Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - The Best of Muscle For Life: Nutrition for Athletes, How Fast You Can Lose Fat, & Cold Showers

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. The first is an interview I did with Dr. Susan Kleiner on power eating for optimal athletic performance. The second is a monologue that I recorded called How Fast You Can Safely Lose Fat Before You Start Losing Muscle. And the last

Starting point is 00:03:22 episode featured on this episode is another monologue that I recorded called, I took a cold shower almost every day for a year and here's what happened. Before we wade into it, 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 diet quiz, muscleforlife.show slash diet quiz now, answer the questions and learn what you need to do in the kitchen to lose fat,

Starting point is 00:04:20 build muscle and get healthy. Okay, let's start with some key takeaways from the interview I did with Dr. Susan Kleiner on power eating for optimal athletic performance. So the evidence-based sports nutrition model differs in several ways. As I said, number one, we are looking at maintaining performance outcomes, even in an off season. And so, you know, while we may do cuts because, you know, there's so many factors and the one that is often cited that we know very well is power to weight ratio. And so doing a, I call it a fat loss really cycle rather than a cutting cycle. Cutting is typically going to be more in a physique arena or a fighter, right?

Starting point is 00:05:13 Or a boxer or something like that. That's going to have a cut. In those situations, the differences in sports nutrition is we never eliminate carbohydrates. in sports nutrition is we never eliminate carbohydrates. You use carbohydrate as your friend and fuel around training so that your training is both effective, that you're getting a benefit from training and not just sleepwalking through it. But we want to fully fuel each training bout. And then we may alter carbohydrate consumption at another time around the day. But we want to always make sure that training is fully fueled. And then fat intake will be adequate to fuel recovery and health and well-being. And depending on the training stage, what we're trying to accomplish with that training period, fat will go up or down. And in a female

Starting point is 00:06:17 athlete, fat and carbohydrate will be altered throughout the month, depending on their menstrual cycle. The person that is really looking to cut fat, that your performance isn't as important as the way you look, then dropping carbs is a super easy strategy for leaning out. We do drop some carbs, even in a competitive season. Now, folks should know it doesn't require dramatic calorie drops. You can take out about 400 calories a day from your need, and not necessarily from what you were eating, unless what you were eating was where you were solidly maintaining. If you drop 400 calories, you will begin to see a pretty good drop. Now in some people, it may take a 500. In some smaller folks, it may need only 300. in some smaller folks, it may need only 300. But that classic 500 calories a day, seven days,

Starting point is 00:07:34 3,500 calories, I should lose a pound, that never works. And it's because the body responds to the changing internal and external environment. We are dynamic as an organic system. We are not static like a car. The body will restrict its fuel utilization when you restrict the income. And so at about 300 to 400 calories restricted a day, research shows that the body maintains its higher level of metabolic demand. And so what happens is you can still do your exercise when you dramatically restrict. You can still fuel your exercise, but the other systems that maintain your immune function, your reproductive function, your bone mineral metabolism, cardiovascular, all of the other systems start to power down. cardiovascular, all of the other systems start to power down. And this is why over long periods of time, people who dramatically restrict calories and carbs, typically, who are pushing themselves

Starting point is 00:08:34 at an elite level, will shorten their playing life because the rest of their body starts to fall apart. I have my clients actually track by hand because then they really learn what they're doing. And the easy way to do that, and I have it in the New Power Eating, is the old-fashioned way dieticians, we used to do it. It's as quick and dirty as most of the apps out there. And that is the distribution of calories and macronutrients from the American Diabetic Association. So you are separated into food groups, and it tells you how many calories, protein, carb, and fat for a specific serving of a specific type of food. For instance, you know, a third of a cup of rice is one breadstarch

Starting point is 00:09:27 serving, and that is 70 grams, approximately 68 calories, approximately 15 grams of carb, one gram of protein and zero grams of fat. So you go through that on a daily basis by hand. And I know this sounds weird, but this is how you really learn what's in your food. And you can calculate easily throughout your day. You eat a wide variety of foods. You know where those foods need to come from. You know what's in them. Instead of constantly having to go to an app to tell you that's fairly inaccurate anyway. Many apps have lots of missing data points, and my clients love it. Within a day or two, they have gained more knowledge than they have ever understood about food. When we have this conversation all

Starting point is 00:10:27 about macronutrients, it's a reductionist view of nutrition. Food is so much more than macronutrients. And we know there are certainly the micronutrients, vitamins and minerals, there's food factors, There's food factors, phytochemicals, fibers, you know, so many things in food that we have yet to discover. And when we think only about macronutrients, and not about a wide variety of food in the diet, we limit, we can easily limit or restrict whole food groups. For instance, grains. You can get carbohydrate, as you said, from vegetables and fruits, from beans. Why bother with grains if you can get carbs and if that's all there really is in whole grains? But that's so far from the truth. It's light years from the truth on what is in whole grains and the things that are in whole grains that are not in any other food. A banana has something different than an orange, then has something different than grapes and cherries, then an apple. They're all different. And it's the variety. Variety is like the watchword of good nutrition. Variety is the most important, really. And it is through variety that we get the

Starting point is 00:11:51 distribution of all of the nutrients that we have identified and all of those we have yet to identify. Well, when it comes to whole grains and the gut, again, so we know you asked me about keto, what we know is people, this is again, this is data, this is evidence, people who have cut carbs out of their diet have a much higher inflammatory environment in their gut. So whole grains, to speak to those in particular, and the fiber from whole grains is somewhat unique in the plant kingdom of foods that we eat in that they act as we call them prebiotics. They feed the gut biota or the cultures in our gut. or the cultures in our gut, those fibers are required to keep the healthy bacterial and yeast communities in our gut abundant and to assist with tamping down the pathological communities.

Starting point is 00:13:00 And so when we don't have any whole grains, and this is the direct connection to that chronic disease problem, is that we do end up with chronic systemic inflammation, which is partially at the root of chronic disease. And so it starts in the gut, it spreads. Flour should be a fresh ingredient. But we are buying flour when you can get it off the grocery store shelf that is months old by the time you buy it. And you may keep it in your cupboard for years. First of all, that's weird that it stays fresh. It's not fresh, but that it hasn't gone rancid in that time, and it's whole wheat flour, that tells you there's no fat in there. That's your first clue that it isn't really 100% whole wheat. If it's stone ground, then it is 100% whole wheat. Unfortunately, the government has

Starting point is 00:14:00 allowed the labeling of whole wheat flour when it is steel roller milled, meaning that the kernel is sheared apart. And you have only the endosperm, which contains starch and gluten. That's white flour. So they use white flour and then they add back bran. use white flour and then they add back bran and they say maybe they add back some of the germ that's supposed to have more of the sort of fat and nutrients added, but they either don't do that or they deactivate it so that the enzymes are no longer active. So you don't have bioactive enzymes. You don't have so much in that flour that actually through the baking process becomes beneficial. For people who are susceptible to depression, diets that are lower than 40% of total calories from carbs can increase their risk of depression.

Starting point is 00:15:07 Diets that are lower than 25 to 30% from fat in people who suffer from anxiety and inability to cope with stress, it can make them worse. So we've got real data on why certain diets feel better. on why certain diets feel better. So that 40-30-30 concept has real data behind it, other than what it does for body composition. You know, the biggest thing for me, as I said, is I encourage people to investigate and think about variety as the driving mission of the diet. Look at food as much more than just macronutrients, but it is an easy back of the napkin calculation. include variety in your setup to use those American Diabetic Association distributions of calories and macronutrients in food groups. And that will help you see how certain foods are similar or different from each other, where nutrients come from, but then to know that if you cut out a whole food group,

Starting point is 00:16:26 there are a whole host of things that you are eliminating from your diet. And if you need to cut that out, then be aware of it. And that's where supplementation becomes important. How do you generally approach managing the energy balance of your athletes? So for female athletes, I use energy availability, and that is really good data to help us determine you need to have the exercise energy expenditure, how much energy you're expending during your exercise, and the activity of highest energy demand. And as I mentioned, the body will fuel the activity of highest energy demand first. And then the energy left over is what is available to fuel all of the sort of less than absolutely essential systems in the body to stay alive. And so that's the concept

Starting point is 00:17:28 of energy availability, what energy is available to fuel, as I said, reproductive system, which we see go offline very quickly in female athletes because of under fueling, immune function, bone mineral metabolism, et cetera, et cetera. So we can determine that number by understanding energy intake, how much fuel are you consuming, energy expenditure of exercise, what are you using during that greatest demand of energy, and then understanding fat-free mass, which is different than lean body mass. We want to know fat-free mass data. And so those three things, many people can't determine on their own, but that is what I use to determine the needs of my female athletes. And we have data to say that once you get under 30 calories per kilogram fat-free mass, you will very quickly start to see alterations

Starting point is 00:18:40 in reproductive hormone function. So deficits in reproductive function, that's sort of the tip of the iceberg, the first thing. So never go below 30 and ideally be at least 45 calories per kilogram fat-free mass, but you can have wiggle room in between when you are trying to create, depending on the athlete, her maintenance or a slight deficit. And that's it for the featured snippets from the interview I did with Dr. Susan Kleiner. I hope you liked them. And if you did and you want to go listen to the whole interview, you can find it back in July of 2020. That is when it was published. If you are hearing this, you are still listening, which is awesome.

Starting point is 00:19:33 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, getting at least something out of it, would you mind sharing it with a friend or 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, now let's move on to the highlight reel from how fast you can safely lose fat before losing muscle. If you are fairly overweight, so let's say you're at 25% body fat or above if you're a man or 35% or above as a woman. And if you know what you're doing in the kitchen, in the gym, you can safely lose two, three, or even four pounds per week. And most of

Starting point is 00:20:28 that is going to be from body fat, if not all of it, once you really get into the swing of things. And if that is raising red flags in your mind, because you've heard that that rate of weight loss constitutes starvation dieting and that that is going to wreck your metabolism and scramble your hormones and jack up your hunger. That can happen if you go about it incorrectly, but it does not have to happen. You can lose several pounds per week without any negative side effects to speak of. Our body has countermeasures that it can deploy to decrease energy output and encourage more energy input to encourage more eating. And as we get leaner, we feel the effects of these defensive measures more and more. When body fat levels are very high, the body knows it

Starting point is 00:21:27 has large energy reserves. The body knows it can survive for a long time. Now, many people talk about safe versus unsafe weight loss. And I will use these terms sometimes just because they are familiar to people and they meet people where they are at. But when I'm talking about the quote unquote safety of weight loss, I like to educate people a bit more because it's not accurate to say that any rate of weight loss is quote unquote unsafe. That's the wrong term because it implies there's some great danger to losing weight too quickly. And there's not. I think we can soften it a little bit and talk about optimal versus non-optimal or smart versus stupid, maybe, because there are ways of going about losing weight that

Starting point is 00:22:21 produce the best possible results. Those would be the optimal and the smart ones. And then there are ways that produce the worst possible results, which are still results. You still will lose fat, but they are the worst possible results and they are stupid. So what does that optimal smart way look like? Well, let's start with a simple statement of what we are trying to achieve. What is our goal when we enter a cutting phase? Our goal is to lose fat as quickly as possible without losing muscle and without having to suffer. Now, what does that look like in very specific practical terms? Well, let's start with an interesting study that was conducted by scientists at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, where scientists had 15 overweight men aged 18 to 55 follow a back-breaking diet why it was only four days. So in this experiment, the participants were put on a diet that provided just 10% of their total daily energy expenditure. And they had to work out.

Starting point is 00:23:32 And this program involved walking eight hours per day, which is a lot of walking. If you remember back in the day when we used to travel and we used to go to cities and walk around a lot. I mean, I'm a pretty fit person and four to five hours per day of walking was noticeable. I would feel it when I was going to bed at night. So eight hours a day of walking and then 45 minutes of a hand cranking machine. So what that did is it put these people in a 5,000 calorie deficit, daily deficit, 5,000 calories. And after four days, they lost on average about 4.4 pounds of pure body fat. Based on this study, you could hypothesize that an upper limit for fat loss, we're talking about a physiological ceiling, is about a pound

Starting point is 00:24:26 per day. In other words, that no matter what we do, we cannot physically burn more than a pound of fat per day. And that's, of course, interesting to know, but not very practical because nobody is going to be able to do what those people did. So what can we do then? Well, there's another study that lends insight to this, and it was conducted by a man named Seymour Alpert, and he is a professor at the University of New Mexico. And based on his analysis of data from previous studies that involved people losing weight, you know, in a calorie deficit, where body composition was also measured, that's key. Alpert found what he believes is the maximum threshold of calories that the body can extract

Starting point is 00:25:13 from body fat per day. And what he found is 30 calories per pound of body fat per day seems to be the limit. And that is a very useful formula because we can use it to find out how much fat we can lose per week before we start to lose muscle. We can get an idea of what our physiological ceiling is. Now, Alpert's equation working the way that it does suggests that as we get leaner, we won't be able to maintain the same rate of fat loss without losing muscle as when we were fatter. And that is what many studies have shown. That the leaner we are, the more susceptible we are to muscle loss when we're cutting and that the size of the calorie deficit is the primary factor. We can't hack that by eating a lot of protein or getting extra sleep or taking a bunch of creatine.

Starting point is 00:26:07 Again, I wish we could, but we just have to accept that as we get leaner, we are going to have to dial back the rate of fat loss. Here is a pretty simple rule of thumb. man at 25% body fat or higher, or if you're a woman at 35% or higher, you can set your daily calorie deficit anywhere from 15 to 25 calories per pound of body fat. And that is not per pound of body fat you want to lose. It is total body fat. We want to make sure that we are also preserving muscle. And that means that we not only have to eat enough protein, we have to make sure that we are not eating too few calories. And then of course there is the experience of the diet. It's great to lose fat quickly, but if you feel terrible all of the time and all you can think about is eating food, maybe we should shrink the deficit a bit. Let's still lose fat rapidly, but let's allow you to do it in a sustainable way, right?

Starting point is 00:27:05 And so my rule of thumb here is you don't want to start your cut at or below your resting metabolic rate, which is the amount of calories you burn essentially at rest, not bedridden, but not moving around or doing much. Think the laziest of lazy Sundays. As you get deeper into a cutting phase, you usually have to reduce your calorie intake. You can only increase activity levels so much. You can only exercise and move around so much and you will plateau. You will reach periods where your weight loss has stalled and the only solution is to eat less. And what you'll find is if you start eating less than your resting metabolic rate, the side effects can really become pronounced. And so the best way to manage your calorie intake is to start your calories as far from your resting metabolic rate as you can. And you do that by

Starting point is 00:28:00 doing plenty of exercise and having plenty of physical activity, let that drive a large portion of your calorie deficit and you maintain that level of activity throughout the cut. Or maybe you don't start at maximum activity. You just start at a healthy amount, a good amount of activity that allows you to start ideally at least, I don't know, a couple hundred calories above your RMR. And then when you reach your first weight loss plateau, if you can add more exercise and more activity without causing problems related to muscle loss or falling behind in recovery, then you do that and that will get the needle moving again. And then when you stall again, if you can no longer add activity, which my general

Starting point is 00:28:45 recommendation is no more than four to six hours of resistance training per week when cutting and no more than half of that, whatever you are doing in resistance training, no more than half of that in cardio and no more than probably an hour of high intensity cardio per week. So once you're doing that, the only other option is to eat less food. What about people who are just overweight? What about guys around 20% body fat or gals around 30% body fat? How should they calculate the size of their daily calorie deficit? Well, in this case, I recommend a daily calorie deficit of 15 to 20 calories per pound of body fat. And to put some numbers to that, let's say we have a guy at 190 pounds, 20% body fat. He has 38 pounds of fat. If he were to go with 15 for his daily

Starting point is 00:29:36 calorie deficit, that would be 570. And that 500 daily calorie deficit is kind of like the default go-to that is often recommended because it produces about one pound of fat loss per week. We ride that until we reach the next milestone, which for men is around 15% body fat and for women around 25%, at which point I would recommend 15 to maybe 17 calories per pound of body fat for a daily deficit. And then the next important threshold is about 10% body fat in men and 20% in women, at which point I recommend a deficit no larger than 15 calories per pound of body fat. Now, you might be wondering why I don't recommend

Starting point is 00:30:21 the maximum amount of potential fat loss as identified by Albert. Why don't I just recommend everyone run a daily calorie deficit of 30 calories per pound of body fat? Well, mostly because it is hard to do if you have a lot of fat to lose. Again, you have to be very active if you are also going to keep your calorie intake above your RMR slash BMR. And not everybody has several hours per day to exercise or do active things. And it can also be difficult if you are fairly lean, wanting to get lean, or if you're lean, wanting to get really lean, because again, the leaner you are, the more sensitive your body is to the calorie deficit. Well, that's it for some of the better snidbits from how fast you can safely lose fat before losing muscle. And if you want to learn

Starting point is 00:31:14 more about that, go check out the whole episode. It was published in September of 2020. And next up is the monologue I recorded on cold showers. I took a cold shower almost every day for a year. Here's what happened. I want to talk about cold showers and a little lesson that I learned through taking cold showers pretty much every day for, I guess, over a year now. And like most people, I first heard about cold showering because of Wim Hof, the Iceman, as they call him, who is able to do some pretty impressive things with his body, no doubt. And I heard that took cold showers, you would experience a wide variety of benefits like more testosterone. Do you want more testosterone? Of course you do. What about a stronger immune system? Sure. Who doesn't want a stronger immune system? What about less stress and better moods? Uh, yeah, I do. And how about a dollop of rapid fat loss on top of all that? Well, yeah, please.

Starting point is 00:32:27 Like most people, I first heard about intentionally exposing yourself to extreme cold, not that cold showers are extreme cold, but I mean extreme cold. I first heard about it when I heard about Wim Hof's story, which I mentioned earlier. Of course, his stuff has made the rounds on the interwebs that started a few years ago. And in case you don't know about this guy, he has climbed some of the tallest mountains on the planet in just his shorts. He has run a marathon in freezing temperatures, again, in his shorts. He ran another marathon in the Namib desert without any water, and he has also swam underwater in an ice-capped lake for 120 meters. Risky. Moreover, Wim says that anyone can tap into their own latent superpowers, if you will, through a protocol that he designed that involves regular

Starting point is 00:33:23 cold exposure, breathing techniques, and meditation. Actually, much like the samurai Musogi ritual of breath training, sleep deprivation, and chanting beneath icy waterfalls. I figured, what the hell, I'll give it a go. I did stick with the cold exposure, starting every day with a three-minute cold shower. And by cold shower, I mean as cold as the water goes. Now, what have I gotten out of this? And what does science have to say about everything? Well, here is the long story short. The benefits of cold showers have been widely oversold. They will improve your ability to handle cold, and they're also great for waking up in the mornings,

Starting point is 00:34:05 and they may toughen you up a little bit. And I think they also can help teach you a very simple and powerful lesson, which is the reason why I wanted to do this episode as a Motivation Monday. But there's very little evidence that they're going to do much else. They're not going to do much for your physiology. I want to start with some myth busting. So cold shower myth number one, cold showers help you lose fat. And the theory here is that cold showers can help increase fat burning because of what is known as brown adipose tissue, BAT, also known as brown fat in humans. Now, unlike normal white fat cells, whose primary job is to store calories for future use, brown fat cells help maintain a stable body temperature by doing the opposite, burning calories to generate heat. These things are true and have been proven in a number of

Starting point is 00:35:06 studies. Specifically, what these studies show is that once activated by cold temperatures, just two ounces of brown fat in your body can burn through as much as 500 calories of energy per day in an effort to elevate your body temperature and keep it at that homeostasis level. Now, it used to be thought that brown fat simply disappeared in humans as we got older and that adults had none. Newer research has proven though that we do, we adults do have brown fat, which has led some people to speculate that we could use cold exposure to turn on the brown fat that we have and rapidly increase our metabolic rate and of course our fat burning. That's a hypothesis though. And how has it panned out in research? Well, this has been studied and what we

Starting point is 00:35:59 know is that cold exposure does tend to slightly increase metabolic rate by stimulating brown fat. However, the effects are much smaller and much more unreliable and impractical than many people would have you believe. Furthermore, research shows that cold exposure can also markedly increase your appetite, which of course just makes it easier to eat back any of the extra calories that you might burn. So the key takeaway here is very simple. Yes, you can use cold exposure to boost your metabolism and you can boost your fat burning,

Starting point is 00:36:31 but a cold shower is not going to cut it. You're going to have to spend at least a few hours per day in rather cold air or water, like almost shivering cold air or water. And the results are going to depend on your genetics. Some people have far more brown fat than others and therefore will burn a lot more calories when exposed to cold. Now let's get to my personal experience. Here's why I've been taking cold showers for a year or so. And here's what I've learned. Despite all of what cold showers cannot do for me, as I mentioned several times now, I still do them every day. Can you guess why? No, it's not that I think taking a quote unquote Spartan bath as the cool kids call it makes me a badass. You know, the Spartans

Starting point is 00:37:18 supposedly preferred to bathe in cold water. Therefore taking cold showers makes me a Spartan. I feel so alpha right now, bro. It's also not because it jolts me awake in the morning, which it does do. And I, okay, that's a little bit why I am awake after three to four minutes of ice cold water, but you know, a good pre-workout can do the same without giving you the brain freeze or shriveling your frankenbeans. Now, the real reason why I have converted to the cold shower is simply because it is uncomfortable. And I know that the better I can force myself to do things that are uncomfortable or even painful, things that I don't really want to do, the better my life is going to be. This is one of the most fundamental

Starting point is 00:38:06 things that separates the successful from the unsuccessful. It's very simple. It's very unsexy. Successful people do the things that unsuccessful people don't want to do. They do the things that make people go, ugh, that turn people off, that scatter their thoughts and weaken their wills. These are the hard things, the uncomfortable things, the complicated things, the unexciting things, the exhausting things. Successful people find a way to do them all every day, every week, every month, every year without fail. If nothing else, my silly daily cold shower routine is just a reminder, a rather shocking reminder to continue embracing things that make me uncomfortable, to continue doing things that I don't really want to do, and also to learn to like things that I may not enjoy, but that serve a greater purpose, that

Starting point is 00:39:08 serve a goal that I do care about. So to wrap up here, cold showers are not going to help you lose fat faster. They are not going to increase your testosterone levels or boost your post-workout recovery or strengthen your immune system or give you prettier skin or hair or do much of anything else physiologically speaking. By my lights, the only sensible reason to get under a stream of glacial water every day is because it sucks. And the more you're willing to do things that suck, the more satisfying your life is ultimately going to be. And that's a wrap on that episode. And if you want to hear the whole thing, you can find it back in March of 2018. Well, I hope you liked

Starting point is 00:39:53 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. And if you didn't like something about this episode or about the show in general, or if you have ideas or suggestions

Starting point is 00:40:20 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: Nutrition for Athletes, How Fast You Can Lose Fat, & Cold Showers

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