#163 - Layne Norton, Ph.D.: Building muscle, losing fat, and the importance of resistance training

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in depth content. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, at the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are. Or if you want to learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com subscribe Now without further delay, here's today's episode. My guest this week is Lane Norton. Lane is a bodybuilding figure and a physique coach. Along with being a natural pro bodybuilder and professional powerlifter, he has an undergraduate degree in biochemistry and a PhD in nutritional science from the University of Illinois. In this episode we talk at length about his background and while I initially thought we'd spend a few minutes on it, it turned into quite a lengthy discussion. But I encourage you to listen all the way through because not only is it interesting and it paints a picture of a really interesting and determined guy who, to be completely honest with you, demonstrated to me. Not someone who's as naturally gifted as I would have assumed he is from the images of Lane that I'm familiar with, but really a guy who's if anything, his superpower, commitment, dedication, determination and that commitment, dedication, determination that he brought to his powerlifting and bodybuilding have really carried over into his obsessive need to understand everything as it pertains to training and nutrition, both in the spirit of improving body composition, adding muscle mass, understanding the metabolic benefits of that, along with the health benefits. We go into some really deep stuff here and most of the time we're pretty good and we take a step back and we get into this is what actin is, this is what myosin is, and this is how muscle protein synthesis works. The show notes, I think will be helpful on some of those things. I learned a lot in this myself. We had a very interesting discussion around IGF growth hormone cortisol, a number of hormones that play a role here. That again, I think there's some misgivings and misunderstandings about how these things work. We also frankly don't get to as many things as I had hoped to. This podcast is a little bit long and despite the length, there are probably about five or Six topics that we didn't get to that I suspect we're going to discuss several months from now. Lane has great graciously already agreed to be back on and we'll be able to revisit a number of these topics at that time. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Lane Norton. Hey Lane, awesome to be sitting down with you today, at least virtually. I've been looking forward to speaking with you for actually about two and a half years. I know Dom introduced us a long time ago. We were trying to do this in person at some point and then one thing led to another. It became Covid. And then all of a sudden I realized you don't have to be in person to do a podcast. Though I do wish we were in person because I. I suspect this will be a really long discussion and a great one. You know, first off, I just want to say one thing that I think people sometimes assume is that people like you and I have so much in terms of viewpoints that are vastly different. And you know, I spent a lot of time reading your material and watching your videos and I followed your work for quite some time. And I would actually say that there are very few things that I think you and I don't see eye to eye on. And maybe some of those things will come up today. I think they'd be very interesting. But I also think the level of nuance and sophistication you bring to this subject matter is exciting, which is why I want to talk with you about so many things. But I kind of want to start by letting listeners understand a little bit about who you are and why I think you're qualified to speak on so many subject matters. So I mean, let's just talk about. You grew up in outside of Chicago.

If I recall, actually in Southern Indiana. So I'm from Evansville originally. So 20 minutes from Illinois and five minutes from Kentucky.

Oh, impressive. That's not often you can straddle that many borders, right? What kind of sports did you play growing up?

Baseball was my primary one. I played since I was 5 and lettered in high school, but it was. I would never say that sports came naturally to me. It was definitely something I really had to work at. That may be apparent for my baseball aficionados out there. I was a 5 foot 10 right handed first baseman, so that's not your prototypical first baseman, but I really enjoyed baseball and it kind of stoked my competitive fire. I also did run cross country in high school as well, which definitely not the sport that you would pick as the precursor to strength sports and bodybuilding. But, but those were at the time, kind of like the ones that I sucked the least at, I guess is the way I'll put it in terms of natural ability. Baseball was my real passion though, growing up. That's what I really enjoyed.

Was it during baseball and learning to get conditioned for baseball that you kind of discovered the weight room and your talents in the weight room.

So I would actually say no, that was more so. I was very, very much picked on. And I would say like borderline, like emotionally abused by my peers. Growing up, I was a nerdy kid, I had adhd, I was talkative, I was goofy. All that stuff can help you when you get older because being different is good when you're older, but when you're young, being different is not so much fun. So I got picked on a lot, didn't really get much attention from girls. And just to be quite frank, I started lifting weights just to hopefully have people stop picking on me and get some dates. And lifting weights. Didn't do either of those things. But I developed a passion for weight training. And I wouldn't say it was something that like really, really came naturally. I was never like a hyper responder or anything like that, but I just, I really, really enjoyed it. And I'd always been somebody who, in my scholastics, I wouldn't say things really came that easy to me either because probably a little bit because of my adhd, but I was able, I did find at a young age that through sheer volume of work, I could overcome a lot of that stuff. And so I really appreciated lifting weights. I guess from the perspective of the work investment to the payoff, compared to how much talent was needed, seemed to be a lower threshold. If you're 5 foot 10, right handed and you're trying to pitch in the big leagues, you're pretty limited, you know. Now certainly there are limitations in terms of like hypertrophy and strength building, but for me it felt more fair, I guess, in terms of level of work you get in versus what you see. And then in terms of, I think the other thing is it's very measurable. If you lifted a certain amount today and in two months you go in and you're lifting, you know, 10% more than that, that's a very hard outcome. There's no, oh, I think I'm getting better. It's like, no, I am getting better. And so I appreciated kind of that black and white to weightlifting.

You know, I can sort of appreciate so many of the things that you just said, and among them is sort of an early discovery for training. For me it was more boxing. That was the thing that kind of drew me in young. But in parallel to that, strength training and endurance training both became supportive pillars to boxing. I was fortunate, I think, in that I found great mentors that introduced me to powerlifting when I was young. They were older men that trained in a gym at the university that I trained at when I was 13 and 14 years old. Did you find mentors like that who kind of took you under their wing to keep you safe and also explain the sport and you know, give you some common sense around training?

I would say the first few years, no, actually, when I, I always joke that we didn't have a lot of money growing up, you know, Southern Indiana wasn't really a hotbed of fitness information. And I'll go ahead and date myself, I'm 39 years old. So when I started was in the late 90s. I mean basically what you had was, was bodybuilding magazines and I really couldn't afford a subscription to those either. So I actually, the first thing I ever did when I got into weightlifting was I walked down to my local library, literally walked down to my local library and checked out books on weight training.

Do you remember some of the books you checked out?

Oh man, I wish I did, but I, I don't. And actually I would say like what I do remember, especially for one particular book which was it's kind of like basics of strength training or something like that wasn't that bad actually. We have really advanced our understanding of weight training. But you know, the basics, progressive overload, that sort of stuff is still, still relatively similar. And I remember the book did talk about periodization, which at that time kind of was not a new concept in athletics, but for weightlifting was a new concept. So anyways, like that, that was kind of like my first few years was a little bit self guided or when I had lifting classes, they did offer a class on lifting in high school. It was kind of just doing what, whatever the football team was doing basically. But obviously I still got stronger just because if you're consistent you will get stronger regardless of what you're doing. And then at 19 I entered my first bodybuilding competition as a teenager and just by pure serendipity, I wanted to compete in drug tested bodybuilding. I always have to give this caveat, you know, I've always been drug free in terms of anabolic steroids, growth hormones, you know, all that kind of stuff. No Performance enhancing drugs. I don't have any problem with anybody who does it as long as they compete in untested organizations. That's my, my caveat. I always just chose to compete drug tested because I just never felt called to be Mr. Olympia or anything like that. And I, you know, again, I don't, this is my own personal ethos. I'm not judging anybody who's ever done performance enhancing drugs. I just wouldn't have felt good about myself. That's the only thing I can say. And I'm not saying that anybody who's done that shouldn't feel good about themselves. I just knew I wouldn't feel good about myself. So with that out of the way, I was doing a drug tested bodybuilding show and pretty much the only natural bodybuilding evidence based, natural bodybuilding coach lived in my hometown and his name was Dr. Joe Klimzetski. And I reached out to him because he wrote for the natural bodybuilding magazines and he helped prep me for the show. I won the teenage division and the, the novice division and I was hooked, of course. But also Dr. Joe wasn't right about everything, obviously. But the crux of his information and being so focused on being evidence based and not necessarily buying into dogma, that sort of thing, that definitely did help me. And just listening to him talk about the physiology of, you know, for example, a water depletion is something very common amongst bodybuilders. And the first meeting we ever had, he's like, yeah, I don't do that because I don't think it's a good idea. And he listed out all the physiological reasons why he didn't think it was a good idea and it made a lot of sense. So. But I remember listening to that thinking, man, I don't know any of this stuff. Like I would love to, to know more about this. And so I think meeting Joe, that was part of the reason that I really wanted to learn more about the human body and push more in academics. And he had a PhD and I think that was kind of like the first seed of maybe I want to go even further than just like an undergraduate degree or something like that.

So there are actually several things in there that I want to go back and revisit. I'll start with the latter. You mentioned adhd. Was school kind of hard for you and was this a big step forward to think, hey, not only am I going to go to college, but I'm probably going to want to do a PhD to follow in this guy's footsteps? Not Necessarily to follow his footsteps, but to really go deep into something scientific.

I think by the time I got to college, I had developed really good study habits. Let me back up. Yes, school was difficult for me. It was very difficult for me to stay focused, but just through sheer effect of my parents basically beating into my head from a young age, you are going to college and you are going to get an education. You know, that sort of thing. I don't want to sell it like it was an overbearing parent sort of thing. It was just. They were very committed to my education, but it was never like, oh, you need to go be a doctor, or you need to go do this, you need to go that. It was just, we want you to get educated. And I wanted to get educated, too. I was the first person in my family, even, like my extended family ever even go to college. So I think the ADHD made it tough at first. And I never got bad grades in school, but I struggled in terms of the teachers would really complain about my lack of attention, my lack of focus, those sorts of things. And I. So I found for me, when I had to study, I really had to spend a lot more time than most of the students my age were doing. So I took, for example, advanced chemistry in high school, and I'll never forget this conversation. We had a test coming up, and I had studied for probably a total of like, 15 hours, I'd say, for this test, which in high school is a lot for a test, at least for me, seemed like a lot. And I remember talking to a friend of mine who got the same grade I did on the test, and he was like, yeah, you know, I studied a little bit last night. And I was thinking, man, if I studied just last night, I would have failed this test, you know? So it did seem like I had to do more work. And it might not even been more work if I tried to sit down for, like, eight hours. I remember my roommate my freshman year in college, Great guy. He was the head of medicine at Naples General for several years, but he could sit down for eight hours straight, have complete silence, and just study the whole time. If I tried to do that, I'd get about 30 minutes of productive studying in. So I had to learn to kind of break things up. And I'm not saying this works for everybody with adhd, but for me, it worked. So I. I would get distracted so easily that I just stopped trying to fight that. And I allowed myself to get distracted, but I'd always come back. So I would do 30, but no more than 45 minutes at a block. I would do that and then I would take 15 minutes and I would let myself browse the Internet or read something else or watch some TV or something like that. But I would always put a timer on and I would go back when it was time. And that seemed to really work personally for me. So by the time I got to college, I kind of had figured out what worked for me studying wise. And I went to a college called Eckerd College, which is a private school in St. Petersburg, Florida, which was on the ranking. It was very selective at a high quality school, all this kind of stuff. And so I was petrified because I'm this kid from Southern Indiana. I've never been anywhere really and I have no idea how I'm going to stack up against students from other places like, you know, the Northeast and that sort of thing. So I was so petrified. I studied so hard. I got A's. I still remember this. I got A's on my first 11 tests I ever had in college because I was so petrified about failing. So I think by that point I had already had good study habits. You know, I did take like Ritalin and Adderall growing up, and I do think those helped a little bit. I always joke, like, the only problem with like Adderall is whatever I was doing when it kicked in was what I was going to be doing for the next eight hours, you know, so if I were one day, I was, I was looking up fantasy football rankings. First year I ever played fantasy football. And that I did that all day, all day. When it kicked in, I went from worst to first in fantasy football that year anyways. But by the time I got to grad school, I was kind of able to wean myself off that. I think the last time I ever took any medication was 15 years ago. And I think a lot of it, you know, I don't judge anybody who takes medication for it because like I said, I think it did help. But I think I just got to the point with my study habits where I didn't really feel like I needed it. I just think the fact that I had to struggle a little bit when I was young actually really helped me and kind of like cauterized me in terms of like being able to deal with some adversity. And I think that's what really helped me when I went to college and then grad school.

So I'm going to put on the back burner for a moment some of the stuff I want to Come back to. With respect to your training history and continue down this sort of academic thread. Talk to me a little bit about the decisions you made to then pursue higher education beyond a bachelor's degree, and how you decided to, for example, pick a PhD and then further decide what area you wanted to study.

So this is just like one of those things where you look back and you go, wow, I really stumbled into doing some of the right things, having no freaking concept of what I was doing at the time. So when I originally went to school, I went to Eckerd because I wanted to study marine science. When I was growing up, I wanted to be a shark biologist. That was my passion, was sharks. I still love fishing and I still love going out and being in the wild with sharks and that sort of thing. In fact, one of my goals is to dive with a great white shark at some point.

Did you see that Nat Geo Special? It was based on something that happened in Hawaii, I think, two years ago where that whale came ashore. They took it. This was off Oahu. They took it five miles out and they went out there to study the tiger sharks that would be feeding off it. And lo and behold, like the largest great white ever came up upon it.

Oh, I didn't see that.

Oh, you must see this. We'll link to it in the show notes. This is one of those things where one day I was walking through the playroom and my kids were fixated on it and I sat down for two minutes to watch it, and then an hour later I'm still watching it, Couldn't stop, stop. But I won't spoil it for you then. I'll just. I'll just leave it at that and say, you will go bananas watching this thing.

Cool. Yeah, I think I watched Jaws about 8,000 times when I was a kid, so I probably will enjoy it. I still get excited for Shark Week whenever it comes up. So anyway, I went to Eckerd for that. I remember I interviewed at Florida Institute of Technology as well, and one of the professors there actually studied great white sharks. And I'm very thankful for this guy. I can't remember his name, but he said, look, I'm not telling you not to do this. I'm just going to be honest with you about what I do. He said, I've got a job that maybe 1 in 10 people in the entire world have. I don't get paid great for it. And it was really hard to get. Now, I'm not saying you can't get that, but what I would recommend to you is if you're truly passionate about this, go do a degree in a more general science and then go specialize when you get to graduate school. He said, because if you start general, you'll still have the base that you need for grad school. And if you're still really passionate about this, you're going to need the grad school education anyway. I thought, okay, well that's not a bad idea. And so I actually went. Instead of marine science, I started in biology. And then my first year I had a general chemistry professor named Chris Schnabel. And I actually still keep in touch with him to this day here and there. And we were in lab one day and I think he really liked me, like just my attitude. And he said, lane, come here. He's like, I know you're doing biology. He's like, what you need to do is biochemistry. And I was like, well, why do I, you know, I'm a freshman, I have no idea what I'm doing. Like, why do I want to do biochemistry? He said, well, let me put it to you this way. He's like, if you decide that you don't want to go to grad school and you have a biology degree, you look like a pre med who didn't get into med school when you go to get a job. He said, but if you get a degree in biochemistry, the world is your oyster. You can get any job that you'd be able to get in biology you can get with biochemistry and then some. And if you want to go to grad school, you have that option, this and that. By the way, I'm not slamming on biology students out there. If you love biology and that's what you want to do, no worries. This is just what he said. I was like, okay. So I switched to biochemistry my second year. I took organic chemistry and I had a great professor for organic chemistry. It was very hard. He was not easy, but he was firm but fair. And if I look back, my best mentors were always firm but fair. And I got a B in the class. But at the end of the semester, he asked if I wanted to come do research with him over the summer. And I was kind of like, well, why do you want me? I, you know, I got a B. He's like, you asked a lot of questions, you were engaged. He said, grades matter. But at the end of the day, I want students who are passionate and work hard. And I saw how hard you worked. So I went and did research with him over the summer. That was my first kind of foray into research. Didn't get anything done because, you know, it's 10 weeks and it's my first experience in research. So I got to deal with a lot of frustration and stuff not working. But I got to do research with him for two years over the next two summers. And when I got to my junior year of college, I think having that idea of, okay, what happens next, I had started writing articles for bodybuilding.com again. That's another whole nother conversation of serendipity. And I knew I was really passionate about bodybuilding because during that time, like I said, I'd gotten into competing and whatnot. But I was thinking, well, I don't feel like I'm going to be a professional. I don't feel like I really know anything. I had crested the Dunning Kruger and I was down in the valley, you.

Know, by the way, that's such a great point to make. Why don't you explain to people who don't understand what the Dunning Kruger curve looks like and what it means?

Yeah, so if you look at any subject, I'm generalizing very much. So if Dunning or Kruger listens to this, I apologize if I butcher it. But essentially. So the Dunning Kruger curve is basically perceived knowledge versus actual knowledge. And the really interesting thing is, when we start in a subject, since we are aware that we have no knowledge, our perceived knowledge pretty much aligns with how much knowledge we have, which is none. But pretty quickly, our perceived knowledge skyrockets. It goes very, very high, usually after about six to 12 months of, you know, being involved in a particular subject. And we get to this. Some people never get to this inflection point where it starts to come back down. But eventually, if you keep learning and keep learning and keep learning, you realize, oh, wow, I didn't know as much as I thought I did because I thought I knew that. But then this contradicts it. And so you start having this, like, downward turn. Even though you're learning more, your actual knowledge is going up, your perception of your knowledge starts going down. And I would say my third year of graduate school was where it got to the very bottom. That's where I got to the very bottom. And interestingly, if you look at the Dunning Kruger effect, I have a friend named Jeremy Lineke. He's a professor at Ole Miss, and he always says, once you drink from the fountain of knowledge, you will thirst for the ignorance you once had. Your perception of your knowledge, if you continue learning, will never reach that initial crest that you had that first six to 12 months where you thought you had kind of everything figured out.

I just can't agree with that more. Bob Kaplan often says, and I'm sure he's paraphrasing somebody, that the further you get from shore, the deeper the water gets. And again, it's a slightly different way of saying basically the same idea. And what I thought I knew about nutrition 10 years ago relative to what I know today, in absolute terms, I know infinitely more today than. But in relative terms, that is the perceived terms. It's basically to the point where I pretty much think I know nothing. Now, I know that's not true, but there are days when I think I actually don't know nothing because to your point, you're constantly looking for the example that contradicts your belief system. And so you have a belief system which is, well, under this condition or this condition or these set of conditions, this must be true. There's always going to be an exception to that. There is something else, though. I mean, I think, unfortunately, social media has created a lot of people who shout really loudly from the top of the Dunning Kruger that, that initial peak of the Dunning Kruger curve. And I'm not sure if it's just blind stupidity, willful ignorance, or what, but I think there are a lot of people who have no interest in moving forward, and that's unfortunate. But I think that makes it very difficult for people who want to learn because it makes the signal noise problem very difficult. For example, nobody really wants to hear uncertainty. If someone's in the market for knowledge, do you want to hear it from that person whose absolute knowledge is high, their perceived knowledge is perhaps low, and they caveat things that they talk about? Or do you want to hear that person who's nine months into their resurrection of knowledge and speaks like they know everything? We tend to gravitate more towards that person. So I find this phenomenon very interesting, and I just had to make sure we spent a moment on that. Based on your reference.

We had a guy named Alan Levinovitz on our podcast who's a professor of religious studies. Not to get too far down the rabbit hole of that, but he, he's done a few books about naturalism and how we kind of, even without evidence, default to believing that something that's natural, even though he talks about how we can't really define that is better. And one of the things he talked about was if you want to look for people who know what they're talking about, and it is difficult, as you said, because there's this sea of information out there. Look for people who seem unsure. He's like, it's a complete paradox. Another friend of mine, Greg Nuckols, said, he said, what were people are really good at when they talk to somebody quickly, they can determine whether or not that person knows more about a subject than they do. What we're really bad at is if two people have more knowledge on a subject than we do and they're in disagreement, we have a lot of problem picking out who is more knowledgeable of the two. We tend to just default to whatever our bias is.

Which, by the way, is why debates tend to be a very unhelpful forum.

I always tell people debates favor people who could speak well. And at the end of the day, I mean, it doesn't matter what it's talking about. Religion, politics, nutrition. 95% of the people are going to go with whatever their perception was before the debate. And then that little 5% of the independents are going to make their decision, usually based, not necessarily off evidence. Because, I mean, if you don't have a PhD in something or an advanced degree, if two people are citing studies, who do you go with? You know, it's very, very difficult. So, yeah. So just all that to say, you know, I didn't feel like I really knew anything is three years into my biochemistry degree, even though I was getting good grades and didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, I knew I wanted to be in the fitness industry. Like, I was very passionate about bodybuilding, but I had no idea how I was going to make a living doing that. Because at that time, this is circa 2003, the people who made money in the fitness industry, either you owned a supplement company, you owned a gym, you were a personal trainer, or, you know, you, you wrote for a publication or something like that, you know, and I didn't have the capital to start a supplement company or, or the wherewithal to do that. And I didn't really want to be a personal trainer. And so I just kind of was like, well, if I go to graduate school, I'll learn more. Maybe I won't feel so stupid and I can delay the real world a little bit longer, figure out what the heck I actually want to do, and hopefully I won't be in the unemployment line if I have a master's or PhD. And that was. That was literally my logic.

Now, how did you toggle between? Because I could see at that moment in time you choosing between two paths. Right? You could have gone very deep down the exercise physiology path and you could have gone very deep down the nutrition path. You chose the latter, of course. Curious as to how you thought about it at the time.

Probably the magazine shaped some of my bias. There was a lot of focus on nutrition as opposed to training and even to this day this could be a little bit of selection bias. But I get a lot more questions about nutrition than I ever do about training. And even like me, like people are like, I hear about 80% nutrition, 20% training and I'm like, listen, have a PhD in nutrition. I will tell you, training is the most powerful thing for your health and body composition that you can possibly do. You need all the protein you want. You can do all these modifications with your diet you want. If you don't train, the changes to body comp are going to be pretty minimal. You know, in terms of you can lose fat, but you're also going to lose a little bit of lean body mass with it when you, when you diet and you can gain lean body mass, but you're also going to gain body fat with it. Resistance training specifically is the most powerful tool you have to change your body composition and I would actually argue your overall health as well. But at the time I was very focused on nutrition and specifically had just started kind of reading studies on muscle protein synthesis. Just, I was always a skinny kid growing up. You know, I wasn't a fat kid. I was, I was a skinny kid growing up. It's always mostly focused on how do I build more muscle, how do I maximize muscle building. I wasn't really focused on how do I get super lean.

That goes back to a question I wanted to ask you earlier, Lane. We kind of glossed over the fact that at 19 you win a drug free amateur bodybuilding contest which happened to be your first. When did you start lifting weights? Seriously, how old were you?

I started and stopped because I got my first girlfriend. So I started when I was like 15 years old, stopped when I was 16 because I got my first girlfriend and then I picked it back up when I was 17, almost 18 and then never dropped it after that.

Okay, so when you go to that second pickup, give me a sense of your height, your weight, your body comp, and then contrast that with what you looked at, what you looked like at 19.

So I actually remember exactly how much I weighed. I was right under five foot ten. I'm now five foot ten and a half. So I essentially was pretty much stopped growing and I was 152 pounds. And I remember that because the day I picked back up weight training was in November of, I want to say 1998, no, 1999. And it was at a Bigger, Faster, stronger seminar that came to my school because I decided to get back into strength training because my girlfriend had dumped me. Very shallow reasoning. And they weighed us at the Bigger, Faster, stronger seminar. And for whatever reason I always remember that now when I started originally I was 140lbs. As a freshman I started lifting some weights, but at this, when I picked it up and never dropped it, I was 152 pounds. And then for my first show I had peaked in the off season, I guess it would have been two years later at £200 and I competed at £175. Probably something like that. By that time I had grown an extra half inch and was five foot ten and a half. And yeah, so I guess it would have been about two and a half years later when I hit that mark. By the end of my high school career had gotten to be like one of the, I want to say bigger guys in the class but a little more muscular than other people. Other people had started to notice, but specifically my upper body because my legs were still terrible because for the first year I didn't really train them because you know, leg training sucks. Although now I love it.

Was there a point when you just discovered you had a gift of strength? You know I, I remember talking to Mark and Chris Bell and on the podcast with them I talked about these brothers that were around when I grew up. They were, they were an age above me, so they weren't my peers. But by the time I was a teenager they were in their 20s and they were always in the gym when I was there and there were four of them and they were freaks of nature. Now they were also all of them taking herculean doses of anabolic stero. But I saw them both on and off steroids and the steroids simply took their God given abilities and made them out of this world. But I mean I'll never forget one of the brothers who at the time was in residency, he was doing his residency in emerging in emergency medicine. So he was very, he was, his training volume was a fraction of what it was when he was in college. He would still come into the gym between shifts, narrow grip, 315 for 12, cold, like it was nothing, you know, on his way to squatting. 505 for 12, like unwrapped by the way. And like there was just a genetic gift that these guys had. And I sort of assumed, like, yes, they train very hard, but pretty early on they knew that they were strong. And it was clear. Just based on the hereditary nature, your best totals nearly 1800 pounds, correct?

Yeah.

So again, I don't want to for a moment take away from how hard you work, because I know how hard you work, but was there something that clicked in and said, I'm way better at this naturally than I will be at baseball?

I would say, actually, no. It never, it never clicked at that time because I never had like a period of time where my gains were just crazy. I never really had that. What happened was I saw that when I was very consistent and very steady, I had very steady increases. And so it was never like, oh, I put £50 on my bench press in six months. It's like, oh, this is the thing I'm, I'm doing now. It was just a very steady progression. And I think that was actually good for me, honestly, because I think if I'd had a lot of success right out of the gate, I might not have pushed as hard or been as consistent because it's kind of this weird paradox with me. The harder something is, the more I want to do it. And I do see this as it comes naturally to people, and they don't have those kind, that kind of resistance early on in terms of having to overcome, like, plateaus and frustration and setbacks. And I encountered all those pretty early on. And I think having a little taste of that enabled me to push through much bigger setbacks in the future. So honestly, I can't think of a time when I ever was like, wow, this is now. I will tell you. When I got to college and was training consistently and able to really eat consistently, because even though, you know, it's calorically dense food, I was trying to build muscle like that. I wasn't really concerned about the fact that I'm eating more calories because one, I was using them and two, I just wanted to be bigger. Like, I didn't care if I put on a little bit of body fat. So there was a point when I got to college where I was like, you know what, maybe, maybe I can do this. Because I would look at, I'd search online to try and find any, like, teenage bodybuilders, you know, And I look at it, come to find out, partly delusionally, because people on stage photos always look way less impressive than they actually look in person.

Wait, weigh less or way more?

Oh, way less. So if you see an actual, like, competitive bodybuilder in Person compared to how they look on stage in the photos, usually way more impressive in person in terms of their girth or definition, muscle size, muscularity, everything.

Oh, that's so. That's counterintuitive to me. I don't really follow. I mean, basically, I think the last bodybuilder I sort of paid any attention to was. God. Well, let's see, maybe Lee Haney. When I was a kid growing up, right? I mean, I paid attention to Lee Haney and Dorian Yates. Probably after Dorian Yates, I stopped paying attention to bodybuilding. And I've never seen someone of that stature in person.

Yeah, it'll blow your mind. It really. It really does. Obviously, it's extremely impressive in magazines and some of the gym photos that they take where the lighting is set up really well, you can look at that and go, okay, that's crazy. Compared to even the stage photos. But, yeah, I'm looking at these other guys that are about my age, and I'm like, you know what? He's a little bit better than me, but I'm. I'm kind of there, you know, I'm kind of, kind of right there. Now, again, take my legs out of the equation, because my legs were awful at the time, but my upper body was there, basically. And so I was like, okay, well, maybe this thing. Maybe I could be good at this, right? And, you know, come to find out, I'm sure genetics are just as important in hypertrophy as they are with hitting a baseball or shooting a basketball, whatever have you. But at the time, my mentality was this is more about work ethic and translates better. And so I was more committed to putting that energy into it. And as far as, like, strength goes and where I felt like I might have a gift, honestly, I think that a lot of my gift was. And again, this could be just hyperbole on my part. I think a lot of the gift was I'm just really stubborn and I could tolerate a lot of training volume. I actually today went back and looked at what I was doing before I went to the IPF World Championships, which is essentially like the super bowl for powerlifting. And that was in 2015, and I was able to get a gold medal in the squat and actually set a world squat record at the time, which was 668 pounds. And I weighed in at 201 and a half pounds when I hit it. And I tallied up how many sets I did that week with over 500 pounds between squat and deadlift, and it was 34 sets.

The week you hit that.

Well, sorry. In the. The two weeks before that. So I was kind of in my overreaching phase. And I just remember looking back at that thinking, like, how bad I wanted that and just how much volume of work I did. I think, again, I think I was just able to tolerate some really insane style training. And I think my body was a little bit more resilient. I think my mind was a little bit more resilient. I think that helped me a lot because there was a lot of. There's a lot of setbacks along the way, and that was, you know, obviously I was in my mid-30s when I did that compared to being a teenager, but there was never like a year where my squat just went. You know, it was always just kind of a slow, steady progression. And this was from the kid who had skinny legs, you know what I mean? But I had, you know, endured. I had two herniated discs in my neck. I had multiple herniated discs in my lower back. I had hip injuries, you know, everything you can imagine of lifting heavy weights and still managed to be able to go do that. But I think the fact that I endured some of those setbacks really early on in my career actually really helped me be able to deal with it, because one of my big rants I get off on is everybody's like, have more confidence in yourself. And what I always tell people is, like, you can't build confidence out of nothing. If you failed at everything you ever tried in your entire life, why would you have confidence? Right? So I try to tell people, like, look, start small. Just like, say, I'm going to show up to, like, if it's exercise, I'm going to show up every day this week. You know, regardless of how I feel, I'm going to go do it, or five days, whatever. Pick. Pick your number. Okay? You do that. There's a. Just a tiny smidget of confidence you get from that, and then you build that over time. Okay, well, I'm going to squat 200 pounds. Okay, and then you hit that, and then maybe you get some aches and pains. Okay, well, I'm going to rehab this. I'm going to go through this. And then you get through that and you get stronger. Right? And so if you do that over time, every little thing that you go through might feel insignificant in terms of what it means to you at that time. But when you look back, you can draw on that. And I think, you know, I always tell people, I don't think I would have had the Success I did in business or social media or academia if I hadn't done weightlifting because that taught me so much about other things in life. So I realized I went down a big rabbit hole there. But I think that's important for people to hear.

I think that makes a ton of sense. And I get asked sometimes what's the most important lesson I learned growing up with respect to ultimately being successful academically. And I was not successful at all in school until my last year of high school because I didn't actually plan to go to university. I wanted to become a professional boxer. So obviously there was no need to go to university. But I think like you, I had an an unusual gift for tolerating a lot of training and a surprising lack of confidence in myself which is what drove the training. It was sort of an insecurity that that's like the other guy's going to train three hours a day, I'm going to train six hours a day. But when I finally did decide to go to college, it actually seemed really easy compared to getting up at 4:30 every morning and running 10 miles and going to the gym this many hours and sparring this many rounds every day and doing 400lb push ups before bed every night and all of those things. If you have to go from doing that to just studying four hours a day, you already have the, what I call the kind of the habit infrastructure and the discipline infrastructure to do that. And I do think that translates. So that's why I think personally I just at least with my own kids, I'm delighted when they take up an interest in something, whether it be my daughter's case, music and sports. Even if you never end up being a professional athlete or drummer or whatever it is, it's really building and wiring a discipline around that which obviously you've demonstrated. Give me another sense of just in terms of I'm still, you have to forgive me, but I just. Most people who don't lift won't appreciate the magnitude of the numbers you're talking about, right? Like a 700 pound squat when you are 200 pounds and you are drug free. That's the thing we have to keep reemphasizing. And I appreciate the way you've talked about this. I've read a lot of what you've talked about talked about with respect to the use of performance enhancing drugs and at least to me it's never come across as haughty or holier than thou. It's been hey look, this is my choice and your only real Pet peeve is people who cheat and basically enter drug free bodybuilding competitions while using drugs. Which is, you know, in a sport like bodybuilding where you truly have a choice, that strikes me as nonsensical. But let's go back to when you're 19, how much could you squat, deadlift and bench? And I don't mean bench where you're bouncing it off your chest, I mean under clear guidance and rules.

So the interesting thing was I was a really good bench presser in high school and as a competitive powerlifter 15 years later, bench press was my worst lift. So I peaked early. I hit a 300 pound bench press in high school. Now that was not with a pause. If I'm thinking about what I could pause, probably would have been like 285 or something like that. 280, my squat. So I didn't really train squat that much because legs hurt. So my body type, I have a very long femur to shin ratio as well as a shorter torso. And essentially what that's going to mean is when you squat the bar must stay over your midfoot if you're going to not fall forwards or backwards. And so that means that I have to lean forward quite a bit when I squat. And so it's not, it's not a pretty squat. When I was, especially when I was in high school, it didn't know how to use hinge correctly and use my hips and whatnot. So I mean basically I was able to squat 315 folded over as a high schooler. So I mean that's pretty strong for a high schooler. It was barely to depth if that and definitely not the way you would teach it to somebody. And as far as deadlift, I didn't really deadlift in high school. I'm trying to think about if I ever actually deadlifted. I think maybe sporadically maybe I could have hit three plates. But I'm not sure. I do know that I kind of started doing it in college and I think I hit like a 405 pound deadlift before I left college. And I think I want to say that I hit like a 385 pound squat when I finished college. So there's no, again you can see.

Like it's not like, okay, that's amazing. Those are very mortal numbers, right? That's a, that's a very slow and steady trajectory to obviously where you are now. And it, and it probably reflects kind of muscle maturity and also technique maturity. You mentioned earlier in passing that you had a couple of herniations, both cervical and lumbar, did any of them require surgery?

Full disclosure, I'm not a, a pain expert or an orthopedist. I think I got some really good advice to not get surgery by the initial person I saw for my neck. And actually, so Dr. Joe, my coach, he was also a physical therapist. So the first doctor I went to when I had my disc herniation, I played rugby in college and that's what I got it from. I had two disc herniations and I had lost, basically I had a stinger and I couldn't even pick up a chair with my left hand in my dorm room without it slipping out of my hand. I lost about 40% of my strength on this left side. And I mean, the first doctor I went to was like, yeah, you, you, you know, you probably won't get back all the strength that you, you had. And I remember thinking, why don't you just stab me in the heart instead? You know, like it'd been easier. But, you know, I talked to Dr. Joe and Joe was like, listen, you know, you have to understand these doctors are used to dealing with your average person who's not going to do the rehab, who's not going to do the work, who's not going to push themselves. He said, that's not you. You will get back. You will hit PRs in the future. You know, this is, this is not a death sentence for your lifting career. I said, okay. And sure enough, six months later, I was, you know, I did the rehab and I was, I was hitting PRs again and then my lumbar herniations. I actually saw Stu McGill, who is one of the more well known experts on lower back pain. And you know, he did an in person assessment of me and he basically said, listen, you know, you've, yeah, you've got, you've got some herniations, but so do about 60% of all people who are over the age of 30.

Did you have any loss of strength going down your legs? Did you have any true sciatic pain or.

I never had radiating pain. I was very localized. But I mean, when it flared up, it was like 10 out of 10. Could not get up off my floor. I mean, I tell people at my lowest point, I went from literally not being able to move off my side on my floor to squatting £668 at a point later in time.

What was the delta between those time.

Periods with my lower back? It has kind of been a little bit of an ongoing issue. So the first time it really hit me was in 2015, the first really big bad incident I had was actually a week out from the Arnold Pro and I had been crushing weights in training. I mean, I was, I was very convinced I was going to squat like 680 or 690. I had hit 600 for five in training on squat. I had hit 675, deadlift for four. I mean, I was smashing weights. And the last heavy training session before the Arnold. So I was going to compete on the Friday of the Arnold Classic, and the Friday before was my last heavy training session and I finished my squats, I went to go do bench press and I still remember, like I laid down, I was like, I feel a little tight, that's weird. And it kind of progressively got worse through the day to the point when I woke up the next day, I couldn't move. And I was like, oh my God, I have to pull all this meat. You know, this and that. Once the initial kind of inflammation went down, you know, a few days later I went in, I was like, all right. Basically three days before the meet, I said, I'm going to go in and try to hit my openers and if I can't hit them, then we're just going to call it. And I hit them. I went and did the meet. I actually won.

Just so people know what we're talking about, this was a bodybuilding meet, not a powerlifting meet, Correct?

This was powerlifting.

So this was okay.

Okay, yeah. So I went in and hit. A long story, but I actually ended up tying the world record at that meet due to an error by my coach in terms of attempt selection. No hate towards my coach, everybody makes mistakes. But in any case, I actually did end up winning the meet and squatting £661 at that meet. But then that lower back issue kind of dogged me. It was never as bad as it was the initial time, but I had. So that was the Arnold's. That was in March. I had the World Championships coming up in June. And that injury kind of dogged me on and on through my training and I got to a point where I had to take four weeks off of squatting and deadlifting and I, I got, I started back squatting and deadlifting with four weeks to go for the World Championships. And again, I don't want to belabor too long, but essentially I was missing weights early on in that training, that, that final training cycle that were like £100 less than what I needed to squat at Worlds. But I thankfully again had so many setbacks early in my lifting career that I just kind of convinced myself that, okay, well, we're just going to keep showing up, we're going to see what happens. And ended up going in and hitting a world record on squat and actually got a, got a gold medal in squat, got a silver medal overall and, you know, obviously did really well. And then a couple years after that during training, this was during a very stressful period of my life. And actually they've, they have shown that like stress, lack of sleep, all that plays into your level of pain sensitivity. I hurt my back and had some other things happen. And I mean, that basically got to the point where I couldn't move for a couple days. And that's when I kind of took it. This is in December of 2017. And I took a step, I had to really take a step back. I took pretty much nine months off of any kind of spine loading, probably excessive, probably didn't need to go that long, but then built back up and in 2019, hit a 666 pound squat and a 727 pound deadlift at nationals. So I think a lot of people get injuries, especially like these soft tissue injuries, and they, you know, hear doctors or people that are operating off of pain science from decades ago say, well, just stop lifting or just stop doing whatever athletic thing that you do. I don't think it's a death sentence for most people. I mean, if you look at, especially with regards to back injuries, I mean, if you go MRI, 100 people that are over the age of 35, about half of them will have herniated discs that they don't even realize because they're asymptomatic.

Let me ask you this question. In your case, do you have a sense what it was about the lifts that was specifically causing the pain? So sometimes you can actually identify what the issue is in the individual that is through an axial loading pattern driving the pain. So it could be. One of my favorite examples is right, people who can't generate enough intra abdominal pressure or who, who can't create, you know, who might have too much lordosis in the spine when they're under an axial load, or they can't, they can't generate enough articulation between L1 and T12, right. So they don't have the segmental control within the spine. So they tend to generate disproportionate load at hinge points. Like, were you able to look at yourself and say, okay, well, like, presumably I'm hurting, I'm making this up, right. But I'm saying, presumably I'm hurting myself under the high, you know, when I'm over 500 pounds, I'm not really hurting myself when I'm doing 405 for 10. And this is how my form changes, when I go from doing 405 to 595.

And.

And I think that's what it is that's precipitating this injury. And I'm going to work on not just rehabbing the injury, but modifying the form. I mean, was there. Were you able to do some sort of an analysis like that?

I mean, lumbar flexion definitely was kind of a triggering for the pain. But if we look at, like the biopsychosocial model of pain, it gets really murky because, I mean, they've shown that you can have tissue damage and no pain, and you can have pain with very little tissue damage. So I think part of it was just I had that initial injury to the disc, but then I probably didn't give myself enough time to desensitize myself to that pain and just kept hammering at it. And the research, it's interesting, the research actually shows that one of the best things you can do for low back pain is resistance training. Like, that's actually one of the best things you can do. But if you're doing it with a load that increases that pain, then it's going to make it worse. So I think that what people probably need to take away is that if you're having pain, and again, this isn't my area of expertise, I take this from people I've learned from, but modify the load and see if that reduces your pain. Modify the tempo, modify the range of motion, and then if none of those things, do then try to modify the exercise selection. And my problem was I was so dogged about, I need to do squat, bench press and deadlift. I need to work through this pain, and I made it worse for a period of time now, you know, like to think I'm a little bit wiser in my old age now. I don't just try to work through it. I say, okay, you know, if I'm having a great example is I had some hip pain that I'd been dealing with for about six to seven months. And the way it finally got better was I said, okay, I'm going to stop doing full range of motion, squats, full speed. I'm going to try and take it back to what can I do with kind of a minimal amount of pain, like a two or three out of ten, right. Something that doesn't cause pain, but I can still get some work in. And for me, that was like above parallel pin squats. So basically I'd bring it down nice and slow, pause at the pins and then come up and I started out doing those. And then the next week I'd either increase the load or I would lower the pins. And I did that for probably about six weeks. And then I got to the point where, okay, it's not hurting as much. I'm going to try and do without the pins. Above parallel regular squat with tempo, like three second descent, right. Taking that, that speed away from it. I did that for like three, four weeks. Pain went down and then basically got to the point where I could do a full squat with no pain. And so again, I'm not, you know, I don't have a randomized control group to compare this to. It could be like if I would have just done nothing, I would have gotten the same benefits. Who knows? But I think just because you have pain doesn't mean you can't do something. And I, based on what some of the pain specialists have said, you're probably better off doing something than nothing if you can. Because if you just take time away from training, you end up detraining. So when you come back, you're not as practiced at the lifts and you might end up hurting yourself again. So that's kind of the approach I take, is modifying those variables and seems to be, seems to be working okay. You know, I always tell people like, this stuff's like a puzzle. And I'm still, I've spent the last few years working through some injuries and just trying to figure out, okay, how can I make this puzzle work so that I can compete as an athlete again?

Yeah, I agree with that completely. I think the worst thing one can do under virtually any circumstances completely stop the activity. I find that moving from two legs to one leg becomes a great tool in my toolkit when I'm hurting. So moving to much more split squat, single leg activity, I mean, even something, even if you look at something like a leg press, right? So, you know, you're sort of an inverted doing a leg press. That's an exercise where you can load up stupid amounts of weight. If I'm feeling anything that's not right there, I'll happily go to a single leg where you're going to typically use not half, but a third the weight at a single leg. And all of a sudden those things that were hurting when you were doing it with two legs Kind of stop hurting. In my opinion, you're getting virtually the same benefit, potentially more, because you're evening out any thing that wasn't right there. And I've noticed that, I think I can say without exception, things get better. Again for me. It also requires a very careful examination of what the root problem was. I guess the last question I have for you on this very specific topic, before I get into a whole bunch of other things that we're going to talk about, is the overlap and or detraction between powerlifting and bodybuilding. So you've competed at such a high level in these two sports that have a very clear overlap, but also have a pretty different point of optimization. I mean, bodybuilding is a very subjective sport where it's about how you look and at the end of the day, nobody cares how strong you are when you're standing on that stage. Conversely, powerlifting, which of course requires a lot of strength, nobody really cares how you look. So both of those athletes pay unbelievable attention to how much weight they lift, but they're serving a very different purpose. You're one of the people who has excelled at both. I've met people who are excellent at one or the other, more on the power side, I should say, than the bodybuilding side. So I'm curious as to what some of the trade offs are that you have to make and sort of a hypothetical lane if you. What would be the closest length of time you could have between the two, if you want it to be at your best in each.

Great, great, great question. So I think the overlap is that the obvious one is that to look muscular you have to have a lot of muscle and contractile tissue is what's needed to move weight. Right. So the more there is a little bit of debate about this, but the consensus is, is that hypertrophy does matter for strength training. So the more muscle you have, the more weight you're going to be able to lift. I think that the trade off is that bodybuilding is a much more forgiving sport insofar as you can skin the cat a thousand different ways. If you don't want to squat, you can hack squat. If you don't want to hack squat, you can split squat. It is simply about creating tension on that muscle, getting the requisite volume in progressive overload. Now, people hear progressive overload and they think weight. But progressive overload takes many forms and the major one of which is volume. In particular, volume load, which is basically, for all intents and purposes, number of hard sets, number of sets that approach failure so you can do that many different ways. If you're hurting on a certain exercise, hey, change it up. Try something different. Find something that you can do without pain or find something that you really enjoy. Right. There's a lot of different ways to skin a cat. When it comes to powerlifting. You can do some accessory movements and whatnot, but you still have to do the major lifts. You still have to be very well trained at the major lifts, otherwise you're not going to perform your best on meet day. And so I think that bodybuilding in a way is a little bit more demanding mentally because if people out there listening, if you've never been like insanely shredded, you cannot imagine the levels of hunger and low energy that these people go through and that I have been through. I'm talking about so hungry that you literally think about it from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep and then it wakes you up at night. I'm talking about such low energy that I can remember one time I was like I had finished my training session, I was probably a few weeks out from a show, I was sitting on my couch and the remote control was probably five feet away from me. And there was a terrible show on that I did not want to watch. And I watched the entire thing because I did not feel like getting up to get the remote. And that kind of serves into like metabolic adaptation and reductions in non exercise activity thermogenesis and just give people a.

Sense, lane, of how many calories a day you might be ingesting during that period of your training cycle and for how long that would last.

My last show I did, I competed as a pro natural bodybuilder in 2010. So it's been a while. And I won the IFPA International, the heavyweight division. And then I ended up doing the IFPA World Championships and placed top five in the heavyweight division. And it's difficult because it's like the amount of calories you start on is not going to be what you end up finishing on. I think the lowest my calories got was just around 1900. Now that may not sound that bad, but keep in mind, you know, we're talking about somebody who is probably over 185 pounds of lean body mass, you know, quite a bit of lean body.

Mass and training how many hours per day?

Two hours a day, you know, minimum. So I mean, that was pretty much all I had energy for. You know, I'd go in the gym and train for two hours and that would be all she wrote. You know, and I muster up. I can remember going in and doing a cardio session one night. I got on the elliptical, I started going, and the only way I can describe this is it felt soul sucking. And I went for what I felt like, must have been 40 minutes. And I looked down at the clock and it said three minutes, three minutes. And I just remember thinking, how can I do this? Or even, like, I would stand up and I would get lightheaded because my blood pressure was so low. Bodybuilding is very difficult in that, that, that doesn't leave you, right? Powerlifting is difficult in that it beats your body up. But once you're done at the gym, other than your, like, rehab work and some other stuff, I mean, you can kind of leave it at the gym. So they're really difficult sports, but for, for slightly different reasons. You know, again, bodybuilding is more forgiving in that it doesn't really matter what exercises you do, as long as you get in enough and you can kind of skin that cat multiple different ways. I mean, we've, we've seen bodybuilders be successful through every different methodology. You know, Dorian Yates never squatted. I mean, he talked about it. He only did leg press, right leg press and leg extensions, whereas Ronnie Coleman squatted tons of weight. So I think that the appeal for me, for bodybuilding was that mental challenge, you know, basically, how much could you suffer? And then the appeal in powerlifting was, this is not subjective. I mean, it is a little bit subjective because you can argue squat depth is subjective, you can argue that deadlift lockouts are subjective, right?

But far, far less subjective.

Far less subjective. And I mean, I've had that. You know, the order of the, the competition is you get three attempts on each lift and it goes squat, bench press, deadlift. And it's progressive, meaning if you pick a weight and you miss it, you can't go down, so you can only go up. But I've been in those big meets where it comes down to the very last deadlift. And it's like either you pull it or you don't. And that determines if you win or not. I mean, I've had that experience. It's unbelievable. And so to me, I probably preferred that only because I'm, I'm doing what I trained to do, right? Like in bodybuilding, I'm doing something different than I trained to do. What I needed to do to get to that bodybuilding stage is way different than what I'm going to do on stage. Whereas powerlifting, I'm just doing what I've done right. Like, this is just a showcase. So now to your question. How far apart could you do well in them?

And let me add one more question, which is what order would you pick? You get to pick the order of which you do the two contests and what the minimum space is to optimize both.

So that's going to be so individually dependent, right? Because for me, at my weight class in powerlifting, 93kg or 205lbs, I'm pretty lean at that body weight. So what I would say is that I would probably, if I was going to do this, I would do a meet. I maintain this body weight with some level of effort, but mostly pretty easily. I would do the meet and then I would start prepping for a show.

And how much longer would you need after that meet? How long would it take for you to be stage ready?

It depends on how hard I wanted to push it and what level. If I was wanting to really maximize lean body mass retention, I'd probably want six months, I would say. Because what people don't realize is we look at, like, we look at these diet studies and we see how much lean body mass gets lost versus fat mass. And people don't realize that a lot of this depends on how much body fat you're starting with. And then it changes, the curve changes. So if you're somebody who's overweight or obese, you don't really need to worry about losing too much lean body mass because you have such a reservoir of energy to pull from that your body doesn't really see the need to start pulling from lean body mass. But if you're somebody who's at. I'll use my caliper measurements for all the Internet experts out there, I realize that the numbers I'm going to give you are not the true numbers, but I don't care. It's what I'm referencing. I'm just using it as a reference point. I always have to qualify this when I give body fat numbers. So I can go from 15% body fat to 7% body fat. And it's extremely easy, no problems. I lose very minimal lean body mass from 7% to 5%. Now I'm probably losing 20 to 30% of that weight is lean body mass. When you get down to the, like, shredded area where you're just, where you literally tried to squeeze off that last little bit of body fat, you might be losing just as much lean body mass as you are fat mass. So for me, what, what, what I would do, and I didn't do this years ago because I didn't even. Didn't even know about this tool is I actually implement a lot of what's called diet breaks. So those, those would be periods of eating at maintenance. So basically a level of calories where you're not going to add back fat tissue, but you can eat more than you did previously. So I had pretty good success with this the past year because I dropped 30 pounds. I went up a weight class and powerlifting and then came back down. So basically, I would diet for two or three weeks, pretty aggressively, try to lose like a pound and a half, two pounds each week, and then I would take one or two or three weeks and eat just at a maintenance level of calories, which for me is about 30 to 33, 30, 400. And that worked extremely well for me, extremely well for keeping my strength. And so if I was getting ready for a bodybuilding show, I probably wouldn't use those too much if I was, like, coming down from a higher body fat. But as I approach and as I would be approaching that lower level of body fat, I would be starting to put these in more and more frequently. So that's why I would give myself so much time. Even though I'd only need to drop about maybe 12, 15 pounds from where I'm at right now, I would probably spend more time at maintenance than I did in a deficit. Because when you get to those low levels of body fat, the best way I can describe it is like if you have a wet towel, when you start squeezing, water comes out very easily. This acts almost a perfect example of adipose tissue. Because if you take somebody who's overweight, obese, what do you have? You have a lot of free fatty acids getting released into the bloodstream. You have very, very expanded fat tissue. So when you start, you start wringing that rag out, it comes off very easily. But then when you get down to the ends and you're just trying to get that last little bit of water out, to get the same amount of water out, you have to put in monumental levels of effort compared to what you did at the beginning. So I guess that's kind of the huge qualifier of why I want so much time to be at my best.

I mean, the one thing that you said, Lane, that actually surprised me, and I want to think about this through the lens of some examples because I thought we could use examples of people like, you know, kind of people that hypotheticals are patients of mine. I was surprised that you said going from 15% to 7% body fat could be done without much loss of lean tissue. That is really impressive.

Yeah.

For me, is that just a function of how hard you're training? At the same time, is that just something that you would attribute to your genetics because it's, you know, it's not due to exogenous testosterone, which would obviously be one tool that would enable that kind of lean mass produce retention.

Yeah. So I think the first thing is it probably depends a lot on what your body fat set point is or settling point. So for those who aren't familiar, body fat set point theory is essentially that you kind of have this relatively tight range of homeostatic body fat that your body will defend. And once you start to drop below that range is when you really start to feel the negative effects of caloric restriction in terms of your hunger goes up, your BMR drops, your non exercise activity thermogenesis drops, your libido drops, you start to have those negative side effects. For me, I would say that my again on calipers that the low end of my body fat set point is probably around 7% and the high end is probably around 11.

And how does that correlate with DEXA for you? Do you know how the caliper numbers correlate with DEXA?

Probably about 3% more on a Dexa I would say.

So kind of 10 to 14% is your DEXA sweet spot.

Yeah, something like that.

And in a show, by the way, you're below 4%. Is that what I would infer from.

What you said earlier on calipers? The, the lowest I've calipered it was like just over 2% body fat.

So call it 4 to 5% by.

Dexa, potentially maybe 5 or 6. Yeah, something like that. And again, that's something I don't really, I let the Internet worry about that because at the end of the day it's just about the visual aspect. Right.

Although I would guess, I would guess below that lane because as recently as 10 years ago I was 7.1% on DEXA. I mean repeatedly, like 7.1 to 7.8 by DEXA. And I still remember what I looked like then. Nothing like what a bodybuilder looks like. So I would easily believe that by Dexa a bodybuilder could be 4% possible.

I, I just, I remember. So there was a guy, he's another natural bodybuilder named Alberto Nunez. And if you ever saw pictures of this guy, like, I'm talking like visible vascularity in his glutes. Right. So like that, that level of.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's crazy.

And he was going, he went and got a dexadon. And I remember he was asking people, he's like, what do you think I'm going to be? And people were like, oh, 2%, 3%.

Yeah.

And he was 6, you know, on a DEXA.

So the question is, then I'd have to ask how much of that was visceral versus subcutaneous.

Possible. The other thing is people don't, People need to appreciate is the level of error that's in those measurements. You know, there is an inherent level of error in those measurements.

But yeah, that's counterintuitive for that level of what you describe in terms of vascularity.

Yeah. So who knows? But I think if you are somebody who your body naturally likes to be at a little bit of a higher body fat percentage, you may see some lean body mass loss at a similar body fat to what I am able to retain more at. Right. So now this is me just completely speculating because there's so little data on this because studies are just so restrictive in terms of what you can actually measure. And I think that this is, this is another point that people don't fully appreciate is that, you know, scientific studies are really big, blunt instruments. You are really, if you're doing a scientific study, you're only supposed to modify a couple of variables if that, because otherwise you just have no idea if what you're observing is due to the variables that you want to test. Otherwise you might as well just go to observational data. And so they're just. When it comes to this kind of stuff, there's so little data out there. And so this kind of is pulling from my opinions based on some randomized control trials I've seen, some case studies I've seen and some mechanistic data, some animal data, you know, and I'm, I always like to tell people when I'm, when I'm kind of going out on a limb because I don't want to state it as fact if I, if I'm not sure if it's fact. But I would say that the differences we see and how much people can retain with lean body mass, I think part of it's due to what their natural body fat set point level is, because as we exit that lower end of our body fat set point, if the body likes to keep a certain level of body fat, then it makes sense that it might start pulling a little bit more energy from lean tissue compared to fat tissue. If it's Starting to defend that body fat. Now there are quite a few things we could do to overcome this, like resistance training. Right. Like that's a big one. And I think some of the decrements we see in lean body mass with dieting is one, a lot of these studies don't do resistance training or when people are dieting and they're starting to feel worse because they're lower energy, their training volume drops, their training intensity drops. And that's probably part of it. And I think the other thing is too, like I will say going from like 15% to 7 on calipers, I did lose some lean body mass mass, but you know, my relative strength didn't really change. So what's likely is, you know, a lot of people don't realize lean body mass is not the same thing as muscle mass. Lean body mass is all non fat tissues. That's skin, bone, organ weight, all that stuff. And including your body water and a lot of, I think what we see with lean body mass loss is water, gut tissue, liver, those tissues shrink in response to caloric restriction.

Yeah, I think most people don't appreciate the glycogen, the amount of glycogen you can lose and how much water tracks with glycogen. So you lose, let's say you lose half your glycogen volume. You take the mass of that, multiply it by three to four, that's the total mass that's lost given the water as well. Not to mention the plasma loss that comes with plasma contraction.

Yeah, I mean we see that like in ketogenic diet studies, like Kevin hall study, you know, there was a loss of lean body mass. But even I, you know me, I'm very critical of zealots and nutrition. And so when I've criticized, you know, ketogenic diet stuff, I've even still said, you know, in this Kevin hall study, well, that's most of that is probably water because if, like you said, if you lose glycogen, you're losing quite a bit of water with that.

No. I wonder if you would agree with an observation that I have found for which I haven't found data to support. But truthfully, I haven't been on a, on a huge hunt for it, but it's been very empirical for me. So I've gone through various different phases of fasting where I'm doing it for different purposes. Right. So I'm not doing it for body composition or anything other than ramping up autophagy. So basically kind of periodic fasting for health Benefits. And the thing that I've noticed is and let's just use, I would typically do like a seven day, five to seven day water only fast, fast each quarter. And what I noticed was provided I did resistance training every single day during that fast. So I dramatically changed my training because I would normally be alternating between cardio and resistance. But if on those fasting days the only thing I did was resistance training and specifically I focused on the biggest lifts possible. So deadlift is my favorite lift. So I would even deadlift every other day and mostly just focus on the biggest muscles. I had to go a lot slower, so I had to take. I needed much more rest between sets, but I could actually still move the exact same amount of weight. So I didn't get any weaker. It seemed to minimize the loss of lean mass, certainly muscle. I shouldn't say that I lost water weight, but I did not appear to lose muscle mass. My thinking was that, that I was at least counter balancing the effect of MTOR reduction that was coming through the nutrient pathway through a different stimulus. Does that. And again, we're going to talk a lot about mtor because of course your work in leucine ties right into my interest around nutrient sensing. Does my observation fit with your observations and your experiences?

I always try to put things in context. Right. So I think if you're looking at losing actual contractile tissue once you've built it, what it takes to maintain muscle tissue is very minimal compared to what it takes to actually build it. So it does not necessarily surprise me, especially because this gets into kind of like power of suggestion, placebo, your own personal feelings about stuff because you view fasting as such a positive that you wouldn't have a reduction in strength because you probably really haven't lost contractile tissue in that period of time. Now if I take somebody now, it's important to point out that you are, I would say a well trained person, but not somebody who pushes the. Like your goal isn't to push the upper limit of hypertrophy. Would I be correct in that?

Absolutely. Nor strength for that matter. Yep.

Right. So. And this is where some of the misinterpretations come from. What I say to people. So I had this the other day, I'll say, okay, do I think that somebody could build strength, maintain it, doing that sort of thing. Absolutely. A lot of that just comes down to boils down to being really consistent with your resistance training. If somebody says to me, I want to be the most muscular, strongest human I possibly can be, do I think that that is still the best thing that they could do. No, I do not. But again, it's important to qualify both those things because I realized that one audience, even though I have more of that audience, is a very small, specific subsection of the actual number of people. But when I say that, what people hear is Lane says, you can't get strong fasting. And I have to always say, no, no, that's not what I'm saying. You absolutely can do. I think that you could get as big and strong doing that as someone who is, you know, consuming nutrients regularly. I don't think so. But we probably will never get a randomized control, lifelong randomized control trial on that. So I can't say for certain.

Well, actually, I agree with you on that. And in fact, when we turned into the new year, this year, you know, I went and got a DEXA scan and looked at myself in January of this year, and I was like, God, I'm kind of amazed over the last decade how much muscle mass I've lost. So I am. On January 4th of this year, I weighed the exact same amount that I weighed 10 years ago in May of 2011. So for all intents and purposes, over a decade, my body weight was unchanged. I'm embarrassed to tell you how much my body fat went up, right? It went from about 7% to 16% over a decade. So you can do the math, right? Like, it's pretty straightforward. I got fatter, I lost muscle. Now I'm not going to beat myself up too much. A lot has happened in a decade, right? I used to train four and a half to five hours a day. I now train maybe 90 minutes per day. I have very different priorities. My goals are totally different. But, you know, I talked about it with Beth Lewis, who I work with, and I was like, look. And she was like, look, we got to get some more muscle on you, dude. It's kind of getting pathetic. So her first thing was no more fasting for a while, right? That was basically her first suggestion, which is like, we got to take a break from the monthly fasting because that's probably not helping your lean tissue. And if we want that to be a goal, which is, is there any reason we shouldn't be able to put five pounds of muscle on you in the next year? Her view is, I think we can do this, but you can't be fasting every month for three to five days. So I think that's completely in line with what you're saying, which is an optimization issue. And I've heard you talk about this with respect to plant versus animal protein and it gets always taken out of context.

Yeah, I just had this discussion the other day.

Yeah, it gets so, so again, what, I'll let you state the argument again because you'll, you'll probably do a better job stating your own words than I will stating your words for you.

Yeah, so I, I kind of had this discussion with somebody who, you know, was saying, well, if you look at the randomized control trials, plant versus animal, it just doesn't make a difference if total protein is equated. And what I've said to people is, okay, I understand that randomized control trials are the gold standard if we are looking at resistance trained individuals. Eight weeks in terms of looking at actual muscle mass is such a short period of time. Okay, now I understand my bias is I did work in leucine, I was funded by the Egg and Dairy Councils, all that kind of stuff. So I'm sure the, any conspiracy theorists out there will have a field day. But I would never tell somebody you can't build muscle with plant protein. Of course you can. Just go look at those plant based bodybuilders you can look at who have extremely impressive physique. So obviously you can do it. Right now, can you build just as much muscle with plant protein? I think you can. However, it's probably going to require more planning on your part and just a little bit more attention to detail because of the factors of limiting amino acids, low leucine content, those sorts of things. Do I think all things being equal, animal protein is probably a superior form of protein? I do. That being said, that is a small sliver of what actually contributes to hypertrophy. Consistent resistance training and progressive overload is by far the most dominant factor. But we, we can barely oftentimes not even pick out differences. We know volume is important. We know volume, weekly set number is important. We can't even pick out differences in hypertrophy sometimes with different volume protocols. What makes you think we're going to pick out differences in actual hypertrophy in eight weeks from protein sources where calories and total protein are equated? And so what I've said is I think the studies are probably a little bit underpowered and shorter on time to actually show the differences we want to show. Now that being said, I'm not saying they're bad studies, I'm just saying this is a limitation, that's all.

Yeah, so I actually, I was going to say that a second ago, but I didn't want to Interrupt you when you were talking about the limitations of these, some of these RCTs. And I was going to add the limitation you just mentioned, which is it's hard enough to, to control the variables. But the other thing is the tighter you put the grip on controlling the variables, by definition in a real world, the shorter the study must become. So you look at Kevin Hall's studies. Well, Kevin is doing studies at the highest level that they can be done. So these are patients that are inpatients. And I know this very well. I'm very close friends with Kevin. I have a very clear understanding of how the ward runs, both his ward at NIH and also several others around the country. I've even spent time inside the metabolic chambers personally to experience this. And yeah, we're talking about the highest level of precision inside a chamber that does indirect calorimetry. The reality of it is you can't put somebody in this situation for a year. And so when it comes to going back to excellent exercise, if we think that the difference in a person over six months might be two to three pounds of muscle mass under perfect conditions, it's going to be very difficult to tease that out in eight weeks. The other thing I would say, going back to protein that I've always struggled with, and I want to actually get your opinion on this, because this is something that I want to know how much this matters, both personally and also professionally for my patients, is I have to suspect, at least when it comes to leucine, timing must matter. And I'll. In a moment I'll come back to why I've been curious about this. Just based on what we now understand about how Leucine and Cestrin 2 work in triggering MTORC 1. So there becomes this whole other variable, which is when we talk about plant versus animal, does it matter where in relation to training we're taking that, does it matter? Meal timing, specifically training timing and all of those other things. So let's actually maybe use this as an opportunity to now talk about kind of your work in graduate school and what it's taught you about muscle protein synthesis and the importance of leucine. Because I think even the most casual observer of bro science has heard of a branch chain amino acid. And you know, if you click one level below a branch chain amino acid, you'll know that there are three of them and one of them happens to be called Lucy leucine. And people, I think would gather that somehow taking those things is good for muscle. But my guess is that's about the level at which most people stop understanding it. So let's talk about what is muscle protein synthesis? What is the role of leucine? And, and I also want to even dive deeper into that, which is how does the body preserve leucine? What do leucine levels look like during the course of a day in response to a meal, a fast, etc.

Muscle protein synthesis is basically what it sounds like. It is the, the synthesis of muscle proteins from amino acid substrates. And you can separate it in terms of, like, what you look at in research. You can, you can do what's called mixed muscle protein synthesis, which is what we did, which is where you're literally taking the entirety of a muscle and you're grinding it up and you're homogenizing it and then you're, you're basically using. In the studies, we use stable isotopes to assess this. We use D5 phenylalanine, which is basically a deuterated. One of the hydrogens on the phenylalanine is deuterated. Basically, you're looking at how much of that label gets incorporated into the mixed muscle versus how much is in the precursor pool, which is the intracellular fluid. And that rate divided by a time factor will tell you what the rate of muscle protein synthesis is. And on a kind of a more broad level, protein synthesis starts in your DNA because your DNA codes for those proteins that are going to be synthesized. So, for example, let's say you go and you would do a resistance training session. We know that in response to resistance training, you have an increase in muscle protein synthesis. That resistance training is triggering something. It's probably a cascade of things that are telling your DNA we need to adapt to this stressor. So we are going to increase the transcription of these, you know, specific DNA sequences to the messenger. And I'm really, really abbreviating this because you can get the introns, extrons, MRNA degradation, all this kind of stuff, but it gets transcribed to an MRNA sequence which is then read by a ribosome. And that ribosome based on the MRNA is going to bring amino acids in and hook them together to build these new proteins. So in the case of, you know, let's say you go and you, you do resistance training, you know, myosin, actin, these contractile proteins, you're going to need those as part of your adaptation to that stressor. And so those are going to be some of the things that are going to be built during muscle protein synthesis. Now, my work specifically was in animals and I'll tell you why, and you kind of alluded to it earlier. So we actually, I have a research review that's going to be coming out my website. One of the things I'm very proud of is we have a 50 page guide on how to read research and we have a VIN diagram in there. And, and in the Venn diagram we have highly controlled, high subject number, long duration. And what you find is the only way you can get all those to overlap is if you do animal studies. So if you want, if you want tightly controlled and a high subject number, it's going to be really short in humans. If you want long duration and tightly controlled, it's going to be very few subjects. If you want, you know, and you can kind of get the gist of it. So for I decided I wanted to do animals because I was more kind of interested in finding out the mechanisms of this stuff. And so one of the reasons I liked using rats was one, they're a good model for human protein metabolism. A lot of the stuff in rats has then been validated in humans. There are some differences. But I can teach a rat to meal feed, meaning they eat discreet meals. I can get them to eat what I want them to eat and then I can measure what I want to measure and I can poke and prod them and do all that kind of stuff, as long as it's okay with the iacuc, which is basically the IRB for, for animals. And so what, what we were interested in was what you kind of talked about, like, how important is leucine? Because at that time, the, you know, the mid-2000s, there had been quite a bit of work done by my advisor, Dr. Don Layman, as well as the Penn State group, which was Leonard Jefferson and Scott Kimball looking at, okay, we know if we give purified solutions of leucine, they increase MTOR activity and we see an increase in muscle protein synthesis. But one, what does that mean for complete meals where you have protein, carbohydrate and fat? What does it mean in the context of different protein sources? And then what does actually even matter for tissue weights, right? Like do you actually, actually see differences in actual tissue? And so some of those work we did was one, we looked at the duration of muscle protein synthesis in response to a complete meal. And that was really interesting. Actually. That was one of the things I was dead wrong about what I thought I was going to see versus what I actually saw. And so we saw like, even with whey, so whey protein, which is thought of as A fast protein. Basically, we saw an increase in muscle protein synthesis that peaked at 90 minutes post meal and then by 180 minutes or 3 hours had gone back down to baseline, which has since been validated in humans. That that's about what we see in humans as well.

Now Lane, let me just ask you a question there for a sec before you go further. Do we have a sense of after the training stimulus ends, how long that transcriptional stress is in place place to continue muscle protein synthesis provided enough substrate is available? In other words, when do we become substrate limited?

So this is really interesting because it's so hard to assess. So part of the reason that this stuff is so hard to measure is in humans you basically have to have a steady state in order to measure muscle protein synthesis because there's certain assumptions you have to make about the isotope that you're using to assess it, the precursor pool and the actual protein bound label. And so that requires what we call a nutritional study state. So if you want to assess like muscle protein synthesis in response to exercise.

Yeah, but let's say you could give somebody an intravenous infusion of all amino acids. So I guess there'd be two questions, right? We start with one question which says we don't care which amino acid is, but we'll give you enough of all of them so that you're not going to be limited by a given amino acid. And then we're just going to give you an IV infusion. So the second you finish the highest stress workout, we just keep running it out and then we're tracking over time muscle protein synthesis. That would be one experiment that would be interesting. And then the second one would be playing with which amino acids are the most important there. Does that kind of make sense?

So we kind of have a pretty good idea of like the time course of muscle protein synthesis in response to an exercise bout when it comes to mixed muscle protein synthesis. Okay, so I'm going to make a very important caveat here in a second. So the peak so that the change percentage is about it increases. It's different from study to study, but about 100 to 150% increase in muscle protein synthesis. That peak is about the same for trained versus untrained, but the untrained duration lasts much longer. So it's still not back to baseline in studies by 48. Well, some studies it's back to baseline at 48 hours. In other studies there's still a statistical difference at 48 hours. So we think basically in untrained people it's about 48 to 72 hours response. The interesting thing is in trained people, that initial robust response comes back down about 10 to 12 hours, and at 24 hours is basically not different from baseline. Now, that's for mixed muscle protein synthesis. Now, here's the rub for myofibrillar protein synthesis, because you can separate that out during your analysis. So we're talking about actual contractile muscle proteins because mixed muscle protein synthesis included includes all cytoplasmic proteins, mitochondrial proteins, all these sorts of things. The myofibrillar protein synthesis, they actually don't know how long it lasts because they've only assessed it up to 16 hours post. And so far neither group has returned to baseline, although they have assessed the area under the curve and it's. It's greater area under the curve for untrained versus trained. Now, the rub on that is, if we look at. I know you're asking about nutrient availability, and I promise I'm going to talk about that.

No, no, yeah, we'll keep going with this point though.

The rub on that is none of these are addressing the other side of protein balance, which is protein degradation. Now, what's really interesting is, is during the first approximately six weeks of resistance training, you don't see much hypertrophy in people who are training. You see strength improvements, but you don't really see hypertrophy. And what's really interesting is in the initial phases of training, you have an increase, a robust increase in muscle protein synthesis, but you also have a very robust increase in protein degradation. And so the thought process is, because this is such a big stressor, a massive stressor, if you've never resisted training before, I mean, everybody knows, like the first time they went and did a leg workout, you couldn't walk for like a, you know, a few days after that, it's almost like your muscles doing a complete overhaul of those proteins. And so you have such a robust degratory response because there are so many damaged proteins or proteins that need to be, I guess, improved that it's almost like you're, you're doing this protein turnover, fetal cycle kind of remodeling. And then what we see is at the end of six weeks, that increase in degradation goes way down. And that's actually, I mean, again, I can't say for certain, but that coincides with when we start seeing the big improvements in hypertrophy.

So, Lane, all things equal, if a person is consuming roughly the same amount of protein during that phase and they're training volume and intensity Is roughly the same. Is it safe to say during that first period you described, they are going to be in a negative nitrogen balance versus a neutral, potentially nitrogen balance? Like, if you were evaluating them with a nitrogen cart, like, how are you. Would that show up as nitrogen excretion in that first phase, or are they recycling it?

Probably not. It's probably going to be pretty. They're probably going to be nitrogen positive a little bit. But here's where this stuff gets so, so complicated, because we know that in muscle protein synthesis, about seven out of every eight amino acids used to create a new protein are recycled from degraded proteins. So when we look at, okay, exogenous amino acids or exogenous dietary protein, and we think about as muscle building, building, I think most people think about, okay, I'm eating this protein and this is going to get incorporated into my tissue, and that's what's going to make me big and strong. It's a lot more complicated than that. If you look at somebody who added 50 pounds of muscle tissue in a year, all right, that's a ton of muscle. Even for somebody on steroids, I think we can agree that's a ton of muscle. When you account for the fact that muscle tissue is about 70% water and about 50, 30% protein, you're basically looking at about 10 grams of amino acids deposited in muscle per day. It's very underwhelming. Oh, I'm sorry, sorry. That'd be for about 25 pounds of muscle a year, I think. Still extremely impressive.

Sure. But there are two different points there that I want to get at. The first point is the one you're making, which is no matter how much muscle mass you put on, it's never going to be impressive relative to the amount of amino acids you took in. There's a second point you're making which I find even more, more interesting potentially, which is the actual fate of the ingested amino acid and how much is being recycled versus not so the analog here. But you're going to love this, Lane. I didn't even think this would come up, and I know you're going to love it. You want to know my favorite thing that drives me nuts about people when they just rave about a ketogenic diet is the differentiation between re esterification, lipolysis and fat oxidation. So here's the example, right? If you're on a ketogenic diet and you're mainlining fat, you can very easily gain weight, because if you're ingesting so much fat that it exceeds your ability to oxidize fat regardless of where that fat source is being oxidized. Meaning endogenous versus exogenous. It doesn't really matter. And in fact, a ketogenic diet can still produce a ton of fat oxidation without oxidizing the endogenous source that you want to oxidize in the first place. And by the way, a lot of the triglyceride contained within the adipocyte gets recycled, so it can be liberated as free fatty acid and then be re esterified with glycerol back into it. So actually it becomes kind of a nice analogy here. I just don't think I knew it was true on the amino acid side as well.

Yeah, so you're, you're making an analogy that is. I don't know if I've ever used it before, but it's bang on. I mean, there's differences, of course, but I think a lot of this boils down to. People think of metabolism as like on and off switches, and it's like, that's think about like dimmer switches. People think like, when you're losing fat, that means that fat burning is ramped up and, you know, fat storage is all the way down at zero. No, you are always burning and storing fat simultaneously. Same thing. You are always synthesizing protein and degrading it at the same time. Now it's the relative rates of each that are going to determine if you deposit versus lose fat or protein.

So let me then bring it back to that analogy, because I just did a podcast on this with Bob Kaplan recently, and we talked about it in terms of fat flux. So we talked about three states. A person who is in neutral fat flux. So they are neither gaining nor losing fat tissue, negative fat flux and positive flat flux. So you're either gaining fat mass, losing fat mass, or maintaining the same. And we talked about it through the lens of de novo lipogenesis, re esterification, lipolysis. No, none of that says anything about oxidation that's happening outside and that can feed into substrate pools. What we then talked about was how many hormones are regulating these different steps. So what happens when insulin goes up and down? What happens when epinephrine goes up and down, when norepinephrine goes up and down, when hormone sensitive lipase goes up and down, when cortisol goes up and down, Testosterone, lipoprotein lipase, et cetera. So in other words, these are all regulated hormonally, some of them outside the cell. So insulin obviously is acting outside the cell, LPL is outside the cell, hsl, inside the cell, et cetera. Tell me about the hormonal regulation on the same unit of muscle. The most obvious difference, of course, is that testosterone works inside the cell. Right. So let's start with testosterone, but then I want to talk about all of the hormones that impact this. Specifically, I want to make sure we at least touch on cortisol and estradiol at some point. But let's start with testosterone because it plays such an important role in that transcriptive drive. Yeah.

So I think the one thing I want to say before we. Before we start on this is keep in mind that when we're talking about all these hormones, and this goes for fat tissue or muscle tissue, what you are seeing on the surface in terms of the actual outcome is the result of the summation of all of those signals. Right? So people get hung up on, say, insulin, or they get hung up on leucine, or they get hung up on, you know, one particular thing, and then they get confused when they see a paradoxical outcome. Right. So a great example of that is Kevin Hall's study on fat loss, looking at where they showed that insulin was 26% higher, but those people actually ended up losing like an, I would call it a non significant greater amount of actual fat mass than people who are on a ketogenic diet. People say, well, how can that be true? Right? And it's like, okay, well, you got to remember that insulin is just one input. It's not the only input. And the same thing goes for building muscle and muscle tissue. So with regards to testosterone, what's interesting about testosterone is I actually reviewed a study recently where.

Yeah, the study by Stu Phillips that looked at androgen receptor density.

Yeah.

So that's which, by the way, I still don't understand something which I'm hoping you can explain. Why would androgen receptor density be higher in someone getting exogenous testosterone? You would think that someone taking exogenous testosterone would have a paradoxically negative response and that they would downregulate androgen receptors. I'll let you maybe go back and explain it from the beginning because the listener might not be familiar with the thesis of the work.

Yeah. So essentially, you know, when you have. When testosterone gets into the cell, it's converted and then that end product binds with the androgen receptor and then it can attach to the DNA, increasing transcription of different proteins. So basically, you're ramping up your capacity for, amongst other things, increasing muscle proteins. That's different than how leucine acts nutritionally because Leucine is a signal also that happens inside the cell, but it's more of a short term signal. Now to answer your question specifically, what I've seen proposed is that when you have enough testosterone available, what tends to happen is the androgen receptors upregulate to meet the demand for metabolizing that testosterone and that the regulation of the excess testosterone, think about the negative feedback loop functions more so on like luteinizing hormone and the gonads and that sort of thing, right? Yeah, if I had to hazard a guess, that would be my guess that the regulation in terms of trying to tamp that down, because think about if you're not getting exogenous testosterone, if you're not getting exogenous testosterone, then there's probably not that same negative feedback regulation loop. And so I always hate it when people go, well it makes sense because there's tons of stuff in metabolism we say, well it makes sense and then it ends up not working out in the study. But to me it would make sense that the muscle might increase its androgen receptor density to meet that testosterone load or that free testosterone load, so long as you're not having so much testosterone that's not negatively feeding back to the gonads and limited reducing luteinizing hormone or increase increasing aromatization, those sorts of things. And I will straight up say I am not a testosterone expert, so I could be getting this stuff dead wrong. But I think more to the point of Stu Phillips work is that muscle growth appears to be mostly intrinsically regulated. And I think in the late 90s, early 2000s, what people were really focused on was systemic, what they thought was systemic regulation of muscle growth. Right. Your, your systemic levels of testosterone, IGF1 and even like the acute responses, like we know, for example resistance exercise will increase testosterone, you know, for 30 or 60 minutes. And it used to be thought, well, that is what's, that is what's driving these responses of hypertrophy. And through a few elegantly designed studies, a lot of them by Stu Phillips, we know that that's probably not the case, that this is probably an effect of tension. Now what's interesting about muscle growth is if we're going to have that tension that's driving muscle growth, there has to be a translation of that tension, contractile force into a chemical signal. So we call that mechanotransduction. And so this is where I know you, we had talked about it a little bit earlier. Mechano growth factor probably comes in. So IGF1, systemic IGF1 and growth hormone are not anabolic to skeletal muscle. People don't realize this.

Let's pause here because this is, I want to make sure people understand what we're talking about. And this is such an important topic, I don't want to rush it. So let's, let's go back to the beginning and assume that the listener here doesn't fully understand where growth hormone comes from. Right. And where it, what it does in the liver, what IGF does. So let's go back and explain the endocrine versus. Well, we'll get to the endocrine versus autocrine function of igf, but just back up two steps with where you are, Lane.

So we know that like growth hormone increases in response to certain things like fasting, resistance training, exercise in general, sleep, potentially. Sure, sure. All those things. And people kind of looked at that as, okay, well, we should be aiming to increase growth hormone for these things. And we know that growth hormone increases the liver production of IGF1. And IGF1 has always been thought of as kind of like the master hormone that is increasing muscle mass. When they look at studies even where they give exogenous growth hormone, what you see is you see an increase in lean body mass, but not an increase in skeletal muscle mass. So the increase in lean body mass is completely accounted for by an increase in body water and connective tissue. So now you can argue there might be some benefits to connective tissue and that sort of thing.

And I would argue organ weight as well. Right. I mean, we see liver hypertrophy and other other things like that as well.

So when it comes to growth hormone, I actually had an article about this years ago on my site about how growth hormone wasn't anabolic. And I got a lot of bodybuilding dogma. People getting really upset about that because they don't understand, and this is pervasive even among scientists, people who don't understand the concept of a localized response versus a systemic response, or people who don't understand an acute response versus a chronic response.

We're going to talk about this with respect to cortisol as well and MTOR signaling, I'm sure.

So growth hormone not anabolic to skeletal muscle. And the growth hormone response to exercise appears to be mostly substrate driven, that it's that growth hormone probably increases as a response to exercise to increase lipolysis to liberate free fatty acids for use as an energy substrate. Now here's where people get confused. The Autocrine IGF1 that is released by the muscle tissue itself in Response to mechanical tension is very anabolic.

Let me just explain for a moment to people the difference between endocrine, paracrine and autocrine. So the endocrine function of something is when a hormone gets released and its effect is all throughout the body. So insulin is a great example. Right. So the pancreas, the beta cell, releases insulin. Insulin goes and acts on ulcerative of cells in the body. Paracrine is when something, when a hormone gets released and it only impacts the cells right next to it. And autocrine is on itself, as you would guess. Now going back to what you said earlier, the one way we explain this to patients is IGF one is the integral of growth hormone. So if you want to get a sense of how much growth hormone is floating around to a first order approximation, you get a sense of how much IGF somebody has. You get a sense of how much IGF is being produced by the liver. And to your point, that's all systemic or what we would really think of as an endocrine igf. Now what you're about to talk about is something that, you know, frankly never really gets talked about.

Yeah. So IGF1, autocrine or paracrine. IGF1 that gets released by the muscle tissue itself is also called mechano growth factor. And that is very anabolic to muscle tissue. But again, it's a very localized intrinsic response. And it makes sense from, to me again, here we go. It makes sense from a teleological perspective. If you place a stress on a particular muscle tissue like your, your legs, it does not make sense to me that your arms will grow because you may not need your arms. Like if you're, if you're, I don't know, if you're a tribe and you're having to climb something in the, whatever, you know, you're using your legs much more than your arms. Muscle tissue is an energetically expensive tissue. To maintain it takes more energy, more ATP, more calories. It is a futile cycle, meaning that to maintain it you actually have to increase synthesis and, and break down because you're having more proteins that are misfolded and whatnot that need to be broken down. That whole thing takes more energy. And so that's why we tell people, if you want to be able to eat more calories, hey, build some more muscle. Because to maintain that takes more. So it does not make sense from a evolutionary perspective, because evolution doesn't care if you're jacked. It cares if you can live long enough to pass on your genetic material. It does not make sense that you would build a different tissue in response to a localized effect of training. We see that, we see that if you train your legs, your arms don't get bigger. We know that. And if you train one leg, the other one doesn't get bigger. Right. In fact, some of the best resistance training studies are where they use unilateral training and the person's non trained leg serves as the own individual's control because you're accounting for genetic variations by doing that. So. Yeah. And then we have another probably component of mechanotransduction is probably phosphatidic acid. So phosphatidic acid is stored in the Z disc of the skeletal muscle, which if you look at a. All right, let's back up.

Yeah, let's remind people how actin myosin work and then where the Z disc fits in. Because I, I forgot you and I got so into the weeds, I, I, it was my bad. I should have reminded us that we should go back.

And that's good. It's fun for me. So the contractile unit of a muscle tissue is what's called a sarcomere. And if you look at a sarcomere, you kind of have these two ends which are called Z discs. And in between you have actin and myosin which overlap. And then for lack of a better term, when you contract, it's basically actin and myosin hooked together and pulling. Okay, now I'm again, I'm really generalizing and I'm sure there's an exercise physiologist out there who's going to throw up their lunch hearing me describe it that way. But for all I feel, that's a reasonable comparison. Now, each sarcomere is separated by the Z disc. Okay. The Z disc is where something called phosphatidic acid is stored. And if you were going to try to transfer a mechanical signal to a chemical signal, it makes sense that you would store this stuff in the Z disk because that is where a lot of that mechanical tension is going to be felt. So in response to that mechanical tension, again, based on mechanistic studies, we believe what happens is that causes phosphatidic acid to be released. And phosphatidic acid is a stimulator of mtor. So we think again that these two things are some of the more major regulators of mechanotransduction in terms of how muscle actually gets built. And then of course, you know, we have other regulators. Testosterone doesn't really regulate mtor, that I'm aware of it, you know, works more on the transcriptional level. We have things like insulin affects mtor, although it doesn't seem to be a powerful enough signal to actually impact muscle building it. If insulin has an effect, it's probably more so on the protein breakdown side of things. If you look at studies looking at carbohydrate ingestion, we don't really see increases in muscle protein synthesis. So if you just give pure carbohydrate, even up to like 100 grams of glucose, even though you get a pretty good rise in insulin, it doesn't seem to affect muscle protein synthesis, but it does seem to inhibit protein degradation. In fact, there was a study in resistance training, I think, out of Bob Wolf's Lab in like 2004, and they did what's called AV balance. So arterial venous balance is where basically you're infusing a stable isotope and you're looking at essentially how much of that label is going into the muscle and then how much is coming out. Right. And so you can determine the net balance. And if you take a biopsy as well, you can determine the fractional rate of protein synthesis and then by basically subtraction can determine what breakdown is. So what they saw was when they gave a large amount of carbohydrate to people who had resistance trained, they went from having an increase in muscle protein breakdown to basically back to baseline, and muscle protein breakdown and synthesis didn't change.

Now, Lane, if you did that in combination with protein, would that be a better strategy to hit it at both ends where you would reduce degradation and increase synthesis? And is that an argument for combining carbohydrate and protein after a resistance training as opposed to just protein?

So here's where it gets very complicated, because there probably is some degradation that is needed in order to remodel and actually make things better. However, really, we need to go to kind of the hard outcome studies. So there's only really two studies I know of that examined like a protein and calorie equated low carbohydrate diet versus a protein calorie equated non low carbohydrate diet. And it was, it was ketogenic. So they measured blood ketones and saw, they went up and this was, I think, 12 weeks. Vargas was the author. And they did see less lean body mass accrual in the ketogenic diet group. Now, they still increased lean body mass. That's important to note. But the group that was getting carbohydrate or more carbohydrates had more lean body mass. Now the caveat to that is carbohydrates have make you store glycogen. So was it just water or was it contractile tissue? Now in the second study they did see a difference in like 1 rep max squat and I think bench press as well. So that kind of suggests that perhaps there is something different in terms of actual contractile tissue. But this is an area that's going to need to be studied a lot more. And again, I don't want anybody to straw man what I'm saying. I'm not saying you can't build muscle on a ketogenic diet. You absolutely can. You can probably build a really good amount of muscle. But can you build as much as if you're including carbohydrate? Possibly not. And it may have something to do with carbohydrates effect or it may insulin's effect on blunting muscle protein breakdown.

The other thing I, I'll add to that again based on my experience and, and you've probably talked about this with Dom, is I think one of the challenges of studying ketogenic diets is the length of time it takes to adapt to them. I went on a ketogenic diet in May of 2011 as an experiment and I was committed to doing it for 12 weeks. And I mean five weeks in I had, I was so miserable. My wife was like, what are you doing and why? And you know, all the standard mistakes I was making and the first being I made no reduction in training volume and I was already training at the level of a maniac, right. So I mean ridiculous training volume and I made zero reduction in it and I was, I mean just staggeringly and upsettingly miserable. And at 12 weeks I finally crested the first hill which was the aerobic hill. So at the time it was cycling and swimming were the two sports. And I, at 12 weeks I just got to the point where I could get my aerobic base back to where it was 12 weeks earlier. But anaerobically I was nowhere near what I was 12 weeks earlier. I won't put you on the spot and make you guess, but if I were going to make you guess, how long do you. Well, first of all I decided to stay with the diet diet because I became so interested in the physiology of it and I wanted to see like what is it going to take to return back to my previous level of anaerobic fitness. It took 18 months and I want to be clear, this is 18 months without one day of deviation, I would end up staying on this diet for three years. With one day of deviation, my wife's birthday, I ended up having a bunch of cake. But for three years to stay on this one, you know, incredibly restrictive diet, it took half of that period of time just to get back to where I was anaerobically. So it speaks to how difficult I think it is to study any of this stuff. And by the way, was I perfectly controlling my exercise during that period of time? No. It's quite possible that some of those changes had to do with other variables. So I don't know. I. Sometimes I just think this. This stuff is so complicated. We should. We should focus on the biggest picture questions and try to get at them. But then there's times when we get into discussions like this, and I'm like, no, these details are the most interesting part of this, right? Especially on this side of the equation, because this is. This is an area I know so little about. That's why I was very excited to discuss it with you for the majority.

Of the audience, I think that. And that's why I try to provide so much context when I talk about this stuff. And I. I don't talk about the ketogenic diet study and also not say, hey, you can still build muscle on it, right? Because I don't want people to take away Lane said, you can't build muscle on a ketogenic diet. And then they go out and they see somebody who built a bunch of muscle and they go, okay, well, this doesn't make sense, right? So I think that's why the nuance is very important. Like you said, we're in the details, right? Because that's what's interesting to us because we kind of hopefully know some of the, like, the major things.

It's the same as testosterone, right? You could say the same thing. You'd be like, do you need to take exogenous testosterone to be a bodybuilder? Nope. Look at all the examples. But if your goal is to be the biggest, the strongest, I have news for you. Go and get yourself some testosterone sipionate and get ready to start smacking a thousand milligrams every single week. I mean, that's the reality of it, you know, so. And again, that that's spoken without prejudice. It's simply biochemistry.

And an anecdote plays into this. An anecdote is important, and I'm about to discuss yours a little bit. But I always tell people, like, be. Just be. Be cautious with anecdote. I'M not saying that your anecdote doesn't matter, but what I am saying is everyone knows somebody who smoked every single day of their life till they were 90. Right. And lived to a ripe old age. Does that mean that it's okay to smoke? Or do we think that's the best thing for longevity? We certainly do not. Right. So when we're, when we're making broad recommendations, we're doing that based on the consensus of the evidence. But we, we also need to understand that there will be outliers that fall outside that and that's where, you know, individualization comes in. So I think one of the things that we really are struggling with right now, and I kind of challenged the low carb community on this a while back because one of my pet peeves is I'm not saying that there's not such a thing as ketogenic adaptation or fat adaptation that may take longer. What I'm saying is we need a hard metric for it. We really need some kind of hard metric to explain this because if we look at things like, okay, let's look at blood ketones.

Yeah, it's clearly not blood ketones, it's not lipolysis.

Right. Because. And we see fat oxidation. Fat oxidation within six days is already maximized.

No, no, it's, it's none of the things that we understand. I mean, my biggest regret about the experiment I did, because I'm never going to be repeating it, is I wish at the time I had the thought and wherewithal to have taken muscle biopsies and collected ample amounts of tissue for all the future. Proteomics, metabolomics, every omic you can think of to have been done down the line, it still would have only been an n of 1. But to me, if that 18 month transition was something beyond psychological, and let's be honest, it could have been psychological too. Right. If it was anything other than psychological, I suspect the answer is 4. Far deeper than in any of the things that typically get talked about.

Yeah. So I think if I was going to explain your kind of 18 months to get back to anaerobic. So first off, I think it's important to note that when it comes to exercise, there's some diverging information in terms of the ketogenic diet or low carb diet, whether or not it's, it's, it's bad for exercise, I think we can pretty conclusively say that for ultra endurance. There doesn't seem to be a downside to it. It also doesn't seem to Be superior. It kind of boils down to personal preference and what the person likes when it comes to aerobic exercise, at least from what I've seen, If you're under 60% of your VO2 max, you're probably safe in terms of getting the most out of your exercise after you're fat adapted. When it comes to over 70%, that's where we start to get into, where it becomes much more difficult to perform well or as often optimally as you can on a kiddog. And of course, yes, if you like, somebody sent me something, said, well, look at Sean baker. He's deadlifting 500 pounds for nine reps and he's 50 years old. You know, like, how do you explain that? And I said, okay, again, this is why we have randomized control trials. Because I'm not saying that he's not strong and I'm not saying that you can't get strong and that you can't do some heavy weights for higher reps. What the question you need to ask yourself is, is he as strong as he possibly could have been if he was doing something different? Because just the sheer magnitude of resistance training, consistently for a long period of time, you will get very strong. It doesn't matter what diet you're on, you will get strong or relatively strong for what you started at. So the question always has to be, are we talking about can you do something or was this the best thing that you could possibly do? Because those are two different questions, right? It's like when people talk about how much protein do I need? We only need about 50 grams a day. If we're talking about preventing you from being in a negative nitrogen balance. But what's optimal for health or lean body mass? That's a very different question. Right? So I think that when. I guess if I could implore the listeners, just always remember that when you, when you see something that you think contradicts or you. That you think is it doesn't fit, what is the person saying? Are they talking about optimizing or are they talking about, can you actually do this? Because if somebody says, well, you can't get strong a ketogenic diet, I'd say, well, you're an idiot. Of course you can. I mean, look at Dom. Dom, I've seen him deadlift £700 multiple times with no carbohydrate intake, right? So it's obviously not true.

The other thing I always encourage people to think about on this front is the relative to what comparison, which is a slight variation on what you said. So I know you had a great video out there, which we'll link to on critiquing the documentary Game Changers, which unfortunately, I just think was such a horrible, horrible piece of propaganda. And I say that not as someone who's against a plant based diet, I think, much like you, but someone who is very much against disgusting science. And I found that to be a demonstration of utter nonsense. But, you know, when we wrote something about this, one of the points we tried to make was one of the biggest challenges of studying nutrition in general is what are you comparing it to? And if you compare Diet X to the standard American diet, almost by definition Diet X is going to look amazing because the standard American diet is such an awful diet. And, you know, I thought it was such an insincere attempt to talk about a form of nutrition that obviously has many benefits, but when it's done in that way, it's pretty bad. And, and we probably won't have time to go into it today. But you, I thought, did such a great job of going into some of the real challenges of that at a level that most people didn't. Right. Like a lot of the criticisms of that movie are so obvious and easy, but you actually went deep in them. So we'll make sure people go and look at that. I want to change gears for a second and come back to this cortisol thing because I think this is a very misunderstood hormone. And I know you've written about this and I think it's worth getting the listener up to speed on cortisol. We tend to look at this very black and white. So let's give the extremes. So there's something called an Addisonian crisis, right? Someone gets a bad infection, they have an injury to their adrenal gland, they can't make cortisol acutely, they're going to die. They are, hands down going to die. The only way to rescue that patient is to give them massive doses of hydrocortisone or hydrocortisone equivalent. And that very much speaks to the medical necessity of cortisol. Let's look at the other extreme. Let's look at Cushing's disease. So you can have Cushing's disease or Cushing's syndrome, where either at the pituitary gland or at the adrenal gland, rampant amounts of cortisol are made. And nobody would dispute the pathology of that state. This is a person who develops basically a ball of fat on the back of their neck that's basically the size of a basketball. Excessive fat accumulation all sorts of metabolic dysregulation. Again, nobody would dispute that that is a problem. Fortunately, very few people are in either of those states. So let's now talk about physiologic levels of cortisol and their impact on muscle protein synthesis and something you said earlier, which I found very interesting, which was tolerating pain, pain threshold, training, resilience and things like that. You can take that in any order you want. That's a lot.

Yeah. So we have to think about the function of cortisol at its root, which is a stress hormone. Right. So you're secreting hormone cortisol in response to some kind of stressor. Again, so this is, this is a great example of acute versus chronic. Okay. When it comes to somebody who's getting very low sleep, overall, unhealthy lifestyle, smoke, whatever, they're going to have high levels of cortisol. And that can be problematic from the, or very like high levels of stress. Because now, like, think about what stress used to mean. Stress used to mean, oh crap, there's that thing that's going to kill me, I need to run. And so your body would produce cortisol for a myriad of different reasons. Part of that was just a fuel mobilization response. It mobilizes glucose free fatty acids, those sorts of things. Things. It's just trying to get as much fuel in the bloodstream as it can. Now when it comes to Cushing's, for example, because, or at least my best guess is, and there may be studies on this, I haven't looked super in detail on it. My best guess is it's not necessarily that you're accumulating fat, you're redistributing it. Right. Like it's going to weird places.

That's right. The legs become incredibly thin, the abdomen and the upper back become incredibly full.

Right. So you actually see this in like people who have liposuction. So liposuction, if you, if you, so your adipose doesn't just sit on nothing, it sits on the extracellular matrix. If you do liposuction, it destroys that matrix. And so people go, oh, well, you can't gain fat back, you can't gain it back there, but you start, if you regain it, you start gaining it in very odd places. And so what you're looking at is a redistribution because cortisol going back to cortisol, if you have high cortisol because you're stressed constantly and your, your body is still operating on genes from, you know, a million years ago, that's telling you we're stressed, must be something coming to kill us. So we're going to liberate a bunch of energy into the bloodstream. Well then it's still got, if you're not going to use it, if it doesn't get used, it's got to be put back somewhere. Right. And so now you can have it started to be deposited in strange places possibly. Now when it comes to exercise specifically it's a stressor. Exercise is a stressor. Makes sense that it would increase your cortisol. But people have kind of taken this, say well we need to limit cortisol as much as possible. So remember there used to be the old, I don't know if you remember this but it's like don't train more than an hour because at that point cortisol starts to go up, starts to spike. There used to be kind of that.

I missed that entire memo and school of thought fortunately.

So interestingly so we've referenced Stu Phillips a few times now. He did a study, I want to say 10 years ago and looked at different hormones and how they associated with actual hypertrophy. So he looked at, so the post exercise increases in systemic hormone. So he looked at testosterone, IGF1, growth hormone, cortisol and I think that was it. Guess which hormone was most closely associated with hypertrophy.

Absolutely. Cortisol hands down. But of course I'm familiar with the paper. But yes, right. The interpretation is again, is it that cortisol is producing hypertrophy or is it cortisol is in response to the stress that is producing hypertrophy?

Again this seems paradoxical because people see an association they automatically think, well there must be a cause there. Not necessarily at all. These two things are happening in parallel. So what it means is the resistance training session that is going to produce the most amount of stress, the most amount of adaptation is probably going to produce the most cortisol and, and possibly the most hypertrophy if it's repeated. Right. So cortisol like we know that it will impede muscle protein synthesis but again that is cortisol acts transcriptionally like testosterone. It is actually a steroid hormone. In fact people get confused because they're like, well he got a steroid, steroid injection before his, you know, tennis match and people like, they're not test just not injecting them with testosterone and they're giving him cortisol so he can go out and play because it reduces inflammation in that particular area. Well, cortisol is more of a long term hormone. It's acting transcriptionally. What you need to be worried about are long term low level elevations in cortisol. And people make this mistake with anything. They make it with mtor. A lot of the vegan doctors get all up in arms about mtor, you know, getting stimulated by leucine and that's going to give you cancer. You don't understand tissue specifics and you don't understand acute versus chronic.

I just want to make a funny comment there I was at a, at a meeting and a very famous vegan doctor who I obviously won't name came up to me and chastised me for the idea that I would ever suggest someone ingest 5 grams of leucine during a workout because of its negative effect on MTOR and how that could be bad for a person's health. And I just had to sit there and smile and I just don't have it in me sometimes to tell people to shut up.

A lot of this is really reductionist thinking, you know what I mean? And this happens for all different. All different. If I can switch gears just a little bit because I think this is really important for people to hear. People want to isolate out nutrients as being good or bad. And I would really implore people that nutrients are not necessarily good or bad. Context matters. And what really matters is lifestyle and overall eating patterns. That is what matters. You cannot possibly think that in a diet where there are thousands of different nutrients that we ingest that it's one thing is causing all the problems that we're having, right? And this, whether it's leucine or sugar or whatever, because when you isolate out these things, you can find mechanistic data to support almost anything you want. But even things that we think we know. Like I remember when I got to grad school and I was like high fructose corn sirup, independently fattening, it doesn't matter the calories, anything like that. And again, do I think high fructose corn syrup is good? Absolutely not. I think it's hyper palatable. I think people overeat it. But if you look at the studies pretty closely, it seems to mostly be an energy thing, that it just provides too much energy. Now people hear that and they think it's a dismissal, like I'm condoning it or something like that. And I'm not condoning it. I'm just saying that if you isolate it out and you keep people's calories the same, it doesn't seem to have the same effect. But do people who eat a lot of high Fructose corn syrup keep their calories the same? Of course not. They eat more calories than other people. They also usually eat more processed foods, more fats, you know, all that sort of thing. So a great study that I think came out a couple years ago that I think really highlights this point was a study where they looked at cancer incidents from any form of cancer. It was in Canada, 100,000 people cohort. And they looked at low meat intake versus high meat intake. And I think it was in quartiles, so four different levels. And I mean, we know this. If you do that, what you tend to find is that meat is. Meat intake is associated with cancer. Now the problem is people who eat high amounts of meat tend to have an overall unhealthy lifestyle. In general, they're less likely to exercise and more likely to smoke. They're more likely to eat processed food foods because most of the meat is coming from fast food, that sort of thing. But what was cool about this was they also compared it with the lowest to highest quartiles of fruit and vegetable intake. And what they found was that at the highest level of meat intake that also consumed the highest level of fruit and vegetable intake, they had the same risk for cancer as the lowest level of meat intake with a high level of fruit and vegetable intake. So basically what that tends to suggest is that to me, we need to look at eating patterns much more so than we look at individual nutrients. And that if you're looking for one nutrient to explain, you know, disease incidents, this sort of stuff, you really need to look at the whole diet. People who eat sugar. Like when I say that sugar isn't inherently bad for you, I mean, from a purely mechanical, If I take 50 grams out of somebody's diet of, you know, starchy carbohydrate, and I just put sugar into it, or the same equal calories from fats, and I just put sugar in there. Do I think anything bad is going to happen? Probably not. But that's not how people eat. So I'm talking mechanistically and people think I'm making a recommendation. So all that to say it's really important to understand how limited nutritional studies are. And you mentioned it. When you're talking about trying to pick out these really granular details, you're talking about a study that's so restrictive, it's really hard to generalize the results to the average person. So when you look at studies that are generalizable to the average population, you can't control that many variables because it has to be free living. And if it has to be free living, I mean, it's very hard to pick out differences because dietary adherence tends to be so low. So I know I went off on a really big divergent rant, but you know, acute versus chronic, localized versus systemic, you know, people just don't understand the differences. And these are, and this includes scientists, I mean, even like inflammation. God. A great example of this is on the Joe Rogan game changers debate where John Wilkes was talking about inflammation. He said if you're training for exercise, you know, and you're having higher levels of inflammation from that, and then you go and eat meat afterwards, like now you're compounding that inflammation. And I just remembered thinking you just don't understand the difference between acute versus chronic. These aren't even the same types of inflammation. Your acute inflammatory response from exercise means nothing. Well, it actually doesn't mean nothing.

It's beneficial, actually.

Yeah, yeah. So here's the crazy thing about exercise. If you were an alien and you didn't know anything about exercise, but you knew about human physiology and I told you, hey, I'm going to make you do something that increases your blood pressure, increases your heart rate, increases your free radical production, increases your inflammation, all these different things, you would go, that's horrible, don't do it. But what is exercise? It's almost like a vaccine. You give a small, you give a controlled dose of a stressor and your body adapts to that stressor by getting better at handling it. So what do we see in people who exercise regularly? They have lower resting heart rate, they have lower blood pressure, they have lower levels of inflammation, you know, those sorts of things. And you know, nutritionally, I question like these studies that look at inflammatory response and response in terms of post meal injection, I really go, how much does that actually mean?

Yeah, I think this stuff means absolutely nothing. I think that, you know, when you think about the time course of something and you tell me that you measured somebody's IGF1 or I IGF6 an hour after a meal and two hours later. Yeah, I agree with you completely. It's totally nonsense. And by the way, your point about exercise I think comes back to what you said when you were making that decision between nutrition science and exercise science, which was, look, exercise probably is the best drug we have. I agree emphatically with that. I think that when you think about the hormesis that comes from, from exercise, like I don't believe we will ever be able to develop a drug that is that Remarkable. It is simply unbelievable what it can do.

Almost any dietary intervention, unless you're okay with just small improvements. To see big improvements, you pretty much got to lose body fat. That's what the crux of it is. With exercise, you get massive improvements. With zero loss of weight, you can see big improvements. You know, I just implore people. One of the, and this goes for like kind of the two opposing ends, like, like plant based kind of really emphatic supporters and then like low carb supporters. I'll hear a lot of people, they'll spend so much time, you know, on these granular details of diet. And they say, well, I don't, I don't resistance exercise. I don't have time for it. And I'm like, you got time to stress over your diet on Twitter. On Twitter for two hours, but you don't have time to go into the gym or just do some push ups at home. Like, you are missing out on the most powerful tool you have to improve your health and body composition. And even like, there was a study by Wolf looking at longevity over age 65 and found a direct association. The most powerful predictor of longevity after age 65 was how much lean body mass you had. That was the most powerful predictor of who lived the longest after age 65 was your level of lean body mass.

Yeah. And there are lots of studies that go beyond just the sarcopenia and look at like grip strength and things like that. So, yeah, I completely agree. And I love the idea, by the way, of in between Twitter feuds over your nutritional views, you have to do some push ups. That's that could be the solution here to this problem. I want to talk a little bit about. I'm sorry, we're just, I keep saying we're going to wrap this up and we're not. I'm sorry, we're going to wrap this up at some point. One thing that I've been really impressed with in following you, Lane, is the deliberate nature with which you approach things. So I've seen pictures of you where I think, like, he doesn't even look like a human being. He's so ripped and shredded. And I've seen pictures of you where you look kind of chubby and you've been very clear and said, I'm going through different phases. I'm very deliberate about what I do. This is a phase where I am adding a ton of lean mass and with it comes some body fat. And right now I'm taking it off. But one, you're very deliberate. So Nothing's haphazard. And two, you really emphasize the importance of consistency. So how do I stay consistent? Because it doesn't take nearly as much work to preserve muscle mass once you have it. But you and I talked about this with Alex Hutchinson on a previous podcast. One of the things I fear the most for my patients as they age is any sort of injury or illness that takes them out of exercise, because the deconditioning that occurs when someone doesn't do anything for a month is devastating. So can you put some numbers to that? Because I believe you've spoken about this, which is what is the effort required to maintain. And I'm not talking about sh. Show like 4% body fat on a stage. I'm talking about. And again, we'll use your numbers as an example. You happen to be, you know, great to begin with, but, you know, for you to stay at 13, 14% body fat is not the end of the world. It's not a huge sacrifice, but it requires being diligent still. What does that mean to you and how do you advise your clients around that?

So there's a few layers to this when it comes to resistance training. I mean, this is really just anything in life. Resistance training taught me so much about just life overall. So the same people who come up with biohacks of how you can like get to your goal in 12 weeks or whatever in the financial world, they're the same people who are like, hey, join my pyramid scheme and earn six figures from home doing one hour of work a week. Most reasonable people know that that's not how you acquire wealth, right? You acquire wealth through. If you're Thomas J. Stanley's, I use fiscal examples because I just find it's easier for people. But 80% of millionaires are first generation, self made. And most of them got there not through getting lucky, but the fact that they saved more money than they earned, they were consistent and they did that for a long period of time. Now that is the granular, mechanistic way of doing it. Kind of like how we talk about calories in, calories out, right? But what it takes to get that consistency is modification to behavior, right? Because for the same reason that somebody binges on whatever, donuts, chocolate, cakes, cookies, whatever, is the same reason that somebody who also knows, hey, in order for me to save money, I need to earn more than I spend, still goes out and blows 1500 bucks on a shopping spree after a stressful week, right? Because they have a habit and an association with something. And so I think People need to understand that consistency is the most important thing. But to create that consistency, you have to change your habits. You have to create habits. I read a review, systematic review, by a gal named Marie Spreckley, and I'm going to give myself a pat in the back here a second because she actually said that she went back to school after reading my book Fat Loss Forever, and it's what inspired her to do her PhD work, which is pretty awesome. And she did a systematic review of looking at people who lost weight and kept it off. So some of the commonalities of that, and a lot of it was what you expected. Consistency, ability to embrace challenges rather than running from them or viewing challenges as part of the process. Process. I think a lot of people, when setbacks occur or challenges occur, they feel that that's abnormal as opposed to embracing it as part of this process. But then something that was in the paper that I hadn't thought about before, that I think is so critical to developing that consistency and making a change, forming a new identity. So the people who lost weight and kept it off said that they had to form a new identity. And I really chewed on this for a while. And do you know Ethan Suplee?

No. But I was just about to say James Clear is the first person who made that point clear to me, no pun intended. And of all the things in James's book, that one actually appealed to me the most, which was it's. It's not about this. Well, I always knew it wasn't about discipline and willpower because those things are going to fade over time. But this piece around, and let's use exercise as the example, it's going from, oh, I have to do this thing, I have to do this thing, to I'm a person who exercises. I'm a fit person. That's the transition that makes it easier to do day in and day out. And that's probably why I've never struggled with exercise. I struggle with the opposite. I really struggle to take a day off. I think, to be completely transparent, I'm always going to struggle with food a little bit. I haven't had the full identity switch in food, but I think I was born with, or at least it was etched in my brain when I was so young due to my insecurities around exercise.

So I think you said something very poignant there, and that's. You just put in your mind, this is what I do. This is what I do. This is part of who I am. And so Ethan Suplee, he's an actor. And he was in you probably. If you've seen the movie. Remember the Titans.

Oh, yes, yes, yes, I know. I know who you're talking about now. He lost a staggering amount of weight, like almost an unrecognizable amount of weight.

So I talk to him pretty frequently, and he has a thing he puts on his Instagram. He say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him about that because I read Marie's paper and then I made this connection because I always wondered what he meant by killed my clone today. And I said, is this what you mean? That you formed a new identity? That you killed the old person that you were? And he said, that is exactly what I mean. Because you cannot create a new life and you cannot have a physical and overall change in your life while still dragging those behaviors behind you. Let's take a basic example. An alcoholic. If you decide, if an alcoholic decides tomorrow, I don't want to be this anymore. You have to change everything. You can't just, okay, I want to stop drinking. No, no. Your entire identity has been around. I go to a bar, I hang out with my friends after work. They probably drink. My family probably drank growing up. That's where I learned it from now, you've got to change everything. You are not going to be able to be this new person while still dragging your old behaviors by behind you. And I think a lot of people try to do that. When it comes to nutrition and maybe even exercise, it's, well, I want things to change, but I don't want to give up my, you know, three glasses of wine a night, or I don't want to give up this or I don't want to give up that. What I always tell people is like, listen, the great thing about nutrition is you get to pick what you sacrifice. Okay? So for me, what made it easy for me? And I always tell people, you should pick the form of restriction that feel feels easiest to you. I don't care what anybody else feels like. For me, if I'm able to eat whatever foods I want, as long as I control portion size and track my calories and macros and whatnot, that feels easy. That is not difficult for me to maintain, like a lean physique and athletic. But for other people, that may be extremely tedious, difficult. It may feel labor intensive to me. It doesn't. What feels labor intensive to me is saying, okay, Lane, you can't have processed food ever again, or you can't have carbs, or you can't have fats, or Whatever. But for other people, some people, I hear it all the time, say, I did X diet, ketogenic diet, and it felt easy. I did intermittent fasting. I was never hungry. It felt easy. Cool. Great. Just don't assume that what was easy for you is going to be easy for everybody else, because this, you know, I thought flexible dieting was going to be the solution for everybody because it was easy for me. So I arrogantly assumed that it'd be that way for everybody else. I think everybody goes through that. That sort of like, you know, you seek out your own echo chamber sort of thing, right? And you find these people who had the same. Had the same experience as you, and you assume everybody's like that. It turns out, no, no, people are quite different. So find the. You get to pick the type of restriction, find what feels easiest, and try not to get too caught up in. Well, this diet increases fat oxidation and insulin. And like all these little things we talk about. Because at the end of the day, if you've ever lost weight and then regained it, why did it happen? It didn't happen because you didn't get your macronutrient ratio perfect or your nutrient timing wasn't down. It happened because you stopped being consistent with the behaviors that you implemented. That's what happened. And the same thing goes with exercise. People tell me all the time, like, man, Lane, I wish I was motivated like you. I'm like, ha. I would say that I. I love lifting weights, and that makes it easier to be motivated. I acquired that love through years, but I don't always love it. Just like I'm not always happy with my spouse. Right. Like, some days we fight. Doesn't mean I don't love her overall. It just means some days we get annoyed at each other. Some days I'm unhappy with weightlifting. I don't want to do it. However, I always tell people, and I'm not saying you can never take a day off, of course, you know, if you need a day off to reset, whatever, that's fine. Fine. You just got to be careful that that doesn't turn into weeks and months and years. Right? And here's the comparison I use. I don't have to be motivated to go into training. It's part of what I do. Just like, I don't have to be motivated and pump myself up to brush my teeth. Do you know why? Because it's a very simple equation. If I don't brush my teeth, they're going to go to crap. Just like, if I don't exercise My body's going to go to crap. So it doesn't. It is not for me. It is not a question of motivation, it is a question of what do I want and what are the actions that are required to get what I want. And if my actions do not line up with what is needed and the amount of work that is needed, it's very simple, I'm not going to get what I want. And it's on a fundamental level, it's that simple. But getting people to one, buy in and two, get past the stage where you start, you've got that honeymoon phase and everything feels good. You're like, yeah, I'm going to do this. And then you hit your first challenge or your first setback or your scale fluctuates. Actually, during the systematic review, participants talked about how seeing the scale fluctuate was a difficult thing to get over. And some people would quit because they would gain three pounds when in reality they probably just had a bad weigh in day. That's why this is why I actually tell people, weigh in every single day and take the average because the average is not going to fluctuate that much. So anyways, the point of this all is that consistency is the fundamental. You could have any diet, you could have any training system. If you're consistent, you're going to see results. I use this comparison and I'll throw it back to you on this one. If I said to you, Peter, I want you to go out and become the best three point shooter you possibly can be. You cannot get any instruction, you can't read any books, you can't get a coach, nothing. But if all you did every single day for three hours a day for 10 years was go out and shoot three pointers, you probably wouldn't be in the NBA. But I bet you'd be pretty damn good at shooting three pointers, you know what I mean?

I would agree with that. Hopefully better than I am now. Because right now I'm not joking, my 12 year old daughter is probably the same as me at shooting three pointers. Which means by the time she's 13, she might be better than me.

Well, I think that's the, that's the other thing for people to keep in mind is use other people's stories for inspiration. But be very careful about comparing yourself because what you need to ask yourself is can I get better? Try not to ask yourself, can I be like X person? Because the answer might be no. But here's the rub. You'll never know unless you put in the Decade worth of work, right? Like when I started out, I had people tell me, why are you lifting weights? You're skinny, you'll never be jacked. And then even when I got into powerlifting, people were like, look at how long your legs are. Look at how you squat. You will never be good at this. If I would have listened to that, I never would have set a gold medal in the squat. I never would have done that. Now that world record got broken and I may never get it back. Very good chance. I'll never get it back. But I got a lot farther than I ever could have imagined. Just through sheer consistency. I did a lot of stuff wrong. But sheer mass, effect of work and consistency can make up for a lot of shortcomings. And I think a lot of people out there have paralysis by analysis. And they never just start because they're so intimidated by all the information that's out there.

Lane, we actually got through a third of this stuff. I wanted to talk about today, and I'm going to make a. I'm going to make an on the field decision that we're going to probably have to sit down again because I want to talk about a lot of things. I want to talk about creatine. I want to talk about KATSU or occlusion training. I want to talk about really nuanced stuff around the differences between the size of a muscle, the strength of a muscle, and the metabolic function of a muscle, or a lot of other things I want to go into with you. And I also wanted to go a little deeper into the sort of leucine signaling stuff.

Yeah, we didn't really get to even touch that, did we?

I know, I know. And to go. To go into that stuff superficially now doesn't do it justice. So why don't we just agree to do this again at some point?

Sure.

All right, man. Well, listen, this has been a ton of fun for me. I hope it's been enjoyable for you and thank you for making the time.

Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. I enjoyed it.

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