THE TRUTH about building muscle - common myths with Luke Leaman

# THE TRUTH about building muscle - common myths with Luke Leaman

**Channel:** 100% Real With Ruby
**Published:** unknown
**Source:** podcast

Hello and welcome to 100% Real with Ruby. Today we are finishing off the chat to talk about the reality about building muscle, how long it actually takes, and if it is possible to get rapid results, and if it is, what does that include? What does that entail? and why do people feel like they're looking worse when they're actually in the process of looking better i call it the shit before the fit here we go gaining fat or i'm training my legs but my legs gain muscle really fast i don't want to train them that much and the argument that we're gonna now move into is how you can't actually build muscle as fast as you think you can and the reality of how slow muscle grows especially yeah so okay so you brought up a very good point we went before we got on about this because um it's gonna it's gonna it's gonna help me like lay out a concept again something that a lot of people argue about in the industry it's like um you could realistically and we've thought about we've thought about this for many many decades have two different types of what we consider muscle growth or it's probably more prevalent say muscle size so you have what's called sarcoplasmic hypertrophy which is basically your higher rep pump up work you're creating a lot of um of energy breakdown and recycling and that causes anytime you do that you're causing a bit of inflammation anytime you contract a muscle you're releasing inflammatory chemicals and myokines anytime you have more inflammation you're going to draw water to that. So part of like bodybuilding pump up or a big part of that muscle size is going to be just fluid retention in the muscles. So it's like you, you pump your arms up and you stay a little bit swollen for three or four days. You start to deflate, you do another arm workout, you pump it up. So a lot of that, a lot of that size gain you get from that is just temporary cellular swelling and a small amount of muscle growth of myofibrillar growth, where the muscle fibers are actually starting to get thick. If you go on the opposite end and you look at people lifting really heavy ass weights, you have less of the inflammatory pump up, but you have a lot more of the actual muscle fiber thickening. So you being a, uh, being a power lifter, former competitive power lifter, you understand this, right? You've done physique, but you've also done, um, power lifting. So it's like when you're doing physique work, you can put on weight really fast, but you have to maintain it. Like the minute you, if you don't work out for a week, you kind of deflate. So it's like, you have to try to try to do your bodybuilding work every three or four days. If you do power lifting, you don't really, you'll notice you're getting really strong. You don't seem to be building a lot of muscle quickly, but it's more dense muscle. The muscle looks harder because it's actually, it's actual muscle fiber thickening. Whereas in sarcoplasmic pump up stuff is mainly intracellular swelling. They both, they both produce increases in muscular size. The heavy lifting produces more muscular size. It's just really slow. The pump up where it makes you look artificially bigger, faster, but the actual muscle growth is very slow. So in both of those situations, muscle growth is very slow just one gives you the temporary appearance of being bigger than you are as long as you maintain the pump up right so it's just something you said before that i want to repeat because i love it before we clicked record luke was just like yeah the women that think they're special snowflakes that think they just gain muscle so fast but the thing is no matter who you are muscle growth does not happen that fast on a yearly basis you're up here and on the note of the muscle the different muscle growths that's probably why i have the lines you see in my legs as well because a lot of the work i've done has been the power work which has developed that density not the ballooning and when you do when you do the heavy work um the the way i the way i teach muscle fibers and motor units you have you know type 1a or type 1 which is going to be more of your endurance they're very resistant to fatigue when you go up for a long run it's mainly going to be type one um they have some muscle growth potential they they grow really well with that you know a lot of pump up work then you have the type 2x which is on the other side type 2x or sometimes people call it type 2b those are your you know really heavy shit lifts or really fast lifts so they're kind of like your fight or flight muscles so when you get under a heavy load of say like 90 you crank out a set of three in the squats your brain doesn understand what you doing All it knows is holy shit this is heavy This can hurt me I'm gonna jack up my sympathetic nervous system. So what that ends up doing is when you do a lot of the heavy work, it creates a level of tone in your muscles that you can't get from the pump up work because it's more of a nervous system phenomenon of keeping your muscles kind of at the ready, kind of like a national guard, like an army reserve. They're there, they're training in case something happens, but they may not have to go over to Iraq or whatever. So your muscles kind of keep that kind of state of ready all the time. When you do a lot of bodybuilding pump-up work, you look swollen, but there's just a difference in that muscle hardness because it's less stimulatory towards your nervous system. Now, the best thing, just be a power builder and do what we used to do in the 80s and 90s and you know start your workout with 20 or 30 minutes of heavy shit and then end on some pump up shit then you get the best of both worlds yeah and the the whole argument though of muscle isn't actually that easy to build and fat loss is a much faster process so maybe you can clarify just why fat loss and yeah fat loss in general is fast like fast because you're comparing it to the rate of muscle growth which doesn't like weight on the scale and looking full doesn't equate to muscles growing so if you think about this if you because you get that like you'll get a handful of women that they train legs and what ends up happening is their their legs are swollen maybe you've done some drop sets maybe you've done higher reps maybe you've done some triceps giant sets whatever the legs they're gonna have that temporary swelling so they take a shower they go home they put their jeans on their jeans don't fit. So they go, Oh my God, my legs are getting too big. Your legs are only big temporarily from that because you just worked out. So you may have, if you just, if you don't train your legs for say another five or six days, you put your pants on your pants fit. So, um, if women have that issue where, um, they feel like their legs are swelling that, you know, you just may think about the amount of volume and the amount of inflammation that you're building in your legs that workout and just you know make some make some adjustments on it um but you're it's definitely not muscle it's not muscle so um if if someone actually truly built muscle like that they would know like they wouldn't they wouldn't be they probably wouldn't be going to a trainer anyways unless they were doing a bodybuilding shore powerlifting meet because they would already be jacked as um because people like that are just jacked naturally like I hardly work out right now and I'm sitting at like 12% at 95 kilos and I haven't worked out. I can't maybe a couple or like maybe six weeks, eight weeks. Right. If I go and I and I hit the weights and keep in mind, I'm hypogonadal, like I'm supposed to be on TRT, but I can't get it here. So I haven't really been on consistent TRT in six years and I'm still I'm just naturally a big guy. I've always been huge. I was a I was one hundred and five kilos in high school when I went to high school. And I was I got up to before I ever did any performance enhancing drugs. I got up to about one hundred and ten, one hundred and twelve kilos naturally. And then I used gear to get up to one hundred and twenty three, one hundred and twenty four for powerlifting. So, you know, some there are some people who are outliers and they don't fit in a normal thing. But most people that are coming to a trainer, unless you specialize in like high level bodybuilding, powerlifting or whatever, most people are not going to be hyper responders. They exercise. So if your legs feel like they're getting thick, that's and it's really fast. It's not going to be muscle. I can almost guarantee you, you know. I also want to take a little roll with the whole fact that you can't full speed muscle growth. Yeah, it's like your body has a finite speed at which it can do things. So, and if you look at, you know, the way to build muscle long-term is keep your protein at a high enough point and get, match your calories to your TDEE. If you have a little bit of flub you need to lose, eating a slight deficit, you could eat a slight deficit. You're still going to put on muscle. Just don't crank a hard deficit. And when you lose that, when you tidy up a little bit, now you can crank the calories back up a little bit. Don't go too high. Like your body can only can only make enough digestive juices. It can only make enough transport proteins. It can only they can only do so much. So if you want to just get really big go ahead and eat your seven eight thousand calories But you going to be big and fat You not going to like the way you look You going to look like a fucking melted candle So and you constantly going to be having to diet that off Just accept that you know work at your TDE and eat it maintenance and see how see how you respond to it. Maybe you see that you're starting to lose a little belly fat. All right, cool. Like that's great. Or your arm circumference is going up or your leg circumference is going up. Your chest circumference growing up, but yet you look like you're getting leaner, happy days. If you're, if all of those are going up, but you look like you're getting too thick in the stomach, well, maybe, maybe you just exceeded your ability to utilize that energy. And that excess energy is going to be put in the fat cells where it's going to be completely fucking useless for making muscle. So no, you don't. I mean, you, they've shown it in the literature. They've shown you don't even need a surplus to put on muscle. If you have stored energy on your body, um, you, you, like I said, you don't want to go into like a 40% deficit, but if you were doing like a 10% deficit and you kept your protein high and you just went going, you'd make a really nice recomp over time. Um, and then, you know, if, if you thought you could squeeze more out of it at 5%, at 5%, at, and the minute you see you're starting to get sloppy, take 5% out and tidy yourself up a little bit. But, these people who do they go wild swings of massive bulking and crazy dieting it's insanity like you can't force your body to move faster than what it's designed to do unless you're willing to take illicit drugs and this is what and what he's trying to say is that if you are over fat which is stored energy because otherwise you're better served in maintenance on the upper end with maybe like a slight surplus of 100 calories to get the most out of it because a lot of us want to see some physical change and you're not going to see physical change if you're dawdling at the bottom end of maintenance and the leaner you get aka just like us as average people and you don't have a lot of stored body fat stop trying to do both at the same time yeah well i think well that's the thing like i i firmly believe if you take a long-term approach you can do both at the same time and if you're 100% effort every single day without a family. But I think, I think what you really have to do is reevaluate like your time domain, right? So if you're like, if you want to put on size really fast, the only way you're going to do that is by doing hypertrophy stuff and eating lots of food. If you want to take, you want to drop fat really fast, you got to go the opposite way. But what I, what I'd love to see people do is, is go into a position where they have, you know, a good body fat percentage, like you get girls in like around like that 24 mark, like 22 to 24 markers, 20, 22 is a lot leaner than people think you get girls around like 23, 24, 25, 26 mark and try to stay at that body fat percentage. So if you see that you're creeping up higher than that, start to reduce the calories. And if your protein's high, you're still building muscle, but you're going to pull off some of that body fat. So your weight's not going to change drastically, like if you went to the extremes, but if you think about, okay, I'm planning on looking like this in a couple of years, it's a much better route. And for the guys, you know, if you could keep your body fat percentage, you know, somewhere between maybe like 13, 14 and 17, that would be a good there. You still have linear Alba showing you got a little bit of fat on the FUPA, but you're still, you can still see a little bit of the upper abs. Once you get to the point where you can't see that, we'll start chipping the calories down a little bit or do a little bit of extra conditioning to burn off some stuff. You clean that down to 13, 14%. You'll look better. Most of the time you can still build muscle. It's to me a healthier way of doing it. And, but you just have to have the patience to kind of flog it out and do it over a long-term period of time. But every person I've done a long-term transformation like that with, they look far, far better they feel better and they're healthier than the people i see that are swinging back and forth between bulking and cutting seasons yeah i'm going to emphasize those four words a long long time because this is the exact approach that i take with my girls and go figure because luke is my mentor who completely revolutionized the way i do everything and like literally you did and unless you guys like appreciate that this process takes time then you're going to keep doing these big swings and wondering why you can never see permanent results or even see any results for that fact because you keep wanting results yesterday then i think a great way to summarize all of this which touches on every single point that we made which i going to split this up into three different podcasts is looking shit before you look fit and this kind of flips into like on the fat loss side yeah you might look like you have more cellulite than usual because your body is doing remodeling and on the upper end side of things because you're feeding your body more than usual it's looking fuller than usual and then again on the dieting side you're looking flatter than usual so maybe you can just emphasize the whole looking shit before you're fit with the cellulite side and going down yeah upwards well a couple of things first really quick um the just to kind of tie in what we just talked about with like uh like anabolic prostatine muscle and fellas you when you look at metabolism you you've got this coin and on one side's catabolism and one side's anabolism and if you if you look at what how our systems were designed. They were designed to go through periods of feast and famine because we were hunter-gatherers. Genetically, we haven't evolved as much as our environment has. We've gotten to the point where we want to know why we have all these age-related diseases. Well, we're living longer. We weren't technically designed to live that long without getting eaten by a fucking lion or something or some type of disease. We're living longer. That encourages your potential having age-related disease. We have far more stress and far more expectations of ourselves, far more pollution, far less food quality. We don't have to hunt for our food anymore. We can massively overuse it. There's a lot of things about the modern culture that our bodies, it's like trying to stick a square peg in a round hole. We're making it work, but it's difficult to make it work so doesn't mean it's a good or bad thing like technology is good like our evolution our environmental evolution is cool but just understand that at the core of us we were designed we evolved for a specific process which is hunter gatherers you know that type of thing so if we put ourselves into we need to we need to understand what those two systems that anabolic and that catabolic system we're designed to do. The catabolic system is basically designed to get you out of danger and keep you alive. It's designed to slowly break down fuel substrates or even parts of your own body if you're starving to death. It's designed to help you get out of trouble. It's designed to ensure your survival for a long period of time. So that's why it's easier to break things down in the body. It's easier. You can do it for a long time. It's a much easier process as long as you can stay the course. So dieting inherently from a physiological perspective is a much easier process than anabolism. It's the mental psychological thing. I always laugh when people tell me that eating in a surplus is so much harder than dieting. If you say that you haven't been lean enough. If you get lean enough where you decide your ass starts to look like a walnut, you take yourself to that level a couple of times, you're always going to say dieting down to that level is so much harder than bulking and eating in surplus. I think that the reason people say eating most harder is because they have this psychological fear of eating too much. No, they eat too much. They're all eating. They're stuffing themselves full of seven, 8,000 calories. And when that's completely unnecessary, again, trying to rush process, but those catabolic processes have to run quickly because they're survival pathways. like they have to run for you to get away from an animal you have to be able to make energy really quickly you have to be able to trickle energy all day um you have to be able to um be at that process to break your own body tissue down if you're starving so just think like we're 100 others we weren't always wasn't a starbucks and a 7-eleven on every corner we there were going to be periods of weeks where we might not find any food at all or very very little food so those catabolic processes have to run all the time and they have to be able to be variable speed and they have to be able to be able to break things down. When you look at anabolic processes, they're not as important as from a survival perspective. So if you think about like seasonal, like think about like winter and think about summer. In the winter, you might have food scarcity. In the summer, you might have a lot more food. So in the wintertime, those catabolic processes would be very important to managing body heat to managing uh metabolic rate in order to uh and survive the course of the winter we might have a little bit less food in the summertime we had ample food that's when the anabolic process would work but they were really only there to build back the muscle that you lost over the winter right so that's why when you overeat so if you were if you you were a hunter gather person on the Serengeti or whatever in the winter,

time while you're hunting and gathering, you've got ample body fat stores. When those body fat stores run out, you're going to start really tapping in the muscle. By the end of winter, you know, you've lost a ton of muscle. You've lost a ton of fat. Now spring comes and you've got ample amounts of food. You're eating, eating, eating. You're going to put that muscle back on, but it's not like you're going to put the muscle back on plus 20 extra kilos. Like you're not going to have like, you're not going to have like hunter gather dudes, like making stone weights to get strong for the winter and like raw, you know, eating plants and thinking like, oh, there's steroids in this plant. I'm going to get, I'm going to be the massive this winter. That's not even part of what is in our evolutionary design. So the catabolic process has to be able to break energy down or fuel substrates and energy or our own body. If that's what's going to keep us alive, the anabolic processes there realistically to just replace the muscle we've lost. so over the course of say a winter season maybe you lost 10 kilos of muscle mass you only need to put that back on over the summertime to get ample food because you're going to put a lot of body fat too so if you're eating like it's summertime for a hundred gather in that situation of course you're going to gain a lot of fat that's that's a good thing for your survival that's what's easy to put on fat because that's going to carry you through a winter time where you have food scarcity. So what we have to do is we have to understand that, that we don't go through that seasonal pattern. We don't go through feast and famine anymore. We just go through feasting all the fucking time. Um, and that's the problem is that people are constantly acting like, um, they're, they're, they're, they constantly eat like they're going to go into a famine, but we don't go on a famine anymore. And then, then they do a program famine where they starve themselves and they go their hunter gatherer thing is running on a treadmill or whatever so if people would just dial down um the extreme manner of wanting to lose weight and definitely dial down what you do after you're done with your body recomposition because that's one of the big things people go back to eating all the shit that got them in trouble in the first place so just think so it's a weird concept i think like we all have cavemen and cavewomen type of genetic things, but we're living in like an alien environment with a level of food abundance and a level of abundance of inactivity that we weren't actually designed to do. And it's probably going to be a long time until our genetic code catches up. And that's exactly why everything we spoke about in this podcast today is your blueprint for an optimal physique. There's the food we eat is a lot more complex than we believe it to be but it is actually simple in just following it it's just that we aren't simple creatures and the digestion process of humans isn't the same as what's extracted in a calorie bomb and then there's the supplements and then there's a micronutrients and then there's how is your body in this space and time with its level of stress and sleep and yes stress of all inputs and then your training status your dieting status it all impacts each other so i guess this is where a coach really does come into play but also just not doing dumb shit and jumping to extremes and taking a lot yeah yeah i just like and if you you go to a coach you're new to a coach this is why i i we changed our policy it's like you have to sign on for at six months, especially if you're a new coach. If someone like you, you're now training with us again, it's like, yeah, we don't put those type of contracts on, but if you're a new person, we don't know anything about, we make people sign up for six months minimum. And the reason is, it's going to take the first two or three months just to get you upskilled to the point where you can do what we need you to do, right? And we've got to find out what makes this person tick, and there's a lot of work. So we tell people, don't expect like us to do miracles in the first three months, your results is going to come in the last three months. And if you're, if you're asking for really big, crazy, extreme results, we're just a long-term thing. But those first couple of months is you getting used to reading your workouts, what we expect coaching your diet, all that stuff. And so people need to understand that when they go to a coach, try to keep things in perspective that that coach knows nothing about you. They've collected a lot of data. they need to go over. They need to talk with you about stuff. They don't know how hard you train. They don't know if you know how to lift correctly. They don't know if you have good nutritional literacy. They don't really think about your lifestyle. So please expect a good like four, six, maybe even eight weeks to iron all that stuff out before you expect to be seeing rapid results. Because again, this inherently is a lot of complex stuff that we will do behind the scenes that our clients don't even know we're doing like if my clients understood how much work we do with calculators and abacuses and spreadsheets and all this other shit like that me checking in on their workout every day is uh is is like that's like such a tiny to many a school thing that we're doing because everything else we're doing is based on a lot of technology our computers our knowledge research we have to research stuff you know there's a lot of shit that goes on uh so you're not just paying for a program and a diet when you actually hire a coach especially a muscle because the shit that we learn under luke is astronomical and you've heard a little bit here in this podcast it's like if you're just hoping to get a coach for a 12-week plan or you're wanting to know if you can quit or exit out or cancel coaching after four months then you're not in it for real results because real results aren't happening in four months yeah 100 and you know um you know a new client onboarding should always be at least at least six months um old client onboarding don't have to worry about that because you've already done that work but new new client on board with a new coach I would always tell them don don look at this as like a three four month transformation It needs to be about a it needs to be a six month minimum because there going to be a couple of months where we have to we at some point have to be able to connect Like, how are we communicating? How are you picking up what I'm putting down? How are you applying it? And so that takes a good amount of work and weeks to get everything, all the wrinkles smoothed out, you know? yeah so i guess the last summary is pretty much why there's the shit before the fit and i guess that ties it up with a nice boat i like that the shit before the fit you need you need to trademark that the shit before the fit yeah but that's like that's like not the one that uh that i came up with was the prepping to prep like you the prepping to prep my prayer is your shit before the fit like you have to understand that like you know we've got this here's the here's the big bulk of the time of the fitness and training and all that but then we got this little shitty period where you and i have to get on the same level with everything um so i like that shit shit for the fit i like that i wish i thought about it it's so true though like you're always you're always gonna feel like things are worse before they get better and there's a learning process which makes you feel worse before you feel better especially as you become more aware of all these things that you were never aware of before you feel like you're going backwards but you're actually not and i can tell you um for a lot of the especially the women listening to this it's like whether you whether you've been chronically dieting or not um even though it's scary i i i i would say that almost 100 of the time the first thing you should do is start increasing your calories Um, you know, I don't always do this. Sometimes I work out people's TV with all my calculations and stuff, and then I'll put them on, put them on a nutritional protocol and then I'll see what happens after a couple of weeks. And then I've got it down to a, down to a system now where I pretty much nail it so good every time that they can stay on the same calories and barely have to tweak anything. Um, but you know, if you're already under eating, you may consider, um, or if you aren't sure if you're overeating or not, you may consider just saying, hey, maybe we pump the calories up and see where we're truly overfeeding. When you see your weights consistently every three or four days, it consistently jumps up, jumps up. Now you actually know that you have exceeded the amount of calories you need. That gives you a really good position of leverage. Now you know you're overeating. Before, you thought you were dieting you may not have actually been dieting or you may still been eating a surplus but you don't know it's better to raise the calories a bit see what makes you actually gain weight then bring it down so i actually just use that on one of my afl girls um she wanted to go into a re-comp and i'm like okay let me look at your calories i go and i didn't realize she was she's and she's training she's doing crazy i've got her doing crazy contrast training olympic training jumps and sprints runs and all this shit really high up and stuff she's eating like 1200 calories And I going holy are you really just eating 1 Yeah OK first thing we going to do is pump you up to 17 Pumped her up to 17 she barely after eight weeks barely gained a kilo then i pumped her up like 21 2200 same thing she gained like 500 grams so we now know where that level needs to be now i can actually bring her calories down she should just start shoving off the fat but she's going to start afl season soon so i probably won't have to i'll just let the afl train to become the deficit and this highlights the importance of taking the long road because the faster you want your results the longer they're going to take to come to you and if you're not willing to deal with the shit you'll never get the fit and if you're not willing to do the prep you're never going to actually be able to experience the prep for saying preventable look and once you've removed you know i like i I told you the other day on one of our calls, it's like there is no minimum food to give somebody. There's a minimum of nutrition. So like you've heard me say in the foundations class, you want a calorie deficit, not a nutrient deficit. So you can take that calorie deficit as low as it needs to be. But why take it lower than it needs to be? And the only way you're going to understand how, you know, what's the minimal amount do I need to pull off? The only way you're going to know that is by knowing what actually makes you gain weight. So pumping the calories up and then you can pull it down and you can do the same thing. Once you see your body weight stabilize and then you start seeing yourself chipping off 100 grams, 200 grams a week. Now you actually know, OK, OK, I'm about halfway there. If I pull off another, let's say I pull off another 200 and I do like a 400 calorie diet and I stay consistent on this. I know I'm going to lose at least like three, four, maybe even 500 grams a week. you do that over the course of one year that's 26 kilos you know so you people need to put their they need to put the perspective in long term and stop thinking so short term that's the perfect ending for all of this so with all that i'm going to leave everything in the bottom of this podcast as well as all three segments you'll be listening to with loop which i might actually split into so that it's kind of in chapters to be your ultimate guide to everything that you need and I highly recommend not only just following muscle nerds on everything and checking everything they have but go into google and type in Luke's name and type in podcasts so you listen to all the podcasts that Luke's been on because honestly all the ones I make sure that I hear every single one that you put out as soon as it's released because whenever Luke speaks there's a wealth of knowledge that comes out of his mouth and every single part of it is something that can help you in some way or form especially if you have blood pressure issues there's one that you can put out on that so honestly do it go into google type it in and you realize that this isn't just about a body you're trying to achieve but an ultimate status of health and physique so with that do you have any other lasting words that's it and yeah i got a call starting so i gotta go i gotta to go, but this has been fun. This has been great. I like this. This is really good. Yay! See you guys.