Ep. #362: The Story of My 7-Figure Fitness Publishing Company

Mike: I think initially getting into any business type or commercial endeavor, it doesn’t make sense to do that. In most cases, especially if it’s all new, get something out there as quickly as possible that’s good by your standards, but it, not anywhere near perfect because you just don’t know it might be in a complete waste of time.

Hey, Mike Matthews here from muscle for life and Legion athletics and welcome to another episode of the muscle for life podcast. Now, according to a 2000. 16 article in the New York times, only 40 authors had sold more than 1 million books on the Kindle store in the previous five years. Another survey by digital book world found that the vast majority of self published authors made 1 to 999 per year, with most of them on the lower end of that range.

Now I mentioned these numbers because they are a. stark reminder of how grateful I should be to have achieved the level of success that I have as a self published author. Specifically, I’ve sold about 1. 3 million books in the last six years and last year was my best year yet actually with over 300, 000 books sold and this year we have plans that should Get us over 500, 000 books sold.

Now, the reason I say those things is not to brag, but just to explain that’s why I get a lot of questions from aspiring writers who have either heard me mention things maybe in writing or on the podcast. I don’t really talk about it much, but I’ve mentioned here or there, and you can find it specifically if you’re looking for it or who know what Amazon Sales rankings translate into in the way of sales and can see that I’m selling a lot of books.

So I hear from a lot of these people fairly often who want to know about the business of selling books, about the writing of them, about the publishing of them, about the marketing of them. And sometimes these are people who are Looking for help writing a book of their own and other times they’re just curious about how the sausage is made Now I haven’t spoken much about the ins and outs of publishing here on my podcast So I thought it might be worth sharing an interview that I did on another podcast called the food for fitness podcast now in this discussion the host Scott and I Get under the hood of my publishing company and the publishing space and the fitness industry in general and discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly.

We talk about the genesis and the growth and the goals of my publishing efforts. We talk about some of the key factors that I believe account for my book’s success, we talk about some of the common mistakes, shenanigans, and skullduggery that is used to sell books and more. I hope you like the interview.

This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in, so Instead, I’m just going to quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my fitness book for women, thinner, leaner, stronger. Now, this book has sold over 150, 000 copies in the last several years, and it has helped thousands of women build their best bodies ever, which is why it currently has over 1, 200 reviews on Amazon.

With a four and a half star average. So if you want to know the biggest lies and myths that keep women from ever achieving the lean, sexy, strong, and healthy bodies they truly desire, and if you want to learn the simple science of building the ultimate female body, then you want to read Thinner, Leaner, Stronger today, which you can find on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google.

Google play. Now, speaking of audible, I should also mention that you can actually get the audio book 100 percent free when you sign up for an audible account, which I highly recommend that you do. If you’re not currently listening to audio books, I myself love them because they let me make the time that I spend doing things like commuting.

Prepping food, walking my dog and so forth into more valuable and productive activities. So if you want to take audible up on this offer and get my book for free, simply go to www. bitly. com slash free TLS Book, and that will take you to audible. And then you just have to click the sign up today and save button, create your account.

And voila, you get to listen to thinner, leaner, stronger for free. Alrighty. That is enough shameless plugging for now, at least let’s get to the show. 

Scott: Hey, Mike. Welcome to podcast. Hey, Scott. Thanks for having me. Absolute pleasure. Mike, give us a bit more info about you. If anyone is semi into fitness, they probably already heard of you.

They probably have at least one of your books. Listen to your podcast. You’re A popular dude in the industry, but if someone’s been living under the proverbial fitness rock, tell us who you are, what you do, why you’re so good at it and how it all started. 

Mike: I’ll start with the last question, how it all started.

Let’s start with the first actually, I am Mike Matthews. All right. So that’s who I am. Yeah, there we go. I’m primary. It’s funny. People ask, if I meet people, whatever, Oh what do you do? Like a fitness things. I guess that’s the best answer. I primarily I’m a writer, right?

Probably what I’m best known for are a few books that have sold about a million copies over the last five or six years. And those books are bigger, leaner, stronger. That’s for men. Thinner, leaner, stronger women. And then the other most popular book is called the shredded chef, which is like a flexible dieting cookbook for obviously both men and women.

My journey, in the fitness industry started in 2012. I published bigger, leaner, stronger, had a different business, different life at that time. And I really just did it as a nights and weekends project. I wasn’t really sure if anybody would care about the book and that’s why I self published it.

Because I didn’t have any connections in the industry. I didn’t have. Looking at it objectively, I knew that there was no reason for an agent to care about me or put any faith in me and no reason for a publisher to care or put any faith and it would take a lot of, I was assuming it was going to take a lot of time and a lot of effort to get any agent or publisher to care.

And I’d rather just put that time and effort into just doing it myself and going straight to the marketplace and seeing if, because ultimately what really matters is readers, right? If you can get a large enough readership, then you win either way. So I just self published it and it was a minimum viable product type of approach.

It wasn’t very large. I want to say in the beginning it was maybe 70 words at most. It might have been as short as 50. I don’t quite remember in the first edition. And it was really just like. All right, here is the book that I wish that somebody would have given me back when I was 17, 18, getting into weightlifting.

It was the result of many years of doing a lot of things that weren’t very effective. And then I was, I think when I first published it, I want to say it’s probably four years or so of doing things that were very effective. And it was me just explaining, okay, so here’s where I’ve been, here’s what I’ve tried and here’s what I’ve learned and here’s how I’ve learned it.

And here’s what you need to do to put it into use and see for yourself if it works for you. I guess this is more just a product of my personality. It was from the beginning a more evidence based approach to diet and exercise. The references section, the citations have grown since then because the book itself has grown since then.

I’ve done. several updates to it. And I’m actually releasing this year, November, December, January, let’s say there’s going to be a full transition over to a new third edition that I’m releasing, which I’m super excited about because I basically rewrote the books for men and women from scratch. And all the fundamentals are the same, but I’m a better writer now in the last four years since I published the second editions.

I’ve done a lot of research. I’ve done a lot of writing on my blogs and a lot of. Speaking on my podcast. So I just I’m excited because these new third editions, in my opinion, are far better than the current second editions, even though I do stand by the current second editions as solid books and probably the best that I was capable of four years ago, but I’m just capable of so much more now, in my opinion.

So anyways, that was back in 2012. I published that book, I think bigger than stronger. I think it sold 20 copies or something in the first month. And I was like, Oh, that’s cool. Somebody bought my book and then it sold maybe 40 copies the next month. And I put my email address in there. I had a, I think it was build healthy muscle.

com or something. I just made an email address, Mike at build healthy muscle. invited people to reach out if they had any questions or suggestions or anything. And I started hearing from people who liked the book and thought it was very interesting at that time. Flexible dieting wasn’t as popular as it is now.

Not as many people had heard of it. Heavy compound weightlifting, like strength training. It was more niche now or then than it is now. I’d say probably in many ways, thanks to CrossFit, it has become more and more mainstream. This is the idea of like heavy ish barbell training has become more popular.

mainstream and more just trendy now than it was, back then. And so for a lot of people, it was just very, a very different way to eat a very different way to train than they were used to. And then started getting people, results where people would say, Hey, I’ve been doing, the program that I included in the book for the last three months.

And it’s amazing. I’ve lost all this weight and I’ve gained all this strength. And so by the end of 2012, it was bigger than you’re strong. We’re selling several thousand copies a month and it was just on purely on word of mouth. I wasn’t doing any sort of, I didn’t have a business, a fitness business.

I had a different business doing something totally different. And I’d put up a couple other shorter books as kind of trial balloons. Just, Stuff that I felt like writing about basically, and to see it, see if it would resonate. But at that point, going into 2013, I saw there was really an opportunity to dive really into this and create more books and write articles and maybe do podcasts, YouTube videos or whatever.

Focusing on education because that’s what I myself am personally interested in a lot of what the fitness industry doesn’t resonate with me personally, and I was actually resistant to getting into it initially. I didn’t want to be a fitness person. I actually was more interested in starting a publishing company and sell and use what I had learned.

about book selling and particularly online and using internet marketing to sell books and just publish other people’s stuff and not necessarily health and fitness stuff. But yeah, I probably would have ended up niching into something, but try different genres and try different markets and see what I liked the most.

But there really was a big opportunity there. And so I decided, okay, I’ll do it. I’ll become a fitness guy, but I’m going to do it in my way. And that means that I’m really not interested in trying to suck up to the tastemakers in the space or the King makers in the space, or I’m not chasing after editors or chasing after people who have followings and basically begging for them to plug me.

I’m just going to, Create the best possible content that I can, and that means articles, books, everything I’ve mentioned, and if I can build a large enough following, then I can just do my own thing. I’m not beholden to anybody. I can write what I want to write. I can say what I want to say.

It’s not just a A matter, I guess maybe it’s a matter of integrity, but it’s also just a matter of, again, I think just my personality in psychological terms, I’m a very disagreeable person. So that means that there are certain things that just don’t suit me very well trying to play politics.

And there’s a lot of that in any industry. And now that I’ve been on the inside of it of the fitness industry for a number of years, yeah, that’s, going to conferences and trying to wangle your way into the good graces of people that who in many ways, I really just don’t respect is just that never appealed to me.

So I in 2013. Launched a website called muscle for life. That was like March or April of 2013. And that grew quickly. And that gets anywhere from I’d say 1. 2 to 1. 4 million visits a month. Depends on the time of the year and what Google’s doing. Like Google’s recent update. Has traffic’s been up down on the it’s been interesting, I’m not concerned over time.

It’ll all settle out. And as long as you keep doing what Google likes, which is creating good long form content, you’ll be rewarded. That’s the long story short, and since then I’ve written, the book for women, which came about because women would write me and ask and say, Hey, So I read this book.

I know it’s for men, but I read it and I like it. Can I do this? And so it was clear that I needed to write a book specifically for women because while the fundamentals are the same, obviously a man’s metabolism fundamentally works in the same way as a woman’s, for example, or the muscle building machinery in men works in fundamentally the same way as the machinery in women.

There are some differences that women should be aware of and training priorities differ. are almost always different, right? So in men, it’s going to take a lot more work to get the upper body that they want than the lower body and in women the other way around. So that’s why the women’s book came about.

And then the cookbook was just something that, I like to cook and it seemed like a good opportunity. I’ve just released a new book, which was particularly on motivation called the little black book of workout motivation. And I started a supplement business along the way as well, which We could get into if you wanted to, but that’s called legion.

And so I’ve just continued to build, I guess you could look at it from an, like an ecosystem basically. So I look at myself as the nucleus of this and then putting things out there that can just bring more people into my orbit. And I could say that if people like me and they like what I have to say and they like the information that I give, then they’ll probably like my app.

They’ll probably like my supplements. They’ll probably like my digital courses, et cetera, et cetera. 

Scott: Yeah, there’s scribbling notes here. There’s so much I want to talk to you about, which I’ll probably do offline rather than bore the listener. But I have a book coming out next year. Actually, it’s my first book published thing.

And we can chat about more about that and Google as well. What’s been happening there. A lot of interesting things, but again, won’t bore the listener with that. But before you started writing the books, what did you do? Were you a personal trainer? Did you do any of this at uni or was it purely a hobby?

Interest base that you saw this gap in the market for an evidence based book that wasn’t You know talking absolute nonsense or aimed at people who want to be bodybuilders Or what prompted you to do that? 

Mike: Yeah, so it really was just the latter it was I wasn’t a trainer by trade I had helped a number of people that would really is like friends family Even just so like just acquaintances and they would I would say okay just come to the gym with me You And I’ll give you a rundown of things.

And we would start, okay. So on the diet side of things, I would start real simple, real practical. We’d look at their numbers. What do you want to do? Where are you at? Okay. So I just did it recently with a buddy of mine, even now. So a guy I met in the gym and he wanted to, I think he was about 230 pounds and he had tried many different fad diets and he had gone up and down and really just his settling point.

for his lifestyle has been about, 230 pounds for some time now. And so he was asking me, Hey, what do you think about the keto diet? I would really like to get down to 200 pounds. His name is Josh. And I was like, all right, Josh, let’s just start here. I explained to him quickly, energy balance quickly, macronutrient balance.

I was like, but just do this eat 2000 calories a day, given your workout schedule, 2000 calories a day, I want you to eat, let’s say 60 to 100 grams of protein. And from there, I’ll just leave the rest up to you. I don’t really care what you eat. I would recommend that you get the majority of your calories from nutritious foods, but to start.

So just all I care about is you hit your calorie needs and you hit your protein target and that’s it. And he was like skeptical. He’s really that’s it. What about carbs? What about sugar? What about gluten? What about, all the stuff he hears about? I’m like, I don’t care.

I don’t care. Eat whatever you want to eat. Again, I recommend that you eat more nutritious foods because it’s healthier and it’s going to make it easier. If you eat very calorie dense junk food too much while you’re in a deficit, you’re just, you’re not going to feel very good and you’re going to be hungrier than you need to be.

But. Hey, do your thing, whatever. And it’s funny. He’s an interesting guy cause he has what is, so he has a master’s in history. He studied history and philosophy, but he’s a financial planner and he studied history and philosophy simply because it’s interesting to him. He knew that those degrees are useless in terms of a career, but he just wanted to do it because it’s interesting to him.

So he always has interesting anecdotes to share, but he was like, this reminds me of something Carl Jung said, basically that, you the truth that you need is in the place that you least want to look right. And I was like, actually that’s profound. I actually like that.

And I totally agree with that. And that applies to really any area of a lot of our lives. The thing that we are most running away from is probably the thing that we need to confront the most. And for him, that was calories. And he’s that totally makes sense. And that’s really what I’ve not wanted to hear for all these years is that I just eat too much fucking food.

And that’s it. And I was like, exactly. So then now I think he’s down 20 pounds now. And he was like okay. So that’s that’s nice to know. So I would take people, years and years ago, I would do that kind of process with them. I would say, okay, here, let’s start real simple here in the gym.

Come work out with me. We’re Let’s start three days a week. Let’s just start push, pull legs. You’re going to do some heavy weightlifting. We’re just going to go with a simple auto regulated double progression model, which I wouldn’t even, I wouldn’t use those words with them, but I’m like, basically we’re going to work in this rep range.

And when you get to the top of the rep range for one or two sets, we’re just going to add weight to the bar and we’re just going to progress like that. And that’s nice because if you are feeling good and strong one day, You’re going to have some weeks inevitably are going to be good based on because there’s so many different factors, right?

That if, especially if you have a life, if you have a job, if you have a family, if you have, if training is not your number one priority in your life and gaining muscle is not the number one priority in your life. Some weeks are going to be better than others in terms of energy, in terms of what you can actually do in the gym.

And so when you can just regulate it yourself and if you go, Hey, I feel really good today. Okay. Thanks. I’m going to try to go for my top set this week and see if I can make progress. Whereas, I run into this this week is a good week. Last week, everything just felt heavy. I don’t know if I even gained a rep on anything major last week cause it was just one of those weeks.

But this week I went up, just today I went up in my squats and my leg press today just cause I was feeling good. And so I would start simple with people, but I wasn’t a trainer per se. I wasn’t, I didn’t charge them any money. And in working through. that with people. I saw that opportunity where I was like, again, there was no book like Bigger, Leaner, Stronger on the market at the time.

And I was wondering why doesn’t somebody just write a real book that isn’t marketing bullshit, that isn’t fad, that there’s just timeless principles that work like a starting strength, but more for, I wouldn’t even say amateur bodybuilding. I would really just say like everyday gen fit flavor of bodybuilding.

which almost bodybuilding almost seems like too much of a too kind of extreme of a term for it. But I guess that’s what it is, right? If you’re a guy or if you’re a gal that wants to have a lean kind of sculpted athletic body, it’s going to take bodybuilding to get there. There’s no other real word that I know of that kind of describes it.

And so that’s really how it came about. And again, I was writing the book. 17 or 18 year old me. That’s who really I was writing that book for initially saying if I could give this back to, young Mike, hey, do this. That was the viewpoint. At least when I initially wrote it. And again, I didn’t really have any master plan for it at all.

I didn’t know if anybody would even care. I put time into it, but I didn’t. Belabor it obsessively and, work on this book for years and years because that just doesn’t make sense. I think initially getting into any business type or commercial endeavor, it doesn’t make sense to do that in most cases, especially if it’s all new, get something out there as quickly as possible.

That’s good by your standards, but it, not anywhere near perfect because you just don’t know. It might be in a complete waste of time. 

Scott: Yeah. 

Mike: Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth.

So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say, Thank you. You can find me on Instagram at muscle for life fitness, Twitter at muscle for life and Facebook at muscle for life fitness 

Scott: jumping right back into when you were working with your pal Josh and he couldn’t believe how simple weight loss is in principle as in calories out negative energy balance, eat sufficient protein, don’t lose muscle, weight loss will happen, eat good food most of the time.

Why do you think? that people love to confuse that message or they think, okay, this is pretty much 90 percent of what we need to do. What we’re going to do therefore is ignore that and then argue over this 10 percent or tell people that they need to time their carbs at this point and supplement with this bullshit.

And so why do you think There are so many charlatans or gurus out there who just seem to want to ignore the basics and make it harder than it needs to be. 

Mike: I think of it in terms of how I think of the government at least the higher echelons of government, in that it’s probably half corruption and half incompetence or maybe 60 40 one way or the other.

So I think that you have a lot of people that are just incompetent. They don’t actually know any better. They themselves actually may think that they’re doing people a favor by talking about, Oh yeah, it’s all about your carb loading or carb timing, or it’s all about hormone optimization, unclogging your hormones, eating the right clean food, stuff like that.

And then I think there are a lot of people that know that’s bullshit, but they are just, it’s an expedient because, in some ways, I’ll bet you, I think this is probably irrefutable that going about it that way, that couching your entire pitch in those terms, it’s going to appeal actually to a lot of people.

There are a lot of people out there. If you look at this in terms of stages of market awareness, right? You’re the first stage is complete as a consumer is you’re completely ignorant and you’re most susceptible to scams and bullshit. And you’re also probably most hopeful of you’re going to be in the magic bullet kind of shortcut, quick fix mindset in the beginning.

So let’s say you’re that person. You’re my buddy, Josh, right? You want to lose 30, 40 pounds and you are just getting into the weight loss space. This is your first time ever looking into it. And you hear somebody say you can lose 30 pounds in 30 days and gain muscle and completely transform your body.

Yeah. And you’re like shit, that sounds pretty cool. Okay. And then you have someone like me out there saying all right, so let’s go for 1 percent of your body weight per week in terms of weight loss. Oh, and also the other person saying you can do eating literally whatever you want. You just have to follow these random rules.

And I’m going to restrict a couple of your, let’s say I’m going to restrict, you can’t eat these two foods, but you can eat all the butter and all the bacon and all the hamburger you want and blah, blah, blah. And you’re like that sounds pretty cool too. And then you come over to me and it’s it’s one, let’s say 1 percent of your body weight per week.

Let’s just shoot for that. And while yes, you can eat whatever you want, you do have to work within the reality of energy balance, which means that hamburgers are just not a great choice because of how many calories, pizza is not a great choice. Yes, you can have some pizza here and there, when you really look at it and you go shit.

This is going to be 1500 calories and it’s going to keep me full for, I don’t know, like four or five hours max. And it’s no protein. It’s just carbs and fat. Yeah. It’s not a very quote unquote diet friendly food. Can you make it work? Yeah. I guess if you’re willing to, you’re going to pay for it though, you’re going to pay for it in hunger or, your diet is just going to be not very enjoyable if you give too many calories to quote unquote junk foods.

So there are a lot of people though that would go or even worse. Maybe they go, okay, so this person says it’s, I can, I just have to follow this weird diet and I can lose all this fat in 30 days and gain muscle. This guy, Mike says that, I can’t lose all that weight and all that fat and I have to track my calories and weigh stuff and that sounds hard.

I don’t want to do that. This guy over here. He says that if I just take these pills, I can lose 20 pounds in 30 days and not even pay attention to my diet at all. Just keep doing what I’m doing. There are a lot of people, of course, that go fuck it. I’m going to start with the pills because, Hey, if it works.

Why not? And then, okay, so the pills don’t work and they go shit, that was a flop. What’s the next easiest choice? All right. I’m going to go with the guy that says that if I just leave out the gluten and let’s say just even the carbs, and I just eat a bunch of fatty foods, which, hey, I like fatty foods.

I can make that work. I’ll try that. And then that doesn’t work. And then at that point, okay. So now they’re, they’ve moved up in their market awareness where they probably start starting to realize that the quick fixes, they either don’t work at all or they’re not sustainable. There are quick fixes out there that amount to just starvation dieting.

Yes, starvation dieting works. That’s of course true. If you have a very highly restrictive diet that in the end makes you eat, let’s say half of the calories you’re burning just due to the nature of what you are, quote unquote, allowed to eat and not allowed to eat. Yes, you will lose weight. But then what happens at the end of that?

And I’ve spoken to so many of those people over the years where they go. Okay, this is clearly not sustainable. I can’t eat like this forever. It’s now 20 pounds. It sucked. I was miserable and hungry all the time, but I did it. And I’ve just had my first taste of real food again, and I really want to eat all of it.

What do I do now? I don’t know. And then it just spirals out of control and they gain everything back. Very common, right? So eventually though, the people, they move through that process and then they find Hopefully they remember me and they go, okay I’m going to try that guy, Mike. His process seems a bit more, it looks seems like a bit more work and it is not as sexy, at this point also I do have a lot of success stories.

And so that’s what I’m trying to cater to. to, ideally I get people were in the beginning and say, Hey, that’s, this is the process. This is how it’s going to go. Hopefully you can, I can convince you to just skip all that initial frustration really is all it’s going to come down to and pain and just come straight to reality.

Which is what I’m trying to promote, but there’s a lot of money and just going, okay, we’re just going to sell bullshit to the people in those first two stages of market awareness. And there are a lot of people that are very, they’re brazen about it. They don’t try to pretend behind the scenes that they’re doing anything else.

And to them, a dollar is a dollar and they do inevitably help some people. That’s true. Some people do, lose weight and feel better and they can get something out of it. But when you weigh it on the whole, I would say it’s probably a net negative. It probably would just be better if as a whole collectively in the space, those of us who coach or train people in person or educate people would just collectively say, okay, let’s just start at reality.

Let’s, I understand that you want a magic bullet, a quick fix. It makes sense. In anything, it would be great if to stumble on, but in this case, there really is none. So why don’t we just start with what actually works over the longterm and what is sustainable? 

Scott: Yeah, I think as well, the bullshit spreaders fuel a wave of attribution biases amongst the, amongst their followers, because The fact that they’re not educating them on the specifics of while, how their approach work.

They’re not saying the reason you lost weight on my diet is because you consume less calories. They say the reason why you lost weight on my diet is because you ate X, Y, and Z or you cut out gluten. So then the people therefore. don’t have this awareness of calorie deficit and then go and say I lost weight because I’d stopped eating bread.

I was like, no, you didn’t. That’s just a consequence of what you were doing. So it is difficult to try and break that cycle. But I think There are those of us out there who are trying to cut through the BS and explain to people the basics of what they need to do and just show them how to do it rather than blaming foods.

Mike: Yeah. And we can probably lay some of the blame. I don’t think there’s no need to blame anyone, but we could say that we could lay some of the responsibility at the doorstep of the evidence based space in that. And this is, I think, one of the reasons why my content on the whole has done well, although I hope I’m representing it accurately in this interview, but I think I do a pretty good job, at least in, in writing when I’m putting all my thoughts down and arranging them, explaining things in simple terms that most people can understand and apply and get results with.

And I think that has been a major problem is that the science has been inaccessible. To so many people for a very long time, because it’s just, let’s just start with jargon alone. If you were to give just your average everyday person who’s saying, Hey, I just want to, I want to lose 30 pounds like my buddy Josh.

Now, he’s a pretty educated guy and he’s a high IQ guy, so he might be able to actually muddle his way through it, but he might not. Also, not even be able to work his way through, let’s say, if I were to give him, there are a good few papers I think of what a review that was written by Dr.

Eric Helms and I think Alan Aragon and a couple other guys, James Creager might’ve been involved in it as a very good, it’s just a, it’s a natural bodybuilding to paper on natural bodybuilding. And it’s just a, it’s a research review and has a lot of great information. And because it’s a review, it is written in a more narrative style, more just prosaic style.

But. There still was a lot of jargon in there, and especially if you are brand new to this, the average person doesn’t even know what a calorie is, let alone why you should count them or why calories in versus out matters. And that’s not a slight on the quote unquote average person. It’s just like how if I were to go, I don’t know I don’t know shit about cars.

I hear. Something like camshaft. I’m like, what’s a camshaft? And I have to look at it. And, but, somebody who knows anything about cars, there was probably a time when I’d be like axle, what’s the, what’s an axle. And it’s a similar 

Scott: day. We had an electrician around and he’s talking about two gang switches.

And I’m like, I don’t know what two gang switches, but to him, and he says, oh it’s one, it’s got two switches. Oh, okay. 

Mike: It’s the simplest of things, right? But if you didn’t stop to clarify that, if you were just like, oh, yeah, two, two gangsters. Okay. And you were to try to read a textbook on how to wire your house or an electrician’s.

Textbook, you would get nowhere. And so I think that also is there’s a big disconnect between where the average person is at and where the average, I would say, evidence based educator is at in their level of communication. And in many ways, I think the bullshit artists are winning in that space in particular in communicating things that people can understand.

Yes, they might be wrong and there might be 180 degrees wrong, the exact opposite of what you should be doing. But if people can understand that they’re much more likely if they can at least get it and they go, okay, so that’s what I’m supposed to do. They’re much more likely to do that than the right thing explained wrongly.

poorly or in a way that’s above their heads. Yeah. 

Scott: I think you’ve hit the nail on the head that the gurus. Are generally better communicators and marketers than those in the quote, quote, evidence based space. And I also think you get those in who would again class themselves as evidence based practitioners who write content as if they’re writing for their peers and they must try and impress their clients with how scientific they are and how learned they are and how many, they take.

Mike: Can how many obscure things they can reference? 

Scott: Yeah. Like personal trainers, if you’re listening to this, your client does not, will never need to hear the words like muscle protein synthesis, fat oxidization, anabolic window, 

Mike: even like they just don’t need. Yeah. 

Scott: Yeah. I know they just need to know things like, okay, have protein after to help you recover and maybe get bigger, lose weight.

It’s simple terms. And I think they’re forgetting that they’re trying to. 

Mike: Or at least if you’re going to use those terms, you have to define them. So if you have somebody that maybe is a bit more interested in learning and would like to know a bit more of the technicalities, okay, that’s fine. Some people are just naturally inclined that way.

But then it’s on you to make sure that you are defining your terms and you are communicating in a way that can be understood. 

Scott: Yeah, I agree 100%. And I think it is disappointing when you see or not disappointing. It’s just a shame when you see people who have the right intentions and are frustrated by the nonsense out there, but the way they’re approaching it is just yeah, it’s just, they’re almost making the problem worse because they’re just adding this element of confusion that the bullshit or the shitters will prey upon and just make.

easier. Yeah. In the end, I would, again, 

Mike: I say you want to measure it in terms of mind share or market share or measure it in financial terms, the bullshitters are winning by a lot. And if you don’t like that, get better. What else can you say? 

Scott: Cause on TV, mainly I suppose on your side of the pond, if you look at the big, who hosts the big health shows on TV and look at the message they’re pointing out, it’s not to do with.

calorie deficit and balance and moderation. It’s, they love to talk about hormones and detoxing and cleansing and biohacking and all this kind of garbage. I would 

Mike: say that in this sense, the media, the mainstream media is probably agnostic. If we’re talking politics, I think you get much more into biases and personal biases and corporate agendas.

And, but in the case of. Health and fitness reporting, I would say that they’re probably pretty agnostic. They probably could care less the substance they could. They don’t really care about. It’s just adoption. So they’re just going, Hey, whatever people want to hear right now, whatever is going to get clicks and, get people sharing around talking, just do that.

We don’t give a shit. Whatever that calorie deficit stuff is. If you can. present that in a way that’s that makes it interesting and that, that resonates with people. Sure. We’ll run with that all day. We’ll never talk about hormones ever again, but if it’s all about hormones and eating fatty foods and exercise doesn’t work and calorie counting doesn’t work, if that is registering more impactfully, then we’re talking about that.

Sorry. And I think that’s again, I don’t think it’s really, there’s any sort of, there’s Conspiracy, so to speak, it’s just, they’re weather veins. They just go with wherever the market is. 

Scott: Where do you think the market will go next? Because veganism was big at the start of the year, everyone was like in veganuary and all this kind of thing.

And it seemed to, if you looked at the statistics, the sort of number of people following a vegan diet had trebled since the year before, but then that seems to have. Large, they disappeared or retreated more and keto is now back at the forefront again. Even though keto has been something people have done in the past, it’s just kind of action.

So it’s so big 

Mike: right now. It’s actually Again, 

Scott: more on your side of the pond, if you look on Amazon, again, look at the bestselling books in this fitness space, about 90 percent are all keto recipes, keto dieting and so on. It’s not as big over here. What do you think the next thing will be once people get bored of keto?

If you have a magic ball, what do you see in the future in the bullshit space? 

Mike: It’s hard. It’s usually. If we want to just take it in terms of contrarian, it could swing to high carb and that’s now a thing which is gratifying in its own ways, of course. Eat all the carby foods that you want, but I don’t know.

I actually don’t really spend much time trying to prognosticate because I think it’s probably mostly a waste of time. It’s more reliable to have your finger on the pulse and see when a wave is starting to build. Let’s say take keto. That was clear, whatever, a year ago or so that this was going to become a thing.

And you have some big personalities in the health space. You have some big websites, some big podcasts and some price and big TV shows. And you just if you keep an eye on what they’re talking about, it was very clear. Again, I think it was probably about a year ago that keto was going to become a thing.

I didn’t jump on the bandwagon because I think it’s stupid. The diet. Initially it’s a medicinal diet. It’s for. It was designed to help people who have seizures who get seizures and a true ketogenic diet is actually low protein, low carb, very high fat, and there’s even a debate in the keto space as to whether a high protein, low carb, high fat diet truly is even a ketogenic diet, but either way, it doesn’t really matter.

The diet makes no sense for the average person who’s in shape and into fitness. It makes no sense unless I guess maybe in some cases if you have people that are more endurance type athletes and they feel some people really like it. I know they, they feel very good on the keto when they’re in ketosis a lot of the time and they like eating the foods and it works for them.

That’s fine. But for the average person who’s like spending more of their time on resistance training and doesn’t particularly like the keto diet. There’s absolutely no reason to follow it. So where we go from here is, I don’t know, your guess is as good as mine. Again, it’s simple things usually that do the best.

So demonizing one macronutrient like carbs, that’s been a thing for a long time now that works well, or it evolves a little bit to demonizing insulin. And so that obviously works well. If you can tie some science and some history into it, that makes it more believable. So there’s paleo, right? Where you had a pseudoscience and pseudo history really to sell something similar to the ketogenic diet.

And now we know a lot of the story of paleo is mostly just kind of mythology. This is not how our ancient ancestors ate. And a lot of the science is questionable, especially around the high level of saturated fat intake. I think that’s just reckless period. Unless you’ve worked with a doctor and you know that genetically you can handle high levels of saturated fat without seeing a large increase in your LDL cholesterol.

If you know that, and there are people out there that genetically they just, it’s, there’s no problem, but then there are people, a lot of people out there where it is an issue. And people that are predisposed to high levels of LDL. One of the guys that works with me actually did that as a little personal experiment to see what would happen if he greatly increased his saturated fat intake and he did blood tests.

And yeah, his LDL shot out the roof, but by your standard paleo gurus recommendations or keto gurus recommendations, his diet would have been, Oh, great. Yeah. You’re doing it perfectly yet. There he is. He’s sitting with LDL two and a half times where it should be. Yeah. Okay. That’s good. So yeah, we’ll see, huh?

I don’t know. This, I think, is more of a global phenomenon, both in a literal and more just abstract sense that we’re moving more toward, I think, science in general. And there are, I think, aspects of that are both good and bad, but hopefully we see just more of a general push in that direction in the fitness space, because inevitably that does go back to.

Energy balance, and there’ll be a point when, and I think we’re not there yet, but there’ll be a point where it becomes radical to say, you know what? All of these fad diets are bullshit. Here’s the one thing you need to know. Energy balance. If we’re talking about body weight, that’s it. And here’s all the science and the science goes back over a century now.

And there’s probably an interesting story that could be told about. How that science developed and why it did catch on. There was a time when it was mainstream and now we’ve just ran off into the weeds chasing other things, but I suspect it will come back to that. It just it needs to have the right marketing appeal.

And that’s anything though that’s reality. And there are a lot of people like you had mentioned in the evidence based space. Scientists, researchers, very smart people that not only are terrible marketers, they want to be good marketers. They have no interest in marketing.

It’s like the artist syndrome. You have a lot of artists out there who are very good enough at whatever they do to make a living, let’s say. But are struggling or make a good living, but are struggling because they have no desire to get into the business or the marketing side of things.

And that’s also why a lot of artists and those types of people get exploited by people who are the people with the silver tongues who are good at persuasion and unfortunately are also often con men. So I hope that in the next, I don’t know, decade or so we see. The general discussion more centered around reality and what really works that of course has to begin with energy balance, macronutrient balance, at least people have to understand it.

You don’t have to count calories. You don’t, there are different ways to get at it, but if we’re not acknowledging that, then anything else is a non starter, right? 

Scott: I just hope as well that the. I know there’s the carnivore meat diet that’s in the shadows at the moment that people are just saying, just eat meat, no vegetables.

And so hopefully that people will see that for what it is. 

Mike: Cause I heard, I actually didn’t hear the interview myself, but a buddy of mine told me that Jordan Peterson, I guess is like only eats meat or something. So is that a thing? thing. I thought it was just some quirky thing that Jordan Peterson does.

Scott: I don’t actually know who he is, but it was, yeah, someone asked me on a Facebook live. They said, what do you think of the carnivore diet? And I thought, please don’t let this be what I’m imagining it to be. And oh, no, it’s a way. Yes, it was. That’s what it 

Mike: is. It’s literally, you just eat meat. Yeah. And nothing, there can’t be nothing else, 

Scott: honestly, unless I’ve misinterpreted it.

I’m going to Google this one because 

Mike: yeah, look 

Scott: into it. And that’s, it’s ridiculous. Even dogs don’t just eat meat. So it’s, yeah, it’s crazy. It’s crazy. 

Mike: Anyway, we are genetically linked to dinosaurs and dinosaurs once just ate meat. So therefore we should eat meat. Just think about it.

Scott: Yeah. If you 

Mike: don’t think 

Scott: about it, it makes sense. Yeah. But don’t, Mike, that you can get all your protein from broccoli. There’s 

Mike: that too. That’s true. So maybe I should just eat broccoli then. 

Scott: Yeah. That would be good. If I got imagine that as a debate, like a hardcore vegan for as in the health benefits of a vegan diet versus.

It’s a one of the carnivore diet. That would be a, yeah, I don’t think there’d be, I would go 

Mike: vegan as long as I could supplement with a couple of things way before I would do it. Carnivore diet. That’s for sure. 

Scott: Yeah, me too. A hundred percent. What’s quite funny my is that we haven’t covered anything that I was actually going to talk to you about this show.

That’s how these things go, right? 

Mike: Is you just get off on. Tangents and then you go, oh shit. That’s been, it’s been 30 minutes. 

Scott: Chad, to offline, I think we might have to do a follow up episode because this one has been I’ll let the listener into what we were going to talk about. Listener we were gonna be talking about workout motivation in Mike’s new book, but we seem to have just had a rant about all things that are wrong with the fitness industry and.

Charltons and fads and dodgy marketing. So it’s been quite good to bitch about it. Very unplanned, but I enjoyed it. ’cause we’re definitely on the same hymn sheet with everything. So I’ll tell you what, Mike, I’ll give you the one question that I ask everyone when they come on the show at the very end, and that’s, what’s the one thing that you know, and now that you wish you knew when you started out.

So let’s say starting out being that time that you. Pen the first book. If you could go and tell 2012, Mike, something, what would it be? 

Mike: And are you thinking more on the fitness side of things personally or life or business or what? Whatever is the biggest thing. I’d say on the training side of things first and foremost, I would say compound exercises and progressive overload.

I never had really understood those things in the past. And they make all the difference in your training diet is obviously energy balance, mac nutrient balance. There’s the 20 percent that gives you the 80 percent in business. I would say be very intolerant of. Badness, basically, because I’ve gone through some interesting evolutions in my businesses with people that I was too generous with, actually, and should have recognized the problems that were not going to get better.

Don’t try to change people. Maybe I could just say it like that. And if you have alignment on core things, that’s great. You’re never going to find someone that you have alignment on everything with. But when you have. Misalignments on core values. Yeah, it’s just not going to change. You can’t change people in my personal life.

God, if I go, if I’m going back to the beginning and nothing immediately jumps to mind, I think I’ve done a decent job. Okay, I’ll say this. I’ll say I would tell myself to not get so consumed with work that, it starts to erode at my marriage. Cause I’ve had problems with my, I would say it’s not my wife.

I understand where I would get so into my work where I would, basically I just would not be there for three weeks. But even if I was physically there sometime, it’s just like I was so in work mode and my wife, Sarah would get upset. Understandably and it never went, into crazy. This is over territory, but it caused problems. So that would have been useful advice. And it doesn’t take that much time. If it’s quality time, in my opinion, to maintain a good relationship, but it does take time and it does take quality time. So another few lessons. 

Scott: Yeah. Love it. Love it. Where’s the main place you want to send the list now? That was quite a poignant discussion. I quite like what he’s got to say. Where are you most? 

Mike: Muscle for life is the hub so that’s just muscle F O R life. com and I have articles there and you’ll find whatever you’ll find all my stuff 

Scott: there.

Yeah, perfect. And I’ll link to that in the show notes and I’ll post your social pages as well. Mike, thank you so much for coming on. I don’t think it’ll be the last time, but I really didn’t really enjoy chatting with you. So thank you so much. Same. Thanks for having me. 

Mike: Hey there, it is Mike again.

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