 one of the most important ways or reasons why strength training is so effective for fat loss and longevity. And that is that it's the only form of exercise that will reliably, done properly, will reliably teach your body to burn more calories on its own. Like if there was one thing that I could do to solve the obesity epidemic, that was really effective. It would be boost everybody's metabolism by 50%. We would solve obesity right out the gate. What's up, y'all? Here's the giveaway for today, Maps Resistance. This is a phenomenal beginner strength training routine. We're going to give that away for free because this entire episode is about resistance training and why it's the most effective way to work out when it comes to fat loss and longevity. So here's how you can win that program. Leave a comment in the first 24 hours that we dropped this episode, subscribe to this channel, turn on notifications, do all those things. And if we like your comment, we'll notify you and you'll get free access to Maps Resistance. Now everyone else, because this program is all about resistance training, or I should say this episode is all about resistance training, that program is 50% off with this episode only. So it's a very short period of time. So if you want to get the program and get it discounted, go to mapsresistance.com and then use the code RESIST50 for that discount. All right, here comes the show. All right, look, here's the deal. When it comes to fat loss and health, nothing beats resistance training, it's actually the best form of exercise when you compare it to other forms of exercise head to head when it comes to those two things. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Do you think that we haven't beat this drum enough? We need to beat it more. I feel like we need a bigger drum. I know I, you know, just when I think that we, we, we should lay off of this, it never surprised, ceases to surprise me, somebody messaging that they're still trying to run the body fat off using weight training. Totally. And you know what's great is that, um, cause we've been doing this for a long time and when you, you obviously train people for a long time and you're, you really care about them. You start to figure this out because you see what works, what doesn't work, uh, considering how many times a week people want to work out and what their goals are and what works long term. But what was frustrating for years, and I'm sure you guys were like this, was that the medical community and the scientific community, they, they, they weren't up to speed. Like all the studies on health and longevity, maybe not now. So over the last 15 years, we've seen some great studies, but especially over the last 10 years. But before that, if you looked up exercise and health, it was none of them use strength training or resistance training, the only studies done on strength training or resistance training, you know, 15, 20 years ago, we're done on athletic performance. So if you looked at what forms of exercise help improve longevity or fat loss or blood lipids or whatever, it was always cardiovascular activity. It was almost never strength training. So we had nothing to point to. And so what people did when they thought of strength training or resistance training, they looked at bodybuilders, which is a terrible way to, to judge it because bodybuilders are extreme. Yeah, those are extreme athletes, um, doing things that are not healthy, uh, to their bodies. And so it just didn't get it the credit that it deserved, but luckily today we have lots of studies now showing just how powerful strength training is for fat loss and longevity, which, you know, those two things were never put in the same sentence with, uh, do you think that was a lack of not knowing by the medical community, or do you think that was a conscious choice because they evaluated risk versus reward and just assumed, oh, weight training is too risky. Therefore, let's point people in the direction of just running because that's an easy, simpler form for them to, I think it was cultural, right? Like to your point, like I think it culture was very much driven in the cardiovascular side of things. Like because it was, I can, I can get you to get off the couch and just start moving. That was like a lot easier ease of access in terms of like, I didn't have to educate myself quite as extensively as I did, you know, now having to go into the weight training side of things. And plus the only example of that really that everybody knew was bodybuilders that were pretty extreme in their efforts. Yeah, but also imagine if you're a researcher, okay? And you're like, let's look at exercise and how it impacts longevity. You're not, you're probably not a strength coach or an expert in exercise. You're just a researcher. So you look at all the forms of exercise, you're like, I'm going to pick, uh, let's have these 30 participants run or bike. You have them do strength training. Well, you need access to equipment. You got to know how to do strength training. There's a million and one different ways to do it. And if you're doing an animal study, good luck. It's easy putting a hamster in a hamster wheel, have a hamster do something that simulates strength training. You got to have, it's a much more complex study and test. And also nobody thought to go in that direction because exercise for a long time had always been like fitness had always been, um, compared to like stamina, right? So like how long you can endure being in shape was really like what everybody desired. Yeah. So it wasn't, it was just that. That's all it was, um, until researchers started to really look at, let's look at this other four, let's look at all these other forms of exercise and see how they impact our health. And so the thing is when you're in a, a, as a particular field and you have experts in that field, they often will tell you, Hey, here's what we're seeing, but the science usually takes a decade or two, uh, to follow. When was, when, when was Jacqueline most popular? Was it the 60s, 70s? Obviously all the way, I know three 80s, but when did, when did he become really popular? Oh, he was as far back as the 60s. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Long time. Okay. So I think it was 60s. Yeah. Or it was his like the real pinnacle of his fame. I would, I would think cause he's probably the single most impactful person when it comes to connecting strength training to health, up into that point and even, even around that time and even afterwards, you know, strength training was connected to bodybuilding and bodybuilding wasn't thought of as healthy. It wasn't thought of as like, Oh, these people are in pursuit of ultimate health. They were more the people that were into sculpting a physique and looking a certain way and being impressive. It wasn't like, Oh, these guys are in, are some of the healthiest people out there. It really wasn't. Yeah. No, and even then, even then if popular media, um, like movies, that's what people see. Right. Jacqueline was kind of well known. He had this popular TV show where he would teach people to do exercises and he would just use a chair. So I don't know if you guys ever seen these videos. Have you seen his warm-ups? That was my favorite. Him and his wife, his fingers. Yeah. And he'd have like these little, almost look like ballet slippers and he'd do like leg lifts and, you know, and he would do, you do kind of like body weight type strengthening stuff. Um, but popular media was if you saw anybody that did strength training, it was the, it was the beach, those B movies, those beach B movies, and they were dumb, narcissistic, yeah, muscle bound, you know, which obviously we know that's baloney, bodybuilders who were super, you know, infatuated with their own bodies. They look in the mirror. They're stupid. And so people never connected strength training to health. Um, and then you had pumping iron, which that was a documentary that kind of went mainstream, but that was about bodybuilding. Still about the way you look. Yeah. And it was about bodybuilding. And it's extreme. Like you see Arnold and Lou, especially back then and people are like, wow, that's extreme and that's crazy. I don't want to look like that. You know, that's, uh, that's not. And also, is that healthy? I don't know. Well, plus, I mean, we were inundated with information that heart health was like the most important thing. And to, to, to immediately address heart health, we assume like cardiovascular training was the best option for that. And like everything, even with our diet was focused around heart health. And it was like lowering, uh, the fat intake and like low fat was like, you know, the, the direction we were supposed to. Well, what year was it when we really started to see the studies come forward about resistance training in, in connection to your metabolism? Oh boy. That, I mean, that's more recent. Um, it's, uh, the, the more, the more recent studies on strength training and health have happened in the last 10 years. Yeah. Before that, you really didn't see too many at all. And we're seeing more and more coming out now. And you did talk about, um, one of the most important ways or reasons why strength training is so effective for fat loss and longevity, and that is that it's the only form of exercise that will reliably have done properly, will reliably teach your body to burn more calories on its own. Like if there was one thing that I could do to solve the obesity epidemic, that was really effective. If I could snap my fingers, um, like Thanos and had some kind of, you know, the glove or whatever makes something happen, it would be boost everybody's metabolism by 50%. We would solve obesity, uh, right out the gates and lots of health issues associated with that. Um, now why is metabolism such an important thing to try to boost? Because once you boost it, it doesn't require you to move or do activity in order to burn those calories. This makes it a very sustainable, you know, for lack of a better term, convenient way to burn body fat, especially. Look, the bottom line is it would be great if we could get the average American to, you know, have an hour or more of activity every day. Not going to happen. It's just not going to happen. They're not fitness enthusiasts. They're the average person and for them exercise isn't their favorite thing in the world. It's just a tool that'll improve the quality of life. Uh, and if it's done right, it'll do so. If it's done wrong, it won't and they stop. So what we want to do is we want to, we want to pick a form of exercise that can make your metabolism burn more calories so that you don't have to spend tons of time trying to burn calories, which by the way, trying to burn calories, your body adapts to that eventually anyway. And you end up getting no, you still have some health effects, but you, the calorie burning effects start to flatten out quite a bit. That's why you see people plateau so hard with that approach, uh, with fat loss. My six year old aunt is experiencing this right now. She's, uh, the one that is married to my uncle who works for the company, ironically, and I've been telling her this message like since I've been in training, you know, 20 years, right? So I've been telling her this forever and she's, you know, fallen into the, you know, jazz or size type of training or the cardio for exercise. And she called me the other day. I think I told you guys this about my son going into surgery just to check up on him and stuff like that. She goes, Oh, I've been meaning to tell you too. I finally have listened to what you said about just focusing on strength training. I cut out trying to do any sort of crazy cardio. I'm targeting my protein and all I'm doing is I'm following this, this resistance training program, ironically, not one of ours, uh, four times, you know, which is really funny, right? So that's whatever. You're lifting weights. I don't give a shit that you're not using the programs you could have for free, right? So whatever, you know, so she's lifting weight, but what she's tripping out on is she's like, and she's been consistent now for about four months. She's like, you know, it's so crazy out of my, I went to Kansas City back to see her family. And, you know, there, you know, me, I like to drink my wine and there's nothing but barbecue there. So we're eating out and she goes, I do this trip every couple months. It's very to go back and see my family and I typically eat and do whatever I want and then come back. She goes and every time I come back, I come back with, you know, 15, 10, 15 pounds I put on myself. She goes, I came back and the scale literally moved like one pound and she goes, and I did like the same behaviors as I've always done. I said, this is what I've been trying to explain to you forever. What you end up doing in the past is, but get ready for a trip like that. You run on the treadmill, you restrict calories, you get a little lean, getting ready to go into that. But then you've also slowed your metabolism down. So now your body cannot eat as many calories as you could if you would have actually not done that and instead tried to increase calories and build strength and then headed that trip. So basically you just, you gave yourself more room and more flexibility. This is what I've been trying to tell you what metabolic flexibility is all about. And you now have it and you're especially like, yeah, no, it's amazing. Not to mention if the value of your exercise is in the calorie burn that you get from when you do it. The second you stop it, you lose the value. If the value of your exercise is in the adaptation, right, then you don't lose that value when you stop. It takes a lot longer to lose that value. Your body would have to adapt in the other direction, which takes a lot longer. And you stop doing your cardio, calories are done. You stop lifting weights or doing strength training. That muscle sticks around for a long time. But you know, there are people that will argue, you know, I've seen studies that show that one pound of muscle only burns an extra 10 calories. Well, first of all, first of all, that's not nothing. You gain five pounds of muscle. You're burning 50 more calories a day. Do the math over the course of a year. That's how people become obese. People don't become obese by gaining 20 pounds in a month. It's usually 20 pounds over the course of two or three years. So that's not nothing. However, there's more to the story than that. You have you have a range of calories that you can burn with the same lean body mass that you have. In other words, your body can become more or less efficient with calories with the same lean body mass. What makes you more or less efficient? Well, the signals you send your body, how you feed your body. And if I'm telling my body to prioritize strength and muscle and I feed my body appropriately, it tips the scale to less efficient with calories. It's more likely to burn more calories. So the metabolism boosts that I see with clients when they do everything right and they gain five pounds of muscle is not 50 more calories a day. It's more like 500 calories and more a day or more, which would take you an hour and a half of cardio or two hours of cardio just to burn. So in no other form of exercise does this. Nothing else will boost your metabolism like strength training. So this is one of the biggest benefits of it. Right. And when you recomp, recomposition, I don't know the word for that. But like when you when you go through and you you acquire more muscle and replace, you know, your fat with muscle, it promotes more movement. So you're you're more prone to want to actually go out and be more active and do things as well. Well, that's all like that's the behavioral aspect that nobody talks about. Also that happens, which I bring up on the show all the time. It's like I always noticed that when I'm lifting and training consistently. More energy. Yeah, I have more energy throughout my day and I'm just more productive. And it's not downstream effect. It's neat. It's not exercise that you would count. It's just I'm more likely to get up and help Katrina with cleaning the house. I'm more likely to get up and wrestle around and play with my son versus oh, when I I'm not exercising, I'm not strength training. I'm not eating well. I feel lethargic. I feel lazy. I come home. I just want to sit down on the couch because I feel tired. It's like those studies don't account for that because they're just trying to measure like oh, fat burns this much calorie or muscle burns this much. Therefore, it's only this value. It's like, no, there's other downstream effects that you get. OK, someone might be wondering, well, doesn't other forms of exercise give you energy too? Yes, if you improve your health. However, we're talking about metabolism. When your body becomes less efficient with calories, part of the way that it does it is it provides more energy to be burned. So you do get more energy. You also generate more heat. People who lift weights or do strength training notice that their body feels warmer because your body burns more calories just through heating itself up. If your body's trying to become more efficient and burn less calories, it'll reduce your energy so you try to move more less. And you'll also notice that you have less tolerance to cold because you already feel kind of cold. All right, here's the next one. And this is a this is supremely unique strength training primarily because strength training has such a variety of there's no like name one form of exercise that has the variety of exercises or movements that strength training has. You can't find one that competes. That means that strength training or resistance training allows you to target, sculpt and strengthen your body. So if I run, I'm using my legs a lot. If I cycle, I'm using my legs a lot. If I swim, I'm using my whole body a lot but I'm using it in this very repetitive kind of motion. If I play any sport, there's this kind of repetitive type of if I see someone run, cycle, swim I can tell simply by looking at their movement. With strength training, I can say I want to develop more of my glutes. I can say I want to sculpt my shoulders to look a particular way. I can say I want to work more on my midsection and build and sculpt that way. It's as in it's of course, there's nothing like this but it's as close as you can get to being a sculptor. Like imagine if your body was a piece of clay and you take some off here and build some there and really sculpt and shape your body. What a wonderful attribute of this form of exercise. Yeah, well a lot of pain we've found is related to weakness. So weakness in your support system and to be able to identify areas of your body to strengthen, resistance training is the most appropriate way to train to address a lot of these things. So that way too, now your body is more resilient, more supported in its movement patterns which then reduces the amount of pain you're gonna experience. Well, and it may sound superficial but also when we look at a body that we're attracted to, a lot of the formula that goes into that is symmetry. And balance, symmetry and balance. And it's less of like, oh that person has 2% more body fat or five more pounds of muscle. It's more about their balance and symmetry that they have their body and that's what we tend to be attracted to and they have all kinds of stuff to support that that when we look at a person it's the ratios of their hips to their shoulders to their waist to things like that that we are drawn to and it's less about oh that person's 5% body fat therefore they're attractive or oh that person has 10 more pounds of muscle therefore attractive. It's that you can actually take resistance training, look at your body and go like oh I'm out of balance here or I could have more shoulders or more glutes to your point and have this more symmetrical physique. Yeah, you could target what you wanna develop and shape and also here's your evidence right here. Rehab specialists, physical therapists, sports medicine practitioners. What form of exercise is their primary form that they use to rehab people? Strength training, they don't use other forms of exercise. Why? Because it's targeted, why is it important for it to be targeted? Because when I'm dealing with an injury I have to look at the individual and say what is it that caused that injury or what did you have surgery on? What are we working on? They don't use general forms of exercise. So strength training is extremely specific and then back to the aesthetic aspect of it. Look I'm not gonna, I mean we can't gloss over this. One of the main motivators for people working out is they wanna look good. Well, okay you could work out and generally look better or what if you could look better but also have a say in what parts of your body you've changed the most. Like tell me one form of exercise I can go and say I want more developed upper chest and I want a better, more sculpted lower back and hamstrings. What activities, I'd have to like create a weird type of movement pattern to do that or I could just go do some strength training, pick specific exercises, place more focus on those areas and then boom I shape and sculpt my body. I mean I think that's pretty awesome. All right this next effect I like this one because this one really convinces people when it comes to strength training and that's the hormone effects. Now I wanna be clear improving your health almost always will give you a better hormone profile. So no matter what you do if your health improves and you're a man with low testosterone or you're a woman with an imbalance and estrogen or progesterone or cortisol is high when it shouldn't be or you have insulin resistance just improving your health you'll see things get better. Okay but only one form of exercise directly influences your hormones to make them to move them in a more youthful way or to develop a more youthful hormone profile and here's why. When I tell my body to build muscle the way one of the ways that it does so is it uses hormones. Hormones are signalers in the body. Okay so we know what testosterone does. We know what estrogen does, progesterone, growth hormone insulin. They have specific roles in the body. If my body says or knows, hey it's time to build some muscle and some strength what hormones are associated with more muscle and more strength. Testosterone in both men and women. By the way testosterone is very important in women as it is in men. Low testosterone in women causes the same side effects that you see in men. The difference is of course the amount. Just like by the way estrogen is important in men as well. If a man has no estrogen health is terrible they feel bad just like it would be in women. They're just different ratios. But testosterone is a hormone that helps drive muscle. So testosterone goes higher. What are the effects of that? Better libido, more motivation, more drive. It's like a dopamine feel. Like I have more energy. Estrogen and progesterone in women balance out. An imbalanced estrogen and progesterone ratio in women makes it hard to burn body fat, makes it hard to build muscle. A balanced one is more ideal for building muscle. So then the body it organizes estrogen and progesterone. What about insulin? Your body becomes more sensitive to insulin. A lot of people don't notice but insulin is an anabolic hormone. It's actually one of the most anabolic hormones there is around. Growth hormone. We hear about these youth centers that give people growth hormone and make them feel younger. Growth hormone is a youth hormone. You find an 18 year old, you compare him to a 48 year old and you see a big difference in growth hormone. Well, what makes growth hormone go up reliably? Strength training. Why? Because you're telling the body to build muscle. What about cortisol? Cortisol is a stress hormone. A lot of people don't know this but cortisol is not a bad hormone. It just has to be appropriate. Meaning it goes up in the morning and starts to taper off at night and it can't be too high all the time. Your body can't build muscle very well if cortisol is high all the time. So if you're sending the appropriate signal that says build muscle and strength, you're also feeding your body appropriately, your body balances out cortisol. So if you want a youthful, balanced, healthy hormone profile and you want to use exercise as a way to do so, nothing does it more directly than strength training. Do you think that's because you're almost tricking your body into thinking that it's a young body that's growing? Because you're sending a signal to adapt and grow basically initially. If you're lifting weights, that's the signal. There's still a need to grow. Right, you're sending a signal saying, hey, we need to add muscle, we need to get bigger or stronger, right? So you're sending the signal to build to grow and that is the same signal that you naturally have when you're this young child that's growing into adulthood. So you think there's almost like a mechanism that we're almost like you're tricking and fooling the body into thinking that it's still young? Well, yeah, kind of. And also it's just your body, remember your body doesn't know you're in the gym or you're doing push-ups in your bedroom. It just knows that there's a stress. Right, that's what I mean by that. It just knows that, hey, we need to get stronger. Yes. Just like when you're a young child, it's not like you're doing anything other than it's like, oh, you're... It's making you grow. Yeah, muscle in general is just better at dealing with stress, right? Like if you're in the environment of stress, your body, it's promoting that signal for your body to be able to meet that demand. And the best way to do that is to build muscle to resist. And so like in terms of tissue in your body, like it's more optimal for you to consist more of muscle to handle it. It also does this. There's a study that was done, I wanna say five years ago, around five years ago, where they compared men and their testosterone levels and then how the men responded to strength training. And in this study, the theory was, men with higher testosterone will build more muscle than men with lower testosterone. Now everybody in the study, they didn't have dramatic testosterone ranges. So it wasn't like people were at a range. They were within range, but some were 900, 1,000 other people were 700, 600. And what they found was that the levels of testosterone had a small effect. It was the androgen receptor density that had the largest effect. What is that? Those are the receptors that testosterone attaches to so it can do its thing. Only one form of exercise reliably increases androgen receptor density, strength training. You build a little bit of muscle, you automatically increase your androgen receptors. Meaning even if your testosterone only goes up 10%, that extra testosterone at 10% is like another 30, 40% because of the androgen receptor density. It makes testosterone more effective. And again, what are the effects on? And by the way, it's not gonna raise testosterone out of range like you're a bodybuilder taking anabolic steroids. If any women are watching, like, I don't want, I don't wanna grow a beard or whatever. That's not gonna happen. But what you will get is a healthy high. And what does that feel like? Again, energy, libido, strength. You just feel, it's a feel good hormone. It's an anabolic youthful hormone just like the other ones I talked about. And again, because strength training tells the body to build muscle, it's a direct way of moving your hormones to become more youthful. Now on the flip side, if I do a form of exercise that makes me lose muscle, let's say I go like crazy long distance running where my body's trying to pair muscle down to make me more efficient at this type of activity. It will also organize its hormones in a way to do so. It's hard to lose a lot of muscle when your testosterone is high. So what happens? Studies show this. Tons and tons and tons of crazy cardio, especially combined with a calorie restriction, lower testosterone levels. One of my favorite things about all the benefits that you're talking about right now is your next point, which is how little you have to do this. That's the part that I think is so appealing to people because let's be honest, not everybody is fitness enthusiast. Most people do wanna live a healthier fit or life, but then also have many other priorities. Don't love going to the gym. Don't love exercising and sweating and pushing themselves really hard. So it is literally the only form of exercise that you could do such a small amount and have such a large impact positively on your health. And most people know that it's good for them, right? It's just one of those things, but it's an extra step for their routine that they're just not willing to make that leap because it seems so daunting. It seems like that time frame. Which is so weird to me though because somebody will go outside and they decide they're gonna get a shape and then they'll start running every day for a half hour, an hour, which is exhausting and rough on the knees. And you could take that one day of running for an hour and divide that by three, you know, what would that be, 20 minutes, right? 20 minutes a day of my month. 20 minute sessions of lifting over the week. And get better results. And get way better results, way better results. 20 minutes of lifting weights three days a week compared to that person who goes out and runs their ass off for an hour, you get to make a massive impact. Way more beneficial. And here's why. It's because when you look at exercise, different forms of exercise, don't judge their value on the calorie burn. Judge their value on the adaptations that they induce. And because strength training induces adaptations that are so favorable, which we've been talking about hormone profile, speeding up the metabolism and much more we'll get into, you don't need to do a lot of it. As long as you send that signal to build that strength in that muscle, you're good. So what does that mean for the average person? This is true, okay? I've trained people for over two, well now almost two and a half decades. The average person will reap all the benefits of strength training, all the amazing benefits of strength training with two days a week. I trained the vast majority of my clients two days a week. Now, I do wanna be clear. That doesn't mean they didn't encourage them to just increase their activity every day. That doesn't mean they didn't encourage them to eat healthier. That doesn't mean they didn't need to eat healthier. Like all that stuff is still true, get good sleep, all that stuff. But we came to exercise. If I had a client two days a week and then they ate relatively healthy, they got good sleep, whatever, they got great results. There isn't a form of exercise that would do that, that would even come close to doing that. In fact, there was a study that I just shared with you guys that showed that it was literally the title of it was three seconds of strength training builds strength in muscle, three seconds. Now, if you look at the study, what it is, it was a really intense, eccentric contraction, meaning they held something really heavy, lowered it really slow, and that was it. And they did that once a day. These people, now, you're not gonna get in great shape over time doing that or whatever. However, in that short, I think it was a three-month study, 10% increase in strength. Show me another form of exercise that you can do for three seconds and get any adaptation. Stretch for three seconds, run for three seconds. Are you gonna get any improvements in performance? Strength training is such a valuable, powerful way to induce adaptations, which means you don't have to do a lot of it. What's the value of that? Well, you said it, Adam. The average person, look, we all became known in this area, in the Bay Area here, before we started the podcast, for being very good trainers. We all had clients with great results. They stayed with us for a long time. All of us did a good job of that, and part of that formula was what? Figuring out how can I get people great results working out two or three days a week. How many of your clients, what percentage of your clients turned into fitness fanatics that worked out four, five, six days a week? Less than five. Less than 5%. Yeah, it was two, three days a week. Strength training does that. Other forms of exercise. You'll get some benefit, but nowhere. Well, this is one of the biggest disconnects that I think that we have in the fitness space is we still have these fitness enthusiasts that are preaching the message that speaks to them. That's centered around motivation and hard work and training every day. You're not doing enough. Yeah, ever. Yeah, and I just think that it's the wrong, if our real desired outcome is to reach the 80%, the majority of our population that are getting more and more obese, if that's our real desired outcome is to help the majority of people, then that message to me is getting lost in translation because they hear that and they think like, I don't wanna do that. I would just rather enjoy, their way they would respond, clients would respond. I'd rather just enjoy life and then die when I'm supposed to die. Even if that means I gotta die five or 10 years earlier, their attitude is that I don't wanna work like that. I don't have a desire to look like that. Well, it's okay, I'm gonna use an analogy. I know you'll love this one, Adam. It's like trying to build wealth. So I can either work more hours and be like work more hours, work more hours, or I could find a way to take my money and invest it so that it grows without me. Boosting your metabolism, influencing adaptations that affect your hormones in positive ways, that's like investing, allowing my body to work for me. Now, if people wanna work out every day and be active and become fitness enthusiasts, oh my God, that's great, I would be a dream for me. I think that would be incredible. But the truth is most people are not gonna do that. And if knowing that people will work out, if we're good, if we do a good job and we convince people and they build a good relationship to exercise and all that stuff, two or three days a week, this is the form of exercise you need to pick. Now that takes us to the next one, which is, and this is really crazy. And the studies on this are phenomenal. When you get results from exercise, your body's adapting to that form of exercise because it's trying to make you better at that form of exercise. Okay, so it's understandable that when you stop that form of exercise, eventually your body adapts in the opposite direction. Cause your body's only as fit or only has as much endurance and only builds as much strength as it thinks it needs. If you lay in bed all day and do nothing, you'll see your body slowly wither away as your body adapts in that direction. Okay, knowing that, one form of exercise where you get the results, you get the adaptations, one form of exercise has the results stick around the longest when you stop. And it's not even close and that's strength training, not even close. In fact, the newest study I just saw showed that young men and women who lifted weights in this study built up a certain amount of strength and muscle, they had them stop working out. Do you know when they started to see strength and muscle gains, excuse me, strength and muscle loss after two weeks, after two weeks off and it was 1%. And each week you saw this 1% and it started to accelerate after you, the longer they went without it. Now you go build endurance and you take a week off and then go try running again and see how much you miss. You start all over again. Yeah, you do anything and you watch what happens to those adaptations. When it comes to strength and muscle, it sticks around. Why is this valuable? Because the average person, if they work out two or three days a week, like we said earlier, they're still gonna miss weeks in that year. Right back to my point I made with my aunt. I mean, that's a lot of people's life. They get ready, they have a trip, they're gonna go for a week where they know they're gonna eat and drink and have a good time and stuff like that. And by her building some strength and muscle, she has built an insurance plan for herself that week. If all she did was run and then she doesn't run and she goes and eats and drinks, all those extra calories end up getting stored as body fat. But because she had built her metabolism up by building muscle and she only took a week off, she really didn't take that big of a step backwards. Yes, and there was that other study too that compared two groups of men where one group would work out for three weeks, then take a week off, three weeks, take a week off. The other group worked out every single week. At the end of the 16 week study. Same results. Same results. Name one form of exercise that'll do that. Now I'm not saying, I do wanna be clear, there's other values that come from being active every single day. So I'm not saying you stop working out for two weeks and you don't lose any of the value. There's lots of values. That's not the point of this conversation. The point of the conversation right now is to highlight how beneficial and how little of work that you can do to get great results from using this form of exercise. How much more flexibility you have with that approach versus any other programs out there and our approaches that you can do in terms of like train your body. Like strength training just allows so much more freedom with it. Yes, now here's the next point which connects to that, which is when you do lose some of the results, getting them back when it comes to muscle is remarkable. Something called muscle memory. Well documented. So you don't believe me, just type that in. Studies on muscle memory. And what is muscle memory? I'll give you an example. Let's say it takes you, let's say you're a woman and you start working out and you start doing strength training and you take it really seriously. You follow a maps program so you got good workout programming. You're feeding yourself appropriately, good protein intake. You're sleeping good. Everything lined up. And over the course of a year, you gain, you know, let's say 10 pounds of muscle which would be a lot for a woman to gain in a year. But let's say she did. She's really sculpted and her metabolism now is through the roof and she's loving life and she's leaner. And then let's say the following year, something happens and she just stops. She just stops working out for three months and her diet kind of goes to crap and maybe she's not eating enough protein and who knows, right? And in those three months, she lost all 10 pounds of muscle. And then after three months, she's like, okay, I'm ready to get back into it. She starts working out again. She'll gain that 10 pounds back in like two months. Or faster. Or faster. It took her a year to gain it initially but once you build it, you develop something called muscle memory. And this has to do with satellite cells and how the muscles actually respond to building once they've already built in the first place. And it's a bit of a complicated process but again, it's well documented. But however long it takes you to build the first time, it's a fraction of that, the second or third or fourth time. Well, I remember experiencing this even just by breaking my arm, right? Like beating in a cast and just seeing how, man, it was one of those things where I just got freaked out because I'm like, man, my arm is so small right now because it atrophied rather quickly. And then just to take the next few months and see how rapidly my body was able to regain that strength and start, you know, building those muscles back, it was pretty amazing. This is one of my favorite parts about actually getting old or older. Oh yeah. Is that not your point you're making is it actually compounds. So like when I fall off, say for a few months or I'm inconsistent for a while, now when I get back, the results, I get back to more muscle than I ever had at a faster rate than I ever have today than just 10 years ago. 10 years ago, I fall off the wagon for a couple months. Yes, I still have muscle memory that I already put 10 years in of lifting and a certain amount of that comes back, but I've built exponentially more since then. So that's compounded. So now it's like, well, I was explaining this to Katrina today. She's just like, I hate you. When we both fall off and we get back on our thing, it's like, I feel like you are like within a week or even a few workouts. She's like, I feel like you're already look like you're in great shape again. I'm like, what that is is it's compounded interest of decades now of lifting weights. It'll not work. I was like, I wasn't like that. I said it was when I was my early 20s, if I fell off for a little bit, I felt like I was always on the struggle to kind of get back to where I was before, but over time of under iron of lifting and lifting and slowly progressing and slowly progressing. Now when I fall out of shape, first of all, my out of shape is better than 10 years ago's good shape. And then when I decided to kick it back up and pick up the volume again and consistency, I get back into shape really, really fast. It's one of the coolest parts about being an older lifter who's been lifting for a really long time. Oh dude, I know old bodybuilders and they weren't competitive. So they were, you know, they were natural. They didn't do the anabolic steroid route or anything like that. But these are old bodybuilders now in their fifties and sixties, members of gyms that I've managed. And they would come in and they would just, you just see this great muscle on them, whatever. And I'd watch their workouts and they weren't doing anything crazy. And I'd ask them like, man, how do you stay so muscle? I was like, dude, I've had this muscle for so long now that I'm older, I don't have to do very much to keep it. And if I stop, it comes back really fast. Like when I was a kid, I remember one guy in particular told me, I was such a skinny kid, you know, and it was so hard to build it. He goes, but now it's like, the muscle is really easy to keep. And there's studies that actually show, I think like one seventh of the volume it takes to build your muscle is all that's required to maintain it. So it's a wonderful form of exercise as you age because the results stick around and it's easy to get them back when you lose them. Which again, understanding, you know, modern life and understanding the average person, most people are not gonna be consistent week in and week out, year and year over year. These things are gonna happen, they're gonna stop, they're gonna lose some of it or whatever. But how wonderful that the first time you gained it as hard as it was, it's so much easier to gain it back the second time when you get back to it. Makes it such a, again, a very sustainable form of fitness. Here's the next one. And I'll tell a story just kind of illustrate this next point. I had a client once that she hired me specifically because she was experiencing bone loss. She was in osteopenia and she was on the borderline between osteopenia and osteoporosis. So osteopenia is what happens before osteoporosis. Once you're in osteoporosis, it gets pretty bad. This is where the bones get so weak and if you continue to go down that path, I mean, they get brittle, they break and it's a terrible, terrible, you know, it's got really bad longevity with osteoporosis. So she hired me to help her build her bones back. Now up until this point, they had her supplementing with vitamin D and calcium she was on in, I forgot the name of the drug. I want to say Fosamax, which is kind of like an autoimmune type drug to help try to stop the bone loss. She was walking and hiking and it was just every year. Every year she'd go get this, you know, bone scan and they would see this kind of decline. The walking and the hiking slowed it down a tiny bit in her lower extremities, upper extremities continued to accelerate. So she came to me and she said, I've read, this was years ago, I've read that strength training, you know, it was great for building the bones. I said, oh, nothing builds the bones like strength training because muscles, anchor and bones. In fact, strength training, we could call it bone building just like we could call it muscle building, okay? Literally it's directly builds bones. So we did, we strength train. And remember she was at the time in her mid sixties, I want to say, and I trained her and I think we had like four months before her next bone scan. So for four months. And I mean, because she was a beginner, it was basic two days a week, you know, standing squats, no way, you know, push ups on an elevated platform, like very basic exercises you would have a 65 year old do that's never lifted weights. Anyway, she went, got a bone scan and she comes in, it wasn't her day off. She comes in super excited, shows me the results. She goes for the first time in years, not only did we stop the bone loss, but it actually started to reverse and she goes, my doctor would like to get on the phone with you. I got on the phone with this doctor and he's like, this is insane. He goes, you know, I have a lot of patients and none of them do strength training. He goes, this right here, this is a big deal and I've never seen this before. Yeah, we don't talk about this benefit enough. I think between how resistance training affects not just your muscles, but also your ligaments, your tendons, your bone tissue, like everything that makes up your musculoskeletal system. And it's like for you to be able to apply the right amount of force to resist and provide growth. It's gonna provide growth in all those areas and reinforce the strength in all those areas so you can have that kind of able-bodied longevity that we all want. Well, this also brings us to our next point that I think is so important is that it's so cool is that where resistance training is extremely moldable and no matter what your goal or adaptation you're seeking, you can change the way you decide to resistance train. Like obviously, she comes in and it tells you that you're not focusing the same way you're focusing the teenage boy who's like, I wanna put on as much mass as possible or the guy who's like, I need to lose 50 pounds of body fat as much as I can as fast as I can. Like that's what's so cool about this is although it's a similar form of exercise, there's so many different ways you can mold it based off the client. Well, okay, let's say your expertise is running and a new client walks, a new client comes in the door and they're paraplegic. Sorry, we can't do running. Sorry, it's not an exercise we can do. Or someone comes in and one arm is half as long as the other or an amputee or whatever, you name it, okay? Strength training, I could do it with anybody. I can do strength training. Literally, if they can move, I can apply resistance to movement to have them build. You can't pick a form of exercise that says individualize or not. And at every level, every level. Which is amazing too. I mean, I've had clients, we really can't do a whole lot, but guess what, we can create tension and we can load the body. So there's just, again, to that point of it being moldable, like even if you have a limitation and you have an injury, like there's ways to work around that. It doesn't need like this whole body cardiovascular output. No, it's again, I've trained kids. I've trained paraplegics. I've trained amputees. I've trained people with all kinds of injuries and surgeries, men, women, tall, short, you know, doesn't, especially with free weights, because free weights are free. So they go to the individual and bands, which I can attach anywhere and create resistance wherever I want. And it's also, again, like I said earlier, why rehab specialists, any kind of rehab you need, you go to a rehab specialist, that they use forms of resistance training. So there's nothing that is as moldable as this form of exercise. Well, yeah, how many times have you guys met a client and you can meet them wherever they're at, right? So how many times have you had a client who was like unbelievably obese and could barely move or really, really old and can barely move? And the training was getting up and down from a chair. But that is a form of resistance training. And it's at the level that that person is currently at and I can build from that. It's resistance for them. That person comes in, right? And I can't make them run. They can't go into stair master. They can't go do, they can't do some jazzercise fucking group class. Like they can't do, there's a lot of things they can't do, but we can resistance train. We can find a way to mold it to their life, where they're currently at and meet them there and slowly progress them to where they can eventually do like a barbell squat or another movement. Perfect. All right, let's talk about brain health. This is something now more and more people are talking about because we're seeing rates of dementia and Alzheimer's kind of skyrocket. And, you know, Western medicine is really focused on trying to find a cure for this. Well, guess what? There's only one form of exercise, one non-medical intervention that's been shown to halt the progression of beta amyloid plaques. These are the things that we think are one of the main causes of the symptoms of Alzheimer's. In fact, only one form of exercise, not only been shown to halt it, but possibly even reverse that strength training. There was a study done out of Sydney, Australia and strength, it blew them away that this form of exercise actually did something that they can't find anything else that can do. And there's medications that don't even operate as well as this does. Now, why is this the case? Probably because building muscle makes your body very insulin sensitive. Muscle is a sugar glucose thirsty tissue. And one of the most effective ways to improve insulin sensitivity is to build a little bit of muscle. Well, a lot of researchers call Alzheimer's and dementia type three diabetes. It's your brain or your body's inability to utilize insulin and process glucose properly, which can cause some of these issues. That's why when you get someone with Alzheimer's or dementia and you put them on a ketogenic no carbohydrate diet, you often see an improvement in cognitive function. Well, strength training makes the brain healthier through this process. And again, generally improving your health will be good for your brain. So I want to be clear. It's not like other forms of exercise don't help your brain. Just getting healthier will help your brain, but none of them come close to strength training in the literature that is looking at exercise and brain health. What's weird is, I mean, we just always think of the brain as this problem solving machine, right? And then like we're sitting there and we're trying to get as much input as possible to learn into, you know, memory bank, a lot of information or try to work our way through problems like cognitively, but you're doing that with your body all the time. And all of these like signals in your nervous system, like reacting and responding, this is all stimulus that keeps the brain super active. It's mathematics. Yeah, it's math. Your brain is computing at an unbelievable level and it's doing crazy math, whether you think you are or not, to throw a ball or to do a barbell squat. The mathematical complexity that the brain is having to do while doing that, we make it sound like it's no big deal. You just grab and you throw something, but the formulas it's having to do in order to do that. And then if you're not doing any of that stuff, like the brain or like every other part of your body, it prunes it off if it doesn't need to. If you don't challenge it in that way, then it says, oh, there's no reason. There's no reason for me to use this this way because this person isn't asking its body to do it. Yeah, and along those lines, when you do other forms of exercise, they tend to look the same and be repetitive over time. So yes, it has some, in that aspect, brain boosting effects. However, at some point, it's the same thing over and over. I'm on a bike, I'm running, I'm walking. It's the same thing over and over again, right? Strength training, because of its variety, because I'm moving in different. Different math every time. I'm moving in different planes. I'm rotating. I'm going laterally. I'm up and down. I'm moving horizontally with all these different exercises. You develop what's called this proprioceptive intelligence or part of your brain. Literally knowing where your body is in space with strength training is different than it is with other forms of exercise. Now, they all will benefit this to some extent. But again, because strength training provides so many different exercises, if you run, it's always the same thing over and over again. That's right, it's like learning multiplication and just multiplication, but ignoring division or algebra or all these other things. When you are doing all those different movements talking about with strength training, you're having to learn all forms of mathematics. It's not just that same formula over and over and over that you got good at. You're challenging the brain in a much different way. Excellent. All right, this last one is important because as of, I mean, I looked this up this morning and the statistics say that one out of every three of us will have cancer or die of cancer in our lifetimes. That's big, right? That's 33% of us and it's a nasty disease and they're very complex and oftentimes it's a slow agonizing death and nobody wants cancer. Well, they've done studies to show the anti-cancer effects of exercise. Now, all forms of exercise if they improve your health will reduce cancer, okay? All forms of exercise. However, none of them came close to strength training. Strength training by itself in the latest studies reduced cancer risk by over a quarter. So 25% reduction in cancer just from strength training. Now, to be clear, the study showed that strength training in combination with other forms of exercise had the largest reduction in cancer. But when you do head to head, none of them came close to strength training. Now, why do I, again, why are we talking about one form of exercise when it's probably ideal to use multiple? Because I do want to be very clear. In a perfect world, you'd have a strength training component, you'd have a cardiovascular component, you'd have a mobility and flexibility component, you'd have a meditative component. But the reality is most people are gonna work out two or three days a week, they're gonna pick one form of exercise. It's the same reason why you lay a foundation before you build a house. Of course, all the other shit matters, the frames, the wall, the stucco, all stuff like that. But you're gonna spend the time to lay in the foundation. First, strength training is a foundation of health. You focus there first, and then absolutely you build the rest of it. And I think it's important to create activity and meditation and walking and going on the occasional run. I think all those things are great. But if you ignore resistance training and you pursue all of it, you're ignoring the foundation. Well, I think too, we just didn't realize the weight of it till recently, like the last 10 years or so. Our priorities were just off in terms of where to focus first. And I think that that's why we have to kind of highlight it a little bit more, resistance training, all the benefits, because people need to realize what that will do in terms of moving the needle for them the most versus these other forms of training. Yeah, I mean, when you're like, okay, I'm ready to start exercising, I'm gonna improve my health. And you're looking at a list of types of exercise. You wanna pick the one, you wanna start with the one that's gonna give you the most impact for the amount of time that you're gonna be able to spend doing it. And that's strength training just across the board. And with this cancer, an anti-cancer effect, it's clear. I mean, nothing comes close. Part of it probably has to do with the hormone balancing effects. Part of it, there's some studies that show that the muscle building process actually releases anti-cancer chemicals in the system. It actually utilizes pro-growth chemicals and way to build muscle, in which case if these pro-growth chemicals are high and you don't have the signal to build muscle, maybe it's gonna help go and fuel cancer cells. There's a lot of theories as to why, but it is very clear that strength training has the greatest anti-cancer effects. And the argument I always make to people is this, like you should, and should is not the same as reality or pragmatism, but you should be active every day. You should incorporate a multitude of different exercise modalities for optimal health and longevity. But here's the reality. You're not going to. Most people aren't going to. So if we're gonna pick one and then you wanna add to it, that's fine, but let's pick strength training. Let's pick resistance training. That should be the cornerstone of your routine. And then if you're consistent with that, you'll love it and you're doing great and you wanna do more. Then build on it. Now we can build upon that. Look, if you like Mind Pump, if you like our information, head over to mindpumpfree.com and download some of our guides. We have guides that can help you with almost any health or fitness goal. You can also find all of us on social media. So Justin is on Instagram at Mind Pump Justin. Adam is on Instagram at Mind Pump Adam. And you can find me on Twitter at Mind Pump Sal.