Hey there, Dr. Mike T Nelson here. In this episode of the Flex Diet Podcast, I’m excited to announce that the Flex Diet Certification is officially open! I’m recording this one from Europe, and I’ll walk you through what the cert is all about. The Flex Diet Cert is my comprehensive program that dives deep into the worlds of nutrition and recovery, all built around the concepts of metabolic flexibility and flexible dieting. But we don’t just stop at macros and science—we also dig into habit-based techniques and the psychology behind behavior change, so you can help clients actually follow through and see real results. In this episode, I also geek out a bit on the role of protein in muscle growth, including a breakdown of muscle protein synthesis and how it ties into exercise. If you’ve ever wondered how to optimize training and recovery to build more lean muscle, you’ll want to tune in. You’ll also hear about the eight key interventions I cover in the cert, plus highlights from expert interviews and some simple, actionable steps you can use with your clients right now to improve performance, body composition, and overall health. Check it out, and if you’re ready to level up your coaching, the Flex Diet Cert is open now for a limited time. Let’s go! Sponsors: Tecton Life Ketone drink! https://tectonlife.com/ DRMIKE to save 20% LMNT electrolyte drink mix: miketnelsonlmnt.com
Hey there, Dr. Mike T Nelson here. In this episode of the Flex Diet Podcast, I’m excited to announce that the Flex Diet Certification is officially open! I’m recording this one from Europe, and I’ll walk you through what the cert is all about.
The Flex Diet Cert is my comprehensive program that dives deep into the worlds of nutrition and recovery, all built around the concepts of metabolic flexibility and flexible dieting. But we don’t just stop at macros and science—we also dig into habit-based techniques and the psychology behind behavior change, so you can help clients actually follow through and see real results.
In this episode, I also geek out a bit on the role of protein in muscle growth, including a breakdown of muscle protein synthesis and how it ties into exercise. If you’ve ever wondered how to optimize training and recovery to build more lean muscle, you’ll want to tune in.
You’ll also hear about the eight key interventions I cover in the cert, plus highlights from expert interviews and some simple, actionable steps you can use with your clients right now to improve performance, body composition, and overall health.
Check it out, and if you’re ready to level up your coaching, the Flex Diet Cert is open now for a limited time. Let’s go!
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[00:00:00] What's going on? It's Dr. Mike T Nelson here with the Flex Diet Podcast, and today we've got a special announcement that the Flex Diet certification is open today. If you're listening to this on Monday, June 16th. And I'm recording this from a undisclosed location in Europe. I got to fly over here to help an athlete for the past four days, and I've got a couple more days doing some stuff over here in a different country.
But today wanted to do two things and now instead the Flex Diet Cert is open and give you a short primer on the effects of protein, including two things that are rarely discussed. So the Flex Diet Cert is your certification for [00:01:00] nutrition and recovery. We use the concepts of metabolic flexibility and flexible dieting to help you design stuff either for yourself or for clients on how to master nutrition.
And we do this with more of a habit based approach. It is more on the physiology side. But we do bake the psychology aspect into the cert. So you're working with clients, not against their psychology, as we all know, that compliance is a main thing, but we wanna make sure that they're getting information, what to do when they are compliant.
So the goal was to solve that problem and also make it a flexible framework so the client themselves actually helps dictate the direction. But it's not necessarily a free for all. Example I use is if you are a new client and maybe you've got a coach, and the [00:02:00] coach is saying, all right, this is like bowling.
We expect you to be com perfect with your nutrition on day one. So if you were going to the bowling alley, this would be like trying to bull a strike on day one. It's not gonna happen. It is also unrealistic, and both of you're gonna be mad at each other. It's not gonna work well. However, maybe we inflate the little bumpers and stick them in the gutters.
And so now your goal is just to get a ball down the alley and knock down some pins, right? So that's more progress than you've made in a long period of time. So we're gonna rig the system a little bit in the client's favor, and it's gonna be a learning progress or learning as they go, but the client's gonna be able to make progress because they are going to get some wins.
They're going to get closer to adding more muscle increase in their performance and improving their body composition. Like I said, we do that based on the concepts of metabolic flexibility, how well your body can use carbohydrates, how well it [00:03:00] can use fat, and how well it can switch back and forth between those two.
And the idea of flexible dieting so that you have options, because a lot of times, eh, this is going away, which is good, but in the coaching world, it's. Hey, just do this one thing, and they just keep hammering the square peg into the round hole. So we wanna make it a flexible way so that clients do have more options because real life is busy.
They've got a lot of stuff going on. And within it we go over eight different interventions. Everything from protein, fats, carbohydrates to exercise, neat micronutrition, sleep, and more. Then we give you the explicit 40 action items. Again, this is set up in a flexible framework but we also tell you exactly here's where you would start in this case.
Here's your options here. Try this or try that so that you as a coach have complete confidence that you are giving your [00:04:00] clients a good starting point. We have about 60% of people go through the cert are actually coaches or trainers. And about 40% are actually fitness enthusiasts who just want to learn more about their physiology and how to get better results themselves.
We also have some great expert interviews from, I think we're up to 11 different experts now. Everyone from Protein Metabolism with Dr. Stu Phillips, Dr. Jose Antonio, Dr. Mike Ormsby. We've got flexible dieting. Dr. Peter Fishman, Dr. Eric Helms. Sleep with Dr. Dan party. Metabolic flexibility, Dr. Hunter Waldman, and many others.
So the concept today that is also taught in the intervention, one in the Flex Diet Cert, which you can go enroll in right now if you want. It's open to June 16th, 2025 through midnight [00:05:00] Pacific Standard Time, June 23rd. Best places to get on the newsletter. We'll put a newsletter link below. It's free to join the newsletter.
We've got a ton of information on the Flex Diet search and even just teaching you some of the concepts itself. If you're not in a position to pick up the cert right now, you can still get out the newsletter and still get a ton of value of things you can go out and apply right away. So one of them today is the first intervention is protein.
And I think one of the things that gets. Maybe not. Overemphasized is the dietary intake up protein. Now, one of the main reasons that this is the first intervention, like I said, is based on something called coaching leverage. So coaching leverage is a trademark concept. We teach on the flex diet cert, and it's the physiologic response times the psychology response of the client or the client's ability to change.
So we [00:06:00] account for both the physiology, like you want to be doing things that get you closer to adding more muscle, improving your body composition, improving performance. You don't wanna be doing things that are not gonna move the needle physiologically. But we also account for the client's ability to change.
The example I use all the time is sleep. It is very hard to get clients or anyone to make wholesale changes in their sleep. It's just a very hard process with a lot of moving parts. 'cause at the end of the day, if you're only in bed for five hours, yes we can optimize your sleep a little bit better. We can do things to help you, but you just need more time in bed.
There's no way around it. Just like training. At some point you're gonna have to lift the weights, push things around, do the work. Same thing in cardiovascular training. At some point you're gonna have to do the work on the row or on the bike or run those things. So there's never gonna be any way of getting around that.
So we take into account the [00:07:00] coaching leverage, and it turns out protein rates out at number one. So that's intervention number one. Sleep rated dead last at eight. That's just because it's very hard to get people to change their habits. So sleep. So that was more on the psychology side. So we wanna rig the system in your favor.
So we're gonna talk about protein is gonna be number one. Within protein, there's two ways to get more amino acids into the muscle. And the first way I'm sure you've heard about all the time, and I've talked a ton about it, 'cause I think it's absolutely fascinating. This is a process called Muscle Protein Synthesis.
Literally taking amino acids the building blocks of protein and stuffing them into muscle tissue to make it bigger, better, and stronger. And there's been a lot of great work that's been done in this area using stable isotope methods and other methods. And we've got a fair amount of data in this area.
And we [00:08:00] know that if you meet these two requirements in general, that you will see more amino acids show up in muscle. So on the feeding side, those two things are, you need a certain amount of leucine, which is probably two to three grams in humans. So leucine is an essential amino acid. And think of this as starting the assembly line.
We need to have the assembly line to make more muscle. We need to start said assembly line number two is essential amino acids. And we might be able to get by with as little as six grams. We could probably get by and maybe saturate that out and maybe 12 to 15 grams. I would default to other buddies like Dr.
David Church and people who do research on this stuff all the time. But that's my understanding. Simply, we need raw materials. We need other essential amino acids to stuff into the muscle tissue. So we have our assembly line that's running. It's been started by leucine, so the switch is on. But now if we're gonna make something, [00:09:00] we need raw material.
And those raw materials are essential amino acids. Third, we need to get energy from somewhere. We could have a advanced biochemical discussion about maybe. Diverting energy from fat to do this, which could be dietary fat or subcutaneous fat. Or fat from somewhere else in your body. Or if we wanna maximize that entire process, we probably need a caloric surplus, but we need energy to run it.
So we won't talk much about where we get the energy from right now, but the two main things are outside of energy. Turning the assembly line on. So two to three grams of leucine and essential amino acids, which we may be able to get by with as little as six essential amino acids there. And leucine is an essential amino acid.
If you're consuming things like a supplement, 20 grams of whey protein has both those requirements. If you're consuming a vegan supplement dependent upon the source of the vegan supplement. But if you go with a higher quality source such as rice protein you [00:10:00] will cover both those requirements. If you go with a much higher dose, so you probably need around 40 grams of rice protein to get that response.
This is because you need, again, enough leucine and you need enough essential amino acids. So in the Flex Diet cert, we do have a little bit of a shortcut. You can help do some certain things if you're only getting the lower amounts of plant-based proteins. For our discussion 40 grams of rice protein.
There's been a couple studies done on This will be sufficient, so that takes care of the feeding side. And what we see is that this will acutely bump up muscle protein synthesis for a couple hours. And that's great, right? If you want to accumulate more muscle, you literally need to take amino acids and stuff them into muscle tissue.
Now again, there is a breakdown side of this equation, so we need what's called net protein synthesis. So just if you always add things to your bank account and you don't take much out, you're gonna have more in your [00:11:00] bank account. If you start making a lot of withdrawals and you don't have much going in, you're gonna be negative.
So on the catabolic side we will talk about that maybe later at a different time. But we'll assume now that's negligible for our point in our conversation right now. But at the end of the day, we do wanna make sure the net is positive. We're sticking more in than we are taking out.
So on the putting more inside, we've got dietary protein. And if we cover essential amino acids, including two to three grams of leucine, we're gonna be good assuming we get calories from somewhere, but that spike will only last for a couple hours. And the other part that I think gets forgotten a lot about this, and I know Dr.
Stu Phillips had a great post recently on this. Is a component of exercise. So while, one of the questions I get about the Flex Diet Cert is this only nutrition? And the answer is but not really. We have modules on neat, so [00:12:00] non-exercise activity thermogenesis. We have a whole module on sleep. We have a whole module on exercise, and the reason I included the exercise is that you need a stimulus to apply to the system or to the organism in order for it to change.
Having more protein is great and there's lots of other benefits to that, especially with satiety and trying to keep calories lower and everything else. Thermic effect of feeding. But if we want more muscle, which I would argue everybody does, or at least trying to mitigate muscle loss, even if your goal isn't more muscle, it's probably performance or mitigating muscle loss, increasing muscle protein synthesis is gonna be great.
So dietary protein is one way and exercise is a huge important area. Number two, and if I were to pick only one, I would actually probably pick exercise over dietary protein. And I think Dr. Stu Phillips had a similar point. And obviously Dr. Stu Phillips has done it ton of this [00:13:00] research over the years, so I'm gonna default to him on that position also.
But we need a stimulus to cause a system to change. So your muscles need a reason to get bigger and stronger. Otherwise you're just gonna go backwards. So your body's gonna be like, Hey, we don't need any of this muscle tissue. We're not really using it to a high degree, so just get rid of it. It's very metabolically expensive to hold onto, so you need to give your body a reason to keep it or even slightly increase it.
And when we look at it in the context of muscle protein, synthetic response. We find that exercise will increase the baseline of muscle protein synthesis for 24 48, maybe 72 hours, depending upon what type of training was done, what population in general. The more trained you are, the less length of time you will get from that, which is why I am a big fan of doing some type of strength training, [00:14:00] probably at least Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
Again, we can have a different discussion somewhere else about what is the bare minimum you would need. Probably one to two hours a week. But I do think if you can get in three sessions, even for 45 minutes, I do think you will get a huge benefit from that. You don't have to be a complete nutcase like I am and spend two hours and 20 minutes in the gym on Monday and Saturday and then do three other sessions plus cardio and everything else.
Except when I'm traveling now it's just get the bare minimum in to, to stay functional, but. So strength training, you need to do some type of lifting, heavier ish weights. Now again, they don't have to be super heavy Again, like Dr. Stu Phillips, Dr. Byrd have shown research down to as low as 30% of your one rep max.
So again, this doesn't always have to be heavy lifting, but you have to do some type of strength training. Let's go lift some stuff, press some stuff, carry heavy things, and this will increase your baseline of muscle protein synthesis. [00:15:00] For 24, 48 or even 72 hours. So if you were to look at a graph, you have the baseline that has been shifted upwards on that baseline.
Now you have your little increases, your more spikes from increasing dietary protein. And the reality is we want to do both. Now again if it was really pressed and I had to pick one or the other, I would probably pick exercise. But the reality is you can do both and most people are probably gonna want to do both.
I. And adding more protein at a meal for most people is an easier starting point than exercise. You're already eating something. We just need to change a little bit what you're actually eating. Trying to get people to exercise is a little bit more of a harder battle. On the psychology side, I think there is an old study showing that for someone to be considered a lifelong exerciser, you have to consistently exercise, I wanna say for two years.
So on one hand, that's a long period of time. Compared to your lifetime, [00:16:00] not really that long for an investment. If you can get through two years of consistently doing exercise, the data says you'll probably stay being a consistent exerciser the rest of your life. So our takeaway here today is that if you want more muscle or more performance, which I'd argue almost everybody does, where you want to at least hold onto as much muscle tissue as you can you need to one.
Give your body a reason to hold on to said tissue. This is lifting weights. Again, they don't have to always be heavy. Least 30% of one rep max do some type of lifting. That will increase your baseline of muscle protein synthesis for 24 48 or potentially maybe even 72 hours in some cases. On top of that, we want to increase our consumption of protein.
Again, we can have a discussion later about bolus dose of high. A hundred grams of protein such as the urine tramline [00:17:00] study. But I like the four by 40 approach for more. Most people get four meals in per day of 40 grams of protein. Now that is on the higher side, that is gonna take some more work.
Are you probably at that flat end of the curve? We're adding more than that is not gonna be a huge benefit. I probably agree with that. There might be some other benefits or reasons to do it. And if you're at 40 grams, even if you're using lower quality sources, odds are you're still gonna be able to get enough essential amino acids and leucine in a most cases.
So go lift some stuff, do some exercise that'll increase your baseline elevation and muscle protein synthesis for one, two, maybe two and a half, three days, and then have some protein on top of it, which will have a short acute spike. Muscle protein synthesis that'll go back down to baseline, but then you could have another meal and it will be increased again.
Now there's a whole bunch of nuance into this and [00:18:00] I'm sure people are reading all the research will poke holes in it and, but if you can think of just two things, getting a higher amount of protein per day, again, the timing of it probably doesn't matter as much. Again, I like doing the four by 40 approach because just eating a hundred grams of protein at once is harder than it appears.
And then two, go lift. Some stuff doesn't necessarily always have to be heavy, and you will see more protein stuffed into your muscles via amino acids, and you will recover faster and also limit the amount of total muscle loss over time. If you want more information on that, we've got a whole module that talks about the intricacies of protein.
We do use a lot of research, but I explain it to you in terms you can understand. And also for this round, if you have any specific questions, you'll be able to get my private email address. You can email me any questions and I will personally answer them for you. Flex Diet [00:19:00] Cert is open today, June 16th, 2025 through June 23rd, 2025 at midnight Pacific Standard Time.
If you have any questions, you can email me also. And the best place to get all the information and the links to everything else is on the free newsletter. We'll put a link to it down below. Or if you're just listening to this, go to mike t nelson.com. It'll be a newsletter tab at the top. Hop on and you'll get all the information.
Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Hope to see all of you in the certification. Have a wonderful day.
Speaker: Did you see that?
Speaker 2: Yes. The frog is certainly taking a beating on this show.
Speaker: Yeah. It's hard to feel sorry for him. We take a beating every show.
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