Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - The No-BS Truth About Workout Supplements

Episode Date: December 18, 2014

In this podcast I talk about the common scams and deceptions supplement companies use to dupe us into buying worthless junk, as well as which types of supplements are and aren't worth your money and why. HOW TESTOSTERONE LEVELS AFFECT MUSCLE GROWTH AND FAT LOSS: http://www.muscleforlife.com/how-testosterone-levels-affect-muscle-growth-and-fat-loss/ D-ASPARTIC ACID: http://www.muscleforlife.com/recommendations/supplement-recommendations/strength-growth-and-recovery/finaflex-pure-test/ WHEY+: http://www.legionsupplements.com/products/supplements/whey/ CREATINE+: http://www.legionsupplements.com/products/supplements/creatine/ PULSE: http://www.legionsupplements.com/products/supplements/pulse/ RECHARGE: http://www.legionsupplements.com/products/supplements/recharge/ EGG PROTEIN: http://www.muscleforlife.com/recommendations/supplement-recommendations/protein-supplements/healthy-n-fit-100-egg-protein/ GARDEN OF LIFE RAW MULTI: http://www.muscleforlife.com/recommendations/supplement-recommendations/general-health-supplements/garden-of-life-raw-vitamin-code-for-men/ FISH OIL: http://www.muscleforlife.com/recommendations/supplement-recommendations/general-health-supplements/nordic-naturals-ultimate-omega/ SPIRULINA: http://www.muscleforlife.com/recommendations/supplement-recommendations/joint-supplements/now-foods-spirulina/ VITAMIN D-3: http://www.muscleforlife.com/recommendations/supplement-recommendations/general-health-supplements/now-vitamin-d/ LEGION: http://www.legionsupplements.com/ Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

Hey, it's Mike, and I just want to say thanks for checking out my podcast. I hope you like what I have to say. And if you do like what I have to say in the podcast, then I guarantee you're going to like my books. Now, I have several books, but the place to start is Bigger Leaner Stronger If You're a Guy and Thinner Leaner Stronger If You're a Girl. I mean, these books, they're basically going to teach you everything you need to know about dieting, training, and supplementation to build muscle, lose fat, and look and feel great without having to give up all the foods you love or live

in the gym grinding through workouts that you hate. Now, you can find these books everywhere you can buy them online. You know, Amazon, Audible, iBooks, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and so forth. And if you're into audio books like me, you can actually get one of them for free with a 30-day free trial of Audible. To do that, go to www.muscleforlife.com forward slash audiobooks and you can see how to do that there. I make my living primarily as a writer, so as you can imagine, every book sold helps. So please do check out my books if you haven't already. Now also, if you like my work in general, then I think you're going to really like what I'm doing with my supplement company, Legion. As you may know, I'm really not a fan of the supplement industry. I've wasted who knows how much money over the

years on worthless junk supplements and have always had trouble finding products that I actually liked and felt were worth buying. And that's why I finally decided to just make my own. Now, a few of the things that make my supplements unique are, one, they're 100% naturally sweetened and flavored. Two, all ingredients are backed by peer-reviewed scientific research that you can verify for yourself because we explain why we've chosen each ingredient and we cite all supporting studies on our website,

which means you can dive in and go validate everything that we say. Three, all ingredients are also included at clinically effective dosages, which are the exact dosages used in the studies proving their effectiveness. And four, there are no proprietary blends, which means that you know exactly what you're buying. Our formulations are 100% transparent. So if that sounds interesting to you, then head over to legionathletics.com. That's L-E-G-I-O-N athletics.com. And you can learn a bit more about the supplements that I have as well as my mission for the company, because I want to accomplish more than just sell supplements. I really want to try to make a change for the better in the supplement industry because I think it's long

overdue. And ultimately, if you like what you see and you want to buy something, then you can use the coupon code podcast, P-O-D-C-A-S-T, and you'll save 10% on your first order. So thanks again for taking the time to listen to my podcast and let's get to the show. Hey, this is Mike Matthews from MuscleForLife.com. Thanks for stopping by and checking out this video podcast. In this podcast, we're going to talk about workout supplements. I want to focus just on this one subject for the podcast because it's a bit controversial. There are a lot of opinions on the matter and I kind of want to weigh in and help inform you as a consumer

so you better understand what goes on in the industry and which supplements are worth your money, which ones aren't, and kind of, you know, share some of my opinions on what I like and what I don't like about supplements and the supplement industry. So to start, I just want to tell you that you don't need to take any supplements at all to build a great physique. Proper diet, proper training, that's really what it boils down to. Supplementation can help, and we'll get to in a little bit later in this podcast, we'll

get to which supplements can help. But just know that I would say the majority of the stuff that you see, or maybe not majority, but a large percentage of the stuff that you see in your local GNC or vitamin shop or whatever is just not worth the money. It's not really going to do anything for you in terms of actual results. And by results, I'm really talking about building muscle, losing fat, getting stronger, things that are quantifiable, not, oh, I think I felt a little bit better on that pre-workout, or I think I had a good pump or something like that, that doesn't really accomplish anything in the long run. You know, I used to

spend probably $300 or $400 a month on supplements. So I know what it's like to go in there and go back to the secret steroid case in the back and behind the glass and you know look at all the different things and try this one and try that one and you know you're trying and you're like do i feel anything i don't know maybe i guess um and uh yeah so i used to be that guy and try all the new stuff and had my different stacks that i liked and ironically i was you know comparatively speaking if i compare my physique and just my liked and ironically I was you know comparatively speaking if I compare my physique in just my strength and like her my body now to then I was kind of smaller fatter weaker it didn't all those all that

money I was wasting on supplements would have been better off spent on better food or maybe some books to educate myself or something. So just know that if you don't want to take supplements, you don't have to. You know, there are different reasons for that. It can be financial, which I understand supplements are expensive, or it could be that you just aren't quite, you don't really trust what are in these products. And I understand that as well. I mean, we'll be, we'll be talking about a little bit more about that you know later but you know there have been some pretty pretty shady scandals that have gone down recently that really make you wonder like what are you actually putting in your body

and you can't trust all companies to do what's right and to not only not cut products with cheap ingredients but to not include things that would just are straight out harmful so yeah that's that's like how I want to kind of preface this video so with that let's get into some of the kind of scams and some of the the shady things that go down in this industry. And I'm actually speaking from a bit of an insider type of viewpoint because I am launching my own line of supplements, which I'll talk about later in this video, which may seem hypocritical, but it's not.

You'll understand when I get there. So I understand from, you know, sourourcing manufacturers and things and talking with different people and whatever You know and I was even a little bit surprised and some of the things that these companies will do So let's go over a few of them one of the scams is using ingredients that have no science And the reason why people do that is because they want to make ingredients labels that look impressive. They want you to look at the label and see all these different things and go, wow, I'm getting all that stuff for $40 or whatever. And what you don't know is that the majority of those ingredients have absolutely no published science, no published literature that supports their use for whatever that is so it could be a fat loss product it could be a pre-workout type product it could be a whatever

test booster and uh the ingredients they might sound fancy they might sound cool but they in the end uh have no proof that they even do anything or to the contrary they have proof or there's proof that they just don't work at all. Like in the case of tribulus terrestris, right, which is in a lot of test boosters, like I think I've seen seven or eight different studies that show that it does nothing for testosterone levels, period. It is not going to do anything, but you'll see it in a lot of test booster products out there. And it's not like these companies don't know that these studies are out there they'll just cherry-pick like a rat study or something that shows that it may be

increased you know androgens in a rat and therefore oh now it works and it's gonna boost your test and you know it's all in the marketing kind of thing so another another kind of just little little scam of the supplement industry is under dosing key ingredients so there are ingredients out there there are things out there natural substances that do have positive effects in the body you know they can increase performance or they could just improve different aspects of your health or whatever. And the problem that companies run into is to use these ingredients in proper dosages, it's just expensive. Like, for instance, let's talk about pre-workouts. Let's say something like an amino acid like citrulline malate or beta-alanine, right? There's two

different amino acids that increase performance. There's a bunch of good science that shows that but you have to take enough of it of course and in the case of beta alanine the average effective dosage you're going to find is about five grams in terms of citrulline malate it's going to be like six to eight grams or so so if you took those dosages of those aminos then you could expect something positive to happen in terms of performance. But if you took a 10th of those dosages, if you took 500 milligrams of beta-alanine or 6,800 milligrams of citrulline malate, you probably won't get much out of it. Maybe a very small effect, but probably next to nothing. So what companies will do is they don't want to put five grams of beta-alanine and 68 grams of citrulline malate in their product because it's expensive. So what they do instead

is they'll put 500 milligrams or less or whatever. And then they'll hide it behind the proprietary blend, which if you see proprietary blend in a product, don't buy it. Like as a consumer, even if you don't have any interest in the products that I'm producing in my line, whatever, I totally understand, but just don't support other companies that are doing that because they're just basically slapping you in the face as a consumer. They're just saying, we don't care to even tell you what you're buying because we're underdosing the shit out of our product and we're going to hide it behind the super mega max pump matrix proprietary

blend to try to fool you. So when you see a company using proprietary blend, just know you're getting scammed immediately. There are no trade secrets in this industry in terms of secret dosages to use or secret combinations of dosages. All the research is public on these molecules. You can go study it yourself and that's really the end of theages. All the research is public on these molecules. You can go study it yourself. And that's really the end of the story. So yes, the underdosing of key ingredients and use of proprietary blend, that's another scam. Another kind of deceptive practice is just cutting products with flour, maltodextrin. And if you don't think that happens, think again.

There have been different scandals. I'm not going to name any company names, but there have been different scandals that even come out on the internet where protein powders will claim so much on the label and then it'll be independently tested and it'll come out a lot less. From speaking with people on the inside of this industry from what they told me is that things like that are a lot more common than you would think probably not with the with the bigger more established brands that have more money to do it right and have more riding on it but

with smaller smaller brands that are maybe up-and-coming you know that they're all apparently apparently like you know you'll have uh pills with you know just sawdust or you'll have uh pre-workouts that are a bunch of caffeine a couple other stimulants and a bunch of maltodextrin which is just a carb right cheap carb um and then of course in the proprietary blend though so in the proprietary blend there's all these other fancy sounding things and tiny dosages when really what you're buying is a tub of Malto. So that will happen. I wouldn't say it's prevalent, but it's definitely out there a bit more than you might think. There are even the use of dangerous substances, like you've probably heard about this whole

craze scandal where it turns out that there's a a it's called an analog which it means it's a molecule that is similar to another molecule chemically but it's not the same it may have the same effects in the body but legally speaking it's not the same so in this craze product there I was discovered there's a meth analog methamphetamine meaning that there's a molecule there are it has meth in it essentially but legally speaking it's not meth the molecule is different enough to where it's not meth but it has those meth-like effects in the body which is actually kind of ironic and just you know because i i i would get email when craze was this was

several months ago before the scandal broke um i was getting there was a time when i was getting emailed or message message probably like every day from someone at least one person sometimes multiple saying asking dude if you try crazy shoes nuts you gotta try craze and I wouldn't look at the formulation and you know standard proprietary blend with creatine in it which is like you see a pre-workout that has creatine in the proprietary blend don't buy it there Once again, that will be included because it's cheap and creatine does work. We'll be talking about that in a minute. So if you're

not taking creatine and you start taking it every day, you are going to notice a difference in the gym. You're going to get stronger, but it has no place in a pre-workout. It's not like you need to have it before you work out. And also, you can buy it very cheaply. You shouldn't spend more than $20 to $30 for a month's worth of creatine, if not less. Not a $40, $50 pre-workout that lasts two to three weeks. So anyways, I looked at this Craze product and I looked at the formulation and I thought there's just... This is a crap product. The people that, you know, they must just be new to

pre-workouts or the company must be including some different stimulants. I didn't think meth, but I thought, you know, this is a common thing that is done with pre-workouts where you just load it with some stimulants, cheap stimulants. You load it with like caffeine and you load it with, you know, there was that DMAA that was in Jack that's now illegal. And there are some other things you can throw that just give you that kick of energy. And you might have a crash after, and it's not particularly good for you. But, you know, for that 30 minutes or so, you have that rush, and then you say, oh, it's a great pre-workout or whatever. And that's much cheaper to do than to, let's say, going back to what I was talking about earlier,

using clinically effective dosages of different amino acids and things that won't give you that crash and it is better for you but that's more expensive so yeah there are dangerous you know dangerous days you don't know always what what are in these products I mean there's one company that it kind of seems like their modus operandi is to release products that have analogs of similar type, you know, where it can be similar to, let's say, a pro-hormone type of molecule. And they put that in their product. They release it. People use it. And then people go, wow, this really works.

This test booster booster I feel so much better until finally you know because the FDA is so behind anyway on regulation but you know they run that for a certain period of time get some word of mouth you know you gotta try this stuff you gotta try this stuff and then pull that product that version of it you know no longer produce it with with that analog so they can't get caught. And then it's now out of the market. In terms of a test booster, it might just have like tribulus terrestris and a few other worthless ingredients.

But the word of mouth is generate enough, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell until it dies off, retire the product, rinse and repeat, easy money. So that stuff happens. Don't think it doesn't. I mean, there are some pretty, the CEO of that driven company that produced craze I remember reading about that you know he has some felony in the past of doing something similar like there are some pretty shady shitty people in this industry that are solely driven by making money that's all they care about is just fleecing people for

as much money as possible. And I guess you'll find that in any industry, but don't think it's not in the sports nutrition world. So the next thing is false, like lying in advertising. That's a very common deceptive practice that takes different forms. You can have false claims of effectiveness. So you can just literally make stuff up in the advertising, say it does this, that, whatever, scientifically proven, low, and you have no proof of it really.

There are, and then it gets more sophisticated where you can misconstrue science, like you could take rat research and try to extrapolate it to humans and just basically say that this molecule is proven to do this in the body, cite a study, and then the study was done with rats. Well, you can't do that. You can't take rat research and just apply it directly to humans. While rats might be similar to humans, certain parts of their physiology might be similar. Well, I mean certain parts are similar similar but it's not similar enough especially when we're talking about metabolism and how different substances are broken down and handled in the body you just can't you can't make that leap rat research or animal research can lead the way for

human trials or can be done for ethical reasons where you couldn't conduct certain studies with humans. So you've got to go with the best evidence you can find, which would be animal research. But it's not, well, this was good or bad for the rat, therefore it is always good or bad for humans. So that's pretty common. Also, taking research that was done with people that are sick or the elderly, for instance, taking studies like glutamine is a common scapegoat for this tactic where companies will take AIDS research, research with AIDS patients, muscle wasting problems in the very elderly and not you know, not necessarily with AIDS, but just on their last legs, I guess you could say. And in those situations, glutamine supplementation has been shown to help preserve or help them maintain their muscle mass. But that doesn't mean that you as a healthy person are going to gain anything in terms of building muscle by taking glutamine.

And that's actually been proven. There are a couple of studies that have been done with healthy athletes that show supplementing with glutamine is not going to help you build muscle. But you'll see it all the time in the advertising. Glutamine is so important for muscle and you're going to build more muscle. It's not true. muscle and you're going to build more muscle. It's not true. It is true that glutamine plays an important role in protein synthesis and muscle growth, but supplementing with it is not going to do anything for you. You get it from your diet and then your body's good to go. So there are another common thing that I think a lot of us, I don't know how many of us really fall for it, but

is the athlete endorsements, the big bodybuilders that are pretending like, oh, it's taking this little test booster. That's why my bicep is 25 inches big. Like, yeah, okay, buddy. All natty, right? So that is just misleading, of course. I mean, I guess you could say, oh, well well you know that they're wrong more than just this supplement but you know that's not how it's advertised I mean they'll have their endorsements on how sick this thing is pump they good and you know this is so crucial for building muscle

mass blah blah blah so yeah those are those are kind of the big the big major deceptive practices and kind of just the status quo, really. I mean, if you look around, go look through a magazine and see, there are companies out there that are more honest. Optin Nutrition comes to mind. I've always liked their products. They're owned by a big pharmaceutical company, Glanbia, which for some people, they think that's bad because pharmaceutical companies, some of them actually are pretty shady. But in this case, I think it actually works in their favor because they're also the biggest supplement company probably in the world. They have a lot of money. They are able to put that money into their products to make

high quality products, which they generally do. Well i say generally a couple products like their pre-workout i'm not it's an okay formulation but it's not great um there are certain products of theirs i think are better than others but generally speaking i think they're an honest company like their marketing is um it's not over the top they don't make ridiculous claims um so so i mean it's an example of company that i that I've always kind of recommended and used myself and trusted and there are others too but anyway just look for those things and if you see companies doing that kind of stuff just don't support it I mean you as the consumer you vote for you vote with your dollars I mean you tell companies what is okay and what's not and if you keep on buying the stuff from the companies that are doing these shady things they're just going to keep on doing it

because it works you know as a consumer you can you have the power you can force whatever kind of change you want to see just simply by spending your money elsewhere and in this world of supplements you have a lot of options you don't have have to go with that exact type of product when you can just look at if another company that isn't doing those things makes it. And who knows, you might actually be getting a better product in the end. using. Testosterone boosters, not worth using. The main reason is because, well, two reasons. One, a lot of them are full of ingredients that just don't do anything. They're not going to increase your testosterone like triglycerides and other various amino acids and things that may do certain things in the body, but they're not going to increase testosterone.

The exception to that would be the aspartic acid. That's a common ingredient used. It actually does have some good science and it can increase your test. But the more important factor or the more important thing to consider is that even if you do increase your test naturally, let's say increase it by 10% naturally or 20% naturally, that's pretty good, but it's not going to do anything for you in terms of building muscle or getting stronger. Maybe you'll see a little bit of strength increase, but you're not going to build more muscle over time because of it. You might feel a little bit better, it might help with sex drive, and that is a reason

to use something like the aspartic acid. If you just want to, if your test is low and you want to do some natural things to raise it because having low tests sucks, you don't feel good, low sex drive, so you want to do it for that reason, then I would recommend taking it. And there are other things you can do naturally as well. But if your test is in a normal range and you feel fine and you have a good sex drive and you want to build up muscle and get stronger, don't waste your time with test boosters because it's just not going to help. There was some research out of McMaster University that actually showed that and I'll link

an article in the description below where I talk about this subject more in depth so you can check it out. HGH boosters, don't waste your time. These are even more worthless than test boosters because there's really no, in terms of any different types of growth hormone in the body and the type that you would want to increase for anabolic purposes, which also keep in mind that growth hormone is not particularly anabolic like testosterone, but it's more, well, it's a muscle preserver. So yes, it's good, but it doesn't drive protein synthesis like testosterone does. But anyways, that specific type of growth hormone, you can't, there is nothing you can do naturally to boost that. And also, you know, there just isn't, it's very hard to prove

if anything works because it's hard to test growth hormone because it's pulsile. Your body pulses, it's hard to test growth hormone because it's pulsile. Your body pulses, releases a bunch, and then it stops, and it does this on a cycle. So while there are a couple of ingredients, one that comes to mind is called GABA, something out of alburic acid or something like that, long word, I just know it's GABA, has been shown to increase a certain type of growth hormone, but that type of growth hormone is not the type that has anything to do with preserving muscle or making gains in the gym. GABA is a good sleep supplement if you're having trouble sleeping but it's not useful for increasing growth hormone or increasing muscle growth or we'll find

increasing the type of growth hormone that increase muscle growth or you know strength in the gym so just don't waste your time with gh boosters um weight gainers i'm not a fan of weight gainers because they're full of junk carbs and usually junk fats and by junk i mean just no nutrition you know dextrose just you sure you might as well just you know it's a type of sugar okay fine just pound sugar then whatever um it's i mean i guess it's okay if you want to have it as a pre of sugar. Okay, fine. Just pound sugar and then whatever. It's, I mean, I guess it's okay if you want to have it as a pre or post workout carb, but personally I prefer to have food. I prefer that you get micronutrients. It's not, dieting is not all about just hitting macro numbers. It's also about, I wouldn't say hitting micro numbers because you don't really need to

micromanage like that, but it's about getting nutrition from your food as well. And, you know, we put a lot of demands in our bodies if we're lifting weights regularly and, you know, doing much cardio and whatever. So our bodies have higher needs for micronutrients. So that's where like the if it fits your macros type of philosophy. Yes, it's true in terms of body composition, it boils down to hitting numbers every day, macronutrient numbers, protein, carbs, and fats. But remember that healthy foods do more for your body than just give it protein, carbs, and fats. It gives us all the vitamins and minerals and other micronutrients that we need to, that our body needs to do its many different physiological processes. So that's why I'm not a fan of weight gainers because, you know, if you're pounding down a few thousand calories of weight gainer a day, you know, you'd be better served getting a lot.

I'd say like it depends how many total calories you're eating every day. But in my experience working with people that are using weight gainers, it kind of just becomes a dietary crutch. Like they're too lazy to make some food or they don't want to think about it or whatever. So they just pound a few thousand calories of weight gainer and in the end of the day they just didn't eat that much food that's not good like if you were getting let's say i don't know 80 of your calories from like nutrient dense foods and you're still having trouble gaining weight then i understand if you wanted to try using the weight gainer personally i would just focus on including some more calorie densedense foods in my meals, or maybe I'd even wake up a little bit earlier to get in a bigger meal or get an

extra meal or whatever. But that's me. So another supplement, in my opinion, not worth using is a nitric oxide-boosting supplement simply because, I mean, yeah, I guess it's fine to like get a nice pump and stuff in the gym and it can feel good and but you know is that worth spending 30-40 dollars a month I don't think so an NO supplement is not going to directly help you build muscle or strength depending on what's in it it might be able to improve your performance a little bit, your muscle endurance a little bit, which if you're training properly could lead to you doing some more reps with your weight, which is more progressive overload, which if combined with proper nutrition can turn into muscle growth. So, you know, yeah, you can kind of work it to where

it could lead to some extra muscle growth. But in my opinion, it just as a supplement by itself is just not worth the money. So, yeah, another supplement that is not worth it. Let's see. I guess those are the major. I'm probably forgetting something, but those are the major ones. Fat burners are hit and miss there's a fat burner from a company BPX called Meltdown which I actually do like has good ingredients good dosages and they've actually paid for a couple universities to do I think

they've done two studies I can link it in the description I believe it's two studies done by universities that show it works which is not surprising when you look at the ingredients and you can sort the research on the ingredients and you'll know what's going to work. You don't even have to pay to get the study done, but I understand for a number of reasons why they did that. And some, you know, some fat burners I don't like just looking at the formulations. So, you know, if you want to try a fat burner, I do recommend BPX as a mouth balance good

product. All right, so let's move now to some supplements worth using. Before that, let me just then say that, like, I'm going to go over some supplements that are worth using. So pretty much anything outside of these are, is not, probably, probably not worth it. There are some things that, you know, that I'm not going to cover right here that may or may not be worth it um i'm not sure i had something you know actually i'm talking about this right now let's talk about bcas before i get into supplements that are worth using because this is also something a lot of people spend a lot of money on bcas and we think that you know you've got to have them for your work

i got an after workout take them every two hours blah blah blah um the bottom line is you don't need to be doing that if you just eat enough protein bcaa is the proper use uh and really the only like worthwhile use the only time i ever use them, is if I'm going to be training at fasted state, which I will, well I don't have to link in or I'll just explain. A fasted state is basically when your body is, its insulin levels are at a baseline and it's fully relying on its fat stores, its energy stores to operate. When you eat a meal, let's say you eat a moderate-sized meal, it'll take anywhere from three to five hours for your body to fully absorb those nutrients.

During that time, your insulin levels are elevated. Insulin's job is to shuttle nutrients out of the blood into the cells. After that process is done, insulin levels come down and you're now in a fasted state. So the reason why you want to exercise in this state is mainly due to accelerated fat loss. Research has shown that you can lose fat faster when you're training in this state. However, it does come with accelerated muscle breakdown. So to counteract that, you use BCAAs. And in particular, really what you want is leucine. Leucine is the amino acid in the BCAAs. BCAAs are three amino acids. It's leucine, isoleucine, and valine. So leucine is the one that really does it. It stimulates

protein synthesis directly. So you can use BCAAs or you can just use straight leucine. If you're going to use BCAAs, you're going to want to do about 10 grams, which will give you three to five grams of leucine, or you can just do three to five grams of leucine directly. Leucine doesn't taste good. It's very bitter, so if you have a very sensitive palate, you're probably just better off going with a BCAA product that tastes decent. So, otherwise, BCAAs are not worth it. You're not doing anything by giving your body leucine every few hours. You're much better off taking that money and just putting it into better food.

You know, higher, high quality meats and high quality dairy products and, you know, eggs and good sources are all good sources of protein. Fish, grains, of course, you can get some protein from vegetables, not very much, but, you know, put that money into getting good micronutrient dense foods and good sources of proteins and good sources of fats instead. Okay, so let's move on now to supplements that are worth using. Let's talk about protein powder. Is protein powder worth using? Yes, it's convenient and that's why it's worth using. It's not that you need protein powder to build muscle, not at all. In fact, I don't use that much protein powder. I have a shake before I work out. I have whey, and I have a shake after I work out, which I also have whey again with some carbs, both before and after. And I have one other shake in the afternoon, which is egg.

And that's simply because it's convenient. I'm here at the office. I'm working. I don't want to take the time to prepare anything. I just drink down some protein, have a banana, some almond butter, and I'm done and I can get back to work. But you don't have to use protein powder if you don't want to. It is actually kind of a cost-effective source of protein and a high quality source of protein. So it's not bad. But if you don't want to use it, if your stomach doesn't do well with whey, if you don't like the taste of egg protein or you just don't like that as an option um or you know if maybe you're uh vegan and you don't like your vegan options then it's fine you

don't have to use any protein powders although in the case of vegans to get enough protein usually we have to get them using some sort of protein powder because it's just hard to get to even the 0.8 grams per pound type of protein range point grams protein per pound range that is recommended if you're going to be engaging your regular weightlifting if we don't use a protein powder but anyway the bottom line is protein powders are not necessary by means they're just convenient and there is a little bit of research that shows that way is particularly good for post-workout

protein because it does quickly spike the it's rich in leucine which is good in it and it quickly spikes amino acids in the blood so you know if you want to use a protein powder I do the what I recommend is getting away and use it have like a scoop before you work out with some carbs and have one to two scoops after with some carbs and you know you two scoops after with some carbs. And, you know, you can get the rest of your protein from food throughout the day. So the next supplement worth using is creatine. Creatine is probably one of the most studied molecules in all sports nutrition.

At least 200 studies on it, maybe even close to 300 actually. And the bottom line is it works. Period. It works. It's not an amino acid. It's called a peptide. It's a combination of amino acids. But it's natural. Like you eat a big steak, you're going to get a few grams of creatine in it. And it improves strength. It improves muscle growth. It accelerates or it can help you build more muscle. If I remember correctly,

it also has been shown to decrease markers of muscle damage that improves recovery. It's good. You don't have to cycle it. You don't have to load it if you don't want to. Loading is where you take, it really what it boils down to is 20 grams a day for a week. And then you bring that down. And that's just so you can quickly saturate your muscles with it. And then you bring it down to five grams a day for maintenance. You don't have to do that. I've found that I noticed its effects a little bit faster, which makes sense if you're just having more and it gets in your system faster. But some people do retain a bit of water when they load it and they don't like that. I don't

care because the water just goes out anyway when you drop to a maintenance dosage, but you don't have to load it. You don't have to cycle it. It's not any kind of steroid or anything like that. Your body will, its production, its own production will just scale down when you're on it and if you come off it scales up it's uh very safe um effective inexpensive relatively inexpensive supplement that you know i do recommend you use um and don't worry about the water retention thing either that's not really an issue these days. It was an issue in the past when processing methods weren't as good, but rarely do people have any water retention issues. I take creatine always. I mean, really, whether I'm bulking, cutting, maintaining, whatever. And I've, you know, just recently, a couple months ago, finished a cut where I ended somewhere between five and 6% body fat, kind of hard to test with calipers at that point. I would

have went to, I had to, would have went point. I would have had to have gone to get DEXA scanned if I really wanted to know for sure, but I was pretty shredded. I really had nothing left I could grab, and I was taking creatine the entire time. So I don't think it makes you obtain a bunch of water or whatever. Another supplement that I recommend you take is a good multivitamin simply because, while it's true that you can get all your micronutrients from your foods, it's just getting harder to do these days unless you eat a bunch of vegetables and a good variety of vegetables and fruits and things like that. I eat a couple servings of vegetables and fruit a day, but I take a multi just to make sure that I'm not

deficient in anything because micronutri community deficiencies can affect your performance and they affect your overall health so a multi I think is worth the investment especially if you're gonna you know put your body under the extra stress that comes along with exercise and whatnot fish oil omega-3 fatty acid is very important the American diet is very high in omega-6 fatty acids and when you're omega-6s and 3s get out of whack, you can have a wide variety of negative health effects. By supplementing with omega-3s, I mean, fish oil, I'll just link down in the description so you can go see the pretty impressive roster of health benefits that come with it.

It's not cheap, but it's extremely good for you and it has quite a few benefits that are particularly helpful for us fitness people like improving protein synthesis in potentially improving fat loss and increasing insulin sensitivity and other things so I do recommend a fish oil pre-workout supplements are worth it depending on what they are. If the formulation is good, then it's worth it. Meaning that if it doesn't just contain a bunch of caffeine and a couple other stimulants that you could just buy way cheaper. Like in the case of a lot of pre-workouts that are on the market, you could just buy caffeine pills and

you would feel exactly the same. You would notice no difference in terms of your, not only how you feel, but what it does for you in the gym. Take 400 milligrams of the caffeine pill for one week and then take the pre-workout for the next week and you really wouldn't notice much of a difference. And there may be a couple other stimulants in the pre-workout that you would notice, but you could buy those cheaply and just throw them in or whatever. However, if a pre-workout has more than that and it has a good formulation, good dosages, I think it's worth it simply because it helps you perform better in the gym. I mean, the more weight you can push in the gym and the more reps you can get, the more

gains you make over time. Of course, it's not an immediate gratification thing, but it does add up over time. And also, there is the fact that how much you enjoy your workouts does matter. Nobody likes to go do something, slog through something every day. It's much more enjoyable when you are pumped up and you're really there focused and you're into it. And a good pre-workout can help with that. So I use a pre-workout, and I recommend, you know, if you want to spend the money, that that's somewhere that's worth spending. Glutamine, I actually do think it's worth it. It's not worth it because it helps you build muscle.

As I said earlier, that's been completely disproven. However, where there is good science conducted with athletes, and I think one study was conducted with football players and there's a different type of athlete. It shows that intense prolonged exercise depletes glutamine levels in the body. So by supplementing with glutamine, you can counterbalance that, which can help basically just help your body deal with the systemic stresses of exercise. Because remember, when you're doing like intense weight lifting you're not only just damaging the the muscle fibers that you're training but you're also putting

quite a bit of a load on your central nervous system you know hormonally there's a there's cortisol levels are spiking the body's under stress now it's a good process of course when you provide your body with everything it needs to like recover and rebuild itself um but there is a there is that stress factor so research has shown that supplementation with glutamine if you take enough of it if you take it over time can just help your body better deal with that and help prevent uh the front over training um so you know that's anecdotally speaking you know i've been using glutamine now for

regularly for probably close to a year. In the last year, I've noticed a couple of things. One is it takes longer for me. I'm able to train for longer periods before I have to take a deload or a rest week, take a week off. Um, and it may or may not be due to the glutamine, but it's something that I noticed, uh, that overtraining does. It just takes longer for me to kind of feel those symptoms of overtraining coming on.

And I've also noticed that I just don't get sick. I haven't gotten sick. Maybe I got semi-sick when I went away in a day or something like that in the last year, whereas in the past I wouldn't get sick regularly, but it would be every six months or so if my wife got sick. Then it usually started with that because I would just be like not paying attention, whatever, and then I'd end up getting sick. So I noticed, and the reason why that is relevant to glutamine is because research has shown that it is actually very good for the immune system.

And it also is good for gut health too. So I do recommend glutamine. Another supplement that I personally use, like and recommend, is spirulina. Another supplement that I personally use, like, and recommend is spirulina. Like fish oil, it has a pretty impressive list of health benefits, similar to fish oil's health benefits, actually, which I'll link to it in the description below, and you can check it out. Again, don't think you have to buy all these. I'm just kind of running down a list of things that I personally use that have good science behind them,

and if you're going to spend the money, these are things that, you know, at least you're going to get something for your money. The last one I'll talk about here is vitamin D. The reason why I supplement with vitamin D is because more recent research, you know, conducting the last decade or so has just shown that vitamin D is actually a very, very important molecule in the body for just overall health and fighting off disease. You know, and a lot of people are vitamin D deficient. I would be if I didn't supplement with it because I sit inside all day. I mean, I go out in the sun maybe a little bit on the weekends, but if I wanted to get enough vitamin

D from just sun exposure alone, I'd have to go in the sun for probably, I'm in Florida, it's the winter now, but let's say it's a summer right so florida hot sun you know close-ish to the equator probably like 15 to 20 minutes a day with most of my body exposed uh would be what it would require for me to get you know my natural because our body can't synthesize vitamin d it gets from sun uh there's a chemical reaction body or we can get it from our food or you know supplements um so yeah vitamin, vitamin D is, it's just important to take for overall health, like fish oil, like spirulina. These are things that even if, you know, you may not feel it. And sometimes I'll get that from people like, well, I don't want to take something that I don't feel. Yeah, okay,

I understand that. But just because you're not feeling a difference doesn't mean it's not doing anything for your body. Remember that. There are a lot of physiological processes in the body that you only feel when it gets really bad. Then you would know like, whoa, something is wrong and you don't want it to ever get to that point. So in my opinion, there are certain types of things like fish, roe, spirulina, vitamin D, where you look at the research and look at the amount of research that show benefits to where it's like conclusive. This does this in the body. And you understand that that is something that is healthy. And you just go, that's why you take it.

And you go, yeah, I might not feel the difference, but I know that it's helping my body. And in the case of vitamin D spirulina fish oil you actually can definitely feel a difference it's not that you definitely won't depends on your body is but somebody you know I can't I guess it's been a while so I've been supplementing them for quite some time now so I actually don't really remember how I felt before but I do remember when I started taking fish oil I did notice a difference. I felt more energetic.

That was the main thing I noticed actually, was that I felt more energetic and my energy levels were steadily higher throughout the day. So that's a list of supplements that I think are worth using. And through my work, writing books and runningwh MuscleForLife.com, I've been recommending different supplements and such. I've recommended the supplements that I personally use myself and were the best things that I could find from companies that I felt I could trust and that I think were worth spreading the word for. But that said I didn't really I couldn't ever find the exact products that I wanted and the exact products that I would want would be like no proprietary

blends all ingredients backed by science clinically effective dosages no artificial sweeteners no artificial food dyes honest advertising that's not, but you know, it kind of just goes with the whole package. And I couldn't find that. So basically what I did is I started it myself. Through the success of my writing and, you know, my work at Muscle for Life, I've been able to do that. And I'm really excited for it because these are the products that I basically always wanted myself and always wished I could find to use and recommend to others and you know my idea was to create a supplement company that's kind of we're dedicated to creating healthy high-quality sports supplements you know

that are based on sound science and you want to sell them honestly so what I'm doing with that is I am starting with a few different a few different supplements away isolate a pre-workout a recovery product which is glutamine and an amino acid called carnitine which has been proven to help with muscle damage and a creatine product that has fenugreek extract in it which helps with creatine absorption and has fenugreek extract in it, which helps with creatine absorption and also has some other proven benefits like improving insulin sensitivity. And it can even improve hormone, particularly for male anabolic hormone levels. It can improve libido. And once again, I mean, that's not going to help you

necessarily build more muscle in the gym, but it can help you feel better. So, you know, my, my kind of opinion is that you as a consumer are just smarter than the industry is giving you credit for at this point. I think the industry almost speaks down to us. Like we're idiots that we, you know, with, with their ridiculous claims and their advertising with their ridiculous product names and just there's so much, it's so cheesy over the top. You know, I think that when you see those ridiculous advertising claims that you know that's BS. I don't think you actually fall for a lot of those magazine ads and a lot of the stuff that they say and the big drugged up bodybuilders that are pretending like, you know, this little pill is all it took kind of thing. I think that when you look at a product and you see it has 67 different ingredients in a five-stage proprietary blend that you might wonder, how effective is this really?

I mean, you're going to fit that many ingredients in a pill this big? Come on, what is it? One microgram per? one microgram per. So, you know, I don't think that like the big A-list endorsements are as convincing as companies might, you know, seem or might think that they are, at least with a certain subset of the workout crowd. You know, maybe the majority are still totally buying into this stuff and think it's awesome. But I think that's more the newbies. And I understand I was a newbie. I was in that position where, you know you where do you start you pick up a workout magazine you don't know anything about this world you just see

these big massive dudes and you're like well I guess I'll try some of this hypermax extreme muscle then you know you just go one after another one after another until you finally get kind of jaded and you're like whatever I guess it's just kind of a waste of money. And then if you get more educated, then you realize it definitely is a waste of money. So anyways, I don't think that you as a more, if you're a relatively experienced weightlifter, I don't think you fall for that shit so easily. And I think that you actually care about what you're putting in your body and want to know exactly what is in your products.

And you also don't want to see a bunch of artificial crap. And you also don't want to see a bunch of artificial crap in there. You don't want to see a bunch of chemicals that you can't even pronounce. Like who knows what some of this stuff is and it's not necessary. I mean, uh, just to have something taste like a little bit better. You want to have, you know, strange chemicals, 32 syllable chemicals. And, and, uh, and, and, and also in terms of like artificial sweeteners and artificial food dyes, yeah they may not be as bad as some people claim. It's not like you're gonna drink a Diet Coke and get cancer, but there is enough research out there to indicate that regular consumption of chemicals like these, it

is probably not good for your health or at least I can say that there is a definite chance it's not good for your health. And in my opinion, better safe than sorry with that kind of stuff. It's not necessary to have artificial sweeteners. You can just use products that don't have any in them. And in terms of the average gym goer it actually can be eating quite a bit of this stuff um you know let's say he has like a pre-workout drink he has several scoops of protein powder a day he has some kind of pro post work recovery type drink he might even have like a bcaa intro workout kind of thing um you know every day that's that's actually quite a bit of quite a quite a bit of artificial sweeteners or and and you know if a lot of those products have dyes as well and over time it can

cause different health issues so so that's basically you know those were my thoughts going into creating my workout line which is called legion by the way l-e-g-i-o-n legionsupplements.com is the URL. And with Legion, what I'm doing is no proprietary blends. So all ingredients are, all of our formulas are transparent. We tell you exactly what's in the product. So you know what you're getting for your money and it allows you to compare. Like you actually now see, well, what am I actually getting for my money? Like that serving is 18 grams of stuff. What is that stuff? Well, when you go look at a proprietary blend, you don't know. You just see the proprietary blends,

18 grams. And what you do know is the ingredients there, they are sorted, you know, in an ascending order by weight. So the first ingredient, there's the most of that out of all of them. And the second is the second most and so forth, which is also kind of ties into a little trick companies will play. Like let's say I have a pre-workout where the first ingredient is creatine on the proprietary blend let's say it's a 10 gram proprietary blend first ingredient creatine it might be 9.5 grams creatine it might basically be all creatine and all the rest is just some tiny little percentage companies will do that because it's cheap and it makes it

you know you think you're getting all this stuff but really what you're just getting is crazy so no proprietary blends all the ingredients are backed by science which if you're familiar with my work on multiple life you're used to me linking to a million different studies I do the same thing with Legion I back up every ingredient that I use with published literature you can go verify yourself good science to not rat studies not a studies or elderly studies. Studies with healthy adults, in a lot of case athletes, things that apply to us.

No label filler ingredients. As you'll see, my products are very simple. They don't have 19 different ingredients in them. The active ingredients lists are short and the other ingredient lists are short. Contain the bare minimum that you need for sometimes masking taste. Like some amino lists are short, contain the bare minimum that you need for sometimes masking taste. Like some amino acids are bitter, so you have to actually use a little

bit of maltodextrin. Like in my pre-workout, I think the serving size is about 20 grams. About 18 grams of that is like amino acids, good stuff. And then there's about a gram or gram and a half of maltodextrin, which is necessary for masking the bitter taste of the amino acids. If the malto wasn't in there, it would taste really bad. But we don't use a bunch of label fillers and we don't use a bunch of additives or fill it with malto in this proprietary blend or anything like that. We use clinically effective dosages, which goes back to that underdosing point I talked about earlier what that means is that the ingredients that I use I use the actual dosages that are used

in studies to prove those benefits so in terms of beta alanine in my pre-workout for instance there's one study it was a meta-analysis of, I believe, 23 different studies done with beta-alanine in athletes, and it showed that the average effective dosage was about 4.8 grams. That's what you'll find in my product. So each serving, you're getting a full clinically effective dosage of, in that case, beta-alanine. My pre-workout also has citrulline malate, same story. Ornithine, same story. Beta-ene, same story.

Theanine, same story. And you can verify all this yourself by just reviewing the studies. My products are naturally sweetened and naturally flavored and that, well, in the case, they're all naturally sweetened and in the case of the protein is naturally flavored, the pre-workout is artificially flavored, and I think there's a combination of artificial and natural actually,

because to mask the taste of amino acids, some artificial flavoring is needed. But the thing about artificial flavoring is, and I did a fair amount of research on this, and also I was working with a consultant who is a, he's one of the lead researchers of a large scientific website and you know if you look at the literature out there there is just

nothing out there to indicate that artificial flavoring is even has a potential to harm you so we chose you some extra flavoring in the pre-workout but the creatine and the recovery product are naturally flavored as well because they taste good. Why not just keep it natural? So to sweeten, we use stevia and we also use a stevia extract. It's not raw stevia leaf. This particular stevia extract, which is called Reb-A, it's the short name for it. It's like Ribodium-A, red a it's the short name for it's like we're body ma things

are longer but it's it's three to four hundred times sweeter than sugar if I remember correctly and it doesn't have the bitter kind of aftertaste that there's another molecule that sometimes used to sweeten but has a kind of a bitter taste to it so red a doesn't so the products you don't have any kind of weird aftertaste. They taste totally fine. And no artificial food dyes because why do you really care if your drink is white or blood red? I don't think so. There's no reason to be drinking that stuff every day. And finally, honest advertising. If you go over to the website at legionsupplements.com, go look at how I advertise my products. I mean, I open up by saying a lot of the same things in this video. You don't need supplements to build

a good body. They can help. And I'm dedicated to only selling the ones that I know can help. But, you know, even if you don't buy any of my products, I hope that you come away just as a more educated consumer and at least don't support the companies that are scamming people and just being shady and just don't waste your money once again if you don't want to spend money on supplements spend it on food instead spend it on a good gym membership you know a good pair of lifting shoes things that actually matter so yeah that's what I'm doing with Legion I have some plans for more products of course my line of products is probably not going to be as extensive ever really as some of these other companies because there's just not

that many things that are worth even creating that I would be interested in taking myself. But there are a few other things I'm excited. We're going to be coming out with a multivitamin that's going to kick ass. It'll obviously have the vitamins and minerals that you need that you'd find in the standard multi but the extra things we're going to be putting in are going to be great for helping the body just deal with physiological stress low in cortisol levels and you know good science behind these ingredients just good stuff that i actually have been wanting a supplement with myself i just want to buy seven different supplements and wear these things and already take enough pills as it is

So I'll be excited to just have a multi that has that in it also, we're gonna create Probably not gonna be a BCAA but we're gonna create a particularly for when you're gonna be doing fast and training It's gonna be a amino acid drink for that meaning it's gonna have the leucine that you want But instead of isoleucine and basically which don't really serve any purpose in this in these circumstances isoleucine I believe stimulates protein synthesis mildly but not anywhere near leucine's ability so you can drop the isoleucine and the valine and replace them instead with amino acids that actually can benefit

your workout so that actually pretty cool because there are a couple things that we wanted to put in the pre-workout, but we had to cut the manufacturing price off somewhere. So they might be able to find their way into this replacement for a BCAA where, you know, if you're going to be doing fasted training, a pre-workout doesn't, that's not, no pre-workouts have leucine in them or very, I've never seen one that does or have enough. So if you wanted to train fasted, you would have the, I don't even have a name for it, I don't know, the leucine supplement that we're going to be creating, and they'll have some other stuff in it that will also improve your workout, plus the pre-workout would be pretty cool. And then, you know, we're going to do our own fish oil, because fish oil is awesome.

I would like to do a spirulina product, probably with chlorella. I just need to do some more research on it. And so, yeah, I mean, we have some plans. But once again, we're going to be sticking to our formula, which is really just going to be like, be honest. Don't be shady. Don't, like, have some integrity. You don't have to rip people off to make money. Create good products.

Be open to customer feedback and i and i i think uh customers will support it um and i know that me as a consumer that's what i always wanted um so yeah i mean that's what i'm doing with legion now i'd love to to hear anything you have to say about it um once again the website is legionsupplements.com you can leave a comment below in this video or you can write me on Facebook. You can email me, whatever. I respond to everything personally. I like staying in touch with everyone. I think it's an important point.

I'm a fast reader, fast typer, so it works. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this podcast. I know I keep on saying that I'll be better on the schedule. I try to fit it in here and there. But once again, you'll probably see another one in the next couple of weeks. So until then, if you like the video, if you like the podcast, please subscribe to the channel, to the podcast, and you can find me at muscleforlife.com. Thanks again.