Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / 5 Beliefs I Got Wrong About Strength Training Over 40 | Ep 500

Transcript

5 Beliefs I Got Wrong About Strength Training Over 40 | Ep 500 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: To celebrate 500 episodes of Wits and Weights of evaluating the claims in the fitness industry, I'm evaluating five things that I used to say on the show that I wouldn't say now.
• 0:10
  Philip Pape: You're gonna see how I've changed my mind.
• 0:12
  Philip Pape: There's a claim with almost no evidence behind it.
• 0:14
  Philip Pape: There's one that I've overcorrected on, and there's similarities across all five.
• 0:19
  Philip Pape: Enjoy.
• 0:23
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 0:32
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, Philip Hape.
• 0:34
  Philip Pape: I'm a certified nutrition coach, and this is episode 500 of Wits and Weights.
• 0:39
  Philip Pape: And I thought about doing the things that shows do at episode 500, you know, tell the story of the show, thank everybody, maybe play some clips.
• 0:47
  Philip Pape: But I really wanted to just look back and say, hey, what have I claimed before?
• 0:53
  Philip Pape: And was I always right or not?
• 0:55
  Philip Pape: I know I wasn't, but specifically which ones should I have thought better of, or maybe I just didn't have the information at the time.
• 1:02
  Philip Pape: This is all about what the evidence supports when it comes to fat loss and building muscle, health, fitness, all of it, and how I've tied that to advice over the years, but also how I'm willing to change as I hope you are as well.
• 1:14
  Philip Pape: So I'm gonna take you through five things I used to say about strength training, about the over 40 crowd like me, like you, that I no longer say.
• 1:24
  Philip Pape: I'm going to tell you what I used to say, what changed my assessment, like what was it that I learned that was the catalyst?
• 1:31
  Philip Pape: And then I'd tell you where I stand today on that.
• 1:34
  Philip Pape: And then toward the end, I'm going to bust a well-known metabolism myth that probably tells you a lot more about why fat loss stalls than age or metabolism actually does.
• 1:45
  Philip Pape: There's a myth about how metabolism slows down as you're age.
• 1:48
  Philip Pape: So I'm going to talk about that at the end and including one thing that could solve your metabolism problem, but many of you are afraid to do it.
• 1:56
  Philip Pape: So we'll get to that.
• 1:57
  Philip Pape: This is not going to be sugarcoated as five things that, you know, I was mostly right, but you know, no, I'm going to be honest and tell you where I was just plain wrong and also where I've overcorrected and things like that.
• 2:08
  Philip Pape: So I think that's good to do in a public forum with everything happening in the industry and so many wild claims all over YouTube and social media and podcasts.
• 2:16
  Philip Pape: I want to be clear about what I mean when I say I change my mind, because you can probably interpret that in two ways.
• 2:22
  Philip Pape: Sometimes the evidence actually changed.
• 2:26
  Philip Pape: Like our the body of evidence, the literature and the science, we actually understand something different, meaning maybe a study had been run before that hadn't been run, and then the answer was a little different, or maybe quite different than what we had assumed.
• 2:39
  Philip Pape: We just didn't have the data.
• 2:41
  Philip Pape: And that's the way science is supposed to work, right?
• 2:43
  Philip Pape: We never prove anything, we always just either support or refute hypotheses.
• 2:48
  Philip Pape: The other version of changing my mind is hey, the evidence has been there.
• 2:51
  Philip Pape: Maybe I was reading it the wrong way, interpreting it the wrong way.
• 2:55
  Philip Pape: Maybe I took a shortcut, maybe I was lazy and kind of followed what many others had been parodying over the years.
• 3:00
  Philip Pape: Sometimes that's a lot more nuanced than others.
• 3:04
  Philip Pape: And if I respect somebody, I'm gonna tend to give them benefit of the doubt when they say something that's closer to the truth than if I don't.
• 3:12
  Philip Pape: And maybe I didn't go back to the source myself.
• 3:14
  Philip Pape: In the field of medicine, there's a group of researchers, Vinay Prasad and Adam Sifu, C-I-F U, and their colleagues, and they went and they counted this phenomenon.
• 3:24
  Philip Pape: What I mean by that is they went through 10 years of the New England Journal of Medicine and they pulled all the studies that tested a practice that was common in the field that everybody was doing.
• 3:36
  Philip Pape: And 40% of them came back and said that the established practice was no better than what it had replaced.
• 3:44
  Philip Pape: So that's four in 10, and that's in the field of medicine.
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: Those are, you know, it's one of the fields that have, I guess, higher quality data, you know, big studies, very expensive, very carefully done studies.
• 3:54
  Philip Pape: And so it's a very high standard of really being skeptical when one practice replaces another, whether it's actually more beneficial, or are we just going with the trend, right?
• 4:04
  Philip Pape: Is it just trending?
• 4:04
  Philip Pape: Are we just like following the crowd?
• 4:06
  Philip Pape: Is it the social media thing?
• 4:07
  Philip Pape: Is it the crowd mentality?
• 4:09
  Philip Pape: Nutrition and exercise science are not even held to that standard, right?
• 4:13
  Philip Pape: Not even close to that standard because the studies in this field tend to be smaller, they tend to be shorter.
• 4:19
  Philip Pape: A lot of them are on college students.
• 4:20
  Philip Pape: I mean, the ones on lifting, they go for eight weeks.
• 4:22
  Philip Pape: What can you tell from eight weeks?
• 4:24
  Philip Pape: It's hard to get anything other than say observational type studies.
• 4:28
  Philip Pape: It's hard to replicate things as well.
• 4:30
  Philip Pape: So I have no idea what the reversal rate is in this field.
• 4:34
  Philip Pape: I don't think anybody else does, but I bet, I bet real money that it's not lower than the 40% in the field of medicine.
• 4:42
  Philip Pape: So we need to be skeptical, we need to be open to change, and really that's kind of the point of episode 500 here and why I did the show in the first place.
• 4:50
  Philip Pape: And so, for those of you who've been along for the ride, this is what it's all about.
• 4:54
  Philip Pape: So we're gonna start with the first of the five things that I've changed my mind about, and that is restoring calories first.
• 5:01
  Philip Pape: What do I mean?
• 5:02
  Philip Pape: All right, for years I told people that if you've been under-eating for a decade, two decades, your whole life, you know, you've been dieting all the time, you need weeks and weeks at maintenance calories before you do a cut because your metabolism has to recover first, has to come back up.
• 5:19
  Philip Pape: If it was ever up in that range in the first place, given all these years of dieting.
• 5:24
  Philip Pape: Like the machinery of your body has to be working again before you have, you know, you could do something like fat loss, which is stressful, right?
• 5:32
  Philip Pape: And there's a lot of names for this in this industry.
• 5:34
  Philip Pape: Some of them are farther extreme, like fixing your metabolism and repairing your metabolism, but even lighter terms like restoring, recovery, et cetera.
• 5:42
  Philip Pape: I've definitely used those terms.
• 5:44
  Philip Pape: And then when you actually look at the data, nobody's ever taken two groups and put one group into a deficit and given the other one time to be at maintenance first and then compared what happened.
• 5:57
  Philip Pape: The closest anyone's come to this is the famous Matador trial, which gets often cited, often misinterpreted.
• 6:03
  Philip Pape: They alternated two-week blocks of dieting with two week blocks of maintenance.
• 6:08
  Philip Pape: So two on, two off.
• 6:10
  Philip Pape: And the group that did that, that kind of interval dieting, I call it, I don't know if they called it there in the study, performed better, had a better outcome than straight continuous dieting.
• 6:21
  Philip Pape: But those are breaks in the middle of a diet, as opposed to having a prep phase or recovery phase before a diet.
• 6:30
  Philip Pape: And it was in men with obesity who are not lifting weights and on and on and on, right?
• 6:34
  Philip Pape: We got to be careful how we compare studies when it comes to which population's been studied.
• 6:38
  Philip Pape: So, what I like to say now is that I do start people, clients, members, whoever I recommend it all the time, that you do start at maintenance without going into a deficit, but I do it for different reasons than recovery per se.
• 6:53
  Philip Pape: I actually like recovery as a transitional thing between dieting and not dieting and doing it as quickly as possible.
• 7:01
  Philip Pape: But when you're gonna go into a fat loss phase, the reason I like a preparatory period is for a couple of reasons.
• 7:06
  Philip Pape: The first one is you may not even know what your maintenance calories are until you've held something fairly steady for long enough, right?
• 7:13
  Philip Pape: You eat the roughly the same amount of calories every day, you weigh yourself every day.
• 7:16
  Philip Pape: Even if you're not eating the same every day, you're measuring both.
• 7:19
  Philip Pape: And that kind of tells you how many calories you're actually burning, right?
• 7:22
  Philip Pape: It reverse engineers into that, but that takes like three to four weeks.
• 7:26
  Philip Pape: Also, doing a deficit when you've already been dieting for a long time and you're already in that mindset mode of restriction and deprivation, you're probably not gonna sustain it anyway, right?
• 7:37
  Philip Pape: It's just gonna feel like more of the same.
• 7:38
  Philip Pape: So we need that kind of break from that perspective.
• 7:41
  Philip Pape: Some of it is psychological for sure, some of it is physiological.
• 7:44
  Philip Pape: And so it's it's kind of a measurement argument and a sustainability argument, let alone the fact that some of you need time to build skills.
• 7:52
  Philip Pape: Some of you need time to build the skills of lifting weights, for example, of tracking your food, of drinking enough water, of having a certain step count.
• 8:00
  Philip Pape: They don't have to be perfect.
• 8:01
  Philip Pape: You don't have to bring them all the way up to like your final state just you know, just to diet, but you need to get them into some level of stability.
• 8:10
  Philip Pape: So I think measurement, sustainability, and skill building are really important reasons to do that as opposed to metabolic repair, right?
• 8:20
  Philip Pape: Or fixing your metabolism.
• 8:22
  Philip Pape: That's the first of the five that I've definitely changed my mind on, but I haven't changed my methodology.
• 8:27
  Philip Pape: It's just the reason why has definitely changed.
• 8:30
  Philip Pape: All right, number two is protein timing.
• 8:33
  Philip Pape: So this is meal timing related to how much protein you get in.
• 8:36
  Philip Pape: And this is one where I would say the evidence has actually shifted to more clarity since the time I've been in this business.
• 8:43
  Philip Pape: And at the same time, we tend to cling to old recommendations without updating.
• 8:48
  Philip Pape: And so there's this overlap where you're like recommending things that are a little bit unnecessary or out of date for longer than you need to.
• 8:55
  Philip Pape: So, for you know, the years that I've been coaching, so since about 2020, what is that, six, seven years now, I've always talked about the how your body can only, not can only use, but is optimal when you get about 20 to 30 grams of protein per sitting minimum to hit the leucine threshold, right?
• 9:12
  Philip Pape: Which we can get from higher quality forms of protein.
• 9:15
  Philip Pape: And we want to space out our protein to get, you know, the total protein that we need for the day, as well as enough protein in each meal, which for a lot of people works out to at a minimum three, if not four or five feedings.
• 9:28
  Philip Pape: Again, it depends on how many calories you have as well, how much protein you actually eat, you need, hit that leucine threshold.
• 9:34
  Philip Pape: Like a lot of people have talked about it.
• 9:35
  Philip Pape: They've had studies over the years, like go back to over a decade ago, 2013, Areta and colleagues, they gave people the same total protein with different meal patterns.
• 9:45
  Philip Pape: And it looked like four servings of 20 grams each was better than eight servings of 10 and two servings of 40.
• 9:54
  Philip Pape: So it looked like, okay, the moderate feeding, that's where we need to be, and that's the whole like protein distribution model.
• 10:00
  Philip Pape: And it's a reasonable conclusion if that's what we're looking at for the evidence.
• 10:04
  Philip Pape: But when you look at what those studies looked at, they were measuring a window of four hours, maybe six hours.
• 10:11
  Philip Pape: And then we extrapolated that kind of four-hour measurement, and we said, okay, this applies to the entire day.
• 10:16
  Philip Pape: And we tend to do that, right?
• 10:17
  Philip Pape: We tend to extrapolate or take something as a microcosm of a macrocosm, and that's not accurate.
• 10:23
  Philip Pape: So then we go all the way to 2023, Jorn Trommelin, and Luke Van Loon and the group over at Maastricht, who are probably about the best in the world at like the tracer research.
• 10:36
  Philip Pape: They had 36 guys who were resistance training, and then either they didn't eat anything or they had 25 grams of protein or they had 100 grams.
• 10:45
  Philip Pape: So this is the famous 100 grams of protein study that has been talked about ad nauseum.
• 10:49
  Philip Pape: And then they used intrinsically labeled protein, meaning that they tracked the amino acids all the way back from the cow so they could follow where everything went in terms of the consumption.
• 11:03
  Philip Pape: And instead of stopping the measurements of four hours, they kept going all the way to 12 hours.
• 11:08
  Philip Pape: The 100 gram dose of protein still show that you could build muscle even after 11 hours.
• 11:15
  Philip Pape: So that's what a half day, a half of a full day period.
• 11:18
  Philip Pape: Muscle protein synthesis was 20% higher than the 25 gram dose in the first four hours.
• 11:25
  Philip Pape: It's about what you'd expect.
• 11:26
  Philip Pape: But then it was about 40% higher from hours four to 12.
• 11:31
  Philip Pape: So the difference increased the longer that they measured, and very little of it got burned off, right?
• 11:38
  Philip Pape: Burned off or wasted or whatever people like to say.
• 11:41
  Philip Pape: So this like artificial sealing of 20, 30, 40 grams was pretty much just that.
• 11:46
  Philip Pape: We could probably eat a lot more protein in a single bolus, they call it, or a single city, and still get all the benefits of muscle protein synthesis, which gives you a lot more flexibility.
• 11:54
  Philip Pape: Now, I want to be careful, right?
• 11:56
  Philip Pape: Because there's people that go to the other extreme and they take this study and they're like, you have to eat, you know, all 180 grams of your protein in one city.
• 12:05
  Philip Pape: That's that's the way to go.
• 12:06
  Philip Pape: One meal a day, one protein bolus a day, right?
• 12:08
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 12:08
  Philip Pape: This is the kind of stuff that happens in this industry.
• 12:11
  Philip Pape: And we we have to really surf the nuance in the middle and look at it more as how you don't have to be dogmatic rather than being dogmatic in a new way.
• 12:21
  Philip Pape: So I think that the thing that this does from a practical standpoint, it gives you more flexibility.
• 12:27
  Philip Pape: So the distribution question is really more about what do you need?
• 12:31
  Philip Pape: How do you perform?
• 12:32
  Philip Pape: How do you respond to it, and what's sustainable and practical for your day-to-day.
• 12:36
  Philip Pape: Now we look at research by Stuart Phillips and Daniel Moore, and they've been mapping this in older adults for a bunch of years.
• 12:43
  Philip Pape: And it seems like older adults are a little bit less responsive to a given dose of protein.
• 12:47
  Philip Pape: They call that anabolic resistance.
• 12:49
  Philip Pape: And the dose response studies identified a per meal requirement for older adults at around 0.4 grams per kilogram versus about 0.25 grams per for young adults.
• 13:02
  Philip Pape: So that's like 60% more protein per meal to get the same signal.
• 13:06
  Philip Pape: Now, why this is annoying is that hey, you can't use more than 30 grams rule.
• 13:11
  Philip Pape: Okay, that's not a thing anymore.
• 13:13
  Philip Pape: But the idea that you should probably get a decent amount of protein at each meal and probably more than a younger person would need still could be helpful.
• 13:20
  Philip Pape: We'd still still see a small benefit for muscle protein synthesis, especially in the older groups.
• 13:27
  Philip Pape: Now, still, having said all that, your total daily protein gets you the vast majority of the benefit.
• 13:34
  Philip Pape: So that's that's kind of where I've landed today, is right the total daily protein, you know, I don't know what percent of the benefit, is it 90%, is it 95%, is it 99% of the benefit?
• 13:43
  Philip Pape: But it's more than enough that if you just worry about that and get to that goalpost first and not worry about the timing, it's gonna do a lot for you.
• 13:51
  Philip Pape: Where the timing then comes in is a little bit of optimization beyond that.
• 13:55
  Philip Pape: You're trying to build a little bit more muscle, but more practically, it's the idea that who wants to eat 120 grams of protein in one sitting and you can go ahead and spread it out and it makes it more practical to actually get the protein.
• 14:08
  Philip Pape: So I kind of given you two things in one here.
• 14:10
  Philip Pape: One is total protein is the most important.
• 14:12
  Philip Pape: Number two is the amount of that total protein, as long as you're around 0.7 ish grams per pound or more, you're again getting the vast majority of the benefits.
• 14:20
  Philip Pape: So if you're nowhere near that, why don't you just step it up until you get there?
• 14:23
  Philip Pape: Then once you get there, it's up to you to see does it make sense for me to go higher?
• 14:26
  Philip Pape: Well, it depends on the calories, depends on how much you like protein.
• 14:29
  Philip Pape: It depends on what types of food you eat, right?
• 14:31
  Philip Pape: Depends on where the carbs and fats sit and depends on how you respond.
• 14:34
  Philip Pape: So since we're talking about protein, I did want to mention one of the tools we have in our program, which is called Eat More Lift Heavy, is a protein day builder.
• 14:43
  Philip Pape: It's it's actually early on, week four of the program.
• 14:45
  Philip Pape: This is a 26-week program for those over 40 who want to build muscle, lose fat, and do it in a sustainable way and build all the skills that we talk about on the show.
• 14:53
  Philip Pape: Uh, but in week four, it's called protein day builder.
• 14:57
  Philip Pape: And all it does is it takes the foods that you already like to eat, your preferences and your targets, and it just builds a day for you.
• 15:03
  Philip Pape: So it is really a quick meal planning tool.
• 15:04
  Philip Pape: It's a little more optimized than using AI because it's narrowed in on specific to protein based on your preferences and based on the evidence.
• 15:13
  Philip Pape: So it's not really a meal plan, it's more of here's some suggestions.
• 15:16
  Philip Pape: And then we often recommend running that tool later on, once you've been tracking your data and see where you are, to continue to optimize.
• 15:23
  Philip Pape: But at the end of the day, total protein matter is what matters the most.
• 15:26
  Philip Pape: Distribution is more from a practical purpose.
• 15:29
  Philip Pape: And if you need more help, if you want to check out our program, go to eatmoriftheavy.com.
• 15:34
  Philip Pape: We've got lots of cool tools in there.
• 15:35
  Philip Pape: And because this is episode 500, we've got a code for you.
• 15:39
  Philip Pape: It's 500 club and it takes$50 off the six-month option.
• 15:43
  Philip Pape: It expires this Sunday.
• 15:44
  Philip Pape: So if you've been thinking about should I join or not, this is a little incentive to do so.
• 15:48
  Philip Pape: But go learn about it.
• 15:49
  Philip Pape: Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com.
• 15:52
  Philip Pape: Okay, let's talk about number three.
• 15:54
  Philip Pape: And I'm actually like on the fence here with how much I should apologize for being wrong on this one.
• 16:02
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 16:02
  Philip Pape: And this is cardio.
• 16:03
  Philip Pape: Cardio.
• 16:04
  Philip Pape: Now I know it's a big ball of wax that we can get into with cardio.
• 16:07
  Philip Pape: But I did spend years telling people early on, you know, cardio's a threat to your muscle.
• 16:13
  Philip Pape: You don't need cardio, the interference effect, like all you need to do is lift and walk, and almost nobody actually needs cardio except for like maybe endurance.
• 16:21
  Philip Pape: I or endurance athletes, I really did have that kind of position early on.
• 16:26
  Philip Pape: And part of it, let's be honest, is marketing.
• 16:28
  Philip Pape: Hey, who doesn't want to not have to do cardio and still get all the results?
• 16:32
  Philip Pape: And I wouldn't use those exact words all the time, but the message was like, keep it minimal, keep it low intensity, don't let it interfere with your lifting.
• 16:39
  Philip Pape: You're here to build muscle, and sometimes cardio can work against that.
• 16:43
  Philip Pape: And a lot of that came from the interference effect.
• 16:45
  Philip Pape: The paper that a lot of people were citing was from Wilson and colleagues in 2012.
• 16:50
  Philip Pape: What it actually found when you go back and read the even that paper, which was often cited, was that the interference showed up in regards to power output and not hypertrophy.
• 17:04
  Philip Pape: In other words, it wasn't even, we shouldn't have even been scared about losing muscle in the first place based on what that research was studying.
• 17:12
  Philip Pape: And then we fast forward what, like 10 years, Schumann and colleagues in 2022, they looked at 43 studies with about a thousand participants, and they found that the effect of concurrent training, so that's lifting and cardio at the same time, on maximal strength was basically zilch, zero nada.
• 17:30
  Philip Pape: The effect on muscle growth was also basically zero.
• 17:34
  Philip Pape: And the only measure that declined in any meaningful way was explosive power.
• 17:40
  Philip Pape: And it really only happened when people did cardio and lifting in the same session.
• 17:44
  Philip Pape: So it only, it's actually reinforcing the fact that there's not much of an interference effect like we used to think.
• 17:49
  Philip Pape: Now, if you're older, if you're like me, 45 or 50, 55, and you're not a sprinter, you're not an Olympic weight lifter, if I had warned you about cardio for this reason, I'm sorry because it was such a small effect, if not negligible.
• 18:02
  Philip Pape: And the effect was on something you weren't even worried about anyway, the explosive power piece of it.
• 18:07
  Philip Pape: So I guess if I had to regret any of these, this would be the one I regret the most because I probably led some people astray early on.
• 18:13
  Philip Pape: But hopefully I made up for it by getting you into lifting weights.
• 18:16
  Philip Pape: We'll see how the long term turns out if you're still listening to the show.
• 18:20
  Philip Pape: Meanwhile, we have this whole field of research into cardiovascular or cardiorespiratory fitness.
• 18:27
  Philip Pape: And that is a really, really good predictor of longevity, of whether you've got not only lifespan, but health span, you know, functionality 20 years later, once you get into the older years of your life.
• 18:41
  Philip Pape: And again, the data here, which a lot of it's observational, a lot of it isn't randomized controlled trials, very hard to do in this area, but it pretty consistently shows that the lowest mortality exists in people who lift and do cardio.
• 18:56
  Philip Pape: In fact, it gets improved with either, yes, even just cardio and you're not lifting or just lifting and not cardio, but it gets improved a lot with both.
• 19:05
  Philip Pape: So my message today is that cardio is not much of a tax on your training unless you're doing it to excess, like anything, right?
• 19:14
  Philip Pape: Or unless it takes away from the time and recovery available to do these things, as opposed to some sub-physiological process going on that's like causing you to waste away your muscles.
• 19:25
  Philip Pape: So, what I like for those of us, especially who are over 40, 50, 60, is you prioritize your lifting, you get your steps in, and then the next priority is fun cardio if you like pickleball or swimming or hiking or whatever.
• 19:41
  Philip Pape: And then if you want to, add in some short sprint work, right?
• 19:44
  Philip Pape: Some short sprint work on a bike or potentially flat ground.
• 19:47
  Philip Pape: We've talked about this a lot in the past.
• 19:49
  Philip Pape: I call it anabolic sprinting, but it basically doesn't take much out of your recovery, doesn't take much time, it doesn't really affect your lifting in any way.
• 19:56
  Philip Pape: It's very quick and it can give you a little extra boost to your day, help with your cardiovascular fitness, help with your VO2 max a little bit.
• 20:03
  Philip Pape: It's fun and it contributes to lifting or contributes to your adaptations in a positive way, right?
• 20:11
  Philip Pape: So that's my thought on cardio today.
• 20:14
  Philip Pape: Now, it one little caveat on cardio, because it comes up a lot these days, is the constraint versus additive theory of expenditure.
• 20:23
  Philip Pape: Herman Ponser's work, it suggests that your body compensates for some of the activity that you add in, but it requires a lot of activity to get to the point where your body serves to compensate.
• 20:32
  Philip Pape: And that goes back to my earlier comment about an excess of cardio and movement could be an issue for a lot of you.
• 20:37
  Philip Pape: And some of you may be doing too much, but usually it's for because of practical purposes.
• 20:42
  Philip Pape: It takes away from time available to lift, or you're tired, or you end up eating more, things like that.
• 20:47
  Philip Pape: All right, number four that I've changed my mind on is effort versus volume when it comes to lifting weight.
• 20:53
  Philip Pape: For a long time, I treated volume, that's sets per week, and frequency, that is how many times you do, you hit the target group each week, and effort, okay, and that is proximity to failure, as three separate dials, three separate variables that were all roughly equivalent or at least highly individualized.
• 21:18
  Philip Pape: So you get your sets in, hard sets per muscle group per week, you spread them across the week, you train hard, hard-ish, right?
• 21:24
  Philip Pape: You train hard, and then progressive overload takes care of the rest as you keep adding weight or reps or sets or whatever.
• 21:31
  Philip Pape: And now I like to say that that's actually wrong in a very specific way, which is that effort is what makes the other two actually matter.
• 21:41
  Philip Pape: You can have suboptimal volume and suboptimal frequency, but train really hard and get a decent result.
• 21:48
  Philip Pape: But if you're not training real hard, it doesn't matter what volume and frequency you have, you're not going to get a decent result.
• 21:52
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 21:53
  Philip Pape: And that really comes down to the mechanical tension piece of what drives muscle growth.
• 21:56
  Philip Pape: We're not talking about strength here that has its own elements.
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: To it.
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: You will get to hear the episode with Andy Baker on that in a couple Fridays from today.
• 22:04
  Philip Pape: But here's what I see all the time.
• 22:06
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 22:06
  Philip Pape: And it's almost somebody who's like doing everything right.
• 22:09
  Philip Pape: They understand the fitness lifestyle.
• 22:10
  Philip Pape: They listen to podcasts.
• 22:11
  Philip Pape: They're going to the gym already.
• 22:13
  Philip Pape: And they might do like 20 sets a week for a body part across four or five sessions, and they're very consistent.
• 22:20
  Philip Pape: They don't miss their workouts.
• 22:22
  Philip Pape: Things haven't changed.
• 22:23
  Philip Pape: They're following a program.
• 22:24
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 22:25
  Philip Pape: But then, then you see them lift.
• 22:28
  Philip Pape: So they might send me a video and you can tell they're not training very hard.
• 22:32
  Philip Pape: Their sets will stop like five, six, seven reps shy of what they can actually do.
• 22:37
  Philip Pape: This is very common.
• 22:37
  Philip Pape: You see that the bar speed hasn't changed at all.
• 22:39
  Philip Pape: They're going really fast.
• 22:40
  Philip Pape: Oftentimes they're counting the reps as opposed to actually training hard closer to failure, even if it gets more reps than what's programmed for them.
• 22:49
  Philip Pape: And that's not really getting you the sets you think it's getting you for the week, is it?
• 22:54
  Philip Pape: Like if you're doing 20 sets a week, but they're not hard sets, you're not really getting hard sets.
• 22:58
  Philip Pape: The goal is to get 20 hard sets.
• 23:01
  Philip Pape: So training with effort is really important.
• 23:04
  Philip Pape: Now, the research into volume, okay.
• 23:06
  Philip Pape: There's a big study by Pellandon Steele and Knuckles.
• 23:10
  Philip Pape: You guys know Greg Knuckles.
• 23:11
  Philip Pape: I love Greg.
• 23:12
  Philip Pape: And their whole group that came out, I think last year, I think 2025, there were 67 studies analyzed with 2,000 people.
• 23:19
  Philip Pape: And they show that more volume does help you, but with diminishing returns.
• 23:24
  Philip Pape: Okay, makes sense.
• 23:24
  Philip Pape: Like a lot of things have what we call a dose response relationship in this sense.
• 23:29
  Philip Pape: But, but every set in every one of those studies, because of the guidance and the oversight, was taken somewhere in the vicinity of failure.
• 23:39
  Philip Pape: It's hard, or maybe they just haven't done the studies of people that do a bunch of easy sets compared to a bunch of hard sets.
• 23:46
  Philip Pape: The flip side of this, okay, is that you don't have to go to complete failure either, right?
• 23:50
  Philip Pape: That's the flexibility piece of it.
• 23:52
  Philip Pape: Refalo and colleagues, they've done some good research here where getting closer to failure does improve hypertrophy.
• 23:59
  Philip Pape: But again, dose response, the effect starts a plateau.
• 24:02
  Philip Pape: It's very small.
• 24:02
  Philip Pape: The curve flattens, right?
• 24:04
  Philip Pape: Like a lot of this stuff.
• 24:05
  Philip Pape: Same thing with protein, same thing with sets, everything.
• 24:08
  Philip Pape: And then they had a trial that compared training to failure against stopping one to two reps shy, and it found similar growth.
• 24:14
  Philip Pape: I think they were looking at the quads in that study and they found similar growth.
• 24:17
  Philip Pape: And we've seen this time and again where you don't have to go to complete failure.
• 24:20
  Philip Pape: So again, I think the answer here is we've got some flexibility, but also in this case, training hard is important, right?
• 24:28
  Philip Pape: So we have this wide zone of okay, we can train all the way to complete failure or some reps shy of failure.
• 24:35
  Philip Pape: So the working theory for why all this is true that I want to come back to is mechanical tension, that the hard reps at the end of a set are where the tension gets high enough to really, really matter to start recruiting more and more of those muscle fibers.
• 24:48
  Philip Pape: And we still don't quite know how it works, right?
• 24:51
  Philip Pape: Like we don't still quite don't understand why.
• 24:53
  Philip Pape: And there's other things that happen, like metabolic stress and whatnot, where we think, you know, metabolites may still have some effect, but mechanical tension seems to be the thing.
• 25:01
  Philip Pape: The problem is a lot of this research is in young men, in college students and males, their short studies, et cetera.
• 25:07
  Philip Pape: The key is you have to train hard, but you have flexibility in terms of how many reps shy of failure.
• 25:12
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 25:13
  Philip Pape: Number five is all about menopause, peri- and post-menopause.
• 25:19
  Philip Pape: And this is the hot trending topic right now.
• 25:21
  Philip Pape: This is the one that I have probably the least comfort with.
• 25:24
  Philip Pape: Yeah, I'm a man, that's obvious.
• 25:26
  Philip Pape: It's not just that.
• 25:27
  Philip Pape: I mean, there's plenty of women I know who don't have a clue when it comes to menopause, and I'm not blaming them.
• 25:32
  Philip Pape: It's the industry has not studied it very often in terms of populations.
• 25:37
  Philip Pape: And then healthcare has been atrocious when it comes to women's health.
• 25:40
  Philip Pape: So, I mean, that's you know, two reasons why we don't know a lot about it.
• 25:43
  Philip Pape: I have people in my life who I love who have various issues like endometriosis and fertility issues and stuff.
• 25:48
  Philip Pape: And it's like knocking your head against a wall, trying to get good health care and good, you know, people who will understand this stuff.
• 25:54
  Philip Pape: But there are some big myths, I guess, that I kind of subscribed to until I knew better.
• 25:58
  Philip Pape: One of that is that menopause slows your metabolism.
• 26:02
  Philip Pape: And that is why you gain weight during metabolism or at least have struggle losing weight, right?
• 26:08
  Philip Pape: And that's why you lose muscle.
• 26:10
  Philip Pape: And it's all because of your hormones.
• 26:12
  Philip Pape: And interestingly, this traces back to a paper by Eric Pullman in 1995 in the Annals of Internal Medicine that found a big drop in resting metabolic rate across the menopause transition.
• 26:24
  Philip Pape: And so this paper got cited everywhere, right?
• 26:27
  Philip Pape: But that study was made up.
• 26:28
  Philip Pape: That study was fabricated.
• 26:30
  Philip Pape: The data was fabricated, and the paper was retracted in 2003.
• 26:33
  Philip Pape: Now, how many times have we seen stuff like this happen?
• 26:35
  Philip Pape: We see stuff like that.
• 26:36
  Philip Pape: This happened in the nutrition world.
• 26:37
  Philip Pape: We saw it happen with autism and vaccines, like all of these things where it totally sets the tone for not only science, but popular culture and discussion for decades to come, oftentimes very hard to claw it back.
• 26:50
  Philip Pape: And this guy apparently went to prison in 2006.
• 26:52
  Philip Pape: He was the first American academic to go to prison for research fraud.
• 26:56
  Philip Pape: And then people still talk about, oh, during the menopause transition, your metabolism drops.
• 27:01
  Philip Pape: But then we have again Herman Ponser's group that published in Science in 2021 with the doubly labeled water.
• 27:07
  Philip Pape: They had 6,400 people across 29 countries and found energy expenditure adjusted for body size, and I believe adjusted for lean mass, put a little asterisk on that.
• 27:19
  Philip Pape: From age 20 to 60 did not change with no special bump during menopause.
• 27:26
  Philip Pape: That is fascinating.
• 27:27
  Philip Pape: Like I know it's hard to believe.
• 27:28
  Philip Pape: It's hard to believe because there's other reasons that your expenditure changes, but it's not that your metabolism just dropped for some unknown reason having to do with age or menopause.
• 27:37
  Philip Pape: Now, many of us, we like to be contrarian or contrarian of contrarians and we'll correct in the other direction.
• 27:43
  Philip Pape: I think I did that for a while, where I said, okay, well, then menopause doesn't do anything.
• 27:48
  Philip Pape: You don't have to worry about it.
• 27:48
  Philip Pape: You don't have to worry about perimenopause, ladies.
• 27:50
  Philip Pape: Like, let's mansplain our way out of this, right?
• 27:53
  Philip Pape: Now I say that jokingly because I never tried to do anything that that that we call mansplaining, but I'm sure I do.
• 27:59
  Philip Pape: And then we we start to blame you, right?
• 28:01
  Philip Pape: We start to say, well, no, it's it's your habits, it's what you're doing, it's the sleep and the stress and the moving less and the eating less protein and all of that.
• 28:08
  Philip Pape: And I think that's an overcorrection too, to say it's all lifestyle because something is actually happening.
• 28:13
  Philip Pape: You know, part of what made me realize this was Dr.
• 28:16
  Philip Pape: Bill Campbell's research, because he's actually looking at this population.
• 28:18
  Philip Pape: But we also have the Swan study that looked at over 1,200 women.
• 28:21
  Philip Pape: They looked at DEXA scans over 18 years, the same women.
• 28:25
  Philip Pape: So this is a longitudinal study.
• 28:27
  Philip Pape: And the rate of fat gain roughly doubled during the menopause transition, and lean mass went down, starting about two years before their last period, and to about two years past it.
• 28:38
  Philip Pape: Their total body weight went up steadily with age the whole time.
• 28:42
  Philip Pape: And that didn't have to do anything with menopause, but the body composition changes seem to be associated with menopause.
• 28:48
  Philip Pape: So fat, muscle seem to change in a significant way with that female clock related to hormones and menopause.
• 28:59
  Philip Pape: Not age, right?
• 29:00
  Philip Pape: But the actual hormones.
• 29:02
  Philip Pape: So I'd say like both of my positions were incorrect, if not just incomplete.
• 29:07
  Philip Pape: The truth is that your metabolism doesn't fall off a cliff, but your body composition can definitely shift with the transition.
• 29:13
  Philip Pape: We know that body fat distribution moves toward your visceral fat in your abdomen.
• 29:17
  Philip Pape: So belly fat, when we talk about menopause belly, that's a real thing.
• 29:20
  Philip Pape: And all of that is happening at the same time as sleep problems, but the sleep problems are often because of the symptoms of peri and postmenopause, hot flashes, night sweats, et cetera, and stress.
• 29:31
  Philip Pape: Your joints are getting a little bit more fragile, sore, whatever.
• 29:35
  Philip Pape: Like that happens to men and women, right?
• 29:36
  Philip Pape: Your joints get a little more less pliable.
• 29:38
  Philip Pape: Plus, you, if you haven't been lifting weights, they they may be more sore and prone to injury.
• 29:43
  Philip Pape: And then it's harder to train and to eat the way you want to.
• 29:46
  Philip Pape: So there's like bi-directional issues going on.
• 29:48
  Philip Pape: You've got a real physiological change and a real behavioral change stacked on top of each other.
• 29:54
  Philip Pape: And so why do we need to separate them?
• 29:56
  Philip Pape: We shouldn't separate them.
• 29:57
  Philip Pape: So what I like to say now is that look, menopause isn't the reason it's not working or you can't lose weight or you're struggling, but it's also not nothing.
• 30:06
  Philip Pape: It is a headwind, it is a challenge.
• 30:10
  Philip Pape: You, if you still lift, if you still eat enough protein, if you still get your steps, you're gonna be in a far better position than another woman in the same situation.
• 30:18
  Philip Pape: But what you're doing is you have more going against you.
• 30:21
  Philip Pape: And the results may come on slower and they may come on with more challenges.
• 30:25
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 30:26
  Philip Pape: And the things that are hardest to fix later in life, especially your bone mass and the visceral fat, are also the two that get a lot worse.
• 30:33
  Philip Pape: But that's an argument for starting right now instead of waiting.
• 30:37
  Philip Pape: That's an argument for starting right now and taking control of that situation.
• 30:40
  Philip Pape: So that's five things that I've beliefs, I guess, that I've shifted on or changed my mind about.
• 30:45
  Philip Pape: And when you look at them all, I put them all next to each other as I said, okay, we've got a pattern here.
• 30:50
  Philip Pape: In every one of them, I was giving too much weight to something insignificant, like a small variable, and I wasn't giving enough value to a big one.
• 31:00
  Philip Pape: So, for example, I was overvaluing meal timing for protein and undervaluing total protein.
• 31:06
  Philip Pape: I was overvaluing the interference effect from cardio, which is a real effect, but it's small and may not even be relevant.
• 31:12
  Philip Pape: But I was undervaluing cardiovascular fitness, daily steps, the other benefits of fitting cardio into your life.
• 31:19
  Philip Pape: I was overvaluing whether you reach failure, you know, in favor of the other things like frequency and volume.
• 31:25
  Philip Pape: And I was undervaluing whether you reached close to failure.
• 31:28
  Philip Pape: And then with menopause, I was overvaluing metabolism, which barely changes, but undervaluing body composition and bone, which is where the real change happens that cascade into other things, which yes, may include your metabolism, your ability to eat enough, you know, your hunger, your appetite, your sleep, your stress, your lifting, all of it.
• 31:45
  Philip Pape: And so it's hard to catch these things in the moment as you absorb the research.
• 31:50
  Philip Pape: And sometimes we like to go to the easy thing to try to change in our habits.
• 31:55
  Philip Pape: And we like to feel productive and like we're working and we're feeling diligent, right?
• 32:00
  Philip Pape: Meaning, okay, I can hit my 30 grams of protein, but skip all my cardio.
• 32:04
  Philip Pape: And it's easy to measure and it's satisfying.
• 32:06
  Philip Pape: It feels like you're doing the work, but maybe you are missing out.
• 32:08
  Philip Pape: Maybe the big variable is something vague and a little bit uncomfortable.
• 32:12
  Philip Pape: Like, am I actually eating enough food despite my fears of gaining fat?
• 32:16
  Philip Pape: Because now I'm lifting weights and I need to eat more.
• 32:19
  Philip Pape: Are my sets actually hard or am I just phoning it in when I go to the gym?
• 32:24
  Philip Pape: But I feel good because I'm going to the gym.
• 32:25
  Philip Pape: So we'll put this all together.
• 32:27
  Philip Pape: What changed my mind about these things?
• 32:28
  Philip Pape: It wasn't really a single study, right?
• 32:30
  Philip Pape: It wasn't a single, I hope not, because in fact, we shouldn't be swayed so much by a single study.
• 32:34
  Philip Pape: But it's it's two things.
• 32:36
  Philip Pape: The first is staying curious.
• 32:38
  Philip Pape: I love curiosity, I love learning, being willing to be wrong, having that growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset, going back to firsthand accounts instead of just trusting what everybody else says about it or trusting what's on social media.
• 32:49
  Philip Pape: And because in most of those instances, the information is there, but maybe twisted a little bit, and you got to kind of untwist it.
• 32:57
  Philip Pape: The second thing is, of course, working with actual people, coaching people, helping people through the podcast, calls our clients, our members, all of that.
• 33:06
  Philip Pape: And that is a massive data point of evidence in the hierarchy of evidence.
• 33:13
  Philip Pape: Anecdote and working with direct people with real human beings is a piece of your evidence, just as your own knowledge of yourself is a piece of your body of evidence, right?
• 33:22
  Philip Pape: It doesn't get a lot more weight than other things necessarily, but it's part of it.
• 33:26
  Philip Pape: When you work with somebody over months or even years, you find out pretty fast that a plan that isn't optimal, but they follow it consistently and they're excited to do it and they're having fun usually results in plenty of growth and success and lots of learning every time.
• 33:43
  Philip Pape: Every time, not sometimes every time, right?
• 33:46
  Philip Pape: Versus some perfect plan or some cookie cutter plan or whatever that you can't follow.
• 33:51
  Philip Pape: That's really important.
• 33:52
  Philip Pape: A lot of what I used to teach as optimization was precision for its own sake.
• 33:58
  Philip Pape: And I think precision for its own sake comes at the cost of sustainability, adherence.
• 34:04
  Philip Pape: And that's what determines whether you're successful most of the time.
• 34:08
  Philip Pape: So, what survives 500 episodes and all of this mind-changing?
• 34:12
  Philip Pape: What survives is principles.
• 34:14
  Philip Pape: Principles don't change.
• 34:15
  Philip Pape: Now, what we learn about those principles through the application of science, coaching, learning, experimentation can change, of course, because that's not the truth changing.
• 34:24
  Philip Pape: That's our knowledge of the truth changing.
• 34:26
  Philip Pape: But eat enough protein, lift hard, progress, recover, move.
• 34:30
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna say that's it all there is because there's a lot of detail underneath, but that's what it is.
• 34:33
  Philip Pape: That's really what it's about.
• 34:34
  Philip Pape: Anyway, I'll probably be wrong about five more things in the next hundred episodes.
• 34:39
  Philip Pape: So we'll see.
• 34:40
  Philip Pape: Before we wrap up, I'm going to share something about your metabolism that I think is gonna help.
• 34:45
  Philip Pape: Before I do, reminder to celebrate episode 500, go to eatmore liftheavy.com.
• 34:50
  Philip Pape: We've got a discount for you at 500 club is the code, 500 club.
• 34:54
  Philip Pape: You get$50 off the six-month option at either tier of Eat More Lift Heavy.
• 34:59
  Philip Pape: When it expires this Sunday, 500 Club, go to eatmore liftheavy.com.
• 35:04
  Philip Pape: I did this to mark and celebrate 500 episodes.
• 35:08
  Philip Pape: If you start shortly after listening to this episode, if you join our program, it's actually timed perfectly for the first up to seven weeks where you build those skills we talked about earlier.
• 35:19
  Philip Pape: Then you go through fat loss all the way through the holidays and early January, where you get to actually test out the system and see how sustainable it is.
• 35:27
  Philip Pape: And then you're not starting over on New Year's like everybody else.
• 35:30
  Philip Pape: So you can find out all of that at eatmoreliftheavy.com.
• 35:33
  Philip Pape: Use code 500CLUB for$50 off the six months.
• 35:37
  Philip Pape: EatmoreLiftheavy.com.
• 35:38
  Philip Pape: All right, so if your metabolism feels slower than it used to, you remember before we mentioned that energy expenditure stays roughly flat when it counting for body size from age 20 to 60.
• 35:50
  Philip Pape: But most of you who are over 40, something is very different than when you were 20.
• 35:55
  Philip Pape: One of those is probably body composition, meaning you have less muscle.
• 35:58
  Philip Pape: But I bet, here's the one I want you to look at.
• 36:00
  Philip Pape: I want you to add up how many of the last 10 years you spent trying to diet.
• 36:06
  Philip Pape: Go back and see.
• 36:07
  Philip Pape: Whether it was cutting carbs, keto, carnivore, calorie counting, weight watchers, optavial, whatever.
• 36:12
  Philip Pape: Try to figure out like how many months of those years, right?
• 36:15
  Philip Pape: Just like take the number of months times the number of total months, or how many diets you did, I guess.
• 36:19
  Philip Pape: If you've had more than three or four diets, you're probably eating far under what you could be and under-recovered, and your metabolism is adapted.
• 36:27
  Philip Pape: And there is an aspect to trying to eat more so that you can recover, but you can do it fairly quickly.
• 36:35
  Philip Pape: You can do it fairly quickly, but you're probably afraid to.
• 36:37
  Philip Pape: You're probably afraid that you're gonna gain a bunch of fat.
• 36:39
  Philip Pape: Now, if you're not lifting weights, if you're sitting on the couch all day, if you're not moving, you are gonna gain fat.
• 36:43
  Philip Pape: But if you're listening to the show, I hope you're doing this while you lift weights, you're moving, you're going to make use of those calories.
• 36:50
  Philip Pape: And then you can recover to your true maintenance.
• 36:52
  Philip Pape: Then you don't have to guess at what it's gonna take to go in a fat loss phase or not.
• 36:55
  Philip Pape: You're not gonna artificially increase your metabolism.
• 36:57
  Philip Pape: That's not what I'm saying.
• 36:58
  Philip Pape: I'm saying you're gonna recover to your true maintenance and feel great and be able to lift more in the gym and be able to lose fat for the first time in a long time because you have that confidence of where you are.
• 37:08
  Philip Pape: You're tracking, you're doing the things.
• 37:10
  Philip Pape: So that's kind of what I want to leave you with.
• 37:12
  Philip Pape: The power is in your control.
• 37:13
  Philip Pape: All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 37:16
  Philip Pape: And remember the goal is never to be right the first time when it comes to science and the evidence.
• 37:20
  Philip Pape: It's to be curious, it's to be skeptical, it's to keep evaluating and put your effort into the things that actually move the needle for you.
• 37:26
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Ape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.