Layne Norton, Ph.D.: Building muscle, losing fat, and the importance of resistance training

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
I guess this week is Layne Norton. Layne is a bodybuilding figure and a physique coach, along with being a natural, pro bodybuilder and professional powerlifter. He has an undergraduate degree in biochemistry and a PhD in nutritional science from the University of Illinois. In this episode, we talked at length about his background, and while I initially thought we'd spend a few minutes on it, it turned into quite a lengthy discussion. But I encourage you to listen all the way through because not only is it interesting and it paints a picture of a really interesting and determined guy who, to be completely honest with you, demonstrated to me not someone who's as naturally gifted as I would have assumed he is from the images of Layne that I'm familiar with, but really a guy whose, if anything, his superpower is commitment, dedication, determination. And that commitment, dedication, determination that he brought to his power lifting and bodybuilding have really carried over into his obsessive need to understand everything as it pertains to training and nutrition, both in the spirit of improving body composition, adding muscle mass, understanding the metabolic benefits of that, along with the health benefits. We go into some really deep stuff here, and most of the time, we're pretty good, and we take a step back and we get into, this is what actin is, this is what myosin is, and this is how muscle protein synthesis works. The show notes, I think, will be helpful on some of those things. I learned a lot in this myself. We had a very interesting discussion around IGF, growth hormone, cortisol, a number of hormones that play a role here that, again, I think there's some misgivings and misunderstandings about how these things work. We also, frankly, don't get to as many things as I had hoped to. This podcast is a little bit long, and despite the length, there are probably about five or six topics that we didn't get to that I suspect we're going to discuss several months from now. Layne has graciously already agreed to be back on, and we'll be able to revisit a number of these topics at that time. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Layne Norton.
Hey Layne. Awesome to be sitting down with you today, at least virtually. Been looking forward to speaking with you for actually about two and a half years. I know Dom introduced us a long time ago.
We were trying to do this in person at some point, and then one thing led to another. It became COVID, and then all of a sudden I realized you don't have to be in person to do a podcast. Though I do wish we were in person, because I suspect this will be a really long discussion and a great one.
You know, first off, I just want to say one thing that I think people sometimes assume is that people like you and I have so much in terms of viewpoints that are vastly different. And you know, I spent a lot of time reading your material and watching your videos, and I followed your work for quite some time. And I would actually say that there are very few things that I think you and I don't see eye to eye on. And maybe some of those things will come up today. I think they'd be very interesting. But I also think the level of nuance and sophistication you bring to this subject matter is exciting, which is why I want to talk with you about so many things. But I kind of want to start by letting listeners understand a little bit about who you are and why I think you're qualified to speak on so many subject matters. So, I mean, let's just talk about, you grew up in outside of Chicago, if I recall.

**Layne Norton** (4:01)
Actually in southern Indiana. So I'm from Evansville originally. So 20 minutes from Illinois and five minutes from Kentucky.