Can You Stop the Metabolism from the Adaptation Process?

[Music] [Applause] our first caller is Christian from California what's up Christian what up how can we help you how you doing gentlemen how are you good good what's going on I just had a question for you experts on uh metabolic adaptation Okay cool so my question is uh how quickly and how severely can metabolic adaptation occur when on a long-term weight loss plan so for example if I were a client wanted to lose between 20 and 40 pounds in say 6 to 12 months for how long is that sustainable on average before the BMR starts to significantly drop now obviously the short answer is it depends but as a baseline if I'm designing a long-term weight loss plan what would be the general ratios of time in deficit to time in maintenance or Surplus or you guys call reverse dieting so that those goals can be achieved while minimizing metabolic adaptation and then lastly just to the second part of the question how bad and how permanent or semi-permanent can the adaptation be I don't really have a sense of scale so when a BMR slows down does it slow down maybe a little 10 to 15% or can it severely Flatline like cut in half if I'm dieting down for too long or too aggressively at a time cool question yeah so the answer is yes to everything you asked so so the Met metabolism adapts immediately now what does that mean that means it's constantly adapting so anytime you're in a deficit the tendency is for your metabolism to try to adapt to meet the new energy uh intake in other words the energy demands are always trying to meet the energy intake now the things you can do to offset that metabolic adapt and by the way it's not a bad thing people we've labeled it as this terrible thing but if your metabolism didn't adapt you would be dead I mean you need a and it's a very complex system in the body me a long time ago I pulled up a a graph of all of the metabolic processes that we've identified and it was like I mean it's it's one of the most complicated things we've ever or complex things we've ever observed um now what you know your question is well how how long can that last when do I do reverse dieting or like so many things play a role in that from genetics to lifesty also previous um experiences and I I don't know if there's any necessary dat to support this but I can tell you from experience that if somebody has come from a place of lots of dieting or has been or tried to be in a deficit for a long periods of time throughout their life then that uh that adaptation tends to happen faster and it tends to stick around longer like if you work with someone who's dieted on and off for most of their life and then they they come to you eating low calories uh already they're like look I eat 1,00 calories a day I need to lose 40 lbs and you're like okay we got to do a reverse diet that could take a while it could take i' I've seen where you I've seen people get reverse dieted up relatively successfully significantly only to have be hit with a very quick metabolic adaptation once they're put in a deficit the best thing you can do to move this in the direction that most people want which is a fast metabolisms build muscle really nothing more effective than that so rather than getting caught up in the how do we offset this and you know what's the ratio of you know uh you know uh Surplus the deficit to maintenance type of deal if you if you uh aim your gaze at building muscle you'll almost always move in the right direction okay so that means you know move your gaze in that direction from a uh training standpoint and from a nutrition standpoint and then mitigate muscle loss when you're in a so that's what I'm looking at when I put someone on a cut what I'm looking at is um are we losing strength and if we are then what I'm going to do is try and put you in more of a maintenance or maybe a a short Surplus um that's the main thing that I'm looking at typically when you see good strength gains or maintenance you tend to see more favorable results with metabolic adaptation does that make sense it does and if I may just uh from two standpoints on this question one of course more General Fitness and maybe bodybuilding I I see what you're saying now I I I'm an amateur MMA fighter so of course I'm when I'm thinking about weight I'm caring more about the numbers on the scale come competition time and I'm not talking about cutting weight we know that's a different process but just getting the numbers down would all the same considerations apply then to healthily lose have a weight loss goal if it's for competition like that yeah okay so the the same rules apply but here the the Nuance of this is what how sou started this is which is it really has a lot to do with the the individual and their prior diet history for example like a guy like you who's very athletic and probably eats in a surplus and trains to build muscle for most of the time and then you just cut for a competition or like that you can really push your body um and it'll probably respond pretty well to to the cuts but I tell you what the more and more you've done that over years the more difficult it gets like I know like in like in the bodybuilding world you get these competitors that have done done it year over year over year and it gets more difficult and more difficult for them to cut because the body is now adapted they've seen that before so and and and just like the competitive world if you think of a client whose yo-yo died so many times they're they're not going to respond as well to and what I mean by respond as well because technically the Met metabolism is spraing really well it quickly adapts but that's not what you want when you want to see someone slowly keep losing so generic answer or what I would do is like okay I'm gonna interrupt this person's uh cut you know every third week if I think that it's like it's necessary if it's somebody who's getting great results in the deficit and we're on week three I might not interrupt it yet I might wait until I see the the progress really start to slow and then I'll interrupt it with a maintenance or even slight Surplus for a week or two and then go back down again and then I'm like and and I'm really going to have to feel that out with the client and and the more times you do that the better you get at like kind of seeing it happen with your clients and then even better is to learn how to interrupt that before the plateau hits but the reality is you're going to train some clients in a deficit and a plateau is going to hit and you're going to be like okay it's time for me to to increase calories use your performance as a gauge as an athlete okay 100% use your performance look if you if your body learns to burn less calories through activity that can be a good thing in athletics you don't want to be in the cage or the ring with this like burning tons of calories you want your body to be pretty damn efficient while you're fighting otherwise you're going to gas out um and body fat percentage you know there's there's definitely some correlation to athletic performance but it's not like who looks the most aesthetic has the best performance I mean I can name Fighters right now Fedor did look nothing like top that was my first thought yeah you know um so you know I I know look you know I'm pretty ripped you put me in the cage right now and I'm done 30 seconds I'm going to you know I'm going to be gassed out so well keep in mind too cuz he's asking kind of about two different types of bodybuilding and and sports or two different situations so but it's all but performance is the measurement okay especially if you're an athlete but even with clients I'm looking at their performance in the gym that's how I'm gauging do we do a refeed do we move it in the right direction not and I'm putting that above fat loss I'm even putting it above fat loss because if somebody's getting stronger or they're maintaining good strength that's one of the better signs that's telling me we're not getting as much of a of a Down you know regulated metabolism and then with you as an athlete look you know I don't know what weight you you like to fight at but I'm sure you've experienced this where you get Fighters they all they automatically assume that if they cut to a lighter weight they're going to perform better it's not always the case sometimes people cut they go on a lighter weight and they feel like garbage and they get their asses kicked because they they they overestimated the power of being at a lighter weight I agree with that 100% I am one of the fighters that wasn't a lifelong wrestler so I'm not as bought into the severe weight cutting so I'd rather risk versus reward risk being slightly smaller than my opponent not at the expense of being depleted yep totally totally so this is such a like the more we sit here like this will be a cool single topic Doug yeah we could go like really deep because it's there's so much Nuance to what we're talking about right now and it it really does depend on the client their history what I'm currently seeing if there were a competitor where they're going into a sport versus if they're going into bodybuilding I mean and and then you hit it obviously you listen for a long time because the way you started this whole question like it was obvious that you've heard us kind of communicate this before it really does depend and for every good piece of tip and advice we're given right now I could think of an example of where I had to throw that out out the door and do it a different way because you know you get every individual depending on their history and their dieting like can hand i' I've had people where I can put them in this severe calorie restriction and they [ __ ] can just shred they hold on to muscle it's like perfect and then other people where you know we we soon as we start cutting they instantly start to adapt or their body loses lots of muscle and not body fat as much like so this is the real art of of of coaching is learning the stuff not only with yourself but with your clients I just I go back to I know s uses performance I'm watching a client and I'm going to like our plan is to get lean and I'm going to interrupt that cut you know anywhere from every 2 to 3 weeks to stretching it out for six to seven weeks before I interrupted all depending on what I'm watching you know whether that that's a good range you know what I'm saying so I'm like it could be I'm always going to interrupt a cut no matter who you are but it really depends on what I see happening on how frequently I'm going to interrupt that cut if that makes sense and watching what the scale Plateau watching the energy levels the Sleep patterns get yeah messed up and then you can okay it's definitely time to refeed to Surplus that's right I'm also keeping in mind this too cuz here's a mistake too A lot of people make is remember that training is already a stress and dieting is a stress and so a mistake that a lot of people make that make this happen even quicker is they keep the same intensity and volume of training as high as they were when they were in this big calorie Surplus and now they're in this cut so sometimes I'll pull that lever sometimes the mistake that we're doing is like we're just we're diving too hard and we're pushing too hard and the body is just freaking out and going like oh [ __ ] what's his even worse typically what happens is people going to cut and up their volume right right now I'm going to add cardio on top of what my workout was I it took me a long time to find figure out that the best thing I could do with my clients when I put them in a cut was cut their volume you're going to reduce your calories you're also going to work work out less what do you mean I'm trying to lose fat you're already in a deficit let the body do the work that's why I used to co that's how I used to coach all my competitors is like listen we already did the hard work building the muscle now we're in this deficit let the body do what it it naturally will do you pushing more thinking you're going to get faster results actually is shooting ourselves in the foot so there is this like real like back and forth I feel like we didn't help you at all telling an athlete to do less is is the right thing to do but so difficult right right that's I mean so that's why this is so nuanced and stuff like that you're not really going to find a standard to all this yeah well I know I hope we I hope we helped somewhat here because I feel like we just made it worse for you disclose where it hit home to the psychological implication stepping maybe not outside my Lane as a as a trainer or a nutritionist but like I myself I've been in alcohol and drug recovery for 10 years now fighting the fight and if you know anything about that which I'm sure you do co-occurring disorders occur so between my fight and addiction and my athletic goals I battled bulimia for a lot of years so this hits home in terms of the the back and forth the severe surpluses I'm just going to fast until I lose weight and I saw your recent episode about fasting you know and um all the way to just binging and purging and I've had my own disorder and remission for two and a half years but I I would empathize with any level of client athlete or not about um what it can do psychologically or what it has done to somebody in the past uh there there's a big uh I mean your your situation is um commendable for sure but even with just somebody who's never battled with those addictions when you go through uh years of like wrestlers for example or or you're a fighter where you're cutting weight constantly and then they go to try to live a regular life the the the the percentage of them that become obese is very high because they don't have that fight to trained for they don't have that extreme okay got to do this for you know 12 weeks and go crazy it's like how do I live a regular life now and be fit and healthy and they never learned those skills what what they lived for a long time was extremes Christian how long have you been a trainer for uh well I am a former Marine Corps officer so informally did a lot of training got into martial arts once I retired a number of years ago and only last year did I actually get the credentials for a strength coach personal trainer nutritionist and yoga instructor Just For Real uh shits and giggles excuse my language and uh so I haven't really put it much into practice yet and I'm aiming to just per um independently out of like my growing home gym you you'll you're going to be a good trainer bro you're you're asking the right questions you got good experience both you like training yourself others like did you do our course have you did you see our three-day course or did you sign up for our course I'm not familiar oh wow yeah we actually launched our coaching program for trainers and coaches oh that's wonderful yeah we have and we have a a free three-day training that's watch that that'll get you started like watch that but uh yeah we're building a training a trainer community that uh and that was a big shift this this year so yeah what's the what's the the URL for that Doug for the Mind pump trainer course.com for the 3-day training yeah we'll email that to you also so that that you sign up there's a three-day training it's free and we talk about some things that can help you become more successful as a trainer yeah you got to join that Community though you'll love that so that I mean that's what everyone's going through so and you're going to be good bro I can tell already thank you so much yeah excellent I'll look at that right away you got it man awesome thanks for calling in bro stay in touch dude all right you got it yeah I mean he couldn't asked good questions well I mean you can't I mean you almost can't ask more nuanced yeah I know yeah I know I mean such a hard one to navigate it is I I mean I think we should do a single topic on it because of it and because what what's tough when someone hits you with that we our thoughts aren't organized on how because sometimes I feel like well what it is is I'm not talking to like if he said I have this clent then I can ask the question specific date towards like going up on stage or like whatever like something spefic we could talk about okay well then here's what we want to do um and where we want to move but when it's General like that look I have I've had clients where I reversed eye of them for a year yeah for a year before they positively responded to a deficit and then I had clients within a couple months it was like boom aab so that's why I think the way this uh single topic structure I think would make really good is like we picked like four or five common avars and then we would explain the coach the the dieting and cutting part for them individually the things common pitfalls common things that work really well and things to look out for something that that make a really good Nuance to because it is it's like uh as we I'm listening to you and I'm like oh yeah that's really good VI I'm like [ __ ] but I can also think of that's contradict it's like for every good uh example or answer I have for him I can also think of an an example where that didn't work and so but that's what I mean this is the this is the part I mean this is also the part that I love about coaching and training is that it the individual like part of that is so important to figure out and and it is it's it's it's detective work and that's half of like what we do [Music] [Applause] [Music]