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- [00:00]
A
Guys, we're here today for another episode of Stronger Culture, I think. And hilariously, I don't know why I want to talk about this, but we're having some audio difficulties with Eric's fan on his laptop. It's throwing me right back to the first episodes of the Revive Stronger podcast where I had my I don't know how many years old laptop, but it was struggling big time with a lot of those episodes, let alone with terrible Internet. And I like, it was the Internet was coming in and out and I had to upload the episode overnight because my speed was so poor. But it was just throwing me back to those first episodes where I had hair. But hopefully my actual interviewing skills have improved. Eric, you still have hair. And you're a great interviewer as well, I believe. I don't know what. I didn't really give you a good lead in here.
- [00:48]
B
No, that's great. I don't know if my interview has hair. I interview well. No, what I will do is I'll tell them the one thing that they didn't realize was our true fix for the audio. And that is distracting people. So the audio issue didn't go away, but I was like, Steve, just. Just put on a stringer, then we'll be good. And at least on YouTube everyone will have. They don't care about the audio. If they see that kind of, you know, visual stimuli is. I'll just put it that way. So
- [01:23]
A
Rascal give shout out. Never skip mass day. Stringer on. It's on. We've been having a heat wave in the. It's not actually at the moment it's kind of average kind of heat for the uk but we were in the. I don't know because you guys don't know if you. Celsius Fahrenheit, but we were close to 40 degrees Celsius. Yeah. So. Which is crazy hot for us. So I have a fan on me and I'm sat here sweating still because I don't know, I'm peak mass. Almost like. I guess that's my excuse. Do you notice that actually with your own body temperature, like when you are massing, do you notice you do get hotter?
- [02:02]
B
I would say I notice more that I get colder when I'm cutting. So I notice the absence of the body heat more than I notice the accumulation of body heat when I get bigger. But I think for me, the point. Everyone hates you. I just want you to know that, Steve, the point at which you talk about all of the off season things like, oh, I'm stuffed and I have no interest in food and I'm melting. It's where most people would love to have their, their body fat be. You know, for me, I don't get those symptoms strongly until I'm probably closer to like 94, to like high, higher. And then it is precipitous. Then every step I get above that. And I might have to adjust that up a little bit now. But back in the day I had a run at trying to be a 105 kilo power lifter. This was say 2016. It was my last meet before I got hip surgery. And my. You know, when you're six foot and you want to be a good powerlifter and you've been competing as a 93, everyone just tells you like, you know, dude, the reason why you're not obviously a world champion is because you're shooting be at least a 120, you know, and like, I knew better. But you keep hearing it enough times and from enough people, you're like, maybe there's just a ridiculous just over the rainbow slope of massive gains. If I can just get to like you know, 105. And I never made it there, dude. I made it to 98 and it just felt like I was a bag of sweat at night, constantly hot and we would go out to eat like Indian like every, every like two days. And I couldn't get over 98, like feasibly. Um, that was when I benched 165. But if you think about what I was benching at 93, it's basically gaining 1 kilo on my bench for every kilo of mass that I gain, which is not that great. So yeah, I had a run that was, that was definitely the last time I remember experiencing like that kind of extreme off season thing. But then in my youth when I was first putting on size and like in my 20s, it was pretty wild because I think I was just, I was just different metabolically back then.
- [04:33]
A
So yeah, this is, this is a great lead in actually to the topic that I was going to cover to some extent because I appreciate you spoken about this at length on the Mass Research. Well in the Mass Research review and also probably on other podcasts and also on the Iron Culture podcast you talked about recomposition. So I don't want to go over all of that again. But it's really interesting to me because I just to briefly go over my background in terms of gaining. Like I was, first of all, I had no idea what I was doing and I just gained and Thought, hey, all the clean food and I'll gain clean weight. And that clearly didn't happen. I got very fat very quickly and wasn't happy with that. And then I came across later down the line more of these kind of like slow gaining. And that was actually a lot of three DMJ's content. And that was, I remember a time there was like it was a recommendation. Maybe a pound per month was a recommendation that you had ages ago. And so I kind of followed that. But I also had at the back of my mind and I'm probably skipping over things, a lot of things to be honest, it's been a long time. But P ratios at the back of my mind where I was like, oh, if I stay leaner, I'll partition more of those calories towards muscle, not so much to fat. So then I'd not really push my body fat up very high and I I' what was now stage weight. It's just so even then that was very lean for me. So I just wasn't in the most productive space. And also kind of yo yoing between like mini masses, mini cuts almost to some extent. And then I came across like Mike Isratel and his content. I know pretty sure you guys debated or discussed, had a roundtable on Abel's podcast, Abel Cybele, the sustainable development podcast. I think a while ago, A while ago. This is years ago. Abel isn't so much in the industry as much as he was.
- [06:21]
B
It's funny, I've always called him Abel. So I was like, Abel,
- [06:27]
A
you're probably right, I'm probably wrong.
- [06:30]
B
I. I mean I hope I am right because the number of times I've interacted with, I'm going to say Abel has was like. I mean I was on his podcast probably almost double digit number of times and we were dming a lot. And if he just never corrected me saying his name the whole time wrong, then that is a level of respect that now makes me feel guilty.
- [06:54]
A
Was I saying Abel? That doesn't even make sense. Like when I read it, I would read that as an English word as Abel. Why would I? I don't know why I decided to do that. Anyway, who knows what the insides and outs of my brain dynamics. But I remember that podcast because I was also going to get you guys on to Deb that topic as well. And also Mike had at that time and I don't know precisely where he is now, but quite a more assertive rate of gain versus yourself. And that was very appealing to me because I think I'd been constraining myself so I kind of went to that and I even remember, I think it's 10 years today, Eric, or close to when you guys as 3DMJ came over to the UK and presented here. And I remember you, the Garth study, I remember you specifically, I'm pretty sure was the Garth study where they, that was one of the earlier studies where they looked at surplus sizes and the impact on body composition. And I remember you displaying it and me being like, ah, but I think there's something to this larger surplus. These guys were doing other things alongside their bodybuilding and, and things like this. I was trying to convince myself that this larger surplus was superior. And I thought I'd found this middle ground between that previous just gaining weight way too fast, then really constraining myself and like, oh, I'm at that sweet spot where I can't think it maybe was like a 1%, no closer to 2% per month kind of rate of gain, maybe even a PO half a pound a week, something along those lines. It was certainly more assertive than where you, you were at. And then the P ratio debate happened too where kind of Trex kind of basically completely demolished that argument where actually it seems like you may even be in a better position to gain muscle if you're higher in body fat than, than lower in body fat. And so that was great for me because it helped me convince I don't need to stay so lean. But then I'd start hitting these wall blocks with my gaining phases because I trying to gain fairly assertively. And like you said, not like many, they just keep gaining. They probably just gain exorbitant amounts of body fat. But I hit a ceiling of body weight where I was just like, I can't push above this. Like it's not comfortable. So now the, the kind of work by Eric Barakat and now your recent research that looked into different surplus sizes and this mass kind of research review and article that you did is really like spinning everything on its head where there was a time of which I thought similar to where people think oh, if I don't beat my performance from last week by rep or load or add a set, I haven't progressively overloaded, I haven't put a stimulus forward that's going to maximize muscle growth, which we now know is fundamentally just not the case. Brian Miner did fantastic work on that. And same here where I thought if I didn't gain weight for a week or two weeks a month, that's terrible. I've just been Spinning my wheels. I've been at maintenance. My body is not changing at all. And I think there was quite a lot of people may be pushing almost that narrative to some degree. And I think myself too, I kind of got caught up in it. So it's been quite refreshing. Almost going a bit full circle back to. Yeah, pound per month is probably not a bad recommendation for a ton of people. So that's. Yeah, it's a nice kind of. That's my backstory with it all. And to jump past this brilliant article where you outlined basically, hey, you probably, if you think recomposition is just eating at maintenance and losing fat and gaining muscle, you probably want to think about it a bit deeper than that. And you outlined some great examples of where it can happen in a deficit, in a surplus, even at maintenance. And it's much more fluid than it's not an on, off, switch. I think that's where a lot of people kind of think about it. Surplus, gain muscle, deficit, lose fat, because they're opposing. And so it's really difficult to do two at once. So the conclusion you seem to have for advanced naturals was essentially to kind of gain tame. And is that because we have evidence that maintenance is essentially as anabolic as a small surplus or because we simply lack convincing evidence that a surplus provides additional anabolic benefit once energy needs are met? That's my question. I don't think was covered.
- [10:59]
B
Yeah, no, that's. That's a good question. I think just to give a little bit of background, I'm not, I swear to God, I won't just rehash like the three hours I did on like brand new.
- [11:09]
A
I need to go sign up to the review.
- [11:11]
B
And yeah, so much of that confusion and back and forth stemmed from us not having, I think, a clear understanding of each one of these things. What's the influence of body composition? What's the influence of training age? What's the influence of the magnitude of a deficit and surplus? And how does it relate to mass gaining through the resistance training stimulus? And then how do they all fit together? Right. And then also you've got these anecdotes where for someone who has always held themselves back because they were staying too lean and were afraid to get into a surplus, then. Absolutely. Like the seafood diet is a great advice, like it was in your case, you know, that's S E E. And I think there needed to be several things for people to understand it. And like you mentioned Chris Barakat's article that just said, here's the data. I think for very analytical minded people. They were like, okay, now I understand it's possible, but I still don't get how or what did I have wrong before? Because some of these anecdotes really do seem to hold true. And I think what I didn't have the ability to fully, fully explain it to people until I could break it down the way I did in the Mass article where I was like, here's like the actual math of it, you know, And I think I understood it conceptually, but that is not enough for certain types of personalities or brains to really get it. And to give you an example of this, I got an Instagram DM that said as a response to me sharing the Brandon d' Cruz podcast where we broke this down in depth, you can't lose fat in a surplus. And I was like, I mean like that's kind of fundamentally true, but it just goes to show you how kind of we very linear thinkers like you're not actually in a surplus or deficit. That's the thing that Most people get. Ms. Right. You are in an absorptive and post absorptive state on and off constantly, unless you got like an IV in or you're fasting completely. And thus if you have an incredibly strong drive to build muscle, you could be going in and out of states where each time you have the fuel supply, your body's just waiting to build muscle because the signaling is there and it's still affecting you. And then anytime you go long enough between meals, there might be a small amount of fat mass loss. And if that drive to build muscle is enough, you can see over time and there might be, because you're coming in and out of the surplus deficit, your net energy balance could result in a small amount of fat loss and a pretty substantial, in this instance that I'm describing, degree of muscle gain and also over what time period, right? So it's probably true that if I caught you in the post absorptive state that you weren't storing many triglycerides or the net change in stored versus liberated triglycerides was, you know, positive so that you were maybe gaining a little bit of fat. But that's not the same thing as saying that over a four week period where on a day to day basis you had, you were positive you were eating more than your tdee, that you can't lose a little bit of fat because you can and we've observed it, right? So I think that's kind of the, the disconnect is that people are, we have A really tough time thinking about things at every single layer as we drill down and down and down and down and down. And there's no impossible in that statement. You know, like if, if they were to use much more specific language in the post absorptive state, you know, when you've consumed a very large meal, you're unlikely, you're highly unlikely to store more triglyceride than you're liberating. I would have been like, yes, that is true, but that's not the same thing as saying, you know, you can't, you can't lose fat in a net surplus. Right. Anyway, so going all the way back to your question of is it because we don't have data showing that a larger surplus helps advanced lifters or that being in a deficit is not harmful? I think it comes right back to the main point of that article, was just to say, hey, you will benefit from a surplus to the degree that the rate of muscle gain that you can make benefits from it. Right? And I think perhaps the most useful study that recently came out that shows this is the one that just got released by Vargas Molina. So it just came out, I want to say, a month ago and I think I saw him, Alan Aragon, chair at Meadow Henselman's, a few others. It got a lot of press because it was a group of 30 lifters. And I'll say lifters because they did have some resistance training experience. I think the average training age was 1.5 years and they were eating 2.5 grams per kilogram of protein. And that was like, hey, based on Barakat and based upon Ruffalo, we think this makes a lot of sense. And we're going to put one group in a 250 calorie deficit and the other group's going to eat at maintenance and we're going to see who has better body recomp. Right now the fine print is that while they had an average of 1.5 years of experience and is trained, neither you or I would be like, that's really well trained, right? And we also know that how close you are to your genetic quote unquote limit and therefore how quickly you can gain muscle relative to your own max speed is not dictated by how long you've been lifting, but how close to your ceiling you've gotten. So there's plenty of people who might have the, I don't know, maybe a third close to how their ceiling that you and I would have had after our first year and a half because they may have not taken it as probably inappropriately, seriously, as you or I did.
- [17:13]
A
Right.
- [17:14]
B
And there may be a few outliers in that study who were just completely locked in for a year and a half, didn't hold themselves back with their diet, like maybe you did, or made smarter decisions with their training than I did and didn't do some powerlifting stuff, whatever, who were actually making the least amount of gains relative to their own maximum rate in that study. So anyway, we don't know, but they're essentially what we would probably describe as intermediates. Some of them probably more novice, some of them a little more advanced. So they have a given known rate of gain that they can get. And then the final piece to it is that the average body fat percentage was about 25%. And this was a mixed group of men and women, but it was 26 men. So that means that they were reasonably high in body fat. They were at that point where definitely I was saying earlier that I'm getting a little sweaty. You know, I'm a sweaty Betty and I'm eating Indian every other night. And if I, you know, if I, if I skip a couple meals and, and, and don't go to eat Indian, I drop to 97. So my body is ready to liberate that fat. And certainly if Steve hall was ever able to get to 25% body fat, he would probably be a type 2 diabetic and maybe in and out of a coma, have a heart attack before the end of the study, and his body would just be liberating fat and any chance it got. Right. So with that background context, we have reasonably high in body fat intermediates, and they're being trained in a research study which we've talked about, is the exact opposite with the Internet thinks typically it's actually a pretty damn hard training protocol. Right. And lo and behold, both groups gained about a kilogram of lean mass. Neither one was better than the other, despite one being at maintenance and one being at a deficit. So I think that kind of directly gets at least part of your answer, or part of your question, I should say, is that it seems like a deficit is at least not harming their ability to gain muscle. Right. But then if you actually look at the energetics, because the difference that did exist is that the group that was supposedly on a 250 calorie deficit or prescribed a 250 calorie deficit lost like a kilogram and a half or 2 kg more fat mass than the other group somewhere in that range. I don't have the numbers right in front of Me. So what do we actually now know is that the amount of lean mass gains that they can make on that program with the given diet they were given was not constrained by being at an intended maintenance or an intended 250 calorie deficit. So that was not the bottleneck to them quote unquote maxing out that that level of gain on average. But when you do the math, they weren't in a 250 calorie deficit and a quote unquote, you know, zero calorie like maintenance level. They were closer to like 150 and 350 if I recall correctly. I don't, again, I don't have the numbers right in front of me, but one was in a moderately small deficit and one was in a small deficit. And it's probably a better like description of the two groups. And in neither case did it hold back their muscle gain. And I really don't think there is any logic to why something magical happens when your net energy balance becomes zero. And all of a sudden now we see a non linear rate of gain where you would all of a sudden unlock something. I think we do have evidence if we look at Rosnik for example, which is on novices training four days per week. I often say three days per week. And I just assumed that about Rosnik. And I read the study again, like oh, actually they got these guys on like a, a 40 per week training protocol. And it is a relatively high volume. Yes. Three is just so honestly it's probably 80, 80% of the resistance training literature if it's a longitudinal study. And then the other like 20% is probably 90% of those 20% being two days per week. So when you see a four day per week training study you're like oh, you know. But anyway, so this is a 40 per week protocol that had actually pretty high volume progressive overload built in. And I'm like, that's like a legit training program, period. If I saw that on the Internet I'd be like, oh yeah, good call. So they were held back the control group by not being in that energy surplus and they were in a small deficit. So it's an example of okay, well what's the difference between these two studies is well one, these guys are day zero lifting and these guys are day, day, I don't know, whatever week, week, 83 or whatever it is, right. On average. So that is not the same. And what we see is that not being in a, in a large surplus held them back. In fact, I bet if There was a, if that had been a slightly different control group or they'd been given a little bit of encouragement to eat in a surplus, we could have seen a graded response to where they, if they were not in like a, a rough 100 calorie deficit and they were in like a 10 calorie surplus, they would have gained more, but still wouldn't have reached that, you know, average of 3 kg of lean mass gain that the two groups that were given a 2000 calorie weight gainer shake on top of their habitual diet would have gained. That would be my hypothesis. And I think the data overall supports that, even if that study doesn't directly demonstrate it. It's just that what's the rate of gain you can make? And then how much do you need to support that energetically? And then how much does being in an energy deficit harm it? And if the rate of gain is really, really slow and you can only put on so much tissue at a time coming in and out of those energy fluxes and having maybe not a perfect diet in terms of energy status may not be the bottleneck. I think that's a really good way to look at it. And then the interaction of leanness is important too, because if you're 25% body fat when you're not in that post absorptive state eating protein, and when you haven't just recently trained, your body is not in as bad of a spot to support muscle gain as it would if you're a lean person. So I think that's kind of the context. It's like if you're walking around at any energy state surplus, maintenance or deficit and you're just barely skirting your lower intervention point of leanness, then between meals you're probably going into like a walk around state of losing muscle mass, you're going to have a net negative energy turnover. And if you're not lean, that's not the case. So it's much easier to see that net turnover be positive. If you're lifting weights, that is. So it's just the collection of all these variables together. You know, am I trying to stay too lean? Okay, that's some downward pressure. Am I a newbie who's lifting weights and has decent genetic, who gets a really, really strong, strongest at everything. We've talked about upward pressure. And then what collectively does that result in, in terms of my max rate of gains? Okay, then what do I need to support that with nutrition? Okay, and then if I have set up a scenario where that is insufficient to supply it. Okay. I'm going to then lose some body fat in the process. And if that inefficient, you know, conversion is even more, you know, giving me kind of this metabolic alert signal, then that is going to result in a less efficient gain of muscle mass. So I would say that there are, if we take a look at an advanced lifter, right. It's not like we're taking out the equation of body composition and we're not, you know, taking out the equation of the diet or the training stimulus. It's just that the training stimulus is heavily throttled. You know, you got a governor on your system even, best case scenario, like, you know, we could take a look at quote unquote, you know, my unicorn gains or the best gains you've made and say the last three or four years, what they really amount to on like, let's say this was a 10 week study by Vargas Molina.
- [25:29]
A
Right.
- [25:30]
B
I mean, what do you think is the most you've gained in the last couple years over any given 10 week period? Like the best 10 week period possible. What do you think?
- [25:38]
A
Yeah, I mean, you could barely wear on probably a normal food scale, to be honest.
- [25:44]
B
Right.
- [25:44]
A
Really isn't going to be much, is it?
- [25:47]
B
Like I, I think I did have some spurts and I look back at like my recovery phase after 20, 23, there, there might have been maybe a 10 week period where I put on half a kilogram, you know, with some of that being recovered losses and some of it being new gains as I transition into the higher volume approach and was training muscle groups that I hadn't trained in that way, degrees of volume and intensity that I hadn't done at longer muscle lengths all simultaneously. So I mean, yeah, that means that you could have found a spot where I could have looked like the people in that Vargas Molina study. Maybe I'm being perhaps, maybe too generous to how much I put on. But that's, I think more realistically we could look at something you couldn't weigh on a scale. So let's say 100 grams. Maybe it's something you could weigh on a scale like the really good hot streak, you know, how much of an energy surplus you need to build. 100 grams of muscle, man. It's not just, not the constraint, you know. So now however, though, let's say you are trying to stay freaking almost shredded, like you're not experiencing reds, but your body is waiting to give you some of those early stage symptoms of low energy availability and now you want to put on 100 grams of tissue. Well, you're basically just fluttering around an energetic state where your body's actually almost ready to use your muscle tissue for energy entity standpoint. So the likelihood is really low. But if you take Sweaty Betty, Steve hall or Eric Helms and then you put them in that same state, you could potentially be in a deficit and still gain those hundred grams just as fast because there's no metabolic pressure to use protein. Right. There's no precipitous drop in iron stores and testosterone and negative sleep impacts that occur. So it's really well demonstrated in that P ratio debate that Trexler did. And one of the things he did that I think is the most convincing piece of evidence is he did a participant level meta regression. He looked at seven studies where he got the individual data points and he plotted it. And you see this very clear clustering where once you get up into the body fat percentages, you know, over 20 in a largely male sample, you just see the lean mass gains, which is a metric he made, where you're basically adding any fat loss. So a loss of 2kg would be a plus 2 score and adding any lean mass gains. So let's say you gained 2kg of muscle and lost 2kg of fat. That would be a score of 4. The clustering of that cloud just starts to precipitously increase as you get higher. And that goes right back to what we started with, where you were like, hey, man, do you get really sweaty and hot and all this stuff when you're higher in body fat? Because what are we looking at there? It's exactly the opposite of what P ratios would predict is that the fatter you get, the more your body is going, I am so ready to lose this. I'm going to increase your thermogenesis. I'm going to ramp up everything related to, you know, triglyceride use. And then the opposite is exactly what I was saying, you know, Trex, I mean, sorry. You know, Steve, I don't, I don't notice it as much that my, my heat ramps up, but man, I get cold when I'm dieting. So the exact opposite starts to happen when you get really lean. And for some reason we know these experiences as bodybuilders, but we really wanted to believe the P ratio thing. And I think it's for two reasons. One, we know those, those times or those people who were too lean, held themselves back and they finally ate and they blew up and it was the thing needed to do. And then two, when you're lean and you make gains, you can see it. And when you're fat and you make gains, you can't and you don't like the way you look the whole time. And I think we just underestimate how much our psychology influences that.
- [29:49]
A
I know for me too, I like to think that I could hack the system. I don't like thinking that it's as simple as be at a healthy level of body fat where you feel good and try and progressively overload over time and train really hard and push yourself to your limits. I like to think that there's cases where we could periodize and that could somehow potentiate more muscle growth. Or hey, I could be clever about staying a bit leaner and go through these kind of well thought out mini cuts that will help again, give me extra gains on the way out because I've improved my partitioning ratio. This sort of thing. It's like, ah, to think that I can't because muscle gain is just so slow. As a natural past, like that five years of like very intentional training, it's to some extent a bitter pill to swallow, but once you've swallowed it, it's so much like just you're in a much better blissful place where you just like let things happen. But to that question. So kind of thought, hey, there doesn't seem to be anything necessarily beneficial.
- [30:46]
B
Sorry, Steve, really quick, I gotta say, I don't see it that way. Well, maybe I did see it that way at one point because I have definitely had to swallow a lot of pills. And if you listen to the history of my content, you will definitely see I have changed over time, as have the people we mentioned. You know, the funny thing is I debated Mike Israel for literally years about appropriate rates of muscle gain and the context and the practical limitations of trying to track small surpluses and stuff like that. And then it became full circle. If you look at the video that went viral on the RP channel when he brought me out and interviewed me, that got millions of views where most people on the street, if they go, hey, aren't you that guy? They're referring to the is bulking dead interview they did to me that probably has like 3 million views now or something like that. So I am the video of the guy who killed Bulking, but it was like a 40 minute conversation. We went through all this nuance and you could see if you watched that in 2024 and then you go back to fucking 2014 or whatever we're talking about where we're both on Abel's podcast You can see the like what 10 years does in people who are actually open to changing their mind. Which I think is kind of a, a cool look at how it's supposed to be. Even though it takes a long time to evolve thought and change perspectives. But anyway, go ahead.
- [32:02]
A
Yeah, no, absolutely. It's very cool. I will have no doubt watched that video. But there's so much content nowadays, they all just amalgamates into one thing, what's the next. But so kind of come to the point of there doesn't seem to be anything necessarily beneficial about being in that surplus. So long as you're at a healthy level of body fat, the body's happy to use that if it needs to to kind of go through that muscle building process. Because the potential for you to build muscle is so limited when you are that advanced. And the most obvious thing that's going to happen when you go into any sort of obvious surplus is fat gain. As someone who has such a limited ability to grow muscle. Right.
- [32:43]
B
Yeah. And I. Can you tell that I'm. I'm not fully awake because I actually started with a tangent to distract. You said something different than I meant and then forgot that I was going to say the other thing. I was like, you know, I've taken on these hard to swallow pills many times and by the way, that was the tangent. Did you notice how it's changed? But no, the thing that I was gonna say is I've swallowed that pill so many times. So maybe I just have forgotten that I did feel the same way you did back in the day, but when I swallowed this pill, it was so long ago that now I actually still see it as an optimization game. Not like just it'll all work out like once I realized, okay, it's like I only need the degree of a surplus that can benefit me. And maybe quote unquote, periodization in traditional sense of bodybuilding isn't going to potentiate it. And mini cuts won't help it. There's still so many other things on the table that in my mind, yes, the governor is on the car, but I'm just like, whatever, the governor's always on the car. And it's just this ever increasing governor, but I still have to do every single thing in my power to figure out how to get to this unknown mileage. And I also can't see the speedometer. Right. So I still play the optimization game. I'm like, all right, did I get enough volume in this week or how many my sets did I actually take to a 0rir. And someone could look at that and go, the difference between Eric being perfect and not is a gain of 50 grams of tissue over a six month period. It doesn't matter. And I would go, yeah, but the difference in me not getting really perfect and getting it perfect is 50 grams of tissue. And they're like what I'm like. But if you add that up over time. So that's the kind of thing where it's all about your perspective because three, four years of making 50 more grams of tissue is a pound ish, you know, of muscle. And I think that does matter for the things we care about.
- [34:51]
A
So anyway, yeah, you're speaking to something that I was going to talk about later and I'm going to go on a very mini tangent and I'm going to bring us back because I'm going to be in, we're recording this a little bit early because this time next week I'm going to be basically preparing for a flight to Bali where I'm presenting on the compounding physique. And this is one of the things where I talk about how those little things add up and especially over time because it's one of the things I see where people are like, oh, you don't need to have that much protein that's been in there volume, you don't need to train that hard. But it's like these are all little things that yeah, in the short term it does. There's barely any difference. Sometimes the research can't even show any. Like if it's not a big enough difference and you've said about this like in terms of the resistance at that stretch, if it's very similar, like you're in a short period of time, especially for trained people, you're not going to see barely anything but stretched out over years when you're trying to get all your ducks in a row, well suddenly you're kind of seeing that person slowly get to hopefully slightly more elite or what have you. And when we're trying to be that person, like it make it adds up over time compounds. So anyway, that's my tangent to bring us all the way back. Something I know we've spoken about before is post show go for the recovery phase to try and get to your lower intervention point where you feel good, you're at this body fat where the body's okay and in that through that recovery phase and try and be as lean as you can whilst getting there. And that is to have as long a gaining window as possible before like you're getting too far away from stage condition or what have you. But I'm thinking if the surplus isn't any better than just kind of having a healthy level of body fat, what if someone does overshoot that and then just holds that weight? Are they now in less of an optimal situation than the person that was so tightly bound about trying to be nice and lean at that point? And maybe if they just like, I don't know, chilled a little bit, got a bit over fat, got soft, but then just that person now just maintains and trains hard. Is one in a more optimal scenario to grow muscle than the other? What do you think to that, Eric?
- [37:00]
B
I think you're probably playing at the margins a bit, but I do think there might be a difference because in the unique state of recovery and also contest prep, there are some non linear things that are going on there. Like if you get lean enough, all of a sudden the wheels really start to fall off. And then if you spend a lot of time in that state and we've seen this, to fully recover from that. It takes more than just getting your body fat up so you can have this lag where your metabolic, you know, it's not just like, because I like in that article and where I've talked about this, I've been trying to focus on body recomposition to help people understand it. Like listen, leaner you are more protein used for fuel, right? Fatter you are less protein used for fuel, right? So no problem of deficit and then deficit exacerbates that. But what we really see is that if you got really, really, really lean to the point where like the only way to get to 5% body fat for a male for 99 point many, many 9% of the population except for like that one dude who literally walks around with stride to glutes. And we, we've all, if you've been in the game long enough, you meet one of these people, you know, and they're like, I don't diet for shows. And you're like what? You know, like they were, they're maybe not the most shredded guy on the planet typically, but they come into shows and they just kind of for them it's like a pickup game, you know, and they have striated glutes. We had a client, Robbie Sardinia, who ended up getting his pro card doing pretty well. But Berto sent me like his application photos and he had at the time, this is 2012, where most of us would try to diet to and would think you're shredded. He got a little Bit tighter. But he was doing four to six week preps and he would, he would feel the same kind of time course of bad. But it was only four to six weeks and he didn't really even need to. Right. You know, so like if it was classic back in the day, he could have literally just like crushed. Yeah, I just need to find a good shaver and tanner and I'm ready to rock any given Saturday, you know. So it's not for any mortal to get to say 5% body fat. It requires months of dieting. Right. So it's not this linear kind of thing where you could just like wave a magic wand and move some things and have a mathematical thing spit out the process of getting yourself the 5% body fat and the, you know, like there's so many things that start to go haywire in that process and related to the time spent trying to get there and in that state to where you come out the other side. And it will take months for those systems to recover. So there is a difference between you at say 12% body fat, if you did that a week and a half after the show because you went hog wild, or you steadily gaining at, let's say 1% body fat per week. So seven weeks post show where you're 12% body fat. And I think the latter example is someone who has a much more favorable environment for putting on muscle. Right. And the former, you will probably be able to keep gaining fat for a while and that lag time will take a little bit more to catch up. It's probably not directly linear. Maybe like if, if you, if you put on 12% body fat immediately, then every system is, is almost ready to go. It's just a time lag. And do you like, are you eating enough of the nutrients that might have been, you know, deficient? So maybe at the four week mark you're in the same point, but now that other person has had a few more weeks of gaining, if that makes sense. And it's kind of the same way on the way down too. We've definitely experienced where you or I have gotten to the same level of leanness, but we know that we retain more muscle on the way down in our different preps or seen the same thing with our clients. Right. I think Jeff Alberts is a great example of this, is that when he looked back at say 2009 versus 2011 or 2014 and people are like, what the hell? He had like almost a 10 pound increase in stage weight and he was basically at the same point in his career that we are now. Right. He turned pro at 38. I think he got his WBF and his NGA pro card in 2009, many times beating me, among others to do it. And then in 2011 made his pro debut, 2014 as well. And he was, he went from like 160 to 170 ish right on stage in pounds. And there were people who were incredulous, but his off season weight was quite similar. And like he put on some, maybe a couple pounds of tissue, which is legit. Right. Kind of the same thing we saw when he adopted some of the different approaches in that area. And he'll talk about that. But I think the major thing that occurred was he had a much more reasonable diet, he took it slower, he was able to maintain more training efficacy, and he just preserved a lot more muscle mass even though he got to the eventual same body fat point. Right. So I think that that's kind of the inverse, if you want to think about it as like a heuristic of what is going on in the off season on the contest prep. Right. So it probably matters to some degree, but I would say it certainly matters less than some people who really worry about this stuff. And that's why like the recovery diet guidance that we give, and I'm sure you give as well, is pretty broad. Like, hey, over one to two months we want to be 5 to 10% over stage weight. And I think most people, they go, okay, that sounds good. And then they think about it and they're like, well, those are drastically different experiences. Getting 5% over stage weight in two months versus 10% in one month. The latter is going to make me feel like I'm being really bad with my diet. But I think that's the type of range where if there is a difference, it's hard to know, versus other things that we observe as coaches or athletes. It's pretty clear with even a little bit of experience, like, no, this approach was way better than that one. But in this case I just think that's probably not true. So you can adapt it to kind of your personality, your individual experience, the things you struggle with. And then it's like, okay, how do I find the least psychological friction and not make you feel like you're failing? Because I think that is, that's something that I think people don't really appreciate. How disastrous that can be to the mentality of a bodybuilder is feeling like they have, they've lost their discipline and their identity as a bodybuilder. During that phase when they can't stop themselves from going out to like binge eat. And then they want to hide it, they're ashamed about it because it's so directly conflicting with the identity. And that core entrance members card. If I'm a bodybuilder or a physique athlete, to get in the door and it's control, discipline, willingness to do those things, like chip away at these really incremental gains and go into that deep, dark pain cave and do everything perfectly and suffer right. And if you go, I actually binged on tacos earlier today. You just don't feel like, you feel like the card is a sham. And I think that hurts athletes more than many people realize. And I think that is one of the main causes of burnout in the sport. So to be able to mitigate that a bit and help people understand it and find a little more grace and then even just aligning systems with physiology, it's like, okay, you're going to have an intense drive to binge. And binging is driven, at least behaviorally in many cases, when it's not like a clinical history of it by restriction. So if we can be as least restricted and tell you that's a good thing, then we're going to do okay here. And I think we rationalize that before the era of reverse or recovery dieting and we're talking about like Lee Priest in the magazines looking fat is going, hey, the post competition period, that's an anabolic rebound phase. And it may have been in the guys who are cycling drugs, but even in the natural world it was believed just as fervently and it sort of papers over this period really well. And for me, I remember in 07 because I've told this story before, my very first contest prep season, pre reverse diet, pre recovery diet. Definitely an era where there were not much distinction between the advice given to naturals and enhanced. I put on 22 kilos in two months and I could have been diagnosed with clinical binge eating disorder. Looking back in retrospect, I didn't start to feel like I had done something wrong until maybe month two or right at the end of month one, because the initial weight gain I was not fat and there was definitely some incidences of me kind of going wild. My plan post show was a list of restaurants. It wasn't a recovery diet or reverse diet. It was like Italian, Indian, you know, because I had just never thought about what I was doing in the off season because I was a skinny guy. So I Didn't think I, it mattered. I was like, eat a high protein diet. And then I had to be so meticulous for prep that it was such a divergence that I couldn't sustain it. And I was trying to track macros and I kept going off them. But then when I started to see, like at the end of month one, like, okay, hold on. This is as fat as I want to get. The fastest I've ever been. This is good. And then I'm like, okay, here's my game plan. It's 3,000 calories. And I'd end the day at 5,000 calories. And I'd gone back to Chipotle twice. And I'm just like, you're weak. That was really, really challenging. But I made it through that first month thinking I was just doing the thing that's normal. And I think for maybe people with a different personality, different background, more solidified baseline behaviors, who actually been appropriately prepared by a coach for what the bodybuilding lifestyle is, I could have, like gotten through that and then been all right, but I wasn't. I was one of those, probably one of the most extreme cases I've actually seen personally and met of, you know, post, you know, contest fat overshooting. And then going back to your point of it, was it a big deal? It certainly felt that way emotionally. But when I look at it, what I actually did was I kind of recomped from late 2007 all the way through to 2008. I held in the low 200 pound range because I got the 102. And I actively cut down for a bit. I purposely was like, I need to do a bit of a cut. But then for a while I wasn't trying to cut. It was like my physiology caught up. And then I told you that I was struggling at 98, you know, feeling hot and like, couldn't put on weight anymore. And that was 2016. Imagine how much more muscle I had in 2016 versus 2007 and being at 102. The weight melted off me for a little bit. And then I just hovered around the mid-90s. And I look back at those pictures and my training logs, I was making great gains. I mean, I'd only been lifting since 2004, so I was like a early stage advanced because I was doing many, many things right. Probably the most wrong thing I did was prepp if you want to think about slowing down your gains to reach advanced. So there was this phase sometime starting in October of 2007 all the way through to December of 2008, before I started my prep in January of 2009, where there was a non intentional recomp going on. If we look back at it, it where I was just like, well, I'm already fatter than when I want to start prep. And then I basically was like, I want to start my next prep closer to like £215 instead of 220. And that is where I eventually started. And I remember because I remember submitting the application because I worked with Lane for the most of my that second prep. And I was 215 pounds. And I got up to 226 at the end of my recovery phase. So from 226 to 215 was sort of this extended recomp. I looked way better at 215 compared to 226 and not like I had just lost 11 pounds of fat. It was more like I lost 11 pounds of fat and probably put on a couple pounds of muscle. So, yeah, But I only know that looking in hindsight. So it was recoverable the situation I was in, but it definitely was suboptimal. I would say, you know, if you could go back over all of that and kind of figure out what would be the best thing for my mental and emotional state and my relationship with my wife and people around me, and probably also in terms of my overall trajectory of gains.
- [49:58]
A
Yeah, very interesting. Yeah. It just makes me think there's so many come back to this end. I say far too often on this podcast, so many roads to roam in regards to. I certainly know of people who feel like they gained like closer to that 10% of body fat that about, sorry, 10 of body weight above stage weight within a month. And they feel like really bad about it because they're thinking, hey, like, I'm already that much above, or even maybe more than that. And they're like, I can't go into a deficit because I'm not recovered from prep, but I want to be in a surplus because I want to kind of gain muscle. It's like, well, you can just hold and make this weight look better. Now, you might not be in as handicapped a situation as you think you are, which I think is really a useful framing because I also have in my head, like, losing body fat was like cycling downhill, whereas gaining muscle was like cycling uphill with the brake on. So I do everything in your power to make that as easy as possible. It's like thinking a surplus is gonna really aid with that. And so it's really, really an important tool. But you could almost just say like be at a body comp where you feel good, healthy, you can really, really kind of light that match. That is the fire for muscle game, which is the training piece. And so long as you're not falling into a deficit that leads to or being so lean that you end up feeling like hungry all the time and the training piece can't be that productive, you don't need to think about it a heck of a lot more than that. So I guess actually, and I think there's a. The bodybuilding scene in the UK is big on this in particular. I don't know if it's the same in the US but there was very much for a long time, I think it's changed a little bit now, but it was very much like push your body weight up to like see your body composition improve and people would be like 40, 50 pounds above stage weight thinking it was necessary to get that quote unquote soft to see that muscle come on. It's like actually you've probably just made it all that much harder for yourself when next time it comes to compete. And also I'm thinking it's opening up options just as a kind of personal example because I'm looking to step on stage next year and I was thinking, okay, so after barley, which is going to be basically come back in August and I was going to go through maybe a, a 10 week kind of relatively not aggressive diet, but like an okay diet to get me nice and lean, close to that lower intervention point and then basically hold there until like March, May next year to kind of just feel good at this nice lean weight. And I'm like, well I could actually you could extend that diet over like 20 weeks and be in this tiny deficit I'd barely feel and be in a better position to kind of gain muscle and, and that sort of thing. Could that be just as good? I guess it from this, from my understanding it could be you really. It's like pick your poison. If it's poison. It's kind of like it could be a potion.
- [52:41]
B
Yeah, it could be a potion.
- [52:42]
A
I'm framing it negatively.
- [52:44]
B
Yeah, it could be a chosen chalice, you know, if we want to go. Yeah, want to go. An injectable like long lasting performance enhancing drug that makes super soldiers in the Marvel universe. Yeah, no, no, I think this is kind of again also the inverse of prep. Right. So you've Talked to Martin McDonald a few times and he talks about how rapid weight loss isn't really worse than slow weight loss. And if you look at muscle retention rates and I don't actually fully agree with that, but I understand where he's coming from. When you look at it in people who are not getting super, super lean because you can see pretty decent body recomp, not much loss of muscle mass and large amounts of fat mass. If you give people who are overweight large deficits and his argument is, listen, people are going to regain the weight anyway, so you're going to have to kind of cyclically diet long term, so why not just get out of the way? It's kind of one of the arguments he's put forth and he's like, and I just diet every once in a while when I need to. No problem. Kind of just maybe making quote unquote weight regain and weight cycling. Not necessarily as pathological or negative if you do it in an evidence based way, I think that game changes a bit with large deficits and either large amounts of weight loss or getting really lean. And when you look at some of the kind of the outliers of, and I will frame them as outliers, like the persistent metabolic adaptation and large scale metabolic adaptation so far more than we predicted in like the Biggest Loser study, for example, or when you look at the degree of energy expenditure that is reduced in like the Minnesota semi starvation study or some of the case studies on bodybuilders, it's a different ballgame when you're pushing either well below your intervention point or when you're losing dozens of kilograms of fat mass from where your body was in a short time period with a huge deficit and a large energy expenditure. So either one prompts a pretty disproportionate pushback physiologically. Right. And I think if you avoid that, you have a lot of play wiggle room with the ranges of a deficit that will get you there. Whether it's a hundred calorie deficit or maybe a thousand. If you're higher in body fat, there may not be a big difference except just the rate of fat loss. And how annoyed are you that you can't have as much of the food you like? Right. So in that context, yes. But if we're talking about Whether someone diets 16 weeks to get in stage shape or 32, we both know the difference, right? We've seen it many times. Unless that person on 16 weeks just has great fat loss. Genetics, low intervention point, did everything else right. As a drug free competitor, you're gonna see a different look. Even if you lose the same amount of scale weight and get to the same stage weight it's just like the physique just looks beat up, kind of spilly, and basically like a. You're flat, but you're spilled over on stage and there's a filminess. And it's not until there's a little bit of time spent recovering does that kind of look go away. Or it might just be that Jeff Albert scenario. It's like, yeah, you're six pounds lighter on stage, you know, so. Right. Yeah.
- [56:20]
A
So I'm get if I can frame it this way. When you're between those upper and lower intervention points, you could basically diet not as aggressively as you would like, but you can be much more aggressive or much less aggressive. And you might be increasing your fat loss, but slowing down your muscle gain. So you can kind of again, if you want to go long and slow or fast and short, they're very similar in terms of result. It's only when you're then below that intervention point. Now slow is the way to go because you're risking muscle loss so easily there. Is that fair to say?
- [56:54]
B
Exactly. Yeah. And I think no one's modeled this quite as well. Like, I was actually able to take James Steele's model where he plots from week 0 to week 80 the rate of muscle gain. And I was like, all right, if this is a linear log change and every given period of time, you're gaining roughly half that again. Or said another way, it takes twice as much time to gain that same amount. I took Rosnik, okay, three kilos in eight weeks. Awesome. What does week 72 to week 80 look like? And it was 0.4 kilos. You're like, oh, my God, I'm at 1 8th. But that's still a pound, you know, that's why the gains are still good over eight week periods when you're, you know, just a year and a half into your training career. So we've modeled how does the diminishing rate of muscle gain work. But I don't think anyone's done a really good job. Like, Kevin Hall's done some large scale modeling. But I want to see someone model someone going from 25% body fat to 5 in a male who's lifting weights. Right. Take all the case studies and where we actually have, like repeated dexes, which is not enough to model right now. It's just not going to happen yet. But I think we would start to see that the body constrains the rate of fat loss that you could actually achieve. Some people have tried to mathematically figure this out, but they're not actually looking at the changing hormonal environment of how accessing other tissues impacts it. It's more like he. If we extrapolate these rates of fat oxidation that we see in these different energetic states, and then we scale that to how much fat tissue is available and we think about the bioenergetic pathways, what happens if you only have 2kg of fat on your body and it's less? Someone could say, oh, therefore you can't be in a more than a 800 calorie deficit when you're shredded or whatever. But those are made up numbers based upon. They're not made up. Those are numbers based upon an extrapolation of physiology in one state versus another. And I think it's really important to acknowledge that you're seeing a bottoming out of many of the hormones and signaling pathways and even blood flow supply, vascularization and heat and changes in fat physiology itself that makes tapping into those stores of body fat at the end of from going from 6 to 5% harder, such to the point that you shouldn't even be using those numbers that you modeled based upon other research to get there. So it's no higher than that. I think it'd be probably the most accurate guesstimation of those types of looks. So if it's a question of how quickly can I gain muscle in the steel modeling and how big should my surplus be? When you're becoming a more and more advanced lifter, when you're becoming more and more advanced in a diet, it's a question of what's the maximal rate that I can liberate fat? And anything faster than that, it's gotta come from somewhere else. Right. And there are ways where you can maybe dig for a bit and we are maybe losing a little bit of lean tissue and depleting glycogen. But that's what we gotta do to overcome that hormonal environment. But then we do a diet break and we see the body get refreshed, you regain the glycogen, and I think we even see some slight regain of lean tissue during prep when it is heavily mediated by just the environment we're in. It's secondary to reds and you eat up into a show, you not only gain some glycogen, but you may regain a little bit of muscle mass depending upon how much you lost and whatnot. At least that's what we think we're seeing as coaches. So that would be really cool to see. Really. Do we have a decent idea of how does our body's ability to Tap into fat stores change as it diminishes and diminishes and diminishes. And we look at, we would have to probably take some of these studies that are looking at amino acid oxidation when you're shredded in a deficit and then do almost a dose response like okay, we know total starvation, it's two to three fold more when you're obese versus like 6% body fat. That's useful. We could try to model and interpolate between those two points. What we really need is someone who's like at 50, 40, 30, 20, 10 and 5% body fat. And looking at that not just in a maximum deficit of not eating anything, but a 1002-003004-00500, up to 1,000 calorie deficit at every body fat percentage. And then we need it in a hundred people to accurately model this. We don't have that, we probably won't have that. So I think that is something, we could probably model that in animals and it would be probably a similar shape but greater magnitude. If I had to guess just on the way rats typically respond to things compared to us. But that would be super cool to see.
- [61:50]
A
Very interesting. Yeah, it's the hard studies to do, which is why we probably don't have them. And also it's a very distinct population that wants these studies done as well. But there's more of us growing, especially in the scientific kind of arena like yourself. So it's very interesting. And one of the thoughts that comes to mind just quickly. Eric was thinking about training volume and obviously how there's that dose response relationship between training volume and muscle growth and then thinking about kind of your energy balance equation where you are body fat wise and how that is interplaying with your ability to recover from a certain amount of volume. And I guess you probably saw this too, but I certainly had, there was a time of which my off season levels of volume I could handle during prep. And then there was a point where I was like I need to start bringing this down because I just, I was going up a lower, upper lower six times a week and I had to change it to a push pull legs. I can't think how much volume probably got trimmed off, but probably at least a third came down and then it slowly got back up. But do you think that your ability, all things being equal, your ability to kind of handle that workload, could that be an indicator for I guess your muscle growth potential stimulus that you're providing? So if you're seeing that volume really like you're barely managing to hold on to what you were. That's when you can be like, ah, now I know this might not be a great position to continue if I want to maximize muscle growth at this stage.
- [63:13]
B
Yeah. A answer is yes. B, I think holistically we take a step back. Someone who's really analytically minded or very physiologically minded and doesn't, you know, consider much of the experience side of it, the subjective experience, I mean, not like how long you've been in an experience. They probably need to hear this is that we can't know our maximal rate of fat loss nor maximum rate of muscle gain. We're not walking around where, you know, I open my fridge and it's a bunch of doubly labeled water, or my house is a metabolic chamber, or I, you know, every night I get into, I sleep in a DEXA and it scans me, you know, and then we have this constant date data where we could actually figure this stuff out. So what do we have is our lived experience and the data we can track which accesses this a little bit. And that's a great example of one of the things that we can know. And the good news is that we feel all this stuff. That's why it changes our behavior. That's why we binge post competition because our body is telling us like, this is not sustainable, healthy, good, and we need to change it. And, and that requires you to get fat, eat in a surplus for a while, and then I will let you have a normal satiety response to a meal, right? Or in your case, how dare you get to a double digit body fat percentage. I'm going to make you sweaty, Betty. And completely uninterested in food. So same thing among athletes. It requires an athlete who has some maybe pathological or previous clinical issues with food or body image to get into a persistent negative state of reds and develop things like the female athlete triad. Because an athlete who doesn't have those issues, they get to a point where that becomes a bottleneck for performance and they go, well, I'm not gonna do that, right? And if I identify that me not eating enough or trying to stay too lean is preventing me from improving my football performance or my triathlon time or my marathon, then I'm gonna change that. That and like, you know, marathon runners, triathletes, ultra endurance athletes, they all get leaner as they prep because it's probably less of a hindrance to maintaining muscle compared to say, improving your VO2 max and running economy. But they also recognize and so do their coaches that they're walking, running, cycling, whatever, a fine balance, a tightrope, if you will, to being ill more often and not being able to train or getting injured more frequently. And we see that in the data, right? So when you look at athletes who are in chronic, problematic, low energy availability, experiencing RED s injury rates are higher, upper respiratory tract infections are higher, and frequency and occurrences of bone fractures and other things that look like, hey, you're not building or maintaining muscle or bone as often and performance or all down. So that is also true in bodybuilding, right? But you know, that's the thing, because if you're paying attention and if you're not completely at war with your own body, like many bodybuilders are exactly that. What signals do we use? How do we know that you can hang out and not worry about being in a surplus? Are you sweating constantly? Like, are you waking up in the middle of the night because you have to turn on the heater and your wife is like, it's the middle of the winter, bro. What's wrong with you? You probably don't need to worry about being in a slight deficit. You could probably gain just as well because your body is so good at using fat for fuel that you're not going to be using protein. So surplus deficit side, don't worry about it. You can be at 100 calorie deficit. You lose a little bit of weight, you like it, it's great, you're trying to stay lean. How do you know if it's too lean? You start to do a lot of volume and you're bonking in sessions, right? You're tapping into glycogen far faster. You're probably in a, like, maybe your ferritin levels are a little bit lower, you're sweating out electrolytes, or maybe you're not sweating and you're overheating, whatever. I think in any of these cases, there are going to be signs and signals that your body is telling you and performance holistically as a bodybuilder, not just did I hit a PR Is really what you want to look at. And if you can perform better at a higher body fat, that is probably something you should pay attention to. And that's not a consistent experience that I've seen as a coach. Some people have to be actually not quite to what you were talking about. 40, 50 pounds over stage weight with kind of the, you know, the UK bodybuilding scene where you had all these natural bodybuilders wearing massive shirts and just thinking they're Getting huge. I see that. And you will persistently see that only lasts for several seasons before the person is like, they start to realize this is not doing what I think it does because my stage weight's the same or 1 pound up. Unless they really like to hold onto their beliefs. It's like, no, you have to gain 40 pounds of fat, increase your stage weight by 1 pound. So next season I'm going to go from, I was 150 on stage and I was 190 in the off season. Now I need to be 230 and then I can be 151. Like, okay, I don't know if that's worth it. But anyway, I digress. That behavior just changes. Like, I saw that in a lot of. I'm not going to name names because I don't want to talk shit. Because, you know, we all can look back and be embarrassed by things we used to do. But there's some very prominent UK bodybuilders who have a ton of respect for who I was. Like, they'll figure it out. And they did. Right. But I think understanding that the signals you get in season and prep and your experience, and I've talked about autoregulation during prep, these are what good coaches rely on and these are what good athletes eventually learn to respond to because of the closest thing we can get to having that fridge full of double water or the Dexa bed.
- [69:18]
A
So well said. Yeah, I think that autoregulation piece, once you understand your body, it's such a game changer with training, with nutrition, with all those things, like you said, you can read the signs, the signals that your body's telling you. Yeah, this thumbs up. No, this is bad. Because until you are at that point, you're. I at least found this. I'm so much relying upon my gurus or textbooks and other people to tell me what I should or shouldn't be doing and why they. They can give you, like, hey, go within these barriers, like on a bowling alley. Like, yeah, we can give you bumpers of things to aim at, but to get a strike, you need to decide for yourself where is the right call and how to throw the ball or whatever. This analogy is somehow working for me. Me and I felt like it took a long time to get there. It's like a bit of a skill set, but the more experience you get, the better you get at doing it all. But this whole, yeah, it was. It's been eye opening, kind of learning more about body recomposition and it's also been it's just opened up opportunities for like, hey, it isn't an on and off switch. There is situations where like you're not wasting time just holding your body weight and maintaining. I, I just, just had it for the longest time where maintenance was like a dirty word. Like you only did that for very short periods of time to resensitize and that was the only reason you'd ever rationalize it. Otherwise you should be pushing things. And in my head now I'm like, well actually like maintaining your body weight might be okay or like just eating around. And I, I see why now it's making more sense why intuitive eating can work so well for so many bodybuilders in their off season where they're not tracking. Because it's like once I, for me now, if I just ate intuitively, I probably just slowly eat, lose weight, then I'd probably find myself getting a bit hungry. I'm like, I probably eat a bit more. But again, it's that data driven bodybuilder where it's like, oh, but if I can manage that, I can measure it and maybe I can tweak it to be slightly more optimal. Or muscle gain's so slow so people like something to chase and you can't force it through the logbook. You like to, I try to, but you also can't force feed it. It starts, you just have to eventually kind of let go. Which is what I come back to. That pill of just like, hey, just enjoy the process, feel good, push yourself hard, it will work out in the end. But yeah, it's been a ride at least. I think there's probably been a lot of people have been through many swings and bouts of that. Eric, we've been about an hour. This has been a great topic. I think if we were to talk about anything else, we'd probably talk for another hour. I did have the question though. Is there anything relating to body recomposition that you still don't have answers for? Is there anything you feel like you
- [71:47]
B
would like more on?
- [71:48]
A
Or do you feel like, like there's enough there to kind of know what we're saying?
- [71:55]
B
The piece that I think we're still uncovering is the degree to which muscle memory is a distinct phenomenon where muscle that you used to have can be regained faster than muscle that you don't yet have? Or is it just the case where if you lose muscle, you can gain muscle faster because you're further from your ceiling. Right. Because the staircase gets increasingly steeper. And that was basically exactly what and this is going to come out. But Josh Pellen's, his whole PhD was on this topic of is resensitization a thing that can occur without muscle loss? Because if it is just us doing studies on a bunch of untrained like the Ogasawara studies and moderately trained people, where if we see a detraining phase where they lose muscle, they can gain muscle faster, are we just looking at the rate of muscle gain they had from six weeks ago when they had less muscle, or is it actual faster slopes? And I have a feeling that it's probably not a distinct thing that we're looking at an early enough training age where losses of muscles make noticeably faster gain of muscles following it, but not because you resensitize, just because you lost muscle. So you're just now become the novice version of yourself who had just tipped over the intermediate phase. And the reason why I'm curious about that is because in prep, I do feel like if you lose muscle, it comes back pretty quick. And that would be evidence of, in certain cases, maybe there is some type of kind of maybe metabolically driven muscle memory or something like that in that unique state. Because if I lose a pound, it took me years to gain that pound, then it should take me years to regain it. But it doesn't seem like that's the case or you'd see advanced bodybuilders, if they really screwed up in a prep, they look worse the next prep. And that's generally not what you see in Teller, dealing with like sarcopenia. And they're in there like competing, like moving into their end stage career. Right?
- [74:14]
A
Yeah, yeah, very interesting. I know it was a long time ago. I did speak to Josh about resensitization on the podcast and I know I'm in talks with him, actually just messaged him the other day on WhatsApp. See, when it's becoming publicly available, we can start talking about some of this research. So that'll be great. People can look forward to that. Eric, it's a blast. As always, thank you for your time. Thank you for your work. Thank you guys for listening. And I guess unless there's anything else from you, Eric, we can catch you in the next episode. Oh, I should say again, I said it a few times, but the mass research review is always linked in the description. But you should definitely check it out if you want to dive into this topic a bit more deeply, especially for the nerds who want to know all the math of how many calories are in a kilogram of muscle versus fat. And why the scale can do some funny things and recomposition can be occurring. It was a nice breakdown.
- [75:03]
B
Thank you, sir. It's been a pleasure.
- [75:05]
A
Cheers, guys.