Ep. #614: The Best of Muscle for Life: Effective Time Management, Body Recomposition, and Meditations

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. To 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 wizzbang 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 As 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 the 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 to 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. 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 handpicked muscles from.

Three episodes, DiDonato White on how to get the most out of every day. And to be a bit more specific, this one is about time management in particular, most of it is about time management, and this was originally published on May 24th. 2017. So if you like the snippets you hear and you wanna listen to the full interview, you can go find it.

The second I have for you, the second highlight reel is how to build muscle and lose fat at the same time. Yes, body recomposition, the evergreen topic that I always get asked about. This episode was originally published on February 19th, 2015, back in the day. So again, if you like these snippets, then you can go find the rest of its back in February, 2015.

You have to go back in the feed and I’m going to record an updated. Episode on this topic. Actually, I’m gonna make a note right now because although the fundamentals that you’re gonna hear in this episode still apply just as much now as they did then I have done a bit more there has been a bit more research on the topic, and I actually did a summary of the research, a review of the current weight of the evidence for a textbook that is going to be used in a univers.

And then I updated the article on Body Recomposition [email protected], an article I wrote some time ago. So I think it’s time. I actually recorded a new podcast on the topic, Mental Note . And then the third round of takeaways comes from a book club podcast, which is cool to see cuz those are fun for me.

And some of them perform well. Some of them perform not so well. I keep doing ’em though. This one. Five takeaways, My top five takeaways from Meditations by Marcus Aures, and this was originally published on February 19th, 2019. So if you wanna listen to the whole thing, you can just go back to the beginning of 2019 and you will find it.

All right, let’s start with number one, Donado White on how to get the most out of every day. Also, if you like what I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my sports nutrition company Legion, which thanks to the support of many people like you, is the leading brand of all natural sports supplements in the world, and we’re on top.

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But there is good evidence to suggest that having many servings of artificial sweeteners, in particular every day for long periods of time may not be the best for your health. So while you don’t need pills, powders, and potions to get into great shape, and frankly, most of them are virtually useless, there are natural ingredients that can help you lose fat, build muscle, and get healthy faster, and you will find the best of them in legions.

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So again, if you appreciate my work and if you wanna see more of it and if you also want all natural evidence based supplements that work, please do consider supporting Legion so I can keep doing what I love, like producing more podcasts like this. Where do we start with this discussion? Let’s probably start with how much time there really is, right?

 There is a, there are real world. They’re all, everybody’s got the same 24 hours in a day, including Beyonce. I like to start my clients with a little bit of an exercise and this is a light bulb moment for a lot of people, so I’ve got a little demonstrative here.

For those of you listening and not watching I’ll describe it for you. I’ve got a piece of paper with the number 1 68 at the top. I don’t know if that’s a little washed out, but I’ve written 1 68 at the top, and that is the number of hours in a week. I’m basically just gonna do a big subtraction problem here.

What you wanna do is write down next is 56 and that is eight times seven. For all of you people out there who don’t sleep eight hours a night, and that is for sleep, then you wanna write down, how many hours a week do I spend working For most people, that’s 40. , you write down work, how many hours a week do I spend commuting?

How many hours a week do I spend at the gym, meal prepping all of those necessities. You wanna write down a number, each of those. So sleep, work, commute especially, is when people forget. , driving their kids around. Include that in there. All of the necessities. You want account for an account for how many hours a week you spend doing each of these things.

And then you just subtract all of those numbers from 1 68 and there’s kind of two camps of people at the end of this. One of one of them, a very rare type is the people who actually have a negative number at the end and they’ve way overcommitted. , they. If you’re one of those people, you’re only human.

There is absolutely no way you can get everything done that you have written down. So you need to figure out how to take some of this stuff off of your plate. But most people fall into this other category, which is, Wow, that’s a large number. Where’s it all going? . The first time I did this, I was in law school and the number was, I think somewhere between 25 and 35 hours I was left with.

Wow. And that’s after accounting for. studying, sleep, gym, cooking, and I, the stuff that you basically are saying, I will not, I can’t drop this outta my life, basically. Exactly. I can’t, This is a necessity. These are my non-negotiables. I have to do these things and I was, and let’s just say 30 hours to make it easy.

I had 30 hours left that I was able to, go out with friends or read a book for something other than school . Just, you could do whatever you want with these 30 hours. , I had to figure out number one, where it was going, and number two, what I wanted to do with it, because that’s a lot of time and you could really make a huge impact with that.

So that’s what we’ll talk about. Going forward in this conversation, but that’s where people should start, is figuring out how exactly, how much time do you really have? If you were to lump it all together, what would be the number of hours per week that you have to do whatever you want with?

We can talk a little bit about the time blocking and the transitions, if that’s what you wanna hit next. . Yeah. So yeah, why don’t you just explain what you mean by those things, so Sure. In terms of order and then transitions. Okay. I like to think of these as two separate concepts, but they work together.

So if you were to block out your schedule, like you were just mentioning, you would have blocks of time where you were doing things, and then you have a line in between them. And the line in between them is the transition time, which is the amount of, however many minutes it takes you to switch from either your morning to your afternoon or your afternoon to your evening.

And the blocks themselves are the time blocks. So I like to group tasks generally together by location or. So the way you would do that is for a time block where you’re running errands, for example, you would do all of your errands on one side of town, like the west side of town first, and then you would commute, however you commute to the east side of town and do all of your errands on that side.

You wouldn’t go back and forth. And that’s, I think, the easiest illustration for people to get. So in that instance, you’re grouping things by location because you’re gonna save. In transition. Going back and forth between the two and another. Or it could also be like at the computer.

So if you’re gonna have a block of time and you’re gonna be paying your bills at the computer and then what else? Okay. Going through maybe personal emails, stuff like that. Exactly. Exactly. And that’s a little more of an in between example, which I actually really like that example. I’m gonna use that one

So that’s grouping activities by type. So the one I like to use for this is if you’re cleaning. It’s really inefficient to do what a lot of people do, which is like, Oh, I’ll wipe down the mirrors today, and then maybe I’ll get to the shower tomorrow. Maybe I’ll vacuum the next day. If you’re going to be doing a cleaning activity, it’s really great to condense all of it into one time block, which, you’ve gotta find the hour or two time block to clean everything, but once you do, you’ll spend less time cleaning overall throughout the week, because you won’t have to drag everything.

And put it back. And then drag everything out again and put it back. . So that is grouping a grouping tasks by type or whatever resources they require of you. The example you just gave, you’re required to sit at your computer and type things and be at your desk, so that’s nice to get all of your computer based activities done at the same.

Cleaning’s the same way. You pull out all of your cleaning supplies and just do everything at once, and then you put it all back. You don’t have to keep dragging it out and, Okay. So what about technology? Are there any software services sass that you like to use for this stuff?

Because there are a billion apps and a billion, sass out there and proposed solutions for becoming more productive or managing your time better. I actually think mentioned planner. So it sounds like you’re old school. Oh. And I’m gonna sound really old school. I’m only 29. I promise I’m not like some old lady.

I really do believe in the paper and pen planner. I know a lot of people use their phone and that’s totally fine if that works for you. They use it because you know it’s always with you. It’s convenient, it sits in your pocket or your purse, and it’s always there. But the way our brains work, you’re actually more likely to remember something if you physically write it down.

And again, that. Results in a lot fewer surprises than, you’re not waking up in the morning with, that little dot on your iPhone calendar, Which by the way, what does the dot mean? Yeah. Yeah. It just means there’s a thing on this day that’s not helpful at all. . Yeah. You’re not waking up to that dot and being like, Crap, I have, this huge thing that I should have been preparing to.

That’s not just some little dot, that’s some big fucking thing. That’s a big dot. Yeah. So I find that the planner. If I can see my whole week on two pages and actually physically write things down, I’m more likely to remember if someone says, Hey, can come to this thing on Thursday? I’m more likely to remember it.

I wrote something down on Thursday. I may not remember exactly what it is, but I know to check , and the dots mean nothing on that iPhone. Like I can’t Yeah. Handle that iPhone calendar. So one that I do like though is Wonder List. The reason I like this is it’s more for. , like checklists and stuff that I share with my husband Jeff, we put our grocery list on it.

 And you can both walk around the grocery store with the phone and checking things off and that helps maximize our time there. We do it with like chores, which sounds, we have a chore chart. We’re two adults living . We’re married. It’s not really a chore, It’s not really a chore chart, but it’s no, the things that need to get done.

What do you want? Exactly. Like the dog. The dog needs her like, tick preventative today. Okay, got it. And stuff we need to share. I love Wonder List for that, but we don’t really use it for scheduling. It’s more for just checklists of repeated things that you need reminders for.

Alrighty, that was Dina White on how to get the most out of every day. That’s the title of the episode, originally published, May 24th, 2017. So if you are interested in hearing more, then go check out the full episode and let’s move on to number two, How to build muscle and lose Fat at the same. You’ve probably heard that you can’t build muscle and lose fat at the same time.

That’s just not possible. That’s not exactly true. It definitely is possible. It’s been shown in you you’ll find it in quite a few scientific studies. And you’ll find it anecdotally. You’ll find people. You’ll either, chances are you’ve probably had know somebody that clearly built muscle and lost fat at the same time, whether it was just by looking at them or, by actual measurement.

If they’re doing a good job, collaring, you’d be able to know that. Or if you’re getting dxa scan, you’d know that. And I’ve had quite a few people. It dxa scanning in particular because they were, they didn’t quite believe that they actually built muscle and lost fat at the same time.

So they wanted to, be as accurate as possible. And there, yes, they did. And the key factor here is what your, where your body’s currently at in terms. Conditioning if you are like in, in the scientific research where you’ll see building muscle and losing fat happening simultaneously is with untrained individuals, meaning people that they don’t, they, this is their first introduction to Weightlift.

If that’s you, if you. New to weight lifting. If this is, if you’re within, let’s say, your first three months of weightlift or if you have done some weight lifting already. But if it is a very inefficient type of weightlift, which is a natural weightlifter the worst way to train is to focus on isolation exercises, which would be exercises that isolate a certain muscle group versus compound exercises, which are exercises that involve multiple muscle groups.

So for instance, if you’re gonna work out your back and you’re gonna do. Isolation type of workout you might do single arm lap pull down like these guys or single arm seated type of type of rose. And you might then go do some cable work. Same type of pulling on the cables and back, back workouts.

There’s gonna be a little bit of a compound nature because there are multiple muscle groups. Your biceps are going to be involved no matter. But compare those types of exercises or even, you could say that even lap pull downs of two arm or close grip pull downs are a bit more isolation than compound.

And so compare those types of exercises to something like doing a bunch of deadlifts or doing a bunch of barbell rows. Or even dumbbell rows are gonna be more compound just because of the free range of movement in which requires more muscles to stabilize. And also you have to use a bit of your body to even stabilize your core.

But of course, the real, in my opinion, the foundation of good back workout is some sort of deadlift, whether it’s a traditional or a sumo or a hex. Because you’re gonna get the most whole body development and strength out of that. So if you’re a new weightlifter or if you’re a weight lifter that’s been doing a bunch of isolation type of work.

And then also high rep work, if you don’t lift heavy weights and you just go for the pump and go for the burn. And so if you’re doing that kind of stuff and then you switch to heavy compound lifting and then do what you need to do with your diet, which we’ll talk about in a minute, then yes, you can build muscle and lose fat simultaneously.

I’ve seen it, hundreds of times by now. There’s just no question. Newbies to weightlifting, you can build muscle and lose fat simultaneously, Guaranteed. Newbies to proper weightlifting. You can also build muscle and lose fat even if you’ve been ar doing, an Isla, if, even if you’ve been weightlifting for, I’ve seen guys that have been doing those, high rep isolation type of workouts for uppers of a year.

Switch to heavy compound lifting, go into a calorie deficit. And build muscle and lose fat simultaneously. So to lose fat, you have to now do the opposite. You have to feed your body a bit less energy than it’s burning, and that’s called a calorie deficit. Now, the problem when it comes to building muscle, Is when you’re in a calorie deficit, and this has been proven a link to study down below if you wanna check it out, that the body’s ability to synthesize proteins is impaired when you’re in a calorie deficit.

And that applies to muscle proteins. Long story short, make it simple. When you’re in a calorie deficit, your body is simply not able to repair and synthesize. When you’re in the gym pushing weights, you’re breaking down muscle proteins your body has. Replace them with new muscle proteins, it has to repair the damage.

If it’s not able to do that as efficiently as normal, what happens is you get to a state where you go work out and you need a certain amount of muscle damage to occur to stimulate, muscle growth. Cuz really what muscle growth is, and I’ve said this before, but in case you haven’t heard me say it before, what muscle growth is you have your protein breakdown on one side of a scale.

And you have your protein synthesis. On another side of the scale, muscle growth is synthesis in excess of breakdown over time. That’s it. So you broke down this mu protein, you, your body replaced or built, or synthesized this much. You’ve gained that margin there. Let’s say it’s weak.

When you’re new especially in the beginning, you can gain upwards of a pound of muscle a week. It slows down. But that’s what muscle growth is. So what happens is when you’re in a calorie deficit, the muscle damage is still occurring. And I’m not sure if I’ve seen research that indicates that there’s excess muscle damage in a calorie deficit.

Not that I can think of, but for. Protein synthesis rates are now lower. So basically you’re just fighting to keep them balanced. When you’re in a calorie deficit, what you don’t want. Is protein synthesis rates to go really low because that’s muscle loss. If protein, if your body is breaking down this many protein molecule or muscle protein, cells and you’re only replacing this much, that margin is muscle loss and that’s what you wanna be preventing.

And you can cause this imbalance by, a lot of mistakes. You could eat two little protein when you’re in a calorie deficit, you could be in too large of a calorie deficit. Starving yourself. You could be doing too much exercise, especially too much cardio. So there are quite a few different things that, if you’re also very stressed.

If your cortisol levels are very high. Cortisol is a catabolic hormone breaks, tissues down. So there are big mistakes that you can make that cause that imbalance. But when you. Everything dialed in. You can keep a balance. You should be able to, no matter how trained you are, if you’re like me, if you have a decade of training experience and you’re pretty much at the peak of your genetic potential or as far as you want to go, in my case, I’m pretty much, as far as I want to go, I don’t really want, I don’t want to.

Be much bigger than I am right now. I would like to be stronger, but then that’s a catch 22 because really to get stronger, if I want to add a hundred pounds to my deadlift, I have to get, there’s no way, I’m not gonna get a little bit bigger, It’s gonna require a bit more muscle. I’m not gonna be getting outta the muscle tissue that I have.

There’s I’m not gonna be gaining a hundred pounds on a lift just in neurological function alone. That’s not gonna happen. , you should, if you’re in my situation, or if you have even five years of, solid lifting under your belt, you’re gonna be a, you’re a, you’re an advanced lifter at that point.

You want it to just balance, and that’s what you’re looking for when you’re in a calorie deficit. You don’t wanna lose muscle, but you shouldn’t, you can’t really expect to gain muscle either. So let’s say you’re in a situation, you’re new or you’re new to proper weight lifting, you have some fat to lose and so you can lose it and build muscle.

How do you actually do that? And it’s very simple. You just. Put yourself in a calorie deficit high protein diet. I recommend relatively high carbohydrate intake. And I’ll link an article down below on why I don’t recommend low carb dieting. And, moderate to low, lower fat intake enough to sustain health.

But no more because it’s unnecessary. You don’t need excess amounts of fat. The hormonal differences are so minor, that’s just not gonna matter, and you’re gonna get a lot more out of those carbs in your training unless your body really doesn’t do well with carbs. That I do run into that. Rarely where people guys will find, they’ll usually find, figure it out.

It’s usually, I’d say it’s guys and girls, they’ll usually figure it out. I just run into it more with guys because guys run into it when they’re bulking and girls don’t seem to bulk as much as guys do. But that’s usually when people will find out is when they’re bulking, they’ll hit a certain level of carbohydrate intake where their body just doesn’t feel good.

Beyond that, like I’ve seen guys, they settle into about a 300 gram a day, which. Depending on your body. Weight is okay when you’re bulking, but ideally you could go higher. But I have run into guys that once they hit that 300 grams a day, or in some cases it’s 400, some cases I’ve seen as low as 2, 2 50, they don’t feel good anymore and.

This is not like highly processed junk food either. This is potatoes and soup, potatoes and grains, whole grains and stuff. This is good food. And there’s just a point where their body doesn’t want any more carbs and they just don’t feel good with more carbs. So we cut it off there, but I recommend that you and again, you’ll see in the article the meal planning article I linked down below.

This lays out how to work your numbers out so you know, if you wanna know how many, how much protein, exactly, how much carbohydrate, how much fat, just go there and check it out. But I recommend that you start with a high protein, moderate to high carbohydrate, moderate to low fat breakdown, and see how your body responds to it.

And yeah. If you wanna lose fat and build muscle simultaneously, put yourself in a calorie deficit. Lay your macronutrients out correctly, be consistent with it, and then train hard.

All right, that’s it for the highlights from How to Build Muscle and Lose Fat at the same time. Again, that was published February 19th, 2015, so you can go listen to the full episode if you’ve liked what you just heard. And now let’s get to the third. Final part of this best of episode, and that is the Book Club podcast.

My top five takeaways from meditations by Marcus Aureus. If you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my sports nutrition company Legion, which thanks to the support of many people like you, is the leading brand of all natural sports supplements in. Okay, so let’s get to the featured book, which is Meditations by Marcus Aures.

And I know this is pretty basic of me as Stoicism is all the rage these days, but I am going to make this recommendation anyway because I really do believe everyone can benefit from this book and. Stoic philosophy. I also feel that is especially true in today’s world, in today’s zeitgeist, which is moving further and further away from things like individualism, resilience and responsibility, and toward fear fragility.

Egoism. In fact, many young people in particular are upping the stakes even further by downright scorning. Many traditionally admired attitudes and behaviors and blindly celebrating their opposites, and I honestly fear the consequences of. Cultural experiment because we know the world that tradition can give us.

We are living in it. And while it is not perfect by any means and will never be no matter what we do an important point. The world now is far better in so many ways than it ever has been before, and especially when you look to human welfare general. And so as we at least in the west, continue our modern revolt against our ancestors, against our heritage, we really don’t know what comes next.

Are we throwing the baby out with the bathwater? We will find out and again, I don’t think it’s going to go well. We are already. Seeing the consequences. They are already unfolding in a number of ways, and I do think that things are going to get a lot worse before they start getting better. But hey, hopefully I’m wrong.

Truly, I actually hope I’m wrong in case you are not familiar. With Marcus Realis, he was a Roman emperor who earned the reputation of a philosopher king during his lifetime and has since been recognized as one of history’s greatest rulers in both character and deed. And this book, Meditations was originally titled to myself because it was Aures.

His journal really, he wrote it for himself and it contains his reflections. Many different things, including virtue, desire, rationality, emotions, the nature of the gods and more. And while many of S’s insights resonated with me, the messages that hit home the most were his views on how to dispassionately and effectively deal.

With the many difficulties of life, which are unavoidable. His thoughts on the importance of avoiding hate and the intention to harm, and on the value of living honestly and purposefully. If I could summarize this book in one line, it would be something like this, A bit of humble. Self reflection is always good for the soul, and meditations will take you on a brief, but meaningful and maybe even cathartic introspection.

All right, With that, let’s get to the takeaways. Here’s the first, choose not to be harmed and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harm. And you haven’t been. And my note here is don’t think you can’t do this no matter how challenging a situation might be, you can respond to it in one of two ways. You can view it as a challenge or as a threat, and that choice can make all the difference in how it affects you To Brad Stolberg and Steve Magnus from their fantastic 2017 book, Peak Performance.

Quote, Some individuals learn to assess stressors as challenges rather than threats. This outlook, which researchers call a challenge response is characterized by viewing stress as something productive and much like we’ve written as a stimulus for growth. In the midst of stress, those who demonstrate a challenge response proactively focus on what they can control with this outlook.

Negative emotions like fear and anxiety decrease. This response better enables these individuals to manage and even thrive under stress. Now, one way to do this is to choose to view feelings of anxiety, stress, and fear that a company uncomfortable situations as natural responses that can be redirected toward positive outcomes.

In fact, you can even view the process of pushing through and reflecting on pain as an opportunity to figure out the lesson or lessons that can be learned. In other words, you can view it as a game of sorts, and the better you get at this game, the more you will come to enjoy your struggles and the rewards they provide.

And that’s it for the highlights from my top five takeaways from Meditations by Marcus Reus. If you want to hear the rest, go find the full episode. It was published on February 11th, 2019, and make sure to keep an eye on that podcast feed because here’s what I have in store for you. Next, I have an interview I did with Pat Flynn on inequality egalitarianism, and.

Flourishing. I have a monologue of me explaining how to find the best workout split for you, as well as a success story episode with a guy named Brian Miller. Very cool story as well as the next installment of my q and a series of episodes. All right. That’s it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it and found it interesting and helpful.

And if you did and you don’t mind doing me a favor, 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, stronger, healthier, and happier as well.

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I read everything myself, and I’m always looking for constructive feedback, even if it is c. 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.