 Hello everyone, welcome to Mind Pump. In this episode we talk about how building muscle will actually build your brain and protect you from cognitive decline. Also later in the episode, Justin talks about his brush with paranormal activity. It's quite scary and he was quite afraid. Stay tuned to find out about that. In the second half of this episode, the guys coach four live callers on questions such as, what can I do to get stronger at the squat? What is the number one thing I can do in the gym to help me with all of my fitness goals? And finally, I have a high stress life. How should I best be training to get the maximum results? Finally, are you interested in specific topics such as how to lose fat, how to build muscle, how to get a better night's sleep? Well we have the answer for you over at our Mind Pump Clips channel where we have short clips that will go into details on all those topics and more. Go over, subscribe and enjoy. All right, here comes the show. Probably the best thing you could do to have a healthy brain is to have healthy muscles. In other words, healthy muscles equal healthy brain. I like that. Yes. So cool study came out. It was an analysis of many studies, right? So I love this, right? When they look at lots of different studies and they look at what each of the studies say or whatever. Do you think that should be a standard like as far as before you take like a study and run with it and like, oh, this is fact or this is how we should go in this direction? Do you think that you need a meta analysis first before we make critical decisions like that? What's your thought on that? Yeah, I would say generally speaking, that's one of the highest standards, right? So you'll have your gold standard, which is your double blind placebo controlled study, meaning in humans, researchers, yeah, on humans, researchers plus participants don't know who's getting what, so everybody's blind to it, placebo controlled, meaning, you know, one group gets nothing. So you can set the control group, you want to have a large sample size. And that's representative. So, you know, men and women, different ages, like there's so there's different levels of what you would consider. Yeah, that's a study we can really take to heart or one that's maybe not so good or whatever. But then you have analysis of multiple studies, right, where that's probably the highest standard where you're looking and seeing the most truth. And I do want to say that this, you know, this particular study looked at all these different studies, echoes what other studies have seen observational studies have seen other data kind of points to. But what this what it said was, essentially, they compared multiple forms of exercise. Okay, so cardiovascular exercise, walking, swimming, biking, strength training. And they looked at the results on cognitive health, in particular at preventing cognitive decline. And what they found was by leaps and bounds, strength training is the best form of exercise to prevent cognitive decline. Now, I talked about this in the resistance training revolution. There was a study done out of Australia, where they saw that strength training prevented the buildup of beta amyloid plaques in the brain. Now, we know that the beta amyloid plaques aren't what cause. We're now learning that's not what causes Alzheimer's dementia. But there is some kind of a connection as to, you know, maybe what's causing that may cause. But nonetheless, it's the only non medical intervention really shown to do that. And there's a lot of theories as to why. And one of the prevailing ones, the one that I subscribed to is that what you find with people who have dementia and Alzheimer's and other types of cognitive impairments is two things. One, there's a very, very high connection between that and issues with blood sugar. So diabetes or, you know, insulin issues. And number two, when people do have cognitive impairment, they tend to get improvements in cognitive performance when you put them on a ketogenic diet. Ketogenic diet, meaning you eliminate carbohydrates completely, body runs off of ketones, and you tend to see this improvement in cognition. And the brain is, you know, it's a thirsty organ and it does utilize glucose. And so this is why a lot of scientists, you know, some scientists and researchers call Alzheimer's like type three diabetes. So what's this have to do with strain training? Your muscles, your muscles are one of the ways you store glycogen. Glycogen comes from sugar and carbohydrates. Your muscles are super insulin sensitive. So building muscle really improves your body's ability to utilize carbohydrates and to be sensitive to insulin. Would you would you say something like by building muscle, you're building these bigger reserve tanks? Absolutely. A hundred percent. The liver is the more of them that we build, the more reserve that you have, which in turn more protective. And you lose muscle and you become weak. You lose insulin sensitivity. You lose that that storage capacity for glycogen. So it's another study that shows that strain training for longevity purposes. Now, it's not the only form of exercise and other forms. All of them have benefit. But what's funny to me is that strength training forever was kind of relegated to like the bottom, the bottom of the list, right? It's like doctors forever now, when they'd recommend you go work out for health, for longevity, it was everything else. Yeah, it was never strained back for the most part. Turns out strength training is, in many cases, superior. It's the best. And this one now is showing for cognitive. And you know what else is funny? What form of exercise was connected to being dumb? Yeah. Yeah. Strength training. Meatheads. So funny. It's so weird, right? So hilarious. So like you want to have a healthy brain, have healthy muscles. You have healthy muscles. You're much more likely to have a healthy brain. Now, to that point, and what's really interesting, and it's kind of cool that this came out, we're right in the middle of our launch of our Maps 15 program. And what comes to mind to me when I think of research like this and reaching the general population is the way it will be communicated will be different than, to your point about the meatheads, the dumb. Like you've got this extreme level of fitness people that are the jacked hardcore fitness train for peace mode, hour, hour and a half workouts. And although there's tremendous benefit, health benefits, for building a strong lean body, I think when you see research like this, I think what is going to be more appealing to the average person is that you can get a lot of these cognitive benefits with very minimal effort in that direction. Bro, you hit the nail on the head so hard. It's not even funny. One of the hallmarks of strength training, one of the things that makes it so valuable is how little time you need to spend doing it to get this huge result. No other form of exercise will show health and longevity benefits that are exponentially larger than the time being spent. So they'll do studies, well, they'll have somebody. There was a recent one that we talked about on the podcast where people did one eccentric loaded movement a day on their biceps and they saw significant strength of muscle gain. Now, are you going to look like a bodybuilder or a physique competitor doing that? No. But for longevity purposes, literally, here's how I predict it's going to be communicated. And I really hope we can save this clip because I love nothing more. You guys know this. I love telling people I told you so. We love, yeah, future predictions. It's my most annoying trait, but I enjoy doing it. They're going to communicate this to people. Do one or two strength training movements a day. That's what they're going to tell people. Because the benefits of strength training have nothing to do with the calories being burned while you're doing it. It's all about the adaptation that it triggers. And it really doesn't take much to cause those adaptations. So if somebody did, you know, like math 15, right? You did 15 minutes a day. That's 105 minutes a week, right? So that's roughly 250-minute workouts a week if you were to devote to 15 minutes a day. Even if you did 10 minutes a day, 10 minutes is 70 minutes. Tell me one form of exercise where you did 70 minutes a week. No. That would reap all those tremendous benefits. So it's literally the form of exercise that I predict the medical community will promote more than any other. We'll be fine. Did they, in this made analysis, did they define a healthy muscle? In terms of its strength capacity, in terms of size, in terms of lean mass versus fat mass with these individuals, what was the determination there? So I don't know what their specific parameters were. I don't understand what you're asking. Because he's talking about having a healthy muscle. Like what is that? Yeah, like what does that consist of in terms of like, because let's say somebody just does cardiovascular training all the time and they still have a real lean physique, but like, you know, might not have necessarily the size and capacity of like a bigger muscle. So it's strength and muscle size, but I do want to say this that like with all forms of performance, there's this like this bell curve, right? Where a little bit, you'll get a little bit of results. Then there's this like, this is where you get a lot of longevity results, but then when it gets extreme, you get diminishing returns. So like, It's like what we talked about with Stan, right? Yeah, so it's like, you know, being strong and having good muscle shape and some size or some good muscle development is good. Being a pro bodybuilder, well, you're probably going to lose, you're going to get diminishing returns or being strong is good, but devoting your life to squatting 500 pounds or 600 pounds. Well, that is like you're pushing the threshold of what your body's comfortable with. Well, I mean, this argument that you're making right now is was kind of the motivation behind me moving in this 15 to 20 minute direction currently in my life. And I think I brought that up the other day when we launched the program, I was saying that, you know, I actually feel really good. Some of the best I've ever felt in my life, by no means am I in the best aesthetic shape, but my focus is a little bit different. And so my thought process of like following this kind of real short workouts was, well, listen, what if my goal really wasn't to sculpt or shape myself to look a certain way and purely was kind of longevity focused? What would my training look like? And that's when I started to do that. Now, the thing that was interesting to me that I was blown away by was how much strength that was still maintaining and how much muscle I was still maintaining. That was the part that was really interesting. Now I speculated that I obviously have decades of consistent high volume training for a long time. And so I'm sure that is playing a factor into why I feel it's so beneficial. Well, I'm so, okay, so here's what I, this again, I had this to bring up too. There was a study that showed that talked about how much strength training was required to maintain, right? Cause there's building and there's maintaining. And one of the, again, another great factor or characteristic strength training is that in other forms of exercise don't offer this, that if you build a certain amount of muscle and strength, it doesn't take a lot to keep it. Other forms of exercise, if you cut down, you'll lose a lot of performance, you'll lose a lot of the health benefits at some point, right? Yeah. With strength training, there was a study that showed that with- That was last year, right? The one seventh or something like that? Well, there's another one that showed that younger lifters could maintain their muscle strength and size with one workout a week. For 32 weeks, the study went. 32 weeks, younger lifters. Now they theorize that older lifters may need a little more to maintain muscle and strength. Also, it depends how extreme you are. So if you're like a bodybuilder, probably you're gonna lose muscle going down to once a week. But these were guys that worked out, three days a week, you know- See, that's interesting, cause I feel the opposite. I feel that- This is speculation, I agree with you. I think the older you get, the easier it is to keep. Yeah, I think that- Or should I say, the longer you had that muscle, the easier it is to keep? Yeah, cause I remember in my early 20s, having these bouts of, say, weeks in a row, maybe even I've had some, I think, times in my life or maybe I even went a couple months of like inconsistently or not training. And I felt like I lost a lot of it. And then trying to get it back took a lot of work where I'm at now, I feel it takes very little to get myself back to what I would have considered in 25 was great shape. When I worked really, really hard and consistently to build in my mid-20s, I feel like little effort towards training and some tightening up the diet and I can build that- You know, there's another factor there too, Adam, is that a lot of people when they stop working out or they work out less, their diet tends to change quite a bit. So there's that role that's being played. So like, oh, I'm not lifting weights, my protein intake's gonna go down and stuff like that. So that'll kind of play a role. But yeah, this is just another study that shows that once you build, because I mean, God, I used to hate this question that I would get from new members. So I thought it was so silly, but I get it. Like, you guys ever have new members come up to you and be like, yeah, but once I build it, what happens when I stop working out? And you look at them like, what the hell is that? Obviously, you're gonna lose whatever. But I get it, right? I get why people are saying that. Strength training, I mean, nothing's permanent, but it's one of the most permanent forms of exercise when it comes to certain results. What you'll lose if you go from training four days a week to one day a week, you'll keep a lot or most of the muscle and strength. What you'll lose is probably work capacity. You'll lose some stamina. Like you go from one day a week back to four, you'll probably get sore. You know, you'll probably not have as much, stamina and endurance go real fast. Strength sticks around for a little while. So when you add all that up, like I'm telling you right now, we're like maybe five to 10 years away from the medical community, literally being like, hey, do like two or three strength training exercise a day. That's what we want you to do. How easy that gonna be for the average person, by the way. What's up everybody? Here's the giveaway. Map 15 minutes, the brand new program we just launched. You can get it for free. Here's how you win. Leave a comment below in the first 24 hours that we drop this episode. Subscribe to this channel. Turn on notifications, do all of those things. If we like your comment, we'll notify you in the comment section. That's the only place we're gonna notify you if you win and you'll get free access to maps 15 minutes. Now everybody else, this is still in the launch phase. There's two days left for the sale and the free giveaway. So if you wanna sign up for maps 15, if you do it in the next 48 hours, you get it for $20 off, plus you get two free eBooks, the power of sleep and the occlusion training guide. Oh, and by the way, we threw in a bonus advanced version for those of you that wanna do a daily short barbell free weight based workout. So that's all in there. Again, over the next 48 hours, after that it ends, goes up in price. You don't get the eBooks and all the free stuff. Anyway, if you're interested, go to maps15minutes.com and then use the coupon code 15 special for the discount and the free giveaways. All right, here comes the show. We just did an episode, right, on our new program Maps 15, which is 15 minutes a day. And then what we did is we included an advanced version because for some people, 20, 25 minutes is more appropriate. People have been working on it a long time. Already starting controversy. And I knew this would happen. You would get all the hardcore lift or you can't do, that's not gonna do anything. That's really where it's gonna come from, right? Yeah, everybody that's like married to this idea that you have to be in the gym for an hour, like every single day. And to reduce that down to what we're talking about, it's like blasphemy. Yeah, well, you know what it is. They've done more damage than good. Because of their, okay, so I'll tell you guys, I'll tell you some stories about when I first became a trainer that I know you guys did the same thing. I know this. When I first became a trainer, I must have talked so many people out of working out. Yeah, to what they needed to commit to. Yeah, because they come in and be like, I can only work out one day a week or no, I can't do that. And I'd be like, well then, because my goal was to get everybody to work out every day and be all super dedicated, fitness fanatic like me. And so I would be like, well, you know, you should actually have to try and hype and motivate them. You gotta make more time. You make more time in the day for your health. You get more time to be a better parent. You'll be whatever. Everybody has the same 24 hours a day at his whole speech. And I would end up talking people out of it because they'd come in and be like, you know, I'm just gonna do like one day a week to start. And then after I told them all this shit, they'd be like, well, one day a week, it's not gonna do anything for me. I'm just not gonna do anything. So I think we've done more damage than good. So these meat heads and these fitness fanatics that are debating this, it's like, listen, you're not helping anybody by the way. Look, I don't need to tell the fanatical fitness person. I don't need to convince them to work out 20 minutes a day. They're gonna do more than they need to. You're gonna do whatever you're gonna do anyways. Yeah, in fact, I need to convince them to not over train so much. I'm talking to the average person who follows this pattern of on off, on off. You're talking about the other 85% of the world. Yeah, more and more. The majority, bro. Yeah. No, I've always, I mean, we've said this since the beginning that that was the, you know, the bone we had to pick with the fitness space was just that, you know, we've been communicating to ourselves for so long, you know, all fighting over the latest studies and who's on the most recent cutting edit shit. Meanwhile, losing a majority of the population because the majority of the people don't think that's for them. They don't, they see that. And there's a sliver of people that see that and aspire and wish they could be that way. But there's actually a big percentage of people like, I don't fucking want that. Most. I don't want that. Think about that shift of a lifestyle where all they see is like, they're so dedicated that they are literally in there like six, seven days a week, you know, for all this time. And their goal is to increase that amount of time, increase the amount of load, increase the volume. Like everything is just like this trajectory of like a gajillion more things to add onto the list. And so it's to your average person. They're like, oh my God, I'm already doing a lot. I don't want to add all this other stuff. No, no, no. What does the average person want? This is what the average person wants. They want to feel better, move better. They want to be generally lean, you know? I know everybody like, I want a six pack. Look, most people don't want a six pack. Most people just want to look healthy. Most people don't want to look like bodybuilders or whatever. Most people don't want exercise to be their life. They want exercise to compliment their life, right? What if I told you I only had to work out 15 minutes and get a six pack, you know? People won't take the pill. Yeah, that's it. You're like, no, I want this. Yeah, so it's like, it's hilarious to me. And we are, look, we're failing. We are failing. Fitness industry, you suck at selling this to the average person. You guys keep talking to each other, a bunch of fitness fanatics, you know, in a circle jerk, talking about how great you guys are, how hardcore you are. Meanwhile, obesity is increasing. And here's what's even funnier. The people that do try to exercise the average person, what percentage of them actually pick up strength training? Even smaller percentage. Why? Because we did a shitty job selling it. So, you know, that's the, and the truth is the opposite of what people think. Literally, a little bit goes a long way, gets your faster metabolism, better insulin sensitivity, improves your cognitive health, or at least, at the very least. Is it efficiency should be the goal, right? Totally. Yeah, to do what is just necessary to get the results and then free yourself up to do everything else. Yeah, protective against the sedentary lifestyle. You're gonna sit down most of your life, let's be honest. You know, jobs are all sedentary. Like you have some muscle, that'll protect you. Yeah, it's funny. So, I have a funny story for our Caldera commercial today. So, I'm talking to Katrina. This was actually just happened, like maybe two, three days ago. And Katrina gets this call from her old VP that used to work for JJ Albany. So Katrina used to work for a big construction company, one of the largest construction companies in the Bay Area. You know, and just a bunch of old rugged dudes. She fit right into that group. I mean, you guys know her personality and stuff. And so they absolutely loved her and they continue to still talk to her and check up on her. And she hadn't heard from this VP in quite some time. And he sent a text which was like, oh my God, Adam's famous. She's like, what? Maybe just figure that out. Yeah, so he's like, call me. So she calls him and stuff like that. Hey, how you doing? I haven't talked to you forever and they catch up. He's like, I don't know if he was watching TV or he was on one of his, you know, iPads or phones or like that. And I guess he got a Caldera commercial. I guess he's in to face her. Obviously, he got targeted. I thought that part was funny when she told me that. Obviously he's a pretty construction dude. I know he's a rugged construction guy, but he obviously cares about his skin because he got targeted by Caldera somehow. But yeah, I guess the feet popped up and it was hard. But I'm also, it was youthful. Yeah, it was our commercial. I think that we... Hard muscle soft face. That's it. We did for them. He's like, Adam's famous and he looks amazing. Yeah. Did you see that they came out? Yeah. I'm listening. So we just got this, their ice serum. I haven't tried it yet. This new thing for the eyes. Doug will be all over that right away. I've already used it. You did already. Yeah. Look at Doug's eyes right now. You might have used too much, Doug. You look like a baby right now. Yeah. Going backwards. I'm actually excited to use it because I feel like that's what around my eyes is where I noticed them. But when I look back at pictures and I compared to like now... That's like the old, yeah, it happens to everybody. You get these little bags and like... I even noticed, and you guys notice, like day to day it fluctuates. Like a good night's rest. Oh, yeah. Like I can... I never noticed that before. Like literally this is new to me. This is like new in the last year or two. I like see like... I can look 10 years older or younger by how I slept and how my... Yeah. Around my eyes. I never noticed that, you know what I'm saying? I'm never like... I squint so much. I guarantee I'm gonna have like just wrinkles, just right here. Just... Yeah, but you'll look distinguished though, you know what I mean? Yeah. Look at that face. Anyway, well, they're doing a good job, obviously. I like how they're putting us out, you know what I mean, on their commercials. Yeah. It's good for our exposure. Yeah. Well, this is now the second or the third one. A Viori one happened last time, Caldera. There was another one where random people that are connected to Katrina and I have now made this connection like, oh my God, mind pump is huge. Cause I seen them on like a stupid ad. I'm like, so funny to me. Oh, that's what it was. It was a text message I got from Viori. Somebody had been like, oh my God, you guys are so big. I'm like, do we even work... We were working with Viori like damn, you're five years ago. But because they put us out on ads, now random people are seeing it. Dude, they're speaking to you, what was that, the IG Live you did? Oh, with Chris. How do you say his name? Nagibi. Nagibi. Wow, great job. Did you like it? What a great discussion. You're not blowing smoke on my ass. No, first off, if you sucked, I would be happy to tell you. I know, I do feel that way. I actually told Chris that. Yeah, you suck. What do you mean? Chris was messaging me. You didn't watch it. Did you watch it or not? I watched it. I hopped on and off a bunch of times. Oh yeah. Okay. You were gonna talk shit, probably. Did you see me on there? No, I know better than... I know dude. If I'm like business, that's why I was like it. I can't pay attention to you fucks because I know you guys are trying to throw me off. I was totally trying to do that. Hey, people don't even know this. Half the time I'll be on an interview because I do a lot of interviews and Adam will be at the window over there and he'll be flashing me his butt cheek or something like that. Trying to get me to crack. So if I see you guys' names pop up, I'm like, yeah, I'm not even gonna pay. I'm not gonna pay attention. But Chris asked me my feedback. I said, you know, Sal said it was really good. I said, he actually called me, he texted me, I said, we're very critical of each other. I guarantee if it was crappy, he'd be quick to tell me that it wasn't good. But yeah, it was a great conversation. It was a really good discussion. He does a great job. Obviously, this is his element. You did a phenomenal job of asking great questions and communicating things. I think the average person would be interested in when it comes to financial health and the economy. Really valuable, a lot of valuable takeaway. I think sometimes when you listen to a finance podcast or stuff like that, it gets to a point where it's a little, not high level is the wrong word. It's communicated away where the average person's like, huh? You lose me. Yeah, you lost me or I'm not interested. We're just boring. Yeah, that's where I'm at. It was really good. So that was my desired outcome. And for content creators, out there, this is like a page out of the, Gary V is really good at this. Patrick Beddavid's really good at this. This is a conversation I'm having anyways. And so this is what really inspired me to do it. It's like, you know what? I'm so into that conversation. I have friends in that space that I respect and look up to, that I'm calling them anyways and going, hey, this is what we're thinking about doing. We're thinking about saving this or investing this or pulling out. Or what do you think that? And so I'm already having these dynamic conversations anyways. I thought, you know what? Here's a cool way potentially to add value to our audience that maybe they would get the same value I feel I'm getting at. So you're gonna do this somewhat regularly? So we're gonna start it bi-weekly right now. So I'm gonna do it again in another way. So by the time this airs another week or so, it'll come out. It'll be on Friday afternoon. I will leave it live for 24 hours and then I'll pull it down. And the reason for that is people will always leave it for one, I don't want it on my wall. My wall is for me and my pictures and my family and stuff. So I don't want, it's a business thing. I'm gonna put it up there. And it's, if it continues to do as well as it did and it grows, then it may turn into something. You know, maybe we turn it into like- I think we should have him on the show. He's really, really good at communicating. Oh, he loved that. Some of that stuff. Super smart guy, but he does it. He communicates it in a very, very good way, which is so important. Do you know how, you know, he got inspired by what we did in the fitness space, right? So he found us like six years ago. I didn't know that. Oh yeah, you didn't know that. So he's been following us since Shred's days. Yeah, so he's been following us since almost the very, very beginning. And we inspired him to build his platform. Oh wow. So he's not monetizing anything he's doing. He does well in the banking and real estate. He's got all kinds of stuff going on. He's a lawyer, so he's got a great back. He's already fine financially. So he didn't build it to try and make money off it. What he wanted to do was disrupt the financial space because there's a lot of grifters. There's a lot of guys out there that are, that have got a lot of fame from being, you know, whatever, giving out advice and they're making money off of people and a lot of the advice they give, you know, lines their pockets. And so he's inspired to disrupt that. You know what's funny as I, you know, as I think about it, because you know, one thing I always say is that the fitness space or the health space, right, you can put weight loss in there is like 98% just bullshit, terrible information. The make money space has got to be as bad or worse. That's how we get most charlatans. We connected on our mutual disgust for masterminds. That was like our thing. That was the thing that we like, we kind of originally hit it off on because like we both just can't stand that because it's such low hanging fruit. And I know there's somebody out there just like, listen, I can sell you a mastermind too. I could also sell you on how I see the value in it, right? There's something to be said about getting in the room, about gaining access to people that have already failed 100 times ahead of you and you can learn from them. I'm not, so I understand that. The part that has never sat well, I think with any of us, is that you know that the success rate of entrepreneurship is less than 20%. So when you fill these rooms up with 1,000 people paying you thousands of dollars, you know there is only a small margin, very, very small margin of people that are gonna be, and by the way, that small margin of people that are gonna be successful, arguably would have been successful regardless of they showed up to your fucking event. Which is why they highlight individuals instead of saying a percentage. You'll never hear a mastermind go like this. 10 out of 15 people that come through our mastermind. They'll say John here. Here's John. John is a millionaire now because we helped him out. And it's like, well, John was gonna be a fucking millionaire. And we taught him how to create his own mastermind. Yes, right, fractions off to his mastermind and then his guy's got a mastermind. Listen, I was a 15 year old kid. I'd been working for a year at this point, saving my money, stay up late, watch late night television, what comes on. How to make money, you know, infomercials. And I bought like three of them. I bought, it was Don LaPri was one. Small ads and newspapers. I don't know if Doug remembers this guy. Then there was another guy named Tom Voo. He was, I think it was Vee. I remember Tom Voo on the boats. On the boat. He had those gangsters. Yeah, dude. Who but Tom Voo? Have you seen Tom Voo Doug? That was the best. Oh, bro. That was a good throwback. Be like me, Tom Voo, beautiful women. Oh my God, what a good throwback. Look at me, gold chain. You don't know nothing about that, do you? Oh, pull this up. You gotta pull up Tom Voo. I don't even know if you'll find it. He had jobs. Oh, yes you will. I bet you all the old clips are Tom Voo on YouTube will be up here. That, I bought his shit, someone else's. And I realized, this was early, early days I realized this. The way that these guys made their money is teaching people how to make money. They didn't make money before. That's right. These guys are full of shit. Yeah. That was after the third one. You know what, I'm so glad you brought him up because this is- You went to jail, by the way. This has been around forever. No, yeah. It's just right now it's crazy on social media because how quickly you can rise to fame on social media and- How quickly you can apparently or appear to rise to fame. Right. Right. So you have these people frontin' and then they teach people how to make that money and then what's crazy is they were- Look at it, there he is. Tom Voo and his babes. Bro, I fell for that shit. I was poor. Now look at me. Okay, would you say he's the OG of doing that? No. Like who did it before? There's a Riffle Wall Street guy. What was his name again? Oh no, but he didn't make- Oh, he's Tom Voo's older than that. He's older than that. Oh yeah, this is like 80s, dude. Bro, Tom Voo, first he would say shit like, look at me, I used to be poor. Now look, beautiful women, lots of- Who did it before him? I used to take him potato every night. He'd say shit like that. Yes, yes. What? Oh my God. Who did it before him? Do you know Doug? I don't know. Bro, this has been around forever. But he's one of the OGs. And he would do the same thing. He'd have people who apparently made all their money because of him and they'd show a picture of their, but look at his commercial. There he is on a yacht. He was Dan Bozeri before Dan Bozeri. He's got five girls in bikinis surrounding him. You know? He went to jail. It's funny bringing this up because I was having a conversation with my sister in law recently and she's doing content too because she's an attorney to be able to kind of repurpose it and sell ways to like, for divorce secrets kind of thing. And she's going through and looking at some of the people in the space that are selling a lot of this stuff. And she's like, there's this weird sense that they're almost like talking to themselves as they're presenting the material to everybody. And I'm like, yeah, that's exactly what I know, especially with motivational speakers. It's like, they're just talking to themselves, to hype themselves up and fronting like, this is what got them success when they're just literally climbing up off of your money that's putting it there. Do you guys remember this annoy the shit out of me? And I'm pretty sure I'm going to annoy a bunch of people watching this right now, but that's fine. Do you guys remember that book The Secret came out? And everybody was talking about, if you just think about it and envision it. Hold on a second. And then it'll happen. Manifested. And then I remember what I was like, what the fuck? And it was like, Oprah was doing it and all these people were doing it. I'm like, I don't know if it works that way, bro. I think you got to think about it, but then you got to put it working. That's all Scientology stuff. And are you still following the Grant Cordon stuff that came out? Is there a new stuff out? No, yeah, I've been following it. Like, he's came out and commented back on it. Did I share on the podcast this? He's just defending himself. I don't think he ever shared on the podcast. Yeah, this was off air. We talked about this, about how he was, how he's making his money, how he basically finds a property and tells his, people that he's gathering all their money, right? That, oh, I've got this incredible investment. And he tells them a price that is inflated from what he can actually get it out. So he automatically makes money off of it. So he makes the cream off. And then he's already got built in a percentage, like 1% he makes. So I would give him, and I believe Lewis House has given him money and some other people we know have given him money. So you give him, let's say we gave him $100,000 of our money, he in the contract says, I'm gonna charge you 1% for basically a finder's fee. Okay, that's fine, because you're guaranteeing I'm gonna- But he's making more than that, because you're buying it off him. Yeah, he's making 1% off the price he tells us and then he goes around and he gets it for a lower price. Now, what we don't know, and what I don't know is how much of what he's doing is technically illegal. Wait, is it proven that that's what happened? Oh yeah. Oh yeah, that for sure is happening. What we don't know, and he's been in and out of court with all this stuff, is if it's technically illegal and because in his contract, if the way he's structured it and worded it, that he could technically do that. So that's the part where he may get off and it will be no big deal is because if he structured it correctly and covered his ass, which he probably did, I'm sure he had lawyers that help him put it together so that if it did go to court that they can't. Because I watched the court case, so actually you can watch it on YouTube. Really? Yeah, yeah, I'll share it with you guys. There's clips of them trying to nail him down and you see the judges going, we can't prove it. Here's what I find interesting with this, some of the stuff, because it'd be like, well, it's not illegal. Look, if you base your morality off the laws, you're fucked. That's not how it works. So there's a lot of stuff that's not illegal, but is it ethical? Is it ethical? Is it the way to do business? I don't know. That's the question. Ripoffs and stuff like that. Shocking news, Beyond Meat is cutting a huge segment of the workforce. Oh, that was on my. Yeah, so apparently, so it's apparently, so hear me out guys, this is just a business lesson I just learned. Apparently if you take a product and then make a copy of that product, that's not the same and less healthy for you and worse, you'll suck. It doesn't last? Yeah, apparently. Since you brought that up, I want to bring up something, let me read it. So a fake burger, that doesn't quite taste as good as a burger, that's also less healthy, not gonna make money. So many DM me, they were at the Tough Mudder and they're handing out like Beyond Meat jerky. And I was like, Beyond Meat jerky. Oh, we were tagged in that. I saw that. That is interesting. I was like, and they're excited. I'm like, look at the ingredients. How many ingredients do they have to use to be able to create something that's kind of that consistency in like me? It's like, it's pretty crazy. It's weird. Yeah. I mean, when that hype first happened and it was really based off of hype, we knew, we knew, we said it on the podcast, not gonna work, huge failure, stupid. So, speaking of companies that suck, great transition. Do you guys remember, do you guys remember who Michael Burry is? Ooh, no. Yeah, you do. He's the guy who, you do. Watch, I guarantee you he'll know after I say this. He's the guy who, yes, he pretty sure. He was the one who was famous. He shorted all the companies and he made a ton of money on them. The movie was based off of him. Absolutely. So, have you heard anything what he's been talking about right now? Like, he's pulled everything out of the stock market. Oh, that's nice. That makes me feel good. So, here's something super interesting that I didn't know. And I actually, to give credit where it's due, I think I heard Patrick Bet David reference it first and then I went and looked up his tweet and then looked up what he had said about it and the articles around it and thought, wow, this is super interesting and I didn't even know this. So, he tweeted out, this was just not that long ago, last month. This morning, there were still 218 primary stock listings in the United States with a market cap of over 1 billion and EBITDA less than negative 100 million. 29 of them had market caps over 10 billion, totaling 655 billion. Saying it again, all this still, okay. Meaning, you've got over 200 companies that are supposed to be worth billions of dollars that are turning in numbers of being negative hundreds of millions of dollars. Wow. So, think about that for a second. That's a skewed market signal. Huge. Which you're waiting for a correction. Huge. Because they have to match. I didn't know that. I think that's super fascinating to me. You're billion dollar market caps. You have billion dollar companies that we all look up to and go, oh, there were billions of dollars. They're amazing. They're impenetrable. They're amazing. Yet, they're turning in negative 100 million dollar earnings for the year. That's crazy. Yeah. Is that not crazy? So, in other words, they're alarming. In other words, we're not potentially bouncing along the bottom, but rather, probably gonna go down further. Which is why he's pulled out completely. He pulled everything out. Oh, yeah. Oh. Yeah. Well, that sucks. Yeah. I know. But I didn't know that. I hadn't heard that before and I know that, okay, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad company. We have examples of companies like Netflix that ran in the red for years before it became profitable. There's plenty of companies that- Yeah, a lot of tech companies, yeah. But that's a bit alarming, right? I mean, I feel like- But those are anomalies. Netflix is like an anomaly. Yeah, when you're talking about 200 plus companies- You know what happens is when we start to see new businesses or a new type of market, this happened during the dot-com crash too, we investors start to think that the old rules don't apply. Oh, this is different. No, no, no, this is different. This is tech that never existed before. Or this is users. There's users. It's information. It's different. But the old rules always prove to be true, no matter what, with business. So maybe that's what's happening. Maybe these are a lot of these tech companies with lots of promise. You know, like when they give, you know, I hate to keep hammering tonal, but it's like tonal's valuation based off of this, that and the other. We look at it and go, no, we know how- Potential, yeah. Fitness users work and what this is gonna look like. And so, yeah. Well, I think this highlights, you know, two-year, and that's why I brought it up with the conversation around the staff cut, 14% by beyond a meter, whatever. I mean, we're seeing this across the board on all the big companies, all the big companies. I mean, Facebook just said they put a hiring freeze. Everybody's putting, these companies haven't slowed down hiring since almost they existed. Yeah. They began, and now they're freezing that, which tells you that they are forecasting a bumpy road ahead. So it's, I don't think it's here yet. I think it's gonna get worse before it gets better in the next year to two years. We're gonna, and so during that conversation, and if you heard me, like, I don't necessarily think we're gonna see an 08 crash, but I think it's gonna be just this, I think we're gonna slowly see it go down and down and down and down and it's gonna be a, and you might see these little- You know, not to add fuel to this negative fire, but- No, we're crapped out. Yeah, yeah, not to make everybody shit. Well, listen- We'll get positive. Let me tell you the positive. It's reality. Let me tell you the positive spin about this, actually. This is when the best companies are built. Of course. This is when the most creative companies are built are in times like this. This is when wealth is created right now, too. So the opportunities that will happen in the next year- Isn't this when acquisition goes way up to, in terms of like businesses acquiring other businesses? Then you just wash out. You wash out malinvestment and smart people realize that things are on sale. So what do I mean by that? Well, after 2008, you know, I'm in the Bay Area here, right? So the housing market here is ridiculous. But after 2008, we had a big drop in home prices here, too. And I remember after 2008, lots of investors came in and started buying up properties, knowing that everything's quote unquote, on sale. And so they were just buying them up left and right and they made a killing because in the market kind of rebounded. So, we'll see. Well, speaking of properties, I guess this is kind of weird transition. But like, so I was at the house by myself this weekend. And- So he looks so rested and- I feel great. Stress-free, so great. I had a whole me time. Like it was so much me time, I didn't know what to do. And so I was like watching TV and you guys know my history of the house having like certain issues in terms of like spiritual things. More? Oh my God. Is there more ghost stuff? So there's one, yeah, so. Okay, so I was sitting on the couch and the dogs were with me and Courtney and the kids are gone. And so I was just watching TV and all of a sudden I hear this like bam on the front door. And I was like, what? And the dogs just like got up real quick, started barking and running towards the door. And it literally like sounded like somebody threw something heavy and just like slammed it into the door. And I was like all kind of, oh, what the hell was that? Was it at night? Daytime? Oh, it was at night time. And I go out, nothing, nothing outside at all. I mean, I have a little bit of a decoration that fell as a result. It was just this little like doorknocker, like skeleton thing that fell off the door. But like not even close to the noise of what like occurred. And so I was just like, that was really weird and whatever, no big deal. I'm gonna kind of go back to watching my movie and just hope for the best. This is kind of like the right, you know? Like kind of move on. And then it just kept like getting at me. And I'm like, oh, like that was so creepy. Like what was that? Like it's like, it takes Courtney because we have that ring camera. And I'm like, maybe she caught something, you know? Oh, shit. On the ring camera. And so she was like, what? So she checked it out and was like, I don't know, I was waiting. I'm like, what was it? And so it turns out we have this dog next door that comes to hang out with our dogs all the time, just randomly. And he just like be lined it to the front door, hit his paws on and knocked like all the decorations down and then just bolted and like left. Really? Yeah, for no reason. Bro, that's pretty good. Just getting the shit out of me. So good that you had ring though. Bro, you got doorbell dish by a dog? Yeah. He's laughing. He's like, shit's on the side. So random. Like that wouldn't even cross my mind is that like that was the thing. A dog came about. Yeah, like why did he do that, dude? And like he freaked everybody out. So have you guys noticed this? This is a dad thing. This is such a dad thing. I hope because maybe it's just me but I hope it's not just me. If I'm home and my kids or my wife or everybody's home and I hear a noise, I go into- Vigilant mode. Aggressive protective mode. Fearless, whatever's there. You're by yourself. You're by yourself. You're scared. When I'm by myself. It's the truth though. Yeah, that's the truth. I'm like, I'm like, I'm gonna ignore it. What is that? What is that? I mean, there's a hundred percent that's true. A hundred percent. You're by yourself. And my kids there and my wife is there. I am fucking dad mode, right? I'm looking for a knife. I'm looking for something. No fear. And I'm going towards the sound. I'm by myself. Yeah. Pretending. That didn't happen. Yeah. Talking to yourself like, oh, that didn't happen. Yeah. I'm exaggerating something. You know, it wasn't that bad. What a weird phenomenon that is. Isn't that funny? That is a weird phenomenon. If I'm by myself and I hear weird noises and shit, I start to get scared. Yeah. When I got the kids. And you think to go grab any kind of weapon or nothing. No. Just like, just be on the couch. Is that when you texted us? You want to come over? Yeah. Guys, you just want to hang out? Can I come over your house real quick, please? Hey, how about our experience on Friday of trying to do our first, what's Riverside call? Oh, our distance podcast? Yeah. You know what's weird about that? Yeah. What's weird about that is that. The producer had the hardest time. Yeah. Yeah. The guy who knows how to do this the most. And on the phone. All right, Doug, I had my issues, too. Yeah. Yeah, Sal and I were good go. Fuck. The one guy that was that, for sure. I know you guys. If we would have bet money in a hat, who would not figure this out? That would be me. Dude, I was good. I already did, bro. I'm 100% I know. Yeah. That's just how that goes. Look at Doug. Doesn't know what to say. It's like no comment, dude. It's like Doug showing us how to work out. You know what's funny about that is I totally motivated. I went and got a bunch of stuff to like stands and like all these things to try and like get myself really set up because that irritates me, dude. Like if I'm not like in a good place with technology, like it eats at me. And so and then on top of that, I went and got a bunch of music stuff and was just down there like getting loud and crazy. You and Doug blown some money this week. Yeah, I don't know what I just I got like this crazy spark. And I was like, I'm just going to do it because I need some like creative juice. And it was like I left and I was like, I had that like buyer's remorse like immediately. But then I put it to action. I was like, oh my God, it was so great. It was so much creativity. And now like everybody's back and I can't get loud. Good for you guys. I never hear either one of you guys blow money. That was like the first time. You guys never, you guys never just go, let me do some blow money. I still feel a little about it. Oh my God, I think you're funny. Totally, dude. Well, Doug came in today with his Louis Vuitton purse. I was like, that's nice, bro. Blingy. You matched my jacket. Real blingy. Doug is boosy like that for sure. Dude, I got to say this, right? So this happened again to me this weekend. Had a rough weekend. I'll tell you guys, I'll tell the audience why in just a second. But I needed something to eat or whatever and when stressful stuff happens, I forget to eat or whatever. So I went into Whole Foods, grabbed just some plant protein that they had. You know, plant protein's disgusting. Always, every time, it's gross. It tastes like grass clippings. I don't care how they flavor it, it's gross. Which makes me appreciate Organifi even more. Well, I remember it was one of the big selling points. I don't know what they do to their plant protein. It's all their products, dude. All their products are fire. They did such a good- No artificial sweeteners either. I know. They did such a good job of making all their products taste good and it's good high quality. Because of all the proteins you can buy, plant protein is almost always the most disgusting. Yeah, and it's- I mean, a lot of them I try to have heavy on the soy. There's a lot of soy in a lot of the other ones I try- No, Organifi isn't used soy. Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah, they don't. No, which, you know, there's controversies to- I mean, yeah, I just don't, I just prefer not to have it. They even save for pregnant women. That soy is okay, but not to go too heavy on soy. It's like an excess. Because of the phytoestrogens. Because there's potential that there could be a very mild and weak yet estrogenic effect from the soy. Anyway, so this weekend, maybe we have to edit this out because I'll see if I can talk about it, but so my grandfather passed away this weekend, 91 years old and really, really tough for, you know, thing for the family. He's, you know, I talked about him turning 90 a year ago and it was kind of a big deal. But anyway, it makes you think a lot about certain things and, you know, it's really crazy. I was having this conversation with Jessica. So my grandfather, man, we're all together. So my whole family just convened together. We're all at man's house. It was like at any given moment, 30, 40 people there and we're gonna have people flying in from Italy and Israel, he's got family in Florida, Chicago, New York. So a lot of people are gonna be coming in and, you know, we just start, you know, you start telling the stories, typically what happens. If you ever lost somebody, it's usually the conversations start to revolve around stories and stuff. And man, what a crazy life, you know? My grandfather, when he was a boy, so. This is your mom's side, right? This is my mom's dad. Maybe 11 years old, 12 years old. They were so poor that he used to hop on trains in Sicily. No ticket, so he'd have to sneak on trains to go to other towns to find ways to make money to bring back to his mom. So he would be gone for two, three days. You're a young boy doing that kind of stuff. Then he gets married, he marries my grandmother. She was 19, she was 16, they get married. She gets pregnant. And he, again, the Sicily during that time was very, and they were poor, and Sicily was very poor, especially. So he went to Venezuela of all places. I think he, you know, he heard. Now, what's crazy about this, my cousin and I were talking about this, I couldn't imagine today with the technology that we have, Google, internet, you know, translating, whatever. Imagine going to another country. You don't speak anything. You don't know, you don't know anybody. Crazy, crazy. And you gotta figure it out. You just gotta figure it out. You gotta hustle, right? So what he did, he took a boat, went to Venezuela, lived there for two years, slept on a dirt floor, and would send money back to my grandmother. Went back to Sicily. She got pregnant, had my mom, still couldn't find work. Again, it was that, went back to Venezuela, did it again, then asked, then had my grandmother come back on a ship and just figured it out how to make his way in this country. And what's, you know, my grandfather, just a very unique, just a tough, unique individual, very loving to his grandkids. You know, he was very proud Sicilian, but he was even more proud American. I remember, you know, I was talking about this with the family, and as a kid, even my grandfather, who, you know, he spoke broken English, but he would always say, God bless America. It's the greatest country in the world. It's a great, and I know why. It's cause he went all over and he was able to make it in this country and raise his four kids and then we went to his house and, you know, he was the first and only owner of that house. Oh, wow. Yeah, he bought it in the 1960s for $23,000. Wow. $25,000 in the house now, $1.7. Do you know what, like, his first break was? I mean, it sounds like he was, like, challenging. It was just a grind. It was just a grind. The whole time was a grind. Always, you know, he, when my mom was little, he was a custodian at school, at a school. And that night he would clean movie theaters and he would bring the family with him at night. And my mom, when she was, you know, seven, eight, whatever, her brother who was 10 or my grandma, they would help clean movie theaters till midnight. And then he'd go home and then he'd work in the school and he'd come back, pick him up, bring him back and they'd, so he could spend time with them. Wow. Basically. Wow. And they'd clean movie theaters every single night. Wow. Was that here in San Jose? San Jose. Oh, wow. Like the centuries or what would you remember? Yeah. Oh, yeah. The old centuries. The old ones. Oh, no shit. I think he did, I think he would clean. I think the centuries and I think maybe even the drive-ins he would do the park, I don't know, but really interesting. And also, you know, another thing too, we were talking about my, he was so proud of his garden. So he has a regular house, right, track house. And I mean, fruit trees and vegetables, all he planted every single one. And my grandpa was so proud of those things. And it makes sense when you realize how he grew up to have your own tree that bore fruit. It's a big deal to my grandfather. So I mean, you know, that's how he passed away. He went to his house against his kid's wishes. And no, if you know my grandfather, you know, you can't tell him what to do. He's a grown man, he's 91 years old. I think it's funny when people, you know, think that they can control, you know, somebody that age or whatever. He was sharp of mine too. So it wasn't like, you know, he had to control him because he was sharp. But he went home and, you know, he was doing his gardening or whatever and blowing that, you know, doing blowing the leaves and tending to his stuff. And we could see, you know, he had the ring camera or whatever. But, you know, he died in his home how we always wanted to go. So very, very tough time, but the families all together and, you know, my grandfather for the last, God, at least the last six or seven years when he, when we would get together, he'd tell me that, you know, he wants me to say, he always said, you know, Salvatore, when I die, I want you to say something nice about me. And he goes, and I want my grandsons to carry me. I want to make sure my grandsons carry me all the way. So he's got seven grandsons. So we're all going to be there. You sent that picture of all the guys. That was all seven. That's the grandsons. Yeah. But he had, I think 13 grandsons and I think 16 great grandchildren, if I'm not mistaken. Wow. If I'm not mistaken. Legacy. I mean, you know, it's just, he started, it's just, again, it's crazy to me. I can't believe. My grandma was telling stories about when she gave birth to my aunt. Cause my aunt, my mom, my, my mom's younger sister was the first one born in this country. And my grandma, neither one of them spoke English didn't know, whatever. She's like, so my grandma was telling me this. She goes, you know, you're, you're, you're no, no took us to the, to the hospital. And he, he was speaking Spanish. So he learned Spanish because he lived in Venezuela, right, for a few years. And, you know, here in California, if you're not going to speak English, you're more likely to find somebody who speaks Spanish. So he's trying to find somebody to talk to everybody, whatever. And he eventually found a doctor who spoke Italian, was able to deliver my aunt. But that was my grandfather. He could talk, he, everywhere you went, he knew somebody, always knew somebody. And I know, and it makes sense. He had to figure out how to hustle and how to make shit happen. Cause he knew nobody. He was here by himself with, you know, with my grandma. It's really crazy. So wild. Yeah. Crazy story. Original, yeah. That'll be tough time, but it'll get everybody together. And there's going to be a lot of people show up for that. So good stuff. Hey, check this out. Want to meet us live? Want to come to Mind Pump Studios? Check out the gym and the studio where we record all the magic, the place that Justin and Adam like to hang out and do cool stuff. It's a great place. Come check us out. Mind Pump Live, it's our first live event. Since all that craziness happened a few years ago, I'm not going to mention it. Don't want to get taken off the internet. But you guys know it was crazy, but we're back. Go to mindpumplive.com. Get yourself a ticket. Show up, meet us in person. Tell us why you love us. We love it. All right. Here comes the rest of the show. Our first caller is Jackie from Ohio. Hey Jackie, how can we help you? So first off, just like everybody else, I want to thank you guys because you guys have definitely given me my life back and not having to run one to two hours a day. I actually gave you advice to try and definitely gave me back some of my time. So I appreciate that. But secondly, I'd like to defend my future profession a little bit because you guys talk some shit on the dentistry. Then I'll... That was Adam. That was Adam. You know, we're not allowed to get people. There are some bad eggs in any industry, but, you know. I've been waiting. There's some bad dreams too. I've been waiting for this. I knew somebody was going to get my ass down. He's like, dead to sir hoax. Every single one. Right. Yeah, I know. Sorry about that. I want to keep your teeth. I have an appointment next week. Just so you know. Just so you know I have an appointment next week. See, there you go. Preventive care. Trying to prevent problems. That's the best way to do it for sure. All right, so my question is, is it normal for a front and a back squat to be almost equal? Or is there an imbalance I should be addressing? I tried to address it by isolating the quads and the hamstrings on the leg extension and then on the hamstring curl machine, which I don't use machines very often. But whenever I did that, my quads were a little bit more like stronger, which is normal, but then my quads or my hamstrings were right behind it. So I'm not sure if maybe they're too equal and I need to boost up my quads strength or where I should go from there. Yeah. Okay. So good question. So two things. It's not common for a back squat and a front squat to be the same or similar, but that doesn't necessarily mean there's a quote unquote imbalance or a problem. Imbalances or issues tend to cause pain or tend to cause mobility issues. So unless you're feeling pain or your mobility is suffering, it's not really something that I would worry about. And I'd point to Olympic lifters as a good example. Olympic lifters, and this has a lot to do with the fact that they practice lots of front loaded squats. Many of them confronts front load a squat, probably more than they can back squat or almost as much because of the way that they practice and train. So it's not necessarily an issue. It's just, it's just not common. For example, it's more common. Someone can deadlift more than they can squat, but there are cases where someone can squat more than they can deadlift. So I wouldn't worry about it unless you're feeling some kind of joint issues or pain. Are you feeling anything like that or does everything feel good? No, I definitely do mobility probably once or twice a week now and have run through prime. I haven't done prime pro yet, but I've done run through prime and I did all the mobility stuff whenever I did performance. So my hips are typically very tight just because I do run still, but I make sure to address that every workout. So my guess would be you have a pretty upright squat and then you have a pretty strong core. How do you feel like when you squat, do you ever feel it in your glutes or do you always feel it in quads? So I've been trying to focus more on my glutes, but yeah, I definitely usually feel it in my quads, but I've widened my stance a little bit and have gone a little bit deeper since working on that. How often do you incorporate hip thrust into your routine? Not very. Oh, you gotta do that. I would swap out some of your back squat sets for hip thrust and you'll probably develop the glute strength and the posterior chain that maybe why your front and back squat are so similar. So again, it doesn't necessarily mean there's a problem here, but you may get some nice surprise benefits, development issues. You're just probably quaddominants, you're a runner. Okay, so you're probably already a little quad dominant because of that. And then you probably are pretty upright squatter, so you get more quads involved there. So you're just not getting a lot of power from your glutes. That's all. It doesn't mean it's bad or it's wrong. Just, and one of the ways you could do that is to be like, is to get into like hip thrust, learning to fire the glutes more. And you could do that. You could do pre-exhaust before you go into squat. So let's say you are gonna do a back squat. I might do some, just maybe two sets of hip thrust right before just to prime the glutes really well before I go into my squats. And then I'm really concentrating on using my glutes. I think if you get better at firing the glutes in your squat, you might start to see the back squat come up. But again, it doesn't mean it's bad. Just means you're probably a little more quad dominant when you squat. Yeah, how often do you deadlift? At least once a week. I mean, I did with anabolic. I mean, I followed that with T, but right now I'm just kinda doing my own thing. I do it at least once a week. Yeah. Yeah, I'm just wondering how often you hit the post to your chain. So, you know, that could be something. Yeah, I do those in RDLs for sure. Yeah. Man, I tell you, I bet if you swapped out your, some of your sets of your back squat for hip thrust, I bet you would notice some pretty cool butt gains from doing that. Cause the hip thrust is phenomenal. Barbell hip thrust and train it for strength. You know, get the reps five to six and see what you can do there. And I bet you'll see some pretty good development from that. Okay. I've also moved it from a high bar to a low bar back squat to see if that's more comfortable. Cause the forever reason in the front spot is more comfortable for me. So I'm just trying to see if maybe like the different bar positioning too will help. Yeah. Adam hit the nail on the head. Your quads are the main drivers with your squats. So hitting, you know, changing the bar position on the back squat can help a little bit, but I think he hit the nail on the head with the hip thrust. I think that'll be the, I think that'll be an exercise you'll benefit greatly from because it seems like it's something that you need to do more of. Okay. No, I appreciate that. Can I do a follow-up question like everybody tries to do? Yeah, you can. Go for it. Sneak it in. So I know the sequence is specifically anabolic, then performance, then aesthetic. And since I have been a little frustrated with I don't hit very high numbers in terms of strength cause I think I've done endurance for so long that I don't have that capacity. So would it be a good idea to go into aesthetic in a cut like you guys have recommended before or just focus more on these hip thrusts and things like that for strength? Well, it depends on your goal. I mean, you can do a cut or a bulk on any of our programs, but like what's your body fat percentage at? Like what are your goals? What are you trying to accomplish? So I use the like home body scanner so it's not accurate, but I'm at about 19% on there. Yeah, why are you trying to cut? What are you trying to get down to? Why not? See where I'm facing here. I just passed born. So like I have some free time to kind of, and less stress in my life so I can kind of do more aesthetic goals now. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. But I would, I mean, if you were my client and you said, hey, Sal, what do you think I should do? I'd say, okay, if you want to cut for a little bit, we could do a few weeks of that just to see, you know, how you feel. And then I'd have you focus on a bulk and 19% body fat and like a really, you know, kind of a small surplus. So maybe five to 10% above your maintenance with your calories with hip thrusts and all that stuff. What you may actually find is your body fat percentage may not go up through the bulk in fact, it might actually even go down a little. Remember body fat percentage is a percentage of your overall body weight. So if you gained three pounds of lean body mass through a small surplus and adding hip thrust, which is an exercise that may benefit you and you gain no body fat in the process, you have simultaneously lowered your body fat percentage because now you've got more lean body mass, same total body fat, you're actually a little leaner. So I don't mind you cutting just keep in mind that we're, the two goals are a little conflicting, right? So if you came to me and it was like, hey, let's get my back squad up and we assessed, I figured it out and I said, oh, hip thrust, let's go build those glutes. Let's get you firing there. I would want you in at least a calorie maintenance or surplus to reap the greatest benefits from those hip thrusts. But then you come to me and you say you want to cut. Well, then we're not going to see the same benefits from that. You will still see some benefits from the hip thrust no matter what, but to maximize the benefits from that to Sal's point, you know, maybe I'd let you do like a two or three week cut and then, you know, so we can lean out a little bit. And then I say, all right, let's go back to a surplus and let's really hit those hip thrust and see what we can get from that. So I don't see anything wrong with wanting to do that. Just keep in mind that if you want to get the biggest benefits from the first question, I think that I would rather you be in a maintenance or a surplus most of the time at least. No, that makes sense. I'm just trying to get cause I was getting frustrated with my performance in terms of like not really increasing the weight super a lot. And I get like, that's not the reason I work out, but I was just getting frustrated. So like maybe I'll change my mindset instead of performance to media aesthetics and try something else about to bring up my motivation, that sort of thing. Yeah, do you have map symmetry? I don't know. You know what? It's always on sale, so I was on the fence about it, but... Yeah, let me send it, let me send you map symmetry. And what I want you to do is cut some of the volume out of the program, add hip thrusts, but then follow the program as it's laid out and then do a slight surplus, literally 5% to 10% above what your maintenance calories are. And then see what happens. I think you're gonna be very pleasantly surprised with a program like that and with a little bit of a surplus. Okay, and is that a 5% or 10% each day or just in the total week? I guess you can break it up either way, but I have like 100 each day or 100 over the week total. No, it's trying to do it every day because it's really hard to make up calories when it comes to a surplus. In other words, there's a limitation to how much muscle you'll gain from being in a surplus. And it seems to be, the data seems to show about 5% to 10% above, for most people, okay? This is different, there's obviously individual variances, but for most people, in other words, if your maintenance calories are 2,000, you'd go up to 2,200 calories, but if you miss that for two or three days, it's not like you could go 600 calories above and then make up for those other days. So try and be consistent with it. Okay. All right, cool. Yeah, I'll do that. All right, Jackie. Thank you, and again, I apologize for Adam. No, you're good, just keep going, twice a year. Thank you, Jackie. You got it. I knew that. I knew that was coming. I know, I was waiting for this. I actually was surprised it got this far. I was like, man, I talked shit about it. Nobody said that. I didn't talk shit about it, it's like twice, and I've been waiting for the call in to call you out on it. Yeah, you know what's good about this point? That was a good question. It was a really good question, but it does highlight something where sometimes when people work out a lot, they try to find problems where they don't exist. Now, it turned out good because it actually got us into a good direction of exercises that'll probably benefit her, but the way she positioned the question was, oh my God, is there something wrong with me? Is there a balance? Yeah. And we don't want to necessarily do that because unless there's like a mobility issue or you start to feel pain. Or she's not developing certain muscles she wants to. I mean, I didn't take it like she was, she thought she was necessarily doing something wrong. I think that it was a really good observation, right? I think she understood that, typically it seems pretty normal to have a bigger back squat than a front, mine's not, so what could it possibly be? I don't think she knew how to position maybe how to ask it. It was really quick for me to realize, yeah, she's a runner. I mean, she's a runner. She probably has an upright squat. She just is quad dominant. And so she's not getting a lot of the benefits from her glutes, which should be the primary mover in that back squat. And so her getting better at firing the glutes, I think is going to bring- She's very anterior driven. Yeah, I mean, even the back loaded squat, like positioning and everything, of course it's going to feel better with the lower position on her. But I love questions. And obviously she's been training for quite some time. She's in pretty good damn shape. And you're trying to troubleshoot like, how could I get better? Like I think this is a perfect example. Doesn't sound like she's like really complaining or thinks she's something wrong with her. I think she just realizes that. I do think those symmetries are going to be really good for her because of- Yeah, we'll expose a lot of that for sure. Well, yeah, the unilateral aspect of it, she's going to get a lot of that glute stabilization, activation with a lot of those exercises. Well, in truth. Okay. How about something about your back squat in relation to your front squat? Or trying to develop, trying to bring up your back squat or something like that. That's pretty general. And I think more- I got it. For most people, your back squat should be a lot higher than your front squat. If that's not the case, watch this. Mm, no. Not many people- Not many people are in that situation. Just say you want to get a better back squat. Everybody wants a better back squat, right? Yeah, that's right. Our next caller is Jenna from Missouri. Jenna, how's it going? How can we help you? Hey, guys. Thanks so much for taking my question and having me on today. You guys truly do make a difference to so many people, so I really appreciate all the content that you guys provide. I actually found Mind Pump when Sal was on with Brittany Lupton back in April, and I have followed you guys since. So I know I have lots of catching up to do. So a little background about me. 24 years old, 138 pounds, roughly 22% body fat. And I'm five, six. I've been working out the past five to six years. Those beginning years were really just going through the motions, not tracking anything, not paying attention to anything. You know, I was there just being active. And I enjoyed being in the gym. The last two to three years, I've really been trying to work on and improve my body composition as well as just educating myself on overall fitness. So the last since January, really, I've been focusing on my goals, which are to lose some body fat, lean out, and tighten up for the long term. So and in my years of previous years of working out, I've only done super sets my entire time working out, which I love them. I have fun doing them. And I've always been on the go lifestyle. So they fit my routine perfectly. So as of this past January, when I wanted to transform, I have never pushed myself to max out before. So I couldn't tell you where my full potential is at. And I'm not one to buy any program or spend money. But after listening to you guys and learning what you're actually about, I bought anabolic anesthetic. So I'm getting ready to start those within the next week or two. So leading into my question, I noticed anabolic is a lot of upper body, which is good for the fact that I have rounded shoulders and I've never cared about my upper body. And now I do care. So I'm excited to see that to the transformation of my upper body. But at the same time, I don't want to put my lower body on the back burner. So what are some ways that I can keep my lower body, build my lower body, and what tips would you guys provide at the beginning? That ain't going to happen. That's not going to happen. Oh, no, anabolic, your legs and lower body are going to grow, for sure. For sure. There's two pieces to this that I want to address. I'll get to maybe how you may want to modify the program in a second. But before I do, there's a common misconception when people, and it's usually women, because women tend to want to focus on the lower body, just like guys like to focus on their chest and biceps with their workouts. And so they'll look at a program and they'll say, oh my god, look at all these upper body exercises versus lower body exercises. Well, you don't want to necessarily think of it that way, because when you look at the lower body, you typically break it down into quads, hamstrings, glutes, and calves. So there's four major muscles right there, right? With the upper body, you have biceps, triceps. Then you have the deltoids, which are multifaceted. So they can bring the arms back, they can bring them forward, they can press above. Then you have the pecs, then you have the lats, then you have the mid-back. So it seems like it's more upper body, but really because there's all these other muscles that are involved with these smaller movements. And so you'll see some isolation movements involved. Whereas with the lower body, we'll do things like squats and deadlifts. And you might throw, we'll throw in maybe a quad exercise like sissy squats or a hamstring exercise like leg curls. So it seems that way, but reality, the volume is all pretty equated. And lower body exercises really have this tremendous impact on the body. Like a barbell squats impact on the total body in terms of just sending a muscle building signal, in terms of the amount of damage and recovery that's required. Really just, a bench press, a row, a pull up just don't compare in that context, okay? So the volume is totally equated. It is not an upper body extra workout program. It's a whole body workout program. And Adam's 100% right. If you follow it as it's laid out, you'll get developed everywhere, but you're gonna see your lower body really develop for very quickly. You'll see a lot of strength and muscle there, especially because you did so many supersets before. It sounds like you like that kind of fast-paced type of workout. Maps and Ebola phase one is very strength-focused, long rest in between sets. Your body's in respond significantly in that first phase. In fact, you're gonna see your strength go up quite a bit, especially because you've never really trained that way before. So now in terms of modification, here's what we always recommend. We create programs for a general audience. We tend to have an avatar when we create a program, but still we're trying to write it for a lot of people. So we encourage people to modify and individualize a program only after they followed the program the way that we've written it. So once you've followed Maps and Ebola the way that we've written it, once you get a good feel of what really good strength training programming feels like and how your body's responding, then after that, then you can go through and start to modify and individualize and make the program really perfect for your body. But before you do that, follow it as it's laid out and kind of trust the process and see how your body responds. And then lastly, I'll add this. I don't know if Maps Aesthetic will be a great program for you to follow up. After Maps and Ebola, I would like to see you do something like Maps Performance after following, after doing Maps and Ebola. I haven't quite looked into all of, I know you guys have so many and I haven't really like, you know, dove in to check what they're all about. I'm really only familiar with those two, so. You started fine. You started fine. I think that's a perfect, Anabalk is the perfect program. Now here's, I'm gonna add some stuff to this what Sal said. You are the type of client who if I'm training you, I'm constantly grabbing your shirt and saying sit your ass down. Sit down, sit your ass down, wait the full two and a half, three minutes, stop trying to get back to the bar. Just cause you think you're ready, I want you to wait. And if it's easy, then let's stack more weight on there. So that's the conversation you need to have with yourself. The entire time that you're lifting through Anabalk is, I would rather see you rest too long than not enough because you're so used to doing that quick super set type of circuit type training. So sit your ass down, put more weight on there, focus on getting strong and adding weight to the bar. That's your main focus in there. Now, I'm not that opposed are you going to aesthetic second, even though Sal said it, we wrote them with the intent that you go anabolic performance aesthetic. So that is the ideal one, two, three as far as the order of programs. The way aesthetic is written though is for somebody like you, what you're asking. I still would want you to run anabolic first at least and I do think performance would benefit you to do that next. But aesthetic is when we start really getting into sculpting the body. So let's say you and I have been training for a while, you run anabolic, you like the results, but then you're like, how do I still want more butt or I want more quad or more hamstring and I want more in my legs. In aesthetic, we teach you how to develop a specific area on your body. So you pick one to two muscles, say your glutes and your hamstrings and they become your focus days in that program to help bring, and basically all we're doing is teaching you how to build volume into your program to build up or to bring up a lagging body part. So that program was written specifically to help you sculpt and build the body and look the way you want, but I still would want anabolic. You gotta start with anabolic. You could technically do that a little bit in the trigger sessions, but I think the biggest point that Adam brought up that I think you need to consider is like going into that program, your mindset towards it, because you've been so focused on the super setting to be able to really like go through the rest periods as it's laid out and then focus more on intensifying by adding load. So that's something too, it's like some of my clients, I really had to spend a lot of time just focusing on that specifically because of the circuit training and the tendency to wanna just keep going, going, going. I really think that that's gonna be a mental challenge for you going into this program. And if you can master that, your body is gonna get a whole new stimulus, which is sending it to spark a change in your physique. By the way, the results you're looking for are gonna follow the strength gains. Okay, so if you see strength gains, you know the results that you mentioned earlier when we started this conversation are going to come, they're going to follow, so that your primary goal through this program is strength. Now, of course, perfect form, make sure you control the weight, don't sacrifice your form and technique for strength, but strength is your goal. If the strength isn't going up, look at your diet, make sure you're feeding your body appropriately. And I see in your question, you didn't mention this, but I'm reading your question here. You're getting ready to get married in June? Yes, in June, yep. Congratulations. So thank you. If you get stronger, if you do this right, and if you feed yourself properly, you'll also may find yourself getting leaner without even trying, because as you start to build muscle, that body fat that you have on your body, the normal amount of body fat you have in your body, actually becomes a smaller percentage of your body. So if I put eight pounds of just muscle on your body, you're not gonna look bigger, you're just gonna feel tighter, things are gonna lift, you're gonna feel sculpted, and you'll actually have a lower body fat percentage as a result. I'm saying that because what some women do is they start to get stronger, they start to, oh my God, I'm feeling good, wow, this is great, and then they start to get worried. Maybe I should start to cut my calories, maybe I should start to lose weight. Don't worry about that, you're at a good body fat percentage, the way you train before, transitioning to maps in a ball like, you're prime position to build strength and sculpt your body, so focus on strength and you'll get all the results that you're looking for. Our programs are so good, you should be able to carry your husband down the aisle. We'll see, we'll see. Just saying. So, awesome, okay. Thank you, Jenna, thanks for calling in. Yeah, I appreciate it, thanks guys. You got it. I kind of want to see that. Wouldn't that be great if we had like, she sends a video. What husband would want? I don't think he'd like this. I don't know, these days, bro. I mean, just saying. These days, these guys today, these guys today. Daddy, can you show us the wedding video with mom carry you? She's like pressing him over here in her head. You know, I'm glad we get, you know, when we have someone that age who, you know, obviously we did a good job, we convinced her to try something like this because usually at this age, you get away with just beating the shit out of your body and you don't figure it out till much later when your body's just not working anymore. So if she does what we say, she's gonna be blown away. She'll be blown away by how her body responds. Yeah, it's crazy. This is not the first time that we've had somebody who looks at anabolic and thinks the leg volume is low and I always trip out. I'm like, that is not low at all. You'll see what happens. But you know who it is? It is the, typically the female client who does supersets, who does jump lunges, to side lunges, to squats, to like, you know, she does like 10 leg stuff every workout and they're all like supersetted. They did leg press. Yeah, lightweight and you know, it's like, oh, just get strong. So you're gonna have to tell this client, again, just constantly rest, rest. I know you, if you can go do it and you're talking to me 30 seconds later, you're going, oh, I can do the next set, Adam. We didn't put enough weight on the bar. More weight on the bar, then. More weight on the bar. If you feel like you're ready to go after 30 seconds, we're not pushing strength enough. That's the challenge. I mean, I get that a lot. Like it's just like, put more weight on the bar. Like if you're not being stimulated enough, that's the goal here. We need to focus on that. Our next caller is Roberto from Florida. Roberto, what's happening, man? How can we help you? Hey guys, how you doing? It's a pleasure to be on the show. I'm a longtime listener. It's been like three, four years since I started listening and you guys have helped me through rough periods in life and enjoyed drives a lot more than I used to. But with that being said, I just want to tell you guys a little bit about my background first. So I played baseball my entire life up to college level. I played in a D2 school. I was a pitcher. My family, Jeans, tend to lean a little towards gaining weight very quickly. My dad, my brother, my mother, they all have struggled during their lives with obesity. They gained weight super easy and it's definitely my Jeans. So when I was 15, I decided to start going to the gym with my dad to support him. And I thought it was going to be a good idea for me to develop for baseball. We hired a trainer. He assessed me. He did all the typical conditioning, strength, see where I was at. And we started developing my strength more than anything. I was one of a nice physique, like every kid at 15 years old. But he told me and everybody would tell me, don't worry about the physique. Worry about being strong and that will translate onto the field. And I mean, that really happened. However, I did see development in my lower body but not my upper body. I was at skinny arms, no chest, no nothing. But I had like thunder ties and you know, typical baseball body. I went on to play, you know, college baseball. And when I was in college during the fall season, we would train about three times a week and we would do like the main movements, a lot of squatting, a lot of reverse lunges, lunges, deadlifting, RDOs, all that kind of stuff. And we did some powerlifting movements like some clean, some hand clean, some of that stuff. But nothing too crazy just to, you know, I guess work on strength and ability and whatnot. So after I was done with college baseball, it was the pandemic. I was a senior, I got a call and be like, hey, season's canceled. You won't play baseball anymore. And that was like a tough hit. And you know, the pandemic happened. I was straight at home. I couldn't go to the gym. My head didn't have nothing to do. So I was like, all right, you know, let's start running. I fell in love with running and I didn't pay attention to what you guys said. And I just, you know, went up to running half marathons every Saturday, basically. I went from 215 pounds to 185. And I thought I was feeling great. I was feeling good. But then, you know, life started back to normal. I went to work and I couldn't keep my physical activity levels up. And in a matter of a month or two months, I gained back those 20 pounds. Everything like you guys have said in my previous podcast, like I ate and it just stuck to my body. Like I just felt like I ate like a tortilla at home and it would just go straight into my belly. But yeah. So then I decided to go to law school for some reason. And to deal with the stress and everything, I was just like, okay, let me just invest some money. I got my MAPS metabolic and it changed me completely. I, before starting it, I decided to go to a little cut. I went, because I had gained some weight. So I was at 205 when I started. And by the end of MAPS metabolic, I waited at 225 looking lean. My upper body developed like never in my life, like nice looking shoulders, biceps, triceps and everything. So I was super into it, super happy with the results. And I said, okay, let's put it, you know, a step forward. And I bought MAPS aesthetic. But I couldn't really finish it. I did like one stage and I just cut it. My body was just exhausted. The stress of law school, you know, increased finals. And then I started working at a law firm and my schedule was super tight and I didn't have time. So every single time I went to the gym, I went once or twice in a week. And then I was just done for one or two weeks. So I was wondering if you guys had any advice on how to deal with the stress of studying, working and having, you know, a little time to still work out and enjoy it and see some development in my body. Yeah, good question. You know, we just came out with a program that might actually work really well for someone like you. Roberto, do you think it would be easier for you to do a short like 15, 20 minute workout a day versus two or three hour workouts? Do you think it would be easier for you to find like 15, 20 minutes a day versus, you know, carving out an hour or a few days a week? Yeah, casually I was listening to that episode yesterday and I was thinking, this sounds like something I would really enjoy because I think I could like wake up 20 minutes earlier, you know, get a workout in because I just got my, I got my own home gym so I could wake up, do 20 minutes and if I'm feeling better than come back at home do another 10, 20 minutes, a couple other reps and that feels like something that I could enjoy more than putting an hour into a workout every day. It's just really hard. All right, I'm gonna send you maps 15. There's two versions in there. One is with a suspension trainer. The other one's a little more advanced. It uses a barbell. So I'm gonna send that to you because I think that'll work better for you. As far as the stress is concerned, you know, exercise is a stress on the body. So if your life stresses go up, your body's ability to adapt to the stresses of exercise goes down. So you have to modify your workouts based on the context of your life. So your workouts need to improve the quality of your life, meaning as your life changes, so do your workouts have to necessarily change. Keeping the workouts the same all the time while life changes means that there's gonna be periods where you're gonna feel good and then there's gonna be periods where you're gonna burn out and you can't stick to it. Maps aesthetic is way too much volume in a case like the one you're telling me. I think maps 15 would be perfect for you. Now, here's the challenge. You're gonna feel really good and you're gonna have a lot of energy doing maps 15 and you may have the following challenge where you say to yourself, oh, I feel like I could do more. I feel like I could throw more at my body. I want you to fight that urge because what you don't want is you don't wanna put, you don't wanna feel exhausted all the time. What you should feel is energized all the time. If you feel energized all the time, then you know that your workouts are complimenting your life and what that means is you're gonna get better results. You'll get better results, ultimately overdoing a workout that's too intense or too much volume, okay? So we'll send that program. I think that'll be perfect for you. I really appreciate you guys for doing that. And so fighting that urge is always an issue for me because I was built with that athlete mentality of going the extra mile, you know? Yep, yep. It's hard to find that medium point of being, okay, I feel good enough towards like, I know where it works today or, oh no, I'm just being so lazy today and I'm just, you know, quitting early. Like, how do you find that middle of the day? The goal is always to do the least amount possible to elicit the most amount of change. So the goal, that's how you have to think every time you go on a workout. I'm gonna try and do as least amount possible to elicit the most amount of change. In other words, there's a sweet spot, right? There's a sweet spot there. And now the athletic mentality that you learn playing sports where you push yourself beyond the point that Adam just said has value in competition, right? And war. And war, like, so we'll interview people who were soldiers, for example, and they'll talk about the training that they went through. The training in the military, for example, or in high level sports, part of it is to get your body ready, but a lot of it is to get your mind ready. Because when you're in battle or when you're in a competition, I'm not competing to maximize my body's recovery and adaptation. I'm trying to win, right? And oftentimes the side that wins is the side that can persevere and push through when your body and your brain are telling you lay down and give up, right? But this is not what we're talking about. What we're talking about right now is your life, your lifestyle. In fact, you're going to law school right now. So why don't you can apply that towards law school? Because I know, look, I have family members that are lawyers, and I know when they went to law school and what that looked like, and a lot of that is very mental. A lot of that is very challenging. So the way you got to look at your workouts for most of your life, there's going to be periods of time when you could take your workouts and push yourself and challenge the mental aspect and there's value there, but the majority of the time, your workouts need to improve the quality of your life. And if you're constantly pushing your limits with your workouts, then you're probably going to be compromising the quality of your life, especially if you do it all the time. You can still utilize that same mindset. You just have to push it more towards being disciplined about doing this to the point where it's going to benefit you. So now think of it as you're trying to figure out that ultimate optimization in terms of how your body is going to thrive going forward. So I had to redirect and reframe this a lot, being an ex-athlete coming in. What's going to be best for my body now? I have to be disciplined about now finding that sweet spot. I do think I can do more, but now I have to change that mentality of more is better and more intensity. And I have to go through this crazy workout to be able to get any benefit, which is not true. That's not benefiting you anymore because of your life stress and everything else that you've accumulated. So now it's just like taking that same type of athlete mentality and applying it towards like, this is the plan now. I love coaching athletes. You just need to shift your competitiveness. Stop being competitive with your workouts and trying to beat the shit out of yourself. Be competitive with your sleep routine. Be competitive with your diet. Be competitive with your recovery. Like get competitive with those things. Don't get competitive with, can I kick my ass inside the gym all the time? Do that. It's just hard because I like that feeling of having weight in the bar, you know? And then sometimes when I feel like, okay, this is maybe like weight. I just try to like, I like that feeling of feeling I guess powerful in a way I'm not sure you guys can relate. So it's just hard to keep myself back to it. Listen, you're talking to three guys who struggle with this all the time. We work out all the time. This is my constant battle. But look, there's the right dose of exercise. The right dose is the one that gets you the best results. And then there's the most that your body can tolerate. Those are two different things. There's how much you can tolerate. Healing or adapting. And then there's also what's gonna give you the best results. There's a little bit of value in sometimes pushing yourself to what you can tolerate. But what you're saying right now and the way you're describing your lifestyle, I think you need to train more often right now in the right dose. And the right dose feels like this. I have a lot of energy. Man, I feel really good. I feel energized. My joints feel good. This is awesome. That's where you need to feel. What you don't wanna feel right now is, man, I feel like I just survived a battle. Oh my God, I crawled out of the gym. Like, yeah, every once in a while, that's a good feeling, but you do that enough times and the rest of your life, the quality of your life is gonna go down. You're not gonna be able to go to school the way you wanna go to school. And then you'll find yourself skipping the gym or your performance will start to decline. You actually start to lose the progress that you gained. Plus it'll probably open up again. This is a season of life that's different. So just treat it that way. You know, going forward, you might have a completely different scenario in terms of your environment like where you can get after it a little bit more intensively and that's totally fine. Just right now you have to be smart. I appreciate you guys. And before I leave, what would you guys recommend in terms of eating? Should I try to just maintain? I know, I maintain you should have like 2,600 calories. That's like my maintenance level. I feel a little like overweight, a little chubby right now. I would like to cut down, get a little lean. Should I go on a bulk or should I try to cut down my calories with this new program? I think if you trained properly and stayed at maintenance, you may see your body composition change a little bit. You can go on a little cut, but I'd be careful with that because cutting is also a bit of a stress on the body. So you can do that. And the way I would do it is I would do like these mini, these short periods of a cut followed by maintenance. So, you know, 2,400 calories for a few weeks and go back up to 2,600 or 2,700 calories for a few weeks. So just kind of make it a slow process. You don't over stress your body while you're doing all the stuff that you're trying to do right now. All right, perfect. I appreciate you guys. You got it, man. We'll send you maps 15. Thank you so much. All right, buddy. All right, man. Yeah. So, you know, let me ask you guys a question. What was harder for you to train in terms of getting the person to adhere? Was it the ex-hardcore athlete who then later on became like a dad or a mom or whatever and, you know, business person? Or was it the like the beginner who like never worked out? Yeah. Well, I would say the athlete, but I would say more specifically like the type A person, right? That just wants to put everything on their shoulders to talk them out of doing everything at once is really difficult. And when you have that gear that you set skill of like pushing yourself, it's so hard to not be in that gear all the time. You know, when I would train people who were athletes like that, it was like constantly like pulling them back, pulling them back, pulling them back. You know, we got to do a little less, a little less right now. This is not, you know, you're not, you know, D1 football right now or you're not, you know, doing what you were doing before. It can be really challenging. I love these clients. In fact, most of my career, this is what I focused on was type A, high performing executives, athletes. Like I was terrible with, you know, kids and I didn't do the advanced age very well. Like that was not my jam. I love this. Cause what you'd have to do with someone like this is you just kind of get them, cause what they have incredible discipline and that they're highly motivated people, you just got to get them to shift away from what they have trained themselves to focus on for so long. That's the challenge. The hurdle is that he's convinced himself that he loves that feeling. He's convinced himself that this is, this is what gives me good results. When I trained hard for my sport, I got this. It's just like, okay, if I can just get you to be that way and get competitive with your sleep routine or get competitive with how you recover. Just direct it. Or get competitive with your diet. And that, and so that's all I'm speaking to. Like I'm not, I'm not even going to waste my time really talking a lot about getting after it in the workout. I'm going to, I'm going to hold him accountable every day. I see him on those things. And when, and then I'm going to talk shit to him, which is what I love about someone who's like a high performing athlete that you can kind of talk shit. Like don't come at me with you. I don't care about your workout that you're adding weight right now. You can't even get your sleep routine right. So I'm going to, I'm going to push them and push that athletic mindset in the areas that I think are going to serve him best. And so once you can get them to make that switch, then they're very successful. They just got to get out of that mindset of beating themselves up at the gym is what's serving them. Our next caller is Michael from Maryland. Michael, what's happening? How can we help you? Hey guys, thank you so much for taking the time to answer my question. First off, I got to do the thing. I got to thank you guys for everything you do. You provide an invaluable service to the space. So thank you for that. So my question is in regards to my mother. She's 66 and she wants to start getting into strength training for her health as well as her quality of life. I'm proud of her for that decision and I want to help her reach that goal. So she came to me for advice. I like the thing I know what I'm doing. I've been in the fitness journey for a while but I don't know enough about that topic hence why I'm coming to you guys. So she's mentioned that she wants to get a personal trainer from any gym close by and I kinda warned her in a way like, hey, don't just get any trainer. They may not have the best experience with that. That age group where they may go too intense or too hard and I don't want her to get injured or lose, you know, get discouraged right away because how intense it is. So my question really is, do you guys have any recommendations or a best approach for her situation or do you guys have a program that you would think would be best for her to really help her get all the benefits of strength training? Yeah, well, I'll send you, I'll send you, I think map starter, which would be a great program. That being said, Michael, nothing is gonna be better than a really good trainer or instructor. But what's cool is that he, you haven't hired the trainer yet. So I love when we catch somebody before because then what I would do is we're gonna give you that program. When she goes into the gym, that's part of the deal of me hiring you. So in other words, we gotta follow starter. And because you're paying money, because here's what's tough. If you already have a trainer, like people listen to our show and they're like, oh, I hired this trainer for six months and they're doing this and you guys say this and it doesn't seem like it aligned. So do you think I could give them your program No, that's never works. They get all pissed because the contract's already been done, but you walking into it or helping her walk into the situation say, here's the deal. I want my grandmother to go through this training program. This is mom. Oh, sorry, your mom. I want my mom to go through this training program and I've already purchased it. Can I hire someone that will help her follow it? And if you present it like that, then by the way, when you go to a gym, ask for the manager. So go directly to the manager, explain exactly what you're explaining to us and say, I'm looking for someone who's going to take care of my mom and who's your best trainer. And I have a program I want them to follow. Can I talk to them or can I hire them? And then you'll be fine, dude. Michael, I had the pleasure of working with an exceptional physical therapist and she did a really, really good job working with people in this age group. And then later on, this became something that I became specialized in. And one of the learning curves that I had to go through was realizing resistance training really is just working against resistance, meaning it doesn't have to be weights or machines. It can even be just body weight. For example, you could test your mom out like this. Can she reach directly above her head with her arms without having to arch her back where her arm is right next to her ear? Well, if she can't, one resistance training exercise may be to really just try to reach and extend her arm to give you an example. Another example would be, hey mom, let's have you stand up from a chair and then slowly try to sit down. So you don't fall down in the chair, but you're controlling descent. The other thing that I learned was the intensity required to elicit change is very low and somebody that's deconditioned and older. Like anything above and beyond what she's used to is gonna elicit change. Your mom should not get sore after her workouts or if she does, it should be very minimal, okay? So if your mom comes home from a workout, I was like, oh my God, I'm so sore in my legs. They went a little too hard and it's better to err on the side of easier than it is to kind of overdo it, especially when you're dealing with someone in this particular case. Now here's the questions that I would ask the trainer that you're looking for for your mom. How many people do you work with that are in advanced age? Do you have any correctional exercise experience or certification or education? Those are two very important things because those people, people have lots of experience working with people over the age of 60, people who really understand correctional exercise, they're going to approach training your mom properly. Even if they use Map Starter, a trainer could train your mom too hard with Map Starter. They could push the intensity too hard with her right out the gates. So even though the exercises may be appropriate, they may use an inappropriate level of intensity for your mom. Your mom should leave the workout feeling good not like she got beat up. And you could call the GM or the fitness manager of that gym and literally ask that exact question to them and say, who's your trainer with the most experience with an advanced age? Who's a correctional specialist or physical therapist background? Do you have one? And then whoever they recommend, then you go in and meet them and then do exactly what I said with the Map Starter thing and you should be fine. Yeah, literally two days a week for your mom would be fine. Even one day a week, she would start to see lots of strength gains and then move to two days a week. And then beyond that, she wouldn't need a whole lot more aside from like additional activity, like walking and stuff like that. So. Gotcha. She already actually does that. She walks every day a couple of miles. But yeah, she's starting to get into that resistance training aspect. And it's funny you mentioned all the sit downs and get ups or holding something over her head. I did actually have her start to do that and see kind of her mobility and her mobility is not that great. So I guess a follow up question to that would be like, would you recommend maybe starting just with like prime or prime pro to get her range of motion ready for starter? Do you think starter is a beginner enough level that she could kind of just jump into that and take it slow? So here's what a good trainer will do, right? A good trainer will look at starter and modify it to fit your mom. So to give you an example, let's say one of the exercises is a seated overhead press with dumbbells. Well, if your mom can't extend her arms over her head with no weight, well, guess how we're gonna do the seated press? No weight. I'm gonna have you hold your hands out with no weight and then lift your arms up and try to straighten your arms out without overarching your back. And that becomes the exercise, right? Let's say it's a seated row. Well, when we're doing the row, if she can't pull her shoulders back very well without resistance, well, I'm gonna add the most minimal resistance. I'm gonna give like a really light band and then I'm gonna focus on that endpoint where I'm really squeezing the shoulder blades back. So a good trainer will be able to take that and modify it to fit your mom. A bad trainer will take that push. And add rituals of mobility exercises. So yeah, that's the thing. That's kind of where you need the coaching to come in. And you're hoping that you have somebody with experience to be able to spot those things out so then they could take some of those things that they notice in terms of imbalances or dysfunction and be able to work on that and have that something that she can incorporate on days that they don't meet and then also still work progressing forward towards learning how to properly resistance train. So really that's gonna amount to the right coach fit. Yeah, you should be able to find a trainer that has either a physical therapy background or correctional exercise specialist background and five years experience with advanced age and they're gonna do a good job of that. They're gonna see, no one with that experience is gonna see her do a shoulder press and then make her keep doing it. They'll see it and be like, oh, we're gonna have to do this instead. We'll do some corrective work. So yeah, that's what, I mean, you asked that question of a GM or an FM at your local gym and you should be able to find, there's normally at least one or two really solid trainers. But your thought with that is correct. I would personally use Prime for those instances to navigate through that. As a coach and a trainer, I would utilize that. And then also in conjunction, run her through starter. Yeah. Right, cool. Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much. And I think again, thanks again for everything you guys do. You guys are awesome. We'll send you Mac starter. Yeah, let us know how your mom does. Yeah, you're a good boy. Absolutely. Yeah, that's right. Good boy. Thank you. Good stuff. Yeah, I've said this a million times. This became my favorite age group to train because it's life-changing to have someone lose 30 pounds. It's life-changing to see somebody build their butt or their biceps. But it is more than life-changing to get somebody who's 70 years old to come in and say. Don't lie. That's not the main reason why you liked it. The main reason why you like it is because of the conversation. Well, that's the selfish part. That's the other part. But I mean, listen. That's the part I did like. I love the conversations with my 65-plus-year-olds because of all the wisdom that they had. But I mean, did you ever have one come in and say, I went up the stairs today? Or I could actually lift something and put it on the top shelf and it was transformative. That is like your independence. That's a really big deal. You're right, the conversation is the wisdom. I mean, I used to ask them all kinds of questions and it was like, man, you're paying me for me to learn from you. This is pretty cool. Totally. Look, if you like Mind Pump, go to mindpumpfree.com and check out 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 at Mind Pump. Justin, Adam is on Instagram at Mind Pump. Adam, and you can find me on Twitter at Mind Pump Sal. This one's really important and that is to phase your training. If somebody trains for a full year doing a bench press and they're always aiming for five reps, if you compared that person to a person who did a bench press where they did three or four weeks of five reps, but then they did three or four weeks of 12 reps and then three or four weeks of, let's say, 15 to 20 reps and then they'll throw in some supersets, at the end of that year, you're gonna see more consistent progress from the person who's moving in and out and less injury. That's another thing. You'll see less injury as well.