Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Build Muscle WITHOUT Bulking if You Want "Lean Gains" | Ep 384

Transcript

Build Muscle WITHOUT Bulking if You Want "Lean Gains" | Ep 384 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: If you want to build muscle, you need to bulk.
• 0:04
  Philip Pape: At least that's what you hear all the time.
• 0:06
  Philip Pape: You have to eat more, you have to gain weight, you have to accept getting a little fluffy in that calorie surplus and then cut it off later with a fat loss phase.
• 0:16
  Philip Pape: What if that approach is inefficient, at least for you?
• 0:19
  Philip Pape: What if you could build muscle while staying lean year-round?
• 0:22
  Philip Pape: In this episode, you're gonna learn why muscle protein synthesis does not require a calorie surplus the way you think it does.
• 0:29
  Philip Pape: You'll discover the principles of what I call aggressive maintenance, and you'll find out who can skip bulking entirely and still make gains versus who might still want to bulk, including the hidden factors like sleep and energy flux that many people ignore.
• 0:45
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering, and efficiency.
• 1:03
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape.
• 1:06
  Philip Pape: And today we're talking about something that often challenges conventional wisdom in the lifting world: building muscle, but without bulking.
• 1:14
  Philip Pape: If you've ever felt trapped by this need to bulk and cut, and you wonder, is there a smarter way to add lean mass without the fat gain roller coaster?
• 1:24
  Philip Pape: This episode is definitely for you.
• 1:27
  Philip Pape: But I also want to give a caveat that to get the quickest gain in muscle, you're gonna have to have a surplus of some kind.
• 1:35
  Philip Pape: I'm just gonna get that out of the way.
• 1:37
  Philip Pape: But we're not necessarily talking about the quickest path here.
• 1:39
  Philip Pape: We're talking about efficiency.
• 1:41
  Philip Pape: And efficiency often means looking at the next six months, the next year, the next two years, and where you want to be with your physique at any given time to get the final result, which may take a little longer, but the way you get there is more sustainable for you.
• 1:55
  Philip Pape: So we're gonna break down the science and the systems behind what I call aggressive maintenance.
• 1:59
  Philip Pape: I've covered this topic here and there in the context of body recomposition.
• 2:04
  Philip Pape: But today I'm specifically focusing on the muscle building side, not so much the fat loss side.
• 2:09
  Philip Pape: This is really about engineering the whole system, your nutrition, your training, your recovery, your nutrient partitioning, doing it efficiently so that you are biasing muscle rather than fat all while eating around maintenance calories and not having, quote unquote, to bulk.
• 2:26
  Philip Pape: And I'm gonna tell you who can benefit from this the most.
• 2:28
  Philip Pape: Now, before we get into that, I definitely want to share a couple listener reviews that came in recently on Apple.
• 2:35
  Philip Pape: Just two.
• 2:36
  Philip Pape: The first one I really love, it is from Laura Lai 1964.
• 2:40
  Philip Pape: She says Philip provides relevant and evidence-backed information on nutrition and resistance training.
• 2:46
  Philip Pape: If you were ever on the fence about whether you should introduce resistance training to see change, listen to this podcast.
• 2:52
  Philip Pape: Science-backed evidence proves it's a huge key to longevity, and Philip breaks it all down.
• 2:57
  Philip Pape: He has top-notch guests on as well, which has led me to other great podcasts.
• 3:01
  Philip Pape: One more thing.
• 3:02
  Philip Pape: He's so fun to listen to, always has a smile in his voice.
• 3:05
  Philip Pape: Thank you, Philip Bape.
• 3:07
  Philip Pape: And you just made me smile, which is hopefully why you hear that on a regular basis.
• 3:10
  Philip Pape: I try to be optimistic about this stuff.
• 3:12
  Philip Pape: I think, like a stoic, we have many things in our control.
• 3:16
  Philip Pape: And if we focus on all only those things, an optimism bias can lead us to amazing results, no matter what life throws at us.
• 3:24
  Philip Pape: And that is the definition of resilience.
• 3:27
  Philip Pape: The second review is interesting.
• 3:28
  Philip Pape: The headline is I didn't know what I didn't know until now from host new normal big life.
• 3:34
  Philip Pape: So this looks like a podcaster.
• 3:36
  Philip Pape: I'm a sponsored adventure sports athlete and have been a competitive athlete most of my teen and a young adult life.
• 3:41
  Philip Pape: However, this podcast taught me there are many factors impacting my health and performance that I didn't know about.
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: Learning about what standard lab work really tells us about our health is a game changer.
• 3:52
  Philip Pape: Thank you so much.
• 3:53
  Philip Pape: So that was probably in response to some recent episodes related to blood work, performance blood work.
• 3:58
  Philip Pape: This is a service we now provide.
• 4:00
  Philip Pape: I'm not going to get into it here, but the long and short of it is if you're looking to understand the interactions and the root causes of things that may be going on with your body, despite having tried all the other things like training, nutrition, lifestyle, it could be another way to peer inside what's happening with your biomarkers, with your hormones, et cetera.
• 4:19
  Philip Pape: Go to witsandweights.com slash blood work for that.
• 4:23
  Philip Pape: But when it comes to these reviews, anyone who leaves a review, we are actually running a say contest, not a contest, a giveaway right now that anyone who leaves a review is entered for a giveaway for three months in physique university in our mastery track.
• 4:38
  Philip Pape: That's a $261 value.
• 4:40
  Philip Pape: And everyone who submits a review is gonna get a surprise bonus.
• 4:43
  Philip Pape: Deadline is October 15.
• 4:45
  Philip Pape: Go into Apple and add your five-star radio review there, if you haven't yet.
• 4:49
  Philip Pape: And I will be monitoring those and then I'll send out the results to the Facebook group and to our email list.
• 4:54
  Philip Pape: All right, let's get into the engineering behind building muscle without bulking, because yes, it is possible.
• 5:00
  Philip Pape: I want to start with the efficiency problem that comes with traditional bulking.
• 5:06
  Philip Pape: As much as I love calorie surpluses and bulking for people who want to get the fastest results, and you will, and the bulk cut cycle, which has been the standard approach in bodybuilding and hypertrophy and strength training for decades, and it still is, again, a tried and true approach, where you spend months in a calorie surplus.
• 5:27
  Philip Pape: In my opinion, six to nine months is ideal, sometimes longer, to maximize your muscle growth.
• 5:32
  Philip Pape: Along for the ride comes some fat, but you are maximizing the muscle growth, meaning you're hitting that ceiling of how much muscle you can, you know, slabs of muscle you can add to your body every month.
• 5:41
  Philip Pape: And to do that, you're making the trade-off that some fat comes along for the ride.
• 5:45
  Philip Pape: And then you do a cut or a fat loss phase to cut it down and rinse and repeat.
• 5:50
  Philip Pape: Now, let me be clear: this bulking is the fastest way to gain muscle.
• 5:55
  Philip Pape: Whether you're a man or a woman, whatever your starting point, doesn't matter.
• 5:59
  Philip Pape: It's the fastest way to gain muscle.
• 6:00
  Philip Pape: If I were to put any caveat on that at all, it would be as if you are significantly overweight.
• 6:06
  Philip Pape: If you're significantly overweight, you definitely want to lose some of that body fat for health reasons, but also because you can actually build a decent amount of muscle while losing weight in that context.
• 6:16
  Philip Pape: So putting that aside, we're talking about people who are kind of in the average range of weight.
• 6:20
  Philip Pape: Even if you have a little extra weight to lose, you're kind of in that average range.
• 6:23
  Philip Pape: If pure speed to muscle growth is your only goal, a calorie surplus is the best way to go.
• 6:29
  Philip Pape: And my usual recommendation for a beginner is around 0.3 or 0.4% of your body weight a week.
• 6:35
  Philip Pape: Potentially more if you're doing it in a very precise, controlled way, or you're a really good responder and you want to take advantage of that.
• 6:41
  Philip Pape: Potentially less if you're not sure or you're worried about gaining too much fat or being not super consistent.
• 6:47
  Philip Pape: But then you need a fat loss phase after that, no matter what, right?
• 6:50
  Philip Pape: You gain the muscle plus the fat, then you diet it off.
• 6:53
  Philip Pape: And the whole cycle takes maybe a year, maybe two years to really get leaner and leaner.
• 6:59
  Philip Pape: And that's fine in the scheme of your whole life.
• 7:01
  Philip Pape: How long really is that when you've been struggling for years and years and years?
• 7:04
  Philip Pape: So if you're into that, which is the way I do it personally, it's very efficient.
• 7:08
  Philip Pape: I mean, it's very, I'll say it's efficient from a long-term perspective.
• 7:11
  Philip Pape: It may not be efficient in the short term, depending on your goal.
• 7:13
  Philip Pape: So I'm happy to help anyone through that who's struggling, who needs help.
• 7:17
  Philip Pape: You can come into physique university.
• 7:19
  Philip Pape: That is what one of the things we teach.
• 7:20
  Philip Pape: We also teach body recomp, which I'm talking about today.
• 7:23
  Philip Pape: It's all all roads to Rome lead to Rome.
• 7:26
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 7:26
  Philip Pape: So from an engineering perspective, this is really a throughput approach.
• 7:33
  Philip Pape: You are maximizing the input to maximize the output, more fuel, more materials, more resources, and it works.
• 7:41
  Philip Pape: But it's not efficient by all measures.
• 7:45
  Philip Pape: Let me explain the difference.
• 7:46
  Philip Pape: Efficiency is about the output per unit of input.
• 7:51
  Philip Pape: Throughput is the total output, regardless of the input.
• 7:55
  Philip Pape: So a bulking cutting cycle optimizes for throughput, right?
• 8:00
  Philip Pape: You're trying to maximize that muscle and you're also getting more fat along for the ride.
• 8:04
  Philip Pape: What we're talking about today optimizes for efficiency, at least on a shorter term scale.
• 8:10
  Philip Pape: That's the I have to keep saying that because over a several year period, I actually think bulking and cutting, if done right, if done consistently, if you don't stop your training, is the most efficient.
• 8:22
  Philip Pape: But for a lot of people, it's not the most practical, nor is it a state they want to live in for months at a time, let's say.
• 8:30
  Philip Pape: What I mean by that is a lot of people don't want to be fluffy for many months out of the year.
• 8:34
  Philip Pape: That's okay, I get it.
• 8:35
  Philip Pape: And it's okay to not want that and to make a trade-off to get to avoid that.
• 8:39
  Philip Pape: Okay, so muscle protein synthesis, MPS, is the process by which your body builds new muscle tissue.
• 8:47
  Philip Pape: Research shows that MPS rates plateau relatively quickly compared to calorie intake.
• 8:54
  Philip Pape: Gone are the old days of the dreamer bulk where you're eating five or six thousand calories or something like that, because you think there's really no limit to muscle gain as long as you just eat more.
• 9:04
  Philip Pape: Yeah, I'm gonna get fat, but I'm gonna get more and more and more muscle.
• 9:07
  Philip Pape: No, it actually has a plateau, right?
• 9:09
  Philip Pape: So the curve goes up quickly and then it quickly hits a limit, like a fixed limit.
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: So beyond that calorie surplus that gets you to that limit, which is around two to three hundred calories above maintenance for a lot of people.
• 9:21
  Philip Pape: Additional calories then mostly increase your fat mass, not your lean tissue, right?
• 9:27
  Philip Pape: That's why it's uh hard for some people to kind of find that level until you do it once and see what happens, and then you can refine the next time.
• 9:34
  Philip Pape: So think of it like this: your body has a limited capacity to synthesize new muscle at any given time, period.
• 9:40
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 9:40
  Philip Pape: It's not like a construction project where throwing more materials and workers speeds things up.
• 9:45
  Philip Pape: Your body's muscle building machinery can only work so fast.
• 9:48
  Philip Pape: That is the rate limiting step, to use another technical term, the rate limiting step.
• 9:54
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 9:54
  Philip Pape: So if you're an adult over 30, and that's an important distinction between, because if you're under 30 and you're raging with hormones and you've got a lot more responsiveness and ability to build muscle, you may want to throw my discussion today out the window altogether and just go hog wild on that surplus.
• 10:13
  Philip Pape: Because who cares?
• 10:14
  Philip Pape: You've got all the time in the future ahead of you, and you're super responsive to the muscle.
• 10:18
  Philip Pape: You've got the hormones and everything else.
• 10:20
  Philip Pape: If you're over 30, especially if you're over 40 or in your 50s, pushing body fat higher just to build muscle becomes a little bit less efficient because your nutrient partitioning gets a little bit worse as you age, meaning a higher percentage of the extra calories might go to fat rather than muscle.
• 10:35
  Philip Pape: You just are a little bit less efficient putting on that muscle.
• 10:37
  Philip Pape: Sorry, that's just what happens when we get older.
• 10:39
  Philip Pape: At least you're doing it, right?
• 10:41
  Philip Pape: Versus your peers who are letting their muscle wither away into decrepitude into old age, which is not what we want.
• 10:48
  Philip Pape: But as you get old, your insulin sensitivity decreases, your recovery, you know, gets a little bit harder.
• 10:53
  Philip Pape: Even if you eat more, even if you sleep more, it's still declining slowly over time.
• 10:57
  Philip Pape: Your joint tissues, connective tissues get a little less pliable, et cetera.
• 11:01
  Philip Pape: So what we're really after here is directing the limited resources toward muscle rather than fat storage as laser-targeted as we can.
• 11:09
  Philip Pape: And that is kind of that when you think of like an engineer applied to physique development, where I'm coming from.
• 11:13
  Philip Pape: So, yes, bulking is faster, but I'm gonna talk about aggressive maintenance here.
• 11:19
  Philip Pape: Aggressive maintenance can be more appealing and more efficient, especially if you want to stay relatively lean year round.
• 11:26
  Philip Pape: And I'm sorry to all my lifter buddies who are all about strength PRs, okay?
• 11:31
  Philip Pape: If you're all about strength PRs, I'm not talking to you because you really should be eating.
• 11:36
  Philip Pape: You know that.
• 11:36
  Philip Pape: And you're not here to listen to, but you all at the same time, we all have that vanity bone inside of us.
• 11:41
  Philip Pape: That's like, what if I just tried with Philip's saying for a year or two and see what the difference is?
• 11:45
  Philip Pape: Experiment.
• 11:46
  Philip Pape: You're gonna avoid that psychological roller coaster of gaining and losing weight, and then you're gonna build muscle in a sustainable way that you could potentially just rinse and repeat forever.
• 11:55
  Philip Pape: Now, you can rinse and repeat bulking too, but again, you are stretching up and down a lot more in a lot more extreme way than what we're talking about today.
• 12:03
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 12:04
  Philip Pape: So that again, this is where the system efficiency comes in.
• 12:07
  Philip Pape: So now I want to talk about the next piece, how muscle growth works without this big surplus or without this modest surplus, I should say.
• 12:15
  Philip Pape: To understand this, we have to look at the mechanisms of muscle growth, which happens when the synthesis of protein exceeds the breakdown of protein, which is muscle protein breakdown, MPB.
• 12:26
  Philip Pape: And you actually do not need a calorie surplus for this to occur if three conditions are met.
• 12:32
  Philip Pape: The first condition is that your protein intake is sufficient.
• 12:35
  Philip Pape: Duh.
• 12:36
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 12:36
  Philip Pape: If you're a new listener, I don't mean to patronize you, you're gonna learn something here.
• 12:41
  Philip Pape: If you've been listening for a while or any other fitness podcast for the last however many years, you know this that protein is super, super important.
• 12:48
  Philip Pape: The research consistently points to 0.7 to one gram per pound of body weight, or 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight of intake per day.
• 12:58
  Philip Pape: And at these levels, you're basically maximizing those raw materials available for protein synthesis.
• 13:04
  Philip Pape: It's as simple as that, guys.
• 13:06
  Philip Pape: Get enough total protein a day and you're gonna meet this first criteria.
• 13:10
  Philip Pape: Don't get hung over or hung, don't get hung over either.
• 13:13
  Philip Pape: Don't get hung up on the meal timing and the type of protein and all of that.
• 13:19
  Philip Pape: Total protein's probably gonna get you there.
• 13:21
  Philip Pape: Now, if you have a very restrictive diet, it's gonna be, it's gonna create some problems.
• 13:25
  Philip Pape: Restrictive meaning you're vegan or vegetarian, for example.
• 13:28
  Philip Pape: You know, no knock on you guys.
• 13:30
  Philip Pape: I'm just saying it's harder to get the full, complete amino acid profile without being a little more deliberate.
• 13:34
  Philip Pape: Okay, so total protein.
• 13:36
  Philip Pape: The second criteria where you don't necessarily need a surplus to build muscle, is that your training provides the adequate mechanical tension and progressive overload.
• 13:45
  Philip Pape: Those that's really all we're looking for is training close to failure and always progressing, making things slightly more challenging in the gym so that you get stronger because strength builds muscle, and vice versa.
• 13:55
  Philip Pape: And the signals you're giving your body when you do that is the most important signal to adapt.
• 14:01
  Philip Pape: And your body's gonna take the protein you're eating and build more muscle tissue.
• 14:04
  Philip Pape: And then third is your recovery.
• 14:06
  Philip Pape: I'm sorry to hammer this home time and again, but guys, we have to sleep.
• 14:11
  Philip Pape: We have to manage our stress.
• 14:12
  Philip Pape: I've been using my breathe that more.
• 14:14
  Philip Pape: I actually put it as a complication on my Apple Watch, just so it's staring me in the face every day, doing more breath work and things like that.
• 14:21
  Philip Pape: One minute at a time doesn't take a lot.
• 14:23
  Philip Pape: These are the most powerful hidden levers that allow the process to actually occur.
• 14:29
  Philip Pape: Now I know what you're thinking here.
• 14:31
  Philip Pape: You're like, okay, but where does how is it possible to do this while at maintenance?
• 14:34
  Philip Pape: Doesn't it all net out?
• 14:36
  Philip Pape: We're gonna get to that.
• 14:37
  Philip Pape: Let's talk about energy partitioning because this is where things get interesting.
• 14:41
  Philip Pape: Lean individuals tend to partition their nutrients a little more efficiently toward muscle than fat.
• 14:49
  Philip Pape: And train lifters tend to do the same.
• 14:52
  Philip Pape: People with good insulin sensitivity are better at directing nutrients where they need to go.
• 14:56
  Philip Pape: And as an aside, one of the best things for insulin sensitivity is being active throughout the day and walking.
• 15:03
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 15:03
  Philip Pape: Just had to put that in there.
• 15:04
  Philip Pape: Resistance training itself improves partitioning, even at maintenance calories.
• 15:09
  Philip Pape: So, what does that mean?
• 15:10
  Philip Pape: What does that mean?
• 15:11
  Philip Pape: That means versus someone who is sedentary, simply by having an active, trained lifestyle with plenty of protein and adequate leanness, right?
• 15:21
  Philip Pape: You're not excessively over fat, you will get more out of your nutrients toward muscle versus fat versus a sedentary person.
• 15:29
  Philip Pape: And that's a huge advantage.
• 15:31
  Philip Pape: Even not sitting a lot for your job and getting up and moving will move that needle toward that direction.
• 15:37
  Philip Pape: There's something called body fat set point theory.
• 15:40
  Philip Pape: Okay, and and and there's mixed evidence on this, and the way it's communicated is often specious, or what am I trying to say?
• 15:49
  Philip Pape: I don't want to say this the wrong way, but basically, people are closer to a lean but not extremely lean body composition, let's say 10 to 15% for men, 18 to 25% for women, they often have better recomp.
• 16:01
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 16:02
  Philip Pape: Now you would think that somebody with extra fat has better recomp.
• 16:05
  Philip Pape: I would say someone in extra fat, I would lean toward trying to lose the fat actually and be in a deficit because that's gonna be the best net benefit.
• 16:14
  Philip Pape: But for most people in kind of an average leanness, they're gonna have better recomp, their hormonal profile is gonna improve, they're gonna have better nutrient utilization, and they're gonna be running kind of super efficiently and they're gonna maximize muscle gain based on what you're already consuming.
• 16:29
  Philip Pape: Again, we're not talking about a surplus.
• 16:30
  Philip Pape: Surplus is always gonna make it more in terms of muscle gain, period.
• 16:33
  Philip Pape: There's also the concept of myonuclear domain theory.
• 16:37
  Philip Pape: When you train, you gain muscle nuclei.
• 16:39
  Philip Pape: And these nuclei persist even during maintenance or slight deficits.
• 16:43
  Philip Pape: So that means muscle memory is a real thing.
• 16:46
  Philip Pape: It really is.
• 16:46
  Philip Pape: And I see this in someone who is detrained, comes back years later, starts to train again, and wow, they just regain and build that muscle so fast.
• 16:55
  Philip Pape: They just gain it back fast without needing to bulk because the cellular machinery is in place.
• 17:00
  Philip Pape: So these are interesting concepts, aren't they?
• 17:02
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 17:02
  Philip Pape: So that brings us to the what here, the aggressive maintenance protocol I've been alluding to and dropping hints at.
• 17:08
  Philip Pape: What the heck is this?
• 17:09
  Philip Pape: And I haven't seen anyone else explain it this way or use this term, so I should probably trademark it.
• 17:15
  Philip Pape: But I have seen plenty of experienced lifters talk about this in other ways.
• 17:20
  Philip Pape: It's eating around maintenance calories, allowing for those daily fluctuations in calories, the daily fluctuations in your metabolism.
• 17:27
  Philip Pape: You're pushing training hard, you're optimizing your protein intake, and you are eating in a way where you're never in a deficit.
• 17:36
  Philip Pape: So to never be in a deficit, it means you have to knowingly be in the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest surplus.
• 17:42
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 17:44
  Philip Pape: Okay, because you you're keeping yourself fully recovered and optimized, and you're keeping your tank just a little past full, but you're not adding so much where now it goes to fat storage.
• 17:57
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 17:57
  Philip Pape: You're also not adding enough to maximize muscle, as I keep mentioning, but you are still biasing it toward muscle gain and maybe some fat loss.
• 18:06
  Philip Pape: But today's not about recomp per se, even though this is a good technique for recomp, in my opinion.
• 18:11
  Philip Pape: Studies show that trained individuals can increase lean mass while decreasing fat mass when protein is high and training is well structured.
• 18:18
  Philip Pape: Again, that's recomp.
• 18:19
  Philip Pape: And then there's recent research on energy flux.
• 18:22
  Philip Pape: That's the total energy turnover, basically eating more and moving more to expend more, right?
• 18:28
  Philip Pape: To increase your metabolism, not cardio per se, not like chronic cardio, but just walking, movement, eating, being active, that doing that promotes leanness and muscle gain, even at maintenance.
• 18:42
  Philip Pape: And there's plenty of anecdotal evidence from experience lifters out there, and you see it on Instagram as well, where you don't really have to bulk and you can still slowly gain muscle.
• 18:51
  Philip Pape: I had Holly Baxter on the show.
• 18:53
  Philip Pape: She was talking about the same thing.
• 18:54
  Philip Pape: You're tuning your nutrient delivery, your recovery, and your mechanical stress just the right way to direct your limited resources toward muscle.
• 19:01
  Philip Pape: But you have to be consistent, right?
• 19:03
  Philip Pape: You have to be consistent.
• 19:04
  Philip Pape: So when it comes to like protein, I want you to get your total protein that start there and then start to distribute it across your day, not because it's some magic formula to maximize protein synthesis, although it should bump it up a little bit, a small amount, but mainly because that's going to enforce the consistency and ensure balanced meals, good satiety, habit forming, et cetera.
• 19:26
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 19:27
  Philip Pape: And I like whole sources of animal-based protein followed by supplementation like whey supplements.
• 19:33
  Philip Pape: Plant-based protein is in there as well.
• 19:35
  Philip Pape: It should kind of naturally fall in there if you're eating a diverse omnivorous diet.
• 19:39
  Philip Pape: If you're vegan or vegetarian, you're gonna have to rely a little more on pea and rice protein and plant-based sources of protein, watching for the fats and carbs and trying to keep it balanced.
• 19:48
  Philip Pape: All right, for resistance training, again, the consistency matters.
• 19:53
  Philip Pape: And that means having the appropriate level of volume for you, which is moderate to high volume because you've got a lot of resources coming in.
• 20:00
  Philip Pape: So 10 to 15, up to 20 sets per muscle group per week, maybe not 20, that might be too much, unless you're in a surplus.
• 20:07
  Philip Pape: So this is where there's some small differences between this and a full-on surplus, but I believe that you're getting still most of the ability to progress because you're not dieting.
• 20:15
  Philip Pape: The fact that you're not dieting gives you a big advantage here.
• 20:18
  Philip Pape: Focusing on compound lifts as the foundation with hypertrophy movements as your developmental and accessory work, using that periodization, you know, using your program long enough to progress, but then avoiding stalls and fatigue by rotating things in the right way, right?
• 20:34
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna get into the details of programming today.
• 20:36
  Philip Pape: Energy availability, because you're not in a surplus, is also crucial.
• 20:41
  Philip Pape: What I mean by that is carbs.
• 20:43
  Philip Pape: Carbs around your main, around your training is gonna maintain your glycogen and your performance, even though you don't have the higher overall calories.
• 20:51
  Philip Pape: So your carbs should still be pretty darn decent, right?
• 20:55
  Philip Pape: If you're eating, let's say, let's say your maintenance is 2,500 calories, that means you're eating about 2550 or 2600 a day.
• 21:02
  Philip Pape: Because remember, this is called aggressive maintenance.
• 21:04
  Philip Pape: You're being aggressive by pushing it a little bit past all the time.
• 21:07
  Philip Pape: So you're probably gonna have, let's say, I don't know, it depends on your body weight, but let's say you weigh 160.
• 21:12
  Philip Pape: You need, you know, 140 grams of protein, maybe 60 grams, 70 grams of fat, and then 250 grams of carbs or something, maybe 300.
• 21:23
  Philip Pape: It depends, you know, men, women, depends on where your expenditure is, right?
• 21:27
  Philip Pape: But we shouldn't be low carb or keto here, generally.
• 21:29
  Philip Pape: You're gonna get much better results for muscle building when the carbs are there, hitting some minimum threshold.
• 21:35
  Philip Pape: They don't have to be extremely high, just hitting that minimum threshold.
• 21:38
  Philip Pape: And, you know, if you don't have that energy, then your body's gonna draw on other energy systems like your fat and that we call that fasted training.
• 21:47
  Philip Pape: You probably will find a drop-off in performance.
• 21:51
  Philip Pape: But if you're still getting your total carbs for the day, even if you're training fasted, it's still gonna compensate quite a bit for that.
• 21:57
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 21:58
  Philip Pape: So there's a lot of flexibility here.
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: And then your micronutrients are really the hidden levers, your vitamin D, your magnesium, your zinc, you know, all of these things affect your performance, your muscle adaptation.
• 22:08
  Philip Pape: Sleep, of course.
• 22:09
  Philip Pape: Okay, sleep is huge, hydration is huge, all of those things.
• 22:12
  Philip Pape: The goal is to engineer the entire system to gain lean mass.
• 22:15
  Philip Pape: Now, you should be dialing in these things anyway if you were to prepare for fat loss.
• 22:20
  Philip Pape: But what you're doing here is just making this a sustainable way that you do things.
• 22:24
  Philip Pape: This is who I am, this is what I do.
• 22:27
  Philip Pape: I am pushing the maintenance calories just a little bit.
• 22:31
  Philip Pape: And when you do that, what might happen is over a six-month period, you might gain a couple pounds.
• 22:36
  Philip Pape: That means you did it right.
• 22:37
  Philip Pape: And a couple pounds is nothing because hopefully all of those two pounds extra are muscle and some of the pounds that are hidden are muscle as well, meaning you gained more than two pounds of muscle and lost some fat and it did out.
• 22:50
  Philip Pape: So you've gained weight, but you've actually gained more than the gain in muscle.
• 22:53
  Philip Pape: That's really what we're going for here.
• 22:55
  Philip Pape: And that's awesome.
• 22:56
  Philip Pape: And you can tell that by measuring your body, you know, your waist size, how you look, how you feel, how your clothes fit, et cetera.
• 23:02
  Philip Pape: And of course, that you're progressing in the gym.
• 23:04
  Philip Pape: So, you know, speaking of efficiency and gym and programming, I know some of you are thinking, well, what the heck do I do in the gym?
• 23:10
  Philip Pape: If you're kind of new to this and you're busy, like a lot of you are, you're trying to save time in the gym.
• 23:15
  Philip Pape: I definitely want to tell you about our new Ignite training template we just came out in Physique University.
• 23:20
  Philip Pape: It is a four-day upper-lower split.
• 23:23
  Philip Pape: It uses supersets and other time-saving techniques like drop sets, but still incorporates compound lifts and solid principles of progression.
• 23:32
  Philip Pape: Each session takes about 30 minutes max.
• 23:35
  Philip Pape: That's why I love it.
• 23:36
  Philip Pape: To get it, you have to be in physique university.
• 23:38
  Philip Pape: So anybody listening who's there, go get it.
• 23:40
  Philip Pape: It's already out.
• 23:41
  Philip Pape: This is from Coach Carol Hanshu, who's our assistant coach in the group.
• 23:45
  Philip Pape: And if you don't have it, if you're not in physique university, join right now.
• 23:49
  Philip Pape: It's only $27 to join.
• 23:50
  Philip Pape: You can cancel right after you grab it if you want.
• 23:52
  Philip Pape: I don't care, but I hope you'll stick around because you see the value in the courses, the curriculum, the coaching, the live calls, the QA's, all of it.
• 23:59
  Philip Pape: You can then use code FREEPLAN to get the free custom nutrition plan that I will put together for you.
• 24:05
  Philip Pape: So you're gonna get a free custom nutrition plan, and then you're gonna have access to all of our training templates.
• 24:10
  Philip Pape: The free nutrition plan is worth multiples of the price alone.
• 24:13
  Philip Pape: You get all of that.
• 24:14
  Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.com slash physique to join.
• 24:18
  Philip Pape: Remember to check the box for the plan and then use code FREEPLAN to get it for free.
• 24:22
  Philip Pape: Click the link in the show notes or go to wits and weights.com slash physique for our ignite four-day upper lower time-saving training template.
• 24:31
  Philip Pape: All right, now I want to talk about some of the less discussed aspects of building muscle at maintenance that really make a difference.
• 24:37
  Philip Pape: Glycogen.
• 24:38
  Philip Pape: Glycogen's role goes beyond just energy.
• 24:41
  Philip Pape: You're filling up your glycogen stores, signals your anabolic pathways, anabolic meaning build.
• 24:47
  Philip Pape: You can refill glycogen at maintenance without bulking by using carbs.
• 24:53
  Philip Pape: And I mentioned this already, but you've got to have sufficient carbs and ideally time them around your workouts, which creates an anabolic environment without needing a surplus.
• 25:02
  Philip Pape: The next thing is neurological adaptations.
• 25:05
  Philip Pape: These are significant, especially if you're a newer lifter.
• 25:08
  Philip Pape: Your early strength and size gains are gonna come from neural or neurological efficiency, the motor learning, the motor recruitment, the connection between your brain and your muscles, just to simplify it.
• 25:22
  Philip Pape: And these really don't require surplus, believe it or not.
• 25:25
  Philip Pape: You can get this just by starting to lift weights.
• 25:28
  Philip Pape: Then recomp, when we it's it's worth talking about recomposition a little bit here, because it is more likely when you're in what we call an energy flux state, a high energy flux state.
• 25:39
  Philip Pape: If you know you want to think like you're an athlete, because you are, guys, you you're listening to wits and weights because you want to be an athlete of aging.
• 25:46
  Philip Pape: I actually stole that term from John Sullivan Sully, who wrote Barbell Prescription.
• 25:50
  Philip Pape: Definitely buy that book if you don't have it in your library.
• 25:53
  Philip Pape: Athletes with higher non-exercise activity, right?
• 25:56
  Philip Pape: Higher NEAT, higher daily step count, higher movement, and less sedentary sitting behavior tend to recomp more effectively while at maintenance.
• 26:06
  Philip Pape: Being more active outside the gym helps direct nutrients to muscle, gives you insulin sensitivity.
• 26:10
  Philip Pape: It's kind of counterintuitive because you think, okay, I'm more active, so I require more food.
• 26:16
  Philip Pape: But the system becomes more efficient and the food that you are already getting now goes more toward muscle.
• 26:24
  Philip Pape: If that makes sense.
• 26:24
  Philip Pape: Now, you may need more food as well if your metabolism goes up, and nobody complains about that.
• 26:30
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 26:30
  Philip Pape: Your sleep architecture, I'm using this term more, sleep architecture, right?
• 26:35
  Philip Pape: The whole system of your sleep quality and quantity.
• 26:38
  Philip Pape: Understanding the slow wave sleep, your deep, your REM sleep, which are correlated with growth hormone release, with muscle protein synthesis.
• 26:46
  Philip Pape: If you have chronically short sleep, less than six hours, you're gonna have a hard time holding muscle, even in when you're in a slightly hypocaloric condition, meaning even when you're in a slight surplus.
• 26:57
  Philip Pape: Sleep quality actually substitutes for a calorie surplus.
• 27:02
  Philip Pape: It is like getting a calorie surplus, guys, for muscle building.
• 27:06
  Philip Pape: Get your sleep.
• 27:07
  Philip Pape: And then there's the protein leverage hypothesis where high protein diets reduce spontaneous energy intake while maintaining an anabolic environment, right?
• 27:16
  Philip Pape: And this explains why some lifters gain muscle without bulking.
• 27:19
  Philip Pape: They're actually leveraging protein to drive both satiety and hypertrophy.
• 27:23
  Philip Pape: And then there are micro surpluses within macro maintenance.
• 27:29
  Philip Pape: Micro meaning day to day, macro meaning overall for the week or for the month or for the year.
• 27:33
  Philip Pape: Your daily calorie intake is gonna hover around maintenance, but really you need to be pushing it a little bit above.
• 27:40
  Philip Pape: In my opinion, about 50 to 100 calories above maintenance on a constant basis.
• 27:44
  Philip Pape: And you may have to switch this up between your training days and your rest days.
• 27:48
  Philip Pape: Maybe.
• 27:49
  Philip Pape: Not everybody has to do that.
• 27:50
  Philip Pape: In fact, most people don't have to do that or overthink it.
• 27:53
  Philip Pape: It's gonna flux with your week because it's not just your training that affects this, it's also your stress and your sleep and your work and your family and your schedule and your vacations and so blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 28:02
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 28:03
  Philip Pape: Over the week, it's gonna net out to a few hundred calories over maintenance for the whole week.
• 28:08
  Philip Pape: But it's gonna kind of feel like a little bit of a bulk, which is great.
• 28:12
  Philip Pape: It's gonna feel fueled up.
• 28:14
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 28:15
  Philip Pape: It's a really great approach, in my opinion.
• 28:17
  Philip Pape: And again, all you're gonna get for it on a negative, and this is not even a negative, is maybe a couple pounds of weight gain over many, many, many months, but you're gonna net muscle gain, which is the goal.
• 28:26
  Philip Pape: So the kind of the last segment here is who benefits the most from skipping the bulk, what we're talking about today.
• 28:34
  Philip Pape: I would say if you are overweight or have a much higher body fat, you definitely don't need to bulk.
• 28:40
  Philip Pape: In fact, this is the one scenario where I'd say you probably still want a slight deficit because you have so much stored energy and you need to drop that body fat.
• 28:49
  Philip Pape: That's so I'll put that there.
• 28:50
  Philip Pape: If you were detrained and you're coming back to lifting, you have all that muscle memory, so to speak, and you're gonna respond really fast, it's a great way to get started and see what you get for your results without needing to go in a surplus.
• 29:04
  Philip Pape: If you're a new lifter and you get these neurological and early hypertrophy gains, right?
• 29:08
  Philip Pape: Newbie gains, again, they require less of a surplus.
• 29:11
  Philip Pape: You're trying to respond to training without needing a ton of extra food.
• 29:15
  Philip Pape: Just make sure you're not dieting.
• 29:16
  Philip Pape: Just make sure you're not dieting.
• 29:18
  Philip Pape: If you are, and then this is the a big category for a lot of you.
• 29:21
  Philip Pape: If you're a lifter who wants to just look good, you want a lean look, you care about aesthetics throughout the year, you want to avoid the cycle of getting fluffy and cutting, you want to stay lean year-round, this is a great way to go.
• 29:32
  Philip Pape: Just let's face it, it's okay.
• 29:34
  Philip Pape: It's okay to have a vanity goal.
• 29:35
  Philip Pape: This is the way to go.
• 29:36
  Philip Pape: And if you're, you know, you're midlife, you're busy, you're professional, you know, raising a family, this aligns perfectly with many of your goals.
• 29:44
  Philip Pape: You want efficiency, you want sustainability, sustainability, long term health.
• 29:48
  Philip Pape: You won't you don't want to deal with drastic swings, which admittedly come with the need for more structure and control to do them the right way.
• 29:56
  Philip Pape: Or I'm gonna raise my hand, having a coach in your corner, or A community like Physique University in your corner, or if you want a free community, get started, join our Facebook group, right?
• 30:06
  Philip Pape: You just don't have that time or desire for these cycles, it's a good way to go.
• 30:09
  Philip Pape: Now, there are some pitfalls, right?
• 30:11
  Philip Pape: The gains are gonna be slower compared to bulking.
• 30:13
  Philip Pape: We talked about that.
• 30:14
  Philip Pape: Also, you do have to still be precise.
• 30:16
  Philip Pape: You have to precisely track how much protein you're eating, your recovery, your training.
• 30:20
  Philip Pape: Too aggressive of a deficit is gonna push you into a surplus.
• 30:24
  Philip Pape: So you've got to just kind of watch out what's happening.
• 30:26
  Philip Pape: In most people's experience, I find it works out no matter what because you're pushing your expenditure up and it's you kind of almost struggle to keep up with it, but not as much as in a surplus.
• 30:38
  Philip Pape: And then there's the psychological trap.
• 30:40
  Philip Pape: If you expect bulking level gains at maintenance, you are gonna be disappointed.
• 30:45
  Philip Pape: You're gonna be disappointed, you're gonna have to bulk in that case.
• 30:48
  Philip Pape: Don't have unrealistic expectations.
• 30:50
  Philip Pape: Okay, but this can be a great approach.
• 30:52
  Philip Pape: So the reason aggressive maintenance works isn't just about the calories or the protein or the training, it's operating at the design limits of your body without exceeding them, at least from a muscle versus fat perspective, right?
• 31:06
  Philip Pape: Again, if we just want raw muscle gain, you're gonna gain more fat as well, and you go after it with a surplus.
• 31:13
  Philip Pape: But this to what we talked about today is its own form of precision that you might find appealing.
• 31:19
  Philip Pape: It is also quite sustainable.
• 31:21
  Philip Pape: It's something you could just keep doing.
• 31:23
  Philip Pape: Now, maybe if you drift over time and gain a few pounds over, say two or three years, you eventually do a fat loss phase, maybe.
• 31:30
  Philip Pape: Or you might find, heck, I'm just leaner and leaner at higher body fat, at higher body weight, and I'm super happy now.
• 31:36
  Philip Pape: I look strong, I'm jacked, I'm lean, I never had to diet.
• 31:40
  Philip Pape: It's possible.
• 31:41
  Philip Pape: So traditional bulking is the fastest way to gain muscle, requires a fat loss phase afterward, and that's a throughput approach.
• 31:48
  Philip Pape: Aggressive maintenance is more of an efficiency approach.
• 31:51
  Philip Pape: So if you want to stay lean year-round while building muscle moderately over time, this is the way.
• 31:58
  Philip Pape: So before we wrap up, remember we do have a review giveaway.
• 32:01
  Philip Pape: If you love the show today, if you learned something, leave a review on Apple Podcasts and tell me what you thought of today's episode.
• 32:07
  Philip Pape: Do it by October 15, and one winner will be selected for three months in the mastery track of Physique University, and everybody who submits a review will get a surprise bonus.
• 32:18
  Philip Pape: Just search for Wits and Weights in your app if you're not already in Apple right now.
• 32:21
  Philip Pape: Scroll down, tap write a review, make it happen.
• 32:24
  Philip Pape: I appreciate it.
• 32:24
  Philip Pape: I'm grateful.
• 32:25
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember, building muscle does not require getting fat.
• 32:32
  Philip Pape: It requires precision, consistency, and a systems based approach.
• 32:37
  Philip Pape: This is Philip Ape.
• 32:39
  Philip Pape: If you've been listening to Wits and Weights, talk to you next time.