Welcome everyone to the Noble Just Bacon podcast.

I am your host, Dr.

Allen, and here with me today is Coach Beth to answer all of your burning health and fitness questions from around the social media world.

This is another one of our rapid fire episodes and we have a ton of great topics to cover.

So let's get rolling.

Our first topic today, thoughts on exercising a muscle that is still sore.

This is a very common question that I see coming up quite a bit in, you know, around fitness spaces when people start getting into lifting and everything like that.

And I think that is a very valid question.

And I think that this hits people particularly hard when they're first starting to lift because that's when you are most susceptible to this level of soreness, to the significant level of soreness.

And so when people experience this, particularly people that have never really lifted consistently before, it can be concerning.

And certainly when someone is new to something, they may not really fully understand what they're feeling.

And if you are experiencing this soreness, you can always question this type of thing.

Now, there's a difference between feeling some deep in the muscle soreness and being so sore that you can't use the muscle, you can't walk, you can't stand without some some serious effort.

Now, First things first is make sure that you're running a good program.

If you're running a good program with appropriate volumes, you are likely not in a level that's so overly sore that it's problematic to exercise the next time that workout comes up.

Some soreness is likely to be expected.

Just because you're a little bit sore, just because you might have moderate soreness, doesn't mean you should avoid training that muscle.

There are things that I would emphasize after making sure that you have a good program that has an appropriate level of volume for you.

One, is your nutrition appropriate?

Is your sleep appropriate?

Is your hydration level appropriate?

If you are dehydrated, soreness is a lot more severe.

And so I would ask all of these questions to a person and then I would say, well, are you lightly active when you're not actively weight training?

For those people that stay lightly active, most of the soreness seems to work its way out.

If you've been sitting for long periods of time after a day like this, within, you know, 48 hours of training, you can feel locked up.

Go for a light walk when you're going into the gym the next time, do a light warm up, you know, go for a jog for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever it is, and then see how you feel.

If you feel that you cannot move after a 5 to 10 minute brisk walk, light jog, warm up, then it's problematic.

I think if that soreness starts to abate and you're like, yeah, OK, I'm starting to feel a little bit more limber.

Things are starting to feel a little bit more fluid.

I think that that's perfectly fine.

Continue to work out.

If after that time period you're like, man, I'm really locked up.

I'm brand new to training, so this is something that I'm not really familiar with.

Stay on the treadmill, walk for 45 minutes slowly.

Don't waste your time.

You've gone in and it's good that you.

Yeah, and it's good that you did get in because that's going to build those habits and routines that you want to build anyways.

So making sure that you're continuing to go when it's possible is still really important.

And whether or not you make that call in that moment, I mean, that's auto regulation, right?

And this is something that we want to teach people to do no matter what stage of training they're in, no matter what experience level they have.

So give yourself the chance to drink some damn water, move a little bit, get a little bit more limber, do some dynamic warmups and then see how you feel and then make that call.

I would be very hesitant to tell a person, oh, if you're feeling sore, just don't train.

I think that that's for 99% of the cases is probably worse than just saying just train through a little bit of soreness.

So having gone through that whole spiel, Beth, anything to add?

No, I mean, I if you, if you took a day off for every time you were sore, I feel like you'd never be in the gym like that.

I feel like there's always something that is a little bit sore from a workout.

I know for me personally, like if, even if I'm consistently and regularly doing any sort of lunge pattern, whether it be like a Bulgarian split squat, walking lunges, a regular split squat, anything that is a lunge pattern for me lights up my legs like it's nobody's business.

And legitimately, even if I have them every single week and I'm being exposed to that stimulus, it doesn't matter.

I can't sit on the toilet for three days.

But if I stayed out of the gym with legs that felt like that, I would never, I would never be in the gym.

And usually it takes like if I'm doing warm up sets, like it might take a warm up set or two with, with weight, you know, with added weight to kind of work through some of that pain or get to a point where maybe my brain just doesn't even register it anymore and I'm ready to go.

The only time that that I think that that advice might change is if you have like a cute sharp searing pain, which is quite different from muscular soreness.

Yeah.

Any, any acute sharp stabbing pains or any neurological symptoms, any tingling in extremities, any loss of feeling, these are things that no matter what we're talking about as far as lifting goes, I mean, these are signs.

There's a difference between deep down muscular soreness, which is OK and expected, and sharp stabbing pains, neurological symptoms, you know, dramatic extreme loss of strength, tingling, numbness, those kind of things.

If you have those, certainly do not train.

That is a sign that you actually have some nerve or blood vessel damage going on.

One thing to keep in mind, soreness is not a definitive sign of a good workout.

Genetics mediate a lot of soreness.

There are going to be muscles that you notice as you start to go on your fitness journey that you get more sore in than others.

Beth might say legs like that.

Legs for me are moderate, but traps for me are extreme.

If I'm going to give my level of like a one to 10, and clearly this is not the same as somebody else's level of 1 to 10.

But if I'm talking about me and the muscles on my body that get the most sore, traps get more sore than anything else, like trapping neck stuff.

So if I'm doing.

You've always gotten lit up from that, from stuff like that.

I always do.

And you'll see me kind of like turning like Batman.

I don't.

My neck doesn't turn.

Yeah.

So it's funny, like that's just a genetic thing with me.

And I've trained long enough that that should have worked its way out if it was just a new training stimulus.

It's not a new training stimulus for me.

It's genetics.

I'm hydrated as hell.

So it's not hydration.

But I'm telling you all of the different things that you can look into.

And if if you've figured out that your volume is good, you figured out that your hydration is good, you figured out that your recovery is good, you're still getting sore, tough shit, move it because that's that's the way that it's going to be.

And so traps and neck musculature is like that for me.

And you know, any day that I do like high poles or I do shrugs or anything like that, I mean, I'm going to be, it's going to feel like I have a slight, slight level of almost whiplash.

And it's, it's not that's being dramatic.

But like you can tell like if I haven't been moving a whole lot, particularly with the fact that I work at a computer and I'm staring forward the entire time, I'm, I just said get in actual movement for your neck.

You like literally need to turn your head a little bit to, to get that to happen.

And so I get locked up from time to time, but this is an example of the fact that genetics can mediate this.

And so if you have a muscle and you're like, man, you know, Alan said that after a while this is going to get better.

But I'm still kind of sore every time I train this.

It might be that way.

In most cases, it gets a lot better.

And in many cases, we actually see people that we work with that have been training for many years and they start to come to us as our one-on-one clients.

And they're like, I want to feel really sore again.

And some people start to chase that.

And just as you know, you've got to work through it sometimes you also have to realize that it's not a definitive sign of a good workout because it does tend to go away.

You do tend to become habituated to it.

OK, so a lot to think about there for the people that are making this decision.

But certainly give it some time.

Make at least use of getting into the gym and you're going to be doing what you need to do.

Do you need to eat at maintenance for a successful body recomp?

Body recomp is the topic of both gaining muscle and losing body fat at the same time.

You're going to likely, for the majority of people, be somewhere around maintenance.

Now, depending on your current body composition, that could be at maintenance, slightly below maintenance, slightly above maintenance.

If you are sitting with a little bit more body fat.

You're going to be slightly below if you're sitting anywhere between a moderate level of body fat.

I mean, men guesstimate would be 1415% to 16.

Seventeen 18%.

You might be sitting at maintenance at about 8% for women.

Whenever you're doing these equivalencies, you know, if you're, if you've, if you're leaner, maybe you are going to sit slightly above and that's the way that it works whenever you're trying to do this really slowly.

If you're obese, you don't need to worry about this question because you're always going to be in a calorie deficit.

And you can still body recomp in a distinct calorie deficit because the fact that more body fat stores are metabolically protective, they're going to protect, you know, a catabolic effect of a calorie deficit and losing muscle mass.

So that's not going to be as much of A concern.

But for the majority of people, when we're talking about this, do you need to eat at maintenance?

I mean, the answer is kind of roughly, but you're going to make adjustments to that based off of your starting body composition, your current level of experience, and how you react when you monitor the changes over time.

So keep an eye on things, adjust your calorie amounts based on how you're doing, and also remember that there's a lot of error involved in calorie tracking.

You know, we've talked about this before.

Even registered dietitians are off by 250 or more calories on average.

So if you're off by 250 calories, that could easily, you could think that you're at maintenance, you could easily be below maintenance or above maintenance.

And so whether we tell you to be right below maintenance, at maintenance or right above maintenance, you're still going to be adjusting based off of the way that you react based off of your progress.

And that's kind of the, the, the gist anytime anybody asks the coach, well, how do I identify my maintenance calories?

How do I identify whether I'm going to build, how to identify whether I'm in a cut?

The real answer is never.

There's a distinct, we can tell you to do this and you're going to be in it.

The real answer is over the next 4-6 weeks we're going to be monitoring your progress and we'll dial it in based on your progress.

And that's how you really do it.

Because each individual person does not conform to the standard equations.

You have different things going on.

You've got different metabolic rates, you move differently.

You know, some people work harder in the gym than others, which can add a nominal effect.

And so adjusting based on progress is really the way to go.

If you feel lost in doing that, that's when you get a coach.

You know, there's a reason that they tend to be so good in comparison to things like apps for adjusting nutrition levels.

But, you know, sitting around maintenance is right if you want to recomp.

But seriously, when you do this, go in with the right expectations because recomping requires more patience than literally anything else.

And I feel for people that have that skinny fat body type.

I mean, that's not what you have.

That's what you are currently are and can change that.

It's not you're doomed from genetics.

It's doomed.

It's you're there because of the habits and routines that you've had.

But you can change that now, getting out of that requires more distinct Dr.

and patience, in my opinion, than anything else.

You know, if you're obese, you can see those changes on the scale every week.

Oh, it's I'm improving.

If you're really skinny and you're trying to build, you can see changes very distinctly, very quickly.

If you're skinny fat, you have to go many, many months at times before seeing significant changes and typically the changes are so small that you're not going to notice it visually.

No, you have to keep a log of things like progress photos, results tracking.

I mean, we do a results tracking with our clients where we take and our measurement, a fine measurement.

Hips and waist, you can certainly take more.

We don't take more because we kind of find that the more that we ask people to do, the less reliable people are putting them in.

So these four give us a really good idea of what's going on.

That in conjunction with what your weight is doing and what your strength in the gym is doing, what your performance in the gym is doing, that's something that people will typically ignore when we're looking at signs of progress on a physique journey, that progress advancement is extremely important for identifying what is going on in a recomping phase because we cannot rely on the week to week to week change in the progress photos.

We can rely on like, hey, this is what you looked like four months ago.

This is what you look like now.

We can't see these distinct changes within 468 week periods.

Often, however, we can tell you that you cannot forever build strength or progressively overload a weight training program and not build muscle.

It's impossible.

Neural adaptations to training are on the mode of usually months and then it's morphological changes that take over.

So it's your nervous system that adapts really quickly 1st and then you actually have to build lean muscle to further see gains.

There's a reason that we don't have the strongest person in the world being 160 lbs.

They're always £400 because more muscle mass is required for more strength and.

This is mass.

Right.

It's 100% true.

And people will say, well, I know a guy who's 140 lbs and he's really strong.

Cool.

He's really strong for 140 lbs.

For £140, right?

He's not really strong for £250.

There's never a person that's like that.

And it's true, there are individual variations in the way that this works.

There's some people that have a lot of type 1 muscle fibers and are very, very maximally strong for their weight.

It's 100% true.

That doesn't mean that they can forever grow without forever progress and strength without building up muscle.

It's just the way that it is.

And that's one of those limiters in in weight limited sports like Olympic weightlifting and wrestling and all those different kind of things.

And it's one of the reasons that you try to game the system.

And you want to talk about that a little bit, Beth?

I mean, you, you, the, you have to find the, the weight class that you're going to be the most competitive in.

So there's a lot of weight lifters that might be, you might see them go up and down weight classes to, to sort of try to figure out where they're, they're quote UN quote strongest or most competitive comparatively to who else is in their weight class.

But This is why those sports have weight.

It's why they're weight class athletes because putting somebody who is, you know, 50A tiny little 52 KG weightlifter against the 97 plus, like their, their absolute numbers are going to be completely different.

So there is a lot of gameplay in the weightlifting world in terms of like when you cut are are we going to go for like there are multiple times that I didn't know if I was going to be a 71, a 73, or do I bump myself up to a 76, which is what I often did by just pounding a whole bunch of water and then getting on the scale.

I'm being 76 kilos.

I'm not actually 76 kilos, but I was more competitive in that 76 KG class.

I was stronger than those women were than if I were to have competed at a lower weight class.

So you can do a whole a whole bunch of gaming the system in those weight class sports.

Yeah.

And typically as you become more and more advanced that the differences in skill seem to work out like they, they all kind of go to a wash.

And so then the differences become who has the best levers, who has the most muscle mass, who has the most type 1 muscle fibers and maximal lifting.

And these are things that you can't control for.

But this is a distinct sign of the fact that it's just not.

You can continually work working on your neural strength and that's it.

That's why you never see these really tiny, super ultra strong people.

They don't exist.

You know, it's, it's a relative thing.

And certainly there can be 140 LB person that is stronger than 180 LB person 100% that can't be.

But that 140 LB person is a lot more trained.

They're a lot more dedicated to what they do.

And that 180 LB person is probably at best an intermediate.

And so you're never going to see an advanced 180 LB person that's weaker than an advanced 140 LB person.

It's just, you know, within some weight.

Yeah, you can.

But that's the genetic difference that's coming into play.

The farther up you go in the in the distance there, the more that those genetics really start to work out.

And then it's purely mass moves mass.

So when we talk about mass moves mass, it's 100% true.

And for those people that are really geared strength sport athletes or focused strength sport athletes, you have to realize sometimes that if you're very advanced, if you're going into a cut and trying to drop weight classes, you may lose.

You're going to lose strength most of the time.

Yeah.

And that was that was one of the other reasons that I never really wanted to go down to the.

I would have been even more competitive in the 64 KG weight class.

But to go from a 73 to a 64, that's not a small amount of weight on the scale poundage wise.

And I probably would have lost.

I mean, I would have been tiny.

I've been 140 lbs like my body is not supposed to be 140.

I I mean, that's I would have been like, I would have had like a six pack like that would have been just super.

I would have lost a lot of strength doing that kind of a weight cut.

And what are you trying to achieve here?

I mean, I'm asking this to the person that's listening to this and what they're trying to do.

I mean, you know, everybody loves the the story of like Bruce Lee being like the strongest 115 LB man of all time or whatever because he was super, super small.

But again, it's a relative thing, like, you know, there's, there's a difference in, in what this is.

So figure out what, what you want for you physique strength and sustainability.

And a lot of times getting lighter and lighter and lighter and trying to get stronger and stronger and stronger is not sustainable for you because you just, you can't keep up with the nutrition that's required.

You can't keep up with the training that's required.

Your genetics start to work against you because that's you're going to hit a ceiling there at some point in, in these types of things.

And so figure out what's best for you, make adjustments for those recomping, follow your progress and you will do just fine.

Stretching after a workout, Is this important or is it OK to skip this?

I actually, when I saw this question earlier, I looked at a couple slides ahead.

When I saw this question earlier, I thought that this was a really important one to address because of the way that I have put out information on stretching before.

I feel like I want to make an amendment to the way that I word things and I and the way that I word things I feel was a little bit less nuanced than it should be.

And I feel that because I think that just like everybody else in in health and fitness, sometimes I can fall into being a little bit too black and white.

Let me put it that way.

Now, what I said in the past is not wrong.

When you take loaded movements like strength training movements to end ranges of motion under load, it will work as good as a static stretching routine.

So do I, and this is the reason that I I feel like I went too far in the opposite direction.

The problem was I was immersed in the CrossFit culture for quite some time and I have so many clients that spent 45 minutes to an hour stretching when they first start working with us that I had a very visceral reaction against.

This is the most over prescribed thing in fitness and I still believe that.

I still believe that that stretching, static stretching is the most overvalued thing in all of fitness.

It is not as valuable as people think it is.

However, that doesn't mean that it is without value.

And so this is where I want to amend how I put this message out, particularly for people who are new to training and who are trying to get into positions for whatever sport they're trying to do.

Static stretching serves a very real purpose because if you're starting to squat and you can't get down into a comfortable squat, just saying just squat will work overtime, but isn't necessarily the best way to get there.

So yes, just squat, but then add in two or three stretching sessions a week in your off time, not before you train in your off time to help facilitate that movement because you have to be able to get into the position that you want to be in for the sport that you're doing.

You don't necessarily need significantly more flexibility or mobility, depending on how people turn that word about.

You can get into the definition differences there, but I think that most people kind of blur those lines.

I agree.

Yeah, I think that's part of the problem too.

Yeah.

And I'll let you get into that after I get my point across.

What you want to be able to do is you want to get into the movement that you can do and then maybe 5% beyond that, then you do not need to stretch anymore.

And the reason that I say that is because too much flexibility can be as problematic for certain movements and strength production as too little can be for making that movement feel like shit, potentially injuring yourself and those types of things.

So if we want to be able to get down into a squat, that doesn't mean that you need to have your ass touching your heels.

That means you need to be, let's say, roughly parallel or whatever feels comfortable, maybe right below parallel.

Once you're there, you don't need to spend hours and hours and hours stretching your legs to get lower.

You need to be able to get into the position that you need to be in for what you're trying to do.

If you're a ballerina, that's going to be different than a stronger.

If you're, if you're a gymnast, that's going to be different than the people listening to this podcast.

So figure out what you're trying to do, keep things a little bit more nuanced.

And this is the nuance that I feel that I was lacking before, which is why I wanted to bring this up and, and really wanted to talk about this topic because I've kind of changed my mind in the way that I do the messaging around this.

And I think that this is a personal growth thing.

So everybody give me a hand here.

I think that I think that we have some very real reason.

And there are, there are research studies that that say, Hey, we've really over prescribed this type of stuff, you know, and if you're buying all of these books on stretching and you're spending these hour long stretching routines, it's, it doesn't require that much to improve mobility.

It's like 5 minutes per muscle like twice a week and you get maximal benefits on whatever muscle that is that you're trying to get down into the position of.

Or if you're trying to get into a position that requires multiple muscles, move in that position, you know, get under a bar, put some weight on it and just squat down and hold wherever your end range of motion is.

I mean, even that works just as well, but that's in addition to your regular squatting, right?

And So what we want to do is we want to say, hey, this probably makes some more sense for beginners and maybe some intermediates to spend some more time doing this.

It probably doesn't make much sense at all for advanced athletes to do this because when you're an advanced athlete in your sport, you can get into that position.

If you're a a more advanced intermediate in your sport, you can get into that position.

And so you don't need to spend any extra time.

And if you talk with a lot of advanced, you know, bodybuilders, power lifters, none of them do significant stretching.

And there's a reason.

But this is that nuanced part of the equation where we have to say, OK, well, what is a person trying to do?

Where are they right now?

And can they comfortably perform the movement that they're trying to perform?

And this is where the nuance comes into play.

You want to talk about flexibility versus mobility?

Well, before we get there, because I think this the question say after your workout, was that like the specific part of the question?

Because I do think that that is an important piece of it is like when you're doing this, because there's the whole concept of, you know, after you've worked out and your muscles are warm, is that maybe the best time to be stretching?

Like, are you able to make more differences, more changes to your flexibility when the muscle is warm or when it's cold?

This did say, is stretching after a workout important or is it OK to skip?

I don't have a preference whether a person stretches after a workout or whether they stretch in the evening when they're watching TVI want to the the the it's.

Just that they do it.

Yeah.

It's just that they do it.

I mean, are we, are we splitting hairs with any differences?

Yeah, pretty much because you might be able to get like a little bit deeper immediately when you are right after workout because you've been moving that you've already it's you've already like you've essentially already done stretching.

So having that in mind, knowing that you're going to take a couple minutes to get that neurological inhibition disinhibition going, because the the majority of the changes for stretching is getting your body used to the fact that you can move into that position.

Your nervous system is keeping you locked more than anything else.

And so your nervous system has this protective reflex.

And the protective reflex is neural and it says we should not be moving into this end range of motion because I could snap a joint.

And so you're essentially teaching it that it's OK to move into this position.

So I think that whether or not you do this right after a workout, please don't do static stretching before a workout.

Yes, there is data suggesting that this can lower power and cause some other issues.

Yes, there is nuance to this because the way that they've set these studies up, if you just give yourself 10 minutes after that static stretching, you can probably perform just fine.

But people will tend to static stretch and then go right into lifting.

And that's where they they see these issues.

So is it overblown?

Like, Oh my God, you can ever static stretch before you train a little bit.

Yeah.

I mean, the, the concern there's probably a little bit overblown.

Does it make more sense to do dynamic warmups in that beginning?

Yeah, it makes more sense to do dynamic warmups.

And so I would still recommend dynamic warmups.

Do you have to do this after your workout?

No, you don't.

Can you do this at home while you watch TV, which is probably like, unless, unless doing it right after your workout is the only way that you're, you'll be sure to do it.

I would, I would say do it at home.

Do it whatever, in whatever way you prefer to do and that you can sustain it, you know, and if watching TV and stretching is easier, which would be easier for me than do that.

If it's easier for you to do it after your workout, certainly do that and that's fine.

All right.

There is there is a difference between mobility and flexibility.

And I think a lot of the lack of nuance actually comes from this incorrect assumption of what mobility actually mobility act technically is dynamic.

It's a dynamic movement.

It's a it's dynamic warm up.

That is mobility work.

So stretching is flexibility.

So stretching and flexibility work allow you to access that end range of motion.

So you get into a split.

That's great.

You can do the splits, but can you control that end range of end range of motion?

That is what mobility work accesses.

So mobility work, think of more stuff like they're called cars, controlled articular rotations.

It's it's more of it's more dynamic in nature and less static in nature.

It is building control and strength in your end ranges of motion.

So a lot of people who are big mobility gurus, you know, they'll say that that mobility work is strength work.

They're not incorrect because a lot of mobility work actually involves loading your end range position and building strength in that position.

It's not just getting into a split or getting into a pancake and just sitting there and accessing that range of motion because you don't necessarily have control over it.

So what good is that range of motion if you can't control it?

So if you can get ass to grass in a squat, but you cannot control your rebound out of the hole, what good is that?

What?

What good does it do you to actually get down there?

So that's the difference between mobility and flexibility.

You should always be searching for a way to get to those end ranges of motion, but then building strength and control within that end range of motion.

Yeah.

So I think that there's a lot of nuance there.

Hopefully this helps out people that are listening to this and might give them some drive to either do or not do stretching.

And like I said, like this, this kind of depends on, on where you are.

And hopefully this either saves people some time or allows them to get into that mobility that they need to get into for whatever they're doing.

But I think that what's really important and, and just to reemphasize, there is such a thing as too much, particularly if performance within a certain activity is, is required.

You know, too much gives a little bit of laxity at at the that end range of movement that you're trying to do and then you can lose some power and potentially strength output.

Well, I mean, ask anybody that has like hypermobility or, or Ehlers Danlos, like they have a hard time weight lifting because they, they're, they're hypermobile joints.

Just like they sort of like crash into the bottom of something and don't have any control over it and like can't get out of the hole and they've got £200 on their back.

Like it's EDS.

People complain about this all the time and it's very real.

Stretch Reflex is very, very beneficial in a lot of instances.

The one that always pops into my mind.

Not that it's really relevant to the people listening to this, but it's really funny.

They find that people who are best at Olympic speed walking have super super tight calves.

Like no ankle mobility whatsoever.

Well, yeah, I mean, they're like this the whole like they're, they're flexed the whole time.

Yeah.

So if you have any sort of ankle mobility, you're not going to be good at an Olympic speed walking, Sorry, but it's just that's just an example that I think that people can kind of understand.

You know, we talk about lifting, you say stretch reflex, bouncing out of the hole that that makes a bit of sense.

But like it's funny how it carries over to lots of baseball.

It's really big tennis, it's really big.

You don't want massive flexibility and spinal rotation.

You don't you don't want like it, it blocks you up or not blocks you up it it it's too loose.

And so it's it's just funny how this works and it's more nuanced than what we hope.

Yes, stretching is vastly overblown.

Stretching.

One of the things that I do want to point out outside of being able to be mobile into the position that you want to be in, stretching is not something that you do to reduce injury risk.

It reduces injury risk.

Almost nothing or nothing.

I mean in this, in the research, it's a zero to 4% reduction in injury risk.

So if you're doing it to reduce injury, you don't need to do it if you can get into the mobility that you need to get into for your sport.

So your sport's doing a lot anyways.

And strength training reduces injury risk by 69%.

So, you know, keep strength training.

I'm aiming for three liters of water a day.

Do I count my black, black coffee and green tea towards this?

Yes.

You count anything that is liquid towards this.

I don't care if it has caffeine in it.

Caffeine is not a net diuretic when it is mixed in a bunch of liquid.

So pre workouts, energy drinks, all those things really, really hydrates you.

You might pee a little bit more.

That doesn't mean that your body's dehydrating.

So don't worry about that.

How does cardio help build muscle?

You might have some opinions on this, Beth.

The biggest thing for me is it increases capillary density.

And so by increasing capillary density, you bring more nutrients to the muscle during working periods.

You bring more nutrients to the muscle after working periods, you bring more blood flow in while you're working, which can be beneficial for performance itself.

I mean, there's things beyond weight training, believe it or not.

And if you're running, if you're doing any kind of cardiovascular work, being able to oxygenate, being able to clear hydrogen ions, which are the things that 'cause that burn in the muscles to lock up requires good circulation.

And you know, we talked about this a lot when we are coaching.

We do this in both our group fitness coaching and our one-on-one coaching.

We there is not a single person that we have ever worked with that does not have cardio planned.

Everybody has cardio planned.

Everybody should have cardio planned.

It doesn't matter if you're going into a build, It doesn't matter if you're a power lifter.

Everybody should have cardio planned.

At least two days and I would recommend at least one endurance day and at least one high intensity interval training day or one high intensity day because they offer different benefits.

Now that is a personal preference for me and probably a little bit of AI want to say bias.

I I like the benefits of both.

I'm not super picky when someone says, well, I don't want to do 1, but I'll do the other.

OK, cool.

Just do the one that you want to do.

Yeah, do do.

Something for your heart, my God.

Yeah, I don't want to gatekeep in that manner, but I do want to say like all things equal, I would do a little bit of both.

I think that if we're going to have to just choose one, and this is again, I'm getting into the gatekeeping, if we're going to have to choose one, I would probably choose in a high a higher intensity one if we had to choose.

If you're telling me I don't like to do that, I like to do distance running.

OK, do distance running.

That's cool.

Hopefully you have a little bit more tightness in your hamstring, so you can do that well.

And so we've got, we're bridging all of the different questions here.

Anything else to add to that, Beth?

No, the the, the cardiovascular adaptations that you get from doing cardio is what helps to build muscle.

It's not, it's not that you're actually like running or doing it, it's it's the adaptations that occur in the heart that are important for this.

Yeah, the improvements to the entire cardiovascular system.

Yeah, I think that's where people are because a lot of people here, you know, let me do, let me go for a Zone 2 run.

It's going to help me build muscle.

And they're like, what?

But it's, it's the, it's your because they think about like calorie burn.

And so their, their mind goes to a cable.

If I'm burning calories, then don't I need calories in order to gain muscle?

It's the adaptations that are occurring in your cardiovascular system that will enable you to build muscle.

Yeah, OK.

My family is doing carnivore.

Is this diet good even temporarily for weight loss?

So temporarily, physiologically, there's probably not any real negatives to it.

The the issue that I have is so carnivore long term is real stupid.

It's real dumb.

But like in the short term, if you've got significant amounts of body fat and it causes you to be in a calorie deficit, your health's going to improve significantly likely.

And This is why some people get kind of like stuck on this.

The problem is over the long term, your health is going to take a dive compared to doing this correctly.

You know you cannot cut out fruits and veggies long term and expect to have optimal health.

Just doesn't happen.

I mean cancer risks raise, you lose fiber that clears out your cardiovascular system that keeps your gut healthy.

I don't care what any carnivore says.

You do need fiber for optimal health and it is literally proven in the research.

Like you cannot look this up and find anything else.

So is this OK temporarily?

I would still say no.

And this is not for a physiologic reason because like I just said from on paper, physiologically this will improve your health.

If you are obese and going into carnivore.

Losing weight, losing excess body fat is far more important than anything else.

I mean adipokines from excess body fat are what causes systemic inflammation.

You know people bitch all the time about oh it's sugar, oh it's seed oils, oh mega 6 None of those things cause inflammation.

When they don't contribute to body fat deposition.

The body fat itself releases adipokines that increase systemic inflammation.

That's the problem.

And if anybody wants to argue with me on that, please do.

I have all of the studies showing that she's waiting.

Sugar doesn't.

He's waiting for y'all in a dark room.

Not 'cause anything, not fucking sugar.

It is not Omega 6.

Doesn't matter, you know?

So here's the thing, it's great short term to lose body fat.

It's still probably not a good idea to go carnivore because if this is, we're admitting that this is not a good long term solution.

So you lose the body fat, you go back to the way that you were eating before long term because you realize that carnivore is a piece of shit for health long term.

And then you gain all the weight back because you didn't learn how to eat in a normal human diet to lose the weight.

So rather than playing this on again, off again game with obesity, why don't you learn proper coping mechanisms and habits and proper ways to eat proper meal construction, become an adult and eat a vegetable.

You know, why don't you learn to do this in the the path there?

Because literally the carnivore crowd are either people that just don't understand science or they're grown children and they don't want to eat vegetables.

I I think it's the latter.

And that's there like, I'm sorry if anybody here that's listening to this is carnival, but that's literally what it is.

And I'm very happy to share research with you.

There is no research that you can share that can disprove the benefits of fruits and veggies.

They can disprove the benefits of, you know, all these other things in your diet.

There's just there just isn't.

And you suggesting, Oh well there are some anti nutrients and some of these vegetables.

If anti nutrients were an actual concern, you wouldn't see studies 100% of the time showing health improvements to adding fruits and veggies to a diet.

You would see health go down.

Even though some things like oxalates or some of these other anti nutrients could cause maybe less of an absorption of zinc, maybe less of an absorption of calcium, maybe less of an absorption of XYZ in the presence of an overall diet that includes adequate portions of these minerals.

It's so inconsequential that it makes no difference.

In the only examples that I can even think of where things like anti nutrients are problematic, it is in situations where people would never do it outside of some pathologies that certain people have.

Let's let's say that we're an otherwise healthy person and then you're not avoiding something because you need to because you're allergic to it, because you have some of these issues I can think of like red kidney beans are very problematic due to some of these anti nutrient things in them when you eat them raw.

Who's eating red kidney beans raw?

Right.

That's that's my point.

So like the reason that I bring this up is because every time I do, some carnivore Jackass comes in and they're like, but raw kidney beans are really bad.

If you eat them.

I'm like, are you eating raw kidney beans like popcorn?

They're like, no, I'm, I'm carnivore.

I'm like, nobody omnivore does that either.

Vegans don't even do.

That I cook my kidney beans.

Right when you cook them, when you, when you wash them, it removes the issues.

So in a practical sense, we can, as assuredly as anything can be said in science, say that these are not problems, they're only net benefits to health.

And all of the complaints about things like, oh, it's going to ruin your thyroid, 100% not true.

100% not true for causing leaky gut, which is actually one of the next questions, which is really funny.

We've got a good segue into this does not 'cause leaky gut.

It does not cause any of these other issues.

You're not causing these like massive problems with micronutrient absorption in the context of an overall diet.

So if you're following what we recommend with a smart omnivore diet, you can't fall into the problems that these people are predicting, so don't worry about that.

Yeah, I just one, one thing that I would like to say about this is a lot of people will say, well, you know, it worked because it did work to help me lose the weight.

But does a diet actually work if you regain all the weight that you lost while on that diet?

I would argue no, because you did.

It's not it's not it it you it didn't instill any sustainable behaviors in you.

So yeah, you've learned to sort of like crash diet, but you haven't actually learned to maintain the results that you got with that diet.

To your point about like yo yoing like that's I, I would argue that no, that it it actually does not work if you cannot maintain your results.

Well, that in the retort is, you know, there have been, there certainly been some people in arguments about this type of thing that have been like, I've been carnivore for three years and I've kept it off and all this stuff.

But again, this is where those long term health problems start to come into play.

So a lot of these people aren't watching coronary artery calcium scores, which there's some research showing that those can double in very short periods of time.

And you know, we've got those, we're we're losing our antioxidant capacity, we're losing our anti cancer benefits, we're losing a lot of other things.

And, and you know, the bro in me also wants to point out the fact that you're not going to grow as much muscle, you will not be as strong and grow as much lean muscle without carbs.

Carbs.

You won't do it.

There's a lot of evidence of this.

You know, strength progress takes hits.

Hypertrophy certainly takes hits because carbs are one of the most important things for building lean muscle and, you know, adequately recovering from training.

And it's awesome that you can maintain some strength, particularly in the short term under carnivore, but you're not even going to be realizing how many gains you're missing out on over the years by staying on carnivore, you know, because they don't have that frame of reference.

This is survivorship bias that's falling in play.

This is this is a logical fallacy and it's one of the reasons that people fall into this type of thing because they see benefits compared to their McDonald's diet and then they're like, OK, well, this is a lot better than my McDonald's and no one is really arguing.

There.

Because you're eating more whole, minimally processed foods.

And I'm not going to be a person that's going to vilify red meat, lean red meats, minimally processed lean red meats are a wonderful food in the context of an overall diet that includes fruits and veggies, wonderful food.

Eggs are a wonderful food.

You don't need to eat everything on a wooden cutting board.

With butter and.

With butter, I mean, even even that's kind of funny.

I'm not vilifying butter either.

I program butter for a lot of our clients.

But the reality is if you substitute seed oils in a calorie equivalent for butter, you get better health.

You just do.

I love the people that that stuff.

Have you seen like the the dates stuffed with butter and it's like, you know, the delicious carnivore snack.

I'm like that makes me.

Dates are a carnivore.

I know, but they that's that's one of the things that they apparently apparently Paul Saladino says that you can have dates now, so.

Paul Saladino almost died doing carnivores.

I know, I know.

And he has reintroduced some fruit back into his diet apparently.

So they do the whole thing where they like cut a date in half and shove this like massive chunk of butter into the date and then eat it as a snack and they pretend that it tastes good.

That's wild, all right?

Is leaky gut a real thing?

I would think that we would all be septic if our guts were leaking.

That's kind of the crux of the issue, isn't it?

No, leaky gut does not appear to be a it's First off, OK.

There's a difference between it not being real and it not being supported by any sort of evidence.

Currently, I can say that there is no scientific evidence that it exists.

So if I change my tune in the future, I change my tune in the future.

Intestinal permeability is a real thing under certain conditions, but typically if we look at intestinal permeability in a medical setting, it resolves within two or three days anyways.

So you might have a situation where like, you know, you're like, man, I'm, I'm having some real GI distress and all that kind of stuff.

And then it kind of goes away.

It's very unlikely that leaky gut is a thing and that you're suffering from it.

You know, maybe you've got something else going on, maybe you got an undiagnosed IBS or, or something like that.

And if you if you want just kind of like a quick, I'm just trying to get, I'm spitballing some solutions.

If you think that you've got something like this going on, most likely you're you probably don't and it's probably just you ate something that was off and it'll be fine in a couple days.

I mean, I had that yesterday.

I ran out of we were watching TVI completely.

We talk about diarrhea a lot.

We were, we were, we were watching TV and I like pause it.

And she just looked up and I was like, I got to go and we have no idea what I ate.

But it's not leaky gut.

It's the fact that I ate something that was a little bit off.

And so, you know, if you're having some of those issues and you continue to have some of those issues, obviously get seen by a doctor, you need, you need to be seen by by a professional.

But 15 grams of glutamine daily might help for some of those those things that I'm not saying that that's the solution.

I'm saying you can start doing that to see if you feel a little bit better, but then still set up an appointment with your doctor and figure out what the root cause is because it's probably going to be something that you need to be looking into if this is a chronic problem that you have.

What is your opinion about whoop and Aura ring?

Thanks.

OK, we're not going to say anything about whoop or, or a ring.

We are going to talk about trackers that you wear on your wrist or around your finger.

Any tracker, no matter the brand, that you wear around your wrist or finger is super shitty at what they sell them to do.

They cannot tell recovery from weight training.

They cannot tell calories burned.

They cannot tell sleep quality.

They can semi tell cardiovascular recovery, they can't tell weight training or gym recovery.

So HRV is what they use as a metric to tell all those things.

That's what they used to tell sleep.

That's what they used to tell calories burn.

That's what they used to tell recovery ability.

HRV is kind of an OK metric for cardio.

It's not an OK metric for weight training it it doesn't.

You cannot program off of that.

You cannot trust it.

And so my typical answer for these things are you can get all of the benefits that these provide by just getting a step counter that that's literally the most accurate thing on these things.

I mean, heart rates OK for it.

And if you're using it to program your thing, I think that the chest straps are better if you really want heart rate.

So like if you're advanced enough to need heart rate, get a chest strap.

You couldn't be using these things, but these things are just super expensive step counters.

This is essentially what they are because you can't use them for any of these other things.

I mean, for calories, they're up to 93% wrong.

They're telling you up to 93% more calories burned than what you burned, according to the research.

For sleep, they can somewhat tell sleep duration, but they can't tell phase and they can't tell recovery.

So like, why don't you just look at the clock before you lay your head down to sleep and then look at what time your alarm wakes you up, and you'll have a rough estimate.

You don't need to spend $100 to like, figure that out, nor is it going to really do anything for you anyways.

You're either you either feel recovered or you don't.

And you can tell if you're getting six hours versus 8 hours of sleep.

You know that well.

I was going to say, you know, when you wake up in the morning if you've slept like shit or not like you you shouldn't need.

And I honestly find that these tend to be self fulfilling prophecies.

So.

Sibo.

Yeah.

So people that like, if your watch tells you you're unrecovered today or like you haven't closed all your rings or whatever it is that that these things tell you, like I know that Garmin, at least the version of the Garmin that I have, and I only use this to track my runs.

That's literally it.

It has Agps on it and I can actually program specific paces and specific distances into this watch and my watch will tell me when I've hit that pace or hit that distance.

That's literally the only reason I have this because I wouldn't be able to do that otherwise.

I don't use it for anything else.

I don't use it to tell me if I'm recovered.

I don't use it to look at my sleep.

I do use it to look at my steps, but again, that's going to be counted by arm swings.

So that's going to be a little bit off.

And I realized that at the end of the day, but it will.

For example, I went on a Six Mile run this morning and my watch at the end of that run told me that it would take me 48 hours to recover.

This is this was a Zone 2 easy run.

I feel fine, but according to my watch, I'm a piece of shit.

So you can't.

And I, I do find that a lot of clients, like I've, I've had clients e-mail me before and friends tell me, Oh my, my whoop strap or whatever, my Garmin, my whatever you're wearing says that I shouldn't train today.

I'm unrecovered and I'm like, well, how do you feel?

And they're like, well, you know, and when I really sit down and think about it, like, yeah, I think the watch is right.

And that's what I mean when I say it's a self fulfilling prophecy.

People will take what they see on their watch or whatever it is that they're wearing and all and just like talk themselves into it like, Oh yeah, I actually do feel like shit versus just using your, your body's own biofeedback and just listening to really what your body is telling you to, to determine that versus some wearable that is that is looking at HRV, which to Alan's point is not, that's not a good measurement for, for recovery at all.

No, not, and especially when weight training is in play, it's it's definitely not on top of the fact that these things the more tan that you are or the more dark skin that you are, the the less reliability that they have.

So we've always referred to this as techno racism, but they're they're really bad.

If you have a lot of arm hair, they're really, they're really bad.

So the issue is what these things do, I don't know if you can see it.

Can you see the green lights flashing, the ones that flash you in the eyes in the middle of the night?

So typically what this will do is it's not doing it right now, but every now and then it's these green lights scan your veins and that's actually how they're determining your heart rate is through the blood pulsing through your veins.

So if you have dark skin or a lot of arm hair, to Alan's point, these things become less and less reliable.

They do make some of these that actually have a red light instead of a green light.

And it's specifically for people that have higher concentration of melanin in their skin because it's it's better able to read through darker skin.

All right.

So these trackers, should you wear them?

I mean, probably not trying to up my endurance, my cardiovascular endurance and lose weight.

Should I lift low weight high reps or circuit train with weights?

Irrelevant.

The whether you circuit train, whether you with lift low weight high reps, whether you lift high weight low reps makes fuck all difference as far as calorie burn goes.

And also, you know, if you're saying you want to improve your cardiovascular endurance, none of these things are.

Cardiovascular.

Do that with weights.

Go run.

Yeah, go run, you know, Does this make you lose weight?

No.

I've actually made a post about this before with all the research that looked at high reps, low weight versus low reps high weight, and the difference in calorie burn and the difference in circuit training calorie burn.

And when we look at bodybuilding routines, it's something like circuit training burns an extra like 20 calories, something like that.

So like it practically, it's nothing.

It feels a lot harder.

And we talked about this a lot when we discuss this type of stuff.

One of the reasons that NEAT non exercise activity thermogenesis works so well for burning calories is because the volume is really, really high and you do it for a really, really long time.

When you're doing circuit training, you may not do it much longer at all.

Like you may not be in the gym much longer at all.

In fact, you may be in the gym less time than lifting heavy and and doing those things.

And so the absolute amount of time that you're actually moving is really not that much different from a calorie burn perspective.

It's not, it's not overly significant.

Is this going to improve cardiovascular endurance at all?

No.

Circuit training in the way that we circuit train in like most gyms and bodybuilding type things is not going to improve cardiovascular endurance at all.

If you're talking about circuit training like a Metcon WOD, yes it could, but that's a very loose definition of circuit training, I suppose in the way that most people use it.

You know, Beth and I will use Metcons quite often for cardiovascular style training because it's fun and anybody that are looking to to get into those types of things.

We actually have the Metcon Bible up on mauiathletics.com, which comes with a / 150 different metabolic conditioning workouts.

So it can actually give you a very large array of workouts to choose from.

So you don't even have to think about it.

But that or standard type endurance training, running, swimming, biking, all those different kinds of things are going to improve cardiovascular endurance.

There are certain certainly a good adjunct to losing body fat, but you don't lift weights in any way in any manner to really lose weight.

That's that's not why you're lifting weights.

So can it help a little bit?

Yeah.

I mean, there's some calorie burn when you do these types of things.

Anything that that makes you active there that helps, but that's not really why you lift weights.

You lift weights because building lean muscle is extremely important.

It it improves bone density.

The, you know, strength training improves bone density.

You build more lean muscle that acts as a metabolic sink so you can handle glucose more readily.

It looks better.

You're stronger, you're more injury resistant.

These are the reasons that you lift weights.

Burning some calories is a nice side effect, but if you want to burn calories, lifting weights is a really inefficient way to do it.

Even circuit training, it's a really inefficient way to do it.

So there's a lot better options if you just want to focus on burning calories.

Now, this isn't to tell anybody to, you know, avoid lifting weights because it's probably the the single most important activity that you can do, but understand that just because something feels intense doesn't mean it burns a lot of calories.

So moral of the story there, figure out what you want to achieve and then set up your program so it can meet those needs.

This one is specifically for me and I found that this is kind of a funny one, But Beth, you can answer this one too.

You've been on a lot of podcast recently.

Are there any you would not go on?

My answer for that is no.

I would go on every podcast that I'm invited on and some people might find that as a weird answer.

And I thought about this a lot when I first started doing podcasts regularly.

And the reason that I would answer that is even if a podcast host traditionally puts out crap content or, or highly hyperbolic content, they are their audience probably needs to hear my message more than literally anybody else.

And so I don't have to put out a bad message just because I'm on somebody's podcast.

I don't have to compromise integrity.

And therefore there's no conflict of interest for me to go on to any of those podcasts.

Now, if I got onto this podcast and I started Hawking like telemedicine or I started Hawking like, you know, a green supplement or I started Hawking like colostrum, then like, yeah, there would be a problem there.

But I would never recommend people something that I don't think can truly benefit them.

And certainly my recommendations over time can change, but at any given moment when I'm recommending something, I truly believe that I can help a person and that it is likely either a worthwhile purchase or a likely a worthwhile use of their time.

Last question, are there any effective fat burning supplements over the counter?

The practical answer is no.

Technically they can show you that these things do increase fat burning, but the level of increase of fat burning is something like 30 calories per day.

So is it a practical good use of your money and your effort and the possible side effects that come with them?

Because most of them include heavy stimulants?

No, probably not.

And even things that don't include heavy stimulants like things that you get from green tea, they're inactivated if you take in stimulants daily.

So if you're drinking coffee, it removes that fat burning benefit that those have.

And even things like caffeine that do have distinct fat burning benefits as adenosine receptors up regulated, it inactivates that.

And so for caffeine, you literally have to go two weeks on, two weeks off, 2 weeks on, two weeks off.

And it's a pretty high dose to get those fat burning effects.

So in a practical sense, for over the counter legal stuff, the answer is no.

You're at best going to be burning about 30 calories.

All right, guys, that is it for Noble.

Just Bacon today.

Reach out to us as you need to at Instagram, Facebook, any of our podcast locations, YouTube, and we will be happy to take down your questions and answer them on a future episode.

Thanks guys.