How Often You Should Change Exercises, Sitting and Your Health, and More…

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Hey, hey, it’s Mike. Thanks for checking out another episode of the podcast. In this episode, I’m going to be taking three questions from my Google moderator. from you know, listeners and readers, which Google’s killing moderator soon. So I’m gonna have to find another solution for that. But the first question is going to be about changing exercises.

How often should you be changing exercises? What types of changes should [00:04:00] you be making and why and so forth? And the next question is going to be about, Sitting at a desk for people that sit at desks all day and the problems that you kind of run into with which I’ve run into hip flexor problems and you know, lower back issues, what you can do about that.

And that’s but not least is going to be a question regarding and what advice I would have to starting up a fitness business, which I’ve kind of addressed here and there, but I’m getting asked it more and more these days. So I figured I would just kind of talk about it again. All right, so let’s get started.

So the first question here comes from Chris from the UK says, hi Mike, how important is it to change up exercises chest? For example, I stick to incline dumbbell, press flat, dumbbell, press, and dips and just rotate as these cover all areas of the chest. Is there any real benefit to changing up exercises?

Cheers, cheers, cheers, cheers. So that’s a good question. So You know, the, I, years and years ago when I didn’t really know what I was doing you know, I thought the idea of muscle confusion, I thought [00:05:00] that was an important aspect of training and that you had to be constantly changing up your, your exercises because your body would get used to it, your muscles would get used to the exercises that you’re doing and you know, that it would then, if you did the same exercises every week, They just get less and less effective in terms of you know, building muscle and building strength and that’s bullshit.

Basically there’s no scientific evidence of that, and there’s a lot of evidence to the contrary, basically, that shows that it’s not. Yes, it’s true that if you went and did the exact same thing every week in terms of exercises and then. reps and weight. If you did all that the same every week, then you don’t even need to look to research to know that your body’s going to only get so far with that.

You know, the whole point, like the reason why your body gets bigger and stronger is to adapt to the, you know, stimuli of the training that you’re doing. So in terms of what those stimuli are, you have, The amount of weight that you’re, you’re moving and the [00:06:00] amount of total reps that you’re doing.

And you can look at that, you know, in terms of let’s say a one week every seven days. So if you are, you know, pushing your body, pushing your body, trying to progressively overload overload your muscles by adding weight to the bar over time, then, I mean, again, this is kind of just logic would dictate, right?

That your body would have to continue adapting. To deal with the demands that you’re placing on it and that that’s what it boils down to. That’s why you’re, that’s why your muscles get bigger and that’s why your muscles get stronger. Of course you have to eat right and you have to make sure you’re getting enough rest and do some other things correctly.

And some supplements can help, like creatine can help with that. But you know, underlying all of it is, is a, is a training program that has you progressively overloading your muscles. that is more important than changing exercises. And in fact, I would say that changing exercises frequently actually is a, is detrimental in the long run because one, there aren’t that many exercises that are actually all that [00:07:00] great.

When we’re, when you’re looking at different muscle groups, there really are only a handful of exercises that are, are, are The are optimal basically and if you know, why would you want to waste time doing exercises that are going to give you less than, you know, different exercise you do. Like, for instance, if you’re training your, your back, then you have at the top in terms of effectiveness or exercises like the deadlift.

Barbell row dumbbell row, pull ups, weighted pull ups, chin ups, weighted chin ups. Those are very effective exercises. An ineffective exercise, comparatively speaking, would be something like, you know, a hyperextension. I would say the lat pulldown is a, is a good exercise, but I prefer weighted pullups more.

I do recommend the lat pulldown in, in my different workout programs, like bigger than you’re stronger, thinner, stronger. I don’t think it’s a bad exercise. And I think it’s worth working in, but it’s, I would say it’s, it’s under. The [00:08:00] deadlift, the barbell row, the dumbbell row, and the weighted pull up.

But it is, it is, it is still a decent exercise. But like a hyperextension, unless you’re having lower back problems or really need to strengthen your lower back more, not worth doing. There are a lot of, a lot of machines, like different rowing machines that you’re just better off using. For like, instead of doing a seated rowing machine you’re better off just doing a barbell row or a dumbbell row.

And, you know. really actually kind of, I guess, looking at it back is not the best example because there aren’t that many variations of pulling exercises that people do really. So we could look at something like chest and say that you’re heavy or you’re barbell and dumbbell presses are definitely those are the most effective exercises.

But then you have a lot of variations of exercise that people do like, you know, let’s say cable flies where, yeah, you can get a pump with cable flies but you can’t go heavy because it, you can, you can hurt your shoulders and the movement. It’s just not very effective because it is hard to [00:09:00] progressively overload your muscles when all you can do is a bunch of high rep stuff, which is more about metabolic stress in terms of on a cellular level, which is a is one muscle growth pathway, you could say, but it’s not as.

powerful and it’s not as important as progressive overload. So when you look at like that, you need to be adding weight over time and you need to be as a natural weight lifter, you need to be able to emphasize heavy lifts to continue, continue changing and improving your, your, your, your body, your body composition, then that limits the exercise you can do right there.

So you, you, you know, you’re now looking at. The bigger compound movements squat, deadlift, military press, bench press, and dumbbell variations of those kinds of exercises. There are some machines that would work for that, like the lat pulldown like the t bar row machine, although it’s usually just a plate loaded, so it’s not, it’s more it’s not a machine in the traditional sense where you, you know, have a stack, a stack weight.

It’s more just a setup that allows you to row [00:10:00] weight, you know, with your body kind of inclined. But as opposed to something like peck deck, which is a real unnatural type of like, you know, you don’t, it’s just a, it’s just a fixed range of motion and you’re not moving weight against gravity in a normal, you know, type of type of way.

So when, when you do have to be lifting heavy weights and you have to be able to push yourself, you know, you’re now going to be You’re going to be prioritizing the, the heavier lifts and if you’re going to be doing it, which is the compound lifts, and then you know, if you’re going to be doing some higher rep stuff, then it’s going to be, which you could do on machines.

It’s going to be later in your workout, but that’s really the, the, the less important part of your workout is that higher rep stuff that you could do on machines. Like sometimes guys, they just like getting the pump from. From a fly, whether it’s a dumbbell fly or a cable fly or a peck deck type of fly motion, and they’ll ask me, can I do that?

And yeah, sure. So just, you know, get your, get your heavy lifting in, do that first. [00:11:00] And then if you want to go do some, you know, pump type of stuff. Sure. Why not? All

right. It’s better. So in terms of changing exercises then so that’s one, one downside is if you’re changing exercises too frequently, you’re going to end up doing exercises, spending time doing exercises that just aren’t that good. And there are another downside is it’s very hard to track your progress if you’re constantly changing exercises.

And again, we go back to progressive, progressive overload to know if you’re achieving that you need to be tracking your numbers over time. You need to know that last month you were benching to 25 for five and this month you’re benching to 45 for five or whatever. You know, there’s progress there. If you’re changing and some people, they change their exercises every week.

And I used to be one of those people. I used to think that that was, you know, beneficial. So, you know, it, you might go who knows how long before you come back to doing that exercise that, you know, it might be a month since you did that exercise last time and you’ve cycled through [00:12:00] all these other exercises in the meantime.

And you’ve cycled through rep ranges and maybe last time you were doing 10 to 12 reps on that. Now you’re trying to do 15. 10 to 15 reps, or now you’re trying to do heavier and it just becomes very disorganized in terms of tracking. And that is not optimal. What really, what you don’t want to be doing, like every time you go to the gym, you want to know you want to have a clear goal in mind in terms of your weight that you want to be moving and how many reps you want, you want to get with that weight and you need to base that on your previous workout.

Meaning that your goal in every workout is just to do a little bit better than The previous week and by a little bit better, that could even be one rep more. So if you start, let’s say you’re gonna be doing the same workout in terms of exercises. But last week you did, you, you bench 225 for four. This week you want to bench 220 in your first set.

Let’s say you just did four, four, four, you had three sets of bench and then you moved on to other stuff and you got four, four, four. So this week. your goal when you, when you get on, when you, after you [00:13:00] warm up and you get ready to do that first heavy set is you want to get at least five reps. If you can get six, great.

But even if you, let’s say you get five, you say you go five, four, four, and then the rest of your workout is exactly the same as the last weeks. In terms of reps, you try, but you just can’t, you know, you can’t beat last week’s numbers, but you did beat that first set. That’s actually. Personally, I’m happy with that that that was a successful workout.

Is it nicer to be able to, you know, beat that by a couple reps and go up and wait? Yeah, sure. But it doesn’t happen all the time. And then sometimes you just can’t beat, you know, you just, you’re, you’re stuck at, you repeat the last week’s workout and that’s not a bad workout. It doesn’t mean anything’s wrong, but if you are stuck like that over a longer period of time, then it means you need to change something.

Some, you know, there’s, there’s a reason why you’re not progressing and when you should be able to progress. Progress. And of course, there is a natural limit to the amount of strength that you can build, but it takes many, many years of weightlifting to get there. That, you know, you’re not going to hit your genetic peak in terms of strength, your genetic potential in terms of strength and like, [00:14:00] you know, three, four years of weightlifting.

I haven’t seen any good research on this, but anecdotally speaking from just people I know, and a lot of the people I’ve spoken with, it seems like maybe after 15 years, you might be getting up there or 10 years, you might be really getting up there to I would say probably, yeah, I’d say 10 years.

You’ve probably have 10 years of like and knowing what you’re doing, you’re definitely going to be at the genetic potential or really at the top of your genetic potential in terms of your physique and how much muscle you’ve built. But you can, it seems like strength can continue a bit beyond that.

Like you might not be able to gain much more size, but the muscle that you do have can, Learn in a sense to contract harder, which translates to more strength, which is why muscles can get stronger without getting bigger. You know, in the world of Olympic lifting, you see that because they have to meet weight.

So they’re trying to maximize strength that let, you know, minute while minimizing weight, body weight at least in the lower weight classes. And you know, so. Depending on how you train and how you eat and what you’re doing, [00:15:00] you can get stronger without getting bigger. But that only gets you so far.

There is a point where like your body only has so much muscle fiber and it can only work so efficiently. And then if you continue putting, you know, continue putting demands on it and telling it needs more, it needs more strength, it needs to be able to handle these heavier weights, then it just has to add muscle fiber.

And that’s just that. So back to this point of progressive overload. So you need to make sure that, you know, you’re trying to beat those, those workouts. And then if you only beat it by one rep, maybe the next week you beat it by another rep and now you can go up and wait. Cool. Now you’re at a new weight and then you push that, push that, push that.

And over time you’re getting stronger. And you, if you’re on a graph if you were just to see your one rep max, just calculated, you want to see that going up. So if you’re changing exercise too often, you just can’t do it. It doesn’t, it becomes infeasible because you don’t know where like, you just don’t know if you’re getting better when you’re doing new exercises.

And if you’re changing the order of the exercises, that [00:16:00] matters a lot as well. If you started out your workout with flat bench that was your first set. And then the next week you do it as your ninth set. Of course, you’re not gonna be able to do it. You did the week before, but you know, Is, is, is something wrong?

You don’t know. Do you need to, and by something wrong, I mean, do you need to address your diet? Are you not eating enough food? Do you need to address your rest? Are you not sleeping enough? Do you need to address your recovery? Are you trying to do too much in you know, too little into, are you trying to jam too much training into, you look at it every week because you only can do so much.

You know, frequency is not as important as the total number of reps that you’re doing every week and how much weight you are using on the, you know, for, for each rep you know, you could, you could do it all in one workout or you could do it all in three workouts. And that, that’s not what matters so much.

It’s just, you can only do so much and you want to be in that optimal range where you’re maximizing the body’s ability to recover. You’re doing enough to really drive muscle growth and strength, [00:17:00] but not so much that your body falls behind in recovery. So that’s kind of the background information on the question of how often to change and then to just get to a simple answer.

What I like to do is, so there are certain exercises I’d never, I never leave out for each workout. So for, I’ll just run down my, run down my, my week. So for my, for my chest training, I’m always going to be doing either heavy barbell or heavy dumbbell pressing and usually both in the same workout.

So my, in my first exercise, as a general rule, my first exercises in all my workouts are, are always heavy compound lifts. Always. I’m never starting my chest with. with, you know, some sort of silly fly movement or a bunch of lightweight crap or pushups or anything like that, you know, pre exhaustion does not work.

There was even a study that I saw recently on that and, but I’ve experienced it myself cause I used to do all this fancy stuff. I used to think, you know, you pre exhaust the muscle and then you really hit it and then no, it does, it doesn’t, it’s not, it doesn’t, it doesn’t do anything special. What you want to do [00:18:00] is you want to warm up.

And make sure that you don’t want to, your warmup sets should not be fatiguing. They should not be hard. You just want to get muscle. You want to get blood flowing in the muscles. You want to warm up the joints, legs, you want to get everything ready to go for your heavy lifting with, without, with using as little of energy and as little glycogen in the muscle.

Like you want to be prepared to really hit your heavy sets and then you just go right into your heavy lifts. So that’s what I do. The beginning of every workout is going to be something heavy and compound like barbell pressing dumbbell pressing for my shoulders. It’s going to be barbell barbell pressing, you know, overhead pressing.

I used to do heavy shoulder dumbbell, shoulder pressing but For some reason, my right shoulder is, there’s just an instability in there and it really comes out when I dumbbell press and I, I, I work with a massage therapist every week and it’s something we’ve actually been addressing because I think it’s just been in there for a while and I just didn’t really notice it until I started getting heavier and heavier on my incline pressing.

Like I really started to notice it when I was getting to about 275 on [00:19:00] my incline bench or. 2 65 or something like that. And it was just like tightness in my neck and my shoulder would get tight. And I’ve had that for a long time actually. And then it’s just not, ’cause I felt it before in the past, but I didn’t really start to feel it until, until I really started going heavier and heavier.

So I’m, I’m not doing any dumbbell pressing right now. Not that I dislike dumbbell pressing. It’s just, it’s uncom, it’s just uncomfortable. And I feel like as I’m pressing up, I just feel like my. Shoulder isn’t stable and I’ve even had it almost feel like it’s gonna kind of come out of its fucking socket or something I don’t know.

It doesn’t feel good. So I’m just like yeah, I’m not gonna mess with that. So barbell pressing feels totally fine All right, cool. I’m sticking with that And, and then, and then for my, for my back training, it’s, I’m always starting with heavy deadlifts, unless I’m taking a break on deadlifts, which I do every once in a while, depending on, like really the only reason why I take a break these days is just if like something’s bothering me.

I’ve, I’ve been, been warming up with like 2 25 [00:20:00] before and just being sloppy with my form, just being like, yeah, whatever. And then had it something like kind of tweak in my back and I’m like, eh. And the thing is with little niggling things like that, like I don’t push through pain. Now, muscle soreness is fine.

You can train if your muscles are sore. That doesn’t matter. But if there’s pain, you don’t want to try to push through pain. And that’s been something that I’ve always kind of kept in where if something is hurting, then I don’t do it. I find an alternative exercise. And I see what’s going on. Maybe I need to stretch.

Maybe it’s mobility stuff. Maybe it just needs to, you know, like in the case of this deadlift, it wasn’t an injury. It’s just There was some pain and it was because I was just being sloppy, you know what I mean? I probably just moved it, you know, it’s enough weight where something can can get mad, but it feels like nothing So I was just like kind of sloppy just doing my warm ups talking, you know looking over talking to the guy with me being like, yeah, whatever and then being like it didn’t feel good and Yeah, it wasn’t [00:21:00] excruciating and maybe I could have just loaded up weight and went for it, but it did it was enough where I just was like, I don’t think it’s a good idea.

And so by doing that kind of stuff same thing with my shoulder when my shoulder and next are bothering with my heavy incline pressing. Yeah, I could have kept doing it, but it was feeling It was becoming more of an issue. It wasn’t getting better. It was getting a little bit worse. So I stopped incline pressing for several weeks and you know, had the massage therapist to work with really like it’s uncomfortable.

There’s, there’s, there are muscles in the neck called the scalenes that come down. Digging in there did not feel good. But it helped a lot. So, so if it’s the only reason why I would take a break from deadlifts or squats or anything really is if something’s bothering me, otherwise I’m always starting my, my, my back training with heavy deadlifting.

And then, you know, I’ll go into then like heavy rowing. Really the majority of my training is just heavy compound lifting, but there are some isolation movements like for instance, dumbbell rows are a bit of a more isolation. I would say than a [00:22:00] barbell row or a deadlift, of course, on shoulders, side raises, rear raises are, I think they’re, they’re important exercises for developing rounded shoulders, you know, that have that kind of cap.

Obviously as a natural weightlifter, your shoulders are only going to go so far. You’re never going to have the huge shoulders as big as your head. That’s just, that comes from drug use. But you can have good shoulders that are proportionate to your arms and that, you know, give you that nice wide upper look.

So then you can have that taper. So side raises are good for that. It’s an isolation move on chest. Not a big fan of isolation moves, to be honest. I know some people like flies. Probably about the most isolation I get on my chest is dips, which are not really an isolation move, so it’s not even a good example.

But you know, I like weighted dips. I like even unweighted dips. If it’s at the end of my workout, I’m going to do a couple higher rep sets. I think dips are great for that. Anyways so, so that, that’s my, that’s my back training. And on my legs, I’m going to always be starting with some sort of squat.

You know, either a front squat or a [00:23:00] back squat. These days I’ve been doing a bit more front squatting because I neglected my front squatting for a while where I would like do it at the end of my workout or I just wouldn’t do it for a bit. And so, like when I started my front really kind of being consistent with my front squats.

I was, I’ve always been consistent or at least over the last four or five years been consistent on my back squat. So my back squat though was getting up to the three sixties or so and feeling good and, you know, deep obviously. And that’s not that impressive. I know, but I, my height works a little bit against me to be honest.

I have long It’s like I’m six two and I have long legs, you know, I have long arms to like abnormally long monkey arms and that works against me on bench press, which has always been a weakness. Like the, the heavy, the heaviest, the strongest I’ve ever been on flat bench is like two 95 for two or three, which again, it’s not that impressive.

I mean, 315 for one. Eh, that’s, I mean, it’s not bad, but that’s not impressive. And, and overhead press like military overhead press, 225 for maybe two [00:24:00] seated. And again, that’s strong, but not that impressive. My long arms are like, I have to move the weight a freaking mile. And same thing with my squats.

I have to, you know, for me to squat low is I like goes on forever. The reps never end. Whereas obviously shorter legs, shorter range of motion. Anyways so I was squatting maybe 360s on my back squat and then, but I was like 225, maybe even a little bit less actually with on my front squat because I just didn’t do it enough.

And so now I’ve been, I’ve been working on my front squat and I had it last week. I mean, I’ll be, I’ll be training legs tomorrow and I’m going to go for 255 cause last week I was at 245 and it felt pretty good. So whatever, it’s coming up. I would like, I mean, given my back squat, I really should be front squatting probably 295 or so 315 and I’ll get there.

So anyways, I’m starting my leg workout with that heavy, heavy squat of some kind. And then usually I’m moving on to whichever squat I haven’t done. So if I’m starting with a back squat, I’m going to move into a front squat. If I’m starting with a front squat, then I’m gonna move into a back squat.

And then you know, [00:25:00] from there I might do some leg press or some hack squat or some lunges depends on what I’m doing. But that’s the first thing with. it with changing exercises is I, I don’t, I recommend that you have your core exercises that you never change. And those are the exercises also that you, that you measure your progress most against.

What I want to see in myself and with everybody that I write with and everybody I hear from is weight going up. Like getting stronger over time on those big lifts, those big first lifts when you’re having most of you have all your energy and your focus is there and you know what I mean? If you, as long as you’re getting stronger on those big lifts, it, it, it doesn’t matter what you do after that.

Like yeah. When you’re bulking, you’ll find when you’re in a calorie surplus and you’re in a good groove, you’ll probably find that you’ll be able to, let’s say you’re going to this, the workout that you do, you’re going to, you make progress where you go up you know, on your first exercise, you go up in reps on your second exercise, you go up in reps and on your third, maybe I’ve had the third happen sometimes, but usually [00:26:00] I haven’t bulked in a while cause I don’t really want to get fatter.

So I just kind of stay at a maintenance level. But When the last time I was bulking, I remember that I would get first night, first and second exercise gains, like gain reps on both of them. And then usually the third exercise would be the same because I’ve just, I’m kind of, you know, I’ve, I’ve expended a lot of energy by the time that third exercise comes around.

So it’s actually pretty good that, you know, I can go up on the first and second and still not lose anything on the third. And so. That’s really what you want to be seeing and that’s why you need to keep those core exercises in and really don’t change them out. Like there’s really no reason to change out deadlift.

There’s no alternative. There is no, there’s nothing you can replace the deadlift with. You either do it or you don’t do it. You know, you could, you could start if you wanted to go heavy on your barbell rows, you could start with barbell rows and do that for four weeks or so just to see where you’re at.

But you, I wouldn’t recommend that. Like, I’d recommend that you do a lot more deadlifting for your first exercise [00:27:00] than barbell rows for your first exercise. Unless you’re doing a some sort of specialized program, of course. So your, your core exercises don’t change much. And then in terms of changing the other exercises.

So for me. Those first and second, those first exercises rarely change for me, but the second and third, and if I do a fourth exercise, those can change, but I usually change them maybe once every eight to 10 weeks. And again, the reason is because I want to be, see my progress. With a certain setup and like in terms of a workout routine, like my back workout, or I’m going to be doing dead lifting barbell rows, dumbbell rows, and then pull ups.

I want to track my progress on those over the course of a couple months and see, you know, where am I starting? Where am I ending? And then, well, I mean, along the way, of course, let’s say at the four week mark, if I haven’t progressed on anything, then I need to look at my diet. Mainly would be the issue again, diet, you know, recovery, rest, and see what, what needs to change.

And so really, I mean that those are my kind of general recommendations and I talk about all this in my books, of [00:28:00] course, bigger, leaner, stronger for men, thinner, leaner, stronger for women, and also just lay out, you know, in there like these free bonus reports that you get with the book that lays out a year’s worth of workouts for each.

And they, they’re broken up into eight week phases. So you do like phase one, it’s laid out for you, phase two, laid out for you. And that there are changes built into that, that walk you through all the exercises that are worth doing basically. And that is a, there is something to be said for that. Act.

Different exercises do train muscle groups in different ways. It’s not that the deadlift is the exact same as the barbell row or even that all you need is a deadlift. I would say that there are definitely benefits to doing other exercises than just the deadlift for developing an all around, you know, thick.

well developed back or, or, you know, in, in the case of chest, I’d say pressing probably gets you the most of it, which kind of comes back to the question here that this guy was asking about. He does his incline press. He does his barbell pressing, his [00:29:00] dumbbell pressing and his dips. I would say those, those presses are going to give you the majority of your of your chest, but you have that dips that third exercise or maybe a fourth or yeah, maybe you do dips one week or maybe then you do, you, you could do something like flies.

You have to go a bit higher reps. You don’t want to replace your, your heavy lifting with it. And you could try decline pressing. I’m not a big fan of decline pressing because it’s a reduced range of motion, which means your muscles have to do less work. And you’re, you’re not targeting, there is no lower chest.

You have the pec major and then you do have an upper chest muscle that kind of runs like this. And it’s actually a separate, a separate muscle. I’ll link an article down below if you want to see, there’s a diagram of it and where I talk a bit about chest training. And that’s one of the reasons why incline pressing is particularly important.

And it’s, it’s also harder, which generally speaking as a, as a rule, if an exercise is harder, that’s probably a good sign. Like, The exercises that a lot of people avoid are the hardest ones, deadlift. I think the hardest exercise you can do [00:30:00] squat, one of the hardest, if not the hardest, you could say, I don’t know what’s harder, a deadlift or a squat.

I think deadlifts a bit harder, but some people find squat harder you know, proper bench presses where the bars coming all the way down, good form, your elbows tucked in and so forth. Hard half reps, not hard decline pressing, not hard compared to incline pressing incline pressing much harder, especially full range of motion.

So incline pressing though is not just harder. That’s not the only reason why it’s good. It’s because it emphasizes more of that upper. It’s like clavicular pectoralis, I think is the name of the muscle and it’s a smaller muscle and it’s a real bitch to develop. The pec major develops much faster. So, and I used to have this problem where I never did any, all I did was flat pressing and decline pressing because I liked that I could put more weight on the decline.

I thought, you know, you look cooler with more weight in the bar. Right. And, and basically this was years ago. I got into a. basically a situation where I had a bottom heavy chest. Like I had this, I had like, you would see maybe something like this line like [00:31:00] this. I can see on video, but then my upper chest was really underdeveloped.

So it was almost like it was like this flat area up here almost. And then you had this chest that just came out and you know, yeah, maybe that’s me just being nitpicky, but. So, you know, that’s what kind of what this is about when you progress more and more and start looking at your physique and going, all right, what really needs to be improved here?

And you start really looking at it. There were some obvious things like I had no upper chest my shoulders are too small. My, my legs were too small. I wasn’t deadlifting at all back in the day. So my back was underdeveloped and you could see that my lats were too small. I didn’t have the middle, I didn’t have like the rhomboids, the thickness that I have now.

So I changed that to where I actually, what I did, the first change I did was all I did was incline pressing for like eight months. I didn’t do any flat pressing or any decline pressing and it worked really well. Actually I, I finally had an upper chest start to fill in where it started to look a bit more proportionate and.

Now I think I’m in a [00:32:00] pretty good place. I’m pretty happy with my chest development. I really don’t want my chest to be bigger because I, I like the, I mean, I like the size the way it is now. And I think the shape is fine now. So anyways, that’s, that’s, that’s the, the. The chest pressing question is, as long as you’re doing your heavy dumbbell and barbell presses, you’re doing 80 percent of what you need to be doing, and then you can rotate through other exercises every couple of months or so, you know, if you want, if you have, if your workout is four exercises, personally, I would do two.

Those first two would be pressing, it would either be double barbell like flat incline or vice versa, or it could be double dumbbell even for a bit. I’ve done that for a while. We’re only trained with dumbbells in my pressing. I like dumbbells cause you can have, you know, a really good range of motion where you can get, I like to get them all the way down here.

And again, you can go, you know, flat incline or incline flat. And then if you did one or two other exercises after that, that’s where you could do your dips or your flies or other things that, you know, you might want to try and see how your body [00:33:00] responds. Thanks. So that’s that’s pretty much the whole story on changing exercises and and then chest training in particular All right, so let’s move on to the next question here.

Comes from Chris from the UK, again. Might be the same person, may not be. But, it’s a good question. And one that I get asked fairly often. So, thought I’d take it. So, here’s what Chris says. Like the majority of desk workers, I suffer from lower crossed syndrome, which is short hip flexors and lower spinal muscles.

Weak lower spinal muscles. Weak hamstrings. and glutes. It’s on its way to being corrected, but squats are a problem. Pros and cons of back squats versus front squats. I’ve run into this before and I actually didn’t know that it was called lower cross syndrome until now. So I just learned something, but.

I wouldn’t say that I had my, my lower spinal muscles. I didn’t never had any problem with just because of heavy deadlifting and I have a pretty, pretty strong lower back at this point. But I ran into hip flexor issues [00:34:00] and issues with hamstrings and glutes not being strong enough for heavy squatting.

And actually it was a point where I had to dial back on my heavy squatting because my hip flexors were so damn tight from sitting all day that it just hurt. I couldn’t squat more than. I think I had to stop at like 275 and I ended up just dialing back to like 245 and just working in a higher, higher rep range because, and this was a while ago, probably about a year ago because my hip flexors were so tight and again, it was because I sit or was at the time sitting so much where, you know, my average work day, I’m probably, I don’t know, 12 to 14 hours.

And that’s, that was, it’s just sitting, right? There’s, and obviously I get up to go to the bathroom and get water and whatever, but. majority of that time was sitting. And so not only is that not good for, for squatting and, and for, for, it depends like it’s not good for cycling and other things that use those muscles.

It’s actually sitting a lot is really not good for your health. There’s been research, you’ve probably heard this before cause there [00:35:00] was research that showed that there was an association between how much time spent. You, you spent sitting and just all cause mortality, which is death from all causes.

And basically the people, the more that you sat, the more likely you were to get a disease and die later in your life or fall down and break your hip and you know, have complications related to that. They’ll lead to your death and whatever. And, but that. The study that I had seen on that, there were actually one or, I think there were two that I saw.

The association was not strong for work sitting, but it was strong for sitting down after work, meaning that, you know, people would go home, sit on their, if, if, you know, if you, people would go from their bed, to their car, to their work, to their work space. to their car, to their couch, to their bed. It was that non work sitting that that was the real association.

And then on the weekends as well, not moving. So there’s probably some confounding factors there in terms of lifestyle. If you’re not exercising [00:36:00] regularly and if you’re sitting on the couch every night, you’re probably eating food. There’s probably overweight issues there. And obviously some of these things are controlled for, but.

It can be hard to control for all these different variables. However, there was some newer research that just came out that I saw that showed that even in people that exercised regularly the, there was an association between the, the total time spent sitting, including work time and so basically the long story short is you want to be spending the, you not want to be sitting for eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 hours a day.

It’s just not what your body was meant to do. I have a standing desk now and which I got from what’s the name of this company? EvoDesk. EvoDesk. And it’s pretty fancy, it’s pretty expensive I found out after that like Ikea has ones for a lot cheaper so I might have just done that. But it’s cool, it has a button that I can like pre program these different heights and I can just hit a button and it goes to them.

It’s very stable. It was a little bit squeaky at first but WD [00:37:00] 40 took care of that and I love it. So now I stand, the majority of my day is standing. I sit down or I sit down to eat lunch maybe and you know, if I, sometimes if I’m writing something, I really want to be thinking for some reason. I feel like I do it better seated, so I’ll sit for that.

But now, you know, my total seated time, I do sit down at night. I don’t have a desk at home. I actually just kind of sit in a chair and on the laptop when I’m working. So. I sit for a few hours at night when I’m working. That’s not a big deal, considering that I’m seated for no more than an hour, really, probably here.

I even do the majority of my writing standing. Sometimes I just feel like sitting. I don’t know. If I really need to think about something, then I’ll sit down. And so what I recommend is if you can’t get a standing desk which I, you, you, you can though, like you don’t even necessarily have a, have to have a desk you can get, like if you have a normal desk, you can get these things.

I don’t, I don’t know what they’re called really, but they sit on the desk and then your, your monitors go on top of them and then you can just bring, you can lower [00:38:00] them or raise them. So, you know, you even have to have a fancy desk. You just take the desk you have right now and then get one of these things and and put your, Computer monitors on them, and then you can raise them when you want to stand, lower them when you want, when you want to sit, you know, there you go and, you know, I, I like to be standing, like I said, the majority, the majority of the day, and I even got one of what do they call these?

It’s like a standing mat, they, they make them, I got it on Amazon, they make them for chefs, People that have to stand all day cause it can be a, it can be, it can, it can, it doesn’t, it actually wasn’t happening to me. Some people that get like back discomfort from standing all day or, or even on your feet so you can get like these foam pads, which I got one, maybe I don’t need it after all cause I didn’t really notice anything standing on the floor, but it is a little bit more comfortable.

To stand on, I guess it has like a similar effect, you know, like those Crocs shoes are popular with people that stand all day for the same kind of, they give you that cushion. So this does it. You can just, I have a mat on the floor that I stand on and yeah, that’s, that’s really what I do. Now, if you can’t [00:39:00] do that for whatever reason, if you can’t get the extension thing or get a standing desk, then you’ll just want to make sure that you’re standing up and moving around probably every 30 minutes or so.

That’s what I was doing before. I had a little timer that I would have, you know, so just to remind me, so every 30 minutes I would just get up and I would go move around, maybe do a couple stretches, stretch my hips out, stretch my hamstrings out. walk and get some water and then sit back down. So that can help.

It’s not as, not as good as just spending the majority of your day standing, but it’s better than just sitting in a chair for, you know, six hours straight or something like that. And then in terms of. Tightness. If you’re actually having problems with your hip flexors right now or, or your hamstrings or even your quads, any, any lower body hip leg issues go on muscle for life.

com and search for mobility and search for an article. There are two articles that I think there’s called a definitive guide to mobility exercises. You’re going to want to look at that and then you’re going to want to look at a mobility article that I, that I wrote for, it’s [00:40:00] like mobility exercises for squatting or something like that.

You’ll see it in the list. And do start with the, the routine in the extra in the, in the article on squatting. And then you can look in the definitive guide one, if there’s anything else in particular for what you have going on, but it’s, it’s not comfortable. There are some different stretches that you have to do dynamic type stretches.

Also search muscle for life for foam rolling and look on that cause that’s what I had to do. So to handle my hip flexors and that I was, what I was running into is it took. A fair amount of mobility work. It took like three or four weeks before I could really start squatting heavy again. mobility work.

And then also like I see this massage therapist, so she was really getting digging in there, which, but you can do that with like a, the right, you know, foam, you can foam roll your, your hips. You can use a, like a, like a lacrosse ball and get in there. It doesn’t feel good. whether somebody else does it or whether you do, it does not feel good.

But it works. So you really just need to really make sure you get those muscles stretched out and you [00:41:00] have to you know, put up with some pain basically. And you have to back off on the, on the weightlifting that’s causing the problems. Cause you don’t want to continue to be aggravating it. If your hip flexors are shortened and tight, you don’t want to just try and try to keep loading weight and then cause an injury.

You have to loosen them up and get your range of, get your, your movement. patterns fixed, you know, and then you can get back to the heavy lifting. So yes, that’s that’s what I would recommend. And then in terms of the pros and cons and also, by the way, the, I would recommend that you do that squatting mobility routine every week, even if you are standing it’s It’s it just helps.

It helps to to keep your your everything moving the way that needs to move so you can continue to progress. You don’t get held back by weak muscles or muscles that are not You know, that are too tight. So they’re not able to relax at all which is obviously a problem. So yeah, I do recommend if you can do it.

It’s a good [00:42:00] massage therapist. Like the lady I work with. She used to work on Olympic rowers. So she just is She has strong hands and they’re not like, they don’t necessarily feel great, the massages, but they help a lot with weightlifting because we just, whatever’s tight, like the neck tightness I was running into, sometimes at my right quad tends to get tightened, which then it can cause pain in the patellar area of the kneecap.

So if, you know, if that’s going on, then she can help with that. So if you can do that, then it’s nice. If not, you can do it a lot of it yourself or with a friend, just doing mobility type exercises. Yeah. Pros and cons of back squats versus front squats, kind of talked about this earlier. I wouldn’t say that there are, there are different exercises.

The front squat puts more emphasis on the quads. It puts less stress on the knees, which is nice if you have any knee issues less stress on the back, which is nice if you have any back issues and the, you can go deeper as well. You don’t need as much mobility, as much flexibility to get deep on the front [00:43:00] squat.

The back squat is especially as you get past that halfway mark and you start getting deeper, kind of like at the halfway point of the descent and To the bottom of the squat back to the halfway point is a lot of hamstring Obviously in the back squat more so than the front squat the quads are more dominant in the front squat Although the back squat is genuinely thought of as a quadricep exercise It’s just that the quads are more responsible for the first as you’re as you As you start your rep and you’re kind of getting so you’re here and you start getting to you’re here right and you start getting to there that’s quad quad quad and as you get deeper though it becomes more hamstring especially if you are set up correctly where you know your feet are about shoulder width apart your toes are turned out a little bit and as you are descending you’re keeping your knees tracking with your toes and you know so you do these things that it puts more emphasis on the hamstrings.

I wouldn’t say it’s so much of a pros and [00:44:00] cons thing. It’s that both are good exercises. The back squat is probably the foundation of your, of your leg training. And then front squatting would be done in addition to it. I like front squatting a lot. Like I said, I’ve been focusing on front squats just because I want to bring my strength up there.

So I’d say do both. Okay, so now let’s move on to the last question here from CWIE23 from Canada. What advice would you give to someone looking to start an online fitness business? Obviously it’s a very kind of vague question but it’s one that I get fairly often. And they’re, it’s kind of, it’s tough to answer at least in a semi timely manner because there’s, I feel like there’s so much that kind of goes into making it work, but if I were to prioritize things and just looking at what other people are doing in this space and what I would do differently if I were them.

One is being in very, very good shape yourself. You definitely have to show that you walk the walk and you have to have the type of physique that the people you’re trying to sell to want to have. And of course that like. [00:45:00] I don’t know why I even have to say that, but I see so many of these people that are trying to be fitness bloggers or we’re trying to write books or kind of do what I’m doing, I guess because I’ve seen a lot more of it come around since I’ve been doing what I’m doing.

You know, a lot of, a lot more books in Amazon with like almost copycat type of colors and or covers with, you know, color schemes and whatever is that a lot of these people just aren’t in very good shape. Like, yeah, I would say they’re fit, but they’re, they, they don’t. You don’t look at them, you don’t go, damn, that person looks really good.

Now, of course, a bit of that is a genetic for instance, like my abs are not symmetrical. There’s nothing that I can ever do about that. That’s just genetically how my abs are there. They don’t, I don’t have that perfect kind of six pack where it’s just like, it looks, it looks great. I just don’t have it.

It doesn’t matter how lean I get. It doesn’t matter how much I train my abs. My abs are staggered. Not that that’s a huge deal, but it doesn’t look as good. My waist is fairly thin, but I don’t have the super tiny waist. So, you know, my muscle insertions in general, not bad, but [00:46:00] you know not, not, not incredible either.

So there was a bit of a genetic thing to really, really have that like, holy shit type of body. A big part of that’s genetics. But you know, as long as you have, Decent enough, you know, as long as your muscles look decent enough when they’re trained and you can get lean, then you’re going to look good.

But a lot of these people that I see in this space, they, they’re, they don’t really look that good and they don’t even have an example of pictures of at a time when they ever looked really that good. And so, I mean, this is an obvious thing, but it’s more from a marketing point of why should people. Why should they aspire to, you know, why should they listen to that person if they don’t inspire, if they don’t aspire to look like them?

I mean, take it in terms of a more concrete thing where if you wanted to learn a skill, you want to learn how to play guitar. And you have a lot of people out there saying they can teach you how to play guitar. Who are you going to be looking for? Are you going to look for the person that was like kind of okay at playing guitar?

I guess they’re good. Or you’re just going to go to the person that [00:47:00] is really, really good at playing guitar and it’s like impresses you where you’re like, damn, that, that person is really good. Of course you’re going to go to the person that’s really good, especially if the person that’s really good is also a good teacher and is able to communicate, you know, The different concepts you need to understand clearly and, and has a good system laid out and, you know, it’s just, that’s so much more attractive.

So I would say that’s the first thing that I see that is, is, is just causing people to not have the success that they want in this space. Another thing that I see. Is you know, you in, and this is, I’m biased just because of my experience, I guess, in, in terms of building muscle for life and building legion and, and also just kind of seeing what’s going on in the internet is that.

If you, if you really want to have a good chance of succeeding, you have to be able to produce good content. Well, I’d say you have to, you have to be able to produce really good content. And this is a subject, there’s [00:48:00] a subjective element to this where I think that the content I produce is pretty good.

I think that some of the articles I do better on than others. Some of them, the words flow better and I like, I, you know, I’m kind of a perfectionist type of person where I, nothing is ever good enough, basically. So, I would say I’m a fairly good writer. I’m a competent writer. I don’t think I’m an outstanding writer.

But these are all subjective. Some people might look at my stuff and be like, oh, it’s not very good. Other people might look at my stuff and, and think it’s very, very good. Now I can say that I get a lot more people thinking that my stuff is very, very good because there is an objective element to it, which is for instance stuff like traffic.

So, you know, and, and, and growth rate. So muscle for life, I started in March of 2013. And so a couple of a couple of years in now. And where it’s over 1. 2 million visits a month and it grows every month. It just grows, grows, grows, grows. And I get a lot of comments of, you know, on my articles, people saying how much they [00:49:00] like them.

I get a lot of social engagement, people sharing, people liking. So those are objective things I can look at and be like, people are liking my content. It’s, it’s good content. I’m good enough to do what I need to do. Basically. Can I improve? Of course now, you know, like recently somebody emailed me and he was, he was saying that like, basically he’s doing, he’s doing what I’m doing.

He’s producing this long form content and he’s doing stuff every day and he’s getting no traffic and that’s because his content sucks. I guarantee you, I didn’t even, I actually didn’t even look at it. I had seen some of his stuff before. He’s not a good writer. He doesn’t, yeah. There are many different ways content can suck, it can be poorly delivered.

You know, bad writing in terms of video content, can’t articulate thoughts. Well you know, whatever, there’s a lot of different ways. Obviously people can do, can deliver content poorly, but then there can be bad ideas. So you could have someone that like is a great, is a great writer or a great speaker, but bad ideas, that person is going to do better than the person [00:50:00] who, you know, can’t communicate themselves clearly.

So in this space, in the fitness space, obviously. If you don’t really know what you’re talking about, if you’re kind of just regurgitating what else is, what, what is out there and you haven’t lived it yourself, you don’t really know what works, you haven’t worked with a bunch of people it’s not that you can’t build a following, but you’re not going to be, you’re not going to do it as quickly as you would if you understood it theoretically and had the actual experience to back it up and had the results in yourself to prove it and results in other people.

So there’s, so yeah. There’s, there’s that on, on the content side of things where you have to be able to produce content. And you have to produce it regularly. That is good enough to where people are sharing it around. That’s the key. Whether it’s social sharing or whether it’s emailing or just sending links, it needs to be good enough to where somebody where for every person that reads it.

You know, there’s a virality factor in there. You could think of it as even a multiplier and the higher that multiplier is, you know, so if a reader, let’s say it’s a [00:51:00] one multiplier. So for every reader that reads it, there’s one. They bring in one new reader, then that’s one level of growth. If it’s a two.

If, and then, because it’s obviously exponential, because that new, and it becomes, you know a self perpetuating cycle, because that new reader, if you have a, if you have a one to one, then you have a constant, you know, engine there. So then the new person brings in a new person, brings in a new person, and of course it’s hard to, I mean, there in certain ways there, these could be quantified using fancy types of things, but you can’t exactly quantify this.

It’s just, you have to look at it in terms of a, of a abstract kind of concept on what you’re going for. If you have a virality factor of over one, let’s say it’s two, well then now you’re looking at like exponential growth type stuff. And I’ll see this more in a micro scale. Like my game with my writing is that I’m always trying to, well, there are articles where I’m, I’m addressing a question.

I know it’s not going to be a super viral type of article, like article I wrote recently on deloading. I knew that deloading an [00:52:00] article on deloading, it’s not going to get a ton of shares. It’s not going to blow up. But it’s something I get asked a lot and you know, I thought it’d make for a good article and it has value.

So I wrote it, but some, a lot of cases what I’m trying to go for, like my personal game with my content creation is I’m trying to beat my, basically if I get over. 1, 000 Facebook likes, you know, this is organic, obviously I’m not paying for them where people are sharing it around and liking it enough.

Like that’s, well, that’s a lot, I’d say over 500 is where I’m like, I’m excited. And then if I break a thousand, that’s like, I’ve only done that a handful of times, like had articles that just did that well, that within a day or two of being posted or let’s say five days and posted, it’s over a thousand Facebook likes.

And that’s given, I have about maybe 70, 000 followers or something. I don’t have a ton of Facebook followers. If I had, if I had a million or something, of course, that’d be a, that would be a nothing number. And then in terms of traffic, if an article can break like, you know, an MFL, if, if an article day one breaks 5, 000 views, I’m [00:53:00] excited.

If it breaks like 8, 000, 7, 000, 8, 000, then that’s like really, really going well. So that’s kind of my game, right? So I’m, I’m you know, trying to, whenever I’m writing, I’m always like, that’s my. I’m trying to inform people, but I’m also just trying to write the best possible article. And I’m thinking like, what could make this better?

What can make this better? What could make this more shareable? What can make this, you know, better than whatever, everything else is on the first page search results. So. But you have to, if you’re going to produce content, you have to go into it like that. You can’t just like go, Oh, I have to write this fucking article now.

Let me know. Yeah, whatever. Fine. Post or, or shoot a video, right? The one of the reasons why you don’t see a bunch of video content for me is Right now I’m more focused on my writing in terms of time and I’m not that interested in video content right now. In the future when I have a gym set up that I can like, we’re going to be moving into a new building would have already done it actually, but we plan on moving out of the state by we, I mean me and there’s six of us, all my team, we’re all going to move out of the state next year, probably [00:54:00] spring ish.

And then we’ll get a building. And we’re going to move to like Virginia, Washington, DC area. If anybody’s in that area, that’s where, that’s where that’s where we’re going to go. Anyways, so we’re going to get a building and then we’re going to put a gym in there, not as a business, but you know, for us to use basically.

And then I’ll start doing more video stuff cause then we’ll start doing some workout videos. And, you know, anyways, that’s, that’s one of the reasons why I’m not, I’m not really just like trying to produce half assed video content. I’m trying to. You at least you know, with these podcasts, people really like them.

Talk about things that people care about. And anyways, so my point is if you’re going to be producing content, you have to be able to producing. You have to produce very, very, very good content that people share around. If you want to grow quickly and if you want to be successful using the type of business model that I’m using.

And it’s not easy. It takes, you know in terms of writing, I’ve written millions of words over all the writing that I’ve done and I’ve read a ton of books on writing. It’s thousands of hours and I, I [00:55:00] still at this point, I feel like I’m good. I don’t feel like I’m great. I just feel like I’m good and it’s thousands of hours to get to a point where I’m good.

Good enough to make a living at it and really draw, you know, that’s really what drives everything obviously is writing. So producing content, that’s very important for making it in this space in terms of, you know, how I would go about it. Being able to get results matters a lot in the end, it doesn’t matter how great your words are or how pretty your, your shit is.

If it doesn’t deliver, you’re not going to have that word of mouth. The vast majority really, I mean my entire business, most of life and Legion, they’re driven by word of mouth. I spend no Legion. Is going to do we’re shooting for about 4. 2 million in sales this year and we spend basically nothing on advertising.

We do some retargeting, we do a couple of things, but we spend basically nothing because we have muscle for life and we have my platform as an author and you know, we are, we have a good ecosystem that we can use to promote it. [00:56:00] But it’s mainly word of mouth and that’s really what I’m going for is I want to, to Create that wow effect where people, you know, you’re delivering a lot more than they expect.

And so in terms of back to like muscle for life and books and stuff, one of the reasons why the website is very popular and my books are very popular is because they actually work. Yeah, they sound good and they get you pumped and fired up and wanting to do it. But if they, if, if, if it were that and then the program sucked and they didn’t work, I wouldn’t be nearly as.

You know successful or whatever as I wouldn’t be where I’m at right now. That’s for sure and there are a lot of mediocre type type of workout programs out there and a mediocre types of diets and that kind of work for some people and kind of Don’t and yeah, if you spend enough money advertising them, you can still sell a bunch of shit That’s there’s no question if you’re a good advertiser and a good marketer, you can sell anything and make money but if you want to actually help people and You want to not have to [00:57:00] have like a churn and burn business where you have to be constantly spending to acquire new customers and then you lose a lot of them because your stuff actually sucks.

Then you have to have, you have to be able to deliver. The goods and deliver, deliver real results. So in this space, obviously that means walking the walk yourself, like I was saying earlier, but then also showing that you can get results with other people. If you know, if you were, if in terms of, well, I’m saying what I want to say is like, if you’re going to do one on one coaching, for instance I don’t offer that.

I never have, I actually am going to be launching a coaching service soon, but in, I haven’t been able to really make. The time for it myself, because my time is better spent on other things, to be honest. But if you’re going to be doing a coaching service, then the first thing you need is success stories.

Like, personally, if I were just to do a coaching service, if I were trying to establish myself from the beginning, and that’s what I wanted to lead with, you know, I would produce content, of course, but I would take on clients for free. I would take on my first 10 clients for free. I wouldn’t even charge them anything.

Or I’d tell them, how about this? [00:58:00] We’re gonna get you to where you want to be and then in the end after you’re there three months or whatever if you want To pay me some money then pay me some money. Here’s maybe what I normally would charge And you know only pay me if you get there or just don’t even pay me at all And then I would want their success story though And I’d probably get them to you know do some video and stuff and you know So then I can take that and prove that I can get results.

So proving you can get results is big and knowing which requires that you know your stuff, you know, if you really want to know your stuff, that means you have to do a lot of reading and you’re going to have to dive into some complicated stuff in terms of the science and the biology. And it might seem overwhelming at first, but if you just push through it and, you know, make sure that you understand all the, even the individual words that are being thrown at you and just make sure you take the time to study it like a real, you know, like you would really study something.

Then you can come out the other end. With a good understanding of what it takes in terms of diet and training to get people to where they need to be. So You know, and I [00:59:00] guess, I mean, I could go on and on with, with business stuff, but the last thing I would say is, is being good at marketing is, is very, very important.

It’s a skill that requires, again, a lot of study. It requires a lot of a lot of not just study in terms of book study, which it does require. I’ve read, I don’t even know how many marketing books at this point. I’ve read so many. But it’s also a thing that you have to constantly cultivate. You have to be constantly looking at what other people are examples of good marketing, good advertising and other industries and what people are doing and constantly be thinking like keeping your antenna up on what could you Like, Oh, that’s a good idea.

I could use that in my business. Or how could you, it’s a, there’s a very creative aspect to, to, to marketing, which is one of the reasons why I really like it. I don’t really come across much as like an artistic kind of creative guy, but that, that, that’s probably one of my strengths actually is you know, I have, I do have a very creative side and I’m good at coming up with In terms of marketing, whether it be product names or brand names or product design I just have a [01:00:00] good eye for that stuff and I have a good ear for, for words that, that have good connotations and, you know, good well, good meanings and good connotations.

And and then of course, as you know, I do a lot of surveying, so I’m always asking for your opinion on things because ultimately what all of you think is much more important than what I think. I can think something’s awesome and you could think it’s shit and I could go put it out and then no one buys it.

And what’s the point of that? And it could all just be a, maybe the product is awesome, but if I couch it in the wrong words or I call it the wrong thing, or I make it look the wrong way, you know, that’s going to be hugely detrimental. So basically, I mean, a lot of this is that it’s hard, it’s a lot of work and like anything, you know, I do not, this, this industry is hard to make it.

It’s not an easy industry to get in. Yes. People spend a lot of money, but, but. People are also very jaded. They’re very cynical in this space consumers as they should be because they’ve been ripped off, ripped off so many times and [01:01:00] there’s so much bullshit in this space and so many good marketers that sell shit products to where it’s very hard to differentiate yourself and you have to really be authentic and really be if you are the real deal and you can prove that through your actions and through your results then you can gain a lot of support.

But if you are full of shit, it. Then people are going to know basically, and you’re not going to do well. So if you know, if you are one of those people that pretends to be natty and you’re all drugged up, a lot of people know, like you think you might be fooling people, maybe you can fool some people. A lot of people know though, or they’re suspicious enough or they don’t trust you.

If you pretend like you really know what you what’s, what’s what with diet and how to get lean and how to do this and how to build muscle, but you don’t really know and you haven’t really done it yourself and you haven’t really done it with others. You’re not going to do well, you’re going to fail. with training, same thing.

If you say you know about all this, about training and how to do this and how to do that, but if you, if you actually don’t, and if you can’t rely, if you can’t say with certainty, I can take anybody and help [01:02:00] them build muscle, lose fat, get strong, get the type of body they want. If you can’t say that with conviction and really know that yourself, then you’re not going to do well.

And again, that’s like anything that’s really any industry that if you wanted to get into any, any type of industry, it’s, you have to be a real professional. You have to really know what you’re talking about. You have to walk the walk. You have to prove that you can get results in others, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

You have to be, you have to understand business takes a lot of study. You have to understand marketing takes a lot of study, takes a lot of doing, making a lot of mistakes, learning a lot of lessons. There’s just no shortcuts. And I know I’m just kind of like ranting almost, but I just, I, I, I’m getting more and more of these emails now where people are just, they think that.

Because I’ve gone from nothing to something very quickly that had that it there must I must have had some secret or something like No, there’s no secret. I I just work. I don’t know maybe 70 80 hours a week on average and I read I don’t know four to five books [01:03:00] a month and I don’t just read to I study like that means reading, highlighting notes, taking all those highlights out, taking all those notes out, creating actionable lists.

What am I going to do with what I just learned in this book? You know, reading, and I also read different blogs, not many blogs cause I like to spend my time reading books more than blogs, but certain blogs are useful in this industry and also some marketing blogs. And you know, I have a team of people, it’s not just me, there’s six of us.

We all work really hard. We all we, we have like, even like a little book club in our group where we all read one book together every month and then we discuss how we’re going to be applying that book and what we’ve learned from it. And you know, it’s just like a lot of work and it’s a never ending lot of work basically.

And if you’re trying to chase it as a lifestyle business, then you’re never going to do very well in anything. I mean, the whole four hour work week, that, that type of, if that’s, if that’s your mentality. I could, if we’re going to put, if we were betting 10, 000 that if that’s your mentality [01:04:00] and you stick to that you are not going to do well, but if you’re getting into something willing to do whatever it takes to work as hard as it takes to study as many books as it takes to be as hard on your, and not hard on yourself, but to be as real.

With yourself as you can in terms of what are your skills? Where are you lacking? Why is this really something’s not working? Why? What needs to be done about it? Doing it? No excuses. Taking the actions over time, being persistent, not just being like, oh, for a month you go in that direction and then you Peter out and then you’re, you know, in a slump for a month and then, you know, then you kind of come back up and then a month you’re good.

Then you’re in a slump. You know, all that stuff gets in the way. And so that’s my, there’s my business rant. And, and, you know, if I had an idea, you can let me know if you’re interested. You can like tweet me or go respond to a blog comment. I see them all or send me an email or whatever. You probably know how to contact me.

I was thinking about doing like a [01:05:00] book of the month kind of recommendation. You know, I was doing those cool stuff for the week posts and I thought they were fun. But looking at the metrics, the analytics of them I couldn’t justify spending the time anymore when I can, I knew that people would much rather have me just like, instead of working, even if it was an hour a week on cool stuff they would rather have me just like spending that time writing.

health and fitness stuff. So that’s, or, or the next book or whatever. So that time now, like now I have the Legion blog which is growing very quickly. I’m excited about that. We launched it, I think this is like the second month or maybe it’s the, yeah, I think it’s the second month. Maybe this is starting month three actually, and it’s, it’s already at like 60 something thousand visits a month, I think something around there.

So that’s pretty exciting. Kind of a hundred, a hundred K a month is that first milestone in terms of blogging. You want to get to that a hundred K a month. That’s when you really have enough traffic to really start doing something in terms of collecting emails and monetization and so forth. Anyways, the idea is.

That if I do like a book of the month where it’s one book recommendation out of, like I said, I probably read, I’d [01:06:00] say it’s maybe three to five books. It depends on how long they are. And you know I was, I, I’m not one to quit books. Like I pretty much always finished books that I read, but there was a novel, how to get filthy rich in rising Asia, which I don’t read many novels at all.

So, but this one was like recommended by some big hedge fund billionaire guy and how much he liked it and blah, blah, blah, and I hated it. It was, I got halfway through it and just quit. I couldn’t, I didn’t care at all about the characters. There were no, nothing spoke to me in that book. It was literally just random events about these two narcissistic fucking people.

It was, it was, It’s terrible. So, you know, wasted a hundred pages is how I looked at it. It was almost like, it’s almost like I feel like I’m, it’s like when you eat, you go to like have your cheat meal and it’s shit food and you’re like, motherfucker, I just wasted my cheat meal on, especially if you’re cutting and you know that like this is your one meal you’re going to go into a surplus and for the day and that’s it.

And then it’s garbage food. And you’re like, great. Now I get to wait another week. I just wasted all those calories. So I felt about that book and I just [01:07:00] wasted time, wasted a hundred pages that could have read on something else. Anyways, take from the books that I read every month and take one that I liked a lot and do a quick summary on it.

Here’s what I got out of it. Maybe like here are my favorite quotes from the book. Anyways, let me know if you think it’s a good idea. It wouldn’t take that much time. I would take it wouldn’t take much time. I would do it basically if everybody thought it’s a cool idea because I do get asked for book recommendations kind of frequently actually.

So anyways, that’s everything. I’m going to sign off here. Thanks again for, for all the support. Thanks for listening to the podcast and you know, if you supporting MFL and Legion and everything you do and more good stuff coming. Oh, I might as well just also, I get asked with Legion and what happened in terms of why we had a stock out of everything and blah, blah, blah.

And I’ve talked about this a couple of times. I just quickly, basically my manufacturer, they merged with another company. They were good for. You know, a good year or so and weren’t really that many issues, six, eight months, something like that. They merge with this other big company and do a [01:08:00] terrible job in the merger, basically explode themselves.

It boiled down to this software that they wanted to switch over to, to run everything, to run their financials, to run their production, everything. And the company they hired Instead of because like when you’re doing software changes like that, I mean, this is like, even with web dev, you don’t just make changes to your live website because things can go wrong.

Everything can explode. We’ve learned that lesson to what you do is you have a copy of your live website and that’s your dev site. You make all the changes on dev and you make dev work perfectly test it, beat the shit out of it. Dev’s good. Then you push dev live. That’s how you, then, then it’s seamless.

Of course you would think that a company doing 400 million a year would do that with the software that runs their entire company where you wouldn’t just take your existing software and throw it away and just put this new thing in and be like, all right, cool. It should be working. But that’s what they did.

They didn’t. They didn’t take the software and create a live working environment, you know, dev environment and work out [01:09:00] all the bugs, make sure it’s everything’s good. They just went live and fuck it. We’ll do a live like O’Reilly style, right? And and exploded themselves basically for an entire month, the entire month of January, nothing happened.

They couldn’t even order raw ingredients and they, they have basically some of the biggest accounts in the entire industry. And so you can imagine the amount of production backlog that occurred. And the amount of pissed off customers that they had basically. So they’ve been now playing catch up.

Still now in July, there’s still playing catch up from what happened in January. And cause it, it just raped them. So long story short is because yeah, I mean, I, you know, it’s an Legion’s a new company. It’s growing quickly. It’s a couple million dollar account to them. But yeah, that’s fine. But Oh, these guys over here.

pay a hundred million dollars a year. So who do you think is going to get bumped in terms of, and you only can run so many products in [01:10:00] so many minutes of the day. So, you know, I basically kind of got dicked for, for these other companies because they just couldn’t afford to have the 90 million account, the 70 million account.

You know, have the same problems that I had basically be out of stock, out of stuff for that long which sucks. But anyways, I have now in place some backup manufacturers and I am, I am. still with the current manufacturer. We’re going to give them one more shot basically because I really do like the guy that is handling my account is a good guy and it’s a good company all around.

There are a lot of, there are a lot of good things about being with this company, but what happened previously is not one of them. So if, if there ever are any. You know, production issues in the future. Then I do have other companies I can go to. Basically, I’d prefer not to, but if I have to, I will. So that’s basically what happened.

And but it’s all sorting out by the end of this month. By the end of July, we’ll have everything back. We have a lot of product coming, so we’re not going to run out of stock for the rest of the [01:11:00] year, that’s for sure. And we’re also putting some other things in place to really prevent this from occurring again.

You know, sure we’re gonna run out of stock of something because sometimes sales explode and what are you gonna do? But it won’t be like this won’t be like two months out of stock on triumph I mean this this this order of triumph that i’m gonna be receiving this month I ordered it in february the beginning of february five month production time I mean, obviously you can’t run a business on five month production time So that’s what happened and it’s being being resolved a lesson that had to be learned the hard way I guess so I appreciate your patience everything is coming back this month and we have a new website rolling out and we have like better prices and free shipping and Some other cool stuff.

So, you know new products and stuff. So I’ll make it up to you. All right. See you next time Thank you again