Build for Health with Srdjan Injac

Fitness was marketed in two languages for a very long time. Men got strength, muscle, and heavy weights. Women got weight loss, toning, aerobics classes, and the little pink dumbbells. None of those activities are bad. The message underneath them was the problem: this is how women are supposed to exercise.

That message is still showing up in gym consultations. Women walk in with a goal and a fear in the same sentence. They want to be stronger and they do not want to get big. So this episode starts with how hard it actually is to add a significant amount of muscle, for anyone, and why "toned" describes a result rather than a type of training. It also gets into what a treadmill readout can't tell you. A 45-minute run flashes a calorie number. A 45-minute lifting session doesn't. If calories burned is the whole definition of a workout, cardio wins the scoreboard and loses the long game.

Then the part that doesn't get marketed to anyone: menopause. Estrogen does a lot of jobs in the body, and bone is one of them. In the years after menopause, bone loss speeds up. One client arrived at ELEV8 before that transition specifically because she understood what was coming. Most people arrive after.

There's also a short, unsparing ruling on pickleball.

Links & Notes

• QuickStats: Percentage of Adults Aged ≥18 Years Who Met the Federal Guidelines for Muscle-Strengthening Physical Activity, by Age Group and Sex(MMWR, May 2022, from the 2020 National Health Interview Survey). 35.2% of men and 26.9% of women met the guideline.
• Sex Differences in Adaptations in Muscle Strength and Size Following Resistance Training in Older Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis(Jones, Wewege, Hackett, Keogh & Hagstrom, Sports Medicine, 2020). Thirty studies, 1,400+ adults aged 50 to 90: no sex difference in relative muscle size gains, and women showed the largest increases in relative lower-body strength. Summary from UNSW Sydney.
• Strength and Hypertrophy Adaptations Between Low- vs. High-Load Resistance Training: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis(Schoenfeld, Grgic, Ogborn & Krieger, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2017). With sets taken to failure, low loads (≤60% 1RM) and high loads produced similar muscle growth. High loads built more strength.
• Comparative Efficacy of Different Resistance Training Protocols on Bone Mineral Density in Postmenopausal Women: A Systematic Review and Network Meta-analysis(Wang et al., Frontiers in Physiology, 2023). Bone loss accelerates with the loss of estrogen after menopause, at 1.5% to 2.5% per year in the first decade. Moderate-intensity resistance training three days a week improved lumbar spine and femoral neck density.
• Episode 43: Did Social Media Make Fitness Harder?. Last week's episode, and where "get fit for summer" comes from.
• Episode 32: GLP-1, Cortisol, and Cycle Syncing: A Women's Strength Training Reality Check with Brooke Passey and Kaila Gallion. The earlier conversation this one follows up on.
• Episode 31: Your Bones Are Alive. More on why loading bone matters.
• Episode 25: Aging Is Inevitable. Weakness Isn't.. Muscle loss with age, and what to do about it.
• Episode 17: Flexibility vs. Mobility. For the yoga-and-Pilates crowd, and the guys who should join them.
• Work with Srdjan and the team at ELEV8 Fitness in Portland, Oregon.
• Submit your questions to the show!

More free fitness instruction exists right now than at any point in history. You can watch a qualified coach teach a squat at 2 a.m. for nothing. And the share of American adults who strength train twice a week has barely moved. In 1997, about one in five met the guideline. By 2018, it was about 27%.

So where did all that content go? This episode follows the incentives. A creator has to post something new every day to stay in the feed. A body getting stronger needs roughly the same few things, week after week, for months. When those two clocks run side by side, the advice changes faster than anyone can follow it. One Australian study of 300 healthy-lifestyle videos found most of the information misleading, and the creators with no relevant qualifications got it right less than one time in twenty. A study of news on Twitter turned up something less comfortable. When researchers took the bots out, false stories still spread faster than true ones. People did that part.

Then the gym floor: what happens when someone follows a downloaded program through shoulder pain because the app says four sets, and what researchers saw when women looked at fitspiration images and then got on a treadmill. There's also a lightning round through the trends in a real feed this week: Hyrox, creatine, 75 Hard, cold plunges, and anything ending in "maxxing." Signal or noise?

It ends with a number short enough to fit on an index card.

Links & Notes

• "Eat Like Me = Look Like Me": A Content Analysis of Healthy Lifestyle, Nutrition and Clean Eating Social Media Content(Porteous, Kemps, Powell & Prichard, Journal of Technology in Behavioral Science, 2026). The Australian study of 300 TikTok and Instagram videos: 68% of the information was misleading or deceptive.
• The Spread of True and False News Online (Vosoughi, Roy & Aral, Science, 2018). The MIT study: false news was 70% more likely to be retweeted, and the gap held with bots removed.
• The Effect of Instagram #Fitspiration Images on Young Women's Mood, Body Image, and Exercise Behaviour(Prichard et al., Body Image, 2020). The treadmill study.
• Trends in Adherence to the Muscle-Strengthening Activity Guidelines in the US Over a 20-Year Span(Calatayud et al., General Hospital Psychiatry, 2023). 19.8% in 1997, 27.2% in 2018.
• Trends in Muscle-Strengthening Exercise Among Nationally Representative Samples of United States Adults Between 2011 and 2017(Bennie et al., Journal of Physical Activity and Health, 2020). 29.1% to 30.3% over six years, in a sample of 1.7 million adults.
• Episode 39: Stress, Cortisol, and Your Gains. For anyone eyeing a cortisol cocktail.
• Episode 22: Stop Collecting Sore Joints and Start Making Progress: Programming 101. For when you're picking the one program you'll stick with.
• Episode 7: Trainer Red Flags, Green Flags, and Real Talk. More on sorting out who knows what they're talking about.
• Work with Srdjan and the team at ELEV8 Fitness in Portland, Oregon.
• Submit your questions to the show!

You can do everything right in the gym and still undo it on the couch at midnight. Lifting doesn't build muscle while you're lifting. It damages muscle and sends a signal. The rebuilding comes later, mostly while you're asleep, and it depends on conditions that a short night takes away.

This episode goes inside that night shift. Deep sleep brings a major pulse of growth hormone, but calling it "the muscle-building hormone" sells short what it's actually doing. Testosterone and the nervous system have their own overnight jobs, and strength turns out to be partly something your brain has to practice in its sleep.

Then the harder question: what does a pattern of short nights cost someone who's training and dieting at the same time? One number from the research works out to roughly an extra meal a day, eaten without deciding to. From there it's on to whether the weekend catch-up most of us rely on actually balances the books, what a sleep tracker is good for when it's obviously wrong about last night, and a practical list for people who've slept badly for years.

This episode is general information, not medical advice. If you have a diagnosed sleep disorder, work with a specialist.

Links & Notes

• The Effects of Partial Sleep Deprivation on Energy Balance (Al Khatib et al., European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2017). The meta-analysis behind the 385-calorie number: short sleep raised daily intake with no change in calories burned.
• The Effect of Acute Sleep Deprivation on Skeletal Muscle Protein Synthesis and the Hormonal Environment(Lamon et al., Physiological Reports, 2021). One night without sleep lowered muscle protein synthesis by 18%.
• Sleep Curtailment in Healthy Young Men Is Associated with Decreased Leptin Levels, Elevated Ghrelin Levels, and Increased Hunger and Appetite(Spiegel et al., Annals of Internal Medicine, 2004). The two hunger hormones from this episode.
• Ad Libitum Weekend Recovery Sleep Fails to Prevent Metabolic Dysregulation (Depner et al., Current Biology, 2019). The study on weekend catch-up sleep.
• Episode 40: Rest Is Not One Thing. The four kinds of recovery, plus more sleep research.
• Episode 5: Recovery Is Not a Reward. Where this conversation started.
• Work with Srdjan and the team at ELEV8 Fitness in Portland, Oregon.
• Submit your questions to the show!

Most of us walk into the gym assuming the body is on duty and the brain has the hour off. It's the other way around. Every squat starts as an electrical signal. The awkward first weeks of a new movement aren't weak muscles, they're a nervous system learning a skill. Strength, it turns out, is partly something you know how to do.

That's the door into a bigger question: what does lifting do for the organ running the show? This episode covers the research connecting resistance training to executive function and memory, why exercise reaches the brain through blood vessels and blood sugar as much as through muscle, and a trial in adults over 55 that pitted heavy lifting against computerized brain training.

The brain training didn't win.

Then the part that matters most as we age: balance, falls, and why the speed of a correction can matter as much as raw leg strength. What can be trained, what can't, and where a fall in your seventies fits in the dementia picture.

Aging is inevitable. Weakness is not.

Links & Notes

• Visit ELEV8 Fitness PDX and Find Your Next Trainer!
• Submit your questions to the show!

Training is the stimulus. It is not the adaptation. That happens later — in the hours we treat as leftover time, and describe with words that all mean absence: rest day, off day, recovery day.

This week Pete brings Srdjan a piece of research that has nothing to do with the gym and everything to do with it. In 2007, Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz published the Recovery Experience Questionnaire, built on a puzzle they kept running into: hours off didn’t predict who came back restored. Two people take the same weekend. One returns ready. One returns wrecked. Their answer was that recovery isn’t one thing — it’s four, and they don’t substitute for each other. Psychological detachment. Relaxation. Mastery. Control. If you spend all day being told what to do, lying on the couch won’t fix it; you need a rest that hands you back the controls.

Srdjan takes that framework into the gym and it holds up uncomfortably well. He walks through what’s actually happening in your body after a hard session — glycogen, protein synthesis, the twenty-four to forty-eight hour repair window — and makes the case that soreness is a lousy measurement of recovery, because different systems come back online at different speeds. Muscles, energy stores, connective tissue, nervous system. None of them are on the same clock.

Recovery isn’t separate from training. It is the training. Let’s build.

Links & Notes

• The Recovery Experience Questionnaire (Sonnentag & Fritz, 2007) — the four-factor model of detachment, relaxation, mastery, and control. Free full text, and the paper that kicked off this whole episode. Also on PubMed.
• Insufficient Sleep Undermines Dietary Efforts to Reduce Adiposity (Nedeltcheva et al., Annals of Internal Medicine, 2010) — the metabolic ward study, 8.5 versus 5.5 hours of sleep opportunity.
• Effect of 1 Week of Sleep Restriction on Testosterone Levels in Young Healthy Men (Leproult & Van Cauter, JAMA, 2011).
• The Effects of Sleep Extension on the Athletic Performance of Collegiate Basketball Players (Mah et al., Sleep, 2011) — every player improved on every measure.
• Gaining More From Doing Less? (PeerJ, 2024) — the thirty-nine-lifter deload study. Free full text.
• Work with Srdjan and the team at ELEV8 Fitness in Portland, Oregon.
• Submit your questions to the show!

Cortisol gets described online as the thing standing between you and the body you want. It's actually the hormone that gets you out of bed. It runs on a daily curve, highest in the morning and lowest at night, and it regulates blood sugar, blood pressure, inflammation, and how much energy the body makes available when something demands it. Exercise raises it. That's the point of exercise.

A hard session raises cortisol for a few hours, then it settles. Chronic stress never allows the settling. The body doesn't keep separate accounts for work, caregiving, money, bad sleep, and training. It adds them up, and when the total outruns the capacity to recover, strength stalls and motivation goes, and the natural conclusion is that the program isn't working.

An acute training spike is a different condition than chronically elevated cortisol, and treating them as the same thing is how people end up buying a supplement to solve a sleep problem. "Cortisol belly" turns out to be a product category. Five hours a night turns out to have a price.

Plus: the case for walking into the gym anyway on the worst days.

Links & Notes

On cortisol's normal daily rhythm

• Cortisol Awakening Response: Regulation and Functional Significance — Endocrine Reviews
• The circadian system modulates the cortisol awakening response in humans — Frontiers in Neuroscience

On exercise, cortisol, and stress regulation

• Effects of a 12-week endurance training program on the physiological response to psychosocial stress in men: a randomized controlled trial — Journal of Behavioral Medicine
• The effects of exercise intensity on the cortisol response to a subsequent acute psychosocial stressor

On "cortisol belly"

• The 'cortisol belly' myth: when diet culture is rebranded as wellness — The Conversation
• 9 Myths About the 'Stress Hormone' Cortisol — TIME
• Routine Screening for Cushing's Syndrome Is Not Required in Patients Presenting with Obesity

On sleep

• Sleep loss lowers testosterone in healthy young men — UChicago Medicine (Leproult & Van Cauter, JAMA 2011 — the 10–15% finding)
• Sleep loss boosts hunger and high-calorie food choices — University of Chicago
• Impact of Five Nights of Sleep Restriction on Glucose Metabolism, Leptin and Testosterone in Young Adult Men — PLOS One

On energy availability and reproductive hormones

• Hypogonadism in Exercising Males: Dysfunction or Adaptive-Regulatory Adjustment?

Show links

• ELEV8 Fitness
• Submit your questions to the show!

A calorie deficit takes energy away. Building muscle demands it. Whether you can do both at once depends almost entirely on where you're starting from, and the answer for a beginner is not the answer for someone ten years in.

Exercise order comes next. The case for doing compound lifts first has nothing to do with those lifts being better. It's about energy: what a squat asks of you versus what a leg extension asks, and what happens to your form once the tank is empty. There are limits to that rule, and they're worth knowing before you treat it as gospel.

Then the timeline questions. One listener has a baby on the way and a month with no gym in front of him, and wants to know when "you don't lose it that fast" stops being true. Another is 67. His doctor just told him muscle is the organ of longevity and to start lifting. His adult kids are terrified.

Then the peptide mail. What an FDA advisory vote actually does, and what it doesn't. Why a yes vote is not an approval. Who pays for trials on a molecule nobody can patent, and what happens if the answer is nobody. Plus a listener six weeks into treating his own elbow, asking when "we need more human trials" stops being caution and starts being a gate.

Corrections & Context

We check the big factual claims after every episode. Here's what needs fixing, what needs more context, and what held up. Everything links to a source so you can check us.

What we got wrong

1. You can't currently get these peptides from a compounding pharmacy. On air we described the FDA committee's vote as clearing the way for a doctor to write a prescription and a compounding pharmacy to fill it. That isn't where things stand. The Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee met July 23–24, 2026 and voted, but an advisory committee vote is not an agency action. Nothing has legally changed. Before any of these substances can be compounded, the FDA has to accept the recommendation and add it to the 503A Bulks List through formal notice-and-comment rulemaking, and that process hasn't started. As of this writing, none of the seven peptides reviewed in July can legally be compounded. → FDA's Advisory Committee Votes on Peptides: What It Does and Doesn't Do — Mintz (July 29, 2026) → What the Peptide Vote Actually Changes at My Counter (Hint: Not Much, Yet) — Pharmacy Times

One thing to separate out: plenty of peptides remain legally compoundable and always have. The seven under review are the exception.

2. The FDA did not lose in court. We said the agency "lost in court" and that's why the peptides came back. No such loss happened. The path back ran through the executive branch: the FDA removed twelve peptides from Category 2 in April 2026 after their nominations were withdrawn, then sent them to the advisory committee. Where compounding has actually been fought in court lately — the Outsourcing Facilities Association suits over GLP-1 shortage delisting — the FDA won. Judges denied the compounders' injunctions in both the semaglutide and the tirzepatide cases. → FDA clarifies policies for compounders — U.S. Food and Drug Administration → Court Backs FDA in Tirzepatide Compounding Case — McDermott

3. "Peptides are not drugs" is backwards. "Peptide" describes a chemical: a short chain of amino acids. "Drug" describes a legal category. Something can be both, and most peptide medicines are. Ozempic and Wegovy are FDA-approved drugs whose active ingredient is a peptide. BPC-157 is also a drug under federal law, just an unapproved one, which is why selling it for human use is illegal. Your body making peptides doesn't change that, any more than your body making cortisol makes prednisone a supplement. This is our own basil-and-nightshade point from the peptides episode, and we dropped it. → Wegovy (semaglutide) prescribing information — FDA → Understanding the Legal Risks of BPC-157 and Other Unapproved Peptides — Holt Law

4. "There are no human trials, and there never will be any" is too strong on both halves. Human studies exist. They're small, old, and mostly unpublished in full. Under the development name PL-14736, BPC-157 went through a safety and pharmacokinetics study in healthy volunteers (Gut, 2003) and a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase II study in ulcerative colitis (Gastroenterology, 2005). A Phase I safety trial in 42 volunteers was registered in 2015 (NCT02637284) and cancelled without published results. The most recent human data is a 2025 intravenous safety pilot in two people. Fewer than thirty published human subjects, total. That's a bad number, but it isn't zero, and "no trials" and "almost no data" lead to different conversations.

The "never will be" half is fair as far as it goes. A molecule without strong patent protection has little commercial money behind it. But academic and government-funded trials happen all the time. And there's an irony from the committee itself: some members argued that allowing compounding would open the door to more study, while the counterargument is that selling it commercially removes any reason to ever run the trial. → Is BPC-157 safe for use in humans? — InpharmD evidence summary, with primary citations → Safety of Intravenous Infusion of BPC157 in Humans: A Pilot Study — PubMed

5. The vote was six of seven, not two — and our earlier reporting needs updating too. We've been describing the July meeting as a narrow win for BPC-157 and KPV with the others still pending. The final tally: the committee recommended adding BPC-157, KPV, TB-500, MOTS-c, epitalon, and semax to the 503A list, and voted againstemideltide (DSIP). Two things matter more than the count. The FDA's own scientific reviewers recommended against all seven. And each peptide was judged against one specific medical use — BPC-157 was assessed for ulcerative colitis, not tendons or elbows or recovery. The uses driving all the demand were never on the ballot. → FDA Expert Panel Backs Compounding of Six Peptides — Medscape → FDA briefing documents and meeting materials, July 23–24, 2026 PCAC

6. There is no 300-pound threshold for GLP-1 medications. We talked about eligibility in pounds. The FDA label uses BMI: 30 or greater, or 27 or greater with at least one weight-related condition such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes, or dyslipidemia. Someone hoping to lose twenty-five pounds may well qualify. Someone who weighs three hundred p...

Part one covered the fight. This one covers the food.

Four peptides get walked through one at a time. BPC-157 and TB-500 are the recovery pair — the ones most often discussed together, and the ones most often sold together. The claim is that one improves the conditions for healing by supporting blood flow and collagen production, while the other helps repair cells reach the damage faster. Neither is a painkiller. Neither creates healing. The pitch is that they make the body better at a job it already knows how to do.

Getting there means a detour through inflammation, which turns out to be the wrong villain. Inflammation is the opening move in every repair your body has ever completed. The problem isn't that it happens — it's when it won't leave. Then the conversation shifts to the other end of the shelf: the growth hormone stack, what a secretagogue actually does, and why IGF-1 has a longer-acting cousin that bodybuilders care about.

Running underneath all of it: the reason a peptide can't do anything for someone who sleeps five hours and eats eighty grams of protein a day.

Nothing in this episode is medical advice. Recorded early August 2026, while the FDA's final decision was still pending.

The show

• ELEV8 Fitness: https://elev8fitnesspdx.com
• Submit your questions!

A peptide is a short chain of amino acids. That's the entire definition. Insulin is a peptide. So is the drug in Ozempic. So are BPC-157 and TB-500 — compounds athletes have used for injury recovery for years, and which the FDA moved to a restricted list in September 2023, citing limited human safety data.

In late July, an FDA advisory committee spent two days voting on whether pharmacies should be allowed to make seven of them again. Six passed. Every vote was close. The agency's own scientists had recommended against all seven.

This episode covers what a peptide actually is, and why the word alone tells you nothing about whether something is safe. Why compounding pharmacies sit at the center of a fight involving big pharma, a federal agency, and a health secretary who has called himself a fan. What the research on BPC-157 actually consists of — and why "over a hundred studies" is a more complicated number than it sounds. And the distinction that most of the coverage got wrong: legal to compound is not the same as FDA-approved, and nothing changed at the pharmacy counter the day after that vote.

Also in here: what happens to a supply chain when the legal version disappears, the gas-station-sushi test for anything you're considering injecting, and why one strength coach is booking a conversation with his physician about his own shoulder.

Nothing in this episode is medical advice. The recommendation, start to finish, is the same one: talk to your doctor.

The news, as of this episode

• FDA advisory panel narrowly backs six of seven peptides — Associated Press via PBS NewsHour: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/watch-live-day-2-of-fda-advisory-panel-meeting-to-consider-use-of-peptides
• Panel backs epitalon and semax, rejects emideltide — STAT, July 24, 2026: https://www.statnews.com/2026/07/24/fda-peptide-compounding-panel-backs-epitalon-rejects-emideltide/
• FDA staff and peptide advocates clash at advisory panel — STAT, July 23, 2026: https://www.statnews.com/2026/07/23/fda-advisory-panel-peptide-safety-compounding-pharmacies/
• What the peptides are and what happens next — CNN, July 31, 2026: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/31/health/what-are-peptides-fda-next-steps-wellness
• FDA panel supports broadening access — NPR, July 23, 2026: https://www.npr.org/2026/07/23/nx-s1-5903202/fda-peptides-restrictions
• Vote-by-vote breakdown — American Journal of Managed Care: https://www.ajmc.com/view/fda-panel-backs-6-peptides-for-compounding
• Committee backs two more, rejects one — Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society: https://www.raps.org/resource/fda-advisory-committee-backs-two-more-peptides-rejects-one-for-compounding-list.html

What the vote does and doesn't do

• A pharmacist on what the reclassification actually means — Pharmacy Times: https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/the-peptide-reclassification-everyone-s-talking-about-a-pharmacist-s-take-on-what-rfk-jr-s-announcement-actually-means
• Legal analysis of the committee's votes — Mintz: https://www.mintz.com/insights-center/viewpoints/2146/2026-07-29-fdas-advisory-committee-votes-peptides-what-it-does-and
• FDA's removal of twelve peptides from Category 2, and what it doesn't mean — Orrick: https://www.orrick.com/en/Insights/2026/04/FDA-Announces-Removal-of-12-Peptides-from-Category-2-and-Schedules-PCAC-Meetings

On the conflict-of-interest question

• FDA advisers back looser rules for six peptides — Bloomberg Law: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/health-law-and-business/fda-review-committee-rejects-first-peptide-in-second-day-hearing

Primary source

• FDA: July 23–24, 2026 Meeting of the Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee: https://www.fda.gov/advisory-committees/advisory-committee-calendar/july-23-24-2026-meeting-pharmacy-compounding-advisory-committee-07232026

The show

• ELEV8 Fitness: https://elev8fitnesspdx.com
• Submit your questions!

A two-week break feels like a setback and mostly isn't. What changes first is muscle fullness, not muscle tissue — glycogen and the water bound to it, drained by less training and different eating. The muscle deflates. It doesn't shrink. In trained lifters, strength has held steady across exactly this kind of layoff.

The harder problem is the gym itself. Walk into an unfamiliar facility with a program written for equipment that isn't there, and you'll either wander or quietly overload one muscle group while ignoring its opposite. There's a portable structure that solves both, and it doubles as a survival tactic on a crowded floor — where the rules nobody posts turn out to matter most: how to ask to work in, what a towel on a bench actually reserves, and whether you're allowed to interrupt a stranger to ask what that exercise was.

Coming back is the part people rush. The strength is still there, but the runway matters. And the thing most people actually lose on a trip isn't muscle — it's the routine, which is the harder one to rebuild.

Links & Notes

Train with the crew at ELEV8 Fitness — personal training, group classes, and open gym memberships are all a short drive away.

The gym Pete trained at on the road: Chautauqua Health & Fitness Center at Turner Community Center, a year-round facility on the grounds of Chautauqua Institution.