 I'll create a fictional example, but I think this will resonate with a lot of people. It's like somebody, um, you know, they're trying to lose weight. Maybe they've dieted many times and, you know, fell on and off the wagon. And then they discover powerlifting. Okay. So they start powerlifting and because it's focused on strength, takes them away from trying to diet so hard, they finally feed their body properly. Their metabolism speeds up. They get leaner and now they're like powerlifting is the answer. So now they do it for two or three years. Their hip starts to bother them. Maybe their knee starts to hurt. They're not working in different planes of motion. They start to develop imbalances, but they ignore it. I'm going to wear a knee brace. I'm going to keep moving. Maybe I got to keep doing, this is the answer. And they ignore the signs and signals that their body's telling them because they've become dogmatic about this particular approach. And we get stuck in this. I can't tell you how many times I've done this. There are a few rules in fitness. Here's one of them. Almost all reasonable approaches actually work, but none of them work forever. And none of them work all the time. So this is the reason why I find it really funny when you get, you know, people that are, they've attached themselves to a modality of training that has worked either really well for them or they've gone really deep into, and that could be anything, right? So this includes, you know, bodybuilding, crossfitters, strongman competitors, the functional movement guy. And they identify so strongly with that modality that they are constantly selling everybody on why it's the best. And the irony in that to me is like, everything is the best. And then it's not, you know what I'm saying? It stops working. Right. Well, and it's not even necessarily, right? Cause someone will make the argument that it doesn't stop work. It never stops working. You know, you're always staying strong. You're always going to be taking a step back. So it doesn't have to be crossfit or mobile or whatever the case may be, but it's like at one point, um, especially when we're talking about what most people are in search of, right. Building muscle, losing body fat, being healthier, healthy, being more mobile, like, those are kind of like the encompasses, I'd say the broad strokes of most people's goals. So when that, when that's your pursuit, right? You're ideally, um, everything works great. Everything is the best for a moment in time and then something else is better. Yeah, it's because it's transformative. Um, so I get that it's like you're in pursuit of a particular goal, uh, maybe it's a performance goal and I want to get stronger at a particular lift or like you said, I'm trying to burn body fat or build muscle and then you do something and it works and because it's transformative, you attach yourself to the thing that you're doing and you lose sight of the, of the, maybe why it worked and maybe, and here's the real issue. And this is why this is going to be such a good episode because you attach yourself to the, you know, what you did to get this particular result. You then become blind to the detriment of that particular method as, as you continue doing it, or you become blind to the fact that it stops working, that you're not responding anymore. I mean, how many times have you gotten stuck in that? I've gotten stuck to it many, many times. I also think, you know, it's not, it's not all the, the person who's going through the journey's fault. Like I do, I do take responsibility as a fitness leader in the space on us. Like we, we tend to get very dogmatic about whatever it is that we attach ourselves to as fitness leaders. I think we're just as guilty as this. And so, and if you're just this person who's kind of trying to find their way in health and fitness and you finally find this modality that speaks to you or gives you the greatest return that you've ever seen, it's really easy to go deep down the rabbit hole. And the deeper you go and the more intelligent people you find in that modality, the more convincing they are that this is the way it's very religious. Like, oh yeah. I mean, it feels that way to me when I look at all the different. It's transformative. That's why it feels that way. Yeah. And the, and the deeper you go, the more, and the more intelligent people that you speak that are in that, that, that space, the more they try and sell you on the idea that this is, this is the best way to train. Well, you want to be sold. You know, I'll give you an example. I'll create a fictional example, but I think this will resonate with a lot of people. It's like somebody, you know, they're trying to lose weight. Maybe they've dieted many times and, you know, fell on and off the wagon. And then they discover powerlifting. Okay. So they start powerlifting and because it's focused on strength, takes them away from trying to diet so hard. They finally feed their body properly. Their metabolism speeds up. They get leaner and now they're like powerlifting is the answer. So now they do it for two or three years. Their hip starts to bother them. Maybe their knee starts to hurt. They're not working in different planes of motion. They start to develop imbalances, but they ignore it. I'm going to wear a knee brace. I'm going to keep moving. Maybe I got to keep doing, this is the answer. And they ignore the signs and signals that their body is telling them because they've become dogmatic about this particular approach. And we get stuck in this. I can't tell you how many times I've done this. What's up, everybody? You're going to like the giveaway today because this episode is a special one. We're giving away a brand new bundle called the unconventional bundle. This is MAP Strong, MAPS OCR, MAP suspension. I'm going to give it away for free because we're putting that bundle on special offer because of this episode. But again, one of you is going to get it for free. Here's how you can win. Leave a comment below in the first 24 hours that we dropped this episode, subscribe to this channel, turn on notifications, do all those things. If we like your comment, we'll notify you in the comment section that you won and then you'll get a free bundle. We're not going to ask you for your credit card or your email. By the way, if somebody's doing that, it's a scammer. We'll notify you in the comments and then we'll email you access to that bundle. Now, everyone else, we created that bundle because this entire episode is about phasing your workouts. Those are the most unconventional workout programs that we have. We put them together in a bundle. We priced the entire thing at $99.99, which is less than the price of one of those programs. So $99.99, you get maps wrong, maps OCR, and maps suspension. This is for a limited time. So if you're interested, go to mapsseptember.com, again, mapsseptember.com, or you could click on the link to get yourself set up. All right, here comes the show. The very first time I really became aware that I would do this. It didn't mean that I stopped it, by the way, because I kept repeating it. But the very first time was when I first started working out, my first introduction to strength training was Arnold Schwarzenegger's Encyclopedia bodybuilding, which I love that. But I still have the original one. We have it here. In fact, it's all taped together and, you know, he advocates for this kind of high volume, double split routine, you know, kind of this traditional bodybuilding type workout. And I responded to it. It was the first thing I ever did with strength training. And then it stopped working for me. I wasn't building any more muscle. I wasn't getting any stronger. I don't know what to do. Then I read about this guy named Mike Menser, whose approach was complete opposite. He wrote a book called Heavy Duty and it was literally as far away from high volume, you know, traditional bodybuilding as you could get. It was like one set to failure. That's it. That sends the signal. Anymore than that is too much and blah, blah, blah. So I followed it and what happened? My body responded like crazy and I became dogmatic about that. And I followed that well beyond the time the wheels fell off where my body stopped responding. But I was so dogmatic about and I did that with rep schemes. I did that with exercises. I did that with methods until I finally came to a place which took me a long time and I learned this with my clients way before I learned this myself because how many times I have to say this, but it's very true. You trainers tend to be much better with their clients than they are with themselves. I had to learn this lesson over and over till finally I said, Oh, I see what happens here. I got to switch gears before the wheels fall off before I start to hurt. That's how I get my body to feel good and how to maintain my health. And that's when I started to really phase my workouts. In a more scheduled way, rather than waiting until the signs were so loud in my body that I was forced to change. Well, I think inevitably, you know, we don't realize that our body is changing and with a changed body, it needs to be provided something different. So wherever you are in the beginning and you feel this great success and things are moving in the right direction, you're actually transforming your body as you go, which means you actually need to provide it something different, which is it's tough because it's like you finally found something that you can hone in on that feels like it's the answer. It's working like this is the way like I finally found the button, which is actually providing change. But inevitably it just your body is so effective at being able to adapt and then make that the new standard that in order to have any further success, you need to provide a completely different stimulus. You know, my journey in this is really funny because I actually I was really resistant to camps. And so there was a part of me that kind of figured this out early, but didn't it didn't come full circle till later on. Like I was this type of person. This is how I was even like in high school as a kid. Well, before working out like, don't put me in the box. I don't identify as the skater kid, the gangster kid, the athlete kid. It's like I wanted to be like whoever I wanted to be created your own box. I did. I did. That's exactly right. So I ended up I ended up sticking myself still in the box thinking I was not being put in a box. Right. And so I was this like, OK, I'm not gonna be it because we are what we're all alluding to right now is the power of novelty when it comes to training. Right. And so then I quickly didn't realize I mean I quickly became this guy and later on realized that I was so the novelty guy that I every workout was novel. Every workout was different and unique. And because I did get that part right, like I did understand like there's tremendous value in it where I where I lost it was, oh, there is some value in these camps for a temporary amount of time, period of time. Yeah. And then you reap the benefits from that and then move out of that and then move into another one. But I was so resistant to those camps that I was like, I'm the everything guy. And then I never actually organize my programs to where I could actually measure the success that they were they were. Well, there's two parts to phasing your workouts. One part is the novelty, which you what you're talking about. You got the other part is following a phase. So if you don't, you have to do both to phase properly. Phasing is not working out different every single time. It's also not working out the same all the time. It's actually working out the same for a period of time, allowing your body to gain adaptations, allowing your body to change and progress, and then moving to something different. That's what phasing is. And again, you it's it's how you do it makes all the difference in the world. So it's not, you know, I'm going to go to the gym and, you know, I have a hat full of exercises and rep schemes. I just pull something out so it's different every single time. It's also not I do the exact same workout. All you know, I only bodybuild I only power lift I only training this rep scheme. I only do these exercises. I only crossfit. It's also not that it's actually a combination of the two. It's interesting to think about it too because there's like each method has its own strengths, but also has its own weakness. Totally. And it's so it's it the further along you go like it exact like it it brings about the weaknesses you can see them more visibly with with your body. So say you're doing powerlifting for, you know, an extended amount of time where, you know, in terms of like stress on the joints, that really starts to come to surface later on if you don't weave into something else that's maybe re fortifying your dress. I totally visualize. And I remember Justin, you and I, when we were building that app, we we totally were creating this and I and I still think that there's some value to at least creating this for people to see is like this visual representation of, you know, each modality that we're talking about, right, powerlifter, bodybuilder, CrossFit or, you know, mobility guy. Tell about whatever. Yeah, whatever, right. All of them. And then if we next to it, there was this like video game avatar scoring system, strength, mobility, endurance, stamina, flexibility, general health, you know what I'm saying? Like, and then we and then we could help people look at it and go like, oh, here's here's all the great attributes of training this way. And it doesn't mean you can't get to all of them, but you there's definitely going to be to your point air attributes that are stronger in certain modalities and weaker in others. And if your pursuit is overall health, longevity, and you want all of it, there's tremendous value in weaving in and out of all of them. So you reap the best benefits of all of that's because the timeline is your life. So and I think people forget this when they work out their timeline is three months, Hawaii, getting married, going to Vegas, whatever. But the reality is it's forever. So if you just want to be a you want to power lift for the rest of your life, you better believe you're going to have to go through phases of mobility and some endurance training. You're going to have to do unilateral work, even though it doesn't seem obvious to you. If this is something you want to pursue for the rest of your life. Yes, you're going to have to do those things. So so I think the first thing to to understand is that novelty can induce positive changes in a physical way. And the key here is to and the reason why is that when you change things, you are now highlighting certain imbalances and weakness because your body gets really good at doing what you do a lot and it does it really, really well and it doesn't need to do other things. In other words, it'll get really good at squatting at the expense of unilateral single leg squats because it doesn't need that. It's going to put all its forces, all its resources to do to doing the specific thing that you do really super well. So if all you ever do is bilateral squatting, you get really good at bilateral squatting, but then there's some imbalances and weaknesses that develop as a result of that and you don't really see them necessarily or you're not able to target them until you go unilaterally. I remember the first time I experienced this, right? So I, you know, I fell in love with deadlifting and squatting early on. I did that like crazy. It gave me great results in terms of muscle, in terms of strength, right? I felt real awesome. And then I remember, I went to do a workout with someone and they wanted to do back step lunges. And I thought to myself, well, you know, I don't remember what it was, but okay, if I could squat 300 pounds, I should be able to back step lunge with 100 pounds on my back with good form. I mean, it's 100 pounds. It's less than half of the weight that I could squat comfortably, for example. I don't remember what the weight was, but it was something along those lines. Well, I go to do a back step lunge and it is, I am not able to do it stable well at all. I remember feeling like I'm gonna pull something. I got to go, wait, I was embarrassed. Like, oh, I can't, I can't do it. And so what all I did was is I stopped doing it. I just went back to squatting, right? When in reality what I should have done is focused on the back steps lunging, which was highlighting an imbalance and a weakness. And so that's a lot of what novelty can do. Novelty can take your body, highlight those weaknesses, strengthen them, and then those weaknesses now no longer hold you back from your main pursuit because you better believe if you're bilateral squatting all the time, the imbalance you have from right to left is one of the things that's preventing you from hitting a new PR. It's one of those things. And the only way to really address it sometimes is to go and train in a different way or at least apply some training in a different way. You know, and this kind of transitions to the next point but it's also important with this one, which is, and this is something I've experienced personally and something I've experienced with all my clients is that the thing that you are resistant to the most typically ends up being the most beneficial. And it's really tough for you. So let's say you're the strongman powerlifter guy, like you make fun of the wiry mobility movement dude. I mean, that is like he is the epitome of all your jokes and you guys are like, I would never want to be that or the yoga guy, but yet that is probably the most important thing that that person could start to add in their life. And vice versa, right? The guy that's so into movement and his body weight and yoga and mobility and looks at like strong men that are moving in the same plane all the time and really heavy weight is just like, oh my God, that's so, it's like, but you have no idea how beneficial that would probably be. And that just, and so the things that I think we're most resistant to, I think end up providing some of the most value physically, but also I think mentally. Mentally massively because the biggest lesson that I learned through fitness that I continue to learn is to be open, open-minded, right? Humble. Yes. Yo, that's a big one man. Possibly be humble. Come on, that's the first lesson you learn, but you have to keep learning it. Like you first learn it because whatever you do first, you suck. So I was like, oh, I'm not that strong. Oh, I can't squat. In order to keep doing this, I got to humble myself. Or I'll hurt myself or I'm just gonna quit. You keep learning that. But like, let's talk about, let's be more specific about the mental changes that novelty can bring. Working out with heavy weight for three reps is a completely different mental state and focus than working out for 15 reps or trying to get mind and muscle connection or trying to do a superset or try to do mobility. Working on mobility has some commonalities but a lot of differences from doing max PR types lifts. Can both of those contribute to a mentality that gives you more longevity with fitness and makes you better at each? Yes, absolutely. That's where I think a lot of the benefit lies and it's funny, you know, taking somebody through a completely different workout and getting them to be like, okay, let me do this for the next four weeks. I know I'm a bodybuilder guy, but let me try this mobility thing for the next four weeks with my training. It's a shift in mentality that benefits them all the way around. Well, it's interesting to me too because the sports world is similar in this that it sort of simulates certain aspects of your body's ability and you display that in a coordinated fashion versus like in the gym, you're segmenting different parts of that. So let's say like I'm a lineman, my first move is I have to get up as explosively as possible and that's my deficit. I'm not, I don't have enough power, I don't have enough snap, I don't have that speed. I can train that and I can work specifically on that mentality. I can grind heavy weights and be able to have that kind of force generation to work exclusively on that. Or if my endurance sucks and I'm dogging it towards the third quarter, that's something that I can actually implement that with a higher rep count. I can cut out some rest periods. I can force myself to get better at that very specific skill set and that's what training is to me and this is where I get so frustrated when we convolute all of it. And things like, you know, circuit training, crossfit, like things like that where it's, it starts to just merge it all together where for me the greatest aspects of it was to be able to parse out different elements of that and exclusively get better. Yeah, we think that the only things that are growing and changing are like our muscles when we train. The brain, the brain actually adapts before your muscles do and it continues to adapt. You learn exercises, you learn movement, you learn how to fire muscles, your brain and your central nervous system learns power output. It learns how to safely output maximal power, how to control certain things. A lot of things are happening mentally, which is why exercise, one of the reasons why exercise has been shown to be one of the most effective ways to prevent cognitive decline. It's not just that it keeps your body healthy, that's a big part and the brain is a part of the body. It's also your training your brain just as much. You mean you do a whole workout with strength training and you have to learn those movements. Do a different phase and you have to learn a new way of training or a slightly different way. A new operating system. This is one of the more challenging things that we have with our audience or people that go through our programs is trying to figure that out. I mean, how many times have we done the live callers and we have somebody who, we just had this just the other day where somebody's going through phase one of performance, they get into phase two of performance and there's like, oh my God, it's too much, and it's like part of the reason why they're challenged after we dig deeper and find out what's going on. We ask a bunch of questions and it sounds like you're applying the mentality that you had in phase one, which is get strong, the kind of five by five lift heavy type of mentality. And now we've moved over into these multi-planar movements with stability components and unilateral components. Totally different. Totally different. Yeah, you gotta change your mind. And extremely challenging. And forces to suppress the ego and go like, oh, I know I can do a lunge with so much weight and therefore now I'm doing this exercise that is like a lunge where I have the reverse lunge to press landmine exercise in there. And you have to dramatically reduce the weight. And then you're hung up on this like, oh, it's so light, it's like, that's not the point. You haven't shifted your mentality. It's no longer about how much weight can I lift in this exercise? And it's more and what we try to explain to people I think in layman's terms is you're trying to make the movement look beautiful now in this phase. This phase is all about the movement and thinking about perfecting that. And if that means you gotta take all the weight off the bar, then so be it. Because that is the adaptation that we're chasing here is we are trying to get so good at that movement. And if you're still hung up on how much weight is on the bar, you're not gonna reap the most benefits out of that phase. That's right. It changes the body and it changes the mind. But let's get a little bit more specifics about kind of some of the more common ways that we phase workouts. Like rep ranges I think is a very simple, easy way, right? So if you're doing the same workout, same exercises, not saying this is how you should always do it, but one way to change things up into phase your workouts is to go from one rep range to a different rep range. And what you'll find is they all have, they all have different values. Okay, so like the low rep range, for example, is different value than the higher rep range. And the low rep range, what you find is less mind to muscle connection, but more full body power and strength and tension. Okay, so when I'm doing a deadlift for two or three reps, I'm not thinking lats. I'm not thinking traps. I'm not thinking glutes. I'm thinking how can I organize my entire body and generate efficient force to lift maximal load, right? How can I take everything? You think of efficiency, like I don't want any power leakage. I don't want my strength to move in any other direction than what I'm trying to do with this particular bar. And what that does is it creates this unit in my body. Now physically, the way it feels is solid, hard, and strong. It's a very different feel from higher reps. It's quite distinct. In fact, bodybuilders, old school bodybuilders used to say, and there's no studies, by the way, on this. This is all anecdote, but there's so much anecdote. There's definitely something there. And either they're explaining it wrong or how they're explaining exactly what happened. But what they would say is heavy weights, low reps, makes dense, granite, hard-looking muscle, right? That's the look that you get from it. Now I don't know if it necessarily changes you aesthetically in that way, but that's how it feels for sure. When I train in the heavier rep range, I think through the process of grinding and the way you're moving and how you apply yourself to low reps, it does seem to create this feeling, and I'm not talking about in the workout, I'm talking about after the workouts, this is how you feel all day long, solid, hard, strong, like a statue. So I kind of understand what they're talking about. It's such a different way of lifting. And I vividly remember going through that learning curve because when I would train, even though I wouldn't consider myself in a box of like a bodybuilder or what like that, but the way I moved the weight was way more similar. Regardless of the phase or rep count I was in, the way I held the bar, the way I moved the weight looked more like a bodybuilder than it did like a power lifter because I didn't identify with a power lifter. I never trained that way before. So there was this really interesting learning curve for me, I'll give you some examples, like when you lift kind of like a common way to lift, like with a bodybuilder, is your wrist and feet are very relaxed. Well, in fact, there's a lot of movements that you'll do like shoulder pressing and bench pressing where you have a broken wrist and an open palm, you know, I'm not trying to grip the bar and connect to the bar and then my feet. You want to feel less of other muscles for more of a target. I do, exactly, I actually am almost thinking about relaxing the rest of the body and completely focusing around this one muscle that I'm trying to, and I got really good at that, really, really good at that. But then when I had to go over to like, okay, I'm gonna deadlift as much weight off this floor and I'm gonna start doing singles and doubles and triples and learning to grip the bar and then feel my feet try and grip the floor. Like that was completely foreign to me and it is such a different shift. And so, and vice versa. So if you're somebody who is all power lifting, it's normally a pretty hard transition to go over to the feel just the muscle and forget about all, you know, getting so much into grinding power. And so- But you can get why they explain it and say, oh, this makes your muscles feel like granite or look like granite. This one gives you the round. Well, I remember seeing it. And again, it's anecdotal, right? I mean, I remember my own experience of never lifting like a power lifter. And I've shared this on the podcast many times. And again, for some people that need the studies will be like, oh, it doesn't matter to me. It's his own story. I remember always chasing kind of the hypertrophy pump look all the time. And one of the things that always discouraged me was I would leave the gym and it would feel like all the air came out of me and I'd have this flat and I'd look like a normal guy. I wouldn't look like somebody who really lifted a lot of weight or as lifted as long as I did. And I remember it always messed with my head until I started really strength training and lifting heavy. And then what I noticed was not only did I have this kind of like, you know, granite hard look, but I looked muscular even when I wasn't aired up. I didn't have to be completely aired up to look defined and muscular in it. Like it built a different type of muscle on my body. And I know that again, there's gonna be people that I roll over that but I remember seeing it on people. I've heard that for a long time. And then I remember finally applying it to myself and feeling that going like, oh wow, I see it now. Such a different mentality. And it was a definite struggle for me to transition to that of thinking, like you said, there's like parts of your body you need to remain loose and be able to sort of pump blood specifically into like the focused muscle group. And so it was like, okay, it was a total mind shift of trying to hyperconnect into that one muscle versus what I would always do, which was get my body as rigid as possible because you don't want any movement. You want no movement. You want to stay as tight as possible. So it's, you don't have any leak in performance. And so it was all about the movement of it and being able to organize your body so everything works in unison. Well, you said it perfectly. You didn't want any leak in performance. Me as a bodybuilder, I didn't want to exhaust any other muscles that I didn't need to. Yeah. That was the thought process. Why would I grip with my feet and my calves when I'm busting my chest? Because I don't want, I don't want to waste any energy anywhere else. I just want to concentrate on that. I just want to concentrate on that one muscle. And what's funny is the debate between those two camps, there's value for both. Yes, yes. And there's also- They're both right. And they're both wrong. And there's, yes, that's it. You know, like higher reps, let's talk about higher reps, right? Higher reps, and what's funny is when you train at low reps all time and you go to higher reps and vice versa, it feels unbearable. You take someone who always trains strength and low reps, you move to higher reps, and they're like, this sucks. You go for high reps, you teach them to do doubles and singles, and they're like, this sucks. It's so funny, but the higher reps, you get the pump, you feel the burn, you get that sweat that a lot of people tend to worship, and you can really target particular muscle groups with the higher reps. Like if I'm trying to get someone to feel their glutes, it's hard to do with three reps. It really is. It's hard to get them to really feel like right now, do you really feel your glute squeezing? You know, with the three rep exercise, it's like, well, I feel everything. Like I'm trying to move this heavy weight. When I go like 15 reps, and I change the technique, and I get them to do mind and muscle, that's when people are like, oh, I can really feel my butt. I feel like getting a pump. Oh my God, this is so, so crazy. Higher reps feels totally different. It also builds something called, you know, and this is within reason, of course, builds something called strength endurance. So there's like strength, and then there's strength endurance. Strength is how much weight can I lift right now? Like all at once. Strength endurance is how much weight can I lift for the next 25 to 30 seconds, right? Totally different feel. Higher rep ranges tend to work on that. So it's totally different. Well, in different types of training and different mindsets lend themselves better for different rep ranges, right? So like, if you are the, you know, grinding strength, power lifter guy, and you have to lift 50 or, and you apply. You try doing that for 20 reps. Yeah, you apply that. That's why most of them bail on it. It's just like, I don't want to do this. It's exhausting. Yeah, it's awful. You want me to squeeze the bar hard while I bench for 20 reps? So, and I guess the mature, you know, more advanced version of me today has really learned to move out of my characters. When I'm in phase one of a lot of our programs, I'm thinking more like a strongman power lifter, you know, connecting to the ground and just trying to be powerful. When I start moving into our like phase three of a lot of our programs and it's a lot of these higher reps, supersets, you know, muscle endurance stamina like you're alluding to, I think more like the bodybuilder side of me, you know? And so learning, and I don't, I mean, it took me, maybe others have found this easy, but it took me a long time to be able to follow one program. And yet, and then try and move out in and out of these characters as far or mindsets when you go into work. Yeah, and the higher reps, the higher reps for me provides, the pumps start to get more pronounced. I get around kind of full. This by the way is when I'm doing it right. Okay, because I think I got to be clear here. You know, I said, grant it hard with the low reps. Now I'm saying round, full, kind of muscle bubbly look with the high reps. By the way, all of that will go away if you stay in for too long. So it's not like, oh, I just want the ground to look. So I'm only gonna do low reps. What I'm talking about, you experience when you're in a proper phase, when the body's adapting to it. Once it's fully adapted and you stay do it long enough, you start to lose some of that benefit. But the higher reps, when you switch to that, it's like, oh my gosh, this pump is insane. It's unbearable. You look in the mirror, things look round and full. And you start to kind of develop this kind of look to your body, which is different than the low rep feel and look to your body. Both of which contribute ultimately to this kind of aesthetic sculpted look. But it is a totally different feel. And every time I switch into a phase, I first don't like it, because I was used to the other one. So it feels kind of like, ah. But then about two, three weeks into it, I love it. Because I see the changes in my body. Like this is great. Well, this kind of goes into the next one, which is where I was probably the most problematic for the way that I used to train, because the rest periods themselves, like I would lend a minute to three minutes to five minutes sometimes based off of like how much that lift taxed me. And to be able to now shave that down, knowing that I only have like 20, 30 seconds, sometimes I don't have any rest in between. What a shift that was for me to, especially ego-wise in abandoning like the heavyweight sort of protocol and like in working out with that type of a method. Well, this used to be one of my favorite hacks to help somebody who's been lifting for a really long time. You know, I'd give them a stopwatch or tell them to get a stopwatch. And hey, just do me a favor this next week when you train, just stopwatch yourself on your rest periods, come back, report to me what they are, and then I manipulate it. And it would be like, because very few people watch the clock and actually manage their rest periods. And you end up falling into a pattern. That's right. If you start to time it, you're like, oh, I rest the same similar time. And which is why too, I don't just right away announce like, oh, you should rest this, it's because I've learned over time that depending on who you identify with, what type of way of training you fall into, you might be the short rest period guy or you might be the power. We can usually guess, by the way. Yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right. I could normally look at someone, and get a pretty guess, but I want to know some facts, right? So I'll have them do that. And then I just put them in the total opposite. And so if you lean more towards the power lifter, three to five minute guy, I also give you 45 second minute rest. Holy shit, it's like a whole, like you've never experienced before, and vice versa. If you're the circuit training mom who loves to just never stop, and she goes from exercise, exercise, exercise, exercise, and it's like a body pump class, and they go, hey, we are gonna keep loading weight on this bar, and I want you to sit down for three, five minutes between sets. It's just like what? Yeah, yeah, no. So short rest periods, you get that crazy pump. You teach your body to get rid of waste, or your muscles, I should say, to get rid of waste faster. You build strength endurance. Anecdotally, you're probably building more capillaries. You're building more sarcoplasm, or your capacity for sarcoplasm. These are all the non-muscle fiber structures that are in muscle, which actually make up most of your muscle size. When you look at a muscle, something like 70% of it is non-muscle fiber. So if you drained it of all its fluid and sarcoplasm and blood, it would lose, I don't know, 70% of its size, and you'd be left with this jerky, like beef jerky. You'd dry a piece of steak, and it shrinks down. So that sarcoplasm makes up the size and shape. Anecdotally, you're probably building more of that with shorter rest periods, especially when you combine it with higher reps. However, I do wanna add this, and we don't need to go too long on this because this could be an episode itself. You can also combine short rest periods with heavy weights, and it's a completely different adaptation. You could do singles. Now, of course, you have to adjust the reps, excuse me, the weight on this, but I could do a single of deadlifts and rest 45 seconds and do 45-second rests. Now, of course, I can't go as heavy as when I rest a long period of time, but it also is different. And the reason why I'm saying this, and again, we don't need to get stuck on this, but the reason why I'm saying this is all of these variables, they don't have to go in, they don't have to be in unison. It's not like short rest periods always goes with the high rest. You know, there are certain things that lend themself well for teaching, and then once you've taught it, then there's combinations that you can't. They seem like they're opposite. That speaks to the novelty point that you made. You find some hybrids in between a bit. I mean, I think of this like, Justin will appreciate the sports analogy. Like, when you're teaching somebody all these combinations of moves in like a sport like basketball, like, you know, you first want to teach the fundamentals and then you teach like a move and you get, you let your body, you get really good at it, you adapt it, and then you can start playing with them together and in different sequences and combinations to create this orchestra of great movements and skill. Like, same thing goes inside the gym. It's like, when we speak, most of the time we're speaking about the fundamentals and the importance of getting really good at all these different adaptations and focuses and what tended lend themself well for people that are trying to get really good at understanding all this. But once you've done this for a long time, like, man, then it becomes, you know, the first rule is break all the rules. It's fun. You know what I'm saying? It's to now interchange and, you know, break the stigma around, oh, you should only rest this long when you train this way, train the opposite and see what happens. You know, you just reminded me of a conversation I had that I totally forgot about that I found was so fascinating back in the day. So I had a member who used to play college football and we were talking about training and working out. And he goes, yeah, he goes, you know, a lot of football training with strength training is you want to get really strong, you want to rest, and then you want to repeat that strength because in football, you do, you know, you have your play, then, you know, somebody gets hit, you go out of bounds, you got to reset, you get in your huddle, whatever, and then you do the play again. So it kind of mimics that. He goes, however, he goes, sometimes it's good to train explosively and hard with short rest periods. And I said, huh? And he goes, yeah, sometimes in football, he goes, you know, what you want to do is you want to play, play, play, play, either you're playing against the clock. You're in dog fight sometimes. Yes, and what you want to do is you want to have repeatable maximal effort with 30 seconds of rest in between. And I was like, oh, that's so fascinating. So that's what I mean by that combination of things that sometimes don't seem like they should go together. The next one is long rest periods. And long rest periods are phenomenal at building maximal strength, power, and really get, you know, summoning those muscle fiber contractions, like really being able to do that. I love long rest periods for the typical average personal training client because the typical average personal training client, I'm going to paint the picture. And this is just like, I'd say, if it took all the people that hired trainers, when I was a trainer, at least 65% of them were middle-aged women. I'd say I already alluded to her. Yeah. The circuit training middle-aged mom who bounces from- You want to lose weight? Yeah, and you know- Exercise, exercise, exercise. Yeah, and so I would just be like, cool, we're going to rest three minutes in between. We're going to do sets of five and you're going to rest a long time. And they'd be like, oh, they'd fight and him and haw about it. And then they get the results and be like, whoa, this is so crazy. That was my favorite person to apply this to. But long rest periods are phenomenal if you've never done them before for building strength and muscle and speeding up the metabolism. Yeah, I won't even go into like the energy part of that, but like with the main thing that I love about these long rest periods is just being able to get to that mental state where you're like super focused because what you need for the most part is it's almost like you got to bat in all the hatches. You got to make sure that each joint is as stable as possible when you go back to doing the lifts. So the lift is all about the mechanics of it, but now you have to be able to get in a mental place where you can literally sum in and recruit as many muscle fibers as possible. Well, fatigue gets in the way, right? And fatigue will totally interrupt that process. Well, you can get a little bit into the energy so people understand why the three to five minute rest period in between because that's about what it takes the average person to replenish all of it. Fully recover. All right, so you break down all these energy, ATP, ATP molecules, and then your body utilizes so many. I used to give this analogy for people that even though it's completely off mathematically, I'd say you've got a hundred of these molecules in your body. You go into a deadlift for five reps and the body uses 75. Then you sit down and you rest and in 30 seconds, it gets to 80. In a minute, it gets to 85. In two minutes, it gets to 90. And then like three to five minutes, it gets to peaks back to 95. It never returns all the way to the full hundred because you're working out and utilizing that, right? So, but then you get replenished to that and then you go do it again. And so what you're doing by resting is you're allowing the body to fully recover, get its energy back so then you can put the most maximal effort into the lift. Well, you're training energy systems as much as you're training muscle. And again, here's an analogy super oversimplified. It's way more complex than this, but it's like if you have a car and the car has two engines, there's one engine that's got jet fuel. And if you wanna go quarter mile in seven seconds, as fast as possible, and your car knows this by how hard you push the gas pedal, okay? You floor it, it turns that one on. And you explode for a quarter mile. The only detriment is that the jet fuel burns up after the quarter mile and it's gone. And then after that, if you keep going, you're not gonna burn jet fuel, you're not gonna have this crazy powerful engine, but you'll have this backup engine that now is running on another type engine, maybe diesel or something like that. And it's just gonna keep you going and keep you consistent and kinda giving that slow drip of energy. And that's what happens. So what you need to do is you need to stop, allow the jet fuel to replenish so you could train that jet engine, that jet fuel big engine again, right? That's what the rest periods do. Both engines are in your muscle, okay? So now that I made the analogy and it sounds super simplified, hopefully people understand that, but both engines train your muscle and you need to be able to train each engine specifically in order to build and develop each one. If you only train one all the time, if I only do quarter mile, turn it off and wait, I never turn on the other backup engine. And if I never floor it, I never turn on the jet fuel engine. So you're training energy systems just as much and the long rest periods allows for this power strength engine to really be focused on and that energy. Short rest periods focuses a little bit more on the other one, both of which make up muscle, make up your shape, make up your fitness and that kind of stuff. All right, so the next one, which is also another way to really break up your workouts into phase, which is a little more complex, it requires more understanding of exercise is just different exercises. You know, when you do different exercises, you're first off, your body gets very good at what you do very often. And there's carryover to other things that are similar and the further away you move from that specific movement pattern, the less carryover that you have. For example, if I do squats all the time and I get really good at barbell squats, I'll get a decent amount of carryover to a front squat because it's kind of similar. It's not the same, but it's kind of similar. And then there'll be some carryover to a lunge, which is still similar, but not as similar as a front squat, right? Now, if I move all the way over to an overhead press, I'm not gonna get as much carryover at all, right? So this is what happens with exercises. That's why it's so important to change exercises for the same body parts. Get really good at back squats. Then get really good at front squats. Then get really good at back step lunges. Then get good at lateral lunges. Then get good at, you know, when I was talking about the whole body, rotating, pressing, pulling, training the entire body, learning how to train a muscle in isolation, learning how to train it in compound ways. Oftentimes, simply change the exercise, gets your body to respond right away. And then you'll see people who hold like, oh no, barbell curls, best exercise for bicep exercise. And they'll be like, no, no, try the spider curl. Fine. And then they do like, oh my God, my bicep screw. That's the best exercise. Like, no, no, no, you don't understand. You gotta do everything. You gotta change it up. Now, my philosophy for this has changed quite a bit during my training career. Early on, it was, you know, muscle confusion, changing the exercises all the time, always being novel in training. And I think I was a good exerciser because of that. You know what I'm saying? You could do all exercises pretty good. You know what I'm saying? Champion exerciser. Champion exerciser, that's what's back then, right? But I wasn't really good at any single lifts. And there are certain lifts that you reap tremendous benefit and have a long learning curve that you can continue to reap benefits from. And so my philosophy has changed it so that I do believe there are certain exercises that should stay in your routine for the most part that should stay in there. And then certain ones that are quickly interchanged, meaning I can run them for a phase a couple of weeks and then I'm done with it. I'm on to another exercise for that muscle group that's totally different and then I can move. And what looks like that, or for me, what that looks like is, you know, movements like the barbell back squat, deadlift, you know, a barbell press, the big compound lifts, they're so challenging. They're so taxing. There's such a massive learning curve. I still don't think I'm great at deadlifting. I still don't think I'm great at squatting to this day. Yes, but take it a step further, right? It's not so much the barbell back squat, although that's a big part of it. It's the squat movement, right? It's not so much the press. It's the pressing type movement. So one way you could do this is you could go barbell back squat and you do that for a while and your change can be to a front squat or you could use a safety bar squat or you could squat with a different tempo. Low bar, high bar, heels elevated, not elevated. Yeah, there's a lot of... Yeah, narrow stance, wide stance, same thing with deadlift. And then of course, the more obvious thing is you add completely different exercises or place a little focus on different exercises. And that's what this means. And again, phasing doesn't mean doing everything different all the time. Phasing means focusing on things for a period of time and then switching and you're absolutely right, Adam. There are movement patterns that should almost always be present in your workouts. Well, and the beauty of different exercises and if you wanna talk about moving in different planes and why that's something that we kind of stress every now and then, which isn't stressed enough, I believe, in our gyms and the thoughts going in our workouts because what we need by that is to be able to react properly to any kind of real world situation, any kind of functional type movement, which I hate using that word because it's just like everybody just hears functional and they're like they assume it's some wacky exercise. But really what we're trying to do is to be able to get your body to have the strength and familiarity when you place it in certain positions and to be able to get yourself out of those positions. And so that way you do that to where you build that support system around the joints, you build that support system to be able to summon the kind of strength that's usable. So compound lifts, obviously, that's where we're gonna stay for the majority to build muscle, build overall strength, be able to like maximize our general output of force, but how do we reinforce it? How do we keep the body intact and in track for the long haul? Yeah, I mean, what use is being able to squat 400 pounds if when you're outside taking out the garbage, you misstep a little bit off the curb and you throw your back out. That happens to people, strong people. Like, oh man, I turned the wrong way and then, oh my gosh, I hurt myself. How is this possible? I could lift so much in the gym. That's functional. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about functional in different exercises, trains your body in different ways and just gives you more well-rounded strength. Now, what does this look like aesthetically? A balanced physique. It gives you a balanced physique. Look, we all know the example of the gyro girl that is muscular but doesn't look right. They move wrong. They don't move like they're put together right. Muscle bound, right? That's the term that they used to use back in the day because of the way people look like they moved because they worked out a particular way all the time. Well, different exercises, forget about the function, forget about the fact that it makes you move better. I know a lot of people are aesthetically driven. It'll give you a balanced, beautiful physique because performance, you know, detriments tend to show up over time aesthetically as well, which brings us to the last one, which is phasing your workouts reduces your risk of injury, okay? It just does because you train your body in a more balanced way. If I train in a strength, one of the signs that I have personally because I can get stuck, right? Like anybody, I get stuck in my favorite phases of working out and I tend to get stuck in a strength phase. It's one of my favorites. I just love it. I totally enjoy it. And the signs that I used to ignore that I'm a little better now at listening to are joint pain. If I stay in that phase too long, there's telltale areas of my body that'll start to, like if I bench press and I'm trying to get stronger at the bench press and I focus on it and my strength goes up, my strength goes up and then I start to feel pec insertion pain a little bit. Like I used to ignore that, but now I'm like, oh, I got a phase into, you know, something a little different. Same thing with the squat. Like if I push it, push it, push it. Oh, little SI joint on the right side, you know, type of pain. That means I need to switch it. Well, when I switch things properly and phase things properly, I don't feel that. And if I push that long enough and don't listen to it, it usually turns into an actual injury that I need to take a break from exercise and nothing's worse for progress than not working out, right? I feel like this is of all the points. This is the one where when you're under 30 years old, you're less interested in this conversation. As you get older, it becomes probably the most important part of this. You're unbreakable when you're young. You just haven't experienced it yet, that's all. But the truth be told, this is the number one indicator for me to change things or move faces or introduce new exercises is, all these years of lifting and training, I'd like to think I'm pretty in tune with my body and it's normally discomfort, pain, soreness, tightness, lack of movement. Those are all these indicators that I need to move out of what I'm doing and change up what I'm doing and you get really good at paying attention to that. And catching it before I think when we're young, we tend to ignore or think that we're invincible until it finally catches up, but father time is undefeated. So eventually this becomes a high priority. It does and at the end of the day, look, here's the bottom line, at the end of the day, if your pursuit really is to move, perform and look your best and not just for now, but man, I wanna look amazing and I wanna keep looking amazing. I wanna move amazing, I wanna keep moving amazing. Being open-minded and phasing your workouts and trying different things, things that may be unconventional to you is one of the best ways to do this and over time what you'll develop is this very balanced, well-moving, muscular, the kind of body that you want that you're seeking by staying in one particular type of training that you don't realize you actually get by moving in and out of different types of training. Look, if you like our information, head over to mindpumpfree.com and check out our guides. We have guides that can help you with almost any health or fitness goal. You can also find all of us on social media. So Justin is on Instagram at Mind Pump. Justin, Adam is on Instagram at Mind Pump Adam and you can find me on Twitter at Mind Pump Sal. This one's really important and that is to phase your training. If somebody trains for a full year doing a bench press and they're always aiming for five reps, if you compared that person to a person who did a bench press where they did three or four weeks of five reps but then they did three or four weeks of 12 reps and then three or four weeks of, let's say, 15 to 20 reps and then they'll throw on some supersets, at the end of that year, you're gonna see more consistent progress from the person who's moving in and out and less injury. That's another thing. You'll see less injury as well.