Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - The 5 Commandments of Successful Strength Training

Episode Date: January 7, 2022

In this podcast, I’m sharing an excerpt from the audiobook version of my new book, Muscle For Life, which is releasing January 11th. Muscle For Life is currently on pre-order, and if you go to www.muscleforlifebook.com, you can learn about the big book launch bonanza that’s underway, where you can enter to win over $13,000 of awesome stuff. In this episode, I’m sharing chapter 10, which is all about strength training. You’ll learn why you should incorporate strength training into your fitness regimen and how to do it right. Let’s get to it! Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio from MUSCLE FOR LIFE by Michael Matthews, read by Chris Henry Coffey with the author. Copyright © 2022 by Waterbury Publications, Inc. Used with permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Timestamps: 0:00 - Pre-order my new fitness book now for a chance to win over $13,000 in splendid swag: https://www.muscleforlifebook.com/ 3:01 - Chapter 10, The 5 Commandments of Successful Strength Training Mentioned on the Show: Pre-order my new fitness book now for a chance to win over $13,000 in splendid swag: https://www.muscleforlifebook.com/

Hey, I'm Mike Matthews, and this is Muscle for Life. Welcome, welcome, and happy new year. Thank you for joining me today. And if you haven't already, please do take a moment to subscribe to the show, because then you won't miss any new episodes, and it'll help boost the ranking of the show in the various charts, and that helps me. Now, today's episode is a bit different. It is from the audiobook of my new book, Muscle for Life, which is releasing

on January 11th and which is currently on pre-order. And if you go to muscleforlifebook.com, muscleforlifebook.com, you can learn all about the big book launch bonanza that is underway and will continue for a couple of more weeks where you can enter to win over $13,000 of awesome stuff that I have collected up from many different companies to give away. Real stuff too, not PDFs that I say are worth $97. I'm talking about $1,000 exercise bikes, $500, $600, $700 sets of adjustable dumbbells, $100 kitchen appliances, and a lot more real stuff like that stuff that many people buy every day. And that's muscleforlifebook.com. And so today's episode is a chapter of the book that is all about strength training. It's called the Five Commandments

of Successful Strength Training. And it is a comprehensive overview of the 20% of strength training principles and techniques that provide 80% of the results. And that is true regardless of your experience. That is true for novices and advanced trainees. So regardless of how jacked you are, this chapter applies to you. There are several points that it touches on, including frequency, both in terms of how many strength training workouts you should do every week and how often

you should train each major muscle group. It talks about how many hard sets you should be doing per workout and per major muscle group. It talks about how heavy the weights should be in terms of percentage of one rep max. And it talks about rest time, how long you should be resting in between each set. Now, of course, if you are an intermediate or an advanced weightlifter who has gained most of the muscle and strength that is genetically available to you, there are some additional principles and some additional techniques that you will want to know about. Stuff I talk about in my book, Beyond Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, for example, but the information shared in Muscle for Life 10. The 5 Commandments of Successful Strength Training

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. Unknown If you're like most of my listeners, you want a specific body. If you're a guy, you want to be muscular and lean but not hulking. You want washboard abs, striking chest, back, and arm muscles, and strong, solid legs. And if you're a gal, you want to be toned but not skinny, and definitely not skinny fat, with shapely legs and perky glutes, a flat, defined stomach, and a feminine but sculpted upper body. glutes, a flat, defined stomach, and a feminine but sculpted upper body.

You can have these things. You don't need top-shelf genetics or a lifetime of training to look and feel like a million bucks. You must know what you're doing, though, because you can't become an Adonis or Aphrodite by just cutting your carbs and counting your steps. Instead, you need to take a different approach to your fitness, one that's more challenging but also more rewarding. It begins like this. Out of all the things we can do in the gym, we want to devote most of our time and efforts to the actions that produce most of the results. In other words, we want to apply the Pareto principle to our training, which states that in many domains, roughly 80% of the

effects come from 20% of the causes. This postulate originated with the economist Vilfredo Pareto, and we can observe it nearly everywhere we look. Research shows that around 20% of patients account for 80% of healthcare spending in the United States. 15% of baseball players produce 85% of the wins, and 20% of criminals commit 80% of the crimes. The Pareto Principle also applies to exercise, where a pocketful of training maxims and methods produces most of the progress. What are those vital principles?

We can express them in a simple formula. What are those vital principles? We can express them in a simple formula. 3 to 5, 5 to 7, 9 to 15, 60 to 80, 2 to 4. No, that isn't a secret code that you have to break, but it does contain the secrets to building the body you've always wanted. Here's the full prescription. Do 3 to 5 strength training workouts per week.

Train major muscle groups at least once every 5-7 days. Do 9-15 hard sets per workout. Train with 60-80% of 1 rep max. Rest 2-4 minutes in between hard sets. Let's go through those instructions one at a time and learn how to combine them into a workout plan that really works. 3-5. Do 3-5 strength training workouts per week. Search the hashtag, hashtag no days off, on social media, and you'll find a lot of very fit people bragging about their dedication and determination. While I applaud the effort,

intense training six or seven days per week is a one-way street to physical and psychological burnout, especially when cutting. Strength training isn't easy. Your joints, tendons, and muscles take a beating, and your nervous system redlines. Although this is a healthy and necessary part of getting fitter and stronger, it also accumulates fatigue that leads to reductions in speed, power, and technique. Some research shows that this response to training may be more of a mental or emotional state rather than a purely physical phenomenon, but it's real and you need to know how to deal with it. If you ignore your body's signals and keep pressing on,

you can develop symptoms related to overreaching, including soreness, fatigue, and weakness that don't go away with rest, trouble sleeping, reduction in appetite and unintended weight loss, irritability, anxiety, impatience, and restlessness, irregular heart rate, inability to focus, depression. Therefore, I recommend 3-5 days of strength training per week, which is enough to achieve

your fitness goals without putting your health or well-being at risk. This is why all of the Muscle for Life workout routines entail 3 strength training workouts per week and encourage up to 2 hours of cardiovascular exercise per week as well. There's a time and place for more strength training, up to five workouts per week, but chances are you're new to my approach to fitness and therefore don't need to do more than three sessions of strength training per week to make fantastic progress, so why spend more time in the gym than you need to? A caveat, though. As you gain experience on this program and start seeing results, you'll probably begin to feel like your rest days are wasted opportunities to build a little more muscle or lose a little more fat. Remember, however, that downtime is a vital component

of Muscle for Life because it allows you to relax and recharge and give your all to your workouts every week. 5-7 Train each major muscle group at least once every 5-7 days. How frequently you should train each major muscle group, the primary muscles involved in pushing, pulling, and squatting that you learned about in the previous chapter, depends on your schedule, your goals, and the difficulty of each workout. A good rule of thumb, however, is to train all the muscles you most want

to develop at least once per week. For instance, if you're training three days per week and are most interested in developing your upper body, you'd want to emphasize your push and pull muscles over your squat muscles by, let's say, using sessions one and three for both pushing and pulling, while training your lower body in session two. Similarly, if you most want to develop your lower body, you'd want to spend more time squatting than pushing or pulling. How many push, pull, squat, and other strength training workouts you can do every week depends on how difficult they are, and the difficulty of strength training workouts mostly depends on their intensity, the amount of resistance used in exercises, and volume, the amount of work done. The more weight, resistance, you use on exercises,

and the more sets you do in a session, the harder the workout is to do and recover from. Therefore, the higher the intensity and volume of individual workouts, the less frequently you can do them. This means, for instance, that you could do two or even three squat or push workouts per week, but they could only be so difficult. You could only use so much weight and do so many sets in each one. And in case you're not familiar with the term set, it's a group of consecutive repetitions or reps, which are individual complete motions of an exercise.

If you do 10 push-ups before resting, that's one set of 10 reps. The key, then, is striking a balance between working out too hard and not hard enough, which brings me to the next point. 9 to 15. Do 9 to 15 hard sets per workout. Each Muscle for Life workout will entail warming up and performing 12 hard sets, meaning your difficult muscle and strength building sets, which will take you about one hour. That means I'm asking for as little as three hours of your time each week,

or about as much time as the average American spends in front of the TV or on social media every day. This is probably less effort and time than you expected, given the results I'm promising, especially if you've seen popular strength training workouts that call for 25-30 hard sets or more per session. Such workouts are popular but often inefficient and even counterproductive, because you can only train an individual muscle group so much in a single workout before reaching the point where further effort fails to

produce further muscle growth. Research shows that this threshold is likely between 8 and 10 hard sets, depending on how much resistance you're using and how fit you are. Just as the number of hard sets per muscle group per workout is important, so is the number of hard sets per muscle group per week. A growing body of evidence shows that someone new to proper strength training needn't do more than 10 hard sets per major muscle group per week to gain considerable muscle and strength, and intermediate and advanced trainees need to do upward of 15 to 20 hard sets per week to continue making progress.

15 to 20 hard sets per week to continue making progress. 60 to 80. Train with 60 to 80% of your one rep max. In Muscle for Life, you'll use weights that are between 60 and 80% of your one rep max, which is the most weight you can move on an exercise for one rep. This will mean doing anywhere from 8 to 15 reps per set before stopping to rest, much harder than many people who do resistance training are used to,

because a lot of fitness programs involve light weights and many reps, which is an inefficient way to train. While training with lighter loads can cause muscle growth, research shows that it only results in significant improvements when sets are taken too or close to muscle growth, research shows that it only results in significant improvements when sets are taken too or close to muscle failure, the point where you can no longer complete a full repetition. There are two problems with this style of training. First, doing 20 plus reps per

set is extremely unpleasant. Sets take longer, feel harder, and cause more fatigue than lower rep highload training. And second, training to muscle failure regularly isn't optimal because it can increase the risk of injury. By increasing the weight and doing fewer reps per set, however, as you will on this program, you can produce a powerful muscle-building stimulus without having to bust a gut or extend yourself to muscle failure. Now, you may be hoping it's easy to calculate your one-rep maxes to ensure you use the proper amount of weight in your workouts. You may also be concerned that this system will be complicated, or that you'll mess it up.

Fear not, because no math will be required. Instead, I'll give you a simple and intuitive method for figuring out your starting weights and then properly progressing to heavier loads. But first, let's discuss the final strength training precept on our list. 2-4. Rest 2-4 minutes in between hard sets. Since most people go to the gym to move and sweat, sitting around in between sets seems like a waste of time, so they keep rest periods short or even skip them, preferring to always stay in motion. This is fine when you just want to burn calories, but if you want to gain muscle and get stronger, it's a mistake.

Strength training involves pushing your muscles to their limits and then backing off, and resting enough between sets is a vital step because it gives your heart time to settle down and gets you ready to give maximum effort in your next hard set. Science agrees, too. A study conducted by scientists at the State University of Rio de Janeiro found that resting 3 to five minutes between sets allowed participants to do more reps, use heavier weights, and get in more total training volume.

Similar findings were demonstrated in another study conducted at Eastern Illinois University. In this case, researchers concluded that when training with heavy weights, two to four minutes of rest between sets produces the best results. In practice, you can rest slightly less, two minutes, between hard sets for smaller muscle groups like the biceps, triceps, and shoulders,

and slightly more, up to four minutes, between hard sets for your larger muscle groups like your back, chest, and legs. Don't be surprised if that much rest feels strange to you at first. You may even feel guilty, as if you're sitting around more than working out. Trust the process, however. Watch how your body responds to the workouts, and rest easy, literally, knowing that the lulls are contributing significantly to the whole. As for what to do while resting between sets,

most important is actually resting so your body is ready for another round of intense exertion. That means you should mostly be sitting or standing, not doing plyometrics or cardiovascular exercise. Another must is keeping track of time so you don't actually under or over rest. The stopwatch app on your phone is a simple tool for this. Beyond that, whatever you do or don't do while resting is up to you, but most people find they enjoy their training more if they stay off the internet, social media, and email, and instead focus on how their workout is going, how their body is feeling, and what they hope to accomplish in their next set.

In fact, studies show that envisioning the successful completion of a resistance training set beforehand can increase performance. Now that we've gone through the entire formula I introduced you to at the beginning of this chapter, let's discuss other aspects of strength training that are vital for optimizing your results. How to achieve progressive overload One of the most important parts of strength training is progressive overload. No matter how much thought you put into frequency, intensity, volume, or any other factor related to workout programming, if you don't get progressive overload right,

you won't make it very far. It's the key to avoiding stagnation and breaking through training plateaus when they inevitably occur. There are a couple of practical ways to achieve progressive overload in strength training, but one of the best methods is known as double progression. In double progression, you work with a weight in a rep range,

a minimum and maximum number of reps to strive for in a set, like 10 to 12 reps, for instance. And once you hit the top of that rep range for a certain number of hard sets in a row, you increase the weight. Then, if you can finish your first hard set with the new, heavier weight within at least a rep or two of the bottom of your rep range, you the new, heavier weight within at least a rep or two of the bottom of your

rep range, you continue working with that weight until you can hit the progression target again. So, with this approach to progressive overload, you work to increase your reps and then cash in that progress to increase your weights, hence double progression. To see how this works in action, let's say you're following one of the men's intermediate programs, which has you working in the rep range of 8 to 10 reps for many exercises and requires three hard sets of 10 reps in a row on an exercise before increasing the weight. You start your pushing workout, which begins with three sets of the dumbbell bench press. So far, you've worked up to 50 pounds on this exercise,

and this time, you get 10 reps on all three sets. Hooray! Time to progress. That means the following week when you do this workout again, you'll use 55 pounds on the dumbbell bench press. Since you're working in the 8 to 10 rep range, your goal is to get at least 6 reps on your first hard set within at least 2 reps of 8, the bottom of your rep range. If you can do this, your progression has succeeded, and you'll now work with 55 pounds until you can do 3 hard sets of 10 reps in a row, and so on. And what if you can't get at least 8 reps in your first hard set with 55 pounds?

We'll talk more about progression in this program, including this point and others, in Chapter 12. How to use a proper range of motion Range of motion refers to how much you flex or extend a joint during an exercise. Flexion occurs when you reduce the angle between two parts of your body, shortening the angle between your forearm and upper arm when curling a dumbbell, for instance. Extension occurs when you increase the angle between two parts of your body, like when you stand up from a chair,

which increases the angles between your thighs and torso and your thighs and shins. When you perform a strength training exercise, there's a limit to how much you can safely and comfortably flex and extend the major joints involved. Your knees and hips in the squat, elbows in the barbell curl, shoulders and elbows in the bench press, and so forth. and elbows in the bench press and so forth. A proper range of motion in a strength training exercise is a full one, which involves moving the major joints to their natural limits of flexion and extension, beyond which injury could occur.

For example, with the push-up, a full range of motion requires that you lower your chest until it touches the floor, elbow flexion, and then presses upward until your arms are straight, elbow extension. And with the pull-up, you must raise your body until your chin is above the bar, elbow flexion, and then lower yourself until your arms are straight, elbow extension. Using a full range of motion when strength training

is important because it increases muscle and strength gain and may also reduce the risk of injury because when you use a partial range of motion, the stress produced by the exercise is concentrated on smaller areas of your joints. When doing a partial squat, only lowering your butt a foot or two, for instance, much of the stress is concentrated on the tendons at the front of your knee. As you keep lowering your body, though, the burden shifts to other tendons and ligaments. By using a full range of motion, then, you allow your entire joints to share the strains of strength training, and this reduces the chances of localized irritation and inflammation. How to use proper form Along with a full range of motion, you also need to control how your body and weight are

moving in each rep. You should always feel like you're using your muscles to execute the movements, not gravity or momentum. For example, when doing push-ups, instead of relaxing your chest and arms and allowing your torso to drop toward the floor, you want to keep your upper body muscles tight as you lower your chest. Similarly, on the chin-up, instead of swinging your knees to help you ascend and then allowing your body to drop downward, you want to keep your legs motionless as you pull yourself up and then smoothly lower yourself down.

To use a full range of motion and proper form in your workouts, you need to know how to do exercises properly, of course, but you also need to use the right amount of weight. We'll talk about how to determine your training weights later in this section of the book, but know this for now. later in this section of the book, but know this for now. If you use too much weight, you won't be able to complete your workouts as prescribed without shortening the range of motion or spoiling your form, which compromises the effectiveness and safety of your training. So, in summary, proper form is achieved when an appropriate weight is moved through the right range of motion with the right technique. How hard your hard sets should be To get the most out of double progression, you must ensure that your hard sets are hard enough to produce high levels of tension in your muscles.

Here's how to do this. End all hard sets of body weight exercises one rep shy of muscle failure, which is the point where you fail to complete a rep. That is, continue hard sets of bodyweight exercises until you feel you have zero good reps left in the tank. End all hard sets of machine, dumbbell, and barbell exercises two to three reps shy of muscle failure. One to two good reps left. Why the difference in difficulty? You can work harder in bodyweight exercises because failure

is less exhausting and dangerous than with machines, barbells, and dumbbells. So if your workout calls for push-ups, you'd end each hard set at the point where you feel you can't complete another rep. And with, let's say, the barbell bench press, you'd push your hard sets to where you feel you can do one or two more reps. And how do you gauge how close you are to muscle failure? It's mostly a matter of trial and error, but once you start training, you'll quickly become attuned to your proximity to failure. An easy way to develop this intuition faster is, as you're approaching the end of a hard set, to ask yourself,

if I absolutely had to, how many more reps could I get with good form? Your instinctive answer will often be accurate, especially as you become more experienced. It may not seem like it, but you've just learned one of the unsung keys to successful strength training, knowing how hard to train in your workouts. Many people don't work hard enough and wonder why nothing changes, and many others work too hard and wonder why they're always stuck in a rut and hurting. You now know how to thread this needle effectively. rut and hurting. You now know how to thread this needle effectively. How to use a proper rep tempo Rep tempo refers to how quickly you do an exercise when strength training,

and there are two schools of thought here, slowly and fairly quickly. People who advocate for a slow tempo often say that muscles don't know weight, only tension, and the longer muscles remain under tension, the more effective the training. Thus, by slowing down your reps, they claim you can produce more muscle growth than with faster reps. But research shows otherwise. Slow rep training has been put to the test in quite a few studies, and in each instance, a faster rep tempo produced better results. Time under tension isn't important enough to warrant special attention

because if you perform an exercise slowly, you have to reduce either the load or the number of reps or both compared to a faster tempo. As load and reps are major factors in how much muscle and strength you gain from training, reducing either, and especially both, is detrimental. Therefore, I recommend that you follow a 1-0-1 rep tempo for all strength training exercises. This means the first part of each rep should take about one second, followed by a momentary pause, followed by the return to starting position in about one second.

If we apply this to a simple exercise like the bodyweight squat, it would mean sitting down in about one second, one one thousand, pausing for an instant, and standing up at the same pace. Don't worry about trying to achieve this tempo perfectly. You're doing it right when you're

moving through the first part of an exercise in a swift but controlled manner, barely pausing and finishing the rep as quickly as possible while maintaining good technique. How to avoid injury Many strength training injuries aren't caused by training too hard in any individual workout, but by failing to recover from previous workouts. Here's a common scenario. Your knee feels stiff the day after a lower body workout and you shrug it off. A few weeks later, it starts to hurt while you squat.

No pain, no gain, you say, and keep going. A few more weeks and, well, now your knee doesn't want a knee anymore. These are called repetitive stress injuries, RSIs, and they're the bane of every athlete. Not painful enough to put you on the sidelines, but troubling enough to hinder your performance. Fortunately, a bit of rest is all it usually takes to eliminate RSIs. In fact, that's the only way to do it. Fortunately, a bit of rest is all it usually takes to eliminate RSIs.

In fact, that's the only way to do it. Once an RSI has set in, you must avoid the activity that caused it and will continue to aggravate it, along with any other activities that prolong the problem. This often means avoiding specific exercises, but sometimes also forces you to stop training a muscle group altogether until the injury is healed. Strength training isn't nearly as dangerous as many people think, but as with any strenuous physical activity, if you do it enough, you'll probably experience at least a mild RSI of one kind or another along the way. That doesn't mean you can't take preventative actions to stave them off for as long as possible, though. Let's learn how. If it feels bad, don't do it.

The rule here is simple. If something hurts or feels off while you're doing a set, stop immediately. I'm not talking about muscle soreness or the burning sensation that occurs as you approach failure, but pain or strange sensations, especially in or around your joints. If a rep hurts enough to make you wince, for example, it's a warning that something is wrong, and if you don't listen to it, you're looking for trouble. RSI's can be insidious, and the early symptoms don't always manifest as pain. Instead, your elbow feels weird on the last few reps of dumbbell pressing, your knee feels funny during a squat workout, or your back feels tight when deadlifting. While such sensations aren't always a sign of an RSI,

they should get your attention, like a weird noise while driving. So when you hit pain or strange, stop, rest for a couple of minutes, and try the exercise again. If it's no better the next time around, do another exercise that feels fine, and then come back to the problematic one in your next workout and see how it goes. If it's still an issue, substitute a different one again and stay away from the offender until it's no longer bothersome. If you aren't sure whether what you're feeling qualifies as worrisome or as the normal discomfort of training, ask yourself these two questions. 1. Is the pain on both sides of my body or just one? When you perform exercises correctly, both sides of your body are subjected

to stress fairly equally. Thus, if one side burns more than the other, it's more likely a sign of trouble rather than of muscle burn or fatigue. 2. Is the pain concentrated around a joint or other specific spot? These are the pains you're most likely to encounter. Muscle and joint aches and stiffness usually go away while you warm up, but genuine problems won't and can get worse. Progress gradually. One of the easiest ways to get hurt in strength training is through zeal. Maybe you're feeling strong one day,

or you want to impress someone in the gym, or just progress faster. So you load the bar with a weight that makes your spidey sense tingle. This is almost always a bad idea. It increases the likelihood that your form will break down, and it can place too much stress on your joints and ligaments and impair recovery. A slow and steady philosophy is much smarter, and ultimately more effective. For instance, if you're new to strength training and you can increase the weight for most exercises every week or two for the first several months, you're doing great. And as you become more experienced, gaining just one rep per week on your most difficult exercises, and thus adding weight every few weeks, is respectable.

A winning motto for strength training is progress is progress, understanding that sometimes you'll advance quickly and other times slowly, but so long as you're moving forward, you're playing the game well. Be a stickler for good form. Bad form can allow you to move more weight, but it also reduces the quality of the training and increases the risk of injury. This runs counter to the purpose of strength training, controlling heavy loads through full ranges of motion with good technique, not haphazardly lifting as much weight as possible. This is especially important with the most effective push, pull, and squat exercises

because while they're not dangerous, they involve the heaviest weights and most technical skill. So don't sacrifice form for the sake of progress or convenience. Instead, learn proper form for every exercise you do and stick to it. Learn proper form for every exercise you do and stick to it. You now possess a powerful plan for long-term fitness success. A moderate dose of relatively short, invigorating strength training workouts that produce consistent results and never leave you feeling agonized, exhausted, or burned out. Workouts that you'll delight in rather than dread. or burned out, workouts that you'll delight in rather than dread. Although simple, my strength training strategy has enough horsepower to radically transform your body and health,

and enough latitude to accommodate just about all bodies and biases. So if you've had a falling out or five with fitness, here's your chance to fall back in love with it. And if this is your first foray, you're in for a good time. Before you can begin your Muscle for Life workouts, however, we need to discuss another element of the training methodology, exercise selection. Key Takeaways How frequently you should train each major muscle group,

the primary muscles involved in pushing, pulling, and squatting, depends on your schedule, your goals, and the difficulty of each workout. But a good rule of thumb is to train all the muscles you most want to develop at least once every five to seven days. You should rest slightly less, two minutes, between hard sets for smaller muscle groups like the biceps, triceps, and shoulders, and slightly more up to 4 minutes between hard sets for your larger muscle groups like your back, chest, and legs. In double progression, you work with a weight in a rep range, a minimum and maximum number of reps to strive for in a set such as 10-12 reps,

and once you hit the top of that rep range for a certain number of hard sets in a row, you increase the weight. Proper form is achieved when the right weight is moved through the right range of motion with the right technique. End all hard sets of bodyweight exercises one rep shy of muscle failure, which is the point where you fail to complete a rep, and end all hard sets of machine, dumbbell, and barbell exercises two to three reps shy of muscle failure,

two to three good reps left. Use a 1-0-1 rep tempo for all strength training exercises. If something hurts or feels off while you're doing a set, stop immediately and rest for a couple of minutes before trying the exercise again. If it's no better the next time around, do something else, then come back to the problematic exercise in your next workout and see how it goes. If it's still a problem, substitute a different exercise once again and stay away from the offender until it's no longer bothersome.

A winning motto for strength training is, progress is progress, understanding that sometimes you'll advance quickly and other times slowly, but so long as you're moving forward, you're playing the game well. Well, that is it for today's episode. And if you are still listening and you liked it, you will probably like the rest of the book, Muscle for Life. Again, go to muscleforlifebook.com and learn all about the giveaway, pre-order the book, enter the giveaway, and you can do other my YouTube channel, to my other social media accounts and other things. Again, all of the details are over at muscleforlifebook.com. And if Muscle for Life

is not for you, maybe it's for somebody you know. If you know somebody who is looking for an enjoyable and a sustainable fitness regimen that's going to help them lose fat and build lean muscle, eating foods they love, and doing just a few challenging but not grueling workouts per week. And especially if these people are in the 40 plus demographic, if they have a lot of weight to lose, if they've never done any weightlifting or maybe even any resistance training before. Muscle for Life is a better book and the programs are better for them, men and women, than my Bigger, Leaner, Stronger or Thinner, Leaner, Stronger programs or books. Because Bigger, Leaner, Stronger and Thinner, Leaner, Stronger are written for a younger demographic,

are written for people who are ready to start squatting, deadlifting, bench pressing, overhead pressing, and who are ready to get serious about meal planning. And those books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and helped tens of thousands of people that I know of lose fat, build muscle, get healthy. So great information. It works. great programs. They work, but there are a lot of people out there who, if I were training them personally, I would not start them on bigger, leaner, stronger, or thinner, leaner, stronger. We would have to work up to that. And that is what muscle for life is for. So again, go to muscle for life book.com to learn

more. And if you are interested in the book for yourself or for somebody else, I would recommend going now because the giveaway is ending in a couple of weeks. And if you put it off, you might forget and then it might be too late.