Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - The Story of My 8-Figure Supplement Company Legion Athletics

Episode Date: December 28, 2018

As the founder and CEO of a successful supplement company, Legion Athletics, I get asked quite a few questions about the business and industry. Sometimes people are looking for help starting a supplement business of their own and other times they’re just curious what goes on behind the scenes. I don't talk much about the ins and outs of Legion here on my podcast, so I thought it might be worth sharing an interview I did on another podcast called Muscle, Mindset, & Meal Prep. In it, I give an in-depth look beneath the hood of both my company and the supplement space in general and discuss the good, bad, and ugly. The host Simon and I talk about the genesis, growth, and goals of Legion Athletics, how to be an informed consumer in the corrupt, treacherous, and deceitful world of supplements, where I hope the industry will go in the future (and how I plan to help make this happen), and more. 6:08 - How do you feel the fitness industry is doing with delivering high quality products and delivering a honest message to consumers? 14:07 - Why did you create Legion Athletics? 31:10 - Do you think making honest products will help you become a bigger player in the long run? 36:19 - How does Legion Athletics set themselves apart from competitors who advertise poor products? 48:38 - What’s in the future for Legion Athletics and Muscle For Life? 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/

When you see a pre-workout at your local supplement store selling for $30, you can figure they maybe spent $5 or $6 at most to produce it, and you cannot make a good pre-workout for $5 or $6. Hey, Mike Matthews here from Muscle for Life and Legion Athletics. Thank you for joining me for another episode of the Muscle for Life podcast. And this time I am sharing an interview I did on another podcast because I think you might find it interesting. the founder and CEO of a successful supplement company, Legion Athletics, I often get asked questions about the business and the industry. Sometimes people are looking for help starting their own supplement business and other times they're just kind of curious what goes on behind

the scenes. And as I don't talk much about the ins and outs of Legion here on my podcast, I thought it might be worth sharing this interview that I did on a podcast called Muscle Mindset and Meal Prep. In it, I give an in-depth look beneath the hood of both my company and the supplement space in general. And the host, Simon, and I discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly. Specifically, we talk about the genesis growth and goals of Legion Athletics. We also talk about how to be an informed consumer in the corrupt, treacherous, and deceitful world of supplements, where I hope the industry will go in the future, and how I plan to help make this happen, and more.

So I hope you like the interview. This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm just going to quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my 100% natural pre-workout fat burner supplement forge. Now it was designed to be used specifically when exercising in a fasted state, and it helps you maximize fat burning while training on an empty stomach, minimize the amount of muscle that you lose while training in

this state, and maintain intensity and focus in your workouts. All that is why Forge has over 400 reviews on Amazon with a four-star average and another 220 on my website with a four and a half star average. So if you want to get leaner, faster, and especially in the quote unquote, hard to lose spots like the hips, thighs, and belly, then you want to head over to www.legionathletics.com and pick up a bottle of Forge today. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code podcast at checkout and you'll save 10% on your entire order. And lastly, you should also know that I have a very simple 100% money back guarantee that works like this. You either love my stuff or you get your money back, period. You don't have to return the products. You don't have to fill out forms. You don't have to jump through any other hoops or go through any other shenanigans.

So you really can't lose here. Head over to www.lesionathletics.com now, place your order, and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet. And if for whatever reason, they're just not for you, contact us and we will give you a full refund on the spot. All righty, that is enough shameless plugging for now at least. Let's get to the show. Hey there, and welcome to this episode of the podcast. And I'm super excited to have with me Mike Matthews from MuscleForLife.com and Legion Athletics. Hey Mike, thanks for joining me on the show. Hey Simon, yeah thanks for having me. Cool, cool, cool. So it's an absolute pleasure to have Mike on the show today for a couple of different reasons. So

firstly we're going to be talking about supplements. So you know a lot of people out there their goal is fat loss, it's building muscle or both. And typically the case for most people, supplements tend to appear in that conversation at one point or another. Some people, it's the first thing they think about. And people get bombarded with supplement advertising across social media and fitness magazines. And it's come synonymous with the industry right now. So I'm excited to have Mike on the show because his company, Legion Athletics, is increasingly becoming a bigger and bigger player in the world of supplementation. But more than that, Legion products come from a very scientific and research orientated background, which is what I think, you know, excites me about products that the company produces. And also, you know, why I think it's important that companies like that are rising to the top. But other than that as well, so I've just talking to Mike before we

jumped on the show, was that four years ago, almost to the day is when I had my accident, broke my hip and, you know, really kind of my life started transforming. But, you know, the real kickstarter for that transformation was Mike's book, Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, with the principles in there still some of the ones that i follow to this day kind of added to that as i've you know grown and changed with my own fitness goals but it's allowed me to build the business that i have you know talk to awesome people on podcasts and really live a basically my my best life i would say so mike is kind of like my fitness man crush. Flattered, flattered.

So with all that said, we're going to crack into some cool questions all around supplementation. So first up, Mike, as I mentioned at the start, supplements are often the start point for a lot of people. They look for answers to losing weight and building muscle in fat burners, testosterone boosters, BCAAs, and that's just to name a few. Overall, as someone who's within the supplement industry, how do you feel the industry as a whole is doing in terms of delivering high quality products to consumers and also delivering an honest message with that? Pretty poorly, right? I mean, that's the honest answer. So when you and I talk supplementation, we tend to be focused in more on the evidence-based fitness space, sports nutrition. But when you zoom out and you look at supplementation, the bigger picture of supplementation, which is tens of billions of dollars a year in revenue, just go on Amazon and look, for example, what are the top selling fat loss supplements? It's going to be Garcinia Cambogia, raspberry ketones, CLA, stuff that either does nothing or does very little in some people and nothing in others. So with fat loss in particular, those types of products

are generally high margin products. So you're dealing with a hot pain button in people, people that really want to lose weight. And often you're dealing with low market awareness people, people who are maybe at the, in the beginning of their fitness journeys. And they, while they may not quite believe the claims that I can just take these pills and lose 30 pounds in 30 days or 20 pounds in 30 days or whatever. Yeah. It might sound a bit too, too good to be true, but Hey, it's 30 bucks, 40 bucks, 50 bucks. Maybe who cares? I'll give it a try. Right. And you know, these people then go through that. And I know this firsthand having worked virtually with thousands and thousands of people over the years, they go through that cycle, maybe a couple of

times until they go, all right, well, it looks like these pills, these quick fixes, these magic bullets don't work. I'm now going to start looking at nutrition is generally the next place they start looking. And then that could be a couple rounds of fad diets until they go, okay, well, fad dieting. Yeah. Maybe I lose weight, but I gain it all back. It's not the long-term solution. And then the next level of awareness is maybe more where I reside, which is, okay, let's talk first principles here. Let's learn how the metabolism works. And let's also face the fact that you really only want to be losing about 1% of your body weight per week maximum. And it's going to require a bit of, I wouldn't say pain, but discomfort. You're going to have to restrict your calories to some degree. You're not going to be able to eat whatever you

want, whenever you want. Supplements aren't going to make that big of a difference. They can help a little bit. And in the case of fat loss, for example, there's obviously caffeine. There's good evidence that that just increases basal metabolic rate. So depending on your caffeine tolerance and how often you have it, you can burn, let's say, up to an extra 100 to 150 calories a day with a moderate intake of caffeine. There's sinephrine is also a mild stimulant. It works synergistically with caffeine and really just mostly to further increase your basal metabolic rate. Yohimbine is an interesting molecule. So there are a few things that you can take to lose fat faster, but you have to make sure that you are getting your diet and your exercise right. What that really means is you're getting

your energy balance right, which is the relationship between your caloric intake and expenditure. So if you know what you're doing in the kitchen and you know what you're doing in the gym, although the gym is not tremendously important in terms of fat loss, mostly it just helps you burn more energy and it helps you preserve muscle. So those are good things. But of course you can lose fat without exercising, but if you're going to do it all right, then you want to make sure that you are regulating your calories and your protein, carbohydrate, and fat intakes properly and doing some exercise. Ideally, you'd focus most of your time on just training your muscles. If you get those things in place, you're going to lose fat. And if you add supplementation, I would say the most you could probably hope for is an increase of... It's hard to put an exact

number to it. And this isn't a strictly science-based number. It's more just anecdotal having worked with lots of people, but I think it's reasonable to say anywhere from 25, you can lose fat anywhere from like 25 to 50% faster with the right supplements. And that actually sounds like, wow, really, when you put it in, in absolute terms, we're talking about, let's say you can lose one pound of fat per week without any supplements you can probably increase that to maybe one and a quarter to one and a half pounds per week with supplements as you say it all really comes back to the calorie side of things first and then building on that with good supplementation and those sort of dietary habits and doing the right things in the gym as well is the thing that's going to take that a little bit further but i think that you know as you said before a lot of people start with the supplements

and forget the nutrition side because that's the hard bit you know it's a lot easier to take a pill than it is to you know monitor calories and make sure you're on track with your nutrition i think it's maybe part of uh as a society how we how we operate in terms of quick fixes and everything's instantaneous that, you know, the pill, the powder, the potion has an allure to it that, you know, just track your calories doesn't. Yeah. I mean, that's understandable to some degree, if it were that easy, Hey, great. You know what I mean? Hey, and if you are just getting into this and you don't really have much information, you don't understand any of what I just spoke about in terms of energy balance. You couldn't even define the word calorie. I can understand why many people, including many,

it's not about being stupid. It's more just a matter of ignorance of not knowing, right? So you can have many smart people, people who are extremely educated in certain regards and could talk about things in depth that we have no idea about. They just don't know about dieting. They don't know about the metabolism. So they're just like, yeah, fuck it. Hey, you know what I mean? Whatever. It's, it's $30 and we'll see what happens. And they do it and they go, well, that didn't do anything. I guess I'll move on to the next thing. And, uh, one of my goals is to try to help as many people skip the first kind of muddling your way through things phase. So let's see if we can just skip that and let's get to the stuff that just works and delivers immediate results. They're not necessarily

staggering or shocking results, but they are consistent and they are significant. I mean, yeah, you lose a few pounds in your first week. That's not going to mean much depending on where you're at in terms of the mirror, but it is a couple pounds. Let's say it's two pounds or whatever. And your weight loss, let's say it settles into a range of about a pound a week. Again, week to week, there's not a huge change, but you start taking pictures. Let's say you're taking pictures and you start looking at them in terms of two or three or even four week intervals, you really start to see progress. And then you also know, hey, this is working and it's continuing to work. And if it stops working, I know what to do. So really, you know, my system on the whole can never stop working.

Yeah. It might take a little bit longer than I thought getting into this or than I would have if I were living in my fantasy, but I can get to where I want to be. And it's not grueling. Once I'm there, I can loosen up on my diet and I don't have to be as strict with everything. I don't have to at least like, at least you got to pay attention to your calories, right? And you can eat more intuitively. That message is very encouraging to many people, especially the people who have gone through the roller coaster of yo-yo dieting or chasing, you know, silver bullets. Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might

enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. Twitter at Muscle for Life and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. to what was the sort of rationale or what was the sort of kickstart for you to want to to build legion athletics from the beginning yeah it was really just to scratch my own itch it was to create stuff that i wished someone else would be creating really and i'm actually more interested in i would say health and wellness physical psychological than body composition because there's not too much you can do to affect your body composition with supplementation. I mentioned a few things for fat loss. There are a few others and you'll

find most all of them. I have two fat loss products and you'll find most all of them in those products. And as far as muscle gain and strength gain goes, you have creatine, obviously. That's a no-brainer. You have some good evidence with beta-alanine. You have citrulline can play a role in that. You have BTE. And there are a few things. There just aren't that many. However, when you get into general health and wellness, there are many different things that you're really never going to get from your diet that you can supplement with. And again, none of them are necessary. But if you have the inclination and the budget, there are only upsides. There are really no downsides other than the money

that it costs. Assuming that they work for you. Some people, supplementation being what it is, some people simply don't respond to certain supplements, like even creatine. In some people, it just doesn't work. It does nothing. And that just is what it is, right? But if you look at it in terms of the bell curve, if you're somewhere in the middle, if you're kind of a normal type of physiology, you are probably going to respond to one degree or another in certain ways when you take certain things. So yeah, so I thought it was neat to be able to create a number of products. If you look at my multivitamin triumph, you look what's in there in addition to the vitamins and minerals, there's a lot of good stuff in there that many people supplement with individually. So many people buy CoQ10, many people buy aged garlic extract, many people buy ashwagandha, they buy those things separately.

And we just kind of threw them all into one product, which you can do sometimes. I mean, you got to make sure, and this is where I have to give all the credit to my director of research who comes up with all the formulations. His name's Curtis, and he's actually the co-founder and was the lead researcher and writer over at examine.com, which is a website that you're probably familiar with and many of your listeners might be familiar with. But it's like the premier resource on the Internet for science-based information on supplementation in particular. Most everything you read, all the highly technical stuff was written by Curtis. And in his tenure there, in his time there, he personally read and collated, analyzed, put into their database over 40,000 scientific papers.

I mean, he's really at a pharma D level understanding of biology and supplementation. So coming back to the multivitamin, one of the things Curtis is also looking for is synergies. When combining multiple ingredients, he's looking for synergies and also looking for contraindications or making sure that you're not putting things in a supplement together that compete for transporters, for example. And so there's actually quite a bit of thought that goes into the formulations beyond just, Hey, that, that sounds cool. Let's put there. That's what that one sounds cool too. Let's put that in that. Uh, and I know one other thing I wanted personally is I wanted supplements that were naturally sweetened, uh, mostly naturally sweetened and then flavoring.

You might as well, and you might as well not use artificial food dyes. And the reason for that is not that, uh, artificial sweeteners are as bad as some people would have you believe. But if you look at the average guy, for example, who's into weightlifting and into supplementation, of which there are many out there, let's say he has a full serving of a pre-workout before he trains, and he has a full serving of a post-workout after he trains. And he probably also has some protein powder before he trains and after he trains. It could be one to two servings before and after. Probably has a bit more protein powder later as well at some point, whether it's before bed or in the afternoon or whatever.

And many people also then drink BCAAs all day. And in addition to that, may take other powder-based supplements. And my point with that is you can get up to your artificial sweetener intake can actually get quite high to a point where a more scientifically grounded, level-headed person would even say, someone like Curtis would say, yeah, that's probably not good for your health over time. And so I myself wanted to be able to use a pre-workout, a post-workout, use protein powders, use a greens supplement. BCAs are worthless, so I don't sell them and I don't use them, but I wanted to be able to use all of that without having to worry about artificial sweetener intake. And I myself have also noticed that if I have too much artificial sweeteners, like five, too much sucralose in a day, my stomach tends to get upset.

So for what it's worth, that at least tells me something that there's a point where I probably should need to stop eating more sucralose. So that was another thing for me. And one of the sort of things that kind of jumped out of me when I looked into Legion products, when I first kind of heard of them, that you know having studied nutrition and looked at you know the right doses of various different products that go into various different supplements was that you know you have a look at some of some of the big names out there and their supplements whether it be a multivitamin or whether it be some form of pre-workout but the the level of dosing of those key ingredients is sometimes alarmingly low so often yeah so so i was you know very presently surprised when i looked into your products

originally and saw you know okay we're looking at beta alanine we're looking at all the various different multivitamins you've got in Triumph, that they're actually the right levels, which shouldn't be surprising. It should be that's the way it is. But I think unless people have got an understanding of where those levels should be, which, let's face it, 99% of people won't even have a clue where the right threshold should be for the right clinical dosage. But that was the thing that struck me from Legion products was the honesty behind it and the evidence-based approach to it was something that really jumped

out at me as being credible. Yeah. And really what that comes down to is I spend a lot more to produce these products than most other companies. For example, my greens product cost me close to $18 a bottle, I believe, somewhere around 18, give or take 50 cents to produce and we sell it for 40. So, you know, somebody hears that and they go, oh, if they're not business savvy, they might be like, well, that sounds, I mean, you're doubling it. That sounds high. No, not at all. Actually in a hard goods business, whether it's supplementation or clothing or whatever, I would say an average markup would be 5X, 5X production costs. It would be considered an average markup. Not great, but okay. Lower than that, it gets worse and worse.

And higher than that, it gets better and better. If you can get up to 8 to 10 times, that's considered fantastic. And in the case of clothing, for example, it doesn't really matter. Whatever shirt you're wearing right now, does the fact that the company you bought that from probably produced it for one eighth to one tenth of what you paid? Do you care? No, you don't care. It's a shirt. You bought it because you like it. And the company is not claiming anything about it. It's a shirt. I mean, you do have some high end, especially in performance where shenanigans, where there are claims being made about clothing that, you know, like it's going to improve recovery or in actually ironically, in the case of compression, there actually is some evidence for that. But my point is you have a little bit of bullshit

on the marketing side of things with clothing, but for the most part, it's just, you went to a store, you saw a shirt on a rack and you're like, Oh, I like that. And you bought it. That's it. Supplementation is different. Of course. Um, requires the same margins to run a good business. And what that comes down to is in most businesses, you have to spend a lot of money on marketing and advertising, and especially in competitive industries, because you're going up against companies who are spending a lot of money in marketing and advertising. And one of the simple realities of advertising is repetition is huge. The number of times that you can get in front of somebody, they can just see your logo or hear the

name of your brand. The more likely they are to think of you when the time comes to buy whatever it is that you're selling. A lot of advertising is not direct marketing. They're not trying to sell you on buying anything right then. They're just hoping that when you do, it could be a month later, go, oh, I want to get a couple of new dress shirts. Who do you think of? I think of a company that sends me catalogs every two weeks, Charles and something. That's who comes to mind. I'm not in the market for dress shirts, but if I were, I would go to them because that's who comes to mind. I'm not in the market for dress shirts, but if I were, I would go to them because that's who comes to mind first. So when you're trying to play that game, that's the traditional, you have something to sell and you need to get the word out. You have to spend a lot of money on marketing and advertising. So that's where a lot of your

revenue is going to. You have to plow a lot of that back into the marketing and advertising. And of course, you need to make a profit. If your business does 10% net, that's good. That's not great. By most standards, that's good. 15% is very good. And anything higher than that is great. Anything lower than 10% is varying shades of bad. So the problem with supplements is you can't make good supplements and have the margins that you need to make all of that work. Because let's also remember that retail is its own game. It has middlemen. It has wholesalers and distributors who generally are marking stuff up double.

So they want to buy something for $10, then sell it to the retailer for $20. And the retailer generally wants to at least sell it for $40, probably upwards of the retailer for $20. And the retailer generally wants to at least sell it for 40, probably upwards of say 40 to 60, right? So you have these, and then that goes back to what can you spend as the manufacturer. So when you start running those numbers, what you quickly learn is, yeah, if you're going to try to sell a pre-workout for $50, you probably don't want to spend more than, I don't know, $10 making it. And ideally you'd spend less than that. However, in the case of a pre-workout, you can do okay with $10. Let's face it, most pre-workouts are not that expensive. So when you see a pre-workout

at your local supplement store selling for $30, you can figure they maybe spent $5 or $6 at most to produce it. And you cannot make a good pre-workout for $5 or $6. Well, let's say you can make an okay one, but if you are going to sell it honestly, it would be this product isn't very good. It's okay. And here's what's okay about it. It's probably better than just caffeine pills, maybe, depending on the formulation, depending on how they spent their money. It may not. The honest pitch would be like, eh, all of these ingredients are at about half of the clinically effective levels, which is what you were talking about. You look at the research and you go, okay, you should be having about this much beta-alanine per day if it's going to do anything.

Yeah, we have about half that. The citrulline, we have about one third of the amount. And creatine, we have about one fifth of the amount. So it's not a very good product, but hey, buy it if you want to buy it. Don't buy it if you don't want to buy it. Then at least then there would be some integrity. But of course, that's not how the game is played. The game is you make the shitty product that's underdosed and you make extravagant claims and you pay bodybuilders and fitness people on tons of drugs to pretend like your products are, you know, making any sort of difference in their, in their training or physiques whatsoever. And, and, and you just spend a lot on your advertising to keep on repeating these messages over and over and over. And so over time, you make money. And depending on what else you might do, like,

for example, some companies have been caught, some supplement companies have been caught putting dangerous chemicals, methamphetamine-like chemicals in some cases in their products, which of course, there was a product called Craze, which you can read about online. I used to get emailed about that product when it was out there and people were, were all hyped about it. And so I'd have people emailing me saying, this is the craziest shit. This craze is amazing. I've never had, I've never felt so good with a pre-workout. And I remember looking at the ingredients and I was like, there's nothing in this. I mean, it's like a little bit of creatine, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. These people must never have had caffeine before or something. Well, it turns out there was

a methamphetamine like drug in it. So yeah. Okay. Now it makes sense. Meth probably does make for some pretty good, pretty good workouts. Um, and so anyway, that's, that's the supplement game for the most part. And what that means though, is, you know, when I was getting into it, I was just not interested in playing that game. Just personally, I don't need the supplement business, to be honest. Let's say if I just want to look at this financially, if all I wanted to do was make enough money to live well and provide for my family and build a retirement nest egg, blah, blah, blah. I could just write books. I currently sell on average 30,000 to 40,000 books a month self-published. I could just keep doing that and easily triple those numbers probably in the next year if that's all I was doing. Let's say two years if I want to be very conservative

in my estimates. So I was like, if I'm going to get into supplements, I'm going to do it simply because I'm going to do it the right way. And I'm going to go into it knowing that the business is not going to be as profitable as business experts would advise. It just won't. Legion, I don't think we'll ever be able to put up a 15% net, for example. I mean, I might be wrong. I would like to be wrong, but I really don't see how I get there with my cost of goods and the price of raws only go up over time. Prices do not go down. And sure, there are some things, there are some economies of scale,

not as much as some people would think. And we can stay lean as an organization, but it'll always be, profitability will always be an uphill battle. Now the business can be profitable enough to make it worthwhile. Obviously, I mean, if it were like a 1% to 3% net business, what's the point of that? You're a conduit for cash. That's kind of a waste of time.

So I got into it knowing that though. And I've been very transparent about all of this since the beginning. And this is really the story of how it came about. And that has resonated with a lot of people where they appreciate the approach and they appreciate the formulations and they understand that while my products are not cheap, like a $40 greens supplement, that's not cheap. It's not tremendously expensive. It's not completely outpriced in terms of just market averages, but they're overpriced, but it's not cheap. However, when they really look at what they're getting and they look at the dosages that they're getting, and they understand that where my costs are at, a lot of people go, I want the best and I'm willing to spend a bit more for it. Yeah. And I guess following on from that is that no doubt you could have, if you wanted to,

you could have released a bunch of supplements, not backed by any sort of science, underdosed high profit margins for a ton more revenue. So do you think... And really a ton more profit too. I mean, that would have been... Because what I've done from the marketing side of things is, okay, I don't have the marketing budget to go head to head with some of my competitors, if we're looking at just pure dollar spend and eyeballs. So instead, what I've done is I've leveraged my platform as an author and a content creator. So I've built very popular blogs over at Muscle for Life and Legion. I have my own podcast, which is popular. I have books and social media, YouTube, whatever, blah, blah, blah. So I've decided to leverage that instead. And if I look at it again, in terms of dollars and cents,

even that doesn't make sense. Because if I were to charge Legion a market rate for all of the promotion that I do, if you just took me and if you said, okay, Legion would have to approach me as a... I have nothing. I'm not an owner of the company. What would it cost? Or if you look at it, what could I get if I were to go to some other company and just say, Hey, here are all the things I have. I have hundreds of thousands of people on my email lists. I have million to two, well, it's over 2 million visits a month on my websites. I have all these books. I'm going to give it all to you and we're going to promote your stuff. You know, we're going to weave it into everything. If I were to say, how much could I get from that? It's, it's a lot more than... Because I have work that I do in the business of Legion as the CEO,

and I work on copy, I work on marketing stuff. You could look at that as salaried work. And then all the stuff I do outside of that is promotional. And my compensation for that promotional, if you look at it from that perspective is probably one eighth, what it would be if I were just to go to another company and say, okay, I'm going to shill for you. How much will you pay me? Do you think like from a point of view of integrity that in terms of the products that you make and the way you promote and all of that sort of stuff, do you think that that will help you in the longterm become one of the bigger players in the supplement industry as potentially other companies fade away because they haven't got that more honest message, that integrity? Do you think that stands you in good stead?

I think that's the direction. Yeah, I think that's the direction. I mean, I think consumers are getting more educated. It's, I mean, what am I basing that on? I mean, what am I basing that on? I guess I have a selection bias because I'm dealing with people who are actively seeking out education. But if I were to not think about it too deeply supplement space in particular are becoming more educated, more skeptical, which is good. I mean, that's something I push and I tell people, you should be skeptical of everything, of what I'm saying. If it has anything to do with health or fitness, you should start out probably assuming guilty and they have to prove their innocence really. And there are various

ways to see if people can live up to that and see if you really should be listening to this person or not, or buying from this company or not. And so I would like to think that, yeah, what I'm doing is going to resonate with more and more people over time as they become more and more educated as a whole and demand better and better products and leave it up to the companies to figure out margins and numbers where consumers are like, yeah, we don't care. That's your problem. What we want are minimally, we just want products with, let's just say it's 100% clinically effective dosages. Let's just start there, right? So any ingredient, which is one of the standards that Legion lives by, any ingredient, if we're including it in a product,

it's at a level that has been demonstrated effective in scientific research. And sometimes that has to be teased out. Sometimes in the case of beta-alanine, you have, for example, one or two good meta-analyses that you can kind of just turn to, which are studies of studies. So that makes it easy, right? You go, okay, somewhere around three and a half to five grams a day with the lower end being more or less as effective as the higher end. Okay, that's pretty simple. But in other cases, it actually requires, this is again, where more of Curtis's expertise comes in. It requires really actually reviewing literature and teasing out details and piecing a whole picture together to determine what is that level

that is going to be effective. I mean, you really want to be in that sweet spot where you're putting enough to be effective and to back up your marketing claims, especially if you're citing research as to benefits, but not so much that you're not really getting anything more out of it. You're just wasting money. Because that's also something we have to look at on our end is we go, okay, here's our budget for this product. We want to use that money as effectively as possible. And if three grams of something works really, if the evidence shows that three grams works more or less as good as five grams, we want three grams and more is not always better. That's a standard that consumers can demand, which means that in some cases, uh, it might mean that products would have fewer ingredients and you'll find that

with some of my stuff. It has fewer ingredients because getting the right amounts of those ingredients is actually quite expensive. Like my pre-workout doesn't, I mean, it has what six ingredients, uh, and some pre-workouts have 30 when you, when you start getting into proprietary blends, which are bullshit, it's just used to cover up the pixie dusting that we've been talking about, but fewer ingredients, higher effective dosages. I'll take that over the flip side, which is a long impressively looking label. But when you really dig into it, which is a long, impressively looking label. But when you really dig into it, you go, well, how much does five milligrams of that really matter? Like what? That's not going to do anything. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I mean,

like you said quite early on is that there's actually just a limited amount of ingredients and supplements. They're actually going to have any effect. So the long list that you see on some of these products actually contain probably 80% of absolute rubbish that's not required. And then 20% of what is required is completely underdosed and not effective. So exactly. And then of course, in the marketing, you just call out the good stuff. You just don't mention that there's too little of it. Yeah. And do you think like um the phrase evidence-based so whether that's supplements or just nutrition training anything like that is sort of coming to the fore in a good way so there's lots of people out there myself so people like james krieger mike mcdonald all these sorts of people spencer nadolski all these guys putting out some

great information about you know the evidence-based approach but it also feels like that's becoming a bit of a buzzword and some of these sort of less qualified i guess the dodgy companies basically trying to latch on to that and they they're citing research that actually isn't true or they're kind of twisting it do you have to kind of do anything to set yourself apart to say you you know, we are genuine evidence-based rather than these guys over here who are just kind of making up as they go along? Yeah, that's tough because that's a battle of perception, right? With most people, if you go look at one of the sales pages on my website, you'll see that there's a lot of research that

is cited. If you don't check it, though, I mean, it could be complete bullshit. I could just be citing random studies about anything. So if you do check it and you go, okay, well, this is good. This is a study on beta alanine. But if you can't get access to the paper, or if you don't know how to interpret scientific research, you then again are still coming back to like, well, I don't know. Now, I'm just trusting Mike. I'm trusting his scientific advisory board, which has people like Spencer Nadelsky and James Krieger on it. I'm just trusting the brand, basically. And that's where I have a number of things that... For example, one of the things that we're going to do is we're going to start putting up our certificates of analyses on the website. We're working out the design of it, where it's going to go.

We just don't want the pages to get too cluttered. But what that is, is when a company produces a product, they do batches of, they do rounds of testing to make sure that everything blended properly and it has the proper levels of everything that you wanted in there. And so we're going to start sharing those on the website to just increase transparencies and say, hey, here's evidence, here's hard evidence that this product has exactly what we say it has, right? And we're going to be doing a number of other things. We're funding research, for example, it's actually research on lean bulking. It's not on supplementation per se,

but we're also going to start funding research on supplementation, which I'm excited about, actually, not only from a marketing standpoint, but just from a contributing, giving back to the community, the evidence-based community standpoint, because there aren't very many companies that are doing this. I think I know of one or two others and they're obscure. They're not doing a good job really spreading the word about it. But ultimately, that's a battle of, again, that's a battle of perception. And my goal is that through all the content that I'm producing and through stuff like, if you look at the sales pages, they're very informative. They explain every ingredient, what the ingredient does in the body, what the benefits are.

And I cite research for all of it. And very educated people really appreciate that. We hear from very educated people very often who actually do take the time to check those citations and they can get access to papers because often reading the abstract is not enough. It can lead to false positive or negative conclusions. They get access to the papers. They look at it and they go, this is good quality research. This is fairly interpreted. It's not being oversold. But for the average person, of course, they don't know that. They just go, okay, well, it's good that

there's research cited. It's good that this is very informative and I'm not just being hit with buzzwords and over-the-top promises. I'm actually being educated so I understand what I'm taking and why. It's good that these certificates of analyses are on the site. And so I want as many of those positive signs as I can really come up with to just inspire trust. Also, this Mike guy, I've listened to some of his podcast episodes. He seems to know what he's talking about. He seems to be genuine. I read his book. He seems to know what he's talking about. He seems to be genuine. I read his book. He seems to know what he's talking about. It seems to be genuine. So there's no quick fix to that. It's really just a lot of being smart and doing a lot of little and in some cases, big things right. And that takes a lot more work. And it does actually turn some people off. Again, people who are still in

that phase of, I just want something simple. Just tell me that I can lose a bunch of weight quickly and I'll try it basically, are often turned off by me and my products, not just supplements, but also my books. Because for example, in my books, I openly say that you're not going to lose 30 pounds in 30 days. In fact, I don't want you to because that's probably not healthy and it's definitely not sustainable. I want you to be looking more at the long-term. And I think there's a psychological benefit of that as well. I want you to first just say to yourself, assuming that what Mike is telling me is true, assuming that I'm not going to hate my diet, I'm not going to hate my workouts, I'm not going to be starving all day or be battling cravings. I can envision myself doing this for a year. And that's what I want people

to really be thinking with your first year, not your first month, but your first year. So again, that message though, doesn't resonate with everybody. However, a lot of the people that are in the quick fix phase eventually do come back when they are like, okay, I want real information. I've been going after all of this magic bullet stuff. And so I'm going to, what's the opposite of the magic bullet stuff? Oh, okay. It's going to take time. It's going to take work stuff. Oh, and then hopefully they think of me at that point where they're like, oh, that's what that, that dude, Mike was talking about that. And he was saying that you can't just take pills and powders and you're going to have to learn a bit about the metabolism. You're going to have to pay attention to how much you're eating and so forth. I'm going

to go back to check him out. That's kind of a bit of my, I guess you could say, marketing philosophy as to how I want to further differentiate myself in the evidence-based space because yes, a lot of people are glomming onto that term because they figure that it inspires confidence and it may still, but of course, like anything, the more people that start saying, oh, evidence-based supplements, evidence-based information, evidence-based workouts, blah, blah, blah, the less effective it becomes and then somebody has to come up with the next buzzword and the next buzzword it's like fad diets same same thing yeah i think the the thing for me that sets your stuff apart is that you just touched on it

there was you've got like a a massive body of articles and all the stuff that goes into the website it's almost it's not just a supplement website i know you've got muscle for life as well which has got a you know similar types of content on it in terms of articles and things like that but when you go on to any supplement website i've never seen one where you get a huge wall of information that's all research-based and has got that level of content in it. And then I think, you know, when you're pushing that clear message about, you know, these are the right things to do, and this is how you solve all of your problems. And, you know, these are the

evidence-based solutions to those problems. And I think marrying that with a supplement company seems to be, for me, that inspires confidence in the product. That's kind of how I perceive Legion Athletics from an outside point of view. And from a business perspective, it's also a great strategy because it's very hard to duplicate. One of the problems is with these types of products, just like any type of product is, if people perceive your product as a commodity, it's just interchangeable with anything else like it. Very hard to inspire customer loyalty and brand loyalty.

And that's the... You want to be able to shift from a commodity to a brand, right? And you want to be able to protect your market share and grow it. And how easily your business can be duplicated is a huge factor in terms of a strength or a weakness. So the harder it is for somebody with money to just come along and copy and paste your business, the more protected you are and the better your business is. So as far as supplements go, it's very easy to just copy and paste. If you have money, that's what we see a lot of out there, especially in the Amazon space,

where you have big brands on Amazon, bigger, bigger, a few of them even bigger than I am on Amazon. And we do a lot of money on Amazon that are run by marketers that have nothing to do with fitness. Their products, their formulations are across the board, mediocre or worse, but they have money and they have expertise and they know what they're doing. And that's when they came along. One or two in particular that have come up fairly quickly. And so they battle it out. And yeah, you could say I'm in that fray as well, but I've done a good job setting myself apart by spending... I mean, I've published probably one and a half million words now between Muscle for Life and the blogs over at Muscle for Life and Legion Athletics. And if you take my books into

account, it's another few hundred thousand words and podcasts. I don't know how many words I've spoken. A lot I've put up. What are we at? 200 episodes or more or something? I don't even know. But the point is, you can't just copy and paste that. That takes work. And it's also hard to do well. Of course, there are a lot of people producing content in this space, but by my standards, a lot of it is very, very poor. And, you know, I would say my content, my own content by my standards is good. It's not great. Maybe sometimes it has shades of great, but I'd say mostly it's just, it's good. It's clear, it's informative, it's well-researched

and it's practical. And that's what most people are looking for. However, you know, this is one of those writing or speaking. Those are things communicating. You can say is just a skill that you can never master fully master. You can always be better. And if you are not getting significantly better, that's, that's a bad sign. Like if you're not looking back better, that's a bad sign. If you're not looking back on stuff that you wrote or spoke two years ago and cringing a little bit here and there, you're not working hard enough, basically. And so I've seen a number of supplement companies that have tried to duplicate what I'm doing. Okay, put a blog up, put some articles up. But in some cases, the content is really not good and it doesn't catch on. It's not that simple. You can't just...

And funny enough, in some cases, I can see that they're going after my keywords that I rank well for. And they're taking articles I've written and just changing words, which legally speaking is permissible. It's just lame. It's obviously just plagiarism. But legally speaking is permissible. It's, um, it's just kind of lame. It's obviously just plagiarism, but it's not even that it's not that simple. You can't even take good content and just spin some words and put it on Google and be like, okay, now I wait for the riches. People, people are, especially people who are searching for education or they're not as easy to trick as, as many supplement sellers think. And they are more skeptical and they will look more into the company and into the brand beyond just some

article that seemed okay on the blog. That was also a business strategy. And the fact that I enjoy creating content helps as well, but yeah, that was intentional going, you know, in the beginning. And it's's certainly so one of the things that i've mentioned at the start um sort of reading your book has kind of been the catalyst for me and so just seeing your model of content creation it's kind of inspired me to do my content creation in albeit a slightly different way but the same thing of you know having a body of content that I'm proud of and gives good quality information and I just love creating content of all different forms whether it's video graphics emails all that sort of stuff and I think that that's for me a crucial part of it

and a crucial part of helping people out you know and that's been at the core of what I do and certainly what you do as well is helping people first and foremost and then building a business off the back of that absolutely if you can if you can do it well it gives you a huge competitive advantage in in terms of business and um it's satisfying because you are able to help people a lot more if you can provide good information than if you can just, even if you have good products, like take supplements, right? Where a lot, Legion does a lot more for people. I would say the blog probably does a lot more for people than the products themselves, really. Because again, supplementation is supplementary by

definition and it'll never be anything more than supplementary so if you don't know what you're doing in the kitchen in the gym it doesn't matter how many supplements you take and of course in the blog is where we provide all the education on what to do in the kitchen in the gym so it's it's just a win-win in terms of legion athletics can you give us any insight into any cool supplements that are coming down the line and then what is the future look like for not just legion athletics but muscle for life and all the things that you've got going on across your different business streams what does that all look like yeah so at legion we just launched a casein which we're excited about um 100 my cellar obviously naturally sweet naturally flavored, really, really tastes

really good, has a really nice mouthfeel. It actually is made from the same milk that our whey is made from, which comes from small dairy farms in Ireland, which sounds like a marketing pitch. But one, there's research that actually shows that the quality of milk coming out of Ireland in particular is just very, very high. But two, you can tell a difference. That's one of the reasons why our whey product, which is just a whey isolate made from this high quality milk, is one of our highest rated products, period. Because people are used to other lower quality whey's and they have ours and they're like, this is amazing. This is for how creamy it is given the macros and how tasty it is. And it doesn't

upset my stomach at all. We hear that all the time. So the casein comes from the same dairy farms. And so it's also just really, really good casein. It tastes really good. It feels good in your mouth. It doesn't upset your stomach. We have a caffeine-free pre-workout coming, just a caffeine-free version of Pulse, which we've taken the caffeine out and we've added alpha-GPC in just to try to make up for... Not that alpha-GPC is a stimulant, but it's something that we have been wanting to work into a product anyway. And caffeine, one, tastes pretty disgusting, actually. So taking that out allowed us to add... Alpha- GBC also tastes disgusting. They're both very, very, very bitter and sharp. So by removing the caffeine, we were able to make some room in the flavor profile to add something bitter in and also just give the product a little bit of

an upgrade. So that's exciting. Protein bars are coming as well, which I'm really excited about. Actually, those protein bars are so good. They taste good. They have 100% whey protein. So there's no milk protein or soy protein. Sorry, actually it's whey protein and pea, whey and pea, but no soy, no milk protein. So just good high quality protein, prebiotic fiber, and some healthy fat. And the macros are very macro friendly and very, very tasty. So those are coming, I want to say next month, it's going to be November, December from there stretching into next year. We're looking into if we can do something for, I don't want to say, I'm going to say hormone optimization or hormone health in men in particular. And this is a product that we

have not created. We don't have a testosterone booster and we never will until, who knows, unless research, unless there's some miracle molecule that research uncovers or something, it's just nothing you can really do naturally. However, Curtis is working on something that he feels confident that will at least, again, supporting hormone health and will be worth taking, which is a nice thing also working with Curtis is he himself has integrity and understands where we basically, I don't want to make anything that's just not worth taking is what it comes down to. If it's not going to really have an appreciable benefit, or if it's not really going to make a difference, then why make it? And so we're looking into that, looking into kind of like a pro-immunity, anti-sickness type of product that could be

interesting and a few other things. And on the most for life side of things, I would say that kind of goes to more of the publishing side of things. So I am releasing new third editions of my books for men and women, Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, and Thinner, Leaner, Stronger, respectively. Those are going to be out by the end of the year. The digitals will be out next month and the hard copies will be officially up selling, ready to go December or January. Also, I recorded the audio books myself, which is cool. It was a pain in the ass. Literally, I sat in a chair for like 80 hours over the course of a few weeks to do it. The books aren't that long, but it took that long to do them partially because those readings served as my final drafts of the books, which

meant that I would be reading often and I would be like, eh, I don't like how that sounds. Stop, make an edit, continue, stop, make an edit, continue. But that's all done. And it's just in post-production now. So those books are going to be coming out along with their respective journals too, because I have workout journals that give a year's worth of workouts for the programs that come in the books. So the journals are being updated as well to reflect some changes in the programs. And then from there, I'm starting, I just started on what's going to be my next cookbook. So I have a cookbook right now that is a flexible dieting, kind of macro-friendly, simple recipes, don't require much in the way of exotic ingredients or cooking skill.

It's called The Shredded Chef. And I want to do a version of that that's going to be like a quick and one pot, a fast and slow, quick and easy type of deal. And just started on that, that, that should be out next year. I want to say Q3, Q4 next year. Um, and then I'm going to be doing a, a blank workout journal, something I think that could do a good job on and just, just a simple workout journal that for tracking your workouts. I think that that there's an opportunity there to do something the way that I would like it to be done. And then I'm going to be doing a second edition of Beyond Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, which is the follow-up to Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, the sequel, which I'm excited. I'm going to really be rewriting it from scratch, which is what I did with Bigger,

Leaner, Stronger and Thinner, Leaner, Stronger, because I wrote the second editions of those books four years ago. And I'm a better writer now. I know more. I have a ton of feedback from readers. So I know what really could be removed from the book without hurting it and what really should be added in, make it maximally beneficial, similar with Beyond Bigger, Leaner, Stronger. And then I'm going to be doing one more book next year, which is going to be a shorter book on meal planning as well. So yeah, that's my lineup. As far as Muscle for Life itself goes, we continue to grow the coaching program. That's doing very well. And maybe looking into some digital courses that would be based on books. For example, I would probably start with flagship

courses for men and women, taking my books, Bigger, Leaner, Stronger and Finner, Leaner, Stronger and turning them into multimedia presentations. And yeah, we'll see if I get to that next year though. So it sounds like you've got a pretty stacked schedule as it goes. Yeah. Stay busy. Cool. I appreciate your time, Matt. Mike, it's been awesome to chat to you. I really appreciate you kind of giving up your time talking to you onto the show uh lots of valuable tips for everybody listening to put into their training nutrition and get some real practical progress out of it so thank you so much absolutely thank you for having me hey there it is mike again i hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful and if you did,

and don't mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you're listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any of the new goodies. Lastly, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking

for constructive feedback, so please do reach out. All right, that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon. And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead I'm going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my 100% natural pre-workout fat burner supplement forge. Now it was designed to be used specifically when exercising in a fasted state, and it helps you maximize fat burning while training on an empty stomach, minimize the amount of muscle that fat burning while training on an empty stomach, minimize the amount of muscle that you lose while training in this state,

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