Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - How Steve Pulled Off a Perfect “Recomp” on my Bigger Leaner Stronger Program

Episode Date: December 24, 2018

In this episode I interview Steve, who’s a 37 year old father of two young kids who read my book Bigger Leaner Stronger and used the program to completely transform his physique. We talk about how he found his way to me and my work, including what he had tried previously, how things changed after he started implementing the advice in my books, articles, and podcasts. As with everything, nothing ever goes exactly as planned, and learning to adjust and adapt to conditions is an important part of the fitness game, which is something Steve experienced firsthand. He ran into a number of roadblocks along the way that most of us can relate to, including issues with workout and meal scheduling, hunger and cravings, dietary temptations, and more, and in our chat, Steve shares what has helped him navigate these barriers skillfully and prevent them from getting in his way. So, if you like hearing motivational stories about how people have changed their bodies and lives, and if you want to pick up a few tips that may help you along in your personal journey, then this episode is for you. You can learn more about Steve and his work here: Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/adapnation/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/adapnation/ Website - https://AdapNation.io 5:00 - Where were your numbers before you started Bigger Leaner Stronger? 7:13 - What are your current numbers? 16:35 - How did you find me and my work? 20:16 - How was your experience with Bigger Leaner Stronger? 30:10 - How did the Stacked app help? 36:12 - How did this help you choose a new career path? 39:36 - What else has made a big difference for you? 39:53 - How did you change your habits from not reading at all to reading regularly? 52:53 - What were your before and after results? 1:05:52 - Where can people find you and your work? 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/

I can't say enough for the impact people like you can have, Mike, on just that cascading effect of getting people moving, respecting their body, starting to create the body that they enjoy and want. It's this kind of rolling thing that you just kind of want to improve upon. improve upon. Hey, I am Michael Matthews from Muscle for Life and Legion Athletics, and this is my podcast, the Muscle for Life podcast. In this episode, I interview Steve, who is a 37-year-old father of two young children who read my book, Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, and then used the program in the book to completely transform his physique. And as usual in these types of episodes, we have a free-flowing kind of just open-ended discussion about how Steve found his way to me and my work, including what he was doing previously and how it was going and how things started to change after he began to implement

the advice in my books, articles, podcasts. Now, as with everything, nothing ever goes exactly as planned. And learning how to adjust and adapt to conditions to make them work for you and your goals is definitely a big part of the fitness game. And that of course is something that Steve experienced firsthand. He ran into a number of obstacles that most of us can relate to, including issues with workout and meal scheduling, partially because he was very busy working many, many hours. He also ran into hunger and cravings and dietary temptations and more. And in our chat, Steve shares what has helped him successfully navigate that minefield and ultimately achieve his goals. So if you like hearing motivational stories about how other people have changed their bodies and lives, and if you also like picking up a few tips here and there that can

help you along in your own journey, this episode is for you. This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm just going to quickly tell you about something of mine. Specifically, my 100% natural pre-workout fat burner supplement, Forge. Now, it was designed to be used specifically when exercising in a fasted state, and it helps you maximize fat burning while training on an empty stomach, minimize the amount of muscle that you lose while training in this state, and maintain intensity and focus in your workouts. All that is why Forge has over 400 reviews on Amazon with a four-star

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that I have a very simple 100% money back guarantee that works like this. You either love my stuff or you get your money back, period. You don't have to return the products. You don't have to fill out forms. You don't have to jump through any other hoops or go through any other shenanigans. So you really can't lose here. Head over to www.legionathletics.com now, place your order, and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet. And if for whatever reason, they're just not for you, contact us and we will give you a full refund on the spot. All righty, that is enough shameless plugging for now at least. Let's get to the show.

Hey Steve, welcome uh my little podcast hey mike thank you for having us absolutely of course this is one of these kind of just free-flowing open-ended conversations about where you were with your fitness and kind of your health or your well-being before you found me in my work and how you came to find me in my work and what has worked for you and where you are now and where you're going and so forth. So I kind of always, I kind of change this every time in terms of where to start, but I think it makes sense to quickly just talk about, I guess, maybe in hard numbers, where you were in terms of your fitness before and how long ago that was and where you are now. So people can get a sense of your own,

at least physical transformation. If you want to include a little bit of like, what was life like back then versus now? And then we can kind of go back to the beginning and hear how you got to where you are now. Yeah. So I'm 37 years old. I'm a father of two beautiful children and I live in the UK, if you can't already tell. And fitness for me has been something that I've always been interested in, something I've always tried to excel at. I remember getting my first set of weights and getting out the back of my mom's shop with some training gear when I was probably about 12, 13. I just, I was interested in building my body, had no idea, didn't really achieve anything. Long story short, my weight, my shape undulated

within like a normal range in my twenties and into my early thirties. And I found I excelled in my line of work, which is salesmen within tech startups. And leaning in on that business and, you know, excelling in my career meant that the pendulum swung very heavily towards doing that and doing that really, really well. And without realizing, assuming I was invincible, my body would always stay the way it is over the course of a couple of years of insane travel, hardly any sleep, just going all out, working probably 18 hour days, the body just started changing. And yeah, I got to a point where I was probably about 210 pounds, Mike, and I'm 5'11", and I didn't really have a lot of muscle in my frame. And it just was a bit flabby and wobbly and wasn't looking too great. And I started accepting that, hey, this is midlife, isn't it?

This is what happens. It's normal. Maybe I just have to accept this is the journey my body's going to go down. And I started just kind of letting go. And it wasn't a great place to be, somewhat emasculated, not very confident. My clothes didn't look as good as I assumed they did. And that's kind of the before, but busy career, busy family life, nailing it in many areas of my life, but my health and my fitness just took second priority. Okay. And then let's fast forward to today. What are things like today? So today I'm almost the same weight. So it was 205 to 210 now. I'm hovering about 200 pounds, give or take five pounds,

but I'm about eight to eight and a half percent body fat. I've added, by the looks of things, at least 20 pounds of lean mass. My body shape is pretty muscular, broad shoulders, developed chest, good abs. Still lots of way to go. But I'd say I'm pretty proud of how I look for a 37 year old. And it's, it's only the start. And much of that transformation, as I hope we'll talk about came from a lot of inspiration from

the work you've done. Yeah, I mean, obviously, people listening can't see your pictures, but it's pretty dramatic. Like you said, you kind of went from like a dad bod to jacked basically. And it's funny though, the weight hasn't really changed because of how many people are focused so much on weight. And I understand that's kind of, that's what's pushed in the mainstream, obviously. So if people were to just hear the summary of that without understanding what that really looks like in terms of body composition, which is of course, where people like me are trying to push the conversation. Let's get past weight and really start looking at the quality of the weight because that's the detail that

makes all the difference. If I'm honest, Mike, it was almost exclusively about the weight when I started the journey of enough's Enough. And it was probably, it was, I know when it was, it was coming out of Christmas. And in England, we don't do Thanksgiving, but we do Christmas in a big way. So we take a week out, you know, we eat loads of food. It's pretty intense for a week or so, Lots of food, lots of drink, lots of just sitting still and gorging. And it just clicked. It clicked that this isn't right. I'd taken a bit of time away from work enough to see what I'd let myself become. So I actually entered a fat loss competition. I started a fat loss competition in the office at the beginning of 2016. And it was

two, three months. And it was a bit of a bro thing, quite a lot of bravado, let's just compete, see who can lose the most and we'll exchange monies at the end of it. So I lost about 25 pounds and it was exclusively abstaining from food and just working out in the gym, but doing some random stuff. And I did lose the weight. So, you know, the obsession about weight is a real one, I think for all of us and seeing the weight come off is a really strong motivation to see how far you can take your body. Would I have gone all in on, you know, strength training and trying to develop muscle, knowing that I have to be in a calorie surplus when I had 20, 25 pounds of extra fat on my frame, probably not. So that was kind

of where I was then. But now, you know, weight for me is just a number. Weight for me is actually an incredible metric. If I trend it every single day, I can see where my body's going. I've now got to point through your education on calories are king, keep protein high, track and calorie count where you need to. I now know if I eat a certain amount, I'm going to put on or take off muscle and fat during the course of time. And that's liberating because now there's no emotion. If I put on three pounds in one day because something's gone funky with my sodium levels, potassium levels, what have you, it's fine. That is an incredible place to be. And it was not the place I was for many years. Yeah. Yeah. Or if it's just take the holidays,

for example, if you know that there are going to be three to five days of a lot of eating and you can just enjoy it knowing that what's the worst that can happen in three to five days, it's for me at least, it's usually so at Thanksgiving, I'll eat a fair amount of food. It depends, I guess, the mood that I'm in sometimes and how good the food is. If it's really good, I'll go all out. If not, I'll kind of just whatever. I'll just eat a bit more than usual through the Christmas period. But then it's never, at least as many years as I can remember, it has never required more than two weeks of just a normal deficit come January, just to get back to where I was. And like you said, it takes the emotion out of it where you don't have to be

thinking about what you're eating or you don't have to feel bad about it. You really can just enjoy it knowing that the quote unquote cost is simply a couple of weeks of eating a bit less food than you're used to. It's not even, which, you know, the first couple of weeks of a cut, I don't know if that's at least how it is for me i almost don't even notice it at all like i only really start to notice some of the effects the inevitable effects of being in a calorie deficit after about four to six weeks i'll notice that my body just is feeling a little bit less energetic than usual and it could use a bit more food but for the first couple weeks i almost feel nothing. So the sacrifice is really nothing. It's completely negligible. And I would actually say holidays have taken on a new meaning. Now I've got myself in shape.

Not to the point that me and my wife obsess about our body and won't let ourselves go. Far from it. We've had two really big holidays this year and we've dealt with them fundamentally differently the first was a month-long holiday traipsing around Australia and we were going to be doing home catering for a lot of the time and eating in restaurants most nights and you think a month of eating like that I'm going to come back like you know sides of a house but we decided up front training is part of our life. So we're going to have to fit training in. Not six days a week, but we have to fit it in in a deliberate way and find gyms that we can keep going in some capacity. The second was, hey, if we eat out breakfast, lunch, and dinner,

I'm not going to feel good. I'm not going to look good. I'm going to get bloated. I'm just not going to be enjoying what I'm doing to my body. So perhaps we skip one of those meals and then, hey, do we have to eat out every time? How about if we cook some of our own food and then we know what we're putting in our body, not just going full tilt on the sugar and the fat that comes with all restaurant meals. And then you layer on top of that, just increase your movement, get out and see the city, enjoy yourself, focus on moving around and not just sitting on your ass, which I think most holidays are right after a few days by the beach. And it's incredible. But that holiday to Australia, Mike, as well as the most recent one, we just come back from Orlando to Disney World with the girls. The last one, when all is said and done after like two days after coming off the plane,

the last one, when all is said and done after like two days after coming off the plane, I'd put on like half a pound in 10 days of being in Orlando with everything supersized and lots of great food and lots of sugar and fat and yeah, half a pound just because we stepped a lot. We missed a meal and we tried to make better choices because we didn't want to feel crap. Do you know what I mean? But we didn't abst to feel crap do you know i mean but we didn't abstain from anything we enjoyed it we had experiences every single day yeah yeah that's a very common experience but i've um it's very much the same for me those are good tips whenever i'm traveling if i'm going to be eating a bit randomly i do the same thing i'll eat two i may bring some protein powder or get some wherever i'm at just because it makes it easy to kind of

keep your protein up it's usually breakfast that i'm skipping unless I'm in Europe and like in Germany, they have good bread. So I like some bread rolls for breakfast, but I'm usually skipping breakfast, eating a smallish lunch and just saving calories for dinner. I train three to five days a week. And usually that is just finding a gym of any kind. It doesn't matter. They're not necessarily my normal workouts, but just keeping that routine in and doing a lot of walking. And I've found that if I follow those simple rules, maybe I'm not as much of a foodie as some people, but I do enjoy food. And if I'm going to go to a restaurant, I'm going to probably eat an appetizer, maybe two, an entree and some dessert. And so I do that for seven, 10, even 14 days and really not see much of a difference.

Maybe it's a- Mind skills do go up though, Mike, but now you've kind of educated me to understand why they go up. I'm at peace with that. You know, if I weighed myself whilst I was on holiday, I'd probably get depressed. All the extra carbs that I wouldn't normally have, all the extra sweet, high sugar stuff, having a bit too many calories and feeling bloated, the travel with the water retention and all of that stuff. The day we got back from holiday from Orlando, I was like three pounds, four pounds over when I'd first started four days, 10 days before. But within two days of

normalizing things going back to normal without going on a diet, just getting back into my normal routine and dropping the water retention and dropping the bloat. Cause you know, we were just eating a lot of volume, things went back to normal. And that was so eyeopening because my previous reaction would have been upon four pounds. And then you kind of feel, well, I may as well just fall off the wagon now because God, it's going to take forever to lose four pounds of fat. Yeah, absolutely. Going back to the beginning, how did you find me and my stuff? So I got on this fat loss challenge and I'd lost a bunch of weight, but people started saying to me, even though I was training hard, or at least in my random hard way, people were saying I was

looking a little flat and they said I had no butt. And I was saying, to be honest, Steve, you're kind of on the edge of too skinny. You can see in your face, you're looking a bit gaunt, you're looking a bit empty. And I was like, yeah, but I'm, I'm slim. So it's fine. Um, but it did etch away at me just slightly. I then went on a holiday to Dubai and on the plane, I was scrambling around on 3g to try and find something I could download. And somehow your book came up. So I'm like, okay, let's download that. And I started reading it on the plane. And what just kind of, uh, just really, really just centered me was there was no bullshit. You were cutting through a lot of the terminology that perhaps was overly complex in industry today. And it just all made logical sense. And I'm quite a logical guy. And I devoured that book whilst on holiday, you know, within a few days by the beach, I wasn't doing anything,

but I was reading your book. At least I was learning. I was writing copious notes. I was starting to reframe what my training would look like when I got back. That was the start. I got back from the holiday and I just reprogrammed everything for myself, centered around compound lifting, centered around the kind of strength rep range and started to take seriously the idea that, you know, these compound lifts were important. And today, fast forward two years, I can't fathom two, three weeks going by without deadlifting or squatting. Whereas before it was all isolation work. Yeah. That sounds familiar. I think I had been lifting weights for seven years before I first deadlifted, which is amusing, but it was, I mean, I was following just like bodybuilding magazine workouts. And at the time you simply, I mean, that, that just wasn't, I don't even know

if I had heard of it. Maybe I'd heard of the exercise, but I didn't know how to do one. That's for sure. It was just a row. It looked like a row, to be honest, before I knew what a deadlift was. So like a standing up row. So it just, and you put just a little bit of weight on it and it was like, yeah, it's just like just lifting a weight off the floor. What's the point? There's quite a lot of point when you do it right. Yeah. Yeah. And okay. So you read the book and then I assume you're like, all right, I'm going to give this a go. And how did it go from there? Like, I'm curious also, what I like to kind of ask each person that I bring on for these types of interviews is, um, in bigger than you're stronger, thinner than you're stronger in my books for men and women,

I try to give my best kind of one size fitsby-numbers approach and give them also an understanding of the basic principles. But ultimately, because people's lives are different and people's bodies are different and respond differently to different things, and some people have restrictions due to past injuries or whatever, or sometimes it's just equipment availability, things don't always go exactly as planned. And that's also one of the reasons why I've written so many articles in addition to the books and recorded a bunch of podcasts and to try to address all of those kind of peripheral things. In some cases, it's other ways to go about it. Because as I talk about and write about a lot, most of the factors

that go into getting fit are negotiable. There are different ways to get to the end result. Some stuff is non-negotiable. You know, the importance of progressive overload, non-negotiable. You got to understand a bit about volume, non-negotiable, energy balance, non-negotiable and so forth. But there's a lot more that really can be tailored. So I'm curious, how was your experience with the program, with everything laid out in the book? Over time, what have you changed and why? Honestly, I didn't follow your prescribed

workout plans. That wasn't for any other reason other than the fact I'd built my own gym a few years before. It sounds like as if I'm a proper pro, I'm not. I just had a space in my garden and I thought I'd build like a garden room. And in there we put some gear, but we've done it quite nicely, but it went unused for years. So I was restricted by the equipment I had. And it's mostly free weights with a pulling machine as well. So restriction one was it had to fit and work within the machines I had. And secondly, I had a bias towards certain things I liked. So I wanted to follow the principles but have the flexibility to kind of program with my interests in mind.

So I took your kind of template as a guide of like, you know, really centering in on the compound lift being the primary focus of your workout. the compound lift being the primary focus of your workout, and then perhaps doing some DUP to get some hypertrophy action in with some isolation work thereafter and massively simplify my workouts. Stop going from this idea that I'm hitting chest 20 different ways doing a thousand reps, but let's get smarter about this. How can I elicit maximum muscle growth whilst eliciting maximal calorie burn and do it in a way which means I can work out the next day? So yeah, I took your principles of kind of how to build a program. I took your principles of calories. And even though I understood calories, I'm not an idiot. Most people do get it, but I hadn't really thought

about losing weight or gaining weight in a controlled manner. My way of losing weight was eat as little as I can and I'll lose weight and it worked, but I was miserable as hell. Now I've realized I can just eat a little bit less, say 20% less than what my body needs. And I'm losing weight at a rate, which feels great. So that was liberating knowing that I can control those parameters in a way, which doesn't feel like as if I'm missing out. The third thing was protein, uh, or I knew I had to have protein. And my answer to that was protein shakes, but I didn't know how much I needed to have. And if I have more than that, is it just a waste of money? So knowing how to kind of thread that needle was useful because then I was a bit more

deliberate on the kind of foods we would have to hit those numbers. And I saw it as a target versus as aspirational, and that really helped. And then I don't recall if you touched on sleep in a big way in your book, because it has been a Mike but as I read that book and then I read some stuff in and around the industry around sleep and more importantly recovery the penny dropped I hadn't realized that your kind of muscle building potential isn't really happening in the gym but it's happening after the gym both in what you eat and how well you recover and recover as a function of proper downtime and proper sleep. So then the game changed. I got, you know, the sleep tracking apps. I got the new mattress. I got the duvet, got the air conditioning, got magnesium spray

and kind of went full tilt, but wanted to fix what was basically a chronic disrespect of sleep. I was probably getting four to five hours a day and I was just tired all the time. As soon as I started sleeping well, I was lifting more. I was progressively overloading. My body was responding. The size had started to come and I just felt more alive. So they're probably the fundamentals from your book, Mike. Calories, the protein, progressive overload, compound lifting, being a functional, sorry, foundational part of each workout, having that full body element, and then respecting strength. Now really focusing on getting strong.

And it's changed everything. It's changed everything about my relationship with the gym, my energy, my vitality, my excitement for life. And I've got more conviction and confidence because I'm strong, I'm functional, I'm moving well, I'm feeling good, my body's in good shape. I can control my weight and how I look to some finite degree. And that's awesome. Yeah, that point on sleep really is something that in the third edition, I talk a little bit about the importance of sleep in the second, but I give it a bit more, I mean, I don't belabor it, but I give it a bit more attention in the upcoming third editions of both Bigger, Leaner, Stronger and Thinner, Leaner, Stronger because, I mean, there's the science of, and we know scientifically how important

getting enough sleep is, but I think it's also, it was worth giving a little bit more words to, even though the book's already fairly long. But I think I've done a good job pulling out some stuff that's good information, but probably doesn't need to be there and replacing it with stuff like a bit more on sleep and a few other things to more directly address questions and suggestions that I've gotten over the years from readers, which I've kept a running list of a spreadsheet for each of the books. Whenever people bring up points that make sense to me, I put them into a spreadsheet for the next update along with my own ideas and sleep was one of them because I've also experienced it myself. I guess I could say I'm grateful for, I had a good run in, so I'm 34 grateful for I had a good run in so I'm 34 now I had a good run in my late 20s into my early 30s where I was sleeping perfectly I now have two kids that doesn't automatically mean bad sleep forever but you're not going to sleep as well for the first bit it's just the way it is and I have experienced firsthand what you read about in the literature or

maybe you hear other people's stories. And so I had a good run there where I was sleeping perfectly and I was eating perfectly and I was able to make a lot of progress in my training to really build a good foundation of muscle and strength. And then over the last couple of years, my sleep has been on and off. It's been more bad than good. However, in the last, I'd say four to five months, it has finally kind of gotten back to good again. However, in the last, I'd say four to five months, it has finally kind of gotten back to good again. So I went through that experience myself. And I was actually surprised, because that was the first time that I had trouble sleeping, just how much it impacts your training. Just for everybody listening. I mean, if, if you're going through if you are not sleeping well right now, and you're finding it very hard, if not impossible to progress in the gym, that's probably why. If your diet is right, if you're kind of like, why can I not? Yeah,

so what? I'm not sleeping that much. Is it really that big of a deal? Yes, it really is. Even if you do a good job coping with it without a bunch of stimulants in your daily life and you just kind of go, go, go, I guess I'm kind of that way. But in my training, I was actually surprised how much it just, that was it. That was where the progress stopped. Once I was consistently not getting enough sleep, and now that I am getting enough sleep again, all of a sudden I'm progressing again. And it feels, you know, you go in the gym some days and you can just feel it. Like you're rested. You feel strong, energetic. You're like, I'll bet you I'm going to progress today.

I'll bet you I'm going to beat last week's numbers. I can just feel it. And then sometimes you get in the gym and you're like, this is going to be a grind. And you're warming up and it just feels heavy. That was every workout almost for a couple of years. Just everything's heavy. You really have to grind and push just to kind of maintain. And that's a direct consequence of sleep hygiene. I agree. You don't know if you're someone like me who think you are invincible and it's beast mode and you're going to work as hard as you can,

crank it out, work 16 hours a day and have, you know, try and have a bit of a life and eat and go to the gym and do all of that stuff. It does take its toll. But if you perpetually live that way, especially if you're young, you don't notice it as you start getting older. And I mean, mid to late twenties, it started to creep in for me, but definitely as I got into my thirties, this now starts to become really obvious in terms of my ability to perform, my patience, my compassion, just generally how I was showing up. But I didn't know it was the sleep. It was only in retrospect, once I fixed the sleep, I realized just how much mental capability I was leaving on the table for the gym and everything else in my life. But the mental game is huge. I think it's probably the biggest part of the sleep

thing that I've benefited from. But, you know, I've learned from you and others that, you know, your body is synthesizing and rebuilding most when you're asleep because it's not having to do anything else. It's turning off all the other processes and it's allowing protein synthesis to maximize. And once i got my head around that and realized that is the kind of quote unquote the best anabolic window your body has i was not getting enough of it and the quality was rubbish so i was like okay right if i'm gonna work my nuts off four to six days a week in the gym i've got to get the the sleep on point otherwise i'm kind of wasting my time so i'd say that whole piece mental and that kind of physical recovery has made a huge difference.

Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at MuscleForLifeFitness, Twitter at MuscleForLife, and Facebook at MuscleForLifeFitness. And then, and I don't know if you want to talk about this,

your app has really helped, Mike. Oh yeah, how so? Please do share. So I kind of became a bit of a fan boy, Mike. So I read the book, Big Alina Stronger, told the missus to read Thin Alina Stronger. She got a lot of value. I then read Beyond Big Alina Stronger and this was all great. And I think it was either in between those two books or maybe shortly afterwards, I just felt it was a bit clunky writing stuff down on paper.

And it was very difficult for me to trend and see visually the progress that I was making because it was on scrappy sheets of paper so I did have another app um I don't need to call it out but it was it was okay it was it just wasn't particularly modern and it didn't have what your app has in terms of simplicity and a good user interface. Using your app has really helped me center in on progressive overload. It almost feels like it's the foundation of the app that the app is wants you to focus on that more than anything else. And as a result, that has been the outcome. You know, I can focus on progressive overload, not just being, what did I lift in terms of raw weight last week? Okay. It was 110 on the bar, 110 kilogram on a bar. Let's go to 115. You know, that is one metric,

but what about if I just done more volume, but calculating volume on the fly is difficult. Whereas your app helps describe daily or weekly overall volume. And then I can start thinking, okay, this week or this session, how do I just improve my volume? A couple of reps, another set. If I fail too soon for whatever reason on that last set, hey, maybe I'm going to do another set slightly lower, just get some reps in. So I get my volume up from last week. That's made a huge difference. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's really, I mean, when I was going into that project, obviously, as you know, that those were my, I was like, I want to build something specifically for weightlifters who kind of know what's most important.

And of course that is maximizing mechanical tension. That's the progressive overload side of it. And then we know that volume is also very important frequency less so of course, but we're actually working on my brother-in-law is overseeing the whole project. He's doing a good job. We're working on a complete overhaul of the app, which I'm actually really excited about because it's going to get a whole new look and feel. And we're also going to be tweaking some existing features based on feedback, adding some features.

And we're just going to make the app 100% free. So for anybody listening, if you're not familiar to make it the app 100% free. So for anybody listening, if you're not familiar with the app, it's called stacked S T A C K E D. And you can learn about it at getstackedapp.com. And currently it's a free download and you can use it for like 20 workouts. And if you like it, it's a one-time upgrade fee of like $5. I'm just going to get rid of that. I guess the reason why, if you wanted to just get into it and get using it, the reason why to do it now is it's going to be a bit of a process. We are about three weeks into it and it's going to take four to six months because we are really overhauling it's kind of stem to stern and keeping all the stuff that people like, but just making a lot

of those things even better. And then adding some stuff that people are requesting. And it's going to become 100% free because I figured at this point, I think it just makes the most sense. I don't really need to directly make money off of that. And I would rather have it be something that generates a lot of word of mouth and goodwill where people are like, damn, this is a really cool app and it's free. And in the future, maybe I would add an in-app store where people could buy programs. I think that could be cool. They wouldn't be expensive. But let's say you wanted to do, let's say I reached out to Mark Ripito and said, Hey, Mark, I want to put your starting strength programming into the app, work out a deal with him where he gets a royalty on every

download. And you go, I want to do starting strength for a training block or phase or mesocycle. So it's, I want to do, let's say it's, I don't know, three months and you go, I want to do starting strength for a training block or phase or mesocycle. So it's, I want to do, let's say it's, I don't know, three months and you just a couple of taps and you pay a nominal fee. And then it not only downloads the workouts, but it actually programs it all out for you because of course it knows your numbers and that's it. You don't have to fiddle with anything. You just go to the gym and start. So that's, that's probably how I would look at monetizing it in the future. But in the short term, at this point, I've already spent way too much money and time on it. So I might as well maximize it what I was thinking and just throw

some more money and time at it and then just make it free and see what people think. I have no idea how popular it is, Mike, in terms of the overall ratings on iTunes. Maybe you can talk to that in a second. But what I've liked about it is, I can't remember, I think it was called Jeffit or J-E-fit that I was using before. Yeah, I used to use that. It's been a couple of pounds and it wasn't expensive. I still have it somewhere on my phone, but it felt a bit dated. It had a huge library of exercises and I think they had some videos as well, which for newbies might be useful. I don't think you have that feature. But what I liked about it is for people that have become

enabled and understand basic programming or want to put their own program together, I found yours was the easiest to do that. You could say like, put your own workout in there, put your own exercise in. I don't care. You can call call it whatever you want tell what muscles you're training and you can configure the whole thing so if you want to have an app that tracks your progress and you want you want it to be your program whether you got it from a third party you built yourself your app does that it does it well it visualizes your progress it helps you understand where you need to go to that you can improve upon that but it's doing a great job and then you've got the plate math, which, which I know it's a simple feature, but simply being able to go, what plates do I have to put on the bar to get the weight I'd done last week?

I was spending so much time and I'm, I'm pretty into maths, but it's complicated. You know, when you've just done a heavy set and you're trying to work out what plates and what fractional plates you have to put on to get to the new weight oh you just don't have the capacity and your app kind of visualizes that which is kind of neat yeah yeah of course we are preserving that and even uh enhancing it in this uh stacked 2.0 i guess we're calling it so yeah let's also now let's uh pivot to your work because you've turned all this into a vocation. Yes. Yes, I have. So much to most of my peers in the industry I previously was, much to their surprise.

So we're in 2018. Towards the back of 2017, I'd got myself, you know, I was on your program. I was feeling really great and, you know, making loads of progress. I moved from aesthetics being a primary driver to training to thinking, I just want to optimize the hell out of everything, right? Let's eat the best food. Let's have the best quality food. Let's eat for optimal nutrition. Let's maximize sleep. Let's take some of Mike's advice on a podcast and listen to or read some of the books that you recommended. And I started building this enthusiasm, this infectious enthusiasm for optimizing myself mentally and physically. And it became, it was a hobby, but it became a hobby that

just consumed me. In the morning when I was reading stuff, I'd read stuff about this kind of thing. When I get home, I'd read books on this kind of thing. And at the same time, I'd been 11 years deep into a career, which I have done very well in, but the why wasn't there. I liked it. I was good at it, earning good money, could continue to do that job for another 10, 15, 20 years easy, but it's hard work. And I'm working for someone else and it's a grind and it's, you know, big US company startup mentality, lots of pressure on all their employees. Yeah, every quarter it's reset the clock and go again. And I just felt at that point

that I had to leverage this passion, this newfound enthusiasm and knowledge as I was acquiring. So big, big, bold move towards the back end of last year, I decided that come the beginning of 2018, I would let my employers know that I will be moving away from not only that company, but the career I've developed. And in turn, start up my own podcast, as well as really a online brand that talks to self-optimization and helping people be their best. I codify in, you know, the library of content and knowledge and anecdote and lessons learned that I've gone through and am going through and offering that in a similar way to you, mostly free with some ideas to productize in the future. But really just wanted to share my message of growth and just the

excitement that I feel that our lives as a family are going. Now I found really both passion intent enthusiasm and real energy not pretend energy not like adrenaline but real vitality and that's come from first change in my body interesting and so we we know the how the fitness transformation played into that but so what else have you tinkered with I'm just curious and what what some, a lot of people listening know the power of exercising regularly and eating well and have experienced it firsthand or are currently, maybe they're just starting and they're looking forward to experiencing it. So what else though, have you gotten into that has made a big difference for you? have you gotten into that has made a big difference for you?

So I'm reading a hell of a lot and I implement some of the things I read. And in some cases, it just kind of bolsters my existing game plan. Let me just interject there on the reading, because you had mentioned that previously you didn't like to read, right? Which I think statistically speaking, most people don't. I think at least in America, the average person reads maybe one book a year. I'm on one book a week, thereabouts these days. And so how did that change for you and why? Because previously what you were not, you didn't really like to read, you had mentioned? Yeah. So my work was everything, everything. It trumped friends. It trumped social life. It trumped family. It was

everything because it had to be everything if I was going to do it well and maintain the career that I was gunning for. So I didn't really have the capacity mentally to support reading, if I'm honest. But once I started finding a passion and a subject that I was interested in, I found the time. So even though I was holding down this job for six, nine months, I was reading furiously. And I'd carve out the morning and the evenings to do so. And I started reading initially around bodybuilding. That from bodybuilding went into sleep. And from sleep went into nutrition.

and from sleep went into nutrition and from nutrition it's kind of bled deeper into both evolution kind of mindset orientated stuff building online businesses as well as like the deeper dive things like microbiome science i just i'm fascinated i'm fascinated by how the bacteria and the species that live within us are dictated most of how we are expressed. So as I think about nutrition now, firstly, I love food. I'm Greek. I was born and bred to eat a lot of food and enjoy the hell out of it. So that was never going to change. But now I can look at the food I'm eating and going, is this going to give me maximal benefit? You know, optimum nutrition, maximizing on certain vitamins and minerals that I think I need, you know, making sure I get a good healthy dose of prebiotics and probiotics. I've even done microbiome testing

to see, it's a company called Viome that's over in the States, relatively new, that are starting to understand through transcription what's in your gut, what the makeup looks like, what their metabolic pathways are. And if you've got viruses or things that perhaps are not good for you, what you need to eliminate, avoid, or lean in on to create more diversity and a happier gut, because a happier gut is going to be expressed with happier emotions and a better physical shape and generally less illness. So that's kind of where I'm at right now. I'm just like, I'm leaning in on how can I optimize myself so I continue to have more energy. And it's just, it's like this bottomless well, Mike, that, you know, the deeper I dig that the more benefits I find in terms of just enthusiasm and get up and go. And that would never have

happened if it wasn't for that transformation that started with just losing the fat and feeling good about yourself and wanting to respect the body that you have. Yeah. And, you know, just to throw in a quick reading tip for people listening who maybe would like to read more than they currently do is read what you are interested in. Don't try to read what people tell you you should read or even if it's somebody you respect and they have their recommended reading list, choose things that you are interested in. That will go far in helping you ingrain the habit and actually look forward to it and enjoy it. Because similar to working out, if you're having to go into the gym every day to do workouts that you hate, it takes a lot of discipline. It takes a lot of willpower

to see that through. And even if you do, and that's fine, that's great. If you, if you have the grit to see it through, that's cool, but it didn't have to be that way. Like you could have made it more enjoyable, which even for people who pride themselves on their ability to just do whatever it takes and do what needs to be done. That's great. And I, and I admire that and I respect that, but I think it's also worth putting a little bit of thought into, and again, if we're talking about training, making those workouts, we might as well make them kind of fun too, if we can. And similar to reading, depending on the purpose, if you are, in your case, you're wanting to build a business. So maybe that means that you are going to end up reading some books, like for example, anybody who wants to build a business, I recommend that

you educate yourself a bit on the financial side, which many people don't. They're not inherently interested in understanding P&Ls and balance sheets and even just basic concepts like gross profit or EBITDA, net profit, things like that. But it makes a lot of sense to slog your way through it because if you do understand those things and your business does end up doing well, you're going to save yourself a lot of headache and you're going to make yourself a lot more money. There's a book that I recommend actually for people that are listening. If I've sold you on upping your financial game, what is it? It's like, yes, simple numbers, straight talk, big profits by Greg Crabtree. An example of a book that is worth reading for anybody who

is in business for themselves. It is not full of jargon and it's not just some expert pontificating and just trying to prove to you how smart and expert he is. Anyways, I just want to throw that tip out there because I know I hear firsthand from a lot of people who ask me the email because they know that I have a habit. My habit's very simple. I wake up at 5.30 or 6 in the morning and I go in, I have an infrared sauna and I just go sit in the sauna. I mean, first I normally have to go to the bathroom, but I start reading. I read on my phone. I like to read digitally because then all of my highlights and my notes and stuff are synced to read digitally because then all of my highlights and my notes and stuff are synced to the cloud and I can pull them out and put them into Google

documents, which I do. I have one document per book I read, blah, blah, blah. And so I wake up early and I just go sit in my sauna and I read usually for on average, I'd say 40 to 60 minutes every morning before I go to the gym. And then most nights I'll read for 20 to 40 minutes before going to sleep. And that's it. It's a simple habit. And I don't even keep track of my progress. I'm not tracking how many pages. I'm not getting too overly, I'm not personally in the whole quantify everything because I think I have a general good sense of, I'd say, the trajectory of the different areas of my life. And while maybe I could benefit from quantifying things more, for me, it seems a bit unnecessary. So I don't track how many pages I finish every

day. I do keep a spreadsheet of all the books that I read every year. And I also track how many pages are in each book. So I guess that's the level of tracking for it. I just like to see that I'm getting through. Yeah, it's true. That's true. Actually, now that I say it, I'm like, ah, that probably actually sounds a bit ridiculous to many people. But so I can then look at approximately how many pages am I getting through. But as long as I'm putting in the time, and it really depends what you're reading. Because I read a book recently that was okay, kind of a random recommendation. It was called Willing to Fail, kind of just a fun story of a dude who built a junk hauling business and started some other businesses. I've read a fair

amount of those types of books. So I didn't have any big aha moments, but I appreciated the effort that went into it. And I appreciate the guy's story. He seems like a cool guy. And so that book, I think I read in two sittings because it was just very conversational. And if you were to put it into a text analyzer, it was probably at maybe an eighth or ninth grade level. So I wasn't in the dictionary really at all. And so that book, I just kind of burned through, but I'm reading a book now on the history of the Federal Reserve called The Creature from Jekyll Island. And that book is a bit, I'd say it's somewhere in the middle. Like there are some books, there's a book that I'm also reading. Usually I just do one at a time, but I got into this other book for some research for a book that I'm writing, which is the second edition of Beyond Bigger,

Leaner, Stronger. It's called Thinking in Systems. So if it's a more cerebral kind of academic book like that, or Thinking Fast and Slow, those books, they're just going to be slower. Like sometimes you're going to read something, you're going to have to stop and think about it, or you're going to have some more of your own, you're going to have more of your own ideas that you're going to want to, you know, marginalia, you're going to want to make notes. The vocabularies are going to be different and you're going to spend more time clarifying words. So I'm not too concerned about my progress per se. It's more, am I putting in the time and am I actually reading during that time and focusing on it? Well, okay, fine. The beautiful thing here, Mike, is most people's

habits first thing in the morning. And I can say this sincerely because I used to do this and I sometimes do find myself doing the same. Wake up in the morning, what's the first thing I do? I open up my phone and I can't help but to press the screaming red icons wanting my attention. And even if they're not, I'm going to go pop into Facebook and Instagram and look at the news app. And starting my day like that was never productive and always led me down a path of losing control before it's even started. And once I realized that I was giving away all the best laid out plans,

when I go to bed or first thing in the morning, just before the hell breaks loose, I'd go, right, this is what I'm going to do. And then as soon as I opened up my phone and started consuming what other people wanted me to see, it was game over. I would just lose the momentum. Whereas doing what you say, reading first thing in the morning, even though your eyes are blurry and you feel you haven't got the cerebral capacity to read, it's crazy how quick your brain fires up after a couple of pages into a book you want to read. It's brilliant. So I've been reading things like Hitmakers, Jordan Peterson's book. There was a Darwinian book on evolution, which was really interesting. There's so many amazing books out there, more than you could ever consume. But yeah, I agree with you wholeheartedly.

Don't read nonfiction if it completely bores you. But there is going to be an element of nonfiction that works. You just got to find what your passion is. Luckily, I found my passion, which was first developing my body and then just digging deeper into being a better person in all aspects. Yeah. Another tip just to share for either finding what is most interesting to you or something that you really want to dive deep into, or if you already know what those things are

and just kind of vetting all the potential books that are out there. What I like to do is first, before I read a book, I see if a book summary is available on the websites that I use are Blinkist and Get Abstract, although I know there are a number of others. But you can check the main ones that are out there. And I'll then read a book summary first, which usually is just an overview of the key concepts. And it's all paraphrased. And it's just an overview of the key concepts and it's all paraphrased and it's, of course, all explained through someone else. So it's not so much, I don't go to those to, it's really just to make a judgment on the book, whether I want to read it or not, because I find that if I don't make any highlights in the book summary, if nothing

piques my interest in the summary, the book is probably going to be just more of the same. Whereas if I find the summary interesting and I'm highlighting things and I'm like, ooh, I like that, that's an interesting idea, then chances are I'm going to like the book. And I found that that has saved me from a number of books that were on my list that I would have just bought and read. And I don't like quitting books. I will, if it's a long book and if I haven't made any highlights in 30 pages or the first 30 or 50 pages, then I may put it down. But I don't know. Maybe I'm just not a quitter. I just tend to finish books if I start them. But I have a number of books where I'm just like, I really could have done without that. I think I walked away with like two ideas that are

mediocre. If I walked away with a few ideas that are outstanding, maybe that's worth the time, but you might also be able to get that from the summary. And I would just say that listening to podcasts is probably the biggest book referral source for me. Listening to you and the likes of Mind Pump. And, you know, as the list goes on, I listen to about 10 or 15 kind of fitness and health, wellness type podcasts. There's always guests. And if you like that guest and you like their concepts, that's the book for you. And I've read some phenomenal books that have come from just hearing the author speak for half an hour. So it's kind of all into

plays. So yeah, anyway, I know this isn't supposed to be a book review discussion, but we've both found our passion in that. Should we talk about, if you're interested, my kind of health status before and after as well? Tell us what did it look like before and after and what was that experience like? So another thing that I haven't mentioned Mike was some of the changes in not just energy but digging a little deeper into what that means for me. I was unknowingly living with a bunch of health issues let's call them that and it wasn't just you know putting on visceral fat and you know being a bit frumpy and not feeling good about myself i had developed a for quite a long time in my life i developed quite an episodic expression of psoriasis and you know

kind of scratchy skin and you know scratchy scalp and that was plaguing me for many years i'd also started to develop a little bit of vitiligo which was uh quite rare for caucasians just a little bit of my face interesting i thought that was uh like a congenital thing i thought something you were born with i didn't know you could develop it uh well some books i'm reading says it can be developed through you know a chronic nutrition lifestyle that perhaps doesn't you know that leads to too much inflammation and cause it's an autoimmune condition. If you kind of rear up your immunity and it starts fighting back at foods that shouldn't be in your body through time, that inflammation can be expressed in various ways. And one, one way could be vitiligo. So I had psoriasis, I had a little bit of vitiligo and without knowing

I was experiencing very low testosterone and how that was showing up was as soon as I'd come home from a hard day's work, I'd want to feed and feed heavy and feed big. So the wife would help me out, make me a massive spag bol, spaghetti bolognese or a huge pie, and I would devour the whole thing. And in part, it was probably the food I was eating. but because I was just fatigued and my testosterone was low, I'd fall asleep immediately after eating and be spark out for an hour or so and then come to, and just the rest of the night would just be a daze. My sex drive was just on the floor. And generally, I just didn't feel very masculine. So I had a testosterone issue I didn't know, but I was experiencing the symptoms, had psoriasis and this vitiligo was starting to express itself.

And fast forward to today, which was cleaning up my nutrition, which I think is the biggest part, moving my body well, getting enough sleep and respecting my body and not just beating it up all the time. The psoriasis is gone. I don't have any flaky skin in my scalp anymore. My testosterone levels have lifted up, but they are still borderline low, but I don't have any of the symptoms. Which then you would argue maybe that, I mean, that would be an argument for that you don't have low testosterone. I mean, there is obviously an absolute number that by all standards would be considered low, but that's kind of a moving target.

You know what I mean? Person to person. And normally you need to have symptoms of low testosterone for that to be the actual diagnosis, because you will have guys at, let's say 400 NGDL who at whatever age, let's say three to 400 in their fortiess maybe even 50s and totally fine and you have other guys same absolute testosterone levels and free testosterone levels but who are experiencing symptoms so there's a bit of a mysterious side to that as well yeah we've got we've got more to learn but yeah i definitely was getting there the symptoms of not feeling very manly and not having that

testosterone to peak me up. I felt, to be honest, if I look back in retrospect, my life was being run almost exclusively on adrenaline and cortisol. It was just that fight or flight, make shit happen, push through, forget the fact you're tired, just make it work. And that did work for many of my years, but it started to really show up in my 30s. And I'm proud to say that those symptoms have now gone. The psoriasis is gone completely, flares up in the winter ever so slightly, but nothing like it did before. And whilst the vitiligo is, by the looks looks of things still there, it hasn't got worse. I think it's declining a bit. I think I'd be a revelation if I was to say that. So I don't want to go out and say, I've cured my vitiligo, but it does seem to be contained.

So I can't say enough for the impact people like you can have Mike on just that cascading effect of getting people moving respecting their body starting to create the body that they enjoy and want it's this kind of rolling thing that you just kind of want to improve upon once you start getting some benefit you want to get more benefits and I'm sure there are many of your customers and audiences that have gone through a similar journey of really just wanting to care for themselves once they've got themselves in shape. Yeah, no, it really does fundamentally change. It changes you, it changes your experience of the world around you, it changes your attitudes. It's just been interesting having a lot of conversations with a lot of people, not just on the podcast, but mostly actually via email since the beginning to see how people have

been very surprised at how their entire outlooks have changed just by getting in shape. And there's the straight psychological stuff. And there's also the overlap into the physiological where like take hormones, for example, whether we like it or not, our hormone profiles can profoundly influence our perceptions of the world and our ideas and our attitudes and really who we are as people, which is funny, but that's just the way the body works. And so, yeah, it's interesting to have those conversations with people and that people kind of improve in ways that they never thought they could even improve. They thought that they were always just this way and that's just the way it was. And we don't know. We don't know. I mean, this is a Petersonian idea, but it's something I

completely agree with. We really don't know what we are ultimately capable of. And that goes beyond just physicality. We can estimate it, at least in terms of what we are physically capable of. But beyond that, we really don't know what we're capable of. And I totally agree that getting your body healthy and fit, you don't have to be super jacked or super lean, or you don't have to be necessarily even as into it as we are, but by getting your body healthy and fit. So if you can just be healthy and fit by normal, you know, you go to a doctor by just normal standards, you have a good body composition and you get some blood work done, everything checks out, and you have the basic boxes ticked in terms of healthy living and just basic life hygiene.

That's the springboard that allows you then to see what else you are capable of. But without that, it's possible. I mean, you have some stories of people out there who have done some pretty impressive things in their lives despite being tremendously unhealthy. But one, it usually ends badly. So that's not good. And two, I will imagine what they would have been capable of if they would have taken a little bit better care of themselves. And it's great that they were able to summon the will and the energy to just go, go, go. But even a guy like Elon Musk talks about that now.

I don't know if you saw recently. It was some interview. I just saw an article on it. It was him talking about working 120 hours a week and how he has accepted that you go crazy, basically. Even a guy like him, he realizes that you know the peter principle there is a point where he can no longer go any higher and uh maybe his it's great that he's able to redline himself and he in a sense is not at the mercy of how his body feels or the

weather or the the news or what other people say. Like he can just go, he can go, this is what I'm doing and get out of my way. And that's great. But even a guy like him is realizing that he can still get a lot done and do everything he needs to do without feeling like he's losing his mind. And like his body is going to just any day now,

it's just going to shut down. He's just not going to wake up. He's going to have, you know, take a bunch of Ambien to going to shut down. He's just not going to wake up. He's going to take a bunch of Ambien to go to sleep, and then he's just not going to wake up. Yeah, I think the founder of Huffington Post, and I think she's got a company called Thrive Global, actually wrote a note to Elon. I think it was out on the press somewhere. And I totally agree. Did you see his response, though? His response was good.

I didn't see it. Well, his response was like, yeah, cool. Do you think this was my choice? Like you think it wasn't necessary? And that's a valid point. Like what the dude is trying to do is by normal standards, I don't know all the specifics, but it was in Tesla in particular, what was going on. He felt that that's just what had to get there. There wasn't, it wasn't a matter of like, Oh, you wouldn't, you know, I I'm just going to hashtag no days off and hashtag hustle grind. It, it was just all this shit has to get done by this time. And I don't see any other way for that to happen outside of me working 120 hours a week. So I'm just going to do it. And I understand that too. And what are you going to say? All the shit we're saying is irrelevant in that context. It's either win, it's win or lose at that point. And he was like, fuck it, I'm going to win. And I'm going to press

my luck and see what happens, but I'm going to win. I do think there's a lesson in this, Mike, for everyone who's pushing super hard. We're all going to get there at some point. We're going to do it. And I've done it. I pushed incredibly hard from as early as I can remember up until even now. But at some point in your 30s, maybe your 40s, you'll start to realize that there needs to be some respect for your body. There needs to be some respect for sleep. There needs to be some respect for, you know, some downtime. And in this go, go, go mentality, in this beast mode mentality and expectations of, you know, Silicon Valley and just generally tech startups is, you know, just work yourself to the bone because it's all about going as fast as humanly possible so we can achieve great things. At some point in time, I think that rhetoric is, um, is going to get challenged because, you know, people are suffering, but they don't realize it until

they get a little older. You're invincible when you're 20, right? At least that's how I felt. And then, and then it's just the focus on these days seems to be a lot more on quantity. It's, it's quantity over quality, right? So it's the more hours you work. And I understand. I mean, I have worked long hours myself and I still work, I guess, quite a bit more maybe than the average person, but there isn't much discussion, especially in the context of what we're talking about here in terms of quality. And even going to why are a lot of people pushing as hard as they are? And then if it's, I understand winning is fun and making things happen is fun. But in many cases,

if finances are a major aspect of it, that in the end isn't as fulfilling as you think. And so then I think there are a lot of people who are burning the candle at both ends chasing something that they may get there and they may get it and then go well that wasn't worth it happens all the time i'm sure it's happened to you as well mike yep but it's just uh whatever that's that's part of that's part of life and that's part of just being aware of where you're at and making sure that you haven't lost sight of why and you haven't fallen into an unhealthy routine that some people may seem, oh, how do you push yourself that hard? But I'm sure even for you previously, that was just what you did. That was your habit. That's what you were used to. And if you didn't do it, you felt weird, just as many people have different habits and if they don't do those unhealthy things they feel weird

i agree listen mike i really appreciate you um giving me the time to tell my story and um thank you for everything that you do for everyone right you haven't done it personally for me but you know i found you the right time in my life. And it's been a beautiful cascade of benefits from your book to your supplements to the app. Your podcast has been a fountain of knowledge. So I just appreciate everything that you're doing. You are a force for good in the fitness industry. You are taking the confusion and the bullshit away and leaving us with just the simple truths. And I really, really appreciate everything you're doing. And I can't wait to see the next couple of years and

what Legion and Muscle for Life turns out. Thank you. Thank you, sir. I appreciate that. So let's just end with where can people find you and your work? So the company that I founded is called Adap Nation.'s A-D-A-P Nation and you can find that at adapnation.io and we are on all the podcast platforms as well as most of the social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook and perhaps in the show notes we can just reference back to that but my work is there it's podcast it's it's video, it's articles. And I'm trying to take a leaf out your book, you know, offer real world experience, be honest and raw, as well as deliver some science. Awesome. Perfect. Well, thanks again for taking the time, Steve. I appreciate it.

Thank you, Mike. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don't mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you're listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live,

then just subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any of the new goodies. Lastly, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscle for life.com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback. So please do reach out. All right, that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode. And I hope to hear from you soon. And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously, though, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead I'm going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my 100%

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