Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - How to Prevent and Overcome Setbacks Due to Sickness, Injury, Time off, Etc.

Episode Date: January 22, 2015

In this podcast I talk about how to keep your immune system strong, how to prevent overtraining and injury, how to keep from losing motivation when you have to take time off, and more... ARTICLES RELATED TO THIS PODCAST: How to Stay in Shape When You’re Traveling: http://www.muscleforlife.com/how-to-stay-in-shape-when-youre-traveling/ How Training Frequency Can Help or Hurt Your Muscle Growth: http://www.muscleforlife.com/training-frequency/ How Much Muscle Can You Build Naturally? http://www.muscleforlife.com/how-much-muscle-can-you-build-naturally/ How to Boost Your Immune System and Beat Sickness Bugs: http://www.muscleforlife.com/boost-immune-system/ My multivitamin TRIUMPH: https://legionsupplements.com/products/supplements/triumph/ “Muscle Memory” is Real and Here’s How It Works: http://www.muscleforlife.com/muscle-memory/ My moderator page: http://www.muscleforlife.com/ask-mike-anything/ 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 my books. Seriously, though, it actually is. I make my living as a writer, so as long as I keep selling books, 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 basically teach you everything you need to know about dieting, training, and supplementation to build

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about my supplements at www.legionathletics.com. And if you like what you see and you want to buy something, use the coupon code podcast, P O D C A S T, and you'll save 10% on your order. All right. Thanks again for taking the time to listen to my podcast and let's get to the show. Hey, this is Mike from MuscleForLife.com. Thanks for stopping by the podcast. In this episode, I want to talk about setbacks, something I get emailed about fairly often and just asked how to best deal with injuries, sickness, missing time,

not only the physical side of it, not only what do you do to prevent, to kind of mitigate the damage, but also the psychological because I've also seen many people more, not so much with people I stay in touch with because I mean, I stay in touch with so many people. I guess there are a lot of people who kind of fall off that I wouldn't hear about. But I've known quite a few people that will get going, everything's going well, they'll get hurt or they'll get really sick for a couple of weeks or something and lose their motivation and just stop, just fall off the bandwagon. So what prompted this podcast is really somebody asking me, how do I kind of deal with that

stuff and stay consistent? you know, stay consistent. Um, you know, I've been, I've been lifting weights regularly for about 12 years now. Um, and of course, along the way, I've pretty much dealt with everything and I've never had a major injury, but I've had dealt with a lot of minor type injuries and strain, muscle strains and, uh, fractured my wrist playing football years ago. And, you know, missed a month. I was in a cast for a month for that. And of course, sickness and blah, blah, blah. So I thought I'd make for a good podcast. And yeah, so let's get into it. Okay, so let's start first with taking precautions to make sure that you kind of do your best to not get hurt and not get sick. Those are really the two major things that would cause you to miss a lot of time. Going out of town kind of sucks.

I mean, that's like if you have to go traveling for two or three weeks, especially if it's for business and you're not even going to go have a vacation. You just got to do what you got to do. We can talk about that as well, but that's a bit simpler in that you just try to get in. If you can just get in even one full-body workout a week or two, an upper lower type of, uh, you know, workout every week and, and be smart with your food intake. You can, you can come back, you could be gone for a month and just do that lift weights two times a week, maybe get in some cardio a little bit here and there, even if it's light walking, I don't know, just burning some energy and, uh, being smart with your, with your meal planning in your food intake. Even if that means, you know, going out and eating at restaurants and stuff where you're saving calories, you're, you're sticking to menu type of items that you can

actually quantify somewhat. They're not just like calorie, you know, just calorie, uh, black holes, who knows what's in there. Um, so there's some simple strategy you can do to, to, to make it work when you travel. But, uh, so let's talk about injuries and sickness though. So the first thing to prevent, uh, injuries is to just not get sloppy with your form. Make sure you understand proper form for each of the major exercises. Um, now I know that, you know, things can get pretty intricate, uh, with certain lifts like, uh, deadlift or, or squat or, or, you know, your bench press or military press, the big lifts that really matter. Um, you can get very, very into the technical of it and that's not bad. There are a lot of people that, uh, military press, the big lifts that really matter. You can get very, very into the technical of it.

And that's not bad. There are a lot of people that find that they just kind of like the biomechanics of it. And they like to really optimize their performance on these lifts where making small changes can actually help you progress. But the first place to start with these lifts is to know the basics, to know things with the deadlift in terms of how deep you should be starting with your hips, where the bar should be in terms of being basically up against your shin. And you want your shoulders over the bar. This is when you're squatting down into the deadlift, knowing that you don't want to be shooting your hips up and then kind of good morning, the weight up your back shouldn't be hunched when you're raising. You want your hips and you want your shoulders, you're raising at

the same rate and you want your back to be neutral. These kinds of things, that's all deadlift stuff, right? Very, very basic, simple things. Don't do the crazy hyperextension at the top of the deadlift. Um, the obvious things that, that, you know, cause, cause injury where, and in a lot of cases, I mean, you see people do these crazy things and not get hurt. I've seen people do stuff like that. The worst deadlifts you've ever seen for, uh, I saw one guy probably about a year and somehow he never got hurt in that, in that time period. I don't know. He's lucky. But it's definitely worth the time to – bodybuilding.com has a lot of good videos. Candido on – what's his name?

I forget his first name. Candido Training on YouTube has a lot of great videos. He really knows what he's talking about. Obviously, Mark Ripito's stuff, Starting Strength, and he has quite a few videos online to teach proper form on these big lifts. So just take a little bit of time and educate yourself on what proper form is. And then there's, so that's knowing it, and then there's doing it. And when you're in the gym, one of the things I even run into sometimes is, you know, obviously I understand proper form for these big lifts.

There are people out there that know more than I do, but I know enough to be strong, progress, and really I've never gotten hurt. I've never had a major injury other than like a mild muscle strain or something that got pissed off, and I had to kind of lay off it for a couple weeks. But that's also just inevitable. But we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. So anyways, back to knowing versus doing. So what I've run into is that in knowing proper form, then go in when the weights are heavy

and it comes down to the last, especially the last rep or two, sometimes you're at least, I mean, this has happened to me. I'm sure it's happened to you where your awareness of what you're doing with your body becomes skewed. You think like in your squat, for instance, not that this is a point of injury, but this is just a point of proper squatting. You think you're reaching parallel, but you're actually like two or three inches above parallel, or I try to go a little bit lower than parallel. So sometimes I'll think that I'm at the bottom of the squat, but I've actually

kind of cheated it by a couple inches. And I just, you know, didn't realize it. Although I've gotten pretty good at knowing, uh, but at first, you know, when I really, when I really started getting into heavier lifting and trying to do these exercises properly, I found it hard to, uh, to, to really know where I'm at. And that's where, um, you know, having somebody with you to video you is great. I'll post workout videos on Instagram now and then, but I also have them just so I can make sure that my form is looking good and, uh, that I am, yeah, there's nothing, there's nothing obviously wrong that I need to be, you know, working on.

So that, that really helps just have somebody video your sets every now and then, especially as you start getting into heavier and heavier weights. So that's something you got to just kind of keep in mind. And as you get, as you train more and more, you get more and more used to it, you'll kind of get a feel for when you're deadlifting. You'll just know. You'll know the position your back needs to be in. Even when it's very heavy, you'll know with relative accuracy where you're at. Are your hips rising too quickly? Are you starting to

round your back a little bit? A little bit of roundness in the upper back is not actually a problem, but it's the lower back rounding is what you don't want. Um, and I try to just keep my back more or less straight, uh, you know, more or less just neutral. Uh, sometimes when it gets, you know, when I'm down to that last rep or two, my upper back will round a little bit on the way up, but, uh, my lower back is, is always in a neutral position. So, so yeah, learn form and practice it and get used to what proper form actually feels like, uh, have, have, you know, especially if you're learning this, having seen yourself on video is great. Um, because then you can start, uh, it'll, it'll, it'll make what you're feeling in, you know,

your, your, your perception of how your body's moving. it'll then kind of connect that to what's actually happening. I experienced that a lot in playing golf and in learning golf or in the golf swing. What you think you're doing is not what you're doing on video. And if you don't put yourself on video, you'll never, I mean, it'll take forever to build. If you ever could really build a great swing, you just have a real natural talent for it, I guess, because the proper golf swing at first, when you, when, when, uh, it just is very, very unnatural feeling and it feels very strange and awkward, but that's actually how it's in what

you think you're doing is not what it looks like on camera and vice versa. So weightlifting is similar in that way. Um, so yeah, so that's the form point. Another point is don't push beyond pain or strain. So if something is hurting, uh, that's, that's not a good sign. If, if it's like lactic acid is building up and your muscles are burning because it's your last rep and maybe it's a higher rep set or something like that, of course, that's, you know, that's fine. You can push through that, but pain is something else. Pain means something is wrong. Um, you know, no pain, no gain doesn't really, it doesn't apply for literally, it's not, it's not to be applied literally. Um, so I've been able to avoid probably, you know, the, any real serious injury just by, by that alone. And, uh,

you know, may in terms of muscle strains, it's very, very rare. And the last one I can remember was I was like warming up on debt on my deadlift with like two 45 or something, nothing. Uh, so I wasn't even paying my form was, it was fine, but I was doing it quickly and just kind of like, uh, wanting to get to my heavy stuff. Just like, yeah, whatever. Two foot about blah, blah, blah, blah. And it did, I think I did like 10, uh, as a warmup set. And then my back was like, well, it doesn't feel good. And, uh, and then within five minutes, my back was, it wasn't like a major pain, but it just did. It hurt. There was, I couldn't, I couldn't deadlift anymore.

So I had to go on and do other exercises in my workout and couldn't deadlift for like two weeks because, you know, I don't know. I just hit a nerve the wrong way or just pissed off a little muscle or something. So that stuff happens. But some people, they may have, I probably could have done the exercise, but it would have been painful. And, but some people will do that, you know, try and, I understand wanting to be tough, wanting to get your workout in, do the whole thing. But that would have been an instance where it would have been stupid of me to try to push through that pain because there's a chance, a good chance, I think,

that it would have, I would have just made it even, well, I wouldn't have just made it worse, that's for sure, but that I could have, it could have then kind of reached that injury status where, you know, certain types of injuries can knock you out for, you know, even a couple months, things that don't require surgery or don't necessarily require going to a doctor, but it's just going to bother you now for a couple months, and, you know, I've run into, I guess I've never really had any shoulder problems, so that's good, because when the shoulders get messed up, that's a real problem. But I've pinched a nerve in my neck, very random, just doing side raises.

And that took me out for about a week. So the point though is work around. If something is hurting, if something is strained and it's painful, work around it. Don't just push through it. And even if that means that you can't squat for the week or you can't deadlift for the week, you know, yeah, that sucks. Uh, but it's better than, uh, turning it into something worse. And, you know, on the extreme end are,

are sometimes I'll hear from people that were, were very, uh, stubborn, I guess, with their bodies for a long period of time with weightlifting and now they have chronic issues and that's what you don't want. You don't want chronic joint issues. You don't want chronic, you know, shoulder pain, elbow pain, back pain, knee pain, that stuff sucks. Um, it's much, much, you know, take a look at the bigger picture. Okay. So what? So you, you know, you have to, you can't train optimally for a couple of weeks. Does it really matter? No. Especially when you're looking at something as a lifestyle, when you're not chasing, you know, when you don't have yourself on a clock, like you need to build this much muscle in the next six months, or you, you know, the whole thing

is a failure or it was a waste of time. Or when you start looking at the bigger picture, when you're thinking, okay, if you're brand new, you're starting off, you want to, you're going from a normal or maybe even overweight type of physique. You want to get into great shape. So let's say, let's say three years, I think that's a good initial commitment to make where you can go. You're going to, you're going to, you're going to do really, really well. You're going to go from normal to like in great shape in three years, if you just do it right. And, uh, and then from there, you know, your goals change or whatever, but it's, it's about adopting a lifestyle. So that also kind of helps with the psychological and some of the anxiety that comes along with missing, missing out on gains and

missing out on, you know, that this workout wasn't optimal or, you know, this week wasn't optimal or whatever. Okay. You know, it is what it is. And, uh, when you look at how much time, once you're better, once it's not a problem anymore, then how much time are you going to have to, you know, really give it your all and not have a problem, then I think that helps you just kind of stay patient, I guess. So another point here is make sure you're not training too frequently. I'll link an article down below on training frequency that I wrote. It's obviously a topic of kind of controversial these days because very high frequency training is very popular right now, you know, training everything two times a week or even three times a week. And I'm not against that necessarily. Um, but

in many cases, and this is, I'm speaking from experience here, working with and hearing from a lot of people that, uh, people take the, their weekly volume is just too high for, for natural weightlifters, especially when people are training with heavy weights. And you just, you can get away with it to a degree if you're in a calorie surplus and if you're genetically kind of predisposed. Like some people genetically just do better with more workout volume than others. My body's somewhere in the middle. And I've emailed with people that can get away with, it's rare, but they're out there that can get away with a lot of weekly volume, a lot more than I would be able to do. And I don't have any reason to believe they're on drugs.

I mean I ask them like, but are you on drugs? And they tell me no because they have some questions or whatever. But I'd say I'm probably representative of the average type of – genetically speaking, the average type of body for weightlifting and how much it can take. And again, I'll link an article down below. But the bottom line, what you should know is that weekly volume and intensity, meaning how many sets you're doing for each muscle group every week, and how heavy those sets are, is more important than frequency, meaning there's only so much you can do for training your chest every week, for instance. And whether you do that in one workout or whether you do that in three workouts is that is less important. What is most important is that you do, you hit that optimal, uh, that

optimal range you, that you are doing, uh, a sufficient number of, of sets every week to maximally stimulate protein, protein synthesis, um synthesis and not doing so much that where it starts to become counterproductive and you start running into overtraining issues and inadequate recovery and not so little that you are getting less out of your training than you could be. And just for the podcast listeners who you're not going to have the link to the article like the YouTube people or the YouTube viewers, basically somewhere around 70 to 80 heavy reps a week is going to be a good target to shoot for in the beginning. And by heavy, I mean anything from definitely the four to six rep, like what I focus, what I emphasize in Bigger

Leaner Stronger, that are those, of course, heavy reps. And then if you're periodizing your training, like what I talk about in the sequel, beyond bigger than you're stronger, of course, anything heavier than four to six is heavy. And I would also include the eight to ten reps in there. Although you can kind of stretch that a little bit where if you're doing, let's say, 60 reps in the four to six rep range and below, so heavier weight, you can probably add another 20 to 30 if it's eight to 10 or higher and be okay. Um, and that's every, every seven days. So again, though, this isn't, this is a very, you have to get to know your body. Um, that's a good starting, starting place. You're, you're probably not going to run into any recovery issues. That's very rare. Most people do just fine with that and are able to build strength and size, uh, you know, quickly, uh,

in, in terms of, cause you also, you have to look at like how much muscle you would like to build get in a certain period of time. Isn't really, that's fine, but you need to look at what's actually naturally attainable. And that's really what you should be shooting for. And I'll link an article down below where I talk about how much muscle you can build naturally, but that's what you really want to be judging your progress against. And basically what it boils down to is first year, 20 to 25 pounds of muscle. That's your first year of weightlifting. That's a good year. Second year, half that, you know, let's say, let's say 12 on the high end, 15 on the low end, 10. And then the third year, about half that somewhere between five and eight or five and seven. And then year four and

beyond is about half that. So about three to four pounds max every year. So when you start looking at it that way, you now have some objective benchmarks that you can measure your progress against. And, and the, the point is, you know, whatever program you're doing, like if you're doing one of my programs or you're doing someone else's program or whatever, if it's delivering that, if that, if you're gaining about those numbers each year and you're gaining strength, then don't change anything because that's, that's perfect. That's exactly what you want. I guess the only other thing to consider would be physique development because, um, for instance, programs like starting strength and strong lifts, great programs. Um, I recommend them all the time. And, uh, but there is, I think they're better suited for people new

to weightlifting, um, because they are full body and the emphasis becomes lower body. When you, when you look at the physiques of people that have done strong lifts or five by five for long periods of time, you're generally going to see a very developed, big lower body, big legs, big butt. And, and I wouldn't say underdeveloped upper body, but relatively speaking, underdeveloped. You're going to see smaller chests. You're going to see smaller arms, smaller shoulders. And that's basically the opposite of what most guys want. We want developed legs. We don't want to have chicken legs, but we are more concerned with our upper bodies for good reasons. Because one uh, an impressive upper

body takes a lot longer than lower body. Your legs are your biggest muscle group in your body. You can blast them with heavy weights. They respond very, very well. They, I mean, I, I, I would be hard pressed to think, I don't know if I've, if I come across people it's with, uh, trouble building their lower body. I mean, it's very rare. I can't even think of the last time I had someone complain about their legs not growing quickly enough. And that's why in Bigger Leaner Stronger and really in all of my stuff, especially in the second edition, which is coming out soon, which is all the same principles but some little tweaks to the program based on feedback and reorganized and new, new information added to clarify questions. I got asked a lot and stuff, um, that the program, a little change is it's leaving a little bit more emphasis on, on the upper body, because

one of the things that questions that I would get from a lot of people is, you know, how can they bring their chest up quicker? How can they bring their shoulders up quicker? Um, and you can bring up quicker by increasing the weekly volume a little bit. And again, there's only so much you can do and you have to be patient. You have to, it takes time to build the type of upper body that most guys want. It's probably about a three year, three to five years, depending on how developed they want to be. But in my experience, most guys are pretty happy around the three year.

If they hit that point at two-year, then they're ahead of the curve. And if they get there in one year, then, I mean, their standards are, either they started with, you know, a good base or they have incredible genetics or they're not looking to be that, you know, big or that defined or whatever. Yeah, that's the frequency point is just, you have to, you have just you have to, if you try to push it too far, you are going to set yourself up for injury just because your body's not going to be able to adequately recover. And you also set yourself up for impaired immunity as well, where for the same reason, overtraining, it just takes a hit, it brings down your immune system,

so you get sick more often. Another point here is staying lean is better for your immune system so you get sick more often. Another point here is staying lean is better for your immune system. The more overweight you get, the more impaired your immune system becomes. So that's just a part of being healthy is being lean. You don't have to be shredded. You have to be super lean, but guys hanging out somewhere between 10 and 15% or 10 and 16, maybe 17% is a good goal. Or if you want to maintain lower, of course you can. Um, I've kind of, I had, I mean, it was just a little like almost like a, you know, we'll experiment. I've kind of run on myself over the last six months or so, just kind of maintaining seven to 8% going up a little bit, going down a little bit just to see where my body,

what, how it would respond. My body is generally speaking, very resilient. I don't get sick easily. I don't over-train easily. I don't need a lot of sleep. I generally, I just feel good, like basically all the time, basically I always have good energy levels. And so I thought it'd be a good test on my body to see like what I could get away with. I tried maintaining about 6% for a little bit. Didn't feel good after a few weeks of it. I couldn't eat very much food, about 24, 2,500 calories a day. My training wasn't very good. Not only was my strength just completely stuck, but I didn't have much energy in the gym. It's just not good workouts. So I got a little bit fatter. I went up to, I'm probably about 8% right now, somewhere between 7% and 8%. It's kind of hard when you start getting, when you start getting down to 8%, 7%, um, without a DEXA scan, you did,

even with a good caliper, um, you don't, it's, you know, it could be, you're holding a little bit of water, a little extra water one day. And you see that when you start getting leaner. Um, anyway, so at this body fat percentage, uh, I'm good. Like my body feels totally fine. Um, my, my energy is higher in my workouts and you know, I know that I can stay here and, uh, you know, I don't get sick. I don't, I feel totally fine. So part of, uh, part of it is also, this is also something where you need to learn your body. Um, I had posted about, uh, body fat set point recently, kind of interesting concept, probably something I'll talk about on a podcast.

Maybe I'll get somebody on the podcast that would know a bit more about it and have a bit more experience. But the concept is that your body has a certain body fat range that it naturally kind of wants to stay in. And this would be regulated by your hunger and your satiety hormones, meaning that if you just kind of eat according to feel and you avoid extremely calorie-dense foods or eating unprocessed foods, things that are going to fill you up for a moderate amount of calories, that your body fat is going to kind of hang out in a certain range and your body is going to function optimally in a certain range. And the science is kind of ambiguous, but there's definitely something to it. I mean, it's something I've experienced with my body and a lot of other people in this industry that have a lot of experience,

you know, working with competitors and stuff have talked about the same thing. Like I think Lane Norton talked about it somewhere, I remember, and a few other people. But the question is, can you change it? So we definitely know that some people are just naturally leaner than others. And that's a simple way of looking at body fat at that point. But can you change that? Can you change your body's default? Really, of course, we wouldn't want to raise it. We'd want to lower it. Can you lower your body's default body fat percentage? And what I've seen with my body is since I've

been at this low level of body fat for about six months or so, I've just noticed that my body tends to stay here. Even if I overeat a bit over the holidays, I ate quite a bit of food and, uh, in a couple of meals where I was like, I definitely, I, I gained max fat. Like in that meal, it was, you know, 10,000 calories. How much fat can I gain from that? That's how like the most the body could synthesize over the next, whatever. Yeah. I'm gaining all of it. But strangely enough, within two days, my, uh, my weight was exactly the same and I looked exactly the same. So a couple of things, I was just like, what? Uh, but, and that's a bit of an extreme example, but I've noticed

before where, you know, I'll do like a, let's say a bigger type of cheat meal on a Friday or something like that. And then maybe another one on Saturday or, um, and just notice that my body fat doesn't change that much. Or if it does, it's like, I can be very fluid with my diet where I can almost just play it by my scale and my mirror. Cause I'm really in a maintenance mode now. Um, I'm not interested in bulking. I'm not interested. I'm not cutting. Obviously I'm pretty lean. I don't have any reason to get really, really lean. I just do that really for a photo shoot or something. Um, so I'm kind of just like wanting to maintain where I'm at. And I figured that if I'm going to do that, this might, this is a good excuse to, uh, see what I can do

with my diet and see how different things affect my body. And, uh, so this is a good excuse to, uh, see what I can do with my diet and see how different things affect my body. And, uh, so this is one of the things like I still, I still track my macros. I still, you know, I'm not just all over the place, but I'm intentionally kind of overeating and kind of stretching my calories a little bit, seeing what I can do. And, uh, and I found that, yeah, if I, if I overeat for a couple of days, I can just under eat for a couple of days and undo it. And not that that's anything magical or whatever, but I've just noticed that my body tends to kind of hang out in this body fat percentage. Almost like it feels like it would take a bit of an effort now for me to get fatter. Like I'd have to really consciously overeat for probably,

I don't know, four to five, maybe six, seven days even before I really start to see a difference. Uh, when, when I, when water comes out, um, cause remember when you go and eat, uh, like I made some pasta the other day, um, I've been playing around some stroganoff recipes, trying to make my perfect stroganoff basically. And I oversalted it, um, because I'd used prosciutto and, uh, I forgot how salty prosciutto is. So it was, it was extremely salty, almost like it was, it was edible, but I was disappointed. But I mean, the next day I was probably holding two pounds of water. I had a film over, I could see it on my stomach and, you know, my vascularity on my abs was, was noticeably less vascularity in my arms and stuff.

And so remember that, that when you are eating, you know, if you're cheating or whatever, I wasn't even cheating, but it was just too much salt, that, you know, that happens. With good food comes salt. You go out to a restaurant, the standard, like, operating procedure in restaurants is just salt the shit out of everything. Every meal as salty as it can be before it's, you know, just overly, overly, no question too, too salty. Um, so you're going to always look a little bit fatter right after, but once the two days or so, and your, your sodium potassium levels are balanced again, that water comes out and then you can really see, you know, is there any damage done? So long story short, I just noticed that once that, once the water, once the bloat kind of goes away, um, overfeeding,

it, it doesn't, it seems like my metabolism, um, is, I don't, I don't know if it's a, I wouldn't say it's a flexibility issue. Uh, I wouldn't say, I would just say that, um, issue. I wouldn't say, I would just say that for, for whatever reason, my, it seems like my, my, my BMR kind of, or my TDE, it's really be my BMR or somehow coming down to my total daily, total daily energy expenditure. It's, it just, it can accommodate more room, I guess is how it seems. So anyways, interesting subject, something I have to look into further before I really kind of give a definitive, you know, position on it or whatever. Um, but it's something that you can look forward to cause you may have the same experience where you get lean, you stay there for a while and that kind of just now becomes your body's new normal. So another point is making sure that you're getting your majority of your calories from

nutrients, nutrient dense foods. Um, if you're familiar with my work, you know that my thoughts on clean eating are that it has a good heart, the whole clean eating thing, but the dogma of it gets a bit ridiculous and it can be counterproductive because restrictive dieting does not work. This has been studied a million times, it's just a known thing. The more restrictive a diet is, the more unlikely you are to be able to stick to it. And definitely the more unlikely you are to be able to turn into a lifestyle, which is really how you need to look at dieting, not as a, some tool or that you use here and there or some punishment or whatever. It's a, it's a way of, it's a way of life. It's meaning that like, it's your, it's, it's how you go about eating, not to necessarily just lose fat or build muscle, but also it incorporates your health.

And it's something that you, I mean, your diet is going to be good, bad, decent, whatever. It's going to be something, and you need to be thinking with that and know what makes a good diet or a quote-unquote healthy diet and what makes a bad or unhealthy diet. And this is something I'm going to be writing an article on, just on this subject of healthy dieting. What is a healthy diet and what makes a bad or unhealthy diet. And this is something I'm going to be writing an article on just, just on this subject of healthy dieting. What is a healthy diet anyway? Balanced dieting, these, these things get thrown around, but really kind of defining what these things are and giving a, a kind of like a goal to shoot for and something that's sustainable. So with that, basically getting the majority of your calories from nutrient-dense foods, which are going to be generally unprocessed foods, you know, stuff that you prepare yourself, not packaged stuff or microwave stuff or whatever, that is the way to go. And this,

for many different reasons, but relevant to this podcast, it's the way to go because it keeps your immune system up. So when your body is getting all the micronutrients that it needs, the immune system runs better and you get sick less often. And it's really that simple. So that is something that helps you stay in the gym for longer periods of time and not miss time due to sickness. So managing stress levels is also important. The more chronically stressed you are, the more impaired your immune system is. This has also been studied and proven. Um, so doing things that, uh, de-stress you and, you know, again, this is another thing I've kind of laid out my, my content calendar for the year. So this is another subject I'm going to be writing on just how to relax and kind of de-stress without

alcohol, which she had a little bit of alcohol here and there. It's not a big deal, but, um, if you start becoming dependent on it, then it definitely becomes a big deal. Um, so, so yeah, a little bit of alcohol here and there is not a big deal, but if you start becoming dependent on it, then it definitely becomes a big deal. So yeah, not being overly stressed because that also impairs immune function and then of course just makes life kind of awful. Getting enough sleep is very important for both for recovery purposes, like muscle recovery, recovery from your workouts and keeping your immune system up. Most people are going to need probably seven hours or so, seven, seven and a half hours. And that's really what you want to be shooting for. Um, if you are like me, I sleep about six hours on average, uh, really no more than six and a half. Sometimes I'll do six and a half on the weekends, but recently, uh, my body has just kind of been programmed, I guess. I just wake up. It doesn't matter if I set an alarm or not.

On Saturday morning, I'll wake up at 6.30 or 6.15, and I'm awake. And I don't go to bed late, though. I'm in bed by, you know, 11.45. I'm getting old now. So, you know, I do my normal thing where I'm getting my six hours by the time I'm asleep and whatever. And I just, that's when I wake up. So for me, uh, there are no, I don't have any, any, any issues with like, you know, symptoms of sleep deprivation and stuff. So, uh, but the point is that, you know, how much body, how much sleep your body needs and that you get it, you know, it doesn't have to be every night. Always. If you, you know,

I slept four hours last night, not even cause I wanted to, I just, I woke up after about four hours and I thought I was like, cause I'm in like a half st. I just, I woke up after about four hours and I thought I was like, cause I'm in like a half stupor because I just woke up after four hours of sleep. And I had looked at my clock and I thought I had to get up in like 15 minutes for some reason. So I was laying there like, well, okay. I don't know. I guess I'm just tired today, but whatever. I got to get going. And, uh, and then after a little while I was like, wait a minute, what? And I looked and it was not even five o'clock yet. And then I had trouble falling back asleep.

So anyway, if you, you know, whatever, that happens and I'm a little bit tired today and it just is what it is. But on a day-to-day basis, you want to make sure that you're getting enough sleep. And then last but not least, there are some supplements that you can take that help with recovery and immunity. Things like creatine, L-carnitine, L-tartrate are great for muscle recovery, recovering from workouts, muscle soreness, um, vitamin C, ginseng, fish oil, vitamin D, echinacea, zinc, garlic extract. And there are a few others. I'll link an article down below where I kind of talk about, um, preventing sickness and you can, you can see, you know,

links, you can get links to these supplements and a couple others. And I take quite a few of them. I don't take echinacea every day. I only take echinacea if I'm around sick people or if I get sick. But vitamin D, I take about 5,000 IUs a day. Ginseng, I don't remember how much it is. It's two pills. It's just the dosage used in studies. I take Panax ginseng.

Vitamin C is in my multivitamin, which I'll link down below if you're interested in it. I take fish oil. Nordic Naturals is the name of the brand. I'm going to be doing my own fish oil, actually, which I'm excited about because there are a couple of cool other compounds and molecules that I want to put into it. Aged garlic extract and zinc are both in my multivitamins. So, you know, I get all these things every day and it definitely makes a difference in improved immunity. I get sick maybe once a year and max twice. And it's usually very mild. Like I just work through it and I just don't go to the gym basically, but I don't get very sick.

And it's partially because, I mean, obviously I'm doing a lot of things that, um, that build up my immune system, but the supplementing definitely helps. So all of that, so that's all kind of preventative stuff. And then there's just, uh, we'll just quickly talk about when something does happen because along the way, you know, you're probably going to strain a muscle or you're going to get sick. Things are going to happen where you're going to miss time and it's going to be annoying. And the, the, for me, the big thing is just not sweating it. Like one, knowing that you can, you can not lift weights for probably a good two to three weeks before you're really going to lose any muscle. And as long as you just keep your protein intake up and, uh, that's really it. You could just sit there and do nothing for a couple weeks and you're

really not going to lose much muscle. Yes, your muscles are going to look smaller. You know, they're not going to be storing as much glycogen water because you're not using them. And you're going to lose strength, at least to some degree. You're going to lose a little bit depending on how you're training actually. But if you're training with heavy compound weights, you're not going to come back just as strong after two or three weeks off. You'll probably have lost a couple reps. You're going to get very sore from those first workouts back, but you'll be right back to normal, you know, probably within a week or so. And even if you're off, let's say you miss two months and you lose 10 pounds of muscle or something. Well, muscle memory is very real. I wrote an article about it, which I'll link down below. And basically

what it boils down to is you're going to regain that muscle very, very quickly, almost as if you're on steroids. You're going to gain that muscle back twice as fast as it took you to build it in the first place. So I had mentioned earlier in this podcast that I fractured my wrist playing football years ago, and I was in a forearm cast for like six weeks. And I was working out in the beginning. I was doing what i could do like doing

my legs and just doing i tried not to do one arm stuff because that would just kind of cause a problem so it was mainly just a lot of leg stuff and uh trying to do cardio and then my cast started it smelled so bad it was disgusting so i just had to stop i was like this is too gross so i just didn't i didn't work out for weeks and weeks and when I got my cast off my it was on my left arm my left arm was tiny compared to my right it looked hilarious I should probably try to find those but I think I have pictures because it was so funny I was taking pictures of it I looked it looked bizarre um so I thought like I'm gonna look this is gonna be ridiculous this is gonna take six months to ever look normal again and so I was was like, whatever, in the gym, people looking at me because it looked dumb.

But it was like, I think about two months or so. And then my left arm was back to normal in terms of size. I had gained back all the muscle I had lost sitting in a cast for six weeks and completely immobile. So it wasn't like it was a full cast. I couldn't even move my arm. So it's like maximum atrophy basically. And, uh, and now strangely enough, my left arm is a little bit bigger than my right arm. So whatever that means, I don't know. Um, but my left forearm is a little bit smaller than my right forearm. I'd never, so who knows? But the point is no matter how bad, it doesn't matter how bad it is when you've built it once you're going to build it back very quickly so you can kind of you know that that is is at least a little bit comforting when you're sitting there like you know you don't have to one you

don't have to think that you're just shriveling away because you haven't lifted in three days or something like that or even three weeks like yeah you're going to lose some muscle after probably about three weeks but even then it's like your body don't necessarily think that because you look a lot smaller, you've lost a lot of actual muscle fiber. Uh, remember that, that size, the fluid that's stored in the muscles plays a big role in the visual size. And when you're working out regularly, your muscles are basically always full of that fluid. Um, and when you're not, then it deflates in a sense. So, uh, you're not shrinking and shriveling away if you haven't lifted in a couple of weeks and anything you do lose, you can gain back quickly. And then there's also something to be said just for the psychological

of when you're, when you're in a situation that, that you, you know, it was annoying or aggravating or painful, whatever time seems to go by very slowly. And, and all you want to do is is you know get out of it and change it and whatever and uh and then once you're out of the situation all of a sudden your mood completely flips and then you're happy again and it's as if it never happened so just remember that you can endure you know we we can endure a lot more than losing some muscle because we you know hurt something or got sick for a few weeks. And just being patient and knowing that once you're back, you're going to be excited again. And yeah, in the beginning, it sucks to get back in there and your workouts are tough, but you

immediately feel so much better physically. And that also then you feel better mentally and emotionally. And then everything that you went through getting there, you know, is as if it didn't even matter anymore. I mean, I email with so many people that went through some pretty intense stuff, ranging from, you know, car accidents, being hospitalized for long periods of time to pretty serious disease issues and whatever. And, you know, they had to go through some shit for maybe even a year in some cases. And now though, now that they're back exercising and doing their thing, they're totally happy and totally excited to get going again. So it's just something to keep in mind that the psychological is kind of under your control,

especially again if you look at the bigger picture. And once you're back rolling again, you're going to feel great, and that really becomes the focus, not so much your condition now. One other thing that I think is worth mentioning is I get asked it a fair amount, actually, is should you exercise when you're sick? And, again, the article I linked down below on sickness in general and boosting the immune system talks about this, but the simple answer is no. It's better.

Like light exercise has been shown to improve immunity and can help you overcome, uh, you know, like a cold or something. I think that's actually what the study was. It was with colds. Um, and so light exercise, if you want to do some light cardio, that's fine. Like some walking, uh, but nothing intense. You don't, you don't want to be doing high intensity interval. Trust me. I've tried this stuff too, because I had known about the research before, but I don't care, whatever. It's just a cold. I'm going to lift.

I'm going to do everything normal, and it just gets worse and drags out, and the workouts suck. It's just not worth it. So now if I get a cold or I get something, I don't lift. I'll do some light cardio. Normally, all my cardio is high intensity because you just get more bang for your buck, I have no reason to do low intensity cardio. But if I'm sick, I'll do, you know, maybe 20 minutes or so of like low intensity biking or walking or something like that. No lifting and really just kind of focus on rest and taking the supplements that I, that I mentioned earlier and just get better. And, uh, you know, I'll wait until, you know, there's that point where, you know, you're not sick anymore. Like,

you know, your body has finally beat it, even though your symptoms maybe are not totally gone. Like you might still have a runny nose or you might still feel a little bit, but you know, like, I don't know. I used to have that with my body. There's a point where I know like, okay, it's not going to get worse now. Like whatever the virus or the bacteria is, it's, it's defeated and I can get back in the gym and you know, I don't feel a hundred percent yet, but it's not gonna, I'm not gonna go backward. Uh, whereas before I would try somewhere in the middle where like, I'd still feel sick and I know that my body hasn't beaten the, beaten the bug yet, but I'll be like, eh, I should be okay. Right. And then go in the gym and then get sicker and like, right. You know, basically I lose a day or two of, of, uh, recovery in terms of getting better

because I went into the gym too early. So I recommend that you just don't make the same mistakes and just, you know, take my word on it and just learn the lesson that I learned. And then if you strain something, if you injure something, um, work around it, there are, you know, unless it's a very serious injury, you can always work around. I've had, like I said, I've strained my lower back before. So then no deadlifting. Um, I've strained little muscles, not even serious, maybe strained isn't even the word. Just I've had muscles kind of bother me. Like I've had my neck just kind of get tight and, uh, and just from, from, I don't know, heavy pressing, just from doing, just doing what we do, it, it, it beats up the body. And, um,

you know, in terms of preventative for that, there's the stuff we talked about earlier, but I also get a massage every week, which, uh, not, not, not really to feel good. I mean, some of it feels good, but a lot of it is more just kind of like, she doesn't go super deep, but, um, I'm more interested in her like finding areas that are, it's not going to feel good and, uh, you know, preventing it from, from getting worse basically. So I found that helps. I found that going to a chiropractor once every few months helps, um, obviously chiropractic, uh, care in general is a bit controversial, but, um, I've even looked into a bit of the science of it cause I was kind of curious.

And, um, from what I've read, it seems that there's, there's good evidence that, um, of curious. And, um, from what I've read, it seems that there's, there's good evidence that, um, if you're that the, the, the spinal manipulation aspect of, of chiropractic is, uh, beneficial if you have somebody that knows what they're doing. And, you know, if you have something, uh, subluxations in your spine, that getting those straightened out can help nerve flow and stuff. And so I found that just going to the chiropractor every few months, uh, helps something, you know, there's a point where like my neck will just feel kind of locked up or, uh, I'll feel it maybe in my hips or something like that. And then there's a chiropractor around here that I like. And, uh, he, he's good and he, you know, he doesn't try to sell me any

weird supplements or he doesn't try to sell me anything. He just, he knows I come in, he checks me out. Oh, okay. This is what it is. Fix it and then move on and do that every few months. So that, that helps as well. And then, so yes, back to finally just working around things is really the key. So if a muscle is, if it's starting to bother you and it's starting to become a problem, don't, don't push through it. You really have to work around it. And I had some, like recently I was doing some really heavy incline pressing and nothing hurts. It's just my neck started to get stiffer and I would just kind of feel like I just would

feel there would be a muscle here that would just not feel good. And each week it wasn't getting better. It wasn't necessarily getting worse. It was just kind of bothering me. And then it'd get a little bit worse. So eventually I was like, okay, well, I just need to take my own advice here and back off on the, it was barbell incline pressing in particular. So back off the heavy barbell incline pressing for a couple weeks, did that, and now I'm fine again.

Things like that go – they seem obvious, but they really matter in the long run where if I would have just continued pushing through it, I probably would have ended up just pissing off the muscle enough where I would have been forced to stop. And then it takes longer to get better. And which means that, um, you know, if that's, if that's you and if it's, uh, you know, you're, you're working on building up your, your chest, then those incline presses are an important aspect of that. So if you can't incline press for six weeks, because you didn't really pay attention to, you know, what was going on and you didn't back off, then that means that you are, I wouldn't say you lost six weeks, but you definitely lost some progress. And if that happens too frequently, then as you can imagine, it adds up in terms of lost gains. So that's everything that I wanted to go over on the subject. I hope you enjoyed

the podcast. Next week, I'm going to swing back around to do over on the subject. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Next week, I'm going to swing back around to do a Q&A because I have some new questions, some good stuff that I want to answer in my Google moderator, which I will link down below in the description as well. So you can go check that out. And yeah, see you next week. 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 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.