Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Should You Fix Your Diet or Training First? | Ep 465

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Should You Fix Your Diet or Training First? | Ep 465 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: Should you fix your nutrition or your training first?
• 0:03
  Philip Pape: You might have heard that diet is 80% of your results and exercise is only 20%.
• 0:08
  Philip Pape: But that has no basis in science.
• 0:10
  Philip Pape: There was one study of overweight postmenopausal women doing aerobic exercise, not resistance training, and they measured scale weight, not body composition.
• 0:19
  Philip Pape: For many of you, fixing your nutrition first is exactly correct.
• 0:22
  Philip Pape: But for others, fixing your training first will produce faster, more visible changes.
• 0:27
  Philip Pape: So today I'm going to show you how to diagnose which one is your bottleneck, a simple framework for deciding where to start, and a five-second test you can do right now to figure out your answer.
• 0:41
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 0:51
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, Philip Pape, and this is a question that I get all the time.
• 0:55
  Philip Pape: Someone sends me a message or asks on a coaching call, hey, Philip, I know I need to fix my nutrition and my training, but I can't do everything at once.
• 1:04
  Philip Pape: So where do I start?
• 1:05
  Philip Pape: Or they say, hey, I just want to lose fat.
• 1:08
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna hold off on the strength training thing you keep talking about.
• 1:11
  Philip Pape: I want to work on my food.
• 1:13
  Philip Pape: Or vice versa.
• 1:14
  Philip Pape: Hey, I just want to build muscle.
• 1:16
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna worry about the food part right now.
• 1:18
  Philip Pape: And the standard answer is either, hey, diet is the majority of results.
• 1:23
  Philip Pape: This is what I hear a lot.
• 1:24
  Philip Pape: You know, abs are not made in the gym, they're made in the kitchen, those kinds of things, which are great sound bites, and they sound very decisive, like you should start with diet.
• 1:32
  Philip Pape: And it sends a lot of people down the wrong path.
• 1:34
  Philip Pape: In fact, more often than not.
• 1:36
  Philip Pape: So today we're gonna retire that myth.
• 1:38
  Philip Pape: We're gonna replace it with something better, and that is a diagnostic that you can apply to yourself.
• 1:42
  Philip Pape: How do we personalize the answer?
• 1:44
  Philip Pape: Because the real answer isn't a ratio or you have to do both, or you have to go in one order or the other.
• 1:49
  Philip Pape: It depends on what is your weakest link right now.
• 1:54
  Philip Pape: I want to give a quick shout out to Christina R, who wrote in asking how this kind of framework applies when you're in your 60s or 70s, even though this audience or this episode is for everyone.
• 2:06
  Philip Pape: Christina, I just wanted to give you a shout-out because the answer is the same framework, regardless of your age.
• 2:12
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna touch on some age-specific evidence as we go.
• 2:15
  Philip Pape: And I think you'll see that it still holds because I'm all about principles.
• 2:19
  Philip Pape: And then stick around till the end because I'm gonna share a five-second bottleneck test.
• 2:23
  Philip Pape: It's one question that tells you whether diet or training should be your first move.
• 2:28
  Philip Pape: And you're like, Philip, just give it to me now.
• 2:29
  Philip Pape: Well, look, we have to set up the why behind this and the true diagnostic so you understand that even when you get an quote unquote answer, that it truly is right for you.
• 2:39
  Philip Pape: Here's what we're gonna cover today.
• 2:40
  Philip Pape: First, why the 8020 claim is a problem and what the research actually measures.
• 2:47
  Philip Pape: Second, how to identify your personal bottleneck using the signs that you can observe right now.
• 2:52
  Philip Pape: You don't need any lab work, you can do this all with just your body.
• 2:55
  Philip Pape: And then, third, a practical decision framework that you can use this week.
• 3:00
  Philip Pape: All right, let's get into it and talk about this 80-20 myth.
• 3:03
  Philip Pape: And some of you may not have heard of it, I get that, but I've been hearing it for many years: the idea that diet is the most important driver.
• 3:10
  Philip Pape: Diet is 80% of the results.
• 3:12
  Philip Pape: You can't have fat loss without diet, et cetera.
• 3:14
  Philip Pape: It's all kind of related.
• 3:16
  Philip Pape: And it's probably understandable for a couple different reasons.
• 3:19
  Philip Pape: One being that most of us have gained weight or fat or become less healthy with age, often due to our eating patterns and our eating habits, or at least we blame those.
• 3:31
  Philip Pape: And when we look at research, there have been some trials that tried to examine the effectiveness of one or the other's independent variables.
• 3:39
  Philip Pape: There was one in 2012 called the new trial, and that was in the journal Obesity.
• 3:44
  Philip Pape: 439 overweight to obese, post-menopausal women.
• 3:48
  Philip Pape: They're randomized into four groups.
• 3:49
  Philip Pape: There was a diet-only group, exercise only, diet plus exercise, and then the control group.
• 3:55
  Philip Pape: And then 12 months later, the diet-only group lost 8.5% of their body weight.
• 4:00
  Philip Pape: The exercise-only group lost 2.4%, and the combined lost 10.8%.
• 4:07
  Philip Pape: So doing the math, diet accounted for roughly 79% of the combined weight loss.
• 4:12
  Philip Pape: And that's kind of where this idea of 80-20 comes from.
• 4:15
  Philip Pape: Now, if all you care about is losing weight on the scale, that's fine.
• 4:18
  Philip Pape: Then go ahead and get a shot.
• 4:22
  Philip Pape: But we care about fat loss, not just weight loss.
• 4:25
  Philip Pape: We care that diet can create an energy deficit much faster than exercise.
• 4:31
  Philip Pape: That is true, especially when compared to aerobic exercise, which sometimes can backfire and actually cause you to burn fewer calories overall due to adaptation.
• 4:39
  Philip Pape: And there have been studies that go back to the 90s where dieting alone tends to produce quite a bit more pure weight loss versus exercise.
• 4:49
  Philip Pape: But the nuance left out from a lot of these discussions is that, for example, in the new trial from 2012, the exercise only group was the only group that gained lean mass.
• 5:00
  Philip Pape: They actually gained 0.3 kilograms of muscle while losing fat.
• 5:03
  Philip Pape: The diet-only group lost 0.8 kilograms of lean mass.
• 5:07
  Philip Pape: And you see this story over and over again with body composition changes in a worse direction, even though people lost weight on the scale.
• 5:13
  Philip Pape: And that's why we care about fat loss and not just weight loss.
• 5:16
  Philip Pape: So this these big swings of, you know, over a kilogram of muscle tissue between the two groups.
• 5:21
  Philip Pape: I don't want that.
• 5:22
  Philip Pape: And I don't think you do either.
• 5:24
  Philip Pape: And here's the worst thing, I guess, is that the exercise in the study was cardio.
• 5:28
  Philip Pape: It wasn't resistance training.
• 5:30
  Philip Pape: If they had used resistance training, guess what?
• 5:32
  Philip Pape: The gap would have been even wider.
• 5:34
  Philip Pape: So it just goes to show that exercise of any kind does have value.
• 5:39
  Philip Pape: And of course, we know resistance training has even that much more value.
• 5:42
  Philip Pape: Now there was a 2022 meta-analysis by Lopez and colleagues that looked at 116 articles covering over 4,000 participants.
• 5:52
  Philip Pape: Resistance training alone, with no change to diet, reduced body fat by 1.6% and increased lean mass by 0.8 kilograms.
• 6:02
  Philip Pape: That's body recomp, body recomposition.
• 6:04
  Philip Pape: Less fat, more muscle at the same time without even touching your diet.
• 6:08
  Philip Pape: The diet plus resistance training group lost the most fat, about 5.3 kilograms, and they preserve muscle.
• 6:16
  Philip Pape: So they didn't actually gain muscle, which kind of makes sense again when you're in a diet, you stunt your ability to gain as much muscle.
• 6:23
  Philip Pape: And all of this stuff is really, really important, guys, because weight loss and fat loss or body composition are not the same goal.
• 6:30
  Philip Pape: When you lose weight through dieting alone, you're going to lose lean tissue, 20 to 30%.
• 6:36
  Philip Pape: I recently did an episode about GLP1s where they talked about 40%, but in reality, when you count for some different factors, it's probably about 25, right?
• 6:44
  Philip Pape: The quarter rule, 25%.
• 6:46
  Philip Pape: And then what we see in studies is that some form of exercise tends to cut the rate of muscle loss.
• 6:52
  Philip Pape: And I suspect a lot of people, it's because they they were sedentary to begin with, and doing any exercise at all kind of primes your body and gives it a signal that it's important to keep that muscle mass, even if you're not doing what we would call lifting heavy or resistance training.
• 7:07
  Philip Pape: So this 80-20 rule has some merit, but in a very narrow context, especially when we say it's it's really about the scale weight loss in sedentary or a cardio-focused population.
• 7:20
  Philip Pape: As soon as you shift that goal to body composition, which is what most of you listening to the show care about, then the ratio changes a lot.
• 7:27
  Philip Pape: And for a lot of people, especially if you're older, if you're over 40 and you're already eating reasonably well, the training may be the higher leverage fix.
• 7:34
  Philip Pape: I was joking on our eat more lift-heavy coaching call this month.
• 7:38
  Philip Pape: Somebody, I asked her if she eats in a very boring way or a very exciting way, as in tends to go overboard on the weekends, things like that.
• 7:46
  Philip Pape: She's like, oh no, I eat really boring.
• 7:48
  Philip Pape: I'm like, okay, that's actually gonna serve you really well.
• 7:50
  Philip Pape: Somebody like her, the eating isn't the issue, and a higher higher higher leverage fix is actually the training.
• 7:56
  Philip Pape: So I wanted to establish that popular frame of what is this, what does the data say?
• 8:01
  Philip Pape: What are we actually talking about here?
• 8:03
  Philip Pape: And now we're gonna say, what is right for you?
• 8:05
  Philip Pape: So this goes back to constraint theory and the bottleneck concept, really everything that I built my philosophy around based on the evidence here, that you need to find the next biggest constraint and go attack that.
• 8:18
  Philip Pape: Again, you know, I sometimes mention our coaching program, Eat More and Lift Heavy.
• 8:22
  Philip Pape: It's built on that idea of every week we go after the one next constraint, and it works really well for getting compounding results.
• 8:29
  Philip Pape: So if we go back to the history of this, the theory of constraints, it was developed by a physicist named Eliahu Goldrat, that's what two Ts, in the 80s.
• 8:40
  Philip Pape: So I was a little kid back then, I probably wasn't reading uh research studies.
• 8:44
  Philip Pape: And the core idea is very simple that every system has at least one constraint that limits its output.
• 8:50
  Philip Pape: And the throughput of the system is determined entirely by that constraint.
• 8:55
  Philip Pape: So if you think of it as a chain, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
• 9:00
  Philip Pape: So if you can if you improve any other link than the weakest one, it's not gonna help the chain, is it?
• 9:06
  Philip Pape: You have to fix the weakest one, and then the whole chain gets stronger.
• 9:10
  Philip Pape: So Goldrat's big insight was that in the corporate world, most managers spend their time optimizing the wrong part of the system.
• 9:19
  Philip Pape: They might speed up a machine that's already fast as opposed to a machine that's creating some sort of bottleneck.
• 9:26
  Philip Pape: And I think that happens to us in our lives, especially when it comes to health and fitness.
• 9:31
  Philip Pape: And so the analogy that I like is a highway.
• 9:35
  Philip Pape: Imagine a four-lane highway that narrows to two lanes for about a mile.
• 9:40
  Philip Pape: And what happens?
• 9:41
  Philip Pape: Traffic backs up.
• 9:42
  Philip Pape: Well, we all love traffic, don't we?
• 9:44
  Philip Pape: I grew up in Miami, I hated it.
• 9:46
  Philip Pape: One of the main reasons I love living where I do now in Connecticut, in the woodsy area, is the lack of traffic.
• 9:51
  Philip Pape: Anyway, traffic tends to back up, and now you're stuck on the highway.
• 9:56
  Philip Pape: And the question is, would widening the four-lane sections to six lanes fix the traffic?
• 10:02
  Philip Pape: No, of course not.
• 10:03
  Philip Pape: You'd still be bottlenecked at the two-lane section, right?
• 10:07
  Philip Pape: You can change that other part of the highway to 12 lanes.
• 10:09
  Philip Pape: It doesn't matter.
• 10:10
  Philip Pape: You're still gonna be constrained at the two lanes.
• 10:12
  Philip Pape: So, what do you need to do?
• 10:13
  Philip Pape: You need to widen that part of the highway.
• 10:15
  Philip Pape: Now, that's separate from all the arguments about, well, once you do that, you're gonna have a lot more traffic anyway, and it's all gonna catch up.
• 10:20
  Philip Pape: That's a separate issue.
• 10:22
  Philip Pape: That's a throughput issue.
• 10:23
  Philip Pape: So in your body, the highway is really your entire system of training, nutrition, sleep, recovery.
• 10:31
  Philip Pape: The bottleneck is whatever of those is most constrained.
• 10:35
  Philip Pape: And for a lot of us listening, a lot of you, especially those over 40, a lot of women who've been in the diet and restrict cycle for many, many years, the bottleneck, believe it or not, is not your nutrition.
• 10:48
  Philip Pape: Believe it or not, it's not your nutrition.
• 10:49
  Philip Pape: I talked to a lot of you, and the nutrition isn't that bad.
• 10:53
  Philip Pape: And you got to consider the fact that the weight gain has happened slowly over many years.
• 10:58
  Philip Pape: You might be eating vegetables, you might be trying to hit protein, maybe you, maybe you are, maybe you aren't.
• 11:02
  Philip Pape: You might even be tracking all of this stuff.
• 11:04
  Philip Pape: But then the bottleneck is you're doing, you know, three sets of 12 on the leg press and it's the same weight every day in the gym, every time you go to the gym, or you're using the little dumbbells and you you're just not willing to go to a gym or get a barbell or get something heavier.
• 11:19
  Philip Pape: And I don't mean to put the blame on you.
• 11:21
  Philip Pape: I'm just saying either not willing or not able, or you're not sure that's what you need to do.
• 11:25
  Philip Pape: And when you're doing that same routine, as consistent as you might be, you're not gonna have any progression or improvement.
• 11:32
  Philip Pape: You're not gonna have progressive overload, you're not gonna get close to failure, and you're not gonna get the thing that drives strength and muscle, which is gonna help with the fat loss and the belly fat and the energy and all the other things we talk about and make better use of your food and fuel.
• 11:48
  Philip Pape: Now, for a different group of people, I hope I wasn't too harsh.
• 11:52
  Philip Pape: Always tough love.
• 11:53
  Philip Pape: For a different group of people, the bottleneck is their nutrition.
• 11:57
  Philip Pape: Oh, yeah, it definitely is their nutrition.
• 11:59
  Philip Pape: They might be training reasonably well, four or five days a week.
• 12:04
  Philip Pape: Maybe they have a good program, maybe they are doing progressive overlap.
• 12:06
  Philip Pape: I know a lot of the guys I speak to who have just gained a bunch of weight, or ladies are eating 900 to 1200 calories and you don't have the energy to adapt to the training and even build the muscle, even if you're doing the right thing.
• 12:21
  Philip Pape: So it's all over the place when we say nutrition is the problem.
• 12:24
  Philip Pape: It's not just that you're overconsuming per se.
• 12:28
  Philip Pape: And as we've talked about before, anything more than a very moderate calorie deficit of like 500 calories a day can it can very well lead to a loss of lean mass while even while you're resistance training.
• 12:42
  Philip Pape: But if you're kind of within that window, you can probably still get stronger while under-eating, but you're still gonna have a very hard time building much meaningful muscle beyond, say, the first few weeks or months of newbie gains.
• 12:52
  Philip Pape: And so I think the idea of strength and body composition and whether you're making progress or not can very well lie in the nutrition side, even if you're training well.
• 13:04
  Philip Pape: Now, if you're not doing either, obviously the question is, you know, what should you fix first?
• 13:08
  Philip Pape: Not necessarily what you should you do first.
• 13:12
  Philip Pape: There's a subtle distinction.
• 13:14
  Philip Pape: The distinction is I think you need to focus on both, right?
• 13:18
  Philip Pape: To some level.
• 13:20
  Philip Pape: Like you need to train and you need to track as a minimum for your nutrition, but you don't necessarily have to quote unquote fix both at the same time to the same level, if that makes sense.
• 13:30
  Philip Pape: You're gonna prioritize one at a time, get that dialed in, and then work on the other, even though you're doing both at some minimal level.
• 13:37
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 13:38
  Philip Pape: Like you're still doing the things, it's not not zero.
• 13:40
  Philip Pape: You're doing it, you just might be at a one or a two over here and you're trying to get this to a three or four over here.
• 13:45
  Philip Pape: I hope that makes sense.
• 13:47
  Philip Pape: So the I would say that the opposite pattern can also reveal bottleneck, meaning if you are eating adequately, if you're sleeping okay, but your lifts have been flat for a long time and you don't look any different, then the bottleneck is probably your training, right?
• 14:04
  Philip Pape: Your volume, your intensity, your exercise selection, probably progressive overload is the main thing that's lacking, if assuming your nutrition is okay.
• 14:14
  Philip Pape: So, what is your two-lane highway?
• 14:16
  Philip Pape: That's the bottleneck.
• 14:17
  Philip Pape: What's the two-lane highway?
• 14:18
  Philip Pape: So, what do you look for to figure that out?
• 14:21
  Philip Pape: All right, let's talk about the signs.
• 14:23
  Philip Pape: One sign is persistent fatigue, even if you have enough sleep.
• 14:27
  Philip Pape: So your lifts kind of stall or even regress backward, especially on the main movements, the compound movements.
• 14:34
  Philip Pape: Or if you have constant hunger or on the other hand, almost no appetite, that can tell you that you have an energy imbalance.
• 14:41
  Philip Pape: Mood disturbances, irritability, brain fog, irregularities with your cycle if you're menstruating, frequent illness or prolonged soreness, hair loss, cold hands and feet, right?
• 14:54
  Philip Pape: Guess what?
• 14:54
  Philip Pape: All of these can be symptoms of low energy availability.
• 14:59
  Philip Pape: Now, there is research on how low is too low in terms of energy needs.
• 15:04
  Philip Pape: Let's just say for a 180-pound man like I am, with let's say 15 to 20% body fat, something south of 2,000 calories, maybe 1800, maybe 1500, you know, the exact number is going to depend on the person, is where hormonal metabolic function starts to break down.
• 15:19
  Philip Pape: And this is a normal thing, this is an adaptation when you're in a deficit, but it is very important to understand that low energy availability will cause lots and lots of symptoms that can tell you that your nutrition is the bottleneck.
• 15:33
  Philip Pape: We also know that a lot of female recreational exercises, as many as half, are at risk for low energy availability based on some different studies.
• 15:42
  Philip Pape: So it's not just about athletes, right?
• 15:44
  Philip Pape: When you hear of things like Reds or physique competitors, it's everyday people.
• 15:48
  Philip Pape: And what they what makes this tricky is for those of you who've been dieting for many years, you might not think that you're under-eating.
• 15:56
  Philip Pape: You might think you're maintaining because your body weight is no longer dropping, you're not losing weight anymore.
• 16:00
  Philip Pape: Or you're even eating less than you used to and you're not losing weight.
• 16:04
  Philip Pape: But your body has adapted.
• 16:05
  Philip Pape: Your resting metabolic rate has probably come down, you've probably lost muscle mass.
• 16:10
  Philip Pape: Your non-exercise activity activity has probably decreased subconsciously.
• 16:15
  Philip Pape: And so all of these are a negative for your training adaptations because now you have lower muscle protein synthesis because of the lower reduced or the lower energy availability.
• 16:26
  Philip Pape: So it all compounds.
• 16:28
  Philip Pape: The encouraging thing here is that even one training session with resistance training can jack up your muscle protein synthesis.
• 16:36
  Philip Pape: It's a great stimulant.
• 16:38
  Philip Pape: This is why I'm saying just getting into the gym and getting your workout done can be a great jump start and in and of itself has massive benefits to your body and your physiology, even in an energy deficit.
• 16:51
  Philip Pape: And then if you're adding protein in after you're training, you're eating your carbs, all of that can push these things higher.
• 16:56
  Philip Pape: So the constraint is the energy.
• 16:59
  Philip Pape: So that would be a those would be good signs that energy availability is the problem.
• 17:04
  Philip Pape: Of course, if you're tracking and you kind of know this and you know that you're in a deficit, great, but you may not know it because your numbers may tell you that you're maintaining.
• 17:12
  Philip Pape: You're just so adapted and underrecovered that you're actually well below what your maintenance could be.
• 17:19
  Philip Pape: Therefore, you don't have enough energy coming in.
• 17:22
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 17:22
  Philip Pape: Now, what about training as the bottleneck?
• 17:24
  Philip Pape: What signs tell you that?
• 17:26
  Philip Pape: Well, if you're eating at a reasonable level of calories, you're hitting your protein, your energy is pretty good, your mood is pretty good, and your body's just not changing the way you want, usually indicated that by your lifts have not progressed in several weeks or maybe several months.
• 17:44
  Philip Pape: And this assumes you even were expecting them to go up.
• 17:47
  Philip Pape: And what I mean is a lot of you don't even, aren't even using progressive overload.
• 17:51
  Philip Pape: And if you don't know what I'm talking about, definitely check out more episodes of this podcast or reach out to me.
• 17:56
  Philip Pape: This is very important.
• 17:57
  Philip Pape: But for those of you who are trying to progress but just haven't been able to, you know, maybe you don't have a structured program, maybe you're changing program a lot, programs a lot, maybe you're not actually trying to push yourself.
• 18:09
  Philip Pape: Maybe there's a fundamental misunderstanding of like sets and reps and load and all that.
• 18:13
  Philip Pape: And the reason I put it this way is because in our coaching program and Eat More Lift Heavy, when we have our coaching calls, these questions come up all the time.
• 18:19
  Philip Pape: As much as we provide educational material, the podcast has it, YouTube has all this stuff, you know, we try to spell it out.
• 18:26
  Philip Pape: Not everybody under understands the details about training properly or eating properly that we sometimes talk to on this podcast.
• 18:36
  Philip Pape: If you have a background in, say, nutrition science or you're a personal trainer or something like that, right?
• 18:39
  Philip Pape: We have to acknowledge that there's a learning curve here.
• 18:42
  Philip Pape: So if you're not progressing, if you're not training close to failure, if you're doing too little volume per week, like far less than say five to 10 sets per muscle group per week, the bottleneck, the bottleneck then might be your training.
• 18:56
  Philip Pape: Like if you're only training once a week, even if it's hard, it still might not be nearly enough for what you need to make progress.
• 19:04
  Philip Pape: And we know this because there's plenty of evidence on the dose response of intensity and volume, especially volume, for making progress and building muscle in conjunction with the principle that builds muscle, which is mechanical tension.
• 19:20
  Philip Pape: And the only rate, the way you get mechanical tension is lifting close to failure.
• 19:24
  Philip Pape: Excuse me.
• 19:24
  Philip Pape: And the only way you lift close to failure is as you get stronger each time you go to the gym and you do that same exercise, you need to go a little bit heavier or a little bit more reps, a few more reps or a little bit more load, right?
• 19:34
  Philip Pape: That that's because by definition, you're gonna get stronger and you're gonna be able to do more.
• 19:38
  Philip Pape: So you need to do more to get close to failure.
• 19:40
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 19:41
  Philip Pape: So it really does come down to progressive overload, but it's it's that because mechanical tension, training close to failure, is the mechanism that drives the muscle growth.
• 19:52
  Philip Pape: So that's training.
• 19:54
  Philip Pape: And speaking of things that you can optimize that you may not be thinking about, but is probably the most important third pillar alongside nutrition and training is your sleep.
• 20:06
  Philip Pape: And even though today's episode is the dichotomy between nutrition and training, I would put sleep into the category of non-negotiable, no matter what.
• 20:17
  Philip Pape: However, it depends on where you are and what your constraint is and what you need to do.
• 20:20
  Philip Pape: One thing that I did to upgrade my sleep is my sheets.
• 20:25
  Philip Pape: I use Cozy Earth's bamboo derived sheets.
• 20:29
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• 20:43
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• 20:52
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  Philip Pape: It makes a great gift, but it's great for yourself if you want to try improving your sleep via a tool like this.
• 21:05
  Philip Pape: The cool thing about Cozy Earth is they give you a hundred-night sleep trial so you can test them for over three months.
• 21:11
  Philip Pape: And then if you don't love them, you can return them.
• 21:13
  Philip Pape: And they have a 10-year warranty as well.
• 21:14
  Philip Pape: So they really do back up their sheets.
• 21:17
  Philip Pape: And remember how much time we spend in bed, it's a third of our life.
• 21:21
  Philip Pape: It's 2,500 hours a year.
• 21:23
  Philip Pape: So, yes, training and nutrition are super important, but bringing it all together is those ideally eight hours of sleep.
• 21:32
  Philip Pape: And that is a logical place to focus.
• 21:34
  Philip Pape: Go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth.
• 21:37
  Philip Pape: You'll get an automatic 20% discount using code Wits and Weights.
• 21:40
  Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.com slash cozy earth.
• 21:43
  Philip Pape: Support the podcast, but more importantly, support your sleep and your recovery.
• 21:47
  Philip Pape: That's witsandweights.com slash cozy earth.
• 21:50
  Philip Pape: Link is in the show notes.
• 21:51
  Philip Pape: All right, let's get back to this decision framework.
• 21:54
  Philip Pape: So we have the concept you got to find a bottleneck, you've got to fix a bottleneck, and you It's either training or nutrition.
• 22:02
  Philip Pape: So you need to ask yourself five different questions.
• 22:06
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 22:07
  Philip Pape: Question one: Are you doing structured resistance training at least three times per week with progressive overload?
• 22:14
  Philip Pape: So that summed up everything I just muddled through a few minutes ago.
• 22:17
  Philip Pape: If the answer is no, then training is the first fix.
• 22:21
  Philip Pape: You notice how I did that.
• 22:22
  Philip Pape: I'm giving you a simple framework.
• 22:23
  Philip Pape: Start there.
• 22:24
  Philip Pape: So guess what?
• 22:25
  Philip Pape: A lot of you, training is the first thing you have to fix, not nutrition.
• 22:28
  Philip Pape: Full stop.
• 22:30
  Philip Pape: This is the single highest leverage change for your body composition.
• 22:33
  Philip Pape: Resistance training alone can help reduce your body fat percent, reduce visceral fat, even when you don't change your diet.
• 22:40
  Philip Pape: It's a tremendous buffer.
• 22:42
  Philip Pape: I've worked with clients who've trained for years and they built a lot of muscle, and their diet is terrible, their walking is terrible, and yet their blood work is pretty darn good because they have that protective muscle.
• 22:54
  Philip Pape: And of course, it gets better now that they start walking, they start improving their nutrition and losing some excess body fat.
• 23:00
  Philip Pape: But the lean mass, the muscle mass, the strength, the bone density, the function is almost more important than anything else for most of you, especially if you're not doing it.
• 23:11
  Philip Pape: So that's question one.
• 23:12
  Philip Pape: Question two, all right, I'm training consistently.
• 23:15
  Philip Pape: Great.
• 23:16
  Philip Pape: Is your training well structured?
• 23:18
  Philip Pape: So you might be doing some progressive overload, which means you're potentially okay, but are you hitting sufficient volume with that progressive overload?
• 23:27
  Philip Pape: At least, let's say eight to ten sets per muscle group per week.
• 23:31
  Philip Pape: And so I'm gonna file this into the training quality.
• 23:33
  Philip Pape: Now, some might argue that if you're able to apply progressive overload to all your lifts, then by definition, your training is well structured.
• 23:42
  Philip Pape: And I could somewhat buy that argument, but some people are muddling the two.
• 23:46
  Philip Pape: And if you've got both of these dialed in, then training is no longer your bottleneck.
• 23:51
  Philip Pape: Question three All right, training solid.
• 23:53
  Philip Pape: Do you know your calorie and protein intake?
• 23:56
  Philip Pape: If you don't, you can't diagnose whether nutrition is the problem.
• 24:01
  Philip Pape: Okay, so start tracking for at least two weeks.
• 24:04
  Philip Pape: Don't change anything, just observe.
• 24:06
  Philip Pape: And I think you're gonna be shocked at how far off a lot of your assumptions might be.
• 24:11
  Philip Pape: Or you might confirm some of your assumptions.
• 24:13
  Philip Pape: Calories alone are always way off for most people.
• 24:17
  Philip Pape: Average self-reported energy intake usually underestimates real intake by at least 20%.
• 24:23
  Philip Pape: I've seen some estimates up to 40%.
• 24:26
  Philip Pape: Question four.
• 24:28
  Philip Pape: So now you're tracking, you know what you're eating.
• 24:31
  Philip Pape: Are you eating enough to support your training?
• 24:34
  Philip Pape: So if your energy availability is low, and you know this from the symptoms we talked about earlier, even if you are quote unquote maintaining your weight, you might have to jack up your food.
• 24:46
  Philip Pape: You might simply have to eat more, help your metabolism recover, get through the fear of the fact that you might gain weight.
• 24:52
  Philip Pape: Yeah, you might gain a couple pounds of fluid and glycogen, but for the vast majority of people that I've taken this through, they're super shocked because they don't get beyond that fluid weight, they don't gain weight.
• 25:04
  Philip Pape: What happens is their metabolism starts to ramp up while they're maintaining weight.
• 25:08
  Philip Pape: So the metabolism goes up, they burn more while they eat more.
• 25:11
  Philip Pape: And that's the principle behind eating more, which then unlocks your training and your movement and your energy and your fuel and your hormones and all the other things.
• 25:18
  Philip Pape: And then question five, so once we've established you're eating enough in general, question five is is your protein adequate?
• 25:24
  Philip Pape: Now, some of you might think, oh, shouldn't you put protein first?
• 25:28
  Philip Pape: Not really.
• 25:28
  Philip Pape: If you're just not eating enough, I almost don't care where it comes from.
• 25:31
  Philip Pape: I just want you to eat more, seriously.
• 25:34
  Philip Pape: And then we can start shifting those macros where they need to be.
• 25:37
  Philip Pape: But then you can focus on protein, where we're aiming for 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of protein.
• 25:43
  Philip Pape: Now you might ask, is that ideal weight?
• 25:45
  Philip Pape: Is that lean mass?
• 25:47
  Philip Pape: Just simplify it.
• 25:48
  Philip Pape: Whatever your weight is right now, 0.7 to 1 gram per pound, start there.
• 25:51
  Philip Pape: You can always optimize further later on.
• 25:53
  Philip Pape: So if all of those are answered, like, no, I'm doing all that and it's super solid, well, now you're looking at secondary factors like sleep quality.
• 26:01
  Philip Pape: We talked about the cozy earth sheets, for example, your stress, your consistency over time with these things.
• 26:08
  Philip Pape: So, like you might think you're doing them, but then in reality you're not actually consistent with them or improving with them.
• 26:13
  Philip Pape: Most people have a clear primary bottleneck in one of the first five questions we talked about.
• 26:19
  Philip Pape: But then a lot of you, as you get into this and more experience, you start to hit those secondary bottlenecks.
• 26:24
  Philip Pape: Now, here's the really awesome thing that I that I get that I get excited about.
• 26:27
  Philip Pape: It's called upward spiraling.
• 26:29
  Philip Pape: Once you fix your bottleneck, it creates an upward spiral, a cascade.
• 26:35
  Philip Pape: When you've been under-eating and then you start eating enough, what happens?
• 26:40
  Philip Pape: Your energy improves and then your training quality goes up.
• 26:43
  Philip Pape: You can push harder, you can get more reps, you can recover faster, you're more excited to go to the gym, and then you build more muscle.
• 26:49
  Philip Pape: And then more muscle increases your resting energy expenditure.
• 26:52
  Philip Pape: And guess what?
• 26:53
  Philip Pape: That gives you more room for calories, which then makes your nutrition easier to sustain.
• 26:57
  Philip Pape: So it's an upward spiral or a virtuous cycle.
• 27:02
  Philip Pape: And the opposite direction is true as well.
• 27:04
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 27:05
  Philip Pape: The opposite direction is true as well.
• 27:08
  Philip Pape: In a good way, I mean.
• 27:09
  Philip Pape: So, like Lyle McDonald always talks about how when women start properly lifting heavy, they almost always change their diet on their own.
• 27:16
  Philip Pape: And that's something I've observed as well.
• 27:18
  Philip Pape: More protein, more structured meals, the training itself is a catalyst for better nutrition.
• 27:24
  Philip Pape: And we have research that completely backs this up.
• 27:26
  Philip Pape: There was a 2011 review that talked about exercise as a gateway behavior.
• 27:31
  Philip Pape: Isn't that funny?
• 27:32
  Philip Pape: Right, because we talk about gateway drugs like on the negative side.
• 27:35
  Philip Pape: But imagine having a gateway behavior like exercise, like training, that strengthens your brain.
• 27:42
  Philip Pape: It rewires the prefrontal circuits involved in self-control, which translates to your diet and nutrition.
• 27:49
  Philip Pape: Isn't that interesting?
• 27:50
  Philip Pape: So, this is the mental side of doing hard things that I think creates resilience, consistency, self-control, all of those things.
• 27:58
  Philip Pape: So starting with training or exercise may actually make it easier to fix your nutrition later.
• 28:04
  Philip Pape: So if both sides need to work and you're not sure where to begin, a good default is okay, start with nutrition if you're clearly under-eating and you have all those symptoms we talked about because you need the energy to train well, or start with training if you're eating adequately, but not providing the stimulus for that change because the training creates that downstream motivation to eat better.
• 28:26
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 28:26
  Philip Pape: And this is all consistent with the questions we gave you before.
• 28:30
  Philip Pape: Even though I tend to start the questions on the training side, eventually you're gonna hit where that constraint is.
• 28:35
  Philip Pape: Now, quick note for Christina and anyone else wondering about age-specific considerations.
• 28:41
  Philip Pape: Remember that muscle mass decreases about 3 to 8% per decade after age 30, and then it accelerates after age 60.
• 28:49
  Philip Pape: But a 2021 landmark study in science found that metabolism itself remains very stable from age 20 to 60 when adjusted for body composition.
• 29:03
  Philip Pape: So this, like, my metabolism is slower now that I'm older narrative.
• 29:08
  Philip Pape: It's all about muscle loss and the fact that you're moving less.
• 29:11
  Philip Pape: It's not that your metabolism is truly dropping off a cliff, which is a good thing.
• 29:15
  Philip Pape: It means the fix can actually work when you're 45, when you're 55, when you're 70, you resist and strain with sufficient stimulus, eat enough food, eat enough protein, make you sure your energy, energy intake supports your recovery.
• 29:28
  Philip Pape: Now, for women in perimenopause, the shift in fat distribution toward visceral fat, toward belly fat, menopause belly, the decline in the estrogen that causes that, and then the increased baseline stress and cortisol all point to the same conclusion.
• 29:47
  Philip Pape: Resistance training with adequate nutrition is the most protective intervention you can have for this.
• 29:52
  Philip Pape: Not doing more cardio, not eating less, not low carb, not intermittent fasting.
• 29:58
  Philip Pape: Resistance training, adequate nutrition, which is great because that means you have lots of flexibility to do this.
• 30:03
  Philip Pape: All right, before we wrap up, I did promise you a five-second bottleneck test.
• 30:07
  Philip Pape: It's one question that tells you whether you have to fix your diet or training first.
• 30:10
  Philip Pape: I'll share in just a moment.
• 30:12
  Philip Pape: But if you're listening to this, you're thinking, okay, Philip, I know what my bottleneck is now.
• 30:16
  Philip Pape: Thank you, but I don't know how to fix it on my own.
• 30:19
  Philip Pape: That is what Eat More Lift Heavy was built for.
• 30:23
  Philip Pape: This is my 26-week, week-by-week coach program.
• 30:26
  Philip Pape: We focus on one constraint at a time.
• 30:28
  Philip Pape: You've got two coaches in the program.
• 30:31
  Philip Pape: In the first phase, we diagnose where you are.
• 30:34
  Philip Pape: We set up your tracking, we assess your training, we identify your specific constraint.
• 30:38
  Philip Pape: And then in phase two, we fix it.
• 30:40
  Philip Pape: We fix it together.
• 30:41
  Philip Pape: You learn to read your data, you learn to adjust your nutrition, progress your training, stop guessing.
• 30:47
  Philip Pape: And then in phase three, you learn to do this independently.
• 30:50
  Philip Pape: We give you specially designed tools and exercises to train you to do this for yourself so you never need a program like this again.
• 31:00
  Philip Pape: If you're over 40, especially women who've been going back and forth between cutting calories and trying new workout plans, nothing sticks.
• 31:07
  Philip Pape: This program actually sequences it for you, slowly but surely in the right order, with coaching to keep you on track.
• 31:15
  Philip Pape: If you're looking for a quick fix or a challenge or rapid fat loss, this is not the program for you because those things are not sustainable.
• 31:22
  Philip Pape: You'll end up right back where you started.
• 31:24
  Philip Pape: But if you want the results to stick, check us out.
• 31:27
  Philip Pape: Go to eatmore liftheavy.com to learn about the program.
• 31:31
  Philip Pape: That's eatmoreliftheavy.com.
• 31:33
  Philip Pape: Link is in the show notes.
• 31:35
  Philip Pape: All right, here's the fastest way to figure out whether you should fix diet or training first.
• 31:39
  Philip Pape: Ask yourself this question Have my lifts gone up in the last four weeks?
• 31:44
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 31:45
  Philip Pape: I thought about this a lot and it really comes down to that one question.
• 31:49
  Philip Pape: Because if they have, then your training is doing its job.
• 31:51
  Philip Pape: You've got the stimulus.
• 31:53
  Philip Pape: But if your body isn't changing, the constraint is on the nutrition side.
• 31:58
  Philip Pape: So you're either not eating enough to support muscle growth, your protein's too low for the muscle growth.
• 32:04
  Philip Pape: Okay, that's an easy way to tell.
• 32:06
  Philip Pape: Now, if that's that's if the answer is yes.
• 32:08
  Philip Pape: If your lifts are going up, but you're not getting what you want, it's probably nutrition.
• 32:12
  Philip Pape: If your lifts are not going up, then there's your answer.
• 32:15
  Philip Pape: That's your answer.
• 32:16
  Philip Pape: The training stimulus is the bottleneck for sure.
• 32:19
  Philip Pape: I mean, the food will help, but it's not gonna help nearly as much as fixing your training.
• 32:23
  Philip Pape: Either your program lacks progressive overload or the way you're implementing it does, or your volume's too low, or you're not recovering because of a different issue.
• 32:31
  Philip Pape: So fixing that is the first thing to do.
• 32:33
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 32:33
  Philip Pape: One question.
• 32:34
  Philip Pape: Have my lifts gone up in the last four weeks?
• 32:36
  Philip Pape: Start there.
• 32:37
  Philip Pape: All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 32:40
  Philip Pape: And remember the answer to which I should fix first is not a slogan or sound bite.
• 32:47
  Philip Pape: It is diagnosing your immediate constraint.
• 32:51
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.