#163 - Layne Norton, Ph.D.: Building muscle, losing fat, and the importance of resistance training

Individuals have a relatively tight range of homeostatic body fat that their bodies will defend. Once you drop below that range, Your body might pull more energy from lean tissue. You will start to feel the effects of caloric restriction in terms of hunger, your bar drops, and your non-exercise activity drops. 

You can lessen the loss of body mass with resistance training.

Lean body mass is not the same thing as muscle mass. Lean body mass is non-fat tissues, such as skin, bone, organ weight and body water. Water gut tissue and liver tissue will shrink in response to caloric restriction.

• A calorie is energy stored in the chemical bonds of food. 
• Energy balance is calories in vs calories out. It is not linear within your body. You don’t lose one pound if you cut 3,500 calories. It depends from person to person. 

During the first six weeks of resistance training, you don’t see much hypertrophy in people. You see strength improvements. 

At first, you have a considerable increase in muscle protein synthesis and protein degradation. When you do resistance training for the first time, for example, a leg workout, you may hardly be able to walk for a few days after. This is because your muscles seem to completely remodel those proteins. After six weeks, the increase in degradation goes down.

• People confuse hunger with appetite. Instead, people eat for reasons such as boredom, stress, trauma and social cues.
• Individuals are usually poor estimators of caloric intake. It is not an issue in isolation, but in accumulation, it adds up - some nuts here or a little extra dressing on the salad. 
• To lose weight, pick the form of restriction that feels the least restrictive to you, such as time-restricted or calorie-restricted. 
• If you can eliminate snacks, most people will improve weight loss, definition and biomarkers.

People experience more discomfort when they are sedentary than if they are active. 

Older people think cardio is the best way to get active as they don’t walk to look bulky. But it is really hard to look bulky.

Lower body strength is more important in terms of falls. Accidental death in older people is usually because of an accidental fall. After 65, you can link most deaths to a lack of muscular strength or muscle. 

• With resistance training, train close to failure without going into failure.
• If you’re sore all the time, you’re probably training incorrectly. If you’re never sore, you’re also probably training incorrectly.
• Variation is vital.
• The sweet spot for hypertrophy is 6 - 10 sets per body part per session.
• The majority of stimulus you get for muscle growth is in the last five reps before failure.
• Keep protein intake high: 1-1.5 protein per pound of bodyweight.
• Play the long game.

• Consume 1.6 - 2.6g protein/ kilogram of lean body mass.
• Start your day with protein. Consider a protein shake instead of milk in cereal.
• Make small changes to increase protein in meals. The less you can change, the better.
• Low fat can impair testosterone levels, which may impact levels of lean body mass.
• There is no perfect diet; there are tradeoffs for everything. For example, a Keto diet is acceptable if you’re training at 65% of VO2 max, but you’ll have lower strength accrual if it's higher.
• Supplementing for hypertrophy training: whey tends to be most digestible.