 What's up everybody today's episode is about boosting the metabolism we teach you how to get a faster metabolism here's what's going on right now we're putting together a bundle of two workout programs plus the reverse dieting guide that can help you out so maps at a bulk maps power lift and reverse dieting 101 all of that together right now for $99.99 that's a savings of over $220 so you can go to maps october.com get yourself signed up by the way I'm going to give one of those away for free here's how you can win leave a comment below in the first 24 hours that we drop this episode subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications do all those things if we like your comment we pick you will give you this metabolism boosting bundle for free for everybody else it's only $99.99 again at maps october.com all right here comes a show one of the most effective things you could do for sustainable fat loss and health in the modern world is to speed up your metabolism and yes you can affect your metabolism through lifestyle exercise nutrition and habits so do that it's one of the most effective strategies one of my favorite things about doing this episode is that I think a lot of things that we're going to cover seem a little counterintuitive and it took me a while to get to this point to where I think that this is like the most concise bits of information that I would provide for a client who comes in with a quote unquote slow metabolism or struggle with weight loss for a really long time and then we begin to list out all the things that like we're going to focus on in the next say six months to a year and it just looks so different than what it used to look like when I was an early trainer and so I think this is a really not only valuable episode but also one that I think I've had to to say over and over and over to like really drill at home and for people to actually take the advice this is a winning strategy I think most people's ideas of you know burning calories and raising your metabolism are all through like manual means and don't really realize there's like a way to build your metabolism towards an automatic thing where you end up getting you know more calories just burning through building you know and building muscle well I think I think that a lot of people don't realize exactly what's going on when you reduce calories and you increase cardiovascular activity I think the general consensus is that that's healthy and good for you most people eat too much food most people don't get enough exercise and there's truth to that hey cutting back food and doing cardio is good and anybody says otherwise just sounds ridiculous and so I think that's why this this information seems a little counterintuitive and why I feel like I have to repeat it all the time but it is the things that will cover are so true and so important to the person who's struggling with fat loss or just overall weight loss and they've gone through the yo-yo dieting in the past and they can't seem to figure it out but yet they're not picking up on this very important point right we're trying to make right now we have to start with this is first off metabolism it's a series of processes that control how your body creates and uses energy it's very complex actually very complex system it's one of the most complex things that we've identified and one that we don't fully understand right you talk about the brain the metabolism the universe or like the three most yes complicated things that we've studied how it adapts how it works how it gets affected so it is quite complex but for the for the sake of this particular episode we're referring to just how many calories your body burns okay so we don't need to go into the detail specifically on what's going on we're talking about how many calories your body burns on on on a regular basis now it is true that generally eating less and moving more is healthy for you but we got to break that down a little bit okay eating less than what right eating less what does that mean it means eating less or eating around the amount that you're burning eating more than you're burning is not healthy in the long term definitely not this is what causes obesity this is what causes lots of problems so you have this equation here where you have how many calories you can burn how many calories you need if you raise the calories burned that means you can raise the amount of calories that you eat and you're going to still have health benefits in other words if a person's body burns 4000 calories a day and they 3500 calories they're going to have very different effects than somebody whose body burns 2000 calories who also eats 3500 calories right very different health effects and so when we look at this we have to look at this in the context of what's going on right now I want to add to that point too because that example you just gave right away someone's going oh someone who's got who's got all this muscle fast you could actually have two people that weigh the same on the scale and have that support that's so fascinating is that you automatically assume like I think the the visual that someone gets oh someone burns 3500 calories they see this like athletic muscular body and then oh somebody's only burning say 1500 calories oh they must be this really out of shape decontition person it's like you could actually have two people let's say that they still in the scale and actually weight exactly the same say 205 pounds and a 205 pound person there that person there's potential for a 205 pound person to be burning 4000 calories their metabolism burning 4000 calories a day and that same 205 person has potential of only being able to burn like 1500 or 12 yeah so this is this is important to understand because when we talk about the process of boosting metabolism always going to talk about building muscle and then you'll get the people that will come on and say well studies show that a pound of muscle only burns X amount more calories not a huge impact okay now that's that's true however what Adam's talking about is true and we need to account for that which is there your your current metabolism with your current lean body mass okay so gain muscle lose muscle none of that it's the same you have a potential and your body can adapt within a range meaning it can become more or less efficient now building muscle does speed up the metabolism just because it's more active tissue requiring more calories to maintain so that's the most important part here however there's also that the efficiency factor that we need to consider and there's other factors that will make your body or behaviors I should say that will make your body more or less efficient what we're looking for in modern societies is a less efficient metabolism one that just burns lots of energy now this is different than what we might have wanted 10,000 years ago when food was scarce when food was scarce you don't want to fast metabolism you just can't find food you want to metal starve to death you want a metabolism that's thrifty right well today if you live in America you want to fast metabolism it's a buffer it's a buffer against easily accessible hyper palatable food it's a buffer against inactivity it's a buffer against all these other things so somebody today with the fast metabolism is much more likely to be healthy than someone with a slow metabolism versus 10,000 years ago when it was the reverse and there are things you could do to impact your body's natural ability and that's what we're talking about here your body's natural ability to burn calories in other words how many calories your body burns on its own not just you having to move well that's why we don't call it like a broken metabolism right yes it's really doing what it's supposed to be doing it's just a way that we're trying to kind of hack into that to benefit us in this environment versus what you're describing before where food was scarce and we had to like keep all the reserves of energy that we possibly could I also want to reiterate to that we don't we don't know everything about it yet I mean there's something that we've all talked about both on air and off air that we've we've seen firsthand an experience you know through the three of us hundreds of clients maybe thousands of clients that we've combined we've trained right and how many times have you got that client who you know was felt like they were gaining weight on twelve to thirteen hundred calories and you put just five to eight pounds of muscle on her and now she's eating twenty five hundred count like this this dramatic swing that doesn't make complete sense at least we don't have the science yet to support because what the science says is like it shouldn't be that many more calories but I know over a fact I've seen it change hundreds of lives by doing that and it doesn't quite add up to what the what the science says on far as what the metabolism should do we see it all the time but even look also consider this even small boosts in your metabolism make a big difference right if you could right now speed up your metabolism by a hundred and fifty calories a day doesn't sound like much hundred fifty calories like what is that but you add that up over the course of a month two months a year two three years you're looking at ten fifteen twenty thirty pounds of potential body fat over the course of that period of time so small even small boost your metabolism can have profound effects I mean a hundred fifty calories that's like a that's like a forty forty minute walk right so be like walking forty minutes extra every single day but you boost your metabolism now I'm using a small number now what I've done with people is minimum I could get people's metabolism go by at least a few hundred and oftentimes as much as eight hundred I've seen people's metabolism boost by a thousand it's it could be pretty profound and it makes sustained it makes fat loss and health and fitness much more sustainable flexibility yeah like you know how great would it be if you could eat more and be leaner right that allows you the ability to live in the world and to eat and enjoy yourself sometimes and I have to be so strict now you can be super strict if you want to be crazy about counting calories but the approach that I've seen that works is let's give somebody a larger buffer let's get their metabolism to burn more calories because I know that they're gonna have that dinner on the weekend they're gonna go on vacation and I don't want to see them rebound I want to see them be able to burn it off just on their own and there is a predictable way to do this and that's what we're gonna go over right now it's literally if you follow these steps and you're patient with it you will get a metabolism that burns more calories now the exact amount of more calories you'll burn that's up to a lot of different factors including genetics body size and so on but you will get metabolic rate if you fall if you do the following so let's start with the first one which is you want your exercise regime so when you look at like your your your whole health regime right and you're like okay I want to lose weight I want to be healthy I want to be fit and we're talking about boosting metabolism the exercise portion should be primarily focused on building muscle that should be the foundation of your routine because nothing will boost your metabolism more on its own than having muscle muscles expensive it costs a lot of energy it's now the brain burns more calories and muscle and a pound for pound basis but you can't build your brain necessarily right but you can build muscle so building muscle is is is one of the most effective strategies to boost your metabolism so you look at your workout look at what you're doing and say is this workout muscle building or is it endurance building or is it flexibility building or is it so the cornerstone the focus should be on muscle building if you want a faster training correct not you know signing up for a race not some not running not cycling not orange theory yeah not any stuff it's literally strength training it's lifting weights right the stuff that builds longer periods yeah what builds muscle and strength so it's gonna look a lot differently than what you're marketed to the most for burning calories by the way this would be the recommendation regardless of what you knew about this person's history almost always right so no matter what but what's interesting about this is the people that tend to fall in this trap of having struggling with the yo-yo dieting and and losing the weight and being stuck here all the time happen to be the people that tend to not train this way too so you kind of get a double benefit yeah you get the benefit of this is what they should be doing anyways to help speed the metabolism you also get the novelty benefit of oh I'm the type person that loves the circuit class or I love to train like an athlete or I love for a marathon when I try and get in shape and so you not only get a benefit of like this is one of the ideal ways for you to train to build a faster metabolism but you also get the benefits of it because it's so novel for that person yeah so so think of it this way now some someone may be listening with a circuit train burn so many calories though running burn so many calories it's true if you run for an hour you're gonna burn a lot more calories than if you lift weights to build muscle okay that's a fact however lifting weights to build muscle is like taking money and investing it and then allowing that money to make money for you so think of it this way you could take a job where you make a lot per hour or you could take a job where you make a little less per hour however you also get stock options and you know for a fact that this company is growing and go public that's the difference the difference is we're taking our training and we're gearing it towards investment can I get my metabolism to boost more so it burns more on its own versus let me try and burn this all my own by the way if you're not trying to train to build muscle and you're just burning a lot of calories your body is a phenomenal way of adapting to that because your body is always trying to conserve energy so if I just burn a lot of calories without a signal to build muscle I will burn a lot of calories initially but over time my body is gonna figure out ways to slow its own metabolism down to make me more efficient and one of the main ways it does this is to actually get you to lose muscle this is why studies will show diet so people cut their calories plus lots of cardio which is not strength training right not muscle building but it is a lot of calorie burning they'll see weight loss but a chunk of that weight loss is muscle how did that happen your body to burn the muscle off your body said hey we're burning a lot of calories we don't need a lot of strength so let's become better at this activity by burning less calories and so it actually starts to adapt efficiency yes when you train for muscle your body is saying well we're not bringing a lot of calories we're not even worried about that in fact what we need is more strength we need more muscle keep packing it on and when you combine it with the rest we're gonna talk about that's how you get the fast metabolism let's talk about the exercises right so so building muscle training for muscle building is traditional strength training for the most part like bodybuilders or power lifters or strength athletes that's how you want to work out but what about the exercises what exercises are gonna give you the most bang for your buck especially for somebody it's only gonna work out two or three days a week well the evidence is clear it's the big compound lifts it's the it's the big gross motor movements the the barbell exercises a barbell squat a barbell bench press a deadlift a row overhead press these exercises just for the time spent doing them gives you the most in terms of metabolism boosting the most in terms of muscle building it would require a lot of exercises combined to equal the muscle building effect of just one of those exercises and when it comes in terms of time and recovery ability and all that stuff it just makes sense to do the one the exercises that give you the most bang for your buck because they're multi-joint compound lifts it's gonna require so much more output and your body's gonna have to work that much harder to produce strength for these types of lifts and so the demand of those alone it's gonna move you so much further than a lot of these other exercises out there that may be promoted a lot is like hypertrophy or like building muscle really the most demanding the largest signal you can produce through those barbell lifts where it's like heavy emphasis on all these muscle groups having to work together that's really what it's about we also said that manual burn is less important but what's nice about building a routine that's around these compound lifts is you actually burn a ton of calories so even though it's less of a priority to burn a bunch of calories in your workout now you're talking about a weight training routine that actually rivals running in some of these circuit training classes you put somebody in a you know orange theory circuit class or you know somebody who just is running a circuit or athletic training with plyo matrim stuff and you give me somebody and I do a bunch of you know squats deadlifts overhead pressing bench press for an hour with like tied on my rest periods like being sticking to the actual true rest periods and going all the way through surprised how close the calorie burn is it won't be that crazy significant of a difference well the way I like to look at it like this just to really simplify it like I could do a curl for my biceps and I'll build my biceps right and the biceps are you know muscle on the top of my arm and it's kind of a small muscle or I could do a pull up a pull up is also working the biceps but it's also working all my back muscles right my lats my rhomboids there's a little bit of trapezius activity so I'm working more muscles in that same period of time you do three sets of curls, I do three sets of pull ups we both worked our biceps but I also worked all this other stuff it's just an efficient effective way to train to send the loudest muscle building signal the other person doing just the curls would have to add other exercises to hit all those other muscles which is fine if you want to spend it requires a lot more volume and then you run into this is more complex getting into the weeds but you run into more adaptation issues is it too much volume strength training really is about sending the signal and then leaving it alone it's like giving the body a reason to build muscle and then that's it because what you get out of it is not while you do it unlike calorie burning type workouts like cardio the value is in the cardio itself unless you're trying to build endurance which here we're talking about boosting metabolism when it comes to metabolism boosting it doesn't happen in the workout with strength training it happens after 3D adaptation compound lifts just do the most I mean how many exercises would it take single joint exercises would take to really have the same effect as a barbell squat I'd have to put together like 5 5 or 6 6 different exercises calf, hamstring, quad, low back upper back core basically what you want to do is you want to your routine should be centered around these big compound lifts getting strong at them and then if you want to add other extra stuff you could definitely do that but again the foundation should be building muscle and the foundation within that foundation should be these compound lifts one and the next point is to focus on getting strong in those lifts that's the best metric for this get strong, get good at them, that's all I'm thinking about I'm training this person, we're trying to and that's what's crazy about this when you think about it is you also got to picture this client really overweight, they've struggled with weight loss their whole life, they come to you and they're like Adam I just want to lose as much weight as I possibly can can you please help me out struggling with my whole life and I'm like alright we're going to get strong that's a hard conversation it's a tough conversation to have with someone that's in that place that's not how they're thinking they're thinking we've got to burn this off we've got to melt this off, I've got to sacrifice I've got to cut back calories and you're kind of like nah you know what I'm going to keep you fed and we're going to trust me that's what we want to do so I mean I just want to make that point that I understand if this resonates with you that you've struggled with weight loss in the past you've veiled back and forth and you can't seem to get to that goal weight or whatever you have this is the major mental hurdle piece right here, this part where it does see what does strength have to do with fat loss? you don't realize that but what strength the reason why it's such an incredible metric is if you get stronger relatively consistently over time you can pretty much guarantee that your metabolism is probably boosting at the same time it's one of those physical pursuits that as it improves it probably means the metabolism boosting as well this is not true of other physical pursuits if you increase your flexibility or your stamina over time that does not mean your metabolism is getting faster or hotter right but strength typically means that so the best metric when it comes to boosting metabolism to measure if you just use a single metric a strength am I getting stronger yes I'm going right it's the best metric for realizing that you have everything in the right direction in terms of like hormones being balanced in terms of like recovery and in terms of like you being able to have and see real progression because everything else doesn't really work you know if you have any of those components out of order out of balance you're not going to see a lot of strength gains well it also goes hand in hand with the next point which is making sure that you feed the body what it needs in order to build this muscle yes because if I ever see anybody fall short here they figured out they're like okay I get it we need to build the metabolism we need to build some muscle so we need to lift heavy okay Adam I'm with you but then they actually struggle with the nutrition piece they're still like I was eating jack in the box also I'm cutting all that out now they're eating chicken salads and they're like eating twice a day so they cut their calories low so they reduce their calories and then they're not seeing the strength gains like we want to see inside the gym and then I come back and I find out later on it's like oh well that's because you took our calories from 4,000 calories to 1,200 calories because you're afraid to eat when I need you to eat you're not going to build tissue out of nowhere so you didn't need these building materials aren't there no you have to fuel the so there's two things that are happening one is the strength training is sending a signal to build muscle and build strength two the way that you eat also sends a signal and that signal can say we can build this muscle we can afford to build this muscle we can afford to have a fast metabolism because we have the food or it can say you know I know you're trying to get stronger but we don't got enough calories we don't got enough food so we're not going to do that we're not going to build muscle we're not going to build strength we're going to keep things as efficient as possible because the calories are too low so you have to do both you have to not only build strength and build muscle but you also have to feed yourself at least enough to allow that to happen now this doesn't necessarily mean you go crazy with your food intake but you got to fuel those things right so if you send the signal to build muscle imagine a bunch of workers right you got a bunch of workers and you're like here's the instructions build the house and they're like alright where's the bricks oh there's no bricks can't build a house so you got to provide the materials as well by feeding your body because if you cut your calories too low while strength training it's not going to work it's just not going to work they're conflicting signals and the boost in the metabolism that you're expecting even though your strength training is just simply not going to happen so feed your body to fuel muscle and strength and I think we can get a little deeper into that right yeah yeah so the next thing is to slowly increase calories as the body adapt so we're feeding the body so you may be wondering well what does that look like how many calories what am I going to do here one of the best things to do is to first off figure out how many calories you were eating just to maintain your body weight easy to do this is to track so take your normal food intake over the next couple weeks write it down or enter into an app they make wonderful super convenient apps now and once you figure out how many calories you're generally eating and you know to maintain your body weight that's your starting point then you start the strength training and then what you do is you slowly very slowly bump those calories up just a little bit and I at first I like to not bump the calories I like to wait for the strength things that happen a little bit and then I bump the calories but what I don't do is cut the calories with the strength training I keep them the same at first and then I start to bump them yeah I normally don't have to do much of adjusting calorie-wise at first it's really just kind of switching the macros when I find when I do when I assess a diet first like so let's take the example I know I use an extreme analogy of somebody who's eating fast food all day but typically there's there's some unhealthy or poor choices in our nutrition when we're when we're way overweight right so I literally look at their just their average caloric intake for a week and then I just make sure that we're hitting protein targets and we're making better food choices but we're keeping the calories about the same I don't really want to cut I don't really need to add anything quite yet I'm just going to say because what I find almost always is they're lacking a macronutrient we're not getting enough healthy fats we're not getting enough protein we're eating too much sugar we're not getting enough fiber yeah we never eat vegetables so there's always there's always a handful of things that I know that they we could be adding to the diet or making better and so I just simply go like okay let's keep your calories about the same but then you know instead of this meal and this meal that you normally would do here like I prefer you eat this this instead so let's add this in here let's add that in there and and then just let and then watch how the body responds and many times you will see the client get a little stronger lean out a little bit and you're not even having to adjust calories in any direction what that usually looks like is I'm stronger in the gym so I can I'm lifting you know 10 or 15 or 20 pounds more on some of those big lifts that we talked about my weight hasn't moved on the scale but I do notice that my clothes are starting to fit differently now when I would have clients I could do body fat tests so I could tell them exactly what's happening and usually what I would see during this initial period of time was a transfer or a change in body composition I should say right body fat went down muscle went up and it usually is about the same in other words they gained two pounds of muscle lost two pounds of body fat something along those lines so the scale hasn't changed although we have more muscle less body fat meaning they have a faster metabolism they're stronger and they're smaller this is another important point to make here is that muscle is dense in comparison to fat it takes up something a little bit more than three fourths the space that body fat will take up so if you lost 15 pounds of body fat and replaced it with 15 pounds of muscle you would weigh the same but you would lose almost a quarter of the size right on your body significantly smaller even though scale said exactly you'd be smaller and so what you should expect if you're not doing body fat tests and stuff is like okay I'm stronger my weight's the same but I feel different my body feels tighter and my clothes fit a little differently and men it usually looks like a weight the waist is a little looser and women same thing you also may notice as a woman that around the butt might feel a little tighter don't freak out it's because your butt is probably building and I want to say that because sometimes people freak out like I thought you said I was gonna get smaller well the butts of muscle and then you may get comments this is my favorite part when clients would do this and they wouldn't change on the scale so their weight would stay the same for the first couple months they come to me like you know it's weird so people keep asking me how much weight I've lost and you guys ever have clients not only that but I'm so glad you said this because this isn't an area that is really challenging also to overcome you tell a client to increase calories you tell them to focus on building strength and not only maybe does the scale not move in the direction they want but then they also start filling out their clothes and their clothes are tighter but I promise it looks it'll look better on you and so that's the part that's really tough because we associate like where we're at like if we look good or we don't look good sometimes how our clothes is fitting and it's like you get a girl who all sudden her thighs and her butt and her jeans is filling out as tighter and she was asking you to lose weight and she might start freaking out yeah but now her butt sitting up two more inches and she has defined hamstrings when she didn't have before coming in you so it's like so you have to understand there is this kind of sculpting process that happens and it's a slow gradual process and just because the pants are fitting tighter doesn't necessarily mean you're going the wrong direction in fact that may mean you're doing incredible right now especially if you can be objective and go you know what actually if I compared this picture of me today versus the picture just two weeks ago I know the scale is saying the same or even I'm up two pounds but you know I do I think I do look a little bit better here than I did two weeks ago and you should be able to see that especially in a two weeks time oh yeah I mean I used to love it clients would come to me and say that they're like oh it's weird people are asking me how much weight I've lost and I've only lost a pound on the scale and it's really weird before I'd lose 10 pounds and nobody noticed like when you look different your body is holding less body fat it's got more muscle muscle looks very good I mean a 150 pound female at 20% body fat versus a 150 pound female at 32% body fat same height and everything if you saw them stand next to each other would look dramatically different dramatically different you can do this with a 200 pound male as well they would look dramatically different so unless your weight is important to some extent but nobody walks around with a scale nobody really cares it's really about how you feel of course how you look your health and body fat just takes up a lot of space and you know unless it's when once it gets past a certain point it doesn't look good muscle looks really good it's tight and sculpted and so in this initial stages of boosting metabolism I want everybody I want to be very clear in the initial stages you should expect to not lose any weight you should expect to look and feel different but you should not expect to lose any weight you should expect to be stronger and start to see the initial effects of the metabolism boosting now what would you say the difference would be between that like a reverse diet where somebody's trying to come out of like a quote unquote broken metabolism or they went on this extreme diet it's pretty much the same protocol it's the same protocol and we would in fact although we would keep the calories roughly the same to start with we would reverse them at some point meaning slowly increase that's what I mentioned earlier you slowly increase the calories to fuel the metabolism so someone may be wondering how do I know when to stop like when do I stop this reverse diet period when do I when do I start to really focus on the fat loss well it's different from person to person but typically I tell someone when you get to the point of eating a lot of food and you feel really good and you feel like you could cut your food and be okay at that point then we cut the calories you've got the muscle you've got the metabolism and the fat loss happens and I'll say this I've seen this happen I mean a lot of times many times I would say at least half the times I've trained people where they'll lose 20 30 pounds and at the end of the process eat as much or more at the end of that weight loss process then they did going into it you can't say that about traditional just cutting calories and trying to burn calories I did this even with somebody who's healthy and in shape so this doesn't apply just to a broken metabolism or just someone trying to lose weight I mean I remember when I was training Melissa for her bikini competition and when I first got her calories were around 1800 or 1900 to keep herself relatively she was great she was in good shape she wasn't bikini ready but she was in good shape and I said I first want to ramp your metabolism up before we get into prep so we trained for the three to four months the goal was to just get her color can take as high as we possibly could maintaining her weight and body about where it's at so that when we decided to go into a cut we have all this room and what ended up happening was we ramped her all the way up to I think 27 or 200 calories so when she was in peak week she was eating at what she was when I first got her so think about that and that's extreme dieting the lowest of low weeks and hardest for most people is that final week going to stage that's what she was eating on a normal week when I got a hold of her when we first started so this idea and concept isn't only for someone who has a broken metabolism or someone who is yo-yo dieted back and forth or someone who just wants to lose 50 to 100 pounds really for me it's that do you want more metabolic flexibility do you want the ability to have a burger and fries every once in a while and not feel like it sticks right to to feel like you can enjoy a night with a glass of wine and eating out and not feel like all that gets restarted and so that's why to your point Sal there is such a huge variant and that's exactly how I ask clients I go well where would you like to be it's not for me to decide just because you are so tall and you weigh so much that oh you should have a metabolism that burns X amount of calories it's like listen if you feel very satisfied and you like the amount of calories you eat and it gives you some freedom to eat out every once in a while and maintain your weight then you're fine but if you go man Adam I feel like I can't get away with anything I eat so tight and clean and if I eat one bad thing well that's the case then this is for you even if you are considered a quote unquote fit person now the next point and this has to do with nutrition also is to prioritize protein so protein number one a high protein diet when I say high protein it's about 0.6 to a gram of protein per pound in normal weight individuals so take your body weight and a little more than half your body weight up to your body weight in grams of protein is what you're aiming for the higher amount tends to work better so I said 0.6 to 1 closer to 1 tends to work better in my experience but it builds more muscle which boosts the metabolism it also on its own has more of what's called a thermogenic effect meaning a gram of protein actually burns more calories so protein also has this effect where it burns more calories on it it's nominal it's not a huge effect but over time it makes a difference and then here's the third reason why I like prioritizing protein it's very satiating so when you're eating a high protein diet especially at the end when you've lost the weight high protein tends to make you feel more satisfied more balanced energy you maintain more of the muscle so when you're doing this kind of reverse diet process through strength and combined with strength training prioritize protein what does that look like every meal make sure you eat the protein first figure out how much protein you need for the day divide it by your meals eat that first then eat everything else and the rest typically takes care of yourself I find this even more important than the whole calorie thing even though I understand that if we're in a deficit we're going to lose if we're in a surplus we're going to gain we're not breaking those laws of physics but I definitely think that for the average person just learning how to focus on hitting what your protein your daily protein intake should be in order to build muscle that by itself and just focusing on that it kind of takes care of a lot of things it does if it's whole foods you typically get the calorie it's hard to do it really is for most people it is hard to consistently get enough protein and day in and day out for the optimal amount so ideal amount of protein that you are to build muscle consistently do that and if you do that I feel like the other things kind of take care of themselves well it's interesting because it's so satiating it's easier to like eat less but if you're not seeking protein because it's so satisfying it's easy to not eat it if you're eating everything else with it if you eat the protein first you're going to build more muscle you're going to get more of what you need and you're going to feel better from a satiety standpoint especially at the end when you finally do cut your calories after this process of boosting your metabolism we say this a lot and I want to add to this because I think this is important to me it's not only do you eat protein first but it has to be protein in there in other words like I brought up the other day when we were talking about had some more conversation and so let's say you oh they guys say eat protein first they have their breakfast lunch and dinner and they always make sure to eat their protein in that order but then they have these like snacks in between oh grapes here and some almonds there mostly snack on carbs or fat like an almond or what that and you end up hitting your calorie budget for the day and still don't hit your protein intake because your three small meals only had 30 grams a piece which is 90 total grams of protein and your body needs let's say let's for argument's sake 180 and then you fill the rest of your calories up with the grapes the almonds and some what we would call healthy snacks but because you weren't protein focused you ended up still hitting your calorie intake and not getting enough protein so it's like everything needs to be protein focused if you're going to have a snack then I'm thinking okay I need to get my a majority of protein first and then I can have those almonds with it or I can have those grapes with it not them by themselves or else what ends up happening is you kind of graze all day and you end up hitting your caloric intake you can't do anymore and then you're short on protein that's super common this is probably the more controversial part of this which is to use cardio for health in this period but not for the calorie burn okay so what do I mean by that well movement's good for you and cardiovascular activity does have health benefits and studies will show that the best health benefits you'll get out of exercise is a combination of strength training and cardiovascular training now if you had to pick one over the other strength training beats out cardio we've done many episodes on this but ideally you want to do a little bit of both and in this particular scenario with boosting metabolism the focus should be strength training cardio should be kind of like this added part and really just for health and ideally if we're doing it for health it's walking really it's about going for walks during the day now if you want more stamina you could push the stamina a little bit but the problem with using cardio for the calorie burn is when I push cardio to burn calories I'm telling my body to become more efficient with calories I'm telling my body I don't want a lot of muscle because I don't want to burn a lot of calories I want endurance I don't need so much strength what happens you'll get less of that muscle building so if you're training to build muscle and you're also training hard to burn lots of calories with cardio you'll get less muscle as a result of that and less of a metabolism burst it's always walking for me unless the only exception to the rule for me is if that's a client who has some sort of a routine that they've always done I'll give you an example my brother-in-law is a die-hard downhill mountain biker it's very intense burns a ton of calories very endurance stamina based and he rides twice on the weekends for so two days of these like three hour rides but he does that year-round non-stop doesn't matter if he's fat, skinny on his workout program not on his workout program so it's a passion for him so I'm gonna build that so insert paddle boarding insert running for an hour on the weekends insert your favorite class you always do if it is something you love to do regardless of your body composition and it's a passion for you or you know pick up basketball you know three times a week or like that then I'm not gonna tell them they can't do that because that's something that they love to do and then it's got other benefits just for besides calorie and even the health benefits of what it does for your heart so those people everybody else if we're starting on this routine I do not want any of that all I want is walking you feel like you know you normally wouldn't get out and you feel good on your diet and you're happy you're doing this new weight routine and you don't want to just sit around and watch TV okay go for a walk, go for a hike go move around, go to a park, go to a zoo go walk around for a while I'm all for that don't go get on a treadmill and kick ass for an hour because that is not gonna help us in our pursuit even though you may think that cause that whole math thing is a trap when you start associating those calories with like a meal that you just had like any calories you can then transfer over on the treadmill to sort of absolve you of those calories that's just a war you're never gonna win yeah think of it this way I'm gonna oversimplify so I know it's not this simple so everybody relax but let's say you're looking at you're doing this and you're like wow my body now is burning 2,300 calories a day if I just got on that treadmill and ran as hard as I could for an hour I could make it like 2,600 calories a day so that's what I'm gonna do and initially that's what will happen whatever 300 calories or so but then what happens your body starts to adapt towards stamina and endurance and it starts to slow its metabolism down eventually you're back down to burning 2,300 calories or less with doing the extra running on the treadmill so now you're doing more work to get the same or worse results so if you want to boost your metabolism don't do cardio for the calorie burn do it for health which is totally fine but don't worry about the calorie burn our goal is to boost your metabolism burn more calories manually and do a lot more work remember we're looking at sustainability we're looking at fat loss forever not just in the short term alright the last one and this was very important because this could definitely throw a wrench in the whole machine which is to prioritize good sleep so poor sleep is a tremendous stress on the body and just because of the way we evolved when we were under chronic stress it was probably due to the fact that we couldn't find calories so the two types of stress that we'll typically encounter is acute something happened right now car almost hit me it's gone oh let me calm down now I'm safe the other one is kind of chronic stress stuff that kind of sticks with you and stays with you poor sleep wears on your body and it's chronic it causes stress to happen throughout the day changes hormone profiles it's just this chronic level stress and what your body tends to do under chronic stress is it tends to try to protect itself and the way it protects itself is it says hey let's burn less calories got to keep it safe we don't know what could happen food might not be here hey let's store more body fat hey let's lower these hormones that tend to speed up the metabolism like testosterone growth hormone let's raise these other hormones that'll help us store more body fat and kind of give us temporary energy things like cortisol and let's not have a faster metabolism so good sleep is important because bad sleep will ruin everything that we just talked about yeah I'm glad you added this one in the list because if there's ever somebody who I feel like is doing all the things you're telling them and then they're still not seeing the results this has been the culprit they're like I'm doing this I'm dying I'm trading this and we're like we're both like scratching our heads because at this point they haven't admitted to me like I have terrible sleep at night or I stress all night long or I have this like that hadn't came up yet right we haven't we're thinking about all the things we we can do about it and this person is piling more onto their already super stressful and non-sleeping nights that I'm not aware of at this point yet and this is normally when this comes out it's like are you sure you're doing this you're doing that you're doing this you're doing that and then it's normally like well then how's your sleep in oh well that's fucked up then you're like oh okay well there there might never fully recovered your body's just never in that place I used to have clients this was like that one last piece that was actually turned out to be a massive piece in the whole puzzle like nutrition dialed like a workouts around point everything but was getting woken up many times in the middle of the night for phone calls and things overseas and it's just like battling that and carrying that same stress all day long it just affected a snowball effect everything else yeah I mean it affects behaviors too it affects cravings it affects your moods yep it affects muscle building it makes all it makes the other things all harder not only does it not help them and potentially hinder them it'll make them it'll make it impossible I had a guy I had a client once that like you were saying Adam was everything right finally we tackle the sleep when we when he really took sleep seriously and we really it took us a little while it took us a few months to really figure this out he did a sleep study and worked with a doctor and we figured it out he lost like 10 pounds of body fat and gained 10 pounds of muscle it was crazy we were doing all the same stuff the only difference was he finally got a sleep down and it made such or and I remember he was going to this doctor they were also looking at his hormone like everything changed yeah just from sleep so I had to include this because if this is off you could strength train with the best programs you could eat great protein you could have the right cardio for health you could feed your body appropriately do all the right stuff this is gonna it'll just yeah we cut the workouts in half with with my client after we had realized that was the biggest culprit and then you just focus on sleep and it was like this completely transformative thing just unlocked you know and I and I know it's sleep that were pointed right now but I mean I think that this could almost include like your overall just stress bucket sure right so maybe you get okay sleep or it's not the worst sleep ever and so you don't think that's the culprit but then you have this like you know crazy marriage your you hate your boss like you just got all this other stress going on in your life that a lot of times in my experience when I when a client is doing most if not all the things you're telling them to do and their body still is not responding a lot of times that is just they're over the body is just feeling attacked from you to remember that even this working out and dieting stuff is a stress on the body well so if if your bucket was already full when you came to me and then I added to it even if it's things that are quote-unquote healthy for you right exercise right eating better it will sometimes completely stall your progress because your body is just too overwhelmed and reducing and cutting back on a lot of things is actually the simplest thing think of it this way right if you if the economy looks like it's going terrible what are people going to do save their money not spend a lot cut their bills right is what your body does with calories if it starts to feel lots of stress it'll try to save calories right try to store more of them and it'll reduce how many calories you put out so it'll actually slow your metabolism down fact losing sleep on the fastest way to slow your metabolism down so it's a very important one now we just went over exercise nutrition how to kind of do a reverse diet but you may be wondering how do I do those things more specifically what does this specific workout look like what does reverse dieting look like specifically for someone like myself so here's what we did we put together a metabolism boosting bundle that includes maps anabolic maps power lift and the reverse dieting guide okay so reverse dieting 101 so everything's in there for you all you have to do is follow it and you do all of the things you'll be able to accomplish all the things that we talked about now all of them together all of them together right now is $99.99 which is going to save you over $220 and that is just for what's going on right now and you can find that at maps october.com also if you like our podcast and you want more free stuff you want to get more free stuff from us go to maps excuse me mindpumpfree.com that's where we have all of our free guides that can help you with almost any health or fitness goal you can also find us on social media Justin is on Instagram at Mind Pump Justin Adam is on Instagram at Mind Pump Adam and you can find me on Twitter at Mind Pump Sal this one's really important and that is to phase your training if somebody trains for a full year doing a bench press and they're always aiming for 5 reps if you compared that person to a person who did bench press where they did 3 or 4 weeks of 5 reps but then they did 3 or 4 weeks of 12 reps and then 3 or 4 weeks of let's say 15 to 20 reps and then they'll throw in some super sets at the end of that year you're going to see more consistent progress from the person who's moving in and out and less injury that's another thing you'll see less injury as well