In this podcast I take any and all questions and talk about third party testing for Legion, why some studies associate taking a multivitamin with increased risk of disease, how to eat more protein, taking fat burners while bulking, and much more.
If you want to get in on the next one and ask me questions, sign up here: www.legionathletics.com/qa/
QUESTIONS FROM THIS Q&A:
YouTube:
00:46 – Are 5 day split workouts more effective in building more muscle than 3 day splits?
02:41 – How many grams of HMB should I take for fasted cardio/lifting?
03:02 – Are Legion products third party tested? Are they manufactured in the USA?
04:56 – Can you use the calorie calculator on your website for women?
06:11 – What’s your take on the recent studies coming out about the negative side effects of too many vitamins?
8:37 – What is your opinion on using whey vs. creatine post-workout?
10:48 – When is the Legion fish oil coming out?
11:13 – What is the best macro friendly restaurant?
12:36 – When are you coming out with your online meal plan course?
14:09 – How many calories can I have while remaining in a fasted state?
16:20 – Is it possible for your metabolism/TDEE to change while bulking so that your calorie surplus becomes a deficit?
18:01 – Any advice for eating more protein?
22:29 – Would you recommend doing HIIT cardio while bulking to minimize fat gain?
22:56 – What should I do for leg day to minimize quad growth but grow the rest of the leg muscles?
24:18 – What are your thoughts about maintenance calories vs. calorie cycling?
28:05 – My friend stopped cutting and gained 24 lbs in a couple days, what happened?
30:15 – What are your thoughts on cleans and snatches included into a routine with the focus on shoulders?
31:08 – What are your thoughts on the recent report on a bunch of popular protein brands (ON included) that were tested for BCAA content and it was found that most of them had less than half of what they claimed?
32:59 – Is taking your fat burner Phoenix counter productive while bulking?
33:41 – What are your thoughts on mixing in street workouts/calisthenics with your strength program?
34:43 – How come I don’t feel sore anymore after a workout?
36:02 – Can I start the Bigger Leaner Stronger program in the 8-12 rep range with lower weights until I get my form nailed down and the hang of everything?
37:05 – What was the rationale that led to including Strength Weeks into the Bigger Leaner Stronger program?
39:16 – How do you feel about all the zero cal energy drinks? When is yours coming out?
42:08 – Is it easier for someone that used to be fat but got lean to get fat than someone who has been relatively lean their whole life?
43:33 – How’s the workout app coming along?
45:11 – I haven’t seen any strength/size gain in my biceps over the last two months. Any thoughts?
48:06 – What do you recommend as a good calf workout in a home gym?
49:26 – Any thoughts on expectations of realistic size/mass as well as how to alter your training to fit with ultra endurance work?
52:37 – What’s your golf handicap?
54:12 – What are your thoughts on the Greyskull LP program for new lifters?
54:38 – In your Fasted Cardio article you mentioned that you take 2 servings of Forge. What is considered 2 servings?
56:46 – On shrugs should we do 4-6 reps?
57:04 – I’m 17 and want to do a strength program. Would you recommend Wendler 5/3/1?
57:23 – If my compound lifts are going up am I building muscle? Or does every exercise have to go up?
59:03 – When are we going to have an EU warehouse for Legion?
1:00:41 – What would you recommend more, isolation or compound exercises?
1:01:39 – Do you consider dietary fiber when tracking calories?
1:03:02 – What would make me stuck from going up in my Military Pressing?
1:04:21 – What should I do to not get so weak during fasted workouts?
1:05:47 – Are there any benefits of taking ice baths after working out?
1:06:23 – What does a typical day look like for you?
1:07:49 – What are your current numbers?
1:11:18 – The ice bath has to do with lactic acid build-up and muscle tension but nothing to do with muscle growth.
1:11:55 – What are some good foods that are rich in macro nutrients and are quick/easy to make?
1:25:54 – When is the Facebook group going to happen?
1:14:10 – How do I deadlift without crushing my boys?
1:14:49 – Should I talk to girls in order to get to know them better or just woo them with my gains?
1:15:27 – I read an article that suggested maximum hypertrophy is in the 8-10 rep range and 4-6 is largely strength related. What are your thoughts?
1:18:00 – What is the absolute fastest way to lose fat for an event like a wedding?
1:19:28 – What do you do to get your numbers up on lifts like bent over rear delts?
1:20:20 – What’s your opinion on using de novo lipogenesis while bulking in order to minimize fat gain?
1:24:28 – Has Anyone Really Been Far Even as Decided to Use Even Go Want to do Look More Like?
Audio:
03:26 – Are 5 day split workouts more effective in building more muscle than 3 day splits?
05:21 – How many grams of HMB should I take for fasted cardio/lifting?
05:43 – Are Legion products third party tested? Are they manufactured in the USA?
07:36 – Can you use the calorie calculator on your website for women?
08:51 – What’s your take on the recent studies coming out about the negative side effects of too many vitamins?
11:18 – What is your opinion on using whey vs. creatine post-workout?
13:28 – When is the Legion fish oil coming out?
13:54 – What is the best macro friendly restaurant?
15:16 – When are you coming out with your online meal plan course?
16:49 – How many calories can I have while remaining in a fasted state?
19:00 – Is it possible for your metabolism/TDEE to change while bulking so that your calorie surplus becomes a deficit?
20:41 – Any advice for eating more protein?
25:09 – Would you recommend doing HIIT cardio while bulking to minimize fat gain?
25:36 – What should I do for leg day to minimize quad growth but grow the rest of the leg muscles?
26:58 – I’ve cut down to about 6% body fat (all thanks to you, Mike!). What are your thoughts about maintenance calories vs. calorie cycling?
30:45 – My friend stopped cutting and gained 24 lbs in a couple days, what happened?
32:55 – What are your thoughts on cleans and snatches included into a routine with the focus on shoulders?
33:49 – What are your thoughts on the recent report on a bunch of popular protein brands (ON included) that were tested for BCAA content and it was found that most of them had less than half of what they claimed?
35:39 – Is taking your fat burner Phoenix counter productive while bulking?
36:21 – What are your thoughts on mixing in street workouts/calisthenics with your strength program?
37:23 – How come I don’t feel sore anymore after a workout?
38:42 – Can I start the Bigger Leaner Stronger program in the 8-12 rep range with lower weights until I get my form nailed down and the hang of everything?
39:45 – What was the rationale that led to including Strength Weeks into the Bigger Leaner Stronger program?
41:57 – How do you feel about all the zero cal energy drinks? When is yours coming out?
44:49 – Is it easier for someone that used to be fat but got lean to get fat than someone who has been relatively lean their whole life?
46:13 – How’s the workout app coming along?
47:52 – I haven’t seen any strength/size gain in my biceps over the last two months. Any thoughts?
50:46 – What do you recommend as a good calf workout in a home gym?
52:06 – Any thoughts on expectations of realistic size/mass as well as how to alter your training to fit with ultra endurance work?
55:18 – What’s your golf handicap?
56:53 – What are your thoughts on the Greyskull LP program for new lifters?
57:19 – In your Fasted Cardio article you mentioned that you take 2 servings of Forge. What is considered 2 servings?
59:27 – On shrugs should we do 4-6 reps?
59:44 – I’m 17 and want to do a strength program. Would you recommend Wendler 5/3/1?
1:00:04 – If my compound lifts are going up am I building muscle? Or does every exercise have to go up?
1:01:43 – When are we going to have an EU warehouse for Legion?
1:03:21 – What would you recommend more, isolation or compound exercises?
1:04:20 – Do you consider dietary fiber when tracking calories?
1:05:42 – What would make me stuck from going up in my Military Pressing?
1:07:01 – What should I do to not get so weak during fasted workouts?
1:08:27 – Are there any benefits of taking ice baths after working out?
1:09:04 – What does a typical day look like for you?
1:10:30 – What are your current numbers?
1:13:58 – The ice bath has to do with lactic acid build-up and muscle tension but nothing to do with muscle growth.
1:14:35 – What are some good foods that are rich in macro nutrients and are quick/easy to make?
1:15:34 – When is the Facebook group going to happen?
1:16:50 – How do I deadlift without crushing my boys?
1:17:29 – Should I talk to girls in order to get to know them better or just woo them with my gains?
1:18:07 – I read an article that suggested maximum hypertrophy is in the 8-10 rep range and 4-6 is largely strength related. What are your thoughts?
1:20:40 – What is the absolute fastest way to lose fat for an event like a wedding?
1:22:08 – What do you do to get your numbers up on lifts like bent over rear delts?
1:23:00 – What’s your opinion on using de novo lipogenesis while bulking in order to minimize fat gain?
1:27:08 – Has Anyone Really Been Far Even as Decided to Use Even Go Want to do Look More Like?
What did you think of this episode? Have anything else to share? Let me know in the comments below!
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hey, it’s Mike. And I just want to say thanks for checking out my podcast. I hope you like what I have to say. And if you do what I have to say in the podcast, then I guarantee you’re going to like my books. Now I have several books, but the place to start is bigger leaner, stronger. If you’re a guy and thinner leaner, stronger, if you’re a girl, these books, they’re basically going to teach you everything you need to know about dieting, training, and supplementation to build muscle.
lose fat and look and feel great without having to give up all the foods you love or live in the gym grinding through workouts that you hate. Now you can find these books everywhere you can buy them online, Amazon, Audible, iBooks, Google Play, Barnes Noble, Kobo, and so forth. And if you’re into audiobooks like me, you can actually get one of them for free with a 30 day free trial of Audible.
To do that, go to www. muscleforlife. com forward slash audio books. And you can see how to do that there. I make my living primarily as a writer. So as you can imagine, every book sold helps. So please do check out my books if you haven’t [00:01:00] already. Now also, if you like my work in general, then I think you’re going to really like what I’m doing with my supplement company Legion.
As you may know, I’m really not a fan of the supplement industry. I’ve wasted who knows how much money over the years on worthless junk supplements and have always had trouble finding products that I actually liked and felt were worth buying. And that’s why I finally decided to just make my own. Now a few of the things that make my supplements unique are one, they’re a hundred percent naturally sweetened and flavored to all ingredients are backed by peer reviewed scientific research that you can verify for yourself.
Because we explain why we’ve chosen each ingredient and we cite all supporting studies on our website, which means you can dive in and go validate everything that we say. Three, all ingredients are also included at clinically effective dosages, which are the exact dosages used in the studies proving their effectiveness.
And four, there are no proprietary blends, which means that you know exactly what you’re buying. Our formulations are a hundred percent transparent. So if that sounds interesting to [00:02:00] you, then head over to legionathletics. com. That’s L E G I O N athletics. com. And you can learn a bit more about the supplements that I have as well as my mission for the company.
Cause I want to accomplish more than just sell supplements. I really want to try to make a change for the better in the supplement industry, because I think it’s long overdue. And ultimately, if you like what and you want to buy something, then you can use the coupon code podcast, P O D C A S T.
And you’ll save 10 percent on your first order. So thanks again for taking the time to listen to my podcast and let’s get to the show.
All right. Thanks for stopping by for the live Q and a sorry, we haven’t done one in a little bit. We’ve just been super busy and every week, every time we’d be like, Oh, let’s do it this Wednesday. And then something happens or we can’t do it and blah, blah, blah. But here we are. And as usual, you can just, [00:03:00] Put your questions in the chat and then Jeremy he answers a lot of people’s questions just cause we get a lot of repeat questions.
So he, Jeremy’s kind of the moderator. So third question is in chat and either he’ll, he’s going to give some to me and he tries to pick questions that we haven’t answered over and over. And then otherwise he’s going to be answering some questions himself in chat. Between the two of us, there’s a good chance we’ll get an answer.
So this is the first question. So the first question is on the year one challenge. Are the five day split workouts more effective in building more muscle than the three day splits? That’s a good question. Something I get here and there in email and just so you, the listener or viewer know what the person’s talking about bit my, either my bigger leaner, stronger program or my thinner, leaner, stronger brand.
I know which one. I put together a year’s worth of workouts that are in like the bonus report and I just called it the year one challenge. So basically the five day split is better than the three day split simply because the five day split lets you achieve a higher volume which is basically the amount of reps you’re doing every week.
Then the three day split. And when you reduce a lot of the muscle building physiology, [00:04:00] you say this is like the science of muscle building when you reduce it down to simple terms, higher volume equals. More muscle growth. Now, the problem there, of course, is you only can do so much before you start running into overtraining issues and before it just becomes counterproductive.
But the, in the case of a three day program, a kind of a push, pull legs you only can achieve so much volume because you just don’t, you don’t have. Two and a half hours to sit in the gym to achieve the same volume that you can achieve on a five day program. And there’s also the benefit of increased frequency in a five day program.
So like my five day program for guys has you doing, you’re hitting your upper body, particularly you’re pressing twice a week just because that scene that is just tends to be a very slow lagging area that, it takes a long time for guys to get the chest. They want to get the shoulders they want and it doesn’t take as long to get.
the legs or even the back that they want because they’re bigger muscle groups that you can just overload more effectively. So yeah, the five day split and then for women it’s focusing more on the lower body. For both men and women, my programs [00:05:00] are the five day splits are better for building muscle.
You could say as efficiently as possible. Next question. Hey Mike, watching this from Ireland. Cool. I supplement with HMB for fast cardio and lift. I checked some of your articles for dosage, but cannot find how much, how many grams would you recommend? Two to three grams. And that’s what’s in our pre workout fat burner forge.
And if you’re just using straight HMB, two or three grams at 15, 20 minutes before you, 30 minutes max before you train and you’re good to go. Next question, are your products. Third party tested. Are they manufactured in the USA? Good question. So we are getting third party testing done with a big lab called Euro fins.
We’ve actually done it. We’ve been doing it. We just haven’t really talked about it. Is there something that I’ve done and Jeremy and I, we just have done it because we want to know for sure that everything is the way that it’s supposed to be. And yes, our products are manufactured in the USA. They manufactured in Tennessee.
Although they’re switching now to Utah is where they’re moving. They, this company, very big company they’ve had. Like for some reason they were running all their pills in Utah [00:06:00] and they’re running all their powders in Tennessee kind of an inefficient type of setup because their Tennessee facility was massive.
It was way bigger than they even needed, but that’s just how they had it set up. So now they’re consolidating everything into Utah, but they’re leaving some of their management team in Tennessee. Again, strange but very big company and one of the biggest actually new suitables. And we actually, we pay a premium to be with them.
Because, They, manufacturers can screw, could screw people like me over by, I want to make a good product. I pay the manufacturer for what I think is a good product, and then the manufacturer just makes something else. That stuff happens, which is also why I’ve gotten third party testing done on all my products with Eurofins.
Just because I, we get COAs, obviously which means that our Manufacturer is testing to make sure that everything came out the way it’s supposed to, but I just wanted the extra peace of mind, basically. We’re gonna be putting those CAs up on the website, by the way it’s on the list. It’s just our dev team is buried in some other stuff right now, but over the next couple months or so we’re, it’s going to be an [00:07:00] actual, like when you go on a product page FAQ reviews COA is going to be on there.
So Certificate of Analysis is what that stands for. Yeah, that’s that. So next question. Can we use the calorie calculator that you have at your web page also for women? Calculations will be the same. Yes, they are. The only, you can select. I believe the calculator is, if it doesn’t have a gender select, it’s because it just doesn’t matter.
And I think it doesn’t because it actually doesn’t matter because what does matter is your body composition. So you know, muscle tissue burns a certain amount of calories, whether it’s on a guy or a girl. The main difference metabolically speaking between men and women is that guys just have a lot more muscle.
Girls have a lot less muscle and they just burn less energy. And that’s really the main difference even in muscle building. That’s one of the main differences isn’t so much that guys can gain muscle so much faster than women. They can gain muscle faster, but it’s more that women start with so much less muscle than guys.
It takes quite some time for a girl who has never done any sort of [00:08:00] resistance training to catch up to even a guy who has never done resistance training. So a girl might have to lift weights for six months just to get up to a level of strength. Maybe even a year of a guy who, is just lifting weights for the first time because that guy just comes with more muscle.
naturally, which of course is related to hormones and other things. All right. Next question. Hey Mike, love your multivitamin triumph, but I’ve noticed some recent studies coming out about the negative effects from too many vitamins. What’s your take on this? I actually talk about this on the sales page for triumph on, on, on the website.
If you go check out the sales page. I talked specifically about this. Also, if you look at the sales page for Genesis, my green supplement I also talk about this there and bought the bottom line is it’s absolutely true. Super dosing certain vitamins like vitamin E for instance, and other actually various antioxidants is not healthy.
Super dosing vitamin D not healthy. What you want is you want optimal levels of, there are many different vitamins and minerals and other nutrients that you need to be getting from your diet. You want optimal levels. Now there are. Some cases, like in the case [00:09:00] of, let’s say vitamin B 12, a water soluble vitamin, for example, that we’re taking large large is a relative term here.
It’s actually not a lot in absolute amounts, but much higher than the standard DRI, like the the standard recommended daily intake of something from the government where if you take a lot more, there are no toxicity effects and you, and then there are.
So go check out the sales page for triumph on the website and and then check out the sales page for Genesis and you’ll see a bit more. And I linked to a bit of research on that in. And explain that point there of why and then there are also just some multivitamins that have for instance, like vitamin a, you have the synthetic form of retinol.
If you take too much of that, that, that can be toxic to your body. Whereas the natural. forms of vitamin a, which your body converts to retinol, you can, which you would get from food. If you were to eat a bunch of food, for instance, with with the natural form, you wouldn’t run into the same problems because your body would convert what it needs into retinol.
And then it has other things that can do with the rest. [00:10:00] So there are. It’s not accurate to say that all multivitamins are bad and all of them are bad for your health. I also just thought of, I believe I’ve done this and if you go check out my podcast, I did one episode on multivitamins specifically.
I think I did that one. Yeah, I did. If you go look, it was. That’s maybe a month or so ago. So that’s another good resource. All right. Next question. So what’s your opinion on using whey versus creatine post workout? Maybe both together or just one depending on your goals. Yeah, both together.
Meal timing when we’re talking about the whey protein is not super important, but I would say the bulk, if you look at evidence on supporting the claim that having protein after you work out helps you build muscle faster over time versus evidence that shows that it does nothing it’s definitely weighted toward that it does probably do something over the long term and that’s something to keep in mind and creatine as well.
It’s effects. It’s not a steroid. It’s effects. It does work. It does help you build muscle and strength faster. But when you’re natural, You are trying to accumulate the, you’re trying to get these little edges. So if having, 30 or [00:11:00] 40 grams of protein and whey protein is particularly good choice because as a very good amino acid profile and it’s digested quickly.
So if having some protein after you train and having creatine, which. You it is better taken post workout. There are a couple studies that show that. So taking them together if over the course of several years, that helps you gain a few more, I don’t know, several pounds more muscle over that time.
Then even if it’s only a few, in my opinion, that’s worth it. Because that’s just one little strategy and then the other little things that you can do where, when you put it all together. Each individual thing that you’ve done by itself maybe didn’t make so much of a difference, but the cumulative effect is actually quite noticeable.
And especially when you’re start looking over the longer term where if you could have, if you can build 20, 25 percent more muscle over the longterm by tweaking little things with your diet and supplementation and your training, how you train and your recovery and blah, blah, blah.
Then it’s worth it. If you care enough and some people they don’t care enough, so they just want to eat the way they want to eat. They don’t want to [00:12:00] mess with any supplements. They don’t mind if that means it takes longer to get the type of body they want, or if they build less muscle there, they just want the they want to keep it simple and keep it easy.
And that’s fine. So it’s really just, up to you. Our next question. When is the fish roll coming out? Simple question. It’s going to be coming out. What do you think, Jeremy? I think it’s yeah, I think, yeah, middle of next month. It’s wrapping up at our manufacturer at the end of this month.
So a couple of weeks from there to, get it to our fulfillment, which is we use the Amazon for fulfillment. So to get to Amazon and do the whole thing. So next month for sure. Next question. So what is the best macro friendly restaurant? My vote is Chick-fil-A. Kareem, you here? Oh, you left Kareem.
Yeah. Sam, yeah. Chick-fil-A. No, I mean there’s obviously Chipotle. I, this is unfortunately Jeremy, do you have any good insight into I don’t eat out very much. So chipotle for sure, right? Yeah, Chipotle is not too bad because you can go on their website and you can check out the [00:13:00] macros and then, obviously it’s not going to be, it depends on what the person is doing.
Yeah but it at least gives you an idea of what you’re eating. And I think if you want to be really anal, you can, get, because it gives you the weight, doesn’t it Jeremy, the burrito? So you can like, come home and weigh it and see where you’re at. Yeah there’s a dude, he’s It’s just like some random online strong dude named Matt Ogas.
If you check him out, he had something on like he weighs his burrito because on the website they’re assuming that obviously a certain weight of burrito and if his is, if it’s over by X percent grams, then he can increase the calories or something like that. So Jeremy was saying he just counts them as carbs.
So anyways, check that out. Check out like. Matt Ogas, Chipotle macro accounting or something Jeremy said there’s a YouTube video on it. So maybe that’ll help you. And otherwise restaurants, I don’t know. I personally, I would just stick with restaurants that, that, but post their information online. And then at least you have an idea what you’re eating.
All right. Next question. When are you coming out with your online meal plan course this project It is as soon as possible now. I’ve been working, I’ve been working hard on it. I’m pretty excited for it actually because it’s pretty, it’s gonna be [00:14:00] very in depth, very cool. And it’s going to come with a very handy spreadsheet.
That’s going to be pretty fancy and helping you not just hit your macros and your calories, but hit your micros as well, which is something that I think is very neglected. In not just first understand what are all these vitamins and minerals that you need to be getting and why. And then how do you actually go about doing it without just wanting to rip your hair out, trying to micromanage so many things in your diet.
But to answer the question, let’s say that I have another week of work on it myself until I’m happy with, until I would send it to an editor. And let’s shoot for end of next month. I think that gives me some time cause I don’t know what it’s called yet. I don’t have any design. I don’t have, I’m assuming things are going to, things always take longer than they should and so forth.
So let’s say end of next month, I would be happy. If we had it out by then. And then I’m going to start right away on the next one, which I’m not sure what that’s going to be yet. I have some ideas. I’ll probably actually end up sending out a survey just to get all of your feedback on [00:15:00] what, in what order would you like me to see these created or what would your level of interest be in these?
And that’ll help me decide what to do next. Next question, how many calories, carbs, fat and protein can I have without blowing my chances of remaining in a fasted state? If you, I’d say maybe 30 calories and or less, like I probably wouldn’t have any more than that. And obviously fat is if it’s some Chris, say you have coffee, right?
And you put a little bit like 30, 30 calories of half and half or cream in your coffee. I’d say that’s probably fine. But when you start getting up to the 100 plus calories, especially if it’s protein or carbs, then again, remember, it’s not an on off switch. We’re talking about training faster or not.
It’s degrees. So it’s just, it’s because of your, as your insulin levels are, if you eat a little bit of it. food, your insulin levels, it’s very little, won’t change but as you start to eat food, more and more food, your insulin levels rise higher and higher. And I’m assuming that, if you are training fasted, you’re probably using a supplement like yohimbine as well, which I highly recommend that you do if you’re going to train fasted because it works.
And that’s just as a quick little [00:16:00] aside. Fasted training just by itself. When you have done quite a bit of reading on it, and I think it’s pretty clear that it does, it can help you burn a little bit more fat in your workouts. But I think the bigger benefit of it is when you start loading up with supplements like caffeine and sinephrine.
I stick with sinephrine. Some people, they like ephedrine. I just do sinephrine, which is the natural. And, him being, and a few others that like just to, to plug my own product. If you check out our fat burner Phoenix and then you check our, we have two different fat burners.
You have Phoenix, which is just helps you basically just increases your metabolic rate. That’s the main benefit. There are a couple other benefits. But if you go on our website. Legionathletics. com and read about Phoenix is the name, so you’ll check it out. And then we have forge, which is specifically for fasted training, which is again, it’s a product that I myself always wanted cause I always bought my own him being separately and then had to have Lucene or BCAAs.
So this is. A nice product with it. We used HMB instead of leucine or BCAAs and then you’ll him being, and then there’s one other ingredient that can help with focus. So [00:17:00] I think that answers that question. All right. Next question. Is it possible that after building or bulking for a while what were once your surplus calories became your deficit calories?
Can your metabolism TD change that much and say six months? Probably not. That would be. I’ve never seen anything like that. I have personally experienced, speaking of personal experience, I have the last time I bulk, which was quite some time ago because I’ve just been maintaining for quite some time now.
I started around 3, 300 calories and I, and that was my, it was a slight surplus and I ended probably about 4, 000 calories, but that was a bit excessive. I was not, I hadn’t hit homeostasis at 4, 000 calories. I was gaining weight still. It was That was my last blowout week where I was just eating a lot of food.
So I would say that what was once your maintenance could be the start of your cut. That’s, I think realistic. I think that like right now I maintain it about 28, 2900 calories a day. Maybe I’ll push to 3000 if before. I’ll eat a little bit more before my heavy squatting and heavy [00:18:00] pulling, but I’d say on average I probably come out to about 2, 800 a day.
If I were to just start increasing that, I could probably get up to 3, 500 and be maintaining my weight. I would be fatter but I think. Yeah, I think I’ve, I might even done that before. So that’s me personally. And then, and now speaking with people that I’ve worked with, I’ve never seen it to that degree though, where like their surplus of, a 10 or 15 percent surplus then turns into a 20, 25 percent deficit.
I don’t know. I think it’s a little bit of a stretch. Alright, next question. I could never eat the amount of protein required. Any advice? For example, I’m in a calorie deficit 25 percent at 148 pounds. Body fat is 27%, total calories about 1, 500 or 1, 450. Protein carbs 145 and fat 32. Okay.
I’m assuming this is a girl because I hear I’ve heard this more from girls and guys that have trouble eating protein because a lot of girls are not used to eating a high protein diet. So it’s something to get it, get just that they have to adjust to. So this depends [00:19:00] on what type of protein, what type of sources of protein, like where are you, where do you like to get your protein from?
Because I hear that and it’s hard sometimes where I’m like. I can eat 150 protein, 150 grams of protein in one meal. Easy. It wouldn’t be particularly enjoyable, but you just do it. But if you break that down, like we can just look at some simple strategies of, for instance if you are not eating frequently, if you’re just trying to eat all that protein in three meals, that can be hard.
Like I know my wife, for instance, she’ll eat, when it comes to a meat or something, I think probably about 30 grams of protein is the point where she just doesn’t want to eat it anymore, but she’s that’s satisfying. So then if she had to eat 50 grams of protein three times a day, yes, then she would run into that same problem.
So if you can spread that out more, like if if you’re skipping breakfast right now because you don’t like it, have some protein at breakfast. Or, if you can just every three or four hours or so have a bit of protein, then that’s an easy way to do it. Remember you can have protein, you can have food all the way up until you go to bed.
So that means that before you go to bed, for instance, my last meal, these days it’s pretty big, it’s like oatmeal and yogurt and stuff, but [00:20:00] before I was doing that, I would just have about 30 grams or so of protein, usually low fat cottage cheese, or 2 percent Greek yogurt. Tasty, simple, and you can eat, it doesn’t matter, you can eat right before you go to bed.
In fact, having a little bit of protein before you go to bed is generally actually a good idea. There’s a bit of research that shows. That it can help with muscle recovery, which makes sense because it gives your body amino acids to use throughout the night, as opposed to its last bit of protein coming at, let’s say 7 p.
m., which it has fully worked through by the time you go to bed. And then it’s just waiting for amino acids to, so it can continue repairing your body and so that would be in the morning or if you skip breakfast, it’d be at lunch or whatever. Increasing meal frequency can help getting a little bit more broadening your horizons in terms of food can help.
So if if you’re trying to force yourself to eat types of protein that you don’t like then find out what you do do you like eggs? Do you like egg whites? Do you like any kind of meat? Do you like poultry? Do you like dairy products? Do you like there? Even the protein that [00:21:00] you get from plant foods, it.
It counts. Of course it counts. In some cases it’s not as it’s not absorbed as well as animal protein is. And the amino acid profiles aren’t as conducive to muscle building, which if you want to learn more about this go on muscle for life and search for vegan and you’ll see an article I wrote on vegan bodybuilding where I talk about this and how to.
How to, if you want to get a lot or all of your protein from plant sources, how to actually do that. So yeah, I don’t, Jeremy, is there anything else you can think on that? It’s just eat more frequently and make sure, and then. Eat the proteins that yeah, of course protein powder.
Yeah. Drink protein. And again, so if if you don’t like whey protein, you should try ours. And if you don’t like our whey protein, you do not like whey protein. There’s not a whey protein on the planet that you’re ever going to like. So if you don’t like whey, or if you don’t like casein you can get a vegan protein for I would.
Stay. I’d recommend staying away from soy. And I talk about this. If you go on legion or most of life and search [00:22:00] for soy, you’ll find articles I’ve written on this subject. So sound like a rice or pea protein, ideally a blend which is actually we’re working on a vegan protein. Just sent a formulation over to the manufacturer today and going back and forth in it.
So sometime later this year we will have our own vegan protein. I’m pretty excited about it because it’s just better than any of the other stuff I’ve seen on the market. Okay. However, yeah, drinking protein is smart too. You can easily, if you just had two scoops of our way that’s almost 50 grams of protein a day right there and it’s super tasty.
It’s easy. It almost, it just tastes like you’re drinking a milkshake almost. So our next question, so would you recommend doing HIIT cardio while bulking to minimize fat gain? Yeah, you can do that. I wouldn’t do too much, though. When you’re bulking, the idea is you keep your cardio to a minimum.
Personally, I would never do more than probably 45 minutes, never more than 60 minutes a week, but I probably keep it closer to 40, 45 minutes a week. And if you’re gonna do it, in my opinion, you do it fasted and use your him being and do what I was talking about, because get the most fat burning out of it that you can.
Next question. Hey, okay. I’ve been lifting for five years now and I’ve [00:23:00] had pretty large quads. I’ve always had pretty large quads due to hockey. What should I do for leg data? Minimize quad growth, but to grow the rest of the leg muscles. Look for that lean ripped look that doesn’t make thighs look too tight in the pants anymore.
Yeah, you’re going to run into that because there are a couple of exercises you could do to isolate the hamstrings or obviously a couple of type of hamstring curls you could do. And there are more hamstring dominant exercises. If you go on Legion and search for hamstring you’ll see an article I wrote on hamstring workouts in particular, but of course it’s not going to only just train your hamstrings.
There are a couple exercises in there that are more hamstrings than quads, but they involve the quads. So that said though, that article actually be really good for you because it sounds like you would. you would want to make your workouts hamstring dominant. But you’re not going to want to completely eliminate quads from them altogether.
You could only really do that by just doing a small handful of exercises, but I wouldn’t recommend that. I would recommend though, if you did a few heavy sets of. exercises that were more hamstring than quads, but did involve the quads. So [00:24:00] at least your quads are getting trained and they’re not just going to detrain.
And then you move to more hamstring exercises that just isolate the hamstrings. Then that’s probably how I would go about it. Okay. So next question I’ve cut down to about 6 percent body fat. All thanks to you, Mike. That’s yeah, that’s shredded. He said I’m shredded. That’s right. You’re shredded shred for summer.
And now I want to maintain what are your thoughts about straight maintenance calories versus calorie cycling? I’ve read your article and calorie cycling seems to make a lot of sense in regards to gains while staying lean. That’s a good question. I myself found it hard to maintain that level of leanness.
Because I found that I wasn’t able to eat enough food to feel good. My, that’s just my body. I can sit at 8 percent and be totally fine and eat plenty of food and have good workouts and really not notice anything negative. Those tough for me though, because at 6 percent I found that like my calories are about 2, 500 a day, maybe 2, 600 and it just wasn’t enough.
I don’t know. My body just didn’t feel right at that level. But if you are able to reverse diet back up to something around TDE or at least up to a point where you [00:25:00] feel good and you don’t notice any detrimental effects, then you’re good to go. So to your question, I don’t, I think you’re totally fine either way.
Straight maintenance that the thing about, I would say, so you have a straight maintenance where you’re just calculating your average TD and just eating that every day and it all works out on a weekly basis. And then there’s calorie cycling, which you’ve read about, and if you’re listening and you’re not sure what they’re talking about, go on muscle for life and search for calorie cycling.
And then there’s also one other. thing that you could do, which is your intake would be set based on your activity level for that day, which you can determine. I’m actually, there’s gonna be an article going up on most for life in the next. Four weeks or so. That’s going to be all about calculating how much calories, how many calories you’re actually burning while you’re exercising.
There’s going to be a calculator in there. Hopefully I’ll be able to steal my dev for that. If not, at least all the information will be in there and maybe we can add the calculator later. But you can find this information online. Some of it is, can be accurate. Some of it, not, that’s why I want to write this article, but the concept is by, by sticking to your true or something around [00:26:00] your true TDE every day.
That’s probably what I personally would go for if you’re trying to stay that lean. Just because you want to avoid being in a surplus and you want to avoid being in a deficit because you are so lean. I just feel if you were taking your average TDE, which means that some days you’re going to be in a slight surplus and some days you’re going to be in a slight deficit.
And again, it just balances out on a week to week basis. Normally that just doesn’t really, that those small fluctuations they don’t really get in the way. When you’re very lean, it may. So I guess first just try straight td just your normal maintenance and just see how your body responds.
Let’s just keep it simple. And if you’re totally fine and you stay lean and you feel good and you have good workouts, then just do that. And then I would say from there. You have the daily TDE records. Actually, you’re trying to be a bit more accurate on what you’re burning every day. So on the days that you’re doing, you’re lifting, you’re going to be eating more than the days that you’re not and so forth.
And then if you want to, calorie cycling is great for if you want to stay very lean, but continue to [00:27:00] gain muscle and strength. Now, of course it’s slower than just straight bulking. But that’s where calorie cycling comes in. So it depends if you’re trying to still build your physique or if you’re just trying to maintain.
And ultimately remember that people’s bodies are different and they respond differently. Obviously we’re all wired the same way, but what works well for me when we’re talking about stuff like this where for instance, me staying at 6%, I’ve tried it several times and I just don’t feel good.
Whereas I’ve. Email with quite a few people that are legit 6%, 6, 7%, and they’re able to just stay there and they feel totally fine. And I don’t think it’s, I don’t think drugs are involved. They don’t look that way at least. Sometimes there are certain things you just have to learn your body.
Next question. My friend stopped cutting and gained 24 pounds in a couple of days. That’s impressive. What happened? Is it water retention? How can I help him get rid of it? It, you hear this usually like post competition where the just straight binge mode for, a week straight of.
Boxes of donuts and ice cream cartons of ice cream and so forth. So your friend must’ve been real hard. Some people do hold a [00:28:00] lot more water than others. For instance, I tend to not. But Jeremy Jeremy, what’s your greatest weight gain of all time? So Jeremy has gained 13 pounds in two and a half days.
You’re in New York, right? Yeah. So eating everything. And then how long until you were back to your normal weight? So it was undone. So in a week he was back to normal. So that’s, that can show you now, of course he gained some fat, but he came back and he just went into a deficit. And so the fat that he had gained was undone in a week.
So he didn’t really gain that much fat as or as you can see, because he went back to his normal weight in a week. So that it can be that crazy. Whereas for me, I probably could. If I were to do exactly what Jeremy did, I probably would have gained half that just because my body, I just don’t tend to hold as much water as he does.
So it sounds like your friend holds a lot of water and and you can’t gain, you gotta think about it. Mechanistically. And physiologically, how much fat can you really gain because your body has to synthesize to create it and store it. There’s a process here. It can’t just, there’s only so much it can do in one day, regardless of how many calories you eat [00:29:00] and a port, like there’s a point where you’ll start just basically shitting out calories that weren’t processed.
Like your body wasn’t able to process the food fast enough for it made it through you. Yeah. In terms of how you can get rid of it, just go back into a deficit and get his food under control and get his sodium potassium under control at least a one to one ratio of sodium potassium.
Like you don’t want to be having, 15 grams of sodium and a gram of potassium a day. So that’s what I would say. Just normalize his diet, go back in a deficit and let’s see in a week if he can just be back to normal. Okay. Jeremy says let’s go faster. So I’m going to go into speed mode.
What are your thoughts on Olympic lifting cleans and snatches included into a bulking routine with the focus on shoulders? I think that, I think it’s fine if you know what you’re doing. If you understand the, there’s a higher risk for injury with those exercises, even when you do know what you’re doing.
And if you don’t know what you’re doing, there’s a much higher risk for injury. So that’s why I don’t recommend them in my, any of my programs, because most people it’s not necessary. They don’t need to be doing more, more intricate movements. Because their [00:30:00] goal is to build muscle and strength and look good and be healthy.
And why put yourself in an increased risk of injury just for what? Just but if you like them and you’re good at them and you know what you’re doing, then I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. There’s the benefit of the explosiveness. There’s that element. So you do get that in those lists, which you wouldn’t get in just more traditional, bodybuilding exercises.
All right, next question. So I’ve said, Mike, you’ve recommended Optin Nutrition before as a quality brand of protein. Have you seen the recent report making the rounds on Facebook, where a bunch of popular brands were tested for BCAA content on included, and it was found that most of them had less than half of what was claimed.
Any thoughts on this? I actually did somebody just. Shot that over to me on Facebook and I have it in my like list of things to look more into. Cause I went and looked and I was like, Oh, that sucks. But I don’t have much to say on it yet because I haven’t looked at it in detail yet.
But it is on my list. I am curious and I’m going to, I also, I’m going to, I want to send that to my the guy that I’m in he’s really the CEO of the manufacturing company. Or he’s one of their top executives because it’s weird they have him split up in [00:31:00] two states. He’s the CEO of their Tennessee operations.
Super cool guy and really has taken good care of me and Jeremy since the beginning. I’m curious as to his thoughts on that too. I would be surprised if Optin Nutrition were spiking their protein. I really would because Why they’re so vertically integrated. They own all the farms. They have a monopoly on way you think you’d be in their best interest to not do anything like that.
That could tarnish the reputation. Now, these other brands. Sure. Yeah. Why not? Who cares? Lie. And then, they’re gonna get caught. And a small minority of People are going to get up in arms about it and are going to boycott them. It’s not going to affect their sales really.
Unfortunately. If more and more things, it just, this kind of stuff takes time to build up to real change. Think of it at like politics or just, it might take 10 more years of abuses before we see any sort of real regulations or even consumer backlash to a point where it matters.
But I’m glad you brought that up and I’m curious. I’m going to look more into it. I just. I haven’t looked at it enough to say, Oh yeah, these [00:32:00] companies, I just don’t know exactly what’s going on. So a question is taking your fat burner counterproductive by bulking. Yeah. I would say forge is not, if you’re gonna do faster training, like the guy that, or the girl, I don’t know if it was the person that was going to do the hit cardio while bulking.
in my opinion, I would do that cardio fasted with forge just because you’re going to burn a little bit more fat while you do it. And that’s the purpose. But I wouldn’t take Phoenix while bulking because why, the purpose is being in a calorie surplus. And if Phoenix is increasing your calorie, your caloric expenditure, which is, that’s one of the things that does, it just means you’re gonna have to eat more food.
So in the end, you’re just basically paying to take something that. It means you have to pay more to eat more food. So it’s, I don’t really see the purpose. Next question. Question from Oz. I’ve been following your program for a couple of years and I’ve really enjoyed the gains. I’ve started watching a lot of YouTube videos about street workouts, calisthenics, and while I know you’ve recently written.
About how this isn’t the best way to build muscle. Wonder about your thoughts on mixing it in with your strength program. Learning [00:33:00] muscle ups, planches. I think that’s how you pronounce it. Planche, yeah, must be. Leverage, et cetera. Yeah, I think there’s nothing wrong with that actually. I’ve written I’ve emailed back and forth with quite a few people that, where we work something like that out.
What has worked well is a three day weightlifting program and then two or three days of body weight training per week. And then one day of rest. A lot of people have done well with that. So you could take a three day program whether it be bigger than you’re stronger or thinner, you’re stronger.
And then depend you how you build your body weight program really depends on where you’re at. In terms of strength and what you’re going for, but if you just thought with that as a template if you’re Monday, Wednesday, Friday, that’s your push, pull legs. Let’s just say we’re keeping it simple.
And then you’re working in your body weight training on those off days. And then you take one day off per week. I think you will do very well. All right, next question. Jamie’s curious about this too. How come I don’t feel sore anymore after a workout? Oh, actually, what’s that? Yeah, your body just adapts to it.
Like it’s, it actually, go on Legion and search for soreness and you’ll see a whole article I wrote on that just semi recently. And the good news is just because you’re not getting [00:34:00] sore from a workout doesn’t mean You’re not progressing. What matters is progressing in the workout. What matters is if you’re, if that, if you’re gaining reps and if you’re gaining, putting weight on the ball over time, and if you’re seeing your obviously then your strength going up and you’re seeing your body weight going up, if you’re bulking or whatever, that’s what matters.
Not soreness. I really don’t get much sore at all. Anymore. Even though, and that’s been the case for many years now for multiple years, really, I don’t get much sore, but if you look at how my physique has changed over the last three or four years, you’ll see it has changed quite a bit. But for that entire time, I really, I get a little bit sore.
I get a massage once a week and some areas of my body are a little bit sore when she’s massaging, but she’s massaging pretty hard. So going most of life. Or sorry, go on legion search for soreness and you’ll see an article that I wrote on that. And I explain what Dom’s is and why it’s not really a reliable indicator of anything.
So yeah. At least anything related to muscle growth. Next question. So hey Mike, brand new to weightlifting and wondering what your thoughts are on starting BLS [00:35:00] program in the eight 12 rep range with lower weights until I get my form nailed down and get the hang of everything. Any suggestions in general beginning this way.
Thanks for all you do with the, from the great white north. The our Northern neighbors. Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with that. I actually I thought I, I might, I thought I mentioned that like in the FA, in the FAQ in the back of the book. Maybe I didn’t though. And I’m just thinking I did anyways.
So yeah, there’s nothing wrong with that. If you want to take the first few weeks and just work in a higher rep range and get your form down and then transition into, you can go straight into the heavier stuff, or you can go, you could go like. Let’s say you did two or three weeks at 10 to 12 reps and then you did a bit in whatever, two weeks at eight to 10 and then moved into the heavy stuff.
That’s totally fine. Nothing wrong with that. And I would just go by, by how you feel in your comfort. Once you feel comfortable with them, with the motions and with the movements and you controlling your body and not having basic motor work. Failures, then you’re good to go. All right, next question.
My friend just got the new version of BLS01 Challenge was telling me about the strength weeks, which my version does not have. What was some of the [00:36:00] feedback you received rationale that led to these strength weeks being implemented into the program? Good question. Basically just to increase the amount of pressing and pulling and squatting that you’re doing over the longer period because the, those really are the core exercises that are going to provide the majority of your physique in at least in how my program is laid out.
And really it’s hard to replicate without doing without, if you’re not bench pressing, overhead, pressing, squatting, or deadlifting, you’re going to have a very hard time building that the physique that those. that those exercises build, you’re going to have a very hard time achieving that with just isolation type exercises, machines and dumbbells and stuff.
I put that in and definitely I’ve, I’m listening to feedback from people and so far everything has been good just because there’s quite a bit of deadlifting in it as well. And not that I think there’s anything wrong with it. I’ve just, I want to, I don’t want to make. I was a little bit hesitant to put it in because I don’t want any of my stuff to get too complicated to where people are [00:37:00] turned off.
That’s one of the big benefits of bigger, leaner, stronger, thinner, leaner, stronger is which actually thinner, leaner, stronger doesn’t have. It’s just bigger, leaner, stronger thing is that it is very simple. It’s easy to understand and easy to do. That’s that I put it in, but I’m definitely listening to feedback and if it were a problem.
For any, if it were really a problem, if I was getting quite a bit of negative feedback for one reason or another, I actually would probably just pull it out because it doesn’t have to be there. I just feel like it is over the longterm, especially over the first year or two that even that increase in volume on those big exercises is going to translate into something at least.
Significant, it’s not going to, I don’t it’s doesn’t, it doesn’t make or break the program. Like for instance, if you didn’t like it or if it just didn’t work for you then you could leave it out and be totally fine. But I just felt like it was an improvement worth adding.
Next question. Can you talk about all the zero calorie energy drinks and when is your energy coming out? I, the only. I guess I’ve had, what have I had? I’ve had monster before and red bull. It’s all I’ve had. And monster, is fine. I don’t know. Red bull [00:38:00] actually can give me an upset stomach and make me feel weird.
I don’t know. I don’t know why. So I haven’t really, I don’t even know what’s in it to be honest. I haven’t looked at him cause I don’t drink them. I’ve had it like. randomly. I can’t remember the last time. But and then monster same. I can’t, I maybe had one months and months ago and it’s, it was fine, but I think I wouldn’t be drinking a lot of those because again, they’re high in caffeine and your caffeine intake.
If you want to, if you really care about your longterm health, you really should be living in your caffeine to no more than. 400 milligrams per day. And if you go on most of life and you search for caffeine, you’ll see an article I wrote on this that you can have some caffeine every day and a little bit is actually associated with health benefits.
But if you go too high it can increase the risk of heart disease and other problems. And it depends on your body. Some people genetically, like in researching for that article, I was reading. Just some papers. And there are case studies of people that were having over a gram of caffeine per day for a long time and with no adverse effects, they couldn’t see anything wrong [00:39:00] with any anything negative caused by that, which is pretty absurd because most people, their adrenals would probably fall out of their bodies if they tried that.
I’m not a big fan of the energy drinks. But personally, I have two scoops of pulse a day. That’s what I do. That’s my caffeine. And I was trying to do three scoops a day for a little bit. Okay. Because I got a DNA test quite some time ago and one of the things that was interesting is that my body processes toxins well and quickly.
So the guy was like, you could have a lot of caffeine. Like with this type of genetic makeup, you could have a lot of caffeine and it probably would do nothing in terms of negative effects. So I was like, I like not so much caffeine, but the caffeine theanine combination and pulse, I really it makes me, it just has a, it elevates my mood.
It just feels good. So I would, I was doing three scoops a day. And I felt like it’s messing with my sleep. So I just went back to two scoops, 350 milligrams a day, and that’s it. So in terms of our energy drink, that’s going to be a next year thing. We do have a formulation but we’re just as much as I would like to just, we’d like to have everything done tomorrow is just, you have to learn patience in, in, in [00:40:00] business and product launches take quite some time.
But we are going to do it. We’re actually excited for it. It’s just I’m we’re really lining up, like we’re trying to line up. Basically, even our entire next year’s worth of products and get all the research done now. So then it’s just more of a, working with our manufacturer and we have to find a new manufacturer in the case of an energy drink.
But yeah, that’s it. That’s I think that’s that. All right. Next question. Is it easier for someone that used to be fat but got lean to get fat more rapidly than someone who has been relatively lean their whole life? Yeah. Yeah. And that’s good. That’s a good question actually. And it’s something I, I’ve read about it like peripherally, not there’s, I was actually just reading about this for, I believe it was the article I wrote on, if you want most of life and you search for healthy body fat percentage, there’s an article I wrote on that.
And there was some of the research I was reading was touching on that. And basically the short answer from everything I’ve read and I can’t say I’m a hundred percent accurate on this. I wouldn’t say I’m a hundred percent certain. But that yes, there definitely are things in play [00:41:00] that even if it’s just appetite related or someone that was quite overweight they, there are, there’s definitely, there are, there are effects, residual effects of someone’s overweight.
They lose a lot of the weight that there are effects that can linger, I guess you could say, even in some cases for their entire lives where that person is going to have a harder time staying lean. For their entire lives or that friend for his or her entire life than someone who has always naturally been lean.
So There is something to that Yes And if you want to learn a bit a bit about that go in muscle for life and search for body weight set point I wrote an article that touches on that. It’s not specifically on that, but I think it will give you a bit of insight all right, next question.
So how’s the workout app coming along? It’s coming along well actually. We’re looking at again, probably about an, probably an August release. I shit I every Tuesday I’m on like a three hour phone call with with the lead developer going over all kinds of stuff and they’re doing a good job though.
There again, it’s a it’s a good company and they’ve [00:42:00] built a lot of apps. They know what they’re doing. It’s just there’s just a lot of. Thought is going into it, which is good, which means it’s going to be better for you in the end, but it just takes more time. And sometime breaks my brain where I don’t know how to explain.
It’s most frustrating when I’m trying to explain like what I see in my mind and I’m trying to just communicate that and if they’re not getting it. And then I get frustrated, but we always get it, we always get it sorted out. So I would say we’re going to have the whole workout section, I would say actually it’s the whole training section of the app, which includes workouts, workout routines, exercises, and workout goals that’s going to be done.
Probably within the next three weeks, which is when beta real actual beta testing can begin, because that’s really the heart of the app. That’s what is really going to set it apart from everything else. The journal section is actually pretty cool too. And it’s going to have some stuff that you just have not seen in any kind of workout app.
But so I’d say if I could start the beta testing in four weeks, I’d be happy. But it’s rolling, and [00:43:00] I’m excited. I think everyone’s gonna really like it. It’s very unique. Hopefully when it comes out everybody likes it as much as I like it so far. Next question.
I’ve been on Bigger Than You’re Stronger for about a year. I’ve seen great progress with all my muscle groups, back, triceps, and shoulders in particular. I’ve been having trouble with my biceps. However, I eat enough calories and protein, try to overload my biceps, but I haven’t seen any strength size gain in around two months.
Any thoughts? Yeah. Biceps can be a real bitch. If you are, when you say you eat enough calories and protein, are you bulking? Which the reason why I asked that is because just in, in speaking with a lot of people that there are, there seems to be there. Everyone seems to have a muscle group or. Two or whatever that don’t really, it doesn’t really progress unless they’re in a calorie, unless they’re bulking, a slight surplus and really pushing it and really training hard.
So I would say first, if you’re just eating around maintenance and maybe some days you’re in a deficit that could be one element of the problem, of course, as I mentioned earlier in this Q and a volume is basically equated more volume [00:44:00] equals more growth. And you only, you only can do so much, so you have to.
Kind of take that into account. But if you are doing my program exactly as it’s laid out, I wouldn’t say that you need more volume for your biceps. Maybe you could increase it by, you could do another three sets than what you’re doing right now. And you could do them on a day, a few days later than your after your arms day.
So you have your heavy pulling and you have your heavy. Arms day and you have a little bit of additional and I would say also then work in different rep ranges. Some muscle groups, especially the smaller muscle groups like, like calves and are in biceps can really benefit from some higher rep stuff.
You definitely want to keep your lower rep in. But if you’re doing six sets and say your heavy pulls and you do six sets of heavy biceps work and then three sets of higher rep you could try, in the, I would say do not, I would say at least 10 rep, but maybe even up to 15 or 20 rep, which going to failure though, going to most like when you’re doing your higher up stuff, going to absolute failure and you’re heavy, you’re not always going to absolute failure, but with your higher up, you’re going to failure.
That, that could help. Those would be [00:45:00] the things that I would try right away. And then also keep in mind that progress isn’t always linear. Like sometimes you just get stuck for a bit for no good reason and you try different things and then nothing seems to really work.
And then out of nowhere. Every the planets align and all of a sudden you, are gaining strength and gaining size for a few months and then you hit another plateau. So that’s especially the case. I don’t know, let’s see if, yeah, so you’ve been training for about a year, you’re going to find that more where in the beginning it’s real linear and it’s almost vertical.
It’s just every week you’re like, I’m stronger, I’m bigger, I’m stronger, I’m bigger. And then all of a sudden you’re like, what happened? I’m not getting anywhere. So as you, Train for longer and longer, you will find that progress isn’t always linear. Hopefully that helps.
Alright, next question. I’m working on following your year one training book. I have a power rack, barbell, and dumbbell, but I don’t have any machines to do the calf workouts. What do you recommend as a calf workout with what I have? I need them to grow, I know how that is. You’re gonna be limited let’s see, you can do, you can use your barbell to do a calf raises as [00:46:00] any, so that’s always something you can do.
There are goofy, like almost like plie type squats, like ballet squats that, but I would, you can see it. Can you get enough? Yeah, I mean they are actually pretty hard. That’s something to look at. You could have someone hop on your back and you can do donkey donkey calf raises and yeah, That’s that’s what I would do.
Also it should just throw it out there that, what might help also is sprinting something where you have to pump your calves really hard. Is, and can definitely help. Like I’ve been getting back into ice hockey. For, I don’t know, a couple months now I’ve been skating once or twice a week, usually just once a week, but sometimes twice a week.
And I’ve noticed that my calves have grown a bit just from that, just because if anyone played hockey, you know what it is. It’s just, it’s sprinting on the ice over and over. So that’s something to be said for that too. All right. Next question. Thoughts about an expert. Wait, a question on thoughts about expectations while doing ultra endurance work.
I’m a big fan and believer through experience of your workouts, but I’ve recently undertaken a goal to [00:47:00] compete in an Ironman. I’ve already lost muscle, but any thoughts and expectations of realistic size mass, as well as how to alter the training to fit with endurance work. If I would at all. Good question.
So I haven’t worked with anyone that has done an Ironman, but I have worked with people that have run marathons and basically we have to taper down the weightlifting as the cardio tapers up. And in most cases we’re down to two weightlifting sessions per week and upper and lower. And we stick with heavy lifting and stick to our compounds, it’s just recovery becomes so important.
You do not want to be in a calorie deficit. because of how much it’s hard to know even how much energy you’re burning. But you want to err on the side of eating too much. In my opinion, if you’re in a, if you’re in a calorie deficit while you’re doing all that exercise, it’s really going to cut into your recovery and it’s going to, it’s really going to cause problems.
So you want to make sure eating enough food, make sure you’re eating a lot of carbs. You do not want to be trying, do not do it on a low carb diet. You’re going to feel terrible, so make sure you’re eating enough carbs. Of course, eat enough protein and fats too, as well, of course anything you can do to help with your muscle recovery.
I would look [00:48:00] into creatine is good. L carnitine L tartrate is good. Those are both in our pre, in our post workout recharge. If you go on muscle for life, I’m actually, I’m putting together an article for lesion on it, but if you go on muscle for life and search for muscle recovery, you’ll see an article on that.
You’re probably already doing those things, but it’s worth mentioning. And I don’t know how crazy your cardio. Actually. I’m only like vaguely familiar with what you do in the iron man. I know it’s a lot of swimming, biking, running. So I’m assuming it’s like cardio, super cardio intensive. So you may need to taper down to no weightlifting at it.
When your cardio is at its max, you have to play it by ear with your body. You might want to. Get it, look into getting something to look at your heart rate, very heart rate variability and determining on based on that, whether you should be adding weightlifting or not. And if you, I actually don’t have an article on that.
That’s an article that I would like to write though. But if you look up heart rate variability on Google, you’ll see, it’s very simple in terms of what you’re looking for. It’s changes in your heart beat and in, in, it’s, [00:49:00] it correlates with. How over stressed your body is basically.
So look into that. And you can always shoot me an email too, if you’re really running into issues. Cause again, I’ve worked with people that have run marathons and we’ve made it work. They lose a little bit of muscle, most of them did, but it’s nothing crazy. They weren’t, they weren’t at this point.
They were glad they did it because you have muscle memory on your side. Remember, whatever you lose, you’re going to gain back very quickly. So you don’t have to stress out. It only would really become stressful if you were losing, If you lost like a year’s worth of muscle gain, then yeah, that in, in a month or something that’d be pretty, that’d be pretty discouraging, but it shouldn’t be anything extreme.
And then what you do lose, you can gain back fairly easily. Once you can just get back to your normal routine. What’s my golf handicap. I actually haven’t, I haven’t golfed in a couple months because here’s the thing. Yeah. Very quickly. The germs laughing should have been a quick one.
Yeah. So I was, I put in about 500 hours, maybe 600 hours on the range on camera, building a swing did very well. And that I liked doing alone because it’s like working out. I don’t want to [00:50:00] talk. I don’t want to, I want to, I’m working on a swing, I’m doing something. And then I started playing more and I was like, this isn’t as fun just playing by myself.
Like it’s cool, I hit good shots and do things, but I’m just. And I don’t have any friends that play golf, so I’m in a limbo right now where I’m not like I actually want to play, but I only take a few hours on Sunday afternoon to do something like that. And I’ve been enjoying hockey more.
So I don’t want to golf and hockey because I have to work on Sunday. So I’ve been choosing hockey. But my handicap, I didn’t play enough to have a handicap. My best round was, and I shot an 83. That was my best round. Playing from the blacks on like a 7, 000 yard course and that was with two triples and a double actually.
So that really could have been a 79 or 78. I don’t remember which way it could have been right, right in there if I would have, just not exploded on those holes. But yeah. I don’t know. If I had someone to play with, I would be playing. Alright next question. Thoughts on the Grayskull LP program for [00:51:00] new lifters?
I just know it by name. I honestly don’t know enough about it. If you go on, if you go on Legion and you search for strength training, you’ll see an article, a pretty in depth article I wrote on strength training. Grayskull’s not in there. But there are quite a few other programs in there, so You might find that article helpful.
Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about that program and I haven’t done it myself. I don’t really have any good insights on it. Alright, next question. So in your fasted cardio article, you mentioned you take two servings of forage. What is considered two servings? for example, per the instructions, I’m supposed to take one pill per 25 pounds, six pills with two servings.
I should take 12 pills while fasted weightlifting in the morning and 12 pills for fast cardio in the evening. And it’s really the Phoenix. Good question. No. I when I’m cutting, I take two servings per day because not every day I take. I do all my exercise fast when I’m cutting just because I want to just get as lean.
I want to get lean as fast as possible so then I can get out of a deficit. So I take one serving. I always do my lifting first thing in the morning. So I take one serving of forge before I train in the morning and then if I’m doing cardio, it’s always after work, five 30 or so. [00:52:00] And then I have only had, I’ll have one scoop of protein about three.
So I’m, by the time five 36 rolls around, my insulin is going to be at a baseline level. It’s only, 20, 20, 22 or 23 grams of whey protein. So that I’d have one serving with caffeine as well. And and before the cardio. So two servings per day, but not two servings twice a day, that would be too much.
And the reason I do that is because my body just does well with stimulants. So it doesn’t bother me like, him being It gets me a little bit, maybe get a little bit jittery and sometimes I get a little bit nauseous if I don’t eat. If I like take it and I exercise and then I don’t eat right away and an hour plus has gone by, I’ll maybe feel a little bit off, but it doesn’t really bother me.
So that’s why I do it. But if it does, if it makes you jittery to the point where you’re uncomfortable or whatever, then I wouldn’t recommend doing two servings a day. In some cases, people just back down to a half a serving a day just because it is going to help. A full serving is best, a half a serving is going to help.
And then when I’m cutting, I usually [00:53:00] take one serving, maybe two servings of phoenix a day again, just because there’s nothing sinephrine is a very mild stimulant. So that’s very well tolerated. Very rarely ever do we hear from anyone that has any sort of negative reaction. So that’s what I do.
Also with caffeine, of course. Next question, for shrugs, should we do four to six reps? Yeah, I would say do them heavy. There’s no reason not to, unless you just don’t like it, then you can, use a higher rep range. And just, just if you’re gonna do eight to ten, then just, get to that point where you’re going to muscle failure or one rep short or so.
So watching from Australia, another one I’m 17 and I want to do a strength program. Would you recommend when they’re five through one? Yeah. Five through one is good program. Again, go in Legion search for strength training and read that article. I think you’ll really like it. If you’re interested in strength training, I talk about a lot in there.
And when learned, I, it’s a great, that’s a great beginners program for sure. And yeah, so go check out that article. All right. Next question. If I take the bulking road and I want to build muscle, does that mean as long as the compound lifts are going up, I’m building muscle or does everything have to go up?
Like every exercise, do it. Good question. What you’ll find, and this is, I’m speaking from [00:54:00] personal experience and also just experience working for a lot of people is because of how taxing it the big compound lifts are, especially when you’re progressing on them, because you really are giving All out effort, as it’s not those reps, those extra reps and that extra weight on the bar doesn’t come easily.
You have to fight for it. So you’ll find that you can, if you can move up on your big, your first big exercises and if you really have it in you, your second exercise as well, you’ll see progress. For me personally, it’s hit and miss where even when I was bulking and everything was progressing steadily, I was steadily progressing on my big lifts.
And then my second exercises were hit and miss. Sometimes I would gain a little bit like usually the second exercise I would progress, but not as quicker. And the third exercise I would not progress. It would be, I would just really just be stuck at the same weight, same reps because I was just pretty, pretty tired, especially on the bigger, like on back on my pulling after Heavy deadlifting and then heavy rowing by the time I would come around to my pull ups for instance, I was pretty shot [00:55:00] So I was happy just to maintain on that But that’s also why I’ve in the program why I have you rotate Exercises in and out like you’re always starting with your big compounds because they’re the most important but that secondary slot Which where you still have enough energy in you to get somewhere.
We’re moving different exercises into that position so Yeah. I think that’s a simple answer for that one. All right. Next question. Greeting from Germany. I like it. I was just in Germany for Christmas last year, my wife’s from Germany. When are we going to have an EU warehouse? Really pumped about it.
Yeah. Good question. So international is going to be a big thing for us. We’re definitely, I’ve definitely going to be doing it. It’s just, we won’t be able to, it’s gonna require a lot of money and it’s gonna require it’s gonna require a bit of research. We really have to do our due diligence to make sure we set it up correctly.
Of course. I don’t know. We may even need to have stuff manufactured in Europe ultimately. Sorry. I just don’t know yet. But we are going to be looking into it later this year because then we’ll have the money that we can set aside to really do it right. And I was [00:56:00] talking with Jeremy.
Probably what we’re going to do is we’re going to start with just one product. Just because the more you try to do if we tried to just roll out our entire line in Europe, there’s a lot of things that could go wrong and then we could lose a lot of money. So we were probably gonna start conservative and start with one or maybe two or three max of our products and just get it, everything grooved in with those products and make sure that, everything is working the way that it should and then roll everything else out.
So we’re going to be looking at that again later this year. And I would say that. Having it online and really rolling next year is should be doable. At least the initial phase of it should be doable. So yeah, and that would include the UK too, as well. And we also want to look at Canada and Australia.
So those are our primary, not necessarily in that order, but Canada, UK, EU, and Australia. Okay. So next question. So you seem to really advocate in your book about isolation exercises, but also compound, would you recommend one more than the other? Good question. Go on most of life and search for compound exercise.
You’ll see an article I wrote on I think it’s called like our [00:57:00] compound exercises actually better than isolation or something like that. And check that out. I would say that yes, I recommend compound exercises more than isolation exercise. If you only could do one, you’re going to want to do your squatting, bench pressing, overhead pressing, and dead lifting much more than you want to do your.
Barbell curls and skull crushers and front raises and side raises and stuff. But I think optimal if your goal is to build a physique and not just get maximally strong but to build a physique and have everything in proportion, then you do both. And I talk about that a bit in that article.
So check that out. He said, somebody asked how much testosterone can you take without ruining his nuts? Yeah, I think none is going to be the answer there. All right. Do you consider dietary fiber when tracking calories? I see that a lot of product subtract fiber calories from the total amount of carbs.
Good question. Go on muscle for life and search for net carbs. See an article I wrote on this. I don’t because soluble fiber has a bit of calories. Insoluble doesn’t. It’s just, it’s an unnecessary. It’s you’re, it gets into [00:58:00] micromanaging something that doesn’t need to micromanage. If you’re like most people, you’re eating maybe 30 grams of fiber a day, a mixture of soluble and insoluble.
So if you really wanted to micromanage it, maybe you’re getting yourself an extra bite of apple or something like who cares? It’s just, it’s such a negligible amount of anything that it’s not worth. Now what is worth micromanaging though, and this kind of goes back to this First digital course that I’m putting together, which I’m just calling it around the office here.
Meal plan mastery. I don’t know why that just came to me, but it did. That’s probably not going to be the name. I’m going to end up surveying it. But that course is going to talk about, that’s one of the things is making sure that you hit your fiber intake. That’s one of the nutrients. It’s obviously not a vitamin and mineral.
But it’s a nutrient that it’s important that you get enough. And it’s particularly important that you get enough soluble fiber. It’s something that if we were talking about maximally optimizing your diet and getting the absolute most you can out of your diet, then you are going to want to pay attention to your fiber intake and make sure that you’re getting enough.
And if you don’t know what is enough, go on muscle for life and search for fiber. And you’ll see an article I wrote on it and it breaks it down. All right. Next question. Having trouble going up in my [00:59:00] military pressing. Is there something that may be wrong? No, not necessarily. If you go on most of life and you search for plateau PLATEAU, and you’ll see an article about weightlifting plateaus, check that out and see if there’s anything in there that can help you.
There is a point, shoulders are a small muscle. The, they’re small muscles and what I was talking about biceps earlier, where I’m at, I can relate to that because my military pressing. So I switched from a seated press to a standing press just to do something new and challenging and made good progress on that.
And then I found I was getting stuck, but that also goes with the territory because I stay pretty lean and I don’t eat a large amount of food. So it, Definitely limits. If I wanted to really start gaining strength I would probably want to gain 15 pounds probably. Me not just by going ham on food, but that’s really, I would weigh probably 15 pounds more optimally.
So check out that article though and see like it could be also that you just need to, like I’m doing a, I’ve added some front raises into my. Shoulder training because for that [01:00:00] purpose to see if I can, if it can translate over to help me progress back on my pressing. But yeah, check out that article.
It might help you. Or what should I do to not get so weak in a F in a when training fasted, I like I have for cutting, but the faster workouts are really hard as the only time I have is in the morning. Yeah. Some people’s don’t do well with fast training. They just don’t. And it might have to do with fat oxidation, like how well they can get energy from fats as opposed to.
To blood sugar and from eating carbs. There isn’t a, there is a period of adaptation though, that you’re going to find in the beginning when you’re used to training, especially if you’re used to training in the afternoon where you’ve eaten a bunch of food and having something before you train and then you switch to first thing in the morning, fasted workouts, you’re going to feel like you’re going to feel pathetically weak.
But if you stick with it, then you’ll find that your body will adapt and you will gain at least a. fair amount of your strength back. You may not ultimately be as strong, probably wouldn’t be as strong ever as you’re going to be training later in the day with a bunch of food in you. But at least [01:01:00] you can get to a respectable back to a respectable level of strength where you can make progress.
Having caffeine before you train that can help you, him being actually can help too, if you’re cutting you said you are, so that could help. But ultimately fasted training might just not work for you. If you’re a girl, then that wouldn’t surprise me because I’ve heard from quite a few girls that one don’t do so well with I F with just fasting and they particularly don’t do well with fasted training.
So you have to see. All right, next question. Are there any benefits of taking ice baths after working out? I’m not sure. I haven’t looked into that. It may help for recovery, but I’m not sure. I feel like I have run into some research on icing for injuries which to reduce inflammation and there’s like controversy on whether you even want to do that.
I’m not sure if for the purpose of reducing inflammation, of course, then it could make sense. But I can tell you that taking an ice bath is not going to help you build more muscle. I don’t think it will help you do anything that you really care about. But I could be wrong. I haven’t looked much into it.
What does a typical day look like for you? Just to just to run through it specifically, so I get up at [01:02:00] six 15, six 30 and just get ready to go to the gym. I’m at the gym, seven 15 ish, seven, between seven, seven 15, depending on, how long it takes me to go to the bathroom and get ready in the morning and stuff and get my vitamins together and all that.
I’ll work out for about an hour. And then I’m here at the office about eight 30, sometimes a little bit earlier, sometimes a little bit later, depends on traffic and workout and whatever. And then just work here until generally maybe 5 30 or so late would be six. Go home, spend an hour with my wife, eat food, spend an hour with my wife and kid, get back on the computer about 7 7 30 and then work usually until 9 30.
And then make some food. And then get back on the computer, maybe for, a final 45 minutes or so and read and go to sleep. And that’s pretty much it every day, at least during the week. Friday, I don’t work at night. Usually Saturday I do a bit of work in the mornings and then I do some stuff with my family in the afternoon and at night.
And Sundays I work in the morning and then I go skating in the afternoon and then just work. back to work. So just a lot of work, not too exciting on it. That’s it. [01:03:00] Jerry said they were actually all right. All right. I’m actually a robot. Yeah. Yeah. Short circuiting here. All right.
So what are my current numbers? There, my numbers have been stuck in a range for quite some time and Again, I’ve accepted that one because of how I train. I train how I like to train. Now there’s always something, remember there’s something to be said for enjoyment. If you like working out a certain way and you’re able to get to your goals, working out that way, then that’s a reason to do it.
Even if it’s maybe not the most optimal way to get there. Whereas. If the most optimal way to get there is something you didn’t enjoy or couldn’t do, then you know, there’s an argument to be made for the less optimal. So I like being strong, but I like how I train and I’m not necessarily just I just want to try to pull as much weight as possible.
So like the most I’ve pulled this was probably like. I want to say about two months ago, it was like four 25 for maybe three. And it was heavy and whatever, and it’s fine, but that’s my, [01:04:00] like my pulling, my deadlifting has been stuck in that range for quite some time now. And my squat, I’ve been doing a lot of front squatting because my back squat was stuck in the range of about three 65 for two or so.
And so my front squat, I was like, I’ll start front squatting. I’ll make that my first exercise and really push hard at that. So I’ve worked up to a two 75. For one or two on the front squat, which isn’t bad. And then my back squatting, I’m just doing lighter, but I’m doing like hold. So I do a lot, I do quite a bit of heavy front squatting.
And then I do some back squatting with like anywhere from two 75 to three 15, where I’m holding. You squat deep and you hold it for a good three to five seconds and then you’re up. And so that’s what I’ve put that back in and my overhead press, my seated, 25 for.
And that was when I was bulking. So more recently it’s been in the range of two Oh five for, I want to say sets of three or four. And then when I went to standing OHP I had to work up, it was even one 35. It’s actually a little bit hard in the beginning just because it just getting the stabilization.
But then I’ve [01:05:00] gotten up to one 65 for two on my standing OHP, which is nothing. Special, but what I was actually running into is my side dealt, got just pissed off with heavy incline pressing several, many months ago. I’ve mentioned this even in a previous Q and a it was heavy incline.
I got up to two 65 for two or three and my neck would get tight. And my side dealt just got bicipital groove. If you’re familiar with that is just Google it. There’s a lot of stuff that ties in there. And it was getting in though. It was like, yeah, It wasn’t an injury, but it was just annoying and I would have to warm up extra.
And so I backed off my heavy bench pressing and my heavy overhead pressing just because I, even my heavy dumbbell pressing, because I was like, all right I’ve been working with a physical therapist here and he’s been great. And it’s actually just been good to work with him. Like my psoas muscle wasn’t quite.
Quite firing the way that it should. And it was messing with my squats. And so there’s been some other benefits working with him, but I finally was just like, all right, fine. I have to stop being stubborn and I have, so I’m not overhead pressing. I haven’t [01:06:00] for a couple of weeks and I’m probably not going to overhead press for a couple more weeks.
So I’m just doing a bit of front raises and I’m doing very high, just 30 rep presses on my chest just to do something that doesn’t piss off my shoulder because I just want it to, it’s not I just want it to be back to normal so I can just go heavy and not have to worry about it. So yeah, so yeah, those are, that’s it.
All right. So next question for the ice bath thing, I work in special operations. Yeah, this is cool. So this is from someone in chat. So for the ice bath thing, I work in special operations. We have ice baths and hot tubs co located. Following hard training, you transition from hot up to the ice bath for the recovery process.
It has to do with lactic acid buildup and muscle tension, but nothing to do with muscle growth. Oh, cool. Yeah, see, I haven’t really looked into it. I know that it’s a thing. I just don’t know how much of it. I don’t know exactly is there much research on it? And it was something that is maybe not researched, but anecdotally we know it does do something or whatever.
So there you go. Okay. So what are some good foods that are rich in macronutrients and are quick and easy to make? Currently I’m finding it difficult to get my daily [01:07:00] calories in. Okay. Yeah. So calorie dense and to find time to cook and prepare my meals in the day, which is subsequently stunting my strength gains.
Good question. I’m just going to. Recommend him to an article. I have to get the title first, go on most of life and search for meal prep that’ll help you with the meal prep side of things and maybe save you some time and even save you some money. And then hold on, let me, I need to find an article.
I just don’t remember the title of it. That is going to help you with it. eating enough food, basically. Let me, okay, here we go. So then so search also on muscle for life for how much food you need to gain. So just search, search for gain weight. And then you’ll see an article that should help you fit some more calorically dense foods into your diet and hit your numbers without feeling like you’re going to throw up every day.
All right. Next question. So when is the FB group going to happen? People will love that. Yeah, I know. It’s true. Just to answer that quickly. We’re bringing on someone that is going to be, it’s actually if any of you are familiar with. Any [01:08:00] of our sponsored athletes, Corey, who is a legion sponsored athlete.
She’s going to be managing our social media. We just, you’ve gotten to a point where I need someone full time to really just take over it because it’s football that gets passed around the office here and everyone does a little bit of something. So that’s going to help because it’s obviously be a social media thing.
And so then shoot, she’ll, that’s something she’ll definitely be able to help with. So we may be able to get it up sooner than later. And off to see, I’ll see over the next month or so we’ll know. And also as we build up this coaching service, coaches can be involved in it. I can be involved in it as well, but my time is going to be limited.
What I don’t want to, Facebook group that then doesn’t get the. Type of attention that it needs and just just becomes stagnant because we don’t have, we don’t have the bandwidth to really manage it properly. So the next part of this question is I just started BLS three weeks ago.
Short guy with. I’ve never heard that one before deadlift without crushing your nuts. I [01:09:00] don’t know. That’s a, I if you have tight hamstrings, if that’s the problem, then you can do some things search for go on muscle for life and search for mobility and check out the article I wrote on how to increase.
Squat mobility and there are, you can get your hamstrings loosened up with some foam rolling and some stretching. And then, maybe you can save your nuts and your dead lifting until then. Maybe you need to deadlift sumo dude. I don’t know that. That’ll at least get them out of the way.
Should I talk to girls in order to get? to know them better, or just woo them with my games? That’s good. Let’s just, let’s end with some just like weird what? Funny questions. Yeah, don’t talk to girls. Girls are gross. Just go on Omegle and just take your shirt off and do it and, just see how many hand over mouth reactions you can get.
Unfortunately, I don’t think girls care nearly as much about muscles as us guys do. We think it’s awesome, and they think it’s fine, it’s cool, or whatever, but I think we’re into it more than they are, actually. Alright, so I read an article that referenced, quote unquote, scientific studies that suggested maximum [01:10:00] hypertrophy is in the 8th and rep range, and 4 to 6 is largely strength related.
4 to 6 works for me, but interested in your thoughts on their position. That’s just wrong. To say that any individual rep range is the, that is for hypertrophy and then anything else is no hypertrophy is just wrong. You can gain muscle in any rep range. The point I get more accurate way of looking at it is that you have to be pushing to maximum effort.
So you have to be getting to that point of muscle failure or very close to it. And there are some benefits I think to, to the heavier lifting and that you gain more strength that is well established. You are going to gain strength. Faster by lifting heavyweight as you, as opposed to higher rep weight, in which case you will build more muscle endurance.
So there’s a benefit there of, if you’re training with about 80 85 percent of your one rep max, which is that four to six rep range, five to seven rep range, you are, you can push yourself to muscle failure or right, right up to that point. And you’re going to gain a fair amount of strength, which then translates into.
[01:11:00] Further increases of weight on the bar faster, which means you progressively over overload your muscles more effectively. And there’s also something to be said for it’s easier to push to that point of muscle failure, I think and it’s definitely more enjoyable with heavier weight than it is with higher rep stuff where your muscles are just on fire and you don’t, you can’t quite tell could you get another rep?
Maybe you don’t know because you just, all you want to do is stop moving. You’re all you want to do is stop the exercise cause you’re in pain. But again, it’s not that high rep is bad. In my book for more advanced weightlifters, which is beyond bigger than you’re stronger. I talk about periodizing your training where you’re doing some very heavy stuff, some moderate stuff and some higher rep stuff.
But if you want to dive more into that, go on Legion and search for hypertrophy and you’ll see an article that I wrote. And where I explain this and another good resource for this, it’s very dense. And you, if you are not familiar with a lot of the tech, the terminology of muscle building and in terms of the scientific side [01:12:00] and the physiology, it’s going to be hard to understand, but if you go to strength theory.
com, that’s another good resource. Where the guy who writes there really knows his stuff. His name’s Greg Knuckles. But very long articles and they can be hard to understand. Just warning you, but another good resource. All right. Question. So what’s the absolute fastest way to lose fat for an event like a wedding?
. So I would say you’re going to want to, you’re going to want a large calorie deficit, high protein, large calorie deficit, probably like 25, 30 percent calorie deficit. You’re going to have to scale your exercise. You’re not going to exercise so much that you run your body into the ground, but you’re going to want to exercise as much as you can.
Take that into account though with the larger calorie deficit. And then I would say you’re going to want to supplement like, caffeine. Again, I would just say the this is me plugging my stuff, but it’s just because I don’t know of anything else really to recommend. It’s in my stuff.
So if you get, if you have caffeine plus my fat burner Phoenix plus my fasted training fat burner forge that’s. That’s everything that I, those are all the [01:13:00] things that I’ve liked in the two products basically. And so then you’re going to be training fast to do all your exercise fasted, no cheat meals, meaning no, like you stick to your meal plan every day, or you stick to your calories and your macros every day.
There’s no eating out and you don’t where you don’t know what you’re eating or you’re, you can’t break down and binge. Yeah. That’s pretty much it. Unfortunately, there aren’t very many, fat loss hacks there. A lot of that stuff is just bullshit. It’s just calorie deficit, high protein lift weights and do cardio.
I should that’s worth saying. And do high intensity cardio as well. That’s also worth saying. And yeah, so that’s everything. All right. So what to you to get your number, your shoulder numbers up on lifts like bent over rear delts, five pounds is huge for that lift. I actually don’t really find that is that’s always worked well for me.
And I’ve gotten up to 50 now on my bent over rears for sets of four to five. But if you do find that and you will find that sometimes, actually, I do understand like on side raises, I’ve run into that problem. So let’s say you hit six or seven reps on your side raises and you try to go up and then you get two or three work up [01:14:00] to 10 reps with that previous weight and then move up.
Or if you’re moving up, I like to move up when I hit my reps for one set. I like to move up. It’s hard, but it works well. If you can also, if that doesn’t work, you can work up to two sets for your reps and see if that works. So you just basically get, get a little bit stronger with that weight before moving up and you should be fine.
All right. Opinion on using de novo lipogenesis while bulking. What is this? In order to minimize fat gain. Yeah, no, I get it, reading it. I didn’t, Jeremy was lying. I didn’t, I thought he was like, just fucking with me. All right. So by eating relatively low fat and super high carb I’ve been bulking to gain a half pound a week for almost a year.
No, it’s actually a good question because when. Yeah. When you start learning a bit more about, just for people listening to noble epigenesis is the process whereby carbs like glucose is converted into body fat and it’s not very efficient. It’s not as efficient as dietary fat being converted into body fat.
So there’s also like when you really dive into the technical aspects [01:15:00] of it, it’s actually not so much that carbs themselves get converted into body fat easily. It’s that they. Blunt fat oxidation because the insulin levels and then your body’s able to store body fat more efficiently of the fat that you eat So then people it’s a good actually so you’re saying that if I eat basically no Dietary fat which would be really bad for your health But if I eat no dietary fat then my body has no dietary fat to store And it can’t really store carbs efficiently as body fat Then I can just pound food and not get fatter And the answer is no, that there’s a point where if you’re a central fatty if, again, you have to get a little bit of central fatty acids in your diet or you’ll eventually die, but your body will start converting the carbs that you eat into fatty acids.
If it has to, it can’t, you can’t handle all of them, but it will start converting just to maintain fat levels. So the answer is no, you can’t just hack your metabolism like that, which again, it’d be terrible because you’d be ruining your health. Now. Regarding eating 5, 200 calories to gain a half pound a week.
I really questioned if you’re eating that much, are you really tracking [01:16:00] everything that you’re eating, measuring everything? Because if that’s the case, then you must be very active. I don’t even know, eight hours a day of working construction or something. If that’s the case, then I understand.
And again I would say, If you really are eating that much, you’re not gaining weight and you’re training properly. You’re at least on a well, decently designed program, a lot of heavy compound lifting and not, over the top in terms of crazy weekly volume and so forth. Then unfortunately you’d have to eat more, but I really would wonder if you’re eating that much food, if you really.
Log everything because I’ve heard from a lot of people that say that Hey, I’m eating 4, 500 calories a day and I’m not gaining weight. And then so he said, Jeremy was just saying, say, yes, he scales everything purpose per perfectly and he’s eating vegan. So he’s, so it sounds like he’s on, it sounds like he’s on a very the high carb Low fat thing.
Yeah, that’s that. I don’t know. How are you eating? What are you eating? Like a thousand grams of carbs a day? How, how are you not just wanting to throw up all over yourself? Yeah. If you’re doing that is impressive. That’s you can eat a lot.
However, if you’re [01:17:00] eating, if you are a high carb and low protein, low fat, that’s really not. That’s not, that’s just bad. There’s just a bad way to eat. If you want to learn more about that, check out the article I wrote on vegan bodybuilding and check out search for how many grams of fat or just search for grams of fat on muscle for life.
You’ll see an article I wrote on, you don’t need to be eating a high fat diet, but you do need to be getting enough essential fatty acids and particularly omega threes. It’s very important, especially as a vegan, because it’s hard to actually get enough. And I talk about that in the vegan article and you need to be, eating enough protein.
So if I’m the right in that assumption, if you’re doing a high carb, low protein, low fat diet, and you really are eating that much, you’re not gaining weight. I think it’s a pretty clear sign. It’s not working and you, we need to change something. I’d be happy to help though. If you shoot me an email, Mike at muscle for life.
If you need help, check out those articles and let me know. And then if you. Need to go. If you’re not sure, or if that doesn’t help you enough, email me. Cause I’d be curious. You’re a unique case. I haven’t come across very many people that are in that position. All right. So last question.[01:18:00]
This is the last one. What is it? Has everyone, do I need to, am I, do I, should I read this first or am I just, I haven’t read it yet. Okay, has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like
Me think about that
That’s great. All right, we’re gonna end on that note. So thank you to your moderator. Mr. Jeremy Who work works hard to make it as good as possible all right, so Yeah. I know. Yeah. All right. So the next one we’ll shoot for doing one in about a month that we want to keep. We want to, we actually want to improve it a bit.
That’s one of the reasons why we were like, we had it on our back burner or in the back of our minds that we want to make this better. And we have some ideas that we hadn’t gotten around to. So we were like do we want to still do it the way it is? Let’s make it better. We’re, we’ll continue it.
And then we are going to make it better though. Maybe the next one we’ll be able to make it better by then. If not the one after that probably yeah, exactly. All right. Hopefully you found it helpful and Guten abend.