 In this episode of Mind Pump, we talk all about the surprising benefits of resistance training and weight training. Now you probably already know that if you start lifting weights, you're going to build muscle, you're going to burn more body fat, you're going to look more sculpted, you'll be able to move better, build more strength. But a lot of you may not know that there are other huge massive glaring benefits that you can get that have nothing to do with building muscle, getting stronger, and burning body fat. So we cover those. We actually cover five of them. We talk about the effects on your brain and your ability to think, the effects on your libido, your healthy sex drive. We talk about your mood and how resistance training affects your mood and the studies that support that. We talk about how it impacts your ability to fight off illness. And then we talk about the empowering effects of resistance training. Also, I want to let you know that there's only two days left. That's it, 48 hours for our huge maps hit 50% off sale. Now maps hit is our high intensity interval training program. So this is a workout based off of high intensity interval training concepts and techniques that are designed to help you burn body fat in short periods of time. These workouts are anywhere between 15 to 25 or maybe 30 minutes long. You're doing cycles of exercises with barbells and dumbbells. The program comes with video demos so you know exactly what you're doing. There are sessions in there designed to help improve mobility and prevent injury as well. It's a very complete program. Again, it's half off. Here's how you get that discount. Go to mapshit.com. That's M-A-P-S-H-I-I-T dot com and use the code hit 50 for the discount. That's H-I-I-T-5-0. Remember you have 48 hours as of the day of the dropping of this episode. So you know I was thinking about something the other day. I was thinking about when I would train clients in the early days and you know obviously as a personal trainer, especially when you first start, you think your job is I'm going to get this person to lose fat. I'm going to get them to build muscle and look better and you know get them fit, right? And that is a large part of what you do as a trainer. But always especially when I first became a trainer, I would always get blown away by the other types of benefits that I would observe on my clients or that they would observe themselves. From what? Strength training? From strength training. Like you know you expect them to say things like oh my arms look more defined or I'm stronger but they would come to me oftentimes and they would say things that I didn't start to put together until I heard it a lot. Like is it normal for me to be more horny? That's a great example. That's a great example. You know where you're going with this I really like because it also reminds me of the evolution of my coaching. Like so when I first started training you speak to the scale, you speak to the body fat percentage, you speak to the way they look almost always. Like that's all you're doing. That's everything. That's a new trainer because that's what they're coming in for. Right. Exactly. To the defense of the young trainer or early years is that it's you know your client comes in and they say hey I want this and that's and so okay so you continue to speak to that but it wasn't until years later probably a decade later did I actually start to like almost okay it like okay yeah yeah we'll definitely lose that way yeah we'll do this but then as we would after you would signed with me for you know months ahead I know I had you the conversation would quickly change to all the other things and the reason why I found so much value in that is what I realized is when people could start to connect the other parts the other benefits that they would get the ones that they wouldn't expect from strength training did it become easier for them to make it more of a habit of their life because then it wasn't just about the way they looked or just the scale up and down they were starting to connect what they were doing with so many other aspects of their life oh it's it's funny because later on I that was how I really sold the value of resistance training and the reality is it's all of the burning body fat burning body fat building muscle getting stronger great that's excellent amazing direct results from resistance training but believe it or not they're not they're almost not as value as the other surprising benefits and this is what my clients would find the ones that train me long term they like that stuff but all the other benefits that they were getting was what kept them going agreed it was the stuff that really dramatically improved its value because the truth is as you're working out you know aside from being obese and all that stuff like yeah you know if I'm 15 pounds you know one way or another not that big of a deal I'm in my you know if I'm in my 40s or 50s or whatever but whoa all these other benefits these are things that I I want well this is also what would encourage this type of climbing I mean I go I would get clients that would come in and their doctor said they have to come in all right right and they were not they're not motivated to work out they don't in fact they even have so like I have to be here they have some disdain even for for exercise people you know like oh I don't I'm not that vain I don't care about all those things but I'm here because for my health right exactly because I have to be when you help when you help them make that connection and it reminds me the same thing the evolution for me as a coach for nutrition too you know when you when you speak to just the weight loss build muscle the way you look with nutrition you know that's that only lasts so long but when you start to help them make that connection with all the other aspects that it improves in their life then people start going like oh shit like you know who cares if I'm up or down on the scale so much I'm noticing it bleed into my work my my relationships my everyday activities like okay now and the cool thing is we now have science to support a lot of this so I'm going to the first one that I'm going to cover was it blew my mind initially and it didn't at first didn't blow my mind I'd hear it from one person I hear it from another person but after you hear it from 15 20 30 people then you start to go huh there may be some some truth to this then you look up the science and you find that it is supported this first one in particular was interesting because it countered a common myth and the myth was of and we've all heard of this the dumb jock yeah you know the smart nerd who's got bad fitness you know weak frail but very very smart and then the jock who's buffed and fit and mobile who's an idiot nothing can be further from the truth one of the number one things I would hear from my clients when I would start training with them with resistance training is that they could think better they're sharper their minds are sharper they had less brain fog they felt they had better memory recall better language I mean I would train kids they would notice this I would train middle-aged people they notice this I would train old people and they would notice this and the science supports this quite strongly exercise all exercise raises a chemical in the brain called BDNF brain derived neurotropic factor which is like miracle grow for the neurons in the brain resistance training does this as well resistance training and exercise has been shown to accelerate learning they know this now with kids you know for a long time they're in schools they started to cut funding from education the first places they cut it from were like physical education PE and that kind of stuff structured play structured exercise they thought well we got to spend more money on math and science or save the money for those types of things studies are showing now that that was doing the kids a disservice not just for the physicality and the fact that kids are not in good shape but it actually being physical and active improved a kid's ability to learn and this actually has been shown in all all ranges of there's still a lot of work in that direction that education needs to go into that that understanding that you know moving around definitely promotes this accelerated learning it fosters better cognitive abilities and this is all proven now and it's like it's so crazy that used to be a myth is that you know you would spend your time better reading more to develop your brain whereas like really the combination of the both is even more powerful well do you guys think what do you think it's mostly from do you think it's the proprioception side you think it's more like neurological you think it's more blood oxygen nutrients the usage of glucose better all of those things so it functions better so i think we forget that our mind so our mind our mind in our brain we can separate the two right the brain is the physical organ that you have in your head the mind is the the the concepts and the the consciousness that the brain produces but we forget that that is derived from this physical machine called your brain if a healthy a healthy brain is going to be able to do that stuff better than a sick brain so in extreme examples a brain with alzheimer's or a brain with dementia is just a sick brain just like a sick heart or a muscle that's weak and when you keep your body healthy your brain the physical brain is part of your body so having poor health it physically also will affect the structural components and parts of the brain so that's number one exercise and resistance training keeps you healthy balances out your hormones so that that's number one but number two and then this is this is what's specific to resistance training this is one thing that i love about resistance training more than other forms of general forms of exercise because there are other types of activities that are really good at this but they're not as individualizable as resistance training is that proprioceptive learning so what is proprioception it's your ability to know where your body is in space so an extreme example would be like an olympic diver you watch them spin in the air it's like how do they know when to point straight down so that they make the the smallest splash possible it's extreme proprioceptive ability now you don't need to go and train that you can but but but simply lifting weights and the reason why weights does this better than other forms of exercise is because if you're running or cycling or swimming you're kind of in the straight line repetitive motion over and over again resistance training i can name a thousand exercises and i can name a thousand varieties and versions of each of those exercises i can name exercises that are better for certain things and others that are better for other things it's constantly challenging your body with a lunge a side lunge an overhead press a windmill a row you are really strengthening that proprioceptive ability of your brain and they find that when you when you don't do something it's okay just like if you don't use your bicep the bicep muscle starts to atrophy and it starts to shrink because your body's always getting rid of what it doesn't need your body's always trying to be as efficient as possible pruning always always pruning so the parts of your brain that aren't being utilized start to shrink and atrophy they start to become weaker and resistance training works so well on that proprioceptive ability which actually affects the entire brain yeah and i think a lot of people don't really consider the nervous system in that entire equation and how many different systems work together so you know if you're not doing something now your your body sort of unlearns that in order to prioritize what you need for the for the most part so to be able to keep doing things and functioning your body in a certain way is crucial to then also maintaining those abilities you such a great you brought up such a great point so if you'd never let's say you never squat never never never squat and then you go and you try to squat or let's say you squat a lot when you're a kid then you stop for 15 years you would have a very difficult time squatting you may even have an inability to squat is that inability due to weak muscles necessarily just doing one squat maybe not it might be just the fact that you just unfamiliar yeah you literally forgot that skill the brain and it pruned it off it pruned said you're not you haven't been using me for 15 years this is a use useless tool for my brain i'm moving on from it i'll tell you what the initial strength gains you get when you first start lifting weights is less from the fact that your muscles are actually bigger and stronger and more from the fact that your central nervous system which includes your brain is operating better it's building you build your brain when you build your muscles well a good example of this and we've talked about this on the show before and you mean when i think of the most recent experience of this was when we were with dr brink and we were doing like hip mobility drills with the 90 90 and when we tried to lift our heel up off the ground in the 90 90 position none of us the first time could even really move it and then you think oh i don't have the flexibility and he walks over and he picks your leg up and he moves it all the way up it brings her foot next to your head right and it's like no you have the flexibility there you've lost that connection right you've lost you've lost that ability to do it because you stopped rotating the hips that far as you've as you've aged and so you've just lost that connection but you can reestablish that they've done studies and shown that uh when people are or like specialized at a particular thing the parts of the brain that are associated with that skill tend to be larger and more densely connected so like the parts of the brain that let's say are associated with um let's site um and you would take a sniper or someone who really really worked on that ability you'd find the parts of the brain associated that to be more developed now scientists in the past thought oh they were born with these parts of the brain this way and that's what makes them better at it now we know there maybe there's definitely a genetic component but the other component which is much larger is that you're developing the brain through these skills and resistance training it's far there's you can get way more complex with it than you can with other forms of exercise and this is one of the reasons why besides the fact that you're obviously much healthier which we talked about earlier one of the reasons why i would always get clients and i noticed this most in two categories of clients the kids that i trained and the older people that train now i think the reason for that is that the kids i would notice because their parents would tell me so i'd start lifting weights with kids and i'm talking about when i say kids i mean like 12 13 14 so not super young uh just because parents typically don't hire a trainer for kids younger than that and they'd come and tell me my son's doing better at math or my daughter's doing better in school and i talked to the kid about it and i'd say hey your mom you know told me that you're you're doing better in school what do you think is going on like i just feel like i can i can think better i feel like i can sit down and focus longer yeah and then my older clients would like oh my memory is better i'm starting to remember things all of a sudden which is phenomenal all the time which is great the productivity that side of things like even at the workplace when you when you're when you're out there exercising like how that actually promotes just a better functioning brain like you think more clearly and then you're you're able to maintain that focus a lot of times like you get the the brain fog towards the middle of the day or you know like when you're at your job and you're just staring at the same thing all the time this kind of promotes this new energy that's usable well you guys are you're going uh you know the the younger route i want to go the other direction with like advanced age which you love to talk about sal and i'm thinking about someone in particular right now my my my father my stepdad's uh wife is about to get hip surgery and one of the things that i'm stressing to her and she's in her 60s and i what i'm trying to stress to her is that listen when you get done with that hip surgery you're gonna feel amazing and if you just keep going about your normal day and you don't do anything you don't train your hips to continue to move through full range of motion because you now are going to have that ability to take them through which you can't because of pain right now what will end up happening is you'll still end up losing that and what you'll end up having to have surgery 10 15 years again because you'll the pain will come back you have a new you have a new piece of equipment but you're not changing the the computer you're not changing the the hardware exactly and so it's so important that as soon as you and so i'm thinking of everyone who might have a family member a friend who's had recent shoulder surgery or hip surgery and they did it because they had this unbelievable chronic pain that built up to the point where they eventually had to have this surgery and then they just feel better because they've had it and they don't do anything about it how important is that for this person to be strength training and and working those muscles through full range of motion to support you're working your central nervous system you're working and training your brain it's actually that's the more important part i know and i know it's not as obvious because when you lift weights and you do it for a long time the obvious changes your muscles you can see the muscles and definition and you know oh wow you look good not stuff what you don't see are the changes that happen to the brain but you are make no mistake you are developing your brain more than you are your muscle even more the changes that happen the brain your ability to move in ways that you couldn't do before has more to do with your your central nervous system at adapting meaning same thing when muscles adapt there's things that are adding and growing and becoming more efficient that has more to do with that than it does the actual muscles themselves getting bigger and stronger it's a very very big piece of the pie and it was always something that surprised me now now i got one more for you i got another one for you that initially when i would hear this i'd kind of like i'd get embarrassed and you know i'd shrug it off like okay well you know whatever um but as i continued training people i just kept hearing it more and more and more and then i realized oh this is a this is a side effect or a direct effect i should say of resistance training and i remember the first time i heard it was the very first time i trained somebody over the age of 65 i was i want to say i was 19 years old so i was only i'd only been training for about maybe six months or so trained an older woman she was in her late 60s and we started working out started doing strength training and it was maybe i want to say a couple months uh into our relationship as trainer and client and she brought it up kind of funny i think she was kind of embarrassed but you know we talk a lot about fitness and health and she was a widow her husband had died years before and she said you know salam i'm noticing some other effects from working out i'm like oh like like more energy well yeah i got more energy but uh you know like a more like more like vigor and i'm like oh like more vigor yeah like you're just wake up more you know energetic in the morning and he's like well kind of she's like i'm a little bit more you know like yeah she's like i'm noticing i'm noticing like i'm having lots of dreams about you but you're not wearing pants yeah it's getting hot in certain regions so i got so she she told me her libido she's like i haven't felt my libido like this in a very long time is that a normal response from exercise and i thought well i think it is yeah maybe whatever i was a little embarrassed but then i kept hearing it from client after client male clients female clients older clients clients in the middle age resistance training and exercise in general resistance training specific phenomenal phenomenal for libido it's got to be one of the best things you could do if you got to do it right of course with appropriate training for your your your sexual vitality well i think this is partially dual prong too i think there's something that's happening uh hormonally uh physiologically in your body and then i also think there's something to the mental and brain talk we just had is also to the the the confident side of what happens like when you get somebody who's because i this was common for me where i'd be training a client and they would just they would just tell me how much better their relate their sexual relationship is with their partner just you know we're having so much more sex and you know they're trying to put it together like you know i feel good i feel better about myself but it's just why it's not just so i think it's a combination of both feeling better about your certain hormones you write it to balancing it out but also yeah that self-confidence of your improving yourself and that's something that like exudes now like to your partner and your partner you know takes takes like wind of that and it becomes a thing oh i mean just speaking about hormones there's there isn't one single thing aside from taking testosterone or taking a testosterone releasing drug like uh you know hcg or something like that there isn't a single thing you can do a man can do that won't have as strong of a direct positive effect on their testosterone like resistance training by itself you can compare it against anything else you can compare it to diet and supplements and all this other stuff nothing causes a direct strong effect on testosterone as much as lifting weights well and until you've dealt with lower than normal for you testosterone levels you don't realize how much how important this is as for me like okay libido is important and testosterone directly affects that for a male right but it's also all the other things that like just having testosterone my my energy levels throughout the day my mood to get things done my interactions with people like all that stuff i feel like is affected from my hormones and when when they're balanced and they're well it totally affects all those other aspects i remember when you were going through your process of trying to get your hormone levels back up and i had you taking supplements uh you know herbs that are tests that have been shown clinical studies to have a positive effect dietary you were doing things with red light therapy and and i remember you you you went you hadn't worked out for a little while um because you weren't feeling good and i remember you came to work and you're like dude i lift i did squats yesterday i did 20 minutes of squats i felt a bigger boost from that than anything than anything else than anything else that you were doing yeah it's studies show uh for men um you're gonna get like a 15 to 25 increase on average in your testosterone levels from lifting weights that's a lot yeah that's that's a big that's again there isn't and by the way some supplements when they raise testosterone if you have low testosterone it's not a it's not a permanent raise so you let's say you take uh an herb that has been shown to raise testosterone and load and men with low testosterone keep taking it and eventually your body starts to adapt and you stop and i notice this you'll notice this if you take some of these things if you feel it for about 30 60 days and then it stops resistance training is permanent it raises testosterone it stays there as long as you keep lifting weights and if anything it starts to raise it even higher it also lowers the the binding hormone that binds to free testosterone which makes it uh basically worthless so in men you could have free you have you have total testosterone but it's the free testosterone that's active and what makes something freeze it's it's not bound by another hormone or another you know chemical in the body to stop when you lift weights you lower that so you actually free up more testosterone you also open up more to androgen receptors in the body these are the receptors that testosterone attaches to so there's like three or four different ways that lifting weights makes you makes your testosterone not just go up but become more free and also become more more effective like a compounding effect it is now in women lifting weights has other hormonal profound effects when you work with like we just had Dr. Becky Campbell on who's a functional medicine practitioner when you talk to functional medicine practitioners and you ask them what form of exercise do you recommend the most to women who are trying to balance their hormones their progesterone to estrogen balance the most common answer you're going to get is going to be appropriate resistance training appropriate being that of course operative word for some people it's going to be lower intense and others higher intensity and all that stuff but resistance training is just so moldable and so it's such a pro tissue type of exercise like it's because you're when you're lifting weights you're telling the body to build muscle it's proactive tissue in order for your body to build muscle it needs to have balanced optimal levels of hormones and nothing does that like resistance training now the side effect of that you have a healthier libido libido is a very very good indicator it's not the only indicator because you want to look at the whole picture but your libido when you have a sudden drop in libido or you don't have a very strong libido in comparison to before that's a decent sign that your health isn't isn't doing so well your body does not want to procreate right if it's not probably one of the first things would you say a lot of time it is if you if you eat too little or your diet's really bad or you lack lots of sleep or you're stressed one of the first things to go away when you're stressed is is libido so it is one of those gauges and resistance training will boost your libido and this is based off my own anecdote training clients more than any other form of exercise if you want to get horny and you want to find a form of exercise that'll help you do that lift weights nothing does it better that also feeds in to sort of the next one right about like how it affects your moods and how it's like anti depression and you know working through and working these things out with your body is such a great outlet for you to to deal with like your mood i feel like that's it seems like that's such an obvious one but like i don't think people make the connection enough like yeah i if you're a if you love fitness right and you're like a hardcore gym goer then you've probably made this connection but i'm talking about the average person like the average person doesn't normally go into the gym or somebody who's not really excited about working out isn't thinking like i'm going to do this to make me have a better mood most of them are like uh i need to go do this but if you were to make that connection and really start to pay attention to how the rest of your day goes when you make those workouts it's i think a lot of people connect that to thinking that it's oh because i did my workout therefore i have a better mood because i accomplished my workout but they don't really realize that there's actually something physiologically that's happening to them that's actually improving their well it's the same thing is paying attention you know just like with eating and like how it's affecting you like like working out and like the different types of workouts if you do it right you give the right a dose so you're not going too intense too overboard it should really charge you up and and give you like a great energy boost yeah exercise uh this is in terms of mood this is the one that actually kept my clients working out forever the longest was this one effect just the the effect that has on uh your overall mood now now this is backed um pretty well by by science in fact they're they're considering making exercise a first line treatment for mild to moderate forms of depression so when you go to your doctor and you depress rather than the first thing that they say is okay here's an antidepressant there's they're they're going to start saying we want you to exercise why because studies are showing that exercise is as effective as a lot of these drugs for for mild to moderate forms of depression which is the most the most the vast majority of the types of depression that people suffer from it's it's far more rare to have a crushing type of depression it's been shown in studies to be as effective in the short term and probably uh more effective in the long term so when you compare in the short term people like oh wow i'm getting great effects the longer they do it the the better the effect now they're not 100% sure why this happens maybe we do know that the exercise releases chemicals and endorphins serotonin norepinephrine uh you know dopamine all the same chemicals that you know antidepressant drugs um you know will target exercise naturally releases those not just while you're exercising but we know now that that your baseline has more of these feel good chemicals so when you first start working out you just get a boost while you work out as you do it on a long-term basis it raises the capacity for it just you just your baseline is much higher and then earlier now we talked about how it was great for the brain uh well neuroscientists noticed uh a little while ago that the hippocampus of the brain in people who are tend to have depressed uh depression and anxiety tends to be smaller so they notice that people who who are depressed they did the brain scans and their hippocampus was smaller exercise supports nerve cell growth in the hippocampus and has been shown to cause growth in that same area so let's say you're in in either the the shrink the the small hippocampus is causing or part of the depression or it's like this negative feedback loop you're feeling bad therefore this part of the brain starts to shrink because you're doing less stuff or whatever and vice versa doesn't matter nonetheless exercise has been shown to stimulate growth of that region of the brain and others that has been connected to depression so not only does it just it literally will start to change again change your hardware so that you you're less prone to depression it's one of the best things you could do i feel like katrina and i have made this connection so much uh with exercise that uh we tend to like pre apologize to each other when one has like kind of missed their work or you know it's like i'm not aware of how different of a mood i have when i'm on my exercise routine versus when i've missed days and uh i've know her and i both know like you pre apologize to a partner say hey just you know i had planned to do my work out and get it in today i'm a little frustrated or whatever about that just so you know i'm sorry if i seem irritable or short like it's it's i've put i've noticed multiple times uh in the past where i've caught myself irritable short or whatever and then when i like unpack it after the fact right after i've already blown up or after i've already said something i probably shouldn't have said reflecting on the day going like uh fuck of course it's a day that i would plan to work out i didn't get my my work out and stuff like that completely affected my mood i use so for me what motivates me now to lift weights consistently is the mood part more than the physical part way way more if i know i'm going to have a big podcast or i'm going to be a guest on a on a big show or i have to produce a piece of content that's really important uh for the business i will purposely schedule it and structure it so that it happens after right after a workout in fact i have an interview uh coming up this week and i told and there's a bigger one i told katrina make sure you book it on this day or these days at this time knowing i'd be coming here right after my workout i'm always my absolute best if i get an argument or a fight with somebody um this is something that i've developed now into a habit and i started this years ago is i'll leave the situation and i'll go do my workout and my post workout mental clarity and ability to process difficult shit is like oh it's so funny you guys like i i totally can see that with my irritation levels like on the road like i'm driving home in traffic and you know for the most part pretty chill if i got my workout and everything's great like all that unused that energy's been used you know and so i'm pretty much in a calm state at that point versus like just being wound up is you just find you just find yourself like thinking differently yes oh like that i'm such a better person for working out well i so you know think about your mood for a second your mood is literally the filter that uh you see you receive information and you put information out so you have this filter so imagine red is the color of your filter everything you see coming in looks red and everything you put out to the world looks red so that's your mood exercise changes your filter both in the short term like i just talked about you have your workout and i have this different filter this is why i can think clear smarter i don't react as emotionally or strong to certain things i feel more grateful uh and for for for my life and for them i just it's a different better filter but also uh articles have talked about how it changes your permanent filter not just the post workout or the day after but your baseline so your baseline then starts to change a little bit and now how much do you think your mood will affect your whole life right it affects your whole life tremendously that's why this one right here is the most important one this is the one that has gotten all my more than any other thing more than fat loss muscle but anything it's the change in mood that keeps them doing it's the one that keeps me doing it and it's when i know why i'll keep doing this till today and this is also what gives people a little more freedom with choosing their workout right like you know our space sometimes we get in this where we're always who's smarter whose way is better this and what's the newest latest greatest thing that burns the most it's like forget all that stuff sometimes sometimes just going to the gym to move could and it doesn't matter how you're moving just doing that for those reasons then what what exactly you're doing in there to maximize bench press or the squad or fat burning like doesn't really become that important and that took me even a long time for myself to kind of let go of that because i was so caught up in the results of training and i was always trying to build muscle and i was so driven by the insecurity versus all the other things that it does for my life once i learned to change that thought process of like sometimes i'm when i go into the gym i'm even thinking that it's only to change my mood i don't care that i'm not going to get the most gains the most important aspect right i'm not going to get the most gains from this workout could i do something else that would be more yeah i don't give a shit i'm gonna refine it down the road i mean you could keep improving the more frequent you're there it's the consistency factor and we always talk to this because of that fact it's like we want to get you in there because like you just doing anything at that point is going to elevate you now here's the thing about that makes uh resistance training unique to other forms of exercise in regards to mood now we know and this is pretty proven that that being able to be present really is a good thing for us it's really a good thing to be in the moment uh not all the time but every once in a while so that you're not thinking about what i got to do tomorrow what's happening yesterday oh my god that embarrassing thing i said or whatever okay resistance training it's harder to be distracted when you're lifting weights than when you're doing other forms of exercise get on a treadmill and walk i guarantee within 10 minutes you're not thinking about walking you're thinking about all kinds of other stuff in your mind you can do this on a stationary bike you could do this on lots of different forms of exercise resistance training if you're lifting weights you're in the weights you're lifting maybe in between sets you can let your mind wander but when you're doing a set of squats or deadlifts or curls it's not the same can you be distracted while you lift weights yes it's possible i highly you're probably gonna hurt yourself if you are but it's possible but it's far less likely you're much more likely to be present because you have to focus on balancing the bar doing this lift i'm doing a new exercise i have to twist i have to focus on the muscle it's one of the best present uh training type of well that exercises you can do and that's what speaks to the brain part we talked about right and that i think that's where all those benefits come from because you know there's other forms of exercises that are great but it really challenges the brain and more demanding right part of that part of that is being super present and then there's the productivity aspect of all of this it kind of combines the mood and the brain part but i would have a lot of clients that would they would be afraid that taking an hour outside of exercise would be taking an hour away from their important business or whatever and every single time they come back and tell me i'm doing more work for sure in less time always i'm way more productive well of course you feel good you're thinking more sharply of course you're gonna be more productive in a shorter period of time wouldn't we all like you just move faster all day yeah you know i how many times have you felt that where you haven't got to work out in for a couple days and then you just feel lethargic and slow and you're tired and everything is like compounding in that way where you get your workout in it's like you're on to the next thing on to the next thing on the next thing before you know it you're like man i accomplished three four times what i would have and i dedicated a whole hour of not working on other things just working on myself working out and look at the way it impacted every other totally now this next one is related to the muscle building aspects of resistance training but not in the way that you would think one of the best insurance policies you can have against chronic disease especially the types of chronic disease that we suffer from in modern society so like what's killing people in modern societies right type two diabetes that's a chronic disease heart disease it's a very common one alzheimer's how about as you get older osteoporosis you know that's a very bad one right you break a bone oh now you're really screwed more brittle now yeah or or or just getting sick when you're older and then going to the hospital you know it's like if you're a 30 year old and you have to be hospitalized for your appendix for a few days not as big of a deal you're a 60 or 70 year old and you have to do that for three days oh my gosh a lot of times we see people getting all kinds of crazy well isn't that well isn't that really common like where it's it's a lot of times somebody passes and that when you get into advanced age they went in for something that is kind of a routine-ness type of surgery but because their body can't handle because how weak they and frail they are they end up dying from that right there's a saying that my doctor clients used to tell me which was uh you break a hip and then you die of pneumonia because these people would go and fall and break your hip die of ammonia yeah because because they're they're they have no muscle they have no strength muscle is one of the best insurance policies you can have against all these chronic diseases starting with with diabetes okay muscle is a very uh you know glycogen uh sugar insulin sensitive tissue if you want to improve your insulin sensitivity have more muscle muscles suck up glycogen they're able to utilize it through expressing energy and strength i mean we know this athletes typically will they have to consume a certain amount of carbohydrates for maximum performance your insulin your body becomes more sensitive to insulin so you don't need as much of it to do the same kind of job it also means to in layman's term for people that you get more flexibility in your diet and it doesn't purchase right somebody who enjoys that glass of wine every once in a while or their favorite piece of pie the more muscle you have on your body the less that negatively affects you because you could burn it right because you could burn it if you have you know you have two people and one of them's got you know let's say they both weigh the same amount you got two men 180 pounds one guy's 12 body fat at 180 pounds the guy's 25 body fat at 180 pounds this is a large lean body mass difference they both weigh the same amount there's also going to be a large calorie burn difference right even if they had the same level of activity throughout the day the person with more muscle has just got more calorie burning machinery on their body forget the fact that they look a lot better they're just burning a lot more calories now what does this mean for for the average person means you can eat more and still not eat too much right you know how great is that because what you'll find with nutrition is you know sugar can be bad certain kinds of fats can be bad certain kind of foods can be bad but context makes a big difference if your calories are low they're not it nearly as bad right is if you're like you have a high sugar diet that's also really high in calories way way way terrible for you in comparison to a high sugar calorie diet that or it's a high sugar diet that's low in calories still not great but way not nearly as bad as the high calorie diet and having a fast metabolism allows you to do this because you've got more more muscle same thing with heart disease osteoporosis this one's an obvious one as you strengthen bone excuse me muscle you also strengthen bone nothing will strengthen your bone more than lifting weights nothing and lifting weights is targeted by the way so if you're let's say you'd like to do a lot of walking or cycling you'll notice a lot of maybe some bone strengthening in the lower lower parts of the body less so in the hands and do you attribute most of that to the stress that you're putting on the bones because you're carrying weights and you're lifting weights or is it because of the it promotes oxygen blood flow nutrients getting through there oh well all of them but mainly it's the you know muscles anchor at you know tendons and the tendons anchor at bones and when they pull harder on the bone or when you load the bone bone adapts right you stress it you stress it so it adapts it gets used to that oh an extreme example it's sensitive to the force the man that you place them oh if you break if you're healthy and you break a bone and it heals it's stronger at the break than it was initially the way the body adapts to get stronger martial artists used to practice like old school karate practitioners would practice punching hard objects and what would happen is they create these micro fractures in the bone and the bones would heal stronger and they keep doing it over and over and they'd get these incredibly dense like if you look at bone under have you guys seen the pictures of like a osteoporosis bone versus a normal bone no on the outside they look the same it's when you look inside and you know the spaces in between the bone it looks like bubbles or whatever there's there's more of them there's more space it's not a spongy mesh yes it's not as dense when you do resistance training and strength training all your bones necessarily grow you're not going to get a wider right you know femur necessarily adapt to become more solid because they're getting stressed on the inside they get more much more dense you're far less likely to break to break that bone and this is because you're strengthening the tight tendons and the muscles around it resistance training just it's I had a client once who actually they did a case study on her she had a bone loss osteopenia which is kind of like when you're on your way to osteoporosis and they couldn't figure out that you know she would do the calcium she was walking she wasn't overweight they were trying to figure out what can we do to to help strengthen her bone doctor recommended let's go have you lift some weights and see what happens so she started lifting weights with me twice a week that was it two days a week we were lifting weights and the not only did we reverse the osteopenia but it was at such a pace that the doctor got on the phone with doctor several times they made her a case study so they could use it to present other doctors and say hey wow if you have aging clients with osteoporosis the form of exercise you need to read the one thing you need to recommend to all of them is lifting weights have them lift weights because what we're seeing here is pretty crazy so definitely your resilience and your ability to fight illness from resistance strength like if you here's another example let's say you get really sick you get the flu flu is nasty and it can knock people down for a week or two let's say you get it and you get pneumonia and you're in the hospital and you know that you're in there for five days if you've got a lot of muscle on your body you're going to come out of you're still not going to feel very good when you come out of there but you got more insurance you're going to come out and you're not going to be nearly as frail and as weak as if you went in there without a lot of muscle on your body well another example is that is when you tear like ligaments and stuff because your your muscles too are supporting all that so I remember like when I tore my ACL MCL and the doctor was so impressed with the my ability still to walk and it was he attributes that to all the muscle mass that was supporting the knees and then if you were if you were a another client who had very little you know muscle muscle in both your calves and your and your quads you would never be able to support yourself the way you are right now which is I mean think of it like that too for injuries as you start to age totally totally the last one that I can think about which for me I always thought was really really cool was how empowering being stronger is now there's the obvious like the the person who gains or regains independence so like you know I I wasn't able to carry my groceries in the house all the way up the stairs or I wasn't able to you know sit down and get up or whatever so now I'm stronger I can do those things that's pretty obvious but there's one that's a little less obvious and I noticed this more with women yeah and it was like I feel strong now and that strength makes you feel confident like just lifting my luggage in the overhead compartment or just feeling confident walking around with good posture feeling strong enough to to if I need to to get away or to defend myself that was a huge one and I would hear that all the time for my female yeah I noticed that a lot with my female clients and I think it's it's mainly because I mean it wasn't promoted enough that you know women like are very much just as capable of lifting heavy weights just like guys it's like this this this thought that it's gonna make you bulky and like you're training to be like a football player and all this kind of stuff was perpetuated out there and so it was all about like as many reps as possible in shaping and sculpting their bodies you know through just like multiple reps but you know once you get them to to to lift heavy weights really focus on that like completely it was just like a transformation right away I also think that strength training gives you the formula for life right when you when you learn when you learn to strength train and you and you lift weights properly with the intent to build muscle burn body fat what what you end up piecing together is the formula that applies to almost everything else in your life that it takes hard work there's gonna be set backs along the way you get back up consistency is one of the number one most important things like you start to real when you and when you've accomplished something through weight training and you and you and you know what it takes to do that to really move the needle and be consistent and see a difference in your physique and all the things that we're talking about even the things that you're not used to when you start to connect that you start to learn that oh wow this is crazy how this this same formula applies to other aspects of my life and almost everything right because it involves you it's self-improvement it's it's how you can you know better yourself and of course that's going to translate into any direction you want to go so that's where I think that's one of the most empowering pieces of oh yeah I mean you go to the gym and you did five push-ups this week and then you're able to do six one the next and you're working hard and you're consistent and next thing you know you could do 20 push-ups like you can't tell me that that lesson that confidence that you build isn't going to bleed over into the rest of your life well you can literally train yourself and to the more extreme example of to do something you never could do before right here when I first got into lifting weights I couldn't even put 45 pounds on each side of the bench press for years but then I look back now and moving 225 is relatively easy for me and to think that whoa if I could think back to that mindset that I had then of like that seems so far away that didn't even seem possible just reps but I did something that I would have guessed is impossible for me to do holy shit where else can I apply this gives you that thought because I remember talking about this even with podcasting or anything else you're doing that's completely new like we were like dude this is like just like fitness this is reps yes we will get better the more we just sit and work on it the more we practice the more practice like every and it's it is just a time-tested fact if you have that mentality going into and it's slow so it forces you to learn that lesson right there is no there is no shortcut there is no lift weights and then tomorrow wake up and you're an expert at it right and that's why that it's so important right you can't you can even cheating right someone be oh steroids isn't that even still takes a long time still takes and that's why it's still that fucking hard you learn to take that apply to everything else. Yeah I had you know I used to hear this more from female clients but now you're starting to hear it also from men and that's the like how many times did you train a client usually this was a female client that was afraid of a weight they were afraid of a weight because they never they didn't know how to exert themselves in that way they didn't know how to lift something really heavy with confidence they don't know how to get under a bar that felt heavy and it's like they didn't even know their capability right they would get on the oh my god that's too heavy and I'm I'm tell I would tell him look I'm watching your form you could actually lift another 30 pounds I know this for a fact I've been doing this for a year it's also one of the most rewarding things as a trainer to give to a client right how many times have you guys had that where a client is like I can't believe I did this right yeah I mean that is so untapped potential so empowering that you you're able to gift that but even just the ability to grind through and struggle because when you lift a heavy weight you know when you pick it up I mean look you know let's say my max deadlift is is 500 pounds 400 pounds still feels really heavy it's not like it's 100 pounds less but it's not like I get under under 400 pound or I lift 400 pounds off the ground and it feels like a piece of cake it feels really heavy but because I've trained myself and understand how to really drive and struggle I can tell that I can lift another 100 pounds now a lot of people never train this now in the past I would hear this more from female clients but nowadays I'm starting to hear from guys too mainly because we're just far less physical we've never exerted ourselves that way now that's a skill it's actually a skill when you learn how to get under a bar and you get under a squat bar whatever and you drive up and you lift it and you feel it all of a sudden other challenges don't feel nearly as challenging you walk out of the gym lifting a weight that you're like the way that felt I don't think I could do this is one of the reasons this is one of the inspiring things about personal trainers because I'm sitting over here going no you can lift it I'm watching your form yeah you can lift it let's try it again let's try and then they do and they're like oh my gosh I can't believe and then everything else seems a little bit easier that's so it's such an empowering feeling and resistance training in particular especially because of the challenge aspect of it the fact that there's so much potential variety with what you're doing you can get really good at one exercise and I could throw one at you that you've never done before and all of a sudden it's super challenging all over again boy what a great feeling going through that process I and I really believe to kind of bring this all together to the coaches that are listening like this is what takes you to the next level as a coach is when you learn to speak to these types of points to your your everyday clients absolutely like when you can make this connect you got to remember that 90% of the people that you train and you coach are not like you they don't love they didn't get up loving to go to the gym and they found they love it so much they've made a career out of it they're not like you most people do it because of the the few things that they know that are important about it and that's enough to get them in the gym to start exercising when you help them make the connection to these other things that really start to impact their life that has nothing to do with the obvious ones of what probably drove them in the gym which is scale on the weight body fat percentage muscle building once you learn to make that switch over to this side like that's where you get life or clients that's where you change people's lives really immense it for them absolutely and with that go to mindpumpfree.com and download all of our free guides and resources if you're a trainer actually we have a free personal training guide there as well but we have guides on squatting guides on building your arms working on your midsection fat loss muscle building again it's mindpumpfree.com you can also find the three of us on instagram you can find justin at mind pump justin you can find me at mind pump salad adam at mind pump adam