 In this episode of Mind Pump the World's number one, fitness, health and entertainment podcast, we talk about the things you can learn from other people in fitness. And these are people who don't necessarily work out to look better, but rather they work out either to perform better in a particular sport or they work out under conditions that are placed upon them. There are things you can learn from the people we're gonna talk about in today's episode that you can apply to your own workouts to get your body to respond like never before. So in this episode we cover three specific types of individuals and we cover the things that they do that we can all learn from. We start out by talking about inmates, people who are locked up in prison who develop phenomenal physique. How do they do it? What can we learn from them and apply to our training? Then we cover gymnasts. Gymnasts have some of the most muscular balanced bodies you'll find anywhere aside from bodybuilders. And they don't even care about bodybuilding. It's a side effect of their sport. Now when we talk about gymnasts we do mention some exercises and stuff that they do on rings. If you like training that way and you want to utilize ring style type training we do have a new program we just released called Maps Suspension. It's a full body workout with just suspension trainers. Go check it out, it's brand new. You can find that at maps suspension.com. So it's two words but all one maps suspension.com. And the final group we talk about are sprinters. Sprinters are extremely muscular and when you compare them to other runners you can see a stark difference. Compare a sprinter to a long distance runner for example. Looks like you're talking about two different species of humans when you compare them side by side. So we talk about what sprinters do that we can all learn from. Now this episode is brought to you by our sponsor PRX Performance. 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Again it's 50% off. Here's how you get that half off. Go to mapsgreen.com that's M-A-P-S-G-R-E-N.com and then use the code green 50 that's green 50 no space for the discount. You know there's a lot to learn in terms of fitness, building muscle, burning body fat from athletic sports or types of athletes that really they don't care so much about building muscle and burning body fat but because of the way that they train the side effect is they produce phenomenal physique because I think sometimes in the fitness space especially if you're like I just want to change my body I want to look good I want to build muscle I want to burn body fat. We only look at other people who are only interested in doing that and we forget to look at some of the things we can learn from modalities that produce that as a side effect. You know what I'm saying? Yeah I mean if you think about it right away what comes to mind a gymnast is probably the epitome of the most fit looking athlete I could potentially come up with. Yeah gymnast is one inmates, people in prison. This is another one I know people who- Their sport is to survive. That's good to say. I'm not sure they fall into the sport category but they definitely- A lifestyle right? Right. It's also a lifestyle. But what I mean by that is they're not a bodybuilder they're not Olympic lifters they're not power lifters you know what I'm saying? It's like what are they doing? What are they doing there? What's so different about what they do in there that produces those types of results? Sprinters is another one. You know these are people that run. I mean short distances but they run. And when you look at sprinters even if you look at like decent high school sprinters and then of course college and higher levels the muscularity they present is tremendous. There's a lot we can learn from why they produce the physiques that they produce and how they're able to produce the physiques that they produce. I mean I like that you picked inmate, sprinters and gymnast because they're all really, really different and they all, and by the way there's exceptions to the rule always. Of course. Right so there's not all inmates come out jacked. Not all sprinters look jacked also not all gymnasts do but there seems to be a common thing amongst all three of these categories of people and there's different reasons why all of them come out or look really fit from their sport that they're doing that I think it's important to talk about what is it specifically because I think sometimes people just think that like oh if I train like a sprinter then I'll look just like a sprinter and there's other factors that come into play. There's specific things that they're doing that are giving them those look and there's things that you can incorporate into your programming that can obtain similar type of results. Oh completely again if you look at them especially in the case of gymnasts and sprinters their goal isn't to get muscular they could care less. Their goal is to produce performance is to win at their sport. Now as far as the inmates are concerned their goal is to build muscle and strength. However in many prisons today most prisons in fact they don't even have access to weights. They removed the weights. They used to right they used to have access to barbells and dumbbells but then proved to be a little dangerous I think some of them were being used as weapons and they thought hey we don't want these men to get buffed so let's take the weights out. The funny thing is they're still getting buffed. Still happening. I can't remember when we had our friend Doug Bobst on here did he have weights or did he own he didn't either huh. No they don't it's been California for sure and in many many prisons they don't have weights but this is a cool thing this is something that really took my game to the next level as a personal trainer is I started to look outside of the traditional spaces for fitness basically for fitness knowledge and for hacks or for techniques it started with bodybuilders with me then that was an easy transition to power lifters and then it kind of stayed there for a while and then I like oh wait Olympic lifters what can I learn from them? What can I learn from kettlebell people who train with kettlebells and then I started to really spread it out and say okay what can I learn from people that don't necessarily use weights but seem to produce incredible physiques what are they doing that sometimes we maybe forget or don't utilize in our traditional training how can I incorporate that in my training how can I incorporate that in my client's training to amplify the results that they get. Yeah I know a lot of people have watched the Olympics and they have watched like certain events like what's the one with the cyclist that's sprint. Oh would they go in the circle? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you seen their legs? Yeah so you see like I mean they're specimens they're quads are bigger than what we called quadsilla the guy that was like in lived in the gym and was just always like you know doing leg extensions and like was had pride in his quads they totally dwarfed you know those legs that I saw. Yeah in fact if you want you can literally Google cyclist sprinters legs. Velodrome, velodrome is what it's called. Okay and you'll see like it's cartoonish they literally look like pro bodybuilder legs it may be bigger and they do some weights you know I know kind of somewhat how they train but mainly what they do is sprint on a bike and they produce these tremendous muscular legs and I know a lot of it has to do with genetics but you could have those genetics and I'll tell you what if they swam they would not produce that kind of muscle in their legs. Justin are you the one that always touts the super training book is that you yeah right? So I don't know did you guys see the post that's our friend Max Marzo posted today strong by science? No not today. So he shared a graph from there that I think is relates to this conversation I actually reposted it and shared it in my story because I thought it was so good and you may be listening right now going like well I have no desire to well one I have no desire to go to prison so I'm gonna be an inmate too. It's a terrible reasoning for prison. Right I don't want to be a gymnast either and I'd have no desire to be a sprinter but that's not the point of this conversation it's the takeaway some of the things that are important and how do you apply those tools in your training and basically the graph that he shared was kind of the adaptation curve that we see over the course of two to four weeks, four to six weeks, six to 12 weeks in your training and you know what I think everybody has learned even if you aren't familiar with a lot of the science is you know man after a few months of training the results really slowed down tremendously and that's where progressive overload understanding the importance of different modalities different types of training this is where this knowledge is extremely valuable even to the average person who's just listening and wants to lose 30 pounds of fat or just wants to build 15 pounds of muscle or just cares about the way they look the things that we will talk about with these three different types of training is that the philosophies that are within them are very important to grasp so you can then take from them and apply it into your training. One of the biggest mistakes you can make in fitness and nutrition as well is becoming dogmatic and religious about your style of training. This happened, here's a good example of why this is a bad thing. For a long time this is what the martial arts world was like for a very, for a long time the martial arts world was you either trained like a boxer or you did Taekwondo or Kung Fu or Kempo or Judo or whatever and that's all you did. And what happened in the martial art world was lots of comparisons and who would win against who and which martial art is superior. And there were very few people, there were people but there were very few people who were saying why don't we take the best of each since we wanna become the most effective at fighting or defending ourselves why don't we learn from each one of them what they each do exceptionally well and see how to combine them. Bruce Lee is a famous example of someone who talked a lot about this. In fact, if you read his book, The Tower of Jeet Kune Do you'll see that he talks about the footwork and boxing and some of the moves and some of the grappling arts like Judo and wrestling. And in fact, he was shunned by the Kung Fu community. He was and then what caused this all to change was we had this competition called the ultimate fighting championship and early on it was martial art versus martial art, no rules. And that totally formed and shifted people and now mixed martial arts is in martial art. And I can make a very strong argument that the best fighter if we were to compare a fighter against another fighter would be a mixed martial artist against any pure style because the mixed martial artist is well rounded. And so when it comes to training your body or eating in a particular way you make a huge mistake if you stick in one and constantly compare your modality to the others and close your mind to the fact that there may be some things you can learn from these other modalities. Now it's easy to do that with all the barbell and dumbbell and resistance training modalities. Although that was hard too. I remember when we first started the podcast it was trying to convince bodybuilders why they should try powerlifting and why Olympic lifters should try bodybuilding and vice versa. Why should you do functional exercises? That was like a big argument. I think now it's becoming more accepted that there's value in all of them even if you just wanna build an amazing looking physique but now we're gonna take it a step further and say, okay, here's a few areas that we've identified that we can learn from. Everybody listening right now you can learn a thing or two about how to build your body from inmates, gymnasts and sprinters. There are things that they do that we don't necessarily do with our training traditionally that if we did implement some of that stuff you would see changes to your body. I love that analogy Sal too because there's also too the importance of how you train that way. So I think from that statement we can agree that the best fighter would be an MMA fighter somebody who has multiple modalities but how does that person go about training for all those? They wouldn't just throw in everything at one time. There's actually a methodical approach on how you get great at each one of those and this is very similar to training the body. So if you're, you know and it's not just you wanna get good at being a gymnast or really good at being a sprinter it's the results that you get from these adaptations. Well I like to think of, you guys know George St. Pierre as one of the greatest of all time and why he was so great was cause he kept evolving. He kept evolving his skillset and he would master certain things and he'd bring in a boxing element. He'd bring in, he'd just work in gymnastics. He'd to work on his balance and his coordination and control and then he'd try and master like certain elements and then incorporate that into the next fight so they just didn't know what they were gonna come up against and I think he's just the greatest example cause he's so humble in his approach to learning these concepts and being able to extract that and actually apply them appropriately in his fights. Super open and now here's the thing with training if you and there's a small percentage of those of you listening right now that are ultra specialized like there's a small percentage of you that just wanna be power lifters and compete in power lifting or just wanna be bodybuilders cause you wanna compete in bodybuilding or just wanna do Olympic lifting. There's a small percentage of you but even to you guys, I'll say this, you can learn a thing or two from the other modalities to amplify your specialization. For example, let's say you're just a power lifter. All you care about is competing well on the bench, deadlift and squat. You don't wanna get on stage and pose like a bodybuilder. You don't care about doing an Olympic lift. You don't care about that stuff. You just wanna be good at power lifting. Could you become a better power lifter by incorporating a little bit of bodybuilding, a little bit of mobility and functional movement or maybe a little bit about what we're gonna talk about in today's podcast? You can. Now the vast majority of you listening are not super hyper specialized in your approach. Most of you listening just want the most fit body you can produce. You wanna have the best looking, balanced body. Most people listening are after that in which case this is even more important. Look at all of these things that we're gonna talk about today and other things that you can find on your own and what you'll end up developing is a very balanced aesthetic physique. Now, I know bodybuilding is oftentimes tied to aesthetics but the truth is in real life, aesthetics isn't bodybuilding. Most bodybuilders look awkward and most people would not consider them to be aesthetic except for the extreme people out there. Aesthetics typically is something that includes a lot of balance, good movement. It's something that the average person would look at and be like, man, that looks phenomenal. It looks really fit, really healthy. I think that's what I wanna look like. And so understanding all the different benefits you can get from lots of different modalities whether it be sports or a lifestyle is key and crucial to that. And that's why I think this is an important episode to do for people listening right now. Now, let's start with the first one. The first category that we mentioned, not really a sport but more of a condition or a lifestyle. Not a lifestyle that's necessarily chosen. Not ideal. But one that seems to produce some very interesting results in terms of physique but also under very interesting circumstance. In fact, the circumstances. Extreme circumstances. The circumstances in this category are what have produced some of these things that I think we can learn from. In other words, they forced certain situations to happen. And because of the fact that these people don't have a lot of control over what's happening to them because of a crime they committed or whatever, that they figured out ways around it and then there's things to learn from that. Yeah, you gotta think of their schedule. Like it's regimen. Every single day has things ahead of them where they know they have to be in a certain place. So like they have these short windows. And so how do they maximize those short windows if they're trying to build up their body for protection to feel like they're strong and they can carry themselves that way throughout the day. And so they've learned how to maximize those short windows as much as possible. And so that's one thing for sure. Do you think that, I mean, I think it's one of those things that just kind of happened by accident, right? Like, I mean, I think it started, I don't think like the guy who went to prison goes like, oh, I understand the science behind frequency and the importance of it. I think it's more like, I'm bored to death in this cell all day long, you know, may as well get jacked when I'm doing it. And then as a side effect, I think you end up seeing these phenomenal results from it. And I think the first point you're making is frequency. 100%. When I've talked to people who have been to prison for long periods of time and trained their bodies, they say that exactly what you're saying, Adam, that the circumstances force them to figure out ways to structure their day, add a little bit of purpose and meaning to their day. How do you pass the time? You know, otherwise you're just there and it's every day is what- You're doing time. Right, and so here's one thing that they do that I think we can all learn from. In fact, this is one of the things that inspired trigger sessions that we put in Maps Anabolic is that they don't just use frequency, they use extreme frequency. So here's what I mean by that. Typically, you know, frequency works really great. If you worked out twice a day, let's say you did an hour workout once a day or two 30-minute workouts in a day, the two 30-minute workouts will probably produce better results for a lot of people. We've seen this with cardio, we've seen this with resistance training. Inmates take this to a whole another level. They'll do things like do 10 pushups every 30 minutes. You know, so at the end of the day, they've done 240 or 300 pushups throughout the whole day. And it's literally, oh, it's 10 o'clock, 10 pushups and they get up and then, oh, it's 10, 30, no matter what they're doing. Their volume just goes through the roof. They'll stop and do 10 pushups or they'll stop and do 10 body rows or something like that. They utilize extreme frequency, extreme practice throughout the entire day. And that I think is one of the main reasons why they build the physiques that they end up building. That example you're using right now too, it can be that basic, right? I think sometimes people will hear then they go like, well, I don't have time to go to the gym four times or five times a day to do a training session. Like it could be as simple as jumping up and we talk about this with pull-ups all the time. So it's like one of those things where people always ask us, how do I get better at pull-ups? And one of the best ways to do it is, do one to three of them 10 times a day. Every time you walk by the pull-up part, do it or every hour get down and do 20 pushups or whatever. There's ways to get these incredible results without having to drive your ass to the gym and spend 30 minutes to an hour of a workout. That's the biggest monster, right? Is the time commitment. And I think that, I mean, that's the biggest pushback when we get clients initially is how do I fit this in? I only have maybe the short window of an hour and that's all I can devote to this. Well, think about now splitting into those chunks of like 10 minute intervals where I could just do something as simple as like body weight squats or push-ups or lunges or something where it's just constantly sending that signal to the body that I'm gonna get stronger. And some people think that's silly, like, oh, 10 squats. Or I can do 60 push-ups. The hell's 10 push-ups gonna do? It does something, no joke. Again, I witnessed this in blue collar workers in my family. I must have told a story, at least 100 or maybe even 300 times on the podcast. But I had family members that were mechanics and plumbers. None of them are working their forearms and hands to failure. They've been doing it for decades. Maybe the first- That impede with their work. Yeah, maybe the first few months their hands got sore but after that it was the same stuff over and over again, they're not working out. But these guys had ridiculous hands and forearms. Like just muscular. Like they belong to amateur bodybuilders. And they didn't work out. They did no exercise. Their diets were terrible. They were usually overweight. But they had these crazy forearms. Look at the next time you see your mail carrier. The next time you see your mail carrier in your neighborhood, look at their whole body and then look at their calves. I guarantee you they will have calves that don't match the rest of the body. I guarantee you they'll have muscular calves. Why? They're walking 50,000 steps a day or more just as part of their job. Now you think their calves are getting a hard workout every time they do that? Of course not. They've been doing it for 10, 15, 20 years. At that point, you know, for them it's like breathing. And yet why are their calves developing so much? It's that frequent signal that they're sending throughout the day. And you can do it as simple as this. I've tested this on myself. I've gotten hand grippers and I'll have a hand. I actually have one in the studio. Usually it's with me. And while we're podcasting or working every so often, I don't even track it. I just pick it up and I squeeze it 10 times. I'm not working out and I squeeze it another 10. And I notice when I do that and I do it consistently throughout the day, I don't get sore, I don't get crazy. But I do notice when I go deadlift or go do a pull up or go work out, my hands are like, you know, it's like 30% stronger. It's that big of a difference. I love this conversation around inmates right now because I feel it's on par with probably how a lot of people feel. Yeah. Right, even though maybe you're not in actual prison right now, but a lot of people probably feel that way without having access to their gym and their normal routine and being kind of stuck at home. I feel like I've applied these principles more in the last three months than I probably ever have. And I'm really enjoying that. I'm enjoying when we're up in Tahoe and we have our little gym set up inside the garage. I'll just go in and I'll do, you know, three sets of deadlifts that I'm done for now. And then I go back later on and go do three sets of pull ups. Then I come back later on and I do some strap work with the suspension trainer. Like it just, it breaks up the day. And at the end of the day, when I calculate all the sets and total volume done, I've done more than what I've done sometimes in a really hard one hour workout that I've dripped all day long and it just breaks the day up nice. Totally. Now, one of the side effects of doing this, and you don't have to do it every hour or whatever. You could do it, you know, four or five times at trigger sessions. I recommend people do three a day or you can have fun with it and do a little something every hour. Here's some of the side effects of that. You get, you have incredible alertness and focus throughout the day. You don't get those energy dips. No joke, you start to feel tired, go do 10 body weight squats, a couple push-ups, stand up and it feels like you had a small cup of coffee each time. It improves my productivity. When I do stuff like this on a regular basis, I'm more productive with work. Movement promotes movement. It does. Now, how can you utilize this yourself? Here's an easy way to do it. Pick a weak body part. This is a great way to bring up a weak body part. If your shoulders are lagging or your calves are lagging, hamstrings, whatever, maybe do something like this every hour, every other hour. You do a few reps for that body part. The key here is not to beat the crap out of that body part. You're not doing a workout each time. You're just doing some reps each super frequently throughout the day. Now, there's another part to this that we can learn a lot from inmates, and that's their creativity. They are extremely creative with how- What they can do with toothbrushes is amazing. Oh, yeah. You know- What? You know what? They make shanks out of them. I don't know where your mind's going. No, that's actually true. When I was in high school, we had a police officer come to do a presentation and he had this glass case and he showed us all the stuff that- All the different shivs that they make. All the shanks they make out of cardboard and toothpaste and toothbrushes and tattoo- They make tattoo machines and cassette players and all this stuff. They're extremely creative. Obviously, you're locked in a cage and you have nothing to do but think all day long, but in terms of exercises- Yeah, they apply the same creativity in that direction. Very, very creative. Now, this, I think, is applicable to today. Like you said, Adam, a lot of people still aren't going to the gym or their gyms are still closed. They're limited by their equipment. You can get really creative with very minimal or no equipment. You can utilize things around your house in different places. You can hang your body. You can do a curl a million in one different ways, whether you're changing the tempo or the squeeze or the hand position or how you rotate your elbows or where your elbows are positioned. I'm just talking about curls, which is a super basic exercise. Creativity is another reason why I think they do build their physics and really thinking about angles and different ways to promote intensity in these exercises. So using walls and using ways to progress, like say a push-up to start walking now up the wall. So now you have even more intense gravitational forces coming down to where you can end up, bringing your legs over your head and doing handstand push-ups. And there's a whole way to progress a lot of very simple moves that if you're confined to a certain amount of space and equipment, it does require you to really come up with creative solutions for that. Well, inmates are an example of how much we over-complicate resistance training. All resistance training is flexion of the muscles with some sort of resistance. So if you understand how to flex your bicep, flex your tricep, flex your shoulders, flex your quads, if you know how to flex all those muscles, all you're trying to do is create some sort of resistance with that. It can be isometric. You can use your body weight. You can do all kinds of different things. And it doesn't have to look like what we see inside of a gym when we walk in, we look at all these machines and barbells and dumbbells. All you are needing to do is create some sort of resistance and flexing the muscle. That's it. And you've got resistance training. And because it's creative and different, it's a new stimulus. It's novel. You're gonna see some great change. There's a couple of things that seem to be common. When I, like I said, I've interviewed and talked to a few people who have been locked up for longer periods of time. A couple of ways they, and this was a big question for me. How do you get creative if you don't have weights to produce more resistance? One way they do it is they break rep ranges of motion up. So what I mean by that is, you know what a full pushup looks like, right? So what they may do is they may go down to the bottom of a pushup and do a bunch of reps just for the first four inches. Then they'll do another more bunch of reps at the next four inches and so on. So they're breaking up the range of motion into small ranges of motion to increase the tension. The other way they do it is with by slowing reps down or by speeding them up, doing an explosive pushup, for example, or doing a very, very slow, high tension pushup. Just lots of creativity around basic simple exercises will give you the variety that you get in a big gym almost with lots of equipment, but you're doing the same exercise. Here's another thing that they do that's kind of forced upon them, but this cannot be overstated. They go to bed and they wake up at the same time every single day. They don't have a choice. That's they go to bed at the same time, they wake up at the same time, they all get, you can resist it all you want, but after months and years, you're getting eight hours or nine hours of sleep every single night. That's it. Every single night you're doing that. This is probably the Achilles heel for most clients is the rest, right? A lot of people have the discipline or the motivation to wanna change their physique or do something different or work out, but then they have this crazy lifestyle or inconsistent lifestyle where, and I'm just as guilty of this. Last night I was up till two in the morning thinking and writing and doing shit, and that's not normal. And then I'll have another night where I'm in bed by nine, 30 or 10. And so I know that inconsistency is not ideal for maximizing my sleep and recovery. And like you said, Sally, these guys are forced into a routine. And one of the side effects of that is they probably end up getting incredible consistent sleep, which is only going to aid in their recovery. Well, you know, a while ago, we were speculating on why pro bodybuilders who've been training forever on tons of steroids and all that stuff hit a plateau and then go to the Middle East. What country was that that they went to? Dubai, right? Dubai and gain like 20 pounds of muscle. Do you know how hard it is to gain five pounds of muscle when you're already extremely advanced? They'd go there and gain 20 pounds of muscle and we couldn't figure out what was going on. We thought maybe there was some new drug or whatever. Then we talked to bodybuilders in the know and they said, no, they just go there, they have nothing to do. They eat, they train, they sleep. And they sleep, yeah, an emphasis on the sleep. That was the big one. Like you get lots and consistent sleep, go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time and their bodies just built lots of muscle. I've done this with clients where we changed nothing. We've changed nothing about their workout, changed nothing about their diet. All we did was emphasize sleep and lo and behold, like magic, fat comes off their body. They start to sculpt and shape or build. Their strength goes up just from doing that one thing right there. And in fact, when I did talk to the people that I know who've been in prison about what they did over there, aside from the extreme frequency, that was the big one. They said, you know what? Our diets aren't that great. We don't get a lot of protein, but we train really frequently and we get good sleep every single night. We got nothing better to do. We go to bed, we have to go to bed at a certain time. Two major factors right there. Exactly, two major factors. Let's talk about gymnasts now, right? Gymnasts have some incredibly impressive physiques on their body and the way they train is relatively unique. One thing that I noticed with gymnasts that they utilize more than almost any other athlete or person who trains their body that I can think of is that use a lot of high tension isometrics. A lot of their competitive moves and positions require that, like if you get up on the rings, you can't be wobbling and moving all over the place. Of course, we all know that the famous pose that they do, the real difficult iron cross, is that what they call it? That is a tension pose. When they get on the pommel horse, they have to learn how to hold themselves up for long periods of time before they do anything else. When they're holding onto the rings, they have to be able to grip and tighten and tense their body and everything's about tension. If you look at a gymnast, the way they get scored is it's not just the movements, it's how nice their body looks. It's how graceful it is. It's how pointed the toes are, how straight the legs are, how straight the elbows are, how well they're able to hold their position while they're swinging or moving their body. That's all isometrics, that's all tension and most training programs, the vast majority, they don't even mention isometrics. It's not even in there. They're such the best example of pure control over one's body and mastery over technique for movements. And it's such a high skill sport that it's hard to really break down every little thing that they do in their training but a lot of it, like you said, is that high control of in range of motion strength. And this is something that you don't find in a lot of other training modalities and that's one specific differentiating factor is they've really put in the time to then expand upon like the types of movements their body can produce. And so teaching the body to just get comfortable with it but then really progressively overloading to where they can do things that your average person just can't. So we mentioned gymnast the other day on a podcast and actually had somebody ask me like, I heard you guys talking about the benefits of isometrics and I just don't understand how something like that can build so much muscle. And the way I explained it and you guys can add to this what you guys think but the way I explained it to this kid that was asking me this was like, and I use the analogy that Sal uses all the time that I love which is the amplifier is your CNS and then your speakers are your muscles and we always talk about how we develop muscles and build muscles but we don't spend a lot of time talking about the central nervous system. And I can't think of a better way to train the central nervous system than high tension isometrics because when you are tensing up your entire body like that that you're developing the communication to all of your muscles, all in your body, all simultaneously and as tense as you possibly can. That is one of the best ways that you could potentially build your CNS, build your amplifier that then can output into the muscle. So I would attribute that to being one of the main reasons why they can develop so much muscle is the communication that they're developing through their CNS. It's the ability to summon all the soldiers to do the work for you. Right. You know and it's, that's such a component people just don't understand that you have the ability, you don't have to add like an extreme amount of load to be able to get a mastery over that and they're an example of that where they're really using body weight techniques but if this is all coming from within, this is that intrinsic which is kind of esoteric on some level we're trying to explain this but you can really squeeze and connect and recruit even more muscle fibers to get involved in every lift. It's the central nervous system that fires muscle fibers. It's the central nervous system that tells your body how many muscle fibers it should activate and the amount of muscle fibers that you can summon is largely determined by how effective your central nervous system is at talking to your muscles. I'll give you a couple examples, okay? Think back, if you've been lifting weights for a while think back to when you first started working out or think back to when the last time you took a long break was and you got under the barbell and you were gonna do a bench press. Remember how shaky it felt? It felt like almost like your muscles were laughing. That's how I remember, that's my best way of explaining it. Like you don't have a good connection so you try to do a rep and it's like da-da-da-da-da-da. Absolutely. That's your central nervous system not being very well connected. Your muscle fibers aren't gonna activate very well. You're not, your muscles aren't gonna grow very well. Remember, muscles are dumb. They don't do anything on their own. They have to be turned on. Think about it, here's another way. If you've ever met anybody who has a, who's had nerve damage to a particular muscle or part of their body, how does that muscle look? Completely atrophied. It's disconnected. The body, because the central nervous system is not attached or connected to that area or that part of the body, the body then atrophies the muscle. We have no use for it. Muscles are what adapt and grow and part of the way they grow is by what kind of signal they're receiving from the central nervous system and high tension isometrics turns things on like you would not believe. Here's one of the other benefits of it. And it sucks because for some reason, isometrics, people don't include that as a muscle building technique which is silly. It'd be like me saying right now only do the positive portion of a lift and never do the negative or only do the negative, never do the positive. You're missing out on a huge component. It's a tough sell because it's really hard and it's not like super fun and exciting. It builds muscle just like the other types of muscle contractions and the better you get at them, the better you're gonna build muscle. And here's my favorite part about it. Isometrics don't damage muscle as much. Yes, that's very safe. So it's a great way that you can literally take your routine, throw some isometrics in, you don't necessarily have to worry about overtraining, you're just gonna get extra results. So I always like finding ways that I can teach a client or show them something so they can feel what I'm trying to explain right now. Cause what we just talked about can be very nuanced for the average lifter who doesn't care that much about the science. They just want the damn results. And so I'm always as a trainer thinking of like, how can I get them to feel what I'm trying to explain to them? So a common area that is really unstable in people and you'd have lots of issues as a trainer is shoulders. Shoulders can be very unstable and clicking feeling and little chronic pain they have there or just feel weak when they first get into their shoulder workouts. And so it takes three or four sets before they really feel like they're getting in the groove. Something that I would do with a client to explain the benefits of like a high tension, isometric exercises, I would find a weight that is really hard for them to press two or three times above their head. So it's a heavy load and get them to press it and lock out above their head and hold. And just hold that. And when you're holding it, you are literally thinking about everything from your feet all the way up to your fingertips, the entire body being engaged, the glutes being engaged, to keep your hips underneath you and the shoulders nice and stacked, the chins tucked. And you're just holding that isometric hold for as long as you can and start your shoulder workout with something like that and then go into your shoulder press, your raises and stuff like that and pay attention to how your shoulders feel. You'll feel stronger. You'll feel stable and you'll feel right in the groove to go lift. And I used to love to show this to show the value of what we're talking about right now. Yeah, great ways to implement isometrics are carries, all kinds of carries, overhead carries, suitcase carries, farmer walks. But you wanna work with isometrics through different ranges of motion. So Adam just talked about end range of motion, right? My arms are straight up above my head. You can also bring dumbbells down like you're beginning a shoulder press and hold there. Right, correct. And that's because isometrics, there is a carryover to ranges of motion outside of what you're doing, but most of the benefit is in that range of motion you're doing. Here's an application for the person who just wants to get stronger at a particular lift. Identify the weak point of that range of motion. Let's say it's bench press and you find that once you come two inches off your chest, it's hard to move the weight. Once you go back, once you go over another four inches, now it's easier to lift. So there's this like four inch window where you're just not that strong. That's where you do isometrics. Get underneath a bar, put the safeties up, put the barbell under the safeties so that the bar is where you're weak. Push up against the safeties, create tension there, do it for 10, 15 seconds and then rest and treat it like a workout. And then watch what happens to your progress. Here's the other thing about gymnast that I really like a lot, a lot is that they don't work out, they practice. This is a very interesting distinction when it comes to training. And this is one that took me a long time to understand. Every time I went to the gym and I thought to myself, today I'm working my chest or my back or my legs, the focus was feeling that body part and hammering that body part. The focus wasn't practicing lifts that train that body part. It's very, very different. Practice means I'm going in to get good at that exercise. Training means I'm just getting the body part to feel fatigued and sore and pumped. Now gymnasts don't go to practice in their gymnasium and they don't go to think to themselves, I'm going to work out my chest, shoulders and triceps. They think I need to perfect my position at the top of the rings or I need to perfect the iron cross or I need to perfect how I pummel on the pummel horse or whatever. How can I get up higher in that position more explosively quickly but then be able to now stabilize it as smooth as possible? So all those little nuances, they're paying attention to where the joints compensate or something happens where the movement overall just doesn't look as seamless as it could be. And so all those things are taken into account when they're going up and they're performing these. Right, and now practice looks like this. I'm practicing perfect technique and I'm getting technique better. You can't do that when you're super fatigued, can you? Right, so the gymnast is not going in there and saying I'm going to do this over and over until I can't move anymore because then all you're practicing is crappy. Bad form. Crappy form. So they practice, practice, practice. My form is starting to get sloppy. They jump off, then they wait. They rest. That's the thing. There's a lot more rest involved in this style of training than people realize. Absolutely. It has to be perfect every time and if it's not, they're aspiring for their next movement to be perfect. So the amount of rest is really to then recoup all of that so they don't have any elements of fatigue. Well, one of the greatest expressions that we see of this besides gymnast is your Olympic lifters. And if you've ever trained with an Olympic- They never lift a failure. They never do. It's very, very rare that they're ever even touching their max load or closer max load. Most of their training is just practice. And when you go to practice, it is a mindset thing like you're a looty two-sal. It's not, I'm going to train legs today and I'm thinking about getting my legs sore. It's, I'm going to squat today. And today, I want my squat to look better than what it looked the last time I squat. So the way you move is so important and you're more focused on the movement of the exercise than you are actually the load of the exercise. That's how 80, 90% of your training should look is focused on the training of these movements before always thinking about the load. Right, now fatiguing a muscle, getting it pumped and doing a lot of stuff. Yes, that's important, but here's how important practicing lifts is. And I'll make this argument all day long. If you were to just be able to split yourself into two twins, everything identical, one of you went to the gym and just hammered muscles. The other one went to the gym and practiced lifts. Let's say it's legs. One of you goes to the gym and hammers your legs when they do your leg workout. The other one goes to the gym and just tries to get really good at squats or really good at front squats or other leg exercises. Over the course of a year or two years or three years, do you know who's going to have better developed legs? The person who practices. No joke, I'll make that argument all day long. It's the person that practices. I remember first witnessing this myself. I remember there was a trainer that worked for me and him and I were similar in build but the guy just bench pressed like a tremendous amount of weight. I remember what he lifted, but he was just so strong. And I remember thinking like, oh, how does he lifting so much weight? And then I realized in between clients, because he would train clients all day long, in between clients, he'd load up three plates or two plates on the bar. He'd get underneath and he'd practice really good technique, rack it up, take the weights off and then go train his neck. So all day long, he's practicing this lift, never really training to fatigue, not getting himself sore, but holy cow, his body got extremely developed and he was really, really strong at that particular lift. So, and this is true for most people. I'll say this, if all of you ever, if all you guys ever do is go to the gym to practice the most important exercises, you're like 95% of the way there, no joke. It is, yeah, sure, you wanna feel muscle squeeze, you wanna do that stuff. There's definitely value in that. But the practice element, boy, can we learn from gymnast in this particular regard. It's gonna benefit you tremendously. The other thing they do really well is they address mobility, full range of motion. Probably, I'd say gymnast above almost, them and Olympic lifters, when you look at the way that they take the body through its fullest range of motion, and this is kinda counter for the bodybuilding community. The bodybuilding community has been pushing the shorter reps and the whole time under tension is what we're trying to accomplish the entire time, missing out on the benefits of learning to take the muscle through its fullest range of motion. And the best part about that is not only do they get all these great muscle building effects, but when you talk about like joint health and joint stability and protecting yourself from injury, man, these are some of the most resilient bodies that you'll see out there. Oh yeah, and remember, mobility isn't just range of motion. Mobility means you control a large range of motion. You're strong throughout the range of motion. So like the difference between a gymnast and let's say somebody that's really flexible is that a gymnast is also flexible, they're training under tension throughout that range of motion. So they're strong through their flexibility. Somebody just really flexible, sure they could do the splits and they could do all kinds of ranges of motion, but they're weak in it. That causes problems. Gymnasts are strong through ranges of motion. Now what does this mean for you? Well, the larger range of motion you have control over, the less risk of injury, but also the more muscle fibers you activate and the more muscle you build. Studies are pretty conclusive on this. A full range of motion done well squat builds more muscle than a half range of motion done well squat. This is true problem. I mean, to point out, it is a sport. And so that when they get into certain end ranges of motion and they're putting an extreme amount of intensity and tension, like there's potential for injury because they're so far out of the normal spectrum of range of motion for your average person. And so this is the ultimate expression of that being a sport, but we could take elements of that and create a little less extreme version of what they've created in terms of the range of motion. So if I could get my shoulder to now get a little bit further back under control, be able to hold weight comfortably in that and be able to control that, that's gonna benefit everything I do in terms of like a regular barbell lift. I'm gonna have a lot more control and stability, which then is gonna allow my body produce more force to provide strength. This is one of my favorite parts about the newest program that we just released, suspension trainer. In fact, my sister was just texting me last night and then she's gone through her first week and she's like, oh my God, like my body has never felt so good. And it's those, the straps allow you to take your body and it with different angles so you can regress it for whatever level you're at. Because obviously doing an iron cross and some of these, I'm sure there's people listening right now that are going. Yeah, like I'll never do that. Yeah, this is great guys, but I'm 50 years old, I'm never going to do the iron cross on rings or do full pull-ups on there or dips off the rings and the things that that's probably going through their head right now. But there's ways to take what we're talking about and regress that and the suspension trainer is a great example of that. It's you have these straps that would create an instable environment very similar to like what rings or pommel horse or some of these things that you're talking about would do. And then yet you can regress it so somebody who's 70, 80 years old can do a push-up with these straps and it's relatively easy enough for them to control their body weight but then take it through its fullest deepest range of motion and force you because it's instable to have control of it to Sal's point and you take it through. And the benefits of that, I mean, I love it. I love hearing my sister who goes through everything that we ever release and I always inch to her. She resembles the average client that I would have. And so I love hearing feedback like that and she's like totally blown away by the suspension trainer because of that. She's like, I didn't think that this would be a side effect to this is that my body, my joints, my back, my shoulder is feeling better than it's ever felt before just from the first week of training this. Oh, oh, totally. So what's the real takeaway here? The takeaway is go lighter so that you can get a better range of motion. That's basically what it boils down to is rather than trying to go heavier with your range of motion. See if you can go lighter and challenge your range of motion so you can expand upon it, activate more muscle fibers and get better results. Lastly, let's talk about sprinters. Now sprinters, in my opinion, have some of the most impressive physiques at the highest level. If you look at Olympic level sprinters, they look almost like if they wanted to become bodybuilders, they could with like six months of training just from their build and their physique. Even the long leaner looking ones like Usain Bolt, you look at his legs, you look at his shoulders and his arms and he's built a lot of muscle on accident just from training the way he does to become a better sprinter. One of the main takeaways that you'll get from sprinters is that they train explosively. Fast twitch muscle fibers, there's almost no way to activate fast twitch muscle fibers better than with explosive movements. Even movements that look slow and grinding, apply it explosively, activate more fast twitch muscle fibers. So what I mean by that is of course, this is all considering you have good technique and good control, okay? Let's say you're doing a heavy barbell squat. Let's say you're 200 pounds on the bar and that's heavy for you, but you got good control and everything. So you go down to the bottom and you come up in a controlled fashion or you go down to the bottom and then you try to explode up. Now because it's heavy, when you look at the squat, you're not moving very fast, but the intention is explosive. Studies show that explosive intentions build more muscle fiber, bigger muscles by activating more fast twitch muscle fibers. Speeds the component. That's right. And I think that that gets a, well, I think people don't understand like how moving a barbell with speed is a completely different experience than just loading it heavily and trying to grind your way up with a lot of weight. Moving it with speed, it provides a completely different stimulus to the muscles to respond to. Now the thing though is that this is like sort of the top. This is the peak of your training experience. And so this is one of those things. We always bring this up sort of at the end of all these things where we're talking about stabilization, we're talking about supporting the joint, making sure all the movement is nice and fluid and controlled. And your control has to be at mastery level to then get you to this point where now I can open it up. I'm opening up the throttle for as fast as I could possibly move, which then gets your muscles to really grow, but you just gotta really make sure that you have everything supported. I'm so glad you brought that point up because that was what I was gonna say. And I'm glad too. And I don't know if we even made a point to organize this where this was last, but it should be in the order of things that we're talking about. Because I'd hate for someone to hear this. We talk about all the benefits that the sprinters get for explosiveness. And you have a beginner lifter that decides, oh, I'm gonna do explosive squats when you have terrible squats to start with. That's right. Work on all the other things we've talked about like isometrics, slowing the tempo down and the tension type movements, perfecting, practicing, all those things should come first. And then explosiveness is the greatest expression of all that together. Like that's when you get that, and that's how you progress it. This is when we go back to the inmates. Like how do the inmates keep getting creative and keep progressing? Well, the pinnacle of that would be this part, the explosiveness, the explosive pushups, the explosive squats. Plyometrics. Yeah, the plyometric type of stuff that we see abused so often. There is value to it, but we talk about it being abused because people highlight the benefits of it like we are right now. And then all of a sudden you have your average person who goes to the gym inconsistently, wants to jump all the way to that because they hear all these great benefits from it. But there's an order of operation. You wanna spend the time building these stable joints, building the strength, building this control, practicing these movements. And then when you get really good at that, this is a great way to progress. That's why this is the last phase of MAPS performance. When you follow MAPS performance, you go through different phases and the last one is utilizing explosive movements to build explosivity and to build muscle fiber. Here's the thing about explosive movements. Studies show that it literally unlocks muscle growth that you could not tap into with traditional lifting. This is on advanced lifters. They'll show with advanced lifters who've been lifting a long time that by applying explosive movements properly, they unlock a new potential for muscle growth. And there's lots of studies on this. There's post-activation potentiation studies. There's studies on athletes who don't necessarily need explosive power, but they utilize it to get their muscles to respond again. There's also a specific way to apply it, by the way. In order to get good or to utilize the benefits or get the benefits of explosive movements, they have to be done explosively. I know that sounds funny. You're probably thinking, well, no duh, obviously. No, no, no, think, okay, this is the deal here. You can't do explosive movements when you're tired, fatigued, sore. Doesn't work that way. So in other words, when you do a traditional, for example, set of squats or bench press, you go to a certain level of fatigue. If you're training explosively, you stop way before that. The minute the set stops becoming explosive, the set is done because every other rep after that is no longer training the explosive movement portion. It's no longer making you more explosive. So it literally is, so when you look at a sprinter sprint, they're doing it not to fatigue. They're exploding, then they're walking back carefully. They're doing a little bit of dynamic stretching. They're getting their heart rate to come back down. They wait a second. And then when they feel like they can be explosive again, they sprint again. It's not like sprint, sprint, sprint, because then it just turns into long distance running. Not only that, you'll actually see, so have you ever watched, and by no means am I a coach for sprinters, but I've watched high level coaches, coach sprinters, and they will actually break up the explosive movement. So if you'll see them practice the takeoff, you know, 50 different times with the block, with a minute rest plus between each one, long rest period, and it'll be, you're coming off the block and they are critiquing the head position where the hand pulls through. And then it's just, they take off and then they stop. Because the whole, where's the leak of power? Right. The whole thing needs to be explosive from the takeoff to the end. And we can take from that and apply that in our resistance training. The whole movement sometimes can be broken down in segments and perfected. Similar to what you were talking about with the tension stuff, with the bench press and things like that, is look at the movement, again, practicing movements, look at it and the parts of it and become hypercritical of a part of it. Now think about extracting like some of the components from the gymnast. So how they do this like extreme isometric tension. So if I'm on the block and I'm trying to get like the maximizing the most power in that moment, I'm gonna get my body organized in such a way that I'm anchoring everything into the ground. I'm driving all of that tension that I'm creating internally and I'm forcing it down into my feet. Now once I get it there, I'm thinking about my technique of getting everything organized to then get triple extension and throw everything out there as quick as possible. And then now you're in a position where my performance has just increased tenfold because I've applied these previous principles to this power movement. I can always tell when I see, and it's very, very rare to see this when someone has been coached like this and they're doing like a box jump or something and you'll watch them like every, they'll do one box jump and they'll literally be like two, three minutes in between and you'll see even, you'll see them positioning their feet, bending at the knee just the exact angle they want trying to replicate what they did before. And it's like, there's literally, there's more time put into preparing the body to take off for that one jump than there is the amount of times they're jumping in the workout. And so that's something that you can learn from these high level sprinters that get this incredible results is don't half hazardly go after some of the things they're doing and just think that, you know, I'm just gonna go explosively in a workout one day, break it down to that level and be that critical of every piece of the movement. And that's where you get that real great benefit. And that's also how you're safe and you protect yourself when you're doing these moves. My favorite tool for explosive training is resistance bands. Love resistance bands for this, like getting into a chest press with a heavy resistance band and boom, exploding, holding that position, bringing them back down, letting go of the bands, resting for a second and then repeating, which brings me to another point, long rest periods. Sprinters don't go and sprint again unless they're ready to explode again. And this is definitely something you can learn from. Now, there is benefit to training with shorter rest periods. You get a better pump and all that stuff, but that also doesn't mean that you don't get benefit from doing long rest periods to where each set you're fresh and ready to apply yourself. In fact- It's anaerobic. Absolutely, in fact, one way you can apply this is rather than doing this crazy amount of volume sets and reps in your workout, you're going in and you're picking two exercises and you're resting three minutes in between sets, but those sets are very, you're applying yourself. You're really driving through. You're really feeling the muscles contract. You're making them really, really count. And studies do show that this approach does build a lot of strength and a lot of muscle. I do think it's something we can learn. This is a workout. It can be a workout. I think we get so caught up in that our workouts have to be like this, long old thing where we do seven, 10 different exercises. Sometimes a great workout can be exactly that. I'm going to pick one, maybe two movements, tops, and the whole hour, I'm going to break down that entire movement and focus on all these little nuance and mastery. Oh, huge. Absolutely. Now here's the thing. You find all of these principles in the maps programs. And I think this is what makes them so damn effective is that through our experience training lots and lots of people, years and years and years, especially if you have a passion for training, and if you're a trainer listening, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you have a passion for really getting people the results that they want, really getting them to do them for themselves, to do this long term, to do it with the least amount of work because that's important. When you're training average people, it's important to give the maximum benefit and minimal amount of time because time is a difficult one for a lot of people when they have a job and kids and all that other stuff, is you really start to figure out what really works. So one of the things you'll find in maps programming is frequency is a huge factor that we always consider. Most maps programs are full body workouts. Most maps programs also have frequency builders within them, whether it's a mobility session, like you find in maps performance or trigger sessions and maps metabolic or focus sessions in maps aesthetic or flow sessions and hit or whatever, frequency is super, super important. What do you find in common with the inmates, gymnasts and sprinters? They train very frequently. The sprinter doesn't go sprint real hard once a week and then leave. They're doing it throughout the whole week. The gymnast isn't practicing to failure once a week. They're doing it every single day. Same thing with the inmate. The next one is intensity is judiciously applied. In fitness, I think just intensity has been like, it's like the one that we just keep hammering. Oh, if something's not working, just go harder. Oh, if it's just apply more intensity, just go harder. No, intensity is a factor. It's something to be played with, just like frequency, just like sets, just like reps or exercises. You can't just squeeze that one all the time. You run out of juice. So intensity is important, but it must be applied judiciously. So if you're doing tons and tons of frequency, does that mean you go balls of the wall every single time? Of course not. It doesn't work that way. The frequency loses its value. The other thing is our focus on the most effective exercises. Just look at gymnast, sprinters, and inmates do very little isolation movements. The inmates, because they don't have access to anything that gives them isolation movements, gymnast could care less about isolation movements, and so could sprinters. Almost everything they do is full body. Almost everything they do is a compound movement. And those exercises just produce the best results. One compound exercise is as good as the next five isolation movements combined in terms of producing results. Now you touched on all the different programs where we've taken these policies. If I had to pick, I would say both maps performance and the suspension training program probably incorporate more than any other program, the stuff that we're talking about today. I would agree, maps performance in particular, with its emphasis on the explosive component at the end of the program to the way we utilize compound lifts, to the way we throw in lots of frequency, both with the foundational workouts and the mobility sessions that are done. I mean, with maps performance, you're doing three longer traditional workouts in the sense of the time, but then you're throwing in another two to three other mobility sessions, which are really shorter and working the muscles differently to throw in that frequency. So that's what you get with all of those programs. For yourself, do not be closed-minded. Be open-minded, look at different modalities, learn what you can pick up from each one, apply it to yourself. And this is really the key to longevity in terms of both progress results, but also just in making things fun, because it is fun to try different things. And with that look, Mind Pump is recorded on video as well as audio. Come check us out on YouTube. Also you can find us on Instagram, even Doug. In fact, Doug does a lot of behind the scenes stuff. So if you wanna learn about podcasting, the equipment and what goes into producing a good podcast, go follow Doug at Mind Pump Doug. If you want fitness stuff or funny stuff, come follow me and my co-host on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump. Justin, me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam.