Age and exercise, how to not be skinny fat, getting back after time off, and more…

Hey, it’s Mike. And this podcast is brought to you by legion. My line of naturally sweetened and flavored workout supplements. Now, as you probably know, I’m really not a fan of the supplement industry. I’ve wasted thousands and thousands of dollars over the years on worthless supplements that Basically do nothing.

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Hey, this is Mike Matthews from musclefullife. com. Thanks for stopping by and checking out my video podcast. I hope you enjoy it. If you do you could just, subscribe to my channel or subscribe to the podcast and I try to get them done one done every couple weeks or so, two or three weeks been pretty busy recently might fell off a little bit, but I’m going to try to keep that in.

So yeah, let’s just get started in this episode. I want to talk about a few different things. One is something I get asked about a lot, which is skinny fat. What is it exactly? Like people know the look, but what is. What does it mean physiologically? How do you become skinny fat? What is, what do you do wrong that gets you there?

And then what can you do to undo that and not be skinny fat anymore? So we’ll talk about that. Talk about about how to get back into the groove of training if you haven’t been exercising for a while and what’s the best way to go about that. So as to not overwhelm your body and not overwhelm you even psychologically.

So yeah, we’ll talk about that. And then I want to talk about age and how age affects your ability to get in shape. So I’m gonna try to keep this to 30, 40 minutes or so we’ll stick with those three subjects. I’ve had a little bit more time. I’ll add something else in. Oh, and also I’m going to talk a little bit about the upcoming launch of my line of supplements, which is getting close now.

We’ve had some snags on the website. Just the logistics of the responsive design and all the e commerce and all the stuff that we wanted to do, but we’re getting close. Hopefully it’s gonna be done this week. So let’s start first with this subject of skinny fat. Now you probably know what it means in terms of looks.

It’s the kind of look where Somebody they don’t have, they’re not particularly fat, but they just don’t have any muscle definition. Their arms and legs just look like tubes, and they’re mushy to the touch. It can become a real problem because a person can actually have a relatively low body fat percentage, but have that look somebody like a guy can be 10 percent body fat, which isn’t that bad and look what you would expect.

To see in someone maybe 15 to 20 percent body fat, that had more muscle because of course, remember body fat percentage of total weight. So like a guy at 150 pounds, let’s say a skinny fat kind of physique. 10 percent will look way worse than a guy. 175 pounds with a good amount of muscle.

10 percent body fat. It’s a totally different look. So the first thing I want to talk about is the I’m actually read an article on this too coming up and this is ties into how do you wind up skinny fat and this ties into this kind of idea of the worst way to lose weight.

The worst way to lose weight is there’s a combination of things you can do wrong that kind of result in actually like a skinny fat physique and depressed metabolism. And a, you can put yourself in a position where it actually is very hard to even get any leaner, even if you wanted to if, let’s say as a guy, you get down to the 12 percent range.

If you’re doing it wrong, you can find it very hard to get below 10%. And even if you did, you wouldn’t look anything like how you want to look or what you would envision, let’s say nine or 8 percent body fat, looking like. And the worst way to do it is this. First would be to put yourself into a large calorie deficit every day, meaning if your body is burning 2000, let’s say 2500 calories worth of energy every day, and you’re eating, 1500 calories or you’re eating 1200 calories per day.

Yes, you’re going to lose weight, of course. But by putting yourself in this large caloric deficit, where you’re eating. half of, your daily, your, what your body should be burning every day, what you should be able to eat and just maintain your current body fat percentage. What happens is your body, your metabolism slows down, which happens anyway when you’re losing weight, but you can really accelerate this by putting yourself in too large of a caloric deficit.

Your hormones, your anabolic hormones, particularly get depressed, which further slows down metabolism and can lead to muscle breakdown. And then there is muscle breakdown, which also occurs as a side effect of just not eating enough food. Because generally when somebody is following, really you could say it’s more of a starvation diet almost or a borderline starvation diet that usually comes with lower protein.

Because if you’re not eating very many calories, you can’t eat that much protein and protein. A high protein diet is super important. When you’re wanting to lose weight, you want to have a moderate to high amount of protein, regardless if you’re lifting weights, it helps build the mass, preserve the mass, but it’s very important when you’re dieting to lose weight because you’re fighting against your body’s when you’re restricting your calories, your body is its ability to repair it.

Muscle tissue to build up muscle tissue is already impaired. So when you are eating too little protein, you’re exacerbating that. You’re making it even worse. So that’s the first big problem or the big mistake that people make when they lose weight, or want to lose weight, is just cut calories severely.

and not eat enough protein. And so then that leads to fat loss, but also quite a bit of muscle loss. And then the next big mistake is to do a bunch of cardio especially steady state cardio, which burns up muscle. I can link a study or I’ll link an article down below where I talk about this. There’s an article where I talk about it, or I can just link a study that shows directly just that the longer you do cardio.

The more muscle you lose, essentially, it’s just the way it is. So that’s why I always recommend doing high intensity interval cardio because it’s shorter. You burn more fat doing it. It’s just a better way to go. But we’re talking about how to get skinny fat here, not how to undo it.

So I’m doing a bunch of steady state cardio is a recipe for weight loss disaster, especially when you’re in a severe caloric deficit. Yes, you’re going to lose fat. Of course. Once again, you’re just accelerating that muscle loss and losing muscle is not only unhealthy. Because the amount of lean mass that your body has is just associated with overall health and longevity, actually, and just research has just shown that the less muscle you have on your body, the more likely you are to die at some point of something, disease or whatever.

But also it slows down your metabolism because muscle drives your metabolism. Would say it’s one of the primary drivers of metabolism. The amount of muscle you have on your body is going to dramatically influence the amount of calories that you can eat and maintain your physique.

As you’re burning up muscle, your metabolism is slowing down even more. And that is leading to this skinny fat look. So you have severe calorie restriction and doing a bunch of steady state cardio. And then I, you could say that the other kind of like factors are over exercising, which many people do because there’s a point where the weight loss slows down.

And because the metabolism has slowed down a lot and just gotten shocked by the caloric deficit and the cardio and, ahem. The kind of like natural response is to just exercise more. So now it turns into maybe doing cardio or even weightlifting doing cardio twice a day or adding a weightlifting session on top of it.

So now you’re adding what you’re essentially doing is even you’re expanding that caloric deficit or that calorie deficit even more by adding more exercise, which once underfeeding your body, it doesn’t that weightlifting that you’re doing won’t build your muscles up. It’s actually just going to get better.

cause more muscle loss. It’s going to cause even more damage to the muscle fibers that your body can’t repair because of the state that it’s in. So if you continue this and I’ve worked with quite a few people that have done this, I would say probably more women than men because the general advice to women for weight loss, just for whatever reason, Tends to be run a big caloric deficit and do a bunch of cardio.

So I’ve worked with a lot of women that have gotten themselves in that position now where by doing that for several months, Or in some cases, six months or even a year of trying to constantly lose more weight in that way has led to this skinny fat kind of look where they, their body fat percentage is not very high.

Maybe it’s around 20 or 19 or 18, but they don’t have the body that they want at all. Their legs don’t have any definition. They don’t have any muscle definition in their arms. They’re not able to eat a lot of food. I’ve worked with women that have come to me and have been able, only able to eat about 1000 calories a day to maintain about one recently, I think about 140 pounds five foot seven, five foot eight.

And that, that woman should be able to eat upwards of if everything were, if you’re doing everything right and she hadn’t burned off a bunch of muscle and stuff, somebody, a woman, five, seven, one 40 should probably be able to eat 18, 1900 calories a day. If she’s exercising three to five days a week, And if you’re not familiar with calories, go on calorieking.

com and start looking at the calorie content of food. 1, 800 to 2, 000 calories a day is a lot of food for a woman. It’s not so much for a guy, it’s not so much for me necessarily but for a woman that’s quite a bit of food. That’s like how you get to being skinny fat and then how you undo it is essentially the opposite.

So what you want to do is if you’re in that position right now and you want to get to your goal, your target physique, which is going to be probably, you’ll have a bit more muscle. You’re going to look a bit leaner. You’re going to be able to eat more food. The first thing that I always recommend or usually recommend because of the metabolic damage that can come with doing this burning off too much muscle, depressing your hormones too much from severe calorie deficits.

What we normally start with is working on a maintenance routine, not trying to lose more weight initially, not trying to reduce body fat, but actually trying to just fix the metabolism, speed it back up. And we do that by increasing calories. To a maintenance level calculating your total daily expenditure and Which I can, I’ll link another article here, I’m a note of this.

Alright,

cool. So I’m just going to link so I don’t forget I’ll link an article on that so you can see how to do that. So we want to work calories up to around, eating where the person’s eating around what they’re burning every day and change the routine quite drastically. Focus on weightlifting shorter sessions, 45 minutes or so.

Intense weightlifting. If you’re familiar with my work, I’m a big. proponent of heavy weightlifting. And I talk about why in my books, I talk about why in different articles, I’m gonna actually write another article soon. It’s just going to bullet point some of the big benefits of focusing on heavy compound weightlifting.

So yeah, we do that to build muscle. And then we increase the food to give the body, give the metabolism a break and give it the nutrients it needs. Make sure eating enough protein, about 40 percent of daily calories coming from protein. And then any cardio that’s being done would only be HIT cardio, which is high intensity interval training.

And I’ll link an article, like I said earlier, I’ll link it and you can see why. I really only recommend HIT unless unless your body is in a very good place metabolically and physique wise and you have plenty of muscle and you just really going for long runs, okay, fine. But if if you’re in a kind of skinny fat type of situation, I would definitely cut out any long, endurance type cardio for the time being.

So that’s the first phase of fixing the skinny fat. Type of body is focusing on lifting weights, building muscle and eating enough food to allow that to occur. And that can take metabolic damage would, I’ll end up writing an article on this and it could really even like there could be a whole podcast just on that.

But it’s a real thing. You really actually can, depending on what you do with your body, you can cause damage in the way of, muscle loss in the way of, Reducing your body’s total daily caloric burn. I’ve seen one study that I believe it was a year. It was still a person dieted down.

They didn’t do it necessarily right. They just followed a standard calorie restriction. I think they did some cardio and by the end of their diet there they did lose a fair amount of weight. And their BMR their, Basal metabolic rate, the amount of energy that they burned every day, just doing nothing dropped and it dropped more than researchers expected, just on the weight loss alone.

Where they go, okay we would expect if, based on simple formulas, that If you’re weighing 30 pounds less, of course your body’s gonna burn a little bit less energy because it doesn’t have to carry around that weight, even if you lost strictly fat, but there was more metabolic slowdown than they expected, and it lasted for a lot longer than they expected.

So metabolic damage is very real and correcting it can be. I’ve seen it go pretty quickly with people. I’ve seen take, I don’t know, four to six weeks or so before they were able to, basically get their metabolism back to where they can eat the amount of food they should be able to eat every day and not gain fat from it.

It can take depending on, I don’t, I haven’t worked with anybody this in, this having this severe of a case of metabolic damage, but I’ve heard of it can have a taking even upwards of six months to fix, which is really extreme. I’ve never seen that before, but I think, I don’t know, 48 weeks is probably a fair assumption of, This first phase of just fixing the metabolism.

So then once the metabolism is fixed and once the calories are up to a normal maintenance level, then you can put yourself into a mild caloric restriction, somewhere between 15 and 20 percent less than your daily, burn, what you’re burning daily. And continue the weight lifting. If you’re, and then add the HIIT cardio If you’re not already doing it, I generally start with three or four times a week, and I don’t go over four times and about 20 to 30 minutes per session, and then things just start rolling, and then the weight loss is easy.

The bigger kind of picture, I’ve worked with women, I remember one woman, she came she actually just emailed me. She started doing it herself and just email me that it was working. We’re in the beginning. She was eating a thousand calories a day, stuck at her current weight. She was very overweight.

And then by increasing her food to, I believe she increased it to just straight jump to 1700 calories a day, started lifting weights and started doing hit cardio. She gained weight initially because that extra food the carbohydrates alone bring water and glycogen into the body that increases weight.

Her weight stabilized though. After a couple weeks of increased food, and then she started losing weight from there. And by the time she emailed me, she already lost 30 or 40 pounds. I believe it was probably, I don’t know, I think she was about four months in or something like that. So that is generally how it goes.

The food increase increases weight a bit, and then you just don’t get freaked out. Just know that it’s not that you’re automatically gaining fat. It’s more likely just water being held in the muscles and so forth. And then once you fix your metabolism, bring your body into a moderate caloric deficit, then you can lose weight very easily from there on and not have, and not have to eat sub 1000 calories a day, which is just terrible for the body.

So that’s the story on On skinny fat and what to do about it. I’m also going to link an article down below that I just wrote on how to build muscle and lose fat simultaneously. Cause it just goes along with this. A lot of people ask, is it possible to achieve that body recomp as a known a recomposition?

And yes, it definitely is. If you know what you’re doing, there are a bunch of little things you need to do, right? It’s not everyone can do it effectively, but The only people that can’t are people that are basically advanced weightlifters that have already achieved most of their genetic potential in terms of muscle growth and don’t have very much weight to lose.

Like me, if I wanted to cut right now, I’m fairly lean right now. I’m probably around 7 percent or so. But if I wanted to get down to 5 percent again, or I was recently I’m not gonna be building muscle during that time period. It’s just not possible. Like I don’t have my genetic potential.

I can maybe put on another 10 pounds of muscle, period, on my frame. It’ll probably take me three or four years to do that. And that really will be it. And to do that it’s gonna require, I can’t be, I’m not gonna be building muscle when I’m in a calorie deficit. And I explain this in the article that I’ll link, so you can just check it out.

But most people can actually, most people can do a body recomp if they just know what they’re doing. Let’s move on here. To the this is also something I get asked about fairly frequently. How to get back into training after you’ve been out of it for a while. And fortunately there, you have quite a few options and it’s not really that complicated.

There’s nothing special that you really have to take into account. The only thing is the obvious is you mean you’re not going to jump back in and be squatting whatever you were squatting before. two years ago or something like that. But you don’t have to necessarily ease your way into weightlifting again.

You don’t have to like, my, my bigger, leaner, stronger program, plenty of people, brand new, just go right into it or People that have lifted in the past that are coming back, just go right into it. And of course, when you’re working in certain rep ranges, you just work with the weights that you can lift.

And if that means you’re benching 135 for six reps, when you start, so be it, no big deal. Your strength is gonna come up quickly. And muscle memory is a real thing. You’re, it’s a misnomer. You’re, of course, your muscles are not remembering anything, but there are changes that occur in the muscle fibers at a cellular level that just remain.

And they, the when your body then gets detrained or when, when you lose the size and the strength that you had, there are cellular changes that have stayed in the muscles. And so then when you get back into training again. Those adaptations that already occurred in the past can kick back in and the process of growing that muscle again is faster.

Basically it’s a simple way of explaining it. So you’ll have that on your side as well. So you’ll be able to make gains very quickly. It’ll feel like newbie gains again or even newbie gains a little bit faster than newbie gains. Yeah. There’s not much to special to, to really say on that.

If you want, you can always start, let’s say start three days a week. This is something I generally just recommend with people. If they’re, if you want to just go all in five days a week, hit the weights. If you want to, work out your meal plan exactly and stick to it.

That’s great. If at all, if that seems a bit overwhelming for you initially then start, on a lower gradient start with three days a week of weightlifting. You can do cardio or not, depending on what you’re trying to do with your body. And, with your diet, maybe initially it’s just a matter of cleaning up your diet.

So maybe you’re not going to count your macros or count your calories initially, but you’re just going to get rid of the stuff that you know shouldn’t be there. You’re going to get rid of the junk stuff, the chips, the pretzels, the sodas, and maybe you’ll knock off having the dessert or drinking the beers, drinking a beer every night or whatever, and just clean up your eating.

And in many cases that will result in putting yourself into a bit of a calorie deficit. So if you want to lose weight, you’ll generally start losing weight just by doing that. And get going on that and maybe do that for your first month, get back into the groove see, establish the habit.

This is probably an article that I end up writing just cause I’m a big believer in the power of habit and how, what kind of the, what I want to say is that I’ll get asked fairly often by people like, so how are you so dedicated to your routine? Why, what do you do for motivation?

Whether it’s, in the gym or with business and work and stuff. And yeah, I guess I’m maybe naturally a pretty, pretty motivated person, self motivated. And I just I like to do stuff and get stuff done or whatever, but a lot of it has to do with habit and what we do habitually is what feels most natural to us and what feels right to us in a sense.

For me, what feels, what I naturally just am drawn toward is my routine, my habit that I’ve established, which is I wake up early, I wake up at 6 30, I go to the gym, I come to the office, I work until six o’clock ish, I spend some time with my family and then I work for a couple more hours at night.

And I do that I usually take a little bit of time, take half of Saturday off, I work on Sunday and that’s just my habit that I’ve established and not doing that. feels off to me. It just, I don’t enjoy. That’s what I enjoy. And, but I got there by just doing it over and over.

And yes, of course, there are rewards and nice things that come with it. And, having the website is great and all the books sold and getting to meet all these people and have a community building and stuff like that is awesome. But it also that’s not. I’m not driven every day by Oh, I gotta make some more money today.

I gotta get, 50 more likes this hour or whatever. It really is actually just a matter of I’ve established this habit of lifestyle and I could, if I were to totally change my habits and make install bad habits instead, if I were to stop going to the gym every day, if I were to start playing video games all day and not working and don’t respond to people’s emails and whatever I would feel I would hate it, but my point is, if I did that enough, that would come to feel normal to me.

And the idea of going back to what I’m doing now would be like, I, it would feel overwhelming Oh, go back to all that work and all that effort and blah, blah, blah. I’m a big believer in just establishing good habits and doing it gradiently. If you’ve ever heard of the Kaizen method, it’s, a Japanese thing.

It’s just basically that philosophy of small steps and then bigger steps and bigger steps. So if you’re going to get rolling again and going just full out, seems a bit tough, then start. With a few days a week lifting, clean up your diet, and then once, once you feel good on that and you feel like you have that habit very established going to the gym, you don’t miss any workouts, you’re sticking to your diet plan, even if it’s loose, then increase that to four days maybe in the gym and then maybe make yourself a meal plan and start hitting exact numbers and just take it one step at a time like that until as you can really take as far as you want.

You could then bring it up to where you’re. You’re exercising six days a week and you’re, regimented on your diet, even if you’re being flexible, which of course I recommend, you’re hitting your numbers, you’re eating healthy foods that give your body the micronutrients and needs and so forth.

It becomes very natural. Yeah. And, on that note, I’ll also link an article down below that I wrote on a good body weight routine. If you want to go that route, a lot of people, I understand this are a bit intimidated by the gym. Or, getting back into it or whatever or maybe either a little bit, insecure about their body and how it looks and, whatever you can start at home.

I’ll link an article down below in the description which I, lay out what I think is a great home routine that doesn’t require very much equipment. It would require, it does require a few things if you’re really going to do it, but it’s definitely cheaper than putting together like a full, weightlifting setup for a home gym.

So that’s a great way you can get back going and build up some strength again, build up some confidence and then get in the gym. So let’s move on here to how age affects your ability to get into shape. Once again, I get asked this by, usually guys are asking this question because they’re, worried that, because they’re 40 years old or 50 years old that it’s too late.

They can’t really build muscle or can’t build much muscle or won’t be able to get lean or whatever. And fortunately it’s completely not true. I’ll link a study down below. This would make a good article at the website as well and make a note of that, but I’m going to link a study down below that was done with college age men and middle aged men.

And just showed that both can do great with weightlifting basically. And you can check out the study. But, and that’s in line with my experiences as well. Working with, I’ve worked with people, I’ve worked with guys even into their seventies actually but lots and lots of guys in their fifties and sixties and lots of guys in their forties and even thirties.

Some guys will even worry like, Oh, I’m, I’m 35. Are my hormones destroyed? Can I, do I, have no tests left in my body to even build a muscle? And no, that’s not the case at all. Of course, if there is a disease or something that’s that’s a different circumstance. But the average healthy, whatever guy that’s 40 years old can do great in the gym.

And even if you’re not healthy, even if you’re overweight and not doing so great and that’s fine. You can do it. You can actually do very well in the gym and you actually don’t even need to do anything differently. The only changes that I’ll make to, to my program, which focuses on heavy compound lifting with some isolation work to help develop different points of the physique, just don’t develop without it, like shoulders and arms and such.

Is, I’ll work with guys in their fifties and usually. unless they’re experienced weightlifters and they really know their body can take it. What we do is we just reduce the load on the big compounds like deadlifts, squats, bench press, military press. Doesn’t mean you don’t have to, you doesn’t mean you have to avoid them.

But if you’re, let’s say you’re in your fifties, and you’ve never weightlifted before, going, jumping into heavy deadlifts is probably not a good idea. We usually will work in, the 68 or 8 to 10, or even 10 to 12, in 10 to 12 rep range initially to build up basic strength, and then in many cases, those guys that are then able to start working toward heavier weights, if they start at 10 to 12, they’ll find that they can comfortably work their way to the 68 rep range and do great.

That’s really the only change. Diet doesn’t need to change. Don’t worry about your metabolism. It’s not true that your metabolism dies with age. Somebody, a guy in his fifties that is in, normal, has a normal amount of lean mass for his age, his metabolism is really not going to be more than a couple hundred calories, maybe three hundred or so calories.

per day slower than an average guy in his twenties. And the main reason for that is actually just the difference in lean mass. That’s it. If that 50 year old had as much muscle as the 20 year old, his metabolism would be, his metabolic rate would be almost identical really. Don’t think that you have to, eat way less or that it’s going to require crazy calorie deficits or something to lose weight or anything like that.

It’s not. The body is extremely resilient and responds really well to exercise and proper eating, regardless of age. And that applies to women for women as well, of course. I’m going to link an article for this point. I’m going to link an article I wrote on I wrote actually specifically for people that think they’re heart gainers that have trouble gaining weight.

And because this, when most guys that ask me this question are on the skinnier side, And they’re worried that their age is going to prevent them from building any, real amount of lean mass to achieve the type of physique that they want. So in this article I have for hard gainers I just go over like here are the basics that you have to understand and apply to, to build muscle efficiently.

And it focuses on stuff like heavy weightlifting, eating enough, resting properly, blah, blah, blah, you’ll see in the article. Yeah, that’s those are the three things I wanted to cover where my timeline is 30 minutes. Okay, great That’s I wanted to keep it to about 30 minutes And just a quick update on Legion if you don’t know what I’m talking about That’s my line of supplements that I’m releasing and they’re gonna be out Within the next couple weeks.

I’ll be able to start taking orders. We were supposed to we wanted to do it this week But it just logistics website, mainly logistics of getting the mobile site working correctly and the e commerce things working correctly and blah, blah, blah. But it’s looking like next week or latest the week after.

I’m pretty excited about that. If you’re not familiar with the products at all you can learn more about them at legionsupplements. com and what kind of makes them unique and Which is, they’re naturally sweetened no artificial kind of junk, no artificial unnecessary fillers, clinically effective dosages, meaning that the ingredients that are in the products first the ingredients are backed by actual science, like I’m not using anything in my products that doesn’t have clinical research done with athletes as well, not clinical research done with 70 year old AIDS patients with muscle wasting or something like that.

These are product, these are ingredients that have been proven to work. And and using them in the dosages that have been proven to work. And that’s a big, important thing because if you take something that was take an amino acid or take any molecule that was proven to, to improve physical performance somehow and that and you put in your product, which is, okay, you’ll find that out in this industry.

But then if the studies that showed the benefits, let’s say the average dosage was like five grams, but then there’s 500 milligrams in your product. What’s that really going to do? I don’t even know if you can say it’s a tenth as effective, you can even expect a tenth of the results. You probably can expect nothing.

That’s no proprietary blends. Every product is going to be 100 percent transparent. Basically, I’m just producing the products that I have always wanted. And it’s always been a pain to, to find stuff to recommend. And, I’m not even a big believer.

Most supplements out there are garbage. And the stuff that I’m going to be selling is the stuff that I personally use and recommend that has good science behind it. Simple stuff protein powder because it’s convenient. Creatine because it works. Glutamine because it helps the body.

It doesn’t help you build muscle, but it helps the body just deal with the systemic kind of stresses of exercise. That product also has another amino acid in it that has been proven to help with muscle recovery. So it is a recovery product. anti overtraining kind of product and then a pre workout that has clinically effective dosages of mainly amino acids and a couple other molecules that improve physical performance period.

I mean that they do, if you look at the science, if you use them in large enough dosages, which I’m doing so the, in the future of the line, of course we’ll have more products, but I’m not going to have as many products as other companies because there aren’t that many things that are worth using.

I’m going to have a whey protein, that I’m launching with, I’ll end up doing an egg protein, which I personally like and use by currently use healthy and fits and I, it’s a good product. I would like to create something similar. And I’ll probably end up doing a casein.

Casein is also good. I use egg instead. It’s a, casein is a slow burning egg is another slow burning. A lot of people like casein though. It is a good protein. I’m going to end up doing a multivitamin, which of course I use and I’m excited. to have some cool stuff I want to put in my multivitamin that would be specifically for people that are training, exercising regularly, particularly like weightlifting regularly.

And I’ll probably end up doing a BCAA type product. I don’t know if it’s actually going to be a BCAA product because out of the three amino acids leucine, Really, leucine is what you want from the BCAs. Like, when you use BCAs, which are really only useful when you’re training fasted, there’s no point to be supplementing with BCAs all day if you’re eating enough protein.

But, if you’re training fasted then, which means you don’t have any food in you for the last at least three to four hours or so. Your insulin levels are at a baseline. Then you want to have BCAAs. And particularly, really, you want the leucine because it stimulates protein synthesis, which counterbalances the accelerated protein breakdown that occurs when you’re training in a fasted state.

I, I don’t know why I’ve been, what? I found one that I recommended on my website, or that I recommend on my website and I use. It’s decent, it’s a BCAA with glutamine, but it doesn’t have, you have to get the amount of leucine that you want, you have to take about 10 grams of glutamine.

Of most BCA products, you want three to four grams of leucine, which requires about 10 grams because the ratio of leucine to iso, leucine and valine is usually just low. 2 1, 1 3, 1 1. So what I would do is I’m either gonna do a high leucine, like an 8 1 1 or a 6 1 1. Naturally sweetened, naturally flavored, which is nice.

And, or I’m gonna do a, I’m gonna do an amino product. Where I’m going to, instead of using isoleucine and valine, I would use a few other amino acids that would just be better basically than isoleucine and valine, which essentially do almost nothing. Isoleucine stimulates protein synthesis a little bit, but not very much, not like leucine.

So my kind of pre workout amino for if you’re gonna be training fast, it would be three to four grams of leucine. And then. I’m not totally sure yet, but I’ve been looking at some other two or three or maybe four others that could go with it that would just make it better than isoleucine and valine.

So anyways, that’s what I’m doing with the supplements. Pretty excited about it. The products are great. I can’t wait to use them myself. Once again, if you want to learn more about that, you can just check out the website, legionsupplements. com. Yeah, so that’s it. I hope you like this podcast.

If you did, I’d appreciate it if you subscribe to my YouTube channel or subscribe to the podcast. Once again, I’m going to get better on the scheduling of it. Try to get one done every two weeks or so. And leave a comment. I respond to all comments. Shoot me a message. I respond to everything.

I love hearing from everyone. Suggestions on future podcasts, whatever, if you have any questions, just write me and I’ll answer. All right. Thanks again. Hey, it’s Mike again. Hope you like the podcast. If you did go ahead and subscribe. I put out new episodes every week or two. Where I talk about all kinds of things related to health and fitness and general wellness.

Also head over to my website at www. muscleforlife. com where you’ll find not only past episodes of the podcast, but you’ll also find a bunch of different articles that I’ve written. I release a new one almost every day. Actually I release four to six new articles a week. And you can also find my books and everything else that I’m involved in over at muscleforlife.

com. All right. Thanks again. Bye.