Training frequency and muscle growth and beating food cravings

[00:00:00] Hey, it’s Mike. And this podcast is brought to you by legion, my line of naturally sweetened and flavored workout supplements. Now, as you probably know, I’m really not a fan of the supplement industry. I’ve wasted thousands and thousands of dollars over the years on worthless supplements that Basically do nothing and I’ve always had trouble finding products actually worth buying and especially as I’ve gotten more and more educated as to what actually works and what doesn’t and eventually after complaining a lot, I decided to do something about it and start making my own supplements.

The exact supplements I myself have always wanted a few of the things that make my products unique are one They’re 100 percent naturally sweetened and flavored which I think is good because while our official sweeteners May not be as harmful as some people claim there is research that suggests regular consumption of these chemicals May not be good for our health particularly our gut health So I like to just play it safe and sweeten everything with stevia and erythritol Which are natural sweeteners [00:01:00] that actually have health benefits, not health risks.

Two, all ingredients are backed by peer reviewed scientific research that you can verify for yourself. If you go on our website and you check out any of our product pages, you’re going to see that we explain why we’ve chosen each ingredient. And we cite all supporting evidence in the footnotes so you can go Look at the research for yourself and verify that we’re doing the right thing.

Three, all ingredients are also included at clinically effective dosages, which are the exact dosages used in those studies that prove their effectiveness. This is very important because while a molecule might be proven to, let’s say, improve your workout performance, not all dosages are going to improve your workout performance.

If you take too little. You’re not gonna see any effects. You have to take the right amounts and the right amounts are the amounts proven to be effective in scientific research. And four, there are no proprietary blends, which means you know exactly what you’re buying when you buy our supplements. All of our formulations are a hundred percent transparent in terms of ingredients and dosages.

So if that sounds interesting to you and you wanna check it out, [00:02:00] then go to www.legionathletics.com. That’s L-E-G-I-O-N at. And if you like what and you want to buy something, use the coupon code podcast, P O D C A S T. And you will save 10 percent on your order. Also, if you like what I have to say in my podcast, then I guarantee you’ll like my books.

I make my living primarily as a writer. So as long as I can keep selling books, then I can keep writing articles over at muscle for life and Legion and recording podcasts and videos like this. This and all that fun stuff. Now I have several books, but the place to start is bigger leaner, stronger if you’re a guy and thinner leaner, stronger if you’re a girl.

Now these books, they’re basically going to teach you everything you need to know about dieting, training, and supplementation to build muscle, lose fat, and look and feel great without having to give up all the foods you love or live in the gym, grinding away at workouts you hate. And you can find my books everywhere.

You can buy books online like Amazon, audible, iBooks, Google play, Barnes and Noble. Kobo and so forth. And if [00:03:00] you’re into audio books like me, you can actually get one of my audio books for free with a 30 day free trial of audible. To do that, go to www. muscleforlife. com forward slash audio books. That’s muscleforlife.

com forward slash audio books and you’ll see how to do this. So thanks again for taking the time to listen to my podcast. I hope you enjoy it and let’s get to the show.

Hey, this is Mike Matthews from musclefullife. com and in this podcast, I’m going to talk about workout frequency and how it relates to making gains, building strength and building muscle and also food cravings. And what some of the research says on what cravings actually like where they come from and then what we can do about it so it doesn’t ruin our [00:04:00] diets.

So let’s just get right into it. Let’s first talk about workout frequency. This is a pretty popular subject these days. A lot of people think that the only way that you can make any gains is by training every muscle group in your body multiple times per week. And by training multiple times per week, Like you would directly train that most multiple times per week, like not, for instance you might perform your deadlifts on your pole day or back day.

Deadlifts, though, train more than your back. They also train your legs. They also train your arms. But like you would have two or even three pole days every seven days. Two or three push and two or three legs and so forth. And the, what is now called as like the bro split or whatever, a typical type of bodybuilding split where you’d have a chest day, a back day, a shoulders day, arms day, legs day and so forth.

A lot of people are, either think or have heard that you can’t make gains on that type of program and that you have to be training everything a couple times a week [00:05:00] or that you make much better gains on training everything all the times a week. So let’s just talk about that quickly. So first is let’s talk about what the problem is with a lot of typical type of bodybuilding programs that have that normal or, traditional type of one major muscle per day type of approach.

The problem is First off, a lot of those workouts are much too high volume. You’re performing way too many sets and way too many reps in one workout for one muscle group in, just for what you’re doing in that workout. So there’s only when you look at, if you’re looking at it in a seven day view, you can only perform so many.

You only can break a muscle down so much in that time or you start to over train. And that relates to training intensity, of course. So the heavier weight that you’re lifting the less volume you have to be doing in those workouts. So what a lot of the traditional type of bodybuilding routines that you’ll find in magazines and such, where they, the big mistake [00:06:00] that that they make or the big problem with those routines is that it’s just way too high volume.

So a lot of times it is higher rep. A lot of times you’re not even lifting that heavy weight, but you’re doing 25, 30 sets in a workout for one muscle for chest or whatever in, just that one day, it’s just too much. You will what you want to be doing in your workouts is. It’s hard to say exactly what this point would be, but ideally you’re causing just enough muscle damage and just enough progressive overload to maximize the resulting proteins in the system, resulting, muscle growth and kind of regrowth process.

You want to maximize that without, you ideally would stop your workout at that point, basically. Yeah. I’m going to be actually talk more about this in my upcoming book, which is coming out in about a week. Dive more into the science of this. But there’s a really good research review that I talk about in the book that shows that, When you have higher intensity training, when you’re lifting heavier weights that somewhere around probably 60 to 70.

They say about 45 to 60 reps, but in my experience is probably about on the [00:07:00] upper end of that 60 reps or so per workout seems to be the optimal amount. of reps for one muscle group that you’re training in one workout. You start going beyond that and it becomes a matter of diminishing returns, basically.

You could sit in the gym for another hour, but you’re not going to build, double the muscle resulting from a two hour workout as you would from a one hour workout. That’s one of the major problems with the typical, chest, back, shoulders, arms, that type of approach. Way too high volume.

And the other problem is a lot of those workouts focus on isolation exercises. For your chest day, maybe it involves a little bench pressing, you might be on the peck deck machine and then you’re gonna be over doing flies and then you’re gonna be doing cable work and stuff. And that type, those types of exercises just aren’t nearly as effective as focusing on compound.

Weightlifting exercises like, the barbell bench press, especially the incline bench press is particularly important if you want to build a full [00:08:00] chest that isn’t, doesn’t have that weird like when you don’t have any upper chest, so the upper chest is flat and then he comes down and you have this big, bottom chest that kind of pops out.

That’s from doing too much flat and too much decline and not enough incline basically. So inclined is really what you want to emphasize. Because of course it trains pec major, but there’s also the pectoralis clavicular pectoralis. So it’s called, it’s a strip of muscle that runs across the top here.

That is your upper chest. It’s a real muscle and it just doesn’t get activated nearly as well with flat pressing as it does with incline pressing and decline pressing basically doesn’t act, I mean it activates it a little bit, but it’s just not, decline I think has no place in any chest routine really.

It’s just a reduced range of motion. That alone is a reason not to do it, in my opinion. You have, a focus on isolation exercises instead of compound exercises, which are already less less efficient in terms of building muscle and strength. But there’s also another downside to that, is with compound exercises, for instance, when you’re doing a lot of pressing, you’re also training your shoulders.

They’re not, they’re a [00:09:00] secondary exercise. getting trained, but they are getting trained. You’ve experienced this. I’m sure when you start bench pressing heavy for the first time correctly, regularly, every week, your interior, your front deltoids get pretty sore. They’re getting trained. So then when you come, let’s say that You’re doing your chest work on Monday, and your shoulders are getting trained as a result of it.

And then you’re doing shoulders work where you’re focusing on your shoulders on let’s say Wednesday. And that’s where you’d be doing your military pressing and maybe your side raises. And it’s not that all isolation exercises are bad, but the first exercise that you should be doing the first, one or two exercises of basically every workout should be compound exercise and they should be heavy.

You want to save your higher rep, your isolation stuff, you’re doing that should be later in your workouts. But anyway, so then you’re training your shoulders again, let’s say on Wednesday. So they actually are getting trained again. Now they’re just the muscle group. It’s being directly trained.

And then let’s say you have an arms day on Thursday where for me, this is my [00:10:00] arms. They always includes close group bench press. I think it’s just a great, just one of the great tricep builders, but also it is now training your push again, right? In my Bigger, Leaner, Stronger program, for instance, it is it’s a five day program.

Chest, back, shoulders, arms, legs. But the reason why people get such great results on it, and you can see that in the success stories on my website, I have scores of them now. People, guys brand new to weightlifting, gaining 20, 25 pounds of muscle in their first year, and getting leaner. I have people that have been weightlifting Me, before I started training this way, I lifted for about six, seven years, and maybe I put on 25 pounds of muscle in that time period, and that’s terrible for six or seven years of consistent weightlifting, and I had done twice a week splits, and I had done, I’d done pretty much every program you could ever imagine now, and I did a lot of things wrong, obviously, that’s why I didn’t make good gains, but I have people that are in a similar boat, they’ve been weightlifting for quite some time, but they’ve never really emphasized heavy compound weightlifting.

And their splits [00:11:00] were messed up. Usually they’re the, the bodybuilder magazine type splits, very high volume, tons of isolation, even bodyweight stuff, doing a bunch of pushups and stuff on chest day. It’s pretty much just a waste of time. Unless you need to get better pushups.

Unless, for, maybe you’re in the army or something and you need to pass your PT test. Okay, fine. But if you’re just trying to build muscle and strength, pushups are a waste of time. I have those people that then come to my bigger than strong program and then do great and they’re surprised that kind of split can work for them.

What you’re also seeing is that then okay, so you’re dead lifting on your back day starts with dead lifts, right? Dead lifts don’t just train your back. They also do train your arms. They also train your legs, especially when you’re dead lifting heavy. So then when you’re training arms again a few days later, they are getting trained again in the, in this seven day cycle.

Okay. When you train legs, now your legs are getting trained again, and that’s your, they’re being focused on. So the common argument on even that would probably be made against that approach is just that you’ll do even better. Okay, fine. You can make [00:12:00] gains on that. And it’s pretty much you just go look at the success stories.

It works. But some people would say you’ll do even better by actually directly training each muscle group. Not as a secondary, not a primary and a secondary type approach, but like primary, like you need to be dead lifting twice a week, you need to be squatting, basically two back workouts a week, two legs workouts a week, two upper body workouts a week, push and stuff, and so forth.

And usually what people will talk about when they’re saying this is they’ll talk about some research that has shown that protein synthesis rates tend to 36 hours or so after a workout, and then they decline after that. So the argument is Then what you want to be doing is you want to be working out and then you ride that as protein synthesis rates rise, and then they start to come back down and bump back up.

And in theory, it makes sense. The study that’s most commonly cited that I’ve seen in regards to that is if I remember correctly, it was like elbow extensions performed in like a couple sets of 10 reps or something [00:13:00] like that. I’m not sure if we can exactly extrapolate that to like an intense leg workout where you’re performing like, let’s say 12 heavy sets, heavy squats, hack squats, leg press lunges, I don’t know if we can exactly say because with the elbow extensions at 10 reps or whatever protein synthesis rates did this, then it will be the same with, a big major compound exercise performed for a lot more sets with a lot more weight.

Not exactly sure. I haven’t seen any research, on protein synthesis rates done with that type of workout. So if I, if you know of something that that if you know of a study where they actually show that, then put it in the comments. I’d actually be curious to see it. So that said, let’s just assume that’s true.

Let’s say somewhere around, at the end of, By day three or so, protein synthesis rates have pretty much come back to normal. You’re no longer building muscle as a result of the previous workout. What you don’t, what you don’t commonly hear about with those two a week type splits is is the muscle [00:14:00] recovery side of things.

And Once again, I’ll be going more into the science of this in my next book, and I’ll also be writing an article on this, which will promote the book, but I’m gonna be talking about this and linking all the studies and stuff. But when you look at research conducted with natural weightlifters, not elderly people either, but young college aged weightlifters, and then also in some of the research that I referenced in the book, it also was, it runs the It includes college aged men and then also middle aged men.

And you look at muscle recovery times on average, when you are working out with any sort of volume and intensity you’re looking probably about five days that it actually takes for muscles to fully recover and repair the damage that occurred in that workout and recover all their strength.

And this is where I’ve emailed with and spoken with a lot of people that have done these two week programs. I’ve also done them myself. And what I ran into is what every single person that I’ve emailed with has also run into. And that’s over training. That is, over time, [00:15:00] even trying to work in D loads and trying to work around it, it becomes the workouts become progressively harder and harder to do.

And the kind of those overtraining symptoms of almost I wouldn’t, I never got, I wouldn’t say chronic fatigue, but I would become more and more fatigued over time. Workouts would get harder and harder. My sleep started to get messed up. I started to not look forward to my workouts, just classic overtraining type symptoms would set in and every natural weightlifter that I’ve spoken to that have tried different types of programs were like, whether it be, where you have a power day and then a hypertrophy.

So you have a low rep, let’s say lower body and then a high rep, lower body low rep, upper high rep, upper and you’re, alternating between those and where you’re doing them twice every seven days or just like a push, pull, legs, rest, push, pull, legs, rest, that, that type of approach.

They have run into overtraining issues. The people that have done well on them are people that are on drugs. That are, people email me and they’re [00:16:00] open about it and I’ll ask them sometimes if they’re on those type of programs, if they’re on any kind of drugs. And the people that have done the best in those programs are on drugs and that makes sense because when you’re on drugs, your protein synthesis rates are much higher anyway, your body can recover much faster.

I would argue, you’re probably better off training that way if you’re on drugs. It actually, it makes sense. As a natural weight lifter, I’m, I’m not that you can’t make it work, but volume and intensity is much more important than frequency when you’re a natural weightlifter.

Now that’s, where you’re training them. If you’re training a muscle group every once every five to seven days as a natural weightlifter, you’re doing it right, basically, with the right volume and intensity. If you were to, train a muscle group once every 14 days, of course you’re leaving gains on the table.

Like you should be training your muscles more frequently. But when you start training them, you start getting increasing frequency to where you’re training them once every three days or even four days You’re going to have a hard [00:17:00] time balancing that volume and intensity in your workouts.

You’re going to have a hard time finding that sweet spot where you don’t wind up over trained. And you’re also, where you’re not dealing with soreness issues going into your next workouts. Also, some of these workouts are very tough to do. If you’ve ever tried to, let’s say you’re trying especially full body.

A lot of people, they don’t try to do full body. But. Some people do email me that they are trying to do like a full body routine three times a week. Just try to squat, deadlift, bench and military press heavy all in the same workout. You’re gonna, one, it’s going to take an hour and a half and you’re going to be just completely wasted by the end of it.

Even an upper body workout I would, when you’re bench pressing and military pressing in the same workout, one of them is going to take a hit because If you start with chest, which you probably would, then your shoulders are, of course, they are involved in that and they are getting fatigued.

So when you go to the military press, your performance is going to be a little bit impaired because of the bench pressing that you were doing just before it. So that’s the the [00:18:00] general overview of frequency. You definitely can make great gains training. A muscle group once a week. What I do, and I also talk about this in my next book, is, and this is better suited probably to an advanced weightlifter whose body has gotten used to getting beat up with a lot of heavy weightlifting, is I have my, my chest day back, shoulders, arms, legs, and then I don’t do it when I’m cutting because it just seems to be a bit too much for my body.

But if I’m maintaining or bulking, I haven’t really bulked in a while because I’m not. I just like staying lean, so I’m usually in some sort of maintenance mode or I’m cutting. And then I take day six, and I’m going to be training some weak points. So for me my weak points are my shoulders.

It’s just the never ending curse of not being on drugs, basically, is you have small shoulders. And that’s one of the easy ways to spot druggers, by the way, is if they have those massive basketball delt drugs every time. Because there are a lot of antigen receptors in that area. So when you get on drugs, your shoulders just explode.

You can’t even do it. You couldn’t stop it if you wanted [00:19:00] to. So my shoulders basically always need work. So I usually give those a little bit more work. So those are getting trained to direct training days a week. My second day is a higher rep, lower volume. I’m not, I blast them hard and heavy on one day, and then I’m doing a lighter workout on them on the next day.

And then also I’ve been working on my lats as well just because all in all, my back is pretty good, but my lats have always just been stubborn. So I don’t know, they’ve always just been slow to grow and I don’t want them to be huge. I don’t like that look, but I’d like a little bit more. So that approach works well where you’re giving your each individual muscle group a good heavy proper workout once a week and then you’re taking another day to give your lagging body parts a little more work.

And I talk about that in my next book and I just call it weak point training. So that’s basically everything I want to say in this video on frequency. And the kind of the summary once again is that [00:20:00] volume and intensity is more important than frequency. If you don’t have the volume and intensity right, meaning the number of sets and reps and total reps that you perform in those workouts and the amount of weight that you’re lifting those workouts, frequency won’t save you.

If you’re doing a bunch of high rep isolation work, two to three times a week you’re going to get blown away by somebody who’s doing, focusing on heavy compound weightlifting. Just training that, muscle group once a week, for instance, let’s just say back or whatever. If you’re doing, a bunch of high rep isolation type back exercises a couple times a week, the person who performs one heavy back workout a week, heavy deadlifts, heavy barbell rows, heavy, T bar rows, dumbbell rows weighted pull ups, things like that person is going to blow you away over time.

So yeah, that is basically everything on frequency. And let’s now talk about food cravings. Particularly people tend to run into food cravings more when they’re cutting. Than, when they’re, than when they’re maintaining their [00:21:00] bulk, when they’re eating more food. And obviously it can really get in the way.

Some people have a lot of trouble with it and it really messes with their compliance or it just messes with them psychologically. And the research of food cravings is convoluted. There are a lot of theories, but not a lot of absolutes. What we do know is that certain types of Circumstances tend to lead to the cravings like stress and that’s and these are things that like when I in the studies in the literature that I’ve read, it just confirms what we already know people turn to food because they’re stressed.

People also turn to food when they’re happy. That has been shown to just be correlated with Oh, you feel good. It makes you want to eat comfort food or whatever. And of course, when you’re dieting, your body is actually under stress. Just being in a calorie deficit, it’s under stress, so that can just, increase stress hormones and increase the desire to, to, eat, whatever it is.

What is being craved is not like some people think Oh, I’m craving these potato chips. It must mean that I need some nutrients in it or need [00:22:00] some salt in it. That has, we pretty much know that’s just not true. That’s not the case. It’s what The foods that are being craved are normally just because of psychological associations that we have with those foods.

Maybe certain types of foods remind you of your childhood or whatever. Those are the foods that your mom used to cook. I don’t know, macaroni and cheese and pizza and pasta and stuff like that. Or associated with whatever kind of, happy type of feelings or times. Whereas other foods that maybe there’s some interesting research that showed that women tend to crave.

snack type foods, candy type, easy type stuff like, popcorn and M& M’s and stuff like that as opposed to foods that require a bunch of cooking and then cleaning. Whereas, us guys, we might just think of Oh, we crave ordering a pizza because, psychologically it has some positive association for us.

So what you’re craving doesn’t mean that Oh, your body needs something in that food and that’s what you should be eating. The cravings just [00:23:00] are what they are. I haven’t really found a good like I’ve heard things that, it could relate to micronutrient deficiencies and I haven’t been able to find any real reliable research on that.

Even specifically I’ve heard, Oh, it means that you need more vitamin C. I haven’t been able to find anything on that. And I’ve had, I’ve told people that have, that have issues with cravings just out of curiosity because I’d heard it. Could you try for magnesium for vitamin C?

Can you try these different things? It didn’t really seem to do anything. So dealing with cravings, really the best way to deal with cravings is work in foods that you like and just eat them less often, basically. So if you crave something like let’s say it’s just something sweet and you’re dieting, you’re wanting to lose weight, then work in something small, like maybe a hundred calories worth of sweet whatever it is that you want to eat.

For me, I like chocolate, so I probably just eat, I do eat chocolate every day, even when I’m cutting. Not eat a lot, but maybe 150 calories worth, but it’s nice. It’s my little dessert. So if it’s [00:24:00] chocolate or if it’s a little bit of ice cream or I don’t care what it is, it doesn’t matter, just work it in and then you don’t have to also have that psychological battle where you really want the food, but you feel that you shouldn’t eat food because you shouldn’t eat it because it’s not clean and whatever.

If you’re familiar with my work, where I stand on clean eating yes, eat nutritious foods, but numbers, diet. is numbers. So you want to work in a little bit of what you crave, work that in. If it’s something that isn’t as hard to work in, if you’re craving pizza, yeah, you’re not really gonna be able to work that in every day.

But what you can do is you can save pizza for your cheat meal. So when you’re dieting, I do recommend that you have take one meal a week and eat what you wanna eat. Don’t go crazy. You don’t need 4000 calories but don’t go crazy. worry about it so much. Don’t think that you have to really, track the numbers.

If you want to be real safe, what you can do is you can actually save up calories for that meal. So you can, let’s say you’re going to go have some pizza for dinner. You can eat protein throughout the day. Pretty much save all your carbs and fats, all those [00:25:00] calories for that pizza meal. So then when you get there, you’re already, you need to eat 200 calories, 200 carbs and let’s say 60 fat just to reach your your normal daily intake and obviously if it’s pizza, it’s going to be higher on the fat, lower in the carbs.

So what? Fine. The calories, for that day, your macros are a little bit messed up. Maybe your macros and a hundred carbs short and 60 grams fat high and it balances out and you’re okay. So really that’s the best way that I’ve found to deal with cravings is don’t get into the mentality that you can’t have them, that you never can eat any of the foods you want.

Just work it in. If it’s something small that you’re craving, if it is just potato chips, fine, work into potato chips every day. Doesn’t have to be a lot, but just knowing that you can have the food actually does a lot to just show the cravings out. And yeah. Whatever. That’s just the psychological side of it, and then if it’s something that’s a bit more, it’s two calorie dense to just work in, save that for your [00:26:00] cheat meal. And and then you look forward to it. And it, I’m, I think if you do that, you’ll have a much better time dealing with cravings. All right. I want to keep these podcasts on the shorter side, somewhere, from around 30 minutes.

So I’m going to cut this one off here. And in the next episode, I may do another one by myself, I may be interviewing somebody we’ll see. I want to keep it to a mixture of ones that I just, talk about a couple things that, cause I get emails, all the time, messages all the time.

So I like to address different, maybe it’s seasonal, I don’t know, at this time of year I get asked a lot about food cravings and then also just, I’ve been asked a lot about frequency because it’s it’s just getting a lot of coverage, I guess you can say in the space. So I hope you enjoy the podcast and I will catch you next time.

Yeah.