Philip Pape: 0:01

As I continue enjoying time with family this Christmas week, here is the second of our most downloaded episodes from 2024. This one tackles a topic that's often misunderstood but could completely transform how you think of body composition, body re-composition or body re-comp. Simultaneously building muscle while losing fat sounds almost too good to be true, and a lot of people do spin their wheels trying to get this done, but this episode resonated pretty hard with our community because it breaks down exactly how it's possible. The strategies we cover here aren't just theory. They are backed by science. They are proven through countless client transformations, and as we revisit this episode, you'll discover why body recomp isn't just for beginners and how you can apply these principles regardless of your starting point. So if you're tired of the constant cycle of bulking and cutting, this approach might be what you've been looking for. I'm going to break down the science behind body recomposition, aka body recomp, which is building muscle and losing fat at the same time, discuss the different ways it can play out based on your starting point, and provide concrete strategies for optimizing everything required to get there your nutrition, your training, your health so that you can maximize your results for Body Recomp. And by the end of this episode, you'll have a clear blueprint to put Body Recomposition into action.

Philip Pape: 1:25

Now, before we get into it, I did want to share some wins from the first few weeks of Wits and Weights Physique University that we just launched earlier this month, and I want you to spot the pattern here as I share some of these. So here we go. Quote I consistently logged my food every day this week. I got all my workouts in. I started journaling again first thing in the morning. Every day. I'm seeing good progress in my fat loss phase. I learned cardio is not a bad thing and can be integrated into my strength training as long as it doesn't affect my lifts. I settled in with my mindset to be in sync with my goals. I worked on my sleep. I'm starting to track more consistently, even the small bites. I am most proud of the positive self-talk, knowing this is a lifelong journey, not a race. I am most proud of how I was able to put into practice what I've learned about flexible dieting while traveling. For the past two weekends I was able to enjoy food without feeling restricted".

Philip Pape: 2:23

Now that is just a sampling of wins from the Wits and Weights Physique University community over the first few weeks, and I ask you now to tell me, could you spot, or can you spot, what they all have in common? Now, I know you can't actually answer me here, but, rhetorically, the common theme with all of these comments is they are all simple, practical wins, focused on consistency, on daily habits, on enjoying the process, and the process ultimately produces the progress right. They are not about quick fixes. They're not about losing 20 pounds in one week, saying no to particular foods or activities or punishing yourself to get a result. They are simply positive affirmations from people who are expanding their comfort zone. They're doing it in the right way. They are starting to shift both their bodies and their minds, their perspectives, in the pursuit of better health, which, just so happens, will also get them a better physique and more confidence along the way. Now all of these students in WWPU are then able to ask questions, get support, join live calls, watch courses to level up their knowledge and share their success with other curious, like-minded and very ambitious individuals who are seeking to become their best selves, even in their 30s, their 40s, their 50s and beyond. And we are just scratching the surface of what students will be achieving in Wits and Weights Physique University. So if you're curious what it's all about, just head over to witsandweightscom slash physique or click the link in my show notes. That's witsandweightscom slash physique.

Philip Pape: 3:59

All right, one more thing related to today's topic on body recomp. So my friend and fellow podcaster, jeff Hain you may already know him, he's the host of the Mind Muscle Connection. Definitely follow his show if you don't already. It's been in my feed for quite a long time. That's Jeff Hain, h-o-e-h-n, and he and I recorded a co-hosted Q&A coming out on May 3rd for episode 169. And Jeff is all about body recomp. He has a free workshop, like that's his thing these days. So I wanted to give him a shout out, given that that is the topic of today's episode on wits and weights, and he was on our show as a guest way back on episode 66. And on that show we talked about sustaining your fat loss results at maintenance, which is somewhat related not entirely right, because that's after going through a fat loss phase, but I wanted to mention that and I'm going to include a link to that episode in the show notes, as well as some other episodes that I referenced today. But I bring this up because if you want to be 100% sure that you don't miss our upcoming Q&A where we answer questions menopause, weight loss, resistance, bulking without getting fat, whether you should be dieting during periods of low sleep, and more. There's six questions in total from our two communities together.

Philip Pape: 5:14

I want you to pause right now and click the follow button in your podcast app. All right, you're going to get notified of the episode when it comes out and, as a side benefit, the more people that follow the show you know who actually click that button the more people who can find the show. Because Apple and Spotify they tend to prioritize followers. Right, they used to be called subscribers, now they're called followers. Just make it confusing and they prioritize those over just individual episode downloads. And also, as much as I love ratings and reviews and I really would love you to take time to go add a review in Apple right now, feel free to pause and go. Do that. As much as I love that and it's great for social proof, the best thing for the algorithm is to follow the show. So again, pause the episode right now, go to the show page in your app and tap the follow button to support the show and get notified of future episodes.

Philip Pape: 6:05

All right, so let's get into today's topic the body recomposition blueprint. Recomp to build muscle and lose fat at the same time. Body recomposition right, what the cool kids call body recomp. No, actually, body recomp is a pretty common casual term for this, and body recomposition tends to be the slightly more formal term, but it's the same thing, and today I want to lay out this blueprint for how to do it, how to successfully build muscle and lose fat at the same time, which is an approach that really can completely transform your physique. In fact, it is the underpinning of everything we do, even when we talk about cuts and bulks, and I'll explain why. When we get there, it's often misunderstood, because, you might have heard, it's impossible to gain muscle and lose fat simultaneously, or it's very hard to do it, or it can only be done by brand new lifters or people who are very obese right, and I might have mentioned things like that myself. Honestly, I might have said things like, eh, really, it's only good for newer lifters.

Philip Pape: 7:11

But we have to think about context and we have to define body recomp and what we mean, and I think there's a broader term, a broader definition I'm going to use in today's episode that will give you some clarity and some options as well and some flexibility, which we love here. And people will say, well, don't you have to focus on one goal at a time, either bulking up or cutting fat? Well, it turns out that that's not necessarily the case, or it doesn't have to be as extreme as you think in either direction, and that's what we're going to talk about today. So, with the right strategies, with the right mindset, with the right knowledge and options, you can definitely achieve body recomp and sculpt that leaner, more muscular physique using a slightly different approach than just going all out on cuts and bulks. So, as always, definitions are important. So let's define exactly what we mean by body recomposition. Body recomposition I want to be clear. So body composition just refers to the amount of fat and muscle you have. Body recomposition refers to simultaneously decreasing your body fat percentage while increasing your lean muscle mass, thus improving your overall look, your overall leanness and your overall body composition. Right, it's recomposition. So you're not just focusing on one aspect like scale, weight or just on body fat. It's really the whole thing, doing it at the same time. But the same time is kind of a flexible term we're going to get to in a bit.

Philip Pape: 8:34

Now there's plenty of evidence that supports the viability of body recomp, even in trained individuals, not just newbies. So trained individuals, um. One that I like is a 2020 article by Chris Barakat et al. Chris Barakat and you probably know Chris. He's been on a ton of podcasts. I really need to reach out and get him on this show. If you're a listening man or if anybody else is listening, who, hey? My friend Jeff Hayden, or anybody else my podcasters who know Chris and want to hook us up, feel free to give me an introduction, but either way, I'm going to reach out. But he and his colleagues had an article titled Body Recomposition Can Trained Individuals Build Muscle and Lose Fat at the Same Time? So pretty straightforward, and it concluded that quote.

Philip Pape: 9:14

Despite the common belief that building muscle and losing fat at the same time is only plausible in novice slash obese individuals, the literature provided supports that trained individuals can also experience body recomposition. Individuals' training status, the exercise interventions and their baseline body composition can influence the magnitude of muscle gain and fat loss. Resistance training coupled with dietary strategies has been shown to augment this phenomenon". We also see this play out anecdotally all the time when I'm working with coaching clients, because I can't tell you how many clients I've worked with who stayed the same weight on the scale, and sometimes they maybe didn't want to stay the same weight early on at least, they wanted that quick win of fat loss. But they ended up staying the same way. It might have even looked like a little bit of a plateau, or they even gained a tiny bit of weight, but then their physique completely transformed. Their waist size went down, their clothes fit better, they look better in the mirror, they felt stronger and they were standing taller and all of those things, because they gained muscle and dropped body fat simultaneously. And so the scale just doesn't tell the full story when it comes to recomposition, and it also doesn't have to necessarily stay at maintenance like stay the exact same for you to achieve body recomp. It can happen in different phases, which we'll get to.

Philip Pape: 10:33

So why is recomposition physiologically possible? And I like to dig a little bit into the underlying mechanisms, underlying processes. And when we do that it starts to make a little bit of sense. Because to lose stored body fat, you normally need a calorie deficit, right? You normally need to be dieting, eating less than you burn. You expend more energy than you consume, right, but okay, that's for fat loss, that's, to lose stored body fat. But to build muscle mass you don't necessarily need a net calorie surplus. What you need is sufficient protein and a muscle building training stimulus.

Philip Pape: 11:17

Now, protein synthesis, muscle protein synthesis and fat lipolysis are separate metabolic processes. They involve different tissues and as long as you achieve a net deficit to tap into fat stores while providing enough protein and training to build muscle, recomposition can occur, and this is why it can be confusing. So the way I like to put it is imagine you're eating just enough food to maintain your weight and, at the same time, your training is very effective and you have plenty of protein. And so your body, at this state where you're kind of like just maintaining your weight, you're training hard, you're having that protein, your body feels relaxed or safe enough, like it doesn't feel like it's threatened or in a deficit right, so it's safe enough to draw from the protein you're consuming and to build a little extra muscle. But what it does then? When it prioritizes that because you're telling it it's important with this training stimulus, it all of a sudden doesn't have that much energy left over for everything else. Your body needs to stay at homeostasis. So then your body says, oh, I need to release a bit of energy from fat cells to make up the difference. And voila, you've added a bit of tissue over here, you've lost a little bit of fat over there and you've maintained your weight, but it's as if you're in a slight surplus. It's as if you're in a slight surplus from the muscle building side of the process. I mean, it's pretty cool. It's like your body kind of thinks it has enough resources to build muscle and you're telling it it's important, so it's going to do that. But then it realized it sacrificed some of the energy coming in over here, so it needs to release some fat.

Philip Pape: 12:54

Now there's one other phenomenon. I didn't have it in my notes, but it came to mind. When somebody has excessive weight to lose and you go into a fat loss phase, you can still build muscle then as well, like in a decently aggressive fat loss phase, because you have so much fat, so much extra fat stored, that the body's able to pull from that without even feeling like you're in a deficit, and thus also build muscle with that. What appears to be a surplus, it's almost like a trick surplus because you have all that extra stored fat. Anyway, those are some interesting mechanisms going on that tell us why it is possible to do this.

Philip Pape: 13:30

So what I want to do is talk about how recomp can play out for you based on your starting point, and I want to break it into three categories losing weight, maintenance and gaining weight because body recomp can occur in all three. It can also occur over the long term, which is not in the scope of today's show, but I am going to mention it when we talk about gaining weight. But losing weight, maintenance and gaining weight are three scenarios where body recomp can occur. So right there, I'm hopefully shattering a belief or myth that you might have that recomp is equivalent to maintenance, because it's not equivalent. You can definitely recomp at maintenance, and it's the most common way people do it or try to do it, but you could also recomp losing or gaining. So we're just going to start with losing weight, then we're going to talk about maintenance and we're going to talk about gaining weight.

Philip Pape: 14:19

So the first category is what people think of as like the dream scenario of recomp, which is you can lose more body fat than you gain muscle, but you're still doing both. In other words, your weight is actually going down and your measurements are going down as well, and you look leaner or more muscular, rather than skinny fat, because you're building muscle. So you're losing fat, building muscle. At the same time, you're actually losing more fat in terms of mass weight than you are gaining muscle, which means you also lose weight on the scale. A lot of people really want this scenario, because you kind of get wins on all sides, right, you get lighter on the scale, you get leaner looking, you get more muscle. It's all the best of everything.

Philip Pape: 15:04

Now, this tends to be common in individuals who are pretty new to proper training and nutrition, because they have a lot of room for a quick improvement on both fronts. Right, they have a lot of room for the training side, because they've never given their body this amazing signal from their strength training. At the same time, they are properly dieting, at the right rate of loss to induce a little bit of fat loss, but not so much that it threatens their body's resources to kind of clamp down and avoid building more muscle. You know, let alone um, let alone lose muscle, right, that that would have to be more aggressive dieting. So we're going to talk. We're going to talk about the rates of loss in a later segment today, when we get into nutrition.

Philip Pape: 15:42

But that is the first scenario. Is your net loss in weight while you're building a little muscle and losing fat? Cool. The second scenario is maintenance. Okay, this is gaining muscle, losing some body fat, not much change in scale weight, all right, so this would be like okay. So this is an interesting one because you might maintain your weight. Or this could also refer to over the longterm you've gained and lost weight and you've come back to the same scale weight as you started. But now, but in the process, you've added muscle and lost fat. We're not really talking about that one, because that's kind of cheating when I say body recomp, because then everybody is doing body recomp over time.

Philip Pape: 16:19

If you're doing this the right way, right, if you're at some point building muscle and at some point losing fat and then it all kind of nets out, all right, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about just staying at maintenance, more or less maintaining your body weight within, say, plus or minus three pounds. But you're slowly but surely adding a little muscle, losing a little fat. The weight on the scale doesn't change, your waist size continues to go down, you keep getting stronger, and it's all happening without any change on the scale. So again, for brand new lifters, this is totally possible. In fact it's a very common and recommended approach that I use with clients. It's just stay at maintenance for a while at the beginning, and you could even stay there for longer than a while if you find it's getting you great results, because now you're not even worried about having to gain or lose weight, which adds an extra stressor and an extra level of planning and tracking. So the only other scenario where I would say that this happens is once you've gone through some cuts and bulks and you've improved your body comp in the past and you just want to maintain your physique, you know staying at maintenance, train really hard and not accidentally dieting. For the most part you can still slowly recomp over time on top of it. So even advanced or trained individuals might consider this approach to body recomp.

Philip Pape: 17:29

The third category is very, very, very slowly gaining weight, so modestly gaining, being in a surplus and gaining a little bit more muscle than you would at maintenance. Right, because at some point, especially the more advanced you are as a trainee, it's very hard to build extra muscle tissue without getting yourself in a little bit of a surplus. So this is most common in very well-trained individuals who want to keep getting leaner but they don't want to necessarily go through the bulk and cut cycles. And you know, this is where you might be cocking your eyebrows and thinking well, that's not really body recomp, is it if you're gaining weight? But again, technically it's not short-term body recomp that would happen in maintenance but it's potentially medium-term or kind of an efficient version of body recomp because you're spending some time slowly gaining muscle and then maybe a little bit of time doing a micro cut or a very slow conservative fat loss phase, like you could pick one or the other, and it doesn't feel too extreme in either direction. So I would say that this is a bit different from the kind of more optimal or even aggressive muscle building phase that's then followed by a moderate to aggressive cut, which I like to live in that state because I feel it's the most time efficient to get from A to B in terms of body fat percentage and leanness and muscle and strength and everything. It's the most efficient and I enjoy kind of eating a bunch of food for a long time of the year and then not taking too long to cut that off. But some people might rather enjoy eating a moderate amount of food all throughout the year, and when you're losing fat, you're still eating a moderate amount of food because it's not much different. So one might appeal to you and there's no wrong answer, there's no right or wrong answer. They're going to result in slightly different timing, aggressiveness and results. The result's going to be the same in the long term, but you might see different results in the short term. All right. So if you do things more slowly but still biased toward one direction, like the gain weight and the loose weight part, this will produce body recomp over time without the larger swings that come from these very focused bulk and cut cycles, and that might be an attractive reason to do it for a lot of you.

Philip Pape: 19:40

So first you want to figure out which category you want to go after, because you might have started listening to this episode thinking, okay, he's going to talk to me about maintenance. How do I do that? Oh, now I realize that there are options. I might want to go in one direction or another. If you're a newer trainee, you might want to try a little bit of fat loss while you're recomping. Or if you're more advanced, you might want to try a little bit of the gain side.

Philip Pape: 19:58

Then we're going to segue into my favorite topic, which is using nutrition to optimize your body composition. In that context, whatever you choose, it's going to depend on the three categories which category you choose. So first we need to nail down calories. Calories are your energy balance. That tells you which direction you're going to go, and they're going to be pegged to your expenditure, your daily expenditure, also called your maintenance calories, and I've talked about this before. But just to reiterate, especially if you knew or not familiar with this topic, the best way to determine your maintenance calories is not an online calculator and it is not your wearable device. It is tracking your food over about two to three weeks, tracking your weight over two to three weeks and seeing how one affects the other. If you eat 2,500 calories every single day and your weight doesn't change one ounce over the two weeks, then you know your expenditure is 2,500 calories.

Philip Pape: 20:51

Now the problem with this approach is it requires not only the tracking, which tracking is fine. I'm perfectly cool with tracking. I think tracking is a wonderful thing. It's the more tedious, laborious calculations based on what you've tracked that can be tricky for some people, or downright overwhelming, scary or tedious. So this is where a tool or an app that can do this for you is going to be your best friend from a practical standpoint. The one that I use is called Macrofactor. My clients use it, my students in Wits and Weights Physique University use it, and it can calculate your expenditure, your true metabolism, based on what you're eating and your weight, and then it can make adjustments weekly to your calories and to your macros based on your goal. So it does everything for you, okay, and if you want a, if you want to, okay.

Philip Pape: 21:40

So here's what I'm going to throw in as a goodie for this episode. I made a video in Wits and Weights Physique University under a course called Macrofactor Mastery, and it's how to download and do the initial setup and then set up your goal for maintenance or for recomp in Macrofactor. It walks you through the whole process with screenshots and everything um on how to set up everything. So I actually put that on YouTube. It's unlisted, you can't get to it publicly, but I'm going to put the link in the show notes for free for you as a podcast listener, to go check it out. Okay, totally free. You don't have to opt in, you don't have to give me an email or anything. It's a YouTube link. It'll just take you right to the video. Check that out in the show notes under episode resources, and I talk about it.

Philip Pape: 22:20

So why am I telling you all this? Because to figure out what calories you need, you need to know your maintenance calories. The only way to do that is to know your true metabolism, how your body responds to your activities and your food, and the best way to do that is track your weight and food over time. All right, then you can adjust your goal to either gain, lose or maintain, and then, if you're gaining or losing, you want to pick a conservative rate. If we're going for body recomp, right, we're not going for cuts and bulks all out. We're going for recomp and then you'll have your surplus or your deficit relative to your maintenance calories, and then you can update that each week as your metabolism adapts. Okay, so now I'm going to give you some actual numbers that make sense for most people that you can use.

Philip Pape: 23:04

So, obviously, if you're going to maintain, just eat around your maintenance and you're good. So if you burn 2,500 calories, eat 2,500 calories a day, more or less, and you're good, you know if, if the next week your metabolism has gone up a bit because you know you've got all these resources, your body feels relaxed, you don't have as much stress, or maybe you've got extra few thousand steps a day of walking. Whatever causes that increase, you're going to eat 2600 calories, let's say. Either way, you're going to eat in a way that maintains your weight and I would prefer aiming a tiny bit above that, like up to 50 calories over on a daily basis, so you're going to hit your protein. Then you're going to get in fats and carbs and so your calories come up to your maintenance and you're going to kind of overshoot that just a tiny bit every day. And I like that approach because it avoids accidentally dieting and accidentally being under fueled.

Philip Pape: 23:54

Because my opinion is, if you're going to maintain your weight, you might as well do it in the most fueled, fed, resource abundant state, rather than slightly underfed constantly, where you get symptoms of dieting like hunger, and there's no reason for that. I mean, the only reason you think there's a reason is you're afraid of gaining all this weight. But if you're properly tracking, if you're using an app like Macrofactor, you're going to be very precise. You'll know where you need to be and if your weight does start to drift one way or the other, you can always adjust the other way, and it's a slow process, all right. So, yeah, you risk the tiniest, tiniest bit of weight gain doing this, but it's well worth the the being in that fed, energized state all the time, and that's at maintenance. Okay.

Philip Pape: 24:37

Now, if you want to lose weight, I would aim for the low end of the evidence-based range to avoid muscle loss but to still make progress, and that is 0.25% of your body weight per week. All right, so a quarter percent of your body weight per week. So let's say you weigh 200 pounds, that's half a pound a week. And if you do the math based on 3,500 calories a pound, that's a 250 calorie deficit, which is enough to move the needle, but it's not anywhere close to the regime of potentially losing muscle or getting into those real dieting biofeedback states of lots of hunger and potentially higher stress and lower sleep and so on. Right, it's only 250 calorie deficit. It's really not that much, all right. And remember, we're trying to possibly add more muscle tissue even while losing weight. So we can't keep it that. We can't go that aggressive, but we don't want to go so slowly that we're really just at maintenance anyway, right. So that's where I think the 0.25% body weight a week is reasonable.

Philip Pape: 25:37

And then, if you want to gain, I would also aim for. The low end of what we have found is the evidence-based range of actually gaining muscle and not just being at maintenance, and that's pretty conservative. It's 0.1% of your body weight per week. So let's say you weigh 150 pounds, that's only 0.15 pounds per week. That's like a 55-calorie surplus and that's barely above maintenance. As I said earlier, even at maintenance I aim for up to about 50 calories over. So when you're trying to deliberately build weight over time, you know 55 calories for 150 pound person, which for a 200 pound person, is going to be, like, you know, 75 calories, not that big of a difference. It's enough to kind of push the needle and make sure that you're building that muscle, but then it's not so much that you can't also potentially lose fat at the same time. Okay, Now, once you've got your calories set, you can then peg your macros accordingly and you're going to aim for 0.7 to one gram of protein per pound of your target body weight.

Philip Pape: 26:39

Now, your target body weight may not be that far from your current body weight. So to simplify, you could just go with your current body weight and I would be closer to the one gram per pound, since we're going for recomp. So to simplify all of what I just said protein around one gram a pound for what you weigh right now. So if you weigh 180 pounds, aim for 180 grams of protein, right, because it is body recomp. I want you to bias the protein a little higher than if we were just in one of the more extreme phases. For fat, I would get in somewhere around 20 to 30% of your calories for general health, for hormone production, all of that, and then the rest goes toward carbs. Now there's a lot of flexibility in fats and carbs.

Philip Pape: 27:17

I've mentioned this in the past on this show but carbs are really important, especially if you're a maintenance, you know, in either of these phases, because in all three of these potential phases you're not that far from maintenance. So you should have a reasonable amount of calories to work with. And carbs are always your friend when it comes to training performance, you know, fueling your workouts, partitioning nutrients toward muscle building instead of fat storage, and recovering from your workouts as well. They just help you feel great, they give you energy and for many of us, practically, we love to eat food that contains carbs as well Fruits, starches, grains. You know all of that. So there you go. That's the basic nutrition for those three categories of Recomp. Now, peri-workout nutrition by peri we mean around your workout, so before, during, after, kind of within a couple hour window of that workout. Peri-workout nutrition is super important.

Philip Pape: 28:11

But before we go there, I want to take a tangent on training, on your workouts, for a second, because this is the only time I'm going to discuss that today. I'm always assuming that, if you're listening to this show, strength training is important and you understand the value of it. But I do have to reiterate that all of the other stuff we talk about today is kind of irrelevant if you are not training right. Most of today's discussion is about nutrition and lifestyle, but it assumes your strength training and doing it effectively to give your body plenty of stimulus for muscle growth. That is just default. That's assumed because for body recomp we're trying to build muscle and lose fat at the same time. So the premise is you're doing something to build muscle right. The doing both at the same time part is what's tricky, and that's why I'm covering most of these other topics today. But if you want good timing good timing on this episode because if you want all the details behind effective training principles, I did recently cover them all in episode 162, which is titled bodybuilding for everyday lifters who want to build their dream physique, and I'm going to link that one in the show notes as well. So if you want to get into details on all these principles, check that episode out. It's actually one of my favorites personally that I made for the show, and it's a recent one as well, so I think you'll like that.

Philip Pape: 29:27

But in summary, what do we mean by effective training or training hard? I think it means three things, okay, and I usually state these things in a similar kind of approach. Whenever I talk about this. It's generally these same things. And we're talking principles here, not programming and all of that. Number one and we're talking principles here, not programming and all of that. Number one it means training close to failure, most of the time, within one, two, three reps of failure, depending on the movement. That's the first one. Number two it means progressing in load reps, sets, some combination of these things over time, what we call progressive overload. And number three, it's training with sufficient intensity and execution, using movements that build strength and muscle right and this is really important the intensity and the execution, because if you're not doing it right, the other things aren't going to matter. And beyond your initial training phase of, like your first few weeks, or maybe even first few months if you're on the weaker end, this is going to include free weights like barbells, like dumbbells, combined with machines and cable machines, things like that, as needed, you know, stuff that you would find in a gym.

Philip Pape: 30:28

So not only does proper training build muscle mass, of course, which is one very important half of the body recomp equation, it also has three other benefits for body recomp that I want to reiterate today. All right, benefit number one muscle tissue is metabolically very active. It's way more active than fat tissue, meaning it burns a ton of calories even at rest. And this increased muscle mass thus boosts your basal metabolic rate, your metabolism, and so you burn more calories throughout the day, and that can aid in fat loss while you're maintaining or increasing muscle mass. So it's not a huge impact I've talked about this before maybe six to nine calories per pound of muscle mass that you add to your body, but even like an extra 50 calories a day. We're talking recomp can make all the difference.

Philip Pape: 31:17

Number two the second benefit of muscle mass and building muscle mass when you're engaging in training. The strength training itself has a massive positive impact on your hormonal response because your hormones start to shift to facilitate the muscle growth and the fat metabolism. All of it. It increases testosterone, it increases growth hormone, and both of those are vital for muscle synthesis and for the breakdown of fat cells. So you get this two for one. Hormonal milieu is the French word they like to use of perfect storm toward building muscle and losing fat. That gets accelerated just through the act of strength training. And then benefit number three muscle mass is denser, so you can look lean and tone at a higher body weight, which tends to mean means you could even burn more calories and thus fat, without needing to lose as much weight. So you can. That's like another way to recomp, kind of in a in a backdoor approach, right, so you could just not have to lose as much weight, and so you can recomp in that way.

Philip Pape: 32:21

Now we've established, I think, why every single person listening to the show should be resistance training if your goal is to improve your body composition and get a fantastic physique period Bar none. If you listen and you're a runner and you don't strength train at all and you reach out to me and say I need some help with my nutrition, I'm going to say what's your training look like? And if you tell me here's when I run, I'm going to say, well, where's the strength training? And you say I don't want to say, all right, come back to me, because you've got to be strength training If you care about your physique and your body composition, which all of this contributes as well to your health. This is why I love this so much and I'm passionate about muscle mass and strength training, because it helps everything, it makes everything easier, even, yes, you're running. So let's continue and talk briefly about workout nutrition after I went on that long tangent.

Philip Pape: 33:09

My recommendation here is that you simply want to bookend your training A little before, a little bit after. You've got flexibility in the amount of time. You don't have to eat or drink in the middle of your workout unless you're starting. It fasted potentially, but for most part, you want to bookmark it with some easy digesting proteins and carbs. This is going to fuel your workout. It's going to kickstart your recovery after. It's going to help with muscle protein synthesis. So something like, you know, whey protein, quick carbs, like fruit I love bananas, you know rice cakes. I know someone who loves you know rice crispy treats.

Philip Pape: 33:42

I'm not huge on using ultra processed foods for a lot of this stuff, but hey, it can work. And then you know, and that's like your pre-workout, then your post-workout can have a little more variety, maybe even a little bit of fat in there. The only reason we don't want much fat pre-workout is it simply slows your digestion, which means you would just have to eat more protein and carbs. Or or you have more stomach you know digestive issues, having more food in your stomach. So, yeah, a little bit of fat after in your post-workout like for me it's oatmeal with peanut butter, love it.

Philip Pape: 34:12

And I would aim to split your protein evenly across your meals and get anywhere from like a third to two thirds of your carbs in the peri-workout period, depending on how many carbs you're working with. So if you're in fat loss and you have less to work with, it may be a smaller percentage because you or no. It actually may be a bigger percentage because you have fewer calories, right, and you're trying to keep the amount of carbs around your workout roughly the same whether you're in fat loss or not. So when you're in fat loss you're basically siphoning most of those carbs around your workout. I've seen it to the point where, like, almost all your carbs are around your workout because the calories are fairly low. But that's also why we don't want the fats to be too high and take away from the carbs, or even the protein to be much higher than it needs to be to give you room for your carbs. So that was just my little thing on pre-work or peri-workout nutrition, as far as just a general principle, but also in the context of body recomp, to make sure everything is fueled properly for maximum results.

Philip Pape: 35:11

Now, it's not just about calories and macros. We know there are a lot of other things here, nutritionally and otherwise. On the nutrition side, I think micronutrition, I think hydration, electrolytes they all impact your performance and body composition. And here we're just going to stick to basic principles, focusing on whole, nutrient-dense foods 80% of the time. You can leave the other 10% to 20% for whatever you want for your indulgences, so that you don't over-restrict, you don't feel deprived. Always be drinking plenty of water and liquids, don't fear sodium, potassium, all of that. This is where I like fruits like bananas for your electrolytes, especially around your training, because that's when you need it to support the fluid balance and it helps with muscle contractions and avoiding cramping and things like that as well. So that's all I'm going to say on micros and hydration, just the basics of mostly whole foods, a lot of variety of foods Don't put any foods off limits, and so on.

Philip Pape: 36:03

And then, beyond nutrition, optimizing your health and hormone status is also important for recomp, because you know, recomp is how do I want to put this? Because the progress isn't as visible in the short-term, I'll say than with the other approaches, where the biofeedback signal tends to be more amplified. So if your sex hormones are out of whack testosterone, estrogen, progesterone you're not going to be able to gain muscle or lose fat effectively. And so biofeedback signals like low libido, poor recovery, like stubborn fat retention which I know that's kind of a subjective one, because we all gain and lose fat in different areas. Some of us just happen to gain it in our stomach, where we don't want it, or gain it in our butt, where we do or don't want it. And I say that do or don't want it, because butt fat can be helpful to some people, all right, and you could get blood work as well, like a before and after.

Philip Pape: 37:08

And so here, like, your lifestyle practices are all going to be dialed in. If you're going for body recomp, besides the nutrition and the training, we've got stress management, we've got sufficient sleep, like. All of these are going to support your hormones, especially sleep. I mean I can't under rate the value or overestimate the value of sleep for your hormones. And then one other little one is alcohol. I mean the less alcohol, the better it's going to be for your hormones as well. Ideally, no alcohol. But again, practicality, lifestyle, I get it, you know. Do what works for you and see how you respond.

Philip Pape: 37:43

Thyroid, specifically, I want to call out the more I learn about the thyroid, the more I think it deserves its own category, because if your thyroid is under functioning, your metabolic rate will be slower and it's going to be harder to eat enough food and be where you need to be to change your body composition. And so I still think lifestyle for the most part is going to work for most people and most women, but you know, because men are affected by thyroid as well, thyroid conditions. But if you want to get your labs done, proactively. If you suspect an issue, get your T3 and T4 checked. You know on the ratio, but continue to focus on all these strategies right Calories, carbs, not over restricting getting in your key micros For thyroid health. That would be iodine, selenium, zinc, foods that contain those supplementation as needed so that your thyroid produces the hormones and keeps your metabolic rate where it needs to be. All right.

Philip Pape: 38:39

So other aspects of biofeedback and general health would be your digestion, your circadian rhythm right, like having a consistent daily routine and schedule for your sleep, your waking and sleeping cycle. But even your eating cycle, even your walking cycle, believe it or not, like, your body starts to get used to these rhythms and tends to go in a more relaxed state when things are consistent and thus keeping your metabolic rate higher and you can eat more food and recomp more easily. Sleep and stress we already mentioned, because they can affect your ability to lose fat and gain muscle. So you just gotta audit your lifestyle, see where you can upgrade your habits outside the gym. Everything works together synergistically. If you are, for example, in our program, right, if you're in Whitson Weights Physique University, you have a biofeedback tracker and we can easily see on a week-to-week basis what is going on relative to the other things and if you're struggling or if you hit a plateau or something's not going the direction you want, we can take all that data together. We can take your calories and macros, your food intake, we can take your scale weight, we can take your body measurements and we can take your biofeedback and see where the patterns are, and you could do the same thing for yourself.

Philip Pape: 39:45

Finally, don't underestimate the importance of mindset. I know I often put it last on the list, for whatever reason. I think we just do this inherently, and yet mindset could be the first thing on the list for a lot of this and for a lot of you listening. You know exactly what I mean, like you may. You may know all the stuff I'm telling you today. You may know exactly what numbers to use for yourself. You may be doing many of these things and yet the mindset comes in in places like getting impatient or not being consistent or not trusting the process. So the antidote to those is be patient, consistency, trusting the process.

Philip Pape: 40:22

You know you're training hard, you're eating in a slight deficit, let's say, if you're doing the lose weight version of this and maybe you're training hard, you're eating in a slight deficit, let's say, if you're doing the lose weight version of this, and maybe you're not seeing a huge drop in scale weight right away because you shouldn't, you shouldn't, and yet in your mind you might be thinking, oh, I'm trying to get this body recomp and also the scale's not budging as much as I'd like. And it's easy to get discouraged if you're only focused on the day-to-day or only on specific metrics. We need to collect all this stuff but at the same time, not get hung up on any one number, on any short horizon, time horizon. Keep your eyes on that bigger picture. But while you're doing that, I do want you to celebrate small victories along the way.

Philip Pape: 41:01

We just don't want to overemphasize victories that aren't really victories, like, oh, my weight dropped a pound yesterday. I don't think that's really a victory. I don't because I would never want to overreact to weight dropping or gaining in one day, ever. I want to look at it over two or three weeks right Now, over two, over, let's say, three weeks. You can say, hey, the combination of things that I'm tracking shows me that I built a little muscle and I lost a little fat. Here's why, you know, my waist size went down by half an inch, my biceps went up by half an inch and my scale weight went down by, you know, two pounds over the three-week trend. Hey, you know, I'm pretty happy with all of that. That's pretty good. I'm headed in the right direction. That's cool, you know, like we can definitely are doing.

Philip Pape: 41:45

To me, those are the victories worth celebrating. I did this thing that I committed to doing and because I did that thing, I know it's gonna later on produce a result and I know that it will be worth it when I unveil that strong, lean, muscular physique that I've built through the process, the process. So go back to the quotes that I said earlier from our community and their wins, and you saw that all of those wins were from this healthy and positive mindset of the process. Like I did this every day, I was consistent. I didn't have to deprive myself. It wasn't. I lost X weight on the scale, right, we can still celebrate those results when they come, but if we focus on the day-to-day and the process, you're almost not going to care when the result happens, because it will have been happening the whole time and you'll have been enjoying the process. So that's kind of the mindset piece of recomp, because it can be harder to see the result happening.

Philip Pape: 42:43

Now that's also in somewhat you can argue for some people. That's why you like to do more aggressive bulks and cuts, because you can see some of the result based numbers changing faster. And for some of us we want those wins too, and that's okay. There's no right or wrong. There really isn't All right. I see it too, because right now I'm rehabbing my shoulder again. Occasionally it gets a little wonky, since I've had rotator cuff surgery. It rehabbing my shoulder again. Occasionally it gets a little wonky. Since I've had rotator cuff surgery, it happens.

Philip Pape: 43:09

I've been assured that this is totally normal and yet I'm the type of guy that wants to push. I want to grow, I want to keep going, I want to improve, and it can be a little bit frustrating when I know I have to come out of my fat loss phase. I have to tone down my intensity, tone down my volume, work, work out fewer days a week, but I know that doing all those things will produce a result. So what do I take pleasure in? I take pleasure in the fact that my shoulder has more range of motion each day and is feeling less pain. And I know that that is a result-based thing, but it's also process. It's showing me that every day that I put into doing these things, I'm getting what I want out of it and even though I'm kind of at maintenance let's call it I am getting a ton of wins every day as a result. That will set me up for going back into a more aggressive phase at some point from a healthier standpoint. So that's my little personal story there.

Philip Pape: 43:59

Some final thoughts on body recomp. Body recomp is absolutely possible. It can be a highly effective approach for a lot of people to completely transform your physique. It really can. And for and or but. For many individuals, using more aggressive buts, bulks, buts, more aggressive buts, more aggressive, bulks and cuts will be the most time efficient way to achieve long-term body recomp. But many of you might prefer this more casual approach that doesn't get to extreme in either direction. And guess what? These choices are part of the flexibility and the sustainability in everything we do and talk about on this show and with our coaching approach and in our community and in Wits and Weights Physique University.

Philip Pape: 44:43

This is the fun part about it. It's not sexy. It doesn't sell a 30-pound fat loss in three weeks, but it sells you a lifetime of joy because you can have such a flexible, individualized for you approach that just is totally in sync with your life and I know so many of you want that. And I strive on this show to show you how to do it practically and take actual steps and it's not just lip service. Right, and whichever way you want to go right Losing fat, building muscle, you know, quickly or simultaneously over the longterm. Either way, doing all these practices the right way is how you will achieve that lean, strong, athletic look you want.

Philip Pape: 45:27

So the exact way it plays out is going to depend on your starting point Whether you have a lot of fat to lose, you're already lean, you want to focus on muscle gain, you're very well trained or you're just looking to etch in those final details in your physique and that symmetry. Whatever, the key principles are still the same Train hard with sufficient intensity, execution, volume, progression right. Eat enough protein and carbs to support your muscle growth while still achieving a modest you know fat loss either a deficit or in less of a surplus, or at maintenance. Optimize your peri-workout nutrition, your hydration, focus on nutritious whole foods and pay attention to your health, your hormones and your biofeedback, not just your body composition, because it all plays together synergistically and this is where having an experienced coach or community to guide you through the process can make a huge difference. But regardless, I strive on the show to give you these blueprints to help you get started doing it on your own. You just have to be patient, consistent, keep showing up, keep putting in the work, and then your physique will transform before your eyes when you look back and you'll say, wow, look, how far I've come, and that's it. That is what we do for body recomp.

Philip Pape: 46:42

I hope this has been not only informative, but maybe a little bit eye-opening, given that there are so many ways, there's so much flexibility in achieving recomp besides just maintenance. Right, and now you're inspired. Right, you've got some ideas, you're ready to put these into action and, as I mentioned before, if you're interested in using Macrofactor to set up your body recomp phase without worrying about calculating your maintenance calories or your calorie macro targets, I'm giving you all a free video on how to set everything up in the app, screenshots, and everything step by step. This video is from the Macrofactor Mastery course in Wits and Weights Physique University, but I'm giving you this video itself, not the whole course. I'm giving you this video absolutely free, no opt-in, no email. Just click the link in my show notes for the free video on YouTube. You'll find it under episode resources and go click it to get my free video on setting up macro factor for body recomp. Stay strong and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.