Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Are Your Fitness Goals in Conflict? (Fat Loss vs. Muscle vs. Longevity vs. Endurance) | Ep 441

Transcript

Are Your Fitness Goals in Conflict? (Fat Loss vs. Muscle vs. Longevity vs. Endurance) | Ep 441 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:02
  Philip Pape: You might be strength training, watching your nutrition, doing cardio, doing all the things, and still not seeing the fat loss or muscle gains you expected.
• 0:09
  Philip Pape: And the problem might not be your effort.
• 0:11
  Philip Pape: It might be that your goals are fighting each other.
• 0:14
  Philip Pape: And every week you train this way, you're getting further from all of them.
• 0:18
  Philip Pape: Today I'm breaking down exactly how fat loss, muscle building, endurance, and longevity conflict at the physiological level, why the popular do-it-all approach produces mediocre results and a simple sequencing method that gets you to every goal faster.
• 0:35
  Philip Pape: If you keep stacking goals without a plan, you could spend the next 12 months working hard and ending up right where you started.
• 0:42
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, founder of the Fitness Lab app.
• 1:06
  Philip Pape: And you have probably been told, or maybe you just assumed, that a good fitness routine should cover all the bases at once.
• 1:14
  Philip Pape: You're gonna lose fat, you're gonna build muscle, you're going to improve endurance, you're gonna live longer, and if you're eating well and training consistently, all of those should just happen together, right?
• 1:23
  Philip Pape: And it sounds reasonable, sounds intuitive, and it tends to be wrong.
• 1:27
  Philip Pape: Not entirely wrong, right?
• 1:29
  Philip Pape: It puts you well above the average population doing some of those things, but wrong enough to keep you stuck or frustrated or plateaued for a pretty long amount of time, sometimes months or years, if you don't understand why.
• 1:42
  Philip Pape: And this is one of the most common patterns I do see in people my age who are over 40, who come to me frustrated and doing all the right things, but they're just doing all the things at once.
• 1:53
  Philip Pape: And that tends to be the problem.
• 1:54
  Philip Pape: Their body has no idea which signal to respond best to, and they're kind of mediocre at everything.
• 2:01
  Philip Pape: Not only are they mediocre, I think it actually sets all of it back even further.
• 2:05
  Philip Pape: So today I'm gonna walk you through why these goals interfere with each other at the cellular and metabolic level.
• 2:12
  Philip Pape: And then I'm gonna give you a straightforward sequencing approach that gets you to every one of those goals, just not in the exact same training block.
• 2:20
  Philip Pape: And then stick around to the end because I'm going to walk you through a 60-second exercise I call the goal audit.
• 2:27
  Philip Pape: You could do it tonight with a pen and paper.
• 2:28
  Philip Pape: You'll know which goal to prioritize and which ones to put on maintenance for the next three months, but you're gonna want to listen to the whole episode to understand how to get the most out of that exercise.
• 2:38
  Philip Pape: All right, let's get into it and talk about the advice that sounds logical, but isn't always.
• 2:45
  Philip Pape: And that's all often the case in this fitness world, isn't it?
• 2:48
  Philip Pape: Something that sounds like it should work doesn't necessarily work.
• 2:51
  Philip Pape: And that is, you know, train for all the goals at the same time, eat quote unquote clean, be consistent.
• 2:56
  Philip Pape: The results are gonna come if you just have a fitness lifestyle.
• 2:59
  Philip Pape: And you hear it in things like the boot camp marketing, the boot camp classes or hybrid training programs, which is really are really popular right now.
• 3:07
  Philip Pape: I hear from a lot of listeners about, you know, how do I combine endurance with lifting?
• 3:12
  Philip Pape: And that's why I'm doing more episodes like this.
• 3:14
  Philip Pape: By the way, our next episode is going to be about how to combine the two.
• 3:18
  Philip Pape: But the promise is that one lifestyle or one routine that you just continue to follow is going to make you leaner, more muscular, better conditioned, healthier all at once.
• 3:28
  Philip Pape: Now, I've used some of that messaging myself when I talk about, for example, lifting weights, which was in our last solo episode about how powerful it is for really checking off all the boxes of fitness, but it doesn't maximize specific goals depending on what those goals are.
• 3:41
  Philip Pape: So if you're not getting results, you know, rather than hitting your head in a wall and just working harder and thinking you need more discipline or I just need to do better, it's probably more about the physics and you're not efficiently going after the right goal right now.
• 3:55
  Philip Pape: And this brings up the concept of periodization.
• 3:58
  Philip Pape: Your body is going to adapt specifically to the demands you place on it.
• 4:03
  Philip Pape: Okay, this is specificity.
• 4:04
  Philip Pape: The idea of specificity is really, really important.
• 4:07
  Philip Pape: And I hope you understand it and really listen carefully.
• 4:10
  Philip Pape: In exercise science, they call it the said principle: specific adaptations to impose demands.
• 4:15
  Philip Pape: You get better at exactly what you train for, right?
• 4:19
  Philip Pape: Heavy squats don't necessarily improve your 10K.
• 4:23
  Philip Pape: Now, there's always little caveats relative to other variables like how much you weigh and what skill how fast you are and your muscle fiber types and all of that.
• 4:33
  Philip Pape: But we know that people trying to maximize a long distance running outcome, their number one priority isn't heavy squats, even though squats can be helpful or helpful, especially in the offseason.
• 4:44
  Philip Pape: Just like marathon training is not going to build your strength or your deadlift PR.
• 4:49
  Philip Pape: Now it's obvious when you compare very different things.
• 4:53
  Philip Pape: So that's easy.
• 4:54
  Philip Pape: But when it gets, I think, costly for you as an individual, like the time you invest, is when your goals actually need to have opposite conditions to succeed.
• 5:04
  Philip Pape: And then you're trying to provide both at the same time.
• 5:07
  Philip Pape: So think about what that looks like in practice.
• 5:09
  Philip Pape: Let's say you want to lose fat, so you're in a calorie deficit, but you also want to build muscle, which works better at maintenance or a slight surplus.
• 5:18
  Philip Pape: That's a very simple one, right?
• 5:20
  Philip Pape: So, you know, let's say you're lifting four days a week for strength for hypertrophy, but you're also running three days a week for endurance and heart health.
• 5:28
  Philip Pape: And maybe you're, you know, you want to compete in endurance sport.
• 5:31
  Philip Pape: I've worked with bikers and runners, for example.
• 5:34
  Philip Pape: Your legs in that case may not be recovering the way they need to, which then stalls your strength and then also stalls your endurance.
• 5:42
  Philip Pape: And then your body fat barely changes in the first scenario because the deficit is too mild to drive fat loss, but too aggressive to support muscle growth.
• 5:51
  Philip Pape: And you kind of get this slow, wonky, half-assed body recomp, right?
• 5:56
  Philip Pape: And by the way, listen to my other episodes on body reconp.
• 5:58
  Philip Pape: There's there's a more efficient way to do body reconp that, in my opinion, involves the very slightest of surpluses.
• 6:03
  Philip Pape: So most people respond to this by just doing more, doing harder, you know, stricter dieting, whatever.
• 6:10
  Philip Pape: They think they just need to ramp up one of those dials, like that it's not strong enough, but you actually haven't addressed the root cause, right?
• 6:19
  Philip Pape: You're pouring more effort into a system that's not working for you.
• 6:23
  Philip Pape: So, what I want to look next is what's happening under the hood.
• 6:25
  Philip Pape: Like, why do your goals fight each other and address the three biggest conflicts that we tend to have so that we can attack them?
• 6:33
  Philip Pape: Okay, the first one is fat loss versus muscle gain.
• 6:36
  Philip Pape: This is the most common one.
• 6:37
  Philip Pape: To lose body fat, you have to have a deficit, a sustained calorie deficit.
• 6:41
  Philip Pape: And for a lot of people, that's gonna be in the say three to five hundred calories below maintenance is a good sustainable deficit for a lot of people, right?
• 6:48
  Philip Pape: Depends on your body weight, depends on your expenditure.
• 6:50
  Philip Pape: And what does your body do?
• 6:51
  Philip Pape: Okay, it doesn't have enough energy coming in, so it pulls from your stored energy, your fat cells to make up the gap, and you lose fat.
• 6:58
  Philip Pape: To build muscle optimally, though, you need enough calories to support that new tissue that's being generated, right?
• 7:04
  Philip Pape: The amino acids from your protein combine to form new skeletal tissue, new muscle mass or skeletal muscular tissue.
• 7:11
  Philip Pape: And for most people, that means not being a diet, and that means being at least at maintenance, if not a little bit above that, or even more above that, right?
• 7:18
  Philip Pape: Like 100, 200, 300 calories above.
• 7:21
  Philip Pape: And so these are opposite nutrition environments.
• 7:24
  Philip Pape: Now, can you do both at the same time?
• 7:26
  Philip Pape: Yes, you can do both at the same time.
• 7:27
  Philip Pape: It's called body recomposition.
• 7:29
  Philip Pape: We talk about it all the time.
• 7:30
  Philip Pape: We've seen studies that support body recomposition.
• 7:33
  Philip Pape: A 2020 meta-analysis by Barricat, Barricat, great research source if you're looking for good citations.
• 7:39
  Philip Pape: Barricat and colleagues found that untrained individuals can gain muscle in a deficit.
• 7:43
  Philip Pape: A 2021 study by Campbell showed that train lifters can recomp under very tight conditions.
• 7:49
  Philip Pape: You have to have high protein, around a gram per pound, progressive overload, and only a very, very mild deficit.
• 7:55
  Philip Pape: And when I say mild, I mean as much as 10, 15, 20% below maintenance.
• 7:59
  Philip Pape: It's not nothing.
• 8:01
  Philip Pape: But the rate of change is slow, very slow in some cases.
• 8:06
  Philip Pape: Maybe, maybe a half a pound of muscle gain a month alongside a pound or two of fat loss.
• 8:10
  Philip Pape: Now, for someone, for many of you, that might be perfectly fine way to live.
• 8:14
  Philip Pape: And we again we talk about that.
• 8:15
  Philip Pape: I have a body recomp workshop in physique university where we go over all these scenarios.
• 8:19
  Philip Pape: But once you've been lifting consistently for even a couple of years and you got to a kind of healthy body fat, then you're you're barely gonna notice these kinds of changes if you keep trying to recomp, in my opinion, from my experience.
• 8:30
  Philip Pape: Whereas if you have a focused 12-week cut and a focused four to six months, let's say six month building phase, the visible change is gonna be more dramatic and in a shorter period of time, even though you're doing two different things and you have trade-offs that come along with that.
• 8:43
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 8:44
  Philip Pape: That's why I assume I'm a big fan of bulking and cutting, but it doesn't have to be extreme.
• 8:48
  Philip Pape: It just has to be precise and focused.
• 8:51
  Philip Pape: So that's one.
• 8:52
  Philip Pape: The second one is strength and muscle versus endurance.
• 8:55
  Philip Pape: Okay, a lot of you are asking about this these days.
• 8:58
  Philip Pape: Uh hybrid training, concurrent training comes up.
• 9:00
  Philip Pape: People are kind of getting more into cardio again.
• 9:02
  Philip Pape: I shouldn't say again, but like lifters are more interested in cardio because they know it doesn't really interfere as much as we used to think.
• 9:09
  Philip Pape: And this one runs really deep.
• 9:12
  Philip Pape: It's called the interference effect.
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: We're gonna talk about this in detail in the next episode.
• 9:16
  Philip Pape: It was first described by Hickson in 1980.
• 9:19
  Philip Pape: That was the year I was born, by the way.
• 9:20
  Philip Pape: Classic days.
• 9:22
  Philip Pape: When you combine heavy resistance training with high volume endurance training, the interference effect says you're gonna blunt your gains in both.
• 9:29
  Philip Pape: And there's there's still some truth to it, although it's been overblown.
• 9:33
  Philip Pape: The mechanism is that resistance training activates one pathway, it's the mTOR pathway, and that drives muscle protein synthesis.
• 9:41
  Philip Pape: Endurance training activates the AMPK pathway, and that improves your mitochondrial density and your energy efficiency, right?
• 9:48
  Philip Pape: These are like different energy systems and different uses of nutrients.
• 9:51
  Philip Pape: So these pathways kind of suppress each other a little bit.
• 9:55
  Philip Pape: A 2012 meta-analysis by Wilson and colleagues found that concurrent training reduced strength gains by about 15 to 20% and hypertrophy gains by about 28% compared to resistance training alone.
• 10:06
  Philip Pape: Now that's an older study.
• 10:07
  Philip Pape: In the next episode, we are actually gonna get into how to combine lifting with endurance in a way that doesn't cause that effect.
• 10:14
  Philip Pape: Okay, so I think again, you have to take it with a grain of salt and look at how the cardio and lifting are being put together, the amounts of it, the volume, the order, all of that, there's definitely a way to have a decent amount of cardio alone with your lifting and it not be an issue.
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: We're gonna talk about that in the next episode.
• 10:29
  Philip Pape: But as far as the actual practical nature of this, when you have those two different goals, you're trying to build strength over here or you're trying to build for endurance over here, it's kind of a practical recovery problem.
• 10:40
  Philip Pape: Because if you're running, say 25 or 40 or 50 miles a week on top of squatting and deadlifting, your legs might not be recovering.
• 10:47
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 10:48
  Philip Pape: And again, it's it's the volume, the volume matters.
• 10:50
  Philip Pape: Training quality will drop when that happens, then you're gonna accumulate fatigue, and then you're gonna work really, really hard.
• 10:56
  Philip Pape: And the numbers may not go the way you want because you're trying to do two goals.
• 10:59
  Philip Pape: Now, a few moderate cardio sessions a week, they're not gonna wreck your gains.
• 11:02
  Philip Pape: Also, some more rigorous endurance work won't wreck your gains if you're trying to maintain, like if you're not trying to just go all out and build PRs.
• 11:10
  Philip Pape: So that's why I think it matters like what degree to each goal you have.
• 11:14
  Philip Pape: And we know certain modes like running is gonna cause a little more issues for people than say cycling, and it has to do with the eccentric use of your muscles, right?
• 11:23
  Philip Pape: And the tearing and the fatigue and all that.
• 11:25
  Philip Pape: So, again, we're gonna talk more on the next episode about that specific topic, but it is important, and I am covering it today, kind of at the goal level.
• 11:33
  Philip Pape: The third conflict is performance versus longevity.
• 11:38
  Philip Pape: And this is more subtle because muscle mass is one of the strongest predictors of longevity and healthy aging.
• 11:46
  Philip Pape: And so maintaining and building strength and lean tissue protects against falls, protects against metabolic disease, helps with insulin sensitivity, so it protects against resistance, protects cognitive against cognitive decline, right?
• 11:58
  Philip Pape: So, in that sense, strength and longevity actually do align really, really well.
• 12:03
  Philip Pape: But once you start chasing a more extreme level of performance, it could work a bit against longevity.
• 12:10
  Philip Pape: So, for example, trying to keep very stay very shredded with a really low body fat percentage, well, you're probably causing some adaptation, if not some disruption to your hormones and your sleep, your immune function, all of that, right?
• 12:24
  Philip Pape: We you you probably heard horror stories of physique competitors having a very unhealthy situation when they're right at around showtime, you know, and combine that with something like chronic overtraining, which is endemic in people who are trying to chase performance.
• 12:38
  Philip Pape: You know, you think elite athletes and CrossFitters and even powerlifters and whatever, which can drive things like inflammation if you're doing it too much.
• 12:46
  Philip Pape: Extended calorie restriction also adds stress to this whole thing.
• 12:50
  Philip Pape: And you may be doing that because of a performance goal, but it can lower your metabolism, it can compromise things like bone density or whatnot.
• 12:57
  Philip Pape: And so the the path to living well for decades to come is has got to include some level of, I'll say moderation and recovery or balance or whatever word you want to use as an essential variable of the whole thing.
• 13:12
  Philip Pape: So recovery is a good word for it.
• 13:14
  Philip Pape: I, you know, not just hard training, harder and harder training.
• 13:17
  Philip Pape: And those of us over 40 notice this because we have a lower ability to recover and we have, you know, it's harder to come by sleep because of our lives.
• 13:25
  Philip Pape: And also joint what joint pliability and and our synovial fluid and all that stuff seems to be less responsive.
• 13:32
  Philip Pape: We're less resilient physically than we were when we were younger.
• 13:36
  Philip Pape: That's no excuse not to still train and still perform and improve.
• 13:39
  Philip Pape: But most people conflate peak performance with optimal health, and they're related, but they're not the same thing.
• 13:45
  Philip Pape: Okay, so those are the the mechanisms and the conflicts, and they're they're pretty much physiological, right?
• 13:52
  Philip Pape: What I just talked about, they're not psychological conflicts, they're actually physiological.
• 13:56
  Philip Pape: What do you do about it?
• 13:57
  Philip Pape: What do you do about it?
• 13:59
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 13:59
  Philip Pape: So the fastest way to reach all your goals is to stop chasing them simultaneously.
• 14:05
  Philip Pape: And the fix to that is to sequence your goals combined with periodizing your goals.
• 14:13
  Philip Pape: So periodization is the word I would encapsulate this whole thing with sequencing or periodization.
• 14:19
  Philip Pape: You pick one primary goal for a defined period, let's say eight to 16 weeks.
• 14:24
  Philip Pape: You have a set period in mind, not because you're trying to chase the scale by a certain date, but because that period of time makes sense for the goal.
• 14:32
  Philip Pape: And then you design your training, nutrition, recovery around that one goal.
• 14:36
  Philip Pape: Your other goals are go into a maintenance mode and then you rotate through them.
• 14:42
  Philip Pape: So any one goal comes to the top.
• 14:44
  Philip Pape: That's your priority.
• 14:45
  Philip Pape: All the other goals are maintenance mode.
• 14:47
  Philip Pape: And what's cool about this is the maintenance mode stuff is still gonna need some attention to maintain them, right?
• 14:52
  Philip Pape: But not nearly as much as to push them forward or to improve.
• 14:56
  Philip Pape: And then you rotate through them.
• 14:57
  Philip Pape: And by the way, we're gonna go through this step by step right now, real quick.
• 15:01
  Philip Pape: I'm working on a relaunch.
• 15:02
  Philip Pape: You guys have heard me talk about physic university.
• 15:05
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna re-launch soon something called Eat More Lift Heavy.
• 15:08
  Philip Pape: Pretty cool.
• 15:09
  Philip Pape: Because after all these years, I realized what people really need is this exact approach of sequencing and periodization, essentially written out for them over a six-month period.
• 15:19
  Philip Pape: And I think even the best one-on-one coaches have trouble doing that.
• 15:22
  Philip Pape: So I'm actually put creating a whole system for that.
• 15:25
  Philip Pape: Stay tuned.
• 15:26
  Philip Pape: I know it's a tease.
• 15:26
  Philip Pape: I don't actually have there's no way to sign up or anything like that.
• 15:29
  Philip Pape: Of course, if you're interested, you could always reach out.
• 15:31
  Philip Pape: Or if you come into physique university now and join, I'm gonna give a really nice deal to people who are already in.
• 15:36
  Philip Pape: So you can come in, start getting the courses and the help and support to hit your goals now, and then check that out when it comes out.
• 15:44
  Philip Pape: Anyway, here is the step by step.
• 15:46
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 15:47
  Philip Pape: Step one is to pick your primary goal.
• 15:49
  Philip Pape: Okay, sounds obvious, but it it it's it's something people skip.
• 15:54
  Philip Pape: They just go and they assume, okay, I'm gonna get fit, and here we go.
• 15:57
  Philip Pape: If you could only improve one thing about your body composition or fitness over the next four months, what would make the biggest difference?
• 16:04
  Philip Pape: So answer that question right now.
• 16:06
  Philip Pape: That's your focus.
• 16:08
  Philip Pape: If you could only improve one thing, okay, don't say I want to build muscle and lose fat.
• 16:11
  Philip Pape: That's two things.
• 16:12
  Philip Pape: Say one thing.
• 16:13
  Philip Pape: And it could be specific, it could be I want to reduce belly fat, I want to get a my first pull-up, I want to deadlift PR, I want to compete in a powerlifting meat, I want to compete in that endurance race, that 5K, 10K or ultra marathon, whatever.
• 16:26
  Philip Pape: That's your one thing.
• 16:28
  Philip Pape: One thing, start there.
• 16:29
  Philip Pape: Step two, you're going to put everything else into maintenance.
• 16:32
  Philip Pape: And this is where people resist because it feels like they're giving something up or they're gonna slow everything down, but it's not.
• 16:38
  Philip Pape: Maintaining anything is dramatically easier than building it.
• 16:42
  Philip Pape: And for example, research shows muscle mass can be maintained on as little as, I'll say one third is like the absolute risk-free, but I've heard as little as one eighth the volume used to build the muscle.
• 16:55
  Philip Pape: So it's somewhere in that range, meaning a lot less, as long as you keep the intensity high, the the stimulus high, right?
• 17:02
  Philip Pape: Like the weight on the bar, you know, you're training close to failure, you're still trying to use progressive overload.
• 17:06
  Philip Pape: So if it normally took you 15 hard sets per muscle group per week to build, you could probably maintain that with as little as like five sets a week.
• 17:14
  Philip Pape: And then you can switch up your training schedule accordingly to save all that time and recovery capacity for your primary goal, if if if that's not your primary goal.
• 17:23
  Philip Pape: So if let's say fat loss is the priority, then of course you're gonna be in a moderate deficit.
• 17:28
  Philip Pape: We're not trying to body recop, we're trying to go all out into a deficit, but keep that protein high, keep lifting to preserve the muscle, keep the cardio at like the low intensity stuff like walking, easy cycling, maybe a little sprinting that kind of is very recoverable, even if it still bumps up your calorie burn a little bit, if that's what you're going for.
• 17:46
  Philip Pape: You are not chasing PRs on your lifts.
• 17:48
  Philip Pape: You're not training for a race.
• 17:50
  Philip Pape: If muscle building is a priority, uh if fat loss is the priority, you're in a deficit holding on to muscle.
• 17:56
  Philip Pape: Now, if muscle building is a priority, you're gonna eat at maintenance or slight surplus.
• 18:00
  Philip Pape: Train harder and with the idea to get PRs.
• 18:04
  Philip Pape: And the cardio, you have maybe a little more capacity for some cardio, but it's still more easy type of sessions versus a ton of miles, let's say, because you're trying to be an endurance athlete, athlete.
• 18:16
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 18:16
  Philip Pape: And I can go through this list.
• 18:17
  Philip Pape: I could say, okay, if you're an endurance athlete, you've got to put that number one, figure out your easy days, your medium days, your long days, if that's something you have, make it very recoverable.
• 18:27
  Philip Pape: You got to have a build-up training plan both on the cardio side with the like miles per week and sprints and all that, as well as on the food side where you might be going a little bit lower protein and a little bit more carbs as you get closer to an event, let's say.
• 18:41
  Philip Pape: So, but and while you're doing that, you might only train two days a week, and it might be a very minimal program to maintain your muscle and strength.
• 18:48
  Philip Pape: So you get the idea, right?
• 18:49
  Philip Pape: Now, the if longevity is the goal, that that gets a little trickier because really, really the thought there is to optimize everything you're doing so that it's sustainable for decades to come, which means you're not necessarily chasing PRs or huge amount of fat loss or a huge endurance output.
• 19:10
  Philip Pape: And it's a, I think of longevity as a little bit more of a balanced approach where everything is kind of being maintained.
• 19:16
  Philip Pape: And maybe you focus on some things like your diet and your nutrition, your nutrient sufficiency, hormones, those kinds of things, if that makes sense.
• 19:23
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 19:24
  Philip Pape: Step three then, once you've got your primary goal and then what's in maintenance, is to plan the sequence across your year.
• 19:30
  Philip Pape: I like to think of a 12-month period.
• 19:32
  Philip Pape: It's a nice bit of time to plan things out and think of it in phases.
• 19:38
  Philip Pape: So if I were working with a client over a year and we're thinking of body composition change, I'm probably gonna plan a month or two of prep work for fat loss phase, probably 12 to 16 weeks of fat loss at most, and then like six to nine months of muscle building.
• 19:56
  Philip Pape: Now, it might not be in that order, right?
• 19:58
  Philip Pape: It might switch around based on what the immediate goal is, but you would plan it over the whole year.
• 20:03
  Philip Pape: Now, if they have an endurance focus in there, well, you'd have to fit that in somewhere, maybe an eight-week block.
• 20:08
  Philip Pape: If they have a powerlifting meet, maybe a block there, and then they're not dieting.
• 20:12
  Philip Pape: You know, where do you put your maintenance and diet phases in there?
• 20:15
  Philip Pape: All the phases have to be building on each other, and that's where the compounding happens because whatever you did in the last phase now gives you a higher foundation for the next phase.
• 20:26
  Philip Pape: Now, when you, for example, build muscle in a surplus, you're probably raising your expenditure and you are also adding muscle mass.
• 20:35
  Philip Pape: So that's gonna make your next fat loss phase easier because you can now eat more calories and you're just healthier overall.
• 20:42
  Philip Pape: Let's say when you improve your cardiovascular fitness in an endurance phase, well, that's gonna give you bigger work capacity to recover in the gym, and now you can maybe lift heavier.
• 20:51
  Philip Pape: You know, maybe a phase of fat loss resensitizes your body to nutrients and hunger signals and eating more fiber and eating from fullness.
• 21:00
  Philip Pape: So when you shift back to building, you're gonna have a better time of eating and using that nutrition.
• 21:04
  Philip Pape: See what I mean?
• 21:05
  Philip Pape: It's pretty cool.
• 21:06
  Philip Pape: So each focus block creates advantages for the next one, and you end up progressing faster over that year by doing one thing at a time than you would by doing three things at once.
• 21:16
  Philip Pape: And this is a huge revelation for me when I got into learning about nutrition science and doing it the right way, because I had sort of inadvertently done these types of things on my own without realizing it.
• 21:28
  Philip Pape: Like the time when I built a ton of strength and drank whole milk and ate a bunch of food and knew, hey, I have to gain weight while I'm doing this.
• 21:35
  Philip Pape: I can't be trying to lose fat.
• 21:36
  Philip Pape: I did it kind of out of control without structure, but I at least in my mind had the idea that you had to do this.
• 21:41
  Philip Pape: And then once I got into coaching and got my certification and started learning more about the evidence and the science, I realized oh, this is this is the what we need to do.
• 21:49
  Philip Pape: We need to specify and be very intentional and then set up structure with flexibility to get there.
• 21:56
  Philip Pape: All right, step four is to integrate all.
• 21:59
  Philip Pape: Of these goals without them competing.
• 22:02
  Philip Pape: So having a primary goal doesn't mean zero attention to everything else.
• 22:07
  Philip Pape: It doesn't mean you just drop it all.
• 22:09
  Philip Pape: Like, okay, I have an endurance sport, come endurance race coming up, so I'm just gonna not lift weights at all.
• 22:14
  Philip Pape: That's the worst decision you can do.
• 22:16
  Philip Pape: It does mean that the secondary work supports or at least doesn't interfere with or like sabotage the main goal.
• 22:24
  Philip Pape: So in a muscle building phase, the cardio is as much as it needs to be without interfering with your building muscle.
• 22:33
  Philip Pape: And that that could be a wide range depending on your capacity, capability, and desires, and also depending to the degree which your primary goal is taking priority.
• 22:42
  Philip Pape: You know, so in that case, you know, walking and easy cycling might come before running, let's say, and stuff that aids recovery without taxing your legs.
• 22:51
  Philip Pape: Whereas if you are going after endurance goals, then as I mentioned before, maybe you still only live twice a week.
• 22:58
  Philip Pape: Or if it's if it's three or four times, it's very short sessions, very little volume to maintain that muscle.
• 23:04
  Philip Pape: Now, you may you may titrate these things, right?
• 23:08
  Philip Pape: Where, okay, 16 weeks out, I have this bike race, and right now I'm just lifting weights for muscle mass and I'm eating.
• 23:15
  Philip Pape: How do I transition?
• 23:17
  Philip Pape: Well, the transition can occur as one thing slowly coming down and one thing slowly coming up.
• 23:22
  Philip Pape: It doesn't always have to be abrupt.
• 23:24
  Philip Pape: There could be a transition phase in between these.
• 23:26
  Philip Pape: And that's sometimes a really smart thing to do with something like nutrition, let's say.
• 23:30
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 23:31
  Philip Pape: And then the last step, step five, is keeping it sustainable, right?
• 23:36
  Philip Pape: It always still has to be sustainable in a way.
• 23:38
  Philip Pape: Now, there's a the caveat on that is how we define sustainable.
• 23:42
  Philip Pape: So what is not sustainable is like a very extreme version of each thing constantly, thinking that that's like you can sustain that.
• 23:52
  Philip Pape: Like, so I'm gonna go on a dreamer bulk, then I'm gonna go in a massive fat loss phase, it's super aggressive.
• 23:57
  Philip Pape: And then, you know, there's a having said that, there's a certain amount of aggressiveness you can handle that's still sustainable depending on the phase.
• 24:06
  Philip Pape: So, for example, some people can handle a big deficit really well, but only for a certain duration.
• 24:12
  Philip Pape: And then when they go into a muscle building phase, it's very conservative.
• 24:15
  Philip Pape: Some people go the opposite way.
• 24:17
  Philip Pape: They want to go very aggressive on the muscle building, but then they want to go very conservative on the fat loss.
• 24:21
  Philip Pape: So that's what I mean by sustainable.
• 24:23
  Philip Pape: Each phase should be moderate, or the the phases that need to be more extreme, you've got to know that that you can do them at that extreme level with the appropriate trade-offs.
• 24:33
  Philip Pape: And the trade-offs might be the duration or the recoverability in other areas or whatever, right?
• 24:40
  Philip Pape: Okay, I hope that was clear, right?
• 24:42
  Philip Pape: Sustainability is always a challenge and it's a very personal thing.
• 24:44
  Philip Pape: Like when we work with our clients or members, the sustainability piece is really what comes up almost all the time.
• 24:50
  Philip Pape: Because at the end of the day, we need to understand what the feedback is telling you, what's your body telling you, what is your data telling you, so we can keep iterating on that and find your level of sustainability.
• 25:01
  Philip Pape: So we've been talking about how all these goals compete for the same recovery budget.
• 25:06
  Philip Pape: At the end of the day, I really think it comes down to recovery, especially if you're over 40.
• 25:10
  Philip Pape: And the one thing I keep coming back to is that recovery is actually the only goal that never conflicts with anything else.
• 25:18
  Philip Pape: So this is kind of interesting.
• 25:19
  Philip Pape: It's like a meta goal that sits on top of everything.
• 25:23
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 25:23
  Philip Pape: You can argue about whether I should cut or bulk, whether I should do cardio versus lifting.
• 25:28
  Philip Pape: But nobody in the history of mankind has ever said that you should sleep more poorly to help with any of it.
• 25:34
  Philip Pape: Now, I take that back because there has been a in business circles and like entrepreneurship and CEOs over the years, like, hey, I'll sleep when I'm dead, or I only need four hours of sleep.
• 25:44
  Philip Pape: But I think we're finding that that's not the case, that even those people need more sleep to perform their best.
• 25:50
  Philip Pape: Which is my very smooth segue into our sponsor today, Cozy Earth.
• 25:54
  Philip Pape: I know, I know, hear me out, hear me out, because I am a convert, a genuine convert about this company.
• 26:01
  Philip Pape: Um, I really like high quality products.
• 26:04
  Philip Pape: And by high quality, sometimes it comes with a price, sometimes it doesn't.
• 26:07
  Philip Pape: It really depends.
• 26:08
  Philip Pape: I would say Cozy Earth is right in that sweet spot of price and quality.
• 26:13
  Philip Pape: And last year I talked about their sheets, which we use all the time now, and I would never give those up.
• 26:17
  Philip Pape: I bought a second pair, but right now I'm wearing their pajamas and using their blanket because thankfully, as a sponsor, I get to try these things out before I tell you about them because I don't want to sell you junk.
• 26:28
  Philip Pape: So you think about the recovery aspects of sleep and what you sleep in and your environment and keeping it cool and dark and all of that stuff.
• 26:38
  Philip Pape: Well, how do we help with those things?
• 26:40
  Philip Pape: Well, sheets are one, but what you wear is another.
• 26:43
  Philip Pape: And I don't usually give it a second thought because I tend to sleep in just shorts or underwear or whatever TMI.
• 26:50
  Philip Pape: But then I tried the Cozy Earth Bamboo Pajama set, and now I actually like wearing them.
• 26:55
  Philip Pape: Whether it's winter or it's warm because they keep you cool.
• 26:58
  Philip Pape: And maybe on a super hot day, I don't know.
• 27:01
  Philip Pape: But for now, I think they're awesome.
• 27:03
  Philip Pape: I think they give me that signal that it's actually the nighttime and it's time to wind down and it's this weirdly effective thing for something that's just close.
• 27:11
  Philip Pape: And so they make a lot of things like that.
• 27:13
  Philip Pape: Cozy Earth makes things derived from bamboo that have that breathability and that temperature regulation.
• 27:19
  Philip Pape: And that's what I like about it.
• 27:20
  Philip Pape: Um, and so their blanket has a similar concept, but of course, a blanket you're trying to keep yourself warm.
• 27:25
  Philip Pape: You're not trying to cool yourself down, but you want it to be comfortable.
• 27:28
  Philip Pape: And this thing is really, really heavy.
• 27:29
  Philip Pape: And I've been using it every morning.
• 27:31
  Philip Pape: Before I work out, I sit on the couch, I read a book, usually fiction, usually science fiction or post-apocalyptic dystopian novel or a legal thriller.
• 27:40
  Philip Pape: Those are the general categories I've been liking lately.
• 27:42
  Philip Pape: Just to kind of chill out in the morning and start to wake up, relax with this very thick, soft blanket, which my kids say feels softer than their hamsters, which tells you how soft it is.
• 27:54
  Philip Pape: And you're just not getting up once it's up.
• 27:57
  Philip Pape: And I think that's a good thing.
• 27:58
  Philip Pape: And then, you know, you can get recovered with a really comfortable blanket.
• 28:02
  Philip Pape: So they back up their products, Cozy Earth does.
• 28:04
  Philip Pape: They have a hundred night sleep trial to test it, which is a massively long amount of time to try something out.
• 28:09
  Philip Pape: They have a 10-year warranty, and you'd be supporting me if you check out the product.
• 28:14
  Philip Pape: So go to wits and weights.com slash cozy earth.
• 28:17
  Philip Pape: Code Wits and Weights will give you 20% off.
• 28:20
  Philip Pape: When you go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth, it'll actually show you the code in case you forget it.
• 28:24
  Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.com slash cozy earth.
• 28:28
  Philip Pape: All right, let's get back to this and keep talking about conflicting goals.
• 28:34
  Philip Pape: And remember, when we get to the end, I'm gonna walk you through your goal audit that's gonna put all this together so you can actually map them out.
• 28:40
  Philip Pape: So let's talk about quickly when doing two things at the same time can work.
• 28:46
  Philip Pape: And I mentioned body recomp.
• 28:48
  Philip Pape: There are specific scenarios where body recomp, losing fat, and gaining muscle at the same time is reasonable.
• 28:54
  Philip Pape: And I I've done entire episodes about this, but just at a high level, if you're a true novice, a true beginner to strength training, your body's gonna respond rapidly to the signal from your training.
• 29:04
  Philip Pape: Your body's gonna adapt.
• 29:06
  Philip Pape: Neuromuscular and muscular, like physical stimulus is going to allow you to build fat, build muscle and lose fat almost at any kind of level of a deficit or surplus.
• 29:16
  Philip Pape: So in that case, you may be fine just sitting around maintenance and doing the thing and working hard.
• 29:24
  Philip Pape: I really wouldn't encourage just a diet right off the bat if you're strength training for the first time, because I really want you to get the most out of the training piece and be fully fueled and recovered.
• 29:32
  Philip Pape: And then you can get in a good position for fat loss phase.
• 29:35
  Philip Pape: You know, in all these cases of body recomp, it's going to be not too far from maintenance.
• 29:40
  Philip Pape: It's either gonna be a slight deficit, it's gonna be at maintenance, or it's gonna be a slight surplus.
• 29:44
  Philip Pape: And really that's it.
• 29:45
  Philip Pape: Now, someone who doesn't really fit into that category, who maybe is an experienced lifter, you're already at a healthy body composition, and you want to do these simultaneously, it's just gonna take a lot longer and it's gonna be hard to measure the changes.
• 29:58
  Philip Pape: They're just so slow.
• 30:00
  Philip Pape: And I see people comment on my stuff all the time about this who are like, well, it took me, you know, 12 months to see a change.
• 30:06
  Philip Pape: And then I ask more about the details.
• 30:08
  Philip Pape: And, you know, either they're they're doing it in a very modest way that's going to take a long time, or they have some experience in their past and it's gonna slow it down.
• 30:16
  Philip Pape: So the same principle applies to hybrid or concurrent training.
• 30:20
  Philip Pape: If you want to do some running or other endurance alongside your lifting because you enjoy it, it supports your health, awesome.
• 30:26
  Philip Pape: Two or three moderate sessions a week, if they're low impact, even better, separated from your lifting by at least six hours.
• 30:33
  Philip Pape: Those kinds of things, those little rules that help that we're gonna talk about on the next episode.
• 30:37
  Philip Pape: But if you're training for a marathon or ultra marathon or a big, you know, like a 10K or whatever, and you also want to get a squat PR, something has to give.
• 30:48
  Philip Pape: Most likely, something has to give.
• 30:49
  Philip Pape: I mean, I guess there are exceptions.
• 30:51
  Philip Pape: You know, there's definitely people talking about trying to do both with some massive level of recovery.
• 30:56
  Philip Pape: Maybe you're sleeping nine hours a night, you have no stress in your life.
• 30:59
  Philip Pape: But for most of us, they're not going to happen together.
• 31:02
  Philip Pape: And you have to go back to the steps that we went through of what's my primary goal?
• 31:07
  Philip Pape: Can I do the secondary thing at a maintenance without it draining my recovery?
• 31:11
  Philip Pape: And the other steps.
• 31:12
  Philip Pape: And I guess, I guess the final thing is psychological because I think most people operate in this space with what I call a simultaneous mindset.
• 31:22
  Philip Pape: The assumption is that, hey, I need to be progressing on everything all the time.
• 31:25
  Philip Pape: Philip talks about all the pillars, right?
• 31:27
  Philip Pape: Lifting and walking and eating and everything, sleeping and stress.
• 31:31
  Philip Pape: And so I feel like I need to make progress on all these things.
• 31:34
  Philip Pape: And then I'm failing if I'm not.
• 31:36
  Philip Pape: And that's a very exhausting mindset and it creates guilt.
• 31:38
  Philip Pape: It creates guilt when you're not doing enough of whatever it is, cardio, you know, your lifts aren't making progress.
• 31:44
  Philip Pape: You get all this anxiety, you send me a message on Instagram.
• 31:47
  Philip Pape: Why am I not building muscle?
• 31:48
  Philip Pape: Why don't I see muscle definition?
• 31:49
  Philip Pape: You get frustrated when your weight goes up more than you thought it would during a building phase, or you're feeling fluffy, and you're like, is this even working?
• 31:56
  Philip Pape: You know what I'm talking about.
• 31:58
  Philip Pape: Right now, the alternative to that would be a sequential mindset focused on the process.
• 32:04
  Philip Pape: And that's what we've been talking about today.
• 32:06
  Philip Pape: In any given phase, you're pushing one thing forward and maintaining everything else.
• 32:10
  Philip Pape: And I don't want you to think of that as a compromise or a trade-off.
• 32:14
  Philip Pape: That's actually on the net going to give you more results.
• 32:17
  Philip Pape: That's how you solve this complex system that we're trying to work with, which is our body.
• 32:22
  Philip Pape: You don't optimize everything at once.
• 32:24
  Philip Pape: You identify the constraint, you focus resources on that constraint, low-hanging fruit, whatever phrase you want to use, and then you move to the next one.
• 32:32
  Philip Pape: Even if that's constraint is deeper, like hormonal or nutrients or whatever, focus on that and go all in on it and fix it and improve it.
• 32:39
  Philip Pape: And guess what?
• 32:40
  Philip Pape: It's gonna help everything else anyway.
• 32:41
  Philip Pape: And then when you truly do that, you remove the internal friction that was draining your energy and draining your willpower.
• 32:49
  Philip Pape: Because now you know exactly what you're doing and why it actually takes the stress out of the process.
• 32:54
  Philip Pape: And now you can measure things clearly because there's one metric that matters.
• 32:57
  Philip Pape: Maybe there's submetrics, but you know, there's this one set of metrics that matters for the next, say, 12 weeks or six months or whatever.
• 33:04
  Philip Pape: And that mental clarity by itself can accelerate your results more than any physical tweak.
• 33:10
  Philip Pape: Lastly, don't forget that fitness is a lifelong project.
• 33:15
  Philip Pape: And I mean that in the best way.
• 33:17
  Philip Pape: I mean that in the best way because you don't have to be your leanest, strongest, fastest, most enduring self by next Tuesday.
• 33:23
  Philip Pape: You just want to be making consistent, measurable progress on the thing that matters right now, and you're gonna feel great for it.
• 33:28
  Philip Pape: You're gonna feel great because you're making progress and improving.
• 33:31
  Philip Pape: And the human struggle is a process of improving until the day you die.
• 33:35
  Philip Pape: I mean, to me, that's a positive thing.
• 33:36
  Philip Pape: It means I can always improve.
• 33:38
  Philip Pape: I'm never gonna hit the finish line because if I did, why be alive?
• 33:41
  Philip Pape: Why be alive anymore?
• 33:43
  Philip Pape: All right, before I let you go, I'm gonna walk you through that quick goal audit that I promise it'll take you two minutes.
• 33:47
  Philip Pape: I want you to grab a pen and paper because you're gonna walk away knowing exactly what to focus on next.
• 33:53
  Philip Pape: And instead of pausing, I'm just gonna talk quickly about something else that might be helpful while you grab that pen and paper.
• 34:00
  Philip Pape: Because if this episode made you realize you've been stacking your goals without a clear priority, my lab, my my lab, my app fitness lab, I believe truly and honestly can fix that based on the feedback we're hearing.
• 34:13
  Philip Pape: It's an AI coaching app that I built.
• 34:15
  Philip Pape: I trained it.
• 34:15
  Philip Pape: It's built on my stuff.
• 34:16
  Philip Pape: It's not just Chat GPT giving you whatever it wants based on all human knowledge.
• 34:21
  Philip Pape: It's very specifically trained on the evidence and what to do.
• 34:25
  Philip Pape: And the very first thing it does is ask about your goals, your body, your lifestyle, your training history, all of this stuff in a free two-minute quiz.
• 34:33
  Philip Pape: And then based on your answers, it gives you a custom plan around your primary goal right now, not every goal at once.
• 34:39
  Philip Pape: And guess what?
• 34:40
  Philip Pape: It's periodized, just like we're talking about today, because I've trained it to do that.
• 34:43
  Philip Pape: So whether your focus is fat loss or muscle building or getting stronger or endurance even, Fitness Lab is going to adapt your nutrition and training plan, your daily activities to get to that goal specifically and forget all the rest.
• 34:56
  Philip Pape: Not forget as in they're not important, but it's gonna help you prioritize and maximize for the thing that matters.
• 35:02
  Philip Pape: And then as your goals shift, it's gonna shift with you and you can tell the coach in the app, hey, my goal is different now.
• 35:08
  Philip Pape: This is what I want to do going forward.
• 35:10
  Philip Pape: Help me out.
• 35:10
  Philip Pape: You know what?
• 35:11
  Philip Pape: We're gonna change our activities now to match that new goal.
• 35:14
  Philip Pape: So go to wits and weights.com slash app to take the free quiz.
• 35:18
  Philip Pape: And actually, depending on when this comes out, if you still want the 20% off because you follow the podcast, I'm gonna include a special link in the show notes for that in case our promotion is done for the winter.
• 35:28
  Philip Pape: So you still get the 20% off.
• 35:29
  Philip Pape: So use the link in the show notes to absolutely make sure you get that.
• 35:33
  Philip Pape: All right, here is the simple exercise that takes two minutes and can save you months of wasted effort in the gym.
• 35:42
  Philip Pape: Grab a pen and paper, write down every fitness goal you're currently working toward.
• 35:47
  Philip Pape: Not the one, not the one you care most about.
• 35:49
  Philip Pape: I want you to write them all down.
• 35:50
  Philip Pape: I want you to write, hey, I want to build muscle, I want to lose fat, I want to get faster, I want to improve my heart rate, I want to live longer, I want to improve my testosterone, anything you can think about, right?
• 36:02
  Philip Pape: Stream of consciousness, write them all down.
• 36:04
  Philip Pape: You could even come back to it, add more later.
• 36:06
  Philip Pape: You got it?
• 36:06
  Philip Pape: Okay, write down every goal you're working toward.
• 36:09
  Philip Pape: Now, circle the one that if you achieved it in the next three months would change dramatically how you feel about your body and your training the most.
• 36:20
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 36:21
  Philip Pape: If you achieved it in the next three months, that one thing on the page, I want you to circle and be like, yes, yes, this is the thing.
• 36:27
  Philip Pape: And then look at all the other ones you wrote down.
• 36:29
  Philip Pape: For each of those, write the word maintain next to it or a little M or whatever makes sense.
• 36:35
  Philip Pape: And that means you're still gonna train for it, but at the minimum effective dose, right?
• 36:39
  Philip Pape: Whatever that is, like we talked about, two lifting sessions to hold on to your muscle, some easy walks for cardiovascular health, whatever.
• 36:45
  Philip Pape: Then look at the one you circled again.
• 36:47
  Philip Pape: So you've got one circled and all the other ones say maintained.
• 36:49
  Philip Pape: That is your primary goal for the next 12 weeks.
• 36:52
  Philip Pape: So every decision about nutrition, training, recovery gets filtered through that goal first.
• 36:56
  Philip Pape: First.
• 36:57
  Philip Pape: If a choice supports it, you do it.
• 36:59
  Philip Pape: If it competes with it, you save it for the next phase.
• 37:02
  Philip Pape: And if you're not already doing things to maintain the other stuff, then don't worry about it yet.
• 37:06
  Philip Pape: Don't worry about it yet.
• 37:07
  Philip Pape: Just focus on the one thing.
• 37:08
  Philip Pape: You're gonna build this up over time.
• 37:09
  Philip Pape: Because the next time, three months from now or six months, whatever, you're gonna do this exercise again and switch to your next goal.
• 37:16
  Philip Pape: All right, do it tonight.
• 37:17
  Philip Pape: Put it somewhere you'll see it, put it on the fridge, put it on your nightstand.
• 37:20
  Philip Pape: And when you feel that pull to add more, look at the piece of paper and don't do it.
• 37:25
  Philip Pape: Don't do it.
• 37:26
  Philip Pape: Focus on the thing that you circled.
• 37:28
  Philip Pape: Your future self is gonna thank you for that.
• 37:30
  Philip Pape: All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember the fastest path to all your goals isn't doing everything at once, it's doing one thing at a time and trusting the sequence and process to get you there.
• 37:43
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.