWN]: And it happens and it does our support, right? [UNKNOWN]: But even if you take a lean ass marathon runner, they're going to lose a lot of fat in a race, but they still could probably run a couple more, or we wouldn't be here today talking, because we wouldn't have survived to degenerate the internet, right?

16:04 [UNKNOWN]: So ultimately surplus means that [UNKNOWN]: the balance between what we're using in doginously between meals, once we're out of that post-prandial state, and what we're using from meals are exogenous and take of energy, is one where ultimately we're using more of our body energy in that. [UNKNOWN]: So that means eventually, on the scale, we will see a decrease.

16:29 [UNKNOWN]: But, if your body is for whatever reason, and there's many, prioritizing a lot of those endogenous stores, even when you're in a net deficit to build certain tissues that can increase the actual weight on the scale disproportionately. [UNKNOWN]: to the amount of energy that is coming from the endogenous stores that you're using, body thought, which are a more energy-dense tissue than you can see for a while, an increase in scale weight while you're action to deficit, right?

17:03 [UNKNOWN]: And of course, the scale is a very imprecise tool because you could also just drink a glass of water before you got on, and that's the unique kind of, you know, like change in scale weight. [UNKNOWN]: But ultimately, surplus or deficit is a statement about a period of time always because we exist in three dimensions or more of saying, hey, during this period of [UNKNOWN]: of more endogenous stores than the exogenous or a surplus was I ended up having more on board I could accumulate my savings or my checking account and yeah I had to rely on my checking when I got coffee but then I got paid today and it was a lot more than a coffee cost right and then maintenance would be when you know more you know the money coming in versus the money going out is the same.

17:55 [UNKNOWN]: and body weight mostly reflects that, but there's enough exceptions to the rule that I think people do get confused when they treat it as a rule rather than as a mostly reflective tool in certain circumstances. [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I like that. [UNKNOWN]: People, if that, if that made your head spin, we got a back button, you can just go back 15 seconds at a time, revisit it.

18:24 [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, well, well said, okay. [UNKNOWN]: So potentially, the, I don't know how large the, the body building power lifting will just say muscle interested market is, I assume it's going to be in the billions, so that billion [UNKNOWN]: how fast can a person actually build muscle mass? [UNKNOWN]: So, whether this person has been lifting for a very, very long time and is about close to probably what they can accumulate, at least with the current type of training they're doing, or they had just started lifting yesterday, and whether they picked the right parents, [UNKNOWN]: Um, and whether the lifting they're doing is effective or not and then whether or not they are in a status of like low body fat far below where their body would quote unquote prefer to hang out and then how much they're eating and then are they on anabolic drugs all they're going to plan to that but if you were to look at like the typical rate of muscle accrual in the first say,

19:34 [UNKNOWN]: eight to 12 weeks of a resistance training program in the literature. [UNKNOWN]: So now the answer is probably specific to most university-aged males over the course of a semester because that's where research is done. [UNKNOWN]: Like in 70% of cases maybe. [UNKNOWN]: We're talking about you know probably one to three kilograms of lean tissue.

19:59 [UNKNOWN]: If we're going to talk about an actual value over a two to three month period, isn't uncommon. [UNKNOWN]: And if we're talking about, hey, let's do everything right to maximize that. [UNKNOWN]: We're probably closer to three to four kilograms. [UNKNOWN]: If we're doing a pretty intensive training protocol, and then it can scale down drastically from there to where if you were to look at [UNKNOWN]: if you were to take it someone who gained three kilograms in their first eight weeks and you've used some of them like modeling data that we have and we just we're kind of just now looking at the impact of training experience and if they don't train their change their protocol at all that might go down to say half a kilogram if we were looking at reaching their 80th week from week week 72 so at same time period but now they're like one sixth of the

20:51 [UNKNOWN]: a year and a half into training. [UNKNOWN]: Of course, it doesn't always operate that and people do change their training protocols, and we see different things in observational, rather than interventional research, which I think is worth discussing. [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, you know, one of the things that I've also been wrestling with to sort of like a central organizing theory here, when it comes to gaining muscle, it never really made sense [UNKNOWN]: like slows down or becomes dysfunctional as you become more trained, I think you can say well, the response is decreased to the same previous stimulus, that makes sense, you become more trained, more well adapted, more accommodated if you're a Louis Simmons person.

21:40 [UNKNOWN]: that all makes sense to me, but the physiological sort of potential for muscle protein synthesis and reducing muscle protein breakdown probably stays in a relatively narrow range. [UNKNOWN]: What I think is happening and you may just say, look, you're an idiot, this is the dumbest thing you've ever said.

22:01 [UNKNOWN]: you have a sort of gap between where you start your untrained, like being untrained, and you start your resistance training program, and then like a ceiling. [UNKNOWN]: We don't know where the ceiling is, hard to predict, right? [UNKNOWN]: We can hem and haul about different predictors of how much muscle a person can gain.

22:14 [UNKNOWN]: But let's just say there's a gap there, right? [UNKNOWN]: My thought is that you [UNKNOWN]: can gain as a untrained person versus train, the percent, it's like a fraction of a percent, right? [UNKNOWN]: Like, it stays the same, but since you get closer to your ceiling, the absolute gain is less, but because the machinery is still generally operated at a similar rate, it's not that you're like, [UNKNOWN]: It always bothered me when people say you'd gain less.

22:41 [UNKNOWN]: I'm like, well, yeah, less and absolute terms, but it's like, what's happening underneath it, if anything is like better, you're able to potentially have less muscle protein breakdown or do more training to get a big stimulus. [UNKNOWN]: I don't know, does that make sense to you? [UNKNOWN]: You feel like I'm often left field here?

22:55 [UNKNOWN]: No, I think you're right. [UNKNOWN]: And I would say that. [UNKNOWN]: Oh, and the podcast here, thanks for listening to Barboma to some podcast talking to us next time, right? [UNKNOWN]: You took the wind, we're out, caching out, not gambling, Vegas, closed, let's go. [UNKNOWN]: I respect it.

23:10 [UNKNOWN]: I think you're right, and I think what I'm going to say is I thought very deeply about this, and I've tried to come up with observations in the real world that, like you said, if we're going to talk about unified theory of muscle gain, that comport with everything we see. [UNKNOWN]: from the propositions of muscle memory as a phenomenon to how can as someone taking exogenous drugs build more muscle past their quote unquote limit because people often especially in the natural community we just kind of treat drugs like oh magic breaks all the rules it's like no it doesn't it's just upregulating a lot of existing things so there's almost like this suppression effect [UNKNOWN]: of your anabolic potential that can be overcome, but it's not a hard physiological barrier where there's maybe this true qualitative difference at the molecular level.

24:01 [UNKNOWN]: It might occur at the next level up where now we have issues of blood flow supply, myonuclear domain control, lots of theoretical things, but I've tried to think through how could this all work and also including things like what happens when someone goes into microgravity. [UNKNOWN]: your observations of astronauts, and then also if someone is performing a relatively ineffective low-volume program, they will plateau, and that will be a ceiling for that stimulus.

24:33 [UNKNOWN]: So is there actually a fixed [UNKNOWN]: ceiling that exists in everyone that could be predicted without, you know, regardless of of what they did, or does the stimulus actually predict the ceiling? [UNKNOWN]: And I have landed more on that because that also comports with the notion that a walking program is a high-perchory program for some people.

24:56 [UNKNOWN]: that bed rest results in a decrease in muscle mass, and that if you take someone who is plateaued on a low volume program even after a year or else I'll say a low stimulus program because it's not just volume that dictates the dose that they can then reach new heights, and ultimately, [UNKNOWN]: I think the way to think of this is that the cumulative area under the curve of stimulative loading of muscle, it is what's going to dictate the rate that you can get to and then also give an every single modeling that we've done.

25:30 [UNKNOWN]: means that that rate eventually is curvilinear. [UNKNOWN]: That means that if you can get at the start of your responsiveness for your muscle being quite high, of a given stimulus, a pretty steep curve, your plateau will be higher. [UNKNOWN]: And I think that kind of unfortunately means that if [UNKNOWN]: you know, like some people have speculated like, oh, you know, if you do a low volume decent, but okay program, you'll still get to the same point.

25:56 [UNKNOWN]: It'll just take 10 years more. [UNKNOWN]: I don't actually think that's true because it doesn't comport with muscle loss and microgravity and all these other things. [UNKNOWN]: And even the observations of muscle memory, [UNKNOWN]: and how that operates have been largely done in relatively untrained individuals.

26:15 [UNKNOWN]: So the way I think it actually works is that there is a given ceiling for a given person that is related to the baseline of kind of their activities of daily living and their quote unquote genetics, but it is directly attributed as well to the stimulus and the dose they're given. [UNKNOWN]: You know, what's the inverse of being in microgravity?

26:40 [UNKNOWN]: If we think about astronauts, they go to space and even doing everything, it's best as they can. [UNKNOWN]: And this will probably get better and better, but like flywheel training, resistant bands, maybe electro magnetic training. [UNKNOWN]: And then maybe in the future, they're taking like my statin, inhibitors and things to offset it.

26:56 [UNKNOWN]: You know, right now, you still lose muscle doing all of that. [UNKNOWN]: And then you come back to Earth and you regain it. [UNKNOWN]: The opposite of that would be like a magic in Earth where we had 1.5 times gravity. [UNKNOWN]: Everybody would be bigger, more muscular, super jacked, and have more bone mineral density, right?

27:13 [UNKNOWN]: And this means that there's really no such thing as being trained or untrained. [UNKNOWN]: And the given stimulus, like we talk about hypertrophy heristics, like how close to failure need to train how much volume do you need. [UNKNOWN]: We have minimum effect that doses, right? [UNKNOWN]: Oh, on average, if you want to see measurable hypertrophy in a lab, using that ultrasound you mentioned earlier, [UNKNOWN]: over say 10 weeks, you've got to be doing at least four sets reasonably close to failure once per week per muscle group, right?

27:39 [UNKNOWN]: That's kind of based upon that's fitting data to a model to the existing data we have and the measurement error, but it's also in free-living healthy individuals who are walking, doing activities of daily living, and then put exercise on top of it. [UNKNOWN]: But if we say, hey, what's the minimum effect of dose for people who were just in microgravity coming back to earth?

28:04 [UNKNOWN]: It would be coming back to earth, then you would plateau from whatever that stimulus is. [UNKNOWN]: So, you know, we say, oh, yeah, like, three R I R, is that even doing anything? [UNKNOWN]: It's like, [UNKNOWN]: Well, relative to the potential rate of growth, you could have, maybe not, but I mean, if you think about it, the nature of kind of progressive overload, it's always bootstrapped to where you were.

28:27 [UNKNOWN]: I think about this all the time, like someone off the street who's never lifted before, but it's not out of shape, right? [UNKNOWN]: And let's say they're not a really, really heavy person. [UNKNOWN]: I care in a lot of body [UNKNOWN]: Not unhealthy, not unfit, not heavy person. [UNKNOWN]: 70 kilos, and you said, hey, how many reps with a 20 kilo bar belt, do you think they could do on a backsquad if they got top form?

28:51 [UNKNOWN]: Like, what would your, what would your guess be? [UNKNOWN]: Empty. [UNKNOWN]: I don't know, probably. [UNKNOWN]: I mean, somewhere in that, it's a lot, you know, empty boat, maybe 50, you know, who knows? [UNKNOWN]: I, I totally agree somewhere in the 20 plus rep range, but the heaviest or the hardest stuff they've probably ever done is maybe a body weight set for like two, like the wrongly toilet.

29:13 [UNKNOWN]: They got up and they dropped their phone and they squatted back down and they picked the phone and that's it So yeah, they did twice, so they're like, okay, it's a double. [UNKNOWN]: It's a cluster set. [UNKNOWN]: Right. [UNKNOWN]: So you put 20 kilos on their back. [UNKNOWN]: You could probably have them do sets of five And because five's right you and I both know that five's are the number right for strength training and let's say they do that [UNKNOWN]: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, a single set of five for 20 kilos.

29:40 [UNKNOWN]: I would bet money that you would actually see high per trophy over maybe a 12 week period that would be a little bit in the quads. [UNKNOWN]: It would be measurable, right? [UNKNOWN]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN]: But they're training it like a 30 R I R for less than the minimum effective dose of what we see in for three sets per week.

29:57 [UNKNOWN]: And you're like, how that can't be possible. [UNKNOWN]: That wouldn't produce any high per trophy. [UNKNOWN]: But we know it does walking programs do it, right? [UNKNOWN]: So I think. [UNKNOWN]: In my mind, this is a very, very long answer, but I think the unifying theory is that there needs to be some degree of stimulus relevant to where you are, and that degree of stimulus is going to have a known ceiling based upon this curl and error spot.

30:21 [UNKNOWN]: Yep, so how much time you got to get under the weights and how well are you getting under the weights? [UNKNOWN]: That's, that's what I tell people is like, generally speaking, more training load will drive more adaptation, where you're depending on what you're looking and the two biggest constraints.

30:35 [UNKNOWN]: One is time, right logistics, and the other one is what can you actually recover from, which is generally kind of, where does your fitness, training tolerance, work capacity, where does all that all kind of come to a head? [UNKNOWN]: And if you took that, somebody's genetics, right, and assuming they're work ethic was insane, you know, there's some upper limit.

30:54 [UNKNOWN]: there's some upper limit and then you know but the heuristic that people will will distill this down to is like look yeah when you're on train on train or new just new you're going to get more muscle mass generally speaking faster um then as you become more and more trained it's like okay I'm with you on that but what I don't want people to take away from is that what's happening underneath right the muscle protein synthesis the muscle protein breakdown the accretion of protein there you [UNKNOWN]: It's not really the rate isn't slowing down.

31:24 [UNKNOWN]: You just can't do as much in a given time because you're getting closer to that cap. [UNKNOWN]: And if that cap is based on your training load, OK, if the cap is based on your training load and your genetics, whatever. [UNKNOWN]: There's just multiple sort of factors that kind of establish that cap.

31:39 [UNKNOWN]: Does that seem like a reasonable harmonization of everything together? [UNKNOWN]: Absolutely, and I think we're getting pretty close to understanding what stimulates growth, but we are still trying to determine what constraints it, you know? [UNKNOWN]: Like, why can't Annabock steroids, you know, like totally circumvent that, and what does that mean?

32:03 [UNKNOWN]: So, yeah, there's still much more to be learned. [UNKNOWN]: I thought that was going to be the most fun portion of the book, the signal book to write, you know, how to superficially logical, uh, a superficial logical dose of testosterone effect training, adaptations, and to some extent it was like, because you're, you're seeing all of these sort of quote, breaks in heuristics, you know, like, oh, that's super interesting, but you're like, well, how though, [UNKNOWN]: is this mostly like a satellite cell, myonuclear accretion thing, do the myonuclear domains, grow disproportionately in response to this high dose of testosterone, what is this an energy thing because glycogen stores go up.

32:43 [UNKNOWN]: There's all sorts of theories and then when you look for like the outcome or the study that would settle the score, you know, that actually doesn't exist yet. [UNKNOWN]: Okay, cool. [UNKNOWN]: Well, so just [UNKNOWN]: Well, just guess. [UNKNOWN]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN]: You know, my working theory there because there are some things where if you compare like this very minimal differences between men and women as far as the relative proportion of muscle mass they gain.

33:07 [UNKNOWN]: So once you're passed, you know, despite the fact that there's massive [UNKNOWN]: So once you're past maturation, it's not a major player, sex hormones, right? [UNKNOWN]: And if you look at hypogonatal men and you probably know this better than I do with signal, versus men at the high normal, you don't typically see a different response to resistance training.

33:35 [UNKNOWN]: You see different baselines. [UNKNOWN]: So, and that's kind of what we see between men and women, right? [UNKNOWN]: After maturation is a different baseline. [UNKNOWN]: I think a lot of what we see as the quote unquote synergistic benefit of going on andabolic steroids with resistance training is actually seeing people gaining muscle from a resistance training, while essentially inducing a second puberty of whatever degree of the endogenous you're taking.

34:03 [UNKNOWN]: And then as you're rapidly gaining muscle mass, you can make the training even more effective. [UNKNOWN]: So they're overlaying on top of each other, but I don't actually think that the anabolic steroids are directly increasing the stimulus you get from resistance training. [UNKNOWN]: Because we also have the base and bass, and I'm not sure if we can have some last names, studies of lean body mass jumping up without training.

34:24 [UNKNOWN]: which again, kind of like a second puberty. [UNKNOWN]: And I think people will get it twisted. [UNKNOWN]: They're like, man, that's, that's so depressing that, you know, they gain just as much if not more in the, in the, in the natural group lifting, you know, lifting weights as the group not lifting weights on antibiotics.

34:41 [UNKNOWN]: And it's like it's a little different. [UNKNOWN]: You know, they're going to reach a new baseline and then plateau. [UNKNOWN]: And that I think is what we're seeing in a lot of these cases. [UNKNOWN]: And I do think there's a distinction between mechanical loading and do-sthypertrophy or detraining induced atrophy, and potentially hormonally induced changes in lean body mass or even energetically induced losses of muscle mass.

35:09 [UNKNOWN]: So more than cover there, but I would not be surprised if a muscle memory exists if you lose muscle because you don't consume enough calories or protein, but maybe it is not really a thing from purely changes in mechanical loading and we just kind of fluctuate from there. [UNKNOWN]: Muscle memory.

35:29 [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, it's another super interesting avenue because you see a differential sort of relationship if it's like a in like spinal cord injury patients for example now their muscle memory and detraining that sort of works versus people who've like I just stopped working out for a long period of time versus other people there's some sort of chemical you know this get a hormone mediated detraining it's even one of the scenes studies he they chemically castrated men [UNKNOWN]: before giving them various doses of exogenous testosterone and there was this robust response even in what would be considered like low normal testosterone levels and there's people like C. C. Look, you just a little exogenous testosterone goes a long way and you know, these people went off to the races and it's like what they came from hypogonatal.

36:19 [UNKNOWN]: So there's some sort of resetting of things that happen there and it's super physiological doses. [UNKNOWN]: I'm inclined to agree with you that there's another reset. [UNKNOWN]: But yeah, men and women usually exit puberty with different amounts of muscle mass. [UNKNOWN]: And because men typically have more muscle mass, they end up gaining more in absolute sense.

36:38 [UNKNOWN]: But the relative improvement between men and women, despite large differences in testosterone, is effectively the same. [UNKNOWN]: So that's the stimulus side. [UNKNOWN]: The ceiling moves with the training. [UNKNOWN]: If you train more, the ceiling will go up. [UNKNOWN]: If you stop training, the ceiling will come down.

36:53 [UNKNOWN]: That holds for the astronaut coming back from six months in orbit, and it holds for the guy doing one set of five on a Monday. [UNKNOWN]: Which sets up what we actually came here to discuss. [UNKNOWN]: If training sets the ceiling, what does energy do? [UNKNOWN]: The standard advice says, you can't get near that ceiling of growth without eating in a calorie surplus.

37:12 [UNKNOWN]: I don't think that's quite right, and I want to talk about why. [UNKNOWN]: If you had to give people like a, how much muscle mass can I gain in a day? [UNKNOWN]: How much contractile tissue could I gain in a day? [UNKNOWN]: Somebody who's new to lifting weights and somebody who's more experienced, where would you kind of put that ballpark?

37:30 [UNKNOWN]: in a day. [UNKNOWN]: Well, we could work back from let's just say, you know, four pounds and two months, you know, something like that. [UNKNOWN]: So it's half a pound a week and that's a wet muscle tissue too. [UNKNOWN]: So let's put a number on that. [UNKNOWN]: Half a pound a week is about 227 grams.

37:47 [UNKNOWN]: So spread across seven days, you're looking at roughly 32 grams of wet muscle tissue a day. [UNKNOWN]: Let's call it 30. [UNKNOWN]: And wet is an important word here because muscle is about three [UNKNOWN]: The actual dry protein you're laying down is closer to 8 grams a day, give or take.

38:03 [UNKNOWN]: The whole point is, what is the cost of building that? [UNKNOWN]: Right, calorie-wise. [UNKNOWN]: And before we start recording, there are a few preprints out, calculating, okay, just the cost of building the tissue, right, the tissue itself. [UNKNOWN]: There's another preprint about, okay, we'll what about the tissue plus the exercise required, plus the changes and other aspects of metabolism.

38:28 [UNKNOWN]: When you think about the energy costs, [UNKNOWN]: of building muscle tissue though. [UNKNOWN]: Is there a series of numbers in your mind as far as like how what this actually costs? [UNKNOWN]: I think there there are from a mechanistic perspective and that pre-print is awesome. [UNKNOWN]: Big shout out to Nikolai and colleagues.

38:48 [UNKNOWN]: This just came out last month. [UNKNOWN]: where they've done a pretty damn good job of building a model, I think, of all the things that would contribute to it, and then to the best of their ability, they've done a, hey, if this was true, what would we see? [UNKNOWN]: And I think that's a really good way of thinking through conceptual, but still evidence-based concepts as a general epistemic recommendation is all right.

39:15 [UNKNOWN]: If this is true, what would we see in the world? [UNKNOWN]: And what things would prove that wrong? [UNKNOWN]: And that gives you hints at where the hypothesis is at least limited, right? [UNKNOWN]: So they come up with a number that includes like five different additive components. [UNKNOWN]: So the stored tissue energy.

39:34 [UNKNOWN]: Which that is kind of what I was talking about earlier like if I want to about calculate if I've got you in Look at the dexious scanner. [UNKNOWN]: I know my reliability and I can say oh, you know or at least the group level Maybe I can say was this a group and a net surplus or deficit [UNKNOWN]: I can know literally nothing about their activity, their exercise, anything about them.

39:55 [UNKNOWN]: I can just look at the change in fat mass and lean mass, and knowing the energetic stored tissue energy of lean mass and fat mass in the way that Dexa calculates it. [UNKNOWN]: I can back calculate whether they were in a net deficit that group over X amount of time. [UNKNOWN]: Right. [UNKNOWN]: So the values that you would use there, that's the stored tissue energy.

40:18 [UNKNOWN]: But there's a lot more to this the stored tissue energy. [UNKNOWN]: Fat mass is a little more simple because adipose tissue is not fat mass. [UNKNOWN]: Fat mass is literally just the fat, which is 100% fat. [UNKNOWN]: Right. [UNKNOWN]: Adipose tissue is 85-90% fat. [UNKNOWN]: And the process of storage is very energy efficient.

40:40 [UNKNOWN]: Right. [UNKNOWN]: So the difference between the store tissue energy and the cost of building at a post tissue, and especially the cost of liberating it, is they're much more close together. [UNKNOWN]: But the store tissue energy of lean mass, or especially muscle mass, [UNKNOWN]: is actually quite different than everything else.

41:02 [UNKNOWN]: So after that first additive component, then there's the biochemical synthesis cost. [UNKNOWN]: It's actually generating all the components that go into what scale of a muscle, right? [UNKNOWN]: then there's the physiological deposition cost and that is the process of actually taking what you built and making it into muscle which is separate in the way it was concept conceptualized here and then there's the kind of what you were maybe didn't realize it but you were alluding to is [UNKNOWN]: You know, we're gaining less proportionate muscle over time as we continue to lift, but as soon as you reduce your training dose significantly, you're going to regress, right?

41:39 [UNKNOWN]: You're going to lose. [UNKNOWN]: That's going to be a detraining effect. [UNKNOWN]: Your minimum effect of dose to be a top-level bodybuilder is higher than it is to not be, you know, measured as technically having sarcopenia, right? [UNKNOWN]: Right. [UNKNOWN]: So we see the same thing in every adaptation.

41:56 [UNKNOWN]: Like if you look at the minimum effect of dose to take an untrained elderly person and increase their VO2 max at the fastest race that's been observed, that dose is less than what it takes for a elite cyclist approaching a 70 VO2 max to maintain their VO2, right? [UNKNOWN]: And there are several case studies of weight lifters at the national level or power lifters at case series where they go through a traditional puredization protocol and they go through a taper and they see their volume kind of decreases intensity goes up and there's measurable losses and lean mass while doing what would be a robust strength training program and of course there are strength still peaks because there's a lot of things that go into what are I'm strength and not all of this just muscle size.

42:41 [UNKNOWN]: We can see that the floor lifts as you approach your ceiling, and so there's the physiological deposition costs and there's the resting maintenance during a creation. [UNKNOWN]: I have to maintain what I've got while I'm building and that should be counted because it's still going on on the same muscle like you said you're expanding an individual fiber, right?

43:02 [UNKNOWN]: So that fiber still got to be there, you know, and then finally there is the [UNKNOWN]: You know, the chemical energy from food and then translated into changes structurally in the body there's a cost of that and we've known that for a long time and we kind of go ahead 10% of whatever you're consuming.

43:22 [UNKNOWN]: And that overall number is about 3,500, but not for pound per kilogram per kilo. [UNKNOWN]: So yeah, now that is really cool. [UNKNOWN]: And then they compare that against animal models. [UNKNOWN]: They looked at drug models, they looked at, even lab grown meat and studies in that world. [UNKNOWN]: Like people who are trying to make it so that you don't have to get a beyond burger, you can actually just grow beef and then like are you a vegan?

43:47 [UNKNOWN]: I don't know, that's an ethical question. [UNKNOWN]: and comparing it to multiple things, you know, animal studies, feed lots, chemical studies, industrial types of studies in that regard. [UNKNOWN]: And going, okay, these don't get it every single one of these components, but when we look at them all together, they seem to comport with this number, and they even provided variant on it, which I loved.

44:08 [UNKNOWN]: You know, it's roughly 32 to 3700 calories per kilogram to build that tissue. [UNKNOWN]: But, [UNKNOWN]: The reason why I think it's only a theoretically useful number, because who says you can build a killer in a month, right? [UNKNOWN]: You don't actually know where you're at on that curvilinear process.

44:26 [UNKNOWN]: You also don't know how effectively you can like stimulate muscle growth, so that's [UNKNOWN]: you're matching that out and then if you're in a surplus, how much of your body is going to, how is your body going to decide to use all of that surplus to build muscle or is there in a ballicatory increase in fat mass?

44:49 [UNKNOWN]: And as that seems to be impacted by energy availability. [UNKNOWN]: So, potentially, like, are you in a state of approaching reds or are you super fine, or are you well above your personal fat threshold, or are you well below it? [UNKNOWN]: Are you in what we would describe as the, quote unquote, non-regulated, you know, point between your two intervention points of the dual intervention model, and all of that interacts together to dictate what is the rate of muscle growth you could have.

45:21 [UNKNOWN]: Just to make sure everyone's on the same page with these two terms, the first one being reds, which stands for relative energy deficiency in sport. [UNKNOWN]: That's what happens when an athlete's intake doesn't cover their training plus their basic physiological needs, and it persists long enough to cause problems.

45:36 [UNKNOWN]: So hormones get disrupted, bone density suffers, recovery gets worse, and yes, you tend to lose muscle. [UNKNOWN]: So when we say reds from here on out, we're talking about relative energy deficiency in sport. [UNKNOWN]: The second is the dual intervention model concept. [UNKNOWN]: So this is Dr. Speakman's idea that there are two body fat levels that your physiology actively defends against going past.

45:59 [UNKNOWN]: There's an upper limit, which pushes back on carrying any more body fat, and there's a lower limit where it pushes back on carrying any less. [UNKNOWN]: And in between, there's a range that it doesn't seem to care about which lets you drift the sort of unprotected zone. [UNKNOWN]: So this middle range is where most people actually live, energy only becomes the constraint on building muscle once you drop below the bottom limit.

46:23 [UNKNOWN]: Now, I should say that this is admittedly speculative that this sort of body fat or bottom constraint set point is the same for overall body fat as it is for muscle hypertrophy. [UNKNOWN]: It could be that these two are different, but conceptually this is where I think we both land here. [UNKNOWN]: So you could have the same person, look at that study, and in two different parallel worlds, one of them is going to train three times per week with a decent protocol, so that they're able to gain, let's say, a kilogram of every three months, but the other person reads that paper, and they're like, sick, I train six days a week for two hours.

47:03 [UNKNOWN]: and I am trying to win the Olympia right, and they might be able to gain, you know, sometime in 10 years maybe, and they might be able to gain at that early point in their career four times that rate of muscle for those two months. [UNKNOWN]: So one could overshoot it and gain fat, one could undershoot it and experience body decomposition, because they created a stimulus for the muscle to grow, constrained it a little bit, and their body went, well damn it, well okay, I got to tap into my savings.

47:27 [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, and we see that in the literature when you have instances or or I should say a study design where someone has the capacity to grow very quickly, but then constrains the amount of growth that they can achieve by not providing sufficient energy. [UNKNOWN]: And then one group might experience pure muscle growth.

47:47 [UNKNOWN]: And the other group might experience a mix of fat loss and some muscle growth. [UNKNOWN]: And I think the greatest example of this is some of the early, early, bulkings studies from the mid 2000s. [UNKNOWN]: They did this with university trained males. [UNKNOWN]: They've had three groups. [UNKNOWN]: And one of them was just told the main team their habitual tie.

48:06 [UNKNOWN]: At the other two were given a 2000 calorie shake on top of their habitual diet. [UNKNOWN]: That was either pure multi-dexterant or a mixture of multi-dexterant and protein. [UNKNOWN]: And they brought them in and they trained them hard four days per week on a high-purchary program with why I would describe as moderately high volume, pretty close to failure.

48:23 [UNKNOWN]: And the two groups that got that 2000 calorie, you know, weight gainer, [UNKNOWN]: They gained three kilograms ish on average over eight weeks on this group level stuff with no change in fat mass. [UNKNOWN]: So pure three kilogram gain of that and that means their body fat percentage went down.

48:43 [UNKNOWN]: However, when you look at the non-significant quote unquote changes in the control group, same training protocol, didn't feed enough for it. [UNKNOWN]: They lost. [UNKNOWN]: Like, almost a kilogram of fat mass, and I think getting the kilogram and a half of lean mass, so like barely saw scale weight change, about a pound.

49:02 [UNKNOWN]: But they were actually in a slight deficit, and their growth rate was constrained to about 50% of what it hypothetically could have been as non-trained with drawn that protocol, because they had to go through the inefficient process of tapping into their fat stores to kind of offset that energy cost.

49:20 [UNKNOWN]: And that constrained their growth, even though it was the same protocol. [UNKNOWN]: So that's where that example of, if those guys had all been given that paper by Nikolai this all the way back in 2002, if I recall correctly, Rosnick and colleagues, by the way, for anyone who's interested, it wouldn't have helped them, you know, necessarily, because you don't know how fast they can grow.

49:40 [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I think that's an important point. [UNKNOWN]: It's like you're trying to if the goal is to maximize hypertrophy, right? [UNKNOWN]: You can almost can't know [UNKNOWN]: Did I max this out unless it's post hoc and you have like some compare that it's somehow similar to you It's a twins training study for example, and it's like, well, we actually gave this other person more more more mass and so perhaps that is maybe one of the origins of the heuristics here right if if we're we're circling this idea where your energy availability sort of that is one constraint [UNKNOWN]: for muscle growth.

50:15 [UNKNOWN]: There's a stimulus constraint, right? [UNKNOWN]: How much training you're doing? [UNKNOWN]: And then now there's an energy constraint. [UNKNOWN]: There's going to be genetic constraint. [UNKNOWN]: So some constraints here, right? [UNKNOWN]: But the energy constraint is about how many how much how many calories basically do you have available to you.

50:29 [UNKNOWN]: you can predict based on some other characteristics we're going to come to here in a few minute, but you couldn't know unless your evil twin was in the other study arm and they got a different amount of energy. [UNKNOWN]: More or less, or whatever, and one of you would figure out, like, oh shoot, I actually had more potential here.

50:45 [UNKNOWN]: So I think maybe that is like the origin story of this curious figure where it's like, look, you want to gain muscle mass? [UNKNOWN]: is being a surplus. [UNKNOWN]: Just stop worrying about it, you know, and it's like, look, now recovering, it's almost insurance at that level. [UNKNOWN]: That's reasonable.

50:58 [UNKNOWN]: You can remove 100% you can remove that constraint. [UNKNOWN]: And I think the issue is is that if you remove that constraint and you're training a shitty, then you will just gain body fat, right? [UNKNOWN]: And I think it. [UNKNOWN]: And that's, and I think that's where some of this overcorrection of like bulking is dead has overleverage the research.

51:19 [UNKNOWN]: And my own study included, that came out in 2023, like if we look at the research by, we, as Americans will pronounce this way, Garth and Carl Garth and Carl Garth and Carl Garth. [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, yeah, exactly, I would go to that or whatever, it might actually be, you know, there's a 2013 study where this was first kind of on the radar where, you know, everybody's mostly relying on Rosnick and saying, look at this, you know, [UNKNOWN]: You should be thrown in 2,000 calorie weight genders down double your gains over eight weeks, but maybe over leveraging an example of young university age males being trained much harder than most of the time it is occurring in the literature.

51:55 [UNKNOWN]: And then we see actually a similar protocol four days per week, you know, upper lore split, but it's on top of [UNKNOWN]: these athletes sports conditioning and they're elite athletes. [UNKNOWN]: So they've been doing some strength conditioning and they get dietitians who follow what I would say is the heuristic and they advise them to be in the intention of like a 500 calorie surplus over a customized period of time for each athlete.

52:20 [UNKNOWN]: So it's a very translational study, right? [UNKNOWN]: And then they tell the other athletes, and again, these are not body builders, right, who are raised in the same era as you and I, they're, you know, a bunch of different codes of Norwegian athletes. [UNKNOWN]: So high level athletes are not thinking I need to like bulk, you know, that's that's not in their terminology that I think, oh, if I want to gain muscle, right, then I'm in a lift and I'm going to let my training do its training, they're not reading flex magazine again, this is, you know, 2013.

52:48 [UNKNOWN]: So, what did they do is they just kind of follow their habitual diets, then they were in a very slight surplus, and the disparity in the actual measured calorie intake between the two groups on average was about 600, and you saw non-significantly greater gains in the lean mass than one RM barely in the group that was in a 600 calorie surplus.

53:08 [UNKNOWN]: But significant within group changes for lean mass and 1 RM strength across various metrics in both groups. [UNKNOWN]: And then hilariously poor jump height and sprint time. [UNKNOWN]: That was in a larger surplus. [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, because they gained more weight. [UNKNOWN]: And the composition of that weight was almost entirely by-fat.

53:28 [UNKNOWN]: So they clearly, [UNKNOWN]: overshot with this heuristic, being elite athletes and trying to balance other things, the constraint was surpassed probably the first additional 50 calories they had more than the other group, but you only knew that in retrospect when you looked at it, right? [UNKNOWN]: So I think that's a great example.

53:50 [UNKNOWN]: It's the same thing as like a trainer response, right? [UNKNOWN]: You have the perfect program on paper, and you're like, look, I've checked in all the boxes. [UNKNOWN]: I've got this training load. [UNKNOWN]: I've got this proximity to failure, this exercise selection, respiratory, it's all teaser, cross, eyes are dotted.

54:01 [UNKNOWN]: You can only know if you maximize your response. [UNKNOWN]: Not only afterwards. [UNKNOWN]: But where's your control? [UNKNOWN]: Where's your evil twin doing a different program, right, unclear? [UNKNOWN]: So really working on trying to get that twin situation going. [UNKNOWN]: So I can figure this out finally.

54:16 [UNKNOWN]: Take down the master's class. [UNKNOWN]: Let's go. [UNKNOWN]: You got to watch Dark Matter that if you want watching that show, it's amazing. [UNKNOWN]: We're on it. [UNKNOWN]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN]: So let's say you can gain a kilo of muscle per month. [UNKNOWN]: All right. [UNKNOWN]: And that puts your rate at like 33 grams a day of total muscle tissue.

54:35 [UNKNOWN]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN]: And that's wet tissue right? [UNKNOWN]: And so okay, we'll now 25% of that. [UNKNOWN]: So we're like we'll call a 10 grams of actual like lean contractile protein. [UNKNOWN]: The Nikolitis papers suggest we'll look you only need. [UNKNOWN]: 115 calories a day to do that, right?

54:54 [UNKNOWN]: And so through this model, this central organizing theory, we're trying to work towards that would mean you don't, that your energy availability constraint then would be, do you have an excess of 115 calories from somewhere? [UNKNOWN]: It could come from the diet? [UNKNOWN]: or it could come from your endogenous fat stores and like an 80 kilo dude, this 20% body fat has will just say a lot of fat energy stored.

55:22 [UNKNOWN]: That's 123, what's something 100,000 plus calories just sitting there. [UNKNOWN]: And so without any other further explanation it's like, well look, you don't need to really be [UNKNOWN]: plus 500 calories from your maintenance level intake, you could just keep doing what you're doing and train hard.

55:41 [UNKNOWN]: And you probably have enough energy on board to maximize your rate for a given stimulus. [UNKNOWN]: Is that the same reasonable to you? [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I mean, that is absolutely theoretically true. [UNKNOWN]: And I like the caveat that we're talking about people who have plenty of body facts.

55:58 [UNKNOWN]: I think that is perhaps [UNKNOWN]: The next, maybe I'd say, moderating factor we need to consider as far as calories, because that same person wouldn't like, let's say they did a bodybuilding show and they're shredded. [UNKNOWN]: The story changes, even if they have the exact same relative muscle mass to their quote unquote ceiling for the given stimulus they're they're on.

56:22 [UNKNOWN]: So, [UNKNOWN]: Whether you want to dig into that next, but I'll let you lead where you want to go. [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, yeah, we're going. [UNKNOWN]: But the thought would be, look, that's a kilo a month, but what if this person is more well trained? [UNKNOWN]: They're closer to their ceiling.

56:34 [UNKNOWN]: And now it's three months, where they're gaining a kilo of muscle. [UNKNOWN]: Well, now it's like 40 calories a day. [UNKNOWN]: You're like, who doesn't have 40 calories a day excess? [UNKNOWN]: And it's like, well, what if you're really lean? [UNKNOWN]: So, so this is where my brain went.

56:48 [UNKNOWN]: And again, therapy needs [UNKNOWN]: When it comes to the energy constraint for high-perchef, I come up with like two big buckets. [UNKNOWN]: One is like a systemic energy constraint, which would be calories from stored energy, so body fat, primarily, and dietary cap calories. [UNKNOWN]: And then like a local energy constraint, which would be protein.

57:13 [UNKNOWN]: I understand it's not local, the protein does go everywhere, but you could effectively have somebody with enough, [UNKNOWN]: calories coming in or calorie stored, but a two-low of a protein and they're like, well, shoot, we don't even have the raw materials here. [UNKNOWN]: So I'm going to call that a local energy constraint.

57:28 [UNKNOWN]: No. [UNKNOWN]: The thought would be, how do we establish cut points for like, this is probably where we're approaching that sort of leanness constraint. [UNKNOWN]: So energy availability is now a little too low to rely on endogenous sources. [UNKNOWN]: How do we establish that? [UNKNOWN]: And further, [UNKNOWN]: Does it change when we start changing the other part of the systemic energy of availability coming from the diet?

57:53 [UNKNOWN]: So we had a 100 calorie day per death, you know, 100 calorie per day deficit versus 1,000 calories, like we'll shoot. [UNKNOWN]: These are two different, you know, sort of worlds here. [UNKNOWN]: How do you, how would you go about coming up with those cut points? [UNKNOWN]: And where have you landed if anywhere yet?

58:08 [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, so you can kind of interpolate some mechanistic research on this and then some larger scale matter regressions, one done by Murphy and colleagues, and then one that I was really privileged to be a part of led by Ruffalo that I did with Dr. Truxler that looked at basically redoing my master's I mentioned at the start of the podcast, but quantitatively, where I did like a systematic review, where I argued that [UNKNOWN]: and also in a deficit, maybe you should have a higher protein intake to offset the costs of those local constraints.

58:46 [UNKNOWN]: And I think, you know, the local constraints come from [UNKNOWN]: being too lean and not having enough energy because your body will start deciding no we need to use a different account here or maybe even get the credit card out type of deal. [UNKNOWN]: So the the meta regression is essentially looking at the interaction effects and and one of our few significant moderators was when we [UNKNOWN]: broke body fat percentage into turtiles.

59:13 [UNKNOWN]: So three different tiers of high moderate and low. [UNKNOWN]: So for low we just we when we did this based upon the data we had but we had under 12% body fat for men. [UNKNOWN]: and under roughly 20% for women we kind of just added like seven or eight percent to the value. [UNKNOWN]: And then grouped, so it wasn't just an overlap of the sex based analysis in this moderator.

59:39 [UNKNOWN]: So we looked at what was the slope of that protein intake to where you saw maintenance of lean mass or even gain in lean mass at higher protein and takes [UNKNOWN]: with each one of those body compositions. [UNKNOWN]: So we had under 12% for men and I'm just going to say for men and I'm sorry but then just add 8% in your brain so I can be a little more efficient in my speech for women.

1:00:03 [UNKNOWN]: So under 12% under roughly 20% or over 20% body fat were a kind of three turtiles and I think I've got that right on the paper in front of me. [UNKNOWN]: and the slope changed and where it intersected the line of protein intake to have no muscle or no lean mass change over the observation period shifted as well.

1:00:26 [UNKNOWN]: So the left shifted right the higher and body fat you were. [UNKNOWN]: So what we saw was that when you're over 20% body fat, [UNKNOWN]: Um, it kind of doesn't matter, like your protein intake becomes pretty similar to what would be, you know, recommended based upon, you know, the larger scale meta analyses on just a resistance training and hypertrophy generally, if saying like, hey, once you get to a round 1.6 or higher, you're using very marginal benefits that are unclear.

1:00:55 [UNKNOWN]: But when we were talking about the leanest turtle with, of course, the middle one looking very similar to the average, because that's the way math works. [UNKNOWN]: When we took the leanest turtle, people under 12%, now it wasn't 1.9 grams per kilogram that was the average intake where you didn't see losses of muscle mass, it was like 2.5, right?

1:01:14 [UNKNOWN]: And also the shape of the slope was different. [UNKNOWN]: So you weren't getting much out of a high protein intake. [UNKNOWN]: And the questions, well, what's going on here? [UNKNOWN]: Right? [UNKNOWN]: And that's just protein. [UNKNOWN]: But when we look at this, all the much larger matter regression that was done a couple years back by Murphy and colleagues, they took a whole bunch of studies and they looked at a similar calculation of when do you lose muscle mass?

1:01:42 [UNKNOWN]: And when do you see a reduction in, or I should say lean mass from being in a certain scale of deficit? [UNKNOWN]: And their kind of inflection point was 500 calories with massive distribution, by the way, so it's not a useful rule. [UNKNOWN]: And then as you got closer to a maintenance energy intake, you would see much more occurrences of gaining muscle with resistance training.

1:02:09 [UNKNOWN]: And there are bliffs all over the place, but [UNKNOWN]: What it showed was essentially in that kind of like one hundred two hundred three hundred calorie deficit range, very common for people to experience body reconstruction because if you're not deficit and you're gaining muscle, where's it coming from?

1:02:24 [UNKNOWN]: Famous, right? [UNKNOWN]: So that is intriguing, but then it's even more thought provoking when you dig into who were the people [UNKNOWN]: Metrogression. [UNKNOWN]: What we would describe is untrained. [UNKNOWN]: They were performing what we would describe is a very low dose resistance training protocol.

1:02:49 [UNKNOWN]: And they were also on average what we would describe is borderline class one obesity, or at least overweight, was kind of like that point there. [UNKNOWN]: So that is a little of a different story than when we look at like lean people who are already you know lifting weights and then what is an appropriate energy and taking protein and take where they don't see muscle loss and that changes as you get deeper and deeper and deeper into a contest prep or get leaner and leaner and leaner when we look at case studies and we have time series data for individuals which I think is really cool.

1:03:25 [UNKNOWN]: So why is the question? [UNKNOWN]: And that's where we shift to the mechanistic data. [UNKNOWN]: And there's some really cool stuff that was done probably wouldn't get through an IRB or an ethics board in modern times that was done in like 60s, 70s, and man, we could talk about the Minnesota starvation study, but there's some total starvation data, so where they don't feed somebody for days.

1:03:47 [UNKNOWN]: and they have this in people who are actually quite lean. [UNKNOWN]: So we're talking single digit body fat percentage, as well as people who are class two or class three obesity, very high in body fat. [UNKNOWN]: And there's a really immediate shift in substrate utilization. [UNKNOWN]: minimal changes in people with obesity, or these men in this data, but a two to threefold increase in various metrics of what I will essentially describe as using protein for energy.

1:04:15 [UNKNOWN]: Either direct oxidation and muscle, or [UNKNOWN]: like basically maxing out what the liver can do as far as converting protein into energy, you know, getting heat tones, you know, gluconeogenesis, all that stuff. [UNKNOWN]: So losing oxidation, doubles or triples, gluconeogenesis doubles or triples.

1:04:32 [UNKNOWN]: So what you're seeing here is that when you don't have sufficient energy, [UNKNOWN]: protein moves from being that local, you know, like kind of primarily used for building repair to, hey, we're taking any and all commerce credit card, you know, I don't get high interest loans, whatever, because I need the energy right now because I don't have anything.

1:04:51 [UNKNOWN]: I'm not eating anything, and I can see my savings account as low. [UNKNOWN]: So, you know, I need to preserve a little bit of glycogen so I can [UNKNOWN]: You know, run from the proverbial tiger for thinking from evolution or biology, and that's probably why a higher protein intake seems to have a slight benefit for lean mass preservation and a deficit, the leaner you are, it's because the leaner you are, the more the body is looking at that local constraint and going.

1:05:18 [UNKNOWN]: I'm no longer interested in building this up. [UNKNOWN]: I want to tap into it as the emergency fund. [UNKNOWN]: And you can see that even when you correct the energy side of it, there is a lag period and a necessary gain of body fat before you're going to see increases in lean mass, like trexler actually in his part of his graduate work, had a study that looked at natural [UNKNOWN]: During the post-contest phase for about two to three months, depending upon the individual, but at least about 10 weeks of data if I recall correctly, and they of course go into a large surplus.

1:05:55 [UNKNOWN]: and they gain exclusively body fat, at least for what can be measured. [UNKNOWN]: And any lean mass is probably attributed to glycogen and water, right? [UNKNOWN]: So this tells you, okay, the constraint for why this person couldn't gain muscle. [UNKNOWN]: And in fact, probably lost them on the way down through their contest prep.

1:06:15 [UNKNOWN]: was energy availability. [UNKNOWN]: And a progressive increase in the body is not thinking about this is not storage time. [UNKNOWN]: I'm not going to build muscle. [UNKNOWN]: And then even when you remove that constraint, [UNKNOWN]: There's a period of time where it's like, I need to get at least to a higher threshold of body fat before I start correcting this system to allow that to be something that's tapped into.

1:06:40 [UNKNOWN]: So yeah, this goes like all the way back to our definition of surplus deficit and maintenance. [UNKNOWN]: And I think if you use those saying heuristics, but you apply them to the specific tissue you're interested in, now they work. [UNKNOWN]: So if you say that a surplus for muscle tissue is when you see a gain in muscle mass, when that tissue is allowing that to come in and will use it and has a sufficient stimulus to grow, like if the conditions are met, where muscle mass could increase and you're in a surplus, then you will see an increase in mass there.

1:07:17 [UNKNOWN]: But [UNKNOWN]: same thing as true of body fat and even though I could describe these as a conceptual model as two separate systems to where hey the fat mass is in a surplus of its growing and the fat mass is in a deficit if it's decreasing or it maintenance if neither one is happening in net and the same thing as true of muscle they're both connected to the same stomach right and the same [UNKNOWN]: which one gets priority and which one is used as an energy deposit source or an energy sync and not even changes throughout the day.

1:07:56 [UNKNOWN]: But all of those constraints go together like what is your rate limited muscle gain potential heavily influenced by how close you are to your current ceiling and then [UNKNOWN]: What is your current body fat that's going to dictate how much priority and access in use of those stores of tissue will I potentially use for energy or energy depth position?

1:08:19 [UNKNOWN]: Am I going to build muscle? [UNKNOWN]: Am I going to use it to as an emergency fund? [UNKNOWN]: And then how much am I eating? [UNKNOWN]: What's the exogenous amount coming on for, which influences that as well? [UNKNOWN]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN]: The way I think about where kind of the, there's like a bridge between skeletal muscle and fat tissue, they are obviously coexisting, but also talking to each other.

1:08:42 [UNKNOWN]: Maybe not directly for much of the sort of relationship, but through the brain, certainly where the fat is sending signals out. [UNKNOWN]: And when you get lower than a particular threshold, the body's like, hey, man. [UNKNOWN]: we don't have access here. [UNKNOWN]: In fact, we're probably below where we need to be, I'm buying up that muscle.

1:09:02 [UNKNOWN]: And you can offset that by taking enough dietary protein to say, well, look, all right, we don't have to sacrifice the muscle yet, but only because you're eating a ton of protein. [UNKNOWN]: And yet you're still constrained to some extent for building new muscle tissue. [UNKNOWN]: You're just not sacrificing what you currently have.

1:09:19 [UNKNOWN]: And I think that's probably why you see that [UNKNOWN]: But it brings this question back, are you telling me that we can use our own fat to build muscle? [UNKNOWN]: Is this really what you're saying? [UNKNOWN]: And I want to be clear, you're not saying we can transform fat into muscle anymore that we can transform muscle into fat.

1:09:43 [UNKNOWN]: Can't do that. [UNKNOWN]: But are you saying we can use our own fuel from stored body fat to build new muscles, how are you saying? [UNKNOWN]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN]: I mean, think about it this way. [UNKNOWN]: Once amino acids try glycerides where glucose gets in the blood, where it came from or how it got there sort of doesn't matter.

1:10:04 [UNKNOWN]: It's going to be then dependent upon where does it need to go. [UNKNOWN]: And even if people struggle to accept that you can use fat to build muscle in that maybe description of kind of like in the blood. [UNKNOWN]: It isn't going to [UNKNOWN]: So, maybe you're more of an empiricist like me.

1:10:23 [UNKNOWN]: Let's talk about one of the most recent useful tests of this that kind of tells you maybe the magnitude and the conditions. [UNKNOWN]: So, there was a great study that was recently done by Vargas Molina. [UNKNOWN]: right, they took these two groups of literature trained individuals. [UNKNOWN]: So what I would describe is late-stage novices, right?

1:10:42 [UNKNOWN]: Also importantly is they were mostly men and I only say that because it was a mixed-sex study but this tells you it helps you understand like what their body [UNKNOWN]: Because I tell you that they are all in their low 20s body fat percentage in both groups on average, if that's women, they're lean.

1:10:58 [UNKNOWN]: If it's a mostly male group, you go, oh, now we're actually talking about that high body fat quartile from the meta regression that Ruffalo tracks and Helms did, right? [UNKNOWN]: So what we're looking at is a group that is relatively high in body fat, but not unhealthily so, but body fat's not the constraint, right?

1:11:16 [UNKNOWN]: They're at maybe their upper end of their their intervention point or something like that on average. [UNKNOWN]: and they're trained, but they've got a lot more they can go and, you know, despite popular beliefs who think of certain people who think that the lab training studies are easy and they are, you know, like cookie cutter nonsense, they are cookie cutter hard core and even if they're low frequency only two or three times per week or whatever, and the study actually had a decent training protocol.

1:11:43 [UNKNOWN]: You're getting pushed very hard by multiple grad students who are very interested in getting their masters at a PhD or helping their PI and making sure that everything is well controlled. [UNKNOWN]: So if it says you're trying to defail your, they want to observe failure. [UNKNOWN]: And I'll never set every time.

1:11:58 [UNKNOWN]: So things are held constant. [UNKNOWN]: So anyway. [UNKNOWN]: eight-week training protocol in what I would describe as late-stage novices, a relatively high end body fat, and the intention what the prescription was was to give one group maintenance and then one group a deficit and to see which one was better for body recomp, right?

1:12:16 [UNKNOWN]: Because this is one of those things. [UNKNOWN]: You know, the researchers were actually responding to the lifting communities [UNKNOWN]: theory, or what is probably a heristic of saying, hey, train people who aren't high in body fat, they can't recop, you know. [UNKNOWN]: So, and they need to be in maintenance to recop because a deficit is too much of a downward pressure signal.

1:12:36 [UNKNOWN]: Now you're creating a constraint. [UNKNOWN]: But what did we actually see? [UNKNOWN]: Well, good news is they had decks of derived body composition and like I mentioned earlier, you can back calculate what happened over those eight weeks in these two groups and actually get objective solid estimations at least the group level based upon fat mass and lean mass energy composition.

1:12:56 [UNKNOWN]: which is something that's like a five to six fold difference in the way that Dexic calculates it because Dexa groups glycogen, lean mass, bone, water all together and then fat mass is like the pure triglyceride or lipids. [UNKNOWN]: And they went, okay, hey, the actual deficit was closer to like 350 and the group that was intended to be in a deficit.

1:13:16 [UNKNOWN]: And the maintenance group actually was in a slight deficit at well. [UNKNOWN]: They were in 150 calorie deficit, ish. [UNKNOWN]: And what happened also is they both gained about a kilogram of lean mass over this eight week period. [UNKNOWN]: So they're actually matching our kind of, you know, normal rate of muscle gain and a reasonably untrained person that we talked [UNKNOWN]: we're not there.

1:13:40 [UNKNOWN]: So between and this matches up exactly well with the meta regression by Murphy in colleagues saying, hey, it's right around a 500 calorie deficit. [UNKNOWN]: We're now you're not gain in muscle. [UNKNOWN]: We see no constraint difference on average. [UNKNOWN]: And this isn't a huge sample size study.

1:13:57 [UNKNOWN]: But if we assume the sample size was decent, then it was. [UNKNOWN]: And they were well randomized so that we had an [UNKNOWN]: and that the average deficits and surpluses or rather average deficits in two groups were reasonably close to, you know, there wasn't massive heterogeneity there.

1:14:14 [UNKNOWN]: Then we can look at that and go, okay, so if you're a late stage novice who has a 20% body fat as a male and you go on a pretty good training program, [UNKNOWN]: Within a 100 to 400-ish calorie deficit, that's not going to be the constraint to how much muscle you can grow. [UNKNOWN]: We don't have a third group who is in a surplus to see it maybe they got even more, but these two things were similar enough to produce a similar outcome of roughly a one kilogram, non-significant difference in lean tissue.

1:14:44 [UNKNOWN]: So what happened to the rest of those calories? [UNKNOWN]: Again, this is where it's helpful to look at these two different systems. [UNKNOWN]: So how did they gain with less energy? [UNKNOWN]: The same amount of muscle. [UNKNOWN]: We'll guess what? [UNKNOWN]: The group that was in a higher deficit lost more fat mass and that's how you actually calculate the fat mass.

1:14:59 [UNKNOWN]: So it's not like an aha. [UNKNOWN]: It's literally how I figured that out. [UNKNOWN]: But you see same lean mass gains and then a proportionate amount of fat mass lost based upon [UNKNOWN]: the size of the deficit. [UNKNOWN]: And the one kind of reality check here if maybe you're not buying into this whole that calculated energy surplus or deficit in that based upon body compositions that the group intended to be at maintenance was in a much smaller deficit of roughly 150 on average and the group intended to be in a deficit was, but maybe not exactly the intended deficit they wanted.

1:15:35 [UNKNOWN]: to put in. [UNKNOWN]: And this is human research. [UNKNOWN]: You can try to be as exact as you can, and we ran into this in our study as well, but you're going to get something close-ish, directionally hopefully where it needs to be, but a good degree of variance when you have people in the free living condition trying to track calories, label accuracy, metabolize a energy, not matching actual energy, memory recall that good stuff.

1:16:00 [UNKNOWN]: So needless to say, I think a good answer to your question, Jordan, if you're like, okay, well, at what point does, you know, body fat and energy availability become a constraint for for muscle tissue interacting with the surplus size or the deficit size and can you burn body fat to build muscle.

1:16:21 [UNKNOWN]: Here's an example that fits somewhere along this very complex interaction, interacting curve, or we go, well, I don't know, but if you told me, hey, I'm 25, 20% body fat and I've been lifting for a year, I would say, don't worry about it, don't be in a huge deficit. [UNKNOWN]: Keep it under a 400 calorie deficit and you'll probably grow just as well as if you were in a 100 calorie deficit.

1:16:45 [UNKNOWN]: could you maybe grow a bit more if you were in a maintenance or surplus state? [UNKNOWN]: Maybe, but I don't think we're going to see this non-linear response once you get to like zero. [UNKNOWN]: All of a sudden now you can gain two kilograms. [UNKNOWN]: I doubt it. [UNKNOWN]: I don't think that would hold up.

1:16:59 [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I think if we're establishing a sort of energy constraint, I think it's important to note that there's that's probably also tied to the stimulus constraint in a way, meaning that if you increase their training load, assuming they could tolerate it, right, not get injured because they're outkick in their coverage, for example.

1:17:18 [UNKNOWN]: then perhaps at that point they need an even smaller deficit or they would respond better to a small surplus because now you're sort of changing the underlying assumptions and the case here. [UNKNOWN]: But I think that's a reasonable point to make. [UNKNOWN]: If you maybe establish the two poles here, right?

1:17:36 [UNKNOWN]: So for guys, 20% of body fat on the high end and maybe we'll call it. [UNKNOWN]: I don't know, 10 percent, 12 percent on the on the on the low end, right? [UNKNOWN]: It's like, okay, look, if you're above 20 percent and you're thinking about a modest deficit. [UNKNOWN]: And you're reasonable, you're not like, you know, world beater.

1:17:55 [UNKNOWN]: You haven't been doing this for 15 years where you're really trying to max out hypertrophy. [UNKNOWN]: You could probably do a small deficit and you can probably recomp. [UNKNOWN]: And I feel generally confident in saying, you're not losing muscle mass gain potential by doing that. [UNKNOWN]: If you said, well, what about a thousand calorie deficit?

1:18:13 [UNKNOWN]: I don't feel so good about that. [UNKNOWN]: Okay, but so we're gonna put this floor, we'll call it 500, whatever. [UNKNOWN]: If you go to the other extreme, the other pole, very lean person, 12% body fat for a male, for example. [UNKNOWN]: I'm not confident that you're gonna gain as much muscle mass in a deficit or at maintenance as compared to being in a surplus.

1:18:33 [UNKNOWN]: And that would be a good use case for like a small surplus. [UNKNOWN]: The point is, it doesn't need to be a massive surplus. [UNKNOWN]: We probably don't need to do a dirty bulk, you know, as it were affectionally referred to. [UNKNOWN]: Unless it's a, that's the behavioral sort of thing where it's like, look, we can't because 100 calories surplus 200 calories surplus, very challenging to establish and also like to continue.

1:18:54 [UNKNOWN]: So maybe we just end up having some insurance and now we call it a 500 calorie surplus. [UNKNOWN]: The heuristic kind of shows its face again on that end. [UNKNOWN]: I think that's where I kind of land here. [UNKNOWN]: And if you're in the middle, it's more uncertainty. [UNKNOWN]: I just, yeah, how do you, how do you maybe square square the, the, the, the, the circle is in what we're talking about in the middle right goes most people are going to fall in the middle.

1:19:17 [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, great question. [UNKNOWN]: And I think here is where you can also check, like, okay, if the way you just described it Jordan is the way it operates, then what would we see in the real world and what are good kind of natural tests of this? [UNKNOWN]: So, you know, the really lean person who's trying, who's acknowledged, like you said, man, I can't gain muscle in a deficit.

1:19:39 [UNKNOWN]: really struggling to gain muscle even at maintenance, and I don't need a huge surplus, but I need something to grow. [UNKNOWN]: They find themselves then gaining weight, right, if they want to keep progressing. [UNKNOWN]: So what's a good natural experiment for that? [UNKNOWN]: weight class restricted strength sport.

1:19:56 [UNKNOWN]: Right. [UNKNOWN]: Right. [UNKNOWN]: And one thing that I think you and I, we, we, we probably fall the IPF reasonably close. [UNKNOWN]: There's been multiple examples of people who have, if they want to improve, they had to actually go up a weight class and they've been constrained. [UNKNOWN]: And then we see basically this elevated baseline all of a sudden a rapid rate of growth in terms of strength and visual changes that would, you know, indicate there's a muscularity there once they finally stopped.

1:20:24 [UNKNOWN]: Trying to, like if you're trying to address the constraint of hey you're walking around a 8% body fat by eating an apple Day on top of your your maintenance and then just cutting harder every time you have to do nationals or whatever You're eventually going to run away and you're going to be just flirting at like you're bumping up against the ceiling and your cuts are getting harder and harder and harder Because you have to lose more water for the level of body weight that you have that's becoming increasingly lean mass and [UNKNOWN]: and that means you're experiencing a slow downward shift towards your low end intervention point.

1:20:57 [UNKNOWN]: And as you're trying to accommodate that, you're getting more signals from your hypothalamus if you essentially being in a status of low energy availability. [UNKNOWN]: And the only solution is not eat that apple. [UNKNOWN]: but actually to go up a way class. [UNKNOWN]: So Taylor Outwood, you know, Panna, we see multiple instances of this.

1:21:16 [UNKNOWN]: Eevee Corrigan having a campaign at 52, cutting down from 57. [UNKNOWN]: But basically being pretty much flatlined around a 480 total once she made her initial, you know, gains, and then boom, his 500 when she goes back to 57. [UNKNOWN]: I see this over and over and over again. [UNKNOWN]: And White Class restricted strength sport in the IPF that is, you know, drug tested is a really good natural experiment of having these constraints in place, and seeing even super high level elite level power lifters, making gains.

1:21:46 [UNKNOWN]: And that doesn't break the rule of, hey, once you're close to your ceiling, you can only make very subtle gains. [UNKNOWN]: And it's not technique that's making the better at squatting. [UNKNOWN]: It's actually proving the rule of saying the main constraint that's holding you back, if you address that, you unlock the next level.

1:22:02 [UNKNOWN]: And all of a sudden, these people are like, like a breath of fresh air for their body. [UNKNOWN]: I'm going to allow you to maintain the, to maintain the, [UNKNOWN]: appropriate level of lean mass that we could have for your energy status once your body fat is higher because I'm not constantly pulling from it to keep you where you're at and balance the checks books, right?

1:22:24 [UNKNOWN]: So that's the lean person example of once they get into the middle, all of a sudden the constraints come off, they have an uptick in the rate of gains and then starts to get curl linear again. [UNKNOWN]: And I think another really good proof in the pudding here is that [UNKNOWN]: If it was true that it was just always the same ceiling height and natural bodybuilders like myself, for example, you're really close to it and then unfortunately during prep because you have to get shredded, you lose two kilograms of lean mass and it's unavoidable.

1:22:55 [UNKNOWN]: You would never be able to compete two years later. [UNKNOWN]: at the same stage weight or slightly higher, right? [UNKNOWN]: So this is not a mechanical loading and doose loss of muscle mass. [UNKNOWN]: It's the energy constraint. [UNKNOWN]: And when you fix that, that gets kind of redirected.

1:23:10 [UNKNOWN]: The baseline comes back up, which is why I think it's a little bit different to lose muscle from a change in energy availability or energy intake. [UNKNOWN]: And boom, next year or two years from now, you can be at the same stage, wait, or maybe a couple hundred grams heavier. [UNKNOWN]: You know, there's no way for me, for example.

1:23:27 [UNKNOWN]: I experienced this myself. [UNKNOWN]: I was on stage almost two kilograms heavier from 2023 to 2025. [UNKNOWN]: I've been training since 2004. [UNKNOWN]: if like what took me to gain back the one point like whatever I lost and then gain 1.9 on top of that should be impossible with with if we kind of held these fixed models rather than kind of this constraints based understanding.

1:23:52 [UNKNOWN]: So [UNKNOWN]: What that means for an advanced lifter like me is that once I get to a body fat percentage, that's in that kind of middle range, like you said, I basically don't need to worry about a surplus. [UNKNOWN]: The constraints, not my body fat, and I can only grow so fast, doing everything perfectly, I'm making a fraction of the gains that I had even as an intermediate.

1:24:14 [UNKNOWN]: So even if we, like when I say, hey, I put on two kilograms from 2023 to 2025, [UNKNOWN]: No one cares about that as like an Instagram transformation period. [UNKNOWN]: People see that in in six weeks, right, for their untrained clients coming to their their personal training studio, right?

1:24:29 [UNKNOWN]: But you know, who does hit me up is every other 30 plus natural body builder who's trying to get their pro-card or computer the pro-level. [UNKNOWN]: Like, bro, what'd you do? [UNKNOWN]: And I can show you the deal. [UNKNOWN]: It's hilarious. [UNKNOWN]: Because it's like, oh man, he he cracked the code, right?

1:24:42 [UNKNOWN]: You know, but it's [UNKNOWN]: What is that over a 24-month period? [UNKNOWN]: It's it's grams on a day basis. [UNKNOWN]: So once I get out of quote unquote the constraint zone of my body fat being too low, then it's just like eat. [UNKNOWN]: If I'm on 100 calorie deficit one day, 100 calories per plus the next doesn't matter, I just don't want to put on body fat so much that when I die down next time, I've got to take an extra month to do it, right?

1:25:07 [UNKNOWN]: I [UNKNOWN]: I kind of was in a purposeful surplus until I felt, and actually have blood work on it, that my physiology normalized, and then I'm just following my habits that ensure a sufficient energy intake, ensure a sufficient protein, and I'm not thinking about whether I'm in a surplus or a deficit, because I don't need much energy to grow with this unfortunately slow rate that I'm constrained to as an advanced level lifter.

1:25:35 [UNKNOWN]: So that's another example of the interaction between being in that mid-range body fat and then being advanced level lifter and having enough calories to play with is all of a sudden main gaining, maintaining, or body recomp and slowly just kind of staying around the same body weight but making it look better and better and better is the way it go.

1:25:54 [UNKNOWN]: So what I am noticing now is I'm flirting in the low 90s or like the low 200s if you will, but right now it's the best I've made [UNKNOWN]: because I'm kind of coming in and out of surplus maintenance over time, and if my training is doing its job, then I start to get hungry again once I'm closer to like say 10% body fat, and then my body will start to creep up, and I'll look, you know, better than I did last time at that body weight, and the difference between me and, you know, your tailor-at-wood, or your [UNKNOWN]: They must then get on stage, or sorry, on one platform at, you know, 74 or 66, and then they didn't experience the ability to go up to the 74, 83 key look class, respectively, and tell the already been world champion for a while.

1:26:41 [UNKNOWN]: So you can see this interplay in the real world. [UNKNOWN]: And if it didn't work this way, natural bodybuilders who lost muscle in the late stage of their career, but like I've had it just retire, because it's going to take ten years to get back to my old stage weight, and we would not be able to see advanced level lifters go up a weight class and actually improve.

1:27:02 [UNKNOWN]: So those examples are essentially checks of natural experiments on kind of the understanding that you present it. [UNKNOWN]: So I'd say, yeah, you're right again, buddy. [UNKNOWN]: That was not like that. [UNKNOWN]: I mean, that was my own experience. [UNKNOWN]: I mean, I started, I did my first meat, I believe it was either $0.09 or 2010.

1:27:19 [UNKNOWN]: First powerlifting meat, I weighed in a 179, as for the 181 division, and I had to cut to get there, because I'm five foot 10 and a half, not a tall person, but still for powerlifting. [UNKNOWN]: I was the tallest person in the 181 class, and I had to die down to get there. [UNKNOWN]: And I think my first total was, [UNKNOWN]: 1,300 and something pounds or whatever that did got a little bit better the next meat but it was one and they switched to the 80, a three kilo class so I had a little more wiggle room, a 1350 or whatever.

1:27:50 [UNKNOWN]: And then I remember I should the bed at this meat. [UNKNOWN]: I tried to, I was like I'm just going to cut more because my body weight kept trending up a little bit. [UNKNOWN]: I think I tried to cut down from like 195 or something to get down to like [UNKNOWN]: That me, yeah, it was bad for me and I was like, I think I need to go a way class as soon as I went up a way class 1550.

1:28:15 [UNKNOWN]: 16 something, whatever I ended up at the top of the 93 kilo class. [UNKNOWN]: I told 1795 and I'm like, okay, that's great. [UNKNOWN]: How do I get better? [UNKNOWN]: And unfortunately, I've never been willing to take my bodyweight up even further than that. [UNKNOWN]: The only sort of proof of concept is that I've done a few fun meets where I did not cut down to make the 93 class or the 90 class to put it on the [UNKNOWN]: 100 kilo lifter.

1:28:45 [UNKNOWN]: So I was like 95, 96 in low and bowl. [UNKNOWN]: Be my best total. [UNKNOWN]: And it is because I think my muscle mass was going up. [UNKNOWN]: And then if the further I restricted myself effectively did not allow for any muscle growth, or at least not a substantial amount of muscle growth.

1:29:01 [UNKNOWN]: And so what people might be hearing this, they're like, oh, so I just got to gain muscle to get stronger. [UNKNOWN]: It's like, well, on some level that it's going to be your limiter. [UNKNOWN]: What do you create force with? [UNKNOWN]: Well, it is your muscle, and it has to be highly coordinated.

1:29:11 [UNKNOWN]: It has to, you know, in order to actually express that, Jeremy Lenicki is listening to this somewhere. [UNKNOWN]: He's like, it's not just about the muscle mass, and we agree it has to be coordinated and everything else. [UNKNOWN]: But yeah, if you constrain yourself in this energy constraint, not only will that some on some level constrain your training load.

1:29:29 [UNKNOWN]: to some extent. [UNKNOWN]: But it's also going to constrain in this case the muscle mass. [UNKNOWN]: And so what we've established here is this relationship of energy availability. [UNKNOWN]: So you can have high energy availability because you have a high amount of body fat. [UNKNOWN]: And if you're that person probably don't need a surplus to maximize muscle mass.

1:29:47 [UNKNOWN]: On the other pole you can have very low energy availability, perhaps bordering on relative energy deficiency in sport or you know or aligning to that. [UNKNOWN]: At that point, the energy constraint is such that you cannot really gain the appreciable amounts of muscle mass even if you're training your face off.

1:30:04 [UNKNOWN]: So if you're very, very lean power lifter, very, very lean generally speaking, maintenance or an deficit, it's probably not the move to maximize muscle mass. [UNKNOWN]: I think everybody, listen, it's like, we already knew that. [UNKNOWN]: But where I think it gets more interesting is like, [UNKNOWN]: for the average, we'll call it a recreational recreationally trained person who's sitting at like, for a guy, 18% body fat, and they're like, okay, what about me, man?

1:30:29 [UNKNOWN]: Should I just be on a 100 calorie, or 200 calorie surplus to ensure that I maximize the muscle mass, or is it okay to sort of like, again, some days a little lower, some days a little higher, on average, I'm kind of maintaining my body weight. [UNKNOWN]: I think that second category is probably where you should be, mainly because you're at a lower risk of putting on unwanted body fat and energy is not the constraint.

1:30:53 [UNKNOWN]: The constraints really the training and then once the training is being the constraint then it's genetics and it's like, well, CRISPR is not widely available, so we go back to the training if that actually is modifiable. [UNKNOWN]: Does that square kind of what you're understanding here? [UNKNOWN]: It does, and I think it also demonstrates how you sort of can't game the system.

1:31:13 [UNKNOWN]: Even when you are willing to do extreme things, like you talked earlier about local, maybe you could do more training to offset the use of protein and that it's coming from muscle. [UNKNOWN]: But then people forget how do we calculate energy availability and the potential for reds. [UNKNOWN]: it's literally taking into exercise expenditure activity into it.

1:31:34 [UNKNOWN]: So by trying to actually offset low energy availability and training harder and more and increasing the what is going to eventually show up as increased energy expenditure through the activity or increased energy expenditure from all the costs that Nikolai has said of actually trying to build the muscle itself, because some of that's on the energy outside.

1:31:54 [UNKNOWN]: They're going to be perfect. [UNKNOWN]: You know, the actual cost of building muscle, that's not an unsight, that's an out-sight of that equation. [UNKNOWN]: You're creating reds. [UNKNOWN]: So you're accelerating reds by trying to offset the muscle loss from reds or that constraint. [UNKNOWN]: And one of the symptoms of reds and one of the associated things is loss of lean mass, sarcopenia, osteopenia, and actually experimentally.

1:32:17 [UNKNOWN]: poor muscle protein synthesis. [UNKNOWN]: So we actually know that by trying to offset it in a constrained system of energy and body fat, you're triggering your hypothalamus even more to go, oh, whoa, now you're moving more. [UNKNOWN]: God dammit, you know, now I need to pull more, more protein.

1:32:35 [UNKNOWN]: So there's only so much you can do with trying to fix something that's not the constraint there. [UNKNOWN]: So I would totally agree if you're talking about someone [UNKNOWN]: that's not the constraint. [UNKNOWN]: Then within reasonable ranges, you just don't have to worry about that. [UNKNOWN]: Yep.

1:32:51 [UNKNOWN]: And you know, to your point again, we can use the real world. [UNKNOWN]: You probably have a more robust scale than me. [UNKNOWN]: In fact, I know you do. [UNKNOWN]: We met at EPC. [UNKNOWN]: We're actually a very similar height. [UNKNOWN]: We're a similar height, you and I, right? [UNKNOWN]: And I am not totaling what's your best, like 1800ish?

1:33:13 [UNKNOWN]: So my best, if I was to take my best case scenario gym total, is like 1,400, you know, that's very strong for non-good power lifters. [UNKNOWN]: It's like 80% pile, right? [UNKNOWN]: I think that's good. [UNKNOWN]: It's good if you're not trying to be in a lead level power left here, but the reality is it's like another more extreme version as you know is also the same height as both of us is my T and here's a 120 right so and he might my friend like I could fit my skeleton inside of him and you'd never know where I went you know when I've [UNKNOWN]: You know, and he walks around at 120, and the heaviest I've ever been is lighter than his lightest he was in high schools of freshman.

1:33:58 [UNKNOWN]: That's just who he is. [UNKNOWN]: And there's a reason why he's you know, totaled well into the 900 kilo, and he used to be in his hey Dave, you know, one of the top level 120s, right? [UNKNOWN]: So [UNKNOWN]: There's an example there where if he had tried to stay, say you want to five, he would be constrained.

1:34:17 [UNKNOWN]: Just like if you were trying to stay at 93, it's a little bit constrained compared to like a hundred. [UNKNOWN]: But me, because I'm the same high as you guys, and I read body power lifting stuff, [UNKNOWN]: Remember back in the day when like the the Shikohite weight class stuff was going around Yeah, you're six foot you're supposed to be at one twenty and if you're any tall and that you should be a super right super Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is that that that's actually a data derived but it's data derived from observing the top level lifters So it's saying If you are a top level lifter This should be your lightweight ratio and I think that assumption doesn't work for me because [UNKNOWN]: I've tried to get to 105 Jordan.

1:34:58 [UNKNOWN]: I couldn't get there. [UNKNOWN]: I got to like 98. [UNKNOWN]: I hit a bench PR, but my squat and deadlift were the same. [UNKNOWN]: And then I had to cut down to 93 because I didn't want to compete with 105. [UNKNOWN]: And the cut was so harsh that I passed out on my deadlift. [UNKNOWN]: So I told less, right?

1:35:15 [UNKNOWN]: So. [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, for me, it's just gross when I try to go up to Austria, so I think I have personally found the point at which trying to go up in weight class didn't benefit me because my natural structure. [UNKNOWN]: It looks muscular, but in terms of the actual lean mass that I carry for my height, it's a little below your typical strength athlete bodybuilder, etc.

1:35:41 [UNKNOWN]: You know, I'm a six foot guy who competes in the the border between the middle weights and the light heavies. [UNKNOWN]: I look muscular, which is great for bodybuilding, but in terms of the actual structural tissue, when I die down for bodybuilding show, I can compete in 83s and a six foot guy in 83s is what's called not an elite level power lifter.

1:36:00 [UNKNOWN]: So trying to match [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, trying to match the, like, like the kind of lightweight expectations of a little power lifters is inaccurate. [UNKNOWN]: And I saw this coaching Bryce Lewis, who is a, as a world champ, he's five six. [UNKNOWN]: And he had one of these, these like logarithmic increases in performance going from 93 to 105, you know, so [UNKNOWN]: This stuff, and he has probably a higher personal fat threshold that is still healthy and benefits his, like the constraint is maybe a bit lower than mine.

1:36:36 [UNKNOWN]: For example, I can walk around a little bit leaner. [UNKNOWN]: So the interacting effects here are [UNKNOWN]: exactly that. [UNKNOWN]: And I think the way to test it is that if you are reasonably active, you have a healthy baseline diet that is consisting of sufficient protein intake mostly on processed foods, a decent high fiber intake.

1:36:54 [UNKNOWN]: And behaviorally, you're not kind of in the obeseogenic loop that most people in Western society are, where just living life is actually a surplus. [UNKNOWN]: If you're [UNKNOWN]: Are you hungry, regularly? [UNKNOWN]: Are you having experiencing food noise? [UNKNOWN]: Are you having any kind of sleep disruption?

1:37:14 [UNKNOWN]: Do you find that your libido is maybe not what it has been in the past, if you're a male, for example, you're probably constrained a bit by either body fat or energy and take for that body fat level. [UNKNOWN]: But if you're not starving, you could eat your body fat is... [UNKNOWN]: quote unquote normalist or a little bit higher than it was in your natural state.

1:37:36 [UNKNOWN]: And, you know, like things are all good and you don't notice when you slip into a deficit or a surplus, it doesn't like immediately mean you get four hours of sleep in the wake up in the overnight. [UNKNOWN]: Then you probably don't need to worry about your energy intake because you're in a well-regulated zone.

1:37:51 [UNKNOWN]: You can easily have what's called quote unquote metabolic flexibility. [UNKNOWN]: You can tap into fat, you can tap into glycogen, you can onboard glucose, you can onboard triglycerides exogenously, and supply all the energy needs from different places. [UNKNOWN]: You're not, your, your body isn't coming in.

1:38:07 [UNKNOWN]: The men jerseys going to the factory going, no, no, no, no. [UNKNOWN]: We are not putting anything more on that conveyor belt. [UNKNOWN]: We're only pulling from here. [UNKNOWN]: We're reversing that conveyor belt. [UNKNOWN]: I want those amino acids for energy. [UNKNOWN]: So I think in that state, it just sort of doesn't matter.

1:38:22 [UNKNOWN]: Just don't do anything extreme. [UNKNOWN]: You know, don't be in a massive surplus or you'll gain body fat. [UNKNOWN]: Don't be in a massive deficit because then you will constrain muscle growth. [UNKNOWN]: That's, yeah, well said, I think if conceptually people think about two separate intervention points, a high one and a low one, we're talking about body fat, high and low body fat, well, if you're in this sort of unregulated zone between you probably don't have to worry about energy and take our micro managing it.

1:38:49 [UNKNOWN]: Now, you may want to be leaner and so you can go, you know, bi-restricting calories and increasing activity, you can go get closer to your lower end if that aesthetically or perform it whatever, you want to do that, that's great. [UNKNOWN]: If you feel like, again, any of those signs or symptoms will call this energy perturbation, you may want to eat a little bit more, you know, unfortunately we live in the society and we're in the freaking...

1:39:17 [UNKNOWN]: Health and fitness space, and people want me to be leaner than what I would probably be my strongest or most muscular, but you know, I Receive pressure from the outside world just like everybody else. [UNKNOWN]: So, you know, you know, you're stuck Just a few a few more questions vote and we'll wrap this up [UNKNOWN]: the first one, which I think is probably the most important one.

1:39:37 [UNKNOWN]: If we're saying that look below 12 percent body fat for a man above 20 percent, those are the poles in between. [UNKNOWN]: You can be at maintenance, you know, outside of that, if you're at the high end, you could probably be deficit and be fine from maximizing muscle gain. [UNKNOWN]: If you're below that, you probably need to surplus in order to maximize muscle gain in the middle, you can be maintenance.

1:39:54 [UNKNOWN]: If you want, what would falsify this relationship? [UNKNOWN]: Because, you know, it almost, it almost makes too good a sense. [UNKNOWN]: It makes me feel too good. [UNKNOWN]: It's really tied the room together. [UNKNOWN]: If you're a big little Bowsky fan, what would falsify this sort of relationship?

1:40:09 [UNKNOWN]: What would you have to see in the data or end or observationally to be like, dang, we messed up again? [UNKNOWN]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN]: So. [UNKNOWN]: I think that's a great question, and I've asked myself that many times, is what would I need to observe that would tell me actually you always need to be in a surplus to get any kind of approach from also gain, and something happens when you tick down a maintenance or a lower, and it really messes things up.

1:40:39 [UNKNOWN]: I think what we would need to see would be like these non-linear relationships in these meta-regressions that in some cases they didn't try to fit it, but we did see it. [UNKNOWN]: I would need to see Vardis Molina replicated and them to actually ensure that they did have a maintenance group and that that maintenance group did weigh better than the rest, you know?

1:41:05 [UNKNOWN]: I would need to see different things in practice to where, you know, the clients or the bodybuilders or my contemporaries or the power lifters would essentially be able to see much more steep increases and like totals as they went up weight classes. [UNKNOWN]: I think another way to kind of disprove this is because, you know, if you're in a store [UNKNOWN]: You eventually get to a point where you're just bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, right, from muscle mass gains, but you don't see the same linear relationship in the supers, right?

1:41:46 [UNKNOWN]: And I think there's actually a really interesting thing is that the athletes who, the people, who carry the most fat free mass on the planet are similar wrestlers. [UNKNOWN]: right. [UNKNOWN]: And I think there's two things going on there because it is different than say sarcopenic obesity.

1:42:02 [UNKNOWN]: You know, in a sedentary, which is not the norm, it's relatively rare in a sedentary person who's very unhealthy and not exercising, who develops obesity, if they continually gain weight, they eventually get so heavy that they cannot be active and therefore they atrophy. [UNKNOWN]: You know, but when you look at lineman, when you look at zoom arrestlers, and when you look at super heavy weights, because they actually did do a dexis scanner Ray Williams, you can find that in the literature, which is pretty sweet.

1:42:31 [UNKNOWN]: they have more lean mass than they could ever carry at a lower body fat because they're essentially replicating that environment we talked about at 1.5g all the time because they're active individual running around and this is kind of also why outside of sarcopenic obesity several voices in our space have currently been saying I'm not too concerned with lean mass losses [UNKNOWN]: when people are dieting and doing not maybe the best exercise protocol.

1:43:01 [UNKNOWN]: Who would ever say that? [UNKNOWN]: Because it's kind of... Oh, who would, right? [UNKNOWN]: I listen to it on your guy's spot. [UNKNOWN]: Because it's like, the funny thing is we can look at the same data and interpret it differently when I talk about like a natural bodybuilder. [UNKNOWN]: They're doing everything they can to maintain muscle mass and every little bit counts.

1:43:19 [UNKNOWN]: them trying to offset the loss of maybe three or four kilograms of lean mass to two massive difference in terms of placing on a bodybuilding show, no difference in terms of functionality or life quality or any of this stuff, except for lower life quality from not being as jacked and they hate themselves.

1:43:38 [UNKNOWN]: But if we're talking about someone who does like a walking protocol and a half decent lifting protocol and you're thinking, oh man, they could have maybe retained slightly more lean [UNKNOWN]: like they're not just losing muscle and the muscle they're losing is maybe just because they don't weigh as much and their activities of daily living are just adjusting to what is necessary for moving a now 100 kilogram body versus being 140 kilograms right so it's unlike like unavoidable sort of loss of lean mass because now they're not getting that training load which was their light from life basically.

1:44:15 [UNKNOWN]: Exactly. [UNKNOWN]: And it is only when you put people with obesity on training protocols that provides a greater stimulus. [UNKNOWN]: then what they were getting from living life is a heavier person and they're experiencing fast rates of weight loss. [UNKNOWN]: So they maybe are triggering their hypothalamus a little bit and they're seeing rapid decreases in body mass.

1:44:35 [UNKNOWN]: If they're doing kind of a half-assed training protocol, nothing happens. [UNKNOWN]: But if you're seeing relatively slow rates of a body weight loss and they're doing a decent training protocol and the deficit's not too large, [UNKNOWN]: We'll guess what, just like we already talked about, there's a meta regression, which exactly proves my points here, Murphy would show that if you're in less than a 500 calorie deficit on average, you're putting on lean tissue.

1:44:59 [UNKNOWN]: Well, it's lean ass. [UNKNOWN]: So it all still keeps supporting the same model Jordan. [UNKNOWN]: And I thought through this a lot, as you can tell, I've thought through sarcopenic obesity, sumo wrestlers, antibiotics there, oh, it's natural bodybuilders, power lifters, [UNKNOWN]: animal models, even waiting limbs of quails, tying weights on chickens and rabbits and doing it for a month and seeing these rapid rates of growth that then plateau, but at much higher degrees of muscle bass before that they're sacrificed and thinking like how much more did they feed these rabbits though.

1:45:37 [UNKNOWN]: They probably weren't thinking, oh, this rabbit is going to get jacked. [UNKNOWN]: I need to give him, like, protein and the feed, you know what I'm saying? [UNKNOWN]: But it's not right. [UNKNOWN]: They're massive. [UNKNOWN]: I perpetually. [UNKNOWN]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN]: We get we come to this similar point when it comes with the GLP one or Ingrid and therapy, generally speaking, you talk about lean mass losses.

1:45:54 [UNKNOWN]: People are hyper focused on lean mass and Dr. Baroque and I have kind of come to the conclusion that we are less concerned with lean mass. [UNKNOWN]: as it on it for its own sake, but more about its function, and we really wish people just switch to like more functional based testing, like the fact that you see X amount of loss, X percentage of loss on Dexus scan, for example.

1:46:18 [UNKNOWN]: Okay, and glad you collected that. [UNKNOWN]: Thank you, you know, would have preferred a MRI. [UNKNOWN]: For example, but a little dexas dexas find. [UNKNOWN]: Let's get a strength. [UNKNOWN]: Let's get a strength test. [UNKNOWN]: Let even if it's something like a time up and go or a stair power or something or even grip strength, even though we then don't really love grip strength.

1:46:34 [UNKNOWN]: But we saw that in a semolina study. [UNKNOWN]: These people lost. [UNKNOWN]: substantial amounts of their body weight 15 plus percent on average of their body weight did not do exercise. [UNKNOWN]: They all over half met criteria for sarcopenic obesity prior to the start of the study which reduced throughout this year long study of at max the magleti doses.

1:46:55 [UNKNOWN]: and their grips strengthen proved. [UNKNOWN]: And it's like, okay, this is a non, you know, a weight bearing limb, how do their muscle function improve, even if they lost lean mass. [UNKNOWN]: And it's like, well, some of that's due to getting the fat out of the muscle probably, right? [UNKNOWN]: The other part is that they have less mass to actually move around.

1:47:14 [UNKNOWN]: And so there's some sort of functional improvement there, as well. [UNKNOWN]: So anyway, yeah, would stick more on function for that particular case. [UNKNOWN]: But [UNKNOWN]: This has been very, very useful. [UNKNOWN]: I think people are going to have more questions. [UNKNOWN]: You guys just published this huge thing in mass on this at very topic.

1:47:33 [UNKNOWN]: I just had one more question. [UNKNOWN]: And then I think we can have you plug all your new book and everything else where people can find this on mass. [UNKNOWN]: We've, I've talked on the last two episodes of the podcast about this idea of a personal fat threshold where people can store a certain amount of fat, primarily subcutaneous on to the skin.

1:47:54 [UNKNOWN]: And once they exceed that, that fat starts spilling over into places where it shouldn't be generally causing harm. [UNKNOWN]: it goes to the liver, it goes to the visceral adipose tissue, goes to the muscle around the heart, pancreas, et cetera. [UNKNOWN]: And so in those places, it matters not only that fats there, but also what type of fat is there and what it's doing.

1:48:15 [UNKNOWN]: Is it turning over? [UNKNOWN]: Is it static? [UNKNOWN]: Okay, people get that. [UNKNOWN]: would you say that there's sort of a personal fat threshold on the low end as it could sort of signals maybe energy availability and maybe that is the the crux of like perm it's permissive almost for high purger fee does that seem reasonable to you?

1:48:35 [UNKNOWN]: It absolutely does, it comports with what we understand of the data and it comports with what I see in practice as a coach. [UNKNOWN]: I think this is an example where I'm pulling from different lines of research and sometimes they don't talk to each other. [UNKNOWN]: like the, if you look at all of the data, the underlying research that eventually led led to the energy availability and red statements that came out, Montchoi, and the most recent ones in 2023, they haven't yet incorporated body fat percentage, and that is because, in my opinion, [UNKNOWN]: most of the time, there's a co-occurrence of people being in a deficit and seeing that cause the problem while they're getting too lean.

1:49:26 [UNKNOWN]: And it's really rare, and only kind of in weight class for good sport and bodybuilding, where you can try to tease out the difference between being too lean, but maybe being in maintenance, or being in maintenance, and that [UNKNOWN]: They're kind of looking at it through the lens of the ideology of low energy availability is not eating a sufficient amount for your activity expenditure.

1:49:53 [UNKNOWN]: They're not looking at the metabolic adaptation literature. [UNKNOWN]: You know, they're also not looking at the literature that is more broadly on body fat settling points. [UNKNOWN]: So it's not like speak men is talking to Mount Joy is talking to [UNKNOWN]: Is this a situation where you could have somebody who's like 25% body fat, right?

1:50:13 [UNKNOWN]: And now they go on a thousand calorie per day diet. [UNKNOWN]: And so massive deficit, right? [UNKNOWN]: And so it's almost like an acute low energy availability state that is causing perhaps some of this sequelae that you would see generally in people who are very lean and who are also not eating enough for their activities.

1:50:32 [UNKNOWN]: That kind of what you're going with this? [UNKNOWN]: I think so, and I think there's probably limits to how much that can have an impact because there are great examples of extremely low calorie diets where obesity researchers and clinicians were exploring the issues they ran into and going, oh, maybe we should at least give them 10 grams of fat so they don't have, you know, like failures of their bile ducts, right?

1:50:55 [UNKNOWN]: Or, hey, this dude, you know, fasted for a year completely. [UNKNOWN]: And I wanted to give him, you know, a micro nutrient. [UNKNOWN]: And I think it's also why we see showing up in the most recent red statement and why we get some pushback from, say, certain researchers like Arita, it's like, hey, not everything is a negative adaptation to low energy availability.

1:51:20 [UNKNOWN]: There's functional and non-functional. [UNKNOWN]: And you can bring in the looking at the subsistence farmers and hunter gatherers like, [UNKNOWN]: They're doing an okay enough to pass on their genes. [UNKNOWN]: They're getting not great sleep. [UNKNOWN]: You know, they're basically running around as the exercise hypoconatal male, but it's still enough to pass on their genes, procreate, and continue the tribe, right?

1:51:42 [UNKNOWN]: They go in and out of states, a low energy availability, and it's a problem to the degree, it's a problem. [UNKNOWN]: But they are probably used to living their life. [UNKNOWN]: at 9% body fat and being in non-dability of low energy availability all the time and that's okay to be a 5 foot 5, you know, not fully, like maybe if they had more food, the whole tribe would be 5-10 in a kind of scenario, right?

1:52:06 [UNKNOWN]: You know, that's what we see in societies where they move into more modern or food available situation, see it in history. [UNKNOWN]: And so that is exactly what I'm [UNKNOWN]: that 1,000 calorie deficit is a problem for that person, not a 35% body fat, but becomes it at 25% body fat when they get in there.

1:52:29 [UNKNOWN]: And that could be lower or higher for two different people. [UNKNOWN]: You know, and [UNKNOWN]: Also, there are probably arson interactions of sex. [UNKNOWN]: I think you can induce a state of perturbed LH possibility. [UNKNOWN]: So lootinizing home on post-atility is kind of the early warning system, not clinically, but in terms of research, that indicates this person is probably going to experience oligominorea or amenorea [UNKNOWN]: And you can do that by putting even women with obesity on a starvation diet, so that specific system of saying, hey, I'm going to enable you to get pregnant and potentially grow a child inside of you and then need to breastfeed it for several months.

1:53:15 [UNKNOWN]: I'm not going to do that right now and there's no food around because again, Jordan, you and I probably wouldn't be here to talk about it if that was one of the adaptations that didn't get filtered out. [UNKNOWN]: So I'm trying to, you know, you're starving and it's like, you know, let's grow a baby.

1:53:27 [UNKNOWN]: They're like, oh, man, we're all that. [UNKNOWN]: So I think, right, yeah, it doesn't go on, but yeah, no more fashes here. [UNKNOWN]: The last question I have for you, then you plug plug away. [UNKNOWN]: What are we most likely going to be wrong about when we look at this five years from now?

1:53:45 [UNKNOWN]: You and I, like if we look back on this podcast, yeah, I would say probably at any time I get out into speculation land. [UNKNOWN]: There's many models that can fit the observed data that we have, but it doesn't mean they're not wrong. [UNKNOWN]: It just means they are sufficient to explain it.

1:54:04 [UNKNOWN]: A great example is like Newtonian physics. [UNKNOWN]: is not actually the way physics works like you have to bring in, you know, our understanding that that Einstein brought in. [UNKNOWN]: But it didn't matter until we didn't just want to, you know, escape the atmosphere like we wanted to make GPS satellites and we wanted to land on another planet and like, oh, shoot relativity matters now, right?

1:54:25 [UNKNOWN]: So I think. [UNKNOWN]: I don't know, I think muscle memory, we have much more to learn about, why you stop growing, we have much more to learn about. [UNKNOWN]: And I think also, I would say the magnitude of growth that one can achieve. [UNKNOWN]: Like for example, I kind of presented this is if you could somehow do a greater stimulus, then you would have more lean mass.

1:54:49 [UNKNOWN]: I think there probably are some like chassis limits. [UNKNOWN]: Like if you and I went and said, hey, I wanna go live on a 4G planet. [UNKNOWN]: We would probably die in five years. [UNKNOWN]: It'd like it best, right? [UNKNOWN]: Like we just can't sustain that, our heart would fail. [UNKNOWN]: But if we went to go live on a 1.3G planet, maybe you and I would be jacked and just be happy but tired all the time.

1:55:13 [UNKNOWN]: I was like, Ryan Reynolds saved us. [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, it's true, yeah. [UNKNOWN]: Exactly. [UNKNOWN]: Perfect example. [UNKNOWN]: So I like I think there there are limits to this and and describing them Directionally is is inherently wrong, but there is like [UNKNOWN]: We have millions of years of adaptation on a on planet earth with exposure to to to mechanical tension and there is going to be a limit to to what we you can do so I would be very curious I think what I maybe I don't understand fully is the [UNKNOWN]: Is it true that antibiotics steroids are basically just lifting up your, you kind of doing that second puberty and I think some of the drugs that are being developed are going to help us understand this like a milestone inhibitor because there's many different ways that you can.

1:56:03 [UNKNOWN]: reduce use of muscle for basically reduce catapilism so that you're in a net antibiotic state or induce animalism so that you get past that catapolic limiter and then you can also manipulate where those constraints lie with drugs, you know, like if [UNKNOWN]: if you give somebody a clenbuter all, for example, which is not an explicit anabolic agent.

1:56:28 [UNKNOWN]: It essentially enables you to tap into fast stores at much lower body fast and it, you know, with much more efficiency, where if you went to a larger deficit, you'd start pulling from lean mass, [UNKNOWN]: and also is an anti-catabolic for muscles. [UNKNOWN]: So it's like a body recomp agent and it follows a pathway that you probably wouldn't think about.

1:56:46 [UNKNOWN]: So I think as we explore drugs, it'll actually help us understand more about the underlying physiology. [UNKNOWN]: So I think maybe the mechanisms by this might change, but I think I'm reasonably comfortable saying like, [UNKNOWN]: the way I've described it is sufficiently accurate that none of the observations we have clearly break it.

1:57:11 [UNKNOWN]: You know, in terms of a model in our mind, yeah. [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, yeah, we may get better technology to sort of better predict time course or response or like crude, you know, link, stimuli to outcome like better. [UNKNOWN]: But I do, I am an agreement with you that where my interest lies are identifying new constraints.

1:57:32 [UNKNOWN]: And so if we have no more antabolic constrain and catabolic constrain, well, now is it for muscle? [UNKNOWN]: Is it for the blood supply? [UNKNOWN]: Is it for the bone? [UNKNOWN]: Is it for something else? [UNKNOWN]: Some other system that has never been constrained up until now in the superhuman robo-cop AI era?

1:57:52 [UNKNOWN]: Watch the space. [UNKNOWN]: We'll probably still be doing this five after six years from now. [UNKNOWN]: So we'll find out. [UNKNOWN]: Okay, so the practical version. [UNKNOWN]: There are three buckets and the numbers are mostly for men, so add roughly 8% if you're woman. [UNKNOWN]: Above about 20% body fat, energy isn't your constraint for building muscle.

1:58:10 [UNKNOWN]: You can sit in a modest deficit, under 400 calories per day. [UNKNOWN]: As long as you train hard and you get your protein in, you'll build the maximum amount of muscle while you lose fat. [UNKNOWN]: If you were to eat in a surplus that's mostly gonna put on additional fat. [UNKNOWN]: Below about 12% body fat, that seems to change, and a small surplus starts earning its place there.

1:58:30 [UNKNOWN]: At that point, your body has stopped treating its fat stores as something it's willing to spend, and so you need extra energy coming in from the diet. [UNKNOWN]: In between those two points, which is where most people are, it mostly doesn't matter. [UNKNOWN]: Don't run a big deficit, but you also don't need to run a big surplus.

1:58:45 [UNKNOWN]: You mostly spend your attention on the training load. [UNKNOWN]: And when it comes to protein, the meta regression that Dr. Helms worked on gives you a number. [UNKNOWN]: If you're over 20% of body fat, about 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram body weight, gets it done. [UNKNOWN]: When you're under 12%, especially if you're not in a surplus, that number tends to climb.

1:59:04 [UNKNOWN]: Probably closer to 2.5 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. [UNKNOWN]: Believe or you get, the more your body starts eye and your muscle is fuel, and you need some extra dietary protein to make sure it doesn't take it. [UNKNOWN]: Um, Dr. Eric Helms, tell everybody where they can find you about your new book and I will link all that in the show notes.

1:59:21 [UNKNOWN]: Now, absolutely, you know, we finished the third edition of the Muscle and Strength Pyramids end of 2025, so you can find those on Amazon if you want a physical copy or if you're happy to get the PDF, check out Muscle and StrengthPyramids.com, and then if you're interested in nerding out to this degree and reading how I've written extensively about [UNKNOWN]: energy availability, as well as training status, then check out massresertriview.com.

1:59:49 [UNKNOWN]: That is where we have a monthly basis of looking at stuff like this. [UNKNOWN]: I hold down the muscle nerd corner, but we've also got Lauren cleanse of sample, Dr. Eric Trexler, that's sorry, Dr. Lauren cleanse of sample, Dr. Eric Trexler and Dr. Mike Zurdos were all a part of it. [UNKNOWN]: So definitely check those out.

2:00:07 [UNKNOWN]: And if you really want to dig into the [UNKNOWN]: you know, I've done in this space. [UNKNOWN]: I'm also an active researcher and you can find me on one of the Google Machine Google Scholar. [UNKNOWN]: You know, I'm the current director of the Sports Research Institute in New Zealand. [UNKNOWN]: I've been doing that and we're trying to do more research specifically on this topic because I'm interested in it and now I know how funding works.

2:00:30 [UNKNOWN]: So yeah. [UNKNOWN]: That works. [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, and you're, and fortunately outside of the United States, where you can still get funding that'll be correct and that'll be his fourth appearance on the barbell. [UNKNOWN]: That's the podcast we talk about that. [UNKNOWN]: Thanks everybody for listening before you guys go anywhere.

2:00:45 [UNKNOWN]: Please leave us a five star rating and review. [UNKNOWN]: Really help strive traffic to our podcast so we can keep bringing you all of those nuance and health and fitness. [UNKNOWN]: That's Dr. Eric Holmes. [UNKNOWN]: I'm Dr. Jordan Vigambam. [UNKNOWN]: We'll catch you next week and every week right here on the barbell medicine podcast.