Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Q&A: Touch-and-Go Deadlift, Sugar Intake, Calorie Calculators, and More

Episode Date: March 6, 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 four questions: 1. Should I do touch and go deadlifts or should I pause between reps? 2. How quickly should I expect results with muscle gain and fat loss? 3. How much sugar can I eat and still be healthy? 4. I’ve used online calculators to determine my ideal calorie intake, how come I’m not losing or gaining weight? 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: legionathletics.com/paused-reps/ legionathletics.com/sugar-facts/ legionathletics.com/how-many-calori…s-should-i-eat/ Timestamps: 1:35 - Should I do touch and go deadlifts or should I pause between reps? 12:17 - How quickly should I expect results with muscle gain and fat loss? 23:55 - How much sugar can I eat and still be healthy? 30:13 - I’ve used online calculators to determine my ideal calorie intake. How come I’m not losing or gaining weight? --- 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/

Hello and welcome to another Q&A where I answer questions that people ask to me, that my dear readers, listeners, viewers, and followers ask me via Instagram. So if you want to come ask me questions, make sure to follow me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, as well as email, which is the best way to reach me if you have a question. I do my best to stay on top of DMs, but the system breaks sometimes and it's hard to make sure everybody gets a reply. Email, however, is much easier to manage. Mike at Muscle For Life is my email address if you want to reach out and ask me anything. And so what I do is I answer people's questions and then I choose questions that I get fairly often or questions that I think

will just resonate with my crowd and answer them publicly on these Q&As. All right, so here are today's questions. One, should I do touch and go deadlifts or should I pause between reps? Two, how quickly can I expect results with muscle gain and fat loss? Three, how much sugar can I eat and still be quote unquote healthy? And lastly, four, I've used online calculators

to determine my ideal calorie intake or my proper calorie intake. How come I'm not losing weight or gaining weight? Now, before we get to the show, 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. Every ingredient and dose in every product of mine is backed by peer-reviewed scientific research. Every formulation is 100% transparent, no proprietary blends,

and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored. To check it 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, then you will get double reward points on your entire order, which is essentially getting 10% cash back in rewards points. So again, that URL is legionathletics.com. And 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. Okay. So let's start with the first one, touch and go deadlifts. Good idea, bad idea. Now, in case you are not familiar with what a touch and go deadlift is, it's simply where you don't fully reset in between reps. You're touching the weight to the floor and going directly into your next ascent, into the next rep. And inevitably, you're also using a bit of bounce. Unless the floor is rock hard, chances are you're deadlifting on some sort

of platform or some sort of mat. And so when the weight hits the ground, it springs up a little bit and that helps you get into the next rep. Now I used to do touch and go deadlifts. I do not anymore. So I've just shown my hand, but I used to do them years ago and I got up to pretty heavy weight doing touch and go deadlifting. I would say somewhere in the range of the low 400s for sets of two or three. And so I got fairly strong training that way, but I stopped doing touch and go deadlifts some time ago, years ago, and for a couple of reasons. The first one being touch and go deadlifts do increase your risk of injury. Now, this wouldn't be the case with warmup sets because the weight is light and it's easy to control it and you're not getting very fatigued, obviously. But when the weights get heavy and you get into your heavy sets

or hard sets, working sets, whatever you call them, your muscle building sets, and particularly with an exercise like the deadlift, you need to make sure that your form stays tight throughout every rep of every set. You need to make sure that your body is staying in the position that it needs to be in, in each part of the lift. So you have your position at the bottom and you want to make sure that your hips are getting low enough. You don't want to make the common mistake of starting your hips too high, which then turns it into almost like a very heavy good morning. That's not a good idea. That's one way to hurt yourself. And then as you are ascending, as you are standing up, you want to make sure that your hips and your shoulders are rising at more or less the same rate. You don't want to make the common mistake of shooting your hips up first and then turning it into a very heavy good morning. You want to make sure that

the bar is moving more or less straight up and down. You don't want it to move away from you in particular. That's an easy way to strain something or get hurt. And you want to make sure that you are maintaining a lot of core tension. So pushing your abs out, you know, Valsalva maneuver. If you don't know what that is, just search for Legion Athletics, Val, V-A-L, Salva, S-A-L-V-A. And you'll find an article that I wrote on it. It's on, it's about how to manage your breath properly when you're lifting. And it's a way, an effective way of doing that. And I may have recorded a podcast on it as well. I'm not sure. You'd have to search my podcast feed or search my YouTube channel. And then you also need to maintain that core tension and proper form on the way down too. Assuming that you are lowering the

bar to the ground, not as slowly as you are raising it off the ground, but in a controlled manner that you're not just dropping it, which I also don't recommend. You should control the bar at least down to about your knees and then you can let it drop. And so my point with all that is it's hard to do all those things every rep when the weights are heavy and especially when you get deeper into your sets. So let's say you're doing a set of six, come rep four or five, it's getting pretty hard. And then let's say you're doing four sets of six that's that's your that's your your deadlifting for the workout that is particularly true on the last two sets and for me the last set the last set i do four sets of heavy heavy deadlifting per week right now and i'm currently working with

i believe i mean i just i just deadlifted today and it was four sets of six reps with 85% of one rep max, I believe was today. Now on that last set, it's hard, especially those last few reps. I'm fully resetting in between each rep, meaning that I'm lowering the bar to the ground. I'm checking my position. Sometimes I have to adjust my feet a little bit because they've shifted a little. Sometimes the bar is a little bit kind of, you know, askew and I have to bring it back to where I want it. And I do a quick like, do I have my shoulders packed? Do I have my lats engaged? Is my back in the flat position? Are my hips right? And then I do the next rep. Now that doesn't take more than a second or two because I've just gotten used to it, but I do go through

that little process on each rep. And even doing it that way, I find that I really do have to pay attention to maintaining core tension and to keeping my hips and my shoulders rising at the same rate and to making sure that the bar is moving straight up and down on those last couple reps, particularly in my last set. And again, that's with resetting and taking a moment to give myself the best chances for success. And what would happen when I would do touch and go deadlifting is it was just not possible to make those adjustments on the fly when I'm trying to bounce the weight off the ground and go right into my next rep. And so, yeah, sometimes the bar would be a little bit too far forward. Sometimes it would be a little bit torqued around. Sometimes I would be favoring one side of my body more than other than the

other, usually my right side, because I'm right dominant. So I tend to favor my right leg when I squat and when I deadlift, I have to, I have to pay attention to it. And that kind of shit is okay until it isn't okay until something gets screwed up. And in my case, I actually hurt my SI joint, not necessarily because of touch and go deadlifting, but I did hurt my SI joint years ago. It wasn't a major injury. Fortunately, it was something that I was just able to kind of train through and it just kind of went away. But I got to the top of a deadlift and it was fairly heavy, maybe 430 or so. And I let the tension out of my core, just a mistake. And I kind of felt my hips shift a little bit. There was just some movement that doesn't normally happen. And that hurt, that hurt for a couple of weeks or so on my left side.

And again, that wasn't because of touch and go deadlifting. I mean, because I had just finished a rep, or at least I don't think it was. I mean, I had finished a rep. I was standing at the top and then felt that shift. But in having spoken to and worked with a lot of people over the years, there are quite a few instances where people have hurt themselves deadlifting. And when I inquire as to what exactly happened, they were touch and go deadlifting and they got hurt on the way up. They got hurt. So they bounce the weight off the ground and then they're trying to go into the next rep and then something goes wrong.

Now, of course, you can't fully prevent that ever. wrong. Now, of course, you can't fully prevent that ever. Doing anything with your body comes with some sort of risk, but I don't think it's necessary to make something like the deadlift riskier than it needs to be just for the sake of making it easier, which brings me to the next point of why I stopped. That's all you're doing is you're just making the exercise a little bit easier, not more effective. And so for many people who are doing the touch and go deadlift and this would apply to me back when I was doing it it's a bit of an ego thing it's being able to put more weight on the bar which minimally makes your training more fun and feel more rewarding and then also if you care about other people and seeing them seeing you do cool things in the gym and lifting heavy weights, then of course it's good for that as well. And that is not a very productive I'm just in the gym to have good workouts and to not get hurt and

really be able to do this for the rest of my life. I no longer care to get attention. I don't care to try to outlift people. And so I am now even more focused on maintaining good form and making my exercises, making every rep of every set as effective as possible. Now, some people say that, yeah, bouncing the weight off the ground does make the exercise a little bit easier, but you can compensate for that by adding more weight, which would make it just as effective as stopping between every rep and using less weight. Now, this is kind of the argument that is made for the trap bar deadlift because you're going to be able to lift more weight, especially with the high handles on a trap bar than a conventional deadlift, which if you're using the same weights on both

exercises would make the trap bar deadlift a little bit less effective for gaining muscle and strength. But of course you can just compensate for that by putting more weight on the bar. And then I think it's fair to say that both of those exercises would be more or less equally effective for getting more jacked. Well, the difference here, of course, is the trap bar deadlift is a proper exercise. Like you can fully reset in between each rep of the trap bar deadlift as well. And you should, whereas the touch and go deadlift is not a real exercise. It's just a perversion of a real exercise. And so I don't quite get that analogy. Sure. Load more weight on the bar with your touch and go deadlifts and increase the likelihood that you're going to get hurt. Okay. So to summarize, don't bother

with touch and go deadlifting unless you are warming up. And if you are currently doing the touch and go deadlift and you're going to change to a full reset. And what that means is the weight is on the ground. Like it's that, you know, that first rep, if you're a touch and go deadlifter, you know how hard that first rep is. That's every rep, right? So that's a proper reset. And so if you're going from touch and go deadlifting to proper resetting, beware, it is a lot more difficult. You are going to have to use less weight. 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, let's move on to the next question probably, but I'm going to summarize here because it is something that I still get asked fairly often. So the long story short here, the simple answer is it really depends on where you're at and where you want to be and how well you stick to the plan, how well you stick to your diet and your exercise plan, your training plan. And so let's talk muscle gain first. Obviously,

if you want to gain 30 pounds of muscle, it's going to take a lot more work than or a lot more time than just 10 pounds of muscle. And it may take more than three times as long as well, just because as time goes on and as you gain more muscle, it gets harder and harder to continue gaining muscle. You have to work harder and harder and it just takes more and more time. That said, here are some simple rules of thumb. Guys who are new to resistance training, let's just say brand new to resistance training and who learn things correctly can expect to gain anywhere from let's say 15 to 25 pounds of muscle, of actual muscle, not pounds of weight, but muscle in their first year. And the range is mostly determined by genetics. So some people are high responders to resistance

training and gain muscle and strength easily. So for those people, if they also eat right and train well and do all the most important things, mostly right, most of the time, those guys can gain upward of 25 pounds of muscle in their first year. And then on the other end of the spectrum, we have people who are low responders to resistance training, who can do everything right. And they are just not going to gain 25 pounds of muscle in their first year. It's just not going to happen. And so those people, let's say the lower end is 15 pounds of muscle in year one. And then the middle of the bell curve is somewhere around 20 pounds. That's what the average guy can expect from his first year of weightlifting.

Now for women, you can just cut all those numbers in half. That's the simplest way of looking at it. Now from there, this is where it gets less exciting. From there, year two, you can expect about half of the progress of year one, half of the results. And that applies to both men and women. Year three, you can now cut that number in half. And just so you can follow along with numbers. So let's say year two for the average guy, 10-ish pounds of muscle in year two. Again, a high responder, maybe 12, 13, a low responder, a couple pounds less than 10, maybe seven, eight, middle 10, 11, nine, 10, 11. There you go. That's what most guys are going to be able to do in year two. And for women, just cut the year one numbers in half. So the average woman can gain about 10 pounds of muscle in year one, five or six in year two.

And now year three comes and you can cut year two's numbers in half to set your expectations. So again, the average guy is looking at five-ish pounds of muscle in year three and the average gal, a couple, two or three pounds. average gal a couple, two or three pounds. And from there on out, from each successive year, year four, five, six, and beyond, the potential gains get smaller and smaller. So I would say the average guy in year four is looking at a few pounds of muscle gain, the average gal a pound or two, and it probably goes down even a bit more from there over the next year or two, and then you're done. And that's just how it works as a natural weightlifter. The average guy, now, if we look at this, we zoom out and just say, okay, so we're looking at like five to six years of gains. If you do the most important things, mostly right, most of the time. And I repeat that line just because I don't want people to

think that they need to try to be perfect because you don't need to be perfect in this game. You can't be perfect in this game or any game, but you don't even have to try to be in the fitness game. You just have to get the most important things like your energy balance and your macronutrient balance and your nutrition, getting your butt, making sure your body gets enough micronutrients and things that it needs to be healthy and vital. And then in the gym, make sure that you're doing the right exercises and you have them set up in an order that makes sense. And you have a progression model that makes sense and you are doing enough volume per major muscle group per week and achieving progressive overload, blah, blah, blah.

And then on the rest and recovery side of things, make sure you're not training too much, volume per major muscle group per week and achieving progressive overload, blah, blah, blah. And then on the rest and recovery side of things, make sure you're not training too much, not doing too much cardio and other stuff. In addition to a bunch of weightlifting, make sure that you are getting enough sleep. Sleep hygiene is huge. And yeah, that's pretty much it. Actually, those are pretty much the major things that if you can just get, if you can be 80% on those things, you are doing fantastic and you are going to be able to reach your genetic potential for muscle and strength gain. And so then segueing back to the topic at hand, that process of achieving your genetic potential for muscularity and strength is a five or six year process if you do exactly what I just said from the beginning. And then from there, that's really it. You're not

going to get bigger or stronger. And so then when you run the numbers of what I just broke down year by year, you learn that the average guy can gain somewhere around 40 pounds of muscle in his lifetime, period, maybe 45. A very high responder, maybe 50, maybe. A low responder, 35. And women, again, just cut those numbers in half. Now, if you are curious why that is, if you're curious about the major factors that determine how big and strong you can get, just search for Legion Athletics muscle build naturally. And an article that I wrote will come up. I also recorded a podcast on it, but I would recommend the article because it has a nifty calculator or two or three, I don't even remember now, that help you figure out how much muscle you will be able to gain. So the title of the article and podcast is something like

how much muscle can you gain naturally? Question mark, something like that. So I think that more or less answers the question about how much muscle can I expect to gain over the next X number of weeks, months, or even years. One of the things that's worth mentioning is when you're lean bulking, another way of looking at this is you should be looking to gain about a half a percent to one percent of your body weight per month. You can gain a bit more when you first start out and you're brand new, maybe for the first couple months, but then you should settle into that range of about a half a percent to one percent of your body weight per month.

All right, let's talk about weight loss now and fat loss in particular. This one's a lot easier. You can expect to lose anywhere from a half a pound to maybe about a pound of fat per week, depending on how lean you are and what you're doing with your diet. Another way of looking at that is for total weight loss, somewhere between a half a percent to 1% of your body weight per week. Again, depending on where you're at and what you're doing with your diet. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, where you're at is mostly how much fat you have to lose. So if you are very overweight, so if you're a guy at 20% body fat or beyond, or if you're a woman at 30% or beyond, you have a lot of fat to lose. You can lose more fat every week at least for the

first bit than someone like me who's relatively lean i'm usually around 10 body fat so i you can lose let's say upward of probably even two pounds of fat per week and safely healthily effectively no issues whereas i would be looking to lose probably closer to a half a pound of fat per week now the reason for that is i have to watch out for muscle loss more than someone who has a lot of fat to lose i can't use a very large calorie deficit for example my calorie deficit needs to be in the range of probably three to five hundred in terms of a daily deficit so i'm i would be eating three to five hundred fewer calories than i'm burning every day whereas somebody who is overweight and has a lot of fat to lose could go as high as maybe 800 calories per day in the red so eating 800 fewer calories than they're burning every day

and have no negative side effects. Just lose fat faster. I have to also be more careful with cardio than someone who has a lot of fat to lose. So if I do too much cardio, it's just going to accelerate muscle loss. And that's why I limit my cardio when I'm cutting to no more than two hours per week. And that's something usually I'm working up to toward the end of a cut. I'm starting with no cardio and just lifting and restricting my calories and using that for as long as I can. But once that no longer works, because I can no longer restrict my calories any further without running the risk of the negative side effects associated with too large of a calorie deficit, especially when you are fit. Then I'll add an hour of cardio per week in, and I'll just play that out and try to squeeze every ounce of additional fat loss from that, and then bump it up to two hours per week. And I usually don't stay there for more than a few weeks before taking either a diet break for

a couple of weeks, going back to maintenance to just give my body a break or just ending my cut. So one more helpful tip to wrap up this question is if you are wondering about rates of fat loss and how long it's going to take to get to the body fat percentage that you want, check out an article over at Legion Athletics. You can just search Legion Athletics, how long for a six pack. And you'll find an article that I wrote. I think it's how long does it take to get a six pack or something like that. That also has a chart you can use to get a pretty good estimate of how long it's going to take for you to get down to that six pack body fat percentage, which to be specific is around 10% body fat for men. That should be your target if you want a bonafide six pack, because while you will see your abs at higher body fat percentages,

you look more fluffy to use a silly bodybuilding term. You don't look as sharp and you still look to use a silly bodybuilding term. You don't look as sharp and you still look kind of fat, but not exactly somewhere in the middle, but at 10% things look real nice. And it's also something you can maintain as well. And for women, although most women I've heard from over the years don't want a six pack per se, but they do want a defined core. They want defined abs. And that look for most women is around 20% body fat, maybe as low as 19 or 18%. Somewhere in that range seems to be a sweet spot for most women. And so again, if you want to learn about how long it will take you to get to those targets, just search for Legion Athletics, how long for a six pack or how long does it take to get a six pack? And you will find the article with the chart. All right,

next question. How much sugar can I eat and still be healthy? So the first thing that should be said here is sugar is not inherently unhealthy. It's not inherently bad for your body or harmful to your body. And that applies to sucrose, a table sugar, that applies to high fructose corn syrup, that applies to maltodextrin, dextrose, various simple sugars that many people say just wreck your health. Not true. And this is kind of ironic because there are chemically similar sugars in natural foods that are nutritious, like fruits and dairy, for example. And even the carbohydrates in vegetables are long chains of simple sugars that are bound together. And when you eat them, your body breaks them down and eventually turns

them into glucose, just the same as the table sugar in the Snickers bar. The only major difference being how quickly that occurs. So the sucrose in the candy bar gets turned into glucose a lot faster than the long chain carbohydrates in vegetables. But in the end, they just get turned into glucose. Now, a key point here though, is I'm not saying you can just eat all the sugar you want and be healthy because that's not the case. When you look at the scientific literature on this topic, you find that where the problems start to occur is with added sugar, is with sugars that are added, simple sugars always, that are added to foods to make them sweeter. And this is a real problem these days. A lot of foods contain added sugar. If you

are not cooking and preparing your food yourself, if you're eating prepackaged, more processed foods, your added sugar intake is likely a lot higher than you realize. Now this is mostly a problem because of how it affects energy balance. There's also the nutritional side of things and we'll talk about that in a minute but the major reason that added sugar intake is associated with different types of disease and dysfunction including obesity and type 2 diabetes is that it simply encourages people to eat a lot more calories than they need to. Now that of course causes weight gain. And if that happens too much, if you gain too much fat, your body goes to shit. There is a point where if you get fatter and

fatter beyond that threshold, your body just gets shittier and shittier and things stop working the way that they should and your risk of disease and problems just goes up, up, up. And so that's the first problem with eating a lot of added sugars. It's just going to be hard to maintain your energy balance the way that you want. It's going to be hard to keep your calories beneath expenditure if you want to lose fat or above expenditure, but not too high above if you want to gain muscle and as little fat as possible and more or less at expenditure if you want to just maintain. That's especially true if you're drinking calories, which many people who have a lot of added sugar in their diet are drinking calories. Often with the people I've heard from and worked with over the years, it's soda. Now, the next problem with a diet rich in added sugars is it is almost

certainly going to be deficient in nutrients, in essential vitamins and minerals and other important things that your body needs to get from food to stay healthy and stay vital. And the reason for that is obvious. A lot of the foods with added sugar, especially with high amounts of added sugar, are shitty foods. They don't provide much in the way of nutrition. They're just delicious. Now, the way to do it right is to get most of your calories from relatively unprocessed nutritious foods, stuff that you clean and cut and cook yourself. And if you want to have some added sugar, if you want to have some treats, don't allot any more than let's say 20% of your daily calories to

that kind of stuff. I personally keep it beneath that, but I don't really care that much about having added sugar. I have some dark chocolate every day. That's my little indulgence, 100 or 150 calories of dark chocolate every day. And currently I'm eating about 2,300 calories per day because I'm cutting. And if I were maintaining, it would be like 2, 2700 calories per day. And my chocolate intake would stay the same. But if that would be too little for you, if you just wouldn't find that satisfying, if it wouldn't be sustainable, maybe because you'd want to have more chocolate or maybe what you like to have doesn't lend itself well to like a hundred calories, like have a hundred

calories of ice cream. And you're not going to be very satisfied unless maybe it's a low calorie ice cream that you like, then that's fine. Have more again, up to 20% of your daily calories. I generally tell people to try to stay around 10%, but sometimes, for example, when you are deeper into a cut and you are struggling more with hunger and cravings, it's nice to allot some extra calories to stuff that actually just makes you feel good for a little bit. And I do understand that. And again, there's nothing wrong with that from a health perspective, so long as you're getting most of your calories from nutritious stuff. And if you do that, you will also almost certainly

be in line with the advice on free sugar intake from the World Health Organization. Now, free sugar is a little bit different. Free sugar is sugar that's added to food as well as sugar that's naturally found in honey, syrups, and fruit juices. And their recommendation is no more than 50 grams of free sugar per day. And they say that 25 grams per day is ideal. Now, notice that I said fruit juices and not fruit. That's a key distinction. So if you are not having any honey syrup or fruit juices, then that 25 to 50 grams of free sugar per day as the recommended range from the WHO would mean added sugar. It would mean stuff that you're eating because you like

to eat it and it's tasty, not because it's nutritious. Okay. The next and final question, I've used online calculators to determine my ideal calorie intake. How come I'm not losing or gaining weight? Now, of course, this is not one question from one person, but this is the type of question that I've gotten many times. Sometimes it's losing weight, sometimes it's gaining weight. So the key takeaway here is that no matter how you go about estimating your total daily energy expenditure, you have to realize that it is an estimate. It is an educated guess, hopefully an accurate guess. And so what these methods are doing is first calculating a baseline, calculating your resting metabolic rate, which is the amount of energy that you burn at rest, not moving around

much, not necessarily completely bedridden, but not doing much of anything. And that can be calculated fairly accurately, but then we need to account for all the additional energy that's being burned through physical activity. And that physical activity includes working out, of course, but it also includes everything else. It includes getting up to go to the bathroom four or five times, whatever in the day, like that costs energy, that burns energy. It includes fidgeting at work while you're working, moving around. That burns energy. It includes taking the stairs maybe up to your office and maybe on the way out to your car when you're leaving instead of taking the elevator. That burns energy.

physical activity is harder to accurately gauge than your resting metabolic rate, which is just taking your body weight, taking your age and your gender, doing some math to it and giving you a number that is based on a lot of good research and is fairly accurate for most people. In the case of physical activity though, it gets tougher because while you can get a pretty good read on how many calories you burned in a workout, some people move around more than others. So there's a term you might've heard, NEAT, N-E-A-T, non-exercise activity thermogenesis. And that refers to the energy burned through just spontaneous activities that have nothing to do with working out. And research shows that some people are very high NEAT types. Some people just move around a lot and burn a lot more energy every day. And some people are very low NEAT types. They just tend to not move as much

and their total daily energy expenditure is quite a bit lower. Now, fortunately, most people are in the middle and you don't have to really worry about this when you are trying to nail down where you should start with your calories. That's mostly what this comes down to. Most of the time, it's people where they're just wanting to lose some weight. They're trying to figure out approximately how many calories are they burning every day so then they can figure out their calorie deficit. You don't have to get too lost in the weeds. You can just use a simple method like your RMR and then you multiply it by a multiplier based on your activity level, which really just comes down to hours of physical activity per week. And if you want to learn how to do that, just search for Legion Athletics TDEE calculator, and you'll find an article that I wrote on this topic. And it also

has a calculator to make it simple. But just know that regardless of whether you use my calculator or someone else's calculator or some other method, for example, probably the most in-depth way you can go about it is the metabolic equivalent of TASC method, M-E-T, if you've come across that acronym. And with that system, you can basically itemize every type of activity you engage in every day and get a fairly accurate estimate of how many calories you burn from that activity. So that includes working out, of course, but includes all the other stuff that I was talking about. But I just say why. It's really not necessary because you're just looking for a starting point. Whether you are looking to cut or lean bulk or maintain.

If you don't know your calorie ranges yet, and you will in time, as you get more used to this and you've gone through several successful cuts and lean bulks and periods of maintenance, you'll just learn your calorie ranges. You'll know that, take me for example, I know that with my normal weightlifting schedule of about five hours per week and about an hour of cardio per week. That's my normal exercise schedule. If I want to lean bulk, I need to eat about 3,300, maybe 3,200 calories per day to start. That's what it takes for me to consistently get the muscle building machinery going. Not that there's much muscle left for me to gain, but at least to start feeling the difference in the gym,

start gaining strength, start gaining weight. And similarly, if I want to maintain, I know that I need to keep my calories around 2,800 or so. That's the sweet spot. And if I want to cut, I want to start around 2,300, 2,400, and I'm going to have to reduce from there probably depending on how lean I want to get. Now you will learn your numbers as well. It will just take some time. And if you're starting with a calculator again or any other method, just know you're just looking for a starting point and you want to see how your body responds so then you can respond accordingly. So for example, if a calculator, if you're trying to lose weight and a calculator says eat 2000 calories per day, you're eating 2000 calories per day. You are following a meal plan. You're weighing your

foods. You're measuring stuff. You're making sure you're not accidentally eating like 2,500 calories per day and you are not losing weight. Well, you need to eat less. Who cares what the calculator said? It's wrong. And by the same token, if you eat 2000 calories per day and you start losing weight too quickly. So if you are losing, let's say 2% of your body weight per week, you're a guy at 15% body fat, or you're a woman at 25% body fat per week. You should not be losing 2% of your body weight per week. It should be 1%, maybe even a little bit less. And you eat 2000 calories per day and you start dropping weight quickly. Yeah, that's cool. And you can enjoy that for the first couple of weeks until

the other shoe drops, until the problems begin. And so then in that case, you want to go in the other direction. You want to raise your calories a bit. Maybe you want to go up to 22 or 2300 calories per day. Oh, and one other thing to remember is if you are new to resistance training, you are going to gain muscle quickly. And if you are dieting to lose fat, you can gain muscle quickly enough to obscure the weight that you've lost through fat loss. And so just keep that in mind. You can effectively recomp. What can happen is for the first couple months, you might not see that much of a change in your body weight, which can be disconcerting. And also just kind of confusing when you look in the mirror and you

clearly look better and your clothes are fitting better, but the weight's not changing much. Just remember that. What's happening is you're gaining muscle and you're losing fat at the same time. And in some people, for at least the first little bit, the weight gain from the muscle can more or less obscure the weight lost from fat loss. 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 in 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 muscle for life.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.