 All right. Today's episode, we're going to talk about why maps training programs has been consistently ranked as the most effective training programs out there. I like that. I like that better. I like that better. It's much better. All right. So I guess we're going to talk about, I guess the kind of how it all started and what makes the maps programs what they are. Cause we have now, we've got tens of thousands of people who've followed the programs and there's a lot of, we talked about this early on, but we've been on air now almost eight years. We really haven't talked about kind of the deal. Well, I mean, how is this for you right now? You and Doug, right? To think about this, that literally right about 10 years ago, you and him, you were training him, you were working on writing this up. He was testing probably some of the philosophy around it and you were applying some of the things that you were coming up with to your clients at the time. Have you wrapped your brain around that? That's it's 10 year anniversary right now. It's been, it's yeah, man. It's pretty cool. It went by fast, huh, Doug? Too fast. It went by super fast. Does it feel like that long ago? Like both. It feels like a long time ago. You know, I feel like a lot when I see old videos and I go, yeah, it was a long time ago, but it also feels like it went by and like, it's like having a kid, like your kid grows up and you're like, oh my God, where'd the time go? It went by so fast. But so back then I had a wellness studio. So we did personal training and I had massage therapists, their acupuncturists, people that help with nutrition, a lot of stuff. And that's when Doug came in and Doug hired me as his trainer. And now leading up to that point, I had been training people for probably 12 years or so. So I'd been doing it for over a decade and I was always a student, you know, like you guys, right? A student of of a fitness, right? Learning about how things didn't, you know, people did things in the past and what works and what doesn't work. Anyhow, I started training Doug and Doug had a lot of experience with exercise. So he was by no means a beginner. He had been working out for a long time. He'd follow bodybuilding routines. And, you know, he was a bit of a student of the game as well. Came to me because he was referred to me by his chiropractor. And through training Doug, he saw like this really rapid transformation and how long into our, I guess, our relationship was it that you approached me? I wish I could remember the exact amount of time, but I would say within the first year, year and a half. Yeah. Oh, so you guys have been training for a while? For a while. Yeah. Yeah. So I basically, I took some time to see what was actually going to happen as far as the workouts are concerned. And I'm sure you were skeptical because of your experience of lifting over the last, what, two or previous two decades? Yes. So I, yeah. So I had experience working out, of course, I had a lot of frustrations working out over the years. And the philosophy that Sal was putting forth was certainly counter to a lot of the things I'd read in the muscle and fitness magazines. But again, my experience was such that I had tried all kinds of different things and I hadn't seen the success I wanted. And I was very open to a different approach or different philosophy because obviously, if what you're doing is not working, something's got to change. And so I just, you know, I stood back and just went through the workouts with Sal and saw the benefits. And little by little, I started thinking, well, you know, this is something that we should be sharing with other people because it's been game changing for me. Why shouldn't we get this out there? Because most of the information I'd been seeing had been really kind of counter to what Sal was putting out there. How many weeks did it were you into the program before you kind of had that epiphany and we're like, wow, this is different, but also it's super effective in comparison to what I've done before. Well, even during the first month, I started seeing some real changes. So I started out and I gained a lot of strength. I started putting on size and I go, OK, something something's working here. So now you're committed. I mean, I'm committed. And I'd paid for, I think, 10 sessions originally was your first package. And then he had another package, which was 40 sessions. So I nice bomb sale. So very nice. Yeah. So I pointed up the money for that, which was not, it was not cheap. Now he was expensive, but I figured, well, you know, once I'm into it, I want to get the benefits, so I'm going to go all in. And so I did that. And then I actually, I think I purchased that package at least once or twice after that as well. Yeah. But sometime, I think during that towards the end of that first package, the 40s package, I said, you know, I really want to do something with this guy. So be honest, all these years now we've been together, you pretty much control most of our money. Have you skimmed most of that money back that you gave to South? Yeah, pretty much. It's a little by little. Here's that first 10 back. All right, everybody, today's giveaways, Maps Anabolic. That was the first NAPS program and it's quite fitting. Today's episode, we talk about the fact that it's the 10-year anniversary of Maps. Also, stay tuned. We got some cool coming out. Not going to tell you much more. It's going to be a surprise. Anyway, if you want to win free access to Maps Anabolic, here's what you do. Leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we dropped this episode, subscribe to this channel, turn on notifications. If you do all of those things and we declare you the winner, we'll let you know in the comment section that you won. Also, we have a 50% off sale going on right now, three programs on sale. Maps, performance, Maps, aesthetic, and Maps hit all 50% off. If you're interested, just click on the link at the top of the description below. All right, here comes the show. I remember the first time I really had to convince. So Doug was like the perfect client. So you guys have done this. I'm sure you've experienced this. You have that one client that, you know, at first are skeptical, but then you show them and then they're like, OK, cool. Let's just like, I'll go along and follow, you know, what you say. And then it becomes a great relationship. They get great results. Yeah. So he was like the perfect client in that sense. And the first thing I had to convince Doug of was to only work out twice a week, you know, that in fact, when he hired me after when he was hiring me, he wanted to come four days a week. So him and I started talking. He already bought the training and he wanted to do like three or four days a week. And I said, no, no, no, we're going to do two days a week to start with. And he had to convince some of it. But, you know, within a few weeks, he knew, OK, this is, you know, this is working. That speaks to your integrity, too, because Justin would have sold him on the four times a week, you know, walked with him on the other two days or so. I truly found it hard to believe that twice a week was going to do the trick. I really did. But I looked at Sal, I looked at myself and I go, well, this guy might know something, you know, but I trusted the process and he got great. Obviously he got great results from it. But towards the God, towards probably that second or third package that you had done with me, Doug came to me and he says, you know, Sal, he goes, I have some internet marketing experience. He was an internet marketer. He was he sold insurance. But he says, I have some experience. If you ever want to put something together that you want it that we, you know, we can sell online, he goes, I'll do that with you. And I had nothing at that point. I didn't really have an idea of what to sell. I'd always thought about writing a book. But I thought, you know, what would that look like? You know, digitally or whatever. And so I took him what he said and it just kind of stayed in the back of my mind and I went home and it was probably. This is like 2012, 2011, 2013 around there. What time is this? Yeah, I'd say this was either at the end of 2012 or the beginning of 2013. OK. Yeah. Now, now consider it up into this point at this point. I had already just I had already learned a lot about training and had figured out that a lot of the stuff that I thought was effective wasn't. And, you know, I do things like I had, you know, probably a few years before this, I really got into learning about how how athletes trained before steroids even became a thing, how before, you know, supplements became a thing. And this was something that was of interest to me because I knew that anabolic steroids changed how the bodies responded to exercise. So I said, you know, back in the day before that even existed, they had to train the way that my clients train the way that I was training naturally. And there has to be if they train differently, then it's because they were natural. So let me see what they did. And when I look back, there were so many different things that they did that people didn't do anymore. So up until this point, I had kind of figured some of that stuff out. But anyway, he came up to me and said, hey, if you have an idea, I'd love to work with you on it. We could sell it online. And it was probably a week later and I went home that night, maybe a week later, I was up late reading and I would do this sometimes. Sometimes I'd stay up late and I'd read whatever you guys know, I'll get into something. I'll just start, you know, kind of going crazy on it. And I was reading the New England Journal of Medicine and there was a study that I've quoted many times on the podcast on it was a really interesting study. They took groups of men and they compared each group of men into each other on muscle building and the groups were broken up into natural with strength training, anabolic steroids with weight training, anabolic steroids, no weight training. So just sedentary and then just sedentary. So a sedentary, sedentary with steroids, steroids in training and then training naturally. And the results of that blew me away because I did not expect to see what I saw. Right? Because you obviously, you knew that the steroids and working out was going to be the biggest. Of course. Like I'm like, they're going to build the most unique study, by the way. Very interesting. Yeah. The one that blew me away because I would have thought second place would have been the natural lifting group. So the group that was natural lifting, they've got to build the second most amount of muscle, but it wasn't. It was the steroid group that didn't lift weights. Now it was a short study. I think it was, I don't know, I want to say 16 weeks. But in that 16 week period, the steroid group that didn't lift built a little bit more muscle than the natural group that lifted. And I thought, this is insane. The first thing I had was, wow, steroids are really powerful. Yeah. But then the what came to me after that. And I was literally up till three a.m. thinking about this. And this is when I started writing out the first maps program. As I said, you know, what's crazy about this isn't the fact that the steroid group that didn't lift built the most muscle, it's that my previous ideas of how we built muscle is not complete. So the thought process then was, in order to build muscle, you damage the muscle with exercise, the body heals and then adapts. Therefore, to that point, the thought process, I think for all of us at that point in our lives was like, OK, the more damage I do, the better off I'm going to be because then I have a louder muscle building signal, right? You're healing to whatever damage you do. Yeah, there was that. But there was also that I had completely ignored that there could potentially any other muscle building signals. It was damage and that was it. There's no other signals that send the body that the body receives that says build muscle. Well, in this study, clearly there was no damage. There was a hormonal signal, which was the steroids, right? They gave them testosterone. So I thought to myself, and this is why I was up till two or three a.m. that night, I thought, I wonder what other signals tell the body to build muscle that have nothing to do with damage? Yeah, like what other signaling systems tell the body to build muscle? So then I was on the internet going crazy and thinking of experience. My experiences with clients and family members, one that popped up immediately was. And again, I've talked about this before at least 100 times in the show is I had, you know, I have a lot of blue collar workers in my family. I have plumbers and, you know, tile setters, construction workers, male carriers and none of them work out. But they all had muscular body parts that correlated or corresponded to the activity that they did. So like the male carriers in my family all had these really muscular forms, male, excuse me, calves, male and female, all had really muscular calves. And the plumbers of my family, these muscular forms, you know? And I'm like, they're not when you're a plumber or a mechanic or a male carrier, you might cause a little muscle damage at first. But these people have been doing it for 20, 30 years. You know, they're all in the 50s and 60s. That damage stops. They're not like they're walking more or cranking on things that are harder. After the first couple of months, the body's adapted and that's it. Why the heck are these male carriers calves? I mean, literally their calves look like like bodybuilder calves or like I have an uncle whose forearms were like this and he was a mechanic and I thought or plumber and I thought the damage stopped. What is telling these body parts to continue to grow? And I'm like, there's still some signaling going on, even though there's no damage, even though there's no damage, there's some signaling going on. So that was like one like clue that I had. Yes. So you basically had your slip in the shower flex capacitor moment. And it was like signals. Yeah. So I'm like some signals, something and all this different stuff. So I'm like, OK, there's damage. That's a real one. Then there's this like low level, frequent signaling system, you know, which I ended up, you know, figuring out it's kind of like mechanical signaling. Then there's the pump. The pump can actually induce muscle growth itself. So there's another one. So then I thought I'm going to create a program that utilizes all these different signaling systems and puts them together in a way to where the body's constantly getting a signal to build muscle because the challenge with damage is always recovery. You can only damage so much. And then the limiting factor is otherwise, if, you know, recovery wasn't an issue, I could just go work out for, you know, six hours in a row and beat the crap out of myself and I'd get better results. And so that's how literally the first map's program was created. And remember that the day after that, Doug comes in to train with me and I'm all tired because I was up all night and I'm like, I got something, dude. I said, I wrote up a program and we tested it, had clients test it and then. Yeah, how long after riding it, testing it with Doug, implementing it with other? Because this is about the same time when you and I start to start to talk to because you had already kind of tested it on clients. In fact, you guys started to create some of the promo stuff on it. Like, how long was that like applying it to the other the trainers starting to create the promo stuff on it? Months, it was probably, I would say, like a five or six month period because Doug was first and Doug had already been working out with me in a similar way. But then I had him apply things like trigger sessions and, you know, we did a little bit more phasing. And then I had a client, Jim, good friend of mine. He tested it. Then I had Homera, you know, her, she used to work for for both of us. I had all kinds of different friends test it, experienced beginner. And I had them report back, you know, tell me what you feel, what you notice. And everybody was, you know, reporting back like, wow, this is really crazy. Like I'm getting really good results. This is wild. And that's then Doug started putting together. Now, at the time, I didn't know and knew nothing of internet marketing sales. I had no idea you could put a program online, do all that stuff. And Doug's like, yeah, we're going to put you on video. You're going to talk to a camera. Do the whole thing. Yeah, I'm surprised you guys didn't go to the DVD route. That was kind of like, you know, almost in that era. There wasn't a lot of programs out in that era, too. It was like, you know, you had like the infomercials and you had a bit of Beachbody and maybe some like bodybuilder programs like I'd seen, but not a whole lot of like quality fitness programs. No, you know, when he tells this story, one of the things that, you know, I try and challenge myself to think like, man, I wonder if you would have sent me over when Doug sent over that when you sent over the promo video that Doug made, if that would have been hyping up like a, you know, a typical online type of program. Like in it, and it didn't have the philosophy. Like what was that? That was your guys's anabolic signaling program. You know which one I'm talking about, right? Yeah, it's like a 30 minute video. Yeah, the muscle switch. So you got to share a clip of that for this this podcast because when I, yeah, but when you sent it over to me, originally you just wanted my opinion on it. Like, hey, what do you think of this promo video? And what I, what I'm the exercise that I try and do with myself regarding this is, you know, would a mind pump have happened? Had it not aligned with what at the same time was happening in my life as far as programming? Because for most of my lifting career and training career teaching other people, I fell in the trap of creative workouts and, you know, like just hammering the clients and volume and intensity. And I was very much so like in that space for almost a decade. And I was on my way out of that. Like I had started to finally realize like this was not the answer. One, I had applied that same philosophy you did to Doug to myself, like reducing the amount of, and then saw I got bigger than I ever got. I thought, oh, this is wild. Like more doesn't always mean more results. And I was starting to train my clients in these full body routines and really simplify the programming. And so I was just coming into that, like really fresh into that for the last, like say six months of my training career. And when I saw that, that is what hit home for me was like, it was very counter to the trends. Yes, that's, this is not trendy. This is the opposite of what, and it's right in line with what took me my, you know, at this point, my entire career to figure out. And that's what made me pick the phone up and go, let's meet. Otherwise I would have just given you like, oh yeah, cool, bro. Yeah, I like it. You know, it's neat, but it- The video looks good. But it prompted me to like, hey, let's meet. We need to all get together and talk because I don't, there's nothing out there that I see that is presenting this message this way. And it took, and I'm in the space and it took me 10 years to get here. So imagine how many people that we could really help by putting this out there. Well, I thought the same thing. Well, my career too was like, even after I left 24 and kind of went and did things on my own, I was still kind of like experimenting with a lot of the trends in the fitness industry and like trying to train people with all this functional training and, you know, single arm, single leg stuff and all this nonsense. And then I made it to the gym where I was around really high level trainers and sports specific type trainers. And so it just really kind of brought things right back to the basics. Like here's what, you know, you've known this before, but you just rush your clients through all of this. And this is really the meat of what we need to focus on. And that had, that program had a lot of that in it in terms of like just focusing on how to build muscle. The beauty is in the simplicity of it. Yeah, well, so, you know, and you gotta, I mean, you gotta kind of go back and think about why training got to that point because at that point, we're talking 10, 10 plus years ago, the most common strength training programs were like these body parts split, one body part a day, high volume type of deal, beat the crap out of yourself, 50 different angles, you know, and whatever. And you gotta think to yourself like why, why that happened? It's not that those don't work, they do, but a lot of the information on how to build muscle and train with weights had been disseminated from the bodybuilding space. And bodybuilders for decades where first off bodybuilders are at that level have very little in common with the average person. They're just genetically, they're just very different. It's like being seven feet tall, they're just genetically gifted. So what does that mean? That means that when they send a muscle building signal to their body, the average person, that signal may last 24 to 48 hours. For these people, that signal lasts a week or two, okay? Because they're just, their body's primed to build muscle. Then on top of it, they're all pharmaceutical enhanced and that means they have this constant loud hormonal signal that's going on in their body all the time. And so they're the ones that are telling people how to work out. The problem is the average person is nothing in common with this person genetically and is informatically enhanced. And they're trying to follow these routines and they're not working. Now, if you go back at the turn of the century, early 1900s, late 1800s, these, I mean, you're talking about tremendous feats of strength from these strong men and strong women, right? And they were muscular and they were doing crazy things. And if you look at their training, they all trained full body. They all trained three days a week. They all train in a similar way and people, it's funny. When we look back, we tend to think people are stupid. So we look back, oh, they didn't know anything back then. No, no, no, they were wise. They did what worked. And by the way, the only way they made money back then was they didn't have social media. They couldn't promote themselves any other way than going and challenging other strong men on stage. This is how they made money. So you had to put up or shut up. Then you also look at the studies on strength sports, like Olympic weightlifting. Olympic weightlifting has more science put into it than bodybuilding does because it's been funded by countries. It's the Soviet Union for a long time. This is the way that they showed their power. And so you look at the science there and there's a lot of science there that didn't match what we were being told worked. So there's a lot of the information's there. And then the other thing is this is that, look, you guys are both really good trainers, really, really good trainers. What made you guys good? You did it for a long time and you cared because if you care about your clients and you do it long enough, eventually, I don't care how hardheaded you are, how big your ego is, eventually you ask yourself the same question. Why isn't this working? Why am I not seeing results on my clients? Let me try this. Let me try that. So it's like all these different roads, they all go to the truth. That's why when you saw what I sent, Adam. You sift through it all to get the truth. Yeah, so that's why when you guys saw what I sent, it wasn't like new information. It was like, that's what I'm figuring out too. In my opinion, it was the money and the marketing that bastardized the fitness industry because can you imagine opening up a Flex Magazine 15, 20 years ago and seeing Ronnie Coleman or Arnold in the middle of it like that and their workout routine was as boring as Maps Anabolic? Like it would not sell anything. What sold was the tricep-bicep blaster workout with cluster sets and drop sets and pyramids and this unique exercise hanging upside down and that was what sold magazines. That's what grabbed attention. And if you had the shit that works really well that everybody's known about for 100 years, it wouldn't sell. It wouldn't be popular. It wouldn't be new. It wouldn't be unique. Which by the way is the same trap that all the trainers inside the gyms fell into. We fell in the same trap on selling our clients on buying more training from us. If I told my clients, hey, we need a squat, overhead press, bench press, deadlift, that's basically what we're gonna do for the next six months to a year or so and I'm gonna get you great results. I wouldn't be able to resign my clients. Instead, it was next week, I'm gonna show you something new you've never done before or wait till you feel this workout I got coming. And on the other side of that, you brought up the bodybuilding side. But in Justin's world, I think was simultaneously the birth of sports performance, plyometrics, stability, training, functional type shit was all coming on the scene and then you got the hardcore bodybuilding scene. And so the two of them, and again, money and marketing, what was cool in the money and the marketing side on that, like, oh man, seeing somebody jump and stabilize on one leg and jump through all these weird hoops and spin and twist and like balance on a stability ball with a squat bar on your back, like that stuff became so attractive to people and trainers and clients that it dominated the space. And we all fell for, we all fell right into it. I'm guilty of going down the same path in pursuit of filling my client book up instead of focusing on what was really giving my clients results. We all remember people doing tricep press downs while standing on dyna discs, you know? What are people doing? Yeah, everything was, you know, balancing and whatever. And that's when the functional, you know, when it got crazy in that way. And what happens, you end up ignoring what actually produces the best results. Instead, you're like entertaining your clients with what's new and what's different or reinforcing the terrible idea that the more sore you get, the more painful this is, the more you feel like you're gonna throw up, that means we're doing something good. And especially when a client comes to you because they hate themselves, it's actually quite therapeutic. Like, oh, I hate, I'm so fat, I can't stand myself. And then you train at the point where they feel like they're gonna throw up and it's cathartic, yeah, that's what I get. That's what I deserve. I need to be beat up. You know, how many times you get a client come up to you and say, oh, I need, why do you want to hire a trainer? Cause I need someone to whip me into shape. Yeah, yeah. Like, what? I won't train myself that hard if I just don't have the discipline. Yeah, dude. So, absolutely. Another thing that is that now, and it's funny too, cause we're talking, you know, this was over a decade ago. Now it's almost like this is silly to even say, but this wasn't silly back then. Just 10 years ago, it wasn't silly to say that all rep ranges build muscle. You got into debates and arguments with people. It was this rep range is the best. No, that rep range is the best. And I just looked at things and said, okay, look, power lifters are big and strong. If low rep ranges don't build muscle, why the hell do power lifters look the way they do? And then I said, high rep ranges build muscle too. I know bodybuilders that train in the 20 rep range. Again, marketing, it's too nuanced to say that. It's much easier on a sales funnel or an infomercial to say these reps are for this. These reps are for that. Or these reps are for this body type. It's so much easier to sell that idea than to say something as vague as, all rep ranges build muscle and lose body fat. Okay, well then which one am I supposed to use? You're trying to confuse the muscle. Then you can get away with all of them at once. Yeah, or how about this? Like, okay, here's two strength athletes, bodybuilders beat the crap out of a muscle, leave it alone for a week so it can grow. Olympic weight lifters practice these movements every day, the same movements every single day. How the heck can those both coincide? You got hyper frequent Olympic lifters who practice movements on a daily basis for hours, okay? Olympic weight lifters will train two or three times in a day doing, practicing snatches and cleans. And you got bodybuilders over here who are like, I only do curls on Tuesday and I beat the crap out of my biceps and I leave them alone for the whole week. Like, could it be possible? And this is what would go through my head. Could it be possible that there's truth in both of them? And that if we understood that there's truth in both of them, could we use what's true in a way to where the average person could utilize the benefits of both? And the answer, of course, is yes. Yes, there is truth in both of them. And so this is what, you know, what I started to apply with clients with myself. And this is what you guys figured out on your own because like I said, look, you train people long enough you're gonna figure this out. It was funny because even in the world that I was sort of training out of, I was getting made fun of for doing bench press in squats because of all of the functional split stance movements. Like there was this whole movement on basically like Bulgarian squats, split squats or lunges. And that was like, you know, how you would basically load that as heavy as you could. And that was the best way to do that for athletes because of the fact that you're primarily on the field are gonna be in a split stance. And so this whole philosophy around it, which you can make an argument, but for me it was always, I wanna build and establish that fundamental strength. And I wanna, I can load it the most effective way with a barbell, I get strongest doing that. But then I also move out of that and do both. And so it's like, it's not one or the other, it's both. Well, the truth is that, you know, and it's funny because when we get like a trainer who's been a trainer for a really long time and they hear some of the maps philosophy or hear the way we talk about exercise, they're never impressed. Cause like, oh yeah, I know, that's obvious, know that. But nobody has been promoting, wasn't promoting that, at least not back then. Nobody applied it. 10 years ago, it's always been known, especially if you'd been a trainer for an extended period of time, you knew that this is the nuts and bolts of training, but nobody was applying it because it wasn't what sold. I mean, at the end of the day, most all trainers, whether you're online, virtually, or in person, have to, you know, feed their families and have a business and keep clients coming in. And that wasn't what was best to keep clients coming. That's the truth. Now, the reality of that is that, yes it is, because if you stick to good programming, you get a greater percentage of people, way more results, you teach them the fundamentals that they can now carry on forever, and then eventually that comes back to you in referrals and the reputation that you have, but it's hard to see that when you're in it, right? When you're in the end of it, in it, and you got monthly goals, I gotta sell this much to make this much money. And what's a quick way to do that? Oh, a quick way to do that is just like what all the marketers have done, which is sell you on simple, quick ideas that speak to you so I can keep you coming back versus thinking what is probably really best for these clients? I look, now I obviously know you guys now, so I know the answer to this, but even before I knew you guys, I could have made this prediction that our careers all follow the same path. Initially, really good at getting clients, selling them training. They stick around for three to six months, you'll lose them and then you gotta get new clients and you're really good at getting new clients. But then what that eventually morphed into as you got good and did exactly what you said, Adam, is clients would stay with you for years. I bet you the last five years of your guys' career, you probably cycled through almost no clients. You had the same clients, they stuck with you the whole time. But the first five years, you probably trained 100 people or more because of that idea that you had to show them different things and get them crazy sore and supers. So there's a huge myth with trainers, which is that you need to entertain your client that way or show them weird shit all the time. The reality is, no, you just need to be able to communicate it well, but train them in the most effective way as possible. They don't go anywhere. They stay with you forever and you end up becoming far more successful. Speaking of selling the program, that's where the big challenge was. Because when- It's not sexy. Well, when I wrote it out, so here's what I understood about myself because I was a huge consumer of fitness. I knew that I would buy something if the person explaining it to me did a good job selling it, but also had some kind of perceived authority. So if it was somebody who I was like, oh yeah, that person has got some authority and then they did a good job selling it, I would buy it. Regardless if it looked sexy or not, I would at least consider it. So I'm like, okay, I can explain it well. And that was the video I sent you, Adam, to review because I knew you had a really good background in fitness sales. So we sent you the sales video so you could give me some critique on it. But the other part was authority. That was where the challenge was. I remember Doug and I talked about that and we're like, well, how do we build authority? I'm like, well, the only way I know to build authority in the fitness space is to look more jacked than anybody else. I'm like, that's not gonna happen. I could get, like I got shredded, but I wasn't like, you put me up on Instagram or at the time in the magazines, no one's gonna look at me twice. I don't look like any of these people. So I said, maybe I'll write a book. Like, how am I gonna build this authority? And then we talked about maybe doing a podcast. I thought podcasting would be good because it was long form. Cause I don't wanna use my body to sell anything. I couldn't compete with the, you know, those people that were out there. Plus I don't wanna do it that way. I wanted to be able to talk and explain and build authority. And the fans wasn't created yet. Yeah, exactly. So that's when we got on the phone, Adam, we met and then it was like, oh yeah, we gotta do a podcast. Cause it's long form. And, you know, knowing what we know about fitness, it's unfortunately often sold in short form, which includes a picture and a before and after and a couple of taglines. But real fitness, long-term success, requires long form. How do I know this? How many times, how long did it take you guys to sell your clients to make real changes, right? Sometimes years of training them. Well, to that point, you know, that had a lot to do obviously with our strategy of not actually selling the program when it was ready to sell. That's right. I mean, when the podcast had started and we were on episode one, the natural progression I think for somebody in the space would have been to promote the program that we had to sell. And we did it. We sought out to go prove to people that we could help them for free and change their lives and make an impact on them by giving them free advice and building that authority, building that trust, building that loyalty. And then we would be able to offer something up to sale, but we had it all along. But thank God we had the experience that we had to know that, to know the importance of we need to help these people. We need to show these people first before we try and convince them, especially since we were trying to convince them to do something that they were gonna look at and go like, oh, bench, squat, deadlift, overhead press, come on. Where's the secrets at? Where's the stuff that I didn't know that I'm supposed to do at? And so we had to first build that trust through the show. Think of it this way, right? If you look at different pastries, if I just looked at the ingredients of the different pastries, the ingredients will all look the same, eggs, flour, sugar, water, whatever. So that's what you see when you look at a good program versus a bad program, except sometimes bad programs have weird ingredients. Otherwise it's like, oh, that's basic. It's not that, it's how they're put together. That's where programming comes into play. The programming is how much of each, when of each, how to utilize each and how to put them in the right sequence. Like when you're making a dish, there's a time when you add the sugar and there's a perfect amount of sugar. You don't just throw it in the beginning, for example, you would throw it in at a particular time or when you would first do the garlic or whatever, right? So programming is what makes all those ingredients become a super effective program. So you can't look at a program, like I know these exercises, oh look, I understand rep ranges, you know, that's not what makes a program effective, what makes it effective. And by the way, I wanna be real clear, like there were a couple programs at the time that were really good and they had gained popularity through forums. At this time, the internet, the fitness space, forums were becoming a thing. And what I thought was cool about forums was that forums, you had regular people sharing information, there was no marketing, it was all just honesty. And so like starting strength, starting strength had nothing. They had no real marketing, no whatever, but it blew up because people were like, hey, this real basic sounding program is actually working. No, that was some of the best. You know, it was competing with Beachbody and bodybuilding.com at the time, which was really tough, which by the way, the success in those two companies was completely around the marketing side. They would create stuff and then have just a good looking body and attach it to this workout that they would offer just to get free traffic to their website so they can then pedal supplements to them. That was the model that they had done really well and Beachbody, same thing, marketed to a demographic or a person, attached a sexy body to it and it was all around the marketing and sales, not on the effectiveness of the program, which there's a reason why those were, one of them was what, a $500 million company, that went $4 billion is they were great at marketing, not so great as, which I get this all the time, right? When people ask, when they actually talked to my aunt and uncle last night, we were there, we got a chance to hang out with all you guys and asking origin story type of stuff. And they're like, did you imagine it would ever be like this big? And I said, you know, it's crazy and maybe it's a little bit of the narcissism in all of us, 100% we did, but the truth is this, it's not because I thought I was so great or I think that you guys were, what I knew was that there was companies out there like bodybuilding.com and Beachbody, which were massive companies that their main nuts and bolts of it was them showing and teaching these exercises and programs that were to be honest, subpar at best. And that- Some of them downright crappy. Yeah, a lot of them downright, I was trying to give them some respect because they, you know, there are some and bodybuilding.com, there were some. Like there was the Lane Norton's in there and stuff like that that were still producing. So I don't want to like completely shit on bodybuilding.com, but for the most part, most of them were very subpar or on your point with Beachbody shit. And what we had to offer, I knew was incredibly, I think what I could have wrote in my 20s would have been better than a lot of that stuff. But we had finally come together at this point and realized was this was extremely valuable. And if we could just get to a fraction of those people, I knew that we would be able to help most all of them. You knew it was gonna work. Yeah. I think that's why it was easy to get behind it. And to your point about programming and how, you know, it's all about, you know, the structure of the sequencing, the thought behind the actual person experiencing the workout itself. We went through the actual training of it in terms of being with vast numbers of people taking them through that entire process. And this is where you see a disconnect with industries like producing actors to kind of like portray this stuff. There's just this massive disconnect from your everyday average consumer. And so to then take sort of that blueprint that was constructed in anabolic and then, you know, deconstruct it and be like, here's the elements of it and here's why this works. And then now apply a lot of the concepts of how, you know, I used to train clients, how you used to train clients, how we used to like prepare for a bodybuilding show, how we used to prepare for getting ready for the off season. Like all of these factors now made sense in terms of like how we can take that same elemental blueprint and then build upon it. Yeah. The irony of what you said about bodybuilding.com is the forums of bodybuilding.com are what got a lot of the truth out there. You talked about Lane Norton. That's how Lane became Lane. It was in the forums, the free forums of bodybuilding.com, starting strength blew up, which is a great, you know, basic program. It's better than 99% of the strength training programs out there were through the forums, five by five, so basic and so whatever came through the forums. And that's where you would read this kind of stuff. And this is where I would be like, oh, like old time strength training. You know, here's really the gist of it. The gist of it is this, and it's more complicated than this, but this is really kind of what it boils down to. If you're trying to build muscle and you want all of the benefits of building muscle, the faster metabolism, it's easier to get leaner, sculpt the body, look good or whatever. If you want to build muscle, the muscle building signal needs to be more consistent than the muscle breakdown signal. That's it, okay? My body needs to be told or want to build muscle more often than it breaks muscle down because you're never stable. Your body's never not doing anything. There's this false belief that you just maintain. No maintenance is when building and breaking down are balanced. If they're equal, then you don't, you build and you break down. You build and break down, you stay the same. If you want to build, then you have to build more than you break down. If you want to lose muscle and you need to break down more than you build. So once you understand this and you look at studies on muscle protein synthesis, which they can actually measure to a decent degree when your body's building muscles through the signal called muscle protein synthesis. And they can test, you do squats, let's test your muscle protein synthesis. It's elevated. How long does this stay elevated for? Oh wow, two to three days max, then it goes down. But wait a minute, the person's still sore. It doesn't matter if they're still sore. Muscle building signal's gone. In fact, two days after it's gone, it starts to go below baseline. This is why people work out, get sore, recover, quote unquote, go back to the gym, do the same thing, but never progress. Because they're breaking down as much as they're building. So the goal, the idea, the whole, if you really want to, boil it down to the most simple terms, the idea behind maps, the philosophy of maps is can we keep that muscle building signal elevated more often than the breakdown signal? That's all it is. Again, the problem was, I can send a muscle building signal through damaging muscle, but then recovery gets in the way. I can't just keep doing that. So now, it's up for two or three days, it's going down. Do I beat the crap out of the body real hard? I can't because if I do that, recovery says no, sorry, we're not even gonna build, we're just gonna heal. We just gotta heal. This is why you'll get sore and your soreness goes away, but you go back to the gym and nothing happens. What happened? Your body just healed. Adaptation is different than healing. Adaptation is above healing. Healing, and then it's like I scratch my hand, my skin heals, and if I do it right, then I'll develop a slight callus. And over time, I develop a callus. That's the muscle building process. So the idea with MapCentabolic was, which was the first one, and with all the math programs is, can we get the signal to stay throughout the whole week, even though recovery's happening, even though all these other things are happening, and the answer to that is yes. You definitely can't, which is why people then, when we finally launched MapCentabolic, which was a year after we did Mind Pump, and the goal of Mind Pump was, like you said, Adam, was can we give people a lot of good information? Can we build authority? Will people believe us? And at that point, if that all works out, then we'll say here's a program that we have, because we had the program done. The program was done, it was ready to go, the digital part was set up, the videos were done. We did no other work. When we had it ready for a year, we don't launch it for a year, because we want to prove to our audience, A, that we have integrity, so we're not just trying to sell you something, and B, we know what we're talking about. Do you remember whose idea it was out of you too? Because you actually didn't even use the term that stuck with me forever, and why I love that video so much, because it really hit home for me when I watched it. It's the scene where you guys show the bear trap, and you talk about- The muscle recovery trap. You say the muscle- Breakdown recovery trap. Yep, and that clip of that 20 minute video, or whatever like that, hit home for me so much, that I was like, oh my God, like how many of my clients have got stuck in this? How long have I got stuck in this exact situation? So focused on doing damage to see how much results I can get, yet never letting my body get enough recovery, adequate rest, adequate nutrition to actually build and adapt. I was so focused on the damage part, I wasn't focused on the adaptation process. That part of that clip I remember sticking to me so much. Do you remember if it was a term you came up with, and then you came up with the like the visual of it, or did you put together a term? Do you remember how that came together? So Sal came up with the term, I just put the visual behind it. Yeah, yeah. So- That was a powerful moment in that for me. So one thing that I learned as a trainer, and I know you guys did as well, is you could understand the idea and what works, but what makes you effective as a trainer, is you have to say it in a way, sometimes you have to say it 5,000 different times, in different ways, but at some point you say it in a way to where the client goes, oh, that makes so much sense. Cause you could, I could say all day long like, oh, you know, you damaged the muscle and then it needs to heal, but then recover, you know, that's recovery, but then adaptation happens after that. And the person can hear you and be like, oh, you know, that kind of makes sense. And then, you know, one day, and I use this with clients one day, I said, hey, look, I don't want you to get stuck in the breakdown recovery trap. And clients would be like, huh? What's that? I'd be like, well, it's when you break down a muscle, you let it recover, you break it down again, you let it recover, you break it down again, but no actual muscle growth or changes happens. It's just break down, recover, break down, recover, and it's a trap. It's a hamster wheel. You're just running on the same hamster wheel. Once I was able to say it that way, it really resonated with clients. So when I told Doug that, Doug's like, oh yeah, perfect. And he came up with the picture of the, you know, the bear trap. Yeah, you know, even though I had, I had come to that conclusion and understood that, I had never heard it communicated that way. That one, I remember that one in the AMP story I always share that you shared first, that those two were things that I understood, but still had yet to put like eloquent words to how to explain it. Cause you're always looking as a trainer. You can read all the PubMed studies you want and apply all the science. And then the next level to being a good trainer first, obviously is to acquire that knowledge, but then how do you translate that to the average person so that they have that aha moment. And that to me, I'm always seeking that, right? Even to this day, I'm always looking for better ways to communicate the things that I've learned through my experience and reading. And I had come to that conclusion around how I should train cause I was training myself that way now, but like still getting that point across to a client. So they understood what they were doing. And I was like, oh man, that was a powerful way to communicate that. Tell me that didn't resonate with you as a kid when, you know, I would do the same thing. I'd go hammer my, whatever my legs. And then I, because it's like, I thought that recovery meant adaptation. That's what I thought. I thought recovery is the adaptation process. I'd hammer my legs and then I'd be so afraid to do anything else. Go lay in bed like this. Yeah. I'd sit on the couch and watch TV. He'd be like, oh, let them grow. Yep. And then, you know, you end up injuring yourself at some point for something else and you have to wear a brace or whatever. You lose muscle hollow fast. Like this doesn't make sense. Like just sitting there, that sends a signal to the body that shouldn't, not just not build muscle, that it should get rid of muscle. So what's going on here? And yes, I get sore and the soreness goes away, but then I go work out again and I'm not stronger. It's gotta be something else. And it's because adaptation happens somewhat separately. They tend to happen at the same time similarly, but they're different. And I learned this through even my own training. Like how many times has this happened to you guys probably later in your career where you, you're a little sore, but you train the same movement or muscle and then you still build muscle and get stronger, even though the soreness is still kind of there. And then you kind of figure out like, oh, this is, hmm. Yeah. Soreness is really not what I thought it was and recovery might not be necessarily, you know, part of this whole adaptation thing. So, and really, again, the key is what you do is you look at, and you guys do the same thing in all trainers, any coach or trainer who's been doing this for a long time. This is exactly what you do. So I know it'll resonate is you look at the problem, you look at the potential solutions and then you look at the roadblocks with that solution and you say to yourself, how can I move around those roadblocks? What are ways that I could either train or rep ranges or how can I utilize intensities that gets around this problem right here? And then eventually what happens is you end up building kind of this formula of ways to do so. And then of course, when you train people, it's very individualized. So some, it's a little different from person to person, but you end up with this kind of basic, you know, roadmap, if you will, where, okay, this is how it works. And so that's really the, you know, the whole idea. And now we're coming up on, this is the 10 year anniversary. And like I said, it came by real fast. I'm excited for the cake smash that Justin said he's gonna do in your face when you're not ready for it. So happy 10 year anniversary. That's with an actual cake delivery. Let's see what's going on. Oh no. Today we're gonna teach you everything you need to know to build a strong, well-developed chest. When I think of weak points and areas that I struggled with developing for a really long time, chest was up there with the- Yeah, it was for me, it was for me for sure. I got more caught up in the weight I could lift versus how I was developing my body. I think it's one of the most challenging muscles to develop for most people because the form and technique.