-: Gonna talk about transformation
and assessing and progressing transformation based training.
So, before I go through,
Cody or if anybody else wants to just let me know
that the audio quality is decent with these headphones
'cause my mic and all that jazz
is connected to the other computer,
then I will move forward. Awesome. All right.
So today we're gonna look at transformation training.
Now, for the sake of this,
mostly what we're looking at for transformation,
I'm gonna be talking about fat loss goals.
I mean, the majority of people looking for transformation,
so fat loss goals, obviously the last week or two weeks ago,
we talked about hypertrophy and if you know,
somebody's transformation goal is more hypertrophy,
then obviously that's where it would apply.
So in this context, we're focusing more on body composition,
fat loss as the major goal.
So ideal outcomes for this
would be either re-comp or fat loss,
which is really just varying degrees of, of fat loss
and varying rates of fat loss
and kind of what you want your performance
and quality of life, et cetera,
to be while you're, you know, through that fat loss.
So similar to for hypertrophy,
transformation is not a stimuli.
Like there's not a transformation stimulus
or any transformation genes.
So what actually are we trying to accomplish from
a physiological standpoint with transformation training.
We're trying to get net negative energy balance
specifically in regards to fat tissue.
And that's kind of what separates fat loss from weight loss,
like negative energy balance and losing,
you know, just water and stuff like that.
That's all going to contribute to weight loss.
Our goal is that that weight loss
comes primarily from fat tissue
and unnecessary water retention, bloat, et cetera.
So you will lose some lean mass
over the course of a transformation but our goal is,
is that that lean mass is mostly coming from water
that is not necessarily needed, productive,
you know, it's bloat basically, right?
So how do we achieve that is basically
from combining enough stimulus to drive nutrient
partitioning towards the lean tissue, muscle tissue
and also all of our metabolically active tissues,
you know, our liver or kidneys, our brain,
all of those things, right?
So that we can maintain muscle mass,
but not putting in so much stress
that we then cause less significant metabolic adaptation
or we could call them mal adaptations.
I mean, the thing is, is that whether you call it
a good adaptation or bad adaptation
depends on the context, right?
It's a metabolic compensation.
It's a mal adaptation when your goal is fat loss,
but it's a great adaptation when you're trying
not to starve to death when there's shortage of food
or something like that.
So the positive or negative things
is like from a physiological perspective,
these are metabolic adaptations designed
to help you survive.
But in the context of a fat loss goal,
these conservatory like energy conserving adaptations,
aren't necessarily helping us, you know, get shredded.
They're doing the opposite, right?
They're lowering our, our metabolic rate.
They're lowering our performance,
they're lowering the functioning level of all of these
systems to decrease calorie expenditure.
And that's the opposite of our goal,
but our body doesn't have any, you know,
physiological ideal in terms of your physique
and how you look et cetera.
It just only knows like,
"Hey, like what are we on?"
It's kind of like, it's kinda just like a, you know,
a bank account looking at trying to keep it
as big as possible and all of a sudden when funds
aren't coming in, it's going to be more stingy on,
you know, what you'd be able to spend.
You know, it can't see into the future that knows
that like, Oh no, this is perfectly fine.
Still plenty of groceries at the store, all of that stuff,
just trying to offload some extra storage right now.
So can we keep all of the metabolic things high and running?
That's what we're trying to do.
We're trying to find that sweet spot of not creating
so much of a stimulus and putting in such a severe deficit
that the body reacts really strongly
and start shutting a bunch of stuff down.
Cause that's ultimately what leads to us under recovering,
not feeling well, low compliance, all of those things.
So we're going for net energy deficit over time
for fat loss transformation, but acutely, we're trying
to get a net negative energy balance towards fat tissue.
We do that over a long enough period of time,
we get a significant change in fat mass and not just weight
and that's what we're going for.
So what are the essentials for that
frequency muscle maintenance?
Cause obviously if we're losing muscle mass,
that means the mean, that means we're in a pretty poor state
nutritionally and also a pretty poor state,
probably from a stress and a recovery standpoint, et cetera.
Like nobody ever feels good if they're in a state where
they're losing muscle mass,
like if their calories are that low,
obviously their performance is low.
Their energy is going to be low.
At that point, like you are wasting away, that's not good.
So, and we're trying to maintain muscle mass
with the training, which is going to help maintain
our BMR and also maintain our performance.
But it's also just one of those things where it's like,
by the time we get to that level,
pretty much all the other boxes
are probably checked in the negative direction.
Nutrient partitioning, that's that part of like making sure
that the energy deficit is specifically towards fat loss
because we want stimulate our muscles to be
still taking up glucose and still storing glycogen and still
utilizing fat for fuel and being metabolically flexible.
Because in that case, right, if we're partitioning nutrients
towards lean tissue that allows them to recover
so that we can continue to perform.
And we'll talk about how that affects
like the actual stress in the nervous system and stuff later
but that in a sense helps us engineer this deficit
to be more biased towards the fat tissue.
If we aren't creating a strong nutrient partitioning
to get the same amount of fat loss,
I have to underfeed the muscle tissue more, right?
And so what we're trying to do is under feed only
the fat cells and as close to adequately
feed the lean tissue.
And the only way that happens is if we
stimulate that partitioning at a cellular level,
where we train in a way that keeps our muscles
like being sponges for glucose and nutrients
and hydration and all that stuff. Right.
And that's why frequency is a big part of this because,
you know, if we do a workout, the metabolic adaptations,
if you remember back in course two,
like they come really quick,
right there they come and they go in a very short timeline.
So if you're only training a body part once per week,
you're likely not going to be doing a very good job
of partitioning nutrients towards that tissue
over the course of seven days,
you might partition a lot of it during that, you know,
one or two days around the time you train that body part,
but it's not going to be that significant
in terms of over the course of the week.
And then the last thing of course,
on here, not over training.
That's going to be, it's going to be the,
the theme not over-training.
So for transformation not over-training
is essentially the number one goal of your program design
and everything else comes less
because people can lose fat from diet alone, right?
It doesn't mean that's the best way to get a transformation,
but knowing that we should know that well,
if the people can lose body fat,
lose weight from diet alone, we might want to make sure
that when we throw a training program in there
that it doesn't screw that up somehow, right.
Or make that process worse, less efficient,
more difficult, etcetera.
So when you're thinking about managing the deficit
and managing your training, et cetera,
you can look at an energy balance
is kind of having its own little trainability bar.
So just like we look at an individual stimulus
and it's like, all right, we have a threshold
that we need to hit to get those positive adaptations.
We obviously have a level of deficit that we need to be at
in order to stimulate fat loss. Okay.
Now at the same time too much of a deficit
will take us out of essentially the amount of nutrition
that we need to be able to recover
and we could use fat losses like the buffering coward,
cause that's essentially what's happening
in a deficit, right?
Is you still have like, all of your cells still need fuel.
You still need energy to be able to move
and do your things, do your workouts, all that stuff.
So in the deficit, what we're doing is
we're filling that deficit with energy from stored fat.
And that is a rate limiting thing at multiple steps
and that will vary between individuals,
but there is simply only a certain amount
of calorie restriction that you can buffer
by utilizing internal fat stores.
And the closer you get to that limit,
the more stressful it becomes on the body,
because how do we mobilize fuel from fat?
Well, we do it with neurotransmitters and stress hormones
and a variety of kinase,
inside the kinase to mobilize those fat tissues, right?
And then we gotta have the ability to take the fat,
those lipids up into the cells that need to be able to use
them and some cells don't use fat very well.
For instance, red blood cells, you know,
and for the brain, for instance, and that's where the body
then has to take the stress response to another level.
Maybe it's got to go into making ketones
or whatever it may be.
So the greater the deficit,
the more our body is going to want to metabolically adapt to
reducing the amount of energy we're expending
and therefore lowering the deficit back down to maintenance
because that's what the goal is.
The body doesn't want to lose that,
it wants to stay at maintenance.
So as soon as we kind of push over into the other direction,
it's very simple.
Like, you know, you can't just eat as much as you want
and gain muscle, you just start gaining fat, right?
And you can't diet as fast,
like as much as you want and just lose fat,
your body will start losing other tissues
and your metabolism will just start flat-lining, right.
And that is by designed to keep you alive.
So we're trying to just like,
we're trying to exist in a trainability range with the
stimulus that we're putting somebody through in training.
We're trying to exist kind of in a similar range when we
figure out what the deficit is that we want somebody
to be on and very similar to trainability and whatnot.
This is like, as somebody is in that deficit longer,
guess what, those subtle adaptations are going to start
closing that window and then, you know what,
we may need to periodize out of that. Right?
So we're going to treat food and training very similar
from a basic first principle standpoint.
So when we look at like a transformation, you know,
timeline or time, right?
So this illustration here,
what I've done with the red line here,
is that represents the deficit threshold.
So basically anytime we would increase the deficit
over that, that's when we're going to start to see
some significant mal adaptation
and the yellow line that's our maintenance, right?
So basically anything below that
would be the opposite of fat loss.
It might actually be no fat gain, now,
or it could be muscle gain, right?
Depending on what you're doing
and obviously how far you cross that line.
Now, what I wanna tell you guys is that like,
so you have this buffering range in there and essentially,
we have this metabolic flexibility
where you might have a maintenance window
where there's a certain range of calories where you are
weight stable and people that essentially,
we'll say, metabolically adapt faster,
tend to have a larger maintenance window,
meaning that as you start putting them on a small deficit,
their body really quickly adjust to that,
and then they don't lose any fat
or you put them on a little bit more calories
the body quickly adjust to that, it is over.
So their range of calories,
where they stay weight stable is larger
and other people it's very different.
And then some people, they, you know,
they might have a fast reaction and then a hard, you know,
swinging the other direction, et cetera.
So that's one of the things where,
as you're working with your clients,
you kind of have to pay attention
to what's going on when you apply these things.
Because in some instances for one person
really small changes might not work because they might
just have like this really big flexibility band.
And for other people, small edit,
small changes might be the thing, they just keep
continuing getting consistent progress
with very small incremental changes.
And so kind of getting an idea of kind of how big
somebody's window is for where they stay weight stable
versus when you push them into a deficit to cause fat loss.
It can be very informative and really help you decide
how you're going to use a, either more linear
or periodization model in terms of energy balance.
Now, if we follow this chart here,
so in this first one here,
we kind of have like this green line in here,
that's kind of representing somewhat of a flux
of periodization in nutrition. Right?
And so the green line is going up,
it's getting closer to the red.
Maybe at that point in time,
somebody saw some drops in performance or whatever.
So they gave them a few more calories,
pushed him back in the other direction
and then all of a sudden we saw the fat loss stall
or whatever, you know, so it's like,
"Okay, we can go back up."
Now basically when we are just
underneath that deficit threshold,
that's when we'll have the highest rate of progress,
but it's also where we have the least room for error.
So basically the more aggressive with your deficit,
the more susceptible you are to over-training, you know,
being impacted by stress or a poor night's sleep,
or, you know, lower than nutrition, quality.
It's basically, you just don't have the ability
to tolerate any outside stresses or inconsistencies
and the training or nutrition.
So you're living dangerously there.
Like say it's just, you know, it's like speeding, right?
It's like, okay, the faster you go,
the faster you're going to get there. Right?
But also the faster you go, the less time you have to react
and the more damaging things are going to be,
if you do wreck, right.
An animal runs out in front of you, like, you know,
the bad things are gonna happen
if you're going 90 miles an hour,
but if you go on 20, then you can stop,
let it go and you keep going on, but you're not
going to get to your destination as fast. Right.
So now I'm not telling you to speed,
and I'm not telling you to drive like a grandma.
I'm telling you to be aware of where you are within this,
so that you can understand where you need to be.
And so if you are speeding,
you can really be watching the road, right.
And you can really be paying attention so that like,
you can almost be proactive if anything happens
or you can be right there waiting for like
what crossing the line, let's periodize out,
whatever we need to do.
And then on the far right here, I have the mal adaptation.
And so that's essentially when we cross and we go above that
deficit threshold, that's where we're going to get
drops in performance, recovery and essentially, you know,
it's going to lower both bars, right?
So that mal adaptation was actually going to cause
that red and yellow line to both shift down,
especially if you're there for a long period of time.
Now this is one of the areas where the,
the research really hasn't filled in the gaps for us. Right.
So there's a lot of research out there on, you know,
doing different types of diets versus, you know,
having the same deficit over a period of time
versus undulating, a greater deficit in the back
of the maintenance and stuff like that.
With the goal of trying to figure out, you know,
how big of a deficit can we go in?
How long can we go before these mal adaptations occur
and can we reverse them
and how long does that take it and whatnot?
And unfortunately there aren't any clear cut answers.
The best like interpretation I can give you
from the research right now is, is that it seems that like
when we're going with an extreme deficit,
is that probably two, like two weeks is about what you
can tolerate before like we're starting to get some,
you know, some mal adaptations that are going
to be harder to, to come out of.
There's some pretty crappy, you know,
I don't want to say crappy research,
but pretty like we'll say depressing results
in some of the research on being able to recover, you know,
your same maintenance level, you know,
calories or your weight neutral level of calories
after being at a deficit for a very long time
and losing a lot of body fat.
And that's one of the reasons where,
when I look at long-term fat loss and you know,
if somebody has got a lot to lose being in a deficit
just continuously and indefinitely may not be ideal.
And this is where, you know,
one of the things that I think that Hass
does a really good job talking about is, is that,
is it actually ethical to put somebody on a deficit,
a diet without doing resistance training
because of how negative the long-term impacts of that
are on their, you know, their BMR,
they're essentially their weight neutral level of calories.
Cause you know, these people diet,
and then all of a sudden they're just, they're in,
they're at a place where what's maintenance for them is not
it's not a sustainable diet at that point in time
for what they would need to stay
and it might not be a nutritive diet, right?
It might be so low in calories that it all of a sudden
becomes an obstacle to get quality nutrition.
So when we're looking at that
and we're looking at how we're doing this,
I tend to lean more towards a periodized model
than I do a linear model for pretty much all cases.
One, I think it's good for, you know,
keeping people like keeping people strong
and performing well and healthy and stuff like that.
You know, but also from the metabolic adaptation process.
So I try to model some of these scenarios for you here.
These are just like not lines and stuff
that I drew to describe the things, right?
So to scale and timeline or whatever,
maybe if a, but just visual concepts so we'll look at those.
My last bullet point on here, sorry, itchy eyeball,
is that as we look at this,
remember fat loss was a game of consistency
that is quickly lost if you get greedy
and that jumping over that deficit threshold, that's,
that's usually where people are getting greedy.
They're trying to lose the fat too fast or training,
whether that be they're training too much
or they're dieting too hard, or a combination of both,
you know, burning the candle at both ends.
That's where, you know, biology is going to come
and hit you in the face and ruin your,
ruin your day by really lowering your maintenance level
and your deficit threshold.
And you're not going to feel good,
not going to be making fast progress.
You're gonna feel like crap and more than likely,
you're going to get discouraged by the plateau.
And you're going to regress and rebound
and actually net greater fat
and lower metabolism than when you started.
So we have to be very, very careful not to get too greedy
when it comes to these things, which is unfortunate
because most people, they want results.
They want them yesterday
without having to do any work or whatever.
That's why, regardless of how shady it is,
you can market basically any garbage to people.
If you promise them that they can get
fast results with minimal effort, right.
And it's like this magic glass of water here, you know,
this is a super water or whatever.
Like, all I gotta do is come up and say that bullshit.
You know, and I'll sell a bunch of super water.