 All right everybody, don't think of zebras. All right, here's what just happened. You're thinking of zebras. What's my point? If you want to stop a behavior, if you want to change your behaviors, don't think to yourself, don't do that. Doesn't work. You have to replace it with something else. In fact, the most effective strategies are to find behaviors that are healthy that give you a little bit of what the bad behaviors were giving you. In other words, if you need to feel more relaxed, if you need to feel some comfort, find a healthier way to do that with other behaviors. You can't simply stop behaviors. You have to replace them. I love this tip. This reminds me a lot of when I would golf and it was like, you get this like water hazard right in front of you. And all you think is I have to hit it over the water hazard. Or don't hit it in the water. Don't hit it in the water. Don't hit it in the water. Hit it in the water. It's just that weird psychology where it's just so you're so focused on that negative aspect and you're not thinking about everything else to get you somewhere. It also reminds me, I think of maybe the single greatest hack that I've figured out as a coach and trainer when it came to diet with clients. Instead of looking at these bad habits or behaviors around eating fast food or drinking alcohol or I didn't focus on that with the clients. Instead, I focused on what I wanted them to go get. The psychology around that was just mind blowing on how successful it was. It was crazy if I told somebody that they can't eat these things. Sure, some people that had a lot of good discipline could stick to it, but it was inevitable that they would eventually break. This was six months a year earlier. And I used to justify that early on as like, oh, this is just job security. These clients need me, they're gonna need me forever. I really did. It was a bad way to look at it. Instead of thinking like, how do I really solve this? I just, oh, some people aren't disciplined enough. No, the truth is that when you tell someone they can't have it, they fixate on it. And then it becomes this rebellious thing. This to me became, by the way, this applies to everything. And this is, I'm applying this to myself in certain aspects of my life right now, but this for fitness became very clear when I trained a young lady who had struggled with eating disorder. And so her mom hired me and she told me specifically my daughter, anorexic, she's recovering. I'd like you to train her. And I had talked to the girls therapists before training her because I thought, I had my own body image issues that I dealt with. And I thought, how am I gonna not trigger this girl with working out in the gym? If she has body image issues, she was anorexic. How do I talk to her about diet? How do I talk to her about exercise? When all I do is talk about getting leaner, looking better at that time, right? Avoiding these types of foods. And the therapist said, no, no, just have her focus on getting stronger. And it was like a light bulb went off. I'm not gonna talk to her about her body or weight loss or don't restrict yourself with diet or no, don't not eat like you did in the past. All I did was I said, hey, what we're gonna focus on is getting you as strong as possible. That's all we're gonna do. And so she took her focus off of appearance and I gotta look a particular way to, I'm just gonna get stronger. And that was amazing. So relieving. Not only was it relieving, but what do you have to do to get stronger? All the stuff that I would have wanted her to do anyway, right? She has to eat more protein. She's got, we're gonna pay attention to her performance, takes her eyes off of her body. And the success was just exceptional. And that's just really what it is. You know, you're also highlighting how I can always tell like somebody's like a really good coach and a trainer. And also explains why I think sometimes people that listen to the show get frustrated probably when they, they recommend like some trainer, right? Some young trainer who like touts all the great studies and they're like, and he's super fit and he's motivational and they're like, why don't you guys bring him on? He's so great. He's just that. It's like, I can tell by what he or she is communicating at what stage or level they are as a coach and a trainer. They haven't realized it yet. Yeah, and it's like, and it's not to knock on them and say like they're bad. It just means that they haven't reached a level yet of really understanding how to help these people. Sure, they can regurgitate a study about nutrition or exercise, which there's a lot of value in understanding those studies. I think that's part of the process. But if that's all they're hammering and they're drilling down to people is the science and the studies and they're not talking about behavioral science and the psychology around everything that we do. They're missing the biggest piece in my opinion. So I'm not excited about bringing them on to share their knowledge and information because it's not there yet. It's not at a place where it's really gonna truly shift the way people look at exercise and nutrition. And really that's where the conversation has to go because anybody can Google search now a study or understand how to exercise or eat properly but learning how to change behaviors, that's the monster. Yeah, so for someone listening, how would you apply this? Well, if you reach for food and you've identified that the reason why you reach for certain things is because you're anxious. Let's just say, let's just say you're uncomfortable and food brings you comfort. So in uncomfortable situations or when you're under a lot of stress, you've identified in yourself and this is different from person to person. For some people it's boredom, for other people it's whatever, but let's just say this is you, right? When you're uncomfortable, you're stressed out, you reach for hyper-palatable, enjoyable foods because in the moment while you're eating them, they do satisfy something. They do solve the problem for you temporarily and yes, the solution is terrible in the sense that it causes the problem to get worse over time because obviously your health goes down more, you become more, let's say obese which causes more stress, more anxiety, which causes you to eat more and all that. But in the temporary, it does solve that problem. I don't feel good, I'm anxious. While I'm eating this food, I feel really good. So you may say to yourself, I need to stop eating that food. That's like trying not to think of zebras. You're gonna fail. Instead say to yourself, what feeling am I looking for? I want relief from this anxiety or this stress or this discomfort. Let me think of a better alternative, something that's healthier that will give me some of that. And it's not gonna replace it completely. You've already developed a relationship with food where it really does a really good job for you, but think of something else that can kind of do that a little bit for you. So you might say to yourself, well, okay, I really like talking to my friend. So when I have that feeling where I need to just medicate myself with food, I'm gonna call my friend or maybe it's a walk or maybe it's stretching or maybe it's listening to an audio book or what it really doesn't matter if it's a better behavior, you could replace the old one with that better behavior and then over time, step ladder yourself to better and better behaviors to the point where maybe you don't even need to find something for yourself. But if you just simply get rid of that behavior, you haven't solved the problem. The problem is not the food that's causing problems for sure. The problem is you don't know how to deal with whatever it is, discomfort, anxiety, stress or whatever. And until you figure that out, it's gonna be a struggle. Today's giveaway is this super bundle. Here's how you can win that. Leave a comment below this video, the first 24 hours that we drop it, subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. If you win, we'll let you know in the comments section. Also, we got a sale. It's January. This is the biggest sale of the year for us. So check this out. We put together four bundles. We discounted each of them by 300 to $350 off. Here's what they are. We have the new to weightlifting bundle. We have the body transformation bundle. We have the new year extreme intensity bundle. And then we have another body transformation bundle. This one's 2.0. You can get all of them if you click on the link at the top of the description below. All right, back to the show. So I'm curious, you shared some of this off air with me and some of the stuff that you're trying to do. I'm more curious, I'm less curious about the vices. I think everybody has vices or things that they tend to gravitate towards in those moments. I'm actually more curious on, have you hacked into the things that you're replacing those feelings when it comes along and you want to do something. What have you found is the replacement for that? Okay, so I want to preface this. I really, getting super personal sometimes for me is hard, but so this is going to be very personal. And it's hard because it feels, obviously it's out in the public and it feels like, oh, I'm signaling to everybody what I'm doing or whatever. At least that's how it feels to me when other people do it. I get annoyed with it. So I'm doing the same thing, but there's a reason for it. I'm asking you so. But it's cooler. Well, here's the deal. There's a reason why I did this. Okay, so let me back up. So I've been trying to reduce my use of things that help distract me from negative feelings. So one of them is cannabis, so I can use marijuana. Another one is cratum. This is an over-the-counter herb that has got some opiate qualities. Social media can be like this for me as well, but those are the two big ones. And you guys know this, I've been trying to reduce my usage now for, I don't know, six months or longer. And I kept failing. I kept failing, I kept failing, and I kept failing. Now my usage wasn't like through the roof. It wasn't like I'm getting stoned all day long. It was at night, before bed. My cratum use, I think I got up to at the high end, I was taking maybe seven or eight capsules a day, which is not a lot. No, I know people, I mean, not people. I know that people can get as high as 30, 40, 50. I was functional in this. I was going to work and whatever. But when I tried to stop, I couldn't. It's happened to me a bunch of times where I'd like go like a day or two, and then I come back, day or two, and I come back. And did you connect that feeling of not being able to stop was more of the physiological effects from those things, or was it more of a mental thing? No, there was no physiological withdrawal. Oh, interesting. It wasn't long enough. Interesting. It's like, you know how long, you have to go off cannabis for a week or two before you start to notice withdrawal with cratum. I guess, depending on how much you're used, but I didn't, I wouldn't notice anything if that went off a day. It's not a big deal. It was all psychological. Interesting. So you've been like irritated, moody, more so, or is it like, what do you notice? I want to feel good, and I don't want to feel anything other than good. So it could be anxious. It could be stressed. It's usually anxiety. I'm very anxious and I'm very uncomfortable on my own. Just be honest, uncomfortable on my own skin. And I don't process shit. I keep it all down here and I just do what I think what I'm supposed to write. So I was trying to stop, trying to stop. It wasn't happening. And, you know, my wife's super supportive and we've been going through some other stuff. And so I said to myself, you know, I know myself very well. Here's something you guys know about me that maybe the audience doesn't know. I don't talk about anything to anybody. If I'm having a challenge or whatever, you guys, everybody in the world that's close to me doesn't know until it's so bad that it breaks. Nobody knows nothing. I don't talk about it. And it just goes back to childhood. I just don't talk about anything. So I keep everything inside. And I said, okay, I need to talk to people because that keeps me accountable. And I think if I tell people that then that's gonna make me feel either like I'm helping someone, which I feel, if I feel like I'm helping someone, I'll be more motivated to be consistent. And number two, I'll be embarrassed to not follow through. So I said, who in my life who are the people I would least likely want to tell I have a problem with cannabis and cratum or just substances in general? My parents. My parents. The last fucking people on earth, I would want to tell are my parents. You did not. Did you really? Oh wow. I did. I got on the phone. It's a bold move, sir. I know. I got on the phone. To my parents, I want to be perfect. So I got on the phone, I got on my parents and I had Jessica on the other line because I wanted people there. And I told my parents and they were very supportive. And of course my mom's a little anxious. So she's like, are you doing anything else? Are you? You know it's a gateway. Oh no, no, no. You don't understand. Are you doing meth? Are you doing heroin? No, she didn't. I don't know. She didn't. Like, no, mom, I'm not. It's not like that or whatever. She's like, is your health going bad? Are you under a bridge right now? What's that mean? Yeah, no, mom, not, you know. I'm not having sex in alleyways for drugs. I said, no, I told her, I said, I said, I've just, I tried to stop like several times and I couldn't. And I knew if I told you guys, it would make it much more real for me. Cause that's the other part. Me not talking about it, it's not real. It's kind of like just inside of me. I tell people that, oh fuck, this is a real deal. Like I really have a problem. Right, right. So I did that. And then I came home and I was like, you know, I had to kind of deal with the feelings of my parents knowing that I'm doing with this, you know, having this challenge. And then I thought, I should probably, I'm gonna post this on social media because it's gonna feel like I'm helping people. And that'll make me feel better about it. I'll feel stronger about it. If I feel like I'm helping someone else, I'll feel stronger about it. So I fucking posted it on X. I actually posted on X that I'm having a struggle with this or whatever. Oh, I didn't even see you did that. I hit send and I threw my phone on the side of the room and I just fucking let, I told myself if in three hours, I changed my mind, I'll take it off. I gave myself three hours cause I knew that'll be enough time for people to see it. Yeah, yeah. It's sitting there. And it's still there. You know what's funny? One of the most viral tweets I've ever put out. Are you serious? Yeah. I didn't even know that. I didn't even see that. It was like a hundred thousand, at this point, like a hundred thousand views and like a hundred comments and all that stuff. And so anyway, so I did that. And it's just, I'm trying to get, I also took Instagram off my phone. So I'm gonna, I'll put it back on when it's my day in the life. Otherwise I already don't use Instagram. I already have an assistant to manages my personal one because Instagram of all the social media ones is the most. Toxic. Distracting. Yeah. It's just the most distracting for me, 100%. So got rid of that one. I create them. I went down a pill every day. So I went six, five, four, three, two, one, now zero. Cannabis went from nightly to every other to every third. And now I'm gonna be down to once a week and then off. So I'm trying to scale it down to prevent withdrawal, which I don't know if that's a good or bad strategy. You know, so that's what I've recommended for caffeine for people. So that's what I'm trying. So that's that. So yeah. And so, you know, I couldn't, I couldn't just stop, right? I had to replace it with something else. Yeah, that's what I was curious about. Yeah. So what did, what did you change? And did you change each one with different things or is it across the board? If you have the desire to get on socially of the desire to have creative, this is my go-to move or you have- First thing I've, the first thing, and I'm gonna add things to this, but prayer. That's the big one for me. And for me, that helps because it's the most real that I am. So what, because, you know, I believe in God. So when I pray, I believe he knows everything. So I can't be fake, right? I can be fake to you guys. Like I can say to you, oh no, I'm fine. I'm stopping this. It's all good. If I'm praying to God, he knows everything. And I say, I'm fine. And I'm like, actually, you know, it's not fine. You know, I'm having fun. You know what I mean? So it's just pray, pray, pray, pray. And that's making a big difference. I'm also gonna either do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu again or yoga. I know those are very different. That's a super relaxing, wait. So Jiu-Jitsu because of the social component. I don't have a social component outside of a home and work. I don't do anything with anybody. So it'd be nice to go out. Plus Jiu-Jitsu is a healthy, less body-focused outlet for me. Like lifting weights can make me a little body-focused. Jiu-Jitsu, it's performance 100%. I told you I'm down to do that with you. I would do that with you. So there's that. And then yoga is the other one and yoga makes me really fucking uncomfortable. I've done it before. It makes me super uncomfortable, super quiet. I'm in there, I'm meathead, I suck at it. It's yin yoga. I'm holding stretches for long periods of time. We gotta think about shit and sit in my own uncomfortable. But I'm trying to find ways to like be uncomfortable, you know? And then, you know, it's crazy too, being uncomfortable and trying to avoid it, man, it makes me communicate differently. It makes me see things differently. It's not good, dude. You gotta be in it. It is not good, man. It's not good. I learned about polyvagal theory recently. Trip off this. When you're in fight or flight, which I'm probably in a lot of time, did you know that a friendly face will appear suspicious and that a scared face will appear threatening? Your brain perceives things differently when you're in fight or flight. Interesting. Your ear will hear high-pitched and low-pitched sounds and will almost, will try to remove mid-range sounds. Okay, so now that you know that- So everything's the threat when you're in fight or flight. That's what you're- Everything is basic. Everything is a fucking threat. Now that you understand that and you know that, have you seen that manifest? Oh, you have. Oh, interesting. Do you remember the first, like, oh, shit, that's interesting. I'm probably reading this wrong. Oh, I communicate to my wife passive-aggressively a lot because I'll perceive what she's saying to me as an attack and not even realize it. And then I'll say something and then I'll think about it after so I've been doing it. I've been thinking about it. That was kind of a veiled thing that I said. Yeah. Oh, interesting. Mm-hmm. So it's a long process. Step one is getting rid of distractions because without that, that's black and white. By the way, that's not the root problem. I think for some people, that is the big, big problem. For me, that's the- No, it's the same- That's like a black and white. Get rid of these people. It's the same thing. The reason why one of our favorite tips to give somebody who's starting a diet is that they just don't eat by the phone. That's your first step. Yeah. We'll get into what to eat. And people think that sometimes it's a stupid piece of advice. No, it's brilliant. It's like, if you do things, if you have these bad nutritional habits that you tend to gravitate towards and you start to make the connection that you're always scrolling on your phone while you're doing it or you're watching television in your living room and you're stuffing your face, the first step isn't like, oh, you need to get six ounces of chicken breast and have one cup of rice and have a vegetable. No, the first thing is just actually stop watching television or scrolling on your phone while you do that. Get rid of the distraction. Become more aware. Step one. Become more aware and right away you'll find you'll already probably start making better decisions. And then you move into the... It's like calming your heart rate down. Make it any kind of an intense conversation you have with somebody to just kind of really start focusing on calming down and the delivery is so much better. Here's how bad it is for me. I don't even know when I'm anxious. I don't even fucking know it. I started to figure it out. I get this feeling in my hands. Because then you distract it. I'm so good at turning that shit off that I've been told it's a superpower. Yeah, at some point it's not because I get this feeling in my hands, I get this feeling in my feet. My mouth will get a little dry and I don't even notice it. Now, you know what I do? I notice those things first and then I go, oh shit, I'm starting to feel a little anxious. Oh wow. Yeah, it's really wild, bro. Yeah, it's wild. It's just how you may grow up really shapes and forms. Oh dude. How you operate and undoing that is like. It's a trip to learn as an adult how all of those things and all those interactions and all of those potential little traumas in your life have affected like who you are as a person. Dude, there's a story, I'm gonna mess it up, but there's like stories like this. The boy that was born with one eye sewn shut and throughout his whole life everybody says, why don't you just open your other eyes? Like we tell them I see everything. There's nothing wrong, whatever. He did not know that it was sewn shut until they took the thread out. And then you see, that's what it's like. So you just don't know what you don't know. Such a crazy, such a crazy process. I guess that would kind of count as like New Year's Resolution-y. Yeah, I guess. I'm trying to segue into our like New Year's adventures. I actually didn't this year. Normally Katrina and I do so. You always do. Yeah, normally we do something like that. We actually didn't do that this year. I didn't even think about that this year. And her and I had a great New Year's. It was just her and I, me and her and Mack. So we had a really good New Year's and we didn't actually sit down and make a list of things. I mean, I guess we kind of did, like not formally, like right, we talked about this week coming up and like, hey, I want to get back on this and I've got stuff ready to meal prep. And so we did some things like that, but not as formal as I've done in the past. Yeah, this was- I don't like New Year's Resolutions because of our experience with them in Gems. Yeah, I think that's why- Yeah, we're a little tainted by that, I would say. Totally, it's an arbitrary number. Oh, it's January 1st, what's the difference between? But you know, I think if I can become so cynical that I just forget the actual value and creating new- I was- Yeah, I was talking to Courtney though, like honestly out of all the holidays, I get the most gracious or like, I look back like fondly over, I guess the whole year, like- Oh really? Yeah, in terms of like gratitude. I get that way too. You know, and because I'm starting a new year, I'm like, well, I just want to see like and reflect on all the good positive things that went. Because I mean, the negative is just inevitable, but like for me to like, you know, really take that but then build upon that growth, you know, further in that direction is where I always want to go in terms of like some kind of a goal. But really for me, it's like a fond looking back of that, but this year was really interesting because I was like having this kind of sentimental, like it's the only time I get sentimental, to be honest with you. Because I don't want to hit me up and be like, oh, I love you, man, I love you, dude. I might say it then. On the 31st. Just on New Year's Eve. Yeah, that's it, that's it. So this year was weird though, like Courtney kind of knew that and we were like having some wine and you know, hanging out. The kids were sick and so it actually ruined, like so our plans altered. And so we had to like drive back, we're up in truck, we had to drive back home, we got home and then we tried to kind of make the most of it and you know, watch movies and hang out with the kids but the kids were like just out. This was a bad one. Like this flew. They were like, so I had fever and the Everett was like puking like until we got there. But like for some reason they slapped and we're watching TV and Courtney are kind of doing our thing and then they kind of like woke back up and then it was almost like midnight. And actually we were watching Willow leading up and it like literally stopped right at like 1158 or something. And so I was like, oh, okay, we're watching this and then all of a sudden like three, two, one, Everett. Bleh! Like literally on the money. And it was like, we laugh about it now. We're like, oh my God, poor guy. And he was just like, ah, like not fun puke. You know, this was bad. That's the worst. What's a fun puke? What do you mean? I mean, you don't have fun puke. No! I was like, yeah! I'm gonna just get it out. I get to see you do that. Sometimes I do that. I try to change it, you know, like have fun with it. Like I'm a dragon. Bleh! You know, some of that. But no, it didn't work out like that. But yeah, so it was just, it was different. Man, everybody, and even our Christmas too, like Courtney's whole family was just like knocked out. So we didn't get to do Christmas with them, but actually in turn we had nothing but like peace, quiet like a whole day to ourselves. I was like, I could do this. Yeah, that's nice dude. I love her family, but I could do this. Speaking of Christmas. My, so we did Christmas Eve alone also with just our kids, but my family did their Christmas Eve and my sister thought it was a good idea to hire someone who's a Santa to come to like, you know, be with the kids and pass out gifts and stuff. And you know, I thought to myself, I wasn't there so I didn't have to say anything, but I was thinking to myself while I was at home, like what kind of like older man, Alexa would work on Christmas Eve, you really got to question that. Right? Like, okay, it's an older guy because he's got a beard and everything, he's an older guy. He elects to work on Christmas Eve to go to someone else's house. It's Christmas Eve, it's a holiday. He's going to go work and he's going to be with kids. Right? Yeah. There's a creep. There's no way he's- Bro, that's, he's not a creep, bro. That's your anxious mind defaulting to the thing that you just talked about. Okay, am I wrong though? Yes, yeah. Am I wrong? I suspect. It could also be this guy. Could be the guy who lost his family and doesn't have a family anymore. Oh, come on, bro. And his one connection back to giving back to Christmas is seeing the joy from kids when they see him in the house. And so- I don't know, I think he's a pedophile. I mean- It's one or the other, right? So anyway, so he's there, right? So afterwards, I was talking to my brother about it, you know, my brother's got kids. I'm like, how was it? He was like, it was good, it was good. He's like, oh, it's kind of weird though. You know, there's like a stranger in the house putting every Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. And I'm like, yeah, who does that on Christmas Eve? Like, who works? Because that's what I was thinking too. He goes, later he took off his gloves. He goes, Sal, he goes, he had like different color fingernails and stuff, all weird. And I'm like, how old is he? He's like, he looks like he's the 60s. I'm like, bro, that's a weird kid. I don't know if he was 60 or on the picture, fingernails, different colors. That's a new thing, yeah. You know what I'm saying? Maybe you're right, maybe you're right on this one. Yeah, so anyway. But so- Interesting. My three-year-old got his gift that he wanted. Remember how when we came over? Oh, the truck, oh yeah, the dump truck. We went to Adam Catriona's house. He's still, he still talks about the great time that he had at your house. Because Max has a whole bunch of toys. And just let him play with it. And Max lets him play with all the toys. Like the greatest kid ever. That's the best kid ever, right? Because my son's three, he doesn't know how to share it. So the kid lets him play with all his toys. Like, this is the best place? Yeah. And Max had a garbage truck. That's all he wanted. So that's what he got for Christmas. I think that's his favorite thing ever. Bro, we set up the garbages. It's so funny how like that's such a common thing with boys, love garbage trucks. Why? Minded too. Why? They love it, dude. It's the machines, right? Yeah. Yeah, it has to be like the closest thing, like a transformer or something. So do you think this would be fun to take our boys to the dump? I'm serious. I've done it multiple times. To see the tractors and shit? Well, I mean, anytime. I told you that, my buddy, Chris McGevey, his son is like ridiculously fascinated by it to where every morning that the, so every, I think it's Friday where he lives, they come and he's got to go down there. And the guy's giving him a hard hat and he's got the little vest. Oh, God. So he gets in the vest. My son will lose his mind. Oh, bro. And they just. He will lose his mind. Yeah. And he's got to watch the whole thing. So, yeah. So you should give him the get up too. I'll ask Chris where he got it. I think the guy gave it to him. I think he got it from the guard because the guard's man would see him every Friday. I would say the adult version of that is those smash rooms. You know the ones where you break like glass. I'm not talking about Jersey Shore, but not that kind of smash rooms. I like smash rooms. Yeah, those are great. But anyways, yeah. No, it's the one where you're just like, you could just go to town and get all the stress out. And like, I love that they have that as an option. All of us helped our dads at one point, right? Blue collar work. Tell me that wasn't your favorite day. Demolition day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so fun. And it's like the easiest part. That's why whoever created those smash houses were brilliant. Like because I didn't, that wasn't around until like, what, maybe 15 years ago. I remember when they first started popping up and it's become like a thing, those brilliant like go get somebody's, you know, beat up old car that nobody wants or donates and then just let people trash it. How therapeutic is it? Well, the only time... I haven't done one. I've always wanted to do one. I've done, my dad was in construction, so I got the opportunity to, you know, break down walls. Sometimes that's not fun, though. Like when we had to do big ass, huge floors of just like granite. It's good for the first like five minutes. Yeah, I'm just like, oh my God, bro. This is not breaking very well. But I used to love it when we would break bathrooms down. There was like a shower with glass and I'd stand back and... Glass tile is just so satisfying. Yeah, do you break a sink? You know, the noise and it's great. What is that? You know, what is that? I want to, you know what I want to bring up? I want to bring up... You brought up, it was a documentary on Netflix? Yes, it's called The Twins One. It's about the twins and what they take one group of them and they eat a meat-based diet and they're the more... God, I saw the preview of this. Yes, I know you're talking about. We got to get the name of it because we have to tell people. This is like the next version of the vegan propaganda. Oh, same creators. Same guys. It's the same people that made... Oh, it's the same people? Yes. What was that documentary that they made? The one that we had to... That was full of shit. You Are What You Eat is the name of this one. The twin... It's called You Are What You Eat, A Twin Experiment. It's the same one as Game Changers? Game Changers. Same shut up. Same producer. I need everybody to understand this is pure propaganda. This is pure propaganda. So here's the study. Lane did a great breakdown of the study and just took it down. So here's how they present it. We had two twins, so they have identical DNA, which is great. When you have a study, twin studies are... That's your golden goose. That's the gold standard because... It's the closest you can get to individuals. Yes, to be in a line. You have identical DNA. But we know with epigenetics and all this stuff, that's not necessarily true, but you're not going to get any closer than that. However, that's not the only thing you need to control in a study. So what they're doing is they're using twins and they're using that as a proxy for this is the best controlled study that there is. That's not true. The twins are controlled, but the diets were not. Here's what they did. They took two twins and they said, one of them is going to eat a quote-unquote healthy omnivore diet. So a diet that includes meat and dairy. The other twin is going to eat a quote-unquote healthy vegan diet. And at the end of the study, we're going to measure their blood markers and see what the difference is. Here's the problem. The only good control that they had was the fact that they were twins. The diets themselves, besides being omnivore versus vegan, well, let me tell you the results. The vegan twin had better blood markers than the non-vegan twin. So of course, everybody's like, yay, vegan diet's healthier. No, no, not so fast. The vegan diet, number one, was 250 calories lower on average. So by the way, how do you not control that? By the way, just eating lower calorie makes a huge difference. There's studies on high sugar. There's shitty diets, terrible diets, but because they're low calorie, you see improvements in blood markers. How long was it too? Wasn't it like eight weeks? I don't remember how long. It was really short, eight weeks. It wasn't that long. Yeah, it was eight weeks. So number one, it was less calorie. Number two, the vegan diet was high in the types of fats that are pro good cholesterol, pro health, like polyunsaturated fats. I can all avoid them, stuff like that. The omnivore diet was much higher in saturated fats. We know, for a fact, you take the average, by the way, this doesn't necessarily mean you're healthier. There's a whole debate around that, except for extreme cases. This doesn't necessarily mean you're healthier, but we know for a fact, if you took the saturated fat out of your diet, replaced it with fats from things like avocados, nuts, olive oils that you will see improvements in blood markers. So the diets were not controlled. If the fatty acids were controlled, if the calories were controlled, what you would see would be nothing, almost no difference, except for this. Here's something that they didn't probably include in the documentary. At the end of the study, they asked them, would you like to continue this diet? The vegan's like, no, I don't want to fucking keep doing this diet as a suck. Now, why is that important, you know? I don't care how great- It's not sustainable. Is that true that's happening? Yeah. That's funny. Even if it's a better option, I could construct the most perfect workout plan. It's going to be the best results ever. You don't want to follow it, it doesn't matter. That matters. Right, so anyway. And now that whole documentary, pure propaganda. Fresh rain, because you know we're going to have to talk about it a bunch of times this year. Oh, I know, it'll be- People will get like swept into it and you know, because something about documentaries, especially, you got all the visuals, you got the way- Well, storytelling. Storytelling. Yeah, storytelling. So much more than that I can tell you. It just shows you the power of storytelling right there. It's like you don't even have to have that much truth in it as long as it's a good story and then people will buy into it. So crazy though to me is like, it's the same people that did game changers. So it's like, obviously there's an agenda here. Of course. Obviously. Come on, dude. Well, the agenda, if you truly, you got to put yourself in the mind of like real vegans. Okay, I'm not talking about pretend vegans. You do it because it's a fad or what? I mean, like real, real, real vegans. And they're like LA vegans. Yeah, not because it's trendy. Like real vegans believe in their hearts and I appreciate this and respect this that it's wrong to harm animals in any way. So if I was that person, then the means would be, no matter by whatever means I'm going to save animals. Right, right. It doesn't matter. I'm going to try and convince you. I'm going to lie to you because I don't want you to hurt animals. And if you eat a diet that's different and I don't think it's necessarily bad, fine, whatever. I'm going to trick you, lie to you, whatever I can do to save these poor animals. That's the motivation. So that's why this propaganda is such absolute garbage. Do you think that's where it's coming from? I mean, like, I like to ask you want to go bigger. Yeah, I mean, come on, like, I think that's the a logical way to look at like the vegan that feels that way because they want to save animals that bad. But then I mean, do you know that about the people who created this documentary? Like, are they like staunch vegans, like about saving animals? Or are they more about climate? I think there's probably money. Yeah, money is always at the end of the road. Yeah, I think because that's the opening line on the, or at least the preview, the opening like clip they use is them saying that like, the number one thing we can do to reduce climate change right now would be to- Oh, they're going to use every angle you can. Was it James Cameron was a big benefactor to the whole thing, right? The game changer especially. I know he was for that one. I don't know about it. What was that? You got to read that headline that you showed. Oh my God, yeah. What was it? So this was from like the New York Post. This is the craziest, like, what a weird time that we're in. This is what happens when people worship the wrong things. Yeah, so the headline, and it's just such a sensational headline, it says humans may be fueling global warming by breathing, new study. Get the fuck out of here. Are you serious? Like, I didn't think it was a real like headline or like a real story, but obviously they're getting better at like just, you know, click baby like, oh my God, this is in your face. So everybody should die. Yeah, because we're all going to talk about it. You know what I say to people who believe in this, this type of crap? Then go kill yourself. I mean, you want to solve the problem, go take yourself off. Isn't that what it's all coming down to? And I don't know, it's interesting. I don't really want you to kill yourself. No, no. But I'm just saying. It's just interesting like how, if you look at sort of the trend of like, okay, well, okay, so if climate change is this dire and like, this is all crazy. Like, but now it just seems like every bit of whatever's causing it is all human created. And so like, okay, so we're on board, right? We need to change our habits and we need to do this and that. Okay, so we're doing that. But then it went, oh, but there's too many of us. Yeah, there's no more room for you guys. So we start justifying like, I mean, what's the end goal of this? It's like, it's like genocide. Let's just, oh, let's just get rid of swaths of the population because it's better for Mother Earth. Yeah, like, is that where we're going to be, you know, in a position where it's like, this is, this makes sense. Yeah, you first. Yeah. That's what I say to that. I mean, it's going to accelerate before the other way. I mean, we're finding ways to increase longevity. So I feel like, I mean, there's people that believe that we're going to have, our generation's going to see like average of a hundred. I saw something on that. Yeah, people think that we're already heading in that direction. You know what's crazy about that? You know what the biggest challenge is going to be if the average person lives to 120, 150, we're going to have to reconstruct everything. Yeah. I mean, social security, retirement, like that's got to change. That's not possible to maintain that. If you're going to live that long. You also have to wonder too. When's retirement kicking, 62? Yeah. I think it's 60. Well, I think you can do as early as maybe 62, but 65, I think it's official. You know when they established that, the life expectancy was like 67 or something like that? Yeah. So you're going to live to 120 and you're going to retire. Who's going to pay for that? I mean, doesn't it also feed right into like my theory around the housing market going to like 40 year mortgages and so that that'll be normal, you know what I'm saying? 40, 50 year mortgages. Because it's like, well, that's what average goes up with the life expectancy. And then now, because people only look at it like a payment, right, that they can afford. And so the fact that your entry level house now becomes a million dollars is no longer a big deal because it's like, oh, you got half your life to pay it off. It's a 50 year mortgage. It's like, oh, the payment's the same as what my dad's payment was, you know what I'm saying? But I also think it's going to be a challenge because 60, what was it? So you can get benefits at age 62, but there'll be less than if you wait until age 67. Round the corner for you, Doug. Yes, that's great. I'm going to hold out for the big payout, man. I'm going to go all the way to 67. Doug. There you go, Doug. Is it, are we going to have to restructure the business when it comes around that age for you? Like, are you going to be able, so you can still dip into your retirement but then also make side hustle with us? Like, we would like, is there a way for you? I don't think it matters if you make a million dollars a year or something like that. You still can get your benefits if you paid into them. Oh, so no matter what, you can pull from that. I thought if you were working, you couldn't. That's not how it works. No. Oh, I didn't know that. You can still pay. No, think about people getting paid. The amount is so low, a lot of these people have to have a job in order to survive. So did you know that that's a big, that Social Security is literally a policy scheme? A pyramid scheme. It's a policy scheme. It's a pyramid scheme. 100% it is. No, it's a sophisticated pyramid scheme. Yeah, no, for sure. Super wild. So speaking of conspiracies and stuff like that, so you guys know how, all right, we're in election year now. So it's about to get crazy, everybody. Just prepare yourself. Turn shit off. Wait, can we, we were just talking about all the meat. Can we talk about ButcherBox and how we're, this is how much we're anti that movement to get rid of it is that we would take, we would do advertising for them for free. That's what I would do. Yeah. That's how much I'm gonna. Just to help everybody. That's how much I'm against that movement. Don't tell ButcherBox this, but we would. Hey, you know what they have, by the way? I think they're gonna listen to this. Yeah. And they're gonna try and do that, right? I don't agree with that. Well, Adam said that. Meat across America. Come up with a new slogan. Did you know that they have, what is it that they have aged? Yeah, so they have a age strip steak that you can get. Age bone and strip steak. Yeah. I haven't had that yet. So I had, so I thought out a couple of them this weekend, I cook those and they were absolutely fantastic. What makes, okay, so explain age to me. Obviously they, what do they do with it? Well, so. It's not just old meat like what's happening. So I don't know exactly how it works, but they put it in an environment where I don't think it's refrigerated. No, it's left out. It's left out for say, 30 days, 20, 30 days. And then what happens is there's a process that the meat, I think breaks down a bit during that time. It actually takes on a more, I don't know, stronger flavor. I love it. But I love the flavor. Yeah, I've always thought of it as like the ultimate slow cook because you keep it at like a room temperature. Yeah, but they gotta do something to it. They put something on it, right? To break down the fibers. You can't just leave meat out for 30 days. Yeah, I'll look at it. So it's dry aged. So I think it's a very dry environment with no humidity. So that's probably why nothing grows on it. Okay, okay. But let me look it up. Yeah, yeah. No, no, you're right about it. Like it'll be in a room where there's like a humidifier or whatever like that that's pulling all the moisture out. Or a dehumidifier. Yeah, that's right man, sorry. Yeah, let's find that out because that's interesting to me but I'm gonna try that. I always, I get like just tri-tips across the board and ground beef that's all I get from there. Well, yeah, I mean, I had the best beef tenderloin I've ever had and it was butcher box. And I didn't even know it was butcher box and Courtney made it for Christmas this year. And we do it like, this is like a new thing. I was like, I'm just over turkey in general. It just doesn't do it for me. It's just hit or miss. And even then it's just kind of a boring meat to me. But man, we had, it was so good. It was medium rip all the way through and then just crust it on the outside with some like salt, pepper, it was so perfect. Okay, look what they do. So the air inside the dry aging chamber is constantly being circulated as the enzymes and the beef cells break down protein, fats and glycogen. So that's what it is. So it's more tender because the fibers start to break down on their own. And wow, that's interesting. You know what would be really cool? I'd love to see Douglas if we could make shift our own at home. Like, could I create like a tent with a dehumidifier? I think you could. Yeah, I would think you would be able to make. You can actually buy machines or chambers. Oh, okay. You can have a home, yeah. Oh, and then dry age or own me? Yes, you can. That's so something both you guys would do. I would, I would totally do that. That's a great idea for a present from you guys to me. You won't go. I'm a hanging meat locker. I mean, I know it's a butcher box but I actually cooked the most expensive steak I've ever. I did this. Oh, you did? Yeah, I did. What was it? Yeah, it was a Japanese A5 rabai wagyu. They actually came with like certificates, bro. That's how, like it has a DNA certificate that it came with because it was, it's like to prove, yes. I'd never seen that before. Did you see that, Doug? Did I show that to you? I saw that, yeah. Yeah, it actually comes with a DNA certificate. Are you comfortable? I'm sure you are. How big were they? How much did they cost? Of course you are. It was 290 a pound. Wow. Yeah, yeah. And that's, you have to cook it yourself. Yeah, it's a butcher, yeah. Yeah, because if you go to a restaurant, that would have been. Oh yeah, it'd be a $1,000 steak at a restaurant. Wow. Now, was it worth it? I would say it was amazing, but the difference between a $300 cut and like what I would say is a really good $100 cut from there, I don't think that it was. So it's like one of those things you do once. Yeah, I actually, I wanted to do it just as I wanted to. I was like, I want to get the most expensive cut I can get and see, to compare it to some of the other stuff that I've had. If you tag have the name too. This was Fred. It doesn't have a name, but it has a serial number, DNA match. It had like, I mean, and it comes with these little certificates and everything like that to prove that the DNA is, that's what it's official. Yeah, yeah, so. But yeah, I mean, I think I've made a $100 steak just as good as that one. But yeah, Katrina loved it. Have you guys ever seen those memes where there's like cows and they're like in this field or whatever? And one cow's like, you guys understand the farmers killing each of us? Like, what are you talking about? He feeds us. He massages us. Massages us. You're a conspiracy theorist. What are you talking about? Totally. Oh, there you go, Doug. Yeah, so you can get the dryagers. They're a few thousand dollars each. I also found that you have to have it refrigerated around like 34 degrees. So it's not room temperature. Oh, it's cold. So it is colder. It's cold, yeah. Oh, there's a cheap one there for 400 bucks. Oh, there you go. Then they got some that are like 11 grand. Well, that one from Wayfair, 1200 bucks right there. That looks like a hold would hold enough. I want to get it. Let's get one, Doug. What do you say? Yeah, let's do it. I mean, we can split it, actually leave it here and just dryage our meat here, you know what I'm saying? Just have it in the corner. Yeah, everybody can dry it and display. Yeah, then everybody can use it. Yeah. Go four ways on it. Sounds like a good company expense. Are you impressed? Yeah. It's working. That could you. I just display my meat. Bring our meat and friends over. It's just fucking meat hanging in the fucking studio. Have waters in there too, so they have to open it. What about water going to go in that fridge right there? It's so dirty. Wow. It's fucked up. Dude, speaking of meat and conspiracies, I wanted to bring up this video I saw. I thought it was hilarious, dude. This guy was like, basically, he was tying in, like you slowly kind of become a conspiracy theorist when you get chickens. It all comes back to if you've ever owned chickens. What? I was like, what are you talking about? And then I was like, hmm, he's making some decent points here. What? So it's like, when you realize it, like when you get eggs and then you see the color and the vibrancy of the egg yolk and you see, you know, like how... It's very different. Completely different. And then you start, he's like, and then the next logical step of that is like the produce. And then you start kind of like, you know, going to the farm and you see the difference and you see how many nutrients you get and how many like you're being deprived of when you go to the grocery store. And then you start like, you know, bottling up in these like little like canisters and you start doing this. And then, you know, the next thing from there is like you start looking at all the bread. And like, so you start making your own sourdough and it's only like three or four ingredients. You're like, why are they putting all this other stuff in there? And then like it keeps going down this whole like rabbit hole of things. And then you start realizing like, how fuck do you like, like, where's this all coming from? None of this is good for me. You know, it's just like, it all starts with chickens. You know, along those lines, you guys ever look at, like you ever go on Amazon where you ever look for survival food? You ever look at it? Do you know what I realized the other day? Survival food is basically terrible. It's, they're terrible examples or representations of what we could get, that's 10 times better, that are protein bars, protein shakes and stuff that's sold to the fitness market. It's the same thing except grosser and worse ingredients. Why? Look them up. Look at, look at survival food bars. I know, I've seen it. Look at the ingredients. It's a shitty protein bar. It's the kind, you would never eat it. It has the shelf life is high on protein bars and protein powders. Do you think they got like a government contract or something? Like for some of these, like... I just think it's a different market. Survival, yeah. I think it's a different market. I don't think anybody buys survival food and tastes it and goes, I don't want this one. Yeah, I imagine they go, I think about it. It's a different market. So you're not going to these gym rats that are going to be consuming every week. These are people that are going to buy it and store it and leave it. They probably throw it away. So they probably put the worst and the cheapest of whatever they can put in it. It's shit. What a hustle. So if you want good survival food, like literally. Buy shakes. Buy protein shakes and meal replacement powders and bars. They have a long ass shelf life and it's got everything you need to probably take it to taste good. You've used it before. It's a better quality. Survival food is garbage. It's absolutely garbage, yeah. Anyway, I had a really nice moment for Christmas. I want to share with you guys, but with my parents. And I talked about, this is like a dual thing with my parents, right? Hey, mom and dad. They're pretty quick. Hey, I'm doing drugs, but hey, here's this great gift. This will make up for it. Yeah, maybe it was a little bit. I hope there wasn't that. Think about that. No, no, no. No, I was. Although you surprised all of us. I had no idea you were doing that. I didn't know it was the last minute kind of thing. It was. Yeah, and it just, actually, no. You know what? Just had nothing to do with telling them about the other thing. So I was at my parents' house and my dad was telling me how, so my dad, right, grew up very poor, very, very poor. He takes care of his cars, like you wouldn't believe. Like he has an Acura. I know, I saw it. It looks like it's new and the things got like 250,000 miles. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I mean pristine. The engine looks pristine. He'll clean the engine, like the tires, the inside, like, okay. My dad takes care of his stuff. So he needs to get rid of it. It's 250,000 miles, okay. And that's what my mom drives. And my parents are both, my grandma's with my parents because she can't care for herself anymore. And it's hard for her to get in. It's too low. So he was telling me about that, like, I gotta get your mom a car. It's hard for your grandma to get in here. It's too low. The car itself is starting to have some problems and I don't wanna keep putting money into it. It's like, I'm gonna go look for some used cars with the kind of expensive right now. So we'll, you know, we're just having a conversation. So I go home and I said, hey, I told Jessica, I said, how would you feel if I bought my parents' cars? She's like, I love that, do that. So I went, told my dad, I said, I'm gonna get you guys the car. So my parents are like, what? Oh my God, my mom, you know, crying or whatever. So then my dad finds the car. I told him, you know, probably average price will be around this or whatever. He goes and finds what he wants and it's more than what I had said. So what he says to me says, I like this one, but I'll put the rest in. So I say, yeah, no problem. So we get there. And of course I paid for the whole thing. Yeah, my mom, for two days, she's calling me crying. It feels so good to be able to do that. Oh, I bet. For that, you know. I bet that's gonna feel amazing. It's not something fancy. It's not like I got them super crazy cars. But it's the fact that they need it. It's the fact that they need it. And they wouldn't ask for it, which makes it even more rewarding to give it to them that they know that they've known for a long time. Obviously you can afford to do something like that. And the fact that they don't ask, that's my favorite to give is to people like that. Oh, my parents would never ask. Yeah, is when I know that you don't want it, you wouldn't ask for it from me. You don't expect anything like that. Those are the most rewarding. Joyful. It'll help. Yeah, tremendous. Oh man, so rewarding to do that. Joyful moment. As a kid, I used to think that. I remember thinking that growing up, one day I hope I can buy my parents whatever, a house or a car or take care of them, whatever. So yeah, I felt really good. And I don't know, did you ever tell the audience that when you bought your new car, what, a year or two ago, you gave your dad your other car, which was pretty much new too. Yeah, that was practically brand new too. Yeah, it feels good, man. It's good stuff. It's good to see that. And I can see, my dad is telling me how coming, my dad's always struggled with living here in this country because there's a lot that he misses about where he came from. But he told me, he said giving you guys opportunities and being here was a good thing. It's really nice to hear that from my dad. That's cool. Cool stuff. Well, we're supposed to mention Caldera. I want to say something about Caldera. I've probably touched on this before. So they have the skin oil that we all love and that we use. They have, and I want to make this point because I was reading up more on some of their ingredients and some of the ingredients in their skin oil are specifically designed to reduce inflammation in the skin, which is a big deal. So now inflammation of the skin can come from a lot of different areas, including gut health, you know, it's like what you eat, environment, that kind of stuff. But when your skin is inflamed, the cells don't turn over the same way. You're gonna have more wrinkles, you'll have more breakouts, that kind of stuff. There are specific oils in their face serum that are there to reduce inflammation. Who was it? Was it you that had sunburned and put it on? You saw that? Yeah, it did. There it is. Yeah, definitely. I think what speaks to their product is that, like, one, we've talked about this before, that I never thought it was gonna be something that took off to our audience. Not really like the, you think our niche audience would be, you know, supplement bars and shakes. We have beautiful dudes in our audience. Well, I think what it is, I think that even if you're someone who's, no, I've never in my life did I religiously put on any sort of face serum or cream or any ever. Never. I never was. But I mean, I remember the first time, the very first time I put it in, I'm going like, oh wow, I noticed a difference. I feel a difference. And so, that's the power of something like that, is you don't even have to be somebody who uses it. And it's been that way for every, I gifted every Christmas now. Oh really? Oh yeah, there's enough guys in our family that are like me that wouldn't do that. And then they all do, and everybody loves it. Yeah, all the guys love it in our family now too. Awesome. So the shout out, in 10 days, we're going to do the three day train, the trainer free kind of seminars. We already have a 7,000 attendees signed up. Signed up for this. It goes over 10. Can we get 10,000 people inside there? If you're a trainer or a coach or you work in health and fitness, you want to attend. We'll be covering some great stuff on how to really improve your odds of success, improve the success of your clients, and really just move in the right direction. This is gonna be awesome. It's free, and even if you can't make the time live. When it's live, Justin and I will be on there with Sal and we'll be answering questions live, engaging with the audience. But even if you can't make that time, if you sign up, then you'll get emailed the recording of that. And it's absolutely free. So if you are listening to this for the first time, you're not signed up. Where's the website out to sign up, Doug? It's mindpumptrainer.com. Check it out. There's a new product called Stress Guardian that uses 14 adaptogenic herbs perfectly put together to help your body manage stress and adapt to stress. What does that mean? That means your workouts you recover faster from. It means you get better sleep. It means it's easier to get leaner, less cravings. That's what adaptogens do. They help the body deal with stress. And Stress Guardian, again, has 14 of the best proven adaptogenic herbs all in one capsule. Go check them out. Go to StressGuardian.com forward slash mindpump. All right, back to the show. Our first caller is Jen from Ohio. Jen, how you doing? I'm speechless. Did you do that on purpose? Justin has that effect. Oh my gosh, remember the episode where you guys were talking about does it really happen when people get so excited that they faint? Oh, syncope. Got the Elvis effect? I was just gonna say that if I had been old enough for my parents to take me to see Elvis, I'd be like, right now. Look, you're gonna get a free program, Jen. I know, thank you for that. Any comparison to Elvis? We're gonna hook you up. Don't worry, no one, tell us what your question is. How can we help you? So I was hoping I'd catch someone's attention in my subject line with 23 years of being a group fitness instructor. You caught my attention, what's up? All right. So started in personal training and exercise science in college and then went into the corporate health scene and somehow working at the gym at a big company here in Cincinnati, they needed me to teach a fitness class. So I just went in and was like, okay, just taught it like I was teaching or training my clients. And it just progressed from there. And now I am actually down to eight classes a week along with my 19 clients that I do personal training with. And I just discovered you about two months ago. My coworker Kate hooked me up and I haven't stopped listening since. I think I've gone over a couple hundred episodes. And anyway, I am really burnout on those fitness classes especially when I am teaching and I'm doing reverse lunges and somebody's just running up and down on the step. And then I have someone who has really tight shoulders and they just insist on doing dips instead of a pushup. It's really, I quit a class actually two weeks ago. I'm just like, I'm done. I still have to do my others because I feel guilty leaving the members. They give me the guilt trip when you come back, when you come back and I'm just like, I just need a little break. So what would you do if you had 20 people in a room you're giving a workout and they just go off and do their own thing? I mean, Adam taught a phenomenal mobility class. I think mobility works so well in a group setting and that's really one of the only things that I would teach in a group setting. Like something where people would get into a position like a 90, 90 hold it and I could walk around and adjust people and put them in different positions. And I would feel good teaching that because it's more of an appropriate application in a setting like that versus a workout. That's really, really reasons why we don't like group classes is I mean, you named a few of them. Teaching people to exercise and strength training in a group setting, you're so limited. It's so challenging and it encourages the get through the workout, get through the movement, just sweat, you just get tired type of attitude. And so it's just not very beneficial, you know? What's your relationship like with the gym owner? Well, so the gym owner, so this is a community center. Okay. And we have a coordinator and I've wanted, because so I teach functional fitness twice a week to a large group like 30, 35 seniors, like the 60, they are my best pupils. They, if I scratch my nose, they'll scratch their nose. I do, I have to do every other week, I have to do a boot camp twice a week. I do a class that's called Strengthen. And then one night a week, I do a class that's called Total Body. And I try to work with the other instructor and find out what she's gonna do the next night. And she likes just to do weights. So then they want cardio. So I'm like, forever I had been doing like the real high volume thing. For now at this facility, that's how I've been lifting. High volume, because I would do the class with them. And as you do, you know, I would range it from eight reps up to 20, I'd time it, lower body, upper body, opposing muscle groups. So anyway, I really don't have say and be like, I used to do a mobility class and they loved it. But then they took it away. The members loved it, but they took it off the schedule. So you don't have a say in what you did? Yeah, that's such, I mean, technically I didn't, I just did anyways. Yeah, I was gonna say. That was my, so. I worked for Orange Theory for two years. I don't know how familiar you are with Orange Theory, but they have a very strict template that every coach in the entire country, and they have a very similar philosophy as Starbucks. They want you to be able to go to any class, anywhere in the country, and it aligns with everybody else. Yet I broke those rules. And my attitude was, I knew I was giving a disservice to these clients by training them this way. I had better ideas on what would help them more. And I just slowly started to mold it to what I thought was a better class and course. And my attitude was, they can fire me or I'll quit if they won't allow me to do this. And what happened was my attendance grew and I was booked out for months in advance and had classes bigger than anybody else in the area. And so they didn't mess with me. They kind of just let me do what I wanted to do because for them, it's about attendance. And for me, it was about teaching and educating this group of people on a better way to approach health and fitness. But it was a slow process. It's not like I took a Turbo Kickboxing class and said, okay, no Turbo Kickboxing, we're just doing mobility today. I would ease them in. And at the end of every class, I would educate them. I'd say five minutes, five to 10 minutes when we would be doing the quote unquote, cool down process of the class. And I would give nutritional tips and I would explain how the body works and different things about macronutrients and what signal are we sending to the body when we're doing cardio at high intensity and low calorie and why that's not a sustainable way to train and what it does to your metabolism. And so I would give them these little bits of knowledge. And so I was starting to slowly educate this group. And so then when I said things like, hey, when I tell you to stop lifting weights, I want you to stop and I want you to rest and I don't want you to put the weights up until I tell you, yeah, I know, I know. So that's the type of stuff that I, but I had to first build that credibility in my class that my class respected me as someone that had this knowledge. And so I used our social media platform. I used the show and reference episodes. And so I used a lot of the resources I had to educate the people. And then I slowly would implement what I thought was a better thing to teach them in that class. And over time molded my own workout routine in there. And so they, and they left me alone. And so I stayed. Now, had they told me, if you change it, you're going to get fired, then I'd be out. That's just how it, because I had enough integrity that it was, this is not helping these people. This is not, I'm doing them a disservice when I know that they are starving their body of nutrition and they're running around like a rabbit for an hour. I'm not building muscle. I'm just not. All I'm doing is burning calories with them. And these people need to build muscle, build their metabolism, work on, a lot of them had joint pain because they're doing all this high intensity stuff all the time and not feeding themselves nutritionally, not recovering properly. So I just refused to not, to not give them what they needed. And if the- To not give them what they wanted. Yeah. Give them what you needed. That's right. And a lot of them thought these other things what they wanted, but I had to, it's just like training clients one-on-one. Sometimes we have to, slowly educate them and convince them otherwise. But that was my goal if I was gonna stay there. And it ended up working out where the owner didn't mess with me and I had built a reputation around being the best coach in the area. There's Jen, we all manage gyms, okay? There is a law you can get away with when you bring in a lot of members. Okay, so long as you're not hurting anybody or stealing from the company, you'd be surprised at the space that they'll give you when members are really happy and you're providing a good service. Now, if you're lying, you're stealing, you're hurting people, that's a different story. So I wouldn't say anything to the manager. I would start the class and I'd say, hey everybody, today's class, here's what we're gonna do. And then I'd take them through. By the end of it, they'll feel the difference. The other way I would do a group class is I would take an exercise or two and I'd break it up into stages. So I'd say today we're gonna learn one of the most powerful exercises you could do to speed up your metabolism, the deadlift. We'd take a bunch of barbells or dumbbells or whatever your equipment is and I'd start with like, I'd break it up into three. Start with like a dowel bar or like a stick. Yep, and I would go three stages. Okay, we're gonna stand up together. Everybody stand up, get in this position. Stay, maintain tension. Walk around, squeeze your shoulder back over here. Tuck your hips for a little bit. Hold that position, go back to the front. All right, everybody, bring them all the way down the floor and pause. You're walking them through step by step. Those are the two ways that I would teach the class, but I wouldn't tell the manager, I would just do it and what'll probably happen is nothing until maybe five or six classes in. They'll be like, what are you doing? Well, I'm teaching it this way. This is what they need. Yeah, that actually shoes into what I was gonna bring up with how I was having the same issue with teaching these high school kids in a group setting, especially the strength training part of it because inevitably it does get away from you. Like you can't cover all your tracks, especially you got 30-something people. So to be able to have a little bit of control and maintain is all about tempo and to slow everything down to almost like a ridiculously slow level and to have them go through the negative portion, to pause and hold the, and so you can walk around and you could actually see visually like the grossest offenders and work your way over there to kind of help alter their posture, their form. But really, it's so much more simplification necessary for group settings than one-on-one. So you have to really eliminate almost the majority of the workout and just keep with like three to maybe four exercises max to really be effective. We didn't ask you this, Jen, but if you lost these classes, let's say the manager's like, no, I don't want you to teach it this way. You're no longer allowed to teach these classes. Would you be okay with that? Financially. Um, yeah, financially it's fine, but it's the guilt that I have. No, no, no, no. I'm gonna stop you right there, Jen. I'm gonna stop you. If you're fine financially, look, here's the deal. I'm gonna cut you off because if my kids ask me for candy every day, all day long, I can't feel guilty saying no. Like, okay, yeah, I'm not giving you the candy and you're sad about it, but that's not healthy for you to have every single day, right? So you're the trainer, you're the coach, you're the instructor. If your integrity tells you this is not the right workout for these people, this is not helping them, then it's up to you to make that decision. Now, if there's a financial issue, that was different. That's why I asked that because in that case, I'm like, okay, we gotta be very careful and tread carefully, but if you know what they need, then do it and you might be surprised. Some people might fall off, some people might quit or complain, but you might be surprised at the end of it. They're like, wow, I do feel a lot better. Wow, this is really good, I really enjoy this. I would do what they need. You're the teacher and the instructor, and then if the manager says, no, you're out, that's okay because you weren't helping them anyway. They'll know where to find you too. You know, your one-on-one services will take off. Yeah, Jen, are you using Instagram? Are you on social media at all? Man, I would use, this would inspire me to build my content online around this, right? So every time I see something in my class that's, they're not like, you reverse lunch and they're just going up and down, up and down. Like, I'm going to create a post around that. I'm gonna, one of the reasons why so many people in group classes struggle with weight loss is they don't understand the importance of rest periods and building strength. And if all you're doing is moving and moving with no rest periods, all you're really doing is cardio with weights, and this is not going to speed your metabolism up. It's not going to build my, like I would make a post literally addressing all the things that I see. You're always, you got all that hip and knee pain and you keep running on the treadmill. People don't realize they've got ankle mobility issues. They got hip mobility issues and they're doing this repetitive movement on the treadmill and all they're doing is making that issue worse. What they really need to be doing is addressing these things. And like, I would be giving away the answer to the problems that I'm seeing in this class setting and build social media. And then while you're in class and you're seeing it say, you let them know, like, hey, I did a post last week about this, you should read it or check it out. So now I'm starting to use that opportunity to feed my other business. I unfriended like all the members from my gym, like during COVID, just because it was just getting insane. So I'd have to be like, hey, you can follow me again. Sure, okay. But yeah, I would just teach the class the way that you think that they need. And you explain at the end of class or the beginning with what you're doing. Hey, today's class, and we're gonna be focusing on something called mobility. Here's how you're gonna feel afterwards. You're gonna feel less joint pain. You're gonna feel more connected to your muscles and you can have more energy than you did coming into this workout. All right, let's get started. Like, you're the guide. Like if I'm walking through the jungle and I got a guide in front of me, I might be like, no, I wanna go this way. But if the guide is confident in saying, no, no, we're going this way. And they start walking. I'm following the guide because I don't know what the hell I'm going. So you have to lead that and do that now. Again, if the manager of the gym says, either you do the classes I want you to do or you're out, you say, look, this is countermind integrity. This is not what these members leave a need. I'm sorry, I can't teach the classes. And then you're gone. You can't feel guilty for that because you're not helping them anyway. Last two things I wanna give you, Jen. One, I wanna give you access to our forum. So are you in our private forum yet? No, no, I signed up for it and then I, yeah. Okay. I'm gonna put you in there for free, okay? We have a lot of other coaches and trainers that are in there. They're in front of us too. And so yeah, don't block me on Instagram too, okay? Follow me on Instagram. So, and then, and then the other thing is, are you signed up for our three day trainer course that we have coming up in January? Of course I am. Okay, good. So I just wanna make sure you're signed up for that. I'm gonna get you in the forum for free. Get in there, say hi to us as soon as you get there. There's lots of other trainers and coaches, lots of them also have trained group classes. So they can share some of the ideas that's worked for them. Cause I know it's, I know the situation, I've been in the situation you're in, it's not as easy as we're making it sound. So any other ideas that we can get from other coaches and trainers and then you can share with us that transition. Do you have MAPS Prime Pro, Jen? Cause that's the program I'd pull from for the mobility class. No, no, I don't have Prime Pro. All right, I'm gonna send that to you, Jim. That's that go through that and pick movements out of that for your class. That'll be, that'll be a great resource. Oh, that's good. Yes, that's an amazing thing to do. Yeah, so with the, I wanted to ask, like with the training coming up, are we gonna have opportunities to talk to you about how to deal with all things personal training? Like I'm still after 30 years, I hate asking clients to pay me. Yeah, oh yeah. Yeah, we're gonna be on their live answering questions and we're gonna try and get to everybody. So yes, you will have an opportunity. I have a list. All right. But you know, real quick, Jen, I can even tell you here, look, and this is a problem a lot of trainers have because they view themselves as helping others. So asking for money doesn't kind of feels like, what am I doing? Like I want to do this anyway, whatever. Like the, here's the deal. If you don't help yourself, you can't help anyone else. Plus you're providing a tremendous and valuable service. Now I know it still feels uncomfortable. That might not change the fact that it feels uncomfortable. So you have to do it very matter of fact. Very matter of fact means this, the less words the better. Here's where people mess up. Those are where trainers mess up. They ask for money in an apologetic way and then they add more words than they need to. Like, okay, so 10 sessions is $1,200. I know it's a lot of money, you know, it's 120 sessions. You may not be able to afford this. You can pay it in half if you want to. And it's like this weird like, you don't even sound confident in what you're offering. You just do it very short, matter of fact, don't look at them while you do it. If you need to look at the paper that you're presenting. Okay, so 10 sessions is 1,220 sessions is 2,200. Which one do you want to do? Very matter of fact, very short. It'll make it easier. It's like firing someone. I remember the first time I had to fire somebody it was so uncomfortable. My manager said, do it very quickly. The less words you use, the better. And it was true. And it never got comfortable, but it would have been way less comfortable if I sat there and had this whole conversation about it. So, and you're not firing anybody. You're trying to help somebody. So it's a completely different situation. How do we fire a client? Same way. Yeah, these are all good questions. We'll cover a lot of this in the training. We actually, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we got some, we got someone coming down the pipe specifically for trainers. Already the stuff you're asking, we address. So you're going to like it a lot. Thanks for calling in, Jim. Thank you, take care. You got it. Boy, does she not represent a significant subset of trainers that we've worked with so many times where they're afraid of asking for money. They don't want to let their clients down. The client basically dictates the workouts and the sessions. Listen, this is going to be the most unique. I was just talking to our NCI group the other day, the most unique part about our course. So many people have been asking, what is it like? Is it like in ASMs like this? No, it's nothing like that. It's like, we still are going to recommend that you get a national cert for the nutrition, physiology, program design type of content. But really it's this stuff that none of them talk about. Yet we dealt with our entire career, these challenges of how do I ask for the money? How do I know what to charge for that? What if they don't show? What if they don't show up? What if they say this? What do contracts should look like? How do I present a year? Lots of reasons trainers just fall off. That's right. And so that was the idea was instead of us trying to compete with the 100 certifications, national certifications out there, to me that's the easy path. What we wanted to do was address the gap or the need in the education process for trainers on how to be a good coach and trainer and scale their business. That's right. And you look again, just back to what she was saying, like you're the trainer, you're the coach, you have to lead this. And the only way to lead is with confidence. Nobody's going to follow you in a dark cave if you're walking in scared and like you don't know where to step, you have to move forward with confidence. That means when you ask for money, that means when you give recommendations or what kind of exercise they need to do. And that means when you tell them what exercises, not to do, bottom line. Our next caller is Kayla from South Carolina. Hi Kayla. How can we help you? Hey guys. Thanks so much for allowing me to come on and ask a question. Super nervous, but also very excited to be here. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, absolutely. So I'll dive right into my question. So my question is, are the spin classes that I teach preventing me from or slowing my progress toward reaching my goals? So just to provide a little bit of background, I have been working out, I guess I should say lifting off and on for about the past eight, nine years. I did, I had a little scent there where I did some beach body and some other methods sprinkled in there. But for the most part, for the past 18 months, I've been consistently strength training. And since the beginning of 2023, I've been really focusing more on programming or following a program. Have not followed one of your guys yet. So I think that's definitely part of my problem, but just getting more consistent with strength training. I have definitely gained strength. I've brought my back squat from about 140 at the beginning, now up to 180. My deadlift really have had some struggles with form, but I've also increased that hip thrust bench overhead press. So everything has increased, but I don't know if I'm really where I want to be. And I would say more aesthetically. So I didn't embody scan back in the summer. I was roughly 135 pounds. I'm about five, three and about 22% body fat. My goal is really to reduce that body fat down to closer to like 19 to 20%. I have been trying to reverse diet and that's where the spin classes kind of come into play. So I teach sweat cycle. So it's hot spinning two to four times per week. Really just I'm scheduled for four classes per week. Sometimes we don't have anyone show up. So just depends on what attendance looks like. So I've been trying to reverse diet just to get that extra fuel. And I went from eating probably 1500 calories up to about 2200. But every time I get up to that number I get a little bit nervous. And then I kind of jumped back down. So for the past three weeks, I've kind of jumped back to about 1800. And I have stayed within the same five pound range. Of course that fluctuated day to day for the past about three years. I've definitely changed. I've gained some muscle, but overall just really want to lose some of that body fat continue to build strength. And just not sure if teaching this many spin classes a week is preventing me from hitting those goals. If I'm overdoing it on the strength training and if I'm eating too much or not enough for really where I need to be. What are your options with the spin classes? Are you, can you stop teaching them? Like or is this something that you need to do to supplement your income? This is part of your job. Cause my answer is going to be different depending on what the deal is there. Absolutely. So I mean, I don't want to stop teaching them because one, it's a foot in the door. I would ideally I'd love to go into coaching or training. I work in sales and I financially can't really take the leap where I just start doing that. I also have a seven year old. So don't want to dedicate all my time. I've really been on the fence, but I feel like this is a foot in the door to the gym if I do decide to go in that direction. So that's part of it. I don't really need to do it financially, I guess. It's nice to have a little bit extra income, but of course then it provides a free gym membership. So a few other factors with that. If you don't want to, if you don't want to not do this because is it affecting your ability to build muscle which then affects your ability to burn body fat? Yeah. It's not helping. It's not ideal, but you're getting endurance stamina. You're being active. It's not like bad as long as you're out over training. So if you don't want to quit it, then you're going to have to do the following. You're going to have to get rid of your scale and you're going to have to stop doing your in-body scans for a while because the obstacle that's in the way right now, the big obstacle, here's what's preventing you from hitting your goals is you. And I don't mean because you're not doing the work, I mean the mental aspect of it. The fact that you're hovering within the five pound range and once you go up to certain caloric intake, you start to freak out a little bit. The scale and the in-body scan is not helping you. So you got to get rid of those and then keep doing the reverse dieting. And the only thing I would track is your strength in the gym. That's the only thing I would track. Am I getting stronger on these core lifts? And if those numbers are going up, you're moving in the right direction. I actually think too, I'm looking at her current lifting as five days a week too right now. Oh wow, that's way too much. I think if you just, if we just sent you maps on a ballick, and then if you tried to do two days instead of four days of coaching spin, I think that in itself with a reverse diet. Oh yeah, you'd build a lot of muscle. Is the way to go. So Kayla, if you built five pounds of muscle, which you wouldn't look bigger, you would just be more sculpted, right? But if you built five pounds of muscle and gained no body fat, you would be leaner. Because your total body weight now is higher, but your body fat has stayed the same. So now it's a smaller percentage of your body weight. So you don't have to lose body fat if you gain muscle without gaining body fat. And you can do that with the good reverse diet and good strength. I literally think if you just, we're gonna send you maps on a ballick, follow maps on a ballick to a T, don't add anything to it. Try your best to only do two days of spin class. Try to avoid the four days. In fact, maybe even on the times when you do four days, if you have to, it's four days, I might only do two days of maps on a ballick that week. And increase your calories, 250 to 300 calories, that's it. And just stay the course, trust the process, give me at least 30 to 60 days to show you some, you'll see strength gains probably first and feeling good and do not sweat the scale up or down. Don't worry, don't worry yourself. Yeah, I don't care about three to five pounds north or south really. In fact, I'd be more concerned if I saw it going down right away because then that would tell me I'm not giving you enough calories for what we're doing. So I would like, I would like scale weight to probably hover around the same or a slight increase, but that should be kind of the goal. That in itself, I think he's gonna solve kind of. That'll be huge. Kayla, do you mind if I ask you a few more questions? No, not at all. Okay, so you're in sales and you have a seven-year-old and you're adding another job with, okay, so I'm gonna assume you probably are very busy and you have a lot of stress. Yes, I would say so, here and there. Are you, do you have help with your kid? Yes, my husband is very involved. Okay, very good. Okay, so do you, how do your hormones feel? How is your energy, sleep, skin, hair, digestion? Do you notice any areas there? Like, do you have a regular period? Like, are there any signs that you might be overdoing it? Like the classic signs that your body needs to kind of reset? I definitely had signs back probably when I first really started focusing on strength training and I was only eating 1,500, 1,600 calories. Like some hypoglycemia, really low blood sugar at certain points in the day. So I started increasing the calories and that has definitely helped. I've been loosely diagnosed, I went to an endocrinologist. My husband and I have sort of been maybe trying to have another, not trying, I guess you could say. And I really just haven't had success but that could be a number of factors. So I did see an endocrinologist and was sort of loosely diagnosed with Hashimoto's but then she ran some tests and basically said, oh, you're fine. I'm a root cause person and she really wasn't going to help me dig into the root cause. So I joined your guys, my Hormones page on Facebook and hoping to eventually see a functional medicine doctor when financially I can do so. But I mean, I sleep about seven hours per night. I do wake up on the days I have morning classes. I'm waking up around like 430 in the morning. Other days it's typically five. I definitely like to be in the gym five days a week just because I need that for my mental health. If I don't start my day with a workout or some type of movement, then my whole day is just I'm exhausted. But I mean, for the best part I feel good. You're overdoing it. Are you, are this classic like, yeah, like all the stuff you're telling me, it really does, yeah, it really does sound like it. Do you have a regular period? Is it pretty consistent? Yes, that has been for a few years. Okay, good. The bumping calories and the two days a week of strength training, if you're consistent with that, I think you're gonna see more than you expect. I think you're gonna be very, very pleasantly surprised with how amazing you feel. Just from the cutting from, yeah, from going from five days a week of strength training with the spin to two days a week of strength training with the spin and a bump of 250 to 300 calories, I think it's gonna blow your mind within about 45 days. I think within a 45 to 60 day period, you're gonna be like, wow. And I want you still to go to the gym five days a week because I don't like disrupting somebody who's created that space for themself and that there's probably a major mental health. But what I want you to do on the off days is literally walk sauna or mobility. Mobility would be best. So those types of things, recoupative type of stuff. Yeah, like you're going there for rejuvenation. Yeah, so still go there. But if this is the off, not your foundational day, walk on the treadmill for a half hour, 45 minutes, do some mobility for 10 to 15 minutes. Maybe do the sauna for 15, 20 minutes or a cold plunge. Do those types of things on those days. Also, MP Holistic Health. I know you mentioned our- Yeah, MP Holistic Health is a holistic health. You'll be able to get more functional medicine related information. That's our functional medicine forum on Facebook. And then lastly, because you're aspiring to make the transition to be a trainer, did you sign up for the free course that we have in January? Yes, I did sign up for that. I'm excited for that. Oh yeah. Thank you guys. Good, good, good, good. I'm excited to see you in there. And if you don't have maps and a ball, we'll send that to you because that's the program you're going to follow. Okay, awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it, guys. You got it, Kayla. Thank you. Thanks, guys. Bye. She's, if she follows what we say, it's going to blow her. You know, it's so crazy. As she's talking, it's so funny. Like we've trained so many people, right? Every once in a while, I'll get a question. I'll be like, oh my God, that's just like so-and-so. I literally remember, literally I had a woman, very similar, came to me, same thing. Lots of strength training. She did power yoga and spin classes. And I cut everything way down. And it was the same thing. Her and her husband were loosely trying to have a baby. And I mean, I'm not even saying anything about that. It was all about like, let's just build your metabolism. You're strong or whatever. She got pregnant. She got pregnant within 30 days. Yeah, at times, yeah. That's what it takes. Next caller is Tracy from Massachusetts. Hi, Tracy. How can we help you? Hi, first of all, thank you guys. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for everything you do. Thank you. I'm calling because I'm in like a bit of a training dilemma. I just had my first baby in March. Congratulations. Thank you. I'm hoping to have more. Before I got pregnant, I'd been training for over a decade consistently. I have a pretty strong resistance training background. I was starting to get a little bit bored at the gym. And then I got pregnant. And then I'm more worried about taking care of my baby. And I think a lot of the problem lies in kind of what you guys talk a lot about is being like coasting versus kind of telling the line, pushing the limit all the time. So when I was pregnant, it was really mentally hard, not really physically hard to get to the gym because I didn't wanna push myself too much. Then I gave birth in March. It went really well. Postpartum feel awesome. But I'm kind of worried about looking into the future. I kind of feel lost in the gym with wanting to have more kids relatively soon. I'm about to turn 35. So I'm kind of like pushing that being older. And I don't really know how to either shift my mindset or to shift my goals, to sort of look forward to getting to the gym while being pregnant or postpartum or nursing. Tracy, this is, I love this question because fitness fanatics who have kids or things pop up in life that become more important than the workouts will hit this crossroad. So you live for a long time, strength training was probably your favorite thing to do. It says in your question, you competed in Olympic lifting. So you didn't just like recreationally work out. Like this was a big deal. This was very serious for you. But now you have a kid, which first of all, if you're a good person, which it sounds like you are, having a kid is going to shake everything. Like all of a sudden, there's nothing more important than this other human being. And so all the other things that you leaned on, you have to kind of put them in new categories. Like what does this mean to me? Okay, how do I do this thing again now that I don't care about it like I used to? Because that's something else that I care so much more about. Here's the beauty about with fitness. If you do it right, it will improve your life. Your life is what you want it to be, right? So you want to be a great mom. You want to be a great partner, a great whatever. Being fit will help that out. It'll encourage that. A fit, healthy version of you is going to be a better mom than an unhealthy version of you. So when you go to the gym, instead of going to the gym like you did before, I'm going to hit a new PR. I'm going to hit a new intensity. I'm going to go train my butt off. It's really about how can I exercise to give me the energy I need, to give me the patience that I need to give me what I need to do the more important things in life. Now here's the other side of that, which is pretty cool. What you did to build your strength and physique to maintain it, you need far less. The data on this is really remarkable, okay? Like literally if it took you 20 sets of a particular exercise to build a foundation, you could literally do three sets to maintain that. So you don't have to keep doing what you did to keep what you've built. You could do far less. And your life is going to change. Listen, look, right now you have a baby. At some point they're going to be a toddler than a teenager, then they're going to go to college. And then you'll have more time to work out again, in which case the workout's going to change again. So right now it's just a different chapter in your life and literally just go to the gym and think to yourself like, what do I need to make me better at the things that are important right now? And it may be that you need more energy because maybe your sleep is not as good. Maybe you just need a break because you got to get out of the house because you're not seeing anybody for a while because you got a new baby. Maybe it's just to alleviate some stress or maybe you got some energy. You're like, you know, I wanna go see if I could do what I used to do. Let me go see how hard I can go. But that's how you should treat the workouts because your life is going to continue to change. And what you don't want to do is fall into this like this trap where the workouts always have to be and mean the same thing to you because that's gonna be really hard to maintain when your life changes as it is now. Trace, you know what I think the hardest thing for clients like you, and I would put all of us in this exact same category as two when big shifts like this happen is our definition of fit. I really think that we have this, we have a different way we look at ourselves, aesthetically performance in the gym that we've raised the bar and the standard so high and then all of a sudden life happens and other shit that's far more important than my PR and my squat or my six pack abs. And I'm wrestling with what Sal just said, which is, you know, he just telling me that, you know a fit me is gonna improve all the rest of my life. But your definition of fit is skewed like mine is. And that was the hardest thing that I had to wrestle with when I decided to make that shift of like, I care more about being a better father, a better husband, a better business partner. But yet I don't wanna get fat or I don't wanna be out of shape. And it's like, so how am I jealous? It's like, yeah, but my definition of fit was so skewed. It was like, I had to make peace with that. It's like, what am I doing? Like, I don't need to have, I don't need to be look like a bodybuilder year round like this. And nor am I gonna be able to and truly be a fully present father and crush it all those things. So I think what happens is people like us really wrestle with trying to sustain that level. And it's not realistic while you also are trying to have multiple babies and do all these other things. So part of it is making peace with the body changing, looking a little different, performance probably being a little less. You at 50% is still better than 99% of the world, right? And so you have to kind of make peace with that. One of the ways that I did is I would shift my focus. So if you're an obsessed person with aesthetics, I let go of aesthetics and became mobility guy. And I started to look at other things. If you're obsessed with PRs and strength in gym, I let go of that and begin and focus on something else, longevity girl. Like, I mean, start to challenge yourself on the things that you most identify with when it comes to fitness and pursue other aspects of health because, you know, getting good sleep, reading more, being present as a mother, being a better father, better, all these things make me a healthier person. And so if I'm true, you're all new challenges. That's right. And so I think sometimes as hardcore fitness people, we get so focused on the performance and the look that when life shifts, we have a really hard time seeing that kind of change a little bit. And we think we're failing, you know? Because you don't have the same squat that you were doing back when you were doing Olympic lifts and training seven days a week. You know what I'm saying? It's like, really though, you're still squatting way more than anybody else and you're still really strong for a mom with multiple kids and working in a husband and all these other things going on. And so you have to really shift your perspective and definition of what you think fit and healthy is. And sometimes for us fitness fanatics, it's a bit skewed. And that's really the biggest challenge here is accepting that, you know, you might look a little different than what you did, you know, four years ago in your prime, or you might not perform exactly the same way. And that's okay, because you're a fucking awesome mom and you're super present with your husband and you're doing all these other things that you're winning in life. That's what I think is probably one of the hardest things when you're in the situation you're in. You know, by the way, Tracy, that what you're going through is very common. So a lot of people go through this, especially moms, where they're like, you know, I was like an executive, I was so focused on my job. Now it's like I'm not that motivated to go to work. I just want to be with my kids or I was so into this other thing. And now I just want to, you know, or I used to hang out with these guys will go through this when they become dads. It's like, well, I used to hang out my buddies and now I got kids and it's, I don't want to hang out with them like I used to. They want to drink and talk about other stuff. And I just want to, so this is a super, I mean, this is a totally- Maps 15 is a program for you. Yeah, you got, I was just going to say, do you have Maps 15? Do you have our Maps 15 program? No, I don't. That's the program for you. Yes. We're going to send that to you. So literally you do a little bit of exercise every day. And there's an option where you can do it at home with a suspension trainer or you could go to the gym and use a barbell. And it's like either a 15 or 20 minute workout a day. I think it's the perfect workout for parents. Great, thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Yeah, you got it. You got it. Let us know how it works out for you. Sure. All right, Tracy. Thank you, Tracy. Yeah, thank you. I heard the baby there. She's got the look of a new mom too, she's like, what am I doing with this baby? I don't know. Hey, listen, you have a kid, it changes everything. And all of a sudden you question, like you have to completely reorganize your priorities. Everything's new. All new challenges, everything you guys are describing. And I mean, I could chime in on what you guys were talking about. But it's the whole new focus now is how to be the best mom and how to handle that and how to handle the time restraints and how to handle your stress. And how to feel good and how to, you know. So all that stuff, you can accomplish that within your workouts. It just has to be structured with that mindset of like, what's gonna be best for me now? It's a massive reflection time for people like her, like us, because most of us, if not all of us, that got into this space that became fitness fanatics, did it because of some sort of insecurity or some radical pursuit, whether it be a selfish one. And then you make an identity. And you, yeah, exactly. And then you identify with this person. Now dissolve it. And now you're like, who am I now? Yeah, and then all of a sudden, for the first time in your life, something becomes way more important than that. And I remember this, like up in, that was one of the biggest defining things about becoming a father was realizing like, oh wow, never in my life did I ever truly care about anything more than myself. I mean, there's a lot of people and things I loved, but there was never anything that I truly cared about more than myself until having a son. And then that radically shifted me. And then that made me look at like, well, who is this character that I've worked so hard to become? And you have to solve this. Otherwise, you end up resenting the child because you can no longer live up to this Olympian. Now they're keeping you from being who you're supposed to be. That's right. And the truth is, no, that person is still, a lot of what drove that person was rooted in these insecurities of not being enough or needing to look a certain way or being teased when you're younger. And now that you have this human that is far more important than yourself, you've got to address it. And you have to recognize that, man, I could actually be a really healthy person and it doesn't take a lot. It does not take a, what was that study the other day about? It's once every two weeks. To just the not lose muscle for the average person. Yeah, it's like ridiculous. And by the way, that's not a person who's as trained as she is. So imagine somebody who's built as much muscle and strength. Mass 15 should be totally fine. That's like that person just don't eat like an asshole and touch some weights every once in a while, but build your routine around being a great mother, a great partner and that aspect. And the rest will fall in place. Our next color is Noah from Ohio. Noah, what's happening? How can we help you? Fellows, what is up? This is crazy. It's been a while since early 2017. So going on seven years right now. True, true OG. Good deal. What's that? True OG. Oh yeah. I was actually in the top two percent of your listeners from like the Spotify wrapped allegedly. So. The elites. Yeah. Good deal, man. Well, thanks. How can we help you? Yeah, I'll kind of hop right into it. So a little bit of background, 29 years old. Grew up a three sport athlete, five, 10, 180 pounds, but really been doing like consistent resistance training since I was about the age of 16. After watching all the Arnold movies, kind of similar style, right? So basically Cal kind of works right now. Every two to three months, I tried to switch up my programming from like a push, pull, leg split to like a full body routine to like the bro split. Always just trying to change it up a little bit. The main thing I'm kind of having issues with, I know this has been discussed before, is getting really like stiffness in my lower back after doing barbell back squats specifically. Sometimes with RDLs, not as bad with RDLs, but really with the barbell back squat. Now the past few years, I've really been making the barbell back squat like one of my favorite lifts to try to perfect after listening to you all. You introduced me to squat university. I regularly follow that content. And I really try to focus on the hip mobility, the ankle mobility, where I'm loading the bar. I feel like I'm doing everything right, right? I do like a 10 to 15 minute priming session before each squatting session. And when I'm doing the movement, I feel good, I feel balanced, I feel powerful, but towards the end of the workout with the squats and really later on that evening in the next morning, my lower back is just extremely stiff and tight. And I don't know why it is. And I feel like what I'm doing right now is enough to where like I shouldn't be really having that pain. I do have a sedentary job. I work from home and as an accounting executive. I do walk my dog about two to three miles every single day. I do priming and mobility before every workout, four bed every night. I try to do static stretching. And it's more so, I would say it's more so on my right side compared to my left side, but it's still kind of like on both sides of the lower back. It's not like an excruciating pain. I can kind of pinpoint it with my thumbs. It's not going down like the back of my hamstrings, back down into my calves. Adam, I think you alluded to in the past that you got some issues with this. You can keep me honest with that statement. But I'm just kind of getting frustrated right now because I love squatting. I love the feeling of it, but like when I wake up the next day, I'm like, man, this place is something's not right. But when I do it with Bulgarian split stance squats, goblet squats, hack squats, everything feels fine. I do not do that stiffness. So I think I kind of know what the answer is going to be, but with your guys' experience and expertise, I'm just kind of getting frustrated at this point. And then I have a second part, but then we'll dive into that too. Okay, so I'm pretty sure I know what your issue is. And I was going to ask you if you feel it more on one side or the other. Do you know where the QL is, the quadratus lumborum muscle is? I don't know exactly where it is. Okay, so this is a muscle that's along the sides of the spine. It's a stabilizer muscle, but it does work with lateral flexion extension. Okay, so this kind of side to side type of thing. The reason why back squats bother you more than like a rear, like a deadlift or a stiff-legged deadlift or Romanian deadlift is because the lever is much longer with the weight with the barbell squat requiring more lateral stability. So when the barbell's on my back, this side to side stability, more of it's required than when the barbell is down here much lower. And you're probably pretty strong. You've been working out for a while. What do you squat with typically? So if I'm squatting heavy, anything heavy for me, I consider 275 and above. So sometimes I'll go lightweight. It was just like 135 or 225 to do that full range of motion, but I do have the butt wink when I squat. So I'm trying to actively avoid that. So sometimes I just go to 90 to where like I feel like my form isn't breaking down. Okay, so I would do windmills. Yeah, get really strong at windmills. Get really strong with windmills. I would do suitcase carries. So suitcase carries for that QL stability on the opposing side. And I think just the, in fact, in fact, you should try this. Next time you go do a barbell squat, literally begin and then end your workout with windmills. I would do windmills before the squats. Be a great primer, yeah. With no weight, just body weight, just kind of move through the motion. And you might even find as you do a windmill, oh, that feels kind of weird. After the barbell squats, add a little bit of resistance, see if you still hurt the next day. But I think windmills and suitcase carries, based off of what you said, the way you describe everything, it's like it keeps saying to me QL, lateral stability, lateral stability. When you lay down flat on your back and then bend your knees at 45 degrees, how much a gap do you have where you can put your hand underneath your low back? Have you done that before? There's a little bit of a gap there. Little or can you like literally fit your arm in there? I can, not my arm, I would say, definitely like my hand if it's flat. So I don't think it's like anything severe, but it's still, but I still feel like it's more on the right side. That's okay, that's okay. I could fit my arm, bro. That's how bad I was. I was so bad I could fit my arm all the way under there. That had an excessive anterior pelvic tilt. So that's why I was asking, because I wanted to know how bad it was. If you can fit your hand slightly under there, that's pretty normal. Most people or everybody should have some sort of a curve like that. So that's not bad. How do you feel when you squat with like squat shoes or elevated heels? So I feel great. I feel great when I do that. I'm trying to avoid that though, because I just want to get good at the back squat. Like I just, I just want to like, like have that be my baby. And Adam, I know you said in the past, like you really had to work at like your ankle mobility. And in my head, I think I am, but like I know you said like, you had to spend like years working on this. Like, like what did that look like? Like would you do it like three or four times a day? Cause I feel like I'm doing it enough. Yes. But I'm probably, so, so the advice I give on the, I was obsessed with it. Now I was lucky because I had this job. This was back when I was working for Orange Theory and when you worked at Orange Theory, one of the things you, I taught classes and I would teach, you know, four or five hours of classes straight. And I'd have these, I'd have these the microphone on and in the class, you send the class sometimes on these two minute, three minute runs. And anytime I would do it, it would be the only time I wouldn't be coaching. They would literally be just running or rowing for two or three minutes. Every time I did that in a class, which would be multiple times in an hour, four hours in a day, I would get down and just do like the 99, or do get down and do the combat stretch on each side. I would kneel down, do it for a minute on one side, a minute on the other side. And then I'd pop right back up. I just started to make that a habit. Like anytime I had the opportunity to just get down there and drive the knees forward. And then I finally got to a place where I could actually sit down, comfortably, which right now I could hop down in a squat, sit all the way down, rested. And then even when I'm doing that, I'm not just sitting there rested. I'm still trying to push my knees forward and really activate, right? So I'm not just resting in that position. I'm always trying to drive the knees forward and get more range of active range of motion there. And yeah, it's more about frequency than it is intensity. So you're better off as many times you can every single day doing it for just a minute than you are scheduling a 20 minute block of mobility two or three days a week. So frequency of that is the king. And it does, it took me a solid year, I'd say to see some really good progress, two years to feel like I solved it. I mean, after that, to this day, I don't have issues back squat anymore, but I literally after every, if I squatted over 10 reps, barbell back squat, and I had any sort of depth past 90 degrees, I would be laying on the floor doing like afterwards, because my back would just be on fire, pumped, just super pumped and tight. And then like you're saying, I didn't have sciatica, I didn't have any issues or any other painting where just a low back would get so tight. I would guess yours was probably more erector spinae fatigue and pump in his. Like, are you feeling the back pain right away? Or is it like the day after? So it's simply like the evening, like the evening after typically I work out after work like five, six o'clock. No, this sounds like QL. This is like, it's screaming QL. So when somebody who's a beginner or just getting started or maybe they had a previous injury or whatever, when they're telling me they have low back pain, it's often of course stability issue, could be hip mobility, that kind of stuff. When you get somebody who's been working out for a while who's pretty strong and they're noticing like, man, I work, I do everything right, do the mobility. I notice that my back just hurts, especially when I barbell squat and it's on one side that screams QL to me. Like 99% of the workouts that are out there lack any lateral stability, anything. Like there's almost none in there. They both, by the way too, are gonna feed into each other, right? Like so, if you have poor ankle mobility, what will happen is as you go down, like rarely ever is our left or right exactly the same. So you have like a little bit better on the left side than the right. So it causes that barbell to slightly shift to the right or the left a little bit and then it flares up that QL like Sal's saying. So they're not exclusively mutual. It's like you were doing the stuff they're saying QL-wise while also continuing to work on 90-90, I mean, excuse me, on combat stretch is going to be massive for you. But they both are probably, but you're not probably exactly like me because like I said, I could fit my arm under there. That's what I was looking for was you to say it was that bad. So it is most likely the QL you're feeling, but it doesn't mean it's not also being exacerbated by the lack of ankle mobility. If you can progressively load a windmill and really like get strong in that, it's just naturally going to take care of itself. Your body is going to support itself like you've never had it support your back. To the point where too, you can even work on doing a bent press. We should have them on old time strength. I think honestly, that's what I'm getting at, perfect. Yeah, old time strength. I think if you run that, your mind is going to be blown. Like how like supported and stabilized your body is going to be going back into those conventions. An easy way to test this, literally is you could like right now, if your back is kind of tight right now, you could do, it is, you could do an old school dumbbell side bend. This is an exercise people made. Plus you already almost have the mustache for it. Yeah. For the old time strength. Hey, yeah. But you know, like you could test this right now. Like if your back is feeling kind of like, ooh, I feel it's kind of tight, you literally can stand up, hold the dumbbell in one hand and put your feet together and do an old school side bend. Do 10 reps on one side and you'll know right away, you'll be like, oh yeah, there it is. I feel it. I could feel what's happening. And that'll be your answer if that happens to you. But if you follow, so old time strength is the best program we have, period end of story for that kind of stability. For the kind of stability where you could lift heavy things and be offset or you could suspend or hold heavy things overhead and have that type of stability. It really creates a strong stiff body. And I don't mean in the negative way. I mean, like you're able to have that stability. So what I want you to do now is I want you to follow old time strength. I want you to be obsessed with the ankle mobility and then report back to us. I have a feeling. I bet you'll hit a PR on your squad. If you're more obsessed about your ankle mobility than you ever have before and you follow old time strength to a tee, I can't wait to hear what you feel and notice when you get back. I think you'll hit a PR on your squad. I would love to. And I'm embarrassed to say I've never even tried the windmills, right? I really thought it was like really like the hip mobility. I got obsessed with that. So I definitely need to focus on like the QL stability. So definitely should have been focusing on that. I just was blinded, right? I know everything is connected, right? The ankle, the hips, the core, everything. And I was driving myself insane because I'm like, I've been doing this for years and it's really gotten worse the past couple of years. But no, thank you for those tips. I'm actually doing legs today in about two hours. So I'm gonna implement this. We're gonna send the program over to you. So you got it. You got it. Oh, that'd be awesome. I appreciate that. Do I have time just for one quick question that kind of correlates? So another thing, whenever I'm doing like my static stretching at night or I always get like cramps in my hip flexors and like on the bottom of my feet, like the soft spot, you know? And like yesterday I was benching and I was going kind of heavy. I had like two, like 265 on the bar and I was putting it up and I just got a cramp in my right hip flexor. Just super tight. And like when I'm doing these stretches at night like I'm doing like the 90 90s, like the child pose and like I just keep getting these cramps. It's been happening pretty much my whole life. I drink LMNT every single day. I get the potassium, the magnesium. I try to get like, I feel again, I'm doing everything right, but I don't know why like I continue to cramp up. It's not really like if I'm walking my dog, I get a cramp, but it's really like when I'm stretching and trying to calm down Adam, I actually followed along with you with the Prime Pro webinar like a year ago. And you even said in the video, like if you feel a cramp fight through it, it'll go away, but damn, they hurt. And like I struggled to fight through it. I can't help you with the pain part, but you know, the seminar that you went through with Adam is not static stretching. So are you doing static stretching or are you like doing mobility where you're activating the muscles because there's a very different. Yeah, so prior to working out, I do mobility before bed. I try to do static stretching to kind of calm down and wind a little bit. So I do the mobility priming before resistance training the static stretching before I lay down. When you're doing the static stretching, when does the hip flexor cramp up? Is it when you're stretching your hamstrings? Yeah. Okay, it's because the, when you're in that long stretch, the hamstrings are lengthened, the hip flexor shortened and the hip flexor is trying to stabilize the joint. So it's good. So it'd be like you'll notice a hip flexor do that when you're doing a hamstring stretch. You'll notice it on the bottom of your foot when you're pointing your toes. Yeah, so what can you do about it? If your electrolytes are balanced, not much other than trying to calm the CNS. So sometimes when people do static stretching, they hold their breath and they, without realizing it, yeah. So static stretching, the idea is to relax and calm the CNS. That means you also have to relax your mind and breathe like you're someone who's relaxed. And that might actually help. Try doing it after a hot bath and tell me if you feel better. Okay. Take a hot bath and then do your static stretching and tell me if you feel better. Candles and bubbles. Yeah, yeah, candles and bubbles. He's a guy though. I don't think he takes baths. Yes. I'm gonna make baths popular again, bro. Sit down while you pee and take a bath like that. Bath boys. No, no, that all sounds good. Thank you, fellas. And I know, I know you all are busy, but just want to give you all just a quick things individually, just kind of alphabetically. Adam, thanks for the strawberry walnut cream. Creatures that have it. I'm not just saying it because I'm on the show. Dude, it's the best flavor. Me and my wife stocked up on all their flavors. It's our favorite one. Also, no shame to admit it. I've been peeing sitting down at night for years now. Getting up in the middle of the night. Dude, there are guys out there, man. It's a win. Sal and Justin, I feel like if you start doing it, you're going to know we're right. And that's why you don't want to do it. So Adam, I want to thank you for, you know, hooking up the guys out there. I got you, brother. I got you. Mm-hmm. I suspect. Doug, thanks for all the work you do behind the scenes. Being like the dad of the group, I really enjoy listening when you chime in on any topics that are discussed, whether it's fitness or non-fitness related. So really enjoy that. Justin, again, your conspiracy theories, just all the fun facts you bring to the podcast about random animals or history. We love that. Also love your take on like the functional side of training with current and former athletes. Just give them my background. Whenever you talk about that kind of stuff, it's just really entertaining to me. Sal, I need to thank you for being partially responsible for now my supplement addiction that I've had for like the past two years with all your partners. Oh, with our partners? Talk to them. I'm glad you talked about. Awesome. You're fine. Noah, we appreciate it, man. Thank you so much. Thanks for your support, dude. We'll send you all-time strength. I think I feel very, very confident. Bro, please email us after you've gone through at least 60 to 90 days of it so we can hear, because I have a feeling that you're going to see. You're going to blow your mind. Anybody's done it, man. It's been game changer. Yeah, I can't wait. Thank you, fellas. And happy holidays to you all and your families, especially your kids. So again, keep doing what you're doing. I appreciate it. And I'll keep you guys updated. Appreciate it, brother. Thanks, bro. Thank you, man. All right, thanks, fellas. You got it. I don't care what anybody says. If you're a man and you pee sitting down, don't start this, bro. Unless you have to. You're losing this argument. It's just you're losing this one. You're lost a freaking space race. You're losing all kinds of stuff lately, bro. Just stay in your lane. And then what he said, Justin, the conspiracy theorist. I don't think Justin's a conspiracy theorist anymore, because he all comes through. No. He's like a prophet. I'm a prophet. We're going to start calling Justin the prophet. I'm just, just pay attention. What the hell? It's so weird. People don't want to talk about it. No, listen, I'm more, I'm more and more convinced. And it's so, I love this. Like as I continue to do this, you never know everything. And you just, I just learned more and more. Advanced lifters, people have been working out for a while. I think this is a very common issue. People who've been lifting for years and years and years, good form, good technique, trying to do everything right. They have nagging, low back issues, especially with barbell squats. I have yet to see programs that really address that lateral stability. Nobody does. So it's all bilateral or it's all balanced in the way it's loaded. And the QL is just stabilizing with every exercise. And what happens is everything gets so strong. And the QL gets strong in this isometric contraction. But any movement outside of it, it gets overpowered. And so then you get sore. It's like, it's literally like his body is too strong for what is QL and support. It's strong and stabilizing, but it's not like a strong muscle, like contraction. Like we're not focused on actually building that strength. And that's really where old time, like on like any other program is really addressing that. Listen, I had to avoid barbell. You guys know this for a little while for the same issue. Literally, two workouts with dumbbell side bends. Not even the best QL exercise you could do. It's just a basic like, okay, let's try. Gone. I was like, oh crap, that's what it was. And I love it when I find stuff like that. But I think this is a much more common issue than people realize. Totally. Look, if you're a trainer or coach, do this. Mindpumptrainer.com. Sign up, three day course. We're gonna teach you how to be a more successful trainer with your business and with your clients. It's mindpumptrainer.com. You can also find all of us on Instagram. Justin is at Mindpump. Justin, I'm at Mindpump to Stefano and Adam is at Mindpump Adam.