 In this episode of Mind Pump, the world's favorite fitness, health, and entertainment podcast, we cover the signals that you can send your body that tell it to build muscle. Your body doesn't build muscle just because it needs a reason, a good reason, and so we find the five best reasons. We start out by talking about strength, then we talk about the pump. We mention increasing workload over time or your body's capacity for workload. We talk about calories and protein and then finally we talk about your hormones. By the way, in that portion, Adam talked about wearing blue light blocking glasses. If you're looking for the best blue light blocking glasses you can find anywhere, ones that don't change the color of the world around you. In other words, they're not orange and red. They have special technology that still blocks the blue light from your computer, from your phone, and helps you get better sleep. Go to Felix Gray. They make the best ones and oh, and we are sponsored by Felix Gray. That means you can go on there and get free shipping and free returns. Here's what you do. Go to FelixGrayGlasses.com that's f-e-l-i-x-g-r-a-y glasses.com forward slash mind pump. Also all month long, maps performance is 50% off. This is a workout program that helps you build muscle, burn body fat, but also helps you move more like an athlete. So the workouts combine traditional and non-traditional functional exercises. This is a fun workout. By the way, this is the only maps program with an explosive phase. The last phase of map performance teaches you how to train explosively so you can move faster with more stability and more securely. If you want 50% off, here's what you got to do. Go to mapsgreen.com that's m-a-p-s-g-r-e-n .com and then use this code for 50% off. Green 5-0. That's green 50 with no space. Hey, do you guys remember when you started to really piece together that the workouts themselves that you were doing were really just a signal? It was just a signal to get the body to adapt in the case of, in our case, build muscle or become stronger or more fit. Do you remember when you started to kind of piece that together? Because it was a long process for me. It was like just last week for me. I don't think there was like a single aha moment. I think it was, I think I had to learn many lessons over and over before it all kind of came all the way together for me. Yeah, I remember reading an article as a teenager and I think it was Iron Man Magazine and in there there was somebody talking about the adaptation process and how, and I had heard that the recovery process is when muscle builds, that it's not the workout itself, but it hadn't really 100% clicked. And then he did this analogy in the article where he talked about how you develop calluses and he said, you know, the callus doesn't develop when you're handling the rough object. Handling the rough objects sends a signal to the body that tells the body, we need to toughen up this part of the hand so that next time this, if this happens again, you're not going to cause any damage. And then it started to kind of make sense to me, like, oh, okay, this workout, the entire goal of this workout is to send the right signal, get my body to start to adapt and change. And it's really all about adaptation. The workout itself is just, you know, sending those signals, you know, and putting this together for clients was a big thing too, like talking to clients about this, because many clients, oh, I say probably all my clients would say things like, oh, man, I had a great workout and it's what made it a great workout. I was so tired, you know, I couldn't walk. I was super, super sore and I'd say, okay, but what's the goal? Like, what is the goal of the workout? Well, the goal is for, you know, and whatever their goals were. And I said, okay, what makes it a good workout then is if it's doing that more than anything else, right? It's that signaling process. Well, I think it would take a long time to really piece all of these things together in terms of, I just knew I had to keep working out. And I knew like the frequency was definitely a factor to that in terms of me just trying to work out as consistently as possible, because I would lose, you know, whatever work I had put in. But over time, I just started to realize that, wow, there's so many different factors to this that I don't have to work as hard as I am working every time in the gym. And there's a different way to do this. That's a lot smarter. And that's when I started to kind of figure out, okay, if I incorporate this, if I hone in on my nutrition, if I, you know, pay attention to my sleep, all these other different factors, like it made all things a lot easier. Well, I think there's, first of all, I mean, we listed off the five most powerful signals, right? One, I think there's somewhat of an order of operation. And then two, I also think that it's important to note that it's not just the more you do of the signal or the harder you do the signal, I think there's a sweet spot for everything that we're going to talk about today. I don't think it's as simple as like, oh, here's the five signals, I'll do that. It has harder as much as you possibly can. That was the lesson I feel I kept learning over a hundred percent, because back to the analogy of getting a callus, there's a right amount of right dose of stimulus on my hand that'll create a callus too much and just tear it'll be a blister all the time or tear through my hand, right? Not enough. And my body feels like there's no reason to build new tissue to utilize energy to create new skin and strengthen my hand. Another big part of this was understanding, and here's a big one, and I know experienced lifters, this one blows their minds, recovering and adaptation are not the same thing. They often happen simultaneously, but recovery is healing. Adaptation is super compensation or overcompensation, okay? So again, if I damage my skin, first my skin is going to heal and get back to where it was before. It's the overcompensation of the super compensation process, the adaptation process that then strengthens the skin. This is the same thing with exercise. If I overdo any of the five signals that we're going to talk about today, or I over apply them too frequently or too hard for my individual body, by the way, that's what's important. The right dose for you is not going to be necessarily the right dose for the next person. If I over apply it, then my body's primary concern is healing. It doesn't have the time, the energy, or the resources, nor does it want to worry about adapting if all it's ever doing is worrying about healing. Adapting is totally different. Again, they happen simultaneously, and what it looks like, by the way, if you get stuck in this trap, is your workout, apply the wrong workout, you get sore, and you're like, oh wow, I'm sore, and then you wait for the soreness to go away, oh wow, I recovered. You go back to the gym, no improvement, and this cycle continues. I think the biggest factor in the beginning is to find what's homeostasis for you, to really narrow down where you're currently at. I don't think a lot of people put a lot of time and energy in really understanding what their body needs, and to be able to get closer to that right dose in terms of all these different things we're going to list, that's so crucial to then not be able to overdo it, to underdo it, so you kind of really have a clear vision of how to just tweak these things to make it all work for you more effectively. Well, when I look at the first one that we list, which is get stronger, I also think it's important that each person that's listening to these five that we're going to cover that you recognize which ones you focus on the most, or the ones that you do, and then the ones that you do not, because this first one getting stronger, for me, this was actually one of the last ones to really come full circle. And the reason why that was was because I never really identified with a power lifter or an Olympic lifter. I wasn't chasing PRs. I wasn't into CrossFit. I wasn't anything like that. So I actually didn't really care about getting stronger. I cared about the way I looked. I mean, I was driven by aesthetics for most of my lifting career. We'll show no go. I used to say that. You remember that? I mean, I used to, my trainers would always try and get me to do some crazy workout and I would scoff at them and say, I don't care how much I lift. I'm all show no go. I don't give a shit. I'm saying as long as I take my shirt off and I look fast, that's all that matters to me. And so I trained accordingly. I chased the pump and I cared about technique and form, which are very valid and important points to lifting. And you can definitely build a great physique focusing on that. But I completely lost the importance of really focusing just on strength, not just for myself, but also for my clients. Like I started to, once I started to realize that for myself, I also realized the importance of focusing on that for like a female client who came in and said, hey, Adam, I just want to lose 15 pounds, you know, and I want to maybe build my butt or whatever. I don't care about, you know, getting super strong. I don't want to lift heavyweight and get, you know, quote, unquote bulky. All I want to do is look better. But what I realized was helping them focus on strength contributed greatly to their aesthetic goals also. Absolutely. Strength is the most closely connected signal to muscle building. In other words, if you consistently get stronger, you will build more muscle. It's really the bottom line. Now here's the thing with strength. It's not linear. You don't always get stronger. That's impossible. And you can't always forever get stronger. At some point you hit a ceiling. If that wasn't true, of course, everybody in this room would be lifting, you know, thousands of pounds with their list, but doesn't work that way. But that being said, the placing the requirement on your body or telling your body it needs to get stronger means it's going to thicken its muscle fibers. Bigger muscle fibers contract harder. Now, of course, strength is also a skill. There's also coordination involved. There's also muscle recruitment patterns and all that stuff. But when you look at the brute force of it, like the bottom line of it, bigger muscle fibers simply contract harder. And so telling your body to get stronger eventually, if you are getting stronger, will yield more muscle every single time. And typically that's what it looks like. By the way, if you do this, and this is especially important for people who are beginner to intermediate as you get more advanced, you got to get more creative. But beginner to intermediate strength is the goal. It's always the goal. This typically what it looks like is you'll, you'll work out and month after month, you get stronger, stronger, stronger. And then all of a sudden boom, muscle appears on your body and then stronger, stronger, stronger, boom, muscle appears. This is usually what it looks like when you're, when you're noticing strength things. By the way, when we're saying getting stronger, I'm not limiting it to what people tend to think getting stronger is, which is max lifts, one rep. I mean broad strength. That's where you're going to get the most muscle. What I mean by that is you're stronger and you're one rep max is you're stronger at your five rep lifts and your 10 rep lifts and your 15 rep lifts. Okay. All of that. That's what's going to yield you the most muscle gain. But strength is definitely the most important one. And this was the key one when I started really figuring this out for clients because I figured this out for myself early on, mainly because I loved strength. Strength was probably a little more important to me than, than aesthetics when I was a kid. But when I trained clients, it wasn't initially, it was like, how many calories can I burn and, you know, and their diet and that kind of stuff. Later on, when I really started to understand the importance of this, this was the number one thing. I don't care if you came to lose weight, gain weight, increase mobility, improve your health. Of course, appropriately, I would always try to get you consistently stronger at a multitude of lifts and a broad range of rep ranges. And when I was able to do this, my clients got the best results regardless of their goal, the best results. Yeah. And, you know, you brought up sort of like the big four, big five lifts. Like I think that we've brought those up so many times on the podcast because it really is a good representation of how well the body is doing in terms of being able to stabilize all the joints, be able to allow, you know, the central nervous system to, to create this force, to be able to lift weights effectively and have this harmonious signal kind of throughout the body. And so to be able to kind of focus on, you know, the major ones is a telling sign that everything else that you're doing is working or not working. And so it is a goal of us trainers to get clients to be very versed in these types of lifts because it's, it really is like a representation of how well the body is doing strength wise. Well, it's not only that, it's also the carryover that you get from those four lifts for, for total body strength and total body building muscle. I was just this past weekend, I was with my family and I had my brother-in-law and my mom's recent husband that she just married this last year that they've been, they kind of intermittently listen to podcasts. They have a handful of programs and we haven't ever really lifted together and we were at the house with the, the PRX set up and they were saying, hey, Adam, could you, you know, take, take us through deadlifting? I'm, I'm, I'm a little nervous about how to do it and, you know, and so they were kind of avoiding it in a lot of the programs and I'm like, no, you do not want to avoid this. So let's go in there and let's do it. So we worked on it and one of the things that I was explaining to them is like, you know, you could, you could literally come in here and just focus on deadlift, you know, for months and months and months and avoid a lot of these other exercises and still get incredible benefits. I said, for example, we're working out right now with 135 to work on technique. You know, you can work on this technique by, by manipulating many different things as far as tempo and rest periods before you start to add load. But then once you get really good at it, you start to add load to this. And not only do you get good at the deadlift, but all sudden you'll see your biceps build, your shoulders build, your hamstrings build, your glutes build, your calves build, like your traps build, all these other muscles that you, or you aren't, you aren't directly hitting, are getting all this great carryover because this movement is so incredible. So I was explaining to them that, you know, the mistake that a lot of people make when they come to the gym is they come in, and they're doing all these isolation exercises like crazy, and they're avoiding the big four, or they barely ever do the big four, when if they just focused on that, the carryover to all the muscle on their body is tremendous. Yeah, great point. The best exercises to get stronger at that give you the most muscle gain, the big four include the deadlift, the squat, the bench press, and the overhead press, but I'll even throw barbell rows in that, pull-ups in that, dips in that, at least compound movements are the ones you want to get stronger at. All right, the next one really has, is a different type of muscle building signal. This is one body builders have identified for a long time, and this one is the pump. Now the pump, this is what the pump is if you've never experienced this. So you're doing a workout, let's say you're training your biceps, and you feel them get tight and engorged. Okay, what's happening is your body is pumping more blood into the biceps because of the exercise, then can pump out. So the muscle itself enlarges, you get this cell swelling effect as the muscle fills with fluid like water and blood, and it's this tight feeling and it feels really good. And then when you're done with the exercise about anywhere between 10 to 20, maybe 30 minutes later, the pump goes away. Now the pump itself also stimulates muscle growth. There's a few different ways it does this. One is through the cell swelling process, similar way to how creatine can help build muscle. Creatine is converted to ATP, which is muscle energy, and every ATP molecule attracts water molecules. So when your muscles have more ATP, they have more water. This cell swelling effect, this hydration effect, also tells the body to build muscle. Here's the thing you want to consider. At least 70% of your muscle size, if you were to flex your bicep and look in the mirror, 70% of what you see are non-muscle fiber structures. Okay, so the majority of your muscle size is not muscle fiber. It's mostly fluid. It's fluid and capillaries and other structures within the muscle that help feed the muscle, that help the muscle contract, that provide it with energy, that support the muscle fibers themselves. And training for the pump allows those things to grow. So you actually get bigger muscles through getting better pumps. It places a slight stress on muscle fibers and causes those to grow as well. Now, training for the pump typically is higher reps, supersets. You're looking at maybe isolation exercises. Here's what those isolation exercises, excuse me, come into play, right? Doing a lateral and doing it properly can really give you a really good shoulder pump. So aiming for the pump is also important for building muscle. And this is why body builders, this is the reason why body builders tend to build more muscle than just strength athletes. Although strength athletes have a lot of muscle, the body builders kind of utilize both. And this is why like a guy like Stan Efferding, right? He was a power lifter for a long time, could lift incredible amounts of weight. Then he went and worked with Flex Wheeler. And Flex Wheeler had him focus more on the pump, added more muscle to his body. They're both very, very important. Well, this is an example of what I was saying when we first started talking about this is that, you know, knowing how to recognize what you tend to gravitate towards and then trying to play with these other signals, you know, the people that are most guilty of this are like you what you had just alluded to the strength athletes. If you're somebody who all you care about is how much weight you lift for the bench, the squat, the deadlift, these big compound lifts, you can build a tremendous amount of muscle focusing on that and staying focused on that. But you can also benefit from switching over and training hypertrophy. I also think about my clients with form and technique. So one of my favorite things about teaching hypertrophy is typically when you teach hypertrophy, hypertrophy, you are going to lighten the load tremendously. You're going to be doing probably, you know, 40, 50% less than what you would be doing when you're chasing, you know, singles, doubles, triples or five by five routine. So this gives me the opportunity to really slow down the technique and really work on the form and the movement. So I love teaching like clients to chase the pump because it gives me that opportunity to lighten the load and really critique the way they move the weight. Yeah. And that's a great point. That's when I was thinking about immediately because it gives you that opportunity to actually feel and understand that mind muscle connection. So it's great to teach beginners how to, you know, get more familiar with how their muscle being, you know, involved should feel in that lift and that exercise. And you can really break it down joint by joint and assess and see where there's deficiencies. And so this is another, you know, great training method to be able to then now isolate and bring up certain body parts of certain muscles that you feel need a little more attention, need to be developed a little bit further. See, this reminds me of, I used to get, it's very, very common to get somebody who wants to develop their butt and they hear, you know, people tell them, you got a squat, you got a deadlift and they do these exercises and they're like, Adam, I just don't, you know, feel it in my butt. They're quad dominant. They don't tend to engage their glutes as much as they should in those movements. And so they don't feel like they're getting much development. I used to love to get a pump and their butt first before they go squat or deadlift like a pre exhaust. So taking them over and doing some, you know, floor bridges and getting them to feel their butt and try and pump some blood and fluid into their butt and then take them over to the heavy compound lift like a squatter or deadlift. And the benefits of that is tremendous. Because to your point, Justin, it gets them to feel the muscle that they're supposed to be working. And sometimes we take this for granted, especially being guys that have been lifting for a really long time, how hard that can be for the average listener to feel the muscle they're trying to work. I mean, how many times have you guys had clients do even something as basic as a tricep pushdown or a bicep curl and they're like, they feel it in some other muscle, you know, or they ask you, where am I supposed to feel this? That's a common one. Right. Yeah. The pump is a great way to get a non responding body part to respond by finding a way to get the pump. In fact, I'd say probably 80% of the time I've worked with a client who had a weak body part. In other words, other body parts responded well, but they had this one body part that just didn't seem to. They also had a difficulty getting a pump in that weak body part. They could get pumps around it and other muscles, but that one body part that wasn't responding, they couldn't get a pump. And so the way that we would help them build that weak body part was first seeking out, finding a way to get them to feel the pump. And then it became much easier. By the way, Adam mentioned the word hypertrophy. Hypertrophy just means growth. Okay. You can have muscle fiber hypertrophy, and then you can have what's called sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. Sarcoplasm are the fluids and non muscle fiber structures within muscle. So you can grow that as well. So muscle fibers can grow and everything else inside the muscle can grow leading to bigger muscle. Now the third one, this one's a really good one. And this one requires a little bit of tracking. Okay. So I think people like to feel this one out and tend to judge it based off how they feel. And I'm going to tell you this right now. Trying to feel this one out is like trying to feel how many calories you're eating every single day. It's never going to be accurate. You're going to be off. I'm talking about learning to increase your workload slowly over time. This is a very effective way of let's say you're, you're not necessarily focusing heavy on strength. The pump is, you know, there, but it's not your super focus, but you want to focus on getting your body to increase its workload. Well, you, what you do is you look at each exercise, look at each body part, how many sets and how many reps and how much weight have I lifted over the course of a week for this. And then next week, increase it just a little bit. You don't need to do a dramatic increase, but just increase it just a little bit and do this over time. This over time, and I'm talking about a year or two years or so or even longer leads to something that's amazing called muscle fiber hyperplasia. Or at least we think it does. Hyperplasia is when muscle fibers, when you actually grow new muscle fibers, and this is great because muscle fibers can grow and shrink. So you work out, they grow, you stop working out, they shrink, but it's theorized and largely believed that if you actually add muscle fibers, those new muscle fibers, they don't go away. And so over time, if you teach your body to increase its workload slowly, you, it leads to more, dare I say, permanent muscle growth. But again, you got to track. This is a tough one. Yeah, it's almost like what we call muscle memory. And I know a lot of lifters who've been in the gym for a long time, for years, it gets easier. It gets easier to respond again and to be able to get back in shape because your body sort of remembers, you know, and responds to the process accordingly. So, yeah, this is one of those important factors is over time, just slowly doing it. So, you know, a lot of people like to overwhelm their body a lot. And I was guilty of this when I was first training was like, more is better, always more. Like I always tried to do, you know, one extra set and push myself to new heights. But as I got older, I finally started to kind of realize that this is a longer process. This is something that could draw out a lot further and it's going to be way more effective. I think of all the signals that we're talking about today, I think this one is the most abused. And because it just, it sounds like, okay, the more work I do, the more results I'm going to get. And so many people, they start off with their routine and they have that idea in the back of their head. And so they do as much as they can stay one and they get after it until they can't get after it anymore. And then they go home and they come back the next day, or they do the most amount of days in the gym that they can potentially do at that time. Like, oh, I have five free days or five days where I know I can dedicate an hour in the gym. So I'm going to start there and do that. And they throw everything and the, you know, plus the kitchen sink at their body to get it to respond. And they see initial results. So it can be deceiving. It's like, oh, wow, I piled on this muscle or I burned all this body fat. And so this must be the recipe. But, and I'm glad we, we, we talked about that this could be like one of those things that if you're not tracking it, you're probably off because for years, I didn't really track volume and pay attention to it. It wasn't until I got into competing, did I actually really diligently start tracking all my sets, my reps and my total weight, my total volume that I was lifting in a week and tracking that over months. And what I realized when I first started doing that is, oh, I'd have this great week where I had good volume and then something would happen the next week or I just wasn't feeling it or I missed a workout or a workout got shortened. And then the volume would dip a little bit, then I'd have another good week and then it would dip again. When I, when I pulled back and I looked at my total volume over the course of two or three months, what I realized is I had these kind of patterns and it all averaged out to be about the same volume. And that was, this is what was responsible for me hitting this major plateau is even though I thought because I had these days or sometimes weeks in the gym where I was getting after it, I knew I was doing more work and evidently I would come back down the other direction a week or two later. And so then it would average out to be about the same volume. And so trying to first track to see that. And I always know like if, if I understand all this science, right, it's not like this is new information to me, but I never really sat down and tracked it. And I know if I make this mistake of thinking that I'm adding workload, thinking that I'm adding volume, if I do that, my clients have to be doing it also. And so this is one of the areas that I think is, is so important to first track to see where you are currently yourself. And then the goal is, like we've said before in this podcast, to do as little as possible to elicit the most amount of change. So the goal for me is, okay, X amount I did this week, I want to just incrementally add a little bit more volume every other week or every week to make sure that I stay on and not throw a ton of extra volume the next week and then have a hard time keeping up with that. No, it's increasing your body's capacity for workload. It's not just adding more stuff. Does that make sense? It's like getting my body to the point where it can do more without feeling worse. Okay. So I'll give you an example. When I used to train Doug early on, and Doug was not somebody who was a beginner. He had worked out in the past. He wasn't definitely wasn't out of shape. He worked out on his own. It was active. We started out two days a week, two days a week in the gym. Got great results. Within those two days a week, we slowly increased his weight. So that's more volume. Then we were able to increase the amount of sets slowly. That's more volume. After about a year, a year and a half, then Doug added a third workout during the week. Maybe two or three years later, he added a fourth workout. And the entire time his body was progressing and he was getting phenomenal results. Notice how long that took. It wasn't like, oh, we did two days a week for a month. Let's go to three days a week all of a sudden. You got to count it all. Sets, reps, and the amount of weight that you're lifting. And that's why tracking is so important. Well, intensity is included in this too, right? So many people abuse the intensity. This was one of those ones too. You know, I would get after a workout so hard and I would feel so sore for two, three, four days later that I wasn't realizing that when I would go back to the gym and work out, because I was so sore, it was hindering the amount of volume I did. When I backed off the intensity, it allowed me to increase the frequency, which over time actually added more volume, even though I was training less hard. Like I was going into the gym, not trying to kill it as much. I actually ended up doing more work. So until you start tracking and paying attention to that, it's really hard to see if you're falling into the same traps. It's a long-term approach. Now, the next one is an interesting one. And this one can also be abused. Believe it or not, increasing your calories or increasing your protein intake, if your protein intake is low, and if your calories are too low, okay, so that's the caveat, right? Calories are too low. Protein intake is not optimal, optimal being around 0.8 grams per pound of body weight, maybe a little more for some other people. If it's below that, just bumping protein and bumping calories by itself actually sends a muscle-building signal. Now, it's a small signal, but when you combine it with all the other stuff we're talking about, it becomes very complementary. Now, if you're gaining lots of body fat and you're like, I'm not getting stronger, I'm just gaining body fat, I don't think you should increase your calories. Probably not a good idea. You can still look at protein, but I don't think you should bump your calories. But this is another signal. Believe it or not, feeding your body, if your calories are low and your protein is low, feeding it a little more does spark a little bit of that muscle-building signal. The people that I see that tend to be guilty of this one, the ones that need to work on this one, in my experience, were typically women that were super body conscious. They were constantly worried about not gaining weight. They wanted to be thin all the time. And so we would do the get stronger. We'd focus on the pump. We'd increase the workload. But it was so hard for them to increase their calories or eat adequate protein. And so because they didn't do that, it was very difficult. Once we threw that in, then we saw things really start to take off. And what it led to was a faster metabolism, which allowed them to eat more and stay leaner later on. So this is another one. It's interesting. Just like the other ones, though, can be abused. Well, I definitely think this is one of the other top ones that gets abused. I remember, as a kid, I'll never forget this conversation. I walked in with my best friend and we were getting a gym membership at gold at the time. And we were both, I don't know, 140, 150 pounds or so. And we're skinny. We wanted to be big. And we're telling the guy that. And so he calls in, you know, the trainer to come over and come talk to us, you know, calling the big dude, right? So here comes this guy who walks around the corner and for sure, probably on anabolic steroids, he's probably 240 pounds of just a ball of muscle. And he sits down across the desk from us. And he's asking us about, you know, our training and our diet. And he says, if you want to look like a bull, you got to eat like a bull. You got to eat some grass. I'll never forget that statement. I remember right after that, my buddy and I, I think we swung by McDonald's after our workout and we bought, you know, like two big bags, 20 piece chicken McNugget and we're piling on the calories. And this is like the volume thing, where it's one of those things that you can also easily abuse and overdo it. The body doesn't need that much more calories. It just needs a little more calories to send that signal for your body to build. And if you overdo this, what ends up happening is you put 10 pounds on the scale, which for 140 pound kid at the time sounds amazing. And I'll take it. But then when I actually do my body fat tests, I realized that I only really added two or three pounds of muscle. The other 78 pounds was actually body fat. So I'm really not making that much progress, because if I decide I want to lean back down and go the other direction, I end up losing the three pounds of muscle and I'm back where I started or even further back. Yeah, it's very misleading. I remember that. That was the sentiment back in the day was just, if you're a skinny kid, just the more you could consume the better. And so that was where all these shakes came out, where it was like 2,000 calories per sitting, just as much as possible. And to be honest, it was difficult to eat quite a bit when you're super active and you're doing all these sports and you're working out and then trying to add in the right amount of calories was something that was a bit of a chore. And so to not track that though, like it could easily get away from you. The other client that I think that suffers from this too, because I had a lot of these is my female client who came in and would say, Adam, I want to lose four or five pounds. I want to wear a flat tummy and I want to build my butt. And you tell somebody who wants to lose some body fat that you're going to increase their calories in order for you to build some muscle on them or build, and the butt is a muscle. So just like a guy who wants to build his bicep or build his chest, we are going to need a calorie surplus in order to put size on the butt. And so this was always a hurdle that I always had to come over as a trainer with a client that comes in and says, they do not want to put on any extra weight or they don't want to get big and bulky, but yet they want a bigger butt and they want a flat tummy. It's like, listen, if we're going to build your ass, if we're going to build that muscle, we need the extra calories to support that. Otherwise, you're just going to keep tearing and breaking down and being sore all the time and getting stuck in that recovery trap, never giving your body enough calories to support or tell it that it should build more muscle. Right. So this signal works if your calories are too low or if your protein is not optimal. By the way, if you want to figure that out for yourself, we do have a macro calculator. You can find maps macro.com. You can go in there. It'll tell you what your maintenance is and then you can add a little bit to that. So you can hit that number and get that muscle building signal. Now the last one, this is an interesting one, hormones. And I say it's interesting because you know, athletes have been using anabolic steroids for a long time, which are essentially hormones. And those hormones do signal the body to build muscle and to improve its performance. Now most steroids are based off of the hormone testosterone. Testosterone is a muscle building signaller as a hormone. Growth hormone does this as well. Insulin, believe it or not, is the most anabolic of all hormones. It also can tell the body to build muscle. And then for women in particular, believe it or not, estrogen, if your estrogen is too low because your hormones are out of balance, you're going to suffer with muscle gains and you might even suffer from some bone weakening effects. So testosterone, growth hormone, insulin, and estrogen are all important hormones. Estrogen, believe it or not, even important for building muscle in men. In fact, I know bodybuilders when they take anabolic steroids oftentimes they'll take estrogen blocking drugs to prevent side effects that can come from taking steroids because some of the steroids that they take will get converted to estrogen. But if they take too many estrogen blocking drugs, they actually build less muscle. And they know this. If you talk to any bodybuilder, they'll tell you you need a little estrogen to build muscle as well. So the key here is how do we maximize the signaling from hormones? I'm not going to tell you to take hormone shots. That's not at all what this episode is about. But we're going to talk about how to get your hormones to work for you. And the best way to balance out your hormones is to be healthy. Be healthy. Hormone imbalances are a clear sign that something is off. In men, if testosterone levels are low, it means it can mean many different things. It can mean your stress levels aren't good. It can mean your sleep isn't good. It might mean that your fat intake or your calorie intake isn't appropriate. Usually those are the reasons why your testosterone may be low. Growth hormone gets affected by lack of sleep and poor diet. Insulin, here's one. If your diet is not good, if your stress levels are high, your body loses its sensitivity to insulin. So your body starts to produce more insulin to give you the same effect. And sometimes you develop insulin resistance, which can look like or turn into eventually diabetes. So get healthy. That's how you get your hormones to balance, which then will send the muscle building signal that you want. This one's paramount because you could be doing everything right. And if this one's horrible, it can completely ruin all of your gains. If your hormones are off. And I hate saying something as generic or as broad as just be healthy. Because I think the average listener hears that, and they think they're healthy. Very few clients that hired me that had hormonal issues actually didn't know that they weren't healthy. And it's because I think there's a lot of common things that we just accept. And so I want to address those. Clients almost always, high stress, lack of vitamin D, poor sleep. When I look at the three biggest offenders when we're talking about hormone, and there's other things that could be causing hormonal distress to your body and creating you to be in an unhealthy environment. But when I think of the most common and the ones that people don't really look into or focus on, I would say those three. They've got high stress type jobs. They don't sleep very well and they lack in vitamin D. Those will crush your hormones every single time. I had a guy once that I trained who when he came to hire me, we through the assessment process, I recommended that he do a full hormone panel. I thought it would be a good idea. Well, he brought it back and his testosterone levels were in the 300 range. Now, typically the normal range that you'll get at a lab is anywhere between like 250 to 1200. It's a huge range. And I don't necessarily agree with that whole range. I don't think 250 is normal. I think that's pretty low. But he was on the low end of that. Now, when I looked at his lifestyle, it made sense. The guy was cycling for hours and miles on most days. He was doing a lot of running. He slept horribly six hours a night. He was an executive. His diet wasn't good. He ate a very low fat diet. So his essential fats were not as high as they needed to be. So I said, okay, here's what we need to do. We got to get you healthy. So this is what it's going to look like. I know you think it's healthy to ride as much as you are and run as much as you are and eat as little as you are. But obviously it's not your hormones don't lie. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to dramatically decrease your workload. We're going to create a sleep routine and prioritize sleep. The goal is to get you to a point where you get eight hours of good quality sleep. I'm going to bump your fat intake. Your fat is way too low, especially for a man your age and especially for how active you were. And we're going to slowly focus on getting you stronger and all that other stuff. And here's what happened over the course of three months. His testosterone levels more than doubled. In fact, his doctor was shocked that he could raise his testosterone levels that high naturally. In fact, the doctor recommended that maybe he should go and look into working with a testosterone replacement therapy facility. Didn't have to do that. He's got his testosterone levels more than doubled just from becoming healthier. Now, what do you think the side effects of that were? Has libido improved? His sleep was easier to get good sleep. His recovery got better. He felt stronger. And here's the kicker. When he would go ride his bike, he was faster. He was actually faster than he was before. This is so counterintuitive. If you're working with a client like this, I've had multiple clients like this that are type A overachievers that everything that they've done previous to that has been successful because of the amount of work and the excessive amount of energy they've put into that direction. And so for me to then assess this and see, hey, we need to back off on the training schedule. We need to bring you in two times a week and you need to do more therapeutic style active recovery in the days in between and not overdo with the cycling, the running and all the different classes that you're involved in. Like we need to kind of back off a bit, let the body fully recover, focus our attention more on sleep. These are things that are, it's a hard sell for somebody like that, but it made, it was the key that really unlocked our potential now to then build muscle again. I don't know if this is just because we live in the Silicon Valley and we have a lot of tech people that work on computers or not, but I've had clients where just giving them a simple tip of, listen, I know you work late on the computer. I know that's something that I can't ask you to stop doing and I want you to prioritize sleep simply putting on a pair of blue blocker glasses just for them to block out that blue light at nighttime to improve their sleep would improve them building muscle. Absolutely because it improves, we noticed the fact improves melatonin production, which melatonin production is related to some of those hormones that we talked about. If your melatonin production is low chronically, stress hormones tend to go up, growth hormone tends to go down, you lose insulin sensitivity and men testosterone levels drop and women start to get an imbalance between estrogen and progesterone. So that is a very important to focus on and it does make a big difference. Sleep, sunlight, making sure vitamin D levels are adequate, get your vitamin D levels tested if you're not sure because when vitamin D levels are low, you can kiss your anabolic hormones goodbye. In fact, some scientists say that vitamin D acts more like a hormone than it does like a vitamin. I've also seen people just take vitamin D and see their hormones balance out. Look, Mind Pump is recorded on video as well as audio. Come check us out on YouTube. You can also find all of us on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin, me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam. He opened up the oven door and closed it. What? Yes. Dude, you can see the bears have evolved. We need to pause for a second. Okay. A bear gets into our house, doesn't set the alarm and is opening and closing things. They have really upped their game. So what is going on? He's probably slept in your head.