Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / You Can Build Muscle FASTER Than We Thought (Without More Fat Gain) | Ep 242

Transcript

You Can Build Muscle FASTER Than We Thought (Without More Fat Gain) | Ep 242 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: If you've been following the standard advice of gaining weight slowly and methodically to build muscle, including advice that I've given on this show, you might be too conservative.
• 0:10
  Philip Pape: New research has changed our understanding of how quickly you can gain muscle while keeping fat gain minimized, and I mean quite completely changed, because what we thought was optimal might actually be cutting your gains in half.
• 0:23
  Philip Pape: Today, I'm breaking down the latest science that's forcing us to rethink what we knew about the rate of building muscle and why.
• 0:31
  Philip Pape: This is actually great news for anyone trying to pack on size.
• 0:34
  Philip Pape: Whether you're a beginner who can gain faster than ever, or an experienced lifter who needs to find your sweet spot to avoid constant bulking and cutting cycles, this episode is going to help you hone in on the most efficient physique building approach.
• 0:48
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that blends evidence and engineering to help you build smart, efficient systems to achieve your dream physique.
• 1:03
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today we're exploring something that challenges what many of us, including myself, have been teaching for years about building muscle.
• 1:11
  Philip Pape: You're probably tracking your calories, your macros.
• 1:14
  Philip Pape: You're aiming to get just the right rate of gain, probably around a quarter pound per week, maybe a little more, something like two to three pounds per month, because that's what everyone says is optimal.
• 1:25
  Philip Pape: I've even said before 0.2 to 0.3% of your body weight a week is optimal and, yes, you're going to make progress.
• 1:32
  Philip Pape: However, you do it when you're in a surplus, but it might be slower than you want.
• 1:36
  Philip Pape: And now you notice others making gains faster.
• 1:39
  Philip Pape: Maybe you feel like you're shortchanging yourself because it doesn't seem like you're putting it all out there.
• 1:45
  Philip Pape: And the new research that we've seen over the last few years suggests exactly that that we can gain muscle faster than previously thought, with less concern about fat gain than we once believed, and this changes pretty much everything we knew about building muscle and how fast and how large our surplus should be.
• 2:06
  Philip Pape: Now, speaking of changing everything, I've revised my free muscle building nutrition blueprint to reflect the new findings, the new rates of gain, and I separate it by aggressiveness depending on how comfortable you are gaining weight and gaining some fat along for the ride as you build that muscle.
• 2:24
  Philip Pape: And if you want your free copy of my muscle building nutrition blueprint, just use the link in my show notes or go to witsandweightscom slash free and it's updated and it's a very detailed guide with not only the rate of gain, but it walks you step by step through the process of building muscle.
• 2:40
  Philip Pape: It gives you an example of how I applied this to a past bulk, which, of course, if I did it again, I might actually go aggressively.
• 2:51
  Philip Pape: And just so you know, I'm recording this as I've recently started a new bulk, which I will be reporting out on, probably in a few months, only because I want to see how well my new program goes as well.
• 2:59
  Philip Pape: I'm running a 19 week program that has a base phase and then a peaking phase to push up my main lifts, which I haven't done in a while, and I'm combining that with the bulk and I'm going at what I would call a moderately aggressive rate based on what I'm going to share today.
• 3:14
  Philip Pape: So let me break this down into three parts.
• 3:16
  Philip Pape: First, we're going to look at why the recommendations are changing based on new research.
• 3:20
  Philip Pape: I've said in the past you should never be locked into a specific finding, whether it's from one study or 10 studies, because there could always be new information that enlightens us as to more precise, accurate approach, and that is exactly the case here.
• 3:35
  Philip Pape: Then, in the second segment, I'm going to explain exactly what this means for you and your muscle building goals.
• 3:41
  Philip Pape: And then, finally, I'm going to show you how to put this into practice based on your experience level, your level of training advancement.
• 3:49
  Philip Pape: So let's talk about how our understanding has evolved, because this is super important.
• 3:53
  Philip Pape: Why are my recommendations changing?
• 3:55
  Philip Pape: Why are the recommendations in the industry changing?
• 3:59
  Philip Pape: And some very well-respected individuals out there, like the guys at Stronger by Science, for example and if you've listened to me for any length of time, you've heard me tell you, as a listener and clients, to gain around 0.2 to 0.3% of your body weight per week when trying to build muscle.
• 4:17
  Philip Pape: And this wasn't just my recommendation, it was the standard advice based on the best available evidence at the time, including some meta-analysis, one by Dr Herrick Helms et al.
• 4:26
  Philip Pape: I've had people on the show talk about that and it was in all of my guidance, even to clients as well, because it's the best thing we knew and everyone's worried about gaining too much fat, so we don't want to push it too aggressively and do the old dreamer bulk right.
• 4:40
  Philip Pape: Just the seafood diet, see it and eat it.
• 4:42
  Philip Pape: But you know, science evolves and sometimes it evolves dramatically and sometimes it catches up to some of the kernels of truth that we know about from the bro science, from the guys who've truly packed on some muscle and I'll be honest, you know I have a long way to go.
• 4:56
  Philip Pape: I've been doing this seriously now for four or five years but I want to say, like, from the nutrition side, probably about three years, and I've learned a lot personally.
• 5:04
  Philip Pape: I've helped hundreds of clients and listeners go through this process and doing it successfully, and yet still we can learn and do it better.
• 5:11
  Philip Pape: So we've gone from having just two key studies on this topic.
• 5:16
  Philip Pape: This is the pitfall of relying on science too much is when we don't have quite enough information out there compared to the decades and hundreds and thousands of anecdotes which in some way count as their own evidence.
• 5:29
  Philip Pape: So we've gone from having two studies to now having five well-designed studies.
• 5:34
  Philip Pape: Look at how different rates of weight gain affect muscle growth and fat gain, and the results are changing what we thought we knew.
• 5:40
  Philip Pape: And I want to give credit where it's due because this was recently detailed in an excellent article by Greg Knuckles at Macrofactor.
• 5:49
  Philip Pape: You know how much I love those guys.
• 5:51
  Philip Pape: He was on the show in the past and he's just a phenomenal writer, but he's really good at distilling a lot of this complex information into an article that's still detailed enough to give you all the key points and graphs and comparisons.
• 6:03
  Philip Pape: And their team.
• 6:04
  Philip Pape: They analyzed these five studies and it kind of opened my eyes about how we need to update our approach as well, and that's why I'm doing this episode and so I've linked to that article in the show notes and you can check that out firsthand and see where it all comes from.
• 6:18
  Philip Pape: But to get into specifics, a recent study published in the Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology found something pretty remarkable because in relatively untrained lifters which is a good place to start because they can change fairly quickly gaining up to about a pound or a half percent of body weight per week led to large increases in fat-free mass, with minimal to no increase in fat mass.
• 6:44
  Philip Pape: And if we think about how our body is composed, when we talk about body composition, there is muscle mass and there is everything else which includes fat, but not just fat.
• 6:54
  Philip Pape: And the way they typically measure these is just creating a binary buckets, you know, fat-free mass and fat mass, which is pretty helpful in our context because a lot of us really care about are we gaining too much fat when we gain muscle?
• 7:06
  Philip Pape: But we also want to see that we're gaining the muscle and what the ratio is.
• 7:10
  Philip Pape: So one pound a week is significantly faster than what we previously thought, even for newer lifters.
• 7:18
  Philip Pape: I mean, I'll say it's on the cusp and you're going to find out.
• 7:21
  Philip Pape: You're going to see here that the recommendations for intermediate and advanced lifters are actually a lot more aggressive than we thought as well.
• 7:26
  Philip Pape: So where it gets interesting for those people, for experienced lifters and by experienced I mean you've been training hard for at least six to nine months Now you've moved into late novice, early intermediate and your propensity to gain muscle is just a little bit less than where it was at the beginning or anything more advanced than that.
• 7:46
  Philip Pape: The research shows that faster rates of weight gain might help increase muscle growth even a bit more, but too much, and you're still going to primarily just increase fat gain.
• 7:55
  Philip Pape: So that's where there's consistency with the previous literature to an extent, but the numbers have just shifted to be more aggressive.
• 8:03
  Philip Pape: So, for example, in a very advanced lifter, when gaining about 0.4% of their body mass a week, about 60 to 65% of the weight gained was fat-free mass, so that's almost two-thirds not as fat, which is more than I thought would happen.
• 8:20
  Philip Pape: I used to say it was around 50-50, right, and any more than that.
• 8:24
  Philip Pape: It just gets worse.
• 8:25
  Philip Pape: But now we're saying it's two-thirds muscle or two-thirds fat-free mass to one-third fat.
• 8:32
  Philip Pape: Okay, in an advanced trainee at 0.4% a week, which, just so you know, is right about the rate I'm going at right now.
• 8:40
  Philip Pape: I used to hit it at around 0.25, 0.3, and now I'm going at 0.4.
• 8:44
  Philip Pape: I consider myself an intermediate lifter and I'm going more aggressive Pretty cool, right, and I know that that could.
• 8:51
  Philip Pape: Then it gives me a lot of excitement because, first of all, I get to eat a lot more food, which is awesome, In fact, almost to the point where it could be uncomfortable, because I do still eat a lot of whole foods and fiber and sometimes I feel too full whole foods and fiber and sometimes I feel too full.
• 9:05
  Philip Pape: So there's that hard gaining piece.
• 9:07
  Philip Pape: I did a whole episode about that in the past and I'm going to link to that in the show notes as well.
• 9:11
  Philip Pape: Anyhow, if we take that rate of gain 0.4%, let's say we slow that down to more like 0.16, I think was the exact number.
• 9:17
  Philip Pape: The amount of fat-free mass that these advanced lifters gained as a percentage of the total weight gained was 85%, so a vast majority of it being muscle.
• 9:28
  Philip Pape: When they're going at 0.15% Now, 0.15% is roughly on the low end of whatI used to recommend anyway, like the lowest of the low end Kind of makes sense.
• 9:39
  Philip Pape: So what this means is simple We've been too conservative with our recommendations, especially for beginners and intermediates and that's probably the vast majority of people listening to be honest Because once you're advanced, you kind of have things dialed in and understand how your body responds anyway, and it's going to take longer between.
• 9:57
  Philip Pape: It's going to take longer to do everything you know to gain muscle mass, to gain strength, and so it makes sense that your rate of gain would slow down.
• 10:05
  Philip Pape: So all of this is excellent news because it means that you might be able to build muscle faster than you thought, without packing on unnecessary fat.
• 10:12
  Philip Pape: So now you understand why recommendations have changed.
• 10:15
  Philip Pape: And again, go check out the article.
• 10:17
  Philip Pape: You can check out the research study that I just mentioned specifically, but it's mentioned in the article, so I would rely on that and their citations to see all of the studies that are being drawn upon.
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: And now I want to use this research to tell us what it means about building muscle, and this is where it gets really interesting.
• 10:34
  Philip Pape: So this research has revealed three insights that I want to talk about, Three major insights about building muscle.
• 10:40
  Philip Pape: First, your training experience matters potentially even more than we realized.
• 10:46
  Philip Pape: Beginners have an incredible capacity for muscle growth.
• 10:50
  Philip Pape: They can gain up to 0.8% body weight per week with minimal fat gain.
• 10:57
  Philip Pape: Like those are fat loss numbers.
• 11:01
  Philip Pape: In other words, like that's the rate of body weight loss I would be recommending for fat gain.
• 11:05
  Philip Pape: Usually, when we talk about muscle gain, we talk about a fraction of that, like a half or a quarter of that, and what we're saying is no, you can actually crank it up to like 0.8% and even potentially 1% of your body weight per week if you're total new and you're willing to gain a little extra fat for the chance of building a lot more muscle.
• 11:24
  Philip Pape: And then we have intermediate lifters and they're not far behind now.
• 11:27
  Philip Pape: They have the ability to gain, say, 0.3 to 0.5% per week effectively and still gain a ton of that as muscle mass.
• 11:34
  Philip Pape: We're talking a half a percent a week.
• 11:35
  Philip Pape: So if you gain let's say you're an average, slightly bigger guy and you're 200 pounds, just for easy numbers that's a pound a week.
• 11:43
  Philip Pape: Right, that's a pound a week.
• 11:45
  Philip Pape: So that's like a little over four pounds a month, which means in six months you'd be gaining like 25 pounds.
• 11:50
  Philip Pape: Okay, and 25 pounds amounts to what does that come out to be?
• 11:55
  Philip Pape: Over what 12.5% increase?
• 11:58
  Philip Pape: And I used to recommend anywhere from seven to 10%, and this is suggesting we can go up to like well, 12.5% over a six month period.
• 12:05
  Philip Pape: You can bulk for less, you can bulk for longer, and that's going to change the total weight gained, but the percentage of that gained as muscle mass should still be pretty high, All right.
• 12:14
  Philip Pape: And then we have advanced lifters who still need even more precision and they should stay in the range of anywhere from 0.15 to 0.35% body weight per week.
• 12:23
  Philip Pape: And I realize I'm throwing a lot of numbers at you.
• 12:24
  Philip Pape: If you go to the Macrofactor article, you'll see tables that give you ranges and I wouldn't worry too much about it.
• 12:31
  Philip Pape: If you use Macrofactor the app itself, it's actually designed around percentage gain per week.
• 12:37
  Philip Pape: Use my code, WITSANDWEIGHTS, try it for free for a couple of weeks and I'm sure you'll be hooked and you'll want to use it forever.
• 12:45
  Philip Pape: Again, link in the show notes.
• 12:45
  Philip Pape: It sounds like I'm promoting a bunch of stuff here, but it's all connected, so beginners can go up to a percent or maybe 0.8%, intermediates up to half a percent and advanced maybe 0.35%.
• 12:56
  Philip Pape: That's the first major insight from this research.
• 12:59
  Philip Pape: But there's more to understand about how this changes our approach, because second is that we've discovered the sweet spot, for muscle growth is also higher than we previously thought kind of that optimal number and the research shows that your body's more capable of using the extra nutrients for muscle growth, especially earlier in your training career and we used to think a little bit slower.
• 13:21
  Philip Pape: More of a lean gain was always better and we know that's not true now, which is great.
• 13:25
  Philip Pape: It's liberating.
• 13:26
  Philip Pape: It means you have a lot more flex pun intended to eat more and gain more muscle without being as worried about gaining a ton of fat.
• 13:35
  Jenny: Hi, my name is Jenny and I just wanted to say a big thank you to Philip Pape of Wits and Weights for offering his free 50-minute nutritional assessment.
• 13:44
  Jenny: During that time he gave me really good tools on how I can further my health and fitness goals.
• 13:51
  Jenny: He asked really great questions and stayed true to his offer of no sales pitch.
• 13:57
  Jenny: I have since applied these things and gotten really close to my health goals and my weight goals, and now I'm able to flip over and work on my strength and my muscle conditioning using a lot of the things he offers in his podcasts, and I just am very grateful for his positive inspiration and encouragement, for all of our help.
• 14:19
  Jenny: Thank you, philip.
• 14:21
  Philip Pape: And then third, and this might be the most exciting finding that the ratio of muscle to fat gain is much better than we feared.
• 14:27
  Philip Pape: I alluded to that earlier.
• 14:28
  Philip Pape: If you gain at one of these moderate rates which is now, is more aggressive than we thought up to three quarters of the weight gained can be lean mass.
• 14:37
  Philip Pape: Now, a little bit of that might be some fluid mass, glycogen going on, but still that's a huge ratio of muscle.
• 14:44
  Philip Pape: I've seen this.
• 14:45
  Philip Pape: You know there's a sanity check.
• 14:47
  Philip Pape: A sniff test on this is with my clients.
• 14:49
  Philip Pape: We track a bunch of metrics.
• 14:50
  Philip Pape: We track body measurements.
• 14:51
  Philip Pape: I do some Navy formula based body fat percentage measurements and I also calculate how much lean mass versus fat you've gained or lost during a muscle building phase.
• 15:03
  Philip Pape: And for my clients who have gone at a more conservative rate, like we used to recommend, it was often well over two thirds lean mass and I always thought, wow, this must just be because they're so new at it.
• 15:16
  Philip Pape: Because many of my clients they've been training, but they haven't maybe been training effectively.
• 15:19
  Philip Pape: So we get them training for strength using the right type of periodization, using the right stimulus, with volume and intensity, and they just get cranky.
• 15:28
  Philip Pape: Their lifts go up, they start building a ton of muscle.
• 15:31
  Philip Pape: So it makes sense.
• 15:32
  Philip Pape: But now I'm thinking, oh, is it actually because we just can go more aggressively and still gain a bunch of muscle and it not be very much fat and let's not worry as much about the scale going up?
• 15:46
  Philip Pape: We actually want that to happen.
• 15:48
  Philip Pape: We want to be well over that threshold and now this liberates us to really push it and not worry.
• 15:53
  Philip Pape: That's what I think is pretty cool.
• 15:54
  Philip Pape: So even when we push the rate of gain higher, fat accumulation isn't nearly as dramatic as we once thought, and this completely changes the old belief that you know, if you gain too fast, it's all fat.
• 16:05
  Philip Pape: Having said that, there is a rate of gain that some people would be going way too aggressively.
• 16:11
  Philip Pape: You know, like one and a half, two percent a week is probably then at the point where you're just going to gain a bunch of fat, and that's like the dreamer book, right.
• 16:17
  Philip Pape: But the evidence doesn't support the fear of too much fat gain in a fairly wide range now.
• 16:23
  Philip Pape: So we've covered why the old recommendations were too conservative, what the new science shows Now, how do you actually apply this to your own training and nutrition?
• 16:33
  Philip Pape: And it's pretty simple how do we take this and turn it into your results?
• 16:35
  Philip Pape: I think it starts with assessing.
• 16:38
  Philip Pape: How do we take this and turn it into your results?
• 16:40
  Philip Pape: I think it starts with assessing honestly, like very honestly, your training experience.
• 16:47
  Philip Pape: All right, you're probably a beginner and I have air quotes here if you're still adding weight to your lifts almost every session so that's session to session.
• 16:54
  Philip Pape: But honestly, if you're able to go up every week, you're probably still in a late beginner, early intermediate stage.
• 16:59
  Philip Pape: So if you're able to go up every week, you're probably still in a late beginner, early intermediate stage.
• 17:01
  Philip Pape: So if you're making progress, but it's less consistent and, again, progress is very fluid here because it's not just weight on the bar, it's also your volume, your periodization.
• 17:12
  Philip Pape: If you use some sort of wave type programming, you kind of know who you are if you're not just cranking up weight on the bar super quickly.
• 17:21
  Philip Pape: So I'm in that situation where I'm not just going to increase weight every session and not necessarily every week.
• 17:28
  Philip Pape: Sometimes I increase sets or reps as a form of adding more work, and there's different reasons for that, outside the scope of today's podcast, different reasons for that outside the scope of today's podcast.
• 17:38
  Philip Pape: But I consider myself intermediate, but still with a huge propensity to grow muscle, and so I'm going to go that moderately aggressive like that.
• 17:52
  Philip Pape: 0.4%.
• 17:52
  Philip Pape: Maybe I could even go more aggressive than that.
• 17:54
  Philip Pape: But the amount of calories required then become actually a little bit of a sustainability issue for me, just like when you cut too quickly and it's not sustainable.
• 17:59
  Philip Pape: I know we're going into the holiday season here.
• 18:01
  Philip Pape: I can only put down so much food at each meal, just how I am, and to go significantly past say 3,200 or 3,500 calories a day would be not that sustainable for me.
• 18:14
  Philip Pape: I could do it, and it's an excuse if I said I couldn't, but that's part of the equation.
• 18:20
  Philip Pape: So 0.4%, anyway, beginner and immediate.
• 18:23
  Philip Pape: You got to assess where you are and if you're advanced, you know who you are.
• 18:26
  Philip Pape: I mean, I'm not going to try to define that for you.
• 18:28
  Philip Pape: You know who you are, so let's talk about selecting your approach then based on that.
• 18:32
  Philip Pape: If you're a beginner, I would start with something like a half a percent body weight gain per week.
• 18:36
  Philip Pape: If you're a little bit worried about too much fat gain, okay, that's a pound a week for a 200 pound person, but you can push it up to 0.7, 0.8% and be probably fine and you're going to get even more gains.
• 18:47
  Philip Pape: If you're intermediate, you might aim for about 0.3 to 0.4%.
• 18:51
  Philip Pape: So this is like on top of the optimal range that I used to talk about.
• 18:55
  Philip Pape: By a percent or so, I mean 0.1% or so, so that you can push it there.
• 19:00
  Philip Pape: And that's where I'm going 0.4%, and then, if you're advanced, you're going to stay more conservative 0.2, 0.3, which is ironically the old optimal.
• 19:08
  Philip Pape: So everything's been shifted up and it's not just about the rate of gain.
• 19:13
  Philip Pape: So this is important.
• 19:14
  Philip Pape: You have to monitor more than just the scale.
• 19:15
  Philip Pape: We're going to monitor how is your progression in the gym strength, numbers, volume, sets, recovery.
• 19:22
  Philip Pape: Here's my premise for lifting and programming.
• 19:24
  Philip Pape: Your program and your approach and your recovery should be set up where you are not missing reps period.
• 19:31
  Philip Pape: Whether you're doing a very beginner program like starting strength, or a more advanced program, intermediate, you know, four or five day split, it should be set up and you should be doing things in advance so that you're not missing reps.
• 19:43
  Philip Pape: I don't like the idea that some people have that I'm just going to push for some goal weight and I might fall short, but I stretched myself and that'll be an indicator of progress.
• 19:55
  Philip Pape: That is not objective and if you are constantly failing reps, it tells me that you are overreaching or you are under-recovering with your program.
• 20:04
  Philip Pape: It is not structured appropriately for you and if you're wondering about all this, reach out to me.
• 20:08
  Philip Pape: I'll help you out.
• 20:09
  Philip Pape: I'll help you identify either a standard template or program out there that's probably appropriate given your training age and capacity, or we can talk about how you might tweak a program in a custom way to work for you.
• 20:21
  Philip Pape: So you shouldn't be missing reps right.
• 20:24
  Philip Pape: Are your lifts consistently progressing the way you want them?
• 20:27
  Philip Pape: You should be taking measurements and progress photos right and tracking your various circumference levels in your body, fat and body composition to make sure they're on track where you want.
• 20:36
  Philip Pape: I have a physique tracker in the Wits and Weights Physique University that everyone uses.
• 20:41
  Philip Pape: So from day one when you go through onboarding, you get that and it shows you how to track all of these measurements.
• 20:47
  Philip Pape: And then it does all the calculations for you and it tells you you are gaining lean mass versus fat at this rate and then you can tell okay, am I doing something that I shouldn't be?
• 20:56
  Philip Pape: Am I not training hard enough or appropriately, or am I eating too much?
• 20:59
  Philip Pape: Or maybe I'm low on protein.
• 21:02
  Philip Pape: There could be something going on that you can tell.
• 21:05
  Philip Pape: Track your biofeedback, like your energy, your recovery between sessions, your DOMS right, your delayed onset, muscle soreness.
• 21:11
  Philip Pape: Sometimes it's fine, sometimes it's a good thing, sometimes it's not.
• 21:16
  Philip Pape: It's an indicator of under recovery, right?
• 21:17
  Philip Pape: Your sleep, your digestion, your hunger, all of those things as well.
• 21:21
  Philip Pape: All these factors tell you whether you're gaining in the right way, at the right rate for you.
• 21:27
  Philip Pape: So we've talked about rates of gain, we've talked about monitoring progress.
• 21:32
  Philip Pape: There's one more piece that's crucial to making this work besides lifting consistently.
• 21:36
  Philip Pape: There's one more piece that's crucial to making this work besides lifting consistently, and that is your nutrition quality right.
• 21:39
  Philip Pape: Just because you can gain faster doesn't mean you should throw nutrition out the window, and it's very common, when you have all these calories you want to hit, that you start throwing in a ton more processed foods.
• 21:49
  Philip Pape: You kind of start eating a little more randomly.
• 21:52
  Philip Pape: Your meal timing gets thrown off right.
• 21:55
  Philip Pape: Training days versus off days start to look quite different.
• 21:59
  Philip Pape: You struggle on off days to even eat enough.
• 22:01
  Philip Pape: There's a lot of these issues and we've got to have the principles in place.
• 22:04
  Philip Pape: There's, of course, protein.
• 22:06
  Philip Pape: It shouldn't be that hard to get enough protein when you're eating a lot more calories.
• 22:09
  Philip Pape: You should have already set that up before you went into a muscle building phase.
• 22:13
  Philip Pape: Anyway, of 0.7, one gram per pound body weight of protein shouldn't be hard when the calories are up.
• 22:19
  Philip Pape: And then you still need quality carbs to fuel your training.
• 22:22
  Philip Pape: Now there's always lots of debates about carbohydrates.
• 22:24
  Philip Pape: My position is that there's no harm in adding carbs.
• 22:28
  Philip Pape: There could be harm in being too low in carbs, especially when you're building muscle.
• 22:33
  Philip Pape: That's the way I like to say it.
• 22:34
  Philip Pape: I'm not going to say low carb is going to harm you or hold you back.
• 22:38
  Philip Pape: I'm just saying that you should try it out and see how carbs help, not just with performance, energy and recovery, but one thing that doesn't get talked about enough the anti-catabolic nature of carbs, the ability of carbs to prevent the breakdown of muscle tissue and make everything else you're doing serve you better, like the protein and the lifting right.
• 22:59
  Philip Pape: It's just.
• 23:00
  Philip Pape: It removes a potential hindrance by increasing your carbs.
• 23:05
  Philip Pape: And then, of course, the balance of your macro is just to make it work, the healthy fats and all that fun stuff to support everything you're doing, which, again, shouldn't be a problem with all those calories.
• 23:14
  Philip Pape: But the key thing with quality is still have the nutrients coming in, still have the fiber, but then you have to manage your timing and you have to manage your frequency so that you don't feel stuffed or uncomfortable and it's sustainable.
• 23:24
  Philip Pape: All of that still applies.
• 23:26
  Philip Pape: All right, now we're about to wrap this up.
• 23:29
  Philip Pape: I do want to share something that I discovered while reviewing the research.
• 23:33
  Philip Pape: That actually changed how I think about muscle gain.
• 23:36
  Philip Pape: So you remember those studies that showed really high rates of lean mass gains in beginners.
• 23:42
  Philip Pape: What they actually revealed wasn't just about the rate of gain, it was your body's nutrient partitioning abilities when the right conditions are present.
• 23:54
  Philip Pape: And one way to think about that is simply this Remember when you didn't lift weights.
• 23:58
  Philip Pape: Remember when you were less active.
• 24:01
  Philip Pape: You were afraid of gaining weight.
• 24:03
  Philip Pape: Probably you were afraid and it happens to people on the holidays every year you just gradually overconsume.
• 24:08
  Philip Pape: You're probably consuming a lot more than you think you are and it's a lot more than your body even needs when you're not that active and you're not utilizing those nutrients in any productive way other than energy storage, meaning fat.
• 24:22
  Philip Pape: Now you're completely flipping that on its head to say I'm doing stuff lifting weights, training hard and being active that actually use the nutrients and energy in a productive way for the first time in my life, and your body is super adaptive to that.
• 24:41
  Philip Pape: It's adapting how it uses the food coming in, such that you're a completely different person than the version of you that wasn't active or lifting.
• 24:49
  Philip Pape: So when you do this and I see this with clients all the time it's so incredible and it's so amazing and even my own personal journey has borne this out I don't fear gaining weight anymore.
• 25:02
  Philip Pape: I can't possibly fear it, because every time I gain weight it's combined with the things that use those nutrients and I build muscle, even if some fat comes along for the ride.
• 25:10
  Philip Pape: I know it's super easy to cut fat after that, and it will be for you too, if you take this approach right.
• 25:15
  Philip Pape: Your after that and it will be for you too, if you take this approach right your strength will skyrocket.
• 25:20
  Philip Pape: Your body composition will change.
• 25:21
  Philip Pape: Your body composition will improve from when you were gaining weight in the past and not lifting, but even potentially when you were gaining weight too slowly.
• 25:27
  Philip Pape: And so ladies not just men, a lot of men I talk to have no problem with the concept of like, okay, I'm going to gain weight, maybe some fat, that's fine.
• 25:34
  Philip Pape: I sense the fear more in women and this is just a generalization but for some of you women who just need to spend time building muscle, you might have to do it even more aggressively than you thought, and it's going to result in weight gain, but for a purpose.
• 25:46
  Philip Pape: A purpose that's going to make you leaner, stronger, more fit, more capable, and then you could just cut the fat, and you won't have to cut it as much as you think, because you're going to have all this extra muscle and you can walk around at a higher scale weight, you know, like a badass, looking great, carrying extra weight, eating more food Isn't that what we want, right?
• 26:04
  Philip Pape: So the increased food, combined with progressive loading, creates such a strong muscle building stimulus that your body is going to preferentially use all those extra calories, the vast majority of them for muscle growth.
• 26:15
  Philip Pape: So keep this in mind.
• 26:17
  Philip Pape: This is a very important episode, a very important concept that sometimes, being too conservative, would actually hold you back from creating that optimal anabolic environment for muscle growth.
• 26:26
  Philip Pape: Right, it's like trying to build a house with just barely enough materials coming in, right?
• 26:30
  Philip Pape: Yeah, you're not going to have extra materials that represent fat storage, but you're making the whole process much harder and slower than it needs to be.
• 26:37
  Philip Pape: It's just going to take forever.
• 26:38
  Philip Pape: Now if you're the type of person who doesn't like to gain or lose weight and just wants to sit at the same weight and get some body recomp, that's a whole separate discussion you can do that.
• 26:48
  Philip Pape: It's just going to take a lot longer time we're talking on the order of multiple years and you might get frustrated with the lack of progress in the gym because you're just not cranking up that anabolic environment.
• 26:59
  Philip Pape: All right, I think I've gone on long enough on this and I think it's all very exciting.
• 27:03
  Philip Pape: I'm passionate about it.
• 27:04
  Philip Pape: It's an evolution in our understanding of some really basic things in the science of muscle growth and strength.
• 27:09
  Philip Pape: Don't forget, strength is a huge part of this.
• 27:12
  Philip Pape: It means that many of you can make faster progress while maintaining a smart, methodological or methodical approach.
• 27:20
  Philip Pape: It's not about going crazy and just dumping calories in your body.
• 27:24
  Philip Pape: It's giving you the resources that you need and cranking it right to that limit to fulfill the potential on a reasonable timeframe.
• 27:31
  Philip Pape: Right, because your body is even more remarkable than we thought at building muscle and when you provide the right stimulus through training and adequate nutrients through food, it knows exactly what to do with those resources.
• 27:43
  Philip Pape: And remember, if you want to implement these new recommendations and all the other things, what do you track?
• 27:49
  Philip Pape: How do you track them?
• 27:50
  Philip Pape: How do you know that it's working to maximize your muscle growth?
• 27:53
  Philip Pape: I've completely revised my muscle building nutrition blueprint to reflect the latest research and it breaks down exactly how to determine your ideal rate of gain, set up your nutrition and monitor your progress.
• 28:04
  Philip Pape: To get those results, just download using the link in my show notes, or, as always, go to witsandweightscom slash free.
• 28:12
  Philip Pape: And if you want to track your progress with the app that I mentioned earlier, which I use, my clients use.
• 28:17
  Philip Pape: Try Macrofactor for free with code WITSANDWEIGHTS.
• 28:19
  Philip Pape: I link to that as well in the show notes.
• 28:21
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember that sometimes being too conservative can hold you back from your true potential.
• 28:30
  Philip Pape: This is Philip Pape.
• 28:31
  Philip Pape: You've been listening to Wits and Weights.
• 28:33
  Philip Pape: I'll talk to you next time.