Why Chasing Perfection Is Killing Your Gains

Foreign. What's going on, everybody? And welcome back to the Build with Science podcast. You're here with your host as always, of course, me, that is Max Coleman, AKA Coleman, et al. And sitting in front of me as its tradition, only a thousand miles away, is the one and only Daniel Plotkin, AKA doesn't condone nor condemn Pilates. Plotkin, AKA Danny Boy, actually have no idea what your opinion on Pilates is at all. I'm sure that your opinion on Pilates is it's fine. It's not optimal for muscle growth nor for health or anything like that, but it's a fine way of thinking about things. And if it's what it takes to get you in the gym, then that's all that matters, right? I would imagine that's a semi.

Pretty much exactly. Yeah.

Well, that leads us perfectly into the topic of today's episode, doesn't it? Which is one that is incredibly near and dear to both Danny Boy and I's hearts. It's something that I thought I had the genius revelation of creating on my own, come to find that many, many people many decades before me, who are far smarter than I am, actually came up with this. So today we're going to be discussing why you should think of things in fitness and health as a dial as opposed to a switch. We're going to talk about it why it's important from a longevity perspective as well as from kind of from an optimality perspective as well as. But then we're also going to go into specific examples with nutrition. We're going to talk about nutrition with respect to how you can think of it as a dial instead of a switch with respect to muscle growth, but also health. Of course, Danny Boy will be leading that because I don't care about health. We just say live fast and leave a big coffin. Right. And then we're going to talk about what you guys all actually care about, which is lifting. We're talking about how you can think about lifting in general using a dial mentality as opposed to a switch mentality. But Danny Boy, why don't you go ahead and start us off with why this concept is important for mental and physical health. Kind of from a top down view. What is the idea of thinking of things as a dial as opposed to a switch? Let's hear it.

Yeah. So basically the dial out of switch concept is trying to illustrate that you can turn things up and turn things down and that will have the largest impact as opposed to it just being an offer on switch. Grow, not grow. Health, not health. And tons of on other wrong and binary ways of thinking about things. So I think it's an important concept for multiple reasons. One, you get to realize that there's multiple dials to turn and maybe focus on the dial that matters most, like which dial should I care about that is going to lead to the most meaningful difference and to the most consistent difference. So I think one, it forces people to not think in a binary way. So I can turn the dial up in some cases to a hundred or to fifty, I can turn one dial up to twenty, another dial up to eighty. So just realizing that you don't have to be all in or all out, super important. Realizing that there's multiple dials and also trying to sort of think about all right, what matters most here? What is going to create the best situation for me consistently showing up rather than having everything at 100 in terms of how can I get the very most out of my training from a theoretical standpoint as opposed to real world, what can I actually do?

Standpoint, which I think is really important for probably this on this podcast audience, I imagine most people who are into evidence based or science based lifting and nutrition and health based content are the kind of individuals and obviously I'm projecting a little bit, can just kind of using myself as an example as someone who's into evidence based fitness and stuff, individuals that are looking to kind of overly optimize all things nutrition and lifting. Right. And we've talked about this before pretty extensively on this podcast. I think it was the biggest mistakes episode, which one of my favorite episodes we've done so far, so definitely check that out. But we talked about one of mine was the sort of all or none mentality. Actually it was one of yours as well. But just on the opposite end of the spectrum where thinking of things in switches as opposed to dials is kind of how most people operate when they're starting a fitness journey. Right. You have individuals at December 31, you ask them what's your New Year's resolution? And they tell you, oh, I'm going to run six times a day or six times a week, I'm going to go to the gym three times a week. I'm going to do all. I'm going to meal prep, I'm going to do all these things, I'm going to get eight hours of sleep. And it's like, okay, let's start with one of those. Let's, let's turn one dial before we flip all of the switches up to see that we can get the most optimal outcomes within the New Year's resolution. And that oftentimes leads to burnout. Now we're not going to get into New Year's resolutions and stuff like that. Turns out people actually stick to them more often than you might realize. But oftentimes people don't stick to their new resolutions. And I think largely that's because of this sort of all or none switch versus dial mentality that people have. And then kind of talking about it from a more granular, my own personal perspective. We'll get into like more specific details here in a second. But like when I, I started lifting when I was 12 and then started got like really into like evidence based fitness around 18, 19 years old. And then I kind of really started thinking about. It's. It's unfortunate that when I was lifting from like 12 to 18, I had a very like dial type mentality where I was like, I'm just doing a couple of things right, at least I'm going to the gym even if I'm not doing everything. And then as soon as I got introduced to like evidence based fitness, I was like, oh, I need to do. I need to get all of my ducks in a row. Which is honestly less evidence based than what I was doing prior to that. And that kind of led me to have these like cyclical phases of I'm all in. I'm. I'm hitting my macros to the gram every single day. I'm doing, I'm making sure that I'm doing adequate numbers of sets and for each individual muscle and I'm training super hard. And then I would do that for several weeks, sometimes several months, and then I would just burn out. And I would need several weeks sometimes, but definitely at least a week. And I would call it a deload, but really it was just psychological burnout and like a need of a break from the demanding nature of trying to do things very intensely and right. And now thanks to actually getting to know Danny boy him and also shout out Derek Van Avery, they kind of like reframed my thinking. So from 19, 18, 19 up until I was like 22, 23, I was kind of going through that everything needs to be perfect or I'm just not training at all or not dieting at all. And then meeting Daniel and Derek at Lehman College. Shout out. They kind of were like, hey man, you know, you don't have to do everything perfectly all the time. And actually, Daniel, I don't think we've ever talked about this on air or off air, but one day we were just going on a like New York City food crawl. We were just going to a bunch of different restaurants and Daniel was dieting at the time and he was like eating normally with us. And then we got to a point where he was like, all right, I need to kind of like pull back. I want to at least be at maintenance calories today and not well above maintenance calories today. And I remember that being kind of like a shocking moment for me being like, whoa, this guy truly understands balance. Because even though he's dieting, he's still out here having fun, but he's not just going absolutely ham trying to stuff his face with as much food as he possibly can. He still has his limits of what he finds to be a balanced approach to dieting and having a normal lifestyle as well. So kind of rambling there. I do apologize, but it's a very near and dear, like I said topic to my heart. And we can go into some more specific concepts with respect to nutrition and lifting here in a second, but is there anything else you want to say from a top down approach?

Yeah, I think you covered it really well in just really underlining the context in which you want to turn dials. So realizing what matters most to you and how much you're going to turn a dial in a specific situation, I think matters probably more than anything to find that balance, because we're all finding a balance. But balance doesn't necessarily mean that you're not all in. Sometimes the balance could be extreme in specific instances. So realizing just which phase you're in, what you're prioritizing what your current life looks like and, and finding the optimal for you, which might mean that the dials are turned all the way to, you know, maybe a 10 out of a hundred for nutrition and training because of the fact that you have other stressors and so on. And I think social media specifically can sometimes skew how much things really matter. Because if you come out with a super hot take, like, are you even, are you even training if you're not eating protein right after? Or like, what's the, you know, even, even in takes where we have evidence that it doesn't matter, you'll see some people have hot takes that are sort of like, let's, let's take the protein timing, for example. Yeah, sure, if you, if it doesn't matter, then, and somebody's super dedicated and there's a theoretical rationale to having protein right after, you could make the case that yeah, have the protein right after, but that doesn't mean have the super hot take that. Like, yeah, if you're not serious about training, then yeah, you'll wait a couple of hours. But if you're truly serious, then you'll have it right after every time kind of thing. So especially when you're younger and when you don't realize the limitations of both just individuals and science, you can get on this train of oh, this study found a positive result, therefore I need to do this all the time. But the study is a very isolated instance where they're keeping things the same between groups while you're an individual that is doing a whole bunch of things differently. It could be that for you specifically, you train at night and when you eat protein or high amount of protein right after, it affects your sleep or something, you know what I mean? Like, you are not the context of the average in the study. So finding what works for you and which dials to turn and what matters most is obviously going to be much, much more important.

Yeah, I think that there is, you know, social media and like, I think that you and I even like as well. Not you and I specifically, but people who do what we do, which is to say the science communicators in this field are in somewhat, you know, partially to blame here because we do present things, especially five, six years ago when you were talking about studies and you would talk about statistical significance when you talk about things like that, where the this X factor or X variable led to percent more growth and P of less than 0.05, all that kind of stuff, it does kind of frame a thinking of binary where you're presenting two variables and you're saying one is better than the other. Something I don't think that people really realize is that in resistance training studies when a one variable beats out the control group, let's say like, let's say like lengthened partials, for instance, beat out a full range of motion in a study. Both groups grew muscle. And I think that's something that people often forget is that yes, one may have had a slightly larger effect size than the control group, but it's not like the control group didn't grow muscle at all. And you could say the same with nutrition. Right? It's Morton at all. Right. That's like the big protein one that everyone always talks about. Right. If you look at that graph, which I know for those listening and for those watching, because not like we have an editor here pulling things up on screen, but like if you look at this graph, it's a very popular graph, we've used it in a ton of our posts here at Built with Science that shows that anywhere from 1, 6 to 22 is generally where grams per kg of protein is generally where you want to be. But if you look at that graph, there are people who built a substantial amount of muscle eating.08 grams per kilogram like that. You can still. It's not like individuals who are eating less than 1.6 to 2.2 were not growing muscle at all. In fact, if you look at the graph, there are some studies where some individuals eating way less grew way more muscle than some eating. But you just have to go on averages, right? That's just how science and science communication works. So like I said, I think that the ways in which we communicate science is at least in part to do with why some people have this, especially some people in the evidence based community have this kind of switch versus dial mentality where if I'm not doing everything perfectly, I'm not going to be, not only am I not going to grow the optimal amount of muscle, but I may not be growing muscle at any considerable rate or any meaningful rate. Right. And so I think that it's getting better the way that people are presenting things. However, now that people are presenting these raw percent changes that, that might this, the leg extension led to 4,000% more growth when you leaned all the way back. Right. And we're not going to get into two issues with that or anything like that. And I don't even think it's an issue in this particular case. But that might lead to kind of a further mentality of oh wow, I need to be doing things perfectly. Anyway, sorry, we're kind of getting to a meta level here, which we don't need to do. But I think that if we need to start presenting things like, yes, look, if you lean back in the leg extension, if you do lengthened partials, if you do 20 sets versus 15 sets, yeah, you're probably eeking out a little bit more growth than you would if you were doing things otherwise. But you're not, not growing if you're doing those other things and at the very least if you need to for periods of time to turn the dial way down because let's say that it's finals week or you're going on vacation or your, your partner is pregnant and you, you have all these things going on in life, whatever it may be, right. You can turn so many dials down like on the, both on the nutrition and fitness side without worrying about losing progress. But I think Oftentimes, people think that we're taking steps back in our fitness journey if we're turning dials down, or in certain instances, turning switches off. But really what we're doing is standing still. We're not necessarily taking steps back. We're standing still, we're resting, and then we're going to start taking steps forward again to reach the progress that we're trying to reach with respect to fitness. Right. Okay. Again, sorry for rambling. Anything you want to add to that before we start going into maybe specific nutrition examples, which I kind of already gave a couple anyway.

Yeah, yeah, we sort of touched upon a few that I think we'll probably dive into just a tiny bit more when we get into it. But one thing that I thought of that I. I find kind of entertaining is that when you know enough, I feel like you can appropriately delude yourself into believing that you're probably fairly close to optimal. So what I do when I'm in different phases of life, when I have different stressors and stuff like that, and when I'm turning different dials, I still convince myself that I'm doing things optimally. I'm like, yeah, I'm doing a little less volume, but I'm pushing so freaking hard. And I added these drop sets and I'm doing these specific techniques that. I mean, what are the chances that I'm not growing optimally here? You know, like, I convince myself because I think there's no doubts, and I'm pretty dang good at convincing myself. I don't know, maybe certain people. This is something that I really do wonder. The people that are better at diluting themselves perform better. Like, I'm thinking specifically about sports and things like that. Like, people that have a true, unwavering belief, even if it's irrational, can benefit from that type of belief, even though it would detract from them. Understanding any sort of difficult concepts about, you know, other topics, it could make them better performers. So I think convincing yourself, or at least being willing to just lean into. I'm all right, I'm probably firing on all cylinders is a better way of going about it psychologically. I just don't know how much that's modifiable. Like, I can't get into other people's brain, slash bodies and know how much that could change. But it's an interesting thing from pragmatic or a coaching standpoint, where sometimes presenting everything to an individual that you're coaching is not necessarily, in my opinion, the best move. I think just choosing the path that makes the most, the most sense, while being extremely positive about it. And by believing that it will work can sometimes just lead people in a direction that just kind of makes it smooth sailing as opposed to being like, yeah, not so sure that this is gonna, we'll try it out and so on. So it's kind of interesting to like, when you step back and try to be super scientific about things, you might psychologically put people into a position where they can't execute fully on the program that you assigned to them. So finding that middle ground, I think is an interesting sort of corollary to this dial out of switch concept.

Yeah. So with respect to self efficacy, like, it was fun. This was actually one of the, early on, like one of the first conversations we had. We were talking, we were in, in the lab, like doing. We were conducting, I think it was the intercept stretch calf study that we did shout out Derek Van Avery for leading that study. A lot of shout outs to Derek today. But you are talking about, you're like, I would love to see a study where we take 25 individuals and like for each group they're doing the exact same resistance training program. The only difference is that one group you're like, oh, dude, like let me tell you, this is, I wrote this program myself. This is a clean program. You're doing a great job and you're going to grow so much muscle from this. And the other group you're like, yeah, I mean, you're in the control group, so like, you're probably not going to grow a whole lot from this. So just so you know and blah, blah, blah, and you kind of basically like feed into that self belief versus self, whatever. Not belief. I'm sure there's some good psychological term that I don't know here and see how that affects growth. And if you ask me, I think it would make a difference. Like, I think that if for nothing else, the individuals in the group that you're telling it's not going to work are just like less motivated to actually push hard or do what they're supposed to do. Right. I think it would make a difference. Probably not anything substantial or crazy, but I think that notion of like convincing yourself that you're doing things at least pointed in the direction, the correct direction can be very valuable and like it can get to a point where it's detrimental. So like for instance, when I was in my like go like what I was talking about earlier, where I would go cyclically super hard and then take breaks. During those breaks I would even be like, oh, well, I'm like, you know, I'm, I know that I'm refosporalizing MTOR right now. I know that like, psychologically if nothing else, I'm going to be ready to hit the gym hard again when I get back to it. So even when I was taking just like full weeks away from the gym and telling myself that it was actually optimal for me to be doing it that way, like you can get to a point where you're like, you're getting so self deluded that you're actually hurting your progress rather than helping things. Right? Okay. I had one more thing to say with respect to all the things that you were saying, but I don't think it, it's, it's, it's left me. So we can, we can move on to some other stuff. Unless you have anything else you want to say.

I think that's good. We can dive into some specifics.

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Cool. I think, let's talk about nutrition. Kind of already talked about protein where with respect to like, look, yes, you should probably be getting 1.6 to 2.2 grams of protein a day, right. So that's anywhere from.07 or.0.8.7, 2.73, it doesn't matter. Grams to 1 gram per pound of body weight per day to maximize your chances of growing muscle. Right. If you go well above that, probably no benefit to doing so. There might be, we're not entirely sure, but probably not. And if you go far below that, you're probably not killing yourself or anything like that. It's not just destroying your chances of building or maintaining muscle or anything, but just if you want to head your bets, you should probably be somewhere between 1.6 and 2.2. There are many, many days where I do not hit 1.6, but as long as I'm around 1.2, I can kind of like to a certain extent pat myself on the back. Right. But if I was, let's say with respect to the whole dial thing, I'm at a time in my life where I get to focus on training A little bit. I get to focus on nutrition a little bit. I'm not in a PhD program like Danny Boy is right now. You know, stay tuned for that. But I have the luxury, the. The privilege of being able to focus a little bit harder and turn that dial of nutrition nutritional focus up a little bit higher than maybe Danny Boy does. Not that this requires anything crazy. I mean, Danny Boy has a fair life with him at all times in the day to make sure that has his MPS stimulated. But that's just one example. It's like, the most obvious example, I think, when it comes to nutrition and this whole concept of a dial notice, which. Yes. And I think that the very way in which it's presented now is better. Right. So we used to present it as one gram per pound, bar none. You have to do that. If you don't do that, what are you doing? But now it's like 1.6 to 2.2. Like, that alone is a step in the right direction because it shows people, like, look, there's a range here. And, like, as long as you're falling somewhere within that range, you're probably doing yourself a service. And you don't necessarily have to have, like, this binary. Oh, no. I weigh 165 pounds, and I only got 160 grams of protein today. Right. And then even further, beyond just the absolute amount of intake, you can talk about, like, the timing of. Throughout the day, not just necessarily with respect to the workout itself, but also, how many feedings of protein are you getting in general? So, Danny Boy, do you want to talk a little bit more about that with respect to. It doesn't have to be protein, just anything with nutrition. But let's start with protein feedings and why that should, in and of itself, probably be looked at as through a dial lens as opposed to a switch lens. Yeah.

So I think evidence is getting clearer and clearer that the total amount per day matters a lot more than the number of feedings. But you could think about it from a pragmatic standpoint where you're like, all right, is it possible that I'm not gonna maintain that muscle protein synthetic response from just one extremely large protein meal? Yeah, sure, it's possible. I mean, we have that recent trauma and study that had that really sweet title. There is no upper limit. But I think it's fair to say.

What a dial mentality that they had when writing.

Yeah. So I think it's fair to say that if you're trying to maximize muscle growth, there's probably not a great reason to do just one meal a day, two plus and probably three is something that makes a whole lot of sense and it's hard to think of a reason why you would not do that. But let's say you could only maintain a deficit on one meal a day than going with that one big meal.

And maybe to be clear, just, just to be clear because I know someone's going to hear that and be like what he's saying on an individual level, there are some people who, if they try to eat more than two meals a day, like, if they, if they like spread their meals out, they just have, they lose kind of a sense of control and it's way easier for them mentally just to do the one meal a day diet. That's what it works for them to stick to a calorie deficit. So sorry, please go ahead.

Yeah, that's exactly what I meant. I don't know how people would interpret.

I'm just sure someone would be like, wait, what? So I have to do the omad dick. Cause that's the only way to stick it. So I just, I wanted to throw the disclaimer out immediately. So I should have more faith in our audience, honestly.

I get what you mean. Yeah, yeah. So I think that's a really good example. Even the total amount of protein example, I usually now even say, particularly with the clientele, I typically work with 1.44 to 1.8. That way people aren't really thinking about a grand. I think gram per pound. This is kind of a funny thing and it's sort of running away. Science is round, numbers stick way better. So if you could just give a simple heuristic, it will catch fire. But if you add a decimal or make it even somewhat more complicated.

Yeah.

The fitness industry is not gonna, you know, run away with it. So I think it took, I mean, maybe I'm just skewed, but it took so much longer for the 1.6 to catch on. And I still think it's, it's not like if you just ask a random bro, no question.

Yeah, yeah, sure.

The, the default and whatever. I mean if you're getting extra, you're getting extra. At least it's, it's more than. So they're, they're safely maximizing. But you do definitely see some people that are, you know, have that switch mentality where they're avoiding dates with their girlfriend or, you know, all in bro. Not gonna, not gonna mess up my diet today and have these, you know, better tasting foods that are lower in protein. So yeah, just Realizing that even that 1.6 to 2.2 recommendation is very, very safe. And 1.4 might actually be enough to maximize growth for maybe most individuals actually. So yeah, protein timing after a session is probably completely unnecessary to do right after as long as it's with, you know, four to six hours, you're probably good. If you're eating normally like you're eating a normal two to three meals a day, it would be very hard to miss that window. So what else? There's like tons of just protein myths.

Protein is alone. We could talk about.

Yeah, exactly.

We could spend so long talking about this. But like truth be told, as long the way that I put it is like as long as you're getting around a gram per pound and they're like a pretty large leeway. Like you could go as low as like maybe not this low but like even like half a pound of, of protein or like half, like 0.5 grams per pound of body weight. Like it's a little on the low end but like still if you're getting high quality protein sources and it's like semi evenly spaced throughout the day, like you're probably chilling, like you're like you're certainly not going to lose muscle. You know what I mean? If you do that unless you're in like a, maybe close to a bodybuilding show, but if you're close to a bodybuilding show, those dials are turned up. Right. But like I think that the, the with respect to the 1.6, the 1 gram per pound thing, I think it's important to remember that we are in a niche community within a niche community. Like the evidence based fitness scene is like kind of new and still very small. Growing fortunately, but still pretty small. And yeah, the average person lifted that like has dedicated their whole life to lifting does. What's a study? The citation. I've never heard that word before. What. What are you talking about? Here's your citation. And then hits you with the horseshoe tricep flex. Right, but so I think that's why we need simple heuristics sometimes. But that doesn't apply to you guys listening to this podcast now because we're so earlier than thou.

Last. Last tangent. But I see comments you know, once in a while when I peruse the social media and it'll be like a post about one specific study and then somebody will comment. This is bs Obviously a study needs to do something with either more sets or more protein or xyz. That has already happened multiple times and those studies exist. And I'M just face palming. Like, how could this person not know that all of this literature exists? And yeah, I have to sort of take a step back and realize that most people don't give a crap, so.

They couldn't care less. Like, like, let's not, let's not let that turn into an actual tandem, right? Um, but yeah, I think we covered protein. Like, look, just make sure you're doing your thing. You know what I mean? Just make sure you're getting somewhere between like, even as low as like 1.2 to 1 point or 2 to 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight, right? And you're probably in the, in the clear. The way I usually say it with respect to timing, is that like. Or not just timing, but distribution is like, look, two is probably better than one, three is maybe better than two, four is maybe better than three, and five is like, there's like. Well, you get to a point of diminishing returns, which is kind of like the whole point of a dial mentality in general, right? Is that you have to kind of accept the fact that, yes, the difference between doing two sets a week and one set a week is like double the growth potentially, right? But the difference between nine sets a week and eight sets a week for chest is like still substantial, but, you know, not nearly as big of a difference as going from. And it's better to think of this like doing 10 sets opposed to 5 sets or chest in a week, right? Way better. But the difference between, if you take that same double mentality, right, the difference between 20 sets and 10 sets, even though that's a larger difference, is probably smaller than the difference between 10 and 5, right? But let's not get into training just yet. Let's talk about. I, I kind of had this caloric deficit example, right? With respect to nutrition, like, let's say that we kind of talked about this before recording, but let's say that I'm on a 2000 calorie a day diet and that puts me in like a 500 calorie deficit, right? And let's say that I've had 1300 calories for the day, whatever it may be, and I'm going out to dinner with some friends later. Like, let's say that even if I like guesstimate my calories and it says I'm at 20, 300 calories for the day, right? Oh, no, I went 300 calories over what I was supposed to have for the day to stay on track with my diet. But you're still in a deficit, you know, like you're still 200 calories below what is considered maintenance. Right. And even if you had those 200 extra calories, you're still at maintenance. So again, we're not taking any steps back with respect to our diet. We're just standing still for a day, which is totally fine. There's nothing wrong with standing still and then getting back on the horse and start walking again tomorrow. Right. What you don't want to do and what I think can happen, especially with individuals who have this switch mentality, is that you're at 1300 calories for the day and you're like, you know what, forget it. Like, let's just go ham, we're going to dinner tonight. Like, let's just eat, you know? And then you end up at 3, 500 calories for the day and just kind of ruined your entire deficit for not only that day, but for the entire week. And that can be really psychologically challenging as well. Is there anything else with respect to like nutrition in general? I kind of want to talk about touch on health here in a second and I'll kind of want to let you lead that obviously, but is there anything else else that you want to talk about with respect to like performance and muscle growth with respect to nutrition before we move on to health? Yeah.

I think even on the other side of things with calories, I think sometimes people, I think it's becoming popular, at least within the evidence based space, that you don't want the deficit to be too large or too little on. So on both sides of that spectrum. But I think that there's a decent argument to be made for both of those things where doing a pretty aggressive deficit, when we think about that dial versus switch mentality. Yeah. Are you risking maybe a bit more muscle loss?

Sure.

But you're ensuring that you're going to be in a deficit each day because the plus or minus is obviously, you know, you can mess up a little bit more. When you have a planned, more aggressive deficit. You also have to diet for less time. It's also motivating to see large loss. So just realizing that the reason I'm turning this dial up, even though I may be sacrificing a little bit, could actually be very well justified. And just because I'm not following that exact recommendation where I theoretically won't lose the most amount of muscle mass, is not that big of a deal. And on the other side of things, with turning up the dial too much on the calorie side of things. Yeah. You're going to put on more body fat, but just from a theoretical standpoint, you want to create an anabolic environment and keep that anabolic environment. So if you're going to do a 200 calorie surplus, you might have undershot on, you know, a few days out of the week and actually been, you know, closer to maintenance or even toward a deficit on some of those days. So ensuring that you're in a surplus and maybe adding a little bit of extra body fat over the course of the gaining phase is not that big of a deal, especially if you're prioritizing and not worried about a mini cut. So realizing who you are and if you don't mind a mini cut and you're good at dieting stuff like that, maybe gaining those extra pounds over that bulk. But ensuring that you're in a surplus during every day of the week might make sense for you specifically in terms of which dials to, you know, turn up and down.

I am so glad you brought up that because it slipped my mind. But this is actually a really good example here of dial versus switch. Right. So it's, it's getting pretty popular in the evidence based community to say like you might not need to bulk at all. Like bulking and cutting cycles. They might be. Turns out Jeff Cavalier might have been right all along, which is crazy to think about, but he, he's been a big proponent for ditching the whole bulking cutting cycles for a long time. It doesn't matter anyway. If you look at the studies analyzing different surpluses on muscle growth, they do all tend towards more muscle growth, but just far disproportionate fat accumulation in comparison to the amount of muscle you're growing. So that is a really good example of by turning that dial up. Yeah, you actually might eke out a little bit more muscle than if you were eating in a smaller surplus. Right. But you just have to know that you're also going to be building or accruing substantially more fat than you would if you were taking a much more slow and moderated approach to, to bulking. Right now for me personally, I try to go as slow as I can because I love to eat. And like anyone who follows me personally on Instagram, you know that food is like a really important part of, of my life and who I am. Right. So I have to kind of like couch myself and like make sure that I'm not going too ham because then I'm going to spend the entire year cutting as opposed to bulking because I put on 30 pounds in a single month. Right. But like I said, it's just an. It's a great example of how this is, like, is a dial, right? You are accruing more fat, but you actually might be building a little bit more muscle, too. And that's just going to come down to a personal preference of, like, am I okay with doing a little bit more frequent mini cuts and full cuts, knowing that I might be eking out a little bit more muscle growth? And I'm okay with being a little bit chunkier, a little bit fluffier around the edges in the winter time and stuff like that, but that's going to come down to personal preference, like Danny Boy said. Beautiful example. Thank you for reminding me about that. I think that was very much worth touching on with respect to health. This is one I'm going to let you take the lead on, but I'm going to give one quick heuristic for myself that I actually stole from Team 3 DMJ that I really like. So for me, I. I've tried a trillion different diets to lose weight and because having abs was a big, important thing to me in high school, because I was a vapid high schooler, like all high schoolers typically are, right? But I didn't see any success until I tried if it fits your macros. And I was like, oh, my God, like, a mathematical objective approach to weight loss. Like, this was. It was perfect for me, right? And I think I've touched on this in the. In the inside in previous episodes, but I was like, whatever. I can just eat pop tarts and cereal and protein shakes to kind of like, meet my goals for the day. And then it wasn't until. And like, Danny Boy knows this, like, because this was the case up until like, a couple of years ago, even, where I just, like, didn't really eat fruits and vegetables very much. I didn't really care to. And it's just because, like, why, you know, if I can get the goals that I'm looking for, why even bother, right? And then aside from the very obvious aspect of, like, yeah, eating more fruits and veggies makes dieting way easier than trying to fit all of your macros in with three meals that are, like, this big because you're trying to eat things that are really calorically dense. Uh, it's also probably just a good idea for your health to have some fruits and veggies every once in a while, right? So I like heuristics. I like having, like, little mini goals to kind of achieve throughout the day. Otherwise I'm just not a very motivated individual to do things. So Team 3D MJ, they're kind of like general rule of thumb with respect to fruits and veggies is just have one to two servings of both fruits and veggies for every thousands of every thousand calories that you're eating for the day. Right. And for some reason that just trying to achieve that daily is like more manageable to me than just like a kind of like in the ether balanced diet, right? Having that kind of makes it easier. It's like an actual goal that I can try to achieve. And that has made my diet look a lot more like that of an adult and a grown up who like actually cares about their health and and well being as opposed to the person that I was two years ago where I was just eating cereal and protein shakes to meet my goals. Right? So that's the heuristic I'll leave you guys with with respect to health. But I think, Danny boy, you're far more equipped to actually talk about why you should think about nutrition as a dial as opposed to a switch with respect to nutrition.

Yeah, so you heard it here first, guys. Apparently you need some weird rule about this many servings per thousand calories. And therefore now a person can follow.

Hey look, I made fun of my.

Already per day and you'll be just fine. Or per meal have an extra, you know, fruit or vegetable per meal. That would be the actually the same thing. You wouldn't have to do the thousand calorie thing. You could, you could just say, all right, each meal I'll have some fruits or some veggies during or after. Maybe one or even two of them can be skipped on some days, but try to make it at least two. No, max over here needs to say, I need this many servings for a thousand calories. And therefore now I can rest easy and follow this rule.

This is actually a really good life lesson there. Thank you for pointing this out because this would have slipped my mind otherwise. They often tell you like in school, like growing up and stuff, like make fun of yourself so that like other people won't make fun of you, you know. But when you have real bullies for friends like Danny Boy, they find a way to bully you even if you are the first to be self deprecating. So thank you Danny boy, for that great life lesson to those less fortunate than yourself that can achieve balance without stupid number heuristics. But please go ahead, that's what I'm here for.

I just want to, you know, the.

Internet try to make us stronger. Future generation.

Exactly. So yeah, nutrition, definitely something where you want to have a dial mentality and not a switch mentality. And this probably goes for almost every, not almost every aspect of healthy eating. So when you think about any category that's popular, whether it's the amount of sugar that you consume or it's the amount of saturated fat that you consume, or the artificial sweetener question or literally anything under the sun, percent macros and whatnot, the biggest thing by far, I would say the base is the habits that you can form that allow you to maintain a healthy weight is going to be probably number one and then two, that'll allow you to maintain the diet period while including a lot of those factors that we know are healthy, like fruits and vegetables, getting your fiber, making sure that you're not overeating and so on is going to be by far the most important factor than you avoiding this specific sweetener or this specific type of fat and so on. There's, there's no hacks unfortunately. If there's a specific diet that works for you for whatever reason for a particular period of time, ride that wave. All good. But the biggest rocks by far are going to be what has you consistently consuming calorie appropriate, nutrient dense diet. We can, I'm sure in future episodes get into the specifics of why and how to do all of the details of, of a diet in terms of why the recommendations for saturated fat are to minimize them so you have lower LDL particles and why the preponderance of evidence points toward the fact that, you know, artificial sweeteners are, would be very hard to overdo actually from, from a health standpoint. But are there open questions? Are there ways like would you be better off with just water?

Sure.

Like where we know for a fact that water is completely safe. But there's always going to be some uncertainty with evidence, no matter what the topic is. But can you stick to your diet better and take those very minor risks and have that dial mentality is really what we're talking about here. So for me it makes total sense to have those diet drinks. I, I get a lot of enjoyment out of them. Instead of having a snack, I'll often have a diet drink while watching whatever fights or anything, any, any sort of thing that I typically would have reached for a snack. Diet sodas really fill that void for me. I feel like for me specifically it's helped a ton. And for dieting, but other people, it could be something that leads them to have other snacks. So just finding what works for you is, is really going to be the biggest thing there. But making sure that the big rocks are in place is super important. And not worrying about the minutia, because often when you worry about the minutia, that's when you get into real trouble and then spiral back. So you avoid sugar for months and then you crash and then now that you're eating sugar again, you don't. You just let everything fly.

Yeah, I think, I think that's the, that highlights kind of like the. If you actually truly adopt this mentality, which is a very evidence based mentality to have with respect to both nutrition, health, fitness, all of that, like, you'll just start your, your capacity for detecting misinformation and disinformation goes up pretty drastically. So like, let's say for instance, you're someone who, you have, you, you eat plenty of fruits and veggies, you get all your fiber, you limit saturated fats, you get plenty of polyunsaturated fats, all that. You eat a very well balanced, healthy diet. And one day you're at a party and you're eating cake because you're celebrating your loved one's birthday or whatever it may be, and someone comes up to you and they're like, aren't you, like, aren't you a bodybuilder? Why are you eating sugar? Haven't you heard? Like, there's red 40 in that red velvet cake. Haven't you heard? Like, you start realizing, like, yeah, I don't eat this all the time. Like, this is like, this is the, the piece of cake I've had this week, right? Like, whatever it may be, you start detecting like, wow, people really do have this. Like, they find a particular thing and if they think if they turn that switch off, they're like completely fine and healthy for the rest of their lives. And you're like, that's absolutely ridiculous. Right? Like, for instance, I had a reel. I posted on Instagram about why I don't think the Carnivore diet is a good diet for health or performance. Mostly health, but. And if you follow me on Instagram, you know that I cook while I'm talking about something fitness or health related, right? And people, so, so many people commented, like, talking about why the Carnivore diet is bad while making ice cream sandwich cookies. Like, yeah, this is, this is a credible source. It's like, bro, like, do you think that this is the only thing that I eat my, like, throughout the day? Like, this is the only source of food that I ever consume because it's what I happen to be making for this video. Of course not. Right. Anyway, let's not talk about my content. You know something. Anyway, yeah. I think that not only is the dialer versus switch mentality good for actual health and fitness, but it also helps you detect dis and misinformation incredibly easily and much more readily. Let's briefly talk about training a little bit, because we've spent more time than I thought we would on nutrition. But let's. Because we. I mean, once you kind of get the baseline of, like, what it means to think of things with respect to a dial versus a switch, going through very specific examples isn't super necessary. Right. But I might as well talk about lifting because that's what Danny boy and I love talking about. So you want to take us off talking about maybe just some things, like some specific variables with respect to maybe volume or intensity or something like that. Yeah.

So I think just realizing the dial switch for these is, you know, probably more important than people realized. So with volume, with respect to volume, I think the evidence we do have points toward the fact that you will get diminishing returns at those higher volume amounts. So thinking that just because. So, you know, especially above 20, thinking that doing above 20 or not doing above 20 is really shooting yourself in the foot is probably a huge mistake. So if you're within that sweet spot of 10 to 20, or even if you're, you know, close to it, like 8 to 10, realizing that you're going to make a substantial amount of gains and you're probably not leaving 80% of your gains on the table is, you know, very obviously a good way to go. Because if you have that switch mentality, you might just be like, yeah, whatever. If I can't get in the gym three times this week, I'm just gonna freaking skip it. And realizing that the amount needed to maintain is super low, it's like 1/9 the amount. So just three sets a week a muscle group could probably maintain, for the vast majority of people, maybe a little bit more and some. And then realizing that the amount needed to grow is not that much more than that is something that is definitely a revelation for some people when they sort of start digging a bit more. And then also realizing that those diet dials have interplay. So if you turn down the volume dial and you do less sets, then you can turn up that intensity dial because you could just give your absolute all to those few sets that you do and therefore get A higher hypertrophic stimulus per set. So just one, realizing where the point of diminishing returns is and two, realizing the things that you can do to maximize the quality of what you're actually doing is, I think, a useful example that applies to the other areas of, you know, fitness and lifting.

Yeah, I think I kind of already gave the. The example with respect to volume of like. Yeah, the difference between 10 sets and 5 sets is far larger than the difference between 20 sets and 10 sets, even though they're both doubling. And that continues to be true from 40 sets to 20 sets. Right. Even though the. Literally the number of additional sets you're doing is far larger, each additional percent gain that you're getting from those massive numbers of sets is going to be far smaller. Right? So now, to be clear, you probably are going to grow more from doing 20 sets as opposed to 10 sets. But, like, over the course of even a year, your grandma might not even be able to tell the difference. You know, I kind of think of. That's how I generally think about stuff is like, is my grandmother going to be able to tell if I went to the gym three times a week versus two times a week for my biceps? Right. Like, a frequency is another great example here. All the best research that we have would seem to suggest that frequency might not matter at all for muscle growth, right? As long as your volume is matched, frequency probably doesn't matter. But if you're someone who's, like, really trying to hedge your bets, it's probably. And you're training with, like, pretty high volumes, let's say, like 30 sets, it's probably better to train two days a week as opposed to trying to cram all 30 of those sets into one single session. But remember, we're dealing with, like, the law of diminishing returns here, right? So unless you're someone who's like, literally trying to maximize every single variable that you can because you have a bodybuilding show coming up in a year, then it's probably not something you should spend the mental fortitude worrying about. By any means, Right. Training is pretty simple here with respect to muscle growth, Right. There's not a whole lot we really have to even say. It's just better, just like with nutrition, to think of these things in terms of dials as opposed to switches, just because that's kind of what's going to keep you in the gym the longest. I think having this kind of, like, very tailored and moderate approach to, like, the fitness and health journey is going to make it a lot more sustainable for you throughout the long term. So, like I said, I don't think there's really much I need to say here with respect to. To. To lifting, because we kind of covered the whole mentality as a whole with respect to nutrition. But, yeah, is there anything. It's kind of a very quick little talk about training. Is there anything else you want to add before we sign off?

I think that's good. I mean, without getting into every single topic. And of course, I think the different dials and how to sort of modify and think about them. So, yeah, I think, as the mentality, I think is what we were really trying to drive home for sure. The concept itself and even applying it to how you consume content, I think is a really useful sort of guide. So, yeah, I think, yeah, think of.

Things like, this is the recapitulation. Don't even have to really say anything like, start thinking of things as dials. Right? Difference between 1.6 and 2.2 grams of protein, probably not that big of a deal. If you mess up on your diet one day, don't just say, forget it. My switch is turned off and I'm gonna go ham on my diet. Right. Think of things as dials as opposed to switches, and you'll find not only is this kind of more sustainable, but also much more enjoyable. At least that's from my own personal standpoint with respect to fitness and health. And I want to shoot a huge shout out again to Derek Van Avery and Daniel Plotkin for kind of like pushing me in this direction. All right, everyone, thank you so much for listening to the Built With Science podcast. If there's a topic that we haven't covered that you'd like to hear us talk about, please feel free to reach out to us at Built With Science on Instagram. And as always, thank you so much for listening. Peace.