What's going on, guys? Welcome back to e Train Prosper. This is episode 227, Brian and myself, and we are talking what actually counts as a training day. So, a little bit of backstory on this. I kept a document over the first five years of my coaching business. And every single time I got a question from one of my clients, I added it into this document. There are hundreds and hundreds of questions in there. And what I did is I took that document, I popped it into Claude, and I said, What is the most common reoccurring question that I received over that period. And this was it. Helping decide what's actually a training day, what is not a training day. And there were so many various forms asking the same question. And I thought what a brilliant topic to explode into in the episode. So we are going to cover it from the the highest level what actually counts as a training day. And generally in terms of macronutrients, whether we're going to change whether we're going to have two targets, one target, we're going to speak about it in the different nutritional periodization phases. Maintenance in a surplus in a calorie deficit, arguments for, arguments against. What is actually the qualifier on helping to further make that decision? Any non-bodyweight mediated arguments, pro and against, and then uh wrapping up with some general activity uh-based outputs there. But before we dive into the meat and potatoes of the proverbial episode, Brian, what's the latest with you? Yeah, I really have much. we have that new strength cycle starting at Paragon on uh the fourteenth. So that's happening. As always, we offer a hypertrophy option for people that don't really want to go hard on the like barbell basics, but it's there for those that do. Uh and yeah, and beyond that, not a whole lot. Kids are back in school, weather's starting to cool. We were just talking about the the change of temperatures here as we're both at elevation. So we're starting to get these really cool, brisk mornings. It was all the way down to 51 today. Um, but then we have a high of like 90. So uh big swings from the morning to the night and throughout the day. Um, but yeah, just kinda doing things, going through life. Um, a few weeks away from switching back to my kind of winter bro split type thing. So um I'll be looking forward to that here. I'll keep you guys updated over the next Probably like five to six weeks or so before I can't really get outside and and do all the cardio that I've been doing. And just looking forward to kind of the whole colder season, hunkering down, being indoors, lifting more, cardioing less, all that good stuff. So nothing crazy over here. How about you? Yeah, so the biggest thing is next weekend I have my refining hypertrophy seminar here here in Salt Lake City. So I'm very, very excited for that. It's going to be a it's gonna be a long week. It's gonna be a long couple weeks. Let's put it that way. Uh like, but I always I'll I'll get a little bit stressed out about things at times, and then I have to remind myself that Aaron, you don't have a real job, right? We've had real jobs in the past. My job is training, fitness, and nutrition. Like this is as good as life really gets for me. And then I feel grateful. Um but I'm gonna have my normal like weekly, you know, week of check-ins. Ben gets here on Friday, which I'm very, very excited to see him. We plan the the final remaining bits. For the seminar, I have my full workweek seminar Friday, Saturday, Sunday, right into my normal work week, and then Thursday morning drive down to the Olympia, full weekend there, doing Olympia things, right back to work. So I'm gonna have I'll be on probably like 22, 24 days straight of just like go, go, go. But at the end of the day, like I said, I I am grateful to have these opportunities and things, and it's cool. I'm so excited for this seminar to to have people come in and have so much hands-on time doing education, doing demonstration, and then having like real training sessions immediately after, specifically at this gym, because we have all of the equipment at our disposal and can show how different equipment modifies the approach and the programming and stuff. So I'm very, very, very excited about that. And just grateful. So that all starts in like three, four days starts that that begin of of that run. I'm really enjoying coaching, right? Doubling down on the things I said. Either it was a it was either one episode or or two episodes ago, um being much more intentional and and taking on the physique projects that that I feel that I can do my best work and I get most excited about. So I I've been really happy with some of the New signups I got going there. If that interests you as a lit listener, please get in contact. I'd love to have a conversation about that. And then my final update is I think it was maybe two episodes ago. Uh I reached out to Dr. Mike T. Nelson and I've been doing his six-minute sprints. I for he doesn't call them six-minute sprints. I forget exactly what he calls them. But that has been Dare I say fun almost because it's so short and you're getting your ass kicked for such a small amount of time, it's unreasonable for you to be miserable with it. So I get by the time I get miserable, I'm like, Aaron, there's 35 seconds left. Like, get over it. And it's so short that I barely get sweaty, which is also nice. so now I just do it with my shirt off and then I get like a little bit sweaty on like my shoulders and and upper back. And then I just, you know, I'm in the basement and I just let my body temperature cool down and then I'm good to go. And and I really, really like that. Yeah. Um, did you happen to reach out to him at all to discuss the question we had last week or the week before about whether the uh the lifting and keeping your heart rate high through lifting has the equivalent effect of zone two? I didn't, but one of the things is so I I I kind of lied. I didn't actually reach out to him. I found the post and he had it in like an Instagram automation setup where you comment like whatever and then you just get added to the automation. So I did that, and then one of the things when you do that, you you you get s added to his email list, right? I mean very standard business practice in this day and age. And then like the second email was that topic specifically, which was on how lifting doesn't create the same uh what would you call like remodeling adaptations that the actual cardio yes yeah so so I was like perfect I can just read this and and then yes so it was it was very very helpful and it was uh I uh erroneously on on the episode was I just interpreted what you were saying poorly but yeah it's it's while like Twenty reps, you know, squats and stuff or something like that can build capacity, like work capacity. It's not the actual like remodeling of the cardiovascular system that the prolonged cardiovascular work does. Yeah. I was saying on the QA episode as well, it's also about how a lot of the elevated heart rate that occurs from lifting is a result of breath holding, pushing through sticking points and things like that, as opposed to the consistent like monostructural uh adaptation that occurs through that like repetitive submaximal. um cardiovascular work. So yeah, I think that's good that you got clarity on that. And that fits in line with, you know, my understanding of it as well. Yeah, yeah, it was really cool. But anyone uh who's So not to harp on it, but really quickly, the six minute thing I really like because the time commitment is laughable. I do like a minute and a half cooldown from literal get on the bike to get off at seven and a half minutes. And what I've been doing is like Not first thing in the morning, but within 30 minutes of waking up after I do my, you know, like household chores sort of stuff. And then you feel great. You're just like your heart, your heart's pumping, like you're awake, you're ready to go. And you have that bit of accomplishment, physical accomplishment early in the day, which kind of just makes you feel better. So I really, really like it. It's I'm gonna so I've been doing it every other day. Cool. Dig it. Well, for anyone that didn't follow the other episode when I talked about it, it's a six minute ramp. So essentially the idea is that over the course of six minutes, you start super easy, like zone two or maybe even less. And then every like ninety seconds or so you increase your effort so that the last ninety seconds of that six minute period, you're basically going, you know, RPE nine or RPE ten or something like that. And so really there's like Aaron was saying, there's only like a minute and a half of like true misery and the rest of it is just ramping up to that point where you're miserable. But the the benefit of it is simply that you're just doing it every day. So you're getting like a little bit of cardiovascular stimulus every single day. It's it's great. I I really, really like it. Cool. All right. let's jump in. All right, let's dive in. So, topic what actually counts as a training day? Um, when would we use it? When would we use training days uh macros versus non-training day macros? Some of the examples uh and why. So the kind of high-level question, right, or high-level answer to this question is a training day is defined by something that we need to recover from. That is the single best way that I like to answer that because that indicates training, right? And what it typically means is structured training. If you need recovery from activities every single day, your training is not structured and you're just probably doing too much, not monitoring your training progressions, or you would realize you're doing too much because you cannot perform at Absolute high levels and train at adequate capacities if you're doing that seven days per week. Now, the second most kind of question that I that I got, or the the sub-level question that I would get from clients around activities that are not training but they are a little bit confused by are really high step count days. Some form of a hike or activity? Granted, there are gnarly hikes that you need to recover from. I'm not saying that that is not the case, but general activities that seem just of a higher output. The common question, the most common part that I get this in practice, is what happens if I'm not eating enough, right? And my expenditure is so high? What happens if I'm upside down? To which my simple answer is always, if that is truly the case, your body weight starts plummeting and I feed you more food. But let's not put the a the the carriage before the horse, because from our own perceptions, subjective perceptions, which we know as humans are are incredibly flawed, and our metric tracking apps and and and devices are Expenditure is often grossly overestimated. The beauty is that when we are consistent enough, we have in this in endogenously built input versus output mechanism called our metabolism. And if you are truly underwater for multiple consecutive days, we get your body weight dumping. So that we have this very beautifully organic mechanism built in, we just often forget that at times. Anything from you there, Brian? Yeah, well I guess uh you noted like high step counts and hikes and things like that that are kind of that intermediary territory where you're like, does that count as a training day? Does it not? And obviously it's going to be dependent upon exactly how much it is, right? Like if you go for a a one hour hike where, you know, you're mostly in zone two and you're burn or less and you're burning say Four to six hundred calories, which would be like a standard, like, you know, decent effort hike for that period of time. That might be totally different, as you alluded to, than going and doing a three hour, 3,000 feet of vert um type hike. And similarly, I think, you know, zone two can be one of those kind of ambiguous things as well, where like, did I do zone two and now it's a training day? And I think again, it depends on exactly how. how robust and and the duration of that session. So like going out and doing like a 30 minute zone two on a bike, probably not that big of a deal. But when I go out and I do a ninety minute zone two ride, I consider that a training day because ninety minutes is significantly more cost than than thirty. So I think there's some ambiguity in there and there's not always like a a black and white like this is training and this is not training. I would agree with that. And I think what is probably best, and I apologize, I should have opened with this, is nutritional periodization, right? And which phase that we are in, which would dictate, potentially dictate, if we would use training day macros versus non-training day macros and or just keep everything the same, right, day to day. So we'll start with that maintenance, right? We'll have an argument for, argument against. So at maintenance, and in what I mean here is we're like we're far from a diet, a truly out of maintenance period, or not reverse anything like that. The argument for using training day macros versus non-training day macros, and to explain that a little bit more objectively, what that might mean is more carbohydrate. on training days and also commonly but not always more total calories on that day. And then on our non-training days, we may have less total calories, or at the least we push some carbohydrate over to fat. Okay. So we're talking about protein generally the same. On training days if we're splitting them off, Carbs are higher, fats are lower, calories might be higher on a non-training day. Calories might be down a little bit, but at the very least, we would push some of the carbohydrate over to fat. Okay, so we're explaining it kind of um well. The reason that we may use that at maintenance. So actually staying at maintenance, right? Because something that is very, very common is at maintenance. The goal is literal bodyweight maintenance. We have this beautiful, again, inbuilt mechanism that you can average out over a seven, 10-day moving average to let you know whether you're at maintenance or not. But something that we see is let's say we're eating 3,000 calories at maintenance. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, we're all at 3,000 calories. And then because we're at maintenance and lifestyle is more flexible, we have more meals out, maybe three, four meals over the week. But on those days that we have meals out, we're not at maintenance. We're in a surplus because any meal out is almost equivocally going to be higher calorie than the dinner or lunch that you make at home. So, with that, we're actually not at maintenance. So, we may use it to pull back our non-training day total calories a little bit to absorb those three-ish meals out per week, right? So, that's a very, very practical one. The other use case for maintenance is to keep our insulin sensitivity as best as we can at body weight maintenance. Because the times that we are not as active or are training as hard. Our demand for carbohydrate is not objectively as high. So if we just push some of that carbohydrate over to dietary fat, we lower the the the the insulin demand and we also slow gastric emptying there by increasing the fats. m Sorry. So those are my kind of two arguments for at maintenance. The argument against app maintenance is management. Right. Uh if if you have one set of macros to hit every single day, uh there's less opportunity for things to go wrong when you're you're operating the same every day. so I I generally don't use it at maintenance often with clients in in full transparency. Maintenance is a time that I like to try and keep things as simple as for for my clients as I can. But there are good reasons that that that we we could that anyone could argue for. Um do you have any thoughts on those before we get into the other two? I have one kind of general question that I think might be applicable to to some of the audience. And uh so The the question, I guess, or this the the situation would be that what I've noticed through all the years of coaching is that oftentimes on hard training days, it's actually it decreases people's appetite at times. So you have hard workouts, they're less hungry on those days, and then there'll be like a a slingshot or a rebound effect. The next day, where it's like all of the potentially underfed that you were the day that you really trained hard, then hits you the next day and you're much hungrier the subsequent day. And so I guess the question would just be like, you know, when we look at the research, it seems like the weekly average of calories and the monthly average and the yearly average, like what you do over the course of the week is more determinant of your recovery. than simply what you do on any given day. So what would be your interpretation or the impact of someone who isn't oscillating these daily based on training or not training, but simply trying to focus on the weekly average and hitting that number. And maybe that even looks like eating less on training days and eating more on non-training days because they're following their appetite signals. But at the end of the day, at the end of the week, You know, you're still at the like target average, so to speak. Does that make sense? It does, it does. I would say maintenance is the only time that I would encourage anyone to let their appetite dictate their decisions. Because in a calorie surplus Appetite's going to be lower because you're trying to feed yourself into higher body weights naturally. In the calorie deficit, your appetite's gonna be higher because we're trying to feed ourselves into lower body weights. So I don't think in a surplus or in a deficit, appetite is as reliable as it is as at maintenance, because I hey I wanna keep my body weight the same. So if I'm uh out of norm hunger, out of normal hunger, it probably means I should put some food in. And if I'm like out of norm really full, it probably means that maybe in the day prior or or or a couple days prior, right? Or using that example, I had a f a free meal that was like a really large meal, I'm I I'm probably over my calories or over my threshold for for a bit. So I think that auto-regulation with appetite works really well at maintenance when auto-regulation is the goal. Mm-hmm. I guess then the the the follow-up would simply be even at surplus or in a deficit, if your weekly caloric targets are met, what is the implication of biasing it to training days or non-training days? I the the thing that I will I'm not necessarily saying pushing back on, but what I practically see surplus is a little bit different because our margins for success are bigger, right? It's easier generally to put body weight on than it is to to lose fat for most people if I had exactly um but but in a deficit It's kind of like playing catch up, right? So I don't like let's say, hey, I don't know, let's say we're doing a a basic 500 calorie deficit um over over a s seven-day period. So it's 3,500 calories, right? If we get to Saturday and we need to be in a 3,500 calorie deficit and you're only at 2,000. I don't like being like, okay, well, it's Saturday, you need to be in a 1500 calorie deficit. Now it because what we get are these really wild swings. And when things are really wild, people make kind of poor decisions, and then we're starving Sunday and Monday, and then we like white knuckle to Wednesday and then have a large day over. And like I said, with fat loss, our mar for most people, the margins for success are already rather small. I want to keep things as predictable day to day as possible as opposed to waiting to the weekend and then making large decisions based off of how my feelings or whatever have gone Monday through Thursday. Yeah. It's so it's the the the the ultimate challenge I get I guess what I'm getting at is there's things that make a lot of sense on paper and they can be right. Obviously the math can math but when you put human emotion and the error of us of our human brains in it, it really muddies the practicality of the math actually working out. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so that was super helpful. That was a really, really good um point by you. Next we'll kind of move into a surplus. So the reasons for splitting off the the non training days and lowering calories and carbohydrate on the day is holding insulin sensitivity for as long as possible. Because that is really the excuse me, one of the ultimate deciders of of how long your gain can be and how productive Your partitioning ratio can be more favorable when our insulin sensitivity is better. Very similar to that is nutrient partitioning. Right? We can take advantage of Basically, times like post-workout, where we have uh GLUT4 translocation, which is non-glucose mediated, sorry, non-insulin mediated glucose uptake, where we can partition things a little bit more favorably. and with that, we can select foods that would be a little bit more appropriate for that. So something like Intra workout carbohydrate, which is you know like a liquid Gatorade coconut water or something like that. So we can take advantage of some of those things, especially when appetite may not be as high, right? So for example, right now, I was very surprised. I was hungry this morning. This is the first home morning morning I've been hungry in days and days, and I've really had to kind of bend some of those rules a little bit to take advantage of those nutrient partitioning times and for me to get more food in at those times because I can eat a lot more pre and post workout. But then when it's 8 p.m. I don't want to put in another hundred grams of carbs. I want to put in 40 grams of carbs. But what that requires me to do is to put in 200 grams of carbs pre-workout. So those things can can help kind of shift that nutrient partitioning and then how long we can maintain that insulin sensitivity. And like I just said, simply appetite and hunger. it is a little bit more reasonable to have For example, like cream of rice, bananas, dates, and a bagel, pre-workout, before your like 90 minutes before your leg day or something like that. But if it's Sunday and we're just hanging out at the house, it doesn't make as much sense to have that meal. So we can make intelligent food sources based on our outputs, which muscles we're we're training, or maybe even priority muscle groups, um, as opposed to just an even spread across the day. The argument against or sorry the other argument kind of for but for a different reason, if we need a certain caloric threshold, like you said, over over a weekly average to get body weight moving at a at our desired target rate of change, on the days where appetite is lower, potentially a rest day. It makes sense to push some of that carbohydrate. Can make sense, apologies, to push some of that carbohydrate over to dietary fat purely because the food volume goes down. So if we move, let's just use that same example, banana dates you know bagel to things like peanut butter and what are some other fats like like you know walnuts or something like that cheese yeah we get the same calories in for a reduced volume which impacts your app your hunger and and satiety generally positively in this context so that would be my you know the the the argument there for This one, uh again, to to go back to the point that you brought up, I do think in a surplus, appetite does play a little bit more of a role. You have your big appetite people and then you have your like people like me. I've just I I'm not a huge appetite person, so I really have to take advantage of these things because when I don't have a training day, it's almost like a relief where I don't have to eat as much food. So that one could but again margins for success are bigger. So what you do in this context I think matters the l second second most. More than maintenance, but not as much as the deficit. What are your thoughts on uh on the on on an inner surplus? Yeah, I mean, I just think you have a lot more freedom because the goal is really to like eat to a point where you are full. Like I think, you know, in in at maintenance or in a deficit, I think either one, you probably want to stop eating before you're at that point of like feeling extremely full. But when you're in a surplus, like you gotta just keep eating until you reach that point where you're like, man, I'm like very, very full right now. And um and again, I think your point about it like being very individual in that some people have bigger appetites and some people have to like force feed, certainly plays a huge role into how you go about that. But maybe like the knowledge or your self-awareness can sort of dictate how you go about consuming around workouts or on rest days and things like that. Like which like if you're in a surplus, like we were saying, you have more freedom. So if you're somebody like I was saying, where on a training day, maybe you have less appetite because you're training and there's all of those kind of downstream effects on like all the the norepinephrine and all that stuff. Um you could maybe allocate some more of those calories to rest days if that fits you better and you're hitting that weekly target. Um so yeah, I think there's like a lot of freedom there in a sense. Yeah. Because the there's more freedom because your margins for success are bigger. Right? The in a insulin positive state, meaning you're more anabolic. And so like as long as you're eating sufficiently, there is more freedom as to exactly how that is kind of partitioned throughout the days. Yeah. And the the final kind of I was gonna say challenge, but metric for for monitoring, it's really body fat. You know, like body weight is more of a proxy, but the fatter you get, the worse these things start to work against you. and really leveraging just like photos, uh training performance, right? If training performance is not improving and your appetite's in the gutter and your body weight just keeps climbing, your partitioning ratio is probably starting to work uh against you. Um, but that one again is it's harder to monitor. Uh this is a a time where I think ADEXA has potentially the most utility because if we're I like to use the term if we're wet we're wet what that means is like if if we're carbohydrate saturated you're not gonna get like the fluctuations of the DEXA of if your glycogen depleted or something like that. So if you're in month one of of your surplus your glycogen's already effectively saturated And then if you're in month three, glycogen is still saturated, so we get a pretty honest reading of any changes. But I wouldn't use it in month one or three. Let's say you're doing an eight-month build, I might start that at four or five, and it's really those final bits of is this extra six pounds of my build? And there's nothing specifically inherently special about that number of six pounds. Is is the additional body fat-free mass I add over those six pounds worth me having to diet those six pounds off at the beginning of my deficit is really what I'm trying to say. So let's say you want to build to whatever 200 pounds and you get to 196, sorry, 194. Is the amount of additional muscle mass accrued from 194 to 196 worth what the fat accrued is of that number that's going to then need to be immediately dieted off? So that's where in those final phases, I think something like a DEXA has some utility in a build. And those ratios of how much muscle and fat you're gaining simultaneously are going to change based on your training age. And so, like in the beginning, that calculation might be way more worth it because you're getting like 50, 60% of the weight gain being muscle. But as you're an advanced trainee, you might get, you know, one pound of muscle for five pounds of fat or something along those lines. Yep. And then you have to just ask yourself, is that worth what ends up being like an extra, I don't know, probably six weeks on your diet, you know? So yeah. Okay. into deficit. So I will say that that in my years coaching, what the the time that I use splitting off the training days versus non-training days most often is in a calorie deficit. And the reasons that the pros there are recovery demand. So typically we generally will have more of a recovery demand post-training days, right? as opposed to non-training days. And one of the strongest indicators for how much of our fat-free mass we are able to maintain through the calorie deficit. Is keeping a high training intensity and training quality. So we have a higher emphasis and demand on training recovery. Second to that, maintaining training intensity, right? Which is the primary driver of what I just said. Maintaining training intensity is how we keep as much muscle mass as we possibly can. Let's say before or in week one of your diet, you have whatever, some lift. We have a hundred reps for 10 pounds. If you get to the end of your diet and you're able to do a hundred pounds for eight reps, I think that's a really quality training intensity that you've been able to maintain, assuming we're like very, very lean now. If that 100 pounds for 10 drops to 100 pounds per for four, you have some concerns there at that point because that is too much of uh a degradation in training intensity, which would probably indicate that you are catabolizing more fat-free mass than you probably care to. So that is the reason I like to use it there. And then the most common thing that I run into is simply the demands of our target rate of loss. At the end of the day, in a calorie deficit, maintaining or achieving our target rate of loss, which is, for generalization speaking, generally about 1% total body mass per week. If we are not making that, I'm going to take more food away from our non-training days. specifically for the first two points I I set maintaining uh our trainability, our training intensity, and the recovery demand, whereas on our non-training days, we generally do not we just don't have as much of a need. It's it's opportunity cost of where we we pull from. Yeah, I I'll say that with that example I used of the person that doesn't get hungry on training days and then gets really hungry on non-training days, that is me in a deficit every single time. And I think it's as much about the physiological effect of training in blunting appetite as it is about simply being distracted and having something to do instead of focusing on food. And so like when I when I diet, I actually take the opposite approach. I make sure to prioritize pre-workout meals in a deficit because I I like you said it's very important that you fuel your training. But other than that pre-workout meal to make sure I have a good quality session, I actually tend to take the opposite approach where I will eat less on the training day because the non-training day where I'm just sitting around working and going for walks and stuff, it just it leads to me being food focused and wanting to eat more food. so psychologically for me, it actually works better to kind of do it that way, which I know is not necessarily the most physiological advantageous approach. Yeah, it's a really good point you bring up too. The the beauty of the training days is one, hard training blunts appetite. I mean, we know that. That that's a very, very real thing. And you get let's let's call like two hours of of appetite suppression during the day, something like that. Now that has to be hard training also, by the way. But on our non training days, you you generally have more time. And you're if if you're if it's not filled with really challenging work or something like that, you have that that that food focused seeking boredom sort of thing where it may not be an actual like stabbing physical hunger pain, but that that psychologically driven desire for for more food and that one is I think that's the hardest, right? Because you can't when I know For example, there was there was times in my last diet where I had that like stabbing hunger pain. And I knew that that meant I like I'm getting closer to this goal. Like it's working. I'm like I'm digging here. The fat is coming off. But when you have that desire for it, you can't easily justify it as This is my body needing more food, because it's kind of like this is my brain wanting things, which is not necessarily the same as a biological like requirements, more of a site, like a human brain driven sort of thing. So that one is it's very real. Uh and it's just, I would say it's more unfortunate more than anything. Yeah. I mean, you just you can't disentangle the psychological impact of these things from the physiological optimization. It's it's really difficult to try to to just turn your brain off and just put your head down and just do the thing that you're supposed to do, especially in a deficit where food focus is so high. And so part of the strategy that I've found with myself and with clients is uh managing that balance and catering to some of the psychological. Aspects. There are some not to derail this episode completely. There I I've it's it's hard to commit to, but I I will draw my line in the sand that it does work better. Making your food more basic and saving yourself from trying to stop seek the flavors that you can't have. Let me put it that way. So one of the things that I noticed deep into my into my prep I started interacting more with like food pages and stuff on Instagram and like saving things for after the the after my prep was over and then my algorithm just started showing me like more food and stuff and then it it's it starts this vicious cycle where now I'm like saving more things and now I'm more food focused and I'm looking at more things and then I have a friend who is very he's like a huge like foodie type type dude and he he got me onto making the like whey drips at night and mug cakes with with whey and I found my hunger skyrocketed where I and and I'm I'm probably like 70-80% of the way through my prep at this point and I was like what the what the fuck has happened like out of nowhere my hunger is equally double what it was And then one day it just hit me. I was like, this all started when I started doing these like nighttime way mug cakes and stuff. I was like, I'm just gonna replace all this with chicken breast at the end of the night. And I got in my Instagram feed, I like unfollowed all the food pages and I purposefully started tailoring my what's that like explore page and I was like looking for anime pages and like liking that and within like two days all my food stuff is gone and within a couple days I'm like back to my normal baseline hunger. So if you are someone who's really psychologically food driven like that and you're doing the sugar free syrups and and multiple different, you know, way flavors and all that stuff, if you just pull that back to bare bones and and just use more I hate to use this term, but like natural or or What's the word I'm looking for? Like neutral flavors of food, a lot of that hunger or food-seeking psychological behavior, I'm not gonna say it's gonna go away, but it it it can reduce by a substantial margin. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely science that shows that when you eat sweet things, you then uh ping your brain to crave more sweet things. And so yeah, I mean, it would just make sense that the more bland you can eat, the the less you're going to to start that stuff. And I think you can actually like curb sugar cravings within a matter of like a week or two if you're really consistent with it. Yeah. Okay, that was that was really cool. I I really liked your inputs were there were super super helpful things that I definitely uh did not consider. So now that we've kind of talked about it from the from the highest level, a lot of the other parts are more along the lines of the calorie deficit scenario because this is the time that this is most likely to be used or the imp implications are strongest, you know, in favor or not. So recovery is our qualifier. so perceived efforts, right? Like I started with at the beginning of the episode, really high step count, getting really sweaty for for a day, um, or something like a longer, you know, a bike ride or something like that. They're not necessarily training days. And what I always come back to is if this new activity or step count or something like that is drive, like truly, we are upside down in our expenditure to intake, we will see a rapid and acute decline in body weight. And if that pushes us over our target rate of loss, I give you more food. So instead of preemptively deciding that I'm going to be burning all the calories in the world, if that does end up happening, we just move to an eat more, move more approach, right? To close that deficit, to put us back to where we want in the rate of gain. What I will say there in all of my years coaching. The amount of people concerned with that scenario and the amount of people that actually find themselves in that scenario, vastly different. Right. I I have in in the last, let's call it two years, I can probably count on one hand of clients who who've done something like this and their body weight has really plummeted over like four or five days, and I've had to increase their food in the deficit. Yeah. What do you think about the constrained model of energy expenditure though, where you get to a point where these leisure activities where you're not really like truly exerting yourself fully, but you're just sort of like leisurely moving your body around a ton and like uh you reach a point per the Poncer research where you can essentially especially in a deficit is as with as they've shown, you can literally like do all of this movement and it doesn't even lead to any more caloric burn. I mean I I'm not gonna argue the research. I think it's one of those times where life gets in the way first, right? So like if if someone if we're talking, let's say, training five days per week and wants to do twenty thousand steps per day and some leisure activity, the the hours demand. That that necessitates is quite high. And most people that I run into in their 30s, 40s, 50s, they just there's just not enough hours available in their life for that to take place. So I generally find the the so let's call it that that constrained energy model or like the energy flux, I find it positive, right? The the clients that I have my worst you know, fat loss success rates with are the people who are who can't really get more than like six to seven thousand steps per day. Like we just because we need to diet so hard, which then hunger is through the roof. And we're trying to manage a lot more of adherence issues and things because they're so hungry. But if we could just move more, we can this we we can eradicate a lot of that. So I I I generally find my twelve to fifteen thousand steps per day people, dieting is is the easiest. Um but if we're trying to push to like 20,000 steps per day, or I do have some people who are on that super high end of it where they're just filling every single day with a new exercise class or or sport or whatever, but it's their it for those people, it's their nutrition. So with those people I generally pull back. and dial in their nutrition and now we can have more downtime, have a little bit more recovery, get better training sessions, because we're not just stacking activities and training on top of each other for energy expenditure and things move a lot better. Yeah, it seems, I think, from my recollection that a lot of the constrained energy seems to occur on those really higher end step counts anyway. Like if you're at ten or twelve thousand, you're still probably getting a pretty good return on your movement. But as you take it higher than that, you start to get less and less uh caloric burn, so to speak. Yeah, I wanna say it was somewhere in like the seventeen thousand was where things really started becoming like uh diminishing returns, if I remember correctly. Yeah. I mean, it's also like like I alluded to, it it does seem that just simply being in a deficit constrains your caloric expenditure to the point of like something like if you're in a deficit, even from the get-go, you're only getting like 70% of what you actually think you're burning. Whereas if you're in maintenance or a surplus, you can get close to a hundred percent of what you burn all the way up to like you said, that 17,000 point or whatever. But I think uh in a deficit, I think that that diminishing returns happens like. Right off the bat. Yeah, it's it starts happening pretty quickly. Uh and I know you you might know a little bit more than this on me, so please correct me if I'm wrong. Are our bodies metabolic adaptations to cardiovascular uh output from like, you know, zone two or something like that start to happen like really hard pretty quickly. Is that not correct? Yeah, for sure. I think the lower intensity that you're moving, you lose like you have a more constrained energy than you do at higher energy expenditures, like higher heart rates. Can you explain that, uh, please? if you're walking, you're going to and you're in a deficit, your your energy constraint is going to occur uh much more rapidly and almost immediately. Whereas if you're training at higher heart rates doing like hit intervals and stuff like that, then your constraint of energy is going to be less significant than it is at like a walking or like a low zone two. Yeah. And I mean that kind of makes sense because of the sheer demand, right? Like if you're pushing into like zone five, you're it's so challenging. Like your body doesn't have a choice but to divert resources to produce the necessary ATP to push yourself at that at that intensity. Um to not to play like devil's advocate, but one of the things that that I've seen and I kind of do experience too, if we have two because If if we just took the statement that we just, you know, made, um, people would think, well, why would I do steps? Why wouldn't I just do like zone five hit with everything? It's the fatigue costs that then curb stomp your neat. So it's that those twenty minute hit sprints, if we put if we use too much of that, our fatigue is so high that our meat completely plummets and then you end up even though we're burning more in that acute amount, the rest of the day goes down so much that you end up actually under where you would want to be. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a certainly a relevant concern, but I think even the maybe even a bigger concern if you're in a deficit is that if you're doing a lot of that high-intensity cardio, you use the word fatigue. And it's not just that it's affecting your neat, but it's affecting your your training sessions. So then you're having lower quality training sessions, your leg days are sacrificed because uh any cardio is gonna have to use your lower body significantly to get into zone five. Your legs are gonna get really tired, they're gonna run out of. the energy resources that they need. And then you're gonna have lower quality weight workouts, which is gonna mean that you then are not able to maintain as much muscle mass. And it's this whole, this whole thing. So I actually am not a huge fan of programming a lot of really high intensity cardio for my clients in a deficit. like we might do one day a week where it's like short duration just to kind of call it spike the metabolism or whatever, the 90s term. Um, but but really I think the majority of your cardio should probably be lower intensity. when you're in a deficit because you need to sustain as much as you can to put into your weight workouts. I completely agree. The only the only times that I will use more hit. I I won't even say more. I I should say some hit in a deficit is with my bigger individuals, like just people with more mass. And what I generally do is I'll do a short sprint interval. So so let's say something like a single Tobata, right? On like on the Echo Bike, which is literally four minutes of work, and then I go put them on the treadmill after. So that but the the time that I use the hit most off season when we're building. for sure. I, from my standpoint, is like, hey, we're we are inherently doing things that are more unhealthy. We're feeding you away from insulin sensitivity. We're putting on body weight, we're putting on body fat. We are creating a holistically unhealthier human effectively. So I'm going to try and do some level of counterbalancing that with higher intensity cardio, which then hopefully also can help us stimulate a little bit of hunger too. Yep. Yep. Okay, let me check. We already talked about there there's one part that that I didn't bring up. So non-bodyweight arguments for having some of those rest day macros. Um, this one would be more at l at maintenance. I'm kind of mad that I didn't put this higher up in the episode. Metabolic flexibility, right? Being able to digest fats and stuff. If I'm really being honest with everyone, I have kind of pigeonholed myself into this position where I can't digest fats well anymore. And even something like if we were to go out and get a steak or something, fucks my stomach up. It's just too much fat. Unless I get a flank steak or a top sirloin, like I can't do a ribeye or anything. It's just way too much dietary fat for me to digest. And it I'm like at best really gassy afterwards. At worst, obviously what what is worse than that? So maintaining that ability of metabolic flexibility just to partition in and digest different foods and things, which leads me into my second part: food flex food flexibility and quality of life. So something like, I don't know, you got a promotion, wife gets a promotion, something like that. You want to go out and celebrate with you know, a a steak dinner in wine, and if every time you eat a steak, you have diarrhea, it's it's not not the most fun thing. So that is uh another reason. Now don't get me wrong, that's a little bit more at like the extremes of bodybuilder or something like that. If you're if your dietary fats are at like a 65, 70, you're probably okay. But if you've been, you know, nine, ten months on end at 40 or 50 or something like that, there's gonna be some work. to you know be able to digest those higher fats acutely again. But that is a very it's not a it's not an X's and O's of body composition reason, but it's a very real quality of life reason. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I find it interesting how there's just people that seem to do better with higher fat, lower carb, and people that seem to do better with higher carb, lower fat. And uh I've like I I always thought I was a a higher carb person, but over the last couple of years I've gravitated more to being uh a bit higher fat. And uh it seems to be it seems to be working pretty well for me at this point. Although I will say that when I'm in a deficit, I do naturally gravitate to higher carb, lower fat because you get more food volume, which I think goes a long way in satiety. So I I am a proponent of of higher carb, lower fat for people in a deficit. And then I think you have a lot more freedom of how you go about that when you're at maintenance or in a surplus. I I agree. I I think in a s in a deficit the argument becomes strongest for for lower carb sorry. Lower fat, higher carb for that very reason that you just said literal fo food vol food volume and training performance. Pr pretty pretty simply put there. Once you get into to maintenance, I think maintenance has the weakest argument for higher carb because the entire of the goal of maintenance is staying the same, right? Which pretty means from a body composition standpoint, if we keep calories at at an isocaloric level, it doesn't really matter that much. I would make the argument I I should not even say would. I will make the argument in a surplus uh A lower fat, higher carb approach typically works better based off of the overfeeding research that we have. The majority of the overfeeding research is in obese populations. The last time I did a dive on this, I could only find two on resistance-trained people. But if obese people or overweight people who are, by effective definition, insulin resistant. Do better on on a higher carbohydrate diet, the people who are not insulin resistant and are insulin sensitive will only do better on a higher carbon diet. Uh and and the real reason there is it's just partitioning, right? For us, before we can store carbohydrate as fat, it has to go through the process of de novo lithogenesis to get converted from a glucose-like structure to a fat-like structure. So it's just safer because of some of those metabolic processes that are expensive in that conversion um there. But Again, better, but not by some gigantic margin. The only gigantic margin I would really argue for, I think, is fat loss. and then the kind of final one here is on the wearable, right? Your smartwatch or anything. The algorithms th they're flawed. I I mean we see it constantly, and I don't think it's it's a challenging space. I think eventually it would hopefully get pretty decent, but I I do not think that we're there yet. So I would not recommend anyone making real decisions solely from the wearable, right? Estimated burn is an a very, very unreliable uh metric often. So I would use it as inputs that would correspond with subjective perceptions, recovery, uh perceived recovery, your your program, how it's scheduled before making any kind of decisions from it. And like I said. If let's say your watch, let's say your maintenance is 3,000 calories and your watch says you're burning 3,500 all week long, your body is your body weight's gonna be going down if that is actually the case. So use it as a proxy input, you know, as in coordination with other inputs, and then make decisions from that. But I would not make decisions solely from what the watch is saying. Yeah, I think that's a hundred percent right in that your watch objectively is not giving you an accurate calorie count of what you're burning throughout the day. But I will say that it is accurate to you, in that if it tells you arbitrarily that you're burning a thousand calories in a day, you can't be like, okay, well then that means I need to, you know, account for those thousand calories in my diet. But when it says that you went from a thousand calories a day to seven hundred or 1300, you can pretty reliably believe that you are either moving less or moving more, and that those numbers are probably more or less accurate to whatever that watch has as your baseline thousand. If you're, you know, if you're up from that, you're moving more, you need to eat more. If you're down from that, you're moving less, you need to eat less. I think that is where the watch is accurate. So it's basic number isn't accurate, but it's uh delta of being higher or lower than than your base number is accurate to you. That's a really good point, and I would gen and I would certainly agree with that. It's then what what matters most is not the number itself. What matters most is the trend above or below the base. And I I use this exact same explanation because sometimes I get clients that pigeonhole themselves on their actual like calorie number. And they'll say, like, well, this entry says it's You know, a hundred grams of oats is is this many, and this one says it's that many. And I say I don't I don't care which one you pick. All that I care is that you pick the same one every single time. I just care that you are consistent in your inaccuracy. Because let's say you're supposed to be eating 2,000 calories and you're actually eating 2,100 calories, as long as you're always eating 2100 calories, that when it comes time to either increase or reduce your food, we're still going to do it by a relative percentage of your baseline. So I say as long as it's consistently inaccurate. we can pull what data we need from it to either increase your food by a margin or decrease your food by a margin. Yep, exactly. Cool. and then the last thing was just around like steps, you know, cardio lifting all kind of gets lumped into activity, which we we could I wouldn't call it all neat because I I think uh objectively of definition, cardio is not neat, it's exercise activity. but if someone has like a really, really, really high step count, we're pushing into that that Ponser territory. when I would potentially pull steps down. And what I very rarely do it unless someone's rate of loss is too hot. And then I have fatigue concerns. Because if we're if our rate of loss is above threshold, the first thing that I think that's gonna happen is our recovery capacity is going to diminish and then our trainability diminishes. So I I generally will pull either cardio back first. And the thing that I the reason I like to pull cardio before I'll touch steps is because cardio is this thing you have to go do. Whereas with steps, like I'm in my work outfit, I can just go walk for ten minutes outside and come back and be perfectly fine. I just can't go fucking hop on the the bike erg for ten minutes. And then just be like come back to work because I'll be all sweaty and stuff like that. So it it fits into most people's lives a little bit more seamlessly. So I'll pull cardio before I pull steps. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'll also add that for me, uh, I talked a lot about the psychological piece of dieting and how I become quite food focused on the non-training days. And so steps or simply like going out and going for a walk is often something that works quite well for me to uh kind of distract myself from food. So if I'm in a deficit, I know that I need to hit my caloric targets and I'm feeling quite hungry. I can go for a, you know, ten or fifteen minute brisk walk and I'll forget about food while I'm doing it. And then oftentimes I'll come back and not have that same level of hunger that I did before. So it can be a nice distraction in that regard as well. Yeah, I've also noticed that that a very similar thing that I'll use with fatigue. If it's like mid-afternoon and I'm like dragging ass for some reason, uh, and I'm not gonna go hit a coffee or something like that because then I can't sleep at night, 10 minute walk, it's just enough enough movement and in the and it gets me doing something, and then I I feel perfectly fine again. Yeah, I agree with that too. Okay, cool. So I like this episode. Hopefully it was helpful. Is there anything that you want to add on the back end of this one, Brian? No, I just think it was great. Thank you for putting all that together and I think it will be valuable for people. Sweet. All right, guys, Brian and I will talk to you next week.