Ep. #463: How Tom Beat Sciatica, Lost 45 Pounds, and Transformed His Physique

Mike: Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I’m doing 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 picking up one of my best selling health and fitness books, including Bigger, Leaner, Stronger for Men, Thinner, Leaner, Stronger for Women, my flexible dieting cookbook, The Shredded Chef, and my 100 percent practical and hands on blueprint for personal transformation.

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So if you want to take audible up on that. offer. And if you want to get one of my audio books for free, go to www. legionathletics. com slash audible. That’s L E G I O N athletics slash a U D I B L E and sign up for your account. Hello, Mike Matthews here, and welcome to another episode of muscle for life.

This episode is a success story episode. This time around, I interviewed Tom, who found me on YouTube some time ago, and then used the knowledge that he learned to completely change his physique and life. When Tom first started in the gym, he didn’t know what he was doing, diet, and he stayed that way for a long time.

He had been spinning his wheels for years before finding his way to me. And he was also dealing with really bad back pain, debilitating sciatica that sometimes had him crawling to the bathroom in the middle of the night to go pee and asking his girlfriend to help him put on underwear. Everything changed though, when he discovered the world of evidence based fitness and started implementing my advice.

In the span of about one and a half years, Tom bulked up from 160 pounds. Skinny fat, as he would say, to about 205 pounds, and then cut back down to 160 pounds. But, this time around, he was far leaner and far more muscular. He had dramatically improved his body composition. And, even better, his back pain was more or less gone.

gone. And he was so astounded by the change in his body, in both his body composition and in the functioning of his body, particularly his back, that Tom decided to pay it forward by sharing his journey and his learnings on the popular website, The Body. Twitch. And now, his channel is the most popular fitness related hangout on the website.

And every day, Tom streams his workouts, he answers people’s questions, he shares his favorite tips that have helped him build his best body ever. And in this interview, he and I chat about his story, and we cover The big important lessons that he has learned along the way, including how deadlifting and stretching helped him dramatically improve his back pain.

Again, to where it really doesn’t bother him much at all anymore. How to optimize meal prepping, not only for food variety, but also time efficiency and huge financial savings. He has a good system for this and more. So let’s get to the interview. Tom, welcome to the podcast, my friend. Mike, thank you for having me.

Huge fan. Really glad to be here. Tom has a popular Twitch channel. So he had me on his Twitch channel to talk about all kinds of things. And so now I’m repaying the favor. 

Tom: Dude it’s funny how like people spend so much time trying to meet, some social media influencer for lack of a better term.

And they go to these conventions go try to meet the person, but you know what? Just make your own platform, invite them on as a guest, and then you can talk to them. But you got to 

Mike: build a platform though. That’s not so easy. 

Tom: I just read one of those books and follow 10 easy steps, book, 

Mike: read, wait a minute.

Come on. What are you doing? So yeah. Social media influencer. I would consider that a slur if what are you you’re like a social media influencer, right? That’s like them’s fighting words. 

Tom: I’m an influencer. How dare you, sir? Call me an influence. It’s almost derogatory, like bro.

Would you call someone bro? Now it’s, it, to me, it’s almost derogatory to say, Oh, what are your lifts, bro? Whoa. 

Mike: What’s the new internet thing is to call everyone my dude. Whenever somebody says that, I just want to tell them you realize that doesn’t make you cool, right? You realize you just sound like an internet idiot, right?

When you say Oh yeah, no, no problem. A 

Tom: dude, being in the Twitch space is a blessing and a curse. I’m on the forefront of. Seeing what the newest internet slang is because people will immediately, whatever’s hot, start throwing it in the Twitch chat and I see it, I gotta feel this out okay, do I feel like an old geezer at 34 years old?

I’m trying to sound cool. Is this actually cool? Is this really stupid? Is this going to die out in five days? And what are some of 

Mike: the buzzwords right now? 

Tom: Oh there was a new one, like no, no meme. Instead of saying no joke, not going to lie, cause that’s also new in the last, I don’t know, 10 years.

Now it’s, I heard a new one, no meme. Hey, no meme, Mike your stuff is fucking hilarious, right? That’s a new way of saying like no joke, or I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s really caught on or if it will, and I don’t know how I still feel gross saying it. So I haven’t figured out if I like that or not.

What’s another one? I’m trying to think, cause there’s certain memes that I know are going to die in a week. Some things go viral in the Twitch world that last like a week. 

Mike: It’s probably beyond Twitch, right? It’s just the gaming, I would assume, right? A lot of this comes from the world of the gaming world.

He 

Tom: doesn’t know, Twitch has its own life in terms of it’s a streaming platform for gaming, but also the Twitch chat is so unique in the way it moves. So for example, Twitch at E3, they were covering E3, it’s a games conference, and there are certain announcements for certain games. It’s so weird to explain, but it’s like you’re sitting in a stadium watching a football game, and then everyone’s cheering or booing at the same time because the chat is just littered with emotes, nonstop emotes and emojis.

And it’s so if people are like, booey is this a sleepy? This is boring. You’ll see all the chats suddenly start moving towards sleepy emotes or, stuff like that. Or jaw dropping emotes oh man, this is so crazy. So it’s just such a weird and unique culture, which is why it just has his life of its own sometimes.

And in some of the memes and jokes in there, I can’t tell if it’s isolated to Twitch or this is like a new internet thing. And Hey, you’re a social media influencer too, Mike. You should know, sorry, 

Mike: that was derogatory. This interview is over. Ben Shapiro style. You see that interview?

And it was with some political pundit in the UK who was asking him mildly pointed questions about a book of his, and he just got super butthurt that anybody wouldn’t child, anybody would challenge him. And I got to the level of ad hominem was like basically saying, nobody even knows who you are.

And the, this interview is over. Okay. Okay. Ben, I didn’t see 

Tom: that. If you want to laugh at Ben, check it out. I’ll have to take a look at that one later. It’s funny seeing those like mic drop interviews. They just drop the mic and leave. It was always just so fun to watch from like the popcorn eating perspective.

Oh, man, this is going to be so juicy. I wonder what’s going to happen next. 

Mike: Yeah. And then your brain just shrink. It just shrivels, just a little bit every time until you’re addicted to that stuff. And then you’re a broken idiot at that point. You can’t focus on anything anymore. 

Tom: For marketing, you’ve got to use Ascend for that.

It’s somehow going to counteract internet culture memes. It is a multivitamin, yeah, 

Mike: for your brain. It means that you can consume more mindless content without destroying your mind as quickly by Ascend. So we’re here to talk about your personal transformation, and this one is going to be cool because there’s a lot of meat to it.

So why don’t we just start with a quick snapshot, like a before and after where you were at before you found me and my stuff. And then where you’re at now, and I guess we can just start with the broad strokes, right? Of the stuff that people want to know about where was your physique at?

And we can get into it when we rewind to like, all right, let’s go through the details now, but you were having back issues and versus those things now, 

Tom: yeah. So I’m 34 years old, six feet tall. And before I got serious about training and dieting and really knew what I was doing and found the evidence based crowd, such as yourself, I was late mid, late twenties.

I actually more like late twenties, six feet tall, about one 60 pounds, I would say skinny fat, but definitely more on the skinny side. It was just not a lot going on. 

Mike: Yeah. You looked like me in my like, Second year of lifting. I had a little bit more chest, maybe because my chest was always just a high responding body part, but very similar.

I’m 62 ish 61 to 2. I don’t know, somewhere in there. And when I started lifting, I was like 155. Although my weight is always strangely low. My best guess is that just because I have small bones. So I have small wrists, small ankles. So a lot of people, they guessed me, they’ve always guessed me to be a bit heavier than I was, but when I started lifting, I was one 55, maybe one 60.

And then after my first year, I had gained maybe eight to 10 pounds of weight, not necessarily muscle and looked very similar to 160 pounds. 

Tom: Yeah. Prior to that, I was going on and off to the gym. I’ll get in more detail later, but getting nowhere, spinning my wheels, going through different types of periods of really bad back injuries, just different kinds of back problems.

Kind of just, spinning my wheels, the doldrums at the gym. So found the evidence based crowd yourself included your sarcoplasmic hypertrophy video is the first video I found of you. I was like, who is this guy? And I started liking a lot of your stuff. That’s, oh, that’s a very old video.

Sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. And then I had a personal trainer at the time too, where he was telling me, okay, you got to focus on calories, energy balance. It just blew my mind. Really? Like I was skeptical. I don’t know about this guy. And then all these different evidence based folks were corroborating all of this.

You know what? Let’s do it. First bulk cut cycle had, really good results. And then I’ve done a couple of bulk cut cycles since then. Progress is really slow right now, but it’s still moving forward in terms of like strength gains. So right now I’m still doing some more bulking and cutting cycles, probably going to end that.

And I would say two ish years from now, I’m going to try to go to maintenance mode because my ideal physique is somewhere between Bruce Lee and underwear model, not fitness model. Cause like fitness models are like 5 percent body fat, like sometimes enhanced a lot of times enhanced. Just to get to a place of decent physique and then maintain, because, as we know, to achieve hypertrophy, you have to put in a lot more time and volume than it does.

It takes to maintain and I’m getting older. Recovery isn’t as good. I’m a busy person. So I do want to reduce the amount of time you 

Mike: also look good now. Just where so you weigh, 

I have a picture here of you may not be you right now if you’re bulking, but this is a picture of you quite lean, probably somewhere around, 8%.

When you start getting veins up there the side of your core, you’re getting fairly low, so maybe even 7 percent or so, and you’re 160 there, but you have a completely different physique. You have a lot more muscle because you’ve in your before, maybe somewhere yeah, 13, 14, 15, something like that to cutting that in half and replacing that weight with muscle looks dramatically different.

And, like you’ve said a couple more years of what you’re doing and. You’re doing things correctly. So let’s say you’re four years in, you are going to have achieved more or less, let’s just say most of what is genetically available to you in the way of muscle and strength gain. Anything you do from that point forward is not going to matter nearly as much as everything you did up to that point, period.

And that’s just reality, right? And I would say it’s in my books. And I’ve, it’s just something I mentioned. Cause I think it’s a good perspective to have, and it gives good expectations. And I think if you look at it the right way, it’s motivating where you start from nothing, do this right for five years.

And that’s it. That’s what you’ve got. And you’re going to be happy with it. Trust me. Like any guy can get muscular. If people could see you again, you have a very similar Physique to me we’re probably mesomorphs, but we have some ectomorphic qualities. You probably also, can you wrap your fingers around your wrist and touch them together?

Tom: Yes. With yeah I actually don’t know how to describe the gap, but yes, I can create a gap there. 

Mike: Yeah, same. So we, we’re not meant to be big people. We’re just not one of the, one of the simplest ways to predict total potential for muscularity is to look at the size of your bones because the more bone density, bone, sorry, not density, but mass, the more bone mass you have in your body, the bigger you can get.

And there’s quite a bit of science behind this. If anybody listening wants to check it out, I recorded a podcast on it. I also wrote an article on it. If you search naturally in my. Podcast feed, you’ll find it. If you go to legionathletics. com search for naturally, you’ll find the article that podcast was based on, or that’s all the, that’s the written form of it, where all the research is, you can go check it out.

But the bottom line is guys like us are just not meant to be like, we would never be good strength athletes, period. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how many drugs we take. Cause everyone else is taking them too, but we’ll be, we’d be going up against people who just have better genetics for strength and size.

Looking at where you’re at now. It looks like your plan makes sense is my point, like a couple more years of hard work and not only will you be obviously happy with how you look, but you can also be happy with knowing that no matter how hard you work going forward, the progress is going to be negligible, not zero, but negligible.

I’m talking about, I’ll speak for myself. I may be according to different models could gain on the low end, another three to five pounds of muscle on the high end, eight to 10. I don’t believe that. I think that is skewed by my low body weight, my abnormally low body weight, which is, I think, Just due to smaller bones and less bone mass, and those models don’t actually take that into account.

And so let’s just say, cut it down the middle and say, I do have another five pounds of muscle that I could gain. I do think that’s possible, but it’d probably take three years. I probably could, if I did everything right. And that means spending. nine, nine months or so of each of those years in a calorie surplus, no fewer than six months.

If I did fewer than six months, it’s just because I did it wrong. So let’s just say six to nine months in a calorie surplus, ideally it’d be nine and working tremendously hard in the gym. And by that, just to put specific numbers to it, let’s say 15 to 20 hard sets per major muscle group per week. Now you can’t do that full body or I’d be in the gym, I’d have to be doing two a days.

So I would have to, I’d have to rotate in mesocycles. I have to be like, okay, I’m going to hammer the shit out of my lower body. And this mesocycle, this training block for people who aren’t familiar with that term, just a block of training. And then in the next training block, I still would be hitting my lower body with a fair amount of volume.

Maybe it’s 12, 13 sets or so hard sets per week. And then I’d have to flip that in the next because I wouldn’t be willing to sit in the gym three hours a day, basically. So I could do that. For a pound and a half of actual muscle gain that I actually don’t even care about. You’ll get to that point yourself where you’re just going to have to make that decision.

And I understand being in the same position where I’m 35, it takes me a little bit longer to recover from tough workouts than it did when I was in my mid to late twenties. I have two kids, my sleep is now better, but it’s been off and on. It depends on what’s going on, in general. I don’t know.

It’s, I don’t have a great, I don’t have a great answer for it. Yes, I want to work hard in the gym, but am I ready to do all that and accept the consequences? The risk of injury goes up too, because the weights get heavier and you have to keep on moving them up. You can’t just stick with the same weights and just do a bunch of.

Reps or sets and get there. You also need to continue to progress for the overload. And so the risk of injury goes up as those weights get heavier. And because failing with, 400 pounds in your back is quite different than failing with 200 pounds on your back. And so there are also potential just other consequences that come with it.

I’m completely hijacking the interview, but I thought I’d share that. It might be helpful to you and just people listening to just be thinking with the bigger picture in the longer term. 

Tom: Yeah, I was gonna say like gratitude and having realistic expectations, I think is huge for just life happiness in general.

But in terms of fitness, like I’m as an ectomorph is like a blessing and a curse. I find it very easy to cut. I actually enjoy cutting more than bulking at the two opposite extremes. Near the end of a cut, it gets miserable. At the end of a bulk, it gets miserable. Yeah. But cutting has always been easier and more enjoyable for me because, like when people get stressed, all we hear about is stress eating.

And yeah, that definitely impacts a lot of people, but some people are stress starvers. I’m a stress starver where when I’m stressed and under pressure, I just skip meals. Naturally. I eat less. I just want to get stuff done. And so if I’m trying to bull, God, that is hard. 

Mike: That’s probably more in line with just the body’s fight or flight response.

It is that’s why, for example stimulants can blunt appetite. Because it’s a similar response in the body. Technically the fight or flight response, it does blunt appetite and it’s yeah, trying to kick you into action. Not go eat some food and pass out.

Tom: Yeah. Sometimes I wish I had that response though when I’m bulking. Cause I just, man, I get so sick of it. 

Mike: Yeah. No, I understand. What, how many calories per day are you eating on average when you’re at the end of a bulk? 

Tom: End of a bulk, probably 500. Oh, that’s not enough to complain. I cut out cardio.

So that way I don’t have to eat as much because if I kept doing cardio towards the end of a bulk, I just have to bring it up to 4, 000. And, I still try to eat healthy. So like healthier whole food calories. It tends to be harder to eat than just junk. Sometimes I will supplement with alcohol calories.

Mike: Sometimes I supplement with in and out. 

Tom: Yeah. Supplement with juice or soda to get the calories up. But yeah, for the most part I try to follow the 80 20 rule, keep things mostly healthy meal prep, mostly healthy foods, and then some junk here and there, delicious junk, like alcohol. I can’t 

Mike: relate.

I don’t drink. So I, all I can do is sit there and be silent. 

Tom: Yeah. Real talk though, drinking is probably not healthy. I just try to convince myself some study here or there. No, it’s not. It’ll kill me less quickly than I, I hope actually. 

Mike: I’m not too interested. I haven’t done a personal deep dive into the research cause it’s not something that interests me.

I’ve never been into alcohol and don’t see myself getting into it. So I haven’t even considered it. Yeah. And I haven’t written much about it. I’ve only written about it in terms of how it can affect fat loss and muscle gain, because those are questions that I would get. So it made sense to do some research and writing on that.

But I did sometime ago, listen to an interview with a guy. So he was an MD PhD and he headed up a large team of scientists and researchers. I think he worked with life extension, actually. Which I’m not too familiar with their business side of things, but on the research side of things, they definitely have a large team of very credentialed people that produce a lot of their content, which tends to be from what I’ve seen a bit over the top in terms of marketing claims, which is I guess par for the course as far as selling supplements goes, but also fairly informative and fairly evidence based. It’s just sometimes when the evidence isn’t as cut and dried, maybe as it’s being presented. And so my guess is their process is they have a large team of researchers and those are not the people who are writing the articles.

So the people who are writing the articles are thinking more, they’re taking the research done by the team and thinking more as marketers. And how do we like sexify this a bit more? But anyway, so I was listening to an interview with a guy who heads up. That entire team and he was saying that this is an area that he did a lot of research in simply because he wanted to basically.

And so his own personal research reviewer or meta analysis, so to speak, was that the weight of the evidence shows that alcohol is simply not good for you period in any amount. It’s a poison. However, some people’s bodies are better at processing it than others. So in some people, you’ll find that they can have a certain amount of alcohol units per week, whatever it is.

And you don’t really see any negative effects, at least in the short term. Maybe if they do it for 40 years, that’s something else. But in terms of like immediate biomarkers, things you can look at, it looks like it’s totally fine. Whereas other people could have the same amount of alcohol and have it very, have it affect them very negatively.

That was his take on it. And that just sticks in my brain as, and there, there also have, I have seen, again, I haven’t done enough research to stand by it, but I have seen a number of studies that have come out in the last year or two that indicate the same thing basically. And they were research reviews and one was.

A review. One might’ve been a meta analysis. I don’t remember exactly because I wasn’t, I was just reading through an update on on research that, that was coming out. So I didn’t get into the details, but that’s my that’s my two cents on alcohol. 

Tom: Yeah. The way I see it, the age old wisdom holds true.

If you don’t feel good doing it like caffeine, you don’t feel good on too much caffeine. You’re probably not well optimized to deal with it. 

Mike: Yeah, that applies to food too. That’s an easy way for people to know. Oh, should you eat insert food here? Let’s start with Okay. If it’s full of trans fat, no, you shouldn’t eat it.

That’s the one where I would say no. And that means it’s like a microwaved chicken pot pie or something like we all know you’re not supposed to be eating that crap. But beyond that, how do you feel? If you feel fine, let’s say gluten, right? A lot of people worried about gluten. Do you feel fine when you eat gluten or do you get bloated or do you get gassy or do you start to feel sluggish could apply even to carbs.

Some people, their bodies just don’t. Process carbs as well as others. And if they get over a certain amount in an individual meal, they do feel sleepy. They don’t feel good. They feel, they get a bit bloated. They get a bit gassy. Sometimes it’s a certain types of carbs, right? FODMAPs. If anybody’s heard of that F O D M A P, there’s an article on Legion about it.

And so for some people, it’s certain types of carbs and stuff that otherwise is healthy. Like certain people don’t do well with beans. Beans is a FODMAP for example. And it’s not the beans are bad, but that’s a good test for food as well. Yeah. If you feel totally fine, like I can eat a lot of carbs and feel good.

I get like that pump. Sometimes I’ll even get like sweat from it. Cause my body just processes carbs. So that’s a sign that, Hey, there’s no reason for me to worry too much about my carb intake. But if that were different I wouldn’t worry about it, but I would calibrate my diet accordingly.

Tom: Yeah. And that’s actually a good segue into my back issues because believe it or not, gluten is a trigger for one of my back issues. I guess I should just give a quick overview of the different back issues I’ve had. So I’m 34 now. When I was about 18 ish, that’s when my back issues started.

And you can go to my website. I have an article at TominationTime. com slash LeakyGut. And I detail this in a lot of detail, but I’ll just give it a quick overview here. The, First major back issue I had was the typical lower lumbar pain that most people have, like the L4, L5, S1 discs, where just dull, achy pain.

A lot of that was, bad genetics and also bad posture, bad movement, bad exercises. I wasn’t really working out back then. But basically when I sat down, I would slouch. Rounded lower back, I would slouch a lot like that. And that was basically slowly bulging the discs, causing typical low back pain.

The next one. that started. I’ve had a couple other minor ones that aren’t that important, but the next major crippling one started in my early twenties. And for about 10 years, I had it on and off where I basically couldn’t walk. Sometimes it was very similar to sciatica is basically like that crushing nerve pain in your butt cheek where it just hurts so bad that to like even you know, try to put any weight on it, it would be like so painful.

It’d be like blackout pain. And in my early twenties, I would be crawling to the bathroom in the middle of the night. If I had to go pee, I would have serious conversations with myself. Do I really want to risk peeing myself or deal with a 20 minute pain of getting up and crawling really slowly to the bathroom?

My girlfriend now wife had to help me put my underwear on. Sometimes I’ll be walking around college campus so young and looking fine, looking like I have no issues, People be like, Oh, Tom, what’s wrong with your leg? What’s wrong with your, like, why are you limping? Why, like, why are you using a cane?

And it was just the same conversations over and over. And I honestly didn’t want to keep having these conversations. And it got so bad that I would try to hide it. Like later on at work, if I was limping down the hall because I was having a bad episode, I didn’t want to be stopped by coworkers to have the same conversation again of you’re so young.

What’s wrong with your leg? It’s not my leg. It’s my back. And then, you should go see a chiropractor. You should see a doctor. I’ve seen them. I’ve seen like over probably 30 different practitioners to try to deal with it of all kinds, right? Like doctors, chiropractic massage, physical therapy, you name it.

I pretty much tried everything to summarize what the problem was. It was basically I have ankylosing spondylitis, AS, that is an autoimmune disease. It’s not technically an autoimmune disease. It’s close enough for the purpose of this conversation. It’s an autoimmune disease where basically my immune system attacks my spine.

That caused permanent SI joint degeneration. That’s basically where the spine and the pelvis kind of come together, for those who don’t know. Transcribed And that does impact my squats a little bit. Anything wide stance, I can’t do sumo deadlift is risky. Wide stance squats is very risky even to today.

I just don’t do them and I’m safer that way. Lunges, single leg stuff, unilateral leg exercises are risky movements. I always have to go bilateral or just both legs together at the same time. AS, irritating or destroying my SI joint, or damaging, I should say, it’s not destroyed, but it’s damaging that combined with poor posture and other problems triggering piriformis syndrome, which was basically tugging on that sciatic nerve.

All of that caused me hell for 10 years. where I could barely walk. I was thinking, am I going to be in a wheelchair 10 years later? And all the while, whenever I did have a reprieve from the pain and things started to get better, I would try to go work out and exercise because I was just so desperate to stop these cycles of going back in to episodes of pain where I could barely walk.

Thank God today, I am pretty much completely better to the point where I haven’t had an episode in, I want to say three years. I’ve had a couple of like mild flare ups where I was like, Oh, okay. I got a warning sign. Got to take it easy. Okay. That last squat I did last sets, I was probably a little bit too wide of a stance.

Let’s just take it easy the next couple of days. And it’s gone. But nothing like before, like I haven’t had to use my cane in years. And it feels wonderful and stronger and 

Mike: healthier than ever. That’s great. And it probably sounded counterintuitive to many people where you went from that to where you’re at now.

And that doing a bunch of squatting and deadlifting in particular helped. I used to think 

Tom: like I had lower back issues. Someone told me, Oh, hey bro, you should try deadlifting. And all I heard was bad back don’t deadlift. And that’s what I thought was chill. Like this guy’s an idiot. But the truth is one of the major things that helped me with a generic low back pain was deadlifting.

Obviously once the pain subsided and I was back to a good baseline. Then with proper form, it really taught me hip hinge movements where you basically know how to properly stick your butt out to hinge at the hips, maintain a neutral curve in your spine as you pick things up. That was a game changer.

That was one of the reasons why I had chronic low back pain all the time. I did not have my neutral curve in my lumbar. I had a flat back. And as a result, I always had that dull ache after properly deadlifting that helped get that to go away completely. And it’s funny because back in the day I could squat maybe 60 pounds and it would set off my back where I couldn’t walk for weeks.

60 pounds. Couldn’t walk for weeks. My last PR, not particularly impressive, but from how far I’ve come, I’m very proud of it. 2. 95 for five on squatting. So that is just a world of difference from where I was before, the bar plus 10 pounds, each side crippled for weeks. I’m so close to just three plates for five.

That’s like my life goal. Three 15 for five reps. I’ll be happy with that. And then I’m retiring. I’m done. 

Mike: The most I’ve ever squatted was again, nothing particularly impressive, maybe 365 for a few. So that meant, I could get. I think I was working with 335 for four or five and then could get 365 for a couple.

I might’ve gotten as much as 375 I don’t remember, or sorry, three, 345 for four. So I don’t remember exactly, but you feel cool at the three plates. 

Tom: You’re so close to that four plate dinner, Mike. 

Mike: I know, although that was at the end of a lean bulk. I was sick of it. I was sick of eating. I actually wasn’t too fat.

I was probably 13 or 14%. I could have kept going, but I just was sick of eating. I was eating 4000 calories a day, every day, and I wasn’t training on the weekend. So at least I was able to get a little bit of reprieve and drop to it. Just my maintenance, but still a fair amount of calories.

And also my right knee was just getting more aggravated. And that became a thing where I never injured it. It just would be aggravated and annoyed. And it was probably due to inflexibility, which I’ve now corrected. I do like a series of yoga stretches every day, basically. And then also an imbalance in my hips where I had good external rotation on my right side.

Good internal rotation on my right side and shit. External rotation and the opposite on my left side. So I had shit. Internal rotation on my left and very good external rotation. And who knows how that happened? Maybe because I used to sit. Remember when I was younger, I’d be on the computer like there was a period when I was, I think I was 13.

And maybe I was 14. For a year, I played a bunch of a video game called Asheron’s Call. It was the first big MMORPG, right? It was very popular. So I played a bunch of that game and I would sit in a chair with my left leg Externally rotated so fully, as if kind of half of a butterfly, right? If people listening just so they can see where my knee is splayed out to the side and my calf is touching my hamstring, and then I would have my right leg up on the chair and I would just prop myself on it.

And if I was on the computer, I don’t know. That just became like a default position that I would sit in for a lot of the time that I was on the computer. And that lasted for a year. But I don’t know, maybe that was enough to. Give me this kind of almost hyper mobile left side, and I definitely affected my diaphragm like it took some time before I would just get random kind of diaphragm pains because this right side of my body was always scrunched up.

So at the time, I felt like I was getting warning signs with my knee. My neck was getting tight from benching. So I got up to 295 on flat for a couple, two or three to 65 or 275 and incline for two or three. I finally called it off on the lean bulk. I hurt myself, but it wasn’t a bad injury.

Deadlifting, maybe it was four 30, something got to the top, felt good. And then felt my hips. Almost like shift. And I was like, Oh, that’s bad. I don’t know. That’s not what’s supposed to happen. And then had back pains. And again, it was that SI joint. There was an instability on my left side. And so my point with all of that is what has really helped that.

And my knee pain has not returned since I haven’t had any back issues, which again, it wasn’t my back that got affected by that deadlifting injury. It was my SI joint, which can refer, the pain can refer into your lower back and also down your leg. So it was the stretching. It was stretching. And then there’s some yoga poses that I did.

My quads used to be way too tight. Hamstrings are okay, but quads were way too tight. And so daily yoga stretches helped with that. And it’s hard to work on internal rotation, but the Most effective stretch that I found is, so if you look at online, there’s a stretch called a 90 90, I think it’s called.

And you have one leg in internal rotation and one in external rotation, basically. So you can do that. You don’t have the other an external, it’s like you have your leg again. It’s think of sitting on your leg where your calves are touching your hamstrings. Your butt is on the backs of your feet, right?

Now, if you did that and instead though, You move your, for me, it’s my left side, move the bottom half of your left leg out to the side. So now it’s at an acute angle and then you’re putting your butt on the floor. It torques your knee. So you gotta just make sure that you don’t jack your knee up, but if you get it right, it allows you to really work into internal rotation.

And so after doing. That in addition to the yoga stretches for my quadriceps, for my quads and a couple of their hip stretches, that was it. That was the end of the knee pains. And I haven’t squatted that heavy in some time, but I’ve gotten up to decent weight again and at various points and no pains and then no SI joint issues to speak of.

Sometimes a little bit of discomfort. I would have it sometimes where it wasn’t even with heavy weight. It’d just be like warming up and I would feel it tweak. And I was like, oh, it doesn’t feel good. And then I would. Stay away from squad. I would go to the leg press for a couple of weeks just because I didn’t want to further aggravate it.

Tom: After going through my 10 year hell journey, specificity for treatment and stretches and all that stuff is just so huge. Like yoga, for example, during the dark times, I heard. Yoga. Oh, so good for your back. Go do yoga. So I tried yoga and not all yoga stretches were good for me. Some would aggravate it. And I just started to realize over time, if someone has posterior pelvic tilt versus anterior pelvic tilt, basically like a slouched lower back versus stripper butt or Donald Duck, the fixes for those two conditions are very different and it can aggravate the other one.

If you don’t choose the right one. And so certain yoga poses would really aggravate me, even though I heard yoga is good for back pain, blah, blah, blah. But it’s just too generic. It’s got to be specific for your situation. And so in general, what really helped me for my back issues was one, being hyper conscientious about my body and my posture and just really paying attention to what am I doing all day?

Like sleep, sitting, standing, all that kind of stuff. And how’s my posture look when I’m doing those things, getting friends, take pictures or video of when you’re doing it, analyzing it. You can do that now today, like Reddit fitness and stuff like that. You could submit form videos. And of course it’s the internet who knows what they’re going to say, but they might give you ideas about what to look into.

In terms of clinicians, the two clinicians that helped me the most by far was one a chiropractor slash acupuncturist. I’ve been to a lot of different acupuncturists. I’ve been a lot of different chiropractors and doctors in general, but the ones who were just a clear step ahead of everyone else were just the ones who did both chiropractic acupuncture for some reason.

Maybe I just got lucky. And the second clinician was a physical therapist who does weightlifting. Those physical therapists who like walk the walk, they tend to be a lot more intelligent. I found in terms of understanding what I’m trying to do and understand the typical road bumps that would happen along the way.

So all of that, plus, proper stretching and learning how to fix my issues. I did a video on this on my Twitch page. If someone goes to my channel twitch. tv slash domination time, you type exclamation mark back pain, one word with exclamation mark, the video will pop up that will talk about the specific stretches I did.

But basically my specific stretches were the yoga pose, the Cobra yoga pose, the bridge, which is basically like a root bridge. And the Cobra is basically a half push up where you’re keeping your pelvis to the ground while you do a push up. And then doing deadlifts helped a lot. And then essentially just in my specific case, avoiding hip opening exercises and actually trying to strengthen the adductors or basically trying to strengthen the inner groin muscles.

All of that combined with a good clinician, I was able to finally get out of this hell hole and then now become stronger than ever. Learning how to deadlift and pick things up properly, man, that’s life changing. Cause people will say Oh, deadlifting 400 pounds is not functional, blah, blah, blah. Hell yeah it’s functional.

If I can maintain a neutral spine and not injure myself while picking up 400 pounds, I’m going to be much better prepared to pick up random 30 pound objects around the house and do weird twisting jerking motions when I’m trying to pick up something awkward because we don’t pick up 400 pounds under normal conditions in our life, but we’ll pick up random objects with like weird positioning.

Mike: Puts at risk for injuries. Yep. And maybe it’s a 50 pound and people get hurt from that stuff. Anybody listening. Yeah. If you’re 20, your risk of that is maybe low, but as you get older, it’s common for people to seriously mess up their backs. Just doing stuff like that. I’m in like a business association, YPO.

And one of the dudes who’s in my Chapter. He jacked up his back so bad that it was like he was out of the gym for months. He would just do cardio and stuff. And if he probably did more weightlifting or had a stronger lower back and stronger core, maybe this wouldn’t have happened, but. He was out for months.

Just, it was like that. It was like, Oh, he went to go move his grill or something and not even pick it up. Just Oh, it was something like that. And if you saw him, he just looks like a normal dude. He’s not like super out of shape or super overweight. He’s in his forties and that knocked him out for months.

Tom: Christmas decorations. Where I keep my Christmas decorations is in the garage in a very high area. It is very narrow to get to. And we have this giant body bag. You can put a corpse in there. Yeah. And it’s not particularly heavy, but it’s like maybe 30, 40 pounds. But it’s it’s so awkward to pick up for me to put this bag away.

I have to basically get on a chair, bend down, like basically do a stiff, like a deadlift to get it off the ground. So it’s really risky for the low back and then pick it up, twist overhead, press it into the top of the garage area. And in my younger years, when I didn’t know how to deadlift properly, I didn’t know how to brace properly.

It’d be like a coin flip chance. I’m going to be screwing my back over, but I understand proper bracing mechanics and how to maintain neutral positions. The best I can, I was able to do it just fine. I didn’t feel like I was going to risk an injury this time.

Mike: Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. If you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it.

It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say, Thank you. You can find me on Instagram at muscle for life fitness, Twitter at muscle for life and Facebook at muscle for life fitness. How did all this lead you to get on Twitch? I remember seeing it before Amazon bought it and it was, I think it was all gaming.

Maybe it was more than gaming at the time, but that’s all I ever knew. It was, it was like a gaming platform. 

Tom: Yeah. It’s Twitch is basically a gaming platform, but. They’ve been expanding to non gaming stuff, but the general idea for anyone who’s never seen it, it’s a live stream, but is very chat focused and it has a huge organic audience, like on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube, if you do a live stream, the only people who are going to find you are people who already know you and they already follow you.

On Twitch, the audience is so large that you have actual organic discoverability as a potential path to grow. So you don’t have to bring in external people. People will just organically find you. Now I started on Twitch because You actually inspired me quite a bit. Mike. I enjoy teaching. I enjoy talking, working out explaining things and distilling information down to the correct level of my audience.

And when I started learning about all this stuff, I was like helping, I was sharing pictures and helping other friends on Facebook and they’re like, dude, how’d you do this? I was like okay, let me explain calories, energy balance. Here’s a bunch of meal prep recipes I do. I do a ton of meal prep.

And I started realizing like I should just create a website where I can just dump all this information. I can just point people to a resource and just save myself some time. And then one thing led to another and people were like, dude, Tom, you should do YouTube videos. You should do X, Y, Z. I’m like, yeah, but YouTube is super saturated, websites, super saturated.

But then one person said you should do a live streaming on Twitch. And then I realized oh wait, yeah, this is not saturated. No one’s really doing this yet. That’s how I entered that space. It was a bit of inspiration from you because I remember from one of your podcasts a long time ago, you were talking about how something along the lines of you should find a market that has a hole that no one’s filled yet.

And be the person to fill that hole and also take, I can’t review set at someone 

Mike: else, but that’s a key takeaway. Find holes that need filling. That’s a life, it’s like a life philosophy. Yeah. 

Tom: Basically like I found, an opportunity that no one’s there’s a market for this. Like live streaming is very unique in that how you can help someone and you can encourage someone, it’s one thing to read an article. That kind of gives you instructions. It’s another thing to hear a person live, hear your story, and hear the nuance to your situation. Be able to answer it live and say, Hey man, you can do it. Let’s fucking do this. Here’s a plan. Let’s talk about it in a couple of days.

Let’s see where you’re at. So I think that was a unique opportunity for Twitch. And so I just did it. I have a home gym. I’m going to work out anyway. And let’s just talk about these things. That’s what got me started on there. And then, following your advice, I saw that it wasn’t saturated yet.

I was able to have that first mover advantage and be well positioned when non streaming stuff started to gain a little bit more momentum on Twitch. 

Mike: Non streaming? What does that mean? Sorry, non gaming. No, that makes perfect sense though. It was a good opportunity to do something that wasn’t, now, especially, It was things were competitive back when you were making that call of, should I go over here?

Should I go here? And now they’re just completely glutted and there are always opportunities, but you have to find them. And, I often get people asking for advice saying they want to get into, some people say they want to start a supplement company. And my advice is don’t. Honestly, don’t do it unless you already have a big platform and you’re willing, if you really want to build a real company, it’s not just about making products and promoting them.

You have to also build a business and that’s a whole other thing. And if you’re not an outstanding marketer. And you don’t already have a big following. Cause if you don’t really have a following, you need to be a great marketer, right? There are some supplement companies that do quite well. And the people who run them could give a shit about fitness.

They may even be the faces of their businesses, but it’s all just about marketing. So sure. You can do that. If you’re a very good marketer and you have money to spend, you can buy your way in. So to speak, if you’re not a great marketer, you don’t have a lot of money to spend. They need to have a big platform.

And even then I wonder, for example, I think of Bradley Martin, the super jacked guy that does all kinds of. Crazy. I don’t know what he’s up to these days, but I remember when a lot of people were talking about the things he would do. And I don’t know if that company really went anywhere. Did he sell supplements?

Yes, of course. Does he still maybe, I don’t know, but I would be very surprised if that business ever broke, let’s say 5 million in annual revenue. And then where is it at now? So if you just want to sell some stuff, that’s one thing. If you want to build a real business, that’s really another thing. And similar to that, people will ask about, should they write books or should they just do YouTube?

I think it was smart of you to survey the landscape and not that you’re looking for the easy route, but why make things unnecessarily hard. And, going into YouTube initially, it would have been harder to gain traction. And you have, what, about 20, 000, 20, 000 followers or so on Twitch? Yeah, I don’t know in the scheme of things, if that’s good.

Again, I haven’t really, haven’t even looked around the website. It’s a large ish number for sure, but in the scheme of things, 20, 000 on YouTube, for example, I don’t know if that’s even considered good, honestly, but it would be probably harder to get to whatever. Magnitude of success. And I don’t say that as a slight, by the way, I literally don’t know on Twitch.

20, 000. Are you calling 

Tom: me an influencer, Mike? How dare you? I’m 

Mike: asking if you’re an influencer. Are you officially an influencer? But my point is whatever magnitude of success you’ve had on Twitch, it almost certainly would have been harder to do that on YouTube. Oh, 100%. I’m complimenting your business acumen.

Oh, thank you. 

Tom: I had a good influencer. Tell me to survey the market. 

Mike: I think I actually would prefer that over a mentor. There’s also another word that like, Oh, who’s your mentor? I don’t have, or when somebody says, Oh yeah, so and so is my mentor. That’s a red flag to me. I immediately assume Oh, this is a scammer who’s about to sell me on some mastermind.

So they can be my mentor too for only. 2, 000 a month. I can get an email from their assistant and think it’s from them. Yeah. But yeah that’s what started the whole, the switch thing. I want you to talk about meal planning. It’s something you’re passionate about and you have some good tips. 

Tom: When people think meal prep, they think of the typical cook five meals on Sunday.

And so you cook like all five lunches from Monday through Friday or five lunches and dinners or some combination, but there’s. a bit of an issue with that, in my opinion. That’s a good starting place. Instagram worthy, you get all your meals lined up and they’re in their individual boxes, snap picture and put a hashtag on it.

But what happens for a lot of people is there’s a lot of food fatigue. That’s it. Cause you’re eating the same thing. for five days in a row. Now, I think to some degree, we have to suck it up. Like you want to save money. You want to save time, meal prep. You want to achieve your calorie goals and achieve some sort of aesthetic or fitness goals or health goals by eating certain foods, meal prep.

But to some degree, you got to suck it up. Yeah, you’re going to be eating less variety than usual. In my opinion, we have way too much food variety, like an unusually high amount of food variety and palatability. In today’s day and age, like within a three mile radius, Mike, how many different restaurants or maybe two or three mile radius, how many different restaurants do you think you could eat at?

Mike: I’m right across the street from a mall. So let’s just start there with the food court, but in many ways live better now than Kings did just, a couple hundred years ago, and this is one of them in that We have instant access to things that were once delicacies. There was a time when salt was a delicacy.

Tom: We have so many food options that I think we’ve forgotten what it’s like to just eat boring. I’m not saying people need to eat boring, but think about your great grandparents and what they probably ate and how it probably wasn’t nearly as much variety as what we have now. And so I think I’m just weird in that I like eating boring.

I genuinely like it for me. It takes out decision fatigue. I actually enjoy that aspect too, that I don’t have to think as much about what I’m going to eat. 

Mike: This is probably for me. It’s one of those things that, in many ways, how we behave is a kind of reflection of our identity, right? And how we see ourselves.

And for some reason, I feel like it’s eating a bowl of oatmeal is more in line with how I identify, as a person than going to a Michelin starred. Restaurant, not that, I’ve been to Michelin starred restaurants and I can enjoy food, but I guess I’m just not a foodie. 

Tom: So you identify as oatmeal.

Yeah. Do you have a problem with that bigot? In terms of food, my meal prep is. Instead of just doing five meals in a week, I think the next evolution, the next step forward is to create freezable meals and make them taste good. Because if it’s freezable, that solves a couple of problems. One is food fatigue goes down because if you can freeze the meals, you’re not limited to just five meals that you cook at once for the week.

You can now cook a few different recipes and then freeze them. So you might be thinking, but Tom, I don’t have much space in my freezer. I only have a typical fridge with a top freezer section. Chest freezers are surprisingly cheap. It’s 180 bucks, less than 200 bucks. You can get a decent size. chest freezer that’s seven cubic feet, or you can stick a few bodies in there.

I don’t know why I keep referencing bodies and storing them. I swear I don’t have any bad habits like that, but you could store dozens and dozens of frozen meals in a chest freezer. They’re very economical for that. 

Mike: To be fair, bodies is actually a better visual idea of the size, probably than seven cubic feet.

A few bodies. Oh, cool. That’s a good size. 

Tom: And so now my typical meal prep looks like this. Like me and my wife, we will I have a weekend set aside where we will just plan out. We’re going to cook three, four, five recipes of food and spend 10 hours, like a full day job or two nights of just cooking for five or six hours and cleaning and get it out of the way because it’s just, it costs so much time to prep food and clean.

So the actual cooking part doesn’t take that long. It’s pretty fun. I enjoy it, but dude, I hate cleaning, but if I’ll have to clean my pans once because I just made 50 meals out of it and I froze them all, that saves me a lot of minutes throughout the rest of the week and months. It’s cheap and I have my meal prep recipes on my website.

combinationtime. com slash meal prep. All the recipes that get on there are legitimately high protein where protein is the top macros. If not like it ties with carbs or fat. Cause I hate it when someone says high protein, you look at the macro ratios, like 10 percent of the calories are protein. What the hell?

This is high carb, high fat, but anyway. The recipes are cheap. They’re Costco friendly. I shop at Costco a lot because Costco sells things like a package of 48. What am I doing with a package of 48? You can meal prep 48 meals. They all cost one or 2 a meal. That’s how I view meal prep. I think it’s a mistake to meal prep fresh fruits and vegetables with it.

You don’t have to do that. I consume fresh fruits and veggies on the side or just frozen veggies. You can microwave that. You can Roast that fairly easily per week. That doesn’t take too much time, but seasoning your meat and then sauteing it and then cooking it. That takes a lot of time. If you can scale that to get it all done at once a month, that’s a ton of time saved.

Last tip on that too, is the starch. For my meal preps, I will often not Breeze it with the starch. One, it’s a texture thing. Two, it takes a lot of space. And three, starch is pretty easy to make fresh. So like rice cookers are amazing. They save a lot of time. I’ll cook like a stir fry that I’m going to serve over rice.

So I’ll cook the stir fry, freeze that, and then just prep the rice fresh once or twice a week to serve it over that. Or potatoes, bake those fresh. That doesn’t take too much time to do. So I recommend for people to just experiment with meal prepping. See if you can freeze it. 

Mike: Do you do beans as well?

Beans? Yeah, I actually have a meal prep recipe for beans. Just another good starchy vegetable that most people like. You can make them taste good. 

Tom: I love beans actually. So I haven’t released this recipe yet because it’s a side dish, but canned beans are expensive. I think if you look at like how much you’re really paying versus dry beans, if you can buy any dry starch, oh man, you’re saving so much money.

I love it. I love saving money. So Costco, you buy a giant like 15 pound bag of dry beans, like five bucks. But if you’ve never cooked dry beans before, it’s a pain in the ass. Like you have to do a pre soak the previous night and then you have to boil it for three hours. And if you have a pressure cooker, saves tons of time.

So one of my pressure cooker recipes I haven’t released yet, but. Really quick is basically just cook a bunch of beans on high, add salt, add pepper, add a little bit of lard or some kind of animal fat to flavor it up. Delicious. My kids gobble up those beans. They’ll actually fight each other for the beans.

I swear I’m not a dystopian zombie apocalypse. We’re like fighting over beans. They really like the beans. It tastes great. That’s called character building right there. All right, kids, one bowl of beans, two contestants, one winner. Go. So that’s, yeah, I have an interesting life. So meal prepping, I do meal prep.

That starts the beans simply because it does cost a lot of time. To cook beans. So that is a starch I will prep in large amounts. 

Mike: So are you storing your containers Marie Kondo style? I’m sure you are, right? Cause you don’t want to have stacked up five high and you’re gonna dig around, but if you turn them on their sides and you label them now you’re talking.

So what I do 

Tom: is it’s similar to that. Cause yeah, if you have a chest freezer. If you have three bodies inside the chest freezer, you won’t get to the bottom body. It’s gonna be like, like it’s a pain to pull those bodies out. So what I do is I get paper bags. It doesn’t have to be paper bags, but typically paper bags because they’re sturdier and they retain their shape.

I’ll store all of one recipe inside the paper bags in containers. And I’ll put one piece of masking tape on top of it and just label it. When did I make it? What time? What day and what’s in it? Okay. And then I will have a bunch of bags in the chest freezer, so I can just open it up, and if I need to reach below the bag, all I gotta do is just remove one bag out of the way, and then I can reach below it, and get to the bag below, and I quickly see what’s in it, cause like when you freeze it, there might be moisture that froze over into ice crystals, and so you can’t see what’s inside of it, but just one label, For the entire bag is good enough.

And so yes, Marie Kondo changed my life and changed my meal prep. 

Mike: That’s not the Marie Kondo style though. The Marie Kondo style, they’d be on their sides. People think of like filing cabinet, right? How the files would look. So then when you’re looking down on it, you’re seeing a lot more, obviously, than if they were just stacked up, they could be color coded.

So you’re going to label one and then, all the rest. 

Tom: She’s only kind of half my mentor and still haven’t really learned enough from her yet. 

Mike: And so what you have your cost per meal, you’d say like a dollar, 2 per meal on average with protein, 

Tom: right? With a good amount of protein. And to me, that’s, it’s such a huge thing where I have a lot of friends and they’re like struggling with debt and credit card debt, and they’re still going out for a lot of their meals eating out.

And they’re spending like, even fast food is like five, 10 bucks a meal to feel full. If you just, Average that out and you replace every lunch with a one or 2 meal. Just lunch. Like you stop eating at a fast food place and you just eat a meal prep recipe. You’re gonna be saving a couple thousand dollars per year from that.

So let’s just say, 4, 000 saved per year. What would you do if you had 4, 000 cash right now? What would you do with that? You could pay off credit card debt. You can take an amazing vacation. That’s what I did. My wife and I took an amazing vacation to Ireland, 4, 000 bucks. I don’t care about.

A restaurant or a fast food meal that’s gonna cost me 10 and really not be memorable, but I could just eat a 1 meal prep recipe, save that money, put it towards a memory. It’s gonna last a lifetime. And so meal prep to me is such a huge lifestyle change for saving time, saving money, hitting your goals.

And it’s just, Something that I think most of us should do 

Mike: or you invest the money. And if you want to learn how long it takes to double, you divide the interest rate into 72 and that’s how long it’ll take to double your money. So if you have money invested at 8 percent interest, do you divide eight into 72 and you get nine.

So it’s nine years, that money doubles every nine years. So if you don’t have debt to pay off, if nothing else, you could think about it that way, where future you. A couple decades from now might thank current you for putting together what would be, several hundred thousand dollars without really having to stretch for it.

Tom: I have a new book idea. Thank you, Mike. It’s going to be called eat boring, grow rich. 

Mike: The title needs work, but there might be something there. It could be like, I will teach you to be really rich. 

Tom: So meal prep in general, I think just my take home message is Eating a different meal for every single meal is a luxury that I just do not think most of us can afford.

You’ve got to eat sometimes the same thing over and just suck it up a little bit. 

Mike: I do the same thing. I’m even more basic than that these days, just because I’m very busy. And yeah, I just don’t really want to think about food if I’m going to make something a bit more elaborate. It’ll be on the weekend.

So it’ll be like a Sunday dinner. I might want to make something, but for my just daily grind food, my lunch is simply a salad and I have spinach in there and some butter lettuce and some green lettuce and some avocado and some chicken for protein. Some ground chicken that I make into patties and bake.

So it’s moist and season it a little bit. And that’s it in the salad. Cause I just don’t care to me. Salads are the dressing makes it right. These days I’m using a sesame ginger dressing and that’s it. And I’ll eat that for a while. And then maybe I’ll go back to a vinegar out of some kind. I like. Vinegar stuff, right?

And that’s it for my lunch. And my dinner is just like a bunch of vegetables to stir fry with a bunch of vegetables. And I actually do like it fresh. And it doesn’t take much time to just chop up some vegetables. At that time I’m like talking to my kids and talking to my wife anyway, so it works right.

And it’s maybe a 20 minute. Deal of getting it going, maybe even less action might be more like 10 or 15 minutes to get it on the stove and cooking and throw some same thing, some chicken in there. And it’s a simple recipe actually use the recipe from my cookbook, the shred chef, which a shameless plug.

And I, cause I like it. And there are a few recipes in there that I’ll just rotate between and it works for me. And I also like that. I know. That way I’m also getting in my nutrition. So I’m getting in a solid five or six servings of vegetables per day, and I’m getting in two servings of fruit.

I do a banana before I work out. I do an apple usually in the morning. So I get a little bit of fruit in. Obviously, the vegetables are more important, but I do get a little bit of fruit in as well. When I’m cutting, I’m not Eating any other very carb rich foods. So I’m cutting right now. So I have a piece of pita bread with dinner too, cause I like it.

So I guess that’s my only other carb rich food, but if I’m not cutting, I eat oatmeal because I like it. I eat it at night. Usually after dinner, it’s like a post dinner cup of oatmeal, dry, cook it the way I like it. And put a little bit of maple syrup in it and it’s delicious and a little bit of milk as well.

And so I’ll eat like that for months and months on end before changing anything, because I guess I’m not very susceptible to food fatigue. Even the vegetables are chosen. Because vegetables are of course good, I’m getting my dark leafy greens, which is important, getting a couple of servings of those in my salad for lunch.

And then I’m eating something cruciferous, right? So a broccoli or cauliflower is always in my stir fry for some of the extra little goodies that are in cruciferous vegetables. And garlic is in there for the extra little goodies in garlic. Cooking it does reduce the value of it. However, you can let it sit for a little bit and then gain some of that back basically, and mushrooms and a few others that I don’t want to call them super foods.

And actually I have a chapter on this. I’m working on what’s going to be the new second edition of beyond bigger, leaner, stronger. And I opened that chapter by poking fun at the idea that there is a super food. No, not in the way that you might read about it on like a goop or something like that, but there are foods, I’m going to pull up right now for the list that are just a cut above the rest in terms of like healthy food choices, because they do have some extra goodies in them.

Like fish is a particularly good source of protein. Cause you also get Omega threes. I’m going to call them functional foods. That’s what we’re talking about. Garlic as well. Garlic is great for you. Ideally you would just eat it raw. You literally could just swallow raw garlic, like a clove or two of raw garlic a day really would be the best way to do it.

Tom: I’ve tried that before. It’s pretty rough. My stomach does. I have a low threshold. Some people don’t, but it can be like painful in the stomach. 

Mike: Yeah, I know. So the problem is if you heat it up, it destroys an enzyme that creates the bioactive compounds that you’re Are giving the garlic at special properties, but you can also chop it and you let it sit for about 15 minutes before you cook it.

And then there you go. So what I do is I leave it out. I’ll chop it. I’ll get everything else going that’s there and I’ll leave the garlic out and then add it a little bit later. Blueberries on the list. I do eat some blueberries sometimes. They’re not, if I’ll have them, I eat them cranberries on the list oats are on the list.

So anyways, I like that. Also, my diet is optimized in that sense, which is really unnecessary, in the scheme of things, but Hey, why not? 

Tom: I was going to say also shameless plug. I sent you a link just now, how I eat my vegetables. So I do something called the cow technique where for my salad, I’m just really all about saving time.

So I think adding all those extra calories from the dressing and the time it takes to create a salad, it is just a frustrating experience to spend 10, 20 minutes to make a salad and then stab it two leaves at a time. So in the link I sent you to my Instagram, I have a video where I basically, the way I eat my salad is, get one of those like big tubs of spinach or kale, whatever, and just literally.

That’s it. Take my hand in there fistful shove in the mouth. So I’m literally like cramming one or two salads in my mouth. 

Mike: The cow method. It makes sense. I was waiting for this. I was like, huh? The cow meth. I like it. That’s as just boring as you can possibly get. I like that. 

Tom: I really do recommend this.

Does it taste good? No, of course it doesn’t. Do I enjoy it? Not really. I enjoy saving time. I can literally just spend 30 seconds. And I’ve got my salad in my mouth and they just don’t think, just chew, go do something else. I multitask, I make my protein shake, I get my lunch ready for the day, like I have a salad for breakfast essentially, and I’m done.

I got one or two servings of dark leafy greens there, save time, save my, save calories too. 

Mike: My salad is a couple of handfuls of this couple of handfuls of that. The protein’s already pre made throw it in, cut up some cucumber. It’s got to take me no more than three minutes to assemble and then to eat it takes, whatever, five to seven minutes.

And I do my email while I’m eating. So it’s, whatever. And the extra calories. I understand that those are calories. I enjoy that. There’s a bit of oil in there. So some polyunsaturated fat for what it’s worth. Not that I really need more fat, but I don’t mind that I’m getting an extra 10 or 15 grams of fat because otherwise my diet is fairly low fat.

That’s also why I add the avocado because I want to get some mono unsaturated fat and just make sure that my fat intake is enough because there are obviously trace amounts and all kinds of other things that we eat. But I do like to get a concentrated diet. 30, 30, whatever, 30 to 40 grams of fat, and then the trace adds up to the rest.

So I think I’m going to stick with my method and expand the three minutes and the hundred calories of dressing. 

Tom: One of my main points though, is I think some of the people I work with, they over complicate it. And they think that to eat vegetables and to eat salad, like it’s going to take so much time.

I got to get all these individual ingredients. And that’s where I come in and say look, if your adherence is suffering because of the time it takes or the multiple ingredients or the cost, dude, just get it down the hatch. Don’t overcomplicate it. Go simple. Same thing with my other vegetables for dinner.

What I’ll often do too, it’s similar to you, but again, the save. time and money route. I love Costco. They have these huge bags of frozen veggies. I add some water in a bowl, microwave, just microwave it for five minutes, 10 minutes, however long you want to do it. It’s cooked. 

Mike: It’s actually not ideal nutritionally for anybody wondering.

It’s not that microwaving your food is inherently bad or anything. But you can leech nutrition out of food if there’s also water involved. But if it’s just a little bit, that’s turning steam, then that’s obviously fine. Probably functionally speaking, it would be more or less the same as steaming your veggies, which is, I think, technically speaking, the best way to preserve the nutrition in them.

Now, stir frying or sauteing is totally fine. It’s not that you’re destroying the nutrition, but if you want to be as anal as possible, then steaming would be the way to go. 

Tom: So I like to keep it simple because like I can set in the microwave. I don’t have to think it’s just there and then it’s done when it’s done.

And then if I’m in a rush, eat plain vegetables. If I want to actually season it, that’s not too hard at that point, but the cooking part, just try to minimize, save a couple minutes everywhere I can to add up to a lot of time saved over the course of the day. But yeah, fruits and vegetables. Got to eat them.

Don’t overcomplicate it. That’s my message. 

Mike: If you’re not eating at least vegetables, fruit is probably an optional as far as health goes because you can make up for no fruit if you’re eating enough vegetables and some other foods. But if you’re not eating vegetables, your diet sucks. Period. I’ve had this talk with a number, a couple of the guys that work with me, these youngins who 23 and invincible.

And I’m just like you can develop the habit now or Yeah. At some point, your body’s going to force you to. 

Tom: Yeah. I will say one caveat to that as someone who’s coming from an autoimmune disease background where diet did make a big difference because gluten was a huge trigger for my AS and closing spondylitis because there’s a hypothesis out there about leaky gut.

And it’s a hypothesis right now. It’s not hard science. So if anyone tries to tell you it’s a hard science thing, it’s not. It’s, we know a little bit about it, but in my opinion, there’s enough information out there to just experiment. Like the acute risk of playing around with your diet, like cutting certain things out.

Like certain fruits or vegetables, like FODMAPS, like you were mentioning, like, when I first heard about FODMAPS, I was like, what? These are all healthy. Like, how are these bad? And then you started reading about the potential problems. Huh, it may not be healthy for me. It’s healthy in general, but may not be good for my particular case.

And I tested occasionally just to see. And if I just go crazy with gluten one day and I have like multiple slices of cake and just eat noodles and have a sandwich and, All of that stuff, the next day my AS flares up, I can’t sleep, I can sleep five or six hours, and then the mid back out of nowhere will start hurting.

All kinds of symptoms and flare ups come up out of seemingly nowhere, but it was diet. Diet played a big role in that. 

Mike: Yeah, and just for people wondering, what are some of these FODMAPs? Apples, Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, onion, mushrooms. So these are all things that generally, yes, are nutritious and good to eat for some people, not so good to eat.

Chances are, you’re not one of those people, dear listener, but there’s a very slight chance. And again, if you want to learn more about that. And if you find that you do have, I think it’s mostly, it would be gastrointestinal stuff, troubles, despite eating foods like some of these ones that I’ve mentioned, then who knows, it may be exactly what’s going on, or it may just be contributing to something so you could, again, learn more at legionathletics. com just go search for FODMAP and you’ll see a pretty long detailed article that I wrote on it, but still to that point, though, that’s not oh I guess I just want to eat vegetables. Like I still stand by if your diet does not contain several servings of vegetables a day.

It sucks. 

Tom: Definitely try to get those vegetables in somehow. I just figure out a way to sustain adhere and make it work for you. For me, that’s a time saving thing and doing the cow technique. 

Mike: I like it. All right, man. Why don’t we just wrap this up here? I think this was great. A lot of helpful information and fun discussion.

And let’s tell everybody again where they can find you and your things. And if you have anything exciting coming up now’s the chance. 

Tom: My main location to find me is twitch. tv slash Tomination Time. Tomination as in like domination but with a T because my name is Tom. Time. Tomination Time. And I’m usually streaming in the mornings, Monday through Friday, early morning before work.

So people can come in there and check me out and we just, it’s a fun, encouraging community. And we do Q& A, a lot of live Q& A type stuff. So that’s the main location to find me. It’s a very interactive community. We also stream at night. We do games. It’s like the wife and I, we will bond. Sometimes she’ll work out and I’ll train her, but that’s my main outlet.

I also have my website, TominationTime. com. And the main thing there that I think people enjoy is meal prep, TominationTime. com slash meal prep. I got my recipes there. Also the gym. It’s awesome. I have a home gym. I’m a advocate for, shopping around to find like the equipment that’s not super high end.

Like rogue fitness is pretty expensive and high end, but you can build a decent home gym with a power rack. That’s going to work for most people who just want to get a little bit stronger and burn some fat, build some muscle. You can build like one with a power rack and weights for less than a thousand bucks.

There are compact options out there too. So my website has that too. TomNationTime. com slash gym. Yeah. Come by my Twitch channel and let’s hang out and chit chat. 

Mike: Awesome, Tom. Thanks for taking the time, man. This was fun. And we should figure out a way to do it again. Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I’m doing 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 picking up one of my best selling health and fitness books, including bigger, leaner, stronger for men.

Thinner, leaner, stronger for women. My flexible dieting cookbook, the shredded chef and my 100 percent practical and hands on blueprint for personal transformation inside and outside of the gym. The little black book of workout motivation. Now, these books have sold well over 1 million copies and have helped.

Thousands of people build their best bodies ever. And you can find them on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google play, as well as in select Barnes and Noble stores. Again, that’s Bigger Leaner Stronger for Men, Thinner Leaner Stronger for Women, The Shredded Chef, and The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation.

Oh, and I should also mention that you can get any of the audiobooks 100 percent free when you sign up for an Audible account, which is the perfect way to make those pockets of downtime, like commuting, Meal prepping and cleaning more interesting, entertaining and productive. So if you want to take audible up on that offer, and if you want to get one of my audio books for free, go to www.

legionathletics. com slash audible. That’s L E G I O N athletics slash a U D I B L E and sign up for your account.