Ep. #356: The Story of My 8-Figure Supplement Company Legion Athletics

Mike: When you see a pre workout at your local supplement store selling for 30, you can figure they maybe spent 5 or 6 at most to produce it. And you cannot make a good pre workout for 5 or 6. Hey, Mike Matthews here from Muscle for Life and Legion Athletics. Thank you for joining me for another episode of the muscle for life podcast.

And this time I am sharing an interview I did on another podcast, because I think you might find it interesting. As the founder and CEO of a successful supplement company, Legion Athletics, I often get asked questions about the business and the industry. Sometimes people are looking for help starting their own supplement business and other times they’re just curious what goes on behind the scenes.

And as I don’t care. Talk much about the ins and outs of legion here on my podcast I thought it might be worth sharing this interview that I did on a podcast called muscle mindset and Meal prep in it. I give an in depth look beneath the hood Of both my company and the supplement space in general. And the host Simon and I discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Specifically. We talk about the Genesis growth and goals of Legion athletics. We also talk about how to be an informed consumer in the corrupt. treacherous and deceitful world of supplements where I hope the industry will go in the future and how I plan to help make this happen and more. So I hope you like the interview.

This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in. So instead, I’m just going to quickly tell you about something of a mine, specifically my 100 percent natural pre workout fat burner supplement forge. Now it was designed to be used specifically when exercising in a fit.

Fasted state, and it helps you maximize fat burning while training on an empty stomach, minimize the amount of muscle that you lose while training in this state and maintain intensity and focus in your workouts. All that is why forge has over 400 reviews on Amazon with a four star average and another 220 on my website with a.

Four and a half star average. So if you want to get leaner faster, and especially in the quote unquote, hard to lose spots like the hips, thighs, and belly, then you want to head over to www. legionathletics. com and pick up a bottle of forge. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps use the coupon code podcast at checkout, and you’ll save 10 percent on your entire order.

And lastly, you should also know that I have a very simple, 100 percent money back guarantee that works like this. You either love my stuff or you get your money back period. You don’t have to return the products. You don’t have to fill out forms. You don’t have to jump through any other hoops or go through any other shenanigans.

So you really can’t lose here. Head over to www. legionathletics. com now. Place your order and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet. And if for whatever reason, they’re just not for you, contact us and we will give you a full refund on the spot. Alrighty, that is enough shameless plugging for now at least.

Let’s get to the show. 

Simon: Hey there and welcome to this episode of the podcast and I’m super excited to have with me Mike Matthews from muscleforlife. com and legion athletics. Hey Mike, thanks for joining on the show. Hey Simon. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Cool. Cool. Cool. So it’s an absolute pleasure to have Mike on the show today for a couple of different reasons.

So firstly, we’re going to be talking about supplements. So You know, a lot of people out there, their goal is fat loss. It’s building muscle or both. And typically the case for most people, supplements tend to appear in that conversation at one point or another. Some people it’s the first thing they think about and people get bombarded with supplement advertising across social media and fitness magazines.

And it’s come synonymous with the industry right now. So I’m excited to have Mike on the show because his company Legion athletics is increasingly becoming. a bigger and bigger player in the world of supplementation. More than that, legion products come from a very scientific and research orientated background, which is what I think, excites me about products that the company produces.

And also, why I think it’s important that companies like that are rising to the top, but. Other than that as well, so I’ve just talking to Mike before we jumped on the show was that four years ago, almost to the day is when I had my accident, broke my hip and, really my life started transforming.

But, the real Kickstarter for that transformation was Mike’s book Bigger, Leaner, Stronger with The principles in that are still some of the ones that I follow to this day, added to that as I’ve grown and changed with my own fitness goals. But it’s allowed me to build the business that I have, talk to awesome people on podcasts and really live a, basically my best life, I would say.

So Mike is like my fitness man crush. So flattered, flattered. So with all that said, we’re going to crack into some good, Cool questions all around supplementation. So first up, Mike, as I mentioned at the start, supplements are often the start point for a lot of people. They look for answers to losing weight and building muscle in fat burners, testosterone boosters, BCAAs, and that’s just to name a few.

Overall, as someone who’s within the supplement industry, how do you feel the industry as a whole is doing in terms of delivering the best supplement? high quality products to consumers and also delivering an honest message with that. 

Mike: Not pretty poorly, right? That’s the honest answer. So what when you and I talk supplementation, we tend to be focused in more on the evidence based fitness space and sports nutrition.

But when you zoom out and you look at supplementation, the bigger picture of supplementation, which is tens of billions of dollars a year in revenue, just go on Amazon and look for example, what are the top selling fat loss supplements? It’s going to be Garcinia Cambogia, raspberry ketones, CLA stuff that either does nothing or does very little in some people and nothing in others.

So with fat loss in particular, Those types of products are generally high margin products. So you’re dealing with a hot pain button in people that really want to lose weight. And often you’re dealing with low market awareness people who are maybe at the, in the beginning of their fitness journeys.

And they, while they may not quite believe the claims that I can just take these pills and lose 30 pounds in 30 days or 20 pounds in 30 days or whatever. Yeah. It might sound a bit. Too good to be true, but hey, it’s 30 bucks, 40 bucks, 50 bucks. Maybe who cares? I’ll give it a try. And the, these people then go through that.

And I know this firsthand, having worked virtually with thousands and thousands of people over the years, they go through that cycle, maybe a couple of times until they go, all right, it looks like these pills, these quick fixes, these magic bullets don’t work. I’m now going to start looking at nutrition is generally the next place they start looking.

And then that could be a couple rounds of fad diets until they go, okay fad dieting. Yeah. Maybe I lose weight, but I gained it all back. It’s not the long term solution. And then the next level of awareness is maybe more where I reside, which is, okay let’s talk first principles here. Let’s learn how the metabolism works.

Okay. And let’s also face the fact that you really only want to be losing about 1 percent of your body weight per week maximum. And it’s going to require a bit of, I wouldn’t say pain, but discomfort. You’re going to have to restrict your calories to some degree. You’re not going to be able to eat whatever you want, whenever you want.

Supplements aren’t going to make that big of a difference. They can help a little bit in the case of fat loss. For example, there’s obviously caffeine. There’s good evidence. That just increases basal metabolic rate. So depending on your caffeine tolerance and how often you have it, you can burn, let’s say up to an extra hundred to 150 calories a day with a.

moderate intake of caffeine. There’s sinephrine is also a mild stimulant works synergistically with caffeine. And it really just mostly to further increase your basal metabolic rate yohimbine is an interesting molecule. So there are a few things that you can take to lose fat faster, but. You have to make sure that you are getting your diet and your exercise, right?

What that really means is you’re getting your energy balance, right? Which is the relationship between your caloric intake and expenditure. So if you know what you’re doing in the kitchen and you know what you’re doing in the gym, although the gym is not. Tremendously important in terms of fat loss.

Mostly it just helps you burn more energy and it helps you preserve muscle. So those are good things, but of course you can lose fat without exercising, but if you’re gonna do it all right, then you want to make sure that you are regulating your calories and your protein, carbohydrate, and fat intakes properly and doing some exercise.

Ideally you’d focus most of your time on just training your muscles. If you get those things in place, you’re going to lose fat. And if you add supplementation, I would say the most you could probably. Hope for is an increase of it’s hard to put an exact number to it. And this isn’t a strictly like science based number.

It’s more just anecdotal having worked with lots of people, but I think it’s reasonable to say anywhere from 25, you can lose fat anywhere from like 25 to 50 percent faster with the right supplements. And. That actually sounds wow, really when you put it in absolute terms, we’re talking about, let’s say you can lose one pound of fat per week without any supplements.

You can probably increase that to maybe one and a quarter to one and a half pounds per week with supplements. 

Simon: As you say, it all really comes back to the calorie side of things first and then building on that with good supplementation and those sort of dietary habits and doing the right things in the gym as well is the thing that’s going to take that a little bit further.

But I think that. As you said before, a lot of people start with the supplements and forget the nutrition side because that’s the hard bit. It’s a lot easier to take a pill than it is to, monitor calories and make sure you’re on track with your nutrition. I think it’s maybe part of as a society, how we operate in terms of quick fixes and everything’s instantaneous that, the pill, the powder, the potion has an allure to it that You know, just tracking calories 

Mike: doesn’t, that’s understandable to some degree, if it were that easy.

Hey, great. You know what I mean? Hey, if I could, and if you are just getting into this and you don’t really have much information, you don’t understand any of what I just spoke about in terms of energy balance, you couldn’t even define the word calorie. I can understand why many people, including Many, it’s not about being stupid.

It’s more just a matter of ignorance of not knowing. So you can have many smart people who are extremely educated in certain regards and could talk about things in depth that we have no idea about. They just don’t know about dieting. They don’t know about them tablism. So they’re just like, yeah, fuck it.

And hey. You know what I mean? Whatever. It’s 30 and we’ll see what happens. And they do it and they go that didn’t do anything. I guess I’ll move on to the next thing. And one of my goals is to try to help as many people skip the first kind of muddling your way through things phase. So let’s see if we can just skip that and let’s get to the stuff that just works and delivers immediate results.

They’re not necessarily staggering or shocking results, but they are consistent. And they are significant. Yeah, you lose a few pounds in your first week. That’s not going to mean much depending on where you’re at in terms of the mirror, but it’s, it is a couple of pounds. Let’s say it’s two pounds or whatever.

And your weight loss, let’s say it, it settles into a range of about a pound a week, again, week to week. There’s not a huge change, but you start taking pictures. Let’s say you’re taking pictures and you start looking at them in terms of two or three or even four week intervals. You really start to see progress.

And then you also know, Hey, this is working and it’s continuing to work. And if it stops working, I know what to do. So really, my system on the whole can never stop working. It might take a little bit longer than I thought getting into this, or than I would, have if I were living in my fantasy, but.

Oh, I can get to where I want to be and it’s not grueling once I’m there. I can loosen up on my diet and I don’t have to be as strict with everything. I don’t have to at least at least you got to pay attention to your calories. And you can eat more intuitively. That message is very encouraging to many people, especially the people who have gone through the, Rollercoaster of yo-yo dieting, or chasing, silver bullets.

Hey, quickly before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or. Advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it.

It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say, Thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. 

Simon: And in terms of legion athletics itself, was that born out of a sense of frustration from yourself about not being able to get supplements that you felt were ones that did something and you wanted to, what was the sort of rationale or what was the sort of, Kickstart for you to want to build Legion Athletics from the beginning.

Mike: Yeah, it was really just to scratch my own itch. It was to create stuff that I wished someone else would be creating, really. And I’m actually more interested in, I would say, health and wellness, physical, psychological, than body composition, because there’s not Too much. You can do to affect your body composition with supplementation.

I mentioned a few things for fat loss. There are a few others and you’ll find most all of them. And I have two fat loss products and you’ll find most all of them in those products. And as far as muscle gain and strength gain goes, you have creatine. Obviously that’s a no brainer. You have some good evidence with beta alanine.

You have citrulline can play a role in that. And you have BTN. There are a few things. There just aren’t that many. However. When you get into general health and wellness, there are many different things that you’re really never going to get from your diet that you can supplement with. And again, none of them are necessary, but if you have the inclination in the budget, there are only upsides.

There are really no downsides other than the money that it costs and assuming that they work for you. Some people Supplementation being what it is some people simply don’t respond to certain supplements, like even creatine in some people just doesn’t work. It does nothing. And that’s just is what it is, right?

But if you are, if you look at it in terms of the bell curve, if you’re somewhere in the middle, if you’re a normal type of physiology, you are probably going to respond to one degree or another in certain ways. When you take certain things. Yeah, so I thought it was neat to be able to create a number of products.

If you look at my multivitamin triumph, you look what’s in there. In addition to the vitamins and minerals, there’s a lot of good stuff in there that many people supplement with individually. So many people buy CoQ10, many people buy aged garlic extract, many people buy ashwagandha, they buy those things separately.

And we just threw them all into one product, which you can do sometimes. You got to make sure. And this is where I have to give all the credit to my director of research who comes up with all the formulations. His name’s Curtis, and he’s actually the co founder and was the lead researcher and writer over at examine.

com. Which is a website that you’re probably familiar with. And many of your listeners might be familiar with, but it’s like the premier resource on the internet for science based information on supplementation in particular, most everything you read, all the highly technical stuff was written by Curtis and in his tenure there, in his time there, he personally read and collated, analyzed, put into their database over 40, 000 scientific papers.

He’s at a. Really at a pharma D level understanding of biology and in supplementation. So come back to the multivitamin. One of the things Curtis is also looking for is synergies when combining multiple ingredients is looking for synergies and also looking for contraindications or making sure that you’re not putting things in a supplement together that compete for transporters, for example.

And so there’s actually quite a bit of thought that goes into the formulations beyond just. Hey that sounds cool. Let’s put there. That’s what that one sounds cool too. Let’s put that in that. And I know one other thing I wanted personally is I wanted supplements that were naturally sweetened mostly naturally sweetened and then flavoring you might as well.

And you might as well not use artificial food dyes. And the reason for that is not that artificial sweeteners are as bad as some people would have you believe. But if you look at the average guy, for example who’s into weightlifting and into supplementation of which there are many out there, let’s say he has a full serving of a pre workout before he trains and he has a full serving of a post workout after he trains.

And he probably also has some protein powder before he trains. And after he trains, it could be one to two servings before and after probably has a bit more protein powder. later as well at some point, whether it’s before bed or in the afternoon or whatever. And many people also then drink BCAs all day.

And in addition to that may take other powder based supplements. And my point with that is you can get up to your artificial sweetener intake can actually get quite high to a point where a more scientifically grounded level headed person would even say, if someone like Curtis would say, yeah, that’s probably not good.

for your health over time. And I myself wanted to be able to use a pre workout, a post workout, use protein powders, use a greens supplement. BCAs are worthless, so I don’t sell them and I don’t use them, but I wanted to be able to use all of that without having to worry about artificial sweetener intake.

And I myself have also noticed that if I have too much artificial sweeteners, like if I have too much sucralose in a day, my stomach tends to get upset. So For what it’s worth at least tells me something that there’s a point where I probably should need to stop eating more sucralose. So that was another thing for me.

Simon: And one of the sort of things that kind of jumped out of me when I looked into Legion products when I first heard of them was that, having studied nutrition in looked at, the, doses of various different products that go into various different supplements was that, you have a look at some of the big names out there and their supplements, whether it be a multivitamin or whether it be some form of pre workout, but the level of dosing of those key ingredients.

Is sometimes alarmingly low, so often . Yeah so I was, very presently surprised when I looked into your products originally and saw, okay, we’re looking at beta lanine, we’re looking at all the various different multivitamins you’ve got in triumph, that they’re actually, the right levels, which is, which shouldn’t be surprising.

It should be. That’s the way it is. But I think unless people have got an understanding of. where those levels should be, which let’s face it, 99 percent of people won’t even have a clue where the the right threshold should be for the right clinical dosage. But that was something that struck me from Legion products was that sort of the honesty behind it and the evidence based approach to it was great.

Kind of really jumped out at me as being credible. 

Mike: Yeah. And what really, what that comes down to is I spend a lot more to produce these products than most other companies. For example, my greens product costs me close to 18 a bottle. I believe somewhere around 18, give or take 50 cents to produce. And we sell it for 40.

Somebody hears that and they go, Oh, if they’re not business savvy, they might be like that sounds, you’re doubling it. That sounds high. No, not at all. Actually, in a hard goods business, whether it’s supplementation or clothing or whatever, I would say an average markup would be five X five X production costs.

It would be considered an average markup. Not great, but okay. Lower than that. It gets worse and higher than that gets better and better. If you can get up to eight to 10 times, that’s considered fantastic. And in the case of clothing, for example, It doesn’t really matter whatever shirt you’re wearing right now.

Does the fact that the company you bought that from probably produced it for one eighth to one tenth of what you paid? Do you care? No, you don’t care. It’s a shirt. You bought it because you like it. And the company is not claiming anything about it. It’s a shirt. You do have some high end, especially in performance where shenanigans, where there are claims being made about clothing that, like it’s going to.

Improve recovery or in actually ironically, in the case of compression, there actually is some evidence for that. But my point is you have a little bit of bullshit on the marketing side of things with clothing, but for the most part, it’s just you went to a store, you saw a shirt on a rack and you’re like, Oh, I like that.

And you bought it. That’s it. Supplementation is different. Of course, it doesn’t, it’s still. Requires the same margins to run a good business. And what that comes down to is in most businesses, you have to spend a lot of money on marketing and advertising, and especially in competitive industries, because you’re going up against companies who are spending a lot of money in marketing and advertising.

And one of the. Simple realities of advertising is repetition is huge. The number of times that you can get in front of somebody, they can just see your logo or hear the name of your brand. The more likely they are to think of you when the time comes to buy whatever is that you’re selling. A lot of advertising is not direct marketing.

They’re not trying to sell you on buying anything right then. They’re just hoping that when you do, it could be a month later, go, Oh, I want to I want to get a couple new dress shirts. Who do you think of? I think of a company that sends me catalogs every two weeks, Charles and something, right? That’s who comes to mind.

I’m not in the market for dress shirts, but if I were, I would go to them because that’s who comes to mind first. So when you’re trying to play that game that’s the traditional, you have something to sell. Cool. And you need to get the word out. You have to spend a lot of money on marketing and advertising.

So that’s where a lot of your revenue is going to. You have to plow a lot of that back into the marketing and advertising. And of course you need to make a profit. If your business does 10 percent net, that’s good. That’s not great by most standards. That’s good. 15 percent is very good and anything higher than that is great.

Anything lower than 10 percent is very shades of bad. So the problem with supplements is. You can’t make good supplements for and have the margins that you need to make all of that work because what’s also remember that retail is its own game that has middlemen. It has a, it has wholesalers and distributors who, who want generally are marking stuff up double.

So they want to buy something for 10, then sell it to the retailer for, Okay. 20 and the retailer generally wants to at least sell it for 40, probably upwards of say 40 to 60, right? So you have these, and then that goes back to what can you spend as the manufacturer. So when you start running those numbers, what you quickly learn is yeah, if you’re going to try to sell a pre workout for 50, you probably don’t want to spend more than, I don’t know, 10 making it.

And ideally you’d spend less than that. However in the case of a pre workout. You can do okay with 10. Let’s face it. Most pre workouts are not that expensive. So when you see a pre workout at your local supplement store selling for 30, you can figure they maybe spent five or 6 at most to produce it.

And you cannot make a good pre workout for five or 6. Let’s say you can make an okay one, but if you are going to sell it, honestly, it would be this product. Isn’t very good. It’s okay. And here’s what’s okay about it. It’s probably better than just caffeine pills, maybe, depending on the formulation, depending on how they spent their money.

It may not, like the honest pitch would be like, eh, all of these ingredients are at about half of the clinically effective levels, which is what you were talking about. They’re, you look at the research and you go, okay, you should be having about this much beta alanine per day. If it’s going to do anything.

Yeah, we have about half that. The citrulline we have about one third of the amount and creatine, we have about one fifth of the amount. So it’s not a very good product, but Hey, buy it. If you want to buy it, don’t buy it. If you don’t want to buy it, then at least then there would be some integrity, but of course that’s not.

How the game is played. The game is you make the shitty product that’s underdosed and you make extravagant claims and you pay bodybuilders and fitness people on tons of drugs to pretend like your products are, making any sort of difference in their training or physiques whatsoever.

And you just spent a lot on your advertising to keep on repeating these messages over and over. And so over time you, you make money and depending on what else you might do, like for example, Some companies have been caught some supplement companies have been caught putting dangerous chemicals, methamphetamine like chemicals in some cases in their products, which of course, there was a product called craze, which you can read about online.

I used to get emailed about that product when it was out there and people were all hyped about it. And so I’d have people emailing me saying, This is the craziest shit. This craze is amazing. I’ve never had, I’ve never felt so good with a pre workout. And I remember looking at the ingredients and I was like, there’s nothing in this.

It’s like a little bit of creatine, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. These people must never have had caffeine before or something. It turns out there was a methamphetamine like drug in it. Yeah. Okay. Now it makes sense. Meth probably does make for some pretty, pretty good workouts.

And so anyway that’s the supplement game for the most part. And what that means though, is, when I was getting into it, I was just not interested in playing that game. Just personally. I don’t need the supplement business, to be honest, let’s say if I just want to look at this financially, if all I wanted to do is make enough money to live well and provide for my family and build a retirement nest egg, blah, blah, blah.

I could just write books, I currently sell on average 30 to 40, 000 books a month. Self published I could just keep doing that and easily triple those numbers probably in the next year, if that’s all I was doing, let’s say two years. If I want to be very conservative in my estimates. So I was like, if I’m going to get into supplements, I’m going to do it simply because I’m going to do it the right way.

And I’m going to go into it knowing that the business is not going to be as profitable as business experts would advise. It just won’t Legion. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to. Put up a 15 percent net, for example, I might be wrong. I would like to be wrong, but I really don’t see how I get there with my cost of goods.

And the price of raws only go up over time. Prices do not go down. And sure, there are some things, there are some economies of scale, not. As much as some people would think, and we can stay lean as an organization, but it’ll always be profitability will always be an uphill battle. Now the business can be profitable enough to make it worthwhile.

Obviously. If it were a, if it were like a one to 3 percent net business, what’s the point of that? You’re just. You’re a conduit for cash. That’s a waste of time, so I got into it knowing that though. And that I’ve been very transparent about all of this since the beginning. And this is really the story of how it came about.

And that has resonated with a lot of people where they You know, they appreciate the approach and they appreciate the formulations and they understand that while my products are not cheap like a 40 greens supplement, that’s not cheap. It’s not tremendously expensive. It’s not like completely outpriced in terms of just market averages, but they’re overpriced.

But it’s not cheap. However, when they really look at what they’re getting and they look at the dosages that they’re getting, and they understand that my, where my costs are at, a lot of people go, I want the best and I’m willing to spend a bit more for it. 

Simon: Yeah. And I guess if I followed on from that is no doubt you could have, if you wanted to, you could have released a bunch of supplements, not backed by any sort of science under those high profit margins for a ton more revenue.

So 

Mike: do you think, and really tell more profit too? That would have been because what I’ve done from the marketing side of things is okay. I don’t have the marketing budget to go head to head with some of my competitors. If we’re looking at just pure dollar spend and eyeballs. So instead what I’ve done is I’ve leveraged my platform as an author and a content creator.

So I’ve built a very popular blogs or at muscle for life and legion. I have my own podcast, which is popular. I have books and. social media, YouTube, whatever, blah, blah, blah. So I’ve decided to leverage that instead. And if I look at it again, in terms of dollars and cents, even that doesn’t make sense because if I were to charge Legion a market rate for all of the promotion that I do, if you just took me, and if you said, okay, Legion would have to approach me as a, I have nothing.

I’m not an owner of the company. But if you said, okay, What would it cost? Or if you look at it, what could I get if I were to go to some other company and just say, Hey, here are all the things I have. I have hundreds of thousands of people on my email lists. I have a million to do it. It’s over 2 million visits a month on my websites.

I have all these books, I’m going to give it all to you and we’re going to promote your stuff. We’re going to weave it into everything. If I were to say, how much could I get from that? It’s a lot more. Then because I, I have work that I do in the business of Legion as the CEO and I work on copy.

I work on marketing stuff. You could look at that as salaried work. And then all the stuff I do outside of that is promotional. And my compensation for that promotional from if you look at it from that perspective is probably one eighth what it would be if I were just to go to another company and say, okay, I’m going to show for you.

How much will you pay me? 

Simon: Do you think like from a point of view of integrity that in terms of the products that you make and the way you promote and all of that sort of stuff, do you think that will help you in the long term become one of the bigger players in the supplement industry is potentially other guy, other companies fade away because they haven’t got that more.

Honest message that integrity. Do you think that I think that’s the direction? 

Mike: Yeah, I think that’s the direction. I think consumers are getting more educated. It’s, what am I basing that on? I guess I’m a, I have a selection bias cause I’m dealing with people who are actively seeking out education, but if I were to not think about it too deeply, I would say that it does seem like probably Do mostly to the internet.

And so you have, for example podcasts are becoming more and more popular. I think that consumers in the supplement space in particular are becoming more educated, more skeptical, which is good. I, that’s something I push and I tell people you should be skeptical of everything, of what I’m saying.

If it has anything to do with health or fitness, you should start out probably assuming Guilty and they have to prove their innocence, really. And there are various ways to see if people can live up to that and see if you really should be listening to this person or not, or buying from this company or not.

And so I would like to think that, yeah, what I’m doing is going to resonate. With more and more people over time as they become more and more educated as a whole and demand better and better products and leave it up to the companies to figure out margins and numbers or consumers are like, Yeah, we don’t care.

That’s your problem. What we want. are minimally, we just want products with, let’s just say it’s 100 percent clinically effective dosages. Let’s just start there, right? So any ingredient, which is one of the standards that Legion lives by any ingredient, if we’re including it in a product, it’s at a level that is that has been demonstrated effective in scientific research.

And sometimes it has to be teased out. Sometimes in the case of beta alanine, you have, for example one or two good meta analyses that you can just turn to, which are studies of studies. So that makes it easy, right? You go, okay, somewhere around three and a half to five grams a day with the lower end being more or less as effective as the higher end.

Okay. That’s pretty simple, but in other cases, it actually requires, this is, again, we’re more of. Curtis’s expertise comes in. It requires really actually reviewing literature and teasing out details and piecing a whole picture together to determine what is that level that is going to be effective. You really want to be in that sweet spot where you’re putting enough to be effective and to back up your marketing claims, especially if you’re citing research as to benefits, but not so much that you’re not really getting anything more out of it.

You’re just wasting money because that’s also something we have to look at on our end is we go, Okay, here’s our budget for this product. We want to use that money as effectively as possible. And if three grams of something works really, if the evidence shows that three grams works more or less as good as five grams, we want three grams and more is not always better.

That’s a standard that consumers can demand, which means that In some cases it might mean that products would have fewer ingredients and you’ll find that with some of my stuff. It has fewer ingredients because getting the right amounts of those ingredients is actually quite expensive. Like my pre workout doesn’t, it has, what, six ingredients?

And some pre workouts have 30 when you start getting into proprietary blends. Which are bullshits just used to cover up the pixie dusting that we’ve been talking about. But fewer ingredients, higher effective dosages. I’ll take that over the flip side, which is a long impressively looking label.

But when you really dig into it, you go how much does five milligrams of that I’m going to do anything. You know what I mean? 

Simon: Yeah. And like you said quite early on is that there’s actually just a limited amounts ingredients and supplements. They’re actually going to have any effect. So the long list that you see on some of these products actually contain probably 80, 80 percent of absolute rubbish.

That’s not required. And then 20 percent of what is required is completely underdosed and not effective. So 

Mike: exactly. And then of course, in the marketing, you just call out. The good stuff. You just don’t mention that there’s too little of it. 

Simon: Yeah. And do you think the phrase evidence based, so whether that’s supplements or just nutrition training, anything like that is coming to the fore in a good way.

So there’s lots of people out there myself. So people like James Krieger, Mike McDonald, all these sorts of people, Spencer Nadolsky, all these guys put out some great information about the evidence based approach, but it also feels that’s becoming a bit of a buzzword. And some of these sort of less 

Mike: qualified, 

Simon: The dodgy companies basically trying to latch onto that.

And they’re citing research that actually isn’t true or they’re twisting it. Do you have to do anything to set yourself apart to say, we are genuine evidence based rather than these guys over here, who are just making it up as they go along. 

Mike: Yeah that’s tough because that’s a battle of perception, right?

With most people, if you go look at one of the sales pages on my website you’ll see that there’s a lot of research that is cited. If you don’t check it though. It could be, it could be complete bullshit. I could just be citing random studies about anything. So if you do check it and you go, okay this is good.

This is a study on beta alanine, but if you can’t get access to the paper. Or if you don’t know how to interpret scientific research, you then again are still coming back to I don’t know. Now I’m just trusting Mike. I’m trusting his scientific advisory board, which has people like Spencer Adelsky and James Krieger on it.

I’m just trusting the brand basically. And that’s where I have a number of things that Like, for example, one of the things that we’re going to do is we’re going to start putting up our certificates of analyses on the website. We’re working out the design of it. Where is going to go? We just don’t want the pages to get too cluttered.

But what that is when a company produces a product, they do Batches of they do rounds of testing to make sure that everything blended properly, and it has the proper levels of everything that you wanted in there. And so we’re going to start sharing those on the website to just increase transparencies and say, Hey, here’s evidence.

Here’s hard evidence that this product has exactly. What we say it has, right? And we’re going to be doing a number of other things. We’re funding research. For example, it’s actually research on lean bulking. It’s not on supplementation per se, but we’re also going to start funding research on supplementation, which I’m excited about actually not only from a marketing standpoint, but just from a contributing kind of giving back to the community, the evidence based community standpoint, because there aren’t very many companies that are doing this, I think I know of one or two others.

And they’re obscure. They’re not doing a good job really spreading the word about it, but ultimately That’s a battle of, again, that’s a battle of perception. And my goal is that through all the content that I’m producing and through stuff if you look at the sales pages, they’re very informative.

They explain every ingredient, what the ingredient does in the body, what the benefits are, and I cite research for all of it and very educated people. I really appreciate that. We hear from very educated people very often who actually do take the time to check those citations and they can get access to papers because often reading the abstract is not enough.

It can lead to false positive or negative conclusions. They get access to the papers. They look at it and they go. This is good quality research. This is. Fairly interpreted. It’s not being oversold, but for the average person, of course, they don’t know that they just go. Okay. It’s good that there’s research cited.

It’s good that this is very informative. And I’m not just being hit with buzzwords and over the top promises. Like I’m actually being educated. So I understand what I’m taking and why. It’s good that the, that these certificates of analyses are on the site. And so I want as many of those as possible.

Positive signs as I can really come up with to just inspire trust. Also, Oh, this Mike guy, I’ve listened to some of his podcast episodes. He seems to know what he’s talking about. He seems to be genuine. I read his book. He seems to know what he’s talking about. It seems to be genuine. So it’s there’s no quick fix to that.

It’s really just a lot of being smart and doing a lot of. Little and in some cases, big things, and that takes a lot more work and it does actually turn some people off again, people who are still in that phase of, I just want something simple. Just tell me that I can lose a bunch of weight quickly and I’ll try it.

Basically are often turned off by me and. My products, not just supplements, but also my books. Because for example, in my books, I openly say you’re not going to lose 30 pounds in 30 days. I, in fact, I don’t want you to, because that’s probably not healthy and it’s definitely not sustainable. I want you to be looking more at the longterm and I think there’s a psychological benefit of that as well.

I want you to first just say to yourself. Assuming that what Mike is telling me is true, assuming that I’m not going to hate my diet. I’m not going to hate my workouts. I’m not going to be starving all day or, be battling cravings. I can envision myself doing this for a year. And that’s what I want people to really be thinking with your first year, not your first month, but your first year.

So again, that message though, doesn’t resonate with everybody. However, a lot of the people that are in the quick fix phase eventually do. Come back when they are like, okay, I want real information. I’ve been going after all of this magic bullet stuff. And so I’m going to, what’s the opposite of the magic bullet stuff.

Oh, okay. It’s going to take time. It’s going to take work stuff. And, oh, and then hopefully they think of me at that point, really Oh, that’s what that, that dude, Mike was talking about that. And he was saying that you can’t just take pills and powders and, You’re going to have to learn a bit about the metabolism.

You’re going to have to pay attention to how much you’re eating and so forth. I’m going to go back to check him out. That’s a bit of my, I guess you could say marketing philosophy as to how I want to further differentiate myself in the evidence based space. Because yes, a lot of people are glomming onto that term because they figure that it inspires quite a bit.

Confidence and it may still, but of course, like anything the more people can start saying, Oh, evidence based supplements, evidence based information, evidence based workouts, blah, blah, blah, the less effective it becomes. And then somebody has to come up with the next buzzword and the next buzzword.

It’s like fad diets. Same thing. 

Simon: Yeah. I think the thing for me that sets your stuff apart is the, like you just touched on it there was you’ve got like a massive. Body of articles and all the stuff that goes into the website. It’s almost, it’s not just a supplement website. I know you’ve got muscle for life as well, which has got a similar types of content on it in terms of articles and things like that.

But when you go on to any supplement website, I’ve never seen one where you get a huge wall of information that’s all research base and has got that level of content in it. And then I think, when you’re pushing that clear message about, these are the right things to do. And this is how you solve all of your problems.

And, these are Evidence based solutions to those problems. And I think marrying that with a supplement company seems to be for me, that inspires confidence in the product. That’s how I perceive Legion athletics from the point 

Mike: of view. And from a business perspective, it’s also a great strategy because it’s very hard to duplicate.

One of the problems is with these types of products, just like any type of product is if people perceive your product as a commodity, it’s just. Interchangeable with anything else like it very hard to inspire customer loyalty and brand loyalty. And that’s the, you want to be able to shift from a commodity to a brand, right?

And you want to be able to protect your market share and grow it. And how easily your business can be duplicated is a huge factor in terms of a strength or a weakness. So the harder it is for somebody with money. To just come along and copy and paste your business, the more protected you are and the better your business is.

So as far as supplements go, it’s very easy to just copy and paste. If you have money, that’s what we see a lot of out there, especially in the Amazon space where you have big brands on Amazon a bigger, a few of them even bigger than I am on Amazon. And we do a lot of money on Amazon that are run by marketers that have nothing to do with fitness their products, their formulations are across the board, mediocre or worse, but they have money and they have expertise and they know what they’re doing and that’s when they came along one or two in particular that have come up fairly quickly.

And they battle it out and yeah, you could say, I’m in that fray as well. But I’ve done a good job setting myself apart by spending. I’ve published probably one and a half million words now between muscle for life and the blogs over at muscle for life and legion athletics. And if you take my books and account into account, it’s another few hundred thousand words.

And. Podcasts. I don’t know how many words I’ve spoken. A lot of what are we at? 200 episodes or more or something. I don’t even know. But the point is you can’t just copy and paste that takes work and doing, it’s also hard to do well. Of course, there are a lot of people producing content in this space, but by my standards, a lot of it is very poor.

And, I would say My content, my own content by my standards is good. It’s not great. Maybe sometimes it has shades of great, but I’d say mostly it’s just, it’s good. It’s clear, it’s informative, it’s well researched and it’s practical. And that’s what most people are looking for. However, this is one of those writing or speaking.

Those are things communicating. You can say it’s just a skill that you can never master fully master. You can always be better. And if you are not getting Significantly better. That’s a bad sign. If you’re not looking back on stuff that you wrote or spoke two years ago and cringing a little bit here and there, you’re not working hard enough, basically.

And so I’ve seen a number of supplement companies that have tried to duplicate what I’m doing. Okay, put a blog up, put some articles up. But in some cases, the content is really not good and it doesn’t catch on. Like people, it’s not that simple. You can’t just, and funny enough, in some cases, I can see that they’re going after my keywords, that I rank well for, and they’re taking articles I’ve written and just changing words, which legally speaking is. permissible. It’s it’s just lame. It’s obviously just plagiarism, but it’s not even that it’s not that simple. You can’t even take good content and just spin some words and put it on Google and be like, okay, now I wait for the riches.

People are, especially people who are searching for education or they’re not as easy to trick as many supplement sellers think. And they are more skeptical and they. Will look more into the company and into the brand beyond just some article that seemed okay on the blog. That was also a business strategy.

And the fact that I enjoy creating content helps as well. But yeah, that was intentional going, in the beginning. 

Simon: And it’s certainly so one of the things that I’ve mentioned at the start reading your book has been the catalyst for me. And so just seeing your model of content creation, it’s inspired me to do my content creation in albeit a slightly different way.

But the same thing is, having a body of content. That I’m proud of and gives good quality information. And I just love creating content of all different forms, whether it’s video, graphics, emails, all that sort of stuff. And I think that’s for me, a crucial part of it and a crucial part of.

Helping people out, and that being at the core of what I do and what certainly what you do as well is helping people first and foremost, and then building a business off the back of that. 

Mike: Absolutely. If you can do it well, it gives you a huge competitive advantage in terms of business and it’s satisfying because you are able to help people a lot more.

If you can provide good information, then if you can just, even if you have good products, take supplements, we’re a lot, Legion does a lot more for people. I would say the blog probably does a lot more for people than the products themselves, really because again, supplementation is supplementary by definition and it’ll never be anything more than supplementary.

So if you don’t know what you’re doing in the kitchen and in the gym, it doesn’t matter how many supplements you take. And of course, in the blog is where we provide all the education on what to do in the kitchen in the gym. So it’s just a win 

Simon: in terms of Legion athletics. Can you give us any insight into any cool supplements that are coming down the line?

And then what is the future look like for not just Legion athletics, but muscle for life and all the things that you’ve got going on across your different business streams? What does that all look like? 

Mike: Yeah. So at Legion, we just launched a casein, which we’re excited about. 100 percent micellar, obviously naturally sweet, naturally flavored really tastes really good.

It has a really nice mouth feel. It actually is made from the same milk that our way is made from, which comes from small dairy farms in Ireland, which sounds like a marketing pitch. But one there’s research that actually shows that the quality of milk coming out of Ireland in particular is just very high, but two, you can tell a difference.

That’s one of the, one of the reasons why whey, our whey product, which is just a whey isolate made from this high quality milk is one of our highest rated products period. Cause people are used to other lower quality ways and they have ours. They’re like, This is amazing. This is for how creamy it is given the macros and how tasty it is.

And it doesn’t upset my stomach at all. We hear that all the time. So the casein comes from the same dairy farms. And so it’s also just really good case. And it tastes really good. It feels good in your mouth. It doesn’t upset your stomach. We have a caffeine free Pre workout coming just a caffeine free version of pulse, which we’ve taken the caffeine out and we’ve added alpha GPC in just to try to make up for, not that alpha GPC is the stimulant, but it’s something that we want have been wanting to work into a product anyway.

And caffeine one tastes pretty disgusting actually. So taking that out allowed us to add alpha GPC also tastes disgusting. They’re both very bitter and sharp. So by removing the caffeine, we were able to. to make some room in the flavor profile to add something bitter in. And also just give the product a little bit of an upgrade.

So that’s exciting. Protein bars are coming as well, which I’m really excited about. Actually, those protein bars are so good. They taste good. They have 100 percent whey protein. So there’s no milk protein or soy protein. I’m sorry, it’s actually, it’s whey protein and pea, whey and pea but no soy, no meal protein.

So just good high quality protein, prebiotic fiber, and some healthy fat and the macros are very macro friendly and very tasty. So those are coming. I want to say next month, it’s going to be November, December from there stretching into next year, we’re looking into if we can do something for, I don’t want to say, I’m going to say hormone optimization or hormone health in men in particular.

And this is a product that we have not created. We don’t have a testosterone booster and we never will until who knows unless research. Unless there’s some miracle molecule that research uncovers or something. It’s just nothing you can really do naturally. However, Curtis is working on something that he feels confident that will at least again, supporting hormone health and will be worth taking, which is a nice thing.

Also working with Curtis is he himself has integrity and understands where we, basically, I don’t want to make anything that’s just not worth taking. is what it comes down to. If it’s not going to really have an appreciable benefit, or if it’s not really going to make a difference, then why make it?

And so we’re looking into that looking into a pro immunity, anti sickness type of product that could be interesting and a few other things. And on the most for life side of things I would say That kind of goes in, goes to more of the publishing side of things. So I am releasing new third editions of my books for men and women, bigger, leaner, stronger, and thinner, leaner, stronger, respectively.

Those are going to be out by the end of the year. The digitals will be out next month and the hard copies will be officially up selling, ready to go December, January. Also, I recorded the audio books myself. Which is cool. It was a pain in the ass. Literally, I sat in a chair for 80 hours over the course of a few weeks to do it.

The books aren’t that long, but it took that long to do them partially because those readings served as my final drafts of the books, which meant that I would be reading often and I would be like, eh, I don’t like how that sounds. Stop. Make an edit, continue, stop, make an edit, continue, but that’s all done and it’s just in post production now.

Those books are going to be coming out along with their respective journals too, because I have workout journals that give a year’s worth of workouts for the programs that come in the books. The journals are being updated as well to reflect some changes in the programs. And then from there I’m starting, I just started on what’s going to be my next cookbook.

So I have a cookbook right now that is a flexible dieting, macro friendly, simple recipes don’t require much in the way of exotic ingredients or cooking skill. It’s called the shredded chef. And I want to do a version of that. That’s going to be like a. Quick and a one pot, a fast and slow, quick and easy type of deal.

And just started on that, that, that should be out next year. I want to say Q3, Q4 next year. And then I’m going to be doing a blank workout journal, something I think that I could do a good job on and just a simple workout journal that for tracking your workouts, I think that there’s an opportunity there to do something the way that I would like it to be.

be done. And then I’m going to be doing a second edition of beyond bigger, leaner, stronger, which is the followup to bigger, leaner, stronger, the sequel, which I’m excited. I’m going to really be rewriting it from scratch, which is what I did with bigger, leaner, stronger and thinner, leaner, stronger, because I wrote the second editions of those books four years ago and I’m a better writer now.

I know more. I have a ton of feedback from readers. So I know what really could be removed from the book without hurting it and what really should be added in and make it maximally beneficial. Similar with beyond bigger, leaner, stronger, and that, and then I’m going to be doing one more book next year, which is going to be a shorter book on, on meal planning as well.

So yeah, that’s my lineup as far as muscle for life itself goes. We continue to grow the coaching program. doing very well and maybe looking into some digital courses they would be based on books. Like for example, I would probably start with flag like flagship courses for men and women taking my books bigger leaner stronger and thinner, leaner stronger and turning them into multimedia presentations.

And yeah, we’ll see if I get to that next year though. So 

Simon: yeah, it sounds like you’ve got a pretty stacked schedule as it goes. Yeah. 

Mike: Stay busy. 

Simon: Cool. I appreciate your time, Mike. It’s been awesome to chat to you. I really appreciate you giving up your time, talking to you on to the show. Lots of valuable tips for everybody listening to put into their training, nutrition and get some real practical progress out of it.

So thank you so much. 

Mike: Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Hey there. It is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did and don’t mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you’re listening from.

This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility. And thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won’t miss out on any of the new goodies.

Lastly, if you do didn’t like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at Mike at muscle for life. com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I’m always looking for constructive feedback. So please do reach out. All right, that’s it.

Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon. Soon. And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me, seriously though, I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in. So instead I’m going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my 100 percent natural pre workout fat burner supplement forge.

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