Water Weight, Fat, Muscle, What is Signal vs Noise?
Claims in the health and fitness industry (and any industry for that matter) can be clinically or technically significant, but have no significance in the real world.
In other words, something might have a significant effect in a laboratory setting, but will never be applicable to you in your daily life.
This makes it difficult to tell what is a realistic and useful claim that you can incorporate into your daily routine for real results, and what is just marketing speak to get you to buy into something that you can never actually take action on or use.
In this podcast we’ll examine all of the following issues:
1 – The difference between real world significance and clinical significance
2 – Separating the signal from the noise: are the results that you are hearing about normal changes in human physiology that are simply being brought to your attention for the first time.
3 – The 80-20 principle and how 20 % of your effort will end up being responsible for 80 % of your results.
4 – Water weight: how water weight/retention is the big confounding factor in the way your body looks and how fitness and nutrition marketers take advantage of this to make claims that their products can do things that are not possible.
5 – Getting to the core principle of what works for weight loss.
John
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I liked the article on water cutting, the problem I have when I sweat lots and I am trying to diet is I start leg cramping so I have have to hydrate alot with G2 or PA light. This is extreme leg cramping, the jumping out of the bed screaming kind. I don’t like the extra sodium in my diet with the hydrate drinks, and my doctor told me to drink quinine water to help with my leg cramps so I found a good sugar free diet brand of mixer, tonic, water with quinine in it. It has a slight tart taste and it has helped the leg cramps, but I am not sure about the effects of quinine on the body. Also if I try to take creatine I get cramps bad, not sure if that is creatine or not. How can I focus on my work out and push extra water off my body while avoiding the cramp issues?
MAYBE THIS QUESTION ISN´T RELATED TO THE TOPIC BUT I HAVE A BIG INTEREST IN KNOWING THE TRUTH ABOUT THIS: DOES WEIGHT LIFTING MAY STUNT MY GROWTH?? I´M 22 YEARS OLD AND WANT TO GROW AS MUCH AS I CAN, I WANT TO INCREASE MY HEIGHT AS MUCH AS I CAN NOW THAT I HAVE THE CHANCE BECAUSE I´VE HEARD A PERSON STOPS GROWING AT THE AGE OF 25. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO ME. I´VE ALREADY BOUGHT THE PROGRAM AND I LIKE IT A LOT, BUT IF WEIGHT LIFTING CAN STUNT MY GROWTH I WOULD PREFER TO STICK WITH IT AFTER I´VE GROWN MORE. I JUST WANT AN HONEST RESPONSE. THANK YOU.
Denny,
I don’t have much experience dealing with cramps, but a good friend of mine is a professor of athletic therapy. I’ll ask him about the cramping issue and see how he teaches his students to deal with athletes cramping.
JB
Marvin,
From what I know people stop growing around the age of 21. Even if it’s possible for you to grow taller I wouldn’t expect weight training to be a problem at your age.
JB
I am 5’5″ and 125 lbs. So I am definitely not overweight and can at least see my 4 pack abs (if not 6 pack). Since creatine normally is just water retention, would you recommend avoiding creatine?
Thanks for all the awesome podcasts!! BTW would be good if you can again have the podcasts on iTunes so we can store them for reference.
Hey John…
They are on iTunes. Check out the “itunes” button at the top left
of this page or just go to:
http://aelinks.com/itunes
B
I don’t know if I missed this in the podcast but how do you know if you are properly hydrated vs over-hydrated?
Great podcast… I just wanted to reiterate a point that was made in the podcast which I think people really need to recognize. The body images we see with body builders, models etc… are for the most part what they look like when they have cut down (water weight loss)or through photoshop. I have come across an inumerable amount of men and women who are discouraged because they are not meeting their goals. Now, through experience I know it is not impossible to reach these goals, but it is important to understand that the idealized body images we see are fleeting… if you do manage to reach one of these idealized images, it will most likely not be permanent for 98% of us. Period…
So what I am getting at is that you can increase your `adonis index`, just don’t fool yourself into thinking your going to look like a spartan from the movie 300 all of the time. Set smaller & more realistic goals that you can attain (explained in the podcast). Before you know it you will actually see progress… rather than getting started with a unrealistic goal and quickly giving up. It happens ALL THE TIME… DO NOT fool yourself into thinking you are the exception.
Thanks for making this information accessible; people need to hear it. (and apparently I need to learn how to write shorter replies).
Nah… long replies, short replies, as long as you get your point across
Thanks for the feedback
Hey, just wanted to say I really enjoy the Barban interviews. Dude doesn’t pull punches.
Will we ever get to hear John expound on his programming philosophies? The set-rep schemes and the exercise choices in the Adonis workouts are interesting to me, and I think it’d be cool if you guys took a break from the fitness industry tell-alls and did a nuts-and-bolts lifting episode.
Anyway, cool content; thanks again.
Thanks Brad. Can either you or John clarify the other part of my question
I am 5?5? and 125 lbs. So I am definitely not overweight and can at least see my 4 pack abs (if not 6 pack). Since creatine normally is just water retention, would you recommend avoiding creatine? Based on your creatine podcast, I started using creatine to increase my lean body mass, but now with this podcast, I am not sure if it is a good idea. So for an ectomorph who wants to retain the lean look, but increase muscle mass, what is the best approach?
John,
Creatine is ok even if you want to maintain a lean look. The water from creatine is within the muscle cell and not outside of it. So you should look just as lean but the muscles will be bigger.
JB
Hey Tim… no problem… we can do that in the next episode following monday’s new one (we recorded that yesterday ’cause I’m
going out of town today).
Good idea.
I have a question. I knew about the adonis effect on the fitness black book. And I read there in a post that a person can have enough protein to build muscles eating nothing but fruit, because protein in fruits is more “something”. It would be great if this is true. Is this true? Because I love fruit and I almost never get more than 25 grams of protein in a day, I can´t buy protein powders and don´t like meat, and eating too much legumes, grains, ect to get more than 70 grams of protein looks too dificult to me and seems like a lot of food to me to get more than 70 grams of protein coming from legumes, grains, etc. And I love fruit, and it´s cheap here in Mexico. I am very cut, but I want to build muscle as fast as I can and have my shoulders, upper back, and upper chest bigger to have my AI.
Neil,
I’m not sure who made the fruit comment but there is absolutely no way of getting any protein from fruit. I’m not sure there is much if any protein at all in any fruits.
Our lower limit number of 70 grams is what we’ve found in the research as the average amount needed on a daily basis to maintain and or build muscle mass.
So if gaining some muscle mass is your goal I would say you probably need to try and aim for at least 70 grams of protein per day (doesn’t matter what food sources you use to get there)
JB
Hi, i know you guys do not advocate eating an excess amount of calories and protein to gain muscle, and say that muscle gain comes from workout intensity and consistency. However, what about those guys who are super skinny and have trouble gaining any weight. Are they just suppose to eat at maintenance as well to gain muscle, cause it doesnt seem to work for many. Thanks
-Keith
Sorry, it was not a post, it was an article about fruit written by Rusy Moore. I trusted this guy a lot. He says in the article he found interesting facts about fruit and he says that in the article. Could you read the article and tell me what you think about it? the name of the article is “Incredible fruit facts: Why fruit should be a much larger part of your diet. Than you a lot for your answers. You give an excelent service to your clients.
Keith,
I don’t think the issue is that ‘it doesn’t work’ I think the issue is that it’s not possible for a super skinny guy to ever get the muscle mass that a larger guy has.
So guys make the mistake of assuming that muscle growth is similar for big guys and skinny guys, when in reality the skinny guy will never have the ability to build the same amount of muscle as the big guys do.
Ectomorphs can never has as much muscle as an endomorph…and thats it.
An ectomorph can eat a lot of food and get fat, but if he workouts just as long and just as hard as an endomorph, the endo will always have bigger stronger muscles.
JB
Hi guys, Thanks for the podcasts.
I had worked out for about ten years on and off and only used creatine for a short time and i’ve just had a six month lay off from the gym and want to start training again. I was just wondering whether i should take creatine right away or workout for a while first before taking it again.
Thanks Ben.
Ok, i see, so are you saying for example an endomorph or an ectomorph would NEVER have to eat exccess calories to gain any amount of muscle?