Training and diet mistakes that stick you in a rut and the power of “mini-habits”

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Hey, this is Mike Matthews from musclelife. com. Thanks for stopping by and checking out the podcast. In this episode, I want to talk about a couple things. One is a handful of diet and training mistakes that I think are probably the biggest mistakes you can make. These are mistakes I made personally for many years, so [00:03:00] I know how problematic they can be.

These are the mistakes that really, account for the majority of the frustrations that people run into both in their training, where they don’t really get stronger over time. They don’t really see improvements in the gym and with their bodies where it’s the same thing where their body, they just tend to look the same year after year.

They don’t really see much in the way of muscle growth and they’re not really be able to get as lean as they want to get. And they’re just stuck in this middle ground, which again, I know how that is because I was there myself. And then I also want to talk about a simple little concept that I ran into A few weeks ago I wrote about it called mini habits and how you can use them to help you incorporate change into your life.

This could be health and fitness type change. It could be, working out starting working out or maybe working out a little bit more to reach your goals or, or dietary related things, cleaning up your diet getting onto a proper meal plan and so forth, or just really, you can use this a little tool for anything in your life that you want to, whether you want to [00:04:00] stop doing something that you know don’t want to be doing anymore or whether you want to start doing something that, that you would like to be doing it’s a, it’s an easy on ramp for building up your willpower and self control.

All right, so let’s start first with the diet and training mistakes. So the first big mistake that I see people making and that I made myself with diet, we’ll start with a diet mistake. is basically not really paying attention and not really tracking, not really planning your calorie intake and macronutrient balance.

Right now it’s very popular to just eat clean. And a lot of people that email me, especially if they’re having trouble losing weight, are confused because they’re eating clean. Which is, means different things to different people. But generally what they’re referring to is they’re just eating a lot of nutritious foods, which is good.

But they’re not losing weight or the weight loss has stalled and no matter how, cleaner their diet becomes, they don’t [00:05:00] lose, they don’t, they’re, they can’t lose any more fat. And I made this mistake for many years where. I would just eat based on my body’s natural instincts, which isn’t bad if you want to just maintain your body composition.

I would always have protein with my meals, so my protein intake was probably actually a bit higher than it needed to be. And I would have a serving of carbs and a bit of fat, and I would just eat when I was hungry, and I would eat until I was not necessarily full or stuffed, but until I was satisfied.

And doing that is okay if you want to maintain a relatively lean physique. I don’t know how well that would work. If you wanted to maintain a very lean physique, you would probably have to, you really have to pay attention to the mirror and you’d probably have to pay attention to like your waist measurement or your caliper readings.

For body fat percentage purposes, because sometimes, if you, let’s just say that you overeat, let’s say you’re a guy and you want to maintain like seven to 8%, which is what, where I’m at right [00:06:00] now, or you’re a girl and you want to maintain I don’t know, 16, 17 to maybe 18, 19%.

If you overeat for a few days if, and if you, depending on what you’re eating, especially if you overeat in terms of if you eat too much dietary fat, you’re going to notice that a little bit in the mirror, you would notice that a little bit. On a caliper and then you’d have to adjust if you really wanted to just go back to, you’re where you want to be.

You then would have to adjust by eating a bit less the next couple of days. It can be done, but when you are wanting to lose weight and you or wanting to gain weight and you want to make sure that you’re going to get results, you really want to be. Planning or tracking your f food intake.

You and I, I’ve talked a lot about clean eating. I think it’s a good idea to eat nutritious foods, but it gets way too dogmatic, especially in all the foods that you’re not supposed to eat, that some people deem as unclean and other people say are fine and whatever. I would say the only foods [00:07:00] that I would really recommend you stay away from would be just the really obvious overly processed package crap like TV dinners and, microwavable apple pies and stuff like that, that are have trans fat, which is probably, that’s the one real type of food that or food molecule you want to stay away from. But otherwise, carbohydrates aren’t the enemy. Starchy carbs aren’t the enemy.

Dietary fat is not the enemy. Saturated fat, unsaturated fat, both. You should be getting both in your diet. So it’s not so much about what you’re eating. It’s more how much you’re eating and, I’ve spoken about this a lot, so chances are it’s not news to you, but in emailing with a lot of people I find that people that know this still, they try to fudge, they try to wiggle too much with their numbers.

They know they should be They know where their intake should be. And, but when we really start looking at how they’re eating, and they really start counting up everything, they find out that they’re overeating by 200 calories a day. Let’s say that, and if you’re trying [00:08:00] to lose fat, that, that could be half of your deficit right there.

And then the weekend comes and they get even a bit more, lacks with it and what should be, maybe their day that they’re going to have their cheat meal on, maybe they should be ending, if they end, if you go three, 400 calories, maybe 500 calories over your normal intake one day a week.

And especially if you do it with a bunch of carbs, it’s going to be fine. But when you’re going 1500 calories over and it’s a bunch of dietary fat as well. That’s a problem. So if you’re cutting your, if you’re should be in a, let’s say four to 500 calorie deficit per day, and then you turn that into a 200 calorie deficit, six days a week, and then one day you’re 1500 calories over with a bunch of dietary fat that can all even out to very little to no actual fat loss.

Let’s say you lose maybe, 50 grams or something like that, instead of the pound that you were hoping to lose. So the, and these are people that technically know better. And that when they’re eating dinner, they don’t, they want to [00:09:00] take those extra couple of bites or when when they’re out in the restaurant, we’re out that restaurant and the.

Massive pot of macaroni and cheese sounds good. They just eat it. And then, some wine would go well. So they drink that too. And then it goes like that. And that’s a mistake that you know, it it has effects. You there your metabolism is I find that And this is also supported by research that you do have some wiggle room.

I, if you’re dieting for weight loss, I generally tell people to be within, try to be within 50 to 100 calories of your target. If you’re a little bit over some days and you’re a little bit under other days, you’re going to be fine. But, You only have so much flexibility. There is a point where if you start eating a few hundred calories more than, because when we’re calculating your intake, when we’re calculating your total daily energy expenditure, it’s not accurate to the calorie.

You might be burning a bit more, you might be burning a bit less. So part of the game is learning your body and is learning your numbers and seeing what you can get away with in a [00:10:00] sense. Because when you’re dieting for fat loss, really what you want to be doing is you want to be eating As much as you can while still losing a half a pound to a pound of fat per week.

That’s the goal. So some people there are obviously there are baseline places to start simple formulations like I’ll link an article down below that just lays out. How to calculate your total daily energy expenditure and then how to calculate your deficit and then how to turn that into a meal plan.

That’s a place to start, but some people find that they have to eat a bit less to lose that half pound, a pound of fat a week. Some people find that they can eat a bit more and that’s a part of that is just seeing what you can get away with your body. But you have to be realistic about it.

Just because somebody else gets to eat and there are some guys that I come across, usually it’s guys that you know, because their metabolism is very fast when they were bulking, they were able to work up to, let’s say 4, 000, 4, 500 calories and they start their cuts at 3, 500 calories.

That sounds ridiculous. I can’t do that. And they have to work [00:11:00] their calories down. They don’t get to just eat 3, 500 calories a day and go from 15 percent to seven. But the fact that they get to start high is definitely a benefit because when they start working down, maybe they finished their cut at 2, 500 calories a day or, maybe a little bit less.

And that’s great for them. For me personally, I have to start my. When I’m going to be cutting, I start it around, I work, I can work my metabolism, my intake up to about 3, 400 a day, and then I have to start at about 2, 800, and then just work it down, and my cuts normally end, if I’m going to be getting very lean, if I’m going to be getting down to the 6 percent range, I’m ending around 2, 000 calories a day.

That’s just how my body works. So part of it is learning your body and learning your your metabolic I’d say capacity for gaining weight and for losing weight and then also for maintaining, like I find for maintenance, if I stay around 2, 800 calories a day. And I get get plenty from carbs.

I keep my dietary fat around 60, maybe 60. Yeah, probably about 60, 70 grams, sometimes 50, depending on what, how I feel like eating. [00:12:00] And I just get the, my protein is about one gram per pound and all the rest comes from carbs. If I do that, then I maintain, I can stay lean. My training is is good. I’m getting enough dietary fat to.

Support my hormones and just general health and it works. That’s my body though. And you are going to have to learn your body. And that comes back to planning and tracking your food intake. Because if you don’t really know how much you’re eating, there’s really no way for you to learn your body. And if you do though, and you do that for a while, one, you’re going to get used to the calorie content and the macro content of different foods.

So you’re going to be able to, when you are going to be. Off a plan for whatever reason, you still are going to have a good sense of how much you’re eating. And also then if you’re going to make little changes in your diet on the fly let’s say sometimes I’ll eat a bit more for a few days because of whatever, if I’m working, like I’m working on a cookbook right now.

So sometimes my dinners need to be a little bit bigger than I would normally like them to be. [00:13:00] So I can adjust earlier in the day. Or I can just go over my numbers for a couple of days and then I can cut it back for a couple of days. But that’s just because I have a good sense of how much I’m eating and a good sense of what’s in foods that if I want to cut back a little bit on the potato for dinner or cut back on my something else earlier in the day, then I know what, how much room I’m buying in a sense.

So the summary of this mistake is don’t just wing your diet unless you are I would say an experienced flexible dieter in a sense like, you know how your body works, more or less the calorie and macro content of different foods. And you’re just maintaining when I’m cutting, even I just make a meal plan and follow it, eat the same stuff every day, or I make myself a couple options for meals.

Just because it keeps it simple. And that way I know that I’m going to lose the fat that I need to lose and I can just get it over with and get back to maintaining or, go back into, if I’m going to be bulking or whatever, but I don’t want to be dragging a cutout because I’m just being too loose with my calories.

And then [00:14:00] what should have taken two months takes four months, which is not just annoying in terms of the day to day experience, but it also sucks for training because when you’re in a calorie deficit, your training for the first few weeks, it’s probably okay, but then your strength starts to plateau, your energy levels start to plateau and it’s not misery, but it’s not particularly fun.

I don’t look forward to some of my workouts when I’m in a deficit, especially if it’s been three or four weeks, like legs, heavy legs training is tough. Heavy pulling is tough. You do it, but it’s much more fun when you feel strong. So yeah, that’s basically the summary of that mistake.

All right. So let’s talk about another mistake here. Let’s go over to the training side. And this is the mistake is using the traditional type of ascending pyramid style of training, which is very popular. You’ll find it recommended, in all the magazines and blah, blah, blah. And if you’re not familiar with it, basically it’s where you do a little warmup and then your first set is going to be, let’s say.

12 to 15 reps with something, on [00:15:00] a, an appropriate amount of weight, let’s say 60 percent of your one rep max, and then you’re going to rest and then you’re going to increase the weight and do whatever you can do there. Let’s say it’s eight to 10 rest, increase the weight 68 and so forth.

And the reason why this training, this style of training sucks is as a natural weightlifter. What you really need to be emphasizing is heavy compound lifting. Of course, I talk about this all the time, but I’m just going to repeat it. And by heavy, the four to six rep range or heavier, depending on where you’re at in your training.

If you’re an advanced weightlifter, then you probably also want to be adding some very heavy power lifting type, like two to three rep. And then an occasional one rep which I talk about that in my book beyond bigger, leaner, stronger, but that’s more applicable to advanced weightlifters. However, whether you’re new or advanced, heavy compound lifting needs to be your emphasis.

And that’s really where you want to be seeing your progress. You want to, if you can, over time, if you can work on with heavy weight on the deadlift squat, bench press and military press. And in terms of bench press, I would [00:16:00] say I put some emphasis on the incline bench press over the flat, although the flat of course is also important.

If you can do that. You’re going to make gains, you’re going to build muscle, you’re going to obviously build strength, but you’re going to build the type of physique that you want. Doing that though requires that you emphasize that those movements and in your workouts and you emphasize heavyweight, not lightweight.

And when you’re doing a traditional pyramid style of training, by the time you get to that heavyweight, you’re so fatigued. You’re not going to be able to move anywhere near amount of near the weight that you’d be able to move if you had done those heavy sets first. And so not only will your weight be down, but your reps are going to be down too.

So yeah. Let’s say, you could pull three 15 for four if you were to just warm up and do it right away. But if you were to pyramid on the deadlift, so if you were to like take two 25 and do 12 to 15 and then maybe two 75 for 68 and then try three 15 for, try to do it for the four to six or four.

Maybe you get to maybe one, maybe you can’t even get it off the ground and you actually would have to go down to two 95 just to get [00:17:00] four. That is not the way you want to train. I used to do it. And again, I learned the lesson of just being stuck in a rut for a long time. And when I started flipping it around where I do all my heavy lifting, my heaviest lifting always comes first in my workouts.

And depending what I’m doing, that’s usually some very heavy stuff like some two to three rep. And then I’m moving into four to six rep and then I’m doing some eight to 10 rep. That’s beyond bigger, leaner, stronger. And if it’s bigger, leaner, stronger, it’s very simple. You’re just working in the four to six rep range.

And the reason why it’s one rep range is because that’s what new. That’s what people new to weightlifting or new to that have never done that style of weightlifting that have done a bunch of high rep stuff. You need to spend probably about a year to a year and a half just building your strength in that rep range on those key movements.

And that alone is enough to give you your first probably 20, 25 pounds of muscle and a real foundation of strength that you can then use to I wouldn’t say. They give [00:18:00] you a foundation of strength that will allow you to make good use of higher rep ranges because you’ll actually be able to move some weight.

One of the problems with the high rep ranges with when you’re weak is you can’t move any weight. You can’t really cause much in the way of muscle damage or even progressive overload because when you’re working at 12 to 15 rep range. And you’re not strong, you’re going to be, your weight is going to be quite low and you’re going to be mainly just working on muscle endurance.

And if that’s what you want to be doing, if you just want to be able to do a bunch of reps on the bench press with one 35, or if you want it to be able to do a bunch of pushups or a bunch of pull ups or something like that, yeah, you just do a bunch and that’s how you build that muscle endurance.

But if you want to build. muscle and you want to get bigger, you have to get stronger. And the heavier weightlifting is what makes you stronger. I wouldn’t say that lighter weightlifting doesn’t make you stronger. Of course it builds some strength, but if we look at it in terms of a continuum on one end, you have the very heavy, pure strength, powerlifting type of lifting.

And on the other end we have the very [00:19:00] high rep, just muscle endurance type of lifting you want to be. You don’t want to necessarily be in the middle. I think you want to be a little bit skewed toward the very heavy, which is that four to six rep range where you’re lifting, about 80 to 85 percent of your one rep max.

And you emphasize that in your workouts. And then if you’re going to be doing some higher rep stuff, that’s fine, but you do it after the heavy stuff. If you do it first, again, when you get to the heavy stuff, you’re not going to be able to perform as well as you would if you’d done the heavy stuff first.

And there’s also just a, an energy point deadlifting, takes a lot out of you. Talk about deadlifting and or squatting, even if it is lighter weights. If you’re working the 8 10 rep range, 8 10 rep range with squats is pretty tiring. And when you get to, if you were to do a few sets like that and then try to go real heavy, you’re just going to have less energy.

You’re going to be more fatigued than if you would just hit that heavy stuff right in the beginning. So to summarize, I don’t recommend pyramid training, traditional pyramid training, reverse pyramid training. I do recommend, although I think [00:20:00] it’s better suited to advance weightlifters that have enough strength to actually move good amounts of weight in the higher rep ranges.

So if you’re new to weightlifting or if you have never really emphasized heavy compound weightlifting in your workouts, I recommend that you start with just doing that work in the four to six rep range. Which is also, the simple underlying foundation of programs like starting strength and five by five, you’re working, five reps, 80, 85 percent of your one rep max.

Adding weight to the bar over time. That’s the key. All right, so let’s go to the next mistake here. Let’s go back to dieting and the, this mistake is eating too little carbohydrate. Low carb dieting is really trendy right now. I’ve written quite a bit about it. I’m going to link I think the, like my definitive guide to why it’s called why low carb dieting sucks.

I’ll link it down below so you can check it out. But, The bottom line is if you are an overweight, sedentary person that doesn’t do anything with your body, you don’t need to be eating very many carbs. If you are an active person, however, and you are not [00:21:00] extremely overweight, even if you are mildly overweight, carbohydrates are not your enemy.

But especially if you’re lean active and if you weightlifting carbs are definitely your friend. Carbs are what fuel your workouts, not just in terms of glucose in the blood, not just blood sugar, but in terms of glycogen in the liver, glycogen in the muscles. This is what you burn up when you’re weightlifting.

It’s anaerobic activity. So the more glycogen and the muscles can store a ton of glycogen a lot. And the more you have in there, the better your workouts are going to be, the stronger you’re going to be, the better you’re going to feel in your workouts. Also research shows that higher carbohydrate dieting is just better for muscle growth.

You have, and there are several reasons for this, which I talk about in the article below you have one side of it is. That in your training, you’re going to be able to push more weight and push yourself further with a higher carbohydrate diet than a low carbohydrate diet, which of course, that itself over time will build more muscle.

But then there are also effects related to insulin in that higher insulin levels. [00:22:00] Insulin is an anabolic like a testosterone is, but it’s anti catabolic. And when we look at muscle growth, what we want to achieve is we want at the end of the day, We want the amount of protein synthesis to exceed the amount of protein degradation and insulin is, it helps us in the protein degradation side of things in that it is anti catabolic.

So it prevents protein breakdown. So if we can lower that protein degradation and keep the protein synthesis at a good level, then, we’re going to build more muscle. Whereas if we were to do the opposite or research shows that low carb dieting, we have people on a low carb diet. They when they’re exercising and after exercise there, there’s higher amount, higher levels of protein breakdown in their body.

So you start, if here’s the synthesis, And if the breakdown protein breakdown is creeping up, if they equal out, then that’s no muscle bill, just like how it is with bot with body fat. You eat food, your body stores fat, your body. Then as it runs out of the energy from the food, it starts burning fat and it juggles [00:23:00] at the end of the day.

If your body has burned more fat. Which obviously we burn a fair amount of fat when we sleep. That’s we had, there’s no food in us. And so we’re gonna have a chunk of fat loss there. So if you looked at it in a term of 24 hours, if morning to morning, your body has burned more fat than it has stored through your eating of food, your net fat content, total fat mass has gone down.

If it’s the other way around. If, because of overeating, you have stored more fat than your body has been able to burn. And of course, burning fat means expending energy. So that’s your basal metabolic rate. That’s your activity level. That’s exercise. Everything you do, if you are eating, if you’re feeding your body an excess amount of energy and it’s then stores more fat than it burns, your total fat mass has gone up.

Muscle growth works in the exact same way. It’s just the variables are different. Now we’re talking about synthesizing, creating muscle proteins versus losing muscle proteins. And if that becomes imbalanced and it becomes [00:24:00] weighted to the losing side, then you lose muscle. So when we’re trying to build muscle, we want protein, everything we can do to X accelerate or to raise protein synthesis rates.

And lower protein degradation rates is going to benefit us. And a high carbohydrate diet has been proven to do that. High carbohydrate diet doesn’t make you fat. It carbohydrates don’t cause weight gain. Insulin is not the enemy. I’ll link an an article down below on that. Insulin is actually your friend.

And a lot of this also is just common sense and just comes down to everything in moderation and balance is basically almost always the answer. And that’s also in lifestyle. If somebody is, they don’t move their bodies, they don’t exercise, they sit in chairs all day, they sit in their car, that’s an imbalanced life.

And so for that person they may need to. imbalance their diet to compensate for their imbalance lifestyle. And that imbalance is carbohydrate reduction. That person’s body doesn’t need energy for what they don’t move. So probably 50 grams of carbs a day is probably enough for [00:25:00] that person. But if you have a balanced lifestyle, which means that you exercise regularly, which is what you’re supposed to be doing.

Our bodies were not made. to just sit around and do nothing. Just look at it from an evolutionary standpoint. Not too long ago we were, our lives were endangered by. Predatory animals probably 10 times a week, if not more. And we were always on the run trying to kill food and, just struggling to stay alive.

And that’s what our body has adapted to is that is high levels of activity, high levels of danger, high levels of stress. Physical stress. And this modern lifestyle is new. It’s different. And the body’s not made for it. So that’s where, you’ve probably seen research that is, that associates sedentary living, just sitting with all cause mortality in terms of just developing all types of disease and just dying.

I’ll link a study down below if you haven’t, so you can check it out. But basically the more you sit, it’s, The more [00:26:00] likely it is, you’re going to die of something is what it boils down to. And that sounds a bit sensationalist, but it’s true. And the association is particularly strong, not so much with working actually, interestingly enough.

But it’s particularly strong with people that go home and just sit in front of the TV and don’t move it. Don’t move their bodies. That’s really where the association comes in for people like me. Where I’m sitting all day when I’m working, although I do stand up and I stretch every 20 or 30 minutes or so, I have that as a little routine just to, I find if I sit for too long, also I get my, my, my muscles can get crampy from working out and whatever, but someone like me or probably like you, we sit for a little bit longer.

Yeah. In my case I’m probably sitting for 11 hours a day or so, which is a lot of sitting, but I’m also in the gym in the morning obviously moving my body weightlifting is not only is it training my muscles, but it’s improving or maintaining my flexibility. It’s also moving my lymph system, keeping that going.

And then I’m sitting and then I do, I like to do [00:27:00] cardio a few times a week. I enjoy it. So it’s also moving my body. So in that scenario. I when we’re looking at my lifestyle in light of the research on sitting, I would be not, I wouldn’t be putting myself at risk for anything. But if I were not exercising and I would just, wake up, sit in the car, sit at the office, sit in the car, sit on the couch, go to bed, that is a dangerous way to live.

So back to just how this relates to dieting. If you are have a balanced lifestyle, if you are moving your body, you are exercising regularly then you a balanced diet. is what you want to be going with. And a balanced diet is, for instance, the standard balanced diet in the fitness world is about 40 percent of your calories coming from, this depends on how many calories you’re eating.

If you’re eating a lot of calories, these numbers would change a little bit, but the standard baseline is about 40 percent of your calories from protein, about 40 percent from carbohydrate and 40 percent from dietary [00:28:00] fat. And that is a high carbohydrate diet, by the way. So I’m not talking about an excessively high carbohydrate diet.

I think there’s like some stupid 80, 10, 10 thing, 80 percent of your calories from carbohydrate and then 10 percent from protein percent, 10 percent from fat. That’s ridiculous. That’s stupid. That’s unhealthy. Too little protein, too little dietary fat and tons of carbs. Why there’s no scientific reasoning behind that.

And that’s just one day the people doing those following those types of diets, if they truly are, sometimes I don’t believe it. You’ll see some girl on YouTube eats 82, 000 bananas a day or something. I’m not sure I even believe that. She doesn’t also have protein outside of that and there’s when you start when there’s money to be made, especially when there’s a lot of money to be made.

People can get pretty funny. And they lose their moral compass. It, it breaks very quickly. And if that means, lying about this, that fudging this and that, yeah, it’s easy to, [00:29:00] it’s easy to justify it to yourself when there’s a lot of money on the line. That’s not all I’m talking about for high carb high carb dieting.

I’m talking the average person. I’m talking somewhere between one and. Two grams of carbs per pound of body weight. So to summarize don’t go for the low carb crap. It’s just there’s no real benefit for in it. You’re not gonna lose fat faster, your training’s gonna suck. Your energy levels are probably gonna suck.

And for what you’re not gonna there’s no benefit in it. And if some, I, and I’ve had people try to then take the health angle and say point to research showing that. Carbohydrate intake, it’s related to increased triglyceride levels and other things that could be a problem with your health or impair, decrease longevity.

But when you look at a lot of that research, it’s research done with diseased individuals or with obese people that are also sedentary in many cases. But even if they’re not sedentary, an obese person’s body, how it deals with carbohydrate, how it deals with food is very different [00:30:00] than a leaner.

healthy person, especially a lean, healthy, active person. And don’t forget that exercise is the number one most, it’s the number one healthiest thing you can do for your body. There are so many benefits that exercise has that. My personal take on longevity in general, I want to live long.

I want to be mentally and physically healthy. I would like to be able to play with my great grandchildren one day. I’m into all that. But at the same time, I want to be able to enjoy my life. I don’t want to be paranoid over every little thing that I eat. I don’t want to restrict entire food groups or, Every time I have a dessert, I feel guilty because I think I just, took 10 minutes off my lifespan or something like that.

And, That’s not just me diluting myself because a lot of that’s like I said, a lot of these types of claims are bullshit and regular exercise can undo the harm, I guess you could say, of [00:31:00] maybe some other doing certain things that maybe are not so healthy, but you can balance so much of it with exercise.

And I’m not saying that I, there are certain things, certain unhealthy habits that I just will never get into like smoking and drinking, for instance. Smoking is horrible for your health. There’s no arguing that just go look at any of the research that’s out there. Regular, drinking, drinking alcohol occasionally is not bad for your health. If you’re having a drink or two a week, you’re probably fine. But regular alcohol intake. terrible for your health. And again just go look at the research. It’s there. It’s very clear. But I’m talking more let’s just say, let’s say that wheat was not so great for your health.

It’s not the killer that a lot of people say it is. And I’ll link an article down below where I talk about this. Let’s just say every time you ate wheat, it caused, let’s just say it caused a little bit of inflammation in the body. There’s actually not. That is a more of a myth than anything else, but let’s just say that were the case and you don’t necessarily eat wheat every day, but you like to have some wheat here and [00:32:00] there.

Regular exercise is amazingly effective at reducing systemic inflammation. So who cares? So you’d have some wheat and maybe it would cause a little bit of inflammation. You’re on point in every other, you exercise regularly, you’re getting the majority of your calories from nutritious foods.

Your body is working so well. You’ve had, you got it in such a good state that you can afford little things like that. You can afford to go on vacation and just eat a bunch of sugar for a few days and yeah, you don’t feel so great and maybe you gain a couple pounds. You then you come back. You just diet for you cut for a week, you cut back on the sugar intake and there’s no residual effect.

So just keep that in mind that if you’re living, if you’re doing what you need to be doing with your body, if you’re exercising regularly, you’re training your muscles regularly, you’re maintaining cardiovascular health, you’re eating a lot of nutritious foods. there are a lot of supplements out there that health type supplements that I like.

I wouldn’t say a lot. There are a handful that I really liked that have a lot of great benefits [00:33:00] like fish oil, spirulina, curcumin ginseng. There are things that you can take that are, have a lot of good research behind them that. It also can fight inflammation, improve longevity, increase, improve your immune system and so forth.

If you’re doing all these things, you don’t have to worry so much about eating a bit more carbs than the other person or eating a bit more sugar than the other person. And by the other person, the person that’s 30 pounds overweight, sedentary smokes, drinks. Yeah, that person’s fucked.

That’s true. One day they’re probably going to die of a heart attack or of a stroke or of some other disease, diabetes, whatever. Yes, that’s true, but just because research shows that certain things cause bad reactions in their bodies and are not good for their bodies or really not good for their bodies doesn’t necessarily mean that’s going to apply to you with a healthy body.

All right, so let’s go into the next mistake here, training related this time. And this mistake is a pretty simple. Most people make it and it’s resting too little in between sets. I used to do this because I thought that. [00:34:00] I don’t know, I guess I thought if I’m working out, then my heart needs to be going, I need to be drenched in sweat, I need to feel like I’m really exerting myself, and that was part of the thrill of it also, there’s, there’s the chemical rush that gives you and also the feeling of that I’m not being lazy, and that’s like the achievement of working out and so forth but, when I, What I’ve basically learned is, and this is backed by by research as well.

I’ll link an article down below where I, you can go look at some of these studies, but basically the, when you’re working with heavier weights in particular, let’s say you are working with four to six rep 80, 85 percent of your one rep max, which by the way, I actually want to, I want to.

Just clarify something. I think that’s, that advice is best suited to men for women. I think that you should start your weightlifting, the eight to 10 rep range and build your foundation there. And then then probably take you six to eight months, six to 10 months to build a solid foundation in the eight to 10 rep range.

And then you can start adding in some four to six rep range work. Many women that I’m [00:35:00] working with, what we find works really well for them is they start their workouts with three to six sets of four to six reps, and then they do three to six sets of eight to 10 reps for the other exercises. Not all four to six because with some women’s bodies are able to take it, but many women find that it.

It leads to a bit of overtraining and it’s hard to balance the weekly volume. It’s hard to balance frequency because women’s bodies simply can’t repair muscle like men’s bodies, mainly because of hormonal differences. So just to clarify that sometimes when I’m talking, I just instinctively I’m always talking about guys cause I’m a guy, but I need to remember that I need to also address, some of these things for women.

So I’ll clarify anything else that needs to be changed for women. But yeah. So anyways, back to this point here, so if you’re resting, a lot of people rest, they don’t keep even, they don’t know a lot of people. I see they don’t watch the clock there. They don’t have a stopwatch. They just rest.

Let’s say sometimes it’s 60 seconds, sometimes it’s 90 seconds. Sometimes they get in a conversation. It’s five minutes. But the problem with that is if [00:36:00] you rest too little, it’s going to impair your strength and that’s been proven that you, let’s say you’re trying to work in the eight center rep range or the four to six rep range.

If you only rest a minute, your sets are going to, let’s say you get two 25 on bench for five and then you rest one minute. You might get three, let’s say two. If you rest for two minutes you might get four. If you rested for three minutes, you’ll probably get five again. And that’s important because when we’re weightlifting, realize that the whole goal is building strength.

That’s what we want to do. It’s not necessarily who cares of whether our heart rate is up, is high or low. Who cares whether we’re sweating? Save that stuff for your cardio. When you’re lifting weights, what you want to be doing is adding weight to the bar over time and rest time in between sets has a big effect and has a big impact on this.

So general rules of thumb are if you are working in the eight to 10 rep range, I recommend you rest two minutes in between sets and keep track of this. Like I just use, my my pod has a little. stopwatch. That’s what I use. [00:37:00] And if you are lifting, let’s say if you’re doing four to six rep work, I recommend three or even four minutes of rest in between sets.

Personally, I do three, sometimes three and a half. But if you’re still feeling if let’s say you do feel your heart is still going after three minutes and you are not that, that’s really what you’re looking for. You’re looking at your heart rate has come down and you’re ready to do the next set.

You can go up to four minutes and if you’re doing even heavier stuff like when I do two to three rep or one rep work, I’m resting four to five minutes in between sets and the whole purpose is to maintain that heavy weight without going so long that my muscles start cooling off and then, that, that can also impair performance.

But if you just follow those simple guidelines, it’s Then you will notice that if you are under resting, you’ll notice that you’re able to maintain your weight and you’re able to push more weight, which is going to help you make gains over time. And if you’re over resting, you’ll find that your workouts are not only shorter, but you will be able to maintain your performance better on, on the exercises and you’ll probably find it a bit more enjoyable.

There is a point where if you were resting [00:38:00] too much and then you come back to do your sets, you lose the intensity, you lose the focus. You’re able to maintain it with a little bit shorter rest. Okay. So I have quite a few more that I could go into these mistakes. I’ll link both of the articles down below so you can read a, I do have some more so you can go check those out.

But I don’t want to go on forever on this. So let’s just flip now over to the next little subject, which is this mini habits concept. I ran into this, I read an article on it and then I read a book on it and I thought it’s a great simple little concept. So I wrote my own article which I’ll link down below.

And basically the concept is, You want to change a habit, you want to install a habit so you want to stop doing something that don’t want to be doing anymore, or you want to start doing something like following a diet starting an exercise routine, starting, reading a book every week, whatever, it doesn’t matter you can try to go all in.

Some people are good at that. I’m pretty good at that. If I decide I want to do something, I Kind of just, work out what is it going to take to get to where I want to go and let’s just do that. And that’s [00:39:00] fine, but it’s the mini habit concept is start very small. Start with something that’s so small that you almost can’t fail at it.

So if it’s working out, maybe you start with doing one pushup a day, which is what the author of the book that I read, which you’ll find it in the article. That’s how he started his workout routine. And ironically, I actually don’t know if he’s on the program now, but now he’s definitely, he has done my program now, bigger, leaner, stronger.

And, but it started with just one pushup a day. And he had tried to get into workout programs in the past and it didn’t go anywhere. It didn’t go well for him. So he started with one pushup a day. Who can, you can’t fail at one pushup a day and then, okay, fine. Five pushups a day, 10, 20, 50 one day a week at the gym, two days a week at the gym.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so it’s just a very simple little concept. Whatever you want to start doing. If it’s follow a diet, for instance, let’s say your diet is you just eat too much fast food, junk food, whatever to you’re eating too much food. And that type of food not only is a lot of [00:40:00] that food actually just straight unhealthy because of the junk in it.

It’s also very calorie dense. It’s very hard to meal plan when you’re, one meal is 1500 calories with like a hundred grams of fat. It just makes it impossible basically. So maybe first you just cut out maybe you don’t even cut out. Let’s say that you’re drinking a lot of soda. Bad idea.

Drinking calories is just a bad idea. It’s a simple recipe for getting fat is just drink a bunch of calories because it doesn’t say satiate you and it skyrockets your calorie intake. So let’s say you cut your soda intake down by one can a day. You get, you do that for a week or two, cut it down by two cans a day, do that for a week or two, et cetera, et cetera.

So let’s say you have the soda gone now and you don’t even miss it. You’re fine. Or replace it, replace the soda with something let’s say there are like sweetened waters out there or sweetened flavored waters, let’s say. And then maybe you just change that to water. I just like to drink water personally.

But and then you go after something else. Let’s say you normally eat a bag of chips a day. Instead you eat half a bag of chips and you throw the other half away or you [00:41:00] save the other half for the next day, whatever. So then now maybe you only eat a quarter of that bag a day until you get rid of the chips and so forth.

And this also builds momentum. And you’ll find that if you do this, if you just make little changes adding or subtracting from the things that you want to add and subtract from, you will gain some momentum. You’ll gain some. It sounds stupid, but almost some confidence in yourself. Okay, you can do this.

This is not so hard. And then you’ll start becoming more ambitious. You’ll want you’ll make bigger jumps and maybe you’re going to go from two days a week at the gym to four just because it seems, why not? That’s when you can look at it and just go, yeah, sure. Why not? If there’s no question in your mind that you’re going to do it, That’s what you want to be.

You don’t want to try to be taking on things where a part of you says you’re not going to be able to do it. Are you really going to be able to? Probably not. You can always, whatever. You’ll give it a try. You want to stay away from that. Instead, you want to just pick things where you just go, I can’t fail at that.

That’s so simple. And what you feel [00:42:00] like you can’t fail at will get bigger and bigger as you do better and better. In whatever it is that you want to do, so that’s the gist of the mini habit. I think it is something that again, I would check out the article I wrote and check out the book, especially as we’re coming into January, it’s going to be the whole new year, new you thing, New Year’s resolutions where people are going to make the mistake of.

Committing to changing every single aspect of their life and becoming, the person they’ve always wanted to be and blah, blah, blah. And that’s good, but it doesn’t work for many people. For most people, it doesn’t work. Much smarter is just commit to some simple little changes and see where it goes.

Maybe at the end of the year, you will end up achieving that big, oh, I’m a new person now in some aspect of your life. But I would personally recommend that you start much smaller. And the mini habit concept can help you with that. All right. So I’ll cut it off here so we don’t go on too long. I hope you enjoy the podcast and I will see you next time.

Hey, it’s Mike [00:43:00] again. Hope you liked the podcast. If you did go ahead and subscribe. I put out new episodes every week or two where I talk about all kinds of things related to health and fitness and general wellness. Also, head over to my website at www. muscleforlife. com, where you’ll find not only past episodes of the podcast, but you’ll also find a bunch of different articles that I’ve written.

I release a new one almost every day, actually. I release four to six new articles a week. And you can also find my books and everything else that I’m involved in over at muscleforlife. com. All right. Thanks again. Bye.