Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - How to Not Be Skinny Fat, Training After Taking Time off, and More..

Episode Date: December 18, 2014

In this podcast I talk about how much age actually plays a role in getting in shape, the diet and exercise mistakes that lead to being skinny fat and how to undo them, how to get back into the groove of training after being off for a while, and more. WHAT SKINNY FAT IS AND HOW TO NOT BE SKINNY FAT: http://www.muscleforlife.com/build-muscle-lose-fat/ http://www.muscleforlife.com/high-intensity-interval-training-and-weight-loss/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19387377 http://www.muscleforlife.com/what-is-if-it-fits-your-macros-and-does-it-work/ HOW TO GET BACK INTO THE GROOVE AFTER NOT TRAINING FOR A LONG TIME: http://www.muscleforlife.com/the-ultimate-bodyweight-workout-routine/ HOW AGE AFFECTS YOUR ABILITY TO GET INTO SHAPE: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19387379 http://www.muscleforlife.com/the-hardgainers-guide-to-guaranteed-muscle-growth/ 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, it's Mike, and this podcast is brought to you by Legion, my line of naturally sweetened and flavored workout supplements. Now, as you probably know, I'm really not a fan of the supplement industry. I've wasted thousands and thousands of dollars over the years on worthless supplements that basically do nothing, and I've always had trouble finding products actually worth buying, and especially as I've gotten more and more educated as to what actually works and what doesn't. And eventually after complaining a lot, I decided to do something about it and start making my own supplements. The exact supplements I myself have always wanted. A few of the things that make my products unique are one,

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then I guarantee you'll like my books. I make my living primarily as a writer. So as long as I can keep selling books, then I can keep writing articles over at Muscle for Life and Legion and recording podcasts and videos like this and all that fun stuff. Now, I have several books, but the place to start is Bigger Leaner Stronger if you're a guy and Thinner Leaner Stronger if you're a girl. Now, these books, they're basically going to teach you everything you need to know about dieting, training, and supplementation to build muscle, lose fat, and look and feel

great without having to give up all the foods you love or live in the gym grinding away at workouts you hate. And you can find my books everywhere. You can buy books online like Amazon, Audible, iBooks, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and so forth. And if you're into audiobooks like me, you can actually get one of my audiobooks for free with a 30-day free trial of Audible. To do that, go to www.muscleforlife.com forward slash audiobooks.

That's muscleforlife.com forward slash audiobooks, and you'll see how to do this. So thanks again for taking the time to listen to my podcast. I hope you enjoy it, and let's get to the show. Hey, this is Mike Matthews from MuscleForLife.com. Thanks for stopping by and checking out my video podcast. I hope you enjoy it. If you do, you can just subscribe to my channel or subscribe to the podcast. And I try to get them done, one done every couple weeks or so, two or three weeks.

I've been pretty busy recently, so I fell off a little bit, but I'm going to try to keep that in. So yeah, let's just get started. In this episode, I want to talk about a few different things. One is something I get asked about a lot, which is skinny fat. What is it exactly? People kind of know the look, but what does it mean physiologically? How do you become skinny fat? What do you do wrong that gets you there? And then what can you do to undo that and not be skinny fat anymore? So we'll talk about that, talk then what can you do to undo that and not be skinny fat anymore. So we'll talk about that, talk about kind of about how to get back into the groove of training if you haven't been exercising for a while and what's the best way to go about that so as to not overwhelm your body and not kind of overwhelm you even psychologically.

So yeah, we'll talk about that, and then I want to talk about age and how age affects your ability to get in shape. So I'm going to try to keep this to 30, 40 minutes or so. We'll stick with those three subjects. If I have a little bit more time, I'll add something else in. Oh, and also I'm going to talk a little bit about the upcoming launch of my line of supplements, which is getting close now. We've had some snags on the website, just the logistics of the responsive design and all the e-commerce and all the stuff that we wanted to do, but we're getting close. Hopefully it's going to be done this week. So let's start first with this subject of skinny fat. Now you probably know what it

means in terms of looks. It's the kind of look where somebody they don't have, they're not particularly fat, but they just don't have any muscle definition. You know, their arms and legs just kind of look like tubes and they're kind of mushy to the touch. And it can become a real problem because a person can actually have a relatively low body fat percentage, but have that look. Somebody like a guy can be 10% body fat, which isn't that bad, and look what you would expect to see in someone maybe 15% to 20% body fat that had more muscle. Because, of course, remember body fat percentage, percentage of total weight. So like a guy at 150 pounds, let's say a skinny fat kind of physique, 10% will look way worse than a guy, 175 pounds with a good amount of muscle, 10% body fat. It's a totally different look. Um, so the first thing I want to talk about is the, you know, I'm actually

writing an article on this too, coming up in this is kind of ties into how do you wind up skinny fat. And this ties into this kind of idea of the worst way to lose weight. The worst way to lose weight is there's a combination of things you can do wrong that kind of result in actually a skinny fat physique and depressed metabolism. And you can put yourself in a position where it actually is very hard to even get any leaner, even if you wanted to. You know, if let's say as a guy, you get down to like the 12% range. If you're doing it wrong, you can find it very hard to get below 10%. And even if you did, you wouldn't look anything like how you want to look or what you would envision, let's say nine

or 8% body fat, you know, looking like. And the worst way to do it is this. First would be to put yourself into a large calorie deficit every day, meaning if your body is burning 2,000, let's say 2,500 calories worth of energy every day, and you're eating 1,500 calories or you're eating 1,200 calories per day. Yes, you're going to lose weight, of course, but by putting yourself in this large caloric deficit, you know, where you're eating half of, you know, your daily, what your body should be burning every day, what you should be able to eat and just maintain your current body fat percentage, what happens is your body, your metabolism slows down, which happens anyway when you're losing

weight, but you can really accelerate this by putting yourself in too large of a caloric deficit. Your hormones, your anabolic hormones particularly get depressed, which further slows down metabolism and can lead to muscle breakdown. And then there is muscle breakdown, which also occurs as a side effect of just not eating enough food. Because generally when somebody is following, really you could say it's more of like a starvation diet almost, or a borderline starvation diet that usually kind of comes with a lower protein because I mean, if you're not eating very many calories, you can't eat that much protein and protein. A high protein diet is super important. Uh, when you're wanting to lose weight. You want to have a

moderate to high amount of protein regardless if you're lifting weights. It helps build lean mass, preserve lean mass, but it's very, very important when you're dieting to lose weight because you're fighting against your body's, when you're restricting your calories, your body is, its ability to repair muscle tissue, to build up muscle tissue is already impaired. So when you are eating too little protein, you're exacerbating that. You're making it even worse. So that's the first big problem or the big mistake that people make when they lose weight or want to lose weight is just cut calories severely and not eat enough protein. And so then that leads to fat loss, but also

quite a bit of muscle loss. And then the next big mistake is to do a bunch of cardio, um, especially steady state cardio, which burns up muscle. Uh, I, I can link a study or I'll link an article down below where I talk about this. I mean, there's an article where I talk about it, or I can just link a study that shows it directly just that the longer you do cardio, uh, the more muscle you lose essentially. It's just the way it is. Um, so that's why I always recommend doing high intensity interval cardio because it's shorter. Um, you burn more fat doing it. It's just the better way to go, but we're talking about how to get skinny fat here, not how to undo it. So, um, doing a bunch of steady state cardio is kind of a recipe for weight loss disaster, especially when you're in a severe caloric deficit. Yes, you're going to lose fat,

of course. Once again, you're just accelerating that muscle loss. And losing muscle is not only unhealthy because the amount of lean mass that your body has is just associated with overall health and longevity, actually. And just like research has just shown that the less muscle you have in your body, the more likely you are to die at some point of something, disease or whatever. But also it slows down your metabolism because muscle drives your metabolism. Well, I mean, I would say it's one of the primary drivers of metabolism. The amount of muscle you have on your body is going to dramatically influence the amount of calories that you can eat and maintain your physique. So as you're burning up muscle, your metabolism is slowing down even more, and that is kind of leading to this skinny fat look. So you have severe calorie

restriction and doing a bunch of steady state cardio. And then you could say that the other kind of like factors are overexercising, which many people do because there's a point where the weight loss kind of slows down and because the metabolism has slowed down a lot and just gotten shocked by the caloric deficit and the cardio and the kind of like natural response is to just exercise more. So now it turns into maybe doing cardio or even weightlifting, doing cardio twice a day or adding a weightlifting session on top of it. So now you're adding what you're essentially doing is even you're expanding that caloric deficit or that calorie deficit even more by adding more exercise, which once again, when you're underfeeding your body, it doesn't, that weightlifting that you're doing won't build your muscles up. It's actually just going to cause more muscle loss. It's going to cause even more damage to the muscle fibers that your body

can't repair because of the state that it's in. So if you continue this, and I've worked with quite a few people that have done this, I would say probably more women than men because the general advice to women for weight loss, just for whatever reason, kind of tends to be run a big caloric deficit and do a bunch of cardio. So I've worked with a lot of women that have gotten themselves in that position now where by doing that for several months or in some cases six months or even a year of kind of trying to constantly lose more weight in that way has led to this skinny fat kind of look where they their body fat percentage is not very high maybe it's around 20 or 19 or 18 but they don't have the body that they want at all their legs don't have, but they don't have the body that they want at all. Their legs don't have

any definition. They don't have any muscle definition in their arms. Um, they're not able to eat a lot of food. You know, I've worked with women that have come to me and have been able, only able to eat about a thousand calories a day to maintain about a, like one recently, I think about 140 pounds, a five foot seven, five foot eight. And 5'8". And that woman should be able to eat upwards of, if she were doing everything right and she hadn't burned off a bunch of muscle and stuff, a woman 5'7", 140 should probably be able to eat 1,800, 1,900 calories a day

if she's exercising three to five days a week and maintain that physique. And if you're not familiar with calories, go on calorieking.com and start looking at the calorie content of food. 1,800 to 2,000 calories a day is a lot of food for a woman. It's not so much for a guy. It's not so much for me necessarily, but for a woman, that's quite a bit of food. So that's kind of like how you get to being skinny fat. And then how you undo it is essentially the opposite. So what you want to do is if you're in that position right now,

and you want to get to your goal, your target physique, which is going to be probably you'll have a bit more muscle, you're going to look a bit leaner, and you're going to be able to eat more food. The first thing that I always recommend or usually recommend because of the metabolic damage that can come with doing this, burning off too much muscle, depressing your hormones too much from severe calorie deficits, what we normally start with is working on a maintenance routine, not trying to lose more weight initially, not trying to reduce body fat, but actually trying to just fix the metabolism, speed it back up. And we do that by increasing calories to a maintenance level, calculating your total daily expenditure, which I'll link another article here. I'm going to make a note of this. All right, cool.

So I'm just going to link, so I don't forget. I'll link an article on that so you can see how to do that. So we want to work calories up to around, you know, eating where the person's eating around what they're burning every day and change the routine quite drastically. Focus on weightlifting, shorter sessions, 45 minutes or so intense weightlifting. You know, if you're familiar with my work, I'm a big proponent of heavy weightlifting and I talk about why in my books. I talk about why in different articles. I talk about why in different articles. I'm going to actually write another article soon. It's just going to kind of bullet point some of the big benefits of focusing on heavy compound weightlifting. So yeah, we do that

to build muscle and then we increase the food to give the body, give the metabolism a break and give it the nutrients it needs. Make sure eating enough protein, about 40% of daily calories coming from protein. Um, and, and then any cardio that's being done would only be hit cardio, which is high intensity interval training. And, uh, I'll link an article. Like I said earlier, I'll link it and you can see why I really only recommend hit unless, um, unless your body is in a very good place, uh, metabolically and physique-wise and you have plenty of muscle and you just really like going for long runs, okay, fine. But if you're in a kind of skinny fat type of situation, I would definitely cut out any long endurance type cardio for the time being. So that's the first phase of kind of fixing the skinny fat type of body is, you know, focusing on lifting weights, building muscle, and eating enough food to allow that to occur. And that can take, I mean, metabolic damage would, you know, I'll end up writing an article on this and it could really even, there could be a whole podcast just on that.

But it's a real thing. You really actually can. on that, but it's a real thing. You really actually can, depending on what you do with your body, you can cause damage in the way of, you know, muscle loss in the way of reducing your body's total daily caloric burn. You know, I've seen one study that I believe it was a year. It was still a person dieted down. They didn't do it necessarily right. They just followed a standard calorie restriction. I think they did some cardio and by by the end of their diet, they did lose a fair amount of weight. And their BMR, their basal metabolic rate, the amount of energy that they burned every day just doing nothing, dropped and it dropped more than researchers expected just on the weight loss alone, where

they go, okay, well, we would expect we would expect if you, based on simple formulas that if you're, if you're weighing 30 pounds less, of course your body's going to burn a little bit less energy because it doesn't have to carry around that weight, even if you lost strictly fat. But there was more metabolic slowdown than they, than they expected and it lasted for a lot longer than they expected. So metabolic damage is very real and correcting it can be, I've seen it go pretty quickly with people. I've seen, um, you know, take, I don't know, four to six weeks or so before they were able to basically get their metabolism back to where they can eat the amount of food they should be able to eat every day and not gain fat from it. But, you know, it can take,

depending on, I don't, I haven't worked with anybody this in, you know, this having this severe of a case of metabolic damage, but I've heard of it can have a taking even upwards of six months to fix, which is really extreme. I've never seen that before, but, um, I think, you know, I don't know, 48 weeks is probably a fair assumption of, of that, this first phase of just kind of fixing the metabolism. of this first phase of just kind of fixing the metabolism. So then once the metabolism is fixed and once the calories are up to a normal maintenance level, then you can put yourself into a mild caloric restriction, somewhere between 15% and 20% less than what you're burning daily,

and continue the weightlifting, and then add the HIIT cardio if you're not already doing it. I generally start with three or four times a week, and I don't go over four times, and about 20 to 30 minutes per session, and then things just start rolling, and then the weight loss is easy. So the bigger kind of picture, I mean, I've worked with women. I remember one woman, she came, well, she actually just emailed me. She started doing it herself and just emailed me that it was working.

Where in the beginning, she was eating 1,000 calories a day, stuck at her current weight. She was very overweight. And then by increasing her food to, I believe she increased it to just straight jump to 1,700 calories a day, started lifting weights, started doing HIIT cardio. She gained weight initially because that, that extra food, uh, you know, the carbohydrates alone bring water and glycogen into the body that increases weight. Um, her weight stabilized though after a couple of weeks of increased food. And then she started losing weight from there. And by the time she emailed me, she already lost 30 or 40 pounds. Uh, I believe it was probably, I don't know, I think she was about four months in or something like

that. So that is generally how it goes. The food increase increases weight a bit, and then you just don't get freaked out. Just know that it's not that you're automatically gaining fat. It's more likely just water being held in the muscles and so forth. And then once you fix your metabolism, bring your body into a moderate caloric deficit, then you can lose weight very easily from there on and not have, and you know, not have to eat sub 1000 calories a day, which is just terrible for the body. So that's kind of the story on, on skinny fat and what to do about it. I'm also going to link an article down below that I just wrote on how to and what to do about it. Um, I'm also going to link an article down below that I just wrote, uh, on how to build muscle and lose fat simultaneously. Cause it kind of

just goes along with this. Um, you know, a lot of people ask, is it possible to kind of achieve that body recomp? Is it known a recomposition? Uh, and yes, it definitely is. If you know what you're doing, there are a bunch of little things you need to do right. It's not, not everyone can do it effectively, but the only people that can't are people that are basically advanced weightlifters that have already achieved most of their genetic potential in terms of muscle growth and don't have very much weight to lose. Like, like me, if I wanted to cut right now, I mean, I'm fairly lean right now. I'm probably around 7% or so, but if I wanted to get down to 5% again, or like I was recently, I'm not going to be building muscle during that time period. It's just not possible. Like I don't have my genetic

potential. I can maybe put on another 10 pounds of muscle period on my frame. It'll probably take me three or four years to do that. Um, and that really will be it. And to do that, uh, it's going to require, I mean, I can't be, I'm not going to be building muscle when I'm in a calorie deficit. Um, and I explained this in the article that I'll link so you can just check it out. But, uh, most people can actually, most people can, can do a body recomp if they just know what they're doing. Um, so let's move on here to the, this is also something I get asked about fairly frequently, how to get back into training after you've been out of it for a while. And fortunately, you have quite a few options, and it's not really that complicated.

There's nothing special that you really have to take into account. The only thing is the obvious is you're not going to jump back in and be squatting whatever you were squatting two years ago or something like that. But you don't have to necessarily ease your way into weightlifting again. You don't have to like my Big know, my, my bigger, leaner, stronger program, plenty of people brand new, just go right into it. Or people that have lifted in the past that are coming back, just go right into it. And of course, when you're working in, in certain rep ranges, you just work with the weights that you can lift. And you know, if that means you're benching 135 pounds for six reps, you know, uh, when

you start, so be it, no big deal. Uh, your strength is gonna, is gonna come up quickly. Um, and muscle memory is a real thing. Um, you're, you're, I mean, it's kind of a misnomer. You're, you're, you're, of course your muscles are not remembering anything, but there are changes that occur in the muscle fibers at a cellular level that just remain. Um, and they, the, when, when your body, um, then gets detrained or when, you know, when, when you lose the, the, the size and the strength that you had, there are, um, cellular changes that have stayed in the muscles. And so then when you get back into training again,

those adaptations that already occurred in the past can kick back in and the process of growing that muscle again is faster, basically is a simple way of explaining it. So you'll have that on your side as well. So you'll be able to make gains very quickly. It'll feel like newbie gains again, or even newbie gains a little bit faster than newbie gains. So yeah, I mean, there's not much special to really say on that. If you want, you can always start, you know, there's not much special to really say on that. If you want, you can always start, you know, let's say start three days a week. This is kind of something I generally just recommend with people. If you want to just go all in, five days a week, hit the weights. If you want to, you know, work out your meal plan exactly and stick to it, that's great.

If that seems a bit overwhelming for you initially, then start on a lower gradient. Start with three days a week of weightlifting. You can do cardio or not, depending on what you're trying to do with your body. And with your diet, maybe initially it's just a matter of cleaning up your diet. So maybe you're not going to count your macros or count your calories initially, but you're just going to get rid of the stuff that you know shouldn't be there. You're not going to count your macros or count your calories initially, but you're just going to get rid of the stuff that you know shouldn't be there. You're going to get rid of the junk stuff, the chips, the pretzels, the sodas, and maybe you'll knock off having the dessert or drinking a beer every night or whatever and just kind of clean up your eating. And in many cases, that will result in putting yourself into a bit of a calorie deficit. So if you want to lose weight, you'll generally start losing weight just by doing that.

And get going on that and maybe do that for your first month. Get back into the groove. Establish the habit. This is probably an article that I'll end up writing just because I'm a big believer in the power of habit. how, what kind of, um, the, well, the, the, the, what I, what I want to say is that, um, you know, I'll get asked fairly often by people like, so how are you so dedicated to your routine? Why, what do you do for motivation? Um, whether it's, you know, in the gym or with business and work and stuff. And, um, yeah, I mean, I guess I'm maybe naturally a pretty, pretty motivated person, self-motivated. And I just kind of, you know, I, I like maybe naturally a pretty motivated person, self-motivated,

and I just kind of, you know, I like to do stuff and get stuff done or whatever. But a lot of it has to do with habit. And what we do habitually is what feels most natural to us and what feels right to us in a sense. So for me, what feels, what I naturally just like am drawn toward is my routine, my habit that I've established, which is I wake up early. I wake up at 6.30. I go to the gym. I come to the office. I work until 6 o'clock-ish.

I spend some time with my family, and then I work for a couple more hours at night. And I do that. I usually take a little bit of time, take half of Saturday off. I work on Sunday. And that's just my habit that I've established. And not doing that feels off to me. I don't enjoy. That's what I enjoy.

But I got there by just doing it over and over and over. And yes, of course, there are rewards and nice things that come with it. And having the website is great and all the, uh, you know, books sold and, and getting to meet all these people and have a community building and stuff like that is awesome. But it also, uh, that's not, I'm not driven every day by like, I gotta make some more money today. I gotta get, you know, 50 more, uh, likes this hour or whatever. Um, it really is actually just a matter of like, I've established this habit of lifestyle. And I could, if I were to totally change my habits and, and, and, and make install bad habits instead, if I were to stop going to the gym every day, if I were to start

playing video games all day and not working and don't respond to people's emails and whatever, and not working and don't respond to people's emails and whatever, I would feel, I mean, I would hate it. But my point is, if I did that enough, that would come to feel kind of normal to me. And the idea of going back to what I'm doing now would be like, you know, it would feel overwhelming, like go back to all that work and all that effort and blah, blah, blah. So I'm a big believer in just establishing good habits and doing it gradiently. So, you know, if you've ever heard of the Kaizen method, it's, you know, a Japanese thing. It's just basically that philosophy of small steps and then bigger steps and bigger steps. So if you're going to get rolling again and going just like, you know, full out seems a bit tough, then start,

you know, with a few days a week lifting, clean up your diet. And then once you feel good on that, you feel like you have that habit very established, going to the gym, you don't miss any workouts, you know, you're sticking to your diet plan, even if it's kind of loose, then increase that to four days maybe in the gym, and then maybe make yourself a meal plan and start hitting exact numbers. And just take it one step at a time like that until you can really take it as far as you want. You could then bring it up to where you're exercising six days a week and you're regimented on your diet, even if you're being flexible, which of course I recommend. But you're hitting your numbers, you're eating healthy foods that give your body the micronutrients and needs and so forth and so forth. Um, it becomes very natural. So, um, yeah. And, you know,

on that note, also I'll link an article down below that I wrote on a good body weight routine. If you want to go that route, a lot of people, I understand this are a bit, um, intimidated by the gym, uh, or, you know, getting back into it or whatever, or maybe they're a little bit insecure about their body and how it looks and whatever, you can start at home. I'll link an article down below in the description, which I kind of lay out what I think is a great home routine that doesn't require very much equipment. It does require a few things if you're really going to do it, but it's definitely

cheaper than putting together like a full, you know, weightlifting setup for a home gym. So that's a great way you can get back going and build up some strength again, build up some confidence and then get in the gym. So let's move on here to how age affects your ability to get into shape. Once again, I get asked this by, usually guys are asking this question because they're worried that, you know, because they're 40 years old or 50 years old that it's too late. They can't really build muscle or can't build much muscle or won't be able to get lean or whatever. And fortunately, it's completely not true. I'll link a study down below. This would make a good article for the website as well. I'll make a note of that, but I'm going to link a study down below that was done with college age men and

middle-aged men and just showed that both can do great with weightlifting basically. And you can check out the study, but, and that's, that's in line with my experiences as well. Working with, I've worked with people, I've worked with guys even into their 70s actually, but lots and lots of guys in their 50s and 60s and lots of guys in their 40s and even 30s. Some guys will even worry like, oh, I'm 35, are my hormones destroyed? Do I have no test left in my body to even build a muscle? to even build a muscle. And no, that's not the case at all. Of course, I mean, if there is a disease or something, that's a different circumstance. But the average healthy, you know, whatever guy that's 40 years old can do great in the gym. And even if you're not healthy, even if you're overweight and not doing so great, that's fine. You can actually do very, very well in the gym. And you actually don't even need to do anything differently. The only changes that I'll make to my program,

which focuses on heavy compound lifting with some isolation work to help develop different points of the physique that just don't develop without it, like shoulders and arms and such, is I'll work with guys in their fifties and usually unless they're experienced weightlifters and they really know their body can take it. What we do is we just, uh, reduce the load on like the big compounds, like deadlifts, squats, bench press, military press. It doesn't mean you don't have to, it doesn't mean you have to avoid them.

Um, but if you're, you know, let's say you're in your fifties and you've never weight lifted before, going, jumping into heavy deadlifts is probably not a good idea. So we usually will work in, you know, the 68 or 8 to 10 or even 10 to 12, in 10 to 12 rep range initially to build up basic strength. And then in many cases, those guys that are then able to start working toward heavier weights, even if they start at 10 to 12, they'll find that they can comfortably work their way to the 68 rep range and do great. So that's really the only change. Diet doesn't need to change. Don't worry about your metabolism. It's not true that your metabolism dies with age. Somebody, a guy in his fifties that is in, you know, a normal, has a normal amount of lean mass for his age, his metabolism is really not going to be more than a couple hundred calories, maybe 300 or so calories per day slower than an average guy in his 20s. And the main reason for that is actually just the difference in lean mass.

That's it. If that 50-year-old had as much muscle as the 20-year- old, his metabolism would be, his metabolic rate would be almost identical really. So don't think that you have to, you know, eat way less or that it's going to require crazy calorie deficits or something to lose weight or anything like that. It's not. The body's extremely resilient and responds really well to exercise and proper eating regardless of age. And that applies for women as well, of course. So, you know, I'm going to link an article for this point. I'm going to link an article I wrote on, I wrote actually specifically for people that think they're hard gainers that have trouble gaining weight. And because this one, most guys that ask me this question are

on the skinnier side and they're worried that their age is going to prevent them from building any any you know real amount of lean mass to achieve the type of physique that they want so in this article i have for for hard gainers um i just go over kind of like here are the basics that you have to understand and apply to to build muscle efficiently um and you know it focuses on stuff like heavy weightlifting, eating enough, resting properly, blah, blah, blah, you'll see in the article. So, yeah, I mean, that's, those are the three things I wanted to cover. Where am I at time-wise? 30 minutes. Okay, great. That's kind of, I wanted to keep it to about 30 minutes.

And just a quick update on Legion. If you don't know what I'm talking about, that's my line of supplements that I'm releasing and they're going to be out. Um, within the next couple of weeks, I'll be able to start taking orders. We were supposed to, we wanted to do it this week. Um, but it, uh, just logistics website, mainly logistics of getting the mobile site working correctly and the e-commerce things working correctly and blah, blah, blah. But it's looking like next week or latest the week after. I'm pretty excited about that. If you're not familiar with the products at all, you can learn more about them at legionsupplements.com and what kind of makes them unique, which is they're naturally sweetened, no artificial kind of junk, no artificial unnecessary fillers, clinically effective dosages, meaning that the ingredients that are in the products, well, first the ingredients are backed by actual science. I'm not using anything in my products that doesn't have clinical research done with athletes

as well, not clinical research done with 70-year-old AIDS patients with muscle wasting or something like that. old AIDS patients with muscle wasting or something like that. So these are ingredients that have been proven to work and using them in the dosages that have been proven to work. And that's a big, important thing because if you take something that was, take an amino acid or take any molecule that was proven to improve physical performance somehow and you put in your product, which is, you know, okay, you'll find that out in this industry. But then if the studies that showed the benefits, let's say the average dosage was like five grams, but then there's 500 milligrams in your product, well, what's that really going to do? I mean, I don't even know if you can say

it's a tenth as effective. You can even expect a 10th of the results. You probably can expect nothing. So that's kind of, you know, no proprietary blends. Every product is going to be a hundred percent transparent. Basically, I'm just kind of producing the products that I have always wanted. And it's always been kind of a pain to find stuff to recommend. And, you know, I'm not even a big believer most supplements out there are garbage. And the stuff that I'm going to be selling is the stuff that I personally use and recommend that has good science behind it, simple stuff, you know, protein powder because it's convenient, creatine because it works, glutamine because it helps the body.

It doesn't help you build muscle, but it helps the body just deal with the systemic kind of stresses of exercise. That product also has another amino acid in it that has been proven to help with muscle recovery. So it is kind of a recovery, anti-overtraining kind of product. And then a pre-workout that has, you know, clinically effective dosages of mainly amino acids and a couple other molecules that improve physical performance period. I mean, that they do, if you look at the science, if you use them in large enough dosages, which I'm doing. So, you know, the, in the future, the line, of course,

we'll have more products, but I'm not going to have as many products as other companies because there aren't that many things that are worth using. So I'm going to have a whey protein that I'm launching with. I'll end up doing an egg protein, which I personally like and use. I currently use Healthy and Fits, and it's a good product. I would like to create something similar. And I'll probably end up doing a casein. Casein is also good. I use egg instead.

Casein is a slow-burning. Egg is another slow-burning. A lot of people like casein,, casein is a slow burning. Egg is another slow burning. A lot of people like casein though. It is a good protein. I'm going to end up doing a multivitamin, which of course I use. And I'm excited to have some cool stuff I want to put in my multivitamin that would be specifically for people that are exercising regularly, particularly like weightlifting regularly. And I'll probably end up doing a BCAA type product. I don't know if it's actually a BCAA product because out of the three amino acids, leucine, isoleucine, and valine, really leucine

is what you want from the BCAAs. Like when you use BCAAs, which really are only useful when you're training fasted, there's no point to be supplementing with BCAAs all day if you're eating enough protein. But if you're training fasted, which means you don't have any food in you for the last at least three to four hours or so, your insulin levels are at a baseline, then you want to have BCAAs. Particularly, really, you want the leucine because it stimulates protein synthesis, which counterbalances the accelerated protein breakdown that occurs when you're training in a fasted state. So I don't know why I've been looking through, I've, well, I found one that I recommended on my, on my website or

that I recommend on my website and I use it's, uh, it's, it's decent. It's a BCA with glutamine, but it doesn't have, you have to, to get them at the amount of, uh, leucine that you want, you have to take about 10 grams of, of most BCA products. You want three to four grams of leucine, which requires about 10 grams because the ratio of leucine to isoleucine and valine is usually just kind of low, 2-1-1, 3-1-1. So what I would do is I'm either going to do a high leucine, like an 8-1-1 or a 6-1-1, naturally sweetened, naturally flavored, which is nice. naturally sweetened, naturally flavored, which is nice. Or I'm going to do an amino product where instead of using isoleucine and valine, I would use a few other amino acids that would just be better basically than isoleucine and valine, which essentially do almost nothing. I mean,

isoleucine stimulates protein synthesis a little bit, but not very much, not like leucine. So my kind of like pre-workout amino for if you're going to be training fast, it would be three to four grams of leucine. And then I'm not totally sure yet, but I've been looking at some other aminos, two or three or maybe four others that could go with it that would just make it better than isoleucine and valine. So anyways, that's what I'm doing with the supplements. I'm pretty excited about it. The products are great. I mean, I can't wait to use them myself. Once again, if you want to learn more about that,

you can just check out the website, legionsupplements.com. Yeah, so that's it. I hope you liked this podcast. If you did, I'd appreciate it if you subscribe to my YouTube channel or subscribe to the podcast. Once again, I'm going to get better on the scheduling of it, try to get one done every two weeks or so. And leave a comment. I respond to all comments.

Shoot me a message. I respond to everything. I love hearing from everyone. Suggestions on future podcasts, whatever. If you have any questions, just write me and I'll answer. All right. Thanks again. Hey, it's Mike again. Hope you liked the podcast. If you did go ahead and subscribe. I put out new episodes every week or two, um, where I talk about all kinds of things related to health and fitness and general wellness. Also head over to my website at www.muscleforlife.com, where you'll

find not only past episodes of the podcast, but you'll also find a bunch of different articles that I've written. I release a new one almost every day, actually. I release kind of like four to six new articles a week. And you can also find my books and everything else that I'm involved in over at muscleforlife.com. All right. Thanks again. Bye.