Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Sometimes More Is More (The Sedentary Lifter Problem) | Ep 475

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Sometimes More Is More (The Sedentary Lifter Problem) | Ep 475 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: You've heard it everywhere lately.
• 0:02
  Philip Pape: Women are overtraining.
• 0:04
  Philip Pape: You need to lift less and recover more.
• 0:06
  Philip Pape: Don't push so hard.
• 0:08
  Philip Pape: And for a lot of people, that's completely correct advice.
• 0:12
  Philip Pape: But what if you do lift three or four times a week?
• 0:15
  Philip Pape: You're hitting your protein, your sleep is fine, you still can't see the muscle you've been building.
• 0:20
  Philip Pape: Today I'm gonna make the case that the most useful piece of advice for a lot of you, especially over 40, isn't to do less.
• 0:28
  Philip Pape: It's actually the old one that our grandmother used to tell us, and that is to move more, but in the right way.
• 0:34
  Philip Pape: We'll be discussing the avatar of the sedentary lifter, which many of you fall into that category, even if you don't realize it.
• 0:42
  Philip Pape: We'll go over things like the dose response curve when it comes to how much activity you should be doing to get the most out of your results.
• 0:49
  Philip Pape: And then I'll give you a three-question audit that tells you in 30 seconds whether your problem is recovery or movement.
• 0:59
  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.
• 1:09
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today's episode is dedicated to the lifter who's been doing everything right.
• 1:16
  Philip Pape: You're lifting three, four, five times a week, you're hitting your protein, you're sleeping, you're following all the recovery advice that you've absorbed from the over 40 fitness internet and podcasts, including this one, about how women overtrain and how you should pull back and prioritize rest.
• 1:33
  Philip Pape: And you're still looking in the mirror, like, where the heck is that muscle definition?
• 1:38
  Philip Pape: Where is the result that I've been working so hard for?
• 1:42
  Philip Pape: Maybe the scale isn't moving the way you want, maybe the tape measure's not moving, and everything you're kind of absorbing isn't unlocking anything for you.
• 1:50
  Philip Pape: So today's episode is dedicated to you because it was prompted by a listener, Katie S.
• 1:57
  Philip Pape: And I want to read part of her message because she frames the problem better than I could, like many people can, because sometimes I can be a bit convoluted.
• 2:04
  Philip Pape: Katie S has been a listener for a while.
• 2:07
  Philip Pape: You might remember she's the one whose question prompted the nursing and body composition episode.
• 2:12
  Philip Pape: I know that was a very niche episode.
• 2:14
  Philip Pape: This one today is really for everybody.
• 2:16
  Philip Pape: So she came back with a follow-up with a ton of really good self-diagnosis of herself.
• 2:22
  Philip Pape: That was redundant.
• 2:23
  Philip Pape: But here we go.
• 2:24
  Philip Pape: Quote: I often find myself trying to find the balance between recovery and not pushing too hard and then being downright sedentary.
• 2:32
  Philip Pape: It turns out I was listening to lots of people saying that women overtrain, need more recovery time, et cetera.
• 2:37
  Philip Pape: When in reality, even though I was doing resistance training, my steps and cardio levels were so low that I should have been listening more to the eat less, move more, or really eat more, move more crowd.
• 2:48
  Philip Pape: I like that nuance, Katie.
• 2:50
  Philip Pape: I finally added a little cardio, and now the muscle I've been building for the past three years is beginning to show a bit.
• 2:55
  Philip Pape: My old mindset of pushing myself really hard with exercise and calorie restriction.
• 2:59
  Philip Pape: I was the one eating 1200 calories stuck while I started heating the new advice.
• 3:04
  Philip Pape: But the context had changed.
• 3:05
  Philip Pape: Now I need to be doing more and using more of those levers like steps and cardio.
• 3:09
  Philip Pape: My steps are often around 4K.
• 3:11
  Philip Pape: End quote.
• 3:12
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 3:12
  Philip Pape: So, Katie, thank you for this.
• 3:14
  Philip Pape: This is really good because it gave me a precise topic to focus on that's gonna help a lot of people today.
• 3:20
  Philip Pape: And I want you to listen through the entire episode because each piece is really important.
• 3:25
  Philip Pape: And then at the end, I'm gonna give you a quick audit that you can know whether your problem is recovery or not.
• 3:31
  Philip Pape: And I don't want you to just skip there because there's a lot of good setup you need to know and context that's gonna help you contextualize this for yourself.
• 3:38
  Philip Pape: Many lifters in the audience are dealing with this.
• 3:40
  Philip Pape: So, myself included, I definitely have become in some phases of my life a sedentary lifter.
• 3:45
  Philip Pape: And it's definitely had required me to change at certain points my habits to make it work better for me.
• 3:53
  Philip Pape: Same with our clients, same with our members, and eat more lift heavy and all of that.
• 3:56
  Philip Pape: So we are gonna cover this message, the women overtrained message or the people overtrained message in general, but it's definitely targeted a lot at women.
• 4:05
  Philip Pape: When is it correct?
• 4:06
  Philip Pape: When is it not correct?
• 4:07
  Philip Pape: What does the research say about things like steps in neat?
• 4:10
  Philip Pape: How to audit your own week to figure out what levers you should be pulling right now.
• 4:15
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 4:15
  Philip Pape: So let's start with the advice itself.
• 4:18
  Philip Pape: I don't want to throw anyone under the bus.
• 4:19
  Philip Pape: The the women overtrain, lift less, recover more message was I'll call it a correction, if not an overcorrection, to a real problem.
• 4:30
  Philip Pape: For probably at least a decade, the dominant message in women's fitness is you need to grind.
• 4:36
  Philip Pape: Hot yoga, crossfit, running.
• 4:40
  Philip Pape: You don't need very much sleep, eat 1200 calories, right?
• 4:44
  Philip Pape: You know the culture that I'm talking about.
• 4:46
  Philip Pape: And I think the pendulum always swings in both directions quite hard sometimes in the fitness industry, especially the social media internet version of that.
• 4:55
  Philip Pape: And so you have a bunch of smart people who start pushing back and saying, wait a minute, this low energy stuff and this recovery issue for women and constantly chronically elevated cortisol from being massively overstressed and underfueling, all of this stuff is real things that are happening.
• 5:13
  Philip Pape: And you're not going to just muscle your way through perimenopause with more burpees or CrossFit, right?
• 5:18
  Philip Pape: And so there's a lot of things there.
• 5:19
  Philip Pape: I know I just said a lot of things, and I a lot of it's true.
• 5:23
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 5:24
  Philip Pape: I've built my own content around a lot of this same frame in terms of many of you, especially over 40, are underfueled and overstressed.
• 5:34
  Philip Pape: And you need to basically strip things back, lift heavy, eat more, recover better.
• 5:40
  Philip Pape: But, but here's where Katie's message puts an important nuance on it, puts an important wrinkle in the message.
• 5:49
  Philip Pape: The less is more advice is for a specific person, isn't it?
• 5:53
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 5:53
  Philip Pape: It's it's for the woman or person who's doing days and days every week of Metcons and a long run and a job that's on your feet, and but you're only getting, you know, 4,000 steps, even despite that.
• 6:07
  Philip Pape: Maybe you're only sleeping five and a half hours and you're eating 1,400 calories.
• 6:11
  Philip Pape: And I've had many, many clients myself who the advice was we need to stop doing so much.
• 6:17
  Philip Pape: And I'm talking about women who are on all sorts of drugs, you know, Adderall and hormone medication and trying to fix our thyroid and everything else.
• 6:26
  Philip Pape: And all they needed was to dial back on the stress load, usually from the amount of activity they were doing, but also from eating more, et cetera.
• 6:33
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 6:33
  Philip Pape: So in that case, the do less is often exactly correct.
• 6:37
  Philip Pape: The training stress is the constraint, is the constraint and pulling it back.
• 6:42
  Philip Pape: And it's not even training a lot of times.
• 6:44
  Philip Pape: It's quote unquote exercise, you know, YouTube workouts and spin or Peloton classes, and here we go again, Pilates.
• 6:52
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna, I'm gonna poop on Pilates.
• 6:54
  Philip Pape: But anyway, it tends to be just too much.
• 6:57
  Philip Pape: But that person is not you, at least it's not you, Katie, and the person that's like you who is listening, who is lifting in, I'll say the proper structured way with progressive overload, reasonable volume, let's say three or four days a week.
• 7:11
  Philip Pape: And you probably have a desk job or you're in your car, whatever, for multiple hours a day.
• 7:16
  Philip Pape: Your walking isn't very high.
• 7:18
  Philip Pape: Maybe it's not super low, but kind of moderate in the middle, like 5,000 steps, 6,000.
• 7:23
  Philip Pape: I mean, I always talk about Jerry.
• 7:25
  Philip Pape: Jerry probably still listens to the show, who is very muscular.
• 7:28
  Philip Pape: He was a lawyer, but he sat around so much he'd only get 3,000 steps a day.
• 7:31
  Philip Pape: And just increasing his step count was a huge unlock to fat loss and calorie burn and heart rate and all that other stuff, right?
• 7:39
  Philip Pape: So a lot of us are sedentary.
• 7:41
  Philip Pape: I mean, I can catch myself in a day struggling to get more than 6,000 steps just because there's so much I'm doing and so much work, and I still want to train, so I get up early, so then that cuts into my sleep, right?
• 7:52
  Philip Pape: You get it.
• 7:53
  Philip Pape: And so dialing back further on the training or movement side because you're told you need to recover, it's probably the wrong advice.
• 8:02
  Philip Pape: Advice.
• 8:02
  Philip Pape: And that leads to the confusion.
• 8:04
  Philip Pape: It only exacerbates the confusion when you listen to podcasts.
• 8:08
  Philip Pape: But I, okay, I think the advice is all consistent.
• 8:11
  Philip Pape: I just think it's not always contextualized.
• 8:14
  Philip Pape: But if you're doing everything you've been told and it's not working, then the things you're doing are not the things for you, is essentially the pithy kind of conclusion there.
• 8:25
  Philip Pape: And however, like Katie, you might have been training the right way and actually building muscle, but certain metrics aren't working for you, or you're not seeing it in the mirror.
• 8:36
  Philip Pape: And it could be a very simple thing.
• 8:37
  Philip Pape: It may not be hormones or thyroid or perimenopause or some exotic thing that you have to optimize in the 1%.
• 8:43
  Philip Pape: It may simply be you need, you know, to add a little cardio in and up that amount of movement.
• 8:49
  Philip Pape: So we're gonna get into that, okay?
• 8:52
  Philip Pape: I want to start though, reiterating what I just said in case you missed it.
• 8:56
  Philip Pape: It's probably not a hormone problem.
• 8:58
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 8:58
  Philip Pape: It's probably not a cortisol problem.
• 9:00
  Philip Pape: It's probably not a liver issue.
• 9:03
  Philip Pape: It's probably not any of these exotic things that influencers want to sell you products on or one-off solutions to.
• 9:08
  Philip Pape: It's probably a context problem.
• 9:11
  Philip Pape: That's all it is.
• 9:12
  Philip Pape: It's a context problem.
• 9:13
  Philip Pape: So the right advice for you might be closer to okay, eat more, move more, the concept of energy flux, of being a more active person, of moving more and getting up off your butt and having a higher step county.
• 9:24
  Philip Pape: Maybe even yes, doing some medium-intensity cardio or sprinting or something.
• 9:27
  Philip Pape: Okay, so let's let's dig into the hidden mechanism here that's gonna affect everyone listening, regardless of whether this is the direction you need to go.
• 9:37
  Philip Pape: And I want to talk about energy expenditure, metabolism, totally energy expenditure.
• 9:41
  Philip Pape: Okay, this is how many calories you burn in a 24-hour period.
• 9:44
  Philip Pape: We've covered the four components of metabolism on the show before.
• 9:48
  Philip Pape: I'm just gonna just reiterate we have our BMR, that's our base basal metabolic rate, about two-thirds of your energy expenditure.
• 9:55
  Philip Pape: We have the thermic effect of food, which comes from processing, digesting what you eat.
• 9:59
  Philip Pape: We have exercise, and we have non-exercise activity thermogenesis.
• 10:04
  Philip Pape: But what I want to focus on is neat, the last one.
• 10:06
  Philip Pape: NEAT, it it kind of dwarfs everything else in terms of how much it varies between people.
• 10:11
  Philip Pape: Now, some might argue you have no control over it.
• 10:13
  Philip Pape: It's all the unconscious stuff.
• 10:14
  Philip Pape: And things like walking belong in the exercise components.
• 10:17
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna argue that here.
• 10:19
  Philip Pape: I'm going to actually do what I think most people do is they do include walking and pacing and standing and yard work and all that into the neat bucket.
• 10:29
  Philip Pape: Everything other than like going to the gym and doing a specific activity.
• 10:32
  Philip Pape: Now, sprinting, I would say, is more of an eat exercise, right?
• 10:36
  Philip Pape: It's exercise, not non-exercise.
• 10:39
  Philip Pape: So there's a little bit of conflation conflating here.
• 10:42
  Philip Pape: But anyway, the original neat research from Jim Levine, who's the guy who basically named the concept, and it found that neat can vary between two people of the same size by up to something like 2,000 calories a day, which is crazy.
• 10:56
  Philip Pape: That's more than some people eat in a day.
• 10:59
  Philip Pape: And so the difference between a sedentary person and a moderately active person and a very active person, just from how they live the many, many hours of the day outside the gym.
• 11:11
  Philip Pape: And some days you don't go to the gym, so it's all the hours of the day other than sleep, right?
• 11:15
  Philip Pape: That difference can be the entire size of a fat loss deficit and a calorie surplus combined.
• 11:23
  Philip Pape: Meaning the swing, it can swing so much, it's so enormous.
• 11:28
  Philip Pape: And the most variable component of many people's metabolism based on their lifestyle, right?
• 11:33
  Philip Pape: Now, and that's just taking the extreme.
• 11:35
  Philip Pape: Like the extreme high end of that is people who have a really rigorous manual labor type job.
• 11:41
  Philip Pape: I'm not expecting you to become the person who's, okay, I'm gonna switch my job and be a manual labor all day.
• 11:47
  Philip Pape: I get it.
• 11:47
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna ask you to do what Dr.
• 11:49
  Philip Pape: Bill Campbell did in his recent study, where he had women walk for six hours every day.
• 11:53
  Philip Pape: Okay, I get it.
• 11:54
  Philip Pape: So I'm not suggesting you're gonna push yourself all the way to that extreme.
• 11:58
  Philip Pape: But there's some opportunity there, is my point.
• 12:01
  Philip Pape: So for most of you lifters in the audience, lifting three or four hours a week is maybe three or four percent of your weekly calorie burn.
• 12:09
  Philip Pape: Now, I don't often talk about calorie burn.
• 12:11
  Philip Pape: I mean, I do in some sense, but like I don't talk about exercise as doing it to burn calories.
• 12:17
  Philip Pape: However, however, when you're struggling with fat loss or struggling to reveal muscle definition, and it often comes down to just a simple matter of you you're not able to successfully do a fat loss phase to reveal the muscle, or when you're so sedentary that your body's just, I'll say health systems, whether that's your resting heart rate, whether that's your, I'll say inflammation, kind of more on the non-fear-mongering form of inflammation when I talk about muscle protein synthesis and like myokines versus cytokines and the blood markers in your body that are inflammation.
• 12:53
  Philip Pape: I'm not talking about good inflammation, let's just say just the chronic low-level inflammation from being sedentary, then the calorie burn equation maybe becomes more relevant, believe it or not.
• 13:04
  Philip Pape: So your exercise doesn't burn many calories, but neat, the non-exercise, when you're sedentary outside the gym versus not sedentary, that's your biggest lever in your metabolism that I think Katie is hitting on.
• 13:18
  Philip Pape: So I want to get specific though about steps.
• 13:21
  Philip Pape: So the most recent and most rigorous meta-analysis on this came out in the Lancet Public Health in July of last year.
• 13:28
  Philip Pape: Ding and colleagues, and it was looking at 57 studies, they found that 7,000 steps a day is associated with somewhere between six and 47% lower risk across every major health outcome they looked at compared to 2,000.
• 13:45
  Philip Pape: So 7,000 versus 2,000.
• 13:47
  Philip Pape: All cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, dementia, depression.
• 13:54
  Philip Pape: So a lot of these things sound like the things that muscle mass also improves.
• 13:59
  Philip Pape: So the optimal for steps is somewhere around 7,000 to 9,000, which we've talked about in the past.
• 14:03
  Philip Pape: This is probably why 10,000 is not the worst, you know, target to go for.
• 14:07
  Philip Pape: It's a nice round number and it's above that, unless it's preventing you from walking at all because it seems so overwhelming.
• 14:14
  Philip Pape: And then there's diminishing returns past the you know nine or 10,000 steps.
• 14:18
  Philip Pape: Because I know some of you are walking like 25,000 steps.
• 14:22
  Philip Pape: Just be aware of that.
• 14:23
  Philip Pape: Okay, so what does that mean for Katie at 4,000 steps?
• 14:26
  Philip Pape: Well, she's sitting kind of on the steepest part of the dose response curve, right?
• 14:32
  Philip Pape: Like on the left side of that curve before it goes up.
• 14:35
  Philip Pape: She's like right above the floor of any detectable benefit, but she's 3,000 steps below this high yield zone from the research where you get the biggest marginal return, right?
• 14:47
  Philip Pape: Like you get the biggest pun intended step change.
• 14:50
  Philip Pape: Going from 4,000 to 7,000 is the single most impactful change that she can make, probably, versus almost anything else, because she's doing all the other things.
• 14:59
  Philip Pape: That's my point.
• 15:00
  Philip Pape: Now, if she was getting four hours of sleep, I'd say maybe that's the biggest one.
• 15:03
  Philip Pape: If she drinks three, three glasses of wine a night, maybe that's the biggest one.
• 15:07
  Philip Pape: But for her, it's, you know, she's doing all the things.
• 15:10
  Philip Pape: So this is a huge opportunity.
• 15:12
  Philip Pape: It's bigger than tweaking her protein, it's bigger than, right?
• 15:15
  Philip Pape: And it's, I'll say it's essentially free in terms of fatigue cost, which we always worry about fatigue in the context of stress versus fatigue and recovery from your lifting.
• 15:27
  Philip Pape: And of course, walking doesn't really have much fatigue unless you make it harder, like with a rucksack, things like that.
• 15:32
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 15:32
  Philip Pape: So what about the, okay, exercise doesn't really burn calories?
• 15:36
  Philip Pape: Argument that I always like to make.
• 15:38
  Philip Pape: And, you know, it gets exacerbated when people talk about the constrained energy expenditure model, for example, from Herman Ponzer, where like, well, everybody pretty much has the same metabolism, so why would you even exercise?
• 15:49
  Philip Pape: That's not true either.
• 15:51
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 15:51
  Philip Pape: Uh, I think Eric Trexler, who I'm a huge fan of, down at he works at Ponzer now at Duke, I think he's explained this better than anyone, that the constrained model basically says that at very high activity levels, your body compensates by reducing other components of your metabolism.
• 16:07
  Philip Pape: So adding a bunch more cardio doesn't linearly add to your total burn.
• 16:12
  Philip Pape: And I think the compensation average is like 28% in the data, but it's mostly pronounced at the high end of the activity spectrum.
• 16:20
  Philip Pape: So someone who is sedentary outside the gym, the additive model and the constrained model basically agree with each other.
• 16:28
  Philip Pape: I mean, it's like zooming in and basically they look like the same graph at that those low levels of activity.
• 16:34
  Philip Pape: If you go from 4,000 to 7,000 steps, you are not nearly high enough on that curve to trigger meaningful compensation.
• 16:40
  Philip Pape: Nowhere close.
• 16:41
  Philip Pape: Okay, so don't use that as an excuse.
• 16:44
  Philip Pape: Instead, the extra movement pretty much adds to your total calorie burn, almost one for one.
• 16:48
  Philip Pape: I mean, it's gonna be close, especially if it's walking, right?
• 16:51
  Philip Pape: Especially if it's walking.
• 16:52
  Philip Pape: So if you're a sedentary lifter, raise your hand, that's you.
• 16:56
  Philip Pape: More movement is just gonna help you out if you're, I mean, like I just said, sedentary.
• 17:02
  Philip Pape: You're just you need to move more.
• 17:03
  Philip Pape: There's no hidden ceiling that is like all of a sudden gonna make you have this massive compensation.
• 17:08
  Philip Pape: That's not who we're talking to.
• 17:10
  Philip Pape: So the hidden mechanism is as follows, right?
• 17:13
  Philip Pape: You've been treating your training stress as the variable, but the variable that's probably gonna be the biggest mover for you is your total daily movement.
• 17:22
  Philip Pape: In other words, you've got your training dialed in, you're you're going in three, four days a week, you're training hard, you're progressing.
• 17:29
  Philip Pape: Okay, that's not the issue.
• 17:31
  Philip Pape: The issue is the movement outside the gym.
• 17:33
  Philip Pape: And when that's low, your fueling, your food, your training are far less effective.
• 17:40
  Philip Pape: Even your muscle protein synthesis isn't ramped up nearly as much.
• 17:43
  Philip Pape: We've seen this in studies that compare, you know, just sitting to getting up once an hour twice an hour.
• 17:48
  Philip Pape: And I've talked about that on the show before.
• 17:50
  Philip Pape: And that affects your body composition, that affects your metabolism and metabolic capacity, your inflammation, all that stuff.
• 17:56
  Philip Pape: Okay, your health overall.
• 17:57
  Philip Pape: Now, obviously, just the bigger picture of energy balance, it still comes down to that, but we're talking about the energy outside of the equation potentially having a lot more potential for you.
• 18:08
  Philip Pape: So, you know, before before I continue, I just want to talk quickly about if you need help, like integrating all this stuff, because I know it's challenging.
• 18:15
  Philip Pape: We talk about the podcast about all these different pillars of health.
• 18:18
  Philip Pape: How do I know which one to do?
• 18:19
  Philip Pape: What do I measure?
• 18:20
  Philip Pape: What do I, you know, train, et cetera?
• 18:23
  Philip Pape: That's why we built Eat More Lift Heavy.
• 18:25
  Philip Pape: This is our six-month coaching program where we connect all the things for you.
• 18:29
  Philip Pape: We coach you on the full set of levers: training, nutrition, neat, movement, sleep, stress.
• 18:34
  Philip Pape: And we do it over 26 weeks on a week-by-week basis, real coaches involved to give you feedback on everything from nutrition to form to you know how to get more steps and how to do it more effectively based on your schedule, all that stuff.
• 18:48
  Philip Pape: And applying it to your specific situation.
• 18:51
  Philip Pape: So you figure out here's the gap, here's the constraint, here's how I move the things forward and do it sustainably.
• 18:57
  Philip Pape: So you adhere and actually stick to it, actually get the results and sustain your results.
• 19:02
  Philip Pape: All right, it's not a tracking app, it's not a meal plan, it's not a workout library.
• 19:06
  Philip Pape: It is a coached experience where we teach you how to do this for yourself by the time you are done, which is super, super powerful.
• 19:12
  Philip Pape: Go to eatmore liftheavy.com.
• 19:14
  Philip Pape: Link is in the show notes.
• 19:16
  Philip Pape: Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com to learn more.
• 19:19
  Philip Pape: All right, so here's the, I'll say the fix, right?
• 19:22
  Philip Pape: We we have a fix on every episode.
• 19:24
  Philip Pape: The simplest framework in stages.
• 19:27
  Philip Pape: Stage one is you've got to audit what you're doing.
• 19:29
  Philip Pape: You have to track something.
• 19:31
  Philip Pape: Are you tracking your lifting and your structured cardio, if any, sprinting, if any, and then of course your step count.
• 19:39
  Philip Pape: And also, I would say an estimate of how much you sit, how many hours you sit, but also how many hours you sit under interrupted where you actually don't get up.
• 19:48
  Philip Pape: That is really important.
• 19:50
  Philip Pape: And what you're gonna find probably when you're honest with yourself is if you train regularly, your structured training is probably like three to five hours a week, maybe a little more.
• 20:00
  Philip Pape: Your steps for a lot of you are just too low, maybe four to six thousand a day if you haven't done it intentionally.
• 20:06
  Philip Pape: It's what I see all the time.
• 20:08
  Philip Pape: Almost every client that's come to me, unless the very small fraction already have a high step count.
• 20:13
  Philip Pape: Many of them are around four to six.
• 20:15
  Philip Pape: And that's the biggest opportunity right there, which means a ton of your waking life is sedentary, even though you're a person who lives.
• 20:23
  Philip Pape: So step one is awareness, tracking these things.
• 20:26
  Philip Pape: Step two is hey, let's go with the cheapest lever.
• 20:28
  Philip Pape: Let's go with the lowest hanging fruit.
• 20:30
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 20:31
  Philip Pape: For me, for you, that's going to be adding steps before you add cardio.
• 20:34
  Philip Pape: There's a hierarchy, right?
• 20:36
  Philip Pape: You've got your training, then you've got your steps.
• 20:37
  Philip Pape: Then you, and the reason I say that is because you could, you might find that your schedule doesn't really allow for much more than that initially.
• 20:44
  Philip Pape: You might also find that, hey, maybe I can't get 9,000 steps, but I can go from four to five, and then I can go from five to six.
• 20:51
  Philip Pape: And then maybe I can make my steps a little bit harder before I try to add more time, right?
• 20:55
  Philip Pape: I can throw on a rucksack, for example.
• 20:57
  Philip Pape: I could do inclines, I can walk faster.
• 21:00
  Philip Pape: Hey, maybe I can make sure that when I, you know, park my car and I can walk the dog multiple times if I have a dog.
• 21:07
  Philip Pape: Go for a walk after meals because I know it's going to be good for my blood sugar.
• 21:10
  Philip Pape: Like there's ways to incorporate it where it doesn't really feel like extra time.
• 21:13
  Philip Pape: It's just kind of part of your day.
• 21:15
  Philip Pape: And so when you're tracking this, and ideally, if you're also tracking your food and weight in something like macrofactor, and you can see your metabolism change every day.
• 21:24
  Philip Pape: And if you want to support the show, download MacroFactor and use my code WITS and weights, all one word.
• 21:29
  Philip Pape: I use it, my clients use it, our members use it.
• 21:31
  Philip Pape: And the nice thing about it is it calculates your true expenditure.
• 21:35
  Philip Pape: So as you increase your step count, you can see it go up.
• 21:39
  Philip Pape: Assuming you're fueling and you're not in a deficit, you're just keeping everything else constant.
• 21:43
  Philip Pape: Okay, we want to see that totally total daily energy expenditure go up by somewhere between, let's say, 150 to 300 calories a day while you're at maintenance.
• 21:54
  Philip Pape: I think that is reasonable.
• 21:56
  Philip Pape: I think that's reasonable.
• 21:57
  Philip Pape: I think along the way you could fuel your.
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: Yourself sufficiently in a very, very tiny, tiny surplus, like aim for maintenance plus 50 to 100 calories max, just to make sure it's fueled because you might find that as you burn more calories, you need more food to avoid getting hungry and falling into a deficit.
• 22:14
  Philip Pape: And you're like, Philip, but wait, I do want to lose fat.
• 22:17
  Philip Pape: But I would do them one thing at a time.
• 22:18
  Philip Pape: Like I would change one variable, get it stable, realize, hey, now my metabolism's actually higher.
• 22:24
  Philip Pape: I'm supporting it with more movement.
• 22:26
  Philip Pape: And now my appetite signals start to normalize because your activity is matching your intake.
• 22:30
  Philip Pape: That's going to set you up really well for fat loss.
• 22:33
  Philip Pape: Or in Katie's sense, making the fat loss easier or being able to do it from a higher level of calories to reveal the muscle, or even doing it at recomp.
• 22:41
  Philip Pape: I think she also implied like not even necessarily having to go into a deficit, just causing your body now to need to find energy to make up for those extra calories.
• 22:51
  Philip Pape: And where does it do it?
• 22:52
  Philip Pape: It draws it from fat stores, and the rest of the energy is going toward your muscle, or maybe at least maintaining your muscles.
• 22:58
  Philip Pape: That makes sense.
• 22:59
  Philip Pape: So that's body recomp.
• 23:01
  Philip Pape: Then our next stage is okay, I've got enough steps.
• 23:04
  Philip Pape: I'm tracking this stuff.
• 23:05
  Philip Pape: This is good.
• 23:06
  Philip Pape: I would then add one or two short cardio sessions a week.
• 23:09
  Philip Pape: I'm a big fan of sprinting or just very moderate cardio.
• 23:15
  Philip Pape: Like it could be more walking, but of a different type.
• 23:17
  Philip Pape: It could be cycling, maybe swimming, incline treadmill, you know, whatever.
• 23:21
  Philip Pape: Like classic zone two, if you've heard that term, but honestly, you don't have to monitor it in that way.
• 23:27
  Philip Pape: Just go at a pace where you can hold a conversation.
• 23:29
  Philip Pape: You don't have to worry about it interfering with your lifting.
• 23:31
  Philip Pape: Again, you guys are not doing that much to begin with.
• 23:34
  Philip Pape: So I'm getting you up into a nice healthy zone here of movement.
• 23:38
  Philip Pape: I did skip one little thing I should have mentioned, kind of stage two and a half.
• 23:42
  Philip Pape: And that is if you sit around a lot, get up every 30 minutes and walk for two minutes.
• 23:48
  Philip Pape: Get up every 30 minutes and walk for two minutes.
• 23:50
  Philip Pape: I did an episode where one study showed an increase in muscle protein synthesis by something like 40% just by not sitting around all the time.
• 23:58
  Philip Pape: So we've got our walking, and then we've got a couple short cardio sessions.
• 24:03
  Philip Pape: I did an episode recently on, I think it was on belly fat menopause belly, but we talked about sprinting.
• 24:09
  Philip Pape: And honestly, guys, too, you will find that beneficial, I think.
• 24:14
  Philip Pape: So we've got some moderate cardio.
• 24:16
  Philip Pape: You know, you're gonna move more, get more blood flow, get more support for everything in your body because you're moving.
• 24:23
  Philip Pape: And then stage four is like, okay, is there anything else now that we need to attack?
• 24:28
  Philip Pape: Is it your lifting?
• 24:30
  Philip Pape: Probably not, given the context we started with, but who knows?
• 24:33
  Philip Pape: Maybe you need more or fewer sessions.
• 24:35
  Philip Pape: You know, with everything else changing, maybe you need to now change your training to match in some way.
• 24:42
  Philip Pape: If things are moving the way you want to, you're good.
• 24:45
  Philip Pape: If not, look at the next thing.
• 24:47
  Philip Pape: Maybe it's your protein and calories, maybe it's your sleep, right?
• 24:50
  Philip Pape: It's probably not activity anymore.
• 24:52
  Philip Pape: Now, just for the ladies who are in perimenopause, menopause, again, not to fear monger here at all, but we know in this time of life, yes, you have the hormonal changes, but also you have the lifestyle changes.
• 25:03
  Philip Pape: You also have visceral fat accumulation that starts to go up because of the hormone changes, and then your spontaneous physical activity tends to drift down.
• 25:11
  Philip Pape: Your sleep could be disrupted, maybe your energy feels lower, maybe it's just a lifestyle thing with like children and parents and money and all that.
• 25:19
  Philip Pape: So there's a whole bunch of reasons at that age where these factors come in.
• 25:24
  Philip Pape: You know, it's not like, oh, everything's just gone to hell in a handbasket because I'm in menopause, but there are true factors that are occurring.
• 25:32
  Philip Pape: And so this isn't doom and gloom.
• 25:34
  Philip Pape: It just means that I think this movement idea is even more important during this life stage and not less, right?
• 25:40
  Philip Pape: Don't be afraid to add movement if you're not among the group who's like just doing way too much of the cardio stuff that I talked about earlier.
• 25:48
  Philip Pape: So, just a brief, like caveat for the nuance.
• 25:51
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying cardio is better for everyone.
• 25:54
  Philip Pape: The context determines which lever you need.
• 25:57
  Philip Pape: So I'm talking about the sedentary lifter, who is met who is many of you who are listening.
• 26:02
  Philip Pape: I can't get the grammar right on that, but all right.
• 26:05
  Philip Pape: You may just need to move more.
• 26:06
  Philip Pape: You may be in denial.
• 26:08
  Philip Pape: Like you're like, yeah, I eat enough protein, I lift, I do that.
• 26:10
  Philip Pape: Let me look at your step count.
• 26:11
  Philip Pape: Like, let's be honest.
• 26:12
  Philip Pape: Let's look at it.
• 26:12
  Philip Pape: I bet it's like 5,000.
• 26:14
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 26:14
  Philip Pape: I'm also not saying that like this culture of you need more recovery is wrong.
• 26:18
  Philip Pape: I think recovery is sometimes the thing that you anchor and make everything else work around that, right?
• 26:24
  Philip Pape: For for a lot of you, the high cortisol, the high stress, you're underfueled, way too much volume.
• 26:29
  Philip Pape: Yeah, maybe you're too too much.
• 26:31
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 26:31
  Philip Pape: If you're like running a ton, ton of endurance work, and then you're lifting a ton, and then you have like 15,000 steps, and then you feel exhausted and your sleep isn't there, all right, you may need more recovery for sure.
• 26:45
  Philip Pape: I'm also not saying don't lift.
• 26:47
  Philip Pape: That is for sure.
• 26:48
  Philip Pape: Like lifting is non-negotiable for so many things, for strength, for muscle, for bone density, for brain health, for everything.
• 26:54
  Philip Pape: So definitely, and I don't think if you're listening to the show, you're even thinking, like, of course I'm not gonna stop lifting.
• 26:59
  Philip Pape: Are you kidding me?
• 27:00
  Philip Pape: Although I do feel sad, occasionally I'll get somebody who follows my email newsletter or the podcast, and they'll see all this content about lifting.
• 27:06
  Philip Pape: They're like, Yeah, I don't think this is right for me.
• 27:08
  Philip Pape: I'm like, oh, so sad, so sad.
• 27:11
  Philip Pape: And they're talking about lifting weights.
• 27:12
  Philip Pape: So, and I'm not saying to start running marathons either, right?
• 27:16
  Philip Pape: Like, okay, we gotta dial it in, folks, and and be in the sweet spot here.
• 27:21
  Philip Pape: If you're a lifter who's been doing everything right and the muscles just not showing up, and you again, you think you are progressing correctly, and all the other stuff is good, look at your movement, look at your sitting, look at your step count, look at your structured cardio.
• 27:34
  Philip Pape: That could be the lever that you need, I think is what Katie is getting at.
• 27:37
  Philip Pape: And I just had to make it a very long podcast episode, 30 minutes just to say that.
• 27:41
  Philip Pape: All right, before we wrap up, remember I told you I'd give you a three-question audit that takes 30 seconds to tell you whether your problem is recovery or movement.
• 27:50
  Philip Pape: Before I do that, just a quick thing.
• 27:52
  Philip Pape: Please text this episode to a friend who lifts, who's been doing things right, but maybe they're frustrated because they don't see it in the mirror.
• 28:00
  Philip Pape: Maybe you have a friend, you know, a close friend, be it a man or woman, who's like, yeah, I go to the gym, I work out, but like I'm not seeing it.
• 28:08
  Philip Pape: You know, get them started on this.
• 28:09
  Philip Pape: This may just be the entry point to some other topics that may be more relevant to them, but definitely text it with a friend, and I would be much appreciated.
• 28:17
  Philip Pape: That is a great way to support the show in case you're wondering how to support the show and you want to like buy my products and stuff.
• 28:23
  Philip Pape: Okay, so here's the three question audit that I promised.
• 28:26
  Philip Pape: Question one, how many hard lifting sessions did you do this week?
• 28:31
  Philip Pape: Now, this is a simple one, but I want you to like if it's three or four, you're good.
• 28:35
  Philip Pape: If it's five, you might be good.
• 28:37
  Philip Pape: If it, but five, six, definitely seven, training stress could be the constraint because it eats into your recovery time and it eats into your sleep time and things like that.
• 28:46
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 28:47
  Philip Pape: So if you if you're in the kind of normal range of three to four, or for some of you, maybe five, you're good.
• 28:52
  Philip Pape: Question two, what is your average daily step count?
• 28:55
  Philip Pape: So what's your actual step count?
• 28:58
  Philip Pape: If it's less than six thousand, then this is your lever you need to work on.
• 29:01
  Philip Pape: I'm telling you.
• 29:02
  Philip Pape: If it's above eight, I think you're in the ballpark of it being okay.
• 29:07
  Philip Pape: Obviously, if it's just barely eight, maybe you push it to nine or ten, but you get the idea.
• 29:12
  Philip Pape: Question three, how many times in the last week did your heart rate go above conversational pace outside the gym?
• 29:20
  Philip Pape: Meaning you did anything at all that exerted you in a good way.
• 29:24
  Philip Pape: Like you played a sport, you went for a nice hard walk or a hike.
• 29:29
  Philip Pape: Now, I'm not telling you have to do cardio.
• 29:31
  Philip Pape: I'm just saying it's a good question to audit whether if you're not getting results, you need to add more cardio.
• 29:38
  Philip Pape: Interesting, right?
• 29:39
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 29:40
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember the right advice for the wrong context is still the wrong advice.
• 29:47
  Philip Pape: Audit your day, then pull the lever that is there for you to get the best result now.
• 29:53
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.