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Bonus Q&A - More Protein vs. More Carbs, Is Creatine Worth It for Muscle? · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: Hey everybody, enjoy this bonus Q&A which is from our Ask Philip Live in the Wits and Weights Facebook group.
• 0:07
  Philip Pape: If you want to join the group and get your questions answered for free on these lives, just use the link in our show notes or look up Wits and Weights on Facebook.
• 0:14
  Philip Pape: Enjoy the Q&A.
• 0:16
  Philip Pape: So Wyatt's first question is when I'm setting a goal or program in Macrofactor and that's the food logging app that I recommend people use because it dynamically calculates your metabolism and gives you accurate targets.
• 0:28
  Philip Pape: When I set a goal using small caloric surplus and configuring protein, I typically do the high end of the optimal range of protein and it gives me about 180, 190 grams.
• 0:39
  Philip Pape: The medium range would give me 150 to 160 grams and, of course, shift those calories to carbs.
• 0:47
  Philip Pape: So what he's saying here is the fat tends to stay the same.
• 0:50
  Philip Pape: If you kind of tweak the protein, you offset the carbs.
• 0:54
  Philip Pape: Vice versa, and it's mainly a one for one in terms of grams, because both carbs and protein have roughly four calories per gram, except for fiber.
• 1:05
  Philip Pape: Put that onto the side, okay, but if you drop 10 grams of protein, you will increase 10 grams of fat.
• 1:13
  Philip Pape: I mean, sorry, 10 grams of carbs, or roughly half that in terms of fat, so like if you wanted to give it to fat, it would be maybe four or five grams of fat.
• 1:21
  Philip Pape: Anyway, he continues what kind of differences can I expect in my training or my physique results by choosing medium or high protein?
• 1:30
  Philip Pape: Either way, I'm at least allotted 250 plus grams of carbs per day.
• 1:35
  Philip Pape: So he's saying, whether the protein is medium or high, he's in a surplus, he's got lots of calories, he's at least 250 grams of carbs, so he's not like in anywhere in low carb or keto territory regardless, and as well a minimum of 150 grams protein, which is about 0.7 grams per pound of his body weight.
• 1:53
  Philip Pape: And then he asked another question about creatine.
• 1:56
  Philip Pape: We'll table that and address that separately.
• 1:58
  Philip Pape: So, wyatt, let's talk about this is a really good question because I've also thought about it a lot and, given that I deal with clients where you know people simplify and they think it's just about macros and there are just strict formulas that we follow and that's the end of it.
• 2:13
  Philip Pape: It is highly individualized and so I want to lay out the considerations for this and then what you specifically can do to figure out what you need, because, again, if you were working with me, we would look at a lot of data and biofeedback and performance information and I'm going to ask you to do that for yourself in this process.
• 2:34
  Philip Pape: So first let's just talk about why you're taking protein in general.
• 2:37
  Philip Pape: Muscle protein synthesis right, you're building muscle, you're strength training.
• 2:41
  Philip Pape: In this case you are in a calorie surplus plenty of calories.
• 2:45
  Philip Pape: We are not talking about fat loss people.
• 2:46
  Philip Pape: If we're in fat loss, the protein, you want it at least the 0.7 up to maybe the one gram per pound, and then the fats and carbs or whatever's left, and in that case the carbs stay pretty low and there's very little room to offset them.
• 3:02
  Philip Pape: In Wyatt's case, he's got a lot more calories to work with and he's wondering if it makes a difference.
• 3:06
  Philip Pape: It's a great question because you're trying to optimize at this point.
• 3:09
  Philip Pape: So muscle protein synthesis when you consume more and more protein, it increases your muscle protein synthesis, which is just the rate or the percentage of your day that your body is net building new muscle tissue versus breaking it down.
• 3:26
  Philip Pape: That's really what we're concerned about.
• 3:28
  Philip Pape: It's always doing both.
• 3:29
  Philip Pape: It's just how much are you pushing the synthesis side?
• 3:32
  Philip Pape: And if you are trying to optimize everything and you're in a calorie surplus, higher protein generally means more muscle protein synthesis.
• 3:42
  Philip Pape: But and this is the big caveat that's going to get into nuance the medium level intake you're talking about, of about 150, 160 grams for your weight, still is comfortably in the minimum recommendations for achieving that of 0.7 grams per pound of body weight, and between that and about one gram per pound it's, I want to say, like a 5% difference, right?
• 4:07
  Philip Pape: So that leads us then to further considerations, because that could be enough for you.
• 4:13
  Philip Pape: But let's look at the other considerations.
• 4:14
  Philip Pape: The second consideration is satiety and then even recovery.
• 4:18
  Philip Pape: So I'm kind of lumping those together.
• 4:20
  Philip Pape: But we know that the more protein we eat, the more full we are, and that's awesome for hunger levels.
• 4:26
  Philip Pape: However, when you're trying to consume a lot of calories, it may actually harm you, in that you are so full all the time you can't quite get in the calories or you have to manipulate your timing or force yourself to eat.
• 4:39
  Philip Pape: This is not a place we want to be.
• 4:41
  Philip Pape: Phase don't have much of a problem with hunger at this point, and so you don't need it for that.
• 4:46
  Philip Pape: It does provide a slight edge in muscle recovery, but so do carbs, right?
• 5:00
  Philip Pape: So if you're already eating high quality protein sources more or less spread throughout the day, kind of around your workout as well.
• 5:03
  Philip Pape: You're probably recovering fine from the minimum amount of protein, the medium amount.
• 5:08
  Philip Pape: So then we say, okay, well, what about the carbs?
• 5:10
  Philip Pape: Like I get protein, it maybe doesn't make that big of a difference.
• 5:14
  Philip Pape: Diminishing returns, yada, yada.
• 5:15
  Philip Pape: What about carbs?
• 5:17
  Philip Pape: Well, I just did a whole episode about carbs you can listen to as well as the one I did called more carbs, more muscle, last year, I believe.
• 5:25
  Philip Pape: But by having a lower level of protein it allows for more carbs, and we know that carbs enhance your training performance.
• 5:34
  Philip Pape: They replenish your glycogen stores, they can help you have more intense and effective workouts, they can improve your energy during the workout and that can indirectly lead to better ability to train hard and stimulate that muscle growth.
• 5:49
  Philip Pape: And that might be more proportionally more impactful than the extra benefit of going from medium to high protein.
• 5:59
  Philip Pape: And so, in conclusion then, physique differences here and muscle building differences.
• 6:03
  Philip Pape: High protein intake may lead to slightly more muscle gain, but the difference is marginal.
• 6:08
  Philip Pape: The extra carbs might give you more performance.
• 6:11
  Philip Pape: That outweighs that difference from protein.
• 6:14
  Philip Pape: This is all may, may, may, and so, really, what am I going to ask you to do?
• 6:18
  Philip Pape: Well, I test it out.
• 6:19
  Philip Pape: At the end of the day, it comes down to testing it out which is the point of my carb episode that got all the hate from the YouTube trolls is testing it out by changing one variable.
• 6:29
  Philip Pape: So what I would suggest you do I don't know what you've been doing so far, if you've been at the 180, 90, I think you have is is make a huge step change in both the protein and carbs.
• 6:40
  Philip Pape: So drop that protein, increase the carbs by the exact same amount, by by that massive, like 40, not massive, but like that 40 grams, and directly track the things you want to measure on the process based goals, process-based outcomes.
• 6:56
  Philip Pape: What do I mean?
• 6:57
  Philip Pape: Not your physique, which is going to change over many months, but the recovery, the soreness, the performance and the progression in the gym.
• 7:05
  Philip Pape: So you probably have a good idea, wyatt of and anybody listening of okay, I've been able to go up by this amount of weight over time every session, or by these many reps on these movements.
• 7:17
  Philip Pape: When you do this step change, does that type of progression feel like it accelerates right, it's a little bit faster or you just feel a little peppier in the gym and you know when you get out of bed the next day you're a little bit less.
• 7:30
  Philip Pape: You know, beat up things like that.
• 7:31
  Philip Pape: You really have to track them and see.
• 7:33
  Philip Pape: You may not notice much of a difference.
• 7:35
  Philip Pape: You may notice a clear difference and at the end of the day, that's what you're going to have to do.
• 7:39
  Philip Pape: If your question was, should I even do it at all?
• 7:41
  Philip Pape: I say, yeah, give the experiment a shot because you really people think we need a lot more protein than we do, and we don't.
• 7:46
  Philip Pape: But most people are getting far less than you need In your case.
• 7:50
  Philip Pape: You're in the population that that I speak to, who they're learning this and they kind of understand okay, I need to have more protein, but you don't have to jack it up so high that it limits your carbs, all right.
• 8:00
  Philip Pape: So hopefully it answers the question of if you need protein.
• 8:04
  Philip Pape: You can experiment between medium 0.7 grams per pound or high one, 1.2 grams per pound, and offset it with carbs and see what the difference is in things like performance and recovery.
• 8:15
  Philip Pape: That's where you're going to notice it, all right.
• 8:18
  Philip Pape: So then there was a second part to your question.
• 8:20
  Philip Pape: You said how much does creatine actually matter if all the other training and recovery variables are at least 80% on point.
• 8:30
  Philip Pape: Short answer probably one to 5%, if I were just to put a number on it.
• 8:35
  Philip Pape: Longer answer is two parts.
• 8:37
  Philip Pape: First, related to what you are asking about, which is performance.
• 8:40
  Philip Pape: The second related to the many, many, many benefits of creating that we are discovering quite frequently in the literature.
• 8:46
  Philip Pape: That might make you rethink ever coming off of it.
• 8:51
  Philip Pape: Okay, so the performance side we know that creatine what it does is increases the availability of phosphocreatine in your muscles.
• 9:00
  Philip Pape: Now the episode I just released Wednesday about energy systems, I talked about the ATP-CP.
• 9:07
  Philip Pape: So the adenosine triphosphate, creatine phosphate pathway, which is very important for lifters.
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: It's very important for that maximum load, intense, squat deadlift, whatever.
• 9:19
  Philip Pape: Important for that maximum load, intense, you know, squat deadlift, whatever.
• 9:23
  Philip Pape: And if you have creatine it just slightly bumps that availability up and that improves your strength and power output during that.
• 9:28
  Philip Pape: We know that.
• 9:29
  Philip Pape: We know that that happens for sure.
• 9:30
  Philip Pape: So then it can help you perform.
• 9:31
  Philip Pape: You know the higher load and get all the reps, or perform more reps at a given weight, and now you get more training volume and now you could potentially accelerate your growth in your performance and maybe even recover better from that.
• 9:43
  Philip Pape: So that's the second piece is well?
• 9:46
  Philip Pape: I guess there's three cause.
• 9:46
  Philip Pape: I should talk about muscle growth specifically.
• 9:49
  Philip Pape: Creatine draws water into your muscle cells and that actually can help the muscle growth as well.
• 9:53
  Philip Pape: It is why you gain a few pounds when you first start taking creatine and why you might look a little fuller, have that fuller appearance, and then again, with more performance, comes more muscle protein synthesis and muscle growth, just like when we talked about carbs.
• 10:08
  Philip Pape: And then recovery.
• 10:09
  Philip Pape: It could aid in faster recovery, both between your sets and between your training sessions.
• 10:15
  Philip Pape: Some people aren't responders Like 20% of people aren't responders to creatine.
• 10:18
  Philip Pape: Some people aren't responders Like 20% of people aren't responders to creatine.
• 10:20
  Philip Pape: And then there's a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a percent that may have some adverse allergy to it, which is so infinitesimal, but I do know one person that had that.
• 10:27
  Philip Pape: Other than that, from a performance perspective, I do think it's worth it just to be on it, and I'll tell you why.
• 10:32
  Philip Pape: Because it also has a lot of other potential benefits that we're learning about, with no downsides, and I want to address those real quick because, even if the training benefit is minimal, I think everyone should probably take creatine, and I'm going to be taking it probably for the rest of my life.
• 10:49
  Philip Pape: I've encouraged my wife to take it, my mother-in-law, my mom, like a whole bunch of people.
• 10:54
  Philip Pape: So there's a whole list of things.
• 10:56
  Philip Pape: I should probably do an entire episode, a deep dive about this.
• 10:59
  Philip Pape: The first one is cognitive enhancement, right, memory intelligence.
• 11:02
  Philip Pape: Now, this may only be in people who have low creatine to begin with because they're, say, vegetarians or vegans, but again, I mean, that is a big amount of the population who also is low in protein when they're not vegetarians and vegans, and so it could help with that, reduce mental fatigue, enhance brain function, all of that.
• 11:21
  Philip Pape: There's neuroprotective effects.
• 11:23
  Philip Pape: Again, this is all potential.
• 11:24
  Philip Pape: We've seen correlations.
• 11:26
  Philip Pape: As best as I can say it, we're talking Parkinson's and Huntington's disease.
• 11:31
  Philip Pape: It might support your cellular energy production, which then protects different types of cells, like nerve cells.
• 11:37
  Philip Pape: It might increase your bone mineral density, mainly as a result of it, helping you with resistance training, and then that helps with osteoporosis.
• 11:46
  Philip Pape: We've seen it could be correlated with improved insulin sensitivity, glucose tolerance, mood, mental health, cardiovascular, like heart, muscle, energy, metabolism.
• 11:58
  Philip Pape: I mean there's so many things we're discovering which is pretty cool, right, like I hope they deep dive into each of these areas and see, is it simply because people who take creatine have a different lifestyle.
• 12:10
  Philip Pape: That enhances these things, right?
• 12:12
  Philip Pape: Or is there a direct improvement because of the creatine?
• 12:16
  Philip Pape: So there's a lot of things.
• 12:18
  Philip Pape: There's antioxidant hydration, thermal regulation I have a whole list here.
• 12:22
  Philip Pape: I didn't want to bore people to death, even skin health, I mean.
• 12:24
  Philip Pape: I don't want to make any of these claims just to say that I would take creatine.
• 12:28
  Philip Pape: I do not just for performance, but for a lot of other potential benefits.
• 12:31
  Philip Pape: Again, that was a Q and a from our ask.
• 12:35
  Philip Pape: Philip, live in our wits and weights Facebook group.
• 12:37
  Philip Pape: If you want to ask your own questions and get deep dive answers for you personally, for you and your context, just use the link of my show notes or look up wits and weights on Facebook and I will approve you into the group totally free and we'll see you there.