Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / What Is Your Muscle Gain Efficiency (MGE) Score? (The Bottleneck Effect) | Ep 285
Transcript
- 0:01Philip Pape: Let's say you've been building muscle, tracking your weight, watching it go up steadily during your bulk and the number on the scale is going up, but it doesn't tell you how much of that gain is actually muscle.
- 0:11Philip Pape: What if there was a way to know exactly how efficient your muscle building efforts are?
- 0:16Philip Pape: Using an engineering concept called the bottleneck effect, I've created a system that measures your true muscle building potential and efficiency, and today I am introducing how the MGE score muscle gain efficiency can tell you if you're mostly building muscle or just gaining fat.
- 0:35Philip Pape: You'll learn the factors that determine your baseline muscle mass potential, how to calculate your efficiency score and, most importantly, how to identify and fix whatever's holding back your gains.
- 0:45Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.
- 1:04Philip Pape: I'm your host, philip Pape, and today I'm introducing a revolutionary way to measure your muscle building success.
- 1:10Philip Pape: I want you to think of your body as a muscle building factory.
- 1:15Philip Pape: Engineers know that every factory has a theoretical maximum output and actual production efficiency.
- 1:21Philip Pape: Your body's no different.
- 1:22Philip Pape: There's your potential for muscle growth, which I call the muscle gain index, and then there's how efficiently you're reaching that potential your muscle gain efficiency, both of which are new scores that I've created.
- 1:35Philip Pape: They are part of a spreadsheet, a tool where you can plug in some numbers between the beginning and end of your bulk and see how efficient you were at gaining muscle.
- 1:44Philip Pape: Now, before we dive into the score and how to use it, if you want to actually access that complete calculator, along with some other evidence-based tracking tools like a body composition tracker and a biofeedback tracker, they're only available in Wits and Weights Physique University.
- 2:00Philip Pape: I saved my most juicy choice calculators for that group and all you have to do is join, and I don't know what you're waiting for.
- 2:08Philip Pape: It is super affordable and it is extremely valuable.
- 2:12Philip Pape: Go to whatsoeightscom slash physique or click the link in my show notes to learn more about the Physique University, where you can take your tracking and results to the next level.
- 2:21Philip Pape: This is only for people who are lifters, who are frustrated that they haven't quite gotten the fat loss or muscle gain output that they want, and we help you dial it in.
- 2:33Philip Pape: We onboard you, we take you through a step-by-step method and process based on evidence and we tell you exactly how to measure and calculate those things so that you have utmost confidence and no more ambiguity or questions about what your metabolism is doing, how to train, how to eat, and then you can get that result with tons of support and accountability.
- 2:54Philip Pape: So if you want to join Wits and Weights Physique University and get access to the exact calculator I'm talking about today, check out the link in the show notes or go to witsandweightcom slash physique.
- 3:05Philip Pape: Now, stick around anyway, because I am going to explain generally how this works and you'll understand what matters.
- 3:13Philip Pape: So, whether you have the calculator or not, so that you know how to go into your next muscle building phase and do it efficiently.
- 3:19Philip Pape: So I'm going to start by understanding our theoretical maximum output.
- 3:25Philip Pape: Right, if we think of the factory analogy here, because this is an engineering episode, what we want to do is avoid bottlenecks.
- 3:33Philip Pape: We want to understand the maximum, but then we also want to avoid bottlenecks.
- 3:36Philip Pape: So the theoretical maximum output for you is your muscle gain index, mgi.
- 3:42Philip Pape: Muscle gain index, mgi.
- 3:49Philip Pape: This actually tells us how much of your lean body mass is likely skeletal muscle mass, based on key factors that influence muscle building potential.
- 3:53Philip Pape: Okay, listen to that again.
- 3:54Philip Pape: When you gain weight to build muscle, you're going to gain some body fat and you're going to gain some lean mass.
- 4:00Philip Pape: What I do with the muscle gain index is tease out how much of that lean mass is likely skeletal muscle mass, so actual muscle mass, because not all of it is muscle.
- 4:10Philip Pape: Some of it is bone, fluid, organ, other tissue, and we need to understand how much is muscle.
- 4:16Philip Pape: And the factors that affect your muscle are like, let's say, the specifications of your factory's machines, right?
- 4:23Philip Pape: So there's a list of these.
- 4:24Philip Pape: First there's whether you're male or female, because that's going to affect your baseline muscle mass potential, not, I repeat, not the rate at which you gain muscle.
- 4:32Philip Pape: Ladies, men, it's exactly the same, no matter your sex, no matter your age.
- 4:37Philip Pape: What's different is the baseline potential, because men start with a higher baseline, given that they have more muscle mass, but it's only about 2%.
- 4:45Philip Pape: Believe it or not, it's only about 2%, so it's actually quite negligible.
- 4:50Philip Pape: Age is the next factor that's going to impact your muscle building capacity, because the older we get and by older I mean over 50, over 60, your muscle building capacity declines just a tad, just a tiny, tiny bit.
- 5:01Philip Pape: But guess what?
- 5:02Philip Pape: It's always there.
- 5:02Philip Pape: You always can build muscle to the day you die, all the way through into your 90s, we've seen, but it does have a small impact less you're stronger and then you might.
- 5:26Philip Pape: So there's kind of this counteracting forces going on which leads me to your strength to body weight ratio, and we can measure that through your squat or we can measure it through your deadlift, for example, and that's your current performance.
- 5:35Philip Pape: That is also going to affect your muscle gain efficiency.
- 5:38Philip Pape: Then we have your frame size, and that can be measured by your wrist.
- 5:42Philip Pape: That can tell us do you have a small, medium or large frame?
- 5:45Philip Pape: And that also determines how much of that percentage of lean mass is skeletal mass as opposed to maybe just bone right or representing something that is not muscle mass.
- 5:55Philip Pape: And then, finally, your current body fat percentage, which influences hormones.
- 5:59Philip Pape: It also influences your muscle building efficiency, your muscle building efficiency.
- 6:04Philip Pape: So the muscle gain index that I came up with is a formula that accounts for all of these things.
- 6:07Philip Pape: So in the calculator I created, you basically plug those in and it gives you an estimated skeletal muscle mass out of your lean mass and it pushes it up or down depending on all of these factors.
- 6:17Philip Pape: So a young male with years of training experience and strong lifts might have very high potential, while someone starting out would have room to grow but the benefit of newbie gains.
- 6:29Philip Pape: So it's kind of balanced between all of these.
- 6:31Philip Pape: So that's kind of the potential of your body, of your factory, and now we have to measure how efficiently that it's running.
- 6:39Philip Pape: And this is your MGE, your muscle gain efficiency.
- 6:42Philip Pape: That number tells us how much of your weight change is actually muscle and how efficient it is.
- 6:50Philip Pape: So it's roughly a number between zero and one, the way that I came up with it, and this accounts for the changes in your muscle mass, the changes in your total body weight, and whether you're bulking, cutting or recomping as well, because I don't want to ding you if you are cutting and of course you've retained or gained a little muscle mass, even though it's small.
- 7:09Philip Pape: The fact that you're cutting means you might have been pretty efficient at cutting, gaining muscle, because you did better than the average, if that makes sense.
- 7:18Philip Pape: So I'll give you some real world example, right, or examples for this score, this muscle gain efficiency A score near the bottom, near about 0.1, remember this goes around zero to one.
- 7:31Philip Pape: There are possibilities of going negative and possibilities of going one, but those are very extreme cases.
- 7:36Philip Pape: So a score near 0.1 just means a very poor bulk.
- 7:40Philip Pape: It means you gained almost all fat.
- 7:41Philip Pape: A score in the middle, around 0.5, is hey, this is a pretty good bulk, it's pretty decent bulk.
- 7:46Philip Pape: You've balanced your muscle and fat gain.
- 7:48Philip Pape: A score above 0.6 shows high efficiency, right, you're actually gaining a lot more muscle than fat.
- 7:54Philip Pape: And then, if you're like re-comping, you could see scores over one, which is like the holy grail of gaining muscle while losing fat.
- 8:04Philip Pape: But the asterisk on that, folks, when you think about that, is the quantity of muscle might not be that much.
- 8:10Philip Pape: In other words, it's, it's very efficient, but because you're not actually gaining weight, you have to multiply that efficiency by how much weight you're gaining, which is small.
- 8:18Philip Pape: It's going to stretch out the duration by months or years to actually gain the same amount of muscle as somebody who's at like a 0.6, but gaining weight faster, if that makes sense, right.
- 8:29Philip Pape: So I know it sounds a little bit confusing.
- 8:31Philip Pape: If you have the spreadsheet, it makes total sense.
- 8:33Philip Pape: It actually calculates it for you and then it says oh, here's your number and here's how efficient it is, and here's what you might do differently next time.
- 8:38Philip Pape: Um, but, and the other thing I want to clarify is a 0.5 doesn't mean it's like 50% lean mass, 50% fat.
- 8:49Philip Pape: However, it does almost mean you've gained 50% muscle to fat.
- 8:54Philip Pape: You get what I'm saying.
- 8:55Philip Pape: So it's a little bit of a different way to look at the data that you can't just easily calculate from knowing your body fat.
- 9:03Philip Pape: All right, so when the score is lower than expected, something is bottlenecking your gains, and that is really the point of this episode is not to say, hey, you know, here's a calculator, here's a formula.
- 9:13Philip Pape: I'm not even going through the math and, honestly, even if you don't have the spreadsheet, you can still do the right things to have the best success.
- 9:22Philip Pape: I just know some people love to have that feedback and that data to really dive in and level up to the next level, and that's what we help people do in our coaching program and in the Physique University.
- 9:31Philip Pape: So if that's you listening, you're like, yeah, I need to get to that level.
- 9:33Philip Pape: Definitely reach out and join, definitely reach out and join.
- 9:36Philip Pape: But if your score is lower, uh, there are five potential bottlenecks.
- 9:46Philip Pape: All right, the first bottleneck is the training bottleneck, and that is where you basically you're weak.
- 9:48Philip Pape: You just don't have a high squat to body weight ratio.
- 9:51Philip Pape: Something has stalled out, right, you haven't either that or you're a newbie.
- 9:55Philip Pape: And again, I want to kind of separate training age, because if you are fairly new to this, you're going to gain muscle fairly quickly, but you still have to be on the right program.
- 10:03Philip Pape: You still have to have the right progression, the right amount of volume, incorporating the big systemic, compound movements, proper intensity.
- 10:12Philip Pape: All of that is basically going to fix this issue.
- 10:15Philip Pape: So if weakness, if a lack of strength, is a thing preventing you from gaining muscle, you are always going to be stalled and you are always going to gain more fat than muscle in the future when you try to gain weight and this could have been your problem most of your life.
- 10:29Philip Pape: If you're not training properly, if you just hit the gym randomly, if you just use the machines without regard for progress over time, that's what's going to happen.
- 10:38Philip Pape: Somebody in our Facebook group just posted hey, I want to go into a fat loss phase.
- 10:41Philip Pape: I'm not sure how to train and, by the way, for the last two months, even though I'm not in fat loss, I haven't made any progress on my lifts and I said whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
- 10:48Philip Pape: Okay, you're not even ready for fat loss.
- 10:50Philip Pape: My man, like we.
- 10:55Philip Pape: We got to fix that before you do fat loss, before you do a gaining phase, whatever.
- 10:59Philip Pape: So that's the training bottleneck that's.
- 11:00Philip Pape: That's a big one for a lot of people.
- 11:02Philip Pape: And again, in you know, in our coaching, we take you through the steps to find out where's the issue for you.
- 11:08Philip Pape: Is it your form?
- 11:09Philip Pape: Is it your progression?
- 11:11Philip Pape: Are you not understanding how to, like, use micro plates or something to go up at the right level?
- 11:15Philip Pape: Um, are you even using the right program, et cetera, right?
- 11:20Philip Pape: The second bottleneck is nutrition.
- 11:21Philip Pape: So this is where you have either your weight gain is too rapid or you don't have enough protein, or you're very inconsistent with your eating.
- 11:30Philip Pape: You know, inconsistency is the big one here and the fix, of course, is consistency with your protein at that 0.7 to 1 gram per pound, a controlled rate of gain when you're bulking or when you're cutting, of course.
- 11:44Philip Pape: But one of the problems people have is they bulk in a very seesaw roller coaster way where they'll eat a lot more food on certain days than other and on the weekly average they're kind of bulking and on certain days they're way overconsking and on certain days they're way over consuming and certain days they're actually under consuming.
- 12:02Philip Pape: It just creates chaos to their body.
- 12:03Philip Pape: Where you're not efficiently gaining, you're not using meal planning.
- 12:07Philip Pape: That's.
- 12:08Philip Pape: The fix is to use meal planning, meal prep, always plan ahead and know what you're gonna eat you know, not down to like every single ingredient, but it could just be the general foods or types of foods and making sure to plan ahead.
- 12:20Philip Pape: The third bottleneck is recovery.
- 12:21Philip Pape: So poor sleep quality, constant fatigue, no rest days.
- 12:25Philip Pape: You know, when I hear someone say I have to have deloads constantly, that's a big red flag.
- 12:29Philip Pape: You shouldn't need deloads very much at all, depending on the program, or ever if it's built into the program.
- 12:35Philip Pape: And this could definitely be a different issue related to sleep or stress, or the wrong kind of lift for you, or pushing too hard and trying to overreach or you're not taking enough rest, and so obviously the fix here is that consistent sleep, bedtime, wake time, consistent amount of sleep that you need.
- 12:52Philip Pape: Maybe it's seven, maybe it's eight hours, you know, maybe it's six and a half.
- 12:55Philip Pape: Having deloads, yes, if you need them.
- 12:57Philip Pape: I talked about this in episode I think it was 282, about the only strength standard you need.
- 13:04Philip Pape: We talked about progressive overload and I briefly discussed deloads in there about how, ideally, if you structure your program the right way, you hardly ever need them, and then, of course, managing your stress, whether that's managing your perceived stress, having stress coping mechanisms, tracking the data associated with stress, like HRV, and focusing on sleep to improve your stress, and so on.
- 13:23Philip Pape: Right, so that's the recovery bottleneck that's going to hold you back from building meaningful muscle.
- 13:28Philip Pape: Yes, even when you're gaining and eating a lot of food, improper recovery could happen, because now you're able to train much harder, but you're also able to push past the limit much more easily.
- 13:36Philip Pape: Much harder, but you're also able to push past the limit much more easily.
- 13:39Philip Pape: Bottleneck number four out of our five bottlenecks is the body composition bottleneck, where, if your body fat is too high or too low, or you have poor nutrient partitioning, or you have hormonal issues, things like that, there could be a lot of different causes depending on the person, and so that's why I lumped it kind of into its own category.
- 14:00Philip Pape: It could it could have to be with the fact that you are not optimizing the body fat range to be in for you.
- 14:06Philip Pape: Like some people say well, I have to get down to X percent body fat and I want to live there.
- 14:10Philip Pape: Well, for you that might be way too shredded and unhealthy.
- 14:13Philip Pape: For another person, it might be perfectly normal.
- 14:15Philip Pape: So we have to have realistic expectations.
- 14:18Philip Pape: Also, phasing, periodizing your approach I mean that is the bread and butter of what we do in our coaching is we develop periods and phases for you.
- 14:26Philip Pape: I mean, when I give you your nutrition plan when you join Physique University, one of the main features in there is explaining what to do over each various range of weeks, like weeks one through four.
- 14:35Philip Pape: You're going to do this, weeks five through 12, you're going to do this and we phase the approach to kind of ease you in properly.
- 14:41Philip Pape: So you're doing the right things and developing the right habits and it also works really well with your body, your hormones, your body composition.
- 14:48Philip Pape: And the last thing as part of this bottleneck is addressing hormone health.
- 14:52Philip Pape: And I do love to address hormone health with lifestyle, which means strength training, lots of walking, managing stress and eating plenty of food, first to see what gets normalized, before you then say, well, okay, I still have certain hormones that are far out of whack.
- 15:07Philip Pape: I need HRT or some sort of treatment.
- 15:09Philip Pape: So that's the body composition bottleneck.
- 15:11Philip Pape: And, by the way, ladies who are in peri and post-menopause, body composition is going to get worse if you're not lifting weights and it's the main reason your metabolism drops during that time of life, because your muscle mass drops, your fat goes up, even if you maintain the same scale weight, and then it does a number with your hormones and everything just cascades.
- 15:29Philip Pape: You know, thyroid, cortisol, insulin it all cascades and a lot of times all you've got to do is take off some of that stress and start lifting weights.
- 15:37Philip Pape: Really, that's sometimes what the main fix is.
- 15:42Philip Pape: The last bottleneck is the system integration bottleneck.
- 15:45Philip Pape: This is about your overall system.
- 15:48Philip Pape: We talk about system engineering and physique engineering and that is your goals, your approach, your consistency.
- 15:56Philip Pape: You know if your goal is mismatched to what you're doing, or you're trying to go too quickly for the quick fix, or the approach you're trying to take doesn't quite jive with the evidence or your body, or you're not consistent, those are all gonna be bottlenecks to gaining muscle.
- 16:11Philip Pape: And the fix is gonna be having all of these aligned with you, with your lifestyle, with your body, with your needs, with your preferences, focusing on one phase at a time, one goal at a time and, of course, tracking and measuring everything that matters.
- 16:27Philip Pape: Tracking and measuring everything that matters and I could have put this at the top of the list everyone because 90% of the time, when someone reaches out, they're new to the community, they're new to the podcast and they say I'm struggling with X, maybe X is binging on the weekends, maybe it's, you know, with their lifting.
- 16:42Philip Pape: I say, are you tracking?
- 16:43Philip Pape: And they're like, oh no, I'm not tracking.
- 16:45Philip Pape: What should I track?
- 16:46Philip Pape: Right, if they're open to it.
- 16:47Philip Pape: I hope you're open to it and then I'll give some free resources on how to do that.
- 16:51Philip Pape: One of the best resources is my Nutrition 101 guide.
- 16:54Philip Pape: If you're looking for something free, go.
- 16:55Philip Pape: If you're looking for something free, go to whatsoeightscom, slash free and you can find that it actually tells you how to set up your calories and macros, the correct way dynamically to work with your body, and then how to do it for the different phases.
- 17:06Philip Pape: So all of these things, these system things I know it sounds complicated if you're new to this or if this is the first episode you've ever heard of my podcast, but it really does put you in a situation where it's sustainable rather than a quick fix, where it's part of your life, where you don't have to cut out all carbs or all plants or whatever extreme diet and you can just focus, actually have the confidence, actually make the progress.
- 17:31Philip Pape: Everything is aligned and part of why you're able to be successful is because you know what the heck is going on and you know what's going in your mouth and you know what your squat was two weeks ago, right, and you're tracking and measuring the right things, all right.
- 17:43Philip Pape: So that's kind of the meat of this episode was what the bottlenecks might be that would prevent your muscle gain efficiency from being higher than it could be.
- 17:53Philip Pape: And for most people that means if it's like, as in the 0.2, 0.3 range, we can get it up into the 0.5 to 0.7 range and you're golden, like getting it to 0.8, 0.9,.
- 18:04Philip Pape: That's usually not realistic for most people, it's just it's kind of the extremes of the range.
- 18:09Philip Pape: So, to use this score, if you have our calculator, if you're in Physique University and you actually have the calculator, the way it would work is you would enter your numbers from before and after, right, or you can do it in the middle of a bulk to see how efficient it is going, because a bulk is usually six, nine, 12 months anyway.
- 18:25Philip Pape: So if you're three months in, you can calculate how efficient you are.
- 18:28Philip Pape: So you're going to calculate your muscle gain index, that's, your skeletal muscle mass that you're possibly gaining.
- 18:32Philip Pape: That's your potential.
- 18:33Philip Pape: Then you're going to see how efficient your muscle gain efficiency is and then you can use that to reverse, engineer what your bottleneck is and fix one thing at a time and reassess every four to six weeks and you're golden.
- 18:45Philip Pape: That's how we do.
- 18:46Philip Pape: That's how we do it.
- 18:47Philip Pape: It's continuous improvement and feedback.
- 18:49Philip Pape: So what's really fascinating?
- 18:51Philip Pape: When it comes down to cause, I'm so nerdy and data centric.
- 18:54Philip Pape: I love my Excel spreadsheets and, by the way, this is an Excel spreadsheet and even if you're not in quote unquote into that stuff, having these different angles of data can reveal patterns that are just not visible with the stuff everybody uses.
- 19:09Philip Pape: Like they're not going to be visible.
- 19:10Philip Pape: If you just take your scale weight right.
- 19:13Philip Pape: If I have a client who's frustrated because their gains are quote unquote slow but their MGE score shows that they're actually building very efficiently, let's say at a 0.6, well above average.
- 19:24Philip Pape: And we look at all the data, how it correlates, and we're like, actually you're doing a fantastic job.
- 19:30Philip Pape: It's just you don't quite have the patience.
- 19:32Philip Pape: Yet this is the first time you've gone through it.
- 19:35Philip Pape: Your expectations are skewed by social media.
- 19:37Philip Pape: But understanding your true efficiency, then it.
- 19:40Philip Pape: Then it changes their perspective and it changes their motivation.
- 19:43Philip Pape: In fact, I just had a client.
- 19:45Philip Pape: We just ended our six month um contract together, um, you know, and we're parting ways amicably, like I do with many clients who they learn what they need to learn.
- 19:54Philip Pape: They're they're good to go and they they're, you know, happy to tell others about me and move on, and that's what I love to see.
- 20:00Philip Pape: You fire me as a coach and she, along the way, she always had a little bit of frustration where it seemed like things weren't quite moving.
- 20:07Philip Pape: And at the end of it all, we crunched the numbers and we said, wow, you dropped 9% body fat and, by the way, she only weighed like 120 pounds when we started.
- 20:16Philip Pape: So she was already pretty light and lean like 120 pounds when we started.
- 20:20Philip Pape: So she was already pretty light and lean.
- 20:22Philip Pape: She's shorter, she's a leaner frame and we had to take it very reasonably during the fat loss, so she wasn't down at 800 calories and at the end of the day over you know a three, four month fat loss phase, pretty typical she lost 9% of her body fat and, what's interesting, it wasn't just fat loss.
- 20:36Philip Pape: She actually gained, I think, three and a half or four pounds of muscle as part of it.
- 20:41Philip Pape: So her scale weight didn't drop as much as she expected when we started, but she was actually happier with the results because she was leaner than when we started, like quite a bit, and so all of this stuff is super fascinating.
- 20:54Philip Pape: It's why I love frameworks and the engineering side of it all.
- 20:57Philip Pape: It strips away the emotion.
- 20:58Philip Pape: It gives us concrete data to work with.
- 20:59Philip Pape: Your body is so sophisticated it's the most sophisticated factory that you'll ever operate and it deserves this level of analysis, at least initially, so that you can know what the heck is going on if you're struggling right.
- 21:13Philip Pape: It's not necessarily a long-term thing, although many of us get the bug and we always want to have our numbers and things like that.
- 21:18Philip Pape: It's really about becoming more in tune with yourself, whether it's through numbers or through journaling or through whatever method of tracking makes sense for you, but it's doing something to get that feedback All right.
- 21:30Philip Pape: So, as we wrap up, remember you have a muscle building potential and there's a certain efficiency you can go at to reach that potential, and bottlenecks are what limit your efficiency.
- 21:40Philip Pape: So, understanding the five bottlenecks, you can then focus on one of them at a time and slowly crack the armor holding you back from building as much muscle as you want to build.
- 21:49Philip Pape: If you want to calculate your own MGA score, if you love data, like me, if you're nerdy about this, if you really want to level it up, take it to the next level.
- 21:57Philip Pape: This, if you really want to level it up, take it to the next level.
- 22:00Philip Pape: If you want to access our complete suite of tracking tools and, more importantly, the accountability support strategy to actually get the result you want for fat loss and building muscle, join Wits and Weights Physique University today.
- 22:09Philip Pape: Head to witsandweightscom, slash physique or click the link in the show notes to learn more about WWPU and start optimizing your gains.
- 22:18Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember, in the factory of your physique, removing those bottlenecks will help your gains soar.
- 22:28Philip Pape: I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.