 Oh, yeah, it's mine pop time. All right, I got a surprise giveaway for you today. This is a great surprise. All right, so here's what you do, by the way, to win a prize whenever we drop these episodes. So when we drop them in the first 24 hours, and by the way, hang tight, I'm gonna tell you what you can win today. Leave a comment in the first 24 hours underneath this video. Make it a good comment. If we pick your comment, if we decide your comment is the best comment of all the comments, it's the king comment, then you will win a prize. And today's prize is amazing. So there's two things, right? Here's the first thing. You win a copy of the resistance training revolution. It's a book that I just published. It's really, really good. I know, because I wrote it, but here's the second part. You may get one of the following things. Either I'm gonna sign it personally, myself, on the inside, or you'll get a naked picture of Justin. And believe me, you're gonna wanna see that. It's really nice. Think cakes and plates. Cakes and plates. All right, real quick, before we get started, one more thing. Subscribe to this channel, turn on notifications, and check out our promotion. There's only two days left, as of the dropping of this particular podcast for this promotion. 50% off maps, anabolic, or 50% off our shredded summer bundle, right? Both are half off. There's only two days left for this promotion. You can learn more at mapsfitnessproducts.com. Just remember to use the code April Special. All right, enjoy this podcast. The fitness space is so full of incorrect information, stigma, stereotypes. I can't think of one that's more damaging than the inaccurate stereotypes and stigma that surrounds lifting weights. It's gotta be one of the most damaging. It's funny. What'd you guys think of Muscle Beach Party when I put that up on? Oh man. Movie? It's cringeworthy. Man, the boys are here, the girls are here, and the muscle men are here. Bikini chicks are the bait, and romance the reward. Yeah, so those are, that was a popular string of like, or class or category of movies in the late 50s and then especially in the 60s, where it was like Frankie and Annette, I think was the name of the two that were always in them. And it's like Muscle Beach Party or Beach Blanket Bingo or a bunch of all of these different movies. And they were always set in California. There was always surfers. And there were always bodybuilders on the beach and there were popular movies. There were popular like drive-in movies for dates. But the bodybuilders were always depicted in a particular way. And it was really one of the first like mainstream media ways that bodybuilders were put out there. And it created this very hard, almost impossible to erase stigma that surrounds. Oh, it still persists today. Like I think a lot of people still associate a lot of lifting weights with that type of a person. You know, like the guy that's just like so incredibly into himself and just like looking at his muscles the whole time and super stiff and everything. I had no idea this genre of movie existed. I didn't know this was a thing. And it does explain a lot, you know, if you talk to someone like Tom Billu who like loves to talk about, you know, movies and the role they play. Oh, on culture? Yeah, on culture. And if you read books like Hitmakers, that's a great book that gets into all that. Like movies play a huge role in our culture. And if that was what was going on in the 50s that was really kind of setting the table for what probably came in the late 60s and 70s, it makes a lot of sense that that's what the stigma was around bodybuilders. Yeah, these are the, I believe it or not, these are the movies that made Arnold want to come to California in particular. He would watch these movies in Austria or Europe, right? So he's just kind of like poor kid. He's a bodybuilder out there. And he would dream of coming to California because he would see these movies and see people like Dave Draper who was a bodybuilder who would be in some of these movies. It's funny too, the names that they would give these guys in the movies were like Hulk, Sulk, Flex, Martian. Galaxy, Flex. Yeah, Mr. Galaxy, you know? And they were totally stereotyped in these particular movies. But yeah, that's what motivated Arnold to originally come over. He saw us like, I want to go on those beaches and I want to be in movies like these guys are. But it did, it really, and if we go back to kind of the origins of weightlifting, the whole time it's kind of been pushing this stigma, if you will. Oh, you think so? I kind of feel like old-timey lifting was more like circus, functional strength, kind of more like strength feats. And this is where I would think that it started to make this transition into more of aesthetics in the way you look. It is, but what I mean by that is the, if you go back to the, I mean, we don't have to go all the way back, right? I know the Greeks used forms of dumbbells and resistance training, all that stuff, but you look at like strong men, strong women. They were, you're right, circus acts. They wore, they would typically wear something that you would- Singlet, right? No, no, either a singlet or they'd wear like this one strap. One strap, yeah. Furry singlet, like to look like a caveman. Like caveman, yeah. And they were never lean. They were just big, obese, really strong people. And then the women would do it as well, but they would give them like these masculine names. That's kind of how it started. When gymnasiums first started, they were literally gymnasiums. And you did it, and this is how it worked by the way. You'd go in and they would start the workout and everybody would do the same thing. So it'd be like, and then you'd have somebody counting. One, two, three, and people would be like doing stuff on the rings or whatever. And it would, women weren't allowed typically. It was just men that were doing this. That's kind of how it started. Then again, you had the strong men. And then you're right, the big popular media initially were these Muscle Beach movies. And the bodybuilders were always depicted as dumb, interested only in their bodies. They were stiff, oiled up, self-absorbed. And they were kind of made fun of or poked at in these movies. Yeah, I mean, he even referenced of like he owned them. All right, boy. Yeah. Oh, it was a Don Rickles character. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I own these. They're all mine. All mine, like they're cattle. Yeah, yeah. And then you moved to, and so that was the original kind of belief. And so at that time, if it was the 60s, and you, by the way, here's an interesting thing. If you watch this movie, I would love people to just pull up Muscle Beach Party. Oh, I'm sure Andrew will pop it up so people can see a clip of it. These guys, although they look like they work out, if they were walking around on a beach today, they wouldn't really stand, they wouldn't stand out that much. So that's the part of all of this that was the most fascinating to me is how much that, I mean, I've seen how much it's evolved just in the 80s. Since I've been born to now, and like what you look at, you know, competitive physiques, I mean, they've already, what you would consider, what a guy that took first place, you know, on stage just two decades ago, wouldn't even place today. And- They wouldn't place in a- In a local show. Yeah, amateur show. That's, I mean, so the level of, you know, expectation on what this, the extreme, you know, fitness looks like, is just, it's gotten crazier. Like, these guys look like they work out. And they- Just like average guys. Yeah, with muscles. Yeah. I mean, they don't look bad, but they don't look like what you, not even on Instagram, what you would post if you were a fitness person. Yeah, no, I've, okay. So my bodies look like that on YouTube, and I've gotten shamed for it. Yeah, yeah. That's what makes me think of that. I'm like, wow, you know, this, how wild is that? That is something that, you know, we revered back then and just thought and admired, like, oh my God, this is so amazing back then to now, you, if you're in fitness, if you quote, unquote, you would be mocked or made fun of for not having, and you know- Well, it also speaks to the evolution of that whole way of training and trying to look, you know, as crazy as possible. And I think that's where like, you know, bodybuilding really started to, you know, get this crazy momentum and like, how far can we go with this? But even then, even then, if you look like those guys in the 60s and you're on the beach, you were a freak. You were not- Back then that was totally abnormal. You were a freak. You were not a normal person. You were a freak and all the stereotypes applied. You were, you know, oh, you're bulky. You're very stiff. In fact, athletes for a long time didn't even touch weights because the belief was that lifting weights made you muscle bound. This is, by the way, this is a stigma that we relatively recently got rid of. Well, yeah, you can even see the way they characterize them in the show. They're all walking all with their lats all flared and all like a robot in there and stuff. And you know they're being told to hold those positions. For all we know, one or two or three of those guys could be incredibly flexible, but they positioned them that way from the very beginning. And so that's carried on like you said forever. In the 56, I mean, of course before, but 50s, 60s, 70s and even the 80s, if you weren't lifting weights, if you weren't in sports, football, besides weightlifting, right, besides Olympic weightlifting, football was one of the first sports that were athletes started lifting weights. And it really didn't start becoming popular till the 80s. If you weren't a professional football team in the 60s, your coach would get mad at you for lifting weights because it's gonna make you stiff and unathletic. This was the belief. We still got that. I mean, especially like transitioning from football to basketball, like the coach would bench us because it was like there was this thought that like we worked out all the time and like we were to muscle bound or whatever to have that kind of skill set where we could use that on the court and be athletic still. And then you would always like give our coach grief about like working this out too much. Yeah, now this is a success story of resistance training because now you'd be hard pressed to find any athlete. I don't care what sport that doesn't incorporate some form of resistance training. Golfers now do resistance training as part of their training. So that's one success story. But for a long time, it was like a no-no in every single sport. It's gonna make you stiff. It's gonna take away from your performance. Now, do you guys think that that some of that stigma has some merit though? Do you believe that it did stem from some of these people being unbelievably muscle bound and not flexible and not athletic? It wasn't because of the muscle. It was because you had the way that you didn't incorporate your skill training alongside it. Of course, I understand that, right? But my point that what I'm asking right now is like, do you think that it was warranted? Because back then we didn't have the same knowledge that we have today around weight training and dieting. And so maybe a lot of these meat heads that were lifting back then were really muscle bound. It weren't very flexible. Did lose or watch their athletic performance decline. And so there was some value behind people thinking. No, I'll tell you what happened. And this is actually, there's a few authors that go deep into this. And you guys will know this because of your experience in training clients. If you take anybody, I don't care who you take and you have them do proper resistance training, their flexibility, mobility and athletic abilities will improve a little bit. No anybody. Now if you take a somebody who lifts weights all the time, look at me, I lift weights all the time. Put me on a court to play a sport and you're gonna think, oh, he's not athletic. Part of the problem is a lot of these body builders in those days, they looked muscular. So your assumption is because he's muscular, he could probably throw a baseball really well. He could probably, but they didn't play sports. What they did is they lifted weights. So the perception was he should be able to cause he looks more muscular than athlete. That's a good point. But he never plays sports. But they didn't know that. They thought it was the weight training that made them that way. The reality is they just lifted weights. Well, I mean, I was kind of guilty of that in the training sphere. We had all these trainers that were like super built and their bodies and their physiques were crazy. But yeah, we'd go to play something like softball and I couldn't believe like, many of them couldn't even hit a baseball. It's because your perception is, oh, they should be able to. Right, they look athletic, therefore they're probably. Yes, but the reality is if you don't train in sports, you're not gonna be good at those sports. Now anybody who lifts weights properly will improve their athletic performance generally. Now you're gonna become a great athlete, but you're better off because you do resistance training. So it never takes away from, it always contributes. Now in the cases where it may take away from, it's literally when you're an athlete and you trade skill for resistance training. Right, right, you're an athlete, you play your sport five days a week, you don't weight train and then all of a sudden you go from that guy to oh, I weight train five days a week and I stop playing my sport. Yeah, of course you're gonna lose athleticism, but it's not because of the resistance training because you lost the focus on skill or whatever. So that's where that perception came from. That makes a lot more sense. And it's stuck around for a very long time. Now the reason why that one is a success story is one of the wonderful thing about sports, especially sports where you score points or that are objective is that at some point whatever works is gonna come out to the top. So I could believe whatever I want about resistance training, but if this team keeps kicking everybody's ass, then what are they doing? And okay, well we gotta try that out. And so it's the beauty of a lot of sports is that the best skills and techniques eventually take over because they're all focused on winning, but you don't see this in other realms because it's not as objective. And so a lot of the stigma still applies. And then you move to the 70s, right? So you have all these Muscle Beach movies of the 60s that perpetuate this note. By the way, would any woman ever wanna work out when all the examples of using weights are these Muscle Beach guys? Yeah, of course not. Why would I wanna look like that guy, right? So that's where it started. Then in the 70s you have a documentary that actually goes mainstream. One award's Pumping Iron. And this wasn't just a dramatization, it wasn't just characters, it was true. Like this is a documentary. The greatest feeling you can get in a gym or the most satisfying feeling you can get in a gym is the pump. Let's say you drain your biceps, blood is rushing into your muscles and that's what we call the pump. Your muscles get a really tight feeling. Like your skin is going to explode any minute. You know, it's really tight. It's like somebody blowing air into your muscle. It just blows up and it feels different. It feels fantastic. And you had the, by the way, if Arnold wasn't in Pumping Iron, I don't think it would have done what it did, but Arnold's super charismatic and people watch it like crazy. And what you saw was the very extreme version of weight training, which was bodybuilding. And that started, that just pushed it, it just solidified it for women. No, thank you. This is what the result is? Yeah, so what did that look like in terms of competitions before that movie? Because I know that that propelled this, it really like elevated a lot of the tension around those competitions. Yeah, so bodybuilding really started getting more and more, every decade got more and more popular. Now, simultaneously though, we're also watching like the emergence of someone like Jane Fonda, right? Coming on the scene and like, because of course there's people, there's women at this time that wanna lose body fat or wanna look better, quote unquote. The 70s is when the fitness, I would say the fitness industry kind of got its foothold. This one started growing, you're right. People like Jane Fonda and people selling videos or workout books and stuff like that. This is when it kind of started, this is when the gym industry was starting to kind of figure out how they could become an industry. Not yet, that started happening in the 80s, but it started during that time. And so in the 70s you're right, women were told to not lift weights. People like Jane Fonda would say things like short reps, lots of reps, don't use weight, you don't wanna get bulky, you just wanna get sculpted and toned. This is when tone became a word probably around the 70s or 80s. And so the stigma keeps getting pressed. And then you had the action movies of the 80s and 90s. My favorite era. They're great, right? And the action movies were always big, muscular, buffed, you know, he-man. Just hulky and kind of dudes. Yeah, Arnold and Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren and all these other guys. Even Bruce Lee in martial arts movies, Bruce Lee, people don't realize this, he lifted weights a lot. In fact, he would train with bodybuilders to learn how to do resistance training, like Bill Pearl. If you see him in Enter the Dragon, now he's genetically a small guy, but if you see him, he's a very muscular dude. He didn't develop that doing Jeet Kune Do. He developed that physique, he does a lat spread. If you watch Return of the Dragon or Enter the Dragon, when he's warming up and cracking his knuckles, and he does this lat spread and you hear everything cracking. Flex Wheeler, one of the top bodybuilders of the 90s says that's what inspired him to bodybuild, was that lat spread that Bruce Lee did. It continued to kind of push this, this is what weight training does and that's really the only value. You want to look like the guy who killed the predator? You want to look like a bodybuilder? This is what you- Universal soldier. Yeah, and it turned off, it even turned off a lot of men. In fact, I remember- Yeah, you had to be a guy that really desired that, which is not everybody. Most people- Yeah, a lot of men do not want that. In fact, there's a minority of us that really pursue that look, because even statistics show that, you've talked about this on the show before, that women don't even like that look. They'd prefer a more normal looking, average looking guy over the overly buff looking dude. In fact, the guys who started lifting weights seriously in those decades were typically like my story, right? Insecure, skinny. No, I want to be the big buff guy, right? It wasn't the guy who was- Well, remember it was even promoted that way. Remember the old articles- Yes. You know, the skinny little weak boy and his girlfriend- The guy at the beach that was kicking sand is famous. Yeah, the girlfriend gets stolen by the buff guy, comes over and says, you come with me. And so then he goes and he buys a program, then gets buff and then he's come back and fight for his girlfriend back. Yeah, Mac, I think it was his name. It was Charles Atlas. Charles Atlas, yeah. Yeah, it was his dynamic tension routine. This was the back of every comic book. And again, it just continued to push that perception. So if you're a guy back then, and you've played sports in high school, you stop working out, you're like, I don't want to get back into shape. You're not thinking bodybuilding. And not at all. I don't want to care about looking like those meathead idiots or whatever. I just want to get back into shape. So I'm going to start, I don't know, playing sports. I'll start running, start doing something else. And definitely women weren't touching the weights at all. In fact, I started working out in gyms in the mid-90s and you would not see a woman in the weight room at all. Never, not in the mid-90s. Gyms had separate areas for women. They were actually segregated and the women's area had no free weights except for maybe five pound dumbbells. They were like pink or purple. And they had some machines, but the machine and the stacks were real light and they had colorful, you know, whatever. And there wasn't anybody really doing traditional resistance training. It was still mainly, you know, these people who wanted to look like what the stereotype was at the time. There was nobody really lifting weights for general health and general fitness. So that's really the 90s. And the women who were fit in the 90s, 80s and 90s in movies, if they ever showed them working out, they weren't lifting weights. They were running. They were running or doing some form of cardio. Jazzercise. Yes, dude. Jazzercise was the thing. My mom still does it. I was gonna say, they're making a comeback right now. What are the leg warmers? Leg warmers are coming back right now. Oh, man. Yeah, I just remember all those movies like Flash Dance and all this stuff. Yes. Like that was a big thing. Yes, did you guys, so funny. God, what's that movie with John Travolta? Staying Alive? Uh-huh. Great movie. I love that movie when I was younger. But that was that disco movie, right? Then they had part two where he goes to Broadway and he does this big show and it wasn't nearly as popular. I thought it was great because I was a big John Travolta fan. But in that he takes a shirt off and he's got this like lean muscular physique. What people don't know and which he never really shared was he trained with bodybuilders to look like that because he wanted to look fit and muscular. Now everybody thought in the way they promoted the dancing, that's how he got muscular. Now he did do a lot of dancing for the film. And hence comes dirty dancing not long after that, right? Patrick Swayze. Which you know he was lifting weights too. They were and so people in Hollywood were starting to incorporate resistance training but it wasn't even something you wanted to say. In fact, for a long time it was considered cheating. This is true. It was considered cheating that you lifted weights so if someone said, wow, you look really good and if you said I lift weights, they're like, oh, it doesn't count. Very strange mentality. And so what you get from this was kind of this terrible stigma and bodybuilders didn't help it by the way. Bodybuilders are so extreme to begin with. And to be fair, bodybuilders were the ones that introduced resistance training at all. Nobody even knew about it before that. And of course, bodybuilders did a lot of experimentation on themselves to figure things out. But like any aspect of anything, I don't care what you talk about whether it's business, fitness, whether it's nutrition. If you look at the most extreme examples, that's a bad representation of what you would probably get from incorporating some of the stuff that you're looking at. Well, especially something like this because you could spend most of your life trying to look like one of these guys. And you won't. And you won't. You know what I'm saying? Like literally trying your hardest. I mean, that's how difficult it is to reach that level of physique. Not to mention, here we are hitting into the 70s and 80s and now the introduction of drugs and stuff are happening. So then it gets exaggerated even more. So you already have this exaggerated group of men that are lifting weights that already look so different than the average person. And then you go throw hormones and stuff on that. And science starts evolving around nutrition and we start learning so much more. And now you think, oh my God, if I touch weights, I'm gonna look like Ronnie Coleman. Like I mean, how many female clients did you train when in your early career that would say shit? Oh, I remember I would, you know, luckily I'm convincing. So I convinced, especially in the early days, right? I'd have to convince women like, no, we're gonna do heavy barbell squats. And I know your goal is to lose weight, but here's why it'll work. And I do my whole thing. And then they would, you know, they'd kind of start with me, but you could tell they were apprehensive. And then after we do a workout, especially after they got their first pump, I would always get this comment. They'd be like, my legs feel bigger. Like, and I'm like, listen, you didn't just build muscle right now. And they would be afraid. Am I gonna like be really bulky? I said, it doesn't work that way. There's nothing I could do will make you bulky tomorrow. It doesn't work that way. And I'd have to constantly explain myself, but it was so ingrained in their head that this is what resistance training does. And there's no other value that it was this constant conversation. You know, when it comes to fat loss, for example, resistance training, lifting weights was never even in the conversation. It wasn't a way to lose weight. I bet you if you find fitness books from the 70s and 80s and maybe even the 90s, they won't lift, they will not list resistance training as a form of exercise for fat loss. It was a form of exercise for weight gain, but never for fat loss within the irony of it is the, it's the most effective form of exercise for fat loss. By the way, studies now completely come from, I'm not just speaking as a personal trainer, but when you look at studies where they do like diet, cause you have to, you know, just exercising to lose weight is a very tough strategy. It's almost always going to fail. Well, that was the problem. We were measuring it this way, right? We were measuring it in a one hour block, you know, and the one law, law through my dynamics, which is, okay, if I'm trying to, you know, burn more calories and I compare all the different types of weight training modalities to purely running, running wins on a calorie perspective, but there's so much more that goes into it. So a lot, I think the research was centered around that. There wasn't even any research. It was literally just that. It was that paradigm. And now here's what the studies show very clearly. When you combine resistance training with diet, what you lose is fat and you oftentimes gain muscle at the same time or you definitely don't lose any muscle. When they combine other forms of exercise with diet, usually it's a 50-50 spread. You lose half muscle, you lose half body fat. Now here's the interesting thing. I love explaining this to people cause it blows our mind. If you lose 10 pounds, half of its muscle, half of its body fat, your body fat percentage is the same. You've just become a smaller, weaker, flabby version of yourself. So you are the same body fat percentage, just smaller, now with a slower. Well, I shared this story on an interview I just did. I think I've shared it on the podcast before, but it reminds me of this client that I had, not that long ago. She's a good friend of mine and she wanted to compete. She wanted to do a show and she was probably about, she probably needed to lose somewhere between 20, 25 pounds somewhere around there. And when I first assessed her and had her like track her food and kind of see where she's at, I told her, no, I said, you're not ready to do that. You're not ready to try and get on stage right now. Your metabolism isn't in a healthy place. And she ignored me and she ended up hiring somebody else. Now I had taught her already then like her food tracking and she was following good program. She was following our stuff back then. And I used to have her periodically hydrostatic way. So, you know, one of the most accurate ways to find her body fat percentage, right? And so she goes and she tests her body fat percentage before she starts this prep, before she gets ready for a show. And then she gets ready, right? And she drops like 25 pounds and she's like a static. So she's like, ah, Adam was wrong this time. Right, right. She gets on stage, I actually went to the show to support her and stuff like that. She's a good family friend of ours. And we go there and she actually weighed herself. She did the dunk, right? And got her body fat percentage, but she didn't want to look at it until after stage. She didn't want to be in her head before she did it. So she wouldn't do her thing. She's all happy and proud that she accomplished it. She lost 25 pounds. And then she opens up the results with me. And the body fat percentage went up. And she's like, she gets all emotional. She starts crying. How is this possible? I don't understand. I feel like I'm the smallest I've ever been. I've never looked like this before. I worked so hard. I was so perfect on my diet for the last 12 weeks. I didn't make one mistake. I didn't miss the gym one time. I didn't miss the cardio session. And this says that I have higher body fat percentage. I don't understand Adam. And I broke it down to her. I said, well, you lost 25 pounds. But 13 of those pounds came from muscle. You lost 13 pounds of muscle on your body. And so there was a higher ratio of muscle loss than actually body fat. So technically, you got fatter even though you got small. Oh man, that just tore her apart. But this is happening all over all the time to just normal people. Not just people that are going to the extreme to competing and getting on stage, but people that are deciding, hey, I'm going to make a change today. I'm going to start to lose this body fat that's been plaguing me for the last few years. And this is what they do. Well, and also too, like this kind of, you know, also reminds me of the BMI science that is perpetuated still by doctors. And this is something they have to have something that's standardized. They have to have an easy way to kind of explain to people that you need to lose weight. Otherwise you got to teach a bunch of doctors how to do a body fat test. Exactly. Otherwise you have to discern what kind of tissue is optimal and what kind isn't. But what that leaves you with is this tendency towards I have to just, by any means necessary, I need to get the weight off. And so I need to reduce calories. Weight training is going to build this bulky physique, right? I'm gaining more mass. And so that's still a stigma that's around lifting weights, is that now you're going to build more mass, and you're going to have this fat to go with it. And so your BMI is going to be high. And the doctor doesn't discern whether or not you have a healthy amount of tissue and muscular tissue versus fat, which we've already been seeing too. All these new studies coming out showing you what active muscle tissue is for your organs. No, that's such a great point. And muscle is very protective. Muscle, more muscle reduces your risk of diabetes and Alzheimer's and dementia. It speeds up your metabolism, which means you burn more calories all the time. It's protective against injury. It's a tissue that is so active that it's more likely, more muscle is more likely to raise good hormones on lower bad ones. It's a buffer against cortisol. So it's a very, very good thing. And BMI just measures total weight. And I could cut one leg off, my BMI goes down, right? But is that a good type of weight loss? No, it's not. Now we got to talk about why people lose muscle when they do it the wrong way. And it's not, now the belief was that the body burned the muscle as a form of energy. It's not true. The last tissue that your body, well, besides organs, the last tissue your body wants to burn to use as energy is muscle. It really doesn't wanna do that. So then you might be wondering, well, why the hell then did Adam's friend lose 13 pounds of muscle? Because their body adapted to the type of stresses that she placed upon it and to her nutrition. And the type of stresses that she started to place upon it was lots of calorie burn through cardiovascular activity. I'm gonna do a lot of cardio. I'm gonna burn tons of calories. And very little food and energy. And very little food and energy. And the resistance training probably changed as well. I'm sure she did more cardio with weights than she did strength training. Now the result of that is this. Look, the body's like, we don't need to be strong right now. So we don't need much strength. We're burning lots of calories through manual activities. This is very different than through just burning calories through our normal metabolism. So burning lots of calories, we don't need lots of strength. So here's what we need to do. We need to become more efficient with calories to kind of offset all this calorie burn that we're doing through activity. We need to get rid of that expensive tissue. And since we don't need to be strong, that's an easy thing to pare down. So it's the same thing. Look, it's no different than if you put a cast on your leg for a month and you take the cast off in the muscle. By the way, if you've ever had a cast, you know what I'm talking about. You lose that muscle and it's gone. Now it comes back very quickly, but initially it's gone and you think what happened to my quad. Your quadricep, your body burned off the quad. It just adapted. Your body has no reason. Your body will only ever be as strong as it needs to be. It's never gonna be any stronger than it thinks it needs because it's so inefficient to do so. Remember, we evolved where calories were sparse and we're trying to survive all the time. So why would your body make you burn more calories for no freaking reason? It's not. If anything, it's gonna make you burn less calories or just enough to meet your demands and to make you more efficient. And so this is what ends up happening with that false paradigm. So the paradigm that we were taught was this. This was the fitness paradigm. Okay, weight loss happens when you burn more calories than you take in. So let's just pick the exercise that burns the most calories. Boom, that should totally be successful. Has it been successful? No, we're now decades into thinking that the exercise solution for obesity is to burn a lot of calories. And where are we today? Decades later, fatter than ever. We're fatter than ever. It hasn't worked. And by the way, I'm not just talking about the average person. The average exercising person is fatter than ever. Because of this false paradigm, you follow people who've done lots of cardio, who do lots of running or swimming or who do classes. Now, why are they fatter than ever? Because this is what happens when you follow that old fitness paradigm. Initially, you lose some weight right away, real fast. By the way, that's what makes you think it's the solution. Oh, it's working. I'm doing 45 minutes of cardio every single day and I lost 10 pounds in like four weeks. It's definitely working. That's what happens at first. Hard plateau. Metabolism adapts. You lose muscle. Now, 45 minutes of cardio, plus your normal metabolism is burning. Just enough calories to balance out what you're taking in. I'm not losing any more weight. This isn't working. Now I gotta either cut my calories more or do more cardio. Eventually, you reach a wall and you're like, I'm not doing any more or you give up. Then you gain the weight back, but it's not the old weight. So if you lost half muscle, half fat, so let's say you lost 10 pounds, five muscle, five fat. And you go through this process and you get frustrated and you stop. And then you gain the 10 pounds back. You didn't gain five pounds of muscle back. You gained 10 pounds all body fat back. Now you're worse off than you were before and it's this kind of hamster wheel of worse and worse results. Not to mention, you're now in a slower metabolism than what you probably started with. Now it's like, it's this uphill battle. By the way, when you use resistance training as the exercise portion of your fat loss journey, the fat loss or the weight loss, I should say, the weight loss on the scale starts off much slower. The cardio person loses it real quick at first and plateaus. The weight loss from resistance training with good nutrition starts off slow. In fact, the first month or two, the scale might not even move. To me, that's the goal. I mean, when I'm coaching a client or when I'm managing my own diet and weight and resistance training, I'm trying to stay the same. If I know that I've put on body fat, I've been inconsistent with the diet, been inconsistent with training. And let's say I've added four or 5% extra body fat of my body than I normally have. And it's time to turn it up, right? Turn it up to me does not mean, even though I know I put on five or 10 pounds of fat, lose weight on the scale. In fact, when I know that I'm gonna pick up, increase the volume of training, dial in my diet, eat better, I actually wanna make sure that I'm one fed. So when I'm hungry, I wanna feed, I just wanna make good choices. And then two, I don't wanna see the scale go really up or really down. I'm like- You're altering your composition. I'd like to hover right around there. And the beauty of that is when you do that really well, you're actually in a very satisfied place as far as food-wise. Like you feel fed, you feel good. You're giving the body what it needs to adapt and build muscle. And so you feel satisfied, versus staying so low and starving the body. Like you're constantly in a state of hunger and the body's going, oh, he's not gonna feed me anymore. I'm gonna pare down all this muscle. Now I wanna add to that, Adam, because I wanna be very clear. Somebody listening might think, oh, that means the first month or two nothing happens. No, no, no. We said the scale might not move. That's right. That doesn't mean nothing happened. Remember the earlier example of where I said, person who does it wrong loses 10 pounds, but five pounds of muscle, five pounds of fat. So they're just smaller, same body fat percentage. Well, what we're talking about is the scale doesn't move because you've lost fat and gained muscle. So if you lost, let me put it this way. If you lost four pounds of body fat but gained four pounds of muscle, that is a huge reduction in body fat percentage because now you're the same weight but with way more muscle and less body fat and a faster metabolism. So for fat loss, the truth is exactly the opposite of what the false paradigm is, the false stigma is resistance training for fat loss, for pure fat loss, is by far the most effective form of exercise. How about this one? Here's another one. This one today still stands today. It's not the best form of exercise for your heart. You wanna get your heart healthy? If you go to the doctor, you go to cardiologist, and they say, look, you need to start exercising because it looks like you've got, we might have to put a stint in soon. Your heart, we need to strengthen your heart. They don't tell you to go lift weights. They'll tell you to go- Which is so funny. Do cardio. Now, to be fair, all forms of exercise done properly will have health benefits for the heart. But here's the beauty, and this is what I love about right now. We're starting to see studies now that are comparing different forms of exercise, specifically for things like heart health. Guess what they find? Resistance training's actually better than other forms of exercise for heart health. Now, I'm not talking about cardiovascular performance or VO2 max. Now, athletic performance is totally different, right? You want endurance, definitely do endurance training. But if you want to reduce the plaque in your arteries, you want your heart to become healthier, like for longevity, because of the muscle sparing, fat burning, fat loss effects of resistance training, that your body ends up developing all the time. Not just when you're exercising, but all the time. It's actually, studies now show, a superior form of exercise for the heart. And by the way, cardiovascular activity also, and this is of course when it's a little bit abused, not just a lot, but a little bit abused, cardiovascular activity also is connected to worse heart health. You can find these studies all over the place. You can find people who do, I think it's like five days a week or more of intense endurance type training. They actually, their heart shows oxidative stress and damage. So they find that it's not good for the heart to push that way. Whereas with resistance training, we actually see benefits of the heart that we don't see with other forms of exercise. So again, it's the opposite of what we were taught. Here's another one. Young people don't do any resistance training whatsoever. I'm- We used to think it was stunt your growth. Stunt your growth. I was actually told that. Yeah. So I think I remember saying that as a trainer my first couple of years thinking that because we've been told it. People still think that today. Yeah, yeah. Because we get asked all the time. When can I start my kid on resistance training? Now, to be completely honest though, there's a very small percentage of really young kids that I'm gonna add a bunch of weight training to. Right? No, resistance training takes a lot of forms. That's right. So I mean, but that doesn't mean that there's not kids that are really young that are doing that. I've seen kids, especially if you have like a gymnastic background. This is where I see this the most. Like I see kids that were put in gymnastics really early. So they have incredible body control and body awareness. I can hand that 10-year-old kid some dumbbells and a barbell and teach him how to lift or her how to lift really, really well and it's completely healthy and smart. Now you take a 10-year-old who's unathletic, no experience of gymnastics, 10 years old and you hand them dumbbells or a barbell for the first time and they're all over the place because they have no body control. Yeah, of course this is all with the context of appropriate training, right? So regardless of who we're talking about, it has to be appropriate. Well, you gotta develop the fundamental skill of resistance training first. Yes. So that's, I mean, if you can build off of that, you're gonna build an incredible athlete that is gonna carry that on with them for the long haul. Oh, I'll tell you something right now. Okay, if you want to set your kids up for long-term success, if you want your kids to have a lower risk and chance of becoming obese, developing diabetes and having issues as adults, then the best thing they could do is resistance training forms of exercise to build muscle. Here's why. A lot of the stuff that happens when you're growing as a kid, whether it's the brain developing or the body developing, there's a certain level of it that actually becomes more permanent than if you were to do it as an adult. Like if you're a young kid and you get really, really strong, even if you stop working out, there's a level of it that kind of sits with you for a while. So same thing with the brain. Like if you teach a kid different languages, they don't develop an accent like an adult would. Muscle memory is a real thing. But remember, as children, especially when they go through puberty, they start to develop kind of this baseline of muscle and strength. And you can augment that through resistance training. So it's not only a great form of exercise for kids, it's one of the best forms of exercise. As far as the belief that it stunts growth, that's super false. It doesn't stunt growth. That's silly. And that belief came from the fact that we have growth plates when we're kids and if they become damaged, then the bones stop growing. No kid on earth is strong enough to lift the weight that's gonna damage growth plates. So unless you have some weird anomaly, you've got a 10-year-old that's squatting 300 pounds, you're gonna be totally fine. They can totally do resistance training. It's not gonna be a problem. Then on the other end of the spectrum, old people, oh boy, old people need to stay away from resistance training. That is very dangerous. This is already brittle. Oh yeah, oh no. Oh, you want grandma to work out with dumbbells? No, no, no, no. She's gonna hurt herself. Are you kidding me? She's got bad knees. Why would she do a squat when she's got bad knees? You know, I remember, this is such a prevalent stigma. I remember getting a surgeon. This is a medical professional that hired me, a woman at the time she was in her late 50s, loved her, we became very good friends. And when she hired me, the reason why she hired me is because one of her other doctor friends worked with me. So she heard good things. She's like, all right, I'll check this guy out. I remember we sat down, I did a goal assessment with her. And I said, as part of the goal assessment, I'm asking her areas of pain or concern. And she's like, oh, I got really bad knees. So I can't do anything with any knee flexion or extension. This is a doctor telling me that. Like I can't do any of that. If I do, normal things. Yeah, I can't, just I have bad knees. So I said, what would you mean you have bad knees? She's like, oh, they hurt and this and that. And I have a little bit of contra-malacia. And I'm like, okay, but there's no injury. She said, no. I said, okay, I said, here's the deal. Can you trust me enough to do just slowly start incorporating some exercises if we notice any problems? We'll definitely back off. And I convinced her and she said, okay, I'll give it a shot. It's so funny. She ended up becoming one of my biggest advocates. This woman, I don't know, six months later, full lunges, full squats. At some point a year and a half later, took us a while, she was doing sissy squats. It was a very intense exercise. Knee pain, not only did she get no knee pain, her knee pain was gone. And I remember her going, this is crazy. I thought adding load and resistance, it damages the joints. I had no idea that it could actually make my joints feel better. Well, because you're loading the muscles. If you're training properly, the joints just work as a beautiful hinge. It shouldn't feel that way. That's a sign for a trainer that there's something wrong there that I can address and fix. But I think this idea of my back is bad, my knees are bad, my neck is bad, my shoulders are bad. Therefore, I don't want to lift weights. It's like, no, that's not solving. That's a lack of strength. That's right. Now, even today, here we are in the year 2021, right? So we were talking about Muscle Beach Party. I think that was 1964 and Pumping Iron was 1974, I want to say. And you got the 80s and with the aerobics revolution and Jane Fonda and all that, like all the stuff that we said, here we are decades later. Today, even today, the average person does not, and I was talking about the average, not the fitness fanatic. Luckily, fitness fanatics are in the no now. Back in the day, when I started training, not even fitness fanatics really understood this. But today, if you're super into fitness, you get this. But still, the average person today, they don't pick up a barbell or a dumbbell unless they're really interested in building a lot of muscle. The average person just doesn't even work out. Like, if my aunt decides that she's gonna start working out because she wants to lose weight, she doesn't think to herself, I'm gonna go grab, I'm gonna go get a barbell and start deadlifting. No, they don't think that at all. They think something along the lines of, I'm gonna hike or run or walk or swim or bike. There's nothing wrong with those. But resistance training, still for the average person, especially for women, but even men, even men today, some 50-year-old dude or 40-year-old dude, some 40-year-old engineer who just wants to lose some weight and, oh, my cholesterol is a little bad and my triglycerides are a little high. I need to start exercising and his friend says, hey, you wanna come lift weights with me? No, no, no, no, no, I'm not trying to get big. I'm not trying to look like a bodybuilder. Like, what are you talking about? I just wanna improve my health. So the results of this false marketing, false paradigm that's been pushed on us is that people who lift weights, who start lifting weights, the average person, the only ones that do it are the people who are interested in building big muscles. Everybody else is picking the least effective forms of exercise for the common goals that we have today, which is fat loss, health improvement, longevity. And if you mix in the context of, like I've said in the past, modern life, and by the way, I talk a lot, this is literally all the stuff I go into in the resistance training revolution, right? Is this context of modern life, which is you're not gonna work out every day, okay? The average person just isn't gonna work out every day, and everybody wants to work out every day, but the average person, we can expect them to do about two days a week, maybe three days a week, if we do a good job of getting them to develop a good relationship with exercise and consistent, they're gonna do maybe two or three days a week of exercise. If all you have and all you're gonna do, which again is most people, is two days a week or three days a week of exercise, and your goals are fat loss, longevity, sculpt, speed up my metabolism, I want more mobility, I want my hormones to balance, I wanna feel better, I want longevity, and you only can pick one form of exercise? Nothing comes close to resistance training. Every other form of exercise is, just in terms of results. We need to get beyond the stigma. Totally, totally. The other result is lots of cardio. Till this day, you go to a big box gym, and what you see is a lot of cardio in comparison to other forms of exercise, because that's still what the average person looks for when they start working out. Now, do you think this is shifting? Like, do you think we're starting to head in the right direction? Because I feel like, you know, there was a time when just like you said, 50% of the gym was cardio, there was only one squat rack, there was, you know, your basic set of dumbbells. Like, it does feel like to me that we are getting more excited about strength training and we're getting more into squat racks, we're getting more in less and less cardio. Do you agree? Well, I feel, yeah. And I feel too that like all the examples we've seen, we've sort of exhausted all the extreme versions of using it, right? Like even with CrossFit, we've seen the extreme version of how to, you know, lift weights and incorporate a lot of these really valuable type of lifts. But, you know, now we're sort of transitioning. Well, what can we do for our health? Because health right now is on everybody's mind. Like, how can I better my body and improve my body's overall function? And we need to get beyond all these extreme versions of it and realize the real value. Yeah, I definitely think the time is coming where resistance training breaks free of that stigma and the average person looks at incorporating it or making it their primary form of exercise. And the driver of that is gonna be the medical community. That's the driver of it. Because the studies, here's one of the big problems with the resistance training. It was one of the last forms of exercise to be studied for health benefits. Most of the studies done on resistance training in the past were all revolved around performance, muscle building, weightlifting, Olympic weightlifting. If there were any studies on health for the last few decades, I mean, not recently because recently we're seeing more studies. But the last few decades, if it was any exercise study, it was cardio. It was, you know, we had subjects perform 30 minutes of cardiovascular activity in conjunction with this and studied the result. It was never, almost never resistance training unless the goal was building muscle, getting strong or athletic performance. Today, we're now seeing studies on resistance training for health. Today, now we show that a strength test, a simple strength test, a grip test or getting up off the floor is one of the best predictors of all-cause mortality. So if you go to the doctor and the doctor wants to perform one test on you, just one to predict your all-cause mortality believe it or not, one of the most accurate tests you could do that simple is a grip test. If you squeeze something and you're within a certain strength then they know your all-cause mortality is not that good or it's good or just standing up off the floor, which is a strength one. We now have studies that show its effect on Alzheimer's. To date, it's the only form of exercise that's been shown in studies to what appears to be, and this is what the researchers in the study were like kind of blown away, to halt the progression of Alzheimer's and maybe even according to the study it looks like was starting to reverse it. Now to someone like me, this makes perfect sense because when you look at dementia in Alzheimer's which some scientists will refer to as type three diabetes, they think it has something to do with the brains and ability to utilize sugar for energy and one of the best protectors of that is muscle. Muscle is, it can store sugar. It's very insulin sensitive. If you want insulin sensitivity, build muscle. I mean, every time, the more muscle you lose the risk of diabetes and those types of risks start to go through the roof. So it's the only form of exercise so far to show that it can stop the progression of Alzheimer's. We have studies now on bone density. There is nothing that comes close to reversing osteopenia or keeping the bone strong. We're now in the middle of this kind of hormone crisis especially with men. We've talked about this on the podcast now a few times and there's that book that was out by Shana Swann I think her name was, she was just on Joe Rogan. Tell me about men's testosterone's plummeting. No form of exercise raises testosterone like resistance training, none. In fact, resistance training raises testosterone in all men. Low testosterone, high testosterone, doesn't matter. If you do it right, you can expect a bump in testosterone levels and then with women and we have yet to see like really good studies on this, this is just my experience. If I'm trying to balance out their estrogen and progesterone and cortisol, I utilize resistance training far better results than other forms of exercise. So I think it's the medical community that's gonna start pushing this to where the average person's gonna go to the doctor and the doctor's gonna say, I need you to start working out but here's what I want you to do. I agree with that but I also think there's a little bit of responsibility on us and in our space. So it's actually one of the things that it really is what made this all possible. The day that you sent over on Facebook, the first version of Maps Anabolic, it's what made me pick up the phone and call you. It's what made me want to talk to you and potentially do something with you business wise because at that point, I felt like everybody in the fitness space was appealing to the same people that really appealed to the bodybuilder type of image. They cared about the way they looked. They just wanted to build muscle or they wanted to have this shredded bikini look and they were not who I trained. All of us for two decades have trained lots and lots and lots of people. Regular people. Yeah, and that percentage is 1% of the people I train. They are not the majority and nobody was writing programs or talking about fitness for the clients I had and which it boggled me because those were the people spending money. They were spending thousands of dollars on me to coach them and train them, yet they were nothing like the demographic of people that we're selling programs to right now in the fitness space. And when I saw that, like this idea that somebody could train a program one to three days a week and get great results with the most effective movements and keeping it very simple for them. It's like, this is what we were missing. This is what nobody is selling right now. Everybody is selling this idea of no days off and beast mode and the motivation and the hype and the creativity of adding tech and doing crazy fun stuff. It's like, no, you guys are all going about this wrong. Most people are not into fitness like you are. Most people, you need to change one or two little things in there. And so you need to write something for them that is very simple, very basic, but yet very effective. That's right. To keep the fundamentals. And it was either you talk to the extreme bodybuilder types and we're just trading those people and we're fighting for that little percentage or it was I'm talking to the average person and then what was it? It was urban cowboy hip hop dance class. It was lots of freaking cardio. It was extreme diets and it was terrible, terrible information and nobody was saying the right stuff to those people. Now, here's the thing that gets me up every single day to do what we're doing. When I look at the real big health problems that modern societies face and make no mistake, these health problems threaten to bankrupt our societies more than anything else. I know there's lots of, we think lots of problems. Oh my God, coronavirus. Oh no, we have, the truth is when you look at obesity related diseases, the cost on societies, the cost on productivity, even if you don't have no obesity, just poor health, poor chronic health, it really threatens the future. It really, really does. Just look at the numbers. Now, what segment of the market has actually has the answers to solve this? It isn't Western medicine. It isn't anything, it's the fitness and health community has the answers and what they need to do is they need to communicate this in the right way. We all have a responsibility to do this in the right way. Don't go for the quick buck. I mean, I could very easily put out a diet pill or some bullshit workout program and say lose 30 pounds in 30 days. It's a 30 day blast or whatever and probably make a quick buck, but I've helped nobody. And then long-term, here's the truth, long-term business-wise I've actually screwed myself because the long-term approach is to do the right thing. That's what makes you successful. And that's why I wrote the book, The Resistance Training Revolution. I wanted to give fitness influencers who really cared, trainers, podcasters, ammunition. Here's how you talk about it. Here's how you get the average person to understand. Now you have a reference. And of course, I want the average person to pick this up and read it and go, oh, this is, and by the way, I'm getting some of these comments, which is making me very excited. I've got a few of them now, my DMs now that the book is out. I've had a few people tell me, like, wow, you know, I found your book never considered to do resistance training as part of my routine. All I've ever done is running or cardio or whatever and I couldn't understand why it wasn't working, why it was so miserable, why I would eat barely over a little bit of calories and gain weight. Oh my God, this makes perfect sense. I can't wait to start lifting weights. And that's what I want people to get out of this. And I think that's the big goal. Yeah. So look, if you like Mind Pump's content, you'll love our free written information. Go check out mindpumpfree.com. We have lots of free guides. Also, if you want to check out my book, The Resistance Training Revolution, go to the resistancetrainingrevolution.com and get yourself a copy or get someone you love a copy. And finally, you can find us all on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin, me at Mind Pump Salon, Adam at Mind Pump Adam. The opposite tends to be the rule. The people that need to get strength training, exercise more in their life are the ones most likely to gravitate to not exercising at all, not training and getting them involved in moving and exercise is gonna do tremendous things for their libido. The people that love to exercise and train hard and push themselves.