Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Q&A: Cutting to Lean Bulking, Ideal Heart Rate for Fat Loss, Massage Guns, and More

Episode Date: August 28, 2020

I’ve churned through over 150,000 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 three questions: Should you go straight from a cut to a lean bulk? Is there an ideal heart rate for fat loss? Are massage guns beneficial? If you were arrested with no explanation, what would your friends and family assume you had done? 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 [e-mail]. Recommended reading for this episode: https://legionathletics.com/clean-bulking/ https://legionathletics.com/cardio-weightlifting/ Timestamps: 4:23 - Should you go straight from a cut to a lean bulk? 18:47 - Is there an ideal heart rate for fat loss? ` 24:54 - Are massage guns beneficial? 32:12 - If you were arrested with no explanation, what would your friends and family assume you had done? --- Mentioned on The Show: Legion VIP One-on-One Coaching: https://legionathletics.com/coaching/ --- 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.legionathletics.com/signup/

Hello, hello, my lovely listener. Welcome to another episode of Muscle for Life. I'm Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today for a Q&A episode. Now, I have churned through at least 150,000 emails, social media comments and messages and blog comments over the last six or seven years or so. And as you can imagine, I have fielded a lot of questions. Now, some questions pop up more often than others, and some questions become popular. Some topics just become topical, right? And others lose currency as time goes on. And so I like to take some time every month to answer several questions people are asking me as of right now. And I'm usually looking for questions that are either common. So a year or two years ago when keto was really taking off,

I was getting asked a lot about keto. So I would answer keto related things. And these days I'm getting asked about stuff like full body training, for example, which is why I have produced some content on that, as well as the questions that I'm going to be answering in today's episode. Now, before I get to those questions, just to let you know, if you want to submit questions for my consideration for the next Q&A, shoot me an email, mikeatmosfullife.com, and you will get an answer to your question and you will provide me with some potential material for the next Q&A. All right, in this Q&A, here's what I got for you. Should you go straight from a cut to a lean bulk? Good question. Something I've been asked about for quite some time now, and I may have commented on this tangentially in some articles or podcasts,

but I'm going to give my full answer in today's episode. Here's the next one. Is there an ideal heart rate for fat loss? This comes from Nacho Man from Instagram. Unfortunately, I don't have where the first came from. Next up, we have are massage guns useful or beneficial? This comes from Overhoff86, Instagram handle. And then we have something fun from Tracy Lush Martinez over on Instagram. If you were arrested with no explanation, what would your friends and family assume you had done? Also, if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my VIP one-on-one coaching service because my team and I have helped people of all ages

and all circumstances lose fat, build muscle, and get into the best shape of their life faster than they ever thought possible. And we can do the same for you. We make getting fitter, leaner, and stronger paint by numbers simple by carefully managing every aspect of your training and your diet for you. Basically, we take out all of the guesswork. So all you have to do is follow the plan and watch your body change day after day, week after week, and month after month. What's more, we've found that people are often missing just one or two crucial pieces of the puzzle. And I'd bet a shiny shekel it's the same with you. You're probably

doing a lot of things right, but dollars to the same with you. You're probably doing a lot of things right, but dollars to donuts, there's something you're not doing correctly or at all that's giving you the most grief. Maybe it's your calories or your macros. Maybe it's your exercise selection. Maybe it's your food choices. Maybe you're not progressively overloading your muscles or maybe it's something else. And whatever it is, here's what's important. Once you identify those one or two things you're missing, once you figure it out, that's when everything finally clicks. That's when you start making serious progress.

And that's exactly what we do for our clients. To learn more, head over to www.buylegion.com, that's B-U-Y-Legion.com slash VIP and schedule your free consultation call, which by the way, is not a high pressure sales call. It's really just a discovery call where we get to know you better and see if you're a good fit for the service. And if you're not, for any reason, we will be able to share resources that'll point you in the right direction. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, and if you also want to finally stop spinning your wheels and make more progress in the next few months than you did in the last few years, check out my VIP coaching service at www.buylegion.com slash VIP.

www.buylegion.com slash VIP. Okay, let's start with question number one, which is, should you go straight from a cut to a lean bulk? And unfortunately, I don't have a note here on who asked me this, but the short answer is absolutely. All right, next question. No joking. So yes, you can go straight from a cut to a lean bulk. And this is something that my position has changed on over time, mostly because of the change in my position on reverse dieting, where I once thought that it made sense to do a light version of reverse dieting, not as thorough and as involved as some people once would recommend and still recommend, but something along the lines of like, okay, you're done cutting. Let's take four weeks or so to get you back to maintenance. And let's just raise your calories by small ish increments. For

most people that would mean around a hundred to 150 calories. You're raising your daily intake by a hundred to 150 calories every seven days, maybe every five days. Let's get you back to maintenance. Let's have you sit there for another few weeks and just get used to that. And then let's go into a surplus. And there's nothing wrong with that approach. There's certainly no harm in it. Maybe if you've been cutting for a long time and you are really suffering negative side effects, then you could say the downside would be that you are still going to experience those side effects while you are bringing your calories back up to maintenance because you are still in a deficit. And unfortunately, going from, let's say, a 500

calorie daily deficit to a 400 calorie daily deficit is not going to reduce your symptoms by 25%. No, you're just going to feel the same. And you'll probably feel the same at a 200 calorie deficit and maybe even a 100 calorie deficit. You're not really going to start feeling better if you've been cutting for a while, especially if you've gotten very lean, until you are at least eating at maintenance. And if you have gotten very lean until you gain some body fat back, you can only get so lean before you are going to forever deal with negative side effects. And that is a consequence of having very low body fat levels. To put some numbers to it, in guys, it's usually around 7% or so. I would say that's probably

the leanest most guys can get and maintain. And that might even be a little bit generous. It might be more like 8%, but close enough. 7% to 8% is probably the leanest that most guys can stay before they just start running into issues related to quality of sleep, energy levels, hunger, cravings, sex drive, and so forth. In women, it's probably around 18%, maybe 17%. Most women, if they go lower than that, they are going to start noticing it and it will not get better until they just gain some body fat back. Unfortunately, it doesn't matter how knowledgeable you are about diet and training and recovery. And no matter how much you try to optimize everything you're doing in the kitchen, in the gym, in your bed and elsewhere. If you are too lean, you are going to, I wouldn't say suffer for it, but you are going to experience negative side effects. And so in a way, coming back to reverse dieting, I once thought that it was probably the smart thing to do. If nothing else, it just prevented you from accidentally eating

way too much and gaining too much body fat back too quickly, which then can lead to a complete spiral, downward spiral of way too much eating. And before you know it, you are back to square one. You're back to where you started your cut, or maybe you even went beyond that. Maybe you're now fatter than when you started. And I know that's a bit extreme and not common. More often, it would just be that there is a bit too much overeating. So there's a bit too much fat gain too quickly, and it's a little bit demotivating. And at one point, there was a plausible theory that there might be some physiological mechanisms working against us at the end of a cut that could be mitigated by

slowly raising our calories. But now I would say the best evidence suggests that reverse dieting is really not necessary. No matter how long you've been cutting, no matter how lean you've gotten, so long as you are properly calculating your current maintenance calories, you can go straight from the end of a cut to maintenance. Now, the same goes for transitioning from a cut to a lean bulk. So the idea behind why you are not supposed to go from a cut to maintenance and definitely not from a cut to a lean bulk is that your metabolism has been damaged or weakened, impaired in some way when you're dieting. And so then before you really start eating heartily, which you would do when you lean bulk, you have to undo the damage. You

have to heal your metabolism by gradually increasing your calories. Now, as I mentioned, the current weight of the evidence suggests that this is not true. Yes, it's true that your metabolism slows down a little bit as you diet, but this is normal and natural and it is not as significant overeat after they have been cutting. You know, you're at the end of a cut, hunger's high and cravings can be intense. Even if you've been doing everything correctly, again, if you've been dieting for some period of time, even with diet breaks and you've gotten pretty lean, chances are you're going to want to eat food. You are going to be itching to get in more calories and particularly more carbs and more fat. And you're probably also gonna be looking forward

to feeling strong in the gym again because your workout performance also really does tend to drop off toward the end of a cut. And so the trap here is not lean bulking per se. It's not increasing your calories. It's just letting the lean bulk kind of turn into the dirty bulk, which is pretty easy to do after you've been restricting your calories. And that means restricting your food intake to some degree, right? In terms of which foods you're

eating. Of course, you're lowering your calories, but to get there, that means that you probably haven't been eating stuff that you would like to start eating again. And what's more, many people think that you have to be in a larger calorie surplus than you do to maximize muscle and strength gain. The largest that you need to be in is probably about 10%, on average being 10% over your TDEE. And some research shows that if you keep your calories right around maintenance, you can still do quite well. You can still gain a significant amount of muscle and strength with minimal fat when you're also doing what you need to do in the gym. For example, a study conducted by scientists at the Norwegian School of Sports Sciences found that athletes who lifted

weights and ate at maintenance calories, which was just according to their appetite, gained about as much as athletes who lifted weights and maintained a 600 calorie surplus, daily surplus. That's pretty big. And the latter group, the people who ensured they were in a calorie surplus, increased their body fat percentage by about 15%, relative, not absolute, relative. Whereas the other group, the group that ate according to appetite and was striving to eat until satisfied, so they were not trying to eat a bit less than they wanted to eat or felt they needed to eat, or a bit more, just according to hunger, their body fat percentage barely changed only about a 3% increase. And again, that's relative. So very, very small. And that was over eight to 12 weeks, which is a decent time period to look at this. And so my point was saying that is if you have

someone who's at the end of a cut, they're hungry, they have cravings, they want to eat food, they want to eat very palatable foods, high calorie foods that they have not been eating. They also mistakenly believe that they need to be in a large calorie surplus to maximize muscle and strength gain. Let's say they have heard 20 or 30% surplus. If you burn 3,000 calories a day, you should be eating upward of 4,000 calories per day. You've got to eat big to get big. That person is now in a bad spot. They are in a position where they are likely to gain a lot of body fat very quickly and not nearly as much muscle. And after a couple of months, they are going to be disappointed. They're going to look in the mirror and be like, great, I just look fat again. And I haven't made that much progress in the gym. I haven't gained that fat again. And I haven't made that much progress in the gym. I

haven't gained that much strength. And I don't really see any change in terms of muscle, which would be the case, especially if you are an intermediate or advanced weightlifter gaining fat quickly. And then they just don't know what to do. Should they cut back down again? But then, okay, they're going to like how they look. And so the key then is doing it correctly. If you are going to go from a cut to a lean bulk, you have to be as anal. You have to pay attention to the details, your calories, your macros, how often you are quote unquote cheating, how often you are eating more than you normally would as when you're cutting. If you can go into your lean bulk with that mentality, you can do very well. Now, what is the right way of doing it? Here's what I like to do. End a cut. Now, I haven't done

this in some time to be fair, but this is how I've done it in the past. And this is what I would do if I wanted to lean bulk. So I would finish my cut and then I would immediately raise my calories back to maintenance. And I would calculate those maintenance calories at my new low weight, not my previous higher weight, my new low weight and my activity levels at that time. So I'd get a new maintenance number. I would go up to that. And then I would gradually increase my calorie intake as needed until I was gaining, in my case, probably about a half a percent of my body weight per month. Now, this can

range, depending on your experience, from about a half a percent to one and a half percent. So one and a half percent would be most applicable to newbies. One percent would be to intermediate weightlifters, people with, let's say, anywhere from one to three years of good work under their belt. And then for people who are advanced, who don't have much muscle and strength left to gain, something around a half a percent or even less, it could be a quarter of a percent of body weight per month. And the reason why the target for weight gain shrinks as experience increases, as weightlifting experience increases is, as I just mentioned, you are not going to be able to

gain nearly as much muscle and strength in each lean bulking phase as you become a more experienced weightlifter. And so you want to minimize fat gain. You want to be able to stretch out that calorie surplus for as long as you can. And as the surplus does not need to be large, research suggests in experienced weightlifters, just 300 calories or so over maintenance, two, 300 calories over maintenance is probably enough. You want to do that so you don't gain fat too quickly and you don't have to end your lean bulk sooner than is productive. If you're an advanced weightlifter and you're lean bulking for six or eight weeks, it's almost a waste of time. You need to be thinking in terms of months. You want to be spending, I would say, at least three months and upward of six months,

if you can, in a surplus. Okay, so to recap here, you are finishing your cut. You are raising your calories to maintenance. You can stay there from anywhere from, let's say, one to three weeks. I don't think I mentioned that earlier, but that is an important point. Some people do like to settle in for a couple of weeks before they go into the surplus because it just helps avoid the, oh shit, what have I done feeling when they look at the scale, they've carved up at the end of a cut. And then a day or two later, they weigh five pounds more. Even if they understand that it's not fat, they didn't gain five pounds of fat. It can be a bit disconcerting. And some people also do like

to see where their maintenance is at. They just want to see it. Like they understand that it's calculated and it's almost certainly going to be accurate enough, but they will raise their calories up to around maintenance. They will stay there from, again, anywhere from one to three weeks to just see how their body responds, see how they feel, and then go into a surplus. So I would say do whatever works best for you. For me, I probably would do two weeks just to enjoy the maintenance calories before I get into the surplus because lean bulking in the beginning is fun. It is enjoyable to eat a bit more food, but after a month or two, it starts to feel a little bit laborious. It starts to feel a little bit like a chore having to eat these extra calories because just as your body doesn't enjoy being underfed, it doesn't enjoy being chronically overfed either. And you do start

to experience side effects. First and foremost, you just get sick of eating. You just don't want to eat anymore. You look forward to your next cut simply so you can eat less food. And for me, at least, toward the end of my last lean bulk, I really felt like I was force-feeding myself the last one or two meals of the day. I was full, completely satisfied, did not want food and had to eat and it was not enjoyable. Now, it's not a real complaint. It's not like it was grueling, but it was obnoxious just as it's obnoxious at the end of a cut when you are always kind of hungry and you're always dealing with cravings and

you are just looking forward to eating more food again. All right, so you've been at maintenance calories now for a week or maybe a couple of weeks. What next? Well, I like to ease into the lean bulk if I'm coming right off of a cut. So I'm not going to jump straight into a 10% surplus. I'm going to raise my daily calorie intake by about 100 calories, and I'll do that for a week. And I know that's not going to be enough to gain weight at the desired rate. And so then I'm going to raise my daily calorie intake by another 100 calories after five or seven days or so. And that actually may be enough in my case. I will not need to go higher than probably 300 calories over my maintenance to gain weight, which means gain muscle and fat

at the desired rate. Okay, let's move on to the next question. Is there an ideal heart rate for fat loss? Again, this was from Nacho Man from Instagram and kind of, but not really. So you've probably heard this one, right? You've probably heard that there is a fat burning zone when you are exercising, which most people define as around 60 to 70% of your maximum heart rate. So for example, my maximum heart rate is probably around 180 beats per minute. So according to this principle, my optimal heart rate for fat burning would be around 110 to 130 beats per minute. It sounds nice and tidy and people like simple, but it doesn't really pan out. Let's talk about where this came from. Well, there is a large body of evidence that shows that as exercise intensity increases, fat burning increases up to a point. After your body's ability to burn fat maxes out though, carbs become the body's dominant fuel source until you are burning

almost entirely carbs in the case of all out effort. So the point of maximal fat oxidation, as scientists call it, is usually right around 60 to 70% of your maximum heart rate. And fitness gurus and marketers glommed onto that and turned that into, oh, if you want to lose fat as quickly as possible, then you want to be right around that 60 to 70% of your maximum heart rate. Because if you go higher, you're no longer burning as much fat. Now you're burning more carbs. And this line of thinking really just misses the forest for the trees because your body fat levels are not determined by how much fat you burn in a single workout, but how much fat you burn over a period of time, so over weeks or months. And that is determined by your

total energy balance, calories in versus calories out. And since you burn more calories when you train harder, harder training is better for fat loss because you burn more calories. And of course, that means then the higher your heart rate is, the better it's going to be for reducing body fat levels. Because if your heart rate is very high, that indicates you are training hard. Now you are probably wondering about the burning fat versus carbs during the workout thing. And while it's true that if you do a lot of high intensity cardio, for example, you are going to burn a lot of carbohydrate as well as a fair amount of fat. But what you need to consider is just how many more calories you're burning in those high intensity workouts. So while the

percentage of those calories coming from fat might be lower than in a lower intensity cardio workout, the sheer number of calories you're burning makes up for it. And then there are after effects associated with higher intensity training that burns a lot of carbohydrate that causes the body to burn more fat than it normally would to get the energy it needs. And we don't have to get into the particulars here, but you can simply think of it this way. So if you're burning a lot of carbohydrate, burning up a lot of glycogen, right? Stored carbohydrate in the muscles and in the liver liver in your workouts, then later your body's going to have to go to body fat to get energy it needs while it replenishes those glycogen stores. And so that doesn't perfectly match up, of course,

in terms of, oh, you burned X number of grams of carbohydrate in the workout. Now you're going to burn Y extra grams of fat over the course of the next 24 hours. But it does work similar to that, to where it mitigates some of that supposed, that perceived downside of the extra carbohydrate burn during the workout. So all that is to say that if we're talking about just losing fat as quickly as possible, the more intense the training, the better because it's going to burn a lot more calories. And that's the primary reason. That said, high intensity training does have a downside. And that, it's still harder on your body. It takes longer to recover from sprints of any kind than from lower intensity stuff. And that can get in the way of strength training and increase the risk of injury. And so then we come back to this 60 to 70% of maximum heart rate. Well, it's actually a pretty good Goldilocks zone for burning a lot of calories and burning plenty of fat and just minimizing the impact on the body, minimizing the interference effect that can occur with cardio

and strength training. So then we've kind of come full circle to the claim that 60 to 70% of maximum heart rate is ideal for fat loss. And there's some truth there, but not for the reasons most people think or claim. There's nothing particularly special about it. It is just a reasonable, workable approach that allows you to burn several hundred calories per hour without putting a lot of stress and strain on your body. And that's why I recommend mostly low or moderate intensity cardio with some high intensity work thrown in if you want to do that. So let's say for example, no more than a total of about half of the amount of time you spend lifting weights given to cardio. So if you are lifting for five hours a week,

no more than let's say two or two and a half hours of cardio per week, and no more than one or two and a half hours of cardio per week and no more than one or two HIIT sessions per week and make those HIIT sessions no longer than let's say 30 minutes. If you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my VIP one-on-one coaching service because my team and I have helped people of all ages and circumstances lose fat, build muscle, and get into the best shape of their life faster than they ever thought possible. And we can do the same for you. All right, next up, massage guns. Are they useful? From overhoff86 over on Instagram. And this one is tricky because there's not much research out there on these things one way or another, but I do think that they're useful because they just do

what a massage therapist would do. Now, I'm not saying that they are as enjoyable or necessarily as effective as a good massage therapist, but they do rub, they do compress, they do jiggle tissues. And believe it or not, those things can make a difference. There is a decent amount of research showing that massage in general is an effective way to reduce muscle soreness, for example, at least if it's done soon after working out. And anecdotally, many, many elite and recreational athletes swear by massage and find it very helpful for the same purpose, to recover a bit faster from their training. Now, there are a couple of studies on massage guns that are worth mentioning. One was published by scientists at the University of Rouen and the other by scientists at Massey University. And this research found that these massage devices did help reduce

muscle soreness after exercise. That said, both of the studies involved small sample sizes, 30 and 13 people respectively, and they were only over the course of three days. And in one study, the participants used kind of a wearable massage device. It wasn't a massage gun. But hey, it's better than evidence showing that the guns don't do anything, right? Something else to keep in mind though is it's hard to say whether benefits observed in any study would be due to just making the person feel better. So just subjective, almost like a placebo effect rather than causing actual physiological changes that matter. Of course, it is very hard to do a placebo-controlled trial in any kind of massage

because any kind of placebo will almost certainly have similar effects as the treatment. But muscle soreness is a fairly subjective sensation. So you could argue that anything that consistently reduces it does have some merit, especially if there are no major downsides and there are no major downsides to massage guns, unless the price is a major deterrent. So even if the effects of these devices and other similar devices or even therapies is mostly due to the placebo effect, well, hey, we'll take it, right? even therapies is mostly due to the placebo effect, well, hey, we'll take it, right? Now, in the case of something like muscle damage, we could measure that, but all we really care about,

right, is if we feel better. Now, I should mention that many of the marketing claims associated with these devices, in many cases, massage as well, are pseudoscientific. So, for example, here's a little snippet from something I found online. Deep tissue massage, which is what these guns essentially offer, loosens the muscle tissue, increases blood flow to it, and helps tight, tense areas relax. Relieving muscle tightness is important since it can lead to imbalances that increase your risk of injury. For instance, tight pectoral or chest muscles can round your shoulders and pull your neck forward. Uh, yeah, no, that is mostly just fake news. There is not much evidence out there to show that massage does effectively improve blood flow or that tight muscles restrict blood flow. Ironically, if anything, damaged muscles tend to have more blood flow after exercise.

That's part of the inflammatory response of exercise because the body's trying to repair the damage. And of course, that requires blood to bring nutrients and to take out waste products. There's also very, very little evidence that muscle tightness causes muscle imbalances or that muscle imbalances are a major factor in injuries. And so my point with saying those things is just don't expect massage guns to do more than they can or will. Don't expect massage guns to dramatically reduce your risk of injury or eliminate muscle soreness or muscle tightness. Just treat them as you would

treat a massage from a significant other or a friend or something, you know, an amateur kind of just like rub the tissues around a massage and you will at least have the right expectations. One thing I should also mention, this is what I actually like a massage gun for, which is alleviating trigger points, which are patches of muscle tissue that are sensitive or tense. And trigger points are very understudied and many experts do not agree on what they are and what causes them, much less how to fix them. And it isn't something that I have looked into too deeply myself. However, I did do an interview with one of the premier experts in the world on pain science, Paul Ingram, and he talked about trigger points.

As of that interview, his position was that they are very real and yes, they are mysterious. We don't quite understand how they work, but if you find trigger points and you work on them, you just rub them. You don't need to be fancy. You just rub them until they feel better. You do that consistently. You can experience some pretty surprising benefits. You can have joint pains go away. You can have muscle tightness go away. You can resolve muscle pains and more. If I have piqued your interest, go check out that interview, Paul Ingram, I-N-G-R-A-H-A-M. I posted the interview probably about a month ago and it is August 24th as of this exact moment when I'm recording this.

So I think about a month ago, that interview went live. And so in my case, I have used a massage gun to hit a couple of trigger points. Now, one of them I've had to get somebody else to do because it's on the back side of my body. It's hard to say exactly what it is. I'm guessing infraspinatus right up against the scapula. There's a point there, a common trigger point. Paul talked about that. That's one. And there has been another one on the longissimus muscles on the right side of my spine. And there

has been another one in my subscap. And we get that with a pointed tip on the massage gun. And there have been one or two on my right quad that have been associated with patellar tendon discomfort. It's been a long time since I've felt pain there, but just a little bit of tightness, a little bit of strange, something a little bit off. By hitting a couple of trigger points on my right leg, I've been able to eliminate that. And yes, I could just rub these points that I can reach. I could rub my sub scaps on my right leg, I've been able to eliminate that. And yes, I could just rub these points that I can reach. I could rub my subscap. It's on my right side. I could rub the point or two on my right quad. I can't rub obviously on my back, but the massage gun is better. It's better than rubbing. You're able to do it more effectively and you don't have to rub yourself for whatever

that's worth. Don't over-treat trigger points though. That's something that Paul talked about. But if you're not going to listen to the interview, I'll just say that's one of the key points is if you find something that doesn't feel good and you're going to work it, don't think you have to hammer it until it's numb. You don't want to over-treat tissue. Just treat it until it feels a little bit better, until you've taken the edge off and then just repeat that every day. And what you'll find is in time, it becomes less and less sensitive, and eventually you may not even need to treat it anymore at all. Okay, final question. If I were arrested with no explanation, what would my friends and family

assume I had done? Again, this is from Tracy Lush Martinez from Instagram. So I asked some friends and family, and here are some of the answers I got. One was probably mistaken identity. They would assume that I was innocent and didn't do shit. Perfect. My plan is working perfectly. Here's another one that I got caught up in some plot to overthrow the government. And that one makes some sense. It's not completely out of left field, but not very plausible either because with what time? I don't have time to be a revolutionary when I have to record podcasts and write articles and write books and run Legion and do all of the health and fitness things that I do. I'm too busy being Mike Matthews to try to usurp

the government. And you know, there aren't any good revolutionary movements out there anyway, at least that I know of. So this one will have to wait. All right, next up is refused to wear a mask somewhere. Oh, this is a good one. Ironically, I don't refuse to wear a mask. I wear a mask when I go into crowded areas and I do it out of manners. Mostly I've looked into the research on masking. I understand that it is mildly effective at reducing spread transmission best and may just be entirely ineffective. The way many people wear their masks and use their masks makes it ineffective and possibly even worse than not having a mask. And it is not going to protect anybody from getting the virus, as many people

believe. And well, before I go off on even more of a tangent on masks, this is something I will actually address in detail in the next Q&A episode, or maybe the next Says You, because I certainly have heard from plenty of people on Instagram who disagree with what I just said. And so I think it's worth laying out my position on masking, and I will save that for the next Q&A or Says You. But as for me getting arrested for not wearing a mask, implausible. Won't happen because I don't mind it. It's slightly obnoxious. If I have to wear glasses, then I have to stick my nose out like the penis out of the hammock because my glasses fog up. Whatever though, it's a small ask. Now, if we are still being told to wear masks a year from now, I might feel differently about it. But let's move on to the next, which is probably

something white collar. So let's go with tax evasion. Ah, yes. A nice victimless crime. You see, the problem with this one though, is I'm not rich enough to pull off tax evasion properly. If you're really going to evade taxes, you got to be very wealthy. Then you can do it with gusto. I would only be able to engage in petty, petty tax evasion that wouldn't save me that much money and would just greatly increase the risk that I would get audited by the IRS. So I don't bother with those things. I just pay my taxes the way that you're supposed to. I take advantage of some strategies that are completely legal, that have bipartisan support, but I still pay a lot of taxes and that's life. All right. The last one is refusing the COVID-19 vaccine. This is something I could get arrested for actually, because I will absolutely refuse to get the coronavirus vaccine when it first comes out. There may be some point where I would agree to get it, but I would not submit to mandatory vaccination. I disagree with mandatory medicine. I disagree with it on principle,

and I disagree with making what is going to be a risky vaccine mandatory. And that's not something that I want to subject myself or my family to. For example, just look at the results of the Moderna trial. Look at that. Look at what happened with the people in the low-dose group. You had one out of 15 in the low-dose group end up in the hospital. You had everyone in the high-dose group experiencing severe side effects. You had several of those people in the hospital. Then look at the exclusionary criteria of that study. Look at the people who were involved in that trial. They were not 70, right? They were younger. They were healthy. They had no history of lung related illness. They had no medical conditions whatsoever.

They were not overweight. They did not smoke. These are not your average Americans. So they found people kind of like me and probably you. And so if a vaccine produces severe side effects, if it puts people like you and me in the hospital, what do you think it's going to do to Sally Sixpack and Joey Bag of Donuts? They're dead. They are D-O-A. So I think the vaccine or vaccines, I think it's going to be a complete shit show and I will not be getting any vaccines for the coronavirus. Certainly not in the first round and maybe never. We'll see how it goes. All right, friends, that's it. That's all I've got for this episode. I hope you found it helpful, enlightening, and make sure to tune in next week because I am going to unveil a new

book. It's called Fitness Science Explained. I coauthored it with James Krieger, a published scientist and respected thought leader in the evidence-based fitness space. I'm going to be sharing several chapters from the audio book with you. So you can get a taste of the content in the book and decide if you would like to pick up a copy. All right. Well, that's it for today's episode. I hope you found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and you don't mind doing me a favor, could you please leave a quick review for the podcast on iTunes or wherever you are listening from? Because those reviews not only convince people that they should check out the

show, they also increase the search visibility and help more people find their way to me and to the podcast and learn how to build their best body ever as well. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then simply subscribe to the podcast and whatever app you're using to listen, and you will not miss out on any of the new stuff that I have coming. And last, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com and share your thoughts. Let me know how you think I could do this better. I read every email myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback. All right.

Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.