Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / 90 Days to Lose Fat and Build Muscle at the Same Time | Bonus
Transcript
- 0:00Philip Pape: Hey everyone, philip here with a quick Sunday bonus episode because I want to talk about body recomposition.
- 0:06Philip Pape: I get asked about this all the time.
- 0:08Philip Pape: Probably one of the most common questions is can I build muscle and lose fat at the same time?
- 0:13Philip Pape: And it comes from, sometimes, a fear of not wanting to gain too much weight, but it also comes from the idea that you don't wanna be in a big calorie deficit and a big fat loss phase either and you want to kind of walk the line of both.
- 0:28Philip Pape: And so if you've ever asked yourself the question can I do this, can I lose fat and build muscle at the same time?
- 0:32Philip Pape: The answer is yes if you do it the right way.
- 0:35Philip Pape: But most people miss this because they either think you only have to cut or bulk or, more likely, they're bouncing back and forth and never really liking how they look or feel in either one, and then they say, okay, I want to recomp.
- 0:49Philip Pape: Can we do that?
- 0:50Philip Pape: Let's do that one.
- 0:51Philip Pape: So the answer is yes.
- 0:53Philip Pape: I'm going to come from it from the positive lens of how you would do it, because true body recomp or body recomposition happens when you are fueling enough to recover and build muscle while training in a way that signals your body to hold on to or and here's what we want even add a little bit of lean mass, at the same time dropping fat.
- 1:14Philip Pape: And for some people it kind of sounds impossible.
- 1:17Philip Pape: Or you might have heard influencers say you know that takes a long time, only certain people can do it.
- 1:21Philip Pape: So I want to bust some myths really quickly.
- 1:23Philip Pape: The first one is that you can only recomp if you're a beginner, and that's nonsense.
- 1:28Philip Pape: I've worked with intermediate lifters who've had incredible body recomp results and I think the evidence supports that there is a broader range of training levels that can do this.
- 1:37Philip Pape: Second, you need to eat in a big surplus or a big deficit and actually still do a bulk or cut.
- 1:44Philip Pape: It's just slower, also wrong.
- 1:46Philip Pape: I think you could do this while pretty much being at maintenance.
- 1:50Philip Pape: And then, third, the scale is the best way to measure progress.
- 1:53Philip Pape: A lot of you who listen to the show know I already advocate that you use other measures beyond the scale.
- 1:59Philip Pape: And when it comes to body recomp, you can't use the scale really other than to avoid significant weight gain or significant weight loss.
- 2:08Philip Pape: And what actually happens during successful body recomp is you might maintain the same weight or even gain a tiny bit of weight, but you're completely transforming the physical dimensions of your body.
- 2:21Philip Pape: So it's how you look and also how you feel, because there's a recovery aspect to this, there's a metabolic aspect to it.
- 2:27Philip Pape: Your clothes will fit better, you're stronger in the gym, you have more energy, and so you really can't be looking at the scale for that, even though that is one tiny measure that supports the overall picture.
- 2:38Philip Pape: Now I've had clients who are kind of all over the place and get the result they want, and what I mean by that is I've had clients who gained three pounds on the scale during a recomp and they might be freaking out a little bit, thinking they're gaining fat, but their measurements show that, you know, they lost two inches off their waist, they gained an inch on their arm and they actually, you know, gained four pounds of muscle.
- 2:58Philip Pape: So for that three pounds of scale weight, they gained four pounds of muscle and they must have lost a pound of fat, right, that's where it gets confusing, because most people are doing one of the specific things I just mentioned, wrong or not doing it, and they get frustrated, right, they're either under eating, so they can't build muscle because their metabolism is kind of lagging.
- 3:18Philip Pape: They're doing maybe too much, too much cardio.
- 3:20Philip Pape: They don't have enough recovery and remember, you're not in a surplus here, so your recovery is limited to an extent.
- 3:27Philip Pape: It's not as bad as in a deficit, but it's not as full as when you're in a surplus.
- 3:32Philip Pape: Or they're chasing scale weight right, even even at the expense of chasing um maintenance, scale weight instead of body composition, meaning it.
- 3:42Philip Pape: You don't necessarily want to just hold your weight, that is, I'll say, in the ballpark of where you want to be, but it's okay to drift a little bit if the other things that you care about are moving in the right direction, right.
- 3:55Philip Pape: And then the other big pet peeve of mine is people who just train randomly, don't follow a good program, don't use progressive overload.
- 4:00Philip Pape: So the result of that approach is lots and lots of frustration because, okay, I don't want to bulk, I don't want to cut, but then I don't know how to recomp properly either.
- 4:09Philip Pape: So if this sounds familiar, then you've come to the right place, because what I teach instead on this show in Physique University is what I call aggressive maintenance.
- 4:18Philip Pape: It's slightly above your normal maintenance calories to support recovery and muscle growth, but still allow for fat loss, because the muscle gain is going to drive your metabolism up a little bit, and so the fat loss kind of happens under the surface.
- 4:35Philip Pape: The math is hard to understand, but it's happening.
- 4:38Philip Pape: And so this is where having enough protein and, you know, balancing your fats and carbs, supporting your training demands eating what you like to fats and carbs.
- 4:45Philip Pape: Supporting your training demands eating what you like to eat and being flexible about it.
- 4:47Philip Pape: Right, there's nothing magic about all of that.
- 4:49Philip Pape: The when people, I think, go wrong here is they don't track the right things.
- 4:54Philip Pape: They don't track the right data, and that's what we're all about here.
- 4:57Philip Pape: That's why I created a tracker called the Physique and Biofeedback Tracker.
- 5:00Philip Pape: We use that with our group program and that calculates lots of things.
- 5:03Philip Pape: That calculates body fat and lean mass, muscle to fat ratio.
- 5:07Philip Pape: I even have an advanced tracker that calculates how much of your lean mass is muscle tissue specifically, helps you track your measurements for context, helps you monitor your feedback like sleep, energy recovery and so on.
- 5:22Philip Pape: All of that stuff tells you if your approach is working, in conjunction, of course, with a proper training and nutrition plan.
- 5:26Philip Pape: So when body recomp is happening, you are going to see lean body mass going up, fat mass going down over time, the scale might drift a little bit or it might stay the same.
- 5:36Philip Pape: It really depends.
- 5:37Philip Pape: Your biofeedback stays mostly positive, right.
- 5:40Philip Pape: There are some places where you could have challenges.
- 5:43Philip Pape: If you're, for example, not eating enough food volume, you might have hunger where someone else wouldn't, even if you're not in a deficit, right.
- 5:51Philip Pape: So there's lots of little levers that we can turn and the whole thing needs to be sustainable.
- 5:56Philip Pape: Now compare that to traditional, you know, just going after fat loss or going after bulking, where there's more challenges to deal with, depending on what you're doing Like, you might be more tired, hungry, miserable.
- 6:07Philip Pape: When you're cutting right or when you're in a surplus, you're dealing with the fears of gaining fat and trying to avoid gaining too quickly.
- 6:13Philip Pape: So I'm actually going to dive deeper into this topic tomorrow.
- 6:18Philip Pape: On Monday's episode.
- 6:19Philip Pape: I'm going to break down the science behind how body recomp works without a traditional calorie deficit, some of the mechanisms that make it happen from that kind of nerdy engineering perspective, like in the body, what's going on, and then some details on that aggressive maintenance approach approach I mentioned and that.
- 6:41Philip Pape: So that's kind of the podcast variety of this.
- 6:42Philip Pape: And then, if you want to implement this, if you want a training plan, if you want to understand how to set up your nutrition and phase this out over 90 days, I'm doing a live workshop Tuesday this Tuesday, august 19th.
- 6:52Philip Pape: It's at noon Eastern.
- 6:53Philip Pape: The replay will be included if can't make it, and I'm going to walk you through a 90 day roadmap for body recomp.
- 7:01Philip Pape: You're going to get the tracker I mentioned.
- 7:03Philip Pape: Training template I'm going to actually propose a very specific template that I think is really good for 12 weeks of body recomp.
- 7:09Philip Pape: You're going to get by by joining the workshop you're effectively in physique university at the same time for no extra cost.
- 7:16Philip Pape: So you're going to get a custom nutrition plan and your first month in Physique University all for that price, so for 27 bucks.
- 7:22Philip Pape: And if you don't think that's a steal, then maybe you know.
- 7:25Philip Pape: Go listen to another podcast, because I'm practically giving this stuff away.
- 7:29Philip Pape: Anyway, if this sounds like what you're looking for, go to livewitsandweightscom or click in the show notes.
- 7:35Philip Pape: Go to livewitsandweightscom.
- 7:36Philip Pape: You can sign up If you're already in physique you.
- 7:38Philip Pape: You're going to get it for free anyway as part of being in the program.
- 7:42Philip Pape: But if you want to do the workshop on the 90 day body recomp workshop this Tuesday, august 19th and get the replay.
- 7:48Philip Pape: If you can't make it, no-transcript.