Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - The Best of Muscle For Life: Natural Bodybuilding, Training After a Break, & Productivity Tips

Starting point is 00:00:00 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

Starting point is 00:01:01 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

Starting point is 00:01:51 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 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. And you can also find new episodes to listen to

Starting point is 00:02:47 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. One is an interview I did with Eric Helms on the art and science of succeeding in natural bodybuilding, which is very different than enhanced bodybuilding. Then there is a monologue from me called How to Get Back into Weightlifting After a Break from

Starting point is 00:03:19 the Gym. And that gives you a training program as well that can get you back into the swing of things. And lastly, there is another monologue from me, a motivational one called my five best tips for increasing productivity. But first, how would you like a free meal planning tool that figures out your calories, your macros, even your micros, and then allows you to create 100% custom meal plans for cutting, lean gaining, or maintaining in under five minutes. Well, all you got to do is go to buylegion.com slash meal plan, B-U-Y legion.com slash meal plan, and download the tool. And if I may say, this tool really is fantastic. My team and I spent over six months on this thing, working with an Excel wizard

Starting point is 00:04:07 and inferior versions of this are often sold for 50, 60, even $100. Or you have to download an app and pay every month or sign up for a weight loss service and pay every month, 10, 20, 40, 50, even $60 a month for what is essentially in this free tool. So if you are struggling to improve your body composition, if you are struggling to lose fat or gain muscle, the right meal plan can change everything. Dieting can go from feeling like

Starting point is 00:04:42 running in the sand in a sandstorm to riding a bike on a breezy day down a hill. So again, if you want my free meal planning tool, go to buylegion.com slash meal plan, buylegion.com slash meal plan, enter your email address, and you will get instant access. Let's start with number one, Eric Helms on the art and science of succeeding in natural bodybuilding. When you decide to compete, to some degree, you're making a deal with the devil to where your perspective is going to shift and you would do things you otherwise wouldn't. And whether you realize it or not, you are accepting certain trade-offs.

Starting point is 00:05:28 realize it or not, you are accepting certain trade-offs. And the arc of my career is all about not telling people the trade-offs you have to make for bodybuilding are bad, therefore the sport is bad, but rather to say we're all adults. But the issue is that a lot of us don't have the proper informed consent going into the sport because we have misconceptions about it. The body fat required to actually get on stage is you take one of those lean people, that track and field athlete, that gymnast, that lifestyle bodybuilder, and they are probably about 10% over the stage weight they need to be. So like, let's say you're 180 pounds, you're walking around lean, you'd probably have to get close to 160 to be the, that's 18 pounds-ish, right? So, let's say you're a woman, you're 140, you've had awesome changes to your physique,

Starting point is 00:06:12 you like the way you look. Depending on the division you compete in, you may have to lose 15 pounds to get into the kind of shape when everyone on the street would be like, oh man, you look great. And then you go, yeah, and I need to lose 15 pounds. Point is, is that the leaner you get, so long as you haven't like completely dieted yourself down to emaciation, you look more muscular. So that behooves competitors over time. If you look at the Mr. America competitions in the 40s compared to the Mr. America competitions in the 50s, and then you keep fast forwarding over time, sometime around the 80s, people started getting

Starting point is 00:06:45 what I would call maximally lean. If you look at pictures of Danny Padilla or Frank Zane in the late 70s, or then you get to Rich Gasparri, some of the guys. And then basically in the 80s, all of a sudden, stride glutes hit the scene. And that was since then we've had competitors in an increasing frequency who are getting maximally lean, if you will, to where there is the appearance of no visible subcutaneous body fat. And when you look at the studies on bodybuilding competitors, depending on what techniques they use and to kind of cross validate that with our cultural zeitgeist of what we think percentage of body fat are. For men, a truly, truly shredded person is probably between four to 6% body fat. And for women, you can effectively add about like 8% to those values. Also knowing that the process of getting down to that incredibly lean state

Starting point is 00:07:37 results in almost a 100% number of people having a big rebound and gaining a ton of weight post competition. And if you're not prepared for that, that can feel really socially isolating and scary. You know, a lot of the bodybuilding culture is based upon valuing yourself through the expression of willpower. You're the person who could diet yourself down to this level of unhealthy leanness, incredible shreddedness to display this physique on stage. That is the athletic feat, quote unquote, in and of itself. And then all of a sudden, you can't stop yourself from

Starting point is 00:08:10 having a second dinner at Taco Bell after the competition's over. And you feel like all of a sudden you've lost your acceptance into this community. You've lost your bodybuilder card, the thing that made you special, that made you accepted in this group, that was something you were proud of, now seemingly vanished. And you're gaining pounds a week of body fat, feeling terrible, beating yourself up. And even sometimes going through these cyclical, not true bulimia in the sense that you might be binging and purging, but going on these really, really harsh diets to quote unquote, correct for the binge that unfortunately prompts the next binge. And you look up three months after your show, you're 30 pounds up, actually heavier than when you started your prep. You feel terrible.

Starting point is 00:08:50 You're unhappy. You don't like what you see in the mirror and you don't know how you got there. But simply knowing that that can happen, why it happens, what to do about it, and to have some acceptance and understand it can make a huge difference in my experience as a coach. Just having people with that informed consent and knowing what they're getting into can make that experience, A, not as drastic in magnitude, but B, not something that can really disrupt someone's life to the same degree. So, yeah, you might be experiencing these metabolic adaptations, but that's not just some hand wavy thing. We actually see organs get smaller in the course of dieting, which might explain some of that. And if these organs are actually atrophying, that means their function changes too. So when you see low energy availability in men and women, we start to see our sex hormones go down. So in men, you typically see a loss of

Starting point is 00:09:40 libido. In one case study of a natural bodybuilder, temporarily went down to one quarter of his normal resting testosterone levels. We see thyroid go down, we see leptin go down, and ghrelin go up. We see an overall tilt of different axes in the body in terms of hormonal status. So cortisol goes up, testosterone goes down. We'll see hunger hormones get elevated, such that satiety won't set in post-meal and you have a resting higher concentration of hunger hormones. And we'll see drops in subconscious physical activity. So non-exercise activity, thermogenesis, you'll see reductions in energy expenditure during

Starting point is 00:10:15 sleep. And this all comes down to what's called, again, low energy availability. And the way you actually determine that was you would look at your total activity and then you'd look at your calories taken in relative to your lean body mass. And then you look at see what is that mathematical relationship. And there's consistent data showing that below certain thresholds and cutoffs, which are probably more realistically ranges and dependent upon your non-exercise activity, like what is your lifestyle activity? There are certain ranges where you start to see things like luteinizing hormone pulsatility

Starting point is 00:10:45 change in women, which is a predictor, kind of an early warning system, if you will, hormonally for when you're going to see menstrual cycle disruption and amenorrhea. Essentially, what I'm getting at is that through the process of creating a calorie deficit, and then there's a metabolic adaptation, some things, you know, only one person gets fired off the accounting team, right? Then you might have to cut harder. You do more cardio, you reduce your calories, which necessarily changes your energy availability status because now you've increased your exercise activity and or decreased your energy intake.

Starting point is 00:11:16 So that mathematical relationship changes to increase energy expenditure, decrease energy intake, and therefore reduce energy availability per kilogram of lean body mass. It means that, okay, we've got to trim the fat even further. Now we're going to actually fire another person from accounting and we're going to go to those motion sensor lights. And this plays out as us experiencing all these quote unquote negative adaptations. And these adaptations are all, if you look at them, they're behaviorally or physiologically, they all appear to drive us to want to eat more and move less. So it's essentially fighting our progress. So I think there's a number of things you can do. One, you can't address the fact that you have to get shredded. In the end,

Starting point is 00:11:54 you will get shredded. So the other option we have, I mentioned there's that short-term and kind of long-term energy deprivation. The long-term is you got to get diced. Can't change that or you don't do well on stage. We can change the acute energy deprivation. So the original kind of approach were these eight to 12 week diets. And this went back to an era in bodybuilding where steroid cycles were actually still cycles. You know, if you looked at the drug using side of the sport, people would often sometimes not take anabolics at all in the off season and then take them for prep. And then, you know, over time and over time and over time on the enhanced side of the

Starting point is 00:12:28 sport, it's gone from, okay, I do some cycles in the off season. And then I do a different cycle during contest prep to now, like it's blasting crews. Like I'm always on some low level because if I want to be 5'10 and 250 pounds on stage, I have to pretty much always be on super physiological levels of hormones. So the eight to 12 week contest prep is kind of a side effect of the length of some of these steroid cycles. And it doesn't have a whole lot of relevance for a natural bodybuilder. In fact, I would say it is counterproductive. It's really difficult to get from the kind of quote unquote normal levels of leanness to the extreme levels of

Starting point is 00:13:05 leanness needed to be competitive in eight to 12 weeks. And the only way to do it is to crash diet. And that accelerates rates of muscle loss and it accelerates all these adaptations. And it puts you below those thresholds where you start to see disproportionate negative side effects of low energy availability almost right out the gates. So a better approach is to probably take almost twice as long, if not longer, and do things straight up. First thing is just don't lose body fat as quickly because it doesn't require as much of an energy deficit. So don't do

Starting point is 00:13:35 too much cardio. So a reasonable rate of weight loss is probably between 0.5 to 1% of your body weight per week. And I would probably only be closer to that 1% earlier on in the diet when you have more body fat to lose. Logistically, what I would recommend is instead of picking a very specific show, I would take a handful of shows that are all maybe no earlier than five months from when you start and then be open to having an open-ended contest prep. So if there are enough shows in your region or within distance that you're willing to go to, have some backup options so that if you do find you're just not getting lean on time, you don't have to crash diet and disproportionately induce those symptoms, but rather just extend your

Starting point is 00:14:15 diet a little longer. First, we need to get to, okay, we know the etiology of why we experience these shitty things. And it's really important to know they're normal and they're temporary. these shitty things. And it's really important to know they're normal and they're temporary. Almost all of the data we have suggests that while sure, your testosterone might go to one fifth of what it was as a male, or you might experience the complete loss of menstrual cycles a few weeks or months, depending on your approach into your contest prep. When we observe people who return to normal eating behavior, and they return to similar body fat levels to what they were pre-contest diet, all these values return to baseline. And that's been shown in case studies and in some of the group level data we have on physique competitors. And when that

Starting point is 00:14:57 does not happen, there seems to be indications of them trying to stay lean post-contest or too lean, you could say. The unfortunate reality is what we've seen from studies outside of the physique sector is that for the quote-unquote metabolic adaptations to go back to normal, there has to be body weight regain. And this almost assuredly is related to the fact that adipose tissue secretes leptin. The position you're in when you are shredded is the exact opposite of what's useful for growing muscle mass. So by doing a reverse diet on the most extreme version, where it takes six weeks to get out of a deficit, then you're hanging around at maintenance and slowly increasing

Starting point is 00:15:34 maintenance by walking back some of these adaptations, but never going into a surplus, you could spend four months being in a state where at best you're not losing muscle and maybe gaining some fullness and some acute performance, regaining lost muscle, at best you're not losing muscle and maybe gaining some fullness and some acute performance, regaining lost muscle, but certainly you're not growing any new muscle. The recovery diet in contrast is the goal is not to reverse. The goal is to recover because in the sport of bodybuilding and in life, we're trying to get back to an ideal physiological state where we can start making progress, right? Given what we know, that until you actually regain a reasonable amount of body fat, the long-term energy deprivation needs to go away. In addition to that short-term increase in calories, that means we need to actually get

Starting point is 00:16:13 into a surplus. And the normal response, the reason why people rebound, it's not because they did it wrong during the diet. It's not because they developed an eating disorder. It's a totally normal response to hyperphagia. So that just means basically when you've induced an incredible amount of hunger by dieting yourself down to being really, really shredded, the normal thing to do, if you were just to do this in an animal, is to therefore increase the amount of food they eat until they get back to a healthy physiological state, right? And all of this stuff tilts back towards homeostasis. When you start, if you decide to get into physique sport, that you're doing it as, hey, this would be cool. This would be fun. I want to see how far I can take this rather than solving something, fixing something and not being

Starting point is 00:16:55 happy with where you are in life and seeing bodybuilding as a solution. Because as cool as it is, and there may be some positives that come from it, don't get me wrong. It'll improve your self-efficacy. It'll improve your ability to manage details, manage stress. Like if you can make it through a hard spell at work or a difficult regular life stress period while doing prep. A global pandemic maybe. Absolutely. Then you'll be able to handle that stuff even better when you're not half starved. So I can definitely say that bodybuilding has given me a ton of positives. Don't get me wrong. I think my effort I can put into my academics, my work,

Starting point is 00:17:32 my relationships, my quote unquote growth mindset, the whole philosophy of progressive overload, managing stress and getting better and moving forward. I learned from the sport of bodybuilding and has made me a better human. But I was also fortunate that when I got into bodybuilding, I thought this would be cool. Not, man, I hate what I see in the mirror. I need to fix that because I think I would have a much more negative experience. And I've unfortunately seen and met a lot of people who have. Hey there, if you are hearing this, you are still listening, which is awesome. Thank you. And if you are enjoying this podcast or if you just like my podcast in general and you are getting at least something out of it, would you mind sharing it with a friend or

Starting point is 00:18:15 a loved one or a not so loved one even who might want to learn something new? Word of mouth helps really bigly in growing the show. So if you think of someone who might like this episode or another one, please do tell them about it. All right, that's it for the highlight reel from my interview with Eric on the art and science of succeeding in natural bodybuilding. And if you want to listen to the whole episode, it was published in July of 2020. So you can go back and find it. And now for our second course, I have how to get back into weightlifting after a break from the gym with a training program. I have good news.

Starting point is 00:18:53 And the good news is you don't lose muscle tissue, actual muscle tissue nearly as quickly as many people think. Yes, you can look quite a bit smaller after taking an extended break, after taking, I mean, shit, you start to notice a reduction in size if you just take a week off the gym, max two weeks, right? Your arms look a little bit smaller, especially the smaller muscle groups. Your pants are a little bit looser. You don't have as much of a residual pump from your workouts. And many people mistake even that for actual muscle loss. Actual muscle loss needs to be lean muscle tissue. And that is worth highlighting because lean muscle tissue is different. When I'm

Starting point is 00:19:36 saying lean muscle tissue, I mean muscle fibers, not necessarily the fluid that is stored in muscles, right? So you have water and you have glycogen. You're going to lose a bit of that if you're not training. As time goes on, your muscles are going to shrink then because of the lack of the residual pump, and they're going to be carrying around less water and less glycogen. Your body holds onto muscle remarkably well, even if you're not training, and therefore holds onto strength well too, because most of your strength comes from your muscle mass. A bit of it comes from technique and even your mindset, but most of it comes from the muscle that you have. So if you are holding on to most of the muscle you have, you are also holding on to most of the strength potential you have. You could look

Starting point is 00:20:21 at it that way, right? Because your skill can degrade. And if you haven't squatted, barbell squatted in a couple of months, like me or barbell deadlifted, you can assume that even if you haven't lost any muscle, so let's say you've been doing home workouts and you have retained all of your muscle. And if you've been doing regular home workouts that are even remotely challenging, you have almost certainly retained most, if not all of your muscle, but you're going to get back in the gym, you're going to get under a barbell or over a barbell, and it's going to feel heavy if you're trying to load it with the training weights that you were using before the lockdown. And that is mostly going to be from skill degradation. So the bottom line here is if you have not been working out at all,

Starting point is 00:21:05 or if your workouts have been very sporadic or not very challenging, don't worry. You probably haven't lost much in the way of muscle and strength and whatever you might've lost is going to come back quickly. If you just follow the rest of the advice I'm going to give you in this podcast, you might want to just jump back into your old routine, but that's probably a bad idea because unless you've been doing it at home, in which case you're probably not listening to this podcast, your muscles are going to be much more sensitive to the training. And that comes with some pros and cons. So on one hand, you will be able to quickly gain back any muscle and strength that you might've lost. But on the other hand, it means that your muscles are going to be far more susceptible to muscle damage than they were

Starting point is 00:21:48 before the lockdown began. And you're going to get a lot more sore from your training. Form is a bit rusty on the big lifts in particular. And if you were to just throw the normal weights that you use on the bar and go for it, you might be increasing your risk of injury. And specifically, I have a few guidelines for you to follow in your training. So let's start with the first one, and that is to use 50 to 80% of your one rep max for your compound exercises. Now, thanks to a phenomenon known as the repeated bout effect, your muscles become significantly more resistant to damage from strength training after just a few workouts. That's how quickly they adapt. And this is why you got so sore when you started lifting, like when you were brand new, but then stopped getting

Starting point is 00:22:35 sore or your soreness levels went way down after just a few weeks of training. Now, here's something many people don't know, though. You don't have to train all that heavy or hard to reap the benefits of the repeated bout effect. That is, you can train with relatively light weights and protect your muscles from damage caused by heavier lifting. I am recommending that you use lighter weights for your first few weeks when you're back in the gym because it'll cause very little muscle damage, it'll cause very little muscle soreness and will greatly reduce the amount of damage and soreness that you're going to experience when you get back to your heavier weights that you're used to using. How light should the weights be though? During

Starting point is 00:23:18 your first week back in the gym, week one, use about 50% of your one rep max on your compound exercises. And then on your isolation exercises, I recommend an intensity of about five reps in reserve. Just RIR is how I'm going to refer to that. And in case you're not familiar with RIR, what that is, is it's simply an indication of how many more reps you could do in a set before your form starts to fall apart. And then what I want you to do is to increase the load on the compounds 15 to maybe 20% going into week two. So this would be somewhere around, let's say you started with 50% of one rep max. Now you're at about 60% of one rep max, again, working with your pre-virus numbers, And then bump up your isolation exercises by five pounds where possible and 10 pounds where you can't go up by five. So going up by five pounds will

Starting point is 00:24:12 probably reduce your RIR by about one. Going up by 10 pounds should reduce it by about two. And then in the following week, on week three, I want you to use about 15% more weight on your compound exercises. So bumping up your compounds to around 70, maybe 75% of one rep max, again, using your pre-corona numbers and making the same increase on your isolation exercises, going up by just five pounds total where possible and where not possible, go up by 10 pounds. And if you're going up by just five pounds total where possible and where not possible go up by 10 pounds. And if you're going up by five, again, you'll be around probably three RAR. And if we're going up by 10, you're going to be back to probably about one RAR. So this should be more or less what you were doing before the virus on your isolation exercises. And then on the fourth and final week for your compound

Starting point is 00:25:05 exercises, let's get you up to 80% of your one rep max of your current one rep max. We can just go with current numbers now because you're going to be back in the groove. Your technique will have come back and a fair amount of your strength will have already come back. And so you can use your training numbers just in the week prior. You can use your 70% of one rep max numbers to now figure out where are you at actually with your strength. And let's put 80% of your current strength on the bar and let's train there. Again, we'll talk about how many reps to do per set in a minute. And then on your isolation exercises, if you're not already back to one RAR, let's get you back there. So if you're at three or two is fine, I suppose. If you're not back to one RAR, let's get you back there. So if you're at three or two is fine,

Starting point is 00:25:45 I suppose. If you're not back to one or two, let's get you there. So if you're still at three or four because you've gained back a fair amount of muscle and strength already, then let's bump that weight up. Okay, let's talk sets and reps per workout. What I want you to do is one to three sets for compound exercises and two to three sets for isolation exercises per workout. And that's it. These are not going to be very difficult workouts because how much work you do, how many hard sets you do in a workout is also going to heavily impact how much muscle damage and soreness your workouts produce. And like intensity, you don't need to do very much volume to reintroduce your body or your muscles to weightlifting and to help protect them from

Starting point is 00:26:32 damage and soreness that will come from the more intense training that's right around the corner. Moreover, doing relatively short, low volume workouts is also a great way to get back into the groove with your technique because when you're only doing a handful of sets, you really never get too fatigued and you're able to pay attention to your form, especially with the loads being lower, and you will be able to quickly sharpen your technique and get back to doing quality training, quality reps. So what's our plan? Well, our plan is week one, just do one set per compound exercise and just two sets per isolation exercise per workout. So you're doing your same workouts that you're doing before, but just much easier versions.

Starting point is 00:27:16 Week two, now two sets per compound with a bit more weight, like we discussed earlier, and then three sets per isolation exercise, again, with a bit more weight, like we discussed earlier, and then three sets per isolation exercise, again, with a bit more weight like we discussed earlier. And then on the third and fourth weeks, I want you to do three sets for all compound and all isolation exercises, again, with the weights going up. Okay, how about reps per set? Well, what I want you to do is just two to five reps per set on your compound exercises. And so again, this is going to feel very easy. We're talking about 40, maybe 50% of you on rep max for two to five reps, but it's important that you just follow my advice. Don't overdo it. So figure out what weight you can use on your isolation exercises that allows you to get 12 reps with five still in reserve. And again, it might take a little bit of trial and error,

Starting point is 00:28:05 but you should be able to figure it out just looking back at your previous training. And especially if you've been keeping up any sort of home workout routine and seeing what you were using previously, assume that you were ending most hard sets with one or two reps still in the tank and then adjusting accordingly. All right. One other tip here in laying out your training, and that is to squat and bench twice per week, even if you don't normally do that, and deadlift and military press just once per week. And the reason for this is just to get back technique. Frequency is very good for that. Frequency doesn't much impact muscle gain per se. It's more just a way to get in enough volume. But when we have allowed our skill to degrade in something, whether it is swinging a golf club or swimming technique or squatting, frequent practice is better than infrequent practice for getting our skills back to where they were. All right, that's it for the featured

Starting point is 00:29:07 moments from how to get back into weightlifting after a break from the gym. And if you want to listen to that episode, it was published in June of 2020. So you can go check it out. And now we have my five best tips for increasing productivity. Have you ever struggled with the idea that no matter how busy you might be, you're just not getting enough done, that too many minutes of your days are being squandered on unproductive activities, that you're going to eventually just wind up kind of flattened under the tonnage of all the work that you have or that you want to do? Well, if you are nodding your head, you are definitely not alone. I have been there myself. And in fact, research conducted by Microsoft found that while people

Starting point is 00:29:51 worked about 45 hours per week on average, 17 of those hours were spent unproductively, 17 hours per week. That's a tremendous amount of time. If you look at it, if you expand it, that's 68 hours per month. That's 884 hours per year, 36 full days of wasted time per year. I mean, imagine what you could do with those wasted hours. If you do these five things today, you're going to see immediate results. And if you make them habits, then you might be surprised at just how much more you can get done every week. So here's the first one. Stop checking your email so much. So, I mean, I basically try to spend as much time in my email as possible, said no productive person ever. I mean, I've known and I've spoken with quite a few scarily productive people.

Starting point is 00:30:41 And one for one, they talk about doing email like they were performing surgery. You know, you wash up, you don your scrubs, you put your game face on, you cut, probe, mend, and you get out. You know, on the other hand, many horribly unproductive people are hopelessly addicted to email. I mean, I swear they would mainline it if they could. And research backs this up. Actually, studies show that knowledge workers spend upward of 28% of their time every day just waiting through their inboxes. And the problem here is that email is a diabolical time waster. It's the easiest way to feel productive without actually doing anything all that important. Instead of starting your day with email, start it with laying out and reviewing what you need to get done for the day and dedicate your first block of work time to those tasks, to the things that are most important, that are most aligned with your greater goals and purposes for the activity that you are engaged in. all distractions. Too many people out there, they're just full-on victims of our modern

Starting point is 00:31:46 dopamine-on-demand culture. I mean, who has time for deep thought or deep work when the penny arcade of the internet beckons with its clanging bells and strobing lights and greasy food? I guarantee you that if you can't learn to work undistracted, you are never going to be good at getting things done. And I might even go as far as saying, you are never going to be good at getting things done. And I might even go as far as saying that you are never going to be really good at anything because it takes tremendous amounts of focus, concentration, and work to develop extraordinary abilities. Furthermore, research shows that distractions make you dumber and more error-prone and that they cause you to waste a significant amount of time

Starting point is 00:32:25 simply refocusing on the tasks at hand. Banish any digital distractions, put your phone on silent, you know, put on noise canceling headphones, shut your door so people know not to bother you, and so forth. All right, moving along, here is the next tip and it is create a personal routine. You know, I don't really know how I get everything done and how I get fit in all my workouts and get my meal prep. I don't know. I just, I guess things just kind of happen. I just hope for the best said no productive person ever. You know, I think too many people, they really just ask too much of their willpower and their self-discipline because they don't realize that it's in pretty

Starting point is 00:33:05 limited supply. Yes, you can improve it as I spoke about last week, but many people are starting with rather shallow reserves. And the most productive people that I know, they all do the same thing as far as willpower goes. They save it for the most demanding and creative parts of their work and lives, and they just automate the rest. A simple place to start in building an effective personal routine is reviewing all the activities that you engage in regularly, and then applying the 80-20 rule, the Pareto principle. I'm sure you've heard of that. If you haven't, it's very simple. It is the scientifically validated observation that 20% of the input is responsible for 80% of the output. So 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes. You're going to find that

Starting point is 00:33:53 a lot of what you do doesn't really move the needle and in many cases may actually be sabotaging you. So the idea of course, is to remove as much of the latter as you can to make more time for the former. All right. So the last tip here is to manage your mood. I don't need to cite scientific research to tell you that you just work better when you are calm and happy. We've all experienced that. And on the flip side, we also tend to work like crap if we feel like crap. And that's why many productivity systems, I think they really miss the boat when they focus too much on managing your time and not managing your energy and mood. Here's how Sean Aker puts it in his book, The Happiness Advantage, which I do recommend

Starting point is 00:34:38 if you haven't read it. Doctors that are put in a positive mood before making a diagnosis show almost three times more intelligence and creativity than doctors in a positive mood before making a diagnosis show almost three times more intelligence and creativity than doctors in a neutral state, and they make accurate diagnoses 19% faster. Optimistic salespeople outsell their pessimistic counterparts by 56%. Students primed to feel happy before taking math achievement tests far outperform their neutral peers. It turns out that our brains are literally hardwired to perform at their best, not when they are negative or even neutral, but when they are positive. So if you

Starting point is 00:35:11 manage your mood as carefully as your work, you're not only going to get more done in less time, you're going to feel better as well. And particularly important is your mood at the beginning of the day, because research shows that this has a market effect on both the quantity and quality of your work throughout the rest of the day. So starting off on the right foot is very important, it turns out. So last year, I want to share 10 simple and scientifically proven ways to improve your mood. So one, you can jot down a few good things that have happened to you every day. Two, you can make time to do things that you're uniquely good at. Three, you can show gratitude for the nice people and the good things in your life. Four, you can spend time

Starting point is 00:35:50 with people you like. Five, you can stop obsessing over making more money. Realize that this is not going to make you as happy as you think. The great Western disease of I'll be happy when I have the house or the car or the boat is a trap. Six, stop obsessing over yourself and your goals and help someone else with theirs. Well, I hope you liked the snippets from my five best tips for increasing productivity. And if you want to listen to that episode, you can find it in August 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.

Starting point is 00:36:36 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. 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, 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: Natural Bodybuilding, Training After a Break, & Productivity Tips

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