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Foreign.
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What's up everybody? Welcome back to Iron Culture presented by Mass. It is me, Eric Drexler, joined by the Dr. Eric Helms. As always, Helms, how are we doing today?
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I'm fantastic. We had a great time in Norway. It was good to see you. That was a pretty cool experience. And yeah, back in the swing of things here. The day I landed, I immediately went with went to work. That's actually one of my hacks for getting right back on the right time schedule. But I also had lots of work to do getting back into it. So. Yeah, how about yourself?
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Yeah, same kind of deal, you know, got home, had work waiting for me. Believe it or not, it does pile up if you walk away from it, but. But yeah, no complaints. Norway was fantastic. Huge shout out to the AFPT for bringing us out there. A lot of good folks in the afpt. Great audience, great group. I was a little upset. The doctor, Lauren Colenzo Semple. I just recorded an episode recently of Front Page Fitness with her and she showed me a picture from a giant biohacking conference run by Dave Asprey. And would you believe they actually had better turnout than we did with the AFPT in Norway?
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That is frustrating. So you're telling me that a specific personal training, regional focused conference specifically designed to help people figure out how to help their clients make long term results was superseded in terms of popularity by a largely profit driven, marketing driven, quick fix community, Is that what you're saying?
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Yeah, that is what I'm saying. And the sticker, I forget the exact price, but it was obscenely expensive to even get in the door of this biohacker conference. And then of, of course, I'm sure it was like just every 30 or 40 minutes there was some kind of opportunity to separate you from several thousand dollars of your own money. And one of the key exhibits that they were highlighting was this like giant. It's not an actual bed you would sleep in, but it's like a red light therapy kind of reclined situation. But it was like $160,000 if you were so inclined. So it really just comes down to how much you enjoy recovery and want your cells to function. If you value your cells and their function, then you won't be cheap and you'll fork over the 160 grand instead of the used Lamborghini that you were otherwise going to earmark that cash for.
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Yeah, it's those tough decisions that really show people's commitment to health. Are you going to buy a second luxury car to be stuck in traffic with for a job that you actually could just work from home? Or are you going to buy something that is exorbitantly expensive and signals that you care about health that probably doesn't do anything for your health? These are the tough decisions that people need to make if they're actually serious about their commitment to health, longevity, fitness and the rest. So yeah, don't be a fool and hire someone like an AFBT certified trainer who is going above and beyond the level of certification typically needed in our industry to call yourself a trainer who might be able to help you make substantive changes to your long term trajectory of health. Really just look at maybe winning the lottery so you can participate in this really productive longevity market that's out there so that you can live forever doing really nothing except trying to live forever. I think that is the goal that most of us should aspire to.
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Of course. Yeah. And I mean you have to at some point tip the cap. What Dave Asprey has built from the initial what if I put butter in my coffee premise, it is a remarkable behemoth cash printing machine. So honestly, it's kind of amazing. At the time he said, hey, hey guys, put butter in your coffee. Every home in America had both butter and coffee in their home. It was all just waiting there. Could have been implemented at literally no additional cost and he has just turned it into a money making extravaganza. So tip of the cap. Even if I don't really love the the premise or the methods.
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No, I mean, honestly, if you told me, hey, I've got this fantastic startup package, it's going to require you to purchase or maybe even just steal a mug, some instant coffee and a stick of butter from maybe your workplace office and then film some things in that office and don't tell your boss and then quit because clearly that's going to result in a multimillion dollar long term career based upon literally nothing. Except for, hey, maybe this is a cool thing, then I would have looked back on my career and thought why did I spend 10 years in school? Why did I develop, you know, multiple years of coaching experience and then start multiple businesses during a financial collapse? That was quite risky and you know it. I don't know about you, Trex, but it makes me question some of the things I've done with my life.
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Yeah, I mean if the goal was profit maximization, then Dave, Dave really hit the efficiency on the head there. Just here's two things. You could combine them, but why not pay me instead, which now you have $160,000 beds. So. All right, Helms, I think now is probably the right time to dive in to the meat of the episode, actually before I do that. Okay. I know you're going to get me while we're talking about you.
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Yeah, exactly. And, and actually one, one thing that you probably would not mention. So I will, I will interrupt you then. I'll, then I'll pass the baton of, of us trying to make our best play at becoming a, a really less successful version of Dave Asprey is that we've actually, and it was announced at the conference, started a partnership with afpt. So for those who don't know, the academy for personal training has been for more than a decade. The first time I went to the conference in 2015, they were already well established in this role, been the primary provider of personal training education in Norway. But now they've also over time moved in to provide that in Sweden and they've done a fantastic job there. And now they are actually launching an English language version of their certification. So AFPT International, which is awesome. I've always known, because I've known the people who started it that they've been heavily committed beyond any need to, if you to take a look at what is required to be in the evidence based space for personal training to education and continuing education. So they wanted to partner with MASS to provide a continuing education to people who are AFPT certified and also bring that on as they're launching into the English speaking market. So for two reasons I'm very excited. One, I think this is one of the best providers of personal training education. So if you're interested in getting into this market, you want to take a look at it. Right now it's primarily focused on the English speaking European market. So AFPT International, check that out. And also just stoked because we get to provide that continuing education to ensure their trainers are continuing to reach new heights of expertise. So I'll leave it there, but just definitely check out AFPT and then I'll let you do the remaining parts of our shilling. If, if you would like to take that gold baton and get out of your $160,000 bed and run with it.
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Yes, absolutely. So folks, you know the drill at this point. Elite fts, our brothers in commerce, valued partnership with them. If you are looking for some apparel, some gym gear, anything under that general umbrella, Elite FTS has extremely high quality stuff. I highly recommend it. I've been using their straps for over 15 years at this point and I cannot wear them down despite there is a time there Helms, where I was doing a lot of ego lifting on a lot of very silly rack pulls with a very high bar position. You know, rack pulls with like a 2 inch range of motion just trying to destroy the straps and could not do it. So elitefts.com use the discount code MRR10. That stands for mass research review. 10 gets you a 10% discount. And of course if you really love the show, aside from all the normal stuff like rate, subscribe, review, all that stuff, of course you can support us by checking out the Mass Research Review over@massresearchreview.com that is the the headlining sponsor of the show. It's presented by Mass. It's what keeps the whole machine moving. So if you are interested in knowing more about training, nutrition, psychology, coaching, anything that would be useful to someone who is a fitness or health enthusiast, you definitely want to check out Mass and we would greatly appreciate it. Anything to add Helms?
- [09:35]
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No, just a big thanks to our dear listeners. I believe as this comes out you will have just heard myself bringing back Omar Yusuf to the fold of the cult. And just having recently discussed the Iron Culture documentary which you know, now that we have had that episode of self congratulatory bliss, we're coming back to do what supposedly we never do based upon some prior comments we responded to, which is answer questions from the dear listeners. Of course, to ask those questions. Trex, I think we recently upped it to having at least 65,000 followers now on Instagram and we haven't figured out the correct conversion if you're on a different social media platform. But we're working on that. So yeah, absolutely.
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All right, Helms, well, great intro. We will dive right in. I think probably the first one I want to start with is a callback to a recent episode looking for a little clarification. So I'm going to dish one to myself and then hit you with a bunch of these for the rest of the episode. So so we had a question from Anonymous, very spooky. And they said they were listening to the chat that we recorded in Australia when we were talking about weight loss resistance, how rare it is, the kind of unique situations where it is like a pretty, pretty tough thing to tackle. But more so we talked more about the practical sides of know, practical applications of when it seems like you're weight loss resistant. What can we do right? So this person says they're listening to that episode and they're saying I'm 105 pounds, small woman. Her words, not mine. She Says I maintain my weight at 2,400 calories per day and I'm not an endurance athlete. Does this put me above the mean? She says, you should know this created utter hell for me because cause I was trying to recover from reds relative energy deficiency in sport as a strength athlete only and dietitians were putting me on like 1600 calories and I was losing weight when they thought that they were treating my reds. And so the question is kind of what gives? And this is a really important point to bring up because super quick, simple clarification, but one of the things I talked about in that episode was this kind of classic figure showing total daily energy expenditure as a function of body size. Or you could look at it as total weight or fat free mass. Usually fat free mass gives you the best signal. And so when you look at fat free mass, it's our main predictor of basal metabolic rate. But in this particular case we're talking total daily energy expenditure. And what I highlighted in that kind of figure, and you've probably seen it all over the place on the Internet, what I highlighted was the significant asymmetry in terms of how much variance we find below the mean and above the mean. And that was really a critical point in my view to kind of reiterate about this idea of having unusually low energy expenditure. So we expect that at the upper ranges it can fan out a lot. Of course some of that is going to be individual differences in basal metabolic rate. A lot of that's also going to have to do with lifestyle, non exercise activity, your training activity on top of that. So what we find is that when you look at people with lower than average energy expenditure, they really kind of fit along this relatively tight window of values at a given body size. But then they fan out and there's a tremendous amount of variance when you start looking well above the mean. And the kind of take home point there was, of course we expect there's going to be variance in energy expenditure, but there's some stuff that a human body has to do to still be a living functioning human body. And those things have a cost. And you know, we talked about how like sodium potassium pumps, there's no bartering at the sodium potassium pump. If you want to move those electrolytes, you're going to have to pay up with the ATP. Same thing goes with when it comes to muscle contraction. If you want, you know, cross bridge cycling to keep on going, if you want those action potentials to keep propagating, there's just an ATP cost That there's no getting around, right. And so when our gets in a really energy, I don't want to mix too many terms here. When our body's in a state of low energy availability and we are, for example, in a pretty substantial deficit, of course there are going to be some areas where we can boost efficiency, turn down some like less essential functions. And we feel that there's clinical ramifications of that. See the most recent IOC position stand on reds, right? All those things we say, well, why do I have impaired immune function? Because your body's trying to save some calories by turning down the energy cost of the immune system. Why is my reproductive system out of whack? Well, because your body's turning that down as well. Why am I not recovering from training as well? Well, that's going to be impaired as well because you don't have enough energy to support that recovery. So there's going to be some areas where your body can start getting kind of cheap if we use like a financial budgetary analogy. But there's some stuff where it's just the cost, right? You still have to pay rent, you know what I mean? And so that's why a major take home point of that discussion is we have all sorts of varian above the mean. And this listener absolutely falls in that category. But when we start looking at the people who say I can't lose weight on, you know, seven calories per pound of body weight and I'm pretty lean, you know, we start finding these scenarios where people are quoting calorie intakes that are not supporting weight loss. And when we look at actual human measurements, they really, it's not just that they're rarities, it's that we can't observe them in nature based on the data that have been collected in many, many, many thousand people. So that's a take home point. But this is a great question because it highlights the fact that we can use these kind of general relationships that have been plotted with high quality data to understand where the boundaries generally exist, what seems implausible versus plausible. But because of how much variance we see, especially near the mean and above the mean, we can't just all live by a pretty simple calorie calculator, right? We have to understand that the human body's dynamic in its energy expenditure within individual and between individual. There's so much variance that we do have to kind of play a little guess and check and try to figure out where our calories are. Unfortunately, it's. I'm very surprised about the experience of dramatically undershooting calories, working with a dietitian to treat reds, that is the opposite of what you want to do. So hopefully I'm going to make optimistic assumptions and say the dietitian started conservative as part of, you know, trying to manage, maybe thinking the client would be a little too hesitant about going higher. Hopefully they elevated those calories very quickly once they got a sense of what was going on. So I try not to dump on clinicians and really bash them if I don't understand the full context and timeline of what happened. But, but definitely if you are a clinician or a coach, you got to be really cognizant of saying, hey, I think 1600 calories is enough, but it may be almost double that before we actually start getting some meaningful improvement.
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Yeah, I. For any clinicians listening, or really anybody listening who has an interest in this topic, I'd actually really recommend a great episode on Seinfeld, Tony. But yeah, great episode of Seinfeld actually, now that I think about it though, this podcast episode of Dr. Tony Bataji might be more relevant. So maybe we'll come back to the Seinfeld one. But it was recent. I think it was a couple ones ago with Dr. Kate Ackerman. And it's really helpful because, you know, the very first IOC statement on low energy availability in red s came out 2014. Does that sound right? And then they updated it in 2018 and they most recently updated again in 2023. And this is an evolution that started from the female athlete triad. And the female athlete triad was a really, really important step. But that saying kind of we stand on the shoulders of giants is important because the if you were someone experiencing red s and low energy availability and you were a male probably could have been more easily overlooked 20 years ago. And if you were a female, there might have been assumptions that there was some disordered eating patterns there rather than just potentially under fueling because maybe you had actually a really high energy expenditure like this. So that 2014 position stand was really important. But one of the things that I would say is a pretty valid critique of the initial work on low energy availability in red S was that it was based on probably too specific of a quantitative number which defined it as being below 30kcal per kg of fat free mass after correcting for exercise activity expenditure. And while this did get discussed and revised and softened at the 2018 and especially in the 2023 position stand, I think some of that kind of I like a number so I'm going to hold on to it. Mindset was, was pretty set and there are still practitioners who kind of maybe hold certain numbers with maybe a little bit too much confidence, especially clinically. When we consider the intrinsically tied nature of total daily energy expenditure variance, it has to also factor into other components of total daily energy expenditure. And it's quite arbitrary. For what we decide is exercise activity and what is non exercise activity. Right. You know, especially in some of the ways that these studies were done, they were done on very homogeneous populations of certain people who did have a relatively fixed energy expenditure. So yes, if you could quantify TDEE and you go, okay, these are all sedentary women with obesity between the ages of 40 and 50, then maybe, and those values are quite useful. But ultimately what you need to do as a practitioner, if you want to be working with populations where this is a legit reality, is understand that it can look very different between individuals and especially classes of sport. So when you talk to me about low energy availability and red S it is almost always through purposeful restriction. And then it is compounded by the fact that someone is, is actively trying to get leaner than is advisable or healthy or good for performance. Or maybe skirting that line, if we're talking about weight class restricted strength athletes and trying to figure out where they can still be functional but potentially experiencing some aspect of lea. But when you are an endurance athlete, it is almost that sometimes the volumes of training, if that also happens to be quite high and covary with the fact that you are just one of those outliers in terms of energy expenditure, then some of those more quantitative breakdowns, especially if someone is coming to a perspective on red S or LEA from maybe a different sport or a more ideal with people with disordered eating patterns, kind of female athlete triad background, they might think you're far different than you are or that there is some issue with food rather than kind of starting with a little more of a blank slate or asking more questions. So that does happen even in well read, reasonably well informed practitioners. So just a really good reminder and the reason why I recommended that podcast with, with, with Kate Ackerman is because she speaks to all of those things in the history and talks about how many things really do vary. And then what are the ways that we can actually assess whether or not someone is actually dealing with lea, problematic LEA or actual full blown RED S. And there are a lot of different clinical markers, but there are also some good practical markers and there are some actual online tools and Assessments that have been published with the most recent and some of the subsequent work afterwards. So really rich area, evolving area. And I would highly recommend people to check out those resources.
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Yeah, and I'm sure we've all run into that, right. Where you've. The older you get, the more practitioners you work with just because your body starts breaking down and your health falls apart and your life gets worse. So if any young listeners, that's what you have to look forward to. But you do see this, like this variance in practitioners where some folks, they kind of like treat things like a flowchart value is above blank. I do this and then you have those other really good clinicians or practitioners who try to make a more holistic kind of contextualized, like let's start with the blank slate. That gives me a good framework for what I would typically do. But let's dig in deeper and figure out what the right course of action is. Right. So you're always in any profession you're going to have, there's exceptional lawyers and crappy lawyers. There's exceptional physicians. Crappy physicians. Right. And sometimes, you know, people are doing things because their hands are kind of tied in terms of like this is how they make me practice in this facility. Right. So all that is to say that that's why I never immediately cast aspersions on clinicians based on kind of secondhand understanding of how the treatment plan went down. All right, Helms, one more quick one that I want to chime in on. And then it's going to be the Helm show. So we had a question from another one from an anonymous source. The question is how come everyone says food volume is one of the biggest factors when it comes to satiety, when fat, the most calorie dense macronutrient is also said to be very satiating. I have a few thoughts about this. I'm kind of out on the whole concept of saying blank is satiating because I find that it just remove so much context that it, it kind of becomes meaningless. Like I've heard some people say. Well, I've heard many people attribute. I've heard people say protein is extremely satiating. I've heard people say fat in this comment is extremely satiating. I've heard people said carbohydrates are really what give you your satiety. So in terms of the macro battle, like you can dig into the research on it, I find it to be a relatively disinteresting topic because I just don't think that's what we should be looking for when we're ranking satiety, I really don't think it's a macronutrient thing in terms of the big levers that we're, we're kind of pulling on. To answer the question directly, I want to allude to an article I wrote in Mass back in, oh, it was years ago, I forget. The paper came out in 2022, it was by Flynn and colleagues. And it gets right to the root of this question. And what they did was they created a two component model of ultimately what is going to dictate how many calories you consume at a meal. And one of the big differentiating factors in terms of what is the limiting thing here that tells me I'm going to stop eating? Is it the volume of the meal or is it the energy content of the meal? The big differentiating factor was energy density. So if you're eating a meal that's very low in energy density, let's say it's 1 or 1.5 calories per gram of food consumed, then generally speaking, volume is going to be the rate limiting factor. You are literally going to fill up your stomach when you're eating a meal of that energy density and you're gonna say I'm full because of the physical mass in your stomach, the volume of that food, more so than the amount of energy you consumed. However, if you're eating a very energy dense dessert, let's say the energy density is 3.5 or 4 or even 5 calories per gram, what's gonna happen is the kind of signal that tells you, okay, satiety has occurred, it's time to stop eating. You don't really wanna do this anymore. It's gonna be the calorie content rather than the volume. Right? So when you challenge yourself to eat a whole cheesecake, the calories are what make you tap out. When you challenge yourself to eat a whole watermelon, the volume is what makes you tap out. And so that's what kind of gets to the heart of this question. Why do people say food volume is a big factor? It is sometimes. Why do people say a really fatty Melissa Tide is very satiating? Because they're probably talking about meals that are on the higher side of that energy, energy density spectrum. And so basically both people are right. But usually what, what people really care about. Because if you want to know like what increases satiety? Eating stuff. So eating large amounts of stuff, either in volume or mass or caloric content, eating stuff is basically what I'm saying, usually what people want to know is what is more satiating per calorie. And that's a very, very big distinction. And so if you, if you are going to look for a meal that's very satiating per calorie, I think the game plan there is pretty simple. Low energy density, decent amount of protein, decent amount of fiber, get some good veggies in there with high water content, even some fruits in the mix if you like, stuff that makes you chew, stuff that slows down your eating rate. That's kind of this multifactorial model for what makes for a satiating meal per calorie consumed, which is usually what everybody cares about. Because guess what's very satiating? Helms three 2 ounce shots of olive oil. Very satiating. Very disgusting. Not calorically efficient.
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No. And this is such an interesting one because the rise of GLP1 agonists, GIPS and the other classes of drugs right now has created a more specific awareness of what started as a colloquial term, but has now actually got some validated, reliable questionnaires on food noise. The term food noise. And this is actually becoming, it's emerging and I don't know where it's going to land, but there are some researchers who are actually saying, you know, this maybe three types of hunger. And I'm using that term loosely because one of them, like two of them would not be considered hunger. But there's like hedonic eating, there's food noise driven eating and then there's actual hunger. And when you. Some of the proposed ways of separating the two is that hedonic eating is based primarily on desire, sensation and trying to derive pleasure from a food experience. Hunger is based upon the specific mechanisms of appetite signaling that come from sensing low energy in the body. And then the food noise has something to do more with almost your addictive like focus, hyper fixation, distraction. And the reason why I bring in kind of that addictive component is there's a whole bunch of clinical trials right now that are showing other effects of GIP1s and GLP1s. Sorry. Anyway, this class of medication because of the way it actually acts on the brain of reducing alcohol intake, reducing things that are typically associated with addictive behavior more broadly and specifically focusing on the neurobiology of what these drugs do, which is I find really fascinating and I think some people have, have even questioned, hey, are, you know, we've had this internal debate actually with, with Dr. Sirdos on, on some of the articles you wrote, hey, the self regulation that we want to try to get from someone so that they don't overeat. They're not getting hunger signals from, from GLP once and they therefore won't be able to deal with it. But in actuality, that's a little more nuanced of a conversation because there's some indications that GLP1s don't necessarily blunt all aspects of hunger. And clinicians will tell you that certain people don't seem to be responders to certain classes of these drugs. And it might be that if food noise is not the actual issue, it could be some other factor. So appetite, all that is to say, is complex. We're still understanding it. And I think ultimately, like you said, what people are really interested in is what foods can I eat that will make me eat fewer calories? Because you can get satiated on almost anything, but you will get a lot of body fat accumulation in the process of some of them. And you know, when people focus on macros, which I think is still kind of a holdover from kind of maybe our era, their. I'm not saying there's not an independent effect of macronutrients, but I'm saying that it is completely overwhelmed by other factors such as like fiber content, energy density and also other cues, rate of eating and texture. And all of these things are existing at the same time. So I would really encourage someone to look into Barbara Rull's work. Very, very convincing stuff where she can isolate literally the, the specific component of energy density, which is the weight divided by the calories. So you can actually see it. But in some cases there are things that, that can have a similar effect that don't actually have a very good energy density, like air pop. Popcorn is actually a great example. It doesn't have that great of an energy density compared to other things because it doesn't weigh very much. But it takes a long time to eat. And visually it looks like a lot of food. And it enables you to get some of these other aspects that provide a pretty notable satiety effect. But then when you look at the macronutrients, if someone, you know, if you told like a keto zealot, hey, here was the macronutrients of this meal. It was primarily carbohydrate. Oh man, that's going to be. And not very much fiber, some in popcorn, but not compared to some other things. Oh yeah, that's going to really make you eat too much. But that's, that's not what that does. So I think it's, it's just really important to acknowledge that there are a lot of levers that you can potentially pull in the spectrum of things that impact appetite. But appetite is at least three things. If we try to delineate it, we're still understanding them. And the element of macronutrient intake is probably one of the smaller contributors in the grand scheme of the collection of, of, let's say, effect sizes that might go into this, you know, multifactorial complex intervention of what could be more satiating.
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Yeah, yeah. So I think that's been. That was my hobby horse for a while. There was some of my mass content. I wrote several articles about satiety and kind of basically just was like, I. I don't really want to do the whole. Is protein satiating? Are carb satiating? Is fat satiating? Because when we actually start to do the. The real trials that are focusing on the big rocks or the big levers we can pull, they're like, yeah, like macronutrient content matters, particularly having enough protein and then modifying the rest so that your energy density is kind of on the lower end. But. But it's just there's so many other more important factors going on than the carb versus the fat ratio, for example. All right, Helms, a question for you. This is something near and dear to your heart. We're going to talk about making gains in a deficit or holding on to muscle in a deficit. So I'm going to give you. This is going to be a double question and I'm going to let you kind of run with it here. So both of these questions came from the same person. I wonder if they're planning a cut. We'll see. But they said, number one, why should protein increase during an aggressive calorie deficit? And the other question was, when the calorie deficit exceeds around 500 calories per day, what is the actual cause of muscle loss or poorer retention? And they were asking, is this like psychological? Is it that your performance is dropping because you're in a deficit, or is it actually just a biological. Not enough energy to go around to support the tissue. So two questions, all about cutting.
- [34:10]
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Yeah. So the first question. So the second question is basically why. And then the first question was the first.
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The. So the second question is all about energy. So there's that, you know, we covered that meta regression in mass where it looked like, you know, over a deficit of about 500 calories. Huge caveats, asterisks, etc. We shouldn't interpret that number super literally, but everyone does anyway. But the idea is really big Deficits threaten your ability to gain new muscle or retain the muscle you have. So purely on the energy side, that's one question. The second question was why should protein intake go up during an aggressive deficit?
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Great. Yeah. And they're actually quite. I think they're mechanistically linked.
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Yeah, that's why I squeezed them together. But I didn't want to force you into that.
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Yeah, well, no, I'm all about it. So I actually am writing about this topic pretty extensively. I'm kind of created this, what I wanted to be, a very pointed, specific article on body recomposition for mass, which ended up becoming a magnum opus where I predicted gains in someone over like a whole career and then talk about appropriate surpluses and found myself being like, this should be a book on body recomp. But I think the reason you're like, I'm not talking about body recomp, I'm talking about cutting. The interesting thing about body recomposition is everyone thinks about it as something that occurs in and around maintenance. But body recomposition is related to energy balance, but it is not requiring one to be in a positive, neutral or negative energy balance. We have observed and will continue to observe people who lose fat and gain muscle across the energy balance spectrum, but most of it is actually occurring in a deficit, even if it's small, because fat has a little more than five times the energy density, or I should say adipose tissue has five times the energy density of lean tissue. So what that means is that if you gain a couple of pounds of muscle and you lose a pound of fat, you're in a deficit by definition. So the reason why protein is probably a good idea to increase in a deficit and our data continually seems to support this. See the 2025 meta regression that we did led by Ruffalo is because substrate utilization chronically changes when you're in a deficit and the leaner you get. So one thing that's kind of interesting about that Kohler meta analysis is if you look at the people who are in the study, the inclusion criteria, it was largely folks on average who were in a overweight to obese BMI classification, with most of it probably being around 30. It was also people who were predominantly pretty, not that well trained, and when you look at the spread, certainly the inflection point, and there was actually a very, very few study groups that were actually on that point of 500kg deficit. So this is a model relationship that is heavily influenced by other factors. There was a whole lot of study groups that were gaining muscle Or I should say gaining lean mass when they were in somewhere between a 50 to 250 calorie deficit. And even once you crossed over that supposed inflection point of 500, there were like four study groups that had meaningful gains in lean mass from the like 500 to even 1700 calorie range of a deficit, daily deficit. Right. So that can happen. And these aren't individuals when you look at that plot. They're study groups. So dozens of people who on average were gaining muscle in a thousand calorie plus deficit. So that is body recomposition by definition. They're gaining muscle and they're in a deficit. They lost fat. Right. So what happens though is quite interesting. There's fantastic classic research where you put people under total starvation for a temporary period and you look at some of their changes in their metabolism. And when you do this with lean individuals or individuals with obesity, you see very stark differences. So gluconeogenesis, where you're actually converting glucose into other things, or actually I should say you're, you're converting other things into glucose, whether that is components of, of, of fat or components of protein, and actually directly utilizing some of the branched chain amino acids like leucine and the muscle for energy, rather than for constructing tissue that goes up two to three fold by different markers in people who are lean versus those with obesity, where it actually doesn't change at all. Right. So another component to whether or not you are going to be using more protein and what fuels you're going to be used as you get into a deficit is essentially the response based upon your body composition to being in an energy deficit and the degree of that energy deficit. And this is a very simple way of thinking about it. If you have a lot of endogenous fuel stores available, your body is more than happy to rely on them without starting to ring the alarm bell and telling your hypothalamus, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, we got a problem here. Maybe we should start relying on some of these excess proteins and protein in the diet that we would otherwise use for stuff like building blocks or building proteins or even your immune system function. We need to start pulling back and conserving and going back to what Red S is. That's the experience of your physiology actually downregulating to the point where it is being thrifty in ways that are negatively impacting performance and at least health in the short term. Turning things off, like your ability to reproduce, down regulating things like your defense against infection, and also turning things down like muscle protein synthesis. And this is also shown in other mechanistic work. So there's been a few studies where they've looked at a relatively large acute deficit in someone who is in the overweight or higher category and they see a dampening of muscle protein synthesis. The good news is that can be rescued with a supply of amino acids as well as resistance training. However, when those same or very similar protocols are replicated in people who are not in the overweight or higher BMI category, we see an increase in muscle protein breakdown and a dampening of muscle protein synthesis. And this is just another way of describing what I said earlier of people using two to three fold more protein for energy effectively. So there is a metabolic consequence to being in a deficit and then having less available exogenous stores of, of fuel on your body. Another great way of showing this actually was in the in house participant level meta analysis that you did when you were going over the knocks against some of the aspects of the P ratio debate. And you actually had a pretty convincing forest plot. You use what's called the lean gains metric, which is essentially you just subtract fat loss from muscle gain so that any loss of fat mass or any gain of muscle is contributing to your overall lean gains metric. And this is useful because instead of calculating something that's based upon a ratio of fat mass to lean mass gains, what do you do when one is negative? It gives you a nonsense mathematical number. Now you can reward with one kind of intuitive number an increase in either one. And when you look at that plot, there's a pretty clear clustering of the higher your body fat gets, the leaner your gains get. In terms of this lean gains metric, which is completely contrary to what most people think. You know, we talk about, hey, we should diet down and then, you know, we'll, we'll be able to make these lean gains because we've improved insulin sensitivity and all this good stuff. And while mechanistically some of that sort of looks good on paper, the reality is, is that when you're really, really high in body fat, your body is kind of waiting to let go of some of that body fat. And at least in some ways now you can get things like insulin resistance, leptin resistance, et cetera. But in acute energy deficits, and especially with exercise, where you're turning on glute four and all these other opportunities to improve glucose handling, all that stuff gets resolved quite quickly. And what we see is that individuals high in body fat, when they start doing resistance training pretty quickly, they are going to start losing fat and gaining muscle. And it doesn't seem to necessarily be impeded. So everything that determines whether or not you're going to lose muscle in a deficit is heavily dependent upon several factors. One, how quickly could you gain muscle in an ideal scenario anyway? And then the rate at which you wish to gain muscle at do you have adequate nutritional support to provide for the energy intensive process of building muscle? So actually turning on muscle protein synthesis and then is that going to be constrained by the fact that you might be lean or not? Because that will also shift your metabolism more towards turning up muscle protein breakdown. Right. So there's essentially just this, an energy crisis. If someone is lean and in a deficit, they simply don't have the energy needed to provide for muscle. Building at the almost cellular level, I think is a good way to look at it because of the shifts we're seeing in their signaling of when there is low energy availability, both chronically, if we're talking about endogenous stores, and acutely. And you can see that large energy deficits, even if you are relatively high in body fat, compromise one's ability to gain or in some cases maintain muscle. And also relatively modest energy deficits in someone who is very lean, do the same thing. But when someone is really high in body fat and they go on a moderate energy deficit, we often see really good stuff, you know, and we start even correcting chronic issues that would enable their ability to gain more muscle mass. So we see divergent outcomes in testosterone. When you take men with obesity who often have metabolic issues that lead to actual suppression of testosterone due to aromatase issues. And the opposite is in very lean men who go on a deficit, you'd see testosterone go up in one and testosterone go down in the other. And this is one of the current issues we have with over prescription of trt. If you're giving someone who has low T because of metabolic consequences secondary to obesity hormone replacement therapy, you're not treating the underlying issue and you might be making the system worse. But if you're taking someone who has a genuine hypogonadal issue with TRT and they happen to also have a high body fat, but that's not the root cause, you get a divergent outcome. And then if you're taking someone who is low in body fat and that's the reason their testosterone is low trt, that might help them, but it's also not the root issue. The root issue is they're too lean and they're not able to sustain a regular signal to their hypothalamus that we're not in an energy crisis. Which is why it doesn't matter if you're shredded, if you try to restore, you know, the, the energy balance, or if you try to restore a certain degree of energy availability, you might always kind of be in that semi suppressed state. And we can do okay in that. That's just kind of the typical hypogonadal male. And as you know, working with Herman Ponzer, when we look at some of these subsistence societies, whether they're hunter gatherers or they're subsistence farmers, they're walking around with shorter stature, certain degrees of malnutrition, they're doing enough to pass on their genes, but not a whole lot more. And that is a very different scenario than other people are in. And they are probably walking around with low T3, low testosterone, high SHBG, low free testosterone, et cetera, but not so much that they can actually procreate. So all of that is to say that that doesn't surprise me given some of the other findings that we see not just mechanistically, but in applied outcomes. There's a great systematic review by Hemsfield, who's a legend in the body composition and energy expenditure and obesity space that looks at early phase weight loss and voluntary weight loss. And early phase is still weeks and months. And there's a specific analysis where they're looking at different levels of body fat initially and you see that the lower the body fat is, the higher the loss of lean mass. And this is probably just the metabolic consequence. Likewise, in our specific analysis that we did, led by Dr. Refalo, we did see that in a deficit, on average, yes, there is a higher point where you get better benefits of protein. And it's not kind of the 1.2 to 1.3 point where you get a positive effect size when you're at maintenance or a surplus. When you combine it with resistance training, where you see lean mass increase, that actually shifts all the way up to on average, across body fat percentages, 1.9 to where on average the modeling is that there's no change in lean mass. And then higher than that, you might be able to put on muscle. That's probably that same metabolic effect exacerbated by the fact that our analysis was specifically only on people below a certain body fat cutoff who were not in the at least the with obesity categories. And then our moderator analyses, which a bit of caution should be applied to them because they're a smaller analysis, we saw three different slopes as you went from looking at the mid range body fat to the low or the higher body fat percentage. And when you look specifically at the low or lean tertile of our analysis, which was a group of men under 12% and the women who are under 20%, that inflection point of where you had neutral change in lean body mass shifted from 1.9 to 2.5 grams per kilogram of protein. And the overall slope is quite flat, meaning, or rather, yeah, it's right, shifted and flat, meaning that you're not going to be able to put on that much muscle in that scenario even if you do jack up your protein. And we have a ton of case studies that are specifically kind of corroborating this, where we see natural bodybuilders who are consuming that amount are often higher still losing some lean mass. And the few instances where we actually see full maintenance or even a slight gain in lean mass during a cut, one is on a figure athlete and the other is on a female physique competitor who has five years of training experience. So what's the difference between say your typical male competitive, sometimes pro division natural bodybuilder and a figure Competitor? Someone with 5 years of training experience. They're earlier in their training career so they can put on muscle faster. So a really interesting way of answering this is let's forget about a deficit and talk about a surplus. Right. So we have a lot of studies on bulking and we have the one that we did in my lab that was on pretty damn experienced resistance trainers. We have Ina Garth and colleagues who actually out of Norway looked at elite athletes performing a hypertrophy oriented strength conditioning program. We have Smith who looked at people with six months experience or more. Then we've got Rosnik that had a pretty hardcore four day per week hypertrophy oriented training program. High volume in young university aged males who did not have resistance training experience. And in each case you see that a larger surplus is more beneficial and that kind of starts to step down and down and down. So they gave a 2000-calorie weight gainer shake to the intervention groups in Rosnik that they fit into and on top of their diet. And the groups that got that intervention, they put on three and a half kilos, or sorry, three kilos of lean mass over eight weeks. Right. You don't see that level of gain in their control group who just ate their habitual diet and you actually see body recomposition. They're in a slight deficit and they lost some fat mass on average. Smith, they did kind of a cool linear Bayesian modeling approach. And again, these are like late stage novices, intermediates. Once they tried to gain more than 2% of their body mass per month, if you look at the average, they started to put on more body fat. So now you're seeing less total gains and a smaller surplus is what's beneficial for them. And then in Gart that they had the two different categories of people, one working with a dietitian who had them eaten, a more intentional surplus, and the other ones that kind of did it habitually and it averages out to them being in a 0.5% rate of gain per month or 1.5% rate of gain per month. And no significant differences in terms of lean mass gained. But the extra surplus that was made up in the group gaining faster came in the form of fat mass. So what this means is that you can gain muscle with various energy intakes if it supports the rate of muscle mass that you can gain. So that means that a less experienced person who gets a really strong anabolic stimulus and creates a strong nutrient partitioning effect towards muscle protein synthesis that's going to get higher than they will when they're later in their career can be in a larger deficit and not lose muscle or be gaining muscle. And when you are a more experienced lifter, no matter what you do, even if everything's optimal, you're only going to gain so quickly. So what you're doing kind of should always look like body recomp. And if nutrient availability is not going to constrain that rate of growth because it's only happening slowly, then you can't really expect much. But a deficit is not going to necessarily be worse off for you if you're a more experienced lifter versus not. It's just that body recomposition becomes a lot less likely. So this is even shown recently. There was actually a study that just got published by Vargas Molina and I love this research group. They do a lot of good work. But like four times now they have said, hey, this group was eating at maintenance and this group was eating in a surplus, or this group is eating in a deficit. And they actually weren't when you look at the outcome on body composition. So they had a like keto bulking study. When you actually look at the outcomes, they were in a mild deficit. And they went, you know, there's some issues with keto. And it's like, well, I'm not sure if it was energy related or not.
- [53:05]
B
Yeah, the way they tend to describe it is like the intention Of a surplus or the intention.
- [53:10]
A
Yeah, yes. So in this one they had the intention of a 250 calorie deficit or the intention of eating it maintenance. But when you actually do the math on the changes in body composition, both groups gained about a kilo of lean mass and then one group lost more fat mass and one group lost a little bit of fat mass. And what you see is that one group was like in 150 calorie deficit and the other one was I think between 300 to 400. So because these were individuals, if you look at the study, average body fat was around like 25% in both groups. And this is a mixed but primarily male group. And that was randomized these two trials. So they were basically trying to see, hey, is body recomp better when you're at maintenance or in a slight deficit? And if you use like the lean gains metric, body recomp was better in a slight deficit because they both gained similar muscle mass and one group lost more fat mass. But if you had had them a group that was say 12% body fat, that may have not been true. Especially let's say if these were not just people with a year and a half of training experience is what they had on average. If you do People with 10 and a half years of training experience, they're not going to be able, no matter what, to gain a kilogram of lean mass over a, you know, two to three month period. Right. So that means that you're not going to see much in the way of lean gains no matter what you do with the surplus or maintenance. And going into a deficit when they're already lean in this case now, it might actually threaten lean mass retention. And there may have been a difference between groups. But if you got people who can still grow pretty quickly, you know, they're a year and a half into their training career and they're relatively high in body fat, perhaps a 400 calorie, 350 calorie deficit, 150 calorie deficit or maintenance. None of those are sufficient to constrain the rate of muscle growth they had. And they were also consuming 2.5 grams per kilogram of protein. Right. So they were providing an excess amount of amino acids that might have otherwise been converted into fuel to some degree and above what we would have recommended or observed or modeled for what was sufficient for this type of category or population, I should say, for offsetting any of those metabolic changes from being in a deficit. So long answer. But hopefully that kind of ties a bow on a few of Those aspects.
- [55:40]
B
Yeah. And let's solidify that bow. It's like I'm giving you an oral exam here. And so part two is practical application. Okay. Because we did have a person submit a question with a little, a little bit of a background or backstory. So I'm going to read it from the perspective of the asker, who is Natalia. So Natalia says, I used to be recreational powerlifter, but due to a series of medical issues, I spent most of the last few years largely bedbound. During that time, gained a lot of weight, BMI peaked at 38.5. Fortunately, circumstances have changed. Medical issues, getting better, some rehab, you know, correcting some physical limitations, and so finally back to having the capacity to work on fitness. So basically it sounds like at this point Natalia has increased her non exercise activity, diet's gotten cleaned up a little bit and BMI is down from 38 and a half, down to 36. But Natalia's starting to say, okay, I want to get back into that kind of lifting, kind of recreational powerlifter kind of mode. Currently dealing with some weight correlated health issues. So on a low dose blood pressure medication, things like that, but not any like acutely dangerous situations. But the question is, being severely untrained and overweight as the starting point, should I spend three months in a small bulk building as much muscle as possible before doing a long, long term cut, or should I focus instead purely on recomping as I cut?
- [57:18]
A
So I think this is a great example, Natalia. You probably had a higher training age effectively, which is going to basically, if you think of your theoretical, it's not a ceiling, but it's a point where gains come so slow that it might effectively be like one. If you think about where you are, you used to be closer to it and now you're further from it. So you can replicate a rate of muscle gain that you would have got earlier, you know, compared to earlier in your powerlifting career. And so that means that you need to have the nutritional support to support those gains. So I understand the question, oh, should I be in a bulk? But the good news is, is that you also don't really need to be too concerned about providing that exogenous energy because you are also relatively high in body fat right now, which of course you're probably framing as a negative thing. You don't like that, like you want to change it. And you know it's causing you some concerns about your health. But it also means that you've got plenty of energy to support that rate of muscle growth, even if you are in a deficit, and I think one thing that's cool is that you're probably going to recop regardless, the only thing that would probably prevent you from recomping was if you were to go into a reasonably sized surplus. So I what I think you don't need to do is intentionally cut, but I also don't think you need to intentionally bulk that terminology. And that's because the strong misconception we have is that we need to be in a surplus to build muscle and we need to be in a deficit to lose fat. And that's simply not the case. Really, when you think about it, a deficit or a surplus is just a successive series of feedings that result in a net gain in body energy or a net loss of body energy. But when you're in the absorptive or post absorptive state, whether you end up in a net deficit or a net surplus, you have time periods where your body is storing stuff and you have time periods where your body is losing stuff. And if you were really lean and you were in a massive deficit, those time periods of losing stuff would send a lot of alarm signals and bells that would start causing some of the issues we talked about earlier related to low energy availability and red s, which would hamper your ability to gain muscle. Hence why natural bodybuilders do everything right and still lose muscle often at the end. But that ain't you right now. If you were to be in a mild deficit or eating in and around maintenance, I'm talking, you know, 50 to say a 400 calorie deficit. I suspect that could occur without you really intentionally dieting. I bet you that would not threaten or limit your ability to put on muscle, especially if you're eating an appropriate protein intake, had a decent spacing, had a excellent, you know, resistance training program, which you probably would with your background as a powerlifter. And I think you would not need to intentionally diet to experience almost the peak benefits that you could get from gaining muscle. So this goes right back to that participant level meta analysis, and I wish I could, you know, throw the graphic up right now for you to see, but the higher your body fat level, the greater those lean gain metrics, which is a combination of just fat coming off at the same time as putting on muscle. And that is basically the natural state of what happens when people are high in body fat, starting resistance training and are not intentionally in a surplus. So I think no need to bulk. That's basically the answer whether you want to take a more intentional Focus instituting a deficit, I'd say that's up to you, but I would say don't intentionally go into a surplus.
- [61:15]
B
Helms, what do you think contributes to the. You know, we've talked about this in various formats in the past, but there are some of these elements of bodybuilding culture that get kind of co opted into more general fitness spaces. One thing that seems to really grip the general fitness discourse is this cutter bulk kind of perspective. What I don't. Sometimes these things, we can trace them back to an interesting origin. Right. So like I, I've heard people speculate that the cramming post workout carbs and natural bodybuilders was just replicating what bodybuilders using insulin were doing. Right. So it kind of, it was being done in the drug using bodybuilders and we said, oh, we need to do that. What do you think has driven this kind of broad acceptance of the belief that you have to either be bulking or cutting in people where it really generally not necessarily the most optimal path forward?
- [62:17]
A
Yeah, I would say it is directly related to the seasonal nature of modern competitive bodybuilding and then also the influence of drug use. So the interesting thing though is like if we were to go back far enough, you know, before the age of anabolic steroids, there were time periods where people would go into contest prep, but they would think about, let me just train really, really hard. They become more active generally and you are more of a physical culturist than you were a bodybuilder. And you'd be more mindful about your food quality and you might cut out certain things like food, whole milk and butter, but you wouldn't necessarily have people thinking about energy, balance and purposely cutting. And many of the people who were good at bodybuilding were just kind of naturally lean and they would sort of recomp, they would, they would lose weight, they would tighten up. I don't want to make it sound like they're gaining weight in the shows or anything like that. And a lot of them were also competing in weightlifting. So there was a weight class restriction and they might compete lighter. So there was some intentional weight loss for sure. But as then the sports started to delineate themselves into strength sport and physique sport. There was a, you know, a brief window, I would say like in the 50s and 60s, early 60s primarily, where you did have these competitions that were divorced from strength sport coming out often under the Weider banner before the steroid era, where people are going, oh, now I just want to get on a bodybuilding stage. And you did start to see leaner, leaner physiques. So, like, if you talk about the mid-50s, late-50s, I think this is probably the first times that people were actively cutting and probably cutting to a point where they would want to put on body fat afterwards to actually progress from their next season. They might have been getting lean enough. You know, they're more comparable to, I would say, like sprinters and other lean athletes, but not shredded. There were some standouts always, but they were kind of the exception to the rule. So I think even if drugs had, like, let's say they just never emerged, but the sports continued to diverge, we would eventually get to what we see in natural modern bodybuilding, where even though we're not using drugs and we're not seeing these precipitous massive increases in scale weight, you know, off season versus in season or even season two season, where someone's like, yeah, I'm going to try to get come in bigger next time, and they get on stage 10 pounds heavier and you're like, what? You know, like you're just up the dose. Right. I think you would have a requirement for cutting and bulking because you need to put back on some body fat for the recovery phase and you need to then drop it all to be competitive. But I think there would probably be different language around it because it would be more tied to recovery to make gains rather than, I need to drive up my body weight so that I can drive up my competition weight so I can be more competitive, like you see in enhanced sport.
- [65:31]
B
So, yeah, because, I mean, think about. It's important to note. Yeah. When people talk about. I used to like, mockingly talk about, I would replicate this type of speech all the time when I was competing in natural bodybuilding. But, like, you'll literally hear untested bodybuilders just debating, do I want to put on 10 pounds this off season or 20 pounds this off season of, like, mostly muscle. And so, like my, my joke used to be, when I was a natural bodybuilder, I think next year I'm going to play the mass game. And it's like it doesn't exist. Like, you just get what you get. And everybody at my height weighs 150 pounds. Right. But for the most part. But yeah, I think, like you were saying, that kind of idea of one element that really, I think contributed a lot to the bulking perspective was just like, there is a group of people on this planet who, if they really wanted to put on 30 pounds of muscle over the next 12 months. It's totally a feasible thing to do. And I think some of that language and decision making has permeated toward the people who listen. That just ain't going to happen for the majority of people that may intend to make it happen.
- [66:41]
A
Yeah, I would say there is specific application of bulking and I think Rosnik is a great example of it, that when these guys did not, when they were in the control group, when they did not modify their diet, it constrained the amount of growth they could have. And there are certainly people, you see this quite commonly in anyone who's really image conscious related to leanness. So it's pretty, pretty normal when you train people who hold on to gender norms, who are, who are women and feel like they need to stay lean or don't want to get too big, but they also want to build muscle and they experience that push and pull, something that's well documented in female athletes, where you finally give them a sufficient surplus and it's like this breath of fresh air and their body starts building muscle at a rate that they previously didn't think they could. But up to that point, they're often like their body weight was relatively stable, sometimes by intention, but they recomp to the point where their body is now like, I'm not going to do that anymore. You've actually been in a deficit for a year and a half. I've done what I can. And now when you do that, I'm going to make you hungry and I'm going to create a hormonal environment where I'm not going to let that occur. Like your borderline athletic amenorrhea. We're not building muscle from here. Give me a surplus or I give you nothing back. Right. You've gotten to the point of basically your training experience where the novice and early stage intermediate rate of gain could overcome the downward pressure of lightweight low energy availability. Until you got leaner, that pressure became higher, and then your rate of possible growth got lower because now you're a genuine intermediate. So you can almost reestablish the rate of weight gain or muscle gain, I should say that you would have had, you know, maybe a couple years ago by simply being in a surplus, a small one even, and now you can gain weight again. So I think there is a time for, you know, like naturally skinny people who have really strong appetite suppression when they eat anything to be in a. To actually try to bulk, or people who are actively trying to stay too lean and hold themselves back, or for people who need to put on body fat and regain lost tissue and get out of a state of reds because they had to diet down. But outside of that, I honestly don't think people really should be bulking. You just need to essentially think of I need to scale my energy intake to my gaining capacity, which is somewhat of a guessing game. But you know, the, the intentional thing to. Or the important thing to realize there is that when you are high in body fat, you kind of, you need to think of it as like, oh, I have these calories to a certain degree. Like that meta aggression showed. On average, once you get over a 500 calorie deficit, and this is in people who are primarily high in body fat, that starts to compromise things. But if you're in a 50, 100, 150, even maybe 300 calorie deficit, it may not impede to any meaningful degree the rate of muscle gain you can get. So do we need to be bulking and cutting Only if it was required, you know, by your sport, or if you can replicate a super novice phase by being on copious amounts of anabolic steroids so that even though you are an advanced lifter, you can gain quickly because guess what? Your ceiling is no longer £200 at 6 foot, it's £260 plus. How much can you take without having a heart attack? Right?
- [70:06]
B
So, yeah, well, I was the original cutter and bulker because back in my day I played football and wrestled, right? And so football season would be in the fall, wrestling would be in the winter. And so basically you would bulk. The winter season ends with wrestling and you start bulking up, you get a good, you know, several month bulk into the football season, gain about 30, 40 pounds, play your football season, and then you have a couple months to really kick things into gear and get down into your wrestling weight. And I had more than one teacher when I was in high school. Pull me out of class and just say what's going on at home? Because I was to there in my mind, I was getting in the shape of my life and everyone around me was admiring how jacked I am. But she was thinking that I was in such a poor state, mentally and or physically, that I was wasting away before her very eyes. So not a good endorsement of your physique when people are starting to bring you out and say, do we need to contact child services? You seem qu quite unwell. But yeah, bulky and cutting. I feel like for me, because of that kind of seasonal element of just sport and having sports that favored such different body weights for competition, for Me, I was kind of just born into the bulking and cutting phases and really never took a moment to think through is this really what I should be doing? It was just kind of always baked in because of that. But yeah, I think it's, I think it's good to have more conversation about exactly who ought to be doing it because I just, I've known so many folks who, let's say they're a male, 5, 10, 180 pounds, moderate body fat, and they spend so much time bulking and gaining 10 pounds quickly and then cutting and losing those same 10 pounds and just back and forth and back and forth and you know, if you enjoy it, that's one way to do it. It's not necessarily, it's not like that's going to be prohibitive to your ability to make progress. But I think it's good for people to know that there's more options on the table and that you don't necessarily have to lock into these eight, 10 or 12 week chunks just because a bunch of, you know, a bunch of untested bodybuilders used to do 12 month or 12 week preps. And so therefore every phase ever since then has been 12 weeks of insert the blank.
- [72:24]
A
You know, well said. I think this actually might be good for people to look across the aisle. And this is the whole purpose of iron culture, is to get exposure to other, what should not be silos in the iron game. Take a look at natural power lifters, especially in the middle and lightweight divisions on the men and women's side. This is essentially a case study of recomposition. Yes, they do cut for competition and they may go through dieting phase, but many of them are just intentionally at least manipulating water. But you might have someone who for six or seven years stays at 83 kilos, but increases their total year on year on year. And if you pay close attention and if you have, you know, the judgmental muscle focused eye of Eric Helms, you're seeing them get leaner at the same body weight over time, right? And then eventually they hit this point, hopefully where they have this realization of man, these cuts are getting harder and harder and harder because they're essentially walking around leaner and leaner and leaner as they've put on muscle. And if you look at what the determinants of powerlifting performance are, especially in advanced powerlifters, it's heavily correlated to muscle size, right? So really interesting examples of this. Delaney, Wallace, Penna. If you talk about others like Evie Corrigan, even Tiffany Chapone, has recently talked about that she might want to go up a weight class because the cuts are getting harder and she wants a total 10 times body weight at 47 kilos. But then she's going to go to 52. There's a bunch, right? Like this is a really, really common occurrence where people after years of being in one weight class go up and then they have a landslide of gains. Russell Orhe Taylor Atwood. I could keep mentioning many of them when they go from 66 to 74 or 74 to 83 or 83 to 93, or the example of 52 to 57 and EV where they've been plateaued. They're competing leaner and leaner and leaner and eventually they realize that the barrier to them getting bigger is I'm too lean and the cutting process is too painful and progress and rates of injury are on the decline and incline respectively. So it's kind of saying, hey, our old conception was this whole body recomposition thing is only on the table for people who are new to the game because they can gain muscle so quickly. And I will go, yes, they can gain muscle so quickly, but the only difference to an untrained versus a highly trained lifter is the rate that they can gain muscle. So you can recomp. It just might take a lot longer. Right. And we even see it happen at the elite level in drug free powerlifting. Yet they're not going through often intentional cutting and bulking phases nearly at least to the same magnitude, length, degree or intentionality that you see in competitive physique sport.
- [75:20]
B
Yeah. And shout out to Chris Barakat with the, the recomping paper back in what, 2020, where they were saying, hey, this is happening at the cohort level in people who are a lot more trained than people are saying is possible. Right. So really solid paper by them.
- [75:37]
A
Actually, there's, there's, there's a really good paper I want to encourage people to read. It just came out in August and I read it and it is fascinating and I really do think without the influence of enhanced bodybuilding that we would almost see recomp as kind of the default status that then just gets more and more challenging over time because you can only gain muscle so quickly. And it is titled, it's by Havers and colleagues, Effects of Skeletal Muscle Hypertrophy on Fat Mass and Glucose Homeostasis in Humans and Animals. And there to review with systematic literature search treks. You'd love this paper, but it basically makes the argument that gaining muscle actually from a nutrient partitioning and a signaling perspective and metabolic perspective has either direct in some cases or indirect effects on assisting with fat loss. And like we, we in the fitness industry have a fundamentally different view of it that you have to choose one because they, these goals conflict with each other, but in many ways, metabolically, they directly help one another. It just becomes a lot harder for the people who want to do it because they can't gain muscle back quickly, right? And drugs aren't magic. If we talk about like beta 2 agonists or if we talk about anabolic steroids, or if we talk about the new myostatin inhibitors that are being tested right now, or even agents that just really, really ramp up fat loss, a deficit has to come from somewhere, right? And if your body would otherwise be going, hey, I want to use both protein and fat because your fat's getting too low and I also want to use this glycogen and you artificially manipulate things. So it is heavily now focused on fat. All of a sudden that drag on protein is not there and you're not seeing that same degree of say muscle protein breakdown. And you essentially are getting an anti catabolic effect just because of the metabolic shift to fat, meaning that your training in the protein you're eating is more likely to result in whatever rate of muscle gain you can achieve. And then if you go, oh, by the way, I'd also like to jack up my androgens or inhibit myostatin, right, or actually take a beta 2, you know, agonist which, which has impacts on both fat and muscle cells. Now you can actually gain muscle in deficit and you see enhanced bodybuilders who are eating and growing into shows. You have your Kevin Levones, right, who go from 220 at 15% body fat to 240 at 5% body fat in three months. You know, so it's, it's, it's, it's, it's kind of a wild landscape when you think about it. But that's not magic. It is just ramping up existing physiological processes that can occur in a natural person to a much lower degree if they happen to have a low body fat set point, a low training age or a high level of body fat that's just kind of ready to go and is going to be used as the dominant fuel source regardless. And an effective training program.
- [78:34]
B
Perfect. Well, I'll tell you what, Helms, I think that actually might be a good starting point. I could do one more question if you insist. But I really like the way that these concepts kind of flowed from one to the other. What do you think? You ready to wrap it up or do you insist upon one more?
- [78:49]
A
No, I think this is good because we basically went from low energy availability to deficits and protein and body recomp and cutting. So there's maybe even a cohesive title to this podcast. I don't know, but I'll let you set that out on the back end.
- [79:05]
B
Yeah, let me. Here's what I want to do, because there is one more good question in here. So here's what I want to do. I want to issue a challenge to the listeners, submit good questions so that we can do another Q and A. We already have one good one in the hopper, but that's not going to be enough for an episode. So if you go to mass. I'm literally checking the URL because I haven't. I haven't mentioned this in a long time. So that's my fault that we have a. We're running out of questions. So if you go to massresearchreview.com ironculture no hyphen, no spaces, just slash ironculture. You can go and submit a question and we would love for you to do it so that we can have another wonderful, insightful, engaging Q and A episode in the near future. So, Helms, anything you want to say to the good people before we sign off?
- [79:57]
A
No. Thank you for listening. Make sure to check out AFPT if you're a trainer and are looking for good education on how to become a better trainer. If you want straps that will survive even Trexler's aggressive rack pulls, check out elitefts.com and don't forget to use MRR 10. And MRR stands for Mass Research Review, where I would highly encourage you to go if you want to get not only great content, but also ensure that Trex and I stay off the streets. Because I'm not sure we'd be able to record a podcast if we were actually living rough.
- [80:32]
B
Yeah, that would be difficult from a technical perspective. So folks, as always, thanks so much for the support. Thank you for listening. We appreciate you and we will be back in seven days with yet another episode.