Well hello ladies and gents, Robert Sykes, Keto, savage.com
and today I have special guest Eric Helms on the podcast.
Eric is a PhD, he is a WNBF pro bodybuilder.
He is the Science Officer at Team 3 DMJ and he is an amazing,
amazing individual. I get the pleasure the honor of
competing alongside him this past competitive season.
I spoke with him on numerous occasions backstage and at the
judging feedback session, and I just was continually impressed
by his character and overall demeanor.
He is a wealth of knowledge. He's been in the natural
bodybuilding space for quite some time.
He was in it long before I was. I was watching his contents when
I was first getting into the space and I really wanted to
just pick his brain on his reverse diet, or as he calls it,
recovery diet because he and I both competed at Worlds as our
final show. So he and I are both in the same
stage of our recovery journey. So I wanted to kind of pick his
brain and tease out how he structures that, because that is
a topic that does not get enough attention.
We talk a little bit about nutrition, we talk a lot about
nutrition. We talk about body fat, set
points, how to improve one's body fats, how to maintain a
healthy composition, post show, how to make natural bodybuilding
and changing one's composition in its entirety a healthy,
sustainable endeavour. We dive into the science a
little bit. We talk about 3 DMJ, We talk
about all kinds of things. I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoy
this conversation. I'm definitely going to have to
get him back on the show because there's so many additional
things I wanted to pick his brain on that we just simply did
not get the chance to cover. So I have absolutely no doubt
you will take something from this conversation if natural
bodybuilding, changing one's body composition, healthy eating
habits is of any interest to you whatsoever.
So that for the delay, sit back, relax, enjoy the conversation
with Eric Helms and we are live.
Eric Helms. How are you brother?
I'm good, Robert. How you doing man?
I'm good. I'm excited to be chatting with
you man. I had the pleasure of meeting
you in person at the Washington show and I chatted with you bits
at the judges feedback session afterwards.
And I just continue to be impressed by your level of
character every time I see you, man.
Well thank you dude that that's that's really a huge compliment
for you to say that specifically about my character it means a
lot and again just huge congratulations on.
I mean I don't, I wish people could could see the the win you
pulled off because you were up against some very, very stiff
competition and not only did you win a very competitive
lightweight class, but then you win to the overall against a
heavyweights heavyweight and then just a very, very good
middle weight with some really stand out body parts.
And you just brought a conditioning and peak and
hardness that was undeniable and you snatched up both the
potential pro cards man. So well done.
Hey, I appreciate it, man. That show specifically has been
on my radar for quite some time. I competed in that back in 2015
and I got first in my class I believe and then second in the
overall. And then I competed in that that
show in 2017, and I think the same thing happened.
And in 2020, when I had planned on competing, COVID cancelled it
all. So that show's been on my sides
for a while and. That's pretty cool, 'cause there
there's obviously a story behind that show for myself and and
Jeff Albert, who competed in the pro division, that was the, I
would say probably the the, the last series of conversations
that kind of solidified the future of three DMJ forming at
the end of O 9. Jeff and I did multiple shows
together. Berto was my wingman and we did
the NGA California together. We did what was then the cap
city, now the muscle mayhem and then Jeff lost to Moji Alua in
the overall by one point at the mayhem, I had the privilege of
being in that overall being a distant third or fourth, I'm not
even sure emoji and Jeff. And then being in the same
position when we went to the Washington State back when it
was still promoted by Kevin. And yeah, at that at that time,
I think Jeff actually won by one point beating out Luke Ellis,
another you know, very great heavyweight who got his WBF pro
card, not I think the next year in that same show.
So there's been a number of people who've that show has been
like they're, they're Crucible, like Luke Ellis, Jeff as well as
you. And it was pretty cool with Jeff
for us to come back to that show 14 years later and just to see
it thriving so well. And Aaron Orton now stepping in
to do such a good job. And yeah congratulations man.
That's awesome that you were able to to come back and not
only like tick that box but like tick it in stone and just etch
it like you. You definitely put it down I.
Appreciate it man. Well it was, it was cool
competing alongside you and Jeff and I mean you got your pro card
this year as well and I know that's been quite the quite the
journey for you too, man. So it was it was cool to see you
cross that finish line. Yeah, dude, that was a very good
experience for me as well. And I had to do every single
show I had planned to to make that happen.
And I was willing to even, you know, sneak out and try to do
one more show in the States couple weeks before Worlds if I
had to. But yeah, I was able to finally
close the deal and close that chapter after jeez, 14 years of
competing for it and having it as a goal for 17 years in
October at the the WBF Australia show.
So that was a that was a that was a it was a great season for
both of us and it was a privilege to be able to compete
at Worlds in the pro Division. Man.
So. Yeah, 100%.
Yeah. I mean the so how many how many
shows did you do total this season then?
I did a total of five. That's what I did.
Five is five is a lot of shows, man.
It is it. I think I wanna say it's the
most I've ever done. I in O nine, I did 5 shows as
well. And then in 2019 I did four.
And then in 2007, my first season as well as 2011, I just
did two. But yeah, there's a yeah, it's
it's I I I I spaced it out a little bit better this time
because I did those five shows in the span of seven weeks, 8
weeks. So it wasn't like 09 or my first
show was in I wanna say April or May and then my last show was in
September. That was one of the harder
seasons I've ever done. So yeah, I, I, I, I I kind of
picked my spots a little better. I got in shape and then I just
did all the shows that were remaining in the calendar year.
But yeah, you're you're not wrong, man.
I don't know if you ever listened to Iron Culture, but we
had Natalie Hayes on, who won the women's pro bodybuilding and
amateur bodybuilding at them GIF Worlds.
But that was I think the 10th or 11th show she did that season.
She's been competing the whole year since, I wanna say May or
June and just like all over the States, you know?
So yeah, like there are some people out there who make five
shows look like just half their season, but that's that's a rare
breed, man. She's obviously a rare breed.
Yeah, that's wild. I mean, five shows.
That was the most I've ever done in the season, for sure.
And most of mine were like flip flopping from one end of the US
to the other. And I was driving to most of
them with my wife and 15 month old kid.
So we were like going back and forth, staying at Koas and just
total nonsense man. But it was quite the journey.
But yeah, I don't think I'd want to do any more than five shows
by any means. Yeah, dude, I'm trying to think
what I'd prefer to because it's in some ways driving is worse
and better, right? You know, like you you have to
stop to. I mean obviously with a 15 month
old that's a whole nother like you win let's we'll just
establish that if if this is a a who who who had a, you know, a
harder season than you already win just with being a parent.
But but yeah, like the the trip to the States from New Zealand
is you got to think about it 'cause we're like a day ahead.
And depending upon how you go and where you end up going, it's
almost a full day of travel. You know, like it's a 12 hour or
13 hour flight or 14 hour flight depending on whether you're
flying into San Francisco, LA or Houston, or if you fly into New
York, that's like a 16 hour flight, you know?
So yeah, we're kind of not near anything except Australia down
here, but driving across the state, same thing, man.
It's like, you know, that's that's not a short trip by any
means either. And with these threaded glutes,
I don't know about you, but I can't sit down for that long,
even on a cushioned seat, without just getting
uncomfortable. Yeah, nothing's comfortable when
you're this lean for sure. But yeah, it was, it was, it was
quite the season, man. But I'll kind of want to talk
about, you know you mentioned, I want to talk a lot of things
here, but you mentioned that this was 14 years in the making
of getting your pro card. I was at 17 years.
I didn't hear you right there. Yeah, so I did my first INBF
show in 2009. So, like, if we were to talk
about how long have I actually been trying to get on stage to
do it? It's 14 years, but I actually
attended my first INBFWNBF show in Augusta, GA.
I was a test judge in O Six at Rodney Hilaire's show that was
going on there. And that was what I I like,
became fully aware of what natural bodybuilding was and
looked like because I was kind of only aware of what was in the
magazines and the, you know, the NPCIFPB scene.
I'd only started lifting in O4 and I started getting
competitive aspirations in O6 and and like becoming a big fan
of the sport. And then attending that show
meeting Rodney Hilaire starting to follow the I, MB, FW, MB, F
reading natural bodily fitness and magazine for all the old
school people who remember the pre social media era.
And then seeing the overall winner who I would describe him
as like a taller Natty Tom Platts.
He just headed this incredible legs and he was diced.
And mind you in in O Six there was not a lot of people who were
bringing strata glut to the stage.
So he had a look that I did not associate with being drug free.
But he had a size and you know, I knew what you had to do to get
on stage and the testing and the quality of the people.
And I was just like, wow. And it shifted my perspective
entirely. You know, I was thinking about,
well, maybe one day I'll have to consider using PEDs if I wanna
be competitive at that level. Let's see how far I can take it.
And then I just like, you know what?
Now I can draw a line in the sand where my, my competitive
mindset won't push me to do things that I'm maybe I'm
eventually uncomfortable with. Because I know that if I had my
training right and my nutrition right and I couldn't, you know,
reach my competitive aspirations, I would probably
end up doing things that I would rationalize as an enhanced
competitor. That wouldn't be best for my
health, for my longevity, or or my legal status, right?
But like, I don't. I don't think I would have been
striving for a pro card for, you know, depending on how you count
at 14 or, you know, 17 years, if I hadn't had an opportunity to
go right now, I can stay natural as a pathway because it's not
like I haven't been frustrated, you know, since in this time
period I've been in a lot of overalls, I've placed second to
a lot of overall winners. And and like you, I've been
very, very close. So I I think I probably would
have made different decisions with my life if I just hadn't
gone to that show. And I'm really glad that I did.
So yeah, competing for it for 14 years, but inspired to do it and
had that on my, my main list of of competitive aspirations for
for 1617 years. Yeah.
But the beautiful thing is man, you fall into the lifestyle and
then your day-to-day grind is not predicated on whether or not
you get that pro card. I was actually doing a client
call with a joint client I have with Aaron Orton the other day
and a lot of competitors that I talked to, especially first time
competitors, they they put that pro card on this, on this
pedestal, this is ever elusive pro card and it's like that's
what drives their their intent, their motivation.
It's like they just want to do the show to get my pro card.
Now you and I both are pros. Like not a lot changes when you
earn a pro card. Like what you do as a natural
bodybuilder. What wakes you up in the morning
to do what it takes shouldn't be predicated on whether or not you
have a pro card. Like you just simply fall in
love with the lifestyle and the time passes anyways and then
eventually you have enough time in the saddle and you earn that
pro card. But like that should never be
the driving factor, I don't think.
Yeah, I think I I was going to make a joke about the reason I
was one minute late for our podcast as I was getting off the
phone with Nike. And they're we're making the
Helm's shoe now that I'm pro. Yeah, Yeah, but it was actually
just because it wasn't recognizing my headphones.
The absolutely true, even IFBB pros are most of the time not
experiencing a huge shift in their lives, even though they
are potentially getting far more exposure because it's really
only the top people in the sport.
And these days it's you have to be the top in your sport and to
have a large social media following for that to impact
you. But ultimately you like you
said, the lifestyle required to get to that level is the same
that it is required just to do the thing you know.
And then if you happen to have what it takes and the discipline
and all those things and the the talent and and in the years in
the game, you'll get there. But IA 100% agree from a a
motivational perspective. If you're purely focused on an
extrinsic reward, and this is something that I've seen as a
coach, this is something I've experienced personally, and this
is also something that is actually supported by sports
psychology research. Being purely focused on an
extrinsic reward is actually less likely to support you in
its achievement, which is, I think, really ironic.
It's actually the focus on the process rather than the outcome
that seems to more consistently result in better acute
performance of the steps leading up to a goal and eventual
achievement of the goal. We've got a ton of data on
intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, so nothing wrong
with having the goal of getting your pro card, but I always tend
to describe it as like you want this layered cake, and the
biggest part of that cake should be a love of the process.
Like you said, living the lifestyle that you know, this is
who you are to some degree and it's probably attached to, you
know, an identity. You know, this is kind of like
your why at the center of everything.
And then you might have other goals that are a mixture of what
people might think of as intrinsic or extrinsic, like I'm
trying to beat myself. It's still an outcome.
It's not necessarily a process, but it is not requiring you to
achieve something in terms of replacing that is in the hands
of a panel of judges that you know are subjective in a
subjective sport. And it's not related to who
shows up on the day, which is a huge, you know, randomizer in in
bodybuilding. It is just you know, compared to
how you were able to present last time.
And you know from now being 40 and from talking to Jeff and and
my colleagues who are, you know, at the still at the peak of
their their bodybuilding career competitively, but very aware
that they might be at a a twilight phase where they may
not be able to beat the prior version of themselves even that
gets eventually taken away from you like all things in life, you
know, or eventually gonna die. And I think that makes the
moments much more special. And it's important to be focused
on the now. And you know, one of the things
that Jeff has talked about and I've heard other masters
athletes talk about is being the best version of themselves that
they can be. Now, that's all there really is,
is what is happening right now. And it's a luxury.
I've come to see it as I've gotten older, to be able to have
the goal of I'm gonna beat my prior version of myself.
Because eventually all you can do is be your best.
And ultimately, even when you are trying to beat the prior
version of yourself, the only way to do that is to be the best
version of yourself right now and hope that the plan you set
in place and the lifestyle you've been living supports
that. And that's kind of like that
smaller second layer of the cake, maybe the icing.
And then the cherry on top is the extrinsic rewards, the
placing and whether that placing comes with a pro card, et
cetera. Because you don't want to be in
the position where you've done everything right.
And if you had those two lower layers, you know, you were
better than your prior season. You had a really great prep.
And if you were focused on the process, you'd be like, damn it,
yeah, I emptied the tank, I emptied the clip.
I did everything I could. I should be proud of myself.
But you get a placing that you that didn't meet your goal and
you see it as a failure or it makes you feel bad about
yourself. I think that is just that's
honestly, it's toxic, you know, for lack of a better word.
And I think that results in some of the, I'll say, displays of
poor professionalism that we sometimes see in our sport,
which I think you know, you're allowed to have a moment, but
just try not to have your phone in your handle.
You're having it. You know where you're
disappointed with the placing or you don't agree with it or you
just need to get it out of your system cuz damn it, you wanted
to win. Like that's all good.
And I've had those moments too and fortunately I didn't have
them online. But but I think you wanna be
able to at least within days, if maybe not weeks, reflect and go.
I'm proud of what I did because you know, I I either was the
best version of myself that I've ever been that I could have
been, or I ticked every single box given the constraints of my
life and the the randomness that life threw at me.
And I did my my my best, which is all I can do.
Yeah, I think bodybuilding, natural bodybuilding especially,
is a great vehicle to put yourself through those
experiences. Like it's a great metaphor for
life. If you step back and look at me,
this is honestly why I why I do the sport in the 1st place.
Like, if I can know wholeheartedly that I gave the
prep every single thing I could and I didn't hold anything back,
then there is no remorse, regardless of the placing.
Honestly, the most relaxed I am in life when I'm sitting there
backstage waiting for my turn to go on, because at that point
everything's done. Like, I literally just go out
and and execute. But everything has been done up
to that point. And if you can be at total
complete peace for yourself in that moment, then regardless of
what the judges say, regardless of what the other competitors
bring to the table, you have no no say in that.
Like you can be at peace with yourself and what you brought,
and then nobody can take that from you.
Well said. Yeah, I I totally agree.
It's easier said than done, but it sounds like you've got that
mentality down pat. Interesting thing for me.
Yeah. Yeah, it it, it's something you
do have to try at, right? You know, yeah, I'm pretty good
on game day. But I would say the few days
leading up to game day this season particularly because I
really kind of put my cherry on top out there.
You know I let myself feel like I was gonna be a competitor this
season knowing that ultimately yeah, like I I was confident
enough in my intrinsic attachment to the sport that it
is who I am. It is a lifestyle.
All those things that we both share in our mentality that I
I'll be doing this no matter what.
You know I'd be I'd be lifting if there was an apocalypse you
know. And I'd be probably going
through seasons and setting up a timer and and comparing pictures
and posting them on my own wall if I was, you know, and I am
legend kind of Will Smith scenario because it's just what
I do and it's the way I push myself and express myself, you
know, both creatively and in terms of, you know, honing my
blade as as a human, I guess you could say.
But I also do have competitive goals, right?
You know, And when I brought them out to the forefront and I
was like, listen, I'm gonna have the goal to get my pro card this
season and it's something I'm gonna put out there.
I care about it and I'll be disappointed if I don't get it.
I think that's OK so long as you've got that anchor of
intrinsic motivation. But I tell you what the double
edged sword to that was. You know, I would get nervous a
few days out of each one of the shows and I would find myself in
the week of peak week like, oh, there's there's something riding
on this and I want to win. It gave me another little boost
of motivation at times when I'm deep in prep and I'm feeling
really dragged down in the middle of a workout or middle of
trying to get my my 15,000 steps or whatever it was for the day.
And that was great. But you know, sometimes two days
out I'm, you know, I've got work to do.
I've got a, you know, pack. I've got to travel.
I've got to be a present husband, friend, supervisor for
my students or what have you or you know do some administrative
work for for something. And I'm thinking about, you
know, like posing God, you know, like there there was a certain
level of anxiety, slash, apprehension, slash nervousness
that I didn't, I I I didn't surprise me, but I didn't
anticipate it when I brought my competitive goals to the
forefront. So that's going to be something
that I get to work on in the future.
But I do think I'm going to have less of that now competing in
the pro ranks because I kind of feel just privileged to be
there, although I still want to move up the ranks.
It's it's it's a different feeling I think competing as a
pro versus for a pro card until you get to the point where
you're trying to you know win titles and and place in the
podium and things like that. No, I totally.
Agree man, like figuring out, like when you put yourself out
there, there is this, especially when you're, you know, seen as
an expert and an influencer and there's so many eyes on you from
the accountability standpoint. There is that added pressure And
something that I did different with this prep is I had the
primary objective being to become the leanest man alive,
totally independent of the competitions.
The competitions were just kind of in tandem to that goal, and I
think that worked well from a psychological standpoint because
I put that conditioning as the forefront and then the I timed
it such that the competitions just were were there by
happenstance, so to speak. But it may have also been kind
of a detriment because like my last two shows, I was leaner
than I was at the Washington show.
But I I may not have been as filled out and just brought that
fullness because I was on such a quest to get leaner than I was
at the Washington show. So from a psychological
standpoint, I think it worked to my benefit.
But if I'm looking at it strictly from a competitive
standpoint, what it looked like on show day and may have
benefited more by not being, you know, trying to get as lean for
that Leanest Man Live title and just focus more on the
competitions. Yeah, dude, There.
I think there is a point where you're down to, I'll say, as
lean as you were at the Washington because you were
peeled, where even getting leaner, you don't necessarily
look leaner because of what you might have to do.
And the fact that like, you know, bro, like you probably had
like 100 grams of of subcutaneous fat on your body.
Yeah, you know, and. And how much of that can you
lose? What do you have to do to lose
it? And at that point, it's so
spread out, like, can you even see the difference?
Because I don't know if you were the leanest man alive, but you
were absolutely on the Benjamin Schuster, Dirk Emmerich level.
And I think at that point the difference between who looks
leaner comes more down to OK, who got that lean and then who
has the development to show it. You know, So totally.
Yeah. Like I I, I imagine maybe if
your goal was a little different and you could have been more
objective or if you had someone in your corner who was being you
know, objective which is the value of coaching, they would
say, right we've ticked that box let's eat up.
And and you could have potentially looked leaner even
if you put on another 10 grams of of fat, which is a, you know,
the whole eating up into a show kind of thing, which is, which
is really interesting. And I think people don't realize
that. But yeah, dude, you brought the
conditioning, that's for sure. I appreciate it.
Man, I I kind of want to touch on reverse dining because both
you and I ended our season with the you know that world show
which was the 19th of November. Now, both of us are 9 weeks post
show, and I know you do a great job about talking about reverse
dining, and I've listened to a few of your podcasts, I've
listened to a few of the debates.
There's a bunch of controversy around the best protocol around
reverse dining. But honestly, I'm just glad that
people are talking about it because that is one of the
topics that just often times gets left out of the
conversation entirely. And so many people, you know,
fail to reverse properly and they're that's what triggers
eating disorder. That's what triggered eating
disorders for me in the very beginning and kind of led to my
current dietary lifestyle. So that said, post show what
what has been your protocol with you reverse that you're you're
about what, 10 lbs above stage weight right now.
Yeah, I'm actually right now I am in the 8586 kilo range which
is like one 87188 and I was on stage at 79 and a like 175.
So I'm like, yeah, just a little over £10 up, 9 weeks post show.
I'm about the same. Yeah.
You know, and I'm, I would say that's maybe a little more than
half body fat, you know, if we were to try to just kinda
compare of and I've put the videos out there and no one's
giving me pushback on that. So I don't think I'm delusional.
Yeah. So and I do think some of that
is maybe regaining loss muscle tissue.
A lot of that is regaining lean mass that is not necessarily
muscle mass totally, which we'll get into in a moment, some
really kind of physiologically interesting mechanisms of what
quote, UN quote, metabolic adaptation is.
And I do think some of that is actually gaining new muscle
tissue, which is pretty cool and I will take that all day.
I I wouldn't expect it and I I don't expect it as a coach and I
haven't expected in prior seasons.
But I think the unique circumstances where I've been
juggling being a strength athlete and a bodybuilder for
the entirety of my career now, moving purely into bodybuilding
training and doing my recovery well has actually enabled me to
put on some some new tissue, new lean mass I haven't had
previously in this phase, but you know, realistic only
probably a couple pounds. So anyway, the the approach that
we've popularized at 3D Muscle Journey, we've made a very
distinctive, purposeful goal of changing the terminology of
saying reverse diet to recovery diet.
And I'd be lying if it was like a firm hard difference that we
could, you know, write down and many people would describe what
we do as recovery diet as a reverse diet.
And it's not that I'm I I'm a stickler on the terminology and
I'm fine with people calling it whatever they want.
But I think saying recovery diet I think helps people
psychologically understand that it is not just the process of
increasing calories out of the diet and putting some of the
body fat back on. But this is a phase where the
goal is recovery. And sometimes even when you know
you need to put back on body fat and you've accepted that and you
know you need to increase your numbers when it's reversing and
you think of a certain pace and you don't want to go too fast,
you will sometimes be unnecessarily or overly
restrictive because you have some arbitrary quantitative
numbers for your either your macros that you're trying to hit
your calories, your body weight and over a certain period of
time where you're slowing down your recovery.
And I think when we call it a recovery diet and from a
coaching perspective or even a self coach perspective, if
you're thinking of it this way, when you think the goal is
recovery, you can be like you know what, I am on track to gain
weight a little faster than anticipated.
But when I was doing it slower, I couldn't sleep and my libido
was still tanked or I still have a menorrhea.
My my menstrual cycle isn't happening regularly regardless
of what we anticipated might be the right pace so.
So we purposely use the language of the recovery diet because I
think some not all iterations of the reverse diet especially kind
of like the the version one point O.
They had some narratives around them that were much more focused
on the staying lean while eating more food rather than thinking
of this being a time to recover maximally so that we could have
a productive improvement season or offseason or whatever you
wanna call it. Yeah, and a lot of kind of the,
the marketing and sales tactics to be frank around some of the
early reverse dieting were very appealing to the mindset of a
competitor Towards the end of the diet like you, your, your
goal is to be the leanest man alive and that means your entire
focus that just you know gets enhanced by the process of
contest prep was on like well, alright, do I have another line
at the top of my glutes? Like do I have a vein in my
adductor now right? And everyone has that to some
degree and it's challenging to turn that ship around when it
has so much momentum and time behind it to go right now, the
goal is to purposely gain body fat.
It's incredibly and also you're in very hard, very hard.
And also we are super hungry. At the end of contest prep, we
are physiologically starving and the natural response is to be
more food focused, to think about the flavor of a carrot, as
I've said a few times on podcast, which is just a
ridiculous thing to think when you're 20 lbs over stage weight
deep in the offseason and you're like, I don't really want to eat
at all, but it is very different, but it's the reality
at the end. So So when you sell someone, eat
more food, when you love food and stay lean, I think
competitors eat it up. But that is not the goal of this
phase. The goal for someone who is
doing a reverse diet after a season is to as efficiently as
possible recover. So they have as productive as an
offseason as possible. And there is physiological
recovery that needs to happen, and there's also behavioral and
psychological recovery that needs to happen.
So that's the first point I want to make is that I'm going to use
the terminology recovery diet because I think it gets at the
heart of what the actual goal is, and I think it makes it
psychologically more palatable when you're using that the the,
the appropriate terminology. No, I can totally.
Get behind that. I think terminology is
important. I've not.
I've talked about reverse dieting in the same context of
it being primarily focused towards recovery, so I don't
have a negative stigma in my mind towards it.
But I think when it comes to reaching the masses for the
right reasons, calling a recovery, that makes all the
sense in the world, so it's by all means use that terminology.
Perfect. Well said.
Yeah, I I agree, yeah. It's not something I don't like
to ascribe negative connotations to things when people don't mean
it by any means. And so, so yeah, I, I, yeah,
it's not like a a, a finger waving thing.
It's just let's let's think about you know what kind of
messaging and what we're trying to accomplish.
So yeah, the recovery diet, the way we describe it at 3 DMJ is
kind of like what seems to fit most people is that within one
to two months post show we're trying to get people.
This is an outcome basis and I'll talk about the process in a
second. Somewhere between 5 to 10% over
stage weight once their body weights like stabilized and
that's when we say stage weight, we mean you know a more filled
out version not like the lowest body weight you had on you know
some two week out rough dehydrated day where you finally
pooped the day before or whatever it is.
But but yeah, like maybe looking at your, your average weight the
week of peak week or your your stage weight unless you did some
kind of massive like back load or something like that.
So that is a goal like that. That's a reasonably broad range
when you think about it and time frame, but it's also fast.
And what we saw was that when we were trying to do the more
regimented, strict reverse diet on the more extreme end, like,
hey, let's go up 500 calories from the end of Prep, cut your
cardio in half and then we'll just increase, you know, maybe 5
grams of fat, 10 to 25 grams of carbs when your body weight is,
you know, not going up too quickly.
We had like an abysmal success rate.
And people were really starting to lose self efficacy because
they would try to follow it and then they would go off the rails
and it would create this almost binge purge cycle.
You know, this this kind of controlled damn right down,
right, almost bulimic kind of response, not actually purging
in a sense of making themselves vomit.
But, you know, actual technical clinical bulimia does not
require vomiting. It just requires binge purge
cycle. So someone would, quote, UN
quote, below the reverse diet and have this massive blowout
where they're supposed to eat 2800 calories and they get asked
to go out to a restaurant and they go, OK, sure, you know, I
can work in this appetizer and they're at 2500 calories.
And man, that appetizer tastes good.
They're with friends and family. They rationalize for a second.
You know, why am I being so strict with this?
I can make it up tomorrow. The next thing you know, they're
they're at home having eaten 5000 calories and feeling
terrible about themselves and wondering what happened to that
competitor who had so much willpower that they could grind
themselves to the point of being, you know, striated
glutes, you know, and then being recognized and applauded and
seeing success because of their conditioning.
And now they can't stop themselves from having a second
deserted Applebee's. Like, it just makes you feel
like you've lost something. And that's a terrible place to
be. I've been there.
I've, I've coached people through it.
And what I realized was that I shouldn't be coaching people
through this. This is it's it.
I'm setting up competitors for failure.
And when we move to a model where we're saying, hey, you
know, these these quote, UN quote slip UPS are probably just
an indication that you needed to do that.
And instead of 2800 calories, let's have the goal of 3800
calories. You know when you give someone a
very large surplus, you know probably the biggest surplus
that they're gonna have in their their postseason period as they
recover and move into the offseason.
And we tell them explicitly the goal is to put on a a healthy
level of body fat to get you kind of back to your lower
intervention point because that's part of the recovery
process. All of a sudden we started
seeing more like 6070% compliance and the the the
remaining 30 to 40% is it just happened a little faster than
we'd want. But it's much easier to coach
someone and say hey you know you're you're recovering faster
than the goal target was. You're doing great, you know,
because really the only thing we want to avoid is being on either
end of the spectrum of gaining weight so quickly and putting on
so much body fat that you lose your runway for gaining, you
know, and that you find yourself three months post show and you
need to do a cut or a mini cut. That's rough because hey, you're
probably not fully recovered and we can talk about what's going
to dictate recovery, but you're you're, you know psychologically
it's really tough to do a cut that close to the prep.
You feel like a failure and and it's it's just very challenging.
Like I said that ship turns around slowly to look up one day
and be like man, it was not that long ago, I like the way I look
and now I hate it. So you don't want to be there.
You don't want to have a plan that sets you up to essentially
spend your whole offseason in and out of mini cuts to get back
to something that is more reasonable and and productive.
But you also don't want to successfully do an extreme
reverse diet where you're actually holding your own
recovery back and you're spinning your wheels.
And I think that's something that more experienced
competitors, competitors with a little more of a restrictive
kind of restrained eating, you know lifestyle that had that
probably before they even got into physique sport and
competitors which is quite common who might have a history
of disordered eating or even a full blown eating disorder
before they came to the sport that that that can't happen and
I have seen that. So we want to be just between
those two. We don't want to slow down a
recovery and we don't want to blow way past it so that we're
we're, you know, having to cut because both of those
essentially from a performance perspective, just make you have
less time in the offseason to make productive improvements in
your physique. I completely agree and I've kind
of played around with both ends of the spectrum as well.
I've had clients that have played around with both ends of
the spectrum. I want to talk about nuts and
bolts of how you get there in the most efficient manner
possible. But I kind of want to touch on
your personal reverse diet right now from a psychological
standpoint because you and I are both in it and you and I both
have been doing this for quite some time.
And I would, I would venture to say I don't want to put words
into your mouth, but I would venture to say that you nine
weeks post show still have some psychological tension with food
and it's you haven't got it all figured out 100% yet, like you
still struggle with that to some degree.
Is that a fair statement? Yeah, yeah.
I'd say I'm like, nearly back. But like, just last night, for
example, I found myself reaching for a smaller spoon to eat Greek
yogurt. You know, 'cause I wanted to
take more bites and I'm like, all right, I'm not.
I'm not all the way back yet. Have you had?
Some some pretty high days like since the show have you had some
days that were you're just like like I'm looking at my data
right now and just from a very high level, what I tend to do is
I'll try and lean on a bunch of the the habits that I've done
throughout the prep because I feel like when you change course
180° like it just really screws with you psychologically.
So I've still posed. I've still practiced my routine.
I've still tracked all my intake.
I've allowed myself much more flexibility.
But I like to keep some of those habits in place because it just
I'm I'm able to free up my mental bandwidth of what the
prep and the shows looming put on me.
I'm able to maintain those habits, led to my success, but
with so much more mental freedom that I can stay locked in and
productive with everything else in my life while still leaning
on those habits. So what I do is, may I'll
increase my intake on a daily basis, but I'll gradually reduce
what I'm allowing myself on the refeed days and kind of playing
around with the weekly averages based off of how my body's
responding. But I had several, not several.
I probably had four days or so that were 8000 calories.
Seventy 508,000 calories. So a lot of food.
But I was tracking everything. I was tracking my sodium.
I was weighing everything out because I wanted to see how my
body was responding. I was going at CGM when I was
eating those large boluses and I feel like I am able to relate
more with people that are struggling with it for the first
time. But I don't not struggle with
it. Like there's times where I'm
just like, man, I could really eat an extra steak right now,
and sometimes I'll allow myself that.
But I think if you're looking at it objectively and seeing the
numbers, seeing how anybody responding, that for me is
better than to just eat intuitively and have no idea why
my body's doing what it's doing. Yeah, I I think so to answer
your question broadly, yes, I have maintained some structure
and yes I have had some high days, not not that high but I
would say so for example the night of the of world's when I
ended my season we went to Cheesecake Factory and I had
Cheesecake. You know that right there is
like 1500 calories on top of you know the the dinner that I had
that was probably, you know with the the, the skinny Long Island
I see I got probably. Close to 800.
So I I think I, I put down, you know, 2300 calories in one
sitting. Yeah.
However, I think I'd only had 800 calories on the day because
that's kind of the way I roll in the peak weeks is I I load early
and then I clean up nicely and I'm, I'm not eating much on game
day. So I think of the day of the
competition only had about 3000. And then the next day we had Big
Breakfast to do a photo shoot. We had dinner out.
I was probably in the three thousands and then when I
noticed that my recovery was a little too slow based upon the
initial, you know, kind of guesstimates I started with, I
did move to like, hey, let's eat on average 3000 calories, but it
wasn't 3000 calories every day. I probably had a 4000 calorie
day at a Christmas party, but I I think probably the highest
high day I would have had was around 4K.
Yeah, and I'm not a metabolic monster by any means.
You know, my maintenance energy intake when I'm lean is probably
closer to 2000 and 2100 despite being a middle weight.
But yeah, I definitely had those days.
And from a what? What kind of behavior
scaffolding did I maintain? The big ones that I maintain are
tracking step count, weighing in every morning and maintaining
the same eating structure and schedule.
So qualitatively someone who is not, you know, thinking about
the, the calories in the food I'm eating would not notice a
big change in my behavior. You know, they're gonna see a
different choice of the of a fruit that I eat at lunch and a
second fruit. They're gonna see a different
brand of Greek yogurt that I eat before bed that has, you know,
higher fat or higher carbs, right.
And they're gonna see me going to the the same cafes with my
wife where I get breakfast, but there's gonna be different
choices of of of what I get. You know, instead of it being
smoked salmon with eggs on toast, it might be, you know, a
bowl of oatmeal with fruit and some smoked salmon, right.
So the way I live my life is becomes different, you know, and
and instead of dinner being something that is mostly
vegetables in a protein source, it'll be vegetable the protein
source in a carbon fat source. So, but so So for me, I maintain
what we call like the default diet which is more so the the
plug and play options. But what I plug in is gonna have
higher calories, higher carbs, higher higher fat at each meal
and everything else is maintained.
I I didn't take it as far as you with practicing posing but I did
do a a six week post like six weeks recovery mark check in
with Brian. So that was another thing that I
intentionally was like hey Brian Minor one of the three DMJ
coaches. Let's let's continue a coaching
relationship where I'm checking in once a month tracking data
have a spreadsheet. So I kind of have that same
behavior pattern because I was checking in with Berto during
prep as it's kind of like my my overseer my guidance.
And so all of those things absolutely maintain a certain
structure. And I think that helps
tremendously because you when you remove that structure, it is
very easy to rationalize and just to slip up and to have that
turn into something that kind of goes off the rails.
And I think the way you can tell whether or not you're a more
mature competitor, which I think is defined by living the
bodybuilding lifestyle in season and offseason, is how similar
qualitatively, again, not in terms of energy intake or body
fat like on you how similar your offseason and season look from a
behavioral perspective and competitors who are relatively
early in their career. It is a really big deviation
from what they might have been doing prior to getting into
bodybuilding to live the quote UN quote lifestyle.
They do it during prep, but they find it fatigues them, You know,
maybe they don't want to eat those same foods, they don't
want to have that same food structure.
They want to be more flexible with when they train things like
that and and that's OK and it does take time to kind of just
ingrain the habits of being a bodybuilder day in and day out
cuz it is quite an abnormal lifestyle which you know it is
what it is but but once you do it without thinking about it
that is a good sign. So when I have a competitor, and
this is often more common in first or second time competitors
or those who had a maybe a history of being overweight and
the first time they got lean was in the course of contest prep.
When they are feeling like to recover, they need to let go of
the structure. That tells me that we have work
to do in the offseason and they're not quite there yet.
And there's a big risk. You know, those are the people
who tend to like myself. In my first season, I was a
skinny kid who just ate everything And then I started
bodybuilding. And all of a sudden I kind of
locked in all these behaviors that were totally foreign to me
and I hadn't done for my entire life, you know, And then all of
a sudden at 20, I guess I was 23 in my first contest season when
I started it, I'm drastically changing everything because for
me, the offseason bodybuilding was just the seafood diet, you
know? So when I came off of that back
to normal quote UN quote eating, I thought I'd just go back to
the seafood diet. I'm a skinny kid.
It'd be fine. I'm not gonna gain weight.
And I found myself two months post show, 48 lbs up and for the
first time in my life, actually looking in the mirror and going,
I'm over fat. You know, Like I don't this is
not an experience I've had and struggling with not being able
to put down the, you know, the fork.
So that was a a very eye opening experience and probably a good
one that I had because now I I I knew like no one's exempt, not
even the naturally skinny. You know, people who come to the
sport who never had to think about food issues like the sport
will bring it to you if if you didn't already have it.
Yeah, no, I totally. Agree.
I think leaning into those habits that led to the success
in the 1st place like you're doing yourself a disservice if
you deviate from them entirely with with your recovery diet
protocol. What what do you consider the
quote UN quote endeavor like? When does that conclude?
When you reach a point physiologically where your
hormones are stable and your body fat is at your running
average throughout a building phase?
Are you looking at it more from a psychological standpoint?
Like what is the the end marker of that recovery diet?
Great question. And I would say that the true
end of it is when the person has behaviorally got back to a kind
of quote UN quote baseline. And I would say that is gonna be
subjectively determined. It's where they're not
experiencing lethargy, which tends to come into prep.
They're not experiencing signs physiologically of suppressed
hormonal systems. Very easy to check in women, you
know, are you having a regular menstrual cycle in men?
The parallels tend to be are you back to a normal, at least
seemingly normal libido and frequency of morning erections?
I think that that's probably a decent proxy.
Is your sleep normalized if it was disrupted?
Those are things to focus on. Are you seeing performance going
up in the gym? Is your body water, indigestion,
normalized? Those are things that that also
kind of look a little funky, like when you start to gain your
weight initially back, it gets distributed in strange ways.
You retain body water when you're trying to digest, even if
you eat the same foods just in higher volumes, you're gonna see
your GI tract need to adapt. I think you're actually
literally regaining smooth muscle in the in the GI tract
and there's probably changes that are going on in the gut
microbiota based upon what you were feeding it in the offseason
versus in season in the amounts. So when all that stuff is
started to normalize, I I think you you are recovered.
One of the most important signs I think though is the food focus
and you this one kind of comes back gradually and you're you're
looking for like not grabbing that smaller spoon or not caring
about the flavor of a carrot eventually.
But I think it's important to take a step back and discuss
like what are probably the determinants of recovery.
So we have to acknowledge all of them and sometimes we focus on
one to the exclusion of the others.
We get a little too one track in our mind and and the way I see
it is there are three main pieces.
One is actually energy availability.
Are you eating enough relative to your physiological needs
acutely like currently right now, what's your energy intake?
And that somewhat independent of other things can have an impact.
Like if you put someone who is very heavy, like you take a
woman with obesity and you put on a really, really low calorie
diet, you will start to quickly see changes in like luteinizing
hormone. And it's possible that they will
actually start to experience a menorrhea regardless of the fact
their body fat is high and it's only been a short period of time
on the diet. So these are potentially
independent factors, but they do impact one another as well.
So there's just how much energy are you eating relative to your
body's needs and how active you are.
And you can express that as a value to, you know, relative to
lean body mass in calories, you know, after taking away physical
activity, calorie expenditure. And we can see in the
literature, there's even relationships there between
what's called Red's Relative Energy Deficiency Syndrome,
which has massive overlap, what we describe as the consequences
of contest prep, but not entirely because there are other
factors. We're also not only restricting
calories, we're restricting calories to the point where
we're getting very, very, very, very lean.
And there are data and we have probably the most robust model
to explain what happens when you get leaner than your body would
otherwise like you to be is what's called the dual
intervention model. We've probably heard of the set
point or settling point model and where it kind of assumes
there's like this one body fat percentage that your body likes
to defend. But that's not really what we
observe. It's more of a range.
Like most competitors, you talk to them, they'll tell you like
the diet's easy until I get to X body weight, and then it seems
like I have to disproportionately do more
cardio, reduce my calories, and the same process feels harder
because I'm leaner. You know, one anecdotal
experience I have is that when I'm in a higher deficit, when
I'm in higher body fat, it doesn't affect my sleep.
When I'm in a higher deficit on a given day, when I'm lower in
body fat, I'm going to wake up after 4 hours and have to work
to get back to sleep. And that seems to be a very
predictable thing for my body, not everybody.
There's definitely some interaction between energy
availability and body fat. And when we look at kind of just
the range of individuals and we take a look in understanding
evolutionary biology, we see that there's this what's called
a lower intervention point and upper intervention point, and
humans are much better on average at defending against a
lower versus a higher intervention point.
What that means is that yes, some people, if they get high
enough in body fat percentage, you'll see a disproportionate
increase in energy expenditure. Their meat will go up, non
exercise activity, thermogenesis, their RMR will go
up to a greater degree, even relative to their body mass, and
they will get a suppression of appetite.
You know they won't want to eat as much.
So there's this defense of not getting higher in body fat.
Now when you look at other species, like, for example, Gray
animals like mice, they're much better and more consistent at us
than defending against high adiposity levels.
And that makes sense because if you have a fat mouse, what is it
to a predator, it's slow and tasty, right?
Right. You know, you get, you get that
good marbled meat, you know, for all those those, those, those
keto savages out there called, you know, felines, right?
So humans, however, you'll see some people who are very good at
defending against high, high body mass, 'cause, you know, we
are, we are mammals, and we're gonna have some genetic lineage
that's shared with some of the species.
And there was a time where, you know, we had to think about
running up trees and then not getting eaten.
But pretty damn early on in the development of our our our
lineage. We're throwing rocks, we're
throwing sticks, we're getting high ground, we're setting
traps, we're we're hunting in groups.
And we're no longer at threat of predation.
But famine, on the other hand, and starvation absolutely has
been the biggest threat to our species over time, over multiple
ice ages and even not necessarily starvation itself.
But being low enough in body weight and having the associated
negative impacts that makes us more vulnerable to pathogens has
been something that you can look at from an evolutionary biology
perspective. So we're really good at
defending against losing weight. And you can kind of just observe
this by looking at the obesity epidemic.
You know, if we had all these robust systems present in every
single human in in the species, we wouldn't have higher obesity
rates. So people struggle, in fact, to
lose weight and keep it off when there's an abundant food supply.
And we actually see this in other primates.
You know, when you look at captive apes, when you give them
a steady supply of food, they slowly gain body fat and body
weight at almost the same rates as Homo sapiens, which I think
is really interesting. And that's all the way from,
like lemurs all the way up to, like orangutans, like all kinds
of primates. So anyway, for without getting
too far off track here, that's another component is your
individual lower intervention point.
In being below your lower intervention point.
It's gonna keep you in a state of metabolic adaptation, keep
you in a state even when you're eating enough calories, of the
amount of calories you can eat being a little lower than what
they otherwise would have, you're suppressed, if you will.
It's gonna keep you in a state where you're probably not
producing the same number of sex hormones.
It's not gonna be as bad as being on a diet and being lean,
but they are independently factored in there.
So those are two factors. And then another factor I think
is time. Because there is gonna be a lag
time before the increase in body fat and the increase in calories
is going to result in the changes in your body and the
changes in your mind. The psychological and
physiological changes that result in full recovery.
So you can quickly gain body fat and you can restore your your
your calories. But like you and I are
experiencing, even though we're almost nine weeks post worlds,
we're not 100% back. Even though I am what I think at
my or slightly above my lower intervention point and eating a
sufficient amount of calories, from experience I think it's
gonna take me a few more weeks and and the reason I believe
that is also based upon last season in 2019, I kind of did
the upper end of what we consider the recovery diet.
I was competing around same body weight 80 ish kilos and I got to
90 kilos within six weeks versus 85.
So I was 11 lbs heavier. I wouldn't say that was all body
fat and eating a sufficiently higher amount of calories to
achieve that in the same time frame, but I felt pretty
similar. You know, I I don't remember
being more recovered. I remember sometime in November
or December after finishing my season in mid August feeling
like 100% and just kind of looking up.
And we were in New York and I wasn't licking plates, you know,
And I was like, oh, OK, well, if I was in New York, even in
October, this would be, I'd be like, oh wow, this is a great
spot and lots of food, you know. So I think to some degree you
don't want to try to rush the process too much because you
simply can't and it will take time.
You know I I didn't spend 41 weeks in an active contest prep
phase and expect that six weeks would do it.
It's just not it's I don't think it's realistic even from a
behavioral perspective. My whole brain was tilted
towards this one goal of getting as shredded as possible and even
trying to turn around as fast as I can.
I just think it's it's it's setting yourself up with
unreleased unrealistic expectations to think that you
can just turn on a dime like that.
So the markers you're looking for, Yeah, yeah.
So I'm probably repeating myself.
But the markers you're looking for those subjective factors and
then some of those objective factors which I think you can
tell without needing to actually get lab work done.
Like, you know, your sleep quality, menorrhea, you know,
some of the markers in men parallels for for hormonal
status. And then also, are you eating a
reasonable amount of food? You know, so as an example, even
though I have a slightly slower metabolism, quote UN quote, or a
lower energy expenditure you'd predict, I know in the offseason
my maintenance energy intake should be in the mid 2000.
So like I'm currently eating like 2526 hundred calories.
My weight's still going up a little bit and that tells me
that that's weight I probably need to gain.
That's indicative of incomplete recovery.
If 187 LB male training five days a week and getting, you
know, 8000 steps on average per day is gaining weight on 2500
calories, I'm not that much of an outlier, right.
That's indicative of some type of suppression.
So in those cases, that's another thing.
It's like OK, if we set up a reasonable calorie intake based
upon your history and what we know is reasonable for your
activity levels and body mass and we think you're tracking
accurately, which I'm pretty confident I am.
OK. Maybe that's what you need to
gain. So that's kind of the objective
side of it, subjective side of it.
Then you just have to have the the time, the body fat and the
energy intake. And when you focus on any one of
those exclusively, you can get yourself into trouble.
You can think, OK, I've restored my energy intake, why don't I
feel better? Well, maybe you're you're
staying too lean. You just eating at maintenance
isn't going to cut it. That's kind of the old school
reverse diet. Well, I've gained a lot of body
fat, but I'm still hungry. Well, you probably did it
really, really fast. And gaining more body fat isn't
going to help. This is going to take some time,
so maybe we need to slow it down.
Or, you know, it's been a bunch of time.
Why don't I feel better? Well, if you've been eating too
little and if you've not gained enough body fat, So I think you
have to take all three into account.
When it comes to all of that and the ranges, and that's going to
be a little bit different for everyone, what what's your take
on homeostatic set points? You were touching on it there
about that being a window. And one of the commonly held
beliefs is that you can reset that homeostatic set point at
higher or lower levels depending on typically how long you stay
at a given composition. What is the the the science and
the data show on that? The data does not actually
support that unfortunately. It suggests that really within
the two ranges, your upper intervention point and your
lower intervention point, that there's this basically regulated
range if you will, or non regulated range where
physiologically you could be about the same.
But what is gonna dictate whether you're floating closer
to your upper intervention point or your lower intervention point
is largely environmental. And when I say environmental I
mean that in a much broader sense.
That includes your own purposeful changes to your
environment like quote UN quote living the bodybuilding
lifestyle. But most people are a little
more of a hazulty of their environment than bodybuilders.
We as bodybuilders we architect our environment tremendously.
You know all the things we talked about that we're
maintaining that's quite abnormal compared to most of the
members of our species right. So you know athletes they they
they change their environment to get to a certain outcome but
most people and and that this is normal and it would be nice if
they this is all they had to do. But the modern environment has
changed so much that it it leads to this they just live their
lives and someone living their lives in 2024.
Versus 1824 in the same country with the same genetics, they're
gonna have two different body compositions.
And there's actually hints of this and some of the research on
people who are living in more technologically like
oppositional societies. So, so, so Luddites.
That sounds a negative connotation, but you know your
Quakers or your people who are living as agricultural farmers
even in the modern age, people who don't drive cars.
You know, you you can go to these these societies where
they're still living more, more traditional types of of lives
that you would see in the colonial places where they where
they live. So you these, these societies
have been studied in the United States.
You can go to a community and some researchers have, and
there's some studies in the 90s where they would get pedometers
and they would do body composition testing on a whole
bunch of people in these traditional societies.
And the average body fat among men was like 9 to 11% body fat.
And the men were clocking, you know, 20 + 1000 steps per day.
And you see a little bit higher in women, but that you're also
seeing them give birth to like nine children on average, which
is a very different, OK, they're they're, they're they're quote,
UN quote traditional societies. They're also very, very
different. You know, they're they're
religious sects most of the time.
So but anyway, when you look at historical data or there's even
some data that come out of, there's there's there's
Australian actors who work in a hey, we're recreating this, this
historical farming life of the first people from Europe who
settled Australia. And you look at their step
counts and you look at the changes in their behavior and
the fact that they're only eating things that they're
making. And you will see, despite the
fact, despite the fact, this is the interesting thing, once you
get out of looking at the hunter gatherer era, era of humanity
and you start looking at the agricultural era, there's a big
change. You see an increase in food
availability, but you don't see a decrease in activity.
Yeah, it's hard being a hunter gatherer, but it's really hard
also being a farmer. They're they're, they're
comparable number of steps and you're constantly moving and
there's a ton of manual labor in either case.
But you've got butter, you've got dairy, you've got constant
access to meat, you've got grains, you have food
availability. So for example, in some of these
societies, the average energy intake for men is like 3800
calories, but they're 9 to 11% body fat.
However, when you look at hunter gatherer societies, they're
shorter in stature. They are, you know, producing
far less energy expenditures than you'd expect for the
activity levels. Their body mass is lower and
they're consuming fewer calories.
So they're kind of in this constant state of, you know,
basically energy, energy expenditure suppression.
They're they're metabolically down regulated so they can
survive cuz they don't have food available.
But body fat is also low. So I think that's a really
interesting thing when you look at what's going on and to answer
your question, to get all the way back to it, I'm pretty
skeptical at least that you can modify your physiological
intervention points. I do think unfortunately you
might be able to put push up your upper intervention point.
I think that there is some potential mechanistic
explanation for that. You know with with gaining new
fat cells and and just making it easier to regain body fat.
I don't have strong data for that, but I think if there was a
way you could alter your your upper and lower intervention
point, it's much more likely you could your upper.
But I think the majority of what explains differences between
individuals is whether they're closer to their upper or their
lower intervention point based upon their environment.
And that's why you see, for example, in in Asian societies
or agricultural societies, despite having, you know, some
of the same pieces in place, like a high energy intake, for
example, in those traditional societies I was talking about,
you'll see a lower body fat that they're walking around.
And it's not because they've reprogrammed their Physiology.
It's that their behavioral environment and their the foods
they're eating and the activity levels they maintain and the the
palatability of the foods they're eating are much
different to what we're experiencing in in our modern
lives. So from a.
Practical application standpoint.
If somebody is wanting to remove body fats and just maintain a
healthier composition, and they feel like they can do so through
an extensive cut and recovery diet and reset homeostatic set
point, so to speak, what they're likely going to experience in
reality is doing those things, building the habits, forming
that lifestyle, and then in doing so improve their
composition. And then by adhering to that for
a long enough period of time that simply becomes easier than
it was previously. It becomes the new normal, so to
speak. So they're able to maintain that
composition more so as a direct result of their environmental
and behavioural changes than anything that's happening under
the hood, so to speak. Perfect summary exactly.
Couldn't have said it better or more succinctly myself, clearly
because I spent a lot of time saying exactly that.
Now, I like it, man. I think.
I mean, This is why we do. We did.
This is why we love the the lifestyle, because we see like
it. It just bleeds into every aspect
of our life. Like your relationship with your
spouse, your your ability to perform in business as a coach.
Like all of these things benefit from just the habits ingrained
in us as a result of bodybuilding, and that is so
much more than a pro card that is so much more than a a body
fat scan or caliper could dictate.
I mean, that's just who we are to the core, and we can't help
but love it. Absolutely.
Yeah, I totally agree. And yeah, that's that's
something that I think it's missed out a lot on.
I think social media really emphasizes the look of
bodybuilders. But I think I like to say
instead of the aesthetics, it is the aesthetic ASCETIC, the monk
like existence. You learn to live and then start
to appreciate and love and habituate.
That almost frees you up to operate in our modern world and
be more effective. You know you you start to look
like the outlier. Why is it that they are not you
know, like I'm 40 and all my friends who are 40 who are you
know, not participating in sport or some type of regular
activity. I look younger than them and
they ask I'm the guy that asked for advice and and I I'm the
person who they're like wow, like you have so much discipline
and I go like you know I did have discipline at one point but
I don't have to exert discipline on a day-to-day basis now
because these this is just how I live and that's that's a hard
thing for people to get and it's a hard thing.
I mean obviously we both talked about how we still struggle with
it and contest prep. Is that purposeful?
Like let me throw, you know, let me throw a wave at this, this,
this boat and see if I if, if I can regain my stability.
And I think that is why the recovery phase is so challenging
for for even bodybuilders who have this ingrained healthy
lifestyle is because it's a big difference between me walking
around it in the high one 80s, low one 90s and looking, you
know, beach lean and just seemingly effortlessly
maintaining that versus going from what would be considered a
lean physique to losing. Oh let me let me go ahead and
lose like 15 to 20 lbs of body fat and and then see if I can
make it you know so so yeah it it is it is absolutely a a
constant forced decision every time you compete to to to
reingrain the behaviors and re establish your why and and and
recommit to the lifestyle and transition in and out of you
know these these slightly more normal phases that to the
average person still look quite abnormal.
And yeah, I think, I think it makes you a more resilient
person if it's if it's something you can really habituate to
100%. Post recovery diet, when you are
in a slight surplus and prioritizing, you know, building
more link tissue, are you taking as a regimented approach to
tracking your intake? Or are you pretty much just, you
know, maybe checking in from time to time, ensuring that
you're eating enough total calories, enough protein, and
then implementing progressive overload?
Great question. Yeah, I I trend more towards
outcomes versus the variables the deeper I get into the
offseason. So what I mean by that is like
right now I'm weighing in daily, you know, I'm, I've got my step
count tracker on my on my wrist and I actually have a calorie
target. An average calorie target
doesn't mean it's not like I can't like right now like I
said, I'm targeting 25 to 2600. If I think yesterday I probably
had 2200, so today I'm probably gonna have more like 2700 and
that's that's totally fine, right.
I'm not having like 1800 and then you know 3200.
But I'm staying within some kind of reasonable range, maybe plus
or minus, you know, 10% on the calorie target or so.
But that becomes more of AI stopped tracking calories later
unless my data, my outcome data is telling me I probably should.
So what does that mean? So I have a A target, you know,
like I have a rate of weight gain and upper end weight that I
associate with a certain body composition.
Of course if I'm looking awesome and I'm heavier than I thought I
would be great. That means I'd probably put on
some lean tissue. But essentially I have kind of a
cap on how much body fat and what body weight relative to my
stage weight I'm gonna allow myself to get up to before it
triggers that eventual mini cut. You know, that comes with kind
of the end of the runway of a gaining phase.
And once I'm out of the period where I would consider me still
recovering, energy intake is maybe not tracked if a body
weight is. And I'm going to start tracking
my scale weight the minimal number of times that I think I
need to get a realistic average, so maybe three times a week.
And I just have a spreadsheet that calculates an average.
So I'm basically looking at the output of the equation instead
of, you know, energy intake minus expenditure equals, you
know, net deficit or surplus which will result in the change
in body mass. I'm just looking at body mass
and then allowing myself to auto regulate based upon that.
Oh, I'm I'm starting to plateau. OK, I need to, I need to modify
things and I start to focus more on internal cues.
So I find that the heavier and heavier I get, the more my
weight loss will slow down and the more satiated I feel.
So for example, if I actually get over 200 lbs, if I am just
satisfied after meals, I'm probably in a slight deficit.
But when I'm under 190 like I am now, if I am just satisfied
after meals, I might be in a slight surplus, right?
And if I'm eating at maintenance, I might feel just a
little hungry, like I could eat more.
You know, like you said, I could have a second steak, right?
So during the recovery phase, I'm weighing in daily.
Not so much that I need that data to get an accurate view of
my scale, weight or it's change, but I find it's good reinforcing
behavior for monitoring that keeps me on track.
It's just like you doing your posing.
So I will probably stop checking my body weight daily when I'm A
not gaining as quickly and B, don't feel that I need that
accountability because right now, when I see my scale weight
tick up more than it should, it creates A manageable level of
anxiety. You know, because I know I'm
supposed to be gaining weight. I know I still need to recover
based upon how I feel, but at the same time I am, I don't need
to take that any faster than I need to cuz there was that time
component that I talked about. So where I am currently is
weighing in daily, having a calorie target and having
somebody weight goals, but those are proxy proxies for how I
feel. So right now I'm a little ahead
of pace than what we initially anticipated for my recovery.
But we're talking about like a kilo, not much nearly fully
recovered body weight is starting to stabilize.
So I'd suspect maybe by February I'm gonna slow down the number
of weigh insurance that I do, just maybe do three per week and
I will shift towards maybe not having a calorie intake target.
But just trying to see my my average body weight, my running
average and my two week average slowly tick up.
We're talking the goal is to gain roughly 100 grams per month
because that'll kind of get me to where I want to be, which is
is roughly a pound a month. It's it's slow weight gain.
So and and that then becomes an outcome goal rather than me
tracking every little metric that gets to it.
I'll still keep tracking steps because I got a Fitbit and
that's easy and it's also good for health.
But then I just really focusing on tracking my training.
That's the only thing that doesn't change is I am tracking
Rep sets, RPE load, and looking at that over time.
Because if I'm not making progress in the gym, at least on
some kind of time scale, then then something needs to change
because I'm potentially not inducing enough overload to to
hopefully put on muscle. Are you using?
A. An app or anything or just a
spreadsheet for tracking your training metrics.
Bit of both. I used Boot Camp, which is an
app I I really like. Fully transparent.
I am an advisor on the app, but I'm only an advisor on it
because I like it. I used to use Gravitas, who I
also have been an advisor for, but those are two great training
trackers where you can look at personal data and you can look
at your volume over time, past PR's, your historical records,
and associations between that and changes in strength, which
is great, and how much volume you've done for and for
different muscle groups. But and you can track things
like RPE. But anyway, I use Boot Camp to
track when I'm in the gym, and then I transfer that to a Google
spreadsheet, which is so Brian can see it and that I can look
at a little, you know, more more intuitively.
And I've got my body weights on a separate sheet, so I do both.
Gotcha. Yeah, I'm I've always trained
pretty intuitively, like I know kind of what my markers are and
I'm I'm sure to increase those. But this will be the first year
I really dove into tracking all of my training metrics without
fail, like I do my nutrition. So I'm really kind of curious to
see how that impacts things going forward.
I find it keeps me honest and I also like it because it allows
me. As you know, it's an advanced
lifter like we used to have the mindset of like each session I'm
gonna find some way to improve. I'll add a Rep here or I'll do
something. And it's not necessarily always
realistic to progress each time you repeat an exercise or a
session. But what I do like to do is
shift between different Rep ranges and find ways to do
something I haven't done before. Like, let's say I'm I've got an
exercise which I'm currently training in the six to 10 Rep
range, and I go into a session. I'm just not feeling good for
lifting. Heavy on that.
And I go, you know, well, what's my best 20 Rep set?
And since I haven't done that in a while, maybe three months ago,
and I have been accumulating little bits of progress, I can
look through my tracker and I have good memory, but not that
good a memory. I'm not gonna remember that nine
months ago my my 20 Rep Max on you know bicycle was like 15
kilos or something like that. And I I can see if I can try to
beat that and then I can have a run at a higher Rep PR for a
while across four sets or something like that.
And then when I'm really burnt out on on the burn, essentially
I'll jump back down to 6 to 8. I don't always do it like that,
but it gives me more options. It essentially gives me like a a
a better memory and it puts more opportunities on the table for
me to get that like a little endorphin kick of like I'm
making progress. And it feels a little more like
when I was earlier in my lifting career and I could make very
clear progress, you know, adding 5 lbs week to week or adding a
Rep you know something like that.
So I really enjoy it. And when you combine that with
kind of like an auto regulated progression model use what's
called dynamic double progression and then you know
you can I I I'm a little more motivated going into each
session because I'm gonna find a way on at least one exercise to
to move move the needle up a little bit.
And right now obviously during the recovery phase it's going so
well that I actually am making progress more like an
intermediate which is which is just I I love it, I I'm, I'm
very motivated going into every session, but I think the log
book can help with that as well it is pretty.
Exciting when you have that influx of energy coming in and
you just feel on top of the world post show, he can just go
kill the training sessions, but you've still got all that
vascularity and definition that you brought to the stage.
And I just you feel like an animal in the gym?
Absolutely. Yeah, I'm still, I am.
I've probably got another 3-4, five pounds that I can gain
before I stop getting like, oh shit, visual feedback, you know?
And I am planning to stay a little leaner this offseason, or
at least experiment with it that I have in previous seasons.
Just based upon how well I preserved strength and how I
felt in the course of pacing This prep really well.
And all the signs are indicating that I have probably just been
trying to get too heavy and you know, you've been in the game a
while, just like I have. And early on in the mid 2000s,
the messaging we got was just like, you know, eat big to get
big. There wasn't a lot of delineated
information for natural athletes.
And you know, you tell someone and they see you and you're 6
foot and you got a narrower frame and they're like, yeah,
well, you know, even as a drug free athlete, I expect you to be
220 lbs on stage at some point. And now I know that that's just
not realistic. You know, there's maybe some
world out there where I'm able to get up to like 185 on stage,
but that's still a far cry from even 200, let alone 220.
So I was consistently getting a lot heavier than I think my,
what was was benefiting me And just seeing like pictures of
myself as a teenager walking around with with abs and
probably at, you know, 10 percent, 12% body fat.
Naturally, I'm starting to reassess whether I was even
benefiting from getting that heavy.
And I'm experimenting with having a leaner offseason, which
I I do think motivationally does help.
Yeah, you know, having just having bicep feints, man.
It just makes training much more more font, so there's definitely
a point of. Diminishing returns with putting
on body fat for the sake of building maximum amounts of lean
tissue. I mean, I used to do the same
thing. I got up to 230 lbs, my first
legitimate building phase, and I'm only 5, seven and a half.
So like, that was not a good look for me.
That's huge. Bro, yeah, I was.
I was a beefcake. But The thing is, like, even if
you put on more lean tissue, which one could argue if you are
or not, yeah, you've got different leverage points.
You could probably lift more weight, but you have to diet so
much more aggressively if you're trying to maintain some
reasonable length of prep time and then you risk losing any of
that added lean tissue in that more aggressive dieting period.
So at the end of the day when you step on stage, I don't think
there's any benefit plus there's certainly not as much of AA
benefit from a health standpoint, just overall
enjoyability and longevity standpoint by getting that heavy
I totally. Agree.
And and ultimately the proofs in the pudding, I have just never
seen it work out the way we ambitiously wanted to as young
competitors. At least in the natural scene
where you go, all right, you know, I competed at 160 and my
off scene I was 180. So let me push it up to 190 and
then I'm gonna, you know, get down to 170.
It's like more like you push up to 190 and you get down to like
161. Yeah, you know, and then and
then the next season and then that's like your second season.
Like my stage weight, it increased from 2011 to 2019.
But that was an 8 year period of me being in a surplus, you know,
or at least in maintenance. My stage weight in 2023 versus
2019 was almost identical. It functionally was identical.
But I then the individual changes I made were targeted,
you know and they're in muscle groups that you know having
slightly bigger medial delts is really not going to shift your
stage weight very much or like upper or lower lat or something
like that. So IA 100% agree.
I think it is the presence of a surplus and and the absence of a
deficit and being above your lower intervention point.
Those are the main boxes to tick and then you just want to give
yourself as much time in that state as possible.
So I think gaining too quickly it essentially gives you a
marginal benefit for losing a lot of time and it ends up being
kind of a tortoise. First, the hare scenario.
And just like you said, you can carry more lean body mass at a
higher body fat, but you can't carry more lean body mass once
you die it down And even and some of that is also artifact of
DEXA scans, like it's not actually an artifact, it's body
composition testing. We actually have data that
there's obligatory lean mass losses when you lose adipose
tissue cuz fat mass is not entirely composed of fat of
triglyceride. There is some lean tissue there
and when you gain fat and when you lose fat, there's a small
proportion of it that is lean mass.
And like you said, you know, leverage, I think leverage is
kind of a catch all term. Someone really pinned me down
and asked me what that was and say, OK, well it's changes in
range of motion and it's your ability to brace against load
with different exercises and and you know, things like that
rather than actually a true quote UN quote physics leverage,
right. But there is a reason we have
weight classes in in powerlifting.
Yeah, the majority of it is yes, you're probably carrying more
lean tissue at higher body masses.
That is contractile tissue or connective tissue or scalable
mass. I do think that is something
that actually happens is when you're walking around at 5-7 and
230 lbs, you're probably carrying more bone mass because
that constant weight on your scalable system is going to
increase bone density to some degree, which is probably gonna
allow you to move more weight. And I I would say this because
we know the inverse is true, that when you look at studies on
astronauts, when they are out of a gravity well, they start to
quickly lose it. And there is something to be
said for a constant higher tension on a given tissue.
You're going to see it. It's not the same as the
stepping in the gym for an hour four days a week or five days a
week. I don't think you can quite
replicate being 230 lbs and walking around day-to-day living
your life 24/7 for months with, you know, lifting as heavy as
you can in the gym. So I wouldn't be surprised if
you know the Robert Sykes at 230 lbs have higher bone mineral
density in addition to having just more lean mass in your
adipose tissue to where you could move heavier weights and
and lift heavier loads and carry some more muscle.
But you you just can't replicate that.
Unless maybe you're going to do the the weighted vest 24/7
thing, which sounds awful to me. Yeah, does not sound.
Pleasant. I've.
Got a bit of a selfless question for you Sir.
So you've been in space for quite some time.
I mean, I remember watching whiteboard videos of you long
time ago and you have been a voice of reason.
You are very well spoken and you are incredibly knowledgeable.
I have made it my point as of late since I've adopted this
ketogenic way of eating and lifestyle to offer that as an
outlook for people that want to compete at a high level and
simply do better with that format of eating.
I don't ever want to come across as dogmatic when it comes to
nutrition. I mean, people obviously get
lean with a variety of diets and I got lean.
It was very competitive when I was eating carbohydrates.
Having not consumed carbohydrates now for eight
years and still have a love for bodybuilding, I've wanted to
kind of be a voice of reason for people that resonate more with
that lifestyle. What is your take on not say
what I've personally accomplished, but that could be
folded into it, but just natural bodybuilding from a ketogenic
perspective? Like, there's been a lot of
pushback from people in the bodybuilding space towards me
for wanting to do this in the complete absence of
carbohydrates. And I've always kind of been
like a let me show you what I can do as opposed to tell you
kind of person. So I felt like this prep season
illustrated that quite well, but I'd love to get your take on
that, just with your background and your knowledge and
experience in the sport and in nutrition in general.
Yeah, there's some interesting stuff there for sure.
I think the first thing is that anecdotes I think are something
that we don't give enough credit to in any time.
People kind of step into the quote UN quote evidence based
space. And that's even true of
scientists, cuz we have definite tilt towards I want verifiable
data. But the one thing that anecdotes
will tell you is whether or not for a given person, population
or kind of phenotype or genotype if you will, whether something
is required for success or whether it is it is a sufficient
barrier to success. And then when you get even more
robust anecdotes, like in your case, we can look back on your
prior preps with carbohydrates and without and you can see, oh,
did he improve? Did he look better or worse, you
know, or or, you know, maybe he would have improved anyway, but
if it was that big of a barrier to him being better, he wouldn't
be able to get better. But I would say you, you would
probably say that your physique now in 2023 on stage presented
better than eight years ago when you weren't eating
carbohydrates, right? Yeah, 100%.
So you've been able to improve your performance in a sport
while being ketogenic for eight years.
So what we know from that that anecdote is that the key
determinant of your success was not carbohydrate intake and we
also know that a a a potential barrier to your success was not
the presence of carbs or not. And I think that's really
useful. That's not to say that there
aren't going to be some people where that's not the case, but
we absolutely know that there are individuals like yourself to
where carbohydrates are not going to be required for high
level success in bodybuilding and or even improvement.
And I think that's important and that's a really, really useful
thing. Just to know purely from not
even looking at the Physiology or the research or the science
and be aware of that. I think another perspective that
I have as I've gotten more into the history and sociology of
bodybuilding is to realize that we've gone through phases.
There were phases where there was more of a dominant focus on
a lower carbohydrate versus higher carbohydrate diets within
the industry and within different regions.
So for example, when you look at surveys of bodybuilders in the
UK versus the US, you see a lot more people in the US using low
carbohydrate diets in the UK tends to be more dominated by
high carb diets. This is probably just due to the
cultural influences of who were the dominant like voices in the
space or or or pros. You can also see a lot more use
of ketogenic diets. We're currently in some of South
America right now and it's not like you're seeing these trends.
We're at IPB World Championships or the Olympia or even WMBF
worlds where you know, high carb or low carb diets is dictating
whether or not that country is relevant for a period of like a
decade or not, you know. So the influence of those
dietary trends within bodybuilding is going to be less
of an important factor than we can see based upon like the
population of the country and the popularity of the sport.
And then when you think about the energetic demands of
bodybuilding, which is essentially going to be mapped
on to the energetic demands of hypertrophy training, we see
that, well, shit, you can get hypertrophy from a range of
volumes and even Rep ranges. It really comes down to, you
know, doing the appropriate amount of work for the person,
the right proximity to failure, and then even if they're not
doing, could quote UN quote optimal amount of volume.
You can still make progress, you know, and it's very difficult to
know whether you're actually doing this optimal.
So I I do think that there can be a clustering of factors for
someone where they respond better to lower volumes.
They they they tend to be pretty metabolically flexible and do
just just as well with a low carbohydrate diet compared to a
high carbohydrate diet. And they might also even get
some other benefits of a low carbohydrate diet because there
is some data indicating that not for everyone, but for the
majority of people it can result in more satiety that that makes
the dietary adherence easier. And I'm actually curious about
this and I almost wanna flip the question on you.
I do wonder if the peaking process for some people might be
better because yeah, theoretically you might be able
to achieve higher levels of fullness with carbohydrate
loading versus say fat loading or just bringing your energy
intake back up. But from a data perspective, we
see that people who are adapted to high carb diets, their
glycogen levels aren't chronically low.
They're they may not be able to get super compensated to the
same degree. But because you're using fat and
because you're adapting to some degree to as much as one can to
the energy substrates you're taking in, you can probably
maintain quote UN quote normal levels of glycogen.
But then you're not necessarily dealing with some of the
potential spillover or acute shifts in appearance that you
get with carbohydrate loading. I I I do wonder, and you would
have more experience this with this than I would.
Is there that you mean high fat that adapted to high fat, That
right I did mean. Adapted to high fat diet.
Thank you. I'm following you.
So. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I guess what I'm saying is you're you're you're you're not
gonna get flat trying to do a fat load, right?
You may not get as full maybe. I don't know, but I do wonder if
there's less likelihood of having a spilly look when you're
doing a carbohydrate protocol that that's low in
carbohydrates. Do you find there's this less
likelihood of oops when you're when you're taking that
approach? Yes.
So there I I was doing several trial peak weeks in preparation
for my for my first show and I would get incredibly aggressive
with sodium, fats and proteins and the ratios, macro
distributions and I could be on the incredible aggressive end
and not risk near the spillover that I was experiencing when I
was incorporating carbohydrates. There could be an argument for I
didn't get as filled out, but it it would be.
I don't even think it would have been a noticeable difference
even with the trained eye because like I'm looking at
myself, I'm critiquing my physique, I'm, you know,
training and look at my muscle fullness and I never felt flat
after doing one of these peaking protocols with the ketogenic
approach. So I don't feel like I was
sacrificing any from a fullness standpoint, but there was much
less risk of spilling over. Even if I was only aggressive
and or if I timed it closer or further to the actual show day
in the week 'cause I was trying to front load and I was trying
to back load. I was trying to figure out what
timing made the most sense. And that's going to be a little
bit nuanced for the individual. I kind of landed on a 48 hour
out as the high calorie day, but I was getting super aggressive
with my sodium too. I mean, I was typically around
11 to 14,000 milligrams of sodium a day, which is pretty
high by most people's standards. But I didn't cut water, so I was
able to maintain hydration throughout the entirety of it.
But I don't feel like there's near the risk for spilling over
if you remove the carbohydrates from the equation.
And honestly, I said that makes sense to me.
And I have noticed that there's an extreme variation between how
people respond to carbohydrate loading protocols and some
people can get quite full and I think they wouldn't respond as
well. Like, you know, they there are
some people who are really hard to spill over and eat a
ridiculous amount of carbohydrates and they look
better the more they eat. And I've coached them and I've
met them. I was talking to what Benjamin
Schuster was taking in for his carb load this 21 year old that
looks like he's got the muscle maturity of a 35 year old and
we're like the same weight on stage or close to it, roughly
the same height. He was the 2nd tallest guy in
the class. I was the tallest.
But dude, he was eating like 800 grams of carb a day like the
whole week. And I'm loading 2-3 days out on
500 grams of carbs and tapering it down and I'm just like, I
know our stats look the same, but we are not the same, you
know. So I I think that's really
interesting. And I would say you know to to
give some validation to your experiences is that I think it
would be a good idea for a coach to understand that if they've
got a client from a peaking perspective who is very
unpredictable and they're often looking worse based upon even
conservative carbohydrate loading protocols on game day,
they would be remiss to not at least try a low carb approach to
peaking. Where the best chance at having
them look their best on game day is to just make sure they're not
flat and then to emphasize, you know, loading fats and and
sodium. In my mind, the only potential
downside is that you might set back the actual fat loss aspect
because you know you're not going to spill over a quote UN
quote. But if you are overdoing it on
fats and calories, then you're just going to be higher in body
fat over the next couple days post show, right, Which which
may or may not be an issue. I think, I think when you're at
the level of conditioning you're at, that's, you know, So what
you gain 100 grams of fat like you're you're, you're, you're
fine, right. And that may be occurring anyway
with a carbohydrate load and and if someone's celebrating post
show, etcetera. So I definitely think there's a
use case and I think that there are some people who adapt better
to low carbohydrate diets than others.
That's absolutely something that we've observed in the
literature. I was actually part of a trial
for a master's student this is offseason.
It wasn't in the context of dieting, but I went on a 12 week
period of consuming around 70 to 90 grams of carbohydrates a day
but still eating maintenance calories and high protein.
So this is a modified low carb diet, not quite ketogenic,
although I probably was actually in the if I was to, you know get
a keto stick probably was in ketosis some more days than not.
And I was one of four other athletes, a mixture of weight
lifters and power lifters and there was some really
interesting divergent responses. So we did four weeks of tracking
just that maintenance, our normal, you know, our normal
diet, 12 weeks on this modified low carb diet.
And then four weeks afterwards going back to our habitual
eating patterns. And we looked at skin fold
changes and subjective interviews and reports of
satiety and also progress in terms of our lifts relative to
the trajectory of our progress in prior competitions.
And it was kind of clear we had one person who was actually me
who did not who basically saw a a poor outcome in terms of their
strength performance when they went on a low carb diet like
it's I stopped progressing and I actually regressed a little bit.
And then we had two people who kind of plateaued their strength
but they lost somebody weight from the body weight you'd
expect to lose going low carb. So the relative strength
improved And then we had two people who kept the same exact
trajectory of strength improvement and lost body
weight. So their relative strength,
they're coefficient in powerlifting or weightlifting,
Sinclair score at the time Wilkes score and their absolute
strength kept increasing at the same rate.
And then you saw people whose body weight stayed the same and
didn't go down and you know, I saw other people who had
dropped. So for me, for example, while my
performance went down, I also started to lose skin folds and I
found myself satiated for the first four weeks.
So like my, when I eat a a low carb diet, I walk around
probably 2% body fat lower all the time.
Whether that's worth it in terms of the gym performance.
I ultimately said no. But I I think you're gonna get
people who are gonna cluster and have some beneficial outcomes,
some negative. And if you get enough clustering
for a person where the positives outweigh the negatives, that's
when I think you get those anecdotes of like, well, this
has really worked quite well for me.
So it's absolutely possible to do bodybuilding on a low carb
diet for I would say a sizable minority, if maybe not a
majority of people. Whether it is better or
beneficial or optimal, I think that probably would be a far
lower number. But I think we have enough
anecdotes where it's you cannot deny that some people would do
just fine on one or the other and then they can lean on
personal preference. And there are gonna probably be
some people who would actually is better for and it might be
worth experimenting. I think an.
Important caveat when it pertains to the ketogenic diet
and optimizing performance is that individuals that want to go
that route truly allow their body time to fully adapt to
maximize fat metabolism as the primary fuel source.
I see so many people bouncing from one to the other and trying
to, you know, play the middle ground and they wind up getting
stuck in this purgatory limbo land where they're not really
capitalizing on the benefits carbohydrates have to offer or
fat metabolism has to offer. And most of the studies
unfortunately are such short period studies that they're not
really allowing the participants to fully adapt anyways, which is
going to skew the results, oftentimes negatively, towards
the ketogenic diet. And the adaptation process is
not, I mean you can be producing ketones in, you know, short
order, but that is far different than actually performing at a
high level. So that process takes a lot
longer than many people are willing to to undergo so.
Anecdotally for you, how long have you observed when you've
had people go on ketogenic diets, how long does it take for
them to to fully adapt to it well?
They start getting the psychological benefits and just
like they they report better mental acuity, better satiety,
things of that nature within, you know, a few days to a week.
But from a performance standpoint, I always tell
people, look, give it a solid six months without deviation
before you make an opinion one way or the other.
And what I've noticed in myself is that that continues to trend
positively the more time I am adapted, which is why I don't do
cyclical keto or targeted keto or have random high carb days,
because I don't want to interfere with that deeper level
of adaptation that seems to compound over time.
Interesting, yeah. Because one one of the issues I
have with some of the critiques of the studies of ketogenic
diets is that the IT almost presents itself as a logical
fallacy. Like no matter how long people
watch the adaptation, period. The people who who have a bias
towards low carb diets be like I wasn't long enough, you know?
I agree and I and it becomes remove those fallacies for sure.
Yeah, and and. I'm not saying you're saying
that, but it does become like how long is a piece of string,
you know? And I'm not saying this, this
encompasses everything. But when we look at some of the
studies on muscle Physiology and the metabolic adaptations to
actual muscle tissue, those happen pretty they've pretty
impressively the degree that one can adapt and the studies on,
you know, glycogen preservation, how it kind of goes down at 1st.
And then all of a sudden you're seeing people with normal quote,
UN quote, glycogen levels who have been on low carb diets and
are endurance athletes. And you're like, well, what's
going on here? And I don't think most people
know this, but like if you give people a glycogen depleting bout
of training, not even who are necessarily like keto adapted
and you just give them water, they do replenish glycogen.
Like we have a robust ability to exchange energy substrates
because glycogen's too important.
So I think there are some misconceptions around it and
that this process probably happens even faster in when one
is keto adapted. But from what I've seen, you
know, where you're talking on the order of weeks, the muscle
has made energetic adaptations to where it is using fat far
more effectively, and that starts to plateau.
But I'm definitely open to the idea that there are other, more
systemic adaptations that take longer.
Or maybe it's a psychological or behavioral habituation, or maybe
there's neuromuscular adaptations that are more
central. Because you're not the only one
who's told me that anecdotally it seems to take longer and that
it gets better with time, although I'm not sure if that is
necessarily like all Physiology or even all muscle Physiology.
Yeah, I've got no. Doubt that some of it is is in
tandem with other factors beyond just Physiology, but I wouldn't
recommend somebody totally 180 their nutrition like during peak
week for instance, without yeah. Testing.
Things out beforehand, Yeah. Eric, I can literally talk to
you all day long man. But I want to be respectful of
your time. We'll have to do another follow
up podcast because I want to dive deeper into 3 DMJ and that
as a business that as a brand that as a coaching platform
because I love what you're doing with that alongside your your
colleagues there. But I also have to extend you a
Congrats because just last week the WNBF changed their their
regulations. So we do no longer have to
compete every two years to maintain pro status, which I I
feel you are excited about. I'm certainly excited about
because I think as natural athletes competing every two
years, when you're spending six months in a deficit and three
months, four months, five months on recovery, that that's just
not ample time. Yeah.
I mean I'm sure you and I both are very motivated now that
we've turned pro to try to bring the next level and considering
how long it took both of us to turn pro, I know for me doing
that in a two year period, it feels like a tall order for a
short period of time. And yeah, and then just
generally like you know I I have, I've competed no no more
frequently even as an amateur than every two years.
So to think that I kind of have to hold myself to that schedule
has always been something that I would say the entire natural
community has kind of kind of raised their hand and go hey,
can we change this. And I'm really, really pleased
and appreciative of the WNBF leadership for taking that step
forward. I think it's an important thing
for our sport, so that's, I think it's great news, man, I
am. And I'd love to.
Come back on to talk about 3 DMJ for sure, yeah, yeah.
You are always invited. I definitely want to keep the
conversation going because that is definitely something I wanted
to touch on because like I said, y'all been in this for a long
time. You bring a wealth of knowledge
to the table and you've changed more lives than than y'all were
ever ever realized. Just with the content you put
out freely on the intra webs, what you're working, you know,
doing with people, one-on-one and client coaching
relationships, just how you interact with people on a
day-to-day basis. I haven't got utmost respect for
you and the entire team and I'm excited that we were able to
formally meet in person and keep the conversation going.
Thank you so much, Robert. I really appreciate that It
means the world and I feel I owe so much to the natural
bodybuilding community. So to hear that we're making
that positive impact it it means a tremendous amount.
Thank you. You absolutely.
Are Where? Where do people go to find out
more about you and dive deeper into your world?
3D muscle journey.com You said it, so that's the the number
three, the letter D musclejourney.com.
And then from there you can find the links to all kinds of stuff
from our our YouTube channel where I'm logging my offseason,
and to where the other coaches do a lot of great work.
As well as well as to the vault where we have courses.
If you want to become a student of the sport, and if you really
want to nerd out, we've got links to my books The Muscle and
Strength Pyramids as well as Mass Research Review, where I'm
one of the the many authors who writes about the latest
scientific information that's most relevant to, you know,
hypertrophy, body composition and and strength and resistance
training, adaptation and fat loss.
Well, I will certainly. Link it to all those.
Make it easy for people to find you.
And if anybody's listening to this podcast, they should also
go ahead and subscribe to the Iron Culture podcast because
that is also putting out some great information.
Yes. And we also have the three DMJ
podcast if you really want a natural, bodybuilding specific
podcast and I appreciate that, man.
Thank you. I love it.
Eric we'll keep killing it, man. We'll be in touch and have a
great 2024 brother and enjoy the remainder of your recovery diet
back at you. Take care, man.
You too.