Ep. #924: Research Roundup: Smart Phones Make You Weaker, Creatine Boosts Your Brain, Cardio Doesn’t Kill Gains, and More

Hey there and welcome to Muscle for Life. I am Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today for another research roundup, the fourth in my research roundup series of episodes. And in these episodes, I break down five studies that I found interesting and practical on various things related to diet, exercise, supplementation, mindset, and lifestyle.

Stuff. that will help you gain muscle, help you get stronger, lose fat, perform and feel better, live longer, get and stay healthier. And in today’s episode, we are going to be going over research on cardio and its effects on muscle and strength gain. We’re going to be talking about recomposition, body recomposition, gaining muscle and losing fat.

Losing a lot of fat, at the same time, pre workout meals, creatine’s effects on cognition, how creatine can make you smarter, and finally, how browsing social media in between sets can actually make you weaker. But first, if ya like my videos, What I’m doing here on the podcast, then you’re going to love my award winning fitness books for men and women, which have sold well over 1 million copies, have received over 15, 000 four and five star reviews on Amazon, and have helped that I know of tens of thousands of people build their best body ever.

Because, here’s the deal. Building lean muscle, losing stubborn fat, and gaining whole body strength isn’t nearly as complicated as you have probably been led to believe, and my books are the shortcut. They give you everything you need to build your best body ever without having to live in the gym, give up all the foods or drinks you love.

Or do long, grueling workouts you hate. If you are someone over the age of 40, man or woman, and if you are new to resistance training, or relatively new to resistance training, you want to get my book, Muscle for Life. That is going to be the best one for you, and that is going to be the best program for you.

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as well. And if you’re a woman under the age of 40 trying to gain your first 15 pounds of muscle or lose your first 15 pounds of fat, you can lose more, of course. But if you’re trying to lose that first 15 pounds, then my book, thinner, leaner, stronger will show you the way. And I also have a workout journal for you with a year’s worth of thinner, leaner, stronger training called the year one challenge for women.

So you might want to pick up that too. And finally, if you are an advanced weightlifter with at least three years of proper training under your belt, I have a book and program for you too. It is called Beyond Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, and there is a workout journal that goes with it called the Beyond Bigger, Leaner, Stronger Challenge.

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Okay, let’s start with some more research that shows that cardio does not kill strength and muscle gain. So my source here is a paper called compatibility of concurrent aerobic and strength training for skeletal muscle size and function and updated systematic review and meta analysis. And this was published on November 10th, 2021 in sports.

Medicine. So the idea that cardio can kill your gains is probably one of the most stubborn fitness myths out there. You will still find influencers and experts and thought leaders claiming that cardio will burn muscle and make you weaker or at least hinder muscle growth. and strength gain. And while it’s true that too much cardio and too much high intensity cardio in particular can get in the way of your gains, it takes a lot more than many people think.

It takes hours and hours of high intensity cardio per week and high impact cardio per week to noticeably hinder your progress in your strength training. And this study that I am covering today, which was conducted by researchers at the German sport university adds to the growing body of evidence that shows that cardio generally speaking is not bad for your gains.

So in this systematic review and meta analysis, the researchers parsed the results of 43 studies, including a total of 1090 participants. And they found that concurrent training, and if you’re not familiar with that term, a training program that includes weightlifting. And endurance training is referred to as concurrent training.

They found that did not lead to significantly smaller strength gains or less muscle hypertrophy than just weightlifting alone. And further sub analyses showed that strength gain and hypertrophy were unaffected by the kind of endurance training performed, how often it was done, the proximity of the cardio and strength training workouts, or the age and experience level of the exercise.

athletes. In other words, what the researchers found is that the interference effect, which is the technical term for cardio’s interference with muscle and strength gain, they found that just wasn’t worth worrying about for most people. People. Now, that final point of for most people is the asterisk, of course, because there aren’t very many jacked marathon runners, are there?

And a lot of people will point that out. And that is a valid observation. But what you have to keep in mind is the vast majority of studies that have looked at the interference effect and concurrent training as a whole have involved fairly low volume cardio programs, a few hours of cardio per week, Which is less than one 10th of what many competitive endurance athletes do.

And so the takeaway from this study is that you can do a fair amount of cardio without having to pay the piper. You can’t do as much as you might want if you take your endurance training very seriously. But if you do a few hours per week, let’s say two or three hours of moderate intensity, endurance training.

Per week, that is not going to hurt your gains. And if you want to do some high intensity stuff as well, I’d recommend limiting it to about one hour per week. And if you can do something that is low impact, that isn’t sprinting on concrete, for example, I think that. It makes a lot of sense as well because high impact, high intensity cardio puts major stresses on the body and it requires a lot more recovery than more moderate intensity, low impact cardio.

My preference, for example, is biking. I have an upright bike and I do 30 minutes of moderate intensity cardio five to seven days per week. It’s maybe like a five out of 10 in terms of difficulty and to put that in a more Understandable context. My heart rate is elevated and my breathing is labored, but not so much so that I can’t have a conversation.

I often will make phone calls when I’m on the bike, personal or work calls. I will usually save them for when I’m on the bike. Sometimes I just read on my phone, but. If I am on the phone, I can have a conversation, you’re going to hear me breathing on the phone, but I’m not having to stop every three or four words to catch my breath.

If I were training at that intensity, that would be maybe more like an eight or even a nine when you can’t even get out full sentences without having to stop and catch your breath. That’s where you start to enter the high intensity range. So anyway, coming back to this study and concurrent training in general.

A couple hours of cardio per week is great for your health. It is great for increasing energy expenditure, and if you want to get outside, it’s also great for getting outside, making sure that you don’t just sit in your cave all day like me, clicky clacking away on the keyboard. And there we go.

That’s it for concurrent training for today. At least let’s move on to gaining muscle and losing a lot of fat at the same time if you are new to resistance training. So my source here is a paper called effect of a hypo caloric diet, increased protein intake and resistance training on lean mass gains and fat mass loss in overweight.

Police officers, and this was published on May 26, 2000 in annals of nutrition metabolism. Yes, it is older research, but it is good research. And that’s why I wanted to cover it. The practical takeaways apply now just as much as they did 20 years ago when it was conducted. So most people, when they get into resistance training of any kind, definitely weightlifting, they want muscle and they want to lose fat, those are the two biggest goals.

And unfortunately, physiologically speaking, those goals have irreconcilable differences because gaining muscle, at least gaining muscle effectively, That requires a calorie surplus and losing fat requires a calorie deficit. And this is why most people, especially more experienced weightlifters find that they can’t achieve both at the same time.

They can’t gain noticeable amounts of muscle and lose fat at the same time. That said, there are a couple of exceptions. If people are on steroids, that changes everything because now they can be in a calorie deficit to lose fat and use the drugs to overpower the physiological disadvantages of the calorie deficit and drive tremendous amounts of muscle gain.

And then you have people who are new to resistance training. And this study I am covering today, which was conducted by scientists at Brigham and Women’s Hospital it is one of the most impressive examples of body recomposition of building muscle and losing fat at the same time, at least in the scientific literature.

At least that I’ve come across. So in this paper, the participants were 38 overweight, sedentary, middle aged police officers. The average age was 34 years old. None of them had any previous weightlifting experience, and they were all around 27 percent body fat on average. And these were men, by the way. So that is.

Fairly high for men in women. Not so much in men. That is solidly overweight and in just 12 weeks of maintaining a 20 percent calorie deficit. So eating about 80 percent of their daily caloric expenditure and eating about 0. 7 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day and doing a few weight lifting.

Workouts per week. These men, they lost nine to 15 pounds of body fat and gained four to nine pounds of muscle on average. And it’s worth noting that those fantastic results, damn near perfect recomp, right? Those were obtained using a completely run of the mill diet and training plan. The boring basics, they lifted some weights, they restricted their calories moderately, they ate sufficient protein, they probably could have done a little bit better with a little bit more, but they ate enough ish protein, and they, again, lost up to 15 pounds of fat and gained up to 9 pounds of muscle in just two weeks.

Three months and what they didn’t do. There was no intermittent fasting. There was no high intensity interval training There were no supplements. There was no low carbing. It was just the Pareto approach It was just the 20 percent that gives you the 80 percent and I’ve seen results like that And even better than that, so many times now over the years in beginners, and that’s why my books and programs have done so well over the years have remained so popular bigger, leaner, stronger, which is now 10 years old, thinner, leaner, stronger, and my newest muscle for life Bigger, leaner, stronger is particularly for men aged, I would say, up to about 40 to 45.

Thinner, leaner, stronger women up to 40 to 45. And Muscle for Life is primarily for people 40 and beyond. And those books and those programs represent the whole 20 percent that gives you muscle. The 80 percent and to put that in more specific terms, those books and programs will show guys how to go from nothing to 30 to 35 pounds of muscle gained, and more or less as much fat as they want to lose.

So let’s say six pack abs. That’s way too much. Where most guys like to get to and maintain. And for women, those books represent in those programs represent up to 20 to 25 pounds of muscle gained. And again, as much fat as they want to lose for most women, that means getting to somewhere around 20 percent body fat.

Some women like to be a little bit curvier. And so they prefer 23 or 25. Some. Women like to be a bit more defined and they prefer 18 or 20 and those goals in my experience represent the ambitions of at least 80 percent of people who care about this stuff at all, who want to start working out, who want to learn how to diet correctly.

It’s only a minority of people who want to take it even further than that, who want to get as jacked. And as strong as they possibly can, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just not where most people’s heads are. Most guys are perfectly happy after they’ve gained 30 ish pounds of muscle and they have abs and that’s it.

They’re now just looking to maintain that for the rest of their life. They really don’t care. If they gain another ounce of muscle or strength, and for most women, it’s probably around 20 pounds of muscle gained some, maybe 20 in the right places, bring the body fat level down to about 20%, give or take some, and they are ecstatic.

And again, are now just looking to look like that for the rest of their life, which you can do as well, by the way. So anyway, if you are new to all of this, I wanted to share this study and my comments as encouragement, or if you are not new, but if somebody, is just getting started, maybe you want to share this with them because they are going to have a great time in their first three to six months.

They’re going to gain strength quickly. They are going to gain muscle quickly, muscle definition quickly. They are going to lose fat. Quickly. It is the honeymoon phase, right? And then it does get harder, but by then you have created the right habits. You have created a lot of momentum. And if you have set up your diet and your training correctly, you are enjoying the process.

You are eating foods that you like. You are doing workouts that you generally like. Of course, you are not going to love every workout, but remember, you will always love having worked out. That. Satisfaction never goes away. And so it is at that point after your first six, eight, 10, 12 months, it’s. Much easier actually to just keep going than to stop.

It would take a lot more effort for you to stop. At that point then to just keep going. Okay. Let’s move on now to talk about pre workout meals and why they might be mainly helpful simply because they just make sure you’re not hungry. So my source here is a paper called viscous, placebo, and carbohydrate based.

Breakfasts similarly decrease appetite and increase resistance exercise performance compared with a control breakfast in trained males. And this was published on March 16th, 2020 in British journal of nutrition. So many people, they think that they have to eat a small meal before they train to perform at their best.

And many supplement companies give that idea currency and they have. Products that they claim are ideal for that, usually fancy carbohydrate products or protein powders or some combination thereof. And while eating before training can improve your performance, research conducted by scientists at Lowborough University shows that boost may be more psychological than related to energy availability.

As many people Think and claim. So in this study, the researchers, they had 22 resistance trained men who normally ate breakfast report to the lab for three separate training sessions, consisting of four sets of the squats and bench press to failure with 90 percent of their 10 rep. Max and two hours before each training session, the participants, they consumed one of three breakfasts.

They had water, they had a viscous carbohydrate based breakfast, a gel basically, or they had a viscous, very low calorie placebo. Breakfast. Now, both of the gel breakfasts tasted and looked the same. And the researchers told the participants that they contained calories that both of them did. And what the results showed is that the participants, they performed about 15 percent more total reps on the squat and about 4 percent more total reps in the bench press.

After eating the gel breakfasts, then after drinking just water. And although the higher calorie gel raised insulin and glucose levels more than the low calorie one, the people, they felt equally full and performed about just as well. After both, in other words, drinking the breakfast slop did not improve performance because it provided more energy, but simply because it helped them feel more satiated.

And this isn’t all that surprising when you consider how few calories you burn. With strength training, unfortunately it is in the range of probably three to 600 calories per hour, depending on what you’re doing, how intensely you’re training, how much you weigh. If you’re a hundred pound girl, for example, you’re going to burn obviously a lot fewer calories than a 200 pound dude.

And so anyway, given that the energy demands of strength training just aren’t that great, it would make sense that it’s not that important that you fuel up before your. Workout and that doing so isn’t going to make that big of a difference in your performance. Now, if you are doing long, intense workouts that burn a lot of calories, like for example, if you are going for a moderate intensity 90 minute bike ride, that’s going to burn a lot more calories that is going to burn a thousand plus calories on average for most people.

And in that. Scenario research shows that you will probably perform better if you eat a small meal beforehand, a caloric meal that if we were to repeat this experiment that I just shared with you with endurance training, 90 minutes, moderate intensity. The results would be different. Other research does show, for example, that consuming about 30 to 40 grams of carbs and some protein and fat, if you want about 30 minutes before the workouts before that longer intense workout, that will help you perform better.

And even then though. If you ate a large meal several hours before the workout, that pre workout meal becomes less important because of course your body will still be processing the food that you ate several hours ago. But let’s say you were going to go on this long bike ride first thing in the morning, then yes, you are almost certainly going to perform better.

If you have some carbs beforehand, and again, you can have some protein and fat if you want, but for performance, it’s the carbs that matter. So the key takeaway here is eating some food before you lift weights is probably going to help you perform better if it satiates you. If it takes you from feeling hungry to not feeling hungry, but if you are not hungry, especially because you already ate food, let’s say a few hours ago, you don’t have to eat again.

In that scenario, for example, you could just go do your workout and then eat your next meal, or at least your next serving of protein within an hour or so of finishing your workout. Hey there, if you are hearing this, you are still listening, which is awesome. Thank you. And if you are enjoying this podcast, or if you just like my podcast in general, and you are getting at least something out of it, would you mind sharing it with a friend?

Or a loved one, or a not so loved one, even, who might want to learn something new. Word of Mouth helps really bigly in growing the show, so if you think of someone who might like this episode, or another one, please do tell them about it. Okay, let’s move on now to some research on creatine and how it can make you smarter.

So my source here is a paper called Effects of Creatine Supplementation on Cognitive Function of Healthy Individuals, a Systematic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials. This was published on July 15th, 2018 in Experimental Gerontology. And so for a couple of decades now, creatine has been one of the most popular muscle building supplements.

And one of the only effective ones that are really only a handful of natural supplements you can take that can help you gain muscle and gain strength faster. Creatine is one of them. And research conducted by scientists at Aristotle university of Thessaloniki. And I might not be pronouncing that correctly, but I can’t check right now because my internet is down.

So I did my best this research. It shows that creatine may give your brain a boost. two. So in this meta analysis of six studies containing a total of 281 participants, the researchers found that supplementing with creatine likely improves short term memory and intelligence. So that’s reasoning and mathematical processing.

So for example, in one of the studies they reviewed elderly participants who supplemented with 20 grams of creatine monohydrate per day for a week. performed better at tasks involving remembering sequences of numbers and ordering wooden blocks than the participants who took a placebo. Now this review also found some evidence that creatine improves long term memory, spatial memory, scanning, attention, response, inhibition, word fluency, and mental fatigue.

Many elements of cognition and of cognitive function. But the results in those cases were too inconsistent to be conclusive. And there are two other more recent reviews that found that creatine can also improve brain health in people with mild traumatic brain injuries, concussion, and depression. So there is a growing body of evidence that creatine is just good for the brain.

And scientists are really just starting to dig into this. We are going to know a lot more over the next three, five, 10 years, as this line of research continues. And also, by the way, if you are wondering how this applies to you, because you are not elderly or you don’t have a. Traumatic brain injury or a concussion or depression.

The evidence shows that creatine still can benefit your brain and its function regardless of your age and regardless of your condition. And if you want to learn more about that, look for an interview. I. It was posted a couple of months ago with Darren Kandow, C A N D O W, and he is one of the world’s preeminent creatine researchers.

And among many things creatine, Darren talked about how creatine can benefit all of our brains and how much we should be taking every day. To reap those potential benefits. Okay. Moving on to today’s final study, which is related to scrolling in between sets and how that can actually make you weaker. So my source here is a paper called mental fatigue from smartphone use reduces volume load in resistance training, a randomized single blinded crossover study.

And this was published on May 17th, 2021 in perceptual and motor skills. And if you look around. Most gyms, you will see most people, nine out of 10 people are fixated on their phones and scrolling through social media in between sets. And it might seem like a harmless diversion just to make your rest periods less boring.

But this study, which was conducted by researchers at the federal university of Paraiba, it shows that it might hurt your gains. And so what the researchers here did is they had 16 experienced male and female weightlifters do a workout that involved three sets of squats to failure, and then had them look at social media or watch a documentary for 30 minutes before doing a second workout of three sets of squats to failure.

And at the end of the study, the results show that the weightlifters who watched the documentary completed about 15 percent fewer reps in their second workout. Whereas the group who were pottering around on social media, they performed about 29 percent fewer reps on average. And the researchers, they also found that the social media group experienced much higher mental fatigue too.

So 60 percent versus about 15%. And. Those results are not an anomaly. Many studies have shown that using technology such as smartphones to perform mentally taxing tasks, like scrolling through social media, that it can have a detrimental effect on athletic performance. And that of course, is in addition to the many other downsides of spending too much time on social media, which is not that much time for some people.

Some people don’t need to be scrolling for that long every day to feel more anxious, lonely, depressed, suspicious, distracted, jealous, stressed, unworthy, unsatisfied, ugly, misinformed, vulnerable, untrusting, aggressive, and narcissistic. Many reasons to spend as little time on social media as you can. But if you are not quite ready to uninstall Instagram and TikTok.

I would recommend not using social media for at least 30 minutes before your workouts, not using it during your workouts. And it’s probably better if you don’t mindlessly surf the web and look for random videos to watch while you are doing a workout as well. And if you find that difficult, you can download a program that just blocks social media and other websites for a preset period of time.

Freedom is one freedom. com. T O is a good program for this. And so then if you have been scrolling in between sets and now you are not going to scroll in between sets, what should you do instead? You could do nothing whatsoever. That would be better than scrolling. Or if you want to actually perform better, you could try visualizing your next set.

Seeing yourself performing it properly and successfully in your mind’s eye. Research shows that actually improves performance. You could think about some weightlifting cues that improve your technique and thereby can improve your performance. You could listen to music or you could do the previous two things while listening to music that gets you fired up that also can improve performance.

And a kind of funny final personal note here for a few of the people who I see in the gym every day, who I know, listen to this podcast and who see me on my phone in between sets, you might be thinking, Oh, Mike’s such a hypocrite. But I’m not on social media. I’m actually doing flashcards, vocabulary, building flashcards, which probably is not ideal for performance because obviously it’s mentally taxing.

I am trying to remember the meanings of a bunch of words, but doing these flashcards takes a bit of time. It takes. 30 to 45 minutes, and I’m not too concerned with performing a little bit worse. I am making slow but steady gains in my training, at least my strength. My whole body strength is going up by small amounts, which is about the best I can expect given my training history.

My body composition, I stay fairly lean and so I’m enjoying my workouts and I would prefer to have the flashcards done. I would prefer not to take 30 or 45 minutes at some other point in the day just to get them done. I used to do that. I used to do them later at night, but I found that my performance was worse and I really didn’t like doing them at night.

Now, I multitask in the gym in between sets, I go through flashcards and that way I am through at least 50 percent of them by the end of the workout. Sometimes 100 percent that usually depends on who’s in the gym, who’s around me, am I talking to anybody in between sets, which I do like to make some time to do.

Otherwise I would have literally no social interaction outside of my immediate family whatsoever. Ever. Yeah, that’s why I am looking at my phone a lot in between sets.

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 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.