The Weekly Roundup: Your Go-To Guide For Everything You May Have Missed This Week & More! 2/6 – 2/12

Welcome to Ben Greenfield's Weekly Roundup!

In this weekly post, I share with you my most interesting discoveries of the week, including the latest news on the fronts of fitness, nutrition, health, wellness, biohacking, and anti-aging research. I also recap my upcoming events and special announcements so you can keep up with opportunities to learn, giveaways, discounts, and more!

New Discoveries

If You Want More Muscle, You Probably Need *A Lot* More of THIS  🍽️ 💪

Many people train hard, hit their protein targets, and still wonder why visible muscle gain stalls once they’re past the beginner phase. 

What you might not realize is that putting on meaningful muscle and size often requires eating a lot, typically 25% or more above maintenance calories, according to a recent review.

The uncomfortable truth is that muscle gain in trained individuals is brutally energy-expensive, and most people simply aren’t fueling their bodies enough to support it. When I was deep into bodybuilding in college and weighed 214 pounds, I was eating around 6,000 calories per day, and there was a reason for that.

The study's authors explain that muscle growth doesn't purely depend on the energy stored in new tissue; it also includes the metabolic cost of protein synthesis, hormonal shifts, nervous system demands, and recovery processes. 

In other words, the textbook “lean bulk” math massively underestimates what it actually takes to grow muscle at an appreciable rate, and protein alone won’t save you if total energy intake is too low. 

If you want real muscle, you need plenty of real fuel. 

That means accepting larger calorie surpluses, being strategic about where those calories come from, and timing them to support training and recovery, while also managing satiety and minimizing unnecessary fat gain. 

I’ve written extensively about this in my deep dives into lean bulking, nutrient timing, carb cycling, and muscle-building strategies for advanced trainees, along with podcasts that break down how to gain size without wrecking metabolic health.

If muscle growth is your goal and progress has stalled, those resources, linked below, are worth revisiting:

• Functional Forever: My Top Tips For Maintaining & Building Muscle, Strength, Energy, and Confidence With Age.
• Ben Greenfield’s Entire Muscle Building Program Unveiled: Top 6 Muscle Building Workouts, Diet For Building Muscle Without Gaining Fat & The Best Supplements For Muscle Mass.
• Staying Strong Forever, Research-Backed Protein Intake Recommendations, The Best Supplements For Muscle Gain & More With Dr. Gabrielle Lyon.
• The Real Skinny On Calories (& Why They May Matter Less Than You’ve Been Led To Believe).
• Safer Than Steroids? Your All-inclusive Guide To Gaining Muscle, Losing Fat & Much More With “SARMs.”
• What A Half-Naked Ironman Kickboxing Superhero Can Teach You About 5 Tools to Track Calories And 4 Ways To Log Your Diet The Right Way.
• The Best Workouts, Biohacks & Supplements For Muscle Gain, Muscle Recovery, Muscle Maintenance & More!

If you’re serious about improving your health but tired of juggling apps, programs, and conflicting advice that never truly work together, LIFE Premium was designed for you.

With LIFE Premium, you get direct access to the elite coaches I’ve personally trained, plus daily programming that helps you dial in fitness, nutrition, recovery, and longevity, all inside one connected system.

For just $1 for your first 30 days (normally $12.99/month), you’ll receive group coaching with my team, daily workouts designed to fit real life, and monthly small-group coaching calls in cohorts of fewer than 15 people.

On top of that, at no extra cost, you also get unlimited access to:

📚 Ad-Free Content Library: Workouts, recipes, podcasts (including Boundless Life), articles, and expert-led videos.
🤖 Ellen: Your always-on AI health guide to help you ask better questions, set realistic goals, and build personalized plans.
💬 Groups: Focused communities for accountability, support, and real conversation.
📍 Places: A curated map of gyms, studios, restaurants, and wellness spots near you.
🫶 Community + Events: Live sessions, challenges, and discussions that make health social and sustainable.

If you want a simpler, smarter way to train and stay consistent, you can try LIFE Premium for just $1 here.

This Week in Health & Performance: What the Latest Research Says

🧠 Magnesium Threonate—Turn Back the Brain Clock?: After just six weeks, magnesium L-threonate supplementation was associated with improvements equivalent to reducing cognitive age by up to 7.5 years versus placebo, with added sleep benefits (read more here).

🍬 Sugar & Cravings—Not What You Think: Contrary to popular belief, new research suggests that consuming sweet foods or drinks does not desensitize your taste buds or make you more prone to craving sweets over time. In other words, sugar exposure alone isn’t automatically rewiring your brain to want more sugar (study here).

🔥 Spot Reduction—Technically Possible, Practically Brutal: Yes, you can spot reduce fat (like crunching your way to a smaller waist), but the research shows it requires close to 90 minutes of targeted ab training, four days per week. For most people, adjusting their diet and prioritizing big compound lifts like deadlifts is a far more efficient strategy (read the full study).

🚶 Steps Aren’t Enough—Walk Longer, Not Just More Often: A long-term study found that when it comes to heart health, the duration of your walking bouts matters more than simply racking up steps throughout the day. Longer, continuous walks beat frequent short strolls to the water cooler (study here).

Key Takeaway: Nutrition myths, fat-loss shortcuts, and step-count hacks don’t always hold up under scrutiny. The research keeps pointing back to smarter diet choices, efficient training, and intentional movement done for long enough to matter.

Want to dive deeper? Click the links above to explore the research, and click here to follow me on X for all the latest health and performance news hot off the press!

Product Of The Week

::: Sleep Deeper, Feel Calmer, Perform Better—Get 20% Off Hapbee :::

Most wellness products promise change by asking you to swallow something.

Hapbee takes a different approach, helping you shift how you feel using safe, frequency-based signals, without adding another pill, powder, or stimulant to your routine.

The real value isn’t in what Hapbee emits, it’s in what users consistently notice: steadier energy during the day, an easier time winding down at night, and deeper, more restorative sleep, without the grogginess that often follows supplements or sleep aids. 

Many people report falling asleep faster and getting significantly more REM sleep, which matters for recovery, longevity, and mental performance.

For many, the biggest win is consistency. Instead of bouncing between stimulation and sedation, Hapbee supports smoother transitions between focus, calm, and recovery. That steadiness makes it easier to train, work, travel, and sleep without constantly compensating with caffeine during the day or knockouts at night.

In a world built on overstimulation and artificial calm, Hapbee’s promise is simple: help your body find its own balance, so performance feels sustainable rather than forced.

Right now, you can save 20% for a limited time when you try Hapbee using my link here (discount auto-applied).

We’re Hiring a Part-Time Backend Engineer for LIFE Enterprises!

Are you a backend engineer who loves building systems that actually run in production and scale under real-world load?

If you’re excited about designing reliable, high-performance infrastructure and want your work to support health, wellness, and human optimization, this role might be for you.

As a Backend Engineer for LIFE Network, you’ll help design, build, and operate the backend services that power a fast-growing, data-heavy wellness platform. You’ll work closely with frontend engineers and product teams to ship production-ready features, improve system performance, and ensure reliability across cloud-native infrastructure.

If you enjoy owning backend systems end-to-end and want to help build technology that elevates human performance, apply here!

Podcasts I Recorded This Week:

The Coolest, Craziest Oral Peptides (& Where To Get Them), Boosting Testosterone Without Drugs & More With LIFE Network Expert Kyal Van Der Leest

The *Best Of* Protocols to Reset Your Brain, Boost Energy & Break Mental Limits: Best Of Optimized Living