Ep. #934: Q&A: Sleepless Nights, Minimum Fat Intake, Blood Panels, Marriage Secrets, and More

Hey there and welcome to muscle for life. I am Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today for another Q and a where I take questions that people ask me on Instagram and answer them here on the podcast. And if you want me to answer your questions, follow me on Instagram at muscle for life fitness as well as my sports nutrition company at Legion and look for a story every Monday or Tuesday.

A story goes up where I’m asking people for. And previously I have done this only on my account, but I think I’m going to start doing it on legions actually. So keep an eye though on mine and legions stories. And then I get a bunch of questions and I find ones that I think are interesting or that are topical.

Or that are popular and I answer them there on Instagram and then I bring everything over here to the podcast So in today’s episode, I am going to be answering a variety of questions I’m going to be answering a question about the secret to a happy marriage How intense exercise should be when you are cutting?

if age is a reason for weight gain independent of diet and exercise, how I deal with sleepless nights, if I have a college degree, if you can train your glutes every day or any muscle group every day, and more. Before we wade into it, I’ve worked with tens of thousands of people over the years, and the biggest thing I see with the people I have helped the most is they’re often missing just one crucial piece of the puzzle.

And if you are having trouble reaching your fitness goals as quickly as you’d I’m gonna guess it is the same thing with you. You are probably doing a lot of things right, but dollars to donuts. There’s Something you’re not doing right. And that is what is giving you most of the grief. Maybe it’s your calories.

Maybe it’s your macros. Maybe it’s your exercise selection. Maybe it’s food choices. Maybe you are not progressively overloading your muscles. Whatever it is, here’s what’s important. Once you identify that one thing, once you figure it out, that’s when everything finally clicks. That’s when you start making serious progress.

It’s like typing in your password to log into your computer. You can have all the letters, numbers, and symbols right, except just one. And what happens, you can’t log in, right? But, as soon as you get that last remaining character right, voila, you’re in business. And I bet the same can be said about the body you really want.

You are probably just one major shift, one important insight, one powerful new behavior away from easy street. And that’s why I offer VIP one on one coaching, where my team and I can help you do exactly that. This is. High level coaching where we look at everything you’re doing and we help you figure out that one thing that is missing for you And it can be a couple of things too.

That’s fine There’s no extra charge for that. But once we figure it out, that’s when you start making real progress That’s when you start looking better and feeling better So if you’re ready to make more progress in the next three months than maybe you did in the last three years And yes that has happened For many of our clients head on over to muscle for life dot show slash VIP.

That’s muscle F O R life dot show slash VIP and schedule your free consultation call, which by the way, is not a high pressure sales call. It’s just a friendly chat where we get to learn about you. and your goals and your lifestyle and then determine whether our program is right for you because sometimes we do speak with people who just aren’t a good fit for our service but we almost always have other experts and other resources to refer those people to so if you are still listening to me and you are even slightly interested go schedule your free consultation call now at muscleforlife.

show slash vip Fikers asks secret to a happy marriage. Is it even possible? My wife, Sarah and I, we’ve had our ups and downs, but I can honestly say that I’m happily married and a few things I have learned along the way. I’ve been with Sarah since I was 17, by the way. So I’ve been with her now longer than I haven’t, which is a funny thought and a few of the things that I’ve learned are one, don’t do things that you feel you have to withhold from your partner.

For example, looking at porn, spending money that you shouldn’t be spending if you have combined finances, like if you’re married, for example, flirting with people and so on. Because the more you do things that you shouldn’t be doing and that you don’t want them to know about, the worse the relationship becomes, the worse you feel about them, the worse you feel about yourself.

The worst you feel about the relationship. And yeah, that’s the first point. The second point is tell your partner when you do these things, because even the most conscientious among us slip up now and then, and the easiest way to unburden yourself, so to speak, the easiest way to get over the guilt is simply.

To confess and a third thing I’ve learned is take care of yourself. So really try to be the type of person who deserves a good relationship. And of course, that starts with taking care of yourself, taking care of your body, taking care of your mind, taking care of your emotions. And number four is make time for the relationship and make time for sex.

And that gets harder when kids enter the picture. I understand I have been there myself and Sarah and I probably could have been better over the years, explicitly making time for each other, date nights and explicitly making time for sex. But I guess we have done okay in that regard since we started having kids.

Our son is nine. So over the last nine years, if I had to give us an honest grade, it would probably be a C or a D in that regard. And that is. Probably more my fault than her fault, because over that time period, I have worked a lot and I’ve made that my number one priority. There was a period there for the first few years of Legion, where I was working seven days per week.

And sure, there was the occasional exception, but that was the exception. The rule was I was working full time. Monday through Friday, and maybe I would take a little bit of time off Friday evening. And then I would work anywhere from probably four to six to maybe eight hours on Saturday, and then four to six hours or so on Sunday.

And so there just wasn’t. Much time for anything other than work. And then I eventually started working a little bit less, but not that much less. And so I was less available than Sarah was, so to speak. And that is something now, though, that I am better with. I still work a lot, but I work a bit less and I take a bit more time to spend, not just with Sarah, but with the kids.

And so maybe now we would get like a B minus or something in terms of making time for. Each other and investing energy and effort into the relationship to keep it strong and to keep it interesting and to make it work. Okay, photo surfer asks, how intense should exercise be during a cutting phase with less than optimal energy?

Keep in mind that you’re. Perception of the intensity of the workouts shouldn’t change. You want to work just as hard as you always do, even if the absolute intensity like the load, for example, or maybe the volume as well. Those things. Can decline as time goes on. That is normal. It is normal to see a slight reduction in your strength.

For me, I start to notice it after about 68 weeks of cutting and my training weights start to feel heavy and I am no longer progressing on many exercises really. And then maybe by week 10 or 12, I am starting to slip. Backward a little bit in my strength, so I’m losing a couple of reps with my normal working weights, at least on the big exercises.

Again, that’s totally normal, but my perception of the intensity of those workouts is no different, even though my workouts by the end of a, let’s say I had to cut for 12 weeks. I wanted to get really lean. I’m going to lose a fair amount of strength. And by the end of that, Cut. I might also reduce my volume, for example, instead of doing 16 sets per workout.

That’s my normal workout these days. I might end that cut it just 12 sets per workout. Those workouts though feel As difficult as my workouts did before I started cutting, even though in an absolute sense, the workouts are not as difficult. The workouts that I’m doing at the end of a cut would feel significantly easier than my normal workouts I was doing before I started cutting.

And so the point here is maintain your training intensity when you’re cutting, keep the weights as heavy as you can. Push yourself, try to make progress, even though you might not be able to, you need to maintain muscle and strength. And the key to that is maintaining that training intensity and doing enough volume to.

properly and adequately stimulate your muscles. Don’t walk through your workouts when you’re cutting. That’s how you can accelerate muscle loss or aggravate muscle loss. Okay. Goalie P asks, is age independent of diet and exercise a reason for weight gain? Mostly. No, there is a decline in hormonal health, of course, that occurs as we get older, and that can incline us toward fatness.

But ultimately, energy balance remains in full force. It is just a harsh fact. Mistress. That’s what many people don’t realize because even slight, almost unnoticeable reductions in activity and increases in eating can add up to noticeable amounts of weight gain over the course of months and years. And especially when you add in a few holiday periods where there is major overeating and drinking in a short period of time, resulting in several pounds of weight gain.

And so that’s what many people just don’t realize as they get older, their activity level generally goes down if they don’t explicitly try to increase it and do things to be active. If they don’t do that, then they just tend to move less, not more as they get older. And even if their food intake remains level, even if they don’t.

Also gradually eat more and more. Just that reduction in activity, that steady reduction in activity means more and more weight gain. Jack con 66 asks, how do you deal with sleepless nights? For me, no screens. I don’t go to my phone. I don’t go to a tablet. I don’t go to a computer. No willful rumination. I don’t start thinking about work Or problems, personal problems, interpersonal problems, whatever.

And I don’t work myself up into a lather about the fact that I’m not sleeping. So I don’t allow myself to get frustrated. I just accept that this is not a good night. It happens even to the best sleepers. Everybody has a white night now and then. Melatonin can help. So I’ll go and take some melatonin. And I also sleep for as long as I can.

And for me, it’s hard to make it past seven 30, but I’ll try no alarm. So if I have an alarm set and I don’t have to get out of bed for something specific, I will turn it off and sleep as late as I can. Again, if I get really lucky. I’ll be able to sleep until maybe 830, but usually 730 is when I have to get out of bed regardless of whether I’ve slept well or not, simply because I’m awake at that point, I can take a nap later, which sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t.

But that is another tip. It can help a lot if you can get to sleep. And I’ve found that just napping, maybe. Actually being asleep 3045 minutes can really make a big difference after a bad night’s sleep, and I don’t fall asleep for long. It’s 3045 minutes, maybe, and I wake up feeling quite refreshed, and I get a second wind.

The morning is okay. If I don’t sleep enough, it’s not great, but good enough to get some work done. And then energy levels start to dip and I start to really feel the bad nights sleep in the early afternoon, take a short nap and then feel even better usually than I did in the morning and have another at least three or four hours of high energy where I can do some more work and not just drag through the day.

And something else that has helped me is to just remind myself that I will probably sleep. A lot better the night following a bad night’s sleep. I’ve noticed that pattern where if I don’t sleep well and I just get through the day, I will be tired enough that evening to have a good night’s sleep. And following up on the topic of sleep, another question regarding sleep from Marie Harmonic, she asks while cutting, I have trouble sleeping.

Any tips, something I have noticed and accepted as I have gotten older. I didn’t. Notice this when I was younger, it wasn’t an issue is when I’m cutting, if I get too aggressive, either in terms of the size of the calorie deficit or the duration of the cut without taking any diet breaks, my sleep will suffer.

And I’m not alone here. Of course, many other people have the same issues, even though they might not realize what is causing them. So make sure that when you’re cutting, you are not doing too much exercise. That’s one thing. I would not recommend more than four or five hours of weightlifting and maybe two or three hours of cardio per week.

And if you are going to do high intensity cardio, no more than one hour per week. And also. Make sure that your calorie deficit is not excessive. So what I’ve noticed is if you have a lot of fat to lose, you can be fairly aggressive. At least in the beginning, you can run a large calorie deficit, 5, 6, 7, 800 calories per day, for example, and lose a couple of pounds of fat per week and feel great and sleep great.

But as you get leaner, If you try to lose weight at that pace, it becomes more and more difficult. You deal with hunger more, you deal with cravings more, and your sleep will probably start to be impacted. So what you have to do is find the sweet spot for you. So for me, what I’ve found is when I am lean, wanting to get very lean, when I am somewhere around 10%, which is basically where I.

Sit in where I have sat now for a couple of years, anywhere between eight and 10%, but when I am around, let’s just say 10 percent and wanting to get down to maybe seven or 8%, I have to use a smaller calorie deficit than let’s say 10 years ago, 10 years ago, I would just do the standard five to 600 calorie deficit, daily calorie deficit aim for somewhere around one pound of fat loss per week, and I would just ride that.

All the way to the end of the cut and get super shredded. Now I cut that in half. So my daily calorie deficit is probably around two or 300 calories. And I have explicitly played around with this and found that if I try to push that. 2 5 6 ish 100 calories that daily deficit I’m okay for a few days, but within a week or so, my sleep starts to get worse.

And for me, it’s wakings. I don’t really ever have a problem falling asleep. I will have problems staying Asleep, and if it’s bad, I might wake up every hour or two something else that I incorporate into my dieting now that I didn’t previously because I simply didn’t have to is diet breaks. So raising my calories up to maintenance for anywhere between, I don’t know, for me, it’s about 7 to 10 days, and I find that doing that every.

Four to six weeks or so of dieting helps a lot. It just helps bring the physical stress levels down and keep them low enough so I can keep losing fat without destroying my sleep. Another way of doing that I’ve tried, which has worked to some degree, but not as effectively as the seven to 10 days of maintenance calories is four or five days of a deficit, followed by two or three days of maintenance calories.

So basically a deficit throughout the week, on the weekdays and then maintenance calories on the weekends that worked fine when I was younger. But again, now, as I’ve gotten older, the longer diet break makes a bigger difference, and that really also is in line with the research that I’ve read on diet breaks, you do need more than a couple of days to favorably influence your physiology enough To make a difference.

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. Mark Shannon asks, what oils do you recommend cooking with? And why? I personally like olive oil the most. I like the taste and I like that it is a polyunsaturated fat.

I prefer that over something like coconut oil, which is very high in saturated fat. Not that saturated fat is bad for you, but you do want to limit your intake of it. No more than 10 percent or so of your daily calories should be coming from saturated fat, because if you start going Much beyond that, chances are you are increasing your risk of heart disease.

And so olive oil, it handles heat. It tastes good and it is a quote unquote, healthy fat. Okay. McGehee Mason asks, do you have a degree? If so, what is it in? No, I don’t have a degree because I didn’t go to college. And the reason I didn’t go to college is when I was. I think 16 turning 17. I had done everything I needed to do to graduate from high school here in Florida.

You don’t have to, or at least at that time, you didn’t have to wait until you were 18 to graduate. You just had to rack up enough credits, enough study time and enough subjects and starting at probably maybe 12 or so. I stopped taking spring breaks and summer breaks and I just yeah. Studied more or less every day on a normal kind of just school schedule throughout my spring breaks and summer breaks and so by the time I was 16 or 17 I had finished everything that I needed to do to graduate and at that point I didn’t have a vocation.

In mind, I figured I would become an entrepreneur of some kind, but even that wasn’t very appealing to me because the successful entrepreneurs that I knew were doing things that were very uninteresting to me and the idea of just like selling widgets for a profit was very uninspiring. I. Didn’t want to do that, even though now that I have built a successful I guess a couple of successful businesses.

I have more appreciation for the art and the science of building a business. But at the time when I was like 17 or 18, just building a business to make money doing whatever sounded good. Really boring, even if I could make a lot of money, I’ve never been that money motivated. What I like the most about making money is just the freedom that it gives you the freedom to do what you want to do with your time.

And for me, that mostly just means work, but I get to work on things that I want to work on. And so I like nice things and I’m Building a nice house and I don’t really care about driving fancy cars or wearing fancy clothes or watches, but I have an appreciation for some of the privileges and the luxuries, I guess you could say that come with having some money, but I don’t get nearly as excited.

About making money as some of my friends who are far more successful than I am, and they love it, though. They love making money, and they love building their business and making it more profitable. And yes, I like building my businesses, and I like making them more profitable, but I don’t get the same visceral thrill.

But anyway. I’m 17 or so, and I’m figuring that the corporate world, certainly not for me, and I will do something entrepreneurially and in talking with my dad, who is a successful entrepreneur and other successful entrepreneur friends of his, the consensus was that’s what If that was going to be the direction that I wanted to go in college would be a waste of time unless I wanted to try to get into an Ivy League school and do it really just for the networking opportunities.

Basically, get in there, make rich friends who then I can go to when I’m ready to start a business to raise capital and maybe even find business partners and so forth, but that. Plan just wasn’t all that appealing to me. I figured it would probably be a better use of time to just start working. I start working in different industries, start doing different types of work and find the direction I want to go in, because at that time I really I didn’t have any idea.

And so that’s what I did. I just started working and eventually I found writing and I found fitness and then I combined those things into bigger, leaner, stronger, which I self published in 2012. And then that book sold very well and I wrote more books and those sold well. And I started a website muscle for life, which was really just a blog, but it was a good time to start a fitness blog because It wasn’t nearly as hard to rank in Google as it is now, and there were not nearly as many competitors in the space as there are now.

And so that blog, I launched it in March of 2013, and by the end of the year, it was getting about 700, 000 visits a month. And I was using that also to build a big email list, which allowed me to regularly communicate with people. And then, of course, Legion came next, and here I am. And that approach worked well for me.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for everyone. I think that there are people who probably should. Go to college instead of trying to strike out on their own. And I guess I could say quite a bit about that actually, but I’ll save that for another podcast. Miss Danny Ryan asks, do you eat the same thing daily or have variety?

Who does the cooking at home these days? I don’t have much variety because I’m too busy to care really to put any time or thought into what I eat. I eat foods that I like every meal, every day. I just can eat the same foods every meal, every day for long periods of time before I care to change them. I can eat the same thing for probably about a year.

Or so before I am not enjoying it anymore and want to change it up. And so that’s convenient because, again, it just makes it simple. And it is important, though, that you should be enjoying everything that you eat. And even though I have been eating the same lunch now, I make a salad with some spinach and mixed greens and arugula and some cucumber and some sort of protein.

Sometimes it’s chicken, sometimes it’s beef, sometimes it’s fish, and I add some goat cheese and sometimes some pumpkin seeds or some nuts. Simple salad. I love it. I still really enjoy it. I’m, my mouth is watering right now talking about it. And I’ve been eating it for. I don’t know, at least a year, and I’ve made slight changes like the goat cheese is a newer thing, and that’s enough variety for me now where I can probably just eat that exact salad for the next year before I care to Add something else to it.

Maybe cut up an apple and put that in there or maybe switch the goat cheese for a different type of cheese or maybe do something else. And so the point here is do not try to force yourself to eat food that you don’t like. It doesn’t work long term. And if you need. A lot more variety than I do in your diet.

That’s totally fine. Accommodate your needs. Okay, the next question comes from Anonymous, and they ask, What blood panel metrics do you find most valuable for overall health? A few are vitamin D, CRP, HbA1c, ALT, and AST. RBC mag free and total testosterone estradiol lipid panel fasting insulin and CBC if you look at all of those and if you need to rewind and look those things up I understand but that constellation of metrics will give you a very comprehensive picture of your overall health.

Okay. The next question is, have you ever dived in a carnivore MD, dived into his thoughts on an animal based diet? Yes. And our ancient ancestors did not Avoid plant foods and neither should you ancestral diets differed greatly based on the location and the flora and the fauna but none of those menus excluded plants including the Hadza and Maasai tribes that are often used to valorize animal centric eating Another question from anonymous.

How do I get my wife to start tracking? Start tracking food is the question here. I would say start simpler. Ask if she can take what she’s eating now and make maybe just one positive change. Like maybe she can swap a serving of carbs, maybe refined carbs in particular for some protein. Maybe she can choose a lighter version of a preferred food or a preferred.

beverage or maybe she can replace a caloric beverage with a zero calorie one including diet soda if she loves soda it is definitely a net positive to cut the caloric soda out. And add some non caloric artificially sweetened soda in I do agree that eating large amounts of artificial sweeteners every day, like six, eight, 10 plus servings every day forever is probably not great for health, particularly for our gut health.

But that is not having a diet soda every day. Another question from anonymous will cardio every day in a bulk affect strength and gain. It can, yeah, I can, especially if it exceeds a couple of hours per week and if it comes directly before or after weightlifting, that’s not ideal or if it involves a lot of impact that is going to cut into your recovery.

And it’s probably worth mentioning that some people, they are the exception, not the rule, but some people find that they need to do very little or no cardio at all to make consistent progress when they are lean bulking. But most of us. We’ll actually benefit from a bit of cardio, maybe an hour or two per week when we are lean bulking, because that cardio can help with our intraset recovery and that can improve our performance, make our workouts more effective.

It can help with nutrient partitioning. I know that’s a little bit speculative, but there is evidence that our body might be able to better process the food we eat if we add some cardio into our regimen, and it can also help with the post bulk. Cutting because you’re already in the habit of doing the cardio, which is not necessary.

Of course, when you are cutting, but it certainly helps. It speeds up the fat loss and it can reduce hunger and it is necessary. At some point, it’s necessary for most people to get to very lean. For example, most people can go from any degree of overweight to relatively lean. without cardio, but to go from relatively lean to very lean, it almost always requires cardio simply because you need to get your energy expenditure up and you can only do so much resistance training before it just runs your body into the ground.

Okay. Next question from anonymous. Is there any value in temporarily maintaining after bulking and before? Cutting. No, just start your cut. You will have momentum on your side. Your first few weeks of cutting will feel very easy. You probably will enjoy eating a bit less food, but you are not going to notice anything in the way of less energy or reduced performance in the gym.

Just jump into it. Next question. Also from anonymous noodle lifting weights, best way to progress to doing a pull up start with. Negatives look up a negative pull ups. This works great. You can even do it at home with just a chair and a bar. One more anonymous question here. After how many days slash weeks slash months without training does muscle loss start?

You are going to notice at least a little bit of strength. And maybe a little bit less muscle size, like your muscles are going to look a little bit smaller after 10 to 14 days off, but actual muscle loss of actual lean tissue does not start until three to four weeks of no training. And so remember that when you have to take some time off the gym for whatever reason, and also remember that whatever you might lose, it’s going to come back very quickly.

Quickly, once you get started again, so you could stay out of a gym and do no resistance training whatsoever for a couple of months, get back into it. And within a month or so, at least look right back to where you were before you stopped. Okay, next question comes from real gold plate and they ask what is daily minimum of fat as percentage of calories that body needs for normal function around 30 percent of your daily maintenance calories is reasonable and it can be slightly more or less according to your preferences when you are lean bulking, you can go down to you.

Even like 20 percent of daily calories and still have that be more than sufficient because of how many calories you’re eating. And when you are cutting, you can go down as low as maybe 20%, but understand that’s quite low. And I would not recommend doing that for long periods of time, like maybe you do that for the final four or six weeks of a diet because you need to cut your calories a little bit more and you want to keep your carbs up.

I think that’s totally fine, but I wouldn’t recommend starting what is going to be Thank you. Let’s say an extended cut like a three plus month cut. I would not start that at 20 percent of daily calories. I would probably start closer to 30 percent and work it down as I have to cut my calories. Sam J Smith, 25 asks, do you think the U S and China will have a war in the next 100 years?

I don’t know. I don’t know much about geopolitics, but if I were G, I probably would just stand back and let America collapse on its own. And I actually saw a headline recently from, I guess you could say a reputable news outlet. I don’t remember which one, but it was to this effect where it was basically saying China’s leaders are not looking to get.

To entangled with Taiwan right now, because they’re just waiting for America to destroy itself. And that seems more likely to me than an outright war with China, at least a hot war in the next 10 to 20 years, because America is rapidly becoming a nation of dysfunctional. Mutants and freaks run by a bunch of dysfunctional mutants and freaks, and it is impossible to maintain a high functioning society with a preponderance of low functioning people of dysfunctional mutants and freaks.

Okay, final question comes from very peachy and they ask. Can I do glutes every day? Yes, you can. You can train any muscle group every day, actually, but I would only recommend it if you really like it, you really like training that muscle group, or if you really need to do a lot of volume to. Progress. So if you need to do, let’s say 15 to 20 plus hard sets per week for say your glutes or any individual muscle group, then you don’t have to do it every day, but that is one way of doing it.

And keep in mind that only a very experienced weightlifter needs to do that much volume. To make progress. If you are relatively new, you only need to do probably 10 or 12 hard sets per week to make all the progress that is available to you. If you doubled that volume, you would gain very little additional muscle and strength compared to just the 10 to 12.

So if you are though an experienced weightlifter, you have gained a lot of muscle, you have gained a lot of strength, and you’re really trying to squeeze out. The last little bits from an individual muscle group, then, yep, you have to train it pretty hard, 15 to probably 20 hard sets per week with anything from, let’s say 70 percent of one rep max to 95 percent of one rep max, taking most of those sets close to muscular failure, maybe even going to failure now and then, depending on which muscle group it is and what exercises you’re doing.

And if that’s the case, then training every day, training that muscle group every day. Is a workable way of getting that done. 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.