 Boom, what's up everybody? All right, here's today's giveaway. We're gonna be giving away the intuitive nutrition guide that'll help you develop a more intuitive approach to nutrition for better health, leanness and muscle. And we're gonna give away the NoBS six pack formula. This is a workout just for the core. In fact, it was designed to build the muscles of the core, right? So your abs are more visible even at higher body fat percentages. Here's how you can win both of those together. Leave a comment, the first 24 hours that we dropped this episode. Subscribe to this channel, turn on your notifications. And if we like your comment, among all the comments, if we think it's the best one, we'll notify you and we'll get free access to both of those things. Also, huge sale going on right now. Two very popular workout programs are 50% off right now. So here they are. Maps hit. High intensity interval training done right. All written out for you with exercise demos. And maps split. This is a bodybuilder split style routine. This program's about three months long. Both routines, both programs, 50% off right now but you gotta use this code, DEC50. Go to the site mapsfitnessproducts.com and then use that code DEC50 for 50% off, either one or both of those programs. All right, here comes the show. What would you say is the number one fitness rule? Oh, this is good. This will be a good. The golden rule. This will be a good discussion because I think there is one rule above all. One ring to rule. Regardless of your goal. I wanna look pretty. I wanna build muscle. I wanna lose body fat. I wanna jump higher, run faster. Longevity, like what's the, is there a single rule that Umbrella's all pursuits? Be healthy. And I think being healthy is the number one rule because it contributes to all the other goals that people have. And if health is sacrificed, I don't care what your goal is, you're gonna miss out on whatever your goal is. At some point- Why do you think this overlooks so much though? Because- It's not expedient. It's also not, look, here's the deal. It's not a sexy line. It doesn't sell much, right? Like what does that mean? It's also kind of vague. Be healthy. Okay, what does that mean? In fact, you know what a lot of people think health means? Absence of illness. Yeah. If I'm not sick, I'm healthy. I've had clients who go to the doctor, get a physical. Blood markers are all good. Yeah, they're inactive. They don't eat very good. They, you know, they're already taking certain medications, but they say, oh, no, doctor said I'm perfectly healthy. The absence of illness is not health. That just means you're not sick. It reminds me of the recommendations for certain nutrients that you'll get from, let's say, the FDA, where they'll say, okay, this is how much vitamin C you need. This is how much vitamin D you need. Those, many of those guidelines are there to prevent illness. Right, the bare minimum you should be intaking, right? Right, but they're not optimal, right? So like for example, this is a very easy one, right? Protein intake. It's very well established that a high protein intake, which is roughly 0.6, 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight for most relatively normal body weight individuals, maximizes satiety and muscle growth and it's good for fat loss, but that's more than what is required to prevent illness from lack of protein. So you'll get a recommendation that's like half of that for protein intake, but again, it's not optimal, right? It's not for health. So I think that's the first thing to focus on is that health is not the absence of illness or at least not the way we're talking about it. So when we're talking about health being the number one fitness goal or rule, it's not just not getting sick, it's about going beyond that. You know, along the lines of the protein intake that you're talking about right now, this actually reminds me when this really started to click for me. I remember when I was younger, I was taking all the over the counter pro hormone, anderstein and I was taking creatine cell tech is what it was back then and all these muscle building gimmick supplements. And I was doing all that stuff and I wasn't really paying attention to diet. I really had never tracked my food, measured weight, done any of that stuff. I was just, I was a young kid who was lifting weights and just assumed that if I wanted the competitive edge, I wanted to build a lot of muscle then I gotta go take all the muscle building supplements. And so I was spending what little money I had on that and saw little to no results. I remember the first time I began to track weight, measured my food and saw that I was grossly under eating protein and not in a unhealthy manner. I wasn't eating like something that was, you know, gonna make- You were still getting your essential protein. Right, I was getting essential but I wasn't in the optimal range to build muscle. Okay, well I'm gonna increase my protein and instantly I started to pack on muscle faster and better than I ever got from anything that I paid hundreds and hundreds of dollars for over the counter and to me what it just, it highlights the point you're trying to make right now is that, you know, if my body is optimal as far as what it's being fed or how it's being taken care of, it's gonna respond the way I want it to respond a hell of a lot more than trying to take all this other shit to try to trigger it to that. A really healthy body adapts well. What I mean by that is, you know, building strength, improving your speed, your flexibility, your ability to handle stress, burn body fat. Like these are all adaptation processes and your body is better at doing those things when it's healthy. When it's not healthy, oftentimes it can resist certain adaptation processes. For example, if your body's under a lot of stress, then its goal may be to conserve energy and so what it might not wanna do and often won't do is build muscle or strength. It may want to hold on to body fat at all means because you're under too much stress just to give you kind of an example. Without health or when your health really starts to decline, you lose performance. So you might think to yourself like, I just wanna be fast and strong and explosive and those are great goals. There's nothing wrong with those goals. But if your health starts to slip away, then you're gonna lose those things as well. You will start to lose strength, you will start to lose speed, you will start to lose explosive ability. Aesthetics is a big one. This is a huge one. It's like, I wanna look really good. Well, the way you look is a reflection of your health and yes, you can get away with sacrificing your health in the name of aesthetics. We know many fitness influencers do this but at some point, the bill shows up and you gotta pay the bill, right? At some point, your health starts to decline and then it starts to reflect in your aesthetics and if you've ever met anybody who's been doing this for a long time who constantly sacrifices their health for aesthetics, you know, at a certain point, ugh, it's, you don't look good. This isn't working for you anymore because your health is starting to decline. Quality of life, this is a big one. There's a big difference. Well, okay, obviously, this is obvious for people watching this right now. If you have poor health where you have chronic illness and pain, your quality of life just sucks. I mean, if you've ever just, even if you don't have any chronic health issues, if you've ever injured yourself, you know how much it reduces your quality of life. But there's also a difference in quality of life between like, you know, I'm just not sick and optimal health, right? Optimal health, you have way more energy. You have a more positive outlook on things. That makes a huge difference too. I don't wanna just skim over that. When you feel good in an optimally healthy way, you're more positive. Negative things don't feel so negative. You feel more motivated. You feel like things aren't as stressful. So the difference between, you know, okay health or not sick and optimal health, there's a big jump in quality of life there as well. Well, I think there's also one factor that's not as visible. And you're kind of alluding to that with talking about like how happy and how, you know, vibrant people are in terms of like their mental health as well. So that's like, we just don't, we do a bad job of considering the holistic, the body from a holistic perspective, all the systems, all of the things that have to work correctly in order for you to be at that optimal level where you actually experience that. And you understand that there's degrees of quality and what that can provide in terms of like how, you know, not just longevity and living longer, but what your abilities are and also your interactions, your interpersonal relationships with people and how that affects everyone around you as well. Yeah, and being healthy also allows you to continue to train. It keeps that your ability to exercise and work out there. And it keeps the catalog of exercises that you have at your disposal very large, right? If you injure yourself, well now you've just narrowed the amount of exercises that you can utilize or you've reduced your ability to train and exercise, which really sucks, you know? And I mean, here's an extreme case, but you know, it's like you get older. Like, man, my favorite activity was hiking and I can't hike anymore. It just, my ankles hurt or my knees bother me, right? So that can definitely have a negative effect on your quality of life because now you can't do one of your favorite things, right? So good health means, in the context of fitness, means you have good movement. So there's no real glaring issues with your movement. You could do most fundamental exercises and movements without too many issues. You have a low risk of injury. So it's not a guarantee against injury, but when you're healthy in the way that we're talking about it, the risk of injury is quite low, right? So if you've been working out for 15 years and you might have tweaked a muscle here or there a few times, like that's not bad. That's not bad at all. In fact, it's funny I had this conversation along, I just remember this conversation I had with a client a long time ago where they were like, oh, I like working out, but what about the injuries? And I said, if you compare two groups of people for 10 years and on one side is people who've exercised for 10 years and done it properly. They've had good mobility, they've exercised appropriately, they're focused on their health. You may have a few tweaks and injuries where I pulled my back a little bit or my shoulder got a little stiff and sore. If you go with the other side who did no exercise and nothing over 10 years, you'll have more injuries. You'll have more pain from lack of movement from sitting on the couch or sitting at a desk all the time. Oh, good movement and maintaining a healthy level of strength everywhere. It has that sort of effect where you basically are able to keep up. Man, I've totally lost training where I was going. Well, you can keep moving when you have good strength. Keep going with strength. You're stable. And the thing is it affects you mentally so much because also too, there's moments where you get pain and pain sets in because of lack of movement but also your loss of strength, it creates those signals back to the body which then my interactions with my kids, if I'm in pain, I'm a lot shorter and I'm less tolerant of conflict or having certain conversations with people that I know I'm on edge. I just carry myself completely different when I'm in a state of pain. So let's pretend we have somebody listening right now who wants to build some muscle, maybe they want to burn some body fat. They know they want to look better but they hear it, they get the message, they've heard us talk about this stuff before and they're like, okay, I get it. I'm message received. I'm not supposed to focus just on the way I look. A better approach to this is to approach being healthy. How do you go about that? What are you looking for? How do we guide somebody in that direction of like how do they figure out, am I eating optimally right now? Am I lowering stress like I'm supposed to? Like how do they go after that? Because there are so many things that fall under the umbrella of being healthy like we've been talking about for the last 10 or 15 minutes. So then you get a client and you've got them to reframe the way they look at fitness now. Like, okay, I want to be healthy. I get it, Sal. What are the steps? Yeah, what are the steps and where do I focus and what am I looking at? I think the first thing you want to do is you want to realize that the best coach or trainer or guide that exists in the world is your own body and the signals that your body will send you. There's nothing more accurate and there's nothing more individualized than being able to read those signals. By the way, that's the key is learning how to listen to your body because I can say listen to your body and someone may say, well, my body tells me to sit on the couch and eat donuts. That's what my body's saying right now. My stomach grumbles and I listen to that. Yeah, and that's mainly because we've learned how to read some signals and we've also learned how to ignore others or not even pay attention to other signals. It reminds me of, I know I've talked about this before but I think it's definitely pertinent to this which is the four stages of learning that everybody goes through and the first stage is unconscious incompetence. You're just, you're not aware of what you're not aware of, right? So it's like the first time, it's like the first time you learned anything. Like I remember years ago, I wanted to get an investment license. I thought I was gonna, for short stint, work in investments. And I remember the first few days going into learning about investments and realizing how much I didn't know. Like I had no idea that I didn't know as much as I did because I didn't even know what I didn't know, right? So that first few days I was in there and I was like, oh my gosh, this is way more stuff than I realized, right? So a lot of people are just unconsciously incompetent. And I know this because here's a great example. When I would get a new client and I learned how to get around this, right? I'll get a new client and I would say, here's one of the questions I would have on an intake form would be something like, do you have any areas of pain in your body? And I swore to God, eight out of 10 times, people would say, no, I don't have any areas of pain. And then I would do this. I'd do the checklist from head to toe. Do you have any neck pain? What about shoulder pain? What about back pain? My elbow bothers me. Yes. And then once I'd hit that, oh yeah, actually my elbow does kind of bother me a little bit throughout the day. But I never broke it or I never had surgery. Yeah, oh my back. Yeah, I tweak it, you know, like every other month or so it'll bother me. I'll take it and leave and then I'm okay. Oh yeah, my knee kind of bothers. And we'll go down the checklist. And you start to, I remember the first time this happened as a few times as a trainer. I was like, what? Why aren't people aware of this kind of stuff? And then I realized, well, they just, they've dealt with it for so long that it was just, it's just there. It's not something that they even think about. Most people just attributed to be getting old. Yeah. I remember that. That was like part of my spiel and pitches. Like I would tell people like, listen, all these nagging pains is not because you're old. It's because you've had these issues that you've been dealing with for years and they're just catching up to you and they're letting you know. It's not just a symptom of being old. Like there's many people that are old that are pain-free and just fine. Continuously repeated patterns that you have changed. But they justify it because of that. Because it's like, oh, wait till, and they would say that, oh, wait till you get my age. You'll see. And by the way, these were people that were like in their late 30s and 40s when they were trainers. I was saying this. It wasn't like they were 70s and 80s. Yeah, you wanna learn how to listen to your body and pay attention to all the signals. So do you take over-the-counter medications for things that happen to you all the time? Like, oh yeah, I always have heartburn. I take this. Or I have headaches three times a week. So I take ibuprofen. I have to take this stuff for my skin because it does this issue. Or I have to take laxatives quite frequently or anti-diarrheal medicine. So that's one place to start. Also consider how you feel when you wake up. Do you wake up and feel like a truck ran you over? Do you go to bed and have trouble sleeping? Do you find dramatic energy shifts throughout the day? Like it's normal to have energy changes, but do you do this like great energy crash? Oh my God, I can barely keep my eyes open. Like pay attention to all of these things. Now why is this important? Because when you start exercising and you start changing your diet, you wanna be able to pay attention to how certain things are changing. Now are they changing for the positive? Let's say you're somebody that has this kind of low level chronic back pain and you're paying attention to it. Even though you're used to it, you're so used to it now that it's just kind of part of who you are. But then you start working out and you start pushing yourself. And you're not paying attention to the fact that your back hurts a little more than it used to and you have to take more ibuprofen than you did before, right? But let's say now you are paying attention and you go, wait a minute, I was taking a couple ibuprofen every other day. Now that's since I started working out, I'm up to twice as much. Maybe I'm not working out the right way. So that would be an example, right? Or maybe you change your diet and you notice that you're digested. I've had people do this before where they go, oh, I heard, actually I had a client once who started eating more raw vegetables. And she just like, oh, I read raw vegetables were really healthy. I'm eating tons of raw vegetables. And through conversations with her, she just started getting lots of bloating. But didn't really, she was not paying attention to her body. So for her, she's like, yeah, I'm bloated, but what's the big deal? People get bloated. And I'm like, maybe raw vegetables aren't something that's working well for your body. So we had to change her nutrition. I think it's important too to know this is like a lifelong pursuit too. Of like looking for these signals and learning. It's not like it just to, oh, I figured a few things out and then I'm done. I don't, I don't, I mean I- It's that awareness, right? Yeah, I shared the impact. Obviously, if you've heard me talk about Ned, when we have commercials from them, I talk about how mellow has been like unbelievable from it's been now religiously I take it. And it's not mellow the supplement is magical or something that Ned did that was so amazing. It's that, oh shit, I was probably magnesium deficient. I was probably not getting enough magnesium because the impact it's now making on my sleep. And when I get better sleep, I'm better at my job. I'm better on the podcast. My body responds better when it comes to building muscle and burning body fat. And it's like one simple little thing like that by tweaking in either potentially in your diet or taking a supplement to make you healthier. And then it has this cascading effect that plays into all your pursuits. Well, to that point, yeah, it's a constant practice. And I think that if you look at health like that and it's not like something that I'm trying to get to a place and then, you know, figure out what that place looks like and stay there. It's like you're just continuously evaluating a lot of those signals and feedback that your body's providing it. You just have to be receptive to it. And that does take a lot of insight and a lot of like deliberate practice to figure out what those signals are or where they're coming from and just you have to pay attention and be present. Yeah, practice is the best word for it by the way because it's something you practice regularly. Why? Because life circumstances change. So if I'm looking to optimize my health and everything's going great in my life, that's gonna look different with my application of exercise and nutrition and meditation or prayer or sleep. But let's say I have a family member who gets really sick or I lose my job or I just have a baby so now my sleep isn't so great, right? Now I'm gonna be changing the way I apply certain things to help optimize my health for those circumstances. So in one circumstance, it may be that I work out really hard. In other circumstances, it may be that it worked out really easy because other things are more challenging for me. It may be that I need to lower my anxiety. So now going to the gym, it's more like stretching and mobility and I'm just kind of staying in there and being calm. So this is why it's a practice because it's ever changing, ever evolving but always have that connection to your health. I had somebody close to me a long time ago who had diagnosed with a terminal form of cancer and once she got diagnosed, she looked back and she used all these signs and symptoms that she ignored for like four months. She's like, oh my gosh, that's why this happened. That's why that happened. And just ignoring, ignoring, ignoring until in her case, it was really bad but how many of us do that, right? How many times have we, how many times as anybody who's maybe watching this had a medical situation arise and then you look back and go, oh yeah, I was ignoring all those signs and signals for so long and it's mainly because we're disconnected, right? In wellness, they'll say that you're not in your body, you're separate from your body. So that's really what that means to listen to your body. Even if you just say that to yourself and just focus on it throughout the day a couple of times, that alone makes a huge difference. Well, how common would you guys say that you would see a client who is eating a food that they have like an intolerance to? How common? It's almost always. Everybody's susceptible. I mean, even myself, like I'd say that's something that like I was guilty forever of is just, you know, you just like a little bit of bloat or watery tension. It's like, maybe you don't really notice it but it's like you eat that three, four times a week and you just, you know, you just chalk it up as a full, oh, I ate too much or a full day but then you're all inflamed for the next 24 hours and your stool is off and you just chalk it up as normal, you know? Dude, I have an uncle, right? When we have a family, you know, big Italian family functions and there's always some kind of a pasta that's being served. And when I was a kid, he would always do this, right? We'd eat and he'd eat a lot, you know, a lot of people eat a lot in my family and he'd sit there with his belly and he'd tell us the kids, right? Come here, hit my belly. So hard. Oh my God, I ate so much, I hurt so much. And then when I got older and I became a trainer and he would make that same comment that he always does and I go, you know, uncle, maybe you might have an issue with gluten, but what's gluten? And I said, I wonder if it's the pasta and the bread that's, because that's not supposed to happen. So my aunt started serving him gluten-free pasta, which at first he complained because oh, it's not the same or whatever. But then he's like, oh my God, the difference. Like my stomach doesn't get so hard. This is like decades of him doing this, right? Because you're not in your body and you're just not really, you're not paying attention. And again, if you get really good at listening to your body, it will tell you what you need to do or the direction you need to move. It's not easy, but that awareness is the first step. Well, the problem is that that's the body already beginning to give you these pretty loud signals, but we're still ignoring it. Oh, they'll get louder and louder. Yeah, we normally wait until you get diagnosed with something where you've got something really like chronically bad. But for the most part, there's a lot of people listening right now that I guarantee you're eating foods that make you unhealthy, that you don't realize that make you feel this way and your body has a response to it, but because you've kind of just ignored it for so long. And because it's not- And there's a downstream effect to that. And because it's not crippling you, you just justify it. Yeah, here's a common one in our space, right? How about this, right? Like I've been working out, training heavy. Ooh, my elbow bothers me a little bit. I think I'll wear an elbow sleeve, you know? I'm going to change this shoe or tighten up my belt a little bit. And they constantly are adding things to their body to mask these little pains. And then later they tear something and then you're going to say, yeah, you know, I should have listened to my, my elbow has been hurting me for a while. I just kept taping it up or rubbing icy hot on it. You just figured it incorrect itself. I just kept doing push-ups. Yeah, you know, so the next step would be to, this is part of that awareness is to consider the whole picture, right? Look at everything. So why is that important? Well, maybe what you're looking at and the only thing you're paying attention to is the scale. So you're like, oh my God, I'm losing weight. This, everything's going great, but you're not considering that your sleep has been bad. You haven't been sleeping as good or your skin really isn't looking like it used to, right? Or you're losing weight, but you're pale or you're losing energy. I used to see this all the time in the gym. I would see people who would lose weight and look less healthy than they did when they were heavier because the way that they were losing weight was either by starving themselves or by over-exercising. And because they don't consider the whole picture and because the first step, which was to be aware, because they lacked awareness and they didn't consider the whole picture, they would come into the gym looking less healthy. You know, I'm talking about people lost 30 pounds looking less healthy and I talked to them and they'd have the dark circles under their eyes. I just shared with you guys the other day one of our big famous fitness influencer friends that we know that decided to compete recently. And I was looking at her pictures at the beginning of her journey and where she's at now and she looked so sick and unhealthy. And a lot of that starts because I think the routine, the diet and routine that she's currently in is already not optimal for her body either. She's already banging the shit out of it and overstressing and under-eating over cardio like as it, and then decided to, hey, I'm gonna compete and take my body to a whole other level. And then you got people that are celebrating because it's leaner, an ab is popping out or body fat percentage drop down. They're not looking at everything. Right, and I'm looking and I'm like, dude, does nobody else see what I'm looking at? I look at your dark circles and looks gaunt and it's like, this is not healthy, man. And then you got a million people looking up to you trying to do what you're doing. It's such a terrible, terrible message. Yeah, influencers and fitness media like that tends to condition people to not consider the whole picture. Right. Because again, I would talk to these people that would lose 30 pounds, that would come into my gym regularly. And I'm a gym manager, so I'm trying to meet people and talk to people. And I would ask, you can't go up to someone, you can't go up to a member and say to them, hey, it looks like your health isn't as good. That's just, it's not gonna be taken well. It's not gonna be effective. The desired result is to help them, it's not gonna help them so you don't say that. So what I would try to do is ask them questions to see if I could get that out, right? So I'd be like, hey, how you been? Oh, I'm great, you know? How do you feel? How do you feel, you know? And I'm looking at them, again, the dark circles. Oh man, I lost 30 pounds. I'm like, I'm so much healthier. Like, do you feel like healthier? Well, I mean, I look better and I'm so happy about that. And I'd be like, man, you are ignoring how you feel. Cause I can clearly see that your energy is lower than when you first came in and signed up because you're overtraining yourself and under eating. But you're not considering the fact that you, you know, that you had, that you're not looking at the whole picture. It's just the scale, right? Or how about this? You'll see this on the flip side. Just, you know, how strong I am, you know? I had this one guy that worked for me years ago, sales guy. And at the time, let me think, I was a real young manager. So, and he was a lot older than me. So he's probably in his 30s. And this guy would, you know, he was just eating like crazy and he was on all kinds of anabolic gear. And, you know, he'd come and get so excited cause he added 15 pounds to his squat or whatever. I swear to God, he looked like he was in a heart attack just sitting there. When I was looking at him, his face was red and you know, he was getting real bloated. You know, he was so excited that he kept adding weight to his lifts. And I remember thinking like, oh man, this, you know, his health isn't doing so good. But again, he's not considering the whole picture. So that's an important piece to all of this is to look at everything. And in that context, that'll help, I guess, direct you towards better health. You know, mentioning the, you know, power lifter type guy like that that's doing like an extreme sports reminds me of the next point, which is like staying in a like either an extreme modality or extreme goal for too long of a period of time. Like I think there's, I think there's lots of value in getting shredded at one point in your life to prove that you can discipline yourself and be consistent like that. But to stay in that, and this is really, this is why I was, I was so excited to move out of the competitive space. I mean, people always ask me if I would go back and do that. And the answer is probably never again. It was fun why it lasted. I thought I got tremendous value from, you know, getting myself to that position. But I would never want to stay there. And not because of that, just because I think it's hard because actually when you get the momentum and you're there, it's actually not that hard to do that. Like at least for, I didn't feel it was that hard. Once I got there, getting there was hard. Maintaining it was, I mean, when you have that much lean mass and you've built that much consistency, but I just know it's not healthy for my body to live in that state. It's just too extreme and it's better for my, to let my body kind of ebb and flow. And you see this in sports a lot when someone is passionate about being a power lifter or a bodybuilder or whatever, you know, crossfitter. And they're just, they're so extreme in their sport and they look, they look cool. You know, they look cool maybe afterwards. And so they justify that it's healthy and it's not healthy for their body. Well, and I think if you have the ability to pursue some of these more extreme activities and challenge yourself, there's lots of growth opportunity there. You're gonna learn a whole lot. And like you said, going through your journey of like going up on stage and just, you're able to now relay and relate to people like on that journey, figuring out a healthier way to kind of approach it mentally and all that. There's lots of value there. And it reminds me back to our conversation with Dr. Andy Galpin where it's like, you know, there's opportunities to optimize or what was the other version? Yeah, there was optimize or what was the other word, adapt? Adapt, adapt and optimize. Cause then you wanna be able to, too, though, to find your way back to homeostasis. So what is, what is your healthy state look like? Well, you know, where's your balance? And to, you know, to grow is great, but now you gotta find your way back to balance and make sure that you have longevity. Otherwise, you're just, you're redlining too long. You're gonna, you know, eventually things are gonna backfire. Yeah, balance and health is the base, that's your home base. These extreme endeavors where you move away from home base. And I think a lot of the value in the extremes, first of all, anything extreme is away from optimal health. So extreme endurance, extreme strength, extreme leanness, right? Any type of extreme performance or goal moves you away from optimal health. But I think that there's a lot of value in the way, especially when they're done right, in the way that they contribute to the quality of your life. Like, you know, I know that trying to deadlift 600 pounds is not, for me, optimal health. I know that. But I love it, right? I love it. I have so much fun doing it, right? And I don't, and I think that quality of life and enjoyment is a part of things. So, you know, if we were just gonna try and live as long as possible, things might get a little boring. So that's okay to do that. But don't stay there for too long or don't, especially don't always stay there. Because when you always stay there, then you really start to run into problems. And then the irony is those extreme goals that you're so married to slip away. So if you think you're amazing because you're the strongest person in your gym and you're constantly staying there, never going back to balance and health, never going back to home base, allowing your body to be in that optimal state of health, you'll lose that strength. That strength is gonna start to move away from you, either because of injury or because of breakdown, right? This is true for being super lean or being whatever. You know, being a CrossFit athlete. You push too hard for too long in that extreme. The health starts to decline. And like we said at the beginning of this episode, health is the foundation of the base. When that slips, you can forget about everything else. So there is nothing wrong. And I'll never say you should not pursue extreme goals. There's definitely good ways to do it and there's better ways to do it and less optimal or not so good ways to do it. But there's a quality of life thing. It's fun. I do lots of things that are not healthy that improve my quality of life. I may have a glass of wine every once in a while. I may smoke a joint with my partners here. But that's okay. But let's say, you know, if I did that every single day, now we start to run into, you know, some problems. So don't stay in that extreme lane for too long, remember the home base, right? Now the last one, this is a big one. This is a tough one. This is a tough conversation with yourself. And really you're the only one that can decide this or understand this for yourself, which is to be mindful of your tendencies and your insecurities. Ooh, this is a hard one, right? Like I'll speak for myself because I can do that best with this particular point. I know that my insecurities around fitness lie around not being muscular enough, right? Or not being strong enough, right? I grew up as a very skinny kid, or at least that's what I thought. And so that's what drove me to work out. So I have to be aware of that tendency because very easily can it slip away from me and I push too much in that direction to the point where I start to sacrifice my health. So I have to remind myself like, I know my tendency is to push in that direction. So what does that mean? What does that mean for me? Well, it means that I'm probably moving in that direction more often than I should, but because I'm aware of it, what I'm not gonna do is sign up for a contest with my partners here who can bulk the most. Like I'm not gonna do that. That's like a bad idea. That's my own insecurity. I'm gonna throw myself into the fire. It's gonna push me in a bad direction, right? If your insecurity is the opposite and you constantly feel like you're overweight, even though you're not and you know this is an issue that you've worked on, you probably don't wanna sign up for a stage show. You don't wanna do a bikini competition or a physique competition if that's your issue because that's gonna make it really bad for you, right? So be mindful of those insecurities and how they may drive you. It really will help, I think, at least move you away from that, from going too extreme in those directions. The most common example that I see with this is somebody who views themselves as fat, right? So part of their self-talk is I'm fat, right? So they see themselves as fat when in reality they're carrying body fat on them. So they have this extra stored energy that they have, but they view themselves as fat. They decide to start their weight loss journey and they're reducing calories, they're doing cardio, they're training and they get on a scale, right? Maybe the first three days they're seeing great results and they're celebrating, yes, I'm kicking my ass in the gym, I'm getting leaner, I'm getting smaller, I'm losing weight. And then they get on a scale on day four or five, let's say, and the scale stayed the same or it went up, maybe. And they now allow their insecurity of being fat to drive their behaviors now based off of that. Even though you can't expect to lose weight in four or five. And not to mention that's a terrible indicator of what you're potentially doing, right or wrong, because like we've talked about on the show before many times is that very easily this person could have had two or three extra glasses of water, maybe they took in an extra 1000 milligrams of sodium, maybe they have 40 or 60 more grams of carbs instead of fat that day. All of these things, maybe they had a stressful day or didn't sleep very much the night before. All of these things can result in them retaining a couple pounds of water, which will eventually come right out in the next 48 to 72 hours. But most people don't know this. And then they see the scale and see that they stayed the same or went up. And then that results in them doing more extreme bad behaviors in that direction, which is normally cutting their calories even more, increasing even more activity. And they don't realize how much they shoot themselves. Yeah, they're sacrificing their health for that insecurity that's driving them. We had someone in the forum recently make a post. Now, I don't remember the exact details, but this woman actually had called and did one of our live Q and A's and we had helped her. And so then this was maybe two months later and she did a post in our forum. And the post was basically like, what's wrong with my body? I'm doing everything you guys told me. So she starts off by saying something along those lines. Oh, I called into the show and I did everything that they told me, but it's just not working. And then I go into the, so I'm in the forum, I get tagged because she tagged me. And so I'm like looking at her posts, I'm like, okay, well, how can I help her? And then I look at the details. She went from 1,300 calories to 1,800 calories. So she bumped her calories by 500 over the course of two months. She cut her cardio down because she was overdoing cardio. Her strength is going up and the scale went up one or two pounds, I think it was. One or two pounds. Yeah, awesome situation. And I know, but she was like, what's going on? What happened? I'm like, hold on a second. And then I rephrased it to her. I said, you increase your calories by 500, you cut your cardio down, you're stronger, and you only gained two pounds. And she's like, oh yeah, I guess that's pretty good. I'm like, that's excellent. Yes, it's muscle. Your metabolism is speeding up. You probably gained muscle. You're probably a little leaner, but if you're not, my goodness, we're moving in the right direction anyway. We're setting up this wonderful situation where later on when we do a cut, it's gonna be very easy. You're gonna get lean. But her insecurities were driving that whole post. That whole post was about her insecurity about I can't gain any weight and what's going on. Well, I see some of these insecurities and I think that's probably the most relatable and most common is just the feeling of being overweight or being fat or letting that sort of dictate, even your eating habits. And so there's certain foods that sort of have that response where you just wanna punish yourself because I shouldn't eat this. I always eat this. And then you just get into this vicious cycle of I'm eating it, so now I'm being bad and it just tends to perpetuate more of a binge situation, more of a frequency of bringing it back because you can only sort of fight yourself internally for so long instead of forgiving yourself and being flexible and having a completely different outlook and looking at it in a healthier light. The other one I see that's common is areas on their body that they're not happy with. So I have a little bit of a gut and so my programming and workout routine is centered around a thousand crunches a day. Or- Yeah, super unbalanced routine. Right, or I have, I wanna work on my butt and so every day I'm doing all these silly, glute kickbacks and dog peas and like so. A lot of times these insecurities about an area drives us to do the things that are not gonna get you the most results, but they don't realize it, just like the person I was giving the example of who cuts their calories and runs on the treadmill like crazy. Many times what's wrong, the worst part about these insecurities is it drives you in the wrong direction. Even though your desired outcome is to get the better butt or to lose the 10 pounds or whatever it may be, because they're driven from the wrong place, you end up doing something that ends up shooting yourself in the foot. Had you come from a better place of health and thinking like, how do I become a healthier person? You'll have a better, you'll make better choices when it comes to program design and eating. Yeah, your insecurities really distort your subjective opinion and objective ones as well. How many times have you guys had a client do this where they'll complain about how they look and let's say this client has been with you forever and then they'll look at an old picture of themselves and say, man, I thought I looked really bad back then but I looked really good. I wanna look like that again. I actually caught a client on this once, right? I had this woman that I trained for like 13 years and she just always had this negative view of herself and I get it, by the way, I'm in the fitness space because that's what drove me there, like most people in the fitness space. But I remember she brought in a picture once and it was like a five-year-old picture and she goes, Sal, I wanna look like this again. And then I took the picture, I said, oh yeah, I remember that, you know, because I trained her at that point and I sat her down and I said, do you remember what you used to say about yourself five years ago when this picture was taken? You hated the way you looked. She's like, I did. I'm like, yeah, maybe we need to address the insecurity because your opinion, your opinion is so distorted because of this. In my, for me, you know, again, because I wanted to build muscle and get stronger, this would affect my workouts because let's say I went into a workout and the goal was to improve my form and my technique or maybe I was gonna do shorter rest periods. God forbid I took weight off the bar. Oh no, I'm not taking weight off. I don't care how the workout changes. When I bench, this is how much I lift or when I squat, this is how much I lift. And so my form went out the window or I didn't do certain training modalities because I couldn't lift as much as I did when I did my other training modalities. And so back to your point, Adam, it drove my training programming in the wrong direction and I wasn't doing what was best for myself because my insecurities were driving all of that. So I think it's important to be mindful. By the way, they're gonna be there. And by the way, that hangs around for a long time. It sure does. It wasn't even that long ago when, I think I mentioned on the podcast recently, we did the German volume training episode and it made me go, oh, you know, it's been a long time since I've done some GVT. I'm gonna do it for chess this day. And I actually had to drop the weights down to 35 pounds on each side of the barbell, right? So I was benching under 135. And it's like, I thought about it while I was doing it, I didn't care, I'm in my garage by myself. But I thought, man, you know what? Had this happened to me just maybe eight years ago or so. In a gym, right? Yeah, in a gym. I was like, fuck that, I'm not doing that today. I'm not gonna put the pink weights on right now, you know what I'm saying? That ain't happening. And the workout program would have changed. Right, right. So I had this moment of like, wow, that's crazy. Like, you know, long as I've been in this and I know better and stuff like that, that's something that, you know, when it's a deeply rooted insecurity, it's constant work and maybe it never fully goes away. It's just that you've at least brought awareness to it and you don't let it drive your decision. Yeah, I think, again, in my experience, being mindful of it, it's like, it's like you have this dangerous dog that you gotta be mindful of. And so it's gonna snap at you. It's gonna bark at you. But if you don't pay attention, it'll bite you, right? So that's all it is, basically. Is these insecurities will move you in other directions, keep, take you off track a little bit. But if you're not mindful of them, they're gonna take a hold of you and you're gone. And that's it. You're moving in that direction, you're spinning. So that's the key right there. So make health the priority overall and all the other goals can be accomplished. If you don't and your health starts to decline, you can forget about any other fitness or health goal that you have because they just won't, they just won't happen. And by the way, and I don't know if we really said this, but we did a roundabout way, but the simplest way is like, you know, whether your goal is aesthetics, performance, if you get healthy, it will only speed up how fast you get to all those things. I don't know how many times I've assessed somebody who wants to, you know, lose fat or build muscle and tweak a couple of things in their diet to make them healthier and they end up getting their goal, whatever it be, performance-driven or a look that much faster because we actually focus on health and not so much on their goal. Well, again, along those lines, let's say you're good health, optimal health, and you wanna gain 10 pounds of muscle versus health is not so optimal and I wanna gain 10 pounds of muscle, which one's gonna be easier, right? Or I wanna lose 15 pounds of body fat or I wanna add 15 pounds to my bench press or I wanna shave a little bit of time off of my mile, right? If your home base is good health, you just get there so much easier and so much faster in such a more balanced way and it won't cause so much damage on your body when you do go after those extreme goals. Look, if you like our information, head over to mindpumpfree.com and check out our guides. We have guides for all of your fitness needs and goals. You can also find all of us on Instagram, so Justin is at Mind Pump, Justin. I'm at Mind Pump Salon, Adam is at Mind Pump, Adam.