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This is an amazing study and I’m over the mooooon to see it based on women and considering the menstrual cycle. Such an amazing move in the right direction wooooo
Thank You for the educational video Layne 😊 I am almost done with fat loss program, but this was eye-opening for me! Pushing yourself in lifting weights is important in maintaining as much muscle as possible. I would like to lose at least 5 more pounds of body fat. It’s has been a long journey to get to this point, I learned a lot from you throughout the past few months. I appreciate all of your educational videos
Great tip on approaching failure. I struggle with this often. This is why I test myself each meso, per exercise, to make sure I calibrate my estimates of RIR. Solid video.
From the endurance sports perspective. Some people might object that these calories are too low. In my own practice and based on speaking with other sports dietitians, a lot of female athletes habitually eat ~1500kcal a day despite their heavy training load (endurance + strength) leading them to low energy availability. The problem is that they learn to tolerate it so they feel "fine". Over time, their performance decreases, body starts breaking down to make up for low energy availability.
It's true, there's only so long you can get away with not fuelling your body appropriately. I'm not an endurance athlete, but habitually trained very hard (cardio +weights) and ate very little - sometimes intermittent fasting, so less during the day and more in the evening. Eventually low relative energy availability caught up with me and I was just tired all the time, sick and couldn't train well! I wouldn't never do that to my body again. Now at about 2200Kcal, no more intermittent fasting and regular eating during the day. I'm only up a smidge in body fat, but super strong, training well and feeling fantastic!
So happy to see studies on women! Also, it would be interesting to see how many calories per day a person's metabolism would decrease over a normal 8-10 week cut of maybe 20% calorie deficit. Personally, that's about when I start to plateau and it's crazy to me that my body will find a way to burn 400 less calories a day when I'm doing the same activities and eating the exact same foods weighed to the gram each day. I wonder if some people's bodies adapt to a calorie deficit more than others.
Mine definitely does. After a year of eating 1800 calories (my BMR), and training hard (improving on all my lifts all the time, heavy sets, lots of volume), I didn't lose fat OR gain lean mass. I assumed then this was my maintenance, so being sick of dieting with no result my coach put me on a diet with 400 more calories to gain lean mass. I've maintained my weight for 3 months so far, but my scans show I am losing lean mass and gaining fat even though I am training even more carefully (attention to hard sets) than before.
Going on a daily deficit is a silly idea anyway because you're going to feel like crap. What matters is that you're in a weekly or monthly deficit. So some days you should be at maintenance, you can even have days where you're in a surplus. All that matters is the the overall trend is a deficit.
Terrific study and I really appreciate Layne's explanation and his takeaways. This study is consistent with my experience as a physique competitor. Makes perfect sense. And let's train HARD!
To those asking what overweight or fat people should do, I've gone from 272 to 220 over the course of the past year and 4 months by rinsing and repeating eight week or so fat loss and maintenance phases. Your top priority should definitely be just to get to a healthy body weight where you have normal blood pressure and bloodwork. Losing lean mass hasn't been a thought in my mind at all and it really shouldn't be in yours too Imo. Clean up your diet, train hard, and lose the weight gradually in a manner that you can consistently do. The fat loss phases are gonna have a lot of suckage, especially for compound movements, but the strength comes back in the maintenance phases in my experience. I'm as strong as I was in terms of squat and dead at a lighter bodyweight now. I got 500x3 on deads and 405x2 on squat around 236 back in March. Bench has taken the biggest hit, but my best was only 350 at 272, whereas now I probably have 315 on a good day. And now I actually look like I lift and not just like a lard ass.
You don't have to do phases. You just need to make sure you're in a weekly or monthly deficit. So in a week you could have 3 days in a 300-400 calorie deficit, 3 days at maintenance and even a day at a 300-400 surplus and you will lose weight without feeling like crap all the time.
Mistake was having them do intense cardio. Save the energy expenditure for resistance training during caloric restriction, and that should allow for more effective recomp.
Kind of a similar subject, but sort of different, I’m curious if this difference in energy availability would lead to issues in more than just muscle building. Since protein synthesis is using the amino acids to build structures in general, and your body is built up of amino acids, I wonder how different diseases and recovery from them would differ based off of low energy availability. It would make sense with less calories or protein that in addition to not getting enough protein to keep their muscle, which, of course is not good, but they would not be getting enough calories and protein to help repair other cells in their body as well. Anyone know anything on this front? Might be kind of confusing. Thanks Layne for the info.!
Layne, i have like 6 months of training expirence and well i slowly learned the concepts in a way where i applied them and felt the results, and when most people say they're afraid of "overtraining" i think they mean too much volume for a given workout day. I try to train everyday, and my exercise selection ranges from 4-10 exercies with 3 sets each (i'll start tweaking the sets a bit once i get sufficient expirence) and some people like RF (a good channel for training, but he dosen't know much about nutrition to put it kindly) and he said that you don't need more than 4-5 exercies per gym session... But as you can imagine those days where i do 10 exercies per session, they're all isolations or near isolations, and when i'm on the lower side i'm doing the more compound style exercies, so yeah i just wanna grow all my muscles as symetrically as possible, that's why i have a lot of exercise variety, and some interpret this as "overtraining" because "Oh you can't do more than 4 exercies per session brah, because then you're not training hard enough brah" as RF would put it.
@@barbarashirland9078 Exactly! Like use a BMR calculator to calculate your ideal BW maintenance cal and eat to that..? Lose fat and gain muscle or as coach greg says maingain. ????
When was the exercise taking place in relation to meals? I'm asking because I've seen things saying eating a high protein meal after exercise on a low calorie diet can be protein sparing. As far as overtraining, I tend to rate it on recovery time.
This is for Layne's comment on recomping. What about the reverse example? What about someone recomping from more fat to less fat? For example, someone at 200 lbs with 30 percent bodyfat doing intense training while on maintenance? Would this not work?
I am sooooo confused! I use the carbon app and will give calories below my maintenance. Trying to loose 10LBS. I do resistance training 5 times a week plus 10,000 steps every day… not loosing so far ..can someone help me understand what to do ? Maintenance calories or less then maintenance to loose the weight and gain back my muscles?
Makes me wonder about the effects of routine intermittent fasting, like 3 day fasts once a month or something. Does it affect your ability to build muscle in the long term? Can you just eat enough around it to mitigate it? I would normally expect the second, but if a week of crash dieting has these effects... I've done that once, initially lost a shit ton of bodyweight, i.e. water weight, and was super tired for a day or so. Then could train fine. But wonder now how much muscle weight I lost in that one week.
Stuart Phillips Lab conducted a study a few years ago with male college students. These poor lads were put on a diet that was 40% below maintenance. Furthermore, these students were put on a very demanding 6 days per week resistance training program that was very intense and regulated. The protein consumed was I believe 1 gram per lb of body weight. I think this study went on for 6 weeks. When completed, these subjects had all lost a significant amount of body fat and they actually gained some lean muscle tissue as well! This research changed Dr. Phillips belief that one had to be in a calorie balance to gain muscle. I am sure Layne knows about this research.
REALLY WEIRD when I was dieting on low calories it was the first time in my life that I had high cholesterol. I was like get F'ed, I'm barely eating and it's mostly vegetables! Now since then and I'm back to normal eating, my levels are back to normal/healthy range
Squats to failure is a different beast because it taxes your cardio-pulmonary system is a way that, say, bench press does not. If you hate doing cardio, you also hate leg day.
You definitely can recomp your body without heavy weights. You can get strong visibly muscular legs with dance. I would say you would have to clock in more hours of dancing than maybe doing an hour of heavy lifting, but for me it feels much better. I am very flexible this way. Of course as a woman you might not develop very large muscle, but it will lean your legs out for sure. Male dancers have gigantic quads and calves just take a look.
How important is technique then? The heavier i lift the harder is to keep a straight technique. I dont mind losing 20% technique and range of motion. Or is that still wrong? If i do technique perfect...i feel like im lifting too light. The first 5 reps are like easy cake.
So trained females but at what bodyfat percentages? If they were already kinda lean to begin with it should come as no surprise that a large caloric deficit would lead to muscle loss, even with enough protein.
Btw the RIR study was not participants guessing their RIR. It was “if you were going to do X reps, which weight would you choose?” And they maxed reps from that. So they normally worked at 5 RIR. The RIR prediction study was “do X reps and tell us your RIR” then max from there. Which came out to be 1-2 depending on experience. So basically everyone is cool with training at 3 RIR but in reality it’s 5 RIR. Both of which are problems
If you weigh 140 but wanted to be 200lbs of solid muscle, would you not calculate maintenance calories for that body size at a particular energy expenditure?
something i run into a lot when i train very hard is that i end up so sore that i genuinely cannot train again for several days. How would you recommend balancing difficulty of training with ability to perform consistently.
Finally someone with common sense. I am sick of the "experts" who say that nutrition is more important than training. It´s just nonsense. Get in enough calories and enough protein (no, more is not better) and you have done 95% you could ever do for nutrition.
This was such an interesting study! Loved the take-aways! 👏🏼 The low energy group seemed to be eating below BMR - which I’m sure was by design. I wonder if the results would change if they were eating slightly above BMR. (While still in a deficit, of course) I’m just curious….it’s probably not worth another very expensive, controlled 10 days study. 😉
Curious about your thoughts about using PSMF diets to lose body fat and supposedly maintain lean muscle. According to the guy that invented it, he found opposing results. Although I don’t think he was training subjects in the studies, just trying to get them to lose weight.
If you are very overweight you can get away with crash dieting or if you're like 15% bodyfat and want to minicut to continue bulking you can get away with it Just know if you aren't training HARD, getting proper sleep, enough protein, you may lose lean tissue. But that comes back pretty quick
I definitely agree however I believe training modality can minimise muscle loss. ie: in a calorie deficit try to limit cardio as much as possible and do less sets and reps but lift as heavy as you can. 1 set of 3 at RPE 9 will work better than 3 sets of 10 at RPE 8 to retain the muscle you gained during your bulk. I know a lot of people will say you need to do cardio to lose the extra fat you’ve gained but the calorie deficit can do this. Imho
Love your work layne. Any way to get more payment options for Carbon other than credit card? Paypal possibly? I would need to get a credit card just for the app haha
I wonder if the body is converting the protein to carbohydrate to have enough energy to convert the other protein into protein. Like if you ate enough protein on a calorie deficit, would your protein synthesis remain the same as a maintenance diet. It would seem in a slight calorie deficit you arent using muscle store to make carbohydrate, but the loss is through not replacement. Which would seem you want to minimise the amount needed to be replaced by exercising less. It would have to be a pretty extreme calorie deficit for your body to be using your muscle for energy.
Thanks Layne, What does this tell you about calorie targets for cutting? Does it seem you can go very low cal and cut fast with minimal muscle tissue loss as long as protein is high and training is hard?
When prothein synthesis is low on calorie deficit and on the other side we are destructing muscles during resistance training, wouldn’t that be bad for muscle building? Are there studies of body composition on caloric deficit where the control is low calorie& non resistance training? As someone who lost 14 kg in recent 7-8 month following almost exactly the same formula they did for the low calorie group, I also ended up loosing about 27% of lean body mass, about 2.5 kg muscle which lead me question the role of resistance training for muscle retention during calorie deficit?
10 Days should be long enough to measure certain things. This has to be one of the best studies around when it comes to this. I would like to see a similar study with a group of men. The idea that things would have massively changed over more time just doesn't seem accurate here based on their metrics.
I wonder how this lines up with my current plan which is basically eat at or just above maintenance and then every once in a while I do a 24 or 36 hour fast. So, currently I'm on week 2 of three weeks doing a 36 hour fast on Thursdays (since it's what fits in my schedule). This will adjust my weight diwn about 2lbs to get me back in the weight goal that I have set (which is a specific number +- 3lbs, so a 7lb window). This seems to be working really well for me so far.
Do u have any opinion on the U shape association being shown in some papers on mortality and lifting time and intensity? Where lifting time can exceed mortality rate compared to non lifters and training intensity can be harmful for cardiovascular health. They're showing the mortality reductions are seen between 40 and 80min a week and cardiovascular benefits of intensity between 30 and 70% of 1RM. This sounds terrible to my training addicted brain but what do u make of it?
@biolayne1 please do a video about CICO, Insulin Resistance/Constantly High Blood Sugar and its effects on losing weight. Its crazy because I've maintained the same diet and didnt start losing actual bodyfat until I started following up meals with ACV, cinammon water. I geniunely believe my previous blood sugar issues has been effecting my ability to build muscle as well. I feel like this is not being spoke about enough and dr's are leaning toward metforomin and ozempic instead of the more natural options i listed above.
Great vid but I kind of wish you covered a bit more in depth if the group in the deficit performed differently/ had any specific struggles due to having less energy. Or some others notable differences regarding training
Help, I do 16-20k Steps a day, weight lift 3x a week. Eat about 2300 cals a day. Im 85 KG. And I want to get down to 75 kg. Is this good? would I lose weight too fast? Or should I eat more
So this is confirming common knowledge? Every bodybuilder knows you can't add mass during a cut. I would prefer if they compared different levels of deficits to maybe move us towards an understanding of the optimal muscle sparing rate of cutting (i.e. does cutting twice as fast change the ratio unfavorably?)
I had to lose at least 10kg for surgery, so for a year I ate stupid low amounts of calories because it's the only way I can lose weight. I dropped 14kg, but I think most of it was muscle. Because after finally having the surgeries, it'd been 2 years of disordered eating, couldn't lose anymore weight no matter how hard I tried, and I finally just went back to normal eating and started working out again, slowly building all my muscle back and omg.... pretty much all the weight I lost was muscle. I've gained maybe 10kg back, but I'm the same size I was at my smallest, just more muscle tone and strength. Actually I think I've lost a little more fat since then too. It's crazy how dense muscle mass can be. Point of story, I may have lost fat but I lost all my muscle mass too from drastic dieting. It's really hard to lose fat and keep muscle for me. Slow, slooooow and steady wins the race... maybe
What would be the advice for overweight people? Do we just need to deal with the muscle loss? Gladly I'm only 11 lb away from my goal weight but I've been losing lean mass consistently even when hitting the gym and eating good amounts of protein which I know it is expected but feels like a very high price to pay.
a couple of things. how much of your calorie intake is protein percentage wise? If you aren’t eating a balanced diet for muscle retention and fat loss that could be a thing that is hurting you. are you fatigued by the end of your lifting week? maybe try an active rest period with your deficit diet and see how your body reacts / recovers.
As someone that's on a deficit with the primary focus being to get to a healthy weight (currently 300+) is there a point to lifting? Been working out at the gym. Some cardio and some weight lifting. I understand I won't have much gains while dieting, but will it atleast slow down the muscle loss?
Great review! Do you feel they effectively corrected for composition of calories from the other macros? What if it's a certain percentage of calories from fat or from carbs that sets one up for muscle gains, not necessarily total calories? Would that have been teased out? Any ideas why the calorie defecit negatively impacts muscle gain? Maybe evolutionary adaptation to save energy for brain and other short term needs rather than putting energy into long term adaptations? Interesting stuff. Thanks!
There is an upper limit to how much protein your body can use for muscle maintenance/building. That limit was met with 2.2 grams per kg of lean mass. Adding more won't help. In a large caloric deficit you lose muscle, simple as that. If you're pretty fat you might have some leeway before the muscle loss starts.
Or better yet, drop the intense cardio during the energy restriction. Doesn't make sense why they had the subjects doing cardio in addition to resistance training, if the goal was to recomp during caloric deficit.
@@davin8r I just read the study. They were investigating the impact of Low energy availability on young, female athletes, from a performance perspective. Participants were already doing a combination of resistance training and cardiovascular work. The exercise training program makes sense.
@@stoempert ok, but I'm just saying that for us to draw conclusions about an optimal strategy for body recomp, we'd need a similar study with resistance training but without the cardio.
I'm curious if there's any good research/theory on how to "push yourself to near the limit". Like something along the lines of how to measure that more effectively, or how to prep you mind/body for near maximum efforts, maybe even how to embrace pain effectively? Until then, just acknowledging the idea that your limit is not where you think it might be is more than enough to get started. Appreciate the videos as always!
Unfortunately, this relates to psychology which is not a real science. Everybody is unique and have different personalities and mindsets. To be an effective study, they should take people with different external stressors they have to deal with, i.e work, children, life, etc. which drains their willpower tank and prevents them from giving their absolute best from working out
One of your best videos and that’s saying a lot because you keep producing one outstanding video after another! Thank you!
Wake up babe, new channel name just dropped
Wake up babe, we are under attack by AI bots hell bent on applying trillions of dollars of research and the collective achievements of humanity in machine learning to obtain first post supremacy.
😂😂
Shit wait did it? What was it before?
Biolayne@@UnhumanNewman
This is an amazing study and I’m over the mooooon to see it based on women and considering the menstrual cycle. Such an amazing move in the right direction wooooo
Thank You for the educational video Layne 😊
I am almost done with fat loss program, but this was eye-opening for me! Pushing yourself in lifting weights is important in maintaining as much muscle as possible. I would like to lose at least 5 more pounds of body fat. It’s has been a long journey to get to this point, I learned a lot from you throughout the past few months.
I appreciate all of your educational videos
Great tip on approaching failure. I struggle with this often. This is why I test myself each meso, per exercise, to make sure I calibrate my estimates of RIR. Solid video.
From the endurance sports perspective.
Some people might object that these calories are too low. In my own practice and based on speaking with other sports dietitians, a lot of female athletes habitually eat ~1500kcal a day despite their heavy training load (endurance + strength) leading them to low energy availability.
The problem is that they learn to tolerate it so they feel "fine". Over time, their performance decreases, body starts breaking down to make up for low energy availability.
It's true, there's only so long you can get away with not fuelling your body appropriately.
I'm not an endurance athlete, but habitually trained very hard (cardio +weights) and ate very little - sometimes intermittent fasting, so less during the day and more in the evening. Eventually low relative energy availability caught up with me and I was just tired all the time, sick and couldn't train well!
I wouldn't never do that to my body again.
Now at about 2200Kcal, no more intermittent fasting and regular eating during the day. I'm only up a smidge in body fat, but super strong, training well and feeling fantastic!
So happy to see studies on women! Also, it would be interesting to see how many calories per day a person's metabolism would decrease over a normal 8-10 week cut of maybe 20% calorie deficit. Personally, that's about when I start to plateau and it's crazy to me that my body will find a way to burn 400 less calories a day when I'm doing the same activities and eating the exact same foods weighed to the gram each day. I wonder if some people's bodies adapt to a calorie deficit more than others.
Mine definitely does. After a year of eating 1800 calories (my BMR), and training hard (improving on all my lifts all the time, heavy sets, lots of volume), I didn't lose fat OR gain lean mass. I assumed then this was my maintenance, so being sick of dieting with no result my coach put me on a diet with 400 more calories to gain lean mass. I've maintained my weight for 3 months so far, but my scans show I am losing lean mass and gaining fat even though I am training even more carefully (attention to hard sets) than before.
@@catche85 damn. That's heartbreaking. Here's hoping you make gains soon 💪
@katiet915 thank you!
Going on a daily deficit is a silly idea anyway because you're going to feel like crap. What matters is that you're in a weekly or monthly deficit. So some days you should be at maintenance, you can even have days where you're in a surplus. All that matters is the the overall trend is a deficit.
you lose weight, less you weight less you burn calories, nothing crazy about it
“Learn to tolerate some pain”
💯 💯 💯
Most people have NO f-ing clue how to push themselves hard enough
Appreciate you Layne!
Terrific study and I really appreciate Layne's explanation and his takeaways. This study is consistent with my experience as a physique competitor. Makes perfect sense. And let's train HARD!
To those asking what overweight or fat people should do, I've gone from 272 to 220 over the course of the past year and 4 months by rinsing and repeating eight week or so fat loss and maintenance phases. Your top priority should definitely be just to get to a healthy body weight where you have normal blood pressure and bloodwork. Losing lean mass hasn't been a thought in my mind at all and it really shouldn't be in yours too Imo. Clean up your diet, train hard, and lose the weight gradually in a manner that you can consistently do. The fat loss phases are gonna have a lot of suckage, especially for compound movements, but the strength comes back in the maintenance phases in my experience. I'm as strong as I was in terms of squat and dead at a lighter bodyweight now. I got 500x3 on deads and 405x2 on squat around 236 back in March. Bench has taken the biggest hit, but my best was only 350 at 272, whereas now I probably have 315 on a good day. And now I actually look like I lift and not just like a lard ass.
This is good advice. Last year I went from 270 to 170 in ten months and I ended up looking and feeling like shit.
You don't have to do phases. You just need to make sure you're in a weekly or monthly deficit. So in a week you could have 3 days in a 300-400 calorie deficit, 3 days at maintenance and even a day at a 300-400 surplus and you will lose weight without feeling like crap all the time.
Accurate.
Sounds solid
Preach on! Keep it up.
Get these videos out there!
"learn how to tolerate discomfort and pain" a quote for the ages.
Thank goodness for your summery
calorie surplus is a MUST. It took me a year to gain about 5lbs of muscle on maintenance and only a few months to gain it in a surplus
Thank you SO much, Layne! I really, really needed to hear this message today. Keep up the great work!
Good Job Layne, I appreciate your quality & informative videos.
Mistake was having them do intense cardio. Save the energy expenditure for resistance training during caloric restriction, and that should allow for more effective recomp.
Such an awesome video with useful pearls that I am going to share with all my family and friends
I've been getting foamy urine the last couple days as I near my deload, maybe you could make a video on that.
Great elaboration of this study
Great research review Layne!
Thank you for the science speak and then giving your take aways. Helped solidify what I assumed with sitting at maintenance calories right now
Thank you SO much, Layne!
6:06 how did they measure the rate of muscle protein synthesis?
An awesome study design & a very interesting study indeed!!
Thank you layne❤ appreciate all your hard work.
Great review! Many thanks for sharing Layne.
Thank you, Layne.
Love this!
thank you
Always great! Very informative! So much to digest!
loved this video, thank you Layne
What a great breakdown. Thanks a lot
Loved this breakdown, such an interesting study too
Yes another great video and great advice! Train hard and definitely push yourself!
Kind of a similar subject, but sort of different, I’m curious if this difference in energy availability would lead to issues in more than just muscle building. Since protein synthesis is using the amino acids to build structures in general, and your body is built up of amino acids, I wonder how different diseases and recovery from them would differ based off of low energy availability. It would make sense with less calories or protein that in addition to not getting enough protein to keep their muscle, which, of course is not good, but they would not be getting enough calories and protein to help repair other cells in their body as well. Anyone know anything on this front? Might be kind of confusing. Thanks Layne for the info.!
Thanks again I have a long way to go for my legs and glutes and to be honest I’m not pushing myself as hard as I know I can. Thanks again
I was just talking about this. Better to keep maintenance calories and do more steady state cardio etc. to increase metabolic rate.
I’m willing to bet results would’ve been different if they did LISS cardio instead of higher intensity cardio.
What are the implications for mini cuts?
Layne, i have like 6 months of training expirence and well i slowly learned the concepts in a way where i applied them and felt the results, and when most people say they're afraid of "overtraining" i think they mean too much volume for a given workout day. I try to train everyday, and my exercise selection ranges from 4-10 exercies with 3 sets each (i'll start tweaking the sets a bit once i get sufficient expirence) and some people like RF (a good channel for training, but he dosen't know much about nutrition to put it kindly) and he said that you don't need more than 4-5 exercies per gym session... But as you can imagine those days where i do 10 exercies per session, they're all isolations or near isolations, and when i'm on the lower side i'm doing the more compound style exercies, so yeah i just wanna grow all my muscles as symetrically as possible, that's why i have a lot of exercise variety, and some interpret this as "overtraining" because "Oh you can't do more than 4 exercies per session brah, because then you're not training hard enough brah" as RF would put it.
So what if your already over weight (fat). Would you still recommend a surplus or eat at a maintenance for the target weights calories?
This is what I want to know too.
@@barbarashirland9078
Exactly! Like use a BMR calculator to calculate your ideal BW maintenance cal and eat to that..? Lose fat and gain muscle or as coach greg says maingain. ????
When was the exercise taking place in relation to meals? I'm asking because I've seen things saying eating a high protein meal after exercise on a low calorie diet can be protein sparing. As far as overtraining, I tend to rate it on recovery time.
Great video!
This is for Layne's comment on recomping. What about the reverse example? What about someone recomping from more fat to less fat? For example, someone at 200 lbs with 30 percent bodyfat doing intense training while on maintenance? Would this not work?
I am sooooo confused! I use the carbon app and will give calories below my maintenance. Trying to loose 10LBS. I do resistance training 5 times a week plus 10,000 steps every day… not loosing so far ..can someone help me understand what to do ? Maintenance calories or less then maintenance to loose the weight and gain back my muscles?
Makes me wonder about the effects of routine intermittent fasting, like 3 day fasts once a month or something. Does it affect your ability to build muscle in the long term? Can you just eat enough around it to mitigate it? I would normally expect the second, but if a week of crash dieting has these effects...
I've done that once, initially lost a shit ton of bodyweight, i.e. water weight, and was super tired for a day or so. Then could train fine. But wonder now how much muscle weight I lost in that one week.
Stuart Phillips Lab conducted a study a few years ago with male college students. These poor lads were put on a diet that was 40% below maintenance. Furthermore, these students were put on a very demanding 6 days per week resistance training program that was very intense and regulated. The protein consumed was I believe 1 gram per lb of body weight. I think this study went on for 6 weeks. When completed, these subjects had all lost a significant amount of body fat and they actually gained some lean muscle tissue as well! This research changed Dr. Phillips belief that one had to be in a calorie balance to gain muscle. I am sure Layne knows about this research.
Like to see the same study on males of the same age group. Will testosterone play a significant role or not on preserving muscle loss
To some extent, but significant calorie deficits are proven to crush men’s testosterone levels.
REALLY WEIRD when I was dieting on low calories it was the first time in my life that I had high cholesterol. I was like get F'ed, I'm barely eating and it's mostly vegetables! Now since then and I'm back to normal eating, my levels are back to normal/healthy range
Very interesting!
10 days is not enough for fat adaptation, so wonder if this was done on keto dieters.
The link to your online nutrition class does not work.
Squats to failure is a different beast because it taxes your cardio-pulmonary system is a way that, say, bench press does not. If you hate doing cardio, you also hate leg day.
Can a person can get close to surplus effects at higher body fat percentage say 20 Percent at maintenance?
Great, but annoying finding. Its harder to calculate maintance than deficit calorie intake.
Thanks for msg at end if video
I would be curious to how this would've changed if the protein had been upped to like 120g of protein and upping the carbs by about 20g as well.
You definitely can recomp your body without heavy weights. You can get strong visibly muscular legs with dance. I would say you would have to clock in more hours of dancing than maybe doing an hour of heavy lifting, but for me it feels much better. I am very flexible this way. Of course as a woman you might not develop very large muscle, but it will lean your legs out for sure. Male dancers have gigantic quads and calves just take a look.
How important is technique then? The heavier i lift the harder is to keep a straight technique. I dont mind losing 20% technique and range of motion. Or is that still wrong?
If i do technique perfect...i feel like im lifting too light. The first 5 reps are like easy cake.
So trained females but at what bodyfat percentages? If they were already kinda lean to begin with it should come as no surprise that a large caloric deficit would lead to muscle loss, even with enough protein.
Btw the RIR study was not participants guessing their RIR. It was “if you were going to do X reps, which weight would you choose?” And they maxed reps from that. So they normally worked at 5 RIR. The RIR prediction study was “do X reps and tell us your RIR” then max from there. Which came out to be 1-2 depending on experience. So basically everyone is cool with training at 3 RIR but in reality it’s 5 RIR. Both of which are problems
So many data points and variables... How can it possibly be "highly controlled?"
If you weigh 140 but wanted to be 200lbs of solid muscle, would you not calculate maintenance calories for that body size at a particular energy expenditure?
Why not Biolayne anymore?
something i run into a lot when i train very hard is that i end up so sore that i genuinely cannot train again for several days. How would you recommend balancing difficulty of training with ability to perform consistently.
after this study... would you still recommend fat loss sprints?
Finally someone with common sense. I am sick of the "experts" who say that nutrition is more important than training. It´s just nonsense. Get in enough calories and enough protein (no, more is not better) and you have done 95% you could ever do for nutrition.
Doin it big in Denmark!
This was such an interesting study! Loved the take-aways! 👏🏼
The low energy group seemed to be eating below BMR - which I’m sure was by design. I wonder if the results would change if they were eating slightly above BMR. (While still in a deficit, of course) I’m just curious….it’s probably not worth another very expensive, controlled 10 days study. 😉
Curious about your thoughts about using PSMF diets to lose body fat and supposedly maintain lean muscle. According to the guy that invented it, he found opposing results. Although I don’t think he was training subjects in the studies, just trying to get them to lose weight.
If you are very overweight you can get away with crash dieting or if you're like 15% bodyfat and want to minicut to continue bulking you can get away with it
Just know if you aren't training HARD, getting proper sleep, enough protein, you may lose lean tissue. But that comes back pretty quick
Go algorithm go!
I definitely agree however I believe training modality can minimise muscle loss.
ie: in a calorie deficit try to limit cardio as much as possible and do less sets and reps but lift as heavy as you can.
1 set of 3 at RPE 9 will work better than 3 sets of 10 at RPE 8 to retain the muscle you gained during your bulk.
I know a lot of people will say you need to do cardio to lose the extra fat you’ve gained but the calorie deficit can do this. Imho
Love your work layne. Any way to get more payment options for Carbon other than credit card? Paypal possibly? I would need to get a credit card just for the app haha
I wonder if the body is converting the protein to carbohydrate to have enough energy to convert the other protein into protein. Like if you ate enough protein on a calorie deficit, would your protein synthesis remain the same as a maintenance diet. It would seem in a slight calorie deficit you arent using muscle store to make carbohydrate, but the loss is through not replacement. Which would seem you want to minimise the amount needed to be replaced by exercising less. It would have to be a pretty extreme calorie deficit for your body to be using your muscle for energy.
I'm not versed, but you can tell from a distance that was great study design.
Thanks Layne,
What does this tell you about calorie targets for cutting? Does it seem you can go very low cal and cut fast with minimal muscle tissue loss as long as protein is high and training is hard?
Great video
Were the test subjects, overweight? If so, how much? Rate of muscle loss will be greater if already low body fat.
When prothein synthesis is low on calorie deficit and on the other side we are destructing muscles during resistance training, wouldn’t that be bad for muscle building? Are there studies of body composition on caloric deficit where the control is low calorie& non resistance training?
As someone who lost 14 kg in recent 7-8 month following almost exactly the same formula they did for the low calorie group, I also ended up loosing about 27% of lean body mass, about 2.5 kg muscle which lead me question the role of resistance training for muscle retention during calorie deficit?
10 Days should be long enough to measure certain things. This has to be one of the best studies around when it comes to this. I would like to see a similar study with a group of men. The idea that things would have massively changed over more time just doesn't seem accurate here based on their metrics.
So fat lost sprint is dead?
I wonder how this lines up with my current plan which is basically eat at or just above maintenance and then every once in a while I do a 24 or 36 hour fast. So, currently I'm on week 2 of three weeks doing a 36 hour fast on Thursdays (since it's what fits in my schedule). This will adjust my weight diwn about 2lbs to get me back in the weight goal that I have set (which is a specific number +- 3lbs, so a 7lb window). This seems to be working really well for me so far.
Do u have any opinion on the U shape association being shown in some papers on mortality and lifting time and intensity? Where lifting time can exceed mortality rate compared to non lifters and training intensity can be harmful for cardiovascular health.
They're showing the mortality reductions are seen between 40 and 80min a week and cardiovascular benefits of intensity between 30 and 70% of 1RM. This sounds terrible to my training addicted brain but what do u make of it?
@biolayne1 please do a video about CICO, Insulin Resistance/Constantly High Blood Sugar and its effects on losing weight. Its crazy because I've maintained the same diet and didnt start losing actual bodyfat until I started following up meals with ACV, cinammon water. I geniunely believe my previous blood sugar issues has been effecting my ability to build muscle as well. I feel like this is not being spoke about enough and dr's are leaning toward metforomin and ozempic instead of the more natural options i listed above.
Great vid but I kind of wish you covered a bit more in depth if the group in the deficit performed differently/ had any specific struggles due to having less energy. Or some others notable differences regarding training
Go read the study? Don't be stupid and blame him for your idiocy
Help, I do 16-20k Steps a day, weight lift 3x a week. Eat about 2300 cals a day. Im 85 KG. And I want to get down to 75 kg. Is this good? would I lose weight too fast? Or should I eat more
Nice
So this is confirming common knowledge? Every bodybuilder knows you can't add mass during a cut.
I would prefer if they compared different levels of deficits to maybe move us towards an understanding of the optimal muscle sparing rate of cutting (i.e. does cutting twice as fast change the ratio unfavorably?)
I had to lose at least 10kg for surgery, so for a year I ate stupid low amounts of calories because it's the only way I can lose weight. I dropped 14kg, but I think most of it was muscle. Because after finally having the surgeries, it'd been 2 years of disordered eating, couldn't lose anymore weight no matter how hard I tried, and I finally just went back to normal eating and started working out again, slowly building all my muscle back and omg.... pretty much all the weight I lost was muscle. I've gained maybe 10kg back, but I'm the same size I was at my smallest, just more muscle tone and strength. Actually I think I've lost a little more fat since then too. It's crazy how dense muscle mass can be.
Point of story, I may have lost fat but I lost all my muscle mass too from drastic dieting. It's really hard to lose fat and keep muscle for me. Slow, slooooow and steady wins the race... maybe
since they were females, question is it the same for males? especially since Testosterone is usually higher
What would be the advice for overweight people? Do we just need to deal with the muscle loss? Gladly I'm only 11 lb away from my goal weight but I've been losing lean mass consistently even when hitting the gym and eating good amounts of protein which I know it is expected but feels like a very high price to pay.
a couple of things. how much of your calorie intake is protein percentage wise? If you aren’t eating a balanced diet for muscle retention and fat loss that could be a thing that is hurting you. are you fatigued by the end of your lifting week? maybe try an active rest period with your deficit diet and see how your body reacts / recovers.
Use a modest caloric deficit, shooting for 1-1.5lb of fat loss per week. Keep your protein high. Light weights.
Lane got to PREACHING THE GOSPEL at the end lol
Again, what’s the takeaway?
Jk, great video, great and important channel, highly elaborate and informative content.🔥🚀
This video is priceless
As someone that's on a deficit with the primary focus being to get to a healthy weight (currently 300+) is there a point to lifting? Been working out at the gym. Some cardio and some weight lifting. I understand I won't have much gains while dieting, but will it atleast slow down the muscle loss?
Yes! You should do resistance training to minimize lean mass loss and and to improve your body composition(fat x lean mass).
Great review! Do you feel they effectively corrected for composition of calories from the other macros?
What if it's a certain percentage of calories from fat or from carbs that sets one up for muscle gains, not necessarily total calories? Would that have been teased out?
Any ideas why the calorie defecit negatively impacts muscle gain? Maybe evolutionary adaptation to save energy for brain and other short term needs rather than putting energy into long term adaptations?
Interesting stuff.
Thanks!
What if the calorie deficit group consumed more protein, say > 1.5g/lbs? I wonder if they’ll maintain more lean mass. What do you think Layne?
There is an upper limit to how much protein your body can use for muscle maintenance/building. That limit was met with 2.2 grams per kg of lean mass. Adding more won't help. In a large caloric deficit you lose muscle, simple as that. If you're pretty fat you might have some leeway before the muscle loss starts.
Or better yet, drop the intense cardio during the energy restriction. Doesn't make sense why they had the subjects doing cardio in addition to resistance training, if the goal was to recomp during caloric deficit.
@@stoempert I believe there is some evidence that there are unique benefits to higher protein consumption during immense caloric deficit
@@davin8r I just read the study. They were investigating the impact of Low energy availability on young, female athletes, from a performance perspective. Participants were already doing a combination of resistance training and cardiovascular work. The exercise training program makes sense.
@@stoempert ok, but I'm just saying that for us to draw conclusions about an optimal strategy for body recomp, we'd need a similar study with resistance training but without the cardio.
I'm curious if there's any good research/theory on how to "push yourself to near the limit". Like something along the lines of how to measure that more effectively, or how to prep you mind/body for near maximum efforts, maybe even how to embrace pain effectively?
Until then, just acknowledging the idea that your limit is not where you think it might be is more than enough to get started. Appreciate the videos as always!
Unfortunately, this relates to psychology which is not a real science. Everybody is unique and have different personalities and mindsets.
To be an effective study, they should take people with different external stressors they have to deal with, i.e work, children, life, etc. which drains their willpower tank and prevents them from giving their absolute best from working out
Just lift the weight until you really can’t after trying for a minute.
Basically do Starting Strength.