Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / The Case for Building Muscle FIRST in 2026 (Why Cutting Alone Won't Work) | Ep 419

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The Case for Building Muscle FIRST in 2026 (Why Cutting Alone Won't Work) | Ep 419 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: Every January, millions of people start cutting calories to lose fat.
• 0:04
  Philip Pape: By March, most have quit.
• 0:06
  Philip Pape: Frustrated, tired, no leaner than before.
• 0:10
  Philip Pape: And the problem isn't discipline, it's that they're trying to diet their way into a body they never built.
• 0:15
  Philip Pape: Today I am flipping the script on how you approach 2026.
• 0:19
  Philip Pape: You'll learn why muscle is an asset, while cutting is just maintaining what you have.
• 0:25
  Philip Pape: How to escape the cycle of chronic dieting, and why people who build muscle first end up needing to diet less often for the rest of their lives.
• 0:33
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering, and efficiency.
• 0:50
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Cape, also the creator of Fitness Lab.
• 0:54
  Philip Pape: And as we head into a new year, into 2026, I want to challenge the default mode that most people are operating from.
• 1:03
  Philip Pape: The assumption that fat loss is the goal, that cutting is the strategy to get there, and that everything else falls second behind that.
• 1:11
  Philip Pape: Today's episode is about a fundamental shift in thinking.
• 1:16
  Philip Pape: The idea that muscle is the asset and cutting is just maintenance.
• 1:20
  Philip Pape: I want to kind of flip around how you think about both cutting and bulking.
• 1:26
  Philip Pape: The goal is not to get better at dieting, it's to build a body that requires dieting less often.
• 1:32
  Philip Pape: So we're going to cover three things.
• 1:34
  Philip Pape: First, why cutting alone keeps failing you, even when you do it right.
• 1:39
  Philip Pape: Second, the structural advantage that muscle provides for your metabolism, your fat loss, your long-term physique, and your longevity.
• 1:47
  Philip Pape: And third, how to design 2026 so that fat loss becomes short, infrequent, and almost effortless compared to what you've experienced before.
• 1:56
  Philip Pape: And then I want you to stick around until the end because I'm going to share a specific rule about cutting that most people get backward that will let you lose fat faster while protecting more muscle.
• 2:09
  Philip Pape: It's counterintuitive, but it could change how you approach all of your fat loss phases from here on out.
• 2:14
  Philip Pape: So stick around to the end for that.
• 2:16
  Philip Pape: All right, let's start with the problem with this cut first mentality, this fat loss first mentality.
• 2:23
  Philip Pape: And it's a pattern that I've seen hundreds of times where someone decides, hey, I need to lose that 10, 20, 30 pounds of fat, and I'm gonna go in a calorie deficit.
• 2:31
  Philip Pape: Then you start seeing some results, then progress stalls, then you cut calories more, maybe you add some cardio, progress stalls again.
• 2:38
  Philip Pape: Eventually you're eating very little, exercising a ton, maybe exhausted a lot, and then barely losing anything.
• 2:44
  Philip Pape: And this is men, women, all ages, all sizes, all hormonal situations, right?
• 2:50
  Philip Pape: I see it time and again.
• 2:51
  Philip Pape: And so then you take a break, then you tend to regain the weight because you're not tracking, or it just was too restrictive.
• 2:58
  Philip Pape: And then the cycle starts again next year.
• 3:00
  Philip Pape: And you know, we see a pattern throughout the year as well between the seasons, especially as we get toward the holidays, which we're just finishing now.
• 3:06
  Philip Pape: So this is a great time to reset this pattern.
• 3:09
  Philip Pape: And for some people, this has been going on for decades, right?
• 3:12
  Philip Pape: People in their 50s and 60s who've been doing it since their 20s.
• 3:15
  Philip Pape: We know that on average, women try over 100 diets in their lifestyle, for example.
• 3:20
  Philip Pape: And then you're just losing and regaining, I'll say the same 20 pounds, but it's not even the same 20 pounds.
• 3:25
  Philip Pape: It's you're losing muscle and gaining fat in addition to the fat that you've lost and gained, if that makes sense.
• 3:31
  Philip Pape: So you're actually getting worse and worse body composition over time.
• 3:34
  Philip Pape: And then the frustrating thing is these are often very disciplined, smart people.
• 3:38
  Philip Pape: They listen to this podcast.
• 3:39
  Philip Pape: They're not, you know, failing because of uh willpower, as we've talked about before.
• 3:44
  Philip Pape: It's because of the system and the structure.
• 3:46
  Philip Pape: And I call this the cutting first trap.
• 3:49
  Philip Pape: You guys, not you guys, but a lot of you listening fall into this.
• 3:53
  Philip Pape: A lot of you are desperate to lose weight, are so obsessed with the scale, and that's the thing holding you back.
• 3:59
  Philip Pape: And understanding this requires looking at what dieting actually does and what it doesn't do, right?
• 4:05
  Philip Pape: So the core problem here is when you cut calories and you just don't have enough muscle mass, yes, you're reducing your body weight, but you're not improving your body's capacity to handle the energy coming in, the food that's coming in.
• 4:19
  Philip Pape: You're not building metabolic resilience, right?
• 4:22
  Philip Pape: You are not creating a more efficient machine.
• 4:25
  Philip Pape: What you're doing is getting smaller, which you might say, well, that was my goal.
• 4:29
  Philip Pape: But then you're getting weaker and you're actually getting worse body composition.
• 4:32
  Philip Pape: The research on this is pretty clear that energy deficits absolutely are gonna reduce your body mass, that's thermodynamics, but they don't improve your strength.
• 4:40
  Philip Pape: They don't improve your work capacity, they don't improve your metabolic health on their own.
• 4:44
  Philip Pape: Now, I've I've given the caveat before that if you have a lot of weight to lose, if you're like three, 400 pounds and you lose 100 pounds by almost any means, you're probably gonna have a net improvement in your health, but you could have a much better improvement in your health and the ability to sustain that health with what we're gonna talk about today, which is resistance training, sufficient muscle, so that dieting does not lead to losing that lean mass, reducing your training performance, lower energy flux, worse body composition just because the scale is lower, because the the end goal is not to have a lower scale weight, is it?
• 5:18
  Philip Pape: And if you think it is, keep listening to this episode.
• 5:20
  Philip Pape: Two people can lose the same amount of weight and end up with radically different physiques depending on how much muscle they started with and how much they held on to.
• 5:29
  Philip Pape: One person can look very lean, very defined, very athletic.
• 5:33
  Philip Pape: The other looks smaller but still soft, what people call skinny fat.
• 5:36
  Philip Pape: We've talked about that before.
• 5:37
  Philip Pape: And many of you have lost weight and then you're not happy, and then you think the answer is to lose more weight.
• 5:42
  Philip Pape: Stop, stop.
• 5:43
  Philip Pape: That's not gonna get you there, right?
• 5:45
  Philip Pape: It's not the weight loss.
• 5:46
  Philip Pape: This is why cutting alone is not gonna work.
• 5:49
  Philip Pape: Not because cutting itself isn't useful, it's very useful, but cutting without the structural foundation of muscle is extremely inefficient.
• 5:59
  Philip Pape: And you're somebody put it best that you can't sculpt a pebble, right?
• 6:03
  Philip Pape: You can sculpt a nice slab of marble, but you can't sculpt a pebble.
• 6:07
  Philip Pape: So the first shift here is stop thinking of fat loss as the primary goal.
• 6:11
  Philip Pape: As much as I talk about fat loss on this episode as a goal, don't think of it as the primary goal.
• 6:16
  Philip Pape: Start thinking of muscle as the asset, the thing you're building, the thing that you're gonna keep around for a long time that's gonna make everything easier.
• 6:25
  Philip Pape: And then cutting is this little task to maintain that asset from a better state, whether that state is better muscle definition, physique, health, what have you.
• 6:37
  Philip Pape: You've got to have the muscle there.
• 6:39
  Philip Pape: So that leads me to the next point I want to talk about, which is muscle as this infrastructure for your body, not just for the for aesthetics, even though that's a wonderful side effect for many of us, right?
• 6:51
  Philip Pape: It's not just about looking like you lift, even though that's a great selling point.
• 6:55
  Philip Pape: Muscle is not just cosmetic, right?
• 6:58
  Philip Pape: It's a major aspect of your health and of making fat loss easier.
• 7:04
  Philip Pape: From a physiology standpoint, skeletal muscle, this is a major site, for example, of glucose disposal.
• 7:10
  Philip Pape: When you eat carbs, muscle tissue absorbs a significant portion of that glucose.
• 7:15
  Philip Pape: More muscle means better glucose handling, which means better insulin sensitivity.
• 7:19
  Philip Pape: This is why strength training is probably the number one recommendation for people with blood sugar issues.
• 7:25
  Philip Pape: I go on diabetes podcasts, I talk about pre-diabetes, type 2 diabetes, and people ask me, like, what's what's the first recommendation you have, or what's the highest priority?
• 7:33
  Philip Pape: And I usually say it's strength training because a lot of people with blood sugar issues know about walking.
• 7:38
  Philip Pape: Walking is also important, sleep is also important.
• 7:40
  Philip Pape: But if you're not strength training, that could be the biggest issue because muscle is a metabolic sink.
• 7:45
  Philip Pape: It has somewhere to put that glucose instead of storing it as fat.
• 7:48
  Philip Pape: And the insulin-triggered uptake of glucose, the first place it's going to go is skeletal muscle, or I should say 80% of it's gonna go to skeletal muscle.
• 7:56
  Philip Pape: So if you have more of that muscle, you're able to dispose more of it.
• 8:00
  Philip Pape: Another thing muscle does is releases compounds called myokines that influence your fat tissue and your liver, also other organs like your pancreas and your brain.
• 8:09
  Philip Pape: These are signaling molecules that improve your metabolic flexibility.
• 8:12
  Philip Pape: And that's your ability to burn different sources of energy, right?
• 8:15
  Philip Pape: Carbs and fats, whatever, depending on how you're consuming your food and moving at the time.
• 8:20
  Philip Pape: The metabolic value of muscle is far less about how many more calories it burns and more about things like nutrient partitioning and tolerance for what you're eating, how much you're eating, the types of food you're eating.
• 8:32
  Philip Pape: People love to talk about how muscle burns more calories at rest, and it does maybe six to nine calories per day extra, which matters over time.
• 8:40
  Philip Pape: It's not nothing, but it's not the main benefit.
• 8:42
  Philip Pape: The real benefit is that you can eat more food with fewer negative downstream effects.
• 8:47
  Philip Pape: You can have your carbs go more toward muscle glycogen instead of fat storage, your protein going toward muscle repair instead of oxidation, right?
• 8:54
  Philip Pape: And so if I see this with clients, I see this with a lot of you listeners who are doing this the right way.
• 9:00
  Philip Pape: You focus on building muscle, you build, let's say, 10 pounds of muscle over a year.
• 9:04
  Philip Pape: Totally doable for men and women, right?
• 9:05
  Philip Pape: Men could probably build a little more, but doesn't matter.
• 9:08
  Philip Pape: And their scale weight might be the same, might be a little higher, depending on how they approached it.
• 9:13
  Philip Pape: Did they do a bulk?
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: Did they do it closer to maintenance?
• 9:16
  Philip Pape: But they're probably eating more food.
• 9:18
  Philip Pape: Their metabolism has gone up, their energy is better, they're training stronger, they look leaner.
• 9:23
  Philip Pape: That's the power of nutrient partitioning without even having to do a fat loss phase.
• 9:27
  Philip Pape: And that's why two people can eat the same diet and have different body compositions.
• 9:31
  Philip Pape: And that's why you see people complain that, you know, I can't eat as much as this other person.
• 9:34
  Philip Pape: Now, we shouldn't compare ourselves to each other because some people just have genetically lower metabolisms on average, but they can still move the needle, right?
• 9:43
  Philip Pape: It's the people with more muscle are gonna be able to handle the fuel a lot better.
• 9:47
  Philip Pape: And it's gonna affect all these other things, which then become more critical as we age.
• 9:51
  Philip Pape: Think about sarcopenic obesity.
• 9:53
  Philip Pape: This is the combination of low muscle mass, high body fat, reduced functional capacity as we age.
• 10:00
  Philip Pape: This is a phenotype, right?
• 10:02
  Philip Pape: Low muscle and high fat.
• 10:03
  Philip Pape: That is probably the most associated with the worse health outcomes, than either of them alone.
• 10:09
  Philip Pape: Meaning, if you have a lot of muscle mass, you're gonna significantly blunt that effect.
• 10:13
  Philip Pape: If you have low body fat, even if you don't have a lot of muscle, that's gonna be a benefit as well.
• 10:17
  Philip Pape: But having both is extremely beneficial.
• 10:21
  Philip Pape: It affects your mobility, your metabolic health, your longevity.
• 10:24
  Philip Pape: And then chronic dieting all the time, especially without resistance training, accelerates this phenotype again of high body fat and low muscle mass.
• 10:32
  Philip Pape: Where even when you lose weight, you're losing the wrong kind of weight.
• 10:36
  Philip Pape: You're losing muscle and then fat comes back, muscle doesn't come back because you're not doing anything to bring it back.
• 10:41
  Philip Pape: So from this lens, cutting without first building muscle, it's not just a matter of being inefficient.
• 10:48
  Philip Pape: It is highly counterproductive.
• 10:50
  Philip Pape: You're setting yourself up for this awful phenotype of aging, of sick aging, I'll call it, that creates the most problems down the road.
• 10:58
  Philip Pape: So muscle's not optional, guys.
• 11:01
  Philip Pape: Like anytime I hear someone say, Yeah, I'm not resistance training, maybe I'll do it.
• 11:04
  Philip Pape: It's not my focus right now.
• 11:05
  Philip Pape: I'm like, what are you doing?
• 11:07
  Philip Pape: Get your act together.
• 11:08
  Philip Pape: We have to resistance train.
• 11:09
  Philip Pape: Doesn't mean lifting weights in a very specific way, but it does mean following the principles of resistance training to build strength of muscle, which we're gonna touch on a little bit later, right?
• 11:19
  Philip Pape: It's not a nice to have.
• 11:21
  Philip Pape: Muscle's the foundation that makes all of this work together.
• 11:24
  Philip Pape: Now, before we move on to talking about how and when you should cut, if you're planning out your year, if you want personalized guidance on building muscle and optimizing nutrition and knowing when and how to cut and what to do on a daily basis.
• 11:39
  Philip Pape: You want to wake up and know here are the few things that I should do to continue moving the needle.
• 11:44
  Philip Pape: The Fitness Lab app is what I built to do exactly that.
• 11:48
  Philip Pape: It's an AI-powered coaching app that is a game changer.
• 11:52
  Philip Pape: It gives you daily briefings, it gives you daily activities based on your data, based on your training and your nutrition patterns, your biofeedback.
• 12:00
  Philip Pape: It's not generic advice.
• 12:02
  Philip Pape: It's highly adaptable and personalized to you.
• 12:04
  Philip Pape: You don't have to go to ChatGPT and figure stuff out.
• 12:06
  Philip Pape: It will literally tell you here's what to do today, and here and then tomorrow it'll tell you what to do tomorrow based on what happened today.
• 12:13
  Philip Pape: So it adapts to what's happening to you in your body.
• 12:15
  Philip Pape: And through January 2nd, just a few days left, you can get 20% off as part of our holiday promotion.
• 12:20
  Philip Pape: Just go to wits and weights.com slash app.
• 12:23
  Philip Pape: The link is also in the show notes.
• 12:25
  Philip Pape: That's witsandweights.com slash app.
• 12:27
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 12:28
  Philip Pape: Now let's get into the part most people miss, which is why short, infrequent cuts are probably the best approach for most people.
• 12:36
  Philip Pape: And then quick reminder at the end of this episode, I'm going to share what I call the mini cut accelerator.
• 12:41
  Philip Pape: All right, this is a specific approach that lets you lose fat faster than conventional cuts and still protect your muscle.
• 12:48
  Philip Pape: And it's counterintuitive, but it's a nice balance between speed and sustainability.
• 12:55
  Philip Pape: So stick around after for that toward the end of the episode.
• 12:58
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 12:58
  Philip Pape: So let's talk about cutting.
• 13:01
  Philip Pape: If you're cutting most of the year, you're probably doing it wrong.
• 13:04
  Philip Pape: If you're cutting most of the year, you're probably doing it wrong.
• 13:07
  Philip Pape: Now, this doesn't, this is not speaking to someone who has like 50 or 100 pounds or more to lose and is doing this slowly over a long time because that is their priority.
• 13:15
  Philip Pape: This is the vast majority of you who are more concerned with 10, 20, 30 pounds of fat to lose.
• 13:21
  Philip Pape: Muscle is slow to build, but it's very durable once you have it.
• 13:25
  Philip Pape: It's actually kind of easy to maintain.
• 13:26
  Philip Pape: Fat is actually pretty easy to cut off.
• 13:29
  Philip Pape: You might hear that and say, Oh yeah, right.
• 13:31
  Philip Pape: Get in my body and tell me that.
• 13:32
  Philip Pape: But it's it's relatively easy to cut off when you've built the muscle.
• 13:36
  Philip Pape: This is my point.
• 13:37
  Philip Pape: With reasonable training and nutrition, you can maintain muscle mass with as little as an eighth of the effort that it took to build it.
• 13:44
  Philip Pape: So that's what I mean by it's an asset, it compounds.
• 13:46
  Philip Pape: It's like once you've got it, it's pretty easy to hold on to it.
• 13:49
  Philip Pape: Even if you lose it because you stop training for six months, it'll come back very fast.
• 13:53
  Philip Pape: Amazing how the body works.
• 13:55
  Philip Pape: Fat loss is different.
• 13:56
  Philip Pape: It's very fast, it's a lot faster than muscle building, but it's kind of fragile, right?
• 14:01
  Philip Pape: It's easy to reverse and it's hard to maintain without ongoing effort.
• 14:05
  Philip Pape: The moment you stop a deficit, the body is going to return to its previous state.
• 14:08
  Philip Pape: I don't mean you're gonna gain all the fat back, but it's going to want to get to some level of homeostasis.
• 14:13
  Philip Pape: If you're not careful, that could then also mean creep up in weight.
• 14:17
  Philip Pape: And then the deficits accumulate a lot of costs to you and your body and your psyche.
• 14:23
  Philip Pape: Diet fatigue, physical fatigue, reduced performance, hormonal disruption, downregulation, increased hunger, decreased motivation.
• 14:30
  Philip Pape: It's not great to be in a diet for very long.
• 14:32
  Philip Pape: Let's just be honest.
• 14:32
  Philip Pape: There's no, there's no like good diet in terms of a dieting phase.
• 14:36
  Philip Pape: So if your default state is that level of restriction, then something structurally is not going to work long term.
• 14:43
  Philip Pape: It's off.
• 14:44
  Philip Pape: You're paying these costs in you're paying costs to try to maintain something that you don't even have yet, instead of being in a more fueled state and building something that's then going to allow you to cut without the same level of cost.
• 14:59
  Philip Pape: So it's I to me it's a win-win to do it this other way.
• 15:03
  Philip Pape: So, what does that look like?
• 15:05
  Philip Pape: What does a well-designed year look like for most people?
• 15:08
  Philip Pape: In my opinion, rule of thumb, 80% or more of your time is spent at maintenance or a slight surplus, focused on building strength, on you know, building muscle mass, on recovering, on enjoying food, on living life to the fullest and not worrying about dieting at all.
• 15:26
  Philip Pape: In fact, I just had a client reach out to me who's been in maintenance for a while now.
• 15:30
  Philip Pape: She's getting stronger, and she lost she lost a bunch of fat initially together, and then we went back to maintenance.
• 15:35
  Philip Pape: And a little doubt in her mind was like, I feel like I have to lose another couple pounds, but I'm loving what I'm doing.
• 15:41
  Philip Pape: And people say I look great.
• 15:42
  Philip Pape: And and then, and it was like, look, you answered your own question.
• 15:45
  Philip Pape: Like, this is not the time to cut.
• 15:47
  Philip Pape: If you have, if you want to cut two or three pounds at some point in the future, we could do it very strategically.
• 15:51
  Philip Pape: But let's be honest, you're loving this life, and that's where I want most of you to be, dear listener.
• 15:55
  Philip Pape: That's where I want you to be.
• 15:56
  Philip Pape: So 80% or more of your time spent in maintenance or slight surplus, and then maybe six to 10 weeks at most, either two short phases or one medium to long phase at most, and some of you just a very short phase of intentional cutting to remove any accumulated fat for whatever goal you have, which for many people is like in the spring leading to summer, get a little bit shredded.
• 16:17
  Philip Pape: I hate to use the word shredded because it implies extreme leanness, just to get a little get a little bit more muscle definition when you, you know, have your shirt off or you're wearing a bathing suit, whatever.
• 16:26
  Philip Pape: And that's it.
• 16:26
  Philip Pape: Shortcuts, infrequent cuts, the rest of the time you're building or maintaining what you've built.
• 16:31
  Philip Pape: Now, what kind of lifestyle is that?
• 16:32
  Philip Pape: It's that's an awesome one.
• 16:34
  Philip Pape: And compare the style most people operate, where they try to cut for four to six months or indefinitely, let's be honest, and then they might break the cut for a few weeks to recover or because they just can't do it anymore, and then they keep going and they're always in a state of metabolic adaptation.
• 16:51
  Philip Pape: They're always restricting, spending 70, 80% of the year in restricting, restricting, restricting, wondering why they never actually look better and get the result they want, and thinking this stuff just doesn't work, or even that calorie deficits don't work.
• 17:01
  Philip Pape: Here's why the muscle first approach works so much better.
• 17:05
  Philip Pape: I mean, guys, this is my opinion, but I think it's very well supported by evidence and what I see with my own clients, those using my app, those in the group program.
• 17:16
  Philip Pape: Physiologically, short cuts, okay, doing a cut for a short period of time, what's it gonna do?
• 17:24
  Philip Pape: It's gonna limit how much lean mass you lose, how much muscle mass you lose, if any, because the longer a cut goes, the greater risk you have for losing muscle mass.
• 17:33
  Philip Pape: Your body adapts to that restriction also, right?
• 17:35
  Philip Pape: Your metabolism will slow down slightly.
• 17:37
  Philip Pape: This just is gonna happen.
• 17:38
  Philip Pape: It's totally normal.
• 17:39
  Philip Pape: Your hunger is gonna go up, your training performance is gonna drop.
• 17:41
  Philip Pape: And again, shortcuts are gonna minimize this.
• 17:44
  Philip Pape: I don't want to call it damage, but this not so great living state of you know, low energy because you're not giving your body time to adapt to it in a shortcut, which is a good thing, right?
• 17:56
  Philip Pape: Like a shortcut is gonna maybe dip into that regime a little bit, but then you're done before you know it.
• 18:01
  Philip Pape: Psychologically, living mostly outside a deficit is gonna reduce burnout.
• 18:06
  Philip Pape: It's gonna improve your adherence over the long term.
• 18:08
  Philip Pape: The S-word, sustainability.
• 18:10
  Philip Pape: It's gonna reinforce also your identity as a lifter, as an athlete, someone who's building, someone who's operating at a high level of performance, not as someone who's always dieting and saying no and restricting and feeling, you know, emotionally stressed by all of this.
• 18:27
  Philip Pape: And then here's a counterintuitive observation that I've seen repeatedly with clients.
• 18:33
  Philip Pape: Many people with sufficient muscle mass just naturally lose fat over time while they're in maintenance phases for a long time.
• 18:42
  Philip Pape: And they're not even intentionally doing it, they're not restricting.
• 18:45
  Philip Pape: It's just because that higher energy flux, they're eating more, they're training hard, they're moving more, they're not packing on a bunch of fat from being in a big surplus, but they're just slowly recomping over time.
• 18:55
  Philip Pape: And that creates an environment where the body naturally wants to be leaner, right?
• 18:59
  Philip Pape: That's recomposition.
• 19:01
  Philip Pape: Now, the the most optimal or quickest way to build muscle is to go into a slight surplus.
• 19:06
  Philip Pape: And by slight, I mean really slight.
• 19:09
  Philip Pape: But for many of you, just being at maintenance, living with enough muscle that your body handles the energy more efficiently can get the job done.
• 19:16
  Philip Pape: So, the goal I want you to internalize here is not to become a better dieter.
• 19:21
  Philip Pape: I think a lot of you are trying to develop this skill of dieting, which to be fair, we give you the tools here on the show to try to do that because at some point you do go through a cut and there's tools for that.
• 19:32
  Philip Pape: But what I want you to internalize is building a body that requires dieting less often.
• 19:39
  Philip Pape: Then fat loss is just these brief, almost routine maintenance tasks.
• 19:44
  Philip Pape: And I see it all the time.
• 19:46
  Philip Pape: People I've worked with for a while who've spent the time to build the muscle, they're like, yeah, I'm just gonna do a quick fat loss phase, gonna take four or five weeks, cut a few pounds, boom, then get back to it.
• 19:54
  Philip Pape: That's far better than this exhausting year or years long struggle that most people experience.
• 19:59
  Philip Pape: So I went.
• 19:59
  Philip Pape: briefly connect this to the GLP1 era we're in now as well.
• 20:04
  Philip Pape: Stick with me.
• 20:04
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 20:05
  Philip Pape: I don't think this is going to be controversial.
• 20:06
  Philip Pape: I'm going to I'm going to apply some nuance to this.
• 20:08
  Philip Pape: Medications like semaglatide or zepitide, you know, are wake are making rapid weight loss very accessible to millions of people.
• 20:17
  Philip Pape: And many of you are probably taking these.
• 20:18
  Philip Pape: And I have clients who take these.
• 20:20
  Philip Pape: All good.
• 20:21
  Philip Pape: For some people, they are genuinely helpful tools that address real physiological challenges with appetite regulation.
• 20:28
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 20:28
  Philip Pape: We had Jamie Selzeron talked about that exact thing and he's doing it the right way.
• 20:32
  Philip Pape: Love it.
• 20:32
  Philip Pape: I'm not anti-medication.
• 20:34
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 20:35
  Philip Pape: The concern is this that rapid weight loss without the resistance training is what creates the scenario I've already described.
• 20:42
  Philip Pape: And it tends to accelerate it the reduced muscle mass, the lower metabolic capacity, a physique that is lower on the scale but may not be improved or feel different the way you want it to be.
• 20:54
  Philip Pape: And many people are taking these medications need to lose weight for health reasons.
• 20:57
  Philip Pape: And so it's an independent goal, let's say.
• 21:01
  Philip Pape: And then when you stop the medication or when your body adapts, then you, you know, you get back where you're started.
• 21:06
  Philip Pape: And many people on these medications then are worse off and they end up gaining the weight back and they're gaining more body fat.
• 21:11
  Philip Pape: And then it's kind of this vicious cycle to the extreme.
• 21:14
  Philip Pape: And that's why I think the muscle first philosophy matters today more than ever, to be honest.
• 21:18
  Philip Pape: So whatever tool you use to manage appetite, which we're going to have a whole series on appetite starting next week throughout January, we're going to talk about lifestyle-based appetite management, natural appetite suppressants, pharmacological, we're going to talk about all those tools.
• 21:33
  Philip Pape: Whatever tool you use to do that or to create a deficit, the strength training piece is still non-negotiable.
• 21:39
  Philip Pape: The solution is the same no matter what tool you're using.
• 21:42
  Philip Pape: Resistance training, adequate protein to preserve and build muscle during weight loss.
• 21:47
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 21:47
  Philip Pape: So this again this is just the cut side of the equation.
• 21:49
  Philip Pape: So if you're already if you're you know considering using these meds or you're already on them, make sure to double down on strength training.
• 21:55
  Philip Pape: I don't mean do double the strength training I mean double down as in do it, make it a priority, make muscle and strength a priority.
• 22:02
  Philip Pape: Let the medication handle the appetite piece and those two can work together really, really well because the goal isn't just weight loss.
• 22:09
  Philip Pape: It's building the physique that's durable, that's functional, that's sustainable and that requires muscle.
• 22:14
  Philip Pape: All right so how do we design 2026 as your muscle first year and not worry about things like getting too bulky or gaining too much fat.
• 22:22
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 22:23
  Philip Pape: How do you do this?
• 22:24
  Philip Pape: I would first assess where you're starting from how much muscle do you have?
• 22:29
  Philip Pape: Have you never lifted before or have you lifted for two decades?
• 22:32
  Philip Pape: Two different populations, right?
• 22:34
  Philip Pape: How well do you recover?
• 22:35
  Philip Pape: What is your training age?
• 22:36
  Philip Pape: How long have you been lifting consistently?
• 22:38
  Philip Pape: Because if you've been cutting a lot for many years without any time building at all, then you probably have very little muscle to work with and that means your first priority is absolutely to build muscle, not to cut.
• 22:50
  Philip Pape: If you look like you lift right now, whatever that means to you and the answer is not really, I don't, then you probably want to build because you're not going to just by continuing to cut.
• 23:02
  Philip Pape: So that's that's the first one.
• 23:03
  Philip Pape: Step two is you have to commit to this.
• 23:06
  Philip Pape: And by commit I mean eating at maintenance or a slight surplus for six to 12 months.
• 23:11
  Philip Pape: We're not talking about a dirty bulk that's that's 1990s where you gain excessive fat.
• 23:16
  Philip Pape: I'm talking about a control building phase where you add muscle slowly while staying relatively I'll say relatively lean or whatever your leanness is now and you're just going to get leaner because you're adding the muscle right it's very hard for people to grasp this, but you could actually gain a little bit of weight and be leaner because more most of that weight is muscle.
• 23:34
  Philip Pape: Now how much of a surplus?
• 23:35
  Philip Pape: In terms of percentage body weight a week I'm going to say anywhere from 0.3 to 0.5% body weight a week all right which for a lot of people is like maybe a half to a pound a month maybe more than that for men maybe it could be two pounds a month no more than that.
• 23:50
  Philip Pape: It usually amounts to a hundred to three hundred calories above maintenance.
• 23:54
  Philip Pape: So you could do this with macrofactor you could do this by by hand you could do this using my app.
• 23:59
  Philip Pape: It doesn't matter just that you are intentional about it and making sure you're not dipping into constant restriction like before step three is of course you're training you've got to train for this that means enough volume, right?
• 24:11
  Philip Pape: Typically 10 or 15 hard sets per muscle group per week.
• 24:14
  Philip Pape: Use progressive overload which means you're gradually increasing the weight or the reps or sets over time but generally the weight training within one to three reps of failure on most working sets, using compound movements combined with isolation work, all that fun stuff we've had several episodes recently about training, about training volume.
• 24:31
  Philip Pape: We did an episode about strength versus hypertrophy.
• 24:34
  Philip Pape: It's all in the library if you need something specific reach out.
• 24:38
  Philip Pape: How about find me on Instagram at wits and weights and send me a message this is the part that requires consistency and this is the part that a lot of people screw up because they're like okay I'm going to go into a slight surplus and then I'm going to train and then I miss a training session and then I miss another one.
• 24:51
  Philip Pape: You're probably going to want to train three or four days a week and you're going to want to track your progress.
• 24:55
  Philip Pape: So again there are multiple ways to do this you can use an app, you can use a notebook, you can use Fitness lab, it doesn't matter.
• 25:01
  Philip Pape: If you've been using the same weight for months, the same pink dumbbells that's I'm sorry if that's derogatory but that's it kind of gets the point across.
• 25:07
  Philip Pape: If you're doing the YouTube circuit training workouts, if you're doing the CrossFit style workouts and nothing's improving, you're not building muscle, right?
• 25:14
  Philip Pape: At best you're maintaining something and being a little bit fit, but you're not actually building maintaining muscle.
• 25:18
  Philip Pape: Then of course you've got the protein and the nutrition side.
• 25:22
  Philip Pape: And so we we talked about being in a surplus but part of that surplus is having sufficient protein up to a gram per pound of body weight.
• 25:28
  Philip Pape: For most people it's 0.7 to one gram per pound.
• 25:30
  Philip Pape: So take your body weight and get kind of close to that like just a ballpark it I weigh about 180 so I try to get 160 to 180.
• 25:40
  Philip Pape: If you weigh 200 it's 180 to 200.
• 25:42
  Philip Pape: If you only weigh 150 pounds you're trying to get like 120 to 150 something like that.
• 25:46
  Philip Pape: And then we've got sleep and stress sleeping at least seven to eight hours managing your stress also getting enough steps all that stuff.
• 25:54
  Philip Pape: We're not going to go through all these pillars again today but whatever you're doing in fat loss to maintain your energy and metabolism you're still going to do that when you're building muscle it's not like you give that up you still want to be active you still want to move around you're not going to sit around all day.
• 26:07
  Philip Pape: And then and then only then so we're talking six to 12 months of building when you then decide to cut you to make it short and deliberate.
• 26:16
  Philip Pape: I would honestly just do the whole building phase continuously and then do a focused six to 10 week cut at around a half to 0.75% of your body weight a week.
• 26:26
  Philip Pape: We're going to talk about a different option later in the episode that might be even more strategic for some of you, but that's generally what I recommend.
• 26:33
  Philip Pape: And then you're going to get back to maintenance or building so you're not going to stretch the cutout.
• 26:36
  Philip Pape: You're just going to not chase a lower number on the scale you're going to get in, remove the fat, get out.
• 26:40
  Philip Pape: Understand that your overall body weight may actually trend kind of slightly up over time.
• 26:45
  Philip Pape: You know it's going to go up and down with the building and the fat loss but then the net effect is probably slightly up because of muscle.
• 26:52
  Philip Pape: And that's a great thing because you're going to be leaner, higher body weight higher metabolism more food all that jazz.
• 26:58
  Philip Pape: And then just repeat this going forward and most of your ears are going to look like this long periods of building or maintenance brief periods of cutting you're going to accumulate muscle you're going to improve your metabolism the cuts are going to be really short and easy.
• 27:09
  Philip Pape: And that is what I mean by becoming a person who rarely needs to diet that will be your identity as you you perform you're an athlete you lift you train you eat you fuel and occasionally you drop some fat.
• 27:22
  Philip Pape: And it's not being genetically blessed.
• 27:25
  Philip Pape: It's because you're working on building this infrastructure of muscle.
• 27:29
  Philip Pape: So we've covered a lot all right before I wrap up I want you to stick around I'm going to share what I call the mini cut accelerator.
• 27:36
  Philip Pape: It's a specific approach to fat loss where you can push a little harder finish a little bit faster and protect more muscle than conventional cutting that I just talked about and it might change how you approach your cuts.
• 27:48
  Philip Pape: But a lot of you are looking for tools to help you do this.
• 27:51
  Philip Pape: So if you need a tool to help implement any of these approaches whether muscle building executing a strategic mini cut and you're looking for support from human coaches and others in a community physique university is where we coach people through this.
• 28:06
  Philip Pape: And what's cool is coming up on January 20th we're going to do a workshop called Get Lean in 45 days.
• 28:13
  Philip Pape: It's going to be a complete framework for executing the kind of short aggressive muscle sparing cut that I'm about to describe in a second.
• 28:22
  Philip Pape: It's the exact setup it's the macros it's training we're going to have a specific training program for the 45 days how to transition out without rebounding.
• 28:31
  Philip Pape: And again that's going to be January 20th but if you join physique university now you'll have a few weeks to do some of the prep work because you want to be ready for this.
• 28:38
  Philip Pape: This is not for everyone you can't just jump in.
• 28:40
  Philip Pape: This is not a quick fix.
• 28:42
  Philip Pape: You have to have your nutrition a bit dialed in you have to have your baseline your training things like that dialed in but we can get you some of those resources in advance only if you join physique university or if you're already in and if you're ready hit the ground running then in January 20th that's how you can do it.
• 28:57
  Philip Pape: So go to wits and weights.com slash physique link in the show notes go to wits and weights.com slash physique join us in physique university for the get lean in 45 days workshop.
• 29:06
  Philip Pape: All right so let's talk about that strategy the mini cut accelerator most people are going probably too slow for too long which sounds anathema to what I talk about because we are all about sustainability.
• 29:19
  Philip Pape: The problem is a 12 or 16 week moderate deficit even though it sounds sustainable because the rate of loss is less it tends to be psychologically hard on some people it really is.
• 29:30
  Philip Pape: 12 or 16 weeks on paper doesn't sound like that long.
• 29:33
  Philip Pape: It's three or four months but in reality it starts to feel kind of fatiguing and kind of tedious right and again not everybody.
• 29:41
  Philip Pape: For some people it's perfect but for others I've found that something like a four to six week mini cut is going to be extremely effective and it's a balance between very rapid fat loss.
• 29:52
  Philip Pape: That's a different protocol that I've that I teach and kind of a standard cut that we talked about earlier.
• 29:57
  Philip Pape: And in a four to six week mini cut you are pushing about one to 1.2% of your body weight loss a week right so it's a little bit faster than that typical half to one percent recommendation.
• 30:10
  Philip Pape: And because it's short, you're still not risking any muscle loss.
• 30:14
  Philip Pape: So this brevity the shortness is what protects you.
• 30:17
  Philip Pape: You know you again going back to my earlier points about your metabolism will start adapting, your hormones start to downregulate, you don't really get much time to hit that phase, which is a good thing.
• 30:27
  Philip Pape: And then psychologically you can push harder knowing that there's a clear end date.
• 30:30
  Philip Pape: So for a lot of people this is really powerful.
• 30:32
  Philip Pape: Let's say you're a 180 pound person that might look like 1.8 to 2.2 pounds a week for four to six weeks which is eight to 12 pounds of fat.
• 30:42
  Philip Pape: This is a very common archetype especially a lot of men that I work with who are eating a decent amount of calories and they weigh around that 180 to 200, they can lop off like 10 pounds of fat.
• 30:53
  Philip Pape: If you are let's say 130 or 40 pounds, you could still get you know four to eight pounds of fat.
• 30:58
  Philip Pape: It's all relative, right?
• 30:59
  Philip Pape: Compare that to someone who kind of has to grind away for like four months for 16 weeks and there's this little bit of hunger and fatigue the whole time it's not a lot but it's enough to make it feel like a grind even though on paper it seems more conservative and sustainable.
• 31:16
  Philip Pape: The problem or the key here is it only works if you've built the foundation first.
• 31:20
  Philip Pape: So this doesn't happen next week or in two weeks as we start the new year.
• 31:24
  Philip Pape: This is either during a long building phase or after.
• 31:28
  Philip Pape: And so I mentioned early earlier I recommend doing these after you do have the option let's say you're planning to build for 12 months let's say after six months you do a mini cut and then you get back in it and finish the year out strong.
• 31:41
  Philip Pape: So you're kind of sandwiching the mini cut in between two maintenance two building phases.
• 31:45
  Philip Pape: And really that's all it is.
• 31:47
  Philip Pape: So you've got to get that in place first and that workshop I mentioned the get lean in 45 days that's exactly what we're covering a full framework for executing this.
• 31:56
  Philip Pape: So if you want to get access to that and do the prep work join us in physique university go to witsandweights.com slash physique and we're going to help you execute that 45 day mini cut and learn all about it.
• 32:08
  Philip Pape: All right until next time keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember that 2026 is your year to build not just to cut I'm Philip Pape and I'll talk to you next time here on Wits and Weights