Sleep as the Foundation of Progress

Catabolic processes work really quickly, and that's why muscle growth takes a long time. Like for, let's say a guy, the first year you're going to put on, if you're, if you're good the whole year and you don't miss your training sessions and you're diligent about your sleep, which is probably the most important factor out of everything we're talking about. If you don't sleep, you are fucking up your programming. You can take all the drugs you want. You can do all the training sessions. You can eat perfect. If you are not sleeping, man, you are really shortchanging yourself. Like if you feel like I was thinking about this this morning to all clients of mine who don't sleep. They're like, what do you take for your brain? You remember everything. And I'm like, no, no, no, I don't take anything. I take nicotine and caffeine for my ADD because it's hard for me to get my drugs, my ADD medication here. I don't take any nootropics. I don't take anything for my brain in that way because what I found was I'm trying to out supplement a sleep issue. So sleep is very important. Now, if you look at going back to what we're talking about, It's like it's going to be much faster to go from, say, 32% body fat to 24. Like, what is that? That's for 12, 12%, right? You could realistically do that if you're pushing it 12 weeks. Or you could take 24 weeks. But if you try to recomp that, it's going to take you 48 weeks. It's going to take you significantly longer, twice as long or longer than that than if you just did a dedicated shred. Now, once you get that dedicated shred, now you have a decision to make. Like, if you want to get stronger and you do want to put on some shape and some size, we could do a lean bulk or you could just bulk and then shred that fat off again. What I would say is if you're looking at fat loss, but you want to grow into it, just focus on the fat loss, get it over with because it's really quick. Then if you want to get size, now do your do your recomp at this point, because you don't put on muscle quickly anyways, unless you take drugs and even those are limited. So if you think a male is going to put around six kilos or around like 13 pounds of actual dry lean muscle tissue in his first year training, then that's going to slow down every year. So if we look at the realistic possibilities, you're putting on maybe 80 to 120 grams of actual dry muscle lean muscle every week So if you look at that if let just say it a hundred 100 grams times 52 weeks is 5 kilos 5 kilos is around 11 11 and a half pounds And then the next year it's going to drop by 20, 25 percent and every year is going to drop. So these people who say you can't recon, you're not going to gain a lot of muscle unless you eat in a massive surplus. You don't gain a lot of muscle quickly anyway. So it's a moot point. You're getting bigger. but as obi-wan said to the stormtroopers these are not the droids you're looking for this is not the bulk you're looking for you're gonna have to diet that off later so it's probably going to take the same amount of time of bulking up and shredding that off is if you just slowly bulked up and you never had to shred again you know this makes more sense that way and it's healthier right well and we've all been there we've all done that that built uh that block that we put on too much weight i know i've been there and um definitely yeah i i agree i think at this point it just makes sense to to do it really slowly. And, you know, like you said, it's just going to, it's not going to be healthy that way if you do it too quickly and everything like that. And then again, it all comes back to the body fat percentage too, where you at with that. I think that's going to play a huge role in that as well too. You know, you got to ask yourself, do you want to have to diet it off later? If you're okay and want to diet it off later, okay, go for it. Like whenever I put on fat, it's not because I'm bulking to get bigger. It's because I'm being an asshole with my nutrition. I just want to eat shit food. Like when I go to Texas, I gain weight because I've got Texas beer, I got barbecue. I got Tex-Mex. So I diet before I go. And now I'm dieting after I got back from Texas. So, but, and just like a final point on that, there's literature that just came out over the last one or two years that say conclusively calories, eating more calories is not the way like, yeah, you, you have to have enough calories to support what you're doing. And if you want to grow, you need probably a little bit more than that, but you don't need a lot more. You need like five, maybe 10% more than your TDEE. So if my TDEE is 3,200 and I don't change anything other than my nutrition, I realistically don't need more than about 3,500 to grow new muscle. But the problem is, especially for men, they want to grow faster than that. So they get on 5,000 calories and they go, I'm not growing. I'm like, yeah, no, you are. You're getting fat and you're not digesting all that food anyways. If you want to, if you want to grow faster, that's why God invented Diana ball. Take Diana ball, put on your big boy pants and stick a needle in your glute. I love it. Yep. I mean, that's, I mean, that's really the only way to speed things up. So