Staying fit while traveling & advice from Buffett on setting goals

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Hey, Mike here from muscle life. com. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. In this episode, I want to talk about traveling, how to stay in shape while traveling, or at least how to mitigate the damage. I want to talk about cardio, how much cardio you should be doing, how much cardio is too much. And last but not least, I want to talk about an interesting little anecdote and piece of life advice I ran across.

Somewhere in a blog and a book or something. It’s in my notes. So I read it somewhere and it’s from Warren Buffett and it’s related. It’s relating to setting goals and It resonated with me. So I thought I might resonate with you. So we’re gonna go over it All right. So let’s start first with [00:04:00] traveling.

I get asked about this fairly often I’ve written an article about it, but I thought it’d make a good podcast They make good podcast content as well because there’s a good chance you haven’t seen the article So The obvious, the problems with traveling are obvious it’s, it’s hard to, you’re going to be eating out a lot, depending on the trip, you’re going to, be eating in a lot of restaurants, so it’s very hard to know how many calories you’re eating and what your macros are like it can be hard to get into gyms or just stick to your normal workout schedule or impossible and yeah, those are the obvious, those are obviously the two yeah.

Two big problems. And if it’s just like a weekend trip, you only can do in terms of food, you only do so much damage in a weekend. It doesn’t matter if you don’t work out for a few days, but if it’s a few weeks it can be I’ve just heard from, people have emailed me. I’ve been pretty shocked with how much fat, they’re able to gain in a few weeks of overeating and drinking and not working out And then on the flip side that’s gone one end of the spectrum and then [00:05:00] you know and somewhere more maybe in the middle would be people that let’s say they had to go on a business type of trip for a couple weeks and they It wasn’t, they’re not eating a ton of food or drinking a ton of alcohol But it’s just how do you fit in workouts and how do you?

Try to keep your food under control. So let’s talk about the diet point here first. It depends on what you’re wanting to accomplish when you’re traveling. If you’re cutting and you want to continue losing weight. You’re really going to have to you’re going to have to make a very simple meal plan to follow.

It’s really the easiest way to do it. And when you land, you’re going to have to go then go stock up on those foods, keep them in the refrigerator in your room and really just eat those meals. You’re going to have to avoid eating out. You could probably work in something like Chipotle because, It’s, they post their calories and macros online, which they’re not going to be 100 percent accurate because it depends on how much stuff people are actually putting in your bowl or burrito, whatever.

But even you can add a little bit to those numbers just to pad [00:06:00] them and be okay. But if you’re eating out in restaurants I’ve spoken about this, been written about this before you just really don’t know what’s in your food. There’s of course exceptions in terms of certain dishes.

I guess you could be a bit more accurate in guesstimating, but many times you don’t know how much oil, how much butter and oil butter cream. Are added to a lot of different dishes, of course, because it just makes things taste very good. If you are going to be cutting, then, you’re going to want to, you’re going to want to, you’re going to want to, Yeah.

A lot of things you can just buy in a grocery store, essentially. Greek yogurt, nuts, fruit you can make salads. You can have like just the the, whatever ingredients are going to be using and then the dressing separate. And it’s not very exciting, but it gets the job done.

You’re probably also going to, that means that you’re going to have to play with your meal timing, where if you’re, let’s say people are going to be going out, you have to go to a lunch, Yeah. At some restaurant or whatever you have to plan and you’re not gonna be eating at the [00:07:00] restaurant because it’s just you know You’re not gonna be able to know what you’re actually eating Then you’re gonna have to eat your food either before or after to bring in some Tupperware So just takes a little bit of planning.

I’ve done it before And it’s not that big of a deal, you just think ahead, you make a simple little meal plan beforehand, and then when you land, you go to Whole Foods or whatever, you get what you need and have, that’s where something also like six pack bags, something like that, one of their products can be helpful, which is a, it’s like a duffel bag with slots For that comes with containers for food.

So something like that is helpful as well because then you can take it with you and have it, wherever throughout the day, wherever you are. If you’re in one location, you can just have it there. Or even if you’re, out and about, you can just have it in your car and it keeps your, it’s insulated.

Something like that is helpful. cutting. If you’re not going to do that, then I would say don’t even try to cut while you’re traveling. Personally, I tend to just go with a maintenance type of diet. Really, when I’m traveling, I’m trying to [00:08:00] game either trying to not gain any weight.

just trying to come back and carry on basically in, in terms of my weight, whatever I’m doing before I travel or if it’s if I, or I will just basically accept that I’m going to gain some weight, but I have a ceiling on it. So my wife’s from Germany, so I’ve been over to Europe quite a few times and over the holidays, I allow myself five pounds.

Basically when I. When I weigh myself every morning and when I’m Consistently, like after a few days, I’m five pounds heavier than when I arrived, then that’s when I stopped because it’s not all fat. Obviously, if I’m eating more food, my muscles gonna be holding more water, more glycogen.

And that’s what I, at that point, then I just bring my food and take down to where I know where my maintenance level is. And you can do something like that as well. And that’s also so then if I hit that point after about two weeks or so, which I generally don’t even like to be gone longer than that.

But the last trip was pretty, pretty long. It was like a three week trip, which is just [00:09:00] too long for me. But after two weeks, I had gained those five pounds. So my final week was less food. But I kind of pace myself. So I’m not, I don’t show up and just start eating everything and, eat 10, 000 calories a day for four days and then be up five pounds and quit.

I just eat a bit more than I normally would. The dinners are a bit bigger. My breakfast are usually small. I’m just not you. I’m not at home. I come here to the office. And so whatever I’m eating is here at the office, I’m not going to be cooking anything elaborate. But if I’m over there, then I’m eating breakfast.

And that works as well. We’re then also just psychologically you’re prepared to gain weight, which if you’re used to staying lean, you do have to just accept, you have to, it’s not, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter how balanced, balanced you are about it mentally.

Nobody, when you stay lean, nobody likes to get fatter. But if you weigh that against you’re gonna go enjoy yourself. You’re gonna eat a bunch of good food you don’t normally eat. You’re going to get fatter, whatever. You just come back, you diet for two or three weeks and then it’s gone and it’s worth it.

And that’s a much better [00:10:00] approach than just going I don’t go, I go there just knowing I’m going to get fatter as opposed to going there trying to tell myself like, no, I’m going to be really good. I’m not going to gain any fat or maybe just a little bit, but then I can just, I, three or four days of deficit and I’m going to be, I’m back to normal.

I don’t go there with that because then with that mentality, because then if I do start overeating or if I do start gaining fat, then just creates more anxiety about it because I really, I didn’t want to, but maybe I will, I just decide from the beginning, yeah, I’m going to go get fatter basically, and then I’m going to come back and then I’m going to die for a few weeks and I’m going to undo it and that’s going to be that.

I will say though I recommend that you don’t. Go overboard with this and going overboard, the easy way to go overboard is eat a lot of fatty foods and drink a lot of alcohol, which is what a lot of people like to do when they are, just on vacation. And the reason why is because and you’re probably familiar with this if you’re familiar with my work.

Is that [00:11:00] dietary fat is stored very easily as body fat carbohydrates not so much and protein really not so much. So if you, when you’re in a calorie surplus, if that surplus is coming from protein, carbohydrates or fat, You’re going to gain fat regardless, but you’re going to gain fat the quickest if it’s from dietary fat.

And then if you add alcohol on top of that, then the rate at which you’re going to gain fat is accelerated because alcohol blunts fat oxidation, which means that the when you’re drinking alcohol, your body is storing that body fat even more efficiently. Essentially, I’ll link an article down below in the description if you want to read more about that.

And, just as a little aside, you can drink alcohol fairly regularly and still do well in the gym and still lose fat. But again, you should check out the article that I wrote on it because you have to do it. You have to do it correctly. You’re not gonna be drinking every day, obviously, but you could drink some alcohol, let’s say once a week.

And if you’re smart with your diet and you and you don’t overdo it. You will [00:12:00] be totally fine in terms of losing weight, but if you want to gain rate, gain weight very quickly, eat a lot of fatty foods and drink a lot of alcohol. I’ve seen, I’ve known people, I know people that have gone even like I know one dude who went for a weekend to New York and just ate food basically all day, lots of fatty food tons of calories and ton of them from dietary fat and was drinking alcohol.

A lot of alcohol every day and he came back, it was like three days and he came back like 12 pounds heavier. Now he holds a lot of water so obviously he didn’t gain 12, 12 pounds of fat, but there was a good chunk of fat there. I don’t know what the maximum amount of fat your body can synthesize in a day is, but I’m sure he hit it.

I would guess he probably gained five pounds of fat in three days. Which is, that’s pretty impressive that plus a bunch of water and bloat and stuff and he was like 12 pounds up. Just beware if you’re going to eat it, [00:13:00] if you’re going to be in large calorie surplus every day, and it’s going to be from a lot of it’s from dietary fat and you’re going to add alcohol, you’re going to gain a lot of fat and it’s going to, you’re going to gain it very quickly.

Another thing I really like to do when I travel just to kinda keep things in check is I reduce my meal frequency. Meaning that if I’m here, just doing my normal daily grind I’m eating, eh, every few hours just cause I enjoy it, it’s not necessary, obviously, for building muscle, losing fat or anything like that.

But I mainly just keeps my energy level stable, actually. And I don’t really get hungry. I don’t when I haven’t eaten food in a while, but I’ll feel a little bit empty and sometimes just a little bit lower energy. So by having food every few hours and you. It just keeps the energy levels nice and stable.

So I’m traveling, though, I will eat. Normally, what I’ll do is I’ll skip breakfast unless I’ll do. I’ll do one large meal a day, essentially. And then little supplementary meals. [00:14:00] So it’s normally not breakfast. It’s normally dinner. So normally skip breakfast. And I’ll eat a light lunch and then it’ll be a bigger dinner or maybe lunch will be a medium sized meal and then a bigger dinner.

I just make sure that I hit my protein every day, which is I just stay around a gram per pound. That’s just when you’re training Regularly, I would say 0. 8 grams per pound would be the bare minimum that you’d want. Around one gram is you’re totally fine. And when you’re in a calorie deficit I like to go a little bit higher.

I like to go up to 1. 2 grams or so, 1. 1 per pound of body weight. And those numbers are most relevant to people that are relatively lean. Someone that’s overweight or extremely overweight could stick to something like a gram per pound of lean mass and be fine. But, so when I’m traveling, I’m like thinking with hitting my protein numbers, which protein powder helps a lot for that.

I always have protein powder with me when I’m traveling because Then I can supplement with 50 to let’s say I don’t like supplementing more than 7075 grams a [00:15:00] day because it starts to upset my stomach. So 50 grams a day from powders like my standard when I’m even when I’m here, I’m gonna be doing 50.

Yeah, 50. I’d say 50 to 70 grams a day, depending on what’s going on for the day. So I like to have powder with me when I travel because it’s just convenient for that purpose. So like maybe I’m going to do, maybe that will be my breakfast for instance. It’s just a couple of scoops of protein and water. And I, again, I don’t wake up hungry.

I don’t really get hungry. So it’s more just like getting a little bit of food in me. It gives me a little bit of energy. And then at lunch I’ll have some protein. So like I’m going into dinner, I like to go into dinner having eaten about a hundred grams of protein because then I only have to eat. Or maybe 120 and obviously if, if it’s a few days where my protein is a bit lower than one gram, it’s, again, it’s not a big deal if I’m around 0.

8, I’m totally fine. What I wouldn’t do is completely explode my macros for no reason and eat, forget to eat protein, eat like 40 grams in a day and just eat a ton of carbs and fat. I wouldn’t do that. I always keep my protein, [00:16:00] for me, I weigh 190 pounds. It’s, I’m never eating less than 100 and, 50, 160 grams a day and my, it would be normally upwards of 200 or so, it’s like my normal intake.

So I’m, what I’m doing is I’m essentially saving a lot of my calories and I’ve talked about this before in terms of cheat meals. This is something you can do. You don’t have to be traveling to do this. It’s just a nice way. to be able to go enjoy a big dinner or it could be a big bread, whatever a big meal, eat a lot of calories without going way over for the day, essentially.

So I’m saving a lot of, I’m saving basically all my carbs and fat or a large amount of my carbs and fat for that one meal. And it depends. Like I was in New York recently and one night we ate at this really good restaurant called Per Se and they only do they, they do, they have a vegetarian tasting menu and a vegetarian.

Just a regular, omnivorous tasting menu. And there are nine courses with some inter course things. And so my wife got the vegetarian when I got the [00:17:00] other one, but my wife weighs like 96 pounds. She doesn’t eat very much food. She can’t eat very much food. So each of her courses, she like had, there’s already small.

Cause it’s obvious, those are nine big courses, but she only ate maybe half of each and a couple of them she thought were, she just wasn’t that into. So I ended up eating I don’t know, 15 courses of food plus random little things in between plus bread. Plus I eat so much food. It was absurd.

So something like that, obviously like Heather has a lot of calories. But I have noticed that, if I, Look at that day. So it’s New York where I’m doing a lot of walking, which is something I’m going to get to in a minute. It’s also a good little strategy and I’m, I really am just eating protein.

I had a salad for lunch. I had some vegetables, whatever, just saving all my calories for this dinner. And then in burning energy too. And I find that I can do things like that. And yeah, my weight’s a little bit up the next day, of course even just from water retention. But over the course of the next few days.

My [00:18:00] body is totally back to normal and this also relates to, to, to my body weight set point, which I’ve written about, which would actually make a good podcast to as well. I’ll link an article down below if you want to check it out. But if you want to just wait, I’ll talk about an upcoming podcast where I stay pretty lean just around the year.

I’m about about 8 percent probably, okay. It’s hard to caliper when you start getting under 10 and get it accurate. Is it 8? Is it 8. 5? Is it 7. 5? It’s hard to say. But I stay pretty lean and at this point this has become my body’s set point in that this has become its default.

It’s it takes You know, consistent, deliberate overeating for me to really gain fat no, a noticeable amount of fat and hold on to it. I can do these like real acute overfeeds now if once a week, let’s say, and it doesn’t change my, my, my body and I talk about why in the article and I can talk about it, playing podcasts.

But anyways, so when I’m traveling, I have my one meal plan for that day. What’s my big meal. I’m going to save my [00:19:00] calories for that meal. If it’s a big lunch, that means that I, it’s going to be a lot of calories at lunch and then I’m not going to be doing a big dinner. My dinner, then I might even skip dinner, depending how big lunch is.

Or I might just have some protein, even if I’m in a restaurant. It’s just, that my normal lunch of like salad and protein becomes my dinner now. So this is also this playing with meal frequency thing just is a little segue into intermittent fasting. I do like to intermittent, just use intermittent fasting when I’m traveling.

And if you’re not familiar with it, I’ll link an article down below and just explain briefly. Basically the, there are different protocols for it, but what you’re doing is for every 24 hours you are not eating food for a large number of them and you have a short window in which you eat your food and it’s relatively short.

There are different types of protocols like a certain IF protocols would call for 20 hours of fasting and that means really no food, no calories. Very few [00:20:00] calories. If you wanted to have, let’s say 30 calories of half and half in your morning coffee That’s fine, but you couldn’t have toast, so you’re not eating food you’re keeping your insulin at B at a baseline level and This is it’s it’s pretty trendy these days it was very trendy a year or two ago and it really hit the bodybuilding scene and it’s There are health benefits to fasting.

There are certain physiological processes that only occur when the body is, when insulin is at a baseline level. So there, I think that there is something to be said for even if you’re not doing it every day. I don’t do, use IF on an everyday basis because I don’t really like it like that much just in terms of personal, of my eating patterns.

I don’t like having to eat large meals, which you have to when you IF, if you eat a fair amount of calories every day, because there’s a point where it just slows me down. If I’m here at work, I don’t like having to eat, let’s say a thousand calorie lunch, let’s say break my fast with a thousand calorie lunch [00:21:00] because mentally I’m just going to probably be a little bit foggy.

Because I forget the name of the hormone, but when you eat food, your body releases a hormone that induces sleepiness and the more you eat, the more it releases and that’s why something big meals can make you feel tired. But some people do like I F and it totally works. You don’t, you don’t have to be eating protein every few hours to maintain muscle.

You can fast for 20 hours a day and then Four hours of eating and be totally fine the protocol I like the most is Martin Burkhand’s lean gains protocol the most it’s most applicable for fitness people You fast for 16 hours, and you eat you have an 8 hour eating window and again I explain in the article down below And so I like to, I’ll use that when I travel where I’m going to be fasting, let’s say I’m going to be skipping breakfast and I’m going to be breaking my fast at lunch.

And let’s say noon. So the night before I stopped eating it. 8, let’s say I’m done dinner, 8, 9, no more food. I’m fasting to the next day through to [00:22:00] 12, 1. Just drinking water, walking, if I’m traveling, walking around, doing what I’m doing. And then I, now I’m going to be eating from 1.

Again, I have that window now from 1 till about 9. And in that window, I’m breaking the fast. Usually, again, when I’m traveling, it’s normally a dinner thing. That’s my big meal, so it’s like a smaller meal. That I’m going to break it with and then maybe some protein somewhere in the middle in there and then another smaller meal and then I’ll have my big meal and that’s it.

That’s a great way to keep, it helps keep your calories under control. And if you do fine with fasting, I do completely fine with it. Meaning that some people, they get very hungry when they fast and it’s very uncomfortable. I don’t, I’m fine when I fast. So if you’re fine when you fast, it’s a, it’s an easy way to just cause you only can really comfortably eat so many calories in an eight hour period or if you wanted to fast longer, the reason why Burkhand cuts it off at 16 hours of fasting is that research shows that a muscle breakdown really starts to accelerate at that point.

The amount of energy that you’re like the amount of the. the glucose that [00:23:00] your body needs. A larger portion of that starts coming from muscle tissue at that 16 hour point. So that’s why he cuts it off there. And then you stimulate protein synthesis by eating protein. So that’s why I personally also do the same thing.

I’ll fast from, I don’t know, anywhere from 14 to 16 hours. And then I have that eating window. So let’s talk about exercise, working out working out and traveling obviously can be a pain but if you plan ahead, like if you stay in a hotel that’s near a gym if you make that a, one of your criteria when you’re choosing a hotel that helps a lot because then, you’re on your own schedule.

You can wake up early and you can go your workout done. That’s what I like to do. It’s possible if it’s not possible and your hotel has a gym, it’s obviously going to be limited, but you can do things. What I’m looking at, especially if I’m just going away for, less than a week or whatever is I don’t.

necessarily have to be doing the same workouts that I’d normally doing, but I want to do something. I just want to not only burn energy, but burn up some of the [00:24:00] glycogen in my muscles, which gives me some leeway with my carbs that I’m eating. It gives my body something to do with the carbs other than store them as body fat because carbohydrates converted into glycogen and the muscles can hold a lot of glycogen.

So when you deplete them, the body has as a priority, it’s going to replenish those glycogen stores before it starts storing carbohydrate as body fat. So even if the hotel gym sucks and a bunch of light dumbbells and some machines, and all you can do is a bunch of high rep stuff. Ironically, high rep stuff is good for burning out glycogen stores.

So don’t think that’s worthless, that does actually have value. And also just even putting your muscles under any sort of semi decent load is going to help you just maintain your strength. And in terms of the number of workouts that you can do to maintain, you don’t have to, you could maintain your current muscle and strength on no more than two workouts a week.

Maybe even one, maybe one full body. It’d be a real [00:25:00] pain in the ass workout. It’s going to be long. It’s going to be really hard, but if you had a proper, if you had access to a proper gym, so you have access to some heavy dumbbells and a good barbell. But just and plates you can, you could do just like an upper day, which would be just your upper body, a lot of your pressing and you could do a lower day.

And people normally would combine their squats and deadlift, even though the deadlift is more a back exercise than it is the legs. But most people would like to combine that on the lower. So you’re doing all your pressing, you’re doing your arms on your upper and you’re doing your dead lifting and your legs on your lower.

And you can stick to your heavyweight lifting. Do anywhere from three to six sets. I would say personally, what I would probably do is I’d probably do probably Shhh Six sets for either my chest pressing or my shoulder pressing, depending on for me, I would do shoulders because my chest, I don’t really, I just want to maintain the chest that I have, but I would like to have a little bit more in my shoulders.

But if it’s the other way around, if guy, [00:26:00] if you’re still trying to really build a chest, then, do a bit more chest and do, I would do three sets for smaller groups like like my arms, like biceps, triceps, and then on the lower day. I would do, again, I would either do six sets of squats or yeah, I’d probably do it probably about six sets of heavy leg.

It doesn’t have to necessarily be all squats. It could be like back squats, front squats, or it could be squats, like press or whatever. I would do three sets of deadlifts and then I do some accessory pulling work and probably some accessory leg work as well. Three sets, maybe in a little bit of a higher rep range.

And again, these are tougher workouts. They take they take a bit of time. But that’s all you, let’s say no more than an hour and a half per workout, but that’s only two workouts. You do that in a week and you are going to come back from your, if as long as your food intake isn’t, as long as you don’t dramatically under eat in this period or eat no protein or something, you’re going to come back and, you probably have lost nothing in terms of performance.

And I just noticed, sorry about the light back there. It’s early. So now the sun is blasting. Anyways. [00:27:00] Now, if you can’t, if there’s no hotel gym, you can’t get to a gym, you can just work out in your hotel room. You can do body weight stuff. You can do push ups. You can bring a pull up bar what is it called, like total gym bar.

You just pack it in this little box, take it with you, install it in your room so you can do pull ups. You can do leg stuff like lunges and you can do air squats and pistol squats. And you can do things like push ups. burpees and you can even get one of those TRX training things and set that up in your room.

So there are even things you can do in that. And again, yeah, if you’re in, if you’re right, if you’re like me and you do a lot of heavy weightlifting, doing a, doing body weight workouts every day is, it’s not the same, but it does burn energy and it does burn glycogen and it does just keep your muscles tells them.

They’re still needed here. And I found that getting workouts in, it really does also help with preventing. It does. It helps with mitigating the damage, preventing too [00:28:00] much. Weight gain because I’ve gone both ways when I’ve traveled, I’ve gone, I’ve been out of the country for several weeks and not been able to, not taking my own advice.

And I noticed that I gained fat faster and I, and of course when I come back, it takes longer, it takes several weeks to get back to my normal weights and just get everything feeling normal again. But if just doing. a couple big heavy workouts a week. I gained fat. I’m able to eat more food for longer periods to gain my, my, my allotted amount of fat.

And I maintain my performance much better. Like I come back and Within a week or two, I’m back to normal in terms of my weights, and I’m just continuing. So it is worth it if you can make it happen to get into a gym for, even if it’s one day. Like I said, you could do a whole body workout.

It’s going to be tough, and you know what to do. You have your big compounds, you’re going to do your pressing, you’re going to do your pulling and squatting all in the same day. And that is worth it though. Don’t think that’s worthless. And [00:29:00] just one last point on that is even if you’re gonna be out of town for a couple months I would say the same thing.

It’s worth it. One to two workouts a week and you can maintain your strength, you can maintain your muscle, it’s gonna buy you some extra room to eat food. So don’t think that it’s hopeless if, I, the guy I work out with actually every morning, he has to, he has a company in Europe and he has to travel there.

for several months at a time. Now, like just it can be random. It can be called over and then he’s got to go and just on a, two months he could be gone or even three months. And but on a workout or two a week, he could, he now I’ve been telling him to do this. He doesn’t do it, but he could because he thought that, if he can’t be in the gym with me four or five days a week, or if he can’t be in a gym four or five days a week, then, who cares?

But Just one to two days a week would be enough to, so he could then come back and not have to, spend a month or spend three weeks or whatever, getting back to where he was at. If you’re going to be out of town for extended period, I really recommend that you figure out how you can get into the gym at least two days a week.

If you can do [00:30:00] three days, then you could do something like push, pull legs, or you could do chest and tries back and by his legs and shoulders. If you can get in the gym more, get in the gym more, but even if you only can do one day a week don’t think that it’s not worth anything.

Another little thing I like to do when I’m traveling is I’ll keep my my hit cardio and my high intensity interval cardio in. Depending on I guess I like to keep it in just in general. I’ll do it at night after we’re done doing everything or whatever. And I guess it depends on the night.

Obviously, if it’s going to be a late night, then I’m not gonna be doing it. I would do it in the morning, but just even 20, 25 minutes of hit cardio, which you can do in pretty much any hotel gym, cause they’re going to have some cardio stuff. Also just helps. It helps. burn energy. And I’d mentioned walking around a lot before.

There’s a study I had just seen recently. It was like they had taken like 100 obese people and they had one group do a resistance training program, a light, light resistance training program, of course. And they had another group do a cardio program and they had another group just be more [00:31:00] active in their day to day.

Life take the stairs instead of the elevator walk instead of drive short distances and things like that and the people that were just active in their day to day lost just about as much weight as the other two groups Because of course it burns energy, but that’s something to keep in mind when you travel my, my, what I’m trying to do when I’m traveling is I’m trying to burn a lot of energy.

If I’m going to be eating a lot of food, I’m trying to just burn a lot of energy. So obviously if I’m doing any sort of resistance training workouts, that burns energy and it also maintains muscle and strength. And then I like to do hit cardio because that burns not just energy, but it also is, it burns fat more effectively and it doesn’t take much, just 20 minutes or so.

And in the day to day I’m trying to walk a lot. If again if I can take stairs, I’ll take the stairs instead of the elevator, these little things, they really do matter. And it might seem a little bit obsessive, but it’s really not, it’s just being smart. It’s if I’m, if there’s no [00:32:00] reason to, if I can just make little tweaks like that.

And if it can, if it only means over the course of an entire trip, let’s say over a week, you lose, if you lose quote unquote a few hours, it’s something like, You could just wake up, sleep 20 minutes less and do some hit cardio instead. Like that 20 minutes of sleep doesn’t actually matter.

Once you’re awake, you don’t notice any difference sleeping 20 minutes less. So yeah, I’m just trying to, I’m trying to keep my energy expenditure high. So then my big meals have less they just, they have less. I can maintain my weight on more calories. And another little this is this is the least important of all the advice would be if you can do a workout before a meal again, this kind of comes back to depleting glycogen stores.

So if you were going to, if you could get into the hotel gym and just do a high rep whole body type of routine for 20 minutes and just burn out glycogen stores before a meal, it’s, it Again, it’s not a huge thing, but if you can, then it basically you’re creating a carb [00:33:00] sink. You’re depleting your body of its carbohydrate stores, which are glycogen.

So now when you go eat a bunch of carbs, the priority is going to be refilling those glycogen stores before storing fat. So that’s something I don’t. Don’t like, you don’t have to get obsessive about that and think that, oh shit, it’s five and dinner’s at six. I gotta go.

I gotta run. I gotta go do my, my my high rep workout. But if you happen to be at the hotel, for instance, and you have some, you’re to have downtime before dinner it’s not a bad idea to go just burn up your glycogen stores before you’re going to go out and eat a bunch of food. Alright, so that’s it really on the travel advice.

That’s all I’ve got, but if you do all that stuff, you’ll find that it’s very, it’s actually very easy to maintain weight while traveling. It’s very easy to lose weight too, if you’re just willing to do what I was talking about in terms of you have to just keep your food intake, tightly regulated, but it’s very easy to maintain weight without having to count all your calories and count your macros and enjoy and still be able to enjoy yourself.

You can’t, obviously gorge every day, but you can still eat food [00:34:00] you like every day and have nice meals. You don’t have to, you don’t have to put a ton of time in the gym to do that. So I hope that helps. That ran a bit longer than I had anticipated. So I’m going to save the cardio how much cardio to do for the next podcast.

But I’m going to touch just shortly on this Warren Buffett advice. I think, I thought it was pretty cool. So the notes I had here was so this was I guess it was advice that Warren Buffett had given an employee. And, The Buffett wanted to help this employee get ahead in, in the, in their work life.

So he suggested that the person list the 25 most important things you want to accomplish in the next few years. And then had the employee circle what were the top five and prioritize those on a smaller list. And. So then the person had, okay, here’s our top five and here’s our 25. And so then Buffett asked the person, now those, taking those five out, what are you going to do with the remaining 20?

And then, so the person said, okay, so like the top five, yes, those are the ones that I really need to focus on. But then those other [00:35:00] 20 are they’re close. They’re almost as important to me. So I’ll work on them. Here and there, I’ll try to fit them in when I can as long as I’m making progress on my top five and buffet advised the person to do something else.

He said, no that’s not what you want to do. What all those 20 the ones that you didn’t circle, those are your, Avoid at all cost lists, meaning you don’t want it to have anything to do with all those. Your entire focus is now just on those top five things. And that resonates with me particularly because I guess being an entrepreneur.

It’s easy to have ideas. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Yes, ideas have value, but execution is really where it at, where it’s at. You can have the greatest ideas ever, but if you can’t execute, nobody cares. And you can have mediocre ideas, execute them really well and do very well. But I have a long list of things that if I were to make, I could make that list of [00:36:00] 25 different things.

You’re welcome. Cool, like goals, things that I think would be cool to do in my work and produce and whatever. But I have, I guess just discipline myself in this same way where I know that I can only reliably execute a handful of things at a time. It’s, I have a small team of people, we all work hard but there’s only so much that we can do and there’s only so much I can do personally.

For instance I am always working on a book project, a health and fitness book project. I have some product development at Legion. I have a couple always have one to two things coming with muscle for life. And then I have a fiction book project that I’ve been working on. I just, that’s the lowest priority of my list, but it still is on there and I really don’t take on anything else.

I took on this app and so now I’m really maxed out. And of course there’s only, just a time in the day type of thing. But it’s looking at all the possible things you could [00:37:00] do and focusing on what are the, When you have to really pare it down and you have to now not touch anything else that isn’t of those circled, if you were to say five type thing, it forces you to really prioritize your goals and focus on the ones that are going to be most helpful and they’re going to generate the most value.

And that has that’s a valuable lesson that I’ve learned in work and that have all the possible things that I could do. And there are certain things that I would love to. Improve about muscle for life or improve in certain in different projects of mine or but I have to look at with in the order that I’m going to be doing things.

What is going to create the biggest what’s going to, what’s going to help things move the furthest. And when you pair your list of goals down like that it really forces you to look at what’s going to, what’s going to give you the greatest return. And it doesn’t necessarily mean financial return, but what’s going to give you the greatest return, what’s going to create the [00:38:00] greatest result.

And you have to look at it that. Every minute you spend on lower priority goals, lower priority activities, you’re stealing time from the higher priority and the higher value goals and activities. And a good example for that could be like spending too much time on social media, even if it’s for work purposes, I think social media is great.

Obviously I use it and I engage with a lot. I use it to engage with people. I don’t, it’s not like necessarily a huge sales engine for me. It’s more just to stay in touch with people. It’s, it is also a time sink and it’s something where you could sit there on social media all day and feel productive and answer a million messages and talk with all these people.

But should you have spent, six hours doing that or should it have been maybe an hour and then seven hours Writing that next book, for instance, that when it is finally done is going to, going to produce so much more value and, some people might say, oh, on the social media stuff, what if, you might come across the perfect person [00:39:00] that is has just the right connections or really resonates with your work and really helps you jump ahead and introduces you to someone that is big in your field and blah, blah, blah.

Yeah that’s possible. Something like that could happen, but I don’t like to put my time. or I don’t like to, I don’t like to put any significant amount of time into something that is a maybe I much rather put my time into something that’s guaranteed to produce a lot of benefit. And that, that is gonna, that’s always, at least my experience is always the stuff that’s just a lot of work.

Instead of, spending a lot of time over here on social media, hoping that I meet somebody, I would rather spend that time producing, writing the next book and making it as good as possible. And getting that out there and then, I think it’s more likely also that someone that would be a very valuable connection to me is I’m much more likely to meet that person because they pick up a book of mine and read it and like it as opposed to, I answer a tweet of theirs and then somehow they go, Ooh, I should really look into [00:40:00] this guy and that also, I think this advice applies to, to just every day living as well.

I time spent doing anything. It’s not that I think that time spent not working is a waste of time. Not at all. There are other areas of other aspects of life, of course, that and I’ve known plenty of people that were very strong in their career and they made, make a ton of money and they’re very respected in their career.

But, they’re Yeah. love life is hopeless. Maybe whether they’re married, whether their marriage is in shambles or maybe they’re divorced now and they can’t get anything going and again in that area. Or they have they don’t really have any sort of friends to rely on. They only have their little business world or whatever.

So yes, there is a something to be said for that, but. But there’s also something to be said for sacrifice if if some people, I know people that are totally fine just living what you’d call a quote unquote balanced life where they do, they do their work and they’re not really trying to become [00:41:00] very professional at anything.

They’re not trying to acquire any. skills or become really expert in anything. They’re just doing their thing. And then they like to have their tons of free time. And so they can hang out with their friends on these days. And then they have plenty of time maybe with their girlfriend or wife on these days.

And they have their weekends where they’re going to watch the sports and they’re going to do this. That I know people that, that are, they seem to be pretty, pretty okay with that. And I don’t, I guess there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. That’s not me, But then there are people though that have ambition and want to accomplish something and in terms of work or career or profession or whatever.

And if that’s you, then My, my experience and this is also just in knowing a lot of people, over the years, I just have met quite a few self made millionaires and just see how they live and how they work is it requires sacrifice. There’s just there’s just no way around it. There was a Ted [00:42:00] talk on this actually.

It was I think it was like, why you’re, why Ted? Hold on. Let

me see. Yeah. It’s a guy from a guy named Larry Smith. Why you will fail to have a great career kind of a funny title, but the message was along these lines and that it requires so much sacrifice to really, cause you just, you need a lot of time to really make anything great happen to really get really good at something to build a company to, and that means that where are you going to pull that time from?

Which activities. So just any, if you have a strong desire to make anything happen, just know it’s going to take a lot more than, even if that was your nine to five type of things take a lot more than that. There will not be time to watch, six TV shows a week and to go to three birthday parties and to spend the weekends [00:43:00] on the beach.

And you it, There’s just if you didn’t have to sleep, then you could do that because then you could just work instead of sleeping. And then you could have all the fun you want. But otherwise it just takes, it just, you have to make that sacrifice. And for me, the sacrifice has been I spend a bit of time with my family every night, maybe an hour or so.

And, but I don’t, I just, the sacrifice for me has really been friends. I don’t have much of a social life outside of the friends that I work with. And that’s my choice. And I’m totally fine with that because I know that I know why I’m doing it. And so to tie it back to what I was talking about earlier, it’s just a matter of every minute that you spend doing this is this is how I I’m speaking from my own, this is how I apply it to myself.

Every minute. that I spend not working on one of my six or seven things that I’m juggling at any time. I just want to make sure that I, that’s a minute. Spent doing something that at least does have a similar amount of life value. That’s why I don’t really [00:44:00] watch much TV. I watch one TV show at a time and I watch it when I’m doing my cardio just because, it makes the cardio go by and it’s a good excuse to sit there for 25 minutes or whatever and watch a TV show.

Otherwise, I’m not watching TV. I don’t read much. fiction. I read most of my reading is for work purposes. I do throw a fiction book in here, there in here and there. But I’m not just randomly hanging out with people. A lot of this, I don’t surf the internet at all. I don’t bother with reddit.

I don’t serve you too. I just don’t do any of that because those activities really have no value to me where I could put that time into something that does have value. The activities that do have value to me outside of work would be, I like it. Friday nights. I like going to dinner with my wife.

Saturday. I like spending time with my wife and son. I usually take about the whole Saturday and then Sunday at work. But I don’t like, for instance, hobbies. I haven’t played golf for six weeks or so because I normally play on Sunday afternoons, but I’ve been working like I work Sunday morning and Sunday night and play golf in the afternoon.

But I’ve [00:45:00] been working instead because I have a lot of things and I want to get these things done. So anyways, I don’t wanna go on and on about this, but really it’s just the point of, just, if you really look at how you spend your time, and If you really just prioritize a handful of things and figure out how you can put the maximum amount of time and just cut out activities that don’t really have that much value to you, if it’s not really that important to you, if you don’t really need that much downtime, I don’t really believe in burn the burnout type of I don’t get burned out because I stay productive and I think staying productive prevents burnout.

Now, of course, if you’re, yeah. Just doing activities that you hate, then yeah you’re going to burn out. But if these are your goals, then I just that’s not going to be a problem. And don’t, I know that there’s a lot of ideas out there about, don’t overwork, don’t work too much.

And I think that’s bullshit. I think if you are working on the right stuff, you can, I’ve had many days where by the end of the day, I’ve probably worked [00:46:00] 114 hours, give or take. And I’m totally energized. And I’m like, I, it was a great day. I never am ending like going, Oh God, thank God it’s over.

So yes, that is that’s everything I have to say on that. Hopefully you find that helpful and that’s it for this episode of the podcast. Next week, I’ll talk about the cardio point, how much cardio to do and how much too much and talk about some other stuff too. I will see you then and before I close up here, I just wanted to let you know that over at legionsupplements.

com we just released a couple new shirts having fun with these shirts actually have a. I’m going to be serving the next couple and they are, one is it says it doesn’t get easier. You just get better. And the other is eat clean, lift heavy. And we do them with some cool type of graphic, actually somewhat like what I’m wearing actually.

So that’s, this is one of our shirts. So if you like these types of shirts, go over to legionsupplements. com and check out our two new ones. And also it’s a cool. thing that’s up and coming. [00:47:00] I think it’s going to take a few months really before it’s live. It’ll be at least three months, hopefully not six months, but we’ll have to see.

And that is we’re going to be over at Legion. We want to get into apparel for real. Like the t shirts are cool and these are good quality t shirts and they fit well and, I like them. But I want to do some real apparel type stuff. Stuff that is performance type apparel that would be comparable to Nike or Under Armour.

And I have the perfect person to work with an industry expert works for a very large clothing company and he’s consulting me on it and he just actually designed an entire line of active wear himself and launched that for this company. So he’s like the perfect guy to work with on this.

And I’m pretty excited about that. We’re going to be, we’re going to be starting with some core items, some performance shirts for men and women, and then we’re going to get in some novelty stuff, some train pants for men, some leggings for women. And we’re going to do it right. These are going to be similar to supplements.

There is, there’s a bit of an opportunity to create not just high quality clothing that [00:48:00] is, has good material and is a good fit. And even some performance stuff like sweat wicking. I actually didn’t know, like I thought sweat wicking, I thought it was bullshit, I thought it was just marketing.

But if you use the right polyester blend, it actually, it will wick sweat and keep you dry. Who knew and and for instance, like you can put, you can weave silver into your shirts. Lululemon does this, which is anti antibacterial. And so what that means is you can wear the shirt for more workouts and it’s not going to smell.

It also keeps you from smelling. So there’s some cool things you can do in that regard, but also there’s some cool things you can do in terms of just being responsible with how you make them, the materials that you use being, environmentally responsible fair trade. Working with companies that, that they only, they don’t they don’t have any child labor.

So a, an injury, the brand concepts for a cool and I’ll talk about it more as we get closer, but I’m excited. I’m excited for it. I think it’s going to be fun and it’s gonna be some really high quality stuff. I’ll keep you posted on that, but I’m just there’s a little teaser.

All right, so [00:49:00] I’ll cut it off here and I will see you next week.