Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Staying Fit While Traveling & Advice From Buffett on Setting Goals

Episode Date: April 2, 2015

In this podcast I give you several diet and training tips for maintaining muscle and strength and minimizing fat gain while traveling and some simple, powerful advice from Warren Buffet on setting and pursuing goals in life (34:50). ARTICLES RELATED TO THIS VIDEO: How to Stay in Shape When You’re Traveling: http://www.muscleforlife.com/how-to-stay-in-shape-when-youre-traveling/ The Definitive Guide to Effective Meal Planning: http://www.muscleforlife.com/healthy-meal-planning-tips/ Does Alcohol Consumption Affect Weight Loss and Muscle Growth? http://www.muscleforlife.com/does-alcohol-consumption-affect-weight-loss-and-muscle-growth/ How Much Protein is Needed to Build Muscle: http://www.muscleforlife.com/how-much-protein-build-muscle/ How to Enjoy “Cheat Meals” Without Ruining Your Diet: http://www.muscleforlife.com/cheat-meal/ How to Change Your Body Weight Set Point: http://www.muscleforlife.com/body-weight-set-point/ The Definitive Guide to Intermittent Fasting: http://www.muscleforlife.com/the-definitive-guide-to-intermittent-fasting/ 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/

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That's muscleforlife.com forward slash audiobooks, and you'll see how to do this. So thanks again for taking the time to listen to my podcast. I hope you enjoy it, and let's get to the show. Hey, hey, Mike here from MuscleLife.com. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. In this episode, I want to talk about traveling, how to stay in shape while traveling, or at least how to mitigate the damage. I want to talk about cardio, how much cardio you should be doing, how much cardio is too much. And last but not least, I want to talk about an interesting little anecdote and piece of life advice I ran across somewhere in a blog,

in a book or something. It's in my notes. So I read it somewhere. And it's from Warren Buffett. And it's related, it's relating to setting goals. And it resonated with me. So I thought I might resonate with you. So we're going to go over it. All right, so let's start first with traveling. I get asked about this fairly often. I've written an article about it. But I thought it'd make a good podcast and make good podcast content as well. Because there's a good chance you haven't seen the article. So the obvious, the problems with traveling are obvious. It's, you know, it's hard to, you're going to be eating out a lot.

Depending on the trip, you're going to, you know, be eating in a lot of restaurants. So it's very hard to know how many calories you're eating and what your macros are like. It can be hard to get into gyms or just stick to your normal workout schedule or impossible. And yeah, I mean, those are the obvious, those are obviously the two, the two, two big problems. And if it's, if it's just like a weekend trip, you know, you only can

do, in terms of food, you only can do so much damage in a weekend. It doesn't matter if you don't work out for a few days, but if it's a few weeks, it can be – I've just heard from – people have emailed me. They've been pretty shocked with how much fat they're able to gain in a few weeks of overeating and drinking and not working out. And then on the flip side, that's kind of on one end of the spectrum. And then somewhere more maybe in the middle would be people that – let's say, they had to go on a business type of trip for a couple weeks. And they're not eating a ton of food or drinking a ton of alcohol, but it's just how do you fit in workouts and how do you try to keep your food under control. So let's talk about the diet point here first um it depends on what you're what you're wanting to accomplish when you're traveling if you're cutting and you want to continue losing weight

you're really going to have to uh you're going to have to make a very simple meal plan to follow it's really the easiest way to do it um and when you land you're gonna have to go then go stock up on those foods keep them in the refrigerator in, in your room and really just eat those meals. You're going to have to avoid eating out. Um, you could probably work in something like Chipotle, uh, because you know, they, they post their calories and macros online, which they're not going to be a hundred percent accurate because it depends on how much stuff people are actually putting in your, your bowl or burrito or whatever.

because it depends on how much stuff people are actually putting in your bowl or burrito or whatever. But you can add a little bit to those numbers just to pad them and be okay. But if you're eating out in restaurants, I've spoken about this, written about this before, you just really don't know what's in your food. There's, of course, exceptions in terms of certain dishes, I guess. You could be a bit more accurate in guesstimating, but many times you don't know how much oil, how much butter. Oil, butter, cream are added to a lot of different dishes, of course, because it just makes things taste very good. So if you are going to be cutting, then, you know, you're going to want to, you're going to want to, you're going to want to eat a lot of things. You can just buy

in a grocery store, essentially, um, you know, Greek yogurt, nuts, fruit, uh, you can, you can make salads. You can have like just the, the, uh, the, whatever ingredients you're going to be using and then the dressing separate. Um, and it's not going to be using and then the dressing separate. Um, and it's not very exciting, but it gets the job done. Uh, you're probably also going to, that means that you're going to have to play with your meal timing, where if you're, let's say, uh, people are going to be going out, you have to, you have to go to a lunch at some restaurant or whatever. So, you know, you have to plan and you're not competing at the restaurant because it's just, you know, you're not going to be able to know what you're actually eating. Then you're going to have to eat your food either before or after.

You have to bring in some Tupperware. So it just takes a little bit of planning. I've done it before, and it's not that big of a deal. You just think ahead. You make a simple little meal plan beforehand, and then when you land, you go to Whole Foods or whatever. You get what you need and have – I mean that's where something also like six-pack bags, something like that, one of their products can be helpful, which is a – it's like a duffel bag with slots for – that comes with containers for food. So something like that is helpful as well because then you can take it with you and have it, you know, wherever throughout the day, wherever you are. If you're in one location, you can just have it there. Or even if you're, you know, out and about, you can just have it in

your car and you know, it keeps your, it's insulated. So something like that is helpful. Cutting, if you're not going to do that, then would say don't even try to uh cut while you're while you're traveling uh personally i tend to just go with um a maintenance type of diet really when i'm traveling i'm trying to gain either trying to not gain any weight just trying to come back and carry on basically um in terms, in terms of my weight, whatever I'm doing before I travel or if it's, uh, if I, or I will just basically accept that I'm going to gain some weight, but I kind of have a ceiling on it. So my wife's from Germany, so I've been over to Europe quite a few times. And, uh, over the holidays, I kind of allow myself five pounds basically. When I, uh, when I weigh myself,

I weigh myself every morning and when I'm consistently like after a few days, I'm five pounds heavier than when I arrived, then that's when I stopped. Cause it's not all fat. Obviously if I'm eating more food, my muscles are gonna be holding more water, more glycogen. Um, and that's what I, at that point, then I just kind of bring my food intake down to be holding more water, more glycogen. And that's what I, at that point then, I just kind of bring my food intake down to where I know where my maintenance level is. And you can do something like that as well. And, you know, that's also, so then like if I hit that point after about two weeks or so, which I generally don't even like to be gone longer than that,

but the last trip was pretty long. It was like a three-week trip, which was just too long for me. But after two weeks, I had gained those five pounds. So my final week was less food. But I kind of pace myself. So I don't show up and just start eating everything and eat 10,000 calories a day for four days and then be up five pounds and quit. I just eat a bit more than I normally would. The dinners are a bit bigger.

My breakfasts are usually small. I'm just not like, well, I'm not at home. I come here to the office. And so whatever I'm eating is here at the office. I'm not going to be cooking anything elaborate, but if I'm over there, then I'm eating breakfast. And so, you know, that works as well. We're then also just psychologically you're prepared to gain weight which if you're used to staying lean you know you do have to just accept you have to you know it's not i don't care it doesn't matter how balanced like well balanced you are about it mentally nobody when you stay lean nobody likes to get fatter but if you you kind of weigh that against well you're gonna go enjoy yourself you're gonna eat a bunch of good food. You don't normally eat.

You're gonna get fatter, whatever. You just come back, you know, you diet for two or three weeks and then it's gone and it's worth it. And that's a much better approach than just going like, I don't go, I go there just knowing I'm gonna get fatter as opposed to going there, trying to tell myself like, I don't know, I'm gonna be really good. I'm not going to get any fat or maybe just a little bit, but then I can just, I, you know, three or four days of deficit and I'm, and I'm going to be, I'm going to be back to normal.

I don't go there with that because then with that mentality, because then if I do start overeating or if I do start gaining fat, then, uh, you know, it then it just creates more anxiety about it because I didn't want to, but maybe I will. I just decide from the beginning, yeah, I'm going to go get fatter basically. And then I'm going to come back and then I'm going to diet for a few weeks and I'm going to undo it and that's going to be that. I will say though, I recommend that you don't go overboard with this. And going overboard, the easy way to go overboard is eat a lot of fatty foods and drink a lot of alcohol, which is what a lot of people like to do when they are, you know, just on vacation. And the reason why is because, and you're probably familiar with this if you're familiar with my work, is that dietary fat is stored very easily as body fat.

Carbohydrates, not so much, and protein, really not so much. So when you're in a calorie surplus, if that surplus is coming from protein, carbohydrates, or fat, you're going to gain fat regardless, but you're going to gain fat the quickest if it's from dietary fat. And then if you add alcohol on top of that, then the rate at which you're going to gain fat the quickest if it's from dietary fat. Um, and then if you add alcohol on top of that, then the, uh, rate at which you're going to gain fat is accelerated, uh, because alcohol blunts fat oxidation, which means that the, when you, when, when you're drinking alcohol, your body is storing that body fat even more efficiently. Essentially, I'll link an article down below

in the description if you want to read more about that. And just as a little aside, you can drink alcohol fairly regularly and still do well in the gym and still lose fat. But again, you should check out the article that I wrote on it because you have to do it correctly. I mean, you're not going to be drinking every day, obviously, but you could drink some alcohol, let's say once a week. And if you're smart with your diet and you don't overdo it, you will be totally fine in terms of losing weight. But if you want to gain weight very quickly, eat a lot of fatty foods and drink a lot of alcohol. I've seen, I mean, I've known people, I know people that have gone, even like I know one dude who went for a weekend to New York and just ate food basically all day lots of fatty food tons of calories and ton of them from dietary fat and was drinking alcohol a lot of alcohol every day and he came back it was like three days and he came back like

12 pounds heavier now he holds a lot of water um so obviously he didn't gain 12 12 pounds of fat but there was a good chunk of fat there like i don't know what the what the maximum amount of fat your body can synthesize in a day is but i'm sure he hit it i would guess he probably gained five pounds of fat in three days, which is – that's pretty impressive. That plus a bunch of water and bloat and stuff, and he was like 12 pounds up. So just beware. If you're going to eat – if you're going to be in large calorie surplus every day and it's going to be – a lot of it's from dietary fat and you're going to add alcohol, you're going to gain a lot of fat. And you're going to add alcohol, you're going to gain a lot of fat and it's going to, you're going to gain it very quickly. Another thing I really like to do when I travel, uh, just to kind of keep things in check as I reduce my, my

meal frequency, meaning that, um, if I'm here, you know, just doing my normal daily grind, uh, I'm eating every few hours just cause I enjoy it. It's not necessary, obviously, for building muscle, losing fat or anything like that. But it mainly just keeps my energy level stable, actually. And I don't really get hungry when I haven't eaten food in a while, but I'll feel a little bit empty and sometimes just a little bit lower energy. So by having food every few hours, feel a little bit empty and sometimes just a little bit lower energy. So by having food every few hours, um, and it just keeps my energy levels nice and stable. So I'm traveling though. Uh, I will eat normally what I'll do is, um, I'll skip breakfast unless I'll do, I'll do one large meal a day essentially, and then little supplementary meals. So it's normally not breakfast. It's

normally dinner. So I normally skip breakfast and I'll eat a light lunch and then it'll be a bigger dinner or maybe lunch will be a medium-sized meal and then a bigger dinner. I just make sure that I hit my protein every day, which is I just stay around a gram per pound. That's just, you know, when you're training regularly, I would say 0.8 grams per pound would be the bare minimum that you'd want. Around one gram is you're totally fine. And when you're in a calorie deficit, I like to go a little bit higher. I like to go up to 1.2 grams or so, 1.1 per pound of body weight. And those numbers are most relevant to people that are relatively lean.

Someone that's overweight or extremely overweight could stick to something like a gram per pound of lean mass and be fine. But so when I'm traveling, I'm kind of like thinking with hitting my protein numbers, which protein powder helps a lot for that. I always have protein powder with me when I'm traveling because then I can supplement with like 50 to let's say, I don't like supplementing more than 70, 75 grams a day because it just, it starts to upset my stomach. So 50 grams a day from powders, like my standard when I'm, even when I'm here, I'm going to be doing 50, yeah, 50, I'd say 50 to 70 grams a day, depending on what's going on for the day. So I like to have powder with me when I travel because it's just convenient for that purpose.

So like maybe I'm going to do, maybe that will be my breakfast, for instance. It's just a couple scoops of protein and water. And again, I don't wake up hungry. I don't really get hungry. So it's more just like getting a little bit of food in me, gives me a little bit of energy. And then at lunch, I'll have some protein. So like I'm going into dinner, I like to go into dinner having eaten about 100 grams of protein, because then I only have to eat, or maybe 120. And obviously, if you know, if it's a few days where my protein is a bit

lower than than one gram, it's again, it's not a big deal. If I'm around 0.8, I'm totally fine. What I wouldn't do is completely explode my macros for no reason and eat, you know, forget to eat protein, eat like 40 grams in a day and just eat a ton of carbs and fat. I wouldn't do that. I always keep my protein, you know, uh, for me, I weigh 190 pounds. So, uh, I it's, I'm never eating less than a hundred and, you know, 50, 160 150, 160 grams a day. And it would be normally upwards of 200 or so. That's like my normal intake. So what I'm doing is I'm essentially saving a lot of my calories.

And I've talked about this before in terms of cheat meals. This is something you can do. You don't have to be traveling to do this. It's just a nice way to be able to go enjoy a big dinner or it could be a big bread, whatever, a big meal, eat a lot of calories without going way over for the day, essentially. So I'm saving a lot of, I'm saving basically all my carbs and fat or a large, large amount of my carbs and fat for that one meal. And it kind of depends. Like I was in New York recently and one night we ate at this really good restaurant called Per Se and they only do – they do – they have like a vegetarian tasting menu and just a regular omnivorous tasting menu.

And there are nine courses with some intercourse things. And so my wife got the vegetarian one. I got the other one. But my wife weighs like 96 pounds. She got the other one, but my wife weighs like 96 pounds. She doesn't, she doesn't eat very much food. She can't eat very much food. So each of her courses, she like had, you know, there's already small because it's obvious, you know, there's not nine big courses, but she only ate maybe half of each. And a couple of them she thought were, she just wasn't that into. So I ended up eating like, I don't know, 15 courses of food

plus random little things in between plus bread. Plus I eat so much food. It was absurd. So something like that, obviously like Heather has a lot of calories. Um, but I have noticed that, you know, if I like that day, so it's New York where I'm doing a lot of walking, which is something I'm going to get to in a minute. Uh, also a good little strategy and i'm i you know i really am just kind of eating protein um i had i had a salad for lunch so i had some vegetables whatever just saving all my calories for this dinner and then uh in burning energy too and um i find that i can do things like that and yeah my weight's a little bit up the next day, of course, even just from water retention. But over the course of the next few days, my body is totally back to normal.

And this also kind of relates to my body weight set point, which I've written about, which would actually make a good podcast as well. I'll link an article down below if you want to check it out. as well. I'll link an article down below if you want to check it out. But if you want to just wait, I'll talk about it in an upcoming podcast where I stay pretty lean just around the year. I'm about 8% probably. It's kind of hard to caliper when you start getting under 10 and get it accurate. Is it 8? Is it 8.5? Is it 7.5? It's hard to say. But I stay pretty lean. And at this point, this has kind of become my body's set point in that this has kind of become its default. It takes consistent, deliberate overeating for me to really gain fat,

a noticeable amount of fat, and hold on to it. I can do these real acute overfeeds once a week, let's say, and it doesn't change my body. And I talk about why in the article and I can talk about it on a podcast. But anyways, so when I'm traveling, I have my one meal plan for that day. Like what's my big meal? I'm going to save my calories for that meal. If it's a big lunch, that means that it's going to be a lot of calories at lunch and then I'm not going to be doing a big lunch, that means that, um, I, it's going to be a lot of calories at lunch and then I'm not going to be doing a big dinner. Uh, my dinner, then I might even skip dinner depending how big

lunch is. Uh, or I might just have some protein, even if I'm in a restaurant, it's just, you know, that my, my normal lunch of, of like salad and protein becomes my dinner now. Um, so this is also, um, this, this playing with meal frequency thing kind of just is a, is a little segue into intermittent fasting. I do like to intermittent, just use intermittent fasting when I'm traveling. And if you're not familiar with it, I'll link an article down below and just explain briefly, uh, basically the, there are different protocols for it, but what you're doing is for every 24 hours, you are not eating food for a large number of them, and you have a short window in which you eat your food. And while it's relatively short, there are different types of protocols, like

certain IF protocols would call for 20 hours of fasting, and that means really no food, no calories, or very few calories. If you wanted to have, you know, let's say 30 calories of half and half in your morning coffee, that's fine. But you couldn't have toast. You know what I mean? So you're not eating food. You're keeping your insulin at a baseline level. And this is – it's pretty trendy these days. It was very, very trendy a year or two ago when it really kind of hit the bodybuilding scene.

And there are health benefits to fasting. There are certain physiological processes that only occur when the body is – when insulin is at a baseline level. So I think that there is something to be said for – even if you're not doing it every day, There is something to be said for even if you're not doing it every day. I don't use IF on an everyday basis because I don't really like it that much just in terms of personal of my eating patterns. I don't like having to eat large, large meals, which you have to when you IF if you eat a fair amount of calories every day. Because there's a point where it just slows me down. If I'm here at work, I don't like having to eat, let's say, a 1,000-calorie lunch.

Let's say break my fast with a 1,000-calorie lunch, because mentally I'm just going to probably be a little bit foggy, because I forget the name of the hormone, but when you eat food, your body releases a hormone that induces sleepiness, and the more you eat, the more it releases, and that's why big meals can make you feel tired. But some people do like IF and it totally works. You don't have to be eating protein every few hours to maintain muscle. You can fast for 20 hours a day and then four hours of eating and be totally fine.

The protocol I like the most is Martin Burkhan's lean gains protocol. It's most applicable for fitness people. You fast for 16 hours and you have an eight hour eating window. And again, I explain it in the article down below. And so I like to, I'll use that when I travel where I travel where, um, I'm going to be fasting. Let's say I'm going to be skipping breakfast and I'm going to be breaking my fast at lunch. And, uh, let's say, let's say noon, right? So the night before I stopped eating at eight, let's say I'm done dinner, eight, nine, no more food. I'm fasting to the next day through to 12, one, uh, just drinking water, walking, you know, if I'm traveling, walking around, doing what I'm doing.

And then, and then I, now I'm going to be eating from one. Again, I have that window now from one till about nine. And in that window, I'm breaking the fast. Usually again, when I'm traveling, it's normally a dinner thing. That's my big meal. So it's like a smaller meal that I'm going to break it with. And then maybe some protein somewhere in the middle in there. And then another smaller meal, and then I'll have my big meal, and that's it. That's a great way to keep your calories under control. And if you do fine with fasting, I mean, I do completely fine with it, meaning that some people, they get very, very hungry when they fast, and it's very uncomfortable. I'm fine when I fast.

So if you're fine when you fast, it's an easy way to just, because you only can really comfortably eat so many calories in an eight-hour period or if you wanted to fast longer. The reason why Burkhan cuts it off at 16 hours of fasting is that research shows that muscle breakdown really starts to accelerate at that point. The amount of energy that you're – like the amount of the glucose that your body needs, a larger portion of that starts coming from muscle tissue, uh, at that 16 hour point. So that's why he cuts it off there. And then you, you stimulate protein synthesis by eating protein.

So that's why, uh, I personally also do the same thing. I'll fast from, I don't know, anywhere from 14 to 16 hours. And then I have that eating window. So I'll talk about exercise, working out, um, working out and traveling obviously can be a pain. Um, but if you plan ahead, like if you stay in a hotel that's near a gym, if, if you make that a, one of your criteria when you're choosing your hotel, um, that helps a lot because then you know, you're on your own schedule. You can wake up early and you can go your workout done that's what i like to do if it's if it's possible um if it's not possible and your hotel has a gym it's obviously going to be limited but you can do things i mean what i'm looking at i mean especially if i'm just going away for you know less than a week or whatever is i don't necessarily have to be doing the same workouts that I'd normally be

doing, but I want to do something. I just want to, um, not only burn energy, but, uh, you know, burn up some of the glycogen in my muscles, which gives me, um, some leeway with my, with my carbs that I'm eating. It gives my body something to do with the carbs other than store them as body fat, uh, because carbohydrates converted into glycogen and the muscles can hold a lot of glycogen. So when you deplete them, the body has as a priority, it's going to replenish those glycogen stores before it starts storing carbohydrate as body fat. So even if the hotel gym sucks and a bunch of light dumbbells and some machines, and all you can do is a bunch of high rep stuff.

Ironically, high rep stuff is good for burning out glycogen stores. So don't think that that's worthless. That does actually have value. And also just even putting your muscles under any sort of semi-decent load is going to help you just maintain your strength. And in terms of the number of workouts that you can do to maintain, you don't have to. You could maintain your current muscle and strength on no more than two workouts a week, maybe even one, maybe one full body. I mean, it'd be a real pain in the

ass workout. It's going to be kind of long. It's going to be really hard. But if you had a proper, if you had access to a proper gym, so you have access to some heavy dumbbells and good barbell and plates, you could do just like an upper day, which would be just your upper body, a lot of your pressing. And you could do a lower day. And people normally would combine their squats and deadlift, even though the deadlift is more a back exercise than it is the legs. But most people would like to combine that on the lower. So you're doing all your pressing.

You're doing your arms on your upper, and you're doing your deadlifting and your legs on your lower. And, you know, you can stick to your heavy weightlifting, do anywhere from three to six sets. I would say, personally, what I would probably do is I'd probably do, you know, probably six sets for either my chest pressing or my shoulder pressing, depending on, for me, I would do shoulders because my chest, I don't really, I just kind of want to maintain the chest that I have, but I would like to have a little bit more in my shoulders. But if it's the other way around, if you're still trying to really build a chest, then do a bit more chest. And I would do three sets for smaller groups like my arms, like biceps, triceps.

And then on the lower day, I would do, again, I would either do six sets of squats or, well, yeah, I'd probably do about six sets of heavy leg. It doesn't have to necessarily be all squats. It could be like back squats, front squats, or it could be squats, leg press, or whatever. I would do three sets of deadlifts, and then I'd do some accessory pulling work and probably some accessory leg work as well, three sets, maybe in a little bit of a higher rep range. And, again, these are tougher workouts. They take a bit of time, but that's all. Let's say no more than an hour and a half per workout, but that's only two workouts. They take, uh, they take a bit of time, but, um, that's all you, let's say no more than an hour and a half per workout, but that's only two workouts. You do that in a week

and, uh, you are going to come back from your, if, as long as your food intake isn't, as long as you don't dramatically under eat in this period or like eat no protein or something, you're going to come back and, you know, you probably have lost nothing in terms of, uh, uh, performance. And I just noticed, sorry about the light back there. nothing in terms of performance. And I just noticed – sorry about the light back there. It's kind of early, so now the sun is blasting. Anyways, now if you can't – if there's no hotel gym, you can't get to a gym, you can just work out in your hotel room. You can do body weight stuff. You can do push-ups.

You can bring a pull-up bar, like, what is it called? Like total gym bar. You just pack it in its little box, take it with you, install it in your room. So you can do pull-ups. You can do leg stuff like lunges and you can do air squats and pistol squats. And you can do things like burpees and you can even get one of those TRX train things and set that up in your room. So there are, there are even things you can do in that. And again, you know, yeah, if you're in, if you're right, if you're like me and you do a lot of heavy weightlifting, doing a, doing body weight workouts every day is, it's not the same, but it does burn energy and it does burn glycogen. And it does just kind of keep your muscles tells them they're still needed. You know what I mean? So, um, and I found that, that getting workouts in,

it really does also help with preventing. It does. It helps with, yeah. Mitigating the damage, preventing too much, uh, weight gain. Cause I've gone both ways when I've traveled. I've gone, I've been out, out of the country for, for several weeks and not been able to, you know, not, not, not taking my own advice. And I noticed that I gained fat faster. And I, and of course, when I come back, it takes longer, it takes several weeks to get back to my normal weights and just get everything feeling normal again.

But if just, just doing a couple big heavy workouts a week, I gain fat. I'm able to eat more food for longer periods to gain my allotted amount of fat, and I maintain my performance much better. Like I come back, and within a week or two, I'm back to normal, uh, in terms of my weights and I'm just kind of continuing. So it is worth it if you can make it happen to, to get into a gym for, even if it's one day, like I said, you could do a whole body workout. It's going to be tough and you know what to do. You have your big compounds. You're going to do your pressing, your new, your pulling and squatting all in the same day. And, uh, that is worth it though. I

don't think that's worthless. And just one last point on, on that is even if you're going to be out of town for a couple months, uh, I would say the same thing. It's worth it. One to two workouts a week, and you can maintain your strength. You can maintain your muscle. It's going to buy you some extra room to eat food. Uh, so don't think that it's hopeless. If you know, uh, the guy I work out with actually every morning, he has to, he has a company in Europe and he has to travel there for several months at a time.

Now, like just, it can be random. He can be called over and then he's got to go. And just on a, you know, two months, uh, he can be gone or even three months. And, but on a, on a workout or two a week, he could, he, now I've been telling him to do this. He doesn't do it. But he could because he thought that if he can't be in the gym with me four or five days a week or if he can't be in a gym four or five days a week, then who cares?

But just one to two days a week would be enough so he could then come back and not have to spend a month or spend three weeks or whatever getting back to where he was at. So if you're going to be out of town for an extended period, I really recommend that you figure out how you can get into the gym at least two days a week. I mean, if you can do three days, then you could do something like push-pull legs or you could do chest and tris, back and bys, legs and shoulders. If you can get in the gym more, get in the gym more. But even if you only can do one day a week, don't, don't think that it's not worth anything. Another little thing I like to do when

I'm traveling is, uh, I'll keep my, uh, my hit cardio and my high intensity interval cardio in, um, depending on, well, I guess I like to keep it in just in general. I'll do it at night after, after we're done doing everything or whatever. Um, and I guess it depends on the night. Obviously, if it's going to be a late night, then I'm not going to be doing it. I would do it in the morning, but, um, just, just even 20, 25 minutes of hit cardio, which you can do in pretty much any hotel gym, cause they're going to have some cardio stuff. Um, also just helps. It helps burn energy. And, and I'd mentioned walking around a lot before. Um, there's a study I had just seen recently. It was like they had taken like 100 obese people, and they had one group do a resistance training program,

a light resistance training program, of course. And they had another group do a cardio program, and they had another group just be more active in their day-to-day life, take the stairs instead of the elevator, walk instead of drive short distances and things like that. And the people that were just active in their day-to-day lost just about as much weight as the other two groups because, of course, it burns energy. But that's something to keep in mind when you travel. What I'm trying to do when I'm traveling is I'm trying to burn a lot of energy. If I'm going to be eating a lot of food, I'm trying to just burn a lot of energy.

So obviously, if I'm doing any sort of resistance training workouts, that burns energy, and it also maintains muscle and strength. And then I like to do HIIT cardio because that burns not just energy, but it also burns fat more effectively. And it doesn't take much, just 20 minutes or so. And in the day to day, I'm trying to walk a lot. You know, if again, if, if I can take stairs, I'll take the stairs instead of the elevator, these little things, they really do matter. And, uh, it might seem a little bit, uh, obsessive, but it's, it's really not, it's just being smart. It's if I'm, if there's no reason to, uh, if I can just make little tweaks like that and if it only means over the course of an entire trip, let's say over a week, you lose, quote-unquote, a few hours.

But it's something like you could just wake up, sleep 20 minutes less and do some HIIT cardio instead. That 20 minutes of sleep doesn't actually matter. Once you're awake, you don't notice any difference sleeping 20 minutes less. So yeah, I'm just trying to keep my energy expenditure high so then my big meals have less. They just, you know, I can maintain my weight on more calories. And another little, this is like, this is the least important of all the advice, uh, would be if you can do a workout before a meal, again, this kind of comes back to depleting glycogen stores. So if you, uh, we're going to, if you could get into the hotel gym

and just do a high rep whole body type of routine for 20 minutes and just kind of burn out glycogen stores before a meal. It's again, it's not a huge thing, but if, if you can, then it basically you're creating a carb sink. You're depleting your body of its carbohydrate stores, which are glycogen. So now when you go eat a bunch of carbs, the prior, the priority is going to be refilling those glycogen stores before storing fat. So that's something I don't, don't, don't like, you don't have to get obsessive about that and think that, you know, Oh, Oh shit, it's five and dinner's at six. I gotta, I gotta go. I gotta run. I gotta go do my, my, uh, my high rep workout. But if you happen to be at the hotel, for instance, and you have some, you're have downtime

before dinner. Um, it's not a bad idea to go just burn up your glycogen stores before you're going to go out and eat a bunch of food. All right, so that's it really on the travel advice. That's all I've got. But if you do all that stuff, you'll find that it's actually very easy to maintain weight while traveling. It's very easy to lose weight too if you're just willing to do what I was talking about in terms of you have to just keep your food intake tightly regulated know, tightly regulated, but it's very easy to maintain weight without

having to count all your calories and count your macros and enjoy and still be able to enjoy yourself. You can't, you know, obviously gorge every day, but you can still eat food you like every day and have nice meals. You don't have to, you don't have to put a ton of time in the gym to do that. So I hope that helps. That ran a bit longer than I had anticipated. So I'm going to save the cardio, how much cardio to do for the next podcast. But I'm going to touch just shortly on this Warren Buffett advice. I thought it was pretty cool.

So the notes I had here was, so this was – I guess it was advice that Warren Buffett had given an employee. And Buffett wanted to help this employee kind of get ahead in their work life. So he suggested that the person list the 25 most important things he wanted to accomplish in the next few years and then had the employee circle what were the top five and prioritize those on a smaller list. And so then the person had, okay, here's your top five and here's your 25. And so then Buffett asked the person, now those – taking those five out, what are you going to do with the remaining 20? And then – so the person said, okay, so like the top five, yes, those are the ones that I really need to focus on. But then those other 20, they're close. They're almost as important to me. So I'll kind of work on them here and there.

I'll try to fit them in when I can as long as I'm making progress on my top five. And Buffett advised the person to do something else. He said, no, that's not what you want to do. to do something else. He said, no, that's, that's not what you want to do. What all those 20, uh, the ones that you didn't circle, those are your avoid at all cost lists, meaning you don't want it to have anything to do with all those. Your entire focus is now just on those top five things. And that resonates with me particularly because, uh because I guess being an entrepreneur, it's easy to have ideas. Ideas are kind of a dime a dozen. Yes, ideas have value, but execution is really where it's at.

You can have the greatest ideas ever, but if you can't execute, nobody cares. And you can have mediocre ideas, execute them really well and do very, very well. But I have a long list of things that if I were to make – I could make that list of 25 different cool goals, things that I think would be cool to do in my work and produce and whatever. But I have I guess just disciplined myself in this same way where I know that I can only reliably execute a handful of things at a time. I have a small team of people. We all work hard.

But there's only so much that we can do and there's only so much I can do personally. So, for instance, I am always working on a book project, a health and fitness book project. I have some product development at Legion. I always have one to two things coming with Muscle for Life. And then I have a fiction book project that I've been working on. That's the lowest priority of my list, but it still is on there. And I really don't take on anything else. I took on this app and so now I'm really maxed out. And of course there's only, you know, it's kind of a time of the day type of thing,

but it's looking at all the possible things you could do and focusing on what are the, when you have to really pare it down and you have to now not touch anything else that isn't of those circled. And if you were to say five type thing, it forces you to really prioritize your goals and focus on the ones that are going to be most helpful and they're going to generate the most value. And that has a, that's, that's, that's a valuable lesson that I've learned in work and that of all the possible things that I could do. And there are certain things that I would love to improve about muscle for life or improve in certain, in different projects of mine or, or, uh, but I have to look at with in the order that I'm going to be doing things, what is going to create the biggest, uh, what, what's going to, what's going to help things move the furthest. And when you pair your list of goals down like that, uh, it really forces you to look at what's going to, what's going to give you the greatest return. And it doesn't necessarily mean financial return, but what's

going to give you the greatest return, what's going to create the greatest result. And it doesn't necessarily mean financial return, but what's going to give you the greatest return, what's going to create the greatest result. And you have to kind of look at it that every minute you spend on lower priority goals, lower priority activities, you're kind of stealing time from the higher priority and the higher value goals and activities. And a good example for that could be like spending too much time on social media, even if it's for work purposes. I think social media is great. Obviously I use it and I engage with a lot. I use it to engage with people. I don't, you know, it's not like necessarily a huge sales engine for me. It's more just to stay in touch with people. It's, it is also a time sink and it's something where you could sit there on social media all day and feel kind of productive and answer a million messages and talk with all these people. But should you have spent, you know, six hours doing that? Or should it have been maybe an hour and then seven hours

writing that next book, for instance, that when it is finally done is going to, you know, going to produce so much more value. And, you know, some people might say, oh, but, you know, going to produce so much more, uh, value. And, you know, some people might say, oh, but you know, on the social media stuff, what if, you know, you might come across the perfect person that, uh, is, is, has just the right connections or really resonates with your work and really helps you jump ahead and introduces you to someone that is big in your field and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, that's possible. Something like that could happen. But I don't like to put my time into –

I don't like to put any significant amount of time into something that is a maybe. I much rather put my time into something that's guaranteed to produce a lot of benefit. And that is going to – that's always – this is my experience. It's always the stuff that's just a lot of benefit. And that, that is going to, that's always, this is my experience is always the stuff that's just a lot of work. Um, instead of, you know, spending a lot of time over here on social media, hoping that I meet somebody, I would rather spend that time producing, writing the next book and making it as good as possible and getting that out there. And then, you know, I think it's more likely also that someone that would be, uh, you would be a very valuable connection to me is – I'm much more likely to meet that person because they pick up a book of mine and read it and like it as opposed to I answer a tweet of theirs and then somehow they go, ooh, I should really look into this guy.

And that also – I mean I think this advice kind of applies to, to just, uh, every day, every day living as well. Um, I, time spent doing anything. I mean, it's not that I think that, uh, time spent not working is a waste of time. Not at all. There are other areas of other aspects of life, of course, that, and I, and I've known plenty of people that, uh, were very strong in their career and they made, you know, make a ton of money and they're very respected in their career, but you know, their love life is, is hopeless. Maybe whether they're married, whether their marriage is in shambles or maybe they're divorced now and they can't get anything going and again in that area or they have, they don't really have any, any sort of friends to rely on.

They only have their, their little business world or whatever. Um, so yes, there is a, something to be said for that, but there's also something to be said for, uh, sacrifice. If, uh, you know, if some, some people, I know people that are, that are totally fine just living what you'd call a quote unquote balanced life where they do, you know where they do their work and they're not really trying to become very professional at anything. They're not trying to acquire any real skills or become really expert at anything. They're just doing their thing. And then they like to have their tons of free time

so they can hang out with their friends on these days. And then they have plenty of time maybe with their girlfriend or wife on these days and they have their weekends where they're they're going to watch the sports and they're going to do this that i know people that that are are they seem to be pretty pretty okay with that and uh i don't i guess there's nothing inherently wrong with that that's not me but then there are people though that have ambition and want to accomplish something, uh, and in terms of work or career or profession or whatever. And if that's you, then, uh, I mean, my, my experience, and this is also just in knowing a lot of people, I mean, I've over the years, I just have met quite a few self-made millionaires and just see how they live and how they work.

It requires sacrifice. I mean, there's just no way around it. There was a TED talk on this, actually. I think it was like, why TED? Hold on. Something like this. Let me see. Yeah. It's a guy from a guy named Larry Smith. Why you will fail to have a great career kind of funny title. But, uh, the message was along these lines and that it requires so much sacrifice, uh, to really, cause you just, you need a lot of time to really make anything great happen, to really get really good at something, to build a company.

And that means that where are you going to pull that time from? Which activities? So just any – if you have a strong desire to make anything happen, just know it's going to take a lot more than, you know, even if that was your nine to five type of things, take a lot more than that. There will not be time to watch, you know, six TV shows a week and to go to three birthday parties and to spend the weekends on the beach. And you, it, it, there's just, if you didn't have to sleep, then you could do that because then you could just work instead of sleeping. And then you could,

you could have all the fun you want. Um, but otherwise it just takes, it just, you have to, you have to make that sacrifice. And for me, the sacrifice has been, um, I, I spend, I spend a bit of time with my family every night, uh, maybe an hour or so. And, but I, I don hour or so. But the sacrifice for me has really been friends. I don't have much of a social life outside of the friends that I work with. And that's my choice. And I'm totally fine with that because I know why I'm doing it. And so to tie it back to what I was talking about earlier, it's just a matter of every minute that you spend doing,

like this is how I kind of, I'm speaking from my own – this is how I apply it to myself. Every minute that I spend not working on one of my six or seven things that I'm juggling at any time, I just want to make sure that I – that's a minute spent doing something that at least does have a similar amount of life value. That's why I don't really watch much TV. I watch one TV show at a time and I watch it when I'm doing my cardio just because it makes the cardio go by. And it's a good excuse to sit there for 25 minutes or whatever and watch a TV show. Otherwise, I'm not watching TV. I don't read much fiction. Most of my reading is for work purposes.

I do throw a fiction book in here and there, but I'm not just randomly hanging out with people. I don't surf the internet at all. I don't bother with Reddit. I don't surf YouTube. I just don't do any of that because those activities really have no value to me where I could put that time into something that does have value. The activities that do have value to me outside of work would be, I like, you know, Friday nights, I like going to dinner with my wife. Saturday, I like spending time with my wife and son. I usually take about the whole Saturday and then Sunday at work. But I don't like, for instance,

hobbies. I haven't played golf for six weeks or so because I normally play on Sunday afternoons, but I've been working, like I work Sunday morning and Sunday night and play golf in the afternoon, but I've been working instead because I have a lot of things that, and I want to get these things done. So anyways, I don't want to go on and on about this, but really it's just the point of just if you really look at how you spend your time and if you really just prioritize a handful of things and figure out how you can put the maximum amount of time and just cut out activities that don't really have that much value to you. If it's not really that important to you, if you don't really need that much downtime,

I don't really believe in the burnout type of like, I don't get burned out because, um, I stay productive and I think staying productive prevents burnout. Now, of course, if you're, if you're just doing activities that you hate, then yeah, you're, you're going to burn out. But if, if these are your goals, then I just, that's, that's not going to be a problem. And, uh, don't, you know, I know that there's a lot of, uh, ideas out there about, you know, don't overwork, don't work too much. And I think that's bullshit. I think, uh, you know, if you are working on the right stuff, you can, I mean, I, I I've had many, many days where by the end of the day, I've probably worked, I don't know, even 14 hours, give or take, and I'm totally energized. It was a great day.

I never am ending like going, oh, God, thank God it's over. So, yes, that's everything I have to say on that. Hopefully, you find that helpful, and that's it for this episode of the podcast. you find that helpful and that's it for this episode of the podcast. Um, next week I'll talk about the, the cardio, uh, point, how much cardio to do and how much too much and, uh, talk about some other stuff too. So I will see you then. And before I close here, I just wanted to let you know that over at legionsupplements.com, uh, we just released a couple of new shirts, uh, kind of having fun with these shirts, actually. I'm going to be surveying the next couple. And one says, it doesn't get easier,

you just get better. And the other is eat clean, lift heavy. And we kind of do them with some cool typographic, actually somewhat like what I'm wearing, actually. So this is one of our shirts. So if you like these types of shirts, go over to legionsupplements.com and check out our two new ones. And also it's kind of a cool thing that's up and coming. I think it's going to take a few months really before it's live. I mean, it'll be at least three months, hopefully not six months, but we'll have to see. And that is we're going to be over at Legion. We want to get into apparel for real. Like the t-shirts are cool and these are good quality t-shirts and they fit well and you know, I like them. Um, but I want to, I want to do some, some real apparel type stuff, stuff that is performance type apparel that would

be comparable to Nike or Under Armour. And, uh, I have the perfect person to work with. Um, an industry expert, uh, works for a very large clothing company and he's consulting me on it. And, um, he just, just actually designed an entire line of active wear himself and launched that for this company. So he's like the perfect guy to work with on this. And, uh, so, uh, I'm pretty excited about that. We're going to be, we're going to be starting with some core items, some performance shirts for men and women, and then we're going to get in some novelty stuff, some training pants for men, some leggings for women. And, uh, we're going to be starting with some core items, some performance shirts for men and women, and then we're going to get in some novelty stuff, some training pants for men, some leggings for women, and we're going to do it right. These are going to be similar to supplements.

There's a bit of an opportunity to create not just high-quality clothing that has good material and is a good fit. Um, and even, even some performance stuff like sweat wicking, I actually didn't know, like I thought sweat wicking, I thought it was bullshit. I thought it was just marketing, but if you use the right polyester blend, it actually will wick sweat and keep you dry. Who knew? Uh, and, uh, and for instance, like you can, you can put, you can weave silver into your shirts. Lululemon does this, which is anti antibacterial. And so what that means is you can wear the shirt for more workouts and it's not going

to smell. It also keeps you from smelling. Um, so there's some cool things you can do in that regard, but also there's some cool things you can do, uh, in terms of just being responsible with how you make them, the materials that you use, uh, being, you know,, being environmentally responsible, fair trade, working with companies that they don't have any child labor. So kind of like an – the brand concept is very cool and I'll talk about it more as we get closer. But I'm excited. I'm excited for it.

I think it's going to be fun and there's gonna be some really high quality stuff. So, you know, I'll keep you posted on that, but I'm just, there's a little teaser. All right. So I'll cut it off here and, uh, I will see you next week.