I have been so far off with recovery so far off and it's one of those underated just like nutrition is understated so often we think we can outrun a bad diet but you can't outrun recovery either because the whole like like I keep coming back to is like why are you training you're training to create a greater stress on the body so the body's like I have to adapt to that but if you never give it time to adapt then you're always going to be in a breakdown state if you're in a breakdown State the
first thing that goes is lean mass first thing that goes up is inflammation and oxidation and we know none of those are good and viable for health so we look at not only for health but if you're someone who's competitive or want to do some kind of like 5K 10K whatever it is CrossFit open who knows you need recovery in order to adapt and get fitter so for looking at recovery metrics it doesn't mean necessarily sitting on your butt and doing nothing but it's that polarized super low intensity work because if you're doing true high
intensity and Sprint interval you need recovery because you can't do that every day you can't go to the gym and be like I'm going to do this every day your body just won't allow you and you're going to fall into that moderate intensity tired but wired sympathetically driven your body's going to break down you're going to put on belly fat you're going to go what the hell is going on recovery is so essential and as we get older we find we need more recovery we see though on that women are more endurant so when we're
looking at fatigability and endurance when we're doing reps and sets and our resistance training we don't need as much recovery between because our bodies our muscles our muscle architecture is less fatigable than men so we need a little bit more of a dose response to get adaptation but when we talk about recovery from day to day we start to see women eat a little bit more because we don't have the same kind of muscle enzymes for fast twitch that men do our bodies need a little bit more time to absorb that harb training recover from
it before we can hit it hard again so I tend to tell people like if you're looking at a week and you're someone who's like I always have lots of energy at the beginning of the week and then it starts to taper off it's like okay well let's moderate that let's do like a Monday evening session and maybe a Tuesday Morning session and then Wednesday's off and then maybe a Thursday evening session Friday's off and then you might do something on the weekend and when I say off I mean really low intensity and when you're
doing a session that's like your resistance training or your Sprint so it's you're trying to really like polarize where you're putting it giving your body adequate recovery and the reason why you're bookending a Monday night and a Tuesday morning is so that Monday you're sleeping in being able to deal with what happens on a Monday and then you do your hard session Monday night and then you get another dose response by doing it Tuesday morning so it compounds the responses you get a better better stress a more there's more adaptation needed because you've kind of
you put them so close together but then you give yourself a bigger block of a break yeah because then you have all of tues rest of Tuesday all of Wednesday most of Thursday then you hit Friday and then Friday is really really hard again and your body can handle it damn that's good okay I'd be remiss though to before I move on to not ask about body recomposition sort of puzzle of yeah like what's the quickest way to do that to have a body recomp and then I'm curious about like bulking and cutting that's not
something that I've ever done I'm not sure it's something I'd really love to do but it seems like it's the sometimes the quickest way to get certain results just because you give yourself the adequate nutrition to grow muscles but then have sort of cut so what's the what's the most efficient way to maintain and grow lean body mass but then reduce body fat when we're looking at you had the key factor there like eating to build your muscle because so many women don't eat enough and you need abundance to actually build muscle right so you're
doing your heavy resistance training and for women we know that when you're doing heavy resistance training especially like squats and deadlifts it increases the mobilization of abdominal fat so by the nature of actually doing resistance drain you're helping with body recomp so if you're doing your build phase right and you're polarizing like I just said like the double dose and then another hard one so you can actually get harder then we look strategically to do one Sprint interval maybe on Wednesday night and we have a slight calorie restriction every night so when we're looking at
what are we doing okay we're going to take out maybe 150 to 200 calories every night but only over the course of one block of training so you build and you're like I got to cut okay how am I going to cut well we keep our resistance training we add in one Sprint interval session to really top and like create a a different stress then we have a very slight calorie restriction so it's kind so you're bulking and cutting within the week yep and then the other thing is really upping that protein so we see
that when you're in a calorie deficit if you are maintaining that 1.1 to 1.2 gram per pound you strip body fat and you keep your lean mass so women who are eating a lot and they're like yeah I need protein protein protein it's like it's really hard pressed even with my Olympic lifters they're still not eating enough protein to get that muscle because it's really hard to think about how much protein you need to eat because they're like what do you mean I need 150 to 160 grams a day so but that's what you need
to build it and to and to lose some of the body fat so protein becomes really important yeah there there's a study I've been talking about recently because a friend of mine from um Florida he posted it and he's like look at this really cool study on protein and they took um normal weight but obese women so you know like skinny fat and it was big cohort and they split them and none of them were doing exercise they're just normal daily life they split them and all they did was increase the protein intake in one
group to 1.6 grams per kilo so that's just right around that 08 to 0.9 grams per and then the other group maintained their normal which was like 08 grams per kilo so what is that five per pound is or maybe a little bit less over the course of 12 weeks no exercise people with a higher protein intake completely recom their body no exercise same same calories too same calories okay got it they just no calorie change macro adjustment yep exactly so protein is so powerful when you're bumping it up and your body's like oo look
at this I can build lean mass I don't need to store fat because I can build lean I have the building blocks yes exactly so you know we talk about exercise and resistance training being the key all but if you don't have adequate protein you're not going to maximize that and you're not going to recomp so protein super important and then as far as for those people who don't consume animal protein like yourself what what are your best tips to get enough protein wide variety wide variety of fruits veggies I know people like what veggies
protein peas green peas lots of protein in there right an Nami we look at nuts and seeds we look at sprouted grain breads Bread's good especially a lot of protein and sprouted green breads Tempe for fermentation I'm not a fan of tofu primarily because I can't handle soy but I don't find it a really fantastic source of protein I'd rather air on the side of Tempe because you have more bang for your buck we're looking at nutrient density um and then yeah and there's times and places when you're really trying to up your protein where
you have to supplement and that's just part of it like you can't eat enough yeah yeah so don't be afraid to implement it it's there to use let's finish off with just sort of like a little bit of a wakeup call of the of birth for birth control because feel like it's one of those things that in the general population is getting a lot of awareness to its um detriment everything from uh you know disrupting your not having a real cycle and having a withdraw bleed which I didn't even know until a few years ago
um because I took birth control for 16 years um to every to even studies showing that women that are on contraceptive oral contraceptive or birth control are choosing different men than if they weren't on birth control they choose more feminine men when they're on birth control than when they're off so essentially if you've got a if you if your woman has is on birth control you're together and then she gets off of it she might not like you yep I know it's strange isn't it it is and then I think about the poor side effect
of it reducing testosterone correct it reduces testosterone in in women as well which I think I took it for my whole career so essentially this is what was happening with my much needed like uh for my job when we look at OC's and the combined oral contraceptive pill right so when we look at it there's so many different formulations when we're looking at the progestin component that's the important part this is where we start to see that you have a lot of aggression depending on what if it's more androgenic so this is why the studies
are coming out it's like if a woman's on an OC and she's looking for a more effeminate man it's because she feel the androgenicity of that progestin is making her like really aggressive and it's like yeah okay I want to be the alpha in the in the relationship here when we look from performance metrics um we look at the estrogen and the progesterone component so we know that if someone is using a 30 microgram dose of estradi in their oral contraceptive pill it builds Muscle really easily but there's no strength that accompanies that muscle bulk
weird so it's like why do I want to build more muscle fibers when it doesn't actually make me stronger if we look at 20 microgram dose it doesn't really do anything different than naturally cycling we look at oxidative stress it's much higher just across the board for women who are taking oral contraceptive pill we see inflammation factors much higher for women using it across the board and we also see that training schematics change so we know that if we are looking at training really really hard it's the first five days of the active fill where
you can push hard and recover well and it's the last five days of the placebo pill that you can train really really hard and recover well because when you're on it it's not like you have the steady state dose you have a peak in a trough every day which is why 10 days from the start of your bleed essentially is until five days in five days after is so when we look at the modernization of medicine and scientific design it was the point where men were like women are have smaller brains and they're delicate flowers
and they don't know anything so when we look at like how things evolved it's all been through that male lens so scientific design has always been through the male lens and I mean it was a point not too long ago where women going through Perry menopause were put in insane asylums because no one understood what was going on and if you look retrospectively almost all the women that were killed as witches in the Salem Witch Hunt were women who were Perry menopausal because of hot flashes and mood disorder so people like primarily men are like
these women are crazy and they're witches so there's a long history of the male lens on all of this stuff so we look specifically at scientific design originally it was male rats and it was CIS men and that model is broken people are seeing that it's broken we see things like ambient you know it stays in the women's system a lot longer so people like gosh what the hell so medical community even though it was like in the 90s that NIH said you can't just use male rats you can't just use men but it's just
in the past four to five years where people are like oh my gosh yeah really we have to use women and I will say one benefit of the covid pandemic is the outcomes between women and men in the vaccine and the vaccine rates and success in the vaccine what was that I don't even know that statistic it was better for women women got less sick and they had less time being sick than men and then they're looking now at long covid and unfortunately it's reversed but now people are really going what's going on if that
happened then there are sex differences so if if it was not that case if men did better than women never would have been the conversation but because women did better than men on the vaccine it made so many people globally in the medical community look up and be like what and then in sports science and nutrition I've been in this for oh gosh a couple of decades but it's really just been in the past four or five years where we've had you like Don Scott who's been tracking menstrual cycle on the US soccer team coming
out and saying hey we've had better outcomes when we're tracking the menstrual cycle and people are like what what do you mean and so it's been feeding forward back into the scientific Community you have to clean up that scientific design and include women if you like this clip and you want to hear the whole episode click at the bottom of your screen
