Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Q&A: The Best “Weight Loss Foods,” Time Under Tension, Periodization, and More!

Episode Date: August 2, 2019

I’ve churned through over 150,000 emails, social media comments and messages, and blog comments in the last 6 years. And that means I’ve fielded a ton of questions. 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 four questions: How important is time under tension (TUT)? How important is periodization? What are the best weight loss foods? Is lifting lighter weight explosively better for gaining muscle and strength than lifting heavier weight more slowly? 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]. 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.legionathletics.com/signup/

Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I'm doing on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider picking up one of my bestselling health and fitness books, including Bigger, Leaner, Stronger for Men, Thinner, Leaner, Stronger for Women, my flexible dieting cookbook, The Shredded Chef, and my 100% practical and hands-on blueprint for personal transformation inside and outside of the gym, The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation. Now, these books have sold well over 1 million copies and have helped thousands of people build their best bodies ever. And you can find them on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play, as well as in select Barnes & Noble stores. Again, that's Bigger Leaner Stronger for Men, Thinner Leaner Stronger for Women, The Shredded Chef, and The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation. Oh, and I should also mention that you can get any of the audiobooks 100% free when you sign up for an Audible account, which is the perfect way to make those pockets of downtime,

like commuting, meal prepping, and cleaning, more interesting, entertaining, and productive. meal prepping, and cleaning more interesting, entertaining, and productive. So if you want to take Audible up on that offer, and if you want to get one of my audio books for free, go to www.legionathletics.com slash Audible. That's L-E-G-I-O-N athletics slash A-U-D-I-B-L-E, and sign up for your account. Hello friends. Welcome to another Q&A or QUA as the cool kids like to call it. This time around, I am going to answer four questions that were submitted to me via Instagram. And I've decided that's the best way to submit questions for these episodes. If you want me to answer your question in an upcoming Q&A episode, then just submit it to me on Instagram.

I do. You can DM it to me or you can submit it via the ask me a question post, which I've been inconsistent with, but I'm going to be doing at least one a week so I can get a bunch of questions, which of course then I'll answer a bunch of them right there on Instagram, but then I can choose questions that I think would be good to answer here on the YouTube channel slash podcast, because this audio also goes up on my podcast called Muscle for Life. In case you didn't know, I also have a podcast. All right. So the questions I'm going to be answering are one, how important is time under

tension? Two, how important is periodization? Three, what are the best weight loss foods? And four, is lifting lighter weights more quickly, more explosively better for gaining muscle and strength than heavier weights more slowly or traditionally in terms of a rep tempo. All right, let's start at the top. Time under tension. How important is it? It is not very important in the scheme of things. Yes, it does play a role in muscle and strength gain, but you can think of it more as a side effect, a beneficial side effect of proper training methods as opposed to a primary driver, at least a primary mechanical driver of muscle growth or something that you should prioritize in your training. It's similar to metabolic stress in that regard. Yes, it does play a role in muscle building,

but it is a weak stimulus, much weaker than progressive overload and volume. Therefore, you would not want to sacrifice progressive overload or volume to simply increase the time under tension in your workouts. And unfortunately, that's exactly what happens when you alter your training to try to maximize time under tension. Of course, the most common way to do that is to do super slow reps. So instead of maybe a 2-0-2 tempo, or maybe even a 1-0-1 tempo of one or two seconds down, no real pause at the bottom, and then an explosive movement upward, you might drag it out to go like four seconds down and then a pause and four seconds up. Or you might just go four seconds

down. So let's talk about the bench press, let's say. So it's going to be four seconds to touch the bar to your chest, slight pause, and then an explosive movement upward. That would be another way to increase time under tension, make the eccentric or the lowering portion of the movement take longer than it normally would. So when you do stuff like that, yes, you do increase time under tension, but you decrease the amount of weight that you can use in the exercise, the amount of reps that you can get. And that's immediately obvious to anyone who has tried those types of training techniques, but it also has been shown in scientific research. For example, there's a study that was conducted by scientists at Springfield College with men on

the bench press, and they found exactly that. By exaggerating the eccentric portion of the bench press, it did increase time and attention, of course, but it also decreased the amount of weight that the men could move, could work with, and the amount of reps that they could get. And so the conclusion of that study was that the men were able to do more total work on the bench press, which of course is a major factor in muscle and strength gain, with a traditional rep tempo of 202, then a slowed down tempo of 204 is what they were using in that study. Now that said, there is a certain minimum amount of time and attention that you want to expose your muscles to, to maximize the training stimulus, to grow, to make our muscles bigger and stronger. However, as I mentioned in the

beginning of answering this question, if you are following a decently programmed workout routine, you are going to be hitting that minimum threshold. You're going to be exceeding it most likely. So again, it's really not something that you need to worry about so long as you are programming your training halfway well. And that means that you should be emphasizing progressive overload, getting stronger over time, you know, adding weight to the bar or working with heavier dumbbells over time and volume. The amount of different ways to think about volume. I like Greg Knuckles's thinking on it, simplify it to just hard sets per major muscle group per week. Those two things, getting stronger and doing enough hard sets per major muscle group per week, are going to be the determining factors in your

progress or lack thereof. If you just get those two things right, you really can't go wrong. Time under tension will take care of itself. Muscle damage will take care of itself. Metabolic stress will take care of itself. You know, these less important muscle building pathways, you could say, will just naturally fall in line if you get your progressive overload and your volume correct. Okay, the next question, periodization. How important is periodization in your training? Well, generally speaking, it's actually not that important. For some people, it is worth including in their programming. For other people, it is not worth including. Now, to understand why, let's first define periodization. So the generally accepted definition of periodization is simply focusing on certain aspects of your fitness more than others for certain periods of time. So for example, it is common for powerlifters to use a higher rep, more kind of like bodybuilding

style workouts as they work their way up toward a competition and as they get closer to then start using heavier weights and to start training more in the way that you would think of when you think of a power lifter. Now the reason people do that is both of those different training styles, the higher reps, lower weights, and then the lower reps, higher weights, they have different physiological effects in the body and if you combine them intelligently, if you program them correctly, then they become complimentary. The result becomes greater than just the sum of the parts, so to speak. I don't want to get off on too much of a tangent here, but oftentimes when people

program like that, when it's a linear type of programming, we're in the beginning of a training block, the weights are a bit lighter and the volume is a bit higher. And then toward the end of a training block, you flip that where the weights get heavier and the volume gets lower is, well, there are usually two reasons why people program like that. One reason is when you start a training block, you have just come off of a deload or a rest week or so, and you are fresh and ready to really exert yourself in your workouts. And research shows that it is volume that drives the systemic fatigue that accumulates through training more so than intensity or load. In other words, it's the number of hard sets that you're doing

per workout and then per week, and you can even break that down into individual muscle groups that beats your body up more so than the amount of weight that you're using. The amount of weight that you're using can beat your joints up more. So you might feel it more acutely in that way. But the systemic gravity that just builds through a training block more comes from the volume than the load. And so then it makes sense that you want to start your training block when you're fresh with your most difficult training, at least when you look at it in the sense of the systemic effects, which is the higher volume. So you're starting off with the higher volume and the goal is to gain muscle, even if it's very you know, very little, if you're in an, if you're an intermediate in intermediate or

an advanced weightlifter, you're not going to gain much muscle to speak of in, in four to six weeks, of course, but you're trying to at least gain a little bit of muscle in the, in the first phase of your training with the higher reps. And then as you get toward the end, or at least the last, you know, third or so of a training block, you want to then reduce the volume to give your body now a bit of a break because you've just been beating it up for maybe three or four weeks straight. And you want to recalibrate your muscles to working with heavier weights, especially if you're a power lifter and you have a meat that's coming up. And ideally you will have gained at least a little bit of muscle in the, in those first four weeks of the, of the higher rep, higher volume training portion, uh,

of the, of the training block. And you can think of that muscle that you hopefully have gained as potential strength. You have to kind of unlock it. You have to calibrate it to the heavier weights. And so that's what you do then. You start working with heavier weights and you start doing fewer hard sets per major muscle group per week. Okay. So let's get back on track here, back to periodization. So another common reason, it's a good reason why people periodize their workouts is simply to keep them interesting. Many people, and it's of course understandable, they get bored just working out the same way month after month after month, let alone year after year after year. And so just by switching up the rep ranges and switching up the loads that you're working with, it can maintain your interest in your

training, which can translate to better results. Because I mean, if you've been working out for any period of time, you know how that is. You know the difference between a workout where you're just not really into it. You're putting in the time, you're going through the motions, but you don't really feel the intensity. You don't really feel the focus and you don't really feel the intensity, you don't really feel the focus, and you don't really feel the drive simply because you're kind of bored. And yeah, you can listen to music that you like, and you can remind yourself why you're doing this, and you can keep track of your progress and even review it semi-frequently to just remind yourself why you're doing this and to reassure yourself that it's working and you can change exercises up. You know, every training block, you can switch some

exercises out or do some different things. But periodization is another great way to just make your training feel different and to give you something new to look forward to. Now, as far as hard benefits go in terms of muscle and strength gain, this is unclear because there isn't a lot of good research available on periodization. However, there was a meta-analysis that was conducted by scientists at the University of Alabama, and it found that periodized training does seem to produce slightly better results in terms of muscle and strength gain over time than non-periodized training. One of the problems though with a lot of the research that was reviewed for that meta-analysis is many of the studies didn't last very long. They didn't last more than eight to 12 weeks. And that's a problem because the

entire idea behind periodization is long-term. It's long-term thinking. It is programming your training in such a way that you will benefit not over the short term, not over four, eight, or even 12 weeks, but over the long term. I'm talking about years. That said, here's what we do know. If you are relatively new to proper weightlifting. So let's say if you're a guy and you haven't gained your first, um, let's just say 30 pounds of muscle yet, which would mean that I would say relatively new is probably your first 20. So we can extend that to, uh, you're either a beginner, that's your first 20 pounds of muscle, or you're now into your intermediate phase, which would be your first 30 ish pounds of muscle. And if you're a woman, you can just cut those numbers in half.

You do not need to periodize your training any more than would naturally occur with a simple double progression model. And in case you're not familiar with double progression, it works like this. You work with a weight until you can move it for a certain number of reps. And once you can get a certain number of reps, you then increase the weight, which bumps your reps down. You work with that weight until you can get a certain number of reps, rinse and repeat. So it's double progression because you progress in your reps and then you progress in your weight. And that's a very simple, powerful method that even intermediate and advanced weightlifters use. People who get

really into the nitty gritty of trying to optimize everything almost always use double progression in some way in their training. Oftentimes you'll find it with accessory exercises. So they may have a linear type of progression on their big lifts where they essentially force themselves to add weight to the bar every so often. But then with their accessory lifts, with their dumbbell curls and their side raises and so forth, they use double progression and just progress naturally. It depends how they're feeling, of course, in their workouts and how they're doing in general. And if they have more in them, then they go for more. And if they don't, they don't.

So if you're new to proper training or relatively new to proper training, if this is your first year or two or so of proper training, or you can, again, you can look at it in terms of just muscle gain is a good way to look at it. You can just use double progression for all of your lifts and you will get a little bit of periodization. So let's say if you're doing my bigger, leaner, stronger program for men, and you're working mostly in the rep range of four to six reps, it's a little bit of periodization. It means that sometimes you're going to be doing four reps. Sometimes you're going to be doing six reps. Of course, it's not quite the same as what you see in periodized programs where it's like, okay, we're going to work for the first four weeks of this training

block. We're going to be working in the rep range of 10 to 12. And then for the last two or three weeks, we're going to be working in the rep range of four to six. That's normally what you see. of four to six. That's normally what you see. But the just sticking to one rep range, again, introduces a little bit of variability. And other programs might have you be working in a wider rep range. Maybe it's six to 10 reps and you're ending sets with a rep or two in the tank. So it really then depends on how you feel that day. You'll find that often in programs for people who are prepping for a bodybuilding show, because as you get deeper into that prep, your body just does not want to work out period or programs that just have a lot of volume that really place a lot of stress in the body. So it's hard to say, you to say where you're going to be at

that day. Some people might be able to get on that leg press and do 10 reps, no problem, with whatever weight, with a couple reps in the tank, whereas somebody else may only get six reps, even though they are equally strong, generally speaking. It's just their bodies are not dealing with all the volume and all the abuse nearly as better as the other guy. That said, if you are well into your intermediate phase as a weightlifter, you have at least two years of proper lifting behind you, you're a guy and you've gained your first 30-ish pounds of muscle, or if you're a woman and you've gained about half that, then yeah, you probably should start periodizing your training. If nothing else, just to keep it interesting to you, unless that's really not a problem and you can do the exact same style of workouts, you know, month after month, after month, year after year,

and still enjoy them and really feel like you are wanting to be there. That's important. And additionally, you probably will gain muscle and strength a bit faster from that point on if you periodize your training. But you should also know that if you have been doing everything correctly, or at least the most important things well most of the time for a couple years now, you probably only have another three or four years of progress available to you really until you'll have mostly tapped out your genetic potential for muscle and strength gain. Now, I know that's not a very popular thing to say. The idea that five or six years of doing the most important things mostly right Most of the time is going to produce the vast majority, mostly all of the muscle and strength gains that we have available to us genetically, but it is the truth and it should be known. And it doesn't have to be

discouraging because in those five or six years, you are going to completely transform your physique. You are going to look great. You are going to feel great. And you also are then going to be able to make a new decision about your training. So you're going to work very hard for five or six years. And by the end of it, you're going to look fantastic. You're going to look like a fitness model. You might not look as good as your favorite fitness model or as the fake natty dude or chick on Instagram, but you are going to look super fit. And now you go, okay, so this is more or less what I've got. Where do I go from here? Now, if you really love training, you really love pushing yourself hard in the gym, and you want to see if you can just get a little bit better, even if it's gain one

pound of muscle per year and add 10, 15 pounds to your major lifts in a year. If you like that game, great. Then you just keep going. And you understand that you have to work tremendously hard now for what is marginal, very marginal improvements, especially considering how easy things are in your first year or two and how significantly your body changes. But if you are into it and you have the right expectations, great, then that's what you do. You just keep pushing yourself harder and harder. You're going to be periodizing your training. You're going to be continuing to push yourself to add weight to the bar over time or have your dumbbells over time, progressive overload.

You're going to be training with quite a bit of volume. You're going to want to find out for yourself how much volume your body needs to continue successfully progressively overloading your muscles. Most people are going to find that it's probably in the range of 15 to 20 hard sets per major muscle group per week and you just keep going. Now, on the other hand, if you are very happy with the way that you look and how you feel and you like all the work that you've done to get to where you are, but all of what I just explained doesn't excite you, if it doesn't really seem that interesting to you, okay, then what else do you want to do at that point? Do you want to now just maintain your outstanding physique and maybe use the time that would otherwise go toward training if you really

wanted to keep progressing to put into other things that you're interested in. It could be exercise-related things that you could just do for fun. It could be sports. It could be business-related, just personal hobbies, whatever. If you want to do that, you can do that. You can maintain an outstanding physique

with just two or three workouts per week very easily. You might even be able to do it with one full or three workouts per week very easily. You might even be able to do it with one full body workout per week, but let's say absolutely with two or three workouts per week, you know, an hour-ish per workout. That's all you need. And that plus, you know, keeping your calories where they need to be and paying attention to your macros. Again, you can be even kind of loosey-goosey with it, but you can't just egregiously overeat, of course, and think you're going to maintain your awesome abs. But you do that. So you go, all right, three hours a week, I'm going to be in the gym lifting weights. And then I have

another three hours per week that I normally would be in the gym lifting weights. What do I want to do? Maybe I will get into, I don't know, bicycling, or maybe I'm going to go for nice walks in the park down the street and I'm going to listen to audio books or informative podcasts or something, or maybe I'm going to start work a bit earlier those days and get some more work done, whatever. My point is, that's now open to you. Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of 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 MuscleForLifeFitness, Twitter at MuscleForLife, and Facebook at MuscleForLifeFitness. All right, let's go to the next question. What are the best weight loss foods? I don't like the term weight loss food because there's really no such thing as a weight loss food. There are foods that are more conducive to weight loss and weight gain than others, but there are no foods that inherently cause weight loss or weight gain. There are no foods that inherently cause weight loss or weight gain.

So really what this comes down to is palatability and satiety, how yummy food is and how filling it is, right? Some foods are tastier than others and easier to overeat than others. And some foods are less filling than others, more filling than others. So for example, brownies are much easier, much tastier than and much easier to overeat than broccoli. But calorie for calorie, broccoli is much more filling than brownies. So specifically foods that are high in fiber, water, and protein tend to be more filling than foods that are lower in fiber, water, and protein. And foods that are high in fat and sugar are obviously more palatable, tastier than foods that are lower in fat and lower in sugar. So the best foods for weight loss, so to speak, are mostly going to be foods that are good,

but not so good that you can't stop eating them. And that could be something like even a sweet potato, for example. I think sweet potatoes are very tasty. When I'm eating a sweet potato, would I feel compelled to eat three more? Probably not. As well as foods that are very filling for the calories that they contain. So this, for example, is one of the reasons why vegetables are great for when you're cutting, because most vegetables don't contain very many calories, but they're very filling. They contain a lot of fiber. They contain a lot of water. They take up a lot of space in your stomach. Research shows that the volume of a meal highly impacts the satiety resulting from it. So

a meal with a lot of volume to it and a lot of food really fills up your stomach is going to make you feel fuller than a meal that has less volume, less food, but the same number of calories that's been shown in research. And if you want to see this in action, just eat a couple hundred calories of vegetables and then record how full you feel after, let's say on a scale of one to 10, and then an hour after and two hours after. And then next time around, eat a couple hundred calories of muffin, let's say. Eat a muffin, basically, and see how full that makes you feel afterward, an hour, two hours afterward, and you'll see. Alrighty, the final question here is, does training with

lighter reps and faster, more explosive reps increase muscle and strength gain? And the answer is no, it does not. However, research shows that training with your normal weights, which should be in the range of let's say 60 to 85% of your one rep max, if you are trying to gain muscle as quickly as possible. And if you also want to be gaining strength as quickly as possible, you're definitely going to want to be including some training in the range of 80 to 85% every one rep max. So research shows that if you're training with your heavier weights and you work to move those as quickly as possible, that can help you gain muscle and strength faster. For example,

a study conducted by scientists at Pablo de Olavide University found that after six weeks of having 20 people bench press three times per week, the participants who were instructed to move the bar as quickly as possible gained more strength, quite a bit more strength than the people who were instructed to move the bar at a slower, more controlled speed. And there have been several other studies on this as well. And the consensus currently is the weight of the evidence currently is if you want to maximize muscle and strength gain, you want to work with heavier loads and you want to move the bar as quickly as possible. Now I should mention, of course, you still need to maintain proper form. You don't want to just drop the barbell to your chest when you're bench pressing and say, hey, that moved very quickly. So by removing all

resistance to the bar, it moves even faster. Of course, that's not what I'm saying at all, but you don't want to, and this kind of goes back to the time under tension question. You don't want to lower the bar at an abnormally slow pace. You want to lower it as quickly as you can while still controlling it, one to two seconds. And then you want to apply maximal force when you're raising the bar, when you are ascending. And the same thing would go for a squat. You don't want to just drop your hips to the floor. Of course not.

You need to control on the way down. don't want to just drop your hips to the floor. Of course not. You need to control on the way down. You don't want it to be a forced, slow descent, but a controlled descent, and then a forceful ascent, standing up as quickly as you can. Now, in case you're wondering why then do you find explosive training, so to speak, in different powerlifting programs. Why do some of those programs have workouts which do call for less weight for fast reps? Well, keep in mind those workouts are part of an overall training plan that is designed specifically for powerlifters and not just to maximize muscle and strength gain, but also to maximize their performance with very heavy weights and often with special

weightlifting suits. And so my point is that is not really relevant to most of us who just want to get in stage act. Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I'm doing on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider picking up one of my bestselling health and fitness books, including Bigger, Leaner, Stronger for Men, Thinner, Leaner, Stronger for Women, my flexible dieting cookbook, The Shredded Chef, and my 100% practical and hands-on blueprint for personal transformation inside and outside of the gym, The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation. Now, these books have sold well over 1 million copies and have helped thousands of people build their best bodies ever.

And you can find them on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play, as well as in select Barnes & Noble stores. Again, that's Bigger Leaner Stronger for Men, Thinner Leaner Stronger for Women, The Shredded Chef, and The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation. Stronger for Women, The Shredded Chef, and The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation. Oh, and I should also mention that you can get any of the audiobooks 100% free when you sign up for an Audible account, which is the perfect way to make those pockets of downtime, like commuting, meal prepping, and cleaning, more interesting, entertaining, and productive. So if you want to take Audible up on

that offer, and if you want to get one of my audio books for free, go to www.legionathletics.com slash Audible. That's L-E-G-I-O-N athletics slash A-U-D-I-B-L-E and sign up for your account.