Ep. #936: Q&A: Slow Cutting, Improving Stamina, Preventing Muscle Loss on Trips, 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. I put up 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 get into it, do you sometimes lack the energy and the motivation to get into the gym?

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com slash pulse order now Use the coupon code MUSCLE, save 20%, try PULSE, risk free, and see what you think. Aniceegg asks, is there a downside to losing fat too slowly for someone around 28 percent body fat? Yeah, definitely. It is the duration. Because the longer you have to cut for, the more things can go wrong and get in the way.

Random, accidental overeating, vacations, diet fatigue, demotivation, etc. So when cutting, I generally recommend people to lose fat as quickly as they healthfully Can you don’t want to be so aggressive that you suffer you don’t want to be hungry all of the time and have cravings all of the time and lose muscle and so forth.

But you do want to lose fat at least most people should be looking to lose fat as quickly as they can without running into any of those problems. That way you can greatly increase your chances of reaching your goal, your target body composition. And then you can get back to the fun stuff like maintenance and lean bulking.

Alessio Bell 897 asks, going to be traveling for a month or so, any tips to prevent slash minimize muscle loss? Yeah, definitely. So the first thing you should know is it takes about three weeks of no training to lose actual lean muscle tissue as opposed to just losing water and glycogen in your muscles.

And that makes your muscles smaller when you lose water and glycogen, the intramuscular Water and glycogen, which does shrink and your muscles shrink when you haven’t trained. I start to notice it probably after about a week, seven or 10 days of no training when muscles look a little bit smaller, probably only an amount that I personally would notice, but that is not because I’m losing muscle tissue.

It’s because the water and the glycogen, which is a form of carbohydrate stored in the muscles and in the liver, those substances. I have less of them less water and less glycogen in my muscles after call it 7 or 10 days of no training. That is also what people refer to when they’re talking about the residual pump that comes with training the post training residual pump that is mostly just water and glycogen.

That is in your muscles that makes them look bigger and fuller and the water and glycogen comes back very quickly once you start training again. So you could be off for two or three weeks. Your muscles might look quite a bit smaller, but that’s not because you’ve lost actual muscle tissue. And then once you get back in the gym within a week or so, you just look back to your normal size.

That’s mostly because water and glycogen coming back. And so then when you are going out of town, make sure to enjoy yourself. Don’t worry about losing muscle because you are going to take a couple of weeks off of the gym. You are not going to lose any muscle unless you severely restrict your calories and your protein intake while you are not training.

And if you do basically nothing, if you just lie around in bed all day and eat very little food and very little protein, all right, fine, you actually can lose a fair amount of muscle in a couple of weeks, but so long as you eat enough calories and if you’re like most of us, you are not in a calorie deficit when you are on vacation and if you’re just physically active, Even just moving around.

You don’t have to do any formal workouts, but just walking around a lot, for example, actually does stimulate a lot of the muscles in your body to some degree. And if you are so inclined, again, I would not go out of my way personally to do it, but if you are so inclined and you can do, even if it’s just one.

Full body resistance training workout per week. And even if it’s something just like body weight training, high reps to basically to failure, you don’t have access to a gym or you don’t want to bother going to a gym. You just want to do a simple body weight workout. It could be in your hotel room, or maybe you go into the hotel gym, which is very limited.

They have some machines, they have some light dumbbells. That’s totally fine as well. It can be a much less difficult workout than you are used to. To and still be highly effective at maintaining muscle and even strength. For example, research shows that you can maintain your muscle on one third to even one ninth of the amount of volume that it takes to gain muscle.

Now, of course, the more intense the training is, the less volume is needed to maintain the muscle. So if you train, let’s say fairly intensely five days per week, and you were to cut that volume down to one ninth. That would need to be fairly intense training. You couldn’t go from intense strength training to light body weight work at one ninth of the volume, but regardless, my point is one or two max two.

And I would just do whole body training. Just keep it simple. Just. Hit all of your big muscle groups, do the most compound ish exercises you can based on what you have available. That is plenty for maintaining everything that you started your vacation with. Okay, Carlos real 54 asks, should you lower your macros as you decrease body weight in a cutting cycle?

Yes, you will need to bring your calories down. You can also read macros depending on how you are tracking things or you need to bring your activity up as you lose weight because This reduces your total daily energy expenditure. It costs more energy to move a heavier body than a lighter one But it’s not that much generally You Total daily energy expenditure drops about 100 calories for every, call it 10 to 15 pounds lost.

So you just have to adjust for that as you go. And eventually what you’ll find is that you can’t feasibly move or exercise more, which is what I’d recommend doing in the beginning of a cut. If you need to increase, if you need to grow that calorie deficit by let’s say 100, 150 calories, cause you’ve lost now 10 or 15 pounds.

If you can move a bit more, I would recommend that before cutting food. But once you’re up to three to five hours of weightlifting or resistance training per week and call it two or three hours of cardio per That is about as much activity as I would recommend because if you start doing a lot more than that, you can not be able to recover from it.

It just becomes too much on your body, especially when you are also restricting calories. So at that point, you just have to start eating less food. And as far as which macro or macros to reduce, of course, most people, they just reduce Carbs or fats or a combination of both and I would say do whatever you enjoy the most.

I personally like to keep my carbs as high as possible when I’m cutting, I find that my workouts are best and I am generally fuller if I can keep my carbs up and so as I’m cutting my fats get lower and at the end of a cut I might be only. Getting 20%, maybe even 15 percent of my daily calories from fat.

And of course that is not ideal as a general way to eat. I would not recommend that as a lifestyle choice, but it’s totally fine to do temporarily when you are cutting. Okay. Comfy sweats asks if your gym would allow it. Would you squat barefooted? No, I much prefer squat shoes because they increase stability and they help you screw your feet into the ground.

Like literally, like you imagine you’re screwing your feet by trying to turn your toes outward into the ground. And that can help with form and even performance. Danius 187 V asks, so you have doubts about the war on Ukraine? So this was asked to me a couple of months ago. When it started, no, then I didn’t have any doubts.

And even now I don’t have doubts. I’m just not surprised. Putin made it very clear that he was not going to allow any more of his neighbors to join NATO, particularly Ukraine. And he was absolutely not going to allow Ukraine to rearm itself with nukes, which has been part of this ongoing, which I guess now is defunct, but NATO discussion.

And so The Western slash global elites fucked around anyway, by using a color revolution to install a rabid anti Russian president in Ukraine, who would then continue this agenda to join NATO. And now we are all finding out. And so look at it this way. Would the U. S. ever allow Canada or Mexico to ally with Russia or maybe China and then arm itself with nukes.

No soap. That would be a guaranteed invasion and war. Okay. Disorganized asks lifting head for bench. Why not stay planted? So this is a habit that I’ve had actually just lifting my chin off of the bench a little bit when I am pressing barbell pressing dumbbell pressing and I thought it was a benign habit, actually, and I knew that you definitely don’t want to smash your head backward, like down into the bench because that can strain your neck.

But ironically, I recently strained my neck, nothing too bad, but just annoying on the incline dumbbell press by doing the opposite, just bringing my chin to my Chest a little bit too forcefully when I was pressing relatively heavy weight. And so now I am retraining myself to leave my head on the bench.

And again, to not push backward into the bench, because many people do that. And that can also strain your neck. So here I am still learning how to lift weights better. All right. Keith plus two asks, which type of cardio is more effective to increase stamina for sports hit or lists? So high intensity interval training or low intensity, steady state cardio.

Ideally you would do both. Ideally, if you really wanted to maximize your endurance, you would want to do a lot of moderate intensity work, and then you would want to steadily increase your performance in that so you could measure that by wattage per session, for example, if you were on a bike, and then you also want to do some high intensity work.

But I would recommend limiting that to no more than an hour or so per week. So an hour or so of high intensity interval training per week with each session lasting maybe 20 or 30 minutes. And you also need to make sure that you are progressing in those workouts. So your sprints should be getting progressively longer in those workouts and your rest times should be getting progressively.

Okay, mamkin kachok asks. Should I continue using creatine when I am cutting? Yes, absolutely. It’s going to help you retain your performance and your muscle mass. Do it. Anonymous asks best form of government. Impractically speaking, if I am just going to daydream a benign dictatorship of some kind, like for example, what we had in the Pax Romana Period.

Practically speaking, though, I think the best we have seen so far is something akin to what we started with here in the USA, a representative government with limited democracy. I wholeheartedly believe that one of the many things wrong with our current polity and our society is too much democracy, not too little, too much.

For example, what if we had to earn the right to vote by, say, paying taxes in three of the last five years? Yes, with reasonable exceptions like retirees, blah, blah, blah. But what if that was the rule? What if, for example, now the parasites who take so much more from society than they give, or maybe only take from society and give nothing, what if those people had no say in how the country is run?

How might that change? The dynamics of this culture. Rara Rachel 79 asks which pulse flavor for someone who thinks most are too sweet. Don’t mind tangy. Oh, that’s definitely sour candy. Then that is my favorite actually because I like Tang like you and I don’t like too sweet. Although I will say that I don’t find.

Any of the pulse flavors too sweet for my tastes. If I try some of the artificially sweetened stuff out there, that can get way too sweet for me, particularly with protein. Anyway, I think sour candy pulse is delicious. And if you like sour, you might like it too. Okay. Sean, Joe one 25 asks what book had the most significant impact on your life?

I get asked this fairly often, and I wish I could give. Okay. A great, honest answer to it, but what I find is it’s so hard for me to pick one, but collectively I would say it has been the many books I’ve read about writing and marketing because I can attribute at least 80 percent of my time to it.

Success in my career to my abilities in those areas and my success in my career has greatly impacted every aspect of my life. Shemunk7 asks, best way to tell if I’ve gained muscle pictures, body scan, measurements, et cetera? Question mark. The easiest ways to know are just. More strength. If you’re getting stronger, especially if you are not brand new, if you are brand new to weightlifting, you are going to gain a fair amount of strength in the first few months without gaining much muscle.

But if you are at least, let’s say six to nine months into your resistance training journey, then more strength generally means more muscle and more body weight as well. Because of course muscle weighs something. So if you are getting stronger and you are getting heavier, even if slowly you are gaining muscle, even if you are not gaining noticeable amounts of body fat, particularly if you are within your first year or so of resistance training, because you can lose fat and build muscle at the same time.

Next question comes from smoovboss. He asks, I’m guessing it’s a he, is World War III about to start? Serious question. I will be at least a little bit surprised if the Goddard Damerung is sparked off over an invasion of a country that most people couldn’t even find on a map and or didn’t even know existed a few months ago.

Guess though, that actually would be a kind of fitting end to the clown world that we live in, but no, I don’t think the probability of Armageddon over Ukraine is very high. If I had to put a number to it, probably no higher than 10%, but geopolitics is a bit off my beat, so I might be wrong. Okay. Last question comes from Theo Meester and they say cutting if I’m under on protein, but hit my calories for the day, should I try to hit my protein or stop eating?

You can just stop eating, but I would not recommend that you make this a habit. Unless you’re talking about missing by like 10 grams or something. Generally, you want to work to hit your protein target at least five days per week, because if you miss it by a lot, several times per week, that can get in the way of your results.

Actually, it can. It can slow down fat loss. It can accelerate muscle loss. So make sure that you are really paying attention to your protein intake. If you don’t want to pay attention to all of your macros, pay attention to your protein and you can let your carb and fat intakes fluctuate so long as your calories are where they need to be.

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 muscleforlife. com muscleforlife. 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.