#793 - Menno Henselmans - The New Science Of Using Protein To Build Muscle

Chris Williamson
Hello friends. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Menno Henselmans. Hes a fitness coach, researcher and an author. The evidence based nutrition movement is taking off right now.

Gone are the days that you trawl random bro forums looking for the special blueberry extract which will improve your protein synthesis. Were using science now, so lets speak to a scientist about how to eat for gains. Expect to learn if your body can actually absorb more than 20 grams of protein per meal. If flexible dieting or if it fits your macros is a sustainable, sustainable approach for weight loss. Whether caffeine is an effective fat burner, which foods are best for sleep and recovery?

The most underrated bodybuilding foods you should be probably eating more of and much more. Manno is a beast. I love this evidence based movement at the moment. I love the fact that we are getting to real hard science when it comes to diet training, nutrition, sleep recovery, all that stuff. And hes one of the underground heroes of it.

So there is an awful lot to take away from today. I've been absolutely obsessed with legendary foods lately. They make the best protein sweets I've ever had. Their cinnamon protein, sweet roll and strawberry protein pastry are like crack. They're literally like crack.

And you warm it in the microwave for about 10 seconds and it tastes phenomenal. Their macros are insane. Each of the snacks are between 150 and 220 calories and have 20 grams of protein. Do you hear me? 20 grams of protein in something that tastes like a sweet four to six net grams of carbs and 2 grams or less sugar.

Your average cinnamon roll is more than 400 calories and has 60 grams of sugar and zero protein. Obviously because it sucks. I love them. They help satiate my sweet tooth, they keep my gains and they make me hit my protein goals. What else do you want?

Best of all, they offer free shipping on all orders over $69. Plus you can get 10% off all purchases by going to eatlegendary.com modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. So if you've got a sweet tooth and you want to keep your gains, head to eatlegendary.com modernwisdom and modern wisdom a checkout this episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business, from the launch your online shop stage to the first real life store stage, all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage. Shopify is there to help you grow, whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits, Shopify helps you sell everywhere, from their all in one ecommerce platform to their in person POS system.

Wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify has got you covered. Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the Internet's best converting checkout, 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. You would be amazed at how many massive brands you love. Use Shopify. Gymshark, perhaps one of the biggest independent sportswear companies in the world, uses Shopify.

And if it is good enough for them, it is good enough for you. So if you are looking to get started at selling something online, Shopify is the easiest, quickest and most convenient way to do it. Plus, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period@shopify.com. modernwisdom all lowercase. That's Shopify.com modernwisdom to grow your business no matter what stage you're in, this episode is brought to you by Gymshark.

The best gym wear on the planet is from gymshark. So no matter what you are looking for, if you are spending more time in the gym, you will feel better if you've got cool new clothing and gymshark make the best men's shorts on the planet. Their studio shorts, in Dusty Maroon, Willow Green, Onyx, Grey and Navy, were what I wore throughout all of my trip to LA, which you may have seen on YouTube recently. Their crest hoodie is what I am flying in whenever I'm on a flight, and their geo seamless t shirt is also what I train in every single day. All of their kit is unbelievably lightweight sweat wicking.

It's easy to wash and dry. I'm in love and the fit and quality of their fabrics are phenomenal. Plus, there is a 30 day free returns internationally and you can get 10% off everything site wide and worldwide if you go to gymshark.com and use the code mw ten at checkout. That's gymshark.com and mw ten a checkout. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Menno Henselmans.

How much truth is there that your body can only absorb 20 grams of protein per meal? Because this is something that's been floating around for a very long time. So this myth has a kernel of truth behind it. But the idea that the body can literally only absorb 20 grams of protein in a meal is outright ludicrous. The body can easily digest and absorb basically infinite amounts of protein in a meal.

Menno Henselmans
There is no practical limit. You'd have to be doing massive food challenge, hot dog eating contest stuff. Even then, it's probably not really a limit. So the problem is that after the digestion and absorption of the protein comes the metabolism stage, and there is a limit to how much muscle protein synthesis the body can stimulate with a single meal. That's called the muscle full effect.

Now, it seems that if you ingest something like whey protein, which is very rapidly absorbed, a very high quality protein in resting conditions, when you are fed 20 grams of protein seems to pretty much maximize muscle protein synthesis over the span of a few hours. However, when we start looking at mixed meals, when we start looking at post workout conditions, protein sources that are not super high quality, not whey protein, things that are matched with fiber, you know, meat, for example, which is much more slowly absorbed, then we see that the absorption limit changes, or that the maximum productive amount of protein that we consume in a meal goes more up to 80 grams, at least 40 grams, and in a recent study, seemingly even 100 grams, at least, if that's pretty much your only meal for a day. So it seems that the body is quite flexible in how it handles protein. If you fasted beforehand, if you had a workout beforehand, the body can use more protein because it wants to build more muscle. So in that sense, the body has adapted, evolutionarily speaking well, to using the protein.

When there is indeed a demand for muscle protein synthesis, like, you can't just eat your way to the olympia, you have to actually stimulate muscle growth, and then the protein will be used for muscle protein synthesis. Right. So when people were saying you can only absorb 20 grams of protein per meal, what they meant was that was what your body can utilize for muscle protein synthesis. And that seems to have a ceiling which is raised through exercise, through a scarcity of protein over the last period, 24 hours, 20, whatever, 30 hours, something like that. And also, presumably, androgens, whether or not you're on testosterone.

Yes. So we have this thing called mtoR, which is a master enzyme, and it integrates all of the signals for protein synthesis. Essentially, it looks at all the factors that govern whether this person needs to get very jacked or whether we are okay with minimal jackedness. And if this person is on a boatload of testosterone, there are lots of amino acids floating around in the blood, and you have thoroughly trashed your muscles with a workout beforehand, then mToR is maximum effort. If, on the other hand, you are rested, well fed, you have not worked out, then mTor is like, eh, we're gonna keep it at this level, right?

Chris Williamson
What is the takeaway for people who are probably training moderately hard, not doing aggressive intermittent fasts once per day. What do you think is an acceptable protein target to hit per meal? I think as long as you distribute it roughly equally over at least three meals per day and you are sandwiching your workouts within a five hour inter meal window, meaning that your workout has to be sandwiched between two workouts within that five hour period so you can shift them. Your workout has to be sandwiched within two workouts. Workout has to be sandwiched in two meals.

Menno Henselmans
Two meals, right, yes, sorry. So you can have a pre workout meal workout 5 hours after another meal, or you can have 5 hours before the workout, 4 hours. Say if your workout is 1 hour, you have the meal, and then right after you have another meal that counts in terms of the sandwiching requirements, and then one other meal somewhat removed from these two other meals, you're probably going to be okay. And at least those meals should all have at least 20 grams of high quality protein, or 0.3 grams protein per kilogram body weight. So that's usually going to be 20 to 40 grams, depending on your size, you're probably fine.

If you want to really optimize muscle growth, maybe you want that fourth meal and to distribute your protein more equally. And so protein, more protein after the workout versus before. Not just right after, but in the periods between the workout and sleep. That seems to be the most important period. Then there's some optimization there.

But for the average gym goer, that's not counting every gram of food free, roughly square meals per day, you're pretty good. Okay, how much protein do you actually need? Because this seems to have been thrown up in the air. Is it 0.3 grams per kilo? Should we get up to 2 grams per kilo?

Chris Williamson
It's all over the place. I conducted the last big meta analysis on this together with true all star team in evidence based circles. As far as that niche goes, and we have started, we found that in line with pretty much every study that's been done, and we have a lot of research on this, that sealing the maximum effect seems to occur at about 1.6 grams per kilogram per day. That's total protein intake per total body weight, which is in freedom units 0.7 grams per pound. So that's pretty much the point at which research no longer finds increases in lean body mass.

Menno Henselmans
If you increase protein intake further, holding meal frequency and the like constant. A recent meta analysis also verified that for strength development, that is also sufficient. They came at 1.5. So almost exactly the same number. I reviewed all of the data on this as one of my very first articles, which actually ranked on number one on Google for a long time because I was one of the first in evidence based fitness that just looked at the data and throughout everything that we thought we knew about how much protein you need, and most of the recommendations came from supplement companies and the like.

And I concluded, actually the number doesn't seem nearly as high as almost everyone recommends. Like, 1 gram per pound was kind of the minimum that was being thrown around recommended. And it seems that quite a bit less is also going to maximize your gains. Now, I typically recommend for maximum gains, 1.8 grams per kilogram, which is 0.82 grams per pound. That will surely maximize muscle growth.

Assuming, again you have those free meals, roughly square meals, and you are not training fast, that you have a post workout meal within at least a few hours after the workout, you're pretty much going to maximize muscle growth. What happens if you eat over that for protein? Does it just get excreted away? Or are you risking maybe gaining unnecessary weight that you don't want? Most of it gets oxidized.

The body doesn't store protein directly as fat, but protein can still contribute to fat gain. In the best controlled research, metabolic ward studies by Bray et al, for example, find that if you increase protein intake far above requirements, it's simply the calories that counts, not the protein per se, but the protein does contribute towards fat gain. There have been some studies that contest this, but they are in free living settings rather than a controlled metabolic word. So I put a lot more stock into the most controlled data. It's just practically difficult, though, to really overeat on protein, because if you go up to, like, four gram per kilogram, you get people around you do not like it.

You yourself do not like it. It's just impractical. Dude, no one has ever accidentally fallen into doing more than a gram per pound. No one accidentally does that. Unless this is the one day where you go to a brazilian steakhouse, one of those things with the fucking ping pong paddles that's green and they just keep bringing you meat.

Chris Williamson
No one does that by accident. You have to work hard to think. You just don't tumble into that much meat, so. Okay, well, I mean, that's, I guess, kind of a stress alleviating for a lot of people that were, you know, I'm probably pretty average weight for most of the guys that are watching, like, 84 kilos, which I think is like, maybe 100, 8185, something like that. In terms of.

But for me to think, okay, I need to get at least 1 gram per pound of body weight. Like 180 grams of protein per day is, to be honest, unreasonable to expect that you're going to get it from food, which means that you then, okay, well, I'll put a shake in. Oh, maybe I'll do a double scoop shake. Okay, well, there's 40, but that's still 140. Right?

Okay, so I have three meals of 40 grams, which is a lot. That's a ton of meat each time, three times throughout the day, which means I've got a big breakfast and I'm still under. I'm like, right, okay, well, I better have. And then you start looking at stuff that, should I really be using this as, like, the basis for my nutrition? Protein bars and stuff like that.

So reassuring for those of us trying to hit our protein goals. It's interesting that you say that. I fully agree with that. Funny enough, when you mention this to most people that I would consider serious lifters. They're like, it's super easy.

Menno Henselmans
But it's only super easy because we as serious lifters have pretty much revolved our whole lives around getting that protein. No, we've gaslit ourselves into believing that 180 grams of protein per day is an acceptable way to live a dietary life. Yeah, that's a normal, regular amount, but only indeed when you have set your whole life around a meal being protein. Like we think, oh, we need a meal. And the first thing you think about is, oh, how do we get protein?

And with that mindset, it's not so difficult. And the difference between 0.82 grams per pound or 1 gram per pound is not massive. But I find in practice, for a lot of people, especially people that are not super hardcore about going to the gym, it makes a substantial difference. And also it introduces some fattier foods, maybe even cheese, as potential protein sources. Yeah.

So it actually makes a significant difference in terms of what you can eat. And it doesn't just have to be tilapia filet. Think about. Here was a study that people keep on bringing up to me about how participants are given a shake of some kind and they're told that it's either high calorie or low calorie, and their expectation of the caloric amount contained within this shake has an effect on how they metabolize it, how their body uses it, how much truth was in that. Study, it has a significant effect on the satiety or the satiation of the shake.

It can also influence energy levels. But depending on how motivated and serious you are as a lifter, it has minimal effect on actual exercise performance and those more objective measures. So the reason that I was thinking about that was if bodybuilders, every bro listening for the last decade has been thinking, oh, another day not hitting my protein goals. I only managed to get 160 grams of protein in per day. I have to presume that there's a little bit of cortisol that's going to get released from that.

Chris Williamson
If nothing else, just the texture of your own sort of phenomenological existence is going to be like, ugh, God, I don't feel like I did the thing today. I didn't tick the box. I'm not feeling like as satisfied as I should be. Because you have this potentially, according to science, wildly fucking unreasonable goal of 1 gram per pound of body weight. It's like, no.

Menno Henselmans
I think the most interesting study of placebo and nocebo effects, which is most effects that you're touching on here, is when they give people fake steroids. And this is a mind blowing study. Probably wouldn't pass ethics committees anymore. It's quite old, but they gave a bunch of already well trained lifters essentially fake dianable. So they told them it was steroids.

Like androgenic anabolic steroids were in there. In reality it was a placebo. And the gains they got were massive. So these were well trained lifters and they got very serious additional gains in a span of eight weeks. Essentially the level of what you would expect from low dose actual steroids.

Chris Williamson
Wow. So the mindset and the effect of believing that you can make greater gains. Or any other, it's all in your mind. That's huge. Stop lifting these weights.

Stop going into the gym and sweating and spending all your time around men. Just believe that you can gain and that's what you need. There's a book called the Expectation Effect by David Robson and it's outstanding. My two favorite ones from that gluten intolerances have ten x'd in the last sort of 30 years. Unbelievable increase.

And you know that maybe there's more gluten in food. I'm open to that as a potential explanation. Maybe the type of metabolic sort of environment that people are in means that gluten, they're more susceptible to gluten y problems, something like that. I don't know. Maybe it's degradation of our microbiome or maybe it's all of the news articles telling you how bad that gluten is for you.

So the researchers brought participants into the room, sit them all down, feed everybody the same meal. They tell everybody in the room that this meal's got gluten in it. There isn't gluten in the entire building. Five minutes later, people are breaking out in hives, they're running to the toilet with diarrhea, they're vomiting, they've got inflammation, they've got headaches, they're unbalanced, they've got vertigo. No gluten in the entire building.

So that was the first one, but the second one, this is the best one. And it relates to, I guess, what you do. Participants were split into, um, two groups. 50% of each group had an equal proportion of people who do and don't have a particular genetic mutation that allows them to blow off CO2 more effectively. Apparently, this is not that uncommon in the population that people are.

They tend to be more efficient breathers, basically, which is also correlated with their ability to be good at cardio. Group a. Half and half do and don't have the genetic mutation. And they're told you do have the genetic mutation, you should be really good at this. Group B.

Half and half do and don't have it. They're told you don't have the genetic mutation. This might be a little bit tough. Shock horror. The group that was told that they did have the genetic mutation, they outperformed.

Interestingly, the people who didn't have the mutation, but were told that they did outperformed. On average, the people who did have the genetic mutation but were told that they didn't. So David coined this term, which was, your expectations are even more powerful than your genesis. In some instances, yes. There's similar research, actually, on caffeine, where the effect of believing you are on caffeine is stronger than the objective effects of being on caffeine without knowing it.

God, that's so funny. The Diana Ball one's wild. Well, I mean, there's also. There's a justification, I think, for why you should always buy the name brand painkillers. Because even though you know that the literal makeup of the drug is the same, the expectation of it being neurofen as opposed to CV's own brand, is so great that it's actually worth buying it because the painkilling effect will be increased.

Menno Henselmans
Yeah, I personally actually drink Red Bull or energy drink in general, even though research quite clearly shows that it works no better than just anhydrous caffeine, just caffeine powder. In fact, it might work a little bit worse, according to some research, but I, for one, prefer the taste. And subjectively, I do feel, which is most likely a placebo effect, but I do feel more, and it's very persistent. So I'm sticking with the energy drinks. Rory Sutherland has this idea about Red Bull, and he says that they purposefully dialed the taste back of Red Bull to make it taste a little bit worse than it needed to, because humans associate poor tasting liquids with medicinal properties.

Chris Williamson
Like, there's no medicine that you were used to having that tasted like strawberry dreamsicle, unicorn dust, or whatever new bang flavor gets released. And the fact that Red Bull does it is kind of herbal. It's a little bit bitter. It probably could be a little bit sweeter. Like, it's, you know, you get to know the taste of it, but it's, you wouldn't go as far as to say from first principles, oh, this is like an optimal human fucking palate tasting drink.

And yet he thinks that, and I think he's probably right. The oddness of the taste kind of played into the magical. We don't know why it's working, but we think it's working properties. When it first got released, it could be. I personally wouldn't say it about Red Bull, but I know that there are products where that is actually being done.

Menno Henselmans
For example, parodontax, toothpaste is horrible, absolutely horrible. And they made a big deal out of it being, I think it's also natural and whatever, some other stuff that doesn't really matter for your teeth, but mainly it's disgusting. It's absolutely horrible. But they had a doctor saying it's better than the others, and the others are chemical and whatever, and this is how natural toothpaste tastes like. And it was a wild success for some time.

I think eventually people realized that it just wasn't worth it. Yeah. Like the enjoyment, dude, of having minty, fresh breath. Yeah. Okay, so something else that I guess during mine and your trajectory of bro lifting on the Internet has come and gone, and I wonder whether or not it's going to come back is flexible dieting or if it fits your macros.

Chris Williamson
What is your post mortem on? If it fits your macros as a diet methodology, if it fits your macros. Which is the idea that only the macronutrients you eat count, it doesn't matter where they come from, whether it's McDonald's or protein shake or super healthy whole foods paleo meal. In the end, all that matters for at least your gains, like fat loss and the like, is your micronutrient intakes. Like the amount of protein in particular, and the amount of total calories in particular, that has largely been validated in the sense that those are by far the most important factors.

Menno Henselmans
And there have been numerous studies and individuals showing that even on an absolutely terrible, super unhealthy diet, you can still lose fat, at least theoretically speaking, as long as you get that low energy intake. It's just a whole lot harder to do it with junk foods because it's so easy to overeat on them. You want a high fiber intake and the like for satiety normally to make it long term sustainable. And in general, I think that has been a very, very positive development. It ended for at least some parts of fitness.

The debate between high carb, low carb, all these things, they are not nearly as important as total energy intake. You know, whether you consume super blueberry, superfood, or whether you're eating Twinkies, your total energy intake is by far the most important factor that influences whether you lose fat or not. If you are in energy deficit, regardless of diet quality, you are most likely going to lose fat. So in that sense, I think if it fits your macros and what later became flexible dieting has been a godsend for the fitness community as a whole. But a lot of people certainly took it to extremes, and it is not the case that the effect is exactly the same.

Like fiber does have some firmic advantage, protein does also have a firmic advantage. The type of carbohydrate. It seems that there are some effects. There was a recent study that probiotics, prebiotics and the like may also have a few percent effect. But even if you add all of that together, you're getting maybe 5%, 10% total difference in fat loss.

So for most intensive purposes, it's just how much protein are you consuming? What's your total energy intake across the week, even, not even across the day or whatever, and that determines your fat loss. So that's the positive legacy of if. It fits your macros, what about the negative legacy of it? I think it's scared or it drove a lot of people away from healthy eating.

And when you look not short term, but long term, most people, like in decades, not months or years, which is long term for a lot of people in fitness, but really in what we are interested in as individuals, or at least what I try to teach clients and students, is how are you going to live for the next 2030 years, the next decades of your life? How are you going to age? And if you look at it that way, even calorie tracking in general is not the most sustainable strategy for most individuals. It is great to develop calorie awareness, but long term, you probably want to transition away from that and actually start thinking of food choices that allow you to eat ad libitum as much as you want without having to track every single gram of food that you're eating and making sure that, oh, yes, I can be super flexible now because my macros are correct, but you are being exceedingly inflexible in the sense that you are literally weighing every gram of food that you're eating. And that has, I think, done some damage.

And it's also why things like paleo do work quite well for a lot of individuals. Even though in the end, yes, it's all about calories and protein, it does work. When you instruct people, you give them relatedness and a frame of mindset. Certain foods that are better than others, these are satiating foods that they can eat as much as they want out. Of course, people also take that to extremes and start making paleo cookies and stuff.

But that aside, it gives a frame of reference some foods that are better than others. And most people long term do well on that, and it's quite sustainable. So I think we have to strike a bit of a balance between what is theoretically the answer and what works in practice long term. Yeah, I mean, all of me and my friends, when we found out, oh, you mean I can get shredded on Haribo, we were like, this is Haribo. It is.

Chris Williamson
This is magic. I mean, I can do, like, I get to eat cheesecake and I can get Lena, but practically, you know, it's one of those things fantastic works in theory, but does it work in practice? And I just struggle with it. You know, you're playing with fire. It's like dicking about with nuclear grade weapons, uranium.

Because like, all right, if you're going to use Haribo as part of your carb source for the day, that's fine, but it's really hard to stop eating once you've started. And you only need to go over by three haribo. And that's like a non insignificant amount of fucking sugar that you've gone over your very tight amount of calories for the day. So, yes, I think it was fun. It was a fun period to be involved in where I would have birthday cake on an evening time, dude.

Carb backloading. Carb backloading. Another one when I thought that was skip loading. You remember that? You remember skip loading?

Every Sunday I'd go to Waitro. Oh, dude, skip loading was crazy. So skip loading was basically like carb night, but once per week. And the goal on the Sunday was to maximize as many, like half a kilo of carbs if you could do it on a Sunday. And it was like a metabolic reset, you know, so that your metabolic base rate didn't drop too low because you were going to keep on.

Yeah, like, but like just a single really fucking aggressive refeed once per week, dude. So much like horseshit experimentation in my background. Okay, you mentioned caffeine earlier on. What have you learned recently about caffeine? I think that most of the effects of caffeine, in light of that earlier study that we talked about and most research in general, suggests that caffeine is by and large a psychological aid.

Menno Henselmans
It does very little long term. If you look at studies where people are given caffeine for a period of weeks and you look at how much muscle they're gaining, how much fat are they losing, much strength are they gaining? In the vast majority of research, there is no effect on those measures, even if acutely. If you give people a boatload of caffeine, they do perform a little bit better in certain conditions. And it also seems that if you narrow it down to, like, which individuals respond better, it works better when you are sleep deprived, it works better in the morning, it works better in individuals that are not as well trained, which all shows that, or all trends in the direction of.

If you are well rested and you are super motivated, then the effect is probably not really there. Maybe you can use a little bit of a kick in the ass, but for most individuals it's going to be a marginal effect. The long term, it's pretty trivial. So I think people should use it that way as a psychological aid. And it's very easy to overdo it on caffeine.

The main problem for a lot of individuals is that caffeine seems like magic, and therefore you can solve a lot of life's problems, including the ones created by caffeine, with more caffeine, or so it seems. And you run into this negative spiral where caffeine starts interfering with sleep quality. And the effect of that in the latest meta analysis is present for 13 hours for the average individual, if it's a good dose, some 7 hours even at a low dose. And some research even finds that a strong double espresso in the morning, like 200 milligrams, caffeine still affects objective measures of sleep quality at night, which is long after the subjective effects have waned off. And then you enter into this spiral where you consume more caffeine, worse sleep, more caffeine, worse sleep, and in the end, you're just consuming a lot of caffeine, and it feels like you're functioning better than you were before.

But in reality, the caffeine is simply keeping you at baseline, so you are not improving your cognitive functions, your life, or anything. You are simply using the caffeine to be where you would be if you were well rested and not using any caffeine. I'm not saying don't use any caffeine. I'm just saying it's a drug. Most people don't even realize it's a drug.

Use it as a drug, not as a supplement or not as food, where it's just like, use it just to use it, actually see whether you get an effect out of it. Monitor if you're still getting a similar effect or if you're not getting massive tolerance. Can you function after one day without caffeine, or do you get massive headaches and are you intolerable? Those are indications. Maybe dial it back.

And the good news is, only a few days will resensize your receptors to almost 100%. It's nine days after massive tolerance. So just a few days for most. Individuals, nine days for someone who is completely dependent on caffeine will reset them back to baseline. So why is that so fast?

Chris Williamson
Is that it's just acting so directly on the adenosine receptors and they seem to be quite robust at. At kind of going back to baseline. Yeah. It is a relatively safe drug in that sense, compared to, say, heroin.

That's what I want all drugs to be compared to. It's a relatively safe drug. Dot, dot, dot. Compared to heroin. Yeah.

Menno Henselmans
It's still easy to abuse, but the abuse effects are not nearly as bad as that of the drugs that are commonly banned. Because people would abuse them, right? Yes. What about the difference between caffeine and pre workouts? I haven't used pre workout for quite a while.

Chris Williamson
Probably five or six years. Did for a long time the world of Jack three d and no explode and stuff, and then dipped out. Presumably, the technology, whatever that means behind pre workouts, has continued to get complex. I know there's no stim pre workouts now. I don't even know what that means.

Talk to me. What's the science say about pre workouts for improving performance? That versus caffeine. If you are using a pre workout, what should you look for? Et cetera, et cetera.

Menno Henselmans
We never advanced past jacked. We peaked. We peaked in 2011. Jacked was peak pre workout. Okay.

Chris Williamson
Okay. Okay. Yeah. Jacked was not so safe, actually. But caffeine is pretty much as good as it gets.

Menno Henselmans
And funny enough, most comparisons involving caffeine with pre workouts find that anhydrous caffeine, which is caffeine powder or pills, works a little bit better. It also works a little bit better in at least a few studies than coffee. And it works better in at least some research than pre workout formulations. It seems that there are some negative interactions there. They're small, and if you like your pre workout, it's fine, because in the end, it's almost a psychological effect anyway.

But there is some negative interaction, it seems, between at least caffeine and creatine, and possibly between caffeine and citrulline or beta alanine, one of the more popular reworkouts that are at least somewhat promising in terms of supplements. So, by and large, I would say just consume what you feel best or what you like best. But you don't have to spend a lot of money on fancy pre workouts. They're absolutely not essential. In fact, they are pretty much useless for the vast majority of products.

So if you like your coffee, if you like your Red Bull, or if you want the theoretically best, just anhydrous caffeine, I don't care about the bitterness and I care about my wallet. Then, you know, just use caffeine powder. You can dose it super accurately. So that is the theoretically optimal solution, I suppose. But, yeah, no pre workouts.

I have very little regard for their efficacy. What about fat burners? Do fat burners work? No. There have been a couple reviews which all essentially concluded that fat burners don't actually burn fat.

At best, they increase energy expenditure a little bit and maybe decrease your appetite. The best ones are illegal, though, and they are decidedly worse than, for example, fiber supplements. And even those are not great because of the digestive side effects, so you're better getting it from food. But, for example, fiber supplements somewhat reliably result in fat loss because when people supplement fiber, it decreases their appetite, it makes them fuller, they eat less, and therefore they lose fat. Fat burners maybe increase energy expenditure a few percent over a few hours until you become tolerant to them.

And that goes for caffeine and pretty much everything else that works. And it's now illegal. Like jacked. God damn it. An FDA ruining the party, as per usual.

Chris Williamson
Isn't it interesting that so many of the things that we've spoken about so far today are to do with satiety, that there's this, you know, it's such a like principle, such an underlying fundamental principle of you have a degree of hunger, how much is that going to make you eat? And then what are the foods that you're choosing? How calorie dense are they? How palatable are they? How sick do you get of eating them?

I had a conversation with Johann Hari about his new book, Magic Pill, about ozempic, and it's crazy just how much of modern human weight gain downstream. Health problems, heart disease, stroke, all of that stuff is just food is way easier to over consume because of how palatable it is and way more calorie dense than it was typically and designed. So. And like, what? Pretty much everything that we're doing now is to try and like, oh, well, if you eat more fiber, fiber actually takes up room and real estate in your stomach, and that means that you can't take it up with Pringles or whatever.

Like, so much of what we're doing is just basically trying to compensate for this evolutionarily mismatched diet environment. Yes. A good frame of mind that I like to use is that you have a certain amount of appetite units every day, and you have to fill those up, because realistically speaking, long term, you're not just going to be hungry every day. Nobody is six pack lean, and they're like, yeah, I've been hungry for ten years, bro, but look at these abs. Nobody wants that.

Menno Henselmans
So in the end, not being hungry, at least up to a certain point, is essentially a long term requirement to be sustainable and happy. So you want to fill up those appetite units, and there are different foods that have a certain different number of units that they fill up. So if you have Haribo, it fills up very few units, but it has a lot of calories. And then there are other foods that fill up a lot of those units, vegetables in particular, for very few calories. And that in itself, or that, by and large, is the puzzle that we have to solve for fat loss.

Like, you want to get your protein in and you want to fill up those appetite units. And I like to have the frame of reference that most meals should have a protein source and a filler, something that fills you up without having a lot of calories, and you want to get your protein. And protein also helps itself as a filler. But usually you want something like vegetables, potatoes, depending on preparation, something with fiber and some more volume to fill you up with that mindset. I think for most individuals, you can have very good fat loss diets that are long term sustainable without even necessarily tracking your calorie intake and weighing every gram of food that you eat.

Chris Williamson
Yeah, well, I suppose what you're trying to do by weighing the food is to reverse engineer the environment that you would get into if you did what you're talking about. In any case, yes, and it is exceptionally beneficial to count your macros to weigh your foods for at least a few weeks, if you've never done it, to develop calorie awareness and it will blow your mind. And when you have that calorie awareness, then eventually when you have created a sustainable meal plan, which is also extremely beneficial. One of the most important predictors of long term diet success, people having a meal plan that they created, that they like, which is satiating and satisfying, and when they have that, then transitioning away from counting is essentially as simple as not doing it anymore. Because when you have a fixed meal plan and you know that what you're eating, then you don't have to track it anymore because you're eating the same things anyway.

Menno Henselmans
Now, then you can change the portion sizes and the like a little bit, but by and large, when you found that with calorie tracking, these foods fill you up without resulting in overeating, then you don't actually have to track anymore. So tracking is a great first step to allow you long term to transition away from tracking. Because I think most individuals will not want to track their macros over the next decades of their life. Yeah, I feel like two other areas that you need to pay the price upfront at some point is time blocking or some kind of sort of calendar tracking Pomodoro technique. I need to learn the physics of how productivity works thing.

Chris Williamson
I think that's important. Even if you end up coming full circle around to I just do what feels good, bro, on each day. But you actually understand what deep work is, and you kind of understand that time times intensity equals work done and so on and so forth. What are the constituent parts? Kind of.

And the other one is, I'm a huge fan of sleep trackers for nothing else than to red pill you on. Hey, you're not getting as much sleep as you thought you were. And it's like 70% as much sleep as you thought you were. It's way less. It's the same as you thought you were in a surplus.

No, you're not. You thought. You thought you were in a deficit. No, you're not. You're in a huge surplus, like 500 calories off because you forget about that banana that you had and that little bag of chocolate.

And you got some crisps from the draw earlier on. But yeah, with sleep, it's exactly the same thing. Well, I was in bed for 8 hours. No, you weren't. You were in bed for 7 hours 15.

And of 7 hours 15, you were asleep for 6 hours 20. So you got 6 hours 20, and you told yourself you got eight. And that's just like a, like a sniper looking down the scope of his rifle. It's an adjustment that you need to kind of really only make maybe once every couple of years to just remind yourself of, oh yeah, that thing about I don't sleep anywhere near as much as I thought. Oh yeah, that thing about I eat 500 calories more than my brain tells me that I did.

Menno Henselmans
Sleep is another one of those things where we have kind of come full circle with sleep tracking technology, where now we have all of these smartwatches and a lot of tracking devices. And before that, we just had gold standard polysomnography, which measures your brain waves and heart rhythm and a lot of different things. That's the gold standard. And when you really look at what the validity of all those devices is, then in the end, it aligns up pretty well with, do you wake up naturally and do you feel refreshed? If you wake up naturally and you feel refreshed, you could do this with the Pittsburgh Sleep quality index or anything less informal.

Literally, just ask yourself those questions. And if the answer is yes, then your sleep quality is probably good. And if you wake up with an alarm, indeed, after six and a half hours of sleep, and you're like, oh my God, no. And you're like, yeah, I had enough sleep. No, you didnt.

Chris Williamson
Yeah, yeah. Theres a really great study that was done where they paid people to fall asleep faster, and the control group was people who werent paid to fall asleep, and the control group that werent paid fell asleep more quickly than the group that were. Yes. Happiness, sleep and productivity, to an extent, are extremely deceptive areas to optimize. Because the process of optimization itself deters from attaining the end goal.

Yes, yes, yes. Very odd. There needs to be a name for that. Like it's inversely, inversely productive or something like that. Because it is.

It is. The harder that you try to achieve these things, often the more difficult it is. And in some ways, there's very little that benefits from more cortisol. There's not much stuff where you think, oh yeah, my outcome in x domain would be improved if I was more stressed and the very act of applying pressure to yourself to achieve the thing induces the stress, which probably makes the achievement of almost anything harder. Definitely.

Okay, talk to me. Given that we're on sleep, talk to me about the relationship between sleep, fat loss, muscle gain, beyond I want to wake up feeling rested and not like I want to shoot myself in the head. What happens to our bodies based on the amount of sleep that we get? So the traditional kind of bro mindset to that, which is also how I used to think about it, is that sleep is somewhere quite low on the hierarchy, where we know it's important, but not nearly as important as how many sets of biceps curls do I do and how much protein am I consuming at lunchtime. Right.

Menno Henselmans
In reality, that hierarchy is completely upside down. Sleep has massive effects on, well, everything, but also fat loss and muscle growth. So there have been at least four studies, to my knowledge, that have found very significant effects of sleep restriction, in particular on reduced fat loss, reduced muscle growth, reduced strength development. And the effects in multiple of those studies are over 50%. So there was one study where they contrasted, I believe, seven and a half and five and a half hours of sleep.

And the group with just 2 hours of sleep deprivation essentially lost essentially half the amount of fat and double the amount of muscle. So the effects on your body composition during a fat loss diet, which is how most people, or how most of the studies have looked at it, is massive. It's not on the scale of how many grams of carb do I have at lunch? It's on the scale of am I even going to the gym? So sleep is right up there with just the big effects, like high protein diet, resistance training, decent number, total volume, or decent total volume of resistance training.

Sleep is pretty much right up there with the pillars, the fundamentals. It's not something to optimize. It's one of the pillars. It is the thing. Yeah.

Chris Williamson
Wow. Sleeping 5 hours instead of seven and a half hours reduces fat loss and increases muscle loss by over 50%.

So that's in a fat loss phase. Presumably the effect is exactly the same. That doesn't matter whether you're in calorie deficit or calorie surplus, your muscle, would it reduce muscle gain by. I'm trying to work out what the converse of this would be. I think during a bulking phase, like an energy surplus, the effect would be less.

Menno Henselmans
And the most drastic effects are found in the studies where they have weight loss diets. It might be the interaction that sleep deprivation and stress have a very negative interaction effect, like if you have a certain amount of stress that you experience and you're well rested, you can tolerate it. But when you're also sleep deprived, it has a very negative interaction effect where the stress interferes further with your sleep quality. And because you are not well rested, you also respond a lot more adversely to the stress. And it's probably the same in this sense, but we don't have a lot of research on that.

So that's largely speculative on my part. I would suspect that the effects are in significant part mediated by diet adherence. And no matter how well you try to control it, in research, there's always a limit to how people actually follow the programs. Yeah, because someone who sleeps for five or five and a half hours a night are more likely to overeat the next day. They're going to have a preference for salty and sugary foods they're going to lean into more highly.

Chris Williamson
Their willpower is going to be decreased. Maybe it's because the fact that they're trying to get into the gym and even just like, for like, you want 5 hours sleep versus you want seven and a half hours sleep, what's your training look like? The training's going to suck. So we don't need to get into the, you know, cortisol sympathetic arousal state of your body throughout the day. It's like, hey, just your training sucks on 5 hours of sleep.

Menno Henselmans
Yeah. If you don't give it maximum effort, then all the optimization in the world is not going to matter. What about artificial sweeteners? Has anything new come out recently? In my view, artificial sweeteners and low calorie sweeteners in general are by and large safe and very effective for fat loss.

There have been multiple studies where they found that it can even help with diet adherence. And at worst, they are equal to water. So they don't stimulate blood sugar response, they don't affect your insulin. And this is not just me saying it's actually pretty much all the big scientific institutions that agree with this, just not the media headlines, which are very keen to take a rat study where they have dosages that are the equivalent of consuming like 200 cans of Diet Coke per day. And then if you do that for the equivalent of a lifetime, then there is an increase in the number of tumors that are found in this group versus the other group.

So there have been numerous organizations, the European Union, FDA, that have looked at pretty much all of the popular sweeteners, especially aspartame and sucralose, and concluded that they are safe. Gut, microbiome also, in most well controlled studies, not on effect now, are they 100% perfectly safe for your whole life, regardless of dosage? No, definitely not regardless of dosage. And when you consume them for decades, is there potential for harm? Sure.

It's still something that we have not fully researched. Like, we don't have randomized controlled tiles spanning 50 years, but you also have to weigh the pros with the cons. So there are potential negative health effects. Maybe not really in the best controlled research, but at least in animal research with super high dosages and stuff, you have to weigh that with the better diet adherence that you might get with the higher satisfaction from your diet, with just the enjoyment of consuming foods that you like to eat more when they are sweeter, with the fact that maybe now you're eating vegetables instead of something with a lot more sugar, because you can sweeten the vegetables and it's not okay for you. So you have to weigh all of these positives with any potential negatives.

And in that sense, I think for most individuals, on practical basis, sweeteners are a net positive. If you don't want to use sweeteners, fine. But if it helps you with fat loss, and that in itself is probably going to affect your, then that in itself is probably going to more positively affect your health than any negatives of their consumption. Yes, that if the choice is between high calorie drink containing a shitload of sugar and you getting a trace amount of fucking ace k or something, we probably take that.

Chris Williamson
I found it really interesting takeaway from Johan on that book about Ozempic, and he kind of created a kind of like a taxonomy, or like he stratified out people into BMIs and said, anybody under BMI 27, he thinks there's no real benefit. This is largely for aesthetic reasons. And there's all of these downstream health risks that may be worrying. 27 to 35 is the gray area in which, where he said, you know, it really depends on kind of what you're trying to achieve, because you're going to discriminate, it seems more muscle loss than fat loss. By using Ozempic, you get ozempic face, which is this sort of new trend that's going on, said over 35, consult your doctor, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But I think that the risks of Ozempic seem to be less than the risk of you being a BMI of 37 or something like that. And I think that looking at, you know, this sort of cost benefit analysis, even when it comes to artificial sweeteners, like what? What's the alternative? If you are someone with a sweet tooth and you need to put something away to satiate that desire on a regular basis, the choice between, I mean, how many is like 250 calories, probably 40 grams of sugar in a diet, in a normal coke, something like that. It'S usually like 50 calories per hundred milliliters.

Menno Henselmans
Most soft drink products. Okay, yeah. So not far off. What about how effective are artificial sweeteners at satiating our desire for sweet stuff? Because there's an argument to be made that you're conditioning your palate to like sweet things, and by having your xevia during the day, you're then, you know, going to relapse with cheesecake on a nighttime.

Chris Williamson
Is there anything to do with that? There is something there, but it's not different between sweeteners and any other sweet food. So sweeteners don't hijack any of the systems in your brain or anything like that. They can be very sweet, of course. And in general, humans learn to like what they eat.

Menno Henselmans
It's funny, people think that they don't eat things because they don't like them. The research actually shows that we learn to like the foods we eat. So we like foods because we eat them. In part, of course, we also eat food because we like them. But you can actually retrain your brain and even your reward pathways in your brain to like vegetables, for example.

And you can see that when you do brain scans with people that have eaten vegetables for a long time, the reward pathways actually light up more in their brain when they're used to vegetables. Now, a similar thing can occur with salty food, sweet food, anything. So if you eat a lot of sweet foods, you might like sweet food more and it might increase your, what? Level of sweetness you find agreeable. But it's very context specific, it's limited.

And as long as you can satisfy that with your sweeteners, there is not really a problem there. So I don't think that there's anything malicious there in terms of sweeteners having these negative effects. I can't believe that you suggested somebody putting sweeteners on vegetables. That seems like a. I don't know, I've never even, I've never even considered it.

Chris Williamson
Who knew that I could just sprinkle some splendor across broccoli and it would taste nice? It's amazing. Broccoli, maybe not, but I add sweetener to almost everything I put in my soy sauce. Yeah. So.

Oh, my God, what is wrong with you? It works super well if you eat, for example, pasta or tomato soup. And what is the difference between, like, a super good, high quality tomato soup and a really average one? It's the level of sweetness, by and large. So, and I've actually tested this with individuals.

Menno Henselmans
If you give them, like, canned tomatoes with a little bit of sucralose, they'll be like, mmm, that is good. And then you can tell them like, yeah, fresh from Italy. Best tomato quality. I doubt many people will tell the difference between higher quality tomatoes that are naturally sweeter versus cheaper ones with a little bit of sucralose in it. Wow, I didn't realize everybody that comes around to your house for dinner is now going to know that they're being cooked by splendor.

Chris Williamson
You're just secretly lining up splendor in the kitchen and they don't know. Okay. One of the other areas that I've been pretty interested in recently is high protein versus low protein for longevity. There's a whole bunch of people, many of whom have been on the show, Brian Johnson, Rich Roll, Peter Diamandis, all of whom are concerned about mtor activation and the amount of protein that you're having. And how definitively, in your opinion, can the science tell us the outcomes of high protein versus low protein diets when it comes to, let's say, health span?

Menno Henselmans
I'm personally not very concerned about that. And again, it's a consideration of pros and cons, because we know that there are decisive health benefits of high protein diets in fighting sarcopenia, in reducing diabetes, and a lot of positive effects. So these have to be weighed against any potential negative effect. And I think that the concerns with mtor and the like are generally overblown. Most of the best controlled long term trials and cross sectional studies.

So, epidemiological research, they do not find that protein intake has a significant relationship with all cause mortality, and there are health benefits. So that would suggest that there's also no effect on longevity. The research on mtor and the like is somewhat concerning in the lab, but we have to weigh that against the tissue specific effects that we get in real life. So just like muscle tissue, just like you cannot eat your way to the Olympia with more protein, the same is true for mtor activation in other tissues. You cannot just eat more protein and enlarge your heart, for example.

Fortunately, it doesn't work that way. So it's also not the case that just eating more protein, everything's just going to get bigger and you're going to get tumors everywhere. You're going to get cancer. Right? So the fact that you get mtor activation in muscle tissue, nobody gets muscle cancer.

So that's by and large not a concern. Bicep cancer, which everyone's worried about. Yeah. So in general, I think the rationale, the mechanisms there, there is cause for concern. But the current research does not point towards negative effects.

In the longest randomized controlled trials, we don't see negative health effects. And in the associative long term research, we don't see effects on all cause mortality. There was actually also in that study where they looked at protein intakes up to 100 grams, and if that still contributes to protein synthesis, they also looked at autophagy and it was not affected actually by high protein attacks. It's also tissue specific. And by and large, I think in particular, if protein helps you stay lean, that is going to be worth more than any negative effects of protein attack, because we know that if there's one thing that will extend your lifespan, it's probably caloric restriction, which translates into being and staying lean long term.

I think those positive effects will be. Much more important on the scales of time. When you say staying lean, how can someone normal, what's the adjudication, the metric that they. I'm staying lean. I am within a healthy, whatever.

Chris Williamson
What does that mean? At least not overweight by conventional standards. But based on what? BMI? Yeah, if you're not doing strength training, then BMI is probably fine.

Menno Henselmans
If you have some estimate of your body fat percentage, then you want to be below about 21% for men and below 33%, 31% for women. Just to interject that, everyone that listens to this podcast is jacked, everyone trains. So given that BMI becomes a more, yet a less useful metric, I suppose because it can't account for where is this weight being held? And muscle is pretty dense, how should someone balance off? Okay, I'm not at 21%.

Chris Williamson
I'm. I walk around at 17% body fat or something like that. Is there still a consideration? Would you still have a particular consideration when it comes to bmI? I just.

The total amount of stress on your system from holding weight. I don't know how many people are going to be high bmi, 17% at like getting into this realm, but there may be some mass monsters listening that would be interested. That's a very good question. For body fat, it seems pretty much that lower is better for most health markers up to the levels where people don't go anyway, because it's unsustainable for muscle growth, most of the research is only positive. So in that sense, you would think bodybuilders are going to be insanely healthy, at least the natural ones, because they're jacked and they're super lean.

Menno Henselmans
However, there is something to be said about having very high body mass, putting stress on the heart. There is ventricular hypertrophy. You are lugging around a lot of meat, and it does put strain on the tissue. So maybe the engine burns up quicker, but it also adapts. We know with loading of the spine, for example, that power lifters lift loads that untrained individuals would not be able to without basically shattering their whole spine apart.

And the spine adapts, it can learn to tolerate those loads. And the heart is also very adaptive, and that's the driver of the cardiovascular health. So in that sense, I'm also not super concerned, especially not when we're talking about natural ranges. Right, so you're saying that your natty limit will probably cap out the leanness plus BMI equation that we're trying to come up with here, because, let's face it, you're just not going to get that big. Right?

You're not going to be a Ronnie Coleman. Right. That's good. In one way. That's kind of.

Chris Williamson
I know it's sad for those of us that just want linear growth across our time in terms of lean body mass, but it is nice that there's this kind of like a built in failsafe that presumably ancestrally would have been pretty rare to have tapped. I don't know how many nomadic hunter gatherers 50,000 years ago were dying soon because they were just too jacked and lean. But given that we now have all of this luxury time to go and lift things and put them down in the same place in an air conditioned room that we still presuming, again, that you stay natural, we still do have this kind of ceiling. And maybe that is the thing around about that, where you go, hmm. Until the time that I start taking androgens, I'm probably going to be fine.

And this just gain as much muscle as possible. You're probably going to be fine. You don't need to really worry about lugging around all of that extra weight. Yes. In particular, because I would, again go back to the cost benefit analysis.

Menno Henselmans
We know that muscle growth is very effective at lowering blood sugar levels and increasing insulin sensitivity. It's like you have a huge sponge where they could always absorb a lot of blood sugar. So being jacked is actually insanely effective at preventing type two diabetes. It's almost impossible to get type two diabetes without a huge genetic propensity if you are lean and jacked. And indeed, in research, we see that people that lose a lot of fat and build muscle, they can effectively cure or reduce all the symptoms of type two diabetes, sometimes in a matter of eight weeks.

There have been some studies, no way. Massive effect. Because, again, it's both of those things. Fat loss and muscle growth are both exceptionally effective at reducing fasting blood sugar levels and improving insulin sensitivity. That is not just a concern for diabetes, because it's also why diabetes is such a big problem.

Blood sugar levels or your average blood sugar exposure and your insulin sensitivity are quite strongly associated with your chronic or systemic level of inflammation. And that, in turn, is associated with pretty much every health predicament there is. So everything that the path for you is pretty much associated with systemic inflammation, all the leading causes of death. And because of that positive effect on insulin sensitivity, and thereby on reducing your systemic inflammation level, I think that the effects of muscle mass, again, in line with most of the research that we have, are positive up to the nadimax. Now, maybe there is research.

We don't have a lot of research on super Jack guys, but again, sticking with what we know is probably positive. That is an area that I'm not really too sure why, but continuous glucose monitors talk of reducing insulin sensitivity, blood sugar levels, glucose monitoring, all of this stuff. That's like a new wave. I think that I wasn't really hearing too much about. I would say the first time I heard about it was carb backloading, skip loading, carb night, that stuff, because that was the way that you portion off carbs, and your insulin sensitivity is decreased later in the day, which you can partition it more effective.

Chris Williamson
Some bullshit I can't remember, but this is now it's a big deal. You've got Karen, mother of two and a half golden retrievers wearing a CGM.

How legit is using that kind of technology to inform us? And what should people that are using that take away from it? What's real and what's rubbish? Well, I think the biggest factors are simply being jacked on lean. So all comes back.

I love the fact that it just comes back to being jacked and lean. That's my favorite thing. Yeah. Body composition is simply a huge factor. So just like with when we talk about where sleep ranks on the hierarchy of factors that influence muscle growth and fat loss, your body composition itself has huge effects on your health.

Menno Henselmans
This was why we see in research, for example, to illustrate how effective fat loss is for health improvements. People that lose fat in research, almost invariably get healthier, regardless of diet quality, regardless of whether they crash diet. There has even been a case of some professor that did a Twinkie diet or something, and he just took some multivitamins and ate some Twinkies and lost a lot of fat over the course of a year or something. And pretty much all his blood work was better, despite essentially living on Twinkies. So the effects of being lean, and especially if you add being muscular to that, are massive.

And indeed, in research, we see, with very few exceptions, that people that lose fat, their cholesterol levels go down, their blood sugar levels go down, their heart rate goes down, blood pressure can go down. Not as consistent as the other factors, but almost any metric you look at as a health biomarker, it improves the leaner you get. And there's not even a very clear limit. Like, at some point, we know that hormone levels, anabolic hormone levels, they start tanking when you get super lean, but it's even debatable if that is really bad for your health. So, by and large, for most people, up to the point where they wouldn't go anyway, because it's not sustainable to be 5% body fat year round or whatever, being leaner probably is better.

Chris Williamson
And realistically, I guess people are probably going to struggle to halt. What's the leanest that you've ever been? Actually, probably four or 5%. Wow. What does that feel like?

Menno Henselmans
Crap. Feels like crap. Wow. Yeah, I think maybe the lowest I've ever been. I probably got down to maybe like eight, eight and a half, something like that.

Chris Williamson
And I didn't actually feel that bad day to day, but just the process of getting there to me was so miserable. My body seems to want to sit at maybe like between twelve and 15. And it's just, it's sweet doing that. And I can be training or not, I can be active or not, I can be eating well or not. And it kind of just fluctuates around about that.

What are the things that you wish when it comes to diet, body composition, and the modalities as well that people are looking at? What are the things that you wish people would pay less attention to? What are the things where people are kind of very unnecessarily manic and focused on that? You think, I know this sounds sexy, or this is something that you're really bothered about, or it's trendy or whatever, but I really don't think that it's worth the effort. A lot of things.

Menno Henselmans
I think carbohydrate intake is massively overemphasized. In my latest systematic review of the literature, we found minimal effects of carbohydrate intake on strength training performance. Now, if you are a tennis player or a soccer player, it's a whole different ballgame, no pun intended. But if you are just doing strength training, you go to the gym, you lift weights, your carbohydrate intake has minimal effects on your performance. Most of those effects are psychological.

There are no sibo effects. And there's even direct research showing that people that believe they need carbs, they respond more positively to carbs than people that don't have that essential constraint. So carbohydrate intake, definitely very overrated supplements. Supplements are massively overrated. In general, branched chain amino acids are still super popular, like pre workouts we talked about.

Most supplements in general are just there at the fine tuning, right? At best.

Other than that, for training, I think exercise order is actually something that is, it's not negative that people pay a lot of attention to it, but people are wasting a lot of time and they're being needlessly inflexible with their exercise order. Most research finds that you can be quite flexible, and you can what I do, what I call combo sets with a lot of exercises that stimulate non overlapping muscle groups. For example, squats, chin ups, overhead press, you can combine all of those, but you don't have to superset them. So you can take a minute of rest after squats, then do your chin ups in the same rack, and then take a minute of rest, reduce some of the weight, then do barbel overhead press in the same rack, and it's super time effective. And it's just as effective for your gains as doing your set of squats.

Five minutes rest. Set of squats, five minute rest, and you're just spending a whole lot more time in the gym. Dude, I can't remember when it was. I think it was probably about six years ago when I saw that every leg extension and hamstring curl in the gym is next to each other. They're like brother and sister, you know, our next door neighbors, every single one of them.

Chris Williamson
And I remember I had this, like, the sky opened and Moses came down and I realized, why the fuck have I not just been using these two? And you actually can superset these two things because you're not cardiovascularly, you're just not that drilled. And I honestly don't think that there's been any difference other than I've saved myself 15 minutes a session every leg workout for the last half decade just by moving between those two. And that's one of those things where it is kind of like bro science in that this is, look, it's a procedural sort of structural thing that you do when you're training, and you just get into this rhythm of, oh, okay, I know that that's like, when you realize that for you, because of the articulation of your shoulders, that actually overhand pull ups are better than underhand chin ups, and you've always wondered why your forearm hurts. After this, it's like, I just struggle to get into that position or whatever it might be, or you go neutral, and you're like, oh, wow, all my shoulder pain goes away just accumulating little bits of personal wisdom like that is.

That's what training age, I think, is really beyond the, I have good sort of set point muscle activation, neural drives. Good. That's one of the other best things that you compound by getting older in the gym. Specifically about the superset of lac curls and leg extensions. There.

Menno Henselmans
There is actually a difference, but it's positive. So it's called an antagonist superset because you are basically training the exact opposite muscle functions. And if you do the leg curls first, this has been directly researched, you get a better effect. So if you do leg curls and then leg extensions, then your leg extensions actually have higher levels of muscle, muscle activity. It's a marginal effect, but you also have higher total performance, so you can actually do more reps, and that's probably just more mechanical tension, which should lead to more muscle growth.

So not only do you save time, you actually increase your performance. That's why they put them next to each other in the gym. One other thing that I've been sort of considering today, as we talk about artificial sweeteners and continuous glucose monitors, timing of your pre workout shake and whether it's grass fed or whatever, how do people that are super obsessed with the small details of training and diet usually pan out as far as getting fitness results goes? You mean how effective obsession is for fitness results? Yeah, like focusing on the small details of.

Chris Williamson
Because a lot of people want to. I want to optimize. I want to see all of the things under a really close up microscope, and I want to get it. All right. Have you got any idea whether or not the people that, like the guy on the left of the midwit meme, like the dude with the neanderthal brow that's like, I just lift heavyweight and eat meat?

Is it like the dude on the left or the dude in the middle or the right. Who does best? It's hard to say, on average, because you would have to disentangle motivation and obsession. So there are certainly a lot of people that are massive overanalyzers. Like they're not going to the gym, but they are, you know, worrying about how many grams of carbs to eat, or they're not tracking their calories, but at the same time.

Menno Henselmans
Or they are tracking their calories, but at the same time still going to McDonald's and always and are overeating. You know, people have just their priorities completely mixed up. That's definitely a real thing. On the other hand, generally people that are more obsessed are probably also more motivated, and motivation is huge. More motivated people just get better results, for sure.

So it probably depends on kind of where you fall on the are you overanalyzer, obsessive type, or are you just super motivated? Like, I want to know every single detail because I will take advantage of every single advantage I can get. Yeah, that's such a good point. To say that the type of mentality that someone has that would cause them to be very obsessive and pay attention to the details probably has more upstream effects, which means that they are going to be more consistent with their training and they are going to be x, y and z. The problem if this is a matrix of, like, how obsessive you are versus how much you pay attention to details, the worst one to be in is someone who pays attention to lots of details but isn't obsessive because that's the person who is going to be bothered about why their continuous glucose monitor is but hasn't trained twice this week.

Chris Williamson
And that's stepping over dollars to pick up cents, so to speak. Talking about motivation to train, what have you come to realize through your own experimentation personally and the literature and stuff like that, how can people keep their motivation to train nice and high? You can keep your motivation to do anything nice and high basically by cultivating intrinsic motivation, which means you need relatedness, competence and autonomy. Those are pretty much the driving forces of both happiness and intrinsic motivation to do anything in life. Which means that specifically for training, you need to have a certain degree of freedom to make your own training program, do things the way you like it, so that you're not in some rigid program that you don't understand why it works and you just have to follow it and you don't like the rules, but, you know, this is the diet, so that's the autonomy aspect that you want.

Menno Henselmans
And if you can combine them with competence, that you also know why you're doing what you're doing, and you have some basic understanding of human physiology. You can create your own training program, your diet, that is very beneficial. And then you also need some degree of relatedness with the activity. So whether that's being a gym bro or whether that's just having strong relatedness with being jacked, like, oh, the identity. Of this kind of, you wear the clothes like you enjoy wearing gymshark or whatever.

Chris Williamson
Right? Okay, that's interesting. I thought when you said relatedness, I thought a community of people, but I suppose this would be a part of that. If you're someone who considers your identity to be wrapped up in your fitness and training, you're likely to hang around with people whose identity is also wrapped up in it, which presumably is a. Positive flywheel crossfit does it exceptionally well.

Menno Henselmans
Cultivating relatedness to training. Because it's not just that you go to the gym and you exchange your time and effort for muscle growth. No, you are part of a community. You are also following a certain type of diet. You are part of a tribe.

You are not just doing your workouts, you are doing their special workouts. You have a language, you have a way to dress. Yeah, that's funny. What was that study posted about talking to yourself, making you stronger? So there are a lot of ways to motivate yourself, and most of them are effective, including talking to yourself.

So you can do it internally or you can actually do it out loud depending on what your personal preference is. But if you hype yourself up and you tell yourself like, I can do this, or you visualize that you are actually doing it, that's also very effective. Those things do actually increase motivation and can help you set that pr or give it maximum effort for your next set. Especially exercise like squats, which have a high kind of anxiety component if you want to perform well. So pretty much whatever floats your boat is my conclusion in terms of getting yourself riled up is effective and can therefore be good to implement.

Chris Williamson
Have you ever applied that motivation formula to other areas of your life? Wanting to become smarter, or wanting to learn something, or become more proficient at a hobby or a job or get a partner or anything like that? Have you ever tried to use that same formula effectively in different domains of your life? I'm personally very bad at that. I consider myself a reasonably rational individual, which means I have great difficulty with all of these positive psychology tricks.

Menno Henselmans
I always feel like I'm just fooling myself and it doesn't work. But I know from research that it does work and it doesn't actually depend that much on your personality. So I'm in this difficult spot where I'm not doing things that I know work because I just feel weird doing them.

Chris Williamson
Yeah. There's a level of sort of rationality that you get to where you realize that you've made yourself less effective by being more rational. I mean, you know, like, maybe a perfect example of this would be religion, that people that are religious, they live longer, they have better life satisfaction and happiness. They have all of this other stuff. And, you know, Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins or someone can come in and go, well, that's stupid.

You can't all be right. And we mean that Muhammad flew to the moon on a winged horse or whatever it might be. But then you go, look, what are we, what's the outcome that we're trying to get here? Are we trying to live a effective, happy, fulfilled, flourishing arete life? Or are we trying to be truthful and ultimately rational?

And really, what is the reason for being truthful and ultimately rational? Presumably, it's to improve the tiny sliver of existence that you've got while you're on this planet and you kind of like sacrificed the thing that you wanted for this outcome that is supposed to be able to get it, but actually doesn't when you look at it in the cold, harsh light of day. Yeah. So I struggle with the same thing, what you have with religion. I think you talked about it in your q and a where you want to reap the benefits of religion without actually being religious.

Menno Henselmans
And I try to reap the benefits of positive psychology without feeling like I'm tricking myself. But it's hard. It's hard. Tough life. Yeah.

Chris Williamson
Okay. What are the most underrated bodybuilding foods? We've got a panoply of different things that we can throw on our plate. What's the most underrated ones for someone that wants to get jacked? Olives.

No way. Shut up. There is some. Olives are just a generally super healthy, quite satiating food with great fat sources. There is actually some research suggesting that the fats in, or some of the fetal chemicals in olives have also anabolic properties for your muscle.

Menno Henselmans
But I wouldn't get your hopes up on that being very significant. But it's just a food that you almost never see in fitness circles. But it's super healthy. It has fiber, it's quite satiating. Great fat source.

So I put that one up there. And other than that, berries probably. Berries are also exceptionally satiating for how few calories they have. And you don't hear that much about them. In elf circles, yes, in fit the circles, less so.

And then I would probably list pangasius filae as also very underrated. What is that? It's a white fish that is actually flavorful. So unlike tilapia or cod or whatever, which just tastes like nothing like seawater, parnassias is only marginally more fatty, with three to 5% fat per 100 grams or three to 5 grams per hundred grams, 20 plus gram protein. So super good protein source as most fish, and just much more flavorful and good types of fat too, like omega three fatty acids.

So again, all of these things just fall under practical considerations and health things. Because if it fits, your macros is largely correct in terms of muscle growth and fat loss, that there are no magic muscle building foods and there are no magic fat loss foods. It's just foods that you like that fit into your diet that are satiating and satisfying for you and are also healthy. What about eggs? Are eggs healthy?

Eggs are not healthy, but they're also not unhealthy. So eggs in most studies score essentially neutral. They have no relationship with all cause mortality. And the best research, for example, effects on cholesterol are also super modest, much more modest than you would think based on their cholesterol content. Their fatty acid balance is quite good, especially if they're omega three eggs or flaxseed fat eggs.

Then the ratio is a little bit better between the fatty acids. So generally, a very nutritious food, high protein, decent ratio of fatty acids. But in terms of health, are you going to be healthier when you eat them? Which is the case for, say, avocado or olives. You can give that to people in a study, and eight weeks later you can see that their biomarkers are better than they were before.

That's not the case for eggs. Some people are hyper responders. They might experience a more significant increase in cholesterol levels, in ldl cholesterol levels in particular, or apob, which is the better marker than LDL cholesterol. So in that sense, I would say they're definitely wrongfully demonized because they're a very nutritious food and it has a lot of utility, but they're not healthy in the sense of health promoting. I would rate them mostly as neutral.

Chris Williamson
Okay, what about red meat? Similar ballpark. The latest meta review of meta reviews found essentially no effects. There's a lot of research on red meat. It dwarfs the whole exercise science field.

Menno Henselmans
Makes me very envious when I look at research on eggs or red meat, and I'm like, I wish we had like 10% of this for exercise science. No, just study after study after study. Unfortunately, most of them are really poor, but still mostly neutral effects. Again, very nutritious food. So it's healthy in the sense of having a lot of good nutrients of protein, but not healthy in the sense of when I eat this, I can see that my blood biomarkers improve in the span of weeks, but also not unhealthy and definitely wrongfully demonized in that sense, especially when you consume it in moderation and it's not processed red meat.

Chris Williamson
How much magic is in liver? Very nutritious. Very, very nutritious. So in the sense of nutrient indices, liver scores off the charts on a lot of indices, not just liver, also kidney. Most organ meats score very well.

Menno Henselmans
But again, I don't think that you will see objective improvements in your longevity or any health biomarkers when you consume a lot of it, unless you were, for example, iron deficient. And liver is a particularly convenient and rapid way to correct that deficiency. It's so interesting, man, looking from the outside, as someone that I don't really care about what camp I'm a part of. I've like, been non monogamous with my diet approach, and even. Even within my non monogamy, I'm non monogamous.

Chris Williamson
Like, I don't even stick to diets all that much, but the, like, level of vehement tribal adherence and how aggressive people get. Have you got any idea or theory as to why diet is such a. And nutrition is such a battleground for this semi religious, existential war between different tribes? I do. I believe that as a society, we have become less materialistic due to the digitalization of our society and further increased welfare levels, making it less important whether you wear, whether you have Prada, I don't even know what they make, shoes or bracelets or whatever, but whatever.

Menno Henselmans
If you have Gucci or just generic type clothing that used to be a big driver of socioeconomic status. But these days it's more about what you say, because you also don't have to do things anymore because it's mostly online now. So it's just what you post and what it seems like that you may be doing in life. So things that signal your identity in some way, which you can display on, especially social media, are a lot more important indicators of your identity now than they were before, because it's less about material goods, it's less about what you actually do. It's more about social media, what you portray.

That's why what we are currently, whether you consume Starbucks now is all about whether they support Israel or not. And just like it's not so important anymore whether the diet is right for you, whether it's healthy now, it's about am I a carnivore or am I a vegan? Because do you care about the environment and do you care about animal welfare? And these things have suddenly become very intertwined with fitness, making it kind of confusing at first glance that a lot of people are now suddenly extremely invested in how many grams of carbs they eat or whether the diet is ketogenic or not. Whereas before that was simply a utilitarian consideration, like what diet suits my needs for dietary purposes.

Suddenly these days, it has become a lot more of an identity indicator, which is far more important for our emotional welfare then. You know, what type of like for. It's the equivalent of. For our training, for example, is nobody cares whether you use a dumbbell or a barbell for your identity. But maybe we'll get to the point that even that matters.

Chris Williamson
Oh, God. Well, I mean, there was. There was a. There was a period for a while of free weight versus machine that was kind of an equivalent, right? Yeah, yeah, there is.

Menno Henselmans
But that's niche, you know that? Because if you tell that to the average individual on the street, they're just like. What do you mean? Yeah, exactly. But within the niche of strength training individuals and evidence based fitness, it's like you have the natural lifters, the announced lifters, the people that are free weights and people that are strong versus people that just lift for aesthetic purposes.

There's that. But diet is definitely on a whole different level these days. Yeah, I think that's probably a pretty good reason for it. That you self brand through your diet. It says something to the world about who you are or what you are or what people should expect of you.

Chris Williamson
I think another element of it, this is my bro science example, was your diet is in some way supposed to be upstream from your longevity. And by attacking somebody else's diet, what you're basically doing is reminding them of their impending death, that it's death denialism to say that going vegan or going keto or going carnivore or focusing on protein or whatever muscle centric medicine, all of these things are, I am going to live longer because of this thing that I do. And implicit in the not all religions can be right because they contradict each other. Not all diets can be right, whatever that even means, because they contradict each other. And implicit in me saying that my diet is optimal is me saying that your diet is suboptimal.

And the downstream effect of that is you're going to die sooner. I'm going to still be here. Yeah, that's interesting. There's a lot of psychology about mortality and how that affects a lot of the things we do or our thoughts about mortality, but I'm not up to date on that literature. Yeah, it's an interesting one.

Mano Hanselman, ladies and gentlemen. Mano, I've been really looking forward to this for a long time. There's like a million more things that we need to get into, but we can bring this one into land today. Where should people go? They need to follow your Instagram.

They need to check out all the other stuff you do. Where should you send them for your listeners? Probably best is my Spotify and YouTube. I'm very active there these days. And yeah, my Instagram is also doing quite well at Menno Hanselman.

Menno Henselmans
And you can also go to my website, mennohansemods.com, and my newsletter will provide you with a tour of my most popular contents. For those that are new to my contents. Hell yeah, dude. I appreciate you. Thank you.

Likewise.

Chris Williamson
Get away, get offense.

#793 - Menno Henselmans - The New Science Of Using Protein To Build Muscle

Primary Topic

Episode Summary

Main Takeaways

Episode Chapters

1: Introduction to Menno Henselmans

2: Debunking Protein Myths

3: Practical Protein Strategies

Actionable Advice

About This Episode

People

Companies

Books

Guest Name(s):

Content Warnings:

Transcript