Ep. #918: The Best of Muscle For Life: Full-Body Workouts, Habits to Keep Weight Off, & Elon Musk

Hello and welcome to muscle for life. I’m Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today for another installment of the best of muscle for life, which is basically a hand picked selection of the juiciest morsels from some of the more popular episodes I’ve recorded over the years. And I do these episodes because.

Some people, my favorite people, of course, they listen to most or even all of my podcasts, but my analytics tell me that while many listeners do tune in on a regular basis, they don’t catch every episode and thus they miss out on insights that could help them do at least a little bit better inside and outside of the gym.

And so I had the idea, why don’t I do these best of episodes where I share some of the most practical and compelling ideas, tips, and moments from the more popular episodes that I’ve done over the years, and these best of episodes, they do well, and so I keep doing them. So in this installment of the best of muscle for life, you will be hearing hand picked morsels from three Popular episodes one is an interview I did with Menno Henselman’s on the benefits of full body training.

The next one is a monologue that I recorded called 10 Habits of People Who Lose Weight and Keep It Off. And the final one is a monologue that I recorded on a book that I liked, which is Elon Musk by Ashley K. Vance, before we get into it, have you ever wondered what strength training split you should follow?

What rep ranges you should work in? How many sets you should do per workout or per week? I created a free 60 second training quiz that will answer those questions for you and others, including how frequently you should train each major muscle group, which exercises you should do, what supplements you should consider, which ones are at least Taking and more to take this quiz and to get your free personalized training plan, go to muscle for life.

show muscle for life. show slash training quiz, answer the questions and learn exactly what to do in the gym to gain more muscle and strength. All right. Let’s start with some of the highlights from the interview I did with Menno on the benefits of full body workouts. Yeah. When you talk about full body training, mostly It just refers to literally training every muscle group in the body, every major muscle group that you want to train, you’re training it basically every time you’re in the gym.

And it’s good to, I think, talk about training frequency mostly because, when you say full body training, that can mean you’re training twice a week and two of those sessions are full body, which I think that most people would agree with that. If you train twice a week. Or even three times a week, you should probably do full body because if you do a split thing, you’re going to hit every muscle group very often, only once a week, that is most likely based on lifting.

Almost all the data we have not going to be optimal once you’re past the Nova stages. There seems to be a fundamental limits on how much muscle growth or how long you can stimulate muscle protein synthesis. Like after a session, you’re going to grow, but you’re not going to grow for a month. You’re not going to be able to do if you can do 50 sets and then just spend the rest of the month on the couch getting jacked, so clearly there is a limit to how long you can grow after a single workout. Even if. You can grow for that period, it’s going to require very high volume and as you already touched on most or there are several lines of research based again on almost protein synthesis and also in direct training frequency studies that point to there being basically a maximum productive session volume.

So That’s going to lie. It’s not very clear where that lies. And it depends a bit on where you regard the very contentious and how you say it, there have been concerns about the data validity of some of the work of some Brazilian researchers namely pollution, Teal, and the value of studies. But depending on how seriously you take those.

The limit is, it’s probably going to be around 10 sets, roughly like maybe 15 based on like NPS data. It’s probably going to be more like 10 sets. If you exceed that threshold, you are not actually going to stimulate much more extra protein synthesis. It seems that’s basically just the cap, like your body.

Get the hint. It wants to grow, but there’s just a limit on how much you can stimulate it to grow in one workout. Let’s say that volume is all you need. Maybe you don’t need more than say those 10 sets in your case. Even if you do that, it’s quite hard to do 10 productive sets. Like actually very productive sets for one muscle group.

It’s also going to take a lot of time because you need to, several minutes rest in between all of those. Whereas for full body training, you can train with much shorter rest periods because you can do bench press and then you can do a set of chin ups and then you can do a set of squats. You don’t need a full five minutes between each of those.

But if do 10 sets, like bench press fly, double bench press, and then machine pack fly or whatever, then your work capacity is going to tank pretty hard by the time you get to like over five sets. So when I started promoting high frequency training, the literature was far more compelling in favor of high frequency training.

But now it seems that most of the benefits, if not for, beyond when you’re saying at least twice a week, most of the benefits, if not all the benefits comes from your higher total workout. Output. And then some people will say it’s just that you’re doing more work. You can also say that for rest intervals, you can say that for most advanced training techniques, they work because they allow you to do more work.

No pun intended. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that’s the mechanism, but it is a real benefit. And I’d say it’s also very practical because like I said, full body workouts can help you take advantage of circuit training and tagging the supersets. Or just stringing up exercise together, which I call combo sets, which are not strictly doing a super set to do rest in between, but not as much as you would need between two sets of bench presses.

So it’s very time effective and you can take advantage of many of those techniques. And also in a crowded gym, you can see Oh, if I can’t do this exercise, I’ll just do the other one. So how do you like to build your full body training? I do it flexibly. So I’ll string like a couple of exercise together, depending on someone’s needs.

Equipment and their goals. They have to be unrelated because you don’t want overlapping musculature. You don’t want to string together like the bench pass and the overhead press because those are definitely going to interfere with each other. If those don’t, that becomes like a press workout basically.

Yeah. And then there’s like borderline cases, like deadlifts and overhead press. It’s you can’t string them together. You probably don’t want to do them right back to back though. So you have to, you have to pay attention to that. What kind of exercise are, and then often I like to do just as an example of program that I just asked for clients, it’s like lacrosse squats, and that’s actually an attack in a super set, but flexibly, so I basically say if you can do a lacrosse and then do the squats right after you feel up for it and it’s logistically possible.

Then go for it. Otherwise, feel free to take a little bit of extra rest. It’s not going to make or break the program. And then after that, you can do like a set of jumps after catching your breath, making sure that your heart rates are somewhat back to normal, but also, not rushing it, but not taking as long as it takes.

Probably the full five minutes you would otherwise take between two minutes or so probably it’d be for me after exactly, you can do it that way. And then just doing that basically cuts your workout time in half. If you do the math, you write it down. Some people it’s like, it doesn’t click, but basically you’re spending time exercising that you would otherwise just be resting.

So it would be wasted time. And now you’re spending some of the time exercising. And as soon as you strength, at least two exercise together, you have overlapping rest as well. So you basically use your rest, not just the rest, the thighs and the back for your squats, but you’re also resting your lats, your biceps or the chin ups.

So it’s majorly cuts down your training time. And the general rule of thumb to basically start with the most technical, heavy, hard. effortful kind of workouts. It generally pans out that way, but there are some exceptions like antagonist supersets. This is actually something I first learned from John Meadows and then finally started experimenting with it.

And he said, yeah this actually works doing leg curls before your squats. And the reason they liked it is because people with knee injuries. It generally feels better. And then he’s, at least they aren’t as painful. I’m not sure if it actually does anything for the tissue, but at least it reduces pain.

And I combined that with the lift John antagonist supersets. I actually got to cut down the rest period as well. And that it actually can enhance performance in the squad. And it also feels better for a lot of people and some other useful principles are lower body first before upper body, because there’s some research like this is not very hard data, but like some acute data on the measurement of neuromuscular fatigue suggests that lower body muscles, at least the quads, almost all the research in the quad, they’re easy to study, suffer more from central nervous system fatigue.

And that’s probably not going to be a major concern in most workouts. But it’s possible that near the end of the workouts, did they suffer a bit more and especially exercise like squats and deadlifts anecdotally definitely suffer a great deal when you put them in the end of a workout. So I like to put those first good general principles.

Also. To go heavy first, because then you can actually take advantage of post activation potentiation. Whereas if you do light work first, and not only do you lose that benefit, but you also induce more fatigue actually usually have non weekly templates. So I have a certain number of workouts. That you alternate between with a certain structure.

Like maybe my program will be five days rather than seven days and has two workouts, one rest day, two workouts, one rest day, something like that. And it just alternates. So some weeks on Monday will be the chest day, but other weeks on the Monday, you actually have the. For one day or something, so in general with programming, it’s good to think outside the Gregorian calendar because it can be convenient for some people, especially if you have a weekly schedule for work and everything.

So your recovery also has a weekly. Or people with kids, cause weekends is like kids stuff. But there’s no need to really focus on that because it’s not an actual variable that matters, it’s not like your body cares. It’s Tuesday. So what are the scenarios where you would recommend a different kind of split or maybe not?

Actually, I’m not, I don’t think that your position is that full body is best always for everyone, but maybe it is. I’m just curious. Yeah, actually I would be, that’s not my position for sure. I basically scale up frequency along with training advancements. So basically anyone that I have do full body is like at least late intermediate.

Unless they’re training like two or three times a week, like I said, because then full body, I think makes sense for almost anyone, but based on purely on the literature, it’s actually very hard to make a case of why just always training full body is actually detrimental because pretty much, like I said, if you just group all of the studies together, like you don’t care about any other factor, like energy deficits, plus how advanced they are, whatever, then basically the literature says looking at higher versus lower frequency, we have a I think it’s like 15 to 20 studies that finds neutral.

So it doesn’t really matter what frequency you do. Then you have six or so, let’s say either significantly or very strong trends or benefits of higher frequencies. And only one study for one out of six studied muscle groups. Found significantly greater progression in the lower frequency. And that was more a case of the higher frequency group, just not having any biceps growth for some reason, whereas the other lower frequency group did have growth that was more comparable to all the other muscle groups.

So I’m not sure if that study really should be met with I should have a lot of weight. Basically the overall trend is it’s probably neutral or beneficial. And if you also look at recovery indices. Higher frequencies are generally positive. Like you’re going to increase how much volume you do.

You’re going to decrease soreness. You’re going to improve your testosterone to cortisol ratio. It’s actually quite hard to make a case, I’d say against doing full body, but in practice you do see that people can end up with too high volumes. And beginners, even if it’s just one hard set, they may get injured or just even one hard set per day, like every day.

It’s simply too much for them already. All right. That’s it for the featured snippets of the interview I did with Menno Henselman on the benefits of full body training. And if you want to listen to that whole episode, it was published in July of 2020. So you can go back and find it and listen to the whole thing.

Let’s move on now to the monologue that I recorded called 10 habits of people who lose weight and keep it off. Okay. The first habit is stick to a meal plan, make a meal plan and follow it. This is a huge quote unquote hack for losing weight and keeping weight off. Because it allows you to control your calories.

It allows you to control your macros. And if you know what you’re doing with your meal planning, and if you know what you’re doing with portioning your food, that doesn’t necessarily mean weighing and measuring everything, although that’s a great way of going about it. And I would say it’s probably necessary if you are lean wanting to get really lean, because then you don’t have as much wiggle room.

With your calorie deficit, if you have a lot of fat to lose, you can afford to use a larger calorie deficit than if you have less fat to lose. And therefore, if you accidentally overeat by let’s say 200 calories in a day, it is not as big of a deal if your calorie deficit is let’s say five, six, seven, 800 calories.

But if it is two or 300 calories, then you may have just wiped out most or all of your fat loss for the day. by accidentally overeating just a little bit in each meal, for example. But if you’re a guy above, let’s say 15 percent body fat, or if you’re a woman above 25 percent body fat, you don’t have to weigh and measure everything, but you do have to have a good sense of portions.

All right, let’s move on to the next tip, which is to replace unhealthy fats. And I should probably put that in scare quotes, quote, unquote, unhealthy fats with quote unquote healthy ones. And practically speaking, this would mean cutting out the fat from stuff like fast food and maybe TV dinners and replacing it with stuff like olive oil and avocado and nut.

Okay, the next tip is to move more. To walk more, take the stairs, try to be more active outside of your workouts. And the reason why this is a great tip is it can burn a lot more calories than people realize. For example, walking at a normal pace, not slow, but not fast. Just walking at a normal pace, burns a couple hundred calories per hour.

Walking is a great. source of cardio, especially when you’re cutting because you get the extra calorie burn and it doesn’t really put any demands on the body. It doesn’t cut into your recovery and it encourages you to get outside and hopefully you have some nature around you so you can reproduce. The benefits of being in nature every day.

And so this goes for just everyday decisions that you make. For example, instead of taking the elevator, you can take the stairs instead of just sitting in your chair for hours on end every day while you’re working. You can set a timer to get up every hour. hour to maybe two hours max, and you can go for a little walk, even if it’s just 10 minutes.

But if you’re doing that every day, and then maybe you have a longer walk on the weekends that all adds up. All right, let’s move on to the next tip. Tip number four here, which is if you are going to snack, go for fresh fruit instead of delicious things like cookies and. Pastries and confections and the like.

And I would say it. The first thing that you should know is the less snacking you do, the better that has been shown in research that the better you stick to just a few larger meals per day and don’t randomly nibble on stuff throughout the day, the better you’re going to be able to lose weight and keep it off.

And the reason for that is obvious, especially if you’re snacking on stuff like cookies and muffins and chocolate, it is very easy to eat an additional, let’s say, 500 plus calories per day. If you are the snacking type, if you like to snack. I like to have a couple of smaller meals throughout the day.

Like me. I’m like that. You can use snacking strategically. You can insert it in your meal plan. For example, at about 3 p. m., 3 to 4 p. m. every day, I have a protein shake. I take two scoops of Legion’s Plant Plus. Right now I’m using vanilla. I’m going to switch to chocolate. And I like to mix it with a Less water than you normally would for a protein shake.

So it turns into a protein pudding and then you can eat it with a spoon. I just like the texture and the more intense taste. And I also have a piece of fruit. Sometimes it’s an apple, sometimes it’s strawberries, sometimes I’d say a serving of fruit, right? So sometimes it’s an apple, sometimes it’s strawberries.

Sometimes it is blueberries. I also have a banana, but I like to have that first thing in the morning. And so you could say, then I wake up and I have a banana. That’s a little snack, right? And then in the afternoon I have a protein pudding slop and I have some fruit. That’s also a snack, but it is not me going into the pantry and just picking little bits and pieces of things that sound good.

All right, let’s move on to the next tip, which is to read food labels. What you’re eating. You know how big a serving is and so forth. And this is so important. If you’re going to be eating prepackaged foods, generally you don’t want to be eating prepackaged foods. If you’re eating a lot of prepackaged foods, I’m going to guess that your diet isn’t very nutritious because the most nutritious foods are generally the ones that you prepare and you cook yourself.

But when you are going to be using prepackaged foods of any kind, Just make sure that you look carefully at the serving sizes and let’s take an example here of why this is so important. Let’s take oatmeal, right? So nutritious food. And of course it is prepackaged unless you’re buying it in bulk and it just comes in bags, but you don’t have to do that, right?

I don’t do that. I just get three, six, five organic. Not their instant oatmeal. I like the rolled oats, the old style. If you were to look on the nutrition facts panel and you go, Oh, cool. A cup of oatmeal has this many calories. Here are the macros. Perfect. But if you don’t look at the weight in grams of the oats that they’re assuming is one cup of oatmeal, what might happen is let’s say it’s 60 grams.

I would have to look what it is. Let’s say it’s 50 or 60 grams is what they’re assuming. And you accidentally are putting in 80 because of course you can do that. And maybe you’re cup is slightly heaping, let’s say it’s 60 to 80, right? That is a significant jump in calories. You have just accidentally overeaten by a fair amount.

All right, let’s move on to the next tip, which is don’t be sedentary. And if you have to sit a lot, try to stand up, walk around, stretch every so often. And this is really just the other side of the tip that I discussed earlier about being more active. And so yes, avoid extended periods of Sitting still of not moving plan, regular periods of movement throughout the day, not just your one workout or maybe even your two workout.

Alrighty. That was again from 10 habits of people who lose weight and keep it off. That’s the title of the podcast and it was published in July of 2020 as well. So if you want to check it out, you can go find it in the feed. Let’s move on now to some of my. Favorite moments in the episode I recorded on the biography on Elon Musk by Ashley Vance.

Okay, so this week’s book is Elon Musk by Ashley Vance. And if you like to read biographies and memoirs to find ideas, models, Systems habits and so forth that extraordinary people have used to do extraordinary things. Then you definitely want to read this book. And just in case you have only recently arrived here on earth and spend most of your time up in orbit and therefore don’t know who Elon Musk is.

He is one of the most fearless and visionary entrepreneurs around these parts. No, seriously, though, Elon was one of the co founders of PayPal. And then he took the money that he made there to create three other companies, which are space X. Tesla motors and solar city. And SpaceX is a space exploration company.

Tesla motors is an electric car company and solar city is of course a solar energy company. All right, so now let’s get to my five key takeaways from this book. Starting with number one, which is quote, the guiding principle at SpaceX is to embrace your work and get stuff done. People who await guidance or detailed instructions languish.

The same goes for workers who crave feedback. And my note here is the world is absolutely starved for people that have feedback. Initiative people that are willing to venture out into unknown territories and risk large amounts of time, money, and effort on new and untried things that may ultimately come to absolutely nothing, maybe in the end, a complete waste of resources.

And if you can develop this trait in yourself, if you can become more enterprising, I really think that this is one of the easiest and most powerful ways to increase your earning potential and ultimately your career potential. Because right now. Out in the world or even just in the company that you work in, there are an infinite number of problems that need solving.

And these are all opportunities. They’re just there waiting for someone to come along and figure them out. Why not you? Okay. Second takeaway quote and the absolute worst thing that someone can do is infuriate you. that what he’s asking is impossible. An employee could be telling Musk that there’s no way to get the cost on something like that actuator down to where he wants it, or that there is simply not enough time to build a part by Musk’s deadline, Elon will say fine.

You’re off the project. And I am now CEO of the project. I will do your job and be CEO of two companies at the same time. I will deliver it. And what’s crazy is that Ilan actually does it every time he’s fired someone and taking their job, he has delivered on whatever the project was. And my note here is that a leader earns devotion by showing devotion and never asks his people to do something that he won’t do himself.

And I think you would be hard pressed to find someone more devoted to their vision and willing to shoulder any burden than Ilan. Elon, for example, several years ago, when it looked like both SpaceX and Tesla, we’re going to fold. Elon actually literally lived in his office. He worked 18 to 20 hours per day, seven days a week.

He slept on a beanbag for a few hours a night employees, there was a joke around the office and this is all recounted in the book, of course, but employees, they really wondered. If he even showered, okay, my third takeaway quote, as he sees it, all of the design and technology choices should be directed toward the goal of making a car as close to perfect as possible to the extent that rival automakers haven’t.

That’s what Musk is judging. It’s almost a binary experience for him. Either you’re trying to make something spectacular with no compromises or you’re not. And if you’re not Musk considers you a failure. And my note here is that. While perfectionism can be paralyzing, at some point you do have to stop tinkering and just ship the thing too many people though, think about too many things other than simply making the best product.

What they fail to realize is that the number one, best way to grow a business is to just make. Products and services that are so good that customers will tell everyone about them. Word of mouth is the absolute best way to acquire new customers. But it’s also difficult because you have to earn it. You can’t get it with fancy advertising or fancy marketing.

You have to deliver the goods. You have to deliver an outstanding customer experience. And of course, a big part of that is delivering an outstanding product or service. All right. The next takeaway here. Quote, even then as essentially a college kid with zits, Elon had this drive that this thing, whatever it was, had to get done and that if he didn’t do it, he’d miss his shot.

I think that’s what the VCs saw that he was willing to stake his existence on building out this platform. Musk actually said as much to one venture capitalist informing him, my mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit seppuku. Then fail. And my note here is that when you can make decisions, big or small, this amount of force and certainty and determinism, when you can say that you’re going to do something or not do something, and that only death can change this.

I think you really enter a whole new realm of existence and potential. Goethe said that boldness has That’s genius and power and magic in it. And I’m really a believer of that. I think that the moment you can truly commit to an action or a plan or path, then all sorts of things just start aligning to help you that otherwise would never have occurred.

Okay. The fifth and final takeaway. Here it is. Quote. Elon came to the conclusion early in his career that life is short. If you really embrace this, it leaves you with the obvious conclusion that you should be working as hard as you can. And my note here is people often say that when you’re on your deathbed, you’re not going to be proud of how much you worked.

And I completely disagree. I think that if you spend your life in service of something greater than you and engaged in meaningful work, You’re going to be very happy about it when you’re on your deathbed. What you’re not going to care about is the shit that people spend a lot of their time and put a lot of their attention into.

How many video games you played and how many TV shows you watched or political arguments you think you won on Twitter. I really do think that the only way to be truly satisfied with your life is to find some external cause that means enough to you. To make it worth sacrificing your life to.

Something that makes all the trials and tribulations of life worthwhile and endurable. And you’re only going to find that in work. You’re not going to find it in drugs, in entertainment, in food, or anything else that provides immediate gratification and immediate pleasure. Pleasure. 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 questions 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 I hope to hear from you soon.