 Alright, in this episode of Mind Pump, we talk all about functional training. Functional. Gosh, that term has been bastardized more recently than the fitness space. What does functional mean? Aren't all exercises functional? And if not, which ones are more functional than others? And what is the benefit? What is the benefit for athletes? That's obvious. But what are the benefits for everybody else? Those of you that just want to build muscle and burn body fat, should you spend any time on trying to train more functionally? Now we think definitely, we think everybody has tremendous benefits, can get tremendous benefits from at least placing some focus on functional training. In fact, in this episode, we list seven of the ways that functional training will help you burn body fat, build muscle, and just get better results overall. So we talk about how functional training places an emphasis on mobility. We talk about the multi directional component, you know, that means you're moving in different directions or you're using one leg versus two legs, that kind of stuff. Talk about the novelty aspect, you know this, you might already know this, you change up your routine and your body responds all of a sudden. We talk about why the real life practical movements that functional training tends to employ. The emphasis on performance over aesthetics, if you're sick and tired of being obsessed with the way you look and you just want to focus on performing better, functional training is a great way to do that. We talk about the different types of muscle contractions and of course how functional training increases work capacity so you can work out more appropriately and more, thus getting better results. Now our most functional program, the one program that we designed a while ago specifically for people to help them improve on their functional capacity is maps performance. It's very different from other workout programs. This is a, I believe a 12 or 16 week program all the way out, follow it all the way through. It's got exercise demos, workout blueprints, everything you need to get functional results. There's also mobility sessions in maps performance. So there's workouts and mobility sessions. Now this month we've taken math performance and we've cut the price in half. It's 50% off. Here's how you get the discount. Go to mapsgreen.com and use the code green50, G-R-E-E-N-5-0, no space for the discount. So I feel like we, we have to address this because it's, it's starting to gain traction. In fact, I was, I was tagged on a post again. Today I was tagged on one a couple of days ago. I'm still getting comments from Eugene Tau's post on the bar, barbell back squat. And now the most recent one I'm tagged on is this study that's going around that is saying that it is as beneficial or more beneficial for someone to use a machine squat versus a barbell back squat for functional purposes. And right away that just, it just doesn't even make sense to me. There's, although I could see how I could make a case for it being close to as beneficial at the very beginning of, of teaching someone this, but long term and an overall function for more than six or eight weeks. I just, I just don't see that. Yeah. I 100% disagree with the conclusion that a lot of people are going to take from a study like that. Because what a lot of people will get from that is that a machine squat is as good or superior to a barbell squat for building muscle and for performance. This is why it's so important to look deeper into the study. So little background. I did my, I looked up the study and I saw that it was a small sample size. It was 27, initially 30 women signed up for the study. So it was only women, there were 30. None of them had any prior resistance training experience. So these were all total beginners. Three women dropped out. So eventually it turned into 27 women doing the study and it was for six weeks long. So what we have now is 27 untrained individuals following this study for six weeks. Within the six week period, what they did is they had half of them do hack squats. So this is like what you would do on like a paramount machine or something like that's where the pads are on your shoulders and you slide on the, on the hack squat. The other half did barbell squats. And then at the end of the six weeks, which for people listening right now, if you're a beginner and you start working out with weights, you're a beginner for probably six months to a year, just in the way your body moves and the way you control yourself with your training and the way you can feel exercises. There's just so many more variables. Yeah. There's six weeks. You're still a total, total beginner when it comes to training. So these people went through six weeks of training and then they compared the barbell squat to the hack squat. And what they found at the end of the study was that the hack squat might be a little better in that six week period at producing power and strength and agility. Okay. So let's break this down for a second. You guys are familiar with the high jump in the Olympics, but not the one with the, not the high jump. What's the one where they jump over the pole? That's a high jump. It's a high jump. Okay. Not the one where they have to stick to pole vault. So forget the pole vault, the one where they jump over, right? Yeah. And they approach it sometimes backwards and kind of kick their legs. Okay. Do you guys know the original way people jumped over those things? Oh, straightforward. They would run and they jump over straight forward. Yeah. And for a long time, there was a limit to how high people were getting. And then some brilliant person discovered if I ran and then turn backwards and led with my head and kind of now that's those famous over it. Yeah. It's those famous videos you see of the person like either their head is going over first, they arch their back legs over. Okay. So let's say we took 30 people and we said, let's see how high you could jump over this, this, uh, this, this high jump. I already know what you're going with. And 15 of them, you said, jump however you want. The other 15, you try to teach them the other technique. At the end of six weeks, the people trying to jump normal would still kick their ass because the learning curve for the better technique is much higher. Or this is the problem. It reminds me of the analogy that you've given on this podcast multiple times about the chicken pecking versus learning the home keys. Oh, with typewriting. Yeah. Yep. Absolutely. If you took somebody in the first, no one's typed in their life before. And you say, Hey, you type with your fingers as fast as you can and you will try and teach you the proper way. Right. At first the person doing what their two index fingers is going to blow the doors off the other person. Right. Uh, because there's a, there's a steeper learning curve. But once you get past that the benefits you reap blow the doors off of the other way. Yeah. What I was thinking, like, because it's, it simplifies all the variables. All you have now to, to consider is this one, you know, straight path. I have to take this weight and move it, uh, already where the machine wants you to go. So, uh, you know, to consider all these other factors of having to brace and have how, how to hold your body in the proper position, how to support your joints, like all of that takes a lot of time for you to develop. Yeah. Let me ask you guys a question. Let me ask you guys this. How long did it take you guys to take the average untrained because this study had a bunch of untrained people or dental employees, take the average untrained healthy person, how long would it take you before you could really push them on a barbell squat, really get to reap the benefits of the barbell squad years, years. Yeah. You're, you're, you're practicing, you're practicing, you learn, but this exercise, uh, first off there, the, the progress you're going to get from it is going to be a little slower initially than just getting on a leg press or a hack squat, just like just doing a shit ton of cardio and starving yourself will get you more weight loss initially than doing lifting weights, speeding up your metabolism, reverse dieting, that approach. But after you pass a certain point, you know, after two, three months, four months, five months, you start to, to pass up the easier approach. And then the distance starts to become massive. You take somebody who's been hack squatting for two years, no barbell squats. You take someone who's been barbell squatting for two years, practicing it, working on the things that gets them to do it properly, compare those two groups and what you're going to see is night and day, but six weeks untrained. Yeah. No shit. Give them the easier thing to do and they're going to do, look, I tell you what, I, you know, I could probably drive my car faster than if I got into a high tech formula one car, the first couple of times I tried and take me a while, learn how to maximize this formula one complex. So a barbell squat is one of the more complex exercises, not the most complex. It's not up there with Olympic lifting, but it requires a lot of skill and practice. And it is one of the most functional things you can learn to do. Period. I'm so tired of hearing that message right now. And it's so, I think the reason why I'm so tired of it is because I spent the first half of my career not hearing it enough at all. And maybe because it's become popular and because things like CrossFit have, have made squatting and barbell lifting cool again and add, and started to add that to more people's routines, it's gotten popular again. And now here's the, it's like this pendulum. We're always doing this where we're swinging back and forth where it's like, nobody was barbell back squatting. Then all of a sudden, you know, 10 years into my career, all of a sudden it's super popular and a lot of people, probably a lot of people that shouldn't be doing it. I'll give you that, right? At least haven't done the training to get to the point. Yeah. The prerequisites. You haven't done the right prerequisites to get to the point where you should be barbell squatting with, especially with heavy load. So now you're getting the counter message again that are trying to tell people like, oh, maybe you shouldn't be barbell squatting. And now we're starting to come out with stupid studies like this. And we're having a lot of really popular people on social media take that. And they're doing it because it's clickbaity. I get that. I can totally respect that. We're in the digital marketing business. We know that, you know, titling something or taking a counter message is a great way to get attention and get people talking about whatever it is you have to say. But it's just, it's almost leading. It's yes. And it's a poor message to be sending to people. We just got to a place where I feel like more and more people are learning the benefits of barbell exercises to come and say some shit like that. The only people that the understanding or the message gets through to the right way are probably your really intelligent trainers that have a lot of experience or have read a lot of studies. They can unpack that. They get what's going on there. But for the majority, they hear that message and it justifies why they shouldn't barbell. No, that's just it. There isn't a lot of studies around exercises, working out in fitness. There really isn't. And the studies are really limited. They're short. And they do a very poor job of representing what most people will probably experience. And so if you read the study, the six-week study done on 27 untrained women, at the end of six weeks, the hack squat performed, by the way, a tiny bit better. It wasn't like it was drastic. It was just a little bit better. But if you have a lot of experience training lots and lots and lots of people for a long period of time, you know, you ask me, which one's better, Sal? Hack squat or barbell squat? There's no competition. For most people, the barbell squats are far more functional. But that term alone, functional, like what does that even mean? And for a while there, totally. I remember when it really became like a marketing thing. You know, this is when I started training clients in gyms, it was this is back in 19, I think 1997 was when I first became a personal trainer. Yeah, it was a little while ago. Rachel Borgnan? We were lifting dinosaur bones. There weren't even barbells at that time. But this is when I first became a trainer. And before that, I'd been working out in gyms probably since 1993 or 94. And for the first few years as a trainer, functional was never even a term. Nobody said that. It was you went to the gym and you worked out. Strength training. Yeah, it was strength training or not. Nobody said the word functional. Maybe somebody might have said real world strength or something like that. Well, you know where it originated from. It originated from physical therapist. So it's been a practice for actually a really long time. It didn't make its way into the gyms and fitness professionals until where you're alluding to right now, which is in the late 90s, early 2000s, did it make its way to trainers? But originally, it was a method of training that most PTs physical therapists did for rehab to help with their clients movement and mobility when they're rehabbing from an injury. And really all that it means is or what it's supposed to mean is is does your training give you a lot of carryover to everyday life, to improve your quality of life. Now, any type of exercise, I want to be clear, by the way, any type so as long as it's relatively appropriate, any type of exercise is going to improve your quality of life and it's going to make you more functional than none. So if you did do, if you do nothing and you sit on the couch all day long, you could use, you could do some of the most non functional exercise, you're probably still going to get more, more functional ability just because now you're exercising. So when we are talking about functional versus unfunctional training, I think we're just comparing which one gives you more carryover, which one makes you feel better. Now, here's the, here's the number one thing I'll say about functional training. Number one for the average person, the number one goal of exercise should be to help prevent obesity. And the reason why I say that is only because obesity is the biggest problem that most of us, that most people will face. That's the big rock, right? Like, okay, that's great that you're doing all this wonderful functional exercise. But if you're 60 pounds overweight and your diet is bad and all that stuff, then it's not very functional. You get a heart attack or you get your increase your cancer risk, it doesn't matter. So that should be kind of number one. But then we go down the list, right? Does this improve my ability to do my daily activities? Do I have less pain? Is the strength in the gym relate to the strength I experience outside the gym? Like, am I strong on a bunch of machines at the gym, but then I go move my couch and I hurt my back? And honestly, like anecdotally, I know like where the term I guess came from, from the rehab kind of perspective. But as, as a sports performance or strength driven trainer, I knew like it was also a counter to a lot of like, you know, the big box gym sort of movement of all the machines and, and kind of placing everybody in these confined space where like, I'm, I'm trying to train in this fixed position. But it didn't have the greatest carryover when we went to use this strength out on the field. And so, you know, there was this movement of coming back to, you know, lunges and coming back to, you know, free weights and, and squats and deadlifts and trying to get that strength, but also not having the parameters where everything was fixed in one plane. Yeah, this is not controversial to say, but the more individualized the workout is for a person, the better it's going to be for that person. I don't think anybody will ever disagree with me. If you take a general routine and you apply it to a bunch of people, or you take routines that are individualized, the individualized ones are going to be always better. Now break that down to the exercise. The more individualized that exercise is for that person, the better it is. The biggest problem with machines, biggest, this nobody will debate me or if they do their idiots is that machine, your body has to conform to the machine. You get on a hack squat or a leg press or a chest press. That machine was designed for what they deem to be the average person that's going to be using that machine. If your arms are long, or you're tall, or you're short, or your shoulders are wide or narrow, or you're just a person. Everybody's shaped differently. You get on that machine and you adjust a seat in the arms, or most people don't. Most people don't adjust anything. They just get on there and do it. But even if you do adjust them, you still have to conform to that machine moving in that track, following the handles. Free weights conform to your body. So when I place a bar on my back, or I curl away, it doesn't matter how long my arms are, or how short I am, or how wide my shoulders are, the free weights conform to my body. So that's the biggest, most functional plus of free weights, is it's individualized mainly because the free weights adjust to the body, not the other way around. But I do remember when the word functional, have you guys ever trained physical therapists? I've had several physical therapy clients and they would talk about functional training. The one area that I found that they missed was that strength, the physical pursuit of strength, or the physical action of strength is positive for all other physical pursuit. The greatest pursuit. It's the one that contributes to all of them. If you're stronger, and you do it right, you're going to have better stamina. If you train properly with a full range of motion, you'll have better mobility. And so when I would get these physical therapists, they were so good at the biomechanics of certain movements and correcting pain and stuff like that, but they were really bad at just progressive overload and building strength. Then I'd have them get stronger and then they would click and they'd be like, oh, this is where the term sort of got bastardized because then you started to see a lot of the movement of functional training becoming stability training and becoming the emphasis of joint function and movement. It became very much centered around balancing and strength wasn't a big part of that training. Do you guys remember that? Oh, yeah. Oh, totally. It was like overnight, man. All of a sudden, trainers had clients balancing on dynadis, foam pads, single leg everything. Well, it's like anything else. The pendulum seems to swing one way real hard and then come back the other direction. We weren't doing anything around stability training 20 plus years ago, then we went crazy with it. So now we're trying to find the middle. So all this stuff and all this talk around functional training inspired me to write a list of what I thought were the seven ways that functional training helps us to build muscle or burn body. And why everybody should do something functional based. Right. Besides the basic traditional resistance training exercises, I would say this, wherever you're at in your fitness routine, however experienced you are, functional means you're going to challenge your body a little bit differently with exercises that you think are going to give you more carry over to the rest of your life. And what Adam's talking about are what are the benefits of that? Let's say all you do, you just want to train to look good. You just want to be lean. You want to be muscular. So you do your traditional body part split or your full body workout and you follow these exercises and you're thinking, well, I really don't, I'm fit. I move around fine at home and you know, I play, you know, frisbee with my kids at the park. Why should I incorporate more functional training into my routine? Or maybe you're a beginner and you're listening and you're like, I just want to lose weight. I just want to get better shape. Why do I need to go the functional training route? Like what is the value of functional training besides to the athlete or besides to the person who's super motivated by being an awesome, you know, athletic minded person? Well, the first one that comes to mind is the emphasis that it puts on mobility. And I know on the show we talk a ton about the benefits of mobility. It's one of those things as a young trainer, I didn't talk about, I didn't address and, you know, as I've aged and no longer that, you know, limber and spry young kid, I'd now see the benefits of it, especially for long term health, for joint health and just for overall, you know, movement in life because nobody, I don't care how fit or unfit you are, nobody likes to wake up in the morning and deal with joint pain or back pain or struggle to get up out of a chair. And, you know, when you talk about the average person, most people, whether they want a six pack or not, at the end of the day want to feel good. And so I think that one of the number one things and the first thing we talk about is how functional training plays in a major role in overall mobility and joint health. Totally. If you're, imagine you have a catalog in front of you, and it's a catalog of all the exercises that your current level of mobility will allow you to do or perform properly, which means you can reap the benefits from those exercises. Risk of injury is low. You can do them properly. Okay. Improve your mobility. That catalog grows. Every time you improve your mobility, the catalog of exercises and movements that you now have at your arsenal continues to grow and expand. And this is very important because as you continue to train, changing up exercises and doing different things, maybe one of the biggest tools you have or one of the biggest factors you can manipulate to getting your body to continue to change. Now, mobility isn't just range of motion. I think a lot of people think, oh, I can touch my toes, do the splits, whatever. I must have good mobility. No, it's not the same. Mobility is having range of motion, but having complete control and strength in that. Yes. Control and strength within that range of motion. Then there's this also. So we talked about risk of injury. Of course, if you hurt yourself, you're not going to be able to work out and get in shape. So that's obvious. But let's talk about having greater ranges of motion that you have strength and control in. It's conclusive. Studies show this, that larger ranges of motion done properly will give you better results than shorter ranges of motion in terms of general strength, general muscle building, and then of course, indirectly, generally talking about fat loss. In other words, doing a full barbell squat where your butt goes down below parallel with good control, good stability, so you've got great mobility there, is going to give you, generally speaking, better overall results than a half squat. Same thing with a bench press, a row, overhead press, any other exercise you could possibly do. So improving your mobility, let's say you love to do, let's say you love doing, you know, deadlift squats, benches, overhead presses, rows, you like doing pull-ups, you like doing all the greatest exercises, but all you do is improve your mobility. So now you're doing a half an inch deeper on your squat. Now your overhead press, you have a quarter inch more extension at the top. You're able to squeeze and control and connect to more of the rep on all your favorite exercises. What you've done is dramatically improve or increase the effectiveness of those exercises that you always do. That's why mobility plays such a huge role in just getting good results is the ability to move through greater ranges of motion. Yeah, I think another thing when we had Max Schmarzo on the show, he brought up an interesting point that I've always, ever since I've been trying to think about this even further, about how to convey that point about movement aesthetics and why we pay so much attention to Olympic athletes like gymnasts, like if you're watching a martial arts event and you're watching why one dominates over the other and the way that they move is so much more superior than the other opponent. Fluid. It's fluid. It's natural. It looks awesome. We're dumbfounded by it a lot of times and I think that people don't realize that movement is a signal of health as well as somebody coming in with the motivation of looking like they have a six pack. That's signaling that I'm in good health. Well, good movement signals good health as well because now your ability is increased. Now it's a longevity to it. If you're moving well, you know that you're going to be able to do things that other people can't. Totally. And injuries happen. A lot of injuries, I should say, not all because some injuries happen because something falls on you or whatever. But a lot of injuries happen because your body moved within a range of motion that you simply didn't control. And oftentimes, you're in that position, you call upon your muscle, your strength, boom, you tweak or you tear something or you twist something because of it. So it's like the reaching back behind you in the car because your kids are acting up and you're twisting and then, oh no, I got to grab the steering wheel. You try and move quickly from that position. I hurt my back. You may be fit. You may be someone who works out all the time. In fact, this happens to people like that all the time. Or maybe you work out all the time in the gym. You think you're fit. You go throw the baseball around with your kid. And the next day, you're like, my shoulder is messed up. I hurt my shoulder throwing a baseball. It's because you're moving it within ranges of motion that you did not entirely have control over. Mobility is improving upon that ability. And being able to move better within greater ranges of motion not only dramatically decreases your risk of injury, but it gives you better results just because your range of motion is better in all your exercises. I think a simpler way to put it too is as we start to age, especially today, man, we sit down so much. We're not moving around through full range of motion. And your hips and your shoulders, these multifaceted joints are so dynamic. They allow you to move all over the place. And when you limit yourself for years and years to this kind of same place where I'm just, I'm always typing in front of me, I'm always driving for me. And I stop like lifting above my head or I stop squatting all the way to the ground. What ends up happening is muscles get shortened and tightened and tightened and tightened. And you lose that range of motion that you used to have. And instead of just going to exercises, that compliment that go, oh, I can no longer get down there, astagrass anymore. So let's just go do, you know, hack squats halfway. What ends up happening is you end up tightening up and shortening up and tightening up. And then what ends up happening to your point, Sal, is one day you have to move out of that range of motion. And that's how almost every one of my older clients were hurt. Super cool. It was never deadlifting 500 pounds or squatting 300 pounds on their back. It was picking up a fucking shampoo bottle in the shower. It was pulling some weeds, you know, in their rose garden. It was always some bullshit, simple move. That's outside of all those traditional exercises. That's outside their traditional movement. And it's because your body was designed to be able to do that. But you've limited it for so many years. And why I can't stand this message is of the, you know, machine squatting is you start to confine that to the machine. And you're doing that because it's easier for you. And it's more challenging to work towards getting a better squat or work to getting a better overhead. It's the caution tape. It's the same response you're going to get from your doctor that's like, uh, yeah, you probably shouldn't do that ever again. You know, and then that's all they leave you with is like that specific thing that you were doing before, like say it was, uh, you know, a sport or say it was like, you know, just basically like I can't, I can't run anymore. I can't do any, you just can't do it anymore. Now now we're just going to limit you to and confine you even further to a chair. And it's more than just the muscles changing because of the lack of movement. The neural pathways that control that movement also start to disappear. That's right. It's not just the muscle. It's that you actually lose the ability. Whatever you don't train, you lose. Your body's very effective at this, by the way. Your body's always trying to be about as good as it needs to be. There's no reason for it to be any better than it needs to be. In fact, being better than it needs to be costs resources and your body is this a beautiful, you know, efficiency machine. It's always trying to burn just about as enough calories as it needs to. It's only going to give you as much strength as it needs. There's no need to be stronger than you need to cost too many resources. There's no reason to be any faster than you need to. Oh, you know what? Uh, you're not reaching up above your head anymore. We don't need that movement. Get rid of that. Let's become more efficient. And so you start to not only do you just maintain what you've been maintaining, but you slowly start this, uh, this decline. And so training functionally is extremely important for everybody just from that standpoint alone. You know, that statement reminds me of, remember the first time that Dr. Brink put us in the 90, 90 and had you do the heel lift? Right. It just like, it was like your, I can't do it. It was like your leg didn't even, wasn't even a part of your body. And then he took his hand and then he moved. He's like, here's your range of motion. Right. And you had this incredible, the range of motion was there. But to your point about, there was no, no access to it. Yeah. No access to it whatsoever. And that single thing, like just working on the internal rotation of my hip and the external rotation of my hip, which is basically what you're working on in those 90, 90 moves where you're switching back and forth and you're lifting those back legs up, just me working on that every single, like completely eliminated the bursitis that I had in my hips. Right. And a big part of, uh, a big part of the reason why you might have had bursitis was because every time you squatted or whatever, because you lacked con, you know, connection to certain parts of that movement, um, your joints were moving suboptimal. However little, right? One set of squats, two sets of squats. Not going to notice a difference. Just over time. Over time. This is how, look at most people's pain is chronic. It's not the acute variety. And it comes from something like that. Look, here's a big thing that, that functional type training does very, very well. I would say, and even argue that this is probably one of the hallmarks of functional training. It's utilizing different planes of motion. That's that. Yeah. Favorite. Yeah. Because just building traditional strength or just building muscle, we tend to get stuck in this forward, everything in front of me type of position. I'm squatting straight. I'm Brett. I'm pressing straight. I'm curling straight. And so I train in this, there's very little lateral movement, which your body moves laterally. Of course it does. You don't just, you don't want out robots stuck on a track, right? And we do very little twisting. Yeah. Rotational, very, very little twisting. And so because of that, we get really, really good at one plane of movement forward and back and we get really, and we get strong in it. We get super strong and good at one plane of movement and we get, we completely lack another plane of movement, which actually, believe it or not, increases risk of injury. Also susceptible. It does. It totally does. So it's like having all this, it's like having a car with tons of horsepower, but you don't have good brakes or you don't have good suspension and it just blows out, you know, parts of the car or whatever. So this, and so here's a good example. Think of a regular lunge. Most people listening have probably done a regular lunge, great exercise, one of the best exercises ever by itself, very, very functional. But if you've never done a side lunge or Cossack squat, try doing run right now and notice how unbelievably awkward and weird it feels, if you can even do one at all. Now from a, from a, from a standpoint of muscle, you're using the same muscles. That's the, that's the funny thing. The muscles are, you're still using the glutes, still using the quads, still using the hamstrings. There's maybe a little bit more of the abductors or the muscles on the side of leg that are being used with a, you know, maybe a little bit more obliques, but really what it is, it's the patterning and the fact that you're going laterally. So what do you think will happen if you start to train that lateral movement or you start to throw that into routine to become more functional? Do you think you're going to build more muscle or improve your ability to build more muscle? Absolutely. It's one of my favorite things about functional training. It's like in mass performance, for example, we made such an emphasis on training in different planes of movement. And what people noticed from that is at first, just like the study said, at first it was hard. They had to go light, couldn't use a lot of weight, but as they got stronger, their capacity to improve. Oh, what they don't realize is that's, that's going to fortify the joints even more when you go into that, that forward and back plane, right? If I'm going to then back squat again, and I've been doing caustic squats, I've been moving laterally, I've been twisting, now I'm able to express those stabilizing muscles, and they're going to be a part of the process even more, which then allows your body to produce more force. Yeah. Producing more force is the game. People don't realize that. Like to get stronger, you have to, you have to feel like you're able to, to support your joints with all that load on your back. No, your body has natural limiters, in fact. It's got a governing system in place. Yeah, your body tries to limit the amount of strength that empower you can exert based off of its assessment of whether or not it thinks you're going to get hurt. The more, the more trained you are, the more you're able to tap into that amount of strength. And most, or the more of the strength that you have, the capacity you have to express. And the more you train a particular movement, the more your body feels comfortable within that movement, expressing that strength. And there is some carryover to the, to other movements. But if you never train in certain planes of movement, your body just doesn't feel safe. Even though the side lunge uses the same muscles as the front lunge, your body, try loading it like you do with your front lunge. You're going to, well, don't do this. You'll fall. You're not going to be able to, because your body's like, Nope, I don't feel safe. Well, and, and doing the, the movements in different planes like that also mimics real life more. I mean, that going back to the point I made of the injuries that always happen to the client, it's always something as simple as, you know, picking a shampoo bottle. Well, the reason why she got hurt picking up the shampoo bottles, because she didn't, in her shower, turn her body 180 degrees around, squat down in the sagittal plane, and then pick the shampoo bottle up. That's why she did that. She would have got hurt. The reason why she got hurt is because she moved in the transverse plane. She tried to move naturally. Yeah. She tried to move naturally. She rotated and then lunged over. And because she had no strength or control in that position, she gets hurt. And that's the reason why that type of stuff has the most carrier and why I think it's, you know, quote unquote, the most functional and any sort of program that you're following that claims to be functional should incorporate these type of movements. Totally. And you know, it's funny too, because one of the, one of the paramount principles of bodybuilding has always been using different angles, just from a muscle development standpoint, even though a barbell curl, a preacher curl, and a concentration curl, and a drag curl are all flexing at the elbow. Anybody with any experience in muscle building will tell you that doing all of those is probably better than just focusing on one, even though the volume and everything is the same. So training in different directions, training in different planes through functional training is another way to literally change the angles on your body. If you've been working out for a long time and you're consistent and you haven't done about a functional training where you're focusing on different planes because you think this is not going to build me more muscle, you are wrong. The fact that you're training in these different planes will actually contribute to your body's ability to build more muscle, just simply because there's different angles, different angles, which brings me to another one. Novelty. How important is novelty at getting your body to respond? It's funny, I did a post yesterday on my Instagram about the best rep range. And you know, people often will ask us, Hey, what's the best rep range to build muscle? Where should I always train in? And if you take a lot, if you take studies and you examine them, and again, most of these studies done for six weeks or eight weeks, the studies pretty conclusively show that about eight to 12 reps is probably the best rep range to build muscle. Now, the problem with that is, and it is true, if you compared all the rep ranges for a six week period only, and you took beginners or whatever, you're going to find that eight to 12 builds more muscle. But what those studies don't show is if you follow those people for a long period of time, follow them for three, four, five, six months a year, you'll find that unless you get them out of that rep range and train in the one to five rep range or the 15 to 20 rep range, the progress slows to a grinding halt. It stops. So the answer to the question of which rep range is best is the rep range you're not doing when you're not doing. Yeah. And all of them, all of them and none of them depends on which one you're doing, which one you're going to do. That's novelty. This reminds me when we first started the podcast, the first or the first year that we started creating and writing programs, the order was MAPS anabolic, MAPS performance, and then MAPS aesthetic. Now, as far as sales was concerned, MAPS anabolic and MAPS aesthetic just blew everything out of the water, just blew performance. And of course we knew that going into it because they both are gear. Sexier. Yeah. They look sexier and it's more towards, you know, looking better and building muscle is what it's marketed to, right? And I remember I'd get DMs and emails from people saying, Hey, I've, you know, I've followed MAPS anabolic, I've done aesthetic. And my goal is I want to build muscle and, you know, I want to learn, I want to burn body fat, what program or what should I do next? And MAPS performance, of course. And they be, Oh, well, no, I don't want to be an athlete. That's not my goal. All I care about is the way I look. I just care about aesthetics. And I'd say MAPS performance still is that. And the reason why that is, is because I know that it's marketed to people that care about sports performance, but it has incredible benefits for burning body fat and building muscle, especially to somebody who never trains that way. That's all, that's all, that's tons of value. Right. Tons of value. Novelty is so important when it, now, now you don't want to overdo novelty. You're not trying to go to the gym and make up exercises every single day. There's a certain level of consistency that you want to stick to to maximize the, the I can definitely speak to that because I was an addict for novelty at a certain point because of how effective it was. Once I found, you know, one specific thing, I got to a certain point where I was benching all the time. I was squatting all the time. I was power cleaning. I was deadlifting, but that was it. It was all this like balanced barbell load. And, and then I started to, to get to a point where I, I could only do so much my shoulder gave out on me. And I would always get to a certain weight and stop. And that was as far as I could go. And then I started, and then I found Indian clubs and I found rotational movements with my shoulder. And I just started working on that. And it was, it was like a key just unlocked this new potential where my shoulder felt stable and my shoulder felt really stable and stronger going into a simple lift like a bench press. And it was dramatic how much more weight I could add to the bar. And so then I thought, well, that must be the key. I got to do a lot more rotations. I went crazy. I'm going mace bells. I'm going, you know, like I'm doing side tosses. I'm going all rotation and everything. And, you know, and it got out of hand. But the point of it was, is that that was the new stimulus that was lacking. That was the thing that I needed to focus on to reinforce, you know, my abilities to then gain more strength. Totally. As a kid working out, I don't know how many times this lesson was tried to, you know, be learned, but I just refused to learn it. Like I would do a routine. Like the first routine I did, I was like, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger's, you know, encyclopedia bodybuilding routine. I did that. It was a, it was a split routine, lots of volume, lots of angles, different exercise. Did that for a while. Then I read Mike Mentzer's heavy duty. Heavy duty was go to failure one set per body part. That's it. Super short workouts, super intense. And I was only training maybe a few days a week. Switch to that. Oh my God. All this muscle is coming on my body. That's all I'm going to do now. Did that forever, forever, forever in my body stopper. Then I changed to a different routine. Oh my God. This is the best routine. It took me like five times to realize that putting it together. Wait a minute. Oh, wait a minute. It's when I change routines that all this stuff happens. How often do you guys get clients like that? I don't know how many times I get a client. I remember getting a client who would sit down and tell me what was best for their body because of their past experience. Oh, I've tried lifting like this. And when I lift like this, I got the best results. And I'm like, well, that's because it was novel to you because you've never trained that way. And so your body responded. But Justin, you bringing up the tools and rotational stuff brings me to the next point, which is the real life practical movements and using things like sandbags and Indian clubs and getting into real ways that you would use your shoulder. You would use your hips and using tools like this. Oh, I was surprised. And let's see, I'm trying to think when this happened. This was probably seven or eight years ago. I had gotten really into reading the history of strength athletes and strongman type training. And at this point, you know, I've been working out already for a long time. I've been training forever. I'd kind of hit some limits with my lifts and, you know, I'm a historian when it comes to strength sports. And so I'm reading stuff and I'm like, you know what, it might be fun to incorporate some of these odd lifts just because I've been training for so long. And I just want to see what would happen. So one thing that I did was I started doing these really, really heavy sandbag carries. So this is where I would take a sandbag or I'd take like a punching bag or whatever. It was almost like that size. And they'd be really, really heavy. In order to lift it and walk with it, I'd have to hug it. So my arms would reach all the way around it and I'd hug it and I'd lift it up and I'd walk for distance, drop it. And I'd do sets like this. I was shocked at first off, how sore I got. But then I was shocked at how strong it made me in my dead lifts, which was my lift. That one I'd been training forever. And then I started to piece it together. I was like, wait a minute. When I'm hugging the sandbag and lifting off the floor, even though it looks a lot like a deadlift, the difference is my shoulder blades are rounded forward. I'm doing what's called rounded back lifting, not lower back rounded, but rounded around my upper back. So now my rhomboids and my traps and my lats are their tension that they're holding is in this lengthened or different position than when I'm deadlifting where I'm trying to keep things kind of protracted. I built more muscle and I got much stronger. Then I started experimenting with a kettlebell overhead press versus a dumbbell press. And then of course I met Justin when we started doing mind pump and got introduced to all these other types of tools that you could use. And I'm, first and foremost, I like building muscle and being strong. I wouldn't consider myself in any capacity of functional training. So that's not my favorite, favorite thing to work on. But because those things contributed to the strength of muscle, I definitely started incorporating them. And you mentioned sandbag. I mean, sandbag is one of those tools that, I mean, it's the great equalizer. It shifts on you. It moves on you. You have to adjust with it. And so that's a completely different skill to acquire, which then has a lot of carryover then with something that doesn't move and is nice and fixed. And you can wrap your body around it much more easily. So I mean, there's ways to use these tools where then it is novel at first, but then it has massive carryover because now your body reacts differently. It stabilizes on command. And that applies greatly towards strength pursuits. One thing, like you mentioned with deadlifting, for me, I had hurt my QL and I had gone through this process of rehabilitating myself and really found that windmills was a massive breakthrough for me in terms of being able to regain that connection and get that kind of rotation in my thoracic spine and to be able to then adjust and stabilize something again as simple as a deadlift. But if you have the most minute shift, it's going to affect you greatly when you have that much more weight added to that. Totally. One of my favorite movements that we included inside Mass Performance was the Zercher Squats for the point that you're making Sal because, you know, as functional and as amazing as barbell back squats are, and we would all agree on that, when I think about, you know, the way I would pick up something and carry something in real life, you rarely ever throw it on your back and load it. Almost never, unless it's your girlfriend at a rock concert, she's on your shoulder. Right, right. You know, 90% of the time, you're bare hugging it with this kind of rounded shoulder position and squatting it or picking it up. And so, you know, talking about real life type of movements that are exercises that have carryover into real life, Zercher Squats, that was something that was introduced to me when I met Justin. I'd never trained Zercher Squats before and just absolutely loved incorporating that in my routine. And it's one of my favorite movements that's been, that was placed in that program too. That's actually Jessica's favorite squat. Is it really? Yeah, because she started doing the Zercher's after, you know, after she was introduced to him. And she's like, wow, the way I feel these in my glutes, the way I feel these in my back and just the improvements she saw. And it's, I tell you what, when you find an exercise that you're not good at, just through simply getting good at that, oh my gosh, the strength gains and the change you see in your body is incredible. Because that initial, those initial newbie gains, you can actually apply that to an exercise you're not good at. So if you've been working out for a while and you remember how fast you progressed when you first started working out, where you're like adding 10 pounds of bar every single week, that first three months or whatever, find an exercise that you never do like, like the Cossack squat that I talked about, or the Zercher squat or whatever, that you're not, you're not, you're not familiar with. And the strength gains come fast because a lot of that is just you learning how to do the exercise. Now imagine what that does for the rest of your body. Now there's another benefit, the next point that reminds me of something that you recently have been talking about, Sal, that I think is when I think about majority of my clients, what they would benefit. And it's this point. And that is creating a program or following a program that is based off of performance over aesthetics. And I think that the benefits here, of course, there's physical benefits that we can get into, but the mental benefits that I think that are applied here are what's more important. Because when I think of the average client that I used to get, most of them came to me because they were insecure about their body. They were slaves to the scale or they're constantly comparing themselves in the mirror or to their friends. And it was all about how they looked and how they looked drove how they trained in the gym, which a lot of times was a very unhealthy relationship. And they weren't doing things that were best for their body. And when I could get a client to stop focusing on the way they looked and their their scale weight and begin focusing on their performance in the gym and how they moved and how they perfected the movement and they improved upon everybody. Oh, it's incredibly liberating. And the irony of it is when they stopped caring about those things, that ends up being a side effect that comes later on. They start to look much better. Oh, they get better at the exercises. I mean, if you put the focus and the emphasis on improving on these very specific exercises that have carryover towards building and developing muscle, I mean, look at that. Like that's that's the recipe. And in a lot of times, I mean, it's it's tough because that's like everybody's most everybody's goal coming in. I want to look better. I want, you know, my body to change and to be able to reveal like this muscle and this hard work I've been doing. But a lot of times, you know, putting that emphasis into actually like improving those specific exercise, getting better at the skill of working out makes the world difference. It was my biggest secret weapon when I trained clients. It was the one thing when I pieced it together, when I put it together, it made me more effective than I'd ever been before as a trainer. And it separated me from my peers as trainers. And it was every client that I got, every single client that I got, almost every, my goal was to get them to focus on performance. My goal was to get them to care about their movement, their strength, and their stamina. Because here's the truth. If you improve your general performance consistently, the side effect of that, the very, very consistent side effect of that is better aesthetics. So if you get stronger, faster, better mobility, better stamina, the very high odds are you're going to look better. The reverse is not true. If your goal is to change how you look, you could give a crap about performance. All you want to do is change your body and its appearance in the mirror. The odds are not that your performance will always improve. In fact, oftentimes, especially when we're talking about the average person, especially when we're talking about the average person, you get the average woman that comes in and wants to lose weight, and all she cares about is the scale. All she cares about how she's looks, oftentimes performance actually gets worse because of the diet practices that accompany that, and the fact that they treat workouts like a punishment. So changing your focus from how you look to performance will radically change how effective your workouts can be, and it is extremely liberating. If you are listening and you're honest with yourself right now, and you're honest, and you feel like you're a slave to the scale, or to the reflection, or to comparing yourself to other people, liberate yourself, and for the next few months, stop caring about that. And I don't mean stop caring like you're like, ah, I'm gonna, no, no, just don't focus on it anymore, and focus entirely on all aspects of performance. Am I moving better? Am I faster? Am I stronger? Do I have more stamina? Do I feel better? Just focus on that. You're gonna have a surprise at the end of that three-month period. And of all those things you listed, when you're, if you're somebody who's listening, and you're already following like our math performance program, I can't help but stress this, and the reason why I want to make this point was because I remember when I was going through performance, Katrina was going through it, my friend Everett was, and I had somebody else, and occasionally we would get together and we'd work out in the gym together on that program. And I remember vividly doing the, the reverse lunge line, landmine to press exercise, super challenging exercise. Yeah. And a lot of moving parts in that. And I remember coaching them through that, and them wanting to increase weight. And I was explaining to them that, you know, this is not the most weight that I could do here, but there's so many things that are being communicated through the entire body from head to toe, that I'm actually more focused on to Justin's earlier point about the beauty of the movement. And I think learning to look at it like that, learning to look at an exercise, and trying to make it look fluid and seamless and everything speaking to each other versus, oh, I could get 10 more pounds up, but then I've got to throw myself to the side a little bit, or I'm kind of wobbly when I do it. And just not a lot of people approach their training programs like this. It's sometimes we get so caught up on either one, how we look, and so it's punishment like you said, Sal. And I think there's also a lot of people that are guilty of just how much weight is on the bar. And when you're following a really good functional training program, that actually, even though that's an indicator of improvement, because you've increased strength, and I do think that strength is one of the greatest pursuits, because it has so many carryovers, I actually think that when you're focused on functional training. It's everything. It is. And movement should be at the top of the list and improving. I would always look at my previous week, compared to where I was at in performance and go, I may not have moved up five or 10 more pounds, but boy, it's way more fluid when I do this exercise. Those are gains also. Totally. And it's not always how much we're putting on the bar or what we see coming off the scale, getting to be able to move and get your body to communicate better from head to toe is a huge success too. And one, that we don't celebrate enough. And I think that you should put a lot of emphasis on when you're training a MAPS performance or any functional program for that matter. No, I'm glad you said that functional focused is focusing on all of it. In fact, functional training done properly is the best type of training to focus on all of the functions or at least the three different types of contractions that muscles make. And what I mean by that is, okay, so if you're not, if you don't know what I'm talking about, every time you lift a weight, let's say you're curling a weight, that curling action is considered a concentric contraction. So that's the type of contraction the muscles shortening. When you lower the weight, that's eccentric. That's you lowering the weight. So your muscles still contracting, but it's allowing itself to lengthen. Okay. Anytime you hold a weight in a position, that's considered an isometric contraction. Functional minded training focuses on all of those things because they're all important. If you want good function, you have to be able to control the concentric, the isometric and the eccentric. Okay. Which one of those makes you build muscle? Which one of those helps you burn body fat? Which one of those is good to train? Yep. The answer is A concentric, B eccentric, C isometric or D all of the above, right? All of the above, they all do other forms of training kind of understand this like body building. They'll say, oh, focus on the eccentric, right? That's where the muscle growth happens, where prep power, you know, if you're training for strength, like, oh, the concentric is the most important, just lifting the weight. And they kind of understand this a little bit, but functional minded training is the only type of training that really pays attention to all of those. Can you walk with a weight above your head, stabilizing? There's your isometric. Can you walk doing a farmer walk or, you know, a suitcase carry? That's your isometric. Are you lowering the weight with good control? There's your eccentric. Are you able to explode or control the weight on the way up? That's your concentric. Well, again, it's more movement focused. So like, can I create the action? Can I create the momentum that's can propel me forward? So, you know, that's the first thing is accelerating. Okay, I want to accelerate this way. I want to accelerate my body. I want to do this. Now, can I stabilize and and control my body while I'm doing this and keep all my limbs and everything in check isometrically? So can I hold my body in a certain position while I'm moving? There's certain isometric components to that that have to occur. And then can I slow my body down? Can I decelerate? So these are all muscle actions controlling the joints that we have to consider. Right. I would argue that the isometric portion is probably the most underrated portion of this. It's neglected in all training. Right. And maybe one of the most beneficial things that you can do. Certainly, if you're not. Definitely for the novelty reason. Right, right. I mean, if you're not training any sort of isometric action, which is why this was important that we included it when we were writing something like performance because we knew the value of that portion. And then we also knew that most people just don't put a lot of emphasis on it. Like you said, Sal, bodybuilding community does a really good job of speaking to the eccentric portion that's slowing down the reps and chasing the pump and getting more blood inside there, like great job there. Your powerlifting and Olympic lifting does an incredible job of talking about the expression of the concentric and explosive and getting up through the rep. But not a lot of people speak to the isometric portion of the exercise, which is as valuable if not more valuable because most people neglect it. Oh, it's, it's, it's funny. You know, years ago when I was doing jujitsu, I noticed as strong as I was, because I've been lifting weights, I would get really fatigued in certain positions because in jujitsu, there's a lot of, especially with the gi, you slow down, you hold a position. So you have this isometric strength, this isometric contraction that you have to get really good at, or you'll get someone in a lock or a guillotine choke. And maybe it's not perfect. So you're squeezing and holding and squeezing and holding. And I would just fatigue, I would just get blown out. So what I started to do is I would get like a medicine ball or at one point I had a buddy who had a dummy and we would focus, we would, we would do these isometric holds on where I'm getting a guillotine or I'm getting a position and I'm squeezing and holding and squeezing. I started to building muscle, which was funny. I wasn't, I wasn't lifting any more weights with this, but because I was doing the, because it was so novel for my body, I actually started to build muscle. I also experienced this with overhead carries. You know, Justin was big on overhead carries. And when we first met, so say now I'm going to give this a shot. I'm going to take a dumbbell or kettlebell, press it up above my head, hold it there and walk or just hold it there for time. And I was surprised at how much carryover I had to the rest of my lifts. And I actually started to develop a little bit of muscle, you know, as long as I've been training. That's a big deal for me. So focusing on though, on all three of those types of contractions is something that functional, real functional training does better than any other type of training. Now the last thing I want to talk about is, I think one of the most important, when it comes to your training, especially if you're advanced, especially if you're pushing your body, the number one limiting factor that's going to, that prevents you from progressing any further is your overall body's ability to recover from training your overall body's total work capacity. Okay. We know that exercise is what sends the signal to the body to build muscle, but along with that signal comes some damage and your body needs to heal. If you had, if you were like Wolverine and you had instantaneous healing properties, you could literally do 10 super hard workouts every single day and you would progress 10 times faster because you're able to throw more at your body and recover from it because your work capacity is so high. Well, when you train functionally minded, when you improve your ability to train in different planes of motion, when you have better mobility, greater ranges of motion, when you focus on all the different types of contractions, you actually increase your work capacity. So now if you train like a bodybuilder, now you can add a couple overhead carries. You can add a couple rotational movements and rather than really hammering your body's ability to recover, you just expand it upon your body's ability to handle all of that work. Work capacity is a big one. In fact, I'll say this all day long, one of the things that the, some of the people that you know that have the most muscle or the best ability, one of the reasons why they're the best is necessarily because they train better. It's because they have the ability to train more. Yeah. They actually have a greater work capacity. And you can develop that by just like focusing specifically on that. When does the breakdown occur and how can I stretch that out a little bit further? Like me being in all of that like demand and that load and that stress on my body, can I withstand just a little bit more? Can I train myself to stretch that out and withstand it just that much further? And there are techniques to do that. And applying those within your programming will have massive carryover. When I'm doing reps, now I don't feel that onset. I don't feel that the impending doom where I'm fatigue, that breakdown is just going to, my body's going to start shutting down. Yeah. I mean, if you're like, oh, I can't, I like to do more exercises. I think I can recover from it, but my joints can't handle it. And I do more of my shoulder hurts, my back hurts, my knees hurt or whatever. Improving your mobility through functional training now opens those doors for you. Now you can do more training and your joint, because your joints are moving better. You know, you don't have to, it's not like your joints either move perfectly or they move terribly. You have kind of different capacities. Well, if you're moving at 85% of your, of what's considered perfect for your joints, you're going to be limited by that. You know, you're not going to be able to do as much as you can do because at some point, like Adam, you'll develop bursitis or tendonitis or issues with your joints. So functional training at the end of the day improves or increases your work capacity. So you could do more on your body, which then of course results in better progress, faster results. And these are all the things that we kind of focus on in maps performance, which this month is 50% off. So you go to mapsgreen.com. You can get that program for 50% off, but you have to use the code green 50 as G R E N five zero no space. Also, we have guides that we write that are totally free. So if you want more information that costs nothing, make sure you go to mine pump free.com. And finally, you can find the three of us on Instagram. You can find Justin at mine pump, Justin, me at mine pump, Sal and Adam at mine pump, Adam.