Here are 5 common myths that could be wasting your time if your goals this year are to get in shape, lose fat, and build muscle.
A lot of these things I’ve learned through personal experimentation and through coaching guys over the past 8 years to help them get in shape.
This first myth is an expensive one.
It could have meaningful impacts on your health and your overall quality of life.
xyz diet is best for fat loss
I can get into all the nitty gritty about all the trendy diets out there, but let me just show you something cool.
Most diets help you in one of three ways.
They will control either how much food you eat, when you eat, or which foods you eat.
Or a combination of all three.
Diets that control WHICH foods you eat, cut out a lot of food groups.
Think of diets like keto, vegan, and paleo.
It makes it a lot harder to eat enough total calories if you cut out entire food groups.
Same deal with intermittent fasting, and other diets that restrict WHEN you eat.
If you can only eat during six or eight hours of the day, it’s gonna be harder to cram enough food in just to maintain your weight.
Some folks take it even one step further and eat just one meal a day.
This honestly sounds horrible to me.
Or you could track HOW MUCH you eat and keep a running total throughout the day and then stop once you hit your goal.
In any case, all three of these diets help you do one thing:
Control your calorie intake.
I’m agnostic about this.
Honestly, whatever gets you moving in the right direction is awesome.
But I will say that after being a fat kid for most of my life, (people called me Fatteo in my family) I got tired of it.
Tried keto, and I felt like shit.
Tried fasting and I got light headed and I felt low energy all the time.
I was fed up with not seeing the scale move and not seeing my body change in the way I wanted it to.
So I naturally gravitated towards tracking my calories and my protein intake and that’s what has worked best for me.
Been doing for a over 8 years now and I look like a fitness model.
That all comes down to losing fat and building muscle, or Body Recomposition
But find a way of eating that fits in with your lifestyle.
You’ll need energy to do the things you love.
I personally love lifting weights.
I love doing jiu jitsu.
I want to have enough energy for that.
This is where most of the lean and healthy people differ from a lot of people who struggle to lose weight.
People who struggle to lose weight often just see activity as a way to burn calories.
Me on the final pitch of a cliffside climb in British Columbia, roughly 80m or 260ft up.
Activity is about more than just burning calories.
Exercise for fat loss
There is really only so much cardio you can do in a day before it becomes unreasonable.
It’s not a super effective method on its own for fat loss.
Let’s imagine you want to lose just one pound per week.
That’s doing an extra 500 calories burned of cardio every single day, that’s a solid hour on the treadmill for a lot of us.
If you look back through some of my videos, you’ll see that I’ve been down that road.
I lost all the weight. I went down 145 pounds. I looked like a stick figure. It’s not a good look.
You might be thinking:
You were doing all that cardio, obviously you were eating away at your muscle because cardio kills gains, right?
I’ll give you a twofer here.
Cardio does not kill your gains
I used to honestly be worried about that too, and it’s hilarious to even think back on that.
Because at the time when I was worried whether or not going for a run was gonna make my biceps smaller, I wasn’t even keeping a training log.
- I didn’t push hard in my workouts at all
- I never filmed any of my sets
- My technique was garbage
Cardio was absolutely the least of my concerns.
If that’s something you’re worried about, just take a look at everything you’re doing to build muscle right now, and make sure that that’s all good first.
Are you sleeping well?
Are you managing your stress?
Are you eating enough protein and enough total calories?
Is your training quality and quantity high enough?
I covered this recently in My Biggest Muscle Building Mistake
Once you get to the point where you’re sufficiently training hard for muscle growth, you realize that it’s gonna take a lot of activity to meaningfully take away from your hypertrophy or muscle building training.
Most guys just don’t have enough time in the week to meaningfully train for muscle growth AND impact it with some cardio training.
Maybe if training is your full time job?
I will add one caveat.
If you are planning to do your cardio directly before your weight training workout, that’s not the best time for it just because it can make you a little bit more tired.
Especially if you’re training legs and you’re doing an ultra fatiguing style of cardio, like the stairmaster and then going to do your squats and deadlifts.
You won’t grow less because of the interference effect between cardio and weight training.
It’s just that your legs tired.
Remember earlier when I said I did a bunch of cardio and I did keto and I got down to 145 pounds and I just looked like a prisoner of war?
A commonly given piece of advice is to lose the fat first and then build muscle later.
That is completely garbage advice, and I’ll prove it to you.
These are the bodpod test results from a client of mine who wants to remain nameless.
If you’ve never seen a bod pod before, it’s a spaceship looking device that uses pressure to measure how much body fat you have and how much muscle you have.
As you can see, this gentleman got his first scan on the 2nd of October, 2024, and he got his second analysis on the 5th of November, 2024.
One month apart.
He only lost 4. 5 pounds of total weight.
But here’s the crazy part.
He lost 8.1 pounds of fat mass off his body while building 3.65 pounds of muscle or lean mass.
Are these typical results? No. This is amazing.
And for those who don’t know, yes, I run a coaching business where I work with guys 1:1 to help them get in great shape.
This is the exact thing I wish I had when I first tried to lose weight and wanted to get in shape.
Not to mention, coaching all these people makes me money.
Which is great, so I can create a future for myself and my girlfriend and our future family, and hopefully buy a new car that doesn’t look like it’s about to explode.
Now, this guy could have just done cardio and dropped his calories really low.
Do you think he would have lost the same amount of fat or more fat?
I think it’d be pretty close to the same.
But in this scenario, he comes out with three and a half pounds more muscle at the end of just the first month.
Let’s play this out to the next six months, eight months, or a year.
This guy could be down 20 or 25 pounds of fat while putting on six, seven, or even nine pounds of muscle.
Fat loss and muscle growth can happen at the same time for almost everyone who hasn’t been taking fitness seriously recently.
But you must give your body a reason to do so.
Train hard for muscle growth with weights a few days per week.
Get plenty of sleep, manage your stress, and eat enough protein.
You’re gonna do all this while you are in a calorie deficit, so that you’re losing weight week after week.
Just don’t push so hard that you’re losing something insane like 5 pounds a week.
By the way, this is the fastest way to see visual progress in how your body looks.
You’ll also notice faster differences in how you fit and feel in clothing.
Unless you don’t care at all about having any more muscle.
Then just do your thing.
By the way, if you’re not sure how much weight you want to lose or how many calories you should be eating, then download my free weight loss calculator.
It’ll spit out a six month plan for exactly what weight milestones you should aim to hit by when and give you a daily calorie goal to make sure you’re on the right track.
Losing fat takes a long time
I hate to break it to you, but most people who think this are two pump chumps who are fatter than they think they are.
Was that too harsh?
Here’s what I mean.
This is what 50 mini wheats looks like.
Just kidding.
That’s only 45 mini wheats.
You probably didn’t notice that five were missing, did you?
That’s because when you have a lot of fat to lose, it’s hard to actually visually see the progress you’re making.
If you have 50 extra pounds of fat on your body, and you lost five pounds this month…
It’s just not that easy to see, especially since it’s spread out all over your body.
That fat hangs onto your butt, your thighs, your face, your back, and it’s just coming off everywhere evenly.
You can lose a pound of fat in four or five days if you’re being serious about it.
Picture a pound of butter.
Every few days, one of those is coming off you.
The reason it feels so slow is because most people give up in week two or three.
After you’ve lost your first 30 pounds of fat and there’s only 20 more to go, things start to look crazy.
When you lose one or two pounds of fat in a week, it makes a pretty big difference.
Results keep showing up faster and faster as you get leaner and leaner.
Just quit fiddling around.
Put your foot down and get fat loss over and done with.
You can put in a 4/10 level of effort and get 2/10 results.
Or you can put in a 9/10 effort and get 9/10 results.
Sometimes it just takes that extra little bit of push and focus to see the serious progress you’re after.
Speaking of things you probably think I shouldn’t be eating, but I do anyways…
Carbs do not make you fat
Here’s what you need to know.
These are both sources of carbohydrates.
In fact, there are 43 grams of carbohydrates in a cup and a half of this A&W Root Beer.
And not much else.
I could easily put back five, six hundred calories of this and then not feel very full afterwards.
But one pound of raw potato is 315 calories.
And after I finish eating that pound of potato, I want to unbuckle my belt, lay down, and not eat anything or think about food for the next few hours.
Scientists have found boiled potatoes to be one of the most satisfying foods on the planet.
I agree.
A nice smashed up potato with some beef on the side, oh my god, that is amazing.
I have a cake in the fridge right now that you probably think is carbs too.
But the reality is that cake has a bunch of fats in it as well, and it’s super calorie dense.
The bottom line is this, it is not carbs making you fat, it is calories that make you fat.
When you ingest more calories than your body burns every day, it’s stored as body fat.
So, you can enjoy these fun things in moderation and plenty of carbs as long as you keep your calories in check.
Not to mention the fact that in your life, you’re going to have to eat like a regular person sometimes and that’s hard to do if you completely avoid carbs.
What happens when you go out with your friends for dinner or you want a beer?
Maybe avoiding carbs just didn’t work for me personally, but when I finally understood that carbs can be helpful, it completely changed the game for me.
I hope by learning about these myths, you can avoid wasting time like I did in the past.
Have an awesome weekend.
– Matteo
