Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / The Paris 2024 Olympics Strategy for More Muscle and Less Fat (Optimization Theory) | Ep 201

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The Paris 2024 Olympics Strategy for More Muscle and Less Fat (Optimization Theory) | Ep 201 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: What we're talking about today is how these Olympic athletes strategically cycle their nutrition to achieve peak performance, but also optimize their body composition, as some sports call for that.
• 0:13
  Philip Pape: And if you're listening to this and you have a goal of leaning out, of building muscle, losing fat, we are going to talk about using the engineering principle of optimization theory to do that to build more muscle, lose fat, prevent plateaus, make your diet more effective and sustainable.
• 0:31
  Philip Pape: So if you're tired of the yo-yo dieting, if you're not sure what to do with your diet, if you're struggling to improve your body composition, this episode will show you how to engineer your nutrition like an Olympian.
• 0:43
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the podcast that blends evidence and engineering to help you build smart, efficient systems to achieve your dream physique.
• 1:02
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, philip P, and I want you to think about this.
• 1:05
  Philip Pape: You've been dieting on and off for months, maybe for years, and sometimes you make progress, sometimes you don't.
• 1:12
  Philip Pape: Your energy fluctuates, your workouts feel inconsistent, you're not quite sure if you're building muscle or kind of spinning your wheels and going up and down Sound familiar.
• 1:23
  Philip Pape: Well, what if I told you that there is a way to structure your nutrition that allows for both muscle gain and fat loss without feeling like you're constantly fighting this uphill battle and not really making progress.
• 1:35
  Philip Pape: And this is a method that aligns with your body's natural rhythms, perhaps even with your schedule, with periods of progress, with periods of progress, with periods of maintenance, with periods of recovery.
• 1:46
  Philip Pape: Whatever life throws at you, you can handle it, and that's what we're exploring in today's episode, which is all about optimization theory.
• 1:55
  Philip Pape: We're going to break down how you can apply the nutritional strategies of Olympic athletes to your own body composition goals, even if you never plan to compete or step on a platform or go to the Olympics, like most of us won't.
• 2:09
  Philip Pape: Before we dive in, if you're enjoying the show, if you want more content on building muscle and losing fat efficiently, if you want content on periodization, sign up for my email list.
• 2:19
  Philip Pape: The link is in the show notes or you can just go to witsandweightscom slash email and you will get all sorts of unique angles, interesting strategies, helpful content.
• 2:28
  Philip Pape: Some of it's psychology, some of it's training, some of it is nutrition, special promotions, challenges all that fun stuff that you would only get on the email list.
• 2:36
  Philip Pape: Again, click the link in my show notes or go to witsandweightscom slash email.
• 2:40
  Philip Pape: So when most people think about dieting, they often fall into one of two camps the chronic calorie cutter, who's always restricting you know who you are.
• 2:50
  Philip Pape: Or the eat whatever whenever crowd or eat in moderation.
• 2:54
  Philip Pape: Or, you know, cut carbs or whatever, who avoids any form of structure other than some general blueprint or diet.
• 3:00
  Philip Pape: Here's the thing neither of these approaches is optimal.
• 3:03
  Philip Pape: I think you know that they're not optimal if you want to achieve and maintain your best physique and not even optimal.
• 3:08
  Philip Pape: They're not even effective, they're not even sustainable, and that's the use of optimal that I'm using today.
• 3:13
  Philip Pape: But that is where a concept called nutritional periodization comes in, and it's a strategy used by athletes in general.
• 3:22
  Philip Pape: That's where we get the concept from, but it can be definitely applied to you.
• 3:26
  Philip Pape: It's not just for elite competitors.
• 3:28
  Philip Pape: We can adapt it to body composition for anyone, and in fact, it's exactly the approach that I take with my clients, whether it is in Physique University or one-on-one clients.
• 3:37
  Philip Pape: That is what we do.
• 3:38
  Philip Pape: So I want to talk about optimization theory and you'll see how this all comes together, about optimization theory and you'll see how this all comes together In engineering.
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: This is a principle that is about maximizing or minimizing a function to find the best solution.
• 3:51
  Philip Pape: In our case, we are using nutritional periodization to maximize fat loss and muscle retention, or to gain muscle and minimize fat gain, right, all while minimizing the negative impacts of our dieting, because we want it to be at least sustainable, if not enjoyable, depending on what process we're in.
• 4:15
  Philip Pape: So if we think about the Olympics and we think about athletes and how they do this, right, they do periodize their training.
• 4:21
  Philip Pape: That is not what we're talking about today.
• 4:23
  Philip Pape: I wanna talk about how they periodize their nutrition.
• 4:25
  Philip Pape: That is not what we're talking about today.
• 4:26
  Philip Pape: I want to talk about how they periodize their nutrition, and they tend to have four different phases or seasons.
• 4:30
  Philip Pape: And so the one phase is the building phase, and this is where you are focusing on building muscle.
• 4:39
  Philip Pape: You're in a slight surplus, you have higher carbs and you're either building strength or muscle.
• 4:45
  Philip Pape: You're working on that skill and you're not selling yourself short in the energy department.
• 4:49
  Philip Pape: You're giving yourself all that you need and, yes, it might come with a trade-off of you're going to gain some weight, kind of like the off season.
• 4:55
  Philip Pape: Okay, that's one phase.
• 4:58
  Philip Pape: Then we have the performance phase.
• 4:59
  Philip Pape: This is where you shift to potentially maintenance calories.
• 5:03
  Philip Pape: Right, you've gotten the skill development, you've gotten the strength, you've gotten the muscle and now you're going to balance things out and fuel your performance and hold on to those gains from the building phase.
• 5:13
  Philip Pape: Then you might have a leaning out phase, especially for sports where they need an improved strength to weight ratio.
• 5:20
  Philip Pape: Right, think of endurance athletes, where you need to lean out and get a little bit lighter.
• 5:23
  Philip Pape: There's a lot of examples of this.
• 5:25
  Philip Pape: Not all sports apply right.
• 5:26
  Philip Pape: In some sports, bigger, bigger, bigger is better, and I'm not really talking about those.
• 5:30
  Philip Pape: So the lean out phase this is where we now introduce a gradual calorie deficit.
• 5:34
  Philip Pape: Maybe the protein comes up a little bit, you reveal some of the muscle you've built, or you lighten out just to reduce scale weight, maybe for a weight class or some other performance metric.
• 5:44
  Philip Pape: But again, if you just care about how you look or your physique or aesthetics, this is also simply where you're going to reveal that muscle.
• 5:51
  Philip Pape: And then, finally, we have the recovery phase, which is where we get back to maintenance calories.
• 5:55
  Philip Pape: We come out of the dieting phase and then we focus back on getting to the routine we were in before before we get back to the next cycle of building.
• 6:05
  Philip Pape: Now, through all of these cycles, the principles are roughly the same, but there are changes.
• 6:09
  Philip Pape: There are differences.
• 6:10
  Philip Pape: It cannot be helped.
• 6:12
  Philip Pape: The calories change, the hunger signals change, the goal is different, even though the principles are roughly the same.
• 6:21
  Philip Pape: And again you might be thinking look, I'm not an athlete, do I need to do all this?
• 6:25
  Philip Pape: Do I need to do cuts and bulks and all this stuff?
• 6:26
  Philip Pape: And the beauty of this approach is it doesn't have to be extreme, it doesn't have to be even that difficult.
• 6:31
  Philip Pape: It could be very gradual and you can spend as long as you want in any of these phases.
• 6:37
  Philip Pape: You could even skip some phases in certain cases.
• 6:39
  Philip Pape: And it really comes down to how quickly not quickly as in quick fix, but how much you're willing to go in one direction or another and really step on the gas pedal to, overall, improve your body composition a little more efficiently than someone else who might be okay coasting for a while, right?
• 6:56
  Philip Pape: So for the average person, what does this look like?
• 6:58
  Philip Pape: All right, in the building phase, you might have a very slight surplus, something like this a quarter percent of your body weight a week, right, and that's where you would have plenty of protein.
• 7:10
  Philip Pape: You would still have good quality food.
• 7:12
  Philip Pape: You might have to have extra food, though, to get the calories in.
• 7:15
  Philip Pape: You're gonna have more carbs and you're gonna be training really hard and really building your growth, your muscle, without excessive fat gain.
• 7:22
  Philip Pape: And for some of you, building phase can be very lean, but I typically recommend around that sweet spot of 0.2 to 0.3% body weight a week.
• 7:31
  Philip Pape: The performance phase, that's the next one.
• 7:32
  Philip Pape: That's where you get out of the building muscle and you come back to more of a maintenance phase where you stay there for a while.
• 7:39
  Philip Pape: You sustain your habits, you sustain your body composition.
• 7:42
  Philip Pape: Maybe you're a little bit heavier and you're ready for a cut, but you've come out of that building phase and this may be as short as zero days for some people who just want to go straight into a cut, or it may be hey, I'm going to hang out here for a while and take advantage of my larger body mass for my numbers and everything else.
• 7:58
  Philip Pape: Then we get to the leaning out phase and most people listen to my podcast.
• 8:01
  Philip Pape: They're coming here.
• 8:01
  Philip Pape: They're like how do I lose fat?
• 8:02
  Philip Pape: Or most people sign up as a client.
• 8:04
  Philip Pape: You know how do I lose fat?
• 8:05
  Philip Pape: Not everyone.
• 8:06
  Philip Pape: Some people want to go straight into the building phase, but leaning out is where we apply that moderate calorie deficit.
• 8:12
  Philip Pape: You know, moderate for you, which could be aggressive for someone else, but for you it might be moderate to aggressive, depending on your calories, depending on your metabolism.
• 8:21
  Philip Pape: And we do it strategically and we do it for a defined period.
• 8:23
  Philip Pape: And by strategically I mean there's many ways to do it.
• 8:26
  Philip Pape: We could do it as a straight line, like every day you're eating these calories, or we can alter it, we can cycle it, we can even cycle the dieting phase with breaks and these are topics I've talked about extensively on some of my recent episodes, such as my stair-step fat loss process or my three new dieting methods.
• 8:44
  Philip Pape: Go check those out.
• 8:46
  Philip Pape: And then we have recovery.
• 8:47
  Philip Pape: We always have to have recovery out of a dieting phase, right, not a reverse diet, not a reverse diet.
• 8:55
  Philip Pape: We recover straight to our maintenance calories and we give our bodies and minds a final break from that deficit.
• 8:58
  Philip Pape: And we've revealed our muscle and now we are ready to walk around and just maintain those results for as long as we want, until you get the bug for the next building phase, which many of us do.
• 9:07
  Philip Pape: So that is what we mean by periodization, and this allows us to optimize our nutrition for our goals at different times, just like Olympians do, just like athletes do, but tailored to your everyday life and body composition goals.
• 9:22
  Philip Pape: Now, I mentioned optimization theory before and I really want to tie it to that and show you where it comes into play, because throughout this process, we're constantly gathering data and making adjustments.
• 9:35
  Philip Pape: Without that, you cannot do this, you simply can't.
• 9:38
  Philip Pape: It is going to be so much more frustrating.
• 9:41
  Philip Pape: You're not going to know what's going on, there's going to be much more uncertainty and it's going to take a lot longer.
• 9:46
  Philip Pape: My clients want to be efficient, they want to get it done, they want to know what's happening, they want to have confidence and they want to be able to fire me and do it on their own.
• 9:55
  Philip Pape: And so this curiosity of hey, what's going on with my body?
• 9:58
  Philip Pape: What's going on with my?
• 9:59
  Philip Pape: Well, we're going to talk about the metrics.
• 10:02
  Philip Pape: We track, but what's going on, so that I can make those adjustments and rapidly prototype my body along the way and go from start to finish as efficiently as possible, rather than blindly following some fixed plan.
• 10:14
  Philip Pape: We're optimizing it based on our individual response, and that means tracking not just your scale weight which you should and daily would be ideal but also your circumference measurements your lifts, your lifting, progression, progress photos and, most importantly, honestly is how you feel, your biofeedback, your hunger, your recovery, are you recovering well from workouts, are you sore?
• 10:37
  Philip Pape: Your energy, your digestion, your sleep, your stress.
• 10:41
  Philip Pape: All of this is valuable data and then, like an engineer fine-tuning a system, we make small adjustments, just small adjustments.
• 10:47
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 10:48
  Philip Pape: Maybe you need a few more carbs in the building phase to fuel your workouts.
• 10:51
  Philip Pape: Maybe you can handle a slightly larger deficit in the leaning out phase without losing muscle.
• 10:56
  Philip Pape: And the key here is we are not making drastic changes.
• 10:59
  Philip Pape: We're making small, calculated adjustments to optimize our results.
• 11:04
  Philip Pape: And that's exactly what Olympic athletes and their nutritionists do, and they pay them a lot of money, or somebody pays them a lot of money and you can do this on your own.
• 11:14
  Philip Pape: You can do this with a little bit of support.
• 11:16
  Philip Pape: You can get a little extra support by reaching out to me and we can talk about that.
• 11:20
  Philip Pape: But they're constantly fine tuning, based on their performance and based on their body composition data, to get where they need to be.
• 11:27
  Philip Pape: And the real power of this just to give you a little bit of a surprise here at the end is nutritional periodization.
• 11:34
  Philip Pape: While it does give you the physical changes.
• 11:36
  Philip Pape: It profoundly transforms your relationship with food and your relationship with your body.
• 11:43
  Philip Pape: All right, so one of my clients I'm going to call her Sarah.
• 11:45
  Philip Pape: She came to me after years of yo-yo dieting very common, right, you've been dieting for years and she was either always on a diet and she tried all the fad diets, including keto, which is probably the most popular one today, other than, say, carnivore.
• 12:00
  Philip Pape: Uh, I think she did weight watchers in the past as well.
• 12:03
  Philip Pape: She was either on or she was, you know, off the wagon, off the track, right, there's no in between.
• 12:08
  Philip Pape: And even if there's an in between, it's like no man's land uncertainty.
• 12:13
  Philip Pape: And we started with the maintenance phase, at the recovery phase, as the lead up to the leaning out phase.
• 12:20
  Philip Pape: And we talked about periodization and how, hey, we're going to map out the next six to 12 months and I mean literally map it out Like I will take a whiteboard, we'll draw a quick, quick and dirty little graph for the next 12 months and we'll scratch out what it looks like to periodize your nutrition over time.
• 12:35
  Philip Pape: And it completely changed her perspective and I see this all the time.
• 12:38
  Philip Pape: It's this aha moment of oh wow, like I can actually do this and I know with certainty that I'm going to go from here to there and here there maybe.
• 12:47
  Philip Pape: Maybe as simple as I'm going to lean out with 15 pounds of fat loss right During the building phase.
• 12:53
  Philip Pape: Uh, you then, once you've leaned out, what's cool about that is, once you've leaned out, now you're confident you can do it.
• 12:58
  Philip Pape: We can go the other direction and you're confident you can do that without gaining too much weight, just gaining the right amount of weight and doing it on purpose, to build muscle.
• 13:06
  Philip Pape: And then you learn to eat, not for emotion or because you can't help yourself, but you eat for performance, you eat for recovery, you care about nutrient density and whole foods because they fuel you and they feel good, not because they're quote unquote healthy.
• 13:21
  Philip Pape: When you're in a maintenance phase, you practice sustaining the new habits, and Sarah did exactly that right.
• 13:27
  Philip Pape: She now knew what to do.
• 13:32
  Philip Pape: She didn't have the pressure of being on a diet, but it wasn't like going back quote unquote back to whatever you were eating before.
• 13:35
  Philip Pape: It's still eating the same way.
• 13:36
  Philip Pape: It's just scaling things a little bit.
• 13:38
  Philip Pape: And when she was in a fat loss phase, she learned that she could lose fat without crash dieting.
• 13:43
  Philip Pape: And that's the key it's controlled, it's controlled and then you don't do it forever.
• 13:52
  Philip Pape: You give your body a break with the recovery.
• 13:53
  Philip Pape: And this is so typical of pretty much everybody I work with.
• 13:54
  Philip Pape: And in her case, by the end of that fat loss phase it was about 16 weeks she had lost something like 18 pounds.
• 13:59
  Philip Pape: I was looking at her data.
• 13:59
  Philip Pape: She lost about 18 pounds of fat, lost several inches on her waist.
• 14:02
  Philip Pape: She actually gained some muscle because there was a net improvement in her body composition while she was losing fat, so she had some recomp.
• 14:13
  Philip Pape: She actually built some muscle and lost some fat, so she didn't even have to lose that much weight on the scale.
• 14:18
  Philip Pape: The most important thing is she now had this sustainable, fun, enjoyable approach to nutrition that she can maintain long term.
• 14:25
  Philip Pape: She knew how to handle vacations.
• 14:27
  Philip Pape: She knew how to handle vacations.
• 14:28
  Philip Pape: She knew how to handle going out.
• 14:29
  Philip Pape: She knew how to handle being in the summer versus being in the winter, versus the holidays versus the spring.
• 14:34
  Philip Pape: And that's the power of nutritional periodization, right, it's not just about the physical, it's the approach that keeps you progressing year after year and you enjoy the process All right.
• 14:47
  Philip Pape: So, as we wrap up, let me just recap all of this.
• 14:49
  Philip Pape: Number one nutritional periodization is a powerful principle that we can live by, that is used by athletes and we can adapt it for our own body composition goals.
• 14:59
  Philip Pape: Number two it involves cycling through different phases building, maintenance, leaning out, recovery each with its own focus, each with its own goal.
• 15:09
  Philip Pape: Number three by applying optimization theory, we can continually fine tune our approach in those phases, based on our individual response and data.
• 15:18
  Philip Pape: It's not fixed.
• 15:19
  Philip Pape: And number four this strategy not only leads to physical changes, but can also transform your relationship with food and your body.
• 15:30
  Philip Pape: Achieving and maintaining your ideal body composition, your dream physique, whatever you want to call it, isn't about perpetual dieting.
• 15:36
  Philip Pape: It isn't about avoiding structure.
• 15:38
  Philip Pape: It's not about intuitive eating.
• 15:40
  Philip Pape: It's not just quote, unquote, listening to your body.
• 15:42
  Philip Pape: It's strategic planning.
• 15:44
  Philip Pape: It's purposeful nutrition with intent and ongoing optimization based on your feedback.
• 15:50
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 15:51
  Philip Pape: That's really what it is when you put it all together, it's clarity and confidence.
• 15:55
  Philip Pape: All right, again, if you want to learn more about optimizing your body composition using this approach and many of the other things that we'd use, just join my free email list.
• 16:02
  Philip Pape: That's all you got to do Join the list, you'll get the information and then, of course, if you ever want to reach out.
• 16:07
  Philip Pape: You can reply and say hey, philip, what's up, I have a question and I'll answer it.
• 16:11
  Philip Pape: That's it, simple.
• 16:12
  Philip Pape: Go to witsandweightscom, slash email or click the link in my show notes.
• 16:16
  Philip Pape: You'll get exclusive content that I don't share anywhere else tips on how to apply principles like these, journey, and you have a direct line of connection to me and our community.
• 16:26
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember, in nutrition, as in the Paris 2024 Olympics, it's all about strategic periodization and optimizing.
• 16:37
  Philip Pape: For you, this is Philip Pape.
• 16:40
  Philip Pape: You've been listening to Wits and Weights and I'll talk to you next time.
• 16:42
  Philip Pape: You