Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Build Muscle First, Cut Later for Easier Fat Loss and Less Hunger | Ep 429

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Build Muscle First, Cut Later for Easier Fat Loss and Less Hunger | Ep 429 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: If all you've done is diet and you've never spent time building muscle, then every diet will make the next one harder.
• 0:07
  Philip Pape: More hunger, less energy, slower results.
• 0:10
  Philip Pape: Today I'm going to show you the muscle-first approach to fat loss.
• 0:14
  Philip Pape: You'll learn why more lean mass means less hunger per calorie of deficit, how chronic dieters sabotage their own metabolism, and a timeline to set yourself up so your next fat loss phase actually works.
• 0:27
  Philip Pape: This is how you stop fighting your body and start cutting from a position of strength.
• 0:33
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering, and efficiency.
• 0:49
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape, and founder of the Fitness Lab app.
• 0:54
  Philip Pape: And I want to talk about building muscle versus losing fat because most people approach fat loss in a backward sequence.
• 1:02
  Philip Pape: They are desperate to lose weight or to lose fat, and they say, eventually I'll build muscle once I'm lean enough.
• 1:09
  Philip Pape: And on the surface, it makes just logical sense, I suppose.
• 1:12
  Philip Pape: You get lean, then focus on performance.
• 1:15
  Philip Pape: But it creates a compounding problem that a lot of you never get out of.
• 1:20
  Philip Pape: Because every time you cut without adequate muscle mass, you're just making the next cut harder.
• 1:26
  Philip Pape: You might lose a little lean tissue, your metabolic rate, your metabolism might drop slightly, your hunger hormones are always adapting to try to fight that deficit.
• 1:35
  Philip Pape: And then the next time you try to diet, you're starting from a slightly worse position.
• 1:39
  Philip Pape: You're in this tiny window that is highly unproductive.
• 1:42
  Philip Pape: And you've got to get out of your head and just go for building that muscle.
• 1:47
  Philip Pape: Women, men, a little extra weight to lose.
• 1:49
  Philip Pape: It doesn't matter.
• 1:50
  Philip Pape: It's actually gonna pay off tremendously.
• 1:52
  Philip Pape: You know what?
• 1:52
  Philip Pape: My own story was the first time I finally did a bulk, it was a crazy bulk.
• 1:57
  Philip Pape: I wasn't really trying to.
• 1:58
  Philip Pape: I actually gained a ton of weight and I was a little bit down on myself because I had gained some fat.
• 2:03
  Philip Pape: And then when I cut it off, I realized, you know what?
• 2:05
  Philip Pape: That was the only thing I could have done in my entire life that actually allowed me to build muscle.
• 2:10
  Philip Pape: And of course, I'm gonna teach you how to do it much more efficiently than that.
• 2:13
  Philip Pape: So you don't gain a lot of weight, and and it's gonna be a game changer.
• 2:18
  Philip Pape: I want you to get out of this chronic diet or trap.
• 2:20
  Philip Pape: It's why some people feel like every time they try to lose fat, it's just this hard thing.
• 2:25
  Philip Pape: They don't quite get the result they want.
• 2:27
  Philip Pape: Maybe they lose a few, maybe they gain it back.
• 2:29
  Philip Pape: So we're gonna flip that around.
• 2:31
  Philip Pape: Today is episode six of our eight-episode appetite series for January.
• 2:37
  Philip Pape: And you're like, appetite, aren't we talking about building muscle?
• 2:39
  Philip Pape: Well, I wanted to make the connection where a muscle-first strategy, if you spend time building that metabolic capacity before worrying about your next cut again, when you actually do it, when you actually do a calorie deficit, you're going to have less hunger, you're going to have better adherence, you're going to eat more calories, and you're going to retain more muscle.
• 3:00
  Philip Pape: And at the end of the day, that's just going to make all those fat loss faces in the future so much easier.
• 3:04
  Philip Pape: So it's a little bit of investment now for a massive payoff later and for the rest of your life.
• 3:10
  Philip Pape: Then at the end of the episode, I'm going to give you a simple test that you can do in your next workout to tell you whether you're actually training as hard as you can train.
• 3:20
  Philip Pape: This is pretty cool because again, we're talking hunger, but we're really talking about building muscle.
• 3:24
  Philip Pape: And it's a little trick that I've found, especially with newer lifters, who I know a lot of you are not training hard enough.
• 3:30
  Philip Pape: Well, if you're going to go and spend time building muscle, I want you to do it effectively as well.
• 3:33
  Philip Pape: So stay tuned for that.
• 3:36
  Philip Pape: Hey, this is Philip, and today's episode is sponsored by Calocurb.
• 3:40
  Philip Pape: If you've ever been in a fat loss phase and felt like hunger was working against you, Callocurb's GLP1 activator is a game changer.
• 3:48
  Philip Pape: CallowCurb is a natural appetite support made from a marisate, a patented bitter hops extract that activates GLP1 and other gut signals to help you feel fuller, faster.
• 4:01
  Philip Pape: Clinical studies showed a 40% reduction in cravings and a 30% reduction in hunger within one hour.
• 4:08
  Philip Pape: If you want to try it, go to witsandweights.com slash calocurb for 10% off your first order.
• 4:15
  Philip Pape: The link is in the show notes.
• 4:17
  Philip Pape: That's witsandweights.com slash calllocurb.
• 4:20
  Philip Pape: All right, let's start with the pattern that I see, just so you can kind of put yourself into the shoes of this avatar of clients, questions from listeners, the fitness community at large, a lot of you are doing this.
• 4:32
  Philip Pape: You're desperate to lose weight.
• 4:34
  Philip Pape: Let's just be honest.
• 4:34
  Philip Pape: You want to lose 20 pounds.
• 4:35
  Philip Pape: You'll want to lose 10 pounds, 20, 30, whatever.
• 4:37
  Philip Pape: So what do you do?
• 4:38
  Philip Pape: You start a diet and you eat less.
• 4:40
  Philip Pape: Maybe you add some cardio, maybe you track your calories and macros, maybe you're doing it all quote unquote the right way, and you lose weight and you lose some fat.
• 4:47
  Philip Pape: You know, obviously there's some water weight loss in there.
• 4:49
  Philip Pape: And maybe some of that is muscle because you're not quite in that mode of knowing how to hold on to the muscle as effectively.
• 4:56
  Philip Pape: Because you've never really spent time truly training for building muscles.
• 5:00
  Philip Pape: So it doesn't translate either into your fat loss phase.
• 5:03
  Philip Pape: Regardless of how you did it, that that you go through, you might lose five, 10, 15, even 20 pounds, and then life happens, and then you stop tracking, then you go back to normal eating, then you regain some weight.
• 5:14
  Philip Pape: Six months later, you try again, same approach, same results, but maybe it feels a little harder.
• 5:19
  Philip Pape: And if you've been trying to diet your whole life, okay, I know you know the women out there on average try over 100 diets in your lifetime.
• 5:26
  Philip Pape: That this is the statistics we see.
• 5:28
  Philip Pape: It just gets harder and harder and harder.
• 5:30
  Philip Pape: You're hungrier on the same calories, your energy is lower, your progress is slower, your metabolism is dropping.
• 5:34
  Philip Pape: We don't like that.
• 5:35
  Philip Pape: We don't like that.
• 5:36
  Philip Pape: And what's happening is very well-documented phenomena, repeated dieting with, I'll say, mixed or lack of adequate resistance training and protein, you lose muscle.
• 5:48
  Philip Pape: But even if you're doing those things, you don't really have much muscle to hold on to.
• 5:51
  Philip Pape: And so you have a lower metabolism as a baseline, right?
• 5:55
  Philip Pape: And it just means you don't have the capacity to make that fat loss phase as effective.
• 5:59
  Philip Pape: And at the end of the day, once you lose the weight, even if you did lose just fat, there's not much muscle to reveal either.
• 6:05
  Philip Pape: So it's kind of both of those pieces.
• 6:07
  Philip Pape: And I'm tying it more to the appetite and hunger side because of our series, but it really is all of that, right?
• 6:12
  Philip Pape: And speaking of hunger, there's the hormonal piece.
• 6:15
  Philip Pape: Now I've beat to death the hunger and appetite hormones over the last several episodes.
• 6:20
  Philip Pape: So please go back and check those out.
• 6:22
  Philip Pape: But because your appetite system adapts to being in a deficit, all of these hormones, you know, leptin that makes you full, ghrelin that makes you hungry, and your body's sensitivity to these signals trend in the wrong direction or they're staying down regulated just a bit because you're always in that dieting state.
• 6:41
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 6:42
  Philip Pape: Also, people who've repeatedly dieted have stronger responses to the negatives of these than people who haven't.
• 6:50
  Philip Pape: So we don't want to keep doing this and compounding the issue as we get older.
• 6:53
  Philip Pape: So, in practical terms, of course, two people eating the same calories in a deficit, while they might lose the same weight, might have different hunger levels.
• 7:03
  Philip Pape: And to be in that deficit, you might be in different calorie levels too, because you might have a higher metabolism.
• 7:10
  Philip Pape: So to be in the same deficit, you can eat more than someone else, right?
• 7:13
  Philip Pape: And that affects hunger.
• 7:15
  Philip Pape: So building muscle is going to be really important.
• 7:17
  Philip Pape: This is the trap, though, this chronic diet, always have to diet, always have to lose weight, always afraid of gaining weight and gaining fat.
• 7:24
  Philip Pape: And that's why you're not building muscle or you're afraid of getting bulky or some nonsense like that.
• 7:28
  Philip Pape: And I'm sorry to say that is exactly what it is because, ladies and men, it takes a lot of work and time to actually build decent size.
• 7:36
  Philip Pape: And ladies, you're not gonna get bulky.
• 7:38
  Philip Pape: Your bodies don't do that, you know, unless you you're on performance-enhancing drugs.
• 7:42
  Philip Pape: Men, we want to get bulky, and it's hard to do that.
• 7:44
  Philip Pape: So let's put that aside.
• 7:46
  Philip Pape: All right, so how does building muscle change this whole equation?
• 7:50
  Philip Pape: What does it do mechanistically?
• 7:52
  Philip Pape: Well, first we have the calorie side.
• 7:54
  Philip Pape: Muscle tissue is gonna burn more calories in a lot of different ways.
• 7:57
  Philip Pape: I did an episode a while back about how muscle burns more calories than you think.
• 8:02
  Philip Pape: And it's not just the tissue itself.
• 8:04
  Philip Pape: The tissue burns six to nine calories per pound a day.
• 8:07
  Philip Pape: So it's more than fat, and you're going to thus add, if you had 10 pounds of muscle over time, you might increase your calorie burn up to say 100 calories a day.
• 8:17
  Philip Pape: That's not nothing, right?
• 8:18
  Philip Pape: But it also increases how much you train, how hard you train, how much weight you can carry around.
• 8:22
  Philip Pape: You tend to move more.
• 8:24
  Philip Pape: All of these things kind of compound on their, on their, you know, on themselves.
• 8:28
  Philip Pape: And then you're more efficient with your nutrients.
• 8:30
  Philip Pape: So you have better insulin sensitivity, right?
• 8:31
  Philip Pape: It all actually, at the end of the end of the day, gives you a higher metabolism, right?
• 8:36
  Philip Pape: And that burns more calories, which means you can eat more calories.
• 8:38
  Philip Pape: So that is very important that a person who's more muscular just burns more calories because of the muscle and because of the weight, and because they're doing, they're burning more calories, doing activities, and because they tend to be more active anyway, given their lifestyle, right?
• 8:53
  Philip Pape: So your deficit's gonna be more forgiving.
• 8:55
  Philip Pape: And then so that's the muscles or the calorie side.
• 8:57
  Philip Pape: And then we have the appetite side, which gets really interesting for this episode.
• 9:02
  Philip Pape: We know that muscle tissue affects insulin sensitivity.
• 9:05
  Philip Pape: Well, when you're more insulin sensitive, your blood sugar stays more stable after meals.
• 9:10
  Philip Pape: You're gonna have fewer blood sugar crashes, and that means fewer hunger spikes, fewer cravings, and less of that desperate need to eat something immediately after a meal.
• 9:19
  Philip Pape: And I think we spoke about this on the last solo episode, how muscle just seems to make people less hungry.
• 9:25
  Philip Pape: And I've seen this anecdotally as well, right?
• 9:28
  Philip Pape: People just have a little more muscle mass.
• 9:30
  Philip Pape: I don't know, they just don't have as many appetite issues, as many hunger issues.
• 9:33
  Philip Pape: And that alone could be the reason you want to do this, right?
• 9:37
  Philip Pape: I've seen a lot of clients and our physique university members, mostly women, I'm gonna be honest, who are like, you know what?
• 9:43
  Philip Pape: I'm finally gonna let it, I'm finally gonna listen to you, Philip, and I'm gonna build muscle, and I'm gonna just I know there's fear of gaining fat and gaining weight, but I've got you in my corner.
• 9:51
  Philip Pape: You know, we talk them through it.
• 9:53
  Philip Pape: And it just opens up all these doors because they can eat more food, they have more flexibility, they start to feel great, biofeedback normalizes, better sleep, start getting new PRs.
• 10:02
  Philip Pape: Everything just turns out for the better.
• 10:05
  Philip Pape: And six months later, they're like, oh my God, that was awesome.
• 10:08
  Philip Pape: You know, I gained like six pounds on the scale, but five of them were muscle.
• 10:11
  Philip Pape: You know what I mean?
• 10:12
  Philip Pape: And it's like that was a great result, you know, and they're almost looking at scale weight gain as this huge positive because it allowed them to gain muscle and they're leaner.
• 10:20
  Philip Pape: They have less, you know, even if they haven't gone through a fat loss phase yet, because they did it in a kind of a lean way, they have smaller waist size, right?
• 10:27
  Philip Pape: More muscle definition.
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: And that's what I want for you.
• 10:30
  Philip Pape: And it's gonna make all these things easier.
• 10:32
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 10:33
  Philip Pape: There's also emerging evidence that muscle mass influences your incretin hormones like GLP1, which we've talked about a lot throughout the series.
• 10:42
  Philip Pape: That's a satiety signal that drugs like semaglantide, you know, manjaro, terzepatide, wagovi.
• 10:47
  Philip Pape: I'm mixing brand names and chemical names, but you get the idea.
• 10:50
  Philip Pape: And it's the same pathway that like the calllocurb we've talked about is the sponsor of this episode, addresses, right?
• 10:57
  Philip Pape: And some research suggests that people with more muscle mass have a better GLP1 response to meals.
• 11:04
  Philip Pape: So this is a funny one because I was I was responding to somebody in our community in in physique university who said, Hey Philip, have you actually used Callocurb?
• 11:12
  Philip Pape: And I said, Yeah, I think I'm a super responder because when I use it, it actually like dampens my hunger quite a bit.
• 11:17
  Philip Pape: Now, I'm not in a fat loss phase, but I I thought, oh, I seem like a super responder.
• 11:22
  Philip Pape: And it could be because I have some muscle mass, right?
• 11:25
  Philip Pape: Like, and and I wonder if people who are more trained will over-respond to something like that, which means it could be a really powerful tool and you don't even have to take very much of it, just as a side thought.
• 11:36
  Philip Pape: So more muscle, greater satiety signal per meal, less hunger and a deficit.
• 11:40
  Philip Pape: I mean, it all compounds in a good way on itself.
• 11:43
  Philip Pape: And then, of course, there's the training itself.
• 11:45
  Philip Pape: Like when you resistance train, you tend to be less hungry, especially versus something like cardio, especially the chronic, stressful, high, you know, intense cardio or lots of it, high volume cardio.
• 11:56
  Philip Pape: Resistance training, on the other hand, makes you less hungry.
• 11:59
  Philip Pape: It suppresses ghrelin, usually for a few hours after your workout, right?
• 12:02
  Philip Pape: And so people who strength train tend to feel less hungry compared to cardio sessions, which is great, which I love it.
• 12:08
  Philip Pape: So when someone says build muscle first, then cut, which is what I'm telling you today, it's not just about like building muscle.
• 12:15
  Philip Pape: It's it's it's changing the difficulty of the fat loss that comes afterward, making it easier.
• 12:20
  Philip Pape: So I just I just briefly mentioned the sponsor for today's episode.
• 12:24
  Philip Pape: I want to talk about them for a second, Callocurb, because I'm I've become a big fan.
• 12:28
  Philip Pape: I've become a big fan of this.
• 12:29
  Philip Pape: I didn't realize this would happen until I learned about them.
• 12:32
  Philip Pape: We had Sarah Kennedy on the show last week to talk about the science behind it.
• 12:35
  Philip Pape: And we've been talking about GLP1, right?
• 12:38
  Philip Pape: GLP1 and how it affects satiety, how that tells your brain to gut brain access that you're satisfied after eating.
• 12:44
  Philip Pape: Well, Callowcurb is a natural supplement that upregulates your own GLP1.
• 12:49
  Philip Pape: So your endogenous GLP1 that your body produces, when you take callocurb, it basically triggers that to increase by about 600%.
• 12:57
  Philip Pape: Whereas when you eat food, it goes up by about 300%.
• 13:00
  Philip Pape: And so you take it about an hour before your meal, and it effectively has a mechanism that makes you start to feel fuller and you haven't eaten anything.
• 13:09
  Philip Pape: And that's why it tamps down the amount you eat during the meal.
• 13:12
  Philip Pape: And it does that through bitter hops extra a bitter hops extract called amerisate.
• 13:16
  Philip Pape: So the bitter hops gets down into your lower gut, time release, and then it triggers your bitter taste receptors, and that causes your body to not want to eat as much.
• 13:25
  Philip Pape: And there have been randomized controlled trials, clinical studies showing a big reduction in cravings by 40%, hunger by 30%.
• 13:32
  Philip Pape: Now notice that's cravings and hunger.
• 13:34
  Philip Pape: So cravings has to do with food noise and emotional eating and stuff like that.
• 13:39
  Philip Pape: Hunger, just general hunger by 30%, and the end result being average calorie intake reduced by 18%.
• 13:46
  Philip Pape: And this is on top of the tools that you guys are using already: macro tracking, eating whole foods, eating more fiber, they compound.
• 13:54
  Philip Pape: And if you take GLP1s, you could potentially take a lower dosage while taking these or even come off of them altogether because these upregulate your hormones, they don't replace them.
• 14:03
  Philip Pape: It's right, so it's not a stimulant, you don't need a prescription, it's not a drug, it's just a really good tool that I think a lot of people can benefit from.
• 14:10
  Philip Pape: So Calicurb's awesome.
• 14:11
  Philip Pape: You go to wins and weights.com slash calicurb and get 10% off.
• 14:15
  Philip Pape: Link is in the show notes.
• 14:16
  Philip Pape: I would say that if you are in a building phase and eating in a big surplus, it may not be the best tool for you, right?
• 14:23
  Philip Pape: Because you're not trying to tamp down hunger.
• 14:25
  Philip Pape: But when you are at back in maintenance or in a deficit and transitioning to a cut and the hunger signals ramp up, having something that supports your natural satiety can make a huge difference in the amount of deficit you can sustain, right?
• 14:40
  Philip Pape: And that's why I like it for myself.
• 14:42
  Philip Pape: And I'm actually using it in my fat loss phase in a few days that I'm about to start, along with our get lean in 45 days workshop and course in physique university.
• 14:52
  Philip Pape: We're gonna do this together.
• 14:53
  Philip Pape: And so I'm definitely recommending this as a tool for some people because I use it myself or I'm going to because I know how powerful it is.
• 14:58
  Philip Pape: I seem to be a super responder.
• 15:00
  Philip Pape: So go to witsandweights.com slash callocurb, C-A-L-O-C-U-R-B.
• 15:04
  Philip Pape: Get 10% off.
• 15:06
  Philip Pape: Just try it out.
• 15:07
  Philip Pape: Like, I can't tell how well it's gonna work for you until you try it.
• 15:10
  Philip Pape: But the science is really solid.
• 15:11
  Philip Pape: It's owned by the New Zealand government, not a company.
• 15:14
  Philip Pape: It's pretty cool.
• 15:14
  Philip Pape: Witsandweights.com slash callow curb.
• 15:17
  Philip Pape: All right, so let's talk about the psychological advantage as well of building, because of building muscle first.
• 15:22
  Philip Pape: Because a lot of you think it's a psychological disadvantage.
• 15:25
  Philip Pape: You're worried about gaining weight, you're worried about gaining fat of bulk, you know, whatever the whatever the situation is, or maybe you're afraid you're not gonna be able to lose it or something like that.
• 15:33
  Philip Pape: But but let's reframe this, okay?
• 15:35
  Philip Pape: When you're in a building phase, food is your friend.
• 15:39
  Philip Pape: You're eating at or slightly above maintenance, you're fueling your performance.
• 15:44
  Philip Pape: You are hitting PRs in the gym constantly.
• 15:46
  Philip Pape: You're watching your strength increase, you're seeing your body composition change in a positive direction, even when the scale's going up a bit.
• 15:54
  Philip Pape: This is a very common story, and it's surprising for people, but you don't know until you do it.
• 16:00
  Philip Pape: And you're like, whoa, I see my shoulders are starting to pop.
• 16:02
  Philip Pape: I'm actually might even see a little bit of abs popping through, you know, the the tiny, the little layer of fat you have that, you know, we can get rid of that later.
• 16:10
  Philip Pape: Let's build, build, build right now and give ourselves the capacity.
• 16:14
  Philip Pape: And this, here's the cool thing: it creates a completely different relationship with food than chronic dieting ever does.
• 16:22
  Philip Pape: Because in a deficit, food is restricted, right?
• 16:25
  Philip Pape: You are restricting something.
• 16:26
  Philip Pape: You're managing portions, you're saying, I'll say you're saying no to things.
• 16:30
  Philip Pape: Hopefully you're building in your flexibility, though, but you are dealing with some hunger.
• 16:34
  Philip Pape: And even with all the satiety strategies and food hacks and tools in the world, there is an inherent psychological tension when you're eating less than your body wants.
• 16:45
  Philip Pape: There's something there that you're gonna just notice, right?
• 16:48
  Philip Pape: And some people notice it a lot more.
• 16:50
  Philip Pape: But when you're in a muscle building phase, now you're eating to perform, carbs become fuel for your workouts, protein is the material that's building, building, building all these muscle cells.
• 17:01
  Philip Pape: You're not constantly thinking about what you cannot have.
• 17:04
  Philip Pape: You're focused on what you're building, and this really, really matters.
• 17:09
  Philip Pape: But when you finally end the build and decide to transition to a cut, you approach it from a position of psychological abundance.
• 17:18
  Philip Pape: Think about that.
• 17:20
  Philip Pape: You've spent months not obsessing over food, but you've built a positive relationship with your training.
• 17:27
  Philip Pape: Your identity isn't as a dieter, it's I'm a lifter who's now temporarily gonna cut my fat.
• 17:32
  Philip Pape: That's it, right?
• 17:33
  Philip Pape: I'm just I'm cutting it off, and then I get back to it.
• 17:36
  Philip Pape: So compare that to the person who constantly diets, always feeling restricted, always dreading being hungry, always thinking, here we go again, same deficit, different experience.
• 17:45
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 17:46
  Philip Pape: And the the I the thing that I think people flip in their head, I mentioned this before, is they think, I'm gonna cut first, and then I'm gonna have the body to enjoy my building phase.
• 17:57
  Philip Pape: But that never happens.
• 17:58
  Philip Pape: Nobody's ever pleased with that smaller body before they start the building phase.
• 18:02
  Philip Pape: They might be mildly like, oh, okay, the scale's down, but don't really look much better.
• 18:06
  Philip Pape: And that was a lot of work, and that kind of sucks.
• 18:08
  Philip Pape: So now what?
• 18:09
  Philip Pape: And and and sometimes you get obsessive about it where you're like, well, now I have to stay at this weight because now I've achieved this weight and that was my goal.
• 18:15
  Philip Pape: And what's the point of all that, right?
• 18:18
  Philip Pape: Then then you then you just start a cut.
• 18:20
  Philip Pape: Then you just, if you do your next cut, let's say you gain weight back and now you cut again, but you didn't do it by gaining muscle.
• 18:26
  Philip Pape: It's just it's a cyclical, never-ending, you know, hellscape, just to put it like mildly or whatever.
• 18:34
  Philip Pape: And you just get these long ruling fat loss phases, right?
• 18:37
  Philip Pape: And we just have a whole community in physique university of folks who are doing the opposite.
• 18:41
  Philip Pape: And I love to see it.
• 18:42
  Philip Pape: They're just thriving, they're building, they're cutting from abundance, and the deficit feels easier because you earn that ease.
• 18:49
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 18:50
  Philip Pape: So keep keep listening because look, at the end of this episode, you're you're like, okay, you're talking a lot about building muscle.
• 18:56
  Philip Pape: Well, I'm gonna get into that in a second, and then later on, I'm gonna give you a technique you can use in your next workout to find out if you're training hard enough.
• 19:03
  Philip Pape: This is a way to calibrate mentally whether you're training hard enough.
• 19:07
  Philip Pape: It takes just one set and it's gonna give you data.
• 19:10
  Philip Pape: Okay, trust me.
• 19:10
  Philip Pape: This is this is a really cool technique.
• 19:12
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 19:13
  Philip Pape: Of course, when someone says trust me, you're not supposed to trust them, right?
• 19:16
  Philip Pape: So I shouldn't have done that.
• 19:17
  Philip Pape: All right, what does this look like practically to build muscle?
• 19:20
  Philip Pape: Now that's a huge topic, but just a practical framework.
• 19:24
  Philip Pape: And I'm gonna give you some numbers here, all right?
• 19:26
  Philip Pape: How long should you build?
• 19:27
  Philip Pape: I would spend six months in a building phase or more, six to 12 months, even.
• 19:32
  Philip Pape: I mean, you may really enjoy doing it for a full year, just putting dieting in your rear view for a while, depending on the mental side of this and depending on the how it aligns with holidays and things like that.
• 19:42
  Philip Pape: And I know it sounds like a long time, but it's not.
• 19:44
  Philip Pape: If you're doing it at a lean level of gain, you're not gonna gain a lot of weight on the scale, but you're gonna invest in that capacity and infrastructure and the psychology and recovery that you need.
• 19:53
  Philip Pape: It's gonna make fat loss easier.
• 19:54
  Philip Pape: You're gonna learn a ton about yourself, trust me.
• 19:56
  Philip Pape: And that whole time is gonna be a learning experience.
• 19:59
  Philip Pape: It's gonna be amazing.
• 19:59
  Philip Pape: How fast do you go?
• 20:01
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 20:01
  Philip Pape: Well, this is where there's there could be some controversy because you'll hear some influencers say you could you could build muscle maintenance.
• 20:08
  Philip Pape: You hear others say like you really need to push it if you're a new newbie.
• 20:11
  Philip Pape: The evidence says anywhere from 0.2% body weight a week to like 0.8% body weight a week.
• 20:17
  Philip Pape: It's pretty big range.
• 20:19
  Philip Pape: When you do the math, you realize even at that upper range, it's not a lot of weight.
• 20:23
  Philip Pape: It's it's not a ridiculous amount of weight.
• 20:25
  Philip Pape: I would say one to two pounds a month for females, two to three pounds a month for males, if if you just want to go with simple round numbers.
• 20:32
  Philip Pape: From a percentage basis, if you are my client or if you're in physique university, I'm gonna push you a little bit toward that 0.4, 0.5%, only because we're really helping you look at the data and adjust and everything.
• 20:43
  Philip Pape: But if you want to be more conservative, 0.3 is decent.
• 20:46
  Philip Pape: Now there's a whole other experience that's like a very lean gain where you can go as low as 0.1, 0.2.
• 20:53
  Philip Pape: It's just not gonna be optimal.
• 20:54
  Philip Pape: It's not gonna, it's gonna take a while.
• 20:56
  Philip Pape: You're you may not notice as as many results.
• 20:59
  Philip Pape: That's more of a special use case.
• 21:01
  Philip Pape: Most of you I'm talking to probably need to push it a little bit up to that 0.3 to 0.5% body weight a week.
• 21:07
  Philip Pape: So if you're let's say 160 pounds, that's like a half pound a week.
• 21:11
  Philip Pape: Like I said, about two pounds, a little over two pounds a month.
• 21:14
  Philip Pape: So that'd be like a kind of a thin male, a skinny male, or kind of an average female, whatever.
• 21:19
  Philip Pape: I mean, people are all over the place.
• 21:21
  Philip Pape: But for a 160-pound person, that would be like 12 to 20 pounds over six months.
• 21:25
  Philip Pape: And if you think about it, 12 pounds, but more than half of that is muscle.
• 21:28
  Philip Pape: That's six, seven, eight pounds of muscle.
• 21:30
  Philip Pape: That is so worth the three, four, five pounds of fat because you're actually gonna look leaner even before you go through the fat loss phase, most likely.
• 21:38
  Philip Pape: If not, you're at least gonna look more muscular, you're gonna be stronger, you're gonna be so recovered that when you cut it off, it's just gonna be beautiful.
• 21:44
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 21:45
  Philip Pape: How do you set up your nutrition?
• 21:47
  Philip Pape: Well, you're gonna have a mild surplus because if you're aiming for a body weight increase, you're gonna have an increase, you're gonna have a surplus.
• 21:54
  Philip Pape: Now, two ways to do this.
• 21:55
  Philip Pape: You can use an app like Macrofactor, or you can calculate 2,500 calories per pound.
• 22:02
  Philip Pape: Not 3,500, 2500.
• 22:05
  Philip Pape: This is my the special rule that I use when you're gaining, because muscle is denser than fat, and remember you're trying to gain a bunch of muscle along with the fat.
• 22:12
  Philip Pape: When you lose fat, you're trying to lose mostly fat.
• 22:14
  Philip Pape: So when you gain, use 2,500 calories per pound that you're trying to gain.
• 22:19
  Philip Pape: So if you're trying to gain two pounds a month, then that's 5,000 calories a month above maintenance divided by, you know, 30 days in the month.
• 22:28
  Philip Pape: So it's not that much.
• 22:30
  Philip Pape: It might be like a couple hundred calories a day at most for most people, but it might be a little more than that.
• 22:35
  Philip Pape: So that's nutrition.
• 22:36
  Philip Pape: Proteins, protein, protein.
• 22:38
  Philip Pape: 0.71 gram per pound, always my rule of thumb, no matter what phase you're in, for most people, most of the time, with some small exceptions that we don't need to get into on today's episode.
• 22:48
  Philip Pape: So 0.71 gram per pound spread throughout the day because of practicality.
• 22:53
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 22:54
  Philip Pape: Training is just train your butt off, use progressive overload.
• 22:58
  Philip Pape: Almost any program is going to work as long as you are adding weight, reps, volume over time, track your lifts, you know, get those compound movements and those big movement patterns in there along with isolation, and train three to five days a week.
• 23:11
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 23:12
  Philip Pape: You know, get close to failure most of the time.
• 23:14
  Philip Pape: The typical rules, again, we're not gonna explain all of that today.
• 23:17
  Philip Pape: I've I have full episodes on that topic.
• 23:19
  Philip Pape: Cardio, I would keep it, you know, low to moderate.
• 23:22
  Philip Pape: Get get your eight to ten thousand or more steps a day.
• 23:24
  Philip Pape: And then, you know, beyond that, totally optional cardio, depending on what your goals are.
• 23:30
  Philip Pape: And then mindset, you know, your metric is not the scale, even though you need the scale to know if you're gaining, right?
• 23:35
  Philip Pape: It's the performance, though.
• 23:37
  Philip Pape: Are you getting stronger?
• 23:38
  Philip Pape: Are you recovering well?
• 23:39
  Philip Pape: Are you hitting your protein?
• 23:40
  Philip Pape: Are you is your biofeedback all training like you would?
• 23:43
  Philip Pape: I don't want you to accidentally dip into diets as you're trying to build.
• 23:46
  Philip Pape: And then after this six to nine to 12 months of progressive, continuous growth, really stable body composition, solid nutrition, and now you're ready to cut, right?
• 23:58
  Philip Pape: And then that's when you enter a deficit with more muscle, higher baseline metabolism, better insulin sensitivity, better psychological framework.
• 24:05
  Philip Pape: It's gonna be awesome.
• 24:06
  Philip Pape: And then the cut itself, you may have heard this me tell you this before, but I like eight to 12 weeks for most people.
• 24:12
  Philip Pape: But we are doing a workshop, let's say, I don't know when this, we already did it when this episode comes out, I think, on getting lean, get lean in 45 days.
• 24:20
  Philip Pape: You can come into physique university, witsandweights.com slash physique, and you can still get the replay.
• 24:24
  Philip Pape: And also when you join now, immediately when you join, you get access to our eight-week course that will walk you through a mini cut.
• 24:31
  Philip Pape: So a mini cut is more of a six-week, slightly aggressive fat loss phase.
• 24:35
  Philip Pape: So if and when you're ready for that, hop on in.
• 24:38
  Philip Pape: Okay, $27 investment, wits and weights.com slash physique.
• 24:42
  Philip Pape: It's $27 a month, and you get access to all that stuff.
• 24:44
  Philip Pape: The goal is never to be in a deficit forever.
• 24:47
  Philip Pape: It's to be in a deficit maybe a fifth of the time, at most a fourth of the time for the rest of your life, until you get to your goal, you know, leanness, and then you probably never have to use a deficit ever again.
• 24:57
  Philip Pape: Okay, now I want to close this episode with a reframe to tie this all together.
• 25:03
  Philip Pape: Most people think of metabolism as something that happens to them as they age, right?
• 25:07
  Philip Pape: Or genetics.
• 25:08
  Philip Pape: You have a fast metabolism, metabolism, slow metabolism.
• 25:10
  Philip Pape: You're lucky, you're not lucky, it's hormonal, it's menopause, whatever.
• 25:15
  Philip Pape: And I think that holds people back.
• 25:17
  Philip Pape: I think that's holding you back because your metabolism is something you have a huge amount of control over and that you can build.
• 25:22
  Philip Pape: Starting however old you are, it doesn't matter.
• 25:24
  Philip Pape: And the the best metabolisms are the result of years of training, of recovering, of having solid nutrition, the decisions you make about how you treat your body.
• 25:34
  Philip Pape: And when you build muscle, you are literally increasing that capacity, right?
• 25:37
  Philip Pape: And your ability to eat more food, maintain your body composition, support the tissue that drives growth in your body.
• 25:43
  Philip Pape: Anabolism is what it's called it.
• 25:45
  Philip Pape: Tissue growth, right?
• 25:46
  Philip Pape: Thriving, growth, repair, abundance.
• 25:49
  Philip Pape: Doesn't that sound so much better than the opposite?
• 25:51
  Philip Pape: So when you train hard, when you recover well, you're reinforcing those adaptations.
• 25:55
  Philip Pape: You're training your body and your nervous system.
• 25:58
  Philip Pape: You're training your nervous system to function at a higher level, to use more of your muscles, to put nutrients where they're supposed to go, instead of being a lazy grifter floating on the couch, aim, aim, you know, wandering mean mean meaninglessly and aimlessly through life.
• 26:12
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 26:13
  Philip Pape: Tried to string together a poetic sentence there and I couldn't do it.
• 26:16
  Philip Pape: A faster metabolism is not a gift, it's a skill.
• 26:20
  Philip Pape: It's a skill.
• 26:21
  Philip Pape: And you could develop that skill.
• 26:22
  Philip Pape: You can develop that skill.
• 26:23
  Philip Pape: So a building phase is a huge investment in what I'll call sustainable leanness.
• 26:29
  Philip Pape: Sustainable leanness.
• 26:30
  Philip Pape: When I talk about lean, I'm not talking about skinny.
• 26:33
  Philip Pape: I'm talking about having muscle, upgrading your operating system, your hardware, and your software, which is your nervous system, and now, you know, being able to draw from that bank account for the rest of your life, if you will, to mix metaphors here.
• 26:47
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 26:47
  Philip Pape: So for those of us that are getting older, if you're over 40, over 50, over 60, it's probably most of this audience.
• 26:52
  Philip Pape: This matters even more to start this now, right?
• 26:55
  Philip Pape: You're at a point where muscle loss starts to accelerate if you don't actively fight it, fight it, sarcopenia and all those issues, osteoporosis, et cetera.
• 27:02
  Philip Pape: So every time you, every year you spend just trying to cut off a few pounds, you're losing ground.
• 27:08
  Philip Pape: You're losing ground.
• 27:09
  Philip Pape: Building your muscle now, it's not just about looking better in six months, even though ironically, you probably will.
• 27:15
  Philip Pape: You probably, you're not gonna actually look fatter, you'll probably look stronger and better.
• 27:18
  Philip Pape: It's it's it, but it's preserving that functional capacity for the for the rest of your life, right?
• 27:23
  Philip Pape: So stop trying to earn the right to build by just, I just need to get to this weight.
• 27:27
  Philip Pape: I just need to lose weight first.
• 27:28
  Philip Pape: Don't just stop.
• 27:29
  Philip Pape: Just get that out of your head right now and start building such your cuts.
• 27:32
  Philip Pape: Cuts don't cost you everything you work for and you actually can do this the right way, right?
• 27:36
  Philip Pape: And and just one last thought I have just I'm sorry, indulge me.
• 27:40
  Philip Pape: It is my podcast.
• 27:41
  Philip Pape: It is more fun.
• 27:43
  Philip Pape: It is more fun to build first, right?
• 27:45
  Philip Pape: And I know it sounds trivial.
• 27:46
  Philip Pape: We're talking about science and hormones and metabolic adaptation, but the reality is the people I know who do this, they have so much fun.
• 27:52
  Philip Pape: I kind of mentioned that already.
• 27:54
  Philip Pape: We have so many awesome people in physique university who are just like sharing every day how much fun it is to eat more and work out and feel better when you work out and set PRs.
• 28:03
  Philip Pape: I mean, I see wins all the time now about PRs from somebody who was focused on losing weight when they join, and now they're focused on getting stronger.
• 28:10
  Philip Pape: Their mood is better because they're not chronically underfed.
• 28:14
  Philip Pape: They're building something visible that can be measured, you know, in multiple ways than just the scale, right?
• 28:20
  Philip Pape: And then and then you could do your cut from a position of strength and do it pretty efficiently and do it pretty easily almost.
• 28:25
  Philip Pape: And that again is where I do love my six-week mini cut for people who have done this the right way.
• 28:30
  Philip Pape: So if you're there sitting thinking, I need to lose 20 pounds and then I'll focus on muscle, I want you to mix that around, flip it around, and tell yourself I'm gonna build muscle first, build a better machine before you ask it to run on less fuel, if you will.
• 28:42
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 28:43
  Philip Pape: And then the cut will be easier, the results will last longer, you'll enjoy the process of getting there.
• 28:47
  Philip Pape: And before I let you go, remember I did promise you a way to find out are you actually training hard enough to build muscle?
• 28:52
  Philip Pape: And this is a technique you can use in your very next training session right after this.
• 28:58
  Philip Pape: Hey, this is Philip.
• 28:59
  Philip Pape: And a quick reminder about today's sponsor, Calocurb.
• 29:02
  Philip Pape: If hunger has been the hardest part of your fat loss phase, even when everything else is dialed in, check out CaloCurb.
• 29:08
  Philip Pape: It's a natural GLP1 activating supplement with clinical data showing 40% fewer cravings and 30% less hunger within one hour, leading to 18% fewer calories, so you can stick to your fat loss plan.
• 29:21
  Philip Pape: Go to witsandweights.com slash calocurb for 10% off your first order.
• 29:26
  Philip Pape: Link is in the show notes.
• 29:28
  Philip Pape: That's witsandweights.com slash calocurb.
• 29:31
  Philip Pape: All right, here is that quick tip you can use in your very next workout to make your building phase more effective to figure out if you are training hard enough.
• 29:40
  Philip Pape: All you have to do is pick one compound lift.
• 29:43
  Philip Pape: Might be your squat, your bench, your deadlift, pick a heavy one.
• 29:46
  Philip Pape: In this case, I'm asking you to pick one of your hard, heavy lifts.
• 29:49
  Philip Pape: And instead of stopping at your programmed reps for the last set, I want you to do an AMRAP.
• 29:55
  Philip Pape: Amrap means as many reps as possible.
• 29:57
  Philip Pape: And you're like, what the f this guy who who who taught who who tears down CrossFit and is all about training low and slow, and I'm telling you to do an AMRAP.
• 30:07
  Philip Pape: Yes, this is something I learned from Alex Bromley, who's very much a volume and set-based progression type guy.
• 30:13
  Philip Pape: And one of his programs, I did amraps on the last set.
• 30:18
  Philip Pape: Now that was every major exercise.
• 30:21
  Philip Pape: Well, it wasn't every single one, but it was all the big ones.
• 30:23
  Philip Pape: And by doing an MRAP, you can tell how many more reps you're actually able to do.
• 30:28
  Philip Pape: So let's say you programmed in three by five squat.
• 30:31
  Philip Pape: Now, this isn't something to do on a like starting strength style program where you're just trying to get sets across and then going up in weight.
• 30:38
  Philip Pape: This is more of a hypertrophy type program when you're an intermediate or even a late beginner, but you can do this anytime as a test.
• 30:45
  Philip Pape: Three sets of five.
• 30:47
  Philip Pape: On set on the third set, instead of doing five, you just keep going.
• 30:50
  Philip Pape: Six, seven, eight.
• 30:51
  Philip Pape: If you could do 12 or 13 or 14, you know that you were nowhere close to failure on that fifth, on that, on those previous two sets.
• 30:59
  Philip Pape: A lot of you think you are and you're not, right?
• 31:02
  Philip Pape: And so if you programmed, you know, six to eight reps on the last set, keep going past eight and see how far you get.
• 31:09
  Philip Pape: If you get to 15, 16, 17, hey, you were nowhere close.
• 31:12
  Philip Pape: If you could barely do nine, you're probably pretty darn close.
• 31:15
  Philip Pape: Not only does it tell you if you're training hard enough and how many reps were in the tank, right?
• 31:19
  Philip Pape: R-I-R, reps in reserve, it will give you the confidence to know how much you can jump next time.
• 31:24
  Philip Pape: Like if you only hit an extra rep, you're probably right where you need to be, right?
• 31:28
  Philip Pape: If you could easily do double the reps, well, then it was way too light.
• 31:31
  Philip Pape: And you can convince yourself with data right in the moment, oh, well, that was way too light.
• 31:35
  Philip Pape: I need to like jump up by, you know, 15% next week instead of just say 5% or 10%.
• 31:41
  Philip Pape: So try that out.
• 31:43
  Philip Pape: Do an amrap on your final set of a particular lift to give you objective feedback on whether you're actually pushing hard enough to build muscle, and then make sure to go up the next week to close the gap.
• 31:54
  Philip Pape: And then you can start progressing in a more normal line from that point on, right?
• 31:58
  Philip Pape: Try this, try it this week on one lift.
• 32:00
  Philip Pape: Do it, do it.
• 32:02
  Philip Pape: All right, that's it.
• 32:03
  Philip Pape: I want you to keep using your wits.
• 32:07
  Philip Pape: I want you to keep lifting those weights.
• 32:08
  Philip Pape: And remember, the best time to build muscle is Ollie right now.
• 32:13
  Philip Pape: Talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.