Staying Strong Forever, How Much Protein Do I Need, and Best Supplements For Muscle Gain.

When you directly measure skeletal muscle mass, then you do see a correlation between strength and mass, and more importantly, outcomes that we care about. And when I say outcomes, I mean hypertension, cardiovascular disease, mobility, strength. And one layer further is that it's actually the loss of skeletal muscle mass, rather than the gain of body fat, that is much more detrimental to overall health and longevity.

Well, folks, my guest on today's podcast and I did not coordinate the idea that we were both going to be showing off our guns during today's show, but that's the case. Although if you're watching the video version, I think her tattoo's cooler than mine. But I'll leave that up to you to decide. Her name is Dr. Gabriel Lyon. You've probably heard of her before because she has gotten very popular of late for her entire concept of what she calls muscle centric medicine. And I'm a huge fan. And Gabriel just wrote this book, Forever Strong A Science Based Strategy for Aging. Well, it's fantastic. You should read the book. We're going to go into stuff that may or may not be in the book as the discussion evolves, but she is just a fantastic resource for all things strength training, weightlifting, and muscle as medicine in general. So, Gabriel, welcome to the show.

Hey, friend. So I don't think. I think that there is maybe for the hundreds of podcasts that I've done, I don't think I might have worn a tank top one time, by the way.

Okay, well, you picked the right one because we're all into, like, not wearing pants or doing our hair or showing up for podcasts still digging green smoothie shards out of our.

Are you walking and podcasting at the same time, by the way? I have never.

You know what? I walk for most of my podcasts. I have this whisper quiet treadmill in my gym called a Walk Elution, and it works fantastically. It's got like this nice plush foam surface and it's like one of the best investments I've ever made for my home office aerobic fitness.

I'm sold. I'm actually going to get.

Check it out.

I'm going to get it.

Yeah, they're pretty cool. They were designed by this dude who. He was a Swiss inventor who spent time in Korea and found that when he would walk out in the Korean rice paddy fields, he can't make this stuff up, by the way. He had less knee and hip pain and his feet got really strong and supple and stretched and he came up with this line of mats and shoes. I interviewed him like 10 years ago, and then found out a couple of years ago that he had advised. I believe Woodway owns this company.

Yeah.

On the development of a non motorized walking treadmill that's kind of like curved.

We have one. We have one, but it's very loud.

Okay. Yeah, no, this is different. This, this one and it has this. You can, you can Google. It's called the Walk Elution. This nice plush surface. So to incredible. Okay. It's not gonna, it's not gonna get you strong. You know more about that. But it's, it's great. I probably get, I don't know, 8 to 10,000 steps a day in on this thing. So.

Yeah, I love it. Well, I'm excited to chat. It's been a long time coming and I'm so grateful that you're on board with this concept of muscle centric medicine, which shockingly, it's this idea that skeletal muscle is the largest organ system in the body. People always talk about the skin, but skeletal muscle.

Yeah, I was gonna say people say the skin is the biggest organ in the body. What's up with that?

It's not. Right. So this idea that skeletal muscle is this organ system. And what's even more important to understand is that, you know, we have medicine and specialists for pulmonology for the lungs, for cardiologists, for the heart, endocrinologists for hormones. But this idea that muscle centric medicine and muscle as an organ system does not have surrounding it for all of its metabolic properties and all of its potential to counteract diseases of inflammation and autoimmunity. It doesn't have its own form of medicine. Like what medications negatively impact skeletal muscle. So that is why I created this concept of muscle centric medicine so that we can have.

They don't teach weightlifting classes at medical school, right?

They don't. But, But Ben, now if we can speak about it as an organ system, we then have a unifying language. We can now have concrete discussions that unify language that really move the needle for people. And this is essentially muscle centric medicine.

Well, back to medical school, I mean, I, I honestly like had read your book and you and I have chatted back and forth a few times, but I stalked you a little bit leading up to this podcast and found some pretty impressive lifting videos on Instagram. Like you're, you're, you know, like an explosive kind of Crossfitteresque weightlifter. And I'm just curious, like your backstory as far as weight training, is this something you were doing before medical school? Something you've been into all your life, is it something that's evolved or had you become such a darn good lifter? Because some of your lifting is actually pretty impressive.

Thank you. So full disclosure, I'm five foot one, maybe a buck ten. May on a good day I might be 110 pounds. And I started, you know, my parents are very athletic. My dad was captain of the wrestling team. All American athlete. Very, very athletic growing up. Played soccer for a little bit, ran track, did a little dance and gymnastics. And then very early on, believe it or not, got into bodybuilding. And this was before. It's not the bodybuilding you see now. Do you remember when there was figure? So there's figure now, but back in the day, I'm talking back in the day. Really, when do you remember Fitness America?

Well, I don't know because I was bodybuilding in 2005 and there was figure then. How do you differentiate between modern figure and old figure?

Well, I think that modern older figure was.

You know, the, the women were smaller. Right now I think that the, the figure women again, I haven't really looked into the sport so much lately, but it seems to have moved more towards this bodybuilding esque look. But yeah, before that. Do you remember Fitness America?

Was that like a magazine?

Fitness America. So before. But there used to be back in the day, obstacle courses. That was the first iteration kind of of a women's fitness movement. They did these obstacle courses. I was really interested in the obstacle courses and I was at, I spent time at the University of Limerick. I spent a year at the University of Limerick looking at exercise physiology and nutritional sciences. And while I was there, I became obsessed with this idea that I was going to do an obstacle course. Started training while I was there and.

Then this, this was obviously before. I want to make you sound old. This is before like spark Spartan and tough mudder and all that.

Yeah, I think it was. So this was, you know, I graduated med school 2006. So 1990, like 2000, 1999.

I don't think Spartan took off till like maybe 2000, maybe 8, 9, something like that.

Right. So this was before that. And then I decided, well, I couldn't really find a ton of obstacle courses. So I was going to do Fitness America. And Fitness America was a combination of bikini. Like you have to go out in your bikini. I've never do this nowadays now bikini and some kind of dance with athletic moves that you had to do. And that's really what started.

My interest in skeletal muscle specifically. And yeah, so I've been training my entire life and I still train, train through both pregnancies. I do a mix of, of CrossFit style. I enjoy that a lot. I always try to challenge myself, do something different, you know.

So what's it look like for you on a typical week? Like, what's your actual strength training routine look like?

Yeah, my actual strength training routine is three days a week of something explosive, depending on my recovery. So I work, I actually work with a coach. I live here in Houston, so I train. Poor Carlos. It gets inundated with questions. But I train a place called Sigma Training. And what we do is three days a week we do a mix. Sometimes we'll do heavier lifts, whether it's a heavier squat or a deadlift, but we'll always do something explosive in nature. Do a lot of sled pushes and my training. So we'll do sled pushes, we'll do kettlebell swings. We'll try to add in something rotational. You know, always thinking about, why do people get injured? What are the planes of motion that they're moving in? We always incorporate some functional training because my goal isn't necessarily to get bigger, but it is to continue to improve. And we will just pick a target and we'll work that target for 12 weeks or more. Right now it's more explosivity and rehabbing. A hamstring that I tore. I was training for a 50 hour event and I tore my hamstring, which has taken years to recover.

A 50 hour what event? Like a running.

You actually did it? It was kokoro.

Oh, that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. A lot of people get injured training for that. That's a beast.

Yeah. So I, you know, and it doesn't help that I'm married to a seal. So his idea was just, you know, do 100 push ups a day. It's easy. Just do this. But my volume was too high. It was probably four hours a day. And I avulsed my hamstring. I ripped my hamstring off the bone. I was at 80, a little over 80% avulsion. Actually went through PRP years, two and a half years of PRP and stem cell and regeneration for my hamstring. But it still can flare up now. Still can flare up, yeah.

Wow. So the explosive training that you're doing, is this based on some of the. I guess there's actual studies. I think the majority of them were done on like rodent models and guinea pigs associating. I believe it's a decreased rate of telomere Shortening with explosive like wiry power lifter type of muscle versus bodybuilding esque mass. Are you familiar with those studies?

I'm not. You know, telomere length that, you know, I don't think so much about that. From an aging perspective, perhaps I should. But what I really.

Well, it's not, it's not the most cutting edge measure. I mean even the Horvath clocks and the methylation data, it's, you know, it's, it's based on some pretty small sample sizes and you know, and small cell numbers. But yeah, the, the idea basically is that powerful muscle is more associated with longevity than muscle mass or overall strength.

So here is what is going. We are at the precipice of change for that, for that belief. So for the last 30 plus years, when we think about how do we study muscle, it's really two populations. We've studied muscle with athletes. That's really kind of the traditional model. We study athletes and that is the interest with muscle biopsies and how do we make our athletes better. And then the other overarching body of literature is aging geriatrics sarcopenia, even though sarcopenia actually only became a diagnosis in 2016, which got an ICD 10 code or an ICD, whatever, at that time it was, was not 10, but an International Classification of Disease 2016. And the traditional belief, because we use DEXA to measure body composition, there is not a huge correlation. There's a very minimal correlation between body muscle mass and strength and these outcomes. That is incorrect.

An inverse correlation between body muscle mass and strength.

Yeah. So, meaning people will say that muscle mass doesn't matter. People will say that it really is just strength that matters and the amount of mass that one has does not correlate to outcomes that we care about.

There's about 30 years of literature and you will always hear people say that it's really the strength that matters. We care about strength, we don't care about mass. That's not true.

Yeah. Cause that is what you hear a lot is you don't got to be a bodybuilder. You don't need a ton of hypertrophy. And not to derail you too much, but I think part of that might be to a lot of these studies that have been done in untrained individuals where you see a neuromuscular response to training that occurs before you see almost like a musculoskeletal hypertrophic response, meaning that people get strong more quickly than they put on size, for example. So in an untrained individual, when they first start training, they see some improvements in strength, et cetera, that come prior to the actual development of appreciable muscle mass. Thus leading, I think a lot of researchers to say, well see, you could get strong and get the benefits of strength training even if you're not putting out muscle.

That is, that is a very good point. That, that is, that is a very good point. And I do believe that that is part of it. And the other part of it is that we haven't been measuring skeletal muscle mass directly. The incremental changes that can be detected from adexa is not enough. You will require say a 10% change in muscle mass before you have a detectable change. And exactly what you're saying is someone might get strong before they put on mass. Again, whether it's untrained, trained, trained individual like yourself, it's going to take a lot more work for you to put on mass than say an average individual. And because of that, that has created a lot of.

What I, and I hate to use the word wrong thinking, but really an incorrect hypothesis that we have now layered decades of research. There's a new validated way to look at body composition and specifically muscle mass. And that is something called a D3 creatine and it directly measures muscle mass. So it's a, what's it called?

A D3 creatine.

A D3 creatine dilution. And what this is, is it's a dilution method and it uses this assumption of a 24 hour creatine excretion. This is a lot of words, assessment of muscle mass. So basically 98% of total body creatine pool exists in skeletal muscle. And so what happens is that creatine that turns over in muscle and through that conversion of creatine to creatinine, they can directly measure skeletal muscle mass. And when that is utilized, and it's been validated in neonates, in children and adults, when you directly measure skeletal muscle mass, then you do see a correlation between strength and mass and more importantly, outcomes that we care about. And one more thing, and when I say outcomes, I mean hypertension, cardiovascular disease, mobility, strength. And one layer further is that it's actually the loss of skeletal muscle mass rather than the gain of body fat that is much more detrimental to overall health and longevity, which I'm interested, that's super intriguing.

People say, well, fat churns out, inflammatory cytokines, is a storehouse for toxins and blah, blah, blah. But we were saying is the loss of muscle Mass is actually more deleterious than the gain in fat cell size or number.

Exactly. And it's kind of like, and this literature, the guy who pioneered this is a guy named William Evans. And he, here's one of the analogies that he uses. It's kind of like when you lose your keys and there's a street lamp in an alley and you lose your keys and the only light is underneath the street lamp. Even if you lost your keys 15ft away, you don't look over there because you don't have a light. So it's like the street light effect. The street light effect. You're looking where there's light, but it could just be totally wrong. And, and, and that, and that has colored our perspective, number one, on the importance of hypertrophy training, the importance of the amount of mass. You know, we talk about skeletal muscle mass from a functional perspective, meaning strength and endurance and all of the, the physical metrics, but it's really the metabolic metrics that we have to understand, relate not just to.

Strength, but the health of skeletal muscle. Right. There's no. You cannot be healthy without a robust amount of healthy skeletal muscle.

It does not exist. So for all the literature in PubMed or some of these large databases, if you pull out a study and the study says healthy sedentary adult, that is a disease state.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I want to get into some of the metabolic effects of muscle, but surely there must be, I guess, a law of diminishing returns. You know, there's like, if you get to the point where you can't wear skinny jeans or put your hands in your pockets. And I've even said this before, like, I wonder if some of the reasons that bodybuilders tend to, you know, painting with a broad brush, it seems, die a little bit earlier. You know, part of it might be due to the cardiomegaly and the, you know, the athlete's heart phenomenon and the stress in the heart. But don't muscles at a certain point become very demanding as far as, like endogenous antioxidant production or what you have to carry or. Cool. Like, have you ever thought about like a Goldilocks zone of muscle mass?

So I have, and I want to mention a few things. So number one, we do not know anyone's optimal skeletal muscle mass. I cannot say, Ben, you should be 115 pounds of skeletal muscle mass. It does not exist. We have defining charts for sarcopenia and cachexia, but we do not have a optimal muscle mass, contrary to say Body fat percentage, we might say greater than 30% is a problem. And let's say an ideal body fat percentage for a woman would be anywhere from. And I'm just making up this number because I don't actually like to see women greater than 24%. But again, it depends, it depends on where she is naturally, if she's looking to get pregnant, et cetera, et cetera.

And by, by the way, the, the most recent study on all cause mortality related to fat was about 11 to 22% for men and about 22 to. No, it was lower than that. I think it was like low 20s, late teens, up to around 34% for women. And I suppose you could come close to estimating ideal muscle mass by saying, looking at epidemiological data, here's about how much someone, your height and weight should weigh. And then in a man, multiply that by what would it be. So 11 to 22%, 89 to 0.78 and that'd give you a rough approximation of what a good muscle mass would be for you. Kind of like reverse engineering.

Yeah, that's, that's very smart. And we, we did some of that in my book. We put together.

Table. So we took athletic populations and then we took sarcopenic populations and we put together. It's like an appendicular lean mass chart to see where someone is that they could use, say an in body and utilize those numbers, plug it in and see. But even that, it's not a. It, it's not foolproof because again, we haven't been measuring skeletal muscle mass directly. And I'm going to. Actually, I have a great question for you because I cannot wrap my head around this. They say, so we say, you know, 10, 11 to 22% of body fat would not be great for a guy, but the standard for a human is 40% muscle mass. So right, there's cardiac muscle, there's smooth muscle, and then their skeletal muscle. 40% of the body would be skeletal muscle. But how could that be true? And how can that be unchanging?

That accounts, that accounts for like 51 to 70. No, 51 to what? 62% of overall mass. And you would then have to say that, you know, 30 plus percent of the entire mass is like bone and water.

So you know, I think that we probably haven't been questioning that enough, quite frankly, in terms of just what we are thinking. But beyond the importance of.

Skeletal muscle mass in relation to physical activity, it is an organ system and you know, there's the metabolic rule that Your listeners are all very accustomed to. They know that healthy skeletal muscle is the primary site for glucose disposal. We know that the carbohydrates that you eat must be disposed of somewhere.

Right. I think it was you. You said you call like the metabolic sink.

Yeah, yeah. And this, and I think that this, we have a good framework for understanding this. And again, it's a primary site for fatty acid oxidation. You know, people always talk about how metabolically active skeletal muscle is at rest. It's not, quite frankly, and it typically uses fatty acids.

It is not unless you're doing that soleus pushups.

Right. Not a, not a very metabolically active tissue compared to the brain or these other kidney or these other organ systems or individual organs. But again, site for glucose disposal. The more healthy muscle mass you have, the more you are going to have glucose tolerance outside of training. Right. Like. So let's assume that you are an individual who is training. You are depleting muscle glycogen, which you do need to be doing. Right. There is a component of unhealthy skeletal muscle that is weak, that is like a swamp pool. Right.

A pond where you are not utilizing these substrates. That is all what I would consider unhealthy muscle.

As you think about the health of skeletal muscle and its importance, again, muscle for glucose fatty acid oxidation. And then another really interesting aspect of skeletal muscle is which it comes as no surprise, is this storage of. It's the amino acid reservoir for any kind of highly catabolic state for any time of bed rest, which, you know, is the number one treatment of choice when people get sick is people go to bed, people go into the hospital, they get put on bed rest. This is very deleterious to skeletal muscle.

Yeah. And by the way, I should interject that I heard that.

The mortality that occurs with age is typically due to frailty induced by injuries or illness that keep you bedridden for certain periods of time as life progresses and you gradually lose muscle. Is there something to that idea?

Actually, yes. And the evidence will support within one week an individual. 65. Let's say an individual is 65 years old. And again, you know, we're speaking in absolutes. There is variation. Um, and I do want to come back, I, I do want to circle back to some of this diminishing returns of exercise. You could put a older adult on bed rest and in one week they might lose, they might lose two pounds, if not more of skeletal muscle mass from their legs. In seven days, protein might have a sparing effect for the first seven days, but after that, if you are not moving, you will lose tissue.

Versus a younger individual will lose, I don't know, in 30 days, might lose again.

There's really two camps, but let's just say a younger individual will also lose skeletal muscle mass, but at a fraction of the rate. If I was going to throw out a number, I would say that a older individual will lose skeletal muscle mass three times faster.

And are you saying that's because of a diminished amino acid pool with age?

It's. No. That's a really good question. There's a couple things that happen to muscle is the young muscle. And this is called a catabolic crisis model. And Doug Patton Jones developed this model and he was in Galveston. The catabolic crisis model is that up until age 40 or 50, our ability to recover. And again, you got to think these are probably untrained individuals. Our ability to recover from a skeletal muscle mass perspective seems to be more robust. But as an individual ages, they never get up to baseline functioning. They lose skeletal muscle mass quickly. And in that quick loss of skeletal muscle mass comes a whole host of metabolic problems. For example, when you lose skeletal muscle mass, one of the things that we see in blood work is we start to see an increase in blood glucose, fasting blood glucose, we see an increase in insulin. These things in insulin resistance can happen very quickly in skeletal muscle. So now you've taken an older individual, you've put them on bed rest, they're losing skeletal muscle, and let's say they're trying to recover from something. You put them in an insulin resistant state and you begin to create low grade inflammation and metabolic derangement. Then you'll see an increase in triglycerides, all of these things that the cascade is again so detrimental. And a lot of these people don't recover versus a younger individual. Although I have to say we say older and younger. There are a handful of things that potentially change. But we're a sedentary society. 50% of individuals are not working out. So these diseases of aging that we think about, like cardiovascular disease, hypertension people, Alzheimer's disease, these diseases don't begin later on in life. They begin in our 30s.

And I would argue that the changes in skeletal muscle mass also begin in our 30s. They begin much earlier.

Yeah, perhaps this is a good time to come back to this idea of the law of diminishing returns that you wanted to address. Because.

If you're going into old age with a lower amount of muscle mass due to neglecting strength training, I think that this aggravates that issue all the more. I mean, the latest evidence I saw was you can be 85 plus and actually not just maintain muscle, but build muscle. So it's kind of like the Chinese proverb, you know, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago or today. But I encourage a lot of young people to start strength training early so they build muscle mass reservoir going into old age, going into injury, going into illness. You know, you talk to runners and endurance athletes. In short, you've probably seen some of this. Gabriel, there's pretty good evidence that increased capillary density, such as you would get from aerobic training or even like concurrent training. Mixing up strength and cardio can accelerate your ability to be able to gain muscle due to better blood flow and metabolite feeding to the muscle. But you know, when I see people doing like yoga, running, swimming and I don't know, sauna and cold plunge or, and this is very common in the, you know, the biohacker community, right? Like neglecting, just, pardon the expression, lifting heavy or making yourself harder to kill with weights, I get very concerned, especially when, you know, people, you know, say, oh, I'm gonna start strengthening when I'm 40, when I'm 50, I think you got to get it on early.

I totally agree with you. And the law of diminishing returns.

You know, I think that epidemiology data, which is obviously, we know, poor quality data, you know, a whole host of.

Or a handful of people were saying, you know, you shouldn't train, what was it, resistance train, more than 60 minutes a week or something like that.

Oh my gosh, you're going to open up a can of worms.

No, no, I'm not, I'm not trying to, I just want to mention.

Yeah, but, but mention it. That was Dr. Mercola was, he was probably the most popular guy championing this idea that if you lift more than three times a week or exceed as little as 30 minutes of strength training a week, you see, increased all cause risk of mortality. I don't know about you. I dug into the studies and I couldn't find the actual protocol being used. But the only population for which I could imagine that to be the case would be like the extreme competitive weightlifter who's whatever, 30 to 60 weeks or hours a week of weight training consists of max deadlifts and extremely soul crushing movements. Right.

But also these studies had a ton of confounders and a lot of it was epidemiology. These are not high quality studies. And on the flip side of that, we know that skeletal muscle mass increases your survivability. We know that training, resistance training with their. I mean, the body of evidence to Support more than 60 minutes is. I mean, I was just looking at a paper earlier today because, believe it or not, I'm working on my next two books, and it's all protocol based, that there are so many protocols that show improvements in biomarkers related to metabolic dysfunction, strength, mobility that are all longer than 60 minutes. I mean.

Oh, all the ones I saw that you're probably referring to also were up to 140 minutes a week. Right. Like, we're talking four times that, which was cited recently by people who are not completely shoving strength training under the bus. But I think not doing people a favor when it comes to maintaining the, the, you know, the metabolic and beneficial aspects of strength training you've been talking about. Yeah.

And then the other thing that we have to understand is 50% of Americans are not training. 50% of Americans are not exercise.

The same type of people who don't need to hear from, you know, bless their hearts, you know, Sean Baker or, or Paul Saladino, that vegetables are going to kill you, you know, because they're already eating a standard American diet, are the same type of people who do not need to hear that strength training is going to kill you. No, they're sedentary.

And when I started to see that, I, I, I was, quite frankly, really surprised. We can't look for hacks for hard work because it requires discipline, which is something you're really good at. It requires discipline. It requires being able to push through any barriers. You become stronger, you build confidence. And again, exercise is going to change the body's homeostasis more effectively than anything. There is no pill that is nearly as effective as changing metabolic parameters, as changing the influence on our overall health than training. I mean, resistance trait. We're just catching up. You know, again, skeletal muscle, as an organ system, it secretes myokines. I don't know if you've seen some of the literature out of Copenhagen, but Bente Pedersen was really just. She's a physician who also studies exercise immunology, and she coined the term myokines. And what this is, is these are as skeletal muscle contracts, and it's typically related to the amount of input. So if someone is doing a certain kind of endurance training or a certain kind of resistance training, they will release in a somewhat linear fashion. I mean, there's hundreds of different myokines that are released. These molecules, these peptides, from exercising skeletal muscle that have anti inflammatory effects that regulate something like Interleukin 6. So there's Interleukin 6 that comes from skeletal muscle that has a very different effect than interleukin 6 coming from macrophages.

Yeah, yeah. It's a good reason, by the way, to not take high dose vitamin C or vitamin E or do a 10 minute cold soak after workout because you actually don't want to quell that myokine response. Yeah. The idea though, I think a lot of people are thinking as well, you know, typical meathead. Doesn't muscle just kind of make you a big old lunk? Talk to me about the neural effects of. Of muscle.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think that there is.

When you say the neural effects of muscle, I will tell you that the brain muscle connection, as you know, is highly correlated. We know that exercise improves cognitive performance. We know that. Again, is it a myokine release? Is this an increase in bdnf? It's typically there's an increase in irisin and capsepsin B, these myokines that actually then influence BDNF release in the brain. It is believed that this is neuroregenerative. That might be a very bold statement, but can have some counter and protective effects from our day to day insult from aging, from metabolic dysfunction in the brain, which, you know, when we think about metabolic dysfunction, we think about Alzheimer's, type 3 diabetes of the brain. A large portion of Alzheimer's disease is a metabolic disease. Insulin resistance in the brain.

Exercise can improve these things and I think it's really twofold. It improves the overall metabolic health of the individual and it also improves the.

Functioning and the firing of the brain. And the myokine bdnf, you know, I think it is a very complicated system.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, all the more so if you, I don't know if you mess around with blood flow restriction or cats at all.

I do, I do.

But you get a huge dump of vegf, vascular endothelial growth factor and vasoactive intestinal polypeptide into the brain. So it's literally, you know, you're getting these things crossing the blood brain barrier and the spark in neurogenesis is significant. There was a while where people were saying, well, whatever, the typical nerdy cross country athlete and stupid football player and aerobic exercise makes you smarter. And I think Jonathan Rady talked about this in his book Spark.

But the idea that aerobic training is more associated with cognitive improvements than strength training. But if you Are strength training using a method that specifically builds up some amount of lactic acid and muscle tissue. You see a surge in BDNF and VEGF that's similar to what you get from aerobic or high intensity interval training.

You also bring up another really good point is that the modality seems to have different metabolic adaptations. It seems that they turn on different genes. It seems as if things are not replaceable. For example, if someone is going to do endurance type exercise, that's, that is not. You can't just do endurance. If you really want to think about the totality of health, there needs to be some, I mean, listen, there should be some kind of endurance type activity, but that can't be instead of high intensity interval training and that can't be instead of lifting heavier weights. You know, there's some data out of McMasterson University that will, that show that older individuals, as long as they go to failure and they're creating enough of a stimulus, their rep range could be 40, you know, 40 reps that they will still have a skeletal muscle benefit. They'll still be able to put on muscle, they'll still be able to maintain muscle.

Yeah, you're, you're correct. You're correct. Is it not 90 seconds to 120 seconds of time under tension? And this is why I like, you know, working a little bit of super slow training is enough of a.

What do you call a continuous increase in peripheral blood pressure. Right. Like driving a little bit more resistance against the heart to where you get a cardiovascular training effect from resistance training.

And then the, and this is, this brings up the, a good point that it can't be replaceable. So for example, if we tell an individual who's afraid of lifting heavier weights, well, you can just do a bazillion reps, will it improve? Will you make improvements? Yes, but at the same point in time, when we think about this strength training continuum, you do have to stress your body in different ways. You know, again, I'm going against what the data would support. The data would support you can lift lighter weights for a period of time and that that would be sufficient. But I don't know if they know. The difference has yet to be determined in the metabolic adaptations within skeletal muscle.

Yeah, that's kind of like Brad Schoenfeld's research. And if you look at the low load, high rep. High load, low rep.

Yes.

Argument, it's that you can achieve similar gains with both. But if you actually look at the volume equity between the two, you need a ton more Volume and significant increases in volume from the body weight approach. And if you have the time during the day to work yourself up to 500 pushups instead of doing, you know, a few heavy reps of chest press for a few sets, great. But it's definitely not the most efficient way. And you gotta increase volume significantly over time with low load.

That is exactly the paper that I'm referring to, which Brad Schoenfeld is the lead author. And the paper is loading recommendations for muscle strength, hypertrophy, local endurance, a reexamination of the repetition continuum. And you're exactly correct.

I do want to make sure that I talk with you about nutrition because this is a big piece, right? The. The idea of protein and other things that you can do. So obviously the question that everybody asks, probably the second most commonly asked question beside, is this going to break my fast, bro? Is how many grams of protein should I eat per day? What's your take on that?

Well, I'm going to tell you what the evidence supports, and then I'm going to tell you what I believe to be.

The right target. The evidence right now supports. Well, first we, you know, you've talked about this I think, a lot in the past is we know that the minimum is the RDA. The minimum to prevent deficiencies would be 0.8 grams per kilogram, which turns out to be what,.47 grams per pound, right?

Yeah. A little something below 0.5. Yeah.

Really, really low. For example, if a woman is 150 pounds, she might hurt. Her minimum would be 45 grams of protein to prevent a deficiency. Albeit a deficiency from protein doesn't happen overnight. It is typically a trend over time because of challenges with protein turnover in the body. There's all kinds of things. It's not an immediate immediate deficiency, which I think is a problem, and that's why people get a little confused. But that's a minimum to prevent a deficiency. And then on the same hand, and I'm going to get to your question just from a framework of thinking about it. If you got sick and you know that the minimum vitamin C to Prevent scurvy is 60 milligrams a day, would you shoot for a higher amount of vitamin C?

Probably.

Nobody thinks about protein in that way, but the. The RDAs are still set that way. The evidence supports at least 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram. So essentially, double the RDA would be a more optimal range. Now, to put in perspective, I would consider the RDA 0.8 grams per kilogram, a lower protein diet. And by definition, if we have semantics, right, that's the minimum to prevent a deficiency. So that would be a lower protein diet. If you were to double that 1.6 grams per kilogram, evidence definitely supports that that would be a moderate protein diet, that that would be enough to be able to manage appropriately muscle turnover, potentially. Body composition. Is that optimal? I would say that that is not optimal.

Yeah.

Optimal would be one gram per pound, ideal body weight.

One gram per pound, ideal body weight.

Maybe not ideal body weight.

Okay.

Of ideal body weight. But the question, and I think also we have to recognize that the RDA was based on animal based foods, it was based on high quality proteins. So the minimum to prevent a deficiency would be 45 grams of higher quality protein. And I do think that that's an important differentiation to make because there's a lot of confusion in the space about the kinds of proteins, the sourcing, et cetera, the other component to this conversation. So if I were to go on record and say 1 gram per pound, ideal body weight, you can go lower than that and you certainly can go higher than that without deleterious effects. But if someone is doing a lot of endurance, maybe you do better with additional carbohydrates. And how are you going to get your fiber and your fruits and vegetables, et cetera? The distribution question is.

Having a resurgent. It's having a moment.

I know the protein distribution, that recent 100, 100 gram post workout protein feeding study.

We actually, and by the way, we should mention that this group is probably the finest group. So it's Van Loon's group and they are probably one of the finest groups in the protein space. That paper was not necessarily reflective of many of the papers within that group.

Does protein distribution matter for a younger person? It doesn't.

And we, we should explain by the way, before we get too far down this road. That means like how many times your protein feedings are split up throughout the day, right? Protein distribution.

So originally, you know, I've been, I've been studying protein metabolism for 20 years and I started in Donald Layman's lab and Don Layman is one of the grandfathers of, of protein. He would cringe, it'd be so cringeworthy and that he's hearing me say that because he's in his 70s, birthday's coming up. Um, and the idea of protein distribution started out with this idea that leucine, which is one of the essential amino acids, is required to, to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. And they were really looking at early Body composition studies. And they put together.

Lehman and Doug Patton Jones put together, they really put out a handful of papers in which they did an even distribution, meaning for example, 30 grams of dietary protein three times a day as a way to manage body composition. And I really think that that did the world a disservice because people took that and ran with it and said, well you know, this is what is required for optimizing body composition. It's 30 grams three times a day. And there's actually not evidence to support that. So now we have a new paper that has come out talking about how there's no anabolic upper limit to protein. So the whole idea of eating a protein bolus, like the amount of protein per meal is really, you have to understand or one has to understand, it's for the health of skeletal muscle. If you do not hit a particular leucine threshold, which is one of those branch chain amino acids, you do not stimulate mtor, you do not stimulate this muscle protein synthetic response. Right? You are sub threshold. And it's one reason potentially why I think we see a lot more sarcopenia than we should, which is a decrease in muscle mass and function. But we have to recognize that that first meal of the day hitting between 30 and 50 grams of dietary protein, that's where nearly all of the research is, is on that first meal of the day. Some could argue that because it's coming out of an overnight fast, there's no confounders, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But regardless, the first meal of the day, whenever you're going to take it, is where you are going to get the most anabolic response to your meal.

Also fantastic for circadian rhythmicity and jump starting sleep drive as well, probably due to the leptin signaling.

I think that I am certainly not a leptin expert, but there is, there is certainly evidence for circadian entrainment with food. People always think about it with light, but it is absolutely with food.

That's why I don't skip breakfast when I travel. I don't do the intermittent fasting thing for the first few days. And even though I'm not a huge egg bacon guy at home, usually if the hotel has a restaurant, I'll go down and just order six eggs and olive oil or ghee or something like that.

And that is a good strategy. So that first meal of the day, really getting that anabolic response again is where the literature, you know, I feel comfortable saying that we could look at the literature and there's a Large body of evidence that that first meal of the day is very important for that anabolic response of again, why do we care about it? Because we care about protecting muscle. If you believe that you cannot be a healthy individual without healthy muscle, you must take action to really think about what are the habitual things that one must do for optimizing muscle mass. That being said, people will say, well, that middle meal is important like a lunch meal. It's not. So these initiation factors, like EIF4 and these other initiation factors, once muscle protein synthesis is started.

We don't know actually how long it lasts. Maybe these, maybe MTOR resets at five or six hours later, we don't really know. But what we do know is that those initiation factors are still going. And so if you add in a middle meal, you're not going to necessarily get a more robust muscle protein synthetic response, which is different than what everyone has been talking about.

Yeah. So what I'm hearing then is that you start off your day with 30 to 50 grams and then just get in the rest of it during the day up to the amount of. I'm gonna talk to my American listeners now. Go with grams per pound, around like 0.7 to 0.8 grams per pound or 1 pound per desired mass goal. Just however you get it the rest of the day. As long as you're starting off with 30 to 50 grams at the beginning.

Of the day, I think that that is a reasonable, I think that that is absolutely reasonable. I will also say that that last meal, one could argue for that last meal of hitting another 30 to 50 or more doesn't really matter before you're going into an overnight fast. And then I will say if you're younger and you're training and you're healthy, the distribution doesn't necessarily matter. But for other components of health that you're talking about, like circadian entrainment and things of that nature, and you know, you might not want a huge bolus of food, et cetera. So it's not just, we can't just be myopic and say, okay, well, it's just about protein. It's not, it's about protein. It's about how are we layering this in a, in a, a cycle, in a 24 hour feeding period or a 24 hour period and then that last meal of the day is, is important. But this paper that came out talked about how there was no anabolic upper limit. And that's not, the evidence doesn't support that. So there is.

Yeah. And by the way you're referring to the paper where they gave people 100 grams.

Correct, correct.

There were a lot of challenges with that paper that I think are not necessarily being mentioned, by the way, I have to say, these are extraordinary researchers. But they chose casein, which we know is four times slower in absorption. They chose 25 grams of casein, which I didn't know that, not enough to really elicit a major response. And then they chose a hundred, but there was no gradation. So if they had chosen 45 grams of casein, there wouldn't be a difference from a anabolic response from 45 to a hundred, because we've already initiated muscle protein synthesis, we've already initiated all these factors and mtor. So the idea that there's no upper limit to an anabolic response would mean that you could put on, I don't know, 1 pound of lean body mass in 12 hours. There is an upper threshold of an anabolic response that is in the literature and including the literature in that group. So I, I think the point is that that paper shows one. What, what is that? What is like the idea of that paper is that you can absorb all the protein, perhaps.

Yeah, because, because that's like, you know, I don't know what you tell your gastroenterologist friends who say, well, the body can't absorb more than 40 grams at a time, or, you know, the flu floating around the Internet. You'll see people even say 30 grams at a time. You're saying that's not true. And maybe what this paper at least shows is that that's not true.

And I think that the paper was incredible. It showed, you know, it used exhaustive exercise, and it seemed as if there was a, a very unusual kind of recovery response that, that we might not account for. I mean, that was really unusual. There's a lot of really good things to the paper. But I, I think the idea that we extrapolate that there's no upper limit to an anabolic response and that people could just eat 200 grams of protein potentially in a day, and maybe that's better than eating twice a day. I, I, I think that that would be really taking it out of context. And here's where I think it matters. It doesn't matter if you're young, but where it does matter, it matters if you're older. So, for example, let's say we talked earlier about this catabolic crisis. So somebody goes, falls, breaks a hip, I don't know, gets sick, is on bed rest, and they're Believing that they should have one meal a day and that's sufficient. That would not be an ideal strategy for someone who is challenged with a catabolic insult, whether it's an infection or a bed rest state, et cetera. And we just have to be careful. I don't think that this paper changes any current strategy, quite frankly.

Yeah, yeah, okay, that makes sense. Now, when it comes to muscle building, talk about protein.

Yeah.

I know you and I are both huge fans of essential amino acids, especially those rich in adequate leucine for the muscle protein synthesis reasons that you described earlier. So I think protein and essential amino acids, in my opinion, those are a no brainer. I've already had 15 grams of essential amino acids today. It's only what, 11:30am so what else though, as far as muscle building supplements or additions would you add in or recommend based on what you know?

Well, there's a couple things I don't know if you've heard of. I do want to mention the essential amino acids. We talk a lot about amino acids as it relates to. Well, number one, we talk about protein as if it's one thing which we know it's not. It's 20 different amino acids. And then we talk about the idea that these amino acids are interchangeable. And I think that that is really doing the complexity of protein research and information a disservice. We can agree that.

What do you mean interchangeable?

Is that people will say, well, this has 10 grams of dietary protein and that must be equivalent to this other 10 gram of dietary protein.

Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah.

And the reality is these essential amino acids, and I just want to highlight this because I do think that it's important to recognize that for examp, leucine we spoke about that plays a role in the activation of mtor. But what about threonine, which is an essential amino acid that is important for mucin production, or tryptophan, which is important for serotonin production, or lysine, which is important for carnitine and fatty acid oxidation. And you know, these amino acids and these foods, they're not interchangeable. And I think that when we talk about how are we optimizing human health, that it's not the same to say, okay, well you can have this peanut butter and that peanut butter is the same as this 4 ounce steak. These, the amino acids are different, the micronutrients are different. And, and we do have to do a better job. And the next frontier, I think is going to be understanding the limiting amino acids. And I Don't. I won't go off into a rabbit hole about methionine, lysine and leucine. But those are the three key limiting amino acids that I think you're going to get a lot more play coming up in the literature.

When you say limiting amino acids, you mean limiting for muscle protein synthesis or something else?

Great question for everything for so Lou, that's a wonderful question. Leucine, particularly for muscle protein synthesis and then methionine that creates this integrative stress response if that is limiting or restricted and then lysine, lysine is really important again for fatty acid oxidation and growth and those pools last a lot longer. So that would not be a meal to meal.

Amino acid that we care about. It would be more of the overall strategy of eating versus leucine would be a meal to meal type of amino acid that we care about.

Okay, interesting. So what else, other, what else other than amino acids would you look at like your, your go to stack for, for muscle building or maintenance?

One of the things I'm very interested in and I'm curious as to your thoughts, but I, I, There's a compound called urolithin A. Yeah. 30 to to 40% of individuals, some people make it, some people don't. And it's a postbiotic, it is made in the gut microbiome. It's an ellagitannin from things like pomegranate or walnut. And I think that there are some pretty good evidence for the urolith and A's impact on mitochondrial health and function, strength and endurance, primarily in older individuals through the process of mitophagy, which is obviously cleaning out these old mitochondria and helping with the regeneration of mitochondria, keeping it quote youthful. I don't know. However you want to say it, I really, really like urolithin A. I think that that is.

If I could have made a supplement and brought it to market, I probably would have developed something like that.

I agree that's impressive. I mean most of the resistance training studies have been done in mice or rodent models, but it's still impressive. And I've been taking a probiotic for a while that has pomegranate seed extract in it and then have used the timeline nutrition stuff as well. And I think there's enough evidence and absence of harm and side effects to where if you can afford to add it into your protocol, I, I, I wouldn't rank it above like amino acids and, and definitely wouldn't rank it above creatine. But I, I think it, it's, it's good for that.

Um, I absolutely agree with you. I, I do think it's phenomenal. I think creatine is also hugely impactful and we're going to start to see more the greater impacts of creatine on cognition. I know that we're seeing it right now in older individuals, but it's going to be interesting as we kind of switch the focus from ATP and performance based creatine.

Creatine'S influence to brain function. So creatine would definitely be on there. If someone is eating a lot of.

Red meat, we should mention that. Well, that and sleep deprivation. But it's at least double, triple or even quadruple the dose recommended typically for performance. And considering once you exceed five grams and some people, two and a half grams, you get, you know, you're painting the back of the toilet seat, so to speak, you got to kind of break it up during the day. Yeah, but if you're willing to do like four, let's say two and a half gram portions of creatine throughout the day, I mean, and it's dirt cheap compared to a nootropic. I think that's a fantastic strategy for.

Yes.

I, I would agree with that. I, I definitely think that that's, that's important. And then you know, there's some foundational ones like omega 3 fatty acids. They're seeing some evidence to support that it might affect women differently. I don't know, I don't know if they have nailed down the mechanism of action, but I do think that it has something to do with the ribosomes, the impact on the ribosomes for women. And that would be omega 3 fatty acids. We know that it can be helpful for a whole host of things, brain health, mood, etc.

Vitamin D. Unless you're out there in the sun all the time.

Yeah, that, that's a good stack. So we have fish oil, vitamin D, creatine, amino acids, maybe some urolithin A. Yeah, I think that's fantastic. I mean, I, I, I can't say I can name. You know, there's all sorts of other things out there, you know, like ATP precursors or you know, blood flow enhancing agents.

But what you just named, that also works great too. That works great too.

Yeah. I guess one other I would throw in would be colostrum. I, I really like the effects of colostrum on growth hormone, particularly col.

So gut health, the gut muscle axis is going to be the next frontier. The gut muscle access is going to Be the next frontier.

Yeah.

Um, yeah.

And, and I, I what? Well, I should ask you, actually, when you say gut muscle axis, what do you mean?

For example, urolithin A is a postbiotic that directly affects mitochondrial function. There is the ingestion of or the creation of this postbiotic that actually has skeletal muscle effects. I think that it's probably bi directional. You know, you're talking about colostrum. We treat a lot. You know, I had mentioned before that my husband's a seal. In my clinical practice, a whole portion of the practice is all special operations. And one of the things that we always are, always do is we treat gastrointestinal infections, we treat parasites, we treat all kinds of things.

And again, this is anecdotal, but the better their gastrointestinal health is, the better their physical performance. And I'm not. The better their nutrient absorption, everything. And of course, there's butyrate production. There's all, there's a whole host of things. But I, I, I do think that there is a, a gut muscle access that is going to be.

Just, there's.

Going to be a lot more tension on that.

Yeah. If for, if for no better reason than it's hard to do a deep barbell squat when you have diarrhea. Right.

True.

Yeah.

Also true.

Okay, you have time for a few lightning roundish.

Yeah, can't wait. Rock and roll. Yes, sir.

All right. Top workout sent off to a desert island. We've established maybe body weight workouts aren't your favorites. Let's say there's a. You can take some equipment. But what would be your top workout?

Oh, so some kind of kettlebell? Heavy kettlebell. Carries, swings, Turkish get ups, you name it. Something I can throw around. Squats, goblet squats. There's nothing you can't do with a heavy kettlebell.

I love it. Yep. Russian style kettlebell training, little system of breath work. And you've got equipment for eons. What is the meal that you can't live without?

I'm not a major foodie, but I love a good ribeye.

Oh, yeah, you're speaking my language, cook. Tao, if you had to pick, you're.

Not gonna like my answer. Okay, my answer is well done. But here's why. Because I do so much parasitology work in my clinic that it's always well done. Everything. I don't eat raw fish. Nothing.

Yeah, well, I go.

Doesn't mean we're tasting.

Just take a parasite cleanse. It's worth it.

Fair.

All right, so if you could Throw out all your supplements. It could even be like, you know, those. In addition to those we've already discussed, what would be kind of like your top Go to supplement.

I mean, I really like. I really like nootropics. I like. I mean, whether it's methylene blue, there's products that I use. Thesis. I like brain stuff. Yeah, I know that. That didn't.

Was interesting too, because you can feel it. And you could begin to, once you experiment with nootropics, detect the subtle differences between, like, verbal fluency, word recall, focus, sleep deprivation, et cetera. Because obviously there's a dizzying array of nootropics, but they don't all act in the same way.

Right. Beta hydroxybutyrate. You know, I mean, there's. I. I cycle through a whole slew.

All right, question from my wife. She wants to know, because she saw me looking at you on Instagram, what's your secret to looking young? Especially with age.

I mean, man, it's lifestyle. It's training. Training and diet. It's training.

Collagen.

Collagen's amazing. So I do. I actually use collagen. I didn't even think about that. I use at least 20 grams of collagen a day orally.

Do you do, like, derma rolling or anything like that or what? Laser treatments? Derma rolling. You do anything like that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's talk about that collagen also. Definitely laser. They have a new laser that I just tried, and it's. It's. I think it's called the Morpheus, but it's like a fractional CO2 laser, but different, and that works great. So I've been doing that. I don't do derma planing. I don't do any of that stuff. And I use a lot of really good skincare. I use. I use retinoids, so I use retinol. I use hyaluronic acid. I don't know if there's a ton of evidence of topical hyaluronic acid versus oral, but I use that. I use vitamin C.

Yeah, I dig it. The hyaluronic acid collagen combo, I think, is fantastic. I think we'll see more research behind that. Gabriel, you're amazing. I think your lifting prowess is just as impressive as your facial care protocol and your body of knowledge. This book, forever strong. You guys. It's incredible. It's going to motivate you to hit the gym, even if you're scared of it or don't know where to start. Gabriel's great at laying everything out. I'm going to link to everything that we talked about, except maybe the Morpheus laser, because I don't know if I can hunt that down. You go to BenGreenfieldLife.com Lion Gabriel's last name L Y O and BenGreenfieldLife.com lion gabriel thank you so much.

Thank you so much for having me, Ben.

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