Description:
Most runners think running and building muscle don’t mix.. but they’re half right.If you don’t fuel, lift, and train smart, your body will burn your muscle b…
Transcript
Introduction
Running doesn’t just burn fat—it will actually burn your muscles first if you make the same mistakes that I did. I went from looking like this to this in only 50 days running the same amount of mileage. And I just remember thinking, why did I put in so much work at the gym if I’m going to lose everything in only 50 days?
If I had to summarize everything I learned into 60 seconds, I would tell you that your body is like an engine. And like any engine, it needs a fuel tank. When that tank is full, like after a meal for example, your body has all the energy available to spend. But not all the fuel in the tank is the same. Your fuel tank is actually divided into three parts.
The first fuel your body is going to tap into to convert into energy is glycogen coming from carbs, sugar, pastas, bread—anything that is quick and readily available. That’s why when somebody’s fainting, you give them sugar. It’s the fastest fuel that your body can absorb into your bloodstream. Once glycogen is depleted, your body will use fat as a fuel source.
Now, there’s a couple of problems with fat. One is that most runners don’t have a lot of fat available in their body. Number two is that fat is a much more complicated fuel source to convert into energy. It takes more time to break down and is also much slower to release. As a result, the reality for most runners is that they will use muscle and fat as a fuel source as soon as glycogen is depleted.
That’s exactly what happened to me when I was doing Run for Europe. I was running 24 marathons in 2 months and I went from the best shape of my life—feeling super strong and running a lot of mileage every week—to running the same amount but just losing 10 kilos of muscle. The good news is that since then I’ve learned a lot of lessons that I put together into this video in a six-step masterclass so you don’t do the same mistakes that I did.
Step 1: Eating Enough Calories
This is the easiest concept to understand but also the hardest to maintain. For beginners, if you want to gain weight, you need to be in a calorie surplus, meaning you need to eat more calories than you burn daily. If you want to lose weight, you want to be in a calorie deficit, burning more calories than you eat. Very simple.
So, how many calories are we talking about? Everyone has a baseline of how many calories you need to eat every day in order to maintain your weight. We call this maintenance calories. Your maintenance calories are composed of two things. One is BMR, your base metabolic rate—that’s the amount of calories you need to stay alive. Literally to breathe, to keep your brain working, to keep your heart pumping, to keep your lungs breathing. The second is your NEAT, your non-exercise activity thermogenesis. That’s a fancy name to say the silent burn that’s going on every day when you’re doing your chores, when you’re doing groceries, when you’re standing up from your desk. All right, that’s not exercise, but it still burns calories. So those two together, that’s your maintenance calories—how many calories you need to eat every day just to maintain your weight.
On average, a 30-year-old male like myself needs about 1,900 calories to maintain your weight, excluding any exercise. The problem with running is that it naturally creates a huge calorie deficit. A good rule of thumb is that you burn one calorie per kilogram of body weight per kilometer. So, I weigh 75 kilos, which means I burn 75 calories per kilometer of running. If I go on a 10 km run, I will burn 750 calories. Obviously, that depends on your intensity and body weight, but it’s a good rule of thumb.
This means that if I add this to my maintenance calories of 1,900, I’m now over 2,500 calories I need to eat just to maintain my weight. And if you sprinkle in some strength sessions on top of that, you can easily go to over 3,000 calories every day. That’s a lot of calories.
If you ever wondered how hybrid athletes like Nick Bear can maintain such muscle mass and weight while running so much mileage, just look at one of their vlogs. Look at what they’re eating. They’re eating an insane amount of food and everything they’re eating is super high in calories, super high in protein. They’re really optimizing all their nutrition to be in a calorie surplus while burning 3-4,000 calories a day.
That was the main reason why I lost so much weight during Run for Europe—I didn’t eat nearly enough calories during that time. We were traveling through three countries per week and we were just too busy trying to fill up the water tank, finding a spot to sleep, running and traveling to really focus on nutrition. But don’t worry, later in the video, we’ll go deeper into what to eat and at what time in order to maintain a good body composition, meaning burning more fat and keeping your muscle in your body.
Step 2: The Importance of Protein
When you’re doing any type of muscular exercise, you’re tearing up muscle fibers and you need protein to rebuild them. That process is called protein synthesis. And you can think of it literally like a light switch. If you go for a run and you have a protein shake right afterwards, your light switch—your protein synthesis—is switched on, meaning you’re rebuilding the muscle that you tore up. If you just have carbs, let’s say you have an apple after you run, then your protein synthesis is off. You’re not actually rebuilding the fibers that you broke down. So, you’re breaking down your muscle and you’re in a catabolic state.
This is super important because if you want to maintain your muscle mass, then that means eating enough calories is not enough. You need to make sure you fuel with the right fuel source at the right time. Before an activity, you want to get carbs and fat in your system because that’s going to help you fuel your run. And after you exercise, you want to have something that’s rich in protein so you can rebuild the muscle fibers that you broke down.
So what happens when you eat enough calories, but you don’t eat enough protein? You will maintain your weight, but your body composition will change. You will build up fat stores and break down muscle mass. Eating enough protein is crucial. How much protein are we talking about? A good rule of thumb is 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilo of your body weight. This is the golden rule for hybrid athletes—if you run and you go to the gym. To be honest, I think everybody should kind of do that.
If you’re interested in a full meal plan for runners who also go to the gym that is not only calorie rich, but also protein rich and healthy, I’m giving one away for free. First link in the video description down below. You’ll get one email with the PDF inside. It has a bonus section with protein-rich snacks that are also really tasty and help me personally hit my calorie and my protein count every day.
Step 3: Strength Training
Finally, if you want to build muscles efficiently as a runner, you need to follow these three golden rules.
First, stick to heavy compound movements. Big multi-joint lifts are more functional and translate directly to your sport. Instead of isolating every tiny muscle like a bodybuilder, focus on movements that force your body to work as a system: squats, deadlifts, lunges, pull-ups, presses. When you only train your muscles in isolation, you actually raise the risk of injury and you’re missing out on all the full body stability that actually makes you a stronger runner.
Second, follow a smart training split. A simple PPL (push-pull-legs) split works brilliantly for runners who try to efficiently build muscle and maintain muscle. If you go to the gym three times a week, focus one day on legs, one day on pushing, and one day on pulling. If you can, sprinkle one more session in per week for stability and plyometrics—things like box jumps, single leg balance drills, and band work. That’s where you build the reactive strength that running demands. That’s four gym sessions per week on top of your running, and you will become extremely strong.
The third golden rule is progressive overload. This idea of progressive overload is ancient. It literally started with Milo of Croton, a wrestler in the 6th century BC in Greece. Legend has it that Milo tried to carry a newborn calf on his shoulders every single day. As the calf grew bigger, so did Milo’s strength until he was eventually carrying a full-grown bull. That’s progressive overload—same exercise, just increasing weight steadily, consistently over a long period of time.
Step 4: Annual Periodization
This is by far one of the best concepts that you can steal from pro athletes as an amateur. I first came across it in the book Primal Endurance by Mark Sisson. It’s a really good book, but it’s heavily biased by low carb propaganda, which didn’t really work for me, but still really solid book with lots of really good advice.
So, how does it work? Let’s say you’re training for an ultramarathon that happens in November. That means you’ve got 10 months to build up. You don’t just go hard all year because that will lead to burnout and it’s not sustainable. No one can sustain that. Well, Goggins can actually—Goggins doesn’t have annual periodization. I think the protein synthesis switch for Goggins is just “Goggins mode” and it’s pretty much switched on since he watched that first Navy Seal series back when he was 18. But yeah, I mean the guy doesn’t have a meniscus anymore. His knees are literally just bone on bone and he’s still going.
Anyway, annual periodization—how does it work? You have your base phase, your build phase, your peak phase, and then the recovery phase. Every different training plan has different words for it, but they all work the same way.
First is your base phase. It’s like your foundation. You build your aerobic endurance with lots of easy miles to grow that engine. You dial in your technique and form, and most importantly, for hybrid athletes, that’s when you want to lift heavy and strong. Mileage is lower here, so it’s the perfect window to focus on real strength—big compound lifts, stability work, and fixing imbalances.
The second phase is the build phase. That’s when you ramp up your mileage. You mimic the real conditions of the event. So that’s when your long runs will get longer, and you will naturally lose a bit of body weight just because you’re spending more time building mileage. And that’s completely fine—it will help with your running efficiency. But make sure you keep that protein synthesis switch on so you’re keeping your body composition the way you want to and you’re not fueling your long runs with your hard-earned muscle. This is where most runners screw up. They increase their mileage, go less to the gym, and so they think they need less protein and that protein synthesis is switched off. Every time you go for a run, you need a protein shake after your run. That’s so important if you want to keep your body composition.
Then you have the peak phase. That’s a few weeks before you race when you sharpen your blade. The volume drops, the intensity stays the same. And obviously after the race, you have your recovery phase. This is the phase that separates smart runners from burnt out runners. After your big event, you want to take a few weeks completely off. You want to pull back, recover, and let your body and your brain regenerate.
Main takeaway from this annual periodization is like a blueprint to help you train with seasons. It will help you run strong, stay strong, and most importantly, do it again the next year.
Step 5: Fuel Long Runs
Fasted running—when you’re running on an empty stomach—can be very, very interesting to become metabolically flexible, meaning you can switch between your different fuel sources. You can switch from carbs to fat efficiently. But there’s a few rules and you have to do it correctly.
The first really important rule is you don’t want to go on a fast run when you’re fasted. What happens when you go on a fast run? You will not use fat as a fuel source because it takes too long to break down. You will use your glycogen stores and as soon as that’s depleted, you will use your muscle. So, if you’re doing a fasted run, make sure you’re doing it at very low intensity. And even more importantly, you should never go on a fasted long run because what happens then? You will burn muscle—hard-earned muscle—to fuel that long run. Don’t do it.
On long runs—that’s anything that’s longer than 75 minutes—you should always take carbs every 45 to 60 minutes. The easiest way to do it, of course, is a gel. I did this mistake during Run for Europe. I only had my first snack at the half marathon point, so halfway through after 21 km. Sometimes I took almost 3 hours to complete that because there was also elevation. So when I arrived at that aid station, I was already in a complete catabolic state, just burning through my muscles.
Step 6: Recovery and Sleep
We see it everywhere. It’s arguably the most important step because if you don’t do that, everything you’re doing before is for nothing. If you’re stressed out, your body produces something called cortisol, and that is a poison for muscle growth. So, even if you eat the right amount, eat the right protein, go to the gym, and everything, but you’re stressed out and you have bad quality sleep, that will kill your gains.
And it’s not just sleep. If you want to be smart and don’t do too many junk miles—junk miles, if you don’t know what that is, is just adding mileage in kilometers to your routine that don’t really give you many benefits but cost you a lot in recovery terms. The best way to avoid that is to focus on more quality sessions rather than quantity.
Conclusion
So, I hope you enjoyed this video and found it helpful. Let it flow. Stay wild and peace.