Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - The Best of Muscle For Life: BCAAs, Signs of Overreaching, and Ode to the Gym

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, and welcome to another episode of Muscle for Life. I'm Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today. And if you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe to the show in whatever app you are listening to me in so you don't miss any new episodes. And so you help me by boosting the rankings of the show. It really does help. I really would appreciate it. Okay, so this episode is a new installment in the Best Of series, where you get to hear hand-picked morsels from the most popular episodes that I have recorded over the years, highlight reels, key takeaways. And if you like what you hear in these Best Of episodes, then chances are you are going to like the full episodes that the highlights came from. So this time around, the three episodes that will be featured on this

Starting point is 00:00:52 episode are what can BCAAs actually do for you according to science, eight signs of overtraining that most people don't know, and an ode to the gym. Also, if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my health and fitness books, including the number one best-selling weightlifting books for men and women in the world, Bigger Leaner Stronger and Thinner Leaner Stronger, as well as the leading flexible dieting cookbook,

Starting point is 00:01:23 The Shredded Chef. Now, these books have sold well over 1 million copies and have helped thousands of people build their best body ever. And you can find them on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play, as well as in select Barnes & Noble stores. And I should also mention that you can get any of the audiobooks 100% free when you sign up for an Audible account. And this is a great way to make those pockets of downtime, like commuting, meal prepping, and cleaning more interesting, entertaining,

Starting point is 00:01:55 and productive. And so if you want to take Audible up on this offer, and if you want to get one of my audiobooks for free, just go to www.buylegion.com and sign up for your account. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, and if you want to learn time-proven and evidence-based strategies for losing fat, building muscle, and getting healthy, and strategies that work for anyone and everyone, regardless of age or circumstances, please do consider picking up one of my best-selling books, Bigger Leaner Stronger for Men, Thinner Leaner Stronger for Women, and The Shredded Chef for my favorite fitness-friendly recipes. Okay, so let's start with the takeaways from what can BCAAs actually do for you according to science.

Starting point is 00:02:47 For people listening, just to answer that question of what BCAAs are, why are people using them, and what can they do, what can they not do, and so forth. All right. So BCAAs, the branched chain amino acids, just to get the obvious out of the way, they have three amino acids that have branched chains. The other amino acids are pretty much straight lines. These ones are all bendy. And they were grouped together specifically for that purpose, just structural. The three BCAAs, leucine, isoleucine, and valine, do different things in the body. And truth be told, we don't know anything about valine. It's just nobody really wants to research it but leucine is the primary one that stimulates muscle protein synthesis and This led to BCA is being marketed initially because it was claimed that they could build as much muscle as protein

Starting point is 00:03:39 But because you're taking in less amino acids overall, it's less calories Then this you know fueled But because you're taking in less amino acids overall, it's less calories. Then this fueled consumption of BCAAs. It was later found out that this was not the case. You needed all essential amino acids to sufficiently build muscle. Shouldn't that have been obvious from the outset? It was not necessarily obvious from the outset because there are stores of amino acids in the body mostly the intestines and liver so i thought that if you could just tell the muscle to start building it will start taking amino acids from the liver and intestines and then that those stores would be replenished the next time you eat food but it seems that it's not so simple you can't

Starting point is 00:04:21 just take amino acids from the liver because it's incredibly greedy so it needs a surplus of most amino acids probably all the essential ones in the blood when you stimulate the muscles so because legion is a whole premium sports company company we can only sell stuff that has an effect which is why i tried to look into a legitimate effect of bcas and i technically did find one but it's not something most people would you know use it for because bcas seem to have a role in preventing central fatigue so central just refers to the brain in the like in a way that is probably due to the I'd say I'm going to give a little nod to Valiant here. But the truth is, the mechanisms of how BCAAs prevent fatigue is just due to the fact that they're literally branched. You want to you want to explain that?

Starting point is 00:05:23 So when you're working out, you just have muscle breakdown and amino acids go into your blood. And they just float around. Some go to the brain, realize, we have nothing to do here. So they just leave, go to the kidneys and eventually get processed out. But the more you work out, the more amino acids go in your blood and ammonia builds up and this does lead to fatigue but another thing that happens is tryptophan the turkey amino acid as many people know it by that also produces serotonin and thus melatonin can go into the brain and start to accumulate and when it accumulates in the brain that is strongly associated with not just fatigue but also fatigue related to heat stress. So tryptophan does this because tryptophan turns into neurotransmitters but it's also

Starting point is 00:06:11 a large neutral in charge amino acid. There's actually a transporter into the brain so the door of which it goes through called the large neutral amino acid transporter. Very aptly named. It just looks for large neutral amino acids. Tryptophan is one of them, but not the only one. If you pump a lot of BCAAs into the system,

Starting point is 00:06:32 they're also pretty large and neutral. And they just kind of float around the body. They sort of clog up this transporter a little bit. So the tryptophan that would normally go into your brain just hangs around in the periphery for a bit longer. It delays the buildup of trip command in the brain.

Starting point is 00:06:48 Not perfectly, because eventually the BCA is just going to leave or the BCA is just going to eliminate it. But by delaying this, it can delay prolonged fatigue with specific reference to a heat. specific reference to a heat but also uh more like when you get fatigued and your finite motor control goes down a bit that's also the fatigue that bcas can prevent a little bit so not so much crossfit not so much repetitive like running where you just do one repetitive motion all the time but more so in highly technical sports like tennis or badminton. Those are the ones where BCA supplementation can really interesting. The main thing that I want to get into, and this is like the part where I can say BCA is actually work because for a

Starting point is 00:07:36 long time, BCA is despite these mechanisms did not show much strength. Like they technically delayed fatigue, but it was like, you got one extra swing in a tennis match like oh no that just makes such the difference it doesn't this is because when I mentioned earlier how amino acids are breakdown products ammonia is produced in ammonia causes fatigue BCA's themselves will

Starting point is 00:08:01 produce ammonia so they cause fatigue in a way. BCAAs, for the purpose of reducing fatigue, shoot themselves in their own feet. Which is why I wrote this article for Muscle for Life recently. BCAAs paired with citrulline. Because citrulline, through the urea cycle, can help reduce ammonia buildup in the blood. So BCAs do their unique effect on preventing fatigue. There is the natural side effect of increasing ammonia, which would normally shoot themselves in the foot.

Starting point is 00:08:36 Then citrulline takes care of the ammonia issues and allows the BCAs to actually shine without being impaired. And the studies that I went over on this article, there's one looking at elite tennis players, where they're basically put through a few simulated matches just to make them fatigue. And then they just shot tennis balls at them and said, in a very sadistic manner, go until you fall. And in the last stages of fatigue, citrulline seemed to stave off like half of the fatigue that placebo group experienced.

Starting point is 00:09:13 The BCAA citrulline combo, I should say. So yeah, there actually does seem to be a specific promise for BCAAs, but it may require citrulline or potentially L-ornithine in combination with BCAAs, but it may require citrulline or potentially L-ornithine in combination with BCAAs to truly shine. And again, it only shines in like cognitively heavy fatigue prone sports. So it's not really something everyone does. Yeah. It'd be more of an endurance supplement. What about, we were talking about this before we started recording, endurance supplement. What about, you know, we were talking about this before we started recording, um, a theory that has been bouncing around online that BCAAs may stunt muscle gain

Starting point is 00:09:53 as opposed to augment it. Okay. So that theory comes from the fact that leucine is the trigger to stimulate muscle growth paired with the idea that the body is always in a state of homeostasis, an active balance. Much like a grandfather clock swinging back and forth, if something goes in one direction, it's going to go in another. You cannot just have a body at baseline, stimulate a process in one direction, then expect it to go back to baseline without dipping into the opposite direction for a little bit. It's very much like a sine curve rather than just a straight line. And so if you stimulate muscle protein synthesis, but you do not give the actual amino acids to build the muscle with, you will have no net gain. But then after the stimulation muscle

Starting point is 00:10:43 protein synthesis goes away, you'll be left with a refractory decline in synthesis rates and you don't need to provide amino acids for that because you have your muscles they can just degrade on their own so i said uh decline in most protein synthesis but the theory is it might also stimulate catabolism so it's like the sine curve where the stuff you want you're not optimizing but the stuff you don't want will happen regardless and so the theory is if you keep on pulsing bcas throughout the day could you have a net loss of protein if you don't optimize the positive spikes by actually just having whole foods. And at this moment in time, there's no evidence at all assessing this in otherwise healthy

Starting point is 00:11:31 demographics. But the theory has been going around a lot with sarcopenia researchers, those who are tending to the elderly and don't want them to lose any muscle mass. And I can't really read their research all that well but it seems like that's a valid hypothesis that they're still testing out as for athletes if you wanted a reason to not pulse bcas each and every day then have that be your reason but i don't think you're just going to like shrivel up into a little weightlifting raisin if you continue using BCAAs. I doubt it would actually cause any significant muscle loss. And that's it for what can BCAAs actually do for you according to science. And that was originally published in July of 2018. If you want to go back and listen to the whole episode and I wish it weren't so I wish BCAAs

Starting point is 00:12:27 were worth taking because I get asked multiple times a week and over at Legion, our customer service team, they hear from people multiple times per week, asking us to make BCAAs asking why we don't make BCAAs. And so we have a simple explanation that links people to a more in-depth explanation from me if they want it as to why we don't make BCAAs and probably never will because the weight of the evidence is pretty heavy at this point. It would take some real convincing breakthrough research to all of a sudden show that BCAAs in fact do help us gain muscle and strength faster if we use this special type of product or if we use it in a special type of way.

Starting point is 00:13:14 But as far as your run-of-the-mill BCAAs go and the run-of-the-mill supplementation protocol, unfortunately, it just doesn't do anything if you eat enough protein. And that's why I don't sell BCAAs. But if that changes and I can get behind BCAAs, then I will happily sell them because again, many people want them. I just don't want to sell them. Anyway, let's move on to the highlights from eight signs of overtraining that most people don't know. the highlights from eight signs of overtraining that most people don't know. So one of the tricky things about weightlifting is it conforms to one of the basic laws of living, which is that if you want more, then you need to do more. And so more for less, that is the motto as an intermediate slash advanced weightlifter. Now, what does all that

Starting point is 00:14:05 have to do with overtraining? Well, many people understand that and try to program their training accordingly. They try to just work harder and harder and harder in the gym to continue gaining muscle and strength. And it's the right idea, but it generally leads to problems. Unless it's gone about intelligently, it leads to problems. So anyone who has tried that before knows what I'm talking about. You start to struggle to finish your workouts. The weights start feeling very heavy. You start losing strength. You start losing endurance. You start sleeping worse. You start to struggle with just general fatigue and energy levels. You start getting odd aches and pains, particularly joint pains. You start getting sick more frequently and

Starting point is 00:14:59 so on. Now, these types of things are all signs that there is a systemic imbalance between work and recovery. And scientifically speaking, the symptomatology is known as overtraining syndrome. And that is something that everyone does run into and does have to wrestle with at some point along the way in their weightlifting journeys. There are two general schools of thought here. So the first one says that there is no such thing as overtraining. There's only under-recovering. The idea here is if you are feeling physically overwhelmed by your training, it's not really that difficult in the scheme of what your body can actually handle. It's just that you are not recovering well enough. And if you just did a better job recovering from your training, you would feel totally fine. And

Starting point is 00:15:51 you could even train harder than you are currently training as long as you are recovering well enough. Now, the other school of thought is the polar opposite of that. It is that if you do more than, let's say, a couple intense weight lifting workouts, heavy compound weight lifting workouts per week, and a couple cardio sessions per week, you are going to overload your nervous system, which is then going to fall behind, and that's going to negatively impact your performance and your health and well-being in many different ways. Well, as is often the case in the health and fitness space, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Yes, heavy resistance training workouts do place a lot of stress in the body and especially when they involve a lot of compound exercises, exercises that train many major muscle groups and require or stimulate a lot of central

Starting point is 00:16:48 nervous system activity. And cardio workouts done in addition to the weightlifting often place even more stress on the body. Now, if it's just walking, for example, then not really, but if it's high intensity interval training, then yes, that definitely places an additional load on the body, on the systems of the body. But most people can train quite a bit harder, can spend quite a bit more time beating their bodies up in the gym than they currently do without running themselves into the ground. My rule of thumb that I use, not just with my own body and training, but with all the people I work with, and this rule of thumb is really based on my

Starting point is 00:17:33 understanding of the scientific literature and my experience having worked with thousands and thousands of people, men and women of all ages and circumstances over the last six or seven years, of all ages and circumstances over the last six or seven years is most people can do three to six hours of heavy weightlifting per week and one to three hours of cardio per week, depending on what they're doing, what their goals are. And if they are looking to lose weight, maintain a calorie deficit somewhere around 20 to 25% and be totally fine. Do well. And I know research shows that overtraining may be more of a psychological state than a physiological state, but regardless of the ultimate cause, it is real. The symptoms are real. If you push yourself too hard for too long, you start to feel bad. So for example, the first sign is something I mentioned earlier, and that is that your workouts start to feel

Starting point is 00:18:31 particularly hard. When your body becomes more and more fatigued, just in general, when you fall further and further behind in recovery, the perceived effort of your workouts increases. And how this usually plays out for me, at least, is toward the end of a training block, which is usually like a week six or week eight, the weights just start to feel heavy. And I've slept well, I've been sticking to my diet well, but regardless, progression stops. So for a couple weeks, I don't gain reps on really anything. I'm not adding weight to the bar. And then that weight that I've been using for the last few weeks, let's say it's on a bench press or a squat or a deadlift. I notice it particularly on the harder exercises. That weight just starts to feel heavier and heavier. Another sign, the second sign, is that you lack the motivation to train. So if you normally

Starting point is 00:19:32 look forward to your workouts and you now have no desire to get in the gym and you have to drag yourself through each rep, each set, that is a red flag that your body may need some extra recovery. That brings me to the next sign, which is feeling depressed. In some people, mood disruption extends beyond just training. They lose motivation to do anything, really. The next sign, the fourth one, is feeling perpetually sore. So as you probably know, muscle soreness isn't correlated with muscle growth. I rarely get all that sore these days, regardless of how hard I train, yet I can continue to progress in my workouts and gain very small amounts of muscle over long periods of time. But when overtraining syndrome has started to set in,

Starting point is 00:20:27 some people experience a persistent soreness that just doesn't go away. Muscle soreness. The next sign is you are not sleeping well because when you're pushing your body too hard, when the work has way outpaced the recovery. Your nervous system can become overstimulated, and this makes it harder to fall asleep and stay asleep. So I want to quickly, though, touch on what you can do to help prevent these symptoms, help stave them off for as long as possible. So one is getting enough sleep. Most people need around eight hours of sleep. So if you can prioritize that, then that is going to help. Another is eating enough food. If you are in a calorie deficit, your body's ability to recover is

Starting point is 00:21:17 impaired. So unless you are intentionally maintaining deficit to lose fat, it is smart to try to be in a deficit as little as possible if you are trying to really push it hard in your workouts. All right, that's it for the takeaways from eight signs of overtraining that most people don't know. And if you liked it and you want to listen to the whole episode that was published in March of 2019, so you can go back and find it. And now let's move on to the final episode featured in this episode, which is an ode to the gym. What I've experienced is that no matter how smart and hardworking and tough you might be, or might think you are, the world will figure out ways to break you. And while some people experience more painful and debilitating breaks than others,

Starting point is 00:22:06 we all get broken. And what really matters is what do we do about it? What do we do to heal and come back stronger? And if you want to read more about that and learn from someone whose story really inspired me, check out Ray Dalio's book, Principles. And a major theme of that book is the process of progress whereby things get better and then get worse. And then you have to figure out why they're getting worse, learn the lesson, use it to make things go better again until they eventually go worse again. And then once again, you have to figure out why are they going badly, learn the lesson, apply the lesson. In the book, he has a diagram of how he likes to visualize progress as a series of upward loops. So you're moving up and then you're dipping,

Starting point is 00:22:57 dipping, things are getting worse, getting worse, you're going down. But if you handle that correctly, you can then loop back around and make things go better again until they start to go worse. And then you have to figure out why they're going worse and things are going down, going down. And if you do your job well, you loop back around and start doing better again and so forth. A lot of people like to think or want to think or want to believe that success in any area of life or any endeavor is a fairly linear journey with some peaks and valleys, but on the whole, just a nice upward climb. And that is just not the case. It is messier than that and doesn't just have valleys, but has periods of regression and often

Starting point is 00:23:45 despair when you're not sure if you're going to be able to get things moving in the right direction again. All that matters though, is that you do get things moving in the right direction again. All that matters is in the end, what are you left with? What results did you produce? How hard it was to get there or how chaotic it was just doesn't matter in the end. The gym is a lot more than a place to move, grunt, and sweat. I think that it is a miniature cosmos of sorts where we can make contact with the deeper parts of ourselves, our convictions, our fears, our habits, our anxieties. It's an arena where we can confront these opponents head-on and prove that we have what it takes to vanquish them.

Starting point is 00:24:34 The gym is also a setting where we can test the assumptions we've made about ourselves and the stories underlying them. It calls on us to demonstrate how we respond to the greater struggles of life like adversity, pain, insecurity, stress, weakness, and disadvantage. And in some ways, the gym asks us to show who we really are. And in this way, I think that it is a training and a testing ground for our bodies and minds and even our souls. The conflicts that we learn to endure in the gym empower us in our daily lives as well. The concentration, the discipline, the resilience that is required to build a great body are also required to build a great life. And I really do think that if you can do one,

Starting point is 00:25:25 you can do the other because the way to do anything is at bottom the way to do everything. The gym also calls on us to constantly attempt new things and thus is also a source of learning. It's a forum where questions are at least as important as answers, and it cultivates what scientists call a growth mindset by teaching us that our abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. And that is a worldview that is essential for great accomplishment in any area of our lives. The gym is practical as well, not idealistic. It's a laboratory that's open to any and all ideas and methodologies, and it gives very clear, very unqualified feedback. The ideas and methods either work or they don't. So in short, the gym can be so much more than merely a place

Starting point is 00:26:27 to work out. It can be a refuge from the chaos around us. It can be a world of our own that we create to satisfy our most personal and our most primal dreams and desires. And all this is why the gym can give us so much more than just muscle and strength. It can give us more life. And that's it for the snippets from An Ode to the Gym. And if you want to hear the rest of it, it was published in June of 2018. Well, I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful. And if you did, subscribe to the show because it makes sure that you don't miss new episodes. And it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people who may like it just as much as you. just as much as you. And if you didn't like something about this episode or about the show in general, or if you have ideas or suggestions or just feedback to share, shoot me an email,

Starting point is 00:27:30 Mike at muscleforlife.com, muscleforlife.com. And let me know what I could do better or just what your thoughts are about maybe what you'd like to see me do in the future. I read everything myself. I'm always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.

Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - The Best of Muscle For Life: BCAAs, Signs of Overreaching, and Ode to the Gym

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