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You Don't Need a Calorie Surplus to Build Muscle Over 40 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: If you want to build muscle after 40, but you've been told the only way is to eat in a surplus and gain weight and accept some body fat, this episode is going to change how you might plan out your next few months.
• 0:13
  Philip Pape: Today I am evaluating the surplus claim.
• 0:16
  Philip Pape: Where does it come from?
• 0:18
  Philip Pape: You'll learn the real energy cost of building a pound of muscle, plus three conditions that decide whether you can add muscle at the weight you're currently at.
• 0:34
  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.
• 0:44
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, Philip Pape.
• 0:46
  Philip Pape: I'm a certified nutrition coach.
• 0:47
  Philip Pape: I've worked with a lot of lifters.
• 0:49
  Philip Pape: I've struggled and challenged myself to build muscle and lose fat many times over the past few years, and I've been reading the research.
• 0:56
  Philip Pape: So last episode, Monday, I did an episode on perimenopause and weight gain.
• 1:01
  Philip Pape: And one of the things I said there, stick around because today's episode is for men and women.
• 1:05
  Philip Pape: One of the things I said was, hey, the math still works.
• 1:09
  Philip Pape: What tends to change is where fat is distributed and how much muscle you are losing.
• 1:14
  Philip Pape: And for men, the same thing starts to apply with older age.
• 1:18
  Philip Pape: After you get over 40, you're starting to lose that muscle mat and you're starting muscle mat, muscle mass, and you're starting to gain some belly fat from different reasons and in different ways than women, but still.
• 1:29
  Philip Pape: Now, a handful of you got back to me, which was pretty much the same question that I hear all the time.
• 1:35
  Philip Pape: Hey, I want to build muscle, but I really don't want to gain weight to do it.
• 1:39
  Philip Pape: And I'm afraid of gaining fat.
• 1:40
  Philip Pape: So what am I supposed to do?
• 1:42
  Philip Pape: And that's what we're going to talk about today.
• 1:44
  Philip Pape: Because the advice you've heard for a long time on many podcasts, and I've said versions of it myself on this show, I've done probably workshops on this, is that muscle requires a calorie surplus.
• 1:58
  Philip Pape: So if you want to build muscle, you have to eat more and you're going to gain some fat, and then you can cut that fat off later.
• 2:04
  Philip Pape: And that's the traditional bulk and cut model.
• 2:07
  Philip Pape: Now, you've also heard me talk about body recomp or aggressive maintenance or lean gaining, all that stuff.
• 2:14
  Philip Pape: If you're starting to get on the older side of life, and I say over 40, it's not like a magic number, but it is correlated with not only hormonal changes, but also slowing down and more stress and less sleep and less adherence, all of that.
• 2:28
  Philip Pape: And then with the muscle and bone loss, mat, bone mass loss, and all of that coming together at the same time.
• 2:34
  Philip Pape: And you've probably spent your whole life being told to eat less, maybe trying to eat less, doing the diets I'm raising my hands right now, the keto, the carnivore, it goes back to Atkins and other weird diets that I've tried.
• 2:45
  Philip Pape: The idea of deliberately gaining weight and doing it for months on end on purpose.
• 2:51
  Philip Pape: What?
• 2:51
  Philip Pape: WTF?
• 2:53
  Philip Pape: I would never do that, right?
• 2:55
  Philip Pape: So you're thinking to yourself, it's just not an appealing thing.
• 2:58
  Philip Pape: Like, what the heck?
• 2:59
  Philip Pape: I've been trying all my life to lose weight.
• 3:01
  Philip Pape: And even if I'm haven't been trying to get skinny per se, I've been trying to not be fat.
• 3:06
  Philip Pape: So what most of you do instead is you just skip the building part and you live in this permanent, you know, maybe maintenance at most, mostly a light deficit, slightly or largely underfueled, year after year after year.
• 3:21
  Philip Pape: And guess what?
• 3:22
  Philip Pape: That is a big part of why nothing is changing.
• 3:26
  Philip Pape: So our roadmap for today's episode is pretty cool.
• 3:29
  Philip Pape: First, I want to show you where the surplus number came from.
• 3:33
  Philip Pape: Okay, you're gonna be a little annoyed when you hear it.
• 3:37
  Philip Pape: Then I'm gonna look at what the trials measured, including where people arguing against having a calorie surplus, who are basically on my side of this episode, are also overselling their case.
• 3:51
  Philip Pape: Okay, right?
• 3:52
  Philip Pape: Because I've seen people say, send me Instagram reels by some, you know, really good lifter, bodybuilder, or whatever, who obviously is jacked and experienced.
• 3:59
  Philip Pape: So you're like, nope, you never need to be in a surplus, you just need to be a maintenance.
• 4:02
  Philip Pape: And there's it can lead people astray because there's nuance behind that.
• 4:07
  Philip Pape: Then we're gonna cover the three conditions that predict whether body composition works for you, okay, and what the trade-offs are when you choose it.
• 4:17
  Philip Pape: And when I say body recomposition, body recomp, I mean at the same time, like building muscle and losing fat at the same time, not over time with cuts and bulks.
• 4:25
  Philip Pape: Then stick around to the end because I always have a little treat for you at the end of these.
• 4:29
  Philip Pape: Today, it's gonna be one number that you can check tonight that tells you whether your current rate of fat loss is fast enough or slow enough relative to how much muscle you risk losing.
• 4:40
  Philip Pape: It's always a good number to have in your fat pocket.
• 4:43
  Philip Pape: All right, so let's start with where the calorie surplus rule came from.
• 4:48
  Philip Pape: If you go open a sports nutrition textbook and you look up how much you're supposed to eat above maintenance to build muscle, you're gonna see recommendations somewhere between 360 and 955 calories a day.
• 5:01
  Philip Pape: And maybe newer ones have a lower minimum.
• 5:03
  Philip Pape: That is a huge range.
• 5:05
  Philip Pape: And those numbers got perpetuated through certifications, through bodybuilding forums, through coaches, and became part of the zeitgeist.
• 5:16
  Philip Pape: I love words like that, the zeitgeist of our culture.
• 5:18
  Philip Pape: Okay, now in 2019, there was a review paper by Slater and colleagues, and Eric Helms was one of the authors on it, actually.
• 5:25
  Philip Pape: Okay, I'm gonna come back to Eric in a minute.
• 5:26
  Philip Pape: We all love Eric.
• 5:28
  Philip Pape: And the paper asked a pretty simple question, which is whether an energy surplus is actually required to maximize muscle growth.
• 5:36
  Philip Pape: And their answer, which for a scientific paper is about as blunt as it gets, is those estimates have never been validated in a resistance training population.
• 5:47
  Philip Pape: Nobody actually studied them.
• 5:49
  Philip Pape: So the numbers that people use oftentimes in this fitness industry that I've found are often inferred, especially ones on populations that have not been studied, like peri-impostmenopausal populations, for example.
• 6:03
  Philip Pape: And I think the inference itself can be sometimes way off, especially if the math is wrong.
• 6:09
  Philip Pape: And I'm gonna explain that here because this is the math piece, is what change how I think about it.
• 6:14
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 6:15
  Philip Pape: You know the rule that a pound of fat is roughly 3,500 calories per pound.
• 6:21
  Philip Pape: Okay, now it's not a perfect number, but it's in the neighborhood, it's in the ballpark.
• 6:25
  Philip Pape: Fat tissue is, of course, mostly fat.
• 6:28
  Philip Pape: Fat is energy dense.
• 6:30
  Philip Pape: So when you reverse engineer it and you say, well, okay, a pound is a pound.
• 6:35
  Philip Pape: So of course, building a pound of muscle, or you know, or let's say adding a pound of weight, which includes some muscle, must also take thousands of extra calories.
• 6:45
  Philip Pape: The problem is muscle is mostly water.
• 6:49
  Philip Pape: It's like 70 to 75% water.
• 6:51
  Philip Pape: Only a fifth of it is actual protein.
• 6:53
  Philip Pape: We also know muscle is more dense, but the water piece is probably more of a mover here.
• 6:57
  Philip Pape: A pound of muscle stores way less energy than a pound of fat.
• 7:01
  Philip Pape: And so you can't use fat math on muscle, right?
• 7:05
  Philip Pape: Now, in the past, I've talked about this where if you do want to use math, a number like 2,500 calories per pound makes sense when you assume 50-50 fat and muscle.
• 7:15
  Philip Pape: So I'll just throw that out there.
• 7:16
  Philip Pape: I I have an episode about that, it came out a long time ago.
• 7:19
  Philip Pape: But what is the cost of lean tissue?
• 7:22
  Philip Pape: Well, estimates are that lean tissue store 700 to 850 calories per kilogram.
• 7:29
  Philip Pape: And if you add in like metabolic overhead to assemble the tissue, you're in like 600 to 930 calories per kilogram.
• 7:38
  Philip Pape: There is a newer model from this year from 2026 that puts the all-in cost around 3481 per kilogram.
• 7:47
  Philip Pape: Now that's up from a preprint, it hasn't been peer reviewed, but I'm giving you the high numbers so nobody can accuse me of you know cherry picking here.
• 7:54
  Philip Pape: So if you gain a kilogram of muscle over 12 weeks, for which for most of us over 40 years old is a really good 12 weeks, even using that high estimate, and I'm sorry I'm using kilograms for all my American folks out there, but it's that way I can connect the math to the paper.
• 8:09
  Philip Pape: You're looking at something like an extra 41 calories a day.
• 8:14
  Philip Pape: And on the lower estimates, it's only like five or 10, which is like a tablespoon of peanut butter.
• 8:18
  Philip Pape: I don't think you can build a four-month weight gain phase based on such a tiny, tiny surplus.
• 8:26
  Philip Pape: Now, stay with me, okay?
• 8:30
  Philip Pape: It's hard.
• 8:31
  Philip Pape: What I mean by that is hard to wait gain to gain weight and measurably know that you're doing so when the number's that small.
• 8:36
  Philip Pape: That's what I mean.
• 8:37
  Philip Pape: Now, this is a mechanistic argument, okay?
• 8:40
  Philip Pape: It's the it's math related to the tissue density of energy, blah, blah, blah.
• 8:45
  Philip Pape: Okay, it's not an outcome from a study.
• 8:47
  Philip Pape: Math is a great abstract for real life.
• 8:49
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna lie about that, but we have to think about our evidence quality, let's say.
• 8:55
  Philip Pape: So, what the math says is that a surplus is almost not even necessary.
• 9:00
  Philip Pape: But what actually happens to your body over 12 weeks of trying to gain?
• 9:04
  Philip Pape: Let's look at that, shall we?
• 9:07
  Philip Pape: Ooh, hopefully I've got you hooked.
• 9:09
  Philip Pape: Okay, so we know that the surplus number itself hasn't been tested in a population.
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: But let's look at studies that have done some testing, shall we?
• 9:18
  Philip Pape: Eric Helms, I love his work.
• 9:20
  Philip Pape: He's one of the few people in this field who will publish results that either show a non a non-result, let's say, or they just don't, aren't flattering to what his own position has been.
• 9:30
  Philip Pape: He ran a study in 2023 where he took train lifters and split them into three groups.
• 9:35
  Philip Pape: One group aid at maintenance, one was in a small surplus of 5%, and one was in a bigger surplus of 15%.
• 9:40
  Philip Pape: Many of you are familiar with this, are familiar with this paper because I've used it myself as a foundation for some of working with clients and helping them build muscle with the right surplus.
• 9:50
  Philip Pape: Everybody in the study trained for three days a week for eight weeks.
• 9:53
  Philip Pape: Now, there was no evidence of a difference in muscle thickness between the groups, and there was no difference in squat strength.
• 10:00
  Philip Pape: The bench press had some evidence favoring the big surplus, but I think the most important finding is that the rate of body weight gain predicted the increase in skin fold thickness, which is fat.
• 10:15
  Philip Pape: Okay, skin fold thickness measured with, I think, a caliper.
• 10:18
  Philip Pape: That's fat.
• 10:19
  Philip Pape: And it did not predict muscle thickness.
• 10:22
  Philip Pape: So the faster that people gained weight, the more of what they gained was fat.
• 10:27
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: Now there's a caveat, there's nuance to this.
• 10:31
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 10:32
  Philip Pape: That study started with 21 people and ended with 17 people on RAND during COVID.
• 10:37
  Philip Pape: A small study like that that essentially does not find a difference between groups is not the same as proving there isn't a difference, just to put that out there.
• 10:48
  Philip Pape: But there is a bigger piece of evidence we have, a meta or meta-regression by Murphy and Kohler in 2022.
• 10:55
  Philip Pape: And by the way, a meta-regression, sometimes I have to slow down here and define these things.
• 10:59
  Philip Pape: It's where you pool a bunch of studies together and then you look for a relationship across a whole range of values instead of just comparing two groups against each other.
• 11:08
  Philip Pape: So they pooled resistance training studies where people were eating in a calorie deficit.
• 11:13
  Philip Pape: And the lean mass gains were blunted or impaired compared to the control group.
• 11:20
  Philip Pape: The effect size was negative 0.57.
• 11:23
  Philip Pape: So, and then strength wasn't affected at all, essentially.
• 11:27
  Philip Pape: The I'll say headline finding is that a calorie deficit of about 500 calories a day is where the lean mass gains stopped happening.
• 11:37
  Philip Pape: Okay, so think about that for a second, because we have kind of two directions fighting for each other.
• 11:42
  Philip Pape: On one hand, it's saying, hey, a deficit can cost you muscle growth.
• 11:47
  Philip Pape: Okay, fine.
• 11:48
  Philip Pape: Some you you're often you often hear that a deficit's gonna potentially cause you muscle loss or gonna cause muscle loss.
• 11:55
  Philip Pape: On the other hand, it means a deficit smaller than 500 calories a day.
• 11:59
  Philip Pape: Well, the people in these studies were gaining lean mass while losing fat.
• 12:02
  Philip Pape: What is that?
• 12:03
  Philip Pape: That's body recomp.
• 12:04
  Philip Pape: That's body recomp.
• 12:06
  Philip Pape: Now, you know, to be fair, they were looking at deficits, different sized deficits.
• 12:11
  Philip Pape: They didn't have a group that was also in a surplus.
• 12:13
  Philip Pape: That'd be pretty cool, right?
• 12:14
  Philip Pape: So when you when you hear someone say, talk about that paper and say, okay, here's how much growth you would lose by going from a surplus to maintenance.
• 12:21
  Philip Pape: Well, they're extrapolating past the edge of the data.
• 12:24
  Philip Pape: They might be right, but the paper's not going to tell you that.
• 12:28
  Philip Pape: So this brings me to the part that I guess I'm a little uncomfortable with and why I love this show, because we can challenge our own beliefs and we can be skeptical.
• 12:38
  Philip Pape: Because right now, the loudest people out there are pushing this one really hard, the fact that you don't need a surplus and pushing it to an extreme like they always do.
• 12:50
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 12:51
  Philip Pape: In other words, I would like to make the nuanced argument on this episode today that you don't quite need a meaningful surplus to build muscle, but there's nuance behind it.
• 13:00
  Philip Pape: But I'm not going to go to the extreme of you just can do deficits all the time and always be a maintenance and never be in a surplus.
• 13:05
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 13:06
  Philip Pape: So the claim goes something like this.
• 13:08
  Philip Pape: In something like, I don't know, 90 to 95% of hypertrophy studies.
• 13:12
  Philip Pape: I think I heard Milo Wolf or somebody mention this on a podcast.
• 13:16
  Philip Pape: Researchers never tell people, hey, I want you to bulk and I want you to cut.
• 13:20
  Philip Pape: They say just eat normally.
• 13:21
  Philip Pape: Sometimes they're not even controlling for nutrition, right?
• 13:23
  Philip Pape: And then the body weight stays the same in many cases.
• 13:27
  Philip Pape: And then people gain muscle because they're on this training regimen.
• 13:30
  Philip Pape: And so by definition, they must have lost fat, right?
• 13:32
  Philip Pape: So recomp is happening, and that's great.
• 13:36
  Philip Pape: So you're like, oh, yeah, hold on, Philip.
• 13:38
  Philip Pape: You've been arguing that exact thing for the last few minutes.
• 13:41
  Philip Pape: But I think there are some problems with this.
• 13:44
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 13:44
  Philip Pape: The first is that in a lot of these studies, hypertrophy is measured by ultrasound at one spot in one muscle, like the front of the thigh.
• 13:51
  Philip Pape: Body weight is measured on a scale, and they don't measure body fat distribution or body composition, right?
• 13:57
  Philip Pape: Whole body fat mass a lot of the time isn't measured.
• 13:59
  Philip Pape: So the fat loss part is an inferred conclusion, not a measurement.
• 14:03
  Philip Pape: The second problem is that stable body weight, like within 1% over eight to 12 weeks, is well inside the normal fluctuations from water and glycogen and gut content and all of that.
• 14:15
  Philip Pape: So I have a real problem with like these short-term studies trying to conclude anything.
• 14:19
  Philip Pape: Well, I shouldn't say anything.
• 14:21
  Philip Pape: That's taking it too far.
• 14:22
  Philip Pape: But like on body weight.
• 14:23
  Philip Pape: And it to be fair, many of them aren't even measuring, they don't care about the body weight necessarily as a variable.
• 14:28
  Philip Pape: They just happen to say, hey, by the way, their weight didn't change.
• 14:31
  Philip Pape: If I give you a specific example, okay, maybe it'll help.
• 14:34
  Philip Pape: There's a 2024 study on single set training.
• 14:37
  Philip Pape: Uh Herman with two N's, he was the lead author.
• 14:39
  Philip Pape: And Brad Schoenfeld and Milo Wolf were the co-authors.
• 14:42
  Philip Pape: And it was done in train lifters who averaged over four years of experience.
• 14:46
  Philip Pape: And people cite this as a finding of body recomp.
• 14:50
  Philip Pape: So I went and I looked at the paper, and body weight change and fat mass change, I didn't see those appear in the results at all.
• 14:57
  Philip Pape: Like they're not reported, going back to my comment I just made.
• 15:00
  Philip Pape: So whatever recomp claim people are attaching to the study is not necessarily something you reported.
• 15:05
  Philip Pape: This is why you gotta be very careful.
• 15:07
  Philip Pape: I know you're not all gonna read every study just like I don't read every study, but you gotta just be careful.
• 15:12
  Philip Pape: Now, that doesn't make recomp false.
• 15:14
  Philip Pape: Okay, when we measure it, sometimes we do find it.
• 15:17
  Philip Pape: And I also think recomp is a really fun and marketable thing to sell because I sell it myself, because yes, it's possible and it's possible for certain people.
• 15:26
  Philip Pape: But like some people take it too far or they build their whole business off of it.
• 15:31
  Philip Pape: So having said that, this brings me to what I think is the practical problem with all of this.
• 15:35
  Philip Pape: And speaking of, you know, conflicts of interest and disclosures, you guys know that I have an app and it's called Fitness Lab, right?
• 15:42
  Philip Pape: And if you run a recomp phase, your body weight is supposed to stay roughly flat.
• 15:48
  Philip Pape: Now I've talked about aggressive maintenance or slight deficits, but still your body weight's gonna stay mostly flat compared to if you're bulking or cutting.
• 15:56
  Philip Pape: That's kind of the whole point, which means the scale is really not gonna help.
• 16:01
  Philip Pape: It's not gonna move very much, all right?
• 16:03
  Philip Pape: And so if you make it front and center, it's an easy reason to quit.
• 16:07
  Philip Pape: It's very hard to see changes in body recap.
• 16:09
  Philip Pape: It takes longer, you have to be more patient.
• 16:11
  Philip Pape: All right, you have to look at the right things.
• 16:13
  Philip Pape: And so when you know, working with a coach or using my app or whatever, you have to understand what you're measuring and managing is aligned with the thing, with the outcome you're trying to get.
• 16:24
  Philip Pape: So if you look at my app fitness app, it reads your scale weight but turns it into a trend.
• 16:30
  Philip Pape: It reads your lift progression alongside that, okay, and says, okay, you're getting stronger or not.
• 16:36
  Philip Pape: It looks at how hard your sessions are because that's useful, right?
• 16:39
  Philip Pape: That gives you even more information than just the numbers, especially when you connect it to things like your sleep and your other biofeedback.
• 16:46
  Philip Pape: And then when you take all that together with check-ins and you put it all together, here's what's going on underneath the hood.
• 16:51
  Philip Pape: That's kind of the recomp process, okay.
• 16:54
  Philip Pape: When you're building muscle and not gaining weight, that's kind of the game when we talk about recomp and not having to be in a surplus.
• 17:04
  Philip Pape: But I'm gonna put a star in that.
• 17:05
  Philip Pape: And I'm sorry I'm kind of rambling today because a lot of this is unscripted.
• 17:09
  Philip Pape: The evidence that it's working is mainly in your training log and in your biofeedback, as opposed to in the scale.
• 17:16
  Philip Pape: So, anyway, real quick, by the way, I should pitch my app since I'm talking about it Fitness Lab.
• 17:20
  Philip Pape: We're running a Labor Day sale right now.
• 17:22
  Philip Pape: I don't want you to miss it because it closes September 13th.
• 17:25
  Philip Pape: And this episode comes out pretty close to the end of that.
• 17:27
  Philip Pape: But you have to be on my email list.
• 17:28
  Philip Pape: Go to witsandweights.com slash email, join my list, and you'll get it in your welcome email.
• 17:34
  Philip Pape: If you're already on my list, guys, you should have seen an email with the deal.
• 17:37
  Philip Pape: If not, just reply to one of them and let me know, hey Philip, where's the freaking 30% off deal?
• 17:42
  Philip Pape: But if you're not on my list yet, just go to witsandweights.com slash email, and that goes through September 13th.
• 17:49
  Philip Pape: Fitness lab can do all this for you with the body recomp stuff.
• 17:52
  Philip Pape: But anyway, if the surplus isn't required, if recomp is real, but it's being oversold, then the useful question, of course, isn't does it work?
• 18:02
  Philip Pape: It is, does it work for you?
• 18:05
  Philip Pape: And that's where you have to understand.
• 18:07
  Philip Pape: Can it work for you?
• 18:08
  Philip Pape: There are three conditions.
• 18:09
  Philip Pape: And I'd say if you have two out of three, you're pretty good shape.
• 18:12
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 18:13
  Philip Pape: Condition one is you have some body fat.
• 18:16
  Philip Pape: You have some body fat to spend.
• 18:18
  Philip Pape: That's like a nice little battery of energy on your body.
• 18:20
  Philip Pape: This is the way I like to reframe for people who have a little extra body fat carrying around.
• 18:25
  Philip Pape: Hey, you've got some energy to draw from.
• 18:27
  Philip Pape: We go back to Gilbert Forbes in the 80s, and there was a concept called partitioning, which just means where the tissue comes from and where it goes.
• 18:36
  Philip Pape: And some people still use the term, right?
• 18:37
  Philip Pape: Nutrient partitioning, for example.
• 18:39
  Philip Pape: So leaner people tend to give up more muscle when they're in a deficit, and they put more of their surplus toward muscle.
• 18:46
  Philip Pape: People carrying more body fat tend to do the opposite, which for our purposes here is what we want.
• 18:52
  Philip Pape: Because the body is more willing to pull that energy out of fat stores and put it toward muscle.
• 18:59
  Philip Pape: Interesting.
• 19:00
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 19:00
  Philip Pape: So you're starting to see why surplus or not surplus isn't really the right way to frame this.
• 19:06
  Philip Pape: Because if you have a lot of body fat and you eat at maintenance or in a slight deficit, your body may still experience that as a quote unquote surplus from the muscle mass building perspective.
• 19:18
  Philip Pape: All your body cares about is does it have enough resources to construct that muscle tissue?
• 19:24
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 19:24
  Philip Pape: And your body's able to create some of a lot of those resources too, from the energy.
• 19:29
  Philip Pape: And this is why lifting weights is so fantastic, especially when you're overweight.
• 19:34
  Philip Pape: Now you're gonna hear specific numbers touted about body fat cutoffs, where, oh, are you lean or not?
• 19:40
  Philip Pape: Or where does this start to happen?
• 19:41
  Philip Pape: You're gonna hear like, okay, men above 10 or 12% body fat, or women above 18 or 20% body fat.
• 19:46
  Philip Pape: And these are more like coaching heuristics.
• 19:48
  Philip Pape: Okay, there isn't like a trial that establishes these body fat thresholds for recomp.
• 19:53
  Philip Pape: And again, it would probably be very individual anyway.
• 19:56
  Philip Pape: There's definitely not one for women.
• 19:57
  Philip Pape: I know that.
• 19:58
  Philip Pape: So this is like a rough sense of direction, right?
• 20:00
  Philip Pape: It's not like a hard line, like many of this stuff.
• 20:02
  Philip Pape: And by the way, Forbes' original data came from people who weren't lifting at all.
• 20:06
  Philip Pape: Some of them were recovering from starvation states.
• 20:09
  Philip Pape: So we gotta watch out who we apply this to.
• 20:11
  Philip Pape: So anyway, condition one is that you have some body fat.
• 20:14
  Philip Pape: Condition two is you have some training headroom.
• 20:17
  Philip Pape: What do I mean for that?
• 20:18
  Philip Pape: Okay, for most of you listening, that means that there is room to improve your training stimulus, which is uh I could say the vast majority of you probably.
• 20:29
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 20:30
  Philip Pape: Maybe you are detrained, maybe you're coming back from a break or an injury, maybe you never really trained hard in the first place.
• 20:36
  Philip Pape: Or this is the big one.
• 20:37
  Philip Pape: Maybe you've been doing the same three sets of 10 with the same pink dumbbells for two years.
• 20:40
  Philip Pape: I mentioned the pink dumbbells again, I did last time.
• 20:42
  Philip Pape: Maybe that lady who commented on Spotify about how I I constantly mention I'm an engineer and she's so annoyed by it, will be annoyed by the pink dumbbells if I just keep mentioning them.
• 20:51
  Philip Pape: So if your training has been coasting, right?
• 20:53
  Philip Pape: You haven't really been using a progressive overload, then doing it is going to put your body in a massive, big new stimulus.
• 21:03
  Philip Pape: And you don't need extra calories to respond to a stimulus if you're a noob.
• 21:08
  Philip Pape: You weren't getting it, now you are.
• 21:10
  Philip Pape: That is a huge stimulus where your body will respond to it almost despite how much you're eating.
• 21:16
  Philip Pape: Almost, almost.
• 21:17
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 21:18
  Philip Pape: Training is what builds muscle bar none.
• 21:21
  Philip Pape: The food and the protein are there to support it.
• 21:24
  Philip Pape: Speaking of protein, that is condition number three.
• 21:26
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 21:26
  Philip Pape: I'll just mention it again.
• 21:28
  Philip Pape: At least 0.7 grams per pound, that's your floor for protein.
• 21:31
  Philip Pape: Are you getting that much protein?
• 21:32
  Philip Pape: If not, you need to work your way up there fairly quickly with your routine.
• 21:36
  Philip Pape: You know, track it if you need to.
• 21:38
  Philip Pape: Use macrofactor, my code, wits and weights, all one word, and get your protein.
• 21:43
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 21:43
  Philip Pape: You have to be training and the protein supports it.
• 21:46
  Philip Pape: If you're only eating protein and not training, it's not really gonna make a lick of a difference.
• 21:50
  Philip Pape: Now, when you're in a fat loss phase or a calorie deficit, I should say, you probably want a little bit more protein than that.
• 21:56
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 21:57
  Philip Pape: And it's not just to hold on to lean mass, but in many cases, it's You're newer, it'll actually still help you build more lean mass even when you're in a deficit, even when you're losing weight.
• 22:05
  Philip Pape: It's crazy.
• 22:06
  Philip Pape: It's crazy.
• 22:06
  Philip Pape: So combining multiple of these things that you're not already doing is a huge lever that you should get going on right now, guys.
• 22:13
  Philip Pape: All right, now let's talk about trade-offs.
• 22:15
  Philip Pape: One trade-off of body recomp is that you give up speed.
• 22:18
  Philip Pape: A calorie surplus is probably going to buy you a little bit more muscle.
• 22:23
  Philip Pape: I don't think it buys you as much as what like our bulk and cut bodybuilding culture, social media culture implies.
• 22:29
  Philip Pape: And again, we can go to the Helms study that says, hey, the faster you gain, the more you're probably just gonna gain fat, but it's very individualistic.
• 22:36
  Philip Pape: Again, if you're new to training, you have a little more leg legroom.
• 22:39
  Philip Pape: I always put a brand new person who's doing their first building phase ever, who's highly responsive to training and maybe has some fat but not too much fat.
• 22:47
  Philip Pape: I might put them at like as much as 0.4, 0.5% body weight a week, which is still not that much.
• 22:53
  Philip Pape: It's still not that much.
• 22:54
  Philip Pape: If if anything, it's enough to push you to eat more.
• 22:57
  Philip Pape: And because people tend to not eat enough and have trouble eating more, they eat just the right amount.
• 23:01
  Philip Pape: It's the way I think about it.
• 23:03
  Philip Pape: It's like a stretch goal.
• 23:04
  Philip Pape: So that's one trade-off.
• 23:05
  Philip Pape: You give up speed.
• 23:06
  Philip Pape: The other thing is you give up using the scale as the signal.
• 23:10
  Philip Pape: And for a lot of you, that's hard psychologically, but it could be hugely beneficial because then you learn the other things that you get to use.
• 23:16
  Philip Pape: During a body recomp phase, you want to use your strength log, you know, your training log, your tape measurements at your waist, at your navel photos every few weeks, all those things to kind of see what's happening.
• 23:27
  Philip Pape: Biofeedback, like you should be feeling good during body recomp.
• 23:30
  Philip Pape: You shouldn't feel low energy or like you're in a deficit, but you're also not gaining a bunch of weight and potentially fat to go with it.
• 23:36
  Philip Pape: It's just gonna take time and you have to be patient.
• 23:38
  Philip Pape: Now, I'm not saying a surplus never helps, okay?
• 23:41
  Philip Pape: Tying all this together in a bow, the you don't have to be in a surplus piece really means you probably can get enough energy into your body to support muscle growth if you're at least at maintenance.
• 23:51
  Philip Pape: And sometimes it helps to push a little past that, but if you have a little extra fat, you may not have to because of the extra fat and your body still experiences as a quote unquote surplus.
• 24:00
  Philip Pape: The other thing is if you start to build muscle and your body craves more energy and food, you may have to overconsume calorie-wise, and it might seem like a surplus, but you're not really in a surplus.
• 24:11
  Philip Pape: Your body's metabolism's just going up.
• 24:13
  Philip Pape: And sometimes you have to overshoot that a little bit, being a tiny surplus, just to stay at not a surplus, if that makes sense.
• 24:20
  Philip Pape: And if I'm confusing all of you, if I'm confusing all of you, I want you to reach out.
• 24:25
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 24:25
  Philip Pape: I want you to reach out, join my email list, witsandweights.com slash email, reply, let me know what you're dealing with, let me know what you're confused, and I'll reply in person.
• 24:35
  Philip Pape: If you're already lean, you're already well trained, progress has stopped, you know, maybe a small surplus is the boost you need.
• 24:41
  Philip Pape: And there's good evidence behind that.
• 24:42
  Philip Pape: We also know that recomp takes time.
• 24:45
  Philip Pape: Take, we said that it's slower than a dedicated build and a dedicated cut, and you have to stay motivated in other ways.
• 24:51
  Philip Pape: I'm also not saying, hey, just eat a maintenance and you're going to sort yourself out.
• 24:54
  Philip Pape: Of course not.
• 24:54
  Philip Pape: You have to have your training, you have to have all the other things, the protein, et cetera.
• 24:57
  Philip Pape: And even to stay at maintenance can be a difficult skill to build over time because you need to know, am I really a maintenance?
• 25:03
  Philip Pape: Now, what's cool is we have plenty of studies on young trained men, but we also have some resistance training trials in post-menopausal women that show this exact pattern.
• 25:13
  Philip Pape: And sometimes they don't use the word recomp.
• 25:15
  Philip Pape: So it's it's kind of hard to find the studies depending on how you search for it.
• 25:18
  Philip Pape: There's one from 2024, and they had 43 postmenopausal women over 24 weeks of resistance training, and they measured significant reductions in total fat and visceral fat alongside significant increases in muscle mass and in strength.
• 25:32
  Philip Pape: And the heavier load groups did even better.
• 25:34
  Philip Pape: Nobody said here, eat in a surplus.
• 25:36
  Philip Pape: Nobody said here in a death, eat in a deficit.
• 25:38
  Philip Pape: They just lifted and their body composition changed in the best direction in fat and muscle for both at the same time.
• 25:46
  Philip Pape: Now, those were untrained women.
• 25:48
  Philip Pape: So again, this is what happens when you start lifting.
• 25:50
  Philip Pape: So I don't want you to conclude on this up from this episode you should eat less.
• 25:54
  Philip Pape: No, I think it's somewhat the opposite.
• 25:56
  Philip Pape: I think it's you need to start lifting, you need to eat more fuel to support your lifting, you need to increase your protein, right?
• 26:02
  Philip Pape: But to the level that you need to be fully fueled, which still may not be a surplus, if that makes sense.
• 26:08
  Philip Pape: It's just not in a deficit.
• 26:09
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 26:10
  Philip Pape: Before we wrap up, that number I promised you at the beginning of the episode, I'll give you that in a minute, so that you can properly calibrate your uh window for body recomp.
• 26:19
  Philip Pape: But before I do, the fitness lab deal closes this Sunday, September 13th.
• 26:24
  Philip Pape: You have to go to witsandweights.com slash email.
• 26:26
  Philip Pape: Join the list.
• 26:26
  Philip Pape: You'll get it in the welcome email.
• 26:28
  Philip Pape: That's witsandweights.com slash email.
• 26:30
  Philip Pape: This is a permanent 30% off for life deal.
• 26:33
  Philip Pape: Anybody who knows Fitness Lab since we launched last year, we've never had a deal like this.
• 26:36
  Philip Pape: Usually the deal is 20% off your first payment.
• 26:39
  Philip Pape: This one is 30% off permanently.
• 26:41
  Philip Pape: Okay, so get in there.
• 26:42
  Philip Pape: You get an even bigger deal if you sign up for a whole year.
• 26:44
  Philip Pape: So that's up to you.
• 26:45
  Philip Pape: But go to wits and weights.com slash email.
• 26:48
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 26:48
  Philip Pape: Here's a numeric value that you can check for yourself if you're trying to, you know, build muscle, lose fat recomp.
• 26:57
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 26:57
  Philip Pape: There is a meta regression that pooled a bunch of resistance training studies done in calorie deficits.
• 27:03
  Philip Pape: And they saw where lean mass gains occurred versus where they stopped.
• 27:08
  Philip Pape: And they stopped right around a deficit of 500 calories a day.
• 27:12
  Philip Pape: Now, I don't like just calories or percentages of calories.
• 27:17
  Philip Pape: I like rates of loss relative to your body weight.
• 27:20
  Philip Pape: So if you convert that to body weight, for most people, this if you if we base it on the weight in the study, the body weights in the study, you want to limit your rate of loss to roughly half a percent of your body weight a week.
• 27:34
  Philip Pape: Now that's not nothing, like that's still meaningful, right?
• 27:37
  Philip Pape: So if you weigh 160 pounds, stay under three quarters of a pound a week of loss to potentially not only keep your lean mass, but gain lean mass, especially if you're newer to lifting.
• 27:48
  Philip Pape: If you're trying to have your cake and eat it too, pun intended, maybe?
• 27:50
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 27:51
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 27:52
  Philip Pape: So look at your last three weeks of trend weight.
• 27:55
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 27:56
  Philip Pape: I know I threw you for a loop there.
• 27:57
  Philip Pape: You can't just go by whatever you weighed yesterday.
• 27:59
  Philip Pape: You got to have a good idea of your trend weight right now, your overall actual average weight, and just do the math.
• 28:04
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 28:05
  Philip Pape: Do the math, multiply it by a half percent.
• 28:07
  Philip Pape: And whatever that is, don't exceed that amount of weight loss per week.
• 28:11
  Philip Pape: Now, you take that, you multiply by 3,500 calories, that's the calorie deficit.
• 28:17
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 28:18
  Philip Pape: In other words, the pounds that you calculate times 3,500, that's your calorie deficit.
• 28:22
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 28:25
  Philip Pape: And remember, the surplus was never the thing that built the muscle.
• 28:30
  Philip Pape: The training does that.
• 28:31
  Philip Pape: The food is there to support it.
• 28:32
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.