Ep. #714: Q&A: Deload Timing, Birth Control and Performance, and Popular Exercises I Don’t Like

Hello, and welcome to Muscle for Life. I’m Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today for a q and a where I answer questions that readers and followers ask me. If you want to ask me questions that I can answer for you and that may be chosen for future q and a episodes, shoot me an email. Mike, muscle for Life, just f o.

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And in this episode I will be answering the following three questions. The first one comes from Verage, five Vibe have from Instagram, and he. She, I don’t remember if it was a guy or a gal, asks, how do you determine when you need to deload? And then I have a question here from anonymous. A woman I’m assuming asking about birth controls and physical performance, athletic performance, do they hurt performance?

And lastly, I have a question from bearded wanker. from Instagram, and he certainly, a, he asks, what popular exercises do you not like or do? And. Also, if you like what I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my sports nutrition company Legion, which thanks to the support of many people like you, is the leading brand of all natural sports supplements in the world, and we’re on top.

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Okay, so let’s start with Verage five vibe halves. Question on Deloading. How do you determine when you need to deload? First, let’s quickly define what a D load is. So a D load is a temporary reduction in your weekly training stress to give your body. And your mind as well, a break from hard training. The basic theory of deloading while you do this is based on research on how the body deals with physical stress.

Now, scientists are still debating the best way to describe this process, the best model for this process. But the gist is you provide your body with a stressor. Like exercise, you then remove the stressor by resting and recovering, and then you adapt to deal with the next stressor better. So you stress the body, you allow it to recover, and then it becomes better at dealing with that type of stress in the future.

And the case of training. You get bigger muscles, you get stronger muscles, you get more muscle endurance, you improve your work capacity and so forth. Now, that third step adaptation is technically referred to as super compensation, and that is what allows you to build muscle, get stronger, faster, more coordinated, improve your work capacity and so forth.

So as for how. Often you should plan D loads into your program. There is no one size fits all answer because some people’s bodies can just take more abuse than others. The ideal frequency of D loads also depends on how strong you are, because stronger people tend to need more frequent D loads to recover from their training because it’s just more difficult.

The loads. Heavier, which puts more stress and strain on the body. How long you’ve been training also matters because newbies tend to need fewer deloads. Newbies tend to not need to deload as often as more experienced weightlifters because they aren’t strong enough yet to really beat up their bodies.

Whereas more experienced lifters are, they’re lifting heavier weights. They’re usually doing higher volumes, both in terms of hard sets and total reps, or total poundage. And another factor that impacts how frequently you should deload is how durable your body is, and particularly your joints. Your tendons, your ligaments, because when you start getting pain in your joints or in your tendons, in your ligaments, that is a pretty reliable indicator that you may need to deload.

Of course, there are many other things that can cause that, but if you have been going great guns in your training for several months without a break and things are just starting to. De-load can resolve that issue and de-loading more frequently can prevent it from recurring. So let’s go to some rules of thumb here.

If you are new to lifting, then I think you should plan a de-load week, maybe every eight to 10 weeks or so of intense training. And if you’re cutting, if you’re in a calorie deficit, then I would say make it every six to eight weeks. Now if you are in your intermediate phase, if you’ve been lifting for, let’s say, anywhere from one to three years, so that’s kinda like the beginning to the middle of your intermediate phase, then I would say plan a deal load week every six to eight weeks of intense training, and reduce that to every four to six weeks when you’re cutting and if you’re an experienced lifter.

So if you have. 3, 4, 5, 6 plus years of good training under your belt. Then I would say plan to de-load every four to six weeks as your standard approach. And then when you’re cutting, you could probably just use the same frequency. I don’t think you need to de-load every two or three weeks. That’s unnecessary.

Four to six weeks works well when you’re cutting. I also don’t recommend that you do more than 12 weeks of hard training. Without Deloading at least once, regardless of how experienced of a weightlifter you are, because in my experience, there’s very little benefit of training longer than that without a break, and the risk of the downsides starts to increase markedly.

Now, I have trained with people who responded really well to training and who went. I remember one guy, he went probably eight months from new, he started new. and I don’t think he deloaded once in eight months, even though I urged him to, and he did quite well in his defense. Finally, it started to catch up to him.

His knee started to bother him in his heavy squats, and he started to feel his shoulder a little bit in his pressing, and then he started to deload from that point on. And those were no longer issues. But he was an outlier. Again, he responded really well to training and he grew up playing sports and clearly could just recover from a lot of volume and a lot of stress.

The average person is not going to do as well as he did. In my experience, working with many people after three or four months or so of intense training. Without any deloading is where they will start to notice their motivation to train wanes. The weights start to feel very heavy, like their normal training.

Weights just start to feel heavier than usual. And heavier and heavier. They’re no longer making progress. Sometimes their sleep is getting disrupted and they are running into little aches and pains. Those are all signs that it’s time to de. And some people just push their training to that point and then deload and then do it again and again and again.

And I’ve done that myself. I’ve made that mistake many times over the years because deload workouts are kind of boring, especially if you enjoy training. But I have now learned my lesson that if I look at my progress on the. It is consistently better when I am Deloading on a frequent schedule. And now what I find, I’m following my Beyond bigger, leaner, stronger program, which you can learn about in my book called Beyond Bigger, leaner, stronger.

And in this program you deload, deload every fourth week, three weeks of hard training and a deload. And in the beginning I was reluctant to do it that way because again, I like training and every four weeks. Thought was gonna seem completely unnecessary. But now that I’ve run the program for a total of probably a year and a half, cuz I was running it for quite some time while I was writing the book and putting it together, and now I’m back on it for about six months, I can say that I think it’s calibrated quite well because what I find and what I’ve found, From many of the people who are also on the program sharing feedback with me is that most of us are looking forward a little bit to that deal load.

By the end of the third week, we are feeling a little bit beat up and sometimes there’s a little joint niggle or two. And speaking for myself here, I certainly could go at least another two or three weeks intensely before I’d really start to notice the down. But by de-loading every fourth week, I never reached the point where I know it is time to deload.

And in the past, again, when I tried to just kind of auto-regulate it and de-load as infrequently as possible, basically I would reach that point, or sometimes I would even get sick. Not to say that not de-loading is going to make you sick, but not deloading often enough, certainly is going to increase your risk of sickness because as your body.

Overstressed, your immune system is not going to work as well. So anyway, that is my little pep talk For anybody who is bulking at the idea of deloading every 4, 5, 6, even eight or 10 weeks, again, I understand training intensely is more fun and that’s how you make progress, or at least that’s how you feel.

You are directly making progress. That is the offense of the game, so to speak. But think of Deloading as. Defense and by incorporating that element of the game, so to speak into your regimen properly, what you’ll find is you just make smoother progress over the long haul. Now, if you aren’t sure how to de-load, head over to legion athletics.com and search for de-Load, and you will find an article that I wrote on de-loading that gives you some sample de-load programs, some ways to go about it.

There are a couple of philosophies of de-loading and. Talk about which I prefer and why, and well, I guess that’s it for that question. Let’s move on to do birth control pills hurt performance. Now, over the years, many studies have been done on this. Many studies have looked at how birth control pills affect athletic performance, and some show that birth control pills cause performance.

To Wayne that they hinder or impair performance. And others though, show that they don’t seem to have much of an effect. Now, last year in 2020 researchers at Nottingham Trent University conducted a meta-analysis on all of the available data to see if they could spot trends that might otherwise be obscured in different studies on small groups of people.

And before we get into exactly what their research found, let’s. Cover a little bit of background information on how birth control pills work, and that will give us a better understanding of the research. So birth control pills normally come in packs of 21 or 28 pills, and for women who use the 21 packs, they’re taken every day, 21 days straight.

And this more or less shuts down the normal fluctuation of hormones that causes menstruation and increases fertility. In women, that is known as the consumption phase. When you’re taking these pills. Then for the other seven days of the 28 day cycle, the women don’t take any pills, and this is known as the withdrawal phase.

Now for the women who use the 28 packs, the process works the same way, but the difference is during their withdrawal phase, they continue taking. The pills. So the pills they take during that time though are placebo pills. So those ones during the withdrawal phase, they don’t contain any hormones. They’re just taken because they help women maintain the habit.

So they don’t forget to take the pills that actually have hormones and prevent them from getting pregnant. And all of those variables make studying birth. Hills tricky. So what researchers did in this 2020 meta-analysis is they really did three separate meta-analysis on different groups of people. So they did one that compared the athletic performance of women during their seven day withdrawal phase to naturally menstruating women who were not taking birth control during the first seven days of their menstrual cycle.

And then they did a meta-analysis that compared the athletic performance of women during their three week consumption phase to naturally menstruating women during the. Three weeks of their menstrual cycle, the mid follicular phase to the lal phase. And then they did a meta-analysis that compared the athletic performance of women on days that they took birth control pills, two days that they took no pills or placebo pills.

And in the first study, the one that compared the athletic performance of women during their seven day withdrawal phase to naturally menstruating women not taking birth control during their first seven days of their menstrual cycle. The researchers found that the women not taking birth control pills tended to perform slightly better.

That said, the differences were slight. They tended toward insignificance, so didn’t seem to make that big of a difference. Now, in the second meta-analysis, the results were. Similar, more or less the same, actually. So in this case, remember they were comparing the athletic performance of women during their three week consumption phase to naturally menstruating women during the last three weeks of their menstrual cycle.

And again, the women not taking birth control pills tended to perform slightly better, but the differences. Were slight and tended toward insignificance. And in the third meta-analysis, which again was comparing the athletic performance of women on days that they took birth control pills to days, they took no pills or placebo pills.

There was basically no difference in athletic performance at all. So whether women were taking them or not, didn’t. Impact their ability to perform. So according to the results of this study, women who don’t take birth control pills probably perform very slightly better than those who do. And there are several other well-designed studies on this that were not included in those meta-analysis that.

Support that conclusion as well. Now, despite that, most female athletes take birth control pills specifically. Research shows that about 57% of female athletes take them compared to just 12% of the general population, and that’s probably because the negative effects on performance tend to be. Quite small and many women feel that they’re outweighed by the upsides of birth control, which includes more than just menstruation for athletes in particular, because in most cases, birth control pills work by more or less eliminating menstruation.

And that also eliminates many of these symptoms that come along with the period, like hot flashes, fatigue, nausea, digestive issues, and so forth. And what that means for athletes then is they can be more consistent with their training. They can consistently. Harder, and that can certainly be a net positive in maintaining and improving athleticism.

That said, many women experience negative side effects with birth control, pills like headaches and increased appetite and weight gain, high blood pressure, increased hair growth, breast tenderness, disrupted sleep, and if any of those side effects. Are bad enough. Those obviously interfere with training and they may wipe out any of the benefits that I just mentioned regarding getting rid of your period.

If you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my sports nutrition company Legion, which thanks to the support of many people like you, is the leading brand of all natural sports supplements in the. Okey dokey. Let’s move on to the next question from bearded wanker.

What popular exercises do you not like or do and why? A good question. I like this one. Before I give my list though, I want to give a little bit of context because of differences in anthropometry, so the proportions of our body, the. Measurements of our body and biomechanics, how our body moves, some exercises, or at least some exercise variations are just better for some people than others.

And what this may mean is you’re gonna find that some exercises and some variations are easier for you or just more comfortable or. World more difficult than others. Generally speaking, people gravitate toward the exercises that they find easiest and most comfortable because those are the exercises that they can progress best on and that they can lift the most weight on and that they just enjoy the most.

For example, some people like me prefer the low bar squat position over the high bar squat position because the high bar position has the weight placed at the long end of the. Between the hips and the head, and I am taller than average. I’m about six two, so this is a long lever. When I’m squatting in the high bar position, it is much more difficult to prevent the forward lean.

But if I move the bar down my back a little bit and squat in the low bar position, that helps a lot. It helps alleviate that issue so I don’t have to really focus on maintaining the proper back angle. Instead with the low bar squat, I can just focus on some simple cues like throwing the bar off of my back, for example, that help me maintain proper form and generate maximum.

Another example is the deadlift, the conventional versus the sumo versus the trap bar, which is going to feel most comfortable for you, which is going to allow you to move the most weight. Well, a lot of that is gonna depend on how your hip sockets are located on your pelvis, how shallow or deep they are, and as well as how your femurs meet your pelvis.

Those variables make a big difference in how the deadlift works for. Body and you’re likely to gravitate toward the one that feels most comfortable and that you are strongest in. And that’s correct. That is what you should do. If you find that conventional deadlifting is more comfortable than sumo deadlifting.

That’s the case for me. And you were probably also gonna find that you’re stronger in the conventional deadlift and you don’t need to sumo deadlift. You can just conventional deadlift. And of course the opposite is true as well. If you just do better with the sumo deadlift, if it is more comfortable for you and if you are stronger in it, then stick with it.

You don’t have to conventional deadlift ever. Now, why am I telling you all of. Well, the exercises and the variations that I don’t like that I’m gonna share with you may at least in some cases be different to the ones that you don’t like. You actually may like some of these exercises and feel that they’re very effective, and you may find that some of the exercises that I do like and that I do regularly and that are in my programs, don’t work well for you.

And that’s. That’s normal. That said, I am gonna share exercises that I think are a waste of time for most people. Most people don’t need to bother with any of these exercises. There are just better ways to spend your time in the gym. So let’s start at the top with the weighted side bend, which many people do because they think they can spot reduce their love handles.

They think that by training their obliques, they can get rid of their muffin top. And the irony is, This exercise makes the problem worse because the bigger your obliques are, the fatter you look, the leaner you have to be for those muscles to clearly look like muscles as opposed to just blobs of fat.

And furthermore, if you are doing heavy squatting and deadlifting and overhead pressing every week like you should, you almost certainly don’t need to add anything special in your routine for. Development, your obliques will develop just fine. It’s gonna take time, and you can speed up the process a little bit by adding some core training into your regimen.

And the same thing goes for really any of your core development. Your abs, for example, the rectus abdominus, the six pack muscles, you will almost certainly get there without any direct ab work. If you are following a well-designed hybrid between strength training and body. , which I think is most appropriate for most people at least.

But it can take time, and if you want to add some core training or some AB training into your routine to speed that up a little bit. I don’t see anything wrong with that. So in the case of obliques, let’s say you have been squatting, deadlifting, pressing for a while, you’re pretty strong and you want a bit more obliques just looking at your body and looking at your physique.

Then you could add some twists to your AB routine. You could do some twisting cable crunches. Air bikes. Those are two exercises that I used to do a fair amount of until I got my core development up to where I wanted it to be. And then I’ve simply used heavy compound weightlifting to maintain it. And again, I almost certainly would’ve gotten to where I am now without the core training, but it probably would’ve just taken a little bit longer.

That’s all. Alright, next on my list is really anything that uses the Smith. And some people, guys usually like the Smith machine. I used to be one of these guys back in the day because you can load it up with a lot more weight than you can a free barbell. And that works wonders for your ego. But unfortunately, it is not ideal for gaining muscle and strength.

And anyone who has switched from doing a lot of Smith machine training to a lot of free barbell training knows exactly what I’m talking about. The free barbell training is much more difficult, and that’s because the Smith machine removes the stabilizer muscles from lifts and it forces an unnatural range of motion.

And just in case you’re wondering, yes, studies have been done comparing the Smith machine to the free barbell on exercises like the bench press and the squat, and the overhead press, and the weight of the evidence is that the Smith machine is considerably less effective for gaining muscle and strength.

So stay off of the Smith machine unless you have no other choice, unless you are working out in a gym. Does not have a free barbell bench press or maybe a free barbell overhead press a little setup for seated or just a free barbell that you can press overhead if you are doing the standing overhead press.

And you know, I actually would choose. Dumbbell pressing over Smith. Machine pressing. But I’ve been in gyms, I’m thinking of one. I was in Italy in the summer of 2019 and I was in a hotel that had a Smith machine and it had a cable set up and it had dumbbells up to maybe 50 or 55 pounds. And so for my bench pressing, I went to the Smith machine because they had maybe, uh, three 15.

Maybe 3 55 in terms of weight. And so I was able to get a better training stimulus out of the heavier Smith machine pressing, then very light dumbbell, bench pressing 50, 55 pounds, basically warm up weight, you know, doing sets of, I don’t know, 20, 25 reps or maybe even more. And then for my shoulder pressing, my overhead pressing, I went with the dumbbells.

Which wasn’t ideal. Maybe I was doing sets of 12 to 15, but they didn’t have a little utility bench that I could bring over to the Smith machine. And so the only way to then overhead press, quote unquote, on the Smith machine with a full bench would’ve been to do like a very inclined bench press, basically, because you need the utility bench to get your head out of the way, and they didn’t.

Now as far as squatting and deadlifting go on the Smith machine, I find back squatting very awkward on any Smith machine. Because of the range of motion, because of the fixed path, which isn’t perfectly up and down, it’s usually on an incline. However, I’ve found that front squatting tends to be a bit more comfortable.

On the Smith machine. So if I were forced to choose between, let’s say, a Smith machine for a front squat or maybe just dumbbells, I probably would do the front squatting on the Smith and then move on to maybe some lunges or some split squats or something with the dumbbells. And as far as the deadlift goes, I don’t recommend deadlifting on a Smith machine if the track is not perfectly vertical.

So if it has a slight slope, Don’t deadlift on it because you want a perfectly vertical bar path. When you’re deadlifting. That’s how you maintain proper form. That’s how you properly transfer force to the barbell. And of course, that is not possible if the track on the Smith machine is not perfectly vertical.

Now, if it is vertical, then I would say it’s safe to deadlift on. It’s not ideal. If there is a barbell that you can use and load up, just do that. Or a hex bar or you know, a trap bar, use that over the Smith machine. But if you have to choose between a vertical. Smith machine deadlift and no deadlifting whatsoever.

Then I would pick the Smith machine. Okay, let’s move on to the next exercise, which is the Yates Row, which looks pretty cool when Dorian does it, if you check out videos of him online. But the problem with this exercise is when you get down to it, especially when you watch people doing it in the gym, it turns into kind of like a half rep cross between a sh.

And a reverse barbell curl. And the problem really fundamentally is that the range of motion in this exercise in the Yates Row is much shorter than the conventional barbell row. And generally speaking, when you shorten a range of motion, you make the exercise less effective for building muscle because you make it easier.

Your muscles don’t have to work as hard when you reduce the range of. Now that said, the counter-argument to that is that you can add more weight. So in the case of the eighth row, yeah, you’re not moving the bar as far, but you can use more weight than the conventional barbell row. So some people say that that makes up for some of the stimulus that is lost with the shorter range of motion.

But I would say that that line of thinking is. In line with the weight of the evidence on range of motion and muscle building and strength building, and that we should probably just quote unquote, play it safe and stick with exercises that have larger ranges of motion, safe of course, ranges of motion, not smaller ranges of motion.

By the same logic, then maybe we should all just be half squatting with a lot more weight. And while you may describe. A half squat to a power lifter, for example, for correcting a specific deficiency in their squat. You would never tell somebody to only half squat and just load more weight because that’s going to be just as effective as full squatting.

All right. Let’s move on to the next exercise, which is really just a family of exercises, and it’s anything done on the b. Ball. Oh, the bosu Ball. The bouncy ball used by trainers everywhere to trick their clients into thinking that they know what the hell they’re doing. Functionally training right now, it’s usually claimed that you can use the BOSU ball to add instability to the.

Exercise and that’s going to improve performance or it’s going to activate the core muscles. And research shows that it does. Not. Performing exercises on unstable surfaces actually just makes them less effective. Studies have been done on this and shown that, so leave the bosu balls and the Swiss balls to the professionals and just keep your feet and your back on stable surfaces.

Okay, next is the behind the neck, pull down and the behind. the neck press. And the problem with this exercise is you need crazy shoulder flexibility to actually use a full range of motion. And if you don’t have that, then these exercises are at best a waste of time and at worst, a shoulder injury just waiting to happen now.

How did this become a thing? Well, these exercises were popularized by power lifters and strong men, but that doesn’t mean that we should all be doing them again. You have to have some serious shoulder mobility, some serious shoulder flexibility to even hope to be able to do them correctly. And even then, they do put the shoulders in a very unnatural position, and they can put a lot of strain on your.

As well, especially as the weights get heavier. So again, this is where I think it’s smart to just play it safe. Let’s just go by the book here and stick to the traditional pull downs and the traditional shoulder presses. You’re not missing out on anything by not, uh, going behind the neck. Okay, next up is the AB machine.

Every AB machine, all of the AB machines. Bother with them. And my biggest gripe with these machines is that they reduce the involvement of the lower back, which is meant to flex and tense along with the abs, and this can actually increase the risk of injury. Another issue with AB machines is something that I commented on earlier in that it’s usually not necessary.

Most of your AB development, most of your core development will come from your compound lifts, from your deadlifting and squatting and overhead pressing, and then of course, being lean enough. And if you wanna speed that up a little bit, or if you have been doing those things for a while and you’re not happy with the, let’s say the size of your rectus abdominal muscles, if you’re.

Abs look a bit underdeveloped and you want to add some isolation work for your abs. I understand. But in that case, I would say just stick to the simple stuff. Stick to the weighted crunch. Maybe the, the leg ray on the captain’s chair or the hanging leg ray and air bikes. If you want to add some twisting into it.

If you wanna get your obliques more involved. Okay, next exercise is the triceps back. I hate this exercise because the tri. Really only feel like they’re doing anything at the very end of the lift when you’re locking out and you can’t use any amount of weight on this exercise and still maintain proper form.

So you basically can’t progress to anything that is meaningful. And yeah, it’s a shitty exercise. Just stick to the staples, stick to the close grip bench. Press the overhead triceps, press the skull, crushers, dips, triceps, push downs, and so forth. Okay, moving on. Decline bench press. I used to love this exercise of course, because it allows you to put more weight on the bar.

It allows you to feel like you are stronger than you really are, and the problem here is the reduced range of motion. That, of course, is why you can put more weight on the bar and research shows. Thanks to that, thanks to that reduced range of motion, the decline bench press is less effective for gaining muscle and strength than incline in flat pressing.

So now I don’t do decline bench pressing ever. I mean, I can’t remember the last time I’ve done it actually many, many, many years ago. Now a common argument or a common reason for including the decline bench press in your regimen is that it’s going to emphasize in the lower part of the chest of the pectoralis major, and I understand that, but I would say just do dips instead because it’s just a better exercise.

You get the full range of motion and you get the emphasis on the pectoralis major and there you go. All right. The final exercise on my list is the dumbbell front. Not because there’s anything inherently wrong with it. It’s an okay exercise for training your anterior, your front deltoids. It’s just unnecessary.

It’s just redundant if you do a lot of bench pressing and overhead pressing. I just don’t see a reason to include it in a program, and especially not when you consider that most people are very front dealt heavy. They are doing a lot of pressing, they have done. Pressing and they are not doing a lot of side raises or rear raises, so they’re not training the side delts or the rear delts nearly as much as the front delts.

I made that mistake for a long time myself, and so instead of doing dumbbell front raises, I would much rather see most people doing some side raises in some rear raises instead, using that time more productively. And that’s it. That’s my exercise. List. And that’s also it for this episode of the podcast.

Thanks again for joining me, and next week I have a monologue coming on one rep Maxes. How do you find your one rep? Maxes. And why is that useful? How do you use them in your training? I have an interview with Sam Vik on mobility and massage for happier joints and muscles, and then another q and a where I am going to be talking about mouth guards, compression clothing, and skipping breakfast.

All right. Well, that’s it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and you don’t mind doing me a favor, please do leave a quick review on iTunes or. Wherever you’re listening to me from in whichever app you’re listening to me in, because that not only convinces people that they should check out the show, it also increases search visibility and thus it helps more people find their way to me and learn how to get.

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Just muscle f o r life.com and share your thoughts on how I can do this. I read everything myself and I’m always looking for constructive feedback. Even if it is criticism, I’m open to it. And of course you can email me if you have positive feedback as well, or if you have questions really relating to anything that you think I could help you with, definitely send me an email.

That is the best way to get ahold of me, Mike, at muscle life.com. And that’s it. Thanks again for listening to this episode, and I hope to hear from you.