 Question is from Nathan N. Norman. I recently came across conflicting arguments regarding the correlation between lean muscle mass and resting metabolic rate. Why do you think most of these studies seem to suggest that the increase is fairly minimal? So I'm confused on what the question is here. I'll break it down for you. So what he's talking about is how, we talk about building muscle speeds up to metabolism. Then studies will come out showing one pound of muscle. You just addressed this. One pound of muscle only burns this many more calories. And adding five pounds of muscle isn't going to increase your metabolism. There's too many other variables that the study doesn't take into consideration. There's also this, is that when you're trying to build, when your body's trying to build, it just becomes less efficient with calories. So there is, yes, there is this caloric number. There is a certain amount of calories that muscle will build. And it's more than however many calories a pound of fat, for example, will end up burning. That's true. That number right there is not a ton, but there is this inefficiency that happens with calories. I've seen this time and time again with clients. I'll take a client and I'll have her gain four pounds of muscle, which if you do the direct, numbers should only boost your metabolism by about 50 calories a day, but I'm having her eat 600 or 700 more calories a day and she's getting leaner. I hate this and I get really irritated by the guys that try, the guys or girls that try and counter this message because I think it's a very good message. I think it's the right message to be telling people because more people need to strength train, more people need to be focused on building lean body mass because of how much it impacts your metabolism. And then out comes somebody, and I wish I knew who first did it because they deserve to be slapped for it, who comes out and isolates fat and muscle and then shows that it's not as what everyone's been exaggerating for every pound of, because I used to say this as a trainer to get this point across to my clients, I would actually relate it to a McDonald's Big Mac or remember this, I had the same spiel to everybody that listen, if we can put three to five pounds of muscle in your body, literally just getting that on your body, not losing any body fat, not changing anything you've got, you will be able to eat an additional 300 or so calories. That's like a Big Mac that you could have and cancel out and just to give them that visual and understanding of how important it was that we build muscle. And then of course later on comes out the study that show that that's not true, it's maybe five calories or whatever. Well, yeah, that's just measuring metabolically what muscle is doing and what fat is doing in the body and what it needs for energy. What you're not taking into consideration is the digestive system. You're not taking into consideration the signal that you're sending to build, the calories that are having to get allocated to recovery, to adaptation. There's more than just those. And we need to understand something that mammalian metabolism is extremely complex. I could probably say that it's the second most complex thing that we've observed in the universe right underneath, right below the brain, the human brain. So we don't know everything. Here's a good example. If you take somebody and you bump their calories a little bit, they start to burn more calories. They don't even have to do anything else. You just start bumping their calories a little bit and they start to burn more calories. You start to cut their calories a little bit, their body starts to burn less calories. How is this happening? Even though there may be even no difference in tissue, you can measure the body fat and their muscle, nothing's changing, how are they burning more calories? We don't really know, but the best theory that I've heard is that your body can become more or less efficient with calories. Sending the signal to the body to build muscle promotes inefficiency with calories. It promotes a faster metabolism because you're trying to build muscle and other things are happening in the body. And again, I've seen this time and time again. I've had many clients who gained five pounds of muscle, not a lot, but their metabolism boost was massive and didn't directly correlate to the amount of muscle. I like this question because it creates a discussion around a topic that is nuanced and that I think it reminds me of my pet peeve of and why we do what we do is there's no study that could counter what I've seen on hundreds. I mean, I'm in the middle of it, like this exact topic right now is what I'm working with two female clients right now in building their metabolism and getting to eat more calories. And both of them, when I got ahold of them, and this is not even that long ago, we're eating 1,500 and 1,700 calories. And both of them are in the 2,200 and 2,300 calorie range right now and neither of them are putting weight on the scale. How the fuck did that happen? And that short amount of time, I didn't put 30 pounds of muscle on them and based off of these studies that show that it's only a few calorie difference, that's what it would be. And I didn't build 30 pounds on these girls. And you wanna talk about studies, okay? So let's look at the studies where they're actually looking at people and seeing what happens when they diet and lift weights versus diet and do cardio versus just diet. These studies exist. That's okay, there's another thing. And you don't need a study to do this. Just check your own behaviors. I was just commenting to Katrina about how important it is for me to be a better husband and a better father to get my workouts in. Whenever I lift and get a good lift in early on in the day, when I come home, I notice I'm very aware of this. I start cleaning up around the house and I start doing things for an helper. When I've had a day where I miss my workout or I'm off on my diet, I feel lethargic, I'm tired, I come home and I wanna sit down on the fucking couch. I just move less. How do you, you can't, that's not gonna be in that study. We're not measuring that. We're isolating just muscle and fat. We're not taking into consideration behaviors. That's a very good point. But even when you look at everything else, I just pulled up an easy study right here where they took participants, older participants and they compared fat loss with just diet plus walking, diet plus weight training or diet alone. Diet plus walking resulted in 16 pounds of fat loss. Diet plus weight training resulted in about 17 pounds of weight loss. Almost equivalent, right? But here's the difference. Muscle mass loss was four pounds with the diet plus walking. Diet alone resulted in less muscle mass loss than cardio or walking plus diet. Resistance training obviously resulted in no muscle mass loss. So what does that tell you? Well, that tells you that your body tries to adapt, it's metabolism tries to change things. Resistance training of all the forms of exercise is the one that promotes the faster metabolism. It's the one that promotes and the part of the way that promotes that is by keeping and building muscle, but it's not the only way. There are other things that are happening we quite don't understand, but I can tell you again, this much, I've worked with lots and lots of clients and when I have them lift weights and I have them change their nutrition, I can see big changes in how many calories they can eat and maintain their weight or get leaner. Big changes. I've had clients that went from 1200 calories to 2200 calories a day. I'm telling you, I'm in the middle of it right now. I haven't had to hold these girls longer than a couple months. In a couple months time, we've moved from 1500 up to 21, 2200 calories. Huge difference. And they are not 30 pounds bigger. They're the same weight I got a hold of them at. And that's the goal and I keep telling them is that my goal is to keep increasing your calories and see in that scale, just kind of hover around the same thing. They are weighing in at 121, 130, these are two girls' weights and they're sticking right at that weight and I'm just bumping calories, bumping calories. And now why is that beneficial? Well, it's beneficial because you live in a wonderful time with lots of food all around you. You live in a time where daily life is sedentary. You don't have to be strenuous and break your back. Having a faster metabolism or a more inefficient metabolism is an advantage. It just keeps you leaner. And how great is it gonna be for these two girls who initially, what they wanna do is lean out, right? How great is it gonna be for them when I get them up to 2700 calories? And I go, okay, it's time to diet down to 25 or 2,300 calories and they get to reduce down to- Down to a high amount. Yeah, 500 more calories and they were used to eating in the first place and their body starts leaning out. That's the beauty of it. And that is the real takeaway and message and the trainers out there or the scientists that are putting out the studies to try and counter this message, it irritates me because, yeah, the study is correct. Yes, when we measure it that way, but there's too many other factors, there's too many other unknowns and coming from people that have been doing this for a really long time, the impact that you make on somebody's metabolism by putting them on a strength-focused program and building muscle is unbelievable when it comes to metabolism.