 I want to get a better pump for your next workout. Try this. It's super easy. Have a nice big glass of water with some sodium about an hour to 30 minutes or so before your workout. Believe it or not, water and salt are probably two of the best ingredients to give you a better pump. Sounds magical. I remember when I figured this out, I didn't, this didn't, um, happen for me until competing days, until I was like tracking water and salt and realize like, Oh my God. And you know, I know some of my companies hate to hear this because it's cheap stuff. Yeah. I mean the, yeah, the market for, you know, explode, you know, your nitrogen oxide and your creatine market is massive. One of the reasons why we love creatine, aside from the energy that you get from it is the massive pump that you can, you can feel, um, but nothing in my opinion compares to water loading and sodium loading. And I would, I mean, I would say more than a glass of water. So my kind of formula before getting into my workout at noon or one, that's when I kind of trained was, could I get a half a gallon of water down? And then like back then this was before we had a partnership like elementy, um, I was doing like two of those big dill pickles or I would just have something that was loaded full of sodium. Like if I ate out at this restaurant where I was having all kinds of salt in my food, the pumps were better than any supplement. Oh, like citrulline, arginine, you know, uh, all the, the supplements that boost, um, you know, blood flow, supposed to give you a better pump. None of them come close to being well hydrated and having a decent amount of sodium in your system before you work out. So here's what I, so I work out first thing in the morning, um, like around six, 37 o'clock. So I don't even eat, right? So it's not like a carb load or anything like that. I don't have any food. I'll have, uh, one of these filled with water. So let me see how many ounces. This is something like a 32 ounces. So I'll make sure I drink 32 ounces of water and I have a full elementy packet in here. Elementy is about a thousand milligrams of sodium. Then I fill up another one and put another packet. And that's what I drink during my workout. And if I do that and I compare that to not doing it, if I don't do that, the difference in the pump is so dramatic. It's hilarious. And the reason why it's funny is because that the market for supplements to increase the pump is so big and people spend so much money and it's like salt and water, like salt and water. It's like the, the poor man's, uh, options. So you have that and then you also have like whole milk with like a little bit of, uh, oval teen for approach. You didn't make yourself. You guys do oval teens still around. I don't even buy a quick or something or you can't work with baby. You might be sure you can still get it. Oval teen was the first, that's whatever. It's still, they still dominate all the rest homes. I'm sure they have like some contracts, you know, some contract they signed for like 50 years with all the rest homes. Yeah, they sell it. They do. Yeah. It's on the Amazon. It's malt, right? Yeah. It's malt. Yeah. Chocolate. Chocolate malt. What is malt? It's from barley, I believe, or it's from wheat or barley. It's some type of, uh, I don't know. Bro, literally you just said, told people to drink dairy with gluten. Basically. I mean, isn't that like crappy, uh, terrible gut right there? Well, you know, it's crazy about your advice, how that you get, because I take it even one step further. You're going fasted, which is amazing that you still get this massive pump, even without really any glycogen, right? Like, I mean, you're super. I mean, I had the dinner from the night before. Yeah. But I mean, that's minimal in comparison to like you actually loading. I bet if you actually did everything you're doing and you had like 70 grams of carbs real quick before. Yes, I would. You would feel a crazy. In the rare moments when I can work out later in the day, which is what I love. It just doesn't happen because it's just it's impossible with kids and working on stuff. But if I can, then yeah, if I have like a meal or two, you know, hours before, plus I make sure I'm well hydrated, plus I have good sodium, then yeah, then the pump is. Yeah, you need your pre-workout, just black coffee. Boom. Yeah, a fun experiment for the more tips. The young people that are probably listening to this that would do this, right, is to to go and carb deplete for a few days and then do your advice with the sodium and the water and then load the carbs before you get into the workout. So let's say I go like three days of low carbohydrate. I'm going to work out the next day at noon that night. I'm probably having a big, big meal with lots of carbohydrates in the morning, have another one and then a mid morning before my lunch, like an hour before my workout, an hour and a half before another large carb meal with all that water and sodium. And you'll have one of the craziest pumps you've ever now, the pump itself is does seem to signal muscle growth. Part of it is getting a good pump means that there's the environment that you're in, right, the environment your body's in is probably conducive to muscle growth. Okay, so if you can't get a good pump, you either don't have enough, you know, food in you, you don't have enough water, obviously electrolytes are off. That's not a great environment for for muscle growth. So the pump itself tells you, oh, this is a good environment for muscle growth. But the pump itself also signals the body to build muscle through cell swelling, which signals muscle growth. And they've shown this to be a thing. Bodybuilders have known this for a long time. So, you know, it's not going to outweigh a good workout or anything like that. But let's say you're doing everything right. And then you say, okay, what else can I do to maximize my gains? Hydrate yourself, have some sodium. Element T is great because it tastes good and it's easy to put in your water. Plus it's got a little bit of magnesium and potassium, which balances out the sodium and work out. Try 30, try 30 ounces of water about, you know, an hour or so before your workout with the sodium, which is a thousand milligrams of sodium. So if you don't want to go the element T route and you want to just use salt, fine, a thousand milligrams and watch what happens. Compare it to when you don't do that. It's, it's pretty well. I did this morning. I'm like, oh my gosh, so crazy. That's the signaler then. How's the cell swelling? So something like a BFR, that would be like the main indicator for muscle growth. No, that's part of it. That's restricting the fluid coming back out, right? That's what that is. Well, yeah, but the cell swelling, the waist buildup. Yeah, the waist buildup is part of it also though. So BFR is like on a whole nother category, but just the pump itself can, plus there's a psychological benefit, right? So when you work out that psychological benefit of the pump, which people love, you know, if you're trying to develop a body part and then it swells and you can see this temporary muscle growth, you know, it's temporary because the pump is transient, but it looks good. It feels good. And I argue, and I used to do this with clients, if you have a muscle that's hard to feel, like a hard to connect to, if you get it pumped, then it becomes easy to feel in your workout. So whenever I train a client who had a tough time, let's say feeling their glutes or their lats or their pecs or whatever. Pump it. Yeah. I would, we can't podcast with you after this, but no more people have dairy. Hey, try this drink. I got to double down. Have some diarrhea. Uh, I used to drink oval team. That was the first supplement. Yeah. Because you know, I used to do was like chocolate slim fast. I used to drink a bunch because my grandma had slim fast in there. And I remember reading the label. That's when I was an early trainer. And I remember reading the label. I'm like, Oh, this is like just a low calorie version and lower protein. It's like basically a quarter serving of my mild plaque shake. And so I just drink four of those. No, you didn't. Yeah. So my grandma would have those little six packs. She's so mad at me. Where are my slim fast? You know, hey, you want to know it's funny. So when I was a kid, if something said diet on it, I thought it made you lose weight. Not that it was lower calorie. So I wouldn't eat diet. I remember thinking that too. And actually the slim fast cans when I was a trainer was when that, that was one of those. Well, that's when you understood. Yeah. We will, we, we talk about paradigm shattering moments in our career. That was a very paradigm shattering moment for me of around the marketing around diet products. It's like, Oh, wow. A lot of these diet products literally are just a smaller serving of the muscle building product. You know, it's like identical. It just cut in half or cut a quarter. I've never seen the low calorie sliced bread. It's like hella thin sliced. Yeah. Yeah. It's out of gals. Yeah. You pretend. Dude, it wasn't, you blew my mind yesterday when you told me about tab being actually like they changed it to Diet Coke. Yeah. I thought, I knew it like left the market and it was like a popular drink amongst women, especially tab, but then they just decided to kind of bring that in. So that was Coke labels. So Coke made tab. That's right. Coke made tab and experiment with like calorie free soda. Yeah. And that, that market started to explode and tabs started to do really well, but it started to eat into its, its core products. And they didn't want to, and because the branding was so different and off, they didn't want it to cannibalize Coca-Cola. And so that's when they invented Diet Coke so that they could still keep the branding of Coca-Cola. It was probably one of the most brilliant, I almost rival it these days, right? One of the most brilliant, brilliant moves ever. I know you were a big tab drinker. Yeah. I was. Yeah. Were you really? My mom was. I did drink it though. We did have it around the house. You know, interestingly, they sweetened tab with saccharin. Oh, that's before saccharin. And so saccharin got associated with cancer. And that's another reason they discontinued tab, but it was because of the association with saccharin. I feel like that might have been a bigger. Maybe a bigger reason, bigger reason. The cancer connection. Shea, I disagree with that. That's never stopped anybody, dude. It had to do with revenue, bro. Well, no, well, no, no. It was taking market share away from its flagship product. Well, no, I remember that saccharin made the news. It actually made the mainstream news back in the 80s. Yeah, it was in the 80s. I think it was around 1982. Because there were rat studies that showed that it caused cancer. Right. Brain cancer or something. Oh, wow. Yeah. I remember that. Yeah, I don't know how long. So what I don't know, and that's maybe what, that's what got rid of tab, right? Because I think they both coexisted for a while. I think what Coca-Cola did was, I believe, right? I don't, you have to do, I didn't, you know, do enough research to speak completely on this. But I'm pretty sure what happened was they, they made Diet Coke to try and bring some of that market share back to the branding. But simultaneously, we're probably still running tab. I doubt they would just shut it down while I was making all that money, right? Yeah. So I'll have to research this more. I don't know if there was an overlap there or not. I'm pretty sure there was. I mean, it would be, it would be pretty. I'm doing tab and I lost 60 pounds. Yeah. You had cancer. Now, the other thing, the other reason why they, they actually wanted to rebrand was because at that time, tab was like solely marketed to women. And they actually, and so when they did Diet Coke, they co-branded it as like a, you know, what does it tell me? It was just discontinued in 2020. Tab? Yes. I, you know, so much, so much for your bullshit idea, but I told you the cancer didn't stop. Well, no, no, it took the saccharin out. Oh, they just took that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that didn't stop the product though. They replaced it with Aspartame. Aspartame, I'm sure, yeah. Wow. You know what? When you were talking about tab, I'm like, I could, I could have swore I saw it at the store. Wow. 20, that's probably why it made this article, right? So it only, it came across one of my things I read daily or whatever. And I was like, oh, that's an interesting story. You know, back then in the 80s, it was considered unmanly for men to consume anything diet. So that's why things like Tab were marketed to women. Any diet product. I mean, I still feel that way. Yeah. If a guy ate, if a guy ate anything that was diet, I could be made fun of. So no diet products touched men at all until. Yeah. That totally shifted completely. What's up, everybody? Today's giveaway is Maps Strong. This is a strong man inspired workout program. Here's how you can potentially get it for free. Leave a comment below this video, the first 24 hours that we drop this episode. Also subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. If you win, we'll let you know in the comment section. Also, we got a sale going on right now. You get Maps 15 minutes, Maps Anywhere, Maps Prime and our ebook Eat for Performance all together in a bundle priced for $99.99. That's a savings of over $200. Again, it's a huge promotion. If you're interested, this is a limited time. So act now. Click on the link at the top of the description below. All right. Here comes the show. Another interesting story. You guys have any guesses on how well the Jordan brand does with Nike? Do you have any idea? You mean today? Yeah. And what it's done, is it, do you think it's more or less popular when Jordan played now? Or do you think it's still growing? Do you think in this recession, what are your thoughts on how the business does? I mean, again, this is my limited knowledge, but in terms of kids and their excitement around Jordan brand, it's very prevalent. Like my son, I know your daughter, it's still the cool shoe in comparison to anything else. There's just really nothing that's even close. Is it bigger now than it was before? Yeah. So it's consistently grown. It just eclipsed $5 billion in revenue last year. Wow. What that means to Michael Jordan? Okay, so he made over $150 million from them just last year from the Jordan brand alone. One year? Yeah, one year. $150 million. Do you know what he made in his entire career of playing basketball? Probably way less than that. $50 million. $90 million. Oh, wow. $90 million, he made his entire career of playing in basketball. That's his total collections and his income. It dwarfs it. And last year alone, after, what is that? 30 years ago, he played 20 something, 30 years ago, since last time he touched a court. That's crazy. Making off of his shoes, $150 million. That while. Hey, speaking of money, I got a great article for you, Adam. I know you'll like this. This will be interesting for all of us to look at. So do you guys want to guess what the worst college degrees are in terms of? Art, environmental, hold on. Horticulture. Horticulture would be good still right now. So these are the worst. Not environmental horticulture. Horticulture in general. Gender studies. So this was. In the marijuana business. So the New York Federal Reserve released a labor market report on college majors. And these are majors that are just terrible in terms of their value on the market. So you get one of these degrees. So are we going to get a list of them? Or do we have a list of them? Okay. But I want to hear what you guys. Well, here I'll read them off. You guys let me know what you think. Yeah, because I know there's going to be some really rare ones that we probably like. No wonder that's bad. Well, some of them are really popular. And, you know, this is important, by the way, to know, and this is a conversation I have with my older kids. As I say, look, you can learn and study whatever you want. But I'm not going to pay for a degree that has. They're not all going to make you money. Yeah, I'm not going to pay for a degree that has terrible. Like anthropology or something like that. Yeah, this has got terrible market value. And you're not going to get a loan for something with terrible market value. If you want to learn about that, luckily we're in the internet age, you can learn about whatever you want for almost free. If you're going to pay, you got to make sure that there's some market viability. It only makes sense. It doesn't make any sense to get loans for $100,000. Well, I think that's a pretty logical way to approach it. It's investing, right? Yeah. Just like you would invest in a stock or real estate, like do your homework on like the likelihood of this is going to be a good investment for 10 years down the road. Especially if you're going to learn for free anyway, right? Right, right. Okay, so here's some of the worst ones. Number six, performing arts. Yeah, so I knew arts. So medium wage in the early career is under $40,000. The unemployment rate is 7.6%. The underemployment rates, this is like people who do it just part-time, I can't get full-time work, 64%. Oh, those are cool stats that they got. Yeah. Okay. Number five, leisure and hospitality. Oh, interesting. The median wage is $38,000. Unemployment, 5.3%. Underemployment, 58.6%. You know what, though? Think about it. Leisure and hospitality. So you're working in hotels and stuff like that, right? Hotels, airports, like... You get a degree for that? Well, yeah, that's what I mean. That's kind of... Most people just jump in and... To hop into management. Really? Yeah, for sure. If you wanted to be like a Southwest manager, I would imagine that they would want some sort of a degree. Don't you think you would do better by starting there in a low position? You and I would know, we all know that that's better for most industries. What industry do you know where you're in a position to hire others and you would not prefer no degree with 10 years experience? Just the academic accolade versus experience. Well, I guess it's the ones with the high barriers where you have to have a degree. And again, only because of that, I bet you if you actually asked another doctor, like if you allowed a person to practice underneath you... For 10 years. For 10 years. Could you rather have them with a kid? He has opinions about that in terms of like how much she had to help educate a lot of the doctors that would come in fresh from school and just get them up and running. Because she's in the field. Yeah, because she had way more hands-on, right? And they had no idea. And like we're just like... And that's my point. My point is that like even, I think even someone at the doctorate level would say, give me the guy or girl who's been in the hospital helping people for 10 years, then the kid who just came fresh off his doctorate and... So here's another one. This one I wouldn't have guessed, psychology. $37,000 a year is the median early career wage. Really? Unemployment 4.7%. No, okay. Unemployment 47%. Okay. Do you think that's because a big bulk of those are probably like high school counselors? Probably. Because I would think that... Yeah, because you would have to get like a PhD, maybe be a professor, really, right? Because to be a psychologist, I think you have to have a pretty high level degree. So these are... Oh, yeah. Yeah, these are... I think these are... Like high school counselors. That's what I would think it would be, right? And that makes sense that it would be lower, that much lower, because that sounds crazy for a psychologist. Those are the four that it shows on this post right here. So... Well, philosophy has to be worse. Yeah. You know, I want to look and see if there's... If I can see more of these, because they just give me four. What a stupid post. That was the funny part. I remember I was taking all these philosophy courses and was like, this is so interesting and amazing. And I'm like, this will never translate to any kind of job that's going to pay me money. I can't wait to see... Oh, here's another one. I got another one right here. Number two, with social services. Sorry. Number three, with social services. $37,000, medium wage, early career, unemployment, 3%, underemployment, 27%. Number two, family and consumer sciences. $37,000 a year. Now, that's interesting, because I think that would apply in marketing really well. And that would... So that's a community service officer, nutritionists. Oh, number one. Well, I mean, this makes sense. Theology and religion. Well, yeah. I guess you're not going to make... Unless you start your own... Powerpoint church. Because you start your own religion. Yeah, dude. And then you're crushed. Then you're really like an entrepreneur. Yeah. That's why they put... Nominate yourself. That's why they put medium average. Because if you throw average in there, people like, what's his name? We'll throw that shit way off. Yeah. What's that guy's name? Yeah, I can't give a name right now. What is his name, Doug? Joel Steehan. Yeah, Joel Steehan. People like that. What is he worth? I thought we looked it up one time on the show. And we talked about him one time and then we looked up his... We were going to have him on the show, I think. We were. Well, when we met Tony Robbins, his people... They're like, he's a great guy. You got to know him. Yeah, that's interesting. And he was... I don't know. I need to know him. I don't know anything about him. All I know is he's super popular. Well, you know, I mean, I appreciate that. That's a way to say that because we don't know him. And I think I've learned my lesson of speaking out on people that I really have not spent the time in the church. Yeah, exactly. In my... I've been surprised so many times. I've been wrong more than times that I've been right. I've been wrong in both directions. From other people. Yeah, there's been times I've been excited because I think they're amazing. Because then you meet them and you're like, this kind of thing. The facade, they present themselves online and that everybody puts them on a pedestal, then you meet them and they're terrible. Or I see somebody who gets trashed, like Olstein, who has a lot of haters, a lot of love, and so you think he's going to be this way and then there's totally different. Yeah, what does it say? His last name is Osteen. Osteen. Not Olstein. I don't know why I say Olstein. What's Olstein? I don't know. I've said that for a long time as well. His net worth is apparently $100 million and he generates around $70 million in profit each year. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Now, what I've heard. That's through his books. That's right. So what I've heard is he takes $0 from the church. Now, I know either I'm going to get somebody who's going to be like, oh, look, yeah. No, it's all his books. Yeah, so supposedly all the money that is donated to the church gets reinvested back into the church and the community and $0 comes with that. All of it has become from his book sales and probably the courses and the things that he probably sells and stuff like that. And when you think of it that way, it's like, well, damn, dude, that's true. That's pretty legit. Regardless of how you feel about the person. Yeah, you make your money. To build that kind of a business is crazy. All right. So something cool just came out, the pipeline. It was a meta analysis on mental health. And this is a phenomenal article, phenomenal article. So this was just literally just came out. And the meta analysis, this is the title of the article. Okay. And this is huge, by the way, this is huge in medicine. This is like, this is massive news. The title of the article is, exercise could be the first line of attack in mental health treatment, first line. So they did a huge meta analysis. They looked at 100 studies featuring all modes of physical activity on depression, anxiety, and psychological distress across broad adult populations. Okay. This is what they concluded. Exercise is as effective, if not more effective, than psychotherapy or pharmacotherapy as the initial treatment. In other words, it did as well or better than drugs or psychotherapy. So what, okay. So what happened? I'm so surprised. And who's funded this? So, okay. What, okay. What happens? Obviously, this is a meta analysis, too. I don't know. One, this is a message that we've been saying for a long time. Yes. Okay. You've already pointed to other studies that we're already pointing in this direction anyway. So this isn't new news for us, but to have a meta analysis like that, it to be mainstream news, what happens from here? Now, do we start to see some sort of lobbying against this from the pharmaceutical companies? Like, do you see, are you going to see pushback on it and to kind of suppress the information? What do you think happens if, because if that's true. I'm a big gym chain. I'm using that as my marketing campaign. Oh, I see how this is obviously this is great for fitness, great for gyms, great for that side. But I think of the other side, the psychology and the pharma side, which is big money and big business. Or do they adopt it and kind of incorporate it? That will be the most brilliant. Yeah. So, well, so there's an interesting thing. So their speculations have to do with, you know, neurochemicals, serotonin or brinephrine. You know, I would argue that's part of it, but it's also part of the fact that you are doing something, you're working hard towards something, seeing yourself progress. That by itself also feels really good. But what's interesting is they found that resistance training had the largest impact on people with depression and yoga had a better, had good performance with anxiety, which makes sense. Yoga, very peace related, you know, you got it kind of mind, body, focus, strength, training, great for depression. But here's what I think about, you know, here's my opinion on what you're saying, Adam. There's a big hurdle here. So I don't think the pharmaceutical industry is going to care too much about this because here's the hurdle. It's always easier to tell someone to take a pill. Pill versus work. That's the problem, dude. The problem is- So you think that they're not even going to have to do anything about it? They don't give a shit. They're like, eh, that still requires work. It's not going to touch them. Nobody cares anyways. It's not going to touch them because, okay, people have known that exercise makes you look better forever. That's a strong ass motivator. Yeah, people still don't do it or do it consistently. So I don't know. I don't know if, now what might, what this might do is it might get doctors and therapists and psychiatrists and psychologists to work with, I don't know, fitness organizations, trainers, who knows, to work with them to help administer exercise or maybe use it as a prescriptive, like, hey, here's what I want you to do, just like they could prescribe meditation and mindfulness. But is it going to touch the pharma industry? You know what this reminds me of? You know, today we have a commercial for NCI and the girl's name is slipping my mind right now. So I feel bad that not to shout her out, but I remember she was part of the VIP group that we were last time. Crystal, I think? No, it's not crystal. No, it's not crystal. It's someone else who had the business that actually she was a therapist first. So she was a therapist first and then she's combined. Crap, I know you're talking about. Her therapy. She's in the group, the NCI. Yes, yes. And I remember talking to her going like, man, what like a cool, I just, and you bring this up. Like this has got to be incredible news for someone like her who's already moving in that direction of like, she doesn't separate the two. It's like, if you get personal training from me, part of that comes with like the therapy side and vice versa. So I always thought that was such a brilliant strategy. If you ask me now what training a coach or trainer could go through that would benefit them more than anything in terms of like applying, fitness and helping someone. Besides learning how to communicate effectively would be learning like therapy skills. Skills of communication by helping people through, like what therapists go through, that would make a trainer. By the way, trainers who've been training people for a long time, you learn a lot of this through trial and error. But I think that's got crazy carryover. Isn't that, it's crazy because it just goes to show too. It's not ever going to be saturated. This whole, because everybody like that thinks, oh, should I get into personal training? Should I get into like online coaching and all that? There's so many different angles to it. Like this is another layer to that. You could help somebody, you know, go through their anxiety, like help them out with their mental health. There's more, there's more people suffering from obesity and mental health than there are people that could potentially help them. Yeah. Think of it like that way. Yep. Yeah. I mean, that's what makes that, that's what makes this profession so amazing, which is also ironic too when I see trainers that have the scarcity mindset when it's just like, dude, there's so many people that need our help. They need good training. Yeah, that need good help. The fact that you come from a place of scarcity is such a naive place to be because of how many people you could spend your entire career trying to gather up all the people to help you. You know what is, you know what's interesting? As a, well, first off, unless you're a licensed therapist or in a field that's regulated that way, you're not allowed to say, um, I helped treat depression and anxiety. You're not allowed to say that. Oh yeah. I wonder if studies like this will open the door for trainers. To be able to say that. To be able to say that. Like I don't do psychotherapy, we don't do talk therapy, but I do train people through physical activity to help alleviate anxiety and depression. Right. I wonder if that- Physiological alleviation. Yeah, or just, I mean, well, I mean, it shows, the data shows, it's as effective or more effective. I wonder if you at the, okay, so at the bare minimum, if I was a trainer and coach, I would market myself that way at least. I would find a way to do it. Right, so even if I can't make claims that I, you know- I treat depression. I treat depression like this is one of, or that, yeah, I can solve it or whatever like that, that I would say like one of- I would do something like- Like things that I specialize in, I work with these types of clients to help them with X, Y and Z, and then I think that would be a brilliant way to market. Yeah, and by the way, knowing what we just, I mean, knowing what we know, and with a study like that, and knowing what we know about inactivity levels today, especially among the youth, okay, because kids today are far less active than they used to be, far less active. Like I could walk around neighborhoods right now, and I won't see, I'll see maybe two kids, two kids, teenagers, whatever, outside doing anything physical. When we were kids, if you drove through neighborhoods, you had to like keep your eyes open and hit your brakes 15 times, because people were out on the street playing, riding their bikes, like all over the place. You know, I know we like to blame anxiety and depression on the youth, on social media and this and that. I bet you a large chunk of it's just fact that they don't move. They just don't move. They don't go outside, they don't move. I mean, they're deeply connected regardless, whether you blame it on as the main thing or not, it's definitely deeply connected. You know, you're bringing up something I wanted to ask Justin about. Before we move on to that though, since we were talking about NCI, I know that we are what, about a month away from the big event that we have coming up. Yeah, I think it's the 15th of April, right in that area. And are they still taking sign-ups for the, this is the big coaching, this is the big coaching con. This has got Alex and Layla Hormozzi, like in all kinds of other great speakers that are going to be there. Yeah, it's April 12th through the 15th. And so anybody who signs up, and I believe you have to book a room at the hotel. That's to get access to us. Yeah, we're going to have an actual. So you can go to this, go to the coaching con, you can sign up for it, you can go to it and experience all the speakers and what NCI has to offer, regardless of you stay at the hotel. But if you stay at that hotel, that specific hotel where we're at, then you get all those amenities. In addition to that, you get the private fireside chat thing that we're doing for the people that stay in that hotel. Where is it? Is it Arizona? Is that where we're going? Yeah, it's in Arizona. Let's see what part. We never know Phoenix. I don't know if it's, oh yes, Phoenix. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So back to what I wanted to ask Justin. So I don't know if you know this, but did you know that he took his phone from his oldest? No more phone? Oh, well, permanently or just a week? Yeah, so it's a permanent thing. Oh, wow. Yeah. And this is something like I was kicking it around and then I kind of ran it past Courtney and just to see what her thoughts were around it. And it was, because what we've noticed is he just doesn't even really even miss it and isn't out of the loop in terms of his friend group and also there's no draw. So before it becomes like another... Limb. It's just so addictive. And I know every kid also is probably different with the usage of it. It was to the point where he was actually caught a few times in class pulling it out. Or the one indicator for me was PE. His grades started slipping in PE. I'm like, how does it happen, dude? And I know exactly what he's doing. He's on here not paying attention to what's going on and what he's supposed to do to participate. And so I was like, that's it. And so it's been an experiment of a couple of weeks. I was initially going to bring it back. But then I'm like, I'm not bringing it back because it's just not worth it. Like, so the plan is once it becomes something that he's going to want to kind of fight for and negotiate with us, we'll allow it later on as a dumb phone, like a flip phone, like a brick phone. And that way he'll have access to calls, text messages. But honestly, all that other stuff is pure. You could make any argument you want to me. It is just a distraction. There is no value to that in terms of that versus the education he's trying to build at school. And also like the relationships he's forming with his friends and everything on the smartphone is completely worthless in that regard. So was there like a single event that led to this or was it like a buildup of multiple things that have been happening? Like what made you finally just like rip the bay nut? So that's it. We're taking this thing. I don't know. I guess for me, and this is everybody's uniquely, especially parents, you have your own combs with how you want to deal with this. But I just was like, if it's in my house, and I just was kind of like, I'm pulling the power back. Like it's not, I just, it was an experiment. I'm like, okay, like I, I was trying to rationalize, like I don't want to be the, I don't want to be the, you know, the parent that's like hammering, like you can't and like you're going to, you're going to grow up without any of this technology, you know, like and be like totally like alarmist about it and have, have him not be able to interact with his friends in a realistic way. But seeing how he interacts with his friends still without it and just kind of observing his behaviors now versus like with the phone. It brings no value. So to me, I was like, this is on me. This isn't on him. He's a kid. This is my responsibility. Yeah. And so if it's on me, like I just don't, I don't find any value in it. And he doesn't need to grow up with it. You can, you can experience that all later, like out of high school when he goes to college and that's fine. How long has it been right now? So it's been a month. Oh, wow, it's already been a month. Yeah. What do you notice? What are you seeing? He looks me in the eyes. Oh, interesting. He's not distracted with the way he answers questions. He is very prompt about getting up in the morning because I know that at night, like, and we're not always observing, but there's that draw, right? It's there. It's there. Yes, stay up late, like scroll through whatever nonsense. And just to like, what is he looking at? I don't have a good handle on that. And he still has a laptop. You know, he still has like. Yeah, but the likelihood he's going to get out of bed at 10 o'clock at night. Yeah, and like type things. And I'll, whatever, dude, that's fine. Like I'm not like a micromanager and like a helicopter parent or nothing. But you're just making it, you know what you're, you're, like we talk about with nutrition, you're just making the barriers. Make it hard. Yeah. Make it hard for him to get to that point where it's not just like you said, it's an appendage where he's just like this. Like it, to me, it feels like a drug. Yeah. How, how resistant was he to it when you initially did it? And then was it, was there like a, like, did he flip out when you first did it? And then it took a while to get him like acclimated. And then. I think at first he was upset. Obviously he was upset. And it was two, it was like, he kind of knew that his grades were slipping as a result of it. And so he didn't really fight that fact. He just thought he was going to get it back. You know, like he was like, okay, they're going to let this blow over and do the same old thing, you know? And like, I'm going to get it back. And it's kind of like that whole, you know, how long can, can I outlast them kind of a thing? And, and I just didn't bring it back. And then, and he was kind of like, he mentioned it the other day and I was like, oh yeah, do you miss it? You know, and he's just like, honestly, not really. Oh, cool. And I was like, and then, and to your point, this is that was actually the definitive decision for me where I was like, if he's telling me that, it's gone. Yeah. So. And so, and then how is he, I mean, because I think it's some of the challenges, right? Like if I was a kid, you know, how am I getting hold of my friends to go play or like get ready or weekends around, we're going to all get together and do something. How is he communicating now? Is he doing it through a video game? Through, okay. He can just do it through a PlayStation. So he'll, because it's so much easier to manage that because he's out again in the living room and he'll interact with his friends or he's in our bedroom and he'll, you know, play. But like, I can hear those interactions and like him talking to his friends and stuff. And two, it's like easier for me to be like, okay, it's an hour or it's like a half an hour that you have here. And then it's not like the most painful ripping a band-aid thing off to get them off like it is to take the phone. Yeah. And you did a good timing too because you wait till they're. Oh, it's too late. Yeah, 17 and it's like. Yeah. Yeah. They already built a social media following and they're like social networks with kids that are on there all the time. And so yeah, that's that's kudos to you. Well, we'll see. We'll see, dude. I mean, again, this is like social experiment, but that's sort of the plan. I mean, you could always bring it back. There's nothing wrong with him doing this for a year or two. And then, you know, you know, he's older. And I actually think it's so funny. That's why I wanted to bring this up. So I would send a message to Doug and I, I think Doug was the only one communicating with me. I was high the other night. And I was like, I have these high ideas sometimes, right? And I have this idea of my. Spaghetti. I saw that. Yeah. So, you know, it's. Hot dog flavored protein. So here's where my brain was at was, you know, I obviously were, you know, adults, right? So we're much more self aware than a young, young, you know, adolescent, right? And I'm always looking for ways to improve my behaviors around this tech. I mean, that's how powerful it is. It's powerful enough that I'm aware of it and I still need to think of ways. How do I create these barriers? So I'm a more present father. It pulls us, dude. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a more present father. I'm a more present husband. And what are some things I could do? And I had this like idea like, you know what, like maybe I'm gonna bring back the pager. And so if it's business related, like it's emergencies, someone needs to get a hold of me, they can page me, right? And I can get to my phone, but, you know, leave and start putting like time constraints. Like I use my phone between the work hours of 9 a.m. to 1 and then it gets put away and then I have my pager. Like, and so I actually started like, do pagers even exist still? And there's actually a big company that still sells them and millions of people still. Is it Motorola still or what? No, it's not. Well, Motorola does make them, but there's a company that I think I sent the link to Doug because I was like, let's do this. Let's start a trend. Dude, that's hilarious. But my point of bringing that up is I actually believe that the generation coming up, I mean, you gotta understand that your son and daughter and even yours grew up in this kind of really transitional period when it comes to tech and social media. We didn't have enough research and time to know what some of the unintended consequences are. And, you know, initially, of course the kids are going to get drawn to because they're addictive, just like the adults are drawn to it. But over time, because we are a pretty smart species and we look back and go like, wow, look at all these things that are connected to all the addictive properties of this. I actually think that the next generation up is gonna make it a cool thing. And I think you already see that. Like with social media, like you now notice like real popular kids don't post all the time. It's like cool to not post. It's like- You're more interesting if they can't find you. That's right. So it's becoming a, it is becoming popular in the generation coming up again. So I do think that you nailing this right now is a good time. And I actually think it's not gonna be that challenging because I think, right when you're already putting a stop to it, when he gets into high school, it's gonna be less cool to be addicted to your phone. Most kids are gonna, I bet you kids will start to call it out. It might be. I really hope so. You know, in the hard part, so Jessica and I are starting this, where we're gonna have a station where we put our phones at the house. So if you wanna go on your phone, you can go on your phone, but it's at the station. And we're gonna do that even with ourselves. Perfect. So if I wanna get on my phone, I gotta get up, walk over, and be on my phone at the station. We literally just started doing this. The iron is that. I'll let you guys know. The irony of that, right? Like the old phone with the wire connected that everyone had to go to if you wanted to talk to somebody. That's right, that's right. Listen, I'll tell you what right now. We'll hang up this. Long cord, you're trying to like close the door. Look, I see it with us. I see it with myself. Like we hang up this podcast was the first thing that we do. Boom, on our phones. We'll all go out to lunch and we're all hanging out talking. Someone pulls out their phone, the other guys pull out their phone. Next thing you know, we're all on our phone doing anything. And it's not like we don't, we're being rude or we're, it's not a conscious thing, which is what makes it even more dangerous. That's the thing, it's totally subconscious. Totally subconscious. So how do you deal with shit that is that powerful? Well, the way you deal with it is you have to develop structure around it. That's the only way because I can't, it's not gonna happen by you saying, Oh, I'll just use it less. It's just you're lying to yourself. Well, you know what else you lie to yourself too. I don't think there's anybody out there that has a business that demands their phone any more than someone who's built a business off of a social media business like we have, right? But I fully recognize that there is productive time where I'm on that phone where I'm making business calls, writing emails, answering to business relationships that we have. And then there's times when I'm scrolling, you know what I'm saying? And most of the time it's bullshit. It's stuff that I didn't need. And if I were to like restrict myself to a smaller window, then I would only have the time for the productive. And it wouldn't allow the other bullshit in there. But then when you make this justification that, Oh, I need it for my business. Oh, I have to have it. Like, Oh, that's crazy. I would never put my phone away like that because I have this business that requires it as well. Really though, like I bet if I actually put these window and this restriction, like then anything that hit me after that window would be there for me at first thing in the morning. And then I'd only have a few hours to knock it out and I get the shit done. Plus you have to train everybody else around you that that's like your barriers, right? So this is the window that you have access. And it's like, unless you have that sort of train, it's like people will just expect that you respond immediately. Yeah. Well, the idea because I can be quite resistant to feeling like I'm being controlled by anybody, including myself. I don't like, this is why I've always worked for myself. I don't like being told what to do. I just have this and it's good and bad. There's good side to it and bad sides to it. But the reality is me putting my phone in a centralized location at my house is not because I'm being terrorized or controlling myself or whatever, or my kids. I have to do it for my kids, but now I feel like I'm being controlled. The reality is, here's what it does. I want to get on my phone. It makes me pause. It just brings awareness. If it's in my hand already, there's not enough time for awareness for me to be like, I'm wasting time on it. That's that barrier again. But if I have to stand up and walk over to it, and it's right over there. It's not like I put it super far away. It's literally right there in the middle of where we all hang out. But it just gives me enough time to pause to make me go, oh, okay. And also be aware that I'm standing at my phone and the other people in my household can see that this is what I'm doing. And so it becomes more of this visible thing. So we're experimenting with it. But I'm not going to lie. Like any discipline, it's going to be hard. Yeah. The second stage is going to be this because I haven't done this yet. So the second stage is this. And I, you know, shit, I don't even know if I should say this on the podcast because I don't know if I'll be able to follow through is not taking the phone to the bathroom. Oh, I don't know if I'm ever going to be there. That's my, I like that time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I know. I said, you guys would say that. Everybody says that. I said, hey, there's a lot of other areas I could cut fat out of my diet before I cut it out right there. I said, I don't know. I don't want to go, I'm not ready to go back to reading the back of a shampoo bottle. I'm not ready for that. Country living. We got no magazines in there. I know. I'm not with you on that one, bro. Not yet. I said, that's the next step. Bust out the national geographies. Listen, just like we coach people with exercise. You start one step at a time, master the first step. That's next level right there. I think that's one of the best places for it. That's the best place for it. I think it's... Well, my friends used to joke. This was back when I was even at 24 Fitness because I was actually really good about putting when we were at work at 24, all my trainers put their phones in the drawer and we actually used to... We trained everybody to do that. That's just you don't have a phone on the floor when you have clients. Either did I, I keep it in there. But when I would go to the bathroom, I would take it. So my buddies would always tease me that like, are you taking the shit right now? Because I would be responding. You know, I'd probably get back to textbooks. So you knew if I was texting you, I was probably in the bathroom and like they were right. Like like nine times a day. They should connect the phone to your bowels so it stops working when you stop pooping. And then see how long people stay in there. You know what I'm saying? So do you think, I think that's going to be, I think that's going to be a space, right? Like I think that when you try and think of like merging spaces that are going to happen like in different industries and stuff, I really think that there's going to be... It's already starting. Yeah. There's going to be things around like, how do we learn to coexist with this powerful tool? Listen, when our environments change radically, there's unintended consequences. And then like you said, we're a smart species. Eventually, and usually it takes a generation or two, we then structure ways to kind of try to correct. So like for example... We're examining it right now. Right. For example, if you want to be active, you typically have to go to a place and schedule activity. It's called a gym. You know, 500 years ago, that would be the most crazy thing you could ever explain to somebody. You'd be like, listen, this is what you're going to do. You're going to go to a place. You're going to lift heavy chains. You got a chopped wood, you know. Yeah. You have to like kill something and you got to like... No, worse. You're going to burn things to be able to cook it. You're going to pretend to chop wood. You're going to pretend to lift heavy. Well, now you pretend. Yeah. Like, wait a minute. You lift things and put them down. Let me make it. And you don't build anything with that? Like, no, no, no. Well, why are you doing it? Well, it's good for the body. And you pay somebody to go in there and do that. And then, oh, and then you pay someone to tell you how to do it, right? It's almost embarrassing when you look at it like that. It's, I mean, it, you know, it's just, it's just, this is the environment and the, I guess the success, the rules to success or the keys to success in modern societies is structure and discipline. Well, and the truth is we have to get to the unfortunate part for the generation right now and what we're going through is the dumb part of our species is we have to go to the extreme before we wake the fuck up. Like, we're not the type to like the first- We never, yeah. No, we got to first, we got to first see some real bad shit happen for a couple of decades for us to go like- I think we just went through that. Hopefully you think that, yeah, we- That's what I hit a level. I mean, I really think that that's where we're at with this, you know, and I feel sorry for anybody who's between the ages of kind of five and probably 15 because I feel like you're right in the thick of that group that was like, you know, born with the iPhone and just- And I'm using it so- You realize you've been duped. Yeah, dude. And you know, it's really hard if you guys, I don't know if this is true for you guys, but when I'm really trying to be self-aware of it, like anything that's unconscious, right? Without awareness, right? Some impulsive behaviors. If I take those away, I realize how uncomfortable I can be on my own skin sometimes. So it's like, I'm like sitting here. I don't like being bored. I don't like sitting here. I don't like, you know, not having anything to distract me, which means I got to be stuck with my own thoughts. Some people use food, other people use drugs, other people use- And the phone can be a part of that. And so I find myself having to face the fact that I'm uncomfortable in my own skin a lot of the time. That's just the truth. That's just full disclosure. And so it's like, I got to deal with this now. Like, if I keep my phone over there, I'm sitting here. I'm like, huh, I got this weird anxiety right now. That's right, so the baby's gonna work is dealing with it, right? It's really like leaning into that. I mean, the ultimate test would be to be in line in the DMV without your phone. Well, the ultimate test, you know, talking about like it being like an industry that's going to, I think, explode over the next decade as like all these things start popping up, you know, one to that point is Aaron Rodgers just got back from it. Retreat up in Oregon called- Is it dark? Yeah, it was a dark retreat. And I think he was in there for three to five days in complete darkness. No phones, no tech, no nothing. Buy yourself. But you got lights and shit. No talking. You got lights and shit. Dark. Like, I think that's why it's called- Was it a silent retreat? Yes. You can't talk anymore. No, he's not social. He's not with anybody. He's by himself, too. Oh, yeah. So Jessica did something like that. Yeah, look at what it is, Doug. Like, so I get my facts straight on where- I don't know if I could do that. I don't know if I could do that. That, I have to be around people. That would be torture. I can't deal with myself. Well, yeah, I will imagine that would be the extreme, the extreme training for that, right? If you already have a hard time putting your phone down and being in your own thoughts by yourself in a moment like that. Are you afraid I'd cry or something? So it's four days. Four days. Pitch black room. No phone, no television, no lights, no distraction. Wait a minute, you sit in a pitch black room 24-7? Yes. Yes. So you don't see sunlight either? Sounds like solitary confinement. No, no, no, no. That sounds like not a good idea. That's torturous. Your circadian rhythm and everything, you don't even know what's going on. Yeah, but here's Sal. Look, don't be all alarmist. Four days, bro. Even the most extreme stuff by itself, he has to do that extended period of time. Have you seen the studies on stuff like that? They've done studies on that to see how people's circadian rhythms become and whatever. And I mean, you have to be- Bro, you're not going to convince me that a four-day bender on Mollie in Vegas is any worse. Wow. They're going- Why would you pick that up? Because how many millions of people do that every weekend? Every weekend, there's at least a million people flying back from Vegas who just went on a bender for four days with lots of lights, lots of social activity, lots of drugs. Speaking of that, did you guys know there's a bunch of white powder like just falling down from the sky in like Virginia and like Maryland? Speaking of Mollie and Mollie. What a transition. You're making a powder. I saw this. Okay. So they don't know what it is. They're like staying side and like we don't know what this is. Did they ever figure it out? No, they're still speculating on what- It might be like dust storms, they said potentially from like Texas or- But some people were thinking it might have been from the Ohio thing. Yeah, the Ohio East Palestine crash. Oh my God. And so it's like a mystery. They don't know if this is like super toxic chemicals just like falling down from the sky into their house and their cars and everything. What the? How? So weird. Yeah. Are you looking it up, Doug? I saw an article on this too. Oh, you did? Yeah, I did. I didn't see anything on this. That's weird. So they haven't decided, they haven't figured out what the hell it is. No, it's not cocaine or Mollie though, right? No, it's not the fun powder. Imagine that. Hey, Mollie's flowing in the sky. Wow. People would be happy everybody would be though. Oh, exactly. It's until they died. Depression gone. Dude, you guys want to hear something crazy, crazy? Did you guys hear about this top international model from Korea? Did you hear what happened to her? Have you heard this whole story? No, I'm waiting for the punch line. There's not a punch line. Okay, let me hear. So top international model and social media influencer, Abby Choi, her head was found in a soup pop Monday. What? Boiling soup. They've arrested her ex has been and three of his relatives in connection with the crime. Apparently this in the body was dismembered. What? And it's parts made into soup after a family feud over a luxury property. This is a real thing that happened. What? Yes. This is a like this 28 year old model. Apparently she's really well known and that's what happened. What in the fuck? Did you see the guy from here, the JV? Look, that's them right there, dude. The freaking body was cut apart and the head was in a soup. Brother in law. He's the one who did it? He got arrested over it. They don't, I don't think they convicted. He looks like a kid. Her head was in a soup. Yeah, dude. Bro, that's crazy. Whoa. That's in Hong Kong. Hong Kong, my bad. Yeah, there was like a dispute over some property. That's gangster. Like a feud. Yeah, that's hella gangster. Wow. That's beyond gangster. Yeah. I wonder if that's what it is. It's actually some like mafia type shit. That's what that sounds like for sure. It's not Yakuza, right? Because that's just… Triads in Hong Kong are used to be. Is that what's over there? Yeah. I mean, is that the same? Is that like… That's who Doug used to roll with back in the day. Yeah, Yakuza was me. Doug's got the full tats. I was just inside the neck. I thought those were prison tats. Have you guys ever seen a straight up Yakuza tatted up person in real life? Yeah, so if they're wearing a suit, it's like everywhere you can't see, right? The skin exposed, but like everywhere else is tatted. So apparently that's, Doug, that's supposed to be telltale sign Yakuza, right? Oh, absolutely. I mean, in Japan, I don't know if it's the same way now, but nobody had tattoos except for the Yakuza. Okay, so I… Go ahead. I was just going to say, yeah, so they put it down to their wrist so they can wear a long sleeve shirt. And it also goes up to the neckline. Yes. And then there's no tattoo in the middle here. So you can't see where the shirt's on buttons. Yeah, so they… This is like the most gangster flex ever, right? Yeah, a lot of like these Onsen, which are like a, you know, like hot springs in Japan, they do not allow anyone with tattoos. So if we go to Japan, a few of you guys can't go into those. Is that still a thing? Or have you ever… I think so. I mean, I think there's some that do allow the tattoos. Yeah, see, so I was at the gym and there was a Japanese businessman and he was whatever, he came in and he was changing and he was workout gear. And he takes off, he's right next to me, we're changing. He says, hi to me. Hey, how you doing? Real nice guy. And he takes off his business shirt or whatever and he full on had fully tatted like Yakuza style. And I was like, what? Oh, wow. Sir, are you… And I didn't say shit. I was like, wow, okay. Either he's pretending, but I doubt it who would get so tatted like that. And he was like in his, he looked like he was in his fifties. So, yeah. Where are like mob, mafia, gangster, like cartel? Where is it most prevalent? Mexico, would you say that's probably where it's most prevalent still? Like the cartel? Yeah, just like gangsters. Organized crime like that. Where do you think it's most prevalent? I know. Mexico? Chicago has never left. You know, you thought of it like as the mobsters and the, you know, roaring twenties and all that. But are we, are we counting the evolve? Are we counting corporations working with government too? Or you mean like… Yeah, that's the ultimate gangster. Because they're the most powerful gangsters. Pharmaceutical companies, I would say. Yeah, yeah, but they operate with the law. I'm thinking of people that are like straight up. They're the ones that make the law. Yeah, yeah, so it's a little bit. They are a gang themselves or whatever. But yeah, where would you say it's where it's most prevalent? Yeah, I mean, what do you think of is Mexico because of all the drug cartels? Colombia is the most visible. Yeah, I mean, I mean, Mexico is the first, I think of like, like Mexico just what, two months ago, just shooting up airports. I mean, and nobody doing shit about it. Like that's… Well, they cleaned it all up in New York, right? That was prevalent during the 70s. Like, it was like crazy and then they cleaned it up. In Italy, there's different. Mafia refers to the Sicilian mob. Then there's the Calabresi mob, Sirza Drangheta, I think they're called. Then there's the group from Naples. I can't remember what their name… They have different names for them. People always refer to the mafia and mafia, but mafia is Sicilian. But then different parts like Naples and Southern Italy, not Sicily, has their own. Maybe you can look up what the Naples organized crime is called, but they have their own different names. Funny story. So my ex-wife's family is from a small town in Calabria, which we used to go visit, right? Back in the day. Camorra. Camorra, they're from Naples, right? Okay, so… That's it, right? Yeah, Camorra. So the Drangheta, it's ND, it's a weird name, but their town got raided by the federal police of Italy. And it's this little tiny town in Southern Italy got raided because apparently it was like, that's where the head of the Calabresce mafia was. Oh, wow. Yeah, dude, I used to go visit this town all the time. It's this little beach town that you would never guess. Yeah. How long ago was that? That happened, I want to say 15 years ago. Oh, well, not even that long ago then. No, no, no, it's a big deal. I mean, if you type in the town, you'll probably see. The town is Siderino, S-I-D-E-R. So Justin, your theory is that it's just as prevalent. They just become more sophisticated. Yes, and part of that you see in Vegas, right? Like it used to be all mob run and then they just kind of pulled themselves out. You see corporations, but I think that they invested in a lot of the corporations and the online gambling and stuff like that. I think that they kind of really helped to usher and evolve. And when I was in Chicago, the reason why is because I knew like guys at car dealerships and strip clubs and a lot of ownership was all still mob run. So it was like, it didn't really leave. It just kind of like took on different forms. That feeds into my conspiracy theory around some of these businesses that I see in the U. I mean, I've brought it up on the show before. You see these crazy businesses. It's just like the math doesn't make sense. It's like the square footage of that building in the Bay Area. You always think it's a mob run. Well, you know, too, because of my experience in the cannabis industry and how, you know, I was just in that, what, 10, 10, 15 years ago. And how much I saw it was corrupt at the city level, right? The fact that we were paying contributions towards, you know, officials and stuff like that. And like, you know, cops coming down and you get the heat off, you donating to the whatever cause, you know, and so, you know, just get more sophisticated. Yeah. So I experienced it and we were nobody, right? We're a very small level of what I was dealing with. And I thought, God, if this is still happening to someone like me who's involved in this right now, I'm nobody. Like I can't imagine like how deep this runs. It's got to run much. It just has become way more sophisticated with shell companies and being able to hide behind other people and organizations. It's like, dude, that's what's going on. You found an article on the bus over there? Yeah, I did. So, yeah, this area is your reference to Derano and Calabria. Yeah, pretty wild. Anyway, one more thing, I found just so people understand the level of genetics that professional bodybuilders have. I sent this link, Doug, in the group text, if you want to pull it up. It's a video of Lee Priest when he's 16 years old, 16 years old working out. So just, you just look at the 16 year old kid and you cannot deny that there is an entire different species. He's 16 right there? I'm bodybuilding genetics. That's 16 year old. Lee Priest. You know, when I see that, though, there's a part of me that I feel bad for them that they went down the rabbit hole. Like, look how amazing he looks right there. Like, if you just kept that physique for the rest of your life, but the level of addicted to the body dysmorphia that you have to go into that sport forever and to keep getting bigger and bigger. When you get praised for being a freak and going real crazy with the potential of where you can go. Well, he was getting praised. Imagine looking like that when you're 16. What do you think about your friends are telling you? You remember, you know, who looks, what he looks like, who reminds me of that? You know, we have a friend, Jason Sinatra. Oh yeah. Jason and his brother. Yeah. An all-natural. Yes. Crazy looking. Yes. Crazy genetics. I mean, that's probably, he's probably, I would, 16. Do you think he's natural right there? Yeah, he is. Is he? Yeah, Lee Priest is all natural right there. He, he tells, he's very open about when he started using anabolic. Yeah, I know he, I know he's open about his drug use. I didn't know if he started, you know, you look at that physique and you would swear that dude is on there. Bro, there's no amount of drugs in the world that I could take that would make me look like him when he was 16. That's how crazy his genetics are. Yeah, he had the best arm. I mean, yeah, it's most of these bodybuilders. Yeah. You'd find. Oh, shout out, dude. I have a shout out for you guys. Who? This guy's a little bit of a prick, but you should follow him. I already know what you're going to say. Hello, thank you. I already know what you're going to say. I like how you're presenting this. My bump to Stefano. Back on Instagram. Back on Instagram. Maybe a moment. So make sure you get in there and talk to him while you can. So we've tried to. It's like Sal Light. Yeah, it's Sal Light. I like that. We reigned him in a little bit, you know, said maybe half the memes that you were doing before. We slowed down a little bit. Let's try and keep you on here for business reasons. I'm going to tell you all the secrets of the cabals that run the world. Yeah. I'm going to let you guys know what happened. Yeah, if you're not following. That's on his Twitter. Mind pump to Stefano. You can actually find Sal. He is back on Instagram. Hey, check this out. There's a company we work with called Organify. They make plant-based superfoods and protein powders for health, wellness, longevity, and athletic performance. Go check this company out. Go to Organify.com. That's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I dot com forward slash mind pump. Use the code mind pump and get 20% off. All right. Here comes the rest of the show. Our first caller is Madeline from Washington. Hi, Madeline. How can we help you? Hey guys, this is so cool. You guys have been such a staple in my life and your program for so long. I, wow. Thank you for taking my question. I appreciate the support. Cool. So I'll dive right back in. Just a little background about myself. I've been lifting for about 16 years and doing your programs for about two. They've been super helpful. But I recently started working on getting my metabolism up to about 27 to 2800 calories. And I thought that was a good place to dive into a cut from. So I dropped down to 21 to 2200 calories. And I noticed over about a week or two, there was a gradual increase in like some irritability and some depression, which is just not really like me. It was kind of out of character. So I was just wondering if you, have you, have you seen this before and other clients? Have you heard about this? And I will also say that I am feeling a little bit better. I did a refeed for a couple of days. And then when I went back to drop into my calories at 21 to 2200 again, it was right around the same time that I was traveling for work and I got sick. So my movement and lifting were down. I haven't really done much since. So I've been essentially not in a deficit for the last week. I've been feeling a lot better. But I'm planning to dive right back into training next week, hopefully if I'm feeling better and increase my movement again. So I'm just a little worried that I'm going to go back and start feeling a little depressed again. And I was just wondering if maybe I should approach this differently as I dive in or if you have any insights there. So I'm all ears. Yeah, good question. Too much, too fast maybe. Well, there could be a few different reasons. There could be a few different reasons. But you, you tried this once and you felt that way. You haven't repeated this to see if it happens again. No, but I'm planning to once I start recovering from this cold. Okay. So this, this could be a situation. And I think I'm using the term right auspicious correlation. Is that the right word, Doug? Maybe look that up. Where sometimes people make correlations with things that are not necessarily connected. For example, you know, I've seen funny charts that show like when the price of bacon goes up by 15 cents that the stock market drops 20%. And I want to make these connections that aren't really connected. They have nothing to do with each other. But if you look at just those two things, they seem to be connected. So you've only done this once. There could be a lot of different reasons why you might have felt irritable and depressed that had nothing to do with the cut. Now cutting can sometimes do this, but because your calories are pretty high and you only drop down to 2100, it's unlikely that it came from the cut. Now I'm not saying it's not possible. Yeah, you're in a healthy place still. Yeah, but it's unlikely. Now I've seen people get irritable and depressed from calorie drops when the calories get really low. So when I see people drop down to 1,300, 1,200, 1,000 or lower, then you can start to see this start to happen. But your calories are pretty good. So it could be it could be what you're taking out of your diet. That's put that's potential. For example, like if you took Justin and you put him on a cut and you cut cheese as the main thing. I'm pretty sure he would go through. I think he would go through a little bit of depression if that was where his calories were restricted from. So where did you cut from? Did you cut mostly carbs, mostly fat, a little bit of both? Like did you take a favorite food out or a meal that you normally eat consistently that starts your day? Was there anything like that? Yeah, it was a lot of mostly carbs is what I cut out. My fats and protein are still quite high. And before I went into the cut, I also cut out sugars and things like that. So maybe that's related. Yeah, good. By the way, it's called a spurious correlation. I don't want to sound like an idiot. Make sure I fix that one. So this is spurious. Yeah, I mean, some people, I found this when I was coming from really high carb is originally when I reduced the carbs, I didn't like how I felt. So some people just do better on a little bit higher carbohydrates. And so maybe when you mess around with the cut, you manipulate the macros. So maybe take a little bit of fat next time and a little bit of carbs versus mostly carbohydrates and see if you feel better. That's exactly where I was going to go if it was the cut. Did you go to no carbs? What did your carbon take go from and what did it go to? So right now I'm about just under 200 carbs a day, which it feels not bad. But then again, I'm feeling good because I'm not moving a whole ton. So I'm not sure. I'm not sure where I was at before. I just, I cut it out before I started diving into that. Okay, so when you did the cut, you went down to about 200 grams of carbs or did you go down to like 50? Yeah, I went down to about 200. Okay, so it's probably not the carbs then. Sometimes when people go like really low carb, especially if their sodium intake isn't where it should be because it could pull water out of your body, that'll make people feel a particular way. Now, here's another reason why cutting calories can sometimes cause the feelings that you have. We have lots of connections to food and different relationships to food. And there's a very strong psychological connection to, for some people, to reducing or restricting or what they may feel like is restricting. So you may take someone, and depending on the relationship they have with food, now they know that they're restricting, they know that they're removing, and that alone starts to make them feel anxious and anxiousness can lead to irritability and then irritability can lead to depression. So that could also be the case. I've seen also hydration and sodium. Yeah, so that's a possibility. So I mean, I don't know if you have tried using like LMNT, but using like a packet of LMNT and then making sure that you're drinking adequate water and see if that has anything to do with it. I've seen clients before when they've gone on a cut not realize like how much their water intake is kind of low already and now they've just reduced a bunch of their sodium and the combination of not being hydrated, not enough sodium in a diet could make them feel like that. So that's also a possibility that you could look into. I mean, obviously we're kind of guessing at a lot of things. We don't have all the details, but those are all possibilities. There's a host of psychological factors, I'm sure that went into this, especially if you're not feeling good and you got a cold and we kind of stack things a lot of times when we're not feeling good. And then that sort of plays games with us in terms of like how we perceive what we're doing. And so if you're like actively trying to cut and go in that direction and then you're not feeling well, so we sort of associate those two together. So I don't know. I mean, again, this is the first time it happens. So run it again, it would be interesting to see. I would 100% test it again. Madeline, if you don't mind me asking, what's your history with your relationship with food? Have you ever dealt with any disordered eating or challenging relationships with food? Okay. So it's unlikely that the cut was what caused the way you felt. If your protein intake was high, fat intake was adequate, those are both essential. Your calories didn't go down to some low, crazy low number. The cut wasn't huge. It's not like you went from 2,700 calories to 1,200 calories or 1,500 calories, which would be a big drop in terms of percentage of calories. It's more likely that it was something else. So I would try this again and see if that happens again. Now, if it does happen again, because we're not going to be on the phone or on Zoom talking to each other, if this does happen again, if it does happen again, then my recommendation would be to do a smaller cut. So rather than going down 500 or 600 calories, try 300 calories and see if that does the trick. But I'm going to predict it's probably going to be okay. I don't think it was the calorie cut that caused those feelings that seem to be strong enough for you to even want to call in and talk to us about it. So try it again and see what happens. Okay, yeah. Thank you. I hope you're right. That would be awesome. And I'll keep an eye on the sodium as well. No problem. Madeline, I want to give you... What programs of ours you have? Would you like one on the house? I have a ton of your programs. I think MAPS 15, I've had my eye on that one, would be awesome. Send that over to you. Okay, thank you. Yeah, we appreciate the support. Thank you. Okay, thanks, guys. You guys. So this is a really good example of the answer to this question would have been very different had she said she went from 1500 calories to 1000 calories. Yeah, an unhealthy type of thing. Then I would have been like, oh, it might have definitely been... Totally different state at that point. Completely. But because she had got her food intake to... I mean, that's a really good... Yeah, she's in a good place. Chloric intake for a female. She's been working out for a long time. I asked her the question about food relationship history because if you have a history of disordered eating or kind of challenging relationship to food, well, I mean, any perceived restriction can cause those feelings with somebody who has that history. But I have seen the water and sodium thing, though. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, that was exactly where I was going to go, but you got there first, 100%. Yeah, so if she... If you haven't tried this and you're listening to this, Madeline, I would do that. I'd invest in... And you don't need to get elementy. You could just throw some salt and some water, but I mean, I like how many... I mean, they're like 1,000 milligrams of sodium. And it tastes good. Yeah, and it tastes good. And it's just easy. By the way, that's an easy thing to realize if you're like, oh my God, I'm feeling irritable and depressed again. Go drink the, you know, chug a water with elementy and you'll know within 30 minutes. Yes, that's why that's a cool one, right? It's like, it's that simple. I remember I was getting headaches. And then I remember I had dill pickle. I had like a big depot. And I was like, why is every time I had this dill pickle, I feel good. And I'm like, oh, shit, I still don't even take... Might be another reason. Our next caller is Johann from Germany. Johann, what is happening, my friend? We're going down. I love those glasses, by the way. I think it's awesome. Are you got the Juve light going right now? What is that? That and those are the donkey blued up lockers, which you guys almost make fun of. Oh, yeah. Because it's probably... Well, don't fall asleep on us right here. Yeah. All right, go ahead and ask your question, my friend. We'll help you out. Probably trying to be quick. So first of all, we're really going to say, well, thank you, as everyone says, for all the amazing information you put around fitness. Thank you. Well, health, fatherhood, life, like everything. And also a massive thank you to everyone on your team that normally is behind the scenes. So not just Doug and Andrew, but also everyone whose names I don't know. And then most importantly, I want to thank you for the personal impact you had on me, or by the impact you had on me personally by introducing me to both Jason Phillips and MCI as well as Stephen Cabral and his IHP program, which I'm both running at the moment, which are amazing. And I've mathematically leveled out my coaching abilities and skills. Hell, yeah. That's a thread. Yeah. So first of all, lots of stuff to be grateful for. And now as promised, my question goes, which is around implementing D-LOG weeks in your programs, because despite listening to every single episode for the last three years and hearing those phrases like, do they leave someone work? Do you list the most amount of change at them? Or to what's the other one? And that's a difference between what your body can tolerate and what's optimal cell. I still can't get really over the fact that I just want to go all-in in every workout and really overdo intensity most of the time. So when I ran the RGB bond war, I didn't really make any progress when I was doing the low rep phase in aesthetic compared to when I was running anabolic in the beginning in terms of my strength levels. And when you've done recently introduced the anabolic advanced, I was like, oh, D-LOG weeks sounds like that might actually be the solution for me. So my question is, how would you schedule and then also design D-LOG weeks in your programs in terms of reps, sets, weights, exercises compared to the normal program in order to allow for the super conversation to happen? Yeah, yeah, cool question. Very good question. Yeah, yeah, good question. I want to say this to you and also to anyone else that's listening. Most people get the comments we often get on our programs in all the programs, especially the core ones, right? Maps Anabolic, Math Performance and Maps Aesthetic. A lot of people say, Maps Anabolic, I got such great results. And then we'll hear sometimes people say, with Aesthetic, I felt over-trained or burned out. Aesthetic is very high volume. And for a lot of people, it's going to be too much volume. This is a bodybuilder type routine. Anabolic is appropriate for probably 85% of the people watching and listening, meaning it's not that you can't handle more, it's just, it's appropriate, it's going to give you the best types of results. Okay, so let's get into D-LOG weeks for a second. D-LOG weeks are phenomenal, but it's not going to solve the problem of consistently doing too much. It's like a Band-Aid and it could be a good Band-Aid and it will cause your body to start progressing again, but it's not going to fix the problem, which is when you're training, you may be just applying too much too often. So I'll answer your question first, but then I'll tell you what I think you should, what else you should probably do. With D-LOG weeks with our programs, you're probably going to do great doing one D-LOG week after every single phase. So after phase one, you do one week of a D-LOG week. After phase two, you do another D-LOG week. After phase three, you do another D-LOG week before you move to the next program. What does a D-LOG week look like? This will make it easy for most people, 50%. 50% volume, 50% intensity, 50% frequency. All three of those, not one, not two, but all of them. So look at your total volume, total frequency, total intensity, cut everything in half. So if you're working out three days a week or four days a week, you're going to work out one or two days that week. If you're doing 10 sets for a body part, you're doing five sets for the body part. If you're lifting 50 pounds for 10 reps, you're going to lift 25 pounds for 10 reps. So it's 50, 50, 50. That's what a D-LOG week looks like. It's not a workout at all. You're basically going to the gym and moving. Your body through full range of motion, doing some exercises, and really you're facilitating recovery. You're not trying to do anything other than facilitate recovery. Now, for you, what I'm also going to recommend is this. When you follow a program like Aesthetic, which is again, very high volume type program, and this is for anybody listening, you're probably going to get great results if you just cut the volume down by a third. So however many sets we recommend, do... One less. Yeah, do one less. If it's three sets, do two. If it's four sets, do two or three type of deal. So look at your total sets, cut them down by a third. Boom. The program is probably going to be appropriate now for you. So you can follow any of our programs. If you're finding that you're over-training often on our more advanced type programs or high volume type programs, we'll then cut everything down by a third. You still follow the same programming. Everything's the same. You're going to feel amazing. Now, you're following Maps Antibolic Advanced. I probably need to say this to someone like you. In the program, there's an optional third exercise or an optional third set to failure or whatever. Don't do the optional third set or third whatever. In fact, we actually got in a debate here in the studio over whether or not I should even add it because we know people end up doing the max that we put in there. Most, the vast majority of people were better off not doing the optional extra. So do the, you know, how it's laid out and don't do the optional with that. And then you'll probably get phenomenal results with that program. So a couple of things to add. One, just so you know, that challenge maybe never ends. We're sitting here on this podcast talking about it. We still have this challenge ourselves. So when you like to work out and you enjoy lifting weights and you've seen great progress in the time that you're doing it, we tend to do that ourselves. Like we're always skirting those lines. And so it'll be a probably lifelong challenge of always kind of like motivating yourself to push and then learning how to pull back when you need to. Sal gave you some really basic recommendations on the 50%. I think that's really cut and dry and you could pretty much apply that formula to any type of a workout. And that's a perfect D-load week. I like to take a D-load week and make my client and individualize it. Meaning if I was training you and you were complaining about certain things, like my hips are, my hip, my left hip is nagging me all the time. I don't want it right after a phase one workout or that. Or, you know, I'm really stiff here. Or, you know, I would do like a week of actually like, since you have this, all the RGB bundle, like a performance, the mobility days. I, one week of like just mobility work would be phenomenal and specific to the areas that you need to be addressing. Like I just threw out the hip thing. I have no idea if that's an issue for you or not, but it's common, right? Somebody, they squat heavy, deadlifting heavy. Also, they start to notice hip stuff going on. And so instead of just following anabolic by 50% on, I would say, hey, this week we're doing all mobility work. And we're going to focus on 90 90s and your combat stretch and lizard with rotation and some scorpions. And like, I'm going to, I'm going to pick a handful of mobility moves and you're basically going to do that all week long. Maybe I let you sprinkle a little bit of like a focus session work in there, some cable work for your arms or something like that. That maybe, maybe you don't have any issues in your upper body. It's just kind of lower body stress or low back type stuff. So maybe I let you do some shoulder work and some buys and tries and do that type of work on cable machines for that week and then all mobility. Like that could be a deload week for you and learning to tailor it to the area and no one knows better than you, right? Unless you had a coach or a trainer, like what you neglect, like that you know you should probably do more of and I'm just going to guess that it's probably mobility recovery type, active recovery stuff, since that's typically what most people neglect. And so I would build a week of deload around that stuff. Yeah, I liked that a lot. I was going to reiterate the same kind of stuff in terms of like really specifically targeting things that have been talking to you within your program. Like you'll notice like certain tightness in your shoulders, your hips and you know addressing that in the deload week is the best time to do that. Adding in unilateral training is a really good way to address that as well. So that way you can also reduce down the load and really like individualize and specifically work on one side versus the other to make sure that they're both functioning properly. So you know just being a little more specific with it but yes like cutting that overall volume and that intensity down. What programs do you own? Currently I'm in B and then I also got polypt and splint. Although I haven't started those yet because I didn't feel ready for them in terms of the intensity. I also got Prime and Prime Pro. Oh okay good, you do have Prime Pro. So Prime Pro, you know another one that would be worth maybe would throw your way is Maps 15. Dude, if you did a cycle of Maps 15 I bet you'd love it. Do the 20-minute version? Yeah, your body would probably do well on that. Yeah, do the advanced version and I bet you would. I bet your strength would go through the roof on that. I like that. That would absolutely be amazing. I mean I love working out so doing that every day and just reducing the time would be phenomenal. So thank you so much. Yeah, you got it man. Send that over to and you know what if you find yourself wanting to do more or spend more time in the gym or the workout do it mobility. That's it. So follow Maps 15 as it's laid out for the 20-minute version or the advanced version and then if you find yourself wanting to do more or be in the gym longer just completely direct that all to mobility stuff from Prime Pro or from performance mobility. Yeah, I mean with the priming up from that I normally do I also spend more time anyways. Okay, cool. Good, good. Yo Han, thanks for calling in man. Yeah, yeah. Can I say one more thing for any new listeners that might be listening? Yeah. Because recently you mentioned that in the beginning people usually just go for the single topic episodes or skip the entrance and just watch or listen to the questions which I also did but the more I listen to you the better you get. Like the more I really appreciate the interest because you always not just share entertaining stuff but also some good nuggets for coaches like me or just around life. So yeah, really appreciate it. And what definitely recommend to just stick into the podcast and making sure you keep listening. Thank you, Yo Han. It's a great compliment. I appreciate that. Thank you, man. Absolutely. You got it. Yeah, that's so funny. You could pretty much divide most people who work out into two categories. I always do too little and I always end up doing too much. Yeah, I'll overdo it. Oops. You know, and it's challenging. You're absolutely right. You said we still do. I mean I... We all do. It's one of the... It's also one... I mean Doug and I were the other day were talking afterwards and I was having this same conversation with Katrina because she's just like, man, you have this ability to switch and get in shape so quick and fast. I'm like, you know what? That is years and years and years of not doing it well and really honing in on knowing how to apply just the right amount of intensity and to change my... You know your body at a new level. Yeah. And honestly, it's really crazy. It's very little. That's why you... I do... I love hearing him repeat what we talk about with the, you know, doing as little as possible to elicit the most change and then what your body can tolerate is different than what's optimal for it because that is the game in this. The game is learning where and we're all unique and different is what's the least amount I can do inside the gym and with my nutrition to elicit more change and I just want to tweak that every week just a tiny bit and we are so tempted because we get the hype and the motivation and it's like, I'm making change now. I'm going to do this now. And it's like, ah, you know, go on. We're so driven by momentum. We're such momentum driven creatures and so like to be all in is sort of like a natural instinct that you're either all in or you're all out. Well, and I think it's because and I mean, correct me if you guys disagree with this is that most things in life do reward you for that extra effort and work. You know, the old saying of like you get what you put in, right? The attitude of like, if I work extra hard at work, I typically get paid more or we make more money. Like if I do, if I work hard at my relationship, I normally see the fruits of that. But this isn't like that. It's rare. It's different. It's unique. And because of that, you're limited by your body's ability to adapt. Yes. It's not like everything else where more is better, harder or pushing or doing. It's like, there's a sweet spot. It was true if our bodies had this unlimited ability to recover and adapt. This would be easy. I would just tell people, oh, here's more and more and more and more progress. Yeah, you'll crush. You'll crush. Here's a seven hour workout and you're going to get incredible results. Doesn't work that way. Our next caller is David from Australia. David, what's happening, man? How can we help you? Hi, guys. I just wanted to say I'm really grateful for the opportunity to come on and actually ask my question. It's 2 a.m. where I'm at. So I'm a little nervous as well. So I'll do my best. Appreciate the call, man. Yeah, I just wanted to say thank you initially. So I started listening to you guys late last year, probably around November. And I just started training in October. So sort of what happened over time was that I was learning things from lots of different places. And basically now I just look for you guys. So I'll check out your old YouTube videos or I'll have a question. And I'll just google Mind Pump at the end of it and be like, I'm sure you guys have answered it already. And that improvement has really helped me with not just my physical fitness, but then my mental health and my ability to be present in other parts of my life. So a big thank you to you guys for all the effort you put in. Huge compliment. Thank you, man. Yeah. And so my question is around sort of the topic of intensity and in particular, moderating intensity if you enjoy training hard as well. So to give you a bit of context, so over the past few weeks, I've been pushing myself and sometimes I've been a bit over eager on upping the weight. Sometimes I'll fail on compound movements, mid sets. I won't finish all the reps. I also have some pretty intense ADHD. So one of the things I've noticed is that when I focus and get in the zone, I don't get the signal that I'm fatigued or I'm at my limit until quite late. So I'm sort of the guy who always thinks there's one more rep in the tank or there's just a bit more juice to give regardless of whether it's there or not. So my actual question is sort of a two-parter. So the first part is what are some cues or some information that could help me figure out when I'm at my limit in terms of intensity? And then the follow up to that is when I've realized I've hit my limit, what are then some techniques that I can use to help me moderate the intensity for the rest of my training sessions so I have a more sustainable workout? I love this question. So fellow ADD person over here. So I can completely relate to what you're talking about when it comes to intensity and when you're getting that space in that zone. It's a superpower sometimes, but sometimes it's definitely something that can be detrimental. Okay, so here's a few tips that have helped me with this exact issue. Number one, you want to practice what you're talking about when you're not in the space or in the zone because it has to be something that you... This is a skill that you have to learn and in that space or when you're in the zone, trying to learn it when you're in that space is going to be almost impossible. So what does this look like? Before you do your workout, maybe the day before or a week before, I used to find that I was better at this the further I was away from the workout. So if it was a week before I was much better at this at planning this than it was the day before and definitely day of or in the workout. In the workout, forget it, everything out the window. But if I could do this the week before, when I felt calm and logical, I would write out what I was going to do. And then in the workout, all I would tell myself is, I'm going to stick to what I wrote, regardless of how great I feel, regardless of how much more I think I can do. So what that looks like is when I'm in that logical calm space and I'm not in that space of like in that zone and whatever, and I'll say, okay, last time I squatted, I did X amount of weight for this many reps. It would be, it's probably wise to stick to this weight for this many reps. So I'm going to do that. And I'm doing it in a state of mind where I can probably trust myself. Then when I get into the workout, I have that paper or I have it written down somewhere. I look at this and I say, okay, I'm going to trust myself because I know when I was in that space, I was quite logical and not feeling the way I am now, which is like, I can do anything. So I'm looking at this and it says to do 10 reps with 120 pounds. So then that's all I'm going to do. So I get into the bar, I do my 10 reps and I'm like, oh my God, I want to do five more. No, no, no, I'm going to stick to exactly what I wrote down. So that right there helps a lot. And then what it does is as you practice this, you start to get used to the feeling of doing the appropriate amount of intensity when you're in the zone. So this is a practice. And the more you do this, the more often you do this, the better you'll get at recognizing what the appropriate amount of intensity is when you're in that particular space. Does that make sense to you? Yeah, that does make sense. I guess it also raises, well, because that sort of technique is something I have to do with like lots of things. Like I have to just hold myself accountable to a plan. Correct. I stopped listening because it sounded like so much shit. So I don't know. That sounds like a lot of stuff. Here's, I think all of us in this room have been challenged with this. I think it's actually more common than you think that people want to do more. We're just having this conversation right after the last guest. It's a very common thing. You would be surprised how great of results you would get never even coming even close to failure. Leaving two, three, four in the tank. Yesterday I was deadlifting. I've been deadlifting in a long time. I started with 135. I got to 225 and 225 felt heavy. Now I'm strong enough to know that I could, if I wanted to go 315 and above, no problem. But I could feel that the weight was challenging enough that I'm getting work. And so there was no need to throw another 90 to 100 more. I could do 90 to 100 more pounds for sure with the eight reps that I was working with. And I didn't go. I just stayed at that weight because I know I don't need to. Here's a challenge with that, Adam, is that I think you're selling to David why he should moderate his intensity. I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, David, I think you know that. I think the challenge is when you're in that space, you do it anyway. Am I correct? Yeah, yeah, that's right. So I'll give you an example of something that might happen. So I'll use deadlifting as an example. So let's say, for example, I'm doing a few sets of deadlifts. Let's say I'm doing like a five by five or something like that. I come in, I'm feeling good. I do my warmup. I do my first two sets. And I feel like real strong. I feel like top of the world. And I'm like, maybe it's time. I think maybe I'm ready. I'm feeling good. So I'll do my third set. And maybe I'll see if I can add an additional rep or I'll see if I can up the weight. And then I go for it. And I go, that's a bit too hard. And then what then will happen from that is I'll go, okay, that was too hard. I'll go back to the weight and the scheme I was previously doing. But now I've gassed myself out, which sort of leads into that other question of saying, well, oh, okay, well, what is the best option for me from this point? And I've done that a few times. So David, so again, you were about to say something before we got cut off. You said that you have to do that with a lot of things, where you plan and you set yourself up with kind of structure. Let me ask you a question. Why do you end up, why do you do that with a lot of things? Because I end up either doing way too much or doing way too little. Okay, so you know yourself. You know that you get caught up in the moment. Is that accurate? Okay. Yeah, that's the aspect. Okay, so what you've done with other stuff, which sounds to me like that's a strategy that's worked for you, is what you should do with your workouts. Just what I said earlier. So I know Adam said it sounds like too much. I'm telling you, if you practice ahead of time, write down what you're going to do. And then the only thing you have to tell yourself in your workout is, I'm going to do what I wrote down, nothing more, nothing less. I'm going to do exactly what I wrote down in the workout. Do that. Now what'll happen over time, which is now the place that Adam is talking about, because he's been working out for a long time, so have I, over time, you can make these decisions because you've practiced and you've developed a skill. Because I guarantee you, 15 years ago, that was not a skill that Adam had. It was not a skill that I had. I did the exact same thing you did. I get caught up in the moment and I would lift too much. And it took me a long time, 43 years old, 44 now. And now I can do this, but I've practiced over time. So this is a, you just started working out in October. You got to develop the skill and it's not going to happen in the moment. What'll happen in the moment is you'll keep doing this over and over and over. Maybe it'll learn in 10 years, but if you want to figure this out faster, write out what you're going to do before, maybe days before, and then just stick to that. No matter how great you feel, just stick to that. Over time, you'll end up developing that skill and what'll reinforce that is the results that you get. Then you'll be like, oh my God, I'm feeling great. Oh my God, this is amazing. And then that'll reinforce the development of this particular skill. But if you don't plan ahead of time with someone like you, this isn't for everybody by the way, but this is specifically for you. You mentioned your intense ADHD. You mentioned how this is something you have challenged with other things. If you don't practice developing a skill ahead of time, you're going to constantly get lost in the moment. And it's going to be very, very difficult for you to learn from. Have you been bringing a workout log with you and writing and tracking your sets and how much weight that you've been putting up for each rep? Yeah. So actually, I just finished the first phase of MAPS Anabolic. So I did the pre-phase as well. So I'm sort of tracking along with that. And I try to keep my sets and reps consistent. And then I sort of play with the weight and see how that goes. How often do you kind of push it? So if you're running it just as it is and you're kind of tracking and noticing what weight you started out with, when do you start kind of pressing it? Maybe like... Gosh, it's hard to say off the top of my head. I would say maybe like every... I let like a whole week pass and then a week or a week and a half and see how I feel and then... That sounds good. Yeah, okay. I'm just trying to see how you're like kind of perceiving this, when to kind of push, when to kind of just track and see what your ability is for that day. And just yeah, the overall planning itself, it sounds like is, you know, this is going to be beneficial for you at least for that knowledge of like, this is kind of my base and this is where I am with this left. And when to kind of like push and pull with that. That's... This is just something you learn as you build and develop more experience being in the gym. What's the negative feedback that you're getting from actually this? I don't even think we've covered that. Like we're just talking about strategies to get you to not do this mentally, but why has this become a bad thing for you? Are you finding aches and pains? Are you seeing or are you regressing and getting weaker? Like what are... Because I didn't even think to mention like you could, this could be okay. Yeah, yeah. So really the main thing for me is trying to build that skill more than anything. Like in terms of my results, I've been able to see like a consistent increase in strength over time. So really for me it's more about trying to understand and build that skill and then also try to sort of factor it into the rest of my training because the past like I think probably a couple of weeks or so in particular what I've started to pick up on is that that sort of like deadlift scenario I mentioned where I'll push too hard early and then I'm just exhausted for the rest and I'm like, oh I wish I could avoid this so I could be more consistent. So another smart approach. By the way, you're going to make gains with a lot of mistakes right now because you're so new also. So a strategy when I have a new lifter because we always think of adding more weight to the bar as a way to progressively overload. So maybe when you plan this out like Sal is saying and you've decided you're going to do this and then you get in that moment and you're like, man, I definitely got more in me. And I want to do that. But Sal, don't add weight, slow down the tempo. Yeah, good advice. So when I have a new lifter who's wanting to get good at technique and that's where they really want to focus anyways, when they are tempted to add more weight, don't add more weight, slow the rep down. You can make 135 pounds. And that's what I did with the 225. I don't even think you're making a mistake though, even just kind of pushing for that because you're not going to know. That's why I asked that too. I was like, it doesn't sound like you're- This is just data. These are data points. So then you come back at your next workout. You know that like you pushed it a bit too early the last time. You just have to track that. So that way you don't make that same mistake. Yeah, and perfecting your form is so important. I mean, what Adam is saying is so valuable because because you're new, when something feels like you can add 10 pounds, you're actually going to get more value out of making the next set look even more perfect. Especially with things like deadlift and squat. Literally, I'm in this 20-something years and I'm deadlifting yesterday. I know I can increase the weight, but I also know like I haven't deadlifted in a while and that's such a technical exercise. Like I just decided to slow my tempo down. Make it look even better. Yeah, and just perfect how I feel it, how everything's firing. Like it just, and man, that made, and I'm sore shit today. So it totally made that 225 more than effective as far as sending a signal to adapt. So instead of, you know, adding weight, when you get tempted like that again, just slow the reps down. Don't add more weight. Just slow the tempo down. Take your negative, add an extra two seconds to your negative and watch what happens. Yeah, or, you know, like what I like to do is I like to think of like, all right, let me ground better with my feet. Let me get my positioning even better. Was I tight in my lats while I was pulling this? Was my form absolutely perfect? Let me try and perfect it even more. Pause at the squeeze. Yeah, like those are all ways to progress the lift without having to add more weight to the bar. And for beginners, I would- Invaluable. I would argue that it's more valuable than adding weight to the bar. Absolutely. That's exactly what I used to do with clients. When we first started and they told me, oh, this is light, Adam. I'd say slow it down. Yes. They'd want to add weight. I said, no, slow it down. Like, let's do all that first before we could always add weight down the road. Like, let's slow down and focus on the squeeze and resisting the negative and like, you know, pausing in the contraction. Like, I mean, there's so many things that we can do with the technique of a sows point gripping with the floor and thinking of the position of your neck and your head and your core and like, there's so many other parts with a, especially a technical lift like the deadlift that I can progress you in without ever adding load to the bar and you will see progression. You'll get better. You'll get stronger. You'll build muscle and we don't have to add, you know, 15, 20 more pounds to the bar. Yeah. And then the other part of your question was, you know, what if you do make that mistake? How do I get back into the workout? Don't go back to the weight that you- Don't go back to the weight that you had before. Go to something lighter. To reduce it. Yeah. Because when you fail with a weight, you fry, your CNS gets a little bit more fried. So it's not going to give you the same output. So you can't always go back to the weight that you had on the bar before. So let's say you went from 175 to 225. 225 was too much. Now you're exhausted. Go down to 155. Not to 175. Does that make sense? Right. Yeah. Yeah. That does make sense. And I wanted to ask about that a little bit. So I think I can sort of guess what the answer is based on the direction you guys are going in. But would that if I do that, so let's say that exact scenario is I dropped the weight below where I was at before. Is that just purely an indication of the fatigue that I'm now feeling? Like it doesn't have any effect on the quality of the workout or the results or anything like that? No. If anything, that's now you've saved the workout. Yeah. I've done it to the point where in the stronger you get, the more this is even, the more of an impact this has. If I'm doing a full body workout and I start with, say, squats or deadlifts and I do what you did where I went through a weight down. The rest of the workout is easy. Not just the rest of the deadlift workout or the rest of the squat workout. Oh, right. The rest of the entire workout is easier. And it's not because I'm like, ah, scratch this workout. I've lost, I saved the workout and I still progress. Yeah. No, that's really good. That's really good advice because I think I've started heading in that direction. Like, so with squats is one example. One of the things I'm doing with that now is that because I'm fairly tall, so I'm like just above six foot. When I started learning to squat, my range of motion like sucked because like I had to like move a lot. My balance isn't great. That sort of thing. So now that I sort of feel confident with the movement, I've actually been lowering the weight a bit and trying to focus on depth and my ability to like hold it, get out of the hole like safely, all that sort of stuff. Perfect. Great choice. That's it, 100%. You must listen to a great part. I know you're on track. Yeah, I did say at the start that I stopped learning from other places just from you guys. So if you didn't like that answer. David, what maps program are you following right now? I'm following Anabolic right now. I bought the the new year bundle. So I have like Anabolic performance and aesthetic keyed up to go. You're set, man. You're good. Yeah. Right on. Yeah. Good job, man. Yeah. Thank you. You got it, mate. Thanks for calling. Yeah. Keep it up. Thank you very much. You know, good question. Yeah. But you know what? We just went into like answering it. And I'm like, I didn't actually hear a real problem with that. But yeah, he's so new to lifting. So I had to like kind of bring it back. I get a little, it's funny because I, he listening to him say his reason for it when you ask, because I thought it was a great question. You asked him, like, how great of a position is he in as a beginner to realize? Yeah. You know, it's because he's listening to our show. I think. Oh no, his mindset is perfect. Yeah. For him to be like, well, I just want to learn this skill. Oh my God. I wish I had that mindset as a kid working out. I would have gotten so much better results. Yeah. A bit of overthinking though. It is. Yeah. I think like to Justin's point, like, you know, that's kind of, that's, I mean, this happens to me still this day where I put a little too much on the bar, realize, oh, that was too much. Then I go back the other way. And it's like, you know. But I mean, I'll tell you what, you know, when he mentioned his, how he feels, then he said, oh yeah, I have to do that with a lot of things. I know what that's, I understand what that's like. There's a, it's an on or off switch and on is completely on. And he seems very analytical. The only way to manage it in some cases is to follow a plan or structure that you set out beforehand. Because when you're in the moment, it's almost as if you can't trust your feelings. Just go too much. And I don't typically recommend tracking like every single weight and set and all that. But I think in the very beginning, in this instance too, because he's so analytical, it's going to help him. Totally. Our next caller is Justin from Washington. What's up, man? How can we help you? What's going on guys? How you doing? Good. Stabbed it. Sweet. Happy to be on the podcast with you guys. I just wanted to say thanks for all the awesome content you guys have created. I've listened to just about every episode. I found Mind Pump in December of 2017. And then I went back and listened to all of them pretty much. So. Oh wow. Oh man. Legit, legit fan then. That's cool. Yeah. Sparkly Tanks and everything. So I'll just go with my question here. My goal and my question is, I love to race my dirt bike and enduro hair scrambles, which is an hour and a half race between track and trail. And years past, I've been good enough shape to, you know, ride the whole race at a decent pace, but not really push myself and just kind of make it without getting out of control. But this year I want to be able to ride as hard as I can the entire time, you know, and push myself without getting hurt. So my heart rate is typically between 160 and 180 for the entire race, depending on how many times I crash. It spikes way high when I eat it. So then the races are spaced out three to four, yeah, three weeks to a month apart. So I have a lot of time between them. And then there's eight races that start up on March 18th. So here pretty soon. I'm currently in phase two of performance. I add the OCR rice bucket to increase my hand strength. And I'm looking to hit the first race while in phase four. I'm a little behind, but I'm about to switch into phase three of performance. And then after that, my plan was to run maps strong to keep my work capacity up if that works. So my main question is during this in season, if you call it, what should my training look like to get my full potential during these weekend races? I ride almost every weekend in the trails to keep my body used to riding. But I like to see if I could build my muscle endurance stamina so I could ride to my full potential, basically kick my friend's ass. You're on the right track. I'll tell you that. Yeah, so hold on. So in season, you're practicing every weekend? Is this Saturday and Sunday? Yeah, when I can, life doesn't get in the way. Okay. But I try to go at least once a weekend. Okay. And then when you go out and do your riding, how long? Because a lot of people don't realize, so this is good for people who knows, well, I trained some dirt bike racers. And this, when I first trained them, I had no idea just how much stamina and endurance is required to do this. It's insane. A lot of people don't know that, but it's pretty crazy. How long are you practicing for when you're going off on your own on the weekends? So we typically will ride for, I don't know, an hour and a half, take 10, 15 minute breaks, sometimes drink a beer, which is not always ideal. Okay. And then you ride more. So I mean, you ride for basically, I don't know, we're usually on the bikes for four or five hours. Okay. Well, okay. So my question, my answer would be different depending on, you know, what you just said. So you're riding once a week or so in season, except for when you're actually doing the competition, which is when, you know, when you're doing that long race. In that case, two or three workouts during the week would be totally fine. You could follow, I mean, there's, a lot of our programs would be appropriate for. I think what he's doing is actually pretty damn good. I like performance and I like strong. I like the fact that you even added the rice buckets in from OCR like you're on a pretty damn good track. The only thing I could see that would make this better for racing is to add a little bit more race practicing on the dirt bike and reducing maybe a workout. So if you had the ability to get to the track one more day a week and spend the hour and a half to two hours doing that instead of a lift, because you're doing plenty lifting wise to have strength to have stamina, have endurance. The only thing that would make you even better at this race is to spend more time on the bike. Where do you find the, like what's your weakness with your, with your performance? Is it the stamina? Is it strength? Is it, do you find pain anywhere on your body? Fatigue first, I guess. Well, I'd say most fatigue is in my, well, my arms get pumped up, you know, arm pump. So that's why I worked in the rice bucket to kind of help that. But then like my lower back gets kind of tight towards the end of the race. You know, it's just, I would say my muscle endurance, like my stamina is what holds me back because I get tired and I start making mistakes, you know, and you get trees and stuff. So I don't want to do that. So I just need to work on my endurance. Yeah. So don't you guys agree? Like the, the, the biggest thing would be more riding. Of course. You know, another, another, like I would probably, another reason why the low back might hurt too is you might be a little sore from the leg training and then you're sitting on a bike for three hours at a time. And so the bike or so your low back is locking up and being tight. So I might address some mobility work. I don't know if you take the time to do mobility before you get on the bike. I think that would be extremely beneficial to you, especially in the hips and low back. So like nine core strength and mobility. I think it's your two, one, two punches. Yeah. What I found, so this is what's interesting about your scenario. You said your arms get pumped up. Most people love a pump in the workout. When you're, when you're doing what you're doing, you get a pump and I saw, I actually, there's two clients I remember specifically. I had a drummer who had a band and he'd be like, man, my forums get pumped and I can't play anymore. And then the dirt bike rider said the same thing. He's like, how do I train so I don't get a pump on my forums? I remember when I first got that client, I was like, I've never heard somebody not want to pump before. What actually helps with that is frequent daily exercise. It actually trains your muscles to not be, not to get so pumped. Cause once you get a pump, you kind of lose function. Though I'm sure you already know this, you start to lose your grip and in your dexterity and your fingers and your hands. So what you could do is you got your normal workouts, take out some of the exercises in there that are let's say low back intensive, low back intensive and hand intensive. Instead of doing them in the workouts, do a little bit every single day so you can condition your body to not get a pump so easily. So what you're working on is stamina. You're lots and lots and lots of stamina rather than strength and building muscle. Cause focusing on strength and muscle building is going to make you get a pump. You want, you're looking more for that stamina and that waste removal process and not getting a pump while you're racing. Yeah, the way, and you're using the rice buckets, which I think is perfect. And I try to slowly reduce the intensity of that a bit. Yeah, and like more frequency, more volume of it, but less intensity. Totally. Okay, so how many times should I do, like say the rice bucket? Every day, every day. Every day. Yeah, I would do it every day, but not hard. Yes. Because if you do it hard every day, you're going to find some problems. Not hard, but a good goal would be to, I would say, increase time. Yeah, so let's say, like let's say right now, you can do the rice bucket for three to five minutes or something like that. And that's a good amount of intensity. I might reduce it down to like two to three minutes every single day until that gets easy. And then I might try and get it to a minute more, and then a minute more on top of that. And so, and then do it a second time a day, you know, for another minute or two. Yeah, so just slowly build it up with the goal of can you get in that rice for, you know, 10, 15 minutes, no problem. And like you get that stamina built up like that, that's going to carry over nice. Yep. Yeah, and I like those work sessions for this, you know, and like carrying, like doing farmer carries and doing suitcase carries and things like that to, or just constantly kind of conditioning your body to withstand. But keep the intensity moderate. Exactly, yes. At most. You're not going high intensity on your hands and your forearms and your arms. Grip strength is different than grip stamina. Yes. So, I mean, they definitely, they definitely contribute to each other. Sure, sure. Yeah, definitely some, having grip strength is going to carry over to some stamina, but you would get more benefit. Like let's say like we talk about farmer carries being a great exercise for grip strength. You doing, you know, 40 yards of like, you know, 300 pound carries or something. Like that's really great. But you, you'd be better off doing a quarter of the weight for a longer period of time because the race is an hour and a half. You need more stamina. Even with your core exercises doing high reps is not, you know, the worst idea in this case in this instance, in terms of like you being able to be conditioned and not fatigue quite as frequently. Yeah, so frequent training, your training stamina, low to moderate intensity for those target areas. That'll, that'll, that shouldn't make a big difference. Okay. And then so like I could hit the weights like, because there's a month between them basically, so I could hit the weights three weeks hard and then like maybe back off the last week, the week of the race. Yeah, you could do that. Especially legs and stuff, because you feel low back stuff. So my theory would be you probably hit, you know, lunges or squats or you did something pretty hard that week and you're still kind of tight from that. And then you go sit on a bike and that's probably locking the low backup. So the final week before you go do a race, I'd actually probably pull out either all of your legs or reduce it to like just mobility types. Yeah, up your mobility. Okay. And then that and watch with how you feel from that race. It's like two weeks. Okay. That's perfect. Thank you. You got it. And then it's kind of like within the same, it's called the, it's another race, but it's way longer. I think it'd be pretty similar answer, but it's called the Desert 100. It's a 100 mile race, which takes about five and a half hours on my bike as well. But it's pretty much the same thing, correct? Yeah. Just exactly. Just more, more of the same. Yep. And then during this time, I waited about 255, about two months ago now. Down to 226. Would it be a bad idea to, to like cut, because I'm trying to be lighter on my bike. I don't want to be heavy on them. You know, it's harder on everything. Would it be a bad idea to cut like during the three weeks where I can lift and then maybe like eat at a maintenance slash bulk? That's okay because, okay, so this is a trade-off. There's a trade-off. You get the value of being lighter on your bike, which makes it easier, but the trade-off is less calories can sometimes sacrifice recovery and performance. So you can cut, but I would keep the cut very, very modest at most. So you're not going down five, 600 calories below maintenance. You're like two, 300 calories below maintenance. So slow cut is a smart way to do this. Don't be aggressive with it. Okay, that makes sense. Yep, perfect. You got it, man. Thanks for calling in. Awesome, I, yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah, good luck. Circle back, let us know how you do, man. Okay, thank you. Sounds good. Take it easy. All right. I just, I just realized he said, he rides his dirt bike for an hour, takes a break, drinks a beer, gets back on his bike, rides again. Performance fuel cell. I don't know if that's, is that a good idea, bro? Let's drink it and do this again. That's like par for the course with these guys. I love it. It's crazy. But yeah, the stamina thing with the hands, I remember, you know, doing judo and jujitsu, you know, you're gripping the gi and my, you know, forearms would get so pumped and then my hands were useless. I had the strongest hands in the gym, strong grip, but then when they got pumped, which I loved in the gym, I love a pump in the gym, but when I would grip the gi and my hands were pumped, it was like I had like useless claws. I couldn't do anything. Yeah, you mentioned the drummer. Like this is like before we had played show and I was even just playing guitar. Yes. And I think too, like some of the adrenaline going into it on top of that, like it would just make these pumps like stupid where I could barely even function with my fingers. So I had to like get over that and like really kind of like work through that. Yeah. And I remember the, like I said, when I got these clients, I was like, uh, this is going to be hard because I've like, I've always tried to get people to get a pump. Now I'm trying to figure out how to get someone ruins your dexterity to not get a pump. His two issues are the exact two things that will get me to get off my ATV. Like if I'm riding all day long, it'll either be my low back that bothers me or my forums are gone just cause the vibrate, the grip and vibration on that thing all day long. It's a lot of stress there. And anytime it's my low back, it's cause I was training that week and I hit like heavy squat sort of like something like that. And then my, my hips are all locked up and tight and then it's pulling on my low back on there. And so I started to realize like, okay, if I'm riding on Saturday, I'm going to just like really reduce the intensity on my legs. And then before, if I make a conscious effort of actually doing a really good 20 minute mobility, especially like my 90, 90 stuff before going huge difference. You know what I did that really helped me with the grip stuff is I got a gripper and at first I messed up cause I would do it throughout the day but too high of intensity. I ended up giving myself tennis elbow. Then I went back and did it again. And then what I would do is throughout the day, I'd pick it up and I'd squeeze it. And the intensity, I'd keep it low. I just squeeze it, squeeze it, just low intensity, put it down. And I do this throughout the whole day and I do up crazy stamina in my hands and forearms. Yeah, they have those cool ones where you can do individual fingers. So I did the same thing. Yeah, but you got to keep the intensity low otherwise you're going to screw yourself. Look, if you like Mind Pump, head over to mindpumpfree.com and check out some of our guides. We have guides that can help you with almost any health or fitness goal. You can also find all of us on social media. So Justin is on Instagram, Mind Pump Justin. Adam is on Instagram, Mind Pump Adam. And guess what? I'm back on Instagram. Mind Pump to Stefano. Here's where you'll find me. Today we're going to teach you everything you need to know to build a strong, well-developed chest. When I think of weak points and areas that I struggled with developing for a really long time, chest was up there with the work. Yeah, it was for me for sure. I got more caught up in the weight I could lift versus how I was developing my body. I think it's one of the most challenging muscles to develop for most people because the form and technique.