Overtraining vs. the sedentary lifter

Philip Pape 0:00

You've heard it everywhere lately. Women are overtraining. You need to lift less and recover more. Don't push so hard. And for a lot of people, that's completely correct advice. But what if you do lift three or four times a week? You're hitting your protein, your sleep is fine, you still can't see the muscle you've been building. Today I'm gonna make the case that the most useful piece of advice for a lot of you, especially over 40, isn't to do less. It's actually the old one that our grandmother used to tell us, and that is to move more, but in the right way. We'll be discussing the avatar of the sedentary lifter, which many of you fall into that category, even if you don't realize it. We'll go over things like the dose response curve when it comes to how much activity you should be doing to get the most out of your results. And then I'll give you a three-question audit that tells you in 30 seconds whether your problem is recovery or movement. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today's episode is dedicated to the lifter who's been doing everything right. You're lifting three, four, five times a week, you're hitting your protein, you're sleeping, you're following all the recovery advice that you've absorbed from the over 40 fitness internet and podcasts, including this one, about how women overtrain and how you should pull back and prioritize rest. And you're still looking in the mirror, like, where the heck is that muscle definition? Where is the result that I've been working so hard for? Maybe the scale isn't moving the way you want, maybe the tape measure's not moving, and everything you're kind of absorbing isn't unlocking anything for you. So today's episode is dedicated to you because it was prompted by a listener, Katie S. And I want to read part of her message because she frames the problem better than I could, like many people can, because sometimes I can be a bit convoluted. Katie S has been a listener for a while. You might remember she's the one whose question prompted the nursing and body composition episode. I know that was a very niche episode. This one today is really for everybody. So she came back with a follow-up with a ton of really good self-diagnosis of herself. That was redundant. But here we go. Quote: I often find myself trying to find the balance between recovery and not pushing too hard and then being downright sedentary. It turns out I was listening to lots of people saying that women overtrain, need more recovery time, et cetera. When in reality, even though I was doing resistance training, my steps and cardio levels were so low that I should have been listening more to the eat less, move more, or really eat more, move more crowd. I like that nuance, Katie. I finally added a little cardio, and now the muscle I've been building for the past three years is beginning to show a bit. My old mindset of pushing myself really hard with exercise and calorie restriction. I was the one eating 1200 calories stuck while I started heating the new advice. But the context had changed. Now I need to be doing more and using more of those levers like steps and cardio. My steps are often around 4K. End quote. All right. So, Katie, thank you for this. This is really good because it gave me a precise topic to focus on that's gonna help a lot of people today. And I want you to listen through the entire episode because each piece is really important. And then at the end, I'm gonna give you a quick audit that you can know whether your problem is recovery or not. And I don't want you to just skip there because there's a lot of good setup you need to know and context that's gonna help you contextualize this for yourself. Many lifters in the audience are dealing with this. So, myself included, I definitely have become in some phases of my life a sedentary lifter. And it's definitely had required me to change at certain points my habits to make it work better for me. Same with our clients, same with our members, and eat more lift heavy and all of that. So we are gonna cover this message, the women overtrained message or the people overtrained message in general, but it's definitely targeted a lot at women. When is it correct? When is it not correct? What does the research say about things like steps in neat? How to audit your own week to figure out what levers you should be pulling right now. Okay. So let's start with the advice itself. I don't want to throw anyone under the bus. The the women overtrain, lift less, recover more message was I'll call it a correction, if not an overcorrection, to a real problem. For probably at least a decade, the dominant message in women's fitness is you need to grind. Hot yoga, crossfit, running. You don't need very much sleep, eat 1200 calories, right? You know the

When "less is more" is correct

Philip Pape 4:45

culture that I'm talking about. And I think the pendulum always swings in both directions quite hard sometimes in the fitness industry, especially the social media internet version of that. And so you have a bunch of smart people who start pushing back and saying, wait a minute, this low energy stuff and this recovery issue for women and constantly chronically elevated cortisol from being massively overstressed and underfueling, all of this stuff is real things that are happening. And you're not going to just muscle your way through perimenopause with more burpees or CrossFit, right? And so there's a lot of things there. I know I just said a lot of things, and I a lot of it's true. Okay. I've built my own content around a lot of this same frame in terms of many of you, especially over 40, are underfueled and overstressed. And you need to basically strip things back, lift heavy, eat more, recover better. But, but here's where Katie's message puts an important nuance on it, puts an important wrinkle in the message. The less is more advice is for a specific person, isn't it? Right? It's it's for the woman or person who's doing days and days every week of Metcons and a long run and a job that's on your feet, and but you're only getting, you know, 4,000 steps, even despite that. Maybe you're only sleeping five and a half hours and you're eating 1,400 calories. And I've had many, many clients myself who the advice was we need to stop doing so much. And I'm talking about women who are on all sorts of drugs, you know, Adderall and hormone medication and trying to fix our thyroid and everything else. And all they needed was to dial back on the stress load, usually from the amount of activity they were doing, but also from eating more, et cetera. Right. So in that case, the do less is often exactly correct. The training stress is the constraint, is the constraint and pulling it back. And it's not even training a lot of times. It's quote unquote exercise, you know, YouTube workouts and spin or Peloton classes, and here we go again, Pilates. I'm gonna, I'm gonna poop on Pilates. But anyway, it tends to be just too much. But that person is not you, at least it's not you, Katie,

The lifter who trains hard but sits all day

Philip Pape 7:00

and the person that's like you who is listening, who is lifting in, I'll say the proper structured way with progressive overload, reasonable volume, let's say three or four days a week. And you probably have a desk job or you're in your car, whatever, for multiple hours a day. Your walking isn't very high. Maybe it's not super low, but kind of moderate in the middle, like 5,000 steps, 6,000. I mean, I always talk about Jerry. Jerry probably still listens to the show, who is very muscular. He was a lawyer, but he sat around so much he'd only get 3,000 steps a day. And just increasing his step count was a huge unlock to fat loss and calorie burn and heart rate and all that other stuff, right? So a lot of us are sedentary. I mean, I can catch myself in a day struggling to get more than 6,000 steps just because there's so much I'm doing and so much work, and I still want to train, so I get up early, so then that cuts into my sleep, right? You get it. And so dialing back further on the training or movement side because you're told you need to recover, it's probably the wrong advice. Advice. And that leads to the confusion. It only exacerbates the confusion when you listen to podcasts. But I, okay, I think the advice is all consistent. I just think it's not always contextualized. But if you're doing everything you've been told and it's not working, then the things you're doing are not the things for you, is essentially the pithy kind of conclusion there. And however, like Katie, you might have been training the right way and actually building muscle, but certain metrics aren't working for you, or you're not seeing it in the mirror. And it could be a very simple thing. It may not be hormones or thyroid or perimenopause or some exotic thing that you have to optimize in the 1%. It may simply be you need, you know, to add a little cardio in and up that amount of movement. So we're gonna get into that, okay? I want to start though, reiterating what I just said in case you missed it. It's probably not a hormone problem. Okay. It's probably not a cortisol problem. It's probably not a liver issue. It's probably not any of these exotic things that influencers want to sell you products on or one-off solutions to. It's probably a context problem. That's all it is. It's a context problem. So the right advice for you might be closer to okay, eat more, move more, the concept of energy flux, of being a more active person, of moving more and getting up off your butt and having a higher step county. Maybe even yes, doing some medium-intensity cardio or sprinting or something. Okay, so let's let's dig into the hidden mechanism here that's gonna affect everyone listening, regardless of whether this is the direction you need to go. And I want to talk about energy expenditure, metabolism, totally energy expenditure. Okay, this is how many calories you burn in a 24-hour period. We've covered the four components of metabolism on the show before. I'm just gonna just reiterate we have our BMR, that's our base basal metabolic rate, about two-thirds of your energy expenditure. We have the thermic effect of food, which comes from processing, digesting what you eat. We have exercise, and we have non-exercise activity thermogenesis. But what I want to focus on is neat, the last one. NEAT, it it kind of dwarfs everything else in terms of how much it varies between people. Now, some might argue you have no control over it. It's all the unconscious stuff. And things like walking belong in the exercise components. I'm not gonna argue that here. I'm going to actually do what I think most people do is they do include walking and pacing and standing and yard work and all that into the neat bucket. Everything other than

NEAT and the 4 components of metabolism

Philip Pape 10:30

like going to the gym and doing a specific activity. Now, sprinting, I would say, is more of an eat exercise, right? It's exercise, not non-exercise. So there's a little bit of conflation conflating here. But anyway, the original neat research from Jim Levine, who's the guy who basically named the concept, and it found that neat can vary between two people of the same size by up to something like 2,000 calories a day, which is crazy. That's more than some people eat in a day. And so the difference between a sedentary person and a moderately active person and a very active person, just from how they live the many, many hours of the day outside the gym. And some days you don't go to the gym, so it's all the hours of the day other than sleep, right? That difference can be the entire size of a fat loss deficit and a calorie surplus combined. Meaning the swing, it can swing so much, it's so enormous. And the most variable component of many people's metabolism based on their lifestyle, right? Now, and that's just taking the extreme. Like the extreme high end of that is people who have a really rigorous manual labor type job. I'm not expecting you to become the person who's, okay, I'm gonna switch my job and be a manual labor all day. I get it. I'm not gonna ask you to do what Dr. Bill Campbell did in his recent study, where he had women walk for six hours every day. Okay, I get it. So I'm not suggesting you're gonna push yourself all the way to that extreme. But there's some opportunity there, is my point. So for most of you lifters in the audience, lifting three or four hours a week is maybe three or four percent of your weekly calorie burn. Now, I don't often talk about calorie burn. I mean, I do in some sense, but like I don't talk about exercise as doing it to burn calories. However, however, when you're struggling with fat loss or struggling to reveal muscle definition, and it often comes down to just a simple matter of you you're not able to successfully do a fat loss phase to reveal the muscle, or when you're so sedentary that your body's just, I'll say health systems, whether that's your resting heart rate, whether that's your, I'll say inflammation, kind of more on the non-fear-mongering form of inflammation when I talk about muscle protein synthesis and like myokines versus cytokines and the blood markers in your body that are inflammation. I'm not talking about good inflammation, let's just say just the chronic low-level inflammation from being sedentary,

Steps and the dose-response curve

Philip Pape 13:00

then the calorie burn equation maybe becomes more relevant, believe it or not. So your exercise doesn't burn many calories, but neat, the non-exercise, when you're sedentary outside the gym versus not sedentary, that's your biggest lever in your metabolism that I think Katie is hitting on. So I want to get specific though about steps. So the most recent and most rigorous meta-analysis on this came out in the Lancet Public Health in July of last year. Ding and colleagues, and it was looking at 57 studies, they found that 7,000 steps a day is associated with somewhere between six and 47% lower risk across every major health outcome they looked at compared to 2,000. So 7,000 versus 2,000. All cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, dementia, depression. So a lot of these things sound like the things that muscle mass also improves. So the optimal for steps is somewhere around 7,000 to 9,000, which we've talked about in the past. This is probably why 10,000 is not the worst, you know, target to go for. It's a nice round number and it's above that, unless it's preventing you from walking at all because it seems so overwhelming. And then there's diminishing returns past the you know nine or 10,000 steps. Because I know some of you are walking like 25,000 steps. Just be aware of that. Okay, so what does that mean for Katie at 4,000 steps? Well, she's sitting kind of on the steepest part of the dose response curve, right? Like on the left side of that curve before it goes up. She's like right above the floor of any detectable benefit, but she's 3,000 steps below this high yield zone from the research where you get the biggest marginal return, right? Like you get the biggest pun intended step change. Going from 4,000 to 7,000 is the single most impactful change that she can make, probably, versus almost anything else, because she's doing all the other things. That's my point. Now, if she was getting four hours of sleep, I'd say maybe that's the biggest one. If she drinks three, three glasses of wine a night, maybe that's the biggest one. But for her, it's, you know, she's doing all the things. So this is a huge opportunity. It's bigger than tweaking her protein, it's bigger than, right? And it's, I'll say it's essentially free in terms of fatigue cost, which we always worry about fatigue in the context of stress versus fatigue and recovery from your lifting. And of course, walking doesn't really have much fatigue unless you make it harder, like with a rucksack, things like that. Okay. So what about the, okay, exercise doesn't really burn calories? Argument that I always like to make. And, you know, it gets exacerbated when people talk about the constrained energy expenditure model, for example, from Herman Ponzer, where like, well, everybody pretty much has the same metabolism, so why would you even exercise? That's not true either. Okay. Uh, I think Eric Trexler, who I'm a huge fan of, down at he works at Ponzer now at Duke, I think he's explained this better than anyone, that the constrained model

Constrained energy model of calorie burn

Philip Pape 16:00

basically says that at very high activity levels, your body compensates by reducing other components of your metabolism. So adding a bunch more cardio doesn't linearly add to your total burn. And I think the compensation average is like 28% in the data, but it's mostly pronounced at the high end of the activity spectrum. So someone who is sedentary outside the gym, the additive model and the constrained model basically agree with each other. I mean, it's like zooming in and basically they look like the same graph at that those low levels of activity. If you go from 4,000 to 7,000 steps, you are not nearly high enough on that curve to trigger meaningful compensation. Nowhere close. Okay, so don't use that as an excuse. Instead, the extra movement pretty much adds to your total calorie burn, almost one for one. I mean, it's gonna be close, especially if it's walking, right? Especially if it's walking. So if you're a sedentary lifter, raise your hand, that's you. More movement is just gonna help you out if you're, I mean, like I just said, sedentary. You're just you need to move more. There's no hidden ceiling that is like all of a sudden gonna make you have this massive compensation. That's not who we're talking to. So the hidden mechanism is as follows, right? You've been treating your training stress as the variable, but the variable that's probably gonna be the biggest mover for you is your total daily movement. In other words, you've got your training dialed in, you're you're going in three, four days a week, you're training hard, you're progressing. Okay, that's not the issue. The issue is the movement outside the gym. And when that's low, your fueling, your food, your training are far less effective. Even your muscle protein synthesis isn't ramped up nearly as much. We've seen this in studies that compare, you

How to audit your week

Philip Pape 17:45

know, just sitting to getting up once an hour twice an hour. And I've talked about that on the show before. And that affects your body composition, that affects your metabolism and metabolic capacity, your inflammation, all that stuff. Okay, your health overall. Now, obviously, just the bigger picture of energy balance, it still comes down to that, but we're talking about the energy outside of the equation potentially having a lot more potential for you. So, you know, before before I continue, I just want to talk quickly about if you need help, like integrating all this stuff, because I know it's challenging. We talk about the podcast about all these different pillars of health. How do I know which one to do? What do I measure? What do I, you know, train, et cetera? That's why we built Eat More Lift Heavy. This is our six-month coaching program where we connect all the things for you. We coach you on the full set of levers: training, nutrition, neat, movement, sleep, stress. And we do it over 26 weeks on a week-by-week basis, real coaches involved to give you feedback on everything from nutrition to form to you know how to get more steps and how to do it more effectively based on your schedule, all that stuff. And applying it to your specific situation. So you figure out here's the gap, here's the constraint, here's how I move the things forward and do it sustainably. So you adhere and actually stick to it, actually get the results and sustain your results. All right, it's not a tracking app, it's not a meal plan, it's not a workout library. It is a coached experience where we teach you how to do this for yourself by the time you are done, which is super, super powerful. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com. Link is in the show notes. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com to learn more. All right, so here's the, I'll say the fix, right? We we have a fix on every episode. The simplest framework in stages. Stage one is you've got to audit what you're doing. You have to track something. Are you tracking your lifting and your structured cardio, if any, sprinting, if any, and then of course your step count. And also, I would say an estimate of how much you sit, how many hours you sit, but also how many hours you sit under interrupted where you actually don't get up. That is really important. And what you're gonna find probably when you're honest with yourself is if you train regularly, your structured training is probably like three to five hours a week, maybe a little more. Your steps for a lot of you are just too low, maybe four to six thousand

Adding steps before cardio

Philip Pape 20:05

a day if you haven't done it intentionally. It's what I see all the time. Almost every client that's come to me, unless the very small fraction already have a high step count. Many of them are around four to six. And that's the biggest opportunity right there, which means a ton of your waking life is sedentary, even though you're a person who lives. So step one is awareness, tracking these things. Step two is hey, let's go with the cheapest lever. Let's go with the lowest hanging fruit. Okay. For me, for you, that's going to be adding steps before you add cardio. There's a hierarchy, right? You've got your training, then you've got your steps. Then you, and the reason I say that is because you could, you might find that your schedule doesn't really allow for much more than that initially. You might also find that, hey, maybe I can't get 9,000 steps, but I can go from four to five, and then I can go from five to six. And then maybe I can make my steps a little bit harder before I try to add more time, right? I can throw on a rucksack, for example. I could do inclines, I can walk faster. Hey, maybe I can make sure that when I, you know, park my car and I can walk the dog multiple times if I have a dog. Go for a walk after meals because I know it's going to be good for my blood sugar. Like there's ways to incorporate it where it doesn't really feel like extra time. It's just kind of part of your day. And so when you're tracking this, and ideally, if you're also tracking your food and weight in something like macrofactor, and you can see your metabolism change every day. And if you want to support the show, download MacroFactor and use my code WITS and weights, all one word. I use it, my clients use it, our members use it. And the nice thing about it is it calculates your true expenditure. So as you increase your step count, you can see it go up. Assuming you're fueling and you're not in a deficit, you're just keeping everything else constant. Okay, we want to see that totally total daily energy expenditure go up by somewhere between, let's say, 150 to 300 calories a day while you're at maintenance. I think that is reasonable. I think that's reasonable. I think along the way you could fuel your. Yourself sufficiently in a very, very tiny, tiny surplus, like aim for maintenance plus 50 to 100 calories max, just to make sure it's fueled because you might find that as you burn more calories, you need more food to avoid getting hungry and falling into a deficit. And

Adding light cardio sessions

Philip Pape 22:15

you're like, Philip, but wait, I do want to lose fat. But I would do them one thing at a time. Like I would change one variable, get it stable, realize, hey, now my metabolism's actually higher. I'm supporting it with more movement. And now my appetite signals start to normalize because your activity is matching your intake. That's going to set you up really well for fat loss. Or in Katie's sense, making the fat loss easier or being able to do it from a higher level of calories to reveal the muscle, or even doing it at recomp. I think she also implied like not even necessarily having to go into a deficit, just causing your body now to need to find energy to make up for those extra calories. And where does it do it? It draws it from fat stores, and the rest of the energy is going toward your muscle, or maybe at least maintaining your muscles. That makes sense. So that's body recomp. Then our next stage is okay, I've got enough steps. I'm tracking this stuff. This is good. I would then add one or two short cardio sessions a week. I'm a big fan of sprinting or just very moderate cardio. Like it could be more walking, but of a different type. It could be cycling, maybe swimming, incline treadmill, you know, whatever. Like classic zone two, if you've heard that term, but honestly, you don't have to monitor it in that way. Just go at a pace where you can hold a conversation. You don't have to worry

Movement breaks every 30 minutes

Philip Pape 23:30

about it interfering with your lifting. Again, you guys are not doing that much to begin with. So I'm getting you up into a nice healthy zone here of movement. I did skip one little thing I should have mentioned, kind of stage two and a half. And that is if you sit around a lot, get up every 30 minutes and walk for two minutes. Get up every 30 minutes and walk for two minutes. I did an episode where one study showed an increase in muscle protein synthesis by something like 40% just by not sitting around all the time. So we've got our walking, and then we've got a couple short cardio sessions. I did an episode recently on, I think it was on belly fat menopause belly, but we talked about sprinting. And honestly, guys, too, you will find that beneficial, I think. So we've got some moderate cardio. You know, you're gonna move more, get more blood flow, get more support for everything in your body because you're moving. And then stage four is like, okay, is there anything else now that we need to attack? Is it your lifting? Probably not, given the context we started with, but who knows? Maybe you need more or fewer sessions. You know, with everything else changing, maybe you need to now change your training to match in some way. If things are moving the way you want to, you're good. If not, look at the next thing. Maybe it's your protein and calories, maybe it's your sleep, right? It's probably not activity anymore. Now, just for the ladies who are in perimenopause, menopause,

Movement during perimenopause and menopause

Philip Pape 24:56

again, not to fear monger here at all, but we know in this time of life, yes, you have the hormonal changes, but also you have the lifestyle changes. You also have visceral fat accumulation that starts to go up because of the hormone changes, and then your spontaneous physical activity tends to drift down. Your sleep could be disrupted, maybe your energy feels lower, maybe it's just a lifestyle thing with like children and parents and money and all that. So there's a whole bunch of reasons at that age where these factors come in. You know, it's not like, oh, everything's just gone to hell in a handbasket because I'm in menopause, but there are true factors that are occurring. And so this isn't doom and gloom. It just means that I think this movement idea is even more important during this life stage and not less, right? Don't be afraid to add movement if you're not among the group who's like just doing way too much of the cardio stuff that I talked about earlier. So, just a brief, like caveat for the nuance. I'm not saying cardio is better for everyone. The context determines which lever you need. So I'm talking about the sedentary lifter, who is met who is many of you who are listening. I can't get the grammar right on that, but all right. You may just need to move more. You may be in denial. Like you're like, yeah, I eat enough protein, I lift, I do that. Let me look at your step count. Like, let's be honest. Let's look at it. I bet it's like 5,000. Okay. I'm also not saying that like this culture of you need more recovery is wrong. I think recovery is sometimes the thing that you anchor and make everything else work around that, right? For for a lot of you, the high cortisol, the high stress, you're underfueled, way too much volume. Yeah, maybe you're too too much. Okay. If you're like running a ton, ton of endurance work, and then you're lifting a ton, and then you have like 15,000 steps, and then you feel exhausted and your sleep isn't there, all right, you may need more recovery for sure. I'm also not saying don't lift. That is for sure. Like lifting is non-negotiable for so many things, for strength, for muscle, for bone density, for brain health, for everything. So definitely, and I don't think if you're listening to the show, you're even thinking, like, of course I'm not gonna stop lifting. Are you kidding me? Although I do feel sad, occasionally I'll get somebody who follows my email newsletter or the podcast, and they'll see all this content about lifting. They're like, Yeah, I don't think this is right for me. I'm like, oh, so sad, so sad. And they're talking about lifting weights. So, and I'm not saying to start running marathons either, right? Like, okay, we gotta dial it in, folks, and and be in the sweet spot here. If you're a lifter who's been doing everything right and the muscles just not showing up, and you again, you think you are progressing correctly, and all the other stuff is good, look at your movement, look at your sitting, look at your step count, look at your structured cardio. That could be the lever that you need, I think is what Katie is getting at. And I just had to make it a very long podcast episode, 30 minutes just to say that. All right, before we wrap up, remember I told you I'd give you a three-question audit that takes 30 seconds to tell you whether your problem is recovery or movement. Before I do that, just a quick thing. Please text this episode to a friend who lifts, who's been doing things right, but maybe they're frustrated because they don't see it in the mirror. Maybe you have a friend, you know, a close friend, be it a man or woman, who's like, yeah, I go to the gym, I work out, but like I'm not seeing it. You know, get them started on this. This may just be the entry point to some other topics that may be more relevant to them, but definitely text it with a friend, and I would be much appreciated. That is a great way to support the show in case you're wondering how to support the show and you want to like buy my products and stuff. Okay, so here's the three question audit that I promised. Question one, how many hard lifting sessions did

Bonus: 30-second movement audit

Philip Pape 28:30

you do this week? Now, this is a simple one, but I want you to like if it's three or four, you're good. If it's five, you might be good. If it, but five, six, definitely seven, training stress could be the constraint because it eats into your recovery time and it eats into your sleep time and things like that. Okay. So if you if you're in the kind of normal range of three to four, or for some of you, maybe five, you're good. Question two, what is your average daily step count? So what's your actual step count? If it's less than six thousand, then this is your lever you need to work on. I'm telling you. If it's above eight, I think you're in the ballpark of it being okay. Obviously, if it's just barely eight, maybe you push it to nine or ten, but you get the idea. Question three, how many times in the last week did your heart rate go above conversational pace outside the gym? Meaning you did anything at all that exerted you in a good way. Like you played a sport, you went for a nice hard walk or a hike. Now, I'm not telling you have to do cardio. I'm just saying it's a good question to audit whether if you're not getting results, you need to add more cardio. Interesting, right? Okay. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember the right advice for the wrong context is still the wrong advice. Audit your day, then pull the lever that is there for you to get the best result now. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.