I'd like to talk a little bit about body recomposition. Simple question to start off. Is it possible to, quote unquote, gain muscle while at the same time losing fat? Yes. Great. That will be reassuring to people. Does it require a caloric deficit? This is the weird part. No, no.

And just super interesting, man. My friend and colleague, Chris Barakat, he collected all the studies that witnessed this recomposition phenomenon with a recomposition. We call it recomp. You know, it's simultaneous gain in lean mass and loss in fat mass. So he collected all the studies. He collected 10 studies.

And this review was put out five years ago. So you can imagine there's probably a few more studies that have shown recomp now. So we can say at least a dozen studies have shown this phenomenon, which we didn't necessarily think was possible like 10 years ago. You know, we thought, okay, you need a caloric surplus to gain muscle and you need a caloric deficit to lose fat.

But what happened in these studies is the recomposition phenomenon is, I think, seven out of the 10 studies was a lean mass gain dominant recomposition. So in other words, more lean mass was gained than fat was lost. So there were net gains in body mass by the end of these trials, which would at least very strongly imply that fat was lost in a caloric surplus.

If you were going to suggest to somebody the best way to approach this, let's say somebody, loosely speaking, this is not a competitive athlete. This could be a man or a woman, assuming that the same advice would pertain to both, is willing to do resistance training three to four times per week.

Let's say three times per week, do some cardio three times per week for about an hour each session for those. And they are willing to eat maintenance calories or slightly over, and their goal is to gain some muscle and lose some fat. Where would you set the calories relative to their needs?

Would it be an extra two to 500 calories? I realize that's hard to say because we should talk in percentages, but let's just keep it broad for sake of a broad audience. How much more than maintenance should somebody ingest? And let's assume that when they go in the gym, they know what they're doing.

They warm up for five, 10 minutes, and then they train hard. They take the sets close to failure. They're doing, you know, three to six sets per body part. They're training with meaningful effort. And when they do their cardio, they're somewhere between zone two, and maybe they throw in a, you know, a max heart rate workout once a week.

They do some sprints in the middle of their zone two and go back to, you know. So this, I think, is pretty typical of what a lot of people are willing to do or currently doing. I would say sort of the simple and direct answer is to try to keep the caloric surplus pretty judicious.

So 10%-ish above maintenance conditions, which could be for somewhere between 200, possibly 300 calories above what you see as maintenance. And the common thread amongst these recomposition studies was that protein was very high. Protein was somewhere between a gram to a gram and a half per pound of body weight.

Interesting. So now we've upped the protein intake. Yes. Could we even say that the caloric, this 10% above maintenance, should come from quality protein? Exactly. Yes, yes. And there's a series of studies done by Joey Antonio and colleagues where they fed the subjects four to 800 calories above and beyond their habitual intakes just in protein.

And either recomposition happened or no significant change in body composition happened. Were they training? They were training. They were resistance training. And so what protein apparently does when you consume very high amounts of it up to, you know, a gram, a gram and a half per pound of body weight is it just sort of spontaneously does some magical things.

It'll drive down your intake of the other macros. It will potentially increase your exercise energy expenditure and or your non-exercise energy expenditure. It will do odd things. Like I talked to Joey Antonio when he got some feedback from the subjects on his very high protein study where he subjected them to two grams per pound for an eight-week period.

And he had subjects coming to him saying, hey, I'm like sweating while I'm sleeping. When you say two grams of protein per pound of body weight, are we talking about increasing total caloric intake or just using more of one's daily caloric needs, devoting more of that to quality protein?

See, that's the super interesting and kind of mysterious part. They're literally saying, okay, maintain your usual dietary habits and then just add 50 to 100 grams of protein on top. So you're eating an extra chicken breast and a couple of scoops of whey protein or maybe some eggs as well.

And you're just adding more quality protein. Adding more quality protein. On top of what you're already eating. On top of what you're already eating. And we already learned that we can distribute that pretty much wherever we want. Just do what's most comfortable for you relative to your training and other needs.

Yeah. And you're saying then, but they're sweating in their sleep. They're sweating in their sleep, that extra 80 to 100 grams of protein, just add it. And it's a, look, it's a, it's a free living study. So we're not surveilling people in a metabolic ward. So the increase in protein could have translated to greater energy expenditure through a, you know, a number of pathways, non-exercise pathways or exercise pathways.

It could have put more power to the ground during their training. There could have been some, you know, sort of some magic thermic stuff going on. Who knows? But, and also we can't discount the fact that, look, when you're telling people to add, let's say 80 or 100 grams of protein to their habitual intake.

The weird thing about subjects self-reporting is they tend to over-report the healthy stuff that, that you assign them and under-report the unhealthy stuff. The good pupil phenomenon. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so there could be some misreporting going on there. But over a series of like five-ish studies now, just stack the protein on top.

Nobody gains fat. And some people lose fat. Awesome. It's, yeah, it's, it is pretty freaking awesome. Now, here's the, the, the thing that needs to be said. Okay, so there was a metabolic ward study done in 2013-ish by Bray and colleagues where they subjected the participants to escalating amounts of protein.

And it was a protein overfeeding study. There, there were three levels of protein intakes. There was 5% protein diet, a 15% protein diet, and a 30-ish percent protein diet. The calories, the total calories escalated too. There was no exercise involved with this metabolic ward study. And the subjects gained both lean mass and fat mass with the escalating protein amounts.

So there's different stuff going on when you lock people up in a metabolic ward and they can't train, and then you're escalating their protein intakes and calories. They will gain fat and lean mass. But in free living conditions with resistance training, if you just over protein the subjects, they actually have a tendency to lose fat.

And it is, it's a really interesting phenomenon because it's been seen repeatedly. With men and women? With men and women, yes. The message I'm getting is, if you're going to add calories, add quality protein. Yeah. Make sure you're resistance training. Here I'm building on the previous things we talked about.

The distribution of the protein probably doesn't matter as much as just getting the total protein correct. Yeah. And I find it very reassuring that I can train fasted or not fasted, mostly because very few of us have total control of our schedule. So sometimes we need to train first thing in the morning and we got to catch a flight or head to work.

And sometimes people only have time in the evening and this kind of thing. And sometimes people have time in the morning and we're going to be able to train fasted or not fasted.