Ep. #415: Lyle McDonald on How to Recover Faster from Injuries

Mike: Hello there. I am Mike Matthews and welcome to my muscle for life podcast on this episode. I talked to the one and only Lyle McDonald about something that I was pretty excited to chat about because it is not discussed very often. And that is how to use nutrition to recover from injuries faster.

Now, If you work out or do just about anything physically challenging often enough, chances are you are going to have to deal with an injury or two along the way, even if they’re just minor issues like muscle strains, tendonitis, joint pain. aggravations and so on. Now, in most cases, all it takes is a little extra R& R to heal up, but if an injury is more severe, there is a lot more you can do to accelerate your recovery.

And that’s what Lyle is going to talk about in this interview. Now, in case you are not familiar with Lyle, he has been one of the foremost Evidence based fitness researchers and writers for a couple decades now and someone whose work I’ve always Liked and that helped point me in the right direction back when I got serious about educating myself on getting into great shape when I started to really look into the Evidence based fitness space so to speak so Lyle is Also uniquely qualified to talk about injury recovery because he has not only scoured the literature, but he has also used what he learned to help recover from a rather gruesome rollerblading accident that literally shattered his leg.

And yeah, that sounds like something out of a bad comedy, but it is what happened. And so after the strategies that Lyle discusses in this episode worked so well, that his doctor was genuinely impressed by how rapidly his leg healed up. Lyle documented everything in a book of his called Optimal Nutrition for Injury Recovery, and this discussion is a Summation of the key information that’s in the book.

Now, obviously, the book and this interview focuses on how to use nutrition to recover faster and better from injuries, but Lyle also shares some other tips that can markedly increase healing. This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills. But I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in.

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All righty, that is enough. Shh. For now at least. Let’s get to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It’s been a bit. Yeah. Thank you for having me. Yeah. I appreciate you taking the time. The last time I think you were here to talk about fat loss for women. And that was probably, yeah, it was a very popular episode.

It was one of the more popular, probably top 15 that I’ve done by downloads. 

Lyle: Excellent. 

Mike: So I’m sure this one will make the rounds too. And so this time Here to talk about injury recovery and specifically the reason why I wanted to get you on is because you have a book that I thought was interesting and unique, particularly that goes over nutrition and recovery.

You’ll get into this, that a lot of the discussions that I’ve read and heard online. around recovery are just the standard rice protocol. It’s good. It’s bad. Don’t do things that re aggravated. It just takes time stretching mobility, blah, blah, blah. And, but not much talk about nutrition.

And so that’s what initially piqued my interest. And so here we are, and I’m just going to pass the mic over to you. And I think a good place to start is why did you write this book? You just told me, but I thought it’s interesting. So let’s start there. 

Lyle: Yeah, one of my old sort of long held philosophies is, we’re all trying to fix ourself one way or another.

Psychiatrists are always, or psychologists are always crazy. An old joke, dietitians and personal trainers, we were usually like, overweight kids. And you want to find someone who’s an expert on low back pain, find someone who’s suffered with it for years. So what happened with this is I got invited to go roller skating, indoor roller rink, like your parents used to go to, for somebody’s birthday.

And I was an inline skater for years. I raced. I was nice. Like I hadn’t skated in a while, but I did it for two decades. So went out and, we were out skating and it was one of those group skate things. And I was out goofing off. Somebody got out of control and ran into me. Everything goes into slow motion when you’re about to get hurt and everything slowed down and my skate stuck to the floor and I went over the side of it and I like just felt part of my left leg explode.

Mike: Damn. 

Lyle: They get me off the thing. We go to the emergency room and and this is gross. My foot sitting on the floor, your foot points up. It was just hanging off. To the side, like there was no support. It’s swollen up to the size of a cantaloupe. And they’re like, yeah, you broke a bone. I tore two ligaments.

They pumped me up with painkillers and said, I need to see an orthopedist as quickly as possible. I did. His name is actually Doc Savage. No, no joke. It was awesome. 

Mike: So you were sold on the spot. You’re like, how could this go wrong? How can this possibly go wrong? 

Lyle: And I asked him and I was like, dude, did you have the comic book?

He’s oh yeah, I had all the comic books as a kid. He was an older guy and they did the thing. He’s okay. So I broke my fibula, the little bone on the outside of my shin, complete break. I tore what’s called the pyramidal ligament on the inside of the ankle, which normally holds the foot. And I tore the ligament in between the tibia and the fibula.

So he’s we’re going to go in, we’re going to put a plate on the fibula. We’re going to put two cross pins across the tib fib so they get close enough. And so that’s the long and the short of it. The only other interesting thing, just because I think it’s a cool story, is he takes me in for the surgery and he goes, all right, I’m going to give you prescription for, it was probably morphine.

It was good. I don’t like painkillers. And he goes, now I want you to start taking this early because it has to build up in your system and he goes, no, you don’t have to listen to me. But do not call me at 2 a. m. after the surgery, screaming in pain. And I go, okay. I said, I don’t like painkillers, but I knew this.

And the day of the surgery goes, do you want a nerve block? You can block the femoral nerve. And I’m like, okay. And they did that for 24 hours. I couldn’t feel a thing. It was like that scene in Kill Bill when she’s in the car and I’m like, move your left toe. Nothing. I closed, the person who was watching over me, I like closed my eyes and said, touch me.

Nothing. It didn’t exist. And exactly 24 hours later, I felt pulse, excruciating pain. And that’s where I was. This was a major thing. Like this required surgery. This is really the extreme end of injury recovery. Some of what I needed to do, but it just threw me into, all right, I need to go nail this down in terms of what I need to be doing nutritionally, in terms of supplements, activity.

Now I was getting a lot of feedback from my orthopedist, of course. And I’ve got some really good, smart physiotherapist friends online that I got more feedback from. It sucked. I was on crutches, in pain, sleeping was a nightmare. You can’t do anything. You can’t do laundry. You can’t put dishes away.

Like it was just, it was hellish. But I wanted to just make sure I was doing everything correctly to make sure it healed not only quickly, but 

Mike: yeah. 

Lyle: Because with a lot of injuries, I’ll talk about this in a second. You can get a lot of scar tissue. If it doesn’t really rebuild itself properly, you end up with essentially permanent problems.

My left ankle still doesn’t have the same range of motion and never will. I can also predict when the weather changes. That is absolutely true. Like a superpower. Now there’s research on that. Like people with osteoarthritis, totally. When the barometric pressure changes, you can totally feel it.

And the only really good thing that’s come out of this is that I now have a legitimate reason to never full squat again, because my shin just doesn’t move that way anymore. It will not move forward enough. So I’m just limited to box squatting. Within the range of motion. So that’s like the long version of what basically I just blew my leg up because someone else ran into me, which really frustrates me.

If I’m going to get hurt, it should be my fault. I don’t like it when someone else, the difference is my leg healed. He’s got to live with the guilt for the rest of his life. So I’m okay with that. 

Mike: If you want to blame yourself, you can, in a karmic sense, you could just say it probably is my fault.

Lyle: Like I didn’t have to say yes and I had been on skates for years. I was out there goofing off and dude runs into me. I was like, so anyways, that’s the long and the short of how this came to be. And then also like I went and looked and I was really shocked to find that, you go to Amazon and there’s 47 books on any given topic and fitness and health.

The last book I could find on injury recover was like 1994. Nobody had written anything other than what was, on PubMed and in the research, so I’m like here’s an opportunity to offset some of my hospital bills to go figure this out for myself and then just try to put it together. And what’s probably one of, one of my most applied books, it’s like 44 pages.

I was super to the point, super focused and just keeping it practical instead of 200 pages of theory. I should write more like that when I’m in a hurry. So anyway, 

Mike: When you’re dealing with that, if someone’s hurt. They’re going to appreciate that. It’s to the point. Yeah. I just want to be better. Tell me what to do, please.

Lyle: Sure. At the end of the day, nobody needs to know about osteoblasts and osteoclasts and all this bone resorption stuff and what’s going on. It just doesn’t matter. It’s just like, how do I make the bone get stronger and supported nutritionally or whatever? So yeah, I tried to keep it super to the point.

Mike: What were some of the Maybe surprising or counterintuitive things, or what are some of the things that come to the conclusions you came to that run a bit contrary to what most people think they know about injury recovery? 

Lyle: I don’t think they really jumped out at me. Let me make it clear. The book really deals with muscle, tendon, bone, and ligament, right?

There’s other stuff. Concussions are a big deal right now, especially in sport, and that is a whole separate issue that I did not get into. Nerve injury, not really going to touch it. Menisci, the little squidgy bits between your bones, like not a lot of healing. So I tried to focus on the stuff that in a training sense, we’re going to see most often.

I think the big one, and I’d say this is the big controversy that’s erupted, right? So we go back in the day and when you got hurt, you would just be immobilized for weeks and months and ice and rest and this and that. We know now that while that’s important to a point. Too much is bad, right?

There’s been this shift from, the old thing was, rice, rest, ice, compression, elevation. That has actually been now, this was news to me, expanded to prices, which is protection, protect the injured area, I wear a boot, rest, ice, compression, elevation, and then support. If your shoulder’s injured, you wear a sling.

Protection and support doesn’t add much to it. And there’s some debate over some of these. Protection, there’s no debate. If you’ve injured an area, you want to keep it protected so it doesn’t get re injured. Like I have two dogs. I was terrified that one of them was going to be playing and run into my foot.

So I wore the boot for quite some time. It’s really where the rest ice compression elevation is especially rest in ice. Originally, the idea was just rest and rest. And the problem is that after an injury, there’s this immediate inflammation phase when it swells, and then you enter what’s called a proliferation phase.

And at this point, scar tissue starts to form to just cover the injury. Now scar tissue, while it’s great for covering the injury, is never as strong as regular tissue. It’s not as strong as bone and muscle. It’s not muscle fibers are lined up very much in line. The scar tissue is random. And if you rest for too long, this proliferation phase just lays down so much scar tissue that you don’t get into the next phase, which is called remodeling, where you’re laying down proper cells.

And then of course that leads into recovery and rehabilitation. So the rest thing went from, you should rest forever to resting too long is bad. But people have gone to the other extremes. You should never rest, right? They talk about early mobilization and I don’t disagree with that. Like when I broke my leg, I was in a compression sleeve.

The Achilles tendon will tighten, the muscle will tighten, the ligaments will over tighten, and you’ll never get that range of motion back. But the key here. Is how early is early? I broke my leg. This foot was hanging from just the skin. So this is pretty gross. Now I know you will hear about athletes who get hurt within one day.

They have their therapists. They are back to play in a week. When you’re a million dollar athlete, you have million dollar therapists. They know exactly what they’re doing. If you’re reading my book, you are not a million dollar athlete. 

Mike: I’m sure there are drugs that come into play as well. Oh, 

Lyle: God, yes.

Because again, if you’ve got your championships in a week, they got to get you back on the field one way or another. If you’re in football, they just give you painkillers and cocaine and tape you up. And they know how to do that. But in my case, the more severe the injury, the longer you need to rest. But we’re talking days to three weeks here.

So if you have a minor muscle strain you pull something in the gym, you might wait a couple of days, lay off of it, start stretching it by day three, and by day four or five, you’re doing light activity. You don’t want to sit there and wait for this muscle pull or this muscle strain does not need two weeks of you sitting around doing nothing.

In my case, I’d let even some of The inflammation and swelling go down before I could do anything. I think he started me on that about three or four weeks, right? I was out of the major inflammation phase, I was off the painkillers, and all I was doing was, he said, take off all this other stuff, and I was just doing ankle circles.

Yeah. Just to get a little movement through the muscle, through the ligaments especially, because I’ll talk about this, how this integrates with nutrition. He’s draw the alphabet. Just to start movement, nothing severe, because if you want to pull the toe back and point it, a little bit of light stretching, but it was all very gentle.

And you do this within pain tolerance. Anything less than a 3 on a 10 point pain scale, you’re good. If it hurts the next day, you overdid it. So it’s a matter of degrees here. And the same thing with ice. So we went from ice every injury, every day for weeks on end, to the people who were like, never use ice.

Again, somewhere in the middle. We know that some inflammation is important for healing. For There’s been a zillion studies on ice baths after training in pair adaptation and anti inflammatories before lifting decreases muscle growth. And we know that you need some inflammation, however, excessive or runaway inflammation is just as bad.

We need a happy medium. In that initial stage, like I said, I blew up my entire leg. To say that I should not be trying to reduce or control inflammation under that circumstance is ridiculous. Now, do I want to be icing it consistently six weeks later? Only if it hurts. There’s also even some debate if ice works.

The old idea of using an ice cup or an ice pack. It’s debatable if that even penetrates the skin. There’s actually new technologies. They gave me the coolest thing. It was an ice pack that I strapped behind my knee. And it actually, this was so bizarre. A, I could wear it with my boot, but it was cooling the blood moving underneath my leg.

The outside was warm. But it was cold inside, like a cool sensation, so to speak, but it was really just weird. So yeah, putting ice on the outside of a leg, it’ll make the skin numb. So again, if you’re in that early phase, if you’re in that inflammation phase, which is one to seven days after a major injury, you do need to almost try to eliminate the inflammation because it’s out of control, right?

I was on heavy anti inflammatories. Within a week, I was off of them, and I only used ibuprofen, or I used the peroxysodium, which I like better, as needed. If it flared up, then same thing with my painkillers. If I needed it, I would take one, and if not, I tried to avoid it as much as possible. So the rest and ice thing is just a matter of degrees.

If there’s severe inflammation, then You need to rest and not move it, but once that starts to dissipate, you do want to start with light movement as early as possible. Compression, again, that kind of ties in with all of this, and even elevation, that’s really to keep the swelling down. 

Mike: Yeah. 

Lyle: Even some of the studies are like, we don’t even, because what they do, somebody gets hurt or they, whatever, they throw ice compression elevation at us.

That doesn’t let you know what’s causing what, but I think it doesn’t matter. Since mine was a lower body injury, I did elevate it. If I was laying on the couch, I did elevate it in bed. Why? Gravity pulls fluid down into the foot. It did make it unpleasant for me. At that point, I was wearing a compression garment.

And you also, since I’m not walking, you don’t get that lymphatic muscular pumping. Fluid just accumulates there and it’s really unpleasant. And I did wear support, not some, I guess it’s crutches. He didn’t even want me putting my toe on the ground initially. That’s how tender this was. And several weeks later, he was like, okay, you can put 10 pounds of force on it.

When you weigh 175, that’s barely placing your heel on the floor. It allowed me to drive. That was also the biggest fear. I drive, of course, I have a clutch. It was my left leg. We’re not a manual car. I couldn’t drive, couldn’t get to the grocery store. Being injured sucks. It was just awful.

So I think that’s probably where the biggest controversy really is. To me, it’s not whether it’s needed. It’s a matter of how long and too little and too much is going to be bad. But that also depends on the extent of the injury. Like I said, minor muscle pull, whatever. Go a little bit too hard in the gym.

Take a day to rest it. Maybe ice it, maybe not. Start moving. Two days later, a major injury, you might have to wait till three weeks. But once the major inflammation period is gone, you should start into some light mobilization and movement around. 

Mike: Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it?

Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. If you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say, Thank you.

You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. 

Lyle: Other issues I had to deal with, having an injury, there’s also the atrophy issue, right? I couldn’t walk on my left leg. What’s going to happen to those muscles in the glutes and the quads and the hamstring?

They’re going to go away too, and there’s really nothing you can do, short of EMS or something along those lines. So I said probably that’s probably the big one that kind of leads into another topic, which is the whole inflammation cascade. There’s on the one hand, we’ve got the never use anti inflammatories.

Long term, they can be bad, and I think there’s no debate about that. But what the studies have shown is, For 14 days after a major injury, they’re fine. If you’re on them every day for a year, at least one of them can increase heart disease risk. Forget which one it is. But runaway inflammation is bad. Too little inflammation is also bad.

So you use the strong anti inflammatories till you’re through that first couple of phases, maybe two weeks tops. Then you want to modulate inflammation. Now it’s the next section of the book was ways of modulating inflammation. So there’s enough, but not too much. And mainly that revolves around supplements.

Mike: And just for people wondering why is inflammation good? Especially these days. That word is now just a buzzword for bad. You have anti-inflammatory eating 

Lyle: right, and it’s like everything else, like the cortisol thing. Is cortisol bad? No. Physiologic pulses of cortisol that go away are very adaptive.

They’re important for tissue remodeling and memory and health and this and that and the other. Chronically elevated cortisol is very bad and inflammation is fallen into that same camp. It’s become a dirty word because many people, like you are chronically inflamed, and that’s actually more related to obesity, body fat is very involved in the inflammatory cascade.

You don’t want 24 7 inflammation, and there’s actually a really interesting bit about this, right? There were studies early on that found that anti inflammatories before you lifted weights decreased growth. Because that acute inflammatory response, that short lived, is part of the overall adaptational signal.

But when they took older individuals and gave them anti inflammatories, they grew better. Because there’s frequently a chronic inflammation that occurs when you’re older. And that kind of points out that it’s a matter of degrees and directions. A similar thing that might help, I don’t know exactly why the inflammatory cascaded, but it’s just part of the overall signaling.

This whole thing, antioxidants and reactive oxygen species and all that stuff. Chronic oxidative stress is very unhealthy, but especially in an endurance standpoint, those, the increase in those sort of oxidative. Stress is part of the stimulus, so you want some but not too much, and the inflammation cascade to training is part of that.

I don’t know the molecular pathways, but so again, it’s a matter of you want to stress the tissue enough to get a little bit of an inflammatory response without it becoming so runaway. When people have that kind of stuff, that’s why they use cortisone shots, which caused humongous problems in the long term, but it’s to break that runaway and where inflammation is driving more inflammation.

If you can break that cascade briefly, frequently it’ll shut back down. And where the drugs, the anti inflammatory drugs, non steroidal, anti inflammatory drugs, the NSAIDs, they’re totally nonspecific. They’re just a big hammer that just shuts down, because inflammation also has both good and bad pathways, and that’s what we’re getting into.

The drugs are completely nonspecific. They shut it all down. 

Mike: It’s just whack a mole, right? Wherever it is, they 

Lyle: Yeah! Exactly. It’s just dropping a bomb on the system, which is fine when you’ve got runaway inflammation and your foot looks like a cantaloupe, as it did in my case, but not so much in the healing process.

So at that point, the goal is to modulate inflammation, to maintain the positive inflammatory pathways while tamping down those negative inflammatory pathways. And that’s where lots and lots of supplements come in. The primary one of which, that should be no surprise to any way, are The fish oils.

I’ve been pushing fish oils forever. Everybody knows the benefits of these things, but among everything else, they are critically important for modulating inflammation and doses of anywhere from one and a half to five grams of combined EPA and DHA. The two fish oils per day is what’s been used.

Just because I like to be smug about this since probably the early 2000s, I recommended between 1. 8 and three grams combined, which is right in the middle of where it seems to have the most benefit. If I were going to pick one thing to help my, people should be taking them anyway. And I have for as long as I can remember, that would probably be the big one.

Mike: That’s for people who are not hurt, right? That’s just, if you’re physically active, especially if you’re into resistance training and 

Lyle: The omega three fish oils may help with muscle growth per se. Like they truly do everything. I remember when the data was starting to break and all I thought was, you know what, if I saw this list of benefits and hadn’t read the research, I’d think it was bull, they almost sound too good to be true, but they truly do.

Like everything. So yeah, you could bump that up certainly with an injury because probably you do need proportionally more again, depending on the degree. If you’ve just pulled your muscle a little bit, you don’t need to throw the kitchen sink at this, but if you’ve got a major injury that you’re trying to deal, so that’s the fish oils, one and a half to five grams of combined and how many pills or liquid that takes.

This gets confusing because a gram fish oil pill is not a gram of EPA and DHA and people this gets really confusing This isn’t the actual active fish oil. The pills I take have 300 milligrams of combined EPA and DHA per day So for me to get one and a half grams I would have to take five of those pills Five one gram pills would give me one and a half grams of the active fish oils and to get five grams It would be A lot more than that.

It’d be like 17 pills a day. And I 

Mike: usually, the natural triglyceride oils where you have to, where you swallow the oil, aren’t they more concentrated? 

Lyle: Carlson’s and stuff like that are probably easier. I’m in the habit. I’ll do 10 a day consistently anyway. So it wasn’t any, yeah, I do eight a day as just a normal.

They make double concentration fish oils, if you’re not a big pill swallower, or like the Carlson’s liquids a lot of people like for salad dressing and stuff. Other things that have been looked at, white willow bark, which is interesting, that’s a natural form of aspirin, whereas aspirin is a kind of nonspecific, white willow bark is more of a modulator, and I don’t know why that’s exactly the case chemically, up to 240 mg per day of the white willow bark.

I didn’t take that because I couldn’t find it. Curcumin and turmeric. I’ve been studied extensively for this stuff, and I took that religiously. Four to six hundred milligrams, up to three times a day. 

Mike: Another good one to take just in general, in my opinion. 

Lyle: Yeah, the reality is we are, when we’re training heavily and joints get inflamed, and tendonitis, and I see this question a lot online.

People here owe. Not the drugs impair muscle gain if I eat a lot of antioxidant or anti inflammatory fruits and vegetables with that will know because it’s just the foods aren’t as potent and they’re more of modulators and I get it. I get why they concentrate the drugs to make it. Those are anti inflammatories, but that is to control a specific situation 

Mike: and I would say to somebody if you’re talking about.

Dramatically reducing your fruit and vegetable intake because it might impair your muscle gain by 2 percent over your lifetime. I think you’re missing the forest for the trees here, my friend. 

Lyle: I agree. I’ve seen people going. So if I have a bunch of vegetables at breakfast before trying to like, no, you’re fine.

I seriously don’t miss the forest for the trees here. 

Mike: Yeah. 

Lyle: Bromelain and papain, those two enzymes found in pineapple are actually It’s funny, it’s one of those decades ago, people were talking about that for healing and it turns out it’s true through whatever mechanism, 202, 000 milligrams per day.

That’s really hard to get with pineapple. So I again took a supplement. Green tea affects three or four milligrams per day. That’s green tea extract. Yeah, I’d have to look for 100, but I believe so. That’s that E. C. G. C. Whatever that is. Yeah. 

Mike: The catechins, the fat loss molecule. Yeah, 

Lyle: I didn’t use that. I’ve used it before and I just, I don’t know, it made me feel weird.

I can’t really explain it. It’s something didn’t fit my neurochemistry somehow. 

Mike: You don’t want it on an empty stomach. That’s for anybody listening. It can make you really nauseous. It can just more just make you feel weird. 

Lyle: And that’s probably what it was. I’m sure I was taking it as part of a cardio fat loss, something.

And it just said others Pycnogenol, Boswellia, Catsclaw, Capsaicin, which is. Spicy pepper. Another one not to take on an empty stomach unless you really want to have a bad time. That stuff’s, man. And you don’t want a pill to break in your throat. So what I was doing, like I said, I focused on, I took the fish oils, the curcumin, turmeric, and the bromelain, papain, And I think I, whatever dose I took, I work at home.

I just did like every three or four hours I was taking that stuff, just absolutely religiously. And it is interesting when I went back for my first follow up, which is about the three week mark, my orthopedist, Doc Savage, even mentioned, he goes, wow, like your inflammation is significantly less. Then what I would typically see at this point, and I can’t say for sure that’s what did it, but it’s not going to hurt.

And I certainly wanted to get this stuff under control as much as possible. So those are probably mostly important in those early phases of injury, right? So inflammation one to seven days, the proliferation, that second phase, when major inflammation goes away in the cal, like seven to 21 days, I pretty much kept taking it for most, the first few months, it wasn’t going to hurt I don’t know that it helped, but I was of the standpoint, I had it and might as well, and I was just neurotic enough.

So like that deals with the inflammation thing. Early on, shut it down. After a couple of weeks, modulate it so you’re getting the good without the bad. 

Mike: Makes sense. How does nutrition fit in? To this whole picture, 

Lyle: and it’s a little weird. I normally wouldn’t cover supplements first. I think in the book, I only did it because I was talking about inflammation.

So nutrition was really, the next thing, and I knew some of this and the overall thing in a very real way. One researcher pointed this out recovering from an injury. You were building new tissue or rebuilding tissue rather nutritional requirements for growing babies and growing Children.

It’s proportionally higher. Per pound or per kilo. Like it’s not higher than absolute numbers. Of course, clearly a hundred pound kid doesn’t need to eat what a 200 pound adult does, but they need like proportionally more protein and this and that and the other, because they are building tissue. Whereas adults were mainly maintaining it.

But obviously we know that when we exercise, we’re trying to build muscle or whatever, we need more than just maintenance levels. 

Mike: We were all teenagers. Once we remember how cool it was to eat anything and everything and just never gain any fat. Yeah. 

Lyle: It just grow and grow. So the four big factors, calorie intake, protein, carbs, and fats.

Micronutrients are part of it, and I’ll come back to that. Calorie intake is honestly the hardest bit, because of the nature of injuries. You don’t want to diet when you’re hurt. This is Athletes Get Nuts. Oh my god, I’m not training as much, I’m gonna get fat, I should diet now. 

Mike: That’s common. I hear from people like, Eh, I can’t really lift, I might as well cut, I might as well get leaner.

Lyle: And if you want to ensure that your injury does not heal effectively, do that. This is an anabolic requirement, just like building muscle. Now it may not take zillions of calories, but if you are losing weight or losing fat, you are not eating it up. So probably the easiest way to set calories is if you’re losing weight, eat a little bit more.

If you’re gaining too much body fat, cut it back. It was funny, I’d just come out of a diet when all this happened. Did I want to? Regain the body fat. No, but I wanted to be injured less and I’m like, you can always diet later. 

Mike: Just out of curiosity. How pronounced are those effects? If I think back, I probably can find an instance where I did the same thing.

And so I understand. The psychology of it. So how big of a difference is that in your estimation where, okay, so you’re hurt enough. Let’s say it’s enough to prevent you from doing, you can’t squat for a bit, or you can’t do what you normally do. And if you just maintain a deficit versus doing what you’re going to recommend.

Lyle: I, I don’t honestly know if I can quantify it. You’re looking at so many overlapping. 

Mike: I know. I know. Would you say it’s fairly significant though? 

Lyle: Yeah. It’s certainly not going to help. All of your hormones will be affected in terms of testosterone, free testosterone, insulin, growth hormone, IGF one people, you can’t gain muscle in a deficit generally without getting into that topic.

So you’re certainly not going to rebuild healthy ligaments, bones. Now, and again, this is so long term damage ligaments. May never come back to normal. A torn muscle or a broken bone will never be as strong, no matter what you do. It will never be back to a hundred percent. And if you limit that by not laying down proper tissue, you’re setting yourself up for long term problems.

So people just lose sight of, again, forest for the trees. I’m worried more about. What happens in this six month span, then, next year or a year down the road, you can always get back into shape. And if this injury is dogging you for the rest of your career, you’re not going to be happy. Now the hardest part with calorie intake is figuring out what it is.

Like I said, you can, if you’re gaining fat, you’re eating a little too much. I would rather see weight stay stable or a slow fat gain. Problem is with excessive fat gain, you start to get insulin resistance. You start to get other issues. It’s a very happy medium, but you should at least be maintaining it.

The problem is how do we figure out how my maintenance levels have changed? So let’s say you injure your leg. You were training lower body heavy twice a week and upper body heavy twice a week. You’ve now taken two leg workouts out. Probably burning more calories than the upper body. What do you do?

How do you factor this in? Not to mention you go from possibly walking a lot to not. Now this gets offset because crutches, you burn two to three more calories crutching around than you do walking, which I’m waiting, I need to write a crutch. Walking fat loss ebook. I just want to, I want to get people on a treadmill on crutches without being injured because I think that would be awesome.

But 

Mike: that’s like an achievement unlocked. Oh yeah. Lyle 

Lyle: started that. Oh my God. But like it is, it’s exhausting work. Being on crutches is awful. I’m so glad that I did have a strong enough upper body. It is awful to be on crutches all the time. So on the one hand, when you’re on crutches, you’re burning more calories per minute, but you’re probably being a lot less active.

So these may be offsetting one another. Some of it depends on the injury, not just weight training. If you’re a lower body athlete, you’re a cyclist, you’re a runner, and you injure your leg. Runner’s not doing anything. Maybe water running, if they’ve got access to it, a cyclist can sit on a trainer, they’ve injured their legs.

There’s not much a cyclist can probably do like upper body ergometry, which is the most boring thing ever. 

Mike: It’s really like spinning in circles, right? 

Lyle: Oh, my God. These are the worst thing I’ve ever done. You injure your upper body, your shoulder injury, and you’re a cyclist. You can sit on a trainer for sure.

Back injuries can be some of the most debilitating because you can’t do anything with a back injury. You can’t train legs. You can’t train upper body. You can’t do anything. I would say people who lift weights have more options. In Premise, I’ve actually got a friend who just had a surgery. He’s off lower body training for six months, so he’s just training his upper body more frequently.

He went from two upper body days to four upper body days. Every day is arm day now. He’s achieved the bodybuilder’s dream. He’s living the dream. He has a legitimate medical reason to train arms every day. He’s thrilled to death, but he’s a competitive bodybuilder. He’s I can bring up my weak upper body, which fair enough.

I knew a guy in college, Chaney Humphrey, who was this amazing gymnast. And he did a tumbling run and landed off the tumbling mat. On the concrete, and it was ugly, he shattered both of his ankles. Six months, he just did upper body work on rings. That was how he stayed in shape. And his rings routine was amazing.

I think his floor routine never quite got back to where it was. But it’s people who weight train, but even then, lower body is almost easier than upper, right? Because you can do upper body machines. If you have an upper body injury, you’re not loading a squat bar, you’re not holding a squat bar on your shoulders.

You may not be able to leg press cause you can’t hold onto the handle tight enough, like that may be even more limiting in some ways. For me. A, there was just this sheer hassle of getting to the gym, driving. Also the crushing depression that occurs when this all happens. This also happened, I was just in flow.

I was writing a women’s book and everything was coming along great. And I was editing and man, it just shut me down for, all I did was watch television and play PlayStation for three months. It’s so horribly depressing when you can’t do anything. Even when I finally got back to the gym a few weeks later, I’m crutching around.

I can’t load machines. I’m like limited to the upper body. Select, pin machines that I normally would never go anywhere close to and yeah, it would have been great. Should have been in there four days a week, hammering my upper body. I didn’t have the energy or the mindset. I went in for my two disappointingly depressing workouts just so I wouldn’t go crazy and then I would go to the grocery store just cause I was out.

Like I left the house twice a week. It was just, but anyway, so all of that goes into, for the general public, their activity may not change too much. It might, but if you’re normally just sitting in front of the computer all day and suddenly you’re sitting on the couch all day because you’re injured, your activity levels don’t change very much.

But if you’re an active athlete, depending on the nature of the injury in the sport, your activity multiplier may go down enormously, and you have to factor that out. The standard multipliers of if normally you were at 1. 5 times resting metabolic rate because you were training four times a week and you come down to twice a week maybe you drop that.

1. 3 on rest days and keep it up, whatever. And if you’re training as frequently, it may not change much, but adding to even that, and this was something I wasn’t aware of after an injury, there’s something called the stress factor. And this goes to what we were talking about you are rebuilding tissue.

The body becomes hypermetabolic after a major injury, and this can increase your resting metabolic rate by even 20 percent after a minor injury, up to 50 percent over baseline from surgery or bone fracture, which is what I had. If my normal resting metabolic rate basal level was 1, 800 calories, that alone might go to 2, 400 just because of the intensive healing.

After major burns, resting metabolic rate can go up by 100%. Wow. Which at the risk of being, this is a little classless, you want to talk about burning in the cut. I know, too far, but I think I’m hilarious. Anyway, so like all these competing demands where RMR, resting metabolic rate goes up for the stress factor.

Anywhere from 20 to 50%. Thermic effect of food won’t change very much. Activity can just be all over the map and it may not change very much. If you’re generally sedentary, it may go down enormously. If you’re an endurance runner, you’re used to running 60 miles a week and you go to zero training, now you’re doing nothing.

This depends on the sport and that’s a huge variability. Just have to eyeball it and look at body composition changes. 

Mike: I guess you can math it out a little bit. 

Lyle: You can, and that’s in the book, the quick estimates. And I’m like, this is how you would math it out based on some assumptions and you’ll get.

A starting point. Daily energy expenditure is, I won’t say gas, but it is an estimate. 

Mike: Yeah. It’s always a moving target, right? Even when you’re not injured. 

Lyle: There’s that too, and we’re looking at a long term thing. If you’re off for one day, it’s not any big deal. So that’s overall calorie intake.

And then we get to the macros. 

Mike: And just to interject there, I’d say it’s important then to err on the side of Same thing with lean bulking, right? Is I got people that write, they’re afraid of losing their abs at all. They want to try to keep that fat gain as minimal as possible. So they go, Oh I’m just going to go into a 5 percent surplus.

And I’m like, eh, how do you really know that’s a surplus though? Chances are, if you do that. Yeah. You’re going to be in a slight deficit half the days in a slight surplus. Let’s go a little bit higher. Let’s go 10%. So at least you have a good buffer. Absolutely. And yeah, that means a little bit more fat gain over like the next six months or something, but who cares?

Lyle: And if you’re neurotic and insane, which most of us are to one degree or another, that’s why we got 

Mike: into 

Lyle: fitness, right? Exactly. But you can always take the fat off later and even easier when you heal faster you heal, the faster you get back to normal training. Main thing, like with everything, protein intake.

And here’s really where the researcher first said it’s like, healing an injury is very much like building muscle. And you’ll find recommendations of no surprise, anywhere from one and a half grams per kilo up to about 2. 2, which is 0. 7 grams per pound up to one gram per pound. The standard recommendation, been using for years.

Now, I would add to that, if you’re also training heavily, Conceivably, you need a little bit more, right? That’s just to cover the injury recovery. If you’re now in the weight room four times a week, because every day is now arm day again, you might even go to 1. 2 grams per pound, about 2. 5 grams per kilo or thereabouts, but you do need sufficient protein.

These are the building blocks predominantly of muscle ligaments and tendons are, the collagen. And I’ll talk about that. Again, a different set of supplements, but yeah, it’s like everything else. What are the two key factors for muscle growth? Sufficient calories, sufficient protein. Injury recovery is just building new tissue.

So no big shocker that those are a player here. Carbohydrates, the recommendation, one and a half to three grams per pound, 3. 3. That’s pretty much right where someone who’s moderately active, but not excessively so should be in a lot of that’s hormonal. I seem to recall there was more involved carbohydrate and something about the connective tissue matrix.

And I think I was starting to zone out at that point. Those are pretty standard numbers for people who were lifting. You definitely don’t want to go low carb or keto because your hormonal status will not be optimal, but nor do you need to eat all the carbs because you’re not doing so much. Fat recommendations.

About 25 percent total calories. We’re looking at half a gram per pound up to just under a gram a pound, gram per kilo, up to about two grams per kilo, like fairly standard stuff. The only requirement being the fish oils and everything else will just like, so it’s really just your basic athletic diet.

Quite honestly, I would add to that, and this is really specific to bone healing. There’s this whole thing with protein intake and bone health that’s been floating around for a long time. 60 years now? With this idea that, oh, excess protein is bad for bone. And the answer is that is contextually true and contextually untrue.

Too much protein in the absence of calcium, vitamin D, and all those other nutrients? is detrimental to bone. Sufficient protein in the presence of those nutrients is hugely beneficial to bone. You also need to ensure sufficient fruit and vegetable intake. I don’t want to get into the buffering and the acidosis and pH stuff, but there’s an element of truth to that whole thing.

Fruits and vegetables provide endless micronutrients and all that other stuff, but basically you need sufficient calories, protein, carbs, fat, fruits and vegetables to buffer any issue with the protein. Sufficient micronutrients. You’re covering all your bases. 

Mike: And on the micronutrients in particular, they’re important and that’s just something that is maybe is obvious to you, but to some people, maybe not so obvious.

Why? 

Lyle: It’s been so long, I don’t think I ever looked at it in detail. It’s just, we’ve got all these biochemical. Pathways and processes that have endless cofactors for optimal use. And I’ll talk about like vitamin C and collagen here in a second, because that’s really a super popular topic right now.

And if you haven’t, I imagine you’ll let Alex leaf on at some point to talk about that because he’s, that’s very exciting, a big thing for him. And there’s good reason for it. Like vitamin A, B complex, zinc, copper, manganese. For whatever reason, these are just evolved in the tissue building process. And I also, I take a daily multivitamin.

I have. For years, not because I think it does much so much as can’t hurt my health, plug 

Mike: any potential holes. 

Lyle: It’s just like anything else any pathway that has a limiting factor will be the limiting factor in recovery for bone health. Very specifically vitamin D, vitamin K, magnesium, silicon, boron may be involved.

I think some of that there’s, there’s a lot of eh, might be important. Maybe not, but again, you’ll, if you’re eating that diet and take a multivitamin, if it’s a specific bone injury, I got one of those super overpriced life extension foundation, like bone builder supplements, life extension foundation.

Those guys make bodybuilders look sane when it comes to supplements. I don’t know how familiar you are with them, but they do their homework. They keep up with the literature at a level of insanity and their products, the ones that are, a lot of their stuff is just like living on a prayer.

But when they put together a bone donor supplement, it is every nutrient that has possibly been shown to maybe have a benefit. And since I was recovering a massive, complete fracture, I wanted every supporting nutrient I can get. And that sort of brings me to supplements, right? Basic multivitamin, can’t hurt, might help, whatever.

Whey protein, 20 grams prior to resistance training increases protein. So like we, we’ve known this from a muscle growth standpoint, but if you’re healing a muscular injury, and I’ll come back to this, like before you load the tissue. You want the nutrients in your bloodstream, right? That’s probably the simplest way I can put it, whether or not it helped.

Once I got to the point that I was able to load that bone and literally initially I would sit on the couch with my heel on the floor and I would push it lightly into the ground. This was the limit of what that bone could take, but it needed some sort of stimulus to start telling it lay down proper bone tissue.

Rather than the scar tissue, but I always made sure that I had taken my bone building nutrients before I did that, because I wanted those to be available in the bloodstream when the tissue needed it. 

Mike: Weigh is also calcium rich. That’s also a bonus. 

Lyle: Yeah, exactly. They, that too. And honestly, typically my more, my breakfast, which has been this, I’d have a oatmeal with Greek yogurt, whey protein Some sort of dietary and I would that’s when I would take my fish oils my bone builder my anti inflammatory Nutrients like I wanted before I did anything for my rehab which became a lot of movement stuff early mobilization light stretching Then starting to load that tissue I wanted all those nutrients in there so that they would be utilized as much as possible because even with the inflammatory modulator If you go train too hard, it is very possible to kick off another inflammatory cascade.

So I wanted that to be modulated before I did any sort of activity. Probiotics, there’s some evidence that it may increase middle absorption, which is important for bone health. I’ve taken those forever anyway. I’m not convinced anyone is better than any other. I just get the Pearls brand from my grocery store.

’cause as I like to put it, sometimes I like to feel pretty. Basically it’s just whatever. You’re not the target market, 

Mike: For that product. But 

Lyle: I know, and that’s why I think I’m funny. glutamine, believe it or not, 10 to 15 grams a day for bone healing. Arginine, wound healing, 14 grams. Like arginine is gross and disgusting and I wouldn’t bother, but this was just what the research has randomly found for me.

Like I said, with the inflammatory stuff, I just stick with the big ones. Inflammatory modulators, fish oil, curcumin, Bromelain for the basic multi whey protein probiotics. I might’ve done glutamine cause I had some in the house. I don’t remember. So that’s just general stuff to support all the basic nutrition, but there’s also tissue specific supplements, depending on the type of injury.

Creatine specifically may limit some of them, that muscle atrophy. It’s not always the case. Some study, a lot of the studies that do this, like it’s bedrest level, like it’s zero muscle contractions and that may not overcome that, but creatine does enough other things, including help with depression that it was worth taking.

Mike: I’ve seen some research on helping with muscle retention in the elderly. 

Lyle: Oh yeah, absolutely. So like creatine is one of those supplements like fish oils that it just does everything. Everyone should take it. It does so many beneficial things. Glucosamine and chondroitin, those used to be super popular, those are more for tendons now.

There’s a lot of research that says it doesn’t work. A lot of research, because it’s absorbed terribly poorly. The stuff I looked at, apparently the current model is it may limit further deterioration. I think I took it because the worst it was going to do is nothing. And I had, 

Mike: I take it because of that and it’s cheap.

I’m like, eh, maybe it does a little bit of something. If I take it for the next 10 years of my life. If not, I don’t care because it’s cheap. 

Lyle: Exactly. Cause with aging, all this stuff wears out. So it may not help with recovery. But it may very well help long term. And then the other one, specific for tendon was this, there’s this collagen vitamin C and the Keith Barr has done all the research on this.

And it’s funny, right? Cause if you go back and talk to your mom or probably your grandma, everyone used to talk about that collagen and Jell O was great for, as I like to put it, nails, hair, and hooves, just because I think, and it’s true. Like hair, fingernails, toenails, stuff like that uses a lot of collagen.

And so does tendon. And what Keith Barr specifically showed was that he gave them 15 grams of collagen, gelatin, like Jell O basically, and 48 milligrams of vitamin C. Don’t know where that came from why that value. And then he had them do what amounted to 20 jump rope, jump type jumps, like very low, like not super high amplitude, but.

High peak force jumps versus nothing. And what he found was that the increase in tendon tissue synthesis in the collagen group was twice as high because going back to what I said earlier, the nutrients were available when they were needed. And that’s pretty critical given the generally slow rate of tendon healing.

That’s pretty enormous. To be able to increase it by that much, just by having some collagen or gelatin, or I literally would eat a packet of jello before I did my stuff. But 

Mike: do you think there’s a benefit for people who aren’t injured just for tendon health? 

Lyle: Actually? Yeah. That’s something Alex leaf.

This is really his thing is that I don’t think it’s going to hurt right now. You didn’t need to rely on the collagen as a protein, but it has zero. Zero value as a protein 

Mike: right now. And it’s such a trendy thing right now. I, people often DM me and email me asking about it. I’m like, no it’s trash tier protein.

They’re only selling it to you because it’s cheap. These are people who are buying it because they want, this is body composition needs, not recovery needs. They don’t, or they’re not trying to make their hair prettier or something. They’re thinking like, should I buy this whey protein or should I buy the collagen?

And. Fake doctor on the internet who’s actually a chiropractor says I should buy the collagen. 

Lyle: And there’s super overpriced GMO or like non GMO organic, like high collagen proteins that it’s 40 bucks for a 15 day supply. 

Mike: Or 

Lyle: you can get 

Mike: a kilo for 

Lyle: 22 bucks. There’s a story. This is back in like late seventies, 1980.

diet called the last chance diet. And it was low carb diet. It was based around nothing but collagen protein. And a bunch of people dropped dead from it because A, there was no minerals, so they got into heart arrhythmias. But literally in a dieting situation, your body will start eating itself because you are getting, collagen has zero biological value for as a protein source.

It’s simply a collagen source for healthy tendons and again, hair, hands, and hooves. So that’s one that if you are healing a tendon, 

Mike: that’s like a self fulfilling, probably the last chance diet. And then it kills people. 

Lyle: Yeah, for real. And I already talked about, the bone specific stuff in terms of vitamin D, K, magnesium, that’s the one like, but also realize that from when you’re starting to get into so let me go back.

Inflammation for seven days, maximum proliferation, scar tissue, about the three week mark, you start with that early mobilization. And this is just light movement, right? You’re not trying to heal the tip. You’re just trying to start. Put a little movement through it. Once you get into that remodeling phase where you’re trying to lay down tissue in your training, there’s often a lot of overlap, right?

Muscles attached to tendon, which attached to bone. If you’re doing any sort of muscular work, you’re loading the tendon as well. And depending on where the nature of the injury is. Ligaments, there’s not really a way to load them specifically. It’s just movement tends to put a little stress and strain on them.

That’s why I was doing, the ankle rolls and draw the alphabet. And it was much for a range of motion as it was to just put a little stress on the ligaments and ligaments, it’s an amino acid. So again, protein will pretty much support that, but bone, you’re really looking at, you need axial loading, basically forces that go along the bone.

And what’s been shown for that is that. Somewhere between 20 and 40 loading cycles per workout is the maximum. The bone becomes basically resistant to further stimulation. So like I, so rather than do, a hundred repetitions, I would do 20 of those like little foot pulses into the ground.

And then I would do that three or four times a day after having these nutrients in my system. And that’s so when you get into that phase, you want the nutrients in your system, whichever is tissue specific before loading that. So if you’re healing a muscle tendon injury, have some whey protein and some collagen.

Go do some weight training that puts some stress through both of those areas. So if it’s a patellar tendon, do leg extensions or leg press or whatever it is. And that will ensure that you have enough of a load to stimulate recovery and rebuilding while having the nutrients available to support it.

And that’s the goal of all of that. 

Mike: That’s fantastic. Was Doc Savage impressed with your superhuman Yeah, 

Lyle: we got to a point with it where it’s like he could tell it was healing well. And there’s just this gradual process from the influence that he started me on like movement, and then he finally gave me where I could I could put weight on the foot and you just hobble along to use that foot like a crutch or you just keep the legs straight and you just pivot over the heel.

And my walking mechanics were completely screwed up and my foot was turned out and all this other stuff. Yeah. And then he got to the point, he was like I can’t really see by the MRI, the x ray, if the bone is healing, but we think so. Eventually I was supposed to get the pins taken out, but one of them broke and you can’t do anything with that anymore.

So I’ve got those for life, which hopefully I won’t set off any metal detectors when I go. It was funny, he’s a cyclist and he had the identical injury a year before. He got hit by a car and like literally the exact same injury. So we were definitely on the same page. 

Mike: That’s one of those funny synchronicity moments.

Lyle: Yeah, for, yeah, really. And it was really a lucky thing. Like I just, they told me to find an orthopedist and I went looking within like my health insurance. My network and the first one I found didn’t, wasn’t a network. And I called this other one and just happened to lug out to this guy. It was awesome.

One thing I did talk about in the book, I don’t know if you want me to get into this briefly, is some drugs that have been used or considered. I don’t know if it’s really relevant to your podcast so much. And if not people can, 

Mike: I think it’s, I think it’s worth considering worth talking about.

Lyle: Cause that, that is something that people forget. A lot of steroids and such were really developed for medical purposes. And the two that have really been used for injury healing are Nandrolone, which is, Deca and Oxandrolone, which is Anafar. Usually a lot of these, it tends to be postmenopausal woman with severe osteoporosis.

So they use very baby doses, like 25 milligrams every three weeks of Nandrolone or 10 milligrams per day of anivar, like super tiny doses for men. You might scale that up 50, a hundred milligrams a decade per week, 40 milligrams per day for men, somewhere in that range, usually multiply by about three or thereabouts they’ve tested human growth hormone.

At 2 to 5, 2. 5 to 10 and a half IUs per day, super expensive. I’ve never thought HGH was very cost effective. IGF 1, same thing, super expensive. One thing I did do, because I’ve heard too much purely anecdotal evidence, is, you’re familiar with that BPC 157 peptide? It’s a magic healing peptide. It’s all animal research.

There’s nothing in humans. Lots of people have written about it. People either use it and it’s magic or use it and it does nothing. I was willing to give it a shot. Like I was willing to throw everything. Like you do have to inject twice a day with an insulin needle. It’s a headache. Like it’s not human approved, not recommending it.

I just tried to include everything in this book. The only thing I didn’t really talk about was electrical muscle stimulation, which that has been shown to help a lot with muscle atrophy. I looked at the data. It’s certainly interesting. I never got around to buying an EMS. Even when I got to the point where I could do some sort of work, like I would put a rubber band around my toe and do calf raises and stretching.

I could do some light leg exten whatever I could do. When I finally got back to training, literally his leg extension was super slow, like 5 up, 5 down. Because the pad hit, of course, right where my injury was, and I was so detrained, so I tried to keep those peak forces. Electrical muscle stimulation for muscle atrophy, but I didn’t really look at it.

But to put all of this together. So first seven days is inflammation. Again, this is one to seven days, light injury, one day, major injury, seven days. That proliferation phase, seven to 21 days, depending on the extent of the injury. After that, you’re really into remodeling. At that point, you should start early mobilization.

Possibly light activity, again, depending on the extent of it. What I wrote down, relatively minor injuries, might be one to three days of total rest, and then you should get back into it. Possibly tendons and ligaments a little bit slower than muscle. Major surgery, up to two weeks. If it hurts, don’t do it.

Should stay below three on the pain scale. For the remodeling rehabilitation phase, for light muscle injury, maybe a week. You’ve done it. We’ve all had a little strain. Even heavy muscle damage when you get sore. Within a week, you’re back to 100%. You might do one light blood pumping workout, and if you bone break or ligament tear, it might be six weeks before you’re back into remodeling the tissue because it takes that long just to get to where it’s strong enough to even handle the loading.

Muscle and tendon loading, tension slash movement, like basically lightweight training. Anything that stresses the muscle stresses the tendon. I think there’s been some work on isometrics being specific to tendon health. I’ve got a physio buddy online named Tim Rowland. He’s written a lot about using isometrics early on.

For like tendinosis more so than discreet, but tendons, if you tear a tendon, if you actually rip a tendon, which usually means you rip the muscle away from the musculotendinous junction, that surgical that if we’re talking about healing tendinosis or tendonitis, we’re talking about. That’s your typical tendon injury is just overuse.

And that’s a very different thing. Bone break, you’re looking at axial loading 20 to 40 repetitions per session. There’s actually been a lot of really interesting work for bone mineral health for women where jumping is really effective for stimulating bone mineral density. But what they typically 20 maximal vertical jumps, just jump straight up and land.

Rest jumps right up and land. The other one they had women basically jump up to a chin up bar and just drop, but they’ll do 20 reps multiple times per week or twice a week because doing a hundred doesn’t give any more of a benefit than 20. You’re better off doing less a little more frequently. And then really, like I talked about, make sure you’ve got whatever nutrients support your specific injury in your system before you load it.

The only thing I would add, and this is for the athletes, be patient. That may be the hardest bit, right? Especially if you’re a competition athlete, it’s a whole different thing, but even for the neurotic gym goer, 

Mike: or even non neurotic, even just the everyday, it probably most people listening can relate to, even if it’s just, it’s during the, it’s the winter, you get a cold or you get a flu and the first day you feel better, you’re back in the gym and by that night you feel like shit again.

Lyle: And that’s, my mentor years ago told me. We win your heart. He said, wait till you think you’re injury free and then wait another week, which is not generally bad advice because what people forget, right? So you’ve been recovering for four months and you’re like, I’m ready. Damn it. I want to get back to it.

I feel fine. And you go in. And you re injure the area. Now at best you lose two or three so if you like, so let’s say you wait those four months, if you waited another month, you could get right back to it and be fine, but you go back in, you re injure the area you have just lost for not waiting three weeks, you have lost four months.

Mike: And depending on the injury, right? You’ve also probably increased the risk that you’ll re injure it again, depending on what it is. 

Lyle: You may have made it worse. If it didn’t heal enough, you may have very well just made it worse. So now instead of. The four months plus three weeks. Now you may need six months or eight months and it may never heal.

This is especially true of ligament injuries. Once you stretch a ligament and it’s weird with ligaments, it’s almost better to tear them. If you stretch them beyond a certain point, they’re loose for the rest of your life. And once you sprain an ankle, you’re far more likely to sprain it going forwards.

You lose neuromuscular control. The ligament never goes, whereas if you tear it and they surgically repair it, it’ll be tight again. As weird as that sounds, you’re almost better off tearing it than just stretching it and getting like a grade 3 or grade 2 strain. So yeah, so you may, you may very well make it worse by getting back in too soon and possibly ending up with something permanent.

So you’re always better off, like with the diet stuff, erring on a little bit less. And when, and then you also have to remember, if you haven’t been training, It’s going to take you months to get back to where you were. If you think you can jump back into where you stopped, you are going to have a bad time.

I spent months, like I said, I started with super slow leg extensions and leg curls, five up, five down for probably a month. And over time I’d go five, five, three, three, two, two. I don’t think I brought in leg pressing for four to six weeks. Cause once I, once he cleared me for a little bit heavier loading, I was able, I wanted to start actually loading the bone, but light, I started with, a wheel five up, five down and.

May, as long as it didn’t hurt every couple of weeks, I’d go a little bit heavier, a little bit faster, and it took me months. Your work capacity is down, your fitness, again, if you’ve been training upper body, you’ll be fine there, but if you’ve had a lower body injury and a break and something that’s kept you from training for four to six months, it may take you four to six months to get back to where you were.

And you have to basically be a beginner again, and it sucks. 

Mike: Yeah, I fractured my wrist playing football when I was younger, about I was 20 or something. And it wasn’t too bad. It was I think I was maybe five weeks, give or take a week in a full arm cast. And so I was in the gym doing what I could in the beginning, but then my cast started smelling like shit.

And I was like, Oh, this is. This is too gross. I’m just going to wait it out. And so I had the atrophy to my arm was half, I was on my left arms, half the size of my right. And so when I could get back into it, I remember trying to train. It wasn’t like curls. It was something that wouldn’t have been, I wouldn’t, maybe it was even a lower body workout, but regardless, I just remember, Getting so nauseous, I had to actually just stop the workout because I just didn’t realize how much of a difference even that amount of time made just four or five weeks off.

And I tried to go back with the same intensity. Yeah, I had to work back into it and I didn’t work with any Therapist. I probably should have seen somebody, but I just got back into the gym. And so rotating my palm upward is what I couldn’t do with the injury. So when I first was back in the gym, I casts off.

I really was, I couldn’t get beyond. I could just maybe begin to see if I’m looking down at my hand, begin to see my pinky. So I could maybe break. Yeah. Just break straight up and down by I don’t know, 10 or 15 degrees, but within a, I want to say within six months or so, just, I just went about my thing and trained normally I was doing hammer curls.

That’s all I could do. But I would just, I would eventually though, get a little back, get a little more pronation. That’s it. That’s the correct. Yeah. So get a little bit more back, a little bit more back, a little more back. And within a year or so I had full range of motion again. So I’ve, I almost accidentally did some of what you were talking about of.

Continuing to, I would just push it a little bit and if it hurt, I would not do it. But in time, I guess with the repeated stresses and I was, when you’re 20, you’re basically invincible. And I was able to eat a bunch of food and sleep really well. And it 

Lyle: makes a big difference. Yeah. It’s that’s one thing I did when I came here.

Cause again, I had no range of motion on that angle. And the, Oh my God, I took a picture of it one time. And I think I measured, cause most of that muscle atrophy is in the first couple of weeks. And my left calf was. A solid inch and a half smaller than the right. It also I joked it, one thing I did that I shouldn’t have, this was really reckless of me.

I got so frustrated by not, like I did a lot of hopping around my house on one leg, which was really unsafe because all it would have taken was one spill and I probably would have re injured it. It was bad. Not my, but I got so sick and not being able to carry anything around, but oh my God, my right calf was huge.

Like the best, cause hopping one legged around the house, 

Mike: carrying things too. So weighted one legged hops. 

Lyle: Yeah. So I figured the workout plan along with the crutches thing, it’s gonna be like, if you break your left leg. Spend six months jumping around on your right leg, then break the right leg.

It’s been six months jumping around on your left leg to bring that calf up. But then, but now 

Mike: your right calf is fucked. I know 

Lyle: there’s no way to win on this one, but yeah. So like I, I started doing calf raises and one of the things I did was I would do like higher reps to get some blood really.

And then I would let, it’s like of the shoulder, like one of those shoulder, where the pads sit on your shoulder type calf raise machines is I would just let it push me into a stretch and let it grad, just try to gradually relax into it. It was actually really interesting for the first month or so. I felt nothing in the muscle.

The Achilles tendon had tightened up so much and it can shorten permanently. This is another reason why early enough mobilization is really a key. If you don’t get that soon enough, you may, you will never get back full range of motion. Happens with ACL injuries. It happens with shoulder injuries that you have to start putting a little bit of stress across the tendons and ligaments and muscles.

And so I would just, and then finally about a month in, I felt the stretch move into the muscle belly itself because finally I had stretched out the Achilles tendon. I’ve got, it’s hard to describe on the front of that calf. There is like a mechanical block, right? You’re people are like, Oh yeah, you get this calf stretch or whatever.

And you feel it in the calf or behind the ankle. For me, there’s just a physical block on the front of the leg that I don’t think will ever truly go away. No matter what I do, I still, do the stretching and do the thing. But it’s like, there’s a bony block or maybe it’s where the pins are in there or something that it physically just locks up.

So yeah, so that’s gets into all that stuff, but it is, it’s a year long process of bone mineral density takes a while to both be lost and regained. So yeah, you are looking at possibly a year from a major injury to be even close to a hundred percent. And you may never quite get there. 

Mike: I bet you all the things that you were doing helped you psychologically and just emotionally because you got to feel like you were doing something about it every day and you were taking all these supplements and you’re doing your exercises, 

Lyle: because there is like there’s an incredible body of literature on the truly clinical depression that athletes go through when they get injured. This is no joke. When your identity is really training or athletics or competition or sports. And that is taken away and depression, like the loss of control is just nightmarish.

So yeah, at least I was, doing something that was, it is having even the. The semblance of control was really critical. Even though I ended up, rented a car that was not automatic so that I could at least go do what I needed to do a couple of times a week. One thing, and I mentioned this in the book and this was, luckily I, somebody pointed this out to me.

Someone has made a thing called an IWOC and you can picture it as a really high tech peg leg. And what it does is you bend your knee back and it straps to your lower leg. And it’s just got a little plastic foot on it. It is literally a peg leg. I’m convinced some guy broke his leg and he was good in the workshop and thought, I’m going to fix this thing.

But it allowed me to be able to walk and have my hands free. And that, 

Mike: I just Googled it. It’s clever. It’s 

Lyle: really a fascinating tool and it takes some practice. Do not use it when it’s wet. That you will have a bad time. It doesn’t work well moving sideways, particularly and it is, you step onto it and you have to pivot up and over the thing.

And it’s it took me a little while to practice on one of my physio buddies says, Oh, his guys don’t, people he knows don’t like it because it shortens the hip flexor. You know what, you’re screwed no matter what you do. Like I can read, you can stretch the hip flexor during the day. To me, that seems like a very strange reason to discount what is a life saving tool.

Mike: Isn’t that, that a whole concept that you’re going to even semi permanently shorten a muscle controversially in and of itself? 

Lyle: It could probably happen if you did it over months and months, like you can lose sarcomeres, but even there it’s I usually 

Mike: hear in the context of sitting like, Oh, if you sit in a chair for X number of hours a day, you’re just going to.

Permanently messed your hip flexors up. 

Lyle: If you, maybe if you never got up and stood up straight or walked, maybe, like I remember for a while, there was a big thing that, Oh, rugby players shouldn’t spin on a bike in between hats to stay warm because it’ll shorten their hip flexors, are you joking?

We’re talking about 10 minutes, like having them run around the pitch because to stay warm so yeah, if you’re talking about chronic, and he just told me, yep, lay on your stomach, put a pillow underneath your leg to stretch the hip flexor out and you’ll be fine. Cause the amount of independence it gave me was just.

Beyond incredible. I wasn’t willing to take any negatives. I think I almost fell down. I would bring groceries home in a backpack and I learned real quickly that this was a bad idea because crutches are bad enough, right? If you’ve ever been on crutches, you don’t quite get enough forward momentum, especially on stairs, you tend to go backwards and that’s really terrifying.

And I think I did that once on the IWOC. I don’t know. Set it down and didn’t, I had a gallon of milk in my backpack and I almost didn’t get far enough up, but I had two dogs, like I had to walk down, it was a nightmare, it was just absolutely, the I walk for lower body injury, if you can use it, not everybody can.

Depending on where the injury is in the leg, but it was a damn lifesaver for me. 

Mike: Probably burned a few more calories per gait with the iQoL. 

Lyle: Oh yeah, I didn’t use it all the time. I, if I needed, I would put it on in the house and do everything that needed to be done as far as dishes and laundry and food.

And then I, cause it’s not super comfortable to sit in. But for the few times when I needed it, since I live alone, it was an absolute lifesaver, but to, to go back to really drive this home, the stuff in the gym takes time, regaining full range motion takes time because you’ve got tissues that have to be reconditioned.

And if you go too fast and get hurt again, you’ve just lost that much more time. And again, I realize it sucks and you just do what you have to do. And you have to think long term or you do, you end up making it really a lot worse. 

Mike: Yeah. And speaking from personal experience, having similar injuries, I haven’t probably the worst was that was the fracture, but then I’ve run into some tendon issues, once it’s.

Over and you’re good again, at least for me it’s over and you don’t even, you’re just happy to be healthy again. And it’s as if it never happened in a sense. 

Lyle: Yes. You also often learn not so much with mine. Mine was such a random, accidental thing, I had a, another, I had a back injury early in my, when I was lifting in my twenties and it was just a macho dumbass, like we all are.

And I was dead lifting and I could feel my form breaking, but the card said two sets of five. So by God, I was doing two sets of five and I felt the pop. I felt the pop in my low back. I swear I heard it. I’m pretty sure it’s just cause it traveled up my spine, but like I heard, I thought, I was so dumb.

I finished my back workout. Cause by God, I’ll be fine. Like I just, youth and stupidity. But. Luckily, it wasn’t a career ender. I didn’t, I just strained a ligament. Took me about nine months to get back from that. Cause again, think about it the same way that trying to come back from an injury too quickly can lose you months for not stopping on one repetition, one missed repetition, I lost nine months of training and assuming it doesn’t end your career.

Oh, the lesson you will learn from that once you’ve done it once, suddenly you become a lot more self aware in the gym of what you’re doing and realizing that one bad workout, that one bad set, that one tiny mistake is not worth it. You can get the rep tomorrow. You can get the set on Friday. The six to nine months you’re going to lose by doing something stupid and immature in the gym.

You typically, like I started, you want to find someone who’s an expert on injuries, find someone who hurt themselves. They will they will suddenly learn a lot about what to do and what not to do. And that’s what drove this book. And I guess that kind of brings it full circle. 

Mike: Yeah, no, it was a great discussion.

And the name of the book is Optimal Nutrition. 

Lyle: It’s, I think it’s Optimal Nutrition for Injury Recovery. Cause I’m super great with titles. 

Mike: And it’s on Amazon. That’s how I found it. Yes. As a Kindle only. I don’t know if, are you selling it hard copy on your website as well as a Kindle only? 

Lyle: I never did.

It was so short and I didn’t, with the longer books, a lot of people don’t want to read long books on a Kindle and I get that. There was never any point in me having it printed just because it was so short. That shouldn’t take super long to, and like I said, I tried to keep it from being too boring.

And it’s got, for those who want to delve as usual, I didn’t include all the references, but there’s some selected. References at the end. Kevin Tipton, who’s been, he’s been writing about protein and sports nutrition forever. He’s written several of the reviews looking at, especially the nutritional dietary stuff, protein, carbs, fats, and how that, some of the supplement stuff.

I delved into some of the other, some other papers that looked at glucosamine papain and some of that inflammatory stuff. But the references are there to get people started. As always with your work. Yeah, as always. So what’s next for you? What’s new and exciting. Premise, I’m working on the women’s book volume two in practice.

Yeah, I go through phases of writing and not writing. I’m still pretty exhausted from that first project. One thing I’ve been kicking around for a while was I’m sure you’re familiar with some of the intermittent caloric restriction. Stuff that I think is interesting. Again, I’m smug.

It’s Oh, you mean what I wrote about inflexible dieting 14 years ago? Sure. But whatever, but it is it’s being researched. I know there’s a paper, there’s a study about to be done on athletes specifically, which we’re currently like, it’s all weight loss stuff. 

Mike: Yeah. With with Andy and Mena, right?

Lyle: Sounds right. I remember seeing the, research. It’s funny. I’ll come across some cool paper. I’m like, Oh, this is awesome. It’s this is a study that we’re going to be doing. And I’m like, Oh, so we’re now publishing papers about papers we’re going to publish. But it’s just it’s laying out the study design and yeah, so I think that’ll be potentially really interesting adding to the very, Yeah.

Mike: I’m actually, I’m giving money and protein powder. Oh, cool. To, to that. Yeah, 

Lyle: so I’m really excited about that, and I think it will add to the very limited amount of research we have on intermittent fasting and athletes. There’s only those two papers that I’m aware of, and I know that even the research on weight loss says it might be good.

It might be better. It might be the same. It might probably person dependent. 

Mike: Yeah. If it helps you maintain your deficit, 

Lyle: like everything else. Yeah. Like every, the one most recent paper I saw that I didn’t. I didn’t like the conclusion. So what they did is they did a two day diet, five day, like the two five pattern, versus a standard deficit.

And okay, no shock, they both lost about the same amount of weight and body fat. I don’t necessarily think ICR will make you lose more fat for a given. Deficit. I don’t think it’s like, at least not in its own right. Their conclusion was ICR has no benefit over standard dieting. My conclusion or my thought is right, but they only did diet two days a week.

To me, that’s a benefit. To only have to diet hard for two days a week and eat normally for five, that seems a practical psychological benefit on a different, but like to your point, some people don’t like diets like that. They don’t respond well to them. They find that they fly off there. There’s something, there’s that psychological diet switch that flips.

I am on a diet. I would prefer a 25 percent deficit daily than a 75 percent deficit or whatever it is. 

Mike: Or just cycle calories. I’d like to be at. Maintenance for a couple of days and then I’ll, and then I’ll drop low and then I’ll go medium. 

Lyle: Yeah. And bodybuilders have been carb cycling for decades.

So in a sense, this isn’t new. I think ICR is a little bit more formalized, but I’ve been kicking around, maybe trying to put something together, looking at how it might be implemented. For athletes, because they do have different issues, general weight loss. You don’t have to worry about supporting training.

You don’t have to worry about recovery. You don’t have to worry about your training structure. And I think ICR for athletes brings in some separate issues and mainly because most of it’s written. I’d have a big sense of what 

Mike: it’s worth. Intermittent fasting is still hugely popular. Look at it on Google trends.

It gets a shitload of searches on Amazon. 

Lyle: Oh yeah, no doubt. And I still I’m whatever, I’m not going to get into it. Martin’s book was super disappointing because he basically came out and said after 10 years that, eh, I knew intermittent fasting was nothing special. It’s dude, really? Like you spent a decade charging people a lot of money to tell them to skip breakfast.

And now you’re like, eh, I knew it wasn’t magic. Okay. But yeah and that’s another one of those things. When it works, it’s fantastic. It’s a great calorie control. It makes perfect sense to cluster. Most of your calories around training from a number of I get all of that, man, I’ve written about it, wrote about it in a women’s book for smaller dieters, especially trying to fit in, being able to skip breakfast and have more calories to work with later in the day is perfect, makes perfect sense.

And for some people it becomes a binge purge. It just depends on who the person is. And I wrote it, this was in the women’s book too. People forget that these are not mutually exclusive, like meal frequency, If you’re not eating a lot, intermittent fasting makes perfect sense. If you have to eat a lot because you’re carb loading, intermittent fasting makes no sense whatsoever because I’ve seen people do it.

Man, I’m trying to eat 3000 calories a day on three meals. Maybe this isn’t the right approach. 

Mike: Yep. Do you think there’s something to be said for having a few more servings of protein? Like for muscle building purposes, maybe five servings spaced out by a few hours as opposed to two or three servings.

Lyle: Yeah, there’s been a couple of papers on that. We’re splitting it up. It’s probably better in the big picture. And even what’s even interesting about that, if you go back 15 years ago, one of my old forums, this is where Martin, Borge Fagerle, someone who I’m going to deliberately choose not to mention by name because of some drama last year.

This is where they all showed up, was on my forum. Like I was there when they, before they were really well known. And man, we argued about intermittent fasting. For months, because I wasn’t buying it. I wasn’t buying that’s not having some protein first thing in the morning or earlier in the day.

I wasn’t convinced that it wouldn’t cause problems with muscle loss. I don’t think it like the Raman on data is very convinced. I don’t think it’s the issue that then, however, to your point, people forget this recovery from training. Is ongoing. It’s not like a switch. It’s not like you trained at six and you’re done it.

If you train at eight o’clock in the evening, protein synthesis continuing for 24 to 36 hours, depending on how well trained you are. To me, if you’re not having, even if it’s just a protein drink in the morning, I’m afraid that you will be limiting adaptation and potentially growth exactly what you 

Mike: said.

If you play that out over Oh, you’re going to be, let’s say it’s going to take you, at least five years, to achieve most of your genetic potential in terms of muscle growth, you could say it may even take eight to 10 years when you factor in the realities of life. 

Lyle: I think you’re very much limiting yourself and okay, like whatever the fasting, there’s no real magic to it.

And yeah, I know autophagy and all this other stuff that there are people are ranting and raving about, low carb is it’s semi fasting without fasting and to have 30 grams of protein is 120 calories and isn’t going to be a diet breaker. It’s not going to make you. Super, super, super hungry.

And I think if muscle growth is your optimal goal, I definitely think that’s a better way to do it than just putting 80 percent of your calories and all your protein in the one meal after. And I think people get so insistent on, I must not eat anything for 14 hours or whatever their goal is. Numbers are that they do lose the big picture that adaptation is long term and continuous.

And I think that’s where some of the dangers in these calorie cycling things can come from If you do the super heavy intensive training two days around then cut your calories way back you may have very well limited a lot of the benefits you’re going to get. 

Mike: Yeah, I was just going to say that’s also why there’s there’ve been a few papers now that Show that having some protein Particularly some slower burning protein before you go to bed can help with muscle gain over time for the same idea.

Of course, it makes sense. Not that you’re going to lose muscle if you don’t do it, but your body’s muscle building machinery, so to speak, it’s just going to be sitting there waiting for you to give it some raw materials to work with. 

Lyle: And somewhere, I couldn’t find it right at the moment. I got this really interesting book that it’s by it’s from the Nestle Nutrition Institute, because they do a lot of it.

It’s by Mon and Louise Burke, who is who I want to be when I grow up. She’s Louise Burke is amazing. She’s this clinical researcher, sports nutritionist, who’s just brilliant over at the AIS. And it’s called Sports Nutrition, More Than Just Calories, Triggers for Adaptation, and it’s pointing out kind of some of the stuff, like we know, Whey protein, and leucine, and mTOR, and fatty acids, and PPR, AR gamma, and alpha, and delta.

And all these nutrient calories are not just fuel and building blocks. They are molecular signals at levels that we’re only just now starting to scratch the surface of. But somewhere in this book, they talk about this and there is a paper out there somewhere showing that. Evening training that there is a big dip in protein synthesis in the middle of the night.

I don’t know what they did to these poor folks if they had to wake them up at 4 a. m. and do an infusion study, but they did directly measure this in humans. And they were like, yes, there is this critical period that makes perfect sense conceptually and logically. That if you do not have nutrient, yeah, you can eat a pile of protein right at bedtime and maybe not eat or that 30, 40 grams of casein or slow acting protein, back in the day, Dandy Shane recommended like, yeah, you should get up twice during the night.

And I’m like while I don’t disagree with that on a nutrient standpoint, now your sleep structure is screwed. And I don’t know that’s necessarily the best way to go about it. I think having a slow acting protein at bedtime makes far more sense and then getting a good night’s sleep. 

Mike: How much more would you really be gaining, especially if you’re going to sacrifice some of your sleep quality?

Yeah. 

Lyle: Yeah, and some of this was body opus, and he’s yeah, you had to get up every two hours in the middle of the night to carb load. It’s nah, it really doesn’t matter in the big picture, but this was two decades ago before this research was developed. But yeah, so I might do something on ICR for athletes, or I might just do nothing until I get motivated to write again.

I always sit there and go, I should write this out, and then I get bored and go do something else. So I don’t know, really no project wise. I want to get the women’s, the training book for women. I don’t know. I don’t want it to take forever, the first book took three years and normally I take about a decade between projects of that sort, but I don’t really want to wait that long.

So we’ll see what’ll happen is when I get back to it, I’ll write relentlessly. It just takes me a little time to get my focus back. So I think about it constantly. And I’ve always tended to write chapters in my head. Usually when I’m like, what I should do is get back to morning cardio. That’s when I did my best writing.

I would write it all on my head because I was bored. And then it was super easy to put it to paper. So maybe that’s what I should get back to or take my dogs for longer walks. So don’t know what project is next. Part of me wants to do something quick just to get it out there. And part of me wants to go play Shadow of Mordor some more.

So we’ll see. 

Mike: For everybody who wants to check out what you currently do have out where can they find you? 

Lyle: My main site is still body recomposition. com. That’s where all my articles are. My store is specifically store. bodyrecomposition. com, but there’s a link. From one to the other, but that’s where all my books are available.

One thing I do want to mention, just cause so the women’s book I did, was that last year, it is a monster. Like it is a monster of a book. One thing I started doing about a month ago is I’ve taken the big book and I’m subdividing it into three to four chapter booklets in Kindle format only on the Amazon Kindle store.

Mainly to make it more easily digestible and also not nightmarishly expensive, right? I do realize fully that 50 bucks is not a cheap book in this especially in this just given this the world as it is and Also, it is an overwhelmingly long book. So what I’m doing is every two weeks I’m releasing like the next section and there’s three of them out already the fourth one will go up next week but for people who just want to You Check it out or just have a specific set of topics and I’ve grouped them.

Awesome. Thanks a lot for taking the time, Lyle. I really appreciate 

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