Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Your Secret Weapon for Fat Loss is NOT a Calorie Deficit or Macros | Ep 314

Transcript

Your Secret Weapon for Fat Loss is NOT a Calorie Deficit or Macros | Ep 314 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: You've been told that fat loss is made in the kitchen, with a calorie deficit combined with strength training to hold on to your muscle.
• 0:07
  Philip Pape: But what if that's completely backward?
• 0:09
  Philip Pape: What if building muscle must come first in your transformation journey if it's really going to work?
• 0:15
  Philip Pape: Your metabolism, your insulin sensitivity, your hunger signals and, yes, your ability to shed stubborn fat is tied into how much muscle you have, and most fit pros aren't going to tell you this because it challenges the industry's eat less, move more mantra and what they're trying to push, which is generally weight loss.
• 0:33
  Philip Pape: Today's episode reveals why strength training creates the metabolic engine that makes fat loss almost effortless by comparison and gives you a framework to finally get those lasting results.
• 0:44
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.
• 1:04
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, philip Pape, and today's episode is something special because I recently had the opportunity to be interviewed on the Be Rad podcast with Brad Kearns, former world-ranked professional triathlete, guinness World Record holder and New York Times bestselling author.
• 1:20
  Philip Pape: And this is around the time.
• 1:21
  Philip Pape: I read his book, co-written with Mark Sisson, called Born to Walk, and he had me on his show because we wanted to tackle one of the most persistent misconceptions or myths in fitness the idea that calorie restriction and diet should be your first priority for fat loss, or indeed that quote unquote fat loss itself should be the first thing you do.
• 1:41
  Philip Pape: Instead, we explored why building muscle through strength training is the foundation upon which all successful body transformations are built.
• 1:51
  Philip Pape: So why wait?
• 1:53
  Philip Pape: This discussion aligns perfectly with what I've been teaching for years on this show that a muscle-centric approach creates the metabolic conditions for easier fat loss.
• 2:04
  Philip Pape: Approach creates the metabolic conditions for easier fat loss, for better health, for long-term sustainability.
• 2:09
  Philip Pape: Rather than create another entirely new episode on this topic, I wanted to share this conversation because I essentially hit the juggler Is that the term?
• 2:16
  Philip Pape: I went straight for the juggler when it talks to the principles that I regularly discuss anyway, and I think it's a great encapsulation of that.
• 2:25
  Philip Pape: If you enjoy this episode, all I ask is go ahead and hit follow on Wits and Weights if you haven't already, and that way you'll catch every episode when they come out on Mondays, wednesdays and Fridays.
• 2:35
  Philip Pape: And then go ahead and follow Brad's podcast Be Rad with Brad Kearns, and I love his podcast because of the aspect he takes when it comes to cardiovascular fitness and endurance, especially from the perspective he comes from.
• 2:47
  Philip Pape: All right, so here we go.
• 2:49
  Philip Pape: Here's my conversation with Brad Kearns about why building muscle first is your secret weapon for effective fat loss.
• 2:56
  Philip Pape: Philip Pape, we are here.
• 2:59
  Philip Pape: We are here.
• 3:00
  Philip Pape: Good to see you again, brad.
• 3:02
  Brad Kearns: I had so much fun joining you on your fabulous podcast Wits and Weights, where we talked about the book Born to Walk and a broad-based approach to functional fitness, and so I said we got to get over to B-Rad and get in deep with the great work you're doing over there, especially as you describe your, I guess, quantified and analytical approach to proper fitness protocols.
• 3:25
  Brad Kearns: And I've always been kind of a intuitive style athlete and not getting deep into a regimented approach because I know that doesn't work for me from experience.
• 3:36
  Brad Kearns: But I also realize when I'm performing or pursuing these complex goals, like trying to be a sprinter in the old man's division and dealing with minor injuries and aches and pains and things that set me back that you really have to be careful and strategic with your dispensation of energy in order to progress with fitness.
• 3:56
  Brad Kearns: So I thought we could get into that background mission statement of your podcast and then some of the the fun things that you've learned as a host and fun topics that really have resonated with your, your listeners.
• 4:11
  Brad Kearns: How's that for an intro man?
• 4:13
  Philip Pape: yeah, man, that's a great intro.
• 4:15
  Philip Pape: It's funny.
• 4:16
  Philip Pape: I just heard you talking on your show about um you were talking to one of the greatest runners of all time and how she has an intuitive approach.
• 4:24
  Philip Pape: And I get these comments all the time from folks that say, well, I'm not a data person, I'm not um, I'm not an engineer, I don't think that way.
• 4:31
  Philip Pape: And yet I've talked to experts who are professional bodybuilders, competitive bodybuilders, who had one point in their life where they said, look, I need to buckle down and use some sort of tracking or measurement just to know where I am and to calibrate where I am first, and build that skill and build that intuition, and then, at some point in their lives, they have that level of intuition that they don't need to do it anymore.
• 4:52
  Philip Pape: So I hear what you're saying, man.
• 4:54
  Philip Pape: I could go both directions and the spectrum is wide and I'm all about flexibility.
• 4:59
  Philip Pape: So, yeah, let's get into it.
• 5:01
  Brad Kearns: Yeah, you were talking about Shelby Houlihan, the American record holder at middle Distance, who just came back from a four-year layoff, and I was really blown away about how she mentioned that intuitive approach and just getting out the door and running at whatever pace she felt like.
• 5:18
  Brad Kearns: And so here's like one of the fastest female runners in the world who, if you were training with her, you'd be like how fast are we going today?
• 5:25
  Brad Kearns: I don't know, we'll see.
• 5:26
  Brad Kearns: And it was really a profound insight.
• 5:28
  Brad Kearns: But at the same time, she's working with the greatest coaches on the planet who have a very, very refined and sophisticated approach.
• 5:35
  Brad Kearns: I had Grant Fisher's coach on my show, michael Scannell, old friend of mine, who I used to race with in a professional duathlon, and he reported how they sat down in November and plotted out his path to the Paris Olympics and where he had the magnificent performance of winning two bronze medals in both the long distance events of 5,000 and 10,000.
• 5:57
  Brad Kearns: But he had every workout planned from November to August 4th for the first race and August 9th for the second race.
• 6:04
  Brad Kearns: And that was fascinating and he said he was so structured and so focused that he hit basically every single workout.
• 6:10
  Brad Kearns: So that's the sign of a really well-informed training program If you can lock in and perform every workout as desired.
• 6:18
  Brad Kearns: But of course, for the average recreational enthusiast that's listening to wits and weights or trying to get out there and stay fit and as well as coach soccer and perform in the in the corporate setting, uh, that's when we have to.
• 6:30
  Brad Kearns: We're forced to have a more fluid approach, but we still might benefit from that foundation of structure and quantification yeah, I think there's a place for guardrails.
• 6:40
  Philip Pape: while being simplified and also the the intuitive aspect in terms of, let's say, your biofeedback, how your sleep is, your stress, your digestion, your hunger, those things can be quantified, even though they're subjective, and so you're kind of melding the two together just to give yourself an idea of where the heck you're landing right now, to even make a decision from and have informed data.
• 7:05
  Brad Kearns: What kind of stuff is important, like if someone came in as a new client who's proclaimed a desire to get fit and they're doing a little bit of this and that, but now they want to get into a program.
• 7:15
  Philip Pape: Yes, I help with clients with strength training, body composition, fat loss, and it's funny because we do.
• 7:20
  Philip Pape: We have a lot of the same approach when it comes to getting stress off of the body through potentially reducing the amount of cardio and, uh, how much you're working out and also training in a way that gives you more recovery.
• 7:33
  Philip Pape: Especially as we age, people complain about, you know, their joints, um, and injuries and health issues, and they're stressed because of life and their family.
• 7:41
  Philip Pape: They have families, like you said, because of life, and they are family.
• 7:45
  Philip Pape: They have families, like you said, gen pop, we have, you know, two jobs or running a business and parents, and so, um, when we start, I I just like to spend two months baselining what you're doing and giving you your own self-awareness of how much you're eating, what you're eating, the composition of the food, some of the micronutrients and the fiber, um, how the movement and the training you're doing affects your recovery, because I don't want to say, hey, here's the best program for you on day one if I don't even know you yet.
• 8:10
  Philip Pape: I do an intake but I don't really know.
• 8:12
  Philip Pape: I want to see how your expenditure and your metabolism responds to the things you're doing.
• 8:17
  Philip Pape: I want to understand how your hunger and your sleep responds, because after two months you may be in a great position to build muscle rather than try to diet and lose fat and have the best outcome that way.
• 8:27
  Philip Pape: We just don't know until we have that initial, you know data set.
• 8:30
  Philip Pape: So having a coach to guide that uh, you know with you, it's kind of like the analogy you said with these elite athletes.
• 8:36
  Philip Pape: Even a gen pop person can have that person in their corner and take off some of the mental stress and even emotional stress, right when they can be the person that you can unload to, and all you got to do is just enter the numbers and your coach can kind of help you understand what the numbers mean and then you can make decisions from there.
• 8:54
  Brad Kearns: What is a gen pop person?
• 8:58
  Philip Pape: Oh, what do you mean Like general population?
• 9:00
  Brad Kearns: I just oh gen pop Okay, I thought you were going to say like gen X, gen Y and gen pop, like for old old mans or whatever.
• 9:07
  Brad Kearns: Yeah.
• 9:07
  Philip Pape: Okay, gotcha General population Is dropping excess body fat, the preeminent goal that you see the intent is the person's thought when they come to me weight loss or building muscle and we have to reframe it, and that's one thing we can get into is we reframe weight loss away from scale weight and to body composition, metabolic health and having a muscle-centric approach to health and physique.
• 9:37
  Brad Kearns: So maybe you can go deep on that term.
• 9:39
  Brad Kearns: What does it mean to you?
• 9:41
  Philip Pape: The term body composition.
• 9:43
  Brad Kearns: Muscle-centric approach oh, muscle-centric approach?
• 9:44
  Philip Pape: Oh, muscle-centric approach, yeah, so you know, we think I guess we talk about being over fat or obesity being a concern in society and for sure it is, I'm not going to deny that, and there are a lot of extrinsic factors, environmental factors behind that.
• 9:57
  Philip Pape: But what I find is people are attempting to lose weight or lose fat as the predominant way that they get quote unquote healthy, kind of like they.
• 10:06
  Philip Pape: Many people think running or cardio is the predominant way to get healthy or lose fat.
• 10:10
  Philip Pape: We know that's not the case.
• 10:11
  Brad Kearns: Burning calories.
• 10:12
  Philip Pape: Yeah, yeah, burning calories.
• 10:13
  Philip Pape: And until you've spent some time understanding how to train properly to add some strength and muscle to your frame, you can't maximize the health that you're going for, even if it is a great physique, because you haven't built the foundation, so you can't sculpt a pebble, is the analogy.
• 10:31
  Philip Pape: I like you can sculpt a nice big stone, but you can't sculpt a pebble, so you've got to build that at some point.
• 10:37
  Philip Pape: If you've got excess weight to lose or excess fat to lose from a metabolic health perspective, fine, we can get there, it's not a big deal, but at some point you then have to build muscle.
• 10:48
  Brad Kearns: It seems like someone who is succeeding building muscle is going to shed excess body fat in the process.
• 10:55
  Philip Pape: Exactly that's the secret that I don't like you don't know what it's experiencing.
• 10:59
  Brad Kearns: We gave it away.
• 11:00
  Brad Kearns: All the other trainers are listening, going.
• 11:01
  Brad Kearns: Oh, I'm going to redo my branding now.
• 11:04
  Philip Pape: Yeah, right, no, and that's the thing.
• 11:05
  Philip Pape: You can't, you don't, you can't, you can't know that until you experience it, we can talk, talk about it all we want on our podcast, and I do, brad.
• 11:13
  Philip Pape: Like half of my episodes in the last month are probably about why you should gain weight, you know, or why you should build muscle, and it's not always about gaining weight on the scale, brad right.
• 11:29
  Philip Pape: It is really about energy and fueling yourself and performance mindset, rather than even a physique or a scale mindset.
• 11:33
  Philip Pape: And once you're focused on performance, all the other things start to come in mind.
• 11:37
  Philip Pape: Whether you're trying to lose fat or not, like you said, you will start to lose fat.
• 11:40
  Philip Pape: It gets easier.
• 11:41
  Philip Pape: Your metabolism increases because of the extra muscle mass, the extra weight you're carrying around, the lower stress, the higher protein, the higher fiber.
• 11:48
  Philip Pape: It all aligns really well.
• 11:51
  Brad Kearns: It also seems like right now, as I am a member of the 60 plus division I just turned 60 recently and so I'm looking around at my peers and I have a lot of lifelong friends who have had extreme or a decent or good devotion to athletics and fitness and all that but it seems like we're now kind of turning a corner, hitting a fork in the road, where the first and foremost objective is to build or preserve that lean muscle mass and muscle strength and not so concerned primarily with keeping the waistline down.
• 12:28
  Brad Kearns: But I think you know the dad, bod and the busy working parent, male or female, from ages 25 to age 50 or what have you, is kind of just not eating too much food and keeping your pants size the same.
• 12:43
  Brad Kearns: But now it seems like, you know, we have an intense focus and a desperate need to keep that muscle on, to the extent that we might even, you know, rethink some of these strategies that maybe have been successful to manage caloric intake.
• 12:59
  Philip Pape: Yeah, are you familiar with Jonathan Sullivan?
• 13:01
  Philip Pape: Some people call him Sully or Dr Sully.
• 13:03
  Philip Pape: He wrote the barbell prescription and he uses a term called the athlete of aging, to that exact concept.
• 13:11
  Philip Pape: If we think of life as not an inevitable decline but really an athletic pursuit where we want to thrive as a human and again, this is why I resonate with your message so hard, is that that's what we want.
• 13:24
  Philip Pape: When I'm 95, I still want to be deadlifting, like I want to die doing a deadlift.
• 13:28
  Philip Pape: You know what I mean, like whatever that means to you.
• 13:31
  Philip Pape: And it hits really close to home for me, brad, because I've had two situations just in the last two weeks with family members one who passed away after being in a nursing home for a number of years and declining very quickly because he just wasn't mobile.
• 13:46
  Philip Pape: He could have been but he kind of, I'll say, gave up on life.
• 13:50
  Philip Pape: I hate to say it that way, but it was.
• 13:51
  Philip Pape: It was sad, you know, and he was in a wheelchair and then the health issues accelerated, um, because of it.
• 13:56
  Philip Pape: And then another family member who went to the hospital with heart issues.
• 14:00
  Philip Pape: And it's, it's the same story we've heard so many times, the predominant story we hear with older folks of polypharmacy right Taking so many medications on top of each other, of heart conditions, of metabolic disease, type 2 diabetes, all of these age-related diseases, even some cancers, could all be prevented with a little extra muscle mass, a little more movement and just watching what you eat and really enjoying the process too.
• 14:28
  Brad Kearns: So, when you have an intake or a thousand of them, what are the prevailing themes Like?
• 14:36
  Brad Kearns: What do you think is the biggest and most egregious offense to healthy living and longevity?
• 14:43
  Philip Pape: That's a good one.
• 14:44
  Philip Pape: The most egregious offense.
• 14:46
  Brad Kearns: So is it the junk food diet or is it the, uh, you know, sedentary baseline daily pattern, that kind of thing?
• 14:54
  Philip Pape: Yeah, I mean, I guess the red flags are going to depend on the person, but it generally is the lack of training or training properly.
• 15:02
  Philip Pape: So we're talking lifting weights and I know there's kind of this triumvirate, um and I know you talk about as well of you know lifting heavy things and then moving a lot, and then some sort of explosiveness, right, whether it's the sprinting or the player, what have you?
• 15:16
  Philip Pape: Um, people are not training and so no matter what they do with their diet, it's not going to matter, because they're going to lose muscle.
• 15:23
  Philip Pape: That's my perspective.
• 15:25
  Philip Pape: So when someone comes to me and says I want to fix my diet, I don't care about lifting weights right now, I'm like, let's flip that around.
• 15:31
  Philip Pape: Let's flip that around.
• 15:32
  Philip Pape: If I can get you in the gym, it's going to cascade to your desire to fuel what you're doing in the gym, to want to eat healthier.
• 15:40
  Philip Pape: You're going to have better regulated hunger signals year.
• 15:43
  Philip Pape: You're going to have better regulated hunger signals.
• 15:44
  Philip Pape: You're going to have greater insulin sensitivity, all the other things that lead to the eating side becoming much easier.
• 15:47
  Philip Pape: And guess what?
• 15:48
  Philip Pape: You'll have a little more resilience, even if your diet isn't so great, like at least to start, until we start to optimize it going forward.
• 15:55
  Brad Kearns: Yeah, I think what you just said is hugely underrated.
• 15:58
  Brad Kearns: Like people do not make that connection, they you know the diet industry is massive and all the programming and things we've heard our whole life to where you know you just got to manage your portion sizes and fast a little bit or try keto or do this or do that.
• 16:12
  Brad Kearns: But then maybe like describe in more detail how going and hoisting some weight around is going to optimize your dietary habits.
• 16:24
  Philip Pape: Yeah, yeah, this is.
• 16:25
  Philip Pape: This is a great topic, I mean, I think so.
• 16:28
  Philip Pape: There's multiple reasons for it.
• 16:29
  Philip Pape: The big one is, I think, the hormones and the insulin sensitivity from lifting weights, which is extremely underrated because we know that insulinemia you know the term.
• 16:42
  Brad Kearns: Hyperinsulinemia is chronically excessive production of insulin.
• 16:45
  Philip Pape: Yes, yes yes, always trying to suck out the technical terms which is related to cortisol, which is related to the lack of muscle mass, is extremely important because muscle is a thing for glucose, right.
• 16:56
  Philip Pape: So the more muscle mass you have, the better you can utilize the carbs that you're eating.
• 17:00
  Philip Pape: And I always talk about carbs in the context of how sedentary you are, because you can't simplify carbs being good or bad.
• 17:08
  Philip Pape: Right, you can't just say, well, carbs are bad.
• 17:10
  Philip Pape: Well, if you're sedentary for sitting on the couch all day, the more carbs you eat, sure, it's just going to go to fat storage it really any excess of calories are, but carbs especially right.
• 17:18
  Philip Pape: And there's inflammation and et cetera.
• 17:21
  Philip Pape: And quite the opposite happens when your strength training is that your body wants to suck those carbs up, both the ATP and then the glycolytic process that comes after that from long training sessions, from having the muscle mass.
• 17:34
  Philip Pape: It's just going to suck it up like a sponge.
• 17:36
  Philip Pape: That's sort of the way I like to say it.
• 17:37
  Philip Pape: And so you need those carbs.
• 17:39
  Philip Pape: You want those carbs.
• 17:40
  Philip Pape: Where was I going with this In that, from a metabolic and insulin perspective?
• 17:47
  Philip Pape: For food, it means that you can have a very flexible diet, both in terms of macronutrients and calories.
• 17:55
  Philip Pape: You can be fueled up, you can eat more food and be living the vast majority of your year, not dieting.
• 18:01
  Philip Pape: That's what I wanted you to get to is where you're almost never dieting, isn't that great.
• 18:06
  Brad Kearns: I mean, I hope people do.
• 18:08
  Brad Kearns: You really get this insight deeply?
• 18:10
  Brad Kearns: You powered through that with a great explanation and the sync concept.
• 18:18
  Brad Kearns: So I want people to fully understand.
• 18:20
  Brad Kearns: When you have a lot of muscle mass on your body or you're stimulating the muscles in a workout, the, the glucose is going into the muscle to refuel and replenish.
• 18:29
  Brad Kearns: That's insulin's job is to restore energy into storage depots we know about how it does that into the fat stores, but it's also doing that to help, you know, replenish and recover your muscles.
• 18:42
  Brad Kearns: Compare and contrast to someone who's sitting around.
• 18:46
  Brad Kearns: What happens to that glucose?
• 18:47
  Brad Kearns: Well, in the case of the trends of modern lifestyle in America and across the world, you're gonna get type two diabetes over years and decades because the glucose just flows around in your bloodstream.
• 19:01
  Brad Kearns: Insulin is produced, that mechanism gets exhausted.
• 19:04
  Brad Kearns: That's that hyperinsulinemia, and then you have elevated glucose and elevated insulin and that's the disease pattern of life.
• 19:11
  Brad Kearns: So it's sort of you know, the reason that going and lifting weights is important is so you don't get diabetes.
• 19:18
  Philip Pape: In a nutshell, and, in the short term, take advantage of the fact that it, you know it suppresses those postprandial glucose spikes, blood spikes, which then affect your hunger signals.
• 19:28
  Philip Pape: You have much better regulated satiety.
• 19:30
  Philip Pape: All this GLP-1 talk about the weight loss drugs.
• 19:34
  Philip Pape: Well, your body has that naturally and strength training can trigger it Without side effects.
• 19:38
  Philip Pape: Yeah, it can trigger it, which intends to decline with age, which is one of many reasons people have more and more difficulty as they age, unless you're training.
• 19:47
  Philip Pape: So to me, lifting weights, I don't want to say it solves everything, but it is kind of the magic pill to a lot of these issues that people have with age.
• 19:54
  Philip Pape: And Brad, I've had clients who are very well muscled and they need to lose some body fat because they're very over fat as well.
• 20:03
  Philip Pape: But they have much better health markers than somebody with less muscle who's overweight.
• 20:08
  Philip Pape: And that just tells you something right there that there's a huge mitigating factor, that muscle mass.
• 20:13
  Philip Pape: That can't be underrated.
• 20:15
  Brad Kearns: I'm kind of curious how someone gets to that point, because if you are a fit enough person to carry around an impressive amount of muscle mass, why the heck do you still have a gut there?
• 20:26
  Brad Kearns: And it must be just horrible dietary choices that override all these beautiful insulin sensitivity benefits of lifting the weights every day.
• 20:37
  Philip Pape: Yeah, I mean.
• 20:38
  Philip Pape: There's multiple reasons.
• 20:38
  Philip Pape: One is intentional in the powerlifting world, People intentionally gain a lot of weight to push more lifts and get bigger numbers.
• 20:46
  Brad Kearns: Yeah, physics yeah.
• 20:48
  Philip Pape: That's all it is.
• 20:49
  Philip Pape: Yeah, yeah, you get more cross-sectional area.
• 20:51
  Philip Pape: Yeah, you know what I'm saying.
• 20:54
  Philip Pape: The allometric scaling that occurs and then the absolute numbers that scale up once you gain more weight.
• 21:00
  Philip Pape: And, frankly, just, some people never had a great diet to begin with, even though they lift weights.
• 21:05
  Philip Pape: It doesn't.
• 21:05
  Philip Pape: They're not mutually exclusive.
• 21:07
  Philip Pape: It's very possible to have a poor diet and still have been able to lift and build muscle over time, as long as you have the just net fuel in your body.
• 21:15
  Philip Pape: It's not efficient.
• 21:16
  Philip Pape: But guys come to me and they're like hey, I've tried carnivore, I've tried this, I've tried that.
• 21:20
  Philip Pape: And we we work together say look, all you need is a good, nutritious, nutritious, whole food diet.
• 21:24
  Philip Pape: Look at your protein, look at your fiber.
• 21:26
  Philip Pape: You're still going to have plenty of calories coming in, but we're just going to, you know, track what's going in your body and we're going to regulate that so that you can drop some of that fat and then get back to a nice lean state and then you're good to go.
• 21:36
  Philip Pape: Um, I'm right now in a gaining phase, brad, I am.
• 21:39
  Philip Pape: I mean, you can see me just by top.
• 21:40
  Philip Pape: It's not like I'm.
• 21:51
  Philip Pape: I'm fat, right, uh, but I do that on a regular basis, I will gain 20 pounds and then lose 20 pounds, but with the intent to build muscle over time.
• 21:56
  Brad Kearns: Uh, so describe how and why you initiate these gaining phases.
• 22:01
  Philip Pape: Yeah, for efficiency.
• 22:03
  Philip Pape: So if you gain right now the research based on the latest studies and meta-analysis, which are quite recent there've been maybe four or five studies in the last five years that have given us the most of this data Gaining weight at around, let's say, 0.3 to half a percent of your body weight a week for a beginner or intermediate is kind of the optimal level where you're going to gain the most muscle without gaining too much fat in terms of time duration, and it's going to depend on the individual.
• 22:32
  Philip Pape: So if you've done it before, you may know your individual numbers and they might be higher or lower.
• 22:38
  Philip Pape: If you kind of know that, let me tell you I have spreadsheets for all this stuff, right, you know we have a numbers guy where you can plug in numbers and know exactly how efficient your muscle gaining was, so that next time you go in a bulk you could either go faster or slower, um, but then you do that and now you're talking six, nine, maybe 12 months where you add a significant amount of muscle, and we're talking multiple pounds, right, five, 10 pounds of muscle, uh, and then you can do a fat loss phase and then you can effectively sustain that.
• 23:05
  Philip Pape: The alternative is doing a more intuitive approach and kind of maintaining your weight and building muscle slowly over time.
• 23:12
  Philip Pape: It's just going to take a lot longer to add those slabs of meat to your body.
• 23:15
  Philip Pape: That's all.
• 23:16
  Brad Kearns: So are you systematically over-consuming calories when you're in the gaining phase and as well as doing hypertrophy style workouts?
• 23:27
  Philip Pape: it's exactly what it is.
• 23:28
  Philip Pape: Yeah, you're in an intentional calorie surplus.
• 23:30
  Philip Pape: It's not crazy, it's not a dreamer bulk, as they would call it back in the day, where power lifters you know go in and order you know ten cheeseburgers and like three orders of fries, it is maybe 200 calories a day surplus, right, something like that for most people.
• 23:45
  Brad Kearns: That's what everybody eats, Philip, Come on Just naturally right.
• 23:48
  Brad Kearns: But they're not training.
• 23:49
  Brad Kearns: That ain't no surplus.
• 23:51
  Brad Kearns: We're in a lifelong surplus yeah.
• 23:53
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 23:54
  Philip Pape: What happens, though, is if you're doing it consistently and by consistently I mean because you're tracking, you don't fall too low or you're unintentionally not in a surplus your expenditure, your metabolism will tend to ramp up quite a bit.
• 24:08
  Philip Pape: Hundreds of calories, like for most people.
• 24:10
  Philip Pape: For women, I'll tend to see anywhere from like 100 to maybe 400 or 500 calorie increase over the months.
• 24:15
  Philip Pape: For guys, it could be 1,000.
• 24:18
  Philip Pape: It could be 2,000.
• 24:19
  Philip Pape: It's insane.
• 24:19
  Philip Pape: And you're eating.
• 24:20
  Philip Pape: You know where you start eating.
• 24:22
  Brad Kearns: 2,600, 2,700 calories.
• 24:30
  Brad Kearns: You might end up 4,000 or more, Like I'm up to 4000 now.
• 24:32
  Brad Kearns: It's a lot of food, man.
• 24:32
  Brad Kearns: It's a lot of food.
• 24:33
  Brad Kearns: So your metabolism is increasing as a consequence of both eating more food and doing these strenuous workouts.
• 24:41
  Philip Pape: Yes, and gaining more weight?
• 24:42
  Philip Pape: Right, Because you're carrying around more your BMR is higher.
• 24:44
  Philip Pape: And probably metabolic adaptation, that it's like opposite metabolic adaptation, where your body is just so flooded with energy it tries to be as inefficient as possible in burning calories.
• 24:57
  Brad Kearns: How so.
• 24:57
  Philip Pape: Kind of the opposite of how.
• 25:00
  Philip Pape: So what do you mean?
• 25:01
  Philip Pape: How so?
• 25:02
  Brad Kearns: I mean you're over-consuming calories.
• 25:04
  Philip Pape: So what is the adaptation that's occurring where the body's trying to yeah, I mean, I believe it's just your body is not trying to hoard calories like it would during a fat loss phase, when, I mean at the mitochondrial level, you're even conserving energy.
• 25:18
  Philip Pape: The hormones get downregulated.
• 25:20
  Philip Pape: I think it's just the opposite of that, right?
• 25:22
  Philip Pape: So I don't know to what extent that's the case.
• 25:24
  Philip Pape: I think it's just the opposite of that.
• 25:25
  Philip Pape: So I don't know to what extent that's the case.
• 25:26
  Philip Pape: I don't think we have science that says it's.
• 25:28
  Brad Kearns: These are the exact components.
• 25:28
  Brad Kearns: Yeah, it's a fascinating, fascinating topic.
• 25:30
  Brad Kearns: Well, you know, it happens and the science is uh, what your scale says?
• 25:35
  Brad Kearns: Uh, three months later, because theoretically, you would gain um way more than you did if you just counted calories and had the same lower metabolic rate, right?
• 25:53
  Philip Pape: Right, exactly that's where you would hit plateaus if you weren't tracking that and staying on top of it.
• 25:55
  Philip Pape: You basically have to over-consume by more each week as your body is ramping up.
• 26:01
  Brad Kearns: It's the opposite, uh, the traditional approach to uh fat loss, where you're lowering calories, lowering calories and a lot of times uh, that doesn't work so well, as we know.
• 26:13
  Philip Pape: Exactly.
• 26:14
  Philip Pape: I'll say it's not a symmetrical problem.
• 26:17
  Philip Pape: The fat loss side of the equation has lots more detrimental potential when you're chasing down into a deficit, because now getting to zero means you starve to death.
• 26:28
  Philip Pape: Going the other way is a bit of a different situation.
• 26:31
  Philip Pape: It's more of you're maybe trying to stuff yourself and I don't like to put it that way, because if somebody gets to that point, we need to talk and figure something out that is more sustainable.
• 26:39
  Philip Pape: But it's not a symmetrical problem, if that makes sense.
• 26:43
  Brad Kearns: Well, also, what's interesting is, I assume you're choosing exclusively healthful, high satiety, high nutrient-dense foods, and so it's not the cheeseburger and the milkshake diet and therefore, like you say, it's a ton of calories.
• 27:00
  Brad Kearns: It feels like you're a chore to eat that much food because you still have optimal appetite and satiety signals, but you're overriding them in order to add some more muscle.
• 27:12
  Philip Pape: Yeah, that is actually a big challenge is when you have that high volume food and you're trying to gain weight.
• 27:19
  Philip Pape: Now, if we think of whole foods, there are calorie dense whole foods right Like nuts.
• 27:23
  Philip Pape: So that is where you start to incorporate more nutritious foods that are also calorie dense.
• 27:29
  Philip Pape: Liquids like a smoothie, yeah pre-digested things like that, and you know what.
• 27:35
  Philip Pape: For flexibility, though, I do think it's okay to have maybe five, 10% of your diet.
• 27:40
  Philip Pape: Just I don't want to say free for all, but it's there for some flexibility.
• 27:44
  Philip Pape: I know we may not be on the 100% same page there, but in my view is, when people restrict completely, they tend to binge, they tend to go the other direction and, honestly, when you have everything else dialed in, you're, you're.
• 27:57
  Philip Pape: You're pretty good from that perspective.
• 27:59
  Philip Pape: The other thing, what's interesting you mentioned hunger.
• 28:01
  Philip Pape: Your hunger signals regulate and then what I find happens is you're really good at telling whether your body needs more calories before you know it, like before the data tells you, because you can actually get hungry in a gaining phase.
• 28:14
  Philip Pape: If you're starting to fall behind your metabolism, I'll have clients say why am I hungry?
• 28:20
  Philip Pape: I'm eating 3,500 calories.
• 28:21
  Philip Pape: I'm always eating 20.
• 28:22
  Philip Pape: I'm like because your body is hungry.
• 28:24
  Brad Kearns: Yeah, that's fascinating, even though you're eating a lot of calories, yeah.
• 28:27
  Brad Kearns: Yeah, and you're turning up these important dials.
• 28:29
  Brad Kearns: I've talked about this a lot on my podcast referencing the work of Dr Herman Ponser, author of Burn, and talking to Jay Feldman four times the Energy Balance podcast, where he has this bioenergetic model of health where the more you consume in nutritious foods I'm talking exclusively about that, not shoveling junk down your throat but when you consume an optimal or even, in your case, like an aggressive amount of calories, you're going to turn up the dials of reproduction repair, growth and locomotion.
• 28:58
  Brad Kearns: I wonder if you experience certain symptoms like you're a little warmer or you're more fidgety at your work desk because your knee's tapping, because you have so much energy and so much energy to burn.
• 29:10
  Brad Kearns: I'm pleased to present B-Rad grass-fed whey protein isolate super fuel, the absolute highest quality all-natural protein supplement infused with creatine that delivers everything you need to optimize your appetite for fat loss, recover quickly from workouts and build and maintain lean muscle mass the single most important attribute for aging.
• 29:36
  Brad Kearns: Gracefully, our protein comes directly from small family farms in America's dairy land of Wisconsin.
• 29:42
  Brad Kearns: It's cold processed and micro filtered for maximum bioavailability and digestibility.
• 29:50
  Brad Kearns: So please don't mess with the many cheap commodity protein supplements that are ineffective, inferior, less pure and often contain junk sweeteners, especially the plant-based offerings that are vastly less bioavailable than the gold standard of protein supplements, that's whey protein isolate.
• 30:09
  Brad Kearns: Whether you're in your peak athletic years, looking to grow and recover, or in the older age groups, trying to delay aging and decline, whey and creatine are widely agreed to be the most critical and effective supplements to take for the rest of your life.
• 30:27
  Brad Kearns: You can easily stir the super fuel in water or make a delicious smoothie every day.
• 30:31
  Brad Kearns: I'm certain that you're going to love the pleasant, light, natural vanilla bean and cocoa bean flavors, so try some.
• 30:40
  Brad Kearns: On Amazon today it's a huge hit with dozens of five-star reviews.
• 30:44
  Brad Kearns: Or you can order direct from bradnutritioncom with our buy three, get one free and make the super fuel a centerpiece of your daily routine.
• 30:54
  Philip Pape: Yeah, that's a really good one.
• 30:55
  Philip Pape: You definitely get hotter.
• 30:56
  Philip Pape: I hear that all the really good one.
• 30:58
  Philip Pape: You definitely get hotter.
• 30:59
  Philip Pape: I hear that all the time.
• 31:02
  Philip Pape: It's like you get hotter.
• 31:03
  Philip Pape: And so for women who are in peripost menopause and they have hot flashes already it's kind of an interesting one, although some of those symptoms get mitigated when they're actually building muscle.
• 31:08
  Philip Pape: Just ladies who are listening, just so you know it's kind of interesting.
• 31:11
  Philip Pape: But yeah, the fidgeting is another one.
• 31:14
  Philip Pape: That definitely explains why your metabolism takes off like a rocket, because everything stacks on top of itself.
• 31:20
  Philip Pape: You actually move more unconsciously, and this leads to the joke about powerlifters trying to do as little as possible when they're not lifting weights so that they don't have to eat even more.
• 31:31
  Philip Pape: Right, it's kind of a joke.
• 31:33
  Philip Pape: Right, we want to be active, we want to be walking.
• 31:35
  Philip Pape: It's great for a joke.
• 31:36
  Philip Pape: Right, we want to be active, we want to be walking, it's great for recovery, etc.
• 31:38
  Philip Pape: But there is a long-time joke about powerlifters just like acting like sloths between their lifting sessions.
• 31:44
  Brad Kearns: Well, what's really interesting about that is now emerging research in the endurance athletic world, especially with these Norwegian triathletes who are coached by Olaf Alexander Boo triathletes who coached by Olaf Alexander Boo, a scientist with a scientific approach and we're now realizing that the consumption of calories as many as possible is fueling a more ambitious training regimen than we've ever seen, whereby these guys can go faster, for longer and train harder than any triathlete from back in historical times.
• 32:17
  Brad Kearns: And it's really fascinating to me because I felt like I stuffed my face every day for those nine years of training and traveling on the professional triathlon circuit and we always had to have food around us and I traveled with a bag of food, but it was the only way we could sustain a really ambitious training regimen.
• 32:35
  Brad Kearns: And we also learned from like old time bodybuilding culture that the limiting factor for Mr Universe to not have even bigger muscles, or Arnold in the movie Pumping Iron, the limiting factor was not that they couldn't train another hour a day and go from five hours a day to six hours a day.
• 32:51
  Brad Kearns: The limiting factor was the ability to digest and assimilate calories, and your stomach will explode if you go over 7,000 calories every day for six months time requiring you to down-regulate your training.
• 33:04
  Brad Kearns: But somehow the triathletes who are training eight hours a day now they're inhaling so much food, not only in real life but during exercise, that they're able to go really fast and be in the carbohydrate burning heart rates, rather than this huge emphasis we've always had at endurance of, like you wanna be a good fat burner and you wanna lower your heart rate, so you're burning emphasizing fat burning during your workouts and you're not getting tired.
• 33:29
  Brad Kearns: So it's kind of like flipping it on its ear to say eat more, train harder, get fitter, build more muscle, live longer.
• 33:40
  Philip Pape: Yeah, exactly, and I didn't know if that's always a good thing, but in general, if you're doing it right and you structure your recovery, well you can avoid, because what I also see is if you go too hard, then now you potentially have joint and tendon issues, especially for those bodybuilders where they're almost outpacing their own ability to with their connective tissue to support what they're doing.
• 34:03
  Philip Pape: Of course, that's where enhanced and steroids come into play too for some of those Um, but that's another great point about why we we become this huge furnace is that you can train harder in an almost exponential way when you're highly fueled, thus accelerating the ability to build that muscle.
• 34:19
  Philip Pape: Maybe that's why it's super efficient to be in a calorie surplus.
• 34:23
  Brad Kearns: You know that kind of ramp up of your.
• 34:25
  Philip Pape: I see it myself as well, and one of the hardest things is to pull back from that when you need to, when you're trying to like peak out on your strength, when you're trying to peak out on your strength and you actually want to reduce the volume and actually hit max loads, it feels like you're not working out that much, so you're almost, you almost like to have to hold back, like just today I didn't do accessory work in my training because I'm in a final three week phase where I'm going to peak out on week four on my squat, my deadlift, my press.
• 34:53
  Philip Pape: I'm deliberately eliminating all that volume to put it all into the ability to hit those lifts and it feels like I'm not working because I have all this energy, like you suggested.
• 35:04
  Brad Kearns: Yeah, yeah, I mean this is, I'd say it's become a hugely controversial subject because we have so many longevity experts touting the amazing life extension benefits of fasting and restricting carbohydrates to the extent of ketogenic eating, and I've had a big recalibration in my own mindset and belief system and strategy to realize that if you're in that category of healthy, active, athletic person with good blood values and so forth, the restriction of calories for any reason is unwarranted and I'd much rather focus on eating more, moving more, training harder, recovering faster as my path to longevity.
• 35:47
  Brad Kearns: My new mantra, as listeners know, is perform, recover, perform, recover and that there is no role of fasting in that equation.
• 35:57
  Brad Kearns: And I appreciate this discussion about kind of the opposite strategy.
• 36:01
  Brad Kearns: Because you look healthy on the screen, man, you're putting up some big weights.
• 36:06
  Brad Kearns: I mean, how are we gonna measure your longevity and your basic health and fitness status right now?
• 36:11
  Brad Kearns: How about pulling a new PR on the deadlift?
• 36:13
  Brad Kearns: So whatever you're doing is working by definition, as opposed to starving yourself and heading to the gym and pulling some moderate weights or whatever the opposite would be.
• 36:25
  Philip Pape: Yeah, and I feel like when you get to that point of building that foundation, even if you are going to go into a calorie deficit and go into a fat loss phase, it tends to be so much easier and almost not feel like a diet.
• 36:38
  Philip Pape: I mean, I have a lot of clients in this situation where I say, look, let's not worry about cutting right now, let's build a foundation.
• 36:44
  Philip Pape: What you're going to find after that is that a quote unquote diet, maybe the only diet you'll ever do, because you're trying to get to that whatever leanness that is that you're going to walk around, as even that isn't going to feel that hard.
• 36:54
  Philip Pape: It might take 12 weeks and it might be at a moderate rate of loss and because you have this high metabolism, it's kind of easy to do and you're still going to eat mostly what you like.
• 37:01
  Philip Pape: You know you have to cut out a few things here and there, um, and then you're done.
• 37:05
  Philip Pape: So doesn't that sound great Like?
• 37:07
  Philip Pape: If you're listening to that, just understand how powerful that is versus the yo-yo dieting always losing weight, losing muscle when you lose weight, because that's what happens when you don't train and then you get more and more skinny fat or fat over time, and then the metabolic issues wrap up, you know, as we age.
• 37:25
  Brad Kearns: Yeah, I wonder you've probably seen this too.
• 37:26
  Brad Kearns: When we were, you know, really first building the primal blueprint community and doing retreats and interacting with a lot of people, there was a lot of people that came to us with seemingly severe metabolic damage from a long history of yo-yo dieting and they'd come forth and report that, hey, I tried your eating style of the ancestral approach with meat, fish, fowl, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds.
• 37:51
  Brad Kearns: I don't eat any grains anymore, I don't eat processed sugars, I'm not drinking my Starbucks anymore and I'm still struggling to reduce excess body fat.
• 38:00
  Brad Kearns: And I wonder if you see that amongst your population, and are there some people that, just because of their past history or their current status of poor metabolic flexibility or whatever you want to call it, do they require some kind of a different approach?
• 38:15
  Brad Kearns: Or how do you deal with that?
• 38:17
  Philip Pape: Sure, I mean, there I'm, I'm like I might be that guy.
• 38:20
  Philip Pape: So I was so, way back in the day I did at Atkins right, I remember Atkins even slim fast.
• 38:29
  Philip Pape: I mean it's crazy.
• 38:29
  Philip Pape: This stuff I tried over the years and then I joined the CrossFit community back in 2010.
• 38:34
  Philip Pape: I did that for about eight years and I found out about the primal community and paleo and I actually did that.
• 38:41
  Philip Pape: I have so many cookbooks still in my kitchen with paleo recipes, okay, and I was still overweight and I couldn't quite get there either.
• 38:51
  Philip Pape: It helped a little bit, right, it helped in terms of other aspects of health, but without that training stimulus, you're right, there was a big missing piece.
• 38:59
  Philip Pape: That's the piece that I'm so passionate about now.
• 39:01
  Philip Pape: That's why I put it at the top of the list and everything else kind of falls from that.
• 39:06
  Philip Pape: The other thing is, what was I going to say about that?
• 39:10
  Philip Pape: I think people get too hung up in the fact that certain foods whether you talk about the quality of food or the exact type of food or the macro are going to solve everything for them or vastly improve their metabolic health.
• 39:23
  Philip Pape: I think even if you had the quote-unquote perfect diet, it is not enough.
• 39:26
  Philip Pape: It is just not.
• 39:27
  Philip Pape: You have to give yourself the chance to live like a human, a functional physical, pushing things around, human in the world.
• 39:35
  Philip Pape: I knew a guy, kevin Kevin.
• 39:37
  Philip Pape: What's his name?
• 39:37
  Philip Pape: Oh man, kevin McShann is that his last name?
• 39:40
  Philip Pape: He's in a wheelchair, he's paralyzed from the waist down and one of his favorite things to do every day is lift weights.
• 39:46
  Philip Pape: And he, he talks about it.
• 39:48
  Philip Pape: So passion.
• 39:49
  Philip Pape: He's like no one has an excuse.
• 39:50
  Philip Pape: If you can I mean if you can move something on your body, you can be active and you should be active.
• 39:54
  Philip Pape: Very inspiring guy, guy.
• 39:57
  Brad Kearns: Right, there's, it's within reach of everyone and, interestingly, it doesn't take uh, huge chunks of time to dabble and and and progress down this road of being a competent person who does resistance exercise.
• 40:13
  Brad Kearns: So it starts there.
• 40:15
  Brad Kearns: Diet is not enough.
• 40:17
  Brad Kearns: Love it, yeah.
• 40:19
  Brad Kearns: And how about compare contrast to the widespread pursuit of steady state cardio in with the goal of weight loss?
• 40:30
  Brad Kearns: You know what I'm going to have to say about it because I said it on your show, but is there, do you have some insights about the difference between a protocol that has strength training, some brief, explosive activity like sprinting, a foundation of, you know, comfortably placed movement versus the people who are getting that sweaty red face climbing the stairs for 45 minutes, however many days a week, at the gym, or going to these difficult classes like the morning spin class and all that thing as their main and perhaps sole pursuit of fitness.
• 41:02
  Philip Pape: Steady state cardio yeah, there's a couple angles I could come at this, one from.
• 41:07
  Philip Pape: One is the fact that you can find thousands, if not millions, of people who don't do any of that type of cardio and have amazing health.
• 41:15
  Philip Pape: I mean, if that's not proof, you know people who lift, people who don't do any of that type of cardio and have amazing health.
• 41:17
  Philip Pape: I mean, if that's not proof, you know people who lift, people who walk, they eat right.
• 41:22
  Philip Pape: You know, like you said, they might, they might do occasional activity, they might play sports.
• 41:26
  Philip Pape: You know they have fun, but they are not doing that.
• 41:29
  Philip Pape: I know what you refer to as metronomic, day in, day out cardio.
• 41:33
  Philip Pape: That that's one.
• 41:34
  Philip Pape: That's one answer I have.
• 41:35
  Philip Pape: Uh, another one is just clients that I've worked with, especially women, who have what they think is an adrenal failure or an issue with their cortisol.
• 41:47
  Philip Pape: They have hormonal issues.
• 41:48
  Philip Pape: They might be as young as 27 or in peri and postmenopause, and it's often that they're just doing too much, that the stress is compounding what's going on with their bodies.
• 41:59
  Philip Pape: And when I tell them let's just drop all of that, I mean I like to take a like eliminate all the cardio approach first add in the lifting and then start to add in the other things until you hit a equilibrium, a nice equilibrium, right.
• 42:13
  Philip Pape: You'll know when you've gone past that point.
• 42:16
  Philip Pape: And I had a client who she thought she would have to be on medications forever.
• 42:20
  Philip Pape: And um, she was a massage therapist, so she was active like seven, eight hours a day working with people, and she was going to the gym five or six days a week.
• 42:30
  Philip Pape: She was doing Peloton, she was hiking, she was doing a lot.
• 42:33
  Philip Pape: And I got her training three days a week for about half an hour, lifting really heavy.
• 42:37
  Philip Pape: And they say, no, you shouldn't put uh, women who have adrenal issues and high stress on heavy lifting, don't do that.
• 42:42
  Philip Pape: It's just like when they talk about autoimmune conditions.
• 42:45
  Philip Pape: Don't lift heavy.
• 42:46
  Philip Pape: Quite the contrary, the evidence supports lifting heavy for just about any population.
• 42:50
  Philip Pape: And I think you know this, brad like and by heavy I mean 60 to 90% of your max.
• 42:55
  Philip Pape: You know like, whatever you can lift for the, for one single rep of, let's say, a deadlift or squat, 60 to 90% is a really solid range to lift in.
• 43:06
  Philip Pape: And what happened to this client is she came off her medications because her stress dropped significantly without any other changes to her lifestyle.
• 43:14
  Philip Pape: It was mainly the movement Like you're talking about.
• 43:16
  Philip Pape: It was just too much cardio.
• 43:17
  Philip Pape: That's just two angles I come at it from.
• 43:20
  Philip Pape: The whole sprinting thing is actually a little bit newer to me, to be honest, and like I said before we started recording, I'm telling everybody about it because I'm doing it myself too.
• 43:29
  Philip Pape: I just did my couple first sprints over the last few weeks.
• 43:32
  Brad Kearns: Nice.
• 43:33
  Brad Kearns: Yeah, it's a difficult one to ramp up with, because most of us stopped from our last season in middle school, soccer or high school or what have you.
• 43:44
  Brad Kearns: And then we know from research that we lose the anaerobic explosive muscle fibers at a much greater rate from aging than we do.
• 43:53
  Brad Kearns: Our aerobic conditioning and for some reason, the fitness population at large are getting their cardio in but, you know, grossly deficient in anything that resembles near maximum effort.
• 44:09
  Philip Pape: Yeah, and I wonder, in the lifting community specifically because I've talked to a bunch of guys since you came on the show community, specifically, because I've talked to a bunch of guys since you came on the show there are different pockets of knowledge and understanding.
• 44:23
  Philip Pape: When it comes to quote unquote conditioning, because it's always been a hot topic with the old adage of, like cardio is going to kill your gains, right, and then there was the counter argument of no, no, no, in reality you can actually do a decent amount of cardio, up to like half the amount you lift, without detriment.
• 44:37
  Philip Pape: The question is, what do you mean by cardio?
• 44:38
  Philip Pape: Because that's a very broad umbrella, and so I start with the lifting and I say, okay, lifting itself is, um, is, is really a form of cardio.
• 44:47
  Philip Pape: Um, your heart rate is constantly spiking when you're doing heavy, especially when you're lifting heavy.
• 44:52
  Philip Pape: I can show you on my Apple watch you know, look at this guy guy, he went on a jog with a lot of stoplights, I guess it looks like that you know every spike is a rep of of my deadlift and it pops up to you know 130, 135, like actually right around the fat max heart rate, believe it or not kind of interestingly.
• 45:08
  Philip Pape: I don't know if there's a correlation there, um, but the cumulative amount of um getting your heart rate high plus the epoch right, the post, the post-active post, uh, you know, I'm trying to say exercise post, uh, whatever the, the acronym.
• 45:21
  Brad Kearns: Excess post exercise.
• 45:22
  Brad Kearns: Excess post yeah, oxygen consumption is uh.
• 45:25
  Brad Kearns: The concept is that you you burn more calories after the workout and that's where you get the really strong driver for fat reduction.
• 45:33
  Brad Kearns: It's not the eight 700 calories you burned at the workout, but it's the next 24 hours that matters a lot.
• 45:42
  Philip Pape: Yeah, and I still use that, the old term afterburner effect, and you know well, that's, that's not real, but actually there is, there is, it is still a thing.
• 45:48
  Philip Pape: Um, so, there, so just lifting alone is going to get you somewhat well-conditioned.
• 45:53
  Philip Pape: And then I go to the next step and say okay, does your strength training program include speed work or enough volume that that also increases your work capacity?
• 46:03
  Philip Pape: So that takes you to another level of conditioning.
• 46:06
  Philip Pape: So, for example, um, the West side barbell guys like Louie Simmons, the conjugate style program, now those guys were like big enhanced pot body, uh, power lifters.
• 46:16
  Philip Pape: But the principles that they used and I don't have to go into all the training principles of conjugate, but they had two days a week that were max effort and two days a week that were dynamic effort.
• 46:26
  Philip Pape: And on the dynamic effort days they would use accommodating resistance.
• 46:30
  Philip Pape: So they would use bands or chains.
• 46:31
  Philip Pape: Um, if you don't have bands or chains, you just use vault, you speed.
• 46:35
  Philip Pape: So you do a lot of sets of low reps sub-maximally.
• 46:41
  Philip Pape: So rather than doing, say, three sets of five heavy squats, you might do 10 sets of two at 70% right, and you're taking 30 or 60 seconds rest instead of two, three, four minutes rest and you are exploding on that concentric as powerfully as you can, where the plates are rattling, like that's a good indicator that you've done it right and that builds work capacity.
• 47:06
  Philip Pape: It builds the movement pattern.
• 47:08
  Philip Pape: You know it's a developmental variation for the main pattern when you're not without taxing your central nervous system with the load, and then you've got conditioning as well.
• 47:19
  Philip Pape: So I like that approach.
• 47:22
  Philip Pape: If you're a lifter, then I say, okay, what else do we need?
• 47:24
  Philip Pape: Walking, that's the next form of cardio.
• 47:26
  Philip Pape: We've got to get to that.
• 47:27
  Philip Pape: Eight to 10,000 steps is usually solid for a lot of people.
• 47:30
  Philip Pape: It's very practical.
• 47:31
  Philip Pape: If you want to be a 20,000 step a day guy, go for it, but you know eight or 10.
• 47:36
  Philip Pape: And then it's the big question, brad, what do we do?
• 47:39
  Philip Pape: Do we need anything else?
• 47:40
  Philip Pape: And so when my clients are in fat loss, they're like should I get a little cardio boost?
• 47:44
  Philip Pape: And what I've recommended up to this point is some form of medium steady state, like on a bike or pushing a prowler, but not running, cause I'm a big fan of, you know, recovery involving using the concentric and not the eccentric right.
• 47:59
  Philip Pape: You do all those, those um squats, those air squats and CrossFit.
• 48:02
  Philip Pape: That is that you're going to be sore.
• 48:04
  Brad Kearns: So the eccentric.
• 48:06
  Brad Kearns: Uh just define that a little bit in case in case.
• 48:09
  Brad Kearns: People are uh falling off a bit.
• 48:12
  Philip Pape: Sure, yeah, yeah, I know it's, it's the, I'll guess.
• 48:14
  Philip Pape: I guess I'll say the pushing up part of the movement, the contractile part of it, so, like in a squat, it's the coming up part of the squat, whereas going down that's the concentric.
• 48:22
  Philip Pape: That's the concentric.
• 48:23
  Brad Kearns: Yeah, the concentric is lifting up and the eccentric-.
• 48:26
  Brad Kearns: The eccentric is like when the muscle is lengthening and shortening at the same time, or something.
• 48:36
  Brad Kearns: That's why you get sore.
• 48:36
  Brad Kearns: Is that the definition?
• 48:39
  Philip Pape: Yeah, yeah, I should get a better way to describe it, but yes, I think of like running, for example.
• 48:45
  Philip Pape: The concentric is when you push off the ground, the eccentric is when you land.
• 48:48
  Brad Kearns: The eccentric is when you land.
• 48:49
  Brad Kearns: Yeah, so when you're landing people, like going down a hill, and you see your quads tighten or tense but they're also being forced to absorb the impact, so they're kind of they're flexing but they're shortening at the same time.
• 49:10
  Brad Kearns: Same with lowering down from the deadlift is lifted off the ground and then you lower.
• 49:13
  Brad Kearns: The eccentric part is what causes that micro tears in the muscle and soreness, and I believe that's exclusively so, like you can't get sore doing concentric things, only the eccentric.
• 49:25
  Philip Pape: Right, because the eccentric is what controls the resistance against gravity.
• 49:29
  Brad Kearns: Right, so that's what leads to the muscle producing force and then tearing and oh right you're, you're absorbing gravitational force while you're flexing the muscle, as opposed to um not absorbing the gravitational force.
• 49:43
  Philip Pape: Yeah, yeah, which is why I like say swimming or biking or pushing or pulling a sled as forms of quote unquote cardio, um, but, but.
• 49:53
  Philip Pape: But, like we talked about before, I liked the idea of sprinting as opposed to hit.
• 49:58
  Philip Pape: Um, I used to.
• 49:59
  Philip Pape: I used to be into the Tabata style CrossFit hit, which was like the inverse of what you you know.
• 50:04
  Philip Pape: It would be like a two to one work to rest ratio, and then I kind of evolved toward a maybe one-to-one, but I like the one-to-six that you talk about with sprinting as well.
• 50:15
  Philip Pape: Regardless, very few of my clients do much of that cardio anyway, because they find they don't need to and most people don't quote-unquote like doing this kind of cardio great reason is for recovery from the other workouts.
• 50:31
  Brad Kearns: You're going to be bashing your muscles with the ultimate eccentric behavior of running down a paved road especially.
• 50:38
  Brad Kearns: You mentioned Tabata, which is a popular interval training protocol, but what's so funny about that?
• 50:45
  Brad Kearns: Has been widely misappropriated and abused, because the original research with the Japanese speed skaters was it was a four-minute workout.
• 50:56
  Brad Kearns: It was 20 seconds on, 10-second rest, 20 seconds work.
• 51:00
  Brad Kearns: Or is that the opposite?
• 51:02
  Brad Kearns: Excuse me, 20 seconds work, 10 seconds rest?
• 51:05
  Philip Pape: Yeah, two to one, yeah, yeah.
• 51:06
  Brad Kearns: Yeah, two to one work to rest yeah, and then you're done in four minutes.
• 51:10
  Brad Kearns: But you go to the local neighborhood fitness club and they say 9 am Tabata class, and so they'll do like all kinds of crap with this two to one work to rest ratio, first with your bicycle pedaling, and then you get off and do some pole work or whatever.
• 51:27
  Brad Kearns: But the workout's meant to be an extremely challenging, high-intensity interval session and it's over in four minutes, besides warm-up, cool-down and all that stuff.
• 51:38
  Brad Kearns: So it's a great protocol, unless you extend it out to an hour of CrossFit where you're doing Tabata, box jumps and rope climbs and upside-down push-ups and things that get people injured when they get fatigued at the end.
• 51:50
  Philip Pape: And then you do grace, you do you know where you're doing like 30 power cleans with 135.
• 51:56
  Philip Pape: I was there, I did it for eight years.
• 51:58
  Philip Pape: It didn't do anything for me other than give me some injuries, some tweaks.
• 52:02
  Philip Pape: I was miserable most of the time, although I love the community, and I touched a barbell for the first time, which was great, but I didn't learn proper form until after I stopped doing CrossFit and just focused on on training.
• 52:14
  Philip Pape: Um, and that's important for people to know, because I think I think it's okay to be I don't want to say judgmental, but I try to discourage people from doing those things at all, like I'm not sure that there is any positive, even when you have the community aspect.
• 52:28
  Philip Pape: I think there's other ways to do that.
• 52:30
  Philip Pape: There are some really good group traditional strength training programs now where you can get in a group but actually train with progressive overload.
• 52:38
  Philip Pape: Do it low and slow, take your rest periods, have your recovery.
• 52:41
  Philip Pape: That's what I would encourage people to look for.
• 52:44
  Brad Kearns: I'll tell you my CrossFit strategy that was very successful for me is you bail out at around the one third or the halfway mark, cause I've done a grand total of three or four CrossFit classes in my life, visiting someone.
• 52:57
  Brad Kearns: Hey, let's try this out.
• 52:58
  Brad Kearns: And there's so many good aspects of the community and the, the, the philosophy of broad-based functional fitness and all that great stuff, as opposed to training for a marathon.
• 53:10
  Brad Kearns: It's the run fit club where we show up and we jog six miles every day.
• 53:14
  Brad Kearns: We're CrossFit's, building all these skills.
• 53:16
  Brad Kearns: But, like at the one third to halfway mark, I was good and I'm a fit person.
• 53:21
  Brad Kearns: But you know they're saying, okay, we're gonna do 15 pull-ups and then come over here and do the box jump and then climb the rope.
• 53:26
  Brad Kearns: All right, I did it high five.
• 53:28
  Brad Kearns: And then they go okay, now we're gonna do a set of eight and then break it down to four and then we're gonna do five and I'm like, what the F are you talking about?
• 53:36
  Brad Kearns: I just did 15 pull-ups.
• 53:38
  Brad Kearns: That's a personal best for the year.
• 53:42
  Brad Kearns: So I think the fatiguing aspect of a lot of traditional fitness programming is the big problem, not the workout design so much as when we're talking about elite, high-performing athletes, especially the people we watch in the Olympics.
• 53:58
  Brad Kearns: They're not blasting these workouts to the point where they're on their hands and knees and having shitty times in the last four reps.
• 54:02
  Brad Kearns: They are very consistent and they're almost always working well within their capacity.
• 54:06
  Brad Kearns: We will watch Gabby Thomas collapsing on the ground after running a mile time trial, since she's the Olympic 200 meter champion, and that was not her cup of tea.
• 54:15
  Brad Kearns: But even then she got up if you want to watch the video and did four straightaways of 150 builds or whatever.
• 54:23
  Brad Kearns: So we're socialized, I think, to struggle and suffer and CrossFit is extremely to blame there there, as well as the endurance community to blame rather than a properly organized training session where you don't walk out of there staggering to the nearest pint of Ben and Jerry's.
• 54:41
  Philip Pape: Yeah, and I think it comes down to what are you trying to accomplish and if that is not getting you what you're trying to accomplish.
• 54:46
  Brad Kearns: I want to crush myself.
• 54:47
  Brad Kearns: Man, that's my goal.
• 54:48
  Philip Pape: Exactly.
• 54:48
  Philip Pape: Yeah, I want to be miserable and I want you know, I want to be injured.
• 54:52
  Brad Kearns: I want to be miserable.
• 54:53
  Philip Pape: Yeah, and I'll tell you if.
• 54:55
  Philip Pape: If your goal is to get your VO two max up, you could do that with lifting and walking and if you want to get a little bit higher, apparently sprinting which, by the way, I'm going to do an official VO two max test.
• 55:04
  Philip Pape: It's been a long time I got when I'm at the peak of my bulk and I'm at my heaviest and I've barely started sprinting.
• 55:12
  Philip Pape: That's going to be my baseline.
• 55:13
  Philip Pape: I'm going to report back after about three months, once I've lost about 15, 20 pounds and have been sprinting for a while.
• 55:19
  Philip Pape: We'll see.
• 55:21
  Philip Pape: I'll share that data with you guys, Listeners.
• 55:23
  Brad Kearns: Vo2 max is a volume of oxygen per milliliter per kilogram of body weight.
• 55:29
  Brad Kearns: So you're going to be gaming the test.
• 55:30
  Brad Kearns: Milliliter per kilogram of body weight?
• 55:30
  Brad Kearns: So you're gonna be gaming the test.
• 55:31
  Brad Kearns: If you drop 10 pounds, your VO2 max score will skyrocket.
• 55:34
  Philip Pape: I don't care, man, no, I'm just yeah, yeah, no, it's great, we can normalize it you can I?
• 55:38
  Philip Pape: Bet, you can normalize it by body weight.
• 55:42
  Brad Kearns: And also well, you have maximum volume period and then, and that's, I don't think that would be affected by anything.
• 55:52
  Brad Kearns: Whether you're lifting weights or sprinting, I mean you kind of have.
• 55:55
  Brad Kearns: That's why VO2 max is largely genetically determined.
• 55:59
  Brad Kearns: It's just how much oxygen can you consume when you're exercising at high intensity.
• 56:03
  Brad Kearns: But I'm also annoyed at how the fascination and the hype around VO2 max is like the ultimate anti-aging marker and it is.
• 56:13
  Brad Kearns: If your VO2 max is terrible, then you're in bad shape, son, and you better get your butt together and get out there and move your body and work your heart and lungs.
• 56:21
  Brad Kearns: However, once you have a competent VO2 max, which I'm certain that you'll have from your lifetime commitment to fitness, it's not such a big deal and arguably we might want to negotiate for carrying around more muscle mass as hitting another important fitness pillar that directly compromises your VO2 max potential.
• 56:42
  Philip Pape: Yeah, which then brings up another issue, or not an issue, but a curiosity people might have is how important a lot of these health metrics are Resting heart rate lipids.
• 56:52
  Philip Pape: A lot of these health metrics are resting heart rate lipids, hrv.
• 56:58
  Philip Pape: Especially in the context of your current periodization phase and the body mass and muscle mass you're carrying around, it is really important.
• 57:02
  Philip Pape: Like BMI, for example, is a totally worthless statistic unless you're just looking at a population right, and we know that new metrics like body roundness are more relevant.
• 57:11
  Philip Pape: And, honestly, just taking a tape measure of your waist, you know you can kind of that's one of the best proxies for body fat right there.
• 57:17
  Philip Pape: Anyway, it's very simple and that's the kind of data I like working with clients on, where it's data, but it's easy to measure, it's easy to track.
• 57:25
  Philip Pape: Where I was going with that is that.
• 57:27
  Philip Pape: Going back to those clients who are highly muscled but also overweight, you will still see health metrics that are not where they need to be because they're not walking enough.
• 57:37
  Philip Pape: For example, I've had clients who are lawyers.
• 57:40
  Philip Pape: They sit around all day.
• 57:41
  Philip Pape: They get 3,000 steps.
• 57:42
  Philip Pape: They're highly muscled.
• 57:43
  Philip Pape: We don't change anything except their steps.
• 57:46
  Philip Pape: They go up to 6,000, 7,000, and their resting heart rate starts to decline and a lot of their health markers, according to blood work, improve just from the walking.
• 57:59
  Philip Pape: And so that's just just, you know, more proof of the power of being an active person in general and not having to do it via miserable cardio or chronic cardio.
• 58:05
  Brad Kearns: Is 3,000.
• 58:06
  Brad Kearns: Pretty crappy, is that like a pretty inactive person?
• 58:10
  Brad Kearns: So you will.
• 58:11
  Brad Kearns: Even if you're just going from the parking garage to the office building and then you go down the hall to use the bathroom and then you walk around the house, are you going to get up to like one or two or 3,000 steps with doing almost, you know, minimal exercise?
• 58:27
  Philip Pape: So if I think of my own self working at home, if I was recovering from surgery, and I could hardly do anything?
• 58:34
  Brad Kearns: no, I've been in that state.
• 58:35
  Brad Kearns: I probably still got like 1,500 steps.
• 58:37
  Philip Pape: I don't know you can almost not, unless you're just sitting in one spot all day, which I suppose there are people who do that.
• 58:46
  Philip Pape: I mean, this guy was lifting weights, so just from the lifting sessions, three days a week, he was probably getting 3,000 steps from his lifting session or 2,000.
• 58:52
  Philip Pape: Was lifting weights, so just from the lifting sessions, he, you know, three days a week, he was probably getting 3000 steps from his lifting session or 2000.
• 58:56
  Philip Pape: Really, wow, maybe 2000.
• 58:56
  Philip Pape: Um, I pace, I pace between my sets to get steps while I'm working out.
• 59:01
  Philip Pape: So that's a good trick for people to have it stack.
• 59:03
  Philip Pape: But going from three to six and then six to eight or nine, we know that that seven to nine is really the sweet spot right, Based on the mortality literature, on a massive step change in your health.
• 59:14
  Philip Pape: And that's not inaccessible for most people.
• 59:16
  Philip Pape: Seven to nine, it's not crazy.
• 59:18
  Brad Kearns: If it is, then we got problems and we got to talk about it and we got to set you up with with with Philip and take, do that intake form and say what the heck is going on here.
• 59:26
  Brad Kearns: Um, I mean back to the message of the book born to walk like this is a whole separate category from your fitness objectives, and your to-do list is that we are obligated to be in movement throughout the day.
• 59:39
  Brad Kearns: It's a no-brainer, it's like on the same category as sleeping.
• 59:43
  Brad Kearns: And then, oh, do you want to have a high quality, fit, active, energetic life?
• 59:47
  Brad Kearns: Then let's talk about fitness.
• 59:49
  Brad Kearns: But I kind of put that in the given category rather than oh, okay, I have to do some weightlifting twice a week and I got to.
• 59:56
  Philip Pape: I got to walk like no kidding, yeah, if I have a client who is not walking and they should be.
• 1:00:01
  Philip Pape: And here's the thing with coaching right Is that you can't force people to do things, but you can try to frame it in a way that shows them it's inevitable that they need to do this for their own health.
• 1:00:20
  Philip Pape: I do think, like the training consistently and the walking are must do's, no excuses.
• 1:00:25
  Philip Pape: If you can't do them, then something else has got to change, Whether that's a time audit, getting something else off your plate, eliminating, delegating on and on, it's a time management thing for a lot of folks to be honest.
• 1:00:36
  Philip Pape: That's your excuse and there's no excuse.
• 1:00:39
  Philip Pape: You can do it with your dog.
• 1:00:40
  Philip Pape: You can do it with your kids.
• 1:00:42
  Philip Pape: You can do it walking around the house.
• 1:00:44
  Philip Pape: How many of you are watching Netflix or scrolling social for at least an hour a day?
• 1:00:52
  Brad Kearns: That hour, go ahead and scroll social but walk while you're doing it like, don't make an excuse.
• 1:00:55
  Brad Kearns: Yeah, it's like saying I I don't have the budget for uh nutritious foods.
• 1:00:57
  Brad Kearns: And then I have my uh b-rad nutrition guide where they I rank the world's most nutritious foods by by category.
• 1:01:04
  Brad Kearns: And we have sardines up there, we have liver up there, which is dirt cheap compared to buying a steak or even even a, and so there's numerous foods that are among the highest on the planet and they're pennies compared to driving through Chick-fil-A.
• 1:01:21
  Brad Kearns: I just lost another sponsor.
• 1:01:22
  Brad Kearns: Sorry, but you know there is budget concerns with people and time concerns too, and I've heard from those people and they've given me some plenty direct feedback that I strongly appreciate and empathize with people that are really jam-packed and we don't want to cut into sleep with nonsense social media badgering like just get up at 4.30 and do it man, no excuses, no, not going to happen, not going to be successful.
• 1:01:47
  Brad Kearns: But there's that time management layered underneath where, oh yeah, I forgot about my Netflix hour to three hours every evening.
• 1:01:55
  Brad Kearns: Can I pinch into that?
• 1:01:58
  Philip Pape: Yeah, it's funny.
• 1:01:59
  Philip Pape: I just in my Facebook group yesterday we posted the question like what's one of the what's one of the most challenging things about your fitness?
• 1:02:06
  Philip Pape: And somebody said getting up at 3 am for cardio?
• 1:02:09
  Philip Pape: And I replied brutal and I replied well, I see two problems with this.
• 1:02:14
  Philip Pape: Do you want me to say what they are?
• 1:02:16
  Brad Kearns: Cardio and getting up at 3.30?
• 1:02:18
  Brad Kearns: Exactly.
• 1:02:19
  Brad Kearns: Oh my goodness.
• 1:02:21
  Philip Pape: But then to be fair, he said, well, I'm just walking on an incline.
• 1:02:24
  Philip Pape: I'm like okay, well, that's a little better than when I thought what you meant with cardio.
• 1:02:27
  Philip Pape: But I'm still saying you're getting up at 3 am.
• 1:02:29
  Philip Pape: I hope you're going to bed at like 7 pm or something.
• 1:02:32
  Brad Kearns: Hey, that's a pretty disciplined person right there, someone who gets up in the dark and walks on an incline.
• 1:02:38
  Brad Kearns: They're going to succeed with a little tweaking.
• 1:02:40
  Brad Kearns: So before we wrap up, like if someone just wants to get started and drift over in that direction of being a competent resistance training person that's building muscle and looking toward that longevity goal, what's a baby step one can take if we haven't gone near that side of the gym over there with the bros clanking the plates?
• 1:03:03
  Philip Pape: Yeah, I would really love for somebody to have access to a barbell and I could give them the baby steps from that.
• 1:03:09
  Philip Pape: This is the challenge, Brad, is people.
• 1:03:12
  Philip Pape: This is one of the excuses you get is I don't have access to this or that, or my gym doesn't have this, or I have home gym.
• 1:03:17
  Philip Pape: So really it's starting with what you do have access to right and not making any excuses, and then working on the main movement patterns squatting, picking things up, engine pressing and everyone's at different strength levels.
• 1:03:30
  Philip Pape: Everyone has different equipment access.
• 1:03:32
  Philip Pape: Obviously, if you reach out to me, I'm happy to give you a free program template or guidance based on what you have, but that's really what it comes down to.
• 1:03:41
  Philip Pape: We we could do a whole podcast about progressive overload and training session.
• 1:03:45
  Philip Pape: You know training and all of that, but it's really three days a week usually is sufficient for most people shouldn't take more than half an hour to 45 minutes when you're beginner beginner and what we're looking at is, uh, fairly heavy, fairly low reps.
• 1:03:58
  Philip Pape: You know we're talking four to six, maybe up to eight to 12, you know, in that range of reps, maybe three sets of three or four exercises, a full body, and you do that.
• 1:04:09
  Philip Pape: You take a long, you take long rest periods.
• 1:04:11
  Philip Pape: By long I mean at least two or three minutes.
• 1:04:13
  Philip Pape: These aren't the 32nd circuit training.
• 1:04:15
  Philip Pape: You're not super setting, You're just one exercise and then the next, uh, three sets each, and then you take a day off and you do it again three days a week and that's it Like.
• 1:04:26
  Philip Pape: It's not at all like anything that you guys think of with F45 or CrossFit or you know the running club Right.
• 1:04:34
  Philip Pape: That's just to keep it very high level, brad.
• 1:04:37
  Brad Kearns: That's great.
• 1:04:37
  Brad Kearns: I mean you can probably utilize the machines if you're completely incompetent with a bar and you want to learn carefully and slowly.
• 1:04:48
  Brad Kearns: I saw people getting trained with PVC pipes with the experts that came to our primal con retreats and it was like you know, if you do 20 reps with a PVC pipe on deadlift, you're going to feel it, even if you're pretty fit, like you don't have to load up right away and bring in injury risk.
• 1:05:06
  Brad Kearns: I would hope.
• 1:05:09
  Philip Pape: Yeah, actually it's funny.
• 1:05:10
  Philip Pape: I was just talking to another lifter about the concept of progressive overload, um.
• 1:05:15
  Philip Pape: I had a podcast in fact today's episode that just came out.
• 1:05:18
  Philip Pape: Whenever this is coming out it's it's called um the only strength standard you need, and it was the idea that the overarching principle of getting strong is that your body needs stress.
• 1:05:28
  Philip Pape: And by stress I don't mean chronic stress, I mean it needs a stimulus, it needs to recover and then it will stress.
• 1:05:31
  Philip Pape: And by stress I don't mean chronic stress, I mean it needs a stimulus, it needs to recover and then it will adapt.
• 1:05:34
  Philip Pape: But the stress has to be enough.
• 1:05:36
  Philip Pape: Just like in your thermostat it's only gonna kick in when the house is too cold or too hot.
• 1:05:40
  Philip Pape: You need to push and challenge yourself just enough so that you adapt for the next time.
• 1:05:46
  Philip Pape: So you come in on Monday, you squat, you do three sets of five, at whatever weight, I don't care, maybe it feels super easy.
• 1:05:52
  Philip Pape: You go in on Wednesday.
• 1:05:53
  Philip Pape: I want you to add a certain amount of pounds.
• 1:05:56
  Philip Pape: Maybe it's five pounds, maybe it's two, If you're not super strong.
• 1:06:01
  Philip Pape: Maybe it's 10, maybe it's 20.
• 1:06:02
  Philip Pape: If you're just a 20-year-old male testosterone coursing through your veins and then do that each session, At some point it's going to start to feel heavy, but at some point it's going to start to feel heavy, but you also are going to be able to keep going up for quite a while.
• 1:06:13
  Philip Pape: A beginner can double or triple their strength in just a few months.
• 1:06:18
  Brad Kearns: You know the legend of Milo of Croton, the great, legendary ancient Greek Olympic athlete.
• 1:06:23
  Brad Kearns: He was undefeated as a wrestler, one of the greatest Olympians of all time.
• 1:06:27
  Brad Kearns: In the old days in Greek history, he gained his strength by raising cattle, and so he'd pick up the calf when it was born, and then he'd pick up the calf every day for the rest of its life until he's picking up whatever a 400 pound animal.
• 1:06:43
  Brad Kearns: But yeah, that progressive overload.
• 1:06:45
  Brad Kearns: That's the.
• 1:06:46
  Brad Kearns: Yes, I got to get better at that man, because I'm kind of working with the same weight on my hex bar deadlift, because I have some fears about injuries.
• 1:06:53
  Brad Kearns: I've strained my back before and then I'm performing a recovering in my sprint workouts my bread and butter.
• 1:06:59
  Brad Kearns: But it's a really important point to remember that the body loves that challenge adaptation and that comes when you extend out and get toward your limit.
• 1:07:12
  Philip Pape: Yeah, and you can do that with anything.
• 1:07:13
  Philip Pape: Like you mentioned machines.
• 1:07:14
  Philip Pape: There are obviously different tools for different jobs, some more efficient than others, depending on your goal, and again, we can talk about those details, but doing something and progressing on it is going to be helpful.
• 1:07:26
  Philip Pape: It's funny you mentioned the low back thing.
• 1:07:28
  Philip Pape: A lot of people do have fears about injury and I've known so many folks.
• 1:07:33
  Philip Pape: I can think of one guy in particular um, he's an engineer, a guy from India, and kind of very skinny, you know, kind of skinny fat if you will.
• 1:07:42
  Philip Pape: About 40 years old.
• 1:07:42
  Philip Pape: Um eats a lot of Indian food, which delicious, but you know the, the macros aren't always optimal for for building, and he had really bad back pain.
• 1:07:52
  Philip Pape: And this is super common with desk jockeys, right?
• 1:07:55
  Philip Pape: And I've experienced it myself, just really sore back pain.
• 1:07:57
  Philip Pape: I said why don't you try deadlifting?
• 1:07:59
  Philip Pape: I'll come to my?
• 1:08:00
  Philip Pape: He lived nearby.
• 1:08:01
  Philip Pape: I said come to my home gym and we'll just do it together.
• 1:08:03
  Philip Pape: I'll show you how to do it right and then I'll give you a simple progression.
• 1:08:06
  Philip Pape: And he started doing that and all his pain is gone.
• 1:08:16
  Philip Pape: Okay, and I'm not.
• 1:08:16
  Philip Pape: I don't mean this to say, oh, this is a miracle thing, because your particular back issue may be specific, but many people have seen pain go away in their joints and their back just from lifting weights.
• 1:08:22
  Philip Pape: It sounds counterintuitive to folks that don't quite get it, like with the deadlift.
• 1:08:26
  Philip Pape: Deadlift is one of the best tools to improve back pain.
• 1:08:29
  Philip Pape: You got to do it right and you're going to have good form, but I'm super passionate about that, yeah.
• 1:08:33
  Brad Kearns: It's great for your joint health.
• 1:08:34
  Brad Kearns: Yeah, you're getting the blood flowing, you're getting the discs lubricated.
• 1:08:38
  Brad Kearns: You're working toward a stronger, more resilient body.
• 1:08:42
  Brad Kearns: So whatever got you that back pain in the first place?
• 1:08:44
  Brad Kearns: Now you're a stronger guy.
• 1:08:46
  Brad Kearns: You're going to ward it off.
• 1:08:47
  Philip Pape: And would you rather have a strong bad back than a weak bad back?
• 1:08:50
  Brad Kearns: That's what I'm about to say Philip Pape, everybody from Wits and Weights podcast, tell us how to connect with you on your Facebook group and the other places that we should engage.
• 1:09:01
  Philip Pape: Yeah, I mean on Facebook.
• 1:09:02
  Philip Pape: We can put the link in, but it's called Wits and Weights.
• 1:09:04
  Philip Pape: On Facebook, my podcast is Wits and Weights and on Instagram at Wits and Weights, so pretty easy to find me.
• 1:09:11
  Brad Kearns: And you offer this remote service for consultation and programming.
• 1:09:18
  Philip Pape: Yeah, I do online nutrition coaching, so it's really about fat loss, building muscle, all of that and, again, you can go to witsandweightscom learn all about that, or hit me up.
• 1:09:26
  Philip Pape: And what I really want you to do, though, is listen to my podcast first and get the basics and understand my philosophy, and learn first before, because I want you to have that foundation, because then you're going to really take off and level up.
• 1:09:40
  Brad Kearns: Love it.
• 1:09:40
  Brad Kearns: Nice little assignment.
• 1:09:42
  Brad Kearns: Okay, first people go listen and then reach out Come inform man, Bring your A game to fill up when you finally reach out and connect.
• 1:09:48
  Brad Kearns: Thank you so much for spending the time.
• 1:09:50
  Brad Kearns: I love what you're doing.
• 1:09:58
  Philip Pape: Keep it up and thanks for listening.
• 1:09:59
  Philip Pape: Everybody.
• 1:09:59
  Philip Pape: All right, that was my conversation with Brad Kearns on his Be Rad podcast, and what I hope you take away from this discussion is how fundamentally important muscle is as a foundation for any successful physique transformation.
• 1:10:10
  Philip Pape: The typical approach most people take is they restrict calories, they add in cardio, they white knuckle through hunger, and that is what doesn't work long-term, because it does not address the root cause.
• 1:10:22
  Philip Pape: When you build muscle first, you create a metabolic environment where fat loss becomes just so much easier, dramatically easier.
• 1:10:30
  Philip Pape: Your body becomes a glucose disposal machine.
• 1:10:33
  Philip Pape: Your hormones work with you instead of against you.
• 1:10:35
  Philip Pape: Your hunger signals normalize, and I've seen this pattern play out hundreds of times with clients those who focus on strength training first and diet second consistently achieve better, more sustainable results than those who do it the other way around.
• 1:10:51
  Philip Pape: And this is especially true for people in their 30s, in their 40s, 50s and beyond, when natural muscle loss accelerates.
• 1:10:59
  Philip Pape: Remember, muscle's not just about looking good or even being strong, though those are fantastic benefits.
• 1:11:05
  Philip Pape: Your muscle tissue is highly metabolically active.
• 1:11:08
  Philip Pape: It acts as your body's primary glucose sink.
• 1:11:12
  Philip Pape: It's a sink for the carbs that you eat and it creates the conditions for optimal fat metabolism.
• 1:11:16
  Philip Pape: So the more muscle you carry, the more resilient your metabolism becomes against diet fluctuations, aging, hormonal changes, all of it.
• 1:11:25
  Philip Pape: So if you are struggling with stubborn fat, if you're hitting plateaus despite doing all the things, I encourage you to flip that around.
• 1:11:32
  Philip Pape: Focus on building strength first.
• 1:11:33
  Philip Pape: If you've never doneaus, despite doing all the things, I encourage you to flip that around.
• 1:11:34
  Philip Pape: Focus on building strength first.
• 1:11:34
  Philip Pape: If you've never done it before, building muscle and watch how much easier fat loss then becomes when you have that foundation in place.
• 1:11:41
  Philip Pape: All right, if you enjoyed this episode again, all I ask is you hit follow on the podcast to catch every episode when they come out and then go follow Brad's excellent podcast.
• 1:11:50
  Philip Pape: Be Rad with Brad Kearns wherever you listen to your podcast.
• 1:11:54
  Philip Pape: All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember the secret to lasting fat loss isn't found in restriction.
• 1:12:01
  Philip Pape: It's found through building building muscle, that is.
• 1:12:04
  Philip Pape: I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.