Ep. #566: The Best of Muscle for Life: Booty Building, Eating & Training According to Body Type, and More . . .

Hello and welcome to Muscle for Life. I’m Mike Matthews. Thank you for taking time outta your day to listen to me talk about health and fitness things. Now, as of right now, I have produced over 500 episodes of Muscle for Life, and they total over 700 hours of content probably, and I’ve talked about a huge variety of things related to getting fit and healthy.

Ranging from the basics of diet and exercise, like energy and macronutrient, balance and progressive overload, and training frequency and volume to stuff that is more faddish like the ketogenic and carnivore diet and collagen protein and M C T oil to more unfamiliar territories like body weight, set point, and fasted.

Training. Now 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. And as cool as that is, it also poses a problem for you. My dear listener. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

500 plus episodes, 700 plus hours. I mean, some people do actually make the time to listen to most, or even all of my podcasts, but according to my Wizbang analytics software, many listeners do tune in on a regular. Basis, but they definitely do not catch every installment of the show and thus miss out on insights that could help them get a little bit better inside and outside the gym.

And people have also been telling me that they would like me to do more shorter multi topic episodes like my q and As you know, stuff that is more easily consumed during a commute. For example, and so I got an idea why not do 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.

So this way, people who are new to the show can quickly determine if it is for them or not. Because if they listen to a couple best of episodes and don’t like them, then chances are they’re just not gonna like the podcast. And for those out there who do enjoy the podcast, who do like what I’m doing, but just don’t have the time or the inclination to listen to all of my stuff, well those people will then be able to still benefit from the discussions and find new episodes to go listen to.

So in this installment of the best of Muscle Life, you will be hearing hand. Picked morsels from three of my most popular episodes. They are an interview I did with Jeff Nipper on building your best butt ever and a monologue I did on the best diets and workouts for your body type, as well as a book club episode where I shared my.

Key takeaways and my thoughts on those key takeaways on the book, the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. Now, before we get to the show, if you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting.

My sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural evidence-based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and protein bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support. And more. Every ingredient and dose in every product of mine is backed by peer reviewed scientific research.

Every formulation is 100% transparent, no proprietary blends, and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored. To check it out, just head over to legion athletics.com and just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps. Use the coupon code M F L at checkout and you will save 20% on your entire order if it is your first purchase with us.

And if it is not your first purchase, then you will get double. Reward points on your entire order, which is essentially getting 10% cash back in rewards points. So again, that URL is legion athletics.com, and if you appreciate my work and if you’ll wanna see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this.

And so let’s start with the first one, which is the interview I did with Jeff Nippert on building a great, but, and if you like the key takeaways that I’m gonna share with you here, then you will definitely like the full interview. So you should go check it out. This interview was posted on February 24th, 2017.

So if you just go back to February, 2017 in my podcast feed or in my YouTube channel, or just search for nipper in my YouTube channel, you will find the full interview. How would you recommend, so let’s say, I mean, most of the people listening to my podcast are fairly well educated in terms of just pretty much everything, like all the basics of diet, training, supplementation, whatever.

So yeah. Let’s say you have someone that is, um, squatting once or twice a week and, um, you know, moderate, moderate volume, moderate intensity or type type of type type of training program. How would you then recommend that they start working in some glute specific, Stuff like how many sets per week, for example.

Okay, good. Good question. Um, I would say it’s gonna be highly individual and depend on their level advancement. But, um, I think that when it comes to frequency, so we can just, you know, start there. I think that as many of your listeners probably know, uh, two times a week has been shown to be superior to once a week in terms of hypertrophy, pretty substantially, uh, at least according to, to the most recent meta-analysis by Schoenfeld and others, um, two times a week seems to be better.

However, three times a week, there’s not a whole lot of data to support that being better. Then two are, there are a few studies you could cherry pick, but Right. Well, I’ll be interested, I’ll be, I’ll be interested to see what also comes outta that line of research because mm-hmm. You know, I’ve spoken, like I spoke with Eric Helms about this recently.

Mm-hmm. Um, that right now, as we kind of understand it as frequency, as more of a way to inc. It, it’s more about the volume that that allows you to. Do, uh, and, and recover from whereas, but if you could get that same volume in, in one training session and recover from it, it may or may not make that big of a difference.

But yeah. No, it’s an interesting, I mean, I think it’s, I, I agree that it’s generally good advice that if you have, you know, something, some body part that’s lagging in, in just training it once a week, right now, directly training it once a week. Add it, you know, you might have to reduce, depending on how that workout is, you might have to reduce the volume of that workout, but you can then double that by training it three or four days later and thereby increase the weekly volume.

So yeah, just, just kind of making a, a, you know, a, a little note on that for people listening. Of course. Um, and then of course there could potentially be some mechanistic benefit to training it more than three times a week. Yeah. So five times, six times, seven times a week. Uh, my girlfriend for example, when we met was training her legs six times a week.

Yeah. And she didn’t train her upper body cuz she didn’t want it to grow. Yeah. And that works just perfectly fine. Um, but if you’re going to take low volume kind exactly. Work out to, so that’s what I’m was gonna get into. If you’re taking a two times a week approach, you can load those individual days more heavily.

So you could do, say, a heavy squat on your Monday workout and then do a heavy deadlift or something on your Thursday. Right. Workout with lighter squats if you really wanna bring up your squat or something. But there’s no real need to squat twice a week. Yeah. Um, however, if you’re. Gonna be training at a higher frequency of five times a week, or I would say anything more than three or four.

Uh, you really want to be cognizant of the exercises that you’re including and choose ones that are gonna be of lower impact, right? So you could do, you know, hip abductions, uh, banded clamshells, glute kickbacks, even some like light hip thrusts. Those sorts of things are gonna have less of a generally taxing effect on your system than say, heavy squats and deadlifts.

Right? So in terms of setting that up, I would. Probably start off your week where you’re fresh, maybe on a Monday or something after the weekend with your heavy, say squat. Mm-hmm. Uh, variation, whatever. Front squats are really effective as well, you know, whatever. Um, and then maybe hit, hit them with maybe a lighter.

Hit again a little bit later in the week. So a couple days later you could hit them with some hip thrusts or something like that. Something more specific that’s just kind of glued as opposed to Right. Focused. And then hit another glute focused session for a third time, uh, say Friday. So you could go Monday, Wednesday, Friday with your heavier loading, sort of like strictly focused on progressive overload day on Monday.

Yeah. And then Wednesday and Friday could be a little bit more. Glute specific with more isolation movements and that sort of thing. There’d just be one example of, of a way to set it up. Yeah. But I think that exercise, the exercises that you choose, have to be carefully considered because they’re going to determine your rate of recovery after performing them.

I think that with the glutes specifically, it’s of particular importance to load them in a variety of different ways. I think this is good of muscles just generally speaking, but. For muscles, like, say just like the biceps, it’s like a simple single joint movement. It just flexes the elbow. It’s like you just have to curl, right?

Um, the glutes are more complex than that. They have a ton of different origins and insertions. Um, so they originate at the pelvis, the sacrum, and then there’s a bunch of fascia that runs up the spine, uh, from the. Thor thorax region down to the lumbar and the glutes actually insert all the way up through that fascia.

And then, did I say insert, I meant originate all the way up. So they attach all the way up there. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and then also on the femur, so they attach at the femur and then also at the IT band. So you have all of these different attachment points for the glutes, which mean they can do a bunch of different stuff.

Um, so they’re most. Probably popular function and most significant athletically function is hip extension. Right, right. So like driving the hips forward like you would in a deadlift lockout. Right. They also do hip external rotation. So like if you were to point your, if you were kind of like to rotate your whole leg, like clockwise if you were to rotate your right leg clockwise, just so people can follow along.

Sure. Opening the thing of it is opening your hips, like opening your hips up. Right? Yeah. And then they also do hip abduction. So like in the bad girl exercise Yeah. If you’re bringing your leg out to the side of your body. Yeah. Um, and then also, uh, posterior pelvic tilt, um, which is like what you would do like in, when you’re twerking, like the downward part of a twerk.

Yeah. The anterior pelvic tilt. I like hip, popping your butt out and then posterior is kind of popping it back in. Yeah. So they do all of those things. And if you’re just to include, say like the squat. Uh, which trains, you know, hip extension, uh, or the barbell hip thrust, also training hip extension and posterior pelvic tilt to a degree.

I think you’re missing out on hip abduction and external rotation, uh, to a degree. Right. And also just the fact that the fibers run in all these different directions, I think should be an indication that you should try in them in sort of different planes of motion. Mm-hmm. Uh, if that makes sense. So maybe have we have a, a simpler version of that with the chest where you have Yeah, there’s the upper chest.

It’s not like it’s some different type of peck, but because of how the, the, the fibers run and how, uh, as opposed to, you know, the, the, the larger, lower part of the peck, uh, doing reverse grip barbell or, you know, incline pressing, um, helps tremendously with. You know, uh, especially if someone has developed that kind of lopsided, you know, cause all they’ve done is flat pressing and decline pressing for years.

I used to be one of those people, so I know firsthand, but. Yeah. Yeah. Very similar I think, uh, there as well. So I would say that like you basically want to, and this might not sound overly scientific or anything, but you want to pick exercises that you can feel really well. Yep. Um, and those are gonna be different for different people.

True. Uh, some girls that I’ve worked with really love glute kickbacks. Others just finally feel it in their quads. Yeah. Like, they feel like their quads are taking over, in which case that might not be a good exercise to include, but often it is. Um, same thing with lunges. I personally find a really good stretch in my glutes when I do lunges, and they’re always sore like for multiple days after, probably because of the eccentric component of lunges that you see.

It really stretches the glutes out, like when you think about what you’re doing when you lunge. Yeah. Um. But again, some people don’t really like it or it hurts their knees or they have quad issues or whatever, so you don’t have to include that one. Um, I’m just listing off ones that I like. Sure. Uh, lower, lower back extensions would be another one.

Uh, or hip extensions, whatever you wanna call them. That machine. Yeah. Hyper. Hyper extensions, right as well. Hyper extensions. Right. Uh, so. That one is also very good for glutes, especially if you do it a certain way, which we can get into. Sure. The leg press has been shown to be great at activating the glutes even over, over the course of the long term.

So it’s one of the few exercises that has actually been studied over, like, say, a 12 week period, and you’ve actually seen significant glute hypertrophy from it. Um, and there are ways to make it more or less glute focused, um, depending on your foot position and stance and so on. Um, so then there’s also the machine hip abduction, and then you can do that with bands or you can load it with a plate.

Uh, there are a ton of different ways you can load the glutes through these isolation type exercises, but I think when you understand first what it is that the glutes are responsible for doing so you understand their biomechanics, then you can think about, okay, this exercise makes sense. This exercise doesn’t make sense cuz it’s not even loading the glutes.

Properly. Yeah. Um, I see some people doing weird variations of the squat where they have like the cable held out in front of them and it’s like pulling them forward and they’re just doing squats. That that doesn’t, I’ve seen that Instagram. I see. Random. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you have to think about what the glutes are actually doing and then load them in a way that’s gonna.

Create 10 greater tension. Yeah. Uh, within the muscle when it comes to the glutes, what have you found, um, in terms of, we’re really talking about, you know, intensity, rep ranges and so forth. Right, right. So I think that, and your listeners might be familiar with this as well, but, uh, the kind of maybe most commonly accepted model, at least, uh, in.

My experience is Seinfeld’s, like three point model where you have mechanical tension, muscle damage, and metabolic stress. Mm-hmm. Being the three main drivers of hypertrophy. Yeah, I’ve, I’ve written about it many times. A lot of listeners are gonna be familiar with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. So I think that you want to structure your training in a way that’s gonna be able to optimize most of those with, I think, tension being the most important thing.

So if you’re someone who’s limited on time, you could get away with. A more minimalistic workout, like you said, where you might just like squat, barbell, hip thrust, you know, row, yeah. Uh, bench press up o h p, whatever. And you’re good. Um, if you wanna optimize your training, I think you should, you know, be including other exercises and.

Other rep ranges. So I think that using a variety of rep ranges is really important, especially for the glutes. Um, because like I said, you know, they are so varied in their structure. Yeah. So, and it’s also because also in somebody’s exercises, they don’t lend themselves to, yeah. You can’t, you can’t load a kickback like the five, what you do, like 85% of one rep max back like, nah, it’s not gonna work.

You just can’t do it. Yeah, exactly. So I think that, yeah, doing some burnout exer, uh, exercises at the say end of a session is a really good idea. And you can do that at the end of every session because it’s pretty easy to recover from. Yeah. Like you might be sore for a couple days after, but like the repeated bouts effect will kick in and you won’t be sore for so long.

Yeah. Uh, if you keep doing it, um, one. That I really like, uh, is again, borrowing from Brett, but it, I think it’s just called Brett’s Glute Burnout or whatever. It’s on YouTube and it’s basically where you are on a bench or a hip thruster if you have one and you hook up. Bands, or you could use a plate or a barbell.

If you don’t have the bands, um, you hook up a hip circle, so you’ll, you’ll need one of those, um, around your knees. And initially you’re just sat there doing 20 hip abductions, so you’re just like, you know, flaring your knees in and out, and then, With your knees, with a wide stance, you do 20 hip thrusts with the bands around your hips.

Hmm. With the knees out, then you bring the knees in. So you no longer have that tension from the band. Uh, in terms of active hip abduction. Yeah. You’re just like, you’re just there with a narrow stance. The band isn’t doing anything and then you do another 20. This sounds painful. So it’s like a 60 rep set.

Absolutely. Burn out your glutes at the end of a session. So like doing that once a week. I think maybe at the end of like your progress overload day or something like that where you’re not getting as much metabolic stress, uh, it would be a good idea. Yeah, that sounds painful.

All right, so that’s it for the highlight reel of the interview I did with Jeff Nipper. If you want to listen to the full thing again, it was posted February 24th, 2017. So if you just go back to that period in my podcast feed, or if you can search the whole feed depending on. How you’re listening to this, just search for nipper, N I P P A R D, and it’ll come up.

And if you are listening to this on YouTube, you can just go back to February, 2017, the uploads from that period. Or you can just search for nipper in my channel if you like. What I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere. And if you want to help me, Help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural evidence-based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support.

And more. Every ingredient and every dose in every product is backed by peer-reviewed scientific research. Every formulation is 100% transparent. There are no proprietary blends and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored. Two, check everything out. Just head over to legion athletics.com and just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps.

Use the coupon code. M F L at checkout and you will save 20% on your entire order if it is your first purchase with us. And if it is not your first purchase with us, you will get double reward points on your entire order. That’s essentially 10% cash back in rewards points. So again, the URL is legion athletics.com and.

If you appreciate my work and want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. Okay, let’s move on to the second featured episode in this best of episode, and that is a monologue that I did called the Best Diets and Workouts for Your Body Type.

And this was posted May 10th, 2019. If you want to go check it out based on what you hear here. Best type of diet for Ectomorphs. So if your body falls squarely in the ectomorph category, chances are you are struggling to gain muscle and weight and that that is what you are looking for a solution to in this podcast.

Well, the first thing that you should know is there is nothing inherently wrong with your body. You just have some genetic programming that makes building muscle and strength and makes gaining weight harder than it should be, or maybe harder than it is for other people. If you do eat enough food though, and if you do train properly, you will make progress like everyone else.

It may be a bit slower, but all that really means is you just have to work a little bit longer to get the body you really want. And to put that in perspective, let’s just say that you gain muscle and strength 20% slower than the average person. And let’s say you are a. Guy, and that means that to get the body you probably want, if you’re like most guys, you kind of want to have the superhero look, you don’t wanna look like a completely muscle bound meathead, but you want to have a good amount of muscle.

You wanna be fairly lean, you’re probably gonna have to gain about 30 pounds of muscle. And for the average guy, that’s maybe a year and a half or two years of work. But for you, maybe it’s two or two and a half years, big deal. It’s really not a big. And remember, you’re gonna enjoy the process because you are going to see your body continually getting bigger and stronger, and you are going to know that if you just keep at it, you will reach your goal.

Let’s now move on to mesomorph. Let’s talk about that body type. Now, this body type is distinguished by the following characteristics. Wide shoulders, narrow, waist, thin joints, thicker, rounder muscles. Normal or slightly above normal amount of lean mass. Mesomorphs gain muscle and lose fat fairly easily, and they also don’t lose muscle as easily as the ectomorph.

So if you are a dominant mesomorph, go give your parents a big hug and a big kiss because you win. You have won the genetic lottery. There’s a reason. Why a large percentage of elite bodybuilders, weightlifters, and athletes are mesomorphs or primarily mesomorphs. These are the people who get to have their cake and eat it too.

They build muscle and they gain strength fairly easily. They are not predisposed to fat gain. They have a high aerobic capacity. They tend to have that attractive V shape. Just naturally they have the wide shoulders and the narrow waists, and that, of course, only becomes more pronounced as they spend time in the gym.

And so, They are just predisposed to having great physiques. That said, nothing comes easily. Of course, if you are largely a mesomorph, you do get a running start, but you still got to finish the race. So let’s talk about dieting. Dieting for mesomorphs True two form here. The Mesomorph does get to enjoy the most flexible.

And all around enjoyable type of diet. Simply put the mesomorphic type gets the flexibility of the ectomorph, but generally does not have to eat as much to gain muscle and weight and tends to see better results on less food. So for example, a mesomorph may be able to eat 1000 fewer calories per day than an ectomorph, but gain muscle and strength.

Faster. Furthermore, when cutting, your average mesomorph will also eat less than your average ectomorph, but will be less likely to lose muscle and strength. So what all that means is the Mesomorph really just follows the same game plan as the ectomorph with slight modifications and just gets better results.

So for example, if a mesomorph is above 15% body fat, men, 25% women, He should, he or she should cut their fat first before Lean bulking. They should use a small calorie surplus to build muscle somewhere around 10% and a moderately aggressive deficit to lose fat somewhere around 20 to 25%. Mesomorphs should gradually increase their calories to continue gaining weight and strength once they have hit a plateau in their lean bulking phases.

And usually what they will find is they don’t have to increase their calorie intake as much as the average ectomorph to start gaining weight and strength again. The lean bulking periods should still be much longer than the cutting periods. Mesomorphs should still end their lean bulks around 15 to 17% for men, 25 to 27% for women body fat.

That is, and then they should cut back to the 10 slash 20% mark and repeat. And lastly, a high protein, high carb, moderate, or moderate slash low fat diet is going to work best for most mesomorphs. And that’s it. There’s, there’s really not much else to it. Let’s talk about training. As an endomorph, and this is where you, Mr.

Or Mrs. Endomorph, get to shine. This is where you gain muscle and strength faster than average, and based on my experience working with quite a few endomorphs, this is where you can often benefit from weekly training volumes that would cause an ECTO or a Mesomorph major. Problems. For example, I’ve come across a few people over the years who can successfully run some of the more brutal upper, lower split programs like Lane Norton’s Fat, if that’s still around it.

It was around, it was a thing for a while, and they are. And they have been endomorphs one for one. Now I’m talking about running those programs naturally. If you add steroids into the mix, of course everything changes. But the bottom line here is if you are an endomorph, you are going to have a good time in the gym.

You are going to respond well to weightlifting, so enjoy it. And like Ectomorphs and Mesomorphs, you are also going to respond best to a workout program that emphasizes heavy compound lifting and that relegates the high rep low weight stuff to accessory work. And that. Puts you somewhere in the range of 10 to 20 hard sets per major muscle group per week, and that has you ending most of those hard sets with one or two reps still in the tank, one or two reps shy of technical failure.

And as far as cardio goes, there’s nothing special to be said here. Really include cardio in your routine as needed. And as far as supplements go, nothing changes there. Creatine is good. A fat burner can help you get leaner when you’re cutting and a multivitamin. Fish oil are recommended. So the bottom line with all of this is most of the advice that’s out there for different body types is just meant to sell you stuff, sell you PDFs, pills and powders, as I like to say.

Yes, there are considerable differences between. The physical traits and the inclinations of ectomorphic, mesomorphic, and endomorphic body types, but not in how they should eat and train to get the results they want. Remember, your body type is a predisposition, not a pre. Destination, regardless of your dominant type, if you eat right, if you train hard, if you supplement option optionally and intelligently, you can build a strong, muscular and lean body that you can be proud of.

And I hope this podcast helps you do just that.

All right. That’s it for the best diets and workouts of your body type. Again, if you liked what you just heard and you want to listen to the entire episode, it was posted May 10th, 2019, so you can just go find it or search it accordingly. All right. Let’s move on to the last round of highlights for this best of episode, and that is from a book club podcast I did on the seven habits of Highly Effective.

People by Stephen Covey. Now, this one was posted on September 8th, 2017, in case you want to go check it out, based on what I think were some of the more interesting bits of the episode, which I have chosen to share with you here. Okay, so this week’s book is one you’ve probably heard of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.

And the bottom line here is if you want to gain more control over your life and destiny, and you aren’t afraid of facing subjects that many people find very unpalatable like responsibility, integrity, long-term thinking, and self-mastery, then you need to read this book. It’s on just about every books you have to read list and for good reason and in it.

Covey takes you by the hand, and he basically says, look, if you wanna live a good life, you just can’t be an irresponsible, self-absorbed insulin. Small-minded, unenlightened, judgmental, delusional little child, which is unfortunately where many people are at. You know, he says you might be able to bullshit your friends and your family, and maybe even yourself, but you just can’t bullshit the universe for whatever reason.

There are some basic fundamental rules to this game of life, and if you work with them, you can win. If you flout them, you lose. Period. Covey then goes on to lay out in way too many words I might add, just warning you, uh, his ideas about what makes people effective and ineffective in life. And I really do wholeheartedly agree with many of his assessments and would attribute many of my own personal successes to the principles laid out in this book.

That said, I do have to warn you, you are probably not going to like reading this book mainly because. Covey really isn’t much of a writer in my opinion. This book is twice as long as it should be and a lot of the pros is very purple. So you’ve been warned. However, I will say I do think it’s worth the slog.

Allow me to share my five key takeaways, and here’s the first one that which we obtain too easily. We esteem too lightly. It is dearness only, which gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price on its goods. And my note here is these days, I think too many people wear themselves to a frazzle chasing easy.

They don’t wanna learn about processes and paradigms. They just want shortcuts and handouts. You know, they don’t wanna plant in the spring and tend in the summer and then earn their harvest in the fall. They just want to shirk and slack and reap a bounty that they didn’t sow. And, and this seems to be particularly bad with.

Today’s youth, the people that I jokingly refer to as generation Y, as in why is it gotta be so hard? And what these people, what they fail to realize or accept is that nothing truly easy is worth doing. Easy is boring, it’s bland. It’s the wormy fruit that fell off the tree several days ago, lying around on the ground.

Nobody respects easy and. As a corollary to that, I think that one of the greatest lessons that we can learn is the most difficult way to do something is in the long run, often the easiest. And the reason for that, of course, is it’s the only way that actually produces results. By doing the hard work that most people don’t want to do, we can obtain the results that most people wish they had.

Alright, takeaway number two. The way you spend your time as a result of the way you see your time and the way you really see your priorities. My note here is that when people say they don’t have time for things, it’s almost always bullshit. What they’re really saying is they just don’t really want to do them.

I, I really do think that there’s very little that we’re actually incapable of. There’s just our sense of urgency and necessity, and if you have any doubts about that, I mean, if you truly think that you don’t have time to. Get your workouts in or read more books or, you know, whatever else. Do yourself a favor and record for the next week, seven days.

Record how you spend every minute of every day. You can put it into a spreadsheet on your phone. You can carry a little miniature notepad around with you, whatever you wanna do. And then at the end of the week, look back over how you spent your time, and you might be surprised at just how much time was wasted on less important stuff or even completely unimportant and fruitless stuff.

You know, I did this myself recently simply because I think it’s a healthy exercise to do every so often, and what I get from it is, It, it allows me to not only evaluate the worthiness of what I’m doing with my time, it also allows me to weigh my actions and activities against all the things that I’m not doing, and therefore gives me a very objective view of my priorities, which then I can reflect on in the context of my longer term goals and purposes, which allows me to assess my life on the whole and answer the question of am I living correctly?

You know, are my current day-to-day actions, are they bringing me closer to the type of person I want to be and the things I want to be doing and the things I want to have, or are they not? I don’t think there’s really any middle ground there either things are either getting better or they’re getting worse.

You’re either making progress, you’re losing ground, and by dispassionately looking at how you’re spending your time and then extrapolating that out into the future and looking at it probabilistically. Where is that likely to lead you? It’s just a good way to know if you can feel good about what you’re doing every day, and also equally important, what you’re not doing every day.

A lot of people don’t consider that latter half, but it’s a huge part of achieving happiness and success. I think you have to know what you’re doing and why and what you’re not doing, and why. All right. Well, that’s it for that episode. Again, if you liked what you heard and you wanna listen to the full episode, it was published on September 8th, 2017, and it’s called Book Club Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.

All right, well, that also wraps up this best of Muscle Life episode, and I have a lot more goodies just like it on the way. All right. Well, that’s it for today’s episode. I hope you found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and you don’t mind doing me a favor, could you please leave a quick review for the podcast on iTunes or wherever you are listening from?

Because those reviews not only convince people that they should check out the show, they also increase the search visibility and help more people find their way to me. And to the podcast and learn how to build their best body ever as well. And of course, if you wanna be notified when the next episode goes live, then simply subscribe to the podcast in whatever app you’re using to listen and you will not miss out on any of the.

New stuff that I have coming and last, if you didn’t like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike muscle for life.com and share your thoughts. Let me know how you think I could do this better. I read every email myself and I’m always looking for constructive feedback. All right, thanks again for listening to this episode, and I hope to hear from you soon.