Reframing Muscle And Aging

Philip Pape 0:00

You've probably heard that you should build muscle while you're young because you'll lose it when you're older. And sure there is science behind that, but what nobody's talking about is the flip side of this advice, which is the dangerous myth that once you hit your 40s or 50s, you've already missed your chance. Today I'm showing you three things. First, why the muscle building window never actually closes. Second, why midlife might actually be your best opportunity to build serious strength. And third, the engineering framework that explains why starting now gives you a compounding advantage for the next several decades. If you've ever felt like you're behind or you should have started earlier, this episode will change how you think about muscle, aging, and what's actually possible when you apply the right inputs at any age. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today we're going to tackle a topic that comes up constantly with my listeners, our clients, especially those in their 40s, 50s, and beyond. I was recently listening to Peter Atia talk about building what he calls a strength reserve early in life. And while I completely agree with this concept, I noticed something missing from the conversation. That is the practical message of hope for anyone who didn't start lifting in their 20s. This episode is about reframing that narrative, that story around muscle building and age, especially for strength training over 40. Not to dismiss the science, which is real, but to show you why the moment you're in right now, whatever your age, is the perfect time to start building strength and muscle. It's a little bit of an inspirational episode, but it's also one of the most important things to wrap our head around and say, hey, I am where I am today. What should I do going forward to give me the best chance and an amazing rest of my life for decades to come? So let's get into it.

A 65-Year-Old’s Breakthrough

Philip Pape 2:10

And I actually want to start with part of a testimonial I received from someone in Physique University. And I'm not going to read her whole testimonials. It's actually quite long. I'm going to focus on what's relevant to today's episode. She said, I asked him if this program was appropriate for a 65-year-old mostly beginner. I've been lifting for a while, just trying to figure out, figure things out on my own, but I really wanted to be doing things right. I feel like I'm doing things right now because I haven't felt this good in a long time, maybe ever. I have a workout program with instructional videos, nutrition app, a community of like-minded people whom I can reach out to anytime I need. I love how Philip and his program gives me a lot of leeway in the things I want to eat and my fitness workouts. Not that I'm a control freak, but this program enables me to feel in control. I don't have to rearrange my entire diet and eat things I don't like. I'm getting results with strength training without killing myself. As a matter of fact, one morning I skip my workout to get an extra hour's sleep, guilt-free, because that's what I needed. And Philip suggests we get our sleep dialed in, is one of the first things we do. The program takes care of my whole person. I'm feeling really good and I'm getting stronger. I feel empowered emotionally and physically because I get to make my own decisions with guidance from Philip. I like his engineering mindset and the fact that he backs up his exercise science with facts. And she goes on from there. But really, the point is she's 65 doing this for the first time. And listen to the kinds of things that are possible again at any age. And I think that is so, so powerful. I love to see when someone who's never done this before, finds the show, finds our program, whatever, reaches out, sends me an email, and says, like, I feel at my wit's end. I'm whatever age, I feel like I can't do it anymore. Perimenopausal hormones, you know, these issues, that issues.

What The Science Actually Shows

Philip Pape 3:50

It's possible. Okay. And that's what we're going to talk about. So jumping into the topic, let's start with what the research shows because understanding the mechanism helps us engineer the solution. I've talked about it a lot on the show, but I'm kind of bringing it all together today and talking about muscle mass and the decline of muscle mass with age, but that's not something to fear. In fact, it's something that really gives us power. It's something that's at the crux of what many people out there discussing obesity and weight loss and health are missing. So, what does the data say? Let's start with the quote unquote bad news, and then we'll jump from there. The data shows a roughly 3% to 8% loss per decade after age 30, and that accelerates after 60. We also think that's why your metabolic decline accelerates around that age, because of the muscle mass. Because in reality, people's metabolisms tend to stay stable from the age of 20 to 60. I know it sounds insane. There, I did a whole episode on this. I'm not going to go into that piece of it, but from the muscle mass piece, it really starts to decline 30s through 60s and then accelerates after 60. This goes back to studies back to the late 80s by researchers like Lexel and others who measured muscle fiber counts. They mess measure cross-sectional area in looking at aging populations. However, the critical part that gets left out from a lot of these conversations, right? They're like, okay, muscle mass declines. That sucks. The decline is not primarily driven by aging itself. It is driven by what I'm gonna frame as three D's for this episode to make them easy to remember. Three D's, D as in dog. Disuse, deficiency, and deconditioning. Okay, disuse, deficiency, and deconditioning. Most people in these studies, first of all, weren't strength training. I mean, that's just the average general population is not strength training. And they weren't eating enough protein and they weren't providing their muscles with the mechanical tension needed to maintain, let alone build muscle, because they weren't training. And when you actually look at studies where older adults, okay, we're talking 60 to 80 years old, engage in progressive resistance training, the results look like magic and they are remarkable. And I wish we had even more studies like this. There was a landmark study published in the New England Journal of Medicine by Fiat Fiat, I don't know how to pronounce his name, but F-I-A-T-A-R-O-N and colleagues in 1990 that showed that frail nursing home residents in their 80s and 90s had 10 to 20% increases in muscle size and even bigger improvements in strength after 12 to 16 weeks of training. That's it. That's it. That is incredible in their 80s and 90s. And of course, not surprisingly, they saw better metabolism and functional capacity. Functional being a more important word than the word itself. In other words, that's living your life and daily living. Very important when you get into your 80s and 90s. Their muscles didn't know they were old, right? Muscles muscle, no matter how old you are. They respond to stimulus the same way that younger muscles do. They might have different kinetics

The Three D’s: Disuse, Deficiency, Deconditioning

Philip Pape 6:50

behind them, different support structures like your bones and connective tissue, but they're still muscle tissue. And the mechanism is very straightforward. When you apply that mechanical tension to muscle tissue, this is understood probably to be the most important driving factor in muscle growth. When you do resistance training, you trigger a cascade of responses at the cellular level. Very important. Satellite cells activate, protein synthesis ramps up, your muscles adapt. We don't have to get into the biology of it. I half understand it myself. I will be honest. I'm still learning this stuff. But I understand that it works and you get stronger, your muscles get bigger, and it doesn't stop when you're 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 or 90. And unless you're out there listening to this and you're 120, 130, you've already cracked the code, most likely, anyway. What does change with age, though, is how efficient this response is. And this is one of these things we just have to understand and live with. It's okay. Older adults might need a little more protein to overcome a little bit more anabolic resistance, which is kind of that blunted response to protein. They may need more recovery between sessions. The neuromuscular adaptations, like the motor unit recruitment that occurs, might take a little longer to develop. Now, is this because you're older and your body is so trained in one way and your brain is less pliable and plastic and all those? Maybe. Again, I'm not a biologist, but it all makes a little bit of sense, doesn't it? The good thing is, none of this means the window is closed. It just means the inputs have to be adjusted for you, which you would want to do anyway at any age, male, female, you know, different situations, different lifestyles. And so we're going to talk about that throughout today's episode. The takeaway from this first part is really simple, though. Muscle doesn't expire. It does, however, decondition. Okay. And deconditioning can be reversed by conditioning with the same physics that you use to build it in the first place, which again, mechanical tension, progressive overload, adequate nutrition recovery, the basics. Those are the principles. So that's kind of the underlying what's going on, right? And again, I meant remember the three D's disuse, you haven't used it, deficiency, okay, because you haven't used it, you don't have the function, and deconditioning, you haven't trained your muscles. So of course they are doing what they do best, and that is wither away because you don't need them. And we are gonna turn this around. We are gonna flip this entire conversation around and look at why

Older Adults’ Surprising Training Results

Philip Pape 9:20

starting now, whether you're in your 40s, your 50s, your 60s, I really don't care, might give you advantages that younger lifters don't have. Ooh, pretty cool, right? I've thought about this a bit. I've thought there's certain things that I have an advantage over younger lifters because I started later. Certain things I don't, but let's focus on the positives. Okay. First, you've got a lot of data and you have some level of discipline. Now, I don't want to over-emphasize discipline for its own sake. I'm not asking people to quote unquote be disciplined. What I'm talking about is that at this stage of life, you've tried lots of things. You're listening to this podcast, you're collecting lots of data, you've learned a lot about your body, your life, you've gone through the school of hard knocks, you've created and developed wisdom. Let's be honest, you have wisdom. Now, there's a lot of stupid people who are 45 that I've met, and yet they still have more wisdom than they did when they were 25. So laugh at that or think about that what you will. Okay. And granted, some people don't have the mindset to develop wisdom, and that's a whole different conversation. But you're listening to this podcast, so I'm gonna say that you've self-filtered into the group that I'm talking to. So you're you're probably not winging it in the gym on YouTube videos. I hope you're not by this point. But if you are, great. That's something we're gonna start from and say there's a more structured approach, a system-based approach. But you kind of understand that it usually takes a little bit of effort, a little bit of a system in place, some form of tracking or measuring, right? You know this from your money over the years. Think about the jobs you've had, the businesses you've had, making money, spending money, losing money, investing money in risky ventures that didn't pay off, whatever it is in your past has probably taught you things that there's some level of awareness, knowledge, discipline, consistent application of some sort of principle that gets you a result. And so think about the areas where you have been successful over the years and you have the years behind you to give you some of that wisdom. Again, to use that word, right? There's lots of things I did I wish I didn't do when I was young, but then I reframe it and say, you know what, I'm glad I did, because it taught me early on what I should and shouldn't do. Okay. This is like the engineering mindset that I talk about on this show, where younger lifters are chasing novelty. And to be frank, some older lifters as well, but they know there's something different that they need to do. And so I see people program hopping, getting distracted by trends. I think you being in your 40s, 50s, 60s, dear listener, you and me, we're we're we've got a little more wisdom. We can take a structured approach. We can track the inputs and outputs, we can make adjustments based on feedback rather than emotion because we know all that other stuff hasn't worked. We know it hasn't worked. So we have that behind us. All right. So I just kind of give you props for that. Give yourself props for being just the fact that you're older means you're wiser in some ways. The second thing I I think here is you've got hopefully more resources than you when you were younger. And there are a lot of different types of resources. One may be money. Not everybody, I understand, but one may be, you know, that you've

Adjusting Inputs With Age

Philip Pape 12:15

earned some more income, you've saved some more money, you're probably making more than you did when you were younger. At least you should be, right? And maybe you can afford some more of the tools or coaching or equipment or gym memberships or whatever food, you know, that you need to make it happen. I think that's an advantage of being older, is that you've got, you know, I think of all the things I had college debt, I had lots of, you know, I had credit cards when I was younger, things that I've had to kind of scrape out of. But you also have access to tools and people, a lot more people than probably when you were younger. You can invest in different recovery strategies. You probably have your own place to live where you're, you know, in charge of your bed and your sleep hygiene and your supplements and stress management, your schedule. All of those things, it just what comes to mind for me is just as we get older and we get more responsibilities, the flip side to responsibilities is you generally have resources as well. Okay, maybe that's not everyone, but it's it's a thing that comes to mind to me versus like a 20-year-old. And then the third thing, and I think this is huge, is your motivation is different at this age. Okay, you're not lifting just to look good at the beach, although that could be a great side effect. I always say that. Like the vanity piece, the visual, the physique is a pleasant side effect. But what you're really doing is you're lifting for longevity, for function, for independence. You're lifting so you can pick up your grandkids, so you can hike without pain, so you can live the second half of your life with strength, with vitality instead of decline and dependence and decrepitude. And this kind of motivation is far deeper and more sustainable than vanity. Again, not to knock vanity, but we need the deeper motivations as well that are tied to meaning, values, quality for your future. And if you have children like I do, it enhances it even more. Not to say, not having children, you can't have deep meaning. Absolutely, you can't. Everybody can have meaning in their life, no matter what, no matter your religion, you know, your family situation, whatever. But do you have those things in your life that you're anchored to that makes you far less likely to quit when things get hard? And I would ask you to seek that out if you're not sure what it is. You've got to reflect on that and identify what that is for you, right? For me, that is absolutely my family, my wife, my kids. But it's also their kids when I get older and if I have grandchildren, I don't want to do to depend on them. I want to be the one there helping them stack wood, you know, move into their new house, right? Run around and play sports when I'm 70. Absolutely. And you know what? I see 70 and 80-year-olds who have done this the right way and focus on getting strong, do that. Absolutely. Even if they were already on the path toward frailty. And that's my point of this episode. It's never too late to start. That is why strength training over 40 is not just effective, but can be more strategic. And one little side tangent of this, which actually wasn't in my notes, but I was thinking is you haven't beat yourself up from 20 years of strength training already, whether it was done correctly or not. So that's another advantage of starting late. You're a little bit fresher in some ways. In other ways, not so pliable. I get it. But again, we're focused on the positive. And then the fourth, I guess, advantage of doing this over 40 is, and I think nobody talks about this, is that you can not only build but preserve tons and tons of muscle as if you were young. I mean, I'm gonna be honest, your amount of muscle you can build is still not that far off from what you could have when you started young. It's a little bit less, but not much. And guess what? Most people take a long time to get to their genetic potential anyway. And so I wouldn't even worry about that. I wouldn't even worry about, oh, I only have so much muscle to build. If your problem is that you're running out of new muscle to add, you've already won, you've already won the game. I'm you've already won the game. In that case, you're just you're you're trying to optimize and you're trying to go after that next level, right? And by doing this now, I don't care if you're 55, 65, like the

Why Midlife Can Be An Advantage

Philip Pape 16:16

person whose testimonial I read. I don't want to say her name because I didn't get permission to say her name, but yet. But just like her at 65, she is front loading her reserves for the next few decades. I mean, at 65, and if you live to 95, that's 30 more years of health span, wealth span, whatever word you want to use. And you think of it like this if you build your strength and muscle now, okay, over the next couple of years, you build that. We're not, we're not always dieting, right? We want to build muscle. It doesn't have to be in a big surplus, it could be at maintenance. That's a whole separate topic. How do you build? How do you lose? That's other episodes. But if you do that now and then you maintain it, and by the way, it's a lot easier to maintain than build. So, in other words, once you've built some muscle in the first few years, you have a lot more flexibility on how much volume you need in the gym to hold on to it. And then you're holding on to like 90% or more of that new tissue that everyone else is losing their muscle mass. You've built muscle mass and you're holding on to that muscle mass in your 70s and 80s, because you can definitely just keep training. Compare that to someone who never built that reserve in the first place. Even a small amount of that age-related decline is what is going to lead to them being frail and dependent. They're gonna be, they're gonna fall, they're gonna break their hip, they're gonna have joint issues, they're gonna have dislocations. Okay, they're not gonna be able to get off the toilet one day. I know it's it's a terrible, grim view of the future, but it's kind of like in Christmas story where the ghost of Christmas past says you have a choice and this is gonna lead to one future or the other. That's your choice right now. Okay, you're not trying to turn back the clock, you're changing the future clock. And if you want to think of it as getting younger every year, I'm cool with that because I do that myself. I'm turning 45, joking with my wife. I'm like, since the time I was 40, every year, I've actually gotten a year younger. Now, I'm not turning back the clock. I'm still that many years old on this earth. But from the age of 40 to 45, I feel like I've gone from 40 to 35 in age and how I feel and how I function. And and I was joking with my daughters. I said, so I'm gonna do that another five years. When I'm 50, I'll be like I'm 30. Now, at some point, I don't think I can really be like a 20-year-old ever again because of the hormone situation. Although, you know, there is TRT. But I said, you know, at least if I I'm I'm 30, I'm like a 30-year-old when I'm 50. That's 20 years of biological advantage over my peers. And then I just maintain that. And now when I'm 60, 70, 80, 90, I'm far younger in spirit and physique and fit and physical capability than my peers, right? And that's where we want to be. So if you're realizing now it's your time to start building serious muscle and strength, but you're like, look, I listened to your podcast or I'm gonna binge the show, whatever, and it's a lot of information. It's very confusing. I don't want to figure it out on my own, or it's gonna take me a long time to do that, which is super common. And don't beat yourself up for it because that's exactly where I was until I started following people and working with coaches and asking for help. If you're in that situation now, I want to invite you to join Wits and Weights Physique University. This is my semi-private group coaching program. Okay, I'm just laying it out there, being transparent. You get evidence-based nutrition and training, strategies, courses, help, accountability, live calls, all that fun stuff. It's not really about the stuff, so much as the clarity to know what to do for you and quickly be able to get an answer from experts. So that would be myself as well as Coach Carol. She's an expert, especially for women and hormones and thyroid issues, uh, especially. She's also a personal trainer. And you get immediate help from one of us. You also get direct nutrition support. There's training templates and programs designed for every level, every level of equipment, days per week. There's live coaching calls. One of the most value-added things we've been doing is monthly workshops that go really, really deep on things like body recomp and recovery dieting. And the one coming up in November before we get to the holidays is how to finish strong with a year, how to have a bailout strategy rather than trying to do more than is realistic during the end of the year. It's those kinds of things. And of course, the community that binds it all together of like-minded, ambitious people who are all ages. I mean, we have people as young as in their 30s, maybe even late 20s, to be honest, but most people are in their 40s, 50s, beyond, who are focused on doing this, on trying to reclaim their muscle, build it up, become stronger, and just more badass people. Okay. That's excuse my French. That's the the closest to swearing you're going to get on this podcast. And the best part is because you're listening to the podcast, if you use my code FREEPLAN, you'll get a custom nutrition plan as well for free at the beginning. And what that's gonna do is give you an accelerator for what to do, when to do it, how to do it. Right? We don't do meal plans. We don't do anything that's generic. We personalize it for you in a group setting. And you're like, how does that work? Well, come check it out. Go to physique.wits and weights.com. I have a demo in there. You can read all about it. You can ask me questions if you're if you're not sure. Some people will ask 10 questions before they join. I'm cool with that. If you're serious about making this the decade that you build that real lasting strength, because that's what it's about, is strength, guys. It's not about YouTube workouts, it's not about mobility, it's not about you know yoga and mindfulness and all that. All that's great, but it's really about strength and function and fitness that all ties to the rest of it. I want you to go to witsandweights.com slash physique, use my code FREEPLAN to get the free plan, link in the show notes. All right, let's keep building this framework for this episode. Because next, I want to give you a mental model. I think mental models are a great way to understand why starting now is optimal and kind of tie into the the deeper why of why we do this and then how to do it. So I want you to think of your muscle mass as structural capacity, structural, as in your structure of your body. And I want you to think of your strength as the output, kind of like the gas engine, the throughput, the output. Okay. If in any system we design, if you designed a system in life, like a physical product or system, you would design it for future demand, right? You wouldn't just design for the current you current use, you want it to last.

Building A Long-Term Strength Reserve

Philip Pape 22:30

Right? When a civil engineer builds a bridge or designs a bridge, they don't build it to handle just the traffic today. They say, okay, we need a safety margin, extra capacity, increased load over time, unexpected stress, wind and hurricanes and all that fun stuff. Your body works the same way. The muscle and strength that you build now is not just for today. It is your margin of safety for the next three, four, five decades. Every pound of muscle you add, every unit of strength you gain, expressed by, you know, weight on the bar, weight on the machines, weight on the dumbbells, expands that margin. And even if you start later in life, the act of building capacity is still going to pay an equivalent dividend across your remaining lifespan. And therefore, by starting today, you're retrofitting your system with far better materials and greater load-bearing capacity. You're increasing your whole capability of your body. Someone who started at 25, they have a longer runway, sure. But you can still build substantial capacity in a short period of time and then maintain it because that's the key. It doesn't actually take a long time to build it up. And as I mentioned before, maintenance requires a lot less work and stimulus than growing. So we want to focus on that growth. Once you build the muscle, holding on to it becomes easier. And that's why I always tell you, dear listener and our clients, that building, if you if you're not sure if you should build muscle or lose fat, I err on the side of building muscle. Now, you're gonna build muscle regardless if you've never done it before, whether you're losing fat or not, because you've never done it before. Your body's gonna respond really well. So don't get hung up on that. Okay, don't get hung up on Phillip saying you need to gain weight. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying you need to build muscle. All right. Not five years ago because you don't have a time machine. Okay, that's not the best time. You can't go back in time. But think of the opposite. Every year you delay is another year it gets harder. Your margin of safety decreases, and your health span decreases. Okay. Again, not to fear monger what's happened in the past. If you're 70 today listening to this, this is not a negative story. This is a positive story. You're listening to this and hearing this message now. Amazing. Now do something about it. Now, what do you do about it? Let's talk about the inputs and outputs because this is where we get practical. All right. On the input side, you have, I'll say, four primary variables for today. And I say for today because I always go on podcasts and I talk about the pillars of health. And sometimes it's four, five, six. I kind of move them around. But today we're gonna talk about four. The first one is training. You have to progressively resistance train, ideally three or four times a week, but for some of you, two is gonna be amazing, better, way far better, infinitely better than zero, that's for sure. And you have to have enough volume and intensity to create the adaptation where you build that muscle. And that means primarily using compound movements. So these are exercises that involve major natural movement patterns, squats, deadlifts, pressing, and so on. You have to progress, meaning you're not jumping around doing YouTube workouts. You're doing whatever you did on Monday, you're doing it the next Monday, and you're going up in weight or going up in reps, right? That's just simple examples. You're progressing. And the real first principle here is you're training close enough to failure that your muscles, muscles have to respond and get bigger. Okay. Lifting weights with progression in that way, that is what signals your body to build and maintain muscle tissue. So if you've been doing this for 20 years and going to the gym, you're like, Philip, I love all what you're saying, but I just don't can't seem to build muscle. Well, you're not doing a progressive program. I guarantee it. If I looked at what you were doing, that is not what you're doing. If you still have the same 15-pound dumbbells, and that's the heaviest dumbbells you have in your home gym, that's the problem, right? That's the problem. Now, if you're 80 years old, you've never worked out before, 15-pound dumbbells might be super heavy. So it's all relative. So that's the first variable is training. The second variable is nutrition. And this is why it's four today, because I'm kind of lumping them into big categories. Nutrition. Adequate protein is the underwriting factor here, overriding factor here. And we're just gonna hammer it home the message again. 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of body weight a day. That's it. Optimal muscle protein synthesis is closer to that higher end, but at least 0.7 grams per pound, you're golden. Okay, older people tend to need more than than younger, but that range covers pretty much anybody, and it's good enough. It's plenty good enough. Don't sweat it. All right. At the same time, you need enough energy. So energy is calories. And for some of you, that might be a slight surplus or even a you know, more aggressive surplus to really focus on growth. If you're trying to recomp, I would keep it more toward a very slight surplus. If you're overweight, if you have extra weight to lose, you're gonna have a slight deficit. But the point is you have to have enough energy

Inputs That Drive Muscle Gain

Philip Pape 27:18

where your body feels like it has the resources to build the muscle in response to your training. A fat loss phase, specifically lose body fat, is a trade-off to that. And I'm not discussing that today. But if you have extra body fat to lose, there is a place for fat loss phases for sure. They're not very long, they're moderate too aggressive. You get them over and done with, you get out, and you go back to building muscle. Third, the third input here is recovery. Sleep is non-negotiable. I can't tell you enough how sleep is probably the biggest other than alcohol for some of you. Sleep is the thing that many of you should focus on first. Now, I don't mean first to the exclusion of training. You've got to train as well. But if you had to pick all the other things that could be having the biggest impact on your metabolism and your muscle building, it's probably sleep, quantity of sleep, quality of sleep, you know, managing your fatigue and recovery between your sessions, using the right workout program depending on the phase you're in, all of that fun stuff. You know, even managing your stress, like can be connected to this. All of that supports your ability to adapt. And I'm not, I'm not, I'm not gonna talk about movement today and neat and all of that. I do think it's very, very important that you're walking and getting up. I'm not gonna put that as one of the one of the primary variables for muscle building, but I probably should. Now that I think about it, I probably should. But we're gonna go to the fourth variable, and that is consistency. I wanted to I wouldn't include a process-related input here because this is the multiplier. It's also the thing that you succeed or fail by because you can have perfect programming, perfect nutrition, but if it's sporadic, you're not gonna build anything. If you have adequate nutrition and adequate training and do it consistently, oh, that is gonna compound into such an amazing transformation. Now, it may take longer than if you did it more optimally, but so what? It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. All right. I briefly mentioned earlier we're gonna be doing a challenge in physique university in November before the holidays. It's to close out the year. I'm mentioning it because part of that strategy is having a bailout option. What I what I mean by that is we all want to be optimal. We all want to train five days a week, you know, eat our protein every day, sleep nine hours, all those things. We want to, we want to do those, but in reality, we don't do those. And rather than saying, well, okay, I'm not doing them, so I'm a failure, we have minimums that we try to hit. And I've talked about that many times, having a minimum. But I'm gonna take it one further and say, why don't you have a bailout strategy as well? Even if you can't do the minimum, do you have a bailout strategy that still gives you a win? That's my point when I talk about consistency is doing something every day, a non zero in all the things you care about. On most days, if you're optimal or even minimum, you're gonna be good. Even if some days are bailouts, as long as you don't have any zeros. Now, are you never, ever, ever, ever, ever gonna have a zero? No. But this sets up your mindset and the way you approach your process to give you tons and tons of flexibility. I could be optimal, I could be minimum, or I can go with the bailout strategy. Anyway, that's something we're gonna teach in the workshop. Let's get back to this, talking about consistency. I think it's super important as probably the number one principle. And remember, consistency and intensity often battle each other. So if you're trying to go all out and be too intense, you know, David Goggin's style and everything, that's a sure recipe for failure. If you're all or nothing, sure recipe for failure. Let's pick one thing, training. Let's pick two things, training and sleep, whatever makes sense for you, and build up over time. Okay, that's the inputs. On the output side, well, now you have to see how all those inputs are translating to what you're doing. And that's where you track metrics that give you feedback. You're like, oh, data, numbers, you know what? All life, all existence can be reduced to math. I don't whether you like to hear that or not, it's true. Math is a universal language. And that's because math is simply, is simply an abstract representation of reality. That's all it is. And by reality, I mean the empirical, observable things that happen,

Tracking Outputs And Closing The Loop

Philip Pape 31:16

the cause and effect that happens. Okay, and if you can figure out the cause and effect, ooh, you've got it made because that gives you control and confidence. That's what we are all about. So, for example, weighing yourself on the scale every day is a perfectly normal thing to do. It is not obsessive and it's associated with high positive outcomes in not only weight and fat loss, but main maintaining that. There's so many myths in the fitness industry about tracking, being somehow obsessive or calling causing OCD type behaviors. It's not true. If you are if you are prone to those to begin with, certain things may trigger that, but it's not because you're tracking itself, it's because you've got other issues to resolve. So take scale weight, for example. You weigh yourself every day and then you average it out or you smooth it out over time to see if your body mass is moving in the right direction. Now that's one example where there could be confusion because you're like, okay, Philip just said I need metrics. I'm weighing myself every day and it's going up and down two, three, four pounds. Can't do anything with that data. You're right. You can't do anything with that data because the daily fluctuations are meaningless. But over time, the amount of energy you have stored in your fat is going to be indicated by the trend in your weight over time. Once you've smoothed it out for that noise with the water weight fluctuations, right? So you kind of have to have a level of understanding of these things. Obviously, that's where a coach can help. You know, we can help. Listening to this show can help. There's things I had to figure out not till I was four years old. So that's trend weight. Strength progression in your lifts, your big lifts, your accessory lifts, really anything you're trying to progress to confirm that you are adapting. And again, you have to know what to measure. What do I measure? Okay, I need to measure the exercises, the sets and reps, the weight. Really, it's just the numbers and track that they are changing over time. Measurements for your physique, your body composition can be helpful to understand where the weight's going, whether you're achieving your goal for losing body fat, visceral fat, et cetera, and health. And then there's all the subjective markers that become more objective over time of your biofeedback, recovery, energy, soreness, right? Hunger, sleep stress, et cetera. And I could go on, I've done entire episodes about this, but this is a closed loop system. Your body's a closed loop system. So when you apply inputs and you measure the outputs, you can reasonably determine what should be adjusted. Okay. And I say reasonably because it's it's a practical thing, it's not a perfect thing. You're not going to get down to the third decimal on stuff. You're just going to know that, okay, the way I'm eating right now is leading me to slowly drift up in weight. Okay, great. So I need to eat a little bit less. Like that's a simple way to close the loop. The precise amount of calories you need, you'll never truly, truly know. And I'm sorry if you're a perfectionist and feel like you have to know, you don't. It's just good enough. It's not mystical. It's not dependent on luck. It's not dependent on genetics either. The genetics establish the baseline. Once you measure yourself, it's it's baked in. The genetics are baked in, but you need to measure yourself for you. Then the genetics are baked in. At that point, it becomes engineering everything. Right? Now I get it, things change over time. As we get old, if you're in your 50s, if you're a woman, you're like, wait a minute, I've got my hormones are all changing. So how can you say that it's just inputs and outputs and it's a closed system? Because at any given point, what's happening is still a result of what's going on in your body. And it may be because of some combination of hormones and nutrient deficiencies and your behavior and your brain genetics, but it's still measurable to a good enough extent that you can do something about it. Now, some of you may need to measure more things than others. Some of you may need blood work, right? We do performance blood work for a reason. Go to witsandweights.com slash blood work, just to give ourselves a plug here on that, because that can be a massive game changer for anybody who has done the things or they're starting to put all this in place and there's still something else that seems a bit mysterious. But anyway, the beautiful thing is this works at any age as long as you provide the right inputs, right? Stimulus, recovery, nutrition, consistency, and measure the outputs. All right, so this episode's going longer than I than I anticipated, but I think it's important. And now we get to the practical stuff. So let's make this concrete. What should you do if you want to start building muscle and strength right now, regardless of your age? First is start with a structured training program. When it comes to lifting weights after 40, it's no different than lifting weights under 40. But the difference is how you respond and understanding that your nutrition and training need to work together. So if you're new to lifting or if you're coming back after a long break and you're detrained, a very simple full-body program, three times per week with the big compound movements can get you 80, 90% of the way there. Absolutely. In fact, it's probably what you should do. All right. Programs like Starting Strength, uh, we have different novice strength programs in Physic University that also uh play on this concept of keeping it simple. It's boring, but basic. You focus on learning the movements, getting in touch with your body, building that base of strength, and establishing consistency. And you'll start to pack on wins after win

A Simple Plan To Start Now

Philip Pape 36:24

after win after win as you see how strong you can get pretty quickly. Even if you're 80 years old starting this, I guarantee it. Doesn't mean you have to use a barbell. It might be a dowel, it might be body weight, it might be dumbbells. It depends on where you are. Now, if you're more advanced, if you're intermediate or advanced, well, then we have to look at having enough volume to continue growing. Okay, that could be splitting into four days a week, even five days a week, using things like upper lower body splits, body part splits, push-pull legs. There's so many varieties. It you almost can't go wrong if you're just sticking to the principle of progression. I've known people who almost do random gym workouts, but they actually tracked what they were doing and did more of that as they went, and they even had progress. It's not optimal, but the principle is they train close to failure and they progressed. That's it. You have to increase the demands on your muscles over time, whether that's more weight, more reps, or more sets. You have to. So that's the first one is training. Second is your nutrition. Again, we're tying these back to the inputs that I mentioned earlier, but being a little practical. For nutrition, the best thing to do is to track it. Okay. Just track it. If you're like, oh, here he goes again. It's because how do you know where your money is going without tracking your spending? How do you know where your food and your body mass is going with track without tracking your food and your body mass? I mean, it's just, it's, it's almost self-evident. But if you're not doing it, don't complain that you don't know your metabolism or don't know why you're gaining weight. And don't say, I think I'm eating this or I think my metabolism is this, because that means you don't know. Just to be honest about it and honest with yourself. So start tracking your food, which includes your macros and your calories, and hopefully also your micros. I love MacroFactor, my favorite app. I use it myself. Use my code WITS and Waits, all one word, to get a free trial on that app. And that app is not only going to track your food, it's going to give you an estimate of your metabolism. And then you'll know how much you need to eat for what you're trying to do. You have to be tracking for two or three weeks before you could really get enough data. And that's why you have to be consistent about it. And then you adjust your calories based on if you want to lose fat, you want to maintain, you want to build muscle or recomp, whatever. Now, underlying all this is how do I eat? And that goes down to eating consistently, having enough meals throughout the day, having enough protein in every single meal and fiber. If you start there, the rest is going to slowly fall in line as you realize what it takes to reach your goals and the quality of foods needed and what it takes to not be hungry and and and things we've covered in other episodes on this show, I'm not going to go into, but it's eating whole foods, eating fiber, eating consistently, not doing things like fasting and keto and all these restrictive diets. You don't need them. If you want to do them and they feel great for you, I've always said go for it, but you don't need them. Third is again recovery. And this is where a lot of people at our age screw up because you're training like you're younger without recovering adequately, and then you get injured or you get burned out, or you don't focus on form, or you're trying to progress really quickly and you don't dial in the movement pattern. In my opinion, getting the movement pattern right, but not dragging it on for months is probably a good approach. Okay. Being mindful, getting a coach. I don't care if it's a personal trainer in the gym, hopefully somebody that knows what they're talking about, reach out to us, join physique university, whatever it is, to get that help. I've had multiple coaches as I've learned to train, and I still go and I talk to coaches, and I still will occasionally hire a personal trainer who I respect to do form checks for me. Because it's and I've got friends who are really good lifters, so we can do the same. We can send it to each other. I'm in a barbell club that I pay for where there's a coach who can do that. You know what I mean? So I do it myself. I walk the walk. I suggest you do the same, or else you're gonna screw something up and you're at best, or yeah, at best, you're just not gonna progress, but at worst you're gonna injure something. We don't want to do that, especially with the age-related stuff. And then fourth, well, how many points do I have here? I have five points, practical points. Fourth, I want you to think long term. This is the mindset piece about consistency and patience. It's not a 12-week challenge. I'm sorry if you think this is a short-term thing, like I need to improve my physique, I'm gonna take 12 weeks and I'm gonna move on with my life. That's not. This is the next chapter of your life. This is your new life. This is the system you're gonna use for decades. And that means this is the fun thing about it, this is the positive thing about it. The choices you make for that system should be things you want to make on a day by day, by week, by month, by year basis. Things that are sustainable, not just effective in the short term. Listen that to that carefully. Choose things that are sustainable, not just effective in the short term. What that means is you're gonna choose things that have some level of effectiveness, but are also sustainable. So you're actually making a little trade-off most of the time to do that. The trade-off is you're not picking something that's 100% effective, you're picking something that's 90% or 80% or even 70% effective, but you can do it. And when you take effectiveness, modest effectiveness from I'm gonna do it, you get the transformation. You get it on whatever timeline it's gonna happen, but you get it. If you're going for 100% effective, but you don't do it, that's a zero. That's a big goose egg. So get that into your thick skulls. And I'm talking to myself here, guys. Okay, I'm talking to myself here. And then lastly, here, get help if you need it, and pretty much everybody needs it. It's insane that people will go to all of these specialists for healthcare, but they won't talk to one person when it comes to the preventative, functional, lifestyle nutrition stuff, right? Personal trainers, coaches, nutrition coaches, friends who know about this stuff, you know, programs, groups, free groups, paid groups. I don't care. Whatever your resources allow that makes the most sense, get help. Work with someone who could give you objective feedback and keep you accountable. It's not not only does it accelerate your results, which I know a lot of you, you know, because you're a little bit of impatient, impatient for this, that kind of piques your interest. But but more importantly, it prevents the legion costly mistakes that you're gonna make otherwise, which you're gonna learn from, but it might take you 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. We want to learn these now, okay? Especially when injury is at stake or your health's at stake. So the point to all of this is there are clear actionable steps you can take starting today. This is not theory. This is something, this is not something you have to wait for the perfect time or even wait till Monday. The perfect time is right now. If you have to go back and listen to this episode over and over to get it in your head, please do. Use the timestamps, share it with a friend, talk about it with a friend, post it on social media and say, this is the thing that I learned, and I'm gonna do this today because I want to live a great life. The last thing I want to leave you with is a concept called opportunity cost. Okay, this is for all my engineering and finance folks out there, business people, but really this is for everyone. Opportunity cost is the value of the next best alternative that you give up when you make a

Consistency, Mindset, And Getting Help

Philip Pape 43:25

choice. Okay, it's the value of the next best choice that you gave up when you made another choice. And here's what I've realized about opportunity cost regarding building muscle later in life. Every day you delay is not just a day that you don't build muscle. It's a day that you lose muscle because your baseline is not neutral. You don't just stay the same. The baseline, if you do nothing, is decline, is muscle loss, is strength loss, is reduced metabolic health, is decreased functional capacity, is age-related disease. So the question is not whether you should have started earlier. The question is what are you going to do now? Here's the truth you can spend the next five years regretting that you didn't start 10 years ago. Or you can spend the next five years building something remarkable so that five years from now you look back and realize this was the turning point right now, today. The muscle building window never closes. It never does. It is always open to you. You have to choose to walk through that door. And what I've seen over and over with clients in their 40s, their 50s, their 60s, in this age grain, which is the vast majority of people I work with and I identify with, is that when they do start, when they commit to the process, when they trust the system, the results are life-changing. They change your life. I'm almost in tears thinking about this and how many people could be helped by just taking this message to heart. And it's not just how you look. Great, that's a side effect. It's how you feel, it's how you move, it's how you show up for yourselves and for the people you care about. I'm choking up here. This is the this is it. This is the decade you take control, this is the decade you build that reserve, this is the decade you engineer the body, the life that supports what you want to do for the next 20, 30, 40 years. And how powerful is that? So let's just recap what we've covered today because it was a long episode. First, muscle loss with age is not inevitable. It's driven by inactivity, inadequate nutrition, lack of stimulus, and your muscle remains very responsive to all of these things well into old age, which means you can do something about it. Second, midlife is an ideal time to start because you have a little bit more discipline than the young ones, you have some more resources, you have some more motivation to apply a longer-term approach. You're thinking about longevity, you're thinking about your kids, your grandkids, you're thinking about the future generations and your own health and not being in a nursing home. You're not chasing just the short-term vanity. And again, I'm okay if you want to be good looking, but you are building that foundation for longevity, for independence, for metabolic health. Third, doing this today is gonna expand your margin of safety for the next few decades. You're not trying to reverse time, you're trying to change the future of your time on this earth, right? And it all compounds. So you've got to start today, just like with money for retirement. And then finally, the practical steps are actually clear. We know what to do. You train the right way, you eat enough protein, you recover, you think long term, have patience, be consistent, and get help if you need it. All right, so I always like to leave you with some clear action or something simple that's gonna be helpful. And I thought for today's episode that sharing my muscle building nutrition blueprint could be a fun thing to grab because it's one of the more comprehensive guides I have. It tells you how to set everything up for muscle building, but it also has a real life example. When I did this myself a few years back during a muscle building phase, I gained 10 pounds of muscle and how I did it. And so it kind of gives you the numbers, gives you the thought, gives you the process and the really practical stuff. And that's totally free. Okay, you can download it for free. Go to witsandweights.com slash muscle. A link will be in the show notes. Witsandweights.com slash monk muscle to set up your nutrition plan for building muscle. And that is it today, guys. I hope you were inspired. I hope you take action. Please do. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the best time to build muscle always, always, always is

Opportunity Cost Of Waiting

Philip Pape 47:05

right now. Talk to you next time. You're in wits and weights.