 Consistency always beats harder. Watch this first caller is James from Oklahoma. James, what's happening, man? How can we help you? Well, uh, yeah, this is a, it's kind of crazy. I'm, I'm pretty nervous. Not gonna lie. So, uh, I just, uh, I wanted to get on here and I just wanted to ask a couple of questions here. Um, just a little bit of background and I'm just going to try to read directly from what I've got here. So I don't get off topic too much. Okay. Um, so a little bit of background, I've kind of been into health and fitness my whole life. I kind of started out as a power lifter and a runner. Um, I've kind of transitioned over the years to just trying to be, uh, healthy and strong and functional and be more mobile. And I've kind of been helping some people do that. Um, we live in pretty low income area. And a lot of people struggle with understanding it and how to apply it. And they, a lot of people think that it needs to be hard and it doesn't have to be hard to be consistent. Um, but I've, I've used a lot of your information and your programming to be able to help people. I mean, I've, I've modified several different programs from maps, anabolic to split. Uh, my youngest son is currently on, uh, maps power lifter right now. And by the way, uh, he goes, he has one week left in that. And as of this morning, his bench press is up like 15 or 20 pounds. It's pretty significant. You know, and he's not, and he's a, he's a pretty strong kid to start with. So anyway, um, the biggest question that I had is, um, finally convinced my wife to strength train by, by getting her to listen to you guys a little bit. And then she started seeing some other women that were showing some, some progress in the strength training spectrum. And, um, we started maps anabolic in July of 2022. Um, he, she does have some mobility issues. She has a hip that may at some point have to have some surgery done on it. They've not decided for sure on that yet. And so I've modified a lot of stuff. I've, I've taken her squats from a back squat to like a Bulgarian split squat with a little more limited mobility, um, some, um, and then also some air squats to get depth and things like that, but just try to work on mobility over the past, over the first three month spectrum of that program. And I guess it was 12 weeks total, including the pre phase. She saw, I mean, mobility change outrageously. I mean, she was just so excited one day. She was able to bend over and I mean, I squat down and pick something off the floor without bending over. I mean, it was just a huge, huge, huge difference. And by sticking to that program, I did kind of tried to go with what you guys said. Um, don't take anything away. Um, she's a little bit of a bigger woman to start with, um, hopefully she doesn't then went to the cross here on this deal, but she started right around 257. Um, she's about five, six, um, over the course of about three months, she didn't see any weight loss at all. But what we did see is about a 23 inch total body composition change. She lost about eight inches in her waist. She lost about an inch and a half each one of her legs lost half an inch in her arms, things like that. So she was like, okay, let's keep going. So we kept going. We're our third time through, um, anabolic. Uh, we just finished it up. And at this point, things are starting to slow a little bit. Um, we're starting to see, we're still seeing a slight bit of weight loss. Her, her weight has actually came down about 10 pounds now. Um, and the composition changes. Definitely there. She looks more athletic. She looks stronger. She is getting significantly stronger when we started with the, uh, dumbbell bench presses and stuff. And when we're talking like 10 pounds was pretty rough on her, uh, last week, she did the forties for four sets of eight. Holy cow. You know, so yeah, I mean, it's a pretty significant change. Um, her mobility is just out of the charts. I just am to the point though, where we've had her caloric intake, I pushed it up a little bit to start with the kind of reverse diet, her a little bit, um, minimum of 150 grams protein a day, um, as much as possible from real food and then supplementing with a pre-work. I'm not pre-work. I'm sorry. A protein shake to, uh, if we don't hit those goals and she was at about 2200 to 2400 calories a day. Um, with that, she was still dropping inches, but now we're to the point where we were just looking at. Do we continue with anabolic? Do we start trying to change things up? We started split four weeks ago. Um, we will finish week four of split this Saturday, but I didn't know if that was the right course to take at this point. Do we continue with anabolic? Do we go with split? Do I try to work in something like symmetry or just not sure what, how to move forward? James, really first off, fantastic job. Yeah, you're going in the right direction. I mean, if she lost that many inches and she has strength gains, like you said, of like four times stronger on a dumbbell chest press, you're in the Goldilocks part. Yeah, she has built a significant amount of muscle and burned a significant amount of body fat for people watching right now thinking how's this, how's that possible? Is that her weight doesn't go down, but she loses size. Body fat takes up roughly a quarter more space per pound than muscle. So when you lose 10 pounds of body fat, gain 10 pounds of muscle, you're going to lose about a quarter of your size, roughly, maybe a little less on your body. So that's what's happening. And what's happened now is you've set yourself up very well for a calorie cut because now her metabolism is probably in a healthier place. And now you can cut and she's not going to get this crazy metabolic adaptation like she might have in the beginning and she'll get leaner. As far as programming is concerned, the importance with the programming is really just what's appropriate for her body to continue her progress to keep her improving mobility, to keep her in a healthy place. The best way to go after anabolic is maps performance. Symmetry would be good as well. Either program would be great. If you don't have performance, I'll send that over to you because that's ideally the direction you want to go out, especially if you've done anabolic a couple of times in a row. Now, I do want to comment on the mobility thing. I want to say this just for the audience and even for you, the key to mobility is strength. People think it's flexibility. People, it's not, it's strength. Now, what that means is not necessarily you can lift more weight, but rather you have strength in larger ranges of motion. You have enough strength to where your body doesn't get tight to try to protect itself. So when someone starts working out and if they do it right, they're going to see significant improvements in mobility. And that's what she did, even though she did a non-mobility program like Maps Anabolic, which is very, you know, sagittal plane or whatever, you know, very straightforward kind of strength exercises. She saw a great improvement in her mobility. But yeah, I think you can do a cut now with her. I could drop her 400, 500 calories, probably mostly from carbs is what I would do. And then I would go maps performance or map symmetry. And again, if you don't have performance, we'll send that to you. That would be perfect. So I want to comment on that because you do have, you do have some options here. I actually think and what matters is where her mindset is on where I would take her if she was a client. In a perfect world, I'm actually going to stay the course nutritionally and I'm going to switch up her programming and maybe even consider increasing calories a little bit in a perfect world. And that's and what I mean by a perfect world is that she trusts me. She's happy with what she's seeing. She knows the long game. She knows what we're trying to do. And we're just going to stay in this kind of Goldilocks, you know, phase where we're at where we're just, you know, dropping body fat, you know, slowly, we're increasing muscle slowly. It's a beautiful exchange. We're slowly speeding up the metabolism. We're getting better in mobility and stronger. Like she's in a really good, but now where it's difficult for some clients is that they want to see that scale go down. They've been putting all this hard work in for so long. And so if if she's at this kind of breaking point mentally where she's frustrated, you've done a good enough job now building her metabolism up that you can do exactly what Sal said to show her some change, like to show her some scale movement, right? You could cut 500 calories out, maybe increase a little bit of movement and then in addition to that switcher program and she's going to drop some weight for sure. But you're what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to go back to reverse dieting again sooner later. She's not going to drop her full 70, 80, 100 pounds that she may want to lose all from just a 500 calorie deficit. What will end up happening is you'll show her a nice little drop and then eventually her body will start to adapt to that new caloric maintenance and then she'll be at a new plateau again versus just keep on this process of let's just keep slowly adding more calories and building muscle until I get you maybe to a place where you look at me and you're like, honey, I can't eat anymore. You got me eating 2800 calories. All I think of all I'm doing is eating all day long. Now I want to go. That's where I that's where I want to take a client is I want to keep pushing the calories till they get to that point. And then when I reverse them or when I cut them, they're in a place where they're like content, they're losing weight and we have more room to drop even more if I want to continue the weight loss. So you really kind of have those two different options and how I decide that is kind of the mindset of where she is at. If she's motivated, focused, inspired, trust the process that you're in right now. I actually like the idea of continuing to add calories and continue to build the muscle because you got good momentum in that direction. But if I feel like my client's getting so discouraged that she's not sure I know what I'm doing or whatever, and I'm like, OK, let me show you. I've had these conversations when they're at this point and I go, I can drop you weight right now. You've already got it at a good place. I can show you that really quick, but that's not the end of the journey, right? And we can't just keep going that direction of cut, cut, cut, because then you're going to be down to 1200 calories and miserable six months from now and still not at your final goal. So you do kind of have a couple options right here on how you go after this and neither one is right or wrong. Yeah. And as you switch the stimulus up, you'll probably still be able to keep, you know, on that path of like being able to exchange and body fat and build muscle just because of the novel stimulus of it. So I like that you're moving already in that direction. Obviously, like, I think performance is probably a really good match for that, just to consider joint health and what Sal said in terms of like, you know, it's strengthening and supporting around the joints. So that way now, when she progresses even more to other programs, maybe she wants to get in power lift, maybe she wants to get in, you know, to our other programs, like she's going to have that sort of base support, really supporting her. James, where's it? Where's she at mentally? You know, Adam came up with said a really good point. Where do you think she's at? Is she okay with, you know, what she's doing? Or is she really like, I want to see some some movement on the scale? Well, she's definitely in that I need to see some movement on the scale phase. You know, it's kind of one of those things to work physically. At one point, she said here, take the scale get rid of it. I don't want to see it. So or I would have her way backwards or have her way to where she couldn't see it so that I can be in control of kind of how we're moving and what we're scaling and to stop focusing because that's what I tried to tell her over and over again is is that listen, you know, you've just said because I'll ask you the same sense of questions that you guys asked, how is your mobility? Do you feel like do you feel better? Are you moving more? Do you see your strength and increasing? And it's yes, yes, yes, yes. But this one factor is the one that, you know, that controls that mind so much from what society and things have done. Okay, well, James, there's two things you could do with that. One, one thing that I used to do with clients in that situation is I would do I would record body fat percentage because then I could show them weight loss in terms of fat loss and say, okay, your weight's the same on the scale. You gain this much muscle, but you actually did lose this many pounds of body fat. Sometimes that would help. But you're on the right path. And I tell you what, I think I have a happy medium for you. Maps performance is more of a calorie burning program than maps and Ebola anyway. Okay. So you might not need to do a 500 calorie cut. You could probably do a 250 300 calorie cut. And then mass performance will make up the difference. And then what you could do on top of that is you could start increasing activity throughout the day. So if she's not walking, let's say 1015 minutes after breakfast, lunch and dinner, you could just add that. And that culmination right there will show her some pretty good movement on the scale. Yeah, are you tracking you guys tracking steps at all? Yes. Yeah, we are. I originally started and keep in mind, you know, she came from zero fitness background. So I do understand that the initial burst of this was just from some sort of activity. But she I told her, I would like you for two weeks to wear this tracker. I don't care what your steps are, you just need to know what your average is. And she was averaging around 6000 a day. So we slowly over time increased that right now she's averaging around 12, 5 to 13. Yeah, you know, she's a she's a fourth grade teacher. So she's she's kind of taking the desk out of the scenario a little bit, tried to make sure she's moving with them as they're moving and increasing, which I would have called this a couple weeks until your last interview, I believe it was with Lane Norton. I would have called it neat before. I guess that's not necessarily neat anymore. But trying to get her step volume up. Yeah. Okay. So here's your three options. Option one is what Adam said, stay the course. And what you'll do is present it to your wife and say, here's the pros and cons. The pros are, we're going to keep moving in the direction of a faster metabolism. Eventually we'll get to a point where you're going to be eating so much food that you're going to be like, okay, I need to get rid of like I can't eat this much. And then the cuts going to be really easy option due to we do a more aggressive cut 500 calories. We'll see more movement on the scale. But at some point, we're going to plateau probably within within 60 days 3060 days. And then we're going to have to reverse again and pause that option three is we do something in the middle where I cut your calories about 250. And I have you do maps performance, which are burn a little extra calories. And then we try and increase your activity. So those are the three options I would present to her. And then you you got to go pros and cons and have her pick where she's going to go. But it's a good it's good to do it that way because so she knows what to expect. Yeah, what I've been doing, I've actually been doing antibiotic antibiotic with her. And what I've been doing and it seems to be working pretty well for me as I will bulk for I'm trying to clean bulk with real food, no mask gainers and like that, but eat higher calories for four weeks and then lower calories for about two. I'm not going extremely low, but I'm dropping from about 3100 calories a day to about 2800 calories a day. So would that be something that would kind of, you know, those small mini cuts or what it should be longer than that? Yeah, no, I mean, mini cuts are great as well. You're asking for you or for your wife for her. Yeah, I mean, a 250 calorie cut would be more of a mini. But again, if you combine that with performance, she's going to burn probably an additional 150 200 calories a day with performance in comparison to anabolic because it's more of a it's definitely more maybe not phase one. But once you get to phase two, three and four, it definitely burns more calories. You know, one last thing I want to ask James, we have you because we didn't get into this at all. And because I think you're doing a great job. I don't think we think anything's wrong here. But maybe there would be even better progress if hormonally, she's all balanced. Well, have you had her blood work done? Do you know where she's at? Yeah, only in everything. He had her hormones checked. I believe it was last summer before we went into before we went into this, I wanted to do a battery of just making sure that everything's good. She's healthy. Yeah. You know, I don't obviously I don't know what those baselines should be because this is the first time we've ran them. But I know that the she just recently went back for her yearly checkup her her blood lipids are better. I mean, literally all of her blood markers are better. We haven't checked the hormones since then. But they did say that she was in normal ranges. I will say that we did that at a GP versus a hormone doctor. And I have seen first case, you know, I you know, I had a 345 test Austrone GP is like, Oh, yeah, that's perfectly fine. Men's health doctors like, No, it's not. Yeah. Yeah. They give you a big range. But if she has if she has some pretty, you know, loud signs of hormone imbalances, you know, hot, cold intolerance, you know, poor sleep, libido mood, you know, stuff all over the place, then you could definitely look there. I mean, at one point, I think it's I think it's a valuable investment. You look like you're about our age or whatever like that. I mean, getting blood work done on a semi regular basis, I think is extreme. I think it's valuable for any age. But as we get older and stuff like that, I think paying attention to that stuff is even more important. So, you know, maybe worth the investment at one point, taking her to a hormone specialist, you know, and having them kind of look at it and see if there's a little tweaks that they can do. I actually just yesterday got on to Dr. Stephen Cabral's website to look at some of the things that we could do there. If some of the hormone testing, how that's going to work and try to get some of that moving forward, because I do believe that's something that we need to address. So, good. Excellent. I will say too, just one last thing's not to tie up anything any longer. I was in relative, you know, I just say this for the other people that my upset about getting just work for her. I've been three times through anabolic. I'm into split now, but my in my three times through anabolic, I gained 18 pounds of lean muscle. And I wasn't in terrible shape when this started. I've went up two and a quarter inches in each one of my legs in the thigh area, about a quarter to a half an inch in my calves. I put on three quarters of an inch in my arms. My chest has grown. I mean, it's just, it's crazy how rest, you know, that three days of just work and then the rest, it's just that anyway, it works man. Genius. Hey, we're going to send you four months if you don't have that. Okay, James. Yeah, it's perfect. Yeah. Thank you. You got it, man. Good luck. Great job, by the way. Yeah, keep us posted. Yes. We'll do. Thank you. Wow, what a great, what a great direction. Yeah. So obviously you've been listening to the podcast for a long time. Yeah. And I tell you, man, it's so good for people to hear that because, you know, if you said she was 245 pounds, a lot of people of that state are like, I just want to lose weight. I don't care. Yeah. But she lost so much body fat and built so much muscle that the scale didn't move, but she lost a combined total. What do you say, 28 inches on her whole body? Like she is setting herself up to not do what most people do, which is not put it back on. Gain all the way back. Listen, the challenge is not losing the weight. Almost everybody who tries to lose weight loses some weight. Almost all of them gain it back and then some. So it's not the weight loss that's the challenge. How they do it. It's the keeping it off and he's setting up the, he's setting the stage for that to not happen. So great job.