Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Q&A: How Many Calories Should You Eat to Lose Fat? (And More!)

Episode Date: November 7, 2018

I’ve churned through over 100,000 emails, social media comments and messages, and blog comments in the last 6 years. As you can imagine, some questions pop up more often than others, and I thought it might be helpful to take a little time every month to choose a few and record and share my answers. So, in this round, I answer the following three questions: What’s the best weightlifting program for natural bodybuilding? Is cryotherapy a good way to boost post-workout recovery? How many calories should I eat to lose weight?   If you have a question you’d like me to answer, leave a comment below or if you want a faster response, send an email to [e-mail]. Recommended reading for this episode: The Definitive Guide on How to Build a Workout Routine How to Create the Ultimate Muscle Building Workout I Took A Cold Shower (Almost) Every Day for a Year. Here’s What Happened. How Many Calories Should You Eat to Lose Fat & Not Muscle? 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, Mike Matthews here from Muscle for Life and Legion Athletics. And in this episode, I am going to do something new, something that I'm going to do every month, and that is answer questions, do a Q&A. You see, I have churned through over 100,000 emails, social media comments and messages, and blog comments. When you really put that all together, I mean, it's over 100,000 emails sent and received in my inbox alone. So yeah, it might be upward of 150,000. But anyways, I've gone through a lot of communication in the last six years or so.

And as you can imagine, some questions tend to pop up more often than others. And they change too, depending on how the overall discussions in the health and fitness space are changing. There are some evergreen ones, which we're going to get to. Two of the questions in today's episode are just going to be evergreen, but then one is a bit more topical, something that people are talking about these days. And so I thought it would be helpful if I took some time every month and chose a few questions and then shared my answers. So that's what we're going to do here. And in this round, I answer three questions. One is what is the best weightlifting program for natural bodybuilding? Evergreen, of course, something that I've been asked since day one and probably will be asked for the rest of my life. The second question is

cryotherapy, a good way to boost post-workout recovery. Cryo and cold exposure in general are pretty popular these days, still very topical. And so I thought that'd be a good one. And then number three, how many calories should I eat to lose weight evergreen and on many people's minds? This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm just going to quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my one-on-one coaching service. So the long story short here is this is the personal coaching service that I wish I had when I started in the gym many years ago. Every diet and training program that we create for clients is 100% custom. We provide daily workout logs and do weekly accountability calls. Our clients get priority email service and discounts on supplements, and the list goes

on and on. Furthermore, my team and I have also worked with hundreds of people of all ages, circumstances, and needs and goals. So no matter how tricky you might think your situation is, I promise you we can figure out how to get you results. If I have piqued your interest and you want to learn more, then head on over to www.muscleforlife.com forward slash coaching and schedule your free consultation call now. I'll tell you, there's usually a wait list and new slots fill up very quickly. So if you're interested at all, don't wait. Go schedule your

call now. Alrighty, that is enough shameless plugging for now at least. Let's get to the show. Welcome to another video podcast. And in case you're wondering or have wondered why I call these videos that I do video podcasts, the reason is I post the videos to my YouTube channel and then I post the audio of the videos to my podcast, which in case you didn't know, I do have a podcast. And if you want to learn more about the podcast, just head over to muscleforlifepodcast.com. That's muscleforlifepodcast.com. So anyway, in this video podcast, I'm going to change things up a little bit and do something that many people have been asking me to do.

And that is to do a simple reader slash follower Q&A where I answer questions that people have asked me via social media, email, and so on. And I'm going to do one of these Q and A's a month. So if you want to get one of your questions answered on the YouTube channel slash podcast, simply ask it. However you best like to communicate, you could, again, you could put it as a comment down below in this video or other videos. Obviously I can only get to so many YouTube comments, but there's a chance that yours will get seen. And in many cases, I will try to answer the question right there. And if it's a question that I also think would be worth answering publicly, I would make a note. So you don't necessarily have to wait until the,

you know, next month or who knows how many months of, of videos would go by before your question would be featured. Often you can get an answer fairly quickly. The best way to get answers, just so everybody knows, is email mike at muscleforlife.com. That is the most efficient way for me to communicate with as many people as possible. And so anyway, the point is send your questions along and I will do my best to answer them. And as I am going through answering questions, I'm also going to be cherry picking ones again that I think will be productive to answer publicly. Okay. So let's go to the first question. I don't have a note as to where this question came from, but I'm going to start paying attention to that going forward. I believe this came from Instagram, but I don't have the username. However,

I am going to start noting this stuff down. So people will also get shout outs, um, on my, on my YouTube channel, on my podcast. So the question is, what is the best natural bodybuilding program? And I like that question because while it sounds simplistic and it sounds kind of like a newbie question, it's actually not. It's a question that many intermediate and even advanced weightlifters ask me fairly often. And so my answer is the best natural bodybuilding program, first and foremost, is going to be one that you can stick to over the long term. And that means it's going to be one that you enjoy, that fits your lifestyle, and is designed around your personal goals. Now,

there is a caveat there, though. It needs to be one you can stick to, but then it also should be designed around certain non-negotiable principles related to muscle building and strength gain. Now what I mean by that is we know, for example, that mechanical tension is the primary mechanical driver of muscle growth. Mechanical tension is more important than cellular fatigue, and it's more important than muscle damage. So you're going to want a program that acknowledges that and therefore maximizes mechanical tension over time, otherwise known as progressive overload, which is simply increasing the amount of mechanical tension produced by your muscles over time. And of course, the most effective way to do that is to add weight

to the bar over time to get stronger over time. So to that point, then a well-designed natural bodybuilding program will have some sort of progression model built into it. It will over time challenge you to go from lighter weights to heavier weights within whatever rep ranges you are working in. So progressive overload, emphasizing mechanical tension, non-negotiable. A good bodybuilding program is going to be built around progressive overload and mechanical tension, regardless of training frequency or volume or intensity. However, rep ranges, which I just mentioned, that's an example of a negotiable point. You can gain muscle and strength in a variety of rep ranges. There is a point where you get too high and it becomes very impractical. And for example, um, I would say anything over 12 to probably 15 reps

gets pretty impractical, especially with compound exercises. The reason for that is you are going to have to be taking most of your sets close to technical failure. And that is very hard to do. If you are working in high rep ranges, it's very hard to do because it's very painful. It's terrible. For example, just try doing a 20 rep squat, barbell squat, and try ending within two or three reps of technical failure, you know, with two or three reps left in the tank. Good luck. That said though, you can do quite well in bodybuilding, working in a variety of rep ranges. And it's hard to say that there's one single rep range that is best. If we're talking about anything ranging from, let's say, the 3 to 5 rep range to the 10 to 12 or 12 to 15 rep range. natural bodybuilding programs. Such a program is going to have you train each major muscle group once every three to five days, and is going to emphasize compound exercises, multi-joint exercises that involve multiple major muscle groups over isolation, which are single joint,

mostly just relying on one major muscle group. mostly just relying on one major muscle. word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. Twitter at Muscle for Life and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. Okay, next question. What's your opinion on cryotherapy, splurge or save your money? I would say save your money unless you don't care about the cost, unless you have enough money that the cost doesn't matter. But even in that case, I actually wouldn't recommend it as a regular thing if you are also trying to build muscle or gain strength as quickly as

possible. And the reason why I am not an enthusiastic supporter of it is it's not going to make much of a difference. I mean, there is some evidence that it can reduce muscle soreness a little bit if you do it after workouts, and it might be able to speed up recovery a little bit. However, there are a number of studies that show that cold water immersion, like regular thing if you are trying to gain muscle or strength as quickly as possible is by blunting the post-workout inflammation that occurs in the body, you are also going to blunt muscle growth over time because that response is part of the muscle building process. And that's been shown in research as well. It's not just some hypothesis. building process. And that's been shown in research as well. It's not just some hypothesis.

And it's also worth mentioning that one study showed that simply taking a 10 minute walk after exercise was just as effective for promoting faster recovery as cold water immersion. And as someone who has been taking cold showers almost daily for a year and a half now, simply because I kind of enjoy it, it helps wake me up in the morning. I know there are no real physiological benefits because it's not extreme enough. Basically, even I would rather just go take the walk than do the cold water immersion. Because for those of you who don't know, true cold water immersion is intense. You're talking about a bathtub of water at about 50 degrees, give or take a few degrees. I think it's like 50 to 55 degrees is probably the normal range. And then you're talking about 10 minutes of immersion up to your neck.

That's rough. So yeah, if I can just take a 10 minute walk and get the same recovery benefits as the ice bath, I'll take the walk. Now, we also know, thanks to a few studies, that cold water immersion is more effective for promoting faster recovery than whole body cryotherapy. So while we don't have a study that I know of that compares just a 10-minute walk to whole body cryotherapy, it is reasonable to assume that the walk would be probably more effective. And once again, I'd rather just go for a walk than do a cryo session or pay for a cryo session. Okay. Next question. My friend says to lose weight, I should be eating

no more than 1200 calories per day. How do I know this is the right amount of calories for me? And the reason why I wanted to answer this question publicly is twofold. First, to address the idea that a certain number of calories is always too low for some people. And this is usually among women. And so what you'll have is you'll have, let's say a woman who's smaller, she's petite and weighs 130 pounds, right? Her body fat percentage, let's say is 25, 26%. She wants to get down to 20%. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing unhealthy about that. But because she has a small body and doesn't have very much muscle, even if she is kind of muscular, there's still in an absolute sense, not going to be much muscle there because she's small. And because she is probably not spending 10 plus hours a week in the

gym, she has to eat what sounds like a pretty low number of calories every day to consistently lose weight and lose fat. Now for that person, it may be 1200 calories. She might be able to eat a bit more, but it would probably range from 1200 to maybe 1500 calories per day. Again, depending on her basal metabolic rate, which is a bit of genetics is, is in play there as well as body composition. And then of course there's physical activity level. Now, my point is some people would hear that. Let's just say it's 1300 calories. That's the number that allows her to lose a half a pound a week, let's say to maybe three quarters a pound a week in the beginning. And some people would hear that and they would say, Oh, those are poverty calories, poverty macros. You should never eat.

You never have to eat fewer than 1500 calories a day to lose weight, starvation, dieting, blah, blah, blah. No, they're wrong. Some people, especially small people who don't have a lot of muscle and who aren't tremendously active, they don't get to eat very many calories when they want to lose weight. And even if they're just shooting for the standard, you know, about 1%, about a half a percent to 1% of your body weight per week. For some women that does mean eating 13, 1400 calories per day. Whereas others who are larger or more active or who just have naturally higher metabolisms, they may be able to eat 16, 17, 1800 calories a day and lose the same amount of weight. So that was the first reason why I wanted to answer that question, just to make that

point that 1200 calories is not necessarily off limits, uh, just because it sounds like a low number. And the second point is just, okay, how to determine how many calories you should be eating to lose weight. Um, first I'm going to mention that I have an article that you may like over at legionathletics.com. If you search for calories, you will find it. It's titled something along the lines of how to know how many calories you should eat every day. And it has a calculator and stuff. So you may want to go over there, but, um, I wanted to say here that for most people, this is equally applicable to men and women cutting calories are going to be around 10 to 12 calories per pound of body weight per day. And so that's a simple rule of thumb that you can use to set up

your own cuts. If you want to just keep it simple, you could start at 12 calories per pound of body weight per day and see how it goes, adjust accordingly. And it's also good for judging advice that other people are giving you. So if somebody is telling you to eat 15 calories per pound of body weight per day, when cutting, it's not going to work unless you are tremendously, tremendously active, it's not going to work. And on the other hand, if somebody is telling you to eat seven or eight calories per pound of body weight per day to cut, that's unnecessary. That is, that would be starvation dieting. That's where I would even say nobody needs to go that low. there. It is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don't mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or

wherever you're listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any of the new goodies. Lastly, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback. So please do reach out. All right, that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode. And I hope to hear from you soon. And lastly,

this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously, though, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead I'm going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my one-on-one coaching service. So the long story short here is this is the personal coaching service that I wish I had when I started in the gym many years ago. personal coaching service that I wish I had when I started in the gym many years ago. Every diet and training program that we create for clients is 100% custom. We provide daily workout logs and do weekly accountability calls. Our clients get priority email service and discounts on supplements and the list goes on and on. Furthermore, my team and I have also worked with hundreds of people of all ages, circumstances, and needs and goals. So no matter how tricky you might think your situation is, I promise you,

we can figure out how to get you results. If I have piqued your interest and you want to learn more, then head on over to www.muscleforlife.com forward slash coaching and schedule your free consultation call now. I'll tell you, there's usually a wait list and new slots fill up very quickly. So if you're interested at all, don't wait, go schedule your call now.