Sustainable Body Fat Percentages and Maintenance

what what do you think is a sustainable body fat percentage for someone natural and someone who is using pds where can someone stay and you know and have that life where they can go out and do what they want and not have to just you know be super disciplined all the time yeah i mean look again it's it's it's not that difficult guys like it's the hard part is getting there. And realistically at the ranges, I'm going to say it's not that difficult. It just takes time and it takes patience. It takes a little bit of discipline, but I like keeping guys around 15% or under, which 15% is a lot leaner than people think because people go to a DEXA. 15% on a DEXA could be 18 to 21%. Like it's not actually a real 15 or they'll get down to say 10 on a DEXA. And I'm like, no, no, no. You're more like 13 to 16, somewhere around there. If you're 10 on a DEXA, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. And that is not that difficult to maintain once you get there. Like if you look at Allie, like Allie maintains this incredible shape year round. She doesn't train a lot anymore. Like we trained a lot to get there, mainly because she thought she had to. We actually had this conversation this morning. It's like she hasn't been able to train as much because she's been traveling and busy and all that. She's like, I can't believe I'm maintaining my physique. Is it because we've built to this point? I'm like, no, no, no. it's because you didn't need to train that much anyways. We only did that because psychologically you enjoyed it and you felt like it was necessary. Now you're learning that it's actually not that necessary to do the stuff we've had to do for the last six years. You can actually maintain and make improvements. They'll be slower, but you can still do it without having to dedicate like a part-time job to your training and nutrition. Right? Yeah. So, so like, I think once you get to about 12, so I'm sitting around like 12 to 14% and I maintain that pretty much year round, except over the holidays, I'll creep up to like 15, 17%. But I'll usually, if guys want to put on weight, I'll give them a range of like 12 to 17. Once we start getting a little bit past 17, I'm probably going to start doing a mini cut and dial it back down because the closer you get

20 and above the more insulin resistant you're going to get you're going to get anabolically resistant a lot more your calories are going to be biased into fat stores and away from muscles now steroids do change a lot of that so you can get away with a lot more but then you're dealing with inflammation from adipokines you're dealing with inflammation just systemic inflammation hyperimmune response which is going to lead to inflammation that's all going to lead to the higher sympathetic nervous system drive, higher levels of glucocorticoids. So the fatter you get, the more opportunity or the more preference you're going to bias towards that bulk being put in the fat instead of being put in the muscle. So you might as well just keep it at a point where it's maintainable and you're making slow progress. People try to put weight on too fast and they don't realize anabolic processes work very slowly. From an evolutionary perspective, there's no inherent benefit of being 120 kilos of 6% body fat as a hunter-gatherer. There's no evolutionary benefit. That's actually a negative thing because you're easier to hunt, right? The skinny lean dudes are going to outrun you, and you're going to get eaten by the lions. So you have to think of it in that way, and a lot of people will poo-poo that. But my point of it is we're not that biochemically, physiologically different than we were, say, 10,000 years ago. So catabolic processes work very quickly. Anabolic processes work very slowly. And it just goes for like that feast and famine during a year, right? So you live in bounty during the summertime. You eat a lot. You put on some fat. And that fat lasts you all winter. You lose all that fat during the winter. And then you go and you hunt again, right? so i think that people need to be a little bit more uh they need to be a little bit more diligent at keeping their body composition at a reasonable level and think about where you're going to be in 12 months 24 months five years instead of trying to put on two years worth of growth in 12 weeks yeah to have that longer term outlook is going to be helpful yeah rather than i want to do this i want to get ready for the you know my beach body in the summer and then they forget about it and just have that longer term discipline i guess it comes down to we've used that word a lot well and if you have that longer term outlook you can recomp over time and then you never have to get overweight or over we'll say not overweight we'll say overly fat like most of my clients that are really lean, they continue to put on muscle, but we're looking at like, can we gain 100, 150 grams of weight on average per week? Some weeks we don't gain weight, some weeks we lose, but we're looking at the average over time. And if somebody's putting on four or five kilos a year, I'm pretty happy with that. And we don't have to really clean up a lot of that body fat. That means you get to eat more longer and you never have to really do a deficit unless you have a photo shoot or you have videos or something or you have to do a, you know, be on stage. You You want to get lean? Okay, we'll do a really quick three-week cut. Catabolic systems work really fast. You can knock off a couple of percent in a few weeks and you good Yeah