Your Secret Weapon for Fat Loss is NOT a Calorie Deficit or Macros | Ep 314 - Wits & Weights | Fat Loss, Nutrition, & Strength Training for Lifters

Episode Transcript
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Philip Pape (00:01):
You've been told that fat loss is made in the
kitchen, with a calorie deficitcombined with strength training
to hold on to your muscle.
But what if that's completelybackward?
What if building muscle mustcome first in your
transformation journey if it'sreally going to work?
Your metabolism, your insulinsensitivity, your hunger signals
and, yes, your ability to shedstubborn fat is tied into how

(00:23):
much muscle you have, and mostfit pros aren't going to tell
you this because it challengesthe industry's eat less, move
more mantra and what they'retrying to push, which is
generally weight loss.
Today's episode reveals whystrength training creates the
metabolic engine that makes fatloss almost effortless by
comparison and gives you aframework to finally get those

(00:43):
lasting results.
Welcome to Wits and Weights,the show that helps you build a
strong, healthy physique usingevidence, engineering and

(01:04):
efficiency.
I'm your host, philip Pape, andtoday's episode is something
special because I recently hadthe opportunity to be
interviewed on the Be Radpodcast with Brad Kearns, former
world-ranked professionaltriathlete, guinness World
Record holder and New York Timesbestselling author.
And this is around the time.
I read his book, co-writtenwith Mark Sisson, called Born to

(01:25):
Walk, and he had me on his showbecause we wanted to tackle one
of the most persistentmisconceptions or myths in
fitness the idea that calorierestriction and diet should be
your first priority for fat loss, or indeed that quote unquote
fat loss itself should be thefirst thing you do.
Instead, we explored whybuilding muscle through strength

(01:46):
training is the foundation uponwhich all successful body
transformations are built.
So why wait?
This discussion alignsperfectly with what I've been
teaching for years on this showthat a muscle-centric approach
creates the metabolic conditionsfor easier fat loss.
Approach creates the metabolicconditions for easier fat loss,

(02:08):
for better health, for long-termsustainability.
Rather than create anotherentirely new episode on this
topic, I wanted to share thisconversation because I
essentially hit the juggler Isthat the term?
I went straight for the jugglerwhen it talks to the principles
that I regularly discuss anyway, and I think it's a great
encapsulation of that.
If you enjoy this episode, allI ask is go ahead and hit follow

(02:29):
on Wits and Weights if youhaven't already, and that way
you'll catch every episode whenthey come out on Mondays,
wednesdays and Fridays.
And then go ahead and followBrad's podcast Be Rad with Brad
Kearns, and I love his podcastbecause of the aspect he takes
when it comes to cardiovascularfitness and endurance,
especially from the perspectivehe comes from.
All right, so here we go.

(02:49):
Here's my conversation withBrad Kearns about why building
muscle first is your secretweapon for effective fat loss.
Philip Pape, we are here.
We are here.
Good to see you again, brad.

Brad Kearns (03:02):
I had so much fun joining you on your fabulous
podcast Wits and Weights, wherewe talked about the book Born to
Walk and a broad-based approachto functional fitness, and so I
said we got to get over toB-Rad and get in deep with the
great work you're doing overthere, especially as you
describe your, I guess,quantified and analytical

(03:22):
approach to proper fitnessprotocols.
And I've always been kind of aintuitive style athlete and not
getting deep into a regimentedapproach because I know that
doesn't work for me fromexperience.
But I also realize when I'mperforming or pursuing these
complex goals, like trying to bea sprinter in the old man's

(03:43):
division and dealing with minorinjuries and aches and pains and
things that set me back thatyou really have to be careful
and strategic with yourdispensation of energy in order
to progress with fitness.
So I thought we could get intothat background mission
statement of your podcast andthen some of the the fun things

(04:06):
that you've learned as a hostand fun topics that really have
resonated with your, yourlisteners.
How's that for an intro man?

yeah, man, that's a great intro.
It's funny.
I just heard you talking onyour show about um you were
talking to one of the greatestrunners of all time and how she
has an intuitive approach.
And I get these comments allthe time from folks that say,
well, I'm not a data person, I'mnot um, I'm not an engineer, I
don't think that way.
And yet I've talked to expertswho are professional

(04:34):
bodybuilders, competitivebodybuilders, who had one point
in their life where they said,look, I need to buckle down and
use some sort of tracking ormeasurement just to know where I
am and to calibrate where I amfirst, and build that skill and
build that intuition, and then,at some point in their lives,
they have that level ofintuition that they don't need
to do it anymore.
So I hear what you're saying,man.
I could go both directions andthe spectrum is wide and I'm all

(04:58):
about flexibility.
So, yeah, let's get into it.

Yeah, you were talking about Shelby Houlihan,
the American record holder atmiddle Distance, who just came
back from a four-year layoff,and I was really blown away
about how she mentioned thatintuitive approach and just
getting out the door and runningat whatever pace she felt like.
And so here's like one of thefastest female runners in the
world who, if you were trainingwith her, you'd be like how fast

(05:24):
are we going today?
I don't know, we'll see.
And it was really a profoundinsight.
But at the same time, she'sworking with the greatest
coaches on the planet who have avery, very refined and
sophisticated approach.
I had Grant Fisher's coach on myshow, michael Scannell, old
friend of mine, who I used torace with in a professional
duathlon, and he reported howthey sat down in November and

(05:46):
plotted out his path to theParis Olympics and where he had
the magnificent performance ofwinning two bronze medals in
both the long distance events of5,000 and 10,000.
But he had every workoutplanned from November to August
4th for the first race andAugust 9th for the second race.
And that was fascinating and hesaid he was so structured and

(06:08):
so focused that he hit basicallyevery single workout.
So that's the sign of a reallywell-informed training program
If you can lock in and performevery workout as desired.
But of course, for the averagerecreational enthusiast that's
listening to wits and weights ortrying to get out there and
stay fit and as well as coachsoccer and perform in the in the
corporate setting, uh, that'swhen we have to.

(06:30):
We're forced to have a morefluid approach, but we still
might benefit from thatfoundation of structure and
quantification yeah, I thinkthere's a place for guardrails.

while being simplified and also the the
intuitive aspect in terms of,let's say, your biofeedback, how
your sleep is, your stress,your digestion, your hunger,
those things can be quantified,even though they're subjective,
and so you're kind of meldingthe two together just to give
yourself an idea of where theheck you're landing right now,
to even make a decision from andhave informed data.

What kind of stuff is important, like if someone
came in as a new client who'sproclaimed a desire to get fit
and they're doing a little bitof this and that, but now they
want to get into a program.

Yes, I help with clients with strength training,
body composition, fat loss, andit's funny because we do.
We have a lot of the sameapproach when it comes to
getting stress off of the bodythrough potentially reducing the
amount of cardio and, uh, howmuch you're working out and also
training in a way that givesyou more recovery.
Especially as we age, peoplecomplain about, you know, their

(07:35):
joints, um, and injuries andhealth issues, and they're
stressed because of life andtheir family.
They have families, like yousaid, because of life, and they
are family.
They have families, like yousaid, gen pop, we have, you know
, two jobs or running a businessand parents, and so, um, when
we start, I I just like to spendtwo months baselining what
you're doing and giving you yourown self-awareness of how much

(07:57):
you're eating, what you'reeating, the composition of the
food, some of the micronutrientsand the fiber, um, how the
movement and the training you'redoing affects your recovery,
because I don't want to say, hey, here's the best program for
you on day one if I don't evenknow you yet.
I do an intake but I don'treally know.
I want to see how yourexpenditure and your metabolism
responds to the things you'redoing.
I want to understand how yourhunger and your sleep responds,

(08:20):
because after two months you maybe in a great position to build
muscle rather than try to dietand lose fat and have the best
outcome that way.
We just don't know until wehave that initial, you know data
set.
So having a coach to guide thatuh, you know with you, it's
kind of like the analogy yousaid with these elite athletes.
Even a gen pop person can havethat person in their corner and
take off some of the mentalstress and even emotional stress

(08:42):
, right when they can be theperson that you can unload to,
and all you got to do is justenter the numbers and your coach
can kind of help you understandwhat the numbers mean and then
you can make decisions fromthere.

What is a gen pop person?

Oh, what do you mean Like general population?

I just oh gen pop Okay, I thought you were going
to say like gen X, gen Y and genpop, like for old old mans or
whatever.
Yeah.

Okay, gotcha General population Is dropping
excess body fat, the preeminentgoal that you see the intent is
the person's thought when theycome to me weight loss or
building muscle and we have toreframe it, and that's one thing

(09:29):
we can get into is we reframeweight loss away from scale
weight and to body composition,metabolic health and having a
muscle-centric approach tohealth and physique.

So maybe you can go deep on that term.
What does it mean to you?

The term body composition.

Muscle-centric approach oh, muscle-centric
approach?

Oh, muscle-centric approach, yeah, so you know, we
think I guess we talk aboutbeing over fat or obesity being
a concern in society and forsure it is, I'm not going to
deny that, and there are a lotof extrinsic factors,
environmental factors behindthat.
But what I find is people areattempting to lose weight or
lose fat as the predominant waythat they get quote unquote
healthy, kind of like they.

(10:06):
Many people think running orcardio is the predominant way to
get healthy or lose fat.
We know that's not the case.

Burning calories.

Yeah, yeah, burning calories.
And until you've spent sometime understanding how to train
properly to add some strengthand muscle to your frame, you
can't maximize the health thatyou're going for, even if it is
a great physique, because youhaven't built the foundation, so
you can't sculpt a pebble, isthe analogy.
I like you can sculpt a nicebig stone, but you can't sculpt

(10:35):
a pebble, so you've got to buildthat at some point.
If you've got excess weight tolose or excess fat to lose from
a metabolic health perspective,fine, we can get there, it's not
a big deal, but at some pointyou then have to build muscle.

It seems like someone who is succeeding
building muscle is going to shedexcess body fat in the process.

Exactly that's the secret that I don't like you
don't know what it'sexperiencing.

We gave it away.
All the other trainers arelistening, going.
Oh, I'm going to redo mybranding now.

Yeah, right, no, and that's the thing.
You can't, you don't, you can't, you can't know that until you
experience it, we can talk, talkabout it all we want on our
podcast, and I do, brad.
Like half of my episodes in thelast month are probably about
why you should gain weight, youknow, or why you should build
muscle, and it's not alwaysabout gaining weight on the

(11:28):
scale, brad right.
It is really about energy andfueling yourself and performance
mindset, rather than even aphysique or a scale mindset.
And once you're focused onperformance, all the other
things start to come in mind.
Whether you're trying to losefat or not, like you said, you
will start to lose fat.
It gets easier.
Your metabolism increasesbecause of the extra muscle mass
, the extra weight you'recarrying around, the lower
stress, the higher protein, thehigher fiber.

(11:48):
It all aligns really well.

It also seems like right now, as I am a member of
the 60 plus division I justturned 60 recently and so I'm
looking around at my peers and Ihave a lot of lifelong friends
who have had extreme or a decentor good devotion to athletics
and fitness and all that but itseems like we're now kind of

(12:12):
turning a corner, hitting a forkin the road, where the first
and foremost objective is tobuild or preserve that lean
muscle mass and muscle strengthand not so concerned primarily
with keeping the waistline down.
But I think you know the dad,bod and the busy working parent,

(12:33):
male or female, from ages 25 toage 50 or what have you, is
kind of just not eating too muchfood and keeping your pants
size the same.
But now it seems like, you know, we have an intense focus and a
desperate need to keep thatmuscle on, to the extent that we
might even, you know, rethinksome of these strategies that

(12:55):
maybe have been successful tomanage caloric intake.

Yeah, are you familiar with Jonathan Sullivan?
Some people call him Sully orDr Sully.
He wrote the barbellprescription and he uses a term
called the athlete of aging, tothat exact concept.
If we think of life as not aninevitable decline but really an
athletic pursuit where we wantto thrive as a human and again,

(13:20):
this is why I resonate with yourmessage so hard, is that that's
what we want.
When I'm 95, I still want to bedeadlifting, like I want to die
doing a deadlift.
You know what I mean, likewhatever that means to you.
And it hits really close to homefor me, brad, because I've had
two situations just in the lasttwo weeks with family members
one who passed away after beingin a nursing home for a number

(13:43):
of years and declining veryquickly because he just wasn't
mobile.
He could have been but he kindof, I'll say, gave up on life.
I hate to say it that way, butit was.
It was sad, you know, and hewas in a wheelchair and then the
health issues accelerated, um,because of it.
And then another family memberwho went to the hospital with
heart issues.
And it's, it's the same storywe've heard so many times, the

(14:04):
predominant story we hear witholder folks of polypharmacy
right Taking so many medicationson top of each other, of heart
conditions, of metabolic disease, type 2 diabetes, all of these
age-related diseases, even somecancers, could all be prevented
with a little extra muscle mass,a little more movement and just
watching what you eat andreally enjoying the process too.

So, when you have an intake or a thousand of them,
what are the prevailing themesLike?
What do you think is thebiggest and most egregious
offense to healthy living andlongevity?

That's a good one.
The most egregious offense.

So is it the junk food diet or is it the, uh, you
know, sedentary baseline dailypattern, that kind of thing?

Yeah, I mean, I guess the red flags are going to
depend on the person, but itgenerally is the lack of
training or training properly.
So we're talking liftingweights and I know there's kind
of this triumvirate, um and Iknow you talk about as well of
you know lifting heavy thingsand then moving a lot, and then
some sort of explosiveness,right, whether it's the

(15:15):
sprinting or the player, whathave you?
Um, people are not training andso no matter what they do with
their diet, it's not going tomatter, because they're going to
lose muscle.
That's my perspective.
So when someone comes to me andsays I want to fix my diet, I
don't care about lifting weightsright now, I'm like, let's flip
that around.
Let's flip that around.
If I can get you in the gym,it's going to cascade to your

(15:37):
desire to fuel what you're doingin the gym, to want to eat
healthier.
You're going to have betterregulated hunger signals year.
You're going to have betterregulated hunger signals.
You're going to have greaterinsulin sensitivity, all the
other things that lead to theeating side becoming much easier
.
And guess what?
You'll have a little moreresilience, even if your diet
isn't so great, like at least tostart, until we start to
optimize it going forward.

Yeah, I think what you just said is hugely
underrated.
Like people do not make thatconnection, they you know the
diet industry is massive and allthe programming and things
we've heard our whole life towhere you know you just got to
manage your portion sizes andfast a little bit or try keto or
do this or do that.
But then maybe like describe inmore detail how going and

(16:18):
hoisting some weight around isgoing to optimize your dietary
habits.

Yeah, yeah, this is .
This is a great topic, I mean,I think so.
There's multiple reasons for it.
The big one is, I think, thehormones and the insulin
sensitivity from lifting weights, which is extremely underrated
because we know that insulinemiayou know the term.

Hyperinsulinemia is chronically excessive
production of insulin.

Yes, yes yes, always trying to suck out the
technical terms which is relatedto cortisol, which is related
to the lack of muscle mass, isextremely important because
muscle is a thing for glucose,right.
So the more muscle mass you have, the better you can utilize the
carbs that you're eating.
And I always talk about carbsin the context of how sedentary
you are, because you can'tsimplify carbs being good or bad

(17:08):
.
Right, you can't just say, well, carbs are bad.
Well, if you're sedentary forsitting on the couch all day,
the more carbs you eat, sure,it's just going to go to fat
storage it really any excess ofcalories are, but carbs
especially right.
And there's inflammation and etcetera.
And quite the opposite happenswhen your strength training is
that your body wants to suckthose carbs up, both the ATP and

(17:29):
then the glycolytic processthat comes after that from long
training sessions, from havingthe muscle mass.
It's just going to suck it uplike a sponge.
That's sort of the way I liketo say it.
And so you need those carbs.
You want those carbs.
Where was I going with this Inthat, from a metabolic and
insulin perspective?
For food, it means that you canhave a very flexible diet, both

(17:53):
in terms of macronutrients andcalories.
You can be fueled up, you caneat more food and be living the
vast majority of your year, notdieting.
That's what I wanted you to getto is where you're almost never
dieting, isn't that great.

I mean, I hope people do.
You really get this insightdeeply?
You powered through that with agreat explanation and the sync
concept.
So I want people to fullyunderstand.
When you have a lot of musclemass on your body or you're
stimulating the muscles in aworkout, the, the glucose is

(18:26):
going into the muscle to refueland replenish.
That's insulin's job is torestore energy into storage
depots we know about how it doesthat into the fat stores, but
it's also doing that to help,you know, replenish and recover
your muscles.
Compare and contrast to someonewho's sitting around.
What happens to that glucose?

(18:47):
Well, in the case of the trendsof modern lifestyle in America
and across the world, you'regonna get type two diabetes over
years and decades because theglucose just flows around in
your bloodstream.
Insulin is produced, thatmechanism gets exhausted.
That's that hyperinsulinemia,and then you have elevated

(19:07):
glucose and elevated insulin andthat's the disease pattern of
life.
So it's sort of you know, thereason that going and lifting
weights is important is so youdon't get diabetes.

In a nutshell, and, in the short term, take
advantage of the fact that it,you know it suppresses those
postprandial glucose spikes,blood spikes, which then affect
your hunger signals.
You have much better regulatedsatiety.
All this GLP-1 talk about theweight loss drugs.
Well, your body has thatnaturally and strength training
can trigger it Without sideeffects.

(19:38):
Yeah, it can trigger it, whichintends to decline with age,
which is one of many reasonspeople have more and more
difficulty as they age, unlessyou're training.
So to me, lifting weights, Idon't want to say it solves
everything, but it is kind ofthe magic pill to a lot of these
issues that people have withage.
And Brad, I've had clients whoare very well muscled and they

(19:59):
need to lose some body fatbecause they're very over fat as
well.
But they have much betterhealth markers than somebody
with less muscle who'soverweight.
And that just tells yousomething right there that
there's a huge mitigating factor, that muscle mass.
That can't be underrated.

I'm kind of curious how someone gets to that point,
because if you are a fit enoughperson to carry around an
impressive amount of muscle mass, why the heck do you still have
a gut there?
And it must be just horribledietary choices that override
all these beautiful insulinsensitivity benefits of lifting

(20:35):
the weights every day.

Yeah, I mean.
There's multiple reasons.
One is intentional in thepowerlifting world, People
intentionally gain a lot ofweight to push more lifts and
get bigger numbers.

Yeah, physics yeah.

That's all it is.
Yeah, yeah, you get morecross-sectional area.
Yeah, you know what I'm saying.
The allometric scaling thatoccurs and then the absolute
numbers that scale up once yougain more weight.
And, frankly, just, some peoplenever had a great diet to begin
with, even though they liftweights.
It doesn't.
They're not mutually exclusive.
It's very possible to have apoor diet and still have been

(21:10):
able to lift and build muscleover time, as long as you have
the just net fuel in your body.
It's not efficient.
But guys come to me and they'relike hey, I've tried carnivore,
I've tried this, I've tried that.
And we we work together saylook, all you need is a good,
nutritious, nutritious, wholefood diet.
Look at your protein, look atyour fiber.
You're still going to haveplenty of calories coming in,
but we're just going to, youknow, track what's going in your

(21:31):
body and we're going toregulate that so that you can
drop some of that fat and thenget back to a nice lean state
and then you're good to go.
Um, I'm right now in a gainingphase, brad, I am.
I mean, you can see me just bytop.
It's not like I'm.

(21:51):
I'm fat, right, uh, but I dothat on a regular basis, I will
gain 20 pounds and then lose 20pounds, but with the intent to
build muscle over time.

Uh, so describe how and why you initiate these
gaining phases.

Yeah, for efficiency.
So if you gain right now theresearch based on the latest
studies and meta-analysis, whichare quite recent there've been
maybe four or five studies inthe last five years that have
given us the most of this dataGaining weight at around, let's
say, 0.3 to half a percent ofyour body weight a week for a

(22:22):
beginner or intermediate is kindof the optimal level where
you're going to gain the mostmuscle without gaining too much
fat in terms of time duration,and it's going to depend on the
individual.
So if you've done it before, youmay know your individual
numbers and they might be higheror lower.
If you kind of know that, letme tell you I have spreadsheets
for all this stuff, right, youknow we have a numbers guy where

(22:44):
you can plug in numbers andknow exactly how efficient your
muscle gaining was, so that nexttime you go in a bulk you could
either go faster or slower, um,but then you do that and now
you're talking six, nine, maybe12 months where you add a
significant amount of muscle,and we're talking multiple
pounds, right, five, 10 poundsof muscle, uh, and then you can
do a fat loss phase and then youcan effectively sustain that.

(23:05):
The alternative is doing a moreintuitive approach and kind of
maintaining your weight andbuilding muscle slowly over time
.
It's just going to take a lotlonger to add those slabs of
meat to your body.
That's all.

So are you systematically over-consuming
calories when you're in thegaining phase and as well as
doing hypertrophy style workouts?

it's exactly what it is.
Yeah, you're in an intentionalcalorie surplus.
It's not crazy, it's not adreamer bulk, as they would call
it back in the day, where powerlifters you know go in and
order you know ten cheeseburgersand like three orders of fries,
it is maybe 200 calories a daysurplus, right, something like
that for most people.

That's what everybody eats, Philip, Come on
Just naturally right.
But they're not training.
That ain't no surplus.
We're in a lifelong surplusyeah.

Yeah.
What happens, though, is ifyou're doing it consistently and
by consistently I mean becauseyou're tracking, you don't fall
too low or you'reunintentionally not in a surplus
your expenditure, yourmetabolism will tend to ramp up
quite a bit.
Hundreds of calories, like formost people.
For women, I'll tend to seeanywhere from like 100 to maybe
400 or 500 calorie increase overthe months.

(24:15):
For guys, it could be 1,000.
It could be 2,000.
It's insane.
And you're eating.
You know where you start eating.

2,600, 2,700 calories.
You might end up 4,000 or more,Like I'm up to 4000 now.
It's a lot of food, man.
It's a lot of food.
So your metabolism isincreasing as a consequence of
both eating more food and doingthese strenuous workouts.

Yes, and gaining more weight?
Right, Because you're carryingaround more your BMR is higher.
And probably metabolicadaptation, that it's like
opposite metabolic adaptation,where your body is just so
flooded with energy it tries tobe as inefficient as possible in
burning calories.

How so.

Kind of the opposite of how.
So what do you mean?
How so?

I mean you're over-consuming calories.

So what is the adaptation that's occurring
where the body's trying to yeah,I mean, I believe it's just
your body is not trying to hoardcalories like it would during a
fat loss phase, when, I mean atthe mitochondrial level, you're
even conserving energy.
The hormones get downregulated.
I think it's just the oppositeof that, right?
So I don't know to what extentthat's the case.

(25:24):
I think it's just the oppositeof that.
So I don't know to what extentthat's the case.
I don't think we have sciencethat says it's.

These are the exact components.
Yeah, it's a fascinating,fascinating topic.
Well, you know, it happens andthe science is uh, what your
scale says?
Uh, three months later, becausetheoretically, you would gain
um way more than you did if youjust counted calories and had
the same lower metabolic rate,right?

Right, exactly that's where you would hit
plateaus if you weren't trackingthat and staying on top of it.
You basically have toover-consume by more each week
as your body is ramping up.

It's the opposite, uh, the traditional approach to
uh fat loss, where you'relowering calories, lowering
calories and a lot of times uh,that doesn't work so well, as we
know.

Exactly.
I'll say it's not a symmetricalproblem.
The fat loss side of theequation has lots more
detrimental potential whenyou're chasing down into a
deficit, because now getting tozero means you starve to death.
Going the other way is a bit ofa different situation.
It's more of you're maybetrying to stuff yourself and I

(26:33):
don't like to put it that way,because if somebody gets to that
point, we need to talk andfigure something out that is
more sustainable.
But it's not a symmetricalproblem, if that makes sense.

Well, also, what's interesting is, I assume you're
choosing exclusively healthful,high satiety, high
nutrient-dense foods, and soit's not the cheeseburger and
the milkshake diet and therefore, like you say, it's a ton of
calories.
It feels like you're a chore toeat that much food because you

(27:05):
still have optimal appetite andsatiety signals, but you're
overriding them in order to addsome more muscle.

Yeah, that is actually a big challenge is when
you have that high volume foodand you're trying to gain weight
.
Now, if we think of whole foods, there are calorie dense whole
foods right Like nuts.
So that is where you start toincorporate more nutritious
foods that are also caloriedense.
Liquids like a smoothie, yeahpre-digested things like that,

(27:34):
and you know what.
For flexibility, though, I dothink it's okay to have maybe
five, 10% of your diet.
Just I don't want to say freefor all, but it's there for some
flexibility.
I know we may not be on the100% same page there, but in my
view is, when people restrictcompletely, they tend to binge,
they tend to go the otherdirection and, honestly, when

(27:56):
you have everything else dialedin, you're, you're.
You're pretty good from thatperspective.
The other thing, what'sinteresting you mentioned hunger
.
Your hunger signals regulateand then what I find happens is
you're really good at tellingwhether your body needs more
calories before you know it,like before the data tells you,
because you can actually gethungry in a gaining phase.
If you're starting to fallbehind your metabolism, I'll

(28:18):
have clients say why am I hungry?
I'm eating 3,500 calories.
I'm always eating 20.
I'm like because your body ishungry.

Yeah, that's fascinating, even though you're
eating a lot of calories, yeah.
Yeah, and you're turning upthese important dials.
I've talked about this a lot onmy podcast referencing the work
of Dr Herman Ponser, author ofBurn, and talking to Jay Feldman
four times the Energy Balancepodcast, where he has this
bioenergetic model of healthwhere the more you consume in
nutritious foods I'm talkingexclusively about that, not

(28:50):
shoveling junk down your throatbut when you consume an optimal
or even, in your case, like anaggressive amount of calories,
you're going to turn up thedials of reproduction repair,
growth and locomotion.
I wonder if you experiencecertain symptoms like you're a
little warmer or you're morefidgety at your work desk
because your knee's tapping,because you have so much energy
and so much energy to burn.

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Yeah, that's a really good one.
You definitely get hotter.
I hear that all the really goodone.
You definitely get hotter.
I hear that all the time.
It's like you get hotter.
And so for women who are inperipost menopause and they have
hot flashes already it's kindof an interesting one, although
some of those symptoms getmitigated when they're actually
building muscle.
Just ladies who are listening,just so you know it's kind of
interesting.
But yeah, the fidgeting isanother one.
That definitely explains whyyour metabolism takes off like a

(31:17):
rocket, because everythingstacks on top of itself.
You actually move moreunconsciously, and this leads to
the joke about powerlifterstrying to do as little as
possible when they're notlifting weights so that they
don't have to eat even more.
Right, it's kind of a joke.
Right, we want to be active, wewant to be walking.
It's great for a joke.
Right, we want to be active, wewant to be walking, it's great

(31:38):
for recovery, etc.
But there is a long-time jokeabout powerlifters just like
acting like sloths between theirlifting sessions.

Well, what's really interesting about that is now
emerging research in theendurance athletic world,
especially with these Norwegiantriathletes who are coached by
Olaf Alexander Boo triathleteswho coached by Olaf Alexander
Boo, a scientist with ascientific approach and we're
now realizing that theconsumption of calories as many

(32:04):
as possible is fueling a moreambitious training regimen than
we've ever seen, whereby theseguys can go faster, for longer
and train harder than anytriathlete from back in
historical times.
And it's really fascinating tome because I felt like I stuffed
my face every day for thosenine years of training and
traveling on the professionaltriathlon circuit and we always

(32:26):
had to have food around us and Itraveled with a bag of food,
but it was the only way we couldsustain a really ambitious
training regimen.
And we also learned from likeold time bodybuilding culture
that the limiting factor for MrUniverse to not have even bigger
muscles, or Arnold in the moviePumping Iron, the limiting

(32:46):
factor was not that theycouldn't train another hour a
day and go from five hours a dayto six hours a day.
The limiting factor was theability to digest and assimilate
calories, and your stomach willexplode if you go over 7,000
calories every day for sixmonths time requiring you to
down-regulate your training.
But somehow the triathletes whoare training eight hours a day

(33:09):
now they're inhaling so muchfood, not only in real life but
during exercise, that they'reable to go really fast and be in
the carbohydrate burning heartrates, rather than this huge
emphasis we've always had atendurance of, like you wanna be
a good fat burner and you wannalower your heart rate, so you're
burning emphasizing fat burningduring your workouts and you're
not getting tired.

(33:29):
So it's kind of like flippingit on its ear to say eat more,
train harder, get fitter, buildmore muscle, live longer.

Yeah, exactly, and I didn't know if that's always a
good thing, but in general, ifyou're doing it right and you
structure your recovery, wellyou can avoid, because what I
also see is if you go too hard,then now you potentially have
joint and tendon issues,especially for those
bodybuilders where they'realmost outpacing their own

(34:00):
ability to with their connectivetissue to support what they're
doing.
Of course, that's whereenhanced and steroids come into
play too for some of those Um,but that's another great point
about why we we become this hugefurnace is that you can train
harder in an almost exponentialway when you're highly fueled,
thus accelerating the ability tobuild that muscle.
Maybe that's why it's superefficient to be in a calorie

(34:22):
surplus.

You know that kind of ramp up of your.

I see it myself as well, and one of the hardest
things is to pull back from thatwhen you need to, when you're
trying to like peak out on yourstrength, when you're trying to
peak out on your strength andyou actually want to reduce the
volume and actually hit maxloads, it feels like you're not
working out that much, so you'realmost, you almost like to have
to hold back, like just today Ididn't do accessory work in my

(34:46):
training because I'm in a finalthree week phase where I'm going
to peak out on week four on mysquat, my deadlift, my press.
I'm deliberately eliminatingall that volume to put it all
into the ability to hit thoselifts and it feels like I'm not
working because I have all thisenergy, like you suggested.

Yeah, yeah, I mean this is, I'd say it's become a
hugely controversial subjectbecause we have so many
longevity experts touting theamazing life extension benefits
of fasting and restrictingcarbohydrates to the extent of
ketogenic eating, and I've had abig recalibration in my own

(35:25):
mindset and belief system andstrategy to realize that if
you're in that category ofhealthy, active, athletic person
with good blood values and soforth, the restriction of
calories for any reason isunwarranted and I'd much rather
focus on eating more, movingmore, training harder,
recovering faster as my path tolongevity.

(35:47):
My new mantra, as listeners know, is perform, recover, perform,
recover and that there is norole of fasting in that equation
.
And I appreciate thisdiscussion about kind of the
opposite strategy.
Because you look healthy on thescreen, man, you're putting up
some big weights.
I mean, how are we gonnameasure your longevity and your

(36:08):
basic health and fitness statusright now?
How about pulling a new PR onthe deadlift?
So whatever you're doing isworking by definition, as
opposed to starving yourself andheading to the gym and pulling
some moderate weights orwhatever the opposite would be.

Yeah, and I feel like when you get to that point
of building that foundation,even if you are going to go into
a calorie deficit and go into afat loss phase, it tends to be
so much easier and almost notfeel like a diet.
I mean, I have a lot of clientsin this situation where I say,
look, let's not worry aboutcutting right now, let's build a
foundation.
What you're going to find afterthat is that a quote unquote

(36:46):
diet, maybe the only diet you'llever do, because you're trying
to get to that whatever leannessthat is that you're going to
walk around, as even that isn'tgoing to feel that hard.
It might take 12 weeks and itmight be at a moderate rate of
loss and because you have thishigh metabolism, it's kind of
easy to do and you're stillgoing to eat mostly what you
like.
You know you have to cut out afew things here and there, um,
and then you're done.
So doesn't that sound greatLike?

(37:07):
If you're listening to that,just understand how powerful
that is versus the yo-yo dietingalways losing weight, losing
muscle when you lose weight,because that's what happens when
you don't train and then youget more and more skinny fat or
fat over time, and then themetabolic issues wrap up, you
know, as we age.

Yeah, I wonder you've probably seen this too.
When we were, you know, reallyfirst building the primal
blueprint community and doingretreats and interacting with a
lot of people, there was a lotof people that came to us with
seemingly severe metabolicdamage from a long history of
yo-yo dieting and they'd comeforth and report that, hey, I
tried your eating style of theancestral approach with meat,

(37:49):
fish, fowl, eggs, vegetables,fruits, nuts and seeds.
I don't eat any grains anymore,I don't eat processed sugars,
I'm not drinking my Starbucksanymore and I'm still struggling
to reduce excess body fat.
And I wonder if you see thatamongst your population, and are
there some people that, justbecause of their past history or
their current status of poormetabolic flexibility or

(38:11):
whatever you want to call it, dothey require some kind of a
different approach?
Or how do you deal with that?

Sure, I mean, there I'm, I'm like I might be that
guy.
So I was so, way back in theday I did at Atkins right, I
remember Atkins even slim fast.
I mean it's crazy.
This stuff I tried over theyears and then I joined the
CrossFit community back in 2010.
I did that for about eightyears and I found out about the

(38:39):
primal community and paleo and Iactually did that.
I have so many cookbooks stillin my kitchen with paleo recipes
, okay, and I was stilloverweight and I couldn't quite
get there either.
It helped a little bit, right,it helped in terms of other
aspects of health, but withoutthat training stimulus, you're
right, there was a big missingpiece.

(38:59):
That's the piece that I'm sopassionate about now.
That's why I put it at the topof the list and everything else
kind of falls from that.
The other thing is, what was Igoing to say about that?
I think people get too hung upin the fact that certain foods
whether you talk about thequality of food or the exact
type of food or the macro aregoing to solve everything for

(39:20):
them or vastly improve theirmetabolic health.
I think even if you had thequote-unquote perfect diet, it
is not enough.
It is just not.
You have to give yourself thechance to live like a human, a
functional physical, pushingthings around, human in the
world.
I knew a guy, kevin Kevin.
What's his name?
Oh man, kevin McShann is thathis last name?
He's in a wheelchair, he'sparalyzed from the waist down

(39:44):
and one of his favorite thingsto do every day is lift weights.
And he, he talks about it.
So passion.
He's like no one has an excuse.
If you can I mean if you canmove something on your body, you
can be active and you should beactive.
Very inspiring guy, guy.

Right, there's, it's within reach of everyone
and, interestingly, it doesn'ttake uh, huge chunks of time to
dabble and and and progress downthis road of being a competent
person who does resistanceexercise.
So it starts there.
Diet is not enough.

(40:17):
Love it, yeah.
And how about compare contrastto the widespread pursuit of
steady state cardio in with thegoal of weight loss?
You know what I'm going to haveto say about it because I said
it on your show, but is there,do you have some insights about
the difference between aprotocol that has strength

(40:40):
training, some brief, explosiveactivity like sprinting, a
foundation of, you know,comfortably placed movement
versus the people who aregetting that sweaty red face
climbing the stairs for 45minutes, however many days a
week, at the gym, or going tothese difficult classes like the
morning spin class and all thatthing as their main and perhaps

(41:00):
sole pursuit of fitness.

Steady state cardio yeah, there's a couple angles I
could come at this, one from.
One is the fact that you canfind thousands, if not millions,
of people who don't do any ofthat type of cardio and have
amazing health.
I mean, if that's not proof,you know people who lift, people
who don't do any of that typeof cardio and have amazing
health.
I mean, if that's not proof,you know people who lift, people
who walk, they eat right.
You know, like you said, theymight, they might do occasional

(41:24):
activity, they might play sports.
You know they have fun, butthey are not doing that.
I know what you refer to asmetronomic, day in, day out
cardio.
That that's one.
That's one answer I have.
Uh, another one is just clientsthat I've worked with,
especially women, who have whatthey think is an adrenal failure
or an issue with their cortisol.

(41:47):
They have hormonal issues.
They might be as young as 27 orin peri and postmenopause, and
it's often that they're justdoing too much, that the stress
is compounding what's going onwith their bodies.
And when I tell them let's justdrop all of that, I mean I like
to take a like eliminate allthe cardio approach first add in
the lifting and then start toadd in the other things until

(42:10):
you hit a equilibrium, a niceequilibrium, right.
You'll know when you've gonepast that point.
And I had a client who shethought she would have to be on
medications forever.
And um, she was a massagetherapist, so she was active
like seven, eight hours a dayworking with people, and she was
going to the gym five or sixdays a week.
She was doing Peloton, she washiking, she was doing a lot.

(42:33):
And I got her training threedays a week for about half an
hour, lifting really heavy.
And they say, no, you shouldn'tput uh, women who have adrenal
issues and high stress on heavylifting, don't do that.
It's just like when they talkabout autoimmune conditions.
Don't lift heavy.
Quite the contrary, the evidencesupports lifting heavy for just
about any population.
And I think you know this, bradlike and by heavy I mean 60 to

(42:54):
90% of your max.
You know like, whatever you canlift for the, for one single
rep of, let's say, a deadlift orsquat, 60 to 90% is a really
solid range to lift in.
And what happened to thisclient is she came off her
medications because her stressdropped significantly without
any other changes to herlifestyle.

(43:14):
It was mainly the movement Likeyou're talking about.
It was just too much cardio.
That's just two angles I comeat it from.
The whole sprinting thing isactually a little bit newer to
me, to be honest, and like Isaid before we started recording
, I'm telling everybody about itbecause I'm doing it myself too
.
I just did my couple firstsprints over the last few weeks.

Nice.
Yeah, it's a difficult one toramp up with, because most of us
stopped from our last season inmiddle school, soccer or high
school or what have you.
And then we know from researchthat we lose the anaerobic
explosive muscle fibers at amuch greater rate from aging

(43:52):
than we do.
Our aerobic conditioning andfor some reason, the fitness
population at large are gettingtheir cardio in but, you know,
grossly deficient in anythingthat resembles near maximum
effort.

Yeah, and I wonder, in the lifting community
specifically because I've talkedto a bunch of guys since you
came on the show community,specifically, because I've
talked to a bunch of guys sinceyou came on the show there are
different pockets of knowledgeand understanding.
When it comes to quote unquoteconditioning, because it's
always been a hot topic with theold adage of, like cardio is
going to kill your gains, right,and then there was the counter

(44:29):
argument of no, no, no, inreality you can actually do a
decent amount of cardio, up tolike half the amount you lift,
without detriment.
The question is, what do youmean by cardio?
Because that's a very broadumbrella, and so I start with
the lifting and I say, okay,lifting itself is, um, is, is
really a form of cardio.
Um, your heart rate isconstantly spiking when you're

(44:50):
doing heavy, especially whenyou're lifting heavy.
I can show you on my Apple watchyou know, look at this guy guy,
he went on a jog with a lot ofstoplights, I guess it looks
like that you know every spikeis a rep of of my deadlift and
it pops up to you know 130, 135,like actually right around the
fat max heart rate, believe itor not kind of interestingly.
I don't know if there's acorrelation there, um, but the

(45:10):
cumulative amount of um gettingyour heart rate high plus the
epoch right, the post, thepost-active post, uh, you know,
I'm trying to say exercise post,uh, whatever the, the acronym.

Excess post exercise.
Excess post yeah, oxygenconsumption is uh.
The concept is that you youburn more calories after the
workout and that's where you getthe really strong driver for
fat reduction.
It's not the eight 700 caloriesyou burned at the workout, but
it's the next 24 hours thatmatters a lot.

Yeah, and I still use that, the old term
afterburner effect, and you knowwell, that's, that's not real,
but actually there is, there is,it is still a thing.
Um, so, there, so just liftingalone is going to get you
somewhat well-conditioned.
And then I go to the next stepand say okay, does your strength
training program include speedwork or enough volume that that

(46:02):
also increases your workcapacity?
So that takes you to anotherlevel of conditioning.
So, for example, um, the Westside barbell guys like Louie
Simmons, the conjugate styleprogram, now those guys were
like big enhanced pot body, uh,power lifters.
But the principles that theyused and I don't have to go into
all the training principles ofconjugate, but they had two days

(46:23):
a week that were max effort andtwo days a week that were
dynamic effort.
And on the dynamic effort daysthey would use accommodating
resistance.
So they would use bands orchains.
Um, if you don't have bands orchains, you just use vault, you
speed.
So you do a lot of sets of lowreps sub-maximally.
So rather than doing, say,three sets of five heavy squats,

(46:47):
you might do 10 sets of two at70% right, and you're taking 30
or 60 seconds rest instead oftwo, three, four minutes rest
and you are exploding on thatconcentric as powerfully as you
can, where the plates arerattling, like that's a good
indicator that you've done itright and that builds work
capacity.
It builds the movement pattern.

(47:08):
You know it's a developmentalvariation for the main pattern
when you're not without taxingyour central nervous system with
the load, and then you've gotconditioning as well.
So I like that approach.
If you're a lifter, then I say,okay, what else do we need?
Walking, that's the next formof cardio.
We've got to get to that.
Eight to 10,000 steps isusually solid for a lot of

(47:30):
people.
It's very practical.
If you want to be a 20,000 stepa day guy, go for it, but you
know eight or 10.
And then it's the big question,brad, what do we do?
Do we need anything else?
And so when my clients are infat loss, they're like should I
get a little cardio boost?
And what I've recommended up tothis point is some form of
medium steady state, like on abike or pushing a prowler, but

(47:52):
not running, cause I'm a big fanof, you know, recovery
involving using the concentricand not the eccentric right.
You do all those, those umsquats, those air squats and
CrossFit.
That is that you're going to besore.

So the eccentric.
Uh just define that a littlebit in case in case.
People are uh falling off a bit.

Sure, yeah, yeah, I know it's, it's the, I'll guess
.
I guess I'll say the pushing uppart of the movement, the
contractile part of it, so, likein a squat, it's the coming up
part of the squat, whereas goingdown that's the concentric.
That's the concentric.

Yeah, the concentric is lifting up and the
eccentric-.
The eccentric is like when themuscle is lengthening and
shortening at the same time, orsomething.
That's why you get sore.
Is that the definition?

Yeah, yeah, I should get a better way to
describe it, but yes, I think oflike running, for example.
The concentric is when you pushoff the ground, the eccentric
is when you land.

The eccentric is when you land.
Yeah, so when you're landingpeople, like going down a hill,
and you see your quads tightenor tense but they're also being
forced to absorb the impact, sothey're kind of they're flexing

(49:09):
but they're shortening at thesame time.
Same with lowering down fromthe deadlift is lifted off the
ground and then you lower.
The eccentric part is whatcauses that micro tears in the
muscle and soreness, and Ibelieve that's exclusively so,
like you can't get sore doingconcentric things, only the
eccentric.

Right, because the eccentric is what controls the
resistance against gravity.

Right, so that's what leads to the muscle
producing force and then tearingand oh right you're, you're
absorbing gravitational forcewhile you're flexing the muscle,
as opposed to um not absorbingthe gravitational force.

Yeah, yeah, which is why I like say swimming or
biking or pushing or pulling asled as forms of quote unquote
cardio, um, but, but.
But, like we talked about before, I liked the idea of sprinting
as opposed to hit.
Um, I used to.
I used to be into the Tabatastyle CrossFit hit, which was
like the inverse of what you youknow.

(50:04):
It would be like a two to onework to rest ratio, and then I
kind of evolved toward a maybeone-to-one, but I like the
one-to-six that you talk aboutwith sprinting as well.
Regardless, very few of myclients do much of that cardio
anyway, because they find theydon't need to and most people
don't quote-unquote like doingthis kind of cardio great reason

(50:28):
is for recovery from the otherworkouts.

You're going to be bashing your muscles with the
ultimate eccentric behavior ofrunning down a paved road
especially.
You mentioned Tabata, which isa popular interval training
protocol, but what's so funnyabout that?
Has been widely misappropriatedand abused, because the
original research with theJapanese speed skaters was it

(50:55):
was a four-minute workout.
It was 20 seconds on, 10-secondrest, 20 seconds work.
Or is that the opposite?
Excuse me, 20 seconds work, 10seconds rest?

Yeah, two to one, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, two to one work to rest yeah, and then
you're done in four minutes.
But you go to the localneighborhood fitness club and
they say 9 am Tabata class, andso they'll do like all kinds of
crap with this two to one workto rest ratio, first with your
bicycle pedaling, and then youget off and do some pole work or

(51:27):
whatever.
But the workout's meant to bean extremely challenging,
high-intensity interval sessionand it's over in four minutes,
besides warm-up, cool-down andall that stuff.
So it's a great protocol,unless you extend it out to an
hour of CrossFit where you'redoing Tabata, box jumps and rope
climbs and upside-down push-upsand things that get people

(51:48):
injured when they get fatiguedat the end.

And then you do grace, you do you know where
you're doing like 30 powercleans with 135.
I was there, I did it for eightyears.
It didn't do anything for meother than give me some injuries
, some tweaks.
I was miserable most of thetime, although I love the
community, and I touched abarbell for the first time,
which was great, but I didn'tlearn proper form until after I

(52:12):
stopped doing CrossFit and justfocused on on training.
Um, and that's important forpeople to know, because I think
I think it's okay to be I don'twant to say judgmental, but I
try to discourage people fromdoing those things at all, like
I'm not sure that there is anypositive, even when you have the
community aspect.
I think there's other ways todo that.
There are some really goodgroup traditional strength

(52:33):
training programs now where youcan get in a group but actually
train with progressive overload.
Do it low and slow, take yourrest periods, have your recovery
.
That's what I would encouragepeople to look for.

I'll tell you my CrossFit strategy that was very
successful for me is you bailout at around the one third or
the halfway mark, cause I'vedone a grand total of three or
four CrossFit classes in my life, visiting someone.
Hey, let's try this out.
And there's so many goodaspects of the community and the
, the, the philosophy ofbroad-based functional fitness

(53:06):
and all that great stuff, asopposed to training for a
marathon.
It's the run fit club where weshow up and we jog six miles
every day.
We're CrossFit's, building allthese skills.
But, like at the one third tohalfway mark, I was good and I'm
a fit person.
But you know they're saying,okay, we're gonna do 15 pull-ups
and then come over here and dothe box jump and then climb the

(53:26):
rope.
All right, I did it high five.
And then they go okay, nowwe're gonna do a set of eight
and then break it down to fourand then we're gonna do five and
I'm like, what the F are youtalking about?
I just did 15 pull-ups.
That's a personal best for theyear.
So I think the fatiguing aspectof a lot of traditional fitness
programming is the big problem,not the workout design so much

(53:49):
as when we're talking aboutelite, high-performing athletes,
especially the people we watchin the Olympics.
They're not blasting theseworkouts to the point where
they're on their hands and kneesand having shitty times in the
last four reps.
They are very consistent andthey're almost always working
well within their capacity.
We will watch Gabby Thomascollapsing on the ground after

(54:10):
running a mile time trial, sinceshe's the Olympic 200 meter
champion, and that was not hercup of tea.
But even then she got up if youwant to watch the video and did
four straightaways of 150builds or whatever.
So we're socialized, I think,to struggle and suffer and
CrossFit is extremely to blamethere there, as well as the

(54:31):
endurance community to blamerather than a properly organized
training session where youdon't walk out of there
staggering to the nearest pintof Ben and Jerry's.

Yeah, and I think it comes down to what are you
trying to accomplish and if thatis not getting you what you're
trying to accomplish.

I want to crush myself.
Man, that's my goal.

Exactly.
Yeah, I want to be miserableand I want you know, I want to
be injured.

I want to be miserable.

Yeah, and I'll tell you if.
If your goal is to get your VOtwo max up, you could do that
with lifting and walking and ifyou want to get a little bit
higher, apparently sprintingwhich, by the way, I'm going to
do an official VO two max test.
It's been a long time I gotwhen I'm at the peak of my bulk
and I'm at my heaviest and I'vebarely started sprinting.
That's going to be my baseline.

(55:13):
I'm going to report back afterabout three months, once I've
lost about 15, 20 pounds andhave been sprinting for a while.
We'll see.
I'll share that data with youguys, Listeners.

Vo2 max is a volume of oxygen per milliliter per
kilogram of body weight.
So you're going to be gamingthe test.
Milliliter per kilogram of bodyweight?
So you're gonna be gaming thetest.
If you drop 10 pounds, your VO2max score will skyrocket.

I don't care, man, no, I'm just yeah, yeah, no,
it's great, we can normalize ityou can I?
Bet, you can normalize it bybody weight.

And also well, you have maximum volume period and
then, and that's, I don't thinkthat would be affected by
anything.
Whether you're lifting weightsor sprinting, I mean you kind of
have.
That's why VO2 max is largelygenetically determined.
It's just how much oxygen canyou consume when you're
exercising at high intensity.

(56:03):
But I'm also annoyed at how thefascination and the hype around
VO2 max is like the ultimateanti-aging marker and it is.
If your VO2 max is terrible,then you're in bad shape, son,
and you better get your butttogether and get out there and
move your body and work yourheart and lungs.
However, once you have acompetent VO2 max, which I'm

(56:24):
certain that you'll have fromyour lifetime commitment to
fitness, it's not such a bigdeal and arguably we might want
to negotiate for carrying aroundmore muscle mass as hitting
another important fitness pillarthat directly compromises your
VO2 max potential.

Yeah, which then brings up another issue, or not
an issue, but a curiosity peoplemight have is how important a
lot of these health metrics areResting heart rate lipids.
A lot of these health metricsare resting heart rate lipids,
hrv.
Especially in the context ofyour current periodization phase
and the body mass and musclemass you're carrying around, it
is really important.

(57:02):
Like BMI, for example, is atotally worthless statistic
unless you're just looking at apopulation right, and we know
that new metrics like bodyroundness are more relevant.
And, honestly, just taking atape measure of your waist, you
know you can kind of that's oneof the best proxies for body fat
right there.
Anyway, it's very simple andthat's the kind of data I like
working with clients on, whereit's data, but it's easy to

(57:23):
measure, it's easy to track.
Where I was going with that isthat.
Going back to those clients whoare highly muscled but also
overweight, you will still seehealth metrics that are not
where they need to be becausethey're not walking enough.
For example, I've had clientswho are lawyers.
They sit around all day.
They get 3,000 steps.
They're highly muscled.
We don't change anything excepttheir steps.

(57:46):
They go up to 6,000, 7,000, andtheir resting heart rate starts
to decline and a lot of theirhealth markers, according to
blood work, improve just fromthe walking.
And so that's just just, youknow, more proof of the power of
being an active person ingeneral and not having to do it
via miserable cardio or chroniccardio.

Is 3,000.
Pretty crappy, is that like apretty inactive person?
So you will.
Even if you're just going fromthe parking garage to the office
building and then you go downthe hall to use the bathroom and
then you walk around the house,are you going to get up to like
one or two or 3,000 steps withdoing almost, you know, minimal
exercise?

So if I think of my own self working at home, if I
was recovering from surgery, andI could hardly do anything?

no, I've been in that state.
I probably still got like 1,500steps.

I don't know you can almost not, unless you're
just sitting in one spot all day, which I suppose there are
people who do that.
I mean, this guy was liftingweights, so just from the
lifting sessions, three days aweek, he was probably getting
3,000 steps from his liftingsession or 2,000.
Was lifting weights, so justfrom the lifting sessions, he,
you know, three days a week, hewas probably getting 3000 steps
from his lifting session or 2000.
Really, wow, maybe 2000.
Um, I pace, I pace between mysets to get steps while I'm

(59:00):
working out.
So that's a good trick forpeople to have it stack.
But going from three to six andthen six to eight or nine, we
know that that seven to nine isreally the sweet spot right,
Based on the mortalityliterature, on a massive step
change in your health.
And that's not inaccessible formost people.
Seven to nine, it's not crazy.

If it is, then we got problems and we got to talk
about it and we got to set youup with with with Philip and
take, do that intake form andsay what the heck is going on
here.
Um, I mean back to the messageof the book born to walk like
this is a whole separatecategory from your fitness
objectives, and your to-do listis that we are obligated to be
in movement throughout the day.

(59:39):
It's a no-brainer, it's like onthe same category as sleeping.
And then, oh, do you want tohave a high quality, fit, active
, energetic life?
Then let's talk about fitness.
But I kind of put that in thegiven category rather than oh,
okay, I have to do someweightlifting twice a week and I
got to.

I got to walk like no kidding, yeah, if I have a
client who is not walking andthey should be.
And here's the thing withcoaching right Is that you can't
force people to do things, butyou can try to frame it in a way
that shows them it's inevitablethat they need to do this for

(01:00:19):
their own health.
I do think, like the trainingconsistently and the walking are
must do's, no excuses.
If you can't do them, thensomething else has got to change
, Whether that's a time audit,getting something else off your
plate, eliminating, delegatingon and on, it's a time
management thing for a lot offolks to be honest.
That's your excuse and there'sno excuse.

(01:00:39):
You can do it with your dog.
You can do it with your kids.
You can do it walking aroundthe house.
How many of you are watchingNetflix or scrolling social for
at least an hour a day?

Brad Kearns (01:00:52):
That hour, go ahead and scroll social but walk
while you're doing it like,don't make an excuse.
Yeah, it's like saying I Idon't have the budget for uh
nutritious foods.
And then I have my uh b-radnutrition guide where they I
rank the world's most nutritiousfoods by by category.
And we have sardines up there,we have liver up there, which is
dirt cheap compared to buying asteak or even even a, and so
there's numerous foods that areamong the highest on the planet

(01:01:17):
and they're pennies compared todriving through Chick-fil-A.
I just lost another sponsor.
Sorry, but you know there isbudget concerns with people and
time concerns too, and I'veheard from those people and
they've given me some plentydirect feedback that I strongly
appreciate and empathize withpeople that are really
jam-packed and we don't want tocut into sleep with nonsense

(01:01:39):
social media badgering like justget up at 4.30 and do it man,
no excuses, no, not going tohappen, not going to be
successful.
But there's that time managementlayered underneath where, oh
yeah, I forgot about my Netflixhour to three hours every
evening.
Can I pinch into that?

Philip Pape (01:01:58):
Yeah, it's funny.
I just in my Facebook groupyesterday we posted the question
like what's one of the what'sone of the most challenging
things about your fitness?
And somebody said getting up at3 am for cardio?
And I replied brutal and Ireplied well, I see two problems
with this.
Do you want me to say what theyare?

Cardio and getting up at 3.30?
Exactly.
Oh my goodness.

But then to be fair , he said, well, I'm just
walking on an incline.
I'm like okay, well, that's alittle better than when I
thought what you meant withcardio.
But I'm still saying you'regetting up at 3 am.
I hope you're going to bed atlike 7 pm or something.

Hey, that's a pretty disciplined person right
there, someone who gets up inthe dark and walks on an incline
.
They're going to succeed with alittle tweaking.
So before we wrap up, like ifsomeone just wants to get
started and drift over in thatdirection of being a competent
resistance training personthat's building muscle and
looking toward that longevitygoal, what's a baby step one can

(01:02:57):
take if we haven't gone nearthat side of the gym over there
with the bros clanking theplates?

Yeah, I would really love for somebody to have
access to a barbell and I couldgive them the baby steps from
that.
This is the challenge, Brad, ispeople.
This is one of the excuses youget is I don't have access to
this or that, or my gym doesn'thave this, or I have home gym.
So really it's starting withwhat you do have access to right
and not making any excuses, andthen working on the main

(01:03:24):
movement patterns squatting,picking things up, engine
pressing and everyone's atdifferent strength levels.
Everyone has differentequipment access.
Obviously, if you reach out tome, I'm happy to give you a free
program template or guidancebased on what you have, but
that's really what it comes downto.
We we could do a whole podcastabout progressive overload and
training session.

(01:03:45):
You know training and all ofthat, but it's really three days
a week usually is sufficientfor most people shouldn't take
more than half an hour to 45minutes when you're beginner
beginner and what we're lookingat is, uh, fairly heavy, fairly
low reps.
You know we're talking four tosix, maybe up to eight to 12,
you know, in that range of reps,maybe three sets of three or

(01:04:06):
four exercises, a full body, andyou do that.
You take a long, you take longrest periods.
By long I mean at least two orthree minutes.
These aren't the 32nd circuittraining.
You're not super setting,You're just one exercise and
then the next, uh, three setseach, and then you take a day
off and you do it again threedays a week and that's it Like.
It's not at all like anythingthat you guys think of with F45

(01:04:30):
or CrossFit or you know therunning club Right.
That's just to keep it very highlevel, brad.

That's great.
I mean you can probably utilizethe machines if you're
completely incompetent with abar and you want to learn
carefully and slowly.
I saw people getting trainedwith PVC pipes with the experts
that came to our primal conretreats and it was like you
know, if you do 20 reps with aPVC pipe on deadlift, you're

(01:05:00):
going to feel it, even if you'repretty fit, like you don't have
to load up right away and bringin injury risk.
I would hope.

Yeah, actually it's funny.
I was just talking to anotherlifter about the concept of
progressive overload, um.
I had a podcast in fact today'sepisode that just came out.
Whenever this is coming outit's it's called um the only
strength standard you need, andit was the idea that the
overarching principle of gettingstrong is that your body needs
stress.
And by stress I don't meanchronic stress, I mean it needs

(01:05:30):
a stimulus, it needs to recoverand then it will stress.
And by stress I don't meanchronic stress, I mean it needs
a stimulus, it needs to recoverand then it will adapt.
But the stress has to be enough.
Just like in your thermostatit's only gonna kick in when the
house is too cold or too hot.
You need to push and challengeyourself just enough so that you
adapt for the next time.
So you come in on Monday, yousquat, you do three sets of five
, at whatever weight, I don'tcare, maybe it feels super easy.

(01:05:52):
You go in on Wednesday.
I want you to add a certainamount of pounds.
Maybe it's five pounds, maybeit's two, If you're not super
strong.
Maybe it's 10, maybe it's 20.
If you're just a 20-year-oldmale testosterone coursing
through your veins and then dothat each session, At some point
it's going to start to feelheavy, but at some point it's
going to start to feel heavy,but you also are going to be

(01:06:12):
able to keep going up for quitea while.
A beginner can double or tripletheir strength in just a few
months.

You know the legend of Milo of Croton, the great,
legendary ancient Greek Olympicathlete.
He was undefeated as a wrestler, one of the greatest Olympians
of all time.
In the old days in Greekhistory, he gained his strength
by raising cattle, and so he'dpick up the calf when it was
born, and then he'd pick up thecalf every day for the rest of

(01:06:38):
its life until he's picking upwhatever a 400 pound animal.
But yeah, that progressiveoverload.
That's the.
Yes, I got to get better atthat man, because I'm kind of
working with the same weight onmy hex bar deadlift, because I
have some fears about injuries.
I've strained my back beforeand then I'm performing a
recovering in my sprint workoutsmy bread and butter.

(01:06:59):
But it's a really importantpoint to remember that the body
loves that challenge adaptationand that comes when you extend
out and get toward your limit.

Yeah, and you can do that with anything.
Like you mentioned machines.
There are obviously differenttools for different jobs, some
more efficient than others,depending on your goal, and
again, we can talk about thosedetails, but doing something and
progressing on it is going tobe helpful.
It's funny you mentioned thelow back thing.
A lot of people do have fearsabout injury and I've known so

(01:07:32):
many folks.
I can think of one guy inparticular um, he's an engineer,
a guy from India, and kind ofvery skinny, you know, kind of
skinny fat if you will.
About 40 years old.
Um eats a lot of Indian food,which delicious, but you know
the, the macros aren't alwaysoptimal for for building, and he
had really bad back pain.
And this is super common withdesk jockeys, right?

(01:07:55):
And I've experienced it myself,just really sore back pain.
I said why don't you trydeadlifting?
I'll come to my?
He lived nearby.
I said come to my home gym andwe'll just do it together.
I'll show you how to do itright and then I'll give you a
simple progression.
And he started doing that andall his pain is gone.

(01:08:16):
Okay, and I'm not.
I don't mean this to say, oh,this is a miracle thing, because
your particular back issue maybe specific, but many people
have seen pain go away in theirjoints and their back just from
lifting weights.
It sounds counterintuitive tofolks that don't quite get it,
like with the deadlift.
Deadlift is one of the besttools to improve back pain.
You got to do it right andyou're going to have good form,
but I'm super passionate aboutthat, yeah.

It's great for your joint health.
Yeah, you're getting the bloodflowing, you're getting the
discs lubricated.
You're working toward astronger, more resilient body.
So whatever got you that backpain in the first place?
Now you're a stronger guy.
You're going to ward it off.

And would you rather have a strong bad back
than a weak bad back?

That's what I'm about to say Philip Pape,
everybody from Wits and Weightspodcast, tell us how to connect
with you on your Facebook groupand the other places that we
should engage.

Yeah, I mean on Facebook.
We can put the link in, butit's called Wits and Weights.
On Facebook, my podcast is Witsand Weights and on Instagram at
Wits and Weights, so prettyeasy to find me.

And you offer this remote service for consultation
and programming.

Yeah, I do online nutrition coaching, so it's
really about fat loss, buildingmuscle, all of that and, again,
you can go to witsandweightscomlearn all about that, or hit me
up.
And what I really want you todo, though, is listen to my
podcast first and get the basicsand understand my philosophy,
and learn first before, becauseI want you to have that
foundation, because then you'regoing to really take off and

(01:09:39):
level up.

Love it.
Nice little assignment.
Okay, first people go listenand then reach out Come inform
man, Bring your A game to fillup when you finally reach out
and connect.
Thank you so much for spendingthe time.
I love what you're doing.

Keep it up and thanks for listening.
Everybody.
All right, that was myconversation with Brad Kearns on
his Be Rad podcast, and what Ihope you take away from this
discussion is how fundamentallyimportant muscle is as a
foundation for any successfulphysique transformation.
The typical approach mostpeople take is they restrict
calories, they add in cardio,they white knuckle through
hunger, and that is what doesn'twork long-term, because it does

(01:10:20):
not address the root cause.
When you build muscle first,you create a metabolic
environment where fat lossbecomes just so much easier,
dramatically easier.
Your body becomes a glucosedisposal machine.
Your hormones work with youinstead of against you.
Your hunger signals normalize,and I've seen this pattern play
out hundreds of times withclients those who focus on

(01:10:43):
strength training first and dietsecond consistently achieve
better, more sustainable resultsthan those who do it the other
way around.
And this is especially true forpeople in their 30s, in their
40s, 50s and beyond, whennatural muscle loss accelerates.
Remember, muscle's not justabout looking good or even being
strong, though those arefantastic benefits.

(01:11:05):
Your muscle tissue is highlymetabolically active.
It acts as your body's primaryglucose sink.
It's a sink for the carbs thatyou eat and it creates the
conditions for optimal fatmetabolism.
So the more muscle you carry,the more resilient your
metabolism becomes against dietfluctuations, aging, hormonal
changes, all of it.

(01:11:25):
So if you are struggling withstubborn fat, if you're hitting
plateaus despite doing all thethings, I encourage you to flip
that around.
Focus on building strengthfirst.
If you've never doneaus,despite doing all the things, I
encourage you to flip thataround.
Focus on building strengthfirst.
If you've never done it before,building muscle and watch how
much easier fat loss thenbecomes when you have that
foundation in place.
All right, if you enjoyed thisepisode again, all I ask is you
hit follow on the podcast tocatch every episode when they

(01:11:47):
come out and then go followBrad's excellent podcast.
Be Rad with Brad Kearnswherever you listen to your
podcast.
All right, until next time,keep using your wits, lifting
those weights, and remember thesecret to lasting fat loss isn't
found in restriction.
It's found through buildingbuilding muscle, that is.
I'll talk to you next time hereon the Wits and Weights Podcast

(01:12:08):
.

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Your Secret Weapon for Fat Loss is NOT a Calorie Deficit or Macros | Ep 314

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Your Secret Weapon for Fat Loss is NOT a Calorie Deficit or Macros | Ep 314