 In this episode of Mind Pump, the world's top fitness, health, and entertainment podcast, we talk about workouts. Now, a lot of you who listen to this podcast are currently either working out literally at this moment or following a workout program. And one of the hard things to figure out is whether or not the workout has actually the best one for you. Like, is this the best possible workout I could be doing for my body, my goals, for what I'm looking to accomplish. So what we did is we broke it down, okay, we give you three ways you can tell if your workout is right or wrong for you. So the things that we cover are results, how you feel, and whether or not the program that you're following is sustainable. Of course, we go into detail and we break it down for you because the right workout for your body is one that gives you the best results, makes you feel the best and is the one that you can stay the most consistent with. Now this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Zbiotics. 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I tested it again. I tested it again. It worked every single time. Crazy stuff. Anyway, we have a massive discount for you. Go to Zbiotics.com, that's Z-B-I-O-T-I-C-S.com forward slash mind pump and you'll get 10% off any of their products. Also, before the episode starts, I want to let everybody know that this month we've put one of our programs on 50% off, Maps Starter. Now Maps Starter is a great at-home workout program. All you need is a physio ball, a resistance ball. Those are the big, they look like big bouncy balls that you sit on, you do exercise on. So you need that and you need dumbbells. It's a full body workout. That's all the equipment that you need. It's a great workout program for beginners. It's a great workout program for people who've worked out for a long time who want to refocus on their form and technique. It's one of the workouts that I can honestly say is for pretty much everybody. Again, it's 50% off. Here's how you get the half off discount. Go to mapsstarter.com. That's M-A-P-S-S-T-A-R-T-E-R.com and use the code starter50. That's S-T-A-R-T-E-R-5-0, no space for the discount. One of the hardest things for people to figure out, I was thinking about this the other day, is believe it or not, because a lot of people think that would be easy to realize. It's actually not. It's figuring out whether or not the workout that you're doing is actually right for you. It's working for you. I always found that one to be, especially when I first became a trainer, I found it to be very interesting that that would be a hard one to figure out. But then I think back to when I worked out and how many times I followed workouts for long periods of time, ignoring lots of signs and signals. So I think it'd be a good idea if we did an episode on that. I think it's really difficult to judge because what we think is results sometimes are not the right results, if that makes sense. I think a lot of the things that we, as in people in general, measure the success of their workout are not the right indicators. I also think that the space, we are responsible for feeding into that. And so the consumer gets stuck on a few metrics that they think is what tells them if they're doing well or not. And many times, those metrics are not good for you to utilize as a good judge or indicator is if this workout is working well for me. Yeah, your average person just has a lot of assumptions of what their abilities, like what they can actually do and where they should start based off of what they see other people doing. And just in my own experience, it's really difficult to identify exactly what your body needs and what's going to benefit the most without trial and error and really a lot of detective work. I'll give you an example. We've all heard the story now in the podcast of I was a skinny kid and I started lifting weights because I wanted to get bigger. So my goal was just gain size. That was my number one goal always gain size. So as long as the scale showed my weight going up, yeah, that meant that the workout was working, you know, as long as my shirts felt tighter, even if my pants, you know, my waist on my pants started getting tighter and I had to get bigger pants. It didn't matter because the scale was going up. Your mind can play incredible tricks on you amazing tricks on you to the point where if I had a client who gained a pound on the scale, but through body fat testing realized we got way leaner and just gained some muscle, the client would freak out. Oh my gosh, I'm so much bigger. What's going on? Reality or actually not? Well, I feel like it's the mind, the mirror and the scale. These are the three things that I think that most people use. And they all three I think play serious tricks. And I mean, I'm just as guilty, right? I'm like you, Sal, had the and a lot of times it's because we all have these deep rooted insecurities like we talked about that drove us into the gym. And because mine was being a skinny guy trying to build muscle, you know, I'm looking at the mirror more than in the scale, you know, looking at those two things like I want to be bigger. I want to be bigger. So if the weight is going up and I'm filling shirts out in the mirror, I'm on the right path. And like many things, there's there's some truth to that. But sometimes that can be really deceiving on how successful your programming or your diet really is. Totally. Because okay, so the first thing in this one can be good and bad. Okay. And it's obvious, right? Are you getting results? Like, are you getting results from your workout? That's that's sounds objective. The problem is, it's not always objective. Like we're talking about right now. I remember one time in particular, I went on this, you know, I was, I think I was probably 18 or 19. And I was like, you know what, I'm pulling all the stops. I'm just that's it. I'm going to get big. Yeah, I'm going to force feel myself means necessary. Yeah, I'm going to eat 6,000 calories a day. I'm going to lift heavy. I'm going to take all the supplements. I'm going to do everything just to get big. And sure enough, the scale would go up and would go up. And at one point, I think I reached 230, maybe a little over 230 pounds, which is heavy for me. And I'm six feet tall. I don't have a massive frame. I weigh right now probably around 195 to 200. So 30 more pounds on my frame. And I was so proud of myself, because I had put packed on all this weight and I gotten so much bigger. Then I got a body fat test. Now, the body fat test was boy, was that a disheartening situation? I literally got tested, saw that my body fat went up. First I didn't care. I was like, yeah, of course my body fat went up. I'm a lot bigger. And I'm like, wait a minute, let me do the math real quick. I gained, I think during that period of time, something like 25 pounds. And I think out of that 25 pounds, I gained something like four or five pounds of lean body mass. I gained 15 to 20 pounds of body fat to gain five pounds of muscle. And of course, when I went down in body fat, I lost everything. And I realized that I had been fooled. I had been totally tricked. I was getting results. The goal was to gain weight. But my mind had totally played tricks on me. This happens a lot. And this happens a lot with weight loss. I was just gonna say, it happens in the averse just as much, if not more, where a client is losing weight. And so they think they're on the right path. And then they go do a body fat test like that. Or in a perfect world, they do it before they start their program. And then they do it two months later, and find out that their body fat percentage went up. A lot of times too, this is when we would get trainers that would be arguing the method of the body fat test, like it's not accurate. Like, oh, there's no way, you know, just to make them feel better. We get that a lot even today, right? People always ask if these tools, like, you know, how accurate, I heard they could be off by this much. And you start hanging on, oh, the fact that it could be inaccurate. And therefore, there's no way this is right, because it's saying that I got fatter, but yet I lost, you know, 20 pounds off the scale. It's not possible. But absolutely, it's impossible. Not only is it possible, it's actually more common than the other way. It's more common that I see somebody who loses 20 pounds that does it through just restricting food and increasing tons of movement or following some program that they bought. And then they get on the body fat test and realize that, oh, wow, even though I lost 20 pounds, I actually went up body fat percentage. And so I think before we go any more, we have to really explain how is that possible and like how body composition works, like changing your body composition versus just losing weight or gaining weight. Right. So let's say you weigh, you know, 200 pounds. If you have 20 pounds of body fat on your body, you're 10% body fat. If you weighed 100 pounds with 20 pounds of body fat on your body, now you're 20% body fat. Same amount of body fat pounds. Now the ratios change. It's your percentage went up. Obviously, a my kids, my kid is going to have less total body fat on their body simply because there's so much smaller than I am, although I may actually be leaner percentage wise than my kid. Does that make sense? So if you lost a bunch of weight on the scale, and you did lose some fat, but you also lost some lean mass, you could very well go up and body fat percentage. Now why is that a bad thing? Because a high body fat percentage, regardless of your weight, let's talk from the aesthetic standpoint, first high body fat percentage, regardless of weight, you look fatter, you look more flabby, you're not as sculpted or tight or toned. 20 pounds of body fat on a 100 pound person does not look lean, like 20 pounds of body fat on a 200 pound person would look that would be somebody who's shredded versus somebody that looks me, you know, kind of leanish, maybe not. It makes that big of a difference. So that's the aesthetic component. But let's take it a step further. If you lose muscle, body fat percentage goes up and you lost weight. Now you're stuck with a slower metabolism. Now to maintain your weight, you have to eat much less. And if you want to get an even leaner or lighter, forget leaner, you want to get even lighter, you got to cut your calories even more. Now, it's obvious that this is a failing approach because how low can you go? Right. How long can you sustain that plan? It's just not realistic. No, it's not. And I've actually worked with people like this where they do, and I used to see this all the time. Some will come to me and they're doing five or six days a week of cardio. They did some kind of diet keto, low carb, paleo, whatever. So the calories are really low. They come, they see me and they say, Hey, I've lost all this weight and I start to look closer at what they're doing. And, you know, I'm like, wow, you're eating 1500 calories a day. And you're doing five to six days a week of cardio. How do you feel about cutting your calories even more and working out even more? And, you know, of course, most of them are like, wow, that's a lot. I got to work out more. I got to eat less. You know, they've put themselves in a really crappy situation. So results are an important indicator of whether or not a workout is working for you, but you got to break the results down and you can't let your, you can't be fooled by yourself. You can't be fooled by the scale or the mirror. You have to get much more objective when you break things down. And a lot of times this is really driven by this surge of momentum and this passion to get to a place and a goal. And by all means necessary, like you're trying to gain all this weight, you know, what's going to get me there, you know, the quickest, the fastest, the most efficient way possible. But you don't like realize the byproduct of that, what happens as a result of that? Or even, you know, you look at the overall like, oh my God, I actually lost muscle by trying to lose weight and now I have to rebuild the muscle. And now I'm like starting this whole new process when I could have been a lot more effective if I drew it out a little bit further. We have to speak to the people who don't care too. So I recently shared that the story about my brother-in-law who has dropped, you know, about 25 pounds in the last year through all his cycling and then restricting his calories, you know, and his response to me when I initially told him that his body fat percentage probably stayed the same or actually went up even though he lost weight was like, I don't care. You know, I'm down from where I was, you know, so, you know, why should I care? And I know there's a lot of people like that. There's a lot of people that have, you know, 30, 40 pounds and it bugs them, they're insecure about it. And then they do all this hard work of restricting calories and training to get it off and they get it off and they feel, you know, super excited and happy to be there as they should, you know, because they've disciplined themselves to follow a program and stick to it. But the thing with that is this, and this is what I explained to him. Now, he rides really aggressively in the summertime and then wintertime comes around and he's just, it's not possible. It's not possible to go on these three, four-hour rides. He lives in an area where it's all snow and everything like that. So he's no longer, and even if he does other things like go out hiking, nothing compares to his mountain biking, mountain biking, calorie expenditure. So he just can't possibly keep that up. And what I was explaining to him is you really set yourself up for this yo-yoing effect to happen. You no longer can keep up that movement, but then you're kind of eating the same. And even if you do kind of modify that a little bit, you're nowhere, you're not burning anywhere nearly as much as you were burning for. And like to Sal's point, you've now slowed your metabolism down. You've now told your body to be efficient with only that many calories that you're eating and expecting in that it needs to burn this much. So then when you stop, the weight piles back on. So that's the worst part about that, even if you are satisfied because you're down two pounds at pant sizes and people are telling you, oh my God, you look great because you've dropped all this weight down, your face is looking leaner, all these positive things that are giving you feedback that, oh, I must be doing the right thing. But in reality, you have no idea that you're really setting yourself up for long term failure. That's the big one. Now one measure of results is usually, and I'm not going to say always because I'm going to give you some examples of when it's not, but usually a good sign. And that's if you get stronger. So if you get stronger in the gym, a performance increase or improvement like that, it's typically good news. It usually means something about your workout routine is working. Okay, now here's when you can even be fooled by that. I've actually seen this before. I've actually had people come up to me and I've watched them in the gym and they tell me, oh my gosh, I added 30 pounds to my squat. And I know I watch them squat. I'm like, well, you're not squatting as deep as you used to, and now you're wearing a belt and knee wraps. Or, oh, I can bench press more. Well, your technique is better now. So that's why you're lifting more. Not a bad thing, but you're not necessarily adding more muscle and getting stronger. You're just getting better at your technique or you're adding new aids to help you lift more weight. Or you could also be adding more fat, like your example that you gave with yourself. So you could be getting stronger, but then you're also adding fat at a higher rate, which puts you in the same similar predicament. I find that the strength results are better for somebody who is losing weight. Like if I have a client who is losing weight and getting stronger, that's almost always a good indicator. That's normally a really good indicator. If we're getting stronger and we're leaning out or losing weight on the scale, that's a pretty good sign that we're probably at least hanging on to muscle mass, maybe even potentially building some. But if you're on the gain and you're trying to build, and that's your main goal, and you see the strength go up a little bit, that always isn't a great indicator because if the ratio of fat that you're adding to the muscle you're adding is much higher, you're technically just getting fatter. Right. And here's one that you can look at. Look at your strength to weight ratio. Now, this isn't perfect at some point. If you get big enough, your strength to weight ratio is not going to be as good as it was when you're lighter. But if you're, you know, if you gain, let's say you gain 20 pounds of weight because you're trying to gain a bunch of mass, but your squat goes up five pounds. Okay. Yeah, you're stronger and you're actually weaker as a percentage of your body weight. If your body weight went up 20 pounds, your squat should theoretically go up a little bit higher than that. But you only added about five pounds to the bar. Same thing with your bench or anything else. Now, that's something you want to pay attention to. Just because you added weight to the bar, look at your overall body weight. Now, some people don't care too much about this, but you know, being a certain strength, but also being really, really heavy actually makes you weaker as a person moving around. It just makes you weaker. You might, you have gained 40 pounds, but now you can't do a single pull up or you can't do a single dip. So your fitness level really hasn't improved that much. This, by the way, is coming from, again, personal experience where I was just pushing weight on the bar and weight on the scale so much. And I did get stronger, but my strength gains didn't match my weight gain. And so, yes, I was strong. In fact, I'll tell you what, at my absolute heaviest body weight, I was not able to deadlift, squat, or bench press as much as I was able to later on when I figured this out at a lighter body weight. That was actually my PRs that I've ever hit my all time PRs were not at 230 or 35 pounds. They were like at 205. And it's because I did it the right way later on. Well, and to like, if you're adding just pure mass, like, and I know a lot of people don't really care because they just want to get big, you know, and this is something that they're just trying to get as big and massive as possible. But when you go into the doctor and they kind of assess your BMI, and they tell you like, well, you're kind of at a higher risk for you know, these these these things, these diseases, these these complications later on in life, these health problems, you know, it is something that you need to consider if you're adding all this excess mass, what kind of mass is it that you're adding on top of everything? Now, we have to talk to you about what it looks like to see no results at all. Now, it seems obvious that if you're not seeing any results whatsoever, your program is not working for you. But I think it's deeper than that. Many times, when I thought I was seeing no results because I was judging it through the three things we talked about before, the mind, the mirror, and the scale, I wasn't seeing anything happen. You weren't paying attention to other results. Exactly. And I actually was actually on better progress than I was when I was seeing those things fluctuate the most. So that's the real tricky part about this is, and this is something that I remember coaching the clients a lot, you know, them telling me, I don't feel like my body's changing. My clothes are fitting about the same. My scale is about the same. But I know as a coach, that if they're if they're reporting to me correctly, like that we're eating this way, I know I've got them on good programming, I'm constantly having to reassure them that stay that stay the process. And then I'm also asking other things. I'm asking them about their their energy levels. I'm asking them about their sleep. I'm asking them about their mood. I'm asking pain. I'm asking about a lot of other things to help them make a connection that your body is changing for the good. Sometimes when you're at the perfect place, it's got this beautiful ratio of you just you'll lose about a pound of fat, you gain about a pound of muscle. And that takes weeks and months to do that. And so because you're not seeing this huge swing in the mirror or huge swing on the scale, your mind starts to play tricks on you and think, Oh, what I'm doing, is it working for me? In reality, it could be working perfectly for you. Right, right. So results, although they sound objective, and I would say of the things that we're going to cover in this episode are one of the more objective things because they can be measured. They can still play tricks on you. And it's not a 100% guarantee that your program is the right one for you that your workout is working for you. Now, the next one you just alluded to, Adam, was how you feel. Now, this is a big one. This one to me is one of the bigger ones because people have confused feeling crappy with an effective workout versus feeling good. This one's hard. It's like, you know, when people are on this new routine that's beaten them up and you and they're like, Oh my God, I'm doing this new workout. And it's so gray and I've lost weight. And of course, you know, we don't know if it's fat or muscle. And, you know, I'll say, well, how do you feel about, Oh man, I'm so sore. I can barely walk. Like I'm so sore. And when I get home from the gym, I could all I do is I just lay on the couch because I can't move because I just had the best workout. I'm like, Holy cow. You have completely confused what an effective workout is supposed to feel like. You are doing the whole martyrship thing where it's how much I can withstand how you feel is a very, very important metric. But you got to you got to fix that. You got to fix how you think about how you feel. Your workouts should make you feel good. Now, I don't mean feel good, like I feel good that I'm beat up. So that means I had a good workout. I mean, literally, you feel good. Oh, I remember the first time I made that shift personally, to understanding that the, you know, hobbling out of the gym or just destroyed, you know, used to be connected for me as, Oh, that was what was a good workout. When in reality, when I really honed in, you know, my programming, I realized that no, when I, when I had a perfect workout, I actually left the gym feeling with more energy. Oh God, that took me so long to figure out. I remember when I started to piece that together, it took me a long time. But you know, the way I used to feel after my workouts when I was first started working out was exhausted, tired, lay on the couch. Didn't want to get up in the morning. Yeah. And I'd be satisfied. Like, yeah, I did it. You know, I broke everything down. That's what I'm supposed to do or whatever. Well, later on as I started to really figure this out. And by the way, a lot of the stuff that I learned for myself, I learned through my clients, one of the wonderful things about being a trainer is that when I train other people, all my insecurities are, or most of them are gone. I'm not applying them to my client. I only apply them to myself. Yeah. I'm much more objective and trainers listening to exactly what I'm talking about. You typically will train your clients better than train yourself. So I'd be watching my clients and I would see what would give them better results. I'd see how their energy levels were. I'd see what workouts worked best for them. Eventually, I started to kind of put this together and apply it to myself. And I remember it was, I was, it was years after I'd been working out. I remember, wow, not only my building muscle, getting stronger, staying lean, but also I have tons of energy. Like the workouts aren't kicking my butt like I like too much. I feel good. I would leave the gym feeling like I could do another workout feeling like I want to talk to people. I want to hang out with people. I want to have a good time. I felt phenomenal. If your workout is making you feel crappy, that is the wrong workout. Also, let's also remember this. Most of you listening right now, don't just work out for a living. Okay. Most of you have a normal life. Your workout should compliment your life. It should not take away from it. If your workouts beat you up so much that you come home, you don't have time for your kids, I need a lay on the couch, I'm so sorry, I can't move. Like it's not, even if the workout was giving you results, what are you, what are you trading? You're trading feeling crappy and ruining the rest of your life for this super intense workout. Well, I found too, like training clients to kind of talk about when you, when you feel like you're not really moving the needle, you're not, you're not progressing. I'm not really losing weight right now. The most value I could provide my clients was to highlight these things, to highlight how much better their sleep were, how much more energy they had, you know, how much better their movement was like sometimes like strength metrics for people that were losing weight. You know, while we were still going through that process, it's just better to have all these other things that are still happening and we're still moving you forward, but you're not always going to see those results just, you know, one or the other result happening. It's usually, you know, it shifts quite a bit. Well, the other thing too, when talking about feel is also how you feel going into the next workout. Another one that was really tough for me, it took a long time to get through this was, you know, if you're training to get that sore feeling, and then you go into the workout the next day or two days later, and it hinders the workout you're about to do, like that's something that you have to pay attention to. We don't want that. Like I don't want to go into a workout after the previous one I just did. And you know, I spend the first 20, 30 minutes, I have to really warm and prime and really get in just in the flow and warmed up because I'm so damn sore from the previous workout. You'd like to get in a place where I can get, I can kind of pick up where I left off versus trying to recover still from the damage that I done just two days ago. And that's so important because we're sending a signal when we lift, but there's also the important factor of how we recover. That's such a big piece to how you progress and see your results. And if you're constantly, I mean, Sal, you call this the recovery trap, right? If you're constantly hammering the body all the time, it's constantly trying to recover. You don't give it its chance to actually adapt and progress. That's right, because recovery and adaptation is getting stronger, building muscle, burning body fat, improving endurance, all those different things. Recovery is healing. And oftentimes they happen simultaneously, but they are not the same thing. One is healing. One is super compensating. One is adapting. Well, if you beat your body up so much that all it could do is recover, it's not going to care up because recovery is a priority. If your body doesn't heal, you'll die. So before when I cut my hand before my body can think about building a callus over where I just cut, it needs to heal the cut. That's the priority. And if I keep cutting it over and over again, am I going to add a callus? Is it going to adapt by making my skin stronger? Of course not. I'm cutting it too often. My body's only trying to heal. And that's what that recovery trap, this is what it feels like. This is what the recovery trap feels like. You beat yourself up in the gym. You get really, really sore. You go into the next workout, no improvements. You do the same thing, beat yourself up, get really, really sore, rinse and repeat. You just do this over and over. It's like a hamster wheel of beat up, recover, beat up, recover without any real progress. It literally is like a hamster wheel. You're definitely running, but you ain't going anywhere. Nothing's happening. You're driving a car. You're not getting traction. You're making a lot of smoke, but you're staying exactly the same place. And ignoring these signs is going to be to your detriment. I mean, these things like pain, your body is telling you these things to address certain issues. And I know training a lot of strength athletes personally, a lot of it is we're always trying to push so far forward and trying to get PR lifts and try to maximize whatever we can in the gym in spite of these indications of pain. And so we're going to put aids there to suppress the pain and move forward. Now, in terms of a long-term strategy, you have to really think about what you're going to be left with in terms of joint function, in terms of your overall performance. It's not going to be what it used to be, even though you got certain numbers you're looking for. Such a good point. There's a good pain and there's a bad pain. What's a good pain? A little bit of soreness. A little bit. I'm being honest here. Okay. So I'm a little sore. I worked out like, okay, I can feel like I did a little workout. By the way, no pain is fine too. If you're progressing, getting good results and you feel great. No pain at all is also an awesome thing. But a little bit of pain, perfectly fine. What's bad pain? Excessive soreness. It lasts for more than a day. It's sore to the touch. It hinders how you move. It hinders how you move. Adam, you made a great point earlier. You go into your next workout and you're like, oh my gosh, I'm so sore from the previous workout. I don't know how I'm going to do this next workout. You got to be able to perform each time. Joint pain. Joint pain is terrible. If your workout is making your joints hurt and stiff, like Justin said, a lot of people think, oh, my knees started bothering me. So I think what I'm going to do now is rub Ben Gay on it and then put a knee wrap around it. Oh, cool. It doesn't hurt anymore. While I squat, let's just keep doing that. We know what's going to happen. You keep pushing that. Eventually, you're going to have a big problem. Your workouts should reduce pain. They should reduce that kind of pain. Always. They should not increase that kind of pain. Now, this is, of course, if you're a high performing athlete and you compete in a sport, you go play a football game, or you go run a marathon at your fastest speed. Yeah, you're going to have some bad pain afterwards. Understandable. You push yourself to the limit. But when you're training your body on a regular basis, when you're exercising, working out on a regular basis, when you're doing this so you can have long-term forever results and success, 99% of the time you should not have lots of pain. There's another one. This one for me is a very big signal. For some people, it's a big signal. And that's sleep. I know when my sleep is crappy that I'm pushing it too hard in the gym or that my workout is just not working for me. My workouts, when they're good, always improve my sleep. They always get better sleep when I'm having really good, effective workouts. When my workouts are not effective, my sleep just isn't as good. Well, that works both ways too, right? So sometimes you get the bad sleep first, right? So sometimes when you get that, learning to modify and change your workout. So maybe you're on a great workout plan. Maybe it is working for you, but learning to connect that the sleep and workout part, how much they work together and knowing that, oh, I got a poor night's sleep. Today, even though I'm scheduled to get after squats or that, maybe that's the day where you work more inward or do more mobility work or scale back the intensity. You've got to learn how to do that because real quick, you could take a good program and make it shitty because other aspects of your life are not in place. Like if your nutrition is off big time, your sleep is off big time. And even though you have great programming, it'll look like poor program. That's a great point. Remember, your workouts are moldable. You can change them depending on the context of your life. So a workout that may be effective for the healthy, well-rested version of you may be ineffective for the not as healthy, not as well-rested version of you. There's a different workout or a different intensity that will be superior for you depending on the context of what's going on, how you feel. And sleep, I think it's so undervalued. I think people just don't even realize how vital it is in terms of recovery and what that does to balance your hormones, what that does to set you up for energy and repair damage cells and everything else. In terms of that, I know you guys have probably experienced this a lot with your clients where when they're on a good path or getting good sleep, they're making good progress. Their libido goes up. I think the people that don't understand this are the young, right? Because it's always there. If you don't have kids in your 20s, you may not understand this. But if you're 35 and you've had kids, you fucking understand this thing. There's no doubt in your mind. That morning would still there. Well, you know what? It's actually becoming much more common with younger people now. Libido's a big one. You should have a good workout, should give you a healthy libido. It should feel, and what I mean by healthy is, and the reason why I say healthy is of course there's dysfunction in the opposite side, right? Where people are fanatical about, you know, sex or whatever. I'm not talking about that. What I mean is you should feel vibrant. You should feel a healthy libido. You should be able to have good sex, good performance, good orgasm. By the way, these are all reflection of your hormones. Bad workouts tend to cause hormone imbalances and men, we see drops into testosterone and women, we see estrogen and progesterone getting way out of balance. Bad workouts will start to do that. And by the way, the way to fix that is not to take hormones. This is what I see a lot of people doing, where I see a guy is like, oh, my testosterone level is low, just give me some testosterone. It's like, well, let's look at what's going on in your lifestyle. It's actually a signal. It's low because your workout's wrong, your sleep is wrong, your diet's wrong. Fix those and then see what happens. I never realized this as much as I did the last couple of years when I went through coming off the testosterone and my libido just taking a shit and my testosterone levels being flatlined. And then coming back, and the way I had to train was so different than what I was training just a year prior to that. And understanding that, what I realized, now for me, where I was at, now this is going to be dependent on everybody, it is different, right? So where I was at, my levels were so low that if I went in the gym and what I thought was like a normal, pretty good workout, it was too much sometimes. Sometimes the next day, it would be terrible. I would end up having bad sleep, my sex drive would be down. And then sometimes I go in and I'd be like, okay, I'm going to be more mobility focused. And then I'm just going to get like a good squat session or a good deadlift session. And then I would see it within the next day or two. I would feel that spike in my libido. It's amazing how the body will speak to you like that if you're paying attention to those signals. So I can't stress enough like how important that one is and to not ignore that as a good signal. The other thing that we talk a lot about too is just the importance of consistency. And one of the things that helps so much with consistency is enjoying what you're doing. So what do you say, Sal, time you talk about a subpar workout done consistently is better than a great workout done inconsistently. Right. So you have to factor that in. And I'm always very cognizant of this when I'm speaking to a client that maybe I wish they were doing their programming a little more like this or I wouldn't, but they really enjoy what they're doing. And it's working for them. You got to try and find that balance. You want to have obviously the most ideal programming for you and what you to see the results at the same time to you also have to be enjoying it. Those those go hand in hand. You can stretch yourself, but it can't always be a chore. You know, at a certain point, you have to be able to look forward to it and find elements in there that really excite you and try and maintain that and try and look for that constantly. Otherwise, it's just not going to be something you keep doing. I've always I've always found this to be true when a person is doing a workout that makes them feel good, good energy, good libido. They feel mobile, no pain. They're getting results. Maybe their strength is going up. Their body composition is changing for the positive. Metabolism seems to be faster. They enjoy the workout. They enjoy it. Right. I've noticed that I don't care what kind of workout you're doing, how fun it is for you. You're not getting good results. You've got a lot of pain. You start to feel crappy. You're irritable. Your hormone levels may be off. Your libido's down. You start you stop enjoying it. Now, you may you may be one of those people that's like, I'm going to do it no matter what. Then you just push and push and push. And I've seen this many, many times and cause a lot of damage. But so that becomes a good thing, a good sign. Are you enjoying the process? Is this something you want to continue doing? Which brings us to the next one. Is your workout sustainable? This is a big one. Because I think a lot of people don't consider that when they get into a workout. In fact, one of the number one comments I would get from people is, okay, great. I build muscle and burn body fat. Then what do what happens when I stop? It always surprised me when I would hear that. But I would hear it always. I still hear that from people. What happens when I stop? Do my muscles turn to fat? You're not supposed to stop, guy. That's right. This is something that you have to do that sustainable. So let's say right now you're doing this workout plan, and it's having you work out, you know, six days a week and you're, you're working out like crazy, you're getting good results, you feel good, but you also have kids a job. In order to work out six days a week, you are really carving out time. It's very difficult. You got to be honest with yourself. Is this sustainable? Because if it's not, then that may not be the right workout for you. Regardless, look, here's the thing. For a lot of people, they could get way better results if they had all the time in the world, but most people don't. So the best workout for them, like we said earlier, that's going to keep them consistent, is one that'll be more sustainable. Now, this doesn't mean you can't stretch and push yourself, but you need to have an exit plan. Well, no, this is why if you look at this, the spectrum that we've built all the programs on, you have maps anabolic on one of the spectrum, and then you have maps PED at the other end of the spectrum. We would never recommend the average person, no matter what their goals were, to start in PED. The amount of volume and training that we're asking somebody to do. It's just time. Oh, yeah. It's not a sustainable place. Now, if you are somebody who's gone through all the programs and you've been consistent with no hiccups all the way through it, then maybe you are somebody who is ready for that volume of training and can handle that and may be something that you could potentially sustain. Somebody else, that's a horrible place to start them. Because, yeah, maybe even if they did that program right out the gates, they might see some great results, but it doesn't mean that it's sustainable for them long term. And you have to factor that in, which is, I think we've all talked about this, early in the career, I used to try and close people on committing to three or four days a week in the gym. And when they'd tell me, like, well, I'm really busy and this and that, I only have a sitter for two days. You know, I'd be like, oh, you got to find another day, and I pushed them to commit more, which was such a bad idea as a trainer. And I didn't realize how many people I was setting up for failure versus now in the opposite. Now, someone goes like, oh, Adam, I got all this. I got this time. I've, you know, I'm off of work right now. And I've decided that I'm going to focus hardcore on my training. And I've got five to seven days a week. Can you write a program for me? And I go, well, you know what? Have you been training at all in the previous month or six? No, not really. But I'm ready now. Okay. Why don't we start off with something a little bit slower, like two days a week? Oh, no, no. But I got all this free time of this. Well, yeah. Here's the thing, though. Will that last forever? Will you forever not have a job? Will you forever have this open availability to always train five days a week? Why don't we build something first that's sustainable with less? And then from there, you can start to add to that. And that's really hard for people to make that switch or that decision when they are committed right now to make a change. And they've like mapped it out for themselves and they've have lauded, okay, I've got this time for me. It's just because you have the time to do it right now doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea for you to be doing that. That's right. It's because when you're motivated, you just want to do everything. And you think the more you do the faster you'll get there. Here's one of the one of the wonderful things about asking yourself if something is sustainable and what is a realistic amount of time you can dedicate to exercise or working out forever. One of the wonderful things about it is you learn how to become efficient. Okay, some three day a week workouts will give you far better results than other six day a week workouts. In fact, I could I know that I could do this all day long. Oh, I remember what happened to me. Oh, yeah. So what happens when you start to ask yourself these questions is you actually become more efficient, you actually become more effective, even total, because you know you only have a few days a week that you can make it to the gym. So the sustainability question that you need to ask yourself isn't just about my time and how much I can fit. It actually oftentimes leads to more effective, more efficient, smarter workouts. Because if I'm going to the gym every single day, you know, I may I may be getting as many results with twice as much twice as much work. That's a that's a waste of time. I have to share when that went off for me as a trainer in my mid 20s. Because, you know, there's somebody who's listening right now and they're like, you know what, I'll always have five to seven days. I love the gym. I'll always commit to that. But even if that is sustainable to your points out, sometimes it's not what's best for you. That was really hard for me to get that because I was a young kid. I was athletic. I love to move. I love to train. I was in the gym always five to seven days a week. And one of the biggest plateau breakers that I ever did was taking my five to seven day workout and dropping it down to three. Boy, was that a mental fuck. That was really hard for me to do that because I was so focused on building muscle and I have my thought process was the more I did, the more results I would get. But the reality of it was one, I was stuck in that recovery trap to I was moving and burning so much I couldn't keep up with the amount of food that I needed to replenish myself because of how much I was burning. And I know there's somebody listening right now that is probably in the same place that I was because I was in that place for years and I was a trainer. I should know better, but yet I still fell on that same trap because of my own insecurities of wanting to be bigger, wanting to train harder, thinking that that was what was going to get me to more muscle on my body. But in reality, I packed on a good 10 pounds of muscle the first time I switched after being consistent with five to seven weeks back to a three day a week program. You have to ask yourself, look, let's say you start a business and you're working 15 hours a day, seven days a week, and you build it up to a certain point. At some point you have to ask yourself, okay, we're doing fine. Am I going to be able to do this every single day forever? I need to figure out how to make this sustainable. That's the thing that you need to ask yourself with your workout. If your workout is not sustainable, regardless of all the other stuff we talked about, it's probably wrong for you. It's probably not right for you. Now also, I want to talk to the people that have been consistent, that are in the gym, that are kind of like your typical person. You always see them in the gym doing like the same thing. They're always, they got their routine down, they got their program down, they figured out the amount of days a week that they can commit to, but they're still hitting like a plateau. This is something too that I've found, if you're in that sort of position where you've nailed down like your habits, like what works best for you and all this, but now you're hitting a wall. Now you're hitting a wall. We got to start really looking ahead about how we can add new stimulus and how we can look forward in the future to keep this going, because this is something that you want to make sure that you keep moving forward. How do we now shift little elements of the workout to then provide a whole new stimulus? Totally. And by the way, sustainability can also be this, like, oh, I found this Zumba class. Oh my gosh, it's so fun. This is keeping me consistent because it's so fun. Now you got to ask yourself, am I going to still be excited by the same Zumba class in three years? You might not be as excited about them. I kind of start getting boring at some point. So you want to think to yourself downstream. That doesn't mean you have to change the workout right now, but you might want to have a bit of an exit strategy. One thing that I recommend always is to change the goals of your workouts and change the focus of your workouts. I mean, if you were to follow MAPS workout programs, you could follow one, which would take you for anywhere between 10 to 12 to 14 weeks. When that one's done, you move to a new program for another 12 to 14 weeks. When that one's done, you move to another program. Now my experience, besides that being more effective for your body, besides that being better for the way you move and feel because the goals change a little bit, I've also found that to be superior for consistency because for 12 weeks, I did a strength, heavy strength powerlifting type routine. And now for the next 12 weeks, I'm doing more of an athletic mobility based routine. You're just staying ahead of it that way. You're staying ahead of it that way. It gives you better results, but it also keeps things fun and exciting. And fun is part of sustainability. It's not all of it. Of course, discipline plays a big role because you're not always going to have fun when you work out, but you can definitely get really bored with the same thing over and over again. That can make it very difficult. Well, part of that sustainability too is learning to wear that sweet spot is for your body. I want to go back to talking about my experience with the five to seven day a week and then dropping to three because that was an issue for a really long time. And it was really hard for me to even put it together like, why? How's this working? I'm working less, but I'm seeing more results. And I think the analogy that someone gave to me that thought was really good. And they brought it to like a golf swing. And anybody who's ever golfed before has experienced this, right? I'll never forget trying to hit a golf ball as far as I could. And it's the funniest thing ever. The more you muscle it and the more you get after it, the worse it gets. Yeah, the worse it gets. And that's so weird. You think like, to go further, you'd have to hit it harder, but it's not that way. In fact, hitting it lighter would, and if I backed off, I'd end up hitting the ball sweeter and straighter and further. And that analogy, I think of that with when it comes to training and diet and programming is when you learn just the right sweet spot for your body, it does. It just goes. The results come. It's consistent. It's fluid. Feel good. All the things we're talking about kind of comes together. And if you continue to try and push thinking that more is better, it's the same thing like the big muscle guy trying to muscle the ball further down the course. It's the same thing you want to find. What is that great balance for you? What's sustainable long-term? And you know what? What makes it sustainable? Back to your point, Sal. You know what? When you do, when it's hard, when you are, it's easy, when you are feeling good, you're sleeping good, results are coming. Most everybody does love that. Just like when you're golfing. It's a lot of fun when it is fun. When you're staying on the course and you're moving forward and you're hitting par or birdies, like it makes the thing fun. When you're slamming the ball and you're muscling all the time and you're constantly out off the course and you're constantly chasing and losing balls, it's a shitty ass sport. It's not fun to play. I don't care how hard you're hitting the damn thing. Same way. Totally true. Now, you know, back to feeling good and pain and how do I know the right exercises. You know, you can definitely assess your body. You can definitely do a self-assessment to figure out what works best for your body. Now, the problem with that is it can feel a little complex. In my experience, it's hard to teach that without actually coaching someone. So what we did is we put together a free class, a webinar online where Justin actually teaches you how to do a self-assessment. And through that self, there's three movements. So he takes you through three movements. And through that self-assessment, you'll learn what are good priming exercises for my body, which can also lead you to what's going to be a better workout for you. It's a free class. Highly suggest that everybody take it, assess your own body. This will help you figure out what workout is right for you, or at least how to prime your workout properly, which increases the odds that your workout is going to be better for you and right one for you. You can find that at mapsprimewebinar.com. Sign up. Again, it's totally free. You get free replays. If you go on there and you show up when we're putting it out live, Adam, Justin, and myself and Doug will actually be on there answering questions live as well. So if you get on the live webinar, you'll be able to talk to us. If not, no worries. You'll still see the whole assessment on the replay. Again, free. It's at mapsprimewebinar.com.