Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews

In this episode, I interview Wendy, who’s a recent graduate of my 90-day transformation coaching service, which helped her cut fat, gain muscle and strength, and significantly transform the shape of her body in just a few months. Before finding her way to me and my work, she had been working out for years and had tried many different things, and most recently had spent 9 months working with an in-...

If your goal is to get or stay lean and maintain your cardiovascular health, you don’t have to grind out a single long session of grueling cardio. Ever. That’s right… - No boring jogs. - No droning away on one of the hamster wheels in the gym. - No sacrificing hours and hours every week. In fact, if you know what you’re doing (and you will by the end of this episode), you can get a lot more out of...

This episode is part of a weekly series that I have dubbed “Motivation Monday.” (Yes, I know, very creative of me. What can I say, I’m a genius…) Seriously though, the idea here is simple: Every Monday morning, I’m going to post a short and punchy episode that I hope gets you fired up to tackle the workouts, work, and everything else that you have planned for the week ahead. As we all know, it’s o...

In this episode I interview Kurtis Frank about one of his favorite topics, nootropics, or “brain boosters.” Chances are you don’t know of Kurtis, but you probably know of his work. He’s the co-founder of Examine.com, which is the premier resource on the Internet for learning about the science of supplementation. Today, it boasts guides on over 500 supplements containing over 41,000 scientific cita...

“How the hell can I be this skinny with a stomach this big and fat?” That’s the first line from an email I received earlier this week. And it inspired this episode. You see, I’ve worked with thousands of men and women and if there’s one thing that frustrates people most, it’s having too much belly fat. I’ve written quite a bit about how to lose belly fat, but visceral fat deserves its own treatmen...

As you probably know, I work hard to understand and promote high-quality diet, nutrition, and exercise science. That’s why I’ve spent and continue to spend a lot of time researching and writing, and why I reference quite a bit of scientific literature in my work. What I don’t do, though, is produce a research review where individual studies are broken down and analyzed because my plate is already...

I know some people (commies) believe you shouldn’t say this anymore but . . . MERRY FREAKIN’ CHRISTMAS . . . and happy holidays! I hope you’re having a fantastic time with the people you both love and tolerate (often one and the same, no?) and are ready to enjoy a good few weeks of “refeeding” . . . wink wink . . . :-) For my part, I am currently in the cold, northern reaches of Germany, where my...

One of the first pieces of bodybuilding advice I was given was on pre-workout nutrition. If I didn’t eat protein and carbs immediately before training, I was told, I’d miss an opportunity to accelerate muscle growth, if not directly hinder it. And so I did, before every workout, without fail. Chances are you’ve heard the same things. Bodybuilders and gymbros alike have been singing pre-workout nut...

This interview is about the processed food industry, which generates a trillion dollars in sales every year and specializes in creating inexpensive, highly processed foods that are hyper-palatable and hyper-gratifying. Thanks mainly to the advances of food science, they’ve mastered the art of making foods and beverages that can “hit the spot” in ways that natural, nutritious foods never will, whic...

It’s cold and dark at six in the morning. And it seems even colder and gloomier when you have to get up and train. At that hour, it’s like gravity has tripled. Your eyes droop, your limbs drag, and your nervous system is running on fumes. It’s time like these that you thank the gods you have a pre-workout supplement. You fumble the top off, mix a (heaping) scoop in water, gulp it down, and the mag...

This episode is part of a weekly series that I have dubbed “Motivation Monday.” (Yes, I know, very creative of me. What can I say, I’m a genius…) Seriously though, the idea here is simple: Every Monday morning, I’m going to post a short and punchy episode that I hope gets you fired up to tackle the workouts, work, and everything else that you have planned for the week ahead. As we all know, it’s o...

Hang around in the gym long enough and you’re going to hear about clenbuterol. Like steroids, “clen” is extremely popular in the world of bodybuilding and is the “go-to” cutting drug for many of the people that step on stage. Thus, it’s not surprising that it’s also a hot commodity among the general fitness crowd. If you want to shred fat as quickly as possible without losing muscle, the pitch goe...

“Skinny fat” sounds like a paradox. How can you be both skinny and fat at the same time? Easy: have too little muscle and too much body fat. It doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, of course, but hey, some of us just don’t want to be skinny fat. And we don’t have to be if we do three simple things: 1. Do a lot of heavy compound weightlifting. 2. Get our calories and macros right. 3...

Did you know that certain fat cells in your body are extremely “resistant” to being mobilized and burned? Did you know that these fat cells tend to accumulate in the dreaded belly, hip, and thigh regions of your body? And did you know that you can use a handful of science-based diet, exercise, and supplementation strategies to beat (and burn!) stubborn fat for good? Imagine having that tight waist...

One of the first pieces of bodybuilding advice I was given was on post-workout nutrition. If I didn’t eat protein and carbs immediately after training, I was told, I’d miss an opportunity to accelerate muscle growth, if not directly hinder it. And so I did, after every workout, without fail. Chances are you’ve heard the same things. Bodybuilders and gymbros alike have been singing post-workout nut...

This episode is part of a weekly series that I have dubbed “Motivation Monday.” (Yes, I know, very creative of me. What can I say, I’m a genius…) Seriously though, the idea here is simple: Every Monday morning, I’m going to post a short and punchy episode that I hope gets you fired up to tackle the workouts, work, and everything else that you have planned for the week ahead. As we all know, it’s o...

If you want to know how to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in your work and life in less time, then you need to read this book. This is one of my favorite books I’ve read this year and one I will definitely be reviewing regularly. In it, Cal defines deep work as “the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task,” and he argues that it’s the...

There’s no way around it. If you want to gain muscle efficiently, you’re going to need to eat more calories than you burn each day. While eating slightly more calories than you burn every day is conducive to muscle growth, eating a lot more isn’t more so. That is, you’ll gain just as much muscle eating ~110% of your total daily energy expenditure as you would eating 120 or 130%. The only thing tha...

As you probably know, I work hard to understand and promote high-quality diet, nutrition, and exercise science. That’s why I’ve spent and continue to spend a lot of time researching and writing, and why I reference quite a bit of scientific literature in my work. What I don’t do, though, is produce a research review where individual studies are broken down and analyzed because my plate is already...

If someone feels they’re carrying around too much fat, they’ll probably say they need to lose some weight. Ironically, if that’s their only goal–reducing the number on the scale–they’re like to run into a new problem along the way: becoming skinny fat. You see, the phrase “weight loss” is tossed around by just about everyone, including myself, but what we really want is a bit more than that. We do...

This episode is part of a weekly series that I have dubbed “Motivation Monday.” (Yes, I know, very creative of me. What can I say, I’m a genius…) Seriously though, the idea here is simple: Every Monday morning, I’m going to post a short and punchy episode that I hope gets you fired up to tackle the workouts, work, and everything else that you have planned for the week ahead. As we all know, it’s o...

In this episode, I interview my buddy Sal from the hugely popular Mind Pump Podcast, which he hosts with Adam and Justin, and which you should definitely check out. I wanted Sal to talk about three topics that he’s particularly revved up about recently, and that’s gut health, overcoming systemic fatigue, and using mindful/intuitive eating strategies over more rigid, planning/tracking-based strateg...

Among all genres of supplements fat burners are surrounded by the most misinformation and blatant lies. We’re going through an obesity epidemic and it’s reaching far more than just the US. I mean, a third of the entire damn world is overweight according to BMI. The. Entire. World. It’s clearly an issue of habit formation, easy access to food that happens to be unhealthy but oh so delicious, and a...

Once upon a time, my girlfriend (and now wife) packed protein bars in her purse when we went out for the day. They weren’t for her. They were for me. She did it because she knew that if I didn’t eat protein every few hours, Mr. Hyde would come out. I wouldn’t just get hungry. I would get angry. Hangry. It was kind of pathetic, I know, but I thought that if you went for more than a few hours withou...

Build muscle and lose fat at the same time. It sounds so simple, right? Why shouldn’t we be able to do it? Well, some people say it’s a fool’s errand. Others say you need to follow “special” forms of dieting and training. Others still say it takes steroids. They’re all wrong. Building muscle and losing fat simultaneously (or “body recomposition,” as it’s often called), isn’t beyond the power of us...