Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Q&A - How Fast Do You Really Lose Muscle? (Plus Bigger Glutes, Creatine, & More) | Ep 483

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Q&A - How Fast Do You Really Lose Muscle? (Plus Bigger Glutes, Creatine, & More) | Ep 483 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: It's been a while, but today we have another QA.
• 0:02
  Philip Pape: Today's questions all come from our members inside Eat More Lift Heavy.
• 0:07
  Philip Pape: And there's some really good ones, such as how long can you rest between reps before it counts as a separate set?
• 0:12
  Philip Pape: Why does the scale jump when you start creatine?
• 0:15
  Philip Pape: How do you grow your glutes without your quads becoming the dominant muscle group?
• 0:20
  Philip Pape: And how fast you actually lose gains when life gets in the way.
• 0:23
  Philip Pape: I'm answering all of these as always with evidence.
• 0:26
  Philip Pape: And I think a few of the answers are going to surprise you, so stick around and enjoy today's QA.
• 0:32
  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.
• 0:45
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, Philip Pape, founder of Fitness Lab and the Eat More Lift Heavy program.
• 0:50
  Philip Pape: And today is a special one because a few weeks back I asked members in that program to send me their questions, the bigger ones, the science questions, the trends, the stuff they're always wondering about, but never had an answer to.
• 1:02
  Philip Pape: They often get these questions just day to day in the program as well as on our monthly coaching calls.
• 1:07
  Philip Pape: But I specifically asked for some additional questions from them.
• 1:10
  Philip Pape: By the way, if you want to send a question for the podcast anytime, go to wits and waste.com/slash question.
• 1:15
  Philip Pape: Many of your questions actually turn out it turn into full episodes as opposed to a Q ⁇ A.
• 1:21
  Philip Pape: But today I wanted to take multiple questions and answer them.
• 1:24
  Philip Pape: So that's what I'm doing today.
• 1:25
  Philip Pape: I'm giving them shout-outs, that kind of thing.
• 1:27
  Philip Pape: And if even if you're not in that program, I definitely want you to stick around because these are very relevant questions about resting between reps, creatine, glute training, perimenopause, the anabolic window, losing your gains.
• 1:39
  Philip Pape: And if you lift, if you eat food, which we all do, uh if you're over 40, several of these are probably gonna be highly relevant for you.
• 1:48
  Philip Pape: And then I save the best one for last.
• 1:50
  Philip Pape: I want you to stick around to the end because the last question, someone, the last question is something that a lot of people get wrong and causes, I'll say, the most unnecessary panic.
• 1:59
  Philip Pape: And that is how fast you lose your gains when life gets in the way and you can't train.
• 2:03
  Philip Pape: It's one of the most common questions I get.
• 2:05
  Philip Pape: Hey, I'm going on a trip.
• 2:06
  Philip Pape: Hey, I'm gonna have surgery, hey, I'm taking a break.
• 2:08
  Philip Pape: Hey, it's been a while since X, Y, Z.
• 2:10
  Philip Pape: How big of an issue is that?
• 2:12
  Philip Pape: And I think it's a very reassuring answer.
• 2:14
  Philip Pape: And I'm gonna give you the minimum that you need to hold on to muscle, and we're gonna look at the evidence.
• 2:18
  Philip Pape: I think that's a good one.
• 2:18
  Philip Pape: So we'll close out the episode, but let's get into the questions.
• 2:22
  Philip Pape: All right, the first question comes from Tim E.
• 2:25
  Philip Pape: And Tim asks, and I I love this one because it's the kind of thing you think about as you're training, and then you forget to kind of look it up.
• 2:32
  Philip Pape: So he says, How long can you rest between reps before it becomes a separate set?
• 2:37
  Philip Pape: Now he's doing squats, especially that third set, and he's resting two or three seconds between reps to catch his breath, and he wants to know if that's okay.
• 2:46
  Philip Pape: And we see this with heavy work.
• 2:47
  Philip Pape: We see this with, for example, deadlifts.
• 2:50
  Philip Pape: It gets confounded by the fact that people have trouble knowing how and when to breathe and brace very often.
• 2:56
  Philip Pape: Again, that's something we teach you to do.
• 2:58
  Philip Pape: So it all is connected.
• 2:59
  Philip Pape: But the short answer answer for Tim is that it's totally fine for a few seconds to take a breath, and that's it.
• 3:06
  Philip Pape: That's the short answer.
• 3:07
  Philip Pape: But I want to explain why, because there's real science here.
• 3:10
  Philip Pape: There's a whole, there are entire training methods built around deliberately resting inside a set.
• 3:16
  Philip Pape: So inside a set, like Tim is asking.
• 3:18
  Philip Pape: You've got cluster sets where you break the set into little groups of reps with short rests in between.
• 3:24
  Philip Pape: You might have heard the phrase density sets as well.
• 3:27
  Philip Pape: You've got rest pause where you go to near failure, you stop, you take a few breaths, then you squeeze out a few more.
• 3:33
  Philip Pape: You in in both of those, the rest is usually around 15 to 30 seconds.
• 3:38
  Philip Pape: That's where you've restored enough that, say, your bar speed comes back and your fatigue drops.
• 3:43
  Philip Pape: So when a coach wants to intentionally build rest into a set, that's the kind of pause that they're using.
• 3:49
  Philip Pape: You might have heard of the dog crap method, the same idea.
• 3:51
  Philip Pape: It's like 15 to 30 seconds.
• 3:53
  Philip Pape: If you've ever done BFR, same thing there.
• 3:56
  Philip Pape: So two or three seconds, Tim, just to breathe and rebrace, obviously it's nowhere close to that 15 to 30 seconds.
• 4:02
  Philip Pape: That's actually totally normal.
• 4:03
  Philip Pape: That's just lifting.
• 4:04
  Philip Pape: In fact, that's good lifting in many cases because sometimes you do need that to get reset in that brief moment.
• 4:10
  Philip Pape: We see the same thing with the deadlift.
• 4:12
  Philip Pape: Whether you're breathing at the top or bottom, these days I tend to recommend breathing at the top.
• 4:16
  Philip Pape: But what the, you know, when I looked into the research, there is a meta-analysis.
• 4:21
  Philip Pape: So meta-analysis is a study of studies.
• 4:23
  Philip Pape: This was 29 studies that compared these broken up set styles to traditional straight sets.
• 4:30
  Philip Pape: And when you match the volume and effort, the muscle growth is identical.
• 4:34
  Philip Pape: The strength is identical.
• 4:35
  Philip Pape: So even if you rested long enough to technically split the set, it actually wouldn't hurt your results as long as you're getting the work in.
• 4:43
  Philip Pape: The micro rest, if you want to call it that, is not what really matters.
• 4:48
  Philip Pape: It's the total quality reps.
• 4:50
  Philip Pape: Now we've talked about training close to failure and mechanical tension and all that.
• 4:54
  Philip Pape: That's kind of where the thought is.
• 4:55
  Philip Pape: I'm less and less of a stickler about, you know, even the number of sets, for example, or reps, if you're getting the similar effort is.
• 5:03
  Philip Pape: I think more importantly, is can you objectively measure it and track it session to session so that you're not just all over the place?
• 5:10
  Philip Pape: And then Tim mentioned in the thread in our program where he asked the question that some people rest like 10 seconds between deadlifts and wonder if that's too long.
• 5:20
  Philip Pape: And my take is that on that is, you know, taking 10 seconds to reset your breath, rebrace, get your setup right is probably on the upper end, but it's not quote unquote too long per se, especially if you're doing extremely heavy reps.
• 5:37
  Philip Pape: I mean, we're not trying to let's take ego out of it.
• 5:40
  Philip Pape: Let's take, you know, critics from different groups or philosophies, whether it's starting strength or other, and just think of the what you're trying to do.
• 5:49
  Philip Pape: Well, you're trying to lift the weight with good form and you're trying to get the mechanical tension, you're trying to recruit all those muscle fibers.
• 5:57
  Philip Pape: So if you take a few seconds to get braced properly and it helps you do that, so what?
• 6:02
  Philip Pape: Okay, so what?
• 6:03
  Philip Pape: I mean, if you were in a competition, you're only going to do a single anyway.
• 6:06
  Philip Pape: So on the big compound lifts, squats, deadlifts, especially, breathing and rebracing, like if you're wearing a belt and you really fill that up, that interabdominal pressure between reps is a very good technique.
• 6:17
  Philip Pape: So with a squat, that's where it's on your back.
• 6:19
  Philip Pape: Now I don't want you sitting there for 15, 20, 30 seconds and taking forever and shifting around and all of that.
• 6:24
  Philip Pape: I just want you to, you know, take that breath, get braced, go down.
• 6:28
  Philip Pape: It really shouldn't take more than two or three, maybe at most four seconds if you're really heavy and getting a little bit winded.
• 6:35
  Philip Pape: Now, improving your work capacity, because you know, having slightly better conditioning through things like speed work or just a decent amount of volume probably will make it such that you don't need as much time.
• 6:45
  Philip Pape: But there is a difference between like the respiration you need and the support you need through a big breath.
• 6:52
  Philip Pape: So I wouldn't overthink it.
• 6:53
  Philip Pape: Tim, you you're doing that, was a lot to answer your question, which I basically answered at the beginning, but I wanted people to understand the full context.
• 7:00
  Philip Pape: So that is the rest between reps question.
• 7:03
  Philip Pape: I wouldn't overthink it.
• 7:05
  Philip Pape: And that's it.
• 7:06
  Philip Pape: So moving on to the second question is from Ajana B.
• 7:09
  Philip Pape: And this is a really good, I'll say forward-looking question, trying to be proactive.
• 7:14
  Philip Pape: She says that she's strength training and eating whole foods right now.
• 7:17
  Philip Pape: And she's wondering when she eventually hits the perimenopausal stage, what effect that's going to have on her, given that she's built this foundation of good habits and fitness.
• 7:26
  Philip Pape: And I do love this question.
• 7:28
  Philip Pape: I think you're thinking ahead and probably hearing a lot of things online or social media, or, you know, there's a lot of fear-mongering as well about around perimenopause, which is the period that could last several decades for some women.
• 7:43
  Philip Pape: Some women, it's a lot shorter than that.
• 7:44
  Philip Pape: But what's actually happening during that transition, starting as early as, say, your mid-30s, for many women, it's in more like their mid-40s before they get to the menopause transition, usually around 50 or a little after that, estrogen starts to decline.
• 7:57
  Philip Pape: It gets a little bit more volatile, a little bit more erratic.
• 7:59
  Philip Pape: And estrogen has an important, you know, stimulus in the body.
• 8:03
  Philip Pape: It supports your muscle stem cells.
• 8:05
  Philip Pape: Those are the cells that repair and build muscle.
• 8:07
  Philip Pape: Estrogen supports your bone.
• 8:09
  Philip Pape: It helps, you know.
• 8:10
  Philip Pape: So when we hear about osteoporosis being more of an issue for women, that's why.
• 8:14
  Philip Pape: It helps keep fat in the lower body so that the like the more hip and thigh pattern instead of the abdominal fat around the organs.
• 8:21
  Philip Pape: So as estrogen drops, you tend to see on average accelerated muscle loss, accelerated bone loss.
• 8:26
  Philip Pape: Women can lose somewhere in the range of one to two percent of bone density a year in that transition.
• 8:32
  Philip Pape: And there's a shift toward more visceral fat and a little drop in insulin sensitivity.
• 8:38
  Philip Pape: And then sleep is often getting disrupted.
• 8:40
  Philip Pape: That affects your recovery.
• 8:42
  Philip Pape: Your lifestyle tends to be more stressful and more difficult on all these things as well.
• 8:47
  Philip Pape: And you know, it sounds kind of grim when I say it that way.
• 8:49
  Philip Pape: And honestly, the whole industry is built on selling against that fear.
• 8:54
  Philip Pape: But what's really fascinating and empowering about this, and this is how we're gonna reframe this.
• 9:00
  Philip Pape: I'm a big fan of reframing, not delusion, but literally just looking at it from the productive angle that's gonna help you.
• 9:07
  Philip Pape: Every single one of those changes I mentioned above is directly opposed to what you are already doing in our program and what we talk about on this show for that everyone should be doing.
• 9:17
  Philip Pape: And we also think there's a lot of confounding evidence in the in the literature that these things aren't necessarily caused by perimenopause and the hormone changes per se.
• 9:28
  Philip Pape: They're just correlated with many other things happening during that time of life that believe it or not, some of those things happen to men as well, like the muscle loss and the drop in bone density, which gives us even more evidence that you can control counteracting that with your lifestyle.
• 9:43
  Philip Pape: So lifting and lifting heavy, and again, heavy is a relative term.
• 9:47
  Philip Pape: When I say heavy, I simply mean heavy enough for you to make progressive, to progressively overload, to hit the mechanical tension.
• 9:52
  Philip Pape: That is the single best stimulus we have, stimulus we have to keep muscle and to keep bone, because mechanical load is what tells your bones we need to stay dense, have that dense matrix.
• 10:04
  Philip Pape: Adequate protein fights the muscle loss.
• 10:07
  Philip Pape: You know, eating whole foods, staying relatively lean without too much body fat, that keeps visceral fat low.
• 10:12
  Philip Pape: It helps with your insulin sensitivity.
• 10:14
  Philip Pape: Obviously, muscle helps with all of this as well.
• 10:16
  Philip Pape: So you're not starting from zero already, AJ, because you're doing so many great things and getting ready for that.
• 10:24
  Philip Pape: You are actually going to be in a better position, a better starting position.
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: Kind of like when someone has surgery and they've been lifting for a year.
• 10:31
  Philip Pape: Now they're super strong, they're in a much better position to recover.
• 10:33
  Philip Pape: Well, going into perimenopause, you're already way ahead of the game.
• 10:36
  Philip Pape: And by the way, anyone listening who hasn't started, today's the best day to start.
• 10:40
  Philip Pape: And you can reverse things, you can enhance things, you can build muscle till any age, till your 80s and 90s.
• 10:46
  Philip Pape: And so if you're already doing it, well, of course you have a head start with more muscle, denser bone, better insulin sensitivity, habits that are more automatic, or I should say behaviors that are automatic with a series of habits that you've developed.
• 10:58
  Philip Pape: So a woman who's built that foundation would have a different experience than a woman who is trying to do it for the first time when they're say 50 years old while dealing with other symptoms like hot flashes, bad sleep, and so on.
• 11:10
  Philip Pape: So it kind of makes sense, right?
• 11:12
  Philip Pape: But what do you actually have to adjust when you get to perimenopause?
• 11:16
  Philip Pape: Well, honestly, not much.
• 11:18
  Philip Pape: That's the good news.
• 11:19
  Philip Pape: You keep lifting heavy, you don't back off on the intensity.
• 11:22
  Philip Pape: That's, I guess, a lot of women have that instinct where they start to hear that you need to change things like uh how you eat, or you have to cut carbs or intermittent fast or something ridiculous like that.
• 11:31
  Philip Pape: That's often counterproductive.
• 11:33
  Philip Pape: You tend to have to eat more, a little bit more protein because of a little more anabolic resistance.
• 11:38
  Philip Pape: You know, you supplements like creatine are helpful.
• 11:41
  Philip Pape: We're going to talk about creatine later in this episode on the very next question.
• 11:45
  Philip Pape: You know, you still want to get plenty of sleep, if not more sleep.
• 11:48
  Philip Pape: You want to ramp your training appropriately, depending on what phase you're in, how much energy you have coming in, because your recovery might be more sensitive.
• 11:56
  Philip Pape: Maybe your bones and joints, you know, take a little more stress.
• 11:59
  Philip Pape: So you just have to be aware of it and have good form.
• 12:01
  Philip Pape: And I know you've been asking about form in the community as well.
• 12:03
  Philip Pape: So, bottom line, the foundation you're building right now is the best perimenopause insurance policy you could possibly have.
• 12:11
  Philip Pape: Keep doing what you're doing.
• 12:12
  Philip Pape: And for all those listening, I hope that inspires you to get on it today.
• 12:16
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 12:17
  Philip Pape: The next question, question three, is about creatine.
• 12:20
  Philip Pape: We love creatine.
• 12:21
  Philip Pape: So Denise M asked, and then and then a few others piled on, is creatine a benefit?
• 12:27
  Philip Pape: She said specifically, is creatine a benefit while doing eat more lift heavy?
• 12:31
  Philip Pape: And if so, is there a better time to take it anytime during the day or around the workout?
• 12:34
  Philip Pape: Short answer yes, creatine is one of the few supplements I'll recommend across the board.
• 12:39
  Philip Pape: When you get to, I forget which week of the program, it's like week 16.
• 12:43
  Philip Pape: There's a tool that I've developed that helps identify all the supplements that would be a good idea based on your specific situation.
• 12:49
  Philip Pape: And creatine is going to be on everybody's list.
• 12:51
  Philip Pape: I'll be honest, it's just gonna be there by default because it's good for anybody.
• 12:55
  Philip Pape: I want to break down the how though.
• 12:57
  Philip Pape: So dosage, very simple, five grams a day of creatine monohydrate.
• 13:02
  Philip Pape: That is it.
• 13:03
  Philip Pape: You don't have to do a loading phase.
• 13:05
  Philip Pape: You don't have you can take it with anything at any time.
• 13:09
  Philip Pape: In fact, I'll just mention timing real quiz real quick because she asked about that specifically.
• 13:14
  Philip Pape: Denise did.
• 13:15
  Philip Pape: It doesn't matter.
• 13:16
  Philip Pape: Daily consistency matters more than when you take it.
• 13:19
  Philip Pape: There, there has been a tiny bit of research that hints that post-workout has like some microscopic edge over pre-workout, but it's so small, it's probably not actually meaningful, let's just say.
• 13:31
  Philip Pape: So take it whenever you actually remember to take it.
• 13:34
  Philip Pape: Like I will take it, I tend to take it post-workout on my training days or with my lunch.
• 13:40
  Philip Pape: Like, I have a mix that I take with lunch so that I could take all my supplements and whatnot on my recovery days.
• 13:46
  Philip Pape: So whatever it works.
• 13:47
  Philip Pape: You know, people have talked about like caffeine and should you take it in hot beverages?
• 13:51
  Philip Pape: Is that gonna hurt it?
• 13:52
  Philip Pape: No, just take five grams a day.
• 13:54
  Philip Pape: There is some evidence that higher levels of creatine might have cognitive benefits.
• 14:00
  Philip Pape: I don't want to overstate that until we know more, but some people have asked about that.
• 14:04
  Philip Pape: I tend to take somewhere like 10 to 15 a day just uh for a little extra boost.
• 14:07
  Philip Pape: It's gonna get metabolized and excreted anyway.
• 14:10
  Philip Pape: And when you start taking creatine, this is the thing that freaks most people out.
• 14:15
  Philip Pape: So to all my members and eat more lift heavy, you know, you've heard you've heard this before, but to everybody listening, when you start creatine, the scale is going to go up almost inevitably.
• 14:25
  Philip Pape: Of very few people have I seen it not happen to.
• 14:27
  Philip Pape: For most people, it's gonna go up like two to four pounds.
• 14:30
  Philip Pape: Now, if you load it, like the old days, like if you take, if you take the loading phase, you might go up even more, but there's no need to load it.
• 14:36
  Philip Pape: So two to four pounds, it's not fat.
• 14:38
  Philip Pape: It's water being pulled into your muscle cells and muscle cells, and that's what you want.
• 14:41
  Philip Pape: That's a sign that it's actually working.
• 14:43
  Philip Pape: Your muscles are fuller, they're better hydrated, they function better.
• 14:46
  Philip Pape: That's why you get a few extra reps in the gym when you take creatine, you get more performance and more results.
• 14:51
  Philip Pape: So when you see that first, that bump in the first week or two, be like, okay, yeah, good, good thing.
• 14:57
  Philip Pape: That means the creatine's working.
• 14:59
  Philip Pape: I'm getting more muscle water.
• 15:01
  Philip Pape: And, you know, for a lot of people, it actually looks better.
• 15:03
  Philip Pape: It doesn't look bloated or puffy like some myths have held over the years.
• 15:07
  Philip Pape: It often looks better.
• 15:09
  Philip Pape: But you have to account for that, which is why I prefer taking creatine when you're at maintenance, so you can just allow for that bump to kind of normalize.
• 15:16
  Philip Pape: If you're tracking with something like Macrofactor, it might interpret it as a drop in expenditure temporarily, but then it comes back.
• 15:23
  Philip Pape: And then when we talk about, okay, is creatine even more helpful for older folks, especially women over 40 than for younger folks, younger guys, whatever.
• 15:31
  Philip Pape: Women have lower creatine stores to begin with.
• 15:34
  Philip Pape: And I found a two-year randomized control trial, okay, RCTs, we we love randomized controlled trials with humans.
• 15:40
  Philip Pape: And these were postmenopausal women, average age of 59, where creatine combined with resistance training helped maintain bone strength at the hip, the femoral neck, the femoral neck of the hip, which is the part that's very, very important for fracture risk.
• 15:56
  Philip Pape: So they weren't looking at bone, not just muscle, which is very interesting.
• 15:59
  Philip Pape: So take take take for that what it is.
• 16:01
  Philip Pape: Feel free to look up the evidence yourself.
• 16:03
  Philip Pape: I haven't really deep dived into that aspect, but if you're anybody, if you're a woman who lifting through perimenopause, menopause, creatine is definitely going to be helpful for you.
• 16:11
  Philip Pape: Nobody should shy away from it unless they're, for example, allergic to it, which is very, very rare.
• 16:15
  Philip Pape: Five grams a day, easy peasy, lemon squeezy as they say.
• 16:19
  Philip Pape: So I think this is a good place for me to mention something because all of the questions today came from inside Eat More Lift Heavy.
• 16:26
  Philip Pape: And I just want to explain what that is, real quick, for folks who are curious.
• 16:30
  Philip Pape: It is my 26-week coached program.
• 16:32
  Philip Pape: We have another coach in the program, Coach Carol.
• 16:34
  Philip Pape: She's amazing.
• 16:36
  Philip Pape: She's a women's and hormone and thyroid expert who's also really good with like recipes and meals and nutrition.
• 16:42
  Philip Pape: And she actually jumped into the comment thread to talk a lot about the glute training, which we're gonna talk about in a little bit.
• 16:49
  Philip Pape: That's actually the next question.
• 16:50
  Philip Pape: But about the program, it's not a meal plan and a workout.
• 16:54
  Philip Pape: It is a 26-week program where every week you learn a skill and you develop the skills over time, and then we have you apply those skills and we give you feedback.
• 17:03
  Philip Pape: So it's across three phases.
• 17:05
  Philip Pape: The first one is called stop guessing, where we get your nutrition and training dialed in with the right level of tracking and measurement for you.
• 17:12
  Philip Pape: And I know if tracking people are like, oh, tracking, just note that we make it flexible enough that it works for you and we get you, you know, uh seeing the results of the tracking and how they help you make better decisions.
• 17:24
  Philip Pape: And everybody who comes through tends to, I shouldn't say everybody, but almost everybody who comes through tends to realize, oh my gosh, this is what I've been missing.
• 17:31
  Philip Pape: It's actually not that hard and doesn't take much time at all to track these things, but I get tremendous benefit from it.
• 17:38
  Philip Pape: And we show you what tools to use, how to use them, how to interpret the numbers.
• 17:41
  Philip Pape: That's the first phase.
• 17:42
  Philip Pape: The second phase we call eat more lift heavy.
• 17:44
  Philip Pape: That's where you really just focus on building that muscle, that metabolic capacity, that that just great lifestyle and health for movement and training and eating that will pay off long term.
• 17:55
  Philip Pape: And then the final phase we call trust yourself.
• 17:57
  Philip Pape: You learn to run your own, I'll say your own physique, but basically you're learning to be more autonomous and independent with a lot more advanced tools that we give you, as well as things that you can use on your own.
• 18:09
  Philip Pape: So you can make the decisions and then you can get us to help you with the feedback on that.
• 18:13
  Philip Pape: And that last phase is the whole point because I don't want you to be dependent.
• 18:17
  Philip Pape: I want you to know how your body works, why it works the way it does, how to gain and lose body fat, how to build muscle, how to measure it all successfully.
• 18:24
  Philip Pape: And then you're kind of off on your own, or you go to the next phase and keep leveling it up from there.
• 18:28
  Philip Pape: So the reason these questions today are so good from our members in EM in Eat More Lift Heavy is, you know, they've gone past the basics and they're asking deeper questions.
• 18:39
  Philip Pape: And I get that from a lot of listeners as well who've been listening to the show and been training, following their nutrition, doing the thing.
• 18:45
  Philip Pape: Guys, this is a skill.
• 18:46
  Philip Pape: This takes effort, this takes uh time.
• 18:48
  Philip Pape: I've had folks write in who, you know, they've never used my services in any way, but they've listened to the show and they said, you know what, I've tried some cuts, I've tried some bulks, I've tracked like you've suggested, I've I've been very thoughtful and intentional about it.
• 19:01
  Philip Pape: Just, and look, I've had some great outcome.
• 19:03
  Philip Pape: And you know, my response to them is heck yeah, more power to you.
• 19:07
  Philip Pape: I love to see it and tell the world we need to inspire more people to do this stuff because everyone can do it.
• 19:12
  Philip Pape: I don't care if you're a man, woman, what age, menopause, doesn't matter.
• 19:16
  Philip Pape: You can get the results you want.
• 19:17
  Philip Pape: Okay, let's talk about glutes, everybody's uh favorite topic.
• 19:21
  Philip Pape: Or a lot of people, I'll say people, but let's be honest, a lot of women ask about glutes.
• 19:25
  Philip Pape: It just is what it is.
• 19:26
  Philip Pape: And the question from Desiree is what are the best exercises to grow glutes?
• 19:31
  Philip Pape: How often, how many sets and reps?
• 19:33
  Philip Pape: Uh, we've had several episodes in the past, and I've had some guests on talking about glutes.
• 19:37
  Philip Pape: And, you know, remember, this is the general, the general answer to anything about how do I grow something is not just about exercise selection.
• 19:46
  Philip Pape: It's also about the principles that underlie training in general.
• 19:49
  Philip Pape: But we're I do want to get specific about glutes.
• 19:52
  Philip Pape: And then JC jumped in with a follow-up that I think a lot of women are thinking about, which was hey, she wants a fit-toned shape.
• 19:59
  Philip Pape: She doesn't want her quads to get too huge, she wants the right, we'll say symmetry.
• 20:03
  Philip Pape: She doesn't want to get, she doesn't want to look ripped or like she got a, in her words, a certain kind of surgical enhancement.
• 20:10
  Philip Pape: She just wants the glutes to grow without everything else blowing up.
• 20:15
  Philip Pape: And you know what?
• 20:15
  Philip Pape: I could personally identify with that, JC, because as a man, I genetically have a larger derriere.
• 20:21
  Philip Pape: Hopefully that's not too much information, but for a man, that may not always be a good thing if I'm doing a ton of squats and it's like out of proportion, right?
• 20:28
  Philip Pape: And I think I get what you're talking about.
• 20:30
  Philip Pape: So let me talk about the training first and then the I don't want to get bulky or blow up other parts of my body part second.
• 20:36
  Philip Pape: They're like two different questions.
• 20:38
  Philip Pape: So the glutes, the glutes grow from loaded hip extension.
• 20:44
  Philip Pape: Okay, that is the movement pattern.
• 20:46
  Philip Pape: So your best exercises are things like Romanian deadlifts, hip thrusts, regular deadlifts, hip extensions, cable pull throughs, even cable and band kickbacks.
• 20:58
  Philip Pape: So Carol mentioned that in the post in our community when she was providing specifics.
• 21:03
  Philip Pape: Because again, if you want to grow something beyond average and you really want to get enough volume, you want to hit it from different angles at different positions, like lengthened, shortened positions and enough, you know, enough volume, right?
• 21:16
  Philip Pape: Enough frequency and volume.
• 21:18
  Philip Pape: So it's it's nice that we have all these different exercises to choose from.
• 21:22
  Philip Pape: Now, you might hear that hip thrusts light up the glutes more than squats on the muscle activation tests, right?
• 21:28
  Philip Pape: And that's true.
• 21:29
  Philip Pape: Muscle activation is way higher.
• 21:32
  Philip Pape: But I don't like isolating conversations to just muscle activation.
• 21:37
  Philip Pape: If anyone is making a claim on social media that that's the main variable we care about, they're they're like 10 years out of bed with what really moves the needle here.
• 21:47
  Philip Pape: This is the nuance, this is the evidence.
• 21:49
  Philip Pape: When you look at the training studies that measure actual growth over time with MRI, okay, actually looking at your body composition, hip thrusts, and score.
• 21:59
  Philip Pape: Squats grow the glutes about the same.
• 22:02
  Philip Pape: So activation, muscle activation does not perfectly predict visual muscle growth and size in and of itself.
• 22:09
  Philip Pape: What you need is both.
• 22:11
  Philip Pape: You need both form, you know, both movement patterns.
• 22:13
  Philip Pape: You need multiple movement patterns here.
• 22:15
  Philip Pape: And that makes sense because you just need to use hip dominant stuff and squat pattern stuff and kind of make it all work together.
• 22:22
  Philip Pape: Now there's a bunch of other exercises I didn't even mention, like I don't know, step ups and reverse lunges and walking lunges and all of that.
• 22:28
  Philip Pape: That could also help.
• 22:29
  Philip Pape: And what's cool about it is there's so much flexibility that as long as you have enough different exercises at frequency and volume and you're training hard progressively overload, you're probably going to be good.
• 22:40
  Philip Pape: And that's honestly the training hard part and the doing it consistently part is usually where people are not doing it and therefore their glutes aren't growing.
• 22:48
  Philip Pape: I've known people that they just do a basic program with squats.
• 22:51
  Philip Pape: You know, women just and their butt blows up because they're they're lifting heavy with squats, and I'm talking low bar squats that use all the hip musculature.
• 22:59
  Philip Pape: But it all depends.
• 23:00
  Philip Pape: It all depends.
• 23:01
  Philip Pape: So frequency-wise, you're gonna want to train those muscle groups specifically two to three times a week.
• 23:07
  Philip Pape: It's kind of the sweet spot.
• 23:09
  Philip Pape: You're gonna aim for 10 to 20 hard sets a week.
• 23:11
  Philip Pape: So the higher you get, the higher dose response, but it's it's diminishing returns.
• 23:16
  Philip Pape: So if you really have the time in the gym and you really want to dedicate, you know, aim for that 20 sets.
• 23:21
  Philip Pape: You may be more or less responsive to someone else.
• 23:24
  Philip Pape: Sometimes women respond to a little bit more volume.
• 23:27
  Philip Pape: That's on average, just speaking, generally, for you, you may not need 20 sets, you may need 15.
• 23:33
  Philip Pape: Um, heavy compound work in there, you know, in the 6 to 12 rep range, let's say you've got the accessory stuff like the kickbacks, pull throughs, and stuff, maybe in the 15 to 20 plus range.
• 23:44
  Philip Pape: Um, doesn't have to be, but in a range where you can have really good form and really feel it and get that mechanical tension and get close to failure, and then progress it over a few months.
• 23:54
  Philip Pape: So we're talking 8, 12, 16 weeks, just run that program straight out and see what happens.
• 24:00
  Philip Pape: Now, you're gonna want to measure them as well, right?
• 24:02
  Philip Pape: And so I'm gonna I'm gonna pivot to JC's part of the glutes question, which is how do you grow the glutes without the quads taking over?
• 24:10
  Philip Pape: And of course, you want to be measuring your glutes, measuring your thighs.
• 24:14
  Philip Pape: Like if you really care about that level of detail, you've got to measure them with circumference measurements on a regular basis to just validate what's happening and try to offset other variables like food and sleep and inflammation and things like that.
• 24:27
  Philip Pape: But for growing the glutes specifically, you want to isolate them more.
• 24:31
  Philip Pape: That's really what it comes down to.
• 24:32
  Philip Pape: You're gonna you're gonna go lean into like the hip dominant movements, hip thrusts, RDLs, kickbacks, pull throughs, because those all load the glutes and barely touch the quad.
• 24:41
  Philip Pape: So you just want to look at the exercises and shift around the number of sets that are hitting the X, the, the muscle group that you want to outpace the other muscle group.
• 24:52
  Philip Pape: Now, I have heard some coaches say, just cut out altogether things that hit a muscle group that you think is already too big.
• 25:01
  Philip Pape: And there's logic there, isn't there?
• 25:03
  Philip Pape: There is some logic to that.
• 25:04
  Philip Pape: I wouldn't want you to get what they call imbalance, but that's very hard to do if you're doing regular movement patterns on a regular basis anyway.
• 25:11
  Philip Pape: You can go a little lighter on the deep, like knee dominant stuff, the deep squats, the leg presses that drive a lot of a lot of the quad growth.
• 25:19
  Philip Pape: You know, if you've got a lot of, it's not really so much about the lightness, though, as the effective reps or the number of um hard sets and reps.
• 25:26
  Philip Pape: So it's really more about volume.
• 25:28
  Philip Pape: You can kind of lower the volume on those and shift that volume more to the hands and the glutes, right?
• 25:33
  Philip Pape: You can't perfectly isolate the glute from the leg, right?
• 25:37
  Philip Pape: Nobody can do that.
• 25:38
  Philip Pape: We're a system, but you can bias the ratio.
• 25:41
  Philip Pape: You can make the glutes the priority and the quads then come along for the ride.
• 25:44
  Philip Pape: So again, Carol gave specifics in the group on like, do these specific exercises.
• 25:50
  Philip Pape: Here's a program.
• 25:50
  Philip Pape: We've got a glute and leg program in our in Eat More with Lift Heavy as well.
• 25:54
  Philip Pape: We've got all that stuff.
• 25:56
  Philip Pape: That's like the mechanics of the specifics, but I wanted to hit on the principles.
• 25:59
  Philip Pape: Now, the big fear behind JC's question about not wanting to get bulky.
• 26:04
  Philip Pape: Um, I think that was part of the question.
• 26:06
  Philip Pape: I want to put this one to rest because women already have less muscle than men, just in an absolute terms.
• 26:12
  Philip Pape: Women also have more body fat.
• 26:13
  Philip Pape: The women, female body, it's it's not designed to get bulky, is kind of the way I'm gonna put it.
• 26:18
  Philip Pape: It's very, very, very hard.
• 26:20
  Philip Pape: You're not gonna accidentally get big and bulky, let's say.
• 26:24
  Philip Pape: The toned look that a lot of women want that you're describing, that is a function of proper hard training, plenty of heavy work, training close to failure, enough fat loss to see the muscles.
• 26:38
  Philip Pape: If anything, what you might be worried about is when you gain some fat, some body fat, or you're eating a lot and you're in a surplus, and then you get a little bit bigger or bloated or puffy or whatever from body fat.
• 26:49
  Philip Pape: Well, that happens to men and women, right?
• 26:50
  Philip Pape: That but that's not really bulk, that's body fat, that's not from muscles.
• 26:53
  Philip Pape: Um, now, granted, having more muscles, could it push that out a little bit more?
• 26:57
  Philip Pape: Yes.
• 26:57
  Philip Pape: But I've never seen a woman that is not taking enhanced, you know, drugs that looks bulky, at least in my opinion, from from a male who, you know, I'm married with a wife, so I'm a straight guy who finds women attractive.
• 27:11
  Philip Pape: And all I'm saying is that from my point of view, I've never seen a bulky woman who trains and build muscle.
• 27:17
  Philip Pape: So that's kind of my thought, all right?
• 27:19
  Philip Pape: And I joke about it that as a man, I wish I could get quote unquote bulky.
• 27:23
  Philip Pape: Now, I I can definitely put on the fat, but it takes a lot of work to put on muscle.
• 27:28
  Philip Pape: You have to train hard, and it's gonna take years and years and years to put on muscle.
• 27:31
  Philip Pape: And for women, it's gonna give you the toned look you want.
• 27:35
  Philip Pape: And if you want to get ripped or shredded or whatever, that's just a function of leanness and body fat.
• 27:39
  Philip Pape: We're not even gonna go there right now.
• 27:40
  Philip Pape: All right, the next one is one of those questions where I think the answer is the opposite of what a lot of people hear.
• 27:47
  Philip Pape: And uh, JC asked on a zero to 10 scale, how important is it to eat protein right after lifting?
• 27:53
  Philip Pape: What's what can be held back or what can stall if you don't do that?
• 27:58
  Philip Pape: She changed her workout time.
• 28:00
  Philip Pape: She's now going to the gym after dinner around 7:30 or 8 o'clock at night, and she doesn't want to eat a big heavy meal when she gets home.
• 28:06
  Philip Pape: So she asked.
• 28:07
  Philip Pape: And I said, that's maybe a three out of 10, maybe a two out of 10.
• 28:11
  Philip Pape: Uh, this is the famous anabolic window, the idea that you've got this narrow, like 30 to 60 minute window after training where you have to slam in your protein, or then you you waste the workout, or you don't get as much muscle protein synthesis or whatever.
• 28:25
  Philip Pape: And a lot of people believe that for many years.
• 28:27
  Philip Pape: And we know how much body, you know, bodybuilders way back in the day believed in tons of protein and the raw eggs right after your workout and all that.
• 28:35
  Philip Pape: But the actual research, there is a a well-known meta-analysis on this, found that once you account for total daily protein, there is no magic anabolic window.
• 28:46
  Philip Pape: It's it, if there is, it's more like many hours on both sides of your workout, which is awesome.
• 28:53
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 28:54
  Philip Pape: And the part that I think is great for JC, for your situation, is that a protein-rich meal will keep your amino acids elevated in your blood for many, many hours.
• 29:03
  Philip Pape: So if you ate dinner and you train right after dinner, your body's still digesting and using that protein all the way through your workout and after it.
• 29:09
  Philip Pape: So you're totally covered.
• 29:11
  Philip Pape: The pre-workout meal is covering the post-workout window.
• 29:14
  Philip Pape: So if you eat a second big meal at nine o'clock, it's not really going to do anything for you.
• 29:17
  Philip Pape: It's why you don't need to do the pre-bed casing protein.
• 29:20
  Philip Pape: It is why I recommend a lot of people do not train fasted or at least experiment with training fasted versus not training fasted.
• 29:27
  Philip Pape: But if you do train fasted and you had a huge dinner the night before, not huge, but like you had a decent dinner with plenty of protein and carbs, especially the night before, some of that even carries through to the next day a little bit.
• 29:38
  Philip Pape: So, what actually matters, JC, is not the timing, it's the total protein.
• 29:42
  Philip Pape: That is really the game.
• 29:43
  Philip Pape: That's like 90, 95% of the equation.
• 29:45
  Philip Pape: Hit that target consistently, spread it across your meals, mainly for practicality purposes and potentially a tiny, tiny edge, but don't worry about the workout timing when it comes to the protein.
• 29:57
  Philip Pape: If you want something small after, like a small shake or some Greek yogurt, it's fine, but you don't have to force a heavy meal down at night.
• 30:05
  Philip Pape: Just get your sleep.
• 30:07
  Philip Pape: Like that's what I would recommend is focus on the sleep.
• 30:09
  Philip Pape: All right, we got one question left, the one about how fast you lose your gains.
• 30:14
  Philip Pape: Before I get to that, just a reminder about how to submit your question to the podcast.
• 30:20
  Philip Pape: Every question today came from a listener.
• 30:23
  Philip Pape: In this case, all of our listeners were also members of Eat More Lift Heavy, but we definitely air questions for listeners and we make entire episodes based on listener questions.
• 30:33
  Philip Pape: I really love these because that way I know you are thinking of something specific that you're not sure of the answer to or have not heard a good answer to out in the world.
• 30:42
  Philip Pape: And a lot of other people are thinking about it as well.
• 30:45
  Philip Pape: So if you've been chewing on something, if you saw a claim online, a piece of advice you're not sure about, you want another opinion, something about your own training that doesn't seem to make sense, send it to me.
• 30:56
  Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.com slash question.
• 30:58
  Philip Pape: That's wits and weights.com slash question.
• 31:00
  Philip Pape: Give me as many details as you can, especially your own personal contacts, so I can help you out directly, not just a general question.
• 31:07
  Philip Pape: I always reply to the emails directly.
• 31:09
  Philip Pape: And then if you want, I can give you a shout out on the show.
• 31:12
  Philip Pape: You can select whether you want a shout out when you submit the question.
• 31:15
  Philip Pape: So go to witsandweights.com slash question.
• 31:18
  Philip Pape: Okay, speaking of questions, last question.
• 31:20
  Philip Pape: How fast do you lose your gains?
• 31:22
  Philip Pape: So this is also from JC.
• 31:24
  Philip Pape: She asked, How many days of not working out before you start losing your gains?
• 31:28
  Philip Pape: And I told her about two to three weeks, but I want to expand on the details.
• 31:32
  Philip Pape: This is a very anxiety-inducing question everyone has because we're always having things that come up in our life that force us to take a break in some way, right?
• 31:41
  Philip Pape: My my brother and parents visited for a week, almost a week and a half, and I worked out the morning that they arrived so that I could get in a workout in knowing I probably wouldn't train most, if not at all, while they were here, which turned out to be the case.
• 31:56
  Philip Pape: You know, we were just all over the place, we were exhausted, we were traveling, everything.
• 32:00
  Philip Pape: But then I fit one more in during the middle of it.
• 32:02
  Philip Pape: But sometimes I'll go a week, week and a half without training.
• 32:05
  Philip Pape: And a lot of people, when they take time off, there's probably more of a psychological panic than a physiological change, especially if you're into training.
• 32:15
  Philip Pape: Like you once you get into this game, once you get into lifting regularly, you love doing it.
• 32:18
  Philip Pape: You you enjoy doing it, you know that the results are there.
• 32:21
  Philip Pape: And you know, you start to feel a little bad when you take time off.
• 32:23
  Philip Pape: Because you're like, I don't, what am I doing?
• 32:25
  Philip Pape: Am I setting myself back?
• 32:27
  Philip Pape: And you might look in the mirror and say, okay, I'm looking flatter, smaller, like from a muscle perspective, you think you're like deflated, right?
• 32:33
  Philip Pape: Have you ever had that feeling?
• 32:34
  Philip Pape: I've had that feeling.
• 32:35
  Philip Pape: You know, I look at my chest and I'm like, oh, it's like I don't have a as big of a chest.
• 32:39
  Philip Pape: What you're probably seeing though, in that first week without training, is a reduction in glycogen and water from your muscle because you don't have the training stimulus.
• 32:48
  Philip Pape: So it's more like a deflated balloon, not a you lost the balloon.
• 32:52
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 32:53
  Philip Pape: As soon as you start training and eating normal again, normally again, it fills back up really, really fast.
• 32:59
  Philip Pape: And I know this both anecdotally and in the research, but anecdotally, what's interesting, or I guess this is supported by research as well, people who are detrained for years.
• 33:10
  Philip Pape: So they haven't trained for years, their muscle comes back fast as well.
• 33:13
  Philip Pape: So, I mean, if that can happen, imagine how much faster it must be if you only take a week off.
• 33:18
  Philip Pape: Also imagine how much you gain in a week.
• 33:21
  Philip Pape: Are you gonna lose any more than that in a week?
• 33:23
  Philip Pape: Yeah, you know what I mean?
• 33:24
  Philip Pape: So it's not, it's not much at all, even if it were that, but it isn't that.
• 33:28
  Philip Pape: So the actual muscle mass, you hold on to that a lot longer than you would think.
• 33:32
  Philip Pape: The research tells us that trained people can take one to two weeks off completely, zero training, and lose essentially zero muscle.
• 33:41
  Philip Pape: So your strength then holds a little bit longer for about two to three weeks, even up to four weeks, you know, the strength, because that's more neuromuscular.
• 33:49
  Philip Pape: Those are movement patterns that's wired into your brain.
• 33:51
  Philip Pape: Real meaningful muscle loss usually doesn't start until past that three to four week mark of doing nothing.
• 33:59
  Philip Pape: And then there's this muscle memory, right?
• 34:01
  Philip Pape: This is a real thing.
• 34:02
  Philip Pape: It's not gym, Jim Bro, what do we call it, bro science.
• 34:06
  Philip Pape: When you build muscle, okay, and oh man, that we had a great conversation.
• 34:09
  Philip Pape: Who was on the show?
• 34:10
  Philip Pape: I wish I could remember, or did was this a solo episode?
• 34:13
  Philip Pape: Well, anyway, when you build muscle, you add nuclei to your muscle cells, and those nuclei stay even when your muscle reduces in size, when it I'll say shrinks when you're not training.
• 34:24
  Philip Pape: And there's research showing that those nuclei are retained for many, many months.
• 34:27
  Philip Pape: So even if you lose some size on the long break, it snaps back really, really fast, way faster than it took to build, because the memory is still there.
• 34:35
  Philip Pape: The cellular memory or machinery, if you want to call it, is still there, just waiting to be sort of reactivated and refilled up.
• 34:41
  Philip Pape: Now, the practical version of all of this is probably more of a thing that you should care about.
• 34:47
  Philip Pape: When life blows up your training because of travel, because of a sick week, because work is just crazy, because family's visiting, you don't have time.
• 34:56
  Philip Pape: You don't have to have your entire program to hold on to the muscle.
• 35:02
  Philip Pape: You actually only need a tiny bit of volume.
• 35:06
  Philip Pape: So, as little as, for example, one session a week, sometimes a third or less of your normal volume.
• 35:11
  Philip Pape: I've heard of it as little as one eighth, but I wouldn't go that extreme.
• 35:14
  Philip Pape: That's basically just taking it off.
• 35:16
  Philip Pape: So as long as the intensity is up, if you have like one session, a few hard sets for your legs, pushing, pulling, right?
• 35:22
  Philip Pape: Just a simple upper or full body and you're still training close to failure and all that, maybe 20 minutes, then you're gonna do an even better job of maintaining.
• 35:31
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying you have to do that.
• 35:33
  Philip Pape: I'm just trying to say it's so little that like what I did when my folks visited, I just squeezed in that one morning session while everybody was still sleeping, just got it done.
• 35:42
  Philip Pape: It was, it actually felt really good.
• 35:44
  Philip Pape: You may not be able to do that, but honestly, even if you're in a hotel, if you're somewhere without a gym, there's some basic movement you can do.
• 35:50
  Philip Pape: But you don't even have to because we know that most of this is maintained for at least one to two, if not three or four weeks, and then it comes back super, super fast.
• 35:57
  Philip Pape: That is the takeaway.
• 35:59
  Philip Pape: If you feel a little flat, if you feel a little bad or untrained, whatever, it's mostly psychologically, psychological with a little bit of a fluid mechanics going on.
• 36:08
  Philip Pape: And then you come back.
• 36:10
  Philip Pape: I would say you start with roughly where you ended if it's only been a week or two.
• 36:15
  Philip Pape: Some people find they're even they feel stronger when they come back because they needed the recovery.
• 36:19
  Philip Pape: But if if it feels kind of sluggish and hard, you can drop off the intensity by maybe 10%, you know, like the load by maybe 10%.
• 36:26
  Philip Pape: But it's gonna come back right really fast.
• 36:28
  Philip Pape: The minimum effective dose is way, way lower than what you might have thought.
• 36:34
  Philip Pape: So that's it.
• 36:35
  Philip Pape: I'm just answering questions today and nothing else.
• 36:39
  Philip Pape: And if you want to submit your question, go to witsandweights.com slash question.
• 36:42
  Philip Pape: I'll give you a shout out on the show.
• 36:44
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 36:47
  Philip Pape: And remember, the people asking the best questions are the ones who keep getting better.
• 36:50
  Philip Pape: So keep asking them.
• 36:52
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.