Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Building a Great Body and Building a Great Life

Episode Date: December 22, 2014

In this podcast, I interview JC Deen from JCDFitness.com, and we talk about... How the quest to build a great body also helps you in the quest to build a great life. Why maintaining perspective and mental balance is crucical to the "inner game" of fitness. How working out helps you feel in control of your life and maintain a positive, causative outlook. Why spending more and more time in the gym and eating less and less food to get lean is a recipe for disaster. What "nutrient partioning" is and why it's important. Why chasing the "end all be all" method of building muscle and getting lean is futile, and what you should actually be looking for. What metabolic speed has to do with your ability to lose fat, and especially to getting really lean. And more... Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

Hey, this is Mike Matthews from MuscleForLife.com and this is the MuscleForLife podcast. Thanks for listening in. Today I have a great guest, JC Dean from JCDFitness.com. I just met him a week or two ago. Really cool dude, doing good work with with mainly with clients, right, JC? You do a lot of coaching? Yeah, mostly coaching. I sell some products. But yeah. Yeah, it's true. Also, yeah, you have a couple ebook type or information type products. And so yeah, I'm gonna start doing more guest appearances on podcasts, just getting

out there and starting to meet some people because I've been like a hermit for the last whatever year that I've been doing this. So thanks for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, sure thing. So let's just get right to it. Why don't you share, just in case the readers aren't familiar with you, share a little bit of your, you know, what do you do? do what's your story what motivated you to get fit yeah so um my

fitness personal fitness story kind of goes back all the way through uh i guess just my entire life i mean i kind of grew up as a chubby kid and going through school i was always really really conscious about it. It was something that bothered me a lot. And I got into athletics at a pretty young age. And I started... What sports did you play? Yeah, so starting out really young, I guess my first sport was like baseball.

And then I got into basketball. Okay. Going through, basically going through middle school, I started to get into football. Then as I went on through junior high school, I mostly focused on football towards the end. I loved the strength and conditioning aspect of it. That was one of the things I loved the most. Growing up through school, it was always chubby, and I hated it. And you kind of look at yourself in a certain way. You're growing up through school, and your appearance is everything,

and it's kind of a scar that it can leave you with. So when I got out of – I turned out to actually be a pretty good athlete in high school, and then I got done with high school. It was time to go to college. At that point, I really had nothing to fill my time. I went from being a completely dedicated athlete to having nothing to do after school. When I got into college, I just immediately got interested in bodybuilding. I started reading all the magazines, all the books.

Yeah, all the brochures. All of that, man. I loved it, and I thought it was awesome. And then the first semester towards Christmas, I made friends with a ton of guys. And at the end of the fall semester, they always did what's called like a best body contest, which was basically like a big reason, like a big challenge. Like how good a shape can we get in the next, like, two months? Like, what can we do to, like, you know, change our fat asses to, you know, being muscular and ripped?

And so what happened was I took that really seriously. And since I had an athletic background, I was like, okay, I can put my mind to this. I can really do this. I read everything I could and then I started just continuing to train four or five times a week. I was up at 7 a.m. doing cardio before class. Then in about two and a half months, three months, I was down 20 pounds, 25 pounds, something like that. The leanest I've ever been. I had full row of abs. I was pretty muscular, as muscular as a 19-year-old kid could be.

And it changed my life. I was like – there was 15 guys in the contest. I won second place. I won like 300 bucks. So that was huge for me. And I was like, wow, this is really cool. This is really fun. And then from then on, I was kind of in my circle in college and my fraternity and stuff i was kind of looked at as being the go-to guy for fitness stuff right and then i

from then on out it was it just became more and more interesting and i kept doing it and kept studying it and then about 2008 i started my blog, and then a couple years later, I started taking it very seriously, and started coaching, and got certified, and that was basically how I got into it. It was a former fat boy, got into fitness, got in shape, and the rest is history. Yeah, that's cool, that's cool. I got into, I mean, I played ice hockey as a teenager. I played some baseball when I was younger, then I got into ice hockey. And then it was similar, once that was done, I was so used to doing stuff with my body. So where do I go from here?

And I guess it was kind of a transition, maybe I was 17 or 18, into weightlifting. Initially, just to impress girls was my initial motivation. girls was my initial motivation. But then, then like you, you know, you get into, you start doing it and then get not only motivated by the results that you see, but also just by how your body feels. And you know, there are other, a lot of other benefits to working out regularly. And it became more of a, just a personal kind of, I don't know if I guess you could say a passion, but more just something that became like, I couldn't – I can't think of not exercising. It's not about like, oh, not lifting weights, eating protein. You know what I mean?

It's more just not using my body, pushing my body, and just all the benefits that come from it. So now it's something that, yeah, it's cool to look good, but there's a lot more that you get from it. Yeah, there's a lot to learn from setting out and doing something and being regimented and having some type of structure. And I think for a lot of guys that I've coached, having fitness in their life, you know, having a training routine with a training three or four times a week and having that structure and building that confidence,

it goes way past just the initial aesthetic, you know, experience or the strength that they gain. Yeah, totally. I mean, I, I kind of constantly preach this, but, uh, there are definite, uh, correlations between what it takes just to, to get in the gym and get strong and, you know, build muscle, get lean, build, build the type of body that you want, and also to achieve success and kind of build the life that you want. Not in an abstract kind of philosophical sense, but a very practical sense. You have to show up every day. You have to put in the work.

It doesn't matter how you feel. You put in your time. You do what you need to do. And just like how a workout doesn't have to feel, you know, it could be, you could, you can have low energy and it can be not a great workout, but you still got something done. And it's like that with anything, you know, you show up to work, you do what you need to do. Some days are better than others, uh, just because you weren't feeling it one day, who

cares? Do the work, you know, you get what you get done. And, uh, over time you kind of build that momentum where you have a lot more good days than bad days, you know? Yeah, absolutely. That's a great way to put it. Yeah. I talk about that and you know, whatever, various articles and stuff, just like some extra motivation beyond, because in my opinion, if you go too far into the, if your motivation is just to look a certain way or just impress a girl or a guy or whatever, uh, or, or just impress girls or guys. Um, I think that they're one that then you can get into the psychological, it becomes unhealthy psychologically, or it can, uh, you know,

where people, they get to the point where you can have, I mean, I've, I've come across it where, and maybe you'll see this a little bit more with people to compete, but where they'll, you know, a person will look great, but they, they're, they hate their body. They feel their fat. They, they, they nitpick everything on their physique. Um, and it becomes a thing where it's never good enough. And there just becomes, it's like an unhealthy amount of just introversion into, uh, nearly building muscle and losing body fat. And I think that that just going after that leads more to a neurosis than, uh, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And, and we've all experienced that to some degree. Like I, you know, I can relate to that a little bit where, uh, back in, in August I was cutting for photo shoots. So, you know, you get really

lean, get to five or 6% and it looks great and it's not really sustainable. I don't, I was cutting for photo shoots. So you get really lean, get to 5% or 6%, and it looks great. And it's not really sustainable. I wouldn't want to stay like that year-round. But then you start. You're like, okay, that's done. I'm going to start eating more food. And there is that initial like, but I don't want to get fatter. Yeah.

So it's like taking that to the extreme. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's definitely a balancing act in figuring, you know, making it all work mentally as well as physically. Yeah, totally. So what were some of the biggest challenges that you've faced so far in achieving your fitness goals? And also, you know, what has helped you kind of overcome them? Yeah, so the first one that I dealt with the most was what I call the former fat boy syndrome. And actually Men's Health interviewed me about this. They found an old article of mine and interviewed me about the former fat boy syndrome is you know growing up and being chubby or being fat and seeing yourself as this former shell and like who you were you kind of no matter

what you do no matter how fit you get you kind of always look in the mirror and it's it's kind of dysmorphic you know you see so it's like similar what i was just talking about exactly yes totally it's that that was the biggest thing that I like was and that's why I resonated with what you were saying. Like I that was my biggest hurdle, you know, like as on a personal level. So what I actually did the way that I got over that the most was, you know, you were saying that it's a constant grind. Like, you know, you do it regardless whether you feel good, you do it, you know, because it's your habit and your routine. regardless whether you feel good you do it you know because it's your habit and your routine so what i actually did is i hired a coach um shortly after i had you know gotten lean uh for the first time because i was still like even though like i saw pictures where i had full you know full row abs you know like my delts like i could see lines in my delts and like all these you know sure signs that i was i was lean um I was still struggling internally with the whole – like I would struggle with like, oh, am I going to eat this much?

Am I going to get fat? Am I going to go back to the exact person I was 40 pounds ago or whatever? So I hired a coach and I was like, look, I need expert guidance. When in reality, what I was doing is I was just dumping off all of the thinking onto him. And what was great about that was all the things that I knew I should have been doing, he told me to do anyway. And because I was paying him and because I put faith in him, like, I did it instead of sabotaging myself and kind of going back. It's kind of like the big thing you were saying, like, you know, if you eat a little bit more, is it going to, like, completely ruin everything that you've done? Which we both know is is totally crazy right but for some people that have been restricting for a long time

yeah they think that that extra hundred calories that extra cookie or whatever is going to absolutely yeah yeah i mean i'll i'll get you know although i guess a lot a lot of people if they've read any of my books or if they've kind of like read articles they're usually because i talk about this a lot that you know it's it is just a numbers game. And when, when you understand that it's not that big of a deal, but yeah, I still get emailed sometimes where, you know, people are worried that because they ate too much over the weekend, you know, they feel, they feel very guilty or whatever. And I understand that, but as you know, the reality is it's like, okay, so what? So you were in a surplus for a couple of days, you know, the worst is it's like, OK, so what? So you were in a surplus for a couple of days.

You know, the worst case scenario is you set yourself back a few days. Big deal. Yeah. Yeah. Even if even that. And it's like, I mean, that's if you overdo it, really. Like if you really work hard at it over the weekend. Yeah.

And that's one of the things I think is so interesting is we're especially in this. Like, I think humans in general are always in a negative frame of mind. Like're always thinking about the bad you know the bad that can happen how bad something feels what we're doing that's detrimental instead of you know maybe reframing it and and looking at it in a positive light um so yeah i mean it's just like i get the same emails and people will say like i actually did a group fat loss group uh on the New Year's to help some of my current customers out with getting kind of started again. And I was like, look, let's just do 14 days. Let's be pretty strict. Let's be pretty hard.

And then we'll ease up and go back into a moderate style deficit. And one of the guys in the group had come off the diet and he was like hey i i really like i really went to town today my you know my it was a kid's party or something like that and he was like i ate a bunch of cookies and cakes and he was like i really think i need to go to the gym and get on the elliptical and try to like undo some of this damage and i said whoa whoa whoa i was like i was like how how well did you do the rest of the two weeks? He was like, I was spot on, lost like six, seven pounds, whatever. I was like, this is not that big of a deal. You don't want to go get in the habit of every time you indulge or any time you go out and you eat something that you think was not in line with what you should have been doing.

been doing, you don't want to get in the habit of going and getting on the elliptical or going and doing an hour-long session of supersets to try to mitigate some of that stuff. Because then you'll find out that because you want that extra food, you'll mitigate it with exercise six times a week. And then it's like, how sustainable is that? And how healthy is that from a psychological view? Yeah. And also, even from a physical view, not that exercising six days a week is bad, but if you're doing, I mean, I'll talk with it. I don't run into this as much usually with people that, uh, are competing, but you know, where they'll have coaches that'll have

them do two hours of cardio a day and weightlifting, you know, it's just, it gets insane. And, and, and you'll find that, uh, at least I run into that, that food issue with them where they're also on a severe calorie deficit. So, you know, they're, they're just miserable and sometimes they, they just give in. It's like they're, you know, they need more food really. Their coaches are not doing a good job at all, but then what they actually should be eating more and exercising less. So, so sometimes they'll start be eating more and exercising less so so sometimes they'll start to do that and then they'll feel really like you know guilty about it or because you know they're working toward this this goal and they've put their faith in

in a bad coach basically but yeah and it's just it's a lot of bad ideas like we we also as as some people that are like really driven we tend to get really one-track minded. So we tend to think that if something doesn't revolve around a certain method or a certain idea or a paradigm, that everything else is irrelevant or wrong. So we'll make decisions based on whether or not it doesn't fit in line with either what we learned or what our coach told us. And I'm not saying to your coach or or whatever but at the end of the day like there's a million ways to to get to this one goal that we all want of a better better body right it's just it's just a matter of you know doing things doing things more properly than others i guess is the best way

to say it yeah yeah and you know like even a. And, you know, like even a lot of the, you know, my, I preach a lot of heavy compound weightlifting, you know, not overdoing it with cardio, sticking mainly to high-intensity cardio so you can just do less of it and get more out of it. You know, flexible dieting, make it a numbers game, not a whole, like, you know, the whole eat clean kind of thing is, I agree that eating nutritious foods is important. Your body needs micronutrients.

But unfortunately, some people, they get, if they don't understand really the physiology of food and what your body does with it, it becomes then this weird rule, this like dogma. You know, eat clean, eat clean. I just got to eat clean. Just got to eat clean. And then I'll get lean. this like dogma, you know, eat clean, eat clean, just gotta eat clean, just gotta eat clean. And then I'll get lean and it's just, you can eat a ton of clean food every day and not be in shape at all or not look like you're in shape at all. Yeah. And so yeah, it's like a lot of this stuff that I'm talking about. Is it the ultimate best, you know, end all way to build a great body?

No, I don't, I don't think that, you know, I'm not saying I have everything figured out and neither are you or anybody else. But what is encouraging for people is that the methods work and that you make gains quickly enough where you're motivated, you get to see your body change every week. And then ultimately, and also it's very easy to fit these kinds of things around, you know, your lifestyle. So then it's like, what else do you want? Great. So now you can, you only have to spend, you know, whatever, three to six hours a week exercising. You get to eat foods you like. You get to go out to restaurants here and there.

You know how to play with your diet. And, you know, so a lot of people, they don't, they won't necessarily fall into like, well, I don't, if it's not in this little paradigm, I won't do it. But it's even for me personally, it's like, when you put all these things together, it works very easily. So why even do anything else? And it gets me exactly where I want to be. You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. And I do people need to find that. And, you know, that that's not always the same for everybody. Yeah, it's not. And it's, it's kind of a, it's one of those things where you've got to keep working and you've got to keep trying out different methods and read different resources

and try out different things long enough to figure out what works for you. Because, yeah, I mean, it's like we said, we can get someone lean and feeling good on three hours of training a week and sometimes it might take six. But it might only take six because that's what they really want to do as opposed to just going to the gym three times a week yeah yeah that's true figure out exactly what makes sense to you and how it can fit into your life and then make that your slave and don't become a slave to your exercise your nutrition program yeah yeah i totally agree so uh what drives you to kind of keep on

putting in the work week after week kind of talking about what we were saying before, where you just make it a schedule and you just do it? What drives you? like the routine. Honestly, I really just love that. I love that it's my time and I get to go in and do it. Of course, I love the results. I love looking good and I love feeling good. I love being mobile. But honestly,

at this point in my life, I would just feel lost if I didn't have that locus of control. That's honestly what keeps me in. It's such a habit that I just, if I go a couple days, unless it's a planned break, but if I go three or four days without hitting the gym, I'm just like, what am I doing with my life, you know?

Yeah, yeah, I know. Like I hate if you get sick or something and you're just forced to sit around and you can't for years. Yeah, and that's the worst too. Usually it happens when you're in a really good groove or you're like starting you're starting something new and it's like you're excited um and then i know that will happen to me it's happened to me a couple times and uh i'll start something new or i'll plan out a new routine and and then the next thing I know I'm like getting a chest cold or I'm getting the flu or yeah or you know when I was in Thailand I got like I got food poisoning a couple times and it's like you know something just put you down and you get food poisoning is the worst because you can't even eat you just sit and waste away for you know until

until you finally get over it depending how bad it is but man all the water you lose makes your abs look really good that's your one stomach flew away from your ideal body yeah it's like me and my my roommate we always we always joke about it he's like like one of either one of us will like get a stomach bug or something and yeah i'll be like man my life is miserable i can't leave the house and my stomach hurts and i'm like well at least your abs are going to look really great. Like we can go, we can go do a photo shoot right now and you'll have those pictures forever. Just get a pump first. Yeah. So what do you think are like some of the biggest benefits of being fit other than, you know, looking a certain way?

I think what it does for, I think the benefits of being fit, obviously, what it does for your mobility, what it does for your ability to just be agile and move and do other things in your life. I know, I know like with clients that I've worked with, especially people that have worked behind a desk for a long time. Yeah. They have very limited mobility after 10 or 15 years of just sitting in that standard position yeah you know that you've probably seen this you know there's research that just uh associates the amount of time that you just spend sitting with just overall mortality like all kinds of disease and as you get older just sitting there doing nothing all day is just terrible for the body. Yeah, just being sedentary in general is way worse, I think, than we can even begin to understand, I think. Yeah, there's research on it.

That's why I even have a little routine where every 20 or 30 minutes or so, I stand up because I'm sitting. I'm in the gym in the morning, and then I just sit in my workday. My average workday is, I don't know, 12 hours, 11 hours, and I'm sitting for all of it. So, um, a few days a week I'll do some cardio at night, but you know, whatever, otherwise I'm just sitting. So I'll do like every 30 minutes or so I'll stand up and stretch and, you know, stretch my lower body, stretch my upper body. Just after reading there, there was like, I don't know, three or four studies on this, specifically sitting.

It's just sitting there motionless is just bad for the body. So my body, I guess it's always kind of felt fine because of my routine. But I think it's a good idea to just not sit in the same position for like four hours at a time. You know what I mean? Yeah, and that's really good. for like four hours at a time you know what i mean yeah and it's that's really good um because it's once you get used to doing that once you get used to sitting for so long it's actually hard to start to train your train your brain you know to get out of that yeah to get out of the habit i know that i'm i i've i've been in that that loop uh many times and so uh something that i do

something similar now like you know i'll be working or whatever and I'll make sure to get up like I used to like I used to set a timer for every like 40 minutes 45 minutes I would get up like or I would just like go outside and walk and get some like fresh air or something right um so I think yeah I think that's really important you know mobility mobility aspect uh above anything else like is just is huge especially for people that have had limited mobility due to sitting. I think that's a huge benefit. Another benefit that I love, too, is the, it's interesting. A lot of times our people, we have a, we all want to control something, right?

And, like, controlling something makes us feel better. The fact that we can feel like we're in control oftentimes gives us a sense of confidence or it gives us a sense of hope. And in reality, like regardless of whether that sense of hope or confidence is like not really built upon much, if you believe it is, it can make the biggest difference in the world. And I think training for some people, putting them in that routine and giving them something to do on a very consistent basis that they're controlling the outcome of and that they are in charge of and just reap massive benefits in terms of how they view their space

and how they view the world and how they carry themselves and how their relationships are. Yeah, yeah. I totally agree with that. I think it reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers. I don't know if you read it. Yeah. I thought it was a decent book. I didn't like that it seemed like he was kind of leaning on this message

of that success just kind of boils down to luck or that great success just kind of boils down to luck or that great success just kind of boils down to luck and and uh a confluence of the right circumstances i don't totally agree with that but i think um it just makes what you were saying makes me think of that because yeah there are you know we look at we look at life and what we're doing and going about things and it can be on our uh in, in our personal lives, things, personal goals we want to achieve, uh, work related or, or even, even, you know, hobby related or body related or relationships or whatever. I think that, yeah, there are things, I mean, there are a lot of things out in the world

that aren't under our control. Things can happen. Things do happen that, you know, we, we didn't anticipate or want. We have to know, we have to deal with them but i think uh like you were saying if you can have them and if you if you have the mentality you have the attitude uh that there are things that you can always do you can there are always things you can be in control and you can affect circumstances in your life and you can affect positively uh you know anything that kind of you come in contact with by your actions. And you can take actions to overcome, you know, whatever kind of bad luck or whatever

type of things come your way that you weren't planning for or hoping for. That just is, it's a huge shift in terms of how you're going to approach life instead of just being a complete victim where you feel like you know victimized by life or you feel that uh everything is just random and that there's nothing or there's there's little you can actually do to determine your your your course in life determine how things come out you know know what I mean? And, and training is a, it's a little microcosmic kind of version of that where, you know, you can go in the gym every week and if you do the right things, your body improves, you get stronger, you look better, you feel better. And that's something that, uh, you know,

it just is a little miniature demonstration that there always are. If you, if you have, if you know what to do, and you're willing to put in the work, you know, you can make progress. Is it necessarily going to be as much as the other guy? Maybe not. But, you know, in terms of training, there can be various different reasons for that. It could be, you know, genetics, it could be drugs, it could be whatever. But in terms of life, you know, I think that it's the same way. Certain people, you know, genetics, it could be drugs, it could be whatever. But, uh, in terms of life, you know, uh, I think that it's the same way. Certain people, you know, we, we tend to compare ourselves with a lot of other people. Um, and that can, that can be unhealthy, but, uh, that in my experience, um, you know, where if you have people that are very insecure and they're always looking to others

and to see what they don't have or, uh, you know, what they wish they had or whatever. If when, when a person's able to start making progress in their own lives, that tends to the volume gets turned down a bit. You know what I mean? They become more secure in themselves. They become happy with, with where things are going. Um, and I definitely think that working out regularly just helps instill that. It's kind of a worldview, I think. You know what I mean? Yeah, it just totally makes you see things in a different way. Have you read the book called The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg?

Yeah. So one thing I like about what he says in there is whenever you're trying to change a habit, like you can, basically you change the behavior, you know, you have the, you have the cue and you have the reward and the behavior is always what you do. That's the habit. One thing I thought was really cool about what he said though, was you can get people to change the routine, but under a lot of stress, we tend to go back. So it's like, that's why an alcoholic that will be in AA and for like 20 years, be sober for 20 years, have something drastic happen.

Yeah. And then he finds himself at the bar that night drinking a sorrows away after 20 years of being sober. Right. And he says the biggest factor that tends to hold people together with long term change is some type of belief and hope in the fact that they can actually change and that they can actually get better or,

you know, make their circumstance different, whatever it is that they're focusing on. Yeah. And that's what I like about what you said. There's, you know, you,

you may have certain circumstances, but having that particular locus of control in your life gives you a certain view. It gives you a certain way of seeing things. That's almost like the belief you're creating. It's a belief that you need regardless of whether it makes sense to anyone else. If it makes sense to you and it works for you, then by all means, do it. Yeah, I totally agree. Let's talk a little bit of training stuff.

So what does your exercise routine look like right now, like in terms of weightlifting, cardio? What are you doing? So, yeah, I'm basically, I love bodybuilding stuff. And I was in Thailand for two months, so I really trained very haphazardly. I wasn't able to stay very structured. So I spent a lot of time just like I would go into the gym and we would focus on like five movements.

You know, I'd do chin-ups, rows, dips, Romanian deadlifts, stuff like that just to stay in shape. But now that I'm back, my preferred method is basically right now I'm kind of doing an upper-lower split. I get quite a bit of volume over four days a week. And then once I start to really adjust to that, I'll probably move to a five-day-a-week split or like a three-day-on, one-day-off, like a push-pull legs type thing. Right. I really like volume.

I really like doing bodybuilding stuff. I don't really do cardio at all. I like volume. I really like doing bodybuilding stuff. I don't really do cardio at all. The only cardio I guess I would do are complexes towards the end of my training sessions or ab type of splits or ab type of supersets. Yeah, like circuits. Leg raises, circuits, that type of stuff.

So that's my preferred method of training. Cool. And you probably focus on just, you know, the bigger compound lifts. Yeah, yeah. It's mostly, you know, I pick something, I guess, to gauge progress and to get better at. So, you know, like it might be a deadlift, might be a squat, might be a hack squat or a leg press or a bench press or whatever it is I'm focusing on. pack squat or a leg press or a bench press or whatever it is I'm focusing on. And the rest of it is all built around just trying to make that mind-muscle connection and try to get that pump and try to get as much of a stimulus as I can within that session.

And then look at my logbook next time and try to just get a little better. Yeah, that's another important point that I talk about, especially because if you're new to weightlifting, you can pretty much do anything, and you're going to be making good gains for your first six months. If you just show up in the gym five days a week, and you can do goofy exercises and do a bunch of reps and whatever, and you're going to make gains.

But once those newbie gains are done, which in my experience, I don't know, I guess it seems to last maybe six to eight months on the long, on the long side is kind of how it seems. Uh, then it's much harder to, to, you're not going to be adding weight to the bar every week. And then it becomes a game of just beating your last week, week's workout by, I mean, for me, it's like, if I, uh, you me, it's like if I, you know, let's say I'm training legs or whatever, if I'm going to do 10 sets in that workout, if my first, let's say, two or three sets,

if I'm able to do one rep more with the same weight as the previous week, I'm happy. You know what I mean? If I can just maintain the same reps and whatever that I did the week before, I'm happy. And that's just beating your previous workout, even by a rep, is a little bit of progress. And that's just the way it is. I mean, as you get more and more conditioned, you're not going to be squatting whatever for four reps, and then the next week add 20 pounds and squat the same and squat that for four reps that's just not how it goes yeah you know what i mean you got to work up

you know you're going to work up to six or seven reps and then you can add maybe that 10 pounds and then you're back to four and you know it's just uh because i've had it's funny i'll have people usually newer like they'll go through that first six months where they're adding weight every week and they're like this is amazing and, and I'll get emailed sometimes like, I'm not making progress anymore. And I always have to be like, well, what do you mean exactly? You're not making progress. And then it'll be like, well, I'm not, I'm not adding weight anymore every week. Like, yeah, but you know, are you, are you moving up in reps? Well, yeah, but you know, I was adding five pounds to the bar every week for the first one. That's the joys of being new to it,

but it becomes a game of inches, just moving forward bit by bit over time. Yeah, and helping people understand that just because you're not adding weight to the bar every week or every training session doesn't necessarily mean you're doing anything wrong or doesn't necessarily mean that you doing anything wrong or doesn't necessarily mean that that you're you're not gonna you're not gonna get there that's that's like the the biggest thing for people like us who have been doing this for a long time like i'm not

near as strong as i used to be because i just don't care to be but when i was pretty strong i mean it was to the point to where i would have to start gauging actual strength gains by the month. And I would have to try to plan it in a manner that I could try to add five pounds to a lift at the end of the month instead of saying, oh, well, I'm just going to aim for every week or whatever. And it wears at you after a while because you just think, oh, I'm not really making progress. But that's when you start to really dig into, okay, well, what are the other ways that I can make progress? Can I, can I shorten my rest periods? Can I, can I add another step? Can I add another rep? Then you have to get really creative. And, uh, yeah, it also depends on what you want to do with your body. You know, once,

once you kind of build that foundation and you have the size that you want, uh, you have to kind of make a decision where you want to go. Do you want to, uh, you know, focus on getting stronger? Do you want to just kind of maintain where you're at? Do you want to, um, work more on the muscle endurance side and be able to do, you know, a bunch of body weight type movements or just do a bunch of, be able to do a lot of reps. And I think that, you know, for a lot of guys, I guess it kind of comes down to, they still kind of want to build that ideal physique, you know, with the right proportions. And that kind of dictates how you're going to be training. But then again, there are, and that kind of dictates how you're going to be training.

But then again, I've talked to quite a few guys that have put in a good 7, 8, 9, 10 years of proper heavy weightlifting. They've built great physiques. And now some of them like to do some CrossFit stuff here and there. Some of them like to just do different types of routines just to challenge themselves because they're not so concerned now with having to build up their back a little bit more or build up this or that a little bit more. Now they're able to have fun maintaining their physiques and, you know, doing something different. Yeah, and that's a good thing too. Fun is a great word to throw in there because it's always fun when you're beginning and you're making constant progress and everything is kind of new to you.

And then when you graduate routines and you're finally on like an intermediate style routine and you can still make progress in various ways. And then when it starts to slow down is when it becomes not so fun anymore. Because you start to view it as like, oh, I'm going to go into the gym. And it's like a big guessing game. It's just like, am I going to get better today? Am I going to go into the gym, and it's like a big guessing game. It's just like, am I going to get better today? Am I going to regress? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's, I think, one of the biggest issues is we think that everything has to kind of revolve

around that whole idea that we have based upon progression. And then what I always tell people, too, after a while is, you know, depending on where you're at in your journey and your training age, strength is not something that is even really that reliable. Strength can be affected in so many ways from your sleep, from your mood, from your emotions, how you dealt with your weekend, what you did at work, what you spent your willpower on. weekend, what you did at work, what you spent your willpower on. I mean, it could be many things.

And you can go into the gym expecting to do a heavy triple, but when you're warming up and your warm-up weight feels heavy. And then learning how to deal with that is another issue in itself and realizing that because you're not strong as you thought you were today doesn't necessarily mean that your training is not working or hasn't worked. Yeah, sure. It's just one of those very – You have bad workouts. It's happened to all of us.

We've all experienced that for sure. For me, what I – I just kind of chalk it. I just don't let it bother me. I just like you say, I know what I'm doing and I know how my body works. I want to see – I'm looking more as you were saying earlier I'm looking more like yeah I would like to see a small improvement each week ideally I would get at least another rep something like that sometimes it happens sometimes it doesn't but more important to me is over the course of play one to three months I want to see

I I would like my my focus on my training um, right now I'm doing a periodized program that, um, I start with some very heavy lifting, like some power lifting type movements. And then the, the middle portion of my workout, the bigger, you know, six sets or so is in the four to six. It's still heavy, you know, 80, 85% of my one rep max. And then I'm finishing with some higher rep movements. But so I'm focusing in the majority of my, of my workout is still kind of, uh, my fribular. Like I'm like I'm wanting I want to see myself getting stronger. But, you know, yeah, if I come in and have a bad workout and, you know, I just am not able to hit my lips. Maybe I was, you know, a little bit like I'll have it sometimes where my shoulder workout is I'm still feeling my shoulders a little bit from my chest.

Well, you know, whatever. That's just the way it is. Try to work through it and, you know, try to do better next week. And I think having a longer term view of what you're looking to achieve helps with that as opposed to like I got to get better this week. I have, you know, more just like I know what I'm here. Yes. I'm here to get better this week. I'm here to try to beat last week, but if I don't, no big deal. I'm 29 years old. I have a lot of years ahead of me to, to beat last week's workout. You know what I mean? Yeah, totally. This is a lifestyle. It's not, it's not like I'm not trying to, you know, I'm not following some weird crash, quick fix. Like I got to hit this by this point so I can, you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And just having that long-term view and long-term approaches is ultimately what's going to make you succeed or not. And that's regardless of, you know, you've been doing this for 10 years or six months. And understanding that it's all about like, hey just you're not just lifting for a while to get a look and then and then yeah just give it up yeah because because it's not realistic yeah so totally and what about the nutrition side like do you do follow any particular type of dietary protocol or like are you in intermittent fasting or traditional type of dieting or yeah so i'm like hardcore paleo as you can get like if i can't hunt it down and kill it i'm not eating it uh okay

no no no like i'm just really not i'm just joking i don't really care about uh fads or paleo intermittent fasting or no i was totally kidding yeah i don't think when we were talking about i don't know if we ever really talked about it. So I was like, oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, like a totally flip switch over a week. No, basically I'm a very middle-of-the-road type of guy. I think that whole foods should comprise 90% or 95% of your diet. I'm not opposed to having some junk in your diet.

I'm not opposed to eating what you want. I think that all those things are really important. But I think at the end of the day, the most important thing is to follow something that fits what is good for you. And, I mean, of course, I have a general baseline. I think getting enough protein, which is about a gram per pound of body weight, and not doing low-carb and not doing low-fat, trying to about a gram per pound of body weight, and not doing low carb or not doing low fat, trying to find a balance there. I prefer a more higher carb diet.

Yeah, me too. Just because I feel better, I look better. Your training is way better. My training is better. I'm in a better mood. Depending on how sedentary I am, just with sitting most of the day, if I don't have at least 150 grams to 200 grams of carbs as a baseline, I'm just not going to perform my best when it does come time to train. On the training days, depending on how much, I'm going to have more carbs than that.

Even for clients, I try to steer them away from the idea that you got to go really low-carb in order to lose fat. I mean that's – sure, you can lose fat by going low-carb or low-fat. But it's all more and more out of just like you said, playing a numbers game and keeping everything in check and making sure you maintain a deficit or have a timeframe that you're focusing on. And using exercise to drive that as well as opposed to, I mean, you've probably seen research that just shows that even the metabolic adaptation that occurs when you diet is less when you are using a smaller deficit, but really using exercise to drive that calorie burn. There's a difference in the body between, if you're, let's say you're just in a 500 calorie deficit with no exercise that just straight restricting calories, that is not that it's unhealthy, but it is not as optimal as let's

say you were in a, uh, I don't know, a 250 calorie deficit from your diet. And then a 250 calorie deficit on top of that, you know, burning through exercise, there's just a difference in the body. And, um, you know, when I died, I actually usually set myself at about, you know, it come for me, it's about 20% deficit just from diet alone. And then the exercise on top of that. But, uh, I think that, you know, using exercise to drive fat loss is also a big part of it and not trying to, like, I would much rather prefer when I'm, especially if I'm, if I'm needing to get really lean, moving more as opposed to cutting my calories more. You know what I mean?

Yeah, totally. And of course, you only can do that so much. You can't get to that point where you're doing two hours of cardio a day. But I try to get up to lifting five days a week and doing probably about 30 minutes of HIIT cardio four to five times a week would be the most I would do. But I prefer to push toward that as opposed to just dropping my calories more and more. I totally agree with that. Another thing I think is important to mention too is training in itself. I think it's much more important than people who especially are really big on nutrition.

I think they'll downplay it a lot. They'll say, well, nutrition is 80% or 90% of your results, which I agree to an extent that it's really important, but I don't think we should place a number on it like that. I think that having your training set up in a manner to

create what you want as an outcome. Somebody that I read all the time, his name is Amir Siddiqui and he's got a lot of great ideas and some of my really good friends have worked with him. Something he says and I really ascribe to this belief is, your training is what dictates where your food goes. Your training program creates a pathway for your macronutrients and what your body does

with them. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. If you're not doing any exercise at all and you're dieting, what is telling your body to keep the lean body mass and burn off the body fat? Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Or what's telling your body to store this and not that?

But when you train really hard you're creating a demand a metabolic demand you know your muscles need the the micronutrients they also they need the amino acids uh your your body is burning uh the carbohydrates so yeah and it's also storing them in the muscles and you can you can have like glycogen super compensation where all of those things it'll it'll it'll'll store even more, which then that's less carbs to go to fat storage. And, yeah, nutrient partitioning, I guess, would be, like, the general kind of bodybuilding term for it. Yeah, that's the word. And it's just – that's one thing I think is really important. I tend to not skimp on the calories as much, especially in the beginning,

because if you can get away with exercising a little more and eating more, and it's in line with your schedule and it's not a burden to you, then it's like, I would rather do that. And then that gives you something later to maintain with, as opposed to saying, okay, we've got 10 weeks to get really lean. Let's drop you down to 1,600 calories and see where you end up. Yeah. Because then what?

I just saw a video. I couldn't actually make it through the whole thing, but it was a Q&A video with Jeff Seid. And he was saying that for cutting, he recommends 1,000 calories below BMR. Oh, my God. And, I mean, I don't think he's not the brightest dude. So he probably meant below TDE, like total daily energy expenditure. But even that, like that's, that's one too much. And then you can't, you can't just do a one size fits all. What does that mean for the girl that who's TDD or TDE is, uh, 1800 calories a day. Like, what does that mean for

her? She's supposed to eat, uh, you know, 800 calories a day. What does that mean for her? She's supposed to eat 800 calories a day. And then if she took his advice literally, if she goes, okay, well, standard catch, my BMR is 1,300 calories a day, 1,400 calories a day. She's a small girl, right? So I should be eating 300 or 400 calories a day. All right, let's do this. Just like I said.

So yeah, there's a lot of bad diet advice out there. And that also comes at the expense of trying to lump everyone into one category and saying this is what everyone should do. Yeah. A big part of it is, you know, I talk about this in an article on my website on speeding up the metabolism to make weight loss easier. And just that point of, you want your ideally, when you come into, it's time to time to lose fat, you want your metabolism to be as high as you want it to be. And really, actually, it's like, it's like metabolic inefficiency, we want our metabolisms to be because an efficient metabolism would be a metabolism that can keep us alive on very little energy. So in a sense, we want our metabolisms to be very inefficient,

we want it, you know, to be able to feed our bodies a bunch of energy and we want our bodies to, uh, you know, use up that energy to keep us alive. And that's the metabolism is without storing fat. So if you, if the faster your metabolism is, the more food you can eat, the better position you're in, uh, for fat loss. And it's, it's actually a hundred percent necessary. If you want to get really lean, like if you're a guy and you want to get really lean like if you're a guy and you want to get you know uh down to the six to eight percent or six to seven percent range or if you're a girl you want to be you know down in the 14 15 range you have to make sure that you're you can't be starting that process uh you know with a metabolism that's running at

60 capacity well sure you're going to burn it out and you're going to end up, you know, with metabolic damage where you're only able to eat some piddly amount of food every day and you maintain, you know, you won't even reach your goal. You'll just end up being stuck at too high of a body fat percentage eating nothing. You know what I mean? Exactly. And, you know, there are some people that actually believe that a really robust metabolism like you were saying uh or being inefficient uh to say it the way you did is

actually kind of they think the key to remaining young and remaining healthy um because yeah the longevity like like permanently restricting calories that whole thing well no no no so like i'm thinking of the opposite of the spectrum spectrum. So you have the camp that believes that calorie restriction and fasting is like the holy grail to living longer, which it might make you live a little bit longer, but what is it doing to your overall well-being, your overall health? But then some people believe that we should try in a way to keep our metabolisms really healthy and burning at a really high rate yeah to mimic uh other life forms or younger people that have really high metabolisms and that are full of energy and vitality and try to maintain that for

a long time uh i can actually i can send you some stuff on it later, but it's a neat concept because if you think about it like kids, for instance, of course it's their age, but they haven't been exposed to a lot of stress. They haven't been exposed to a lot of the food that we've eaten for so long. So their metabolisms are naturally robust and naturally high. Their body temperatures are naturally high. They they move the best they feel the best they have the most energy and then over time muscle muscle mass comes into that as well exactly research has shown you start losing muscle in your early 20s actually if you don't do anything and then you just waste

away over the years and that that lowers you know b BMR as well. So in the body when you're younger and your body's building that muscle, I mean, that's, there's a, like you say, there's a vitality that comes with that. Yeah, and there's some people that really believe that maintaining a youth-like metabolism is essentially the key to long-term health and vitality. So I could see that for sure. I read about that stuff quite a bit. So I'm interested because that would require exercise as well. I mean, you couldn't just do that eating a bunch of food, really.

I mean, no, no, it totally does. And that kind of points back to the research that you and I were talking about earlier that that movement in most most any form is good for you. Yeah. If we're showing that being sedentary is taking years off of our lifespan, then obviously movement is good. Yeah, what's the obvious corollary is that the body, it's just, you know, it's meant to be moved around. And that, of course, just makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. This is not really, we weren't really meant to sit in a chair and stare at a computer screen all day.

That's right. Unless it's really cold outside and we have hot chocolate then it's then it's okay then uh genetically we're building that in yes um yeah cool so before we uh before we wrap up here i try to you know keep them somewhere around an hour i could go on forever i'm sure you could too but um why don't you why don't you just tell me quickly just tell that you know the readers and the listeners quickly like what are you working on these days kind of what you have planned for this year? And also, where can people find you if they want to learn more about what you do? Sure. So the best place to find me is just jcdfitness.com. That's my homepage. That's where my blog and all my articles are. You can find pretty much anything about me there

that you need to. I'm currently working on a series, and the time of release is unknown, but I'm kind of working on a series of habit-based fitness products. So I've actually got a product out right now called LGN365, and that's kind of like an all-encompassing. That's like your flagship product. That's like a resource. Like if you need to know about fat loss or muscle gain and you need an education and you're lost by that, but I'm also working on some things that are very habit-based. Uh, I've become really,

really interested in, uh, habit-based literature and the psychology and how we actually create things and do things and, um, trying to create some things that will help people in the long term with that. That's cool. Yeah, and then, you know. What are, anything you want to share on that? I'm just curious. Yeah, so specifically, one thing that I've paid attention to just within my clients, right?

Like working with clients. We're all really good at kind of following like a plan that someone gives us, right? Like all really good at that and i think we all need that to an extent i think we kind of need an outside factor whether it be a book whether it be a form link where we got a program from or something absolutely i mean it's like that learning anything it's it's great to have someone that's already done it and that that can just get you going in the right direction say you know you don't have to pay attention to all this other stuff just do this for this period of time and you're going to get results and you know that's always nice to have yeah exactly like i think that's a huge component and you know i won't ever overlook that but something that i'm really interested in is is helping people that have

already kind of gotten past that initial phase of seeing the results and getting getting to a point to where they want to be. Also helping them realize that to get any further, it's really kind of in their own hands because they need to start making things work for themselves and kind of figuring out the best things that they need to do. And what does that boil down to? It boils down to figuring out the steps and the habits that you need to build and that you need to take. Because can coach you for so long but you know your life better than I do and you know the things deep down that you need to work on and that you need to change. And so I'm basically trying to come up with some practical ways and come up with some

ideas that I can – and then I've been instilling within my clients and I've been helping my clients with them trying to come up with a way to help people see it from a kind of top-down perspective and say, okay, I've gotten this far and now I need to take it up another level. Here are the three main things in my life that I need to do on a consistent basis to make this work. Then they can recruit any outside factors that they need, whether they need a coach to oversee their diet or whether they need somebody to, you know, check in with or whatever. But at the core, they don't really need to, you know, read every latest fitness book or, you know, pop a DVD if they need to get in shape. It's more of like, hey, I've got the tools, I've got the resources, now I just need to

do it. Yeah, totally. That's awesome. So. Yeah, cool. Keep me posted on that one. Cool. Once you have them released. For sure. Okay, totally. That's awesome. So. Yeah, cool. Keep me posted on that one. Cool. Once you have them released.

For sure. Okay, awesome. Well, is there anything else you'd like to share? No, that's pretty good. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, sure thing. It was great. Awesome. Well, again, this is Mike Matthews, MuscleForLife.com, with JC from JC Dean Fitness. And thanks for listening. You can subscribe if you're on iTunes or if you're watching this on YouTube.

You know, subscribe to the channel. More stuff coming. So thanks for taking the time to be here with us. See you next time.