Ep. #1170: Q&A: Fasted Training for Muscle Growth, Aggressive Dieting, Leg Day

[00:00:00] Hi there and welcome to Muscle for Life. I am your host, Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today for a Q&A episode number 65. I’ve done 65 of these and per usual I’m going to be answering a bunch of questions that people have asked me over on Instagram. I put up a story every couple of weeks.

Asking for questions, get a bunch of questions, go through all the questions, pick questions I like or that are topical or that I haven’t already answered a million times before, answer them briefly there on Instagram, and then bring everything over here to the podcast for my beautiful podcast listeners.

And so if you want to ask me your questions, follow me on Instagram at MuscleFlyFitness and just watch my stories and look for that ask me anything story that I put up every couple of weeks. And so in today’s episode I am going all over the place as usual. Thoughts on hydrogen water, on sea moss supplementation, on fasted weight training, is that detrimental to [00:01:00] hypertrophy?

I answer a question about Vivek Ramaswamy and the biggest mistake I think he made. In his political campaigning, I have a question here about arching your back on the bench press. Is it good? Is it bad? Can you overarch your back? BPC 157, is it safe? And more. Before we begin, every day your biology is changing.

It’s getting stronger or weaker, faster or slower, healthier or sicker. And the driving factor behind these changes is not your genes, or your environment, or even your age. It’s your lifestyle. How you eat. How you exercise, how you sleep, how you supplement, and not just how, but how often, because what you do every day is far more important than what you do every so often.

That’s why I just released a new book [00:02:00] called Stronger Than Yesterday, which is available right now over on Amazon, and which is a daily reader with 169 short and insightful chapters That give straightforward and practical answers to perhaps. The two hottest questions in fitness. 1. How do I look great?

And 2. How do I feel great as well? In short, Stronger Than Yesterday is a book that you can dip into every day for a morsel of education, a spark of encouragement, or a moment of joy. And by doing just that, by reading and applying just a few daily pages, you can gradually upgrade your mindset. Diet, exercise, supplementation, rest, recovery, stress management, and more.

So again, the book is called Stronger Than Yesterday. It’s available right now on Amazon. And I’d be honored if [00:03:00] you got a copy, gave it a read, and gave me some feedback. Vladdy Martin asks, opinion on Russo Ukrainian war? This was asked probably six weeks ago, maybe eight weeks ago, but my opinion is still fundamentally the same.

And that is, it would appear that Ukraine has lost and Putin is probably going to get exactly what he wants and exactly what he wanted in the first place. And anyone who can’t understand how this happened, how we got here really. Needs to stop watching the news. Remember in the beginning, remember when this started and the media at least here in the West was saying that Putin only had enough money to fight for two weeks and then he was gonna be broke How could anyone continue to listen to [00:04:00] these sources of information when they are so consistently wrong and so consistently dishonest?

Anyway, OneKoner asks, Thoughts on hydrogen water? Unfortunately, you’ll want to stay away from all fancy waters. Just skip them all. They are all scams. Just get a good enough reverse osmosis filter at home. Something that you can get off Amazon for a few hundred dollars. And get a metal flask to drink from.

And drink a couple, two, three, maybe four liters per day, depending on how active you are, how much you sweat. Basically just drink when you’re thirsty and let your thirst dictate your water intake. And for most people, that is going to get them to something around a gallon or so per day, maybe a bit less if they are a smaller person.

Now, if drinking to thirst doesn’t get you anywhere close to that amount of water, maybe [00:05:00] it only gets you to one or two liters per day because you’re just not very aware of your thirst or you’re just generally not thirsty, then you may want to put a little bit more thought into your water intake and try to get it up to something around three liters per day.

The Geek Asks. Ever heard of CMOS supplement? What do you think? Yeah, and like most supplements, it’s generally overhyped. It does have some beneficial nutrients in it. There are some antioxidant effects, but you can get much more of the same nutrients, much more of the same effects by just eating enough vegetables and fruit.

Why bother with the supplement? Dennis Rathka one asks, is fasted weight training detrimental to hypertrophy? No, but not eating protein within maybe an hour or so after fasted weight training can be because what happens is muscle breakdown rates soar. They go way up after you’re done [00:06:00] training.

If you are in a fasted state. And I would prefer that you eat protein again within an hour or so of finishing your workout rather than an amino acid supplement to try to extend the fast. Many people use BCAAs or EAAs to try to fast longer. That is going to be less effective than eating protein, but it can work to a degree, you can bring muscle breakdown rates down with BCAAs or EAAs.

It’s really the leucine that you are going for. If you feel like you have a strong reason to extend your fast another couple of hours after your training, I would recommend a supplement and I would recommend HMB over leucine. So over BCAAs, over EAAs, I’d recommend HMB, which is a metabolite of leucine, no insulin response, even stronger anti catabolic effects.

And so you could have an effective dose of HMB, which is going to be two or three grams if I’m [00:07:00] remembering correctly, after you work out. And then within a couple of hours, you eat protein, but if you want to make your fasted weightlifting maximally anabolic, so to speak, you are going to train and then you are going to have at least 30 or 40 grams of protein within an hour or so of finishing that workout.

Franz Meyer 47 asks, thoughts on Vivek Ramaswamy. He seems smart. He’s educated. He is articulate, rich, young, mildly based. Interesting guy for sure maybe a Psy Op, but maybe that’s me just being too cynical because everything is fake now. However, he is not much of a marketer because if he were, he would have went with a pseudonym.

He would have done what Nimrata Nikki Haley did because Vivek. Rama Swami. Rama Swami. That sounds like a brand of Indian instant noodles in [00:08:00] the context of marketing names matter a lot. Company names matter a lot. Product names matter a lot. First impressions matter. And when you are the product, your name matters.

If you have the right type of name, it’s going to greatly enhance your immediate appeal. If you have the wrong type of name, and for example, a wrong name is a name that’s very hard to pronounce, That’s going to immediately make you less appealing with most people. And even smart people are not immune to this effect.

Good storytellers know this, for example. The character names matter. And if you choose a name that doesn’t sound right, that’s hard to pronounce, you are going to make it harder for your reader or your viewer to that character. And so anyway, Vivek should have changed his name. Grace Morgan Rowe asks, Bad form to super arch back in bench press?

[00:09:00] See everyone doing it. Yes, that is bad form. You want a slight arch, but overarching simply shortens the range of motion, which is fine if you’re trying to win a bench press competition, but it’s bad if you’re trying to gain muscle and strength. So a slight arch no more than is required to just fit your fist in there between your spine and the bench.

iCurry94 asks, better to start with an aggressive deficit or with a mild one and slowly decrease calories? Most people do best with an aggressive start because it produces quick results, it produces minimal side effects, and those things produce a surge in motivation that in turn produces the consistency that is required to lose a significant amount of fat.

And then, Most people do best by staying as aggressive as they can until they’ve reached their body composition goal. That’s the [00:10:00] rule. Aggressive, but not reckless until you reach your body composition goal. Slow cutting can simply take too long and more time means more ways to more opportunities to mess it up and slower results, which means less motivation, which makes it harder to stay consistent with your diet.

Now, of course, every rule has exceptions. And the big one here is once you are relatively lean, so once you are around, let’s say 15 percent body fat, if you’re a man, maybe 25 percent body fat, if you’re a woman, and you’re looking to get even leaner, you’re looking to get maybe down to 10 percent if you’re a man, or maybe sub 10%, 20 percent or sub 20 percent if you’re a woman.

There is a point when you are going to have to slow down. You are not going to be able to run as large of a calorie deficit when you are looking to go from relatively lean to really lean as you can when you are overweight, working toward relatively lean. And so specifically [00:11:00] you want to aim for the range is about 0.

5 percent to 1 percent of your body weight lost. per week. And when you are overweight, you have a lot of fat to lose. You can be on the larger end of that spectrum toward 1 percent of your body weight lost per week. And you calibrate your calorie deficit to produce that. As you get leaner though, you have to work that number downward.

And when you are fairly lean, looking to get really lean, you have to be around 0. 5 percent of your body weight lost per week. And so those numbers will dictate how large your calorie deficit needs to be. So let’s say you are a woman, you weigh 200 pounds, you have a lot of fat to lose, and you are targeting at least 1 percent of your body weight lost per week.

You might be able to be more aggressive. It depends on your circumstances, but let’s just go with that. Just go with two pounds of fat loss per week. Okay. That’s going to require around an 8, 000 calorie deficit for the week. 4, 000 calories per pound of [00:12:00] body fat. That’s not perfect, but it’ll work well enough for our purposes.

And so you’d set up your diet to produce that 8, 000 calorie deficit over the course of seven days, and you could do that steadily. Something between, 1, 000, maybe 1, 200 calorie deficit per day. Or maybe you want to have aggressive days where you are 1, 500 to 2, 000 calorie deficit. And then you want to have less aggressive days.

But regardless, by the end of the week, you want to be in about an 8, 000 calorie deficit to lose those two pounds of fat. So you do that for a while and as you’re losing weight, you start to bring that weight loss target down. Eventually it becomes one and a half pounds of fat loss per week. And of course, then your deficit comes down to your weekly deficit comes down to about 6, 000 calories.

And then you keep going and now you’re fairly lean and your weight loss target is something now closer to one pound of fat loss per week. And that’s not 1 percent of your body weight, that’s now maybe [00:13:00] 0. 75 percent of your body weight or maybe even getting closer, maybe it’s 0. 6 percent of your body weight.

And of course, now that the fat loss target is one pound per week, you are now going to have to produce about a 4, 000 calorie deficit. by the end of that week to lose that pound of fat. And you just carry on that way until you reach your body composition goal. And if you are relatively lean, looking to get even leaner, you may need to start incorporating diet breaks into your regimen.

If you’re overweight, looking to get relatively lean, probably don’t need to. You probably will feel more or less fine throughout the entire process of. Dieting so long as you are doing the most important things, right? Most of the time you are being aggressive, but not reckless with your calorie deficit.

You’re not crash dieting on 500 calories per day. You are eating plenty of protein, something around 40 percent of your daily calories coming from protein, and you are eating plenty of fiber, which [00:14:00] means you’re eating fruits, vegetables, whole grains. If you do those things and you just stay consistent, it should be pretty straight sailing.

There can be times where you are a bit hungrier than you would like to be and you have little cravings that you’d prefer not to have, but generally it should be smooth. However, when you are fairly lean, looking to get really lean. Your body’s metabolic adaptations associated with dieting that produce the negative effects associated with dieting really start to become a factor and an effective way to deal with those issues, aside from just bludgeoning your way through, which you can do, you’re not going to irretrievably harm your physiology.

Everything will come back to normal within probably your first month of finishing your diet and bringing your calories back up to maintenance. But if that approach is too unpleasant and you’d like to make it a little bit more pleasant, you can take diet breaks. So what you do is for five [00:15:00] to seven days, you increase your calories to maintenance, mostly by carbs.

That’s the best way to do it is just increase your carbohydrate intake. to your current maintenance, meaning you have to calculate your maintenance calories at your body weight. When you are starting the diet break for most people, it’s going to be something around 12 to maybe 14 calories per pound of body weight per day.

But you just want to calculate your approximate total daily energy expenditure before you start the diet. Diet break and then you increase your calories to that number you do that for five to seven days mostly by increasing carbs and then you get back to dieting and You can do that as often as you need to but if you do it too often Obviously, it can just slow down your metabolism Progress more than you would like.

And so what I’ve found is, again when people do need to take diet breaks, it’s usually when they’re relatively lean, looking to get really lean, most people who are overweight, looking to get relatively lean, [00:16:00] don’t really feel the need or desire to, they’re getting good results. They’re making steady progress.

They feel good. They want to just keep going. Totally fine. But, there’s a point again when dieting gets harder, and once you enter that phase, most people seem to do best with a diet break, so a one week diet break every maybe two or three months of dieting. And that allows them to carry on and reach their body composition goal with minimal pain and suffering.

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Alright, Jay Harris takes asks. When is it necessary to start deadlifting or squatting with a belt? It’s never necessary, but it can help you lift more weight. That’s what the belt does. It doesn’t necessarily make the exercise safer, but it does help you lift more weight. However, I would not recommend using a belt for at least the first year or two of deadlifting and squatting.

I would recommend that you get strong without that belt. And then if you are going to use a belt, I would recommend that you only use it on your heaviest sets. So your top sets and that you alternate between periods of belted and beltless training. So [00:18:00] maybe use a belt for a couple months of Deadlifting or squatting, maybe one training block, and then follow that with a training block with no belt, because if you use a belt too long, you can almost forget, and I put forget in scare quotes, because not really, but you can quasi forget how to generate the whole body stiffness and especially the intra abdominal the torso tension and stiffness that you need to lift heavy and to be strong and so i think it’s a good idea again to alternate between periods of belted and beltless training Liz Cosper asks, thoughts on Ozempic?

I’ve done a couple of interviews on this over the last year or so, but currently I’m seeing way too many people using it who shouldn’t be. I’m seeing a lot of normal Or even fit people who could just follow a meal plan, [00:19:00] but would rather take the drug to just kill their appetite and make it quote unquote easier.

And I’ve also seen way too many women end up skinny fat after their use of ozempic because they had no appetite. Which meant that they were eating very few calories, very low protein dieting, no weight lifting and the skinny fat look for many women is more distressing than the Slightly fat look. Many women would rather have a bit extra body fat and at least with some of it in their boobs and some of it in their butt, they like that look more than the skinny fat look that they end up with if they crash diet with very little protein intake and no resistance training.

And finally, let’s remember that we don’t know what the long term effects are. of this drug, especially if you are [00:20:00] taking it for a long time. So there are many people who take it to lose a bunch of weight, and then they keep taking it to maybe at a lower dose, but they keep taking it to keep that weight off.

And unfortunately, we don’t know what types of problems that might cause. Five years from now, ten years from now, and if someone is very overweight, and that, as we know, is very unhealthy, greatly increases the risk of all types of disease, greatly decreases quality of life, And if somebody has tried multiple times with proper dieting, proper exercise, and they’ve failed again and again for whatever reason, I do understand using Ozempic and even acknowledging that there are more Possibly unknown risks associated with this drug, but if you say there are very known risks with staying very overweight and I’ve tried [00:21:00] proper dieting, proper exercise, I’ve failed again and again, for whatever reason, if I can use this drug for a period of time to turn off my appetite, and then I can also use that as an opportunity to build good habits to undo some of these bad habits.

Thanks. That I have been unable to break, and if I can come out of that diet period, let’s say it takes six months to lose the amount of fat required to get to a healthy body composition. So six months is that’s a lot of time. And if you work on undoing the bad habits and replacing them with good habits for six months.

You can come out of that in a very good position to get rid of the ozempic and continue the good habits that now will help you maintain this healthy body composition. So that approach, that scenario makes a lot of sense to me. Peter G. Dewitt asks, Did you ever do more than one leg day? Because for many years, I would [00:22:00] deadlift on one day, I would do three to four sets of heavy deadlifting, and then I would do a more proper lower body workout a couple of days later.

But I’ve never done two full lower body workouts per week, meaning, let’s say, 15 to 20 plus hard sets per week, split up into two workouts. And the reason is It takes us guys a lot more work to get the right upper body, the upper body we want, the muscular upper body then the muscular lower body. And that’s mostly because we just have to do a lot of direct volume for a number of different major muscle groups in our upper body, our pecs, our shoulders, our biceps, our triceps, our back muscles.

Whereas lower body really only requires quads and hamstrings. So if we’re talking about. muscle building for aesthetics. You just need to have developed quads, developed hamstrings. Maybe you got lucky and you got some calves along the way too, [00:23:00] but getting big quads and big hamstrings. Really, if you just do 10 to maybe 12 hard sets per week for each of those muscle groups for a couple of years, maybe two or three years, and you push for progression, you achieve progressive overload.

You don’t just go through the motions. You’re going to have big quads and hamstrings by normal standards, maybe not by bodybuilding standards. But most people I’ve worked with over the years, most of the people in my orbit, they don’t consider themselves bodybuilders. They’re not particularly interested in bodybuilding, even though you could say what they’re doing and what I’m doing is lifestyle bodybuilding.

Okay, fine. But they are mostly just looking to get fit, to look athletic, to get lean. And to get strong by normal standards and so again, one to two years of consistent lower body training consisting of 10 to 12 hard sets for your quads and your hamstrings [00:24:00] per week is going to do that. However, to get the upper body that most guys want.

On average, it’s going to take probably double the amount of time to get to that lower body. It’s going to take three or four years of consistent work to get that upper body that most guys would say complements their lower body, that completes their physique. S R 1 1 A H, S R E A? Asks, if I elevate my heels when doing squats, is it better or easier?

It can be better if you are having trouble hitting depth in your squats because of a lack of ankle mobility, which many people have an issue with, but don’t realize they have an issue with and don’t realize is the limiting factor in their squat. It is why they cannot get to depth comfortably. But that’s about it.

It doesn’t make the exercise easier, aside from what I just mentioned, and it doesn’t make it more effective. It [00:25:00] doesn’t help target the quads because any type of squat is primarily a quads exercise anyway. And so if you find that you do need to do that, you do need to elevate your heels to hit depth, and it’s because of your ankle mobility, that’s fine, do it.

You can get a good pair of squat shoes for that, for example. Many weightlifting shoes, they elevate the heels a little bit, and that’s one of the reasons. But I would also recommend working on your dorsiflexion, working on that ankle mobility, so you don’t need the elevated heels to squat well. Tommy Jack the Lad asks, About to start a minimalist program from legion’s website.

Will I lose arm size? Maybe if you are reducing the direct volume for your biceps and triceps significantly, you’re going to keep pulling, you’re going to keep pushing. So that’s indirect volume for your biceps and triceps. But if you’re going from, let’s say 10 hard [00:26:00] sets direct training for your biceps and triceps per week to maybe three hard sets for your biceps and triceps per week plus The indirect training from the pulling and the pushing, it can appear like you’ve lost some size, but you’re not going to lose muscle that way.

If you lose anything, it’s just going to be maybe a little bit of the residual pump that you would normally have from that additional direct volume. And of course, if that happens, you can get it back by just doing more volume and thereby creating a larger residual pump that lingers after your workouts.

But just know that only a few, like three, four, max five hard sets, sets taken close to muscular failure or two muscular failure per week, Is enough to maintain muscle in any major muscle group and in the case of buys and tries, it’s probably true that just 3 to 5 hard sets per week [00:27:00] of pulling and pushing is enough to maintain Most if not all of the muscle that you have in your buys and tries.

But again, if you were to go from let’s say an arms and shoulder day, maybe that’s in your routine and you are doing a fair amount of direct volume for your buys and tries and you’re switching to a two or three day per week routine and you’re going to go down to zero now sets directly for your buys and tries.

You’re going to go from anywhere from let’s say eight to 10 per week to zero. You’re going to do your pulling, you’re going to do your pushing. You may see some shrinkage in your buys and tries over the course of the first maybe couple of months of making the switch, but know that you haven’t lost muscle, you’ve just lost pump.

Is BPC 157 safe for humans? Maybe. Unfortunately, it’s under researched, and most of the studies that have been done have been in animals and they’ve been positive, but we shouldn’t extrapolate that directly to humans [00:28:00] because long term effects are unknown and it’s also an unregulated substance. So if you’re just buying it off the internet, you don’t necessarily know what you are getting, but I will say that it looks promising, particularly for healing injuries.

Many people have experienced almost miraculous results with this peptide. With in some cases, some pretty gruesome injuries, torn tissues, for example, torn muscle tissue, ligament injuries. And again, in some cases, people have reported healing so quickly that they almost couldn’t believe the results. It’s, it was happening in their body but they were just shocked at how effective.

It was in helping with recovery. And so there is appear to be something there. However, coming back to the question about safety again. Unfortunately, there just isn’t much information to go on. I don’t know of any major red flags, but I can’t point to [00:29:00] a robust body of human evidence that indicates it’s perfectly safe.

How would you like to know how to drop from 18. 9 percent to 10. 2 percent body fat in just 14 days? Forget calories in and out, because that is a toxic colonial construct that’s faker than math and triangles. Instead, What you need is timed doses of handstands, Bishop’s cap, cactus needle supplementation, and Satali breathing exercises.

Those things will do the trick. Now, what if you want to extend the muscle building effects of whey protein powder? That’s easy. You just do what your hunter gatherer ancestors did to bulk up fast. They added sprouted galangal root to their grass fed whey protein [00:30:00] shakes. And how would you like to be able to indulge in weekly guilt free carb orgies?

All you have to do is train your body to convert the excess glucose into muscle pumping glycogen rather than waist expanding belly fat. And we can thank Nazi scientists recruited by the U. S. government in Operation Paperclip for a little known method of doing just that. And it is eating raw meat.

German red garlic one hour before the binge cloves and cloves of raw German red garlic. The more, the better my unfabricated data suggests. So yeah, none of that actually works, but it does give you an idea of what you will not find in my newest book that I just released called stronger than yesterday, which is available right now on Amazon and what you won’t [00:31:00] find.

is page after page of quasi scientific gibberish and pretense geared toward peculiarity and persuasion rather than practicality and performance. Instead, in this book, you are going to find a few things. One, simple, evidence based, time proven diet exercise and supplementation techniques. that’ll help you improve your body composition, reduce the risk of disease and dysfunction, slow aging, and more.

Two, motivational musings that’ll inspire you to wallow in fewer cheat days, skip fewer workouts, and generally stay out of your own way on your fitness journey. And three, you’ll meanderings that I hope will earn your smile because As Victor Borges said, a smile is the shortest distance between two people.

And one of [00:32:00] the reasons I wrote this book was simply to get closer to more like minded people like you. What’s more, about half of the chapters in Stronger Than Yesterday are educational, and the other half are motivational, which means that this is a book you can dip into every day for a morsel of knowledge, a spark of encouragement, a moment of joy.

And by doing just that, by reading and absorbing just a few daily pages, You can gradually upgrade your mindset, your diet, your exercise, your supplementation, rest, recovery, stress management, and more. And also, for whatever it’s worth, I spent nearly two years working on Stronger Than Yesterday because that’s simply what it took to produce something that is good enough to hopefully not just meet but beat your expectations.

So again, the book is called Stronger Than Yesterday. It’s available right now. [00:33:00] On Amazon, whichever Amazon you shop on, and if you do read it, or if you do listen to it, I’d love to hear your feedback. So please let me know. I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful. And if you did subscribe to the show because it makes sure that you don’t miss new episodes.

And it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people. Take care. Who may like it just as much as you. And if you didn’t like something about this episode or about the show in general, or if you have ideas or suggestions or just feedback to share, shoot me an email Mike at muscle for life.

com muscle F O R life. com and let me know what I could do better, or just What your thoughts are about maybe what you’d like to see me do in the future. I read everything myself. I’m always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode and [00:34:00] I hope to hear from you soon.