 Boom! This is mine, with the world's number one fitness health entertainment podcast. All right. Would you like to win a free Maps Prime program? Of course you would. Here's how you can win free access. Leave a comment in the first 24 hours we drop this episode. Make it a good comment. If we pick your comment, you'll get access to Maps Prime for free. Now for the rest of you, you can get Maps Prime at 50% off flash sale going on right now. Go to mapsprime.com, use the code Prime50off. That's Prime50off. Now if you'd like to win stuff, we give stuff away all the time. So turn on your notifications, subscribe to this channel so you know when we post these episodes. All right, enjoy the podcast. We've been doing this for a long time and every so often, you get your, you just, everything you think gets flipped on its head. But there's one thing in particular I can think about and I wonder if you guys are the same that just such a crazy, complete reversal and flip. Actually, let me see if you guys are the same. What's one of the biggest changes you've made in how you look at training over the last, I don't know, 15, 20 years? Oh my God, bro. That's so vague. Can you take me closer to where you want to go? Yeah, where you did, you thought of a value of something, you did a particular thing and then you learned something else. I'll tell you one of the most, okay, so I got one for you. And it's recent, right? Okay. Or relatively recent. I want to see if it's the same one that... Phone rolling before I work out. Yeah. That was something that I didn't do. I did thought, whoa, what a huge difference this was doing and became like a ritual. Like that's how I started every workout. I spent a good 10 to 15 minutes phone rolling before... And then you're applying it to every one of your clients after that too, right? Yeah, totally. I'm 100% guilty of that. Even up to when we started the show, when we first started the show, I was still phone rolling. It wasn't until I met Brink, Justin Brink, Dr. Brink, he moved me away from that and moved me into the direction of more like mobility and priming stuff. That was the biggest switch. Yeah, that's specific. But generally speaking, for me, it was warm-ups. My idea around warm-ups completely shifted later on in my career. So when I was a train, for a long time, I would get peak clients and I'd have them warm up on a little cardio, right? Get the heart rate up and warm the body up. Maybe some light type of stretching, foam rolling with the other one. Now is the truth be told? It was a little bit of that. So you had an extra 10 minutes to go eat your food in the back? That guarantee that's part of it. That was the added value. I'm like, I got enough time to get a Starbucks coffee. Yeah, just keep moving. I really think a lot of us traders... He's calling everybody out. I am. I think we all kind of justify that because when you run... When you're going clients back to back. Yeah, when you run an 8, 10 hour day and you're hitting them all on the hour. Yeah, you're on all day. Yeah, there's no break. Nothing. There's no break. So you literally have... And sometimes you secretly are praying for a client to be late. So you have the opportunity to shovel some food down, right? Yes. Or go get a coffee really quick. So the 10 minute warm-up on the elliptical or whatever. I had some clients mess that up because I would have everybody warm up on cardio. First of all, we were taught that. We were taught get the heart rate up, warm up the body, reduces risk of injury, blah, blah, blah. We're going to get into why that's almost completely bullshit. But we bought into it. And then, of course, like you said, Adam, it was great because it bought you 10 minutes. But then I would have clients that would ruin the whole thing where their appointment was, let's say, at 5 p.m. They came in early. They come in early to do their warm-ups so they're ready by the time that it's time to trade. I was like, ah! You know who always did that? You want to know it's funny? You know what clients always did that? It was not my clients that were highly motivated. It was the ones that were like the penny-pinchers. And they were like... In every dollar. I'm paying this guy $80 an hour. That means I get 60 minutes. If I spend 10 minutes on this elliptical, this is silly. I want to squeeze everything out of this. Yes. Those were the clients that were smart and would come in early. Not the ones like, oh, I want to put the extra work in. I need to do this. It was like, I'm paying this dude for... I'm going to come in here before this. Now here's where my mind started to get blown. It was understanding what warm-ups really do. So what we're taught is they warm up the muscles, right? So warm... More elasticity in the tissue, that kind of stuff. Yeah, warm tissues are more elastic and pliable. And they even give me this example. They said, imagine you have a rubber band and you put it in the freezer, right? You can't stretch it out very much. It snaps. But if you put it in the... If you warm it up, it's much more... So I literally thought of muscles like that. I literally told people that. Did you really? Yeah. That they're like rubber bands. This is actually not true. The reality is what makes the muscle pliable or not or whatever is your central nervous system. The reality is a warm-up is not warming up the muscles. It's getting the CNS to start to fire and function in a way that is beneficial. When you understand that, then you look at your warm-ups completely different. No one really communicated the CNS very well to me. It was in every certification, in every book we had to read, but it was always a daunting chapter that I never enjoyed and I never really learned how to apply it to clients until much later. Yes. I feel like this is definitely an area where I adjusted my training completely as well as addressing the feet and ankles, too. That was one of those things that none of our certifications did a good job of addressing. In terms of mobility. Yeah. If I took my bicep off my body, if I peeled it off and threw it on the floor, it's just dumb by itself. It'll have a certain amount of stretch to it. It's not doing anything. It's just sitting there. If I have a tight hamstring and I tear it out, it's not tight anymore because I tore it off my body. Now it's on the floor. It seems pretty flexible. In fact, if you talk to, so I used to train a lot of surgeons and doctors and when people are under anesthesia, they would always comment how remarkably flexible they were, right? Because the CNS is dampened and shut down, right? So what makes a muscle do anything, whether it's be tight or contract or relax or stretch is the central nervous system. So to give you an example, let's say you go to stretch your hamstrings. So you go do a, you go to touch your toes. And the furthest you can get initially is where your fingertips barely touch your foot. Now if you stretch and you hold that stretch for 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes, you will find that eventually within a minute, you'll be able to go down further past where you could go before. And now you've added, you know, three, four, five or six inches of range of motion. Now what didn't happen was your hamstrings change. In other words, the hamstrings themselves. They didn't get longer or more elastic. No, they didn't change at all. The difference was the central nervous system. Relaxed. Told the hamstrings, okay, we're okay here. We're safe, stretch, stretch, stretch. So really warm-ups are all about the CNS and have very little to do with muscle. A lot of our limitations are a factor of what we call the overbearing mother. So it's basically like it's limiting you for a reason because it feels like there's instability there. There's low support. And so, you know, that being able to channel the central nervous system to support those joints and provide that kind of stability allows you then to go even further, you know, angle-wise. Right. And so the promise of warm-ups in the past was to reduce the risk of injury. So if you warm up properly, you're less likely to pull a muscle or tear a muscle or hurt your joint or whatever. That was the promise. Now, did they actually deliver? Maybe. Depends on how you did the warm-up, but they delivered very little. They didn't do much at all in terms of, you know, promising that delivery. In fact, there were studies that showed that the traditional ways, and I remember learning this, the traditional ways people warmed up for a long time, like static stretching, actually increased the risk of injury. Now, you might ask yourself, how's that? Why is that? Why is it that static stretching before workouts or warming up wrong is worse than not warming up at all? Well, you're just passive. Well, you just alluded to it, right? You said that what happens after you do a static stretch for 30 seconds, you tell this, the CNS tells the muscle to relax, to relax. Not protecting as much. That's right. It's not, it's, it's, it's relaxed. And then you want to, then you go into a workout and potentially something like a CrossFit or explosive type of a workout where you need to call upon that muscle and you want it to respond fast. There you, and you just got done sending a signal to say, relax, calm down. That's their, their conflicting signals. Right. And that's where the danger or the risk is. Or you move in a range of motion you don't own. Right. And then you hurt yourself. So where does the injury come from? Okay. Injury comes from weakness and injuries come from weakness. Now, some people might be thinking, well, I know super strong power lifters and body builders that hurt themselves. Yes. That's true. But they were weak at one particular point, whether it be stability or in a range of motion, they didn't own. Right. And that's where the injury happened. So what a warm up should do is improve your strength and your function. That's what reduces the risk of injury. Not necessarily increasing range of motion or just making your body feel warm, but rather getting the central nervous system to fire more efficiently, more effectively and to be stronger because you don't hurt yourself in a movement that you own. That's the bottom line. If you own the squat, if you own the deadlift, if you own a fast twist or throwing a baseball, if you own the movement from beginning to end, acceleration to deceleration, stability, the whole thing. If you own it, you're not going to get hurt. It's when you don't own the movement that you injure yourself. So what a warm up should do is get you closer to owning more of the movement in order to prevent injury. If you can't generate any force in whatever position you're in, you're going to leave yourself susceptible to some kind of an injury. And so to be able to work on that and be able to address those weak points in the chain is going to be crucial for you to have long-term success. And this is really the only thing that makes heavy load dangerous. It's not owning the movement. Of course. This idea of heavy weight, heavy squatting is bad for the knees. This exercise is dangerous. It's only dangerous. It's only bad for the knees if you don't own that movement. You don't own that range of motion. If you haven't done the prerequisites to be able to do that, then when you load something, they're more likely to move out of that range and injure yourself. But if you do a good job of actually priming the body and owning that movement, then you're less likely to get hurt. Look, I could squat 200 pounds very easily. I will not hurt myself squatting 200 pounds. If I put 200 pounds on my 11-year-old daughter's back, she's going to get hurt. Same weight, right? The difference is I can own that weight and that movement and she can't. So really this is what it all boils down to. And when you realize this and you realize that the paradigm around warm-ups should be getting the central nervous system ready, also known as priming the central nervous system, then you're going to have much less risk of injury. Number one, number two, you'll also have a far more effective and efficient workout. A workout that actually gets you better results. Do either of you know the history on warm-ups, the whole callus that you remember when we were kids? Do you remember PE class, getting in the line, the rows and the windmill things that you would do? Do you guys know the history? I have no idea. I don't know what the history is. Where did we land on that and where did this become the kind of traditional way everybody warms up? There was a few pioneers in calisthenics and Dr. Ed Thomas was one of them. But it was all with a lot of intent behind it which kind of got lost in the weeds. I think that it just got distorted once it made its way into schools and they saw and tried to mimic certain movements and like arm circles and things but there was no real intention behind it. It was just aimless. That's such a good point because this was something that I always had a hard time communicating to clients and because it almost comes off like we're anti-stretching. No, there's value to it. It's very similar to I feel like when we communicate cardio, right? People think we're anti-cardio because really what it is and I tell my clients is we have to learn to stretch with purpose. So there's a lot of value in stretching and static stretching but knowing what you're stretching and why you're stretching it is extremely important and when to do that. Right. And there are certain places to do a static stretch and there's certain places it doesn't belong. Right, because if you have instability within your normal range of motion let's say you have a little bit of instability within your squat or whatever and then we just give you more range of motion. We just say here you go which static stressing we'll do in a short period of time give you more range of motion but not increasing any strength or stability. We've actually made a situation worse. It would end up happening. So static stretching definitely has a place it's to increase range of motion but you need to connect to that range of motion and so the way we've warmed up in the past was almost a waste of time. Now the traditional warm-ups of getting on cardio for example it's a little better than nothing because will that turn on your central nervous system more than just coming, you know, driving to the gym and then walking and then starting to work out? Well, yeah. You're gonna get more of a central nervous system turn on from doing, you know, walking on the treadmill or going to the elliptical then you are from just going straight to the workout a little bit more but not a whole lot more, you know. Well, there's definitely value in prepping the body for, you know, intense movement and intense loading of the joints and so, but there has to be that intent behind it and so to be more specific to your own needs is something that, you know, hasn't been really voiced in the past and I think that people need to really figure out like obviously we tried to make this a lot easier in terms of like just doing three movements to identify these things but to really understand their body more and their needs in terms of where their imbalances lie you know, what type of exercises will help kind of set them up better for, especially with the compound less better performance in the gym. Right, now back to foam rolling like what does foam rolling do? Well, foam rolling can allow you to move in ways that may be beneficial and that's where the benefit comes from, right? So, tread lightly here. Right, so if I do a foam roller and that didn't fix anything but what it might do is allow me to then do priming movements or exercises in ways that are more beneficial to my body or at least get to them a little faster so foam rolling still has some value but when I first started foam rolling I thought that was the value, that was it like, oh foam roll, now I can do all these exercises and what I ended up finding was I got to the point where I had to foam roll I could no longer do movements without foam rolling because I never followed it up with movements that made it Yeah, it kept reoccurring the same pain. Yeah, you want to make the foam rolling obsolete, essentially. If you use a foam roller you want to get to the point where you don't need a foam roller anymore that won't happen unless you do the proper priming and real warm-up movements which I think we'll get into. Well, the challenge with foam rolling was that I think we misunderstood exactly what it was doing for so long and it was one of those things that you could feel the difference. Oh yeah, you feel it right away. And so it was really hard to kind of overcome this one also because I think I explained foam rolling wrong for a very long time. Oh yeah. I was under the impression that we had these adhesions like scar tissue that was built up over the muscle foam. You're like kneading it like bread. Yeah, and they were, yeah, exactly and that's what, we had all these adhesions this was limiting the range of motion in the muscle and you're going in with these foam rolls you're basically breaking those all up and then that's then allowing you to do that and when you would take somebody what do they feel? They feel like these knots and then they would do it and they would feel looser and better so it was like, this is what it's doing. Yes, and by the way those knots in your muscle are there but they're not there because you have like a tissue that's stuck or whatever. They're there because again the CNS is making it be there and pressing on it just tells the CNS to relax. That's a focal point. It is. Yeah, your CNS is telling the muscle to kind of be in this light state of tonus and so when you press on it you're sending a signal back to the CNS and then the CNS says, oh okay we don't need to be in this state of tonus or what kind of tricks it and cause it to relax but the tissue itself you're not breaking up a... And what causes that? Is that just a neurological over application to that area? Like your body is firing more neurons than needed to that area and that's what causes the over state of tonus. It's firing what it thinks it's needed, right? So because it's trying to protect. It's a protective mechanism. Yes, so all this is because your body is trying to keep you from hurting yourself so it's going to make you tight and feel pain in a certain way limiting your range of motion so you don't do things that you don't necessarily have the stability to perform and so this is where the problem comes in so you got to solve the root issue. Now what warm-ups can do for you if you do them properly is definitely reduce the risk of injury in a very, very big way but it does weigh more than that and this is where I think where I want people to really evaluate what they're doing before the workout the 10 minutes or 15 minutes before the workout. A proper warm-up increases your functional range of motion. This is very different. I don't care if your body allows you to squat all the way down if you've got no stability all the way down don't do that, right? If you go all ass to grass but you've got no stability please don't do that because all you're going to do is potentially hurt yourself or probably hurt yourself especially when you add load. What I want is functional range of motion so you're able to go deeper but you still own usable. Yes, that deeper range of motion. You guys remember the type of client that you got when you first saw this like when you saw somebody who had incredible range of motion and flexibility but then when they got down in the squat the knees went all over the place and they were all wobbly like crazy. I can remember one woman in particular where she would come in and she would talk about a lot of pain and so I was testing her flexibility because back in those days I thought, oh it's because you're tight, right? And she was hyper flexible like fold her in half sit all the way at the bottom arm, she could touch her elbows behind her back and I remember thinking like what the hell is going on? Luckily I worked with a really good physical therapist and she's like, well, she's hyper range of motion and no strength. She's like a baby. You take a baby you can move all over the place. Super moldable but yeah, they don't have the strength to get out of these positions. Nothing supporting it and that's actually one of the that's a very high risk of injury under load. So with that person I had to really focus on getting them to own range of motion before we'd move into deeper range of motion and make her strong and her pain went away it was all about increasing strength. Yeah, it was all about control. Those were difficult for me to deal with because for the majority of people you're trying to open up range of motion you're trying to unlock because we get so locked into these certain positions because of our daily habits and rituals and whatnot but somebody like that to be able to slow down and really have and gain control and really add tension and strength so I would apply a lot more like isometrics I'd have them stop and really hold and squeeze and there's ways to address that but you really need to work on the ability to ramp up and summon this force that you need to feed in to strengthen the movement. This was when I was really unaware of the benefits of isometrics when I first had a client like this that was foreign to me and that's why I struggled a lot I remember having a handful of clients early on. It's because it's not common. It's not. It's really rare to see it and you're so used to people being tight all the time. Tight and weak is more common than loose and weak. Yeah and to see somebody who could actually perform the full range of motion the exercise but just is all over the map you're kind of like where do I start here with this person and I didn't understand what was happening in isometrics I just thought I actually thought that was a methodology of training and that was dead and we've moved on from that at that point in my career and didn't really understand what you were doing on a neurological level when you're doing isometrics and that's what that person was lacking and what they needed. Right and so here's another thing a proper warm up is going to increase the amount of muscle fibers that you activate. Here's one telltale sign between a classic crappy warm up and a proper warm up. A classic crappy warm up might make the exercise you do next feel more comfortable. Okay might do that oh I can get in and I feel okay I don't have pain in my shoulder that's great. A proper warm up often times you'll feel stronger going into the lift. In fact when I've worked with clients and transition them from the old way to the superior way all of a sudden they were hitting PRs they were just their squat went up in weight and their bench went up in weight and their breast went up in weight because we turned on the central nervous system in a very effective way. Does this turn into faster results? Absolutely. You know I this is just my figure but I think if you do a proper warm up and priming you probably can squeeze out 5% more out of your results and your progress it doesn't sound like much over the course of 6 months in a year that makes it pretty damn that's like a pounds of muscle that you could be adding to your body or faster metabolism or burning more body fat or you know 10 more pounds on your on your lifts. I mean there's a couple approaches to this that you can apply for priming but one of my favorites is to address whatever whatever is pulling you out of stability so this is why I like to go through the whole process of really finding out where those imbalances lie so for example you know let's say your shoulders tend to come forward quite a bit and you're going to bench press and to be able to set your your body upright and to be able to have security and support and stability there in the shoulder joint and really be able to retract and depress those shoulders I'd have you know I'd prime with some kind of a you know a rubber band row or something to to get my muscles to respond to stabilize and support then going into like one of those compound lifts now this is this is why I'm most proud of our maps prime program of all the things that we've created and done I'm most proud of that program still to this day all the things that because I think this is really difficult to do I don't I mean it took me years as a trainer to kind of piece all this together and then once you kind of start to grasp it right so if you're listening right now you've maybe heard us talk about this you're like okay kind of making sense to me now still don't fully understand what they're talking about the difference between warming up and priming or maybe you're moving into like okay yeah I get it the next hurdle is how do you figure out that specifically to you because what is going to prime really well for somebody else could actually be counterproductive for another person based off of where they're weak or where they have postural issues like so knowing what to prime for either what exercises or for your body specifically was probably one of the challenging most challenging things that we had to overcome in creating a program and I think that is and it's one of those things that if you don't know you don't know and if you never used it or applied it you do it once though the right way in your soul yeah if you do it correctly one time it's one of those things that you immediately feel it in that workout you don't have to do it's not like strength building muscle or strength you don't have to do it for long periods of time of consistency before you start to see little it's like you should be able to do this and that's how you should know if you're actually doing it right if you're doing it right you should feel that in that very next workout or in that workout yeah I've used this example before but I love the story because I remember getting like confused by this demonstration in the mall and then later figuring out what they were doing and being like oh now I know so years ago there was these products you'd see them in kiosks in the mall and they were like these bracelets or these necklace magnets yeah and it was like oh MLB players wear these for better performance and it balances out your body and blah blah blah and the kids selling it would be like oh yeah it totally works and I'd be like this is what is it new composite material or whatever it's advanced blah blah blah he'd say okay let me show you how it works he'd say stand on one foot and put your right arm out so I'd stand on my left foot or whatever put my right arm out and he'd push down on my arm and then I'd kind of fall over and he'd say now try it with the bracelet so immediately after he'd put the bracelet on me he'd do it again and my balance was significantly better the second time around I remember almost buying it but I was like magic I was like wait a minute I'm not going to get this anyway later on I figured out oh all I did the first time was tell my CNS what to do second time around I was able to have better stability and control because I practiced it once that's literally what happened my CNS fired better the second time around this guy's using this what happens to all of us as a way to sell me some bullshit product so this is what proper warm-ups can do for you this is why so in the book The Resistance Training Revolution although I wrote that as a way to really convince people the average person especially to do resistance training is their primary form of exercise if you go in the workouts that I put in the book although I say warm-up and the reason why I say warm-up is because I would have to explain priming to people who maybe have never even done resistance training it says warm-up but what you're doing there is priming what you do with every workout is two or three priming movements before you get the workout and I know people are going to be blown away when they do them because I've seen it a very simple thing that I've tried so hard to convey to athletes and anybody that really wants to squeeze out performance the more stable and secure your joints are the more force you can output and so what that means is you're able to apply more strength to all those movements it's very simple if you're listening to Justin right now it also means more muscle yes and you're like what do you mean by that right so in layman's terms your body will only allow you to exert as much force as it thinks you can safely exert here's an example of that go do a barbell squat as heavy as you can then put on a weight belt all of a sudden you're squatting more weight right all the weight belt did is increase your core stability you sense it you're more stable more force coming out of your legs right if your bench press is stuck at you know 135 pounds and your body says and it knows a little instability on the left shoulder it's not going to let you get that much stronger if you increase the stability of your shoulder even if you don't do a special bench routine or you know all you do is increase the stability of the area that your body is sensing is the weakness boom all of a sudden your bench press goes up increasing stability allows your body to exert more force and I know you know studies will show that you know most people can't even get up to 50% of their total capacity the body literally limits them from doing that now what do you guys have to say to the people in the and there's some very intelligent people in the strength community that believe that all you need to do is just to practice the movement and that is going to prime the CNS and get the body to get more force output like Justin is alluding to and build more stability and control what do you have to say to that because there is some really smart guys and girls in the strength community that think this whole mobility movement and priming and doing things like that is a waste of time all you need to do is get onto the barbell and squat more well here's the reality is get better at those movements the more you practice them and so where they're coming from you know in terms of that make sense practicing and applying those same movements continuously you're teaching your body to improve every time with the mechanics of it the technique of it but you know the more inevitably you're going to get to a point where you're going to get so strong just in that direction where it's going to create instability and now that instability is something that you're going to have to account for later which you could have simultaneously been working on with mobility to make sure that those joints still feel like they're locked in that place and have that security now I remember earlier in the episode I said injury comes from weakness so let's say your stability let's say I'm going to make up some numbers let's say your stability strength score needs to be at least of a ratio of 1 to 2 to your total strength so in other words your stability needs to be at 150 pounds well if I don't increase my stability strength and my squat strength goes up to 400 the ratios off my risk of injury goes up much higher so now getting stronger increases my risk of injury because my stability strength no longer can support it now I know where these strength athletes and coaches are coming from yes it's true practicing the movement does have a lot of value in fact I think after you prime you should still do a set or two of lighter weight or target exercise that being said the priming movements and mobility movements have a ton of value in fact a lot of these same guys and girls end up with injuries end up on their Instagram doing these mobility movements that their therapists then told them to do it's mind blowing all of a sudden I see so and so lifter who you know crapped on all of that stuff all of a sudden doing tube walks in 1990s because they've hurt their back well either that or the invent products to create stability certain like elastic you know shoulder things and you know knee sleeves and everything else you know in order to kind of provide what they're lacking well this is where there's also what is one of the problems I think in our in our space right and also what's wrong with studies right because you know most of these intelligent people that I'm talking about they don't just say that they point and they reference studies to support their argument and my my thing is this I think if all your goal was to squat more weight or bench more weight their argument has a lot of validity to it right you know if that's all you care but most people not only want that but they also want to be able to move left to right really well keep going rotate get all the way sit down to pick up their child want to be able to feel good when they're 70 years old and also get a really strong bench and a really good response to somebody who's challenging me with that statement is because yeah okay you're right if we looked at this in this very narrow box of like okay all I want to do is get good at squatting and that's right if I just practice squat practice squat forget all that other bullshit if you were to do two more sets of squats you'd be even better at the heavy heavy squat I still challenge that though you know I honestly I still think that them doing that but also addressing expressing that will provide more stability which then helps them to generate more force again these are the same people that said training your biceps if you're a power lifter is a waste of time why train your biceps you're not you don't need your biceps well now a lot of them have changed the tune because they find that strengthening your biceps reduces the risk of a bicep tear and because of the increased stability at the elbow might actually help you deadlift more weight if you're a strength athlete I don't think it should you know take over your training any kind of athlete by the way this is true for all athletes I don't care if it's a strength athlete or you play football or baseball or whatever most of your training should be done in your sport right so if you're a strength athlete yes definitely devote most of your time to training in your specific you know strength sport whatever that may be but priming properly is going to provide you with a lot of value at the very least reducing risk of injury at the most like what Justin's saying you'll probably see some some increased or faster strength gains from doing so and it doesn't take a lot of time we're talking about 10 minutes 15 minutes before your workout what you don't want to do is this because here's what happens when you feel pain you're too late and when you know when you don't feel pain it doesn't mean you're in the clear there's this gap between not enough stability no pain no pain and then pain so sometimes what people do is they like oh my SI joint hurts oh my knee hurts a little bit they do a little bit of priming mobility pain gone I'm good no no no you're just this close to pain you just move this far we can go a lot further the other thing I don't like with their argument too is that in my experience so if you're an athlete you're talking to specific athletes and you're talking to everybody who's already a pretty good squad or a pretty good deadlifter then I see this applying a little more towards them but when I think of the general population it was very rare in fact I could probably count on one hand maybe two hands in my entire career when I asked someone to do a squat in front of me and it was just beautiful I mean it was just fall never never right it was like rarely ever did you ever see that and most often you saw a really poor recruitment pattern you saw this excessive forward lean these rounded shoulders this protruding forward head they didn't even know how to activate certain areas right and so if you tell that person just a squat more and that's why I don't like when they come out it's because you just teach that they just ingrain that bad recruitment pattern they make it good at squatting good at bad squatting right and that right there is a dangerous place to go and it also it started to you know I feel like there's a lot of people that want to justify their awkward weird squat or deadlift stance and movement pattern and be like oh it's my morphology you know it's like no it's not there's many people that told me that they thought that they were told by somebody else that their morphology wouldn't allow them do this narrow this narrow stance squat because they can tell it just it doesn't feel comfortable and then I worked on their mobility primed them correctly and oh voila we can do it all of a sudden and to me that's that's very obvious that it isn't just right you know how are you going to get around that if you're not in good posture it's going to stop where there's curvature it's going to stop where there's a weakness in the kinetic chain you can't get around that no matter how hard you try and work around it yeah and the morphology argument it reminds me of the whole genetic argument for weight gain and weight loss for obesity oh you know I know I'm 60 pounds overweight but it's my genetics you know and no yes there's different genetics definitely exist there's definitely differences in people they do play a role but there aren't genetics that exist to make you obese that that didn't exist until not that long ago right there are yes there's definitely differences in morphology but a squat an overhead press that's a fundamental that's a fundamental movement it's like walking yes there's more phologies you know different leg lengths and different socket for walking but are there more phologies that exist where you can't walk extremely rare right it's extremely rare so and here's a deal regardless if there is a situation with your morphology that makes certain movements more challenging working on mobility and proper priming will make you make it more likely to reach your potential right you may have a lower like I don't have the muscle building potential of Ronnie Coleman but I have my own potential and I can get closer to my potential by doing everything right I might not reach his I might not ever get the mobility of a world-class gymnast but I'll reach my proper limit of mobility by doing things right right and proper priming is a part of that so and here's the thing I want to communicate I think it's very important and I know this is this is a selling point because I know as a young lifter if you told me you know proper priming and warming up will reduce your risk risk of injury one ear out the other that's why I didn't do it all I cared about was building more muscle I'm in my 20s I could care less I haven't I've never hurt myself I feel indestructible but here's the other part of it and this is true proper priming gets you better results you'll build more muscle you'll activate more muscle fibers you'll utilize exercises more effective you'll get more out of your squat more out of your deadlift more out of your presses and your rotating movements more strength more longevity and then of course the longevity aspect but you have to sell that because and it's true because I know there's people who are like I don't hurt I'm fine why would I waste time doing so much well we're just wired that way until we can't I mean I was just having this conversation with my dad last night who's getting to a place where you know his back is always hurting and I'm explaining to him chronic pain and why we need to address this and work on mobility and prime your body I'm telling him he needs to prime his body before he drives his car you need to you need to learn what's going on and breaking down why your low back hurts because of what's going on in your hips and the surgery you had you've got to address that stuff if you neglect it eventually it's going to shut you down you may feel fine right now and all I care about is getting shredded you know or building muscle and so you're right Sal like you have to sell it different because if it's something about longevity or being healthy or joint integrity none of that stuff appealed to me at 25 none of that stuff would have got it's funny I just did this I just did this with my dad the other day so my dad he's got arthritis up and down his spine a lot of his joints he's been working hard labor since he was a child and long hours and all that stuff and he never really worked on mobility or stretching he definitely played sports that was about it and so he's very stiff right he's prone to pain or whatever and so I saw him the other day and he's like my back you know it's so tight Sal hurts and my upper mid back what do I do and he's expecting me to go in there and massage him and so I said no let's try this prone cobra exercise and he's like how would an extra why would me doing an exercise make that when does more work help yeah that's not going to make it feel better and I said no trust me so we did literally a few reps I had him stand up he moved around and he's like whoa salvatore much better what's going on I'm trying to explain to him how the body the central nervous system works and all that but that's literally what it does and it's more of a permanent fix if I massage him he'd feel a little better but it wouldn't feel better for very long well you got to know back to like what I was talking to my dad about very similar type of conversation so they asked those actual specific questions son can you show me some back exercises I could do for my back because my back hurts and then after asking a ton of questions and getting to the bottom of oh the hip surgery and the lack of good rehab it's not your back I said it's your lack of stability and strength in your hips that your low back is overcompensating for that and it's not like a thing that happens right away it's that because the body is unbelievable and resilient so you may not prime very well and you go get a squat and you may see strength gains and you may not hurt yet but what you don't realize is because your body is not working properly together that parts of it is overcompensating for the areas that should be working and eventually that shit catches up I dare anybody watching or listening to this I dare you go to mapsprimewebinar.com Double Dare try some of the priming movements on there before your workout okay and then I dare you to DM me and tell me that you didn't notice a significant difference in how you felt immediately in your workout and I dare you to tell me you didn't have a better workout it'll blow your mind now I want to add something to that though because one of the other things that was really challenging about doing this in video form was it's really hard to convey the intent which is why we did these webinars yes because in this one this is the one with Justin right Justin does the prime one I do the prime pro yeah so this one's mapsprimewebinar.com and he's taking Doug through and it's good because you watch him coach Doug he designed this test to address a lot of real common issues people face because of their job maybe they're working at a desk and they're leaning over all the time their head is forward a lot and you're driving pretty much everything in your daily activities involves you reaching something in front of you and what this does a lot of times it's it it promotes this forward shoulder this upper cross syndrome and this test will go ahead and highlight how far that's gotten away from you and so this is one of those things that don't worry pretty much 99.9% of everybody fails this test because it's almost designed for you to fail just to show you how important it is to then reestablish this connection that will help your joints maintain long-term health and be able to work properly and and do it without pain and you get the idea you know what the intent is and it's it's much easier to understand yeah you have to so if we if we're trying to get connected to an area that's dormant or that we're not connected very well to it's work this isn't like stretching no you're connecting not disconnecting yeah this doesn't feel like yoga this doesn't feel like you relax and you stretch before you go work out I mean if you do this right a lot of times you just have to sweat your heartbeat will get going because you're trying to intensify that you're trying to get connection and strength in this new range of motion and so how you do it is so important you can't just kind of like you're contracting the muscles you know this it's work it's real work and you do sweat and you know it has to be active and that's sort of the point to this is we don't want to just get into these ranges of motion passively we need to to have that kind of tension all the way through so we're training the body that okay we we have access to this type of force and support through all these different angles of the range of motion yeah now for most people a good 10 minutes maybe 15 at the most but probably around 10 priming your body before your full work out and that'll be enough to give you all the benefits that we just talked about for most people I want to add something to that also though okay so yes that's true but what's beautiful about priming because it's not like strength training you're not tearing breaking down you're not going to really really sore from doing this and frequency so when you find a movement so say you go through the webinar that Justin did for free and you try a couple and you notice like maybe you notice one or two I'm like whoa I did that and when I went to do my bench press I really felt a difference my shoulders felt good I was stronger do that all the time I mean you definitely should and need to do it before you work out to maximize the benefits from your work out do it on your off days yes and the more often that you are practicing that the more often you're teaching that pattern and that connection to get solidified and strong so that when you go into that work out you don't have to spend as much time priming and this and I tell you first hand when I started working on all this after Brink I spent so much time in this area that I had to kind of let go of the like muscle guy and strength it was all going to be mobility and really getting reconnected so what's cool is the more you practice it and you work at this the less of it you actually have to do right because then you will start to do it just not even connect much faster yes you think you don't even have to think about anymore and it's it becomes easier when you put a lot of effort into frequently doing it yeah in fact they'll show what studies that connections in the brain if they're practiced often start to become very solidified almost like tracks in the snow some footprints but if you walk back and forth you create this nice line this nice connection and so you're you're 100% right Adam just like anything right you practice it very often like it might have taken you years to learn how to play the piano but then you could once you learn it you could stop for a few years and then go pick it up yeah it makes its way into your subconscious at some point and I think it just it takes I don't know how many specific number of reps but it's a whole lot of cool and there's all these people that speculate on you know how long it takes to actually acquire certain skills but it definitely takes a lot of reps right so again it's mapsprimewebinar.com totally free take the course and notice the difference also if you like this content if you like our podcast you'll love mindpumpfree.com we have a lot of free guides and written content there and you can get all of it for free cost nothing it's a way that we like you can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin me at Mind Pump Sal Adam at Mind Pump Adam and Doug at Mind Pump Doug literally this is no joke I know there's a lot of books written on the obesity epidemic and how to solve it and they're like all these complicated literally this is it right here if people just reduce their heavily processed food and take down to about 10% of their diet so 10% of your diet or less heavily processed food that's it eat like you want to enjoy your food