Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Live Q&A: Muscle:Fat Bulking Expectations, CLA for Fat Loss, Lifting Plateaus, and More...

Episode Date: July 31, 2015

In this podcast I conduct a live Q&A and take a variety of questions ranging from how much muscle and fat you should gain on a bulk to weighing food before or after cooking to drinking calories and more! If you want to get in on the next one and ask me questions, sign up here: legionathletics.com/qa/ QUESTIONS FROM THIS Q&A: What LBM (lean body mass) to fat ratio can you expect to gain while bulking? Is it bad/dangerous for my health to steal from my fats to add to carbs, leaving me getting around 10-15% of my daily calories from fat? When is Phoenix coming back in stock? I'm not progressing on my squats as fast as the rest of my body. Can I add squats to Day 1 and Day 3 on BLS? Or is that too much volume? Whenever I try to work my chest, I only really feel it in my "front" delts area. How come? How can I fix it? Can you talk a little bit about your fiction writing? Thoughts on CLA supplements? How is your Stacked App tracking? You recommend liquid calories like fruit juice for hard gainers. Is all that fructose a problem? Does it matter where your sugars/carbs come from? If you've been lifting for a while, but you're still weak with an average body fat percentage, is recomping still possible? Do you ever play with your potassium vs sodium levels between cuts, maintenance and bulk? What happened to the forums on Muslce for Life? I miss the community! A while ago you mentioned potentially investing in European warehouses to house Legion stock for the European customers. Is this still an option you are considering? 42:54 - When you bulked in the past what were your top takeaways from the experiences? Anything you wish you would have done differently? Suggestions for weight progression? I'm female, been lifting for about 6 months and seem to have stalled on adding weight to my big lifts. Any update on the new grass-fed whey protein from Legion that you're working on? For tracking calories, do you weight meat before or after cooking? I'm at 8% body fat (using your 1 point method-video) and still have a considerable amount of fat around the bellybutton. Is this just really stubborn fat? You recommend Vitamin D3 and Omega 3. Do you need both? Why is the Legion Whey+ only 70% protein? I have heard that multivitamins do not dissolve well into the body. Is this true? Does Bigger Leaner Stronger work for Athletes? I am a Rower so its a mix of sprints and endurance. What do you think of the current season of True Detective? What is a good replacement multivitamin while Legion Triumph is out of stock? What do you recommend for people who get lower back pain/stiffness when doing traditional deadlifts? Would you recommend switching over to sumo deadlifts instead. 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

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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. All right, so let's get started here. So the first question is, what LBM lean body mass to fat ratio can you expect to gain while bulking um i think like well actually i know for a fact genetics play a role in this this is actually me i'm gonna be writing an article uh on one of the upcoming articles probably on the legion blog just kind of an updated all encompassing guide to building muscle and talk about different rep ranges and how people's bodies respond to different things. And, but basically long story short is, um, you can take, and I'll have some

research I'm going to be, you know, showing to there's, there's some, there are some studies on this. I'm going to be citing and kind of talking about in the article where you can take, you know, two people, uh, starting at the exact same point, uh, in terms of their, their body composition, um, and training experience, everything. Put them on the same exact program, same diet, same training program, everything. And one person can gain a lot more muscle than the other. And that's where genetics come into play. And some people are genetically their high responders to weightlifting, and some people are genetically low responders. Most people are in the middle. So it's not that genetics are going to hold you back or be a problem. Uh, but so like, for instance, I am probably, I wouldn't say I'm a high responder to weightlifting, but

I'm on, I'm on a, I'm above the normal. And I know actually one of the reasons for this is cause I did, I did a DNA fit test. Um, I mean, they, they, they like gave it to me, you know, we did a podcast together and stuff to talk about it, but basically like genetically I'm more actually, uh, my body's more built for endurance, which makes sense growing up. I have very good endurance. Like I've always played sports growing up. I played a lot of ice hockey and, um, I was always particularly good at skating. I was fast and I didn't run out of gas easily, but I have this one genetic marker. I don't remember the name of it, but it's particularly good for

building muscle, uh, and, and building strength for power. And basically what, what the guy from DNA fit said is that you'll see that particular genetic, it's a polymorphism that, that, that expression of that gene in, uh, in a lot of high level athletes. And just, I don't know, I just lucked out in that, that, then I got that. And he said, so you'll see it like, cause they work with a lot of professional soccer players and other professional athletes. And just, I don't know, I just lucked out in that, that, then I got that. And he said, so you'll see it like, cause they work with a lot of professional soccer players and other professional athletes. And he said, they, they'll see that one. He said in like probably 80% of professional athletes they've worked with have that gene. Um, and it relates to muscle recovery action in particular now that now that's exactly what it was. So, um, I'm able to probably get a bit more out of weightlifting than, than the average person, but I'm not, not at all.

Like if I remember correctly in terms of my genetic profile, it was like 60, 40 or 70, 30 for endurance. Actually, I just have this one genetic marker that is particularly good for weightlifting. Um, so you'll see, you'll see variations. It's hard to say that cause you know how one, it's hard to predict how, how people are going to respond. It's gonna be in a range. But, um, if, if you're gaining on a ratio of, you know, fat to muscle on a one-to-one ratio, in my experience, working for a lot of people that seems to be

pretty common. And that means you're doing well. If you're gaining more muscle than fat, you're, that means that you are just genetically, you respond very well to weightlifting. And also there are other genetic factors that can, uh, affect how your body stores fat. You're, that means that you are just genetically, you respond very well to weight lifting. And also there are other genetic factors that can, uh, affect how your body stores fat. For instance, coming back to me, I am genetically basically have like genetic predispositions to not store as much fat from, uh, carbohydrate and dietary fat from, from over, from overfeeding basically. Um, and whereas other people, and that, that also has always kind of shown where I was never like a super lean person growing up, but also I ate a lot of food. Like I was probably around 15% body fat, you know, through my teenage years, maybe 13 to 15% body fat, but I ate a ton of food. Um,

you know, I definitely was in a surplus a lot of the time. And then it was probably like, I was in a surplus during the week. And and it was probably like I was in a surplus during the week and then I was probably in a slight deficit during the weekend when I would like sleep in and I wouldn't eat as much food and I wouldn't really think about it. Um, so, you know, but that's a general rule of thumb. The general rule of thumb is if, if you're gaining for every pound of muscle, you're gaining a pound of fat, you're doing well. Uh, if you're gaining more muscle than fat, you're doing very well.

And if you're gaining more fat than muscle, that doesn't necessarily mean you're doing anything wrong. It might just mean that, you know, you have genetically, you are, you know, kind of got a little bit of the short straw in that regard. But again, it doesn't matter when you look at the bigger picture, you know, what, what the vast majority of guys want to do, the type of look that they want, type of body that they want is they have to gain anywhere from 30 to 50 pounds of muscle and they want to be lean and anyone can do that naturally anybody you don't it doesn't matter what

your genetics are it doesn't matter what your it doesn't matter anything you can do that it's just if you have genetics on your side you might be able to do that faster you know the guy with the high responder to weightlifting um especially if somebody also is kind of resistant to gaining fat that could be uh you know three years to go from a normal dude to that 50 pound or 40 pounds of muscle, the fitness model kind of look. Whereas a genetic, you know, a lower responder, that might be four or five years. But it's not a matter of can you get there? It's just a matter of time. So let's go next question here.

Is it bad or dangerous to my health to steal from my fats to add to carbs, leaving and getting me around 10, 15% of my daily calories from fat? It depends on how many total calories you're eating. When you start talking about – when you're talking about macronutrients in percentages, that is like you've heard 40-40-20, 40-40, 20 standard type of breakdown. Yes. If you're eating around your TDE or if you're in a slight, you know, if you're in a deficit, um, let's say if you're within 500 calories up or down of your TDE, then you could say you're going to be around 40, 40, 20. But when you really start going into larger, uh, surpluses, I mean, I'd say probably even like more so in a deficit, but if you're 500 calories under, if you're, let's just say you're in a 20% deficits, you work more in percentages here. So it's going to be different for guys and girls. So if you're like in a 20% calorie deficit

and you're eating your macros or 40, 40, 20, that's going to be more or less fine. Uh, if you're in a 20% surplus, you, it's just, you're better off thinking of it in terms of absolutes thinking of in terms of one gram, like if you're in a surplus, one gram of protein per pound of body weight is all that you need. Um, I would probably go 0.3 to 0.4 grams of fat per pound and, and which gives you enough fat for everything your body needs and get the rest from carbs because high carb is going to do you the best when you're trying to build muscle and strength. So coming back to this 10 or 15% calories from fat, it depends how many calories you're eating. If you're eating 6,000 calories a day, then that's absolutely enough fat. But if you're eating 2,000 calories a day, then no, that's not enough. As a rule of thumb, I don't recommend

that people go below 0.2 grams of fat per pound or 0.3 grams of fat per pound of lean mass, which those usually work out to be about the same. The reason why, like in my books, I recommend just go with 0.2 if you're cutting is because then you can work off of your current body weight and you don't have to mess with your body fat percentage. And it just, it just, it simplifies it a little bit. And the outcome is more or less the same within a few grams of fat. So it's not like if you're at 40 grams of fat calculating at the 0.3 grams per pound of lean mass and you're at 37 grams of fat calculating at the 0.2 per pound of body weight. It's not like that matters. So it's three grams. It's not that big.

But we're talking about there is a difference though health-wise between – let's say that your 0.3 grams of fat per pound of lean mass puts you at 40 grams, but you're eating, you're eating 20 grams. That's probably not, that's probably not a good idea. That's just not good for your health. You'll start noticing like, um, symptoms of low fat is what are they? I actually should write about this. I've done a little bit of research. I've come across things here and there like dry skin. I know skin problems, hair problems. Um, shit, I don't remember actually make a note for them in my mind for, for an upcoming article. Um, maybe there's something worth writing on high fat dieting in general, but, uh, the bottom line is if you, if you kind of keep your fats in that 0.3 gram per pound of lean mass range, that's everything

your body needs for health reasons. Um, sure you can go higher fat if you really want to, if you have a reason to, but if you're weightlifting regularly and you want to make pro continue making progress in your weightlifting, carbs are going to serve you way better than fats. So I know I like the idea is that's why you're probably asking is can you bring your fats down really low to get more carbs? Um, and I wouldn't recommend that if anything, if you were like in a calorie surplus and you wanted to get more carbs, I would say, bring your protein down to 0.8 grams per pound. If you're in a surplus, that's probably enough, especially if you're in, if you're an experienced weightlifter, that's likely enough. Um, although, you know, working with one gram per pound is a

good standard, you know, again, these are, it's kind of splitting hairs. It's being pretty pedantic on it. You know, sometimes I get people in the blog comments like arguing on, well, why do I recommend one gram per pound when this research shows that 0.8 is probably enough? Well, yeah, but then there's, there, there's a lot of protein research and, you know, in my opinion, you just kind of look at everything and go, all right, well, what's the, given all of, all of the research, where's the preponderance of, of, of the evidence? Like what, what is, what's the number that's weighted here the most? Okay. So around one gram per pound. Cool. If you want to, if you really want to drop that to 0.8 grams per pound, because you really want to eat those extra, you know, uh, 30 grams of carbs a day, but then, uh, okay, fine. In a calorie deficit though, I'd recommend going

anywhere from one to 1.2. As you get leaner, the higher protein intake, as you get leaner, it actually is important, especially if you're physically active, if you're exercising quite a bit, that is important for maintaining muscle. Next question. When's Phoenix coming back in stock? One to two weeks. Uh, so just to, just to give a quick update on what happened here. So, I mean, you're probably familiar, but, um, as you know, we had, uh, I mean, it was just, uh, the manufacturer that I'm with big, big, big, big company, one of the biggest actually. They went through this whole merger and they did a terrible job. And they basically like – the big, big problem was the capital, the investment group that owns the company.

I guess they decided or the CEO or new CEO or somebody decided that they needed to move over to this new software system to run everything. So you can imagine this software system is ridiculously complicated. I mean it runs everything from purchasing to production to finance to everything. And so they didn't – if you're – they didn't set it up on a – they didn't set it up what would be like a dev kind of environment and make it work there and then port it over. They just scrapped what they had and just tried to go with this new one and it didn't work. And it didn't work for a month. So for a month, you had a company that's doing, you know, 30, $40 million a month in terms of sales. That's what they're booking. And a month goes by and they can't even order a raw ingredient. So you can imagine how big of a problem that is.

So they've been, they buried themselves in, So they buried themselves in back production and whatever. And so that's why they have accounts. This company has accounts. Like one account pays them $100 million a year. Another account pays them $70 million a year. Another account is about $40 million a year. So you can imagine me. Yeah, I pay them a lot of money, but I don't pay them $40 million a year.

So that's kind of what happened. And I didn't have a backup manufacturer in place, which was my mistake. I mean, this kind of came out of nowhere. I never had, we never had any manufacturing problems before. Everything was always smooth and great. And then all of a sudden it was like, wait a minute, what, what, what just happened? a backup manufacturer. I actually have two backup manufacturers in place now. One of them is, is actually running, uh, already running, uh, Phoenix triumph and forge. And they're like running on a six week turnaround, which is incredible. Normally like normal in this industry is eight to 10 to even 12 weeks turnaround, which is part of the problem. So even if you have a backup, once you, if you know there's a problem and you're going to be out of stock now, let's say you only, let's say only have four weeks of stock left. And then your manufacturer tells you like, Oh, by the way, we haven't run your stuff and we're not going to be running it. Uh, in, in, in the case of triumph, for instance, I ordered 10,000 bottles of triumph back in

February on February 10th. And I, they, they still, they never ran it. They just actually never ran it. I canceled it this week. We're talking about five months later, a little bit over five months later, I finally just canceled it because this other manufacturer that I've been now have working, that I'm working with, that I ordered with, uh, about a month ago, um, they are going to beat, it was, it's easier just to increase their order than try to get this, try to get my, my other manufacturer to even run the stuff. So, um, and then also, you know, this, this other manufacturer, they have two facilities. One facility is incompetent and pathetic, and I'm just never going to work with them ever again. The other facility is almost like a separate company

run by somebody separate. Who's actually competent, who knows what he's doing, who wants to, you know, he wants to keep, he likes what I'm doing and, and, and, and has been as being as helpful as he can. So anyways, I learned a lesson there about have a backup manufacturer in place and, um, and don't necessarily just count on things to go well when, you know, things don't just randomly go wrong. People make them go wrong. So that's what I was obviously along the way, I was kind of strung on with a lot of weird excuses and stuff, not from the, from the shitty facility. They always had, they always had weird problems, weird excuses, ingredients failing. Now looking back on it, I think they were just lying. I think they just didn't care to run my stuff because I know that they run some like MLMs and stuff where they're running, you know, they might be running a hundred thousand bottles of,

of one product. And you know, I want 10,000 bottles and they're just like, yeah, who cares about that guy, whatever. So, um, long now coming back to the question. So Phoenix actually finished bottling today. So that means it's a, it ships out and it takes about Amazon about a week to receive it. So we're talking about two weeks, uh, Phoenix will be back and that's, uh, that's about 8,000 bottles. Then I have another 5,000 bottles wrapping up in a, in a couple of weeks with this new manufacturer who's doing a great job. Um, and so that, that's a lot of Phoenix. So we're going to be good for the rest of the year on everything. So I have like, you know, all these thousands and thousands of bottles of triumph. I have thousands of bottles of recharge. I have, I mean, really it's about, it's over a million dollars of product, you know, my cost,

uh, on order that's going to be all coming in over the next month or so. So inventory is not going to be an issue for the rest of the year. And, um, you know, obviously I can't say that we're never gonna go out of stock again, but it's not going to be for this reason. You know, I don't mind making mistakes. I just don't want to make the same dumb mistakes twice. Uh, so, you know, now that we have backups in place and also, you know, we're going to be building up, building up a safety stock, which is something that it's not that I didn't know that I should do that, but I was trying not to do that because a safety stock is essentially just sticking money in your warehouse and bye-bye. You just don't

see that money ever again. But you know, it's necessary. So we're going to start putting money into that and you know, whatever lesson learned. So everything, everything's gonna be back in stock next month. And we also have a new website that's going up that is really, really nice. Jeremy's done a great job on it. I'm excited to get that up. And we have a joint product, Fortify, that's coming soon. We have our greens product, Genesis. All of this is going to be next month.

And then we're going to start working on Lunar, which is going to be our sleep product. That's going to be later in the year. So sorry for the inventory. I know it's lame, but, you know, at least we're here. I know, I know, at least I know some companies that are almost out of business because they didn't have any cash to sustain themselves and they're just completely out of stock. So that's a fun. Anyway, next question. I'm not progressing on my squats as fast as the rest of my body. Can I add squats to day one and day three on BLS? Was that too much volume? Um, yeah, what sometimes like, uh, what,

what guys are doing and it's working well for them is they'll add a few sets of squats actually on their back day. So like if you're doing the five day on day two after the deadlifts and doing it like an eight to 10 rep range. So you're not because the trick is when you're training muscle groups two, three times a week is you really have to watch out. You have to balance your volume and your intensity correctly, or it'll just end up overtraining. And it's a slow like slide into overtraining where your workouts just get harder and harder. You have less energy or feeling more fatigued and just becomes a general kind of grind. And that's what you want to avoid. So that's why, you know, you do a little bit of extra chest pressing, but it's not

a lot and it's not super high rep. It's not like very taxing on your, on your central nervous system. It's not like your heavy, heavy stuff. So you can treat legs the same way. And what guys are doing is like, I know they'll do, they'll, they'll deadlift and then do their heavy deadlifts. And then you don't need to warm up for your squats because you're good to go from your deadlifts. So then like three sets of eight to 10 squats, and then they finish their back workout and then give their legs a couple of days to recover. And then they do their legs workout at the end of the week. And, um, you know, that's, that's, uh, that, that, that's it. Um, and that's really, I mean, there is a point where you just can't do more. Like, like I was saying earlier, um, genetically, you know, not only is your entire

body going to respond better or worse to, to weightlifting, um, but certain muscle groups do as well. Like genetically, I always had a, a fast responding chest. My chest grew quickly and, and, you know, for not because I was training it correctly in the beginning. And, um, it just did. My arms were kind of similar. My shoulders though were a bitch. They just would not, they, my shoulders did not grow for shit until I really started training them heavy. And it took like a couple of years, I feel like at least a year of a lot of heavy pressing to actually build my strength up to get anywhere with my shoulders. have like zero calves and that's all type. It's all like, uh, slow twitch muscles, like worthless for size. And, um, so, you know, I train them three times a week and they're growing very, very slowly. So, but my upper legs are, are not slow responders. Like actually my upper legs, last time I measured them were about 27 inches or so. And I, I actually don't want bigger because

I'm already having trouble with jeans and stuff. And I don't really like that look where every thing you wear looks like you're wearing leggings. Um, I just would like more now separation and definition of my legs. And that just comes in with time. Um, you know, I've only been like really properly training my legs for a few years at this point. And I'm, I'm guessing it'll probably be like at five years or so, maybe six years, I'll be happy with, uh, well then again, we'll see actually, you know, some people genetically look at some bodybuilders, they don't get all of that on all the drugs that they're on and everything that they're doing. They still don't have that crazy type of separation that you have all the way up the legs. So maybe I, maybe that's just not for me. Um, it's not a

body fat thing. Like right now I'm pretty lean. I just hang out about 8% and you know, I have, yeah, I have some definition of my legs, but not what, not what you see, even in drug guys that have it maybe very, uh, you know, it's very pronounced. Um, but I would expect at least to have a little bit more kind of separation in my legs than I do given also how my upper body has developed, but you know, Hey, it could be genetics. Um, and also something to keep in mind is like if you really wanted to make maximum strength gains on like something like a squat, bench press, military press, you would be better served doing a squat, bench press, or military press program. And this is on my list of articles to write. Specifically, like here is a bench press program. If you want to just focus on your bench press and treat everything else as an accessory where you're kind of maintaining the rest of your body, but you're really focusing on building your bench press.

Do this. Deadlift, do this. Squat, do this. It'll be a fun article series to write. But anyways. All right, next question. So I've been having a hard time putting muscle onto my chest, mostly upper, but that's common. Whenever I try to work out my chest, I only feel it in my front delts area.

How come? How can I fix it? I get this question usually from people that are new to weightlifting. Um, and the same thing with back. And I remember that where like the pecs, I mean, think about it, the pecs in your day-to-day life, you really don't even use them. Like they're, they don't do, I mean, what, what, what do you do a lot of pressing with in your day-to-day life? So most guys, when they're starting out weightlifting, their pecs are like atrophied almost not literally, but you know what I mean? Where, you know, you can be, if you play sports, for instance, all your, all your other muscles are going to get worked a lot more than your chest, unless you're like a lineman playing football.

So that's common. First thing I would check is form. Like when you're bench pressing, for instance, it's very important. A couple of form points is, uh, you want to make sure that you're, that you're arched and you've really had, you really have your chest up. This also protects your shoulders, right? So your chest is up also just, just to say, you don't want your shoulders in this, your, uh, your arms in this position, because the more you do this, the more shoulder impingement

occurs and that's bad. You want to keep your shoulders down in this area. And so the, in the bars down here. So like when you're pressing the first motion, what a lot of people do is they kind of go like, they go like this and they, they bring it up. You want to do the opposite. You want to keep your shoulders tucked and it's almost like you're pushing it a little bit down and it comes into that groove. So, but you want to make sure that your, um, your shoulder blades are pinched and your shoulders are tucked down and your chest is up. So you're making sure that you're really pushing it in your chest. A lot of people, they make the mistake when they're

benching, they're flat and they're like this and they, and they, and they try to do a straight bar path and they have their arms out like this. Like that's wrong in every way. That's your, your, that's what, you know, rips a hole in your rotator cuff eventually, basically. That sort of screws up your tendons. And, you know, so you want to protect it by chest up, you know, shoulders down, shoulder blades tucked, and the bar path is not perfectly vertical. So that's the first thing to check is your form in terms of dumbbells, same concept. I like to rotate the dumbbells like this at the bottom, cause then you can just get more range of motion like this. You'd kind of have to stop here. This, you can go a little bit,

a little bit further, but the same concept, you don't want your elbows all over the place. You want your shoulder up, shoulders down, or sorry, when your chest up, shoulders down, shoulder blades tucked and, um, making sure that you're maintaining that position throughout the whole, the whole lift. Uh, so, you know, that would be the, that would be the, the most likely reasons why I think that you're feeling it more in your shoulders and your chest. And if you are new to weightlifting and if your form is good, if you're doing everything I just said, then that's just, you just have to keep going. And then eventually your chest will build up enough and get strong enough where you actually feel it working. It's going to be the same thing with your back. If you're new to weightlifting,

you're going to do all this deadlifting, all this pulling, and you're going to think it's only your arms. Your back is going to almost feel like it's not like what, what muscles even in there that's even doing anything. But trust me, it's, it's, it's working. Just keep your form in. And, you know, I anecdotally, like just in working with people, I would say, I would say give it six months and then you should start really actually feeling if you, if you have that issue where you don't feel those muscles working, but your form is correct, then just keep doing it. And you know, as you, within that first six months, you'll build up enough strength and enough muscle in the area

to actually feel what you're trying to do. Uh, all right, next question. Can you talk a little bit about your fiction writing? You always seem to be briefly mentioning it when talking about your love for writing, but never in any detail. I ask because I used to write fiction pretty frequently before taking up more fitness-focused lifestyle. Now I'm trying to find a balance between the two. Yeah, all right. I'll talk about it quickly. I don't want to talk too much about it just because it's probably not what everybody wants to hear about. But yeah, actually my original interest in writing was fiction. That's how I even found writing because I always like to read fiction.

I actually always like to read nonfiction more than fiction. That's the case now. Ninety percent of my reading is – well, I actually haven't read a fiction book in a bit because I've started a couple and then quit them because I'm like these books suck and just went back to nonfiction books that I enjoy. suck and just went back to nonfiction books that I enjoy. But yeah, so I like reading like in terms of subjects. I like historical type of like, I like biographies a lot. I like just books about different, you know, interesting events and times in history and interesting people in history. So my interest is particularly in alternate history in terms of fiction, um, creating stories around, uh, you know, alternate history normally is, is, is around events. So you'd say, Oh, what if, you know, you know, this would have happened in world war two and some, some big, big event,

how would that play out? Or what if so-and-so, uh, you know, had done this and not that and whatever, uh, my, my interest is more revolving around specific individuals. So what if this person would have done this and how would that have played out? Obviously, it just kind of – it's moving. I'll be starting the outline soon. But I've been working with like a coach basically from – there's a – I've read a lot of books on fiction and I've read a lot of different story models. And what I have – there are a few that I really liked and one that I really, really liked is called Dramatica. And it's just complex. So it turns a lot of people off and that's probably why it's not popular and it'll never really gain mainstream popularity, but I know it's popular among professional writers, among, uh, you know, people that write for TV shows. Like I know the person that wrote,

one of the people that wrote for band of brothers really liked it. And anyways, there are, there's like a fairly long list of professional writers that like it because, um, it's, it's actually extremely, it's an impressive work, basically. There's so much thought and so much time that went into creating that thing. And so I've been working with like a coach on that because I've studied it all myself and I have a fairly good grasp of it. There are certain, there are so many moving parts in it though. It's good to have somebody that he teaches it in a university in California, actually. So it's perfect that he knows it inside and out. And he's analyzed a bajillion stories and he has a good mind for storytelling.

So the first project that I'm actually working on is like an alternate history story for Nikola Tesla and kind of surrounding the period when he was working on Wardenclyffe, which is kind of his life's work, and he got screwed over by J.P. Morgan. And so anyways, the whole story idea for that. And I'll update more on it as I actually have something to show. I don't really like talking about my stuff when I have nothing to show. Um, I don't even have an outline yet, but I'm getting there. Like I'm, I'm working through, you know, there's, I've done a lot of, a lot of research, read quite a few biographies and just kind of gotten wrapped my wits around. Cause first you have to find the story, you know, and you have to go read about all the people involved, read about Tesla, read about Morgan, read about Theodore Roosevelt, read about the time period, what was going on and find the, where's the story and where's the

entry point? What, you know, how does this play out? And so I have a basic outline. Now I'm going in all the details with this guy's name's Jim and, and then I'll be starting the outline soon. So that's just a personal, something I just want to do. I don't really care. And, uh, and then I'll be starting the outline soon. So that's just a personal, something I just want to do. I don't really care. Like, I think I can be good at it and I think I can have some success at it. Um, but it's not, uh, you know, I I'm, I'm busy being Mike Matthews. So I'm busy being the fitness guy right now. So that's still my, that's obviously my priority. I'm not going to take time away from all the stuff I have to do in my, in my writing for MFL and my writing for Legion and everything I got to do there to, to, you know, indulge my, uh, my hobby basically.

Um, so yeah, I mean, I said, maybe that answers the question on finding the balance. I'm, I'm very much a time just a schedule routine type of person um i recently read a biography on elon musk which i highly recommend if you like uh biographies and if you're interested in elon musk read it it's uh ashley vance's biography just came out i liked it a lot he's a good writer um good sense of storytelling keeps it interesting keeps it moving gives you good insights got a lot of access personal one-on-one access to Musk. And so one of the things that Musk was like, he was talking about is, so he was saying that he needs a girlfriend, right? But he was like looking at it in terms of time. Like, all right, so how much time can he, he was thinking,

can he afford to have a girlfriend time-wise? Like how much time does it take? Eight, 10 hours a week to have a girlfriend? Yeah, I think I can fit that in. It was just funny. That's actually how he's thinking. And I can relate to that. Not that I'm anything like Elon Musk, obviously, but I can just relate to that because that's where I'm at with my life is my schedule is so packed. What am I going to give time to? Do I have time for that? For instance, I would like to, one of the things that I had taken up, I put about 400 hours into it actually is learning German. Uh, and my wife, my wife is German. And so I did audio courses when I was driving, cooking food,

walking my dogs. I did like all of Pimsleur's German courses. I did Michelle, Michael, whatever Thomas's. And I did, I forget maybe one other, but I went through all of Pimsleur's twice actually. So I got real good at all that shit, 400 hours or so. And I was expecting initially that 400 hours of like audio learning, I would at least be approaching something semi resembling fluency. Um, I didn't know that fluency is more like a thousand hours. Uh, and maybe I'm kind of a fast learner. So maybe I could do it in 800 hours, maybe 600 if I was like, whoa, whoa, but not doing Pimsleur. The problem is those programs, those audio programs, the only audio programs I could find were more geared for tourists. So I was, I have a now

better understanding of the language and the grammar. And it wasn't that I wasn't able to talk about anything, but my vocabulary was so worthless. I couldn't talk about anything I actually cared about. So what it came down to is then I found a book called fluent forever. And if I want to continue, I was going to have to take time. Now I couldn't do it on an audio basis. I would have to, to take actual sit down time. And that means at night, like I'm working at night, I'm working on, I usually am doing article writing at night. So I'm not going to be taking away from article writing. I'm not going to be taking things away to do that. So that's just for example, something in the future.

Yes, I'm going to do that. I'm going to carve out probably an hour a day and dedicate that to sit down time and go back at learning German in a more efficient way. So that's it for me for finding balances, looking at my time very realistically and what am I doing with my time and where am I, if I want to add something, what am I taking away from? And that's, that's from a day to day basis, uh, in, in, in looking at on a weekly basis, like, you know, Saturdays I spend time with my family. I don't do much work on Saturday. If I do, it's early in the morning or later at night, but the bulk of my day is just doing stuff with my wife and son.

And you know, I don't want to take that. I need to keep that in. Um, so I'm not going to take time from that Sunday. I golf in the morning and then I start working after lunch and I just work until night and I enjoy my golf. What, what I want to take from golf to, to do my language learning. Not really. I mean, golf is something I like and I'm finally getting good at it and I'm finally getting toward my goal at that. And it's something to do with my body other than weightlifting. I always, like I said, I grew up playing sports and kind of miss something competitive. I mean, I don't really find weightlifting at this point, especially with my body I'm trying to maintain.

It's not as fun as when it was when I was like bulking and trying to get bigger and stronger. Um, so that's a long answer for that question, but hopefully that helps, uh, thoughts on CLA supplements, CLA it's, it's unreliable. Long story short, if you look at the research, some research shows that it helps accelerate fat loss. Some research shows that it doesn't. Um, there's, there's obviously some, something in some people might do something and some people might not do something. That's why I don't recommend CLA on my website. And Legion, we're never going to sell CLA. It's not worth it. Get your fat from food. Enjoy that and save the money. Uh, how is your stacked app tracking or coming? Um, good. So it's behind schedule. I've explained why it comes down to just lazy, shitty people. Um, but that's life. And however it is, uh, the, the workouts section of the app, which is the, really the heart of the app. Like that's what

you're going to be using to track your workouts. And that's what really has to work well. And that's what really, what I really don't like about a bunch of other apps that I've tried is that they're so clunky when you're actually in the gym, they're so like unintuitive. I just rather use my Google spreadsheet. Um, so that's going to be done, uh, by the end of this week and they're going to be pushing it so I can start playing with it. And, um, so that's really when the beta testing can begin because, you know, the last little things to, to finish will be like the journal, which is where a section of the app where you're going to be able to go and, um, explore your, your progress and see how you're, how you're doing with your goals and how different

things are coming along and so forth. Um, so while like that, that's fine, that's going to be in the app when it's done. But once this workout section is done, it's then time to start using it. Cause that's really needs to be slick. Everything else is like simple. You know, it's not that hard to do the journal correctly. Just don't be stupid. Go copy. I'm just copying Google analytics. It has a dashboard. It has different ways to show data. You can manipulate data in different ways. Like that's easy. Not that any of it's actually hard, but it's like in terms of the actual user experience, the, the most thought to the little things needs to go into that workout section. So, um, that'll, I'll start with, you know, us in the office, we'll use it first and make sure, get, get the major

bugs out of the way. And then I'll probably send an email out kind of looking for, I'll probably gather up 50 people and I'll just push it to your phones and you can, you know, get a bunch of feedback and stuff. I also have, I put together an update basically with screenshots and stuff. And, uh, I had to, I had to switch to a new dev company, web dev company because my previous company sucked. And, uh, so now we're with a new company and, um, they're rolling on, they're, they're doing some NFL stuff. And then I'm going to have them put, put up this update. So you can kind of see where stacked is that and see how it's going to work. Uh, next question. You recommend liquid calories like fruit juice for hard gainers.

Is all that fructose a problem? Does it matter where your sugar and carbs come from? Yes, it does. There is a point where like if you go on MFL and you search for fruit or fruits, plural, both should bring it up. You can see an article I wrote on this. There is a point where too much fructose is bad. If you're eating fruit, you're, it's really, you're not going to get there. You'd have to eat so many freaking apples. You have to eat like 30 apples a day or something to actually kind of get to that point where it's just not, not probably not healthy in terms of fructose. And again, if you're drinking, you know, if you're drinking like a liter of, or two liters of fruit juice a day, plus having

some sugar and things, then there is a point where you could be getting to be, to have too much. I don't, I wouldn't say I just like recommend fruit juice. Like, Oh fuck it. Just drink some fruit juice. But some guys, I do recommend it. We're like, I mean, I'll, I'll email with guys where like, they'll be at, you know, let's say their protein around a gram per pound and there'll be at carbs of like two and a half grams per pound and their fats are relatively high as well.

And they're just, they actually physically can't stomach more food. So that's more the case where I'm like, okay, let's start drinking calories and not necessarily fruit juice, but it could be milk. Let's just, you know, let's try to stick with something with some nutritive value. let's try to stick with something with some nutritive value. But you know, there is a point where like, I understand if you, it's unfortunate if some of these guys, they have to eat 5,000 calories a day, every day, just to gain like a half a pound or pound a week. And yeah, that might sound cool at first, but try doing that when you're not just going to be eating like a large pizza every day, which some of these guys do. And I understand there's a point where like, they just need more calories and they're eating so much nutritious food. It's not like they need more nutritious food. So they're just like, well,

what's, what's high calorie. I'm just going to eat that. And, um, you know, a weight gainer is, is a, is an option as well. I'm not a big fan of most of the weight gainers out of there out there because a lot of them are just full of like dextrose and junk carbs. I'd rather, I'd rather have like nutritious food. Um, but I'm, I'm looking at, we might actually do our own weight gainer. We're going to see what we can do on that. If I can make a good weight gainer, I'll make one and it'll be, I say weight gainer. It's not that it's like going to be a special thing for gaining weight. It's just going to be a high calorie type of protein shake, a meal replacement shake with high quality carbs. Um, and, and

obviously with like not no artificial crap. And I know I haven't, I haven't given it much thought yet, but it's on the list of things that it would be nice if I can make a good, a good product for that because I know it's kind of an issue. Next question for recomping, what defines a beginning lifter? If you've been lifting for a while, but you're still weak with an average body fat percentage is recombing still possible? I would say, um, if you're, I mean, anywhere up to, I've seen the recomp from a brand new guy last upwards of eight to 10 months where like they're effectively recomping from day one all the way through, you know, the end of month eight, month 10. Um, but you know, if there's definitely, I would say this, if you've been weightlifting for a while, but you've just been doing a bunch of high rep stuff and isolation exercises and, you know, standard magazine bodybuilding crap. And then you make a switch to a heavy compound weightlifting program like mine or like starting strength or strong lifts or whatever.

There's a very good chance that you're going to be able to have that recomp kind of effect. I did. I know when, when I, that was my, you know, I was like seven years into lifting and I had gained maybe like 25 pounds, maybe 30 pounds of muscle in seven years, which is shit. And, uh, when I, and I was just doing that, I was doing much of high rep stuff. Every, every workout was like super set this drop, set this giant, set that pre exhaust this, you know, all over just way over the top bro science, fancy type bullshit. And when I switched from that to just like go back to the basics, heavy compound weightlifting and, and cut for the first time actually learned about dieting, like, Oh, it's just numbers. Okay. I need to do that. Um, and I definitely had a recomp where I got, I gained a ton of strength and gained muscle and size and lost fat. So, uh, again, like I'm genetically maybe a little bit

better than the normal type of responder to weightlifting, like I'm genetically maybe a little bit better than the normal type of responder to weightlifting, but I'm not like an outstanding, I don't have outstanding weightlifting genetics by any means. So I would say that probably anybody could do that. Um, do you ever play with your potassium versus sodium levels between cuts, maintenance and bulk? What do you do in terms of this when it comes to the last few days before one of your photo shoots? Um, no, I actually don't. I just keep my sodium potassium, uh, levels balanced, um, where I'm trying to get, I'm looking to get anywhere. I'm about three, maybe four grams come in Florida and I'm sweating. And, you know, uh, so maybe it's about three to four grams of, of sodium a day, I'd say closer to three and trying to get

about four to five grams or so of potassium. And that's mainly through food, through eating. I like bananas. And I do also supplement with, although I just ran out, so I have to get more, but supplement right now with about a gram of potassium a day. And I just kind of keep it there. It's not worth messing with. Even if you have something coming up where you want to look extra lean, when you start manipulating sodium potassium in water and carbohydrate, you start trying to play with all those variables. You're more likely to just mess it up and look worse and, and get nothing out of it. So you're, you're better off just making sure that you get really lean and, uh, and you know, just keeping your, keeping your sodium, potassium, water

intake where they're always at and balanced. And then, uh, because if you, if you dramatically raise your sodium intake or your potassium intake, you can, you can hold water. If you drop your sodium, you will shed water temporarily, but then it'll just, that'll, your body will just adjust. Um, one thing that is valid is, is cutting your carbs, uh, let's say a week before to what's about a half a gram per pound of body weight that will shed some subcutaneous water, replace those calories. You know, don't think with the calories, you can replace them with fat. Um, and then, and then the day before carving up like a refeed the day of, and, and, and also keeping your, your, like, I know, I know bodybuilder type guys, like they'll, they like

to stick to drier carbs. Um, and they're not drinking water. Like they cut their water the day before they don't drink nothing, but they just reduce their water intake and start eating a bunch of carbs and then keep their water intake. You know, they're just kind of sipping on water up through the photo shoot and then you just go back to normal. It can make a little bit of a difference. It's not a night and day thing. If you're lean enough, it can make a little bit of a difference. That can be the difference of like holding a little bit less water under your skin, which, you know, it does make you look a little bit tighter and a little bit better. Next question. What happened to the forums in Muscle for Life? I miss the community.

The forums, the reason why I killed it is because the idea of a forum is that the community interacts with each other. And there were probably only like 10, maybe max 10 users that were really kind of interacting with people. And the majority of it was people just coming to ask me questions, which is fine, but I'd rather have them just email me or social media message me or post on the, on the discuss, uh, the ask me anything on the website, because that's easier for me to manage on the forums. I'd have to go into each forum, find the questions, respond to them. Uh, like it, there wasn't, it was a real pain in the ass to manage and the forums were starting to get spammed.

Uh, and they'd even gotten hacked. And what happens is like what these people do is they, they'll post, if they break into it, they, they basically inject links all over the place and you can get penalized for it. Like, uh, I know a very, very big company, massive, massive company is, is manually penalized by Google right now for that, for their forums. I mean, there are huge billions of dollars a year company. And it's not like they, it's not like they're trying to get bullshit scam links. Like they're not trying any shady link building. It's just so much spam linking has been done on their forums that Google has mainly penalized them. And now they're trying to figure out how to clean it up.

So I don't want to fuck with that. You know, um, you don't want a Google penalty. That's what you don't want. So when, when the forum started getting real spammy and it was a real pain in the ass to clean up and it was really just people asking me questions anyway, if it was just time to pull the plug on it and, uh, we're going to, we're going to put up a Facebook group instead and that'll be better. Um, and I think it'll also foster more general engagement because people are kind of indoctrinated to using Facebook.

They know how it works and blah, blah, blah. So next question. A while ago, you mentioned potentially investing in European warehouses to house Legion stock for European customers. Is this still an option you're considering? Yes, absolutely. The only reason why we haven't pursued it yet is because we've been unfucking ourselves here in the – just here in the US and we have a lot of lost sales to make up for. But we do have a couple options. It's just not going to be until next year basically.

I know bonded warehouses are potentially a good option where basically we'll be able to ship stuff into a warehouse in the Netherlands. That's technically still us soil. So there's gonna be no tax issues. And then when you customer from Europe orders, it's going to ship to you from, from what's technically the us soil in the Netherlands. But that means that I can, I don't have to charge them. The shipping is now cheap. You know what I mean? It's not, not a problem.

Um, so that's, that's the one promising option. But the only thing with it is it's expensive and it requires kind of a gamble. Like, you know, yes, it could go well, but also there could be problems with anything. So, you know, next year, next year. When you bulked in the past, what were your top takeaways from the experience? Is there anything that you would have done differently? Oh yeah. I mean, in the past, before I knew what I was doing, I was on a permanent bulk basically

where I was, I mean, really not permanent bulk. I, what I did is I just ate a lot of food. I was eating so much food that my set point, my, my, I was kind of hanging out at 15, 16% body fat, but it wasn't really gaining much strength. I wasn't training correctly. And, um, that's stupid. I mean, the proper bulk is, uh, where you're starting leanish as a guy, 10% ish as a girl, 20% ish. You're you're, you know, your numbers, you know, what your body needs in terms of calories. So you're, you put yourself in a slight calorie surplus, about 10%

over TDE. Um, and you're eating a lot of carbs, you're keeping your protein, you know, where it needs to be. You're keeping your fats moderate and you're really pushing the carbs. You're training hard, you're training heavy. You're really, you know, pushing yourself to, to progressively overload, to make progress. Um, and, and then you slowly get fatter and you slowly gain muscle and you ride that out. You ride that out until, you know, you get up to as a guy, 15, 16, 17% as a girl, 25 to 27%. And then you go back and do a cut. You get rid of that fat. You do it right. So you keep your muscle and now you're back to your starting point, but you've gained X pounds of muscle. You do it again. You do it again until

you reach a point where you're happy with your size, get lean, maintain. Um, those are really the key takeaways. It's just, you also have to be patient. You have to realize that it takes time to naturally build muscle. Uh, your first year as a guy, you can gain, let's say, if you're a high responder, about 20 pounds of muscle. As a girl, it'll be about 10. Your second year is about half that. I mean, if you're a really high responder, I would say 25 as a guy and maybe 12 as a girl. But, you know, 20 is a really solid year. 15 is a solid year for sure.

Second year is about half that. So if you're a guy, if you can gain 10 pounds, you've had a good year. 15 is a solid year for sure. Um, second year is about half that. So if you're a guy, if you can gain 10 pounds, you've had a good year. If you can gain five pounds as a girl, you've had a good year. Third year is about half that. So now you're looking at five pounds as a guy. Uh, and, uh, you know, as a girl, I would say, let's just say, you know, well, wait, no, did I get that? So, um, yeah, 2010. Yeah. That's about what it is. Yeah. So it's about, let's say 2010, five as a guy. And as a girl, it's like 10, five, two or three. And really from there, from there on out, you're looking at as a guy, it really goes down to two or three, maybe four pounds a year. And as a girl, it kind of hangs out at just a couple

pounds a year, two or three, maybe is in, and there's, there's a bit of science on that. If you search muscle for life for the word naturally, you'll, you'll, you'll find a year, two or three maybe is in, and there's, there's a bit of science on that. If you search muscle for life for the word naturally, you'll, you'll, you'll find a website, you'll find my article on it. Um, and that's based on, on good research. That's not, those aren't just random numbers. Um, and so, but just realize that, that, that takes patience. That takes time. Five pounds of muscle in a year, uh, you know, five pounds is a good amount, but that's not like transformation. You know, five pounds is like a, a, a slight improvement everywhere. That's not like, Whoa, what have you been doing the last year? Um, 10 pounds is more like, Whoa, you've gained quite a bit of weight. Haven't you? Um, so, you know, for me, like I'm not trying to gain really, I'm not trying to just

get, get bigger anymore. That's not really what I, that's not the look that I want. I'm kind of happy with my size where it's at, but even if I wanted to genetically, I maybe could gain 10 more pounds of muscle on top of what I have right now. Maybe not even sure on that, but it would take probably three years of proper bulking, cutting, doing what I just said, like stretching those bulks out, making them nice and long six, seven months. And then, and, you know, making those cuts fast, as fast as possible, maintain as much muscle as possible so I can get back to bulking. And so I've emailed some guys that are surprised to hear that. They were expecting, they've been weightlifting for a while. They've already built their foundation. They've built that first 20, 30, 40 pounds, we'll say 20, 30 pounds of muscle. And now they're like,

why did I, you know, in the last eight months, I've only gained four pounds of muscle, you know, and they think like, what's wrong? No, dude, that's actually really good. Uh, you, you can't ask for any more as a natural weightlifter. Um, all right. Next question here. Suggestions for weight progression. I'm female. I've been lifting for about six months and seem to have stalled on adding weight to my big lifts. Um, I would check your diet, uh, search for go on,

go on muscle life and search for plateau. I read, I wrote an article on breakthrough, breaking through muscle, uh, muscle building or, or strength weightlifting plateaus and check that out. Cause it could be your diet. It could be your training. Um, it could be several different things. Uh, yeah, I I'd have to pull it up. I mean, I wrote it a while ago, but, um, the, the most common mistake that, that people make, I'd say the two most common mistakes are, uh, or the reasons why I let's say three is diet. They're not in a calorie surplus. That is going to kill you. If you're not like actually watching your calories, knowing what your numbers are sticking sticking to them. You are going to get stuck eventually because you have to just like cutting is you are intentionally under eating. Like you're forcing yourself to under eat when you're bulking correctly,

you are forcing yourself to overeat. And that's how it feels after a while. Like after a couple of months of bulking, you you're sick of eating all that food you are, and you just do it because you know, you have to. So if you're just eating kind of comfortably, then that's that, that, that'd be a reason in terms of training, you know, are you tracking your numbers? Are you really pushing yourself in the gym? Are you, are you distracted talking? Are you there to like, you know, you know, that you got, you got five reps with that weight last week. Like you're going to give everything you have to get six reps this week, or are you just kind of going in and going through the motions? everything you have to get six reps this week? Or are you just kind of going in and going through the motions? Another thing that hold people back, uh, is, is improper form. So if you,

if your form is not right, it's going to really get you stuck. Cause you start getting into heavier weights on stuff like your squat, bench press, overhead press, military press, uh, and bench press, um, or sorry, and deadlift. So, you know, if those are the, those are the common things that I run into basically. But go check out the article. There are a few other things in there too. Any update on the new grass-fed whey protein from Legion that you're working on? Yeah.

We approved all the flavors. It took about two months, maybe even, yeah, two months or so, ten weeks to get the flavors right because flavoring is an art. Like Jeremy and I went up to our manufacturer there in Tennessee. We went up to them to help to get this shit sorted out too, like meet everybody in person and be like, all right, what the fuck? Are we going to fix this or are we done? Like I am not – I'm sick of getting told all these excuses and shit, whatever. And I met everybody there and got to meet the flavor team. And it's, it's like a, the flavor lab is they just have a bajillion of these different, uh, you know, substances for flavors.

And it's, it's really a, there is not like a, a science. It's not something you even go to school for. Um, it's very much an art. It's like an individual has a, you know, he has the guy that runs their flavor team. He has like a crazy good palette and, um, he, he has to figure it out. He has to go like, okay, uh, okay. We want to do a watermelon pulse. We're going to, we're doing a watermelon pulse. You've already approved it. We're just getting the labels done, but it's not just like, oh, well here's some pulse and then throw some watermelon in there. We're good. It's like, you have to mix like five different things to get, you know, you have to put this in to get some of the bitterness out of the citrulline malate. Then you have to have the right amount

of watermelon. Cause if you do too much, then it gets nasty in this way. If you do too little, then it's this problem. And then you need this stuff to bring out some of this flavor profile. And because that we work with all natural ingredients, it's, it's, it's much trickier. Our stuff is hard for them to work with because we use large amounts of like large dosages, like eight grams of citrulline malate per serving. Nobody does that. And citrulline malate tastes like shit. So we have that on top of natural, you know, on top of a lot of beta alanine, which also tastes bad on top of blah, blah, blah. And then you have all the natural flavoring. It's just as a bitch for them to, to get the flavoring right, but they're good. They figure it out and it just takes more

time than usual as opposed to, I mean, they joke with some of the pre-workouts that come through there. They're like, yeah, it's easy when it has nothing. Like when the ingredients are legitly nothing then, and they're using all artificial, everything that's real fast. That's really easy. Um, so the, the protein we've approved the flavors. It tastes really good. Like we're really happy. All right. We're pretty happy where things are at with our current product, but this new product kills it.

I mean, honestly, it's, it's, it's so it's very, very good. Even in water, it's very good. Um, the best natural, naturally flavored protein I've actually ever had, which I'm excited about. And, um, so that's, that's a few months away. We've already placed the order, but, um, it that's, that's a few months away. We've already placed the order, but, um, it's not going to be here until let's say Q4 beginning of Q4 is when we're going to make the full transition. Um, because we, we have our current product. We have

a few thousand bottles of that coming. So we'll sell that while we're transitioning into the new and it's going to be nice. It's, uh, I'm excited also for the a hundred percent grass fed it's going to be nice. I'm excited also for the 100% grass-fed. It's unique. And so, yeah. For tracking calories, do you weigh meat before or after cooking? I like to weigh meat before cooking because weight can change with moisture. And I actually generally weigh everything before I'm cooking if I'm making an individual meal. I think where weighing after cooking is useful is where if you're cooking a big batch of food and then you know what the macros are for the whole batch and then take the weight in grams and figure out what the macros are per gram. And then you can portion it out. So then you can figure out, all right, your dinner is 200 grams

of that. It's cool. Put it, you know, especially if it's like, depending on how you cook, if you have your protein, all right, then you have your, your, your starchy carb or your vegetables, whatever you can think of it that way. Or if it's a one pot thing, like I do a lot of one pot cooking. It's still the same thing though, Matt, like my one pot cooking. What I like to do is have the meat not be all ground in and like not be all mixed in, but have it be like chicken, you know, like I've been making these different chilies recently. And instead of doing something like ground beef in there or ground Turkey, which is fine. I just like having like, okay, there's chicken breasts. So I have my protein. I know what that is. And then for the rest, I know that like, you know, if I mix it all

up and make sure that I'm not just getting pure beans or pure this or per that, if it's a pretty good, you know, combination or everything, it's fairly accurate in the end, it all works out anyway, because I'm eating it. But I know that all that is going in me by the end of Thursday. So, uh, if I'm a little bit over, if a hundred calories over one day and a hundred calories, that means that I'm gonna be a hundred calories under another day. So it works out. Um, I'm at 8% body fat using your one point method video and still have a considerable amount of fat around the belly button. It's just really stubborn fat. Um, you're probably not 8% body fat. Some that I, the, that caliper is the best single like thing that I've found besides Dexa or bod pod or something that is just more pain in the ass.

Um, but trust me, like if you look at my Instagram, I'm 8% body fat and I can't even, I can't even pinch. Like I can pinch the tiniest, I can pinch that amount of skin on my, on my abs. There's, I mean, it it's, it's basically nothing. And that's with me at the end of the day, eating food, holding a little bit of water at some point, sometimes it just feels almost like nothing. Um, so yeah, if you can still grab anything down there, it's just fat. And, uh, you know, you're not 80% body fat, basically. Uh, if you can grab, it's just fat and, uh, you know, you're not 80% body fat basically. Uh, if you can grab, it's probably 10% or so eight is like ab veins start showing. And seven is like straight pay. It don't feels like paper seven, six. It feels like six. It feels like you can't even,

there's nothing. I mean, even you go anywhere and it just feels like skin almost. Um, you recommend these two supplements, vitamin D and omega three. Do you need both? Uh, yeah, definitely. They're completely different. Um, you don't need vitamin D if you are in the sun with, uh, you know, 30 minutes a day with a lot of your skin exposed, but in equatorial type of sun too, but that's not most people, obviously. Most people are deficient in vitamin D because it's hard to get it in your food. There's like a little bit in dairy and I think a little bit in a fish, but it's definitely something that you want to supplement with and make sure that your vitamin D levels are adequate. And omega-3, same thing. In omega-3, omega-6 imbalance is just unhealthy. And unless you eat a fair amount of fatty fishes, you're not going to get much omega-3s.

Or if you're eating a lot of – there are some plant sources. But again, you'd have to be eating a lot of fats because the absorption isn't so great. So we're going to be creating both a vitamin D product just because vitamin D is good. And I don't think there's anything special I can really do with vitamin D. There's no absorption issues. There's really nothing. So it's just going to be a good simple D3 that people can add on to orders basically. And then with fish oil, we're going to be adding sesamin, which is pretty cool. It has some health benefits of its own and some synergisms and stuff. So it's going to make it a little bit unique. So it's in natural drugless form of fish oil, low in terms of predatory fish. So it's going to be contaminant-free basically.

Anyways, those will be coming next year. So in the meantime, I just use Now Foods vitamin D and Nordic Naturals. I use their fish oil. I like their fish oil. They have a product called Ultimate Omega, which has about 700, no, 660 milligrams of omega-3s per pill, which is really good. When you're buying fish oil, you don't necessarily want to just go with the cheapest because cheap forms, you have a natural form and then you have an ethyl ester form. The ethyl ester form is, one, it's not as absorbed as well as the natural. And two, it can – there's some conversions in the alcohol that can occur that actually like with people with fatty liver disease like shouldn't be taking it and stuff. Not that you would have that, but it's just an inferior source and you have to pay though. Like ethyl ester, that's the cheap shit. You will not find a natural triglyceride fish oil. That's really cheap. Um, and so I go with a high quality.

It's a bit more expensive, but there you're not like, I'd rather, I'd rather not get a cheap product that basically does nothing. I'd rather pay more for product at least does something. Um, let's see, anything else? Somebody asking why is the protein only 70% whey protein? Because there's more in the scoop than just protein. That's what people, some people forget about that. With whey plus right now, we have four grams of additional leucine per scoop, which I don't amino spike. I could just lie like other companies and say that those grams of leucine are protein.

And all of a sudden now there's 26 grams of protein per scoop, but that's not true. It's protein plus amino acid plus additional leucine, which I like that the leucine's there. It's for muscle related reasons, but I'm not going to count it as protein. So there's that. And then there's several grams of sweetener and flavoring. Remember with natural flavoring and natural sweetener, you have to use quite a bit more because it's not as potent as artificial. So remember there's more that goes into every scoop than just pure protein. It starts with isolate, then you start adding everything on and now you're at, you know, 31 grams of scoop or whatever because of everything else or 30 grams of scoop. I've heard that multivitamins do not dissolve well in the body. Is that true? You know, I've heard that like, I haven't looked into this

because I didn't really care to be honest, but there was something with like centrum, like tablets, generally speaking, tabs are going to be the ones that are going to be harder to digest and break down, which makes sense just physically because it's super compressed as opposed to a gel cap that quickly dissolves in your stomach. And then there you go. But I've heard like people apparently like centrum vitamins are being found in porta potties, like people shitting out these vitamins whole, which, you know, I don't know. That might just be one of those Internet myths. I really don't know on that. You know, I don't know. That might just be one of those internet myths. I really don't know on that. But I know that I didn't go with tabs on my multivitamin because I could have. I could have gone tabs and then I could have cut down the servings with gel caps and how you have to take more every day, but you really, your body really is getting everything then

going tabs, which sounds better, but it's actually not better. Um, does BLS work for athletes? I'm a rower. So it's a mix of sprints and endurance. Um, yes, it depends on what your needs are though. Like obviously if you're training for a sport, you're going to want to – your training is going to be dictated more about what – more around what you're doing. BLS is really – it's a hybrid between a kind of a power type of program like strong lifts and 5x5 and a bodybuilding program where you're taking the core of that heavy compound weightlifting with which builds whole body strength, which are the key lifts really for any extras, any sort of sport. I mean, even take, I'm, I'm, I'm into golf, right? So you have guys like Rory McIlroy, who's getting into, he's kind of making weightlifting a bit more popular in the golfing scene. And he's doing a lot of squats and deadlifts and Olympic lifts and overhead presses and stuff. And that applies to any sport whole body power is going to benefit

you in anything. Name any sport and the deadlift is going to help you. The squat is probably going to help you unless it's like table tennis. Even then, squatting might help you. I don't know. But as a rower, I mean, obviously, lower and upper body power is going to benefit you. So yes, BLS can help you. But the question is like certain, certain aspects, like, uh, I don't know if bench pressing for instance, would really help you if you were only training, although actually it would, cause it would help balance with all your pulling. If you, if you did too much pulling and no pressing and vice versa, you can create imbalances in your body. So yes, and it can, um, I would say though, like in actually talking with and working with different athletes, I would say that the more common kind of setup is where they'll do a three-day. They'll do the BLS like a three-day and then they'll do two or three days of other type of work, whether it be Olympic lifts or explosive type work, stuff specific to their sports.

But they kind of keep the core heavy compound lifts in and then work around it for their sport. Okay, let's see. We're almost – I'm going to have to leave soon. I still have to go grocery shopping. I'll take this one. What do you think of the current season of True Detective? I quit. I stopped.

I couldn't get into it. It's so much worse in my opinion than the first one the first one i mean it was just so much better so much better the acting was but i think i mean i i guess it's such the acting i don't like the characters like great actors i just don't find the characters very interesting the story i find is very convoluted and i'm not stupid i can't't follow along. Uh, but maybe it's also because I find it boring. Like I'm inherently not interested in the story. So I have a hard time, even with some of the details where I'm like, who the fuck was that guy again? Oh yeah, that guy. Okay. Whatever. Um, whereas in the first story or the first season, I found that the story was a

lot more cogent and, uh, and I was just more interested in it. So, you know, I wonder, I wonder how it's getting reviewed because I don't like it. I quit it. I don't have a show to watch right now actually. Now when I'm doing cardio, I'm like watching World War II documentaries because I don't have anything to watch. Let's see. OK. So yeah. OK, good. So yeah, I guess that's see. Okay. So yeah. Okay, good. So yeah, that, I guess that, that, that's everything. I was just looking over and someone's asking about orange triad now that I honestly, now that I know

a bit more about multivitamins and I know just more about supplements in general. I mean, I used to take orange triad myself and I'd recommend it. And now that I know more, I don't recommend that product. Long story short, I don't think it's a very good product. I know Triumph is out of stock. If you're looking for a multivitamin, check out Life Force by Source Naturals. It's kind of like a weaker little brother of Triumph, basically. It's a similar formulation to Triumph. It's just not dosed as well and it's a similar formulation to triumph. It just not, not, not dosed as well. And it's missing certain things, but it's not a bad product. Like that's actually when I was waiting for triumph initially, when we were working on it, that's what I started.

I found, I found that. And I started, I started taking out, taking, you know, life force myself. So, uh, there's a good, you know, interim type product. Um, you know, again, if you compare the formulation to triumph, you'll see triumph is a better product, but life force is a better product than orange triad, hands down. Um, okay. I'll take the last question here. What do you recommend for people to get lower back pain stiffness when doing traditional deadlifts? Would you recommend switching over to sumos? Um, yeah, you can, but I would also, I'd recommend seeing what's going on with your body.

Like you probably should start doing some mobility work. If you go on a muscle for life search for mobility, you'll find an article I wrote called a definitive guide to mobility exercises and some mobility exercises for squatting. Look at the, look at both and try the squatting routine first. And you might need to do some foam rolling. If you search for foam rolling and find an article I wrote on that you want to address because if you're not dealing with an injury, you shouldn't be having like any sort of pain or stiffness. Yes, you're going to get sore. Your lower back is going to get sore. And sometimes you will get little pains and stiffness

type things. I still get that with everything. Sometimes for a week or so, my lower back will just feel like a little bit stiff and then it goes away or my shoulder would be a little bit stiff or my scalenes in my neck. Um, they get, they get right now they're kind of like pissed off. Actually, I have to, I found that incline dumbbell pressing doesn't piss them off. So I'm just going to have to do incline dumbbell pressing and dips for probably the next four to six weeks just to let my scalenes chill out because I was doing a lot of heavy incline barbell and flat pressing. And for whatever reason, that motion was just pissing off. It's just a little muscle in the neck that is just annoying. And it just, it just pulls in the collarbone and it just is annoying. So you have to work around those things. Um, so yes, find something that you can do that doesn't

cause the issue and then start addressing the issue. My guess is it's probably form related. Uh, so if you're rounding your lower back, if you're doing any of the obvious dumb things, don't do that. Uh, or it's mobility, you know, stretching kind of related where you don't have the, you don't have the flexibility or you don't have the right movement patterns and you can address that. Um, okay. So yes, I, I'm just going to cut that off, cut it off here. I have to have to go grocery shopping and stuff, do some writing tonight. So, uh, I hope you enjoyed the, uh, the live Q and a, I always like writing tonight. So I hope you enjoyed the live Q&A. I always like doing them.

So I look forward to doing the next one. It'll be in a month. So we're doing kind of like the last Wednesday of every month. And we'll be sending out emails and stuff as a reminder. So thanks again. And sign up for the next one. And then I'll be back. All right.

Have a good night. 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.