Dr. Layne Norton on Building Muscle – Insights on Diet, Training, and Supplements

you can't out science hard training you've got to you've got to do the work if you want to get the results your body is so made to move against stuff that if you don't do that you are drastically accelerating your aging and your your cognitive decline as well I don't think seed oils are innocuous from the perspective that in the last few decades added oils are one of the biggest source of increased energy in the American diet you carnivores would lose your absolute Minds if anybody dared suggest that it wasn't good for you and so

it just very clearly points out the asymmetrical application of logic hey everyone I'm sitting here with Dr lay Norton who needs no intro he is a scientist he has a PHD in nutrition he is a fitness industry influencer and he is also a natural Pro professional bodybuilder powerlifter he's an author serial entrepreneur the list goes on and on and I'm super excited to be sitting here today with you Lane you and I we've we've had interactions over the years on social media and it's it's a long time coming that we get to sit down together

meet each other have a discussion I have a lot of respect for um the the things that you put out on social media on YouTube the way you look at the evidence and really in particular your overall view of health and fitness and how practical of a view you take evidence-based and really just it it it it it's it's influenced me over the years so I'll I'll say that um so excited to have you here Lane yeah I'm excited to be here and I think you know we had quite a few conversations off camera about

you know I didn't start out like 10,000 foot view I started down as a biochemist in the weeds and thankfully just had a really great experience in graduate school where I had a PhD adviser who had the same background BS in Biochemistry PhD nutrition his name is Don Layman a legend in protein metabolism and he just did a really great job of like understanding the biochemical me mechanisms understanding how they fit together but also understanding how did that look on a global level what actually pans out in real life and I just think I just

got so lucky with that experience to be able to kind of like synergize those things know you also have this very unique background because you are a professional powerlifter bodybuilder and you have been for many years um you know you're you're coaching people you've coached thousands of people in fact I kind of wanted to start with I'm interested in think in in in understanding like what do you what are some of the common themes that you use in your coaching to help people be successful and what are some of I would say the misconceptions that

common misconceptions that you you that you see you have to address in order for them to be successful you know I think if we Zoom way out again right like the people end up spending a lot of energy and time on stuff that just doesn't matter that much instead of just really focusing on the big rocks the big boulders right and one of the things I one of my favorite quotes is the magic you're looking for is in the work you keep attempting to avoid right so for example did a post about red light therapy

the other day and the post was not I didn't think it was negative towards red light therapy it kind of said hey here's what it might do based on these research studies here's the limitations but please keep in mind where this fits in the overall hierarchy of things like this is a very small piece of a puzzle compared to sleep proper nutrition exercise you know and I think there can be so much stuff floating around in the the fitness s oere is that a way of saying it that you and I is having the background

we can pretty easily detangle like what the kind of hierarchy of stuff is like where the most important stuff is but I think for the average person they hear these things they don't really know how to slot those things into order you know and I found so many people like really have an issue of paralysis by analysis of I don't know where to start so I'm just not going to start and so a lot of what I do with my coaching and less so now I do less oneone coaching now I have a team of

people who work who work for me um is really just trying to like get people out of their own way in terms of just saying like hey you don't have to be perfect we just need to get you to start doing stuff and yeah you're going to screw up you're going to make mistakes but we are going to learn from those mistakes we are going to see where your stumbling blocks are and we're going to help remove those barriers to you being able to be consistent because at the end of the day really that is

the big like the biggest lever you have is consistency with nutrition and training and we were talking yesterday on the phone and I think a really good visual example was given by a guy on social media named Ben Carpenter who's a dietitian and he had a um he had two bowls of marbles one was I think colored blue and one was colored green and he said if the Blue Bowl I might mix up the colors but if the blue Blue Bowl represents like highly processed junk food and the green Bowl represents you know good whole

single ingredient Foods if somebody's diet is the the the bowl of all junk food and we take one marble from the bowl of um you know quote unquote clean good foods and put it in the other Bowl does it change the overall diet and everybody say no right like one if you eat like junk most times but you have one healthy meal well it's going to do very little right so why do we think it goes the opposite direction where like you have one unhealthy meal all a sudden you've just undone everything you've ever done

right and so I try to get PE I try to meet people where they're at and get their mindset out of perfectionism and just get it into execution I think that is the biggest stumbling block is we have a lot of people who just really are afraid to try and Fa and fail and just get into execution mode and I think one of the most liberating things for me was that background in being a competitor and failing a lot and just it just got me over the like oh this is just part of it like

and as you like from doing a PhD I'm sure you had plenty of stuff that just didn't work you know like the number of experiments I came home with tears in my eyes cuz I couldn't even get the analysis to work like I spent probably a year and a half going through every step of our analysis of uh muscle protein synthesis because I wasn't getting any data back trying to figure out where is the kink in this chain for those who aren't familiar like muscle protein synthesis to to do like 50 samples probably takes you

a week to get actual data back because you're your grinding Frozen tissue Frozen liquid nitrogen and you've got to keep it under liquid nitrogen the whole whole time like doing just 20 samples of that probably takes 4 hours then you've got to homogenize the tissue then you've got to separate it you've got to take it through various reactions so you can get protein bound amino acids versus intracellular amino acids because you need the precursor pool and then you have got to take it through gcms but you have to do several reactions before that because it's

got to be detectable on the gcms and so you go put all this work in and then a week later you find out yeah it didn't actually do anything now we got to go back to square one right and so probably did that for like 18 months and it was actually a labmate of mine who kind of figured out where the Kink was we had residual acid in the samples but point being with all that it was like I never if I wasn't willing to go in and fail repeatedly I never would have gotten to

the answer you know and I just think so many people are stuck in being so afraid to just go and when I say fail like okay you go out um you have a stressful day you come home and you stuff your face with ice cream or something like that okay well and I had I have a client I'm actually thinking of right now who was a hedge fan manager and we started working together he was probably binge eating almost every day and I every time it happened I said okay first of all there holding yourself

accountable is good shaming yourself is not going to facilitate Behavior change okay cuz it makes you so sensitive to the behavior that anytime you get close to it it's you're just going to be black or white All or Nothing so and then I said okay what's the an into this okay you have stressful day at work you get home um there's not Foods readily available that would be more conducive to your goals so I like okay hey man you you know not everybody's like this but I'm like you have means meal prep service right like

I'm not saying you have to eat these every meal but like at least having them available so if you're home you're hungry you have this available and then he would end up night eating as well so okay lock your door your bedroom door on the inside so that when you're going out to the kitchen you have to unlock it and then put a little uh like lock put a little lock on the fridge or something like that or whatever you tend to get into of course it's not going to keep you out but a lot

of times those behaviors a lot of people like to think that their behaviors are all choices and it's not we're on autopilot for so many things and just that moment of mindfulness of having to actually like enter in a code or something like that sometimes that's a GameChanger for people and I even said to him hey if you have a stressful day at work when you're driving on your way home say out loud man I just had a stressful day this would be a situation where I'd be more likely to B jeed just identifying it

is going to drastically reduce the risk that's going to happen so over time this guy over the course of a year I think he lost like 35 40 lbs and he got to the point where he was binging maybe once every two or three weeks but he would still get really hard on himself about that two or three weeks or that that interval and I said hey man like look at how far you've come don't let Perfection be the enemy of really good like this if I showed you a snapshot of where you're at now

versus where you were and I said this is where you're going to be in 9 months my guess is you would have taken that all day every day you know what I mean and I said listen everybody has something they struggle with may not be binge eating some people struggle with you know alcohol moderation or gambling or you know pick your poison the likelihood that the the inclination for just like the impulse for that to go away very unlikely you're probably going to always deal with a little bit of that impulse but learning tools to

manage that that's where it's at and I think so many people are really hard on themselves not only do they are they hard themselves about the behavior but they're hard on themselves for even having the thought you know and so again I I really just try to meet people where they're at and try to just get them into execution mode one thing I do say to people is like um Ronda if I said to you I want you to go become the best three-point shooter you can be okay now you can't get any instruction can't

even watch YouTube videos but of all you did every single day for 10 years was go outside and shoot three-pointers for two hours you're not going to the NBA but I bet you'd be pretty darn good at three-pointers you know what I mean and just understanding that you realize it is the mass action that makes the difference and so I just try to remove those barriers for people to just go and start executing um what what about this you know you're talking about eating like the the Whole Foods versus the the process and junk food

and bad up what about people that are coming to you that are you know there's so many different diets that are you know fat diets for weight loss and you know like if if someone does want to they want to lose weight they want to you know increase their lean body mass and maybe body recomposition and I know we're going to talk about training and stuff but like what it like do you is there like a calorie amount that you sort of start with is it based on their body weight like is that something or

do you like think about the actual composition are they doing low C are they doing high carb below fat like what's your how do you approach that so the most important thing is calorie intake is the energy intake versus what you're expending but how you get there is what's really important you know people people can kind of conflate the a physical law of you know thermodynamics with tracking calories those not the same thing right like I can say like it's a rule I don't think anybody disagree if you want to save money you got to

earn more than you spend but now keeping a budget can help facilitate that but you don't have to keep a budget to save money and just because you keep a budget doesn't mean you will save money right so I kind of relate I try to get people to understand and separate those two things but yes calorie is the most important thing but what I try to do is one figure out okay approximately what are they spending per day and the best way in my opinion to that is if they have been tracking okay what are

you eating now in general what body weight doing right because if they're logging relatively accurately and their body weight's not changing I mean you can put whatever you want into a calorie calculator but that is their maintenance calories that is their energy expenditure right and so I like to start there and then if people haven't been doing that one nice trick I like to do as you know when you monitor Behavior Behavior changes and we know this right even down to like photons right so I'll say okay if you don't know it would you just

do me a favor just track for the next 3 days I don't want you to change anything don't change a single thing you're doing in fact if you're eating junk food or if you're eating what you think is too much that's great then we have a bigger shovel like your energy expenditure is higher than we thought we have a big shovel to dig you out with right so please don't change anything but what invariably happens is it's a very instructive experience for them because they'll start tracking and realize oh man I I was eating a

lot more than I thought because I was having a a bowl of ice cream that I was thinking was a serving and it was three or I tell people if you ever want to be disappointed way out of weit out of way out of serving of peanut butter you know if you want to be if you want to be depressed um or they do track accurately or sorry or they see what they're consuming and they change their behavior already because they're tracking because they're monitoring right and I mean it's if you look at studies it's

very consistent uh people under report their calorie intake by 30 to 50% um yeah there's a very classic study in 1992 uh the New England Journal of Medicine they had people who self-reportedly were weight loss resistant so these people claimed that they were eating 1,200 calories a day they specifically wanted this population and these were obese people and they said they put them in um metabolic Ward so they're tracking their their their energy expenditure in a metabolic chamber and they know exactly what they're eating and they even told them like we'll we'll know if you're

if you're eating more than you say and they also looked at lean mass BMR total energy expenditure so what was really interesting this was one of the first studies that showed that obese people didn't have slow metabolisms and like at first you know the first few Decades of us trying to deal with the Obesity crisis was us like looking on the metabolism side how do they must have slow metabolisms or we got to increasement metabolic rate and now we know it's the appetite side that has a much stronger effect on body weight regulation I mean

it's so funny when people say to me well I have a slow metabolism that's why I I want to take OIC I'm like well if you have a slow metabolism OIC is not going to help because it doesn't incre your increase your metabolic rate it is a very powerful appetite suppressant um so in this study they looked at BMR total energy expenditure and found that basically people's lean body mass explained about 70 to 80% of the variance in BMR and total energy expenditure you can almost draw like a straight line through it can you explain

that to people because they think it's important right like and that was kind of a follow-up question is like well where training comes into this picture where muscle mass comes into this picture and why like how like how is that a really important like lever that you can pull to help people like body recom to help people lose fat yeah so lean mass just be clear lean mass and skel muscle mass often get used interchangeably and they're not um lean mass is a relatively good proxy for skeletal muscle mass but lean mass versus fat mass

is a two compartment model like for dexa for example you'll get fat Mass so literally all um fatty tissues will go into a bucket and then everything else goes into a bucket so we're talking Bon skin undigested food fluid like all that kind of stuff um but in general adapost is a relatively it's not an inert tissue we used to think it was an inert tissue we know that's not the case anymore but it has a very low energy expenditure relative to other lean tissues and actually skeletal muscle doesn't have a super high energy expenditure

for a lean tissue it's actually one of the slowest if not the slowest like liver and gut tissues have a much higher metabolic rate but your skull muscle is your biggest overall lean tissue and I would argue your biggest organ and so its effect you know having an extra 10 pounds of skeletal muscle because it's so much it does have a profound effect on you know your energy expenditure overall so when they looked in this study when they standardized for lean mass they saw basically no difference no statistical difference in anybody's metabolic rates or their

total daily energy expenditure and when they tracked their intake what they found was they reported 1,200 calories a day but on average they were consuming about just over 1,800 and they also over reported their physical activity by 47% now I think a lot of people will look at that and go so that when I present that data a lot of people get really upset because no one likes being called a liar I don't think people are lying I don't think that's what it is I think we look at ourselves with rolls colored glasses and we

look at um serving sizes and we we tend to like just give ourselves a little more grace than we probably should right and uh even yesterday I did like a day of eating while I was traveling and I showed like I went out to lunch I got a salad grilled chicken you know I said um I said can you put the dressing on the side put the cheese on the side right and I just used a little bit of cheese I used the dressing and um but still like after I added everything up I'm like

there's over 30 grams of fat in the salad a lot of you guys would have the salad and think oh this is low calorie right no this salad was 600 calories you know and so if you think and then look at you know take for example like the Cheesecake Factory you look at the salads are well over a th000 calories and so I think many people do think they're eating healthy and just don't really have a great understanding of how quickly energy can add up if you're not very mindful about it so this study kind

of put the kabash on and that's been it's been supported by a lot of follow-up studies as well showing whether type 2 diabetic obese non- obese it basically boils down to lean mass explains like 78% of the variance in metabolic rate and then the rest of the variance in total energy expenditures is physical activity um can I ask you a question about the lean mass let's say assuming a lot of it is skeletal muscle as well right sure so um what about the fact that your skeletal muscle is also a big sink for for glucose

yeah how is that do you think you can you can't really ignore that aspect as well right I mean in terms of the big picture you're talking no no I I tell people like exercise is one of the only things that you can do independent of weight loss that will Pro improve all your health parameters you know uh and we like in layman's lab the amount of exercise you need to get massive benefits is such a small like I I got in trouble because I called it a disgustingly small amount but it really is like

there was a research study done looking at um vigorous physical activity not even continuous but just like throughout the day cumulative four minutes vigorous activity per day reduce cancer risk by I believe 20% okay and then if you got up to 10 minutes I think it was 30% right and so it's like I'm sorry you got four minutes you know and some people will say well it's a cohort study XYZ but we have randomized control trials looking at very short bursts of exercise seeing improvements in glucose metabolism um blood lipids inflammation and then now the

cognitive stuff too um there was actually a recent uh randomized control trial where they took people with major dep or men with major depressive disorder or general anxiety disorder and they had them do two 25 minutes sessions of resistance training a week that's it and it was for eight weeks and the improvements in major depressive disorder and general anxiety disorder the effect size for major depressive disorder was 1.7 now for those who aren't familiar with effect sizes .2 is a small effect size 0.5 is a modest and 08 anything above 08 is considered large 1.7

is massive and ssris fall between like3 to8 like usually the best you see is about .8 which again I'll tell people I'm not what I'm not saying is that you we should just get rid of SSRI and everybody exercise because sometimes maybe somebody needs an SSRI just to get them out of bed so they'll actually go exercise but like if we're looking at how powerful that lever is it's amazing and then you look at the effects on bone health you look at the effects on um just like mental health cognition even short-term exercise improves cognition

I think there was just a recent study showing that that even an acute bad of exercise can improve I think it was memory formation I could be wrong and so I think again one of the limiters is I try trying to meet people where there are is like hey you see me train for two three hours a day but that's CU I'm trying to be the strongest person in the world in my weight class you you don't need to be doing that like just even if you just go walk vigorously for 30 minutes in a

day you're killing it you know like but uh of course I would recommend people resistance train because I think there are so many benefits with that and um yeah it just doesn't take that much first of all okay I just want to say you are we are speaking the same language like the the all these intermittent they they're called they actually called the Vila studies and Marty gabala was part of that I had him on the podcast talked about that research and it was to me it was just it was amazing that they had these

fitness trackers like you said it was like they went out and did these little short bursts of physical activity and it had a profound effect cumulative right and so um how easy is it to do like 2 minutes of like you know climbing like sprinting up the stairs or whatever um I actually work out mostly for the brain benefits by the way like like if I don't get some form of exercise whether it's resistance training or doing some more cardio like I am not in a good space in my head like I can Rose col

colored glasses are gone I can see the negative in a lot of things comparisons I'm just in a bad mood like it's I am a very different person if I get exercise versus if I don't and so if it's like for me exercise is it's necessary it is a part of my wake up in the like you know like I brush my teeth I have to do exercise if I don't then I'm you know not in a good position and so I think what I'd like to point out in that is you have made it

a habit as part of your lifestyle that it's not can I go exercise day do I have time for it it's no this is this is on the top list of this is going to get done right just like brushing your teeth right and I think one of the things that I really try to hone in on with people is try to get away from something having to feel good to get you to do it okay like sometimes I love to train but it doesn't feel good all the time like there there last week when

I was out in or two weeks ago when I was out in LA and I had long travel I had um missed a session because my one of my podcast ran really long and so I was going to have to combine like a couple sessions and I hadn't slept well and all this kind of stuff and I'm like sitting in the car like come on you can do this you can do this but for me I just got very used to my feelings are going to fluctuate based on who knows what and so I'm going

to go in and do the things I know are conducive to me being in good health regardless of how I feel about it because if you're waiting for it to feel good I mean feelings are like the wind and if you're kind of basing how you act based on that you're just floating around I mean do you feel motivated to brush your teeth no you do it because you know if you don't brush your teeth they're going to go to crap right the same thing happens with your body if you don't exercise and again it

doesn't have to be a bunch of exercise but speaking of the cognitive benefits I mean I was diagnosed at age six with ADHD and honestly the more like as I look back just thinking about it now the more I got into exercising consistently the better my performance in school got and like even now even though I tell all the people you don't need to train for 2 or 3 hours I am such a hyperactive brain going a thousand miles an hour that if I didn't have that my best friend tells me all the time he's

like dude I wouldn't want to see you if you couldn't train for two hours he's like I would not want to be around you you'd be intolerable you know so for me I think you know they say that the sport chooses the person not the other way around right I think maybe subconsciously there was some of that that I just like felt better overall and loved doing it you know but for people out there who are struggling with it whatever listen whether it's CrossFit powerlifting bodybuilding just going to the gym doing machines I don't care

like any of those are going to get you massive benefits relative to not doing anything and actually there was another study that just got published I just covered it they did uh a randomized control trial I think it was in a Nordic country I want to say Denmark and they had people over AG 65 do a year of either high intensity resistance training meaning they were getting them within a few reps of failure on each set moderate intensity which was like body weight stuff banss they were staying further away from failure but they were doing

some resistance or no no no resistance training but they were active like I think the uh average Step count per day was like 9500 in this cohort which is actually pretty high so these were active older people so they did that and then they had followup they had follow up at one year and then four years L and then three years after that so four years total and they actually looked at people who stopped resistance training for the three years after they still had in better strength better lean mass better cross-sectional area those like yes

it they had less than their Peak after they've been doing it for a year but it had this protective effect against age related Decline and sarcopenia because the other two groups the moderate group kind of probably didn't wasn't statistically powered enough to pick out some of the differences but the they declined significantly of course the group that wasn't doing exercise declined significantly and even the group that did that one year of resistance training four years after they started had less visc fat too so it's like one of the things people will ask me is I'm

this age am I too old to start or I'm I'm this I'm can I resistance train I do this everybody if your spinal cord works you can resistance train and it's good for you and in fact right across the street um at University of Illinois where I did my PhD in the exercise Fizz department they were doing a study in uh frail elderly but basically we're talking about people people who had trouble like kind of standing up you know and they started their Progressive overload was they started them sitting down to a high chair and

doing reps with that after I think it was 12 or 16 weeks I can't recall the specific details of the study they saw significant increases in lean mass cross-sectional area muscle quality you know it's imaged by an MRI um they got so much more functional some of them were able to squat down to like a a chair like this and stand up or even lower and so I think resistance training has gotten this bad rap because a lot of people view it as this like really aesthetic narcissistic thing because of bodybuilding and yes there is

that component to it but like your body is so made to move against stuff that if you don't do that you are drastically accelerating your aging and your your cognitive decline as well like it is it is pretty scary to see how quickly uh people and just look at this the research on people over age 65 if they fall and break something and going to the hospital there's Pro I I don't know the exact statistic but I think it's better than 50% chance that they're dead within a year like it's it's a pretty scary statistic

and there's the the as Stu Phillips likes to call the disability threshold right where it's like okay then one of those things happens or and you know then another one they start add infection right and then it's like all of a sudden they're not mobile anymore you know they're not independent anymore and you're absolutely right those things do add up and I do want to there were some people that had some questions about aging as well and you know with everything you just said obviously it's doing something is important and sometimes not obsessing over the

perfectionist type of program to do and all that but I'm going to I'm going to ask you some questions um because people do ask these these questions you know first and foremost training for strength versus muscle mass m is it like do you train differently like is there a different type of are there sets and the Reps different do you think for training for Mass versus um strength yeah so the two are interrelated all things being equal if you have more contractile tissue you'll be stronger right but strength is not just muscle mass it's also

neural Drive it is how many fibers can your motor Nuance recruit like there's a lot of things go it's technique a lot of things go into it and strength is a specific skill if we're talking about strength as um assessed by a one rep maximum right so if you take untrained people into the into a lab and you have them like work up to say a squat Max right what you'll find a lot of times is somebody will just smoke something you go up 5 kgs and they get stapled with it and it's like wait

what what happened because they don't they haven't practiced that skill and they don't know how to one they just don't know how to grind a rep and be uncomfortable but two as you go higher to a one rep max you're recruiting more muscle fibers uh fibers tend to be recruited in order there's some challenge to This research but they tend to be recruited in order from smallest oxidative up to you know middling kind of hybrid fibers up to your glycolytic l right and so if you do High Reps with low weight you'll still eventually recruit

those larger muscle fibers as you get close to fatigue but if you're doing a one rep max and it's a true one rep max you're having to get everything you possibly can right so it's a very specific skill so when it comes to reps and sets for powerlifting you do the number of sets you let me go back so let's talk about building muscle first because it'll help frame it better what seems to be important for building muscle is a few things the first is mechanical tension and understanding that mechanical tension is cumulative throughout reps

and sets so when I say mechanical tension I think a lot of people misinterpret that as it's got to be heavy you know and I'm like well if you want Max mechanical tension just do the most eccentrically loaded exercise you can possibly do that'll be the most mechanical tension for one rep but it's really about what is the number of hard sets that you do and by hard sets I mean proximity to failure now the research seems to suggest for a muscular hypertrophy you have to get within a few reps of failure to really maximize

the response but you probably don't need to go all the way to failure and this is probably conflated by the fact that if you're always training a failure especially compounds your performance and the load you can use is going to drastically fall off for example if I did a 10 rep max set of squats like my absolute best I actually remember the set I did 530 for 10 reps I think something like that in squat after it was done I had to lay down for 15 minutes and I couldn't move like physically could not move

if you asked me to do that again I might have gotten I don't know two reps something like that and so if you if you're doing that big compound movements like that you it's going to be hard for you to actually get a lot of effective sets in because it's so fatiguing now isolation stuff a little bit different single joint movements a little bit different you can kind of push those a little bit harder and actually probably should push those a little bit harder one of the best descriptions I heard was intensity is the medicine

so hard sets close to failure is the medicine the number of hard sets or the volume we'll call it is the dosage so we have several meta analyses now and meta regressions kind of suggesting that there's kind of a dose response between number of hard sets you do and muscular growth I mean we've even seen it like specifically in the triceps there was a there was a regression by James creger that even up to like 27 to 45 hard sets per week on triceps produce more muscle growth than I think like 15 to 25 sets

per week something like that so now again I I want to couch that with you're going to get most of the benefit if if I am always looking at things like how can I be the most muscular strongest human being I can but for the average person if you just want to grow some muscle you don't have to do that many sets but the point is it does seem to be kind of a dose response how do you know if so I'm sorry going you know for someone that may not know what their failure is

like how do you identify close to failure like what's so and and that's actually where practically I think most people probably should train to failure at a certain point because otherwise it's really hard to determine what failure is and actually there are studies on this and on average intermediate and beginner lifters underestimate their uh their repetitions they can achieve by about five to six so for example in a study they might have them say like intra set say on their eighth rep how many do you think you have left two okay then the next set

they actually they yell at them they blare music they're like hyping them up and they'll get 15 or or they'll get you know yeah 15 16 reps right and so I think a lot of people if they've never trained to failure they viewed failure as kind of like discomfort and in fact it's funny because I've had people say well you and I'm going to get into this about the strength stuff I almost never trained a failure especially on compounds and say well you I've had people say you train like a wuss you know you you

stop you know I'm like so okay so that that set of 10 with 530 that took me out honestly took me out for weeks after that to be honest you're saying if I stop two reps short of the 10th rep that that was an easy set I can tell you every single rep of that set was hard and felt uncomfortable okay and so I think people if they've never trained a failure it probably is a useful experience to do with a spotter under conditions like be smart right but I do think it is useful now

when it comes to bodybuilding and growing muscle whether you train to failure or stop shy similar effects but you probably want to stop on compounds and again I'm guessing based on some of these meta regressions I I could come out I could be a little bit off but I think I'll be pretty darn close on compound lifts big compound lifts probably need to get within two to three reps of failure to to get the maximum benefits for isolation probably one or two um but for powerlifting this is where it gets quite different and again there

are bodybuilders who train to failure in every set and are very strong there are powerlifters who are very strong wrong who don't look super muscular and so people will there's actually like um some people in the scientific Community who will say like things like muscle mass doesn't matter for strength I think very strongly that they're Incorrect and there are people who will say well strength doesn't matter for hypertrophy I think strongly that you're also probably incorrect okay because all things being equal let's take somebody who wants to grow muscle all things being equal if they

are stronger they can create more mechanical tension they can do the same reps with more weight okay that's a bigger potential take somebody who's a powerlifter all things being equal if they have more muscle mass they will be stronger and you know one of the things I tell people is well if muscle mass doesn't matter for powerlifting then I'm just going to lose 40 pounds drop down to you know whatever weight class I need to hit World Records you know like no it it matters Mass moves Mass but um I think people for example me

I held a world record squat for almost a year uh hit 668 lbs in 2015 at ipf Worlds um and I don't I've got good legs by most people standards but if you put me on a bodybuilding stage I'll never have the best sets of leg on stage and they'll see somebody who has really great legs who only squats 500 lb and the the the conclusion will be okay well muscle mass doesn't matter for strength no because that person for them because I don't know what their motor neuron recruitment is like I don't know all

that kind of stuff but all things being equal if they have less muscle they'd be weaker they had more muscle they'd be stronger right so same thing for me now when it comes to strength the purest exess expression of strength is force right you have to produce force and that's mass times acceleration actually Mass acceleration squared I think um phys physics people please check me on that one but there's a there's a mass component and there's a a speed component to it so you can move a given load with the same Force As you move

a heavy load you'll just move it faster right so now if it's a heavy load you can apply the same Force but it's going to move slower right so then we call this the strength velocity curve so one of the things that my coach Zack Robinson really kind of pioneered talking about and he came out of Mike zoro's Lab at fa was he said you know a lot of powerlifters or people who are trying to build strength train with a lot of fatigue you know they're training very close to failure you know they're doing heavy

sets and that is one thing that's very important for strength if you want to get better at a one rep max you have to be doing sets with you know heavy singles doubles triples because that is a specific skill set you need that to one learn how to grind hard reps and two just feel what heavyweight feels like and how to manage that under stress so you need those sets but then volume is also important for strength there there's there's quite a few studies that show that but interestingly he did a I believe he did

a meta regression looking at hypertrophy showing that proximity to failure kind of was linearly associated with more hypertrophy so the closer you got to failure the more hypertrophy you got the strength regression didn't show that it had no association with your proximity to failure and so one of the things they said is with strength you're always managing kind of expression with fatigue so if you're training heavy a lot and going close to failure you're doing a very specific skill but you're also inducing a lot of fatigue which is going to reduce the amount of strength

that you can express whereas the way we kind of train or he trains me is we when I'm doing my compound squat bench press deadlift I'll do one set or maybe two sets of a heavy single double triple maybe four reps and then we'll do back offs that are much lighter but we're doing multiple sets of them as fast as we can like the speed of the rep as fast as we can and they've actually shown that you get better strength results not training to failure compared to training to failure but you do have to

do some heavy heavy sets relatively close to fail and it's probably because like I said failure just it induces a lot of fatigue and that's going to mask how much strength you can actually Express when they test it so in general this is kind of minutia that a lot of people don't really need to worry about I I always tell people you know I I'm 90% sure that you're not training too hard I I I'm almost sure of that okay there are people who do train too hard there are people who overtrain themselves there are

people who put in so much fatigue that it's going to mask their results but for the most part most people all there's so many people I see online who think they're overtraining and I'll look at their training and I'll be like no no you're not overtraining and if you are you're not sleeping well or your nutrition's crap or something like that for for people that are not powerlifters or even professional bodybuilders what what are you know perhaps someone that you're would approach your coaching business or something like that who are wanting to you know they're

wanting to gain some ma mass and function and strength everything you know not like a competitive level but like what would you say like how do you do exercise selection like choosing a hack squat over a barbell squat or um doing a you know a bench press over um dumbbells and then also like are there certain like if if you were like are there like the top five exercises for like for each muscle group that you would consider okay so this is where it's going to be a nice segue of us of talking about X's

and O's versus practicality right so I realized within a couple years of coaching people that oh the X's and O's aren't really what matters it's just getting people to do this consistently right and so it took me longer to realize that for training but it still applies and what I mean by that is when it comes to exercise selection for example if I was putting together a program for somebody and they weren't going to compete as a powerlifter and they just wanted to grow some muscle I probably wouldn't program barbell squats only because it's a

you know relatively High fatigue exercise compared to something like a hack squat which is still a compound um it it requires less balance and learning and the research shows very clearly now that that machines produce as much hypertrophy as as free weights we used to have this like feeling that oh no you got to you got to barbell Squat and you got to you know do these big compounds and that's what builds mass and you know we have the research to show that's not true we have the Practical examples to show it's not true cuz

Phil Heath won seven olympas and I don't think I've ever seen the guy touch a free free weight barbell I'm sure he has but for the most part he trained with machines and built one of the greatest physiques of all time and people might say well those guys are on drugs yeah but all of them are on drugs so if we see similar results with different training styles I mean those those sorts of things are equal right and so the research supports that so but here's where practical Segways with that so I trained very heavy

with free weight movements and for me it was the best exercises for growing muscle and here's why cuz that other was boring to me like High Reps with isolation stuff put me to sleep but you load up a free weight barbell back squat I now all of a sudden I'm hyped up I'm excited I'm going to work harder at it I'm going to be consistent at it and so for me even though training like a powerlifter is not maybe how you draw up on paper somebody to be best for hypertrophy for me it was because

it got me excited about training legs two three times a week to get in all that volume I needed to actually build that muscle and I had a client one time Who Loved CrossFit he loved CrossFit he's like you know I know it's not the best for building muscle and I go you know what for you it might be because like dude you told me when you tried to do bodybuilding training that you hated it and you just stopped going to the gym so we have to start with compliance first right like you could have

the best program on paper but if you're not actually going to go in and do it like it's not going to work right and so I worry about for the average person what gets them excited to go what you know exercises do they enjoy that they have pain with right and what will they execute consistently because within that for growing muscle the world is your oyster basically the things that matter because I I kind of got off track but uh mechanical tension number of hard sets and muscles at long lengths meaning uh there does seem

to be quite a bit of research that even when you equalize for proximity to failure if you aren't taking a muscle to a long length under tension you're probably not maximizing the benefits of it um and E so there's if you look at research where they do partials of like the contracted the more contracted partial of a lift so for example if you're doing a squat so doing full range of motion versus a half squat right you get more hypertrophy doing the full squat they've they've there's quite a few studies on this but when they

compare partials in a lengthen position so say if you're just doing the bottom part of a squat in a partial which by the way sounds horrible compared to a full range of motion you see similar hypertrophy so it appears that that that putting tension on a muscle in a lengthened position is important so those are kind of the three things I look at is you know mechanical tension number of hard sets training it at long muscle lengths within that that the world is pretty much your oyster as to how you do it now I will

say I was in the camp for a long time of this whole like you can't grow like Regional portions of muscle based on like how you do exercises well that was one that Bro Science might have been right on it looks like I was wrong on right because there was actually um there was a study that just came out looking I think leg press versus leg extensions and they showed that leg extensions preferably active ated the um uh rectus femoris so kind of that like the middle part of your quad I think I got the

muscle right I uh and then the leg press active preferably grew the vastest lateralis so you probably want to do both right um because there's some people out there say all you need is the compounds you don't need to do any isolation well if you want to get the most out of your regional growth it's probably good to mix it up and I think again something I changed my mind on about 10 years ago I was very big on like daily undulating periodization which is basically like you're changing up your rep schemes workout to workout

right like maybe if you're doing squats you might do like um day one sets of 10 day two sets of seven day three sets of four you know and by one two three I mean just your squat days and I thought that the research suggested that that was going to be than just doing like straight sets or linear periodization and turns out it doesn't seem like it really matters but what I will tell people is practically it might matter because people do well with variety I mean you know this about dopamine and variety right and

if you get a new workout you get excited about it right like and I it's funny as a scientist I have a hard time getting myself Placebo which is actually really annoying because Placebo is great um but even now whenever my coach s a new training block there's a little bit of like you know I get a little bit excited so I think variety is important because if you're just doing the same thing over and over it's too easy to fall into well I do this weight for this many reps for this many sets and

you stop progressively overloading whereas when you change it up a little bit now you have a little bit more motivation to kind of you know not settle into a normal routine but that can go too far too I see people like change their workout up every single session and I'm like you're not actually getting as many benefits as you could because you're not getting used to an exercise for a certain number of reps which allows you to get stronger more mechanical tension probably grow more muscle over time so when it comes to people who aren't

going to compete in bodybuilding aren to compete in powerlifting mostly what I look at is like hey do you know if there's exercises that you really like and have access to is there anything that gives you pain um is there anything that you know motivates you more like I I know some people are like I love High Reps I love the pump I want to get cool let's do more High Reps because again when we look at equated sets in terms of proximity to failure when they compare low load training and I think even down

to like 40% of a one rep max versus high load training they don't see differences in hypertrophy now I could make a devil's advocate argument that perhaps those studies you know cuz a lot of these studies are to 10 weeks maybe over time somebody training with heavier loads might produce more hypertrophy because they'll get stronger and so maybe by getting stronger more mechanical tension but you know I can't really say that now based on the research but even if it was a difference it'd be pretty darn small which for practically for most people out there

I tell them you know if you're just training hard you're getting 95% of the way there and I use this example because people will all the time send me videos of fbb Pro bodybuilders training like look look at how they're training this isn't science B how can you explain this I'm like yeah but they trained really hard for 20 years like every day right and so that mass action is going to wash out a lot of these little differences and most of the people who worry about these little differences are never going to actually get

to express them because they just don't train hard enough and one of my favorite quotes was actually um somebody said you you can't out science hard training you've got to you've got to do the work if you want to get the results I it it also you know I've had this conversation to some I mean a little bit of this conversation with St Philips and Brad shenfeld about you know training the failure lifting heavy and and you know things that you were you've you've given some more details as well but it's what's nice about it

what I like about it is there are a lot of people um a lot of older adults women that have been scared of of lifting because of the like Oh no I got to lift heavy and and I'm going to injure myself I'm you know I'm I might bulk up too much I we can talk about that but like it does give you know once I found out it was like you don't have to lift heavy you just to put the effort in fatigue yourself you know now I'm lifting heavier too but but like I

started like to get into like even starting that was my end where it was like you know okay like I don't have to like do this like scary thing although now I love it and I'm like wanting to lift heavy but being strong is fun anybody who can lift heavy I'll tell you if you can lift heavy and you don't have pain it's fun I haven't come across one person yet who doesn't like loading up a big squat for them hitting it and doesn't get excited I did want to ask you one follow up on

the squat um hack squat versus like a barbell squat y now in terms of you know muscle growth no difference it's going to be similar what about functional like function let's say an older adult you know getting up out of their chair like being able to like avoid the fall do you think it's the same it's hard to know one it depends on how we Define functional right like how we test it um if we're talking about like preventing Falls and that's a great point that you bring up because a lot of people get so

focused on bone density Bon we don't want to break bones well if they didn't fall in the first place you know and by the way the best thing you can do for bone density is lift weights like anything you can do nutritionally pales in comparison as to what lifting weights does for bone density is a massive effect on bone density so what I would say is probably all things being equal the free weight will probably be better I'm not aware of any data that actually assesses this but if we have 65y old woman who's never

put a barbell on her back before that's a big ask squats feel really weird if you've never done it before um seeing a well executed squat now like after having gone through it so much and I'm sure you too you realize wow that's that's actually a very technical lift like that is a thing of beauty to do that well and and so I think a lot of times if I if I really wanted to get somebody doing that I'm probably going to start with them like doing like a a goblet squad or something like that

or to a box or you know something that they can execute with relative confidence to start because if I just put them on a barbell squat it's going to feel weird maybe their back hurts you know whatever but I mean again I look at that as I just want to get them back for more sessions so if what they'll do is a hack squat or a leg press hell yes and then hopefully over time you know we can walk them into some more complex stuff but I'm totally good with people and hey if all they

ever do is hack squats they are still going to be eons better than somebody who's not doing anything at all right and even leg extensions you know so yeah don't let the enemy of good be Perfection and it's so funny there's so many myths around lifting and heavy lifting and I don't want somebody what I will say is most people if you progressively load correctly lifting weights is going to reduce their pain when you now when you're older you're going to have pain okay my dad is sedentary I love my dad he's one of the

most wonderful human beings I've ever met but he doesn't lift right he has sciatica all kind he has more back pain than I do I squat over 600 pounds I deadlift over 700 pounds and yeah I get some some aches and pains here and there and I've dealt with some back issues but you also got to keep in mind when you're trying to be the strongest person in like your weight category in the entire world for your age the amount of training dose I need to make progress is going to be almost right next to

what is going to overtrain me and increase my risk for acute injury and so I've always got to walk that line very carefully but in studies looking at lower back pain and lifting they show it decreases lower back pain like because one you decrease your sensitivity to pain because you're progressively loading those tissues those tissues are one of the worst things you can do is to not load tissues because then they do get really sensitive to pain and pain is a whole another like that's another Rabbit Hole I went down that's there's so much woo

around what causes pain injury we talked about this a little bit but um yeah in general if you lift weights when you get older you'll still have some pain but you'll be strong and less sensitive to that pain than somebody who doesn't this kind of leads to some of the questions that I that I was wanting to ask you about you know again when I you are obviously an outlier I mean you're you're a professional power powerlifter and bodybuilder but um generally speaking like how do you or how do you coach people to um as

much as they can pre like prevent getting injuries like if or I mean lower your risk I would say lower your risk of injuries way say yeah and then also um like warm-ups stretching but then again once you have an injury like how do you push like you're were saying pain like you get better with lifting so then how do you approach once you actually have an injury like what what do you do or what do do you coach people to do as well so I'm not a paint expert but I've talked to a lot

of paint experts I've read a lot of the literature and I I have my own personal experience as well that lines up with literature and I will say man this is something I really changed my mind on for a long period of time the stuff I thought reduced pain and injury versus what actually did was so different in the research literature and honestly discovering the bioco social model of pain was a GameChanger for me because after I set that squat world record I went through like seven years of really bad back pain hip pain that

pretty much prevented me from competing I wasn't able to get back to Worlds until 2022 when I won cuz 2015 I just got a I got a silver medal over all um and it was so the so the things that are big levers for let's just take injury first okay one big increases in volume in training volume and load when you aren't prepared for it so there's a lot of people out there who they'll get you know um let's do this challenge let's do this thing bad idea bad idea if you are drastically increasing your

volume or your load that is one of the big risk factors for acute injury okay so when we say progressively load like even my coach if training is going well and I'm getting much stronger we don't jump up load very fast we're still only increasing you know 5 10 pounds a week because we know it's possible that I get stronger faster than my overall recovery can tolerate right so we're careful about how we increase load putting the tissues in under stress progressively is a big uh injury reducing Factor so and and now I was actually

watching um uh quarterback on Netflix which followed a few different quarterbacks they were following Patrick Mahomes and one of the things I did like that they were doing was the his trainer was saying you know we put him in a lot of different positions under stress and load over time so that the first time as tissues deal with this is not in the middle of the game and so a lot of people think for example like form is really important for injury prevention there's not a lot of research that actually backs that up to be

honest like uh take roundback deadlifting there was a study like a I think it was a meta analysis looking at rounded back deadlifting versus straight back deadlifting or degrees of fuction in the disc and I mean everybody would think okay round back deadlifting it raises your risk of injury and it didn't really um and you see some top powerlifters deadlift with a round back mostly rounded in the upper back um and so you go how is that possible and then even like um like KNE cave knee valgus on a squat right it's where your knees

come in um one of my friends is probably the best female squatter in the world drug-free um she squatted 496 lb at 150 lb body weight her name's Leah bavois she's uh the F she's a French national champion um but her knees cave when she squats but she's always done it that way which means she started out doing it that way when the load was light her tissues adapted to that and it's not really a risk injury risk for her and actually I used to deadlift with a straight back and found that when I was

fatigued my back would start to round and that's when I would get injured and have pain and about 5 years ago I changed I said okay let's try this whole tissue adaptation thing and just pull the way I pull when I'm fatigued because if I'm training for powerlifting and trying to get stronger I'm have to I'm going to have to train under fatigue I've had way less back pain and I don't think I've had any acute injuries on deadlift and so because you prog rively because I progressively loaded those tissues now if you're I think

all things being equal if you can deadlift straight back do that right but I think the the idea that we that we need this like perfect form to prevent injury actually the research shows people who believe they need really good form are actually more likely to have pain and get injured than people who believe that they're resilient and strong and actually people who get injuries uh mindset is actually a big for Recovery people who believe that they are strong and resilient recover faster from injuries and have less pain than people who believe that they're fragile

and this gets into the really the biopsychosocial model so the the other big levers for injury risk are psychological stress that is a massive massive uh lever for acute injury and overall pain so if you look at fibromyalgia chronic fatigue syndrome in fact a lot of autoimmune disorders are very tightly associated with Psych ological stress and psychiatric disorders uh IBS as well and they show there was this really classical pain study I think they did a skin pressure test and they had people they standardized the pressure and they had people rate it zero to 100

zero being absolutely no pain whatsoever didn't feel anything 100 being most painful thing they've ever felt and the average was like I think it was around a 50 but the spread was 4 to 96 if I recall correctly so for somebody it didn't even hardly register for another person it was almost the most painful thing they'd ever experienced so pain is not what we thought it was which is your body's a bag of meat hooked up to your brain and if you poke the bag cut the bag burn the bag cut the bag your brain

sends a signal and goes owie and now we know what happens in the mind affects the body and what happens in the body affects the mind I mean look at the going in the opposite direction look at the exercise studies on cognition on depression so what happens in the body affects the mind it goes the other way as well so psychological stress that by far is the single biggest thing I changed in my life that got me into a low enough pain state to actually get competitive again in powerlifting um and that started with uh

getting better at stress management techniques going to therapy um started doing hard work of setting boundaries with people in my life um and even left a very stressful relationship and I I'll never forget like this light bulb moment and again I'm not saying negative thing about this person like it was stressful for her too right it just it was not a good match overall it's a very toxic Dynamic and two weeks after leaving that relationship I'm like what is happening cuz I was physically noticeably stronger in the gym and I was even sleeping a little

bit less and I real I kind of realized wow yeah I'm not walking on eggshells all the time my body isn't like I'm not like tensed up all the time and this is backed up by the research that it's there is a psychological there is a physical toll that's psychological stress takes and so managing that has been huge in fact I I joke with people that I have become much more Zen not because it improved the quality of my life it improved my lifting so I became even more Zen which improved the quality of my

life which then had like a positive kind of effect on everything right and the other thing is uh sleep so sleep is a big big lever for cute injury and for uh pain management so there was a study in uh I think Army where they looked at four hours of sleep a night versus eight hours of sleep a night so people either had to get or yeah I think it was four versus eight and I forget the duration I think it was 2 or 3 months and they found that people who were sleeping 4 hours

a night had a 236 increased risk of acute injury versus people who slept 8 hours a night that's a massive difference and people who sleep more have less pain and it you can just bundle it up all into that kind of like Stress Management the long story is it is about your overall recovery status and psychological stress your beliefs about pain um your sleep all that stuff impacts it now when you have an injury and you have pain you know we've all not all but a lot of us have gone to the doctor and they've

been like okay that squat gave you an AE don't ever do those again but you have to understand a lot of doctors especially GPS are not trained in modern pain science and they're thinking about liability if you they tell you you know you could you can go back in and squat again you just to like start off slow and manage your manage your pain status accordingly and if he flares up you know back off on your volume cuz if somebody goes back in and gets an another AE they go well that doctor told me to

go Squad I'm going to sue him now right so a lot of doctors are thinking about just minimizing their the risk for litigation but there's something called exposure therapy which was the other game changer for me so to explain it let's take it from like I'm sure you've heard of exposure therapy for like psychology right so for example if I had a fear of spiders if you just take me and stick me in a room with a bunch of spiders that doesn't that's not exposure therapy that's like traumatic and it's going to make it worse

right that's like if you have pain and let's say U for example I dealt with um back pain that was triggered by me squatting below parallel and then having a fast and then accelerating the lockout okay so it was only at the top and it was after I squatted below parallel so it was very specific pain if I went in and Tred to do heavy squats it's just going to strengthen that that pain while I'm while I'm uh pain sensitive but what you probably should do is expose your therapy so that heavy squat that's like

sticking me in a room with spiders right it's traumatic but if you wanted to manage somebody's faar spiders maybe you put them in a room with spider that's under a glass case and they just sit there with the spider and then over time they bring it closer over time they take the case off over time you get better at man in that pain is kind of the same way so when I dealt with this so I was dealing with that as well as hip pain that prevented me from really doing any kind of heavy squats

and so I went in the gym one day after reading about exposure therapy and I said okay is there a squat variation that I can do that's low enough pain that I can touch it without it getting worse because the research shows like if you're recovering from an injury you first off you have to get the initial like high pain sensitivity under control and so that may involve rest and just walking or active recovery but once it's under control enough you kind of want to touch the pain without doing enough to make it worse and

the more you do this the better you get it kind of knowing when to walk that line and so I found okay I can't do a full squat with my normal velocity but I can do a slow tempo squat to a pin that's about 6 in above parallel and then uh do a pause and do a controlled asent and I can do that and that that seems to be okay so I started there and every week if I could if my if I felt okay I'd take the pin down or i' increase the weight or

I'd increase the velocity I pulled one of those levers or or a few of them and it wasn't linear like there were some weeks where I had to kind of just stay the same cuz I could feel that I was a little bit more pain sensitive but after 16 weeks I was back squatting below parallel with not no pain but a manageable amount of pain and then over time of managing that correctly I got to no pain right and so that was such a big game Cher for me and it really made me think about

man everybody thinks if you got pain it means there's like something wrong you're going to make something worse there's a tissue injury and the research doesn't necessarily support that like yes tissue injuries tend to cause pain but soft tissue tissue injuries heal within 6 to 12 months if you're still having pain after that it's because your brain has actually made a connection and if you think about the purpose of pain it's kind of a warning sign right it's it's signaling hey danger danger so I notice when I'll get pain is one almost like clockwork if

I get stressed out about something this happened a few weeks ago I was overwhelmed and here comes my back pain just rearing its ugly head and um the the trigger for that I've also found just learning that I don't have to stop doing what I'm doing I just need to try and adjust it a little bit so I had that a few weeks ago so I'll go okay I'm going to stop above just like right above parallel I'm going to do a slow tempo and I'm G to slow down the ascent of my squat and

I was able to keep squatting right and now it's been getting better I anticipate within a few weeks I'll be kind of back to normal and then again before Nationals this year I was hitting a set of 590 for a triple on squats and on the third rep I felt my adductor like tweak and I was supposed to do back off sets after that and I loaded my sets for backoffs and then I unloaded the entire bar and I was like I can't win Nationals today this was like six weeks out from Nationals but I

went over to a belt Squat and I'm like okay can I get in a position here if you ever used a belt squat you can you can play around a lot more with like your foot position and whatnot can I get in a position here where I can do a squat movement with you know not aggravating it I could and then I again I found that like below parallel was aggravating for that so I did a pin squat above parallel the next time I was in some more belt squats within 3 weeks I was back

squatting below parallel with no pain and and again I'm like okay pain the idea that it's a tissue injury maybe but also maybe not sometimes it's your body trying to send you a signal saying hey our volume's getting pretty high and we're not recovered enough like back off back off and so I've learned to kind of take pain more as a take it as it comes and not put so much judgment behind it and it has made such an enormous difference in my training and um yeah I I just long story short the best explanation

I heard I think it was from Shawn Mackey when he was on huberman's podcast I think he said pain is an experience and it's more like an emotion than it is what we would normally think of as like a the the old school brain connected to your body that sort of thing and so again i' I've become big on what happens in the mind affects the body and what happens in the body affects the mind you you mentioned a couple of things um I I just want to ask you about one the sleep because um

you know there are many times when people there's some people that get chronic like four hours of sleep they're they're stressed their work schedule I don't maybe they're like a new parent whatever you know um but you know generally speaking like let's say you are getting poor sleep because of something social or just an event like it's not like a chronic chronic thing forever but like you get a couple poor nights of sleep um that's when I think that really you need to make sure you really do focus on getting a workout now I don't

mean go and run a marathon but like go and like do a 20 minute interval or even 10 minute whatever something you know how do you so you said sleep is important for lowering the risk of injury generally speaking but and pain Y and pain yes but like if you are not getting if you're getting a porn sleep or a couple forn night sleep do you still think people should go and train or is the risk for let's say injury with like resistance training is it going to be significantly higher or should you just go

and lift some weights like so I think everyone should Auto regulate their training regardless of whatever happens okay and so if you have a poor night's sleep and you come in and you're feeling like crap and it's not moving well then reduce the and adjust accordingly but that that set of squats my best ever set of squats I hit that 530 for 10 that was after a night where I literally slept nothing and but I but I had the approach of well I'm going to go in and just see how it feels and if it

feels bad I'll reduce my target load and we'll just manage it and I felt a little shaky I felt like you know I didn't feel great but it was moving for whatever reason and I think what people need to realize is when we talk about the risk of injury and sleep it is it's like that the bowl comparison I made right like if you have been sleeping great overall and you have one bad night of sleep I very much doubt it raises your risk of injury it it's more about what you're doing just like if

you've been sleeping like crap sleeping great one night is not going to oh you're all recovered and everything's back to basine like no that's not how that works we know like sleep deficits are tough to make up right so I think it's fine to go train after a night of poor sleep um just Auto regulate right if you feel worse and I I tell this I actually um I've had clients I've had to have them stop wearing wearables like or Rings or watches or whatnot because they end up nobbing themselves because oh my my battery

is low or like my my body battery is low or my my uh HRV is messed up or and it's like okay well maybe that'll have an impact but you could just go test the thing you know like you can just go do it and so and the same thing people you know talk about like for females we kind of discuss this a little bit like training for your cycle there's really not a lot of evidence that you need to train differently for any phase of your cycle but if you personally feel worse during a

certain phase of your cycle or even a certain day who who cares if it's the cycle if it's the sleep if it's the hor who cares what it is reduce your load I like that term the auto auto regulate because it it's really applicable to so many different yeah you know situations like people that people are in um but since you brought up the women there's also uh a whole you know class of women that are postmenopausal and you know some of them maybe perhaps haven't lifted weights before they've noticed that even though they're eating

the same calorie-wise that as they hit menopause for some reason they're getting a little more belly fat without necessarily taking in more calories like you know there's something something that's happening that they're not it's not the same H H like how do do you approach that like is it like do they need to do they need to lift is that the secret sauce um do they need to lift more if they're if they are lifting and it's still kind of hard where the calories come to the picture as well again like I said even if

they're already haven't really changed their calories they just hit menopause and then you know they get that sort of belly fat accumulating easier so again where X's and O's meets practicality if you look at the mechanistic stuff of like BMR total energy expenditure um you know all the like hard metrics they don't really change with menopause so your BMR doesn't change um so I said total energy expend on average but here's the thing there's a lot of people who have sleep problems during menopause stress goes up um You probably don't feel as good right as

your hormones change um and so one of the big buckets for energy expenditure is actually uh subconscious or unconscious physical activity like spontaneous physical activity people don't realize that so we if we think about total energy expenditure so calories out right everything you expend in the day people equate that with metabolism well metabolism is your BMR that's basically the cost of keeping the lights on right like that's the cost to run your organs when you're at rest that is usually a pretty big chunk of your total energy expenditure that's like 50 to 70% per day

for most people then you have TEF which is the amount of energy required to extract the energy out of food that's usually a couple hundred calories per day and then you have your physical activity which people think about purely as exercise but it's not physical activity can be broken up into two buckets purposeful and non-p purposeful which exercise obviously falls into purposeful nonpurposeful is also called neat non- exercise activity thermogenesis which is actually really modifiable really modifiable and if you don't feel as good you're probably not going to move as much without even realizing it

and so just looking at the research literature not in menopausal population but let's take dieting for example so we know if you diet lose like 10% of your body weight it can decrease your BMR we call that metabolic adaptation outside of what you would expect just based on the amount of mass you lose so it's about on average like 15% decline in BMR but 10% weight loss can also induce a 4 to 500 calorie decrease in neat per day now let's take what that looks like practic ially all right so I'm about 210 lb and

my BMR is about 2,000 calories a day my total energy expend is about 3400 calories a day if I start doing a diet that's a 700 calorie deficit for me so 2700 calories per day on average that's a good deficit that's a healthy deficit if I lose 10% of my body weight and my BMR declines by 20% or by 15% that's 300 calories and if my neat goes down by 400 calories that's 700 calories total what was a deficit is actually now maintenance for me and so I think a lot of people conflate calorie deficits

don't work with they don't understand that well maybe you thought you were in a calorie deficit or what should have been a calorie deficit but if you didn't lose weight you weren't in a calorie deficit at least sustained over time and so that can feel very attacking for people but again the reality is like you're in menopause you're sleeping worse and people will well I'm still doing the same amount of exercise yeah but if you're not spontaneously moving as much and I don't know what it is about neat people view it as like a a

personal attack when I say physical activity no this might as well be BMR because you can't control it like your subconscious physical now you can try to make up for it by doing more conscious physical activity and also I want to be very clear it's not like you lose 10% body weight and then everything falls off a cliff this is a very Progressive thing over time right but um you knowing that you can make up for it so for example you can do more exercise or you can do more steps during the day that sort

of thing but when it comes to menopause I think and and there is some evidence that like if you get if you get like really low in estrogen and you replace that that can have an effect on energy expenditure about 100 calories per day something like that uh and then there's obviously there are hormones that do make a difference for energy expenditure like thyroid hormone right if you're hypothyroid um it will reduce your BMR but I think the biggest decline I've seen like the biggest absolute Max I've seen in literature is like 25% which is

big as BMR but it doesn't mean you can't get in a calorie deficit you're you're not a Perpetual emotion machine that can create energy out of nothing like you have to if you didn't lose weight or you didn't gain or you gained weight your body didn't create those carbons out of nowhere like they came from something right and I think the disconnect between energy calories people go well calories aren't even real you can't see them it is referring to the potential energy contained in the chemical bonds of food that is captured throughout the course of

metabolism and so what I always say is like if you inest carbons your body does something with them and we can track that and if you are gaining weight your body is not creating carbons out of nothing it has to get them from somewhere so all that to say to come back to the menopause piece of it it is the lifestyle changes that really make the difference trying to double down on sleep trying to double down on Stress Management um and also exercise if you it may not feel good but it is going to drastically

help you and I've got in trouble for some of these for some of these set because again people will hear that and say you know Lane's gaslighting menopausal women he's saying that it's their fault no I think that these changes can happen without you realizing it and again your subconscious decrease in physical activity that's a big lever that can happen without you even realizing it or having any control over it and again people it's why I'm almost so pedantic about terms because it makes a difference as Jack Reacher said says Details Matter and when you

so people will say I'm going to take the stairs today get my knat up that's not neat that's exercise because you're making a conscious decision to do it and so this reduction in energy from neat it's not something you can control so it's it's I'm not saying it's your fault but there are things lifestyle interventions you can do to help correct for that do you think that that um a postmenopausal woman that increases their their volume of resistance training versus let's say you know getting on a pelaton and doing spin or you know endurance like

do you think there's a difference in in helping uh compensate for some of those changes in their their their physical activity that they're not thinking about um because you're getting more muscle mass or does it I mean I'm always going to encourage people to lift weights in some form or fashion right but again it kind of goes back to like practicality if they love spinning that's they hate lifting weights well spin's going to be better than nothing right but if I can get people to lift weights definitely wanted to lift weights and I mean the

research shows relative to your starting lean mass regardless of your age or sex you can build the same amount of muscle so what that means people just to put it practically so there studies showing that women build the same amount of men as a percentage of the starting lead Mass so what I mean by that is if your starting lead mass as a woman is 50 kg and my starting lean mass as a man is 70 kg and we both resistance train we both put on like say 10% lean mass the woman will gain five

kilos the man will gain seven the man gained more absolute lean mass but they both gained the same percentage of their starting lean mass so the potential for growth is actually similar again as a percentage uh and we actually see that even with like strength too that that women kind of as a starting percentage of their one rep max gain similar strength as men in fact it might be a little bit better to be honest but that also could be that women have a lower Baseline because they're not on a population level lifting weights as

much um and so in elderly we see that too as a percentage now if you take somebody who's 70 years old and never lifted weights before they're going to not have very much lean mass but if they start they'll still gain a similar amount as a percentage of their starting Le mass now they're never going to get to the same Peak that somebody who started when they 20 but again this why I tell people the best time to start lifting weights is right now regard like if you have a spinal cord that works start now

it is the best time and even if you're 50 60 70 it's still going to do what it does and it's going to have massive benefits it's never too late what about there's there's a lot of people that are that are older adults so let's say they're 65 or older and maybe they are just starting out and let's say they have joint issues and I think you kind of addressed this with the pain and I want to just confirm this um so you know for these people let's say that are older they have joint issues

if they just start like with like lighter weights just start you know with with with the like low exposure where they're just doing something and training and their muscles are adapting their joints are adapting is that is that sort of the approach you would take with older adults yeah I'd probably probably start with lighter weights and also start with like movements that don't cause them pain or cause them less pain right like trying to find stuff that um whether it's exercises tempos range of motion like just getting it started because I know over time as

those tissues adapt they're going to be able to do more and more complex movements they're going to be able to push harder and harder and that stuff's going to take care of them itself but if I'm just dogmatic about it I'm like no you're going to squat I you know put a barbell on somebody's back the first time they cut and they're 60 years old and they have a horrible experience with it and it hurts they're not going to come back you know so again that's kind of where like meeting people where they are is

really important so yeah I'm going to try and find exercises that are low pain that they enjoy enjoy being relative um and then again like even when people were starting out like we talked about proximity to failure I'm not taking somebody who's older close to failure the first time they lift weights like no way that's going to be that's going to be weeks down the road but just lifting something is going to have such a massive difference compared to doing nothing that it really almost doesn't matter what you do when you start as long as

you start as long as it's not like a such a low load that there's no discomfort whatsoever um and so that's kind of how I'm going to start with people is just like let's get them in let's have them not hate it and then also see themselves get stronger pretty quickly that is a really good motivator to get them to keep coming in right and so that's why again I don't want to change up exercises every week because I want to be be able to say oh wow I added 10 pounds from last time I

added two more reps you know and it was it was easier and so I think practically you can you can take all the research we have on Long muscle links and and and proximity and you just throw that all out the window the first time you get somebody in is about getting to come back for the next one that is where we got to start and um and also like a setting appropriate expectations with people of hey you're going to notice you get stronger within a few weeks you're going to notice this but it's going

to take time before you actually see a difference in your body but within a few months you're going to notice a difference in your functionality for sure and so I think just like starting there with people is really important because like you said for whatever reason people think either it's going to be a waste of time for them to lift weights or they're just going to blow up into this massive bodybuilder and I'm like you know when you get in a car you don't worry about turning into an asscar driver do you like and as

somebody drug free who spent 25 years their entire adult life trying to get as big and strong as possible in a t-shirt I look like an athletic guy you know I I mean I'm a big guy but I don't look like some freak of nature you know and that's with me training consistently hard for 25 years and I always tell people hey you know if you're worried about like getting too big if you start to get too big you could just back off it's not this isn't rocket science like it's like I said I worry

about people training not hard enough I don't worry about them training too hard like that's that is a pretty small subsection of people although we end up having selection bias because we're in this industry which has a lot more people who do train too hard and you know get too um restrictive with their diets compared to the average person right so I think this is a good segue too for you know the other signal of increasing muscle mass that we talked a lot about the mechanical tension and and the training which is the biggest most

important most important factor for not only just muscle mass and function but like we're talking about brain overall health bone density just it list goes on and on right I I think it's I think it's interesting because I'm I'll tell people I'm a PhD in nutrition and I will be the first to tell you training is way more important yes way more important well that's kind of you know I I wanted to get your thoughts on so I I have had you know Stu Phillips and Luke vanen Lon Brett shonfeld we've talked about protein requirements

you know talking about getting getting the biggest bang for your buck with your training 1.6 gram per kilogram body weight um I know you've talked about that as well I I kind of wanted to get your thoughts on like what do you think about like earning your protein like so there there is this sort of focus on protein intake right now like there's a lot of influencers talking about it it's in the blogosphere social media and um but like does someone need to focus on their protein intake as much if they're just sitting around not

exercising not training what do you uh you could make an argument that's actually probably more important if you aren't training but I would say like get training right um what do you mean so like well because if you don't have the training lever to preserve lean mass and get some metabolic benefits protein doesn't do it nearly as much but it does help and so you know but it's it is a small lever compared to actual resistance training does it help let's say if you you look at the enhan studies and people on average well depending

on their age but like younger adults less let's say people that are like 40 and younger they're they're getting on average about 1.5 gram per kilogram body weight right now older adults more like 1.2 but that's their average consumption so do you do you still think focusing on the protein knowing like what they I mean I guess for older adults but I'd love to hear what your your your take is so and that's kind of like the lab I came out of Don Layman's lab that was a big um big Focus for us was older

population and if you look in young populations I mean uh one of the studies you you sent me on protein distribution showed no difference uh in 30-year-old women which doesn't really surprise me because when you're young and even like 30 wouldn't be considered young but young enough that you still have like the normal kind of uh translation initiation signaling so the mour pathway as you get older above I want to say the study I think it was out of reenie or wolf slab I can't remember which one this like back in 2004 but they showed

um not only do you get a decreased sensitivity of that pathway you actually get like less I think less protein uh less of the actual like intor and the Machinery associated with protein synthesis so you're their research basically showed you could restore a normal response of muscle protein synthesis but you have to consume proportionately more protein so I think really are are you talking about anabolic resistance in all adults okay yeah so um I think when you're young it still matters um but it matters less than when you get older and the problem with that

is it's kind of like going in both directions of older people have a lower uh anabolic sensitivity and they tend to consume less protein because it's more satiating it's harder to chew in general like if you're talking about animal proteins and so people just kind of end up gravitating away from that and that's also where you kind of start to see protein distribution probably matter a little bit more when you get into older age where if you're getting you know three meals where you're stimulating muscle protein synthesis versus um you know just one big meal

which most people eat about 65% of their protein at dinner in in America and well what's the problem with that well on a mechanistic level there's not really a storage uh form for protein like we have for carbohydrate and fat so fat obviously you can store as much as you need naap POS uh carbohydrate you've got liver glycogen you got muscle glycogen limited but still a storage form I mean protein you have the three amino acid pool but it's very very very small it's not what I would consider a storage form of protein at all

and uh some people will say well you know skull muscle is a storage form of protein that's like saying you build a house and it's a storage form of wood yeah I guess you can tear the house down and get wood out of it but that's not why you build the house you know and so because of that there appears to be kind of a maximal well new study out of Van lon's lab has kind of challenged this but in terms of muscle protein synthesis it appears that you know kind of caps out at a

certain level on a permal basis and so if you're older let me back up for younger people 10 gram of protein probably still does stimulate protein synthesis but as you get older you probably need closer to 20 30 maybe even 40 grams depending on your only lean mass and the source of protein that you're consuming but you know it really protein Quality Distribution that stuff matters more the lower your protein intake is overall the more you consume on a daily basis the less all that other stuff matters your daily intake is by far the biggest

lever to pull and so what I'll tell people is like hey if you're for whatever reason you can only get it in one meal and you can still get enough total protein I mean I don't think it's ideal but it's better than not getting enough total protein right and I think some of the problems with this research literature as well is when you're looking at protein synthesis you're only looking at one side of the equation you're not looking at muscle protein degradation which is really hard to measure um in fact it's so hard to measure

that protein researchers out there please uh don't get too mad at me saying this uh because I was one of you but we just kind of do this and we go la la la la la and we just kind of follow muscle protein synthesis because degradation is so hard to measure because if you're measuring synthesis you're using an isotopic label and you're just you're looking at incorporation into the tissue versus the precursor pool and then you have a a very simple calculation that you can come up with rate with degradation it's much more difficult because

you're looking at the dilution of that label from amino acids flexing out of a tissue much more difficult to measure and to my knowledge it's almost impossible to measure synthesis degradation and um it's very hard to measure those two at the same time and it's hard to measure them when it's not in a steady state so like if you add exercise you add a meal like now a sudden you're in a non-steady state it's much more difficult to measure so all that being said there may be effects on muscle prot protein degradation that make it

where okay this explains why you know protein distribution is less important than we previously thought because I was a big proponent of protein distribution and I still think if you want to become the most muscular human you can possibly be that getting multiple protein high quality protein feedings per day is probably Superior to one or two but do I think it makes a massive difference no I don't what about um have you seen Luke Van lon's study the the overnight like muscle protein synthesis giving protein like before bed and it's stimulating while you're sleeping you're

like building protein and I mean does that add something to I tell people okay here's I'll tell you what I do okay uh so it's like this is the you inject me with true serum what do I do because I want to do the best I can right um because people ask about pre-training protein posttraining protein does it need to be right after how's the timing here's what I'll tell people probably a good idea to have some protein when you wake up because you've been fasting for 8 10 hours and so muscle protein synthesis will

be depressed we do know that it's also probably a good idea to have protein before you train because it helps with we've shown that protein before training helps with recovery and protein after training helps with recovery but it's not this like okay you know you don't need to be like having a protein shake right as you finish your last last set and like Downing it like no but it's probably a good idea to have a a a meal containing protein couple you know one to two hours before you lift or exercise and it's probably a

good idea to have it after you finish within a a few hours and so yes but your training will probably naturally fall between two meals like that anyway you don't have to like accelerate one or the other and the reality is if you're eating a meal an hour before you go train and you go train for an hour those amino acids are still in your system for four five hours after you originally had them maybe even longer depending on the source so I'll eat I eat four protein containing meals a day I eat breakfast then

I eat lunch usually I'll train in the middle of the afternoon cuz when I feel best then I'll eat dinner you know within a couple hours of finishing training and then I'll eat a meal before bed because again I'm going to be going 8 10 hours without consuming protein and that's just kind of how I do it now do I think you know again I'm trying to be the most muscular person I can possibly be if you're just somebody who wants to build a little bit of muscle just focus on getting enough total protein per

day and if you can divide it up a little bit better fantastic right but that's probably the last like 3 to 5% and what do you think that total protein per day is would you yeah so um this is where I'll tell you what the literature says and then I'll tell you if you injected me with true serum what I really think um so literature says you know 1.6 to 2 gam per kilogram body weight most literature tops out around that 1.6 number what I really think is I don't necessarily know if there's a top

end of protein where you stop getting benefits but I do think it just becomes so marginal that you can't pick it out because with protein synthesis it's actually a really insensitive measure like you're dealing with looking you are looking for small differences between small numbers it is very difficult to pick out and another like difficult thing to look at especially when they're looking at lean mass and protein intake is if you do an 8we study I mean it's not like somebody builds so much more lean mass even if they're resistance training versus somebody not I

mean yeah you build a few kilos but it's not like this massive huge difference and so I think a lot of times we just don't we it's hard to do really long randomized control trials I always tell people when they say why didn't they do it longer why weren't there more subjects money money money and also uh I think people have this view that like there's just just R this group of random people just sitting around waiting to be chosen for research studies and they're just like don't have a life and they just do that

for no no research subjects are me you people watching they're normal people and guess what happens when you try to control aspects of their daily life they drop out of studies one of my favorites is when people go why didn't they do it in bodybuilders you know bodybuilders saying this and I go because you guys suck as test subjects because let's say I want to do a protein study on bodybuilders as soon as I randomize you guys to the low what you guys to low protein you're all going to drop out if I do a

high volume versus low volume study and I randomize people to low volume they're going to drop out like it's you can't it's almost impossible to do or you've got to pay people to do it so anyways if we look at some of the meta regressions if we look at the research on protein synthesis and Even Stu did a a study years ago of egg albumin intake like 5 10 20 and 40 grams of egg albumin protein and the the take-home was that the 20 grams maximized the response and it was no different than 40 grams

statistically yes but I think 40 GS was still 11% higher in rate of muscle protein synthesis but I think there was like six people per group which again when you're doing muscle protein synthesis in human you are taking chunks of flesh out of people you are having them lay around getting infused with amino acids for five six uh van lon's recent study was like 12 hours like people are literally laying supine for 12 hours getting in who wants to sign up for that like I'm not doing that you know plus getting multiple chunks of flush

taken out so it's really hard to get high numbers to do this you're bringing up a really I what I think is a really important Point Lane because and particularly coming from you who you you do really look a lot at randomiz control trials and The Meta analysis and evidence but but the reality is is that you know in many cases there there're almost they can be set up to fail from the beginning because they're underpowered like you said and we have this obsession with statistical significance I mean we had to do something right but

at the end of the day as you said it's like well there's a trend 11% maybe if we had 40 people instead of six probably we'd see you know but then it comes it comes down to then okay well how I I like how you're speaking about it where it's like okay well this is this is what the evidence shows this is my truth serum this is what I really think yeah and I and I think that's important too because you know even people that are influencers that are interpreting studies randomized control trials we can

be very harsh on the results but at the end of the day you know these randomized control trials were designed for drugs where people don't have any of this in their system before the drug this a very black and whitein we see this go up 50% because they're doing this drug whatever which is why whenever you know people when they do meta analyses and nutrition and they're like look the quality of evidence was graded as low to moderate I'm like yeah that's going to be every nutrition randomized control trial cuz one you can't blind it

effectively right like it's you can't you can't blind it to the person because they're going to know that they're eating less like say animal protein products right um but that doesn't mean that these are bad right it's just we have to understand the limitations of them and I think where I get really like people know me for screaming randomize control trials really when I get like that is when somebody makes a claim and the randomized control trials actually show the opposite that's when I'm like come on guys you know what I mean like you can't

make that claim based on this because okay even if we don't necessarily believe these randomized control trials are perfect they're going the opposite direction so at minimum you're it doesn't have an effect and it probably has the opposite effect of what you're saying it's like uh I saw something the other day of like I'm going to come back to the your protein question but I saw something where it was like don't take whey protein because it has in5 GC and that's going to increase your inflammation okay does whey protein have new5 GC uh maybe I

guess maybe sure possible um is there a pathway where nu5 GC increases inflammation sure but what happens when we actually give people away protein in randomized control Tri oh wait it's either a neutral or positive effect on inflammation so just because a pathway exists doesn't mean there's an outcome for it right but if there's an outcome a pathway absolutely exists but when you're dealing with outcomes you're dealing with the summation of multiple dozens hundreds maybe even thousands of biological Pathways all summing up to that particular outcome and so sure I like to use this example

of aspirin we know aspirin is an anti-coagulant but it also activates procoagulant Pathways as well but the overall effect is it's an anti-coagulant so we have to be very careful that's as you've seen there's a lot of content out there now that it's well this thing is in this food and it's going to cause this and it's like I mean I saw something about cruciferous vegetables right like don't eat those because they have isocyanates and that's going to bind to iodine that's going to lower your thyroid function and that's going to cause your metabolic rate

to drop and you're going to gain weight I'm like wow we we kind of skipped over bcde EFG and went from A to Z didn't we and that's a pathway that's a biochemical mechanism does it all exist and is it all at least partially true yeah but what happens in studies where we just have people eat more cruciferous vegetables uh it doesn't impact their their thyroid function at all doesn't impact their metabolic rate and if anything they lose more weight from satiety so obviously we can say okay well that pathway exists but it's it's obviously

not a dominant pathway or even something that really makes a difference based on dosage and all these other things so bringing it back to the protein question you're familiar with an ASM toope so I think the response to protein is probably asmic so you're going to get and if you look at Stew's paper of the egg albumin you're almost starting to see it it's this curve going up where your initial 0 to 20 gram is a pretty steep climb starting to kind of top out but continues to go up and so I think practically there

was a meta regression a few years ago that suggested up to 3.3 grams per kilogram of protein still has improve benefits or sorry it still has benefits for muscle protein synthesis and lean mass but again meta regressions aren't perfect because you're kind of like extrapolating all these numbers that are in different kind of heterogeneous studies and you're trying to come up with a dose response but I think based on what I know about protein synthesis also what we saw with Luke Van lon's recent study of 100 grams of protein after exercise I think there's enough

kind of smoke to suggest that okay you probably don't ever truly max out the benefits of protein on analism but when you get up to that 1.6 or two grams per uh kilogram body weight you're probably 98 99% of the way there right and so the benefits going up more are so incremental you're never going to be able to really pick them out in a study what about for people two things one like endurance athletes like like really just training hard like marathon runners and then two people that are in a caloric deficit trying to

lose body fat does increasing their protein I mean I don't know above two but above the 1.6 and maybe to the two like are there situations where increasing that protein does make a difference in great question and uh Eric Helms a few years I don't know if you're familiar with him but he's a researcher in exercise science Nutrition in New Zealand and uh um he did a systematic review and I think it was a meta regression as well showing that in a calorie deficit possibly up to three grams per kilogram of lean mass so different

than body weight right but still higher than what we typically see that up to I think 3.1 gram per kilogram of lean mass had uh improvements in lean mass retention during a calorie deficit so yes there may be evidence that um more protein is better than a calorie deficit and uh for endurance athletes you know this is where the segue of one of my favorite quotes is there are no Solutions there are only tradeoffs what I mean by that is you see better recovery from exercise with more protein and endurance athletes up to about that

1.6 grams per kilogram I think I saw one study was like up to 1.8 saw benefit as well but when do you get to the point of where practically now because you're consuming more protein you're consuming less carbohydrates and fats which are fueling your extracise and so do performance start to drop off because of that and so that's where that segue has to happen of okay we can keep packing more protein in here and even for resistance training people right okay I might have some bodybuilders who say well you know 1% difference is a difference

between winning the Olympia and finishing in last place so I'm gonna eat a thousand grams of protein I'm pulling out like a a fake example that doesn't exist but what I would say is well yeah maybe you're getting a little bit more muscle protein synthesis but your training is probably going to suck right because you're not getting in carbohydrates fats you probably feel like crap and so guess what uh training is the bigger lever so you're better off taking some of that protein allotting it towards carbohydrates and fats so that you actually feel Fuel and

can train hard versus just continuing to try to pump more protein in so I for me I consume so I'm probably about I'm 94 95 kilos I consume like 230 240 gram of protein per day so I'm like probably like 2 and 1 12 grams around there 2 and a half grams per kilo of body weight and then my lean mass is probably high 80s so probably 87 something like that so I'm right just under that like kind of three grams per kilogram of body weight but again like I'm concerned about like how do I

build the most muscle possible I think for the vast majority of people 1.6 gram per kilogram of body weight which is like 7 grams per pound perfectly appropriate and you're going to get the vast majority of protein by doing that but for those Meatheads out there if you want to consume more protein I'd say consume as much as you like up to the point where you still feel like you're getting enough carbohydrates and fats to be properly fueled for your resistance training sessions um okay this is I want to kind of shift gears and and

talk about some uh some hot topics I guess in the the fitness and health world yeah you know I so starting with with seed oils oh and I do think that this will be the most commented section of this podcast well it's an interesting one I avoid them I try to mostly avoid them I mean I at home I I olive oil is what I use for cooking for everything um but I ALS think they've been overly demonized in the fitness and and health world so and I know that many of our listeners that are

listening watching have heard a lot of conflicting information about cedotal but maybe you could start with just summarizing what seedots are and why are they such a controversial topic yeah so seed oils are generally polyunsaturated fats um which means they have multiple double bonds and versus mod unsaturated fats like olive oil which is a single double bond or saturated fat like say butter animal fats typically saturated you know where you have no double bonds and let me start with this I don't think seed oils are innocuous from the perspective that in the last few decades

added oils are one of the biggest source of increased energy in the American diet and um so I just want to set the stage appropriately as well talking about levers people will say Well it can't just be the calories let me give you the the data on calories right now so if we people will say no it's 24 calories have actually gone down in the American di I've heard this argument they're looking at self-reported data from people which puts it at like 24 2500 calories a day for Americans the more accurate way to look at

it is you look at the food production you look at Food waste and you look at Food availability and you can calculate approximately how many calories per capita people are consuming okay that is objective data that's not well yesterday I think I had like I don't even remember what I had for for to eat yesterday like I I mean I can look at my app and I know but if you ask me to recall it offand like God I I don't really know that data is over 3,500 calories a day on average per person and

the average person gets less than 20 minutes of physical activity per day so yeah I I think like a big chunk of it is energy toxicity now seed oils can contribute to that for sure because even right down to like hey you have a salad what does it take for a chef just to you know put more oil on it or um you know if you've ever had a dish you know I can approximately guesstimate like how much rice is on there but how you going to know how much oil somebody put in like I

mean I guess it tastes a little bit slimier in your mouth but good luck quantifying that right and then I think also seed oils are probably a proxy for poor overall diet quality because they are in a lot of processed foods so the question to me there's two questions practically are they contributing to the Health crisis yes but is it for the reason that the really anti-oil people claim and what's interesting about this anti-ed oil movement is I've noticed it's kind of popped up out of the low carb carnivore sphere and I've seen this progression

over the years which at first the kind of the low carb hardcore keto folks were carbs are bad just blanket carbs are bad and then over time that kind of shifted to well we think it's refined sugar is what's you know insulin and then I mean we've had so many randomized control trials now and meta analysis that kind of show that like sugar isn't good for you but if you're equating energy like I mean I have several meta analysis to show that it doesn't affect inflammatory markers doesn't affect uh blood glucose metabolism as long as

you're getting in the same total calories per day compared to other diets and substituting out different carbohydrate sources so then it shifted to and I think it coincides with there's been a lot of um low car people who also push for saturated fat to be healthy because I I again I think this is like confirmation bias we like animal protein we want saturated fat to be good for us because then we can justify more animal protein and Hey listen I always find it funny when people accuse me of bias on this because my research was

funded by the national Dairy Council the egg nutrition center and the National catman's Beef Association there is nobody with a stronger bias towards animal protein than me right and I I can remember when I did a debate with a carnivore person one time I said never in a million years I think I'd be on a podcast divining the virtues of plants you know so I'm not saying that there isn't some benefits to animal protein everything's trade-offs but if we look at the literature if you say seed oils are uniquely deleterious to health then you have

to say saturated fat is uniquely deleterious to health because for every level of evidence for seeds there is stronger evidence for saturated fat to be dollarus on health so mechanistically we know saturated fat raises LDL cholesterol we know LDL cholesterol penetrates the endothelium we know LDL cholesterol is a causitive risk factor for cardiovascular disease now we can argue about particle size and all that kind of stuff but we know regardless of particle size LDL can penetrate the endothelium and cause damage okay mechanism right and then people say well inflammation okay well if we look at

the studies where they just have people eat more uh polyunsaturated fats sometimes you see an increase in inflammation sometimes you don't but if we look at the studies where they're substituting polyunsaturated fats in place of saturated fats we see neutral or positive effects on inflammatory markers blood glucose regulation uh liver fat in fact one of the things I tell people uh is if you're worried about liver fat increase from fructose you better be worried about saturated fat because they compared them straight up um equating calories over feeding fructose versus saturated fat saturated fat increased liver

fat 70% more than fructose in a randomized control trial so again all right you want to make the argument that seeds are bad for you you have to make the argument that saturated fat is bad for you too and usually it's kind of the opposite where they're trying to push that you know polyunsaturated fats are what's causing a lot of our health problems when in reality at every level of evidence whether it's Animal mechanistic Human randomized control trials or epidemiological looking at polyunsaturated substituted for or saturated substitute for polyunsaturated it's either neutral or positive I

have yet to see one study where they really show the opposite the the the the one study that will they'll site is the Minnesota coronary experiment and there's a there's there was some strength to that experiment it was uh they provided all the meals to participants and they did either you know they were controlling their their intake either High polyunsaturated fat diet or high saturated fat diet and it was a randomized control trial for several years where they're looking at outcomes uh like heart attacks and whatnot which is great here's the downsides when they analyze

that data with more modern statistics they found that I mean really the there was no difference um but originally there was a claim that okay the polyunsaturated group was actually having more um cardiac events than the other group but here's the weaknesses of the study one this is back when hydrogenated oils and trans fats were very prevalent in the food uh Supply and they those were considered polyunsaturated fats and they were getting a lot of their polyunsaturated fats from that this wasn't from canola oil this wasn't from you know some of these other oil this

was from hydrogenated literally probably some of the worst source of fat you can get like you'll get no argument from me that trans fats are uniquely deleterious to health you'll get no argument there uh as bad probably worse than saturated fat so that's one major weakness the other one is yes they were controlling their calories when they're impatient but these people were in and out of these facilities because they were psychiatric facil ities so what did they do beforehand what did they do after what did they do in between it wasn't controlled and you also

have to consider two years is a long time for randomized control trial actually the overall study I think was 5 years but the average length was two years of a person being in it and I think the average age was like late 40s how many people have heart attacks even bad Health in their late 40s it's a pretty low number and so how many people are going to have heart attacks in a 5-year time window probably pretty low and if we think about like the mechanism LDL cholesterol that we think is why you know saturated

fat might be more a bigger risk factor for heart disease it is about lifetime exposure risk and this is something I changed my mind on when I got to grad school I was very much of the opinion well it's more about the particle size it's more about LDL the HDL ratio um you know I don't think LDL really matters that much it's more about the overall and then about 10 years later here come all these mandilon randomization studies which um basically look at people who naturally secrete more or less LDL looking at lifetime exposure to

LDL and that is what matters because a good example I like to use is investment so Rhonda if you and I do uh each invest the same amount of money in an investment and I invest in something that gets 7% and you invest in something that gets 8% if we look two years later you'll have a little bit more money but statistically probably not right but if we look 40 years later you're going to have a lot more money than me and so just looking at a sliver of time this is where yes randomized control

trials are the gold standard but they also have limitations that we have to consider as well and so these mandelian randomization studies I mean when they came out you look at the Life Time exposure you can draw a straight line through it I mean you can literally draw a straight line through amount of LDL exposure throughout the course of someone's life and the for heart disease so to me I had to change my opinion on that now I think I'm making a little bit of a leap from saturated fat to LDL because there are some

forms of saturated fat that don't raise LDL like steric acid doesn't appear to raise LDL but overall if you eat more saturated fat you raise your LDL we see this in the carnivore Community there's people like bragging about having LDL levels of three four 500 milligrams per deciliter and it's like this is going to get people killed and the I think where there gets to be a conflict here I'll come back to CED sorry I know I'm kind of going down the rabbit hole is people might do a carnivore diet lose 30 40 pounds their

blood glucose regulation gets better their HDL gets better but their their LDL goes through the roof and they go number yeah and and they go but I'm so much healthier now one you don't feel heart disease until it's knocking on your door and two you may on balance overall yes be healthier than you were before but you are not as healthy as if you'd gotten all those benefits and also not raised your LDL you would be healthier having all those things and also your LDL lower so that is again we have to be very careful

when we talk about independent risk factors can I can I interrupt for a second because you're talking about the melan randomization studies and I do want to talk about carnivore diets in in a minute too but but uh I've heard a lot in that Community this you know these studies that are cited low LDL is actually a higher predictor of all cause mortality and5 yeah right but but those studies that you were just talking about to me are the argument against that because they're showing people with like natural p uh p uh pcsk9 like like

when they're having a lower level of it and they have naturally just lower levels of LDL throughout their life they have a low all cause mortality they have a lower cardiovascular related mortality and that so to me it's like well you know the low LDL because they got sick or old or whatever is causing their LDL to drop it's a you know it's correlation that's a reverse causality issue right like people who have higher LDL later in life when it's like your risk of dying is much more related to wasting problems you know people who

have high LD aler and cancer you're looking at a proxy for just they're not malnourished and I very much doubt that if we actually looked at the raw numbers of LDL I'm not I'm not familiar with it but I doubt we're talking about elderly people with like 250 levels of LDL I bet we're talking about people who are LD of like looking at levels you know of 40 versus you know 100 or 90 where like getting so far down it's because they're so malnourished and they're wasting right and you got to be careful about picking

out these transient levels of LDL we know LDL transiently if you fast your LDL can go up you know because you're getting moreux out of the liver but like that overall over the course of time it goes down so yeah I think um again aend randomization study is basically a lifetime randomized control trial I mean it is for that the highest quality of evidence that we have um and people will say well there's plot tropy whatever okay nothing's perfect but again we have mechanism penetrates the endothelium we have animal studies showing a dose response we

have actually some human randomized control trials that do show an effect and we have the cohort studies that show an effect when it's when it's long enough and they use appropriate um covariates so we have all those things lining up and we have the long-term randomized control trials so I'm just like I don't need I I don't know what other kind of evidence you need to like convince you like there's just not any like I don't what else we can give you you know and so again with the seed oil thing if you're looking at

just yes it adds calories but is it independently increasing inflammation like if we're talking about actual polyunsaturated fats like not trans fats I mean if you're over eating it sure but if you're replacing saturated fat with that the evidence suggests it's neutral or positive and so you're you're they're talking about a mechanism well those double bonds can get oxidized and there can be XYZ okay but what happens when we just feed it to people and then you're see now some people have said and we talked about this like Heating and reheating it's probably not even

like one time heating it's probably like multiple times heating depends on the smoke point all that kind of stuff um but again that's confounded by the fact that okay if you're Heating and reheating you're frying stuff and fried food is a proxy for really poor diet quality so again is it the the seed oils that they're frying it in or is it the fact that these people just eat really poorly overall in these cohort studies who are eating a lot of fried foods certainly in the cohort studies I so so you're so the seed oils

so far the randomized control trial evidence doesn't suggest it increases cardiovascular disease doesn't in doesn't suggest it increases inflammatory biomarkers in at least in the randomized CRP or some of um now the heated versus the non-heated and this is where I kind of think seed oils can be bad and that it does have to do with what you said about cohort evidence is true right because you're right you can't know are they just frying all this like terrible food and there's there's too many confounders right there's too many confounders but there are very few three

or four studies that have interestingly compared heating serm seed oils a lot of times it's safflower oil they'll heat it or even do repeated heatings like once I did 20 and then and did not and they made muffins the same Muffins with either the like I I thought it was a great study you know the heat the the 20 times heated oil versus just the cool like not heated oil and the heated oils did increase inflammatory markers and they increased oxidized LDL and so and like I said too few studies really comparing just non-heated with

heated yeah because essentially a lot of those um randomized control trials showing no effect on inflammation with seed oils they were giving them pills that were they weren't cooking the seed oil right they're just putting it in the pill so so I do think there's a strong possibility based on the very limited evidence so far that heated seed oils might cause more inflammation compared to consuming them certainly in Whole Foods but even just like putting it on a salad or I don't know what are your thoughts do you so it's kind of like if we

look at the priority of what's important that's some of the last stuff I'm worried about just because I'm like again most people are eating over 3,500 calories a day doing less than 20 minutes of physical activity okay let's get that under control first and if you happen to be eating some seed oils while you're getting your calories to down to I don't know 2500 a day not really that worried about it right but you know do I think it's a good idea to eat a lot of Highly processed foods that had seed oils that are

heated and reheat no I don't think it's a good idea but I we have options too right what about avocado oil or olive oil do you think that maybe just getting those options there you know there was one really big cohort metaanalysis that was done that kind of showed that monounsaturated didn't have as big of an effect as polyunsaturated as decreasing the risk of cardiovascular disease that mon unsaturated was still positive and saturated was negative but polyunsaturated was kind of better in a dose response but I mean I think for the most part if you're

worried use olive oil use avocado what about the phenol polyphenols and olive oil is there's some studies showing like Randomness control trial showing uh a beneficial effect just from on cardiovascular disase with olive oil yeah I think olive oil specifically there's there's some evidence that like it may have some unique benefits for cardiovascular disease and whatnot um and like metabolic Health overall so but again I kind of look at that and go okay well it still has one double bond that can be oxidized that can be you know based on your mechanism for polyunsaturated right

like shouldn't olive oil still be worse than saturated as well and you can't like they never make that argument or at least not that I've seen you know um so yeah I mean I I think again we agree I might agree for a different reason in that I don't know if I've seen enough to really I think if you're Heating and reheating yes like once you get to the point where you're oxidizing those double bonds I mean now you're you know who knows what's happening Downstream of that but I think it's probably you know people

who are eating a lot of heated and reheated oils are just eating really crappy Foods overall you know like I'm not really worried about somebody who's you know they spray their pan with canola oil and cook some eggs on it you like I just I'm not worried about that it's you know the person eating fries that have been refried in the same oil over the course of time but then again it's like all right well is it the oil or is it overall they're having a really poor quality overall diet so I I think for

me yes I hold very much open the possibility that there could be some delerious effects but I think for most people it's one of the reasons I say have guidelines don't have rules right because if you say things like I don't eat seed oils well as a guideline that might be okay because you're probably avoiding a lot of like hyper ultr processed hyper palatable Foods fried foods but when you're like you know cooking in a bunch of butter instead of like canola oil or olive oil or well I guess not olive oil but um like

you're kind of missing the point you know and so I just want people to be a little bit more sane with how they handle this unfortunat I think a lot of this boils down to there's a lot of conspiracy theories around all this kind of stuff I mean I've been told I've been paid off by big Pharma by big food you know all name your name your list um I think at a fundamental level people don't like the idea of responsibility of personal responsibility in this and it's much more pal to kind of say well

you know the food industry did this to us because they put all these things in our food supply and that's what made us all sick and you know XYZ and there's all these you know nefarious back room deals being I tend to think that uh most stuff is much more practical than that which is uh food companies want you to eat more stuff because they make more money and their shareholders get more profits and that's good for business and so if Tomorrow People stood up and were like we're not eating this processed junk anymore and

we want fresh fruits vegetables and that's all they bought guess what food companies would do they would stop producing all that stuff or they would focus on the other stuff right and so I think a lot of people like the idea of having this nefarious evil bad guy in the food world and I think it kind of takes it feels nice for the ego because it takes that personal responsibility away but then it's also very disempowering as well and so what I'll tell people is I want to empower you that you can make change and

it doesn't have to be like these crazy diets you can make some really small changes and have huge benefits uh just by again whatever gets you that whatever decreases your energy whether it's low carb fasting tracking your calories omitting certain foods fine fine whatever gets you there but I just don't see some of these narratives being super helpful overall because it gets people focused on the wrong stuff and it's just a very confusing overall narrative right cuz you got for every camp that says this thing is bad there's another Camp saying it's the best thing

ever right and and so people people like to think they make decisions based on logic most people make decisions based on emotion and most people debate is actually a really poor it doesn't really do much there's a small sliver of people who will change their minds and I I go back to this very classic study in politics where they took a group of Democrats and a group of Republicans and they showed both information that would either refute or support a pre-existing belief that they already held uh same thing for both groups what they found was

it didn't matter Democrat Republican both things that like objectively refuted like here is the here is the the hard evidence it shows that what you believe is wrong that was just of as effective as proof that they were right as reinforcing their P personal beliefs so I tell people when I like debate this stuff online I'm not doing it for the person I'm debating with I have no doubt I'm not I'm not going to change their mind I'm doing it for the small sliver of people who are open-minded enough to think H maybe I was

wrong about my opinion so I just think so much of this stuff these Tribal wars in nutrition are so much based on emotion and kind of creating a bad guy to blame stuff on because we don't want to look in the mirror and see our own personal responsibility in the role of this and I I say this for I'll give one more comparison and I'll let you ask me another question the news everyone says you know I hate the media the media like gets people spun up and like it's stressful and all this yeah but

you watch it you watch it you know what the media doesn't care if they put on good news or bad news the only thing they care about is your eyeballs that's all they care about if every single person in the United States stood up tomorrow and said I'm not watching this crap I'm not watching negative news anymore I promise you within six months the entire news cycle would change because they don't care they want your eyeballs that's it but we know negative news gets people more engaged because they got spun up they get fired up

and emotion cells and it's the same thing with health advice I'm sure you've seen people who talk about things that are dangerous or things that will increase risk of death that gets more attention than talking about the stuff that helps right and when you consider also why it's hard to talk to some of these diet tribes people who have ingrained this as part of their well one their personality but also um their belief when you bring them evidence to the contrary what you're actually doing is assaulting their their belief about their own mortality because if

you are right then they might be actually killing themselves faster and most humans would rather endure cognitive dissonance than believe oh maybe I wasn't doing something that was good for me I mean I mean God we got people who who will justify like chain smoking or like any other thing they the most people end up believing what they want to believe what they wish to be true regardless of the evidence well let's talk about the other thing you mentioned that is definitely a Hot Topic which is the refined trigger yeah and I know you've delved

deeply into this topic it's a lot of reading of you know the evidence it's something that you've talked about I want to ask you if you view consuming refined sugar particularly in the form of sugar sweetened beverages you know like something that's just liquid and sugar do if calories are the same if people aren't over consuming calories MH do you think that's something that is still inert not that harmful or do you think perhaps there's reason to say yeah maybe we shouldn't drink sugar sweetened beverage like you know I know you don't like to say

that because the whole psychology part but um there's diet sodas right I mean so yep so um they're certainly not good for you um I think first off I want to be clear we're probably talking about a subset of the population that's really small right in terms of okay they drink sugar sweetened beverages but don't over consume calories that's very small if we look at the metaanalyses of substitute tion studies um where they look at okay sugar sweetened Beverages and we don't control for intake absolutely increases fat Mass uh makes uh metabolic Health worse 100%

no question about it if they look at studies where they substitute isocalorically they don't really see a difference on sugar sweetened beverages or fructose containing beverages I think was one of the The Meta analyses I looked at which I guess you know could could follow like fruit juices under that as well um so again substitute with what uh so they're looking at isochoric exchange so in randomized control trials where they're having people either consuming say glucose versus a fructose containing beverage that's but they're both they're both sugar so I so what about not consuming just

consuming water oh okay good good good water versus any sugar like it doesn't have to be glucose or fructose okay so if we look at sugars versus okay sugars versus other form of carboh hdate okay so substitution studies for other forms of carbohydrate well I'm I'm talking about a specific type of sugar without a food Matrix right it's it's a it's a liquid 40 gram in a can if you have two of those it's 80 right so I'm I'm just saying like like consuming a high sugar beverage with no food Matrix not like substituting a

carbohydrate food cuz it's different right right um I mean again and I I believe one of the Met analysis I sent was like again it's it's hard to get into it but it was sugar sweetened beverages when they control for calories they don't see some of these delerious effects on inflammation or body weight or whatever but again I think that's probably a really small percentage of the population because most people don't go they don't drink a Coke and go well that was 40 grams of sugar so that means I'm not going to have a bowl

of cereal I mean they're just drinking it on top of whatever their normal diet is right so it's a very very small percentage population now is it possible at a higher dose of you know several cans of this stuff a day could there be some uniquely deleterious effects sure I mean I hope it'll hold open that possibility I think the the issue is more so when you're consuming so much of it whatever negative deleterious effects are probably lost in the wash of so much energy toxicity right because you're getting so much negative effects from that

so yeah I hold open the possibility it could be uniquely delarius but I mean I would tell anybody I mean one of the first things I look for in people when we're working with it's like all right do you drink sugar sweetened beverages all right let's cut those out right now when we come to you know I know we've talked about artificially sweetened beverages because people will say and here's where again messaging can have unintended consequences people say well you don't want to have artificials or diet sodas because they're just as bad as regular sodas

and they come up with a bunch of different mechanisms to try to validate that no objectively not like in the human randomized control trials where they have people say either drink soda or use diet soda very consistently people lose weight and like actually a pretty good amount of weight there was a year-long randomized control trial I think where people lost like 7 and half kilograms just by substituting diet soda for regular soda and I mean when I do uh content on this I'll get people all the time comment like all I did was stop drinking

rer soda and substitute in diet soda and I lost 50 lbs right now what usually the next thing that people say is well why don't they just drink water okay again I'm trying to meet people where they're at okay some people have developed a habit Behavior whatever it is of drinking a soda water's great if I can drink water fantastic but you're GNA have a hard time convincing me they're not better off being 15 lb 20 lb 50 lb lighter by using diet soda compared to regular soda right and in several randomized control trials and

metanalyses now where they compare substituting regular soda with either water or diet soda they actually see diet soda produce more weight loss than water now it's not because diet soda is a fat burner or anything like that it's probably because people are seeking out that sweet taste somewhere else when they have water right they still lost weight with the water group like it wasn't and it wasn't a big difference between the water and diet soda group but you can't really say like you can make all the arguments you want about like brain signaling and and

whatever but obviously it doesn't matter enough because these people are losing weight and the other thing I've heard is you know well it causes an insulin response okay there's several met analyses now to show that that doesn't happen with any of the sweeteners that we know of there was one study where they gave sucros Salone SU plus carbohydrate or carbohydrate alone and saw sucralose plus carbohydrate uh caused a greater insulin response but in my opinion that study was not an appropriate control group because they were matching sweet taste between the sucrose plus carbohydrate group and

the carbohydrate group because I think their primary measure was actually like um sweet taste in the brain looking at that and then this other stuff was secondary measure so they did the right thing by trying to match taste or sweetness level but the problem is I believe I don't think they I think they used sucrose for the carbohydrate only group and they use maltodextrin for carbohydrate plus sucrose because maltodextrin is not as sweet as sucrose but it has a much greater glycemic response than sucrose does and so I don't think you can really say it's

like a saying it's carbohydrate plus sucal no it's multitran plus sucralose and so if we look at the Met metaanalyses they just don't support like any kind of insulin response and what I would say is okay if you're getting a significant insulin response why don't we have people just passing out left and right who are having diet sodas from hypoglycemia because if you're having increased insulin with no glucose coming in your blood sugar is going to drop or or the other explanation is well maybe there if there is an increase in insulin there must also

be a corresponding increase in glucagon to offset that which means all that stuff is going to be washed out since those two counteract each other but again there's no real data suggesting increases insulin and then the other thing that gets tossed around is the gut microbiome which I am interested in um most the studies show no effect but sucrose in particular does appear to have an impact on the gut microbiome I I have um Suzanne deota out of the same lab that I did my PhD in and she's a microbion expert I've talked to a

few other experts and looked at the research data and my take was pretty similar to their take which was hey we know the gut microbiome changes we don't really we only have a rough idea of what a good bad or neutral change is and like for example in one of the studies looking at sucralose they actually saw an increase in the proportion of a bacteria and I'll probably butcher the name uh um black badia ctis I want to say it is something like that you know how these Latin names are but that species of bacteria

is actually associated with better insulin sensitivity less fat mass and better overall blood glucose regulation and so okay well I can kind of make the argument that maybe sucos has a positive effect on overall health based on that now I don't know and I'm not ready to say anything like that my point being is we don't really know now if you're worried you something different than sucrose um I know you like Stevia you know there's um Aspartame is actually very safe um and people say what about cancer okay so here here's the thing again negative

news selection bias you're much more likely to hear about a study where something causes cancer than has no effect how often do you hear a study of like X showed no effect on cancer I can't think of like the last time I heard a study get propagated in the news about that like the null hypothesis just doesn't pop up that much so um 80% of the studies on aspartame show no effect on cancer uh like I think something like 11% are like a possibly and 9% are a yes you're talking about animal studies but the

ones in in it's all the ones that say yes are all the ones in animals at high doses or you know you have some of these cohorts studies where it kind of like pops up here and there um but for me to feel confident that something for me to feel confident something with cohort data I want to see it like really consistently like fiber very confident that fiber is good for health cardiovascular disease cancer mortality because I am not aware of a single study looking at fiber intake in a cohort that did not show protective

effects and in a dose response matter so I'm pretty confident in that data but if you look at like for example aspartame in a study of the you familiar with the neutr Sante cohort um it's a 100,000 person study out of France from like probably three four or five years ago and I think it was a I want to say it was a 20-year cohort and they one of the big headlines was ASP forame increased the risk of cancer so I went into the data and looked at it so what the headline left out was

from non-consumers of it to low moderate consumers it increased cancer by I think a relative risk of like 15% which was significant and then the high consumers were not significantly increased risk of cancer the high consumers were like a relative risk increase of like a non statistical like four five% I'm not aware of anything that's actually carcinogenic that is carcinogenic at a low level and then not at a high level no that doesn't make any sense right and so I think again for me to be be convinced by some of this stuff it would need

to be it's just not consistent and it's kind of like I mean I I use this example too carnivores now you're going to be happy I'm going to make you more happy I'm not convinced that red meat is an independent risk factor for cancer because these studies are confounded by the fact that red meat typically is kind of a a proxy for poor diet quality because most people's sources of red meat in the American diet are fatty they're processed the the stud is looking at unprocessed red meat and cancer risk are all over the place

and when they control for diet quality and there was a really I in my opinion uh An Elegant study a cohort out of Canada um and I think it was by uh a researcher named maximova I want to say maximov maximova Max something and they looked at tertiles of unprocessed red meat intake and tertiles of fruit and vegetable intake so you had you know low medium and high of each at low intakes of fruit and vegetables meat un red meat had uh a negative impact on cancer at high intakes of fruits and vegetables and high

intake of red meat there was actually a protective effect of red meat on cancer I think it was like a relative risk of 78 so like a 22% relative risk reduction I can't remember if it was statistically different but the point being you're looking at overall diet quality cuz if you're eating a lot of unprocessed red meat and a lot of fruits and vegetables you don't have much room for Junk right so again you don't see that stuff pop up consistently in the cohorts or in like the dose response that you would expect and again

I've I've kind of had this debate with Fe with like more people more on the plant-based side who have said well you know you know shouldn't you like that's just showing that high fruit and vegetables can offset the negative effects of red meat and I'm like if something's an independent risk factor it's going to raise the risk at every single level of everything else right so take LDL for instance yes if you have high HDL and low LDL and low inflammation you have a lower risk than somebody who has high LDL and high inflammation and

and low HDL right but at take inflammation at low inflammation high LDL with low inflammation still has a higher risk than low LDL at low inflammation and at high inflammation high LDL still increased risk above low LDL at both those levels that is when we determine something as an independent risk factor because independent of everything else it raises the risk and we just don't see that so again coming back to aspartame diet soda wrapping this all together um I view diet soda as you have to be careful like people demonizing it because what they think

will happen Okay well people will just drink water no people just keep drinking soda and so why not give them this tool that appears to really be a pretty big lever for not much cost what about okay so non-nutritive sweeteners there's definitely you know there's the artificial sweeteners what you're talking about the the sucr um the sucrose the aspartame sacarin right then there's the the more natural on monk fruit Stevia what I'm getting from you I just want to make sure it's clear is that people that are consuming these sugar sweetened beverages if they substitute

them with like a diet soda which has Aspartame is that right usually aspartame some have sucos okay they like asame K as well like that sort of thing okay then it's it's clearly a benefit studies show it they're they're they're losing weight I mean you know more metabolically healthy more metabolically healthy let's take about let's talk about someone who doesn't drink sodas like that are sugar sweetened and they're lean and they kind of just like there's some people out there that like Diet Coke a day like not because they are getting off of their their

Coke habit but because they like Diet Coke for whatever reason maybe it's the caffeine maybe something about the taste I don't know what it is but those people exist like like sure so di Coke a day um you know what what is that did do you do you feel confident that we you talked a lot about the aspartame data and it definitely seems a little bit all over the place um cancer does take of course decades to occur and there's a cumulative damage and dose May matter maybe one a day but like is there an

uncertainty there that you might say well maybe we don't really know at the end of the day or or do you feel like one a day well now I'm going to get meta on you and say I don't believe anything for certain okay um right but I have data I you know bet my life on BET my leg on BET my foot on BET my toe on you know uh you drink a Diet Coke a day I drink diet coke you drink a Diet Coke a day and not feel like you're I wouldn't even feel

increasing your mortality or cancer I don't um I don't present it to my kids my kids drink water because that's what they ask for but I wouldn't feel worried about them having one diet soda a day I mean if we look at you know take aspartame for example by the way I'm sure that comment's going to get me in trouble um if we take aspartame for nothing worse than parent shaming uh we take aspartame for example I mean we know what it's metabolized into it's two amino acids and it gets metabolized into phenyalanine and aspartate

and then um methanol which I right well it's a very very like the amount of diet soda you'd have to drink to get up to a level of methanol that would cause problems is you would die from electrolyte depletion first right from like basically drowning yourself and people people say what about bioaccumulation well as far as I know methanol doesn't really do that there's a way to process it out of your body unless you're consuming so much consistently that your body never starts getting rid of it you know just like ethanol there's a way to

process it out of your body unless you're exceeding your body's rate of capacity to eliminate it so yeah for small for like those levels of diet soda I'm just not worried about it I mean again one thing my professor really hammered home into my head is you can never be certain about anything so when people say there's proof uh I don't think you're speaking scientifically because you can never really prove something in science you can support hypothesis with data you can disprove stuff you can have some things that there's so much overwhelming data we just

accept it as true but you know we've had things that we have held very closely to we thought were true that ended up we were slightly off or you know I will say like most my things that I ended up changing my mind on I never planted my flag super strong about it um like even with protein distribution even though I a big protein distribution guy I never said oh if you're like not Distributing your protein well you can't make gains you know like I never said something like that and so I think actually that

was one of the major issues with Co and the the the distrust in science is science is supposed to be a very behindth curtain thing right like us scientists debate about stuff we do studies and like 30 years after that we come to a consensus and we go we think this right and instead everybody got to see the scientific process play out in real life which was well this study says this and this study says this and well that control wasn't appropriate with this here and we were trying to sail the ship while we were

trying to build the ship you know and I said right at the start I said 20 years from now I'll be able to look back and say we should have done this but we couldn't and unfortunately it's led to like this really pervasive uh distrust in science in fact whenever I get into you know presenting people with evidence what they end up defaulting to is well I just don't trust science cuz it can just be it just be faked it just be bought you know I'm like that's do studies get faked sure that's much less

that happens than just poor design and um like or designs or packing or designs that are designed in such a way that it looks like you're testing two things but you're not going to actually see a difference you know so very rarely and I tell people this almost without fail when I see a study where the headline is something I don't agree with or is contrary to what I I think the evidence says when I go in and read the methods and I read the results 99.9% of the time I go oh I see why

they found what they found right and you have to remember conclusions from studies are just an author's opinion you and you kind of alluded to this earlier but people ask me they kind of accuse me of like being in an ivory Tower like well do you really need a PhD to read research studies and I'm like no I guess you could figure it out but I tell you what you might as well go get a PhD by the time you had enough experience to actually do it well because it is very difficult if you don't

have the experience to understand these studies and the Practical limitations of them as well and I'll give I'll give you one more example um there was a study done looking at um resistance training it was in a certain circuit and I knew the researcher right and he's giving this presentation and it was a certain uh like um order of exercises I said hey Chad why did you guys do them in that order is there something special about that and he goes oh no it's a 10x10 room is the only way we could get two people

in at the same time by doing that order so you realize like scientific studies are so limited they are big blunt instruments and that's why I just don't get excited about like a couple studies anymore I I wait till there's a lot because I always hold open the idea that I could be wrong on some of this stuff you know but again I I I tell people I don't plant my flag real strong usually and if I do you probably should pay attention because I used to believe again that like um diet sodas were bad

for you I used to believe that I used to believe that LDL cholesterol wasn't wasn't a risk factor for heart disease I used to believe that intermittent fasting was you know bad for muscle that like you wouldn't be able to build much muscle and I've changed my opinion on all these things you know because I just saw enough data but again I was never super strong my flag on the front end it was more like I don't think LDL is a risk factor because of this but you know like it wasn't the LDL is actually

good for you and you should try to pump those numbers up I but I think people just fall into such black and white thinking like the carnivore diet I I definitely want to talk to you about that um you you talked about it a little bit I you know it's it's kind of like the seed oil thing you know where it's like you've taken it head on um and I I like talking about I really want to talk about it with you because I don't think people can accuse you as the anti-meat guy clearly I

get accused of it I get it from both sides vegans and carnivores hate me not all vegans well that's ridiculous rational vegans like me um there's clearly a lot of people that experience benefits from going on a carnivore diet an allme diet I also hear them say things like plants are bad for you you mentioned that fiber is bad for you paper interesting how I'm trying to figure out where that's coming from but you know what's your take on it like in terms of you know why they're they're experiencing the benefits you kind of talked

a little bit about it why they're exp experiencing they're experiencing some of these benefits like autoimmune disease is a big one right their autoimmune issues kind of resolved um but like long term for some people yeah but longterm you know like we don't have do we have even data on on this no there's no data um so there's a lot of belief in this based on how you feel I guess or perhaps some biomarkers but you know plants are bad for you Fiers is bad for you like what's what's your take clearly there's something going

on people are experiencing things that are real so I'm big on symmetrical application of logic if you were going to use a certain line of logic you have to apply it symmetrically you can't just apply it asymmetrically but asymmetrical application is usually what people do what I mean by that is let's take the plants are toxic thing right there are people out there who will say well broccoli has this compound in it which is a carcinogen I think I saw some physician doctor saying there's 76 known carcinogens in plants and I'm like uh if you

extracted like the chemical composition out and like over fetto and high doses maybe okay but what actually happens when people eat plants like if plants are trying to kill us they're doing a really crappy job like they are failing miserably because people eat more plants tend to live longer and so okay why are we not applying that towards compounds and meat heterocyclic means heem iron polymeric hydrocarbons nu5 GC and when you bring that out they um carnivore I was debating well that's just hormesis I'm like well well how how convenient that the compounds that might

be carcinogenic are hormetic for the stuff you like but the the stuff you don't like to eat is is toxic I'm like but this is like the Olympic level mental gymnastics they have to do to convince them because again they believe that they're actually doing something healthy for themselves now I want to be very clear some people do carnivore and they get healthier I'm not saying that can't happen I am simply saying you would be even more healthy if you also included fiber in that if you also included fruits and vegetables now I think a

lot of these people are people with undiagnosed IBS people with gut issues digestive issues and what is carnivore it is an Elimination Diet and so what happens when people who have gut and autoimmune disorders go on elimination diets a lot of times they feel better okay but an Elimination Diet is meant so that you can then add back things and see what you tolerate versus not tolerate many people I mean fod map sensitivities many people have FODMAP sensitivities aren't even aware of it so they cut out fruits and vegetables which are which can be high

in fod maps and they feel better okay so then start adding them in one by one and see what you tolerate and I think the other thing to point out is there is a lot of selection bias that goes on here which is if you look at these carnivore groups because I've been in them because I I watch um there only really people who are getting positive benefits are the ones that are the loudest and the people who don't they get like gaslit bullied they get accused of like sneaking in carbohydrates or plants and the

the response is well just add more add more fats add more animal fats you know if they're having problems with constipation or or whatever it is and it's funny I was on a debate with uh Paul saladino um on Mark Bell's podcast years ago and I think I came across poorly on that podcast because one I wasn't super familiar with his entire position and um I was so flabbergasted by it it took me like an hour to just recover and like get my wits back about me and uh he pulled up this his postulation at

the time was fiber is toilet paper you your body doesn't digest it like why would you put that in you um well fiber isn't just like toilet paper like there's this thing called soluble fermentable fiber that actually is the main F fuel for the gut microbiome and of all the things we know that actually help with the gut microbiome that's like the biggest lever is fermentable soluble fiber and that produces things like butyrate propriate which have positive metabolic health benefits in many randomized control trials so that's one but he pulls out this study that I've

never heard of before and it was uh a study where people who had constipation eliminated fiber and uh a lot of them reported Improvement in their symptoms so it's self-reported and there's no control group I'm like okay but the meta analyses show overall that fiber helps with like going to the bathroom with pooping like it helps okay maybe some people feel better by eliminating it right okay I can I can see a place for that but again it's not that carnivore has this magic it's that you're taking things out of your diet that were probably

aggravating you they were uh aggravating your digestion producing excess gas you're having pain bloating and again this is another one where people go I was very inflamed I'm like yeah what was your CRP what was it what's that I'm like well that's what you use to measure inflam well my gut hurt I was blow no no no that is localized inflammation in response to something going on there that is not the same thing as the inflammation that raises the risk of heart disease and cancer and that sort of thing so what I would say to

people is hey if you want to eat like a meat-based diet I still don't think it's a a great idea but like you don't have to have like four ribe eyes a day you can choose leaner cuts of meat you can have fish you know and why not work in some fruits and vegetables and and if you have digestive problems with those add them in one at a time and see which one doesn't give you digestive distress and I think unfortun this becomes so much like a religion for people because they just I think a

lot of them don't like eating vegetables and so it becomes an excuse to not eat vegetables you know we believe what we want to believe and again the asymmetrical application of logic is very interesting to me so there's there's a lot of carnivore ad Advocates out there that say epidemiology is garbage in fact Paul solino had a video titled epidemiology is garbage like okay and then when he was on another podcast he was citing epidemiology and I'm like wa wait wait so epidemiology is garbage unless it's epidemiology that you agree with and but he's not

alone in that there's a lot of people who did that and then Here Comes This like uh internet survey that was published by Harvard about people I think it was in Harvard uh but it was like a self-reported internet survey of people like reporting like certain things improving on Carnivore diet I'm like wait so 20year cohort studies with appropriate covariant are garbage but a self-reported internet survey that's high quality evidence okay I mean again it's like if you're going to apply a certain type of logic you have to be consistent with that and again what

I'll say is hey I just laid out how I don't think red meat is an independent uh risk factor for cancer I'm not convinced about that very unconvinced about that but if red meat had the data that dietary fiber had about reducing the risk of cancer heart disease and mortality you carnivores would lose your absolute Minds if anybody dared suggest that it wasn't good for you and so it just very clearly points out the asymmetrical application of logic and getting more into dietary fiber it fulfills almost every single aspect of what we what I need

to be considered strong evidence which is we know the mechanisms you know in terms of insoluble fiber decreases gut Transit time uh decreases the risk of diverticulitis which probably is a risk factor for developing colon cancer at some point um there's some idea that by having less gut Transit time that they the toxins that are in our digesta that wind up in stool that they have less time to interact with those intestin cells and so by getting rid of it faster that reduces your risk of chacy cancer soluble fiber the effects on the gut microbiome

the production of short chain fatty acids and also the lowering of LDL cholesterol so we we have the an improvement in uh glucose metabolism and insulin sensitivity we have those those mechanisms not to mention the micronutrients vitamins and minerals that are co-ingested in in those plants and fruits yeah in the food Matrix and that and actually what's interesting is um one of the first semar I went to as a graduate student there was a professor there talking about lopen and tomatoes and all this kind of stuff and at the end we're asking questions and he

goes you know what you have a really hard time beating mother nature's kitchen and I really like what he said which is you know whenever we try to extract these individual compounds out of food we never not never rarely do we see the same beneficial effects as consuming the whole food itself to your point about the food Matrix right so yeah there's a there's a a pathway there there's biochemical Pathways there we may not ever be able to like really pick them out in terms of priority of what it but the the the thing to

remember and I tell this to people every food you eat probably activates something positive and negative the question is not whether are things in it that will activate positive and negative Pathways and even that I get the heebie jeebies about because you know a pathway is probably only negative if it's disregulated because your body evolved to keep you alive but can activate good and bad things the question is what is the overall outcome of that right like we said Ty or sorry aspirin activates Co procoagulant anti-coagulant Pathways but the overall effect is anti-coagulation plants fruits

and vegetables so both any food May activate positive and negative Pathways but the question is like what's the overall effect right because if we try to tease apart every individual biochemical pathway it's going to be really hard to wrap that back together and again with fiber there's also a dose response we see a dose response in these cohort studies and again if we do a forest plot of studies showing benefit or showing harm literally every single study is on the side of benefit so I just don't know how much more data you need that just

because fiber might some f sources of fiber might make your tummy hurt doesn't mean fiber is bad for you I don't know how or else I can lay that out you know I I I 100% agree that there's just an overwhelming amount of evidence that that fiber is beneficial plants vegetables fruits beneficial there's randomized control trials there's the observational data I mean you just you can't ignore that I don't even like eating vegetables either I just do it because I know it's good for me okay we we're running out of time I do um there's

another topic I want to cover I also want to ask you about personal routine but um the topic is something that you and I have probably buted head with butted heads with a little bit at at least on social media in the past years ago I don't know that like been recent and um that has to do with time restricted eating okay and you know a form of intermittent fasting so my question to you is well first of all I want to I want to say this over the years my view of certain benefits of

what I think of time restricted eating has has changed as more data has come in and specifically referring to the fact that there are studies out there that have calculated if people are just in their Free Living environment and they're naturally doing time restricted eating and they actually are doing it they do decrease their calorie intake correct between 200 to 500 depending on how short of a time when they're eating their food and so if you don't consider the calories that they are restricting the weight loss benefits seem to go away when you then consider

the calories so in other words if they're don't restricting aren't restricting calories the timer restricted effect on weight loss is seems to go away that's correct now um so I I I didn't always believe that but as more data came out I now say okay well this seems to be real for sure um there are a lot of T types of time restricted eating there's like 6- hour window you're eating in 8 Hour window there's even 10 hours which I don't think you're going to get a big difference if you're comparing 10 to 12 but

um other effects of time restricted eating do you think think you know there's there is a circadian component to time restricted eating right there is a circadian component you are eating you know humans or dial creatures we're eating within our our our time window when our circadian rhythm is more metabolically inclined to process glucose and fatty acids and everything right do you think there is a possibility of a benefit of Tim restricted eating like independent of calories I think there's a possibility but I think based on the research I've seen if it does exist it's

probably pretty small um you know you do in some studies I actually posted about this I think yesterday um you do in some studies see some of the more transient markers have an effect with like especially like early Tim restricted eating versus like continuous feeding but you don't at least to my knowledge I haven't really seen one that like shows the difference in like hba1c or H IR those sorts of things what you tend to see is like fasting blood glucose fasting insulin maybe a little bit lower than in the early time restricted eating which

I think it's possible it's possible that is a real effect it is I think it's also possible that okay well if they're early time restricted eating and they finish eating at like 1: p.m. and they're not eating until you know 8:00 a.m. the next day when they're doing a blood draw whereas the person who is just regular eating eats right before bed gets a blood draw the next day I think it's possible that that might explain that small difference now I could be wrong and so there could be um there could be a small extra

benefit to it blood pressure have you seen the blood pressure one I haven't seen the blood pressure one that's the 6-hour um I think it was um ver from Chicago blood pressure was it was that again calories were equated so there was no weight loss yeah there was the fasting blood glucose but the blood pressure was that was the thing that was most interesting to me because it was like size effects that you get with anti-hypertensive treatment drugs which was very interesting and so that's something I mean there's again you're getting into the potential cardom

metabolic effects there's need there needs to be more research but I just wanted to to see if you what what your stance is and I think again that would be one where I'm like I'd like to see how the timing of the measurement affects it right so I would like to see what I would like to see if somebody do a study just like that but when they do their final blood draw and and blood pressure they do the same length fasted from the day before right so that you're equating that fasting period before those

things because again I think you know blood pressure responds relatively acutely to a lot of different things uh stress you know if you just ate you'll have a higher blood pressure due to solutes in your blood so you know I think it's possible and I hold open that possibility I think what I tell people is like practically it's probably very little difference and so I look at practically is this something that you can Implement your life and make a lifestyle and if the answer is yes by all means it's a great tool right like it's

a great tool cool it's one of your only levers you the levers you have are dietary restriction like low carb low fat plant-based whatever calor tracking restriction right where you're tracking stuff or time restriction those are your three levers you can really pull in terms if you want to put things in the buckets right and you can combine them if you want to but um Whatever Gets You consistent that is the that is the biggest thing and so for some people they love time restricted eating you know I've had people say like hey I eat

in this 8 Hour window six hour window I don't feel hungry I'm good and so I think where people it the messaging can get confusing again is like people say well there's some evidence that early time restricted eating is better okay but what happens if somebody is like not being adherent to that because they get hungry at night and then they end up binging at night because they're well I already screwed up my feeding window might as well just have whatever I want right and so I think the messaging H it's important to understand why

these things work right and so the we would both agree okay if there's a benefit it's probably small and the biggest lever is making sure you're just being consistently you know controlling those that calorie intake and so the benefit of time restricted eating is for many people they they don't have to track and they'll limit their calories that way but I have met people who they use time restricted eating is basically an excuse to binge eat during their feeding window and for them that's not going to work very well right and so um the other

thing that gets brought up a lot is kind of you know autophagy and then longevity and so what I'll say is yes Tim restricted eating raises autophagy but so does calorie restriction and so does exercise yeah all true and and also with autophagy I think again this is where it's like using terms as blanket good bad I mean autophagy is elevated in some cancers it's um it's elevating some wasting diseases I mean we were talking about Lal protein degradation essentially and so you know I just try to remind people like thinking about stuff in black

and white is probably not the way you want to do it right now I think the issue with trying to understand something like autophagy is really you'd have to Almost Do studies looking at autophagy where you're equating like weekly calories like if you want to get in the more extreme versions of fasting and then looking okay what is the overall in that effect because all right let's say you're doing alternate day fasting right like a more extreme version of fasting absolutely I have no doubt that on your day of fasting your your autophagy is going

up but then if we are equating calories right you're going to be eating much more on your feeding day than a person who's just eating the same amount of calories every single day is if we're equating Apples to Apples right and so when you're eating more that tends to reduce autophagy and so what's the overall net effect right I don't know I don't know the answer but I I would suspect based on other things I've seen that it's probably going to be really no difference that it is a tool to control calories and that would

was what affects autophagy on longevity I mean really there's some animal studies there's some inv vitro stuff as well I think um and even the calorie restriction stuff I I think I have a kind of a unique take on this because I've done animal research so there's nothing I'm aware I mean there's a couple rodent studies looking at um uh Tim restricted eating where they suggested a longevity benefit I think rodent model is probably a poor model for longevity because rodents grow throughout the course of their life that you know humans kind of Peak at

like around 20 and then they kind of stay level I mean obesity notwithstanding and then they start to decline later in life very different growth curve from rodents now rodents are good models for other things like protein metabolism decent model for glucose metabolism but for longevity I'm not convinced now if we look at the the monkey studies the primate studies we see the calorie restriction effects on primates right and so I think but I'm not even convinced it's calorie restriction and here's why cuz I know how these study are done because when you're looking at

lab animals you just look at what they normally eat and then you cut 20 30% out and you go that's calorie restriction but I've pulled up these studies and looked at the and looked at the charts of these animals weights they don't like keep dropping there's like maybe a little drop and then it just kind of plateaus right like they they don't really lose much weight if at all animals tend to overeat in captivity and when you look at the odds ratios of what obesity does for longevity what I think is happening and what I

think you're seeing is these animals just don't become obese and and they don't gain excess amounts of body fat and so calorie restriction it's probably more probably better put as it's just like preventing excess body fat right cuz I mean if you take that at face value I mean if you're truly in a calorie it you're enti you'll die eventually you'll die right so I think a lot of this is literally can be boiled down to just don't become obese don't have excess body fat and you don't have to be super lean either like actually

the mortality data suggests if you're super lean that's probably not good either I there's some aspects of that that I I tend to think that people who are very lean are probably extreme in other ways and those aspects of their life probably contribute to the mortality rate but like 15 20% body fat if you're a male appears to be you know a very protective effect for mortality compared to being you know 30 40% body fat and so again I am very convinced that excess body fat is really bad for metabolic Health cardiovascular disease cancer and

mortality but how you get to a normal body weight or lean body weight I think is way less important than actually just getting there got it um I think a lot of people are interested in what Lane's weekly routine is like in terms of your you know you know the workout your your your diet supplement is there like a supplement that is you know in the fitness IND industry you think is like a no-brainer that people should be taking um so I'd love to kind of end with your your personal routine yeah and uh full

disclaimer I own a Suman company outward nutrition and so I you know I have some bias here but I feel relatively I tell people I don't put anything in it that I wasn't using beforehand and wasn't pretty felt pretty strong about so routine wise it it does vary because I travel a lot uh for things like this and I have my kids week on week off because I share custody split custody and uh so weeks I have the kids um you know it's summer now so it's a little bit different but usually I'm up early

you know getting them ready for school taking them to school get back workday starts around 8:30 um usually like you know I'll wake up if I'm taking the kids to school I'll just pound a protein shake or something like that just so I get some protein in hold me over take to school get back have some caffeine whether it's coffee energy drink whatever which by the way caffeine is the original like neutr Tropic cognitive enhancer pretty consistent data on that um and then I'll start work whether it's emails recording content reading research uh a lot

of actual my time as I look on social media for what people are talking about and see if it's something I want to talk about um I handle all my own social media so that is a lot of of what I do on a day-to-day basis posting um you know I like to read the comments to see what people are talking about other questions they have and then um usually like I'll have lunch and then I'll go train in the afternoon and and that will last 3 hours you know depending on like I've got World

Championships coming up in 11 weeks in South Africa and so yeah like my training time per week is like 12 to 15 hours like it's a lot of time um and so I'll usually on on weeks side have the kids I try to train Monday through Friday and then take the weekends off so that I can just spend the time with the kids on the weekend is there a reason you train in the afternoon is it I just feel better okay I just feel better um and usually if I haven't had great sleep if I

have some to kind of wake up I go better but like if I go early in the morning I just notice that my performance isn't as good and I like getting a few meals in before I go train um so and then like once I finish training I'll get back um I have a nanny who helps me with the kids so she like I take the kids to school but then she picks uh them up uh my son is uh on the Spectrum he's ASD and so she takes him to Aba therapy and then um

she'll pick my daughter up she'll do like um homework with her and she'll do uh tutoring and whatnot and then both kids will come back to my house at like 5:00 which is about the time where I finished training and finished all my work and then I'm dad for the evening right and then once I go to bed I might like any emails I got to fire out or something like that but mostly I'm just unwinding I'll watch the sunset I'll watch a TV show whatever right weeks I don't have the kids is usually if

I if I travel that's when I travel um still try to train in the afternoon um but obviously like it can be kind of wonky depending on how things go and pardon me um only we I don't have the kids if I'm in Tampa usually I'm working a little bit longer in terms of I'll wake up a little bit later I try not to wake up too much later because I don't want to get off uh I've just noticed that being consistent at the time I wake up actually helps a lot even if I get

less sleep um but I'll wake up up I'll start work after breakfast I'll get most the way through my work GO train get home watch a sun have dinner watch a sunset then I'll go do some more work and then usually like finish up the night watching a TV show or playing a video game or just something to like depl plug my mind what kind of meals do you eat I mean is it protein honestly um I usually batch cook protein so I'll cook a lot of chicken breast up just so I have quick easy

accessible protein cuz carbs and fats are pretty easy you know um but um you know sources that you would expect you know for proteins chicken breast Greek yogurt um lean red meat lean pork fish uh eggs those sorts of sources of protein for carbohydrates again what you'd expect fruits and vegetables um rice oatmeal one of my favorites is I Love Popcorn that's like my my treat um because it actually is very high in fiber people don't realize especially if you air poop it or there are some Brands who actually are really high in fiber and

not super high in fat um I love that so I'll I'll have that um it's a great way to get in 10 grams of fiber and it takes you a long time to eat it so it's very satiating as well um and then like um I actually do use quite a few frozen meals again I don't let the enemy of good be Perfection because I mean if I spend all my time cooking it's just or I'm hiring like a personal chef I mean that's a lot of expense and so I do use some frozen meals

um that are higher in protein higher in fiber and uh usually at night I'll have like a small bowl of ice cream or maybe a cookie or something like that and that's like my little treat that I enjoy uh sometimes before training if I'm like kind of rushing uh I might have like some gummy bears or something like that just to give me some quick glucose so I make sure that I've you know got something in circulation um but for the most part you know my diet's about what you'd expect uh supplement wise I mean

if I had to build my Mount Rushmore of supplements it is very clearly three supplements it is creatin monohydrate caffeine whey protein the amount of research data on all three of those is enormous and honestly especially for creatin I just can't see an argument at this point not to take it because of the cognitive benefits there appear to be benefits on memory formation even shortterm there was a study that just came out showing like 30 plus grams of creatin at a sitting actually acutely increased memory formation um which I was very surprised by um depression

there was a study that showed that creatin helped a little bit with dep symptoms of depression uh again cognition possibly cognitive decline and then of course all the lean mass strength benefits performance benefits that we talk about and it's very very safe I mean if you take creatin you might see your creatinine levels go up your it doesn't mean your kidneys are failing or anything like that again there's so many long randomized control trials looking directly at kidney function showing that creatin does not negatively impact kidney function the one thing that I hear pop up

consistently now is well it causes hair lies no no one study in 2009 showed that increased DHT okay which is a metabolite of testosterone it didn't show any changes in the precursor or the thing that comes after after DHT and so how is this happening right like where is this happening I mean it must be directly affecting the enzyme that catalyzes the conversion if we believe this right but again even if it was true an increase in DHT is not the same thing as showing hair loss right you're showing a surrogate marker you're showing a

mechanism and it's never been replicated and again very to me a suspect mechanism because you're not seeing the either the precursor or whatever you know came after I fet what comes after DHT you're not seeing a difference in those and so how is this effect happening and more importantly hair loss wasn't measured they didn't measure hair loss yeah and so I I I tell people I'm like you know I'm just not worried about it um again it was 15 years ago I would think by now if it was a legit thing it would have come

back so that's like my tier one of supplements what kind of dose for the creatine uh five grams a day plenty for people three grams for small women probably enough do you think it cause does it does the water is the water gain so the water is all intracellular um it doesn't increase extracellular water people who feel bloated on creatin creatin can be a gut irritant for some people so what I recommend is splitting the dose and taking it morning and night if you find it's a gut irritant but it doesn't increase like extracellular water

all the all the water that we see it does increase total body water and intracellular water which is a good thing that actually makes you visually look better like if you're full with glycogen for example your muscles look better there's a reason bodybuilders load carbohydrates before competition because you look more volumized your muscles look fuller so creatin wheight protein I just take as needed to get my total protein intake I don't think it's a anything magical about wheight protein I think it's just a very high quality tasty relatively inexpensive way to get in high quality

protein people are worried about an insulin response from protein powder are you like again this is where it's important to have guidelines not rules right okay well let's look at the randomized control trials okay yeah it does seem to have an insulin response it does but does insulin sensitivity get worse no if anything in the studies it gets better so again I'm not worried about an acute insulin rise right one of things I'll tell people is if we're going to worry about acute changes and stuff you're not going to be able to eat anything because

fat impedes flow media dilation after a meal carbohydrates raise blood glucose which is you know blood glucose is toxic over time and protein stimulates mtor which is involved in you know formation of cancer and some cancers big difference between acute rises in these systems versus like long-term disregulated signaling big difference then my tier two of supplements would be things like um I really like riola Rosa as a uh as a cognitive enhancer um as an adaptogen um it improves time to fatigue fatigue and improves uh perception of fatigue and appears to be pretty consistent mental

fatigue uh yeah so like even in exercise like their perception of fatigue um but yes it also I I think it's task completion is how they measured it I could get that wrong so if any experts are out there and want to correct me please do what what dose I recently got interested in this in rodol resos and I and I ordered it and I have it yeah um and it was because of the mental potential mental effect so I'm depends on the the the standardization of the cindr sides um there was aens and the

cyinder sides I think it's like you want like 3% but the dose that's usually used and for most people it's like anywhere from I think like 100 to 600 milligrams but if you go above that they actually show like it actually starts to fall off so there appears to be like an optimal curve so like in my our pre-workout I believe we have um 150 milligram and so or maybe 150 milligrams per scoop I have to go back and look but it's an amount that's kind of like right in that middle range to get the

benefits and anecdotally I find it takes the edge off caffeine too so like you don't have as like a as much of a come down off caffeine so I like um I like that ashanda very I'm very bullish on estrog Gonda there's there's a few meta analyses now showing improv lean mass uh improved strength improved sleep uh better Stress Management um you know you know there's been some worries about like I think liver uh some people said or also like depression and mood I haven't seen it pop up in any of the randomized control trials

um and so I just don't I don't really it's not something I worry about um that seems to be another adaptogen that kind of like helps really with Stress Management and interestingly none of the it raises testosterone too but not an amount that would it doesn't raise the testosterone or lower cortisol enough to where it explains the changes in lean mass so this could be like a a matrix thing again where there's like acting on Multi multiple Pathways summing up to an outcome now I am a little bit it's in our it's in our recovery

product but I it's it's tier two because I just want to see more studies over a longer period of time like if you look at creatin caffeine whey protein there are thousands of placebo control trials showing the benefits to this across mult multiple Labs over decades in different countries very strong evidence I just want to see more from things like ashwag Rola over a longer period of time before I would move that into a tier one right and the mechanism isn't really understood yet of ashwagandha and so I just want to see that flushed out

a little bit more right uh and then there's things like uh betane or trimethyl glycine which may improve power output during exercise you have things like bet beta alanine which if you're exercising like intense between 30 seconds in 10 minutes that appears to have some benefits um citrine may have some benefits and at least if you're at least if you're getting like six grams uh in terms of like fatigue resistance so those those are some like and then fish oil melatonin those things would kind of go into my tier two actually melatonin has shown an

increase in lean mass as well um yeah there's some studies now randomized control trials showing an increase in lean mass so some people might say it's improved sleep is improving lean mass but there's actually some evidence that it may act outside of the improved sleep I'm not sure the exact mechanism so again I want to see more of that it's a hormone I mean it's right changes 500 different jeans right so those would kind of be my my tier two I'm sure I'm missing some stuff you know um multivitamin probably go in there somewhere you

know Insurance yeah yeah I mean just make sure you're covering your bases right um if you have a real hard time eating vegetables you know always tell people fruits and vegetables Whole Foods are better if you need a fiber supplement okay a fiber supplement you know you could take Metamucil and Bena fiber so you're getting soluble ins soluble you know again I think it's better to get a diverse array but let's not let Perfection be the enemy of good right so if you need a fiber supplement by all means um so those would kind of

be like the things that I'm that I'm I'm having it stuff and that's you know the supplements I sell we sell there's we sell a sleep supplement there's other things in there there's like uh a few other ingredients that have been shown to improve sleep but melatonin is the big is the big hammer in there um and then there's um our recovery supplement which has creatin it has ashwagandha it has betane you know so some of the stuff I'm talking about and then what do you think of glucosamine and the the yeah I mean I

think that's probably in a tier two if you want I think the evidence is I haven't looked into it super specifically I think there's good evidence that it does a little bit is is what I would tell people it's um it's a small effect but it seems to have an effect so if you're throwing the kitchen sink I mean yeah if you want to do that that's fine um and you know other things that fall into like people are like what's tier three I'm like tier three is where it's there's just not a lot of

consistency in the data right you know or or you got stuff like um you know ECT toone which there's a couple studies out there that show hey an increase in lean mass in NE to sterone and I'm like uh doesn't stimulate protein synthesis doesn't do anything to protein degradation where is this increase in lean mass coming from right so that H&B probably something in tier three you know where like in specific populations there might be a benefit but for most people does nothing um so that's kind of how I I categorize my supplements but I

I really like we only have four supplements in my entire line you know we have a pre-workout we have a recovery we have sleep and we have a weight prot R and our whole deal we're probably going to come up with electrolyte supplement as well uh but our whole deal is basically like the line is not going to do the work for you you got to do the work which is why we call it outw work and we're just going to help you be able to train a little bit harder recover a little bit faster

but it's your training that's going to move the needle totally um well I mean and and and you're going to help them get the information there's people can find you you have a YouTube channel social media you want to call out everything I mean there's I'm sure a lot of people already know where to find you but for those few that don't sure yeah I mean you can find me on Instagram as B that's kind my digital business card and I'm on most platforms as biolane but yeah I mean I do everything so you know

we have one-on-one coaching if people are looking for that we do coaching through a team biolane which is team of kind of like experts that I've handpicked to be one-on-one coaches uh We've trained them in our methods if you want to be a better Coach you want to learn how to do this stuff want to learn methods and don't want to go back to school I have a Academy called physique coaching academy uh with Professor Bill Campbell where it really is like it's over 600 pages of written material but if you want to learn how

to be the best coach to help people build muscle and lose fat body composition we synergize resistance training nutrition supplementation and cardiovascular exercise around all that and there's not really anything else out there that does that right now um so there's that then you know for people who can 4 101 coaching that's we developed um my app carbon diet coach which is 10 bucks a month and I basically wrote a algorithm that will um essentially coach you like do accountability coaching so if you're you know you're doing fat loss you weigh in you know each

day we we tell people it's the more data points it has the better you weigh in each day and based on how you progress the app will adjust your nutrition recommendations to make sure that you're going towards your goals and it will even like give you some feedback messages like when you check in and whatnot to tell you what you're doing well or what you can improve on um so that's been really successful for us a lot of people like that because obviously not everybody can afford one-on-one coaching but you know this thing does everything

that my fitness pal does except it actually like gives you feedback week to week and it adjusts your nutrition as you progress so it's a great option for people who can't afford one-on-one coaching and then my supplement Line outw work nutrition got a couple self-published books and then I also have a research review called reps where um myself and my team of writers we pick out five studies that are in like uh Fitness and Nutrition every month and we break them down in like a really practical way there's like there's some really good research reviews

out there but I found most of them were still like too highbrow I really wanted to get something that was very very practical so reps is research explained with practical summaries um and so that's a great tool for people at $12.99 a month to like like if you're confused about some of this research will'll break it down for you you know and then I also have what's called a workout Builder on my website which is where people can go in and get you know kind of semi-customized programming for like $12.99 a month as well so

I really try to like from top to bottom like build out stuff to help people at every different level of their their fitness journey lot of options there for someone for anyone yeah I I got a lot of stuff going on I I I was I tell people I'm like I tell you one thing I ain't boring yeah well that's for I I absolutely enjoyed having a conversation with you Lane um it's too bad that it had to be cut a little bit short I we could keep going for another couple hours but I think

that means we have to do this again I would love to because any yeah um and again thanks again for coming on for everything you do um and I look forward to continuing following you and seeing what's up and again um possibly around to you soon that'd be fun yeah absolutely thanks for having me on I really appreciate it it's a it's a lot of fun to be able to do this stuff awesome