 In this episode of Mind Pump the World's Top Fitness Health and Entertainment Podcast, we answer fitness and health questions asked by our listeners. In fact, if you want to ask us a question to answer on an episode like this one, go to our Instagram page, Mind Pump Media, post the question under the QUA, that's Q-U-A-H meme, and if we like it, we'll pick it and we'll answer it. Now, in this episode, we also did an introductory portion where we talked about current events. We talked about our lives. We mentioned a few studies. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you a breakdown of the whole episode so you know where to find what you want to listen to. We start out by talking about a sport in Florence called Calcio Storico. This is a crazy sport. The manliest sport I've ever seen. Insane. Then we talked about satellite cells. These are cells in the body that have particular responsibilities and people who seem to be hyper-responders to exercise seem to have more of these. Then we talked about the importance of a meat thermometer. I discovered the other day that a meat thermometer helps me make food way better. I did cook tri-tips last night. We all enjoyed them. They were grass-fed tri-tips from Butcher Box. Now Butcher Box takes grass-fed, high-quality meat, delivers it to your door at better prices that you'll find anywhere. And of course, the quality is exceptional. That's why we're working with them. Now because you're a mind pump listener, you get a hookup. Now Butcher Box has had tremendous demand with all these restaurants closing down, but they're currently allowing people to get on their wait list. So what you've got to do is you've got to go to Butcher Box, don'tmissout.com forward slash mind pump, get on the wait list, and hopefully within a couple weeks they'll let you know when they're ready and they can start delivering meat to your door. Then we talked about Lululemon and how they bought the company Mirror for half a billion dollars. That's insane. Then we talked about Facebook losing a ton of ad revenue because they're not doing enough censoring on their platform, apparently. Then we talked about the Anytime Fitness I Can't Breathe workout. People took it the wrong way, apparently. It's kind of crazy. Then I talked about COVID immunity. A couple studies, one out of Sweden and one out of Germany shows that we may be closer to herd immunity than we think. And then we talked about one of our listeners who has resolved their psoriasis by about 80%. So 80% of the psoriasis was gone because they used red light therapy. Now we work with a company called Juve. They make the best quality red lights you'll find anywhere. These are the ones that are used in the studies. There's a lot of fake crap out there that definitely shines a red light on you, but it's not going to give you the same results. Now red light therapy improves your skin. It also improves things like stretch marks, wrinkles, and of course, issues like psoriasis. Studies support this. I'm not making this up. Now because you listen to Mind Pump, you actually get a hook up with Juve. Here's what you do if you want to get that discount. Go to juve.com. That's juve.com forward slash mind pump. You'll get a free maps prime program with the purchase of $500 or more free shipping and 0% financing for 12 month or 18 month financing options. Then we got into the questions. This is where we answer the fitness questions. The first one was what are some of your favorite ways to build the mid back? The next question was this person's hands give out when they do pull ups and deadlifts. How do you get your hands stronger? So we talk about strategies there. Adam told my special move. Yeah, not good. Special. The third question, this person says, you know, you guys tell us to stay in a certain rep range for about three to four weeks. How long should I stick to an exercise? Like when do I change up my exercises? And then the final question, this person says, how do I know when it's time to reverse diet? Also, this entire month maps strong is 50% off. Now map strong is a full workout program designed to build your body, speed up your metabolism. It's very, very good for the posterior chain. That's the butt. That's the back. There's lots of functional movements in it because it's strong. It's strong man inspired. This program is unconventional, but will put muscle and strength on your body. And of course, as a result, you'll get a much faster metabolism. So it's easier to stay lean. Here's how you get 50% off map strong right now. Go to mapsstrong.com. That's MAPS S-T-R-O-N-G dot com and use the code strong 50. That's S-T-R-O-N-G five zero, no space for the discount. That's the only, the one thing that we haven't figured out and we have a master it is what to tell the wives, like as our excuse to get away for work for like four or five hours. Like right now they're getting to see like, oh, wow, they just, they record for like couple hours. This is not a good example. Yeah. This is not good at all. We got to look more busy. Yeah. Let's stay in here for, or we need to talk about, man, we're getting so behind. We've only been able to work for a couple hours. So everybody keeps saying that, you know, that's the theme that everyone has to stick with, right? That's the story we're telling. You know, we'll do, we'll just stay in here for a couple hours after we're done. Okay. So that they have no. It's too hot in here, dude. It does get a little warm in here, doesn't it? It's all right though. I got my shirt on. We just got the blinds. You see. Oh, I see those. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Put those up, block some sun, right? Did you see Doug, if the measurements were right? Yeah, they're perfect. Oh, good job, Justin. Yeah. Yeah. Although we made them cut the wrong ones first. What do you mean? Well, Justin sent over Doug the measurements, you know, for the blinds. Yeah. But there's no W for width or L for length. Oh, cause I always go height and width. So that was assumed. Yeah. That's standard. That's what everybody does. Everybody does. I'm not sure. I'm not sure either. Height and width. Justin, Justin by far is the most handy. So that's fine. That's how, that's how every contractor I've worked with. He's like, you didn't get my contractor lingo. Anyway, she cut two blinds. Well, you text me and it taught him a way. He measured it in metric, not imperial. That's the world. The whole world does it that way. Well, yeah, exactly. Well, at least I got my shirt on, though. Yeah. Cool. What is it? It looks like a cleanup shirt, dude. Cleanup from what? Yeah. Was that under your bed? Did you find it? Anybody who's watching video right now could see that they knew exactly what I meant when I said that's a cleanup shirt. This is not a jizz shirt. Whoa. Hey, language. Yeah. So I'll tell you why. By the way, you see the holes in the back of it? Mm-hmm. It's been around for a while. Yeah. So here's the story. Like decades. Do you guys remember, like, there's like a few episodes ago where I told you guys how, when I was in high school, if somebody complimented me in something, I just wear it all the time. Oh, somebody told you to look good in that. Yeah. I think I had like two or three compliments in this shirt. This thing's never getting thrown away. No, he didn't. It's made it like three decades. It hides my weak body parts. Highlights my strong body parts. That's why I wear vests. Cover everything. Yeah. But the shoulders are dark. That's what it's all about, man. I heard you. So you're saying you're trying to do some hypertrophy for your arms now, huh? Yeah. Well, it's like spot reductions. That's the thing. You know, it's the summer of guns. You gotta wear the tank top. You gotta be able to pull it off. He doesn't have fat arms. Yeah. I just don't want like one big blob like I usually have. Did you see the picture? Did you not see the picture? I gotta show you this picture. So we were in the raft and Courtney took a picture of all of us. I saw you didn't use that one, Adam. It was too intimidating for you. Yeah, this guy right here. I guess Courtney and him must have had something like a sign or something like, hey, listen. When we go rafting, three, two, one, go. At one point, I'm going to take a photo of everybody and then I want you to flex as hard as you can. Yeah. So, and obviously, all of you two guys think about shit like that. Wait till I show you something. Or the light's good. Hey, babe. You know, it's time. No, no, no. I'm going to show you something. Look at, look at, you ready? You ready for this? Look at, hey, tell me that's not planned. That's planned, bro. Dang. Dude, you look good. He does look good, though, right? Too good. I couldn't post it. I didn't post that because it's like, whatever. You didn't post this? No, because he knew I was going to come with it. That's why. Bro, that's, you need more followers. No, maybe I will do that. Everybody could see what time it is, dude. I think you're right. Holy cow. You know what's funny? Last night, we were talking about, because we were talking about the muscle potential calculator that we have. And, you know, it tells you what your potential is based off of an algorithm that's based off of. How much Doug's been slacking? We seriously, like, deflated old Doug. Well, and Doug's been a bad mood since then. I know. And so, I'm, I'm totally like, like, not living to my potential either. No, you're not. Because apparently you could be massive. Yeah. But I, but last night we were hanging out with the kids and we were, you know, we're all eating dinner and stuff. And we're talking about, like, what's the heaviest you ever got or whatever? Yeah. Did you know Justin hit, like, two over 250? Yeah. Did you know that? I didn't know that. I thought it was you and I with the heaviest. No? I guess not. I got up to 235 maybe. I know you got up into the 240s. Yeah, I was 250, 255. Damn. That's a lot, dude. Yeah. I was telling Sal, like, I, it was hard for me to breathe. Like, I, I would just like, just sitting, like, was hard. And then I couldn't move, I couldn't move left to right. I had to just go straight. So I was like, I had no athleticism anymore. It was like, okay, coach, like, they wanted me to gain all this weight because I was an inside backer because I used to play outside and then strong safety. And then they're like, you need more size because everybody in the league is like, you know, 350 plus, like coming down, you know, trying to mow you over. And so you need to get more size. We need you to really put it on this summer. And so I was eating and, you know, working out. But I was like, totally gaining just, just blobs of fat everywhere. Hold on. You got up to 255 over a summer. How much weight did you gain that summer? Yeah, yeah. From the off season through to the next season. So how much did you gain though? I gained, okay. So normally I rested about 220. Right. Yeah, that's about my comfort zone. So 30 pounds, yeah, over the summer. So do you remember, now I remember when I bulked up to 240, I remember like there were staple meals that like helped me get there. And then it had to be, do you remember like staple things you were eating? Well, this is when we were talking about like, those, those like cytomast gainers and like shakes. And so I would do that. And I would do like four raw eggs. I would blend with them. And then I would do peanut butter. And it was just like the most disgusting, like calorie dense shake that I could possibly handle in the morning. And then my stomach would just be destroyed through practice. And then I would come back and I would go to the cafeteria and just eat like all the carbs, like everything. Like, cause that's all they serve in cafeteria. You're lucky if you get any kind of meat. It's usually like some really crappy like piece of ham or something. And I would stack as much ham as I could on there. But this is when I was living like on campus. And then I would go out and I would get, some of my friends worked at restaurants. And so I'd go sit there for dinner and I would like just cram in like huge meals. What a horse. Yeah. You guys, I've shown you guys a picture of me when I was all heavy, right? Didn't have any sugar guys? Yeah, I've seen it. When he got long hair on top of it. Yeah. Wow, what was I thinking? Gorgeous hair. Gorgeous hair. It's luxurious. The words that you used, I think the first time you saw. That's right. But I had some staple meals. Painting Provee commercial. I had some staple meals that I would eat. And I mean, I know why now I have certain intolerance because I guarantee I created them. Yeah. For breakfast, I would get a punch bowl or like a big popcorn bowl. And I would fill that with Cheerios and whole milk. So it was essentially a box of Cheerios and milk. And then I would have 10 whole egg scramble with cheese. That was just breakfast. Just terrible. I was eating all kinds of pizza. Yeah. Yeah. So how much muscle do you think you gained? You gained 30 pounds. How much of it was muscle though? Let's put like five pounds. I'll be completely honest. But I felt like shit, dude. I bet if you made contact though. Oh, no, nobody was pushing me over. That's for sure. Like I was a juggernaut. If I got like momentum and I was running straight ahead, nobody could stop me, dude. Dude, speaking of hitting, how crazy, who was it that was watching the Calcio Stortico with me on Netflix, that game in Florence? I was watching that. That was you. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. No, I was watching. Dude, did you watch it? Yeah, we watched it. Did you, you didn't watch the beginning though, dude. Yeah, I watched the whole thing. Oh, you did? Yeah. Dude, crazy. What a crazy sport, man. Ever. Well, what's crazy to me is that they don't get paid and they don't get anything. There's no trophy. Yeah, it's just straight honor. Bro, it's all honor. How do we not know about this sport? So I talked about this on the podcast years ago. A long time ago, you talked about it. A long time ago. I didn't know all the details. And then, so Netflix has this series. Forget the name of it, but they're going through different. It's like home field or home game or turf. Home turf, something like that. It's going through different parts of the world in different sports that are unique to certain parts of the world. And so in Florence, they have this game that literally dates back. You ready for this? The origins of this game go back 59 BC. Yeah, that's crazy. It was a game amongst gladiators. Now the way that it's currently being played with the exact rules and everything, exactly as it is now, was in the year 14 something. So it's still hundreds of years ago, exactly the way it is now. Don't they wear the same garbs and everything? The same garb and everything. And so the way it works is there's, I think there's four or five- 27 players on each team. Yeah, and there's four districts in Florence. Oh, that's true. In order to play for a district, you have to be born there and you're not allowed to go on any other team. So it's literally region versus region. You can't trade players, nothing. Oh, that's badass. You play for the place you live or whatever. And the goal is to get a ball, look kind of looks like a soccer ball, to the other net by any means necessary. So you like drop kick somebody with a body slam? It's very water polo-esque on the ground with no rules, right? So that's the way you can pass and move the ball. I can see that. And you throw it in a net that's like that on the other side. Obviously, the net's bigger though on this. But then anything goes, and then 27 guys on each team. And once you knock somebody to the ground, which IE could be a punch, an elbow, a karate chop, you could do whatever you want. Real kicks. Yeah, they have boxers on the team. Like there's wrestlers. So once you get the other person down on the ground, they can't get up until a goal is scored. So part of the strategy is when there's 20, imagine, 50, 54 people on this field. Bro, this is a gang fight. Yeah. That's what it reminds me of. It looked just like it. It was almost like you're watching in prison, like two different like teams just smashed. Dude, and it was really awesome to watch. Yes, it's violent and people definitely, everybody gets hurt when they play this. But the honor and the respect they had for each other. Like the respect was tremendous. They're shaking hands. They're respecting each other. They're not disrespect. There's no poor sportsmanship. The teams themselves, as we're watching it, these dudes are jacked, right? Like these guys lift weights. They're really, really built and tatted up or whatever. And their faces are a little bit scarred or whatever. So they're like arm around each other. They're, you know, they're doing this chant or whatever. And Courtney's watching like silent. She's just eyes focused on it. She goes, this is the most manly thing I've ever seen. That was so hard. Man. No wonder Jessica and Courtney were very quiet watching the steps. They were very happy watching this. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I used that energy later. Of course. I'm an opportunist. Hey, babe, let's go upstairs. Yeah, let's go. What's it called? Calisco or what? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Calciostoni. Get this ball to the other net, if you know what I'm saying. Any means necessary, babe. Yeah, that's right. That's how we're gonna play this. Anyway, pretty crazy. Dude, there was a study that was recently done on, we'll talk about fitness now for a second, on groups of lifters. And the thing that they were studying was how fast people respond to resistance training. It was a pretty large group. You know what they found? So this was a 12 weeks study. 25% of the group could be labeled non-responders. So a full quarter of people in that category or whatever in the group were considered non-responders. Then I think it was an additional, like maybe 15% were considered super responders. And then most people were somewhere in the middle. And they broke down and tried to figure out why some were hyper responders, why some weren't. What they found in the hyper responders is they had more satellite cells present in muscle. Satellite cells kind of orchestrate and tell the muscles to adapt. Apparently, they found that to be one of the big reasons why some people hyper respond. Now they didn't control protein intake. They didn't control diet and that kind of stuff. Part of me wonders if it's the real statistics are that 25% of them don't need to have calories. And that may be the reason why they didn't respond. Yeah, how did they tease all that stuff out? They didn't control for some of that stuff. Interesting though, right? Let me ask you guys a question as trainers. Let's say you took 100 dudes between the guys between the age of 20 and 30, normal health and all that stuff, and you trained them all 100 of them. What percentage of them would you say are the slow responders and what percentage would you say are the high responders? I would say there's a very close comparison, right? I think it would be as rare for me to see a non-responder to a super hyper responder. Yeah, I would agree. I would say that a majority of people that I trained. Yeah, those are the outliers for sure. Yeah, and I would think it's probably pretty close. I think for every person that I met that just nothing, they didn't respond to anything, for every one of those, I would say I probably knew somebody who touched weights or just thought about working out and built muscle. I would agree. I've trained a lot of guys that call themselves hard gainers and ectomorphs. And 99% of the time, they're neither of those, maybe natural ectomorphs, but not hard gainers. They just needed different training styles. Doug thought he was a hard gainer. I did too. I think that's correct. I think that a lot of people that like myself, like you, like Doug, who thought they were hard gainers, just they just didn't have all the pieces. And I think why you feel like you are one is because you have friends who don't put nearly the effort that maybe you're putting in and they respond. And so I think it's just you weren't doing what your body needed. You know what I think a big part of it is, is because I've been writing a lot of articles and stuff. They're not up yet, but we're going to be putting up what's called a pillar page soon, where you can learn all about a particular subject. This one's going to be about hard gainers, or people who find, or who people consider themselves, hard gainers. I think one of the biggest, besides programming, because that's a big one, right? If you don't work out right, it's going to be hard to build muscle. But besides that, a big one is people who consider themselves hard gainers oftentimes just have really fast metabolism. Yeah, yeah. Because the research I've been doing, which totally backs up my experience, is that the average, quote unquote, hard gainer needs to eat about 22 calories per pound of body weight before they start gaining weight. So to put that into perspective, a 150 pound man who- Which is tiny. It needs to build, who says they're a hard gainer, would need to consume 3,300 calories. That's a lot. That's a ton. That was the number one thing for me was that. Totally. I totally underestimated. And here's the thing. What you tend to do is, because I thought until I started tracking, I was like, I know I have these math. I just had Taco Bell with all this, and I was like, that's 5,000 calories. But then I would go, you know, 48 hours and only have, you know, 1,200 calories. So it would end up averaging way too low, and I just was not consistently hitting that. You had it all in one sitting. Yeah, once on, and I also- Because you felt stuff. Right. And then I also gravitate towards, you know, high-intensity type sports. I love the wakeboarding, the snowboarding, the playing basketball outside for hours. Yeah. So I was extremely active and very inconsistent with eating enough calories. And when I reduced the amount of activity that I was doing, I was consistent with increasing my calories. At this point, I still don't even have programming down well. I'm still learning that. I don't even have that down. But just simply by staying consistent with training and being consistent with eating an assert plus, reducing that, I mean, that was my first, like, 15-pound, 20-pound surge of size on my body that I had had. Yeah, I wonder, thinking back, my brother and I both, at the same time, were trying to put on muscle and we were both really into sports. He was taller than me, 6'3", and, you know, was pretty much more of the ectomorph, like fast metabolism, all this stuff. But he didn't really, you know, force himself to keep eating like I was doing. And also, I did more anaerobic activity. So I lifted weights and I didn't do quite as much conditioning and running and stuff like he did. So it was just interesting. I wonder if he would have had the same kind of response if he totally shifted it around what I was doing. I'll put it, I'll make it the perspective even more clear, right? So I just said, this is what studies show, about 22 calories per pound. So 150-pound male, 3,300 calories. So 3,300 calories consistently now. This is what you would need to eat on a consistent, regular basis. Over the course of a week, that's 23,100 calories, right? So now let's say you're this guy and you wanna build muscle and you're like, okay, I heard on Mind Pump I gotta eat, you know, 22 calories per pound. I'm 150 pounds, 3,300 calories, no problem. So you do that Monday through Friday, right? Five days a week. That's 16,500 calories. Saturday and Sunday come along and you know, you're out with your friends or you're doing a few things and oh, oh, you eat a couple big meals and now you ate a total of 2,000 calories on Saturday and 2,000 calories on Sunday. You're now out for the week, 20,500 calories. You're 3,000 calories under for the week what you need to gain muscle mass. So although five days a week, which is most of the time and especially if you're putting effort into it, your perception is I'm totally doing everything I can. Why isn't this working? Cause you don't understand that Saturday and Sunday, you were off by, you know, 15 hour calories, which is easy to do. It's really easy to do when you're eating 3,300 calories a day or that's your target. It just doesn't come out. And that same thing for me, Adam, it was like I thought I ate a lot or I thought I was doing it right. But when I started to really pay attention, I realized that weekends out would screw up because you know, you wake up late. So you can get the extra meal that you have in the morning or you're out with your friends, you know, riding your bikes or whatever. You don't realize that you're skipping an extra meal or and then dinner comes in, you eat a big dinner so you think you made up for it. But you actually, you actually didn't. I think that's probably a big reason. Right, right. So I caught myself last night watching another stupid show on Netflix, but this one actually like hooked me a little bit. Have you ever seen the Married at First Sight? I guess it's just been like 11 seasons or something crazy. I did watch that. Yeah, it was like, I was like, oh God, it's another one of these that, I was like watching it to kind of evaluate each person, which is something I know like Adam's mentioned, you do that sometimes with Katrina. Sometimes me and Courtney will do that. We'll kind of like see, you know, what people are coming in with and why, you know, they're still single and like what's going really going on, you know, underneath all this stuff. But they actually spend a lot of time going through like their apartment and their house, picking through all their stuff. And they collect all this data on each person. And basically like they do this whole psych eval. And then they have another lady who's like a sex therapist and also like a marriage therapist who like will ask really tough questions about like what you like are open to sexually, what you like are looking for for all this. And then they have another guy, it's like a minister who's talking about religion and like what's the most important thing. It's like all the hardest questions that you like most couples rarely get to, which I thought was interesting because, but then they like, they basically pair them for them and they don't see them until they get married that day. I was like, what the fuck? Who's gonna sign up for them? So that was kind of like that other show, right? It was like that, yeah. They talk and they can't see each other as they learn all about each other. But this one, they have the therapist and they have the, but this one is a little more like they're trying to make it, you have a professional. Can I tell you how much I hate these shows? I know. But yeah, watch them. You know what? It sucked me in. I'm telling you, it's candy. That's what it is. You know what I'm saying? Process food. Yeah, it's a process food of TV. It's you're not getting, you know what I hate about it though? Is it the trivialized marriage so much? Do you know what they're coming out with? So like it's like how far could you go, right? The old dating shows were like, you're gonna meet and go on a first date and people, it's like, that's okay. That's reasonable. Then it became like, we're gonna get engaged. You're like, whoa, all right. I think we're pushing it, but let's see. They still have time before they get married, you know? So let's see what, now it's like, we're gonna get married. So you know what they came out with a new show? People are gonna get paired to have a kid. No way. Yes, dude. No way. I can't remember the name of the show, but I watched it. It was like a trailer for it. That's a horrible idea. Dude, like how much are we gonna trivialized? Like getting married and starting a family, it was weird because I was wondering, I'm like, is this like a thing, like a trend that's happening because everybody's has all this access to dating whoever, whenever, but nobody's really committing to anybody anymore. So like that's like sort of the taboo thing now. It's like, oh, well, I'm gonna lock it in. Well, maybe that's why these shows are doing so well too, right? Because we keep the age of marriage keeps getting pushed out, pushed out, pushed out and less and less people are getting married earlier. And so maybe it's just that it's now interesting if you're 25 years old, I ain't gonna get married, but I'm definitely interested in to watch other people. Yeah. Yeah, I'm wondering what the motivation is. It's just interesting. A lot more of these shows are popping up. I feel filthy when I watch it. You know what I mean? After I'm done with it, I'm like, oh man. Right, it's like when you said, oh, I'll just have a handful of that bag and then you're gonna put it in a whole bag. Exactly, dude. Like damn it. Processed TV. Bro, no joke. Eight hours later, you're like, fuck, we're gonna hold back later. No joke, Jessica kind of will watch like one or two episodes and then we'll both look at each other and you can tell we're both like, oh, and then we'll be like, put a documentary on it. We need to like... Something where I can learn. Shit, that would just do it. Anyway, it's a good time. Do you guys, would you guys think about the dinner we made the other night? Excellent. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was super tasty. I loved how Jessica marinated. It was really good. Yeah, so... What was that? She was schoolin' me on it today. Oh, what was she telling you? It was like a... It was a Costco seasoning. Yeah, it was a Costco non-salt rub and then she, and then garlic and then something else she had on there but it was real basic. I told her it tasted like a Santa Fe marinade. Well, she does it early in the day and then you're supposed to leave it all day and then fully marinate. So it was the Butcher Box tri-tip, which is good and it's amazing. Oh, you've been eatin' that like crazy. I love it. I love their tri-tip. It's grass-fed but it tastes close to grain-fed. It's got that nice marble, whatever. You know, flavor to it. Now I asked Katrina, did you guys cook that in the oven and then you seared on the barbecue? Did you cook the whole thing in the barbecue? No, you seared it and then you do the oven. So here's the thing. Okay, I thought so. I was like, who's too perfectly cooked? I told her, I was like, I don't think South Korea's on the barbecue. No, so here's the thing though. Here's the difference. I've never, you guys are gonna make fun of me. Never used a meat thermometer before. Really? I started using one recently. Why the hell haven't I used one before? Well, some people think it's like cheating a barbecue. Fuck that. It makes it, it's good. It comes out good. I go back and forth with it. I use it every now and then. I love it. Cause you know what I used to do? The stupid thing where you touch your finger and you're like, oh, that means firm. That means if it's firm. I just kind of, yeah. I can push, I just know because of time. You know, the amount of time you're cooking all these types of meats, it's just, it's one of those things. You're a man's man. Yeah. I know it. I know what I'm doing. I feel so bad. I'm a grill master. I feel so masculine right now. He talks in construction when it comes to me. Oh, you don't know the first one's high. You need to, you need to. Let me ask you a question. Do you have some of our meat? Yeah, yeah. So one of them is obviously longer. Okay. That was me who put that together. Like Doug, Doug's reading it. You didn't think about that? And then I'm like listening to it and I go, wait a second. I was like, you know, they're all one size and I'm like 49, I'm like, And they're windows. Unless they're like wide like this. Yeah, I was like, I know those windows aren't that wide. I was talking about this. Today at Home Depot. Yeah. I'm there, so. Hey, it got done. Right, Doug? Anyway. It got done. It got done. We're here with the right, the right blinds. Okay. I should have gone with you guys. All right, shit. But the meat thermometer, game changer. I highly recommend people use those. Yeah. I know. I know people use it. Where have you been? I got something. Did you guys see Lou Lemon? I saw this. Mirror, 500 million. Half a billion dollars. Wow. Half a billion dollars. CEO. Were they even profitable? So, okay. No. No, they were evaluated. They were evaluated though. The first year, I want to say like 25 million. Then they skyrocketed to a hundred million. Obviously they got, you know. Was it just because they closed all these contracts to go into places? Or like, how are they getting that high of evaluation? Probably by how fast it was scaling. Yeah. Yeah, at the rate that it was scaling. Scaling from 25 to a hundred million in a one year's time. And I'm sure they were on that pace again. Right. They probably projected it. Now, what do you guys think Lou is going to do with it? Because now, Lou is in the exercise market. Right. They weren't before. Well, so what they did, which I think, brilliant acquisition by the way too. I think this is a really, really cool move. Interesting. What a great way to sell their clothes. Well, yeah. Totally. And also just get analytics on this many people, right? So that's really, MIR is a tech company is what they are. And they're smart enough too that they kept the CEO, right? So the creator of MIR is not only sold for her 500 million or whatever. And supposedly that's like what estimated 180 million to her. She also gets to stay on as CEO and then report to the CEO of Lou Lemus, which keeps probably a very high paying job with I'm sure all kinds of perks and steering the company in the direction they want. I think they just saw it was aligned really, really well and they're two great companies. And Lulu has really been struggling. So Lulu after the whole COVID thing, they took a huge hit. So they were not selling as much with stores being closed. It's one of those things. Well, this is smart then. Right. The ass is very, very smart. Allows them to get into people's houses and inquire a bigger audience potentially. Now, is the MIR audience mostly women or is it split down the middle? I don't know the analytics on. I would assume that they'd have a larger female market for Lulu to spend half a billion on. I know Lulu makes men's clothes too, but their big market is women. I would assume that. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, I think any sort of group or class or virtual class is probably, I mean, even gym world. Gym world, I'd say 65 to 70% of our clientele, it was female, right? So majority and some trainers are higher, obviously some lower. But I mean, for the most part, I would say the high 60s to 70% was the clients that we train. And that's in the gym. And I think when you talk about classes, Peloton, group classes, I think women dominate that market. I think the at-home workout market definitely is a larger female market. For sure. Part of it being comfort. Still, I still hear people, women say that they feel less, not as comfortable working out in gyms. The other part is that you probably want the convenience of being able to do something at home. Right. But this is interesting, half a billion dollars for that kind of a fitness tech company. Well, they obviously see their need to get into people's homes because of everything that's gone on. Right, I think it was kind of, I don't know. I have no idea how long they were courting them for, but it does seem like a move in response to what happened with COVID. Like they started, someone said, hey, we got to do something about this and saw an opportunity. Well, speaking of tech companies. It'd be interesting to watch them. Did you guys see what happened to Facebook? Oh yeah, I saw Starbucks, Coke, I think Hershey's maybe? Hold on a second. It took over 400 companies. Whoa, I thought there was just three. No, over 400 companies. Adidas, Span and Jerry's, Blue Bottle Coffee, Chobani, Adidas is under fire right now too. Coca-Cola, Blue Shield, I mean, I'm looking at Eddie Bauer, Ford, Hershey, Honda, like there's tons and tons of companies that pulled from Facebook. Did you hear why? So okay, that's what I want to know why because here's what's interesting to me, right? Yeah. Just so you know too, Adidas is under fire right now. The CEO just stepped down, stepped out. She made a comment about the whole, everything that's going on with George Floyd and racism as noise. Like they really didn't do anything. They didn't take any action about what was going on. And I think she tweeted at one point that referred to all of it as noise. And she just go, oh yeah, she got lambasted. She wrote out the statement, but it was like one of those total, you remember when people used to leave the company back in the days, right? Where it's like this formal like, thank you for the opportunity, let's say, yeah. But really behind closed doors like, you need to get the fuck out. We cannot have you work for your new job. We're gonna have you say this and you're gonna step over here and you're gonna get paid and you're out of here. Well, so these companies are saying that they're criticizing Facebook for not doing enough to rein in racist and violent content misinformation. So now here's the thing. This is why I think social media companies are about, I've been talking about, they're gonna get to see a mass exodus. And I think they're about to get hammered as well because social media companies are protected because they get treated like phone companies. Like you call someone on the phone, you can't sue the phone company for something that I say. They just allow people to talk and they don't do anything. Well, social media companies are protected that way, but they can't be now because they openly edit their stuff. And now they're getting hammered because now that they do edit, now that these companies can say, well, you're not doing enough or whatever. Now I find this very interesting because from what I've seen, from my own research, Facebook has been, and Twitter, have been more openly editing conservative points of views and not liberal points of views. Now this is, look, I'm non-bi, I don't sign up for one side or the other. This is just from the research that I've read. This is why they've been, that they might be brought before Congress to talk about it specifically because of that. So I find it interesting to see these companies are saying you're not doing enough. Yeah, well, the first sign of it was like the whole Alex Jones hysteria where everybody was trying to block him off of like the, because of the misinformation and things like he was spouting. And so that became like this question, how are they gonna handle instances like this? But yeah, you're right. I've seen a lot more conservative editing and like people like supporting Trump or whoever on that side of it being eliminated from the conversation. But it's like, so how are they gonna handle that in terms of like trying to have a balance? They are a private company. So this is perfectly fine. However, I think they're not protected from being sued anymore. Well, they're also not protected from companies pulling out from advertising. Well, they weren't before either. But now they're not, I think now they can get sued. Honestly, I think this is, that's the best way to handle this. So this is a part of me, I like seeing this, right? Oh, so do I. I believe that Facebook has the right to if they wanna be a hard left company and pull all conservative shit, so be it or the opposite. I agree. That opens the door for a company to provide, that's how Fox News reported. You just wish they had that in their policy so you knew like it was written in there somewhere. I just think they shouldn't be protected from lawsuit. You can't have both. You can't be protected by a law that says that you're, that you don't edit, that you're just like a phone company and simultaneously have the ability to edit and control information because now you're more like a magazine or a newspaper. But I tell you what, I mean, the best way to regulate this is exactly what we see is massive companies pulling advertising out and then losing billions of dollars. Is it really about that or is it about them not making money so they're pulling their marketing dollars back? I'll tell you what, dude, I don't know, maybe, but I'll tell you. You think that Hershey, Coca-Cola, not making money off advertising on Facebook? Dude, yeah, I know. I think it's an election here. It doesn't seem like it. So I think there's gonna be a lot of grandstanding. I also, right now, we're in this strange cancel culture thing that's going on where we are using current context to judge past language or content or media. Boy, do we jump to conclusions fast. Not just that, but it's gotten so crazy because I'm gonna say something right now. I don't care who you are. Nobody will ever, nobody can survive that level of scrutiny because you could go back 10 or 15 years. Imagine if somebody recorded every single text and phone call and email and everything that you said 15 years ago and then with the context of today's acceptable behaviors and words, went back and scrutinized you, you'd be screwed. Everybody would be. But this is what they're doing with everything. It's starting to get crazy where it's, and nobody will survive this. You can't do this because... Well, even people you think are on your team or whatever, then they go back and they've, like a Jimmy Kimmel, something happened with him where they go way back and then he's playing a character but now they cancel him. It's destroying, it's going to be very, very destructive. This, again, nothing will stand this level of scrutiny. It'll turn in on itself as well and everything's gonna get taken out. What we need to do is you need to judge people by what they say, do, and how they behave now because the past things were different. They were acceptable language. There was acceptable things of behaving. Now I'm not talking about crazy stuff. I'm talking about more like, you know, how you may refer to somebody, how you may talk about lots of different subjects, like, you know, how you refer to people of different races, for example. The words that you may use, they may be acceptable one minute, then the next minute they're not acceptable, that's totally fine, but you can't judge what was acceptable 20 years ago with what isn't today and saying, oh, we gotta cancel this person. People need to, like, for example, I'll give you a great example. Barack Obama campaigned in 2008, openly said he did not support gay marriage in 2008. I don't think we should cancel Barack Obama because his current behavior shows that he's very supportive of it. You see what I'm saying? So we gotta be very careful with allowing this, and right now it's so heightened that you're seeing, like, that people are just dropping very quick with even the slightest mention of, oh, maybe you might have said something wrong or whatever, and of course there's, I think there's cases that are clear. I'm not talking about those ones. Did you hear about the trainer at the Anytime Fitness with the whiteboard? No. You didn't hear about that? So it went viral. It's a picture of a world's workout, right? The name of the workout? Yes. Oh, the I Can't Breathe workout? Yes, the I Can't. So, now here's, I mean, that's a poor taste. Yeah, but here's a thing, though. No, no, no, but here's what I've heard now from this. And so I guess the gym owner originally posted an apology and then pulled it back because after speaking to the trainer, it was supposed to be something done in memory to him. It was supposed to be out of respect, not out of something out of disrespect. And it got totally turned just because somebody took a picture. They thought they were making fun of it. Right. Oh, wow. And instead, it was supposed to be something like out of respect, not out of like trying to disrespect at all. And yet. It was a big misfire. Oh, a total misfire. See, that actually proves what I'm saying. I think. No, that's why I brought it up. Yeah, I think everybody right now has glasses. Right. Where everything is. You just want to jump right to that and be like, I can't believe you would say something or do something like that. That's poor taste. It's like, is it really, though, if you was doing it out of support? You know what I'm saying? I don't know. That's right. All the wads were named after fallen soldiers, right? Like some of them at least, so. Yeah, yeah. We need to be careful with this movement. And I think there's a lot of people who think exactly like what I'm saying. And they're like, hey, chill out a little bit. We're going a little too far with some of the stuff. But the problem is that most people just don't say anything. And so you've got a small group of really pissed off people or looking for certain things. And they're allowed to just go run amok. And I think that there's a lot of people who are like, okay, it's gone a little too far when we see a petition signed to take Paw Patrol, for example, off the air, which is a cartoon about dogs. I thought that was fake news. That was it fake news? Yeah, there really was a petition, but it was fake news that they were going to cancel it. But still, you know what I mean? Let me put it this way. The atmosphere is such that you hear that. It is believable. Yeah, and you don't think it's crazy. You know what I mean? I've been getting a lot of, I mean for the most part, I've been getting a lot of positive DMs. Have you guys, I feel like for the most part, people are more sane than you think. I think there's a lot of stuff going on right now that's, like you said, very loud, a loud minority. Yeah, I think there's a big eruption. And I think that people are now, well, from what I'm trying to see, at least through my eyes, is how we're all trying to kind of piece back together and unify through all this stuff. So it's just like, it's one of those things, it's just, man, it was just a massive eruption because of all these circumstances that happened all once. It is, and to make matters worse, the elected leaders will give us information that seems counter, and then it makes you believe all kinds of crazy stuff. For example, with COVID and all the shutdowns, and we were told like, you go outside without a mask or you don't, you go to stores or whatever. Mayor of LA said that he would turn off power and water to businesses that were trying to operate. And people obviously needed their businesses to operate because they didn't have any way to support themselves. And then when you have these mass protests, they wouldn't say that there was a problem. In fact, they said it's not a big deal. And I get, I kind of understand why they said that. You don't wanna get in the way of a massive protest by, you don't wanna try and meet it with force, I understand that. But imagine the message you get when you're a business owner, you're like, man, I lost my business. And 10,000 people organize and you're not stopping them and I couldn't run my business. Did you get the news on, just beginning of COVID, the counties that are shutting down in California now? No, they did. 19 are being told to, and then there's a lot of people that are a lot of them that are volunteering to. Wow. Here are all the counties. Yeah, because you're seeing a spike predictably right. So 19 counties in California right now are pulling no more restaurants again, no more, no entertainment, no bars. Here we go again. Right, Contra Costa, Fresno, Glenn, Imperial, Kern, Kings, Los Angeles, Merced, Orange, Riverside, Sacramento, San Benito, San Joaquin, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Solano, Stanislaus, Tulare, and Ventura. Well, we are seeing a spike in cases. The death rate doesn't seem to be, or the deaths don't seem to be going up, but we might need to wait a few weeks to see what that looks like. I just read a study that says that COVID herd immunity might be much closer than we think. So the antibody tests that we do tests, obviously antibody specific to this version of COVID, but they did a study in Sweden, and then they did a German study, and they found that people who had other coronaviruses, because there's coronavirus is a category of viruses, there's a lot of different ones, right? COVID-19 is a specific type, just like influenza, there's different versions. People who had other coronaviruses had partial or almost full immunity to COVID-19. Oh wow. So they would get COVID-19, but have no symptoms, and they said they saw, not antibodies, but they saw something else, T cells. They saw T cells that were activated from the previous coronavirus, so they think that we may actually be, have more protection than we think, because coronavirus has been around for a long time, but we've all had some form. I told you a little bit about when we took our little doxin in to get his shots and whatnot, we were talking to the veterinarian, and she was all upset, because they've known through, because cats have coronavirus, obviously it's a different strain, but it's very close to the COVID-19 strain, and they were treating that with steroids, and it's very similar to the steroids that they've found have started to work, and this has been information that's been public domain for a long time, but obviously with animals, but when you're experimenting with these drugs, isn't that the first place you go to see what works on animals first? Interesting. I mean, dude, we also got to give credit to the health experts. This was fast, like it came on quick. Everybody's been working hard at it for sure. Yeah, it came on quick, and so information is gonna, they're gonna say one thing, and of course it's gonna change, and a couple months as more information is presented, so we gotta remember that, so we don't, because it's easy to lose faith in the people giving us advice, and to think that they've got bad intentions, it's like, well, you know, I could understand being the scientist on the other side and being like, look, man, this was fast, we didn't know, you know, two more months, information may change even then, so who knows, man? Who knows what will happen? Hey, I wanted to share some cool news. I got a DM just the other day about somebody had heard me talk about my psoriasis, and anytime I get asked probably, I don't know, at least every other time that I do a quaw on the things that I list off that have been the most important. And I always say like, you know, diet for me, sunlight or supplementing with vitamin D has been also soft water instead of hard water, and then the Juve light like has been a huge help for that, especially when I'm consistent. And I noticed when I'm consistent with it, it keeps it down, if I'm inconsistent with it, it kind of flares back up. And they told me that they invested in one about a month ago, and they've been consistently using it three times a week for 20 minutes, and it's reduced it by 80%. Holy moly. That's so cool. And somebody who struggles with psoriasis. That's a big deal. Yeah, 80% reduction in the way that the blemishes or scabs or whatever you want to call them look, that's a big deal. I wish I knew about this. I had a client who had really bad psoriasis, and she was so self-conscious about it, because it's one of those things that's so visible. It's visible, yeah. You know, I wish I knew about red light therapy back when I trained her and lost contact with her a long time ago, but I remember how self-conscious she was. 80% is huge. I don't think there's a single drug you can put on it that will do that. Oh, there's steroids and stuff like that, but a lot of it's like, they don't have a lot of research around it. So there's a lot, and that's why, so I used to go to my dermatologist and they would inject this around it, and it basically kills off all the bacteria around that, but you're injecting something like that into your blood, right? I'm like, ah, it's probably something I don't want to do on a regular basis. It's just a super strong, it like tamps down the immune response is what it's doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, you have options like that. See, that's the thing about the Juve is it doesn't reduce your immune function. It doesn't tamp it down like steroids do. If anything, it's immune booster, but the way it works, it's the best results you get from it are skin stuff, which includes, in this part, I'm not bullshitting about, you can look this up, there's studies on this. The wrinkles. Wrinkles, stretch marks. Improve the appearance of your skin so it looks more youthful. And the reason why it does this is because it dramatically increased the amount of ATP that's produced in the mitochondria. Well, it's funny you say that because my old client used to train, she's always looking at like the latest and greatest Hollywood beauty products. And there's so many now variations of red light, you know, versions like where they have a mask that you can put on. You saw the Billions one, right? Oh yeah, so they have that, yeah. And so she actually bought like this, and I'm like, why do you buy the blanket? So I'm getting her one of those Juve panels because I'm like, dude, this is the only one that's actually proven through these clinical trials and everything, but yeah, there's blankets, there's like hats, and there's all kinds of stuff. People are catching on. Well, it works. It works. That's what it is, it works. And now there's an opportunity for a bunch of charlatans to come in and people to, you know. All the chotchkees and they're making money off of it. 100%. First question is from Freeman Axtel. What are some of your favorite ways to build the mid-back? Oh, the good old mid-back. Ooh, mid. So a well-developed mid-back is so underrated. I'll tell you what, you know, we tend to think of the lats and getting wit and all that stuff, but nothing is more attractive than having that nice muscle and definition of the spine to where Adam called it the canal, where it kind of dips in, yes. One of the things that, I mean, Jessica has got incredible back development, part of it's because she did a lot of silk straining, so a lot of climbing and rowing and pulling, but she had this, I just loved her back. I love the way it looked. I love the way that line looked. She had well-developed mid-back muscles. Some of the best exercises for the mid-back are rows and row variations, but I'm gonna tell you an exercise that blows those away and I'm learning about it now, heavy, no joke, heavy trap bar, farmer walks and deadlifts. Man, that hits my mid-back like nothing. And really, I didn't really start doing those on a regular basis until I followed MAP Strong. Back when we, when did we write MAP Strong? When did we create that? Ooh, a couple years ago. It was a couple years ago. So Robert Oberst is a world's strongest man competitor, massive human being, and we enlisted his help to create a workout inspired by Strongman. I followed the program and in it are unconventional type exercises like snatch grip deadlifts and zircher squats and trap bar farmer walks. And I followed the programs. First time I ever did farmer walks, like programmed where it's consistent every single week. And the biggest gains I saw besides my grip strength was my mid-back. My mid-back just, it just, I could feel it. I could feel the- Well, it's funny. We all kind of noticed that at the same time after going through a few of the workouts for a few weeks, it was like, oh my God, my upper back and my mid-back are just torched. Like it hits it so many times and it's just one of those things. Those work sessions, you're always carrying something. You're always like, your hands are in a position where they're wider than they usually are or you're just grabbing things constantly and it totally adds up over time. All this volume adds right into your back. Well, it makes a ton of sense why that is, right? Like that canal or those, and you get the- The erector spinae and the rhomboids. Yeah, all those muscles support the spine. And so anything that really challenges, flexion or extension of the spine or stabilizing the spine, especially heavy-loaded, is gonna really develop all those muscles that support that. And so when you think about, obviously, for me, deadlift, nothing did it like deadlifting. Deadlifting just completely changed the way my back looked. And that was one of the things. It just gave this new thickness and a just deep canal down the back from deadlifting. And that was the biggest change in my routine before I noticed that big change. But I would say that the trap bar deadlifts, too, is because you were, I mean, you could trap bar deadlift or I mean, or deadlift or carry 400 plus pounds. You're carrying 400 plus pounds and moving like that. The amount of stabilization for all those muscles around there. I mean, so I think that's a big reason why those exercises are so powerful. Picking things up on the ground like shouldering, heavy weights, like there's all, if you just go through and you look at all these exercises, like your back is so essential in that process of lifting something off the ground and pulling it up into your chest. And it's just, it does wonders for your mid-back. To me, that's the real sign of a strong back, too, right? So some people look at backs and they get impressed by the wingspan. Because someone has big glats. But to me, a really strong back will have this more pronounced mid-back. It's very functional. So I picked up on that in my 20s. I worked out at the Gold Gym for a little while on Monterey. Love that gold. I don't think it's gold anymore. I think it's called something else now. But great gym. And I, you know, there's, you see a lot of hardcore lifters in there. And I remember there was one dude that worked out there and his back was so impressive. He had this impressive traps and this back thickness and he wore these tank tops to work out. And, you know, we work out at the same time. So I'd see him all the time. Eventually we'd say hi to each other or whatever. And I noticed he just had this incredible back thickness. And I'd watch his workouts and almost all the exercises he did for back were rows or some kind of a heavy deadlift or trap bar deadlift or something like that. So I never saw him do pull-ups, never saw him do pull-downs, but he did lots and lots of rows and lots and lots of deadlifts. Now, at the same time, there was another dude that was in there that could do more pull-ups than I've ever seen in my entire life and do more pull-ups one more way. This dude could strap 100 pounds around his waist and do crazy pull-ups. And he could also rep out 25 pull-ups like no big deal. Totally different look to his back, very wide. He had the wide-looking lats, but he lacked the thickness. Now I remember specifically paying attention to this too and thinking to myself, if I had to pick one, I'd want to look like the dude that did all the rows. And I think it's because those mid-back muscles are so functional for everyday life. Now that's not to say pull-ups aren't functional. I think they're very functional. But I think that mid-back pulling the shoulder blades back, keeping that upright posture, if you pull something, you tend to pull it towards your body rather than pulling yourself up. It's just a more functional, more powerful look. Well, I just love to those seated rows where you allow your shoulders to protract a bit, but you stabilize your trunk and you're pulling back in. So it's like something where trainers will come up and be like, you're doing it wrong because you're supposed to keep your shoulders in that neutral position and then only retract from there. But for me, getting that full range of motion, I could really feel out of my mid-back. I think it has a lot to do with posture. Like I think what you're alluding to right now is when you have that really good thick mid-back, the muscles that are typically underdeveloped in upper cross syndrome are fully developed. So when you see somebody, which is common, right? So majority of people listening actually suffer from upper cross syndrome at some extent of it. And so with that, you tend to have these overactive tight delts and your pecs are tight and then you have a weaker mid-upper back. And so if you have a very strong developed mid-upper back, you probably have pretty damn good posture. It just looks good. And it looks good. And you stand up and you see, man, when you see someone like that in a t-shirt, the way it hangs on the back of their shirt, you can see the traps in the mid-back and they're upright. You can have really, and we've probably seen this before, somebody who has really wide or good lats, but still rolled forward and poor posture. You look more confident and composed when you have good posture. One-arm dumbbell rows are great too. One-arm dumbbell row with a little rotation to the top that hits that mid-back. Any row that really focus on squeezing the shoulder blades back is gonna give you that mid-back development. Next question is from Chai Latte. I find that my hands give in first during pull-ups, deadlifts, and some dumbbell exercises. Other than grabbing onto heavy weights, what are other ways to train grip strength? Oh, did you see my post or my questions? Someone asked me that and I referred to what Justin does. Oh, wait, what did you say? He straps ankle weights to his wrist when he masturbates. How did I know that you went there? That's so weird. It's not like you at all. It's the truth, that's what I'm talking about. You know me, I keep it real. You're not supposed to watch, okay? That's something wrong with you. Oh, wait a minute, that's what I'm saying. Now, you know, so this for me was a big deal back in the day. Back in the day when I used to work out, I would wear wrist straps. Wrist straps go around your wrist and then they go around the barbell or the bar that you're pulling or the dumbbells to help you hold on to them so that you could pull more weight, do more weight on your movements or whatever. And I saw bodybuilders do them in magazines, so I did them for a long time. And then I remember working out with somebody who followed my workout, didn't use any wrist straps, and not only was as strong as I was, but he had much nicer-looking arms. He had very well-developed forearms. And I thought, gosh, you know what? I don't think I could hang with this guy unless I had all my wrist straps. So I took the wrist straps, I threw them away, and from that day forward, I said, if I can't hold onto the weight, then I'm not gonna lift that weight. Now here's what happened. Not gonna lie to you. I had to go much lighter for a while. Took a while. But eventually my hands caught up and now my hands are strong enough, if not stronger than the rest of my body. Now, we're humans, we're part of the primate species or whatever, category of animals. We're supposed to have really strong hands. We're not supposed to be able to lift things with other muscles that our hands can't hold onto. I think we just baby the hell out of our hands. So number one, obviously don't wear wrist straps, but if you're not wearing wrist straps and you're having a problem with this, what I think you should do is dedicate maybe 10 minutes at the end of two or three of workouts to grip specific exercises. There's a couple that I love doing. One is I like to hold a plate. I like to use a pinch grip. Pinch grip, yeah. Where I use just my fingertips on my thumb or my fingers are flat in my thumb and I hold a weight just like that for static tension. The other one that I like to do are heavy reverse curls, thumbless. So I put my thumb over the bar, monkey grip. I do reverse curls. That works the top of my forearm, but also strengthens my grip to have to hold onto the bar. Just do those at the end of your workout for a few sets, maybe two or three days a week. That should give you the extra volume your hands need. We have some pretty cool exercises that we highlighted around strengthening your hands and your grip in our OCR program. And one of them is like really unconventional but cheap to do is to buy a bucket and put rice in there. And to go through all these like rice bucket drills where your hand is going all the way down towards the bottom and it's pushing the rice away by splaying out your fingers and then grabbing and gripping it as hard as you can and then splaying it out. And so we go through various drills with that and it really does make a difference. Man, my hands were fatigued and I could really feel them being worked going through that part of it. And then there's also tons of other ways that Sal mentioned the pinch grip. We have that in terms of like doing farmer walks with a pinch grip or just hanging from the bar. So there's options like that. I was just gonna refer to it. So recently I've been having shoulder issues and I think a lot of that is due to having max and holding max all the time like this and him getting heavier and just not used to that and my shoulders all roll forward. And so I'm getting all these issues. And one of the things that I've been doing to actually do that is before I start my workout or when I end it or whenever I can grab a bar like we have one here in the garage. I jump on it every now and then and just do dead hangs. And one of the things that I'm noticing even though I'm doing this for my shoulders because that's great for like good shoulder health, right? It's like a great exercise for those of you that are looking for good shoulder health is to do dead hangs and just kind of hang there. But what I'm finding is my grip strength in my forearms are getting like these massive pumps. And I think about what Sal always talks about with trigger sessions and you know and how to work up like with pull-ups and things like that. Like here's a great thing to do is go do a dead hang on a bar, time yourself to see when you give out and then just frequently do that as much as you can throughout the day. If you have a bar or a two by four or a tree branch or something that you can just grab and consistently hang from and just like challenge yourself to add five more seconds, add 10 more seconds, you'll be blown away on how fast your grip strength is. Yeah, you can work up to, now if you don't normally do this, you gotta be careful for overtraining but you can work up to a tremendous amount of volume for your hands and your forearms. A tremendous amount of volume. Like I got to the point where I was doing judo or jiu-jitsu training, which is very grip intensive, three, four days a week. Then on top of that I'll train my forearms three or four days a week and not wearing wrist straps and my hands and forearms were fine. You can work up to a tremendous amount of volume and I tell you what, strong hands, strong grip will improve not just your back exercises but your pressing movements as well. That strong wrist, that strong grip position when you bench press or overhead press, very important to your overall strength. If you don't believe me, next time you bench press, put like knee wraps around your wrist to give you support and see how strong you feel. Now what if you could do that naturally, right? So this is an important thing I think a lot of people should train. We were just talking about MAP Strong earlier. MAP Strong will work the shit out of your grip. That'll make you, that'll give you some crazy strong hands. Really really strong hands are important for strong men so some of the exercise in there, challenge the hell out of grip like the snatch grip high pulls like that makes sure that puts your forearms on fire. Next question is from Nathaniel L. Watson. You guys say staying a certain rep range for three to four weeks, how long should you stick with an exercise before changing those up? We addressed this not that long ago. We talked about exercises because I think someone asked right after we talked about rep ranges. So it's been, but maybe it's been a while and it really depends on the exercise that we're talking about. Yeah, that's true. And I'll tell you myself personally how I do this is if it's like a high skill base thing like any sort of squat variation, deadlift variation, I rarely ever rotate those completely out. Like I know you're going through something right now Sal, which I've done this before where I like I stopped barbell squatting for a while and I do all unilateral. Like I might do that every once in a while but it's not because I'm afraid that I'm so adapt to squats. I'm not getting results anymore. It's more because I can'm addressing mobility. Like what you're doing or in some sort of an imbalance left or right. When it comes to these really high skill movements you may squat and deadlift the rest of your life and never be a master at it. Like it's really that like it belongs in your routine of time. It's really a lot of the other movements that really need to be rotated in and out. Agreed, I would say your squats and your squat variations, deadlifts and deadlift variations. So that refers to sumo, conventional, trap bar, deadlift. Your bench presses and those variations. Rows, overhead presses. Those should almost always be in your routine unless you're addressing some kind of an imbalance or an issue. Everything else you could cycle in and out. Bicep exercises, tricep exercises, isolation exercises. Those you can play with a little bit. Now here's the thing though. I still think you should stay with an exercise. Even those isolation ones, unless you're advanced. Now if you're advanced, you've been working out for years then it's not a big deal. But if you're like most people and you're not super advanced with your training I would say you still stick with those isolation movements for a few weeks at least. Get good at them for three, four weeks before switching out. Minimum. If you're changing rep ranges and you're manipulating like that stuff is way bigger. I think if you went from maps program to maps program you would cycle through exercises appropriately because each program is about 12 weeks long. So probably 12 weeks would probably be the right answer for the ones cycling up. And one thing that we do that I don't know if a lot of people even realize that we do in our programming is we look from even a higher perspective of have we incorporated enough moves in different planes of motion? Have we incorporated enough rotational moves? Is it always hammering this same sagittal plane which most people just get stuck in there? So that's something we are conscious of that and making sure that there's enough of that thrown in to make sure that your joints are still well and healthy and able to stabilize properly. This is why I think that performance and strong because the two of them are really addressed what you're alluding to right now. Just if you don't own those in your collection of whatever maps programs you're following you're probably missing out on a big component or piece because when we did, when we looked at all of them the anabolic and aesthetic and split and PED they address a lot of the body building type of sagittal plane type of movements which great for everybody trying to sculpt and build and shape and build your metabolism all those great things burn body fat but for overall health, joint health being functional it's very important that you incorporate the unconventional type movements, anti-rotational stuff multi-planar movements like those are really addressed well in performance and in strong in my opinion. And you also, here's one other thing about exercise is before you can really start to reap the maximum benefit of an exercise you gotta kinda get to the point where you're good at it not super good at it but good enough to where you could exert maximal force. So it's like, if I do a new exercise let's say I've never done an upright row before for my shoulders, never done it before it's gonna take me at least, and let's say I'm already fit so I already work out, right? It's gonna take me at least a couple weeks just to get good at upright rows and then when I start to get good at them and really feel what I'm supposed to feel and really be able to exert force now I'm gonna maximize, now I'm gonna get the benefits now I'm gonna get the real benefits of the exercise so it's like when I teach someone how to barbell squat takes a while before they can squat to the point where then we can start pushing weight and building muscle for a while it's just getting good at the exercise so consider that as well and now advanced people, people who have a lot of experience they really know how to move well they've been working out for a long time they can kind of get away with switching exercises in and out because they can jump into an exercise and be good at it, they can do a shoulder press and be good at it, they can do a row and be good at it they can, but a lot of people need at least a couple weeks, maybe a few weeks at least to get to the point where they can get comfortable the exercise comfortable enough to where they can push it and then reap the real benefits. I love, if you don't own our math programs I love that structure though I really do that, you should stick to an exercise for 12 weeks and in that 12 weeks you should manipulate things like rep ranges, sets and tempo and shit like that like stick to the exercises for at least three months but manipulate the other variables that can progressively overload the body so you don't need to change the exercises that often and to Sal's point, that becomes even more important than more new you are you'd have to be a very, very advanced person for me to even think it's a good idea for you to be changing it I'm talking about like five years of consistent lifting Yeah, and in only then and honestly then, I still don't think it's a superior way of lifting I think it's like, if someone said You can get away with it Right, exactly, if someone said like hey, I just don't like doing the same exercises for four weeks straight at them can I switch this for that? Okay, yeah, you're advanced you can jump right into a front squat and fire it the way I want you to you know that you can lunge, bulgarian you can do everything already really well like, okay, go ahead and play with it for sanity reasons but for good programming reasons I think that the minimum you should stick to a exercises at least a few months to get really, really good at it and then manipulate the other variables Yeah, when I throw in a new exercise now I do at least that so if I say, okay, like right now I'm gonna be doing trap bar deadlifts instead of straight bar deadlifts that means I'm gonna be doing them now for the next two months You've been doing lunges for quite some time Yeah, and I'm already starting to go back to squats now Right Next question is from Progman 2012 How do you know when it's time to reverse diet? That's a really good question So for the audience that's listening right now a reverse diet literally means you're slowly increasing your calories with the intention of speeding up your metabolism building muscle and getting to a point to where then you can cut calories from a higher calorie percentage or higher calorie point so it's easier to burn body fat So to give you an example it'd be like a woman, let's say her she had to eat 1500 calories a day in order to stay the same way Well, we could cut her down to 1200 but not much lower you can go than that or I could reverse diet her and add strength training get to the point where her body's burning now 2200 calories Now I've got room to go when I cut that person but I guess that, but the question of course is how do I know? When's a good time to reverse diet? You know, I have something for that First, I'm going to make a statement that's a total overgeneralization but I think for the majority it stands that I think most people should start here regardless of your goal whether it's to build muscle to stay this maintain just increase performance or for sure lose body fat I think most people especially if you haven't been tracking you haven't been really doing anything consistently with your diet as far as being regimen I think one of the first things that you should do is to reverse diet most people we naturally do this thing where we don't eat for long periods of time and then we splurge we don't eat, we splurge and there's not a lot of consistency with the way you're eating and doing a real good structured reverse diet kind of gives you that and in my experience almost every client that I've ever trained when we first evaluate their calorie intake especially my women are almost always eating relatively low even if I'm looking at a client that's 100 pounds overweight most of them have already tried dieting themselves so many times that they've actually slowed down their metabolism and they're at a very low calorie intake and my goal was always this so I would tell them listen my goal is to slowly increase calories into your diet while also manipulating and changing your programming so that those extra calories get partitioned over to building muscle and they don't get stored as fat but my goal is to do that until you get to a point where you go from somebody who just kind of eats a few times a day to where you're gonna be like Adam this is becoming a job like I'm tired of eating this much you've got me eating so much I don't want to eat this much what a great position yeah and that's exactly where I want a client who needs to lose weight to get because if I get them there then when I say all right excellent now Susie I want you to drop one meal she's like oh thank God and then what does she get she gets these great results right away because I've now naturally cut out three, four hundred calories I think this is gonna be such a big story in mainstream science and nutrition science that the body has this incredible ability to become more or less efficient with calories and that can equate to a lot like you could take somebody who's a POW and when they take these people who've been in a camp or in prison for a long period of time fed very very little their bodies adapted to be able to operate on incredibly low calories you can also reverse diet people and get them to burn I've had female clients no joke where we do this process and we get them to burn 800 more calories a day and they're burning body fat while they're eating 800 more calories a day I mean it's crazy the body's capacity to do this is actually a very valuable strategy it just takes time so you don't lose weight right away when you do it this way it's like you're setting yourself up for the fat loss you're setting yourself up for the big fat loss and then you're setting yourself up to make it more permanent or easier to stick with because if you're eating a ton now cutting from there is easy if you're not eating that much now cutting from there is really really hard and that's rare how many times did you guys remember getting I remember literally I could count on one hand how many times I got the really overweight client who sat down and I said be completely honest tell me everything you're eating they're like so I had McDonald's for breakfast and then I had this milkshake in the afternoon and then I had a large pizza to myself and they're eating like 7,000 bad calories there are people like that there are they exist like I said a handful of them I've trained in the two decades of training clients and I tell you what those are the easiest you know what I'm saying like you just changed just reduced you just changed some of those choices and all of a sudden they just weight falls off them but that's not what most people hire me because they've already been trying this shit on their own for many years and it failed and they're lost they're like listen Adam this is what I eat why am I still overweight? I don't understand and so the first thing that I have to do with them is to reverse diet them and then so and it's you know I would love to see it take off I would love to see this being the way that like trainers take on a new client like this is the protocol this is to really build up the metabolism to take them through this process of you know like paying attention to the timing of their eating to really ramp it to a point where like you said this is a bit much this is like a chore and now even if the goal is to lose weight and to lose body fat we're in such a better position long term than we were starting out and I think that it really is the biggest barrier is psychological for sure people just don't want to hear that because they already have these expectations coming in that they want to just shed everything off dude you get a client who's like I'm gonna hire you for 30 sessions I want to lose 20 pounds like okay we're not gonna lose any weight for four months for four months the goal is to speed up your metabolism that's a hard sell you have to be a very confident trainer and you have to be able to explain yourself very well but it's a much better strategy here's the bottom line the bottom line is we don't move much but we're all so busy and there's a lot of food all around us so you're better off with a faster metabolism now for hunter-gatherers and there's not a lot of food around us I'd be like don't make your metabolism faster you need to be able to survive on a little bit of calories but that's not the way we live today today if you have a very very fast metabolism you are at an advantage and reverse dieting helps make that happen but it does need to be programmed with a good workout that's geared towards muscle building look on this episode you heard us refer to maps strong maps strong is a program that does exactly that it's a phenomenal metabolism boosting muscle building program it's exceptional in fact some of our most ardent followers of it are women who notice exactly that from following the program and the program is 50% off right now you just gotta go to mapsstrong.com and use the code strong50 that's S-T-R-O-N-G-5-0 also the podcast is recorded on video as well as audio so if you like listening to us imagine how much you like us when you look at us we got faces made for podcasts let me tell you anyway you can find us on YouTube Mind Pump podcast also we have a bunch of free guides if you'd like to learn more about muscle building fat loss developing specific parts of your body go to mindpumpfree.com bunch of free information for you we created it just to provide more value for our listeners