 In this episode of Mind Pump the World's Top Fitness Health Entertainment and Comedy podcast, it's the only podcast that combines all those things together in a wonderful mix, we talk about the perfect plan to get into the ultimate shape. Okay, so we're all personal trainers. We've been training people for a very, very long time, so we're going to be honest with you. The perfect plan isn't going to get you where you want to go in 30 days. It's probably not going to take even 60 days. You're probably looking at a long-term solution, but nonetheless, we're providing you with a long-term effective solution, one that's going to get you the results you're looking for permanently. So that's what you're going to learn about in this particular episode. Now, we start out by talking about assessments and why those are important. By the way, one of the assessments that you probably should do is assess your hormones and your nutrient levels. That way, you know how to supplement your body or if your workouts are benefiting your hormones. Now, you can go to the doctor and get a prescription for those, or you can order your tests at home. We worked with a company called Everly Well, and you get 15% off with the code Mind Pump. So you go to everlywell.com, that's E-V-E-R-L-Y-W-E-L-L.com. Use the code Mind Pump, get 15% off. Then we talk about building strength, speeding up the metabolism, building the base. We talk about performance training, how to sculpt and muscle build. We talk about how to be consistent, how to include novelty in your workouts, and how to get lots of support through this process because transforming your body is not easy and support really, really helps. Now, this episode is brought to you by our sponsor Zbiotics. Now, Zbiotics bioengineered a probiotic supplement. Now, when I say bioengineered, I mean they literally took bacteria, genetically modified it. So this is a patented product. And what it does is when you take it, it actually cures or helps solve the afterdrinking negative effects that all of us can feel after drinking some wine or going out with our friends and having a few cocktails. So what it does is this bacteria produces an enzyme that breaks down the negative byproducts of alcohol. Now no joke, this stuff is amazing. It's been featured in Forbes Magazine, Business Insider, CNET. It's making waves because it actually works. It's no joke. Justin Adam and I tested it a little harshly. We tested it, took this probiotic that's bioengineered. Then we did a drinking game and I fully expected the next day to feel absolutely terrible. And all I felt was a little tired. I didn't have any of the negative effects of the alcohol. This stuff is pretty remarkable. So if you want to get the mind pump discount, here's what you do. 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. They have a three pack, a six pack and a 12 pack. Also, before the episode starts, in this episode we're laying out the full year worth of workouts and programming that you should follow for ultimate results. But we have a bundle of programs that actually works perfectly with what we're talking about. So it includes several of our programs. We have an assessment program in there. Then we have MAPS anabolic in there, which is for your base and strength. We have MAPS performance for movement. MAPS aesthetic, which is the sculpting aspect. We have MAPS anywhere, which helps you work out when you don't have access to a gym or you're traveling. There's a kettlebell workout in there for novelty. And we're throwing in free access to our private forum for the support and accountability you may need throughout this entire process. Now normally this bundle known as the Super Bundle, the MAPS Super Bundle, is 30% off. It's always 30% off. It's discounted because it's got all those programs put in there. But what we're doing right now for a very limited time, in fact, I think there's only two days left, is we are going to add an additional 25% off. Now we never discount bundles. So this is a huge promotion. And we also never throw in free forum access. You're getting both. So here's what you do. Go to mapsfitnessproducts.com, use the code summer bundle to get the additional 25% off the Super Bundle with all the programs that will take you through an entire year of fitness. One of the things I think we continue to learn as we scale this business is that we can never make things more laid out and simple for people. The more things we add to the programs to simplify them, to make them easy to figure out and just plug and play, the happier people are. And I know that it's been a struggle for us because we talk about the individual variants so much and how challenging it is to just give some we won't do is just give out generic information. But I do want to talk about the majority of people that we have trained. There's always exceptions to the rule and very unique goals. But there's trends. Yeah, not only are trends, but there's a very kind of standard pathway that you take a majority of people through. Somebody that doesn't come in and say, hey, I want to be a power lifter and get ready for a meet. Can you help me? Or, hey, I want to get ready and get on stage. For the most part, most people come in, they say, hey, I want to lose some body fat. I want to build some muscle. I want to feel better. I want to be healthier. They all can kind of get lumped in a very similar pathway that I take all of them through. And I would think you guys do the same thing. Yeah, what we're trying to do is we're trying to provide the solution for a complex and difficult problem. Okay, the problem of, you know, getting leaner, building more muscle, being healthier, looking better, having more strength forever, permanently, without injury, without hiccups. That's a complex and challenging task and the evidence is in the numbers. The vast majority of people start working out. The vast majority of people try to, many times in their life, change their eating habits, but the vast majority of them fail. So, this is a complex issue. It's not because people lack discipline. It's not because people are stupid. I hate it when I hear trainers say that. Oh, it's just because, or unmotivated, or whatever the case. And really, a lot of the times, like you're trying to say, they're overwhelmed. They're just overwhelmed once they're trying to tackle way too many things at once. And it seems like you have to. It seems like that's the only way to really move forward and be healthy is to then, you know, change this, change that, change like a million things at once in order to move ahead. Yep. When we started the podcast over five years ago, there were a few main goals that we had. And remember, we started this already having been veterans as personal trainers. In fact, the podcast wasn't something I'd ever thought about as a trainer, not until we started it. All of us did this because we really wanted to help people through health and fitness. We loved it. We love people. And so a couple of the goals were, one, we saw that, you know, there's a lot of bad information in the fitness space. You know, when I was younger, you picked up magazines. That's where you learned about exercises and diet and nutrition. And so much of the information was contradictory. So much of it didn't make any sense. You'd read one thing, you'd read another thing. And they couldn't coexist. It didn't make any sense. Then as it became a trainer, as we started training people, we started to realize a lot of the information that was out there was false and a lot of the good, the right information wasn't being sold or communicated properly. So the first big goal was to counter the bad information with equally effective, good information. What I mean by effective is we can get it out there. And so that was number one. Number two was, okay, once we counter the bad stuff with the good stuff, let's give people actionable steps. Let's give them something that they can follow to help them with the scaffolding towards a lifestyle of fitness and health. People want to, they want to lose body fat, they want to strengthen their body. Maybe they do just want to look better. Most people want to look better and feel better. So let's give them the, let's teach them how to get there. And not just in philosophy, which is also very important, you got to understand how your mind works and the college round fitness and nutrition works. But also let's give them steps. And so that's been the direction of the podcast ever since. And so this is something we're always trying to do. And so I'm totally for it. Well, there's a, there's a very methodical approach to this. And I really like to focus first, right? So the very first thing I'm going to do is assess. You have to. And there's a lot of things that we are assessing. It's not, I mean, movement, of course, right? Like in, in, in maps prime, we break down the, the body into three zones. And we're really focusing on how they move in those three zones and then addressing that. It's like, first and foremost, as a trainer, before I write a program or tell someone to do these exercises, regardless of their goal, I want to see how their body currently moves right now and see where there's any sort of breakdown. And we all have it. I don't give a shit how fit you think you already are or how young you are. We already have some imbalances. It's just a matter of how bad they are and how important it is that this is becomes like the foundation of the training. Now, why is this important? Well, one exercise may be the right exercise for somebody. And it may be the wrong exercise for someone else, the same exercise. And I don't just mean the wrong exercise. I mean, the opposite of what that person should be doing. Somebody has really bad forward shoulder. Their shoulders come forward really bad. They've got really bad posture in that, in that, in that case, which is relatively common. The first, you know, back exercise I'm going to strengthen this person on is not going to be a lat pull down. I'm not going to have them do tons of lat pull downs to begin with, because I know that in that case, that's going to cause worse forward shoulder. Now I'm using a very basic and simple example, but that just, that just highlights, you know, you may think some exercises are great and they may be great, but they may not be great for you. You may be trying to change nutrition, but if you don't have an assessment over your current intake, you have no idea what direction to go. There's it's no different than taking your, your car could be making a funny noise. You take it to the mechanic and the mechanic just starts working on your car without listening, without looking, without doing anything. Without even hearing what you have to say, mechanic just starts taking your car. Yeah, right. You have to do an assessment before you move forward because no matter how effective a routine is or an exercise is or no matter how great, no matter how great a nutrition plan is, if it's not right for you, and not only is it not right, it's completely wrong. Yeah, I mean, it, it's the awareness piece. And I think that we operate based off of what we think everybody's doing. And, you know, we're basing this off of like our friends experiences, maybe a trainer that just, you know, wants to get them to their goal and has good intentions, but, you know, skips this process. This process is so crucial to individualize your efforts in a positive direction. And that's why this, this is something that like I'm always stressing like this is literally the keystone. This is the principal part of your training program of getting you to then, you know, not waste efforts or not do efforts that are going to be detrimental to you as well. Yeah. So the first thing I would do, and we can start with nutrition, the first thing I would do to start with is very basic. And again, because you're not sitting in front of me, I'm not going to do this individualized assessment. It's impossible to do that over a podcast, but I'm going to point you in the right direction. The first thing I think you should do is figure out what your total daily energy expenditure is. Figure out how many calories your body is burning on a daily basis. Let's start right there. Okay. Why is that important? Well, very basic. If you want to gain weight, then you're going to need to eat more than that. And if you want to lose weight, then you need to eat less than that. Now, of course, it's more complex than that. And you have to look at, you know, protein and fat and carbs. And, you know, we've talked many, many times about how high protein helps with pretty much any goal and fat and carbs can be lower high depending on the individual. But at the end of the day, you got to know how many calories you're burning because if you just eat less or you just eat more than you are doing now, first off, you don't even know what that looks like. And people notoriously, there's every study that's ever been done on this. This is why studies on nutrition can sometimes you got to take about the grain of salt because they tend to be based off of surveys. And they've done studies on this and people never accurately predict, not even close to how many calories they eat or how many calories are burned. People overestimate or underestimate by a large margin. So you're going to want to figure this out and you're going to want to start by going. There are calculators online. We have one. In fact, you can go on its maps tdee.com. So M-A-P-S-T-D-E-E dot com. And what you do is you enter in your body weight, your body fat percentage, you enter in your activity level. By the way, if you work out, two or three days a week, you're probably barely above sedentary. Yeah. So I just wanted to stop you there because I know you're heading that direction. And I've gotten a ton of DMs already from people that have been using this. And we alluded to it on a podcast earlier this week. And that is, I would normally start almost all of my clients in the sedentary to moderate. So like light activities? Yes. The last two, no matter what, even if you have like a construction job, just because if you've been doing something, let's say you're a waitress or you have a construction job, you've been doing that for years. Your body has become very adapted to that. Super efficient. Yeah. It's very efficient at doing that. So it doesn't really count it as a high calorie expenditure for you. It's figured out how to use as little calories as possible to get through your day. And so unless I was training like an athlete that's coming in the off season and we're training, doing a lot of extra work and stuff, I put almost everybody there first to start, including myself, right? So even if you're a waitlifter, seven days a week, hard hour session, still starting them low on the lower end. Yeah. So when you go in the calculator and you enter in your weight, your body fat percentage, it'll ask you for activity. I would go sedentary or light sedentary, or excuse me, light activity at the most. And then it'll spit out a pretty general, but relatively accurate amount of calories that you're probably burning every day. And then if you want to gain weight or lose weight, gain weight, you eat more than that. Typically I'll have somebody go about two to 400 calories above that, depending on the person. And if they want to lose weight, same thing, two to 400 calories below that, if they want to lose weight. Now the next place I would assess, and we'll get to movement, because that's our expertise, okay? But the next place that you want to assess is also important. And this is one that I didn't do until later in my career, because I'd never really considered it. I never really thought it was super important. It was hard to get this type of an assessment test. Yes. Yeah. That was, it was very, you had to go to the doctor, you had to make an appointment, you had to do blood work, like there was a lot more things involved with this process. A lot more barriers. Lots of barriers. So, and this is, I think it's very important to get your hormones tested and to get your nutrient levels tested. Now I'll start with hormones and why that's important. It's important because as you continue on this, this process, as you follow our advice that we're going to give you in today's podcast, you want to see if your hormone levels actually get better or worse. Your hormones can actually tell you quite a bit about the success of what you're doing. So if you're a man and your testosterone levels are starting at, let's say, 500 and through this, through this process, they move up to six or 700, you're probably on the right track. For a woman, there's the estrogen progesterone balance that you're looking at. And if it's not balanced and you do this program and it starts to balance out, then you know you're on the right path. Also, not often, this is not often, but sometimes it can highlight the fact that you may need hormone therapy. That's not the majority of people. It's the very small minority. But if you are in that minority, I'm going to tell you right now, I've worked with clients like this. Now I've trained lots of people over 20 years. It's only been a handful of clients, but those clients whose hormone levels, men whose testosterone levels, for example, were low and nothing raised them for whatever reason, being on hormone replacement therapy was like, oh my gosh, it was like a godsend. This is where I recommend to people, this is what I love about Everlywell, right? They have these at-home tests that are really easy for people to ship to you. You use your saliva or blood depending on which one you're doing and you send it right back. It gets sent in on an app. You can look at it. And I normally recommend that people grab two. I say, grab one for right now. So you're getting ready to start a program or diet. Get one right now to get your baseline so you can see where you're currently at. And then retest again 60 to 90 days later because it will tell you a lot. Like, and you may think like, and there's chances this happens and I've had to correct people on what they're doing nutritionally or programming when they think they're on the right path. Maybe they're losing some body fat. Maybe they seem to even like strength go up a little bit, but then they're hormones like they're dipping really hard. And then I know they might be overtraining. And so I might start to make some adjustments or like you said, Sal, we see this great increase in their testosterone levels. And so we know we're probably hitting a stride just right. So you should see positive effects. If you're eating balanced and training properly and getting good sleep, those three things mainly, if you're doing those three things really well, we should see your natural hormones start to increase or balance out. Right. And so in the past, this was tough. I now when I owned my wellness studio, I actually partnered with certain doctors that would do this testing. And then it became easier because I would send my clients over the doctor would would prescribe them a hormone panel, then they'd go to lab, do the test. And then we would see where they're at. And then we would test them again. I used to do 90 days. So I used to do every three months with certain clients to see how but nowadays you can get these tests at home that didn't exist when I had my my my wellness studio. But now like Adam said, you could do everly well and you and they're very inexpensive. I think it's like with even without the mind pump discounts like 70 or 80 bucks for a at home hormone test, you do it at home, then you see where you're at and then test later on. This is actually quite important. In fact, if I opened a wellness studio now, this would be mandatory. Every client ever trained, they would come in, this would be a big part of it. Now nutrient testing is also important. Okay, so you if you've listened to the show for longer than five episodes, you know our opinions on supplements. If I were to take all the things that that, you know, contributed to your fitness and health and made a pie chart. Okay, if I put, you know, nutrition and exercise and sleep and lifestyle and, you know, relationships, all that would make up about 99% and then maybe 1% would be supplements. They're inconsequential in terms of getting your results unless you need them. Right. That's your deficient. If you need them, then they become massive. In fact, if let's say you have a nutrient deficiency, let's say you actually have a B vitamin deficiency, which can be quite common in women, believe it or not, in women with really bad PMS symptoms or anxiety issues, oftentimes have a B vitamin deficiency or a vitamin D level deficiency in men with low testosterone. Sometimes it's because simply because your vitamin D levels are too low. So in those cases, supplementation can literally make up 80% of your progress. No joke. If you have a bad nutrient deficiency, you could have great workouts and everything else. But if you're not meeting that nutrient demand, your body just, it's not going to function perform the way it would know. So you can get your, your, your nutrient levels tested. And here's the other reason why you want to do this. I know a lot of people who are like, Oh, you know what, I'm just going to take a bunch of supplements just in case, you know, I'm not, I don't need to test myself because I'm taking so many things anyway, just to fill the gaps. The opposite is also true. If you're, if your nutrient levels are good or high and you take, you know, high doses or of supplements on top of that, you can cause problems. Vitamin D, we'll talk about vitamin D for a second. If it's low causes lots of problems. If it's too high causes lots of problems as well. And this is true for lots of nutrients, fat soluble ones in particular, water soluble ones. Sometimes we think I could just take it as much as I want. I'll pee it out. And that's largely true. But at very, very high doses. And this is actually, we just talked about vitamin B, the B vitamins. This is true for them as well. You go too high with that for too long, you start to cause yourself problems as well. So having an assessment is important before you supplement. And you can do nutrient tests. Now you can either get one from your doctor, which can sometimes be a pain in the butt, or you can also have them at home. Everly well does those as well. And what a great time to be alive, by the way. I remember, I used to have such a hard time with some of my clients getting nutrient levels, they would go to the doctor, then they come back and be like, Oh, cool. Did you get your nutrient levels test? And be like, No, because they said I only, they only want to test them if I have all these other symptoms. I'm like, I don't care. Let's, what's the big deal? Let's just test them. They wouldn't do it. Also being able to time it just right. So here's a thing too, like that's really important and that I love about an at home test like this is when I'm training somebody and I know, and they're like checking in with me and I know they're doing diet wise, I know they're doing workout wise. And let's say I've seen them like, you know, we're coming up on that like 60 or 90 days since we did the original test. I know I want to take that next test when they've been really consistent with all the things that I've been telling them, you know, they had a great week of sleep, they had a great week of training and great week of eating. Now let's test that. Let's see where you're at right now and let's see how much of a difference when you take care of those things is your body, how your body is doing versus, oh, I got to schedule a blood work test with my doctor that I'm at the mercy of their schedule. And hopefully that lines up when I've also been perfectly consistent with all the things that I've been doing with my trainer. That's really tough to time that sometimes. So I love it for that. So do I now let's get to the part where we did the assessment as trainers mainly, which was movement. Now movement is very, if you want to have a good workout, what I mean by good isn't just that you sweat and get sore and burn tons of calories. A good workout, sure it does some of that, but also is the one that gets your body to change in the most effective way possible. The best workout you could do for your body is the one that gets you there the fastest and the most effective. When I say effective, I mean the amount of time that you're putting in, you're getting a lot of return and ineffective workout can still get you to your goal, but you're using you're just so much time and effort into it. Like imagine a car with 500 horsepower with bicycle tires, it would be ineffective. You'd have a lot of horsepower, but the tires wouldn't connect. So be super ineffective. So the perfect workout for you is one that is extremely effective. You spend three hours a week or four hours a week or two hours a week on it. It's maximizing all of that time. And the best way to do that is to assess. You have to start out by assessing your movement so you know where to start. And you also, this is very important, know how to prime before your workouts. Proper priming ensures that you get the best out of the exercises that you're doing because a barbell squat, when it's utilized to its full capacity, to its full effectiveness, produces tremendous results. Can you do a barbell squat and get bad results? You totally can. And that's with poor movement patterns, poor connections. One of the ways to ensure that you get the most out of those exercises is by doing a proper priming session, but priming has to be individualized. Now the tough part about this is that assessing movement used to be a very complex kind of a thing when as a trainer, I'd have this big checklist and go through all these different things. I remember being in biomechanics and coming right out of learning all this awesome, amazing stuff about the human body and the joints and what their functions are and how to optimize your angles and levers and all this kind of stuff. And then trying to then translate all this to a brand new client that I got that's just trying to lose weight. And it was very difficult for me to then try and simplify this process. And so this is one of those things. And it's been very difficult for strength conditioning coaches everywhere to really wrap their brain around how we can then take somebody through all these different movement potentials the human body is capable of to then see where the deficiencies lie. And so between the three of us, even in all of our experiences of trying to then reduce, reduce, reduce, what are the most common offenders, all this kind of stuff. This is where we really tried to put it together in three specific exercises. Well, and since and Sal started this podcast talking about like our main objectives and goals. And this was one of our things was we created this free webinar for our assessment to help people with that we knew that this is a one of the more complex things to teach people. And you know, in there, we really break down the three zones and help people work them through prime if they already own it. If you don't own it, you could still go through this and get a ton of value. It's still teaching how to do the assessment. Oh, yeah. So there's a there's a ton of value in learning how to do this. And we tried to simplify it as much as you could without without devaluing the main the main points, right? So important that you don't want to make it so generic that it's useless. But at the same time, you want to simplify it so the average person can figure it out for themselves and then begin applying some of these movements to really benefit themselves. That's the key right there. So the assessments that we used to do as trainers were very complex. And to be quite honest, that complex of an assessment really is valuable when you're dealing with very challenging situations, Olympic athletes, or super, super high level athletes, or the somebody with lots of limitations and injuries and issues. But the average person you can assess yourself by by doing three general movements. Now we've highlighted these movements in our program maps prime, but you can, as Adam said, you can go through the assessment portion. We did a webinar where Justin actually teaches you how to do this. The first movement is called a wall test. Then we do something called a windmill. And then we do a squat assessment. And then based off of that, you can determine what your priming movements should be before you work out. This is very important before before you ever do a workout, figure out how to do your priming session. That's the most important thing. Well, I just I think of it like this, if you're, you know, just your average person doing an exercise, like, you know, when that exercise felt its best, like I had everything lined up perfectly. I went down like my muscles responded the way they were supposed to. And it just felt like a great rep priming set you up to have a great rep each each time. So it's one of those things that's, you know, it's definitely undervalued for for your average person because they just want to get in and like sweat and burn calories and all these types of things. But if you really put attention to it, it's going to take you to a new level totally. So it's it's maps prime webinar totally free. And you can go on there and then learn how to do an assessment. You got to do this first before you jump into the workout so you know how to prime. Yeah, use these free tools. We created the calculators absolutely free for you. Go on there, assess that we got the webinars free for you. Go on there, use that figure this piece out. It's so paramount to your for long term success. And the beauty is once you go through these things and you understand you figure out your baseline of what your body is kind of burning, you figure out your baseline of how your body is moving, you figure out your baseline of your hormones, you don't need to keep doing it every single day. It's like that's the main work is done there with the assessment. Now you start to put a plan together to start to improve upon it. Well, even adding to the activity piece, I do recommend like a Fitbit or like a wearable or like a pedometer just like a, you know, an idea of what where it lies in terms of activity levels on the weekends versus during the week, you know, just just your patterns just really pay attention to your patterns that you have going on throughout the week that you keep repeating. Totally. This I dug just highlighted the dot com forgot to say that so it's maps prime webinar dot com to get that free assessment. And now we're now let's get into the workout portion. So you've done the first part, which is the assessing. Now let's move into the workout. And again, what we're laying out right now is what we believe to be for most of you listening right now, the most effective path to getting to your fitness and health goals, regardless of your goals, whether it's weight loss, fat loss, muscle building, body sculpting, looking better, feeling better, all of those fall in this category. Now the first place you go after you've gotten your assessment, you've got your priming session, you know how to get yourself set up is to build the foundation for all physical pursuits. Okay, so let's let's talk about all the physical pursuits, right? You have stamina and endurance, you have speed and power and flexibility and mobility and all that stuff. But the foundation for all of it is strength. Without strength, you have none of that. If you had no strength, you'd have no stamina. If you had no strength, you'd have no mobility. Strength is the foundation and it's the place that we start every client on. I don't care what their goal is. Now of course, it's individualized based on the client. So I may start someone with no weight because that's enough resistance for them, or I may start someone with 200 pounds on their back because that's appropriate for them. But all of them I'm trying to make them stronger and through doing so, I'm also building some muscle. Now muscle from a health standpoint, extremely protective of the body. It helps with autoimmune issues. It helps with immunity in general. Of course, reduces injury. More muscle means you're more sensitive to sugar and your insulin responds better. More muscle means your hormones balance out for women. If you have hormone issues, building muscle tends to balance it out. If you're a man and you have testosterone issues, building muscle tends to raise testosterone. So build the base strength and muscle is the most important thing. Now, what if you're listening and you're like, I just want to lose weight? I don't really care about building muscle. It speeds up your metabolism. That's crazy. And that's what I wanted to touch on. So you mentioned in the last portion that we talked about the TDE calculator, right? And if somebody puts in their, all their activity level measurements, everything weight, and they find out that, you know, let's just say hypothetically, it's, you know, 2200 calories and they want to lose weight. Now, typically, someone would do that and they say, okay, Sal said, you know, reduce 200 to 500 calories so they cut and they want to lose it. I wouldn't start clients that way. Even if you were somebody who was wanting to lose weight, after I did all my assessing with you, you decide that we want to lose weight, we start still in the strength program like we're talking about right now. But I actually want to either keep the calories the same, or I want to increase a little bit because what I'm trying to do is I want to build some muscle during the strength phase, because that's only going to make our fat loss journey a lot easier than if I start you off in a strength phase and start you in a caloric deficit, I would much rather have you at a maintenance to a calorie surplus, even though your goal is fat loss. And that's so this used to be one of those things that the drill into clients heads all the time is that I know you want to lose weight, we're going to if you trust the process, this is what we want to do first. We first want to strength train, let's build some muscle that is going to make your journey of fat loss faster and more efficient and sustainable long term. So even though you're trying to lose body fat, I'm going to take you into the strength phase and I'm going to do it at least a calorie maintenance if not a calorie surplus. You know, it's funny they did for a long time. It was speculated that people who were overweight or obese would have more muscle mass than people who were normal weight or underweight, right? So they said, okay, if everybody said in Terry, somebody who's overweight is going to have more muscle because and they theorize they're carrying more weight from body fat added resistance, you know what they found? They actually found that they had less muscle people who tend to be overweight, tend to be overweight and undermuscled. Okay, so building muscle is very important. If you want to get leaner and of course, for the reasons that we touched upon, it speeds up your metabolism. How would you like to burn as many calories as you would if you did 45 minutes of cardio every day except you're not? Yeah, like what a great position to be in. That's what we mean by build the base. So when I get a client and the vast majority of clients that I train, because I train the average person, the vast majority wanted to lose weight. Most of them want to lose weight. I knew if I could get their metabolism to speed up, this is going to be easy. This is not going to be hard. If I could get Mrs. Johnson to get leaner by not cutting her calories, holy cow, is she going to be happy? And it's going to be maintainable. On the flip side, I've seen so many people do it the wrong way, lose weight, but end up with a calorie intake that's so low that there's no way they could possibly maintain it. So you definitely want to start by building strength to speed up the metabolism, build your base, build some muscle. By the way, if you're looking for a program that works well with that, it's the first program that we ever created, which was maps, uh, anabolic. Now, once you go there, once you do that, the next place you want to move to is to focus on performance. Now, why is performance important? Uh, well, because you live in the world and because just having muscle isn't enough. You need to be able to move well. And I know some of you listening are like, I don't really care. I'm not going to go play football or basketball or whatever. But I'll tell you what, again, uh, having trained lots of people, I've seen my share of people hurt their back, twist their knee, roll ankles, roll ankles by missing a step. You know, they're walking, they're walking, they missed the curb or you know, the kid, something happens in the back seat and they reach around to grab the kid next thing you know, they hurt themselves or even working out. The weight just shifts just slightly and your body tries to compensate for it. Boom, you know, you're susceptible. I've experienced this at the park, throwing a frisbee with my kid and the next day I'm like, why is my shoulder hurt so bad? Why doesn't it feel good? Because I did, I lacked that, that performance aspect. Now you don't want to work on that unless you build the base. You have to build the base first, because if I take you and try to work on lots of performance based movements without a base, injury risk is, is pretty high. But once we've built that, then we start to integrate it with movement and that produces, uh, like fluid performance and movement. Here's an example of someone. I know we've all seen this person who has lots of muscle. How many times have you gone to a gym, seen the big muscular person who moves weird? You know, this is the term muscle bound. You ever hear that term? I don't know if they use that term anymore, but when I was younger, that was something that they said. It used to be like the guy that you knew he couldn't wipe his ass. Most muscle building programs and strength building programs lack mobility focus and rotational strength. Yes. They're very, very focused in the sagittal plane and there's not a lot of rotational stuff that's going on. There's not a lot of stability as if we're robots. Right. Not a lot of stability stuff going on. Not a lot of emphasis on mobility work. And so when I, and when I think about the general pop of, of people that I've trained, this to me is, is probably one of the most important, important things. I mean, and I love Justin probably out of all of us talks about rotational strength more than anybody else in anti rotational strength. I think that is so important, especially as you start to age. As young kids, we kind of naturally get this a little bit. If you play a lot, if you, if you play a lot of sports on the playground, you do a lot of things, wakeboarding, snowboarding, you're very active, you kind of get a nice little mix of that. But as we start to age, you start getting 25 and above and you're playing less and less like that. This is something that you start to neglect and you don't realize it until something bad happens. And it's important that you integrate that type of training into your routine for the ultimate physique. Your body needs to know how to respond to all these situations. And, you know, once you stop teaching it, you know, how to do that, that's where we really open ourselves up for these potential injuries and these potential, you know, pains and strains in the muscles. Right. So what is performance training looks like? You're going to see more movements that make you rotate or twist. You're going to see more dynamic type of movements, stability, stability type movements, mobility, flowing mobility type You might even see some explosive movements, which by the way, explosive movements can also be individualized. So those of you who are like, I'm not a very explosive person, like an explosive movement can literally be a one jump in place or just a fast or throwing something, right? Throwing a medicine ball or a baseball can even be considered an explosive movement. So that's what that looks like. When we talked about strength before, what that looks like is your traditional resistance training, your barbell squats and deadlifts and presses and rows, your very basic traditional resistance training movements. Then when you get to performance, it's a little bit more dynamic. So if you're kind of picturing this right now, you can kind of see the path, right? You see the path with the assessment, then I'm building foundational strength. Now I'm integrating this into more fluid movement. Well, what follows next is where everybody wants to start. What follows next is where everybody thinks where they think they should start, but this is not where you should start. And by the way, I know why people want to start here is because they think that this will get them to look the best, the fastest. It's false. This entire process is going to make you look good. Starting with your assessment to strength, then to performance. You can't tell me your body's not going to make some radical transformations. To me, it's like, it's like giving somebody a trophy versus earning that trophy. Well, it's or it's the people that like to talk about all the things, amenities of their house, right? To the windows, the furniture inside, all things like that, and not laying a foundation. And the house is crooked. That's right. We're sinking into the ground, right? The foundation is so important if you want that to stand long term. That's right. You got to lay the foundation. But your body is looking good this entire time, building the foundation of strength, then going to performance with some mobility. You're going to be leaner. You're going to look better. Aesthetics are going to be coming through. But now that you've got that solid base, now you can make your entire focus on sculpting and muscle building. Now you can train kind of like your physique competitor or your bodybuilder or your targeting specific areas to shape and sculpt. Now, why don't you start there? Well, if you don't got good performance or a solid foundation of strength, not only are you not going to sculpt your body that much, but you're probably going to set yourself up for more injury. So again, this isn't just because we're being safe and so we're going slow. It's also faster and more effective to do it in this particular order. Not to mention also a lot of times when I would look at somebody who has a visual imbalance, right? Like something other, their chest is underdeveloped and their shoulders are overdeveloped or they don't have great arms. They want to work on something to study. Many times, it's because of the breakdown in movement. They're doing exercises, but their body is not performing them correctly. And so then one muscle is getting overdeveloped, the other one's underdeveloped. And this goes back to why it's so important to start with the assessment first. And then all the foundational strength training is so we want to lay that good foundation, good movement patterns before you start trying to sculpt and shape the body. So this is an area that why again, even a more advanced lifter who is trying to shape that I get this client all the time that would come in and be like, Adam, I want to work on my butt or I want to work on my shoulders and they have this area and they want to just go straight to that. And even that person, I'm still reverting them back to the assessment and seeing how they move so I can start to address those things. Because I know if I do that, there's a good chance that part of why they have an imbalance or they don't have the physique they want is because their body's not moving properly. Totally. Now what is sculpting and muscle building in this context look like? Well, now it's like you're more traditional bodybuilding. You're still doing some of those foundational strength movements. But now you're incorporating more volume. You're doing more sets. You're probably doing some more isolation movements to target specific parts of your body. Now that you've chiseled away that big piece of granite, and now you're down to the smaller chisel where now you're focusing on details specific to your body. That's what this kind of looks like. Now I want you all to consider all you listeners consider this. You are hearing three very experienced trainers walk you through the process. What you're not going to hear is the bullshit that you hear from a lot of people, which is it's going to take 30 days or 60 days to get you in shape. I don't even think I think 60 days in fact is too long for a lot of these people on on social media. I think it's always 30 days for whatever reason. Yeah, they've abandoned that. Yeah, it's like 30 days and okay, that's not going to happen. But to make those those huge transformations in the way you look and feel typically takes about a year, especially the right way. Yes, because everybody has an example of, well, I had a friend that did this one program and in 30 days, they look how they look a year later or two years later. Right. And you know, just peeling down, right? Like if all you care is to peel down body fat as fast as you possibly can forget doing it healthy, forget doing it long term. Yeah, we could restrict a ton of calories, move the body like crazy. Everybody has muscle. Okay, you everybody has abs, everybody has shoulders, everybody has arms. And if you peel away every bit of body fat on there, you'll look defined and muscular. But you're also going to be at a place that you're going to be miserable. And the likelihood that you're going to be able to maintain that and keep that what 80% zero sustainability. Oh, and even then trying to get that lean by pushing that much, your body will fight back and what'll end up happening, you lose just as much muscle as you lose body fat. And you'll end up being a smaller, flabby version of yourself. So yeah, great. You lost size, but you look the same. You're just smaller now. So what we're trying to teach you how to do is to do it the right way. So where you're actually leaner, more sculpted, and sustainable. And that's going to take about a year. Now some of you listening may be thinking a year's so long, it's actually not that long. It's not that long to completely transform your body. Completely transform your body and do it in a way where it's going to be permanent. That's not that long at all. Literally. And by the way, that doesn't mean you're not changing the whole time. It's not like you have to wait a year before you see any changes. You are changing every single month by following it in this particular order, starting with the assessment, then moving to building that foundation with strength, working on your performance so you can move better and then get to that final stage of sculpting and muscle building. Now here's we have some special notes here that we need to also consider with all of this. Consistency is key. Yeah. Consistency is extremely important. So if you follow this year long program of doing this, but three months out of it, are you doing nothing? It's going to be very difficult. It's going to take you a lot longer. Not only that, but consistency, which I'll use another word for that discipline, that's going to carry you over forever. If you have that discipline, then you're probably going to always be okay when it comes to your fitness. Now when I'm looking at this from, and I think about all the clients that I've trained and all the ones that were pretty serious about this. So I'm going to cut out the people who really weren't too serious, but the ones that were. One of the biggest things that prevents consistency was, believe it or not, access to equipment, access to a gym. It was either because they traveled or gosh, look what just happened now, right? We've had gyms closed down and a lot of fitness fanatics who never stopped working out, all of a sudden found themselves not working out because they didn't have access to any equipment. Yeah. In a year's time, you're going to take a vacation, right? In a year's time, you're going to take probably your traditional week or two week off during the year. You're going to maybe have some business trips where you're on the road. And so the idea is to be able to put together a plan that I can, when I'm on the road or when I'm on vacation, what can I do to keep sending that signal to my body that I'm trying to still build muscle that entire time and being consistent and just to keeping the habit up because I don't know about you guys, but I know that when I'm training, it also promotes me to eat better and make better choices, right? Totally. In fact, when they give people medications that they have to take every single day, for example, birth control, right? You're only supposed to take it at certain times, but they also include sugar pills in that. Have you guys known that? Yeah, yeah. Just keep the routine going. Keep the routine going. And I know this, there's momentum with fitness. Like if you stop for a week or two, it's hard to get back going sometimes, especially if it's not a, you know, something you've been doing for years and years can be very difficult. So have a routine ready and set up for you that does not include equipment. Something you can do in a room or outside. This will help a lot with consistency. The other second most common reason why serious people sometimes stop is they get a little bored. Sometimes things get a little stale. Now in this case, I think that's a smaller chance because what you're dealing with is you're training in different blocks, you know, from strength to performance to body sculpting, so it's less likely to happen, but it can still happen. One way to do that, I love throwing in different types of equipment. Kettlebells are great for this. It's different than dumbbells and barbells. It feels different. And for people who really like to sometimes just get more excitement with their training. Oh yeah, just that little change can create a whole new spark and a whole new, you know, part of momentum. I go through this a lot. Like this is one of those things like I love barbell training. I love kind of like staying consistent and doing, you know, something that I can stick with for a long period of time, but also, you know, interrupting it every now and then because it's such a nice day out and I want to get outside and, you know, bring my kettlebells with me and do a workout. Like to me, that is something that just saves me. It just keeps me going. Well, the other thing that I think of is too is support and community, right? Like I think that, and I used to always say this when we were working in the gym is, you know, when I'd be setting up an appointment for somebody to come down for the very first time, I would always encourage them to bring a friend. Bring a friend down here to come check it out, even if they're not interested, because if we can get, if I can get somebody to get started and they have a friend that is also wanting to work out or follow something with them, just the accountability piece. Oh yeah. So, and that's something that we talked about that CrossFit did such a good job of. They did such a good job of building community within these boxes. And a lot of why everyone is the people that have stuck with CrossFit have done so well, they don't realize most of it is the consistency, is the consistency. They don't want to let down the people around them. Yeah, it's this consistency of the community and accountability that they built in. It's a really good, it's really, really good. That doesn't mean that you can't do something else besides CrossFit and still build an accountability piece or build a community or have a partner or a friend that is also following a routine with you so you guys can hold each other accountable. Sometimes the support is just finding like-minded people online. You don't have to work out with them, but you can just talk to them. Because here's what happens, okay? Inevitably if you're going to go and follow along and do this year-long plan, inevitably you're going to run into some roadblocks, some challenges, and it's nice to talk to other people who are doing the same thing and you can encourage each other. You know, I learned this as a parent. I had friends that had no kids and I just, I got nothing from them when I would talk about my challenges or whatever. Then I would hang out with friends who had kids and I feel like, oh my god, I feel so much better. I wouldn't feel so stressed out. You're not alone. Not alone. So support is very, statistically speaking, studies show that this makes a big difference to have that kind of support. So when we came up with this entire plan from assessment to strength to performance with mobility to sculpting and muscle building, maintaining consistency, having support, we also thought we would like to provide people with even more structure. Like let's give, let's put something together that gives people everything they need to do exactly what we just talked about. And so what we did is we have something called a super bundle, which includes all the programs that will support you through that entire process, that entire year-long process going from assessment, which would be your maps prime. You can literally follow the program, self-assess, figure out your priming movements to strength, which is maps anabolic. That's your base. Then there's maps performance, which is what's going to help you integrate that strength, that base into functional movement. Then maps aesthetic, which is more of your hardcore bodybuilding, body sculpting type program. We threw in maps anywhere, so you have workouts that you could do, again, anywhere. You don't need equipment. You could do them while you travel. We have some kettlebell program included in there, so for some novelty and some fun. And then what we're throwing in is we're also throwing the support piece. Now, besides the podcast and listening to Mind Pump, we have a forum of real people just like you. And in this forum, you can ask questions about fitness. You can ask questions specifically about the programs. Everybody in that forum has the programs that I just talked about, at least one of them, if not all of them. So you have that support to get you through this entire year of where you're at now to where you want to go and where you want to be. Now, the Super Bundle typically is already discounted, but what we're doing is we're discounting it further. So normally it's around 30% off the normal price. We're adding an additional 25% off, which is, we never do this. We never do a discount on Bundle, especially not one that's big like this one. And then forum access, the private forum, we are going to throw in for free. That never is included in any of our bundles, but we're doing that right now with this particular promotion. So if you want to do something like this, just go to mapsfitnessproducts.com, use the code Summer Bundle. Summer Bundle will take 25% off what we're called a Super Bundle. This is the one that I'm talking about right now. And then when you enroll, you will also get free access to our private forum. So do that. That is probably the best choice for you. If you don't do it, no problem. You can check out our YouTube channel. We've got exercises on there. We teach people how to work out there. Of course, you can continue to listen to the podcast and then you can find us on Instagram if you want to ask us some individual questions. By the way, the podcast is also recorded on video. So if you want to watch us as well as listen to us, go to YouTube, Mind Pump Podcast, and I mentioned social media. If you want to contact us, you can find us on Instagram. Justin is at Mind Pump. Justin, I'm at Mind Pump Sal, and Adam is at Mind Pump. Adam.