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If you want to know how to build muscle, lose fat, and be healthier, happier, and wiser…faster than you ever thought possible…then this podcast is for you. Hosted by the bestselling author and entrepreneur, Mike Matthews, each episode gives you simple, science-based know-how and inspiration that will help you build your best body and life ever.
Find out more at www.legionathletics.com
Copyright: © Mike Matthews
Like it or not, the Bench Press is one of the primary lifts on which your strength is judged.
Nothing turns heads faster in the gym than an impressive Bench Press, and it’s the first (and often only) lift people want to know your numbers on.
There’s a good reason for this beyond ego, though.
The Bench Press is one of the best upper body exercises you can do because, when performed properly, it trains not just the pectorals but the lats, shoulders, triceps, and even the legs (through a proper leg drive, as discussed later in this podcast).
Every chest workout or push workout should include at least a few sets of the Bench Press.
That said, like the other big compound lifts (Deadlift, Squat, and Military Press), the Bench Press is actually quite technical. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll quickly hit a plateau, which is not only frustrating, but can set you up for injury as you try to break through it by compromising form.
So, in this podcast, we’re going to look at 11 safe, scientifically proven ways to increase your bench press and, in some cases, also reduce the risk of injury.
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The ketogenic diet is all the rage right now.
According to many, it’s the single best diet for losing fat, staying lean, and improving health and longevity.
It’s not, of course, because there’s no single diet that’s best for accomplishing all of that in everyone all of the time, but the ketogenic diet can work well as a weight loss diet for some people some of the time.
That’s how it has mostly been promoted, as well—as an effective way to lose weight rapidly—but recently, more and more people have been talking about the ketogenic diet’s superiority for building muscle as well.
They’re calling this approach “ketogaining” and the story is that it’s a healthier, more effective way to gain muscle and not fat than the traditional high-carb diet popular amongst most bodybuilders and weightlifters.
Poke around online and you’ll find some freaky big and lean people promoting ketogaining as well as a few studies that seem to validate their claims, and so understandably, it’s starting to catch on.
How legitimate is ketogaining, though?
Can you really have great workouts and gain just as much muscle but less fat by eating less than 50 grams of carbs and over 100 grams of fat per day?
To help answer these questions, I invited Eric Helms back on the show.
In case you’re not familiar with him, Eric’s one of the premier natural bodybuilding coaches in the game and is himself a professional natural bodybuilder and strength athlete, as well as an author and credentialed scientist with several peer-reviewed publications under his belt.
In this interview, Eric breaks down the research currently available on ketogaining and explains . . .
- The basic theory of ketogaining (why it’s a thing)
- What studies have shown and what questions still remain
- How the ketogenic diet is likely to impact your training performance
- How much fat you can expect to gain following a ketogenic diet vs a high-carb diet
- Eric’s personal recommendation for carbohydrate intake for maximizing muscle gain
- And more
13:49 - Does the ketogenic diet work for someone who wants to gain muscle and strength?
16:39 Why does the ketogenic diet make you feel satiated?
28:41 - Why do you think that the performance was maintained?
34:57 - Does you body get more efficient with the glycogen it uses once you switch to a high fat, low carb diet?
39:09 - Does upping carbs improve performance?
49:18 - Where can people find you and your work?
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The featured book this time around is Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
And I know, this recommendation is pretty “basic” of me as stoicism is all the rage these days, but I’m going to make it anyway because I really do believe everyone can benefit from this book and stoic philosophy.
I feel that’s especially true in today’s zeitgeist, which is moving further and further away from individualism, resilience, and responsibility and toward fear, fragility, and egoism. In fact, many young people in particular are upping the stakes by downright scorning many traditionally admired attitudes and behaviors and blindly celebrating their opposites.
And I fear the consequences of this cultural experiment, which are already unfolding in a number of aways, are going to be severe. In short, I’d bet a lot of shekels that here in the West at least, the scene is going to get a lot worse before it starts getting better.
But hey, hopefully I’m wrong.
Anyway, back to the book—in case you’re not familiar with him, Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor who earned the reputation of “philosopher king” during his lifetime and has since been recognized as one of history’s greatest rulers in both character and deed.
Meditations, originally titled To Myself, contains Aurelius’ reflections on virtue, desire, rationality, emotions, the nature of the gods, and more.
While many of his insights resonated with me, the messages that hit home the most were his views on how to dispassionately and effectively deal with the difficulties of life, the importance of avoiding hate and the intention to harm, and the value of living honestly and with purpose.
A bit of humble self-reflection is good for the soul, and Meditations will take you on a brief, but meaningful (and maybe even cathartic), introspection.
Let’s get to the takeaways.
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Typically, “functional foods” are those that can provide additional health benefits beyond fulfilling basic nutritional needs.
For example, fatty, cold-water fish like salmon, mackerel, and sardines contain omega-3 fats, which can positively impact your health and wellbeing in a number of ways.
Colorful fruits and vegetables like broccoli, berries, and Brussels sprouts are another good example. They contain plenty of vitamins, minerals, and fiber, but also other goodies like sulforaphane, anthocyanins, and carotenoids that can reduce the risk of disease, support brain, eye, and heart health, and more.
And even much-maligned foods like beef, pork, and lamb contain a special type of fat, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), that’s associated with a reduced the risk of type 2 diabetes and cancer (and grass-finished/fed meat are particularly rich in CLA).
All this is why food and supplement marketers have seized on these types of foods and molecules and spent who-knows-how-many millions of dollars over the last decades promoting their purported wonders.
For example, several well-known wellness gurus are trying to make sulforaphane out to be the natural cure for cancer, when it’s far from a magic bullet. Omega-3 fats are important, but they can’t bulletproof you against heart disease as some people claim. And while CLA has some health properties, it’s hard to quantify how helpful it really is for the average healthy person.
So, my point is while some foods are more nutritionally “special” than others and deserve consideration in your meal planning, most aren’t as helpful or vital as many self-styled diet experts would have you believe.
And that’s why I wanted to get Kurtis Frank, the director of Research and Development for my supplement company Legion Athletics, onto the show to break down the real science of functional foods.
Here’s a sneak peek of what you’ll learn in this episode:
- What a “functional food” is and isn’t
- The best functional foods you can eat
- The most popular foods marketed as “functional” that really aren’t
- And more.
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How can you tell if someone is natty or not?
This is a wellspring of controversial fitness gossip, and particularly among men.
Some people say that it’s childish, rude, and unnecessary to ask or even wonder if so-and-so is “natty” or not. Don’t ask for whom the bell tolls and all that.
Others don’t take issue with the line of discussion but claim there are major problems with the common methods of analysis. Thus, they say, unless it’s completely obvious, it’s really impossible to know whether someone is on the sauce or not.
And still others can’t fathom why people purportedly into being healthy and fit would secretly use dangerous drugs to impress strangers on the Internet.
Here’s my position:
1. I couldn’t care less whether someone does or doesn’t take steroids. That’s their business.
2. I do care, however, when someone takes steroids and lies about it to deceive people. That’s when it becomes other people’s business.
Why?
Because it’s no different than lying about anything else to make a buck or burnish your bona fides, and it’s one of the reasons so many young men and women have wildly unrealistic expectations about what type of physique they can achieve naturally and should aspire to.
This is why you should get savvy about discerning who does and doesn’t use drugs. Let’s learn how.
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This episode is part of a weekly series that I have dubbed “Motivation Monday.”
(Yes, I know, very creative of me. What can I say, I’m a genius…)
Seriously though, the idea here is simple:
Every Monday morning, I’m going to post a short and punchy episode that I hope gets you fired up to tackle the workouts, work, and everything else that you have planned for the week ahead.
As we all know, it’s one thing to know what you want to do, but it’s something else altogether to actually make yourself do it, and I hope that this series gives you a jolt of inspiration, energy, and encouragement to get at it.
So, if you like what you hear, then make sure to check back every Monday morning for the latest and greatest installment.
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I’m a big believer in the value of aligning the various parts of our lives toward goals.
In fact, I think it’s the only way to resist the forces of entropy that govern the universe and create a life worthy of our ancestors.
While spontaneity and short-term thinking certainly have their uses (“what song should I listen to right now?”), I firmly believe the better we can conceive of positive long-term outcomes and create and execute plans to produce those outcomes, the more rewarding, meaningful, and satisfying our lives will be.
For instance, many of the more significant goals we all share, like . . .
- Building a great body
- Improving our physical and psychological health and wellbeing
- Becoming financially secure
- Growing a successful career or business
- Raising a healthy, harmonious family
. . . all require goal setting, long-term planning, sacrifice of present pleasures, and perseverance.
That’s probably not news to you, but what you may not know is some methods of goal setting are better than others. And that’s what this podcast is going to be all about.
Specifically, I’m going to share with you some practical ideas and tactics for making your dreams a reality—ones that are not only evidence-based but have also worked for me time and time again, and to which I ascribe a fair amount of my own successes and wins.
And no, I’m not going to just rehash platitudes about SMART goals, affirmations, meditation, or journaling. I’m going to go deeper than that.
As you’ll hear, this is an interview I did on another podcast—The Food for Fitness Podcast by Scott Baptie—and I’m reposting it here on my podcast because I thought you, dear listener, would enjoy it.
5:53 - Who are you and what do you do?
8:54 - Why do people wait until January to work on their fitness?
16:40 - How do you help people make realistic goals?
29:20 - How do you limit the tendency to try to change everything at once?
43:44 - Where can people find you?
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If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re either experiencing or have experienced the following scenario:
You’re dieting to lose weight and are doing everything right. You’re...
- Maintaining a calorie deficit
- Eating enough protein
- Sticking to your meal plan
- Lifting weights regularly
- Limiting your cardio
And at first, everything more or less went as planned. Your weight and waist went down and muscle definition went up like clockwork.
And then, the gears inexplicably ground to a halt.
For no apparent reason, the scale stopped moving and your reflection in the mirror stopped changing. You understand energy balance and so, determined to get the ball rolling again, you further cut your calories and increased your cardio.
It worked, of course...to a point. And then you got stuck again, and this time you felt even more haggard than before.
What to do? Is this as far as your body will go? Have you reached its “set point”? Is a lower body fat percentage just not in the cards for you?
And then you hear about “starvation mode” and “metabolic damage.”
You find stories about people, typically women, who say they aren’t losing weight with extremely low-calorie dieting and hours of exercise every week, and the culprit is (supposedly) metabolic abnormalities caused by calorie restriction.
Essentially, the story goes like this:
Dieting dramatically and incrementally decreases your basal metabolic rate, which eventually halts fat loss, and which requires a lengthy and involved “recovery” protocol to fix the “damage” should you ever want a healthy metabolism again.
Hence, the term “metabolic damage.”
When your body is experiencing the complex set of physiological adaptations that apparently cause metabolic damage, it’s said to be in “starvation mode.” This apparently kicks in the first day of your diet and gets progressively worse and worse as time goes on.
How true are these claims, though? Well, the short story is this:
- “Metabolic damage” isn’t real, has never stopped someone from losing weight, and doesn’t need to be “fixed” with complex and meticulous diet voodoo.
- “Starvation mode” is sort of real, but isn’t nearly as dramatic as many people think.
And in this podcast, you’ll learn why.
Furthermore, you’ll also learn the real reasons why weight loss stalls and what you can do to easily break through weight loss plateaus.
Let’s dig in.
Time stamps:
6:28 - What is metabolic damage?
11:40 - What is starvation mode?
22:06 - Is starvation mode real?
26:48 - What are the real reasons you stop losing weight?
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Face fat can be slightly baffling.
You can be fairly lean, with decent muscle definition and even a nice set of abs underneath your shirt, and still see double chins in every picture.
Why? And what the hell can you do about it?
Well, I have good and bad news.
Let’s eat the frog first:
There are no amount of face stretches or exercises that you can do to slim your mug.
Unfortunately, there’s no magic bullet or quick fix.
Now the good news:
You absolutely can lose face fat, and it’s easier than you probably think.
I can’t promise that you’ll get that superhero jaw or those superheroine cheekbones, but if you feel your face is too fat, there is something you can do about it.
So, let’s dive in and find out why some people’s faces seem disproportionately fat when compared to the rest of their bodies, and how to get leaner, more chiseled features.
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I’ve churned through over 100,000 emails, social media comments and messages, and blog comments in the last 6 years.
And that means I’ve fielded a ton of questions.
As you can imagine, some questions pop up more often than others, and I thought it might be helpful to take a little time every month to choose a few and record and share my answers.
So, in this round, I answer the following four questions:
-Is it okay to use a higher rep range for some accessory exercises?
-Do you have any snack recommendations for cutting?
-Do you have to train abs while cutting to get six-pack abs?
-What should you do to fix a muscle imbalance between your quads?
If you have a question you’d like me to answer, leave a comment below or if you want a faster response, send an email to mike@muscleforlife.com.
Recommended reading for this episode:
https://www.muscleforlife.com/rep-range-podcast/
https://www.muscleforlife.com/8-snacks-for-losing-weight-or-building-muscle/
https://www.muscleforlife.com/low-calorie-snacks/
https://www.muscleforlife.com/muscle-imbalances/
https://www.muscleforlife.com/muscle-imbalances-podcast/
https://www.muscleforlife.com/ab-workouts/
https://www.muscleforlife.com/how-long-to-get-six-pack-abs/
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