 Hit training sucks, it just doesn't work. You know why? Nobody does it right, okay? So here's the thing, hit training done properly is incredible for fat loss, especially in the short terms. Very fast, acting, very effective, but almost nobody does it right. So here's what we're gonna do today. We're gonna give away maps hit to when you lucky viewers. Now this is hit training done the right way. We programmed it properly. We made it so that the hit training in this particular workout is effective. It's not just doing a bunch of exercises, succession to make you sweat, it's done the right way. Here's how you can win access to maps hit. Leave a comment below in the first 24 hours that we drop this episode, subscribe to this channel and turn on your notifications if we pick your comment as the best comment, we'll notify you and you'll get free access to maps hit. Now everybody else, check this out. So in today's episode, we talk about hit training, how everybody does it wrong, how to do it the right way. Some of you may want to just follow a program written out for you by fitness professionals and experts like us. So what we're doing right now was we're putting maps hit on sale. It's actually 50% off. So if you're interested, head over to mapsfitnessproducts.com and use the code December 50 for half off. By the way, that code also is gonna work on maps split. So if you're more interested in just bodybuilding style workout programming, use that code, get half off maps split as well. All right, here comes the show. Boys, we are entering into hit training season. I think this is when everybody starts or it's close soon. Everybody starts to- Let's hit it. That's actually an interesting point. Do you think that we are heading into the most popular time for hit or do you think it is heading into like springtime? No, I think so because yeah, after the holidays, it's like everybody gets in this hustle of like, oh no, like I need to do something about this and what's the quickest way I can lose weight? Yeah, I remember specifically, so I started training professionally, I guess as a kid, right? So I was 1997 or 98, I started working in gyms and hit didn't exist, right? The acronym high intensity interval training wasn't a thing. Cardio was doing the stair master or the treadmill or the bike. In fact, ellipticals I don't even think existed at that time and that was that. And then I remember, I don't remember when this happened. I wanna say- Oh, 102. Was it early 2000, 2001? The reason why I remember so vividly is because I was a new trainer, I was pretty brand. I was like maybe a year or two into the business and maybe like we could probably go back and like fact check me on these when it really started to, I mean, maybe it started before, but it became popular. Yeah. Cause I was in the gyms, I was working in gyms in 2000 and it wasn't but a year or two later, did it become like, I mean, and being completely transparent, like I trained like every fucking client hit for like a year. Everybody did. Like didn't matter your goal, didn't matter if you want to build muscle, lose body fat, all the current studies that were being touted at that time were related to hit and all its benefits. Well, I remember specifically there was one study that is the reason why every trainer did this, especially new trainers. Yeah, I read that one, yep. The experienced trainers didn't. I do remember that. It was all of us new trainers, but there was a study that came out that showed that something like, 15 minutes or 20 minutes of hit training was as effective as, I don't remember, I mean to throw out a number was something like an hour worth of traditional steady-state cardio. So all of a sudden everybody was like, oh my gosh, I could get the same potential calorie burning effect or fat loss effect or whatever with a less than half of the time. And so it just became this huge thing. And it was probably early 2000s. I do remember that. And I remember all of a sudden nobody did traditional cardio. Everybody was doing hit training. I do remember though, too, that study. The one I read at least was very controlled. It had a guy on a bike and it wasn't an assault bike, it was something very similar to that where they were doing just constant sprints and then they would rest for a brief minute. They would do sprints again. So it was like, it was different than what all of a sudden hit became. But that was definitely the study that then a lot of trainers used to justify these like... So that's interesting that we're all, I mean, we all remember different studies. So I remember the muscle sparing one. So I remember the research that was done around how muscle sparing it was. Like, oh, and where you could do this cardio, burn the most amount of fat, but then not, because here's the thing, I remember being the skinny kid trying to build muscle, I didn't want to lose muscle. So cardio was just not happening. And so when this study came out and said, wow, I could do this cardio and actually not lose muscle, that it was the most muscle sparing way for you to do cardio, that's what triggered it for me, or at least what I remember. Now, Doug just pulled up a article that said this was popular in the 70s. I call bullshit. Yeah, well, they didn't call it hit training. I don't think, I think they might have called. You know what, there's a... I mean, we should credit the coach who did it, right? So it's coach Peter Coe is supposedly the first person to like really make it popular, but it wasn't popular then. It wasn't, when we... No, no, there was no workout. When I was in high school and we were lifting weights, I never even heard the term hit until the 2000s. You know, the closest thing I remember that was old? And I only remember this because the name was so funny as a kid. I thought it was hilarious. Fartlek. You ever know what Fartlek is? Oh yeah. It's like that. You run and then you walk. Wait, wait, go back, go back Doug. It says Arthur Jones. We should bring that back. Go up right there, right there. Oh, it's the Arthur Jones. No, his was high intensity training, not high intensity interval training. So Arthur Jones is the one that pioneered. Not a less. One set to failure. The famous Casey Viator study, the Denver Project. I was just saying, he wasn't known for hit? No, he was not known for hit. But this came out and there was a study that showed that, oh, it burns as many calories, but you gotta do less time. It spares muscle. There was another study that showed it's got some positive hormone effects. Now there's some truth to this and then there's also a little bit of false expectations. Now the truth in it is that, yes, in a head-to-head comparison, so long as it's appropriate and all things are equal, it is more muscle sparing because it's the resistance training form of cardio. So let me explain, right? Yeah, that's like saying like a hammer is incredible when hitting a nail. Anything else, it's not very useful. Well, you know what it is. It's not very good for screws. You know what it reminds me of? It's like when people, you ever talk to like the average person who doesn't know much about exercise and you say, hey, you should try resistance training. It's really effective. Oh, I use dumbbells and barbells. You're like, oh yeah, how do you use them? I do the body pump class in my gym or I do this large circuit. And then you have to explain to them, well, you're doing cardio with weights. Even though you're using resistance, you're actually making it more like cardio. Hit training, although it is a form of cardiovascular training, is more like resistance training than traditional cardiovascular training because of the short durations of maximal intensity and it's more related to like sprinting. So you're gonna get more of that muscle sparing effect than you would if you did, you know, steady state kind of long duration, low intensity type of cardio. But the problem now is what typically happens in the fitness space is a study or two will come out and so long as it feeds the popular narrative, which is the harder the better, oh cool, we can have short time. Oh, I can beat the crap out of my clients, then it's gonna become popular and this is just what tends to happen. And it got abused and it got applied poorly and I'll be honest with you, let me ask you guys a question. How often do you see hit training be applied appropriately or properly in the gym? Never, I can't think of an example other than maybe somebody else training. Never, almost never. It's used the way you just explain, which is most people are just doing cardio with weights. Most people are attracted to the sweat, the burn, the high intensity aspect of hit. And so the protocol, the prerequisites get kind of thrown out the door and it's just can I make this client sweat and burn and feel like they got an incredible workout and what really that ends up mirroring more like running on a treadmill and steering wheel. Yes, you're using dumbbells or barbells to do it, but it actually looks more like, what's going on inside your body? Looks more like what happens when you get on a treadmill than when you actually lift weights. Totally, because if you apply hit training properly and you do it right in a short period of time because your body will adapt to it after a certain period of time, but if you do it right, it's extremely effective, but it also has to be appropriate for the person. There are people that hit training, I would never apply hit training to a lot of people. Like if I train somebody who is deconditioned, hasn't worked out in a while, maybe doesn't have good stability or maybe they're overstressed, you get that type A individual that's just super high stress, hit training is terrible. It's a super high intense way of getting their body to crash or injure themselves. Unfortunately, the people I just labeled are the ones that often gravitate towards hit training. So it has to be for the right person. You have to be able to move well, not be in a super high stress lifestyle because hit is extremely high stress on the body. It's a form of exercise, it's very high stress. And if you're not any of those two things and you do it right and there's more that goes into it, then it can be very effective. I mean, that really, I guess is what, why usually it sounds like we're against hit or at least me personally, it's just because I've seen so many examples of people out there that can't even maintain proper posture just through like a strength exercise where you're just supposed to be controlled. You're supposed to have control over your body and without restriction in the joint, without pain in the joint and be able to apply these movements with ease and then to then jump them into something that's like really explosive and fast paced. It's just to me, like why are you doing that? I don't think you come off like you don't like it or hate it or that you're against it. I think that it's, I think you're on point. I think that it's of all the modalities of training out there, it's one of the most abused. Clearly 100%. It's just that, it's not that you're anti it or there's not tremendous value in it or it's not applicable to certain clients. It's just that when you look at like all the different ways of training, like a lot of people don't abuse yoga. You know what I'm saying? It's not a popularly abused. This is an abused way of training because of the things that Sal was alluding to with the burn and the intensity. It feeds into all that. Yeah, and the mainstream narrative, it feeds into that. Therefore it happens to be one of the most abused. Yeah, and here's one of the other reasons why it's abused or used improperly is that people oftentimes, this is true for all forms of exercise, people judge the effectiveness by how hard it feels or how much they suffer through the workout. And because HIIT training literally has intensity in the name, now crappy coaches and trainers and popular fitness media companies can sell programs that just do that. And so then people do it and they're like, oh my God, I could barely finish and I'm breathing hard and I'm sweating a little. This is a great workout when in fact it's not. Here's one of the biggest, number one biggest mistakes I see with HIIT training. When I examine HIIT workouts, which if you look at all the most popular workouts that are sold to the, like workout programs that are sold to the average person, HIIT style workouts have to be near the top, right? That style of training's gotta be up near the top. So when I look at all of them, I almost never see great workout programming. It's almost like, and this is probably what happens is they throw together difficult exercises together and they say, you know, it would be really hard after doing jump squats, burpees. Oh, you know what we could do next? Let's throw in some, you know, some windmills or let's throw in some, you know, whatever to make it really hard. And there's almost no focus on programming. It's almost like the exercises are interchangeable. It doesn't matter so long as you do them in a row. Well, I clearly remember doing that myself. I remember sitting down and writing HIIT workouts for clients back in 0102 and what decided, what exercise I had put there was I was always thinking, what was gonna elevate their heart rate up the most, right? What could I do? So let's say I'm trying to attack the full body. Like this is exactly the thought process of my programming back then. This is why I wasn't a great trainer. But I also know that almost all trainers did it this way. It's like, okay, today's a full body routine. I gotta train this client. So I wanna, I gotta hit buys, try shoulders with that. Well, I know that when my client does a bicep curl, a tricep push down and a lateral raise, their heart rate doesn't get up there very high because it's very small muscles that we're hitting. So what I wanna do is I wanna do a squat first, then I'm gonna do that, then I'm gonna do this. And then when I go to the next series of exercises, I'm gonna pick another compound lift first and then do the smaller muscles because I'm gonna elevate the heart rate to keep it up while I do all these other ones. So I get the most calorie burn. That was the thought process when writing a HIIT program back then. And I still think it is today. So when you see, and that's what I see when I walk in a gym and I see trainers training clients is I always see a compound or plyometric exercise paired with the little auxiliary movements. And you know what they're doing, they're using those compound lifts or plyometric exercises to elevate the heart rate so that they're burning more calories when they do the simple movements. Yeah, it's always jump squats, jump lunges, squat press, burpees, all just kind of thrown together. Sometimes jumping jacks. Mountain climbers. Yeah, they'll throw mountain climbers in there because the trainer's like, what else can I do? I ran out of exercises. This'll make them really tired. I like the term programming when we talk about designing a good workout because we can take that word and as an analogy, we can look at programming for like technology or computers, right? If we break it down and I'm not a programmer with computers, but I can safely say that a lot of programming is basically ones and zeros, right? So it's ones and zeros. But those numbers aren't interchangeable. I can't just throw a bunch of ones and zeros out on a computer screen and then expect it to make a program. There has to be an order and there's a way you put them together that creates the beauty of whatever program you're trying to create. We'll now take that understanding and apply it to exercise. Rather than ones and zeros, what good trainers and coaches have to work with are exercises, tempo, rep ranges, exercise order, what we start with, what we finish with, what follows each exercise. And I'm sure, by the way, an engineer would tell you that's what coding is like, too. Absolutely. That there's all these different variables. You're saying ones and zeros because we know nothing about it. 100%. I guarantee an engineer would say there's all kinds of variables just like that. 100%. And good programming results in the desired result. The results, it ends up with the result you're looking for, fat loss, muscle gain, balance, symmetry, aesthetics, right? If I just throw a bunch of stuff onto a piece of paper and say, here's your workout and there's no emphasis on good programming, what you're gonna get at most, at most is you'll move and you'll sweat. Yeah, you'll get tired. Here's what you'll get at worst. Injury, overstress your body, muscle loss, you're gonna feel like crap, hormone dysfunction, right? Which often happens when people just do a lot of these workouts because the programming sucks. So, number one with high intensity interval training, the programming matters as much as it does with any other type of workout. Arguably more. You're right, because the intensity and how you're working so quickly that a small, like the wrong programming, the wrong exercise at the wrong time is gonna greatly increase risk of injury or reduce the chance of really good results. So, programming makes a huge difference and most hip programs are not written with that intent whatsoever. They're just written with exercises that are hard. This is why, for example, when we created our hip program, we spent a lot of time. We actually sat down and spent a lot of time figuring out the order and the reps and how we're gonna do these particular exercises because we know that that's one of the most important features of a good workout. Especially, yeah, because we're doing these with speed now and we're cutting our rest time. And so, what does that transition look like going into another exercise? Like as a coach, you gotta make sure you're setting your client up for success. So, there's not a whole lot of things you gotta battle in terms of like being able to control their body, be able to be composed and not fatigue them too early, right, in the workout and something that they can kind of string out. So, all of those little factors matter when you're stacking these exercises together. Well, for the audience that actually cares about this stuff, it was the largest launch and the biggest program launch we'd ever did in mind pumps history. By the way, we didn't come out with that program until we wrote lots of other prerequisite programs. And I remember that, I remember that. Our marketing team was so mad at us for not coming out with it first, but we're like, we can't responsibly do this until we have these other things that people can set themselves up. Also, the only program of all programs that we have that has a warning on it because we know that it's abused so frequently by people and that we don't encourage people to stay in that. And of all the programming that we have, it's the one that I would not recommend that people run in a loop. You could get away with running maps in a Bollock all year long, the way it's phased, it's set up. And it doesn't mean that you couldn't technically do hit, but we don't recommend it because that's what most people do. No, I think the best way to apply hit training, if you want maximum results, is to use it as a way to interject it into other workout programming. So two or three months. Interrupt all the other maps for a while. Yeah, so like you'll follow maps in a Bollock and then you'll do maps hit. And then you'll go and do maybe maps performance. And then you could do maps hit again. And in that short period of time, it's very effective at burning body fat, improving stamina, improving strength endurance and that kind of stuff. Go ahead. Well, I was gonna say, and this kind of leads into the next point, but like back on the programming side of it, it may look simple on paper. And this is something like as far as a critique, if it gets any critiques, the way that we program this is because we intentionally made sure that the flow was right, that as you're performing these exercises, you're still able to do them with correct form and composure. And to do that, you're not gonna wanna throw the kitchen sink out there just to wear you out, which is what you see on TV, which is what you see in magazines. And you see all these like crazy ass workouts that have like all the coolest, craziest looking exercise and moves that are worthless. So, just to bring it back down to still it down to what matters and to perform it and execute it with perfect form is something that is a big deal. For some reason of all the forms of exercise, hit training somehow gets a pass for perfect form. Now, bad trainers and bad coaches and people who don't know will have bad form when they do almost anything because they're just after the burn and the sweat. But even I've even seen decent trainers take form and throw out the window when it comes to hit training because the goal they think with it training is the intensity aspect of it. So it's almost like, well, your form can be a lot looser with this exercise because we're doing hit or you don't have to be perfect. That is so wrong. It's cause they have the wrong people doing it. That's why you see it's most popular used with people that are overweight and relatively new to the gym as this quick way to get them to shred body fat and hopefully hang on to some muscle or build a little bit of muscle. So the person that is doing this is not the right clientele that you see at least most. I mean, you see some people that are advanced and athletes that are doing it, which is fine. They're probably a better avatar for that. But I think why you see that is because you have these new people, you have coaches and trainers that wanna show this client quick results because they have a lot of weight to shed. They know if they keep them moving and burning a ton of calories, forget that their burpees look ugly and their jump boxes look like their knees are gonna explode. I know they're burning and they're burning a ton of calories and they're gonna lose some weight from this. So they're applying it to what I think is the wrong population of people. Yeah, I think just to illustrate this, if you imagine every exercise has, let's say two meters on every exercise and one meter is how effective you can make that exercise and then there's another meter that says how dangerous or how high the potential of risk is or that you can make this particular exercise. The better your form is, the higher the potential of the effectiveness of the exercise and the lower the potential of risk of injury for that exercise. The worse your form is, the less results you get from it and the higher risk of injury. This is true for any type of workout program, especially for HIIT training because HIIT training has a lot of fatigue involved. So perfect form is absolutely crucial. Now with HIIT training, oftentimes what people will do, and this is part of HIIT training is you'll do an exercise until maybe you can't perform the exercise anymore, but people misunderstand that as I do this until I can't move anymore. No, you do it until your perfect form is no longer perfect. That means you're done. Now we move on to the next movement because the second your form isn't perfect, we're losing effectiveness. We're actually wasting time with what we're doing and we're only increasing risk of injury and what are you here for, right? You're here to get maximum results and not hurt yourself and the way to do that is for perfect form. So HIIT training, you have to have a very strong emphasis on form and you almost never see that with any kind of fatigue-based program. It's almost like it gets a pass because it's HIIT training. Yeah, it's just kind of funny if you just think about like continually practicing bad behavior, what are you gonna replicate after that, right? So it's just about making sure that what you're doing is quality. So that way when you actually go to use this or like apply this to other workouts, you still maintain that good behavior, that good form. Yeah, well, a good squat is, for example, done properly, is extremely safe. It strengthens the lower body. It works the quadriceps, the hamstrings, the glutes. It works the core and the stabilizers. You get some upper thoracic stability. It's a phenomenal exercise, okay? A squat done poorly trains all those muscles I just explained, not very well, and now you've dramatically increased your risk of pain and injury in your knees, in your low back, in your hips, in your ankles, which is why HIIT training has a higher rate of injury than other forms of exercise. Again, because people don't realize that perfect form is crucial for all forms of resistance training, but especially for HIIT style training. Well, I think part of what leads to that is not only do I think the wrong people are doing it, but also the next point is a major reason for this, and that is the lack of rest periods. So not only do I see the wrong people doing it, but then I see coaches and trainers teaching it, again, like cardio, where there's either no rest periods or very minimal rest periods for the client to fully recover so then they can go perform that perfect form. When you are exhausted and then you're trying to perform a complex movement like a squat, squats are hard with rest. You got perfect rest. And you start off on a squat. Yeah, you rest for four minutes and it's still hard to have good rest. Yeah, a squat is still a very technical exercise. Same thing with a jump box or some of these movements that you see people using in these circuits. And that's another reason why I think this is why you see it poorly programmed and failed as the lack of the rest periods. The problem is with HIIT training, we identify it as no rest. And the truth is you should still have rest. It's not like rest periods with traditional resistance training. So traditional resistance training, you're probably on average resting 90 seconds, maybe a little less, maybe a little more depending on what phase you're in your training. With HIIT training, it is true that you rest less but you still need to rest long enough to be able to perform the next exercise with perfect form. So you don't need to be fully rested. It is more cardio than other forms of resistance training but you still need to have enough rest to get your composure so that you can perform the next exercise with perfect form. That's one of the reasons why the form is so crappy with HIIT training. And that's why too, it's on an individual basis. Not everybody is gonna have the same type of conditioning coming into it. And so you have to pay attention to those things yourself to know when your form starts to degrade, when I can't perform this exercise correctly and then how long it takes for me to regain my composure so I know, okay, now this exercise, I can do this with good form. Well, isn't this also one of the number one reasons why it is effective is the heart rate variability. Is the- God, so glad you said that. It's not just keeping it up the whole time. Yeah, if you're just keeping it up all the time, sure you may be quote unquote burning more calories. So it's an interval. What makes HIIT training so beneficial is the recovery process. Is the heart rate coming back down towards the resting heart rate and then the climb again and the coming back down. If you don't have the peaks and valleys like that, you lose a lot of the benefits from it. Then it is, if it's just peaked all the time, then it's just cardio. That's all you're doing. If you want the real benefits of HIIT, one of the most valuable things that you can do is allow the heart rate to come all the way back down, which is, this is where you have to modify a person. I could have one person where all they need to rest is 30 seconds to a minute because they're in cardio interventions there. Yeah, and they can go right back at it. Then I have another person, I might have to rest three minutes for their heart rate to drop back down for me to go back at it again. So you've got to be able to do that. Yeah, you know, in fact, when you look at the most basic forms of HIIT that are very simple performed on like an air dime or a treadmill, what they tell you to do is to train at maximal heart rate and then wait till your heart rate comes down. However long that takes before you go and do another interval, a lot of people don't consider that. And to them, it's like, I do the sprint and then I cruise for 20 seconds and I got sprinted again, regardless of my heart rate, which does completely defeat the purpose. So good HIIT training would offer you some type of a complex where you're doing multiple exercises. And then you should probably rest long enough to let the heart rate come down, compose yourself before you do it again. Not what a lot of people do, which is they go, go, go until they can't move anymore. And you know, back to Adam's point, like if I do a really hard set of squats where I rack the bar and I'm like, I can't do another rep with good form, you can tell me to do a set of dumbbell curls and it'll look crappy right afterwards. I'm so exhausted, a simple exercise like dumbbell curls is gonna look really bad. I'm gonna have bad form. So I also in between exercises have to give myself at least enough rest to be able to compose myself, not as long as I would with a traditional resistance training workout, but enough to where, okay, I can do some good quality reps. Otherwise, this is the truth. If you don't follow those things that I just said, the exercises don't matter. It really, no joke. It means we'll jump in place. I swear to God, I used to tell my trainers this, that would work for me. After they do a training session, then I would do like a training session for the trainers because I don't want to isolate a specific trainer, but I would say to them, if your clients are looking like this, you're not giving them enough rest to compose themselves, I don't know why you guys are putting different exercises together. Hey, maybe we'll just do this. Yeah, he might as well just have them jump in place and run in circles. Save your money, totally. Because it doesn't matter. And this is to people who are thinking about hiring coaches. If that's what you want to do, you don't need to hire anybody, literally move for 30 minutes real hard and it's the same thing. So the form is crucial and the rest is a tool that's used to ensure a perfect form, which brings me to the next thing. This is a super big pet peeve of mine. For some reason, one of the most popular forms of exercise in hit training is plyometrics. Now here's the irony of all that. Of all forms of exercise, plyometrics has to be the most specific in terms of how it needs to be applied. Plyometrics literally are, the reason why they exist at all is to improve explosive ability. Now to improve explosive ability or to improve strength ability or endurance ability, you have to train it. So I can't get more explosive with plyometrics if I'm not training it explosively. It's impossible to train plyometrics explosively when I'm just doing it in a fatigue circuit. So now I'm just jumping up and down. There's zero explosiveness going on. All I'm doing is jumping in place until I can't move anymore. This kind of speaks a little to the biomechanics of it, but really like what you're trying to do to generate as much force as possible at that one instance. And to be able to do that, you can't have any inkling of fatigue. And so to be able to now take my body through this entire process where I need this triple extension, I need all these joints to communicate with each other at once and to perform this explosively, I need to make sure I'm under the utmost composure and focus. It takes a lot of focus. So to be able to apply plyometrics properly for one, you need a lot of focus and concentration and you need to have your wits about you. You need to be not in any state of fatigue. And then also back to the original point of the prerequisites. So to be able to apply these exercises, we got to make sure our joints are healthy enough to handle that kind of stress. Again, the programming on this, right? The reason why people or trainers do this is only because it's hard. It's just like I was saying earlier about the squatting and the barbell complexes, that when you would write those, when I would write those, when I was 20 years old on these, I would go, okay, oh man, jump boxes, those are really fucking hard. So I'll put that first and then I'll do this exercise. And it was literally the whole reason why I'm putting in there is not because I'm gonna try and help this person jump better or improve their form or work their quads so much. It was that I know this is going to elevate the shit of their heart rate and then I would go to these other exercises. And it couldn't be more programmed, more awful than that because how risky plyometrics are. I did the same thing and that's exactly it. It's like, I'm gonna pick a hard exercise just to make you tired. I can do that with much safer, like if that's your goal, if your goal is just to get tired, don't pick plyometrics because what you're doing is you're picking exercises now that have a high risk of injury when you're really tired. If you want to train explosive ability, fast twitch muscle fibers, right? These are the muscle fibers that have the greatest potential for visible change. These are the ones that grow and sculpt. Then you have to do it explosively. You can't do it super fatigued. Otherwise, it's just, again, it's endurance training, in which case, don't do plyometrics. And then back to Justin's point, if you can't squat with perfect form and stability, then you have no business squat jumping. Like all you're doing is adding an element of explosiveness to something that you can't do that when it's not being explosive, right? But if you can do it perfectly and you do everything right and it's programmed properly, plyometrics have tremendous benefits. They can really change the body and they have so much carryover to your other exercises. I mean, power lifters. Okay, if you look at power lifting, for people who don't know, it's a sport where people compete in the bench press, the deadlift and the squat. And when you watch power lifting competitions, they don't look explosive. I mean, they're lifting maximal weight, they're grinding the weight up. It might take them three seconds to get the weight up and it's a very controlled strength movement. Yet years ago, power lifters realized that if they did some explosive training in their training, which meant they used lighter weight and they moved the weight much faster, they got great strength gains as well. I think at some point, people who are training just for muscular hypertrophy, just for size will really start to figure this out. In fact, you see sometimes people putting plyometrics in their training just to get more development. So it's a very effective tool, but it's a tool that needs to be used properly and most HIIT training programs throw plyometrics in just to get you tired and they're not being used properly at all. And it's at the peak, right? And so it's kind of that point, which was our next point about phasing, your programming and making sure that it's stacked in such a way that you're kind of leading up to something like a plyometric type of a workout, which we're sort of prepping the body. So considering that we start out with lifting weights and doing traditional type of weight lifts, now we cut the rest time in between and we get that benefit from it. And then we move on to multi-planar type movements and using dumbbells and then we get into plyometric training. There's a reason, a rhyme and a reason why we set you up in that direction. Yeah, I don't think when I looked at all the HIIT programs that were out there before we did ours, there was no attention paid to this, right? At all? Yeah, with the phasing. The only, most of them were circuit-based, was the same thing that you were running over and over or at best you would just interchange exercises. Oh, so instead of doing the squat right here, I'm gonna put the deadlift right here. Like that's all they were doing to change the routine up instead of actually methodically thinking about what adaptation are we focusing on right now, running that for a couple of weeks and then phasing out of that into something else. You just didn't see that. No theme, there's no theme to the phases. Phases need to have a theme. Strength, power, multi-planar movement because when you're training specifically for a theme or an adaptation, the body does a very damn good job of moving in that direction. If there's no theme, what ends up happening is you get some great results for two or three weeks, your body adapts. Look, we've all experienced this. You've done a routine, let's say you try a new workout. You saw it in a magazine or online and you're like, oh my God, it's the best workout I've ever done. In the last 60 days, my bench press went up 15 pounds, my squat went up 30 pounds. This is amazing, you're telling your friends, this is the greatest workout of all time. This is gonna get me where I wanna go and then all of a sudden, it just stops working. All of a sudden, four weeks later or whatever, six weeks later, you're working out. You're like, what happened? Man, I hit a hard plateau and then you just stubbornly stick to it, right? I've done this so many times, right? Just because I remember how great it was a few weeks ago. And not only is your body plateau, then it starts to go backwards. What the hell is going on? Your body got used to it, it didn't work anymore and you have to change the phase to get the body to continue to progress. And this is true for HIIT training as well. In fact, for HIIT training, phases should be shorter than they are for traditional resistance training. You know, if I'm doing like a bodybuilding style, you know, workout, the phases are three to five weeks. When we're doing HIIT training, which a total HIIT program is shorter than a total traditional resistance training program because the adaptations happen so fast, my phases are like two weeks long. They're not any longer than that usually. I'm not doing five week phases of the same stuff. Yeah, and for some reason in the space, you've seen a lot of programs out there that really harp on muscle confusion and to really confuse the body constantly by throwing everything at you at once, right? And I had argued muscle focus is what you need to be doing. And that's where you start phasing these out so your body can actually get good at something for, you know, that two to three week, even if we make it a brief window, that's our focus. That's what we're trying to adapt to instead of just take on all the stress and just hope for the best. Yeah, one of the, go ahead. If you were to explain to somebody the reason behind why we phase, you know, HIIT training so short in comparison to traditional training, would it be mainly because of it's so intense? Is that why? I mean, I mean, I think you could, I would say the same, I would say that about plyometrics also like plyometrics or HIIT training. If you have those, that type of training in your routine, I don't think I would ever take a client in it much longer than two to three weeks because of how intense it is. That's the main reason why. It depends on the individual, right? With athletes, you're gonna be phasing. Athletes could probably go a little bit further. Yeah, playing, but see with athletes, it's not just plios, there's lots of other stuff that's getting phased. Well, with athletes too, the desired outcome is not what 99% of the clients that are hiring. Exactly. I mean, 99% of clients that hire a coach or a trainer are looking for fat loss, muscle building, or overall health. Athletes are mainly looking for performance. And it's very specific type of performance. Yeah, right, and so I don't really care that they're, you know, four or five weeks into doing their HIIT training, they're losing the max benefits of losing body fat or building muscle from it because they don't really care about their all performance based. And so as long as their performance is improving, I would, I could extend that. But for the rest of the population, as soon as you start to lose those muscle building effects or fat burning effects, you want to be out of that. Well, in general, HIIT training does something really well. Is it burns? It can, if done properly. I always got to say that, because I know when I say what I'm about to say, everybody freaks out and then this is what I'm gonna do all the time. If applied properly, there is no form of training in the context of a good diet and good lifestyle and that stuff. There is no form of training that will burn body fat faster in a shorter period of time. That being said, it also doesn't work very long. Okay, so if I follow a traditional resistance training type program, I mean, let's use our flagship workout program, MAP Centerball, very traditional resistance training, overall strength, that's a three month workout program. It's lasts for three months, right? HIIT training, you're gonna get really fast fat loss results, but even if you phase it right, even if you do everything right, you'll see after a relatively short period of time, it's just not as effective and it's time to go back to more traditional resistance strength. Although you get fast results from it, you also hit the plateau wall much faster if you don't switch out and move to something different, which is why the phases are shorter. So if I'm doing a six week program, then yeah, I'm gonna do two week phases, three of them or something like that, right? Versus a 12 week program where I can do three, four week type phases or four, three week phases. Now I gotta bring up something that I have never seen in another HIIT program and that is a mobility focus. It's my favorite part about what we did, right? I mean, something that actually helps to restore the joints because we are adding so much stress. Like it really does take a toll on the joint specifically when we move explosively. And that kind of impact we need to make sure that we maintain the health and integrity of. And so these mobility sessions, I thought it was imperative that at least we have one day in the recovery day, the active recovery day of going through and addressing all of these joints to make sure that we're reinforcing them. Yeah, well, when you look at even good HIIT training, so everything's done right. It's written properly, it's programmed properly. There's still weaknesses in all forms of training, which is why ideally over a course of a year or two years, you change your focuses and you do different styles of training because every form of training, even if it's perfect, has got some weaknesses. And one of the weaknesses of HIIT are one of them is the strength, the intensity aspect of it, but that can become a weakness because of the intensity. The recovery becomes an issue and your body does recover faster and better actively than it does when you're doing nothing. In other words, unless you're severely over-trained, like you're at RABDO and you gotta go to the hospital or something like that, unless you're severely over-trained, moving properly and lightly will get your body to heal and recover and adapt better than just sitting on the couch, like you're just trying to recover. I remember doing that as a kid, I'd work out and then I wouldn't move at all because I think all these muscles are growing. Yeah, and that's not how it works. You're better off moving a little bit. So that's one, right? The second weakness of HIIT is the fact that because it's higher intensity, because rest periods are shorter, because you're pushing yourself through this workout that your joints can pay the price, your form can pay the price. And so if you don't place a special focus on mobility, then the chances of hitting that wall of injury or pain, it starts to creep up on you. And what you don't wanna do, and this is what sucks is you're doing a HIIT program, even if it's written properly and you're applying it properly and then you're three weeks into it and you're like, oh my God, this is awesome, but I can't, my low back is bothering me and I can't do the workout anymore. What do I do now? Or my knees are hurting a little bit or my shoulders are bothering me. Now you gotta stop this workout that you're seeing great results from and mainly because you didn't address mobility from the gates, right out the gates, right? So mobility needs to be a focus as part of your HIIT training to ensure that that doesn't happen and to really maximize the results you're gonna get throughout the entire HIIT workout. Well, shameless plug, but one of my favorite things about this program was the flow sessions. And I've actually had people buy the program just for that. Oh, you can use the flow sessions with anyone. So even if you're not, you know, I don't wanna do HIIT training, it's not for me, or it doesn't seem like something that I would want to add into my routine, I've actually prescribed some of my clients and friends to buy HIIT just so they could specifically use the flow sessions because we don't have a single program that has that like that. And I think they're unique and I think they're fun. And I think that you can blend those into any of the routines. So let's say you're following a maps anabolic, you love it, you got great results from it, maybe you're getting ready to run it a second time, but you wanna add some sort of a mobility component in it. Having the HIIT flow sessions built in on trigger days is a great way to add mobility to a strength focus program. Yeah, I remember going through and writing it, there were different things that we had to address that we didn't necessarily have to address with other workouts. Another thing that we had to look at was how can we make this workout appropriate for beginners, intermediate people, and advanced people? And we were able to do that. And so when you follow a good HIIT program, you have to figure that out for yourself and be honest with yourself and say, this is what I always recommend to people. Unless this is your style of training and you're really fit, everybody should start with beginner because you still have two levels that you can move up through. But this ensures that you're training yourself appropriately. And remember this, when we've talked about this many times on the show, it's like a bell curve when it comes to results with your body. So on one end is no results because you're doing nothing. On the other end is no results because you're doing too much, too much intensity, too much volume, too much frequency and appropriate levels of load or whatever. So on the two ends, there's no results. You're not getting any results. And then somewhere in the middle, you see this peak of maximum results. And this is different from person to person but what that middle represents, that bell curve middle represents the right dose for you and the right dose gives you the best results. And this is why it's so important when you follow any kind of a workout, especially a HIIT style workout, that you follow it and it's appropriate for your body because when you hit that magic appropriate level, and I say magic, because that's what it feels like when you hit the right appropriate amount of intensity and speed and frequency and volume and exercises for your body, you don't feel like you're fighting your body to progress. It actually starts to progress for you. And it's a great feeling. This is the only program too that we actually had levels in, right? So yeah, so this is the only program where we actually built in, like depending on your experience level where you should start off with the routine, but by far one of the most popular programs that we ever wrote, but again, only program that we've ever put a warning on because again, people get so addicted to the results because they do come on fast. And so knowing how to intermittently use it with other routines I think is extremely powerful. So here's a summary, right? So if you're doing a HIIT workout for yourself, make sure the programming makes sense. So don't just throw a bunch of exercises together, but they need to flow together with some logic training your body appropriately. Number two, your form has got to be perfect. So when you're following a HIIT workout, just like any workout, make sure your form is really good. Still use rest to ensure proper form. So if you're going from exercise to exercise and you're like, I cannot maintain perfect form no matter what, rest long enough to ensure that that happens because form is number one. Don't do plyometrics unless they're being applied properly. So plyometrics need to be done explosively and you need to be able to apply them explosively. So if it's done with no rest and you're repeating other exercises with it and you're just going in a circuit, then don't do plyometrics do other safer exercises because you're wasting your time. Phase your workouts and with HIIT training, you're looking at probably two week phases. So there's themes, right? Barbell theme, multi-planar theme, plyo theme, train in two week phases or so, that'll get your body to progress more consistently. You'll hit less plateaus as a result. And then the last thing is, put some kind of a mobility focus. So let's say you're doing a HIIT style workout three days a week. In my opinion, at least two days a week, you should go to the gym and just focus on mobility so that, again, you can maximize results and minimize the risk of injury. Also, if you just want to follow a workout that's written out for you, then you can try our program maps it and I do believe that it's 50% off this month. I need Doug to give me the, is that true? The maps it is 50% off, right? That's the offer this month. Okay, perfect. So if you just want to follow a program right now, we have exercise demos in there and the whole thing. You can go to mapsfitnessproducts.com, click on maps hit and then use the code December 50. So that's December and then the number 50 with no space. Also, if you want more free information from us, go to mindpumpfree.com and check out all of our guides. And then finally, you can follow us all on Instagram. Justin can be found at Mind Pump. Justin, I'm at Mind Pump Sal and Adam is at Mind Pump Adam.