10 Things That ACTUALLY Kill Your Gains (Based On Science)

Foreign.

What's going on, everybody? And welcome to the Built With Science podcast. You're here with your host, as always, of course, me, AKA Chaboy, AKA Max Coleman, AKA Coleman at all. And of course sitting in front of me, as always, is DP Plotkin, Paper Money Plotkin, AKA Daniel Plotkin, AKA Danny Boy. And today we're going to be talking about the. The elusive gain killers, that is things that in isolation, when done at common norms, meaning things that we see people doing often that will actually kill your gains, which is a term that's thrown around a lot, especially in the evidence based community. But we, what we mean here is things that result in very, very slow rates of progress or no progress at all, and even in some instances, reduced muscle mass from baseline, so actually resulting in atrophy.

Right.

Muscle loss. I think this is a good opportunity, just this podcast in general, this episode in general is a good opportunity to talk about the fact that suboptimal does not always mean horrible. Right. Suboptimal can mean 98%. And oftentimes individuals like, no offense, Jeff Cavalier from Athleanx, will say things that are gain killers that likely have almost no impact on your gains at all. Right. Or if anything, a very small impact on your gains. Right. So we just kind of want to throw some clarity out there as to respect. With respect to what things can you do that we often see people doing that are actually resulting in either atrophy or almost no progress at all.

Right.

And first, before we even get into any of that, it's important to note that there are very few variables in general that in isolation will result in killing your gains.

Right.

It's very unlikely that any one thing done in isolation when you're doing everything else correctly is going to result in very negative results.

Right.

So first we're going to touch on things that are commonly thought of as gain killers, Right. But probably aren't necessarily actually killing your gains.

Right.

And then we're going to talk about things that Danny boy and I actually consider gain killers. Things that if you're doing everything correctly but you're not getting these, we'll call them three things in order, you could actually be doing substantial harm to your, to your progress in the gym. So, Danny Boy, you want to start off with some of those more commonly thought of things as gang killers that probably aren't gain killers in isolation. You want to start us off?

Yep. So, yeah, just to reiterate, these are things that can definitely have an impact on you not growing optimally. Quote, unquote but optimal could be, you know, 100% of the gains that you could make. But suboptimal could be 99, 98, 97, 95, which is still really, really good progress. So it's not something that is a super high worry, especially for people that could be weakened warriors or many people want to do the thing that's suboptimal but gives them more time with their kids and so on or gives them a good trade off. So this is a good example of that. Very fast rates of loss. So commonly it's stated in the community that losing fat too quickly or being in a large calorie deficit could really compromise your muscle gains. But if you're resistance training, the likelihood that you're really going to lose a lot of your gains, even in the context of a pretty aggressive deficit is very small. Like even if you're doing 800 to a thousand calorie deficit, you're probably not going to lose a whole lot. But by the same token, if you were to go with a more moderate deficit, you might actually be able to gain in that deficit. So are you leaving things on the table? Are you potentially losing a little bit? Yes. But does it matter a whole lot? Probably not, especially if you have a good resistance training program in place.

Yeah, I think that also there's obviously context here and nuance like with respect to how fast you go about doing it as well as like what your baseline looks like. Right. So I know we have some studies looking at obese individuals losing weight very rapidly, more than a 800 to 1,000 calorie deficit, if memory serves, with very little loss of lean tissue in general.

Right.

Now again, we're talking about these as if them in isolation, right? So if you're doing everything else correctly, when you're doing a diet that has a very large restrictive calorie allotment.

Right.

Would that itself result in drastic reductions in muscle? Probably not. Similar to things like different recovery strategies. So we have a whole episode on recovery strategy strategies. Make sure to, to give that a listen sometimes so you can stop wasting your money on, on stupid things that don't help you recover at all. But anyway, other things like NSAIDs, right. Non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs, things like Advil, Ibuprofen and what have you.

Right.

And ice baths.

Right.

Things that people often tout as gain killers. But are they actually killing your gains? Are they actually sub like halting your gains to, to a, to an absolute movement of zero? Of course not. They're having some impact on your ability to grow, but they're not completely annihilating your muscle's ability to grow entirely.

Right.

Another thing, do you have anything else you want to say about weight loss in general? Like the, the rate at which we're losing weight?

Yeah, I think based on Kelly's recent post, maybe I can get on my soapbox real quick about very low calorie diet. So commonly in the literature you'll see very low calorie diets, which are essentially around 800, sometimes even less than 800 calories per day. And our girl Kelly made a post about very low calorie diets and everyone in the comment section absolutely just yammed her and was like, how dare you put these individuals on such a low calorie diet. You're starving them. This is just like not sustainable. Stupid. Of course they're going to lose lean mass, yada yada. But the problem is, is one, it's a super well researched, clinically effective diet. Two, the research in conjunction with the resistance training shows that if they do lose lean mass, it's very little lean mass. And three, diets by definition should not be sustainable. You want to have a situation where you have habits that you could sustain during maintenance and some of those habits you could gain during a dieting phase. But the dieting phase is just like very different than the maintenance phase. So hopefully people get less angry next time a post like that comes around. We're not recommending very low calorie diets, particularly in normal weight individuals, but in clinical cases like, you know, fatty liver disease, severe obesity, diabetic complications, and so on, it's definitely indicated and effective, especially if you transition them appropriately. So, stepping off my soapbox, I think we're, we're good there.

Nice, bro. You do know, do you know much about protein spared modified fasts? Like, or do you do. Yeah, you ran one yourself or, or do you have any opinions on them?

Yeah, I think it's like very similar to what they do with like the very low calorie diets. And I think that they make a whole lot of sense for, especially for people who I think want to just have a higher rate of loss and can definitely succeed while doing it. I've done it many, many times and I also do it sometimes and you know, probably not the healthiest habit, but like, let's say I have a day or two where I'm eating a bit above maintenance. All make up for that by having something like a protein sparing modified fast for the next couple of days and.

Those protocols are not always consistent.

Right.

It's. It's whatever protein you would normally be eating.

Yeah.

One gram per pound times seven to ten, generally. Yeah, something like that, yeah. Okay, cool. Again, not recommending those. Just a little side tangent. Just about protein spared, modified fast. I was a little interested in that. Okay, so, yeah. Losing weight very quickly, are you potentially setting yourself up for more muscle loss over the course of that diet than going a little bit slower? Yes, probably you are setting yourself up for a little bit less muscle retention and obviously a little bit less muscle gain. If you're someone who stands to gain muscle during a deficit.

Right.

But doing a very rapid diet, assuming you're getting enough protein in, assuming you're still resistance training with adequate volumes, you're not. The muscle is certainly not falling off of your bone by any means.

Right.

Okay. Moving away from rates of weight loss.

Right.

Stress in general, I think that this is one that oftentimes people. It's an important one, and I think it's something that people should focus on. Reducing stress outside of the gym in general is good for longevity, it's good for quality of life. And the most important thing, it is good for muscle retention and getting jacked, which is the largest proxy I think we have to quality of life as a whole. There's not a whole lot of data directly looking at stress levels and their effect on muscle growth. And that's largely because it's just hard to get those types of studies approved. Like if Danny Boy and I wanted to run a study where we wanted to see if more stressed individuals or groups of people that are more stressed grow muscle at a different rate, it's hard to go to the IRB and say, hey, we're going to recruit 50 subjects, 25 of them. We're going to hold their families hostage and see how they respond to resistance training. And the other 25, we're just going to put them through the same resistance training protocol with no family captivity whatsoever.

Right.

So things like that are really hard to study. But the studies that we do have are just looking at individuals running similar levels of similar resistance training programs and then just assessing their stress levels throughout.

Right.

Most of those studies tend to point in the direction of. If more stressed individuals tend to see higher expressions of genes associated with. With muscle loss in general. Right. So very acute, very mechanistic. Not a whole lot to draw inferences there as far as that's concerned. But it does point in the direction of if you're someone who tends to be more stressed, on average, you might Have a little bit more time building muscle or retaining muscle or whatever it may be. Right. So get your stress in checked. Anything you want to, you want to say about that, Any boy.

Yeah.

And also just as a principle, like you don't have to have direct evidence for everything. So people who are more stressed are probably gonna actually impact things that we are going to talk about later on that are actually gain killers. So if you're more stressed, probably going to get less sleep, worse quality sleep, you're probably not going to have, you know, all those things in check in terms of is your diet going to be in check, is your training going to be in check like things tend to. It's sort of the lead domino that makes a lot of things worse. So just without having to see evidence, just knowing training individuals, knowing yourself, you're more likely to get injured and so on. So I think it's kind of a no brainer. But as you said, definitely hard to find evidence. What I found funnier than even holding them hostage, like holding half the participants hostage is what you would have to do in the other group because the other group is supposed to be unstressed. But let's say they come and they're like, oh my girlfriend broke up with.

Me, you're out of the study.

Get the heck out of here, bro.

Sorry man.

Yeah, sorry to add to your stress even further, but that $500 we promised you for being a part of the study. Yeah, you're not getting that anymore. Have fun being single, buddy. That's horrible. I'm sorry. Yeah, so, yeah, so it's a hard thing to study but the studies that we do have with respect to stress do point to it having a negative impact on at least the proxies by which we have for looking at muscle growth over a long period of time.

Right.

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And then next year we have things like alcohol use and excessive drug use. So we won't spend a lot of time talking about this here just because again the data looking at alcohol use and drug use one, it's kind of hard to conduct Those studies. And two, they're just very limited.

Right.

Though the ones that we do have. And they generally aren't looking at rates of growth over the course of 812 weeks or anything like that. They're more so looking at acute gene expression or anabolic signaling pathways following any number of the consumption of any number of alcoholic beverages.

Right.

And they also tend to point in a negative direction. So if you're someone who, who drinks quite often, you might see reduced anabolic signaling pathways and other anabolic proteins. But again, it's probably not something that's going to have a very large impact on your physique in the long term, unless you are someone turning that dial to 11, obviously. So we're not recommending going out and binge drinking seven days a week and expecting to see very similar results in the gym that you would if you weren't doing that, obviously.

Right.

But if you're someone who wants to go out, get drinks with your friends once, once a week, and you're not going crazy, you're not drinking so much that it's impacting other areas of your life, meaning it's impacting your sleep, it's impacting your recovery for your next workout, then you're probably not going to be doing yourself a huge disservice by drinking in moderation.

Right.

Anything you want to add there?

That's good.

Okay. And then the last three here that we have are very common things that you hear about with respect to gain killers.

Right.

And that's protein intake, proximity to failure, and volume in general. And I think these are just three things that, unlike the other ones, are just directly related to the training and nutrition that you do. Not so much things outside of the gym or outside of diet having an impact on our progress in the gym. Right. So, uh, you want to touch on protein.

Yeah. So pretty quickly, since I think we touched upon this in another podcast, that 1.6 gram per kilogram number, or like 0,75 or 0,73 grams per pound number is a pretty safe zone for you making optimal gains. So your protein intake not hindering your gains. So many times people will say, oh, not consuming a gram per pound or 2.2 grams per kilogram is killing your gains. When one, you could do substantially less and probably still be in the optimal zone. But even that 1.6 number, you could consume less than that near 1.2, 1.3. And those studies, the aggregate data doesn't point toward a substantial difference in gains. Should you do it? Because it's pretty easy to just Get a little bit more in. Sure. Because you're trying to be on the other side of optimality. But is it going to be a night and day difference? Definitely not. The main thing, as we mentioned, is consistently resistance training.

Yeah. So in that that 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram.

Right.

Per day, or that point point seven to one gram per pound of body weight per day, that comes from a review by, by Morton et al, where they took a bunch of different studies looking at protein intakes and their effect on muscle growth.

Right.

And in that they found that after 1.6 grams per kilogram they were very confident that it would result in the most amount of muscle growth possible in the same in that given timeframe.

Right.

However, if you look at that graph and we'll link it, hopefully, maybe we'll even have someone edit in front of our faces. The. Because we're going to start posting these to YouTube soon. The, the graph. But anyway, if you look at that graph, it shows substantial growth in or substantial changes in fat free mass as low as 0,85 grams per kilogram. Right. But they're just much more confident that if you exceed that 1.6 grams per kilogram, you will see the most muscle growth possible. Right. So while we do still think that it's probably advisable, wise, intelligent, we definitely tell all of our clients to stay with that 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram. Generally you probably could get away with lower protein intakes and see maybe even the exact same amount of muscle growth.

Right.

So I think that's important to note. But if you're someone who likes to hunt your bets, you like to play it safe. Yeah. Stay within that 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram.

Right.

Anything else you want to say about protein?

That's good.

All right.

Last two, proximity to failure and volume. I mean we could spend four and a half hours talking about these alone. So we'll try and keep it brief. But with respect to proximity to failure, you want to talk about, you want to talk about that?

Yeah. So a lot of people say, oh, you're leaving a whole lot of gains on the table if you don't take sets to full on failure. So concentric failure or very close to where you can't do another rep, the problem with that is, is that you're probably not leaving a whole lot of gains on the table even at the lower volume. So even if you do less sets per week, you're probably not leaving a crazy amount of gains on the table. If you leave two reps in the tank, but especially at higher volumes, you may not be leaving any gains on the table by not taking all of your sets to failure. So I think that like we were talking about before, many of these things are a dial and not a switch. So as long as you're pretty close to failure, you're going to be fine for the most part. Maybe in certain contexts, you want to push to true failure and in other contexts you want more sets away from. But it's not going to be a night and day difference. The nuances will definitely save for another podcast about when and why to do things a certain way or. But definitely not going to be end all. Be all if you're a few away. But if you're 10 away or even 6 away on all of your sets, you're probably leaving a substantial amount of gains on the table, even though you'll probably make some. Honestly, if you're. If your volume is high enough, you're leaving some gains on the table. That just why, you know, you're in there.

So it hurts, man.

Yeah, that's true.

I don't train to failure ever. Personally, I've actually. I actually don't even train, so y' all shouldn't listen to anything I'm saying, ever. No, I. Yeah, I think that's good. But even so funny you say 10, because if memory serves Robinson at all, the Zach Robinson's meta regression showed growth 10 reps away from failure.

Yeah.

But I was like, yeah, for sure at 8 and then at 10. Don't remember super well, but I think it was still some growth.

I'm not sure some growth actually exist there.

Yeah. Yeah.

Which is crazy to think about.

Right.

I think a lot of those are using velocity.

Yeah.

As proxy for it. So I'm not sure how, as you get further and further away, what the, like, sensitivity is there, but it's very possible I wouldn't be, like, surprised, particularly in untrained individual.

Yeah, so. Yeah, exactly. So one, that paper has a lot of limitations to it, and Zach will be the first person to point those limitations out. This isn't me dogging on the paper. It's an incredible paper.

Right.

But that. That paper basically just shows that even when you're pretty far away from failure, you can still make gains. Right. Just not nearly as much or on the magnitude that you can when you train a little bit closer to failure. Because remember, like. Like Danny boy just said, people love turning dials into switches. Right. People love thinking in black and whites. But that's just not how things work almost ever in this field.

Right.

Yeah. So I'll real quickly touch on volume, which is just to say that some people think that if you're not in that 10 to 20 range, right? Some people think that if you're not doing 10 to 20 sets per week for a given muscle, you are, you are just losing muscle like you're in space, right? You are just. There's no reason for you to even be going to the gym if you're not doing at least 10 to 20 sets per week. But as we talked about in our last podcast, make sure to give that a. A listen. I don't know, I actually don't remember which one we talked about Rates. Oh, it was the rate. That was the Time Savers Time Savers podcast. We talked a good bit about lower volume training still being very efficacious for muscle growth, right?

Y.

So that's just an important thing to keep in mind is, yes, you are making a trade off by doing less sets over the course of a week, but you are still growing. You just might not be growing as quote, unquote, optimally as you could be or as quickly as you could be.

Right?

So unless you have anything else you want to say about that. Yeah, okay. Dude, those were all things, right? Very fast rates of weight loss, stress, alcohol, protein, proximity to failure and volume. Those are all things that are not in themselves. Unless you turn the dial to 11, right, you're only ever trained with 20 reps in reserve. You train with one set every two weeks for a muscle or you're losing weight. You. You're on a one calorie a day diet, right, with no protein. Unless you're doing those things in conjunction with one another, none of them by themselves are likely to very drastically reduce your rate of return, right, from the gym, right? Now, that being said, if you compound them on top of one another, right, you're in a very rapid weight loss diet. You're not eating any protein, you're training very far away from failure with low volumes. Yeah, you're probably, quote, unquote, killing your gains, right? But assuming that you're doing most of them, right, and you have one thing here and there that you're not doing optimally, maybe you're training hard, but you're, you're eating, you know, one gram of protein per kilogram of body weight, like it's probably not ideal, but it's probably not killing your gains, right? That being said, there are certain things, certain variables, certain factors, certain components that Daniel and I do think probably are going to kill your gains in isolation. Meaning if you are doing every single thing right, but you mess up one of these things, it is very likely that you are resulting. You are, you are causing a substantial detriment to your physique or to your progress in the gym in general.

Right.

And we'll start here unless you have anything you want to add with sleep, perhaps the largest gain killer, if there ever was a gain killer, in my personal opinion, I guess, besides the next one, which is just not training, obviously.

Right.

So there's one study that people very commonly like to cite in our field. In fact, I think I heard about this study for the first time in a round table with Meadow Henselman, Eric Helms and, and Mike is retell at at Revive Stronger. It was a really good round table. We should link that. Anyway, this study took 10 individuals. I believe there's a very small number of people. And it was a random crossover. It was a random crossover design. So individuals, you did both interventions. Right. So they had individuals come into a metabolic ward. Right. Which means that for this 14 day period that these individuals were being studied. They were being studied for the entirety of the study.

Right.

They slept there. All the food that they ate was at this facility. So they knew exactly how many calories these people were eating.

Right.

And exactly how much they were sleeping.

Right.

And they had individuals all on a weight loss diet. They were eating about 90%. So they were on a 10% daily restriction, calorie restriction.

Right.

And they either slept five and a half hours or eight and a half hours every night for two weeks.

Right.

And when they were sleeping five and a half hours.

Right.

They saw a 55% increase in the amount or a 55% decrease in the amount of weight that was coming from fat.

Right.

So when they were sleeping eight and a half hours, they saw a certain amount of the weight that they were losing was coming directly from fat.

Right.

And then when they started sleeping five and a half hours, that amount decreased by 55% over half.

Right.

And the amount of weight that they were losing from lean tissue or muscle increased by 60%. And all they manipulated, the only thing they manipulated across this study was the amount that they were sleeping.

Right.

So that is to say, especially when you're dieting, especially if sleep starts to sacrifice or you start to sacrifice sleep or sleep starts to go, stop the diet, eat at maintenance, figure out why you're losing sleep the way you are and reassess.

Right.

Because it is very clear at least from this one study, a very well controlled study that drastically reducing your sleep per night can have huge impacts on your ability to retain muscle during a weight loss diet and your ability to lose fat during a weight loss diet. Because remember, we don't really care about weight loss at the end of the day. We care about fat loss during your diet. We want to lose as much fat, as much fat as possible without sacrificing any muscle loss whatsoever. So it's just a really important thing to keep in mind. Sleep is perhaps the gain killer. If you are not getting adequate sleep, you are drastically reducing your ability to make progress in the gym. Okay, kind of long winded there. Probably could have done that a little bit more succinctly. I apologize. But Danny boy, you have anything else you want to say about sleep?

Yeah, I think one thing that's important to mention about that study is that they weren't resistance training. So.

Thank you. Thank you.

Even though you would expect things to directionally go like, there's no reason why you would, you wouldn't expect things to be directionally similar. The magnitude very likely be different. Obviously you'd retain more lean mass if you were resistance training regardless of sleep deprivation. But there's also one other study that just teaching people about the importance of sleep and making them go to bed at a certain time increased the amount of muscle mass that they gained from the resistance training intervention. It wasn't as stark as this one because it was just teaching. And I think the actual differences in sleep ended up being close to like one hour or something like that. So we don't really have a good sleep deprivation study in resistance trained individuals or in using resistance training in conjunction with the sleep deprivation. But that goes back to, it's really hard to do these studies. Like it's pretty hard to get sleep deprivation approved, especially in the schools that we're at. So I doubt we're going to get a really quality study like that again anytime soon. Although, you know, I hope it does. But I'm definitely in obviously agreement that it's probably other than the next one, which is obvious, the most important game killer.

The one last thing I'll say about sleep, I, there is one study not looking at sleep deprivation, but they had a group of, I think they were basketball athletes, some college athlete and they, they had half of the individuals come in and they gave them sleep hygiene lessons. And I think they, the, the, the mean increase in sleep over the course of the study was like an extra hour each night, right?

Yeah, that's what?

And those. Okay, yeah, they, they saw basically not anything with respect to muscle, I don't believe. But with respect to performance, they did see better improvements in sprint times, jump performance and stuff like that. Right. So even though these other individuals weren't getting inadequate sleep, when the other group improved their sleep hygiene, they improved their sleep quality and quantity. They did see substantial and significant improvements to their performance. Yeah. So sleep, aside from. Again, we keep teasing out at this next one is far and away the most important thing. If you are dieting and you are, you're doing a slow diet with a high amount of protein, you're training close to failure. You are doing adequate volumes.

Right.

You're keeping stress low, but you're losing sleep every single night. I can still be pretty confident that you're doing a pretty significant detriment to your physique. I would be pretty confident. Obviously, like Danny boy said, the data is not there to support what I just said, but the trend is very much pointing in that direction.

Right.

So keep your sleep in check, ladies and gentlemen. Keep it cold, keep it dark, use some earplugs if you have to. I do and I love it. Okay, so now the biggest gain killer, and this one is kind of silly actually. You know what we did? The biggest gain killer is going to space. We'll just say that if you're in space, that's the biggest gain killer that there is. So my astronaut homies out there, all the astronauts that live to the listen to the Built with Science podcast, stop being astronauts because you're killing your gains.

Well, actually now they have equipment up there that they can retain their gains decently well thanks to exercise science, not scientists like us. We study how to get jacked on Earth. But other ones. I'm kidding. Actually, a recent professor of mine did get a grant for, you know, astronaut esque training. So.

Cool stuff. It is the coolest stuff, dude. Like the, the stuff that they've come up with. Well, for one, bands, this is a silly one, but bands, guess what? They don't need gravity. They work in space, which is a really cool thing. But they also have like a bunch of like way cooler stuff than rubber bands that they use, they use for, for training up there. But even then, even when they're training in space, like they still see like reductions in muscle size upon just smaller reductions in muscle size.

Right?

Which is actually a really good thing to point out. We're in the gravity field of Earth, right? We are subject to Earth's gravitational pull and because of that, we are always experiencing forces, almost always. Especially if you're someone who is relatively non sedentary. Like if you just get up and move throughout the day, that alone can be enough to, to keep a certain amount of muscle on your body at any given point in time.

Right.

So that just all of that is to say it's kind of hard to lose muscle.

Right.

Anyway, the biggest gain killer, right. Is just straight up not training for an extended period of time.

Right.

And there's a bunch of different things and it kind of sounds silly to bring this up.

Right.

Of course that's a gain killer. That's not usually something that people are talking about when talking about gain killers in general. Right. But I do think it's important to mention, and I do think it's important to mention kind of the, some of the things that lead to that, to, to that result. Right. To not training for extended periods of time. So one of those being the all or nothing mentality and Danny Boy, you kind of want to touch on the all or nothing mentality of, of, of resistance training and fitness in general.

Yeah. So it may seem weird, but I think a very, very common thing that I experienced while training and still experiences people telling you that they're just going to take a substantial amount of time off because of the fact that they can't fully commit to training for a given period because of other things going on. And I think that's obviously a pretty big mistake because doing something is.

Way.

Way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way more important than being perfect. Because we know that you can maintain with really, really, really low volumes, like one ninth of the regular amount of volume that you do. So clients that instead of like coming in once every two weeks or even literally like once every three weeks and then coming in for one week and being very sporadic can actually make progress and at the very least maintain. While that person that took a full three months off now has to like relearn the exercises. They lost substantial amount of muscle mass. They just are probably less motivated to come in after that three months because it's a new thing for them. So an all or nothing mentality may seem kind of silly, but I feel like it's very common in both, both realms of fat loss and muscle gain where people, if they can't fully commit or be perfect, they don't want to do it at all. So definitely try to avoid that and be, be good. You know, sometimes being good consistently is better than being great sometimes, sometimes, not all the time. Because.

No, no, I just mean that Being good is. Being good consistently is better than being great sometimes.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure.

For sure. Sure.

Yeah. And so that's the nothing side of the all or nothing mentality, right? The people who, if they can't do it all, they're going to do nothing, right? Oh, I can't, I can't, I can't. I absolutely can't get in the gym for two hours each day. So there's just no point in me going at all. Right. But we have really good evidence to suggest that doing a little bit, a little bit is so much better than doing nothing. Like so much better than doing nothing. And not a whole lot worse than doing a lot either, which is kind of the interesting part.

Right.

But the other side of that, the all side of the all or nothing mentality can have a similar detriment, right? So those individuals who are kind of on the all side of things, I turning every single. I'm, I'm eating unlimited amounts of protein, I'm keeping stress levels as low as I possibly can. I'm doing nothing but laying in my bed between workouts as to not add any extra activity to, to my life, that can be equally as detrimental, but ultimately because it leads to the nothing mentality, right? So those individuals tend to see higher degrees of burnout, but they also tend to see higher degrees of injury. If you're someone who has to be going balls to the wall all the time, you're generally going to again, either burn out or hurt yourself. And assuming you hurt yourself really badly. Now this is kind of, this is kind of a reductio ad absurdum because it's very rare for someone to hurt themselves in the gym to the point where they're bedridden. But I just thought it would be good to throw some numbers on here with respect to the degree of muscle loss that you can see from straight up, not training, and especially like a sedentary lifestyle in general. Right. So this study looked at individuals over the time course. They looked at up to like 120 days onwards, right, of being bedridden. And these individuals were usually either injured or sick with some sort of disease state.

Right.

But they found that the muscle mass, and they did. So they, they measured muscle mass of the quads either through CT scans, MRI and a bunch of different methods, Right? So a bunch of very, very valid and reliable measurements of muscle size, muscle volume.

Right?

And they found that after about five days of being bedridden, you saw about a 1.2% reduction in, in quad size, right? After 10 days, about 5% reduction. After about a month, we're looking at about 12% reduction. And then after about six weeks, we're looking at about a 20% reduction in the size of your quads. Now, again, again, these are bedridden individuals that are either coming off of an injury or are sick. And so this likely isn't you listening to this podcast.

Right.

But it's just to illustrate the point that being sedentary or just not training, like, there's nothing that's going to, quote, unquote, kill your gains more than that, obviously.

Right.

So I just thought throwing some numbers.

On there would be important.

We were actually running a study right now looking at putting one leg in a brace and then looking at the molecular determinants of both retention and regain and the many avenues of that. And just in the two weeks of having the one leg in the brace, I believe it was about a 15% loss in cross sectional area of the quad. So pretty substantial, especially this is in trained individuals. So more loss in trained individuals, which makes sense because they have a higher baseline of muscle activity. So you're more drastically reducing it. So, yeah, I mean, it's very substantial. Importantly, I don't want to just end it on that stark note of you and I saying that like, oh, yeah, you lose what a lot of the time the next question is, well, what's the, what the heck is the point of working so hard if I could just lose it so quickly? The regain is very, very quick too. So don't be super discouraged about the fact that you're going to lose all your gains if you just take a little bit of time off. And to be clear, we're not talking about time off. We're talking about literally immobilized limbs or being in bed, so lying supine, which is much different than just walking around. There's studies that have people just live normally and stop training, and there's no differences because of what we were talking about, gravity, walking around and so on. But regain definitely does happen much quicker when you've previously trained. So just something to throw out there.

Yeah, Nice little, Nice little positive note. Yeah, I think that, I think that that's. And also, like, keep in mind, y', all that these numbers, these, this, this 20% or I guess it's even better on the short time course. This 5% reduction in just 10 days.

Right.

That's not all contractile tissue.

Right.

They're looking at the muscle volume. So part of that volume is water, part of that volume is glycogen. Within the muscle itself. And we see these things depleted after periods of sedentary. After sedentary activity. Right. So that's just an important thing to keep in mind. It's not true muscle loss, necessarily, but we just wanted to highlight the fact that one of the worst things you can do as someone who wants to have a substantial amount of muscle is just stop entirely. Right. Just. Just. If I can't do it all, I might as well do nothing.

Right.

So, yeah, those are really the. The only two, quote, unquote, gain killers that that Danny boy and I really wanted to highlight today, which is just not getting adequate sleep.

Right.

And just straight up not training in general.

Right.

So those are your two big boys. And then of course, we have the things that aren't necessarily gain killers, but if you compound them upon one another, they can result in substantially lost progress. And that's things like losing weight very quickly, not getting inadequate protein, training very far from failure with very low volumes, and keeping stress in life high in general.

Right.

Okay. You got anything else you want to add?

That's good.

Cool.

Well, as always, thank you guys so much for listening to the Built With Science podcast. If you have a topic that you would like us to cover, please feel free to reach out to us at Built With Science on Instagram. And of course, as always, thank you so much for listening. Peace.