 PR's personal records to double-edged swords. On one hand, they can propel your progress, motivate you. They're awesome to aim for. On the other hand, if you do it wrong, it does injury over training, and actually make you hate training. In today's episode, we're going to talk about PR's, why they're awesome, why you should chase them, but how to do it the right way so you develop a balanced, injury-free, amazing physique. At what point did it change to the term PR instead of like... CrossFit. How much do you max? CrossFit. CrossFit. They called them PR's. They popularized it. I like PR's because before they were popularized, it was just about maxing, but it wasn't mainstream to challenge yourself in that way. Right. And it is a performance-based goal. And although not perfect, right, performance-based goals can also not be perfect, I prefer them over aesthetic-based goals because you can get really unhealthy chasing aesthetics or even improving, quote-unquote, improving your aesthetics. You could starve yourself. You could over-train. You could damage yourself. Hitting PR's, you could also do that, but it's a lot harder. And for most average people, you're not going to hit new PR's if you're unhealthy. So it's a better way. It's very objective. Yes. I mean, it's really like there's no fluff involved. There's no sort of interpretation behind it. It's like, can you lift that weight or cannot? And sometimes you have it. Sometimes you don't. But when you start chasing it, obviously to your earlier point, that's where there can be some challenges with that in terms of like... That could create a whole other problem for you. Well, that's why I think this is a good discussion because I'm on the other side of PR. So in fact, I came out earlier. When I first hit Instagram eight plus over eight years ago now, one of the things that I spoke out on quite a bit was the PR culture because I wasn't a fan of it. I wasn't a fan of people chasing that and focused so much on hitting that number that they were not paying attention to form and technique as much. I was injured. It became a thing that, oh, if I wasn't hitting a PR, then I'm not having success in the gym. And so I actually spoke out early on about how I did not like PR culture. And so I do think there's a conversation to be had about, okay, so what does healthy PR chasing look like? I'm so glad you said that because just so people don't get the wrong idea, the PR culture was about max, max lift. And we'll talk about that. And there's a value to that too, but it can also go dark. But just to clarify, Adam chases PRs all the time, but he chases different kinds of PRs. And this is where it can be amazing. This is how you can avoid the problems with chasing the same type of PR all the time, which I think we'll get into. Because if you do that, if it's always the same kind of PR, like let's say it's always a max. You end up training in an unbalanced way. You start to compromise joint health and integrity, start to sacrifice certain things to chase a particular number, and then the returns you get from it become diminishing. And that's the whole PR culture. But if you balance out your PRs and figure out how to set them right, then it can be very powerful. In fact, it's one of the most powerful things you could do to keep yourself consistent with your training and to motivate yourself to show up and to work out and how to create the best kind of workout. And that's the important thing to do is to figure out what a good PR protocol is and then how to mold your training around it. Yeah, I like that because I feel like chasing a PR or just focusing on that and say like the main lifts is a lot like building a car with the most amount of horsepower just to win in a quarter mile. And it's like, that's great. But in real life, you actually have to take turns. Drive farther than a quarter mile. Yeah. And that's how I feel about chasing just the bench squat, deadlift type of PR versus other PRs in your life. A PR can be, man, my knee can now travel over my toe four more inches than it did, say, two years ago. That's a personal record for me. I've never worked at my mobility so much that I've gained that range of motion. I think a healthy relationship with PRs looks like a pursuit of that in different directions and things that benefit you more than just the quarter mile race, also other aspects of your life. Now, I remember when I, because when I first became a trainer, a lot of what I would teach my clients to focus on were aesthetic goals. It was like body fat tests, circumference measurements, weight, because that's what people ask for, right, when they would sign up with you. Shortly after becoming a trainer within a few years, I realized that teaching my clients to aim for performance type goals was superior, because oftentimes in the pursuit of losing weight or circumference or even just fat percentage, people would do things that I'd have to kind of coach them through. They would compromise their health or they would starve themselves or they would over train, and if the scale went down, then that was good and they would ignore all these other things. I noticed with chasing performance, they couldn't get away with doing as many bad things, especially when you first get started, and the first time this really hit me was I trained a young lady who had just essentially come out of an eating disorder. I remember her parents hired me to train her because I trained her parents, and they told me, you know, she had anorexia, she's out of it now, her therapist suggests exercise, but the therapist also wants to talk to you, and I got on the therapist on the phone before I trained this young lady, and I said, okay, normally what I do, and I'm assuming this is a bad idea, is I test body fat and weight and that kind of stuff, I said, I'm sure that's going to be super triggering for her, and she said, oh yeah, don't weigh her, don't do any of that stuff, don't even talk about how she looks. And I said, well, what should I focus on? And she goes, just get her strong. And I remember it was like a light bulb went off for me, like, of course, if she gets stronger, she has to eat enough, she has to nourish her body. And then I saw tremendous progress. And then I remember I applied that to other clients, and I said, what, this is such a better strategy for people if you do it in the right way. And then here's the key for longevity with your training, because we're not interested in getting people in shape and then they get out of shape. We're not interested in teaching how to, you know, build a nice physique, get healthy fit, and then you're out of it. We're interested in really getting people to do this for the rest of their life. Well, the key to that is number one, finding purpose behind your training, otherwise it's going to be hard to show up. So why am I here? What's the purpose? And there's a lot of ways to do that. And then number two is to do it in a way to where you have longevity, because if the purpose is always to get a max squat, in the first three years, everything's going to go great. After that, every five pounds I add to my squat comes with exponentially higher rates of risk of injury and all that kind of stuff. And if I push it too hard, I'll get to the point where I can never squat again, you know, type of deal. So that's kind of what we're going to talk about is how to use this in a way to where you can benefit across the board and get phenomenal results. Today's program, give away the new program, Maps Old Time Strength. Here's how you can win it. Leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop it. Subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. If you win, we'll let you know in the comment section. Now everybody else, it's the final hours of the new program launch, which means you get it discounted. So if you're interested, click on the link at the top of the description below. That'll get you $80 off. Plus you'll get two free eBooks, Forgotten Muscle and Strength Building Secrets and Jay Campbell's Living a Fully Optimized Life. So again, click on the link at the top of the description below or go to mapsoldtime.com and use the code old80. All right, back to the show. Well, let's first talk about why PRs are great and then we can get to the kind of the dark stuff. I think the very first most obvious reason why a PR, setting a PR is good is because it is a motivating factor. It is very motivating to set a goal and then to see yourself moving towards that goal. I can't think of anything that isn't more encouraging on its face than something like that. Yeah, to really set out on a specific target and to see like incremental progress with that. I mean, we obviously, like there's part of that too. You have to pay attention to those small wins along the way that you're getting towards that goal and to not basically to listen to your body and the signals that your body is providing as well. I think part of that too is that we didn't really bring up but there's ways of like masking other parts that might not be contributing like they should. And so now we start to get to the point where we're going to get the, you know, the wrist wraps. We're going to get the certain kind of aids to kind of help with the stability component to get you towards further towards that goal. But for me, the ideal situation is to be able to account for all these things, work on all these things and have all of that together simultaneously working towards that objective of I want to just get stronger at this particular lift that requires so much. Well, yeah, it's an objective way to measure your success in your training. Yeah, whereas in the mirror is super subjective. Super subjective. And you could also see change in the mirror on the scale in the right direction but going about it in a very unhealthy way. Whereas if I'm focused on a lift that I want to be, get stronger in or a new found range of motion in order for me to have success or hit PRs in those categories. It's not 100% but it's more likely that I'm doing that in a healthy way in order to achieve that. Yeah. And here's the other thing that I discovered as a trainer. I'd love your guys' input on this. It's definitely motivating for clients to see the scale change, to see their, you know, clothes fit better. But I actually recognize and notice that performance, when I would point them out, right, when I would help direct the client and point them out, performance improvements were actually more exciting for my clients. It almost was empowering for them. I think it's because they're more universal, right? So it doesn't matter if you just want to look good in a bikini or you just want to lose 50 pounds of fat or you just want to add 10 pounds of muscle. Universally, all those people would like to be stronger and they don't want to be weaker, right? So it's like, it's a common thread found in, or even somebody who's approaching it towards health, anti-aging, you know, they're in advanced age. Yeah, lack of mobility. Like all those people would agree like, yeah, I want to be stronger. Like you've never had... It's like you unlock the new ability. A lot of times too, that's the case. Like somebody could never do a pull-up before. All of a sudden they can do a pull-up. Like that's life-changing for some people. That's exactly what I discovered was the pursuit of learning a new skill or the pursuit of being able to do something you couldn't do before. There's nothing more empowering and motivating than that because, you know, I always talk about when I would train young, you know, teenagers and they do so many push-ups and the next week they do two more push-ups and I would point out to them, you did two more push-ups. I say, really? I say, yeah. That means you're not the same person you were last week. That's like transformative in a very objective way. Whereas, you know, maybe you lose weight, you know, you're 45 years old, you go in, you lose weight, but you know, I'll never look like I did when I was 20 or I'll never. But I just did something I could never do. I've never done a pull-up. I've never dead-lifted this much weight. I've never been able to move in this way like for my entire life or I've never been able to run a mile on this speed or whatever. I just found it to be the most empowering, motivating thing that I could ever present to my clients. And that's, I think, the number one benefit. The second thing is PRs create purpose behind your training. So why are you showing up to the gym? Like everybody needs a purpose behind their training. And there's a lot of ways to do this. And I don't think this is the only way, but this is an easy way. It's a very simple way to create some purpose behind your training. Why are you showing up three days a week to the gym? I'm trying to dead-lift more weight. I'm trying to add more reps to this or I'm trying to improve my squat mobility. It gets you to show up because, I mean, who wants to throw darts at nothing? Like you need a target. And when you have a target, now you have something to aim for. And that in purpose, it goes above motivation because some days you're not going to be motivated, but you've got that goal, that purpose of why you want to show up. Yeah, I mean, not to be cliche, but if you fail to plan, you plan to fail, right? And so it forces you to have a plan. You know, you're not going to go get stronger at a movement, gain a new range of motion or do something like that without some sort of a plan of action. And it's the difference too. We've talked about this before, of training versus exercising, right? Like anybody can go exercise, running's exercise, jumping up and down is exercise, jump roping is exercise. Training, though, is having a plan, having a goal in mind and then building a routine to hit that objective, right? So I think that's important. Yeah. And, dude, I think it's unclear a lot of times if you don't have that, something that you're trying to strive for to see whether or not your training's been real effective or not and to be able to really like measure that, weigh that out, like, you know, my steps leading up to this produced this result and to be able to kind of look at that objectively, obviously, but in comparison to just showing up to the gym and just training your body overall and just kind of going through the motions, you start to realize how much more effective your training gets, which then you can apply that then going forward. Totally. And then we've already said this, but it's hard to have poor health and hit PRs. Now, this isn't perfect. If you're always chasing the same PR, then you will sacrifice your health. Like if you're always aiming for max strength or always aiming for more endurance, then at some point you'll start to sacrifice health. But if you do it right, it's hard to have poor health and continue to improve performance. The body generally, and I'm speaking in a balanced way, generally speaking does not improve its performance if your health is poor. Generally speaking. So when we're talking about beginners, strength is a great one to aim for for beginners because there's so much upside and so little downside as you get more advanced, it becomes a little more challenging, but in the beginning for the first couple of years, try to get stronger in misnutrients in your diet or try to get stronger and have poor sleep or try to get stronger and have too much stress. It's hard. It's really, really hard or poor digestion. So when you're seeing these objectives, yourself progress objectively towards a specific type of PR, it's a better metric of health than the mirror is for sure and definitely the scale. And then the last one you touched on this just now, Justin, is that having a PR encourages proper programming. If I'm training specifically for a goal and that goal, I'm not moving towards that goal, I can modify my training and figure out what's working. And what I'm doing, essentially, is I'm feeling out proper programming rather than showing up and sweating and getting sore. Now I can look at my work and I'll be like, my squat didn't improve this time or my mobility didn't improve. What is it that I did wrong? How can I change my training? It encourages proper training. It discourages overtraining. It encourages balance if you do it in the right way. And so for people listening who are not expert work out programmers, one way to kind of navigate your way through programming is to have a goal and then see how close you start to get to that goal and modify as you go along. Otherwise, you're walking in the dark and you don't know where you're going. This is my favorite part of training these high school kids and taking them through the whole process of off season training to be able to then test that at the end and see how effective they were in applying these concepts. And two, whether or not the programming that led up to that was as effective as possible. And so it gave me a lot of good feedback and data to work with. Yeah, and you probably only have, I don't know, maybe the first year, maybe two, that you can get away with newbie gains and have like subpar programming or be doing things correctly, let's say and still see potential gains because there is that early window, right? Where somebody, if you've never lifted weights before and you show up and you'd have terrible programming but you show up and you start lifting weights, you're going to see initial strength. Let me add to that though. Sure. Definitely true. However, you can definitely do a lot of things wrong and not make that happen in the beginning. Oh, yeah. And you can also still have done way better, right? Yes. That's why it's a little, it could be deceiving at the very beginning, I guess is what I'm saying is that you know, because it's not always a perfectly clear indicator that oh, I'm following good programming because if I just started working out. Just moving more is going to have. Right. Like somebody who hasn't trained in decades and then they follow a beach body program, they're going to see strength gains. Yeah. Because they haven't done anything and any sort of movement in that direction is going to have some positive return. But it doesn't mean that had they done it a different way or a better way, they wouldn't have seen significantly more gains, not to mention also set them up for more in the future. So let's walk that through, right? Because here's what I mean by the programming part. Let's say you're a beginner and you're right. I mean, if you almost do anything besides hurting yourself or really messing up, you're going to see some progress because you went from the couch to doing something. So long as it's not crazy bad, you'll start to see some progress. But here's what'll for sure happen. It'll stop very quickly if the programming's bad. You'll plateau real hard. This is where proper programming gets encouraged. So let's say your goal is I want to be able to make up a goal. I want to squat twice my body weight by the end of the year. I want to just get started. Well, at first, I could have not that great programming and I'm going to add weight to the bar every week. Eventually I'm going to plateau though and what's going to happen is I'm going to have to analyze my workout. I'm going to have to look at what I'm doing and if I listen to my body and I'm really chasing this particular goal over time by myself through trial and error, I'm going to move more towards better programming and away from bad programming. So even with the person just getting started with the newbie gains if they're consistent enough and they're honest and they listen to their body they'll still be able to be like okay, for the first three months I got stronger I have stopped. I got to analyze my workout, what's going on. Now people tend to make a lot of mistakes still so they'll say I got to do more usually the first thing that they do but then eventually they'll start to realize that it's not about doing more it's about doing things better. By following good programming right out the gates but the point is having a PR encourages if you're smart about it better programming and discourages worse programming. Now let's talk about when PRs can go bad. The most obvious one for me is when it's just super myopic. It's just one PR, that's what I worship that's what I obsess over and that's what I aim for all the time, all the time all the time. If you do that you'll start to train in very unbalanced ways and you can and you will start to get a dramatic increase in risk of injury and the returns are not that great. When you first, to use the example of the squat when you first get started the returns you get from adding 50 pounds your squat are incredible. You take a beginner who's never worked out you get them to learn how to squat properly and then they add 50 pounds the results and the feeling and everything they get is like better mobility faster metabolism, more muscle they're leaner, they move better, they're faster it's incredible. You take that same person four years later let's say it's a 175 pound male and he can max out let's say 350 he's really strong adding 50 pounds to a squat is not going to give him all the returns he got initially. He's going to get a little bit from another 50 pounds on a squat but what he's going to get a lot of is dramatic increase in risk of injury and sacrificing things like mobility and pain and stamina and other things. So if it's always the same PR it'll be okay at first but then it'll start to grow. I want to make sure we have clarity around that by myopic you mean very specific strength goal too right? You can pursue consistently strength goals and strength PRs and be totally okay but it's the very specific I want to get stronger at the deadlift or at the squat or just two exercise or just the big three yeah right just so and that's what I mean by specific if it's specifically the same exercises you're always pursuing PRs that's where they can bet. There's nothing wrong with right now I'm chasing a squat PR and then next month I'm going to do a Turkish get up PR and then the next but like picking movements that are going to consistently benefit you by moving out of that same plane or that same focus I think that's okay I think that's where you get in trouble is when it's the exact same. Now to make it even more perfect though I would make this argument that at some point it wouldn't just be max strength regardless. Oh yeah I mean in a perfect world but what I want to make clear is that you could be pursuing basically you could pursue strength for a long time and be healthy and okay if you're smart enough to understand that one of the greatest challenges or problems that occur from chasing justice squat PR it's the same movement it's the same plane it's the same like repetitive stress adds up and you fall into patterns and so like your body gets more efficient at these specific patterns which is great for producing the amount of force to increase your strength and so you can get addictive in that direction but if we're neglecting other types of movements that your body is fully capable of doing and you're just prioritizing this continuous direction of focus and your body is going to start dampening that signal a bit in all those other directions to where it's going to start affecting now your overall body's performance and it's going to start to actually work against you. Yeah to give you an example if I took a beginner and then I took an advanced powerlifter and my goal was to make them both a lot stronger and I did this for six months the beginner would have all positives all positives across the board the experienced powerlifter I guarantee you would suffer from joint pain mobility issues and if I did succeed in getting them a lot stronger they wouldn't have the dramatic improvement in the quality of life that the beginner did because they're so already extreme in that direction that's the point here so if I took that powerlifter and I'm looking for longevity I would set a different kind of PR for them maybe strength in the lateral movement with rotation or maybe some stamina or ranges of motion for certain lifts or maybe something else right that would be that would give them much more isometric contraction yes something in that direction totally totally the second thing is when your PR's go bad is when you start to sacrifice your health to chase a PR so do you strength is an example just eating way more food can get you stronger but then you get into those dudes like us in the gym the perma bulk the guy who's 38% body fat still chasing 5 more pounds on his bench press eh I don't think that extra 5 pounds is worth what you're doing to your body or endurance I mean I've trained some very extreme endurance athletes and shaving 30 seconds off their triathlon time or whatever and I see the sacrifice that it places on their health in order to do so so when you start to notice like yeah I'm better at this PR but I don't feel better I actually feel worse then it's probably time to switch PR's yeah I imagine that's got to be pretty challenging for people to see as that starts to tip over right because I think you become so focused on that whether it be stamina, whether it be strength or whatever that you're focusing on and you know do they have the best to go am I getting better or worse sleep and are my joints hurting more today than they were 6 months ago usually they wait until their body's screaming at them that's how I feel so I feel like even before it gets to the point of sacrificing health just a good healthy balance relationship is to recognize like oh I've been really focused on this unless you're like you always have to remember that when we communicate things like this to the masses and the general population who just want to be overall healthier and stronger it's a complete exception to the rule when I'm speaking to a powerlifting athlete right so the things that we're communicating that's a sport highly competitive athletes a different focus it's not health you're sacrificing health so you have to understand that this is like someone who's like a competitor is like oh that's terrible advice I'm never gonna get that strong well of course because you're a competitor like if you're listening and you just want to be strong you just want to be healthy you're looking for longevity that's where this conversation you have to understand that's where we're coming from and then speaking to those people I think it's just a good exercise to move in and out of these PRs all the time in fact as soon as you hit a PR in whatever it was you're chasing move on I think that's an easy 100% you get a new stamina goal right instead of staying there it's like awesome you hit a PR now let's go for something else you can come back there later on and revisit and see if you can continue to get another PR but what happens is they hit a PR and they're like oh let's see what I do and by the way it's coming from experience I'm very guilty of this too right hit a big squat PR I'm all excited go for it again yeah let's see what I do next week you know say and then I get real close I'm gonna try so I think a good practice a general rule is when you're chasing a PR in any category that when you hit it to then move into something else versus continuing in that same direction yeah you know the funny thing is if you asked any high level athlete hey are you like optimal like is your health optimal right now they'd all say no they would tell you that your body feel yeah no no no it's all about performance there they're not pictures of health now one other thing is they can go bad when this is all you ever train for you always need a PR you always need a goal or you always need a competition then this can you can run into a problem and what it looks like when it becomes a problem is this and I see clients like this all the time that if they didn't sign up for something if they didn't have an event to train for they couldn't work out and it became especially as you get older it could you could start to run into problems because as you get older you may not be able to hit performance PRs at all anymore especially if you've been working out for years and years then it can become quite a challenge so at some point this is there's nothing wrong with what we're doing we're talking about actually this is really good but also at some point you also want to learn how to work out for the sake of doing so for the enjoyment of doing so this is more black belt level you know training longevity type of deal but it's something to keep in mind if you're planning on doing this for the rest of your life 100% agree and I would be completely depressed if I was just measuring PRs in all these like strength or fitness categories I think I look at PR in health like the whole sphere so like a PR could be for me like I spent this much time quality time with my son I spent this much time reading this week like I think a really healthy way to approach this to where it's not just focused on my body my strength I mean that is that's a major aspect of health and obviously what we communicate a lot but the sphere encompasses so much more than just that one and we talk about overall health and some of that can be meditation related some of that can be recuperative type of therapies like hot and cold therapy some of that can be reading for personal growth some of that can be spending time with family and loved ones so there's nothing wrong with and to me that's what I've learned to do is to move it out of just what's going on with the weights in the gym because when you've done as much as a lot of us have done in that area it's hard for me to see a better physique of stronger body than what I've exponentially more difficult yeah and I don't want to be depressed all the time that I can't have a PR there or I can't chase those things it's like so there's other aspects of my life that I want to be able to say that I can hit PRs in too and I think that's a very healthy way to keep you know that mindset of setting a goal and a plan but then also understanding that it moves that beyond just the weight room totally I experienced with that relatively recently when I hit a new PR with the deadlift and afterwards I was like what did I benefit from hitting this new number and I said my ego there was nothing else there was nothing on my physique I didn't feel any better if anything I felt less mobile I didn't get better sleep I wasn't a better dad or a better podcast or anything like that and I'm like okay well I got an ego boost is that really worth it was that worth the risk and you know maybe maybe I shouldn't train specifically for that and so my PR goal changed in fact for me my new PR goal is to work out less and that sounds funny but for someone like myself that's a damn good goal and probably going to be good for me but just an example of the different types of PR in fact we should go through some so obviously you can make a PR anything okay but let's go through some of the best ones that we have identified to be the best ones for most people to kind of cycle through if you will now the first one obvious is max strength how much you can lift yeah this one for the first three years of training is going to pay you back incredible dividends at least the first two years but probably the first three years or so if you do this right and you don't go crazy and all that stuff and you train to get stronger and stronger stronger for a good two to three years you're going to get a ton of return for chasing strength now that doesn't mean you shouldn't interrupt it with other things but overall if you if that's your ultimate goal it's the best possible thing you could train for for most beginners from beginner to about you know year three and I think the best PR that compliments that is to be chasing things like mobility and range of motion so if I'm somebody who's heavily focused on on the PR in the max strength thing then one of the best ways to compliment that would be also to interrupting that or including a range of motion and mobility type of PR or goal I think that in fact is the next one which is specifically just that is can I improve my control and depth of a squat or my overhead press or can I rotate better or I could not perform a lateral lunge before can I get to the point where I can perform it then can I add weight to it range of motion and mobility also can have negatives you push that too far then you get you know you can get joint issues but for most people who work out with weights this one almost always pays back good dividends I don't know too many people who lift weights that over do you know proper range of motion locks yeah other potential areas you can get stronger in which then you know attributes back to the whole and I think it you know the mobility part really highlights that in terms of like where there may be some deficiencies you even realize I don't have that kind of ability to produce force when I'm in this position and that's why you know you know within this lift I'm seeing that as a deficit and you know and another thing that's a deficit which goes right along to the next one for me is like staving off fatigue and so something that happens like within you know this pushing that max weight and I'm getting to that point I'm going through the reps but maybe my reps aren't very high and I'm just really focused on generating as much force as possible but I'm getting really tired in and that's something that I need to address and this is what I'm actually working on currently yeah no you made a great point too which is that that all of first off all of these will contribute to a better healthier better looking physique and body okay all of these they work together the other part of this is if your goal is to simply you know be the best at a specific lift or whatever then don't worry about what I'm about to say we already talked about that but if your goal is to be amazing and also be injury free feel good and have longevity will follow these all of these contribute to each other so you know you talked about stamina we talked about mobility strength like if you cycle through those you'll get stronger over time with less pain less injury and feel better you'll get more stamina over time with less fatigue less wear and tear you'll get better range of emotion and mobility over time with better control and strength with all of it so they all contribute to each other and they all all of these will make you look better and I say that because I know that's a selling point now everybody listening right now is like I want to look better well if you go through these different PR's over time you'll hit way less road products yeah stamina was a good one because this one was one that I I could see for myself that I was because I love max strength or I've always loved max strength but when I got to the point where I could squat 400 pounds for one rep but I couldn't do 225 for 10 without feeling like I'm a throw up then I knew like I gotta work on my I gotta work on my stamina like there's something missing here so stamina is your ability to do more reps it's your ability to there's endurance in stamina it's your ability to do more sets and more exercises like if you're that guy or girl who could show up hella strong but by the end of the workout everything's cut down by half you might need to work on your stamina a little well it also helps to maintain with quality control in terms of like how you're performing the reps because if that does sneak in sometimes it's a little bit more elusive and you don't realize like I'm actually you know fatiguing my way through this trying to maintain good form and you know go through that properly like I want to with like the best performance I can possibly produce but like if I have any inclination of fatigue it's going to degrade I would say that that is the number one cause of like form breakdown and technique is normally for fatigue it's rarely somebody who is doing singles or max lifting and there's a bit of an error in the movement or mechanics it's normally somebody super setting or deep into the workout or not not great rest the day before and so they get sloppy and tired and they get fatigued and then all of a sudden they're not contracting their core they're not keeping their posture right and they get a slouch or get a little lazy because they get fatigued and then the breakdown happens and then the injury happens the direct enemy of technique and form is fatigue nothing well I don't care how great your form is if you get fatigued enough it's going to be crap what do they say in boxing that you know they talk about heart right boxer has heart and coaches will tell you it's stamina if you got stamina you're going to have heart if you get tired your heart goes out the window type of deal so that's true with your workout the next one is stability how stable are you how tense can you be can you hold a weight above your head tight and strong think of you know performers on stage holding each other up and you notice how strong and tight and stable they are can you carry a weight for distance can you do it offset maybe more weight in one hand than the other and you can do that and hold yourself tight anybody who's ever lifted weights knows that being strong doesn't necessarily mean you have tremendous stability I talk about this all the time it's like new parents know this you work out in the gym all the time you're really strong you hold your baby at the grocery store like why am I bicep tired I curl 45 pound dumbbells and this 10 pound baby is making my arm oh it's stability it's that ability to just maintain that isometric contraction you know speaking of which isometrics and that kind of training is sorely lacking in modern programming and it's unfortunate because it's one of the most effective and damaging ways to exercise in fact I would say most people listening right now if you did a and you trained for a PR instability you would get tremendous payback because you probably never train that way I'd say that's probably the one thing that most people don't even know how to train for yet ironically I would say that this is where most of us started all of our programming like when you got a client a new client rarely ever did I right away jump to max PRs and strength like if I can't if I can't get you to balance on one leg I'm certainly not going to you know load you max load you bilaterally I'm gonna first get you to be able to stabilize on each each leg individually by itself before I even think about loading like that and so I think most of us when we train clients that was the foundation was stability first well it's an immediate leak of performance right away if you are at all and stable and then it's your more prone to injury and the focus of this really is the longevity of your joints and the joint health and so in terms of all of the above to be able to extend your ability to keep pursuing these PRs is all you know banking off of like how stable you can create around your joints for longevity well this is also the unfortunate part about how the fitness space bastardized the stability training because there was some value to taking somebody who couldn't even balance on one leg to now maybe they could hop and then balance on a bozu ball and stabilize them without having to touch the ground like their ability to progress from the inability to do that on one leg to be able to hop and then stabilize decelerate and all that in one movement like that's there is some value to that I think that we took it to the extreme and then we begin everything became about that like we do with anything else but there is some value to taking somebody who is very unstable like that building that stability and having stability PRs first before chasing some of these big max PRs now my favorite PR and this different this can you can modify this and changes my favorite is a consistency PR you want to work out two days a week three days a week how long can you keep that string or that record and the last time was three months let me see if I can beat that let me see if I can do four months here's another one for those of you that are hyper consistent with your training think this is stupid pick a segment of your training or something with your fitness that you negate maybe you're very consistent with your weights but you're super consistent with your cardio or super inconsistent with mobility or super inconsistent with meditation well now you can set a consistency PR goal with something like that and all you got to do is do better than you did last time so last time I did you know a week consistently now I'm going to aim for two weeks consistently it's one of my favorites because yeah it trains the most important thing with longevity with exercise which is just your ability to stay discipline and consistent arguably the most simple concept but the hardest one out of all of them I've found with clients coming in to achieve and so this is a very much of a mental discipline that if we can master this one all the rest you're going to have a lot easier time with I mean I attribute this to all the success I had in bodybuilding and the way it looked is exactly what you alluded to which is and I applied it both to nutrition to even when I did introduce cardio to weight training and it was like okay I haven't had seven days of perfect eating and like so the goal was eight days you know can I get to eight days once I pass eight days maybe I went all the way to 13 days and then I fell off again okay now 14 days is the new the new goal right and I just kept doing that until I was able to string months of consistency around diet and training and exercise and it's what made me keep progressing like that and it's what I love about that is that you can meet anybody anywhere where they're at like let's say you've never ate good for three days in a row like there's your first PR like love it hit four days and then you hit four days and then extend it and then just and if you fall off that's okay you fell off on day seven you know where your old PR was yeah now you're stretching yourself again and it's just a great way to build those small wins to eventually building that consistent lifestyle then turns into a habit this was my favorite type of PR to teach my clients to aim for early on because I could apply it to everything not just exercise like you said Adam like okay your goal right now is can you drink a half a gallon of water a day and I want you to track it and it's like oh you did great seven days in a row like let's try and beat that next time and like you said Justin this one leads to all the others so it's a great and it's also a great way to take a break by the way like if you've been pushing your body in all these different directions I mean you could say okay you know like for me for example my goal right now is to not do traditional strength training four days a week I'm only going to do traditional strength training three days a week so far I've gotten three weeks under my belt my goal is to be able to do this for the next you know maybe another nine weeks or so and so it's kind of like it sounds like a reverse goal but for someone like me I identified this could be really valuable alright so here's what we did to help some of you out because obviously the ones we gave were somewhat vague not necessarily specific and so what we did is we created this month we launched a new program called maps old-time strength what was cool about this program were a lot of the exercises and movements and techniques in there were things that we know people don't train anymore we just know it's lost wisdom they're just not exercises that people can even identify anymore but they're super valuable and so what we did is we said we should come up with some challenges that people could try to accomplish that we think most people would benefit from so we picked movements that a lot of people don't do we also picked different types of PRs so that it's not just strength we also picked one that was stamina and one that was the stability or the you know what we call grit in this particular test so what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell you what they are you could train for these yourself practice them another thing that we did with them is we put guidelines on there so you can compete with other people if you want which can kind of make it fun so and it doesn't matter how much you weigh versus how much they weigh it's all based off of your body weight and stuff like that and so here's what they are now Doug if you could put the formulas on there that would be great too so I can give you a little percentage of body weight but the first one is a strength challenge and this is just typical how much max you can lift and here's the lifts and they're all different you've probably never trained these before one is a barbell single arm deadlift the other one is a bent press this is an old school lift the other one is a barbell hack squat and you do it as a percentage of your body weight that's what you're aiming for can I do more now this is cool because if you get leaner it doesn't go up you actually got stronger as a percentage of your body weight which is kind of cool allow smaller people to compete against bigger people so it's pretty cool the next one is a stamina challenge which is and I need numbers for that too Doug where you're going to see how many reps you can do of a hindu push up or dive bomber push up how many reps you could do with a front squat Doug get me those percentages so I can give them to them and then how many reps you could do with what's called a seesaw press a seesaw press is literally a shoulder press where each arm is pumping with the front squat it's half your body weight how many reps can you do and with the seesaw press if you're female 10% of your body weight in each arm and if you're male 15% your body weight in each arm and you're just looking at getting more reps this total stamina and then the stability one which is this one's kind of cool it's my favorite one is you're going to look and see how long you can hold these lifts for the first one is a dumbbell single arm overhead hold and the weight that you're picking is if you're female 30% your body weight if you're male 50% your body weight the second one is a barbell suitcase hold if you're female it's 50% your body weight and male 70% your body weight and then the last one is how long you can hold your chin over the bar for men you have to pull yourself up and for women you can start at the top position and for this it's just total time add up the total time with all of them there you go and if you train for each of these and cycle through them you've got yourself some pretty damn good balance I think most people would benefit from these each one of those challenges addresses everything that we talked about from the stability to the max strength to mobility range of motion like all the movements that are included in there you get if you hit PRs in those movements you're going to see gains in all those other aspects that's amazing by the way if you want specific training for those lifts the new program is called maps old time it does train you specifically to perform those because it's a brand new program it's a launch special these are actually the final hours as this episode airs so you can get it $80 off plus two ebooks for free Forgotten muscle and strength building secrets and living a fully optimized life that was written by Jay Campbell so you have to go to maps oldtime.com use the code old80 and you'll get all of those hookups also if you want free information okay go to map mindpumpfree.com we have fitness guides there that are all free you can also find all of us on social media Justin is on Instagram at Mindpump Justin I'm on Instagram at Mindpump DeStefano and Adam is on Instagram at Mindpump Adam