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Speaker 1: Why is it so hard to get real answers about your health? If you've been told that everything looks fine, but you know that something is off, well, you're not imagining it. That's why I created Vitality 360 to help you better understand what's going on inside your body so that you can take the targeted action needed. With a functional health approach plus testing, we go beyond the guesswork to uncover the root causes of your symptoms. I've teamed up with Dr. Yasmina and in incredible integrative GP. And together we will help you decode your body's signals and answer questions like, why am I always exhausted? What's really causing my stubborn weight? Am I inflamed, insulin resistant, or maybe missing key nutrients? Because when you understand your body better, you can transform your health. Visit v360. health or check out the show notes for more. If you listen to this podcast regularly, you will know that I get a DEXA scan once a year on my birthday to assess my muscle mass, my body fat, see how my body composition is tracking. If you're a regular listener of this podcast, you will also know that I have been very frustrated because my muscle growth had stalled for two years. Despite the fact I was training six days a week, CrossFit three days, running three days, I was definitely getting stronger in the gym and fitter, but I wasn't laying down more valuable muscle tissue. So this year I decided it was my year to shake things up a bit and I shifted my program around a bit. I dropped a CrossFit session, so just doing two CrossFits, and I added two one-hour dedicated strength training sessions to my routine. And I gained three kilos in six months. So I'm sitting there, I thought, hmm, I feel like I better do a midway DEXA scan, a six-month DEXA scan, to see what that three kilos was made up of. And the good news is, yes, I had gained muscle. I had gained 600 grams of muscle. But the bad news is 2.4 kilos of fat had come along for the ride. So it's like, oh, good and bad news. But look, I kind of wasn't surprised because I had allowed my calories to creep up. I'd been trying to hit that magic 100 grams of protein a day. And so I was definitely having more calorie-rich foods, you know, a lot more full-fat cottage cheese, for example. But it just reminded me, here we are, the exercise scientist, the person who knows training really well, and she still got it a little bit wrong. It just reminds me that for an over 40s woman, it really does feel like at this age, our room for error is much more minimal. It feels like fat sticks like Velcro and muscle more like Teflon. So how can we build muscle effectively without fat coming along for the ride? And how can we maximize our muscle growth with the small training windows that we have in our busy week? This is Healthy Her with Amelia Phillips. Strong is the new skinny and I am so happy about this movement. My Instagram feed is full of inspiring over 40s women falling in love with strength training and loving the feeling of being strong because it does feel so good. Whilst how we look might come into it, the real benefits of building muscle go so much deeper. You know, muscle is one of our greatest assets as we age. I love to think of it as a longevity organ. It helps protect our bones. It supports our metabolism. It improves insulin sensitivity, which is so important for weight management. And perhaps most importantly, it keeps us strong, capable, and independent for longer. But if you're putting in the hard work, which I know you are, how do you actually maximize the muscle that you build? How often should you train? How many sets? How many reps? Should you train your whole body each time or split it up? And can you build muscle without accidentally gaining a bit of body fat along the way? Well, to help answer all these fascinating questions, I am joined by one of the most respected strength training experts in Australia, Tony Buttigieg. Tony is an exercise physiologist, a strength coach, and an educator with more than three decades of experience in the health and fitness industry. He holds a PhD in exercise science and is a fellow in high-performance sports at the University of the Sunshine Coast, or USC. He's highly regarded for his evidence-based approach to strength training, to body composition, and to healthy aging. Tony's trained everyone from elite Olympians to everyday clients like you and me, and he's so passionate about translating complex exercise science into practical strategies that we can use. I really encourage you to check out Tony's Instagram. It's full of so much useful education, along with links to his podcast, Stronger With Time, and the courses that he runs. I'll pop all those links in the show notes for you. Tony... Thank you so much for joining me today on Healthy Her.
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Speaker 2: It is a real honour and a privilege. Thank you for having me.
00:05:23
Speaker 1: Well, you recently posted on Instagram a simple plan for programming a six-day per week exercise plan. I loved it. Really straightforward, totally achievable plan. It was basically three days of strength, three days of cardio. What I'd love to do if it's all right with you is give our listeners an overview of this great plan and then we're going to unpack it. Does that sound good? All right, let's get into it. So basically, step one, you said, start by deciding what has the priority. You know, is it muscle mass and strength as your priority, or is it cardiovascular fitness, endurance, speed? And for the purpose of today, and also coincidentally in that post, you chose strength. as a priority. So let's stick with that. Then you said you really want to minimize interference, which you spoke about as being fatigue, muscle damage, or low energy availability. From there, you then laid this great week out. So Monday, Wednesday, Friday were your total body resistance plan. So it was a total body strength program, 12 exercises, two working sets,
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six to eight reps. Then Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday were your cardio days. So Tuesdays and Thursdays were your zone two cardio. So think of that as your steady state jog, might be a swim, it might be a bike ride, it could be power walking with a weighted vest, for example. So that's that lovely zone two where you can talk comfortably, but you probably couldn't sing. And then Saturday was a slightly longer zone two, but that's where you put your higher intensity cardio, that kind of 15 to 20 minutes of the harder efforts and tempo. And then Sunday was our recovery day. And you can go for a recovery walk or whatever you need to do for recovery. You said follow this for a month, progressing with the weights where you can, and then change the strength exercises around for month two. So it's pretty much a set and forget plan for a month. Have I summed that up about right?
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Speaker 2: That sounds like a good default plan, which you can add to and change on a needs basis.
00:07:26
Speaker 1: Okay, great. Let's unpack this. I have questions.
00:07:29
Speaker 2: All right.
00:07:30
Speaker 1: So first of all, I just want to clarify, would you program like this as a default for a beginner and an experienced strength training client? Is that like a pretty standard default for both?
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Speaker 2: As a rule, yes. And it always comes down to the goal first. What do you want to achieve? You can develop lots of things together. You can get fitter aerobically. You can get stronger. You can build muscle. And this is called an emphasis model. You can do everything, but you can't emphasize everything. What we did in this week is we decided that most women, by and large, have probably come from an endurance background or an aerobic background, and it means that their muscle mass is underdeveloped relative to their aerobic fitness. So in this case, we put the emphasis on strength. It came first in the week, and everything was built around that. You'll notice that the day afterwards was an easy day, and that respects the hard and easy principle. The more hard, hard, hard, weights, intervals, CrossFit, intervals, weight, you accumulate fatigue. And what that does is it stops you from accessing the fast twitch muscle fibers. And they're the ones that we want to go after. You need to stimulate them and then recover them. And that's why the next day is an easy zone one or zone two.
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Speaker 1: And that's one thing I've noticed as I've aged is my need for recovery and the length of recovery I need has definitely increased as I've gotten older. I don't bounce back as fast as I used to.
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Speaker 2: And the data does show that. The older we get, it takes longer to recover from the activities that strain the neuromuscular system that use fast-twitch muscle fibers. Not so much from zone one and zone two. There is data into the 80s where the recovery from your low-intensity sessions, it's not really penalized as we age, but it is from weight training
and it is from interval training.
00:09:16
Speaker 1: And you've just mentioned fast twitch muscle fibers. Do you want to just explain for our listeners what you mean when you talk about fast twitch?
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Speaker 2: When we think muscle mass, we often just think it's just one slab of muscle in our thighs or in our butt or in our shoulders. And those muscle fibers, if we... open them up and look inside, they're comprised essentially of two different types of twitches. In other words, they can do different things with a different amount of strength and for a different duration. And to use two extremes, a marathon runner would have and tap into a lot of slow twitch. They can operate at low amplitudes, but for really long periods of time.
00:09:49
Speaker 1: They're your endurance muscles.
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Speaker 2: They're your endurance fibers. And the data shows that we don't really decay them as we age. In other words, if you took a sample of your thigh when you're 30, 50, and 80 years, you'll have relatively the same amount of slow twitch fiber.
00:10:03
Speaker 1: We see so many quite mature marathon runners out there.
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Speaker 2: Right. And some of the times are stunning. And you would have seen a post that I did recently of a 103-year-old cyclist who set the hour record at 25 kilometers an hour.
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Speaker 1: Wow.
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Speaker 2: Just astonishing.
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Speaker 1: Wow.
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Speaker 2: But I digress. The other type of muscle fiber is a fast twitch. And these... by their name, they're designed to produce a lot of force really quickly, but they're very fatigable. They don't last long, but these are the ones that decay. They have a very high threshold to activate. So the effort needs to be high or the load needs to be high. So you need to be sprinting or doing high intensity interval training.
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Speaker 1: I was thinking Usain Bolt. I was thinking Arnold Schwarzenegger. They're going to have a lot of those fast-foot muscle fibers.
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Speaker 2: And they decay. They decay much quicker. So again, if you sample your thigh at 30, 50, 80, you'll see a decline and we're losing those. They peak at about 30 and then they just slowly decline until we're about 50 to 60 and then they drop off a cliff thereafter. Okay.
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Speaker 1: Well, that's why you mentioned fast twitch twice because that's what we're really trying to preserve and grow. Okay. Well, let's get back to the program. So whether you're listening as someone who's had a big break from strength training and you're maybe a beginner or you're coming back in or whether you're a regular strength trainer like me, that blueprint is about right as a default. Okay, so why did you choose total body three days a week when traditionally we hear of people going, oh, today's upper body or lower body or chest and back and hamstrings, but you've opted for the total body three times a week?
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Speaker 2: There's textbook answers and then there's practical answers.
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Speaker 1: I want the Tony in the gym with his client practical answers.
00:11:49
Speaker 2: If you miss a day of training and you're training a muscle group or two muscle groups in a workout, you've missed that opportunity for the week. Have you noticed that guys often miss leg day? And you could be doing a chest and back. You could be doing arms. You could be doing legs. And for whatever reason, you get sidelined.
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Speaker 1: On your leg day.
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Speaker 2: On your leg day.
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Speaker 1: A woman never is sidelined on her butt day.
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Speaker 2: That is absolutely right. It comes down to the practicalities. We often miss days of training because of life. Life. If you're training total muscle, all muscle groups in one workout and you miss a day, it doesn't matter because you're going to come back two days later and do all muscle groups again. But there's also practical reasons. And that is once you challenge a muscle, once you do your sets, you do your exercises, you There's a lag of about 48-ish hours as your body is going through the responses it needs to to grow new tissue. That largely lasts about 48 hours or two days. If you then wait another five days to challenge it again, as it would be if you were on a split program, you've actually missed another opportunity to stimulate that muscle mass. And virtually everybody in the early days of lifting weights would always train all their muscle groups in one go.
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Speaker 1: You mean like decades ago, like in.
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Speaker 2: The 50s and 60s? Even earlier than that. And I speak to historians of strength training, and they'll look at programs written around 1900. 1920, 1940, and they're all pretty similar. Train three times a week, challenge your muscle groups three times a week. And this was decades before molecular science, before they could actually take a sample of muscle and track its response after a training session. There's also another reason, and that is we want everything. We often look at bodybuilders who just want one thing and we emulate it. we're going to train glutes on one day, shoulders on one day, back on another day. But there's two considerations. They're not going to do cardio the next day. They don't have the luxury of rest. We need to go in and train again. So that's a concern. But also when we look at what bodybuilders do to grow muscle and learn from them, how do you tease out the variables of what they're doing, sets and reps and exercises versus the anabolic drugs that they do? And that keeps muscle protein synthesis or the growth pathways high 24-7. If we don't have that, we don't have that. That means that we need to stimulate the muscle, let it recover roughly two days, and then stimulate that again.
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Speaker 1: That makes perfect sense. I love doing total body anyway. I just find it much more enjoyable throughout the actual session. Why did you program less sets, but more exercises. So you were saying two working sets per exercise. A lot of us have grown up doing three, four, up to six sets for one exercise. Why only two?
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Speaker 2: This comes from the dose response literature. And that is, let's look at studies that give one set and measure what happens after eight to 10 weeks. Then let's give two sets, three sets, up to 10 sets. It is really clear that the first set gives you the most stimulus for muscle mass.
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Speaker 1: The first working set.
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Speaker 2: The first working set.
00:14:55
Speaker 1: So you might have done a couple of warm-up sets at a lightweight, whatever reps. They don't count. We're talking working sets.
00:15:02
Speaker 2: Exactly. You can call them hard sets.
00:15:04
Speaker 1: Okay.
00:15:05
Speaker 2: That is... you could probably do two more reps, one more rep, or you hit failure. So you're in within two repetitions of not being able to do another repetition.
00:15:13
Speaker 1: And we call that RIR or reps in reserve. Exactly. And so that's this concept. I want to make sure my listeners really get reps in reserve. Say you're doing a dumbbell chest press, lying on your back, pushing the dumbbells up over your chest, and you get to your eighth rep, and you're going to stop, but then your trainer says, we're going to keep going to failure, and you were able to do three more reps before you failed or the trainer had to grab the weights, you would have been at rep number eight, you would have been in three RIR, three reps in reserve.
00:15:45
Speaker 2: Exactly. We'll come back and talk about why that's important, but it has to do with your fast-rich fibers. When you are working in a certain rep range, let's call it six to eight, that first set is going to stimulate you the most. And then there's a drop-off. So in other words, doing two sets isn't double the benefit of one set. And three sets isn't triple the benefit of one set. It's a drop-off. And as new data comes out, there's more information to actually plot this. And it seems like another two sets gives you double the benefit of the one set.
00:16:19
Speaker 1: Say that again? Another two sets?
00:16:21
Speaker 2: If you do three sets.
00:16:22
Speaker 1: Yep.
00:16:23
Speaker 2: It's the second two sets that actually double the benefit of the first set. Right. So in other words, your first one or two sets are giving you most of your benefit. So that's point one. Okay. There's a drop off in how much subsequent sets are stimulating muscle growth.
00:16:38
Speaker 1: So six sets, you're just getting that diminishing return. Less and less and less. So you're wasting all that precious workout time.
00:16:44
Speaker 2: Yeah. And wasting is probably- a strong word. You are getting benefit, but it's much less than what you think. And because we have so many muscle fibers, not one exercise can challenge all of them. Let's just use the glutes as an example. If you do the hip thrust and you hit failure at 10 reps, you think, I can't do any more. I've used
everything. You haven't. There's regions of the gluteal that have gone untouched. And this is because muscle growth... is fiber specific, not muscle group specific. Okay.
00:17:14
Speaker 1: This is so interesting. And this was definitely something I learned from you. So let's unpack this a little bit more because it goes against quite a lot of historical training, but it makes perfect sense. So explain this.
00:17:25
Speaker 2: You only grow muscle fibers that you activate and essentially exhaust or get very close to failure on. And since not all of your muscles are firing in any exercise, you always keep some in reserve. And some muscle fibers just don't have leverage to produce force. But another exercise will get it. And again, the glutes is a good idea. You've got hip thrusts. You could do abductions, which use the upper gluteals. Yep.
00:17:48
Speaker 1: So that's that sitting machine where you're doing a leg spread, basically. You're sitting and you've got your legs in this weird contraption and you're sliding your legs out and in and you've got either abduction or adduction. Using a very different muscle to a squat or a hip thrust.
00:18:02
Speaker 2: Exactly. It's using the upper gluteals, not the middle and lower gluteals. And again, if you just did the hip thrust and you did four sets, it would be better to do two sets of a hip thrust and two sets of an AB duction machine.
00:18:15
Speaker 1: Because then you're hitting different parts of your glutes and you're getting that absolute benefit.
00:18:22
Speaker 2: Correct. And we could go on and on. You do a Romanian deadlift or a stiff leg deadlift. You do a split squat or Bulgarian squat. A squat, again, is challenging the glutes, but it's challenging different fibers in the glutes.
00:18:32
Speaker 1: I tell you where this has been a huge light bulb for me. I have historically... been of the mindset of you choose exercises that give you the most bang for buck. So these big compound exercises like a squat or a barbell squat or a deadlift where you know you're recruiting a huge number of fibers compared to say a seated leg extension, which is the machine you're sitting down and then you're kicking your legs out in front of you. You're only recruiting a one specific part of your quadriceps. And so I would often shy away from machine weights because I just wanted those big bang for buck exercises. What you're actually saying is I'd be better off, yes, of course, include some of those big compound bang for buck exercises, but maybe not so many sets because then I can jump onto something like a leg extension and hit different parts of that muscle group and trigger that response.
00:19:23
Speaker 2: I think a good rule of thumb, pick a bang for your buck, a squat, a deadlift, and then Pick another two isolated exercises to challenge that muscle region from a really different angle.
00:19:35
Speaker 1: And what I also love about that for the over 40s woman who's got a very full, busy life is they're much more achievable exercises. Like I walk into the gym and I go, oh, my goodness, it's deadlift day. And like there's a part of me that dies automatically. little bit of like scared and, you know, this is going to hurt. But then if I had to do multiple big scary compound moves, it might impact my enjoyment of that session. But if I'm like then I'm jumping on a, you know, leg extension or an abductor machine or lying leg curl, it feels much more achievable.
00:20:07
Speaker 2: Exactly. But it also removes the fear factor. The reason why we like squats and deadlifts and all their derivatives is they load the spine beautifully. They really impose a unique challenge to the lumbar and the hip. And that's the areas we really want to focus bone mineral density. So we like that. However, the brain also knows this. It's much, unless you've come from a history of squatting and deadlifting and you can do so masterfully, the brain, in my experience, but this is well studied, really puts brakes on. Because you can compare what you can do in a leg press with a practice. I'm not going to hurt myself. I might not be able to get it up, but I'm not going to hurt myself. And I have ladies, one of my ladies, she's 69, almost 70, and she can leg press 250 at body weight 58 kilos. Wow. But she couldn't squat 50 kilos because she has a history of back pain. She knows she cannot get more than that. And I'm watching her. Its form is breaking down at that 40 kilos. That's a problem. So her brain will say, you are not using any more fibers. We go into the leg press.
00:21:07
Speaker 1: She's a machine.
00:21:08
Speaker 2: Right. And we can go on and on between a deadlift and a hip thrust. Deadlift could be 60 kilos and the hip thrust could be 150. That doesn't make any sense. It's only one muscle. Yeah. But the brain is not putting the brakes on it. Isn't that interesting? So it's always case by case. If you have come from a lifting background, your brain will have less of a brake system. But for the rest of us, I think machines have got a really bad rap because of the functional movement that came and went.
00:21:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, the trend. There was a real functional movement trend, I remember, you know, unstable surfaces, all that sort of thing. And so machines just don't represent the real world.
00:21:41
Speaker 2: Right, right. But we're kind of coming back. But luckily the muscle doesn't care. The muscle does not care. And the more instability there is, the less you're going to recruit muscle fibers. And all we want to do in the gym, when you turn up, do your exercises, is to recruit the most amount of muscle with the highest amount of effort, and then you go home.
00:21:59
Speaker 1: Let's get back to our program. So you've just unpacked why we're doing less sets and more exercises. And that makes perfect sense to me. Let's talk about the reps. So in your default, you had six to eight reps. Why not two to four reps per exercise or 10 to 15 reps per
exercise?
00:22:19
Speaker 2: The answer is you can. And this is the beautiful thing about weight training. It's very forgiving. If you are newish to the gym and you haven't quite mastered your technique and you're afraid of injury, you can build muscle at 15, 20 and 30 reps or at quote unquote light loads. As long as you work with effort, that is the last few reps are challenging and you probably couldn't do a few more.
00:22:40
Speaker 1: So this is circling back to that RIR principle.
00:22:43
Speaker 2: Exactly.
00:22:44
Speaker 1: So explain that.
00:22:45
Speaker 2: Exactly. If you pick a weight that you can do for 20, but not 22, you can just do 20. Those last few reps will start to slow down, clearly. And at 20 reps, you will feel it because there'll be a bit of a burn going on in the muscle. And that, as you approach the reps slowing down, means that you are hitting task failure. can't do any more. At that point, you've achieved maximum muscle fiber recruitment. Just quite different to doing it for five reps. They're different mechanisms, but the same thing. If you did one leg on a leg press and you did five reps to failure, and then you lightened the load and you did 20 reps on the left leg and you went to failure and you took a sample of the muscle, you could not tell the difference. The muscle doesn't care. It's blind to load. It just senses effort.
00:23:28
Speaker 1: Okay, so the real take home for our listeners here is it's not about the rep number. It's about that how close to failure are you getting.
00:23:37
Speaker 2: Correct.
00:23:37
Speaker 1: But if we have two avatar of listeners here today, we've got our beginners or our ladies coming back from a break versus our regular listeners. trainers, what advice about choosing the reps or aiming for the reps would you have? Would you want the beginners to be doing lighter loads and more reps?
00:23:55
Speaker 2: As a rule, I think that makes perfect sense because there's more grounds for getting it wrong, using muscles you don't want to use. And I think most people realize this with shoulder presses and pulldowns. quite got that mastery and you work with two heavier loads, you're using all the wrong muscles. You're using your arms, you're.
00:24:12
Speaker 1: Using your traps. I've got to be careful my traps end up taking over.
00:24:16
Speaker 2: It's more common than it's not. And therefore we tend to pick the more moderate to light loads. And that could be 12 to 15. You also get to learn the movement because there's a lot of brain to muscle connection in weight training. It is skill-based. And if we ask you to do 12 to 15 reps, okay, it's moderate loads. The chance of an injury is low. The chance of a muscle strain is low. The chance of learning your way through, oh, that's what I should be doing and not just repping it through with as heavy as possible. So I think that's a good rule of thumb is that if you are returning to weights or a beginner, stick to that moderate load because the muscle doesn't care. It just cares about the effort. But why did I stick on six to eight? Well, this comes down to fully acknowledging it's the effort and not the load.
00:25:00
Speaker 1: However.
00:25:01
Speaker 2: The more reps you do, there is a penalty for recovery. And there's also a penalty for the idea of fatigue and muscle damage.
00:25:09
Speaker 1: What do you mean by that?
00:25:11
Speaker 2: If I asked you to do 15 squats versus or even 20 squats.
00:25:15
Speaker 1: I'd be gassed.
00:25:15
Speaker 2: Right.
00:25:16
Speaker 1: My heart rate would be up like 165 like I just sprinted basically.
00:25:22
Speaker 2: Which means everything else you do in that workout will be suffering the consequences of the after effect of those squats. So that's a fatigue issue. That's going to impact you from recruiting the most amount of muscle tissues. And you remember goal one of a weight training session is get in and recruit as much muscle fiber as you can and then get out and recover it. And the next day, don't interfere with that process. Don't go and run heel sprints because you're still recovering. You need to turn up to the weights fresh again. When you do six to eight, you get that beautiful balance of muscle tension, the loading, but without the fatigue and without the muscle damage. And most coaches who know this stuff will also... tend to keep reps under 10 for this very purpose. Not because it's magical, but all things being equal, it will give you less fatigue for everything else in that workout, less soreness over the next few days, and it will allow you to recover faster. Could you do one set of something higher for fun? Sure, but it's not the default. So outside of beginners, we do most of our work under 10 reps with a here or there, or maybe ab or calf specific. We might go above it for those. But as a rule, yeah.
00:26:29
Speaker 1: You know, it's interesting. I was messing around with a couple of new exercises this week and I got my weights wrong and they were a little bit too light. And so I got to my eight and I was thinking in my head, oh, I'm going to, you know, get eight reps. And I was about to stop because I hit my eight. And then I went, hang on, Mills, how many more reps do you think? I'm like, I've definitely got more than two reps in reserve, two RIRs. So I'm like, I'm just going to keep going. Ended up getting to 15. And so I was like, okay, that's feedback. But to your point, at least I didn't waste that set. I got to a point where I was very close to failure. So sometimes you have to improvise if there's a situation like that.
00:27:09
Speaker 2: If you're training in a commercial gym and you can't even get the weights that you want.
00:27:12
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh. Busy gyms. Yes.
00:27:15
Speaker 2: Or that you underestimate the weight. It's not the reps. It's the effort. So if you've thought you might get eight reps as you thought you did, but you realize you could keep going, you keep going and make
a note for next time. But you either need to stop and do another set. You could just keep going again. Muscle is blind to the load and the reps. It just wants the effort.
00:27:36
Speaker 1: Okay, so you heard it here, guys. If you get to eight, don't think Tony told me to stop at eight. No, keep going till you're getting closer to that. Two, three reps in reserve. Why is it so hard to get real answers about your health? If you've been told that everything looks fine, but you know that something is off, well, you're not imagining it. That's why I created Vitality 360 to help you better understand what's going on inside your body so that you can take the targeted action needed. With a functional health approach plus testing, we go beyond the guesswork to uncover the root causes of your symptoms. I've teamed up with Dr. Yasmina and in incredible integrative GP. And together we will help you decode your body's signals and answer questions like, why am I always exhausted? What's really causing my stubborn weight? Am I inflamed, insulin resistant, or maybe missing key nutrients? Because when you understand your body better, you can transform your health. Visit v360. health or check out the show notes for more. Now what about the month-long program? We're doing three strength training sessions a week. They're slightly different. They're not three exact same workouts, are they? Like they're different exercises in each workout, is that correct?
00:29:13
Speaker 2: You could. You could mix them up or you could keep them the same. And let me explain the advantages of each one. In one day, you probably wouldn't get the coverage if you were to do it the same workout Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
00:29:26
Speaker 1: Exact same workout. So those 12 exercises.
00:29:28
Speaker 2: It means something would be missing. Yes. Because remember, no one exercise can do everything. You would need two or three for the glutes. You definitely need two for the lats, three for the shoulders, front, middle and back. And when you start adding all of those things, it comes up to over 12. Unless you love training in the gym for two hours, then what we would tend to do is total body Monday, Wednesday, Friday, but make that Wednesday and Friday session, the same muscle, but from a different angle, those things that you miss. So anterior deltoid versus medial deltoid or upper glutes versus lower glutes or squat versus step up. You get the idea.
00:30:03
Speaker 1: For ease of programming, would you ever do something like AB? So say you've got two total body exercises A, B workouts, slightly different. And so Monday you do A, Wednesday you do B, Friday you do A, and then the next week you do B. So basically alternating weeks, you're doing the same one twice.
00:30:22
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think that's the best way to do it. I think weight training is best viewed in terms of a hierarchy. And that is, I think that's the best.
00:30:30
Speaker 1: I like that because it's just two programs and after a couple of weeks, you know them off by heart. You're not starting to get mastery of those 24 exercises.
00:30:41
Speaker 2: Exactly. These conversations can sometimes be confused for it's either black or white. You either do one workout three times a week or you do an AB and then everything else was rubbish.
00:30:50
Speaker 1: Or an ABC.
00:30:51
Speaker 2: Or I've been failing myself. Yeah. And what I'm doing is all wrong. You're telling me I'm doing it all wrong. And I get these comments all the time. Weight training works and it's very forgiving. So even if you weren't doing this, but you were lifting weights, it's still working. What we're talking about is optimizing your time investment.
00:31:08
Speaker 1: I love that concept.
00:31:09
Speaker 2: And that's a different concept to minimum effective dose. Yeah.
00:31:13
Speaker 1: And I think as well, I mean, as a trainer, you are so much about personalization and meeting the individual where they're at. And because we've got tens of thousands of people listening to this podcast, we don't have the luxury of personalizing it for everyone. But what I love with this conversation is from a blueprint perspective, we're giving a nice framework and then, you know, people can choose to fray around the edges there. All right. So we're doing the, let's say we are doing the ABA and then the next week BAB. Why follow the exact same program for a month rather than kind of mixing it up more frequently?
00:31:50
Speaker 2: Because muscle growth takes a really long time to occur. Don't I know it. It takes much longer than most people realize. Yes. And the reason for this is that you're growing new tissue. And this process goes through what's called a fast clock and a slow clock. Okay, I haven't heard this. The fast clock is muscle protein synthesis. So when you do your session, the rates of muscle growth are elevated for a 48 hours, two days. But the machinery that makes the new proteins grows very slowly. That's the slow clock. So you've got the fast clock, two days. The slow clock, weeks, months, years.
00:32:27
Speaker 1: So what's the slow clock then?
00:32:30
Speaker 2: These are called ribosomes. Now, ribosomes are little machineries in the cell that take the genetic machinery and say, we're going to turn these into proteins. And they grow very slowly.
00:32:40
Speaker 1: Wow.
00:32:40
Speaker 2: But they are working... to tell the proteins to be incorporated into the muscle cell. So we've got ribosomes, slow clock. Fast clock is muscle protein synthesis. Okay.
00:32:51
Speaker 1: Well, I want to ask you about MPS, muscle protein synthesis. And just before I do, I also want to highlight what blew my mind when I looked into the world of bodybuilding is that in a 12-month, and they have 12-month programs, protocols, they spend something like 40 weeks of the year building in their anabolic stage. And I'm not talking, I'm talking natural bodybuilders, not just those on anabolics, but 40 weeks
building. And then they're only stripping for eight to 12 weeks, stripping fat, which blows my mind because most of us ladies, our whole life is focused on stripping fat. And we think that we're just going to turn up and do a a strength training session. A bodybuilder is spending 40 weeks of the year not worrying about their body fat and just focusing on getting stronger.
00:33:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, because they've realized that it takes a really long time. And you might be thinking as you're listening to this, well, not for me. I can notice a change really quickly. You are noticing something, but it isn't muscle. And this is called cell swelling. And when you exercise... Part of the whole process of tissue remodeling and part of the process of metabolism going on inside the muscle that you're exercising is you get the expansion of fluids and that occurs immediately. So I've had female clients say, I couldn't put on my boots the next day. So I don't want to do calf raise. It's like, I understand what you're saying, but that is not muscle. That is fluid retention. And then it goes really quickly.
00:34:12
Speaker 1: I just heard all my listeners gasp as soon as you said cell swelling because as a woman, bloating, swelling. We'll come back to that. I want to focus on MPS, muscle protein synthesis, because I think if anyone's interested and really wants to improve their muscle and strength, we need to understand MPS. So can you explain what that is?
00:34:34
Speaker 2: When you lift weights, you go through a process of repair because there is damage involved. And let's take that month-long program. You do a new program, new exercises, and you're a little bit sore after that first workout. Muscle protein synthesis is what is part of the damage repair process. You damage the muscle.
00:34:51
Speaker 1: So you do a really heavy bicep curl. You're basically micro-tearing those muscles. When you fail in your bicep curl, some of those tiny muscle fibers have literally torn.
00:35:00
Speaker 2: Exactly.
00:35:01
Speaker 1: But it's actually a good thing.
00:35:03
Speaker 2: Exactly. They're micro-trauma and not a tear when you've played football and you've fallen over, right?
00:35:09
Speaker 1: Okay. And that triggers something. That tear suddenly triggers. What does it trigger?
00:35:14
Speaker 2: It triggers the incorporation of new proteins into the muscles that were just worked. And the first really brilliant study that looked at this is in the Netherlands where they put harmless radioactive isotopes in a milk drink. And they had one leg do exercise and the other leg did not. And they drank. The radioactive isotopes could track where it went. And within a few hours, those amino acids ended up in the leg that you just trained, but not in the other leg.
00:35:38
Speaker 1: No way.
00:35:40
Speaker 2: So you become what you just ate. Wow.
00:35:42
Speaker 1: Your body is literally mopping up the amino acids from the protein that you... And so muscle protein synthesis, this process of... It's basically the 48-hour... process of building more muscle starts with the stimulus triggering through the exercise, but then what you eat and fuel yourself with is an important part of that.
00:36:02
Speaker 2: Exactly. Extends it. The big trigger, the whole process works this way. We have sensors inside the muscle cell called mechanosensors, and they sense tension or effort on the muscle. And the more you approach that failure point, the more tension is being sensed inside the cell. That turns the stimulus of, of to chemistry. And it starts a cascade. And that cascade lasts about 48 hours. That triggers a complex called mTORC1. And mTORC1 says, let's turn the amino acids that are floating around. Let's put it inside the muscle. And when you're a well-trained lifter, that whole process is actually done in about 24 hours. For beginners, it's about 48 hours. But that's why we just say, as a rule, 48 hours is done.
00:36:43
Speaker 1: And hence, circling back to your amazing program, that's why we train Monday, Wednesday, Friday, not Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and have the rest of the week off. So we're triggering that muscle protein synthesis in those 48-hour windows.
00:36:58
Speaker 2: And there's another side, and this is much harder to measure. MPS is very easily measured. Simultaneously, there's a process called muscle protein breakdown. And muscle protein breakdown, when you're a beginner, equals muscle protein synthesis. That's why for a beginner, you don't grow muscle in the first eight weeks of training.
00:37:14
Speaker 1: Why not?
00:37:15
Speaker 2: Because MPB equals MPS. In other words, there's no net protein laid down. So MPS goes up, but it's matched by MPB because the body doesn't know how to lay down new proteins yet.
00:37:26
Speaker 1: Is that right? Right. So the training's actually breaking down the protein.
00:37:31
Speaker 2: Exactly. At an equal rate to your synthesis.
00:37:34
Speaker 1: Okay, well, this brings me to the question about soreness because this was another mind-blown moment because early in our careers, I know you were the same, we've been in this industry roughly about the same time, it was this concept of we want to be sore. You've got to be sore after a strength training workout. And if you're not sore, if your client's coming to you and they weren't muscle sore, not joint sore, we don't want sore joints, but if their muscles weren't sore with the DOMS, delayed onset muscle soreness, well, you're not growing. And then you've basically turned that on its head. Can you explain why soreness doesn't necessarily equal muscle growth and why not being sore can actually be a really good sign?
00:38:14
Speaker 2: Because it really does make sense is that when you are lifting, the lengthening actions and the load causes this tearing, tearing you get sore, body repairs that by growing bigger muscles. So that's what everyone thought. Yes. And my clients would say, Tony, you're
losing your touch. I wasn't sore.
00:38:36
Speaker 1: Dangerous words. They are floating with danger.
00:38:41
Speaker 2: And this is where some work in 2016. So this is only 10 years old.
00:38:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay. I don't feel so bad then. Like I've missed something.
00:38:49
Speaker 2: They were able to carefully look at muscle protein breakdown, muscle protein synthesis, and track what it corresponded to in terms of muscle growth. And in this long-term study... It was shown that the muscle protein synthesis that clearly rises after training sessions for the first three weeks was all driven to the damage repair that went on in the training session. But muscle fibers didn't grow themselves. So in other words, the body prioritizes fixing damage that happens in exercise before it prioritizes growing muscle.
00:39:23
Speaker 1: And that actually makes sense because, we've micro-torn the muscles. So suddenly what's happening is the body's actually repairing those muscles before it's growing those muscles.
00:39:34
Speaker 2: Correct. So they're different processes. And studies have been able to show, well, let's cause damage to the muscle. Let's drop things on it and give it a contusion. And let's measure muscle protein synthesis. It goes way up, but has got nothing to do with muscle growth. It has to do with damage repair. So we've got these really elegant studies that just say, just because muscle protein synthesis is up doesn't mean you're growing muscle. And this has two really important implications. Yes, damage is occurring during exercise, but that's not part of the growth cycle. That's a different cycle. And you've got to get rid of that early on. That's why we stick to programs for typically longer than four weeks, because you have to get past the damage repair, which is probably two to three weeks.
00:40:14
Speaker 1: Okay, so circling back to this blueprint program. for today, that idea of say you have got that A-B workout that you're just repeating every week, what you're saying is in the first couple of weeks, say these are all new exercises, the first couple of weeks you're actually going to be experiencing that remodeling, that breakdown, that repair as opposed to growing muscle. So that's why we actually do want to have the same exercises because the first few weeks you probably will be sore. But don't be worried if from week three onwards, wow, I did the squats. Week one, I couldn't walk, basically. Afterwards, my DOMS were so bad. Now week three, week four, I'm not really feeling it. Does that mean it's not working? You're saying, no, now the anabolic is kicking in.
00:41:00
Speaker 2: Exactly.
00:41:00
Speaker 1: Now the growth phase.
00:41:00
Speaker 2: So in other words, the muscle protein synthesis is driven to growing muscle. not to damage repair.
00:41:05
Speaker 1: Yeah. You've got to get through the damage repair first.
00:41:09
Speaker 2: Yeah. And it's worth understanding that that process does happen quickly. In that 2016 study, it took three weeks before they could see the MPS was going to muscle for growth, not going to damage repair. Does that occur faster in people who are well-trained and experienced exercisers? Probably, but not by order of magnitudes that it doesn't happen, it's still probably one or two weeks. But also some people don't get sore, but that doesn't mean you're still not doing damage repair. And I think that's important to understand that people's response and soreness is highly individual. If you do a new program and you're not sore, that doesn't mean that you say, oh, well, we're just all... growing muscle now. It's still doing damage repair, even though you're not feeling it.
00:41:50
Speaker 1: Or is that inverse as well? For example, I am always sore. I don't know if it's because I'm getting older or because I have been mixing things up. I'm just so sore all the time.
00:41:59
Speaker 2: Think of the timeline of it. If you do an exercise and then delayed soreness comes in, remember the name is delayed soreness. It peaks 24 to 48 hours later, but most of your muscle protein synthesis for growth is already done. It rises really quickly and then falls and then you get sore. They're very different pathways. And this has led researchers to try and understand what are we really after in a weights room? And that comes back to point one, and that is we're not chasing soreness. We're not chasing a burn or a pump. We're chasing approaching or hitting task failure in that exercise.
00:42:38
Speaker 1: Which is ultimately leads to muscle growth.
00:42:41
Speaker 2: Correct.
00:42:42
Speaker 1: These fibers, because I'm just sitting here and I'm putting myself in my lovely listener's shoes and they're hearing a cell water retention. They're hearing soreness. They're hearing words like failure and they're like meals, Tony, you're putting me off strength training. Hang on. I've been told I need to do this for longevity, but this all doesn't sound particularly nice. So I want to just, I guess, bring it back to, as a woman, we don't want to be bulky. We don't want to look like a female Arnold Schwarzenegger. And most of us struggle with body fat and our composition. Talking about my example where I've had a little bit of fat come along for my muscle building ride, what would your advice be to the ladies that are like, yes, we want to get stronger, but not at the cost of gaining body fat?
00:43:31
Speaker 2: Let's answer the cell swelling before we get onto the body fat.
00:43:33
Speaker 1: Okay, all right.
00:43:34
Speaker 2: Because they're slightly different conversations. The cell swelling occurs mainly with a lot of volume on one muscle group. And a lot of repetitions because it's metabolically related. And that is if you're doing two sets and you're doing six to eight reps or under 10, your chance of swelling is utterly different compared to doing four, five, six sets of the same exercise with more repetitions.
00:43:54
Speaker 1: So for
example, if you did a leg day and all you did was eight to 10.
00:43:57
Speaker 2: That's a classic cell swelling scenario.
00:43:59
Speaker 1: You're going to walk out, you're going to waddle out of there with, you know, trunks of steel.
00:44:03
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:44:03
Speaker 1: And we don't want that.
00:44:04
Speaker 2: Most cell swelling studies show that it's gone 72 hours later.
00:44:09
Speaker 1: Okay, so we definitely don't want that on a Friday night when we're going to wear a mini skirt or a tight dress. Or maybe we do. I don't know.
00:44:15
Speaker 2: Girls deliberately do it for their glutes.
00:44:17
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:44:17
Speaker 2: Because you will get that pump in the glutes.
00:44:19
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:44:19
Speaker 2: And that will last a period of time. But this is also why you see physique competitors who really want glutes and their off-season glutes look phenomenal. Their on-stage glutes, when they've washed out all the training because they're just in peak week and they're barely training, then they go back to what their muscle really is, which is quite different to what they looked like. Yeah, okay. Training. Now, the second question that you had was, well, how do you grow muscle without the fat coming along? And this comes to the idea, and again, it's a legacy from the bodybuilding world, is that muscle grows best in caloric surplus. Well, that is true. But how much does it take to grow a kilo of muscle? Well, studies have looked at this, and it looks like about 3,500 calories spread over a 12 weeks. So about 40 calories a day.
00:45:03
Speaker 1: In surplus.
00:45:04
Speaker 2: In surplus.
00:45:05
Speaker 1: Oh, that's nothing. Oh, definitely. Because in my mind, I was like, at the start of the year, this is my strength era. I'm going to just let my portion sizes grow. But you're saying it's 40 calories.
00:45:18
Speaker 2: It's 40 calories.
00:45:18
Speaker 1: Which is like a third of a banana.
00:45:20
Speaker 2: It's not much, which is really great news because this idea of, I really want to maximize my muscle. I'm going to I'm going to have to increase this.
00:45:27
Speaker 1: And you know, a lot of the female lifters promote quite high calorie intakes. You know, all these people on these 1200 calorie diets or these, you know, I'm having 3000 calories a day. And I have a lot of people coming to, you know, we do a lot of weight management on our programs and they're like, oh, those calories too low. Cause you know, I keep the calories pretty tight on these programs.
00:45:50
Speaker 2: Yeah. Because there is this thing called thermodynamics and that is If your calories are way above what you need, you don't need all of that to grow muscle. You just need an extra 40 calories a day to grow muscle. And you need the most important stimulus, which is weight training.
00:46:05
Speaker 1: But can you strip fat and build muscle at the same time?
00:46:09
Speaker 2: Yes, because the stimulus for growth is the mechanical tension that comes from your weight training session combined with adequate protein. Because as we've seen from the Netherlands study, What you eat goes into the muscle. And if you don't provide that raw material, you can't create matter from nothing. So you need that raw material, which is the amino acids that is found in food.
00:46:30
Speaker 1: But then if you want to strip fat, we're always told we need to be in a caloric deficit. Right. So would it be a caloric, say you're going at sensible caloric deficit of 300 to 500 calories a day, but we're adding that 40, we're bringing the equivalent of 40 calories back in there. This is what I'm trying to understand. Or is it a caloric deficit, but not a protein deficit?
00:46:52
Speaker 2: They're two separate questions.
00:46:54
Speaker 1: Okay.
00:46:54
Speaker 2: Can you build muscle in energy deficit? The answer is absolutely.
00:46:58
Speaker 1: Oh, that's good news.
00:46:59
Speaker 2: Can you optimize muscle in calorie deficit? And the answer is probably not.
00:47:04
Speaker 1: What's the difference?
00:47:05
Speaker 2: Well, you can still grow, but you might not grow maximally.
00:47:08
Speaker 1: Oh, I see what you're saying.
00:47:09
Speaker 2: So what does it take to grow muscle maximally to top out your genetic potential, providing all things being equal? You're hitting weights three times a week and you're working with great effort. What's about three and a half thousand calories over 12 weeks of 40 calories a day. Can you grow muscle in energy deficit and lose fat at the same time? Absolutely. And it's been studied in both men and women.
00:47:27
Speaker 1: So what am I doing wrong? Have I just let my calories go too high to gain 600 grams of muscle and 2.4 kilos of fat accidentally? Have I just let my calorie creep go a little bit high? So that ice cream on a Friday night maybe wasn't helping.
00:47:44
Speaker 2: It has to be lifestyle, doesn't it? And you need to look across the week and say, what do I really enjoy? But account for that in the week. And if that just means on the Wednesday and Thursday, we just dip down that little bit to account for that Friday night, then that works for one's enjoyment. Because you've got to do this month in, month out. So how much monk-like do you want to live?
00:48:07
Speaker 1: Exactly. No, I love the 80-20, the balance rule. And look, it's interesting, we haven't focused on cardio today because I've really brought you on to talk about maximizing muscle. But I love in this blueprint, cardio is important. And I think another trap that some of my ladies fall into is they stop all cardio and just switch to the strength training. So that's why I like this idea that we're still doing cardio, although our emphasis or focus is on the strength training. And it's interesting when we talk about stripping fat, we've kind of focused on nutrition because really, would you agree that that's the biggest lever?
00:48:41
Speaker 2: No question. And
we love exercise, but it does not burn as much energy as we like to think that it does. The wearables are not particularly accurate, whereas you can create a 300 calorie deficit very comfortably through nutrition. And you can top up a little bit extra deficit through exercise for sure. It's certainly an adjunct But it's not the key driver that most people believe that it is. Yeah.
00:49:07
Speaker 1: I'm glad you made that point. I'd love to get you back on to talk about fueling for muscle and protein and all of that because that's a whole other conversation. But I want to wrap up because this has just been so fascinating and I really... I love this blueprint because I feel like my listeners can take that and use that as their foundation and then adjust for their personalization. But I want to just wrap up finally for a woman listening who really wants to maximize her strength and muscle growth. Of everything we've spoken about today, what would you say your one or two main key points are that you would like her to take away from this conversation?
00:49:44
Speaker 2: Effort applied to your working sets is almost everything, which means that when you're in the gym, it's a phone-free time. because you cannot task switch from doing your emails or from scrolling to applying maximum effort. That's point one. Your set is your set and that is it. There's no talking to somebody. There's no carrying out a conversation on your phone as we see people doing. It's all in to approach task failure. The second aspect is pick exercises where you can do that. Yes, squat and yes, deadlift, they're great for your bones, but pick machines or exercises where you're not going to lose stability. We're not going to be afraid. And you can apply everything to that movement. A hip thrust, a leg press, shoulder press in a machine. You can do those safely and hit task failure. And the final aspect is when you do total body and you miss a day, it doesn't matter because you're still going to hit all those muscles again. So I really like that idea. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you devote to weights. And if you miss a day, it doesn't matter. You're going to hit those again a few days later.
00:50:42
Speaker 1: Tony Buttigieg, thank you so much for your time today.
00:50:45
Speaker 2: It's an absolute pleasure.
00:51:04
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