Ep. #925: Q&A: Heart Rate Variability Scores, Alcohol During a Diet, Ab Training, and More

Hello and welcome to another episode of Muscle for Life. I am your host Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today for a Q& A where I’m answering, oh, I don’t know, maybe 10 or 15 questions that people have asked me over on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness every week or two. On Monday or Tuesday, I put up and ask me a question story and then gather up a bunch of questions, answer them on Instagram, and then come over here and answer them again on the podcast.

And I’m always looking for questions that I have not answered many times before, that I haven’t written about or spoken about repeatedly, or questions that I’m just getting asked. a lot about and that I haven’t also beaten to death already. And sometimes I take some questions that just amuse me and give me a chance to at least laugh at my own jokes.

And so if you want me to answer your questions, just follow me over on Instagram at muscle for life fitness and look for the ask me a question story that goes up every week or two and ask me some questions and maybe I’ll pick one of yours. Before we wade into it. One of the easiest ways to increase muscle and strength gain is to eat enough protein and to eat enough high quality protein.

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com slash way Now use the coupon code muscle at checkout to save 20 percent or get double reward points, and then try way plus risk free and see what you think. Okie dokie. Edgar M asks, what are your thoughts on drinking alcohol when on a diet to lose weight? That is totally fine, but you do have to count the calories.

And therefore, I would say that you are probably going to do best if you limit yourself to no more than a serving or two of alcohol per day. And most people I’ve worked with over the years and heard from over the years. They do best if they limit their drinking also to just one or two days per week. So a couple of servings of alcohol one or two days per week is not going to cause any problems.

Adam Kadmon asks, What is the healthy choice of sauce for chicken or other foods? I like mayo, but it is high in fat. fat. I personally like mustards, barbecue sauces, hot sauces, but you can also find really good high protein yogurt based sauces and dips on many recipe websites out there. And so if you like creamy stuff, that is a fitness friendly solution moving on to Alessio Boom.

Bell 897. They ask for how long should I cut? You should cut for as long as you want to really for as long as you need to reach your goal. The major downsides of long term dieting mostly apply to people who are getting very lean. So bodybuilders and natural people. Bodybuilders in particular, but if somebody starts their fitness journey, very overweight and has to lose, let’s say 50 plus pounds of fat to get to a healthy athletic body composition, that’s going to take some time and there is nothing wrong with that.

They can cut consistently for that whole period. Let’s say it takes about a year. For them to lose the 50 pounds. Let’s actually be generous because they can lose it faster. When you have a lot of fat to lose in the beginning, you can be more aggressive with your cutting. You can lose up to two ish pounds of fat per week and feel totally fine and have no negative consequences.

Whereas if you are lean, trying to get very lean and you try to be that aggressive, You’re going to feel really bad, really fast. So let’s say it takes the person about half of a year. Let’s say it takes them about 30 weeks to lose the 50 pounds. They can cut for 30 weeks. Now they may want to take some diet breaks now and then, and I do recommend at least considering that every, maybe six to eight weeks of dieting, it can be nice to just raise your calories to maintenance for five or seven days, maybe even 10 days, and just give your body a break.

And give your mind and your nerves, so to speak a break, and then just get back to your cut after the week or so of maintenance galleries. And so you can do that every couple of months and you can do it more frequently if you want to, but if you. Do it too frequently. Of course. Now you are just making your cut take longer.

So again, in having worked with many people over the years and heard from many people throughout their entire transformation process over the years, every six to eight weeks or so seems to be a nice sweet spot for just taking the edge off of cutting and making it more enjoyable on the whole.

Okay. Arta 19 asks, do you have to pause for a certain amount of time after finishing a bottle of Phoenix? So Phoenix is one of my fat loss products. One of legions fat loss products. We have two, we have Phoenix, which helps increase metabolic rate and reduce hunger and reduce cravings. And then we have one called forge, which has your Him bean, which accelerates fat burning, but has to be used in a fasted state.

Okay. And it’s best used with exercise. So you really have to be okay with doing some fasted exercise to benefit from your him being at least to benefit in terms of fat loss. Otherwise, it’s just a stimulant. So it can help you have a little bit more energy in your workouts. But if you are in a fed state, if your insulin levels are elevated, because you have recently eaten food, your him being will not help you lose fat faster.

So anyway, Yeah. The question here is, do you have to pause for a certain amount of time after finishing a bottle of phoenix? No, you don’t, but I wouldn’t bother taking phoenix or any fat loss supplement unless you are cutting because It just doesn’t make sense to take them when you are lean gaining in particular because then you just have to eat more food And I don’t think it’s worth the money when you are maintaining because it’s not going to make much of a difference When you’re maintaining and you are not trying to reach a body composition goal like you are with cutting.

So then you can go back to maintaining. Of course, you don’t need fat loss supplements at all, and you don’t have to take them when you are cutting. But if you take the right ones, if you take good fat loss supplements, you will reach your body composition goal at least a little bit faster. And for some people.

That is worth it so they can stop cutting so they can just start eating more food. But then once you are eating more food, I don’t see any reason to take a fat loss supplement. Okay. C Andre asks how I overcame acne in my 15s to 20s. I had pretty shitty skin from maybe about 15 or 16 to 18 or 19.

And I wish I would have at least looked into the drugs. I haven’t. Actually looked into them, even today, I haven’t looked into them at all because now my skin is not breaking out anymore, so I’m not sure if the drugs are worth considering, but I wish that I would have at least looked into them. It just didn’t occur to me and my mom didn’t want to suggest them, because she thought they were bad.

And the acne that I had, it was quite the millstone around the neck. As they say, it was something that I was acutely aware of whenever I was around people, I really did not like it. And now I do have some acne scarring that. Is probably fixable with laser treatments. Maybe it’s not that bad, but I don’t really care enough to look into it.

I guess if I could just snap my fingers and make the scarring go away, I would, I care enough to do that, but that’s about it at the moment. Maybe in the future, I’ll care a little bit more and. Look into what treatment options there are because I’ve heard that there are some laser treatments that actually work fairly well and that aren’t too extreme and that don’t carry risks of like major problems like grotesque outcomes that Look way worse.

Okay. David Richardson. He asks if your HRV score strictly says rest, but you have slept and feel okay. Would you train? Yes, absolutely. I would. HRV, which is heart rate variability. In case you’re not familiar with that acronym. And that is basically what it sounds like. It is referring to the variation of the amount of time in between heartbeats and the more stressed the body is, the less variability there is in.

The timing in between the heartbeats and so if you use an activity tracker, it almost certainly tracks H. R. V. and some of them extrapolate from H. R. V. into just general recovery and readiness for training or doing vigorous physical activities, and I think the science. Behind HRV is interesting and there certainly is an association between heart rate variability and recovery and readiness and just stress levels.

But I think HRV is most useful when it is viewed as a trend. Rather than just a single data point, similar to how you should treat your body weight. Yes, you can weigh yourself every day, but don’t pay attention to the daily fluctuations. Pay attention to how that average daily weight changes. So average it out every few days, three, four, five, six, seven, doesn’t really matter so long as you are consistent and then watch how that average changes over time.

Similar with HRV. So if you see that your HRV is consistently low, Or if it is down trending, then yeah, you might be pushing a little bit too hard. You might be overreaching in the gym or it might be a combination of what you’re doing in the gym, what you’re doing outside of the gym, other things that are happening in your life that are causing stress, how you are sleeping.

But keep in mind that one Bad H. R. V. reading doesn’t necessarily mean anything. I have had fantastic workouts on low H. R. V. days, and I’ve had low H. R. V. readings despite great training and sleep. I’ve had high H. R. V. scores despite terrible sleep. And it’s just not a great index of anything when viewed as a single data point.

Alright, DukeDuke07, Says always hungry always well I could share some kind of appetite control one on one tips here. I could say, eat more protein, eat more vegetables, drink more water, eat soups with lots of vegetables, play around with your meal timing and your meal sizing, but it might be helpful for.

You meet me speaking to this person to first identify when you’re dealing with true hunger versus the desire to eat in an easy way to tell is the next time you have the desire to eat and you want to know if this is true physiological hunger or if it is more psychological in nature. Imagine there were a bowl of boiled beans in front of you.

Would you eat the beans? If you would, then yeah, that is probably physiological hunger. But if you would not eat the beans, that is probably just the desire to eat food. And if that is often the case, if you are often just dealing with the desire to eat food, then you might want to reflect on what is causing that.

Is it boredom? Is it stress? Is it simply the desire to have something tasty in your mouth? Those are three of the most common reasons people have a desire to eat that is not physiological in nature. And so if you can find though what your trigger is, so to speak, then you can work to address that. Eli Hall 05 asks, is there a certain rep range or volume to use while cutting?

My general recommendations when cutting are to keep the weights heavy. So at least, let’s say 70 percent of one rep max or heavier. So that would be no more than maybe about 12 reps per set. And depending on how you are training, you can go as heavy as you normally go when you are Not cutting. You could go all the way up to 90, 95 percent of one rep max.

Like you do in my beyond bigger, leaner, stronger program. For example, I would also recommend that you continue training close to muscular failure in your working sets. You don’t have to go to muscular failure. You can now and then on isolation exercises, if you want to, I would not recommend going to muscular failure on big compound lifts, squats, deadlifts, even bench presses and overhead presses because the risk of injury.

Goes up markedly when the weights are heavy on those exercises and you’re pushing yourself right up to failure and it’s just not necessary for gaining muscle and strength, whatever slight benefit there might be, and there might be none actually, if you just train regularly close to failure, but let’s say there is a slight benefit to including some absolute benefit.

Okay. Failure training on those lifts. I don’t think that benefit would outweigh the risks. So train close to failure and continue doing that when you are cutting. And if you are an experienced weightlifter, I would not be afraid to drop it. To let’s say anywhere between nine to maybe 12 hard sets per major muscle group per week.

That is more than enough volume to maintain your muscle and your strength. You could maintain your muscle on probably half of that really. And maintain most, if not all of your strength as well. So feel free to do that if you want to work out a lot less. However, what I’ve found working with many people is they like their workouts.

They like their routine. They don’t want to. To drop to, let’s say just three workouts per week, if they are used to five, or they don’t want to go from five 60 minute workouts to five 30 minute workouts. And so again, nine to 12 hardsets per major muscle group per week is a sweet spot. It seems that allows you to have good workouts, probably similar to what you are used to doing if you are an experienced weightlifter, but not so much that it.

It causes problems with recovery. Gib Maka asks, deadlifts, back or leg volume? Indirect volume for the other muscle groups, question mark? A deadlift is direct volume for most of your back and your hamstrings, and it’s probably fair to include your quads as well. And I would say it’s indirect volume for your biceps and your lats.

John Chalet asks, if there are weeks I can add an extra day at the gym, should I dedicate it to core workouts? You could, if you really like training your core, but remember you don’t have to do any. Core exercises, quote unquote, like ab exercises to have a great core. If you are regularly squatting, deadlifting, bench pressing, overhead pressing, because those exercises are very effective core exercises, especially the squatting and the deadlifting and the overhead pressing.

And if you just remain Patient you will build good abs like if your abs are currently a little bit underdeveloped and you can see that when you get your body fat percentage low, you will grow those muscles just with those big compound lifts. Now, if you wanted to grow them a bit faster, I suppose you could include some ab exercises as well in your routine, some core exercises, particularly for the rectus abdominis, the quote unquote ab muscles that Are on the front of our body that most people think of as abs.

But if you currently have, let’s say a bit of fat to lose. So you’re not sure what your abdominal development really looks like. You don’t necessarily have to do any ab or core exercises aside from just big, heavy compound lifts. And you might find that when you do get your body fat percentage low enough to see your abs.

So if you’re a guy and you get down to. 10 percent you’re going to see all of your ABS 15 percent is where you start to see the top ABS and what you might find is that by the time you get there, you are very happy with your core development and you don’t need to worry about Augmented at all, like I haven’t done a quote unquote core exercise in, I don’t know, two years now because I do enough heavy compound weightlifting to make it unnecessary.

And I’m just trying to maintain my current core development. I actually don’t want bigger abs. Some guys really, they like that look where you have big, blocky abs and I like where I’m at. I actually don’t want bigger, blockier abs than I already have. And so coming back to this question, if you could add an extra day at the gym, if it were me, what I would do is probably a full body kind of pump session.

So if I were to add something in addition to what I’m already doing, so I’m lifting weights five days per week pretty intense workouts, 60, 70 minute workouts, heavy weights, difficult exercises. And I don’t do a sixth day because it would just cut into my recovery. It would be too much.

But if that were not the case, and I wanted to add a sixth day to my program, I would just do like a full body pump session because they feel great and they don’t put large additional demands on your body. So I’m talking about lighter weights. So maybe 70 percent of one rep max for Like sets of eight to 10.

So I’m ending those sets with several reps still in the tank. And I’m doing probably one exercise for my lower body and then a few exercises for the major muscle groups in my upper body. So probably like some sort of squat or just lower body. Exercise doesn’t have to be a squat, and then some sort of pulling exercise.

Wouldn’t be a deadlift, but a pull of some kind. A horizontal or vertical, depending on my other programming. And then a horizontal press, like a chest focused press. And probably a vertical press as well. Maybe I would replace the vertical press with some arms if I just wanted to. Okay. John salty asks rest timing when deloading still three to four minutes in between sets.

No, when I am deloading, I do about two minutes of rest on the big compounds and about one minute, maybe one and a half minutes on the accessories, just because it’s a deload and we’re not trying to maximize performance, we’re just trying to get some blood into the muscles and. Keep acquainted with the heavier weights.

So those workouts are pretty fast. Kamyar Shadman asks, why should hamstrings get hurt after doing deadlifts? It’s my form or I have weak hamstrings. That’s actually a good sign. If your hamstrings are getting sore, when you deadlift, it signals that you are probably using your hamstrings correctly in the lift, as opposed to turning it into a squat like position.

Movement or a good morning, like movement. Remember the deadlift, at least when it’s done correctly, it’s heavily involves basically all of the muscles on the backside of your body, including your hamstrings. Luke M 81 asks if 15 ounces of red meat a day is bad for you. Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend that because if you do that, it is going to be basically impossible to keep your saturated fat intake in the range of, say, 5 to 10 percent of daily calories, which is smart for keeping your heart healthy.

1. Bistriakov asks tips on combining strength training and marathon preparation. Once your weekly hours of running starts to exceed your weekly hours of weightlifting, you are going to have to start taking time from your weightlifting to give to your running. I would not recommend trying to maintain five plus hours of heavy weightlifting per week, plus say 10 plus hours of running.

It will. Burn you out. Many people, what they do is they go down to just a couple full body weightlifting sessions per week, just to maintain muscle and strength when they’re running. Volume is at its peak in their training periods. 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 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.