 probably one of the most common questions that we get on social media is, Hey, how do I incorporate cardio or how do I continue to play this sport and not lose muscle? Like I want to get better at basketball or I love running or I love swimming. I don't want to lose muscle though. You know, and I've seen this before I've seen people do this before where they'll go and, you know, they like to lift weights and they like the physique that they've built and then they'll incorporate this athletic, you know, pursuit and then they'll start to lose the sharpness of their muscles or they'll start to lose the sculpt a little bit and that's disheartening. Cause it's like, Oh, I kind of want both. But if you do it right, then what you do is you minimize that muscle loss or that metabolism slow down. In fact, if you do it right and you do it really well, you can actually speed up your metabolism at the same time that you build stamina and endurance. You just have to be able to kind of program it properly. And the way to program it improperly is just to go and do it as much cardio as you can for as long as you can. Right. Oh, it's exciting. You know, I'm excited because we have a brand new maps program. I'm going to give it away for free to one of you lucky viewers. One of you is going to get it for free. Stamina and endurance, the ability to go hard and keep going hard. When your stamina and endurance are high, you have the energy to train and play for as long as you want instead of stopping because your body doesn't have the ability. Maps cardio is a full workout program designed specifically to help you build a body that has an endless gas tank that helps you develop a body that is athletic, mobile, strong, sculpted and full of energy. Do you enjoy sweating hard, having the stamina to endure long workouts and activities and not needing to take a break from active endeavors just because you can't keep going? 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So many messages from people who are like, how do I build cardio endurance? How do I build stamina without losing muscle? Don't want to slow my metabolism down. I want to get better at my favorite sport. I want to get better at my favorite outdoor activity or I just like to do cardio type activity. How do I do that? What do I do? Well, we answered the call. We have created a brand new program called Maps cardio. I'm going to give it away for free to one of you lucky viewers. One of you is going to get it for free. Here's how you can win. Leave a comment below in the first 24 hours that we drop this episode. Subscribe to this channel and click on notifications. Do all those things. And if we like your comment, we'll notify you and you'll get free access to maps cardio and everyone else. It's a brand new launch. So that means we got some free goodies and we got some discount. So here's what it is, right? So maps cardio is going to retail at one 70 17 right now. It's only $77 plus we're going to throw in some free stuff. We have an ebook that we're going to sell for 47 bucks called how to boost your VO to max. We have another ebook that's called how to eat for performance. So this is a nutrition based one for performance. That one's also going to be 47 bucks for free. We're going to give those for free with the launch. So maps cardio, 77 bucks plus you get those two ebooks totally for free. Okay. Now this launch ends July 3rd. So you're going to have to act kind of quickly, but here's what you do. If you want to sign up, go to maps cardio.com and then use the code cardio special with no space, all one word for that discount. All right, here comes the show. Cardio can be an effective way to work out. If you do it right, you do it wrong. You end up slowing your metabolism down and losing muscle. I thought you were part of team no cardio. Yeah, I know. No, we need to address that. No, we need to address that because we get that sometimes people attach that to us. Totally not true. When we talk about cardio, we often talk about the people that overdo it, that make that the foundation of the workout, especially when it comes to weight loss and how it can be a very ineffective tool if used improperly, which just so happens to be 90% of the people. Correct. Because mainstream is true because mainstream advice when it comes to weight losses, go do as much cardio as you can burn lots of calories, terrible advice. And we've talked about this a million times on the podcast, but it can send a signal to body to make it more efficient with calories. It pairs muscle down and eventually plateau. And then it makes it much more challenging to maintain the fat loss and look, you lose muscle with that. You end up smaller, but the same body fat percentage. You end up a small, you know, smaller, same flabbiness version of yourself. So what I want to do is I want to talk about cardio. How to do cardio reap the benefits, minimize or negate the potential negatives, right? So how do you keep muscle? How do you keep your metabolism fast and then gain the benefits of cardio training? Well, yeah, because I think one of the things that has been misunderstood is that I think when we advocate for strain training first and focusing on that and we tell people that we normally would tell them, don't do cardio right now, that people assume that we don't recognize all the benefits of doing cardio. Right. Like we do absolutely recognize the benefits that come from doing cardio and how, and all the studies that support how good it is for your heart. I understand that. But when we deal with clients, average people, most everybody that comes to us is trying to change body composition. They either want to build muscle or they want to burn body fat or they just want to get an overall shape or healthier and starting your approach right out the gates with cardio and being cardio focused because that's what they've been taught. This is not the best tool for fat loss direction. Right. And that's just the main point is because that's in out there in the general population, that's how they still think and approach it that way. But there's lots of benefits to cardio and lots of different ways to apply cardio in your training that will lift up your program. Look, I'll tell you what, if mainstream thought lifting weights was the best way to get in great shape and they've got to go to the gym and just lift as hard as possible or whatever and throw weights around, then a lot of our podcasts will be talking about why you shouldn't lift weights in the wrong way or why you should use that tool in an effective way. But it just so happens to be opposite. Nobody's encouraged to go do strength training. Everybody's encouraged to move as much as possible. And so it's a tool that is utilized in effectively and inappropriately. And that's what we what I want to address is how do I take this tool, which can have tremendous benefits for health kit? It's fun. Here's the other thing that we've talked about before, some people love that they love the feeling of stamina and endurance. And I totally can understand that. There were times in my life, especially when I was competing in jujitsu or judo, where I got that feeling of having this crazy gas tank. And so it can be very exhilarating, especially if you're an athlete or you enjoy doing those kinds of activities. So the tremendous benefit, you just got to do it right. So I think let's start with the first thing, which is, again, we're addressing the average person who wants to be very fit, who likes having athletic performance, isn't trying to lose muscle, they want to have a fast metabolism. So that they can eat more and it's easier to sustain, you know, of course, because food is so accessible and tasty, right? So the first thing is that building muscle and strength should still be the foundation. So if you want to, if you want to incorporate lots of cardio or use cardio as a way to burn calories or improve your health or boost your stamina, you still want to make some strength training the foundation because that's what's going to maintain strength and muscle and counter the potential for cardio to tell your body to pair muscle down to become more efficient at calorie burning, which you don't want. Yeah, it elongates the ability to weather a lot of the repetitive stress because the repetitive stress of cardiovascular training, it adds up over time with joint pain, with dysfunction, and to be able to apply a good foundational strength and support system from the very beginning is something that's going to keep you doing what you love to do. If cardio really is something that you're going to be doing indefinitely, like this is something you really need to focus on strength to be able to support your body in those pursuits. Well, so I want you to explain more in depth what you kind of just went over real quick, which is the metabolic side of it, because that's in my opinion, the most important thing to cover and the thing that's misunderstood the most. Yeah, right? There's this idea that, okay, well, why wouldn't I do both then? Why wouldn't I not just strength train and do cardio? I get the benefits of strength training, right? Like you keep advocating for, but then I also want the things that you're saying that cardio provides for me. So why would I not do both and why would you focus first on strength training and why is that so important when we're talking about the metabolism? Yeah, well, you can't. So I do want to be clear. You can do both. You just have to do it right. And so what Adam's referring to. So whenever you do a form of exercise, the reason why your body gets better at that form of activity or exercise is because it's a stress. So it's hard, it's a stress on the body and what your body's trying to do is get better at that particular stress. If I push cardio too much, if that becomes the foundation of my routine, my body's going to, it's really going to prioritize getting better at cardio. And the way it does is boosting endurance, which is not a bad thing. That's great. But also my body's trying to learn how to burn less calories while doing that activity because cardio is a very calorie intensive form of exercise. No form of exercise burns as many calories in 30 minutes or an hour as intense cardio. Nothing, right? So my body wants to become more efficient. Plus I don't need much strength. The traditional cardio type activities don't require a lot of strength. Long distance running, cycling, long distance swimming. Like you need some strength, but you need a little strength actually. Really what you need is a lot of stamina. So my body says, all right, let's make this more, let's make this body more efficient. What it does is it pairs muscle down. So when you look at studies where they combine calorie deficit, meaning low calories in combination with just cardio, you see a lot of weight loss, but then when they break down the weight loss, you end up with a significant amount of muscle loss. You don't wanna do that, right? You don't wanna lose 10 pounds and five of it be muscle. Because what you've done now is you've ended up with a slower metabolism, which means maintaining that new body weight is gonna be more challenging or losing even more body weight is even more challenging. And half of it muscle, half of the body fat, you essentially are almost the same body fat percentage. You're just less strong and you burn less calories, not really a good trade. So, and by the way, making muscle and strength, the foundation doesn't necessarily mean that you need to lift weights more than you do cardio. What it means is you need to place special focus on the strength training and make sure that you maintain or build strength along with this. Because I've trained endurance athletes, many endurance athletes, triathletes. I trained an Ironman athlete one time. And we only did strength training once a week and maybe some mobility stuff on the side. And I would use the strength training as a gauge. Like, oh, we're getting really weak on our strength training. So that's what I mean by the foundation. And when the strength training was good, boy, everything else was great. When the strength training was bad, you would see the person suffer across the board. So that's more specifically what we mean when we say building muscle and strength should be the foundation, especially if you're not this high-level endurance athlete. And your goal is, look, I want stamina and endurance and I want to get lean and I want to be able to maintain it forever. Well, then it's even more important because you want that fast metabolism. Such a great point too, of course, for the metabolism, but also the point you made about being able to measure the success that I'm having currently with my cardio routine is if my goal is I want to add cardio to get the benefits from it, but at the same time too, I don't want to lose muscle. I won't be able to really gauge that if I hadn't first built a solid foundation of lifting consistently. So I know what a good bench press looks for me, what a good squat looks like for me. And then now I can go like, okay, this is my baseline. I want to start to introduce cardio here. My goal is I want to start to introduce cardio while I have this solid base of weight training. And what I don't want to see is me to get weaker in the gym. Can I start to add this? And so the cardio actually benefits my weight training. Can I actually either maintain my strength or even potentially get stronger in the gym without losing all this muscle? And I think that's, laying the foundation first, that's why that's so important because how are you going to be able to measure that if you kind of throw everything out at once? Totally, and that brings me to another point, which is you'll hear sometimes in fitness circles, people will use the word conditioning instead of using the word endurance. Most people, now unless you're a specific type of athlete, like you're just trying to be a long distance runner, or you want to run or cycle for 100 miles or whatever, most people are more interested in conditioning and not necessarily that long kind of endurance. So what I mean by that is the average person loves the fact that they could play hard, work hard, go to the park, run, cycle, do all these different activities and have the conditioning to just have this great gas tank versus just run for three hours, without stopping type of deal. Conditioning is a little bit different than endurance. Conditioning requires more strength. It requires more stability. It's more multifaceted. More speed. Yeah, more speed. It's more athletic, right? It's more athletic than just endurance. And conditioning work is phenomenal for that kind of stamina endurance versus, because you can build endurance by just getting better at running slow for long distance, or you can build endurance by being able to do sled work and some plial work and short arrest periods and compound type exercises or circuits. That'll build that conditioning type of stamina, which most people are more interested in, right? This is where, yeah, you mentioned circuits. You'll tend to see a lot more of those because of the shorter bouts. And this is very translatable to a lot of different sports because you only get brief intervals where you're exerting max effort and you need to move really quickly and that's really exhausting, but you also need a good gas tank. You need some to be able to endure that. And you can mimic that quite effectively in that kind of a setting with circuit training or these short bouts and sprints. I've also thought it, I've always thought it was more functional than like long endurance. Totally. Like when you think about like all the things, the times that you may have to exert like a bunch of, you know, energy like this or to have any sort of endurance whatsoever, like the short explosive bouts are gonna be more realistic of what you are gonna call upon than like what you're gonna have to go for a two hour run. You know what I'm saying? Like that's not realistic. Like let's say your dog just takes off leash and I gotta go get him before, yeah. Or do some yard work. Yeah, or playing with your kids. Or I mean, there's a ton of examples of when you're gonna need these bursts of energy and be able to do that on demand versus how often will I have to just take off for two hours and sustain a two hour run, right? That's, I think it's more functional to be training this way. Yeah, most people who are interested in this are interested in being able to, on the weekend, go do long hikes and swims and rock climb. And these are people who are very active and like to be able to do multiple things and different things. And that's the conditioning. That's what we refer to when we talk about conditioning. And by the way, one of the best ways to measure some of this stuff is what's called VO2 max. A lot of people aren't familiar. I mean, fitness enthusiasts know what this is, or maybe I'd say most people have heard this, but they don't know what that means. VO2 max really represents the amount of oxygen that your body absorbs and utilizes when you're exerting yourself, when you're working out. The better that is, the better your stamina is, right? So when you can utilize more oxygen, more effectively, you just basically build a more effective stamina and endurance machine and improving VO2 max, a lot of different ways to do this. One way is to build more muscle. Automatically, you're gonna improve your VO2 max by being stronger and building more muscle. And by the way, this is why you maybe heard me on the podcast say that strength is the kind of the foundational physical pursuit, because- Of all pursuits. Of all, because if I take, and I've done this with endurance athletes, I've taken endurance athletes and they're like, hey, I wanna get faster in my marathon time. And I just improve their strength by 15% in the gym and they see this boost in endurance versus having to push longer runs type of deal. So that's one way to do it. And then of course, the other way is traditional endurance type training, cardio, conditioning type work. But when that goes up, your stamina goes up and you just, it's basically, you can just go for longer and you have this kind of bigger gas thing. Well, what's great about, talking about the VO2 max too, is this is something that you can improve really quick versus how long it takes to build your metabolism up or build muscle like another, and it just highlights another reason why we always talk about strength being the foundation first is because it is, it's much more difficult to build lots of strength, build lots of muscle, speed up your metabolism. But actually manipulating your VO2 max is actually really easy in comparison to that. This is why you see like in high school and even like college sports, they have what are called like hell weeks where it's like just one week where they do like hardcore conditioning right before the season. And then now they're like in season already expected to play their sport. It's not like they had to do that for six months leading up to that. Like if you're getting ready for being as strong as you possibly can or a bodybuilding show are gonna build this physique, like that takes months and years to build that physique or get that kind of strength to compete at the highest level. But you could actually get in really good sport condition relatively quick because of how fast you can manipulate your VO2 max. Now I do want to caution people that if you do this wrong, you end up what we talked about earlier in the episode which is where you start to pair muscle down. And this is where the challenge is, right? Cause I think probably one of the most common questions that we get on social media is, hey, how do I incorporate cardio or how do I continue to play this sport and not lose muscle? Like I want to get better at basketball or I love running or I love swimming. I don't want to lose muscle though. And I've seen this before, I've seen people do this before where they'll go and they like to lift weights and they like the physique that they've built and then they'll incorporate this athletic pursuit and then they'll start to lose the sharpness of their muscles or they'll start to lose the sculpt a little bit. And that's disheartening because it's like, oh, I kind of want both. Now of course, you can't have perfect both but if you do it right, then what you do is you minimize that muscle loss or that metabolism slow down. In fact, if you do it right, you do it really well, you can actually speed up your metabolism at the same time that you build stamina and endurance. You just have to be able to kind of program it properly and the way to program it improperly is just to go and do as much cardio as you can for as long as you can. That's the wrong way to do it. You want to program it similar to how you program strength training where there's a sets and reps and there's a tempo and a way to kind of put your program together to get your body to do what you want versus I'm just gonna go as long as I can and tell my body, hey, let's lose some muscle. One way to do this is with something called hit cardio. So high intensity interval training. And I remember when, and this was all during our earlier careers as personal trainers, I remember the studies came out on hit cardio blew everybody's mind because at that time, if you were in a gym in the late 90s, early 2000s and you wanted to burn body fat, the way to do it cardio wise was to get on the elliptical, get on the treadmill, get on the bike and just go. 40 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, go, go, go, go. Outcome these studies showing that these 15 minute high intensity interval training based cardio workouts were burning as much or more body fat than these longer sessions. And then they concurrently showed a less of a muscle loss effect. In some studies actually showed a little bit of a muscle building effect, blew everybody's mind. Yeah, much more of a muscle preserving sort of effect to that. And yeah, this is, of course, people were drawn to it too because of the time length because now I can do just this little bit that has quite a bit of an effect on being able to lose body fat and be able to kind of get my composition where I want it to be. However, this is a bit more of an advanced type of a method where we are exerting max effort. So this is high intensity meaning you are going to more of a max situation where we're trying to exert as much effort as possible. So it has to be really structured in a way that is minimizing the risk but also like being able to perform it correctly and without basically sloppy form. Well, this is the order that, obviously when I'm getting ready for a show, I'm going to introduce at one point cardio and utilize that as a tool because it is a nice tool to get lean, right? And to get ready for getting on stage. But this is the first way that I introduce cardio is hit. And the theory for me is like, okay, this is the least amount of time that I have to spend in the gym to get the most bang for my buck and risk the least amount of potential muscle loss. Which is so important when I'm getting on stage or I'm getting on stage, I have to present the most muscular lean physique that I can. So I don't want it to, I don't want to start, which just blows my mind when I still see this with these coaches that start these athletes with cardio 12 weeks out from the show and they're doing this steady state hour long cardio right away. It's like, what are you doing? Like that early on for that long, like you, they literally worked their ass off to build maybe what, three to five pounds in the off season of muscle. The thought that you think you're going to hang on to that starting that much cardio already, that early improvement, you're crazy. I would, I would want to manipulate diet and weight training as much as I can before I introduce cardio. And then when I do introduce cardio, I want it to look like this. I want it to be 15 minutes, 15 minutes, not even every single day, a few days, and then I ramp it up to eventually every day. And then I start adding other forms of cardio before I get there, before I get ready for stage. But I don't want to be doing that for an extended period of time or doing a bunch of cardio first because I care so much about hanging on to muscle. Yeah. So to give an example, and this is, this needs to be individualized because it can be different from person to person somewhat, but to give you an example of a difference between a hit cardio session and a traditional cardio session. So traditional, I'm on a stationary bike and I just ride at the same speed for, I don't know, 45 minutes, right? Hit would be more like I do a 15 second sprint and then I do, let's say like a 45 second slow pace, allow my heart rate to slow back down. And you undulate your effort in between each one of those bouts. Yeah. So I catch my breath, I get ready to go and then boom, another 15 second sprint. And I kind of repeat that. And now the key with this is you want that interval, right? You want that in between sprints to give you enough time to kind of catch your breath, give you enough time to recover enough to exert maximal effort. What you don't want to do and some people make this mistake with hit cardio is they make the interval so short that it ends up becoming steady state cardio. It's just harder, a little harder than steady state cardio because they don't give themselves enough time to get ready to do that maximal effort again. So the numbers I gave can be different. It could be 15 seconds and two minutes, right? Depending on the person, but essentially that's what it is. It's intense all out by a period of recovery, active recovery, and then you do it again. That's why I've seen it get away from people is that whole recovery period of being able to compose yourself again to be able to exert that kind of intense force. And it quickly can turn into just this sloppy way of just trying to endure and get through the workout as opposed to making sure that each exercise has that kind of intent where we need to get as much out as we can in that short burst and then we take that time to kind of regenerate and recompose. Yeah, you know, I'll give you an example, right? So to give you an example of like two types of athletes that might one do more of a kind of hit style in their sport and one do like the more steady state, you look at long, long distance runners, obviously steady state, meaning they run the same speed for long periods of time. And the other one would be like soccer player. Soccer players in a whole game run miles and miles of miles. Have you added up the miles that they ran? Tremendous amount of miles. They're always moving. But they're not, they're moving kind of like this active recovery pace interrupted by these maximal effort exertions where they're sprinting and then they're kind of cruising and then they're sprinting and they're kind of cruising. The performance that a soccer player has stamina-wise in the real world is very applicable compared to a long distance runner and their types of stamina. So not saying one is necessarily better than the other, but I'd say 99% of the clients that I train that were interested in stamina and endurance would be more interested in the soccer players type of stamina endurance, that conditioning versus the distance runners type of energy, sorry, stamina and endurance. So that's the example of like hit versus the other types of cardio. Hit cardio also, like we said earlier, it preserves muscle. And in some cases even it builds a little bit of muscle because of the explosive, you know what it is? Hit cardio is like the strength training of the cardio world. It really is. So if you wanna preserve muscle- Do you think it's that the explosiveness of the training that is calling upon more muscle fibers to actually be explosive? You need more strength. And or that you're doing such a minimal, a limited amount of time where you're actually elevating your car rate. I mean, that's really why it's so muscle sparing, so it's important that you understand that. Part of the reason why hit is so muscle sparing is one, you have an explosive movement that requires more muscle fibers, you recruit more muscle fibers. So then the body sends a signal, oh, we need to build more muscle there. And then the other aspect is I'm only keeping my heart rated elevated for a short period of time before I let it come back down to rest again. So I'm not telling the body that, oh, we're gonna be doing these long distance runs for extended period of time. It's only a short period of time. So the body doesn't adapt and pare down muscle. That has to be the reason why it's so valuable in comparison. It's the quote unquote rest period, not really a rest period, but it's an active recovery period. It's the short bursts of maximal effort. It's all of the above that makes it so muscle sparing in comparison to the other form. Just to paint a picture in a visual, right? You look at a sprinter versus, you know, your endurance marathon runner and just look at the body type that that typically produces. So you just can see, well, why are there, it looks a bit more muscular on the side of the sprinter versus, you know, long distance runner. It's totally different pursuits and the body will adjust based off of the stimulus you're providing. Yes, now this next one is gonna sound funny, but it's so understated. And this one I really saw the value in just as a trainer working with people. And that is to be active daily, but here's a more important part. Pick something that you enjoy doing. There's so many types of activities. Let me take it back a little bit. So many types of activities that people enjoy doing that require a certain level of stamina and endurance or that build stamina and endurance, like water skiing, swimming with your kids or your friends, hiking, playing with your Frisbee at the park or chasing each other, playing hide and go seek or playing soccer with your friends or, you know, rock climbing. Like there's so many activities that people enjoy doing that by them. You're just doing them because you love doing them. And they're great ways to build stamina and endurance. And the reason why they're so great is because it's not working out. You get lost in it. You have a blast, you have a lot of fun. And this is key. If you want, and I always tell people this, like, okay, you've got your two or three days a week of strength training, you wanna add cardio. My next question is, is there anything you just enjoy doing? That's active, that's your cardio. Do that, go have fun doing the thing you want to do. Just find something fun that yeah, it doesn't feel like work and it draws you back and you're moving your body continuously and there's all kinds of forms of that that appeal to different people for different reasons. But there's a lot to pull from there even if it's just going out for a hike all the time or being outside. Like for me just, I make a rule that I just, I'm not able to be inside. It's a nice day. There's no way I'm gonna be inside. Like I have to figure it out outside. That usually promotes a lot more just random activity in sports and things that I could find myself involved with. Well, this is why you never hear us tell the people that love to do these things to stop doing it just because we all hear, people hear us talk about cardio and how it can be counterproductive sometimes with trying to build muscle or burn body fat. And then we'll get questions that come in that are like, oh my God, well, I love to do this. I love to surf and I'm going out sometimes. And then they're like, should I stop doing that to build this muscle or burn this body fat? It's like, you'll never hear us say don't do that. Like if you love doing something that is active and physical and you, like I'm never gonna tell a client that stop surfing or stop going for your runs that you love to do. It's the audience that we're trying to speak to when we talk about that are the ones that weren't doing anything. They want to get in shape and they want to lose body fat or they want to build muscle and they've heard that they should do all this cardio to get there. Those are the people like, hold on, pump your brakes before you start doing all this extra activity that you don't need to do. Let's lay the foundation and strength training first before we start to introduce the cardio. It's not the person who loves to do this physical activity. If you love doing that, it's gonna be a part of your life forever. Maintain that. Yeah, and I'll give a personal example. So I'm not a big runner. That's no surprise. I don't enjoy it. I don't think it's very fun. Hold your laughter. Yeah. I don't think it's very fun. I never have thought it was very fun. But at one point. It's fun to watch though. Yeah, at one point in my life I was really into jujitsu and judo and I loved doing it and I do it four days a week and I'd show up to class and I'd roll with people and just had fun. And these are two, two and a half hour classes and I didn't throw a blast. So, and it was great. At that time, during that period of time, and I would do that. I did this for at least, it was like six or seven years. I was pretty consistent. And at the time, my wife at the time, my ex-wife now, but my wife at the time had signed up for a half marathon and she trained for the half marathon and she ran for it and all that stuff. Anyway, I went to support her in the run and I said, and I never ran. All I did was jujitsu and judo four days a week. And I said, you know what? Let me, I'm gonna do this with you because it sounds like a lot of fun and I didn't sign up for it. I'll stop if I need to. And I ran a half marathon and I ran the whole damn thing. And it wasn't an issue. And I never ran. It was just, I did something that was fun that required stamina endurance. I didn't look at it as like this way to build stamina endurance. It was just this really fun activity. Now these days, it's hiking. I really enjoy going on really challenging hikes. And I'm gonna build more stamina endurance doing that just because I'm gonna be super consistent doing it. So again, this can't be, I can't overstate this. You wanna build stamina endurance and burn more calories and be active. Don't look at the cardio machines as your way of doing it. Now that's one way to do it. But if that's boring as hell, I don't know. Look, I tell you what, I don't have, I've never had a single client that was like, my God, I got, you know, oh, it's Sunday. I got some time. I think I'll go on the treadmill inside the gym and just, you know, everybody I've ever worked with when it became to activity, it was always something else, something they enjoyed doing, either a sport or something they enjoyed doing with friends and family. Pick something like that, try doing that frequently. Great way to build stamina endurance and you'll be most consistent doing that. Now, the next one is one of my favorite ones to talk about because I think it is the number one and biggest mistake that people make when doing cardio, especially when they're trying to lose body fat, is nothing will make you pare down and lose muscle faster than not eating for performance and training like a performance athlete doing cardio. So ramping up cardio activity while also reducing calories and nutrients, nothing will get muscle to disappear faster than that combination and it is so common. Especially if you're not eating enough protein. I look, I'm old enough to remember when endurance athletes were encouraged to eat tons of carbs, tons and tons and tons of carbs because it makes sense, right? Carbohydrates are an easy source of fuel and energy. You need to burn glycogen in order to perform. So I'd get these clients and I'd look at their food, I'd have them keep a food log and I'm talking about 150 pound male kind of endurance athlete and he's having like 60 grams of protein in a day. So like hundreds of grams of carbohydrates and all I would do is I, and sometimes I wouldn't even bump their calories. I would just say, you know what? We're gonna trade 100 grams of carbs for 100 grams of protein, same calories. Let's see what happens. Performance would improve. They would get stronger. One of the best ways to protect yourself against muscle loss is to eat a high protein diet. Eat close to a gram of protein per pound of body weight. And of course, this is different from individual to individual. So sometimes that much protein affects people digestion negatively in which case you can bring it down. Studies will show that 0.6 grams per pound of body weight is probably enough to hit that kind of maximal amount of protein. But studies are very clear on this. A high protein diet, all things being equal, minimizes muscle loss, and in some cases actually contributes to muscle gain, even in endurance athletes. So you got to eat, and this is one of the best things you could do. When you're utilizing cardio, just like we say with strength training, fuel your body for those adaptations, that's gonna make the fat loss much easier versus, you know, what everybody does, they do lots of cardio and they immediately cut their calories way down. Like you cannot send your body a louder signal that says, hey, get rid of this metabolically active muscle, you can't send a louder signal than that right there. Well, this is where it becomes even more important when we talk about actually not wanting to see the scale move too much. Because if you're gonna do a program where you're gonna introduce cardio and be training at the strength training at the same time and your goal is fat loss, you really don't wanna see that scale move that much. Or else it's a quick way to know that I'm probably paring down muscle. If you are eating like you're supposed to, feeding the body enough nutrients, giving it enough protein like you're saying, and your strength training and your lifting, and then you're also doing cardio in there and the scale's starting to dip down, this is where it becomes a mind fuck for people because I came to you, you know, as the client and I said, you know, Justin, I really want to lose this body fat but I also wanna feel athletic and I wanna increase my stamina so that's important to me. So I wanna do cardio too, what does that look like? And then we start going and I think we're doing a great job because I see the scale going down and that's part of my goal. I told you that I wanna lose fat and I've made the connection to losing body fat or losing my belly to what's the weight on the scale and so I think I'm doing the right things because that is going down. But in this case, this is where I'd be very careful is like, I don't wanna see that if my client, I actually, I know if I'm strength training them properly, I'm feeding them properly and we're doing cardio, the scale doesn't have to be moving very much, I know I'm changing that body composition. Yeah, now I do wanna be, you also need to be clear, they're still getting smaller. Right. There's a body composition change. So if you gain five pounds of muscle and burn five pounds of body fat, scale's the same. But here's the difference, faster metabolism, stronger and smaller, smaller muscle takes up, I don't know, roughly something like three fourths, maybe of the space that body fat does. So you've lost that much size, but the weight is the same but you're harder in terms of how you feel, more sculpted. More defined. More defined and smaller. I just had this happen with my sister, she's been working out and she's doing the weight, she's doing everything right. And I hadn't seen her in a while, I looked at her and I'm like, how much weight have you lost? She's like, you wanna know something? She's, the scale hasn't moved. I'm like, I bet you're smaller. She goes, oh yeah, I'm definitely smaller. And I'm like, how many calories are you able to eat now? She goes, I'm eating way more and I'm burning way more calories. Now eventually, if you have a lot of body fat, eventually the scale starts to move down. But definitely initially, you want that body composition change to happen and you have to feed yourself appropriately in order to do that. I'm always like, in terms of our last point, really like trying to highlight this of a good approach of exercise selection to compliment your cardio pursuits. And I'm always trying to get people to think in multiple planes and not always just in this one dimensional direction. So we do a lot of things in front of us and we stay in this one plane of motion where our body is so much more capable of different directions and to be able to reinforce your joints by moving laterally, by rotating and twisting so important to incorporate. Otherwise, as we get this repetitive stress in just one specific type of movement, it's just inevitable we're gonna face pain at some point. One of my favorite tools for this next point, which is what you're talking about, functional exercises. And by the way, I hate the term functional because it's been misused quite a bit. It's like the only thing that really covers that. Yeah, but a tool I love for this is the sled. I love the sled. It's like strength training and stamina at the same time. Driving the sled, pulling the sled. We're the best tools out there. Using, doing lateral movements. It's like you're sending a strength and muscle building signal simultaneously at the same time, right? That you're sending an endurance and stamina signal, right? Now you can use barbells and dumbbells and cables and organize your strength training in a way that'll help do this as well. Functional exercises are typically not isolation, okay? And I say typically, because I could definitely use an isolation exercise that'll improve someone's function if that's what they require. So all you trainers out there that wanna pick on everything I say, yeah, of course. But generally speaking, functional exercises are gross motor movements, right? They involve most of the body. They're dynamic. They're not stuck. They definitely don't typically use machines. You're not stuck on a track moving in one particular way. And it does and it uses all the different planes, right? It gives you strength and stamina in an applicable way to activities that you do outside in the real world. For the people who love stamina and endurance, for the people that ask us these questions, what they really want is they wanna be able to do their favorite things better. Like the surfer who asks us the question, the questions about this, what they want is they wanna be able to surf better. They wanna be able to surf longer with less pain, right? Or the guy who's like, okay, I got kids and I wanna be able to play at the park or coach their team and I wanna be able to go run drills with them and not fall apart or be in a lot of pain, right? This is where functional exercises are so valuable because they allow you to do all those fun, stamina-based, endurance-based activities better and longer and with less pain. This is where functional exercises play a big role. Well, give me an example. Let's take either a surfer or take somebody who has a type of sport. They like to play and they wanna improve and they also want to do some functional exercises that are going to benefit the stamina cardio side of that. What are some type of training modalities that you guys would do? Like what specific exercises I should say? Yeah, so obviously it depends on how we program the whole thing, but I love the sled. I like the sled because it's very functional. It has a lot of carryover. Coaches, you know, you can drag and pull it so you're getting a lot of posterior work too. It's very versatile in terms of being able to kind of cover all those different types of planes of movement and add volume to your training to be able to have that kind of strength and build what we call work capacity. Yes, yes, complexes are good where you're doing like three- Slow risk too, right? So it's another benefit to- Multi-plane lunges, amazing. Yes, complexes are great too where you're doing like three exercises. I wanna be careful with this because you can, programming is very important when you string exercises together. CrossFit early on proved how bad programming could be when you string exercises together, when they would put Olympic lifts in the middle of a circuit and people would get hurt and stuff like that. So complexes can be very valuable. Like if you put the right three exercises or the right combination of movements together, they benefit each other, you get the stamina and endurance and you also get a strength signal with it as well. I'm glad you brought that up because I remember there'd be times where I'd be training a client just like this and we would run like, I mean, whether you call them tri-sets or giant sets where you're doing multiple exercises, kind of like a circuit-based and I'd get people coming out, this is right when CrossFit was really getting popular and stuff and people come out like, oh, are you training them CrossFit? I used to get so irritated and so mad because I wasn't CrossFit, but people just started to think that every time you do multiple exercises- Anything was functional was basically- Yeah, if it was a functional movement and done in consecutive order with another exercise, right? Then, oh, you must be doing CrossFit or whatever. It's like, no, that's not what we're doing. But I mean, there are some things that they were on the right track for, I think, with the way they originally started programming. I think the mistakes were to the point you made, Sal, was they did some really technical lifts that they would throw in the middle of these really taxing type of exercises or runs and that's where you increase the risk so much that even though you're getting great benefits from training this way, the risk versus reward isn't worth it and there's ways to reap those same benefits by programming differently. Yes, and also, using a tool in the wrong way, like for example, explosive training. Explosive training really can build your ability to generate force and speed. However, if I take an explosive exercise and I put it in a complex, it loses all value. Now I'm just jumping. Now I'm just getting tired, right? And this is what you would see with CrossFit or you would see with people who put complexes together. So how you program your exercises together makes a big, big difference when we're talking about complexes. But if you do it right, you get the muscle building effect, you get the stamina effect, it's functional and the risk of injury is really low. And now this is not a point, but I do wanna also comment on this that one thing that can improve your cardio-stamina endurance is improving your mobility and your stability as well. When you look at, for example, and I'll use an analogy, let's say I'm putting a car together and trying to maximize my quarter mile, okay? One thing that you look at when you're trying to do this is am I losing any power, am I leaking any power in ways where it's not gonna be able to put the power to the tires, to the pavement. An easy example would be a car with a lot of horsepower that can't grip the road, right? Lots of power lost because I'm not able to get fast because my tires are spinning in place. Mobility and stability work does that for your body so that when you're running or rock climbing or surfing, you don't get these losses of power, these losses of stamina trying to- It provides attraction and stability that you're able to then kind of generate more force because your body is capable of doing that. This is why, studies will show this, this is really weird, right? But an experienced athlete will burn less calories than an inexperienced athlete doing the same activity. You would think it's, how does that make sense? Well, because experienced athletes become efficient and efficient and technical. So mobility works very important also and I do wanna make sure I communicate that. Now, here's what we did, right? So we just covered some points about cardio, how to do it right, how to minimize muscle loss or in some cases build a little bit of muscle. But this requires programming and some people just wanna all done for them. So here's what we did is we put together finally a cardio program that's called MAPS cardio. So MAPS cardio is designed to build strength, stamina, endurance, give you a better gas tank. This is for people who again like to be active and do all these athletic endeavors. Also doesn't wanna lose muscle. Someone who doesn't want the metabolism slow down that can come from doing excessive cardio. We designed this for people who like to do those things. So that's what we have with MAPS cardio in the program. You have workouts with strength training. You have cardio workouts. So you can use cardio machines. You could do some of the stuff outdoors. And we've included days in there where you get to do your favorite activity as part of your workout. So if you like to swim, if you like to run, if you like to row, if you like to rock climb, there's programmed in this program those days. So you don't have to give up your favorite activity to follow one of our programs which is a critique that we would sometimes get with some of our other. And there's a literal mobility class that runs you all the way through some of the best moves that will help to enhance your body through these cardiovascular pursuits. Right, now we also did this with the new, cause it's a brand new program. We're just launching it. We also did this because people are gonna be interested in maximizing stamina endurance by improving the VO2 max which we covered a little bit. And then we talked about the nutrition part. Always lots of questions with nutrition. We wrote two e-books, okay? VO2 max, how to boost that and a book on how to eat for performance. These e-books eventually will be sold on their own. They'll be like $47 e-books. But what we're gonna do with this launch is we're gonna throw them in for free. So you get maps cardio on this launch and you're also going to get the two e-books for free. Also, because it's a launch, the price is discounted. So instead of $117, which is how much it's gonna cost, normally it's gonna be 77 bucks. So for $77 you'll get maps cardio full workout, cardio-based type of workout, including strength training, mobility, cardio workouts, all that stuff. Plus those two e-books I talked about, how to boost your VO2 max, how to eat for performance which are included, all for that price right there. And that's this launch. This launch special ends July 3rd. And if you wanna get yourself started or just learn more about it, go to mapscardio.com and then the code for all the stuff that I talked about, the free e-books and the discounted price is cardio special with no space. So cardio special and you'll get all that stuff hooked up for you. The rules that apply to somebody who is going from, a man who's going from 20% body fat to 15%. The rules that apply to that person are the same as the rules that go from 10% to 5%. The difference is everything that we talked about.