Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - The Best of Muscle For Life: Beat Disease With Food, Testosterone Replacement Therapy, & You’re Having a Bad Workout

Episode Date: April 21, 2023

In this installment of the Best of Muscle For Life, you’ll hear hand-picked clips from three popular MFL episodes: an interview with Dr. WIlliam Li on how food can help fight disease, a monologue on whether you should take testosterone replacement therapy (TRT), and a motivational episode for when you’re having an awful workout.  Some people—my favorite people—listen to most or even all of my podcasts, but my wizbang analytics tell me that while many listeners tune in on a regular basis, they don’t catch every installment of Muscle for Life and thus miss out on insights that could help them do at least a little better inside and outside the gym. That’s why I do “best of” episodes that contain a few of the most practical and compelling ideas, tips, and moments from the more popular episodes I’ve published over the years. This way, you can learn interesting insights that you might have otherwise missed and find new episodes of the show to listen to. So, in this installment of The Best of Muscle for Life, you’ll be hearing hand-picked morsels from three episodes: Dr. William Li on How to Beat Disease With Food (Originally published 9/15/2021) Is Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT) For You? (Originally published 12/6/2021) Motivation Monday: So, You're Having a Shitty Workout… (Originally published 9/18/2017) And we’ll be starting with number one, Dr. WIlliam Li on how to beat disease with food. Timestamps: (0:00) - Please leave a review of the show wherever you listen to podcasts and make sure to subscribe! (3:25) - Dr. William Li on How to Beat Disease With Food (18:00) - Is Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT) For You? (26:26) - My free quiz to answer all your diet questions: www.muscleforlife.show/dietquiz (27:31) - Motivation Monday: So, You're Having a Shitty Workout… Mentioned on the Show: Take this free quiz to get science-based answers to all of your diet questions: www.muscleforlife.show/dietquiz

Hello and welcome to the latest and greatest episode of Muscle for Life. I'm Mike Matthews and thank you for joining me today. Now, I have recorded hundreds of episodes of Muscle for Life and I've talked about a huge variety of things related to health, fitness, lifestyle, mindset, ranging from the basics of diet and exercise like energy and macronutrient balance and progressive overload and training frequency and volume to fads like the ketogenic and carnivore diet and collagen protein to more unfamiliar territories like body weight set point and fasted cardio. And some episodes resonate with my crowd more than others, but all of them contain at least a few key takeaways that just about anyone can benefit

from. At least that's what I tell myself. That's what helps me sit down in the chair every day and do this. And as cool as that is, it poses a problem for you, my dear listener, especially if you are new here. And that is ain't nobody got time for that. We're talking about probably a thousand plus hours of content at this point. And while some people actually do make the time to listen to most or even all of my podcasts, my whizbang analytics tell me that while many listeners tune in on a regular basis, they don't catch every installment of Muscle for Life and thus they miss out on insights that could help them get even just a little bit better inside and outside the gym. Because if you just get a little bit better consistently enough, that can add up to big results in the long run. And people

have also been telling me that they would like me to do more shorter multi-topic episodes like my Q&As and Says You episodes. And so I got an idea. How about a best of series of podcasts that contains a few of the most practical and compelling ideas, tips and moments from my most popular episodes going all the way back to the beginning. This way, people who are new in particular can quickly determine if this is the droid they're looking for, if this podcast is for them or not. And then those who are regulars and enjoy what I'm doing,

but just don't have the time or inclination to listen to all of my stuff. And I do understand that. I don't take it personally. You can also then benefit from the discussions and the episodes that you are not listening to in full. You can also find new episodes to listen to without having to give an hour of your time to determine whether it was worth it or not. So here we are with the best of Muscle for Life. And in this episode, you will be hearing hand-picked morsels from three episodes. The first is an interview I did with Dr. William Lee on how to beat disease with food. The second is a monologue I recorded on TRT, testosterone replacement therapy, and how to know if it is right for you. And finally,

the third episode featured in this episode is a short monologue, a motivational, at least that was my intention, monologue called, so you're having a shitty workout. And let's start with a highlight reel from the interview I did with Dr. William Lee on how to beat disease with food. So much of the emphasis of healthy eating has been on elimination. I mean, and this has been going back 10, 20 years. And I think that's trained people to actually react to this idea of healthy eating as thinking about deprivation. But it's quite the opposite. I think there's, I mean, as you and I have spoken about before, plenty of opportunity to select from

things that everyone enjoys individually to be able to make healthy choices. And something I noticed as a medical doctor is that my patients would always ask me at the end of a visit, hey, doc, what could I be doing for myself? I mean, of course, I've given them diagnoses and written them prescriptions. And I realized that I was never taught what to eat, what people should eat in medical school. And I thought that was just wrong. In fact, I was stunned to realize that I had so many other answers to people's questions, but not that one. And so I went back and it took me about 10 years to do this. And I went back and said, what can I do as a scientist to study what foods can actually do to help the body? So when I study food as

medicine, I mean, I literally use the same kind of thinking that have been used to develop cancer drugs to say, how do we activate the body's own physiological systems? What foods, you know, like when you hear about, you know, the so-called superfoods, you know, there's only one food and you just eat it and close your eyes and it's going to create miracles for you. That's not so. You could never do that with medicines. In fact, the serious nature of drug development is that, you know, you need to understand how the body works.

You need to kind of use science to figure out what you could do to, you know, trigger something beneficial in the body. And then it takes a decade to come up with it if you're lucky in biotechnology. But what was so amazing when I studied food in the same systems that we use to do drug development is that we found foods that had the same or even better activity than a lot of drugs and food doesn't need to wait. I always say that food has immediacy, something that, you know, we talk about now that your listeners actually hear about, they can put to

work right away. They don't need to wait. When I get asked the question, what are some of the things that I think everybody should know about? I first say, first, understand how your body works and what health and fitness means. Our body is hardwired to keep us fit and our body is hardwired to keep us healthy. In other words, when we're born, there's machinery inside us that repels disease and helps us stay in fitness. And what happens is that as we go through life, there's many forces in the environment, things that we do to ourselves, things that we don't even know are happening to us that kind of erode, they kind of pick at and can deteriorate our health defenses. And that's actually why we get sick. And so that the key to actually remaining fit for as long as we possibly

can throughout our lives is to keep supporting and even boosting, activating our body's health defense systems. There's five of them. And this comes out of my research because we have been involved with drug development. I've been involved with drug development to find biotech things that can actually overcome diseases in five health defense systems. One is angiogenesis. That's how our body grows, is circulation. We've got 60,000 miles worth of blood vessels in our body. And these blood vessels bring oxygen and nutrients,

whatever we're eating. It's our highways and byways of our body that actually bring right to our cells and our tissues. And our brains and our hearts. So we really need good circulation. What are some foods that actually can help our circulation? It turns out that healthy fats like omega-3 fatty acids actually help keep the highways and byways flowing really smoothly. It turns out that there are natural chemicals in fruits. I know that you're somebody who believes in eating regular portions of fruits on a daily basis. The peel of fruits contains a natural chemical called ursolic acid. And I don't think your listeners need to memorize what the

particular chemicals are, but I can tell you, leave it to the researchers like me, we've looked at ursolic acid and it helps our develop our body, develop more blood vessels to keep feeding our healthy organs. And some of the foods that can actually help our body prune away extra blood vessels, the unneeded extra blood vessels, green tea can do it. Pomegranates can actually do it. There's a natural chemical in peaches. It's the summertime. I love peaches. Chlorogenic acid that's found in the meat of the fruit of a ripe peach. That's delicious. Olive oil has some of it. Allium, like garlic and red onions, have a lot of it as well.

But even carrots, most people eat the orange part, the taproot that's under the ground. When you go to a farmer's market and you buy a whole food, whole carrot, you usually buy it with this big bushy green top on it. It looks like the tail of a Maine coon cat. And it turns out that when we compared the carrot bottom with the carrot top, the carrot bottom actually has blood vessel pruning properties, which by the way, are good for starving cancers. Cancers can't grow without a blood supply. So carrots can actually help cut off the blood supply to little microscopic cancers that might be trying to grow. And then the top part, which most people don't eat, but I've learned to eat because you can make pesto out of it. You can

actually juice it and you can put it into a smoothie. There's all kinds of things you can make it and put it into a salad. Carrot tops actually have twice the amount of blood vessel, cancer-starving, extra pruning power. And so this is just one of the five health defense systems and some of the foods that can actually help us achieve balance. That's really an important property. Cruciferous vegetables that you're talking about, they belong to a class of natural chemicals called ITCs, like India, Thomas, Charlie, and ITCs are isothiocyanates. Again, your listeners don't need to remember all the details on this, but here's the key thing. Isothiocyanates are found inside plant cells. So humans have cells, but plants have cells as well. And when we eat the plant, we chew them and it's chewing that

releases those natural chemicals, isothiocyanates. So the more you chew your broccoli, Brussels sprouts, the more you chew that, it's like what our mom said, like, don't just wolf your food, don't chew it. And you'll chew it if you actually prepare it in ways that are really tasty. So food should be tasty. Then you're chewing it, you're actually breaking down those cell walls and releasing the natural chemicals. So you're not just flushing it through your system, you're absorbing it in your gut. What I'm going to tell you about the microbiome, I will tell you, this is a brand new field.

It's very exciting, very important, much more important than we ever thought, but we're just at the tip of the iceberg. And so when you hear people talking about the definitive microbiome diet or whatever, we hardly understand what it is. But let me just tell you what we do know. We know that our body is made of about 30, 40 trillion human cells. And what's remarkable is that while we've always known that we've got bacteria in our skin and our scalp and everything else, and in our gut, because feces is actually filled with bacteria,

what we didn't realize is the stuff that gets flushed, actually, some of those are the remnants of really healthy bacteria. And so when you count those bacteria in our body, because it starts with just saying what it is, the microbiome, turns out in the gut, we've got 39, about 39 trillion bacteria that live inside our gut. So I told you we've got about 40 trillion human cells. We've got 39 trillion bacterial cells.

So we're not even fully human. If you think about it, we're an ecosystem that's part human and part bacteria. And there's even a term that describes an organism like us humans that is not made of only one living cell, but made of different types of organisms. And that term is called a holobiont, a holobiont. So it's not like a cyborg. It's not like a terminator, but a holobiont basically refers to an organism like a human that's part human cells and part bacterial cells. So our gut bacteria is all throughout from our mouth and our tongue all the way down to the tail

end of us. And most of it's in our colon, which is on the back end. This healthy gut bacteria, when we eat food, our body absorbs most of it. So think about it. You eat a broccoli, a piece of broccoli or a spoonful of broccoli. You're going to absorb the nutrients. You're going to absorb some of the plant proteins. You're going to absorb a lot of the good stuff, the vitamins. And then the fiber that's in that broccoli, some of it will get absorbed, but there's a lot of fiber in plants that don't get absorbed. And that fiber just kind of goes down into your lower gut, into your colon. Now, when I went to medical school, what I was taught, what we were all taught is that

the fiber just stimulates your bowel so, you go regularly, so to speak. But now we know that that's not quite true. That fiber that our human cells don't absorb goes to feed our bacterial selves. So that fiber that we don't absorb feeds the bacteria, the bacteria kind of descend on it and chew it up. So every time we eat, we're like feeding our pet bacteria inside our body. And that bacteria eats the stuff that our bodies don't absorb. And I'll come back to this in a second in terms of harmful foods. And then when they eat the fiber, for example, they chew it up. As part of the metabolism of the bacteria, they kick out these metabolites. So they're the things that when you feed them, they produce these metabolites. These metabolites are called short chain fatty acids and the bacteria release them into our

bloodstream, our healthy gut bacteria. And what do they do? These metabolites lower inflammation. They speed up healing. They boost and improve our immune system, which can actually help us fight cancer. And then most remarkably, and again, I talked about the tip of the iceberg, but most remarkably, we're beginning to realize these gut bacteria and the metabolites that they create activate our brains. There's a gigantic nerve in our body called the vagus nerve. It's just one of many nerves that connects our brain, our guts to our brain, but they signal our brain, our gut bacteria is connected to our brain and they ring the bell and they prompt our brain to release neurotransmitters like dopamine, like serotonin, like oxytocin. And that actually controls our mood. So our gut actually is connected to our brain, which is connected to our mood,

which is connected to our behavior. So some of the foods that I think that people need to know about are the same foods that we want to take good care of our gut bacteria. Foods with fiber, plant-based foods. Cruciferous vegetables are a great example, but fruits as well. Kiwi is a great source of fiber that feeds our gut bacteria. It's packed with fiber. Mushrooms also are a great source of fiber

to feed our gut bacteria. The fiber in the mushrooms called beta-D-glucan really is a strong immune booster. And of course, we've all learned last year how important a good immune, healthy immune system. Yeah, that's going to be my next question for you. Yeah. So our microbiome does a lot of stuff. And then fermented foods actually deliver the bacteria right to our gut. So when you actually have foods like yogurt or kimchi or sauerkraut, you are taking, again, old school preparation of foods, fermentation,

and the healthy bacteria that winds up in the edible bacteria in these foods that we actually swallow, populate our gut, and help to build up that 39 trillion population in the ecosystem. Let's talk about things that take down our immune system. If you eat foods that are way too salty, over time, that extra salt actually takes down the immune system. If you eat foods that are way too salty over time, that extra salt actually takes down the immune system. If you eat foods that have too much sugar, that hyperglycemia, like you wear out not only your pancreas, but you also wear down your immune system. And so too, if you eat foods that have too much saturated fat, people who are in that so-called excess Western diet where you're eating the gigantic two-inch or three-inch

T-bone steaks all the time. So what we do know is that lots of red meat, saturated fats, high salt diets, hyperglycemic diets, it doesn't mean sugar or salt's bad for you. It just means that too much of anything knocks you out of balance and actually can take down your immune system. But other things that we do also take down our immunity, like sedentary lifestyle. If you're not active, if you're not physically active, if you're not exercising in some way, shape or form regularly, your immune system is down. And so I think that the idea of immunity is something we're born with. We carry it with us. It's up to us to take good care of it and keep it in good shape, just like our muscles. And the foods that actually can boost your immune system that I really enjoy, blueberries contain anthocyanins.

Anthocyanins are a natural dye that makes that nice, dark, purplish, bluish color. Blackberries have them. Anthocyanins, pomegranate has a lot of anthocyanins. Even dark chocolate has anthocyanins as well. Cranberries have them as well. So the fact of the matter is that those anthocyanins. Even dark chocolate has anthocyanins as well. Cranberries have them as well. So the fact of the matter is, is that those anthocyanins can actually increase certain functions of our immune system called T cells. If we all spend most of our time, let's just call it 80% of our time taking good care of our health defenses, we can afford, you know, our shields are up, we can afford to take a few hits and we'll bounce right back. And so really the whole idea is to practice good, healthy lifestyle habits, including a good, healthy diet most of the time. And it's not that hard. It's really,

really practical. But there are some things that I would say the research has shown time and time and again that they're not good for your microbiome. And if they hurt your microbiome, your good, healthy gut bacteria, they hurt your immunity and actually make your body more inflammatory, which doesn't set you up for all kinds of diseases, which could include helping cancers, microscopic cancers to take off. So nobody wants that. So what are some of these foods that research, science has shown is not good for you, not good for your microbiome and therefore not good for your immune system? Well, first of all, heavy duty alcohol, like if you are heavy drinking is bad for almost every aspect of your body, including your microbiome and including your immune system. I,

you know, I don't think that needs to be said, but, but other things that people tend to kind of not appreciate as much as that processed meats. Okay. These are the, you know, the, the packed with preservatives or packed with all kinds of chemical preservatives. And I'm not talking about the kind that they hang up to dry in Italy, which people don't eat that often even in Italy. But the stuff that, like the lunch meat stuff that's going on, that you see in every deli counter that gets sliced up and put into a sandwich every single day from the time you're a kid. Those preserved meats and those chemicals actually really injure your microbiome. But gut bacteria, you know, they like to eat the fiber and they like to eat other things.

They're pretty adaptable, but like preserved meats, they don't like. It really changes the ecosystem from good towards bad. My motto is love your food to love your health. If you can align the things that you love with the things that are good for you, that's perfect. who love your health. If you can align the things that you love with the things that are good for you, that's perfect. Okay, that's it for the featured snippets for Dr. William Lee on how to beat disease with food. And if you want to listen to that whole interview, you can find it back in September of 2021. And now let's move on to the next featured moments from the monologue that I recorded on testosterone replacement therapy. Okay, so what is TRT? Well, you probably know that it stands for testosterone replacement

therapy, and that pretty much tells you what it is, right? It's a form of hormone therapy that is used to restore a man's level of testosterone into a normal range, and that would be the concentrations seen in healthy younger men or to put specific numbers on it. That would start at about 300 nanograms per deciliter of blood NGDL. You have probably seen that if you have been looking into TRT up to 800 to maybe a thousand NGDL. That would be the high end of normal. Anything beyond 1000 would be freakish and very rare. Now, historically, TRT was given to men who were suffering from low testosterone because of a medical condition known as hypogonadism. And this is a situation where the

testes, they produce little or no sex hormones. And women can also be affected by this condition, but it doesn't reduce their testosterone in the same way as it does in men. It impacts female sex hormones, but that's not relevant to this conversation. I'm really just talking to men here and talking about their testosterone levels. Now, contrary to what many people think, hypogonadism can occur in men at any age. It is not exclusively a condition seen in middle-aged men or beyond. And the main symptoms of it include reduced libido, erectile dysfunction, reduced muscle mass and strength, or difficulty gaining muscle mass and strength, and a lot of difficulty, not just, oh, I'm

progressing, I'm getting bigger and stronger, but it's not as quickly as I would like. No, people with hypogonadism make very little progress in the gym. They seem to be a non-responder often. Also, higher body fat levels in general, you'll see that among men with hypogonadism, osteoporosis or low bone mass, depression, fatigue. If somebody has hypogonadism, then TRT is definitely warranted because even though it is a chronic condition that may require lifelong treatment, it may mean that they have to take these drugs for the rest of their lives. Research

shows that TRT can effectively improve many of the symptoms associated with hypogonadism, and it greatly improves quality of life. As you can imagine, if you could reverse most or all of the side effects that I just mentioned, that changes a dude's life. In recent years, TRT has become a lot more popular among men who don't have this condition, but who just want to fight the gradual decline that is associated with aging, the gradual decline of testosterone. And that generally begins in men in their 30s. And then research shows that it continues at an average rate of about 1.6% per year thereafter. So testosterone levels slowly decline. And this is also often referred to as age-related hypogonadism. Now, a lot of the men who ask me

about TRT want to know what exactly it's going to accomplish with their testosterone levels and what the benefits are going to be and what the risks are. If they can just feel younger, if they can have more energy, if they can have more sex drive, more sexual prowess, if they can feel a bit more vital, a bit younger, They hope they can gain muscle faster. They hope they can get stronger, faster, stay leaner, easier. And the answer to all of those types of questions is pretty simple. Research shows that if your testosterone is low or reaching the bottom of the range of normal, which again is around 300 nanograms per deciliter of blood, then TRT will likely help you feel more energetic and be better in bed and have more vitality.

And it may help you gain muscle and strength a little bit faster. I'm going to talk a little bit more about that in a minute. It is not going to be as dramatic in your body composition as people selling you TRT would have you believe, but it can make a difference. First, you should know that TRT is not going to do much for you. It will do very little for you if you don't have symptoms of low testosterone. So if you feel healthy, if you generally have high energy levels, if you don't have symptoms of low testosterone. So if you feel healthy, if you generally have high energy levels, if you generally sleep well, if you don't suffer from anxiety, if you are able to make progress in the gym, you don't feel weak, you don't look weak, then the downsides of TRT, which I will get into, are likely going to outweigh the upsides. So where does all this

leave us? What is a summary of my recommendation for those of you who are considering TRT, just curious about it, maybe just started it? Well, you now know there are risks associated with it. It is not all benefit and no risk. And so I can speak to this personally, right? So if I had classic hypogonadism, I would be on TRT because, well, for all the reasons that I've discussed. Also, if I were older, I am 37 and don't have any symptoms of low testosterone. I haven't gotten blood work done ever, I guess. If I have, I'm not remembering it because I don't really have a reason to get regular blood work done. People who secretly use steroids get regular blood work done, but I'm not one of those people. So I can't say where my testosterone is at, but I have no symptoms of low testosterone. And that's not surprising given my age and my lifestyle. But if I were 47 or 57 and I was doing everything I could to naturally maintain high testosterone levels, which I will talk about also in a minute, and I still had symptoms of low testosterone. And if I went and got blood work done and found out

that, yes, I do indeed have low testosterone levels, if it came back at 300 NGDL or less, then I would get on TRT because at that point, it's a matter of quality of life. It's not about body composition, trying to gain another inch on my biceps. It's my life is going to be a lot more enjoyable. Every waking hour is going to be a lot better at 600 NGDL than 200, for example. Now let's wrap up this discussion with a few of the things you can do to increase your testosterone naturally. And these are the things I would recommend to anyone before they get on TRT, regardless of their situation. Even in the case of classic hypogonadism, the tips I'm going to share might

be able to help. And I think any competent doctor would say, yeah, we should be doing these things regardless. Like maybe we do have to go on TRT, but it makes sense to, and I'll get into the list, it makes sense to do strength training, resistance training, lift some weights, because research shows that people who do this regularly have higher testosterone levels than men in particular who don't. And this has even been seen in elderly men, obese men, healthy and unhealthy, young and old. Research also shows that a higher carb diet with plenty of healthy fats, a lot of unsaturated fat, monounsaturated fats in particular are great for this. You do also want some saturated fat in your diet, of course, but as a rule of thumb,

probably no more than about 10% of your daily calories should come from saturated fat. Research shows that minimizing stress can help a lot with naturally increasing testosterone levels and testosterone production. And the reason for that is if there's too much stress, it's not that stress is bad per se, right? Acute stress can be great. That's what we're doing in the gym. Chronic stress though, where stress levels are chronically high, that can lead to chronically high cortisol levels, which is a catabolic hormone, and that can lead to lower testosterone levels. So cortisol and testosterone have an inverse relationship. If cortisol levels are too high too often,

then testosterone production is going to be suppressed. And that's it for what I thought were some of the more interesting sound bites from Is Testosterone Replacement Therapy, TRT, for you. And if you want to listen to that episode, it was originally published in December of 2021, so you can go back and find it. And last, we have the highlight reel from another monologue, So You're Having a Shitty Workout. But first, how many calories should you eat to reach your fitness goals faster? What about your macros? What types of food should you eat? And how many

meals should you eat every day? Well, I created a free 60-second diet quiz that'll answer those questions for you and others, including how much alcohol you should drink, whether you should eat more fatty fish to get enough omega-3 fatty acids, what supplements are worth taking and why, and more. To take the quiz and get your free personalized diet plan, go to muscleforlife.show slash dietqu Go to muscleforlife.show slash diet quiz, muscleforlife.show slash diet quiz now. Answer the questions and learn what you need to do

in the kitchen to lose fat, build muscle and get healthy. You don't wanna be in the gym. Everything feels god awfully heavy. You're just going through the motions, counting down the sets until you can leave. I understand it happens. I have shitty workouts too, sometimes every week, sometimes twice. You know, every once in a while I have to slog through a whole run of bad workouts. Like I've got some kind of low grade kryptonite poisoning and every session is just sweaty grunting without aim or purpose. Again, it happens. The problem is

though, these days, these fucking days, I tell you, they really can be suffocating, can't they? They can suck the life right out of you. Well, here's the first thing that you need to know. Bad workouts, just like bad days at work or the proctologist are normal. They're just part of the game, the warp and woof of what we do. In fact, working out is supposed to be hard. That's kind of the point. Easy things are boring things like shaving our genitals or thumb wrestling, which are perfectly fine things to do, of course, but they're really not going to amount to much. Porno nuts have never helped anyone summit Maslow's pyramid, have never helped people reach self-actualization. Working out, on the other hand, building your best body ever isn't manscaping.

It's not bagging groceries, even though it might feel like that sometimes. So consider this. The act of transforming your body composition is so much more than merely building muscle or losing fat. It's you sacrificing who you currently are for who you want to be, and then using iron and steel to beat your new form into being. So yeah, sometimes it's hard. Sometimes it's fucking hard as hell. And sometimes you really do have to leave some blood on the altar as it should be as it must be. Woe is he who believes that things that don't come naturally and easily simply aren't worth doing or aren't meant to be done at all and if we look around you know we can see this everywhere. Person tries

something new, person flounders and person immediately brands himself a failure and quits. Back to fondling himself and arguing with strangers on Twitter, he goes, because he simply doesn't get it. He doesn't get that nothing meaningful happens automagically. Everything takes way more time, way more effort, and way more grit than we want to believe at the outset. The fact that it's hard isn't a sign that it's probably not worth it. The struggle is the point. The struggle is how it signals its worth. The fact that it's hard isn't a sign that you don't belong in the arena. The struggle is how you prove you're worthy. Rome's eventual rise to prominence started with a rather inauspicious string of humiliating

military defeats that simply would have broken a weaker people. The early Romans, though, while they may not have known warfare, few peoples in history have known how to embrace the struggle better than they, and they used that ability to cultivate a military and diplomatic prowess that ultimately won them millions of acres of territory that stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Euphrates, from Britain to Egypt. Every one of us that are playing the transformation game struggles too. It's hard for me, just as it's hard for you, and has been hard for everyone that has ever lived. It takes work. Uncontrollable amounts of unholy and sometimes rather unbearable work. The work that most people simply don't want to do. unbearable work. The work that most people simply don't want to do. You know, the hard things,

the uncomfortable things, the complicated things, the unexciting things, the exhausting things, all the things that never get easier or even enjoyable necessarily, but must be done regardless. Building the body of your dreams isn't hard in the same way that other work is hard though. Nobody's gunning for you. You're not wrestling alligators or jacking off horses. And when you look at it that way, it's actually pretty easy. But it is also hard and that's okay. We shouldn't discount what it takes and what it means. It takes resilience. It takes sacrifice. It takes the courage to stop giving so many fucks about things that simply aren't fuck worthy. And it teaches an invaluable lesson that if you have the power to change your body, then you have the power to change your life. So remember all of that when you are having a bad day in the gym, when you're

having one of those harder than hell workouts. Don't let that one bad day rob you of all the days that are going to follow. Days that might be hard too. They might even be harder. Who knows? Who cares? It's supposed to be difficult. You're smithing a new body, a new mindset, a new identity. Why do we think that should be easy?

It is what it is. It is what it must be. Well, I hope you liked what I chose for you from so you are having a shitty workout and if you want to listen to the whole episode it was originally published in september of 2017 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. 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.