234. What It Takes to Build Lean Muscle

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there and welcome to episode 234 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners, and today what it takes to build lean muscle. So if you’re a runner and you want to improve your speed, your endurance, or both, then you’ll want to work on building some lean muscle.

The problem is that most runners don’t really know how to build muscle, or they’re using an outdated approach that really isn’t doing much for them. Building a stronger body will not only help improve your running performance, it will also help you to lose weight, have more energy, and generally feel better all the time.

So in this episode, what it takes to build lean muscle so that you can get leaner, get stronger, and become the most badass version of yourself yet, but first, as always, if you want some help with all of this stuff, with nutrition, with building endurance, with getting stronger, building strength, becoming that stronger, leaner, more badass version of yourself, I’m here for you if you think that you might benefit from coaching, and I think you might then look into it.

You don’t have to commit to anything. You can go on my website, go to running leancoaching.com, and click on work with me. You’ll fill out a little form. You and I’ll have a discussion over zoom. We’ll talk about coaching and see if this is a good fit for you. If it is, cool, if it isn’t, no big deal, at least now, you know, but I think that most people can benefit from having the expertise, the guidance, the support, the encouragement of somebody that has done all this before and helped hundreds and hundreds of people to become their most badass selves. So if you want a little bit of help, you want to hit the easy button on all this stuff, hit me up. Go to runningleanpodcast.com, leanforlife muscle.

So one of the things that I have found over the last five years or so working with runners on all this stuff, is that runners are not so good about resistance training, right? They don’t do it consistently, maybe only in the off-season. Oh yeah, you know, I run, so I really don’t need to strength train, or do any kind of resistance training while I’m running. Not necessarily true, or that maybe they’re not doing it right. They’re doing, you know, what they think is the right way to get toned, you know. So light weights, super ton of reps and sets, you know? And basically they’re doing a lot of cardio at this point. They’re not lifting heavy enough to actually build muscle to get stronger.

They’re not making strength training or resistance training a priority. So they think that running is enough. So most runners are not being very intentional about building lean muscle. They’re more intentional, very intentional about improving their running performance, about hitting certain goals for their running and they don’t make this connection that the strength side of things getting stronger will help you to reach those running goals.

It’s actually one of the things that’s kind of required for you to reach those goals and to get there without risking injury and burnout and stuff like that. So strength training is essential for your success in long-distance running because when you’re running, you’re putting your muscles under intense stress. And so we want to make sure that we are building muscle. We’re building back that muscle, more lean mass, and we want to get stronger. Building strength helps you to maintain good running form.

For example, it helps you to maintain a consistent power output while you’re running. You know, strong muscles don’t fatigue as quickly as weak muscles. So it improves your endurance as a runner. And athletes who are over 40, especially will benefit from strength training, since strength, for most people, tends to decline faster than your endurance as you get older. So if you’re doing some sort of strength training, it has this sort of anti-aging effect for older adults by preserving lean muscle. I am helping you to optimize all your systems, your cardiovascular system, but mainly your skeletal muscle, muscular systems.

So being a lean runner means you’re a strong runner. Means you’re a more powerful runner, means you’re going to live longer. There are tons of benefits to getting stronger and building lean muscle. For example, you build stronger muscles, yes, but you also build stronger connective tissues, ligaments, tendons, stronger bones. All these things will help you to stay injury free as a runner, getting stronger, building some muscle, helps you to lose weight, because you’re more effective at your body’s more effective at burning fat.

You increase your metabolism. It just costs a little more energy for you to carry around more muscle mass, and we’re not talking about getting huge like a bodybuilder. We’re just talking about putting on a few pounds of muscle here, but it will help to increase your metabolism, because your body requires more energy to carry around that skeletal muscle. It’s a higher energy requirement than fat is.

So it will help you to not only speed up your metabolism, but burn fat more effectively. You know, speed up the fat adaptation process, lose more weight all of that stuff.

Carrying more muscle means you’re going to increase your power to weight ratio, because what you have that you’re carrying around is now muscle that is stronger, you know, than just carry around fat, all right? Because fat does not make you a faster runner, and building more muscle definitely does, though. So you’ll be faster, you’ll be a more powerful runner. You’ll get faster, you’ll be able to increase your endurance, like I mentioned, you can run longer.

A couple of other benefits of getting stronger and building muscle. It helps to increase your lactic threshold, helps to fight depression, reduces risk of disease, protects your joints, boosts energy levels, improves your sleep. So many benefits to getting stronger, carrying around a little bit more muscle. We should all be actively working on improving our muscle mass. And again, we’re not talking about putting on 80 pounds of muscle here. We’re talking about, you know, five pounds, 10 pounds of muscle, something like that.

For most of us, it’s going to offset some of the fat we’re trying to lose. So we want to lose fat weight. We want to put on some muscle weight. That way, we’re improving our body composition. We’re getting rid of some of the tissue that we’re carrying around, the fat in our fat cells, you know, that we’re carrying around that isn’t doing us any good, and replacing that with muscle and which does do us good, it does us lots of good. It helps to improve so many different areas.

So let’s focus on building some muscle while we are losing some of the fat weight. Because listen, running and losing weight are both things that are considered catabolic. They break down muscle or can break down muscle tissue, especially for long-distance runners. So we got to offset the catabolic activity that’s happening with some anabolic activity.

So anabolic activity is building muscle, so running long distances, especially, will break down muscle in the long run. And so we want to replace that. We want to make sure that we are eating enough, getting enough protein, getting rest and recovery. We want to make sure that we are doing adequate muscle building and losing weight is the same thing. You know, a lot of people who restrict calories to lose weight, they lose muscle mass in the process. We do not want this. You want to maintain or you really want to build muscle, and you can build muscle while you’re losing weight, it’s absolutely possible, but you have to have the right approach. You have to do a few things, particularly the things that I’m going to talk about today.

I’ve got three requirements to building lean muscle that you really need to be doing consistently if you want to stay in that anabolic state where you’re building muscle and not in that catabolic state where you’re breaking down muscle.

Okay, so the three requirements to building lean muscle, you know, whether you’re running a lot or trying to lose weight, we got to be building muscle. Here’s three things that are very, very important for building muscle.

The first is going to be resistance training. I think we all know this, like you have to practice some sort of resistance training in order to build muscle. So there’s this principle called the progressive overload principle, and this says basically that in order for a muscle to grow or get stronger, you have to overload that muscle or that muscle group, so that your body has an adaptive positive response to that overload.

So let’s say you go to the gym and you lift 20 pounds, and you do that 10 times as a bicep curl, and you stress out those muscles. When you leave the gym, your body’s going to have a response to that, which is it’s going to make those muscles a little bit stronger and is going to produce a little bit of muscle growth. Okay, so then the next time you go to the gym, you may be able to do 22 pounds, you know, and you may be able to lift those 10 times. Okay, well, now you’ve had a positive adaptation to that overload, you overloaded the muscle. Your muscle now says to itself, doesn’t really say anything, but what it says to itself is, hey, we need to be stronger. We need to be bigger. Because, you know, we’re putting a lot of stress on this, on our muscles here, so your muscle will grow in response to that overload. Okay, so then the next time you go, it’s 25 pounds. The next time it’s 27 pounds.

So the point is that in order to get stronger, in order to build muscle, you have to be doing resistance training. I just went over a ton of benefits of resistance training, but really what we’re trying to do, one of the main things we’re trying to do is either get stronger or build larger muscles, so we can improve the muscle strength, so the strength of the muscle fibers, or we can improve the size of the muscle fibers.

And there’s different types of exercises you do that, you know, there’s a lot of overlap between strength and hypertrophy and power, but ideally you want to be doing things in sort of all areas. I did a whole podcast on this. It was episode 199 called Strength, Power, and Hypertrophy for Runners. So definitely listen to that one, because I break it all down and tell you exactly how to do different resistance training workouts in order to improve strength or power or hypertrophy.

Hypertrophy just means building bigger muscles, right? More muscle mass. Now, if you’re focusing on strength training specifically, you will be getting stronger, but you will also be building bigger muscles. And if you’re focused on hypertrophy, building bigger muscles, you will also be getting stronger. There is an overlap there, so it just kind of depends on where your focus is, what your priority is, but I think we can all benefit from doing some sort of strength or hypertrophy training, some sort of resistance training in order to get bigger muscles.

And you don’t have to do a ton of working out. You don’t have to become a gym rat. And this is where I think a lot of people think that, oh, I don’t have time to do this. Well, one of the things that I teach all my clients in my program is a full-body strength program that you can do twice a week. It only takes 20 minutes each time. You just have to do it twice a week. It’s a full body workout. It is a intense workout. It’s not easy, it’s pretty simple, but it’s not easy. It is hard, but it has great results. And if you were to do that once a week that would be enough to just maintain where you are.

So once a week. Resistance training, if you worked your whole body once a week, that’s fine. You’re going to kind of maintain where you are. Remember, with strength training, it’s a use it or lose it situation. If you don’t work your muscles, they are going to, you know, atrophy. They’re going to get smaller. You’re going to lose some of that muscle mass. So we don’t want to do that. So make sure at least once a week you’re doing some sort of resistance training. Just to maintain what you got, twice a week is enough to build muscle.

If you are doing it properly, you got to be practicing that progressive overload principle, three to five times a week is ideal. Really, if you can get three, four or five times a week in your training plan, that’s perfect. You know, that’s gonna give you the best results. But if you can only fit in twice a week, that’s good too.

Okay, that’s kind of the bare minimum. Once a week would just be enough to maintain okay? So if you can get into three or five resistance training workouts a week. That’s kind of the sweet spot where you want to be. So you have to be doing regular resistance training. Consistency is key here, right? You can’t just do it every now and then, right? It’s not one of those things where you can take time off and only do this in the off season. You don’t want to do it that way. You want to be resistance training the whole time. You’re the whole year around really, there’s really no time that you want to take off again.

If you don’t use it, you lose it. So if you practice some resistance training in the off season, and then you go 16 weeks of training for marathon without doing any resistance training, you’re going to be kind of starting from square one come, you know, the next time you go to start again. So don’t do that. Keep up with the consistent strength training resistance training regimen all year round. The only time I tell people, usually to take off from strength training would be the week of a big race. So if you’ve got your marathon coming up, then, you know, that’s your taper time. You want to make sure you’re not doing anything that’s going to, like, overload you or, you know, break you down the week of your race. You want to be as fresh as possible for that race.

Okay, so three requirements to building lean muscle. Number one, we just talked about, you have to be doing some regular, consistent, intentional resistance training. In order to build lean muscle, you have to build the muscle.

Number two is make sure you have adequate protein intake. If you don’t eat enough protein all those workouts at the gym, there’ll be some benefits, but they won’t amount to much. You need to eat enough protein every day to support the production of lean muscle via muscle protein synthesis, right? You have to eat protein. You have to eat protein, or you will die. Protein is what’s considered an essential nutrient, along with fat. Fat and protein are both called essential nutrients. That means we have to get them externally. We have to eat them, ingest them. Our body does not produce those things, so if we don’t eat fat and protein, we will eventually die. So make sure you’re eating fat and protein every single day.

What’s interesting is that carbohydrates are not considered an essential nutrient. If you don’t eat carbs, you won’t die. Your liver actually produces all the glucose that your brain needs to function properly. Your your brain does need a certain amount of glucose to function every day, and I know tons and tons and tons of people who never eat carbs, and they function absolutely fine. They’re they’re doing just fine. You don’t have to eat carbohydrates. I’m not saying don’t eat them. I’m just saying they’re not essential. Protein is essential. Fat is essential, but protein is one of those things that most runners do not get enough protein.

And there’s a lot of old notions around about how much protein we should be getting and the timing of our protein intake, and a lot of these old notions have been updated in the last couple of years. And I had a podcast where I talked about this back in 2021 I believe it was the ultimate guide to protein for runners, and at the time, it was what I knew to be the science. At the time, it was the, you know, kind of accepted principles and accepted guidelines for athletes. At the time, since then, I’ve changed my advice a little bit, so as the science gets updated, so will my advice to you, just keep that in mind.

So what I’m about to tell you here, I may change this in a couple years time. Who knows? But for now, it looks like what is recommended for most people is to try to get somewhere around point seven grams of protein for every pound of ideal body weight. So this could go up or down, depending on your goals, so maybe point six or up to point eight, even up to one gram. But for most of us, even athletes, we can probably safely say or safely use the point seven grams per pound of ideal body weight as a benchmark for how much protein would we should be getting.

Okay, so just understand that that’s a good place for you to be. You’re going to be fine if you stick around that point seven grams of protein for every pound of ideal body weight. Okay? And the other thing that is interesting that has been kind of debunked or changed or updated, is when you should be getting protein.

So some things that I’ve been learning in the last year or so is that, well, first of all, in the past, we used to be told that we have to get protein like within an hour of a workout, or you’re you’re going to miss the anabolic window. Like there’s this window of time when your body’s going to use the protein to build muscle, and if you miss the hour, it’s not going to do you any good. Not true.

Okay, new research shows that the anabolic window is basically 24 hours. Like your body is constantly using protein to build muscle. Your body is constantly doing this muscle protein synthesis. As long as you’re meeting your daily protein requirements, you’re pretty good to go. Don’t worry about having to get protein in within an hour after a workout.

Now, there are minuscule benefits from eating protein, you know, within an hour or two after a workout, but they’re minuscule. The difference between eating protein within an hour or two after a workout or six or eight hours later is negligible. It’s really not that big of a deal. And unless you’re some sort of elite athlete or bodybuilder, don’t worry about it. If you are an elite athlete or bodybuilder, then knock yourself out. But for most of us, getting, you know, point seven grams of protein every day and or per pound of body weight every day, and just making sure we’re getting that within a 24 hour period, you’re fine. You’re going to be fine. It’s more important that you’re getting adequate protein.

Just got to be consistent with all this stuff. Do it consistently. Use it or lose it. Just remember that we have to do these things consistently. So if you want to get lean, get strong, become a better runner, have more energy, you know, lower risk of injury, have more, you know, fat burning turned on, you want to have faster metabolism. You want to sleep better. You want to just feel better, be in a better mood. Resistance training is going to be the key. Building lean muscle is going to be the key.

You know what to do. Just get out there and do it. Okay, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all. Keep on running lean. I will talk to you soon.