Ep. #1173: Q&A: Strength Loss on a Cut, Training with Back Pain, Ideal Body Fat Percentage & More

[00:00:00] Hello. I am Mike Matthews. This is Muzz4Life. Thank you for joining me today for a Q& A episode number 66, where I answer questions that people have asked me over on Instagram. So what I do is I put up a story every couple of weeks, asking for questions, get a bunch of questions, go through the questions, find the ones that are most interesting to me, topical, things I haven’t answered a million times already, answer them briefly there on Instagram and then bring everything over here to the podcast where I can answer the questions in more detail.

If you want to ask me your questions, follow me on Instagram at muscle for life fitness. Watch my stories, laugh at the memes, and then when you see me put up the Ask Me Anything story, ask away. And I do review every question, I can’t answer every question, but I do review every question and really try to find the best ones.

And in today’s episode, the best ones that I could find Are related to communism, my opinions, losing strength, [00:01:00] losing performance during a cut, is that a cause for concern, what should you do, dealing with a lower back injury, dealing with lower back problems, and working around that while still trying to train your lower body, while still trying to do a squat, do a deadlift the healthiest ranges of body fat for men and women, how I’m eating these days, what does my diet look like, who should and shouldn’t reverse diet when cutting, and more.

But first There are very few supplements that I would say everyone should be taking. Most supplements are very supplemental by definition. They’re not essential. An exception, however, a supplement that I do think everyone should at least strongly consider taking is creatine. Now, you probably know that creatine is the most studied molecule in all of sports nutrition.

You probably know that hundreds of studies confirm That [00:02:00] it can safely boost muscle and strength gains and improve muscular endurance. It can reduce muscle damage and soreness from exercise, helping you recover faster from your training. It can help you preserve lean mass and strength while you are restricting your calories during a cut.

So you can maximally improve your body composition when you’re cutting, which is the goal. It’s not weight loss per se, it’s fat loss and muscle gain or at least muscle retention. However, what you might not know is that there is new research suggesting that creatine also supports various aspects of brain health and cognition, and that’s why experts are now starting to think of creatine as less of a fitness supplement for meatheads and more of a must have supplement for everyone, like vitamin D or vitamin K or omega 3 fatty acids, a few supplements that I also think everyone should strongly consider taking.

And all that is why I just, and finally, I should have done this a long time ago. This was a [00:03:00] mistake, but I just released a micronized creatine monohydrate supplement, or my sports nutrition company, Legion has just released a micronized creatine monohydrate supplement, which you can find over at buylegion.

com slash creatine. That’s B U Y legion. com slash creatine. And in case you’re wondering why creatine monohydrate versus is another. Maybe more exotic form or at least exotic sounding form like creatine citrate or creatine malate It’s because creatine monohydrate is the most studied form It is the gold standard in the scientific literature of creatine’s effectiveness and contrary to what many marketers would have you believe, research has also shown that a number of these other more quote unquote exotic forms of creatine actually perform worse.

Then creatine monohydrate. And in case you are wondering about the micronized part, that simply means the creatine molecules have been broken [00:04:00] down into very small particles, up to 20 times smaller than regular creatine monohydrate crystals. And the primary benefit is solubility. It mixes in water better, and it also can be easier on your stomach.

Some people can get an upset stomach from creatine, and they often don’t get an upset stomach from micronized Creatine. There also are some claims about enhanced absorption with micronized creatine, monohydrate, faster and more efficient uptake by muscle cells, but I think that is mostly speculation. So the bottom line is creatine is not going to help you pack on brain shrinking amounts of muscle in 30 days.

It’s not going to add another plate or two to the bar, but it is going to help you train harder. It’s going to help you recover better. It’s going to help you gain muscle and strength. Faster and contrary to the supplement fake news, it’s not bad for your kidneys. It doesn’t cause men to lose their hair and it won’t [00:05:00] make you bloated.

So if you’ll wanna see for yourself, head over to bi legion.com/creatine, BYL eio n.com/creatine. Pick up a bottle, take five grams a day if you are mostly after the performance and body composition benefits. and take 10 grams per day if you want to also maximally benefit your brain health and cognition because that is the amount that research is suggesting is optimal for both body composition, physical performance, and mental health or brain health and cognition.

And see how it goes.

Dental office asks, Your opinion about communism? I think that communism is one of the most pathetic and deranged and degenerate ideologies ever devised. Here’s a quote from Henry Hazlitt that sums it up perfectly. Quote, The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up [00:06:00] in a single sentence. Hate the man who is better off than you are.

Never, under any circumstances, admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never, under any circumstances, admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness.

Or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects, his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity. End quote. That, my gentle listener, is the essence, is the spirit of communism, and is fundamentally why communism appeals very strongly to certain people and is very repugnant to other people.

For all his failings, Ted Kaczynski made A similar argument and made the argument well against leftism in [00:07:00] general in his manifesto, which I would recommend that you read. Kaczynski obviously had serious mental problems, maybe that had something to do with his connection with the CIA mind control programs, I don’t know, maybe, but he was a very perceptive and analytical and eloquent person, which you’ll see if you read his manifesto.

DJ Hibbs asks Month four into cut, this week starting regressing on some of my lifts. Is that normal? What to do? Yes, that’s very normal. It’s actually pretty cool that he was able to maintain his performance for that long. Four months into cutting and just starting to notice a decline in the gym is a win, really.

And if that happens to you, you don’t really have to do anything unless your performance dramatically decreases. And by that I mean that you are taking weight off of most exercises and losing reps. So let’s say you start a cut being able to [00:08:00] squat 225 pounds for five reps and you are a couple of months into the cut and now you are Down to 185 pounds for 3, 4, 5 reps.

That indicates that you might be using too large of a calorie deficit. So you might want to scale back your calorie restriction. You might not be eating enough carbs. So if you combine a severe deficit With a severe restriction of carbs, your performance can tank markedly. So you might want to bring your carbs up and eat less dietary fat is really what it’s going to require.

You also might need to add some diet breaks into your cut, especially if you’re relatively lean, looking to get really lean. And so every couple of months or so, it might help for you to raise your calories up to about maintenance level for about a week. Mostly by just increasing carbs and you can think of that as it’s like deloading, but for your diet.

However, if you [00:09:00] follow my general advice for cutting, which is to use an aggressive, but not reckless calorie deficit, maybe something around 20%. So regularly eating anywhere from, let’s say 15 to 25 percent fewer calories than you burn every day, eating plenty of protein, eating plenty of carbs. And so on, you shouldn’t run into any major issues in the gym.

Again, you may start to feel like you have less energy. You may feel a bit weaker. You may actually be a bit weaker after a couple of months of cutting. That’s totally normal. Maybe you have to take five or 10 off of a few of your bigger lifts. Totally normal. And the general philosophy with your training is to just keep training hard.

Fight to maintain everything that you have all of your performance. Really, you want to push for progress when you’re cutting. That may not be possible, but that’s the mindset. You’re still going in there trying to beat last week’s workout, trying to beat the last time you did that exercise. You’re looking.

Okay, you did three or four sets. You got so many [00:10:00] reps across those sets. You’re trying to get one more rep across today’s sets. That’s how you make progress. So you still want to train with that mindset and you want to push close to failure. You don’t want to think that because you’re cutting, you can’t make progress anyway.

You’re just trying to maintain, maybe you are feeling a little bit lower energy, a little bit lower focus. So you’re just gonna, you’re just gonna phone in the workouts. You’re gonna just go through the motions. You’re not really going to push that hard. That’s the wrong way to cut. If you want to gain muscle and strength while you’re cutting, if you can, or maintain more or less all of the muscle and strength that you have while you are cutting.

LLeon22 asks, Best way to deal with lower back injury on 5 day routine? Alternates for deadlifts slash squats. If you need remedial exercises for your back, so if you have a back problem that you are unable to resolve with [00:11:00] just rest and basic stretches and things you can find online, I recommend that you pick up a book called The Back Mechanic, which will help you Specifically diagnose what is going on with your back, and then it will give you remedial exercises that you can do to help correct the problem.

Now, as for my favorite options for alternatives for the deadlift and squat, because of back issues, would be the front squat, the safety bar squat, the Bulgarian deadlift. split squat and the rack pull, the Romanian deadlift and the single leg Romanian deadlift. Or maybe you don’t do any of those exercises if they are aggravating the injury.

And I know it’s a bummer to not squat and to not deadlift, especially when you like to do it, but if it’s causing pain, let’s say anywhere above a two or a three out of 10, unfortunately, it’s probably just going to prolong the injury and you want to stay away from that. In that [00:12:00] case, what you want to do is find exercises that simply allow you to train the target muscle groups effectively and relatively pain free.

So in this case, we’re talking about machines, for example, for your lower body. So maybe you find that there’s a squat like machine like this. Maybe it’s a belt squat machine, or maybe it’s a power squat, or a pendulum squat, or a hack squat. Maybe it’s a leg press, or a pivot press. Any of those exercises, if they feel good, not aggravating your back, then do that exercise rather than the squat you would normally do.

And of course, in this scenario, I’m sure this person could also do leg extensions for some extra quad volume, could do some hamstring curls for hamstring volume. The lunge can often work well if your back is bothering you because it doesn’t require large amounts of weight to produce a good training stimulus because you have your body weight as well.

And so you just have to stick with that until [00:13:00] you are healthy. And that may also mean skipping hip hinging altogether. If there is no deadlift alternative, if there is no hip hinge that feels good, then you just need to stop doing any sort of hip hinging and just work on the problem until it’s resolved.

Jay Campbell 2 asks, is there a body fat percentage that has been proven to be the healthiest in men? Yeah, it’s gonna be around 10 percent Give or take a point or two that’s probably optimal for male health Because generally speaking more muscle and less fat means better health for both men and women.

That’s generally true now Can you take that too far? Yes, you can Especially with anabolic drugs, and especially with severe extreme dieting. Again, a guy getting down to 5, 6, maybe 7 percent. It looks pretty cool, but is it healthy? No, it’s not. However, it’s very difficult to do, even with drugs, but certainly without drugs, it’s very [00:14:00] difficult to do.

And it’s even more difficult to maintain for any period of time. And so practically speaking, more muscle, less fat equals better health. And so again, around 10 percent is probably the Goldilocks zone for men. Now, it is not usually optimal for physical performance. So if you’re talking about a male athlete, especially a high performing male athlete, around 15 percent is generally better for performance than around 10%.

And if you’re wondering, for women, the numbers are something around 20%, give or take a little bit for health and 25 percent for performance. JH Jameson 01 asks, is there an age where you should consider not squatting and deadlifting due to risk? The risks associated with these exercises, they don’t actually come from the movements per se, the movement patterns, they are not [00:15:00] intrinsic to the exercises, but from the load and the volume.

And what’s true as we get older, we simply can’t recover from abuse as easily. As when we were younger and we have to adjust accordingly. And that means that we often have to bring the volume down. Sometimes you have to bring the load down. We can’t train with as heavy weights as often as we could when we were younger.

And if you didn’t know this higher load is harder on the joints. But it’s actually easier in terms of systemic stress. Lighter weights, higher reps, more volume, that’s more systemically stressful. And anyone who has done hard sets of say, 8 10 reps of a squat or a deadlift knows that already, intuitively.

That set, Even though the load is lighter than the hard set of 4 to 6 reps, that higher rep set is [00:16:00] significantly harder. Your perception of the difficulty, it’s significantly higher, and that perception is accurate. Now, as for how you make these adjustments as you get older, there’s really no pat formula for it, because it really depends on your circumstances, your body, and how well it’s doing, so it is mostly just a matter of listening to your body, as much as I hate to say those words, That is accurate in this case and simply reducing load.

So reducing the amount of weight that you’re putting on the bar when your joints are hurting reducing volume when you are feeling under recovered. So that would mean doing fewer hard sets usually is the most effective way to reduce volume. So if you are normally doing, let’s say three to four hard sets of the deadlift and the any type of deadlift or squat per week.

And it’s Just starting to run you down, and you don’t need to deload because you did recently deload, you’re not cutting, you just are [00:17:00] feeling a little bit beat up, then you might drop to two sets of each of those exercises, or you might find that the deadlift is particularly taxing, and so you might go to one set of the deadlift, One hard set per week and keep your normal squat volume until you feel like your recovery has caught back up.

Maybe, for example, you notice that your sleep got a bit worse and so you reduce the training stress, your sleep gets a bit better, you’re feeling a bit better and you can bring the deadlift volume back up. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe you bring your squat volume down and You keep your deadlift volume up.

It just depends again on your body, your circumstances. If you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, then you will probably like my award winning fitness books for men and women of all ages and abilities, which have sold over 2 million copies, have received over 15, 000 four and five star reviews on Amazon.

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If you are unsatisfied. [00:19:00] With any of my books or programs, the results, anything, for whatever reason, just let me know and you will get a full refund on the spot. Now, I do have several books and programs, including Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, Thinner, Leaner, Stronger, and Muscle for Life. And to help you understand which one is right for you, it’s pretty simple.

If you are a guy aged 18 to, let’s say, 40 to 45, Bigger, Leaner, Stronger is the book and program for you. If you are a gal, same age range, Thinner, Leaner, Stronger is going to be for you. And if you are a guy or gal, 40 to maybe 45 plus, Muscle for Life is for you. J Ludlow 86 asks, do you eat the same thing every day, seven days a week, not seven days a week?

No, but I do eat the same thing most days, certainly on weekdays when I’m busy and I don’t really want to think about food. I don’t want to dedicate any more [00:20:00] time to food than I need to. And so what that looks like is if I want a calorie deficit, if I want to lose a little bit of fat. Then, around 7. 30 or 8am, I will have a cappuccino, so that’s about 6 ounces of whole milk.

I’ll eat an apple, I’ll eat a hard boiled egg, that’s my breakfast. And then, around 12 to maybe 12. 30, I’ll eat a big salad with chicken. And then, around 3 3. 30, I will have a piece of fruit. Maybe it’s a banana, maybe it’s some strawberries, maybe it’s some mangoes, depends on what we have. And also have one scoop of Legion’s Whey, and I mix that with one scoop of Legion’s Plant Plus.

I just like how they taste together, I like the mouthfeel. I specifically like the Vanilla Plant Plus, and I’ll mix that with some flavor of Whey Plus that just mixes nicely with vanilla. So Cinnamon cereal or salted caramel. Those are my [00:21:00] two go to’s. And then for dinner around six or 6 30. I have my famous vegetable slop, which is just various vegetables and some sort of meat lean ground beef like 93 7 is what I’ve been using for a little bit now.

Some rice and just mix it all together, let it cook, and add in some seasoning. I will change the seasoning profile every so often if I get sick of what I’m using. Currently I’m doing the Thanksgiving stuffing seasoning. Mix some parsley, some oregano, some rosemary, some salt and pepper, and I throw in some sesame seeds as well.

And then I’ll have usually about a hundred calories of dessert. So might be a Yasso Greek yogurt bar, for example, or a few of the Yasso little poppable chocolate covered ice cream balls. And that’s about it. That would be my calorie deficit, [00:22:00] my 500 calorie day. And if I’m not in a deficit, I basically do exactly that, but I also add in some oatmeal at night.

And so these days, I’m not in a deficit right now. So what I’m doing is, It’s basically overnight oats. So I put a couple of cups of dry old fashioned oats in a little container. And then I put a couple of cups of almond milk just to bring the calories down a little. Whole milk tastes better, but 160, 170 calories per cup, whereas the almond milk I think is like 40 or 50 calories.

End When I add in a piece of fruit, so I cut up a banana and put it in there. And I also put in two scoops of protein, one scoop of whey, one scoop of plant, of course, patented mixture, and and some vanilla extract, some salt. When I mix all that up, the almond milk tastes good enough. It tastes good enough.

So that’s basically my maintenance diet, which adds a couple hundred calories, [00:23:00] about 300 calories or so to bring me up to Around, eh, 2, 800 to 3, 000 calories per day. Now, that’s how I eat basically every weekday, at least if I’m at home. If I’m traveling, I have to figure it out. But if I’m here, that’s how I’m eating.

And then on the weekends, it’s similar. It starts usually with a coffee, cappuccino again, and then around 11 or so, I’ll have two scoops of a high protein yogurt, like Greek yogurt or skier. And I’ll mix a scoop of legion way into it. I’ll cut up a banana, add that, or maybe throw in some blueberries. And so that’ll get me it’s usually around, I think about 70 to 80 grams of protein.

With some carbs, a little bit of fat, and then several hours later, I’ll have the big salad with some chicken like I have normally. And then that usually brings me to dinner, which may be the vegetable slop if we’re [00:24:00] staying here. At home or whatever I end up eating if I go to a restaurant and if I go to a restaurant, I typically will not eat probably more than a thousand calories or so I’ll enjoy myself but not gorge myself.

So I may order an appetizer, but it’s not going to be the highest calorie appetizer on the menu. And I’m going to pick an entree that I just want to eat. But again, it’s probably not the highest calorie entree. It may not be a lean protein entree. Because by this point, I’ve eaten 120 ish grams of protein for the day, which is totally fine for at least one day.

I wouldn’t eat just 120 grams of protein every day forever, that wouldn’t be optimal, but doing it here and there doesn’t matter. And for context, I weigh about 193 pounds. And I’m not going to force myself to get a filet if I don’t want a filet, but maybe I do want a filet, or maybe I do want. the pork tenderloin, which [00:25:00] also just happens to be lean or some sort of chicken dish.

But if I don’t, if I want some pasta or something else, I order what I want again, just being cognizant of the calories and trying not to push myself into the 2000 plus. range for the meal. And so that weekend template applies to most Saturdays and partly to Sundays. Sundays, I will do the yogurt.

Sometimes my wife makes pancakes for our kids. And so I’ll eat a couple of pancakes as well. And we almost always eat at home on Sunday evenings. So it’s back to the vegetable slop for dinner for sure. And that’s it. That’s basically how I’m eating these days. Luke m 81 asks if you lean forward slightly in front squats, is it too heavy?

No, if that’s happening, that’s just form. You just need to address your form and the key usually when that’s happening is [00:26:00] keeping those elbows high because when the set gets hard Our elbows tend to dip down a little bit, and when that happens, then it’s very hard to maintain proper positioning, and you are going to lean forward slightly, and that is going to force you to end the set earlier than you would have, at least you would have been able to.

If you would have kept those elbows high, and what can help is when the set gets hard, feel like you’re keeping your elbows way higher than you need to feel like you are exaggerating it like you’re trying to point your elbows at the ceiling. And ironically, by trying to do that. You are going to keep them level.

That’s what’s going to happen. Martin HS Hwang asks, MindPump says to reverse diet until you can cut comfortably. Thoughts on this? I think it’s fine to reverse diet if you’ve been cutting for a while [00:27:00] and you need a break. Although, going straight to maintenance calories can work as well, so long as That significant increase in food doesn’t cause you to significantly increase your food even more.

And in some people it tends to do that, although in my experience that’s not generally the case. Most people seem to do fine with stopping the deficit and going straight to maintenance. However, I would not recommend reverse dieting if you are overweight and you’re ready to start cutting. But you aren’t burning enough calories to comfortably cut now, Sal, Adam, Justin, they know what they’re doing, so I doubt they recommend this, but I have seen this recommended all over social media again.

You’re overweight. You want to lose fat. You are learning about energy balance. You calculate your calories. It’s a low number. It’s concerning. And the [00:28:00] Solution sometimes offered is, Oh we should reverse diet first. We’re going to work those calories up by five, six, 700 slowly over the course of the next X number of months.

And then when you are stabilized at that higher level of intake, then we’ll start the deficit. I would not recommend that because the most likely outcome is you are just going to get fatter. And if you don’t get fatter, it is not going to be because of some metabolic magic that reverse dieting can produce.

It’s going to be because you not only increased your calories, but you also increased your physical activity, which is what I would recommend in the first place. So if you’re overweight and you calculate your calories, it’s not looking very good. Don’t reverse diet. Just figure out how you can Insert more physical activity into your regimen that will then bring your Calories up to a higher and more sustainable level for your [00:29:00] cut.

Matt made Z asks, hi Mike, how do you stay agile after 50? I play touch rugby and lots of explosive moves. So training specificity is really going to help here. So what you want to do to get agile and to stay agile, to get fast, to stay fast. I’m at relative. To age, of course, is you want to train to be agile and you want to train to be fast.

So this is athletics and you don’t do that by lifting weights, especially heavyweights that you move slowly. Now, that isn’t to say that weightlifting harms agility and speed. Of course, it does not. It’s going to help it in many ways, but it doesn’t directly affect Agility and speed as much as many people think what does is specifically training agility and speed.

Mike Thomas 74 SG asks thoughts on the hack squat machine. It’s a good machine. It’s certainly a viable machine. I [00:30:00] prefer hack squat machines that have you more upright rather than closer to parallel to the ground because what I don’t like about the hack squat machines that have you more just lying on your back again closer to parallel rather than closer to upright is it can be hard to keep your lower back to keep your hips down and on the pad especially when you get deeper into a set and it gets hard.

And if your butt and your lower back, if they come off the pad and start moving upward, especially when you’re using heavier weights and pushing hard, you can hurt yourself. And if you don’t hurt yourself, it still can be painful. It can just feel wrong. It can be uncomfortable. And so when I’m using that hack squat, I am always fighting with that.

Now I have found that Putting my feet lower on the platform helps, but I still have to consciously pay attention to that and make sure that I’m [00:31:00] keeping my lower back and keeping my butt and my hips down and solidly on the backrest on the pad. Miss Danny Ryan asks opinions on health care in this country.

Obviously, it’s very dysfunctional in many different ways, but it’s also responding to very perverse market incentives in many different ways for example, Tens of millions of people who don’t actually care about their health and instead want to live like gluttonous slobs until they get so fat and so sick that they need health care just to survive.

And any doctor who cares at all about their patients, which is most doctors, by the way, they will tell you this. They will tell you about the Innumerable amount of times that they’ve tried to get their patients to eat a little bit better, to exercise, to care a little bit about their body [00:32:00] composition.

And unfortunately, on average, most people don’t want to hear those things. In fact, many of them get upset at their doctors for even saying those things. What they want? They want the pills. They want the injections. They want the surgeries. They don’t want lifestyle advice. Nico Michaels 360 asks, does appetite increase in winter or is it just decreased activity levels, increasing body weight?

Interestingly, research shows that cold weather, but not short term exposure to cold weather, just cold climate, can influence hormones related to hunger and cause appetite to increase, and that exercising in cold weather can produce a smaller reduction in appetite. Then warmer weather. So if you notice that you just naturally tend to eat more food in winter, if you live in a place with a real winter, not like me in Florida, then it’s not your imagination.

It could be your hormones, not that you have to give into your hormones, [00:33:00] but it helps to understand the biology. Play retro d Landy asks ever going to offer a creatine supplement? Yes. I finally released a micronized creatine monohydrate supplement, something I should have done a long time ago. I’ve had a creatine, a micronized, creatine monohydrate supplement for a long time or legion has my sports nutrition company called recharge, but I should have offered recharge, which has the creatine plus a couple of other ingredients.

I should have offered that for the additional benefits of the ingredients that are included with the creatine and just a plain old micronized creatine monohydrate supplement simply because many people want just the creatine powder because they are going to put it in their post workout shakes, for example.

And Legion now does sell micronized creatine monohydrate at a very competitive price, I may add, so you [00:34:00] can find that over at legionathletics. com, and I am also releasing in the next couple of weeks, probably will be out by the time this goes up, so I’m recording this on September 2nd, I’m releasing Creatine gummies as well.

And although that sounds gimmicky, creatine gummies, many people prefer gummies over powders and pills for a few reasons. One, there’s no dosing, there’s no mixing with gummies, there’s no liquid, so there’s nothing to clean up afterward. You just Chew them and move on with your day. Gummies are portable, so they’re great for on the go, they’re great for traveling, and they are a deliciously different, and I’m going to have to roll my eyes as I say this next word.

In fact, roll them so hard that my neck is going to snap off and tumble to the ground, vibe. They’re a deliciously different vibe, creatine candies. Yeah, creatine gummies. You should buy them. I think you’ll like them. It’s science. legionathletics. com. Rob [00:35:00] 929 asks, you mentioned a biceps injury last year.

How’s that feeling? Recommended treatment. Yeah. So I aggravated my brachialis from flat benching, which is just one of those things that can happen. And it was annoying, but fortunately it’s easy to work around incline bench, for example, totally fine. A dumbbell benching, flat incline, totally fine, various machines, totally fine, but flat benching was a no.

So I just didn’t flat bench for a bit, and as for treatment, it was mostly just a matter of not continually aggravating it, but also some massage and stretching can help. KT tape also may be able to help, particularly when you are dealing with biceps issues, so that’s worth a try. The JBS Family asks, Should I be concerned with EMFs from AirPods slash phones?

I haven’t reviewed this literature in detail, but I have read a bit and from what I have read it looks like it’s probably not great to have a phone to your [00:36:00] head for like hours every day forever that may increase the risk of certain types of cancers. Now, as for AirPods, that looks to be less of a concern.

Probably don’t have to worry about that. There are very few supplements that I would say everyone should be taking. Most supplements are very supplemental by definition. They’re not essential. An exception, however, a supplement that I do think everyone should at least strongly consider taking is creatine.

Now, you probably know that creatine is the most studied hormone. Molecule in all of sports nutrition. You probably know that hundreds of studies confirm that it can safely boost muscle and strength gains and improve muscular endurance. It can reduce muscle damage and soreness from exercise, helping you recover faster from your training.

It can help you preserve lean mass and strength while you are restricting your calories during a cut. So you can maximally improve your body composition when you’re cutting, [00:37:00] which is the goal. It’s not weight loss. Per se, it’s fat loss and muscle gain, or at least muscle retention. However, what you might not know is that there is new research suggesting that creatine also supports various aspects of brain health and cognition, and that’s why experts are now starting to think of creatine as less of a fitness supplement for meatheads and more of a must have supplement for everyone, like vitamin D or vitamin K or omega 3 fatty acids, a few supplements.

That I also think everyone should strongly consider taking. And all that is why I just, and finally, I should have done this a long time ago, this was a mistake, but I just released a micronized creatine monohydrate supplement, or my sports nutrition company, Legion, has just released a micronized creatine monohydrate supplement, which you can find over at BuyLegion.

com slash creatine, that’s B U Y Legion. com slash creatine. And in case you’re wondering why creatine [00:38:00] monohydrate versus another maybe more exotic form, or at least exotic sounding form, like creatine citrate or creatine malate, it’s because creatine monohydrate is the most studied form. It is the gold standard in the scientific literature.

of creatine’s effectiveness and contrary to what many marketers would have you believe, research has also shown that a number of these other more quote unquote exotic forms of creatine actually perform worse than creatine monohydrate. And in case you are wondering about the micronized part, that simply means the creatine molecules have been broken down into very small particles.

Up to 20 times smaller than regular creatine monohydrate crystals. And the primary benefit is solubility. It mixes in water better, and it also can be easier on your stomach. Some people can get an upset stomach from creatine and they often don’t get an upset stomach from micronized [00:39:00] creatine. There also are some claims about enhanced absorption with micronized creatine monohydrate, faster and more efficient uptake by muscle cells.

But I think that is mostly speculation. So the bottom line is creatine is not going to help you pack on brain shrinking amounts of muscle in 30 days. It’s not going to add another plate or two to the bar, but it is going to help you train harder. It’s going to help you recover better. It’s going to help you gain muscle and strength faster.

And contrary to the supplement fake news, it’s not bad for your kidneys, it doesn’t cause men to lose their hair, and it won’t make you bloated. If you want to see for yourself, head over to buylegion. com slash creatine, B U Y L E G I O N dot com slash creatine, pick up a bottle, take 5 grams a day if you are mostly after the performance and body composition benefits, and take 10 grams per day if you want to also maximally [00:40:00] benefit your brain health and cognition because That is the amount that research is suggesting is optimal for both body composition, physical performance, and mental health or brain health and cognition.

And, see how it goes. 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 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 muscleforlife. com muscleforlife. com and let me know what I can 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 [00:41:00] ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.