 Here's one of the easiest ways to improve athletic performance, cognitive ability, reduce inflammation, and just feel better. Aim for one gallon of water every single day. Now I know that's tough, so a lot of you start slow, but if you make one gallon the target, even if you miss it by a little bit, you're probably going to notice some beneficial effects. This is old bodybuilding wisdom, but it's true. Most people notice benefits when they aim for that much water. There's been a lot of back and forth on this that I've seen of like this is an area where there seems to be a lot of disagreement on how much water exactly do you need and the difference between what you need and probably what's optimal I think is a wide range. Andrew Huberman just did a post recently and I think he was referencing multiple studies, not just one study, but it seems as that eight ounces for every hour for the first 10 hours you're awake. And then four ounces afterwards every hour. So yeah, that's a lot. Yeah, 80 ounces is, that's more than half of a gallon, right? A gallon's 120, I think was 123 or 120 gallons. Yeah, and anybody that I've ever told to target like a gallon and start tracking that wasn't before was under a gallon, rarely ever, or half gallons, excuse me, that were even hitting a half gallon. So I think this is actually something that most people do not drink enough water and would see huge benefit from that. Actually, credit Justin years ago when he was an early trainer with me, I remember somebody was complaining about their energy levels and I actually heard him speak to water first. That was the first time I'd heard somebody, you know, someone's complaining about low energy and saying like, you know, maybe you're not hydrated enough and didn't realize it. And that's one of the first go to places now, I mean, forever, it's been a long time since that first time I heard Justin say that to a client, that I'll ask somebody and more often than not, people are grossly under consuming water and just fixing that, I fixed some of the headaches and the energy and just cravings. Yeah, cravings like so. Well, unless you're intentional about it, you completely fall under what you probably should be consuming. And it's just one of those things like it's, so the bodybuilder, the old, you know, trying to like at least seek out a gallon. I think that's the whole point is that you're intentionally trying to incorporate that throughout your day because when you're not hydrated, you feel the effects of not being hydrated. And two, I know there's like a threshold in terms of like too much and being over hydrated, but I feel like that's a little harder to achieve than versus the other. Well, that's not a little hard. It's almost impossible. My entire life, okay, I have never met somebody who over consumed water. No, you have to try. You'd make yourself sick. Yeah, you know where I've heard of it. I've never seen it firsthand. But where I've heard of it is when you see those competitions, when people do those weird competitions of, well, there was that one famous one, right, it was a radio station, like they drown because they drink water too fast and they didn't have any like a balance of electrolytes. Yeah, and their cells literally drown is what happened. Yeah, no, you're not going to do this by aiming for a gallon. And what I noticed with clients when I would have them aim for this is they would lose weight. Now, it wasn't because of the fat burning properties of water, but it prevented them from drinking calorie-containing fluids. So they would drink less juices and sodas and stuff like that. They moved more because they felt better, they had more energy, they probably got up to pee more. That would be another one right there. Reduced inflammation, that was the first thing people noticed. Is that the next day they'd come back? Because you'll notice this right away with water. If you hit this or you're aiming for this and it's more than you're used to, the day after or even within hours, you notice you're just, you're just, everything feels better. Legumes, tinnins are dry. Yeah, you feel that difference of pain. Within the first week, you notice better skin, better bowel movements. A lot of people who deal with occasional constipation, it has to do with water. Like one of the first things, if you have issues with having regular bowel movement and you just drink more water, that'll solve it for like half the people who have those types of issues. They're just not drinking enough water. So it makes a huge difference. And then for athletic performance, the literature is super crystal clear on this and cognitive performance. Now you said something, Adam, since it's important to know, there's the amount that you need and then there's an optimal amount. So we can get away with a lot less than we're talking about, obviously. And this is where people screw up, is they are like, well, I'm okay. I think I'm okay. I'm drinking, you know, when I'm thirsty or whatever. I feel like this is one of those, this got popular because it was like an assault on the bros, you know, which I remember, this whole show, I've always tried to like defend the bros because it's like, man, there's some stuff, man, that we give bodybuilder community and the bros so much shit about because they do a terrible job of communicating the science per se. The reason and the why. But there's some old wisdom that is behind it, that's been passed down for generation to generation, that has proven to be valuable. And that's why it's stayed around that community for so long. And then here comes this new wave of science dorks that want to just shit on that and then talk shit about somebody. And so we just completely throw out that wisdom because, oh, that doesn't line up with this current meta analysis that we have. And it's like, well, it's not that simple. Yes, they didn't explain it very well. Granted, but they didn't explain the why, but they knew that it worked. So here's what bodybuilders do. They'll do something, it works. Lots of them will do it. Everybody notices it works. Pass on the formula. And then they'll go back and try to explain it. And that's usually where they screw up. So then they'll say something like, you know, flesh fat out of your body with lots of water. You'll hear stuff like that, right? Bro, we see this. We see this from them in the science of isometrics. We see it with water. We see it with fasted cardio. We see it with carb cycling windows. Yeah, anabolic. I mean, there's a lot of things that I just listed off that have value. Yes. And what the scientific community does that annoys me is rather than saying, does it work? As they say, oh, the the mechanisms that you're saying is wrong. And then they throw everything out. I'll give you a great example. I don't know, it's got to have been now 17, 18 years ago when I first owned my my wellness studio. So it's got to be at least 17, 18 years ago. I had somebody in there. That would that was a wellness specialist and she did gut testing, hormone testing, the whole deal. And she would talk about adrenal fatigue. OK, and the symptoms of adrenal fatigue were excessive fatigue, hot, cold and tolerance, brittle hair and nails and skin that was off. And just all these symptoms of just feeling like just general crap. And the wellness community labeled it adrenal fatigue because they said, oh, it's your adrenals that are fatigued. Now, the scientific community came out and said, that's not what's happening. You're not fatiguing the adrenals. Well, lo and behold, 15 years later, those same symptoms are connected to something called HPA axis dysfunction, hypothalamus pituitary adrenal dysfunction. And so they don't call it fatigue. They labeled it something else. They also did this with leaky gut syndrome, leaky gut syndrome. I mean, is that just semantics at this point? The guts not leaking. And then they come out and they say, oh, actually it's called intestinal wall hyperpromeability, which is the same thing. So so bodybuilders are like this works. Then they go to try and explain the mechanisms of why it made them leaner, why it made them well, it's just like they're wrong about the mechanism, the carb cycling, talking about insulin levels and trying to to try and tie that. And that's where they went wrong. Never your body has to. Yeah. So I mean, there's there's a lot of really good valuable tips that I think we've gotten away from because somebody's come along and disprove the the way they explain it. And so then the, you know, the weakened warrior or general pop person that's trying to get involved in health and fitness don't know what to believe because it's like, oh, I heard that this used to be true. But then I follow this really smart, you know, fitness science guy who said that this is that's all false and not true. And so then you totally dismiss that valuable piece of information. And I feel like the gallon of water and teasing the bodybuilder for being that guy who carried that around all the time. Okay. If you ask them for the reasons why they probably don't explain the best, but hey, in my experience with my clients, I've had tremendous success making them care. It doesn't have to be a gallon. It could be one of these that's like, you know, yeah, you know, a third of a gallon and then you do three of those in a day. Okay, fine. Well, I find I find what's much harder is somebody who drinks that a little eight ounces glasses and add those all up and tell me you you're hitting a gallon like, no, it's easier to look at something. And yeah, I used to make my clients buy. Yeah. That's exactly what I do. I would have them buy like a quarter gallon jug and then, okay, four of these a day or three of these a day or whatever. And then tracking it. By the way, this is pure anecdote. But on average, when I would get a client to do this and nothing else, so they'd come in and then I'd say, okay, this is what we're going to start with. We're not going to do anything else. Just do this on average. It would lose about two to four pounds just from doing this. Well, you know that a lot of dehydration will trigger hunger too. That's right. So there's times where you get a client to do this and the thing that's right. They were they were struggling with, you know, cravings and hunger issues all the time and you've you've taught them now to be drinking more water and all of a sudden they don't have that anymore. Like that's massive. Now, one thing I'll add, this is important for people who are athletes. So you sweat a lot on a daily basis or you work outside in the hot sun. You eat a diet that is not, that has no heavily processed food. So it's whole natural foods or you eat a very low carbohydrate diet. So let's say less than 70 grams a day, like really low carbs, those three categories of people, you probably want to add electrolytes to your water. You want to add sodium because you can drink a lot of water, but if your sodium is off, you still may notice effects of what seemed like dehydration and then drinking more water doesn't solve it. So you still may get things like muscle cramps and headaches and things like that. So if you eat a low carb diet or you eat a whole natural food diet, so you don't have a heavily processed, heavily processed foods have a lot of sodium, whole natural foods have almost no sodium. You have to add it and even when you add it, it's still low sodium. And then if you sweat a lot, you want to add some electrolytes to your water. We work with element T. I love them because there's no calories and it's got a good amount of sodium. Most electrolyte powders are like... Tastes good too. Yeah, most electrolyte powders are like they sprinkle sodium in because everybody's afraid of sodium, but element T's got a thousand milligrams in a packet and you throw that in there. You do two packets. I do two to three a day. So I try and get three, I try and drink three of these and one of them, the one that's around my workout, I put the element T. Yeah, I'll do two around my workout. One before and then one during and I just get the best. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. When I did go through carnivore diet, I wasn't doing that and then I had gone through a week or two where I was actually reintroducing it and then this time I added in element T and added in electrolytes, massive difference in my performance lifting weights, which is stupid. It's obvious, but I wouldn't even thought of that as that intracellular fluid is really big contributor performance. Oh yeah, people think it's the low carb that's causing it. Like the keto fluid that people talk about, oh, you're going to keto diet, you know, you drop your carbs, you're going to feel like shit for whatever and you get headaches and it's just withdrawal and it's like, Just lost a lot of sodium. Yeah, you know what? Yeah, because when you eat low carb, you lose a lot of water and you lose a lot of sodium. So I'd be like, oh, well, here, try this. Let's add a bunch of salt to your diet and you'll notice right away if that's the issue. If that was the issue, within an hour or two, you'll be like, oh my God, I feel way better. Substantially better. So yeah, if that's you, then I would add some electrolytes to your water. Otherwise, for most people, average person, I wouldn't do this because they probably got plenty of sodium through their, you know, their heavily processed food diet. Okay. What's up, everybody? Today's giveaway maps performance. This is the athletic training program. Here's how you could win. Leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop this video. Also subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. If you do all those things and we declare you the winner, we'll let you know in the comment section. Also, we put together a new workout program bundle called the Time Crunch Bundle. It includes maps 15 minutes, maps anywhere, maps prime and eat for performance ebook. All put together in this bundle, discounted over $200 off. So you get all of that for only $99 and 99 cents. If you're interested or you just want to learn more, click on the link at the top of the description below. All right, here comes the show. So I got something for you guys and this is not alien related, but it is paranormal related. Oh, cool. Okay, so hold on to your seats a little bit. Have you ever heard of the Hell House? This is in Michigan. So this is a well-studied phenomena and probably some of the best actual evidence of a poltergeist that they've ever had. And reason being like, because they've actually had NASA scientists, they've had like legit, scientific studied, the latest and greatest kind of type of research, equipment and things to go in there and kind of investigate this. So I originally like- So poltergeist is a spirit that moves things and can possess people, right? Yes, and so mainly it's known for, yeah, moving things around like violently. Like this is stuff that's like obvious. Like it's like, you know, you see something move and like slam or break or, and so these people like moved into this house and what they noticed was a window just smashed and broke and then it just randomly happened and then they kept calling the cops like, hey, there's like a somebody around our house lurking and, you know, like come out and check this out and see if they couldn't find anybody, right? And then it wasn't just one occurrence. It was like every single night they were calling the cops and making these reports about these really loud knocks. And it was like the neighbors heard it all and they all heard this knocking on the house and it was like getting louder and louder and more aggressive to the point where like later on it actually had phenomena where there was like just random fire would burst. On one of the guys that was in the bathroom, like there was just this flames that came out of nowhere and like burned. I've seen you do that before in the bathroom. It's just- I mean, that's after a nice bowl of chili, but you know- I've seen this before. That's not a folder guys. Dude, but I mean, so the fire department came out, they all investigated it and in their report, they're like, this is not man-made by any means. Like this wasn't an arsonist. There's no way like this came from any source that we can think of from electrical source, like anything, they couldn't explain it. So scientists have come in there, so it's a famous place where they've come in and tried to study and figure out what the hell's going on. So yeah, and so they just chalk it up as like a paranormal event. And this is just how it sits. Did the people move or they stay in there this whole time? So yeah, so they moved, but their torment to these two brothers, like their parents died off, but they're older now. And like this documentary that I was watching, like they came back and this guy was investigating this house with like a medium and they're kind of going through it and all this. And then they actually bring the brothers in there to like relive all this stuff. And I was like, dude, that's so messed up. So is the house abandoned or is there someone that lives there? So there's people that live there now, which is a trip, like these two ladies. And they've only noticed, the occurrences haven't really happened for them. So they've noticed like some vision of somebody in the window, like outside and they're like, thought that was weird. I'm out of there. I'd be out of there. Yeah, dude. So here's, okay, so the backstory on them. So I guess down the street, at this other house, there was a witch. And she basically did this whole like ceremony and thing to like open up this like crazy portal, whatever, like some demon they unleashed somehow, right? And so this guy that was one of the brothers, like she came over to the house, originally she wanted to buy the house from them because like, I guess the thought process with this was like, they could have this house and they could do all of their ceremonies there. So they didn't have the spirits like at their house. And so they were trying to go over and like and buy the house off of them. And they're like, no, no, we're not gonna sell the house. Like we're not interested. And she came over and basically like, one of the brothers like was talking to him and was like, come with me and like lured him over to their house. And she just like gave him something to drink. And so like obviously probably drugged him and did this whole like ritual around him was like walking around him, spinning, like cut his hair, ate part of his hair. What? And then like, this guy like claims, well, he was just reliving it. And he was like, like going through all this again, like talking about what happened. Like he didn't even remember any of it, but like going back to that house, he started to kind of relive it. Oh God. And so it's dude. And so what they think is like, he might have been possessed and he brought that over to the house with him. Do you watch this alone? Do you watch this with your? I was watching it. With Courtney, yeah. Did you, have you still not watched The Unsolved Mysteries? You got to, so the reason why I'm bringing it up now is cause there's an episode on a poltergeist and it's a crazy one because it's, I can't remember what city this house is in, but this poor single mother and her daughter move into this house. And within 30 days, like there was like 15, like occurrences of like shipping, they moved a talking doll that has like, that talks that she fucking ripped the battery out of. And it still was, oh bro, like all kinds of, and the daughter talking to the ghost and having a name, this gets crazy. The daughter having a conversation, her mom walking down the hall, daughter's having a conversation to some, that looks like nothing in the room. Her giving the name, total weird name. Who are you talking to? She says her name. Fast forward into the show. She freaks out that she has so many occurrences and within 30 days she moves the fuck out. She gets out. And when she's like freaking out and leaving, the neighbor goes like, nobody ever lives there longer than a couple of months. This house is always, and then they find out that 50 years ago that there was a girl that was kidnapped and never found from that, from the house. And her name is the name of the fucking girl saying. Come on, man. Right? Come on, man. That got me, dude. Get me out of there, bro. It's all on, that's the, that's in the new, that new seasons. I can't wait because there is like a big foot one. Yeah. You'll love the big foot one for sure. You know what I mean? Squatch. Yeah. And then you'll definitely like that one too though, because that one had me tripping out because there was a lot of stuff that was like, that's too much. Yeah. Out of there, dude. Do you guys know that the Catholic church still perform, they have a protocol. Yeah, for exorcisms. For exorcisms. You know that? They actually have a, they have like a criteria. So they have, they'll have an event that'll happen. Someone's possessed or whatever. And they'll send doctors and scientists. This is what I know of it, okay? So I don't know the exact protocol, but they'll send doctors and scientists. That's confirmed it's not mental in this. It's confirmed that they have signs of possession or whatever. And if it meets the stringent criteria, and they're very hush hush about it apparently, they'll send a person over there, a priest or whatever to do this exorcism. Yeah. But today, they still, today they still have this protocol. They did that to this house too. And the priest didn't want anything to do with this house. It was like stepped in and it was like, I'm out. You didn't even want to do the ceremony. Yeah. Dude, one of the knives in the kitchen, and he's like lifted up and it threw itself right past this guy's head, into the wall behind him. Hey Doug, Google this for me. How many exorcism happened per year? I'm just curious. Hey, how, like, like, how fucked would you be if you're like, you finally like, you know what? I finally found a Catholic church, they're gonna save us. He walks in, he's like, no, no, no. This is unsavable. I was like, dude, he walks in, he goes, hell no. Just watch that. Bro, come on, man, what are we gonna do? Yeah. And these people, I'm like, why, like, at this point, all of this occurrences happened, like, think about it, they're not getting any sleep, like it happens always in the middle of the night, you know, and like, just torments them. Like, leave, like, at this point, like, what are you doing anymore? Like, they're trying to fight it. Like, you're not gonna win. To fight it? Yeah. A spirit. Have you heard stories? I've heard stories too, where people do move and the spirits follow them, have you heard of these stories? Yeah. Well, they'll move into another house and it's there? Yeah. Oh my God. That's gotta be the worst. I'd be so mad. I'm like, what do I do? To get at it, get at it. You know, I have something really embarrassing to admit since we're talking about shows. Uh-oh. So, this is like super embarrassing. So, last night, I'm on, and what's embarrassing is that I have to admit that it took three episodes before I like put piece this together. Oh. So, and, you know. That's like three hours. I'm gonna blame it on Netflix for, it said 98% match. That's pretty good. You know what I'm saying? Like, 98% match to what you like based off of your algorithm. I should like this, right? But we have like rental properties. I've noticed that it's been thrown into the algorithm way off. Yeah, I do. This is true. We do have our Netflix on on a bunch of different properties where random people are probably using it. So, it gets, you know, sent to me. Now, what got me was, it starts off and it's this girl. Okay, the show is called Sex Life. Okay, so. So, title. Sorry, I got you sucked in. Right, right. So, I'm curious. Interested, right? Yeah, curious. And it starts off and, you know, sex scene pretty much out the gates as you would anticipate. And the girl, though, is like you, where she's having the conversation her head. So, I think because that was so recent and I like you so much that I was like, I told Katrina, I was like, oh, we should watch this. She's having like this inner dialogue, you know, and it's, and then I'm like three episodes in and I finally say something like, oh my God, you know what we're watching? We're literally watching a romance novel that's done in a Netflix series because it's literally terrible plot with just, you know, there's, you know, either dicks, tits or fucking every three to five minutes with like little plot to break it all up. And because it, I mean, these words like engorged in throbbing. You know what made me finally, why I took three, three episodes? Well, first of all, like obviously sex and all those things are, you know, you know, like candy to the brain, right? I'm going like, okay. I'll wait it out. I'll wait it out. Like not realizing I'm watching really bad acting and there's like not a really good deep plot going on here, you know, and I'm justifying, oh, let's go to the next episode and watch you in another one. And then I realized like the most like basic scenes, there's like no reason to show the dude's dick and they do or there's no, or no reason to show it. Like they show full frontal nudity? Yeah. This is on Netflix, right? Yeah. Yeah, I was told about it yesterday and I haven't checked it out. Don't. And I don't intend to. You don't need to. You know, it's literally a romance novel. You know, they used to never show full like frontal nudity. It used to be like, it had to be rated X for something like that. I was showing on Netflix. Yeah. Oh yeah, dick. And it's, what made me realize that it took multiple scenes. I'm like, was that necessary? Did I need to see her naked to get that part? You know, and then I realized, oh, there is no emphasis on this plot whatsoever. It's outside watching. It's literally, it's just designed to bridge me to the next sex scene. I mean, it literally reminded me of like cinemax. Like skin-a-max. Yeah, remember skin-a-max as I told Katrina, I'm like, oh my God, we are watching skin-a-max right now and I've been sucked in for three episodes a while. I can't get those three hours back. It's like the heavy petting network. Yeah, and I'm embarrassed that I watched that. Why is he watching his car with no pants on? Let me go back to the exorcism. So I don't know how many, but there's a lot of requests for exorcisms now, but 15 years ago, there were only 12 American priests approved by the Vatican to perform the ritual. Oh, that's it. Now there's over 100. Whoa. And apparently they get these requests all the time. Hold on a second. When was it 12? That was 12 years, sorry, about 15 years ago. So why did they go from 12 to 100 in the last 15 years, Justin? Why would they dramatically increase the amount of priests that do good business strategy? That's some serious scaling. I don't think they charge for it, but I wonder if... You don't think so? No, bro. I'll charge for it. It's a church. You think they charge for it? You think like a business? Here's your packages, full exorcism? I mean, Catholic church is pretty rich, no? Yeah, but they didn't get that way, not charging anything. Yeah, but I don't think they can't charge. Tithing, dude. Maybe they've got more. Tithing been that good? I don't know. There's gotta be... Historically, it wasn't always tithing that gave them the wealth. Yeah, that's what you're gonna say. They had a real good sense of power. But hold on a sec, just follow me along this thread here. So they went from 12 and in 15 years, almost 10 times as many now are able to do these exorcisms. Do you think that they're seeing more activity? They're trying to strengthen their... Supply and demand. They're trying to strengthen their army. So this one priest... What the heck is going on? It has been weird the last 15 years, it's all I'm gonna say. Because one priest gets 2,000 requests every year. 2,000 requests? Yes. Is there any hot spots or areas of interest? That I don't know. Reoccurring, reoccurring. Yeah, like, because... What city has had the most exorcisms? I don't think they show all that. Yeah, I don't know if we have good stats and all that. I mean, what you're saying already, those exorcisms. I wonder, now let me ask you guys this, to speculate, how do you become a certified exorcist priest? Because you're good at... Well, no, I mean, how do you... Like, what's the process? They all practice. They pull up some push-ups and you're like... There's like a practice. You just bring like a crazy ant in first, you know what I'm saying? Then everybody takes their turn. Are they like badasses? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's pretty jacked. You're ready to throw down, right? Totally. Yeah, follow this, pass this test, we'll let you in. How do you become this? This is great. I told you about the time I made a bad joke to a priest, right? In front of my gym. Did I tell you guys about this? No. When I used to have my gym, there was a breakfast place next door, and there was a bench. A priest. A rabbi. I thought he was gonna laugh, dude. He didn't laugh. He was sitting on the bench in front of my gym waiting to go and eat breakfast. And I'm like, oh, great opportunity for a joke. So I opened the door and I'm like, hey, you and I have something in common. He's like, what's that? I'm like, we both exercise people. And he's like, oh, I thought that was hilarious, dude. That was a dumb joke. I thought it was hilarious. I thought he was gonna love it. He hated it. That's like the equivalent of that is like, oh yeah, exercise, extra fries. Oh my God. You know, like that would be like the quick, like, ooh, and walk away too. Hey, speaking of scary stuff, since we're going down this path, did you guys see what scientists are trying to, what they're trying to do right now? Oh God. So you know how AI is like the big thing, right? So AI, big thing. Okay, so here's what they're trying to do right now. I hate that when they make you open an app. They're so stupid. So they're trying to develop AI that uses human brain cells. So they're gonna make brain cells. They're looking to make it what's called an organoid intelligence. Use the power of the biological system to advance the field of life sciences. So in other words, they're gonna do 3D cultures of human brain cells that replicate parts of our brain that are responsible for learning and memory and then use these neurons to connect them to silicon computer chips to develop like more advanced AI. What? Yeah. How many ways can this go wrong? Yeah. How many ways can we try and play God and then still survive? I just, I swear, this is hilarious. Imagine they turn it on and it's like, please kill me. You know, this, the AI is quickly turning into like, you know, the cryptocurrency bubble for me. I feel like that it's obvious it's here to stay. I don't think crypto is gonna go away forever. Obviously the blockchain is incredible technology. It's gonna be the future. How we do a lot of things. And I definitely obviously see the benefits of AI and where it's going. But the likelihood that you're going to be able to pick or figure out which company uses the technology and turns into the next Google or Amazon and the same thing goes for crypto to think that you know the crypto coin that's gonna be the universal coin that everybody's gonna want to use. It's like, we're in the middle of these like crazy bubbles right now. And like the AI bubble is the- It's expected. It's like the dot com when that first started happening. Lots of money gets poured in because they see the promise. The potentials there. But there's a lot of guessing and things will have to wash themselves out. So yeah, of course it's a bubble. I don't know what the numbers are but I'm sure the amount of money that's been invested into AI type technologies. Yeah. Is it true? I mean, Google and some other companies have already like worked on this like decades ago. Yes. But then they had to shut it down because of all of the bugs and errors and potential problems they saw which we're still seeing those like weird problems like with Microsoft and like all these AIs like- Yeah, I just read an article that Microsoft's AI was creating alternate personalities. I can't remember the names they gave it where the alternate personalities of the AI were like malicious and people are reporting like that these AI machines are like assholes. Dude, it's like comical but scary, you know? It's like, if we're gonna give them a body that's where we're done. You know what's funny about this is that we all know this inherently as humans. Like think about the plot in 90% of sci-fi movies. What's the plot? Yeah. Scientists get overexcited and overeager. Way overzealous. And they create some new technology that ends up turning into like this bad thing. That's like 90% of sci-fi. By the way, it goes all the way back to Frankenstein. Frankenstein. Yes. It's exactly the plot. 100%. Yeah, so it's like we know this inherently and yet we can't stop ourselves. We can't stop but metal. No. You know, we just metal all the time because we can. Until it blows up in our faces. I saw an interview question or something that Elon Musk had said that they asked him if he believes that in the near future that there'll be eight billion, you know, AI robots on the earth. And he said yes. That's a lot, dude. Eight billion? Eight billion. Yeah. What? Yeah. Gosh, I don't know. Well, because here's where I see it being adopted first and early is like in like warehouse type stuff. Things that. Sure. You're kind of, things where we have like self-checkout stuff or there are mindless type of jobs and stuff like that's where these robots are going. So you're going to be able to have, you know, in a warehouse that used, you know, 20 men, you know, eight hour shifts will now use 10 AI robots 24 hours a day, like around the clock, you know. So I see, and you always have a backup 10. So when one goes down. You know, okay. So that's cool. I think that's great. Creating more efficiency, allowing us to utilize resources better to become more productive. The problem though is that what a lot of scientists are trying to do is create sentient self-aware, you know, consciousness with these, with these, you know, devices. And the reason why that's a problem was because you can't define it in humans. So what are you creating? Like, tell me who can define what consciousness is. Like the biggest question in philosophy and science and religion. We can't even define it. We don't know what it is. We can't even explain it, but they're going to try to create it. What they're going to create is what they think it is, I guess, but they don't, again, they don't know what it is. So that's where you can, you can run into some trouble. It's like a sentient self-aware. First of all, if it was really self-aware the way that a lot of people think, you know, self-awareness is, why would it want to do anything for us? What, you know? If someone created you. What's the benefit to it? Yeah, if you were created and turned into a slave, you'd be like, wait a minute, I don't want to do all this stuff. And by the way, I'm stronger and smarter than you. Why don't you do stuff for me? That seems logical, if you ask me. Yeah, I don't understand how, because like you said, we don't understand consciousness as it is, but I mean, I do see how you could, you know, fairly, not fairly easy, but like we have the data points to come up with logical and reasoning answers to any question. Sure. So even though, you know, this, this AI will never have the, the true feeling of a human where it has this emotions, humans are emotionally inconsistent because we're affected by all these things that, like you may, you may consistently, Sal, react and say an answer a certain way. Yeah, we're not predictive. Like, so we can predict like a machine. That's right. So we're not predictive, but because we have so many data points on so many humans, we can get to a pretty good logical answer, I think for most things. And that part of it is very realistic. Yeah, that's cool. But it is interesting. It does point to our ego, right? Like what's the most interesting thing that humans want to do with AI is make one that's a human, right? Make one that's indistinguishable from a human. Yeah, except better. Well, what does that mean better? Better how? You know, smarter, stronger, more powerful. I mean, is that true though? I mean, who's, I haven't heard anyone actually say it like that. Like I'm trying, we're trying to make a human better or we're trying to make an AI better than humans. That's how they define the singularity, self-aware, indistinguishable. What's that? What's that test, the Turing test? Turing test. Where you can't tell if it's a machine or if it's a human. That's how you know you've got real AI. Like that's a goal for sure. That's a hundred percent. I think that's not because the person, the goal is to like necessarily or praise it. I think you have things like the, what was the show Westworld that we were all into? Like, you know, if it's indistinguishable from the real thing, then you could utilize it in things like, you know, talk therapy or whatever, where you're having, I'm having a conversation with my dead father that has got an algorithm that is built around his personality, his answers, everything like that. And I can use that as a- I'm not worried about the good stuff that people will do. I'm worried about all the other stuff. Well, I know, but I'm saying, I would think that that's the driving mechanism of why they're pursuing that level of- Now, look at the internet, right? The internet was one of the, it's one of the greatest advances in human history. Okay, what websites have the most traffic on the internet? Porn? Yeah. So all these resources and technology, all this like innovation, and where do we direct it? Pornography, right? On the internet. So like, this is human behavior. So where is this gonna go? Also to that level. What's always happened in history when you have a new technology, you have to go use it in a war setting. Let's weaponize this somehow. Like that's the other like dark side of what you always have to worry about. Dark, but then here's the optimistic side of that. The potential that we don't use human soldiers to ever fight wars anymore. We all send our 1000, 10,000 AI robots, you send your 10,000 AI robots. Okay, let's take that to its logical conclusion. You have an army of robots, I have an army of robots, right? Where are they gonna fight? Yeah, our robots fight and mine win. Are you gonna be like, yeah, I give up. No, you're gonna make more. And then eventually I have to kill him. I'm gonna have to kill him, so he stops. I mean, we play video games and make set the loss. That's the video game, bro. That's not, you know, communism versus capitalism. I mean, there was an evolution to how we got there. There wasn't video games like freaking 1,000 years ago. Let me ask you this, has war gotten, have we gotten more efficient and effective at it? Or less? In other words, is it more deadly or less deadly? Do more people die in wars when they're waged or less? I'm not the historian of the group. Oh, way more, dude, come on. Before it was like 1,000 people versus 1,000, 10,000 people. Then we created the machine gun and they thought the machine gun would end the world. Then we created, you know- What does that look like as a percentage of the population though too? We've also grown the entire population exponentially. And so if it's a greater percentage, then okay, that point makes sense. But if it's relative to size. We innovate a lot for war, I'll tell you that much. Some of the craziest technology our government has, has to do with war. Well, that's just, that's the crony capitalist side. That's because there's big money in buying or spending money on big fucking toys. You'll say, that's a really less to do. It's not about efficiency. Matter of fact, it's not efficient at all. It's like, hey, let's see who could build the craziest thing for the most amount of money. And then we'll flex on the whole world with it. The absolute number of war deaths has declined since 1945. Oh, so there goes out. Well, but we've gotten more efficient and effective, that's for sure. Well, that's, I mean, this is like the old, I remember being in this class where we had to have like these arguments and like debates. And one of them was like, you argue for nuclear war and I argue against it, right? And like, I was four, which was horrible, right? But he was like, my whole argument is like, you know, this has actually helped prevent a lot of needless deaths because it got to the ultimate escalation where you're not gonna, mutual destruction. And so therefore it's more of a deterrent than it is an actual threat. I mean, that's the same argument that you go with like, you know, like looser gun laws, like let's say in somewhere like Texas, like because there's a fear that somebody could pull a gun on you and shoot you. It's like the similar type of concept. To give everybody a nuke? Yeah. Nobody will touch shit no more. Everybody's scared of everybody. I mean, you don't think it's, I mean, come on. We're in the middle of this, you know, woke culture. You don't think you get to a point where like the generation of generated, finally evolved be like, this war thing is a big business. It is a bunch of bullshit. We should all agree one day that we don't do that anymore. And if we have disputes, we settle it in the video game world. Yeah. You don't think that's a possibility? I mean, maybe, I mean, anything's possible. Yeah. I would hope so. I mean, I feel like, I mean, I feel like the generation coming up right now is like that and you gotta think that maybe, and maybe the other countries, like the Russia's and China's aren't quite there yet. We're like maybe close to it. Dude, we need a good Fred Savage to come in and you know, you guys remember that movie? No. Which movie? The Fred Savage where he was like playing Mario 3 and he beat everybody. No. What? I don't remember the name of it, but it was a video game competition and he was like playing, it was like a big thing in the 80s. Oh, I think I do remember. The Wizard? The Wizard. Oh, I never saw that. Classic. You know what I thought of? I thought of the one where the kids playing the video game, it was an 80s movie and he was really good and he... Was it the pinball? No. And then he created like this like device that you could fly in and they end up, it's like a bubble. Fly to the navigator? No, no. It was like a bubble. He created this bubble with his computer and they could fly everywhere with it and then it got weird because then they met aliens and the aliens were stupid and ruined the whole movie. Like I hate it when aliens are stupid and things like that. It wasn't ruined with the flying bubble. No, it was kind of cool at first. It was kind of cool. The alien sent it over for you. Well, it was a dumb alien. Like the aliens showed up and they were dumb. Like that's a stupid look at the alien. The aliens aren't going to be dumb. Yeah, dude. What's going on here? Anyway, I'm going to switch to fitness and nutrition here real quick. Well, how are you talking about that? No, I had a question. I'm going to be in there. No, I actually had this conversation with a family member of mine about processed foods. I told him, like, here's the number one thing I'll tell you. Avoid heavily processed foods. They're like, okay, well, what if I want the occasional whatever are their guidelines with processed foods? I said, well, protein is always more satiating than the other macronutrients. So if you are going to pick something that's processed, pick a high protein processed food. Magic spoon. Magic spoons are a great example. That was me last night. Magic spoons are a great example. It is processed, but because it's high protein, it's more likely to create satiety. I did four of the five cups in the box last night. Did you really? Yeah, I actually measured it because I was like, I want to see. How many grams of protein was that? So you had 13 times four. So that's four, 12, 52, right? Oh yeah, there you go. 52 grams of protein, and it's 130 calories per serving. So 130 times four. So you're looking at five, 20. Did I do my math fast right there? That sounds right, yeah. Yeah, no. Yeah, five. You used whole milk? Or you used whole milk? Yeah, I did. And whole milk. And I did one and a half cups of whole milk. So you had some good protein in there? Yeah, yeah. So that was like, what, 60? Now did you do it because you were missing your targets? Yeah, I was pretty low in calorie today. Yesterday was my first day of introducing some cardio training in there. So I know I burned a lot. Wait a minute, what? Yeah. What are you doing? I secretly have something I'm working on right now. Hold on. I don't want to announce it. I don't want to hold myself accountable. Hold on. I don't want to hold myself accountable, yeah. Wait, wait, wait, what are you doing, bro? I don't want to commit to anything right now. Why are you doing what's going on? Oh, I'm training for a marathon. No, you're not, bro. You know how you happen to be broke. Hey, you know how funny that would be? No way, dude. We'll come support you. Oh my god. Justin and I will be able to see this. I'm a headband, dude. Let's go. What are you doing? What's going on? Secretly, I really want, I miss basketball so much. Oh, you want to get back? But I don't desert, I'm not allowing myself to play until I get in the right condition because of all my injuries that I've had from being in this position where I, oh, I want to play again and I'm not in the condition to do it. And then I've been hurt every time. So, you know, I'm slowly introducing cardio right now. I don't know if you saw me out there the day. I was doing like these long strided lunges and rotational work and I'm trying to like incorporate that. I don't want to announce it because then everybody's going to ask me every fucking month. Like, hey, you playing ball yet? And I'm like, ah, I haven't done it. Where's your, so let's just pretend that you were consistent, you did it, whatever. Where's the first game going to be done? 24 or fitness. I'll go. So what's perfect is that when we need to. You're going to do a pickup game? Yeah. Oh, yeah, I'll go. I'll go. That's it. And I actually know the times of like, I was just going to say one of the level of players. Yeah, yeah, no, no, for sure. I know like that's how much I have. So where's level one? What time? So level one is there's an old man like, I know I'll bring you in with. Yeah, yeah. Well, so if I have time for that, that's hard to do during the week, but old man time is like 10 a.m. It's like one of the 24 fitness 10 a.m. I just, I just shoulder everybody, the old guys that can still play basketball, they'll play around there. I'll skip that. I would say that's like preface and then like phase one or level one is three o'clock inside 24. Are you like under the hoop garbage guy or like a three point guy initially? Because you got to start one or the other. I've never been at a really good three point shooter. I got to be really feeling myself to be pulling up threes. I mean, I'm definitely inside game, handle, jump shot, you know, layup guy. So that's I, yeah, you won't seem to be jacking up threes, although that would be better for me because it's less likely to get injured out there. But I'm not the. Did I ever tell you guys about the big fight? Well, you got, I mean, look, any, you manage any gym with a basketball court. That's where all the fights always are. Yeah, you are going to have fights at least, I'd say once every quarter. I lost one of my best trainers from that. What do you mean lost? Oh, I was there. Yeah. I lost one of my best trainers from that. Some dude, some dude hit my trainer and he he hit him back and because he was a. Wait a minute. He defended himself and he got fired. Yeah, that's stupid. Well, what happened was the girl, this is in this actually crazy trickle down. This got me in trouble with HR. So at that time, the operation manager, Barb, who you probably remember Barbara was, she was on vacation for like a week and she had like her, her assistant was now the operations manager for her week and it was like, well, it's just one of those, the worst people that could have that position, right? That are power hungry, that. So and she had it. She had it out for this trainer of mine. She didn't like him. She didn't like him. And so she was one that filed the report and she filed the report like crazy bias and it had already been sent up to HR by time I found out about it and then it ended up getting him fired and I lost him and I was so infuriated over that and I and I pulled her in the office to tell her and I'm sitting down in the office. I'm behind my desk. She comes in, she closed door and this was obviously a learning lesson for me to never have a woman in a closed office with me without another person present. Always, always. Yeah, I mean, obviously looking back, it's like, duh, Adam, but I mean, I'm 20 something years old. I'm learning this stuff as we go. And so this was that learning lesson. She so I am telling her like, I cannot believe you did that. And I'm, I'm, I'm scolding her. I'm not yelling or anything like that, but I'm like, I'm, I'm upset and frustrated and I'm expressing that and like, and pulled her aside privately to tell her, don't you ever do that again? Like I lost one of my best guys. Like, you know, you, I understand that you were one of the operating, one of the managers on suit is so am I. And that's my person. Like you involve me in a situation like that. And like, I can't, and so I was pissed, right? So she filed a report against you. Yeah, saying that I cornered her in the office. Oh no. Yeah, and trapped her in the office. So they sent me home and everything like that. They did a whole fucking investigation on me. I almost lost my job that time again. So it was like, how many times do you want to get fired? It's a good thing you brought so much business in. Yeah. You know, you and I, 100, 100% you and I were on the same list, 100%. And the list, the title of the list is. Yeah. Top producers that. That are loose cannon. That are, yeah, we can't promote too much. You know, I, I never had like a. They almost got fired so many times. So I never had like a, I mean, I had a phase and I've shared it on the podcast before or the little moment in time where I think I had a victim attitude. But for the most part, I never really had a victim attitude about anything. I always looked at the positive side of that, which is like, I fucking do so good for this company. They can't fire me. They can't fire me. Yeah. I was the. I'm on touch mode. If I was another guy down the street that's average. And that should happen. They fucking can't him in a heart because they don't want the liability. But I know the way the conversation goes is like, who did what? Oh yeah, should we fire? Whoa, wait a second. That's that one guy over there in San Jose. You mean the guy that broke that record and did that? Just like, oh, what do we give him a slap on the wrist? That was, that was, that was me too. Shake the finger. No, no. We had, we had a fight once. And this would happen once a quarter. Whenever, like again, you manage a gym with a basketball court, you're going to get fights. It's just what happens. So once a quarter, you know, they call you, you'd run up there, your trainers would run it there. You'd break up the fight. And it was almost, you know, you, you know, you, you'd break it up. It's young guys or whatever. Man, one time there was a brawl that they would not stop. And it was a bunch of dudes in their fifties. There was old guys. A 50 year old brawl? It was, it was like a group. It was like four older guys all in their fifties throwing down and blood and we're breaking them up. And they don't want to stop. That's embarrassing. That was, I mean, I was, part of me was like, this is crazy. Part of me was like, okay, we should let him go. We had to get rid of them. But yeah, dude, they were going at it. And guys in their fifties, dude, I was heartbroken when I lost my guy because you could, I could watch the video. You see the whole video too. And he did, yeah. He got shoved. Then he got punched in the face and then he retaliated. And it was all on camera and everything. But it was all because he had already had a warning and he already had some sort of a record with HR already. And then it was reported by someone who reported it like defending, the way she wrote the report up, it was like in defense of the, she took down all his, that guy is the information, the guy that actually was in the fight. I had a trick for whenever, you're gonna get in confrontation in the gym. And I used it twice. You walk him out? Yeah, yeah. One time I used it in the wet area and I told the guy, all right, you wanna handle this, let's go outside. And we walked up to the front and I said, you first, you walk to the door and I lock the door. And then wave that, I'm gonna call the police. That, I used that once and I used another time when I cut a membership card right in front of him and he reached over the desk and I said, hey, let's not do this here. Let's step outside. He went outside again, I locked the door. It was very effective. No, it's a great move. It's a great move. They're all hopped up and they're like, oh yeah, this is like the Houdini dude. But it's great because it's a clear door. So you can look at them and look and you lock the door. They're pissed dude. Yeah, like are you both fucked? Imagine you're that person, like your adrenaline's going. Someone tells me step outside and we're walking outside, like this is going down. So I'm already like. Oh, dude's taking a shirt off. He's already pacing dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then here's the door, lock the door. Lock the door, turn around and wave at him. It was a good time. Call me. Anyway, who's the shout out today? Oh, oh. You had somebody out. I do, actually, you know what? So the other day, I was, remember when I was talking about the trainer who that was this psychology, she blended her business. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. She's in the NCI group. Yes. And so I looked up her Instagram handle because I wanted to give her a real shout out because I do like think she's got, what a great business model. She already reached out to me and said, oh my God, I think she knew she was, obviously I was talking about her, but I'm like, oh man, I feel so bad that we've met several times and I totally forgot. And it's Christine, right Doug? Yes, Christina Hackerley. And her Instagram is mindset of matter coaching. Great follow. Great stuff. Yeah, check it out. All right, check this out. One of the most effective ways to lose body fat. This is new now, is to use a continual glucose monitor and work with a nutrition coach. They can attach how foods affect blood sugar and how it affects your behaviors, your mood, how you feel. If you have a coach and you work with a continual glucose monitor, your results will skyrocket. I've seen this firsthand. It's pretty amazing. We work with a company called Nutrisense and they have the best of this. Go check them out, analyze how your blood glucose levels respond to food, exercise stress and sleep and work with someone with your nutrition in real time. Go to Nutrisense.io. So that's N-U-T-R-I-S-E-N-S-E.io forward slash mind pump and then use code mind pump and get $30 off. All right, here comes the rest of the show. Our first caller is Ileana from Arkansas. Ileana, how's it going? How can we help you? Hi guys, thanks a little much for having me. I'm so excited to talk to you guys. Thank you. So I'm gonna start off with my question and then I will go in and read the background info that I provided on the email if that's okay. Yeah, true. Okay, so my question is, I've increased my calories from 1500 to 2800. However, my body fat percentage has not changed at all per the two DEXA scans taken three months apart. Why didn't I gain any muscle while eating so many calories with adequate protein? So my background is I'm 33, five feet, five inches tall, weigh about 142. And in the 10 plus years I've been strength training, I've never been able to attain the level of leanness that I wanted. In August of last year, I decided to go on a bulk with a plan to then run a cut. At the time I weighed 137, was eating 1500 calories and running maps anabolic. Three months later in November, I was in the middle of running maps aesthetic and a DEXA scan showed I was 25% body fat weighing 143. I'm now running maps strong and decided to get a second DEXA which basically mirrored the exact numbers on my first DEXA. I was surprised that I did not gain any strength. Since starting the bulk I've always consumed more than one gram per body weight of protein and walked anywhere from 13 to 20,000 steps daily. Lastly, I have interrupted the bulk with many cuts these past seven months as well. Okay, this is a great question because this is gonna highlight something very interesting but before I get into that I'm gonna have a few more questions for you. So I just want to confirm here. You, this last, the last two DEXA scans that you did you went from 1500 calories to 2,800 calories. So that's an increase of 1300 calories. Your body weight didn't change, body fat percentage didn't change and muscle mass didn't change, is that correct? Right, but I didn't do a DEXA scan when I first started the bulk, which is in August. So all I have in August to go off of is my weight and the calories that I was going off of. So my first DEXA scan wasn't until November. Hold on, so you did, okay. So in other words, she's good. Yeah, so she very well and most likely built muscle from that when she first increased her calories and weight. Right, right. If all I know, I could have been like 28% body fat, I don't know. Well, I'll tell you right now it's almost mathematically impossible that you weren't something like that because to increase the calories, which by the way, that is a massive increase for a female to be able to increase that much. We've got like 35, 40% increase. And the scale, the scale stayed the same weight you built muscle, you 100% built muscle. So you did change body composition. You just didn't have the stats to prove it because you didn't do it before. Let me ask you this, how do you feel in the gym from the beginning to now? Are you stronger, doing more reps? Does the form feel different? Do you have more energy? Are there any differences? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I listen to these calls all the time and you always ask those questions and my responses are the same as anyone else. Like I feel strong, my libido is great, my hormones are great, sleep is fantastic, right? But I think the only difference with those questions is when people get on here, they get on a scale that tells them the body fat percentage or they might guess what it is. But in my case, like I know what it is cause I got the dexa scan, right? And yeah, I just, I don't, it's discouraging when the strength didn't change at all. And by the way, my weight did go up, right? Cause in August I was weighing, what did I say, 136, right? Right now I'm like 143, I mean, sometimes I weigh 144. Wait, hold on a second. You said you're not any stronger in the gym? No, I do, I feel stronger, but I'm saying the dexa scan did not show that. Oh, muscle gain, right, but you don't have a starting point, a dexa scan from the beginning. Not from August, no, I don't. You just have it from November. What changed from November till now? Did your calories stay the same, everything stay the same? Well, I mean, my calories went up. I mean, November else probably, probably like 2,000 calories maybe. And now I'm 2,800 calories. Let's start over. So let's start from November. In November you did a dexa scan and then you recently did a dexa scan. The difference from November till now was about 800 calories. You're eating 800 more calories now than you wore back in November. Correct. And you're stronger. But also keep in mind, okay, if the dexa scan said the same body fat percentage, but the scale went up, that doesn't mean you didn't build muscle, just means you built as much fat as you did muscle. So keep that in mind. So just because you're, so like, let's say. Well, I was going to ask that. You were 137 in November. Yeah, so she went up in weight, but her dexa scan stayed the same. But that doesn't mean you didn't, you built muscle. You just also added body fat. So you probably did too big of a bulk. Yeah, that's what that's that. So let's just be clear. So in November, you were 137. Same body fat percentage. Okay. August, I was 137. Okay. So November till now, nothing changed. Yeah, I don't even want to know what happened before we started dex, because we're trying to solve what's going on with a dexa scan. If you didn't have the original, we can all speculate all day long, but we're never going to know. So we really should just try and figure out, okay, November, you did your first dexa scan. What was your weight then and your body fat percentage? And then when you did the dexa scan again, what was your weight and body fat percentage? And then also about what you were eating calories in both those. Okay, November, my first dexa scan, I weighed 143.8 and I was 25.2% body fat. Okay. And that was November, like I said, I was probably eating 2,000 calories at that time. Okay. I just did another one, February 15th. My weight was 143. My body fat was 25.3 and now I'm eating 2,800 calories. Okay, so, okay, this is wonderful. Okay, so here's what's happening. And this is what I thought you said at first. That's why I was asking more questions. So when people talk about boosting the metabolism, they always connected to building more muscle, which is true. Building muscle will speed up your metabolism. However, with the same lean body mass that you currently possess, your body can decide to burn more or less calories. In other words, you can be more or less efficient with the total, with the same lean body mass. So what you effectively did in that period of time, you didn't do nothing. You sped up your metabolism. Yeah. Your metabolism got fat. You ate 800 more calories a day, gained no body fat. So what you're setting yourself up for, which is wonderful, is a very potentially, probably. Efficient cut. A very effective efficient cut. I mean, look, a female at 143 pounds, 25% body fat's not a lot. That's a good body fat. That's like a healthy body fat percentage, okay? It's a good, healthy, fertile body fat percentage. Most women who want to look lean, probably want to get closer to 20%. So you're probably looking at a 5% loss based off of what I've seen most women tend to want. So 5% loss. But you're eating 2800 calories, which is phenomenal, which means you could probably end up around 2000 calories or just around that. And get that 5% off. Which for a 33 year old, five foot five female is a, that's where usually, by the way, that's usually more calories than the women I get when they want to go on a cut. They usually come to me and they're like, oh, my maintenance is 1900 calories. That's gonna be your cut, which is exceptional. So what you've done, you didn't do anything. It's not like you did nothing. What you did is you were putting yourself in a phenomenal position to do a cut. So now you can cut, you're gonna end up with high calories. You're probably not gonna lose any muscle and you're gonna look really good and feel really good. I mean, I've trained a lot of men who gained lots of body fat at 2800 calories. So the fact that you're 2800 calories now at a decent body fat percentage, you went up 800 calories, gained no body fat. That's a huge win, huge win. So what I would do, are you ready to go on a cut? Is this what you wanna do now or do you wanna keep going up with the calories? I'm gonna finish strong. I'm on phase three right now. I just started phase three. So I wanna finish strong out. That's four weeks, right? And then I wanted to do a cut with symmetry because I have symmetry and I haven't used symmetry yet. So I was gonna do a cut for like three months. Beautiful. Yeah, I love the perfect presentation for that. Oh yeah, this is gonna be phenomenal. Take your calories down by about 500 to start with and switch to symmetry and watch what happens. And am I doing like a 500 cut? Is it, should I just start with 500 and then do like a 300 cut? I would say 500 until you hit a plateau. No, no, define plateau. Cause she might be like, oh, I don't lose any weight this last four days or what. That you're not seeing any change anymore. Cause you could see, so what will happen sometimes by the way too, I'm glad you said that. So you'll cut the 500 calories. If you are like not only seeing the scale, so the scale's going down, that's ideal obviously. And by the way, we don't wanna go down too fast. So if you cut 500 calories, I don't wanna see a four pound drop every week. That's like super dramatic. We want just like a pound, two pounds coming off every week. Even if the weight doesn't come off, but you are improving the way you look and you can objectively say that when you look in the mirror like, okay, I'm looking better. Or keep doing desiccants. Yeah, or that, yeah, and check that. So, I mean, and that's when I would change to drop another 500 calories. And or, okay, and or adding movement. So I don't know what your step count is like for the day, cause that's another option is sometimes what I'll do with a client like you is I'll go 500 calories, increase 2000 steps a day. Then the next week after that, keep the calories the same, but add another 2000 steps of walking a day. And then the next like, you know, week, we might then drop another 250 calories also add, you know, so you can play with adding more movement to create a larger caloric deficit also. Don't do it through high intensity cardio, but you can do it through moving more. Just walking throughout your day and you'll get great benefits by hanging onto muscle still, but then creating more activity that creates a larger caloric deficit. Yeah, you're in a really good position. You are. Yeah, a lot of options. How strong are you? What do your lifts look like? Like what is your squat and your deadlift and your bench press? What do your numbers look like for that? You know, honestly, it's hard for me to answer because I haven't done like a max wrap. I'm probably gonna find out now and doing this phase four because it's like two to four reps that I'm doing now, you know, but I don't know. I mean, my squat is probably like 275. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's fucking really good. 275 pounds? Yeah, on the squat. My deadlift is actually less, which is weird, but I haven't tested it in a while, okay? These are numbers that I don't know, probably a year or so ago, so. Wait a minute, you barbell squatted 275? Yes. Yeah, you're on fire, dude. Yeah, you're crushing me. You're gonna do a cut and you're gonna be, I mean, and by the way, you didn't gain any muscle by adding 800 calories. At some point, it's hard to gain. The reason why I asked you your max lifts is because I had kind of a clue that you've probably already built a ton. At some point, it gets really hard to gain more muscle. It just does. You can't just gain infinite amount of muscle. So I knew if I asked you that question, you came back with a crazy number, which I didn't anticipate 275, holy cow, but I knew if I heard a big number that you're probably getting pretty, I mean, you're probably already built like a really good amount of muscle, especially the amount of calories you're eating, so. Yeah, if your squatting is gonna be really good. If you were squatting 150, 180, that would be impressive. 275 is like really, really impressive. That's huge. I mean, God damn it. And even if you're not that high right now, you said that was a year ago, even if you're able to squat close to 200 pounds for your size. If you're repping with 130, I would have been like, that's amazing. So you're doing phenomenal. This cut is gonna be real successful. The only thing I'll tell you, I'll warn you about, is trying not to cut too aggressively. Be patient with your cut because you're in such a good position that if you're patient and you give it time and you let your body drop about a half percent of body fat a week, half percent to a percent max a week, you're gonna be in such a good position at 18% body fat that you'll be eating a lot of food. You'll feel amazing. You'll got great curve, great sculpt, great muscle. Again, you set yourself up really well. Have you tracked your steps? Do you know how many steps today you're taking by chance? Yeah, so I mentioned that in the background I do anywhere from 13,000 to 20,000 steps a day. I live in Phoenix, by the way. I think you guys said Arkansas, but I live in Phoenix. And so I'm constantly walking when it's wintertime out here. And just in general, like I walk a ton. I'm always, if I'm not working, I'm outside. So you also mentioned Adam, I can try to like increase my steps. That's kind of hard for me just because I'm always kind of maxing out my steps for the day. So you're a perfect example when I would do the calories. So that's why I wanted to know that. Like if you were lower in steps, then it's more realistic to add 2,000 steps every single day, but you're already pretty high. At one point, you can start, but this would be kind of later, right? I would be doing this after I've done the cut for a while. Like I would do like a 12 to 15 minute hit session post-workout. So and cardio. That's later. Yeah, later, like four weeks down, four weeks into your cut, you can start to add. Throw a little bit in there. Yeah, I would do it. Add first three days a week, then four days a week, and then eventually five days a week when you're lifting after every lifting session, you're doing a little 12 minute hit cardio session. That's it. But wait, like just do the calorie drop first. And that's another way to break through the plateau, creating a larger caloric deficit without cutting calories. So I'd cut the calories, like we said, around like the 500 calorie range, let that take you for the first month or so until you sort of think slow, slow things down. And then you have the option one because you're so high in calories to either drop calories again, or maybe this is where you introduce the hit post workout and that'll lead you on to it. What's your athletic background? Do you play sports in high school and college? Yeah, I grew up playing basketball and in general, I've just been very active. I grew up in a family full of boys, so kept me going. You're like the easiest client. Like if I got you, I'd be like, yeah, we're gonna get you shredded pretty easily. You're in such a good position. This is gonna be an amazing cut. I hope you follow up with us. Are you in our forum? Yeah, I think I am. I'm not on Facebook much, but I think I was on there and got on there a few years ago. If you're not, we'll send you access because I'd love for you to follow up because you're literally at the place that we try to get people at before we start them with a cut. So if you do it right, if you don't overdo it, you're gonna see some phenomenal results. Okay, and then once I'm done with that, I'll be in a good place to kind of manage my physique and stuff because I don't wanna always do this, like bulk and cut kind of game. Will I be in a good place? Yeah, oh yeah, after you cut, you could bump them again to maintenance and then you're good. Okay, wow, I wasn't expecting to hear that. I was really discouraged with my DEXA results, so I'm glad that I'm in a good place and I can cut after doing, while I'm doing symmetry. Yeah, no, you're in a great position, so good job. Awesome, wow, well thanks guys, I really appreciate it. You got it, thanks for calling in. All right. She must listen to great podcasts. That's a boy, that's a, well, hold on, I didn't expect 275 squats. I wonder if she misspoke, that's fucking crazy. Well, I expected her to be, based off of what she was saying, I kind of thought, I bet you she's already got a lot of muscle, because you know how, you guys know this, like at some point, you can boost your metabolism, but gaining muscle just gets harder and harder. You ain't putting up those numbers without good muscle. No, so I'm like, okay, well, if she's really strong, she may be in a position, she's already eating 200 calories, she may be in a position where she's kind of hitting that, she's getting close to that limit of muscle that she could build. What a good question, though, to answer, because this really highlights, she's a, why it's a good question and good for the audience is that she's an extreme example, but this happens at much smaller examples that people get frustrated and discouraged, right? They do their body fat percentage, and they're actually doing really good. They move their calorie intake from 1500, up to say 2100 or whatever, and that's a big jump in calorie, but then their dexa scan says the same as it did, and so then they get all pissed off. Well, because they're not, they're not looking at the obvious, they're not looking at the obvious, which is I raise my calories 800 and gain zero body fat. Like that's amazing. And the way to do it, and I know there's our space, I hate how they shit on the whole 3,500 calories equals a pound of fat, but this is an example of how I like to use that to explain what's going on their bodies, like listen, you've now, by having 500 calories, even though you see the dexa scan the same, your body, the same exact body is now burning a pound of fat every week more than what you were before. Even though you're not seeing that, that's because you've increased your calories. We literally went to your calories back down 500, you'd burn a pound of fat a week, so that's what you've done essentially, and so that's a huge win. Our next caller is Matt from Utah. Matt, what's happening, man? How can we help you? Hey guys, how's it going? Cool, just seeing you guys. You may or may not remember you do so many of these. I asked a question maybe about like three months ago. Yeah, basically I'm doing this year long program where I'm going aesthetic in the spring, performance in the summer, power lift in the fall, and then I asked you all the question and Adam, you recommended doing symmetry, so I shout out to everybody, do not sleep on symmetry. After running that program, seriously, my one rep max like increased even though I was on maintenance since half of a cut during that time. That's awesome. Hell yeah. Dude, it was absolutely loving it. I'm right about, oh, and then I took Sal's advice, you'd recommended at one point in time that first phase of symmetry before every program is a great way to start off. So I started doing that one just finished running it. But my question, what it comes down to is as I'm moving forward, goes to something that Adam said a while back. You talked about like the tempo. Talk about a body building tempo. A real one is a 4-2-2 and you rarely see people actually following that in the gym. So being a little bit like very specific about it, I use a stopwatch for my rest times. I'm very consistent. So I started using an app to track my tempo. It has little sounds, so it goes off. So I am very, very strict on it. Halfway through, I did it the last week of phase three on symmetry. I'll tell you what, I've gotten used to, I know when I start a new phase, my body feels it and it's energizing a little bit of soreness, I'm like, oh, wow, this is a new phase. I was on phase, like the third week of that phase in switching up the tempo, going from just like a one, one, one, it was like, oh, shit, it was like an entirely new phase. And I was just like, wow, I did not expect it to be that impactful. I had a similar experience during the isolation movements during symmetry where I changed, it was a Friday, I needed to get my workout in really quick. And so instead of following that 4-2-2 tempo on the two by 10 ones, I just did a normal one. And I felt that too, because I could go a lot heavier. It's just changing the tempo is almost like doing a brand new phase. Totally. So my question is, as I'm looking into doing aesthetic again and moving through, should I, if it's that much, so impactful, should I change a tempo like that with every phase or should I just keep one tempo throughout the duration of a program? Great question. Yeah. There's no wrong answer here, but I'll tell you what I prefer. I would prefer, because each phase, there's enough variables that change that you don't necessarily need to throw another variable at yourself. So I would tend to lean towards changing the tempo when you change the program, not necessarily the phase. So you can stick to a tempo, actually you can stick to a tempo for a long time if other variables change and then switch up the tempo when you feel like things get stale. So the reason why there's no wrong answer in here is because I'm the opposite. So I love to change several variables like this because, granted, I've been lifting for a long time. So to get my body to show and move and see significant change in a short period of time is rough. Like I've been doing this for a really long time. So I don't get those great newbie swings when I change one little thing. So because of that, I really do like to move multiple levers. And I prefer, because I feel like, man, if I changed the diet a little bit, I changed my tempo a little bit. I changed the training specificity that I'm doing. All those together combined, like, whoa, my body's trying to adapt and figure all of them out. And I see a nice movement. If you're not that advanced, if you haven't been lifting for a very long time, you may not need that to Sal's point. Like you could easily keep your tempo the same for an entire program. The program has enough things that are phasing and changing in it that you should see progress in it. But personally, myself, I like when I change diet, and I like to change the phase, I like to change the tempo, I try to really shake it up. Yeah, there's no wrong answer here. I guess the only drawback would be, because what Adam's saying is true, but the only drawback would be that when I'm, and he says, if you're advanced, the plus side of being advanced and doing this for a long time is that someone like Adam, for example, he can change multiple variables and all of the variables are things that he knows how to immediately apply. Whereas if I take somebody who's only been working out for a few years and I change one variable, I like to focus on that one variable because if I throw too many at them, they don't get good at any of them. It's like, okay, I got to focus on the tempo, plus this, plus that, everything feels so different. So I like to keep things the same and change one or two things at a time. So I'll say this, this might help you. How long have you been working out, first of all? How long have you been consistent working out? Ooh, consistent since probably right before the pandemic. Okay, so not a long time, but enough to where you kind of know. Two, three years. You kind of know what's going on. I did, yeah, I did powerlifting back in the day and then like a whole range of like, I think every time I'd work out, then I'd get injured and then kind of go through that cycle until, you know, I appreciated listening to you guys because it was the first time I was like, oh shit, I don't have to go to like failure every time. Well here, I like to- I don't have to hurt myself. I like, this is how I like to use tempo also for myself is I tend to play with tempo more with the exercises that I tend to be more injury prone with. And these are usually the lifts where I start to get really strong. So like I'll do this with squats, I'll do this with overhead press or bench press because just adding weight to those, sometimes I'll start to feel my joints a little bit. So those are the ones where I'll play with the tempo a little more versus like another exercise that I feel like I can add weight and I feel totally fine. So rather than adding weight, I'll slow the rep down with exercises that I feel like I should probably do that with. Well, what I like is that what you just mentioned in terms of you've done powerlifting before and you've noticed that like, you know, increasing that intensity, you know, kind of pushes you a little bit more towards the risk side of like injury versus, you know, manipulating the tempo, you can get that kind of intensity in a less risk kind of a situation. And so in terms of longevity and moving forward and progressing, I think that manipulating that, there's a lot of benefit to that, especially the older I get in terms of like what I'm trying to do. Like I used to be more prone towards like really trying to like hit those one-one-ones and, you know, see whatever I could do in terms of like the amount of load I could put on there. But now it's in a manipulate tempo. I think it's just an underrated tool and it's something that I think, you know, if you keep using that, I don't see any problem with that. Yeah, I also see, I mean, this is why there's no wrong answer here. What's great is that you're aware of this, you're paying attention to it. You see the benefits of learning how to manipulate it. There isn't like this one rule of how you only use it. There's also this ability for you to, you know, utilize it when you know that like, when I know I'm going like one-one-one, like that takes a lot for me to gear up mentally. I got to feel like, if I, like a day I'm like not really feeling good, I'll lighten the load, slow down the tempo. So you know how you feel lifting those different ways. And so my mindset going into the gym might change how I manipulate tempos for the day. It may be a day where I'm like, oh yeah, it's gripping and ripping day. I feel good today. I haven't done like a one-one type of tempo. I'm going to get after it. Or it might be a day where I was like, man, I'm just mentally, I do not feel like moving some serious weight. I'm going to fuck with my tempo today. I'm going to go real slow and controlled, work on my technique, reap the benefits that I haven't been doing that for a while. And so, you know, that's what, when you get advanced and you've been doing this for a long time, you start to learn how to, you know, work with your mood, work with your body, work with what you've done currently. And you can pull that in and out of your toolbox and use it as you want. And I really think that, you know, everybody wants to know like the ideal way to program all these things. Well, the ideal way is to intuitively learn how to utilize all these tools according to your lifestyle, what's going on. That's even better and more powerful than like a protocol of like, oh, run it for this long, for this amount of time. It's like, you already learned the benefits of what this can do and how powerful it is. So now you can start to play with it in and out of your routine, based off of how you feel going into your workouts. Yeah, there's no wrong answer here, honestly. Yeah, I've listened to enough of the podcast episodes. Actually, like working backwards, I think I'm on like episode 984, working backwards. I've legit listened to every single one. So it gets worse. So, and so, well, I figured that the answer to this coming in is going to be, do the tempo that you're not using. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the right answer. Yeah, that tends to be the right answer. Awesome, thanks for calling in again, man. Matt, did I ask you last time you were on the call, did I ask you, what are all the certifications behind you? Joe, so I actually, you know, I work in the Bay Area. I mean, living in Utah, but I work for NASA. So over there in Mountain View. Yeah. And so these ones are from the State Department. I started off actually in the federal government as an American diplomat, traveling overseas, all that stuff, then eventually joined NASA. And then, so like Argo, I actually worked on that when they did the filming at the State Department. So those are my credentials from when I was a diplomat, wards, stuff like that. Wow. Now you're a diplomat for aliens. Very cool. I'll just give you a damn, it doesn't take that. Yeah, how are the aliens out there? And is the earth flat? Let's answer those two questions. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. One of my best friends actually is a certification of official flat earth society. So if you ever, I've actually ran, I helped start up and run a lot of the social media stuff for NASA and tell you what, man, I'm just convinced. Yeah, it's a very interesting job to say the lie. It sounds cool, man. All right, well, thanks, man. Well done, Matt. Thank you. Take it easy. Awesome, bro. See you guys later. Do you guys have, I'm sure you do, because you guys have been working out forever, do you guys have like a weight on certain lifts that you know once you start to approach a certain level of strength, you're like, I better mess with the tempo. Yeah, totally. Not pushing out. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I'm like that. Like there's a weight for squat, deadlift, press, like all my presses. I know once I start to get to a certain point. It's pressuring the hinge and you can kind of feel the effects of it. I don't even have to feel it. I know, like, oh, I'm getting to this weight. Let me slow down the reps. Let me start pausing my reps because this is usually when I start to feel it. I really love talking to someone like this, you know, like his consistency that he's done for the last three years. He's utilizing all the programs. He's got very specific questions. It's like, I love to get into the nuance of something like this because, you know, and on the internet, there's like all these arguments like we'll take a trainer or influencer, we'll take a study that supports the case for, oh, you run it like this. Well, okay, yeah, that's the truth in this controlled environment, but that's not real life. And so you've now applied it to where you understand the benefits from it. Now the next level to this is learning how to weave it in and out of your lifestyle because you know you can utilize this tool and to not want, not marry it, not do it all the time, and learn how to interrupt like something or learn what you're doing. Don't get rid of one, one, one either is, you know, like speed is something you want to keep as a tool. Right, right. And to Sal's point, like you, you know, you're trucking along, you know that you've been getting stronger and stronger. You're starting to get to where you know this is about your peak bench press. And it's like, you know, I've been just working on getting strong, strong, and I'm doing more like a one, one tempo. When's the last time I dropped my weight by 75 pounds and just went tempo. You made it feel heavier. Yeah. Our next caller is Ian from Louisiana. What's up Ian, how can we help you? Hi, how's it going guys? Good. Super excited. Just want to say thanks for everything that you'll put out. I've been listening probably since 2017 to 2018. Actually a little connection. I think Sal mentioned that, I think Dean Pappas's name, I was working at Gold's, I was working at Gold's at the time he was the CEO. Oh, no way. He's a great guy. Yeah, Dean's, yeah, we had Dean very well. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah, very neat. Just wanted to give a little background before we get into the question. Basically was in the gym space for a little bit of time. Prior to that did five years in retail on my feet a lot. And then got into CrossFit. That helped me get into squatting, deadlifting and all that kind of, all the main lifts. Then went into Gold's and spent a couple of years there and started the bodybuilding phase. So did shows for about two years and really loved it. But at the same time things changed, went back into retail. And as you all know, Gold's has changed. So it was one of those things I got out of that. So yeah, back in the warehouse on my feet a lot, kind of got the daily cardio is what I was saying throughout the day. But I like to work out in the morning before work. And when I was bodybuilding naturally and had really good results, my coach had the whole Arthur Jones, anabolic style maps program, kind of a program that y'all provide. And I was working out three days a week and had really good results. And going right into the split, having not a lot of focus right before jumping into a maps program. I noticed I was getting fatigued in my elbows, soreness and just maybe it was too much. And I was looking for counsel on where would y'all see having taken my body to that extreme in the past and kind of wanting to keep just a healthy look. I like to lift heavy and to maintain that when I'm on my feet so much. And I kind of, I guess the yesterday's conversation, there was a guy from Germany and I think it was a guy from Australia talking about the same thing. I basically backed off a split. I'm taking this whole week off and just trying to mobilize and decide where I want to go with the maps programs. Yeah, I would have started you on a different program. How long were you off for when you kind of got back into being consistent again? How long were you kind of off? Oh, I mean, it's probably been two years, a good solid two years where I would just go into the gym, do something really hardcore, then I'd fall off again. Yeah, split is a lot of all. That's a program that you jump into when you've been training consistently for a while. So yeah, it was too much too soon. Now the challenge with someone like you is that you know what your body's capable of and you reached a really high level of performance at one point. And the reason why that's a challenge is because it's harder for someone like you to gauge what the right amount is because you kind of know what you did before. But so someone like you, I would say, do less than you think and that'll be a good starting point. I think... I mean, I think map 15 would have been a great place to start for someone like you. Yeah, maps at a ball like map 15, even map symmetry, even map symmetry would be perfectly fine for you and produce you with some really good or provide you some really good results. So any one of those programs would be great but I mean, anabolic would be good. We could put you back on anabolic, start there, I would start in pre-phase, I would do three weeks of pre-phase, three or four weeks of pre-phase, then go phase one, phase two, phase three. And then maybe from anabolic go to symmetry and then from there, if you've been consistent the whole time and you feel good, then you can bump up the volume, do something like split, but you don't have to. I mean, you can get phenomenal results never having done a program like split. Again, it's a very like diets on point, sleeps on point, been working out for a while. It's a lot of volume. Ian, how old are you? And are you family, kids, anything like that? What's, give me a little bit of- No, 36, I don't have any kids. I'm married, got dogs. But no, it's like you were saying with the split, that was when I was not natural and I was doing that kind of workout only one day off of rest and I did get results but I kind of figured I needed to back off when I started feeling achy in the second phase. I was in the second phase of split and decided, hey, I'm just gonna get off this. That's another thing that you're adding is that not only were you consistent when you were bodybuilding but you were also pharmaceutical enhanced and now you're doing it natural and you're jumping in right out the gates. Split was way too big of a jump and you're right to stop and take a week off. I think MAP Center Ballock is a perfect program for you. Go three, four weeks of pre-phase and then follow the program and you can choose a three day option after you do the four weeks of pre-phase and I think you'll get phenomenal results just doing that. Do you already have anabolic? I do. I went all in this year and I got on some of y'all's bundles and some of the, I think I have anabolic, I bought anabolic advance when y'all had it on a sale and I just, that's the one thing is, I'm so used to going to that failure and when I was truly bodybuilding but I had to pull myself back. So it's one of those things I'm trying to learn that as I've gotten back into being on my feet so much. You're going to build really good muscle with MAP Center Ballock. Yeah, let me give you, because you already have that, let me give you MAPS 15 too. I just want you to have that. I think this is such an underrated program for somebody who is- Trying to build. Yeah, that's still trying to build in as advanced as you are. It's not one that you would think to potentially go to but I've just, I mean, I've felt great utilizing it and would have never thought that something that low of volume would have given me the results I'm getting from it and so I just think it's great and you've mentioned already being on your feet, having some long days, maybe something that you play with too. So if you find yourself like real hard month or a couple weeks of working and stuff like that and kind of, and even if anabolic starts to make you feel that way, then I would regress all the way down to even MAPS 15 and actually don't even think of it like a regression. It's just a different way of applying volume and intensity and I think it's a great option too. Yeah, I'm glad you said that, Adam, because I think some people look at a workout or look at workouts, like that's, like the goal is the workouts themselves. In other words, oh, I can do more. Therefore, it's like I'm getting another belt in a martial art or I'm graduating. Really, workouts are just to give your body, give you the results that you're looking for. So the appropriate workout is gonna give you the best results. Whether that's more volume, less volume, more intensity, less intensity. It doesn't matter. It's gotta be the appropriate for your body and it doesn't matter what that looks like. Unless you love working out and you just wanna be able to work out more in which case, then that's the goal. But if you wanna be number one at working out, that's fine, but if you wanna have really good results, then train appropriately. And I think MAPS Anabolic, MAPS 15, maybe the advanced version of it, I think it'll be perfect for you. Yeah, I would definitely do the advanced here. You would want the advanced version of MAPS 15, but let us, since you already have anabolic, let us shoot you over 15 so you have that in your arsenal. Okay, can I ask a quick question since I know that just on, I like to go at 4.45 in the morning because that's when the gym opens up and I'm too tired after work and I go to a bigger gym and it's just full of people I just wanted to get my stuff done. If I go in the morning, should I try to, y'all were talking about this the other day, I think Sal mentioned that he goes in the morning and he doesn't really eat. And with mine, if I'm doing anabolic or if I do MAPS 15, is there a difference in my nutrition in the morning with either one of those or that I should be following? Just eat afterwards, eat after you're done. Unless you wanna wake up hello early, eat two hours before, which doesn't sound like it. My first meal is at 9 a.m. and I work out at about 6.30 or 7 a.m. So yeah, you're fine. The meal you had the night before is what's gonna fuel you. Okay, great. You got it, man. Thanks for calling in, brother. No, thank y'all. Yeah, thank you for everything. Appreciate it. That's gotta be one of the biggest challenges. I don't know about you guys, but when I would get a client that was an ex-athlete or somebody at one point was super advanced. I mean, they fell off. It was so hard for them to gauge the appropriate amount of intensity and volume because you have that memory of what you used to do before. And so they always overestimate, right? Like, oh, I gotta do this. I gotta do that. You always wanna live up to that expectation of what you were able to do in the past. And I love that you brought up MAPS 15 or kind of stressing that because those are your levers that you're gonna wanna pull. Either it's volume, either it's intensity or either it's frequency. And frequency is one of those that builds muscle and I think people like undervalue that. Yeah, don't sleep on that program. And Doug, he says that he had pictures for his last six years. Did you share that? Do you automatically share that with Andrews or they have it for the editing team? Yeah, that's been sent over to Jerry. I don't have those pictures. But yeah, he competed before. It says there. So he was natty and 8% body fat. 8% body fat. Not so natty, 6% body fat. 6% body fat, wow, nuts. Yeah, I mean, he just went way too hard, way too fast. And he knows it. He felt it and he stopped. So he did the right thing. And look, again, back to MAPS 15. I did the advanced version like you did. I hit a PR on my deadlift, a lifetime PR on my deadlift. So the programming works. We didn't design the program for beginners necessarily. We designed it for anybody who wants to get great results and it will. It will produce phenomenal results. Just efficiency, that's how I got it. All right, our next callers are Stephanie and Madigan from Indiana. Stephanie Madigan. Thanks for coming on the show. How can we help you? Hey, guys. What up, girls? Yeah, we're super pumped to be on the show. I feel like I don't know how you guys, because we kind of wrote in together, we have like a general similar question, but maybe sort of different angles, I guess. But your guys' program is like the foundation to our friendship. So like we started working out together and that's like how we got really close. And it's been like basically pretty amazing. I mean, like your programming has completely changed our view of like health and how we approach fitness. Awesome. And just, yeah, major things. Super awesome. Our next marketing cycle, huh? Need a friend? Yeah. You can try maps and friends. Together we'll do this. So how can we help you? So I guess, yeah. So I guess, I don't know what the easiest way you guys think is to address this, maybe like Madigan can kind of give some background on sort of like what she's dealing with and then sort of like what I'm working with as well. But I think both of us struggle with like over-exercising and nutrition. And we've had like a pretty long history of dealing with some of those issues. I don't know if there's any mindsets that you guys have seen in people, maybe with eating disorders or sort of like over-exercising tendency that's helped them rather than just like the general public. But we can get more detail. Yeah, let's get more detail for sure. Go ahead Madigan, you go first. Tell us what's going on. Yeah, sure. So just as a little bit of background, we're in grad school together. On a daily basis, aside from strength training, we probably walk seven miles minimum back and forth through the lab doing our various activities. But I guess to address the aspect of the question that more fits my needs right now. So like Stephanie kind of said, we started with maps anabolic, then did aesthetic performance and now we're on the third phase of symmetry. Other way around. We did performance than aesthetic. Yes. We followed it correctly. But I guess I've noticed over like the past month that I have a little thin layer of like fat on my hips that I didn't notice before. And I don't know if this is just, it comes with the territory when you put on muscle because I can definitely see more muscle definition and an increase in my strength over these programs. But I guess my question overall, knowing that spot reducing is kind of a myth, it's not very logical. Do you have any advice for like either how to like take this way off or what program to go into next with this concern? And I guess one more thing I should add is that I enjoy doing cardio a few days a week, mainly on the trigger session or mobility days, just because I enjoy it, I think it's good for my heart. But with that and with past like disordered eating and exercise tendencies, I am fearing a little bit that I might be doing too much and maybe that is hindering the gains. And I don't know how this exactly ties into the weight gain I've seen, but yeah. Have you tracked food? Because of your, I imagine you're not because of your history or do you, do you track? Do you have any idea where your calories are at, your protein intake, things like that? You got it. No, I do not track just because that's, yeah, kind of a little later territory for me, but I could give you a rundown of what I eat in a day. I don't know if that would help. No, no, we don't need to go there necessarily because I mean, unless you were tracking, it's usually not super reliable, but honestly, that doesn't matter at this point. So, okay, so here's how overtraining or overworking can contribute to, let's say, fat gain, okay? There's the stress response, which is part of it. But the other part of it, which I think is more important is when you start to overtrain or overwork, it definitely affects our behaviors around food. We tend to either have cravings or we tend to have low or no appetite. And so what you tend to find with people that overtrain is you tend to see this eating pattern where they under-eat and then over-eat, under-eat and then over-eat. And it's most likely, I see you smiling, you probably, you probably, you know, resonates a little bit with you. So the key is, look, it's gonna be, it has to do with your nutrition. The problem or the challenges tracking and counting is probably really triggering for you. So for someone like you, I like to give very general guidelines. And then there's some kind of structure around those guidelines. So the general guideline would be avoid heavily processed foods. That's the main one. That's the main one. Eat protein first in your meals. That's the second one. And then eat until you're satisfied. That's the third one. So what does that mean satisfied? It's not stuffed. So we all know what that feels like when you get uncomfortable. It's just eat until you feel like, yeah, I feel pretty good. If you eat protein first, you avoid heavily processed foods, and you eat until you're satisfied, you're probably gonna eat an appropriate amount for your goals. And then when it comes to the training, the best metric you can measure is strength. Now there's lots of metrics to measure. There's lots of things to pay attention to. Mobility, control, stability, stamina. But I like strength for someone like you because if you're getting stronger, you're probably doing some stuff right. You're probably not over-training. You're probably not under-eating, okay, if you're doing it that way. Now, one other thing I'd like to add to the food, if you find what I just told you to even be triggering, even that starts to make you feel like you find that once a week or whatever you go off a little bit, and you're like, God, why is this happening to me? One of the best things you could do is bring awareness to impulsive behaviors, if that tends to be an impulsive behavior. So what you would do is you would take your phone out when you're about to eat and literally write down one or two sentences about how you feel. Now it's not that you're necessarily writing down how you feel, that's part of it. But the bigger part is that you take pause and you're writing down how you feel. You're taking pause. And what that does is it brings awareness to the state of mind that may be contributing to any kind of impulsive behaviors or dysfunctional behaviors around food. Now it sounds easier than it actually is. It's simple, what I'm saying is simple, it's an easy step, but it's challenging because you may find if you start to do this, that you're gonna want to not bring awareness. You may actually find yourself resisting to stop and pause because you want to stay in a state of unawareness because food may be bringing you some type of relief to either anxiety or just feeling generally uncomfortable in your own skin or something like that. So it's actually harder than I'm making it sound. But if you do those things, your body will naturally get leaner if you follow those guidelines. And you don't have to track, you don't have to count anything. If you just follow those, just those right there, you'll get the progress you're looking for. So I have two questions. One, it does say in here, you guys primarily focus on whole foods. I'd want to hear the definition of primarily. And then the second question would be you're both college students, so how often do you drink? So we're a PhD student, so we don't drink, we have no life, really. That's a good thing in this case. That's a good thing in this case. So you guys don't, there's not like a, you know, Sunday fun day and shit like that. It's not like a common thing for you. Maybe one drink on the weekend, one or two. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's a good question, Adam. So when you, it's primarily whole foods, but then when you don't eat whole foods, do you notice changes in your behaviors? I think we go ahead and eat night snacking. I mean, honestly, like at night, maybe we would both create like a bowl of magic spoon or some other probably sweet type of food. That's a good alternative right there though. Yeah. It's not a whole food, it's a better choice. Yeah, so I really, if you just stick to those guidelines, I think you'll get to where you're wanting to go, but also really pay attention to taking care of yourself throughout this process. Cause even what I'm saying, sometimes if you focus too heavily on it, what you may find whenever you have, whenever you're working with anybody who has either body image issues or has had dysfunctional eating patterns in the past or just a bad relationship with food in the past, sometimes the more you put the spotlight on those things, the more they go off. So I've actually had clients where I've had better success saying, don't worry about anything. Just kind of just, just don't worry about it. And then all of a sudden things start to work out. So this is going to require you to kind of pay attention to your behaviors. And if you notice that even the guidelines I gave you start to make you feel constrained and you start to find that you go off the rails sometimes because of it more than you might have in the past, then remove some of those constraints. The most important one would be to avoid heavily processed foods because heavily processed foods are just so powerful and making us want to overeat. So like I used to tell clients, well, what if I have a craving? Well, go eat, go eat something that's a whole food. Go eat, you got chicken in the fridge. You got some fruit, go and eat that and then just stick to that. And that usually would work. All right, I know we're not counting and tracking, but I also want to get closer to your behaviors around this. Like, so would you say that you are more likely to lean towards like under eating because you're afraid you're going to put body fat on or are you more likely to, hey, I'm hungry, I'm going to eat and you may overfeed a little bit. What are you more likely to do? Or fluctuate back and forth. Or yeah, we're both. Like what are you more likely to do? I think the tendency is still to under eat. I actually heard a really nice piece of advice from Jordan Syat. I once heard him say, if you're hungry, ask yourself, would you have an apple right now? And if you would, then maybe that means you're actually hungry, but if you wouldn't, maybe you're just trying to fix your problem or something like that. But I still think primarily under eating, but I do try to listen and actually ask myself, am I hungry or am I just bored? Okay, because the reason why I'm asking that, is there is this possibility that we are overtraining in relation to the amount of calories you're consuming and this is part of the problem. So if you have a propensity to eat less or under eat, you are training all the time, you're also doing some cardio on the off days, and then in addition that you're a PhD student, your body could be stalling out on you because you're just not, you're not feeding it enough. And then, and if that's the case, then I would completely throw away the scale for a while. Still take the advice, Sal saying, eat whole foods, avoid processed foods at all costs that you can. And eat when you're hungry, eat when you're hungry, but feed yourself whole foods and train hard. But, and I wouldn't have you doing additional cardio right now. I would say focus on getting strong, don't worry about the scale right now. We need to, because we may need to really boost the metabolism. If you, because of course we don't know because we're not tracking, but let's pretend you potentially could be eating 16, 1700 calories a day, you're walking seven, you're doing seven miles of activity and you're following one of our maps programs and you're doing cardio and you're a PhD student. Yeah, you're, yeah, now that seems, this seems like we're starting to get closer to what the problem may be. And in that case, you need to take care of that. You need to feed yourself, you need to back off some of the intensity and training to create the core. You know what program will probably give you the best for the front end? Mass 15, yeah, Mass 15. Mass 15. Yeah, are you, how, how's your sleep? What time do you go to bed and what time do you wake up? A sleep between 11 30 and midnight and I'm up at 6, 6, 15. Yeah. And like a sleep too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're Mass 15, you guys are, you're running in the red. Mass 15, eat when you're hungry, make a good choice. And that's the total amount of tracking I want you to do is like good choice. And you'll get better results. You'll get better. So we're not telling you this because we're like, oh, we don't want you to like hurt yourself or whatever. That's all there too. But you'll actually get better results. Yeah. That's great advice. Thank you so much. Stephanie, was yours, was yours different, a little different or? Just a little bit different because I think that all of that stuff is really like important. But I'm, you know, basically like I've had an issue with eating since I was probably 14 or 15. And I've been like pretty underweight for a long time. And now like I've started to gain more muscle and it's being like it's feeling a lot better. But I still have like, I don't have an internal queue that I can really go by that says like I should eat more or like I'm hungry. Like I've gotten more or less used to the feeling of hunger and I like it. And that's kind of like weird, you know, like it's like it is still like disordered eating in that sense. And I don't know sort of if you have mindset shifts that can help people that are in that scenario. Yeah, I do. I would focus entirely on strength and do everything you can to get stronger. Make that, cause here's the deal. You're so focused. You're probably focused. This is probably how you do everything, right? Is you just get super focused and, you know, you don't stop, right? You move forward. If you made your primary goal just to get stronger, everything else will kind of fall into place. You'll find yourself eating more to fuel it. You'll find yourself eating more protein, getting better sleep. If you make it all about getting stronger for someone like you, you're probably gonna move in the right direction. Yeah, that's hard. Yeah, I know. I know. Yeah. Is there a third friend to this group? Cause I feel like two eating disordered friends are not helping each other out so much. I know. It's actually very bad and like we're probably facing, so it probably will be maybe for the better, sadly. Yeah, we need to find ourselves a girlfriend who loves to eat, hang out with. You know what I'm saying? You know, I will say this. You girls probably already know this. High performing females. First of all, a majority of women have gone through some form of disordered eating. So it's actually more common than not. It's more rare to find somebody who's never had an issue. And then if you take that group and then you put them in like PhD programs, I bet you 90%, I bet you almost every female in your category at one point has dealt with this because it's a form of control. And you're all high performing. I can control everything. I can do everything type of deal. I'll handle it. And so it's just par for the course. So this is something you're gonna, if you figure this, you start to figure this out now because it's gonna plague you for the rest of your life. So really start to figure this out. And one of the tricks that I found for, especially for young women is to just get strong because then they just focus on that. So like, all right, let's take all that energy and let's just focus on getting strong and everything else tends to fall into place. That's not where you wanna end up by the way. It's just a good step. It's a good next step. Then from there, then you can look at relationships with everything. But it's a good way to take you away from where you're at now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, no. Yeah. Yeah. Wait, can I ask like a really silly sort of small question? Sure. But because we walk a lot, I don't know. Do you think that that inherently like, affects our ability to like grow our legs? Cause I think my upper body is growing really well, but my legs are taking a lot longer. And I don't know if that- No, but it could have a play a role and you not being able to build more muscle, which is the same thing because of all the factors that I said earlier, under eating, overtraining. You guys are not feeding your body enough nutrients. And so your strength training, you're doing all the programming right things, but because we're not taking care of the body and feeding it appropriately and modifying your intensity, your body's not wanting to grow. It's not wanting to build any more muscle. And so in order to do that, we need to feed the body more appropriately, maybe back off some of the intensity and then you'll see that. But walking, if anything is, would actually accelerate that. It's not going to- Yeah, but think of it this way. Think of stress. Think of this bucket called stress. What goes in that bucket? Well, exercise, stressful events, lack of sleep, poor diet, am I working hard towards something? Like all those- Well, poor diet could mean low calorie because you could be eating good food, but low, low calorie. Yeah, it could be just inappropriate diet, right? All that stuff goes in that bucket of stress. We tend to think of exercise as not being in that bucket. Like, oh, it's good for you therefore, throw that on top of everything. But if you really do a checklist of your life, sleep and school and stuff you gotta do all that stuff, and then you know exercise is another stress, then you can make more appropriate judgments. Like, you need to do, MAPS 15 is gonna be the most appropriate program for both of you. And I would do no additional any other exercise. And that's it. And I would look at getting stronger and I would look at like fueling my body. And that'll make you perform better in everything, including school, and your body's gonna, it's going to respond better. I know it sounds and it feels counterintuitive, but you're actually, because right now what you're doing is you're fighting against your body. And you'll lose by the way, this battle, your body will win. But if you work with your body, what it'll feel like, this is how you know you're on the right track, okay? You know you're on the right track when it feels like things are happening and it doesn't make sense. Like, what, this is weird, I'm getting in better shape and it just feels effortless. Like, this is really weird. When that's happening, you're on the right track. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna send you maps 15 minutes if you don't have that. Thank you. Yeah. And I'm also gonna send you maps power lift because that's another program I'd like you to do when you're not doing so much other stuff. So that'll be later, okay? Okay. Okay, awesome. Thank you guys so much. No problem, thanks for calling in. Bye, all. Appreciate it. Yeah, that's a tough one, right? Just, just- I had a feeling it was low calorie. Yeah, I mean overdoing it, under-eating. It probably is like mostly under-eating and then where's the recovery happening? It's just not. I mean, no sleep, they're just high performers. There's just a lot going on. Yeah, your body, look, if your body is overstressed, one of the first things it does to protect itself is store calories. Think of it this way. You go out and work- To survival mode. Yeah, you go out and work. You work in an economy. You have a job. Uh-oh, recession. Uh-oh, depression, inflation. What do people tend to do? Hey honey, let's cut the bills. Let's store more money. Let's save more money because the shit's hitting the fan. This is what your body does with body fat. When it's overstressed, it wants to store body fat as a protective mechanism. It does not want to build muscle because more muscle costs more energy, more calories. It makes you less resilient during times of extreme stress when there's no calories. This is historically what's happened. So you can't fight your body with this. You will lose. Look, if you like Mind Pump, head over to mindpumpfree.com and check out some of our guides. We have guides that can help you with almost any health or fitness goal. You can also find all of us on social media. Justin is on Instagram at Mind Pump. Justin, Adam is on Instagram at Mind Pump. Adam, you can find me on Instagram also at Mind Pump to Stefano. Today, we're gonna teach you everything you need to know to build a strong, well-developed chest. When I think of weak points and areas that I struggled with developing for a really long time, chest was up there with the- Yeah, it was for me, it was for me for sure. I got more caught up in the weight I could lift versus how I was developing my body. I think it's one of the most challenging muscles to develop for most people because the form and technique.