 In this episode of Mind Pump the World's Top Fitness, Health and Entertainment Podcast, we sat down and talked about the habits that we've seen our super healthy clients have. In other words, we sat down and talked about the last 20 years that we've worked as trainers and we talked about the clients that we knew that did exceptionally well. These are people who had very healthy, effortlessly healthy lifestyles, people who didn't gain the weight back and didn't have this yo-yo relationship with exercise and diet, people who were truly healthy. We narrowed down 10 habits that they all seemed to have in common. Now this podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, ForSigmatic. ForSigmatic has some of the best mushroom-based supplements you'll find anywhere. Now one of my favorite products from them is Cordyceps. I love taking their Cordyceps supplement before I'm gonna be outside in the heat and it makes me heat, more heat tolerant. It also helps me with long exercise bouts so I seem to have more stamina but they have many other products. One of my other favorite products is their Mushroom coffees. These are wonderful coffees that'll help wean you off of the traditional coffee that you're currently having. They combine caffeine with adaptogenic herbs and mushrooms which help balance out your body's response to caffeine, the stimulant. In other words, you're gonna feel energized but calm, focused and not jittery. If you go to ForSigmatic.com, that's F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C .com forward slash mind pump, use the code MindPump at checkout, you'll get 15% off any of their products. Also in this episode we talk about exercise and some of the points and if you need guidance, if you wanna follow proven workout programs, go to mapsfitnessproducts.com. On there you'll see at least a dozen, if not more, workout programs designed specifically for different goals and different people. Find the one that suits you best, sign up for it, follow it for a full month. If it doesn't blow your mind, if it doesn't give you all the results you think you should get, you can return it for a full refund. Again, that's at mapsfitnessproducts.com. One of the best lessons I learned as an early trainer, both for myself and for my clients, very simple, very, very simple. I remember one of my mentors, my early mentors told me, this is, he told me it was kinda like a hack, right? He didn't use that word, but he said this is like a secret. He said, look at people who are very successful in whatever area you think you're looking to get better at. So I don't care, business, working out, nutrition, whatever. Find people who you admire, and then just look at their habits, look at their actions, and just copy them for a little while. See what they're doing. You don't even need to understand it necessarily. Study them without being creepy. Study them and copy them. And I did this, I did this with my workouts. I would watch people who seemed to respond really well and do real well, and I'd copy them and I'd learn through that process. I did this as a trainer, as an early trainer. I had a lot of passion, a lot of energy, a lot of excitement, but I did not have a ton of knowledge. I was brand new. So I looked at the trainers around me that I thought were really, really good trainers and I watched them and copied them. I did this when I had my studio, watching my physical therapists in there and what they did and massage therapists, the acupuncturists, and I really think that this is an important skill to really pay attention to the habits of people that you may wanna be like and figure out why they do those things and what the benefits are and then copy them. So maybe we could do this episode and talk about those types of things. I love this conversation and I love the way you took it because this is something that I definitely think was a major contributor to the success I had early on in my career. That was something, I didn't have a lot of experience. I didn't have an education in the background of kinesiology or sports medicine. And so what I did have was an opportunity to work in a place that was highly competitive and there was 20 trainers there and it was very easy to see who the best was. I could see who was training the most clients, how much money they were making and I immediately attached myself to this guy and just asked a million questions. And I remember years later and when I got into leadership and I had my own staff, it just blew my mind how many people did not do that. Like why would you not look to your peers or look at somebody in the space that is having a ton of success and model many of the things that they're doing to have success, doesn't mean you gotta be them, doesn't mean you gotta actually copy them, but model after a lot of the habits that they've put in place because it's normally not something magical that has made this person so successful. It's that they've put a series of habits together that have created the success and whatever endeavor that they're pursuing. It's really a series of trial and error that they may have gone through to figure these things out that you can avoid a lot of that trial and error by observing what they do, what are their habits, why are they so successful in this particular area and then just emulate them. And again, it's not about not being who you are, it really what it is about emulating them and then learning along through the process and then developing similar habits or what you'll find at least I should say is you end up developing similar habits because you start to find consistencies among people who tend to be successful in different areas. Yeah, the most successful people that I've been around are sponges and they definitely have paid attention to a lot of these other people around them who are doing very well. That was something that I prided myself on in terms of especially with personal training. I wanted to know how everybody was organizing things, like what kind of communication was most effective with their clients, like how they could get them to adopt these other healthy habits, especially with nutrition. That was such a hard one for me to nail down in the very beginning. It took a long time and I would sit and listen and I would listen to the presentations of other trainers and how they'd explain it, listen to dietitians. I even brought in a dietitian for myself of my own business to up the value of what I was presenting my clients. And I did that purposely to learn from them and to model some of what they were promoting to my clients. And then I would take that with me on. I have this knowledge now that I can pass on and it can come from me. Right, right. So here's what we did, right? So Adam, Justin and myself for a long time were trainers who trained clients or we train trainers who train clients. And so through this process, we've been exposed to thousands, if you add them all up, right? Thousands of people that we've either worked with directly or by proxy, right, through other trainers. And this is over the course of two decades. And what you end up seeing are patterns over that long period of time. You train one person, two people, 10 people. You may not pick up on patterns, but when you do this for 15, 20 years and you do this with a lot of people, very clear patterns start to emerge. And so what we did in this episode is we listed 10 habits that we've seen that are consistent among the super healthy people that we've been around, the people who seem to do it effortlessly, the people who seem to have the best overall health, the people who seem to do it forever. These are not people that are in and out, but rather it's a part of who they are. Well, and the very first one that we listed is plan breakfast. And I love how you had Doug put it up on the notes by putting a hyphen, right? So it's break fast. Because some people I know right away might be thinking, well, wait a second, what if I intermittent fast and what if I don't exactly do breakfast? And the key- There's a lot of arguments for both. Right, and I think the key to this first one is the planning piece. Not so much do you eat at 6 a.m. or 9 a.m. or two o'clock in the afternoon, but it's that you have structure for the very first meal that you eat for the day. And the people that I've seen that have had the most success around nutrition do this. They map out that first meal and all the other ones, but the first one is so important to kick off the day and set the tone. It totally does set the tone because here's, so let me give you an analogy, right? Let's say you have an important presentation at work, right? That your potential promotion hinges upon. So you gotta do this big presentation. Do you walk into it and then just wing it? Do you just shoot from the hip? Or do you plan for it? Do you think about the scenarios and what to talk about and how to present the things you wanna present? Now, if you're a smart person, you plan. You don't just walk in and then just shoot from the hip because your chances of success are much higher by planning. So this is what we've observed training clients is that people who don't plan breakfast, and again, breakfast, meaning the first meal of the day. So this could be in the morning, it could be in the afternoon, but essentially the first meal of however many meals you're gonna have throughout that day, people who plan it are more thoughtful. It sets the tone and they tend to eat better throughout the day. Now, people who don't plan it, it tends to become a race against the nutrition. It tends to become this battle throughout the day like, oh my gosh, I'm late, gotta get to work, what can I eat? Or I haven't eaten anything, now I'm starving, let me just grab this quick thing. And then the rest of the day tends to follow suit. And I can argue that the things that you eat probably is among some of the most important thing that you can plan throughout your whole day because your health does affect everything. Everything that you do, so the food that you eat is extremely important and planning it is just prioritizing and when you plan it, your odds of success are much higher. You also gotta take into account too that, and I know that this has happened to you guys, it's not like we've planned every single meal of our lives since we've been personal trainers, but the days that I forget to set this up or I neglect planning for what my first meal is gonna look like, what ends up happening, and I'm sure this happens to other people, you get your cup of coffee and that's it, and you get in the car and you rush to work and then you get busy with your day and then hours go by, and there was no planning to that, it wasn't like I was intentionally intermittent fasting or trying to do that, I was just busy, and then as the days go by, all of a sudden hunger starts to kick in because I haven't eaten for a long period of time, and then what follows that are all the crazy cravings, and what follows that is typically this struggle of, oh my God, fighting off this craving of what I really want and what's convenient and fast versus oh, what I should have and I should go prepare this and it's very easy to make that quick decision that isn't ideal for you when you haven't set up and you haven't planned. Plus your options that are surrounding you at the time usually aren't all that ideal. So you get yourself in that situation where now I'm really hungry, I haven't really planned, what can I get in a pinch right now? It's usually not the best thing for you at that point, and so I like the conversation that this is really more about the structure of it as opposed to let's give you these very specific food items that you need to focus on for breakfast because it's just not realistic. Everybody has such like individual biodiversity and needs that they have and also people have different reactions towards food. So you wanna set it up whatever's best for you specifically to then carry you throughout your day and have that energy to pull from. Right, so here's an example of planning for breakfast. So yesterday, I'm having dinner with Jessica and I open the fridge and I go, oh, we don't have any eggs. So I'm gonna go to the grocery store and get some eggs because that way I can have those for breakfast tomorrow. That's as simple as that. It's as simple as being a little bit prepared and planning for knowing that you're gonna eat in a way that's healthy and balanced for you. And Adam, you mentioned even planning to fast. There's a very, very big difference in how I feel when I plan to fast versus when I don't eat because I didn't think about it. Very different feeling. If I'm just not eating because I'm too busy and we got meetings and stuff going on, the mindset that I have is much more like, I just need something real quick. Reactionary. Right, if I think to myself, tomorrow I'm gonna fast, now if I don't eat, I don't have that same reactionary mindset and it's really all about the planning. It doesn't have to be super planned where you meal prep and all your food is prepared. It can be that, but it can be as simple as tomorrow, I'm gonna wake up at this time which gives me 20 minutes, which gives me enough time to eat this kind of breakfast. And at lunchtime, I'm gonna bring this food so I can eat that or I'm gonna schedule this much time to have a break so I can eat at this place. So you know ahead of time what you're gonna do and the successful people that I've worked with, the super healthy people, none of them fly by the seat of their pants when it comes to nutrition. They just don't. All of them have at least some sort of planning that goes into, especially breakfast, but usually all of their meals. So speaking of planning, it brings me to the next one, which, and I remember when we first started this podcast, you guys used to like to razz me and tease me about my water jug that I used to carry around, right? So, and here's the thing, like before I used, I never used to do that before competing until I got to a point where I needed to track and that was important to getting ready for a stage. I just said, oh, I'll just make an effort to drink water, but I wasn't really counting or tracking or paying attention to. And one of the things that I noticed when I really started to track, one, I realized how much I under consumed water. And then two, I found when I was busy trying to drink water all day long, that it kept me from making other poor food choices and also drinking my calories and elsewhere. So it had this kind of two-prong thing that helped with my success in my journey of health and fitness. And so that's something that I, once I pieced that kind of together, it became like a mandatory thing that I would just teach clients. And obviously, depending on their size, it's a different amount that I'm telling them to target, although I think anywhere from a half a gallon to a gallon is a pretty good generic number for most people. And I would tell them, hey, I want you to measure that out and plan to hit that every day. And because they were focused on that, they would make other good decisions throughout their day. Yeah, I remember when you were going through, that was like a big epiphany for you. And I took that too to myself to try and start tracking and seeing how much water I was really consuming. And when I was going through that process, I realized like even some normal nagging, kind of achy pains that I was experiencing, my joints, like I was much better. Those were eliminated on some level, just trying to remain hydrated. There's lots of benefits to being hydrated that I didn't even consider, especially like two, like being more foggy and not as clear thinking as well. It was pretty crazy. Yeah, you notice big differences in your skin. I know this was a great selling point for my female clients where they'd say, hey, let's aim to drink this much water and then let's pay attention to your skin. They're like, oh my gosh, I can't believe how different, you know, my skin looks. This is probably one of the most stark contrasts between healthy people and unhealthy people. Healthy people, they drink, they have a different relationship with water. That is their beverage, it's water. I just drink water. Anything else is like a dessert or a treat and is very occasional. Unhealthy people, water tends to not be the main beverage. The main beverages tend to be coffees, teas, sodas, juices, things with flavor. And because they've developed that relationship with liquids that have flavor, water to them seems boring. I've actually had clients tell me they don't like the taste of water, which always was weird to me because water, I don't understand, that's supposed to have a taste, right? But super healthy people have a completely different relationship with water. If you go out with them to a restaurant or you go out with them to go eat anywhere else, you notice that when the waiter or waitress comes and says, hey, would you like anything to drink? 99% of the time they'd say, oh, just water. I just want water. Almost never would they say, I'll have something else that has flavor in it. And again, this is a huge stark contrast. So this is something I showed Katrina not that long ago because we were having a water discussion like, because this is how we, when we eat out, we most always drink water or tea. And she was like, I feel like the waiter looks at us like we're being cheap, you know? Like it's because we're trying to save money and not do that. I'm like, whatever, you know what I'm saying? Who cares? Give me a boss. But then I told her like, look around in the restaurant and I'm like, you can tell people that are health conscious, you pay attention to what's on the table. And a lot of times you'll notice the people that look healthier and fit are drinking water at the table versus drinking the soda, the beer, the wine or all the other great drinks that you can get when you eat out. And I always look at it like it's like a double win. It's like, oh, I save it because Jesus, when you eat drink, when you have drinks at a restaurant, it's like three to $5 for a drink. And if you get a multiple drinks in a sitting, you know, you're spending an extra 20 bucks just in drinking your calories. So it's like another two-pronged win for me. It's like, okay, not only am I managing my calories better, I'm also in taking my water intake. And then I'm also saving a couple bucks in my wallet too. That's awesome. The next one, this one's an interesting one because I first noticed this when, I had this one client I got close to, he was a successful business person. He was always active, but he ended up hiring me because he wanted structured workout programming. And he was very successful with his workouts as well. Easy to train. Kind of like Doug, you know, Doug was a great client too. He just, he did it applied and learn and it's just great working with people like that. But anyhow, he had invited me to his company to speak to his employees about health and fitness because he thought it would be a good thing for me to go talk to some of his staff. So I actually went to his work and spent the whole day with him. And one thing really struck me, very interesting about this guy. Whenever he would meet, and I stuck with him all day long, it was pretty cool. I shadowed him all day long. What was really cool is that he would, whenever he'd have a meeting with someone, someone would meet up with them and be like, oh, you know, we're supposed to have our meeting right now. I'll be like, all right, cool, let's go outside. And then they'd walk and have their meeting. So every time he met, he did this like five times that day. Every time he'd meet with one of his employees and they'd give him a rundown on statistics or costs or margins or whatever, they would go for a walk outside. And I asked him about this. I said, why do you, why do you, I noticed you walk, is this because you're so fit, you know, fitness conscious? Is it because you like to maintain your fitness? He goes, actually, that's a side effect. He goes, it's cool that I walk throughout the day. He goes, when I track my steps, I'm like 20,000 because whenever I'm talking to somebody, I go for a walk. He goes, but that wasn't the primary reason why I did that. He goes, I did that because I noticed it made me sharper. When I didn't do that, I wasn't as sharp. I didn't feel like I could really empathize as well. My staff, I noticed when we would walk, they were able to convey what they were conveying. Brainstorming was much better. By the way, this is a habit that you see artists do quite a bit. When artists get stuck, when they're writing a book or they're making music and they get stuck on a particular thing, one of the things that they'll do to get through that writer's block or that block is to go for a walk. So one thing that I noticed, I noticed this definitely with him and then I paid attention to it to the rest of my clients that were really successful. The really successful clients that I trained took walk breaks. They weren't workout breaks, they were walk breaks. So like after lunch, after breakfast, you know, when they're having a meeting, when they're talking to somebody, when they're on the phone, they would just go do these short 10, 15 minute walk breaks throughout the day. Well, we've shared the research that supports that when you pair a current habit with a new habit, the success rate is like dramatically higher. So pairing walking with something else that you have to do every single day. In this example you're giving right now, the guy who's got meetings he does probably every single day with three to five people. So very easy to say, hey, every time I'm gonna meet with this person, I'm also gonna walk into it. I do that here, right? So we have a staff here and I meet with them on a weekly basis and when I'm kind of getting, you know, the upload on whatever they're working on project-wise, instead of us sitting in an office or sitting down in the studio and talking, I normally will have them get up and go walk with me and, you know, download me on all the information while we're walking around the block. So it's very easy for me to create that habit. The other one that I always love to do is with eating, right? We all have a meal, you know, multiple meals that we eat a day and if I can just make a habit out of, hey, getting up after I'm done eating, I'm gonna walk, I've improved digestion, I'm gonna increase my steps, burn more calories and it's easy for me to be consistent with that and what people don't realize is those little 10 minute walks paired with meetings, paired with eating adds up to be a lot of extra steps and movement and calorie burn in a day and in the week and in months and that's massive difference and could be the difference between somebody losing 15 to 20 pounds more fat a year. So it's, and it's a really easy thing to stay consistent with asking someone to go to the gym every day and, you know, train intensely for an hour is a major commitment for a lot of people but asking most people that, hey, when you do these certain things in the day, can you just do this walking or add that? That's a lot easier. Yeah, I mean, I've pretty much eliminated all treadmill. I used to jump on the treadmill to try and get my cardio just like everybody else, you know, just to get that additional movement if I'm trying to keep my weight at a certain amount or whatever. So, you know, just like you guys have said in terms of like using it for those, you know, meetings or for, you know, digestion, huge but also me commuting, I have like a 45 minute commuting back home. And so the first thing I do when I get home, which is it kind of kills like three birds with one stone. I get home, the kids come out with me, the dogs come out with me, everybody sort of like downloads me about their day, like how this online school thing has been going, like, you know, what your struggles have been, like it's just a much better conversation than it is when I come in and everybody's sort of in their own corner and, you know, off on their own. So it's a great way to then connect with people as well. Yeah, and I mean, let me put it to you this way. Let's say you did, you know, three, 10 minutes. And here's a wonderful thing about walk breaks is it doesn't feel like a scheduled workout. It's a lot easier to maintain. I mean, think about it this way. If you did three 10 minute walks a day, okay? First of all, easy to digest. It's a 10 minute walk. 10 minutes is easy to spare at any given moment throughout the day. You do it after, you know, breakfast, lunch, and there's three of them. That's 30 minutes of walking cardio every single day. How much easier is it to do that than to schedule a 30 minute cardio session? It's a lot easier. Not only that, but the frequent short walk breaks have been shown to improve mood better than a dedicated concentrated bout of cardio. They seem to burn more body fat. They seem to improve productivity better than the concentrated bouts of cardio. So in my personal opinion, and especially through observing clients, walk breaks in terms of being able to stick to it long-term, in terms of long-term success with your health, far better than the structured, intense bouts of cardio. Now, the next one is one that I think, first of all, was not on my list just maybe five to 10 years ago. And although we didn't order these in priority, I think this one is going to be one of the most important ones going forward in the future. And that is the importance of unplugging and making a conscious effort to detach from all of our tech. I know you guys used to tease the shit out of me about the Adam Attler book that I shared years ago, but that was life-changing for me, like reading that and I feel like, you know, pulling the curtains back on how they've designed this tech to be so addictive and to attract people. And rightfully so, it's a business and that's what they're trying to do. So I don't, I'm not demonizing the tools, but I think a lot of consumers are just completely unaware. They're oblivious. Yeah, unaware. And I think if you were, you'd probably be a little more reluctant to hand your kid an iPad at two years old and do things like that, that you don't know that may be setting you up for greater challenges as they get older. And so because of this, I think this is one of the most important things. And that is just, you know, scheduling that and putting yourself, and what I do for myself to protect myself from going down the rabbit hole of emails and social media and just tech in general, is I have a hard time at night that just, at that time, I don't care how busy I am at work or what's going on that the phone goes up in my room plugged into the charger for the night and I don't see it till the next day. And then I also have a time in the morning that I still wait before I get up and just look at social media or look at emails or look at text messages right away. So I have that window that I allow myself to consume and or use for work purposes. And once it's outside that window, I shut that down. And I think that this is gonna become such an important practice for people in the future because it's so easy to get sucked in. Well, it's one of the more challenging one I think people will face because it's engineered in such a way where almost like everything is on the phone now. I mean, that you could justify. I could justify, I need this for directions. I need this for so-and-so is gonna call me and I need to text all these people and I need to check my emails and like everything is there. And so it's very challenging time that we're in now to be able to put that aside and really just revolves back to the first thing with the scheduling of food. It's the same mentality going into that. Really have to start structuring your day in such a way where you're not reactionary towards all these things, you're ahead of it. So I'm gonna be ahead of it. I'm gonna plan this window during my day to accomplish as much as possible. And if I don't, it's okay. I'm just gonna focus tomorrow. Probably the biggest benefit of doing this is the shift in perspective that you get because what technology tends to do and this is especially if you are on social media or reading news articles or Facebook, Instagram, all the different media outlets online, what they tend to do is they tend to distort your perception of reality. So a simple example would be you're on Instagram, you're following a bunch of fitness pages because you like to learn about fitness and health, but it's a lot of pictures of impossibly fit, perfect-looking bodies. And without realizing, even if you're a self-aware person without realizing it, your brain starts to perceive that as the norm. So then you start to perceive yourself as far worse than you may actually be in terms of your levels of fitness which can tend to make you feel worse. Another good example is reading news articles. If I go on any news outlet, I'm gonna read click-baity articles about what's going on in the world. So I'm gonna read about some kid that got kidnapped over here and some sex trafficking ring over there and this drug bust over there, but my brain perceives it is happening in front of me and I'm gonna develop a lot of fear and anxiety around this. Look, we've known this for a long time. In fact, psychologists and therapists have told clients with lots of anxiety and stress to stop watching the news for decades. This is before technology got so good at putting this stuff in your face. And what happens when you unplug is you start to change your perception a little bit because now your perception is being shaped on real world interactions. You go outside, you talk to your neighbors, you talk to your friends and family members and what you start to realize is, oh, people are not nearly as crazy as it seems on social media. People are not as perfect looking as maybe I perceived on social media. You get that real connection. We evolved communicating with people in real life. It's a totally different feeling. There's a reward there. I think people forgot. The person-to-person interactions, you get something out of that. Like you don't get virtually. And it seems that this platform is so convenient that now I have access to grandma across the country. I have all these different family members now that I could pay attention to, but a phone call would go a lot further or actual face time, obviously, person-to-person, you get a lot of tremendous value out of that. Yes, absolutely. Now the next one, this reminds me of another client that I trained who I learned a lot from. We had this whole conversation about competitiveness and I am naturally a very competitive person. I like to compete. I like to win at whatever I'm competing at. And at the time when I was training this client, I was quite young. I was in my early 20s, so it was like the peak of my obsession with winning. And we were having this conversation about winning. And I said to him, I said, I love winning. It's like my favorite thing to do. I love to win. And he said, you know, that's not bad. He said, but I could teach you a way that'll ensure that you're gonna be more successful in life. And I said, okay, what is that? He says, fall in love with growth instead of winning. And I'm like, what do you mean by that? He goes, well, in any competition, in your view, you either win or lose. In my view, you either win or learn. He said, if you fall in love with growth, then you're going to become a better person whether you win or lose. Doesn't matter what happens. Now you could still be competitive. You could still try to win. But if you fall in love with growth, the reality is you're always winning because you're always becoming a better person. This is something I noticed with the most successful super healthy clients that I trained that they were very much enamored with just personal growth. It was all about growth. And they were able to set aside their ego to examine some of their own behaviors, to examine some of their nutritional behaviors or exercise behaviors. The growth-minded individuals that I trained, when I would talk to them about over-applying intensity, when I'd sit in front of them and say, Mrs. Johnson, your intensity is way too hard for your body right now. And I think that's what's preventing you from losing weight. Now, if she's not growth-minded, she'd be like, well, what are you talking about? I'm burning more calories. I'm working out more hard. But because they were growth-minded, they said, okay, well, you're a trainer. You obviously know what you're talking about. Let me be open-minded to what you're saying. Let me give it a shot and see what happens. And because they were growth-minded, they were extremely successful as a result of it. So the super healthy people I've ever worked with, all of them were growth-minded. By the way, they also happened to be successful in other areas of the world. Oh, I love this one. This one is for sure one of my favorite ones. Because it took me till about 26 before the light bulb went off here. Like you, Sal, I think I was focused so much on winning and losing was a failure. And I looked at failures or losses like that sucks, don't want that to happen, but it wasn't as an opportunity for growth or learning. I think that didn't switch on until later. And it didn't switch on until I started working on self-improvement. So at 26, I began reading really. I wasn't really reading much before that. And what I quickly started to pick up besides what you just alluded to, which is failures are opportunities for growth. I also noticed the momentum that you get when you're focused on personal growth, when you're seeking growth and you're wanting to get better in any aspect. It could be learning an instrument. It could be reading on self-improvement. It could be working on your fitness. Whenever you're doing to improve yourself, I always felt it bleed into all the other aspects of my life. And when I'm not, I can always feel like there's a weight of the world on my shoulders. When I'm not focused on growth or doing something to improve who I am, making a better version of myself for every day, I can always tell how that affects every other aspect of my life. And when I'm working on that, I can feel how it bleeds into everything else. And so from 26 on to today, that is probably one of the number one things that I would say really contributed to a lot of the success was that momentum that I gained from always focusing on personal growth. It was cool for me to see that play out with some of my clients in particular as well who really prioritized themselves for like the first time. And you could see that where now is the opportunity for them to improve physically, which then also improved other habits, their sleep improved, their school performance improved, their relationships with their parents or their significant other, they started to have better conversations. And it was just a snowball effect of things that transpired as a result of them really kind of taking that time to hone in on working on themselves and being growth minded and going through that process. And I think that's one of these areas if everybody could just really take the time to experience it, it takes some courage, it takes some bravery to do something new. And I think that's obviously that's the big barrier for a lot of people to be challenged with. But if you do pursue it, it really does affect everything in a positive way. Oh yeah, if your growth minded, if you're seeking growth, all these points that we're listing in this episode are gonna work for you. If you're not, it's gonna be very difficult to adopt any of these, if they're not ones that you already do. Now the next one took me a long time to figure out for myself, but I did figure it out for my clients. You know, we really do take sleep for granted. And what I mean by that is, I think a lot of people realize the importance of sleep, but we take it for granted because we do whatever we're doing throughout the day and then we just turn the lights off, hit the pillow and expect to have amazing sleep. It really doesn't work that way. Now it's not because sleep is something you have to work hard towards necessarily. Mainly it's because modern life doesn't lend itself well to good sleep. You know, for again, for most of human history, we are brains slowly gotten to sleep mode as the sun set. We didn't have electronic lights. We didn't have electronics that we were looking into. We were outside doing our thing. As the sun began to set, our brain got that signal, perceived it and said, okay, slowly winding down, getting ready for sleep. Pretty sure we didn't cook food in the middle of night. That's like a nice dinner bell for you know, predators all around us. So we didn't eat close to bedtime. And our brains and bodies prepared for sleep before we got to sleep. We're not like a, you know, it's not like your cell phone where you could just shut power off and it's off. The body actually needs to prepare itself for sleep. The most successful, healthy people I've ever met actually put some priority in sleep. They actually treat, they actually take it seriously. They don't just expect to get good sleep. They have sleep routines. Now that may look like in the past with a lot of my clients, this look like dim lights and reading. I had many, many successful clients who this was a strata, this was just something that they did. An hour or two before bed, they have like a dim night light that they put on or a book light that they clip on the top of the book. And they read about an hour or two before bed and go to sleep. Now for them, I don't know if they realized that they were really prioritizing sleep. I think they just thought it was a great way to wind down and read a nice book. But really what they were doing is they were setting their body up for sleep. Now we have science that shows the value of this. When you prepare yourself for sleep by not exposing yourself to bright lights, by not eating a big meal right before bed, by having your bedroom set up for a good sleep experience, cool with the blind shut, no light coming in, it's clear, the evidence is clear. You see the stages of sleep are more effective. People fall asleep faster. They wake up more refreshed. Hormones as a result reflect their good sleep. Fat loss is easier. Cravings tend to go down. This is a very important one. It's not a hard one to do by the way. There's not this crazy, it's like you have to follow this crazy workout or understand nutrition in and out. Really it's just about taking it seriously, just preparing your body for sleep. I think a reason why it's not, a lot of people don't have success with it because I think a lot of people are unaware they're not having success with it, right? I think a lot of people, there's nobody who doesn't sleep, right? So everybody sleeps. So I think everybody assumes that, oh, I'm fine. I get up and I've been sleeping my whole life every single night, I get up about my day. And I think they're just unaware of what it looks like when you really optimize sleep. At least that's what it was for me. Like I just assumed that because I got up every day and crushed every day that it was, I wasn't lacking in the sleep department. And until I start just like the tracking of the water or paying attention to your macros and calculating and weighing your food. Like it's just one of those things until you really start to pay attention to it, you don't realize how much better it can be if you put a little effort towards it. And to your point, Sal, it can be just that simple. It can be as simple as just agreeing, make just like we talked about the unplugging and having a time zone. You just agree that, hey, Katrina and I just did this again, like we changed it because Max is on a new sleep schedule, right? So he sleeps about 12 hours, now he goes down at 7.30. And but he is up, like come 6.37, he is up and ready to be up. There's no like laying down and wanting to nap anymore or relaxing kind of what it was before because when he was getting up multiple times in the night, it was like these little three hour windows we were sleeping with him because we were constantly having to get up with him. Well, now that he sleeps consistently when he's ready to get up, he's ready to get up, which means we now have to adjust our time of going to bed before Katrina and I would allow ourselves to stay up till 10.30, 11.30 at night on a regular basis. And now that's not working because now it's interrupting our sleep when he's ready to go for the day. And so, you know, we've set this just, oh, hey, by 9.30, we have to be in bed. And if we're still awake or that, then we listen to an audio book or we just dim the lights and we talk and have communication for 30 minutes. Like that's kind of this new rule that we have. And it's just that simple. You don't have to do anything crazy or add anything or put that much thought into it. But that little bit of organizing, hey, we're gonna go to bed at this time, we're gonna turn the lights down. And at that point, we're just gonna either be conversing or reading a book does wonders for setting your sleep up. Yeah, I think if you ask somebody, just a random person, like, have you ever felt like super refreshed in like you had like the best night's sleep ever? You know, and they could kind of recount a time where that happened. But you know, well, what did you do that led up to that? Like, I doubt they could even, you know, tell you what all that looked like. And I think if people just put more effort in understanding, you know, how they set themselves up to have that feeling, to have that feeling of being refreshed and having, you know, this vibrant energy in the morning, you know, obviously you're gonna see the benefit to that. And there is a way to do that. Right, the next one near and dear to all of our hearts, we talk about this all the time. And that is to build muscle and lift weights. There is no form of exercise that is better suited to combat the troubles and challenges, the health challenges of modern life, like resistance training, like lifting weights. It's the only form of exercise that will positively influence your metabolism. And when I say positively, I mean speed it up. So it actually teaches the body to burn more calories. It's also protective against a sedentary lifestyle, which is the common lifestyle that we now have. Even if you work out, most of your day is probably sedentary. Most jobs now require very, very little activity. Not necessarily a bad thing, but you wanna protect against the negatives of that. Building muscle does that. It's also the only form of exercise that has been shown in men to reliably raise testosterone levels. And in women, if applied properly, it's one of the most effective ways of exercising to balance out estrogen and progesterone. Muscle also is a wonderful protection against insulin insensitivity issues or insulin resistance, which is a big problem nowadays. By the way, brain disorders, Alzheimer's and dementia, many scientists will say is a form of insulin resistance. In fact, Alzheimer's, some scientists will call type three diabetes. Lifting weights is the best form of exercise when you consider the context of modern life. Here's the best part about it. You don't have to do it every single day. Most people can lift weights two days a week, maybe three days a week, and you're gonna reap most the benefits I just talked about. I'm gonna even challenge that a little bit, and that's because there's a very good chance like our single topic episodes get shared the most, right? So there's probably thousands of people listening to us for the first time with this. And if you're somebody who is not already into fitness and lifting weights on a consistent basis, even one day a week of a full body routine, if you are doing all these other things can make a huge difference in your life. Yeah, that's true. And it's very different than how I would have approached fitness 10 years ago. Back in the days, I would never tell a client they can lift weights only one day a week. I was just like, oh my God, you need to be in here at least three to seven days a week. And that's so not true. In fact, you're far better off if you're not doing anything right now, just starting one day a week, becoming very consistent with that before you go to two and then eventually go to three. And even just doing one full body workout a week with all the other things that we're talking about, you would be surprised what a healthy person that you would be just from that alone. Yeah, I would say if you're new to working out and you need some structure and some guidance, we have a workout program called Map Starter, which is a great place to start. But we have a lot of workout programs you can choose from that'll fit your body and your goals. But really lifting weights is, and now we have, finally we have studies that are showing this by itself, in comp, if you compare it to other solitary forms of exercise, it's the most effective form when you consider the modern life again, when you consider the problems that we're encountering, everything from obesity to diabetes to osteoporosis in women, lifting weights. And again, it doesn't take much. This is a wonderful thing about it. Lifting weights is just sending a signal to your body that says we need more muscle. It's not like you're doing it to burn tons of calories. Unlike other forms of exercise, you don't need to do it all the time to reap the amazing benefits. Yeah, and that's the thing is it doesn't have to be all that often. I mean, strength training itself like provides you with abilities. So, you know, strength itself is something that you wanna be able to keep and maintain because, you know, as we age, we're gonna start losing these abilities. And this is something that we need to express constantly with our joints to also prevent arthritis and other pains and other discomforts and really improves your overall quality of life. So it's something definitely to consider in your routine. Totally, now the next one, this one's interesting to me because, you know, with as modern medicine or Western medicine progresses, one of the drawbacks sometimes is we forget old wisdom. Now, we tend to rediscover it later on, which is what's happening right now with this next one. But we did forget it for a little while. You know, in the early days of Western medicine, if a child was sick, if your elderly parent was sick, or if you weren't feeling good, if you were feeling down, you were feeling sad, you were feeling a little bit of pain, something that people used to say was, go outside and get some fresh air. This was something that they did all the time. In fact, they would do this with babies where they would have babies go and sit next to a window or they'd put them outside to get some fresh air. And it's because they noticed this is old wisdom, by the way, you see this in all old, you know, medicine practices, Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine as well, that going outside has these positive health effects. Now, science is now supporting this, right? We see that when people go outside, feel good chemicals tend to go up, getting sunlight boost vitamin D levels and has positive effects on inflammation. And when you consider how little we go outside nowadays in modern societies, it's even more important. If you think about all the time you spend outside versus the time you spend inside, it's probably a ratio of 95% to 5%. Probably 95% of the time you spend awake is not outside. We did not evolve that way. We need to be outside. Now there's a mean. We're solar powered. You don't need to go outside all day long, but dedicating some time outside or doing maybe some of your work outside, sitting on your laptop outside. It does have huge health benefits. This is a big one for me. I make sure every single day I go outside for at least an hour. And if I don't, I can tell a market difference in how I feel. Well, this one feeds big time into the sleep one too, right, for setting your circadian rhythm, right? So I notice a big difference when I go straight from home to work and then we sit underneath these fluorescent lights and we work all day long until the sun goes down and go home and how hard it is for me to fall asleep versus when I make a conscious effort, first thing in the morning to get out, whether I'm walking the dogs or just going for a stroll and absorbing that sunlight early on in the day to set the tone for my timing, my clock, you know? So my body knows that, hey, it's daytime. It's beginning of the day when it's supposed to start to wind down later on and we're constantly getting this artificial light all the time, it confuses your body into what time it is and is it time to go to bed? Simply by going out and getting into the sun early on in the day, does wonders for you also setting your sleep up later on in the evening. Oh, if you're doing the walks, like we talked about earlier, the walk breaks, there you go. You're walking. There's a combo right there. Yeah, you're walking outside, so you're doing your walk and you're getting, you know, you're being outside and getting that sunlight. Right. Now the next one, this one's also very important. This one is connected to the lifting weights, one that we talked about. And that is to stay mobile or maintain your mobility. If to keep it as simple as possible, really it's about practicing things you don't want your body to forget, okay? So if you don't want your body to forget how to run, you should probably practice a little bit of running. If you don't wanna have your body to forget how to bend over to pick something up, reach up above your head, squat down. Turn and reach behind you. Turn, reach behind you, jump off of a curb or jump up on top of a curb. You probably wanna practice these things to maintain your mobility. Now if you wanna take it a step further and make it really effective, you do some dedicated mobility work with dedicated mobility exercises. That probably will give you the best results. I'll be even more prescriptive, right? So we created a webinar at primeprowebinar.com and it's free and it's an hour long and I take you through every major joint and we do mobility drills in there. If you're listening to this and you're like, okay, I wanna start doing this or include this routine, go through that and then begin to implement some of those moves throughout your week and you don't need to do it all in one one hour setting. I take you through it in an hour setting and if you've got that dedication and you enjoy doing it for an hour, that's totally fine. But another way you can do this is take all those movements and break them up through the week and set them up as little five, 10 minute increments just to add mobility every single day and that in itself will do wonders for your mobility. Oh yeah, and primeprowebinar.com is free and it's really go on there and take it, see how you feel before, see how you feel afterwards. Right, you'll feel it right away. Oh, right away, right? It's not like you gotta do this for a few weeks before you notice a difference. You'll notice a difference right away when you practice it. Yeah, and it's great because a lot of those moves will kinda show you where when your body is in an alignment, the difference that you feel immediately from that and you'll notice it in the way you carry yourself, your posture, your energy levels, it just carries with you throughout the day and so to be able to apply moments of these rituals throughout your day and just chunks, watch what that will do for you with all this other stuff throughout your day. Yeah, now this next one's really interesting. You know, it's funny, when you look at studies on longevity, one thing always pops out that I think scientists have a tough time talking about. It's consistent though, like every longevity study shows that people who have a mindfulness practice, now it usually is in the form of prayer. I think that's the most popular way or most common way people practice mindfulness but it could also be a meditation or a gratitude practice but every single longevity study I've ever seen that's done on lots of people shows that people who have a daily practice of prayer or mindfulness, their chances of dying from all causes is significantly lower by itself. This is when they control all factors, diet, activity, they control sleep, they control for smoking and alcohol. By itself, practicing mindfulness every single day reduces people's risks of all cause mortality. You know, I was watching that show on Netflix alone where people are sent off into the Arctic. This is, I think it's season six or whatever. And it's so interesting watching these people live in the middle of nowhere for two, three, four months or whatever at a time and to see how grateful they are when they catch a squirrel or a fish, things that we tend to take for granted, how happy they are. And it's interesting watching that and seeing how happy they feel in that moment and how sad I feel watching Netflix, eating a burger or whatever on my couch. And it's like, this is totally a mindset. And like anything, you got to practice it to get good at it. Well, this also to Justin's point that he's made a few times now, I think comes to mind for me, which is it takes us out of that reactive state, right? Many times we start our day and we're right into it. You wake up, you roll over, you open up your email, your social. There are, they're reacting to the likes or the dislikes or the bad comments or the email that you got to get to work and do stuff or life hits us in the face. And then we spend the whole day just reacting to all these things. And never once do we get to stop and kind of gather our thoughts, be grateful for where we are currently in our life. And then also start to wrap your brain around planning other stuff, planning all these things that we're talking about. I feel like this one's perfect as the last habit because I feel like getting this in place helps you set the other nine up. Like if you are listening to this list and you're like, man, that's a lot of things. I'm not really doing any of them or there's half of them on here. I'm not really doing, start here. Start here with this one and practice this, whether it be meditation, whether it be prayer, whether it be just being still for a good half hour or an hour out of your day, you start there and that will set the tone for all these other things. So what it'll do is it'll allow you to clear that mental space. You're not plugged in, you're not doing anything else. You're being still and in the moment. And then I can start to gather my thoughts on all these other habits that I wanna build. Well, it just also reminds me of ancient wisdom and why we have rituals and we have these things, part of our day in certain cultures. It's for certain reasons. And one, especially like two, like we pray or we meditate before we eat, like a dinner together. And like, why do we do that? I remember going through that and watching Paul check and he had that realization of, this really puts me in that parasympathetic state. Like now I'm calming my body down and I'm more receptive towards this food and utilizing its nutrients. And this is something that I didn't even really realize till later, if I'm in a rush and I'm eating, like how that affects like my gut health and how now I'm gonna be fighting this heartburn and all these things like as a result of not really calming myself down and being in a better state going into that. And it's the same with getting ready for bed. And you see a lot of these religions and cultures that have prayer before bed or have gratitudes or have meditation practices. And it's all there for a very specific reason. Yeah, it's ancient wisdom. It's wisdom that you see across the world in every culture, they all practice this. And we tend to be okay with saying that evolution is a real thing from a biological standpoint. We see bacteria evolve, we think animals evolve. People forget that ideas evolve as well. And the ones that stick around for thousands of years, there's something to them. And every single culture that we've ever observed has some form of a mindfulness practice either in the form of meditation or gratitude or usually in the form of prayer. So there's a tremendous amount of value. And by the way, there's lots of these things that we're talking about that can be combined. For example, we talked about prioritizing your sleep. Why not do your gratitude or prayer or mindfulness before you go to bed or do that when you're walking? Oh, by the way, if you do it while you're walking, you're also outside. So now you've hit three all in one. So all these things are not things that you have to do by themselves. They're really just habits. They're habits that you do throughout the day and do better as you pair them. That's right. And they tend to work better when you pair them. But again, we wrote this list because these are the things that we observed in our most successful super healthy clients, the ones that keep it long-term forever and seem to have the most effortless time doing it all. Look, Mind Pump is recorded on video as well as audio. Come find us on YouTube so you can watch our faces while we talk. You can also find all of us on Instagram. You can find Doug, the producer at Mind Pump Doug. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin. You can find me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam. I gotta come clean with you guys about something. Finally, Adam and I have been waiting for this. Yeah, I feel like, yeah. We've been talking about this for a while. You guys were gonna have an intervention. Something was gonna happen at some point. To make it easier on you, it's been very obvious for Sal and I for a long time. We like you no matter what. Really? Yeah, yeah. This is a no judgment zone. I mean, I come in here every now and then I'm complaining about my hips, you know?