00:00
Hey everyone, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Mikkipedia. This week on the podcast, I speak to returning guest and one of my favorite people, Brandon da Cruz. He is coach, educator, and one of the sharpest minds in physique and performance nutrition. And today we tackle the topic of body recomposition. While many people think of body recomp purely as losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time,

00:28
Brandon breaks down the three different forms it can take and why the common claim that you cannot build muscle and lose fat simultaneously is based on an overly simplistic view of calories in, calories out. We also dive into why women may actually be better positioned for re-comp than many people assume. God, that's good news, isn't it? ah The physiology behind this and what Brandon sees in practice with his clients.

00:55
So we unpack the nutrition and training fundamentals that need to be in place, including the protein intake, progressive training, and the common mistakes that stop women from seeing meaningful changes in body composition. And I have to say, guys, if you are one of the many, many people that I speak to that are doing the things and not seeing the results, this is an episode that you don't want to miss. Now, Brandon is probably one of the most requested and

01:25
most repeated guests on Micopedia. So I'd be so surprised if you didn't know who he was. But for those of you unfamiliar, Brandon de Cruz is an online nutrition and physique coach, accredited nutritionist, functional nutrition and metabolism specialist, and health and fitness educator with over 16 years of coaching experience. Throughout his career, Brandon has helped more than 1200 clients ranging from Olympia level physique competitors and competitive athletes

01:55
business owners, executives, and lifestyle clients just like you improve their body composition, optimize performance, and enhance their overall health. His coaching philosophy is rooted in an evidence-informed approach that combines the best available research with real-world coaching experience gained from working directly with clients in the trenches for over a decade and a half. 16 years I believe at this point.

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Brandon has featured in many leading industry publications, including Men's Fitness magazine, Muscular Development, Bodybuilding.com, and the Alan Aragon Research Review, where he served as a contributing author. Brandon is also the host of the Chasing Clarity Health and Fitness podcast, and I have that listed in the show notes here. It is like some sort of masterclass in metabolism that I view as professional education for me, but it really is such a treasure trove of information.

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It is a show ranked in the top 5 % of all podcasts on Spotify, which is quite a feat given for thousands of podcasts out there. Through both solo episodes and conversations with many of the industries leading researchers and educators, the podcast aims to bridge the gap between complexity and clarity in health, fitness, nutrition, and physique development. Each episode is designed to empower listeners through education and provide the tools needed to make informed decisions about their health and physique goals. So if you're new to

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Brandon and you love what he has to say. Honestly, this is like, I don't know, like your lucky day because there are hundreds of episodes of Chasing Clarity that you can go back and listen and learn from Brandon. But you get that opportunity today on Micropedia. So quite an introduction as deserved. Before we crack on into the interview though, I would like to remind you that the best way to support this podcast is to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast listening platform.

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that increases the visibility of Micropedia, and amongst literally thousands of other podcasts out there. So more people get to hear from the guests that I have on the show, such as Brandon D'Cruz. All right guys, enjoy this conversation.

04:02
Yeah, and is it one podcast or is it going to be split into two? So I actually did a two-parter with Eric. We spoke about different concepts oh that I have touched on in the past, but I really wanted to dig into deeper. I really value Eric's, first of all, intellectual integrity, and then also the fact that I can bounce ideas off of him. I think a lot of times in our industry, there's somewhat of people in these different silos. You have the evidence-based scene, a lot of researchers and people that are academics, and then you have other people on the other side that are

04:31
coaches and practitioners, and they don't really speak well. They speak at each other. uh But Eric can understand where I'm coming from, from a coaching perspective. I can bounce ideas off him. Obviously, I understand the research, not to the same degree that he does when it comes to stats and really like the deep analytical, like meta-aggressions and stuff. That's Eric's wheelhouse. And he really does help me develop better critical thinking skills. But there's many times that will even be an email communication. There's a post I'm going to make uh soon about body recomp. I think there's been a mis-expopulation of some of the data.

04:59
and it's been presented poorly. uh But this is coming from a practical coaching perspective. I'm looking at the data, I'm doing mathematical calculations, I'm pulling up Kevin Hall's physics equations and stuff, but that is not genuinely my expertise. So I did all the mathematics, did everything, and I sent it to Eric, and he gave me the feedback on things that were correct, things that I needed to work on. So uh those are relationships that I truly value because there are very few people... Maybe I should say the inverse.

05:29
There are a few people in my life that I can go to and that generally make me feel dumb. And most people would like shy away from that. I have a mentor personally that won't bring people on his podcast that are more intelligent than him, which I find to be a little bit of an oddity. It's because he wants to me as the expert by all means do your thing. Um, but I genuinely look for people that have a higher, probably raw IQ than I do, but it's a challenge to keep up with them. But I love that. I live for those interactions where I'm like, I need to bring my A game because if not, I'm not going to hang. Yeah. And in fact, that really does speak to your,

05:58
what you was talking about before with the fact that you've never suffered from imposter syndrome. Whereas I feel like other people may feel intimidated by the idea of, to your point, your mentor and stuff, speaking to someone who, or having a conversation with someone if they feel just a little bit, not inferior, but they don't have that knowledge base that that person does. Which I am all for talking to smart people, which is why we're talking this morning, obviously. That's such a good point. I will tell you that many of the people I bring on my podcast, I engage with, even people like yourself.

06:28
One thing I love about you, Mickey, so I want to give you your flowers. I don't know if we're recording yet, but I'm going to give them to you anyway, um is you have such great intellectual curiosity that you keep me on my toes. Like the greatest example, look at that email interaction we had right before we got on the podcast. You said, I have a few questions on this topic. You sent me 30 questions. the depth at which you could think of things is something that I genuinely revel in because it causes me to think outside the box, first and foremost, but then it actually

06:57
At times when we have these conversations, I am in an audio fashion working through and walking through the things I do in practice each and every single day. And hopefully people out there can gather some value from what I'm able to dispel in terms of information and really bridging that gap between scientific communication and then actual in the trenches coaching practice. Like how do we really make an amalgamation of this? And so people like yourself, someone like Allyle McDonald, who I literally was just on a massive email chain with on some other data, um people like Eric Helms,

07:27
good friends that I feel blessed to have in my circle because a lot of times, like I was mentioning lawfare to you, there's a lot of people that speak before they're ready. They want to put out the facade or the impression that they are experts and they have all this knowledge and they're super intelligent. And it's mostly to impress other people. I can't relate to that. And that's why I say like those individuals, I've spoken to them privately, whether it be at seminars or on zoom consultations where they're hiring me for different to walk through different things, different topics.

07:54
they suffer from imposter syndrome behind the scenes. I will say that I don't suffer from that. It's not that I don't know. It's not that I think that I know everything because that's not the case whatsoever. I'm always looking to dig in deeper. But I will tell you that if I'm not ready to talk about a topic or I do not have well-formed opinions on them, I will pass on it because I do not want to. I really do find that people look to me as a source of information and knowledge and credibility. And I would not ever take advantage of that by speaking outside of my lane or going outside of my scope.

08:23
we're speaking on a topic that I'm not confident on. think that we should share both what we have expertise in and then what we have experience in. And a lot of people are putting out the facade that they're either really scientifically literate and they're mis-extraordinating data, or they're acting like they're very good in the trenches coaches, but they have not a single transformation. They've never really worked with anyone. And I find that to be an insult to what is what I consider both an art and science of coaching and then scientific communication.

08:47
And think this is, just so you know, we are recording. And I think this is one of the reasons why I love us having these conversations because I know that whatever, because people can really trust your insights because they come from both that science perspective, because you do understand the literature and the things that we talk about. But also, of course, you've just got this, like you've got what, 20 years experience or 15 years experience, I cannot recall which, actually working with people. And I've come to you with a bunch of topics before and you're like,

09:17
I'm not speaking on that. I don't know anything about that. I'm like, damn it. thought if anyone's in the know great example, our last interaction was lipidema or I may be mispronouncing that. I just don't have, know, there's been people in your audience that have reached out to me and said, hey, do you know about this? Like I suffer from this condition and I'm just very honest and open. say, listen, I would love to help you. I'm very good on the fat loss physiology perspective, unstubborn body fat, on mobilizing free fatty acids from beta, you know, talking about beta adrenergic and alpha adrenergic receptors. I can go through that whole physiology.

09:46
the downstream cascades and all that stuff with you. But if you have a medical condition that inhibits that process, I'm just not the guy for you. If you're like a, want the body composition expert, someone that's really good with fat loss and muscle gain and body recomposition, I got you. But if you're in a very specific demographic that I've never worked with and I don't have experience with, I will never speak outside of my scope. So there's been people that have asked me, hey, you know, they've thrown different hypotheses at me. And what they're really asking me to do is what I term

10:14
theory crafting. What is your theory on this? But if I don't have well established data, both in terms of actual reading the scientific literature, looking at the best available evidence, and then also testing it and practice myself and clients and then gauging that response over time and collecting data, like even like the topic we're going to discuss today, the reason I came to this was because I had looked over so much data on my own clients. And then it was like, all right, you see this in practice, let me dig in further. Yeah. And often in fact, isn't that the way like, uh

10:41
a lot of our experience actually leads where the research is in these areas. um And of course on that, we're talking about body recomposition. And I love this topic, Brandon, because I think for a long time, before we started engaging and before I, and so this was probably maybe five years ago or so, I was under the um impression that, well, body recomposition was only something available to super newbies.

11:10
in terms of their experience in the gym and just dieting per se. Or actually, I thought that was it. Actually, I didn't think it was going to be possible than someone who would even had one to two years experience. But of course, listening to you, you've really flipped that on my belief on its head. So I'm super excited to dive into this topic today. And the other thing I will say is I get so many people coming to me and they are like, I just want a body re-comp.

11:37
but they're not prepared to do what it takes to actually do it. A lot of people think they can body recomp the diet alone. But anyway, we're going to talk through the nuts and bolts of what is possible. uh So can we actually just kick off with how you define body composition more broadly than just, you know, fat loss or muscle gain? Yeah, so when I think about body recomposition at its core, a lot of people are going to use the colloquial.

12:02
term for body recomposition. They're going to say it's simultaneous fat loss and muscle gain. And I think that is an appropriate definition, but really I look at it from a little bit of a slightly different perspective. I'm looking at the totality of body composition. And so I'm really looking at body recomposition as the condition or the situation in which you're improving your muscle to fat ratio. So it's about increasingly mass relative to your current level of fat mass, not necessarily about what your scale is doing. And acknowledging this off the bat is really important because

12:29
The scale often doesn't reflect what's actually happening during a recomposition phase. Your weight, and I can say this from both practice and there is cases in the literature where you see this, but I see clients that their weight can stay relatively stable. That's usually the most common occurrence. Sometimes it'll move slightly down or it'll even go up. That's all while your body composition is transforming in the process. If you're judging recomposition by the scale alone, you're going to miss it almost every time. That's a big part of why so many of women that I work with are confused about body recomposition.

12:58
they're actually in the process of undergoing it because so many associate massive losses in scale weight with progress and with success. And when that isn't occurring, they actually associate with the opposite. So they think they're not making progress, but body recomposition can manifest in several ways. it's not just the way that we often speak about it, which is simultaneous fat loss and muscle gain. The first form that I call fat loss focus recomp, and this is where

13:26
someone's exclusively losing body fat while maintaining all their lean muscle mass. So in this form, body weight is actually going down, but it's not going down as quickly as it would if you were solely focused on dropping scale weight. So many of the times I actually have to explain to the women, they're saying, you know, I've dieted in the past, why is my scale weight not going down as quickly? And they're telling me this in their phase and it's because they have dieted in aggressive fashions previously and they've lost both fat mass and then muscle mass. And when we, go through this later, but the energetic content of muscle mass or lean mass in and of itself is much lower.

13:55
from an energy content perspective. So if you were to lose, say you were in an energy deficit of 5,000 calories per week, hypothetical, if you were to lose most of that from lean mass, you would actually lose more pounds than it would be indicated just from the 3,500 calorie rule. So a lot of people, they have lost lean mass in the process of losing fat mass during an aggressive weight loss phase, and so their scale weight is going down slower. So when I speak about fat loss focus recomp, what I'm seeing is that your physique is tightening up, your body fat percentage is dropping.

14:24
we're protecting all your metabolically active lean mass. And that's really what I aim for in well-executed fat loss phases. I'm trying to get exclusively fat loss from fat mass while preserving every ounce of metabolically active muscle tissue that that person has and that we've gained prior to that phase. Now, the second form is one that's most overlooked. And this is what I call building focus recomp. And this occurs usually during a lean building phase where you gain muscle while keeping fat gain minimal or nonexistent. So in this case, your scale is actually going up, but nearly all the weight gain.

14:53
is coming from lean tissue because your total fat mass stays roughly the same or barely moves. When you actually look at it, like from a statistical perspective, your body fat percentage has actually decreased despite weighing more. I'll give you an example. And this is often the example that I use with my clientele when I'm trying to explain what's going on. So say I have a woman and she starts a phase at 150 pounds and 24 % body fat. That means that they're carrying 30 pounds of fat mass and 120 pounds of lean mass. Now, if you were to gain 10 pounds of muscle,

15:20
while your fat mass stays at that 30 pounds, you now weigh 160 pounds. And in someone's mind, they say, well, I still have the same amount of fat mass. But if you actually back calculate that, they went from 20 % body fat to 18.5 % body fat because you weigh more, you have more lean muscle mass, and now you're technically leaner. So that's still a recomp. Now, the third and final form of recomp is the one that most people think of when they hear that term. And that is the simultaneous fat loss and muscle gain scenario. So your body is losing fat while building muscle at the same time. And because both these processes are happening concurrently,

15:50
Your scale weight might barely move, it might drop slowly, or it could even go up slightly. it's depending on the tissue change in and of itself. But throughout the entire process, your physique is transforming. And this is the form that requires the most precision to execute. And the form that I aim for in dedicated, uh, reocm phases with my clients. So like you alluded to, this is not something that's going to happen intuitively. It's not going to happen, um, just by winging it. This is going to take a very structured and dialed in approach, which we'll definitely discuss later.

16:18
With regards to all three of those types, I imagine with the first one, someone's fat mass is staying, fat mass is coming down, yet their muscle is being maintained, we're going to visibly see that. So people would probably be quite stoked with that, albeit it might be a slower shift in terms of weight on the scales because you're not getting that drop in lean mass, which for a lot of people is an inevitable part of

16:47
of losing weight, if you like weight. is, but I think that there's so many interventions that we can utilize to actually skew that. uh Even if we look at like the data on women losing, when we actually look, when we talk lean mass, that is really a combination of things. So we're talking about skeletal muscle tissue, we're talking about glycogen, we're talking about water content, we're talking about electrolytes. So if we really break it down just from a skeletal muscle perspective, we have data that looks and recent data at that.

17:12
that looks at the muscle preservation effects in sexes. it's dimorphic, sexual dimorphic differences. And so what they see, this is Hemsfield and colleagues, they found that women in caloric restriction only lost 10 % of their body weight of total weight loss from skeletal muscle tissue, while men lost 23%. So we're seeing a pretty massive discrepancy. Now here's the thing, that was without proper protein intake and without adequate resistance training in there. So we can actually skew that. There's a great paper by...

17:40
Lehman and colleagues. It's a 2005 paper, I believe. And it's like the stair-step approach, essentially. So he looked at the food guide pyramid at that time, their nutritional recommendations, which was high carb, low protein, essentially. It's like .8. It's the old guidelines, essentially. So they looked at that. Then they looked at compared to a 1.6 grams per kilogram of protein per day. And both of those were non-exercise conditions. Then what they did was they

18:05
did a third condition and it was 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram per day plus resistant training. And what they found was it actually was essentially like a linear response in terms of the more vectors or the more variables that we stacked the deck on, the more lean mass was preserved. So I believe in the case of the women, this was a female trial, this was women between 40 and 56. I believe in the initial. It's a 2005 paper. It's a great one to look at. It's almost like the Sarah Step approach. If you just look at the food guide pyramid.

18:34
a high carb, low protein diet without exercise during caloric restriction, they lost between 33 to 35%, if I'm remembering correctly. I looked at this paper a long time ago, but the numbers really stick out to me. So was like 33 to 35 % of total weight loss came from lean mass. Then when you put protein on top of that, that was decreased to 23 to 25%. Then when you actually look at the data on the resistant-trained plus high protein group, they lost 4 % of total weight loss from lean mass. So we're seeing just these things now. Remember, this is an intervention trial.

19:04
this was not optimized progressive resistance training. This wasn't higher than 1.6 grams per kilo. And so my argument here is like, yes, colloquially we'll say that there's this quarter pound rule that actually comes from Haynes Field. He's actually updated his thoughts on that within a 2024 paper, which I just was discussing before with the 10 and 23%. So a of people will think automatically there's this obligatory loss in lean mass. There is in certain contexts, but I think it's much less than it needs to be if you dial in all the details. And that's where something like body recomposition comes because technically if you're gaining lean mass while dropping body,

19:34
You have not lost any skeletal muscle. You've actually increased skeletal muscle tissue. Yeah, no, I 100 % agree with that. And I think when I was saying that it's inevitable, I meant with a lot of the approaches that people take, you're not dialing in. to your point on that layman paper, um what was super interesting, I thought, if we're talking about the same paper, and I think we are, because the age range is also something I'm interested in, because of course it's the age range with which um I work with, and I know you work with, and a lot of people fall into.

20:03
I don't even think the resistance training was actually optimized at all in that. I think they used something like nautilus training or something like that. It might have just been some sort of circuit training or something like that. So for the first type of body recon, which people think that they want, um it's an easier path than say the third type that you talked about, which is that much more optimized, much more strategic.

20:33
Um, and I feel as well, like a lot of people think that they want the first one, but they just want to, you know, but actually once they get there, they're like, actually, I'm not a hundred percent happy with what this looks like. And fact, how do we get to this sort of, you know, how do we sort of move the needle more in the direction that I now know that I want? Absolutely. They call the third hyper body recomb, so that simultaneous fat loss and muscle gain scenario that is called the Holy Grail of body composition. And that's for a reason.

21:02
Yeah. And probably that is the thing which I'm thinking about that is the almost impossible, but not quite impossible. um Brandon, who then do you feel is most likely to experience or notice body recomp in your audience? Like I mentioned newbies. Obviously we both work a lot with sort of perimenopausal, postmenopausal, women, et cetera. Like, is this an avenue for everyone to be able to, you know, is it accessible to everyone?

21:32
If you had asked me this five to seven years ago, my opinion would have been completely different. would have much agreed with you in terms of newbies. people that are, have a, it's training is a novel stimulus. We know that they're going to have a newbie gain. even without nutritional intervention, they're gaining muscle. Oftentimes they're losing body fat or their fat mass is staying the same. They're technically recomping. Secondarily, we could talk about those that have excess adiposity because essentially you have an energy depot to pull from to drive that fat loss and also to fuel the muscle gain process.

22:00
And then third, we would talk about detrained individuals. Now I look at detraining differently than I did previously, and that comes from a lot of experience in the trenches and then looking at additional data. When I used to speak about detraining, I'll describe it or define it in the way that most people do, it's an excessive period of time away from the gym. You got an injury, you got surgery, you were in bed rest. That is how a lot of times the scientific community refers to as detraining. However, detraining also occurs in many people.

22:28
in different chapters of their life. So they don't train as frequently. They're not dialed in as much. They're not really dialing in the vectors of nutrition, training, stress, sleep, things of that sort. what I really try to get across now, and I've seen this in my own practice, I've seen high-level bodybuilders recomp. And the reason that they've been able to do so is because they were technically detrained as compared to their peak physique. So essentially, they're in a state where they can undergo that muscle memory phenomenon. So maybe they're not gaining excessive amount of muscle over their

22:57
their previous peak. But we have to think about it the context like this. I think the best way I had to describe, had a conversation with Eric Helms one time about this, and he told me, do you understand, have you ever looked into elite sprinters? They are not running. So say that we're talking about Usain Bolt and he runs, I don't remember the exact figure, but say 9.6. He didn't run 9.6 the entire season. There was times, and he's a very advanced trainee, there was times he was running 10 flat and there were times he was running 9.8, and then he peaked to a 9.6. You're not always in your peak state. And the same thing can be said.

23:27
about physique athletes or even people that are just recreational trainees or physique enthusiasts. They're not always at their maximum. So I can tell you personally, there's been experiences in my own life where I have went an extended period of time where I'm still training, but I'm not locked in. I'm not dialed in. I am too preoccupied with my client work. I'm answering emails in the middle of gym sessions. I'm doing things that break a of my cardinal rules. And especially, I will tell you, there was a period in 2022 when I transitioned out of my corporate job into coaching full-time.

23:56
I already had what would be considered a full roster. considering the fact that I left a corporate career that took a lot of my time, I probably took on too many clients. And it wasn't that I couldn't serve them. It was that I was working 12 to 14 hours a day to be able to do so. So all I did was work. And luckily, I shortly after found Jane, my partner, and she got me out of that type of um merry-go-round, that vicious cycle. But I will say, there was times that during that period, I essentially was going to the gym five times a week, but I wasn't hitting, you I wasn't trained to failure. I wasn't dialing everything in.

24:25
not even setting up even from like once you get more advanced, you get more into biomechanics and exercise selection and certain movement setups. I didn't want to go through the process of doing them. So I was using suboptimal movements and exercise selection because it would get me in and out of the gym quicker. After that period, the next year, so in the summer of 2023, I technically underwent RECOM, my body weight stayed the same weight, but I was able to lose fat and I gained muscle throughout that process. I was regaining lost tissue that I had lost from just being suboptimal in my approach.

24:53
Also during that period when I first went full time, I barely slept. Mickey, we've had many conversations. There was years that I slept four and a half, five hours. I'm not proud of that. That was par for the course with what I was trying to do. I was trying to get myself to the next level from a business perspective. was working with people. Right now I work with people in nine different countries in eight different time zones. At that time, I was still adjusting to dealing with essentially having emails at all times of the day, all times of the night, and really trying to make sure that I was being very responsive and always something that I've tried to. This is why I work this weird scheduler.

25:23
This morning, I started my first email communication or my first check-in at 3 a.m. this morning. I got on the podcast with you at 4 p.m. and we'll be going for a while. there was times in my life where I wasn't as dialed in and locked in. So I was able to experience Recomp and I am at this point, 21 years into training. So I don't think it's off the table. So when we talk about training. Now, the other category is actually trained individuals. And if you had asked me...

25:46
Six, seven years ago, I would have said, I don't know, man. I may see this in practice on occasion, but it's with pharmaceutical enhancements or HRT. And I would have had all these caveats. I still think those nuances matter. However, we have better data since that time. have a review paper by Barakat and colleagues that actually looks at trained individuals. But besides that, we have to consider the fact that many people, their definition of trained is different than what I would, from an extra science perspective, define someone as trained. A lot of people have went to the gym, but they've been working out.

26:13
They haven't been training. There's a big difference between intentional training sessions that are progressive, that are dialed in, that have tracking metrics, and that you're shooting for progressive overload over time, whether that's the progression of reps or load, each and every single week across the course of the mesocycle and going to the gym and going through the motions or doing a workout class. There's many people that come to me and they tell me, you know, I have an intake form. And upon initial conversation, they've been in the gym five years or 10 years. So they tell me they're advanced. But their body composition in terms of their actual skeletal muscle mass on their frame,

26:42
doesn't reflect being advanced, nor does their training acumen, nor does their training intensity. They haven't never trained a failure. So there's many things. I think how we defined training advancement is a misnomer in many areas of the spectrum. But I will tell you that I think, and I will say this, and I'll go out on a limb on this because there's been many cases that have proven me right. 90 to 95 % of people that I see in a commercial gym that are not coming from a hardcore bodybuilding background can recomp. And even more so as we'll go through the physiology.

27:11
more so even women, because a lot of times women, it's a beautiful thing now. For the last 10 years, I've seen way more women in the weight room and the resistance training. If I go back 20 years when I started in this industry and I started my career, there's barely anyone in this weight room. So it's not as much, it's becoming more part of our culture. I'll tell you, women that are in that 40 to 55 year old age bracket, which I work with a lot and you do, they didn't come up with resistance training. They didn't come up really burying themselves in the gym. So I still think that they have still a portion of their genetic ceiling that we can still reach to and they can technically

27:40
get re-comp. The only cases I would say someone is going to re-comp is someone that's peeled, like shredded body fat. mean, that's going to be uh a bottleneck or someone that is clinically deficient in hormones. So that's where really like an intervention like HRT, MHT, one of those would be very advantageous for someone because we're replacing a deficiency. We're replacing something that's so suboptimal that it's becoming the bottleneck in their physiology to be able to get that simultaneous fat loss and muscle gain.

28:08
Okay, so before I move on to my next question, which is about calories and how we draw energy from to be able to recomp, you mentioned HRT. And in fact, I didn't mention it in any, I think, of my questions. uh I believe that online, I can't recall how the sort of argument goes, but there are a lot of people pushing back against the idea that HRT can help with muscle gain. Like, it's almost like anyone who suggests that it can, they're a grifter, they're trying to sell something. But you've literally just said,

28:36
that in your experience, HRT can help someone with this body recon. So talk to me about that actually, Brandon. All right. So I'm seeing it from a different perspective. First and foremost, if we look in the literature from Bazen and colleagues, or Bazen, people say it different ways, we see that there's a dose escalation response, especially in testosterone administration, that the more testosterone as you go up in this dose escalation, the more skeletal muscle mass you gain, even in conditions where people are not training. technically, the Bazen studies, technically they're on men.

29:05
but they show that you could recomp even without training. first and foremost- Is it technically on men or actually on men? It's actually in men. Yeah. It's dose escalation study between one, I think they started at 25 milligrams, they went all the way to 600 milligrams. So obviously we're going to super physiological range. Now, when we really talk about HRT, I want to differentiate and be very distinct in how I discuss this. I believe that it's not that HRT in and of itself is eliciting muscle gain. I think what I'm seeing

29:33
is that people that are deficient are actually at a lower baseline level of muscle mass than they would be. And the evidence I have for that is if you look at the dimorphic differences in sexes, before puberty, men and women had the same absolute level of muscle mass. What differentiates them is the exposure of men when they go through puberty to testosterone. It increases their baseline absolute values of muscle mass. And that is the big differentiation in, essentially, teenage years where we see even with teenage athletes, men and women, start

30:01
men start kind of advancing in terms of strength, in terms of lean mass accretion. Then if we go back and look at the data on actual relative changes in muscle mass, there's two great papers. I actually had one of their lead researchers, primary investigator, Martin Raffalo, on my podcast, Chasing Clarity, last year. He did a great meta-analysis looking at the sexual differences or the sex differences in muscle mass changes in strength. And they actually found that there's the same relative potential.

30:31
and the same relative increases in muscle mass and strength between men and women. We just can't do that on an absolute value because men are starting at a larger baseline. say for instance, we go through an interventional trial for 12 weeks and both groups gain 10 % of their total skeletal muscle. We look at a cross-sectional area analysis through muscle biopsy, we see 10 % increase. Well, say we were doing it in absolute pounds and men had 150 pounds of skeletal muscle tissue and women had 100.

30:59
Well, that 10 % on a man is going to be 15 pounds increase where it's going to be 10 pounds on a woman. But when we actually back calculate that and look at it from a skeletal muscle, like a frame perspective, are often shorter, smaller stature. So technically they're gaining what looks to be the same amount of muscle. So I really think about HRT as optimizing the variables. It's not that it's going to elicit independently muscle gain and fat loss, but it's going to stack the deck in their favor that they can actually respond to the training, the nutrition, the sleep, the stress management and a better... uh

31:29
perspective. So I see that with testosterone therapy, estradiol therapy, progesterone therapy. Think about progesterone and its effects on calming and sleep. If you get better sleep, you have better body composition outcomes. If we look at Nidalcheva, where they put in the same people in an energy deficit, they took them in an 8.5 hour condition versus a 5.5 hour condition. They found that the muscle or the lean mass loss increased from about 20 % to 55 % of weight loss in that 5.5 hour condition with the same diet and the same people. So that's a controlled condition.

31:59
Say we use progesterone and that helps improve sleep. Now they're have better recovery capacity, better strength and performance outcomes, a better ability to push themselves in the gym. Then we look at other interventions. I'll say this from my own perspective as someone that has hypothyroidism. It's not that getting on thyroid replacement therapy made me lose more fat. It's that it put my physiology in a better condition to respond to the energy deficit and not suffer from down regulations in my basal metabolic rate and total daily energy expenditure from two components.

32:25
Obviously thyroid hormone, especially T3, the metabolically active form, doxor receptors, there's a thyroid receptor in every gland of the body. And that also plays a role in skeletal muscle accretion. It plays a role in muscle protein synthesis, but it also plays a role in fatty acid oxidation. So by having very low T3 levels when I was in a hypothyroid condition, it was essentially hindering my ability to lose fat, to oxidize fat, and then also lowering my BMR. But it also had...

32:50
subsequent decreases or downstream ramifications on my total daily energy expenditure because anyone that has frank hypothyroidism will tell you, have very low energy, you have tons of fatigue, you have brain fog. So how much was I moving during that time? So it's not that going to a replacement dose of thyroid caused me to burn more fat or caused my energy expenditure to go to this super physiological level. It just put me at a level playing field with other people. And that's what I see in practice. It's not that

33:13
independently taking people that have everything single thing dialed in and looking at two different intervention groups, we just put the HRT and it magically becomes a panacea that spikes muscle gain and fat loss. It's that it puts your physiology in a better condition to respond to the same variables that will drive body recomposition. No, I love that. And in fact, a lot of that is stuff that I knew, except that whole fat oxidation thing. That is super interesting. So people with low T3.

33:41
that has implications for ability just to burn fat, which is different, of course, from losing weight, but just even that metabolic state is, I think that's super interesting. Absolutely. Okay, Brandon. So um I want to come back to your comment on the, on body fat levels actually, and the role that they play in someone's ability to body recomp, because, I've heard Holly Baxter,

34:05
talk about this actually before, that she has clients that, you know, once they're above a certain body fat percentage and she works, I believe, I think with men, but predominantly women as well. Like when you've got a woman above say 28 % body fat, she's pretty confident that, you know, she doesn't need to put them in a calorie surplus in order for them to build muscle because they can use the energy that they've already got stored. And I think that you just said the same thing. And this is something which people I do believe sort of misunderstand around

34:34
building muscle that it takes a surplus. can we talk about that calories in, calories out, and the role that that plays in body re-tomp? Absolutely. I find that many people, especially in our space, have what I would consider a myopic view of muscle growth and fat loss, and they base it off of the energy balance model. So many claim that you cannot build muscle and lose fat at the same time. And the reason this gets claimed so repeatedly is often because it comes down to an oversimplified application of calories in, calories out.

35:03
which treats body weight change, so what you're seeing on the scale, and body composition change as if they're the same thing. But they're not, and that's a fundamental misunderstanding. Energy balanced, and this is really how I explain to my clients, be honest with you, I always say your calories will determine what your body weight change is. So it's going to determine whether your body weight is going up or it's going down, as that is controlled whether you're in a surplus or deficit. But your state of energy balance doesn't tell us whether that weight change is going to be made up from a body composition

35:32
It's not going to tell you if you're gaining muscle, if you're gaining fat, or if you're losing muscle, or if you're losing fat. When someone says this term, a lot of times I hear this, you can't gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. You need to be in a surplus for one and a deficit for the other. What they're really doing is they're grouping two different physiological processes into one single variable. This is an example of someone creating a simple story based on a half-truth, but it shows that they don't really understand muscle growth and fat loss on a mechanistic and physiological level. I told you I would do this.

36:01
We're going go down the rabbit hole a little bit, Mickey, because I really do think that it's important for people to understand the actual energetic values of different tissues. And this is where the error in this energy balance model perspective, where you apply it to everything, it becomes really clear. So a kilogram of body fat contains roughly 9,400 calories of metabolizable energy, whereas a kilogram of lean mass contains roughly around, it's like 1815, but we can say 1800 calories of metabolizable energy. So when you compare the two, you compare fat mass and its energy content.

36:30
and you compare lean mass and its energy content, that mass has about five times the energy density or the calorie content of lean mass per kilogram. And that five times difference is why gaining muscle in a deficit is possible. That five times difference is essentially like the underlying mathematical reason why we can recomb. Because what this means in practice is that body weight change and body composition change are not the same thing. And I'll give you an example to try to illustrate this to the audience because I know that sometimes when you hear these numbers and you're not actually like writing it down or really looking at it in a graph,

37:00
doesn't land. And so let's say I have a client who loses 1 kilogram of fat mass and gains 2 kilograms of lean mass over the course of a re-comp phase. Their body weight has technically gone up by a kilogram on the scale. And 99 % of fitness pros on the Instagram are going to say that they're in a surplus. But if we actually calculate what's happening from a cumulative energy perspective, so we go back to energy balance model, we start doing the mathematical equations, this person has lost roughly 9,400 calories worth of fat. But they've gained 3,600 calories worth of lean mass.

37:29
So that's a cumulative energy deficit of around 5800 calories. So in other words, this person gained lean mass and technically gained weight while being in a caloric deficit. The scale weight went up, but they were actually in a deficit the entire time. And this is where holding onto a simple version of calories in calories out doesn't hold up because if you believe that gaining weight required a surplus, this scenario wouldn't be possible. But it does happen regularly when the training stimulus is strong enough to drive muscle growth, even when total energy intake is below maintenance.

37:57
This is also why it's important to have like a deeper understanding of physiology, especially when it comes to fat loss and muscle gain, as they're technically governed by two different mechanisms. A lot of times we look at things and if you take, we have biases. So I'll tell you personally, I have a nutrition bias perspective. I started as a nutritionist, that's my background. So I'm looking at things from a biochemical perspective, but I also spent so much time in exercise science and so much time training in hypertrophy that I understand the mechanism of hypertrophy. But if you only look at it from one view, if you have just the calorie intake perspective, you'll look at everything from an energy perspective.

38:27
Or if you're someone that's more from the exercise science world, you're to look at everything from a molecular standpoint. So what are the mechanisms that are driving these adaptations? Well, if we look at it, we pull it apart and we decide we're going to take both stances. We're going to go the energetic perspective. And we're also going to go the mechanistic perspective or the molecular perspective. Well, fat loss is an energy dependent process. It's primarily driven by being in a deficit and in a state of negative energy balance, because that puts your body in a state where it needs some mobilized stored fuel.

38:54
and preferentially from body fat to meet its energy demands. However, on the other hand, muscle growth is a signaling dependent process that is primarily driven by mechanical tension from progressive resistance training first, and then secondarily by sufficient dietary protein to support muscle protein synthesis. And really all you need to do is create a state of positive net protein balance where your muscle protein synthesis levels exceed muscle protein breakdown. Now, can you do that from an energy perspective? Yes, you can put yourself at maintenance. However, you can also do so through

39:23
dietary protein or even more so, the greatest and most robust stimulator on muscle protein synthesis is that mechanical tension stimulus, aka resistance training. So when you have someone with a slight energy deficit who's training hard and eating sufficient protein, the body is able to use stored fat to meet its energy demands while the training stimulus and that dietary protein are signaling the body to build and retain tissue. And that is why the simultaneous loss in body fat and gain in lean mass is possible. Yeah, interesting. And of course, I imagine that

39:52
If someone is losing that pound of body fat, yet gaining two pounds of muscle, they're going to see it in the mirror. Their body, they'll see that physical transformation, albeit, I mean, it's just a pound, or just two pounds, but still two pounds. Yes. Yeah. When we bring it out to a greater degree, I often try to use the least common denominator. When I give examples, I'm not giving... uh

40:17
as actually accurate description. I'll give you an example. All right. There's a study that actually came out, Stu Phillips, it's on men, but it still applies to body recomposition. There was a four week intervention trial and they actually utilize progressive resistance training, high step counts. it was 12,000 steps per day, four or five resistance training sessions per week that were hard. They put these guys through the grinder. They had HIIT training and they also coupled, it's a study by long learning colleagues, and they either looked at 2.4 grams of protein per kilogram per day versus 1.2. Well, in the condition that was the

40:46
elevated protein. So 2.4. So we can look at that. That's around 1.1 grams per kilogram, if you're looking at the metric system, or how we do it in the US. They actually lost 10 pounds of body fat and gained somewhere in the realm of three to four pounds of lean mass. there's many people that are going to say, that's not possible. Well, it's done through a four compartment model. So it's actually one of the most valid abilities to test. So we're looking at Dex, we're looking at BI. They pulled everything from a compartmental perspective. So really, when it comes to body composition,

41:15
That is like the greatest evidence. Now that occurred in four weeks. There's an argument whether they were untrained or not because apparently they had previous training experience. But based on how you define untrained, sometimes the actual inclusion criteria is only six months without resistant training. So really what I think in my case, and this is kind of like the evidence I think of, this is more like a former trained, then were detrained, and then recombed. But it shows that there can be significant... We're talking... Imagine someone loses 10 pounds of body fat and gains 3 to 4 pounds of lean mass. That is significant. They've changed the...

41:44
Like the entire way that their physique looks, their shape, their structure. You could see how tight their physique is. Their physique is leaner, more muscular, more defined. That's significant degree of body recomp. Now I will say in more advanced trainees, I would say that's possible over much longer time scales. So instead of four weeks, we're looking at 16 to 24. I wonder if you can recall the deficit they were in, Brandon. 40 % deficit, aggressive deficit.

42:08
Okay, that's pretty, that's still recomb still being that so say that we had, we had brought that a little bit lower, like I'll give you a better example. Did you have you come across the brand new recomb study by Vargas Molina? Tell me about it and I'll tell you if I have absolutely. All right. So there was a study, I believe it's published, it was just published in April and it was by Vargas Molina and colleagues and that research group or that researcher has done a lot of the like ketogenic versus mixed diet studies on muscle gain. It was a 10 week

42:36
randomized control trial and they use resistant trained individuals. Now they put both groups on a four day per week moderate volume upper lower training split, but they divided the intervention groups into two groups. So one group was eating at their maintenance calories and one group was eating in a 250 calorie deficit. So very conservative deficit. I believe that based on their calculations and their estimation equations, it was 10 % deficit. So we're talking much more conservative than that 40 % deficit. And both groups followed a high protein diet where they consumed 2.5 grams of protein per kilogram per day.

43:06
Now the deficit group that was in the 250 calorie deficit, they almost three kilograms of fat mass and gained over one kilogram of fat free mass. So they achieved body re-comp. But even the ISO group, was that maintenance calorie group, they lost 1.41, I believe, kilograms of fat mass and gained right around a kilogram of fat free mass. So they lost less fat than the deficit group, which is what you would expect. They were at maintenance, so they were technically in a higher state of energy balance. But they also were able to gain nearly the same amount of muscle.

43:34
really what we see and what's very interesting, the reason I brought this paper up is because Alan Aragon is one of the lead researchers on this and he made a post about this. But also if you look in the conclusion, essentially what they said was that body composition seems to occur independently of a strict energy balance model and that is in certain conditions. And that's what they described was the conditions need to be when protein intake is sufficiently elevated and resistance training volume is progressively increased. So this is kind of like great evidence for what I've been saying.

44:03
years honestly, but what I'm saying in this podcast, is that energy balance governs our body weight, but our training stimulus, our protein intake, and then our lifestyle and how dialed in we are or would govern our body composition, especially from a lean mass and fat mass perspective. Okay. And Brandon, I really want to get into the detail, the nuts and bolts of um in practice and in theory, like what is required for body recon in terms of diet.

44:28
plus exercise. And obviously people know resistance training, people know protein, but I would like to get into the specifics. um But before we do that, I've heard you say before on multiple podcasts, and you may have even said it when we're talking today, that women have a greater propensity to be able to achieve body recomp compared to men. And I'd just love you to detail why that is before we get into the, and how actually to achieve it, Parv. Yeah, absolutely.

44:57
This is something that I actually came across in practice. was really pulling apart my nutritional periodization uh program. was essentially trying to refine it with clients. And I started going through a lot of my client data. And I was looking over progress photos and body composition assessments. I was looking at training logs. I was looking at scale weight trends and biofeedback. What I started noticing was a pattern. started seeing that a significantly higher percentage of the female clients I was working with were achieving significant degrees of body composition.

45:24
Compared to men. Now this isn't saying that my males were not re-comping, but when I looked at the magnitude of re-comp, I started noticing more significant changes in the women that I worked with. So I had literally dozens of female clients who finished a phase looking dramatically leaner and more muscular, even when their scale weight hadn't moved much. So this was a type of pattern that was consistent enough that I couldn't ignore it. So I dove into literature and I really was trying to look for mechanisms to support it. And this was very similar to what I did with the energy flux model. I came to that, I don't want to say intuitively, but through

45:54
essentially coaching assessments and really seeing that higher energy or higher activity levels coupled with higher food was leading to better body composition outcomes and better biofeedback and better hormonal markers on lab work. And then I decided, let me look into literature now. First, when I looked there wasn't there and then Chris Melby comes along in 2018, he terms energy flux and I was like, here's my golden goose. The same thing really happened with this body composition. really pushed me and I'll tell you a little bit obsessively.

46:20
to go down the rabbit hole. And really what I found is there's a few distinct characteristics that I've identified. And when you stack them together, this is what I call the perfect storm for body recomposition. And it applies specifically to women. So the first is that women have higher average body fat levels. So women carry on average eight to 10 % more body fat than men as part of a normal female physiology. So in the context of recomp, that's an advantage. It's a physiological advantage because body fat represents stored energy. So when a woman is put in a slight deficit,

46:48
Her body has more endogenous fuel available to support both the fat loss and muscle building process. The second physiological advantage is that women have greater lean mass sparing during dieting, meaning women lose less lean mass during calorie dosage than men do, especially when we add in an optimized training in protein intake. But that even happens outside of that. So a lot of the trials are just on weight loss trials, and they're only looking independently at the effective diet. Now, we'll go through some evidence later. I actually pulled a bunch of contest prep studies.

47:17
And I saw that that same effect happens even at lower body fat percentages. So when we look at that and we dial in their nutrition, their training, it becomes even more enhanced. They have a better propensity to re-comp. The other one is estrogen has protective effects. Let's think about the dominance. The female dominant hormone is estrogen, whereas the male dominant hormone is testosterone. They both have their benefits. However, I found that in the literature that estrogen does three things that directly support re-comp. First of all, it's anti-catabolic, meaning it's going to reduce muscle protein breakdown.

47:45
which is technically going to improve net protein balance. A lot of times we only focus on the stimulation perspective, only muscle breaking synthesis. But if you can lower that net breakdown, or you can lower breakdown, you can improve net protein balance. It also reduces muscle damage and supports recovery, which means women can train more consistently with higher quality. And then from a nutrient partitioning perspective, it improves insulin sensitivity, which means carbohydrates can be more likely to be directly pushed towards muscle glycogen storage rather than out of post-itial. Then the fourth and final difference,

48:14
comes down to differences in substrate oxidation between men and women. Women are more oxidative, meaning they rely more heavily on fat metabolism as a fuel source during exercise, and they spare glycogen better. Now that's what a lot of people, when we think about substrate utilization, we always think carbs and fats. Well, what often gets overlooked, especially in the context of a deficit, is leucine oxidation and looking at, or essentially gluconeogenesis and also tapping into amino acids for energy. Well, women do that less. So they go through less protein oxidation, which means that they have more dietary protein available

48:44
for stimulating muscle protein synthesis rather than being oxidized for fuel. And even if you look at the studies, it's very interesting. There's a trial by Lila and colleagues, it's a 1999 study. And they look at the difference between leucine oxidation in starvation conditions between obese and lean individuals. And they find that lean individuals tend to increase leucine oxidation by two to three times more than those with obesity or excess body fat. Now here's the thing, all those trials are in men.

49:11
And so we really missed out in terms of that, but I would say that based on the literature that we have, we see that women spare protein better, spare amino acids specifically. So when you take all those together, you get a physiological environment that's protecting muscle, it's mobilizing fat efficiently, and it's supporting the training stimulus. And that's why I would argue in most real world coaching conditions, women may have an advantage over men when it comes to body recomposition. There's also some practical things that we can get into. But when I just talk about the physiology, these are the advantages they have, and then there's also practical differences.

49:41
that are just as beneficial from a body recomposition perspective. Well, super interesting, because you know that I come from a metabolic health background, much more so than a physique background. Although, of course, my interests have broadened over the years. And what I know to be true from just being in a lab, observing, not doing it, but observing with multiple people coming through, that the idea that women burn more fat than men

50:09
Does that hold up in this modern food environment? Does it hold up for the general population? Is it just for fit women? Like, does it change according to the environment that someone's in? In your experience, Brandon? I think I have to put my biases on the table. I work with very hard charging driven type A individuals that are already high achievers and high performers. So I don't really get the general population where they're eating like the standard American diet. So I think that a lot of times when I look at the literature,

50:37
I am looking in certain populations because I'm looking to fit, I'm looking for studies that best represent and fit the population that I work with. So a lot of times when it comes to metabolic health stuff, I understand the literature on a broad perspective. For instance, a 2022 trial looked at the data in industrialized countries, specifically in the US, and found that 90, I believe it was 93.2 % of Americans have some degree of metabolic dysfunction categorized by the metabolic syndrome criteria. We look at, I sent you a study a long time ago, or actually a few months ago.

51:06
and it was by Phil Mathitone and he found that 91 % of adults are over fat, which is essentially defined by having excessive body fat to impair metabolic health. But can I say that I have seen an impairment in fatty acid oxidation or fat use in the women I work with? No, but I also am not working with the general population. Yeah, super interesting, isn't it? And in fact, the other question that comes to mind, of course, and this may be more relevant to your population and maybe to people listening to this as well.

51:35
We often hear about cortisol, and cortisol changes fuel substrate use. So if type A individuals that are hard charging and they're in the gym, at work, at home, et cetera, is that going to impair their ability to burn fat? This is a bit of a tangent, but I'm curious as to how you feel about that. First and foremost, I think that there is imprecise measurements in terms of cortisol. I went down a very large rabbit hole about five or six years ago because I was

52:04
dead set on salivary cortisol measurements in Dutch analysis and urinary dried analysis of cortisol and then plasma serum. There was a trial that I looked at many years ago. I'm going to give you the broad spectrum or the broad scope of it. I won't remember the details in particularly, but I believe it was across the course of eight weeks. So 56 days, they did cortisol testing every other day and they were trying to find a meme. And what they actually found was cortisol measurements. And when I back calculated them, because they were um

52:33
They were in different metrics than I use in the States. And so I was looking for that. So I back calculated it went anywhere between in the US units between 13 and 27. And so if you look at that in a discrepancy perspective, I usually don't like to clients over 15 chronically in terms of serum cortisol on a morning draw. Now there was such a discrepancy in cortisol measurements that I think, a, it's confounded by the situation to sleep, all these things. I also feel that a lot of times we look at

53:02
the shift in substrate use from cortisol and say that it's going to burn through more carbohydrates because uh carbohydrates and insulin specifically is counter regulatory to cortisol. But if you actually look at cortisol from a fuel mobilization perspective and actually the physiology of cortisol, it's actually better at stimulating catecholamines and it's going down that entire catecholamine release chain with adrenaline and your adrenaline and it's actually helping to mobilize free fatty acids. So I can't say and the secondary thing is here.

53:31
I have people that will describe themselves and I would describe themselves as type A. A lot of them don't have high cortisol when I look at it in labs. So I think that's where there's a miss um in terms of what people say, even in terms of, I mean, there's a lot of people in this space which will talk about the different cortisol increasing effects of exercise. And they will say you shouldn't or uh a great example is there's other people in more of the functional health space that says, that say that within a certain proximity to waking up, you shouldn't

53:59
utilize caffeine because it chronically elevates cortisol. It does not chronically elevate cortisol acutely and transiently increases cortisol and that's a fuel mobilization response. So think that we can't look too far into the cortisol because when I've really looked at client case studies, I'm like, all right, this person is a type A high achiever. You know, they seem like they're burning the candle at Boca then, but they have a 13 cortisol. It's like, it's not chronically high. It's not elevated. They're managing it very well. They have the type of personality type that they're hard charging and high achieving. Do I have to work on some stress regulation stuff for them and sleep?

54:28
Yeah, absolutely. But I don't see cortisol as the bottleneck to them being able to recomp and actually mobilize fatty acids from stored fat and then transport them in the serum or in the blood and then, you know, essentially dock them into the mitochondria of cell and burn them off for energy. This is great. And because I think that after listening to us talk about that fuel substrate and the way that I think about fuel substrate use, like it's quite different um from what you see with your clients and probably the people that listen to this podcast.

54:58
Okay, Brandon, so obviously protein is important when it comes to body recomp. And of course, I just said before, um sort of almost off-handedly that people think it's just about protein and that's the major thing. But to your point, it's the mechanical tension on the muscle through resistance training over time that really sort of drives that body recomp process. So let's get into the nuts and bolts about nutrition and also the training fundamentals. Got it.

55:28
You want to start with nutrition or want to start with training? We'll start nutrition and then we'll move to training. You got it. So I think about body recomposition nutritionally as stacking the deck in the fever of those that I'm working with to be able to elicit the simultaneous body recomposition effects where it's lean mass gain and fat mass loss. And the first thing we have to start with is an appropriate energy intake. So for recomp, that means either at maintenance calories, which is actually my preference. That's where I start people at and then going into a slight deficit. It's never an aggressive deficit. So despite the long-living colleagues,

55:58
research that shows a 40 % deficit, I don't think that's the best course of action. I find that the window for RECOM is narrower for either fat loss or muscle building when you're in an aggressive deficit. So calorie control has to be precise. The second is obviously sufficient protein intake. And this is the variable I'd argue that I leverage most on the muscle gain side of the equation. So for RECOM, I'm specifically pushing protein intake. And we can discuss this in further detail. But I'm generally going between 2.2 to 3.2 grams per kilogram, depending on the client's body fat level and their goals.

56:28
The third priority for me is peri-workout nutrition. This is one that I see that many people are leaving on the table. I want female clients going to training fueled and recovering properly after. That means not training fasted. That means having adequate protein and carbs in their pre-workout meal and then supporting muscle protein synthesis and glycogen replenishment post-workout. And then the fourth would be food quality and dietary structure. I create diets built on whole nutrient-dense foods and I'm even back calculating their micronutrient intakes.

56:56
because I want them to have all sufficient macro and micronutrient needs. And that's very important to me because we can't just think about it from the mechanics perspective. Going into the gym, eat your protein. is, you have uh sufficient micronutrients available for thyroid production conversion of T4 to T3? Do you have sufficient zinc to help with uh testosterone synthesis? There's so many different magnesium to help with all these enzymatic reactions and processes going on in the body. It can't just be about hitting macros.

57:25
It's a very nutrient-dense diet. is back-filling that with supplementation if need be. And it's also anchored to a consistent meal structure that supports adherence for the length of a re-comp, because this is not a six-week phase. This isn't an eight-week shortcut. I generally am doing this 16 to 24 weeks, because we have to think the time course of these adaptations. Muscle gain is a much slower process than fat loss. To be able to achieve both simultaneously, we need enough runway. Yeah, I that makes perfect sense. So a couple of things. You mentioned...

57:53
protein load and 2.2 to 3.2, I think that you said per kilogram body weight. that per kilogram body weight actually, is um that lean body mass that you work on? Yeah, so both. All right. So let me describe, I do this on this tier system and this comes from an amalgamation between my own coaching experience, a lot of conversation with Lionel McDonald and his rapid fat loss, and then also more recent literature that we have.

58:19
What I do is I try to tier this and I'm going to try to explain what the algorithm in my brain is going on, which can be a little bit convoluted, but I essentially see it as a tier. So I'm looking at body fat level and goals and I utilize body fat as the proxy for lean mass. So I'm estimating unless I have like a dexam measurement, their body fat, and then I'm back calculating their lean mass. And then I also modify that with based on their age, their training history. And then also another thing I really take into consideration is dieting history, because I have a lot of women that come to me that come from a chronic dieting lifestyle.

58:48
taken the consideration that they've actually perhaps lost lean mass in the past or they're kind of like at a reduced baseline when they come to me. I'll say this, female clients, if they're at moderate body fat levels, and I don't want to define that because it's more so on a look, they're going to go into a re-comp phase with some, they have fat to lose. And so I can typically program protein a little bit lower. It's still not low though. So it's going be 2.2 to 2.5 grams per kilogram of body weight. So that's going come out to like one to 1.1 grams per pound.

59:17
Then for leaner clients, and that's generally what I consider under 25 % body fat, I'm going to push protein higher and I'm going to go between 2.5 to 3.2 grams per kilogram based off body weight. That would scale up even more if I did fat-free mass, but it's even going to go into like the fours, to be honest with you, if it's fat-free mass. And the reason I do this is both from my coaching practice, seeing that there's a lot of literature that looks at different protein intakes. We generally see it like that 2.5 and above.

59:43
That's even like the Vargas study. There's another study we can cover later, which is by Bill Campbell and colleagues. That was 2.5 versus 0.9. It just keeps centering on this 2.5, but I've actually seen benefits even going higher. And that's based off like the Jose Antonio data that looks at both men and women. But I also had this reinforced. So was already doing this in practice, but then there was a meta regression published by Martin Raffalo, but also Trexler and Helms is on the paper. I've spoken in person with Helms on this systematic review and meta regression.

01:00:10
And they showed a stronger dose response relationship between protein intake and lean mass changes in leaner individuals. So the leaner you are, the less stored energy you have to draw from and the more critical protein becomes for protecting muscle and supporting growth. So that's kind of how I frame it. Now there's some other considerations that I take into. So for one, there's age. I have a lot of women that fall between 40 and 55. And it's not that that's old by any means, but I really do find that some of them are already in.

01:00:36
suboptimal habits, especially around like actual protein dosing per meal. So I'm really trying to get up into the higher protein range in terms of totality, but also making sure they have like 40 grams per meal. And so I'm really trying to get multiple simulations of muscle protein synthesis. If I women above that, and they're starting to suffer from anabolic resistance, which there's some debate on that now, if anabolic resistance is from a lack of stimulus, a lack of activity, or if it's really from dietary protein, but I'm going to stack the deck in all these figures. So I'm going look at all this literature. um And so I'm going to use higher protein doses.

01:01:06
I will say for training status, I work with a lot of people that are intermediate to advanced trainees and they're technically at the upper edge of their genetic ceiling. So I'm leveraging every single vector I can and they're getting high protein because I find that to be more advantageous. then dieting history, this is the one I think that gets underappreciated the most. And so with female clients that I have with a long history of chronic under-fueling and restricted dieting, I'm actually pushing protein intake higher because we're working against a body that's been chronically under supplied with the building blocks for muscle growth.

01:01:36
And then I find that the body needs more protein to rebuild than it would to maintain. So a lot of times in this process, I'm trying to rebuild tissue that they may have lost through aggressive dieting practices in the past and then get them above their previous baseline. Now that makes perfect sense. And I guess just a few comments on that. First is, you're speaking to, and I speak to women who, and men, but women particularly, who sort of fall outside of...

01:02:02
the population that Stu Phillips, for example, may be speaking of when he is saying you just need 1.6 grams per kg body weight, it appeared that he didn't even look at that meta-aggression that you talked about. I think he's probably addressed that. But with a trained population who are very dialled in, really focused on Recom, per se, you do need a higher protein intake. ah The next comment that I will make is, uh man, I get so many people

01:02:29
who push back on high protein, they're like, how on earth does someone get in three grams per kg body weight per day or four grams? Like if I'm thinking about myself, if I was to, because I'm on the leaner side and let's say I wanted to like build muscle and whatnot, which isn't out of the realms of possibility, um four grams of protein per kg body weight would have me- No, no, that's not body weight. That's fat-free mass. when we actually rescale it, if you look at the data by Truxler and Helms, it's Truxler, Helms and Ruffalo.

01:02:59
It is going to be like in that range when you want to maximize 2.5 to 3.2 grams. Now, I think when they actually did it according to fat free mass indices, and that was a bad calculation they did based off the body fat percentage estimates, I want to say it went all the way up until 4.2. But remember, now we're not taking total body weight, we're taking total fat free mass. So it's different. That's why I'd rather just go off body weight because everyone in this industry really refers to. So 1.6, like Sue Phillips says, that was the ceiling. A, that's based off a Mordant rep meta regression that he did.

01:03:28
study does not have exclusion criteria, but if you look in the inclusion criteria, part of it is you cannot be an energy deficit. None of these trials, none of these participants. Every single study of that, I think it was 59 trials, they were all at maintenance or in a surplus. That's not applicable to deficit conditions. Secondarily, when he made the graphs of the actual meta regression, now I did a full podcast on the meta regression from Rafalo. And then I also went to a presentation with Helms and I saw the presentation, but I also spoke with him privately about this.

01:03:55
oh at that time. So this was last year. have a, a photographic memory, but I remember charts and stuff like that off the top of my head. And really like the actual um graphs that he utilized just didn't make sense because there was a truly a linear dose response. You did not see an asymptote to it. And I think how we use it on AI, just misapplied the plot. So it did look like there was essentially a stagnation or plateauing. And so if you look, he's pulled that post down completely. So no one in this audience can actually look at it, but

01:04:25
I think it was just, he should have just stuck to at maintenance or building conditions or surplus conditions, because that's what the data he was using. If we look at stuff like the Morton 2018, the Nunes, the Tagawa papers, all right, they support that. This does not, and we have other literature that reinforces it. Yeah. Okay. No, that makes perfect sense. And then of course, with regards to the, if we're basing it on lean mass versus body weight, then that obviously downscales the amount of protein to...

01:04:53
well below 200, which I was like, oh my goodness, I don't know that I could get there. One thing though, actually, and this again is a bit of a tangent, I meet women, and I'm not sure if you do as well, Brandon, who really do have their protein absolutely dialed in. They are very lean. They are not building muscle. And in fact, it's this fear of carbohydrate that means that they're absolutely totally fine to have their tiny woman who will eat 180 grams of protein and I don't know.

01:05:21
60 grams of carbohydrate because, they're in fact, they're not wanting to go near carbohydrate because they've got a fear of it. Now you and I will have a different audience. Like I come from that low carb space. I've evolved how I feel about it, but not to the point where, where someone is, you know, where I'm working with people who have the amount of carbs that you, you would prescribe, but that's fine. Um, but certainly I've definitely evolved. Um, and it's, have a hard job.

01:05:48
trying to get these women to actually reduce their protein to enable them to actually have more carbohydrate? Yeah, I'm going to say that I have encountered that over the years. I think that I have done so much work on speaking about carbohydrates and the benefits, and especially because I work with a population that really is interested in muscle gain and fat loss. I often dispel the myths of insulin and carbohydrates.

01:06:12
blocking or hindering the lipolysis process. Yes, mechanistically, insulin is going to raise, it's going to lower fatty acid oxidation. However, that's in a vacuum. Really, when it comes down to it, if we look calorie per calorie, the energy expenditure effects of carbohydrates are even in overfeeding trials, they're less adipogenic, meaning they're less likely to be stored as body fat first and foremost. Even in overfeeding trials, I'm trying to think of the actual uh paper, a Horton paper, and there's also a Lambert paper. It's actually in women where they overfeed them on carbohydrates versus overfeeding them on fat.

01:06:41
um The net deposition from de novo lipogenesis, so essentially the creation of new fats from, or triglycerides, new triglycerides from carbohydrates was two to three percent, even in five to six hundred grams per day carbohydrate overfeeding conditions. That is not a worry. um And secondarily, from a satiety perspective, from a fueling perspective, from matching the energetic demand of training to the sub-treat that we utilize and that we fuel ourselves with, I think carbohydrates have a lot of advantages, especially when we look at, if you were to tell me...

01:07:09
that someone is eating 180 grams of protein and say 60 grams of carbs or 50 grams of carbs, they're really in that ketogenic dieting level. I would go to some of the 1980 studies that are looking at maintenance conditions of, this isn't men, but it's looking at thyroid hormone regulation and production and synthesis and the effects that low carbohydrate diets have on that. So there's a euclor condition, meaning they were at energy balance and they compared a mixed diet, which was moderate carbohydrates versus a ketogenic diet, which is essentially moderate protein, high fat and

01:07:38
50 grams of carbs are under. And in four weeks, they found T3 levels dropped by 50%. So if you are someone that is interested in fat loss, think about the effects that your metabolically active thyroid hormone is going to have, or a down regulation that is going to have in your ability to actually burn body fat and lose body fat. Secondarily, when we're talking about optimizing the body composition process, a big vector that is resistant training performance, and that is going to be most supported.

01:08:03
by adequate carbohydrates. This doesn't mean you have to overfeed on carbs. Yes, I have many examples of women that are eating three, four, 450 grams of carbohydrates a day. I've worked them up to that. They're very uh physique focused. Some of them are physique competitors and about themselves, and they're not scared of carbs. But that was not a, I take you from six grams to 300 grams overnight. This was a titration process. This was going through subsequent building and cutting phases. Some of them have recons, but obviously I'm utilizing...

01:08:30
what is necessary for that specific phase. I would say this. I don't think you need to overfill yourself on carbohydrates. And I think that would be actually counterproductive for the goal of recomposition. But I will say that there needs to be a uh matched or a more balanced approach to this. You need to fuel yourself, especially if you're someone that is carb phobic or maybe scared of carbs. Just think about putting them in the peri-workout window, before, potentially during, and then after. And just feeling for the work required, feeling your body for...

01:08:55
the demands that you're going to put yourself in from a glycolytic perspective, because that's really what resistant training does from an oxidation perspective. And then also replenishing those fuel substrates you just burned through. And then the rest of the day, you can buy us more protein and fat heavy meals. Yeah. And is there anything Brandon, and I'm sure that I've heard you talk about this, but it might not have been you, it might've been the two Erics actually, about the change in substrate use across a day, whether or not you fuel with carbs pre-exercise,

01:09:24
versus doing fasted exercise. Do women, and it's okay if you don't know this or tell me if I've got this wrong, but do they tend to burn more fat um during exercise and more carb after exercise? Is there a change in the daily substrate use or in fact, am I going on a complete different tangent that is not even worth talking No. What you're actually referring to, and I think that you made a newsletter out of this, was a substrate oxidation

01:09:54
uh podcast that I did many years ago, and it was sex differences in substrate use. But it isn't actually based on um the substrate or the fuel that you use prior to training. It's actually looking at sex differences in substrate utilization birth during exercise, uh both aerobic and resistant training exercise. So the example here is, the best example to give you is in facet exercise. So generally, facet exercise is a...

01:10:18
it's a facet condition first and foremost, and so it's going to rely on fatty acid oxidation. Insulin is low, so it's going increase your ability to mobilize free fatty acids and burn them in the serum or burn them in the blood. Well, women preferentially tap into fats, essentially. And so they're going to burn through more fatty acids than men are going to. Men are a little bit more glycolytic during exercise. So when we look at it, what you burn during exercise, you burn the opposite outside of exercise. So the best example here is if you actually look at the facet cardio oh

01:10:49
literature. can look at Brad Schoenfeld has a study on this. If you were to just look at 24-hour use across the day, you may burn more fat during fasted exercise and it's minuscule if you're fasted versus fed, but you're going to burn more of the other substrate the rest of the hours of the day. That's really what we see with women. They burn more fat during exercise, but they burn more carbohydrates throughout the course of the day.

01:11:09
So it actually switches whereas men will burn more carbohydrates during exercise. And we're talking, I don't want to make this sound in grand, like the grand scheme of thing, like this is massive differences. It's almost like when you look at type one versus type two muscle fibers, we're talking in the era of like 5%. And many people in this industry will say, well, women are slow twitch dominant, they're type one dominant, fiber dominant. And that's why they have to train for type two. And it's like, dude, if you actually look at the literature on this, first of all, it's a crap shoe. Second of all, even on untrained individuals, we're talking about a 5 % discrepancy where women have like 48 %

01:11:39
of type two muscle fibers and 52 % of type one or slow twitch muscle fibers and men have like 47 % of type one muscle fibers and 53%. It's so minuscule. And training status, it completely ameliorates that because there's actually trials on well-trained Olympic level athletes, think they're weightlifters, that they found that the people with the most type two muscle fiber density and actual, like when they went through muscle biopsies, were women. They had 71 % type two fibers. we can find examples all over the literature. So I don't want to make this like a...

01:12:08
brain comparison, it's a continuum. What you burn during exercise, you're generally going to burn the opposite outside of exercise. I don't think that those substrate use, uh even that literature would be applicable for their nutritional interventions because then we would have to get into like the menstrual cycle syncing and like what fuel use change across like your luteal phase versus your follicular phase. And none of that stuff comes out in the literature to make any speck of a difference. That is what we call a toad, a time wasted on useless detail.

01:12:35
I came across that acronym in your email this morning for the very first time. hope you use that in the future. Well, I will. And I will say it is hilarious that you remembered an email that I wrote and this goes to show how different we are. I will forget this conversation about two minutes after we have it. Not because I haven't enjoyed it, but my brain does not retain the same information. Okay. Thank you, Brandon. We have got like 13 minutes left until we absolutely have a hard stop. And I really need to talk to you.

01:13:04
about the training aspect of it actually. Because I was thinking about this this morning whilst I was in the gym and um I did have some fuel before going into the gym because it was in my mind. I just want to have just a little something in the tank before I do it. um But of course, I think probably half the time I'm there going through the motions and half the time I am sort of pushing it. So what is it that we need to do in order to optimize um for body recon in the gym?

01:13:31
Yeah, so I think that really when it comes to the training side of Recom, there's a few non-negotiables that we need to discuss. And there are so many like advanced and nuanced aspects that I could get into this, but A, we don't have the time and B, it may not be applicable to your audience. So I really want to leave them with some valuable information. So the first, you need to be on a structured hypertrophy focused program. This is not random workouts. It's not group fitness classes, and it certainly isn't going into gym and winging it. We're talking about a program that's designed specifically to drive muscle growth. The second factor

01:13:59
that I really try to get across to people that is necessary. isn't an optional variable within this equation. You need to achieve progressive overload. Every training variable that we discuss, a lot of times we get caught up in the training variables rather than the actual training metrics or the progression variables. In this industry, and I come from this hypertrophy space, this body composition space, we often talk about volume and frequency and proximity to failure. Then there's some secondary characteristics, load or weight on the bar.

01:14:28
and exercise selection. All of those are specific programming variables. Progressive overload is the outcome those variables should be yielding. If you're not progressing your performance over time, recomp won't happen. The third is sufficient proximity to failure on working sets. And this is the variable I see the biggest gap on, especially working with female clients. Most working sets need to be taken close enough to failure to achieve the mechanical tension required for hypertrophy. And then the fourth is another overlooked variable. And this is something I really try to get across to clientele is

01:14:57
you need to be consistently tracking just like we, you and come from a nutrition background. We would never tell someone that they wouldn't benefit from nutrition tracking at the bat. I'm not saying you have to do that for the rest of your life, but that's one of the best educational experiences you can get. In the training field, a lot of people overlook that. If you are not tracking what you did in the gym last week and in your last session, you have no target to beat this week. You're not gonna remember it off the top of your head. You need to write it down. So progressive overload doesn't happen by accident. It happens because you're tracking your exercises, your sets,

01:15:26
reps, your loads, you're actually looking at your proximity failure and trying to gauge it and then realizing you can make notes even in your log. I like this really on pen and paper where you could do it in a uh notes app on your phone. Did you feel like you were in close proximity failure? If you are not seeing reps slow down, and that's what we would call velocity loss, so your repetition are getting slower over time, you're not in close proximity failure. It is within those last two to three reps, give or take, where there's a substantial, significant slowing in rep velocity where essentially if you had

01:15:55
a velocity meter, it would fall off a cliff. You need to be intentionally pushing yourself, but you have to intentionally push all those variables forward over time. So you need to be shooting for better reps or more reps per set or higher load or better execution or uh maybe uh shorter time periods, know, density of training. There needs to be some type of progressive variable that is moving forward. So there is a higher stimulus per session and per week. No, that's, that's wonderful. And

01:16:24
Now I'm thinking about, and I of course I'm thinking about myself in the gym as you're talking through this. um In terms of the types of exercises, Brandon, what I find personally is I don't get much value out of, you know, I see someone do something like, oh, that looks good. I don't immediately go and copy it because that's bit storkish in the gym. But I often like I'm in there, I'm doing either like a variation on a squat, I'm doing a row, I'm doing a couple of presses.

01:16:50
I do very similar exercises. I like the idea of that random sort of pick and mix approach, an all-sort approach, but actually my brain just defaults back to the same sort of exercises. Most of the time I'm sort of in there, but some exercises I can really connect with, like my brain, and I feel that real connection with my mind and my muscle. With some of them, I have to really dial back the load in order to make sure I'm actually doing it properly. Like, is that still an avenue for...

01:17:18
Is it really just getting to that state where velocity falls off, be it 12 reps, be it 20 reps, 30 reps? Yes. You're talking, you're actually asking two different questions, but I'm answering them. Thank you. really to drive hypertrophy stimulus, you need two things. You need mechanical tension stimulus, which is essentially the actual tension that the muscle fiber, the specific fiber that you're trying to target is actually feeling. Now that can actually be confounded if you have poor form.

01:17:46
or you distribute the load a little bit differently. let's talk in the context that someone has adequate technique. You need that and you also need full motor unit recruitment. Now motor unit recruitment, we have both high threshold and low threshold motor units, or we could call them fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers. And essentially that works off of the spectrum. And really what we're trying to do, the reason I'm going to advise a close proximity failure is because that is the only way that you're going to get very high degree attention.

01:18:16
degree of that mechanical tension, and that's a primary stimulus of hypertrophy. And you're also going to recruit all those muscle fibers. And really how that happens is it can come in either two ways. If you were to do, we see that motor unit recruitment from a high threshold perspective is maximized around... You look at the literature, it's either between 80 to 85 % of one repetition max. So depending on the person, that's going to be between five and eight reps. So if you utilize loads or better between five and eight reps, you're usually going to maximize motor unit recruitment.

01:18:45
off of the first rep or two. So you're going to have maximum, you know, it's essentially voluntary. But, you know, you take it to that eight rep, you hit that eight rep max, all the motor units, both the slow twitch muscle fibers, meaning the low threshold motor units and the fast twitch muscle fibers, meaning the high threshold motor units, all called into action. Or you could do a set of say 25 to failure. However, really when it comes down to it, you need to get in close enough proximity failure to recruit all those motor units because in high rep sets, what ends up happening is you call upon

01:19:15
the motor units that are needed. So you're going to utilize low threshold motor units first and you're going to cycle through those. So this is motor unit cycling essentially. And you're going to keep going through those motor units, those low thresholds until you tap into the smaller but still high threshold motor units and you're going to keep going through that cycle. If you actually look at great example of this is if you ever watch someone take a five repetition max set on bench to failure or a 25 repetition max set on bench to failure, those last five reps look the exact same. They're slowing and uh

01:19:44
movement velocity. The rep speed is very slow. They look almost the same way. It's grinding. That's what you're looking for is that slowing of contraction speed that is voluntary, or it's essentially involuntary, Meaning that you're not doing this purposely. There are people that use very slow center training. There was this slow movement essentially.

01:20:07
training. That is not what we want. It's that you cannot fight. Even if you're trying to move the load as quick as possible, you cannot move it any quicker because essentially all those motor units are being called into action. You're suffering from fatigue either because the load is so high to begin with or because you have gotten through so many repetitions that your muscle units or your muscle fibers are essentially fatiguing and you're needing to call upon higher threshold ones. Okay. Nice one. Now, two quick questions for you.

01:20:35
One is what is the minimum effective dose that we should be in the gym for body recomp? Yeah. So I'm just going to be realistic with you. What I see in practice and literature would reinforce some of this would be I have clients train four to five times per week, depending on that client's lifestyle and recovery capacity. And then what I'm doing is that is not a bro split. I mean, they're not hitting body parts one time per week. What I'm doing is hitting muscle groups two to three times per week.

01:21:01
so that I can distribute volume more effectively and create a more frequent growth stimulus as compared to that once per week uh protocol. Then when it comes down to, I'll hit on this because you just actually mentioned this, really when I look at working sets, I'm looking at them falling between like the six to 20 rep range for most hyper-tree work and the bulk of their work is gonna be between eight to 15 reps. And then loads are gonna get adjusted to maintain that proximity to failure target and progression is gonna happen by either adding reps in a target range or adding load. Now, one thing

01:21:30
it's very difficult to ascertain. And I'm just going to tell you my experience. There is some literature behind this is how many sets everyone wants to know that that is very based on the individual. But what I see, and this is specific to my female clients, is that they often respond well to slightly higher training volumes than the men that I work with do. And this is not an absolute rule, but on average, women are less fatigued during resistance training. We actually look in the literature on this. Greg knuckles has a great study that looks at this, but women can perform more reps at the same.

01:21:58
percentage of wrong repetition max, they can generally recover between sets within a session much better and they can tolerate higher volume without the same recovery costs essentially. So I lean into a higher end of the frequency and volume recommendations with clients. I'm not talking excessive, but when I'm leaning into things, I'm really trying to get them into the gym and getting as much of a sufficient stimulus per muscle as possible and then making sure that they can do it again within the next...

01:22:25
that same week. So essentially, I kind of think about it as like a hammer, and I'm trying to hit the muscle sufficiently stimulated, not too much that we go into this muscle protein breakdown and degradation perspective, we're sufficiently stimulating it. And then we're getting it back to baseline very quickly so they can hit it again. instead of give me a great example, some people will do body parts splits. So they'll do legs one day and they'll do back one day and we'll do chest one day and they're doing 20 sets for that singular body part. So a day might be 20 sets. I'm not doing that I may be doing in the era of

01:22:55
six to at the upper echelon 11, which is based off our red med, a remer, meta regression, but really it's like six to 10 sets per body part per session. And then I'm doing that two to three times a week. Okay. Nice one. And then, um, if you can in three minutes, tell us where does cardio fit into all of this and steps like, I imagine in terms of minimizing fat gate, like, yeah, give us your, your debrief. Yeah. So cardio, I

01:23:22
I look at as a supportive tool, but it's not the primary driver. And it's definitely not something that I want pulling significantly away from that training, resistance training stimulus. how I think about it is the job of cardio during your recomb phase is to support your total daily energy expenditure, which is going to help with that loss. It's going to help with appetite regulation, as we know, with higher levels of uh movement, essentially. There's a coupling between energy intake and energy expenditure, especially from an appetite perspective.

01:23:47
It's going to help with insulin sensitivity and nutrient partitioning. It's going to help with digestion, but it's also going to support cardiovascular health. And that's its role. It's not the lever that's actually going to be driving the body recomposition outcome. That lever is going to be resistant training plus that nutritional structure that we discussed previously. So what I typically do with my female clients during a recomp phase is I first start with daily step targets. That's the first fundamental I want them to work on, generally between that 10,000 12,000 step per day range.

01:24:14
And then I'm going to combine that with some low-intensity steady-state cardio if I feel that we could benefit from getting more of their deficit created from energy expenditure. So from cardio rather than from, uh you know, it's hydration down in calories. And what I'm not doing, and I'll say this very bluntly, is I'm not programming excessive cardio or high-intensity interval training as a primary fat loss lover. ah What I see, there's like a pattern that I've consistently seen with new female clients.

01:24:42
it's that they're doing too much of high intensity and they're thinking that's going to yield a better outcome and it actually does the opposite. So I have a lot of women that come to me and they've been doing four to five hit sessions per week. They've been doing hours of steady state cardio or some combination of the two and then they're chronically under recovered. And so the resistance training they're doing is being compromised because the recovery budget is ready to spend on cardio. And also it's actually diminishing their ability to maintain an energy expenditure high enough where they can actually

01:25:10
burn body fat and actually go through the recomposition process because a lot of times what's happening is their meat is being bottlenecked. So they're actually down regulating energy expenditure throughout the course of the day. Their biofeedback is off and their recovery is compromised. So resistant training is essentially suboptimal. Their movement throughout the day is subpar and low. And then they also feel terrible and their biofeedback is pretty poor. So it just doesn't make for that perfect storm that I'm looking forward to really induce body recomposition. And I feel like, and I talk.

01:25:38
people a lot about this just in fat loss. You cannot chase two rabbits at once. You cannot chase a fat loss goal and then expect to perform a performance outcome to be optimized because they're quite different. To your point, the likes of an endurance person cannot focus on training and building an endurance and expect to get the most that they can from a body recomp perspective as well.

01:26:05
I'll give you an example real quick. I have a client currently that is a triathlete. And this is someone I worked with many years ago. He was not into triathlons. so initially he was a body composition client. He actually owns a group fitness center. He owns a bunch of gyms in Chicago and he got into triathlons and we had stopped working together for a bit of time while he was building these businesses. And he came to me recently and said, listen, I have seven months until my next training camp and that will give me approximately 10 months until my next triathlon. And I think he's doing like

01:26:35
of those Ironman, it's like 70.6 or something of that sort. Essentially, what we did was we did a six-month time course to body recomp. It gave us a month to get him back up to maintenance and a little bit above. Then he entered training camp. did three months of training camp, and then he did his triathlon. This was all when I always talk about periodization. It is

01:26:53
phasing things in a manner where each phase potentials the next, not where we're trying to chase counterintuitive goals. Yes, you can build muscle and lose body fat at the same time, but I'm going to be very frank with you. If you're at your ultimate physique, the precipice of your physique, your performance from an endurance training perspective or sprinting perspective, or um even like a weightlifting perspective is going to be somewhat compromised because you're actually doing things that are very specific.

01:27:19
towards adaptations that you're looking for. You're driving fat loss and you're driving muscle gain, which is a hypertrophy specific process. And hypertrophy training, yes, it is performance driven, but it's not performance oriented. So it doesn't mean it's going to lead you to the peak because technically the peaking of strength performance even, it requires a taper. And oftentimes if you look in the taper literature, you actually lose lean mass while the process of getting stronger. So these are not directly correlated. And so if you're trying to peak a performance outcome,

01:27:47
need to do the recon phase and different portion of your year essentially. no, that makes sense to me as well. And I do not have time. I've got to run to my ulcer appointment, but I would love to dive into that further. Brandon, are you taking clients right now? Yes. So this will be summer. If you guys have any questions or if you're interested in individualized one on one coaching, please feel free to reach out to me. The best place to do so honestly is through my email, which is betacruzfitness.gmail.com. You guys are interested in evidence-based content and also

01:28:16
really melding or molding that bridging the gap section of research and information and practical application. That's what I really pride myself on doing well. And that will be the Chasing Clarity Health and Fitness podcast. And Mickey, it is always an absolute pleasure to talk to you. If you want to do a part two on this, you let me know. I'm always down to to chop it up with you. We always have great conversations and I cannot wait to have you on my podcast quite shortly. Amazing. Brandon, thank you so much. And honestly, your podcast is like postgraduate learning for me and I absolutely love it.

01:28:46
Thanks so much for your time, really appreciate it. Absolutely, peace.

01:29:01
Alrighty, hopefully you enjoyed that. I just love talking to Brandon as you know and have been a guest on his show several times. So please check out Chasing Clarity, check out his website. He genuinely is open to taking inquiries. So absolutely if you think he's a fit for you, jump on and email him. Links in the show notes. All right guys, you have the best week. If you've got any questions for me, hop on over to Instagram, threads and X @mikkiwilliden.

01:29:30
Facebook @mikkiwillidenNutrition or head to my website @mikkiwilliden.com and sign up to the Accelerator program that is on sale now Wednesday if you're listening to this now right through to Sunday for us to kick off Monday 13th of July. It is a 21 day reset. I'm teaching you the effective fat loss tool of protein sparing modified fast that goes in your diet without the overhaul. So if you've been curious about it,

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about my Monday's Matter program and you've been sitting on the fence, now's the time to jump on in and try it on for size. Would love to see you there. Check it out on my website, @mikkiwilliden.com. All right guys, you have the best week. See you later.