Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - The Best of Muscle For Life: Science of Strength Training, Calculating Body Fat Percentage, & Get Fired Up

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 00:02:46 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 Austin Current on understanding the science of strength training. Austin released a book with a similar title. I think science of strength training is in that book. Fantastic book, lots of great illustrations,

Starting point is 00:03:19 great information. Definitely recommend it. And then there is a monologue just an episode from me that is going to be featured in this episode and that is how to calculate your body fat percentage easily and accurately something that i am always asked about and probably will always be asked about so if you've ever wondered about that i think that you'll find the information helpful. And finally, I have another monologue from me featured here, which is six reasons to get fired up for your workout. 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.

Starting point is 00:04:09 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 XL wizard and inferior versions of this are often sold for 50, 60, even a hundred dollars, 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

Starting point is 00:04:50 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 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. So let's start our highlights with the interview I did with Austin Current. Basically for muscle growth to occur, there must be a mechanical stimulus or stress that happens, right? That's the mechanical tension. So this mechanical stimulus is referred to as mechanical tension or muscular tension, right? More colloquially. And when you contract your muscles against resistance, you create mechanical tension via the force being placed on those muscles, right?

Starting point is 00:05:47 So once those receptors within the muscles, right? Those mechanoreceptors is what they're called within the muscle detect that tension. There's a cascade of chemical reactions that basically lead to muscle growth down the line, right? And that process is that process of mechanotransduction, which is basically taking physical stimulus or resistive work and making it more of the biological response or chemical response in the body that then relays the message down the chain, if you will, of command. And then the amount or duration of the time that that system is turned on or switched on, if you will,

Starting point is 00:06:27 that that system is turned on or switched on, if you will. Then we kind of get into things that are nutritional and protein-based, right? Which is why protein intake and other macronutrient intake, such as carbohydrates and fats that help fuel that process, right? So we need a certain thing to trigger it and a certain threshold to trigger it, but then, or switch it on, if you will, kind of like a light switch. Strength training is such a good way to trigger that, respond to that. And that's a safe and effective way to make that happen, right? And we can target tension in certain muscle groups to have that response in those muscle groups specifically, right? Which obviously, if we're looking to craft or, you know, grow a physique that we want to, or maybe improve our arms or our back or our chest, right.

Starting point is 00:07:10 That we need to be able to, we can't just squeeze our entire body or just go for a run and hope that our chest grows, right. We need, we need a stimulus on that muscle tissue on those muscle cells um are those muscle fibers to actually make this happen so muscle damage basically the micro tears to the muscle fiber and disruption um sort of within the functional unit of a muscle the way that it contracts right so it's kind of that disruption of that uh machinery or or physical makeup of that muscle um but those really Mike, those small micro tears that we always kind of hear about correlated with muscle damage, right. And the main role of muscle damage or the main thing is going to be a by-product of muscle contraction, right. It's sort of a accumulation of waste. Um, and there's different mechanisms here, but the main one, um, just being

Starting point is 00:08:02 sort of those micro tears and ultimately a by-product of this process. And there is, there does seem to be, and especially in my opinion, this, as you mentioned, this is an ongoing debate and ongoing discussion. Um, and we're trying to learn more. It's, it's pretty miraculous. I find it miraculous that as much as we know about muscle and as much as we know about the human body, we still don't know as much as we could about muscle and as much as we know about the human body, we still don't know as much as we could. And there's still a lot more that we can find out, right. Which to me is exciting. We contract the muscle. We create mechanical tension on the muscle. We create this cascade, but when we do contract, right, there are positive things that

Starting point is 00:08:39 happen, but just like anything, they're sort of, there's negative things that occur during that process in terms of metabolic waste and waste products from that machinery working, right? So like if a machine is working in it, let's say your engine, right? It's working and it heats up, right? A by-product of an engine running is heat, right? And so there's, you have to have some sort of machinery to regulate heat, right? And so that's just a have to have some sort of machinery to regulate heat, right? And so that's just a by-product that more or less making the comparison to a by-product of a machine working, right? So a by-product of muscle contraction is therefore damage that can occur if we have too much mechanical tension happen or too much intensity of it for a long, too long of a duration, right? And this is where we get into the field of an adequate amount of training volume. Right. We need hard sets, but how many

Starting point is 00:09:30 hard sets do we need relative to our training age relative to our training abilities? Right. How much volume were we doing before then? Right. So there's some good stuff. Our lifestyle as well. Lifestyle is a big one. Nutrition status. Yeah. Sleep. Yeah. Sleep, all that stuff. Right. So all this is playing into this. It's not just a black and white thing. There starts to be a benefit of, of muscle damage early on, maybe in a training phase or, or a new movement. Right. So we know when things are novel and new. So if we try, let's say we try a new movement, we haven't back squatted before, or we haven't, um, you know, bench press before there seems to be that, that little bit, right. There there's like, we're like talking about off air. It's sort of a proxy

Starting point is 00:10:10 where it lets us know where we're placing tension in the right spots, right. It lets us know that we achieved a certain threshold that we hadn't achieved before. Right. And we know with progressive overload and that's, that's an important bit of, of training bit of training periodization and programming and progressing on our muscle growth journey, right? We need progressive overload. We need a progressive stimulus of some kind to further along an adaptation that we want to happen, right? Because once we adapt to a certain stress, we're pretty covered with that, right? You get really good at running a mile. A mile is not going to be too difficult any longer, but then you take that mile and make

Starting point is 00:10:47 it two miles. Okay. Now we got some adaptation to happen, right? We have a progressive stimulus there. Same here, the same thing here with, with strength training, with, with creating tension and with muscle damage, right? So I do think, you know, I wouldn't shy away from maybe creating a little bit. Um, and, you know, or if you come up, if you come happen to come by it, don't think of it as

Starting point is 00:11:07 like, oh, my gains are gone. I separate tension-based soreness with like trauma-based soreness. Like you've gone too far. Right. And so like, to me, an easy example to me is like a little tension-based soreness is like you were sitting down and you went to get up and you're like, ooh, my quads are kind of sore. You know, you kind of stretch them out. There's, there's some tension in there. You're like, Ooh, that's kind of, I don't know if I could squat today. You know, um, too far as like your partner looks at your quads and you're like, don't even look at

Starting point is 00:11:38 my, don't even act like you're going to touch me. Don't look at them. You know, don't get near me because you might bump into my legs. You know, it's like you were in a car wreck, right? It's like a trauma, right. And that can happen from strength training. It can happen from X, you know, exercise induced muscle, muscle trauma, right. It's, you know, if you've never, go do some German volume training and see how you feel. Oh, you'll feel like you got in a car crash. Go do, go do 10 by 10 on the squat rack. You know, I think a productive level of muscle soreness can be upwards of a day, you know, 24 to 36 hours. Um, you know, sometimes depending

Starting point is 00:12:11 on the intensity of the session, this, you know, certain, you know, if you're in a really intense, high volume hypertrophy phase, right. Um, you're gonna, you know, you're probably gonna be sore for a couple of days. I don't believe strength training sole purpose is to gain as much muscle as possible either. Right. So there's, there's a lot of benefits that extend beyond muscle growth here, right? It's just a helpful by-product of strength training, right? That we get bigger, stronger, we adapt, um, and sometimes leaner. And, um, but also I don't, I don't, yeah, I don't think that, um, you know, we should go for just bludgeon ourselves with, with trauma, either physical trauma, every training session,

Starting point is 00:12:50 right. Where you can, you know, yell at me that Arnold did it. So you're blue in the face, but you're not Arnold dude. Okay. Yeah. Um, I'm not Michael Phelps. I can swim, but I'm not Michael Phelps. Um, and this is where kind of deloads come in,

Starting point is 00:13:05 right? You hear about deloads and pulling back on training volume and training stress. And you got to periodize things, right? You got, there's times in your life where you got to pull back on things, maybe go on vacation or holiday, spend more time with your family and kind of take a load off, do it kind of recharge yourself. Same thing goes with training. You know, it's a ebb and flow of a biological system, you know, and it's the same, same thing. We're not machines, whether you speak in ones and zeros or not, right? The more tension you're producing in a specific muscle, the more stress on that overall system, right? But the more, but the more work is being done in less time with less volume, right? And if we have less volume,

Starting point is 00:13:48 we have less accumulated stress on the system and on our joints and our connective tissues. And so that's a good positive thing, right? So it's a, my goal, I kind of almost, you know, with clients I've worked with for a long time, if we get upwards of, let's say 16 plus sets a week on something, um, it's my goal, or let's say upwards of 20, it's my goal to actually be able to productively pull back on that because that means that we have more high quality work rather than more low quality work. Right. I'd rather have high quality than quality over quantity, right? And this really plays into that in a big way. So, you know, technique and your ability to create tension to me is a fundamental skill, right? It's as important to strength

Starting point is 00:14:38 training as dribbling is to basketball. So metabolic stress is the accumulation of metabolic products within the muscle fiber, right? Within the muscle cell during training right so that that fatigue right this is where muscle or metabolic stress gets really interesting so metabolic stress actually has of currently what we know uh or is theorized has an indirect right so earlier we talked about direct volume and indirect volume right so metabolic stress has this indirect relationship with muscle hypertrophy, right? And it does so through increasing the most direct one, which is mechanical tension, right? So I'm going to explain that. Okay. So the fatigue that is in part caused by metabolic stress is thought to contribute to an increase in mechanical

Starting point is 00:15:22 tension, right? As it increases in the muscle metabolic stress, as it increases in the muscle, it increases motor unit recruitment and decreases the muscle fiber shortening velocity, right? So it allows us to create even more tension as that fatigue is produced. And the more it is produced, the more tension is produced, right? And that's when your rep starts to slow. More tension is then required to keep doing the exercise properly. Right. And that's where your rep speed starts to really slow. You're like, you're, you know, you're at that point where you're, if you're watching, like you're doing a bicep curl and

Starting point is 00:15:59 you're like shaking, right. You're like, there's so much tension and there's not a lot there. Right. And you're, you're getting, and that's again, so there's, there's a, there's a healthy amount of that. Um, Dr. Cody Hahn and colleagues definitely posted a great paper on this. Um, you know, talking about sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, right. So outside of the muscle cell directly, you know, we have the sarcolemma and we have the sarcoplasm and there are, there's certain things in there, right? We store glycogen in there. We there's certain enzymes in there that help sort of govern that cell in a positive way that help, you know, maybe drive more nutrients in or more fluid or more glycogen or more glycogen could be stored there because we,

Starting point is 00:16:40 we need more availability of ready to go energy within that cell, right? Because we're always working at that capacity. And so there is definitely merit to that in terms of sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. There's, you know, myofibular hypertrophy, which is more of like the hypertrophy we're used to where muscles, the actual protein we're gaining more protein, right? Next to each other, right. And in parallel and in series, so next to each other, they're expanding, we're getting bigger, we're growing more protein yeah right next to each other right and in parallel and in series so next to each other they're expanding we're getting bigger we're growing more protein right that muscle protein synthesis process right we're growing more synthesis just means more

Starting point is 00:17:15 right growing developing so within that sarcoplasmic hypertrophy we're rising we're basically rising the volume of the that that fluid state where those things that help contribute as well to fueling the process of all that muscle growth that pros myofibular muscle growth as well right so we need those components outside of that protein to to do their job as well right those those muscle fibers to do their job as well. Right. Those, those muscle fibers to do their job as well. You're adding more ability to, to divide labor and, and increase your ability to, to handle, you know, fatigue or even work being done within workouts within you know, mesocycles. And so like I come from the more of the competing world and we on stage, people talk a lot about muscle density and muscle maturity.

Starting point is 00:18:08 And to me, that's just the difference of you having actual more protein, more myofibular hypertrophy over the course of your career, rather than circle plasmic based hypertrophy. Right. So, you know, us young bucks on stage are just kind of pumped up blobs of, of fluid of just like, we got some, we got some muscle, but it's mainly just for show here for, and as soon as we step on stage, we're going to flatten out. Yeah. Yeah. We have about 30 minutes of where we're going to look like that older dude. That's a, there's a certain rate limiter of our future gains. That's sort of being compromised by our lack of ability to see

Starting point is 00:18:45 the full picture rather than this sort of this myopic view of it, of, of just this one sole focus of being like myofibular hypertrophy, like it has to be within this, right? So if you never do those types of training, you never expose yourself to those things and you never have to force those things to adapt to work better and more efficiently and your ability to store maybe more muscle glycogen in a cell like that's huge for your long-term potential of muscle growth it allows you over a course of a phase maybe to tolerate more volume you recover a bit quicker in between sessions which as we've been talking about this whole time, that's massively helpful. Hey there, if you are hearing this, you are still listening, which is awesome. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:19:33 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 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 featured snippets of my interview with Austin Current. If you want to listen to the entire interview, you can find it back in September of 2021. And let's move on now to the next episode featured here, which is how to calculate your body fat percentage is exactly that. It is the percentage of your body weight that is fat. So for example, if you weigh 150 pounds and you have 15 pounds gain fat, it changes when you lose fat, and also when you gain and lose muscle. Body fat actually plays many vital roles in the body, including protecting organs from damage, maintaining body temperature, producing various

Starting point is 00:20:59 hormones like leptin and other chemicals, and much more. And that's why there's a limit to how lean you can get before your health starts to decline. What is that limit though? Well, first let's start with some classifications of body fat percentage ranges. So in men, the essential range is 4% to 6%. range is 4% to 6%. The athlete range is 7% to 10%. The fit range is 11% to 16%. The normal range is 17% to 25%. And the overweight, eventually obese range is 26% and above. And in women, it looks like this. The essential range is 10 to 12%. The athlete range is 13 to 20%. The fit range is 21 to 24%. Normal is 25 to 31%. And overweight slash obese is 32% and above. And in case you are wondering, the additional fat that women carry in their breasts, hips, thighs, and butts accounts for their generally higher body fat percentages and higher ranges. Top male athletes

Starting point is 00:22:13 in many different sports are usually around 6% to 10% body fat, and the females are usually around 13% to 20% or so. It is not pleasant to try to maintain that look for very long periods of time unless you are very, very active like an athlete, which allows you to eat more food and is just better on your body than trying to stay very lean on smaller amounts of food. But it can be done if you are willing to strictly control your calories. And unfortunately, that can be hard when you are fighting against your body's natural desire to be fatter. Really, your body does not want to be 7 or 8% body fat or 16 or 17% if you're a woman. It would much rather be probably closer to 10 to 15% if you're a man or 20 to 25% if you're a woman. The good news is you can maintain slightly higher levels of body fat, at least most people can, while still being able to enjoy life, eat foods that you like. You can't eat whatever you want, whenever you want, of course, but have good workouts and be healthy. Now, it is not necessary to be that lean to be healthy. Generally speaking, the health benefits of fat loss drop off around 15% body fat in men

Starting point is 00:23:30 and around 20% in women. So you can be more or less just as healthy as a guy at 15% as you can at 10% or even 8% and the same for women at let let's say, 25, 20, or 18%. And so the only real reason to bring your body fat percentage below the fit range into the athletic range or the athlete range, especially the lower levels of the athlete ranges, it's about vanity, really, and just feeling better about how you look. All right, so now let's talk about calculating body fat percentage. How do you do it? Well, there are quite a few ways of doing it and you can get quite a few different results based on what you do. So in my case, the multiple point caliper test that I was talking about in the beginning of this podcast that I was 11% body fat, but then the handheld device in the gym

Starting point is 00:24:25 said I was 8% and a different method, a single point caliper said 6%. So what gives? Let's go down the list here. Let's talk about body composition scales and handheld devices first, because they are the simplest way to measure your body fat percentage. You step on the scale, you hold the device, you get a number. Now, these instruments use a method called bioelectrical impedance analysis, BIA, which involves measuring your body's resistance to a light electrical current. Muscle conducts electricity very well because it is over 70% water and fat does not because it holds much less water. Thus, the more resistant the body is to an electrical current, the fatter it must be. That's the logic behind the method. And it sounds

Starting point is 00:25:11 reasonable enough, but there are some serious problems with BIA. First, electricity takes the path of least resistance. So as the current passes through your body, it will actually avoid fat stores for tissues that are easier to traverse. So internal tissues will be chosen over subcutaneous fat, for example. And making matters worse is the fact that two electrode devices like scales, or at least most scales and handhelds, skip entire portions of your body. The foot-to-foot scales miss your entire torso, and hand-to-hand devices miss the lower half of your body. And as you can imagine, this corrupts the results. Now, skinfold testing uses calipers to measure the thickness of your skin at various points in your body, and the measurements are added together and then fed through a couple of equations that ultimately give you a body fat

Starting point is 00:26:10 percentage. And I think you might see where this can go wrong. Namely, if you pinch too little skin, you're going to read lower than you are. If you pinch too much skin, you're going to read higher. read lower than you are. If you pinch too much skin, you're going to read higher. And then beyond pinching, there is the problem of bad equations, bad math. So the upside to skin fold testing is this. Some methods are more accurate than others and do lend themselves well to tracking changes to body fat levels over time. And we'll get to that in a few minutes. All right, let's move on and talk about the next method of estimating body fat. And that is dual energy x-ray absorptiometry or DEXA. And this is a technology that uses a full body x-ray to help calculate your body fat percentage. And the scientific basis of this

Starting point is 00:27:06 method is that fat and fat-free mass absorb x-ray energy differently, which then allows each of these elements to be isolated and measured. And that sounds like it should be very accurate, right? And most people do indeed think that DEXA readings are unerring. If the DEXA says that the dude is 7%, he is 7%. End of story. But research shows otherwise. Ironically, DEXA can be just as inaccurate as any of the other methods that we've discussed so far. For example, in two studies, the individual error rates using DEXA were as high as 4%. And again, that's in an absolute. So somebody at 10% could read at 6% or 14%. All right, next up, let's talk about the BOD pod. So this is a machine that works similarly to hydrostatic weighing, but it uses air instead of

Starting point is 00:28:00 water. So what you do is you sit in a seated chamber and then sensors measure the amount of air that your body displaces. And then mathematical formulas are used to translate the readings into body composition statistics. Now we already know how inaccurate hydrostatic weighing can be. And unfortunately, research shows that the bod pod seems to be even worse. Its accuracy is affected by more variables like facial hair, moisture, body temperature, and even the tightness of the clothing that you're wearing. All right, so those are the most popular methods that people use to calculate or estimate body fat percentages. And obviously, they all have serious flaws. So how do we do it

Starting point is 00:28:47 then? How do we calculate our body fat percentage? Now, I mentioned something earlier, which is this four compartment analysis. And this is how scientists were able to determine the error rates of the various testing methods that we've gone over. They checked BIA, dexabod pod, hydrostatic, and skinfold results against the four-compartment analysis, which is the gold standard of body fat calculation. And this method involves using several testing methods to piece-by-piece separate body weight into four categories, bone, water, muscle tissue, and fat mass. Now, this is nice to know, but it's not very useful for most of us because it requires a team of scientists. Fortunately, however, there is a

Starting point is 00:29:40 method of calculating and tracking body fat percentage that I feel is fairly accurate and consistent enough to warrant the time and attention. And this is how I do it myself. So what I do when I want to keep close tabs on my body fat percentage, so let's say when I'm cutting or when I'm lean bulking is I use calipers, a scale, a measuring tape, and the mirror. So what I do is I weigh myself every day, and then I calculate an average weight every seven to 10 days. All right, let's talk about caliper measurements and taking bi-weekly caliper measurements. So generally speaking, if your skin is getting thicker over time, you are gaining fat. And if it's getting thinner,

Starting point is 00:30:20 you are losing fat because of course, most of the fat that we are gaining and losing is subcutaneous fat. It is the fat underneath the skin. And this is why caliper readings can be useful despite being not very reliable for determining body fat percentage. I recommend taking weekly waist measurements when you want to keep an eye on your body fat percentage, because the size of your waist measured at the navel is a reliable indicator of fat gain or fat loss. And ever expanding waist indicates fat gain and ever shrinking one indicates fat loss. And that's why it is a good measurement. And that's it for the choice. Select snippets from how to calculate your body fat percentage easily and accurately. If you want to listen to the rest, you can find it in June of 2019. And now let's listen to my selections from six reasons to get fired up for your workout.

Starting point is 00:31:17 So there's a reason why you don't see very many fit people walking around. It's pretty simple, of course. Sticking to a workout program and sticking to a diet can be hard. It can be really hard. You don't get to eat all the foods that you want to eat whenever you want to eat them. You don't get to drink all the alcohol that you might want to drink whenever you want to drink it. You often have to sacrifice some of your free time or maybe even your sleep to fit workouts in. I'm sure you can think of many more inconveniences and difficulties that come with getting and staying fit. And anyone can drum up enough emotional resolve to get started,

Starting point is 00:31:59 but staying the course, making it into a lifestyle is another matter altogether. Doing that takes deep, lasting motivation and dedication. And so I want to share with you a few things that help motivate me whenever I'm on the fence. I hope that these emotional triggers will help you remember why you started working out in the first place we'll get you fired up to get your butt off the couch, into the car, and under the bar. So the first one is working out is a great way to enjoy a natural and healthy high. And I'm not just talking about mental satisfaction here. I'm talking about the actual physical high that results from exercise. You see, the brain-altering chemicals that are released by exercise act similarly to opioid drugs, meaning that when you work out, it is a very healthy and

Starting point is 00:32:53 natural way to just feel very good every day of your life. This is why many studies have shown that regular exercise is a powerful way to increase mood. All right. Reason number two is working out is a fantastic way to silence your critics. Now, while I'm all for, you know, doing it for you and not having to prove yourself to anyone, we all take satisfaction in doing what other people say we can't do. And we've all known people who are just compelled to criticize and doubt us whenever we undertook anything positive. And you know the type of person, you tell them you're

Starting point is 00:33:31 starting a new workout program and they question why they roll their eyes. They snicker or otherwise tell you they just don't think you can do it. Well, you can use those people as workout motivation, get in the gym and prove them wrong, and then relish the look on their faces as you transform your body, as you lose fat, as you build muscle, as you build the body you've always wanted, and probably the body that they've always wanted too. Okay, the next reason is obvious. It's getting sexier because let's face it, the number one reason most people start working out is to look better for other girls or guys. That's why I started hitting the weights back when I was 17, 18. My goal wasn't just to be cuter, but sexier, that primal,

Starting point is 00:34:19 universal, irresistible kind of attraction that just bypasses critical filters and makes people physically want you. And hey, I was a teenager, cut me some slack. I've matured since then. And I don't really care so much about that anymore, but it definitely was a strong motivator in the beginning. And of course, vanity is still part of the reason why I keep working out. I don't know if I would say it's 50%, but I'd say it's probably no less than 30%. I definitely enjoy looking a certain way and that will never change. And that's okay. All right. The next point kind of goes hand in hand, which is working out builds your self-confidence. Yes, that's right. Lifting weights doesn't just build muscle. It also builds self-confidence. Now, of course, some people go to the dark side and just

Starting point is 00:35:05 become narcissistic, neurotic, egomaniacs. But those of us who are mentally balanced generally just become happier, calmer, nicer, and nicer to be around people. This self-confidence boost extends to all areas of our lives as well. Do not be surprised if working out regularly also makes you want to push the envelope in other areas of your life and strive for more to challenge yourself. Next on my list is while strength is pretty awesome, mental toughness is even awesomer. Don't look into it, but that's definitely a word. Definitely in the dictionary. No, but seriously, how many workouts have you missed because your mind seduced you into thinking you were too tired? How many reps have you missed because the little voice in your head said that that was enough? You'd already done enough already.

Starting point is 00:35:55 These aren't physical failures. They're mental failures. And they relate to something much bigger than just working out. If I had to choose one thing, one trait that sets extraordinary achievers apart from ordinary ones in any field, in any activity, it wouldn't be intelligence or wisdom, talent, luck, genetics. It would just be mental toughness, conscientiousness in psychological terms or in pop psychological terms, grit, right? That's kind of the trendy thing right now. But all grit really is, is the psychological trait of conscientiousness, the will to finish what has been begun, the discipline to not give in to temptations, to stray or quit, the willingness to make sacrifices, to make hard sacrifices.

Starting point is 00:36:43 Every day you show up to the gym, every day you put that work in, no matter how many reasons you had to do otherwise, no matter how much mental resistance you might've felt, no matter how drained your body might have been, you are transforming more than your physique. You are transforming your very being. So the next time you start to convince yourself why you should skip or miss a workout, stop for a second and recognize the simple fact that the reason you don't want to go is why you have to go. If you don't go, you are making yourself weaker. And if you do, you are making yourself stronger. Okay, that is it for the featured moments from Six Reasons to Get Fired Up for Your Workout.

Starting point is 00:37:28 And if you wanna listen to the entire episode, it was published in April of 2018. Well, I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful. And if you did, subscribe to the show because it makes sure that you don't miss new episodes. And it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily

Starting point is 00:37:50 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: Science of Strength Training, Calculating Body Fat Percentage, & Get Fired Up

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