How To BUILD Muscle On KETO Series | Part 1

0:00 [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] with you the sun is shining 24 7 cause when we're together it feels like we're in heaven if it will get dark you'll be my million stars i know i can lean on you oh you catch me like a leaf falling from a tree if i'll be a shooting star you make a wish know how to fake this kind [Music] how many times have you started a keto vlog with a coffee production in the intro probably more than you can count

1:01 [Music] all right gel so this may in fact be the start of a next video series on the keto savage live savage youtube channel and that topic is building muscle on keto i've talked about this extensively on my podcast i've talked about this extensively on other videos but i've never had a dedicated series per se to the art and science of building muscle on keto um making a cup drink of coffee so good so the motivation behind talking about this in the first place is i was i was sent a video um on instagram the other day somebody

1:47 dm'd me a question they attached a link to a youtube video with a couple doctors and there was this one pro physique competitor or something of that nature and they were reputable names in the fitness space but they weren't really so much in the keto space but the doctor was just talking about how you can't really build muscle on keto it's impossible it's inevitable that you will lose size mass and strength if you follow a ketogenic diet for too long and i was listening to this video i was also just getting pissed off because it's like these guys have never done a strict ketogenic diet at a legitimate caloric surplus and focused on progressive overloading in their training for any length of time or else they would not be saying what

2:33 they're saying so i am highly motivated to be the light in this sea of darkness that sways especially within the fitness industry as a whole the fitness industry like i said from the very beginning is going to be the last industry to adopt a ketogenic diet for performance and human optimization because they're so set in their ways of traditional bro dieting eating carbs to build muscle having six seven meals a day eating every two or three hours there's just so much dogma in that space and i've been doing this now strict keto for six years i've been bodybuilding now for 12 years and i can assure you having bodybuild having been bodybuilding for twice the time that i've been strict keto i've done it both ways i've experimented with all different kinds of diets and

3:19 you can absolutely build muscle build size build strength build stamina build endurance uh improve your longevity and overall lifestyle with a strict ketogenic approach and i feel like there's there's all these kind of keto cut programs and there's all these you know lose weight with keto blog posts and podcasts and that's all great but losing fats and getting super shredded is just naturally by default sexier than building muscle because when you build muscle you're gonna inevitably put on a little bit of extra body fat because that just comes to territory and for that reason there's not been a whole lot of documentation of building muscle with a strict ketogenic approach and how to optimize for that so i am highly motivated to take the

4:05 next year and show you exactly what i do how it's done and how to optimize for putting on as much lean mass as possible while following a strict ketogenic approach so you don't feel like you are missing out by not having a meal every two hours or a plate full of carbohydrates specifically rice and chicken and broccoli so that's what we're going to talk about in this video so get ready all right challenge so in light of all of this how to build muscle on keto i want to start the conversation with what i'm going to be eating to begin this program off with so i keep it super simple um as you saw in the beginning i made a coffee crystal helped make the coffee she's normally the barista to the house so i got my cup of coffee here and i put

4:51 one scoop of keto brains in there and this is basically a nootropic creamer it's got one scoop is 110 calories uh 10 grams of fat four grams of total carbs um and less than one gram of protein and the ingredients are where are the ingredients it's there's sorry there's c8 mct there's alpha gpc there's lion's man there's l-theanine so this in my coffee just kind of gives me a little nootropic boost so i feel super super smart to begin the day and i put some heavy cream in there as well for about four tablespoons of heavy cream so my morning coffee winds up being

5:39 about or exactly i should say let's see if i can find it here i use my macros plus to track all of my macros by the way so that winds up being 5.6 grams of total carbs from the coffee uh creamer and the heavy cream and 30 grams of fat for a total of 296 calories so about 300 calories in my morning cup of coffee and that is what i start the day off with before i dive deeper into showing you what my macros and meals are for the day i went ahead and recorded some updated posing footage so i'm just going to throw that in here now this posing footage was taken on the first of the year so january 1st 2021

6:26 and i weighed 177.9 upon waking that morning and i did a caliper test according to my caliper test which i do think is a little low it's a little inaccurate um so my i've got a bathroom scale the with things bathroom scale that puts me about 16 body fat which i think is higher than it actually is according to my caliper test i did the jackson pollock seven point test that put me at 9.35 percent not sure if that focused or not 9.35 i don't think i'm that low i'm probably somewhere around the 12 would be my guess i'm gonna get a dexa scan uh this week so i'll put those results in here but just to kind of give you a visual as to where i'm looking currently at the

7:12 beginning of the year at the onset of this building phase let me throw that footage in you can kind of see what i'm looking like currently [Music] yeah i make decisions to glow ridiculous flow potential to glow you know i just do that consolidate my readers line it up put them together anyone that ever let me down forget them forever my memory's bad remember me though my memory's gone my memory it limits me homes no tree huggers cause all the lumber's gone just the beginning am i losing the winning is this reality or am i

7:59 pretending [Music] how's poetry huh all right so i just got back from a run and a quick workout and took a shower for like a whole new man i'm gonna walk you through my first legitimate meal of the day here so we've got on this platter here some sardines this focuses focus sardines and liverwurst so i've got about let me tell you exactly how many ounces of liverwurst i have um i have three ounces of the sardines first of

8:45 all and i'm using the wild planet sardines here and these there's several different varieties this one's got the um it's packaging extra virgin olive oil with lemon lightly smoked and i've got the us wellness meats liverwurst i've got 112 grams of that and then i've also got a keto brick this is the new flavor the chocolate peanut butter cup that we've released is a limited edition flavor a while back um this video is going to go live on friday which means these bad boys are launching this sunday january 10th at 12 noon central this is our lowest carb brick of all of them nine grams of total carbohydrates for

9:30 the 1 000 calorie brick it's delicious i've also got some of this promo kitchen sent me some of this buffalo sauce if that focuses and i'm putting a little bit of this on the sardines and liverwurst because it just gives it some some nice little flavor and it's pretty clean ingredients cayenne pepper sauce vinegar organic cashew butter avocado oil garlic powder and paprika so pretty clean ingredients 1 tablespoon is 35 calories 3.5 grams of fat 1 gram of total carbs and less than 1 gram of protein and this is my first legitimate meal of the day not counting the fatty coffee and it totals 67 grams of protein 12 grams of total carbs that's depending on what flavor brick you use

10:16 and then let's see here 112 grams of fat for a total of 1348 calories boom and this is my meal one i'm typically gonna have this about within two hours after my training session um so that's what i've got going on there i'm only going to start with about two meals a day to begin with during this building phase and the fatty coffee in the morning my first meal sometime after i train and then my second and final meal later in the evening hours this particular meal is super easy because the liverwurst is already cooked the sardines obviously don't have to cook and the keto brick is obviously ready to eat as well so

11:02 oftentimes i'm on the go this is like you know in between meetings in between calls so not having to worry about cooking something is a huge key here so all of these three items i could just portion out properly grab and go and be done with it again it's about 1300 calories so it's enough time me over for several hours and get me through until my evening meal which is the largest meal of the day but i'm about to dive into this so i'll catch up with you in a few let's talk about training let's get them moving a bunch of limbs making some burn piles cutting down some trees burn some calories doing that went for my run today did a little workout today i'm at 13 933 steps thus far according to the aura ring

11:51 which i used to track my sleep and my activity i don't really manipulate my macronutrient intake for the day based off of what my estimated caloric expenditure is via the tracking devices the wearables like the ring the fitbit stuff like that i've always kind of been to the opinion that if you're consistently eating whatever macronutrient goals you have and then you know just being on top of that as far as the activity expenditure goes that kind of averages out over time especially if you're not having any crazy drastic changes i have been moving a lot more here lately with just hiking from hunting and clearing a bunch of land here at the new house so my activity's been a little higher than normal but i've made a plan in 2021 to run a mile every single day

12:37 at least no matter what train every single day no matter what and just move more in general so i feel like i have a good baseline established there so as it relates to training and building muscle on keto a lot of people are under this false assumption that you have to drastically change your training style your formats your sets and rep scheme when you switch over to keto that's just not the case when you switch over to keto especially if you're coming from a carb dependent state yes there is going to be an adaptation period you're basically i mean you are totally shifting your body's primary fuel source from carbs and glucose to fat and ketones when you do that there's there's going to be that adaptation phase your training will likely suffer temporarily especially in

13:24 the highly glycolytic demanding activities like crossfit for instance however after you become deeply fat adapted deeply keto adapted not what comes from just registering ketones on a urine strip but actually adapt them you'll not notice a decrease in performance you'll likely notice an improvement in performance because you have less inflammation and better recovery so you can train more frequently being keto as long as i have now i can literally train heavy squats uh you know repetitively day after day if i wanted to without any crazy adverse effects to my joints whereas in the past i would have to take a full week sometimes a week and a half off in between training legs simply because my my knees would hurt so bad i don't have that anymore with keto a lot of that is because i'm

14:11 having a very high fat version of keto which by definition you would think is pretty just known uh but there's been a lot of variabilities with what people consider keto nowadays a lot of people do very low fat keto which is just laughable in my opinion anyways let's get back to training so take another sip training what i'm gonna do um and honestly this this is gonna hold true whether you're doing a car base a carbohydrate-based diet or a keto-based diet progressive overload is key you have to subject your body to a stimulus in order to elicit a response from your body in this case the stimulus is progressive overloading in the resistance training department and the desired

14:56 result of that stimulus is lean muscle gain muscle growth so if you do you know 10 sets of 10 reps or like a classic 5x5 and you always use the exact same weights the exact same time under tension the exact same frequency your your body will grow to be able to sustain that uh demanded activity but then it has no reason to develop and grow beyond that so progressive overload is simply progressively overloading the muscles the joints the tendons the ligaments your body uh with additional stimuli over time that doesn't necessarily have to be just more weight it can be more weight but it could also be more frequency more time under tension

15:42 burnout sets it could be drop sets it could be super sets it could be any form of stimulus that is increasing the intensities to which you are training increase volume increase weight all of these things can be a form of progressive overload so what i've done in the past is i've just you know i've not really tracked my my lips in the past i prefer to train pretty intuitively instinctively but for the sake of this experiment and just really putting myself out there and showing you you know step by step how i build muscle on a ketogenic diet i'm going to track my lifts i don't know if i'm going to track every single movement but i'm certainly going to track my primary compound movements being squats deadlifts bench press and overhead press and i'll be able to chart that out over time and progressively over those

16:28 progressively overload those in particular so that you can see the growth there and from a strength standpoint and obviously i'll be tracking measurements um and you know muscle mass lean tissue via dexa over the course of this this year so you'll be able to see how those lifts have improved via you know increased weight increased resistance and my lean tissue has increased as well as my um measurements have improved as well so that's the plan there keeping the training very simple i'm doing a actually i'll tell you kind of how i've got that set up in the next clip all right so as far as training goes i have had a lot of success with doing an eight day rotational split in which for every eight day block

17:13 i'm training six days and having two active rest or recovery days now i'm doing this i used to do a standard bro protocol in which you know i'd have monday would be chest day tuesday would be back and biceps or back and then wednesday would be arms and then thursday would be legs or something like that and i saw a lot of success with that a lot of people that haven't really trained for a extended period of time see a lot of success with that however after you train for for several years you kind of have to mix it up a little bit i find that that simply hitting a single muscle group once a week just isn't adequate frequency to elicit the response that i was looking for so i've since done this eight day rotational split and i'm basically hitting each muscle

17:59 group twice during that given eight day block now the caveat being it's not the same uh training style on that same muscle group each time i hit it so one of those sessions is a very heavy focus day in which i have a fewer rep counts but a much heavier weight and then the second time i hit that muscle group i'm focusing more hypertrophy so a little bit higher rep count a little bit lower weights focusing more so on blood flow and just getting a really really good pump and the way i've got this set up is there's a there's a couple differences with regard to like squats for instance like squats has its own standalone day so there's a day in which all i do is squats but i do like 15 sets of squats then i have another leg

18:46 day which is high volume leg day that's more of the hypertrophy focus i'm doing supersets with like quad extensions hamstring curls lunges stuff like that and then i have um i've got let's see i've got a back a heavy back hypertrophy bicep day i've got a heavy chest hypertrophy shoulder day i've got a heavy tricep hypertrophy chest day so i've got it broken up so that each muscle group is pretty much getting hit twice i only hit back or i only hit biceps once but other than that everything's getting hit twice one heavy one focused on hypertrophy and i've got this mapped out i'm going to make this into an excel spreadsheet or a google spreadsheet that you can download and see exactly what i'm doing

19:32 you can use it yourself if you want and i'll link to that in the description of this video so if you want that just go to it and then go to file and make a copy and if you make a copy you'll be able to edit it fully the the initial link would be my master link and you won't be able to edit that but if you just click on file make a copy you'll have full access to it and you can use this same template if you so choose i've had a lot of success with it it's worked really really well for me i've given it to so many of my clients they've all seen success with it it allows the the different muscle groups to have ample time to recover before hitting them again but you're kind of covering your bases because you're hitting them with two different types of stimuli and it works really really well

20:33 all right time to eat some cooking up my ground beef here that's 75 25 ground beef i'm gonna put six whole eggs in there so i'm gonna scramble six whole eggs in there and probably put some sauce on there for some flavor and that will be this meal all right so the final product here with that sauce on there six eggs a pound of the 75 25 ground beef and some that sauce and of course some red and real salt

21:21 so good so good i'm a little bit more relaxed with tracking my sauces and stuff like that during the off season if it was a contest prep i would track everything and i probably wouldn't even use that much sauce um or any sauce but in the offseason i'm a little bit more laid-back and also with stuff like wine like i'll probably have a glass of wine tonight i wouldn't do that during a contest perhaps during the off season i'm totally fine in doing that not really worried about it because i'm just trying to be at a surplus and that's the main thing you know being at a surplus like if you're just at a maintenance intake it's gonna be really hard for your body to partition that nutrients and put on a bunch of extra lean tissue there there used to be there still is this belief that you have to eat big

22:07 to get big and there is some truth to them i took it to a very unhealthy extreme when i was bro dieting eating a bunch of carbs way back in the day i ate way too much and i got way too fat i was 230 pounds and probably close to 30 body fat and that's just not healthy i'm going to eat a lot of food during this off season i'm going to be in a significant surplus to be able to put on as much lean muscle mass as possible lean muscle mass being the key you're going to put on some body fat it's inevitable if you're eating at a surplus you're gonna be at a higher body fat than if you're in a contest prep however if you're really doing a progressive overload principle training very hard training intensely with um you know intention and eating clean

22:53 healthy foods like you've seen me prepare here today not a bunch of dirty keto foods or a bunch of crap carbs or heavily processed foods you're going to really be able to mitigate the unnecessary fat gain in a surplus so that's what i'm doing here i'm eating high quality foods i'm still tracking everything in my off season i'm going to focus on putting on as much lean mass as possible now here's another thing that is worth knowing when you're on a ketogenic diet when you're eating at a surplus your ketones your blood ketones are most certainly going to be lower because i mean when you look at what the ketogenic diet is that it's at its core it's basically an evolutionary adaptation to survive in scarce times with no food so if you're having a surplus of food a surplus of calories

23:38 you're going to see lower ketone readings that doesn't mean you're not fat adapted it doesn't mean you're not keto adapted that doesn't mean that all it doesn't mean you're not following a ketogenic diet just means that you're at a surplus whenever i'm in a surplus in a building phase my keen tones are always significantly lower than when i'm in a contest prep that's okay that doesn't mean you're not keto so eat the foods that you've done eat the foods that you've that you've consumed on any other keto journey of yours whether it be a contest prep a building phase what not you can absolutely build muscle on a ketogenic diet especially well formulated ketogenic diets at a surplus with proper progressive overload principles in your resistance training i'm going to do that over the course this year i'm going to show you how i do that i'm going to document the process i'm going to document how much muscle i built how much strength i gain

24:24 and i'm going to put all the people that say you can't touch so that's that you'll have a great start to a 2021 and i'll see you next time i also forgot to mention my macros for this meal so this meal is 108 grams of protein zero grams of carbs 124 grams of fat 1680 calories total now for the day that yields a grand total of 3 324 calories 266 grams of fat 15 grams of carbs um total carbs and 175 grams of protein my current body weight is right around

25:10 175 pounds that's about a pound of protein per pound of body weight and that macronutrient ratio breaks down to 75 percent of my calories coming from fat i will continue to increase this caloric load probably on a bi-weekly basis as my training intensity increases with the progressive overload so i'll be sure to document all the changes there as well now i'll see you next time