Why carb cycling isn’t necessary and the importance of finishing what you begin…

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Hey, this is Mike Matthews from musclefullife. com and welcome to my podcast. In this episode, I want to talk about two things. I want to talk about carb cycling because It’s popular these days and a lot of people think it’s a secret to [00:03:00] getting super lean or that it’s necessary to get really lean.

And then I want to talk about working something a little non fitness related, which has some overlap, but also can apply some other areas of life. And that’s something I just wrote about on my blog, which is the importance of finishing what you begin. So first let’s talk about carb cycling.

So in case you’re not familiar with carb cycling, basically it’s a style of dieting that has you rotate through. high carb days and low carb days and the low carb days. Some protocols have no carb days. So basically, zero or under 30 carbohydrates, almost like a ketogenic type diet on certain days.

And this is like intermittent fasting where it has we’ve seen a dramatic rise in popularity. over the last probably year or two and it’s gotten more and more coverage in magazines and on websites and stuff. And many guys, especially it’s particularly popular in the bodybuilding world, like people that compete, bodybuilding physique and stuff.

And a lot of these guys will, tell you how [00:04:00] great car cycling is and how it helps them. Get really shredded for shows and maintain muscle and maintain training intensity and blah, blah, blah. And, if you listen to some of these guys, you’d think this is like the holy grail of dieting.

And you also find various forms of carb cycling in different information products that are sold usually more. Sensationalized type shitty clickbait products and stuff that make these wild promises in terms of building muscle and losing fat and, dramatically recomping your body and blah, blah, blah.

And a lot of that is because carb cycling, maybe it’s just human nature, but the more complex or the more intricate and the more moving parts something has, the more we our perceptions can be altered in terms of thinking that it must work, or there must be something to it, because just straight calorie deficit on, balanced macronutrients, oh, that’s that’s so 1900, 2000, or whatever.

Now we’re all about, having to rework your macros, four times a week, and in A lot of when you’re [00:05:00] being sole on carb cycling, there’s usually a lot of references, a lot of scientific references, and as we’ll get into that, you’ll see a lot of it is not valid, and it’s a misuse or a mis, they’re incorrect explanations for things, but it’s given a pseudo scientific type of explanation.

So as you can tell already, I’m not a big fan of carb cycling. It is not necessary. I’ll just say it right outright. It is not necessary to get really lean and I’m speaking from personal experience here. Right now I weigh about 186 pounds. I’m six foot two, I’m about 7 percent body fat and I didn’t, I haven’t done a low day, low carb day.

I don’t do that ever. Basically. I don’t, I’m not a fan of low carb dieting at all. I’m and I eat right now, my, I’ve never, I’ve been cutting for about seven weeks now. I lost a week or so cause I was sick for a few days. So I just it was stagnant that week, but my, I never went below 200 carbs a day so far on my training days, I’m eating a bit more calories, eating about 250 [00:06:00] carbs.

And on my rest days, I’m eating a little bit less calories just cause I’m not, not burning as many calories. And I also found that while calorie cycling, it sounds that alone sounds trendy or whatever. It actually, I found that it does help when I’m under 10% and I’m wanting to get really lean, eating a bit more on my training days.

So my deficit is smaller on my training days but it gives me a bit more carbs to help maintain training intensity. And then my deficit is a little bit larger on my rest days when I’m not training. And I can get away with fewer calories. I find that helps getting, into that really lean type category, whereas it’s not necessary.

Again, I’ve done it both ways, just, same intake every day and I’ve done it this way. I feel this way is a little bit better. My training basically is because my workouts are a little bit better because I get a little bit more carbs in my training days. So for what’s worth and that’s also the when you’re wanting to get really mean is when you have to really start, that’s when your workouts can really start suffering.

If you’re looking to go from 15 percent to 10%, you can just, you Calculate your average TDD, your average total daily energy expenditure, drop 20 percent of that, eat that [00:07:00] every day and you’re going to do great, you’re going to feel great, your workouts are going to be fine, you’re not going to run into any issues.

But when you start getting down into the eight, nine percent range and you want to get down even further, seven, six percent if you do it incorrectly, you can start burning up quite a bit of muscle. Your workouts are really going to suck. You’re not going to have any energy or your muscle endurance is going to be really bad.

So anyways, I talk about this quite a bit more in my upcoming book. I’m going to be launching in about a week. I’ve said that four times, but I’ve run into a lot of random, the typesetter was just incompetent, had to find somebody else and the sales letter is taking longer, blah, blah, blah.

But it’s almost done, the book itself is done, but, the whole thing is almost done. I want to do a whole book launch. I’m not just going to, throw it out there and say, Hey, I’m going to do a whole fun thing. So back to carb cycling. So that’s basically how it works. You cycle through, high carb, low carb and then sometimes no carb days.

And the reasons for doing this, what you’re told is that what you’re often told is that your high carb days replenish glycogen [00:08:00] stores in the muscles. Okay. Which helps maintain your training intensity. Yes, that’s true. That’s a known thing. Also, of course, when you’re eating a lot of carbs, your insulin levels are gonna be quite higher than if you were not eating so many carbs.

And to the contrary of the mainstream kind of crusade against insulin and carbohydrates right now. Insulin when you’re an active person, especially as a weight, when you’re a weightlifter, insulin is your friend. Insulin is, it’s not it’s not anabolic in the way of. testosterone. For instance, it doesn’t directly induce protein synthesis, but it is anti catabolic, meaning that higher insulin levels means that there’s less protein breakdown occurring over the course of the day.

So those are usually two things of like the selling points in the high carb day. Also, of course, it’s enjoyable. Especially when you’re going low carb several days and you eat a bunch of carbs, you feel really good. And, ironically, this is how some competitors deal with food cravings.

They, I know I talked about cravings in the last one, but I came across this and I forgot to include in the last one. But it is that if you are having trouble with food cravings and you’re dieting, go keto for a week, meaning [00:09:00] eat less than 30 grams of carbohydrates a day, and you don’t have to be in a massive calorie deficit.

You can rework your macros, high protein very low carb, high fat, do that for a week and see how you feel. And then go back to what you’re doing before where you’re maybe getting 40 percent or 30 percent of your daily calories from carbohydrates and you’re going to. your perceptions are going to be changed a bit.

If you want to know what real cravings are and what real misery is, just go keto for a week and then you’ll see and try to work out too. So it’s almost like they, different competitors and coaches will have their guys do this just to show them basically shut up, stop whining. You don’t know what real cravings are.

I think it’s a funny, and it’s a simple, I’m sure it works. There’s quite a few people that quite a few coaches that are good coaches that do that. And then their guys just have a, they reevaluate things and they go, okay I guess my 180 grams of carbs per day, like now those carbs are all of a sudden satisfactory and they’re not dreaming about eating apple pies and stuff.

So that’s the high carb sales pitch. There’s truth in it. Nothing [00:10:00] wrong with that, but where the low, where the carb cycling sales pitch falls apart is when is the whole reasoning behind the low carb days or the no carb days. And. This is where the pitch is that you’re going to lose more fat on those days.

And usually it’s, there are different the common reasons given are all your insulin levels are going to be lower and insulin causes fat storage and that means lower insulin causes more fat loss. There’s that, but some people don’t even go that far. Some people just ride the current trend right now because everybody knows that low carb dieting is the best way for losing fat, which is not true at all.

I’m going to link an article below in the description that where I talk all about low carb dieting and why it sucks and why you don’t lose fat faster. And there’s good research showing this. If you. If you’re eating a, a standard high protein diet and your fat loss is not going to change.

If you are set, the calorie deficit is set correctly, high carb, low carb, it [00:11:00] doesn’t matter. Only in very rare cases where if you have a real problem with an insulin response or insulin sensitivity, if you are very overweight and you’re sedentary. Then maybe a lower carb approach would actually be a little bit better for you.

But even then, it’s not that big of a, of an issue really. So that, this is where carb cycling sucks because you do these low carb and no carb days and you feel miserable. Your workouts suck. Some people will tell me they feel great on low carb dieting and that’s after your body gets adapted to it.

Like if you were to do a full, do a ketogenic diet where you’re eating less than 30 grams of carbs a day, 30, 40. For your first 7 to 10 days, you’re going to feel terrible, you’re going to have no energy. And then your body starts to become what they call fat adapted, where it needs to get energy from somewhere.

So it’s going to start oxidizing, of course, not just body fat, but you’re going to be eating more dietary fats. And it basically just it, it learns to, it realize, it sees that it’s not going to be getting a bunch of carbohydrates, which are easy sources of energy, and then it changes. how it’s metabolically, how it’s working to oxidize fats more because it [00:12:00] has to.

And then creates ketones for brain centers. I’ll actually end up writing an article that I keep about the ketogenic diet because it sucks as well. But that’s, it’s similar to the low carb, but it’s an extreme version of the low carb. So in the carb cycling, you do these low carb days.

where you think that you’re supposed to lose more fat. And the only way that you would is if, and sometimes some low carb or some carb cycling protocols actually do this, they don’t on your low carb days, you not only go low carb, you go very low calorie. And that is even more sucky because when you start messing with calorie deficits too much, you start putting yourself in too much of a calorie deficit and you’re not on anabolics.

And I’ll get to that in a second. Cause this is where carb cycling is very popular and it’s probably not a bad idea. But when you’re not on anabolics and you’re messing with, start inducing the, like you start using a 30 plus percent, 25 plus percent calorie deficit, you’re going to start running into muscle loss issues.

Even if you eat a bunch of protein, you can mitigate it somewhat with high protein intake. But [00:13:00] you’re not, it’s not just going to be energy problems. Then it starts to become muscle loss problems. And the worst, what you don’t want to have happen when you’re cutting is basically You just don’t want to lose muscle.

You’re going to lose some, it’s inevitable, but you want it to be as little as possible. You want to preserve as much lean mass as you can and lose as much just fat as you can. Fat and water and glycogen. That’s really what you want to see coming out. And you can do that naturally if you know what you’re doing.

And a big part of that is just a moderate calorie deficit and remaining patient. As boring as that sounds and unsexy and whatever, that is the truth of it. So you have these low carb days, which are often low calorie days. Yeah. And you, of course, if it’s low calorie, you’re gonna lose, if your calorie deficit is a thousand on a low carb day, you’re gonna lose more fat than a 500 calorie or a 300 calorie deficit on a high carb day, of course.

But there’s no, there’s nothing else that you could just go low calorie and it could just be a high protein, be a moderate carb, low fat day, it would be the same thing. But it’s more, that’s not carb cycling. Carb cycling is that you drop your, you keep your protein high, you drop [00:14:00] your carbs to nothing, and you compensate with your fats.

You rotate through these days sometimes it’s like low carb day low carb day, no carb day, high carb day, and you just rotate through that. It really depends on the protocol. And the bottom line though is, and once again, I’ll link article that to, to low carb dieting so you can see that element or that aspect of carb cycling just doesn’t give you anything special.

And I’ll also link our road on carb cycling if you want to look into a bit more of the research as well that just shows there’s really nothing special about this. So you go through, basically there are going to be. A few days a week, you’re gonna be irritable, you’re gonna have low energy, your workouts are gonna suck on when you carb cycle, and then, you have your high carb day.

It’s gonna, you’re gonna feel great and your workout that day is gonna be much better. Your workout the next day is gonna, probably, is gonna be better. And then you’re at that point, you’ll probably, your luggage in stores are gonna be significantly completed again. And then you go back to the low carb, no carb misery, [00:15:00] and in the end.

For nothing. You’re not going to lose fat faster. And if it if the protocol that you’re following also involves very low calorie days, you may also lose more muscle doing it that way. I say maybe because it depends on your genetics and depends on the protocol. If you were to do just like one very low calorie day per week with high protein, you probably would be okay.

It really depends from body to body. Some people, I’ve known guys that. Very active ectomorphic body types, naturally very skinny and very lean trouble. I wouldn’t say trouble. It just, they had to be very spot on with their diet to, to build muscle effectively where my brother in law’s is like this and he used to, so he’d work out like when he was bulking, he would gain, he could gain about a pound in a week.

He had to eat a lot of food for it, but he could do it, probably about 4, 000 calories a day. He only weighed 155 pounds, but he could do it. Gain about a pound in the week and then the weekend he wouldn’t eat enough and then he would lose that pound over the weekend, just [00:16:00] Saturday, Sunday, just by not eating enough.

I would try to tell him his weekend diet was it made no sense. Like he would eat 60 grams of protein and and an overall calorie intake of maybe 2000 calories max. So it’d be like basically no protein, a bunch of carbs, like a big pancake breakfast basically. And then go all the way to dinner, maybe a little bit of protein and like some pasta or something and that’s it.

So just like terrible macronutrient ratios, very low calorie on the weekend considering his body. And he would lose the pound just in two days that he, gained. And of course he didn’t gain a pound of muscle in the week. If when you’re bulking, if you’re gaining for the weight that you’re gaining, if it’s one part muscle, one part fat, that’s pretty standard.

Yeah. If it’s like anywhere above that, if it’s 1. 5 part muscle, 1 part fat, or 2 part muscle, then that’s you’re getting very good, you have, you’re doing everything right, you have good genetics basically. He, looking at his body, he probably actually gained a bit more muscle than fat, his body just didn’t put on fat very easily.

Let’s say he’s gaining I don’t know [00:17:00] a seventh of a pound of muscle or something like that. And He lost it though right over the weekend. He was back and his weight would just constantly that was it That was until finally he learned because I told him a million times like what are you doing here?

You’re just spinning your wheels man Why are you putting all this work in the gym and then undoing it with just silly over like just over eat on the weekends That would be better for him so the that’s in terms of coming back to, to carb cycling, then those very low calorie days, depending on your body type can really actually mess you up.

And so if that’s carb cycling I guess there’s actually one other point I want to touch on, which is this recomp point. It’s a lot of, it’s a big selling point. You have carb cycling. It’s also a big selling point of intermittent fasting in many cases, like these products that just try to capitalize on the latest, greatest.

Fads in terms of workouts and diet, they’ll combine intermittent fasting and carb cycling, which sounds, super advanced where, intermittent fasting, where you’re [00:18:00] fasting every 24 hours. Let’s say that you are fasting for 16 and you have eight hours to eat all your food. And then in those eight hours, you’re also cycling your carbs on days, they, that get really gets there.

It’s strange. There’s a certain subset of people in this space, in this fitness space that’s what they’re drawn to. I don’t know if it’s like the biohacking crowd or whatever, but they’re looking traditional dieting. It’s it’s just, I don’t know, it doesn’t appeal to them. They’re looking for they think that there must be some better way.

We’ve known about calorie deficits since for decades now we’ve known about traditional dieting for decades now, even flexible dieting, right? If it fits your macros kind of thing, which I don’t like the, it fits your, if it fits your macros, rebranding flexible dieting much more about that, even just calling it that.

Which means that you work within certain numbers. You have balanced macronutrients, you get the majority of your calories from healthy foods, but you eat foods you like and you also can include a bit of, junk or whatever here and there. Fit it in, work it in if you want. You can have, sugar, you can have [00:19:00] whatever.

What the junk food, however junkie you’re willing to go is up to you. I’m not a fan of fast food, for instance. It’s just not worth it to me. I would, I’m not interested in that. But there are other things like, I really like chocolate, so I’ll work in chocolate. Or maybe I’ll work in some, gelato or something like that.

Or, stuff like dessert type things that at least are semi, at least I can read the ingredients and I know what those things are. It’s not just, a long list of chemicals where I know what I’m eating. There’s, there seems to be these people that are just drawn to something like the more complex or the more out of the ordinary an approach is the more they’re drawn to it.

And I guess I can understand that to some degree, but that’s just, that, that’s not me. Whenever I get into something, whether it be fitness or I’m learning golf, whatever it is that I’m learning I’m looking for. And I’ve found that. The people that can explain things simply are usually the ones that actually know what they’re talking about.

When they, the people that [00:20:00] try to take subjects and make them very complex or try to pitch you on something that’s very intricate or has a lot of different moving parts to it, and if they’re saying, this is the revolutionary, do this, that, whatever, they probably are just full of shit. And I look for people that teach simple basic fundamentals that make sense and that I can put into use and see, see it working for myself.

I’m against the more sensationalized marketing is, really in any area, the more skeptical I am basically. So that’s, I think one of the big draws of crop cycling really is it just sounds fancy in that sense. It immediately makes people think there must be something special to it.

But the fact is traditional dieting works great. What else do you want in terms of, for instance, If you can, when you’re cutting, if you can lose, if you’re quite overweight, you can lose upwards of two pounds of fat a week. If you’re somewhere more than maybe athletic type range, but you just, you’re not like really lean as a guy.

Maybe you’re around 15%. So you’re not fat, but you’re not [00:21:00] lean. You’re just in the middle. As a girl, maybe this isn’t in the low twenties or mid twenties or something like that. You can, gain up, you can lose a pound of fat a week. Your workouts are great you don’t have any major strength loss, a loss, you don’t have energy problems, you don’t have hunger issues, you don’t crave a bunch of foods and you will run into these issues with carb cycling, it’s a test of your will for a lot of people because low carb, no carb days suck and traditional dieting, which, I talk about, I will link it I’ll link an article that I wrote just if you want to get my take on traditional dieting.

I actually wrote it on clean eating because clean eating it is it’s if it fits your macros and I guess even fasting, it’s like this new kind of little trendy thing. I guess it’s not that new, but clean eating in general, it seems like over the last, it seems like over the last year or.

Maybe two years. I’ve just seen it more and more in terms of people’s social media postings, and they’ve mentioned in articles and whatever. And it’s not nearly as [00:22:00] important as many people make it out to be. Yes, you should be eating nutritious foods, but getting really lean does not require that you restrict a bunch of foods, and you don’t eat a bunch of certain types of carbs, and only eat these carbs, and you only eat at these times, and the schedule maybe is not so much for eating, but Anyway, I’ll link to an article that so you can see what I’m talking about in terms of traditional dieting, which is like I said, moderate calorie deficit high protein, relatively high carb and moderately low fat.

And that just works great. If you are, especially if you’re weightlifting because your workouts. You’re able to maintain workout intensity and that in turn is a major part in being able to maintain your lean mass while you’re cutting. If your workouts go to shit and your strength goes to shit when you’re cutting, you’re, that’s a bad sign.

You’re probably losing muscle. That’s probably what that means. That’s, that, that’s the I guess everything that I wanted to, I want to say on carb cycling. Oh, I do want to talk about, where it may be, it may make sense is probably with guys that are competing because when you do [00:23:00] cut your carbs down, what you will you’re not gonna lose fat faster, but you do lose subcutaneous water.

Just your body holds less water period because as you reduce carbs, glycogen levels go down and water flushes out. And sub Q water does Flush out to some degree as well, meaning the water under your skin. So when you are, these people that are competing, these guys need to get down to 5 percent and their skin needs to be paper thin.

I can see why a low carb approach would make sense for that because I personally, I don’t compete. And. I’ve gotten, I’ve gotten to the 6 percent range. I haven’t gotten to the 5 percent range. And at 6%, I was eating quite a few carbs a day and I was looking pretty dry and pretty, pretty, my skin was definitely pretty thin.

But I don’t know if I would have been like stage ready. That is an area where you’ll see carb cycling a lot with people that are competing and they’re, I can see why that would be. But also what you need to realize with a lot of these people is that they’re on drugs, they’re on anabolics.

And it’s not just they’re on [00:24:00] testosterone, they’re on many other drugs. They’re on, obviously Trenbolone is like the drug now, the super drug that every It’s just like low dose of testosterone, high dose of trend. And if you’re, if you’re cutting, you’d be on the clan, you’d be on T three.

And there’s like the master stack for, just getting retarded leash shredded, eating, more food than you should be able to be eating. And that then with kind of a low carb approach to get rid of water as well. I can see that. And It’s very obvious with these guys, not only can you easily spot them with just how they look there are certain levels of muscular development you just can’t get to without those types of drugs.

Especially, you’ll see it in a lot of the little muscles, the serratus, the obliques, where they’re just, where it’s just ridiculously shredded all the way down. You’ll see it in shoulders, big shoulders, those big, where it’s like as big as my head. Big upper chest, big traps.

So it also is interesting to see in the legs to the, some of these guys that get [00:25:00] ridiculous separation and ridiculous development in the legs. So depending on drugs, I’m not really a drug expert. I just know I’m in this world and I hear about it and I have people email me that are very honest about it.

They don’t care and we’ll talk about it. So it’s interesting, but I’m not, I couldn’t look at somebody and tell you what drugs are taking, but I just, I know a bit from just speaking with people on what’s going on. And of course, the drug testing in these leagues is a joke, so don’t, don’t think that, anything, thing.

When you see those types of guys on Instagram saying how great carb cycling is, no. It’s not the, it’s how great their drugs are, it’s not how great their carb cycling is. And, for people like you and people like me, even if there is a little bit of validity to carb cycle, if we were wanting to get down to 5 percent or even 4 percent and have paper thin skin.

I’m not trying to do that. I don’t know if you are. I’m happy just to be six, seven percent. And when you start getting that lean, I’m about that right now. I’m about seven percent and You naturally look dry. Like I, I’m eating, like I said, my training day is 250 grams of carbs a day. I just cut [00:26:00] it down actually a little bit, 230.

But to finishing my cut, I had to drop my calories a little bit. And, your skin is thin. There’s just not much there. A lot of the skin thickness that people think, oh, it’s just thickness or water, is just fat. You get rid of the fat, you look good. Regardless how many carbs you’re eating.

Even if I were to really mess with my sodium and potassium levels. and mess up and start holding more water. When you get to a certain level of leanness, it just doesn’t matter anymore. You just look good, period. So that’s really the goal. Just get lean, and you can do that with traditional dieting.

And you don’t have to go through any of the misery, any of the upswings and downswings that many people run into with carb cycling. And one last thing I just want to say about just dieting in general, because there are so many different theories out there and so many different approaches, and a lot of them can sound very convincing, and they can link all kinds of science, and unless you’re really going to dive into all the research yourself and put it all together, it can, it can seem, hey, this person must know what they’re talking about.

And that’s just that resist [00:27:00] the shiny object syndrome, which is resist the urge to, to Jump from program to program or diet to diet. Because in the end, you just end up messing with your results. Really if you could just stick to traditional dieting. Maintain a proper calorie deficit, don’t cheat a bunch, don’t, overeat, don’t take five extra bites every meal.

Just stick to the plan and see it through, then you’re going to get the results that you want. But if you’re very impatient and, you are on one diet for two weeks, and let’s say you’ve lost two pounds, But you wanted to lose five pounds, so therefore now you’re going to try this carb cycling diet because you heard that this is the magic pill for, doubling your fat loss or whatever.

So then you get on the carb cycling diet. And maybe, let’s say you still maintain a moderate calorie deficit and do your thing and you lose a pound and a half over the next couple of weeks, or it’s even a little bit slower for whatever reason, and then you get more frustrated. So now you’re going to try intermittent fasting and [00:28:00] then now you’re getting a little bit discouraged.

So you’re having now some compliance issues where you’re eating a bit more than you should. You’re not exactly following your diet the way that you should. And then you jump to, some other type of diet. Maybe you just want to try keto or something like that, or you just try to go for a low calorie and then your weight loss does accelerate, but you feel miserable and then you end up dramatically overeating.

This is a cycle many people fall into and it’s an insidious dwindling spiral of dieting that just ends with throwing your hands up in frustration and saying, whatever, I give up. So resist that. Just, I’m telling you, stick to a traditional way of dieting, balanced macronutrients, moderate calorie deficit.

Use exercise to really drive that fat loss and be patient and you’ll get to where you want to be. And then once you’re there, maintaining is much easier. Maintaining is very easy when you do it right because you’re able to slowly bring your calories back up. You get to eat plenty of food, you enjoy yourself and you get to stay lean.

And [00:29:00] especially if you’re going from a higher body fat percentage, if you’re going from 20 percent, plus or whatever as a guy, let’s say. And you make you stick through it and you make it down to the 10 percent range and you stay there, you don’t ever have to go back up to 20 percent like you can now, let’s say even bulking, right?

You go, you put yourself in calorie surplus, you get up to the 15 percent range and then you come back down to 10 and then when you come back down, it’s easier because you have more muscle and you’re not, it’s not as long of a journey. And you repeat that and over time it becomes easier and easier to get leaner and stay there.

So just resist that shiny objects syndrome, stick to the basics that work and just be patient. So yeah, that’s all for carb cycling. So now I want to shift gears to the other little subject I want to talk about here. And that’s just the importance of finishing what you begin.

Okay, what I want to say on, on, on this subject is it’s almost like a little bit of a challenge that I have for you and a challenge that I try to [00:30:00] put, take on myself in my, pretty much like any area of life, especially, it’s obviously especially related to, to work, but it’s also related to really anything else that you’re doing and that’s to finish everything that you begin, meaning if you say you’re going to do something and, You take that first step, you’re now obligated to finish it, to see it through.

And I’m talking about anything. It can be something small, it could be, I don’t know, learning a hobby. It could be, or it could be something big. It could be launching a, maybe you want to, say you want to launch a blog, or you want to start a business, or you want to achieve something like in your education, or whatever, for your career, whatever it is.

If you say you’re going to do it, You have to do it, no matter what happens, no matter how hard it gets no matter what it means in terms of sacrifice of time and of, other interests and other things that, distractions that might be out there. And if you do that it is a lot more, it can be a lot more powerful than you might think.

It’s not just [00:31:00] about the logistical. benefit of getting more things done just for the sake of getting more things done. It goes beyond just productivity. It really has deeper ramifications, I think. And depending on how you are with this, it can really dramatically change you as a person for the better.

And, some of the most unhappy and just ineffective people that I know are people that can’t do this. They jump from thing to thing. They say they’re going to do this in any area of life. It’s, if it’s work, it’s one month they’re doing this and though some of them have big, they’ll talk very big and how big it’s going to be in this and that, and they’re doing this and that.

And then a couple months later, they’re doing something else and they seem just as excited about that. Oh, how big it is, blah, blah, blah. And then it’s something else. And then it’s something else. And, In a couple of cases their personal lives are even are very similar. It’s, the hobby A now is the thing and all I’m going to get good at this.

I’m going to do that or [00:32:00] whatever. And then that lasts for about a month. And now it’s on hobby B. They never got good. They never got anywhere. And then they go on to the next thing, one of the next thing. And a couple of these people that, I know are. Aware of it, they know that this is a weakness or whatever of theirs and they think that, they say, oh, they just, they get bored easily or they need a lot of variety.

But then some are, have got they’re not even, they don’t want to be aware of it or whatever. They’re in a point of just, got to the point of, delusion where they’re telling themselves that they don’t, they don’t need that or whatever. It’s not a big deal for them. They just like to have fun with things or whatever and they have different ways of explaining it.

But I think that, what actually is underlying that is, is really just a fear of committing to anything because committing to something saying that I’m going to do it and I care about getting there. Even if you don’t tell anybody, if you just tell yourself that I want to do this and here’s why I want to do this and this matters to me and then you fail.

That is more painful than just saying being very maybe about it or [00:33:00] very, I’m going to try, maybe I’ll get into this or me. I’ll try that for a little bit and we’ll see. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that. For instance, I’m learning golf, right? I played quite a bit of golf when I was younger when I want to get back into something physical.

That’s out of the gym, get outside, get some space, get some air, whatever. Figured I’ll take up golf again. And initially I was thinking, okay, I don’t have a bunch of time to play golf like I used to. What I’m going to do is I’m going to give it three months. I’m going to get some lessons.

I’m going to, go there and wake up early on, on the weekends. Time that I otherwise normally would just be sleeping. So I’ll get up at seven and go to the golf course. And I have the time that I have and if I can get to a certain point within three months or so, so there’s certain, if I can fix my swing in a couple different ways and actually be able to see that I, there’s a hope to getting a, getting good maybe within the first year.

And by good, I mean I want to get back to shooting where I was at, which was like high 70s, low 80s. If I can get back to that within a year [00:34:00] or maybe even six months, then I’m interested. And I’ll know that within the first three months. If three months go by, and I’m just, it’s just not coming back, and I’m just sitting out there, on the range being frustrated, I’m gonna do something else.

And so I’m like maybe a month and a half in, and it’s going well. So now I’m thinking, okay, then I’ve met my conditional if. And now I’m thinking, alright, good, so I think I actually can get good. Now I’d like to, maybe the next year I’d like to get good enough where I can play in some local tournaments and stuff.

Okay, fine. That’s just a silly little goal. It’s a hobby. Who cares if I get good enough to play in golf tournaments? But I care. Because it’s going to be fun. And, I’m okay with committing to that. Now, of course, there are much bigger commitments if it was like, making, that’s not a life changing commitment, that’s just something you do for fun.

But if it’s something more related to, let’s say, my marriage, or let’s say something with raising my son or business, making money, putting our future there, more important things. I, I with some of these people that they have this, they don’t set goals [00:35:00] almost.

It seems like on purpose because, I guess I can understand if you, if I were them and I had tried many different things and failed. And if I knew that I just wasn’t good at following through, Why even really go for things? I guess I could see that. Why even bother? It’s better to just be a dilettante and, just dabble in things and not take anything seriously and nothing really matters and I’m just here to enjoy it and whatever, blah, blah, blah.

Okay? But, yeah, that sounds good, but it’s insidious. I think it’s a very slippery slope where You operate like that for too long and it just gets worse and worse to where setting goals just becomes distasteful, basically. And I don’t think anybody would really want to live like that.

I think everybody has just an inherent urge to, want to make things happen. Whatever that means for you, there are things you want to make happen. You want to be able to. Decide. Really what I’m talking about here is it’s [00:36:00] how it comes down to intention. Just the ability to decide to say, I’m going to do this.

Here’s why I’m going to do this and then go do it without a bunch of bargaining with yourself or having to reevaluate. Is it really worth it? Or maybe, maybe this other thing is better. I think that being able to operate in that kind of straight that where you just go straight for something you can say.

This is what I’m doing, this is where I’m going, this is why, and just work toward it and get there. Even with little things, being able to do that with little things can really start to build self confidence and help you prove to yourself that you can do it with bigger things. And, so that’s why I think having a habit of finishing what you begin.

There’s a quote and I have a blog article on this, there’s a quote from Ovid who says either don’t attempt, either don’t attempt it or carry it through to the end. And that basically, that’s the message. If you’re gonna try something, finish it. And if you accept that, not as oh, that’s cute, that’s advice, [00:37:00] that’s something, like that you’d see on a Hallmark card or something like that.

But if you accept that as like personal, Law, like this is how you do things and yeah, no one’s perfect, we’re going to break it here and there, but if it’s like dieting, if you’re on it 90 percent of the time you’re on those 10 percent of little slip ups, extra calories here and there, whatever doesn’t matter.

Same concept here. If 90 percent of your, when you say I’m doing something and you take that first step, if 90 percent of the time you see it through, you’re good. And that will vary. It just changes everything. It changes your view of yourself. It changes your view of your abilities. It changes your self confidence.

And, it helps you it helps you learn to find, this is, I got this concept from from one of Robert Greene’s books called The 33 Strategies of War. I’m a big fan of his work. I like history, and it just, his work is him in me. Steven Pressfield, I really like the stuff they do.

But Green talks about what he calls the joy of attack mode. And this kind of resonated [00:38:00] with me. Where, you get going to, in, in a direction. You’re going to run into obstacles. Things are, not always going to go your way. But you learn that anything that gets in your way, you can always meet with more aggressive action.

And the more aggressively you act, the more things go your way. And you learn the power of momentum and how really when you get enough momentum going in a direction and that’s that 90 percent of 90 percent of the time you’re good and you’re rolling when you do slack a little bit or when things go a little bit off that 10 percent of the time momentum will carry you through.

And really what that means in practical terms is even in terms of a schedule, I think that’s scheduling is like working on a tight schedule where I have to do this because the amount of things that I’m involved in where this time to this time on this day is what I’m doing. Like my days are I’m not, they’re pretty regimented.

I have to go Mondays. Here’s my kind of daily routine. I have to do, I have time for all my little things. Tuesday is a little bit different. Wednesday is a little bit different. I take Saturdays off. I work Sundays. [00:39:00] So it’s a, I have every kind of day and that, that gives me momentum because I’m moving every day.

I’m moving in a direction with muscle for life, with my books, with Legion, with some other projects that I’m working on. Everything is moving in that direction. So if, if I miss a little bit of time on one day or if I get caught up in something and I can’t work on that project that one day It doesn’t matter.

I have enough momentum moving where it doesn’t discourage me. It’s just like, all right, cool. Tomorrow, I’m back on track. So yeah, I mean that that’s pretty much all I really want to say. And I think it’s good advice. Then it’s something that’s really helped me. It’s just when you get into something, if you really want to achieve anything, just go all in and really go into it wholeheartedly and finish what you begin.

Like no matter how hard it gets, you have to Just it’s a matter of willpower, but it’s also a matter of accepting the importance of it and knowing that because when you start doing this, you also start to evaluate your options a bit more carefully. You won’t commit to like I’m very careful with the [00:40:00] things that I commit to doing even to myself.

I don’t just take on. I don’t just go a lot of things I would like to do. A lot of other types of books I would like to write. There are a lot of different, even types of businesses that I know, great opportunities. I could get into that, and I can make a ton of money doing that. But, I have to, I choose my commitments carefully, because I know how much time I have, I know how much work it takes to make things actually happen, and I finish what I begin.

I’m not gonna get into something, And be like, Oh yeah, that’s a great idea. And then just start going on it. And then halfway there be like, Oh, this is too much work. I’ll just go on to something else. That’s just not how I work. So yeah, I hope that is helpful to you. I think, like I said, I think it applies in the gym, but it applies elsewhere.

All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I’ll catch you on the next one. Hey, it’s Mike again. Hope you liked the podcast. If you did go ahead and subscribe. I put out new episodes every week or two. Where I talk about all kinds of things related to health and fitness and general wellness. [00:41:00] Also, head over to my website at www.

muscleforlife. com where you’ll find not only past episodes of the podcast, but you’ll also find a bunch of different articles that I’ve written. I release a new one almost every day actually, I release four to six new articles a week. And you can also find my books and everything else that I’m involved in over at muscleforlife.

com. All right. Thanks again. Bye.