Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Says You! Full-Body Workouts, Long-Distance Running, and Fat Burners

Episode Date: May 27, 2020

I’ve written and recorded a lot of evidence-based content over the years on just about everything you can imagine related to building muscle, losing fat, and getting healthy. I’ve also worked with thousands of men and women of all ages and circumstances and helped them get into the best shape of their lives. That doesn’t mean you should blindly swallow everything I say, though, because let’s face it—nobody is always right about everything. And especially in fields like diet and exercise, which are constantly evolving thanks to the efforts of honest and hardworking researchers and thought leaders. This is why I’m always happy to hear from people who disagree with me, especially when they have good arguments and evidence to back up their assertions. Sometimes I can’t get on board with their positions, but sometimes I end up learning something, and either way, I always appreciate the discussion. That gave me the idea for this series of podcast episodes: publicly addressing things people disagree with me on and sharing my perspective. Think of it like a spicier version of a Q&A. So, here’s what I’m doing: Every couple of weeks, I’m asking my Instagram followers what they disagree with me on, and then picking a few of the more common or interesting contentions to address here on the podcast. And in this episode, I’ll be tackling the following . . . 5:38- Are full body splits better than upper lower? 29:21 - Is long distance running bad for building a lean physique? 36:53 - Do fat burners actually work? --- Mentioned on The Show: Save 15% on fat burners: https://legionathletics.com/shop/ --- 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/

So I have written and recorded a lot of evidence-based content over the years, you know, books, articles, podcasts, videos on all kinds of topics, just about everything you can imagine at this point related to building muscle, losing fat and getting healthy. And I've also worked with thousands of men and women of all ages and circumstances, and I've helped them get into the best shape of their lives. That doesn't mean, though, that you should just blindly swallow everything I say, because let's face it, nobody is always right about everything. And especially in fields like diet and exercise, which are constantly evolving thanks to the efforts of honest and hardworking researchers and thought leaders. And this is why I'm always looking to not just acquire brand new pieces of

information or knowledge, but also to revise existing knowledge to make it more right. I'm always looking to find out where I can be more accurate. And one way to do that, of course, is to just continue to read and research and be willing to accept new ideas that run contrary to existing ideas I might have about how things work. And another fruitful source of help has been other people, people who disagree with me, especially those who have good arguments and good evidence to back up their assertions. Now, sometimes I don't end up getting on board with their positions, but sometimes I do end up learning something new.

And either way, I always appreciate the discussion. And that gave me the idea for this series of podcast episodes. It's pretty simple. I'm going to publicly address things that people disagree with me on, and I'm going to share my perspective. It's going to be like a spicier version of the Q&A episodes that I do. So specifically, here's what I'm doing. Every couple of weeks over on Instagram, at Muscle Life Fitness, if you want to follow me, I'm asking my followers what they disagree with me on, and then I'm picking a few of the more common or interesting contentions to address here on the podcast.

And in this episode, I will be tackling the following. Which workout split is best? And specifically, the advantages and disadvantages of upper lower and body part splits versus a full body split. And this comes from Finn Howcutt on Instagram. And this is something that I have been challenged on by other people as well, who claim that a full body split is best for basically everyone under all circumstances. And then I have something from Omar the Just from Instagram, and he said long distance running isn't bad for building a lean physique. And I haven't said that it is black and

white like that, but I've definitely said, hey, if you want to get as jacked as you can, as quickly as you can, then you probably shouldn't do much jogging or long distance running. And then the last challenge that I'm going to address here on this episode is that fat burner supplements don't work. And this has come from a number of people many, many times over the years who have heard from one influencer or guru or another that fat burners don't work. No supplements are going to help you lose fat faster, period, end of story. And if anyone says otherwise, they're a quack. And anyone who sells a fat burner is a scammer, etc, etc. Also, if you like what I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere,

definitely check out my sports nutrition company, Legion, which, thanks to the support of many people like you, is the leading brand of all natural sports supplements in the world. And we're on top because every ingredient and dose in every product is backed by peer-reviewed scientific research. Every formulation is 100% transparent. There are no proprietary blends, for example. And everything is naturally sweetened and flavored. So that means no artificial sweeteners, no artificial food dyes, which may not be as dangerous as some people would have you believe, but there is good evidence to suggest that having many servings of artificial

sweeteners in particular every day for long periods of time may not be the best for your health. So while you don't need pills, powders, and potions to get into great shape, and frankly, most of them are virtually useless, there are natural ingredients that can help you lose fat, build muscle, and get healthy faster, and you will find the best of them in Legion's products. To check out everything we have to offer, including protein powders and protein bars, pre-workout, post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more, head over to www.buylegion.com, B-U-Y legion.com. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout, and you will save 20% on your entire first order.

and you will save 20% on your entire first order. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, and if you also want all natural evidence-based supplements that work, please do consider supporting Legion so I can keep doing what I love, like producing more podcasts like this. All right, so let's start with workout splits and particularly with the claim that a full body split is best, something that I disagree with and that other people disagree with me on. So let's start with my general position regarding workout splits. Every type of split that is out there that's popular, upper-lower, body part, push-pull legs, push-legs-pull, full body, all these splits can work and can work well, but which will work best for you and which I would recommend to you would depend on what muscle groups you want to focus on. It would depend on your training history.

Are you new? Are you intermediate? Are you advanced? It would depend on how often you want to train. How many days are you going to be in the gym or in the home gym per week, lifting weights up to six? I wouldn't recommend seven days a week. And also how much volume you need to be doing to make progress. And at a high level, keep in mind that so long as you can do 10 to 20 hard sets per major muscle group per week, 10 if you are new, if let's say you're in your first year or so of proper weightlifting, whether you're a guy or a girl, upward of 20 if you are an experienced weightlifter. So if you have at least a couple of years of proper hard weightlifting under your belt and you are really

striving to get the last maybe 20 or 30% of muscle and strength available to you, then you're probably going to need, I would say, no less than 15 hard sets per major muscle group per week and maybe as high as 20 hard sets. And with some muscle groups, very stubborn muscle groups, you might need to go as high as 25 or even 30 hard sets per week. For example, with many natural weightlifters, the shoulders are just very stubborn. They take a long time to grow and they require high levels of volume as you get into your intermediate and your advanced phases of your fitness journey to continue putting on size and strength. With guys, the pecs can be a stubborn muscle group. They weren't in my case, but I've seen that working with many guys over the years. And the biceps as

well. And I'd say that's for men and women. Most people need to put a lot of work into their biceps if they really want them to shine. And so if your workout programming, if your training programming provides enough high quality volume, and if it has a progression model that works, so if you're achieving progressive overload primarily by just getting stronger over time, lifting heavier weights over time. And if you are working mostly with compound exercises and really focusing on improving your whole body strength, that's the core of the program. And then adding some accessory work to increase volume all over your body. It doesn't really matter what type of split you follow. That said,

the way many people execute splits, the way many people program their workouts according to whatever type of split they want to follow or think is best, makes it very hard to check all of those important boxes. So for example, take the body part split, the bro split, the traditional bodybuilding split. It can work well if you don't need that much weekly volume. So let's say you're new to lifting and you only need about 10 hard sets per major muscle group per week to pretty much maximize gains. And that's true for most people. people. More volume when you are newer is going to burn more calories, but it's not going to necessarily produce more muscle and strength gain. And if you want to learn more about that, listen to the interview that I did with James Krieger. And I published it semi-recently in the last couple of months. And it is a long form discussion on volume. And if you just hit the podcast feed and search for Krieger, K-R-I-E-G-E-R, you'll find it. But the long story short is newbies don't need more than about 10 hard sets per major muscle group per week to gain as much muscle and strength as they possibly can

for their first year or so. And research shows that you can profitably work on a muscle group up to about nine or maybe 10 hard sets in an individual training session, meaning that you can do up to about nine or 10 hard sets for a muscle group before you reach the point of diminishing returns for that training session. And if you need to do more volume to continue gaining muscle and strength in that muscle group, you want to do it in another training session. So what that means then is for a newbie who needs to do, let's say it's nine, nine or 10 hard sets per major muscle group per week, they can do well with a body parts, but they can just do a chest day and do nine or 10 hard sets for chest. And they could do a back day, nine or 10 hard sets for back, then maybe shoulders, and then maybe legs and arms. And then they rest for a couple of days and repeat.

That actually was basically a layout of the very first version of Bigger, Leaner, Stronger that I put out way back in 2012 when body part splits were being shit on left and right as actually worthless, as a relic of our ignorant bodybuilding past and only useful to drugged up bodybuilders who are going to be doing a ton of volume for one muscle group in a training session, you know, 20, 30, 40 sets for a muscle group, and then let it rest for an entire week before they did it again. And despite that, BLS 1.0 produced a lot of really outstanding success stories. And one of the reasons why the book became so popular is the program worked. And it worked because it provided enough volume for people who are new to proper weightlifting,

which really was most people who were reading the book, most of the guys who read that book had never done proper training. Maybe they had been training for a long time, but maybe I'd say on average, if I think back to it, the average guy who had been into working out before finding BLS 1.0 had maybe gained no more than 10 or 15 pounds of muscle. So basically still a newbie. Most guys are going to be able to gain 15 to 20 pounds of muscle in their first year. And so BLS, a body part split like BLS that focused on heavier weightlifting, compound exercises, and progressive overload worked very well. Now where that starts to fall apart is when you enter your intermediate phase as a lifter and you need more weekly volume to keep progressing. And that becomes really the primary determinant of whether you're going to

continue progressing or not. Are you doing enough volume? Again, so long as you're doing the right exercises and you have a good progression model built into your program that allows you to get stronger over time, that allows you to progressively overload your muscles, the biggest change you need to make to your programming is volume. That's far more important than periodization, for example, which is worth putting more attention on as an intermediate lifter and definitely as an advanced lifter. And this is something I talk about in the second edition of Beyond Bigger, Leaner, Stronger that I'm wrapping up.

I'm actually in the middle of recording the audio book, which is also going to serve as the final draft of the manuscript. And then it's a race to just getting the publish ready files good to go and launching the book. I'm thinking it'll be all done and out by August. But anyway, to get back on track, the biggest change you have to make is increasing your volume if you want to keep progressing. So let's say that 10 hard sets per major muscle group per week is working nicely for you. Eventually it will stop working. And the only way to make gains again is going to be increasing volume. So let's say you now need to do 12 to 15 hard sets per major

muscle group per week to make progress again, which is what most people will find as they move from being a newbie to an intermediate lifter. And now if you use a body part split and you just do it exactly the way that you were doing it, you go, okay, on my chest day, I'm going to do 15 hard sets because I really want a big chest and I want it as quickly as possible. And then on my back day, I'm going to do 12 hard sets and on my shoulders, I'm going to do 12, 15, et cetera, et cetera. That is not going to work as well as splitting that volume up for the reason that I gave earlier. And that once you get beyond nine or 10 hard sets for an individual muscle group in an individual training session. You don't

get much in the way of additional muscle and strength gain. However, if you cap yourself at nine to 10 hard sets for an individual muscle group in a training session, and then if you need to do more, you do them in a following training session, maybe you put at least one day of rest in between, maybe two, and then train the muscle group again with the remaining, let's say it's five hard sets or four hard sets that you need to do for the week, that will produce much better results. And so that means the body part split you were using, the setup you were using that I shared earlier, let's say it's just chest, back, shoulders, legs, arms, that no longer works, right? So now you're going to have to make some

changes. For example, you might create a modified body part split, a hybrid of sorts by taking your traditional body part split and let's say preserving the chest, back, and leg workouts as they are. So currently they are nine to 10 sets of chest work in one, back work in another, and leg work in the third, and then adding some additional work to each. Now, not for those muscle groups though, because again, you only want to be doing nine or 10 hard sets for an individual muscle group in an individual training session, but you might take your chest workout, for example, and add some biceps work to the end of it, three or four sets of biceps to get some extra biceps volume in for the week. And then in your back workout, you might add some triceps work at the

end of it, or you could flip those around if you prefer to do your triceps work after you're pressing or your biceps work after you're pulling. I prefer them the other way around because after nine or 10 sets of hard pressing and pulling, your tris and your bis are usually pretty bushed. Whereas if you're doing a push workout or a chest workout, your biceps get some training. Obviously, they get some volume, but it's not nearly as much. They're not nearly as involved as the triceps and vice versa with pulling. And so there you have some extra arm volume now that you've kind of tacked onto the end of your chest and your back days. And then you can do the same thing on your leg day where you're doing,

let's say 10 hard sets for your legs. And I would say those would be for your big leg muscles, your quads and your hamstrings. We could exclude the calves from that. You could just do the calf work after, or you could not if you don't need to or don't want to. And for example, what many people like to do is add some shoulder volume onto the end of their squat days, of their leg days, their heavy lower body days. And particularly what people like to do and what I've always liked to do is add side raises or rear raises. I've saved the overhead pressing for the beginning of workouts because it is a pretty difficult exercise, especially like a standing overhead press is definitely a, it's a compound lift. It's not as hard as the squat or the deadlift, but it's harder than the bench press. So I wouldn't want to do, for example, nine,

10 hard sets for my legs and then go do some OHP because my OHP is just not going to be as good as it would be if I did it as exercise number one or maybe number two in an upper body workout. And then we have our shoulders and our arms days in this body part split that we're modifying. And instead of just doing shoulders and arms on those days, you might turn those into, let's say, upper body days and lower body days, if necessary, depending on how much volume you want for your lower body. And on the upper body day, you might still do some more shoulder stuff, but then you also might do some more pulling, for example. That's what I like to do to get in the extra volume you need for your pulling in addition to the nine or 10 sets of back work of pulling that you're doing in your what was once just

your back day, right? And if you are deadlifting on your back day, on your big pull day, keep in mind that is also lower body volume. So if you're doing, let's say, four hard of deadlifts, and then a few days later, you're doing nine or 10 hard sets of pure lower body work, you know, squats, lunges, leg extensions, leg curls, and so forth. You're getting a fair amount of lower body work. You're getting up to, you know, 13, 14 hard sets for the week. Now you might want to do more. Again, it depends on where you're at and what your goals are, but that's plenty for most intermediate weightlifters to be able to

continue gaining strength and thus continue gaining muscle. And so then that leaves us with our arms day, what used to be our arms day. On that day, we may continue to do what we were doing for our arms, but add some more pushing, some more chest work, because so far we're doing nine or 10 sets for chest early in the week. So that was our chest day. And then we took it and we just added some arms to the end of it to turn it into an upper body day, kind of, but mostly just chest. And so now later in the week, we get in the remaining chest volume that we need. Maybe it's three sets, maybe it's four, maybe it's six. It really depends on what we're doing. But of course,

in that session, it wouldn't be more than nine or 10 sets. Okay, so what have we done here? We have taken a body part split that works well for newbies, but does not work well for intermediate or advanced weightlifters, and changed it up to make it work for intermediate and advanced weightlifters. It's still mostly a body part split. We took the basic design of the very traditional body part split and just added a bit of volume here and there to make sure that we're getting enough volume for each of the major muscle groups per week. And what we ended up with still looks a lot more like a body part split. And people would consider that a body part split more than anything else, right? You wouldn't really consider that an

upper lower split because you're only doing one dedicated lower body workout per week. That was our legs day. And then you also are doing some additional leg volume, some additional lower body volume on our back, our pull day with our deadlifts, but that is mostly a back workout, right? That's mostly a back day. That's how people would look at that. And so my point with going through that example is it's more important to understand the fundamentals of good workout programming and to understand what we are really going for than it is to swear by one type of workout split or another. Again, when you look at what are we trying to accomplish, it quickly becomes obvious that you can get there using

a lot of different workout program designs. I just showed you how you could do it with a body part split by just modifying it into what is still like 80% of a body part split. And I won't go through it here for the sake of time, but you could do the same thing with an upper lower split. You could make it work perfectly well. Let's say you had the same person, they're training five days a week. They can go upper, lower, upper, lower, upper. If they want to emphasize their upper body, if they want to emphasize their lower body, they can flip those around so they can go three lower body workouts per week and two upper by going lower, upper, lower, upper, lower. And as far as full body workouts go, I should address that specifically before I move on because that was really the primary point of contention here.

If you look through all of my programming in my books and in all of the workouts in my articles over at legionathletics.com, you won't find very much full body stuff. I have written about full body workouts and I have put together some full body programming, but I'm not a big fan of it because I think other setups are just better. I think that you're not gaining anything with full body programming and are in fact losing some advantages that you could be enjoying if you programmed differently. For example, one of the challenges with full body training is balancing the need for higher amounts of volume and recovery. You can't just blast a muscle group, for example, with six hard sets three days in a row and call it quits. You're going to have to put one to probably

two days. One day is probably fine if you're doing six sets. If you're doing upward of 10 hard sets for a muscle group in an individual workout, especially if it's a bigger muscle group, you will want to put two, maybe even three days in between the training sessions. And so let's relate this to a full body workout routine. So let's say you're going to be training five days per week and you want to follow a full body split. What that means then is you have to keep your volume pretty low in each individual training session. Your volume for each major muscle group needs to be pretty low because you're going to be training at the following day. Depending on what you're doing, how heavy the

weights are, how many reps you're doing per set, what you're doing with your diet, are you in a calorie deficit? Are you in a surplus? Are you maintaining? Your sleep hygiene plays a role in here, right? Because that impacts how well you recover. Even your age plays a role here because that also impacts how well you can recover. But let's say that you can do no more than three to six hard sets per major muscle group per session if you're going to be training those muscle groups the following day. And therefore, if you are training five days a week, you can make it work if you start to play around with those numbers and if you fired up Excel and started building the workouts. And what many people like to do, for example,

is in their first full body workout, they will train their upper or their lower body first, followed by the other. And then they will flip that around in the next workout. So let's say they start with their upper body on day one and then do lower body. They'll start with lower body on day two and then do upper, go back to upper on day three and so forth. But one downside to this setup, even though it works on paper, in actual practice though, something that I don't like about full body workouts, especially as an intermediate or an advanced weightlifter, when the weights get heavy and hard is the workouts are very difficult. I don't mind difficult workouts, but what happens is when you are doing

multiple big compound movements for multiple major muscle groups in the same training session, you'll find that your performance is great on the first and then less so on the second and even less so on the third. And as the big lifts, the squat, the deadlift, the bench press, the overhead press, as those are the key lifts that we want to be making progress on,

our progress on those exercises is going to most determine our progress overall. It's going to most determine our muscle and strength gain. As that's the case, then we really want our programming to emphasize progressing on those exercises. And so, for example, if you start a full body workout with a few sets, let's say it's four sets of heavy squats, you're strong, you're putting 85% on the bar, you're doing sets of six, let's say, that's difficult. And then after that, now you're supposed to do some heavy deadlifting as well. Okay, you can do it, but you're not going to be able to do as well on that deadlift as you would if you were doing a pull workout that

started with it, for example, but okay, fine. You do it. You do the deadlifting and now it's time to bench press. And you've just done four sets of heavy squats and four sets of heavy deadlifts. Of course, your push muscles are fresh technically, but your body is not. You have expended a lot of energy. You're going to be fatigued. Sure, you can do the bench press, but you're not going to do nearly as well in those, let's say it's four sets of bench pressing as you would if you were starting your workout with it. If you were doing, let's say a push day and it starts with four sets of bench press when you're fresh. And some people do try to work around that limitation with their full body programming by, as I mentioned earlier, starting some workouts with lower body stuff, even certain exercises,

and then other workouts with upper body stuff. And so you can compensate for the downside to some degree, but I think the best way to compensate for it is to just program differently if you're going to be training five days a week. For example, my preferred style of programming, what I do myself and what you'll find in my Bigger Leaner Stronger and Thinner Leaner Stronger and beyond Bigger Leaner Stronger, especially the new program that's coming out, what you'll find in those programs is really a combination of push-pull legs and a body part split, similar to what I went over earlier in this podcast, where you have three days a week that are primarily pushing, pulling, and training your legs. That's not all you do in those sessions, but that's mostly what you're doing. And then you have a couple of days. This would be the five-day routine, right? You have a couple

of days with a smattering of upper body and lower body exercises to make sure that we're getting enough volume per major muscle group per week. Now, coming back to full body workouts, we went over how to make it work if you're training five days per week. But what if you're not training five days per week? What if you're training four days per week or three days per week? Well, now it gets more difficult in the case of four days and basically impossible in the case of three days, if you also need to be doing a fair amount of volume per major muscle group per week to continue progressing. And to see why, again, just play around with this in Excel. Four days, you can make work, but those workouts are going to be even more difficult. You are not going to be looking forward to those workouts.

And three days doesn't work because of how much volume you would need to do, how much work you need to do in each of those workouts to get to that. Let's say it's 15 hard sets per major muscle group per week. Those workouts would be very long and very grueling and really counterproductive because toward the end of those workouts, you'd be so gassed that the work that you're doing is of very limited value. So I think that's enough on that one. I wanted to take some extra time to talk about it though, because it is something I get asked about fairly often. And I haven't written or

spoken about workout splits in general, but particularly full body splits in some time. And just to summarize, so a full body split can work well if you're new to weightlifting, right? Because you don't need that much volume to make progress. And especially if you're training four or five days per week, but even if you're only training three days per week, you still can do well with a full body split if you're new. But once you are an intermediate lifter, or if you're an advanced lifter and you need considerably more volume to progress, that's when the wheels start to fall off the full body split. And especially if you're only training three or four days per week.

If you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my sports nutrition company, Legion, which thanks to the support of many people like you is the leading brand of all natural sports supplements in the world. Okie dokie, let's move on and talk about long distance running. And Omar the Just says, and it's not bad for building a lean physique. And he's not wrong. If we're talking about just being lean, you can find plenty of competitive long distance runners who are lean. For example, check out the guy like David Goggins. He has a great physique. Most people would be very proud of that type of physique. He has some muscle, he's lean. That said, if he spent more time training his muscles, lifting weights and less time running, he would have more muscle. He would be

bigger and he would be stronger and have a physique more like what you and I would probably want if you're a guy. And what also needs to be taken into account is the fact that there are a lot of long distance runners who are just skinny fat or skinny, right? So we don't want to get caught up in the survivorship bias of this and say, hey, well, look, there's this one guy over here or this other super freak over here who's pretty jacked and they run marathons every week. Well, most people who do a lot of long distance endurance cardio don't look very good. And it alone is definitely not enough to have a lean muscular physique. And in having worked with many, many people over the years, what I can say is your average everyday person struggles to gain

muscle and strength effectively when they're doing a lot of long distance running. And I've even seen this with other forms of cardio as well, swimming and cycling, but running in particular. And there are a few reasons for this. One is long distance running takes a lot of energy, physical and mental energy. It really does wear you out and it makes it harder to train hard in the gym. It makes it harder to give your weightlifting workouts your all. And I don't have to cite any research for that. Anybody who has run a half marathon on a Sunday, for example, and then tried to go in Monday or Tuesday to squat knows what I'm talking about. Now, of course, there are ways to

program your workouts to minimize the interference effect, but when you're doing a lot of running, you just can't eliminate it entirely. Another thing to consider is long distance running and just running in general, even sprinting. It causes a fair amount of muscle damage and muscle soreness that gets in the way of your lifting. For example, I used to do sprints, just go out and run on pavement for my high intensity interval cardio. And I had to stop because my hip flexors were just perpetually sore and it got in the way of my squatting and my deadlifting. I wasn't able to progress on either of those exercises. When I was sprinting only, I believe I was doing two sprint sessions a week, maybe three. It was a bit ago, so I don't able to progress on either of those exercises. When I was sprinting only, I believe I was doing two sprint sessions a week, maybe three.

It was a bit ago, so I don't remember exactly. And I was trying to space them out and I was trying to give my hip flexors enough love to do both, but it wasn't working. So I had to cut out the sprinting. Now, I could have probably done some uphill, like sprinting on a hill, literally uphill because of the less impact, but I didn't have that readily available. I would have had to like drive somewhere to do hill sprints and I didn't want to do that. And that probably wouldn't have completely

eliminated the problem anyway. So anyway, my point is with long distance running comes some residual soreness and some residual muscle damage and some residual fatigue that can get in the way of your lifting. And with most people, it does. And as a natural weight lifter, it's hard enough to keep the needle moving, right? It's hard enough, especially when you're no longer a newbie, to keep adding weight to the bar over time, keep getting stronger, keep getting bigger. And if you add the additional obstacle of long distance running into the mix, that can be enough to just halt progress. And I should mention here that research shows that lower impact types of cardio, like cycling, rowing, and swimming don't seem to get in the way as much

as running, but they can. It really depends, again, how much you're doing of the cardio, what you're doing in the gym with your lifting, like how hard are you training and how well are you recovering from everything that you're doing? And so that's the primary reason I generally recommend low and no impact cardio. For example, I do upright cycling. I have an upright cycle. And currently, since the Rona kicked off the world tour, I've been doing it every day. I've been doing about 30 minutes of just steady state biking every day to keep up energy expenditure and to stay active because my home workouts are okay. They're just limited. I have a set of Bowflex adjustable dumbbells. I have some powerlifting bands.

And that's about it. And I've been able to do quite well with a very bare bones setup, but I haven't been able to train as intensely as I normally would. And so I'm using that opportunity to just do more cardio, which I enjoy and which allows me to continue eating the way that I like to eat without gaining fat. And I've actually been able to lose a fair amount of fat. I'm down about five pounds since this began, since March or whatever, when the lockdown began. And I haven't lost any muscle because the dumbbells I have go up to 90 pounds and I've been able to get in good enough workouts. I mean,

going back to what I was talking about previously, I've been able to do about 12 to 15 hard sets per major muscle group per week on good exercises with enough weight to produce a strong training stimulus. And so anyway, that's my recommendation on the type of cardio. And as for how much, Anyway, that's my recommendation on the type of cardio. And as for how much, as for the volume, I recommend that your cardio volume not exceed about half of your weightlifting volume. So do no more in terms of minutes or hours cardio than about half of the minutes and hours you are giving to your weightlifting. So in my case, I'm doing about six hours of weightlifting per week

and about three hours of cardio per week. And I wouldn't recommend any more than that, given the amount of weightlifting that I'm doing. If you're lifting four hours a week, then I would say cut your cardio off at about two hours a week. If it's three, one and a half and so forth. And if you follow both of those tips, you'll minimize not only the amount of stress that the cardio is placing on your body, stress that can get in the way of your lifting. You'll also minimize the interference effect you've probably heard about, which refers to changes that occur on a cellular level when you do cardio versus when you lift. And they are different signals, so to speak. They tell the muscles to do different things. And so if you do a lot of cardio,

you're sending a lot of that message, which is contrary to the message that you're sending in your weightlifting. And if you are primarily interested in getting more jacked, which most of us are, then you want that weightlifting message, you want that signal to be much stronger than the cardio signal. And this probably isn't that much of an issue unless you're

doing a lot of cardio, but that's why I recommend to not do a lot of cardio if you are mostly interested in getting bigger and stronger. And so by doing twice the amount of weightlifting as you are cardio, you are sending a much stronger signal to your muscles that they should adapt to the weightlifting first and foremost and the cardio secondary to that. Okay, let's address the final objection that we're going to cover in this episode of Says You, and that is that fat burners don't work, period. And anybody who says otherwise is full of shit, et cetera, et cetera. This is one of those silly claims that I just don't quite understand. This is like saying that immune boosters don't work, period. There's no way to boost the immune system. And if we look at the definition of boost, it just means to enhance

the activity of. Yes, there are very simple ways to boost your immune system. I've already recorded a whole podcast on this. You can go find it. If you search for boost immune, it'll probably come up. So I won't get into that here. But similarly, yeah, there certainly are supplements that will help you lose fat faster. Sinephrine, for example, has a lot of good evidence for effectiveness, for just increasing basal metabolic rate. It has other effects as well, but we can start there, just helping you burn more calories. Something like yohimbine, when combined with fasted training and particularly when combined with caffeine, again, good evidence, good research, well-designed, well-executed studies that show it will help you

lose fat faster. There are a few other ingredients as well that don't have as strong evidence, but still enough evidence to warrant their use if you have the budget and you have the inclination. Nothing in the way of downsides, for example, is not going to hurt. It may not help. Your body may not respond to it, which can be the case with any natural supplement, even creatine, for example, the most researched molecule in all sports nutrition, a very large body of evidence that shows it works. It helps you gain muscle and strength faster and recover faster from your workout, or at least it probably will. It may not help you actually. It generally works, but there

are people who just don't respond to it. And the same thing can be said for fat loss supplements as well. But another example of one of these ingredients that has good evidence or good enough, I think, to warrant its use, and that's why you'll find it in one of my fat burners, Phoenix. Forskolin is an example of one of those ingredients, and there are others as well. And so one of the reasons why people who actually know what I just said and they would agree, they'd say, okay, fine, Mike, that's true. There is good research on some stuff, but most fat loss supplements out there suck. They don't contain the right ingredients. They don't contain the right doses. And even if they do, they claim

to be a lot more effective than they actually are. And to that, I say, yep, I totally agree. Most fat loss supplements are garbage. And unfortunately, most of the popular ones are garbage and are unlikely to do much of anything for you. Now, that doesn't mean, though, that all of them are garbage. And some people, again, then they would say, well, yeah, but most people are not going to take the time to really parse the information. And I would rather just say, stay away from fat loss supplements, from fat burners, and

just focus on your diet and your exercise. Because I don't want people to fall into the moral hazard trap of taking a fat burner and then thinking now that they don't have to really pay attention to their calories or maybe you don't have to pay as much attention to their calories because they're taking a fat burner. And so I'd rather just say they don't work. And then I would say, okay, I understand the intention there, but why not just tell it like it is? Why not just say, hey, most fat burners don't do anything. Most of them do not have the right ingredients. They do not have the right doses and you're just wasting your money. In some cases, they contain ingredients that are even potentially dangerous. I recommend just staying away from them altogether. But if you really do want to take something to

help you lose a little bit more fat and understand that probably the best you can hope for with supplementation, taking the best ingredients in addition to knowing what you're doing in the gym and in the kitchen is maybe an extra half a pound up to a half a pound of additional fat loss per week, a couple of pounds per month. It's not game changing, especially when you consider that you can lose one to two pounds of fat per week without any supplements whatsoever. But if you are lean, wanting to get really lean, and let's say you're only looking at most a pound of fat loss per week. If you can take some supplements and get that up to maybe 1.3 to 1.5 pounds, hey, I mean, that's a 30 to 50% increase in fat loss. And maybe it means in the end that you can stop cutting slightly earlier. Maybe you can save yourself your final

month of cutting when it's all said and done by adding the supplements. And if that's appealing to you, if that's worth the money, because that's all we're really talking about, right? If you are choosing your products properly, you're not going to be choosing something that has any risk to it, really. It's just going to cost you some money. Maybe you're going to have to spend anywhere from $30, $40 to $60 to $80 per month, and you have to be fine swallowing some pills every day. And if you're cool with that, then here, check out these ingredients. And as this is my podcast, and I'll shill whatever I want to shill, I'll tell you that there are pre-made products out there that have the best ingredients that are shown to enhance fat loss, and they're in

Legion's products, in Phoenix, and in Forge. And the difference between those two is Phoenix is kind of our all-purpose fat burner, whereas Forge is a pre-workout fat burner because it contains yohimbine. That's really the ingredient it contains that's going to drive fat loss. And yohimbine is special in that you must be in a fasted state for it to work, which means your insulin levels have to be at a low baseline level. It needs to be anywhere from four to six hours after a meal. And you also need to take it before a workout. You don't want to just take it when you wake up, for example, and then lie around in bed. You're supposed to take it in a fasted state, and then you're supposed to go do exercise. That's how it works. Whereas Phoenix contains ingredients that don't

need to be taken before workouts. They don't need to be taken in a fasted state. Most people, for example, take Phoenix when they eat. They'll take some with breakfast and then they'll take some with lunch and it works just fine like that. And many people combine them, of course. So they'll take Phoenix, let's say breakfast and lunch, and then they'll take Forge before their early morning workout is what many people do. They wake up, they have Forge, they'll have some caffeine, often it's Pulse, of course, and they'll do their workout and then they'll eat. They'll have some Phoenix, they'll have one serving or a half a serving of Phoenix. And then at lunch, they'll eat and have another half serving or another full serving. And some people also do fasted training later in the afternoon or in the

evening. And in some cases, they will skip the caffeine. So they'll just have the Forge before the fasted workout because while yohimbine is a stimulant, it isn't going to, in most people, it's not going to impact sleep in the way that caffeine does. But then there are people out there who mostly younger people, I remember those days, who can have caffeine at 6 or 7 p.m., can have enough to get that synergistic effect with yohimbine. A half a serving of pulse is enough, 150, 175 milligrams of caffeine. They can have that at 6, 7 p.m. and sleep just fine. And so there are people who do that. I used to do that. I used to do fasted cardio, 7 p.m. and sleep just fine. And so there are people who do that. I used to do that. I used to do fasted cardio at 7 p.m. or so on average, and I would have one scoop of pulse, 175 milligrams of caffeine, and I would have a serving of Forge, which if I remember at

the time, because you want to dose your him bean based on your body weight. So it was about 15 milligrams or so of your him bean. And I would do some HIIT cardio. Again, this was like 7 p.m. I'd be in bed by 11, 1130, and maybe even as late as 12, and I would sleep perfectly fine. But those days are gone forever. If I were to do that now, I would probably wake up eight times in the middle of the night. I probably wouldn't be able to stay asleep for more than an hour at a time. It has happened. It sucks. All right. Well, that's it for fat burners and this episode of Says You. I hope you liked it. And if you want me to address one of your concerns in the next episode or in a future episode of this series, follow me on Instagram

at Muscle Life Fitness. And you'll see every other week or so I put up a slide in my stories asking for people to share things they disagree with me on using the little ask me anything, you know, little sticker. And so, yeah, just follow me on Instagram and look for that. Or you could just DM me, I guess. You could say, hey, here's something for your next says you. That could work as well. All right. Well, that's it for this next says you. That could work as well. All right, well, that's it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did and you don't mind doing me a favor,

please do leave a quick review on iTunes or wherever you're listening to me from in whichever app you're listening to me in because that not only convinces people that they should check out the show, it also increases search visibility. And thus it helps more people find their way to me and learn how to get fitter, leaner, stronger, healthier, and happier as well. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then simply subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any new stuff. And if you didn't like something

about the show, please do shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com, just muscle, F-O-R, life.com, and share your thoughts on how I can do this better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback, even if it is criticism. I'm open to it. And of course, you can email me if you have positive feedback as well, or if you have questions really relating to anything

that you think I could help you with, definitely send me an email. That is the best way to get ahold of me, mikeatmusclefullife.com. And that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode. And I hope to hear from you soon.