 Oh, it's always exciting! You know what I love doing? More than anything, hammering fitness myths. This is what we were born to do. And in today's episode, we slap around eight stupid lies that the fitness industry keeps telling people. So you're gonna love this episode. Oh, I know why you're here. You want a free program, don't you? You greedy, greedy listeners. All right, we'll give you another free program. Here's the giveaway. Maps Aesthetic. Free access to Maps Aesthetic. All you gotta do is leave a comment in the first 24 hours that we drop this episode so that we rank higher on YouTube. That's the whole reason why we do this. If we pick your comment, we'll notify you and then you get free access to Maps Aesthetic. But you also have to subscribe to this channel, click on notifications. One more thing before we start the episode. Maps Strong and Maps Power Lift. Two great strength building programs. 50% off. Go sign up at mapsfitnessproducts.com. Just use the code August Special with no space for that discount. All right, here comes the show. Hey, I think it's time. Every once in a while we do these episodes. And I think we need to do another stupid, crazy, dumb fitness myths episode because we can't keep up. The myths just keep coming. And it's hard to keep overcoming them unless we do these episodes every three, four months. We just have to keep all these things in check is what I feel. Yeah, I tell you what, man. One of the reasons, we've said this before, but one of the reasons why we started the podcast in the first place when we all met was we all agreed that the fitness industry probably of all the industries is one of the worst. Riddled with shenanigans. Terrible information in myths that not only are false, but also damaging, actually produce the opposite effect of what people are looking for. It's like politics. You just got to follow the money. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Wow, that's true. It really is. Like a lot of the myths that are in the space, not all, but most of the myths are tied back to some sort of product. Something that they are trying to sell. And so if you follow the money, many times you'll forget. And that's the thing you got to, it's important to address too. I know you talk a lot about studies, Sal, on the show. But a lot of the studies that are out there, unfortunately, are funded by companies that already have a desired outcome going into it. Right. Or they'll take a piece of the study and present it as if that's conclusive evidence of something else. So for example, they'll be like, I remember these things that came out. A compound in dark chocolate has been shown to accelerate fat mobilization, right? Well, what you look at in the study is... Conveniently done by Hershey's. Yeah, no. And then you look at the study and you see that there's these things that are happening on a molecular level, but at the end of the day it doesn't result in more fat loss because you still need to be in a deficit and all that stuff. Or like compound in red wine might make you live longer. It'll help you live longer. So keep drinking that wine. So probably the top myth that it's just been around since day one and it just won't go away is that if some is good, and this is a relation to exercise, right? If some is good, more is better. Or if a certain intensity is good, harder is better. So like there's no limit to how effective your workout can be. You just got to keep making it harder, more intense. Or keep intensifying it. Just go all out. Yes. So let's pretend that we're talking about medicine for a second, right? So you have an infection. You need an antibiotic. Here's your dose, 15 milligrams or whatever. Does that mean taking a 1500 milligrams is going to be more effective? No, obviously not. In fact, too much will cause problems. Same thing with exercise. The right dose will get you there the fastest. More than that and harder than that doesn't get you there any faster and oftentimes gets you there slower. Now I like addressing this one because I think I fell on this trap for a really long time. And as we're sitting here talking about it, I'm trying to think of like where do you think the root of this is? Like where do you think or what do you think the basis of it comes from? Do you think it comes from athletics? You think athletics? You idolize certain sports heroes growing up and I think back then, I don't necessarily know if it's the same today as it was when we grew up, but we definitely idolized a lot of sports heroes and how we're like, they must have got there because they trained so hard every single day and they kept adding to that and it's all these like sort of heroic punishing stories. There's a lot of truth in that because if I watch the workout of somebody who's extremely fit or extremely muscular, very advanced, to me, the average person, I'm looking at that going, oh my gosh, that's insane. That's intense. That's crazy. That's what I need to do in order to look like that. I can only hope to do that. But the problem is that that's how they work out maybe now, probably not always by the way, oftentimes when they're filmed. Look, hey, I'm guilty of this. If you film me in a workout and you're going to post it, I'm going to bring a higher level of intensity. I'm going to go heavier, all that stuff, right? So you're watching them like push themselves really hard. Plus you're watching what they do now after years and years and years and years of consistent training. Had they trained like that at the beginning, same thing would have happened to them. That's going to happen to you. Well, not to mention athletes have a different goal in mind than the average fitness consumer, right? The average person who is watching these athletes and how they train are more than likely here to lose body fat or to build muscle. And there is some value to athletes trained that way. Although I do think it's abused and Justin's talked a lot about this on the show with athletes, there's more value to an athlete training too hard or stretching intensity because it has more application to the game. Psychologically. The psychological benefits of pushing the body beyond carries over into sport more than it does to Susie who wants to lose 35 pounds or little Mikey that wants to add 10 pounds of muscle. Those people, that has very little value. In fact, it's probably detrimental to their pursuit of their goals. But somebody who is an athlete who isn't looking so much to add a bunch of muscle or burn a bunch of body fat, and they want to bring a new level of intensity to the game, that has a little bit more carry over. They need that mental fortitude. They need that toughness aspect to be able to compete against other people that are pursuing the same thing. So, yeah, it's a difference apples and oranges in terms of like your average person just trying to gain muscle and be healthy. Yeah, think of it this way. This really helps a lot. If you understand that exercise and workouts, all they are is a stimulus for adaptation. Okay, so let's use another word. It's a stress on the body and the way that the body adapts to all stress. Any stress that you place on your body, what your body attempts to do is become more resilient to that stress. So if the same insult next time doesn't cause problems, right? So that's all it is. That's all it is. You're just setting something in motion that tells your body we need to adapt to the stress. Now let's look at other forms of adaptation in the body. Let's look at your skin's ability to tan. I like this one because a lot of people can relate to this one. When I go out to the sun and expose my skin to the UV rays, my body perceives it as a potential stress. And what's my adaptation? My skin darkens. Darker skin is more resilient to the sun. So if I go out in the sun, I haven't been out there in a while, you know, maybe 10 minutes is the most I could tolerate. Beyond that, I start to get a sunburn. But if I go out every single day for 10 minutes, eventually I can handle 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes and so on, as my body starts to adapt and become my skin starts to get darker. What happens if I apply too much sunlight right out the gates? I don't get a sun tan. I get a sunburn. And I actually reduce my body's ability or stop my body's ability to even tan because now my body's just inflamed and has damage. So using that example, when you go out to exercise and work out, if you surpass your body's ability to even adapt, all you're doing is creating damage. And all your body's concerned with is healing. Healing is not the same as adaptation. So you have to understand that. This is why I could take a decondition person who never works out and do one set of body weight squats. And they'll get stronger the next time they work out. Just one set of body weight squats. Is that going to do anything for me? No, it's not going to do anything for me at all. But to the decondition individual, it will. Now what if I took that person and I had them do my workout? Are they going to get stronger faster? The opposite's going to happen. I'm going to cause too much damage, too much inflammation, too many problems. And then their body's just healing and they won't even get stronger. The body can't even think about getting stronger because all it's trying to do is heal. So more and harder is not better. The right dose is what's best. So athletic training has definitely been something I agree that has contributed to it. But I don't know if it's the root cause or it's definitely not the only thing either. Because I think another problem that makes people think this way, too, is the law of thermodynamics. We know that. We've been touting that in the fitness space for so many years. And so a lot of people go, okay, calories in versus calories out. Just keep burning calories. So if I push harder, I am going to burn more calories. If I burn more calories, I should potentially burn more fat. Correct? Yeah. So I think that is also part of the problem is it's looked at as something that's that simple. Because that's a law. That's something that everybody in the fitness space has been touting for so many years. Then it just, it seems like, oh, that makes the most sense. If I just do more and work harder, I'm going to burn more calories. Burning more calories is supposed to help me burn fat, right? No, burning calories through movement is a terrible approach to fat loss. Your body very quickly adapts to the calories that you burn during movement. And we'll talk about this in a later myth. But there's a study that I actually quote in the resistance training revolution. And there's other studies that support this. So the one that I always bring up is the one that shows the modern hunter-gatherer tribe, the Hadza tribe of northern Tanzania. And they live the way that we lived thousands of years ago. And they're way more active than the average American or western couch potato. Way more active. They don't have electronics. They live in, you know, huts. They hunt. The way they hunt is they throw a spear at something. They wound it. They chase it forever until it gets exhausted. And then it dies or collapses and they kill it. Super active. Scientists went down and studied them. Very sophisticated testing, by the way, to see what their metabolisms were burning every day. What are these people burning every day? It must be crazy. What they found was they burned generally the same amount of calories as the average westerner. Why? Because it makes no sense for our bodies to burn 15,000 calories a day when we're really active when we evolved in environments where food was very hard to come by. So moving a lot is a terrible way. Now there's benefits to moving, so I want to make sure that people understand. It's healthy to move, but trying to burn calories through movement, it's a terrible approach. Rather, what you want to do is teach your body to burn more calories on its own, which we'll get into a little bit later. This next one, actually, this was an issue before, but it wasn't really a big issue. I saw bodybuilders tout this. I'm starting to see this now become a little bit more mainstream. I'm seeing it more on social media. And this is the myth that cutting your reps short or not locking out, don't lock your elbows out on a shoulder press or a bench press, or don't straighten your knees out on a squat because you want to keep tension on the muscle. And when you lock out, you lose tension. This is totally false. It's a cheap way of keeping tension on the muscle, but the best way to keep tension on the muscle is to go through a full range of motion and at the top of a movement, don't rest the weight on the joint, but rather maintain internal tension yourself. So you could train the muscle through a full range of motion. I mean, that's the key to this point right here is what you just said because I fell in this trap also. So for many years in the beginning of training for me, I was the time under tension guy. I trained with a bunch of bodybuilder guys that taught me this method of training. And that was exactly how we would explain it to other people that we were teaching that. Listen, you don't want to lock the joints out because then you're at rest. And the whole idea is to have time under tension. The more that the muscle is under tension, the more stimulus we're going to get, the more it's going to grow and the more we're going to break down. And so, you know, don't ever want to lock out. Don't ever want to give that muscle any sort of rest. And so we shortened up all these reps. We would never go to full range of motion in fear of giving the muscle rest. And the truth is you can get full range of motion, full extension in an exercise with still keeping tension on the muscle. I didn't understand that when I first started in training. And so I fell on this trap of coaching and teaching this way. Yeah, I cringe at this being from a more functional kind of background and just knowing, you know, how the body then starts to prune these movements off. And, you know, not locking out. We're starting to teach our body certain patterns and habits that, you know, it's going to reprioritize to where that's going to be a difficulty that you're going to have to overcome later on when you do have to extend your joints all the way out. So if we're not training that way, our body is going to reprioritize the way that it expresses the movement. Now, you know, where I noticed this the most, like where it hurt me was the overhead press. So I did the whole come down to 90 degrees. You know, this was like my shoulder press for so many years. And I could not get full extension all the way up over my head. It took me a long time to back out of that because I had shortened that range of motion up so much. And so for me, that was one of the exercises. I mean, there was many exercises that we shortened up, but when I think of like which one hurt me the most, when I look at how long I had to go to fix that issue, it took me a long time to be able to address the shoulder mobility because I'm shorting that range of motion. Well, you've brought this up before. I've had models come in and trying to get them to perform certain movements and just like, and they're young guys coming in that cannot extend their arm all the way up. And that's just a normal functional movement pattern that everybody should be able to do. And if you're not capable of doing that, that should be a sign to you that there's a problem here. To put it plainly, the range of motion that you train is where you'll get a majority of your strength. So if it's 10 inches, that's your range of motion, most of the strength that you gain will be in that 10 inches. And the further you move outside of that 10 inches, the less of that strength that you have to the point where you'll lose a lot of strength. So if you never lock out your shoulder press and maintain straight tension the whole time, and let's say you shoulder press with 135, you might only be able to do 100 with a super full range of motion or maybe even less. I see this with people at the bottom of reps all the time too. What does that mean for you? Well, besides the loss of functionality, which I think is important by the way, I don't know why people discredit that because it's all about looking good. That's great, but if you could look the same, even if you, by the way, even if this didn't build more muscle and make you look better, if you could look the same but have better function, obviously it's better. Why not have both? It's crazy to me. Yes, but I'll argue that it builds more muscle anyway because in this, all studies show this, full range of motion tend to build more muscle than shorter ranges of motion. And this always applies. So locking out, but maintain tension. So I can straighten my arms out and I could definitely figure out a way to like let it rest on the joint in the elbow and kind of balance it. That's not what we're talking about. I'm talking about maintaining tension the entire time. Same thing with the top of the squat or the top of a bench press or any other lift. So full range of motion, maintain tension yourself. All right, this next one, boy, this one was an old myth. I believed it early on. I actually believed it for a long time and that is that high reps are great for getting lean and low reps are great for building size. Now here's the truth. High reps, low reps, moderate reps, they all build muscle. They all do the exact same thing. They all build muscle. And the one that's going to burn the most body fat is the one that's going to build the most muscle in you because that's what results in a faster metabolism, which we've talked about many times on the show, is the most effective way to get lean. Now, where does this myth come from? The myth comes from the fact that 20 reps of squats will burn more calories than 10 reps of squats. And this is somewhat true, but the calories burning your workout is such a small piece of the formula that I really think it's a complete waste of time to look at that because, again, the body adapts and whatnot, especially if you're always doing high reps and your body stops responding to it. Well, now you've lost the main benefit of these repetitions, which was to build muscle. I blame a jazzercise. You ready? Now find that beat. There it is. Oh, yeah. That's good. Ho! Now, start to release, contract to release, contract to release. There you go. Smiling, smiling, smiling down to the pelvis. Front, back, front, back, push. That's who I blame. Yeah, no, there's this sort of weird thought process, too, that, like, you watch all these infomercials and you watch a lot of these at-home workout programs from, like, the 80s and the 90s and, you know, everything was trying to promote tone, muscle tone. And so even not just women, but also men would watch that and be like, okay, but that's how women train, you know? And so that's almost something that psychologically was imprinted, you know, even on myself, that if I did, like, in excess of reps, honestly, I'm just training for tone. And I'm like, no, I want to get jacked. I don't blame that. I actually blame good, really good, six to eight week studies. I mean, that's where this really comes from is that, and there's research to show what rep range is the best for building muscle. And because of that's not the full story, that's where everybody goes wrong. Because we know that eight to 12 reps is the best for hypertrophy. In a six to eight week study, we know that if we compared all the rep ranges, that training in that eight to 12 rep range is the best for building muscle. But that doesn't tell the whole story because that same person who trains in eight to 12 reps all the time because their goal is to build muscle, now if they were doing, and they've been doing that for years, them simply switching to high reps will actually end up building more muscle in their body. So a lot of this, I think, comes from the research and studies that would support these claims, because that's where I got that from. I remember reading that and going like, 12 reps was like the standard. My goal is to build muscle. It's not to tone or to burn more calories. I want to build as much muscle as possible. Look at what this great study is saying. It's saying that if I stay in this rep range, this is the superior rep range for building muscle. Okay, so I stayed there forever. So that's where these studies, they don't tell the full story. And if you don't understand how the body adapts, then you think that, oh, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. Yeah, now here's the value of high reps or low reps or moderate reps, right? Part of the value is when your body's not used to it, when you switch to that new rep range, you get this new stimulus and you tend to trigger the body to start to improve again. So if you always train at five reps and you've done it for six months and then you move to 10 or 12 reps, you will notice that you'll build more muscle and get some new results. So that's one part of the benefit. Here's the other part of the benefit. People need to really start to pay attention. There are psychological benefits to training in low rep and high rep. Now I personally, if I'm dieting and I'm a calorie deficit and I'm trying to get leaner, you will typically see me do higher reps. Now it's not because higher reps get me leaner faster than lower reps. It's purely because when I cut my calories at this stage of my life in training, I've been working out for a long time, when I cut my calories, I inevitably will start to lose some strength. That's going to happen. I'm not going to have as heavy as a squat as I did when my calories were really high and my bench press is going to go down. Psychologically, that can mess with me. And I know this. So I know if I'm cutting and I'm squatting in the five rep range and I'm dropping 15 pounds off the bar, like, oh, it starts to mess on my head. And then before you know it, I'm going to have higher calories because I don't want to see the weight go down. So what do I do? I go higher reps, which means I have to lower the weight anyway. And it kind of tricks me into being okay with going lighter and doing higher reps anyway. That's what I like to do with the high rep, low rep type of thing. But other than that, all reps, all resistance training should be geared to building muscle. Even if you don't build any muscle, at the very least, the one that's going to build the most muscle on you is the one that's going to preserve the most muscle when you're trying to diet and cut down. And that goes for even somebody who their main goal is to lose body fat. Absolutely. So even if your main goal is I just want to lose body fat, it's just as important to that person that they don't stay in that 15 to 20 rep range either because same thing is going to apply after about six weeks. Body is going to get very efficient at it and adapted to that. And actually one of the best things to stimulate more muscle growth, more fat burning would be to transition out of that high rep range into a low rep range. And so the key is to be constantly kind of moving through these and then the other mistake I see with this is the people like, okay, kind of graphs that, okay, you should have different rep ranges. And then every workout includes kind of everything. And they don't realize that what ends up happening is you fall into similar patterns and behaviors and the body gets really used to training that way. This is why I like to do blocks where it's like, okay, I'm for the next four to six weeks, I'm training in this rep range. All exercises are going to fall in this rep range. And then I will strategically move out of that rep range into another one four to six weeks later and then be constantly moving. I 100% agree. And one of the main benefits of that personally is there's a mental state and there's a way you go into a workout and look for the way it feels and how you control the weight when you're going heavy versus when you're going light. When I'm going heavy, there's a different control. There's a different tension. There's a different tempo, different mentality. When I'm going light, it's all very different. And it's easier for me, and I see this with my clients as well, it's better when we stay in that mental state for three or four weeks versus Monday as high reps, Tuesday as lower reps, and we're mixing it up all over the place. It actually takes me two or three workouts to get really good with that mental state. So I prefer the blocks. This is why you find in our maps programs, when we take you through different rep ranges, it's typically over the course of three or four weeks, and then you switch into another one. Each one of these methods is a skill. And we talk about this with exercises, but also just being able to focus on that specific style is going to take your body a while to get used to. And so to be able to get good at it, you need to be able to keep practicing it. And so it's important to kind of allow yourself a few weeks to really experience it specifically on its own. Now, the next one is one of my favorites for us to dispel. And I feel like we've been saying this for a really long time, and we always ruffle some feathers whenever we talk about this. And that is that cardio is best for burning fat. Yeah. That this idea that if you want to burn the most amount of body fat, that the best way to go about that would be to increase your cardiovascular activity. This is one of the most... Now, I want to say this first before we get into it, okay? There's value to doing cardiovascular activity. There's health benefits to doing cardiovascular activity. There's benefits to all forms of exercise so long as they're applied appropriately. So I want to say that before people go, oh, you guys are anti-cardio, and you think cardio, you know, you shouldn't do it. No, that's not what we're saying at all. What we're saying is the message that the best way to burn body fat from an exercise perspective is cardio is not only wrong, it's actually damaging. This is one of the main reasons why I think there's such a high fail rate with weight loss. Now, of course, it's very complex. A lot of it has to do with diet. But a lot of it also has to do with the fact that when the average person decides they want to lose weight, they do... This is what they end up doing. They go, okay... Cut calories, do cardio. I got to cut calories, and let me start to do cardio. Here's the problem, and here's why we promoted cardio for so long. In terms of time spent doing it, it does burn the most calories. An hour of cardio, you know, an hour of running is going to burn more calories than an hour of lifting weights or, you know, doing other forms of resistance training. This is totally true. Here's the problem. The least valuable thing of exercise, of all the things that exercise does for you, the least valuable thing, 100% is the calories you burn while you do it. It's actually a waste of time to even look at that because your body adapts to it, and we ignore the adaptations that take place from that exercise. Here's what happens with cardio. When you do lots of cardio, your body gets better at cardio. One of the ways your body gets better at cardio is it pairs muscle down and makes you more efficient at burning calories. In other words, when I say efficient, what I'm saying is it slows your metabolism down. By the way, this is not just my experience, or Adam and Justin's experience and our clients, although we've seen it many times, studies show this when people diet and do cardio, a significant amount of the weight that they lose is muscle. In some studies, it's half. Now, why is that a bad thing? Well, because now you're smaller, same general body fat percentage as you were before, so you're a smaller, same flabbiness version of yourself before, but now you have a slower metabolism. So what does this look like in the long run? Well, initially, you do your cardio and your diet, and you lose 10 pounds, and then you plateau. What the hell is going on? Why isn't my body losing any more weight? I know I got to do more cardio and I got to cut my calories even more. Then I lose another five pounds, then I plateau again, and I repeat the cycle. At the end of this formula, at the end of this road, you're now eating way less than you did before, doing tons of activity, and just to maintain where you're at, you got to maintain this unsustainable exercise and diet. Now, on the flip side, if you lift weights, you're not burning a lot of calories while you lift the weights, but who cares what lifting weights does or what resistance training does, if you use body weight or bands, too. Is it builds muscle which directly speeds up your metabolism? And I've seen this many times, many, many times with clients. They lose weight at the end of the weight loss journey. They actually have a faster metabolism than they started with. So imagine you're eating more at the end of your weight loss journey to maintain your new lean body. That's a sustainable approach. Yeah, and I think this is still out there because it's super misleading because your body does shrink. You do see substantial difference when you apply this method, but like you said, inevitably, you're going to hit this plateau, your body isn't stronger, and all those are signals on its own that we're not maintaining the amount of muscle that we had previously. And I just don't think that people are aware that there's a different way to approach that, and you could do it in a way that you can also maintain a healthy amount of muscle mass and strength and get all these other benefits to it, but also reduce down the overall body fat that you're carrying around. Well, you hit it on the head on why this is so misleading is because temporarily it actually results in what the people are trying to get. Initially, the scale moves fast. Yeah, I mean, if you get somebody who wants to lose, say, 30 to 50 pounds, and they heard that, you know, I just need to cut my calories, and I need to start doing cardio, and that'll help lose weight, that's confirmed initially. I mean, let's say you got someone eating three to 4,000 bad calories all day long, and they're not doing any sort of exercise, you take that same person, you reduce them to 1,500 calories and an hour of cardio every single day, and initially for the next week or two, they're going to drop weight probably every single day for the next two to three weeks. But what it doesn't do is it doesn't tell the whole story because what exactly are you, what are you telling the body by eating less calories and creating more activity and more movement is to your point, Sal, is that you're telling the body to become very efficient at how little you're going to feed it and how much you're going to ask of it to do. Right. And so then it goes, okay. Then the result of that is slow the metabolism down as slow as we possibly can, because your body's going, oh, shit, I don't know when this person's going to feed me again. So I've got to figure out how to maintain all this new activity off of 1,500 calories. And then the inevitable happens, a plateau, and that person doubles down on that theory and goes, okay, well, then I got to cut my calories even more and it create even more activity. And then so that, and I think you're exactly right, Sal, this is the main reason why we have such a problem with, and we don't have a problem with losing weight. We have a problem with keeping it off. We lose weight every day, every year, and it's consistently happening. But what happens is 80 plus percent of those people put it all back on and some more. And I think it's because of the, and I think that's why too. I think I'm so passionate about dispelling this myth because I think it is one of the number one culprits for the lack of success that people have because this is the approach that they have with fat loss. Oh, it's extremely discouraging because you've, oh, I lost 20 pounds, but I'm doing cardio six days a week and I'm eating like almost nothing. I'm working really hard. Yeah, you are. Yeah, and then I go on vacation for a week and boom, I gained a bunch of weight back and what the hell is going on? By the way, your metabolism slowing down to adapt to cardio or speeding up to adapt to resistance training, right? Both of those are not bad. Like slowing, a metabolism that slows down, your metabolism is doing exactly what you evolve to do. And this is true now. So metabolism was extremely valuable 100,000 years ago. Back when food was scarce. 100,000 years ago, you don't want, like the Hudson tribe that they studied, right? Like I talked about earlier. They, you don't want to be a hunter-gatherer burning six or 7,000, you're gonna die. We're gonna find six or 7,000 calories in nature. So it was a great thing. Today, if you live in modern societies, you know what's a good thing? A fast metabolism. I'll tell you what, if I could snap my fingers and do one thing that would cure the obesity epidemic, it would be this. If I could double everybody's metabolism like that, that's it. Everybody does the same shit, eat the same, but everybody's metabolism just doubled, you would see the obesity epidemic, you know, disappear within a very short period of time. Temporarily. A fast metabolism. I'm sure they would. Until all the behavior. Until all the behavior. We would find a way. But you know, my point with that is, is that a fast metabolism is extremely valuable now. And so that's what you want to aim for. Here's the beauty of it, by the way. Resistence training doesn't need to be performed nearly as often as cardio. In fact, for the average person, two days a week is plenty to give them a lot of these benefits. And one more thing just to hammer this home. One of the other beauties of resistance training is it's the only form of exercise that positively influences the hormones. It brings a youthful level of hormone because the main signal is to build muscle and the hormones associated with building muscle, testosterone, better growth hormone, lower cortisol, balanced estrogen and progesterone starts to happen. Well, cardio doesn't send a preserved muscle signal. In fact, it tells you to get rid of muscle because you just need endurance, but you don't need much strength. So terrible myth, and it's one of the more damaging ones, is actually the whole reason why I wrote the resistance training revolution was the main one. Now, this next one is becoming a bit of a trend that I'm starting to see people talk about now. And I think part of the reason why it's becoming a trend is because one of the strategies with marketing and social media, if you want to get something to go viral or... You got to be a contrarian, right? Yes. You want to counter what a lot of people believe. And there's truth to this. We did this early on, except we picked things that were actually false and countered them. We went the truth route. Yeah. This next myth is totally false. And this is what you hear sometimes, is that squats and deadlifts, they're not essential. They don't need to do them to develop a great body. Now, let me replace this with something else. You don't need to walk. You don't need to know how to walk in order for you to be alive and be a human. And the reason why that one sounds crazy to people is because we understand generally that walking is a fundamental human movement. Imagine if you couldn't walk anymore, who cares how fit and great everything looks. You can't walk. You can't walk. Squatting and deadlifting are also essential human movements. So even if, and we'll argue the opposite of this, but even if squatting and deadlifting was no more effective than other exercises for building muscle and burning body fat, which isn't true. They are more effective. But even if they weren't more effective, you still want to do them because squatting and deadlifting are literally fundamental human movements. And if you stop training them, you actually lose the ability to do that. The truth is the only reason why your walking analogy sounds so ridiculous is because we're not quite wall-y yet. I mean, seriously, if everybody had these hoverboards and floating scooters that flew right underneath your feet as soon as you got out of bed and you never had to walk anywhere, that's how this would be talked about. And it wouldn't be so absurd because people would be like, well, why? I don't need to really walk. And that's what's happened with squatting and deadlifting is because we've evolved with tools so much, it's not necessarily that it is essential. You don't technically have to squat and deadlift for a sweat. You could get away with it. Just like soon here, we'll probably be able to get away with never having to walk if you don't want to. But the idea that we've accepted that we can no longer get down beyond 90 degrees because we're we attribute that to just getting older. It's like, no, we've lost that ability because we stopped doing it, which is why I can't stand people in the fitness space that promote this message. And they do it for what you guys said. It's just to be contrarian, just to be able to get clicks because we know that squatting and deadlifting is so valuable. So, oh, you know what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the opposite approach and tell people that look at this exercise, you could do a hack squat and it stimulates the same muscles and arguably is easier and safer than someone doing a back squat. Therefore, this isn't necessary. It's like, that's terrible. Regardless if it's true, regardless if you could technically build just as much muscle with a hack squat as you can a back squat, even if you want to go down that rabbit hole and take that case and I can see and say, okay, you're right. It's still a terrible message to tell people that we should just give up being able to do these movements that are fundamental. Well, and I somewhat blame coaches too because the thought process a lot of times when certain things are a bit more challenging than others like squatting and deadlift is hard. You know, it's a hard skill to learn. You know, it's something that, you know, it requires some discipline. It requires some education, it's so incredibly valuable and it's something that, you know, should be something to aspire to get better at and to keep practicing and keep, you know, part of the programming. Whereas, you know, it's a lot easier to, you know, avoid those and still be able to kind of get, you know, get a good muscle workout and kind of like weave around the ways of being able to, you know, try to teach incredibly difficult types of exercises, but, you know, my thought process with that is we're avoiding some of the most effective things in the gym that you could be doing. Yeah, and here's the thing. We constantly do this as humans is we constantly ignore and discredit our nature. So what do I mean by that? Okay. Humans are, I'll use a different example. Humans are incredibly social animals, the most social animals that we know about. So what did we just experience with lockdowns and people were isolated, right? We don't need to be around each other. I don't need to see you guys. I can order everything online. I can order all my food online. I can work from home. But what did we all experience? Depression, anxiety, mental health went down, people did. Why? Because we are supposed to be around each other, right? Okay. Humans are supposed to squat and deadlift their fundamental human movements. If you stop doing them, there are downstream effects that you can't predict. Namely, you start to reduce your health. You start to lose quality of life. And does that affect your ability to build muscle and look good? Yeah, it definitely does. But because they're fundamental, when you stop doing them, you actually take a piece of your humanity literally away, just like if you stopped walking. So they're not just effective exercises that making you look good, which they are. They're some of the most effective. They're fundamental human movements. And if you exercise your body and don't exercise these most important movements, you are almost completely missing out on the whole purpose of why you're working on it. When you're strong, you're protecting your joints and you're protecting your body from pain. Yes. And I think that's something that people don't realize that either. A lot of times, it seems like it's just the age factor. It's like I'm getting old and so therefore I'm just going to experience these pains, these arthritis. It just becomes part of sort of the normal, new normal, whereas you could be addressing this ahead of time, getting stronger. You don't have to experience that type of pain. Well, even more reason why you should be doing this is to your point you're making right now is that it's always the fitness professional that's all jacked and ripped and trains five to seven days a week that's making this case. And I think the problem I have most with it is because I think about the average person. And I also think about even the way I train today compared to what I trained just a decade ago, the way I train right now is literally to do as little as possible inside there to maintain a healthy, fit, strong body. My goal is more towards business and fatherhood and being a good partner and things like that. It's not about having the most jacked physique. And when I think about exercises that I can do that give me the most bang for my buck, there's just nothing that compares to a squat. The ability to be able to just barbell back squat, what that does for shoulder mobility, what that does for your spine, your neck, your hips, your ankle mobility, like your core strength, like your posterior chain. I mean, there's not a lot of exercises that if you just get good at that one thing that it promotes pretty good general health and your entire body from your neck to your fucking toes. So I can't stand when I see someone who's super shredded and ripped that's making this case that we can do hack squats instead or you never have to do barbell back squat. Not because it's not true and you can't be ripped and never do those movements. Of course you can. But because it's such an important movement for people to learn and get good at because one day you will wake up and you're going to be 50 something years old and you don't care to be the compete with the 25 year old kids that got shredded quads and lifting seven days a week. And you just like, hey, I just want to be fit and strong. I want to be a good dad. I want to be focused on business. And I want to do as little as possible inside this gym and get the most bang for my buck. And I tell you what with when you eliminate exercises like deadlifting and squatting you're eliminating two of the best movements you can to obtain that goal. Yeah, totally 100%. All right, here's the next one. And I hear this one. I used to hear this one all the time from people in the gym when I would talk to them about like proper exercise and what's most effective and even have family members tell me this which is, well, you know, like, let's say my aunt is doing, she's never exercises and then she decides she's going to start working out. So she starts doing spin classes, right? Super intense spin classes. And then I sit her down and say, listen, that's not really good for you. Your fitness level is not there. You should focus on balancing at your body. We need to do some strength. She goes, you know what though? But doing something is better than doing nothing. So at least I'm moving. Isn't that good? This one ruffles feathers so bad right here because people get caught up in whatever thing they're doing whether it be a Zumba class and Orange Theory and F-45. Like they found something, their CrossFit box. They found something that they love, the community around it or they love, they love something about it and they do not want to be told that. They don't want to be criticized at all. At all and it always, and that's always the, after you break it all down and explain to people why it may not be the best thing for them. In fact, it's probably one of the worst things they could potentially be doing. The argument back is always that, is always, well, it's better than doing nothing at all. And I'm gonna make the case that it's not necessarily. I mean, you could be setting yourself up for a much harder time. If you're doing a class that is high intensity all the time and you're eating less calories to try and burn by fat, it goes back to the metabolism point that we made up earlier. The constant pounding on the joints could cause wear and tear to where you have aches and pain that now will limit you from doing other exercises. So you slow the metabolism down. You potentially injure yourself and then you're only making it that much more difficult to maintain this healthy fit body down the road. Maybe it's working for you right now because you're enjoying it and you're in the thick of it, but it isn't necessarily better just because you're doing something. No, appropriate activity is better than no activity, right? Inappropriate activity is bad. That's the bottom line. If you work out wrong too hard or in a way that's inappropriate for your body, you are not only not helping yourself out, you're causing damage and you're causing problems and it hurts you in the long run. So it's not better to do something versus nothing if that something is hurting you and causing problems down the line. And I'll argue this is one of the reasons. By the way, if you were to pull most people, have you ever exercised before? A majority of people would say yes, right? A majority of people would say yes. Then if you do that same pull, are you exercising consistently now? Most of them would say no. And one of the reasons why they say no is all the bad experiences that they had. Oh, I tried it. It never works for me. I hurt my back. My knee hurts or I lost weight and then I gained it back and so I just stopped doing it. Part of that reason is because they were doing something that was wrong. They were doing something that was wrong and it ruins them for the future and it's hard. You know, when someone goes through three or four or five cycles of losing and gaining weight or trying and it doesn't work, at some point you're like screw it. I've tried a lot of times. That or they connect their positive results to all that hard activity. So just to be, I haven't heard this before, like I got a client who is, you know, put on 10 to 15 pounds but from when they were doing their crazy class five to seven days a week and they'll look at me and they'll be like, you know, honestly, Adam, I'd rather be 10 pounds fatter and not having to freaking hammer myself in that class every day for an hour and so it distorts their image of what is necessary to be healthy. They think that, oh, in order for me to be 10 or 15 pounds lighter or in that shape I was before, I got to be taking this super high intensity class and hammering it out an hour for five days a week and quite frankly, Adam, I'm now at an age where I don't give a shit that much so I don't want to do it. So then they just dismiss all exercise because they connect it to that intense way of training. It's much more difficult to undo bad patterns, you know, at the end of the day, like to be able to undo, you know, all these things that, you know, you're teaching your body and you're forming these solid, you know, movement patterns to be able to undo that and kind of, you know, repair that going forward is much more difficult than to just barely do one thing at a time the right way. Well, it goes back to the shoulder pressing that I brought up with the time and attention thing. Had I been taught to go full range of motion from the very beginning, I would have never had to undo all that. I had to do a quick years of actually working on shoulder mobility just to get to a place where I could actually hold a bar behind my head. Like I couldn't do that for a long time because of your point that you're making right now because I had created such bad patterns for so many years. It wasn't so simply as like, oh, now I'll go full range of motion. It's like, well, I can't now. So now I have to do all this work to undo all that bad shit I did, which is what you get with some of these high intensity type of classes is you've got somebody with poor posture and sensitive movements at high intensity for weeks and months and years at a time. And that work to undo is just, it's such an uphill battle. All right, this next one's really annoying to me and this one's become actually quite politicized and that's the myth that meat is bad for you. And I hate this one because it's completely false. Now, I'm not talking about all meat, okay? Processed meats and meat snacks can sometimes definitely be bad for you. Hot dogs, probably not as good for you as a piece of just steak or ground beef or something like that. But here's the truth, okay? Meat is one of the most nutrient dense forms of food you'll find on the planet. In fact, if you were on a game show where you had to be stranded on an island with one food for a year and if you could survive, you would make a billion dollars. The one form of food that you should pick is meat. Literally, there's no other single food that will provide you with almost every single nutrient that your body needs. Meat does this. It's very nutrient dense. It contains essential nutrients. It's a phenomenal source, of course, of high quality protein. The fats and meats are not bad, like they say for most people, they're actually quite fine. What's bad for you is overeating. What's bad for you are heavily processed foods. Part of the reason why people say meat is bad for you and they'll pull up studies is in these studies, people are eating cheeseburgers and hot dogs and salami and stuff like that and they throw that on there and be like, oh, look at all this meat and look at all this correlation to or connection to. It's actually really hard to overeat if your diet is mostly all meat. I remember when we went through the ketogenic diet and I happened to do it in the thick of the competing years and so my caloric maintenance was really high and I remember telling you that, okay, I like this all meat type of a diet for trying to maintain body weight or potentially losing body fat, but God, to try and gain or eat enough calories when you're eating primarily meat is just incredibly difficult. So I think a lot of this though is, I feel like it's been politicized. 100%. I mean, I really don't, I think it has left. Protein is essential. Yeah, and I feel like the messaging that's been negative around meat has been more about the environment and moving in that direction than it really is about is meat nutritious. Well, it's also marketers because you can't patent a steak, right? I can't patent a piece of steak or some ground beef or chicken breast or chicken thigh, but I can patent a plant-based alternative, right? I can patent fake hamburger meat. Tastes just like hamburger meat, but it's plant-based. It's all hydrogenated oils. Yeah, it's plant-based, and therefore it's better for you, but I can patent it because I created it myself as a product. So this is one of the main drivers of all of this. Follow the money. Follow the money. So one of the main reasons why you hear this is, look, I can patent a meat product too. I could take meat and turn it into like a piece of salami or some sort or whatever, but you don't see patented steak or ground beef. And so what does that mean? That means the price gets low. It's very competitive. People don't have protection against competition, right? If there's a farmer over here making good steak and I'm over here producing good steak, well then the better product with a better price is probably going to win out. But if I make a fake meat patty, I patent it. Nobody else can create it. And if I make it taste like meat, by the way, you ever find this interesting? You never find meat-based products that copy plant. You don't find like, hey, it looks just like a carrot. It tastes like bacon. It tastes just like a carrot, but it's made with ground beef, but it tastes just like a carrot. I would never sell, right? Yeah. There's a reason why we, this is like something that we kind of desire because it's essential. Again, I'll give you another example. If you go to a hunter-gatherers, modern hunter-gatherers today and you would take the meat out of their diet, they're dead. They're dead. They will not survive. Well, I was going to say, one of my favorite things to do, just go watch Naked in a Freight. Yeah, that's true. All you got to do, and if somebody on there and there has been that are just plant-based or vegetarian or vegan or whatever, and they do not last, there's no way they're not getting in the nutrients they need to keep their body going. Well, that's part of why this has been perpetuated is because we have the luxury. Yeah. It's a luxury. We have this luxury to say that let's follow this type of any diet. I mean, because for... You can get away with it now. Most of our existence, you ate whatever you could get your hands on and you would want to get your hands on the most nutrient dense foods as possible because it was all about survival, but we live in a different time now where we have all this luxury of food at every corner or delivered to your house and so we can start to nitpick all the things like this. Yeah, and the truth is, I mean, you can eat a meatless diet today, but it does require more planning and you have to be more careful. Nutrient deficiencies are higher or the risk is much higher. You have to have much more of a blend of foods, but meat in a good diet, here's the other thing, the context has to be right, right? So if you study people who eat a lot of meat, but also eat too many calories, you're going to see problems. But if somebody eats an appropriate amount of calories, everything else is healthy and they're active and meat is a part of the diet, it's perfectly healthy. Meat is not bad for you. All right, this last one, this one's a new message that we're starting to hear and see and it's really frustrating because it feels like gaslighting and that's the health at every size message that your obesity really doesn't, you can be just as healthy and be obese as somebody who's not obese or at least you can be as healthy as you would be if you weren't obese, you just got to move and be active and you're okay. Now to defend this, I think it's important, because I want to defend this a little bit because I believe that the root of this message was intended for good originally. Like I really believe that, part of the anti-bullying movement and the health at every size type of movement comes from this, that we shouldn't judge other people and you never know how healthy someone can be even if they are 10 or 15 pounds overweight. It started about loving yourself. And I think that we promote that message about taking care of yourself if you were to take care of a loved one. So I think that the root of this message and the core of it is actually good, but I think it's been hijacked and it's been marketed and turned into... Weaponized. Yeah, for clickbait reasons. You talked about to be contrarian. Nothing is going to freak out the health and fitness community than putting an obese person on the cover of Shape Magazine and saying, This is healthy. Like talk about getting magazines to sell, creating controversy, getting people to talk about it. So I do think that it's been hijacked and the unfortunate part is the average consumer is the person who's suffering because there are some people that don't realize that this movement's been hijacked and really are starting to believe this message. That, oh, I could be 50, 60 pounds overweight and still be really healthy and the truth is no, you're not. You're not healthy. At least you're definitely not the healthiest version that you could possibly be. You would be 10 times healthier, that same person with 50 pounds less fat on your body. That's key by the way because what you don't want to do, this is not a fair comparison, is to take obese people who exercise and eat whole natural foods and do everything else and compare them to people who are at normal weight, who smoke, drink alcohol and have bad relationships and all that stuff. That's not a fair comparison. The comparison is you not obese doing all the healthy stuff versus you being obese doing all the healthy stuff. Just the obesity itself contribute to worse health and the answer is unequivocally yes, 100%. Just having that much body fat isn't this innocuous tissue that you just store on your body and it doesn't do anything. It's a hormone-sensitive tissue. It produces its own inflammatory markers. It obviously is extra weight that you have to carry that doesn't support itself. So if I gain 10 pounds of muscle, that 10 pounds of muscle moves itself. It's functional, right? If I gain 10 pounds of body fat, it's like I'm wearing a weight vest with extra weight on my body. So now my joints and my body has to support this. It exacerbates other underlying issues that are happening in the body internally. Right, it's estrogen-sensitive. It reduces insulin sensitivity by itself. So obesity by itself, even if everything else looks good, by itself contributes to a lower quality of life, reduced health, reduced longevity. That is a fact. It has proven in every single study that's ever been done on it, but this is a message that is being sold to get you to buy crappy products or magazines or even being used in political ways to say that it's shaming people to say that obesity is unhealthy. Totally not true. Being overweight by itself has health risks. This may be one of the most dangerous myths at all the ones we address. Absolutely. Because you start getting to the place where people start accepting that and believing that that's true and we're just going to continue to head in the direction that we have been for the last three decades. Totally. Look, if you like our information, head over to mindpumpfree.com and check out all of our free guides, right? So we have guides on muscle building and fat loss. We have guides on improving your health and longevity, reducing pain. We have guides for personal trainers. Again, it's mindpumpfree.com. All of us on Instagram. So you can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin, me at Mind Pump Sal, and Adam at Mind Pump Adam.