Ep. #740: The Best Of Muscle For Life: Beating Back Pain, Rapid Fat Loss Tips, and Motivation for Training Hard

Hello and welcome to the latest and greatest episode of Muscle for Life. I’m Mike Matthews and thank you for joining me today. Now, I have recorded hundreds of episodes of Muscle for Life and I’ve. Talked about a huge variety of things related to health, fitness, lifestyle, mindset, ranging from the basics of diet and exercise, like energy and macronutrient, balance and progressive overload, and training frequency and volume to fads like the ketogenic and carnivore diet and collagen protein to more unfamiliar territories like body weight, set point, and fast.

Cardio and some episodes resonate with my crowd more than others, but all of them contain at least a few key takeaways that just about anyone can benefit from. At least that’s what I tell myself. That’s what helps me sit down in the chair every day and do this, and as cool as that is. It poses a problem for you, my dear listener, especially if you are new here, and that is, ain’t nobody got time for that.

We’re talking about probably a thousand plus hours of content at this point. And while some people actually do make the time to listen to most or even. All of my podcasts, my Whizbang analytics tell me that while many listeners tune in on a regular basis, they don’t catch every installment of Muscle for Life unless they miss out on insights that could help them get.

Even just a little bit better inside and outside the gym because if you just get a little bit better consistently enough, that can add up to big results in the long run. And people have also been telling me that they would like me to do more shorter multi topic episodes like my q and A’s and says you episodes.

And so I got an idea how about. A best of series of podcasts that contains a few of the most practical and compelling ideas, tips, and moments from my most popular episodes. Going all the way back to beginning this way, people who are new in particular can quickly determine if this is the droid they’re looking for, if this podcast is for them or not, and then those who are regulars and enjoy what I’m doing, but just don’t have the time or inclination to listen.

All of my stuff, and I do understand that I don’t take it personally. , you can also then benefit from the discussions and the episodes that you are not listening to in full. And you can also find new episodes to listen to without having to give an hour of your time to determine whether it was worth it or not.

So here we are with the best of Muscle for Life, and in this episode you’ll be hearing. Picked morsels from three episodes. The first is an interview I did with Dr. Stewart McGill, who is one of the preeminent spinal experts in the world on the real causes of back pain and how to fix it. And then you’re gonna hear snippets from a monologue.

That I did called the Three Little Big Things about rapid fat loss. And then the final highlight reel is gonna be from a motivational monologue called Six Lessons for Training Hard, like an MFer. I won’t say it because I resolved to stop swearing on the podcast sometime ago, but I’m breaking the rule in this case.

So if you don’t like naughty words, then just skip the. Third or so of this episode. Also, if you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my v i p one-on-one coaching service because my team and I have helped people of all ages and all circumstances lose fat, build muscle, and get into the best shape of their life faster than they ever thought possible, and we can do the same.

We make getting fitter, leaner, and stronger. Paint by numbers simple by carefully managing every aspect of your training and your diet for you. Basically, we take out all of the guesswork, so all you have to do is follow the plan and watch your body change day after day, week after week and month after month.

What’s more we’ve found. People are often missing just one or two crucial pieces of the puzzle, and I’d bet a shiny shackle, it’s the same with you. You’re probably doing a lot of things right, but dollars to donuts, there’s something you’re not doing correctly or at all that’s giving you the most grief.

Maybe it’s your calories or your macros. Maybe it’s your exercise. Selection. Maybe it’s your food choices. Maybe you’re not progressively overloading your muscles, or maybe it’s something else, and whatever it is, here’s what’s important. Once you identify those one or two things you’re missing, once you figure it out, that’s when everything finally clicks.

That’s when you start making serious progress, and that’s exactly what we do for our clients. To learn more, head over to www.buy legion.com. That’s b y legion.com. V I p and schedule your free consultation call, which by the way is not a high pressure sales call. It’s really just a discovery call where we get to know you better and see if you’re a good fit for the service.

And if you’re not for any reason, we will be able to share resources that’ll point you in the right direction. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more, If you also want to finally stop spinning your wheels and make more progress in the next few months than you did in the last few years, check out my v i P coaching [email protected] legion.com/vip.

So let’s start with the featured parts of my interview with Dr. Stewart McGill on the real causes of back pain and how to. Too many people think getting back pain is really the kiss of death. And you know, no wonder they go to, uh, a therapist who gives them ultrasound and then they go to the next therapist who’s asking them questions about their family and then they go to someone else and they get some goofy core exercise and you know, they keep finding that nothing really works and no wonder they get despondent about all of this.

Yeah. Unfortunately, I have a friend in the gym whose wife went through that. Process it sounds like to some degree. Um, multiple surgeries and I mean, ultimately she may have been working with great people, I’m not sure, but I just would hear about it secondhand of from one person to the next and trying this and trying that and constant pain and, well, I, I, I will bet not once did she get a thorough assessment that informed her of the mechanism of her pain.

And that’s why I wrote my book back. It takes the person through a self-assessment of their pain triggers, and then based on the self-assessment, it then shows them what to not do because they have to first stop the cause to wind down the pain sensitivity, and then what they should do to build the foundation for.

Pain-free activity and, and whatever that goal is, you know, if they wanna play golf or even set another record in power lifting, let let, if I can just tell this story about McKenna stimulation. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the book I wrote called Gift of Injury with Brian Carroll. Brian was a champion power lifter.

He was the only guy that I know. Uh, who had lifted or squatted over a thousand pounds in national inter international competition over 50 times over the years. So that, that’s quite a track record. That’s insane. And you have to, you just have to have, uh, big balls to ever even step underneath weight like that, let alone unrack it.

And it’s, it’s, it’s pretty super. It, it’s astounding. Think of, yeah, if you’re out one millimeter, you just get crushed because you cannot correct a thousand pounds on your back. People don’t realize the precision of that maneuver, but nonetheless, uh, Brian came to me with a split sacrum split front to back.

L five was heavily damaged, uh, his bottom vertebra, and then the two discs were heavily, heavily compromised. They looked just horrible. In fact, we show it in the book at the beginning. I said, I think I can get you out of pain. But then he said, oh, great. And then I, I want to set the next world record again.

And then I remember saying to him, if you were my son, I, I think I would just enjoy not having pain. And, and a few surgeons had told him, you know, he may never get out of pain and whatnot, but with this massive fracture, What I did was I, I took a cadaver, I loaded it with a heavy deadlift type of load. We created the split sacrum, but then I did a kyphoplasty.

So what a surgeon would do is mix up some bone cement, inject it into the vertebrae. and it would set and give a internal casting, if you will, of the vertebra. So the idea was to bear load. So they do this on people with osteoporosis fractures and things like that, but I couldn’t get the end plate to seal, so the disc kept leaking through cracks in the, in the fracture, even though that the bone was stabilized.

So I said to Brian, I, I don’t think that’s going to work. We’re going to do some bone stimulation, which we had some knowledge of from Meno stimulation. So some people think, oh, their body is in this state of deterioration, some goofball clinician. Who should know better. Told them they had degenerative disc disease.

There is no such thing. They don’t have a disease and they’re not degenerating. Quite the contrary. Their body is in the continual state of adapting and healing. It’s just no one had shown them how to facilitate that healing process. I’m curious now if we can segue into your thoughts on back surgery for.

Well, I think I, I think I can, uh, I can guess, but I think it’s worth talking about it. . Yeah. Well, there’s a whole chapter and back mechanic on that. The vast majority of back pain should not be operated on, period. Why does most surgery, when it does work, why does it work? Well, sometimes. Changing the anatomy works, but the surgeon better be darn sure that the tissue they’re going to change is the pain generator.

Sometimes it isn’t, even though on the mri it might look as though it’s a bit odd. If you can prove, and it’s very easy to prove by the way that the pain is from another level, you know that that surgery is going to fail. But here’s the interesting thing that I hope. Anything your viewers or or listeners who are are told, you know, you’ve tried all these things, nothing works.

Surgery is the last thing. It is not. Surgery often works because it’s forced rest. Now think of what I just said. I will get a patient who comes in and say, you know, I have to go and write. That’s kinda a scary thought. Well, it is, they’re addicted to, some of them are addicted to exercise, so they’ll say, I have to ride the elliptical for 20 minutes every day, otherwise I’ll murder my husband or something like that.

And I’ll say, fine, I’m gonna play a game with you. I’m gonna call it virtual surgery. and I, I make a big deal of it. I make them kneel down on one knee and I touched them on the shoulder with a wooden dowel or maybe a kettle bell or something like that. And I’ll say, You’ve just had surgery now, you cannot go to the gym tomorrow and ride the elliptical.

You will spend intervals in bed. You’re gonna get up and go to the toilet, and over the next few weeks, I’m going to give you a progression to restore some basic function. And then once the pain is gone, we’re going to rebuild the deficits in your body so that you can do the things that you wanna do.

Again, now I’m not gonna cut. I am going to play that game of virtual surgery and you’re gonna recover like a post-surgical patient when we do this. And we were very unique in our clinic because all of those patients we saw over the years at the university, we followed up with every patient. If on follow up, we asked the question of those who were told they had no option but surgery.

Doing the plan in the book, 95% of them avoided surgery and were happy for it. Wow. So we then step them through a set of questions that they must check the boxes if they cannot check the boxes. Don’t get surgery. So you know, the surgeon has to show the person the cause of their pain and if the surgeon can’t show them the cause of their pain, they mustn’t have surgery because the cause will remain and then they’ll be back in six months.

Oh, I re herniated my operated disc, or the joint above now has a disc bulge on the same side. So anyway, and then I have to hear some tale of. From a patient who’s now an opioid addict, and it was iatrogenic, it was caused by their clinicians. Wow. What, what are your thoughts on the, on the safety specifically, obviously with the spine of deadlifting and squatting?

Well, you, you, you probably know me well enough to know my, the first two words are outta my mouth, or it depends. , you know, I, I often say, you know, I love squats and deadlifts, and I hate squats and dead. . It all depends on the context. So on one hand, they can reduce the safety of that person in breaking to pain or precisely the opposite.

They can build a more robust system, but it’s all governed by the concept of the biological tipping point. Every system in your body has a tipping point. Think of vitamin D. There’s an easy one. If you don’t have enough vitamin D, you’re sick. If you have too much. It’s poison. There is a sweet spot right at the tipping point.

Now let’s get back to deadlifts and and squats. Another concept is exercises are simply tools. Now, what’s the goal of the exercise? If you can name what the goal is, and then you can say, well, the best tool I have in my trainer’s toolbox is a squat, then, okay, that’s your best tool. But if I said, what about pushing a.

Wow. All of a sudden now we’ve got a different load profile through the body. We’ve got frontal plane strength with sagittal plane strength. We’re on one leg. We’re pushing, we’re getting foot athleticism. So there’s an example where I might have a real discussion about. Programming and how it’s all set up before I can get into something like specifically deadlifting and squatting.

And then I need to ask questions like, what volume are we talking about? What load? What other exercises are you doing? What’s your work life? Are you a fisherman? Are you a construction worker? Are you a truck driver? Are you a computer jockey? What’s your injury history? What’s the. Of progression in terms of the end plates of your spine.

The great squatters and deadlifters are hitting records usually, but not always in their late thirties and early forties because it took that long to build that bone mass. That will allow them, if they are into, uh, high volume, what is the rest schedule to facilitate, uh, optimal tissue adaptation. Then my thought goes.

Let me watch you deadlift and squat. What’s your training form like? Because we both know deadlifting, it’s an incredibly technical exercise, and if trainers would realize that and then, you know, I’ll, I’ll get a, a patient in and, uh, she’s a stay-at-home mom. And she tells me, uh, you know, all my troubles started when I started deadlifting.

And then I’ll say, well, well, show me what you’ve been doing. And then she tells me she’s only been training with the trainer for three months. And that trainer’s got her lifting her body weight from a deficit position after three months. Yeah, that trainer caused her back issues. Definitely damaged her tissues, no question about it.

So they violated the tipping point.

Okay, that’s it for the highlight reel for that episode, and that was originally published in January of 2019. So if you want to listen to the whole thing, you can go back and find it. Or of course you can just search the podcast feed or YouTube channel, or if you’re at legion athletics.com, just search the website for Stewart and it’ll come up.

And now let’s move on to the three little big things about rapid fat loss. Insulin is a hormone that causes muscles, organs, and fat tissue to absorb and use or store nutrients like glucose and amino acids. Lately, this vital hormone has been under vicious attack by health and diet gurus because it also inhibits the breakdown of fat cells and stimulates fat storage.

That is, Insulin tells the body to stop burning fat for energy and to start using and storing the energy being provided by food. This makes sense given what you’ve just learned about Fed in fasted states, insulin tells your body whether it has food to burn or must rely on fat for energy. This also makes insulin an easy target and scape.

Here’s how the story usually goes. High carb diet equals high insulin levels equals burn less fat and store more equals get fatter and fatter. And then as a corollary, low carb diet equals low insulin levels, equals burn more fat and store less equals sta. This is wrong, and the evidence used to sell it is pseudoscience.

Eating carbs does trigger insulin production, and insulin does trigger fat storage, but none of that makes you fatter. Only overeating does. This is why a number of overfeeding studies have confirmed that the only way to cause meaningful weight, Is to eat a large surplus of calories, whether from protein, carbohydrate, or dietary fat.

Without that energy surplus, no amount of insulin or insulin producing foods can significantly increase body fat levels. Another gaping hole in the great insulin conspiracy is the fact that high protein, low carb meals, Can result in higher insulin levels than high carb meals. Research shows that whey protein raises insulin levels more than white bread, and that beef stimulates just as much insulin release as brown rice.

Furthermore, studies show that both protein and carbohydrate generally produce the same type of insulin response. A rapid rise followed by a rapid. Carbohydrate and insulin demons. Also often talk about an enzyme in your fat cells called hormone sensitive lipase, H S L, which helps release fatty acids to be burned.

Insulin suppresses the activity of H S L and thus is believed to promote weight gain. But dietary fat, the current darling of the mainstream health and diet marketing machines suppresses it as well. And thanks to an enzyme called isolation stimulating protein, your body doesn’t need high levels of insulin to store dietary fat as body fat.

You’ve heard me say that as important as energy balance is, it’s not the whole. Especially not when the goal is to improve your body composition. Well, it’s time to hear the rest of the weight loss tail, and this is the final act. Macronutrient. Balance refers to how the calories you eat break down into protein, carbohydrate, and dietary fat.

If you want to lose fat and not muscle, or gain muscle and not fat. Then you need to pay close attention to both your energy and macronutrient balances. In this context, a calorie is no longer a calorie because a calorie of protein does very different things in your body than a calorie of carbohydrate or dietary fat.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these macros and discover how they fit into the fat loss. Macronutrient number one protein while the scientific search for the one true diet continues, there’s one thing we know for certain it’s going to be high in protein. Study after study has already confirmed that high protein dieting is superior to low protein dieting in just about every meaningful.

Specifically, research shows that people who eat more protein lose fat faster, gain more muscle, burn more calories, experience less hunger, have stronger bones, generally enjoy better moods. Protein intake is even more important when you exercise regularly because this increases your body’s demand for protein.

It’s also important when you restrict your calories to lose fat because eating adequate protein plays a major role in preserving lean mass wall dieting, protein intake is important among sedentary folk as well. Studies show that such people lose muscle faster as they age. If they don’t eat enough protein, and the faster they lose muscle, the more likely they are to die from all causes.

Rule number three, adjust your food intake based on how your body is responding. Tweaking your calories and macros up and down based on what’s actually happening with your body is vitally important for two reasons. One, formulas for calculating your calories and macros may not work perfectly for you right out of the box.

Two. What has been working can stop producing results to the first point. Your metabolism may be naturally faster or slower than the formulas. Assume you may engage in a lot of spontaneous activity throughout the day without realizing it, like walking around while on the phone, hopping to the bathroom, drumming your fingers while you read or bobbing your legs while you.

Your job or hobbies may burn more energy than you realize, causing you to underestimate your energy expenditure, and you may burn more or less energy than average during exercise. And to the second point, we recall that the body responds to calorie restriction with countermeasures meant to stall weight loss, including metabolic slow.

This is the primary reason why a calorie intake that initially results in weight loss can eventually stop working. Similarly, the body responds to a calorie surplus with countermeasures meant to stall weight gain, including metabolic speed up. This is mostly why a calorie intake that initially results in weight gain can also eventually stop.

The good news is you don’t have to try to account for all this before beginning your fat loss diet. Instead, you can start simple and adjust your calories and macros based on how your body is actually responding. Here’s the basic rule of thumb. If you’re trying to lose weight but aren’t. You probably need to eat less or move more, and if you’re trying to gain weight but aren’t, you probably just need to eat more.

And that’s it for a few of the best parts of the three little big things about rapid fat loss, and that was originally published in July of 2019. So if you liked what you just heard and you want to hear the whole thing, you can go back and find it or just search for it. If you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my v i p one-on-one coaching service because my team and I have helped.

All ages and circumstances, lose fat, build muscle, and get into the best shape of their life faster than they ever thought possible. And we can do the same for you. And that leaves us with the explicit portion of today’s podcast. And so if you have delicate sensibilities, if you don’t like FBOs, then it’s time to tune out or put on the earmuffs.

But for those of you who are depraved enough to enjoy listening to me, use some four letter words here, it. Let’s face it, the fitness game is difficult. Sometimes it’s very hard to resist the allure of the snooze button in the morning. Sometimes it’s easy to sit in the parking lot and procrastinate, waiting for our pre-workout to give us the will to get going.

Sometimes we have to just fight tooth and claw to get through our workouts, and while some of that may never change, I think that the right mindset. All the difference. If we can just stay focused and motivated to succeed in the face of adversity and setbacks, then we’re already halfway home, and that’s what this episode is going to be all about.

I’m going to share six lessons that I’ve learned over the years. That have always helped me keep the flywheel turning, so to speak, both in the gym and just in life in general. And trigger warning, these lessons are going to feature a lot of unladylike language inappropriate metaphors and CRAs vulgarity.

And inevitably that means that at least a few someones are going to say, you know, you didn’t have to use so many violently offensive and psyche rendering words. And yes, I do know, but that leads me to the first item on my list, which is. Number one, say it with me. Fuck it. I am doing it anyway. You see throughout this powerful and transformative and occasionally miserable fitness journey, you are going to meet a lot of people that are going to tell you a lot of things, and many of these people will have so much advice that if you scribble it all down on pieces of paper, you would probably single-handedly decimate entire swaths of the.

Forests. So while you should keep your eyes and yours open, you don’t want their moonshine to move you off target. You shouldn’t do that. They’re gonna say, wheeling out a litany of reasons why it’s not gonna work out, why you should put your time and effort elsewhere, and why you’re going to regret it if you keep going.

And then you’re gonna say, fuck it, I’m doing it anyway. Fuck it. I am going to count my calories and I’m gonna lose those 20. Fuck it. I’m gonna follow that workout program for a couple months. Fuck it. I am going to clean up my diet. You’re probably gonna be afraid too. You’re gonna be anxious, you’re gonna be uncertain, and all of that is completely normal.

I mean, just think back to the first time you rode a bike. You remember that this is really no different. You moved past all the head trash by just getting to work by saying, Fuck it. I’m just gonna do it anyway. You put in the work and you get better and you get better. You build confidence. You build confidence, and you wanna do more.

It’s a virtuous cycle that starts with saying, fuck it, I’m just gonna do it. If you do that, then the hobb goblins of fear and doubt, sure, they’re always gonna hop around in your head and maybe sometimes more noisey than. But that’s okay. Some of that is probably even good. That’s what keeps you moving, keeps you doing, keeps you working.

It reminds you that the way out is the way through. Number three, stop fetishizing future you. One day we say we’re gonna live a beautiful life. For the best life. We’re gonna wake up at the best time every morning. We’re gonna do the best workouts, we’re gonna eat the best foods, and do the best things with all the best people.

One day we say, we’re gonna lose that belly fat. We’re gonna learn that instrument. We’re gonna get that corner office or write that poem about the goat. That fucked the pumpkin. The kicker though, is that that day is never going to come because it’s always tomorrow. It’s always next week. It’s always next year, next lifetime.

So fuck one. You have today. Now don’t let it go to waste. Four. Make time, not excuses. Whenever someone says that, oh, I would do X, but I can’t because Y, it’s almost always bullshit. Unless Y is, I don’t really want to. That’s what most everything in life really comes down to. Necessity. The mother of all invention, right?

I mean, that’s what people say and there’s a good reason for it. There’s just very little that we’re actually incapable of. There’s only our sense of urgency. Now, when we lie to ourselves though and say otherwise, what we are really saying is that we find alibis more attractive than achievements that we.

Excuses, more seductive than excellence and comfort. More desirable than challenge. However, when you refuse to believe that it’s okay to give up if you refuse to take the easy road out to look for reasons to be weak or to blame anyone or anything else for your circumstances. You can tap into something primal and powerful, something that sets extraordinary people apart from everybody else.

And I really think that’s one of those big secrets in life. So think twice before you say I can’t. I can’t get to the gym a few days per week, or I don’t really want to, I can’t make a meal plan work or I don’t really want to. I can’t stop eating sugar or junk food or I don’t really want to Do You wanna know one weird trick for being more of a badass?

Here it is. Stop dreaming up exit strategies. So when you say that you’re gonna do so, Whether it’s losing 10 pounds of fat or gaining 10 pounds of muscle, or maybe challenging your fruity neighbors to, uh, some naked badminton, which is definitely one of my personal favorite pastimes. The thinking should stop there.

No second guessing, no maybes, no loopholes, no if. Or, or, but in your mind, you should see it and you should really visualize it, feel it as already done. All that should remain is simply going through the motions of manifesting it physically. When you can do that, you really can do anything. Okay, well that wasn’t so bad now was it?

If you wanna listen to the whole episode, it was published in August of 2017, so you can go find it or search training hard, we’ll bring it up or six lessons for training Hard should find it. And that’s it. That’s it for this episode of Muscle for Life. Thanks again. Joining me. I hope you liked it. And as far as what I have coming next, well, Friday, there’s gonna be the next q and a episode, and I’m gonna try something different.

Normally I pick three questions for these q and a episodes, and I take five or 10 minutes to answer each. Sometimes my answers run on a bit longer. They are rarely shorter, and I get a lot of positive feedback about those episodes. The consistent complaint, the consistent criticism or bit of negative feedback I get from even regular listeners is the episodes are too long, and I understand that this is really a point of personal preference.

I don’t think there’s any clear right or wrong way to go about podcasting. Some people just like long form stuff and some people like short form stuff. And so what I was thinking is, My interviews that I do with people, they almost always are long form. They are almost always 45 to maybe 90 minutes long, and a lot of the monologues I do are not that long, but they are probably 20 to 45 minutes long.

And so for the q and as I was thinking, Instead of tackling three questions in each q and a for a total of, you know, on average probably 30 minutes. Why don’t I just take one and so it’s a five to 10 minute episode. I’m just answering one question, a bite sized, you know, easy to consume when you’re driving to the gym or.

Uh, maybe making some lunch or walking the dog or whatever. And then just release those more frequently. So instead of doing one 30 minute QE episode, uh, do maybe three a week and just release them as their own little standalone episodes. And so I’m going to give it a try and let me know what you think.

Shoot me an email, [email protected] and tell me what you prefer. Do you like the single topic, shorter q and a format? Or do you prefer the triple topic, longer format? Please do leave a quick review on iTunes or wherever you’re listening to me from in whichever app you’re listening to me in. Because that not only convinces people that they should check out the show, it also increases search visibility and thus it helps more people find their way to me and learn how to get fitter, leaner, strong.

Healthier and happier as well. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then simply subscribe to the podcast and you won’t miss out on any new stuff. And if you didn’t like something about the show, please do shoot me an email. At Mike Muscle for life.com, just muscle f o r life.com and share your thoughts on how I can do this better.

I read everything myself and I’m always looking for constructive feedback. Even if it is criticism, I’m open to it, and of course you can email me. If you have positive feedback as well, or if you have questions really relating to anything that you think I could help you with, definitely send me an email.

That is the best way to get ahold of me, Mike, at muscle life.com. And that’s it. Thanks again for listening to this episode, and I hope to hear from you soon.