The Best Way To Lose Fat

Available on YouTube too: https://musclelabpodcast.com 

Dr. Wolf and Dr. Pak break down the best way to lose fat.

References:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002916525005283
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sms.14075
https://journals.lww.com/nsca-scj/fulltext/9900/effect_of_dietary_protein_on_fat_free_mass_in.179.aspx 
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41653928/ 
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39485653/ 
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26817506/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10552824/ 
https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/JP284967 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Muscle Lab, the best evidence-based podcast out there. Protecting muscle like for building muscle, losing fat, improving your body composition, and things that mean the same thing, but we like to say in different ways. I am Dr. Pack. And I am Dr. Mile Wolf. Yes, doctors, you heard that right. Authority signaling. And today we're going to talk about the science of losing fat. The best way to go about maintaining muscle, losing body fat, uh, while sharing tons of practical tips, our own experiences, both as lifters and as now two lean guys. I can say it, there we go. Q picture of me with a six-pack. It's a podcast. You're listening to it. Imagine it. And um, we're also going to talk about our experience as coaches with a lot of clients that we've helped lose fat. But before we get to that, we have to thank the sponsor of this episode. Totally a sponsor that is not our own company called MyAdapt. Myadapt.com, the best lifting app in the world. And although MyAdapt won't guide your nutrition, it will guide your training, whether you're cutting, maintaining, or bulking, and helps remove any guesswork from your training while uh adjusting your training based on your environment, recovery, and obviously your training goals.

SPEAKER_00 1:15

Yeah. I wanted to say as well, since this is only our second episode, brief reminders. One, if you want to see a handsome hunk who's bald and has beard and is very lean, and whose name literally has pack in it, as in six packs. Oh, nice. Check out YouTube where we actually have visuals for this podcast. That's true. Yes. That's number one. The second thing, the structure of this podcast, we start from the lab, aka studies, the actual research, what the science says is the best way to do something. Then we move it on to the let me actually check, coaching corner, where we discuss practical experiences, any tips that you can actually apply to your own training. Finally, we get a predict, just a summary of how everything works. And at the end, we kind of resort a little small segment that can be really cool to learn about and keep up to date with research called uh what is it called? From the lab notes note.

SPEAKER_01 2:10

It's the um yeah, something like that.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

It's the lab report, uh, lab report. What a slick name, if I say so myself. Nice. The lab report we basically just discussed like any research we're involved in that you should know about that keeps you an update like on any topic that's relevant to you.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

Indeed. And for those of you that are watching, we are holding clipwords because this is science. And the name of the clipboard is distracting me the whole time because the brand is called Rapesco, R-A-P-S-C-O. Shout out to that brand. Or Rapesco. Rapesco probably more likely to be pronounced. That's how you pronounce it. That's that makes sense. But arguably, if you want the best or at least top three best visual experiences when it comes to evidence-based lifting podcasts, I think we're up there. Watch this on YouTube. Three cameras set up in our own gym, the Wolfbackslash Mascala podcast gym, um, in an undisclosed location.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

But we have many great competitors, revive Stronger, Iron Culture.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

They can they can compare information-wise and personality-wise. Shout out to all those people, but come on, guys, they can't compare visual-wise.

SPEAKER_00 3:15

If you've heard of the Strong by Science Podcast, we're like the Phoenix. Indeed. Rising from the Ashes.

SPEAKER_01 3:21

For the OGs that remember, we were co-hosts alongside great friend Greg Knuckles, Stronger by Science Podcast. Um, plenty of four-hour episodes on a bunch of training topics. You know the vibes. Two part, eight hours of sleep. No, that was four hours. Volume volume was eight hours. If um you wanna spend eight hours listening to us talking, made eight times faster and eight times better for a first episode. That's true. That's yep, that's that's a good way to put it. But uh, yeah, let's talk about cutting. It's uh something that concerns a lot of people. The timing couldn't have been better. This will be out sometime in May. So arguably maybe a couple of weeks late for some of you out there. But the time where most people, even though I don't necessarily agree with it, they start thinking about cutting because they want to go to the beach or whatever, uh, which even as a Greek, like is one of those slightly silly goals, but they want to get leaner for summer, right? Um, which is understandable. And we want to talk about the state of the literature and all uh the things that we just mentioned, which I'm repeating for some reason. But the idea behind cutting is losing fat while retaining or even gaining muscle. Um, and obviously the main thing when it comes to cutting is being in a calorie deficit and to lose weight long term, you need to be eating less than your body is burning. Um, and that requires you to do some figuring out. But why do we lose fat when we're in a deficit? Can you riff that off the top of your head? Because I've um I have the gap here, but it will look maybe I can hide myself, but they can't be hide, but for a lot of viewers, this probably makes a lot more sense than it does for listeners.

SPEAKER_00 5:09

That's she was using the rape scope clipboard that we have here at the illustrious Wolfpack studio to hide his face. Um one thing I just want to quickly shout out before I riff on why we lose fat, which will probably be very underwhelming, is most people assume that you can't lose fat and gain muscle at the same time. That's true. The reality is it's probably not true, and we'll discuss more about that later in the episode, and we'll kind of break down how do you gain muscle, why you're losing fat. Is it possible? How do you maximize your chances? When it comes, simply put to why you lose fat, you can think of it in simple terms. Your fat is energy storage. Fat tends to be one of the better energy stores your body has available. You can store about theoretically nine calories per gram of fat. Now, your your fat isn't actually just fat, it has fluids and proteins and all sorts of stuff in there. So it doesn't quite get up to that nine calorie or kilocalorie per gram mark, but it gets pretty close. And so when your body has excess calories coming in from your diets, and you're not burning them all, it's like, all right, let's prepare for tough times, store some of these, and wait until we have to use them. The way you force your body to use them is by getting into a calorie deficit. Effectively, you can calculate how many calories you're taking in by your dietary intake, and you can calculate how many calories you're burning. And there's different components of metabolism, which I'm sure we'll get to a bit later, we should touch on. We'll get to in a second. Things like movement, things like breathing, existing, a bunch of stuff. When it comes specifically to fat balls, though, the way your body releases energy that it can then use for metabolism, like walking around, existing, is by literally breaking up cells. So when you're building cells, that process requires energy. When you're taking apart cells, you're breaking them down, that process releases energy. So you're taking adipocytes, or specifically fat cells, body fat cells, and you're breaking them out for energy. And that turns them into different breakdown products. That's a simple process. You're just forcing your body to draw energy from somewhere that isn't your diet. And you're breaking down adipocytes into energy that you can then use for metabolism and various breakdown products.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

Yeah. Indeed. And as you mentioned, metabolism is a word that people hear a lot. And when it comes to a deficit, we are talking about calories in and calories out, essentially, how many calories your body burns, which is um the main components of your metabolism will be your basal metabolic rate, and essentially the calories that you are burning at rest if you were to lay in bed all day to maintain bodily functions. Um, then you have your neat non-exercise adaptive thermogenesis, i.e., the calories that you're burning by just moving around and doing all sorts of stuff that is not structured exercise. So BMR accounts for roughly 60 to 70 percent of um your metabolism. So that's a big component. That's also determined by your uh weight, the amount of muscle you're carrying, and your organs can play a big role. Um I'm not getting gonna get into that now. Then you have obviously your meat, uh, the thermic effect of food. So how much food, so how many calories, how much energy your body needs to use in order to process the food that you consume, which makes for, and correct me if I'm wrong, 10 to 15 percent thermic inactive feeding?

SPEAKER_00 8:24

Yeah. It can vary based on macronutrients, obviously, with protein having the highest thermic effect around 25%, I believe. Fair enough. Um, whereas carbs are somewhere in the middle, I believe, around like 15%, and fats around 10%. So that contributes to their energy density. You know, protein has around 4 kilocalories per gram. Protein, uh sorry, carbs have around 4 as well, and then fats have nine.

SPEAKER_01 8:44

And then we have last but not least, the exercise, um, the effect of exercise, structured exercise, and how much that contributes to your metabolism, which um contrary to popular belief, is roughly 10% of your metabolism. Now, obviously, if you add all those numbers that I said, you may get slightly below, slightly above 100% for the magic. It's part of the magic, baby. Get with the science. Okay, we have doctor in front of our name, we can say whatever we like, and it's true. But joking aside, yeah, metabolism is not some switch, and that's a big thing. People will talk about them their metabolism being slow or um waking up your metabolism and all sorts of stuff, and it creates this idea that your metabolism is a switch or some form of like being inside you, like some some sort of power that changes or is uh can either be awakened or asleep or whatever, when in reality it's simply how big are you, how muscular uh you are how big are you, how muscular, but how how muscular you are, um, how much you move, um what you eat, and how much exercise you do with some things being sort of predetermined. Um, do you know much about like um variability in terms of metabolism? Because obviously in practice we do see people saying, Oh, yeah, I eat a lot and can't gain weight, and then vice versa.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

Yeah, there's a paper, the authors of which, or the title of which I cannot currently recall. But if I can find it, well, it's the biggest one on the topic. And it I think it's literally called like the the variability of metabolism across a human lifespan or something. Oh, that's Ponzer. Yeah, that's Ponzer. Yeah, yeah. We tried to quantify what most closely predicts overall metabolism. And I basically found that fat free mass was the best predictor of metabolism. Yeah. How many calories are burned?

SPEAKER_01 10:30

Daily life expenditure through the human life course.

SPEAKER_00 10:32

That's the one. Yeah, that's the Ponzer. Shout out, Ponzer, shout out Hermann Ponzer. So I know not many people will be that interested, but I'll give you some mumbo jumbo that I totally didn't have to look at my clipboard for. Um how the breakdown process of fat tissue actually releases energy. Okay, god's hit it. So you start with fat cells or adipocytes. Those get broken down in a process called lipolysis. Lipolysis.

SPEAKER_01 10:58

There we go, this is from the Guliki words, lipos, which is fat, and lisi, which is like the breakdown.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

There you go. Fun fact. We're allowed to mispronounce it, it's fine. Indeed. That releases stored triglycerides, which are then broken down into triglycerol and free fatty acids, which enter the bloodstream and are transported to tissues to be oxidized for energy. The glycerol is then converted to glucose in the liver by a process called gluconeogenesis. The fatty acids, on the other hand, are broken down through beta oxidation in the mitochondria, which ultimately produces ATP. ATP is literally the energy currency of the body. It's what's used for muscle contraction, aka literally locomotion, walking around, lifting weights, etc. So that's kind of the nitty-gritty of how fat tissue is ultimately converted into energy that your body can use for steady functions. Now, importantly, you had noted about fat oxidation rates and how fat intakes may or may not play a role. You want to touch on that?

SPEAKER_01 11:56

Uh yeah, sure. So they're mainly influenced by the deficit size, the training status of an individual, and the composition of one's diet. So higher fat intakes and lower carbohydrate availability will increase fat oxidation rate, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you will be losing more fat mass overall. It's still energy balance that will govern that.

SPEAKER_00 12:17

For sure. And I want to touch on this specifically because it's a myth that pops up both for ketogenic diets and for cardiofratat loss. So people who follow a higher fat diet, a ketogenic diet, whatever it might be, oftentimes say, well, I'm on a ketogenic diet. It uh burns fat like crazy. It's like a metabolic stove or whatever. And there is some like kernel of truth in that claim. DDD. Say with cardio, people will claim that lower intensity cardio is actually the cardio that burns the most fat. And people take that to mean, okay, I need to do low-intensity cardio to boost body fat. The kernel of truth in both those claims is that by consuming more fat than a ketogenic diet, more fat is around. So your body converts more of that dietary fat into energy that you can use for muscle contraction. Likewise, when you're doing low intensity cardio, because your the intensity is lower, your body can afford to use fat tissue or dietary fat, the oxidation of which requires more oxygen to be around. And because you're exercising lower intensity, you have more time to get oxygen in and actually use that fat for energy. At higher intensities, on the other hand, your body's forced to start drawing upon smaller energy stores of carbohydrates, which require a larger amount of oxygen to actually use for muscle contraction. In both those cases, what you're mostly talking about is increasing the oxidation or the burning of dietary fat. More so than actually impacting your fat loss. In the case of ketogenic diets, you're literally just burning dietary fat that's in your bloodstream or what have you. And in the case of lower intensity cardio, whether it's walking or even walking fasted sometimes, people do that as well. What you're burning is technically potentially a bit more body fat, but ultimately, when you then consume calories later in the day, or when you consume calories in general, that excess energy at that point will be stored as body fat again. What really matters isn't whether you burn more fat at some point via cardio, it's your daily calorie deficit that ultimately determines how much fat you lose long term. Whether you burn a bit more dietary fat or a bit less via, for example, a cuogenic diet, or whether you burn a bit more fat acutely in that walking vent because you're fasted, or because you're training at lower intensity, that doesn't determine your long-term fat loss. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:31

And it's it would be amazing if it did. It would be so easy. It would be honestly, I love fasting, I love walking. If you told me, hey, get out there three hours fasted and you're burning X amount more, I'd be doing it every day. Have you heard of this new thing, the Fat Max Zone? It's been around for a long time, Fat Max.

SPEAKER_00 14:49

It's been researched.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

Like uh when I was an undergrad. I saw a recent paper by in um there's um I like to call myself Fat Max, but I'm not feeling good about myself. Uh that's uh Max Coleman before he did the cat, Fat Max. Uh shout out Max Coleman. You weren't fat, bro. You were just okay. You had more of you than love. Um, but joking aside, uh the it's it's a thing now in Greece. I'm seeing a sports scientist uh promote his uh lab. Shout out to him as a as a person. I'm not sure what the Fat Max thing, but the claims around it are more or less what you debunked now.

SPEAKER_00 15:22

I mean, like, look, for excess performance. For performance, yeah. It's a different thing. Like I remember the undergrad, and this is like nearly 10 years ago now, like or university, by the way. Oprah University, number one university in the world. Here's a prestige bias enjoy. And then the dive Solon University. I really went from number one in the world to like number 100 in the UK. What am I doing?

SPEAKER_01 15:39

Shout out James Steele and James Fisher, our supervisors. Oh, that's why we went there. Shout out Solid as well. Shout out.

SPEAKER_00 15:44

Um, back then at least, there was some like cool new research looking at, oh, could we have athletes eat higher fat for a while to make their body more efficient at using fat as a fuel source for even higher intensity exercise? So then, you know, you have them eat a bunch of fat for a while, their bodies get better at metabolizing it, and then when they return to a higher carb diet, they both had higher carbs, which are actually kind of the most important thing, which is why athletes usually eat higher carbs. But their bodies have also adapted to using fat for energy, and they can kind of have the best of both worlds. And that was kind of a research topic 10 years ago at this point. I'm not sure what the research says there. So I'll have to leave a bit of uh suspense for the listener.

SPEAKER_01 16:23

Yeah, I I briefly looked at one of the recent reviews on uh the Fat Mag Zone. There was some some stuff along the lines of what you just said about performance, but nothing to suggest that hey, you sh you will be sure you know improving your body composition much more by being in a fat magazine. But since we talk about how fat is burned, um, quick note contrary to popular belief, fat is not burned off during exercise in a literal sense. So the carbon atoms from fatty acids um are actually exhaled as um CO2, and uh and then the remainder comes off as water, which is a cool thing whenever I'm in a deficit and I have to urinate like nice fat loss, which is not a thing, but hey, that's how I want to think about it. So let me be. What about muscle though during a deficit? Fat is cool, but what happens to muscle? Now, in an energy deficit, there are some pathways like the mTOR pathway and other signaling pathways that are somewhat suppressed. Um, the size of the deficit may play a role there. Um, these are pathways responsible for protein synthesis, so you do see a downregulation over overall, especially in leaner individuals where we also see muscle protein breakdown increasing alongside a decrease in muscle protein synthesis. Um, however, in overweight individuals, sometimes the there's a slightly different picture where MBS decreases, but muscle uh protein breakdown remains somewhat stable, um, which is why being very lean and dieting is somewhat harder on muscle than being on a higher body fat.

SPEAKER_00 18:00

I just briefly want to define some of these terms. Yes, sure, for sure. So muscle protein synthesis, you can kind of think of as adding more proteins to your muscle, which is the process of making them bigger. That's a simplification, because you can distinguish between mitochondrial muscle protein synthesis, so the different aspects of the muscle fiber itself, or myofibrillar, so the actual myofibril. But basically you can think of protein synthesis as adding proteins. The flip side, protein breakdown or muscle protein breakdown is breaking them down for energy or for whatever reason it might be. Um the net balance, or kind of the subtraction of muscle protein breakdown from muscle protein synthesis, is how you arrive at your net protein balance. Basically describing, okay, well, you're breaking down some muscle uh proteins, you're building some other ones. When you compare those numbers, are you overall building more than you're breaking down? MTOR, on the other hand, stands for mammalian target of rapamyosin. Now you know. There is no use for this. There is no use for this ever. I just wanted to say it. Respect that. And yeah, those are the acronyms that you need to know about.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

Hey, that's really cool. I have an another cool fact, and I'll I'll I'll quiz you on it after this. But um in general, we also see um drop in certain anabolic hormones when in a deficit, like IGF 1, testosterone, some thyroid hormones. Um, obviously, those again are going to be proportional to the severity of a calorie deficit. Um and we also see drops in other hormones like leptin, which can be responsible for hunger, uh which falls rapidly, even before seeing a ton of fat loss, um, which again drives hunger.

SPEAKER_00 19:37

So it scales more so with calorie status, yes, rather than tissue change. Yes, indeed.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

So it can be acute rather than chronic. Exactly. So in general, lower body fat means less adibose tissue to use for energy, uh, chronically lower leptin and then higher hunger, which for the few, aka the zero people that have done a bodybuilding prep in their life, you know that after a certain body fat, no matter the tips and the tricks and the volume of food that you consume, your body is literally saying, Hey, you have to eat now, and hunger is through the roof. And sometimes it takes a while for all those hormones to come back to normal and for your hunger to return to um to normal. I said normal twice there. It sounded horrible, but hey, what can you do?

SPEAKER_00 20:22

This is the muscle lab.

SPEAKER_01 20:24

This is the muscle lab. Now we also have this thing which was all the craze back in the day. I mean, still a hot topic, and we've done our respective deep dives, metabolic adaptation. So essentially the fact that your metabolism will adapt. This was one of the boogeyman boogeyman? Boogeyman. Boogeyman. Um, back in the day where uh reverse dieting was all the hype. Um, where, and in general, the boogeyman when it comes to dieting overall, where people are afraid that okay, if I'm losing weight, I'm smaller, therefore my metabolism will adapt. And we do see that uh total energy expenditure does drop uh beyond what's explained simply by just being smaller, and the adaptive component averages roughly 10 to 15 percent of your total daily energy expenditure, um, which is mainly driven by reduced continuous movement and uh improved movement efficiency. However, uh no, please.

SPEAKER_00 21:19

To make it a bit less nerdy, uh what does reduce spontaneous movement? Yeah, and improved movement efficiency really mean?

SPEAKER_01 21:27

So um when you're in a deficit and you are you've been dieting for a while, you may find that subconsciously you are moving much less throughout the day. That could include things like fidgeting, standing up, um, even uh things like um involuntary muscle contractions and which add up. And if we look at some of the literature on fidgeting and neat overall, it's a classic, um classic experiment. I'm blanking on the author's name, a very classic paper. Where they had people in a room just sat there, and they had a TV, a couch, there was a picture. Like when you hear about the environment, it seems so much cooler, but then you look at the picture and you're like, this looks a bit creepy. Indeed. Um, and essentially they saw that some people simply by standing up, moving more, fidgeting more, they burn up to like 500, 800 calories more, a solid amount of calories across the whole day. Across the whole day. Yeah, obviously, they were there for multiple hours. Um, so that's what I mean there. However, when it comes to that being a worry, and we'll touch on the practical side of things later on, that being a huge worry for most people in terms of their deficit, it's not as big of a deal as it's sometimes made out to be, especially for the average person looking to lose fat. So, yes, even if you lose a bunch of weight, you may be burning less than you were burning before, but it's not going to be what most people imagine where, oh, all of a sudden now you need to drop calories by 500 more to keep on losing fat, especially uh if you're already in an appropriate calorie deficit from the beginning. But obviously, size of the deficit will matter in terms of what sort of metabolic adaptation you will experience. So the bigger the deficit, the potential adaptation may be even bigger.

SPEAKER_00 23:20

What a sentence. That is quite the sentence. It's definitely one of the sentences of all time. Indeed. So you mentioned that metabolic adaptation can scale with size of deficit. Obviously, too big of a deficit sounds like a bad idea. So what size of a deficit would you recommend based on research?

SPEAKER_01 23:36

Before that, though, we mentioned the Ponzer paper about the metabolism through a course. I I wanted to say that before, but I forgot. How many authors do you think that paper has? Oof. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 23:47

Uh I remember it being a laundry list, so I'm gonna take a guess. Did you actually read a digital check? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have an example. Oh, if you didn't even count on yourself, you lazy bastard. You'll see why.

SPEAKER_01 24:02

184. Okay, man, that's relaxed. I remember it being long, and I remember it being like Absurd. It's 80.

SPEAKER_00 24:09

Okay, so at 100 over. Yeah, respect. It was like too too long for me to do it. You say 184? 100 over. Listen, some papers take a lot of work, and some papers people just want to be on.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

So and the funny thing is that then the latest uh paper on um metabolic uh well energy conservation, which we'll touch on later in the episode by Ponzer, it's just him and one more author, Eric Trexler. Shout out, Ponzer, shout out Eric Trexler, right? Yes, indeed. So, how much of a deficit? That's a good question. And we have uh classic paper by Murphy and Kohler 2022, meta-regression, 52 studies, over a thousand participants, 1,200 participants, essentially a systematic review and meta-analysis looking at studies with an energy deficit over three weeks. And essentially, what the authors did there, they explored how an energy deficit impacts muscle mass and strength by analyzing the data. And they conducted two analyses. We had analysis A, where they compared groups in energy deficit versus groups not in a deficit, all engaged in resistance training. And then we had analysis B, which had studies only um with only one condition. So either a deficit group or a non-deficit group engaged in resistance training. And drum rolls. What we what they saw actually is that lean lean mass losses, not necessarily direct measurements of uh muscle like ultrasound, increased linearly with deficits above 500 calories every day, even with resistance training. Um essentially the magic number in huge quotation marks was about 500 calories, was a deficit that essentially protected from uh mass muscle loss. And in some cases there were increases in muscle size um when you were before 500 calories. After that, things started to go somewhat south.

SPEAKER_00 25:55

I'll clarify a little bit as well.

SPEAKER_01 25:57

Yeah, yeah. I remember you saying that when we were checking the episodes. Yeah. As I was reading it.

SPEAKER_00 26:01

They, if you've ever done math, which hopefully you have, that's that's a great time. You can think of it as a simple y equals mx plus b formula. They went from maintenance or slight surplus to like large deficits. So on the x-axis, you can think of calorie status. Yeah. From a slight surplus all the way to about minus a thousand calories, I think was kind of limit there. On the y-axis was how much hypertrophy or lean mass gain or loss was observed. At roughly calorie maintenance, as you would expect, participants gained muscle. So they had increases in lean body mass from the start of the study to the end of the study. Likewise on the surplus, and there was a linear relationship between calorie status, so how much of a surplus or deficit you were in, and how much of a lean mass change you saw. The more of a surplus, the more of a lean mass gain you saw. The more of a deficit, the more loss you saw. Importantly, both in a surplus and a maintenance, muscle gain was possible. So when you hear the claim colony stated that when you're at maintenance, only beginners can recomp. That probably isn't true. Because even in the average study input here, you saw that people gain lean mass, while presumably, because they maintain their body weight, losing fat mass indeed. So at the very least, we can kind of exclude the claim that only beginners or it's very rare that people can recomp. Because that's not true.

SPEAKER_01 27:22

And the fun fact is that in many of the studies we do at the Applied Muscle Development Lab, people maintain their weight throughout the study. Obviously, these are not studies looking at recomp, but we see substantial increases in hypertrophy measure by ultrasound in people that have essentially maintained their weak their weight for eight to twelve weeks.

SPEAKER_00 27:38

Hundreds or thousands of studies at this point have been conducted where participants don't really change their body weights but are able to gain muscle almost at the same time. Even in trained demographics. However, the amount of muscle or lean body mass gained during the study decreased linearly as the size of the deficit increased. And the break point, aka the point where the deficit led to no lean body mass gains anymore, was around 500 calories. Going beyond 500 calories of the deficit seemed to start causing lean mass loss. So they actually lost muscle. Importantly, that number doesn't really mean much in the absence of the body weight to go by. Yeah. Because surely someone who weighs 400 pounds and a female weighing 100 pounds, a 500 calorie deficit for the female means they're losing one pound a week. That's 1% of their body weight per week. Whereas for someone weighing 400 pounds, that's 0.25%, a quarter of the relative weight of weight loss. So to contextualize that 500 calorie deficit, which only really matters in context of how big you are. Yeah. Very good point. On average in that meta-analysis, I believe they weighed around 70-75 kilograms. I would have to go back because I actually did a deep dive into this before. But I believe that was a rough size. So 70, 75 kilograms is about like what, 155, 160 pounds, maybe?

SPEAKER_01 28:52

Um there's how I'm saying that.

SPEAKER_00 28:55

So for a person weighing that amount, as a rough rule of thumb from these results, around a 500 calorie deficit is the most thing with without losing substantial muscle. If you're bigger than that, however, that 500 calorie figure might go close to like 800. Yeah. Like if you weigh 220 pounds now, for example. I wouldn't be surprised if that number was closer to say, you know, let's say it's you weigh about 50% more than the average person in that study. Let's say 240 pounds. It might be closer to about 50% bigger, so 750 calories. You can use that as a rough rule to use depending on your body weight.

SPEAKER_01 29:27

Yep. Does that make sense? Yeah, 100%. And it's uh something that is not highlighted often because people will use the 500 number and just applied, but also use it to calculate that, okay, a pound of fat, three 3,500 calories, therefore 7 times 5, 7 times 500, uh, you should be losing a pound per week of fat, which is a 500 calorie deficit. And that's what everyone in under any circumstance should do.

SPEAKER_00 29:52

Just to be touched on that, this is uh well, actually, sort of yeah, so well actually. No, no. So the actual information is um people think that it's 3500 calories, but more recent estimates, so obviously, when you're saying you want to lose a pound of body fat, some people assume body fat is literally just fat tissue, only uh triglycerides, which would imply that it's nine calories per gram. And so that would put the estimate like somewhere around closer to like 4,000 or whatever. Then some estimates showed that it might be closer to 3,500 in practice. In reality, the true number, based on more recent estimates, seems to be around 3,800, 3,900. So if you want to be even more precise about your planning, you can use that number instead of 3,500. That's it. That's your actual factors too.

SPEAKER_01 30:39

It's a really fun fact. But when it comes to larger deficits, um, let's talk about some of the potential negatives uh that we see in the literature, and more specifically as it pertains to obviously lifters, um, and a state of low energy availability. So when you do get in larger energy deficits, let's say what, closer to one, one to two percent of weight, um, weight loss per week?

SPEAKER_00 31:02

Yeah, I would say that's quite large.

SPEAKER_01 31:04

Yeah, fair enough. We see that obviously, as briefly mentioned before, there is a downregulation of certain pathways that are anabolic. Um, hormones that can affect both hunger and overall the ability to build muscle are also negatively affected. Um, and more specifically, even when we look at trained athletes and even athletes uh like uh a recent study in female athletes that were resistance training, consuming a solid amount of protein, um, and doing as much of their due diligence as possible when they were in a low energy availability state, which is roughly 30 calories per kilo of body weight.

SPEAKER_00 31:41

Yeah, so the rule often given in the research and practically is 30 kilocalories per kilogram of fat-free mass, I believe.

SPEAKER_01 31:48

Oh, yeah, fat-free mass, correct. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:50

And that number is often applied, and even though I said this in the past, so it's not a it's not a slight on anyone. That number is often quoted for everyone ever. Yes. But that number might be uh specifically applicable to females, whereas the number in men might be a bit lower.

SPEAKER_01 32:07

Yeah, which makes sense. Um I was thinking about my own body weight and my fat-free mass, and 30 calories per fat-free mass would be still 2,500, 2,300, 2400 calories. But in general, we do see that low energy availability or big deficits are obviously not what will absolutely kill your gains. There is some evidence that when paired with resistance training and a solid amount of protein, which we'll get to in a second, you can still maintain a solid amount of muscle mass, lose some fat. But overall, scaling your calorie deficit appropriately to your size and your body fat levels, and I don't know what your take is on training experience is likely a good idea.

SPEAKER_00 32:50

Yeah. Before we go into that kind of worms, I wanted to mention that given the variance we see in metabolisms, some people to lose fat relatively quickly will have to go below that 30 calorie rule. Yeah. Right. Variance in metabolisms is a thing. Like whether it's because of different organ sizes, like that, there's been some research into that. Kidney, am I right? Kidneys, brain, everything. You know, all the organs. Organs make up a surprisingly large amount of your metabolism. So even though you know, you have a lot of skeletal muscle mass on your frame, presumably, organ weight is relatively small by comparison. Like your heart doesn't make up much weight, like as a percentage of your total body weight. Same with your brain, same with your livers, headers, liver. Um but because of how metabolically active they are, they do make up a large amount of your basal metabolic weight. So for some people, getting into a calorie deficit will almost inevitably mean also dipping below a 30 calorie per kilogram of battery mass. And so the uh the one unfortunate or downer piece of news I want to give for some listeners is that you might calculate that for yourself, and you might realize that to get into a deficit, yeah, you need to have 1500 calories. It might be because you're not tracking perfectly, that's very possible and very often the case. But for some people, their metabolisms are generally just so slow that you will experience some side effects of relative energy deficiency. And that's an unfortunate truth, but something people need to be kind of uh told about, I think. Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 34:29

Without that meaning, and we will get to that in the coach's corner part of the episode, there comes a lot of no seboing when it comes to dieting, performance, uh, muscle mass retention. That as lifters, obviously, if you're an athlete who is doing multiple uh different uh types of training, multiple hours of all sorts of uh physical activity, being in extremely low calories will can affect your performance, might lead to you missing training. There was a recent meta-analysis by Gallant um atal 2025 looking at about 59 studies from different sports, and essentially finding that nearly half of um participants had low energy availability, and those with low energy availability had a worse training, uh worse training response, endurance, coordination, concentration, power, agility, and were more likely to miss training sessions. But for the average lifter out there, especially if you're ticking certain boxes that we'll touch on, a slightly more aggressive deficit will not be ideal and is not going to be our go-to recommendation, but it's not gonna be the end of the world, even if you end up having to go there.

SPEAKER_00 35:31

Yeah. One thing I wanted to mention in the context of relative energy deficiency is just mentioning some of the common side effects. And there's been a lot of research into this because it's something athletes at a high level especially tend to experience a lot. But it can be things like depressive symptoms, irritability, joint pains, low energy, disrupted sleep, disrupted emotional states, um, increased injury risk or injury rates are also a thing. Uh worsened um what's it called? Bone density, not bone density. Oh well, we forgot one outcome. Um disrupted menstrual cycles. Like the the list of things that can happen with relative energy deficiency is quite large. Yes, indeed. So it's not something you take lightly. It's something that can happen when you're losing fat, especially when you're losing fat for a long time when you've had to drop calories quite low. But it's not something you should remain in for a long time. You shouldn't avoid it. It's not usually something that's healthy to normalize.

SPEAKER_01 36:33

Yeah, 100%. Uh it's often an issue with many physic competitors. I would say especially female, but I'm not sure if it's especially female, maybe it's male as well. Now, when it comes to mitigating some of the negatives of a calorie deficit, because as lifters, we care about losing fat, maintaining, or building muscle. The number one thing, which we'll say off the bat here, is lifting weights. Resistance training consistently is arguably your biggest tool. But you know that already. You're a lifter, you don't want us to tell you, hey, lift weights. Thank you so much, Pac and Milo. I'm already doing that. Why am I listening to this? So you can download myadap, mydup.com. Just kidding, not really. But when it comes to your diet, there's one macronutrient that can help you maintain or even build muscle in a deficit, and that is carbohydrate. No, I'm joking, is protein. And we were blessed with a very recent series of meta-regressions. Yes, I didn't say meta-analysis, by Refalo it out with good doctors Eric and Eric, Helms and Trexler, respectively or not respectively. I don't know which Eric is Trexler and which Eric is Helms. Let the audience figure that out. Where essentially they looked at the effect of protein. They did a systematic review with Bayesian Bayesian meta-regression across 29 studies, over 700 participants, essentially looking at the effect of protein on fat-free mass changes in a deficit.

SPEAKER_00 38:03

Yeah. Uh this was as far as a deficit goes, the most informative meta-analysis to date. Indeed. And if anyone needs an answer on how much protein should I be having while I'm cutting, this is the one to book to. There's been other research on protein as well, finding a benefit to higher protein intakes, like even beyond a gram per pound. We won't go into that in this episode because that's a whole different conversation. Um but yeah, it was really cool. So, what were the findings?

SPEAKER_01 38:27

Yeah. So the primary finding was that there was a linear um dose response between protein intake and favorable fat-free mass changes during a cut. So per kilogram of body mass, there was a 97% probability that consuming more protein will lead to a better fat-free mass outcome. Um and when looking at fat-free mass specifically, instead of just uh body mass, there was a 99% probability. So, and it was a preferred method, especially for lean athletes or lean individuals like ourselves, um, as it essentially avoids um underestimating one's needs.

SPEAKER_00 39:03

Yeah. Just to clarify, it became more likely when scaling protein to fat-free mass that additional protein helped. So that suggests that when you're determining how much protein you should be having, ideally, you would be going off of how much fat-free mass you carry. Yes. Obviously, that's not always practical because body fat assessment methods aren't always the best when it comes to consumer-available methods. Yes. But it just suggests that protein needs scale to how much fat free mass you carry.

SPEAKER_01 39:30

Yeah, exactly. And that's something that I always found um I always found weird how we would focus quite a bit on body weight, which makes sense. It's practical, right? And if you if you assume that you're not very fat, as I was, it made sense. But because I wasn't, and uh, you know, in powerlifting, for example, you do deal with people that are higher body fat percentages, the idea that, okay, I'm I'm weighing, you know, 240 pounds, 250 pounds. Do I really need to consume so much protein? Like, is that the fat uh actually driving my protein requirements higher? And the answer is likely no. But they they saw that the effect was linear across all the um across the range that was studied. So they looked at 0.8 to 3.2 grams per kilo of body weight of body mass, or 0.9 to 4.2 grams um per kilo of fat free mass with no clear plateau detected, although the overall effect size was small. Um and then they also looked at uh they had different moderators to essentially see who benefits the most from a higher protein intake. And they saw that those with a lower body fat percentage um had a probability of a positive dose response to being increasing as uh body fat percentage decreases. Essentially, leaner individuals seem to benefit more. Um anything you want to add there?

SPEAKER_00 40:51

I think it's a double whammy, and I'm not sure if they control for this in the meta-analysis, like added as a covariate essentially. Because obviously people with lower body fat carry more fattory mass. Yeah. So practically, if you're leaner and you're using a gram per kilogram of body weight recommendation, you probably want to go higher. At the same time, being lower in body fat probably increases your rate of or your risk of muscle loss. So you want to make sure that you have your ducks in a row when you're interested. So I think it makes sense for two different reasons.

SPEAKER_01 41:22

So yeah, eat your protein. But let's look at some practical numbers from the meta-regression. So overall, the and that's that's a cool way that the authors put it, given that uh the effect size was relatively small. So if let's say you were uh if you were to go above um 1.9 or 2.5 uh kilos of uh grams per kilos of body weight or fat-free mass respectively, yes, the effect was small, but um they categorized it in terms of importance and context, I'd guess, based on body fat. So if you are somebody who's leaner and who wants to do their best to maintain or even possibly increase their muscle while dieting, going closer to maybe 3.2 grams per kilo or even 4.2 per kilo of fat-free mass is a good educated bet. With some caveats that we'll touch on in a second. However, if you're somewhere around 2 grams per kilo body weight or around 3 grams per kilo fat-free mass, and you're not a competitive natural bodybuilder who is going to get absurdly lean, you are very likely getting the majority of benefits that protein in a long-side resistance training can offer in a calorie deficit. Additionally, and here come some of the caveats. When we look at a calorie deficit, we are, and we'll get to some of the practical recommendations in the coach's corner. You're looking at obviously your the composition of your overall diet and how you distribute the calories that you have to different micronutrients and other boxes that you need to take. So it's not just, okay, let me eat as much protein as possible, and I don't care about the rest because that's very important alongside resistance training. So overall, you need um to weigh the you essentially need to budget and see, okay, if I go up to 4.2 grams per kilo of fat-free mass, how much space does that leave for carbs, fats, um, and then for things like fiber, foods that I enjoy, et cetera, et cetera. So that's something that needs to be taken into consideration. Um, but in general, more protein is better if you're somebody who's absolutely trying to maximize uh muscle retention with the cabinets that I mentioned in mind.

SPEAKER_00 43:49

Yeah. And before we move on to cardio during fat loss, because I think that's another big thing people think about when it comes to fat loss, it's worth noting. Protein is the only macronutrient that seems to have a real relationship with muscle gain and also muscle retention during a cut. Unfortunately. That doesn't mean the other macronutrients don't matter. Indeed. But it does mean they operate more on a minimum basis than they operate on a dose response basis. 100%. So protein, simulate the more protein you have up until some number. That number remains relatively undetermined as to where that relationship plateaus. Same as with how many sets you do a week or how much you train. With fats and carbs, there's probably more so a minimum that you need for good health from good normal levels rather than more is better. Yeah. So I think briefly discussing or mentioning those numbers is good. Yeah, for sure. I'm not going to go in depth. There's been a couple of meta-analyses by Whitaker and colleagues looking at the effects of high versus lower carb and fat intakes for testosterone. Basically showing that when it comes to carb intake, higher carb intakes around 5 grams per kilogram seemed to cause potentially slightly greater testosterone levels. So we're within 1 gram per kilogram. Likewise, when it came to fat intake, 2 grams per kilogram seemed to lead to a bit more actually compared to carbs. Testosterone levels versus 1 gram per kilogram. When it comes to whether or not that actually meaningfully impacts hypertrophy, that's a big question mark. Yep. Because we had a meta-analysis on carbon takes by Henselmans and colleagues that recently came out, showing that comparing 1 gram per kilogram to 4 grams per kilogram in lifters, 4 grams didn't lead to more hypertrophy across all the studies available. So that same comparison of 1 versus 4 is pretty similar to 1 versus 5 in the Whitaker analysis. So we can say pretty confidently, okay, going higher in carbs might increase testosterone, but it doesn't seem to actually yield more hypertrophy. So I think focusing on hormones as a means to say I'm going to build one muscle because my hormones are blasting probably isn't reasonable. Yeah. Instead, a good minimum for carbs is probably about one gram per kilogram of body weight, or maybe two. That's sort of like ballpark during a cut especially. I think that's pretty good. And then when it comes to fat, going lower than about 40 to 60 grams as an absolute number, or about half a gram per kilogram, probably isn't ideal. Yep. That's kind of the minimums I would set. And beyond that, it is mostly personal preference. And how much do you hate yourself? And how much protein are you willing to add it to your diet? Until all you have is just protein bars and meat and things that no one likes eating. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 46:39

And obviously, again, like context matters. I'm not going to hit you with the platitudes, but a lot of people caught upset when we communicated the carb findings. Like there's nobody in this world besides, well, there's nobody in this world that hated those findings more than us. Well, maybe there are people.

SPEAKER_00 46:57

Not to mention when we communicated the protein findings. That's true. That was even worse. No one likes being told you probably need more protein to maximize your yes.

SPEAKER_01 47:05

And as with training volume, look, you don't want to tick all the boxes and be like, yeah, I'm doing 90% of um my due diligence. That's fine. That's totally fine. Same with carbs. If you want to eat more carbs because you love eating more carbs, that's cool. Milo here loves to cook. He wasn't super ecstatic when he found out that, hey, I can't really placebo my way to consuming four carbs per kilo, four grams of carbs per kilo body weight. And a little note, a lot of the carb recommendations, aside from general flattages about performance and strongman athletes telling you they're eating 25,000 calories a day, a lot of the recommendations that lifters would follow back in the day, and you'd even see in classic books like The Essentials of Strength and Conditioning came from literature on sport. So you'd hear things like four to seven grams per kilo body weight, which like I would be nearly 500 to 600 grams of carbs for me, which yes, if you're a triathlete, super important, or if you're an endurance athlete, or if you're just a lifter, unfortunately, that literature doesn't add up.

SPEAKER_00 48:08

So you're telling me when I was having over a thousand ounces of carbs a day when I was 20 years old, that wasn't optimal?

SPEAKER_01 48:15

It was optimal for life quality and for yeah, for vibes, for muscle growth, unfortunately not. But what about cardio? Since I mentioned endurance, look at these seamless transitions. Absolute beast of a transition. So this is a topic that is obviously like cardio and cutting, somewhat like very closely associated. You start cutting, it's time to do cardio. And especially back in the day, bodybuilders doing all sorts of crazy things, and the word cardio mentioned, and the the one thing I hate a lot is when people say, Oh, coach opt my cardio, um, and stepper and sweats, uh, sweating buckets and whatever. When we look at the literature and referring to Ponger again, Ponger and Trexler, um, and Ponger, Herman Ponger specifically, has done a lot of work looking at metabolic adaptation and the constrained model of energy. Constrained energy model.

SPEAKER_00 49:13

Constrained model of energy expenditure.

SPEAKER_01 49:15

Indeed, got it wrong both times there. Um, essentially looking at how the body responds to doing more physical activity. Now we don't have a soul, like a concrete answer here. Take this with a pinch of salt. But what we're seeing is that the body, especially when in a deficit, does seem to compensate for a certain amount of calories that are burned for from exercise. So in human aerobic exercise interventions, total daily expenditure uh increased based on what is on the Atlantic paper by about 30% of what an additive model would predict. An additive model essentially is the idea that okay, exercise, um, calories burned when exercising are they scale one-to-one with what you'd expect to see in your metabolism. So if you do X amount of training and your Apple Watch says, oh, you burned X amount of calories, that is 100% accurate. Is that a fair way to put it?

SPEAKER_00 50:11

I think it's a fair way to put it, it's simply, oh, you do 500 calories with the cardio, we're gonna burn 500x calories. Yeah, indeed. Which is probably not true.

SPEAKER_01 50:21

Probably not true. Uh unfortunately, again, because there's nobody uh out in this world that would love it more. Anecdotally, it's something I've observed as well, but take what we're saying with a slight pinch of salt. It's not like we the book has been closed on this. So when um, as I mentioned, when we look at aerobic exercise specifically and calorie restriction, that compensation seems to be even more apparent. Now, the exact reason is not a hundred percent known yet, but there does seem to be a down regulation of other things in the body in order to conserve energy. It may be um that it's also um a combination of down regulation for like um basal and uh and sleep metabolic rate, um, plus less uh physical activity that is not structured exercise, but put a pin into that. However, the cool thing and the solution here is that that relationship didn't seem to uh exist for lifting, so that that competition was not apparent. However, the main takeaway here is not that cardio is useless or that you're not gonna bear any calories, but rather our main tool in order to lose body fat is setting a solid calorie deficit via our diet. And as we'll get into it in a second, cardio and aerobic activity or just physical activity in general should be done mostly for health. And keep in mind we're not talking about going from zero to basic um physical activity for health, doing nothing for uh as far as extra calories burn, but doing more and more cardio as a mean to accelerate fat loss. Anything to add there?

SPEAKER_00 51:55

Yeah, for sure. So we discussed and briefly defined the additive model with energy expenditure versus the constrained model. Just summarizing, additive is a linear relationship. You do more, you burn more, one-to-one. Constrained predicts some degree of diminishing returns. So as you do more and more cardio, you actually burn fewer and fewer calories as a percentage of your predicted burn. Yeah. In a strict view or operationalization of the constraint model, eventually I believe it's predicted that extra cardio doesn't burn anything anymore. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty extreme. Yeah, indeed. But chances are that's probably not true. Yeah. But at the same time, the additive model in its simplest form, just one-to-one, also isn't true. Chances are it's somewhere in the middle. Yeah. Where doing a ton of cardio doesn't seem to really yield the sort of energy expenditure increases you would hope for. Doing some cardio can have its place. And it can be a time-efficient way to increase energy expenditure as opposed to doing a ton of like very low-intensity movement, like walking while you. But the truth is somewhere in the middle. So just keeping in mind that you do get diminishing returns on cardio for boosting your metabolism is worth doing. And that's straight up going to debunk many of the old school approaches of bodybuilders, coaches in bodybuilding, fat loss coaches, mostly relying on lower intensity activity, that isn't gonna result in the same degree of etabolic compensation, and some amount of cardio, or even no cardio at all, I just prefer, is likely the more evidence-based way. Yeah. At this point. 100%. And pushing it too high, exercise is never going to be the primary lever for fallows. It's always going to be dietary restriction. Yeah. Dietary restriction is the main thing, but cardio can come second.

SPEAKER_01 53:51

Very well put. And unfortunately brings us to the sad in the middle reality, which changes some things for some, but at the same time is not as sexy as we would like it. Because it would have been a cool dunk and a cool whoa. Actually, cardio does nothing for fat loss. So don't do any of it. Or the other extreme would also be cool. A one-to-one model would be amazing.

SPEAKER_00 54:15

As with many things, the unfortunate truth is in the middle.

SPEAKER_01 54:18

Indeed. So since calories are the most calories and obviously protein are the most important things, let's talk about. So let's go to the coaching corner and actually tell you, okay, you want to lose fat. It's not as it's as simple if you just take a if you zoom out, yes, it's calories in, calories out. But there are many ways that you can go about counting calories. Um, we are also going to talk about whether a calorie, all calories are equal. And in general, fat loss and long-term, sustainable fat loss is not as simple as one may think, at least in many cases, when we're talking about people's people with lies and people that may have had negative experiences with losing fat before. So let's first talk about tracking calories and how you estimate calories. A bunch of different equations out there. I'll let you touch on some of the specific ones as you have deep knowledge about them. Yes, okay, nice, verified. But uh plenty of calculators out there. They will land you in a rough ballpark, but unfortunately, well, not really, unfortunately, the best way to figure out your maintenance calories is to consistently track your calories for some time while weighing yourself daily, and then seeing whether those calories are correct or not. Those calculators can be off by a few hundred calories either direction, um, but usually they will land you in a relatively okay estimate.

SPEAKER_00 55:45

So to understand whether or not calculators are any good, it's worth remembering how these formulas were established. Basically, researchers take a bunch of participants from a certain demographic. That could be white middle-aged men who exercise. It could be a different demographic. It's usually very specific demographic. Then they effectively put them in metabolic chambers and they measure how many calories a day burn, say at rest, for example. They then try and fit a linear regression through this by adding in different variables. Okay, can we explain how many calories are burned in this demographic? By using their weight in this equation, using their heights, using other things about them, like the body fat. And at the end of it, they try and find the equation that most closely predicts how many calories they burn using different factors about them. However, as you might have guessed from my description, these equations are demographic specific. As I mentioned earlier, one of the biggest predictors of metabolism is how much fattory mass you carry. So that already kind of creates a limitation. The good news is that although all formulas are going to be inaccurate by some level, unless you're unbelievably lucky, just by some absurd thing. The best formula we have at our disposal is the one by cutting and colleagues, which wasn't actually, I believe in physique athletes are relatively muscular people, etymographic. So at the middle east, it kind of accounts for the fact that hey, muscle is a good thing for metabolis. And so for the listeners of the muscle lab, presumably it's going to be your best starting point as per an equation. Um from there, you so you calculate your maintenance at rest. You add on kind of how active you are as a multiplier of that. That multiplier is also kind of made up, to be quite frank. It's going to be somewhat accurate, but it's also only going to give you an estimate. So you've got error on the formula level of just your basal motorblock weight, how many calories you burn at rest, and you've also got error or guesswork on the multiplier of this is how active you are, this is the factor by which we'll multiply your basal motorblock rate. But I would say for most lifters or most people listening to this, the Kyle equation is going to be a starting point. From there, if you wanted to go do it yourself, you could literally subtract from that number how much of a deficit you want to be in. So if for example you lose a pound a week, you might want to be in around like a 300, 3,900 calorie deficit. So you divide 38 or 3900 by seven, which is about like what, 560 calories, and you have your daily deficit. So if your maintenance is 2500, you're going to consume 1940 calories. That's how you would calculate your initial calories. But as Pac mentioned, you definitely ideally would want to estimate it via just tracking consistently. That'll give you a much more refined and precise estimate over time. But as a starting point, it can be perfectly valid. Yep, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 58:41

Now, obviously, once you have that number, then you adjust your macronutrient, uh, your macronutrients based on some of the ranges we mentioned before. What like I'd say as a rough starting point, setting your protein at two um to 2.5 grams per kilo body weight. So essentially multiplying that by uh four grams would give you the calories that you'd get from protein. Then you'd go, what, uh, let's say 50 to 60 grams of fat or 0.5 to 0.6 grams of carb uh fat per kilo of body weight, and then multiplying that by nine, and then you can allocate the remaining two carbs while also paying and a bit of attention to your fiber intake, which is also very important for health, and we'll we'll touch on that in a second. Um, but that's not going to be a factor in your calories.

SPEAKER_00 59:30

The most surefire way ultimately of losing fat is going to be tracking your calories. There are other approaches, and we can kind of discuss those.

SPEAKER_01 59:37

Yeah, that's what I was gonna ask you, no.

SPEAKER_00 59:39

Um but the most surefire way, the most scientific and whatever way you can use if you want to ensure success happens quickly and efficiently, is to actually track your calories and even going beyond making sure you're in a deficit, there is value in the action of logging. Yeah. So one of the best predictors of how likely people are to boost stat and maintain that fat loss in the research is consistently logging behaviors with self-monitoring behaviors. That includes things like weighing yourself, includes things like weighing your food, anything that involves monitoring how you're actually doing. It's probably affected for a variety of ways, for a variety of reasons. One is you're actually checking on how well it's going, you're getting yourself a level of feedback points of like, oh, I'm doing well, I've lost some weight, or it kind of builds your self-efficacy or your confidence in losing weight. So there's a variety of reasons, but it's worth mentioning that tracking, beyond just, oh, cool number, I know I'm hitting the right numbers, it is actually valuable as a tool. And oftentimes, in my experience as a coach, this is a coaching corner after all, the reason clients or people in general, myself included, will struggle to maintain fat loss if they were tracking, especially during their fat loss phase, is because they stopped tracking. Yeah. Or they stopped weighing themselves. Especially when stress comes up or anything else comes up, it's very difficult to maintain that blogging or self-launching behavior. So all that about tracking and using that approach, but there are other approaches.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:08

Yeah, and that's what I was going to ask you, because you you did do a video on that. How can one because I I can see like obviously there's a lot of people out there that hear tracking and feel like, okay, I'm okay to do that for a few months or a few weeks. Um, and that's a good recommendation, regardless of whether you keep on doing it, doing it for a few weeks, a few months to get familiar with, okay, ah, this food has X amount of calories. Okay, now I've noticed that the coffee that I was having in the morning is an extra 100 calories that I had an accounted for. But what about losing fat and being in a deficit without necessarily tracking calories? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:45

So you can get into a calorie deficit without tracking. In fact, people have done it for millions of years or whatever at this point. Um The key is to make your lifestyle conducive to naturally arriving in a deficit. Yes. That means two things. One, generally being pretty physically active, and two, composing your diet in a way that makes it more likely than not you'll end up in a deficit and eating mindfully. So there's a variety of practices, behaviors, tips that you can use to get into a deficit without needing to track anything. I would say the one the one thing I would heavily recommend, and we'll kind of get into this later, on effective body composition tracking. The one thing I would recommend, no matter what, is to actually weigh yourself consistently. There's gonna be cases where that's not advisable, let's say you've struggled with like body mish issues or concerns about weights and whatnot. That can be a concern and a reason not to weigh yourself, but I think for most people who don't want to track calories, tracking your weigh-ins is kind of like a next best thing or a really important thing to do. 100%. Um, because it can actually validate whether or not you're approaching working in the first place. So I'll kind of just run off a brief list of things I would recommend if you're going to take the non-tracking approach, let's call it. One is having regular-ish meals. You don't need to be following a meal plan, like I think that's the kind of the route most people would take. But I think having relatively consistent meals, at least most of the time. Because realistically, for most people, most days, your breakfast is gonna be pretty similar, anyways. You don't have a million hours to spend on preparing it, you just want something convenient that is gonna satisfy you, give you protein, etc. That's also where having some knowledge of okay, what amount of calories in this food, what amount of protein is in this food, can be really helpful in helping you construct something that is still gonna get you enough protein without any track, like as a rough ballpark. Um, I would say you're focusing on satiety, and we'll get into that in a moment as well, is important. Having consistent meals of your day, like I mentioned, and then now dating that approach by actually weighing yourself. Fundamentally, if you're doing these things and your weight is dropping, it's working. I would say focusing on eating mindfully as well. So eating to satiety rather than fullness. Yep. Satiety you can kind of define as I no longer feel hunger. Like if now you were to offer me a meal, yeah, I could eat it like a star space, but I don't feel the need to eat. Versus fullness, where you're literally you cannot eat more, yeah, even if you wanted to. So it's kind of the threshold of satiety where you feel satisfied and you've satisfied your hunger. And there's this kind of the capital ceiling of fullness. You're now no longer able to eat anything, even though try to foresee. I think a lot of time people overshoot satiety and paying attention to your environment, sitting down and eating on its own. You know, maybe listen to music, but not watching a show, watching something that can actively distract you. Focusing on the meal, spending a bit more time eating, so tuning a bit more slowly potentially. Those things can help move the needle from you're eating more than your satiety would actually have you closer to, okay, now you're eating closer to your satiety levels. And that alone can oftentimes slash hundreds of calories off your total labor intake. And that can help you get into a deficit without the need to track. Yeah. I'd say those are the main things. Activity is important, but we kind of touched on that already. And we can give recommendations later on on how many steps to do, how much coil to do, and whatnot. For sure. But I'd say those are kind of like general practices that I used when losing fat to lose fat without the need to track stuff. Because sometimes, like, even with the uh AI features out there nowadays, which I do think are worth using for most people, if you're cooking something and it's complex, those estimates can be off by quite a bit. And it can be a pain to attract everything ingredient by ingredient. 100%.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:35

Awesome. Um, now before we go into food choices, I just wanted to mention that 500 calories has a rough deficit starting point, solid. Um, but especially for those that are, you know, getting into tracking, going a bit like slightly more aggressive than that, not a bad idea, especially if you're guesstimating some of the foods that you are tracking. So I'm for like a 700 calorie day. Deficit, uh, if you know, eating out a lot and you're not counting everything to a T can be an easy way to sort of guarantee and give yourself a reassuring tap on the back that, oh yeah, I am closer to 500 calories because that will fluctuate a bit here and there.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:14

100%. There's two things I want to mention on that note. The first is that contrary to Lockin Wool's opinions, typically in the research, faster rates of weight loss actually seem to be associated with better success. Yes. So people who intend on losing weight faster tend to keep it off better in the long term. Which is interesting. And I think it maybe comes down to kind of um having built more confidence in the process by losing it a bit faster rather than shooting for slower and then not losing that much weight, etc. Like sometimes intentionally aiming for faster weights of weight loss can be helpful for some. The other thing I was gonna mention on the pace of weight loss, which I can't remember anymore, so we'll move past it, is let's focus on food choices now.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:02

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:03

Because I forgot the second thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:05

Fair enough. Really good point though. And I was reading in an article by uh Dan and Lennon from Singh Nutrition on exactly that, that for some people, going a bit faster might be much more rewarding and lead to better long-term success. Um, but obviously, yeah, TNCs apply. So food choices. Now, when you're in a deficit, this is a trap we've all fallen into, some of us more than others, where you think, okay, gotta be in a deficit, hit my protein, I'm gonna have my shakes, I'm gonna, you know, fit foods that I enjoy in my calories. So, you know, foods that are maybe a bit, you know, tastier, lower in volume, uh, just because I don't want to miss those. And then all of a sudden, you end up being in a state where you're starving because you're not eating a ton of food, um, but you're ticking the boxes that you need to tick. But then all of a sudden, the diet is now an uphill battle. So when it comes to food choices, the top recommendation is doing your best to eat mostly whole foods, minimally processed foods, and paying a lot of attention to uh volume, foods that are very high in volume and very low in calories. And you are an expert in sports science, muscle lengths, also food volume. Hit us with your best foods.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:25

So I'll give you a good food and I'll illustrate how it fulfills four criteria for being satiated. Oh no. Salads. You buy them at the store, all you need is a vinaigrette or dressing of some sort. Obviously, don't go crazy with a dressing to the point that it doesn't become calorie efficient anymore. But salads can be great in terms of just plug and play. Yeah. The reason they're beneficial for keeping you full is one, they're not that tasty. Foods that are tastier are easier to overeat. And when you eat a tasty food versus a less tasty food, you will actually feel less full with the same calories from the less from the tastier food. Partly because your brain goes, oh, I want more of this, and partly oftentimes because it also comes along with other things. Specifically, tastier foods typically have less fiber. Fiber is one thing that can satiate you. So it actually helps your stomach feel fuller or whatever. Another thing is density. So, like you mentioned, volume. Foods that have a lower calorie density, aka you get more volume per calorie. So you get more bites per calorie consumed, tend to make you fuller. It takes up more space in your stomach, whatever it is, it tends to help. The final factor is toothsomeness. In general, having juices, for example, like orange juice or having or full sugar drinks like coke or Sprite or whatever. Those won't fill you up much. That same composition of food when made solid with a bit more texture to it will make you fuller compared to that. So in general, viscous or solid foods will make you fuller than liquid foods. Foods with lower calorie density will make you fuller than foods with higher calorie density, which tends to go hand in hand with more processed foods as well. Foods with higher fiber content tend to make you fuller as well compared to foods that have no fiber. And finally, more palatable foods, tastier foods, actually make you feel less full. So that kind of means that your dieties look pretty boring in the way most people think about it when it comes to making you full. So what I do, I'll give you a few examples. Salad with dressing. Oftentimes I'll add other vegetables like cherry tomatoes or uh dried fruit or any other number of things like pickled onions, whatever it might be. Then I also had a smoothie every night, which is about 250 grams or like half a pound almost of frozen fruit, thrown into a blender with some sweetener, water, and creatine, and there's my creature for the day as well. Then any vegetable side dishes that you can make with relatively normal fat. Like oftentimes oven roasting something with like a tablespoon or two of oil can actually be pretty filling and relatively long calories. Like a tablespoon of oil is about 135 calories, roughly. So if you're doing like a whole tray of vegetables with two tablespoons of oil, yeah, you're getting 270 calories of oil. But at the same time, the vegetables are so low in calories, they're getting a lot of fiber, a lot of volume, and relatively truthsome texture in little time. So say those are kind of the things I go tend to go to for satiric.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:25

Yeah. And the the big hag that you forgot to mention that you're a huge fan of is uh fat-free yogurt.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:31

That is true. Uh this one has a lot of volume. It's mostly protein, so it's great if you're trying to get that protein intake in as well. It's extremely convenient. Yeah. I literally take typically once or twice a day, about a pound of fat-free yogurt or 500 grams. Add some sweetener, add some lemon juice or cinnamon, depending on. If I'm trying to go higher in calories, which is rare, I'll add honey. So honey and sweetener. So obviously adding enough honey to make it palatable on its own would be like a lot of honey, a lot of calories. And some sweetener and some honey kind of gives you the best of both worlds. Not too many calories and still that classic Greek yogurt and honey combination. Shout out combination.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:12

And it's uh it's a good example, yogurt specifically. Like if you were to go for a protein shake where you did two scoops of whey with some milk, you are looking at roughly 200 to 300 calories, depending on the milk and the whey. Uh half a kilo or a pound of low-fat Greek yogurt is around 240 calories. Slightly less protein than the two scoops of whey with the milk, or maybe even the side.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:35

50 grams of protein typically in five minutes.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:38

You add some berries in there, and there you go. You are eating for a while versus just literally chugging a shake and you're getting top protein, obviously fruits, great for your health, uh, some fiber. Like those small changes can make a big difference in a calorie deficit, um, especially if you're new to it. We've all fallen in that trap where, yep, we're consuming the calories, hitting the protein, but starving for the entire day. However, at that point, on this point, it's very important to set your expectations when you're in a fat loss diet that at some point you will be hungry. And I see that with clients a lot where, you know, you can implement all the tips and tricks, everything you literally just said, but there will come a point where you just have to push through hunger and be like, okay, I am hungry now. It's fine, it's not the end of the world. And if anything, you can placebo it and be like, do the pep talk and go, like, okay, I'm hungry because I'm in a deficit, it's working, and that's one way to get through it. So, mindset and like although it may not be as evidence-based as uh as some of the things we have talked about, it does play a big role. But we'll get to that um either on an uh another episode or maybe slightly later. Now, you are in your deficit, you're lifting weights, you are doing some cardio, and briefly touching on those, when it comes to resistance training and fat loss, the recommendations, IMO shouldn't change too much from when you're looking to increase muscle growth. And if you want to have a look at episode one where we touch on training volume, obviously, when it comes to fat loss and improving your body composition, the main thing is being consistent with resistance training and doing at least minimum effective dose. But there's no inherent reason to massively change things. If you're feeling fine and recovering fine, which you will likely be, um, keep things as they are and maybe slightly adjust if you do find that um training is becoming super hard.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:37

That's exactly how I would approach it. Specifically, the only thing that really happens in a deficit versus a surplus is that your body shifts a bit more towards catabolism as opposed to anabolism. So it becomes harder to gain muscle and you get more likely to lose muscle, all us being equal. It may also make your recovery slightly worse, but I think that effect is often oversold. And oftentimes this is reported more so by people who are in extreme deficits or doing a ton of cardio. Cardio tends to be something that can maybe boost flight loss a little bit in certain circumstances, but can also fatigue you a lot more if you're doing a lot of it, especially for lower body training. So my recommendation would be keep your training mostly the same. Assume you might recover a tiny bit worse, but your training should fundamentally stay the same. Because when evaluating whether to add volume, for example, as per episode one, you would be looking at performance in the gym. And that'll be impacted by your deficit as well. So that's kind of already encompassed by your performance assessment. So keep your training the same. That's exactly what MIDAP does as well. Our trading app, it literally only accounts for your deficit in the sense of you might recover a tiny bit worse at our baseline assessment. When we ask you about your body, what you're doing, your preferences, your schedule, all that stuff, we ask you if you're bulking, maintaining, or cutting. The only thing that really does is tell us, okay, at face value, as a person, because you're cutting, do we think you're gonna recover a bit better or worse? If you're bulking versus cutting. That's all we really do. So yeah, if you wanna get an effective training routine without really overthinking it, mylap.com and use code the muscle lab.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:09

Indeed. And just for a bit of an anecdote to so that, like obviously, you've competed before. I'm uh at the moment um pushing fat loss even further than just being very lean. And it's the one thing I'm actively doing is not no C Boeing training, keeping things the same. Training sessions are still amazing, even on days where I'm slightly a bit uh hungrier or a bit more tired. Uh, training volume is still high, still trading maybe five or even up to six times every week. Don't lose your minds. And if you need to, you know, cut a set here and there, do so. But keep things the same. As far as cardio goes, keep cardio and physical activity in general for health mainly. That's your that should be your main goal. If you're just doing steps, being roughly at 10,000, 10 to 12,000 steps per day. Really good, easy way to not overthink things, even if you're slightly below that on Sundays, that's totally fine. But as a general rule of thumb, 300 to 600 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity per week that includes steps and lifting, or 150 to 300 minutes of vigorous um exercise, which would be higher intensity cardio. But if you're lifting and walking, you're covered. Focus on your deficit, do your lifting, and um, there's nothing more than I would recommend physical activity-wise.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:32

I think that's a good recommendation. One other thing people tend to wonder about is when to adjust the deficit. So, what are your recommendations or thoughts there?

SPEAKER_01 1:17:40

For sure. Um, I think it's it's it's first important to mention, okay, how do you track whether the deficit is working and how it's working, and then making that call. So, as you mentioned, daily weigh-ins, looking at your average weight every week and then comparing those averages, even every two weeks, is gonna be one way that you can see whether things are going in the right direction. However, there are cases where you, especially if you're you know new to the gym or you have plenty of body fat and you are actually recomping, where the scale doesn't move as much or as fast as you'd expect it to. At the same time, and that's a big revelation once you start tracking your body weight, you'll see a lot of fluctuation, which is why the average is important. Um, that's where circumference measurements, looking at your waistline, um, looking at perhaps your arms, your thighs, and then triangular, looking at waist circumference or circumference measurements in general, your body weight and how things are feeling overall. Um, obviously the mirror, too. That's a good way to know if things are going uh going well. Now, let's say that you have stopped losing weight and you are not seeing any circumference measurements. The first thing that you need to do is to verify that you're actually counting calories right and that you're not, you know, guesstimating or forgetting to track things here and there. Once you establish that you are indeed counting calories right, and after a period of, let's say, three to four weeks, nothing is moving in the right direction, that's where it may be useful to reduce calories by roughly two to three hundred, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:19

Yeah, I think that's all I think the point about making sure you're tracking everything correctly. Yes. Can't be overstated. Indeed. Some of the estimates in the research of people claiming they can't lose weight on certain calories and then measuring how many calories they actually consume oftentimes find they're overconsuming calories by 500 to 1,000 or more versus what they thought they were. So being methodical and precise to a T in your tracking, if you're struggling to lose fat, can be really helpful. Making sure that you're consistent in tracking before you assume, oh, I have a slow metabolism is helpful. Oftentimes as a coach, I have to have a conversation with clients where they're not losing fat and their calories are already countable. And you kind of have to say, Okay, look, are you sure you're tracking everything correct? Because I don't want to create as a coach and as a lifter, I don't want to create a mentality where you believe you have a slow metabolism. Yep. And you believe you need 1200 calories to lose fat. Because oftentimes that's one thing I think a lot of diet apps kind of lead people to think. Adaptive diet apps, where the diet will be like, oh, you're not losing weight, let's drop calories by another couple hundred. And they keep doing that week upon week. And eventually you get to twelve hundred calories or a thousand calories. And people think, oh, this app isn't reasonable. And without full context of is this person actually tracking everything? That can be quite off-putting as someone who's, you know, losing weight and trying to get a handle on nutrition. So I'd say make sure you're tracking everything because more often than not, when your calories need to get really low, it's not your metabolism. It's you're not tracking properly.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:58

Yep. I'd say nine out of ten times. And I've seen that with family members as well. And it's the worst thing that you can do, and that that's what I see um most times where people paint a narrative, they keep repeating that the narrative is either I tried to lose weight and I couldn't, or I'm eating uh X amount of calories and I'm not losing weight. And most times it's just a matter of bad tracking or not weighing themselves on a daily basis, and you know, plus bad tracking. So it's like, oh, weighed myself last week on Monday, then randomly weighed myself on Tuesday next week. My weight actually slightly increased. Okay, the deficit is not working, I'm hungry, must be something wrong with me. I'm telling myself that I tried and I didn't do it. When in reality, you didn't really try with that right approach. Um, great. Now, a thing that often comes up, and it's with sad with a great deal of sadness that we have to report. Uh, unfortunately, it's another game changer, is the topic of refeeds, cheat days, cheat meals, um, and diet breaks. But few definitions. Cheat day is the traditional bodybuilding day where you go completely yolo and you just eat whatever inside the rock, cheat day, lots of junk food, lots of very high-calorie foods in an attempt to refill glycogen stores and boost your metabolism because you're all of a sudden consuming a bunch of calories. Overall, unfortunately, that is one, not going to be positive from a body composition standpoint, because you're essentially putting yourself in a very big surplus, which can undo even your weekly deficit. In some cases, if you go absolutely ham even a bi-weekly deficit, essentially wiping out all the hard work you've done. Uh, and let me be clear, I'm not talking about a day of relaxed eating where you go to a restaurant with your family. I'm talking about intentionally eating as much junk or junk food or as much food as you possibly can. Um, refeeds are days where you eat roughly at maintenance calories or slightly above in an attempt to refuel uh glycogen. And diet breaks are periods where you're actively not dieting and eating and maintenance. When it comes to the literature, refeeds and diet breaks seem to be a good tool where, yes, they won't boost your metabolism meaningfully, they might help with intuition and allow you to actually take a break, as the name implies, from your diet and potentially help with long-term success, but they won't do anything magical as far as fat loss is concerned. So, from a psychological standpoint, if you do find that you do need the occasional day where you eat at maintenance and you are then able, as a result of that, to stick to your diet for longer, implementing a diet break or a refeed, um, depending on your situation, is a good idea. However, I wouldn't necessarily say that it should be a default approach for everyone and that you should most likely have a refeed every X amount of weeks, no matter what.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:04

So it's more of a tool and toolbox exactly applied to your situation, depending on your needs, rather than something that the average person needs to do.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:12

Yes. I I I'd love to sit here and tell you otherwise, um, as somebody who's actively dieting at the moment, but uh the the evidence is simply not there. And with cheat days specifically, if we look at the psychological, uh the potential psychological side effects, they can reinforce bad habits, a bad relationship with food, and potentially binge eating disorder. Obviously, we're not registered dietitians, uh, legal disclaimers on the screen and in your ears. Um, but yeah, the idea of going absolutely ham on one specific day as uh in an attempt to cheat on your diet is not building the right relationship. Because eventually, and that's something we need to very slightly touch on here before we move into the verdict part of the podcast, is that after the deficit comes the real, uh, the real game of maintaining your weight, exiting the deficit, getting back to maintain scholars, and essentially having more or less the same diet with either more of the foods that you're already consuming, so non-processed foods, high protein, etc. Um, and not necessarily going, okay, I'm done with a diet, now back to eating whatever, and now I'm regaining all my weight.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:26

Yeah, let's move into the verdict.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:29

Awesome. Okay, so calorie deficit number one, you have to eat less to lose weight. Roughly 0.5 to 1% of uh your body weight per week as a weight loss rate. Scale protein to your priorities, so be roughly between two to three grams, um, depending on how lean you are and how much you care about, doing everything in your power to maintain or build muscle. Per kilo body weight. Per kilo bodyweight, yes, correct. Um, use cardio for health, not to drive your calorie deficit. 10,000 steps, good um, good point, a good goal to aim for in terms of overall steps. Lift weights every week, super important for muscle maintenance um and potentially gain. And if you want somebody else to do that for you, mydap.com, check out our app. If you want myload to do it for you, wolfcoaching.com.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:26

But if you want Dr.Path to do it for you, drpath.com, all your coaching needs, nice myda.com if you want to keep it simple and have a training approach that's effective and scientific. But if you want an even more customized approach, check us out.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:40

Check us out, indeed. And as far as the lab report goes, a very brief mention of a very cool study, which I'll let you do the talking on. Stretch supersets.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:50

Yeah, so stretch supersets are a new technique that I think gained popularity these past few years. Not true who coined it, might have been me, might have been someone else. It's you. Maybe it is. Um basically it's when you take a set to full range of motion failure. And when you can't do another rep with good technique than a full range of motion, you do partial reps in the stretch positions. Now, this technique we had looked at twice before. Once we compared stretch supersets in the caferies to simply ending a set of failure. So either with one leg, participants ended the set when they couldn't do another full rep, or with the other leg they did partials after that point in the stretch. And we saw around 40% low growth with that stretch superset approach. The second study we conducted compared stretch supersets to straight up just doing partials in the stretch for the whole set. And in this study, we observe the same, actually, we observe no growth with lengthy partials or stretch partials compared to stretch supersets. So these two studies kind of told us all right, well, it seems to be a benefit to stretch supersets. Maybe it's a stretch, maybe it's going past failure, maybe it's the additional reps. So this This recent study that we're talking about in the lab report here is by Golian colleagues. Where they wanted to see all right, stretch supersets are more efficient. They give you more stimulus per set. But what if we did more sets of normal calf raises to compensate for the additional reps you get? So they compared four to six sets of traditional calf raises, just a failure, to two to three sets of stretch supersets for the same number of total reps. And they saw the same growth with both approaches, suggesting that per set, stretch supersets in a shortened biased movement, the calf raise is hardest in the top position, can give you around twice the stimulus. Now, our earlier study found around 40% more growth per set, like if doing the same number of sets. So that estimate of around like 40% more growth to maybe twice the growth per set seems to be like a rough ballpark for the time being. Those are only three studies, so that effect estimate can change a lot in the future. But at the very least, we can say one thing. Stretch supersets on a movement that is hardest in that contracted position seem to give you more stimulus per set. So for people who are time constrained, they don't have hours and hours to train every single day. Taking that approach to most movements, and especially movements that are hardest in the peak contraction, can give you more muscle growth without spending any more time in the gym. So yeah, that's the most recent study I wanted to cover for the lab report.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:19

You're seeing it here, the stretch, or you're hearing it here, the stretch is not dead. More research on the stretch, incoming Milo Wolf, King of the Stretch, Muscle Lab Podcast, myadab.com. Thank you for tuning in, and we'll see you guys next time. Peace. We've got to standardize the outro. Peace.