Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Q&A: Eating Below BMR, Getting Photoshoot Ready, Eating Red Meat, and More

Episode Date: December 27, 2019

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 four questions: 1. What is the best way to get ripped for a photoshoot or event? (2:32) 2. Is it harmful to eat below your basal metabolic rate? (8:09) 3. How can Bigger Leaner Stronger or Thinner Leaner Stronger be modified for intermediate and advanced weightlifters? (13:23) 4. Should I stop eating red meat? (21:46) 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: A Simple and Accurate BMR Calculator (and How to Use It) Is Red Meat Really as Bad For You as “They” Say? --- Mentioned on The Show: Shop Legion Supplements Here: legionathletics.com/shop/ --- 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.legionathletics.com/signup/

Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural evidence-based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and protein bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. Head over to www.LegionAthletics.com now to check it out. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout and you will

save 10% on your entire order and it'll ship free if you are anywhere in the United States. And if you're not, it'll ship free if your order is over $100. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. What is the best way to get ripped for a photo shoot or an event? Is it harmful to eat below your BMR? How should Bigger Leaner Stronger and Thinner Leanerer stronger or similar programs be modified for intermediate or advanced weightlifters? And should I stop eating red meat? Those are the questions I'm going to be answering in today's Q&A. And quickly, if you want me to answer one of your

questions in an upcoming Q&A episode, just send it or multiple questions. If you have multiple questions, send them to me via email, mike at muscleforlife.com, just muscleforlife spelled out,.com or Instagram DMs is another okay way to reach me. It's a bit of a pain in the ass to stay on top of DMs. So email is the best, but you will almost certainly get a reply if you DM me. I do tend to miss some though. If you email me, you will certainly, certainly get a reply if you DM me. I do tend to miss some though. If you email me, you will certainly, certainly get a reply. You might just have to wait a week or two because

I get a lot of emails. And then if your question is something that a lot of other people also tend to ask that I haven't already answered on the podcast or on my YouTube channel or in an article, or if it just strikes me as something that could be useful to my crowd, then I will choose it for one of the next Q&A episodes. All right, so let's start with the first question. What's the best way to get ripped for a photo shoot or an event? And first, let's just quantify ripped. So for guys, let's say anywhere between 7% and 10% body fat, with 7% being very lean, very cut, and 10% being fairly lean, fairly cut. And in women, those numbers would look like 15% body fat would be shredded as a woman,

be shredded as a woman up to 20% body fat, which would be lean and athletic, but a bit softer and less cut than 15%. So how do you do it? How do you get that impressively lean and cut and chiseled and insert every other stupid buzzword look? Well, I just alluded to it because the number one important thing is simply your body fat percentage. It is simply getting lean enough. And I guess I should add that it's getting lean enough without losing any muscle to speak of, or at least with minimizing muscle loss, depending on how lean you're trying to get. If you are a natural bodybuilder, for example, and you need to get down to like four or 5% body fat for a competition, you're going to lose some muscle along the way, but you can minimize it. You can lose as little muscle as possible. And so what that means then is as far as tactics go, as far as how to actually get there, the most important thing is just giving yourself enough time to lose the amount of body fat that you need to lose. Not trying to rush the process with starvation dieting, which sure,

it's going to drop body fat, but it's also going to cut away at your muscle. Not trying to overload yourself with an excessive amount of physical activity and especially cardio, because that too will accelerate fat loss, but it will also accelerate muscle loss and just make you feel miserable. And that process of just fundamentally dieting well is far more important than any sort of shortcuts or hacks you might hear about regarding manipulating your water or your sodium or your carbohydrate intakes, because those strategies for most people don't help. Most of the time, those strategies, no matter how intricate they may seem or evidence-based they may seem, just end up making you look smaller and flatter on the day of the shoot or the event,

and also can make it very hard to get much of a pump, which of course makes you look better. And that's why if you look at some of the peak week protocols of some of the successful natural bodybuilders out there, it's not very much. It's pretty straightforward. It's more or less what I just laid out, giving yourself plenty of time to get lean and then bringing your calories up and carbs up into a show so you look full and can get a nice big pump. A lot of it comes down to that. Many competitors, successful natural competitors don't manipulate sodium or water whatsoever. And as far as carbs go, they may bring their carb intake up a couple of days before the show. And that's just to facilitate getting a pump.

carb intake up a couple of days before the show. And that's just to facilitate getting a pump. And to that point, I myself have had success with that. So in the past, when I've gotten quite lean for photo shoots, I would do exactly what I just told you, give myself plenty of time, get very lean. And then three or four days or so before the shoot, I would just bring my calories back up to around maintenance. and I would do it by just adding a bunch of carbs. And what I found then is then on the day of the shoot, I was able to get a much bigger pump than just three or four weeks before when my carbohydrate intake was quite a bit lower because I was still cutting. And if you want to see how this plays out for your body, just pay attention to how you look.

Take some pictures when you're cutting, say when you're deeper into a cut, when you're getting toward the end of your cut, so you're lean and you take a short diet break or maybe a few days to refeed where you're increasing your carbohydrate intake quite a bit. Take some pictures on the days of those break days or those refeed days, as well as the days that follow. I would say up to maybe five days that follow and just see where your sweet spot seems to be. See where you tend to look best. And then you can simply use that information to inform how you'd prepare for a photo shoot or an event. So you would cut and you get plenty lean, and then you'd start to bring your calories and your carbs up. And let's say it's after three days of that or four days

of that, you're looking really good. Well, then you know, that's how you plan for your photo shoot or your event. A few other tips that help for photo shoots are making sure that you have some color in your skin, making sure that you are not pale because simply getting a tan can make you look like one to two percent leaner. And getting a pump before the pictures, of course, makes a difference. It can make a very big difference. Putting some oil on your body makes a difference. And having good lighting makes a huge difference. You might be surprised how much better or worse you can look based on lighting alone. You can be very lean and look fantastic and go in the wrong lighting and look very meh. And then you can go in the right lighting and look outstanding. So it's worth putting a little

bit of time into figuring out the lighting and using lighting that enhances your physique, not detracts from it. Okay, the next question here, is it harmful to eat below your BMR? No, I wouldn't say it's harmful. It's not inherently harmful, but do keep in mind that the less food you eat when you're cutting, the more you're going to have to deal with hunger and cravings and metabolic adaptation. And the more you risk developing nutritional deficiencies and losing muscle and the less energy that you have in general, the harder it is to not only get through your workouts, but just get through your life, get through your days. So that's why I don't recommend eating below BMR for any extended

period of time. And you shouldn't have to, unless you are a natural bodybuilder who needs to get extremely unhealthily lean for a short period of time to compete. You do not need to be eating below your BMR. And I would say that even applies to women as well, where below BMR eating is more common because they just burn less energy on average because they have smaller bodies. And so many women, especially women who are not very active, who don't exercise very much, when they start running their numbers in order to maintain a decent calorie deficit, they often find that that would entail eating below BMR. deficit, they often find that that would entail eating below BMR. And my recommendation to those women though, is to figure out how to increase physical activity. Let's bump up your total daily energy expenditure so we can create a large enough gap between energy intake and output to drive meaningful fat loss without having to drop calorie intake below BMR. And if that's not possible, and in some cases it's not, I understand some people, again, this is mostly something that

I come across with women, but sometimes with men as well. So some people are too busy. Like they only can exercise a couple hours per week and that just is what it is. And I understand that. And in that case, I would say that instead of just eating below BMR every day, I would rather have you take one of two different approaches. So the first would be eating above BMR, even if that means that your calorie deficit is smaller than you would like it to be. So let's say you would like to lose somewhere around a pound of fat per week, which would require a weekly deficit of something around 3,500 calories. And if doing that would

make, would mean that you have to be eating below your BMR every day, at least five days a week. Instead of that, I would rather have you eat more calories and let's shrink that calorie deficit, maybe even by 50% and let's just target a half a pound of fat loss per week. And by doing that, you're going to have to be more patient. It's going to take more time to reach your goal, but you are going to have an easier time getting there. It's going to be more enjoyable. You are going to have better workouts. You're going to have more energy throughout the day. You are going to be less food obsessed and you're going to be more likely to hold on to your hard-earned muscle. Now, the second approach is kind of just a spin

on the first one. If that doesn't work for you because the calorie deficit would be so small that the fat loss would be almost insignificant, or if you just need to lose fat faster than that, or you want to lose fat faster than that, then I would say if you need to eat below BMR a couple days per week to get that extra fat loss, that's okay. So let's say maybe two or three days per week below BMR, but then on those other days, eat above your BMR. Cycle your calories, so to speak. Now on those other days, you don't have to eat maintenance, of course. You can still be in a deficit, but just don't be in as big of a deficit as you are

when you are eating below your BMR. Hey, if you like what I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural evidence-based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. Every ingredient and every dose in every product is backed by peer-reviewed scientific research. Every formulation is 100% transparent. There are no proprietary blends and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored. To check everything out, just head over to legionathletics.com.

And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout, and you will save 20% on your entire order if it is your first purchase with us. And if it is not your first purchase with us, you will get double reward points on your entire order. That's essentially 10% cash back in rewards points. So again, the URL is legionathletics.com. And if you appreciate my work and want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this.

Okay. The next question, how should bigger, leaner, stronger, and thinner, leaner, stronger be modified or similar programs be modified for intermediate and advanced weightlifters? Well, this is a timely question because I'm in the middle of wrapping up a new, it's not just new and improved. It's really from scratch, rewritten from scratch, new second edition of my book, Beyond Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, which is a sequel to Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, and is intended for intermediates and advanced weightlifters. And there's a lot of information in this book. It's shaping up to be probably the same size as Bigger, Leaner, Stronger.

Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, I believe is 130-ish thousand words. And BBLS 2.0 is, I don't have the final word count yet, but it's probably gonna be upward of 100 to 120,000 words. And so I couldn't hope to summarize all of that here, but the primary change that you need to make in Bigger Leaner Stronger, and this would apply to Thinner Leaner Stronger as well, as you move from your beginner phase as a weightlifter into your intermediate phase. BLS and TLS can take you into your intermediate phase, but there is a point where you will stop making progress. And the primary reason for that, and thus the primary change you need to make, is you simply have to work harder in the gym now. So Big than you're stronger and thinner than you're stronger, have you doing nine to 12 hard sets per major muscle group per week? It's mostly nine.

And that at some point, somewhere in year two or so for most people, that becomes insufficient volume to continue making progress. And by continue making progress, what I'm referring to is continue gaining whole body strength, continue adding weight to the bar or dumbbells over time. And so that does remain the primary goal as an intermediate and advanced weightlifter. Nothing changes in that regard. You are still trying to progressively overload your muscles. And the best way to do that is to just get stronger, to just add weight to the bar over time, add weight to the dumbbells over time. And that means that your 1RMs, for example, on your big compound lifts should be going

up over time. It's going to be a lot slower going than when you were new, but they should be trending upward. And your strength on your accessory exercises should also be trending upward over time. How do you keep effectively doing that though? As a beginner, it's very straightforward. You really don't need anything more complicated, I think, than a double progression model where you're working in a given rep range. And when you hit the top of that rep range with a weight for anywhere from one, two to three sets based on the programming, you move up in weight.

That plus some moderate amount of volume, somewhere around 10 hard sets per major muscle group per week is really all you need in the beginning to gain all the muscle that you are going to be able to gain and all the strength that you're going to be able to gain. And it works quite well for upward of even two years for some people, I'd say on average, probably a year to a year and a half before the gears start to grind. And what people will find, and I know this firsthand because I've heard from so many people who have done my Bigger Leaner Stronger and Thinner Leaner Stronger programs over the years, is eventually those programs just become maintenance programs. Eventually, following the programs as laid out in the books, doesn't result in any meaningful

increases in muscle and strength. And that's to be expected. I know that those programs are not enough for people who want to get as muscular and as strong as they possibly can, given their genetics. I would say those programs are enough for most people's fitness goals. Most guys who just want to gain anywhere from 25 to maybe 30 pounds of muscle and then get their body fat down to around 10% and stay there. You can do that with just bigger than you're stronger. You actually don't need anything else. For women, it's probably about half that in terms of muscle gain. Somewhere around 15 pounds of muscle in the right places, 20-ish percent body fat. So that's a very lean, athletic, but still feminine look. You don't really need anything other than Thin and Leaner Stronger to get there. But if you want to gain

the last, let's say 20 or 30% that's available to you. So Bigger, Leaner, Stronger and Thinner, Stronger are there to give you, let's say upward of 70 or 80 percent of the muscle and strength that you're going to be able to gain ever. But if you really want to see what you can do, you want to see how far you can take your physique. You need a bit more. And primarily what you need is more volume. That is the biggest change that you need to make. You don't need to change too much in terms of exercises or too much in terms of programming. There is something to be said for a more deliberate calculated type of periodization, which you will find in Beyond Bigger, Leaner, Stronger. And there is something to be said for

planning your training out in longer blocks. So in Bigger,er, stronger, you're looking at really just eight week phases in beyond bigger, leaner, stronger. You're looking at 16 week phases or macro cycles would be the technical term, but the primary difference that makes the intermediate program better for muscle and strength gain for intermediate and advanced weightlifters, then the beginners, then bigger, leaner, stronger, or thin, leaner, stronger is just more volume. So in beyond bigger, leaner, stronger, you're going to be averaging some around 15 hard sets per major muscle group per week. And simply by increasing the volume and doing it intelligently and deloading properly and making sure you're not just running yourself into the ground,

that is going to drive new muscle gain and new strength gain more than anything else. And so while this new book, Beyond Bigger, Leaner, Stronger 2.0 is not going to be out until summer of next year to directly answer the question of what an intermediate or advanced weightlifter can do with just Bigger, Leanerer Stronger as it's laid out in the book that's available or Thinner Leaner Stronger in its book. What can you do to make those programs more effective for an intermediate and advanced weightlifter? Add more volume. That's the easiest way to do it. And specifically what you can do is you can take the Bigger Leaner Stronger or Thinner Leaner Stronger workouts and start by adding an extra exercise in the workouts. three hard sets per exercise,

just like how the workouts are laid out. So now you're going to be bumping the average weekly volume up a little bit. You're going to be bumping it up from about 10 hard sets per major muscle group per week to 13 ish hard sets. Cause some are nine, some are 10, but you know, it's going to be somewhere around 10. You're bumping it up by an average of three. That change alone will be enough to start moving the ball again. And then once you've acclimated to that new increased volume, and it will take a little bit of a toll on you in the beginning, you are going to be a bit more sore than you're used to. Your joints are probably going to ache a little bit more than you're used to. You're going to feel a little bit more beat up than you're used to. But once you've gotten used to it,

you can even increase the volume a little bit further. And I would recommend doing that just on your big pressing workout, pulling workout, and squat workout. Not adding even more volume to every workout per se, because it's going to be a bit overkill on your shoulders and your arms, but you can go up on your big press, your big squat and your big pull workouts. So that means now you're going from first from about, let's say it's nine hard sets on a big squat workout to 12, getting used to that. And from there, even going up to 15 hard sets per week for your big lower body workout. And if you want to learn a bit more about periodization, because I did mention that earlier and that Beyond Bigger, Leaner, Stronger 2.0 is going to be periodized differently

than it currently is in 1.0. And of course, differently than Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, you can head over to legionathletics.com and search for periodization. And you'll find a long article I wrote, which comes from the book. Now the implementation is different in the book because the program is different than what you'll find in the article, but it will give you a good understanding of periodization on the whole. And it will give you a bit of a preview of how I'm going to be periodizing beyond Bigger Than You're Stronger 2.0. Okay, the final question is, should I stop eating red meat? And this is a question that ebbs and flows with documentaries these days. So when What the Health came out a couple years ago,

I was getting asked this a lot and just getting asked about vegan dieting a lot. So when What the Health came out a couple of years ago, I was getting asked this a lot and just getting asked about vegan dieting a lot. And so at the time I put together a rather long and extensive review of What the Health, which I then also turned into a podcast. And this time around, of course, it is the Game Changers documentary, which I haven't done anything on yet, but I did just last week record a great informative podcast with Chris Kresser, who was recently on Joe Rogan to talk about it. And by the time this goes live, the Christian Review might be live. I don't remember how we have it laid out on the schedule, but if it's not live yet, it will be coming out very soon. And so that podcast will give a more extensive answer to that question that I'm going to give here. I'm just going to quickly give an overview. But if you want to hear more about the details, then check out the interview with Chris Kresser that will either already be live or be coming out very soon. And so the simple answer is these documentaries are very misleading.

They are outright propaganda in my opinion, because I can't believe that the misrepresentations of science that are in these documentaries are just mere oopsies. Just, oh, oops, we didn't know that that research doesn't say that at all, or we didn't know that we completely cherry-picked our evidence and ignored the large body of evidence that says otherwise. You see, when you zoom out and you look at the weight of the evidence, when you look at what the overall body of literature is telling us, which is what you have to do with science. If you want to look into the science of something, you can't just look at a couple studies, even if they're high quality studies. You have to look at all the research that's available and then particularly

look at all of the high quality research that's available and see what is the overall message here. And in the case of red meat consumption, a good example of this is a very comprehensive review of the literature that was just published in the Annals of Internal Medicine last month, November 2019. And the message is that we are probably not going to benefit by reducing our red meat intake. And there is probably very little risk to eating red meat regularly. For example, one of the things we have to consider is that red meat is a great source of protein, which means that it can help with muscle building and help with fat loss because a high protein diet is better for both of those things. And red meat

is also good for our bone health and it's high in iron. So that reduces the risk of anemia, particularly in women. And although some studies in the past have indicated that eating a lot of red meat and particularly eating a lot of highly processed red meats like bacon and sausage and deli meats may be associated with an increased risk of various diseases, including cancer, the latest and highest quality evidence casts doubt even on that. That said, I don't agree with people who would say that red meat has been more or less exonerated entirely and you can eat all of the red meat that you want or even further, like in the case of the carnivore diet, that you should be eating red meat every day, multiple times per day, even if you don't like red meat. Again, when you look at the current

body of evidence, it is not clear exactly what the long-term effects are of eating a large amount of red meat and particularly the highly processed red meat products, but also just red meat in general. And so my recommendation is to zoom out even further and look at diet on the whole and say, okay, here's what we know. We know that there is a huge amount of evidence that eating a lot of fruits and vegetables and legumes and other plant foods is very healthy for us. So let's make sure that we're getting plenty of those foods in our diet. And if we do that correctly, it's going to eat up a lot of our calories. I mean, you don't need to be eating more than 40% or so of your daily calories from protein. So the remaining 60% of calories should

be more or less from plant foods. And a portion of your protein can also be from plant foods. Animal proteins are better for the purposes of body composition and providing essential amino acids. But if you are getting most of your protein from animal products and then some of your protein from plant products, that is fine as well. Red meat consumption in the context of a diet like that, and we add in exercise, I don't see any cause for concern if you want to have a serving or two of red meat every day. And if you don't, like I don't really, but I do have

a couple servings per week. I like to make a homemade hamburger usually on the weekends, Friday and Saturday, I'll have a homemade hamburger. If I have some hamburger meat left over, I'll have a hamburger patty in my salad that I eat every day at lunch. And I have absolutely no qualms about that whatsoever. And if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural evidence-based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and protein bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. Head over to www.legionathletics.com now to check it out. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout and you will save 10% on your entire order.

And it'll ship free if you are anywhere in the United States. And if you're not, it'll ship free if your order is over $100. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. 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.