Body Fat Thresholds for Growth Phases

and another question for you in regards to clients and yourself when you're going through a growth phase do you have any specific tactics in terms of keeping people leaner or body fat threshold you look to sit to max people out at because personally I find that quite a no return where people go on like 15 to 16 percent and then it starts to become a bit of a zero-sum gain if that makes sense yeah no I would agree with you I've always kind of had this thought that there's, if you look at one of the main drivers for muscle protein synthesis which is insulin attaching to receptor and then causing a downstream biochemical protein messaging game of telephone to stimulate mTOR and other ways that we grow. If the insulin receptor becomes desensitized because you're insulin resistant now how are you supposed to you're pulling off a big portion of how you're going to recover. So it seems to be at this point where if you get too fat, there's too much inflammation, too many catecholamines, too much insulin resistance to really effectively grow. So you start putting on, you're growing, but you're just growing in tissues you're not really wanting to grow that you're just going to have to pull off later. So I tend to say like, you know, try to get as lean as possible initially. If you're skinny fat, then just do hypertrophy. Because if you're a lean guy, let's say you're high body fat percentage, but it's because you don't have a lot of muscle and you don't have a lot of bone structure, then you probably just need to work on a few years of just eat at maintenance or slightly above, high protein, fucking smash the weights and grow and take D-Bowl if you're predispositioned to do that. Because that's always an easy way to do it, right? Not that I'm encouraging that. But if you're truly fat, like most of the guys in the industry that think they're lean, they're fucking probably 10% fatter than they think they are. You get these guys that go, I'm 12% and they're like, bitch, you're 24%. Put those titties back in that shirt. Most of these guys, they don't get in the deck so they just think they know what body fat looks like. Um, most of the time when you see people who, um, the guys who think they're like the bodybuilders who think they're, people think they're six or seven, 8%, um, uh, or they think they're 3% and they're actually like eight, 9%. Right. So until you have feathering on your glutes, like you're not that lean or not as lean as you're supposed to be for bodybuilding. But I like to stay in a range of let's, let's look at, um, let's try to get an assessment of your body fat. And let's try to get you down close to 12%. I think that's reasonable. That's not that hard. Get you to 12 for a guy. Maybe like 18 for a girl, 19 for a girl, 18 to 20 guys, like 12 to 14. And for the guys, once you start creeping up around 18, it was time for a diet break. When the girls start creeping up around about 25, 26, let's take it back down closer to 20. And I think if you stay in those ranges you can still grow and still look pretty good until you gotten super lean and then anything above like 5 fat for guys and anything above like 12 fat for girls But other than that, if you have a normal mentality about it, I think 12% for guys, about 18% girls. I think at the upper threshold of that, when you start to grow is for guys somewhere probably around 18. That's when you start not looking so good. and so girls somewhere around like you know 20 probably 26 27 something like that i always have that paranoia when i start putting weight in a bulking face my face id and my iphone is not recognizing me yeah that'd be the moment yeah yeah that's i always use that so i always use my i've got uh ultrasound device that you take my body fat and i've got my heart beating calipers so i keep the my calipers at home because i don't use them at the office and every morning i get up and I just do my abdominal skin fold. And if I think if that's below eight, I'm fairly happy. So when it goes above eight, okay, it's time to diet. And then I'll diet it down to like six millimeters and then I'll just eat normally until it's above eight. And that's how I kind of regulate my own because that's kind of the only place I keep it when I get lean. I've shredded, dick skin shredded everywhere else except kind of my fupa, like right around my belly button. So that's kind of my metric that I look at.