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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
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.
Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter!
Click here: www.muscleforlife.com/signup/
If you look into the reading habits of extremely successful people, you’ll notice that many of them spend a lot of time reading biographies and autobiographies.
For example, top Nike designer and entrepreneur D’Wayne Edwards attributes much of his unlikely professional success to a biography of Jackie Robinson that inspired him to endure great hardship.
Elon Musk has also spoken many times about his love of biographies of brilliant inventors and entrepreneurs, including Howard Hughes, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, and, fittingly, Benjamin Franklin.
There are several reasons why this type of literature is so popular among overachievers.
First, we humans love good stories, and if someone has a book dedicated to his or her life, chances are it’s because they have an unusual and compelling story to tell.
Second, biographies are the ultimate in self-improvement literature because they provide you with wide-ranging, raw, and unfiltered information and insights as opposed to carefully chosen and pre-digested morsels.
Unlikely most self-help books, biographies aren't making carefully crafted arguments intended to sell you on particular ideas, strategies, or ideologies—they're showing you the real-world results of very different paradigms for thinking and living, which you can then assess and analyze to formulate your own highly individual lessons and takeaways.
In this way, a biography is a "choose your own adventure" of sorts, and can resonate in very different ways with each and every reader.
So, with that, let's talk about this week's book, which is widely considered to be the definitive biography of Benjamin Franklin, and a book that sits on the "must read" lists of many notable people.
I loved it for several reasons:
First, I'm a bit of an Isaacson fanboy. He's not only an outstanding researcher, writer, and storyteller, but he has also worked his ass off for decades to hone his craft and establish himself as one of the premier biographers of our times.
Second, I think that Franklin was a man worth modeling in many ways. What spoke most to me was his intense curiosity, diligence, persistence, practicality, lightheartedness, congeniality, and relentless drive to improve both his life and the lives of others. The world could use more Franklins.
Third, I've always enjoyed American history and the Revolutionary period in particular, and as Franklin played a pivotal role in both the winning of the war and creation of America, I was already inclined to like the book.
The bottom line is if you're already into biographies but haven't read this one yet, I promise it won't disappoint. Similarly, if you've never read a biography before and my pitch has sold you on giving it a go, this is a great place to start.
Want to be notified when my latest book recommendations go live?
Hop on my email list and you’ll get each new installment delivered directly to your inbox.
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Spend enough time in the gym and you’ll inevitably notice that the biggest guys and gals are also often the strongest.
Sure, some people are stronger than they look, but for the most part, strength and size seem to be directly correlated.
The bigger someone is, the bigger his weights tend to be.
This begs a question, then:
Is muscle growth simply a byproduct of strength? If you just focus on getting stronger and stronger, will your muscles just get bigger and bigger?
Advocates of strength training have been saying this for decades, but their detractors say that muscle growth isn’t that simple.
They point to stringbeans that can push, pull, and squat tremendous amounts of weight, and to research that appears to demonstrate that heavy weightlifting–the bread and butter of all strength programs–simply isn’t necessary for getting big muscles.
Instead, they counter, you can focus on other training variables, such as volume, time under tension, metabolic fatigue, and others, and achieve the same results.
Who’s right? Or are both of these schools of thought misguided and the truth is somewhere in the middle?
Well, in this podcast, you’re going to get a clear, concise, and conclusive answer based on decades of anecdotal evidence as well as our current scientific understanding of muscle hypertrophy.
3:59 - What is the primary driver of muscle growth?
5:39 - What should be the number one goal for a weight lifter?
6:31 - What about people that get big but not strong?
11:00 - What about people that are stronger than they look?
14:37: What should you do when you eventually stop gaining strength?
Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter!
Click here: www.muscleforlife.com/signup/
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.
Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter!
Click here: www.muscleforlife.com/signup/
This is one of my all-time favorite success/self-development books and one that I regularly gift and recommend to others because I attribute much of my own success in business and other areas of my life to the lessons found in Mastery--lessons that I believe can transform anyone’s life for the better if they’re truly taken to heart.
The premise of the book is simple: any one of us can become an elite performer in a skill or field if we simply embrace and embody established attitudes and behaviors that have produced past and current champions, and more importantly, that every one of us should strive toward greatness if we want to lead fulfilling lives.
I think these messages are sorely needed because they’re in stark contrast to much of our mainstream culture, which is producing more and more people who are less and less interested in self-actualization than worshipping and pursuing meaningless materialism, entertainment, and distractions, and who are then dismayed when they realize that their lives feel hollow and insignificant.
This philosophical argument was explored in another book that I recommend called All Things Shining, wherein philosophy professors Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly argue that throughout history, we’ve placed tremendous importance and value in notions of sacredness and meaning, but since the Enlightenment, we’ve moved away from these concepts as a consequence of the radical political changes that saw individual autonomy rise above the social order imposed by a God or king. In short, when we abandoned religious and royal dogmas, we tasked ourselves to identify what’s meaningful and what isn’t, and quite frankly, we haven’t done a very good job of it. Hence, the creeping nihilism and widespread malaise of modern life.
There’s a pragmatic argument for choosing mastery over mediocrity as well, as our current economy pays a huge premium to people who are willing to do the hard, deep work necessary to demonstrate mastery--if you want to make a lot of money, get so good at something that people can’t ignore you and you’re halfway home--and tomorrow’s economy is going to demand mastery, as more and more simple, shallow, redundant work will be passed off to machines.
Want to be notified when my next book recommendation goes live?
Hop on my email list and you’ll get each new installment delivered directly to your inbox.
Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/
In this episode, I want to address some common myths and misconceptions about body fat levels.
Obviously being “shredded” is the thing these days--if you want to be cool on social media, you’d better have abs--but how lean can you get before you start compromising your health? And how lean can you stay over the long term before it becomes a problem?
Well, you’re going to get that question fully answered in this podcast, and I think you’re going to be pleasantly surprised because I have good news: it’s harder to hurt your health than you might think.
You can do it, but you have to work very hard at it and probably throw some drugs into the mix as well. Fortunately, for most of us, our body composition goals are not only very achievable, but they’re very sustainable, too.
I’m also going to touch on various other things, including what body fat percentage is and how it changes when you gain and lose fat and muscle, whether it affects menstruation (something that many women worry about when they set out to get lean), and what you should do after cutting to reverse the negative side effects of caloric restriction without gaining back any of the fat that you just lost, which is huge for long-term weight and body fat maintenance.
5:51 - What is body fat percentage?
7:39 - How do you determine your body fat percentage?
9:44 - What is the physiology behind losing body fat?
12:16 - What is a healthy body fat percentage for men?
14:11 - What is a healthy body fat percentage for women?
Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter!
Click here: www.muscleforlife.com/signup/
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.
Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter!
Click here: www.muscleforlife.com/signup/
In this book, Covey takes you by the hand and says…
“Look, if you want to live a good life, you can’t be an irresponsible, self-absorbed, insolent, small-minded, unenlightened, judgmental, delusional little child.”
“You might be able to bullshit your friends, family, and even yourself, but you can’t bullshit the universe.”
“For whatever reason, there are some basic rules to this game of living and if you work with them, you can win. Flout them and you’ll lose.”
He then lays out…in way too many words…his ideas about what makes people effective and ineffective in life, and I wholeheartedly agree with many of his assessments.
There’s a reason why it’s on just about every “books you have to read list”–it’s full of powerful insights that, if internalized, can truly change your life.
I have to warn you though: you’re probably not going to like reading it, mainly because Covey isn’t much of a writer. It’s twice as long as it should be and a lot of the prose is purple, but it’s well worth the slog.
Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter!
Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/
In this episode, we’re going to have some fun but also address a very real problem: assholes in the gym.
You know what I’m talking about. The assholes that smell like shit, that sweat on everything that gawk at women, that superset half of the gym and leave their weights everywhere, and so on.
You might be laughing, and yes, these people can be pretty amusing, but they also make for a significantly worse gym experience for us and everyone else, and, in some cases, even drive people away from gyms altogether.
And so I wanted to have a few laughs at the expense of these assholes by breaking down the 9 most annoying things that they do, and also share some commonsense advice on how we can all make our gyms a bit more pleasant for all of our fellow gymgoers.
Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter!
Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/
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.
Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter!
Click here: www.muscleforlife.com/signup/
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