-: Let's look at a more linear approach done appropriately.
So, in this case for long-term fat loss
what I would recommend is that you start
with a very small deficit and then you progress
to a greater deficit over time
trying to stay below that threshold.
Now, the advantage of this is
is that at the beginning, you know of anybody's program
they're gonna have more recomposition type responses
because you take somebody that hasn't been training before
or they haven't been training, you know
in a way that's nutrient participative or,
you know it hasn't been high-frequency
or metabolic or whatever it may be.
And all of a sudden we start doing that,
okay, we can get the energy deficit
at the fat loss level while not being in a huge deficit
from a overall caloric perspective.
So we don't need as big of an energy deficit
to be fat loss, energy deficit
when we first start somebody training
because they're investing all
of that nutrition that they're taking in
into filling up their glycogen levels
and repairing that and all of a sudden,
like, you know, volumizing their tissue
and initial, you know, hypertrophy responses, et cetera.
So we get a lot of that easy recomposition effect early
so there's not as much of a need to be aggressive
with the calorie restriction, okay.
But people do that because recomp is not weight loss.
And so if the main thing somebody is focusing on
is weight loss and not fat loss
you're going to sell that person more.
You're gonna get more buy-in by having a huge
calorie deficit upfront and then losing
a huge amount of intestinal volume
and water, you know, put them on a low carb bootcamp
whatever, they will lose a bunch of weight
but they won't necessarily lose more fat.
You know, a lot of people are under the confusion
that you lose more fat earlier in a program
because you lose more weight earlier in a program.
When in reality, what you'll see
and what we know from a physiological perspective is
our ability to use that for fuel in somebody
that's like untrained, you know
somebody that's been sitting on their couch, it sucks.
Like they can't.
Like the difference between their maintenance
and their deficit is really small
because they don't have the, they don't have
all the adaptations and then a lot of the enzymes
and they're very good at managing the stress hormones.
They're not very good at uptaking the lipids
and so their ability to utilize fat for fuel is low.
Therefore, the amount of deficit
that they can fill by using fat is low.
And so at the beginning, people actually can tolerate less
of a deficit than somebody that's very conditioned.
Somebody that's done systemic training.
There are aerobically fit.
They manage their stress hormones
and they're very sensitive to those hormones
and they can nutrient partition really well and whatnot.
That's the person that can tolerate a clear deficit.
And so you have to keep that in mind
when we're looking at long-term results.
So, I mean, if you wanna be the super water seller guy
then what you do is you bring people in,
you put them on a severe deficit, you cut the carbohydrates
'cause that's gonna get rid of all the water, right.
And then in two weeks somebody is like, Oh, this is awesome.
Like I've lost like eight pounds or 15 pounds
or, oh this works is so great.
There's a psychological component to that
that I won't argue, but there's a physiological component
to that that I'll say, this is bullshit.
You're gonna make this very hard for this person
because all of a sudden they're gonna expect that to last
and it's not, right.
They're gonna crash and you're not gonna be able
to solve that crash by anything other than putting food
back in, right.
And all of a sudden, they're probably gonna,
like you take a lot of stuff away
from people and they're gonna develop a lot of cravings.
They're gonna be like, you know, a lot,
they're gonna have a lot of negative metabolic adaptations.
And so all of a sudden we throw that stuff back in there
to try and like, you know get them back to feeling good,
performing well, et cetera.
And then all of a sudden bad things happen.
They start putting on the body fat
and that they lose motivation, et cetera, not good.
So, you're playing with fire if you try
and front load a heavy deficit.
You are playing the long game if you focus
on recomposition into accelerated usage
or increasing the ascending usage of fat loss
as a person becomes more conditioned to
tolerate a greater deficit over time.
And part of the way that that's gonna happen
is the training programs, you know,
that you are gonna do.
'Cause they're gonna accumulate
these positive adaptations of recovery and fuel utilization
through the training stimulus that you give them, right?
So somebody coming in with no training stimulus
like, they tend to be nutrient partitioning
in the wrong direction, right.
And so when you take the calories away, guess what
the first thing that's gonna get depleted is,
it's gonna be all their lean tissues.
And so this is why like from a person
to say like skinny fat, why I like to throw them
on like an AMPK face, like right at the beginning.
Because even though that may, I mean, usually
if somebody comes in skinny fat, they're more focused
about changing their look rather than changing their weight.
So that helps.
But you get a big physical, almost like visual change
in the way that they look because we just take
the calories that where going this way
and we shift them over this way into lean tissue.
And all of a sudden it's like, okay, cool,
look like we didn't have to starve you
to accomplish that because we have this low hanging fruit
of like just shifting your, the way that you store nutrition
by introducing a training stimulus
that's specifically for that.
And then all of a sudden when they do that, you know
they now have the ability to train harder
and better now than we do attention based training
or whatever the hell the stage may be,
all of a sudden now we're able to get more output
and performance.
We're able to up-regulate the stimulus of those other things
which then allows us to continue on this journey
of accumulating positive adaptations
that are gonna you know, make them more muscle mass
and less fat.
So, when we're looking at this,
the goal of focusing on a linear thing
would be take advantage of the easy progress
that we can get from recomposition
and don't screw the person at the beginning
by being too aggressive with the deficit, okay.
That does come with a negative of
there will be less weight loss in the beginning
which is why there's a bit of client education
that has to happen when you start somebody
on these programs.
So, remember the very first videos of this course
where we talked about, you know, when we're looking
at assessment and that just like the questions
that we ask affect the psychological outcome.
So you, you're essentially laying the playing field here
of how a person's gonna respond to change in scale weight,
change in circumference or whatnot, right.
And so you have, you set those expectations
then you can be assessing and focusing on the right things.
But if the expectation of somebody comes in is like, yeah
I wanna lose 10 pounds in a month or whatnot,
you can choose to say, well, okay, we can do that.
And you know, go the approach that's gonna yield
those results which is not gonna be fat, right.
Or you can say, Hey, like, this is why people do,
you know, these crash diets or whatever.
And usually these people that come
they have tried this before and so if you can just ask
the right questions, they will tell you that
that doesn't work on their own by just sharing
their past experiences and failures
using that approach, right.
And so that's the probably the easiest way
to get them to buy into this other thing is say,
Hey, you've done this before.
I'm sure you've tried, you know, whatever XYZ
calorie reduction, food elimination thing, you know
whatever it be and it, and you know, well
what were the results of that, right?
You know, I mean, you're here today
so obviously it didn't work that great.
So, why don't we tried this other thing
that is gonna make, one, it's gonna be easier.
You're gonna feel better whatnot,
but the scale is not going to change rapidly
at the beginning, but what we will get is consistent results
over time that lasts that you don't have to suffer
for as much, that you're able to maintain
and, you know, you can hold, throw that line
and like you know, or I'm not gonna take all every, you know
bad food or whatever away from you
because likely we're gonna be shifting
into a calorie deficit that's much more manageable.
Which means, you know if you want to go out on Friday nights
or something like that with your spouse
or your kids or whatever that that's probably still gonna be
an option.
You're not gonna be eating like a bird seven days a week.
So, okay.
I need to get off the soap box and move on
'cause I think this is only like the fifth slide.
So just recap in the bullet points.
Take advantage of recomposition in beginning,
allow for the accumulation of the recovery adaptations,
physiology and psychological impacts
by this approach are gonna support adherence
and compliance because consistency is what's being rewarded
not short-term efforts, right?
So drastic deficits like work like starving yourself
really hard, see gives a lot of reward
'cause you see that initial weight drop.
Here, you're trying to get people to be consistent
and do these things.
And then they see consistent results.
So you're trying to get them to do consistent habits
for consistency results rather than ridiculous life changes
for extreme short-term results.
We wanna create a reward system around consistent.
Okay.
So this is a representation of the, you know
the fucked up approach, which is starving people right,
from the beginning.
So you're too aggressively in the beginning,
it's gonna stimulate too much mal adaptation
and the result of this, it's not just
that you're gonna lose less fat like over time.
It's that it creates a lowering and a narrowing
of the distance between the deficit and the threshold.
So if you look at the far left here, you'll notice the gap
between the red and the yellow line is different
on the left than it is the right
and that is by that is on purpose.
That's not bad art skills.
So essentially...
we go into, you can call it "starvation mode."
You can call it metabolic adaptation,
call it metabolic damage.
Like whatever a lot of these words are, you know
are just like, you know, fear tactics or whatever
but there is a degree of accuracy to it
but they're really just, they're metabolic adaptations.
They're mal adaptations in the context of,
you know, pursuing fat loss.
So, you do that aggressive deficit in the beginning
and what that's gonna do is it's gonna cause
metabolic adaptations that are gonna lower your BMI, right?
So you're gonna like, certain things are gonna start
shutting off.
Certain cells are not gonna be running at full speed.
You know, certain organs and tissues are not
gonna be doing their function at the same, right
to lower the overall amount of calories
that you're using at rest.
It's also gonna lower your neat
which is gonna decrease the amount
of energy you're spending throughout the day.
Just doing the normal things that you're doing.
Then, it's also going to decrease the ability
to respond by mobilizing fat and the amount
that you can buffer that with because essentially
you're already kind of in that stressed state
and all of a sudden we're gonna start responding.
It's like you become cortisol resistant
if you're a member back in course two, right?
So it's not like, Oh, I'm insulin resistant.
It's like, well it means essentially cortisol resistant too.
Like I basically, I need more stress hormones.
I need to elevate my heart rate more.
I need to do all these things just to maintain
what little performance that I can now do, right.
And having to do all of that puts more strain
on all of those systems and overall like everything,
every performance measure and cognitive measure
just starts to like kind of go down the window, okay.
And in reality, most people like most people
if I were to draw this line in terms
of what happens in reality is what most people do
is if they overshoot the red line
then they overshoot the yellow line
and then they bounce back into the middle
but now the red and the yellow are less.
And then they repeat that process and then it's less.
Then they repeat that process and then it's less.
And that looks something like this, okay.
So this is kind of like the representation
of you know, dieting, rebounding,
dieting, rebounding, dieting, rebounding.
But you still get the same net trend of essentially
our overall metabolic rate is lowering over time.
Our overall deficit threshold is lowering over time.
Now, the small nuanced difference that you'll typically get
in somebody who does this versus somebody that starves
you know, at the beginning and then tries to, you know
come back to a moderate deficit rather than, you know
overcompensating and the other the direction
is that because they're going through periods of you know,
overfeeding, we may not see the narrowing
between the maintenance and the deficit as much
but they're still both gonna trend
down because we're repeatedly exposing the body
to that like, you know "deprived starvation state".
And that is a stronger stimulus
than a small period of overfeeding, right.
It's easier to get fat than it is to get lean
and that's because, you know, calories,
excess calories are not near as dangerous
in the body, in terms of the body's perspective
as is the lack of calories, right?
Like, I mean you can spend a lot of your years getting fat,
right, a lot of them, okay.
So ton of people have been progressively
getting fatter their whole life, okay.
But you can only spend a certain amount
of time and not enough food before you die.
So from an evolutionary perspective
we have definitely created a, you know
a biological response to lack of nutrition
that is way more exaggerated than that of excess nutrition.
And we definitely respond to lack
of nutrition more drastically as it is,
'cause it is a more harmful thing than we do
any excess nutrition, right.
In terms of excess to nutrition,
basically the only thing we have to do is keep our blood
sugar from getting so high that it, you know kills us.
But outside of that, our body's like, yeah, cool,
we can just store this more fat.
Like it doesn't see anything,
it doesn't know acutely that anything is wrong with that
in terms of the way our physiology is wired.
I mean, obviously I'm talking about the body
like it can think, but in reality, a particular body is just
like our genetic code is essentially an algorithm
of how we respond to our environment, right.
And basically there's not a lot of negative responses
to over consumption until we get to a diseased state, right.
And that's just not something that we have years
of evolution dealing with.
Like we haven't had to deal with excess food
for the majority of the time, you know,
that our DNA has been evolving, you know
and you know, upright creatures.
So, definitely more starvation response
than excess eating response and that's why
if you go back and forth between the two
the net, even if you spend the same amount of time
you get the same amount of over and under,
the net effect is gonna be to down-regulate
the metabolic over time.
So, this is how I recommend you do shit
which is to periodize things and to work on
progressing your deficit and then periodizing
and you don't have to like do the slope down.
It's like, no like I don't reverse diet or,
you know, fuck that shit.
Like as soon as I'm switching phases,
and now I wanna be in a surplus.
I don't like slowly crawl my way there.
It's like, no, we fucking go to a surplus
because that's what's needed for the training stimulus.
This is right here.
This is stimuli based nutrition over time,
that's what it looks like.
So, I'll spend a period of time taking advantage
at the beginning of a program that I'm gonna
get some initial recomposition, et cetera, whatnot.
My performance is gonna be good
and then I'll gradually work that deficit up either
through the calories, coming down, maybe steps going up
whatever it is, combination of all the above and end of one.
And then I will then throw in like, cool,
now we're gonna switch over and we're gonna do a block
of AMPK or something and I'm gonna throw a bunch of carbs
at you and we're gonna do all this stuff,
gonna get your muscles all full.
It's gonna be great, but we're not gonna
stay there long enough to get fat.
So, basically what I'm trying to do is come down
to maintenance or just pass maintenance to the point where
now our goals are performance or hypertrophy orientated,
right, not trying to gain fat here.
Essentially, I'm trying to be in enough of a surplus
to support improve performance and some hypertrophy
and restoration of muscle glycogen levels, et cetera.
So, essentially what I'm hoping to do is when I go into that
surplus is nutrient partition, you know 99% of that surplus
towards lean tissue, right?
And then once I've gotten all of the benefits of being on
a bit of a break from the diet, but also, you know
potentiating some strength and hypertrophy,
then I can switch back to the deficit and we go that route.
But when I switch back to the deficit
I don't do the jump, I do it more gradual, right.
And I do it gradual so that I can keep track
of how the body's responding to that.
And also knowing that as I'm switching
that I'm likely switching training programs
et cetera, and whatnot.
And you know what I wanna do is I wanna progress the deficit
very similar to the rate at which the body is gonna try
and kind of kick back in terms of the adaptations.
And so that I can kind of get an idea of when
all of a sudden I've reached that point
where the body is starting to adapt faster
or more aggressively than I'm willing to progress
the deficit.
And then I periodize out, right?
So I don't want, so 'cause what most people do
is once they start hitting this red, getting close
to this red line and the results come down, what do they do?
They do, you know, they do this.
They go up and across it.
They're like, Oh, let's starve, right.
And then reality, they lose more weight
but it may not be losing more body fat.
And that's because all of a sudden now
they're losing more glycogen, they're losing more water,
they're losing more lean mass.
And so they think that by pushing their deficit
over that threshold, that they've continued fat loss.
When in reality, all they've done is put somebody
to state where the lowering their maintenance metabolism,
they're lowering their tolerance of that, their performance
and all the other shit is gonna drop, right.
And so that's, I mean, basically that's where
we'll make it to our biomarkers and stuff.
You'll know that when you progress the deficit,
if all of a sudden your last progression, you know,
it was like, okay this is, you know,
nothing seemed to change.
Performance was, you know, stayed the same and whatever
and then you progress the deficit again.
And like, yeah, we lost, you know, a couple pounds
but we also, our performance took a hit,
our sleep took a hit or whatever.
It's like, I bet if you were really tracking body fat
accurately you had noticed that if anything
you might be losing body fat at a lower rate
than you were before.
So, the reason I like this method, all right,
we're periodizing moderate deficits with, you know
periods of performance and hypertrophy phases
between those fat losses, fat loss phases.
This improves deficit tolerance and the maintenance calories
through increased muscle and the adaptations that we occur.
It's possible that these lines even move in an upward trend
meaning that the amount of calories
that I can be eating on and losing body fat
will actually go up because I'm actually getting
all these positive adaptations over time.
And the difference may be going up because I'm getting all,
I'm accumulating all these positive adaptations in terms
of how my body uses fuel, nutrients and deals with stress.
This is an investment in long-term progress,
a more aesthetic transformation
because we're obviously gonna be putting
on some muscle mass.
Definitely, you know, shouldn't be losing any muscle mass
and we'll have greater performance
and health over the course of time with this.
But what I can't guarantee you is
that if you do this method, versus if you just
starve yourself and do, you know, a shit load of cardio
that you would lose 20 pounds in the same amount of time.
But my goal for this is not to lose 20 pounds as fast
as possible my goal is to lose fat loss
in the most efficient and effective manner
that is gonna be, you know sustainable
and leave somebody in a spot of feeling good and whatnot.
That's an important question to ask people
that have a transformation goal is like, okay,
would you, when you get lean, would you still be happy
if when you're lean that your energy is low,
your sex drive is low?
Your, you know, you get skin issues, your digestion is poor
you know, itchy butt, whatever the fuck.
A lot of F-bombs when it comes out with the transformation
'cause there's a lot of triggers
and just all the bad information
about transformation training, you know.
And in reality there's bad information about, you know
hypertrophy training too.
It's just like, you know, you don't tend to mess people
up as much during hypertrophy training as you do with
you know, starving people.
Kind of goes back to that thing
in terms of how aggressive we respond to the two things.
But, essentially this is a, I don't wanna say a better goal
'cause at that's my bias.
But I say this is a pursuit of a better goal
because you say, hey, do you just wanna lose weight,
Or do you wanna look better?
Do you wanna feel better?
Do you wanna be stronger?
Do you wanna be more toned?
You know, whatever, you know those, I mean
people are like, Oh, there's no such thing as toned.
I'm like, well, I mean, toned is just, you know
muscle fat to, you know, body fat ratio.
So in a person's mind, toned is something.
It's just people are like, well, it's not a toning exercise.
And I'm like, well, yeah, but done
with the appropriate diet or whatever
does it have a toning effect?
Sure, right.
I mean, do you wanna tell this person like,
screw you go I don't want your money.
You can't use words.
That's dumb, right.
That's basically, I mean, yeah.
We just wanna communicate that this is probably
the goal that people, this is the goal people
are looking for but it's not the goal
that they know they're looking for.
And it's definitely not the approach that they
know they need to take to get there.
So recapping kind of what our goal is on these things,
right?
Your programming is not to stimulate fat loss, right.
The driver of the fat loss is the deficit
especially when we look at over time, right.
Acutely nutrient partitioning driven by training, you know
that can contributes to in fat loss, yes.
But we're talking about over the course of weeks,
months, years, right?
The deficit is the driver of the fat loss, okay.
It's not to undermine the importance of the training,
I'm just saying that we're not literally trying
to train off the fat, okay.
Your job from the program perspective is to
do everything else that minimizes the issues
of being in the deficit, right?
So you're programming in a way that doesn't negatively
impact metabolism.
That's your main goal, right?
It's like don't overtrain them.
We don't want to encourage more mal adaptation
than the deficit alone would do.
We wanna use the training to decrease
the damage of the deficit from a metabolic standpoint,
from a maintaining muscle mass perspective
from a maintaining strength performance perspective, right.
And we wanna keep a positive nutrient partitioning
for metabolic flexibility performance but also aesthetics.
Because it is, if you're somebody in your,
you're in a deficit like everybody that knows
that's like fluctuated between
you know, being full, you know full muscle bellies,
tons of carbs, whatever and then being depleted
knows it like you could be at the same body fat
and look substantially worse flat.
So part of a transformation that utilizes more AMPK
and then more flexibility or not, you know, a carb Nazi
or a fat Nazi, whatever, but use nutrition appropriate
to the stimuli is that people maintain fuller,
stronger muscles and better recovery throughout that.
And that can effect psychologically how somebody feels
throughout the transformation, because they'll look better
and they'll notice the results better.
But if they're going through periods
where they're getting full and deflated
underneath higher body fat, that can really skew
how somebody thinks they're progressing, right.
Just because there's so much shift in volume from water.
Okay.
All right.
So if our goal for training is don't overtrain,
don't screw things up, well, what is it
then in training that fucks up the metabolism?
And it just, gets training and diet, right?
So we're either gonna be in too great of a deficit
or it's too much stress to the recovery.
And these things will be intertwined
because essentially being in the deficit changes
the recovery side of the stress to recovery equation, right?
So just simply being at too low calories
and not try, somebody who's not even exercising
can have mal adaptation.
But being in a more moderate deficit
but then all of a sudden training in a way that, you know
you don't quite have the recovery for it
it's gonna do the same thing or potentially
even worse, right?
So basically we can't exclude the deficit
as being part of the mechanisms for the stress
and recovery equation.
Simply we'd have less food, right,
so less buffered, less nutrition means, you know
it's easier to go past our recoverability.
So one of the mechanisms for this is we get
more nervous system work for the same performance outcome.
And the reason for that is that if the muscle fibers
are underfed you need to recruit more
to get the same performance.
And that's because the amount of tension
that a muscle makes is going to be effected
by both its internal physiology, as well
as its internal geometry and full muscles
have different leverage than deflated muscles.
And there's also a different response,
a different sensitivity to neural stimuli
in muscles that are glycogen full
versus muscles that are depleted.
So basically if we send the same signal to a full muscle
and a depleted muscle, as you will get a more,
like a higher tension contract out response
from the full muscle.
So that means that to move, you know, to do a 20 pound curl
in a underfed arm, you will have to reach out
to stimulating more fibers than you would in a full arm.
Therefore, the amount of neurological work to lift
that 20 pounds has gone up, okay.
If you are loading and coordinating more joints
it's more neurological rep work per rep.
And what do people typically do when
they're doing fat loss training, right?
Like, Oh, we're gonna do, you know, everything's compound
we want more muscles working.
Like what do we, what's a stimulus that we focus on,
systemic stimulus.
Now, if we are, you know, if we're doing
chest supported rows with a hundred pounds
versus unsupported rows with a hundred pounds
we're still only rowing a hundred pounds, right?
And we are expending a little energy
in the tissue that we need to support us
when we remove the chest support.
So there is a little bit more calorie expenditure there
but our goal is not to drive the fat loss with the training.
So the question is, is the increased neurological demand
of doing the non chest supported row
always going to be the best option?
If we are in a systemic phase, obviously we're doing that
for the systemic function, but maybe not for all
of the training that we do in fat loss
because that extra neurological load may not be getting
enough of the local stimulus to justify
that neurological work to do the unsupported version
versus the supported version especially
when you add the above bullet point
that it is already going to take more neurological work
to do it in an under fed state.
If you're using more multi-joint movements
there's also more ability to compensate it.
So it is easier to compensate in a squat
than it is a leg extension because in a leg extension
like you can't adjust your, you can't move your hips back
to get a little bit more glute or low back involved,
like all you can do is the leg extension.
But all of a sudden when I start using multiple joints
and especially if they're open chain motions,
now those very small subtle cheats
can increase the number of reps that I can do, right.
But they also, all of that compensation,
all that opportunity for compensation means
that now these movements are becoming
more neurologic complex especially as I'm getting closer
to fatigue.
So that means I'm doing more reps
that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to do
from a stimulus perspective, but I'm able to do them
but I'm not likely getting as much of the local stimulus
because I'm doing those extra reps via compensation.
And typically, what do we see when people are focusing
on fat loss clients, they think more multi-joint movements,
you know, whatever.
I mean, there's a reason that, you know
the fucking Bosu ball and the power plate
and all that stuff came about.
People thought like, Oh yeah just the more things
that are shaking and flapping the better.
That didn't work out.
Despite the fact that like with, you know,
some of the, you know respiratory drill things
and stuff like that, you see it seems like it's
like this trying to make a resurgence of functional training
under different names, but yeah, just not effective.
(low hum)