Ep. #944: Q&A: Dad Bods, Bending Your Back on Deadlifts, Advice for Young Adults, and More

Hello there partner and welcome to muscle for life. I am Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today for another Q and a installment where I answer questions that people have asked me over on Instagram and endeavor here to share short but informative insights. Answers. And this series of episodes has been a good exercise for me because I tend to talk a lot.

I tend to go on tangents and this format has forced me to discipline my tongue to shorten its leash. Anyway, in today’s episode, I’m going to be commenting on the dad bod. I’m going to be talking about the type of people I look up to. If bending your lower back, at least a little bit when you’re deadlifting, if it’s okay.

Whether I drink alcohol or use recreational drugs when young children can start lifting weights, the best way to lose visceral fat, training muscle groups once or twice per week, and more. Before we get into it, did you know that you don’t need supplements to build muscle, lose fat, and get healthy? That you don’t need any pills, powders, and potions whatsoever, If you know what to do in the kitchen and in the gym, you can get into fantastic shape without supplements and stay that way for the rest of your life.

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Adam Kadmon asks, do girls really prefer dad bods? Despite what many unattractive women with a lot of body hair and cats and wine might have you believe, no, Adam, most women do not prefer dad bods. The dad bod. They tend to prefer men to look more like a Greek god than a tub of Greek yogurt. And that’s not hard to understand.

There isn’t very much that is sexy about a 200 pound Pale hairy human bratwurst, but jokes aside, I will say that I absolutely agree with the body positivity crowd that nobody should feel like they are inadequate because they don’t look like a photoshopped fitness model and remember that so much of what on social media is not Healthy.

What it takes to look a certain way is not healthy. Oftentimes it involves drugs and excessive exercise and neurotic eating behaviors, even to the point of eating disorders and so forth. And so I think it’s important to maintain perspective and not get caught up in the rat race of chasing physiques that you see on social media or constantly comparing yourself to what on social media.

And if you want to compare your physique to anything, especially if you want to feel better about yourself, if you have been working out for any period of time and you pay attention to your diet whatsoever, compare what. You have compare how you look to the more classical representations of beauty that you can find in high art because that type of look can be healthily attained and maintained by anybody.

All right, Becky Malobo asks some advice for 24 year olds who want to reach a level of greatness in their lives. I think that a lot of that. Comes down to doing basically the exact opposite of most 20 somethings in just about every possible way. And I think that creating a personal constitution, so to speak, to use Stephen Cubby’s term can help.

And if you want to check out mine, legionathletics. com and search for constitution and you’ll find an article. Where I share my own personal constitution and probably a podcast as well. Claudia TDD asks, who do you look up to? I look up to people who work hard, who are honest, who are competent, who are Orderly, who are always learning, who are curious, who think critically, who are ambitious, who are not afraid, who don’t need praise, admiration, approval, or sympathy, who don’t complain or feel sorry for themselves.

Who aren’t degenerate, who give more to society than they take, who think for themselves, and who despise clown world. Goldie Design asks, is bending your lower back a little during deadlifts fine? No, you do not want to flex your lower back because flexion in the Lower back when you are dead, lifting can cause injury now thoracic flexion.

So flexion of the upper part of your back is okay, but it does take practice and it’s more relevant to experienced weightlifters who are pushing their limits like strength athletes, for example, and I don’t do it myself and I don’t recommend it generally again because you have to practice it. And you have to be able to flex the upper part.

So you have to be able to allow the upper part of your back to round a little bit, but not the lower part of your back. Again, it can be done, but you got to work on it. And I personally don’t think it’s worth the. Risk because there is a risk of accidentally allowing the entirety of your back to flex.

And again, that just increases the risk of injury. And as I am not a strength athlete and I’m not trying to maximize my strength per se, I’m not trying to gain every last ounce of strength that is available to me. If I Did want to do that. I would have to be quite a bit fatter. For example, I am around eight to 10 percent body fat in general.

I would need to go up to probably 15 to 18 percent body fat to be able to gain a considerable amount of strength. From where I’m at right now, and I don’t want to do that. So again, no lower back flexion when deadlifting. Okay, I am in Peratore asks. Do you use any recreational drugs, alcohol, marijuana, etc?

No, I do not and I have never even tried weed. I have never been drunk. I’ve had a couple drinks in my life, but not many. I can remember. Taking a shot of, I think it was whiskey at a friend’s wedding. And I remember, let’s see, tasting some drinks when I was in Wyoming with some people I work with and they were all ordering drinks and collectively I maybe tasted enough of them to have one drink myself, and that has probably happened one or two other times as well, but. That’s about it. I never got into drinking. And then as I got older, I figured it’s probably not a habit worth taking up because who knows, maybe I would love it. And then I would have a problem. And the same thing goes for recreational drugs.

I was never interested in them and I’ve made it this far without them. And I figure I don’t know what I’m missing and maybe that’s a good thing. All right. Jamie Pagnotta. Asks, what is a good age for kids to start weight training? Body weight training can start as soon as they would like, or like kids weights can start as soon as they would like to do it.

But barbell training, like strength training proper, I would say 13 to 16 years old is a good general recommendation depending on their temperament. And they will require good coaching. You would. Not want to send your 13 year old into the gym with a buddy to go figure it out for themselves because you can find videos online to see what can happen.

And yeah, there are examples speaking of videos online. I’ve seen of 8, 9, 10 year old boys and girls weightlifting doing even Olympic weightlifting and doing it quite well. But in every case, they had very good coaches who coached them every step of the way. And they also took it seriously. So to speak.

They understood that they were. In the gym to train, not to mess around. And of course, messing around with Olympic weightlifting, even if the weights are only moderately heavy, can get you hurt. Katya Sorez asks best way to lose visceral fat. Ultimately, it’s just a calorie deficit, which is good news, really, right?

You just need to get leaner, but there are a few tips that can help with this in particular. One is don’t drink a lot of alcohol. Two is to do resistance training, three is to do some high intensity interval training and four is to maintain good sleep hygiene and that’s just general good advice, of course, but research shows that those four things can help with losing visceral fat in particular, which, by the way, is fat.

That is covering your organs. And that fat is that type of fat in particular is associated with different types of disease and dysfunctions. So you don’t want to have a lot of visceral fat. And if you want to learn more about visceral fat and losing it, head over to legionathletics. com search for visceral, V I S C E R A L.

And you’ll find an article and I believe a podcast on it. Lucas Caranate asks, train a muscle group one or two times per week. Natural guy objective is to gain some muscle. It depends on your volume. Generally speaking, two times per week is going to be better than once per week with any major muscle group.

But if you are brand new to weightlifting, you only really need to do 8 to 10 max 12 hard sets per major muscle group. Per week, and research shows that you can do upward of 10 sets, 10 hard sets for one muscle group in a workout before you hit the point of diminishing returns, where extra volume doesn’t stimulate more growth in the same way that the volume that you already completed.

did. And so what that tells us then is you can train each major muscle group just once per week. Now that’s not going to happen exactly if you are doing a lot of compound weightlifting, because you have to think of indirect volume in addition to the direct volume. So for example, when you’re bench pressing, that is direct volume for your pecs, but it’s Indirect volume for your triceps and your front delts, for example.

And so then when you train your arms directly and your shoulders directly, maybe in another workout, you actually are training those muscle groups twice per week. But I digress. The point is you can follow basically what is a quote unquote body part split where you are directly. Training each major muscle group once per week.

If you only need to do call it eight to 10 hardsets per week to maximize muscle growth. Now, at what point do you need to start doing more volume to continue gaining muscle and strength? That varies from person to person, but in most of the people I’ve worked with and heard from over the years, what I’ve seen is that it’s probably somewhere around one and a half years or so of proper weightlifting.

At that point, most people. People are going to benefit from additional volume if they want to continue gaining muscle and strength as quickly as they possibly can. In most people, they’re going to want to go from, call it 8 to 10 hard sets per major muscle group per week to something maybe around 12 to 15 hard sets per major muscle group per week.

And when that is the case, then it is clearly better. To split that volume into at least two sessions per week and two sessions is totally fine. There’s no research to suggest that splitting it into three or four sessions per week is even more effective. So let’s just say that you need to do for an even number.

Let’s say you’re going to do 14 hard sets for your chest per week. It. is going to be better to do two sessions of seven hard sets than one session of 14 hard sets. Because again, once you surpass eight to 10 ish hard sets in one workout for one major muscle group, that additional volume is not going to stimulate muscle growth nearly as effectively as those first eight to 10 hard sets.

So the rule then is if you need to do call it 12 plus hard sets per week for. Any major muscle group split that into two sessions. Paul Chippudim asks, there is this article out there saying that high protein diet lowers your testosterone. Is it true? No that’s totally wrong. I’ve seen. that claim before, and I’ve seen some research cited to purportedly back up that claim.

But the studies either did not show that whatsoever or showed that high protein, low carb can lower testosterone levels compared to high protein, moderate or high carb. Yes that’s true. That’s out there in the literature. I’ve also seen mechanistic studies where people are taking things that have been observed Animals or in vitro and then extrapolating them to humans that is fine for generating hypotheses to explore further but is not appropriate for drawing conclusions like high protein dieting lowers testosterone levels.

And really what you are seeing when people make claims like this is one weird trick for becoming an overnight fitness guru. You just start saying things that are the exact opposite of accepted evidence based guidelines. You start saying that high protein eating depresses testosterone levels and therefore is actually worse.

For muscle building, then moderate or even low protein eating or vegetables are bad for you or cardio makes you fat. Saturated fat is a superfood and so forth. Whenever you hear someone make these controversial contrarian claims, you have to ask yourself, What is more likely? Is this a pioneer who is sharing forward looking insights?

Or is this probably just a grifter who is fishing for attention? There are lean asks. How do I know if I’m not a beginner anymore in terms of weightlifting or body composition? If you are a dude and you have gained your first 15 to 20 pounds of muscle, you are no longer a beginner. You are now in your intermediate phase.

If you have gained, let’s call it 30 to 35 pounds or more of muscle, you are an advanced weightlifter. And if you are a gal, you can basically just Cut those numbers in half. So you are a noob. You are a novice until you’ve gained maybe around your first 10 ish pounds of muscle. And then your intermediate phase stretches to probably closer to 20 ish, 15 to 20 ish pounds of muscle gained.

And beyond that you are advanced. Venonimous asks, are electrical muscle stimulators worth it? No, unfortunately, studies show that they likely don’t help with muscle or strength gain or recovery. And I do not recommend them. Last question comes from Yosol Gaten, and they ask, are steroids for pussies?

Wow. Just wow. I can’t believe this person. You need to check your hormonal privilege. You bigot. There is nothing wrong with fitness folks. And that’s F. O. L. X. By the way, nothing wrong with them using safe and effective and science based doses of Anabolic medicine to correct their clinically low levels of testosterone, cypionate, anadrol, and dianabol.

Do better. 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.