 In this episode of Mind Pump, your favorite fitness, health, and entertainment podcast, we talk about how to maintain your fitness, how to keep your muscle, how to stay strong, or at least keep yourself from losing too much strength when you get sick, or especially when you get injured. We actually give you five things you can focus on, that if you do these five things, your recovery will be faster, you'll build your muscle back faster than you would have had you not followed these five things, and you'll get back to a place that's possibly better than you left before. Now this episode is brought to you by PRX, one of our sponsors. PRX makes some of the best at home gym equipment you'll find anywhere. It's commercial grade at home gym equipment that takes up very, very little space. So if you want to have, for example, a squat rack, you know, squat racks are wonderful. They allow you to do some of the best barbell exercises, but they take up a lot of space. 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The before and afters people send us from following the No BS six pack formula are pretty remarkable. People's abs, you know, bust out. You can see people's obliques. Their cores look leaner even though they may not be leaner because they've developed the muscles of their core. Now both these programs combined, normally it's something like a, I don't know, what is it, $150, $160. But right now in October, you could get both programs combined together for $59.95. That's $59.95. That's it. Lifetime access to both Maps Anabolic and the No BS six pack formula. Just go to maps october.com. That's maps MAPS october.com. Hurt foot, torn Achilles, torn ACL, MCL. What right now? No, these are just all the things. All the injuries that I've been through in the last, I don't know. What is that? Am I going on three years? Wait, when did you turn your ACL on? No, that was like, that was a while ago. Six years ago. Now, seven years ago. We were walking yesterday and you said your foot. I know, dude. It was still hurting. Yeah. What's going on? I don't know, dude. I don't know what it is. Being old, you know, my bones are brittle. I think I like, I think I have like a small fracture in like one of my very small bones in my feet. Yeah. One that I can't pronounce. Yeah, I think that's what's going on. It's been three months and it hasn't fully recovered. So, but anyways, the reason why I brought it up is because we haven't addressed this really on the podcast, not in full length, but I get DMs a lot about injuries. And of course, most people that are into fitness and working out and either building muscle or losing body fat, they're always concerned when something like this happens. Rightfully so that, you know, they've made all this progress and then an injury happens and how do I not lose all of my gains. And so I think that we should address some of the, you know, the top things that we focus on when this happens. It's inevitable for most people that something is going to happen at one point in your life that may, you know, obviously hinder your training regimen and how do you navigate around that without losing all of your gains. I get DMs on that all the time too. That's probably one of, I'd say probably the top five questions I get, which is like, you know, something along the lines of, I hurt my shoulder. How do I, how do I maintain my fitness or, or, you know, I tweak my back. How do I keep my deadlift from going down? Or I hurt my knee. How do I keep my quads from shrinking? So it's a common question. It's also, and I understand why it's probably one of the more frustrating things that could happen to you if you're somebody who's very dedicated to working out because you're on a roll. Usually this is what it looks like. Am I, at least in my experience, I'm crushing. I'm on a roll. It's almost, it almost never happens when everything sucks. It's always like I'm flying with my progress. I'm getting stronger. I'm feeling good. And then either I'll get sick. That's one thing that can happen. Or I'll tweak or twist something or hurt something. And then immediately it's like, because you feel like you're being forced to stop progressing. It's not a choice. It feels like it's not a choice. It's pretty depressing, you know, for a lot of people, especially when you're on that high of a motivation and you're really putting the work in and being disciplined. And then that just takes, you know, your feet literally right out from under you. And it feels like now I have to start all over. Right. Right. And your biggest enemy in this, by the way, is the fear of going backwards. It really is because there's a couple of things you want to face here. Number one, you, the reality of the situation is something that you're denying because the reality is you do have to change gears. You are injured. Right. There's no, there's no going around that. Yeah. If you hurt your back to face the reality of what it is. Yes. So you have to accept it. You have to be careful too. I mean, because this is, I mean, and I remember the first time that I injured my knee. I was in such a hurry to get back and recover. And because I, you know, I'm a trainer. I have all the tools. I know what I need to do. You know, I forced it and then end up re-injuring yourself and then setting yourself even further back. So it is a delicate dance, you know, how do I maintain the progress that I've made over the last months or years, but at the same time too, not to overreach and end up setting myself further back. Yeah. And there's also, you know, like you don't want to mask a lot of like your body's signals of what it's telling you while you're doing these movements. Because I know, you know, the, the tendency is to like really brace up and, you know, kind of work around all these things that your body's on the pain, you know, signals are going off all over the place. But, you know, there's a lot of ways that you could think you're making progression, but you're really just masking a lot of the underlying symptoms. Oh, dude, I have a wonderful story about that, that I experienced myself. So, you know, years ago, you know, I was on the, I was on a roll. I was working out. I was very consistent. At the time I had just got it started in Jiu Jitsu, but I was still lifting weights quite a bit. And I was practicing a position and I went to post with my left arm and I felt something in my shoulder. It didn't really feel good. And I couldn't really tell what it was, but it did hurt. And what I didn't do was rest. I didn't, I didn't allow myself to heal or rehab. Instead of what I did, I started with the Ibuprofen. So, okay, my shoulder hurts. Don't want to miss Jiu Jitsu. Don't want to miss my workout. Takes him Ibuprofen. So I did that for a little while and I did get away with it for a second. I think it was probably a month or two I could take Ibuprofen, but I noticed that the over time, the pain started getting a little worse, a little worse, a little worse. Finally, it got so bad to where I couldn't bench press and I couldn't overhead press. And when I would, I couldn't do Jiu Jitsu, went to the doctor, set up an appointment and the doctor said, well, you know, he said, do you want to take some time off? Like, what do you want to do? I said, no, I don't want to take any time off. He says, well, I can give you a cortisone shot right on your, it was my AC joint that was injured. I can give you a cortisone shot there and then you'll feel a lot better. Immediate relief. And I said, let's do this. So he boom, puts the needle right at the point where it hurts, gives me a shot about two, three days later, felt good again, went right back to training, ended up causing damage to my AC joint and having to get surgery to have my AC joint resected. They actually had to remove some of it. Now, when I went to the doctor to get the surgery, it was became very painfully obvious to me. And I would have recognized this in a client. I didn't recognize it myself because, you know, when you're, when it's you, you have your own ego in the way, right? So, I recognized it myself that I caused it to get this bad. I got to the point now where I need to have surgery. So what I did with the surgery was I said, okay, I'm going to take this seriously. I'm going to take the healing process seriously. I'm not going to push it because I already made that mistake. And one thing that helped me was remembering muscle memory. This is a real thing. You know, as a kid, I really injured my knee really bad. And I remember when I finally took the brace off that kept my leg straight. I looked at my left leg and it looked scarily skinny. Like my knee was bigger than my, my femur. And it looked crazy. And I remember thinking, oh my gosh, what happened to my leg? And then doing some rehab and doing some exercise and the muscle came back so quick that it really blew me away. So I thought, okay, no matter what happens with the surgery, I know I'm going to lose my pec. I know I'm going to lose my shoulder and triceps. I'm not going to be able to do pressing or pulling or whatever, but it should come back fast. And that time I treated it properly. I did everything the right way. I remember when I took the bandages off and I finally, I did look in the mirror and it did look scary. I lost a lot of muscle, but I did everything the right way. And it came back and it came back very quickly to the point where, you know, I have wonderful balance between my right and left side. And that taught me a lesson, which is don't be afraid of going backwards because muscle memory is a real thing. However long it took you to build your muscle in the first place is not nearly as long as it's going to take to get it back when you lose it. If it took you four years to build your arms and then you can't work out for a couple months, it'll take you like four weeks, you know, to build them back. Literally. That's how fast it works. So you got to make peace with that because that if you can't make peace with that, you will screw yourself over. I had the same experience with my arm and I broke it in the same year, twice. And it was so demoralizing. I didn't know it was my right arm. It's my dominant arm. And it's something that I was, you know, really identifying as an athlete. And I couldn't do all these things like that I could normally do with my right arm. And taking the cast off, especially for the second time, it was almost like I was just skin and bone. And I just, it was, it was really one of those moments where I was like, I don't know if I'm going to be the same after this. If I really have to like change everything I'm doing to my left side and relearn everything. But you're right, it really came back fast. It came back, you know, within an amount of time I wouldn't even have thought it possible. So it's one of those things that might look scary at first, but it's your body will respond appropriately. And it helps with the fear. Because I think if you're focused on the fear, oh my God, I'm going to go backwards. I'll never get, be the same. You're more likely to do the wrong things. Well, especially when, you know, the first step of the five steps that we listed for this is focus on healing. Yes. And that is, you know, the mistake that I made in the past was still focusing on trying to build muscle and gain and gain and, you know, work around this injury versus put all of my effort and energy towards getting better and healing and rehabbing and addressing the root cause that got me there. Like, I feel like you have to explain a little bit more Sal about the cortisone shots because I remember as a trainer, this was a massive hurdle for me. One, understanding what exactly is a cortisone shot. Why do so many doctors prescribe it and tell clients when they have issues like this, that you dealt with your shoulder and that's the go to, it was hard to overcome that as a trainer because one, I wasn't educated enough to really understand it and what we were doing to the body by taking one of these shots. And then I had to overcome my clients going, I feel amazing. They take this shot in their hip, they take the shot in the shoulder and they're, are they're elbow or wherever they're trying to put the brakes on a little bit to be, yeah. Oh, and then they go, I feel amazing at them. So I'm just going to go get another cortisone shot in a few months if I need one. And what I learned later on was we were never addressing the root cause and not only were we not addressing the root cause, we also were setting these clients up for failure. No, it's the equivalent of driving your car, hearing a funny noise from your engine and just turning up the radio so you don't hear the engine anymore. It's literally the same thing. So what a cortisone shot does is it, it, you know, because here's why you feel pain from an acute injury. So you hurt your shoulder, your body sends inflammatory, you know, factors and markers over to the area, you get increased inflammation. That's also a signal for repair, healing for all the good stuff to happen. You feel the pain which prevents you from moving it. This is a good thing because it allows the area to heal. Injecting a cortisone shot there immediately reduces the localized inflammation. So now you've reduced the pain, but you've also reduced all the important signals that tell the body to heal. Over time, repeated cortisone shots have been proven to cause joint degeneration. Not only that, but if you take away the noise, right, if your car's making noise and you turn up the radio, now you're, you're just, the noise eventually will get louder because you're not fixing the root cause. So if I'm moving improperly, and that's what causes my shoulder pain, and I take the pain away, I haven't fixed what caused it in the first place. I'm going to continue to move wrong and I'm going to cause more problems down the road. So this is the, this is the challenge. This is why focusing on healing is so important because the focus on healing not only allows you to heal and recover, but it also gets you to focus on what caused the problem in the first place. Why did I hurt my shoulder or why does my knee hurt? Not just that it hurts, but what caused it to hurt in the first place? Is it because I used too much weight? Is it because I didn't have good stability? Is it because my form and my muscle recruitment patterns aren't great? Address that. Otherwise it'll happen is you will continue to revisit this problem. This is why a good chunk of people who have pain or tend to hurt themselves, it tends to be a repeated injury. If you talk to somebody who has hurt their back in the past, ask them how many times they've had that same injury. And more often than not, you'll hear a number like three or four. Oh, I hurt my back and how many times have you heard? Oh, it's been a few times. I hurt my knee. Which knee? My left. How many times have you hurt your left knee? Like three or four times. Well, and that's where we get the saying wherein clients would say things like I have a bad knee, right? Bad hips or I have a bad back. You start to identify with a bad area of your body because it constantly gets injured. And so you just assume that, oh, I have a bad low back. I have a bad knee. I have a bad hip. It's constantly bothering me. I'm always having to get cortisone shots. And it just becomes this vicious cycle. And we never really address the root cause. You never focus on truly healing correctly. And then getting to the bottom of why did I get in this place in the first place? And what do I need to do to avoid this in the future? Right. And I think people need to understand healing isn't just not doing anything and laying down and elevating and immobilizing. Like healing, there's a lot more involved in healing and movement is a part of that. But it has to be appropriate. And it has to be addressing the type of movement that was creating the problem for you. You have to identify that. Yeah. And studies show this, like when people have surgery, if you've ever gone to the hospital and had surgery or procedure, they'll encourage you when it's appropriate to walk through the hospital, prevents blood clots. It's also been shown to speed up healing. So that's what we mean by moving. Because there are moments when you should not move the area that's injured, right? You broke your arm. Especially an acute injury, yeah. Exactly. But moving otherwise, which means don't just lay on the couch and be depressed unless you need to just lay down, unless that's what's recommended. But you could just go for a light walk or moving. That's also part of the healing process. But healing is the most important thing. That's why it's number one in this list. Because nothing will prevent you from or nothing will make you lose muscle. Nothing will make you get out of shape more than failing to heal. Like if you, you can have all the strategies in the world, but if you get in the way of the healing process, you ain't going to go anywhere because an injury stops you right there dead in your tracks. It prevents you from moving forward. Now, did you guys use tools? I mean, I, this is what I love like ice baths for too. Like during this time, like, because you have so much inflammation normally in an area that's injured. Instead of blunting it with something like ibuprofen, I'll do something more natural where I'm using like ice baths to bring down the inflammation. And even though you guys both alluded to, when you have an acute injury that you need to leave it alone and rest, at one point, it eventually heals and it is time to move that area. And when it is time to move that area, I don't go right back into strength training that area. Most of my focus is on mobility and stability of that joint. So the area that it may be injured or causing pain or I broke or whatever it may be, as I start to heal and get better, the first emphasis that I put on any sort of training is training the movement. So having stability and making sure I have a good range of motion because after you end up healing in an area, we also tend to build up a bunch of scar tissue that tends to limit your range of motion. And if you go back to just a strength training that area with an even shortened range of motion, now you're setting yourself up for- Well, this is why I do. I don't like blunting the signal as much as possible because I want to find the threshold. I want to find where that lies in terms of like my body's natural signal to tell me, okay, that's the range. I'm going to move into that angle and that position and keep gradually working my way towards maybe expanding upon that, but it's a gradual process. And when I am trying to do that, then I'm going to come back and obviously it's going to aggravate it a little bit, which may, this is where ice for me is definitely an answer to lowering the inflammation. Yeah. And ice can slow down recovery as well because it does slow down blood flow. It's good for pain relief. This is what's good about ice because if you have a little bit of pain, you can use ice. It's natural. It doesn't have the systemic inflammatory lowering effect like drugs. But when I say focus on healing, what I mean is because if you're a hardcore fitness fanatic and you're really worried about losing muscle when you're injured, you tend to be terrible at resting when you're supposed to. I know I was. If the doctor says to me, hey, stay off your foot for the next four days, I'm thinking to myself, he doesn't really mean stay off of it. Like I could walk around a little bit. I think I know. This is the challenge. The challenge is you're worried. It's just so worried about losing muscle that you won't literally follow the doctor's advice. That's number one. Listen to what they say. If they say, rest it, let it heal, then you should rest it and let it heal. I've trained female athletes who got breast augmentation, who were so afraid of losing shoulder and chest muscles that they went and started working out and messed up the implants and caused the implant to shift in its cavity and to cause different problems. That's one example. I've trained male athletes that had like a bicep tear and the doctor is like, don't do anything with your biceps for the next three months or whatever. They thought, well, I'm just going to go light. That's what I'm going to do. Retaring where they had reattached the muscle. So really focused on healing really is take their advice and if they say, don't move it, that's okay. You'll lose muscle. It'll come back faster though if you let it heal properly. This is also to bring up a point for me when talking to the doctor. This is a crucial thing to ask as many questions as possible. I think people do a terrible job of getting like all of that stuff really defined in terms of, you know, what does that mean in terms of resting? Like what is my leg elevated the whole time? Like what are the actual steps like throughout my day look like and have them kind of outline that whole thing for you because, you know, the more information, the better. And so like I actually, like I had Courtney would come into some of my appointments and would sort of act as an advocate for a lot of like different types of medications and things they present. And you know, like the worst thing you can do is just kind of nod your head like you understand them, but not really understand them, not ask more questions. And so I just find that very common for a lot of people. They don't ask enough questions. Well, I also think I mean, I'm going to keep hammering the mobility thing down and stability and range of motion because I mean, this is so close to home for me when I talk about my Achilles tear that I just had. And because I opted not to do the surgery and I healed myself, it did take much longer. And still to this day, I have to put a little more energy and effort into a combat stretch on that side more than I need to do on the other side because it is still a little stiffer than my right side. And so that focus has to be there. I mean, when we created Prime Pro, I really like one of my, my favorite things about that program is I really feel like it is the perfect bridge from physical therapy. So if you're somebody who has an injury, like that was acute to where you had surgery or something broken and you go and you are cast up or whatever, and you see your doctor, then the next thing after that, they send you to physical therapy. Physical therapy basically gets you to heal and get it better and at least being able to move it again. Then you take your cast off or then you're released. And from that moment of being released from physical therapy, you're not done. You're not done like going right back to training just because they have they've said, okay, you're healed. Now go back. If you go back from there and go right back into your normal training routine, what you'll find is that that area that was injured more often than not is going to have all this scar tissue buildup and you're going to have limited range of motion. And if you just go into training and you neglect putting that extra effort into working on the mobility and stability portion and range of motion of that joint or that injured area, that is the, that is the most ideal way to segue back into and again, it prolongs the going to build a lot of muscle aggressively. At first, but it's laying the foundation so that it does come back fast and that you don't end up re-injuring. Right. Or because what'll end up, here's what happens, you hurt your shoulder because you have muscle recruitment pattern issues or movement issues, because let's say your left shoulder is moving, not in the ideal way. So you end up hurting it. You go to the, you wait, you let it heal, go to the physical therapist, do physical therapy, range of motion is back. By the way, let's switch physical therapists. Real job is that's what the insurance pays them to do is kind of bring back a normal, what they'll say, range of motion. It's not to bring back strength, not to bring back the stability that you had before, but rather just give you the range of motion. So then you go back to the gym without really working on correctional exercise and you're like, I'm going to go work out. I'm just going to go work out. You're going to have more compensations than you did before. If anything, you'll make whatever caused your shoulder to get hurt worse. You'll cause worse movement pattern issues. Rather than healing and solving the issue, you'll make things a lot worse later on. So that gradual process is very important. Well, and this is also assuming that you have a really good physical therapist too. You know, just like there's bad trainers, there's bad chiropractors, there's also bad physical therapists. There's physical therapists that will get not get your old range of motion back. They'll get you back range of motion that allows you to do daily functions, which means walking, sitting, standing. That's why I did the quote marks. Yeah. It's not, many times it's not ideal. Many times it's not back to your range of motion you had before that. It's good enough for you to walk. It's good enough for you to get up and down. It's good enough for you to reach above your head, whatever, wherever the injury may be. That's what a lot of them focus on. And that a lot of times is not enough to prevent it from happening again to you. It's enough for you to get by and then you go back again to strength training and then we re-injured again. So I can't stress enough that when you get back into your training and so like the next point is, you know, train what you can. Well, part of training what you can isn't just training the other body, which that is a point too. It's also focusing on that area and working on the mobility and range of motion. You've got to put the energy and focus there that needs to be, I think, a staple in the beginning of your recovery. Right. But you know, the second point being train what you can also refers to this. I've known this to happen with people. They hurt their knee. So now they can't go and do their normal leg workouts. They're doing some correctional stuff. Let's say they're doing some prime pro, some maps, prime pro type stuff for the lower body. But because they can't go in the gym and really work their legs, they also neglect working their upper body. So now they're not working out at all. Studies show that not lifting weights at all accelerates the muscle and strength loss that you may get from your injury. No joke. Literally, going to the gym and working out other areas actually reduces some of the muscle loss you'll have in the injured area. So just because you're upper body, it's even more common for people with upper, I think for guys at least to have an upper body injury and then just not go to the gym and workout legs either. If you hurt your upper body, if you hurt your shoulder or your elbow, you can still work out your legs. You should. You should still work your legs out. Now that doesn't mean you're going to not lose muscle in your upper body, but believe it or not, you actually lose less muscle in your upper body because you work your legs. Whenever you work out, especially with resistance training, most of the muscle building signal is local, meaning most of the muscle building signal goes to the area that you're training. But there is a lesser powerful, but still real muscle building signal that's systemic. So working your legs out does send a large signal to build muscle in your legs, but it sends a smaller signal to build muscle and the rest of your body. There are some very interesting studies that are out that are old and they've done a few of these where people will have a one arm immobilized and they'll have a control group. So one group does nothing, then they'll have another group that works out the other arm and they find that the group that works out the other arm loses less muscle in the arm that was immobilized. Even though it's a different arm. So train what you can also means whatever your injury is, avoid training it or correct, do correctional exercise of whatever is appropriate, but that doesn't mean you should not work out the rest of your body. Find ways to do so. So like with me, with my shoulder injury at that time, that meant I couldn't do barbell squats because I couldn't hold the bar behind my back. I couldn't hold dumbbells for lunges. This is when machines were great for me. I got to went to the gym and I'm like, well, I can leg press. I can literally sit in this chair and do a leg press. I can literally sit in a chair and do a leg extension or a leg curl. And I did do those things. And I do think that those contributed to my faster. Well, you know, this is what machines were. I know this is this was the most valuable part. Well, this is what they originally were designed for. Yeah, they were originally designed for rehabilitation. They were made for that. We just can't we found out that they were just so effective at it that they also built some muscle. And so they've now bled into like everybody's routine. But the reality is, and I know we heart for a long time, mind pump is harped on a lot of, you know, machine exercises, taking over your routine and eliminating the barbell complex movements that are so important. But here's a classic example of where they have tremendous value. And this is the reason why they have tremendous value is because you are in a fixed position, right? The body's in a fixed position. And if you have an injury, you can pick machines that lock that injury area in a fixed position that it's not at risk while you're lifting, you know, potentially heavy weight in other areas of your body. So this is where I do see tremendous value in machine. Totally. So so aside from the correctional exercise and the appropriate stuff you can do from the area that's injured, train the rest of your body. By the way, this is even something you can do when you can't move the injured area. You know, if your leg is in a cast and you're not, you can't do really any correctional exercise, you can still work out your upper body. You could still do seated exercises and seated presses and bench presses and machine rows and curls and those types of exercises. So still train the rest of your body. And because here's the fear, I think some people, number one, they're unmotivated because like, what's the use? I can't, you know, work my upper body. So what's the use of training my legs or I can't work my legs? What's the use of working my upper body? Get over that. That's, that's the, you know, go train what you can. But here's the second part to it. I think that there's a bit of a fear where the person thinks, I'm going to, I'm going to make if my, if I can't work out my legs and I just work on my upper body, I'm going to cause an even greater discrepancy. I'm going to make it even more of an issue because my legs and it's so weak and my upper body is going to continue to get stronger. Not true. The muscle memory brings you back very, very quickly. And again, I'm going to reiterate this, that general muscle building signal that you send reduces the amount of muscle that you lose in the area that you can't, that you can't work. And when you go back to training it, it makes the muscle memory that much more effective. Believe it or not, although you can create big imbalances, there is that there are some safeguards where your body tries to keep things a little bit more balanced. So training what you can is a very, very, uh, it's a very important part of training. And I, and look, the next point I think kind of speaks to this as well, because part of what happens when you're injured is you stop training that area. You start to lose motivation and what tends to fall with that is going to dial in that nutrition. Yeah. You stopped training everything. I hurt my leg. Now I'm not training my arms either, everything. And what's the use of eating a good diet? Right? What's the use of eating a high protein diet? I'm not working out. Anyway, huge mistake. This is a huge mistake. This is where the comfort food and the junk food kind of creeps in is, you know, your, again, psychologically, this is where you want to feel better. And so you're going to gravitate towards a lot of the foods that are comfort foods and things like that. Yeah. It's that all or nothing mentality. Right. If I can't do this and I'm not doing anything. So I'm going, well, that'll make the healing process take longer and it makes the recovery and the road back process take a lot longer. Now, do you see any value in even increasing your protein intake during this time? I do. A high protein diet by itself will build a little bit of muscle. It preserves muscle and people who are not moving. So if you have like a patient who's literally bedridden and you increase the protein, they notice less muscle loss as a result. So it's protective. And I will say this, if you're not moving as much as you were before, I wouldn't necessarily bump my calories really high. I might control my calories a little bit, but I would make up for it with higher protein. So you can reduce your carbs a little bit and then increase your protein. So maybe your calories don't go up, but your protein intake definitely goes up. And remember protein provides you with the building blocks of tissue, muscle in particular. So you want to keep it high. So for somebody who's trying to build muscle and somebody who's trying to heal, I would recommend about a gram of protein per pound of body weight. So whatever your body weight is, hit that number in protein and keep it that way. And you're still going to lose muscle. You're still going to lose strength, but you'll lose less because your protein intake. Well, you glazed over the calorie thing, which I think we had to talk even though this is about protein. It's also about recalculating and recalibrating the amount of calories you should be consuming too. So obviously if you were somebody who was training very intensely for a consistent period of time, and then all of a sudden you go in your sedentary, especially if it's a lower body injury, which is keeping you from even walking around very much and moving, you do need to keep in mind that you're probably going to have to reduce calories dramatically. And so based off of how, and that's going to be, the reason why I won't give you a number is because it's going to be huge range depending on your size and how much your movement is limited, but it's something you need to think about. So you reduce calories at the same time. You don't want to end up reducing protein solo that you're not hitting even those minimum targets. Yeah. So let's say you cut your, you want to, you could cut your calories by 300 calories or 400 calories and still increase your protein. And the way you would cut your calories would be by cutting some carbs, maybe cutting some fat calories. So let's say you cut, you know, 500 calories from carbs and fats, and then you increased your protein intake by 200 calories. You're still at a deficit of 300 calories, but you're now consuming more protein than you were before. And that should have a protective effect on muscle. Now, the next one, this is a good one. And there's kind of two ways to do this. So this is using static tension. So static tension allows you to activate a muscle without moving a joint. So let's say my shoulder is injured and I can't do a bench press. I can't do a row. I can't do a shoulder press, but I can keep my arms immobile and flex my pec or flex my lats and create tension in that area. Now for some people, this is going to be okay. For other people, just flexing the area might be a little bit too much. In this case, this is where stem can be valuable and stem kind of does what static tension does to a much less degree. Static tension is better, but stem is those are the pads that you put on your muscle and it causes the muscle to flex on its own. These days, luckily, stem machines are super cheap. I could go on Amazon and buy one for 20 or 30 bucks. And physical therapists have used them for a long time. And they do reduce the amount of muscle that you lose when you're not moving. But this is really an important point because this is that signal that you're providing to the support system around the joint where the problem lies. And to be able to start creating more of a rigid structure that is telling your body, you have the safety now to start producing movement around this joint again. Everything is accounted for. That's part of the process is really being able to flex and connect and provide that stability there around the joint. Well, this is when I talked about Prime Pro. So Prime Pro, a lot of those movements are static tension movements, right? We take the muscle to its in range of motion and then we connect to it and we create tension. So this is what this is all about. And even though I used an e-stem machine, right? So I think those are great bridges for this time. Like Sal made a point, like if it's so injured still that you can't even flex it, it hurts like, okay, e-stem makes sense. But I also caution people that use that because you're also creating an artificial communication to the muscle to stimulate it. You're not using it intrinsically. You're not using the mainframe. You're not using your brain to fire that muscle. And we don't want to lose that communication. And we don't want to like artificially bring something else in for a long period of time that we don't retrain the connection from the brain to those muscles. So it's a great bridge for somebody that it hurts to do that right now to get some sort of artificial stimulation. But for the long, long term, you want to get to the point where you can actually connect to the muscle and create tension yourself. And that's again, Prime Pro takes you through every major joint in the entire body and will help that. So I don't care what injury you have, there's movements and exercises in that program that will help that person out. And that's where you spend a majority of your time when you're starting to rehab. Yeah. When I had my shoulder in the, you know, in the brace. And then finally, when I was, when I could activate it a little bit, I couldn't, I didn't have a range of motion. So it wasn't like I could lift my arm. That was too much. But what I could do is lean up against the wall. And what I did is I'd lean up against the wall, put my arm up against the wall, and then I just push up against the wall. So my arm didn't move, but I would activate the shoulder muscle. And when I started doing that, when it was appropriate, the recovery really started to take off. This is how you use static tension. Let's say your knee is injured. Once it becomes appropriate, you could literally flex, just flex the quad. Just focus on flexing the quad. Maybe put your foot up against something that doesn't move like the wall and then push against the wall. Don't move the joint, just activate the muscle. That activation alone prevents muscle loss and maintains that connection. Also going back to like talking about the threshold, so you know sort of where your boundaries are, like right up in front of that threshold is where I really want to kind of squeeze and connect and provide stability. Because that's what's now going to provide that feedback to your body that, okay, now we can, now that that's secure, we can, we can press a little further forward and gain just a little bit more range of motion. Now the last point is a relatively new one that I've started using. I would say in the last maybe six years, five or six years. Before that, I wasn't super familiar with it, but it's also one of the most exciting and that's blood flow restriction training. It's exciting because nothing that we have tested or seen can maintain muscle or even build muscle on an injured joint like BFR. It's actually, no joke, studies will show that it, it's similar. It's not the same, but it's similar to lifting weights like you normally would lift weights. Like there's no recovery, you know, tool, there's no, you know, healing tool, there's nothing that the physical therapist provided before that would, that even comes close to what BFR could do in terms of maintaining or even building muscle. And so putting a lot of impact in that injured joint. That's the thing. Like if your knee is injured, in order to really build it back and to build muscle, you have to wait for it to be fully healed so you could do your normal exercise, your squats, your lunges, your leg press or whatever. Up until that point, it's basically about preventing as much muscle loss as possible, but you're going to lose some muscle. BFR has actually shown to stop- Increase muscle. To stop the muscle loss and then maybe even build a little bit, which is really crazy. So the way BFR works is you, and it's much more effective for the limbs, so the arms and the legs, is to tie off the limb with like a knee wrap and you tie it off so that you restrict some of the blood flow. You don't tie it off so tightly that you go numb, but enough to where you feel the blood flow is restricted and you feel some tension. Then you do some light exercise. So let's say normally, let's say I have a knee injury. It still hurts a little too much. I can't do body weight squats. I can't do barbell squats, but I can walk and I can move it. So I can move it a little bit and I get on the leg extension machine and let's say normally I use 150 pounds when I'm healthy on the leg extension machine. Well, with BFR, I would tie off my leg with a knee wrap. I'd get on the leg extension machine and let's say at the moment, my knee can handle 20 pounds. Like that's it. More than that, it's too much for my knee joint, but 20 pounds is about appropriate. Under normal circumstances, 20 pounds wouldn't build muscle because the muscles that I had built before could handle 150 pounds. But now that I've restricted the blood, it prevents, it actually starves the muscles of oxygen, making, training them as if they were trained under high loads. So now I'm doing the 20 pound leg extensions and as I'm doing reps, and this is what you'll experience, you will feel burning in the muscle like if you're doing something with much more weight. You do a few sets like this, you get an incredible pump and it actually tricks the muscles into thinking they're being trained with heavier weight. And it's so remarkable in fact that people who don't need to heal their body from injury can use BFR to build their body parts anyway. That's how effective it is. Well, here's a cool thing too. This is so new that if you have a physical therapist that is utilizing this, you probably have a better physical therapist. It's a good litmus test. Yeah, this is something that is, it's relatively new. It's six years or so, six, seven years is when it started hitting kind of a fitness thing. Yeah, it was, it started in the sports world, of course, right? Where lots of money is at stake and getting these athletes back on the field or back on the ice or because I believe it was hockey where it became popular first. That is where we found this research. And that, and then it slowly has made its way into your standard physical therapy and then now into the bodybuilding and training world. But it's still relatively new. So if you have a physical therapist that went to school 15, 20 years ago and they're rehabbing you, they may not even be utilizing this. And I think it's one of the coolest things. I mean, that I've came across in the last decade for sure. And training that has been like a new hack that we didn't know. I use BFR all the time. I mean, we, what, three years ago, three, four years ago, we created a guide. So we have a BFR guide. It's a collusion training guide. I think we call it. Yeah, yeah. And we also have done some free content on YouTube, our Mind Pump TV channel. So if you want to see how we utilize it, we actually, I think in the YouTube channel, we're talking about how to utilize it for building muscle by itself. But this is incredible for rehab. And this, in my opinion, like this is like the next, so you talk about physical physical therapies first, then you get into a lot of like the Prime Pro type of work. And BFR is really, I think the way you should be lifting weights and training initially before you start to load and do anything like that. Yeah, it's extremely effective. It's a wonderful tool. In fact, it's a tool that we, you know, I even recommended, I think a couple times for people when they were training at home with no equipment during, you know, the pandemic. So it's a great way to prevent muscle loss. But that's pretty, you know, what we just told you really is the roadmap to preventing muscle loss and to getting you back on your feet as quickly as possible. You know, number one, though, is to focus on recovery and healing. If you don't recover properly and get your body to heal properly, nothing we said will help. You'll be stuck on this hamster's wheel of continued pain and injury and not being able to get back to where you were before. But keep in mind, muscle memory is a real thing. And if you do it right, and if you heal yourself right, getting back to where you were before can be a very fast and rewarding process. And if you do it the right way, you'll get back better than you were before. Look, Mind Pump is recorded on videos as well as audios. So if you want to watch the show, check us out on YouTube, Mind Pump podcast. You can also find all of us on Instagram. You can find Doug, the producer at Mind Pump Doug. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin. You can find me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam. It's not that I can't change the light bulb, you know? And so last night, she's like, we get done bathing Max or whatever. She's like, could you, uh, could you bathe Max tonight so I can go change the light bulb in the closet? And I'm like, oh, like, wait. Yeah, okay. All right, now you're challenging me. Yeah. Hold on.