 In this episode of Mind Pump, we talk about something that annoys probably everybody that works out in the gym. All of us have that one body part that for whatever reason, just a stubborn. Like everybody, every other body part responds and reacts and we work out and they change. And there's that one body part that just is so stud, just doesn't listen to anything that you tell it. It's like an annoying teenager. Well, in this episode, we actually give you the solution for stubborn body parts. You don't have to have a body part that doesn't respond. Believe it or not, we have worked with many, many clients on fixing this issue and actually turning a stubborn body part into a strong body part. Now there's four key components that we're gonna cover in this episode. The first one has to do with poor connection. Then we talk about ranges of motion. Then we talk about lack of prioritization. And then finally, bad programming and don't worry, we give you the solutions. Now in this episode, we do talk a lot about priming and how that can contribute to getting stubborn body parts to finally respond. Now, if you're confused by the word priming or you don't know how to really assess your body to figure out how to prime your body properly, if you go to mapsprimewebinar.com, we're actually giving a free priming class. Justin is teaching the class. He's gonna teach you how to do a self-assessment so you can assess your own body, figure out where your movement issues are. And this is gonna show you movements that'll benefit you on priming your body so you can bring up those weak stubborn body parts. Now the classes, when they're being put out there live, we're all gonna be on there answering questions. So we'll be on there active. So if you ask us questions, we'll be right there. But if you miss the class, don't worry, you get a free replay. So no matter what, you get to watch the whole class, you get to learn how to assess your body and you get to learn how to prime your body. Again, it's mapsprimewebinar.com. It's free. Make sure you go there and it'll help you out. Also, this episode is brought to you by Legion, one of our favorite performance-enhancing supplement companies. They make amazing supplements like protein powders, pre-workout supplements. They have a creatine supplement, which is excellent, one of my favorite creatine supplements I've ever taken. Now we work with Legion because they're very transparent. When you look at the label, it tells you exactly how much of each ingredient is in the product. They have third-party testing and they only use efficacious doses. So that means if you're taking a pre-workout and there's beta-alanine in there to help you with stamina and strength, the dose of beta-alanine that's in there is the one that's been shown in clinical studies to be effective. 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Go to MAPS Starter.com that's M-A-P-S-S-T-A-R-T-E-R.com and use the code Starter50. That's S-T-A-R-T-E-R-5-0, no space for the discount. Let's talk about one of the most frustrating aspects of working out. Easily, for me, the most frustrating and it's gotta be for a lot of people. And it's, you know, when you talk to people who work out consistently and put in hard work and effort, this is like the worst possible thing. And it's the stubborn body part. It's the body part that like it just doesn't seem to. It just doesn't respond, doesn't grow, doesn't do what you want it to do. Everybody's got one unless you're that genetic freak who is blessed to be, you know, that was born to be a bodybuilder. It's super common. Like every person has that one body part, right? Where that just doesn't, now, you know, people might, you know, what is a stubborn body part? Well, it's really in relation to the rest of your body because if your whole body's stubborn, you don't have a stubborn body part, you're just not, everything matches. Stubborn body parts are the ones that for whatever reason, they just don't seem to respond with the same level of speed or enthusiasm or just responsiveness as the rest of your body, which actually makes it far more, in my opinion, frustrating because it's like you're working out and, you know, let's say your glutes don't are stubborn and your quads are responding, hamstrings are responding, your biceps, your shoulders, you know, and your butt is just not like, what, is it asleep? Like what's going on? Is it not there? You know what, there's very few, like can you think of, I like this conversation, I'm glad we're going this way because this should strike a chord with everybody because as I'm like recalling all the people that we've trained, I think I've seen a pretty even split of every body part. Like I've definitely had plenty of clients that couldn't get their butt to grow. I've had plenty of clients that couldn't get their calves to grow, I've got plenty of clients that couldn't get their chest to respond, like every muscle group I think I have seen, and I would say all of them are pretty damn common. Maybe shoulders would be one of the least, but even then I think I've seen that too. Like- Yeah, that was Doug. Doug's stubborn body part was delts for a long time. So yeah, no, we have someone in the room who's had that one. Yeah. I've seen them all. You're a hundred percent. Now personally for me, you know, I've had shoulders at one point was a stubborn body part. My calves were stubborn, still are. Chest, that's my nemesis. It's still, I would consider a stubborn body part, but I've gotten it to go very, very far from where I was. So I personally have dealt with this myself. Now here's the interesting part though, is that we're saying that and we're claiming that. And I agree with you because my chest was that. At one point I would even thought my shoulders, my calves. So, but more often than not, it's not stubborn. It's not stubborn that it's- Like that's not something intrinsically wrong. Right, exactly. Right, right, right. There's things that need to be addressed. And that's, so we should definitely dive into that. Yes. Because one of the things that all the muscle groups that I thought were so stubborn on myself, there was a missing component or something that I wasn't doing. Yeah, I'm glad you went there because there are definitely genetic factors that can be used in the future. Genetic factors that can make somebody parts appear to respond better or to look more stand out. That's definitely true. So I don't wanna discredit that. I don't wanna invalidate that particular factor. But the fact is that the genetic components, which I'll go over, the genetic components are things you can't control. So it's kind of a waste of time to focus on them anyway. So what's one genetic component? Well, the length of what's called the length of the muscle belly, maybe one, right? So if you have, so if you, when you look at a muscle and you go from tendon to tendon, right? So look at your bicep that goes muscle belly. This is where all the muscle fibers are. It's the bulk of the muscle. Then it goes into connective tissue and then tendon. The muscle belly itself can genetically be longer or shorter or shorter. So if you look at someone, if you look at a bicep, if the belly itself is really short versus really long and you build them both, the longer belly just has more visual potential for growth. It's like calves. Like you ever see somebody with really, really high calves? Right, soft balls that are up there. Yeah, they could develop them, but they're not gonna be like Justin's calves that go down to his heel. You know, he's got these really long calves. They go all the way down. They're very long calves. So there's a lot of potential. Now that's a genetic factor. So I'm not taking away from that. You just can't control that. There's nothing you can control about that. It is what it is. Besides that, what Adam's saying is 100% true. Nine out of 10 times, that's not the main reason why the muscle, that particular muscle isn't responding. The main reason has to do more with what you're doing or not doing. And that's why it's not responding. You have to do a little detective work to find out what the missing link is. Yes, there's a few favorite things that I would hear from a potential client. And as a trainer, you'll hear your client, a potential client tell you what they want to work on, what their challenges are, because you're doing your assessment. And there's a few words and phrases that are what I would call like money phrases. And what I mean by that is you'd hear it and you'd know right away, I can show that person value in that. Like I'm gonna show them what I can do. One of them is pain. My shoulder hurts, my hip hurts, my knee hurts. And if it's not acute injury, I knew right away, oh, they're gonna love me after about a month or two because I'm gonna take away some of the pain. That's just so valuable, right? The other one was a stubborn body part. That was one of my favorites. Like, if I met somebody who's been working out, which is less common than people who don't work out, but there were decent chunk of people who were working out, who would come hire me. And they would say to me, and I'd ask them, well, what are your main goals with personal training? And they said, well, I work out all the time and my upper body is very developed and my legs just don't respond. Or my arms are just really stubborn or I can't get my back to really respond. I used to love that. It was a money phrase because I knew that there was something that I could do with them that would make that body part respond and then they would see the value in my training. I vividly remember when this came together for me. I had just finished up my corrective exercise specialist certification. And so I was early to mid-20s and really understood on a much deeper level than the surface level I understood lower cross syndrome. So when you go through some of your basic search, you get kind of a breakdown and you start to piece that together. When I really understood what was going on and that so many people suffered from that and why that also results in them being very quad dominant and not being able to develop their glutes and then what I needed to do to correct that and fix that, it was definitely, there was a huge explosion in my business at that time in my career because I became this butt guy. I became the guy who could help you start. You're a butt guy? Yeah, it was a big butt guy for sure. You have the bumper sticker. Because I mean, that's a common one, right? You think of, I mean, there's, I think at one point I've seen them all but as far as pain points, ass is a big one, especially for somebody who trains legs all the time or just tries to train their butt. Totally. And they get these incredible quads but then their ass is flat and they can't seem to get the butt to grow. That's extremely frustrating for somebody who's putting all the work in the gym, especially when they think they're doing all the exercises and doing the things they're supposed to. That was the most common one for me and all my clients that would come in in terms of like where they were not responding. That was like such a common thing because again, yeah, it's where it's set up, like the alignment and the way that their posture was stacked and everything. I mean, it just wasn't even there for them to recruit properly their glutes. And so that was just such an unlocking thing for me to be able to show them. Yeah, so think about it this way. The most effective exercises you could do for your body are typically compound movements. These are exercises where you're using more than one joint and this is widely understood, they're just very effective. Now your muscles work together like a team to have you perform a particular action, okay? This means that sometimes some muscles will do more work than other muscles and so this is just what ends up happening. So you could do exercises that are supposed to be the best for your glutes or your chest or your back, but because of the way your body moves, you develop other muscles that you maybe are, and so oftentimes people with like a butt that doesn't respond oftentimes have great quads. You know what I'm saying? Somebody whose chest doesn't grow often has great shoulders and triceps. Somebody whose back doesn't respond oftentimes has great biceps because they tend to work together with pulling movements and the other ones I talked about were pushing movements. There's another myth that I do wanna dispel though along these lines and this is a little bit more going into the weeds a little bit, so bear with me, but there's a myth that still floats around there that muscle fiber ratios in the body really determine if muscles respond more than others. Now there are two, this is very generalized, it's a little more complex in this, but there's two general types of muscle fibers. When you go into a muscle, the little strings or whatever are considered muscle fibers, and generally speaking you can break them up into two general categories. One is fast twitch. Fast twitch burns energy very quickly, burns out very fast, but generates a lot of power. Slow twitch is the opposite. It doesn't burn a lot of energy very quickly, it's got a lot of staying power, but it's got way less power. Fast twitch muscle fibers because their job is to generate power, getting bigger becomes very beneficial. They grow because it's bigger fiber, contracts harder, burns faster energy, but it contracts harder. Big less blood supply. Right, a slow twitch muscle fiber because it's goal is to give you more stamina, more staying power, it resists growing because a bigger muscle fiber just burns more energy and it wants to stay efficient. This is why sprinters who use power but burn out very quickly have bigger muscles than long distance runners who use the efficient, long lasting, slow twitch muscle fibers. Okay, so it makes sense that genetically you may be born with a propensity for more fast twitch muscle fibers, more slow twitch muscle fibers. That'll dictate to an extent how much muscle you can build. And then what people have done is they've taken that too far and said, oh, the rest of your body grows great because you have all these fast twitch muscle fibers. That one muscle group that doesn't develop well, your biceps, it's because you have too many slow twitch muscle fibers. Doesn't work that way. Your muscle, although some muscles generally have more slow twitch and others have more fast twitch, generally speaking, your whole body tends to match. You wouldn't have sprinter genes for your entire body except for your quads or your whole body except for your biceps. So that's a myth, that's a genetic myth that that's one of the main reasons. Besides muscle belly length, like I talked about before, the only things that tend to be the reason that this muscle group isn't responding has to do with things that you're either doing or not doing. And I think we should probably get into those. I like narrowing it down to what we think are the four key because when I was going through that, the corrective exercise specialist certification, and I learned about lower cross syndrome and I began helping people develop their glutes, it also, the light switch went off for me because at that time still in my career, I was struggling with my chest. And what you'll start to find is even though a chest and butt are completely different, the reasons why my chest wasn't developing is very similar to the same reasons why my clients glutes weren't developing. And so when that light bulb went off for me on how I could help them fix that, it completely changed my approach on how I trained and developed my chest. And the first one that I think of right away is just a poor connection. It's not firing. You gave a great analogy of what you see sometimes, somebody who can't develop their chest, well then that same person a lot of times has great anterior delts and or triceps. And that's because those muscles are taking over a movement that should be chest dominant. Just like the person who doesn't, that has the flat butt but has great quads, their quads are taking over the movement instead of their glutes. So even though we could talk about all different muscles, a lot of the common themes are the four main ones that we're gonna nail down to, will generally help you in, no matter what muscle. Chest and butt do have cleavage though. That's true, they do have something in common. Have you guys ever seen, I'm sure you haven't but I'll ask anyway, have you ever seen like a professional arm wrestler do a pull-up? You ever seen this? So they do lots of pull-ups, right? Arm wrestlers need very strong biceps. They need to pull very hard. In fact, certain positions in arm wrestling, I'm a little bit of a nerd with arm wrestling involves what are called pullers. It's a technique that you use. And so they do pull-ups to strengthen that pulling movement. But if you watch them do pull-ups. I don't even have to, I can tell you, I know how they do them. Yeah, it's an arm pull-up. Their back is supporting them, but they're not doing lat pull-ups. Didn't we do a YouTube video for pull-ups for biceps and we taught this? I think we might have, I think we might have. I love that you're going here. I wasn't even thinking this direction, but this is also how you can take one exercise and make it for a total different muscle. Absolutely. So if you watch these arm wrestlers do pull-ups, you'll notice rounded shoulders. It's mostly biceps and forearm. The back is there as a supporting roll, but the biceps and arms are doing most of the work. And of course we look at arm wrestlers, very developed arms, and their backs tend to not match their arms. Now pull-ups are known to be a back exercise. If you'd see a pull-up in a routine, nine out of 10 times, it's there because it's in back. People typically don't do pull-ups for their arms. Although they can be done for arms, it's actually quite rare. So it's all about their connection and how they're doing the movement. And what ends up happening over time is if you're doing an exercise, and I'm gonna put in quotations and my marks wrong, in other words, you're doing an exercise and you think you're trying to work one muscle, but in reality you're working with the supporting muscles, the more you do it that way, the better you get at doing it the wrong way. You actually strengthen, whatever you train is what you strengthen. In fact, a professional arm wrestler can probably do more pull-ups the wrong way than they could the right way, because they've trained it that way for so long. And that's where the poor connection comes from. So if you see somebody whose glutes tend to not be developed and you watch them do a barbell squat or a deadlift, you're gonna see more hamstrings in the deadlift and more quads in the squat, because the way that they're squatting is working other muscles more and other muscles less. And the more you do this, and this is why it's so hard, because when you're working with a beginner, all their body parts are stubborn. And I can start from scratch and I can teach you, you guys ever hear martial artists say it's easier to teach a beginner than it is to teach an expert into the martial art? Like if you're a tie boxer and you got a tight window black belt coming in, really hard to teach them how to do a tight kick. It's the same in music. I mean, like going in and trying to teach somebody that has already solidified the way that they, say it's piano, the way that they play the keys and they hold their hands up and all these, they've mastered their specific way of approaching this. And then trying to, you have to unlearn all those, the way that you've gone about it forever. Exactly. Golfers will tell you the same thing. You know, if you go in and you just start hitting a golf ball and you start to develop a pattern on how you do the swing and you do that for a year, two, three years. And then all of a sudden you decide you really want to get serious about golfing and then you hire a professional and they just tear you apart. And it sucks because you'll end up regressing at the beginning because you've got to strip that person back down and get rid of all the bad habits even though they may have seen a little bit of success this way. And so the same thing goes with training. I mean, how often have you got somebody who was like somebody who loved to run, right? Runners, sprinters or long distance runners. And then now they want to develop their butt. They're so used to running on their quads and training that way. And so, and your body, the way your body works, right? It doesn't go, oh, this is a chest exercise and it just automatically works the chest because it's supposed to be your chest. It's going to take the easiest path always. And so if you- It's gonna say press move bar this way. Exactly, move bar that way. That's how the brain operates. It sees that and it will default to what you are strong in. If you are somebody who has a chest that doesn't respond very well, but you've been bench pressing for a long time, right? One of the best exercise for chest. And let's say your max bench press is 250 pounds, okay? If I get you to activate your chest early on, if I change your form, you ain't gonna be able to bench 250. You're gonna be weaker because you're gonna get, you're strong at the way you've been practicing. This is why it can be so difficult. So I'm glad we're going here because the rule number one with a poor connection is to take 15 steps backwards. If you're doing pull-ups and your biceps are responding and your back isn't, rather than doing 15 pull-ups, you're doing three and your form is totally different. If you're bench pressing with 175 pounds and your chest isn't responding, we're going down to 115 pounds and you're changing your technique and really focusing on feeling the chest. It's gonna feel like an entirely new exercise. It is. So this is like a new skill you're developing. You have to approach it. Like I have to do this a completely different way. So yeah, you do have to acknowledge you're gonna regress, you're gonna start again from scratch. And since we're talking right now to people with stubborn body parts, which is assuming that you already worked out, you've already revealed to yourself that you have a stubborn body part, this is very important. Gotta take a bunch of steps back, identify how to get that muscle to connect. So in a bench press, what does the chest do? The chest brings the elbow to the centerline of the body. That's what the chest does. So I gotta change my technique. I gotta focus on that. That means I'm gonna have to bench press with like 70% or 60% or less of the weight that I'm used to. When you're doing a squat, what do the glutes do? Well, the glutes take your leg from in front of you and bring it to straighten your body out. They don't extend the knee, that's your quads. So I'm gonna have to learn how to sit back a little bit differently, how to activate the glutes. That means I'm probably gonna have to squat at like 50% weight and relearn. We are trying to reconnect. By the way, before you can develop a muscle, you have to connect to the muscle very well. It's not gonna work. It doesn't work any way. Well, it's a little more nuanced than that too. Like you just glazed right over two things that are important, I think, to know. Cause there's some people that understand how the chest works. Like, okay, yeah, move the elbow to the centerline. But if you do that with a forward shoulder, you're still gonna get all dealt. So not only that, you have to learn to prime the body to be able to get the muscles that hold the shoulder girdle back in place while you also move that. So it's a little more nuanced. And the same thing goes for what you're talking about with developing your glutes. If you squat and you end up putting all your weight on your quads and you don't know how to move your hips properly, then you're still, even though your squat may look like it's a good squat, if it's not activating your glutes because you're quad dominant, there's more things going on than just actually performing the exercise. Yeah, I used to tell my clients, like first we gotta learn how to anchor the movement. And so like anchoring the movement, just like you said with the shoulder blades, bringing it back and being able to really provide stability first. Where are you gonna provide stability? How are you gonna hold your ground before even performing the movement? That's a vital part of that process, which then allows you to get the full access and full recruitment of your chest. Nine out of 10 times when someone has a weak body part and then you ask them, so they say, oh, my chest isn't developing. You say, do you feel your chest when you bench press? No, they know. Part of it's like, I do squats all the time. I just don't feel my butt. My quads get sore and I feel it in my quads. Okay, this is the real value of proper priming. I'm glad you said that, Adam, because if you prime properly, you can learn how to feel what you're supposed to feel because it's really, I'm gonna say this right now, unless you're very, very experienced with training, you know the nuances that we're talking about. You have to understand how to feel the muscle before you can feel it in the exercise. Just knowing form and technique, although very helpful, still can make it very difficult. I could tell somebody all day long who doesn't feel their glutes when they squat, here's what the glutes do, here's what the form should look like. They're still gonna have a tough time until they know what it feels like and then know what to search for. That's the part that makes a big difference and priming does that. I'm so excited that Justin is running this webinar right now because if you're listening right now and maybe you thought that this free webinar is not something that you need to listen to, but then this is resonating with you that, oh my God, I have a stubborn body part. You need to take that webinar. You need to go through that because more likely than not, this is part of the reason why. And so he's gonna go through there and show you the importance of these three core movements and then how to address it if you can't do it properly. And getting to that place is so important before you build on it or start to address the stubborn body part. Yeah, proper priming is like the magic wand for a stubborn body part. It really, really is because the big, I mean, we started with poor connection, but poor connection is the main reason why people have, but there's other reasons, which I wanna get into also. I think the next one, this one is also relatively common and it has, this one I see more often in men than women, mainly because we tend to ego lift a little bit more, which is just a lack of range of motion, a lack of full range of motion. And it tends to be because guys wanna go a little too heavy. Well, I would say that and then also if there was ever any previous pain or an injury or something that had followed you forever and you've been uncertain as far as like how far to go with the range of motion. And just doing that and repeating that range of motion, your body gets really familiar and comfortable with that. So it's hard to then really press yourself a little further beyond that. Oh yeah, I remember when I was younger, my back, I just couldn't feel, it's a hard one. Your back muscles, especially when you first start working out, it's hard to feel, hard to connect. It's behind you. I don't know what that's supposed to feel like or whatever. And so at one point, I considered my back, like maybe it's stubborn or not sure what's going on. And so what I did was, part of what I did, besides I did supersets, that helped a lot. I finally felt a little bit of a pump. But the other thing I did was when I would do a pull down or a pull up is I went all the way down to the stretch and went all the way up to the squeeze. I connected to the whole range of motion because up into that point, I was a kid working out and I just wanted to see how many more reps I could do or how much more weight I can use. And the truth is, of course, you can lift more weight when you do a shorter range of motion. I can half squat way more than I can full squat and I could do way more pull ups if I don't go all the way down to a stretch and go all the way up to where I get my chest to touch the bar and really squeeze. So that range of motion really does contribute to the first one we talked about, which was poor connection. Another one is the myth of tension. Now I blame bodybuilders for this. Bodybuilders, you gotta understand something. When a high level bodybuilder is communicating something to the average person, what they're often communicating is a technique that works for them at that point in their development. They're already jacked, they're already huge, they've been training for years, they've got crazy genetics, they might be on anabolic steroids. They've got great connection to muscles. Bodybuilders know how to connect to muscles and so they'll say something like, when I do a shoulder press, I don't lock out so I can keep tension on the shoulders or when I do a squat, I don't go all the way up because I'm trying to keep tension on my quads. Now this is a bit of a myth because the truth is you can keep tension on a muscle through stretch all the way up to lockout because it's intrinsic. Tension is an intrinsic thing. Now you can change your form to force you to have tension, but that's cheap. That's not nearly as effective as being able to connect to the movement yourself. So if I'm doing like a shoulder press, I'm better off going all the way up to lockout but not resting the weight on my joints but rather going all the way up and squeezing my shoulders, tensing my arms and maintaining that connection. That full range of motion and we know this, studies confirm this very, very well. They do show that for overall muscle development, longer range of motion or superior or shorter range of motion. This is one of the number one cardinal rules of, especially when you train people is to teach them how to do that. Wasn't our good buddy, Ben Pakolsky, the one that made the case for that. He's like the number one thing for him. He says is the squeeze. Yeah, the squeeze and the fully contracted position. Because it's poor connection. Like think about this. If you have a client whose glutes don't grow, how hard is it for them to squeeze it in the fully contracted position? It's hard for them to just feel it there. So people understand what you're referring to or what you're saying right there is that it's easy to feel a muscle in its stretch position because gravity is doing it for you. Think about being in an open position pulling a dumbbell for a bicep, right? Because it's stretched out. You don't even gotta think about it. You feel it pulling on the bicep but bring the arm all the way to your chest or bring it all the way up and you have to kind of intrinsically think about squeezing it because you don't have gravity resisting it in its stretch position. This is why I like isometrics too just because if you're focusing on this range of motion and you don't have that connection, you don't feel it, we can stay there a bit longer and really try and reinforce that process of how to recruit and how to generate that connection again and to be able to feel it is so important for you then to move forward and to be able to feel like you've got the strength and support you need throughout that range of motion. Yeah, so when I would train clients and they had a stubborn body part, I would focus a lot on the squeeze, always on the squeeze. Okay, we're at the top, squeeze your glutes. Okay, you're at the top of your bench. Hold it for a bit longer even. Squeeze your chest, connect to the chest. Oh, your shoulder, squeeze at the top. That squeeze, because that leads back to poor connection and the lack of range of motion contributes to the poor connection. Well, this is why I like what Justin just said because this is where isometric training really kicked in for me because I realized that, and I used to tell clients this all the time, like resistance training, all it is is flexion of the muscles with resistance. That's all it is. All you are doing is flexing the muscle. So the better you are at flexing this stubborn body part, the better you will be at developing it. And so, and one of the harder places to actually flex the muscle is in an isometric position because there is no movement, there is no gravity helping you out, there is no stretch position. You really have to learn to intrinsically do that. And so if you train that really well, then when you add resistance, you add weight, it's easier to make that connection. So this is another really great value in isometric training, another one of those lost arts that not a lot of people do. It is, and what helps you gain connection to ranges of motion? Priming. If you prime your body properly, now, so if I'm going into a bench press and my chest is a weak body part, the hardest part for me to feel my chest is gonna be at the top of the bench press. Okay, it is, it's just the hardest. How do I feel, you know, my chest squeezing at the top of the press, it's not even a full squeeze, like what is, but if I prime beforehand and I can identify the squeeze, and here's an easy, simple way to prime your chest. Now this isn't priming a movement pattern issue which is far more common. So what I'm about to give you is decent advice for somebody who's got good movement. I would grab a stick and I would just grab it and just drive inward with my chest, like I'm trying to slide my hands together but don't actually do that and squeeze my chest. Identify the feeling, so that's a form of priming, then I'd go bench press, now I know what to feel as I'm squeezing through. Now, as I said, for most people, it's more to do with lack of connection to the stabilizing shoulder blades and other parts, but priming helps so much with extending connected ranges of motion. So that's why again, it's so valuable bringing up stubborn body part. Now the next one that I think of is what made me realize that maybe I don't have as many stubborn body parts, I just, I'm not prioritizing. And I shared this story about, I did a YouTube video I think a couple of months ago about my shoulders and I had really, really terrible shoulders and it was brought to my attention by a female trainer of mine that was working for me at the time. And she was a bodybuilder and I had her assess my physique and like, you know, tell me what I could be working on, you know, your professional in this, like what are you thinking? Oh, she told me out of me, I have very weak shoulders and that like just destroyed my ego. But the truth is at that time in my career, I, this is how I trained my shoulders. I thought, okay, they were kind of an afterthought. It was, well, every time I do heavy chest, I get some anterior delts. Every time I go a heavy back, I get some rear delt. Okay, I'll throw some lateral stuff in there. And then I'm done. And then I'm done. So it was just that, I would, of course I was getting my shoulder, and there's some truth to that because when you do your chest, you can't not use your shoulders. They're involved. Same thing when you do your back, so your rear delts are involved. So, you know, my theory was they're getting plenty of attention and they, why aren't they developed that way? And then she really picked on me and then she said, listen, she said, why don't you start every week, every time you start a week off, you start with that area, start with your shoulders. And that was the first time I ever started like designating a workout for my shoulders. And I began to say, okay, if this is a weak body part, you know, because this happens to everybody. I don't care who you are. Maybe if you're some, you know, crazy, you know, bodybuilder guy who that's all you do is live in the gym. Most people have, you know, ebb and flow of training. You're really consistent for a while then you're a little less consistent. Maybe even fall off for a week or two or even months sometimes at a time. And what the natural thing for you to do when you come back is to always gravitate towards the stuff you like to train. Yeah, we all have favorite exercises and body parts. Yeah, the stuff you like or you're good at. And the truth is, if you're really trying to develop a very symmetrical physique or work on a body part that is underdeveloped, then making it at the priority always. And this was something that I first started with my shoulders and then it ended up being my legs next that I started to think this way. I just made it a pack with myself that, okay, one, it's gonna start my week always off like that. And no matter where I end in my workout routine where I fall off for a little bit, when I come back, I'm always starting with the weak muscle. So I could have, let's just say, I've been on a kick for three months and I just had an awesome shoulder workout. Something happens in my life and I fall off for a week or two and then I come back to the gym. Well, I did shoulders last. So maybe I should do something. No, I'm gonna go right back to shoulders again. I'm starting again that week. So prioritizing was huge for me. Yes, and this is actually quite common. I mean, a majority of times when somebody has a body part that's weak, especially if it's for men, legs and calves and for women, arms and shoulders, typically I'm generalizing, but this is typical. Typically it's good. Athletes and Spiceps, I'm just gonna say that. Typically it's because they don't place as much prioritization or focus on them. If you really look at their routines, all my calves don't respond. I'm guilty of this. Yeah, my calves don't respond. I said it earlier in this episode. The truth is, what's the body part I've done, the least amount of sets, the least amount of exercises and what's the body part I never start to work out with, calves, right? So prioritization literally means you prioritize it. It's the first body part. By the way, studies show this. If you train full body, the body part or exercises you start with tend to get more of the gains. That's why you always want to start with the big compound lifts. But if you have a body part that's weak, you really want to focus on, start your workout that way. Never skip that body part that you need to train because that's a big one. Prioritize it, make it a priority, focus on it and that makes a big difference. I love that you brought that up because this was a question I know we've gotten a lot with people is because we've set up the programs in general to try and help the majority. But we always have encouraged people to modify. Of course. And so if let's say you're following maps anabolic, of course we're gonna start with the big compound lifts that's gonna give you the biggest bang for your buck and that makes the most sense for overall muscle gain and fat loss for anybody. But if that same person is like a major goal of theirs is to develop calves while they also do this program, that is an exception where I'd say listen, for now on start your maps anabolic with the calves in the front. Totally. If you think you already have good quads and a great bud and it's not like a major focus here, just by you simply addressing your calves first in the routine always will already make a huge impact. So prioritization was a huge game changer for me when that light bulb finally went off. Now this one I actually, and mainly because it was a body part I really, really liked to train and I really wanted to develop. When I first started working out shoulders were a body part that I was insecure about. I'm narrow naturally. I was kind of bony and I like the way I looked in t-shirts and I would follow my workout and I'd start to develop my arms developed very quickly but my shoulders kind of lacked. And so what I did is I just did more exercises, more sets and trained my shoulders more frequently. So I'd be out in the backyard doing laterals and presses and rear laterals. And you know what happened over time? It took time, but over time my shoulders became a strong suit. In fact, it's one of my better body parts but people don't know this. It started out being a weak body part but I had to prioritize it. This one takes a lot of self-reflection because I have trained many a times a dude that comes to me and goes my legs just don't grow. And what's the first body part they skip when they skip a workout? Legs. Does this just magically happen? Yes, yes. You have to prioritize it. Prioritize it. All right, the last one is probably, I'd say the least communicated in terms of which ones have the most impact although it's still relatively common which is just you have bad workout programming. Now this one, I hate to say it is much more common in women and especially with people who wanna develop a butt. Now the reason why it's more common in women is because women are advertised crappy workouts more than men are. It's just the fact. If a workout is advertised to a woman it typically tends to be like don't do these exercises over here because they build bulk. Do these Pilates based exercises. They produce long lean muscles and do these short choppy exercises for your glutes because you feel the burn and use this hip circle because forget dumbbells and barbells and whatever because they'll make you look bulky. And you look at their workout like why doesn't my butt grow? And I look at their routine. It's like dog peas, butt kicks. Like oh okay. It goes back to what you kind of brought up earlier about fast twitch, slow twitch, muscle fibers and like the difference between the two. And like you have to train your body completely different for both of those objectives. And that's something that again like with women that it's a very common that that's neglected and it's not advertised very often when in fact that's something that could stimulate such a massive difference for them and get like the kind of results they're looking for just by altering the amount of reps, the rest periods, like things like that that's gonna have a dramatic difference on the way that you're shaping the muscle now and getting more explosive response out of the muscle which tells it to grow in a different way. I'm gonna challenge that a little bit. I think guys are just up there too. And what I think about right away that comes to mind was the way Eugene Tao and I got connected was he did a post that was kind of encouraging the benefits of the hack squad and telling people that they don't have to squad. It's not a mandatory movement. And we had great dialogue. I challenged that way of thinking. And the reason why I did is from my experience with so many male clients that trained legs but it was leg extensions, leg curls, leg press. Yeah, that's true. You know what I'm saying? And then complain that their legs wouldn't develop and I'm guilty of this too. I mean, when I was younger, when I would squat my low back would bother me. And so I did all the alternative exercises and all the machines for my legs. And then, you know, bitched about why I didn't have great legs. And it was a lack of prioritization but it was also a lack of good programming. You know, once I learned the benefits of squatting and then when I learned how to deep squat, holy crap, I mean, I train my legs with less intensity, less volume today than what I was doing in my mid-20s and they're way more developed because of the exercise selection that I do now. I mean, if you just squat five to eight sets a week, it is, for me at least, I have found more value in that than 30 sets of leg press, leg extension and leg curls. That's true for most people. Throughout the week, yes. And that was a hard thing for me to get through my own head. And then it was a hard thing for me to communicate to a lot of my male clients and it's the reason why I challenged Eugene when he post that, not because I thought he was wrong but because, man, I remember myself at 20 years old. That's all you needed is a read a post like that. Yeah, give me a reason. Exactly. And if I was looking up to a guy like you and you gave me the okay to not squat, I bought into that and that's why I didn't because there were people at that time that were saying things like that, that how amazing the leg press could be and all these other machines, how they're great for leg development and nothing grew my legs more than learning how to squat. If you wanna develop your body and you wanna develop a weak body part, the routine needs to be centered around building muscle and building strength and it needs to be a good muscle building type routine. And if your program is not centered around that, then it's bad programming. You're not going to bring up a weak body part with a routine that's centered around shaping and small movements and yoga inspired and Pilates inspired and that kind of stuff. Nothing wrong with that. Those have their own values but they're not going to develop muscles nearly to the degree that resistance train, traditional resistance train will and they're definitely not gonna bring up weak body parts as quickly and what are some of the best exercises to develop your body parts? Free weight, barbell, dumbbell, compound movements and if they're not included in your routine as the primary exercises, you need to take a good look at your workout and of course sets and reps are your programs phased properly so you can go through different rep ranges and of course all the other stuff that we talked about. And I also wanna, here's another problem is and it's tough to get someone to break through this mentality is I feel it more when I do this exercise. So like sometimes you'll get somebody who doesn't like to do like a bench press or a squat because the exercises that are like machines that are more isolating exercises, they feel it because it's easier for them to feel there. That doesn't mean the exercise that you don't feel it so much isn't more valuable. It means you're not doing it correctly. This is what priming does. Priming, okay, so yes, you can feel the muscle more when you do a cable crossover than when you do a bench press if your chest is a weak body part. That's true. So the value of the cable crossover is there but the value is to prime you potentially for your bench press. That's where you get the value. This is the value of priming. You're not gonna develop your stubborn body parts just by priming by itself. Of course not. The priming is what sets up all those awesome exercises I just talked about. Your barbell, dumbbell, free weight, compound movements. The priming sets you up so that those very powerful exercises now can give you what they can deliver, what their full potential can deliver. So that's the difference because I used to get that too with clients. Well, I know you're saying a barbell squat works is better for my butt growth but I feel these short dog pee exercises more in my glutes. I'd say, well, okay, you feel them more. That's great. Why don't we use those to prime the glutes, then do the barbell squats? Because by themselves, they just don't send. That's just the connection. That's not the work. That's right, that's right. You need the work to be able to change. And that's it. And look, check this out. Okay, we have a free class that's coming up. It's a webinar, it's online, it's unlimited, people can sign up. Doesn't cost anything. And Justin is literally gonna take you through a self-assessment. The self-assessment is going to identify root causes, root movement reasons why you may have weak body parts. And once you identify those issues, those root issues, which he's actually gonna coach you through, he's gonna show you an exercise for each of them that'll help prime your body, getting you to move better so that you can reap more value from I don't care what workout you're doing. You're not gonna, we don't even care if you change your workout at this point. Just prime properly and watch what happened. That class you can sign up at mapsprimewebinar.com. Do it now. That way when the classes are broadcast live, Justin, Adam, myself, and Doug will be on there answering any questions. But if you miss the class, you get a free replay. So no matter what, you get to watch the entire class. Again, it's mapsprimewebinar.com.