#793 - Menno Henselmans - The New Science Of Using Protein To Build Muscle

27:24So why is that so fast? Is that it's just acting so directly on the the adenosine receptors and they they seem to be quite robust at kind of going back to baseline. Yeah, it is a relatively safe drug in that sense compared to say heroin. That's that that's what I want all drugs to be compared to. It's a relatively safe drug dot dot compared to heroin. Yeah, it just it's still easy to abuse but the abuse effects are not nearly as bad as that of the drugs that are commonly banned because people would abuse them. Right, yes. What about the difference between caffeine and pre -workouts? I haven't used pre -workout for quite a while, probably five or six years.

28:13Did for a long time the world of Jack 3D and NOX blow and stuff and then dipped out presumably the technology, whatever that means behind pre -workouts has continued to get... I know there's no Stim pre workouts now. I don't even know what that means. Talk to me, what's the science say about pre workouts for improving performance, that versus caffeine, if you are using a pre workout, what should you look for, et cetera, et cetera? We never advanced past Jack. We peaked, we peaked in 2011. Jack was peak pre workout. Okay, okay, okay. Yeah, Jack was not so safe actually, But caffeine is pretty much as good as it gets.

28:58And fun enough, most comparisons involving caffeine with pre -workouts find that in hydrous caffeine, which is caffeine powder or pills, works a little bit better. It also works a little bit better in at least a few studies than coffee. And it works better in at least some research than pre -workout formulations. It seems that there are some negative interactions there. They're small and if you like your pre -workout, it's fine because in the end it's almost the psychological effect anyway, but There is some negative interaction. It seems between at least caffeine and creatine and Possibly between caffeine and citroline or beta -alonine One of the more Poit popular we work out is that are at least somewhat promising in terms of supplements so By a large I would say just consume what you feel best or what you like best, but You don't have to spend a lot of money on fancy pre workouts.

29:52They're absolutely not essential. In fact, they are pretty much useless for the vast majority of products. So if you like your coffee, if you like your red bull, or if you want the theoretically best just in hydros caffeine, I don't care about the bitterness and I care about my wallet, then you know, just use caffeine powder. You can dose it super accurately. So that is the theoretically optimal solution, I suppose. But yeah, no, we workouts I have very little regard for their efficacy. What about fat burners? Do fat burners work? No, there were a couple reviews which essentially concluded that fat burners don't actually burn fat.

30:36At best, they increase energy expenditure a little bit and maybe decrease your appetite. The best ones are legal though and they are decidedly worse than for example fiber supplements. And even those are not great because of the digestive side effects so you're better getting it from foods. But for example, fiber supplements somewhat reliably result in fat loss because when people supplement fiber, they decrease their appetite, it makes them fuller, they eat less, and therefore they lose fat. Fat burners may be increased energy expenditure a few percent over a few hours until you become on tolerance to them.

31:11And that goes for caffeine and pretty much everything else that works is now illegal like Jack. God dammit. In FDA ruining the party as per usual, isn't it interesting that so many of the things that we've spoken about so far today are to do with satiety that there's this, you know, it's such a, like, principle, such an underlying fundamental principle of, you have a degree of hunger, how much is that going to make you eat? And then what are the foods that you're choosing? How calorie dens are they? How palatable are they? How sick do you get to eating them? I had a conversation with Johann Haribat, isn't your book Magic Pill about ozempic and it It's crazy just how much of modern human weight gain health downstream, health problems, heart disease, stroke, all of that stuff is just food is way easier to over consume because of how palatable it is and way more calorie dense than it was typically and designed.

32:18So and like what pretty much everything that we're doing now is to try and like, oh wait, if we eat more fiber, fiber actually takes up room and real estate in your stomach and that means that you can't take it up with pringles or whatever. But like so much of what we're doing is just basically trying to compensate for this evolutionarily mismatched diet environment. Yes. A good frame of mind that I like to use is that you have a certain amount of appetite units every day and you have to fill those up because realistically speaking, long -term, you're not just going to be hungry every day. Right?

32:54Nobody is six -packed lean and they're like, yeah, I've been hungry for 10 years, bro, but look at these abs, nobody wants that. So in the end, not being hungry, at least up to a certain point, is essentially a long -term requirement to be sustainable and happy. So you want to fill up those appetite units and there are different foods that have a certain number of units that they fill up. So if you have haramau, it fills up very few units, but it has a lot of calories. And then there are other foods that fill up a lot of those units, vegetables in particular for very few calories. And that in itself, or that by and large, is it the puzzle that we have to solve for fat loss?

33:36Like you want to get your protein in, and you want to fill up those appetite units. And I like to have the frame of reference that most meals should have a protein source and a filler. Something that fills you up without having a lot of calories, and you want to get your protein in. Protein also helps itself as a filler, but usually you want something like vegetables, potatoes, depending on preparation, something with fiber and some more volume to fill you up. With that mindset, I think for most individuals, you can have very good fat lost diets that are long -term sustainable without even necessarily tracking your carry intake and weighing every gram of food that you eat.

34:10Mm, yeah, well, I suppose what you're trying to do by weighing the food is to reverse engineer the environment that you would get into if you did what you're talking about in any case. Yes, and it is exceptionally beneficial to count your macros to weigh your foods for at least a few weeks if you've never done it to develop calorie awareness. And it will blow your mind. And when you have that calorie awareness, then eventually when you have created a sustainable meal plan, which is also extremely beneficial, one of the most important predictors of long term diet success, people having a meal plan that they created that they like, which is satiating and satisfying.

34:52And when they have that, then transitioning away from counting is essentially as simple as not doing it anymore. Because when you have a fixed meal plan and you know that what you're eating, then you don't have to track it anymore because you're eating the same things anyway. Now then you can change the portion sizes and the like a little bit. But by and large, when you found that with kind of retracting these foods fill you up without resulting in overeating, then you don't actually have to track anymore. So tracking is a great first step to allow you long term to transition away from tracking because I think most individuals will not want to track their macros over the next decades of their life.

35:27Yeah, I feel like two other areas that you need to pay the price upfront at some point is time blocking or some kind of sort of calendar tracking, Pomodoro technique. I need to learn the physics of how productivity works thing. I think that's important, even if you end up coming full circle around to, I just do what feels good, bro, on each day. But you actually understand what deep work is and you kind of understand that time times intensity equals work done and so on and so forth. Like you need to, what are the constituent parts, kind of? And the other one is, I'm a huge fan of sleep trackers.

36:04If, for nothing else than to redpill you on, hey, you're not getting as much sleep as you thought you were. And it's like like 70 % as much sleep as you thought you were. It's way less. It's the same as you thought you were in a surplus. No, you thought you were in a deficit. No, you're in a huge surplus, like 500 calories off because you forget about that banana that you had and that little bag of chocolate and you got some crisps from the drawer earlier on. But yeah, with sleep, it's exactly the same thing. Well, I was in bed for eight hours. No, you weren't. You were in bed for seven hours, 15.

36:39And all of seven hours, 15. you were asleep for six hours 20. So you've got six hours 20 and you told yourself you got eight. That's just like a sniper looking down the scope of his rifle. It's an adjustment that you need to kind of really only make maybe once every couple of years to just remind yourself of, oh yeah, that thing about, I don't sleep anywhere as much as I thought, oh yeah, that thing about, I eat 500 calories more than my brain tells me that I did. Sleep is another one of those things where we have kind of come full circle with sleep tracking technology Where now we have all these smart watches and a lot of tracking devices and before that we just had gold standard polysomography Which measures your brain waves and a heart rhythm and a lot of different things and that's the gold standard and when you Really look at what the validity of all those devices is then in the end It aligns up pretty well with, do you wake up naturally and do you feel refreshed?

37:37If you wake up naturally and you feel refreshed, you could do this with the Pittsburgh sleep quality index or anything less than formal. Literally, just ask yourself those questions. And if the answer is yes, then your sleep quality is probably good. And if you wake up with an alarm, indeed, after six and a half hours of sleep and you're like, oh my god, no. And you're like, yeah, I had enough sleep. No, you didn't. Yeah, yeah, there's a really great study that was done where they paid people to fall asleep faster and the control group was people who weren't paid to fall asleep and the control group that weren't paid fell asleep more quickly than the group that were Yes Happiness sleep and productivity to an extent are Extremely deceptive areas to optimize because the process of optimization itself the church from attaining the end goal.

38:25Yes Yes, yes, very, there needs to be a name for that, like it's inversely, inversely productive or something like that because it is, it is the harder that you try to achieve these things often the more difficult it is. And in some ways, there's very little the benefits from more cortisol. There's not much stuff where you think, oh yeah, my outcome in X domain would be improved if I was more stressed. and the very act of applying pressure to yourself to achieve the thing induces the stress, which probably makes the achievement of almost anything harder. Definitely. Okay, talk to me, given that we're on sleep, talk to me about the relationship between sleep, fat loss, muscle gain.

39:09Beyond, I want to wake up feeling rested and not like I want to shoot myself in the head. What happens to our bodies based on the amount of sleep that we get? So the traditional kind of bromine set to that, which is also how I used to think about it, is that sleep is somewhat quite low on the hierarchy where we know it's important, but not nearly as important as how many sets of pi -seps curls do I do, and how much protein am I consuming at lunchtime? Right? The reality that hierarchy is completely upside down. Sleep has massive effects on, well, everything, but also fat loss and muscle growth.

39:46So there have been at least four studies to my knowledge that have found very significant effects of sleep restriction in particular on reduced fat loss, reduced muscle growth, reduced strength development, and the effects in multiple of those studies are over 50%. So there was one study where they contrasted, I believe, seven and a half and five and a half hours of sleep and the group with just two hours of sleep deprivation, essentially, lost essentially half the amount of fat and double the amount of muscle. So the effects on your body composition during a fat loss diet, which is how most people or how most of the studies have looked at it, is massive.

40:28It's not on the scale of how many grams of carbs do I have at lunch. It's on the scale of MI even going to the gym. So sleep is right up there with just the big effects like high protein diet, resistance training, decent number total volume or decent total volume of resistance training, sleep is pretty much right up there with the pillars, the fundamentals. It's not something to optimize. It's one of the pillars. It is the thing. Yeah. Wow. Sleeping five hours instead of seven and a half hours reduces fat loss and increases muscle loss by over 50%. So that's in a fat loss phase, presumably the effect is exactly the same.

41:10That doesn't matter whether you're in calorie deficit or calorie surplus. Your muscle... would it reduce muscle gain by... I'm trying to work out what the converse of this would be? I think during a bulking phase, like an energy surplus, the effect would be less. And the most drastic effects are found in a study's where the pathway to last diet. It might be the interaction that sleep deprivation and stress have a very negative interaction effect. Like if you have a certain amount of stress that you experience, you're well rested, you can tolerate it. But when you're also sleep deprived, it has a very negative interaction effect.

41:47This stress interferes further with your sleep quality. And because you are not well rested, you also respond a lot more adversely to the stress. And it's probably the same in this sense. But we don't have a lot of research on that. So that's largely speculative on my part. I would suspect that the effects are insignificant part mediated by diet adherence and no matter how well you try to control it in research, there's always a limit to how people actually follow the programs. Yeah, because someone who sleeps for five or five and a half hours a night are more likely to overeat the next day. They're going to have a preference for salty and sugary foods.

42:23They're going to lean into more highly, their willpower is going to be decreased. Maybe it's because the fact that they're trying to get into the gym and even just like for like, you want five hours sleep versus you want seven and a half hours sleep, what's your training look like? The training's gonna suck. So we don't need to get into the, you know, cortisol sympathetic arousal state of your body throughout the day. It's like, hey, just your training sucks on five hours of sleep. Yeah, if you don't give it maximum effort then full de -optimization in the world is not gonna matter. What about artificial sweetness?

42:57Has anything new come out recently? In my view, artificial sweeteners and low calorie sweeteners in general are by and large, safe and very effective for fat loss. There have been multiple studies where they found that it can even help with diet adherence and at worst they are equal to water. So they don't stimulate blood sugar response, they don't affect your insulin. And this is not just me saying, it's actually pretty much all the big scientific institutions that agree with this, just not the media headlines, which are very keen to take a rat study where they have those that just are the equivalent of consuming like 200 cans of diet code per day.

43:35And then if you do that for the equivalent of a lifetime, then there is an increase in the number of tumors that are found in this group versus the other group. Right? So there have been numerous organizations, the European Union, FDA that have looked at pretty much all of the popular sweeteners, especially aspartame circlose and concluded that they are safe. Got microbiome also in most well -controlled studies, not enough facts. Now, are they 100 % perfectly safe for your whole life, regardless of dosage, no definitely not regardless of dosage, and when you consume them for decades, is their potential for harm?

44:14Sure, it's still something that we have not fully researched, like we don't have randomized control tiles spanning 50 years, but you also have to weigh the pros with the cons. So there are potential negative health effects, maybe, not really in the best controlled research, but at least in animal research with superidosages and stuff. You have to weigh that with the better diet adherence that you might get with the higher satisfaction from your diet, with just the enjoyment of consuming foods that you like to eat more when they are sweeter, with the fact that maybe now you're eating vegetables in Staddleuth, something with a lot more sugar, because you can sweeten the vegetables, and it's not okay for you.

44:57So you have to weigh all of these positives with any potential negatives. And in that sense, I think for most individuals on practical basis, sweeteners are a net positive. If you don't want to use sweeteners, fine. But if it helps you with fat loss, and that in itself is probably going to affect your, then that in itself is probably going to more positively affect your health than any negatives of their consumption. Yes, that if the choice is between high calorie drink, containing a shitload of sugar, and you getting a trace amount of fucking ace K or something, we probably take that. This was the, I found it really interesting takeaway from Johann on that book about ozempic, and he kind of created a, kind of like a taxonomy, or like he's stratified out people into BMI's and said anybody under BMI 2027, he thinks there's no real benefit.

45:53This is largely for aesthetic reasons and there's all of these downstream health risks that may be worrying. 27 to 35 is the gray area in which where he said, you know, it really depends on what you're trying to achieve because you're going to discriminate. It seems more muscle loss than fat loss by using your Zempik, you get your Zempik face, which is this sort of new trend that's going on. said over 35 consult your doctor blah blah blah blah blah, but I think that the risks of ovo's epic seem to be less than the risk of you being a BMI of 37 or something like that. And I think that looking at, you know, this sort of cost benefit analysis, even when it comes to artificial sweeteners, like what, what's the alternative?

46:33If you are someone with a sweet tooth and you need to put something away to satiate that desire on a regular basis, the choice, but I mean, how many, there's like 250 calories, probably 40 grams of sugar in a diet, in a normal Coke, something like that? It's usually like 50 calories per 100 middle -eaters, most soft drink products. Okay, yes, so not far off. What about what how effective are artificial sweeteners at satiating our desire for sweet stuff? because there's an argument to be made that you're conditioning your palate to like sweet things and by having your Zivia during the day you're then You know going to relapse with cheesecake on a nighttime.

47:19Have you is there anything to do with that? There is something there But it's not different between sweeteners and any other sweet food So sweeteners don't hijack any of the systems of your brain or anything like that They can be very sweet of course and in general humans learn to like what they eat. It's funny people think that they don't eat things because they don't like them. The research actually shows that we learn to like the foods we eat. So we like foods because we eat them in part. Of course we also eat food because we like them. But you can actually retrain your brain and even your reward pathways in your brain to like vegetables for example.

47:57And you can see that when you do brain scans with people that have eaten vegetables for a long time, the reward pathways actually light up more in their brain when they're used to vegetables. Now a similar thing can occur with salty food, sweet food, anything. So if you do a lot of sweet foods, you might like sweet food more. And it might increase your level of sweetness you find agreeable, but it's very contact specific. It's limited. And as long as you can satisfy that with your sweeteners, there is not really a problem there. So I don't think that there's anything malicious there in terms of sweeteners having these negative effects.

48:37I can't believe that you suggested somebody putting sweetness on vegetables. That seems like I don't know. I've never even considered it. Who knew that I could just sprinkle some splendor across broccoli and it would taste like it. It's amazing. Broccoli may be nuts, but I add sweetener to almost everything. I put some in my soy sauce. So my god. What is wrong with you? It works super well. If you eat, for example, pasta, work tomato soup. And what is the difference between like a super good high -quality tomato soup and a really average one? It's the level of sweetness by and large. So and I've actually tested this with individuals.

49:13If you give them like canned tomatoes with a little bit of sucre -lose, they'll be like, hmm, that is good. And then you can tell them like, yeah, fresh from Italy, best tomato quality. I doubt many people will tell the difference between higher quality tomato there and naturally sweeter versus cheaper ones with a little bit of sucrose. I didn't realize everybody that comes around to your house for dinner is now going to know that they're being cooked by splendor. You're just secretly lining up splendor in the kitchen and they don't know. Okay, one of the other areas that I've been pretty interested in recently is high protein versus low protein for longevity.

49:50You know, there's a whole bunch of people, many of whom have been on the show, Brian Johnson, Rich Roll, Peter Diamandis, all of whom are concerned about end -door activation and the amount of protein that you're having and how definitively, in your opinion, can the science tell us the outcomes of high protein versus low protein diets when it comes to, to, let's say, health span. I personally not very concerned about that. And again, it's a consideration of pros and cons because we know that there are decisive health benefits of high protein diets, if fighting sarcopenia and reducing diabetes and a lot of positive effects.

50:32So these have to be weighed against any potential negative effect. And I think that the concerns with MTOR and the like are generally overblown. most of the best controlled long -term trials and cross -sectional studies, epidemiological research, they do not find that protein intake has a significant relationship with all -cause mortality, and there are health benefits. So that would suggest that there's also no effect on longevity. The research on MTOR and the like is somewhat concerning in the lab, but we have to weigh that against the tissue -specific effects that we get in real life. So just like muscle tissue, just like you cannot eat your way to the Olympia with more protein, the same is true for enter activation and other tissues.

51:17You can just eat more protein and enlarge your heart, for example. Fortunately, it doesn't work that way. So it's also not the case that just eating more protein, everything's just going to get bigger and you're going to get tumors everywhere you're going to get cancer. So the fact that you get enter activation and muscle tissue, nobody gets muscle cancer. So that's by and large, not a concern. By -set cancer. Yes. That's what everyone's worried about. So in general, I think the rationale, the mechanisms there, there is cause for concern, but the current research does not point towards negative effects.

51:49In the longest randomized control trials, we don't see negative health effects. And in the associative long term research, we don't see effects on all -cause mortality. There was actually also in that study where they looked at protein in the text up to 100 gram and if that still contributes to protein synthesis, they also looked at autophagy and it was not affected actually by high protein attacks. It's also tissue specific. By and large, I think in particular, if protein helps you stay lean, that is going to be worth more than any negative effects of protein attack because we know that if there's one thing that will extend your lifespan, it's probably color restriction which translates into being a staying lean long term.

52:33I think those positive effects will be much more important. On the scales of time, when you say staying lean, how can someone normal, what's the adjudication, the metric that they, I'm staying lean, this I am within a healthy, whatever, what does that mean? At least not overweight by conventional standards. So based on what BMI? Yeah, if you're not doing strength training, then BMI is probably fine. If you have some estimate of your body fat percentage, then you want to be below about 21 % for a man and below 33 % 31 % for women. Just to interject that, everyone that listens to this podcast is jacked, everyone trains.

53:19So given that BMI becomes a more, a yet less useful metric, I suppose, because it can't account for where is this weight being held and muscle is pretty dense, how should someone balance off? Okay, I'm not at 21. So I'm walk around at 17 % body fat or something like that. Is there still a consideration? Would you still have a particular consideration when it comes to BMI? I just the total amount of stress on your system from a holding weight. I don't know how many people are going to be high BMI 17 % at like getting into this round, but there may be some mass monsters listening that would be interested That's a very good question for body fat.

54:03It seems pretty much that lower is better for most health markers up to Uncertain up to the levels where people don't go anyway because it's unsustainable For muscle growth most of the research is only positive. So in that sense you would think bodybuilders are going to be insanely healthy, at least the natural ones, because they're jacked and they're super lean. However, there is something to be said about having very high body mass, putting stress on the heart, there is ventricular hypertrophy, you are lugging around a lot of meat and it does put strain on the tissues, so maybe the engine burns up quicker.

54:36But it also adapts. Like we know with loading of the spine, for example, that power lifters lift loads that entrained individuals would not be able to without basically shattering their whole spine part. And the spine adapts, it can learn to tolerate those loads. And the heart is also very adaptive. And that's the most, that's the driver of the cardiovascular health. So in that sense, I'm also not super concerned, especially not when we're talking about natural ranges. Right. So you're saying that your nati limit will probably cap out the the leanest plus BMI equation that we're trying to come up with here, because let's face it, you're just not going to get that big.

55:18Right, you're not going to be a only Coleman. Right. In one way, I know it's sad for those of us that just want linear growth across our time in terms of lean body mass, but it is nice that there's this kind of like a built -in fail safe that presumably, ancestrally, would have been pretty rare to have tapped. Like, I don't know how many nomadic hunter -gatherers 50 ,000 years ago were dying soon because they were just too jacked and lean. But given that we now have all of this luxury time to go and lift things and put them down in the same place in an air conditioned room, that we still presuming, again, that you stay natural, we still do have this kind of ceiling.

55:59And maybe that is the thing around about that where you go, hmm, like, like until the time I start taking Androgens, I'm probably going to be fine. And this just gain as much muscle as possible, you're probably going to be fine. You don't need to really worry about looking around all of that extra weight. Yes, in particular, because I would again go back to the cost benefit analysis, we know that muscle growth is very effective at lowering blood sugar levels and increasing insulin sensitivity. It's like you have a huge sponge where there could always absorb a lot of blood sugar. So being jacked is actually insanely effective at preventing type 2 diabetes.

56:36It's almost impossible to get type 2 diabetes without a huge genetic propensity if you are lean in jacked. And indeed in research we see that people that lose a lot of fat and build muscle, they can effectively cure or reduce all the symptoms of type 2 diabetes sometimes in a matter of eight weeks. There have been some studies in the beginning. No way. Massive effects. Because again, it's both of those things fat loss and muscle growth are both exceptionally effective at reducing fasting blood sugar levels and improving insulin sensitivity. That is not just a concern for diabetes because, and it's also why diabetes is such a big problem, blotter level, so your average blotter or exposure and your insulin sensitivity are quite strongly associated with your chronic or systemic level of inflammation.

57:20And that intern is associated with pretty much every health predicament there is. So everything that's passed for you is pretty much associated with systemic inflammation, only in causes of death. And because of that positive effect on insulin sensitivity and thereby on reducing your systemic inflammation level, I think that the effects of muscle mass, again, in line with most of the research that we have, are positive up to the nati max. Maybe there is research, you know, we don't have a lot of research on super jack eyes, but I again, sticking with what we know, it's probably positive. That is an area that I'm not really too sure why, but continuous glucose monitors, talk of reducing insulin sensitivity, blood sugar levels, glucose monitoring, all of this stuff.

58:10That's like a new wave, I think, that I wasn't really hearing too much about. I would say the first time I heard about it was Cards backloading, skip loading, carb night, that stuff, because that was the way that you portion off carbs and your instant sensitivity is decreased later in the day, which you know, you can like partition it more effective for some bullshit, I can't remember. But this is now, you know, it's a big deal. You've got like Karen, mother of two and a half golden retrievers wearing a CGM. what is how legit is using that kind of technology to inform us and what should people that are using that take away from it, what's real and what's rubbish?

58:55Well, I think the biggest factor is simply being Jack Dunleet. So all comes back, I love the fact that it just comes back to being Jack Dunleet. That's my favorite thing. Yeah, body composition is simply a huge factor. So just like when we talk about worse sleep ranks on the hierarchy of like factors that influence muscle growth and fat loss, your body composition itself has huge effect on your health This is why we see in research for example to illustrate how effective fat losses for health improvements people that lose fat in research Almost invariably get healthier regardless of diet quality regardless of whether they crashed diet There has even been a case of some professor that did a twinkie diet or something and he just took some multivitamins and ate some twinkies and lost a lot of fat over the course of a year or something and pretty much all his blood work was better despite essentially living on twinkies.

59:49So the effects of being lean and especially if you add B muscular to that are massive. And indeed in research we see with very few exceptions that people that lose fat, they cholesterol levels go down, their blood sugar levels go down, their heart rate goes down, blood pressure can go down, not as consistent as the other factors, but almost any metric you look at as a health biomarker. It improves the leaner you get, and there's not even a very clear limit. Like at some point we know that hormone levels and a ball of hormone levels, they start tanking when you get super lean, but it's even debatable if that is really bad for your health.

1:00:32So to be 5 % body fat, the neurons, whatever. Being leaner probably is better. And realistically, I guess people are probably going to struggle to hold. What's the leanest that you've ever been actually? Probably four or five per cent. Wow. What does that feel like? Crap. It feels like crap. Wow. Yeah, I think maybe the lowest I've ever been, I probably got down to maybe like eight, eight and a half, something like that. And I didn't actually feel that bad day to day, but just the process of getting there to me was so miserable. My body seems to want to sit at maybe like between 12 and 15 and it's just, it's sweet doing that.

1:01:16And I can be training or not, I can be active or not, I can be eating well or not and it kind of just fluctuates around about there. What are the things that you wish when it comes to diet, body composition, and the modalities as well that people are looking at? What are the things that you wish people would pay less attention to? What are the things where people are kind of very unnecessarily manic and focused on that you think, I know this sounds sexy or this is something that you're really bothered about or it's trendy or whatever, but I really don't think that it's worth the effort. A lot of things.

1:01:55I think carbohydrate intake is massively overemphasized. In my latest systematic review of the literature, we found minimal effects of carbohydrate intake on strength training performance. Now if you are a tennis player or a soccer player, it's a whole different ballgame, no pun intended. But if you are just doing strength training, You go to the gym, you lift weights, your carbohydrate intake has minimal effects on your performance. Most of those effects are psychological, there are no CBO effects, and there's even direct research showing that people that believe they need carbs, they respond more positively to carbs, that people that don't have that essentially will constrain.

1:02:35So carbohydrate intake definitely very overrated supplements are massively overrated in general. Brainstraino amino acids it's still super popular like we work out so we talked about most supplements in general are just there to find tuning right at best. Other than that for training I think exercise order is actually something that is it's not negative that people pay a lot of attention to it but the people are wasting a lot of time and they're being needlessly inflexible with their exercise order. Most research finds that you can be quite flexible and you can what I do what I call combo sets.

1:03:11With a lot of exercises that stimulate non -overlapping muscle groups, for example squats, chin -ups, overhead press, you can combine all of those, but you don't have to super -set them. So you can take a minute of rest after squats, then do your chin -ups in the same rack, and then take a minute of rest, reduce some of the weight, then do barbell overhead press in the same rack, and it's super time -effective, and it's just as effective for your gains as doing your set of squat, five minutes rest, set of You're just spending a whole lot more time in the gym. Dude, I can't remember when it was.

1:03:44I think it was probably about six years ago when I saw that every leg extension and hamstring curl in the gym is next to each other. They're like brother and sister, you know, a next door neighbors, every single one of them. And I remember I had this like the sky opened and Moses came down and I realized why the fuck have I not just been using these two? And you actually can superset these two things because you're not cardiovascular, you're just not that drilled. And I honestly don't think that there's been any difference other than I've saved myself 15 minutes a session, every leg workout for the last half decade, just by moving between those two.

1:04:24And that's one of those things where it is kind of like bro science in that this is, look, it's a procedural sort of structural thing that you do when you're training. and you just get into this rhythm of like, oh, okay, like I know that that's, like when you realize that for you because of the articulation of your shoulders that actually overhand pull up so better than underhand chinups and you've always wondered why your forearm hurts after this. And so I just struggle to get into that position or whatever it might be, or you've got neutral and you're like, wow, all my shoulder pain goes away.

1:04:53Just accumulating little bits of personal wisdom like that is that's what training age I think is really beyond the, I have good sort of set point muscle activation neural drives good. But that's like one of the other best things that you compound by getting older in the gym. Specifically about the superset of lacrosse and leg extensions, there there is actually a difference, but it's positive. So it's called an antagonist superset because you are basically training the exact opposite muscle functions. And if you do the lacrosse first, this has been directly researched. You get a better effect.

1:05:30So if you do lacrosse and then leg extensions, They are leg extensions, actually have higher levels of muscle activity. It's a marginal effect, but you also have higher total performance. So you can actually do more reps. And that's probably just more mechanical tension, which should leads to more muscle growth. So you not only do your safe time, you actually increase your performance. That's why they put them next to each other in the gym. One other thing that I've been sort of considering today is we talk about artificial sweeteners and continuous glucose monitors and the timing of your pre -workout shake and whether it's grass fed or whatever.

1:06:07How do people that are super obsessed with the small details of training and diet usually pan out as far as getting fitness results goes? You mean how effective obsession is for the substance? Yeah, like the focusing on the small details of, because a lot of people want to, I want to optimize. I want to see all of the things under a really close -up microscope and I want to get it

1:06:45It's hard to say on average because you would have to disentangle motivation and obsession. So there are certainly a lot of people that are massive over -analysers. They're not going to the gym, but they are worrying about how many grams of carbs to eat, or they're not tracking their calories, but at the same time, or they are tracking their calories, but at the same time still going to McDonald's and always end up overeating. People have just their priorities completely mixed up. That's definitely a real thing. On the other hand, generally, people that are more obsessed are probably also more motivated, and motivation is huge.

1:07:23More motivated people just get better results. for sure. So it probably bends on kind of where you follow the, are you over an analyzer obsessive type or are you just super motivated? Like I want to know every single detail because I will take advantage of every single advantage I can get. Yeah, that's such a good point to say that the type of mentality that someone has that would cause them to be very obsessive and pay attention to the details probably has more upstream effects which means that they are going to be more consistent with their training. They are going to be X, Y, and Z. The problem, if this is a matrix of how obsessive you are versus how much you pay attention to details, the worst one to be in is someone who pays attention to lots of details but isn't obsessive, because that's the person who is going to be bothered about where their continuous glucose monitor is but hasn't trained twice this week.

1:08:14And that's stepping over dollars to pick up cents, so to speak. Talking about motivation to train, What have you come to realize through your own experimentation personally and the literature and stuff like that? How can people keep their motivation to train nice and high? You can keep your motivation to do anything nice and high basically by cultivating intrinsic motivation which means you need relatedness competence and autonomy Those are pretty much the driving forces of both happiness and intrinsic motivation to do anything in life, which means that specifically for training, you need to have a certain degree of freedom to make your own training program, do things the way you like it so that you're not.

1:09:02In some rigid program that you don't understand why it works and you just have to follow it and you don't like the rules, but you know, this is the diet. So that's the autonomy aspect that you want. And if you can combine it with competence that you also know why you're doing what you're doing and you have some basic understanding of human physiology, you can create your own training program, your diet, that is very beneficial. And then you also need some degree of relatedness with the activity. So whether that's being a Jim bro or whether that's just having a strong relatedness with the with being jacked like like, oh, the identity of this kind of, you wear the clothes, like you enjoy wearing gym shark or whatever.

1:09:43Right. Okay. That's interesting. I thought when you said related this, I thought a community of people, but I suppose this would be a part of that. If you're someone who considers your identity to be wrapped up in your fitness and training, you're likely to hang around with people whose identity is also wrapped up in it, which presumably is a positive flywheel. CrossFit does it exceptionally well, cultivate and relate it to training, because it's not just that you go to the gym and you exchange your time and effort for muscle growth. No, you are part of the community. You are also following a certain type of diet.

1:10:15You are part of the tribe. You are not just doing your workouts. You are doing their special workouts. You have a language. You have a way to dress. Yeah. Yeah, that's funny. What was that study posted about talking to yourself, making you stronger? So there are a lot of ways to motivate yourself and most of them are effective, including talking to yourself. So you can do it internally or you can actually do it out loud, depending on what your personal preference is. But if you kind of hide yourself up, then and you tell yourself like, I can do this or you visualize that you are actually doing it, that's also very effective.

1:10:56Those things do actually increase motivation and can help you set that PR or give it maximum effort for your next set, especially exercise like squats, which have a high kind of anxiety component if you want to perform well. So pretty much whatever floats your boat is by conclusion, in terms of getting yourself riled up is effective and can therefore be good to implement. Have you ever applied that motivation formula to other areas of your life wanting to become smarter or wanting to learn something or become more proficient at a hobby or a job or get a partner or anything like that. Have you ever tried to use that same formula effectively in different domains of your life?

1:11:40I'm personally very bad at that. I consider myself a reasonably rational individual, which means I have great difficulty with all of these positive psychology tricks. I always feel like I'm just fooling myself and like it doesn't work. But I know for research that it does work. And it doesn't actually depend that much on your personality. So I mean this difficult spot where I'm not doing things that I know work because I just feel weird doing them.

1:12:14Yeah, there's a level of sort of rationality that you get to where you realize that you've made yourself less effective by being more rational. I mean, you know, like maybe a perfect example of this would be religion that people that are religious, they live longer, they have better life, satisfaction and happiness, they have all of this other stuff. And you know, Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins or someone can come in and go, well, that's stupid, you can't all be right. And we mean that Muhammad flew to the moon on a winged horse or whatever it might be. But then you go, what's the outcome that we're trying to get here?

1:12:48Are we trying to live a effective, happy, fulfilled, flourishing, Arate life? Or are we trying to be truthful and ultimately rational? And really, what is the reason for being truthful and ultimately rational? Presumably, it's to improve the tiny sliver of existence that you've got while you're on this planet. And you kind of like sacrifice the thing that you wanted for this outcome that is supposed to be able to get it, but actually doesn't when you look at it in the cold harsh light of day. Yeah, so I struggle with the same thing with you have with religion. I think you talked about it in your Q &A where you want to read the benefits of religion without actually being religious.

1:13:21And I try to read the benefits of positive psychology without feeling like I'm tricking myself. But it's hard. It's hard. It's off -life. Yeah. Okay. What are the most underrated bodybuilding foods? We've got a panoply of different things that we can throw on our plate. What's the most underrated ones for someone that wants to get jammed? Olives? I am people all the way. Yes, shut up. Olives are just a generally super healthy, quite satiating food with great fat sources. There is actually some research suggesting that the fats in, or some of the phytochemicals in Olives have also anabolic properties for your muscle.

1:14:03but I wouldn't get your hopes up on that being very significant. But it's just a food that you almost never see in fitness circles, but it's super healthy, it has fiber, it's quite satiating, great fat source. And so I put that one up there and other than that, berries probably, berries are also exceptionally satiating for how few calories they have. And you don't tear that much about them. In health circles, yes, if it's the circles less so. and then I would probably list pangassius filet as also very unirrated. What is that? It's a white fish that is actually flavorful. So unlike dilapia or cod or whatever which just tastes like nothing like sea water, pangassius is only marginally more fatty with 3 to 5 % fat or 100 grams or 35 grams for 100 grams and 20 plus ground protein, so super good protein source as most fish.

1:15:02And just much more flavorful. And good types of fat too, like omega -3 fatty acids. So again, all of these things just fall under practical considerations and health things because if a feature macros is largely correct in terms of muscle growth and fat loss that there are no magic muscle building foods and there are no magic fat loss foods is just foods that you like that fit the your diet that are satiating and satisfying for you and are also healthy. What about eggs? Eggs healthy? Eggs are not healthy, but they are also not unhealthy. So eggs in most studies score essentially neutral. They have no relationship with ocosportality in the best research, for example.

1:15:42Effective cholesterol are also super modest, much more modest than you would think based on their cholesterol content. Their fatty acid balance is quite good, especially if they're omega -free eggs or flexi -eat fat eggs, then the ratio is a little bit better between the fatty acids. So generally, a very nutritious food, high protein, decent ratio of fatty acids, but in terms of health, like, are you going to be healthier when you eat them, which is the case for, say, avocado or olives? Like, you can give that to people in a study, and eight weeks later, you can see that their bar and markers are better than they were before.

1:16:15That's not the case for eggs. And some people are a high -profile responder. They might experience a more significant increase in cholesterol levels, in LDL cholesterol levels in particular, or Apple B, which is the better marker than LDL cholesterol. So in that sense, I would say they're definitely wrongfully demonized because they are very nutritious food and it has a lot of utility. But they're not healthy in the sense of health promoting. I would think that mostly as neutral. Okay. What about Red Meat? I'm on the smaller ballpark. Right. The latest meta review of meta reviews found essentially no effects.

1:16:51There's a lot of research on rap meat. It dwarfs the whole exercise science field. It makes me very enviable. Look at research on eggs or rap meat. And I'm like, I wish we had like 10 % of this for exercise science. No, just study after study after study. Unfortunately, most of them are really poor, but still mostly neutral effects. Again, very nutritious food. So it's healthy in the sense of having a lot of good nutrients, a lot of protein, but not healthy in the sense of when I eat this I can see that my blood biomarkers improve in the span of weeks, but also not unhealthy and definitely wrongfully demonized in that sense, especially when you consume it in moderation and it's not a process that needs.

1:17:31How much magic is in liver? Very nutritious, very, very nutritious. So in the sense of nutrient indices, liver scores of the charts on a lot of indices. Not just liver, also kidney, most organ meats score very well. But again, I don't think that you will see objective improvements in your longevity or any health biomarkers, where you consume a lot of it. Unless you were, for example, iron deficient, liver is a particularly convenient and rapid way to correct that deficiency. It's so interesting, man. Looking from the outside is someone that I don't really care about what camp I'm a part of. I've been non -monogamous with my diet approach.

1:18:14And even within my non -monogamy, I'm non -monogamous. I don't even stick to diets all that much. But the level of vehement, tribal adherence and how aggressive people get, have you got What any idea or theory is to why diet is such a, a nutrition is such a battleground for this semi -religious existential war between different tribes? I do. I believe that as a society, we have become less materialistic due to the digitalization of our society. And further increased welfare levels, making it less important whether you were, what you have Prada, I don't even know what they make shoes or bracelets or whatever, but whatever.

1:19:04If you have Gucci or just generic type clothing, that used to be a big driver of socioeconomic status, but these days it's more about what you say because you also don't have to do things anymore because it's mostly online now, so it's just what you post and what it seems like that you're maybe doing in life. So things that signal your identity in some way, which you can display on especially social media are a lot more important indicators of your identity now than they were before because it's less about material goods, it's less about what you actually do, it's more about social media, what you portray.

1:19:37That's why what we are currently, you know, whether you consume Starbucks, now is all about whether they support Israel or not. And just like, it's not so important anymore whether the diet is right for you, whether it's healthy, now it's about, you know, am I a carnivore or am I a vegan because, you know, do you care about the environment and do you care about animal welfare. And these things have suddenly become very intertwined with fitness, making it kind of confusing at first glance that a lot of people are now suddenly extremely invested in how many grams of carbs they eat or whether the diet is ketogenic or not.

1:20:11Whereas before that was simply a utilitarian consideration, like what diet suits my needs for dietary purposes. Suddenly these days it has become a lot more of an identity indicator, which is far more important for our emotional welfare, then what type of... It's the equivalent of for our training, for example, is nobody cares what you use a dumbbell or a barbell for your identity, but maybe we'll get to the point that even that matters. Oh, God. There was a period for a while of free weight versus machine. That was kind of an equivalent, right? Yeah, yeah, but that's niche. Because if you tell that to the average individual on the street there just like you mean yeah exactly yeah but within the niche of strengthening individuals and evidence -based fitness it's like you have the the natural lifters the announced lifters the people that are free weights and people that are strong versus people that just lift for aesthetic purposes there's that but diet is definitely on the older for level these days yeah I think that that's probably a pretty good reason for it that you're you self -brand through your diet.

1:21:21It says something to the world about who you are or what you are or what people should expect of you. I think another element of it, this is my neuroscience example, was your diet is in some way supposed to be upstream from your longevity and by attacking somebody else's diet, what you're basically doing is reminding them of their impending death, that it's death and isleism, to say that going vegan or going keto or going kind of or what are you focusing on protein or whatever muscle -centric medicine, all of these things are I am going to live longer because of this thing that I do and implicit in the not all religions can be right because they contradict each other, not all diets can be right, right, whatever that even means, because they contradict each other and implicit in me saying that my diet is optimal is me saying that your diet is suboptimal and the downstream effect of that is you're going to die sooner.

1:22:19I'm going to still be here. Yeah, that's interesting. There's a lot of psychology about mortality and how that affects a lot of the things we do or our faults about mortality, but I'm not up to date on that literature. Yeah, it's an interesting one. Manohan Solomon's, ladies and gentlemen, I know I've been really looking forward to this for a long time. There's like a million more things that we need to get into, but we can bring this one to land today. Where should people go? They need to follow your Instagram, they need to check out all the other stuff you do. Where should you send them? For your listeners, probably best is my Spotify and YouTube.

1:22:52I'm very active there these days. And yeah, my Instagram is also doing quite well at meno .hencements. And you can also go to my website menoensemals .com. And my newsletter will provide you with like a tour of my most popular contents for those that are new to my contents. How yeah, dude, I appreciate you. Thank you. Likewise. Popsicles, sprinklers, equilveries, talk about refreshing. You know what else is refreshing this summer? A brand new phone with Verizon? Yep. Get a new phone on any plan with select phone trade -in in my plan and lock down a low price for three years on any plan with my plan.

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