👋 Hi! Tell us about yourself and your training
My Name is Paulo Cavalcante Muzy, or, just Muzy as I am known in my country Brazil and some nearby places by distance or by language.
I am a 40 year old medical doctor, board certified in orthopaedic surgery and sports medicine. I have worked in these areas since I was a medical student in Brazil in the early 2000’s.
Today I do my practice in Sao Paulo, but I lecture and give seminars, conferences, workshops all around Brazil and most of the regions of the globe like Europe, Japan and even the Middle East.
I work attending patients from 9am until 9pm, sometimes more, mostly because some of them got injuried and I plan my surgeries late at night during weekdays or in the weekend when I am at home and not giving lectures anywhere.
My typical day in life is to wake up at 5:30am, prep my childrens breakfast (I have 2 daughters, 15 and 8 years old), go to gym 6am, come back home at 7am, do 25 to 45 min of cardio in my assault airbike and then prep my wife’s breakfast (she is a slow waker…).
By 9 I am at my office where I usually attend medical consults from 8 to 12. 60% of them are people who messed up their metabolism with steroids or hormonal implants.
It’s a minucious job, but I like every second of it.
Because I am the Medical Director of IFBB Brazil among some other responsabilities, one of my passions is to treat people and show them how to achieve their goals without putting themselves at risk.
In my life there have been other sports. Because we are in Brazil, I trained Jiu Jitsu for 12 years.
I had to stop it when I finished my medical residence because at that time I did 5 night shifts per week and my time was so tiny that sometimes I had to choose between sleeping or eating, but I promised myself that I will go back in the next years to come.
I have done strength training since I was eleven years old and never got more than 1 month away from it since I started.
Whatever it took me, I got my training done. I really don’t know what made me so trilled about strength training.
Wasn’t actors, films or anything like it. Maybe it was a possibility to build something that I would never imagine where would get me. The willpower I got, beside the body that was being made, made me do the most difficult and more important decisions in my life.
Today, with a busy schedule, the only thing that I can have personal time to take care of is bodybuilding, and it fulfill all my needs as it does with my free time.
If I am not training, I am studying how to make my process more efficient.
I got one big sponsor in Brazil, Max Titanium Supplements, where I work as a Technical Consultant for Scientific Matters, Information and Customer Education and Media Communication and Positioning.
This go straight towards what I like the most in bodybuilding: the necessity of keep studying and improving knowledge as a main tool of body progression.
As every doc graduated in federal school, I had to join the army in 2005 because Brasil it is compulsory. Although it is compulsory, I had one of the greatest time of my life performing tasks that I would never could do in civilian life.
Shooting, surviving, crossing jungles, piloting armoured combat cars was more fun for me than I ever imagine and as the time for training and graduating at the military preparation course was over, I already was assigned to a battalion to be 2o lieutenant.
In the battalion I was chief of medical staff and took care of almost thousand soldiers between the most fresh recruit to the more con-decorated colonel.
I’ve learned precious things in the army that I would take to my entire life as discipline, strength of will and duty sense. Even though its been more than ten years ago, I still keep this values and many others for my present life and I thing they have a great correlation to my professional success.
⏱ Describe a typical day of training
I don’t use dogmatic styles of training. I use training just to get to fatigue, yes… but not always. I use training until complete failure, yes but not always either.
What I do is to be well nourished and not confuse restlessness with a bad diet. By doing so I can pay attention to how my body responds to training: if I use strength but do not feel my muscle pump, I lower the weights and do more reps.
If my cardiac frequency starts to be raised all the time no matter the intervals I use to rest, is time to finish the training session, and like this over and over.
I usually train for 50 minutes twice a day. From Monday to Friday:
- 1. deltoids/ biceps AM – triceps/calves PM
- 2. Quadriceps / abdominal AM – hamstrings / calves PM/li>
- 3. Back AM – Pectoral PM/li>
- 4. Hamstrings / abdominal am – quadriceps / calves PM/li>
- 5. Deltoids / triceps AM – biceps / abdomen PM/li>
I always do 20 min low intensity cardio after training.
Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays mornings I train with a personal trainer.
For bulking I raise weights, cardio and calories. For cutting I use intensification technics like rest-pause, cluster sets, drop sets, use high intensity interval training for cardio and lower my calories just a little.
Isolate Whey protein is always on my pre-workout and post-workout, creatine is always on my post-workout and I keep track of my training with a training log that I do on app Notes plus the data I collect from my apple watch.
I don’t have favorite exercise: when I start to like one, I put on weight and reps until I dislike it (LOL).
👊 How do you keep going and push harder?
To be a winner is to consistently challenge yourself to do a better work
Pushing harder is a matter of consistency, not intensity. If you worked out your entire life, it’s a lot of harder than some guy who did a prep for a competition and after it, winning or losing it, became arrogant, fat and lazy…
I just think for today. I don’t bother with tomorrow or I will get anxious. I don’t bother with yesterday or I will become depressed. I like to think that I owe myself a good training today because yesterday I did one or I must have a excellent training because yesterday was not.
My mindset does not change a bit in any day. I won’t let it. To be a winner is to consistently challenge yourself to do a better work, in any way it is possible: if is weight so, it will be weight. If it means repetitions, it will be all repetitions that I can give.
If I feel that I won’t endure the training, then I know that I have to go anyway. To do anything in any amount of any weight becausee I know that we all lose to our mind sometimes, so, I’m being prepared for that.
I don’t let my mind beat me: I make my body to respond.
🏆 How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
I am very fine now, I plan doing the next Terminator (LOL), just kidding…
I plan to maintain my improvements. I am reaching a work condition where I will be able to traing and eat more often and sleeping more also.
I haven’t got to my best condition yet, but sure I will…
🤕 How do you recover, rest and handle injuries?
Who recovers faster and better, train more. Who train more, develops more.
I have a sore shoulder (right one) and a sore knee (right one also).
I sleep around 4 to 5 hours a night, but don’t do this: I only endure this regimen because I’ve doing this for a very long time.
I travel from 40 to 50 weekends per year to lecture, almost every weekend, so It is a rare thing to be home Saturday and Sunday…
Actually, the hardest part is travels… I always get somewere to train, also manage liquid meals to handle the weekend routine, but because of the flights and airport procedures and waiting, my stress goes through the roof!
For me, either performance and bruise healings depends on recovery strategies: who recovers faster and better, train more. Who train more, develops more.
So a good part of my work is developing non-steroidal ways to improve recovery, and I do them in nutrition, exercises and supplementation.
In Brazil I use Max Titanium Supplements because they have fewer chemicals added, so it’s flavor is very mild and the protein rate of the protein powders are very high.
In Brasil we also have another facilitation: Manipulation Pharmacies. I develop a series of non-steroidal compounds using phyto-chemicals, aminoacids, proteins, oils and some kind of carbs too to improve rate and speed of recovery.
Some of them works helping satellite cells to migrate, others to lesser the loss of muscle by downregulatin myostatin and ubiquitin-proteassome pathway.
This, besides being effective, is as fun to arrange as if it were a chess game. The more you play and the more you study, better are the results of your moves… I love this!
🍎 How is your diet and what supplements do you use?
My diet program have 300 g of protein and 80 kcal for each gram of nitrogen of it, about 6,5 g of raw protein.
It means that I consume 80 kcals for every gram of nitrogen consumed for it is incorporated to my muscle mass.
The studies show that it is as important to know how many calories your diet has as it is to know how many calories per gram of nitrogen your diet has to ensure that protein wont be wasted out through urine.
I use pulse feeding to arrange my meals, also because it has a robust body of scientifical evidences that tell us that if we consume our diet protein each 3 hours, we will be able to produce more muscle.
Also I keep track of calories, protein, carbs and fat to try to maintain them as balanced as they must be.
Bodybuilding is not an exaggeration of food or a nutrient, is a perfect balanced way of nourishing the human body in constant development.
Of course I don’t drink alcohol, because some evidences shows us that it can be responsible from 5 to 30% of muscle loss, so it is incompatible to mass development.
I go real easy on coffee because I get anxious easily, and can dehydrate mildly but enough to impair muscular recuperation.
👍 What has inspired and motivated you?
I like to train in silence. TV or music usually is pretty annoying to me, and always I am tempted to turn off both of them when I arrive at my condominium gym and both of them are turned on.
I think that since we can hear our favorite songs on private with earplugs, there is no reason to keep one loudspeaker loudspeaking anything around. Very frequently I go to the applieances and turn them of.
Speaking of it, it might sound like a crancky old farth, but when Eduardo Correa, my personal friend since 10 years ago, told me that time under tension was the language that muscle absorb information, I made sure to get rid of anything that might disturb my mind making my body act like that…
✏️ Advice for other people who want to improve themselves?
Knowing who you are is not bad, it is realistic.
Improving yourself means your will must improve first and more important of all, your way of thinking and therefore acting.
Being aware of what you are thinking and doing accordingly.
The worst I can imagine is when someone decides to start to bodybuild and try to copy a Mr. Olympia training or dieting… one must know that he should not compare his beginning with the ones in the middle or ending…
If people don’t do that they will lose their will and even talk badly about the sport.
Knowing who you are is not bad, it is realistic. Bad would be if anyone thinks less about himself or more then really is
🤝 Are you taking on clients right now?
As a medical doctor, I run a clinic with a team of 8 health care professionals like personal trainers, nutritionists, and physical therapists besides a team of 30 personal trainers to teach our patients how they suppose to train.
We have been open since 2005, so, in this 14 years of work, we manage to gather more then 14.000 thousand people (14.486 to be more precise…).
Every day we take about 10 to 12 patients, answer about 150 e-mail messages and 300 whatsapp messages.
It is a lot of work, but it gave to us a lot of experience, and this experience plus the scientific part of this job takes me to lecture so much…
We are a clinic, a complete set of health professionals dedicated to physical performance, knowing the differences of our patients and respecting them.
Whether a patient is a housewife or a bodybuilder, we offer solutions that can be done specifically for their cases with the purpose to give each one the chance to become the best version of themselves.
A great body and health is not for those who can afford it. It’s for those who want this so bad that they are willing to change their life in this pursuit.
This change results in better health, and a better health becomes a constantly improving body.
📝 Where can we learn more about you?
My website is clinicamuzy.com.br, but you can see me also on Instagram as @paulomuzy or on Youtube as Paulo Muzy’s Channel. I will be waiting for you there!
