Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:00

Welcome to the Deficient Vegans Podcast. This is episode 38, and I'm the muscle deficient vegan here with the protein deficient vegan. Do you want to say hi? Hi! Hi, everybody. So last week, we talked a little bit about the food angle on starting a new fitness plan. We're going to follow that up this week and talk about how to pick or build your first lifting plan.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 0:17

Or maybe, like, improve it?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:20

Yeah, definitely. There are definitely some tips in here, even if you've been picking and choosing programs for a while or trying to build your own or whatever. So hopefully you get some value out of this. But first up, new news.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 0:30

New news.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:32

So the first piece of news is that in 2023, there was a Texas law that said that plant-based meat needed some kind of disclaimer on the package that said like made from plants or meat from plants or something along those lines. Recently, a federal judge has ruled that law unconstitutional in violation of the First Amendment. They basically said that the labels aren't misleading. They used the example of like tofurkey and said it's like obvious that it's supposed to be made from tofu.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 0:54

Yeah, you can even go look at the ingredients on the back and figure out it's not made from animals.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:59

Right. So because of that, because it's not a directly misleading claim, it's protected by the First Amendment.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:05

Woohoo! Freedom of speech! Yeah. Also, I find this so stupid because if anyone's being misleading, it's Morningstar by calling stuff plant-based when it has eggs and cheese and dairy in it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:16

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:17

I know. I'm always on a Morningstar kick. Fuck you, Morningstar.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:20

Until they stop doing it.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:22

I feel like it's more misleading than plant-based chicken or like chicken with an apostrophe.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:27

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:28

Would you put an apostrophe in real chicken? Probably not.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:31

Right. Next up is a Italian tech food startup called Foreverland has created a new cocoa-free chocolate.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:41

Do you think it's interesting that an Italian startup has a company using English words?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:46

I do think that's interesting.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:47

Anyway, sorry, sorry.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:49

There are some issues, I guess, with the cocoa supply chain. It's getting hard to get. The prices are going way up.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:54

Ethical issues with it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:55

Some ethical issues. We saw some of that with Chomp Chocolate. That was actually some of the issues he was having. But this new chocolate that Foreverland has made is derived from carob, which is kind of like a bush in the legume family. Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 2:08

I know they use carob. Okay. They're like dog treats, right? That are supposed to have that like chocolatey taste, but chocolate's poison to dogs. So it'll be like peanut butter and carob.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 2:16

I don't know if it's a good idea to give dogs a taste for chocolate with the caruba chocolate. But, you know, it's nice that they can have that flavor.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 2:23

Yeah. Oh, my God. Okay. Here's a really sad thing that I heard that this vet does. Okay. This is really sad. But happy? I don't know. So basically, there's this vet that I read about, and if they're going to put your dog down... you know, you have to have your dog put down, they'll give them like a Hershey kiss as like their last meal right beforehand so they can get to taste chocolate for once.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 2:46

Wow, that's bittersweet. They're calling their chocolate Cheruba chocolate.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 2:50

That's kind of cute though. Cheruba? I don't know. The more I say it, the more I like it. Cheruba, Cheruba.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 2:55

Yeah, I'm sure they would love for people to keep saying it. But yeah, so if anybody is in Italy and happens to come across this chocolate one day, send us a message and maybe we'll arrange some kind of trade or something you can only get in America. Assuming we're not violating any, you know, I don't know what the rules are on sending food.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 3:11

It's called bartering. It's a barter system. Yeah. We'll send you edamame puffs.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 3:15

Yeah, I think those are pretty hard to get. For cheruba. All right. And then the last piece is, so the Super Bowl has already happened by the time you hear this episode. But there was an article talking about vegan options at Levi's Stadium where the Super Bowl was being played. The one they highlighted was an impossible rooftop cheesesteak. It said it was made with bulgogi glazed plant-based meat, caramelized onions, and kale that was grown at the stadium's on-site farm.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 3:41

That is kind of cool. I didn't know they had an on-site farm. Yeah, me neither. But I also don't know anything about Levi's Stadium. No, me neither. Not surprising that I wouldn't know that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 3:51

No, but yeah, that's really cool. So if any of you guys happen to go to the Super Bowl and you tried this cheesesteak, let us know how it was.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 3:56

I like that it sounds like a pretty well-thought-out option. I don't know. I haven't had it, but it sounds kind of good. Yeah. Although, what is bulgogi glaze? Do you know what that is?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 4:06

I have literally no idea. I thought bulgogi was a meat.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 4:10

Maybe it is. I don't know. I stopped eating meat at such a young age. I feel like I really don't know a lot of like terms around it. What the hell is that? Let us know what that is. We can also Google it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 4:23

All right. So let's get into the main segment here.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 4:25

The tofu of it all.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 4:27

Yeah. The tofu of it all.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 4:29

This is going to catch on. I swear. We also came up with a new phrase instead of saying to skin a cat, which is gross. um it's like how many there are a lot of ways to peel a potato

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 4:43

Yeah i actually like that and then you listed off several ways to peel a potato that i don't think i ever thought of i don't remember them all but they were very creative i'm.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 4:53

A creative girl

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 4:54

All right so uh first thing to know is that back on episode 16 we had a kind of an intro to resistance training we covered some terminology some concepts so if you hear anything in this one maybe you're just a little unfamiliar with the terminology maybe go back and listen to that one to get caught up or maybe just go listen to that one first although i don't think i'm going to be using a lot of stuff from that that requires that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 5:14

One this is more basic i would say yeah

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 5:17

So i would say maybe just you know if you're really into the resistance training thing maybe just listen to both of those.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 5:21

Yeah if you're like how do i extra apply this information

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 5:24

Right yeah especially if you're like because we're going to kind of jump right into programming here so maybe if you don't know what reps are what sets are uh that's the kind of stuff i talked about in the last episode yeah So, first thing you have to do when you're trying to build a lifting program or pick a lifting program is decide what your focus area is. Different people have different goals. Even when it comes to the specific aspect of lifting, you think like, oh, I want to lift. I want to get muscles, right? Which could be your goal. But four big areas that I kind of bucket goals into are like strength. Yeah. The muscle growth, which is called hypertrophy. Like you want your muscle to get physically bigger.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 5:57

You want glamour muscles.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 5:59

Right. And then there's also like sports specific training. So if you're an athlete or you want to train to get better at some specific sport, your training might be more tailored towards that. And then there's just kind of a balanced approach. Like you just want to be fit. You want to get a little stronger. You want to get your muscles a little bigger. You want to be a little more athletic.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 6:15

Look good, feel good.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 6:16

Right, exactly. And you might also hear that kind of referred to as like functional fitness. That's kind of a popular buzzword. Yeah. But no matter what your focus is, you will improve in all the areas a little bit. It's just you can tailor your training to like really be focused on powerlifting if you have competitions coming up or something like that. And then you might not be as focused on things that technically would make your muscle a little bigger.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 6:38

Look bigger.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 6:38

Look bigger, yeah. There's a lot of crossover. Doing pretty much any program will improve all of these to some degree. but you can definitely focus on specific areas. So for strength specifically, this is basically like, okay, I like we're going into a powerlifting competition, or I just want to like impress my friends with this number. Like the idea of a strength goal is I want the number to be as big as possible. So I want my bench press to be the biggest number possible. So that is like a strength goal. Typically for strength exercises, you're going to use what are called barbell compound exercises. Compound just means it uses multiple joints. So if you think of something like a curl, You're just bending your elbow. That's a single joint exercise. But if you're doing like a squat, then you're bending your knees, you're bending your hips, your back angle is changing. You got your arms up. Like, I mean, it's a full body exercise basically for a squat.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 7:24

That's why I hate it so much.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 7:25

Because it's multi-joint. So most of the things involving strength, like you want to use as much of your body as possible to move the weight. So we're doing big barbell compound exercises. And you use a barbell because it's usually going to be a couple hundred pounds. And that's pretty hard to hold with dumbbells. Yeah. And it's also really easy to load a barbell. You can get fractional weights and you can even add up to like a fourth of a pound at a time with fractional weight plates. So the way that you would progress on a strength training program, the primary goal you would use for progression on the compound exercises is to increase the weight basically every session if you can. And that will only work for a little while. You'll have to do some more advanced techniques. But in general, your goal should be, okay, I squatted 150 pounds on Monday. If I have squats again on Friday and I got all my sets and reps on Monday, I'm going to go for 155 pounds next time. And you can increase it like every time basically until you get to a point where you can't do that anymore. And that could take months or maybe a year if you're a beginner. And then typically also for strength, you're doing lower reps. So you'll probably be in the one to five reps per set range and your weight will be much higher than it would be if you're using higher reps. Yeah. So typically, if you're doing more than five reps in a set, you're not as focused on strength anymore, especially if we're talking about like you want to powerlifting competition or something like that competition lift is going to be a one time lift. We call that the one rep max. Like how much can you lift one time?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 8:40

And don't they have calculators that you can put in like how, you know, like if you have a normal weight that you're lifting 10 times, you can put it in a calculator and it'll kind of give you an estimate of your one rep max.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 8:50

Yeah. You don't often have to actually do the one rep to test it out. you can just use calculators. So if you know, like, okay, I can do five reps or I can do 10 reps and this is like absolutely all I can do. You can just plug it in or actually a lot of the fitness apps, the tracking apps will just do that automatically for you. And it'll show you like, this is your estimated one rep max. And then a lot of programming can use that. So you might do, okay, I'm doing squats this week at 80% of my one rep max or something like that. So you can kind of use that number to automatically adjust your intensity. And most strength exercises are also going to be bilateral. So that means you're using both limbs at the same time. So if you're doing squats, you're using both legs. Oh, okay. Because you can do like a split squat, but that's not typically going to be used for strength because you just generate more strength if you're using both legs.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 9:35

Now, are these exercises normally the ones that you would see at competition then?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 9:39

Yeah, typically. So the powerlifting competition typically centers around squat, bench press, and deadlift. So the big three is what they're called. So even if people aren't going into competition and they just want to impress themselves or impress other people and see how strong they are, they will typically still focus on the big three lifts because those are the ones that are most easily recognizable as like, oh, wow, you can bench a lot of weight. You can deadlift a lot of weight. So yeah, that's typically what it revolves around. So now moving on from strength, if your goal is muscle growth, the program is going to be maybe slightly different. Your primary goal is really going to be based on effort and how often your sets get you close to failure. Like you can't physically do the lift anymore. Actually, when you're strength training, you won't really be near failure very often. But if you're training for muscle growth, you'll be basically very close to failure with almost every set.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 10:24

I never thought about that for strength. You never get close to failure.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 10:27

I mean, if you're testing, you do. But typically with a good program, you're not really training very close to failure. You're training in like 80 to 90 percent of what your one rep max. And then that kind of translates. If you're doing fives, you would do like 80 percent of what you could do with fives and you just kind of slowly go up from there. So basically your rep ranges for muscle growth would be anywhere from like five reps to 30 reps has been shown to be equally effective. And again, like when I say that, that means you're doing five reps or you're doing 30 reps and you're always two to three reps away from failure.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 10:56

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 10:57

So you would, if you're doing more reps, you decrease the weight. Obviously, if you can do five reps with a hundred pounds, you can't do 30 reps with a hundred pounds. So you'd have to decrease it. Most people find the sweet spot for the reps around like eight to 12.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 11:09

Yeah. Cause 30 reps would take forever.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 11:11

Yeah. And it's also, So as you do more, it's really hard to gauge like how close you are to failure.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 11:15

Yeah. How do you know? Well, like, how would you tell someone that? to find out how close to failure they are.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 11:21

I would say when you're first starting out, just go to failure for a few times. That way you understand how it feels. And then you'll start to just get an intuitive sense for, okay, I've really only got two more of these in the tank. Beginners are not that great at judging it, which is why the advice is often just go to failure at the beginning because then you know for sure.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 11:41

Unless it's over your face.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 11:42

Yeah, don't try to go to failure with things that go over your head or over your face for sure.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 11:47

Or fall in any sort of precarious way. They're called skull crushers for a reason. Or, like, if you're going to failure or you have, like, children or small pets or something around, like, in your workout space, you might want to not go to failure. You might want to make sure they're not in the room.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 12:03

Yeah. I would just use failure as an every once in a while type thing to recalibrate, like, how close you really think you are.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 12:09

When you can fail in a safe way.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 12:10

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Otherwise, you're pretty sure, like, I'm not going to get the next one and you just don't go for it.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 12:16

Yeah. I can usually tell if I'm not going to be able to get the next one.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 12:19

But apparently in a lab setting, when people have thought that they definitely wouldn't be able to get the next one, they can usually get like five or six more. So you never really know.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 12:26

Believe in yourself.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 12:29

Yeah. So also one of the things with muscle growth specifically is, so if we talk about volume being how many sets of this muscle that I do in a week, the volume in a week of exercises is like one of the main drivers of muscle growth. And that's not the same for strength. Strength is basically doing really hard weight and increasing the weight over time. But for muscle growth, the focus is more on doing a lot of sets, a lot closer to failure. And they haven't really found an upper limit for this yet. I think there was a study a couple of years ago that was even showing like 40 sets of biceps in a week was still causing a little bit of additional gain.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 13:06

That's crazy.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 13:07

I mean, it's definitely like a diminishing returns thing, right? Going from 30 sets to 40 sets doesn't get you nearly as much benefit as going from like five sets to 10 sets.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 13:14

Yeah. What's that sweet spot of like, I'm doing the most I can do while still getting good benefits?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 13:21

Yeah. I think it's like most people realistically would top out around 20 sets. a week per muscle group but I try to make sure that I'm doing and like my programs are doing like at 10 to 12 usually unless you're really trying to Is.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 13:35

That like minimum?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 13:37

Minimum would be like 6 but 10 to 12 is like okay I'm really going to get some good progress here, But you don't want to do less than six, probably. Okay. Unless you're just trying to maintain muscle. If you're just trying to like, if your legs are already huge for some reason, and you just really want to focus on your upper body more, you can drop your legs down to like four to six sets a week just to maintain their current size. They won't really get much bigger. And then you can let everything else kind of catch up. And that saves you a little time too.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 14:01

Or if you've been skipping leg day, do the opposite.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 14:03

Yeah, do the opposite. And also something interesting for volume is that the fractional sets count for volume. And so what a fractional set is, is basically like when you're doing bench press, like you're obviously focusing on your chest for bench press, but your triceps and your front delts, your front shoulders are also very involved. So the way that this is kind of calculated now when they do like the science on this is basically you count a set of bench press as one set for your chest and then a half a set for your triceps and a half a set for your shoulders. And so you do those calculations to figure out total weekly volume.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 14:37

It's like freebies.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 14:39

Yeah, exactly. So that's why actually a lot of programs, a lot of beginner programs really focus on just barbell compounds and they don't have like curls or tricep pushdowns or calf raises or any of that stuff because they're already getting quite a bit of volume from pushing and pulling exercises.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 14:53

That's interesting. So you'd have to do less exercises to get the full benefits of everything.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 14:58

Right. And then also for muscle growth, one last thing is that you would use isolation exercises, also called like a single joint exercise, which is like a curl, like a bicep curl or like a leg extension or something like that to add extra volume to focus muscle groups. Because if you do want to add that extra volume to your biceps, like you have maybe your biceps don't grow very well, like genetics, or you just really want to focus on biceps, you're not going to want to add in like a bunch of extra rows just to hit your biceps.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 15:26

Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 15:27

So you would just do an isolation exercise. So you would just maybe add in like a bunch of sets of curls every week or something like that. Also, your biceps recover a lot faster than your back. So they can take a lot of work. And then if you're focused on maybe a sport, this is going to all be very specific to the sport you're actually playing. But in general, sport programs are more focused on what we call power. So we have like strength, hypertrophy, and power as three separate concepts.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 15:50

What's the difference between strength and power?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 15:52

Power involves speed. So it's moving kind of a moderate weight very quickly.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 15:56

How do you time that sort of thing? How do you time it? Like, how do you know you're getting faster with something like that?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 16:01

Also, there are actually bar speed trackers. What? Yeah. Really? Yeah, you just attach it to the bar. It's got a little sensor and you can track it. That's cool. But the way you would typically do it is like you just kind of know what the right speed should be and then you increase the weight over time.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 16:13

Interesting.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 16:13

Typically, they're using a percentage of your one rep max and it's using really low reps, kind of like strength. So you're doing one to five reps, mainly because the lifts are pretty technical and you don't want to just do a whole bunch of them. And then also the movements will be kind of explosive movements that you might see in sport. So there are jumps, throws, a lot of the Olympic variants like power cleans, hang cleans, snatch clean, things like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 16:36

A jerk off? Isn't that something called a clean jerk? Clean jerk off?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 16:40

It's not called a clean jerk off. It's actually called a clean and jerk.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 16:45

My bad.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 16:47

Yeah. Hey, maybe you can make your own variant. We'll add that to the Olympic weightlifting progressions, the clean jerk-off.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 16:58

Very explosive.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 17:04

You have a point there. What sport would you say that trains us for? Huh.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 17:13

It's a hard one.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 17:19

All right. Let's get back on topic. So then, you know, so you would do those exercises and then you would also have sports specific drills, which means like if you're doing basketball, you might have some, like you go out and practice basketball, basically. You do like some agility drills or something like that. Something that's like really specific to the sport you're playing.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 17:38

With weights?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 17:39

No, no, not with weights. You just do the drill.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 17:41

So what does that do with the resistance training?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 17:43

What did you do in softball?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 17:44

In softball they made us do follow around the football players and do the exact work the football players were doing and then we did sprints at the end which felt like it had nothing to do with softball so sometimes i'd get out of it and i'd get to go pitch against a wall yeah because i was a pitcher yeah well

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 17:57

You asked you just asked what does it have to do with resistance training basically you do have to factor it into the program because it's going to wear you out you have to manage your.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 18:04

Face oh i see yeah but

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 18:06

You would just really focus on like the movements i'm doing have some application to my sport so actually there's a part of the The NFL combine, when a new player goes to like basically try out for the NFL, they have a whole list of exercises I do, like a 40-yard dash. And then another popular one is basically you bench press 225 pounds. Everybody does the same weight. And you see how many times you can do it. And the idea there is supposed to be like, you know, you're pushing a guy off of you on the line or whatever. But they're actually thinking about dropping the bench press from the combine because it's not sports specific enough. They don't feel like it translates well enough to football.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 18:40

I can see that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 18:41

Yeah. Because, I mean, you're doing a lot of reps. It's like a really heavy weight. It's not a power movement, really. There's not an explosive component to it.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 18:47

How often are you actually pushing the guy off you? Like you're already down, right?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 18:50

Especially in that way where you're like slowly pushing them because that's why the sport training is a little different because everything happens in like a second. So you're like doing all these movements that just take like a second and you just do it a couple reps at a time.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 19:01

Interesting. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 19:03

Oh, you might also, for football, you might do like the, you've probably seen the sled pushes where they have the big foam sleds out in the field. I mean, that's resistance training. You're pushing against weight. It's just really specific to sport.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 19:14

I saw this football player, he was like doing neck weights.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 19:18

Yeah. That's important for football players because they can fall on their head and hit their head on a lot of people. So there are a couple of sports. Also, interestingly enough, race car drivers.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 19:27

Oh, they do neck stuff too?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 19:28

Yeah, they have to do neck training because the G-force.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 19:30

Turns and stuff.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 19:32

A lot of sport-specific things, depending on what sport you're in. And then if you're trying to just do a balance program, you can kind of mix and match elements from these. There's a popular one called power building that has some big barbell compounds and lower rep range to gain strength. But then all your accessory movements, like your extra stuff, your isolation movements, those are more volume, higher rep type things. So you can kind of do both at the same time a little bit.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 19:52

So you'll get big and strong.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 19:54

And if you're interested in like athleticism and your balance stuff, you can throw in something like a power clean or some kind of other Olympic variant. And that's one of the reasons CrossFit got really popular is because it touts itself as functional fitness, basically, which is, you know, it involves a little bit of resistance training, a lot of cardio, and then a little bit of that kind of power explosive training because they do a lot of Olympic lifts like snatches and clean and stuff like that. So, yeah, you can kind of mix it all together.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 20:19

If you want to.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 20:20

Right. But you do have to be careful about your fatigue.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 20:23

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 20:23

Okay. So the next thing, so once you've chosen your focus, the next thing to decide is like, how do I actually organize my week? So we typically refer to which days you're doing, which types of exercises as a split.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 20:35

Why is it called a split?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 20:37

Because sometimes it's split. Like you're doing arms on one day and you're doing legs on another day. So you're like splitting your training into different days.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 20:44

Like program better.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 20:45

Well, it's part of a program. But, you know, deciding on your split depends on how many days a week you'll be going to the gym in some ways.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 20:56

Is it a split if it's all full body?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 20:57

It is a full body split.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 20:59

Don't ask me why. That's pretty weird. Yeah. Where's the split? Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 21:04

It's split between different days. You're splitting your, okay, let me rephrase. You're splitting your volume up across the days of the week.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 21:12

Okay. I'll buy it. All right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 21:14

So, yeah, it depends on how many days a week. Like a full body, like you just mentioned, is one of the options. Basically, you could just do a total full body split. So every day you go to the gym in that week, you just do full body. You hit every muscle group that you're interested in working on in your body. That's really common, also really effective. Also a good way to get pretty good volume for anybody, but mostly, especially for a beginner without adding on a bunch of extra time. And then the other kind of element that goes into building a split is you want to try to probably hit each muscle group at least twice a week. So if you're trying to get your biceps, you want to maybe hit them twice a week. And that's mainly just because if you're trying to hit, like we were talking about earlier, somewhere between 10 to 12 sets a week, it's usually better to do that across two days than one day. Because you're trying to do 10 to 12 sets for every muscle group in one day every week. That would be like a two and a half hour long workout and you wouldn't be putting much effort into it anymore.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 22:04

You'd be pretty tired. Yeah. Because most times you're doing like three sets at a time, right? Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 22:09

Yeah. Typically three to four, sometimes more. It's like you kind of decide when to add on the second exercise if you're just getting bored or you're not really hitting it anymore. So some people will just go in there and be like, okay, I need to do six sets of biceps today. I'm just going to do six sets of bicep curls. But then other people don't really like that. So they do three sets of bicep curls and then three sets of like some kind of preacher curl, like a little different bicep curl. So that's kind of personal preference. But typically, if you're over like three to four sets, people typically choose a second exercise. So the kind of ways you can split it based on how many days a week you're going, I'd say anywhere from really two to six days a week, you could do full body. And if you're going one day a week, it should definitely be full body. So really, you can just always do a full body split if you want. But something that might be a little easier for you if you're going four days a week or six days a week would be an upper to lower split. So you alternate upper body, lower body, upper body, lower body. Each day you go to the gym in the week.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 23:02

See, that wouldn't work for me because I hate lower body. So I would just keep skipping the lower body days.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 23:08

No, that's a big problem with people, actually. And that is actually another benefit of full body days because people do definitely skip leg day.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 23:13

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 23:13

Yeah. And then there's another really popular one called push-pull legs. So, you know, you do push exercises on one day, you do pull exercises another day, and then you skip leg day.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 23:25

What is push and what is pull?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 23:27

Push is basically like bench press, overhead press, anything where you're pressing the weight away from you.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 23:31

But like, what would that be for legs?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 23:35

Well, legs is its own day. So push and pull are both. Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah. So push and pull days are both upper body for the most part. Although some people put deadlift on pull day. Ew. And some people put deadlift on leg day. So I like it on pull day because it's the big pull exercise and you don't want to do deadlifts on the same day as squats if you can help it.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 23:53

So it's like push, pull and a little bit of leg and then leg day.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 23:56

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 23:57

Okay.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 23:57

Yep.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 23:58

That's not confusing at all.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 24:00

Yeah. And also you don't have to be very dogmatic about these things. If you want to add an extra set of curls to your leg day, feel free. And then you really only want to do push-pull legs if you're going six days a week, though. Because otherwise, if you're doing push-pull legs and you're only going those three days a week.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 24:16

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 24:17

And you miss a gym day, you totally didn't hit that muscle group for the entire week at all.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 24:21

Yeah, that makes sense.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 24:22

So you want to try to get two days a week for everything. So with push-pull legs, that's really like a six-day program. So if you're not consistently going six days, don't do push-pull legs. And you can also kind of combine these. So if you're doing a three-day program and you don't really like doing full body every day, you could do full body the first day, upper body, then lower body.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 24:41

Or you can do full, upper, lower, upper, lower.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 24:44

Right. Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 24:45

I'm reading your notes and it's full.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 24:46

Full.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 24:47

Full. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 24:50

If you have five days, upper, lower doesn't really fit into that. So you just add in a full body day on one of those days. Or you can do three full body days and then upper lower. People do all kinds of variants of these. Just whatever works for you.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 25:01

Whatever acronym you like best.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 25:03

Yeah. The idea is pick how many days a week you can actually make it to the gym and then try to hit every muscle group at least twice a week. And then you can just kind of mix and match this every one. And you actually don't even have to follow a split. You can just like design this thing like I really like doing bicep curls on Monday. I really like doing squats on Wednesday. So you just have to, as long as you hit, you know, the volume you need and you know how many days a week you're going to consistently make it to the gym. You can kind of build your own. But a split just helps you organize a little better if you're not pretty familiar with how to do this kind of thing.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 25:31

I like what you're saying. Like, Monday feels like these exercises.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 25:35

Yeah, vibe programming.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 25:36

Yeah, vibe programming. You should market that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 25:40

Well, actually, I think people are calling that, what are they calling that? Autoregulation now is what they call that kind of thing.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 25:46

What?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 25:46

You just go in and you do the muscles that aren't sore anymore every day.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 25:49

Oh, interesting. No, that's not what I'm saying.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 25:51

But at the end of the week, you still have to be like, oh, I still need some extra volume. But I'm still sore. I guess I got to do it anyway.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 25:56

I'm saying more like the number 13 in the month October feel like they would be orange. That's what I'm saying. Oh, I see. You see? So like bicep curls, they'll seem like they'd be on Monday.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 26:07

If you can do some kind of Rain Man thing and that programming makes sense to you, as long as you get in all your volume, you can do that if you want.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 26:14

Like how people can see sound? Yeah. Yeah, kind of like that. If you're one of those, vibe programming might be for you.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 26:22

Think about the splits as just a way to split up your volume without making the session super long so if you're currently going for two days and you're trying to get 10 to 12 sets of everything or maybe you're even reaching for like 20 sets of everything you're going to realize that you're especially at 20 sets you're going to realize your two-day sessions are like two hours each so you're like okay i need to be in the gym a little less time but i could actually get another day in yeah then you can move a lot of those exercises to the third day and be a little shorter every time so that's really all it's for, Um, one thing to know though, is a beginner almost never needs to go more than four days a week. You get a little more benefit. Maybe if you're going from like one day to two days is pretty good. Two days to three days, you get some more benefit. Three to four is pretty minor, but it often helps to keep the sessions a little shorter. Anything about four, it's like, you don't really need, you don't need to be doing this until you're like really advanced and you have to get like 30 sets a week of biceps or something to make your biceps grow.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 27:10

Yeah. I also think if you're starting a program and you haven't really done it before, you also kind of want to consider like burnout.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 27:17

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 27:17

You know, like if you're trying to inch out every little extra bit for performance, but it's also making you depressed and sad and hate your life. Yeah. Maybe like pull it back a bit.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 27:28

You know what I mean? My actual recommendation for a beginner would be two days a week, full body each day.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 27:33

Yeah, just to get in the hang of it. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 27:35

Keep it simple. And then you can start troubleshooting once you need to. Once your sessions start running long, you're not making progress on your biceps anymore, something like that. Then you can start figuring out, okay, what do I need to do here? But just start with two days a week, full body each time. So now we were talking about hitting the appropriate volume for each muscle group. So now let's talk a little bit about what all the muscle groups are. So one muscle group is chest. Technically, you have like upper, mid, and lower chest, but nobody really thinks of it that way too much. So you can just think of it as chest. And then in your back, people do also just say like, I'm working on back today. But the back kind of does have four distinct parts. It's upper back, lower back, traps.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 28:09

It's a trap.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 28:11

Right. And lats.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 28:16

Sorry.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 28:17

We need some kind of a trap day shirt like that. Maybe shrugs. Have Ackbar doing shrugs? Yeah. It's a trap.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 28:24

I bet it exists.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 28:25

Probably, yeah. Okay, anyway. Yeah, so upper back, lower back, traps, and lats, which you can kind of work independently. Next, you have arms. Everybody knows arms. People like to get their arms big. You have biceps, triceps, and forearms. Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 28:38

I love a tricep.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 28:40

Yeah?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 28:40

Yeah, they look so cool.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 28:42

Especially when they have the little horseshoe thing. Mm-hmm. Shoulders have kind of front, rear, and side, and you'll hear that referred to as delts. Front, delt, rear, delt, side, delt. The shoulder muscle is called the deltoid muscle. So if you hear delts, that means shoulders. Wow. And then last, but definitely not least, is legs. So glutes, quads, hamstrings, and calves.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 29:05

Hamstrings is such an odd word.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 29:07

Yeah. You can think of it as leg biceps. It's actually, you know, the technical scientific term is basically biceps of the leg.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 29:14

It should be leg-seps.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 29:16

That'd be fun. And your biggest muscles are the ones in your leg. So those typically do get worked kind of independently. Oh, and then also, I guess this counts as a muscle group, is your abs.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 29:25

Really? You don't say? Yeah. The core muscle?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 29:28

The core muscle. Yeah. So legs were not last but least. Legs were not last and also not least. We'll do abs last.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 29:38

You know what the strongest muscle in your whole body is?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 29:41

Your heart.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 29:43

Oh, is that it? I thought I heard it was a tongue.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 29:45

I just thought you were going to be cheesy. Is it your tongue?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 29:48

I heard your tongue's like pretty strong.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 29:51

Should we program tongue pushups?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 29:52

No. Okay.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 29:53

Yeah. So yeah, definitely abs. Another thing a lot of people want to focus on.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 29:58

It gets hit in a lot of other exercises though.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 30:00

Yeah. A lot of people don't even directly train abs because you do get a lot of indirect work. But actually I was reading a couple of days ago and I've kind of got an outline put together for a blog post about like the 20% of ab abs. The muscles that don't really get hit by normal training.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 30:15

What are those?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 30:17

Well, I had to look them up, but it's basically like your deep stabilizer muscles, transverse abdominis, some stuff like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 30:22

How do you fix that?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 30:23

There are a couple of movements like dead bugs and bird dogs and some things like that. Even if they're not loading with weight, they're actually really helpful for those. And there's actually a spinal, I can't remember exactly what he is. He's some kind of spinal doctor guy, but he has these exercises called the big three. His name's McGill. So if you look up the McGill Big Three, those are actually really good to add to a lifting program. You don't really add weight to them for the most part. And they feel like they're just kind of like a little beginner exercise, but they're actually really useful for like your deep core stabilizers and stuff that you don't really get work on with a big compound exercises. So, yeah, I'm working on a blog post for that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 31:00

More to come.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 31:00

There's a little teaser. If you just look up McGill Big Three and do those, you'll get probably 90% of the benefit of the blog post I'm going to put out. There you go. Okay. Yeah. So now we talked about the muscle groups. Let's talk a little bit about movement patterns, which are kind of how people are focusing their training more now on the advanced side of things rather than thinking about muscle groups. They're just thinking in terms of make sure I cover these movement patterns. So the movement patterns here to think about are a hinge, which is basically you're bending over at the hips. You're hinging at the hips.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 31:31

It has to be at the hips. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 31:33

Where else would you hinge from?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 31:34

I don't know.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 31:35

Yes, it has to be from the hills.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 31:36

Okay.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 31:37

For this movement pattern. So this is something like a Romanian deadlift or a good morning where you're just bending over. Okay. Next movement pattern is the squat. So this can be a barbell back squat, a front squat, a split squat, even lunges count as a squat pattern, things like that. You want to try to make sure you got at least one of those in your program. Next up is a vertical pull. So vertical pull would be like a lat pull down or a chin up is actually the better option if you can do chin up. And then a horizontal pull. So this is a row, basically. Okay. And then next up is a vertical press. So an overhead press, shoulder press is what you typically think of the sews.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 32:08

Okay.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 32:08

And then a horizontal press. So like a bench press.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 32:12

And you need to have all of these?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 32:13

So you can actually hit all the muscle groups without including all these movement patterns. But if you want a really well-rounded program and you're healthy and you can do all the movements, it's best to try to include all the muscle groups and all the movement patterns. So when it comes to actually picking the exercises for the program, you should know that you can kind of swap exercises pretty freely, really. So if you want to hit quads and you're trying to do the squat movement pattern, then the first thing you'll look up is probably barbell squat. And then you'll look at that and say, I don't want to do barbell squat. So then you can basically switch that out with anything else in that movement pattern. You can switch it out with like a Bulgarian split squat. You can switch it out with walking lunges. You could switch it out with like a box squat or maybe a Smith machine squat, something like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 32:56

What if you can't do squats?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 32:57

Yeah, then you kind of have to change it a little bit and you would switch it out with something like a leg press is probably the best or a hack squat at the gym. Now, if you're just trying to hit quads, you could switch it out with something like a leg extension. But that technically wouldn't fit the movement pattern, but it does still hit the muscle group. So that's the next best option. So, yeah, just feel free to like whenever you're looking at an exercise, you don't have to do that specific thing and you don't have to use the specific implement that it has. So even for something like a bench press, you can use the barbell, you can use dumbbells, you can use a machine. It's all pretty much the same.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 33:28

Some people do resistance bands even.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 33:29

You can do resistance bands. It's just if you're benching 150 pounds.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 33:33

Sure. I'm talking about like beginners.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 33:35

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 33:36

That maybe don't have a gym or equipment.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 33:38

Yeah. I mean, definitely. And you just might have to do higher reps.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 33:41

Yeah. Or like double up on resistance bands.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 33:43

Resistance bands are great too. As long as you can get close to failure in less than about 30 reps, you can still use resistance bands. No problem. Also, some other reasons you might want to swap exercises, like if your gym's busy, like maybe you do like squats, but that squat rack's not going to be free for the next two hours. Then you can just know in your head, okay, I can switch to any other squat type pattern for today, or I can do leg press if I really need to. I can do leg extensions. And I'm kind of getting the same work in, but I don't have to wait on the same machine. So now I'm going to go through, if I could pick one exercise for each muscle group, what would I pick? And I want to see what you think about these.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 34:14

Okay.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 34:14

So for chest, I would say incline bench press.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 34:20

I like that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 34:21

I prefer dumbbells, but at a certain weight, you're probably going to have to switch to barbell. Yeah. Just because it's hard to get up. They also have these little hanger things. You can hang dumbbells on a barbell. So I actually like the movement more with dumbbells, but the weight can get pretty.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 34:33

Hard to use. Wait, what'd you just say?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 34:35

Yeah, so I think they're called the... mad hanger, mad hatter hanger. I don't know. But anyway, you clip this hanger on your dumbbells and then you hang that on your barbell on a rack so you can still do your bench press with dumbbells but you can just, you don't have to like hoist them up into position. They're just hanging up there and you just grab them off this little rack thing. We have some of those downstairs. They just don't, they don't really work super well with adjustable dumbbells is the caveat. Unless you have an adjustable dumbbell that doesn't have a cage around your hands.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 35:05

Yeah. I guess for me, I like these but I kind of like doing them on the um the tonal we

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 35:12

Have yeah which.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 35:14

Is a cable machine yeah just because like if you go close to failure with because all of our weights are adjustable yeah I always get really nervous about dropping them

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 35:21

Yeah for sure and it's really good on the tonal I mean that goes up to probably all the weight you ever need honestly or if you have a cable machine you can do it on that's perfectly fine um and the reason I like these for chest so much is that they you know are a little more focused on the upper chest which is actually the part that people have the most trouble growing and you can use lighter weights. You still get all the work and it still does a really good job on like the mid chest. So it's kind of an all-in-one chest exercise, but you can do it with less weight and it's much safer because it's not like a barbell bench press position.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 35:52

So for me, chest has always been weird as a woman because I'm like, I don't see any of that. Not sure what's going on under there.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 36:02

It's interesting, but yeah. Um, next up for shoulders, uh, I would say the dumbbell lateral raise.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 36:09

Oh man, if you can do more than about 10 pounds on this, you're superhuman.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 36:14

And you know, the reason that I like the lateral raise for shoulders is because we were talking about earlier, the front delts get a lot of work from pushing exercises. The rear delts get a lot of work from pulling exercises. So you don't often really need to work those directly unless you're having a real problem or you just want to do like overhead press for fun or something. Um, so if you're doing you know side lateral raises then you're hitting your side delt which is the part that really pops anyway when it grows so i think that's like the most important type of exercise to do and you can do these on a machine as well you can do them with cables dumbbells just like really easy just pick up the dumbbell you're.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 36:47

Likely never going to get too heavy on a dumbbell i mean

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 36:51

I think even like extremely advanced people are doing dumbbell lateral raises for high reps with like 25 pounds maybe 30 pounds yeah you.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 37:00

Definitely don't want to like cheat it up with momentum so it's just you can't lift too much

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 37:05

Yeah and you can do low reps i mean you could you could do it for like trying to get you know a little stronger just if you like just doing low reps i guess but most people find that these feel better if you do them in high reps yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 37:15

I think i do mine around 15 12 to 15 same

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 37:17

Yeah next up for biceps i like the dumbbell incline curl where you're sitting on an incline bench. The reason for that is your arm gets to go further behind you, so you get a lot more stretch in the bicep.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 37:29

I like these. Okay, I used to do a lot of P90X.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 37:32

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 37:34

And I don't know if these are real exercises, but basically you'd go up with your palms facing upward, and then you twist at the top and then go down with a hammer curl, and I've always really liked those.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 37:46

Yeah, those are good. Those are similar to how Arnold used to do his curls. they're not exactly the same but it's like the reverse of that which is and the reason is like your bicep has two functions one's to like bend the arm at the elbow and the other is to rotate your arm so you're kind of hitting both of those when you do a twisting motion yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 38:01

So that one's my favorite yeah

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 38:03

And you could also do that on an incline.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 38:06

Hmm. I don't think I've tried incline yet.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 38:08

Yeah. You want to start real late. It definitely stretches the bicep tendon at the top of the shoulder. So you want to make sure you're not going to have issues with that. But it gives you a better stretch. You can also do something they're calling like a Bayesian curl now, which is the same concept. You basically stand on a cable machine, but the cable is behind your body and it's pulling your arm out behind you. And then you curl from there.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 38:28

Interesting.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 38:28

Kind of get the anything where your arm is going behind your body is a little bit better stretch for a bicep curl.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 38:33

Yeah. I think it also keeps you from like doing cheat reps where you're just swinging your arm wildly. Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 38:39

And yeah, so if you're trying to do like a barbell bicep curl, the barbell stops, obviously. Yeah, yeah. It hits your body so your arms can't really go behind you. So dumbbell curls have always been a good thing. Preacher curl is kind of the same concept. You get like a big stretch. So it's just a little easier if you just have to sit on an incline bench. You don't have to have a preacher bench, things like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 38:55

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 38:56

For triceps, like the cable overhead extension hits, you know, all three heads of the tricep really well. I like to do high reps on that. Pretty easy to set up. You can also do this with a dumbbell or a barbell if you really want to.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 39:09

I like anything triceps. Yeah. That's like my favorite one. Yeah. You can give me 100 triceps and I'll just do them all if you tell me to.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 39:14

I can recover fairly quickly. You know, your triceps are actually bigger than your bicep. A lot of people, when they work on arms, they really focus on the biceps. But if you're trying to increase your arm size, you would probably want to focus on triceps a little more.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 39:24

Plus, triceps look sexier. Don't they?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 39:27

Triceps look sexier? Yeah. Is that the official opinion?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 39:31

That's my opinion.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 39:32

You heard it here first.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 39:33

Ooh, skull crushers.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 39:35

Yeah, skull crushers.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 39:35

I like skull crushers for triceps.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 39:37

Yeah. Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 39:39

They're good. And they're like nice and slow. I think also like I like the burn of the tricep. Oh, I know. Like the burn of the tricep feels better than the burn of any other muscle.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 39:49

I agree with that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 39:50

I don't know why.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 39:51

Yeah. And they're still kind of crampy for a couple of days later. Yeah, yeah. So you always know that you worked triceps in the last week.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 39:57

Yeah, there's something alluring about triceps.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 40:00

All right, next up for your back. If you can do them, I'd say definitely the best back exercise is pull-ups.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 40:05

I can't do those.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 40:07

Yeah, so I mean, obviously all the rows are really awesome too. Some kind of like chest-supported row where you get a big stretch at the bottom is good or even like a seated row where you kind of lean forward and get a stretch into it. Those are all really good. But if you can do pull-ups, I would definitely focus heavily on pull-ups.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 40:20

I like a seated row.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 40:22

Yeah. You can probably do a multiple exercise for each of these things, but this list is just like, if I could just pick one.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 40:27

Yeah. His personal favorites.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 40:30

For quads, barbell squats, obviously. I would feel very sad if I ever had any program that didn't involve squats.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 40:37

Yeah. I have scoliosis, so squats are pretty rough for me personally. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 40:43

A lot of other good alternatives. And again, any kind of squat is a good alternative, and you could also do leg extensions. Those are pretty good. If you're doing leg extensions, try to lean back a little bit. Yeah. more of the hip involved in that. Next up, hamstrings. A really good one for hamstrings as a compound exercise is Romanian deadlifts. So if I can only pick one, I'm trying to lean towards compound exercises. So I'd have to go with those.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 41:02

I like Ardels.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 41:03

Yeah, Ardels. That's what we're calling them. RDL.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 41:06

That's what I've been calling them for a while.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 41:08

I think it makes a lot of sense. Ardels. I don't think we should catch on.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 41:11

It's fun to say.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 41:12

Yeah. These are similar to a deadlift except the bar never hits the ground and your legs are pretty stiff. So like a stiff-legged deadlift and a Romanian deadlift are pretty much the same thing. You'll see some videos that are like, this was the difference. But realistically, they're basically the same thing. And then glutes, Bulgarian split squats, probably the best compound exercise for glutes.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 41:32

You have to be pretty balanced, though.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 41:33

Yeah. It takes a lot of practice.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 41:35

I feel like they're maybe not super beginner friendly even. Like, you know what I mean?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 41:40

Depends on the beginner, but yeah. Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 41:42

I don't really like them.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 41:44

If you're not very comfortable with like moving your body around, they can definitely be awkward and you won't be able to get the right work out of them. Yeah. So you might switch to something like a hip thrust. Great for glutes.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 41:54

What about lunges?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 41:55

Lunges are really good for glutes too. But, you know, some people might have the same problem with lunges they have with Bulgarian split squats.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 42:00

I feel like Bulgarian split squats are way harder than lunges.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 42:03

Yeah, definitely. But you have to do, you kind of have to do lunges like in a special way to target the glutes because they're more quad focused typically. But if you do like a reverse lunge or you can like angle your leg just right to try to get glute activation on a lunge. So Bulgarian split squat just kind of ensures that you're targeting glutes.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 42:20

So what would you do if you couldn't do any of these split squatting type things?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 42:24

I would do some kind of hip thrust or just glute bridges if you can get like one of those little Bella booty bands and hook up some dumbbells to it, something like that. You can also do the abductor machine. It's a gem. It's good for your mid-glutes at least. Yeah, the isolation exercise for glutes is typically like a hip thrust.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 42:42

Which is really awkward to do in front of people.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 42:45

Especially if you're trying to do a barbell. It's like super heavy to load up. So I'd really only even mess with hip thrust if you could use a machine probably. And a lot of gyms don't have a hip thrust machine. so I'm kind of stuck there, it's a little easier on a smith machine I guess if you have a smith machine you can probably load it up a little easier than a normal barbell not a big deal.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 43:01

Hopefully anyone with hip thrust machines keep them away from windows

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 43:05

Why is that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 43:07

I feel like it's a very personal movement

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 43:08

Oh I see no that's a really good point yeah a lot of gyms have like big outdoor windows yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 43:14

I hate that

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 43:15

It's weird you can get a lot of light in but it's like awkward right make it a one way window at least.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 43:19

Yeah I also think it's awkward when everyone's walking around with cameras and shit I know

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 43:24

Uh, that's why you work it at home.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 43:26

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 43:27

All right. Uh, calves is next. Standing calf raise is the one I would pick for this. They found it's actually a lot better for calf growth if your knee is not bent when you do calf resistance training. So standing is the way to go. Seating is also good, but standing is better.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 43:43

I like calves. Calves are like the triceps of the legs. Like I like the pain of a calf burn, you know?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 43:50

Yeah, you can usually, typically would do these with really high reps. You can even do calf raises just holding a dumbbell on stairs in your house. And it's like a perfect workout.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 43:59

Yeah. I also like the way calf muscles look.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 44:02

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 44:02

There was this girl on my softball team in high school who had the most glorious calf muscles. And we'd always be like, how did you get calf muscles like that? And she'd be like, I don't know. And I think she was just one of God's chosen people. Yeah. They were glorious.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 44:15

Next is forearms. So if you want to try to improve your grip or you just want like your forearms to look bigger.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 44:20

Like Popeye.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 44:21

Yeah, like Popeye. Wrist curls are really good for that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 44:23

Ooh, what about that, like, isn't there one where you get, like, a wooden dowel and put a rope through with a weight on the bottom, and then you, like, spin that up and down?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 44:32

Yeah, the wrist roller. That is actually super good for it. It's just most people don't have one of those. And a little harder to load, I guess, because, like, if we use something like wrist curls, we can do barbell or dumbbell. We can add fractional weight because forearms aren't very strong. If you're doing barbell, it's usually a little easier to do behind-the-back wrist curls. But if you're using dumbbell, you can just do it over a bench or over your knee in front of you, things like that. you can also do wrist extensions so you kind of maybe would do both to get both sides of the wrist, But yeah, no, the wrist roller you mentioned. Also, a lot of people are doing this thing now where it's basically you get a big bucket of rice and you just kind of like move your hands inside the rice. And it's actually a really good form.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 45:07

I've been seeing this guy on TikTok that jabs his hands in a big bucket of rice.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 45:12

I think that's a different thing.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 45:13

Or beans or something. And he's making his hands into spears. And then he does this thing where he smacks his fingers together and it sounds like wood.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 45:20

Oh, yeah. Didn't he say that? Like, don't do this. It's a really bad idea. My fingers hurt all the time or something like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 45:24

Well, he didn't say that, but I Googled it because I was like, I don't know if this is a good thing. And Google was like basically saying that it could be not great.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 45:35

He did it all for the gram.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 45:37

It does sound like wood. It's very weird. I'm not sure what he's training for. He wants spear hands.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 45:41

I don't think it's forearms, but I bet he probably has strong forearms.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 45:44

I bet he does. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 45:46

And then last up is abs. One I really like for abs is V-ups just because you don't really need equipment. You can, if you need to weight them, you can grab a medicine ball or you can hold a plate over your chest or something. But basically, it's like you lay on the ground and you try to make like your head and your feet meet. They both move.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 46:01

That's kind of like Pilates-ish almost.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 46:03

But you can do it weighted. If you have a machine or something, cable crunches are also pretty good. But you're usually doing, after a while, you're doing like the whole stack and it's hard to make it harder.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 46:12

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 46:13

And it's kind of an awkward movement sometimes.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 46:14

It's awkward to do at the gym.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 46:16

Yeah. Yeah. Abs in general, a little tricky. But cable crunches, if you have a, actually, if you have a nice, like, crunch machine at your gym, those can be super good. But a lot of gyms have really bad ones, and it just is awkward. Because you can get like a huge stretch at the top, which is good. And then you come back down and you crunch. If you have a great machine, that's really awesome.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 46:37

It's hard to make machines fit everybody for a crunch.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 46:40

Exactly. Yeah. But yeah, I like V-ups a lot. So now we want to go through an example program really quick that you might build to do a full body three days a week. And in this case, we're doing the same exercises every day. You can change it up and do different exercises each day. And there might be some minor benefits to that, but it's not necessary. And if the exercises you're doing don't cause you any like joint irritation or anything like that, you can kind of just keep the same ones, especially if you're just talking about doing it for a couple of months or a year or whatever. You can keep the same exercises, keep progressing. I would only really maybe switch it out when you start to have problems progressing or you start to have problems with pain or something weird like that. But the program we have here is.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 47:17

So this one's mine. And some caveats are that I have pretty bad scoliosis. So I don't really do squats or like deadlifts. Yeah. Because it's very awkward.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 47:28

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 47:28

Um, and I like doing repetitive things. So like having the same workout for three days in a row is nice. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 47:35

Yeah. And there's like, you know, you're saying there's a couple of exercises you don't want to do, you don't like to do, which is fine because we have a lot of other ways to hit each muscle group. So, uh, you start off with a bench press, you use the dumbbell for bench press. You start out with like a compound movement, hit your chest, tricep, shoulders again. Um, so we start there. Next up, Romanian deadlift. So we kind of got that hinge movement. We're doing hamstrings, glutes. Romanian deadlifts are really good for glutes as well. Doing those also with the dumbbell, just for a really easy setup. You know, the weights with our dumbbells are perfectly within your, like, acceptable range for what you need to be working. So easy. A lying leg curl on a machine. So this is like a hamstring curl.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 48:12

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 48:13

Add a little extra hamstring volume. Leg extensions.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 48:17

On the same machine.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 48:18

On the same machine.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 48:19

What's that machine again? And it's like, it's pretty useful for a home gym, I've found.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 48:23

Yeah. That one's called a freak athlete. It's like an eight and one, 10 and one. I don't know. You can do glute ham raises. You can do Nordic curls. You can do leg extensions, hamstring curls. You can do a lot of stuff with it. So I was like, as far as machines go for a home gym, it also stands up straight. It doesn't take up room when you don't want to. It's actually been super useful.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 48:40

It's probably my favorite thing in the gym at this point because it gets me out of squats.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 48:45

You load it with the same weight plates you put on a barbell, but they also make a little attachment where you can hook it up if you have some kind of cable machine situation like we have the tonal so we could theoretically hook ours up to the tonal haven't had to really do that yet but i do have the attachment yeah but if you have like a cable station maybe inside your squat rack and you have pin selected plates or something like that you can you know hook that up to it instead of using your actual weight plates um so it's actually super versatile and really stable and i like it a lot i.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 49:10

Like it a lot too

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 49:10

Um yeah so you have leg extensions on there for some quad because like you said you don't really want to do the squats so this is how we're hitting quads for And.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 49:17

He put all the leg stuff in the beginning, so it sucks. Yeah. But then when it's over, it doesn't suck anymore. Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 49:25

Uh, next up you have lat pull downs. So you do these, uh, with our tonal. So you're doing it on a cable station and, you know, kind of doing it almost midway between like a vertical pull and a row, you know, lean back a little more just so we don't have to add an extra exercise because we also want to keep the time down, keep it a workout that you want to do. Um, next is bicep curls with the dumbbell, just a normal bicep curl. I think you do like the twisting ones you were talking about. Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 49:52

And all of mine are between like eight and 12 reps.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 49:54

Yeah, all these are, I think, three sets of eight to 12 reps.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 49:56

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 49:56

Using double progression. Next up, tricep extension, also with the dumbbell. I think you're actually doing kickbacks.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 50:03

Yeah, man. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 50:04

And then lateral raise with the dumbbell to hit the shoulders.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 50:08

I just like a lot of stuff with dumbbells because then I don't have to go jerk around with a bunch of machines.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 50:12

Yeah, I mean, it saves a ton of time. If you can do stuff with dumbbell and it's not like the weight is really awkward and you have dumbbells that are like the weight you need to use. dumbbells save so much time that they're really awesome to use for workouts.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 50:24

Yeah and then you know if you don't have like an extensive home gym it kind of allows you to just buy like maybe some adjustable dumbbells yeah and you can do a lot with those And mine's been between like 50 and 60 minutes, which feels like just right, you know, with like rest periods and stuff.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 50:41

Right. Yeah. I mean, like there's some stuff we talked about earlier. You don't see here like, you know, calves necessarily, no like direct ab work, no like rear delt work, something like that. But a lot of that stuff does get work from the other things we're doing. So, yeah. Well, what do you think about the program? Do you like it?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 50:56

I like it a lot. Yeah. I feel like I'm someone that can just do the same thing over and over again and it doesn't, I don't really get bored of it. it's more of like comforting to know that i know exactly what's coming up so because we've we've gone through several iterations of mine and it's like i think you like to add in like different workouts because you kind of like get bored with the same one so um you gave me variety and i said i don't want variety yeah i want to eat this specific tofu at every meal that's

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 51:27

One of the I guess one of the benefits of having like a trainer type person around is like really personalizing it towards this is what I hate. This is what I like.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 51:35

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 51:35

This is what I'll actually do.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 51:37

Because I have like a lot of restrictions around the scoliosis thing just because I feel like my body bends a little off. Yeah. You know what I mean? And there's a little bit of like an imbalance thing. So pulling out some of those because I felt like I could never get the form quite right, which made me really not want to do them. because A, I felt stupid and B, I also felt like I was going to like fuck my back up.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 51:59

Yeah, and this isn't really like, it's not like I'm making a scoliosis program. It's just like, I don't like doing these. So, okay, we'll find something else.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 52:07

Yeah, like, and I think that There are so many exercises that like if you have something that makes you feel like nervous or like you feel like I can't get this form right. And like maybe my body is like proportions are a little different than the people that I see online doing this exercise. Like there are other exercises you could sub in.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 52:26

Yeah. And if you're doing a movement and you're like you're focusing on anything else other than like just giving all your effort. If you're worried about like if you have a confidence thing or you're worried about like I'm imbalanced or like am I going to hurt my back. like those things even subconsciously are going to make your body not try as hard like even if you're doing something like deadlifts when you start to lose your grip like your body is like turning off you know some of the effort that you can put into it it's like okay this is not a stable situation i'm not going to let him like pull as hard as he needs to pull or whatever so there's definitely some components to that where you want to be able to feel like stable and confident and really focus on like you know hitting the muscle that you're trying to work on in the exercise so If we have movements or you have troubles doing those, we just swap them out for something that makes a lot more sense.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 53:10

Yeah. And I also think, like, if you have an exercise that is not even like, oh, I don't feel like my body is proportioned properly or, like, stable enough to do this exercise, but, like, you just fucking hate it. Yeah. pull it out and push put something else in because like step-ups i freaking hate step-ups like i just don't like them i hate them so much that like if you put it in my workout plan i might just not do my workout for the day because like i just loathe it yeah it makes me not want to do it so yeah

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 53:42

And that's that's a real that's a real thing that people have and you know step-ups aren't like a magical work like you can definitely swap those out for 15 other things so we just say hey what what are some of the things you can you don't hate we'll do those things no big deal.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 53:55

Or like what are the things you really like because i think everyone has like favorite things like i just really like anything with triceps or biceps yeah and so it's like obviously you're gonna like put a bunch of those in there for me and then like luckily i just live with a personal trainer so he's just like magics my program and hits all the rest of the shit with the stuff i don't dislike so

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 54:17

Yeah and this is just like a point in time too like if you go a couple months you're like okay hey, well, here's some stuff we were maybe neglecting with this, and then we'll add in some of those.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 54:24

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 54:25

Maybe at some point you add in like calf direct work or something like that. But it's always a trade-off of like, is doing calf work really worth the additional time I would need to spend in the gym and things like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 54:34

You'll be happy to know I do calf raises every time I brush my teeth.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 54:37

There you go.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 54:38

They're not weighted, but they're happening.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 54:40

Can you do 50?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 54:43

Yeah. I'd probably do 100.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 54:45

Oh, okay. Well, you might need to get a heavier toothbrush. I don't know.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 54:50

Hmm shark tank here we come

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 54:54

Why are you brushing your teeth in a weighted vest.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 55:02

Ooh, another use for the squatty potty.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 55:05

Oh, yeah. Yeah, so that's pretty much what we have about like building or picking a lifting program. And hopefully you get some concepts out of there that you can help to build your own program. If you have any questions, reach out and ask and I'll try to answer them the best I can.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 55:19

Or tell us your favorite exercises or the ones you freaking hate.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 55:23

Yeah, love to hear that too. I'm going to mentally guess it's Bulgarian squat squats. All right. So now let's get into our myth of the week this week. The myth of the week this week is that there's such a thing as humane meat.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 55:39

Yeah. I feel like you hear this a lot when you're starting to have conversations about like, oh, why are you vegan? And you're like, well, because I don't want to like harm animals. And then they're like, well, I buy humane meat. So that's not a problem. Or like, you know what I mean? Yeah. I feel like I've heard that a few times.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 55:55

Yeah, it's an interesting argument. And I guess what they mean is like not a completely tortured animal.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 56:02

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 56:02

But, yeah, I mean, so, first of all, cows specifically will naturally live to like 20 plus years old. Yeah. But when you slaughter a cow for beef, you're doing that when they're about two years old.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 56:14

Which is very sad. That's like 10% of a life expectancy. Yeah. So for a human, that would be like, what, eight years old? You just start killing people at eight years old? Yeah. That's sad.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 56:24

Yeah. And then.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 56:25

That doesn't sound humane.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 56:27

No. And then most of the meat you buy at the grocery store is also not coming from, like, you know, your neighbor's uncle's little small farm. It's coming from a factory farm.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 56:37

Yeah. Almost all of the meat you find in your grocery store is a factory farm, which are very cramped, not good living conditions. So, like, not only is the slaughter bad, but, like, they're having a horrible life. Yeah. Like, they are not happily running in the field, gleefully, chomping on grass. That's not the situation at all. Yeah. And a lot of, like, the farms are, like, stealing the baby cows from their mom. And this is, like, true for not just cows, right? Yeah, yeah. But, like, think about, like, a human mom. Like, if you just, like, took her kid from her. Like, because, you know, animals have emotions, too. Like, they've been pregnant and they just gave birth. And, like, their instinct is to nurture and be maternal towards her baby. And then it's gone. And I saw this really sad thing that was, like, when you pull a calf from its mother, they're both like kind of crying for each other for a very long period of time yeah so it's all very very sad and it's not humane at all

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 57:36

Yeah i mean when it comes to the humane meat stuff i guess my first thought has always been like if you wouldn't feel good with handling humans this way it's probably not humane right like i know humane humane doesn't mean that it's just a coincidence but that's still how i think about it like yeah if you're saying like the cow is well treated they had to go whatever the humane is supposed to mean to you it's like okay well would you be okay doing that with humans? Obviously not. That's insane.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 57:59

Or like a pet. Yeah. Right? Even a pet. Like a pet dog or cat. Like, would you be cool with, like, if that's how we treated your favorite animal? Like, if you pick your favorite animal, like, say my favorite animal is a dog. Yeah. But like, if we treated dogs the way we treat cows, like, I would be outraged. Yeah. And I think most people would be outraged. Yeah. It's like, they're, all animals like they all have the same kind of feelings and like emotions and they have they also can feel pain you know yeah so yeah yeah

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 58:28

I think like a lot of this argument usually revolves around like they they killed them quick or something it's like you're kind of missing the point.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 58:35

There yeah exactly like perhaps we shouldn't kill them at all and then i think the other caveat here is like if you don't need meat to live healthily why are we doing any of this at all yeah

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 58:48

That's That's been my biggest thing that's hard to unlearn since I've gone vegan. It's one of the main things I think about is like, I mean, we obviously don't need meat. So why are we doing any of that?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 58:59

Yeah. Like, how do you justify all this behavior if you don't need it and you can live a great life without it and maybe even a healthier life?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 59:06

And then as you learn more, it's like it would actually be easier to feed the planet if we didn't involve livestock. Yeah. Like, so I don't.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 59:13

And better for the environment and like a whole other plethora of positive things.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 59:18

Having a hard time seeing any benefits.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 59:20

Yeah. Sometimes I'll also hear people be like, well, I'm a hunter. So like the only meat I eat is from like animals I personally like kill.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 59:29

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 59:29

And still, I feel like that still is kind of like what you're saying, which is like these animals could live in the wild for a long time naturally and you're ending their life short. And, like, also, did you not watch Bambi? Because, like, I grew up watching Bambi and, like, I just remember crying so hard that, like, I'm pretty sure at some point, like, my mom had to, like, start skipping the beginning because it was too much for me. Yeah. You know, and, like, even today I would not be able to watch that movie without sobbing. Like, I don't know. I mean, I feel like you should go watch some more Disney movies. Yeah. Get some empathy.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:00:01

Yeah. So I think, like, the concept of, like, a humane meat is just pretty misled.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:00:07

Yeah. Yeah, the humane meat is plant-based.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:00:09

Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:00:11

Debunked

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:00:13

Cool so uh let's talk about some of the updates from the protein deficient vegan side of the house this week.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:00:18

Okay well as you may know and if you don't know and you have and you're dating someone you should probably know that valentine's day is next saturday february 14th if you celebrate that sort of thing um but so i've been working on some like higher protein like sweet treats that'd be for valentine's day and actually i'm putting out a vlog post on like an easy valentine's day gift that you could give your partner especially if they are a gym goer or someone who's focused on protein or just like i think this is a great gift but hey here's i'm gonna ruin the surprise for you you're getting a bag of edamame puffs i love it And love coupons that are redeemable for various high-protein desserts that include edamame puffs. And I calculated it out, and you can make all of them with one bag.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:01:09

That's really cool.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:01:10

I'm very excited. So it's like Rice Krispie Treats, various chocolatey confections. They're all really, really easy to make. So, like, if you're someone who doesn't dick around much in the kitchen and you're a little nervous about, like, oh, now I have to be a chocolatier. No, they're, like, easy. If I can do it, you can do it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:01:25

So, based on me tasting the recipes, I think what's going to happen is if I get the coupons at noon on February 14th, I'm going to hand them all back to you at noon and one minute on February 14th, and I'm going to have a really good February 15th.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:01:40

You're going to have a long day, because that's a lot. There's a lot. I think there's, like, eight coupons.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:01:47

No, but we had—you were testing some of the recipes. Yeah. And this morning we had like the chocolate covered hearts and the strawberry Rice Krispie treats for breakfast. And I had like 40 grams of protein with the same macros as a protein bar eating Valentine's Day candy. It's pretty cool.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:02:06

Yeah, I know edamame puffs are the best. But if you are soy free, they also make like a pea protein puff. or if you just hate that kind if you're not like a sweet person you could also give them like a bag of vital beet gluten or something yeah like something like that or like a bag of tvp you

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:02:25

Have a bunch of the bread like say yeah something like.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:02:27

That something and like make your own coupons that are like based on that specific ingredient i don't know i just thought it was fun like it's it's thoughtful because you're thinking about like oh i don't want to completely destroy somebody

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:02:38

Who has a protein goal.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:02:39

Yeah i don't want to destroy their calories and protein for weeks and months.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:02:44

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:02:44

But also it's like, it's kind of hand, it's handmade, you know, like it's homemade. Yeah. And I don't know. I think it's kind of thoughtful. Yeah. So I'm going to put a blog post together and if you want to steal my coupon book, you can like, um, Download it and print it or whatever.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:02:59

Yeah, sounds pretty cool.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:03:00

And then I used like this really pretty pink paper, so they're kind of fun looking. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:03:06

I think it's a really cool idea.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:03:08

Thanks. He does have to say that because I know where he sleeps, but I appreciate it nonetheless. Yeah. Okay, any updates from you?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:03:16

Yeah, so the people who are going through the Veganuary giveaway training are coming up on the end of their third week. We'll be starting like, so I'm separating the 12 weeks up into three kind of four week blocks.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:03:27

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:03:29

So in the second four-week box, we start to introduce some new concepts like gauging effort and maybe tailoring the program a little more towards the goals and adjusting things and stuff like that. So that'll be pretty exciting. Try to, you know, teach a little bit as we go through the program. And then also we took a vote inside the giveaway group and we're going to start doing kind of an adherence leaderboard internally. So that's kind of cool. So if you're supposed to do this many workouts a week and hit your calories and protein and stuff every day.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:03:55

Maybe you have a step goal.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:03:56

Maybe you have a step goal. So like you say, okay, these are all the checkboxes I was supposed to check in this week. And maybe I missed like two of the checkboxes. So we'll figure out like what percentage of those things you were supposed to do did you actually do and just use that percentage of, you know, tasks completed basically as a leaderboard.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:04:14

Actually, this is pretty cool, especially because I feel like I have always been a streak person of like work if it comes to steps or like adherence to like my macros and stuff. And so if I get on a good streak, I'm good for a long time. But as soon as that streak breaks, it's like depressing. You know what I mean? You're like, I was on 139 days step streak and then I got sick with covid or something. And now my step streak's gone and I have to start it again. And it feels like you're climbing back up a mountain. So, I don't know. I kind of like this because it's like a weekly grade kind of thing. And being a nerd who really like high school and school in general, like, I don't know. I really like the idea of a grade. Yeah. And, like, I don't know, it makes you kind of want to do better next week. But also, like, if you miss something, you're like, okay, not 100%, but, like, still like it 95%, which is a pretty good grade.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:05:07

I find it also, I think it's going to be helpful for... Like seeing your progress. So if you're like you're getting to a point where like, okay, not really making the progress. I thought I was. And then we look back at like the weekly scores and be like, okay, we were at like 40%, 60%. So like if we can bump up this adherence, you know, basically doing all the things you're supposed to do. It's called adherence. If we can bump up your adherence a little bit, then we're probably going to see better progress. So you can like directly see like, okay, well, like these low adherence scores were probably like impacting the progress I was trying to make.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:05:36

Yeah. I feel like it helps you troubleshoot like where there's a lack of progress as well.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:05:41

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:05:42

And then also, we're going to have a leaderboard in the group. And so, you know, you want to win. Most people are kind of competitive, even if they don't think they are.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:05:51

Even low stakes competition can be fun.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:05:53

I'm not going to be on the leaderboard because I wasn't part of the January giveaway, but I am going to be looking at your scores and trying to beat you secretly.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:06:03

So if you want to, you know, hang out with us, chat with some of the people that are doing the giveaway training and also some other people that are just coalescing around the discord, you should join.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:06:11

We have the best people. Yeah, they're really cool. I swear. They're all really interesting and fun and nice and funny.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:06:17

Yeah. A lot of good stuff. So if you look in our show notes, you can see the Deficient Vegans Discord link. If you're not familiar with Discord, it's just basically like a chat platform. So there's a bunch of channels you can chat in about different things.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:06:27

And you can make new vegan friends. That's right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:06:29

So check that out for sure. Also, if you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, if you can leave us a review, that's really helpful for helping us show up in search. and then if you're on Spotify or YouTube you can also leave a comment for us.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:06:42

We love comments.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:06:43

We do. And then also in the show notes are our websites social media if you want to get in touch or kind of read about some of the stuff we're doing on the blogs you can check those out. Feel free to send a message on like Instagram or like contact forms on the websites.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:06:56

Hit us up anywhere. We'll find it eventually.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:06:59

Jump in the Discord. We're right there.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:07:00

Yes. Yeah you can ask us anything in the Discord. There you go.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:07:02

Alright. I think that's it for this week. You want to say bye? Bye guys. Bye everybody.