The Protein Corner

I’ve written and recorded a lot of evidence-based content over the years on just about everything you can imagine related to building muscle, losing fat, and getting healthy. I’ve also worked with thousands of men and women of all ages and circumstances and helped them get into the best shape of their lives. That doesn’t mean you should blindly swallow everything I say, though, because let’s face it—nobody is always right about everything. And especially in fields like diet and exercise, which are constantly evolving thanks to the efforts of honest and hardworking researchers and thought leaders. This is why I’m always happy to hear from people who disagree with me, especially when they have good arguments and evidence to back up their assertions. Sometimes I can’t get on board with their positions, but sometimes I end up learning something, and either way, I always appreciate the discussion. That gave me the idea for this series of podcast episodes: publicly addressing things...

Does the prospect of always eating piles of bland meat, vegetables, grains, and the like get you down? Well, with some simple seasoning tips, you can take your chow from “weak” to “wow.” The three best tools are: 1. Salt This is the superstar of zero-calorie food enhancers—just a dash enhances the flavor of meat and fish and elevates any other seasonings it’s paired with. To salt effectively, think “small and slow.” When you’re salting finished food, sprinkle a little evenly throughout and taste before adding more; and when you’re cooking, keep a bowl of salt on the counter and add some at every stage of the process, tasting regularly. If you’re making a soup, for example, add a little salt every time you add something new to the pot that isn’t already salty, and sample the broth often. You should also experiment with different types of salts. Kosher salt, sea salt, and table salt all have slightly different flavor profiles and can be applied in a number of different ways, includ...

In this podcast, I chat with Menno Henselmans again in what’s meant as a part two to our last podcast on the science of self-control and willpower. This time, we’re specifically talking about willpower as it relates to diet. The episode is chock-full of practical tips for improving your diet adherence, which can help you lose fat faster and more easily. This is something Menno is an expert on because he recently released a book called The Science of Self-Control , which is an evidence-based look at willpower that references over 500 scientific papers and distills it all down to actionable tips you can implement now. Menno’s book is designed to help anyone boost their self-control so that they can better stick to a diet, work smarter (not harder), and simply put, be the best version of themselves. And this time, we’re focusing solely on the dietary part of the book. In this interview, Menno explains why dieting is inherently difficult, ways to make it easier, how macronutrient ...

“More, bigger, faster.” This, the ethos of the market economies since the Industrial Revolution, is grounded in the mythical and misguided assumption that our resources are infinite. That we have unlimited time and energy to pour into our work, and that our output (productivity) is directly correlated with our input. This is wrong on both counts. As we all well know, time is finite, and many people feel theirs is running out, that they’re investing as many hours as they can while also trying to have some semblance of a life outside work. Energy is finite, too, both physical and mental. We can only stay on task for so long before our focus wanes and enthusiasm flags, especially when the demand for performance is great. This is why, according to research conducted by Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues at Florida State University, the best high-level performers in various disciplines ranging from music to chess typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no ...

This podcast is about hormones and aging, and specifically, how much hormones affect body composition as you get older. In it, I’ll go through the most important hormones as they relate to body composition, how they change as we get older, and what we can do to maintain optimal hormone profiles relevant to our age. There’s no question that we can’t maintain as optimal a hormone profile at 45 as we can at 25, but as you’ll learn here, we can still maintain good enough hormones to gain muscle, lose fat, stay lean and fit, and feel great. The idea that our hormones crate as we get older and make it impossible to get and stay fit is very discouraging to many people. The good news is that’s mostly untrue. If we’re willing to do a few things consistently and do them well, we can keep our hormones in very healthy and effective ranges. Listen to this podcast to learn about hormones and how they affect body composition, especially as we age. Timestamps: 0:00 – Pre-order my new fitnes...

You’d be hard-pressed to find a safety squat bar in most gyms a decade ago. But nowadays, more and more of them have added this specialty bar to their arsenal. You’ve probably seen one yourself—a barbell with slightly curved ends, two handles in the middle, and padding around the neck and base of the handles. What are the benefits of the safety squat bar, and how does it compare to the regular back or front squat, you wonder? Should you try this exercise, or is it another distracting gimmick? And if it is worth doing, how do you do it properly? That’s what you’ll learn in this article. Table of Contents What Is the Safety Squat Bar?  Safety Bar Squat vs. the Back Squat: The Advantages The Downside of the Safety Bar Squat How to Do the Safety Bar Squat Properly  Step 1: Set Up Step 2: Descend  Step 3: Ascend  FAQ #1: What’s the best safety squat bar? FAQ #2: Can you buy a safety squat bar attachment? FAQ #3: How much does a safety squat bar weigh? Wh...

The post How Tina Used Thinner Leaner Stronger to Lose 46 Pounds and 20% Body Fat appeared first on Legion Athletics . https://ift.tt/eA8V8J December 26, 2021 at 06:00PM Legion Athletics

I hope this article finds you in a mesmerizing holiday haze of holly jolly hearth and home, because here’s the deal with the winter festivities: They were a tough row to hoe in the Before Times and are even more so in these Quacky Quarantimes. There’s shopping, wrapping, baking, cooking, decorating, entertaining, eating, imbibing, friends you never see, family you’ve never liked, and a gimlet-eyed elf monitoring every minute and reporting every move to a schizoid list-making demi-god living on the frozen nipple of the globe with battalions of undying eldritch-gnomes and bionic beast-deer. And now, we have to endure all of that helliday horror plus all of the Ex-Spurts ululating about the next Covaids scariant for us to be afraid of and all of the other pandemonium that comes with being born at the end of the F*ck Around century and living through the times of Finding Out.  So maybe this year we can cut each other (and ourselves) some slack and . . . wait for it . . . let it go...

I hope this podcast finds you in a mesmerizing holiday haze of holly jolly hearth and home, because here’s the deal with the winter festivities: They were a tough row to hoe in the Before Times and are even more so in these Quacky Quarantimes. There’s shopping, wrapping, baking, cooking, decorating, entertaining, eating, imbibing, friends you never see, family you’ve never liked, and a gimlet-eyed elf monitoring every minute and reporting every move to a schizoid list-making demi-god living on the frozen nipple of the globe with battalions of undying eldritch-gnomes and bionic beast-deer. Press play to hear more (plus, a psycho-delicious cookie recipe!). Timestamps: 0:00 – A holiday message 5:39 – Pre-order my new fitness book now for a chance to win over $12,000 in splendid swag: www.muscleforlifebook.com/   Mentioned on the Show: Pre-order my new fitness book now for a chance to win over $12,000 in splendid swag: www.muscleforlifebook.com/   What did you think...

In this podcast, I’m sharing my appearance on The Pat Flynn Show , in which I discussed easy fitness wins. These are simple changes you can make right now to start establishing a healthy lifestyle that you can stick to long-term. Many people try to jump straight into the deep end when they try to get fit and healthy. Grueling workouts with no days off, and extreme diets that deprive you of your favorite foods and leave you hungry and tired. The “all-in” method can work for some, but most people do better with the tiny-habit approach. That is, fostering small behavioral changes that you sustain and build on over time. So in this episode, I share some easy, simple changes you can make that can help build momentum and overcome the inertia that pulls you toward staying sedentary and unfit. Timestamps: 0:00 – Pre-order my new fitness book now for a chance to win over $12,000 in splendid swag: www.muscleforlifebook.com/   21:14 – Walking 29:24 – What’s my motivation? 34:33 –...

To get the most out of strength training, you must ensure that your hard (heavy) sets are hard enough and produce high levels of tension in your muscles. This is easy to do. Here’s how it works in the program in my new book Muscle for Life : End all hard sets of bodyweight exercises 1 rep shy of muscle failure, which is the point where you fail to complete a rep. That is, continue hard sets of bodyweight exercises until you feel you have 0 good reps left in the tank. End all hard sets of machine, dumbbell, and barbell exercises 2 to 3 reps shy of muscle failure (1 to 2 good reps left). And how do you gauge this accurately and know how close you are to muscle failure? It’s mostly a matter of trial and error, but once you get underway, you’ll quickly become attuned to how your form is holding up. An easy way to develop this intuition is, as you’re approaching the end of a hard set, to ask yourself, “If I absolutely had to, how many more reps could I get with good form?” Your ins...

3 Shifts to Let Go of Dieting for Good and Create Consistent Eating Habits Are you looking to stop dieting and reclaim balance with the way you nourish yourself? If so, you’ve come to the right place.  Letting go of diets and plans is such a beautiful first step in reclaiming balance with the way you nourish yourself. It allows you to create a positive food experience and care for your wellbeing. But in order to find and maintain a more balanced approach to your eating habits, you not only have to stop dieting, but you also have to reframe your thoughts about food. You have to reframe the role that food plays in your life. It can no longer be a means of control, fuel to the “perfectionist” fire, or a pawn in the all-or-nothing cycle. Food has to be a unique, easeful component of your life. One that allows you to nourish yourself with joy, void of stress.   These key shifts in how you think about nutrition will help prevent you from feeling pulled back into the die...

Many people fear that a few days without exercise is a step toward getting smaller, fatter, and weaker. This mindset is particularly common among people who are new to lifting weights or who haven’t gained much muscle or strength to speak of, usually because they’re afraid to lose what little “aesthetics” they have. Here’s the reality, though: You’ll have to endure periods where you can’t train, whether due to injury, family commitments, a frantic work schedule, Covid lockdowns, or some other shenanigan. And when this happens, you’ll probably notice two things: You don’t lose as much muscle or gain as much fat as you expected (or any). What little muscle you lose comes back much faster than it took to gain it in the first place. This is largely thanks to a phenomenon known as muscle memory , which helps you regain lost muscle and strength much faster than gaining it from scratch. In other words, even if you have to take a long time away from lifting weights, once you get bac...

In this podcast, I talk with Dr. Flint McGlaughlin about marketing, which is something he knows quite a bit about. In fact, I’ve known about Flint and followed his work for over a decade now, so this was a treat for me. In case you’re not familiar with him, Flint is an academic and business leader who served as the Director of Enterprise Research for Transforming Business at the University of Cambridge (UK) and is the founder of the MECLABS Institute, a marketing research institute dedicated to figuring out how people make choices and what influences those choices. Not only has Flint written and edited hundreds of articles and texts and won multiple awards, but he’s patented ten offer conversion-related heuristics, conducted large-scale research projects in partnership with companies like The New York Times, Google, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Royal Bank of Canada, and has lectured at conferences and universities around the world, including New York University, Columbia Un...