Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - How Training Frequency Relates to Gains and How to Beat Cravings

Episode Date: December 23, 2014

In this podcast, I talk about training frequency and why VOLUME and INTENSITY are more important for long-term gains, and some of the common misbeliefs about food cravings and the easiest way to overcome them (19:23). 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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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, and in this podcast, I'm going to talk about workout frequency and how it relates to making gains, building strength and building muscle and also food cravings and what some of the research says on what cravings actually like where they come from and then what we can do about it so it doesn't ruin our diets.

So let's just get right into it. Let's first talk about workout frequency, because this is a pretty popular subject these days. A lot of people think that the only way that you can make any gains is by training every muscle group in your body multiple times per week. And by training multiple times per week, I mean like you would directly train that muscle group multiple times per week. Like not, for instance, for instance, you might perform your deadlifts on your pull day or back day. Deadlifts, though, train more than your back. They also train your legs.

They also train your arms. But I mean you would have two or even three pull days every seven days, two or three push and two or three legs and so forth. seven days, two or three push, and two or three legs, and so forth. And what is now kind of called the bro split or whatever, a typical type of bodybuilding split where you'd have a chest day, a back day, a shoulders day, arms day, legs day, and so forth. A lot of people either think or have heard that you can't make gains on that type of program and that you have to be training everything a couple times a week or that you make much better gains on training

everything a couple times a week. So let's just talk about that quickly. So first is, let's talk about what the problem is with a lot of typical type of bodybuilding programs that have that normal or traditional type of one major muscle group per day type of approach. The problem is, first off, a lot of those workouts are much too high volume. You're performing way too many sets and way too many reps in one workout for one muscle group just for what you're doing in that workout. So if you're looking at it in a So there's only, when you look at, you know, if you're looking at it in a seven day, uh, view, you can only perform so many reps. You know, you only

can break a muscle down so much in that time, or you start to overtrain. Um, and that relates to training intensity, of course. So the heavier weight that you're lifting, the less volume you have to be doing in those workouts. So what a lot of the traditional type of bodybuilding routines that you'll find in magazines and such where they kind of, the big mistake that they make or the big problem with those routines is that it's just way too high volume. So a lot of times it is higher rep. A lot of times you're not even lifting that heavy weight, but you're doing 25, 30 sets in a workout for one muscle group for chest or whatever in, you know, just that, without one day, it's just too much. You will, uh, what you want to be doing in your workouts is, um, I mean, it's hard to say exactly what this point would be, but ideally you're causing just enough muscle damage and just enough progressive overload to maximize the resulting protein synthesis, the resulting muscle growth and kind of regrowth process.

You want to maximize that without, you know, you ideally would stop your workout at that point, basically. So I'm going to be actually talk more about this in my upcoming book, which is coming out in about a week. I dive more into the science of this, but there's a really good research review that I, that I talk about in the book that shows that when you have higher intensity training, when you're lifting heavier weights, that somewhere around probably 60 to 70, I mean, they say about 45 to 60 reps, but in my experience, it's probably about on the upper end of that 60 reps or so per workout seems to be the optimal amount of reps for one muscle group that you're training in one workout.

You start going beyond that, and it becomes a matter of diminishing returns, basically. You could sit in the gym for another hour, but you're not going to build, you know, double the muscle resulting from a two-hour workout as you would from a one-hour workout. So that's one of the major problems with the typical, you know, chest, back, shoulders, arms, that type of approach. Way too high volume. And the other problem is a lot of those workouts focus on isolation exercises. So, you know, for your chest day, maybe it involves a little bench pressing, but, you know, you might be on the pec deck machine and then you're going to be over doing flies and you're going to be doing cable work and stuff. And that type, those types of exercises just aren't nearly as effective

as focusing on compound weightlifting exercises like, you know, the barbell bench press, especially the incline bench press is particularly important. If you want to build a full chest that doesn't have that weird, like when you don't have any upper chest, you know, so the upper chest is flat and then it comes down and you have this big, you know, bottom chest that kind of pops out. That's from doing too much flat and too much decline and not enough incline basically. So incline is really what you want to emphasize because of course it trains pec major, but there's also the pectoralis clavicular, clavicular pectoralis, I believe it's called. It's kind of a strip of muscle that runs across

the top here. That is your upper chest. It's a real muscle and it just doesn't get activated nearly as well with flat pressing as it does with incline pressing. And decline pressing basically doesn't act, I mean it activates it a little bit, but it's just not, decline I think has no place in the ingest routine really. It's just reduced range of motion. That alone is a reason not to do it in my opinion. So you have, you know, a focus on isolation exercises instead of compound exercises, which are already less efficient in terms of building muscle and strength.

But there's also another downside to that is with compound exercises, for instance, when you're doing a lot of pressing, you're also training your shoulders. They're a secondary muscle group that's getting trained, but they are getting trained. I mean, you've experienced this, I'm sure. you start bench pressing heavy for the first time correctly, regularly, every week, your, uh, interior, your front deltoids get pretty sore. They're getting trained. Um, so then when you come, let's say that like you're doing your chest work on Monday and your, your shoulders are getting trained as a result of it. And then you're doing shoulders work where you're focusing on your shoulders on, let's say, Wednesday.

And that's where you'd be doing your military pressing and maybe your side raises. And it's not that all isolation exercises are bad, but the first exercise that you should be doing, the first one or two exercises of basically every workout should be compound exercise and they should be heavy. You want to save your higher rep, your isolation stuff, you're doing that should be later in your workouts. But anyway, so then you're training your shoulders again, let's say on Wednesday. So they actually are getting trained again. Now they're just, the muscle group is being directly trained. And then let's say you have an arms day on Thursday, where for me, this is my arms day always includes close grip bench press.

I think it's just a great, just one of the great tricep builders, but also it is now training your push again, right? So like in my Bigger, Leaner, Stronger program, for instance, it is, it's a five-day program, chest, back, shoulders, arms, legs. But the reason why people get such great results on it, and you can see that in the success stories on my website, and I have scores of them now, people, you know, guys brand new to weightlifting, gaining 20, 25 pounds of muscle in their first year and getting leaner. I have people that have been weightlifting like me before I started training this way. I lifted for about six, seven years and maybe I

put on 25 pounds of muscle in that time period. And that's terrible for six or seven years of consistent weightlifting. And I, and I had done twice a week splits and I had done, I'd done pretty much every program you could ever imagine now. And I did a lot of things wrong. Obviously, that's why I didn't make good gains. But, um, I have people that are in a similar boat and they've been weightlifting for quite some time, but they've never really emphasized heavy compound weightlifting. And their splits were messed up. Usually they're the, you know, the bodybuilder magazine type splits, very high volume, tons of isolation, you know, even, even body weight stuff, you know, doing a bunch of pushups and stuff on chest days, pretty much just much just a waste of time unless you need to get better pushups, unless, you know, for

maybe you're in the army or something and you need to pass your PT test. Okay, fine. But if you're just trying to build muscle and strength, pushups are a waste of time. So I have those people that then come to, you know, my bigger than your stronger program and then do great. And they're, they're surprised that that kind of split can work for them. Well, what, what you're also seeing can work for them. Well, what you're also seeing is that then like, okay, so you're deadlifting on your back day starts with deadlifts,

right? Deadlifts don't just train your back. They also do train your arms. They also train your legs, especially when you're deadlifting heavy. So then when you're training arms again, a few days later, they are getting trained again in the, you know, in this seven day cycle. Then when you train legs, now your legs are getting trained again in the, you know, in this seven day cycle. And when you train legs, now your legs are getting trained again and that's your, you know, they're being focused on. Um, so the, the common argument on even that would probably be made against that approach is just that you'll do even better. Like, okay, fine. You can make gains on that. And it's pretty much just, you just go look at the success stories, it works. But some people would say, well, you'll do even better by actually directly training each muscle group, not as a secondary, not a primary and a secondary type approach, but like primary,

primary, like you need to be deadlifting twice a week, you need to be squatting, you know, well, basically two back workouts a week, two legs workouts a week, two upper body workouts a week, push and stuff and so forth. And usually what people will talk about when they're saying this is they'll talk about some research that has shown that protein synthesis rates tend to peak at about, I think it was about 36 hours or so after a workout. And then they decline after that. So the argument is, well, then what you want to be doing is you want to be working out and then you kind of ride that as protein synthesis rates rise and then they start to come back down and you bump them back up. And in theory, it makes sense. The study that's most commonly cited that I've seen in regards to that is, if I remember correctly, it was like elbow extensions performed in like a couple sets of 10 reps or something like that. So I'm not sure if we can exactly extrapolate that to like, uh, an intense leg

workout where you're performing like, let's say 12 heavy sets, heavy squats, hack squats, leg press lunges. You know, I don't know if we can exactly say, well, because, you know, with the elbow extensions at 10 reps or whatever, protein synthesis rates did this, then it will be the same with, you know, a big major compound exercise performed for a lot more sets with a lot more weight. Not exactly sure. I haven't seen any research, you know, on protein synthesis rates done with that type of workout. So if I, if you know of something that, that if you know, a study where they actually show that, then, you know, put it in the comments, I'd actually be curious to see it. So that said, let's just assume that's true. Let's say somewhere around, you know, at the end of by day three or so protein synthesis rates have pretty much come

back to normal. You're no longer building muscle as a result of the previous workout. What you don't commonly hear about with those two a week type splits is the muscle recovery side of things. And once again, I'll be going more into the science of this in my next book. And I'll also be writing an article on this, which will kind of promote the book, but I'm going to be talking about this and linking all the studies and stuff. But when you look at research conducted with natural weightlifters, not elderly people either, but young college-aged weightlifters, and then also in some of the research that I referenced in the book, it includes college-aged men and then also middle-aged men.

And you look at muscle recovery times. On average, when you are working out with any sort of volume and intensity, you're looking probably about five days that it actually takes for muscles to fully recover and repair the damage that occurred in that workout and recover all their strength. And this is where, you know, I've emailed with and spoken with a lot of people that have done these two-week programs. I've also done them myself. And what I ran into is what every single person that I've emailed with has also run into, and that's overtraining. That is, over time, even trying to work in deloads and trying to work around it, it becomes, the workouts become progressively harder and harder and harder to do, and the kind of, you know, those overtraining symptoms of almost like, I mean, I wouldn't, I never got, I wouldn't say chronic fatigue, but I would become

more and more fatigued over fatigue, but I would become more and more fatigued over time. Workouts would get harder and harder. My sleep started to get messed up. I started to not look forward to my workouts, just kind of classic overtraining type symptoms would set in. And every natural weightlifter that I've spoken to that have tried different types of programs where like, whether it be, you know, uh, uh, where you have a power day and then a high perfect race, you have like a low rep, let's say lower body, and then a high rep, lower body, uh, low rep, upper high rep, upper. And you're, and you're, you know, alternating between those and where you're doing, um, them twice every seven days or, or just like a push,

pull legs, rest, push, pull legs, rest,s-rest, that type of approach, they have run into overtraining issues. The people that have done well on them are people that are on drugs that are, you know, people email me and they're open about it, and I'll ask them sometimes if they're on that type of program, if they're on any kind of drugs. And the people that have done the best in those programs are on drugs. And that makes sense because when you're on drugs, your protein synthesis rates are much higher anyway, your body can recover much faster. You know, I would argue you're probably better off training that way. If you're on drugs, it actually would make sense as a natural weightlifter. I'm not that you can't make it work,

but, uh, volume and intensity is much more important than frequency when, when you're a natural weightlifter. Now that's, you know, where you're training them. If you're training a muscle group every once, every five to seven days as a mat, as a natural weightlifter, um, you're doing it right. Basically with the right volume and intensity. If you were to, you know, uh, train a muscle group once every 14 days, of course you're leaving gains on the table. Like you should be training your muscles more frequently. But when you start training them, you start getting increasing frequency to where you're training them, uh, you know, once every three days or even four days, you, you're going to have a hard time balancing that volume and volume and intensity in your workouts.

You're going to have a hard time finding that sweet spot where you don't wind up overtrained and where you're also, where you're not dealing with soreness issues going into your, into your next workouts. Also, I mean, some of these workouts are very, very tough to do. If you've ever tried to, let's say you're trying, like especially full body. I mean, a lot of people, they don't try to do full body, but some people do email me that they are trying to do like a full body routine three times a week. I mean, just try to squat, deadlift, bench and military press heavy all in the same workout. I mean, you're going to, one, it's going to take an hour and a half and you're going to be just completely wasted by the end of it. Um, even, even an upper body workout, uh, I would, when you workout, when you're bench pressing and military pressing

in the same workout, one of them is going to kind of take a hit because if you start with chest, which you probably would, then your shoulders are, of course, I mean, they are involved in that and they are getting fatigued. So when you go to the military press, your performance is going to be a little bit impaired because of the bench pressing that you were doing just before it. So that's kind of the general overview of frequency. You definitely can make great gains training a muscle group once a week. What I do, and I also talk about this in my next book, and this is better suited probably to an advanced weightlifter whose body has kind of gotten used to getting beat up with a lot of heavy weightlifting, is I have my chest A, back, shoulders, arms, legs.

And then I don't do it when I'm cutting because it just seems to be a bit too much for my body. But if I'm maintaining or bulking, I mean I haven't really bulked I'm not, I just kind of like staying lean. So I'm usually in some sort of maintenance mode or I'm cutting. And then I take day six and I'm going to be training some weak points. So for me, my weak points are my shoulders. It's kind of just the never ending curse of not being on drugs basically is you have small shoulders. And that's one of the easy ways to spot druggers, by the way, is if they have those massive basketball delts drugs every time because there are a lot of antigen receptors in that area so when you get on drugs your shoulders just explode you can't even do anything you couldn't stop it if you wanted to um so my shoulders

basically always need work so i usually give those a little bit more work. So those are getting trained two direct training days a week. My second day is a higher rep, lower volume. I'm not, you know, I kind of blast them hard and heavy on one day and then I'm doing a lighter workout on them on the next day. And then also I've been working on my lats as well. Just because all in all my back is pretty good, but my lats have always just been stubborn. So I don't know. They've always just been slow to grow. I don't want them to be huge. I don't like that look, but I'd like a little bit more. That approach works well, where you're giving each individual muscle group a good, heavy, proper workout once a week. Then you're taking another day to give your lagging body parts a little more work.

And I talk about that in my next book, and I just call it kind of weak point training. So that's basically everything I want to say in this video on frequency. And kind of the summary, once again, is that volume and intensity is more important than frequency. If you don't have the volume and intensity, right? Meaning the number of sets and reps, you know, total reps that you perform in those workouts and the amount of weight that you're lifting those workouts, frequency won't save you. Uh, if you're doing a bunch of high rep isolation work, you know, two to three times a week, you're, you're going to get blown away by somebody who's doing focusing on heavy compound weightlifting,

just training that muscle group once a week, for instance. Let's just say back or whatever. If you're doing a bunch of high rep isolation type back exercises a couple times a week, the person who performs one heavy back workout a week, heavy deadlifts, heavy barbell rows, heavy T-bar rows, dumbbell rows, weighted pull-ups, things like that, that person is going to blow you away over time. So yeah, that is basically everything on frequency. And let's now talk about food cravings. Particularly, I mean, people tend to run into food cravings more when they're cutting than, you know, when they're maintaining their bulk, when they're eating more food.

And obviously, it can really get in the way. I mean, some people have a lot of trouble with it, and it really messes with their compliance or it just messes with them psychologically. And the research of food cravings is kind of convoluted. There are a lot of theories, but not a lot of absolutes. Um, what we do know is that certain types of, uh, circumstances tend to lead to cravings like stress. And that's, that's, and these are things that like kind of when I, in, in the, the, the studies and the literature that I've read, it kind of just confirms what we already know. People turn to food because they're stressed. People also turn to food when they're happy. You know, that has been shown

to just be correlated with like, oh, you feel good. It makes you want to eat comfort food or whatever. And of course, when you're dieting, your body is actually under stress. I mean, just being in a calorie deficit, it's under stress. So that can just, you know, increase stress hormones and increase the desire to, to, you know, eat, you know, whatever it is. Uh, what is being craved is not like some people think like, Oh, I'm craving these potato chips. It must mean that I need some nutrients in it or need some salt in it. That, uh, has, we pretty much know that's just not true. That's, that's not the case. What the foods that are being craved are normally just because of psychological associations that we have with those foods. So maybe certain types of foods remind you of your childhood or whatever.

Those are the foods that your mom used to cook. I don't know, macaroni and cheese and pizza and pasta and stuff like that. Or associated with whatever kind of happy type of feelings or times. Whereas other foods that, you know, maybe there's some interesting research that showed that women tend to crave snack type foods, candy type, easy type stuff like, you know, popcorn and M&M's and stuff like that, as opposed to foods that require a bunch of cooking and then cleaning. Whereas, you know, us guys, we might just think of like, oh, we crave ordering a pizza because, you know, psychologically it has some positive association for us. So what you're craving doesn't mean that

like, oh, your body needs something in that food and that's what you should be eating. Um, so the cravings just are what they are. I haven't really found a good, um, like I've heard things that, you know, it could relate to micronutrient deficiencies and I haven't been able to find any real reliable research on that. Um, even specifically, like I've heard, oh, it means that you need more vitamin C. I haven't been able to find anything on that. Even specifically, I've heard, oh, it means that you need more vitamin C. I haven't been able to find anything on that. And I've told people that have issues with cravings, just out of curiosity, because I'd heard it. Could you try, I've heard magnesium, I've heard vitamin C. Could you try these different things? Didn't really seem to do anything. So dealing with cravings, really the best way to deal with

cravings is work in foods that you like and just eat them less often, basically. So if you crave something like, let's say it's just something sweet and you're dieting, you're wanting to lose weight, then work in something small, like maybe 100 calories worth of sweet whatever, whatever it is that you want to eat. For me, I mean, I like chocolate, so I probably just eat, I mean, I do eat chocolate every day, even when I'm cutting. Not even a lot, but maybe 150 calories worth, but it's nice. It's my little dessert. So if it's chocolate or if it's a little bit of ice cream or I don't care what it is, it doesn't matter. Just work it in.

of ice cream or, um, I don't care what it is. It doesn't matter. Just work it in. And then you don't have to also have that psychological battle where you really want the food, but you feel that you shouldn't eat food because you shouldn't eat it because it's not clean and whatever. Um, I mean, if you're familiar with my work, you know, where I kind of stand on clean eating, uh, you should, yes, eat nutritious foods, but numbers diet is numbers. So you want to work in a little bit of what you crave, work that in. If it's something that isn't as hard to work in, like if you're craving pizza, yeah, you're not really going to be able to work that in every day. But what you can do is you can save pizza for your cheat meal. So when you're dieting, I do recommend that you have, take one meal a week and eat what you want to eat. Don go crazy you don't need 4 000 calories but

don't worry about it so much don't think that you have to really you know track the numbers um if you want to be real safe what you can do is you can actually save up calories for that meal so you can let's say you're going to go have some pizza for dinner uh you can eat protein throughout the day pretty much save all your carbs and fats, all those calories for that pizza meal. So then when you get there, you know, you're already, you need to eat 200 carbs and let's say 60 fat just to reach your, uh, your, your normal daily intake. And obviously if it's pizza, it's going to be higher on the fat, lower in the carbs. So what fine the calories, you know, for that day, your macros are a little bit messed up. Maybe your, your macros and a hundred carbs short and you know, 60 grams fat high and it kind of balances out and you're okay. So really that's

the best way that I've found to deal with cravings is don't, don't get into the mentality that you can't have them, that you never can eat any of the foods you want, just work it in. If it's something small that you're craving, if it is just potato chips, fine. Work into potato chips every day. It doesn't have to be a lot, but just knowing that you can have the food actually does a lot to just kind of show the cravings out and whatever. That's just the psychological side of it, I guess. And then if it's something that's a bit more, it's too calorie dense to just work in, save that for your cheat meal. And then you look forward to it. And I think if you do that, you'll have a much better time dealing with cravings. All right.

I want to keep these podcasts on the shorter side, somewhere around 30 minutes. So I'm going to cut this one off here and in the next episode i may do another one by myself i may be interviewing somebody we'll see i kind of want to keep it to a mixture of ones that i just you know talk about a couple things that because i get i get emails you know all the time messages all the time so i like to address different maybe it's seasonal i don't know at this time of year i get asked a lot about food craving And then also just, I've been asked a lot about frequency because it kind of is just getting a lot of coverage, I guess you can say in the space. So I hope you enjoy the podcast and I will catch you next time.