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All right, check this out. The best tool, generally speaking, for resistance training or strength training is free weights. Generally speaking, again, it's better than machines, it's better than pans, better than cables, better than body weight. All right guys, let's talk about this. How's that comedian say it? Here's your sign. Here's your sign. Remember that one? Yeah. Blue collar comedy guys? I don't know that. Yeah, you don't know that one? No, I don't know that one. Yeah, that's when you say something obvious. It's super obvious. I think that's pretty obvious. You know it's not, it's controversial. Really? For space, I've seen people debate this before. I think we should talk about why we say... Are these machine people? Yeah. Typically, yeah. Cable, machine people, and by the way, I said generally because definitely there are situations in cases where machines and cables are superior. But overall, when you're looking at, and when you have to consider the overall, right, the whole picture, function, performance, strength, muscle building. Versatility. Free weights are just, they're remarkably effective. And even when you compare them towards machines that are almost identical in terms of the movement pattern, like a hack squat is similar to a barbell squat, but a barbell squat is just so much more effective at all those other things that I... Well, and do you think that is mainly because of just the instability that it causes? Because when you're doing dumbbells or free barbell, like you have to balance the weight versus something being on a track? Yeah, you know, I would say so. But you know what the problem with that is? Is that, you know, when I was training people in the early 2000s, or you guys were too, the instability, you know, crowd went crazy, right? It was like standing on wobble discs and physical balls and dyna discs. And so there's definitely a diminishing returns with that kind of stuff. And we haven't really been able to identify specifically why this anecdote is so common. Like if you talk to top coaches, trainers, if you like just took a survey of a hundred of really, really good coaches and trainers, a majority of them would agree. Now some of them would disagree, but a majority of them would agree. Studies can show that there's evidence to kind of support what we're talking about. Like a barbell squat tends to translate more on the field than like a leg press, for example. Muscle building, I don't know if there's really any studies that show what we're talking about, but there's a lot of anecdote and it's hard to explain why. My theory is that obviously our bodies evolved in the real world, in nature. And so our bodies evolved lifting free things, you know? So I think it mimics, or at least it sets in motion adaptation processes that evolved lifting things that were more similar to free weights than to machines and cables. So my theory is that it's a lot more difficult. So the learning curve is longer. So the gains or potential gains that you could get from it just are extended. So I think if we were to graph this, and let's say you had like a free motion machine or let's just, or whatever your hammer strength, favorite machine for like chest, right? And then you had like a dumbbell press. I think at the beginning they would look pretty close. And then I think that you would get adapted to the machine relatively quicker and then you would see kind of this plateau where the free weights would kind of continue. There's less range of motion to consider in terms of having to stabilize and control. Right. And so I honestly look at it as a, if we're looking at like a signal perspective of how many muscles we need to incorporate for different tasks in each movement, each exercise. So in terms of like me doing say an overhead press on a track, like I can extend and press this weight overhead, but at the same time it's not putting as much demand laterally, rotationally, and also stabilizing completely on the way down as well, which is the eccentric portion. I think there's more demand too with the free weights with gravitational force. Yeah, so, okay, so I'm gonna get to that because I love what you said and I got some thoughts around that, but here's something that a lot of people don't realize that's obvious. I remember learning this when I went to go buy and open my own gym, and you talked to machine manufacturers and hammer strength and all that stuff and Nautilus and all these, Cybex. Most machines are designed around a male who's about five, nine, five, 10. Then they have adjustable seats and arms to kind of accommodate people outside of that. But what happens when you work out with a machine is that you have to follow the machine's path and track and range of motion essentially. Free weights follow your body. So if I'm doing an overhead press with a kid who's four foot 10 or a man that's six foot eight, the free weights will follow them. They're not following the machine. And how many times have you guys had a client that was outside of the average, you go in a machine and it just doesn't work very well for their body, right? So there's that. And then what you said, Justin, here's what's interesting about the central nervous system because that's what sends the signal for the muscles to work, right? We've used the amplifier versus speaker. The recruitment process. Yeah, when you activate the central nervous system, when you activate more of it, then it fires harder and more effectively in specific ways. So for example, if I want to press one dumbbell overhead but maintain a relaxed body, I'm only gonna be able to press so much weight. If I tense up my entire body, I can use, typically I can lift 10% or more. Power lifters know this. When power lifters bench press, they talk about using leg drive. Like what the hell do legs have to do with the bench press? You're just putting your legs on the ground, not lifting the bar, but they noticed a long time ago that when they activate their lower body, they could press more weight and free weights tends to encourage that because of that product. Like if I'm doing a standing overhead press, I have to tense my whole body just to support myself and balance. And so I'm able to probably fire more muscle fibers as a result. Like you could probably intensify your machine workouts by intentionally bracing really hard and trying to add more muscle tension to contribute. However, yeah, free weights are just more, they just place that demand naturally on your body in order to be able to even maintain the certain posture and control of your body. Yeah, and again, I say generally because I know there's gonna be cases where someone's like, oh, I got better results using a machine or this leg exercise. But when I train- One example of when that would happen is when someone's form and technique is so bad on an exercise, then having a machine where it helps you with that could accelerate their results. And you can push harder for example. Right, right. So there are cases where that will make sense. But again, I go back to, I think where the real benefit's kick in, it's the learning curve. I think it's that if you were to look head to head with the point you guys are making with a machine and free weights, I think it would be like a little bit better at first. Zero, zero, you've never done anything, you're just starting someone they're brand new and one's doing machine exercise, the other one's doing free weight exercise. Yeah, let's compare a hack squat to a barbell squat. Right, right. So I think initially the gains and results would be pretty close. I still think free weights would be a little bit better but it would be pretty close. I think it's where it really kicks in is over time. Yeah, because if you put a new client on a hack squat machine in a relatively short period of time in comparison to the barbell squat, they'll be able to push with maximal force. With a barbell squat, it's gonna take a while. It's gonna take a year, two year. They could be doing that movement for years before they can even really truly maximize it because it's so challenging. That doesn't mean you're not getting results the whole time. But yeah, I agree with you 100%. I mean, of all the people that I trained, I never saw, well, I don't wanna say never, of course there's always exceptions. But again, generally speaking, nothing came close and I didn't care what exercise it was. Even if it was a cable curl versus a dumbbell curl, as silly as it sounds, very simple basic exercise. By the way, I had as a kid, this is my own anecdote, I had to dislocate it in my knee as a kid and long story short, I finally decided I'm just gonna go work out so I can rehab it and then I was training my legs really hard. I was doing the leg press, the hack squat, the leg extension, leg curl. I was doing different varieties of leg presses and hack squats in the Smith machine and I developed my legs built, they definitely built and I was pushing weight and I was pretty strong, I was a 16 year old kid, pretty strong. Then I met those power lifters and they're like, dude, just barbell squat and I swear to God, I barbell squatted and I gained 10 pounds that summer and I'd never seen my lower body respond the way it did with all those other exercise. That was my own personal experience. Well, it was interesting because I remember talking to one of my clients who was always focused on Smith machine bench press and just was like discussing what's the difference? Why? Because they tried a regular barbell bench press and could only do half the weight and they were just mystified by that and I was a new trainer and I had a hard time describing all that but just all those little nuanced variables of the ability for the barbell to kind of travel away from you, behind you, tilt, all these types of things that don't seem like a lot but when you add weight to it and you keep stacking that, that's a lot more for your body to account for. By the way, if you ever see me and I rarely ever work out in commercial gyms, usually it's a hotel gym if I'm traveling, I will use lots of machines and cables, mainly because I never do. So I work out, I'd say probably 90% of my workouts revolve around free weights. So the novelty effect is great with machines and cables. So if you see me in a commercial gym, you'll probably see me doing or a lot of things that I don't normally do and there's value there. There's also value in certain cases of rehab. There's certain exercises that just don't work well with free weights, like if I'm gonna do a cable chop, obviously I can't, gravity doesn't work sideways, tricep press down, there's certain exercises that are more suited for cables and machines. Cables, by the way, are my favorite machine. They're the most versatile form of machine. What I said earlier about free weights mirroring the body and or the body having to follow the track of the machine. Yeah, it moves with you really well. At least with cables, right? You can really adjust that for the individual. I mean, when I had my wellness studio, I had a cage, so I had a squat rack, I had dumbbells, I had bands and I had cables and that was it. I didn't have a single machine in there and I trained everybody that way and it was great and I worked out that way and it's still to this day. Again, if you see me working out, that's pretty much what I'll be using. Now there are some studies that actually counter the point that we're trying to make right now and people tend to jump on them, especially if you're a big machine or cable person and that's the short periods where they track people for like six weeks and they're talking about muscle activation. So they'll make this case sometimes that, oh, well, a hack squat fires the quads way more the muscles are more active. Right. Yeah, with the entire time. Right, and so they'll take that on this and they'll study the two groups and compare them and make the case that, hey, if you wanna develop your quads, this machine is actually superior and so that's why I think there is a lot of debate around this conversation, even though I think initially we teased you in saying that this is obvious, but you're right, there's some contention around it or some debate. I think that's one of the reasons why there's debate is because you see these muscle activation studies that show that these muscles are firing way more on this machine, but that doesn't tell the whole story. No, there's a huge limitation with studies on this. Like a real world, like our experience is based off of training people for long periods of time. So like you'll hear us talk about the value of, you know, 15 to 20 rep range or the value of one to five rep range. Well, when they do studies on rep ranges for eight weeks, you know, eight to 10 or eight to 12 builds more muscle than both of those rep ranges. However, what they don't consider in their short period, their short studies is over time, your body tends to get used to a particular rep range and switching will get your body to move again and all of them build muscle. So although one might be a little better in the short term, all of them still build muscle, they all have value. And so I'm talking about, you know, I trained people for years, I know you guys did too. And so that's what this is based off. This is not like I trained 15 people for three months and I found in three months that machines were as effective as free weights. It's like, no, I trained people for, I had clients for me for 10 years. And when you start training people for long, you know, extended period times or you work out yourself for long extended periods of time, that's when these things start to reveal themselves and you start to see, oh, I can see now the value in this way of training because although this one was great for the first six months, I started to develop some joint pain or I started to lose mobility or really stop working after a short period of time. Whereas this other method, you know, give me these long term, you know, benefits. And then we can't dismiss the functional aspect, right? How well does the strength that you build in the gym translate into the real world? We need, that's very, I think a lot of people who are just interested in changing how they look dismiss that. But I'm gonna tell you right now, if your function is good, the odds that you'll look good for longer periods of time are higher. So you can't dismiss that. Now you don't have to become the super functional athlete, but don't dismiss the functional aspect because losing function will eventually take away from the aesthetics that you're trying to build. It'll definitely take away from your physique. And I look, I tell you what, fine, you can see this sometimes in gyms, these old, you know, X bodybuilders that really never learned how to train that way. And you can tell if they're so limited with their exercises, oh, I used to squat. I used to, and then I can't do anymore because it hurts my back and they're very limited. And you can tell that their bodies start to suffer as a result of it. So, you know, keep that in mind. That includes mobility, right? Keep that in mind because if that goes down, then your repertoire of effective exercises becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. What you could do to get your body to feel good and look good becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. And then your appearance and your aesthetics start to suffer as a result. This application of, you know, advice and training is so important. And by the way, this is one of the reasons why one of the only certifications we work with is NCI. It's not because they communicate the best nutrition information. They do have great nutrition. Talk all about the application. It's about the application. I've seen other courses and they're really great for education. So they're gonna make you really smart. But if you can't apply it, it means nothing as a trainer. I don't care how much you know. If you can't coach someone or train someone. It's not gonna get them closer to their desired results. It's not gonna help. That's the entire point why they're there. I think we lose sight of that all the time. How often do you guys read comments on like YouTube and our reviews and stuff like that of people that say that they've learned more from the show than they have from any of their certification they have because we speak more to the application of the science than we actually talk about the science itself. Because you have to factor in behavioral stuff. If you're not factoring that in, you're crazy because it's one of the biggest pieces to their success. If not the biggest piece. And ironically, certifications leave that out. They do. They don't teach, here's two things that certifications leave out that NCI tackled, which is why I think they're growing so fast. They leave out application. Like I've done certifications. I know you guys have too. They rarely ever talk about, like they'll tell you, here's the science, but then they won't tell you, but here's what actually happens. And here's how it affects your clients. And here's an example of a client that has all these conditions and here's how I would appropriately kind of take them through and get them on a better path. Yeah, they don't do that. They just leave that out. Here's the science and then figure it out. Yeah. And then they also leave out the, here's how you become a successful trainer. Nobody teaches you that. Like you go get certified, none of them teach you because here's the deal. If you're a not successful trainer, if you don't know how to build your clientele, you don't know how to organize it, manage it. You don't know how to charge the right rates. You don't know how to, you're not gonna succeed. Then you can't train people. You can't help anybody. And certification courses spend zero time on this. There's no time spent on this at all. Which is crazy because aren't these certifications trying to prepare you to be successful and actually make a career out of this long-term and you have to be able to make money? Oh, I tell you what, look, we all manage trainers. What percentage of your time was spent teaching your trainers, biomechanics and science and what percentage of your time was spent teaching trainers application and how to build their business? Yeah, 80, 20. Yeah, it was mostly application and how to build your business. So NCI, they focus a lot of time on application and building your business, which is why people are succeeding and they're getting clients better results. And I hope other certifications take note and start to follow suit because otherwise what happens? I forgot, when we were up there in Arizona, didn't they tell us what the trainer dropout rate was? I think the attrition rate was like 80%. Oh, I don't know. I mean, I would agree with that though. I mean, that was probably what my turnover looked like when I was managing gyms. Yeah, it was a huge... Did they cover that? Did he do it? Oh, I don't remember him covering that. Like a huge... It's even less for independent trainers once they leave like a corporate setting where you basically fed clients. Right, right. I can only imagine how bad it is. Huge dropout. Absolutely huge dropout. What other industries are like that? What other industries have like really high turnover? What else does that kind of hair stylist or bartenders or... I mean, I know for a fact when I worked in the restaurant industry. Yeah, hair stylist, you're right. I know that one's up there too. I'm trying to think of what other industries... I bet your real estate agents. I bet you that's got a huge... Yeah, because you go get your license and everything and then you're ready to make big money and they're like, oh crap, this is hard. I know a few people who got their real estate license at nothing. I don't know, I'm guessing, so I have no idea. Same with life insurance agents. Really? Absolutely. High turnover there too. Yeah, a lot of people say, oh, I can make money life insurance. They do the exam, the whole nine yards and then they quit. Yeah. I bet you... Probably just sales in general then, right? Especially highly commissioned ones that rely a lot on the sale, right? Sales is probably... I would imagine there were jobs where people thought, oh my God, it's gonna be easy money or jobs where people were like, oh, this sounds like fun. I love this. I'm gonna open a restaurant, I love cooking. And then the restaurant... That's always been the problem I feel in our industry because it always sounds like an awesome idea to live in the gym and help people out and that's just my entire goal is to just help people. Oh, speaking of gyms, I want you to tell everybody what happened with your PRX, didn't they send you the hung weights? Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, they did. I got 25s instead of 55s. I think they know that. Which is a little ambitious. They're good just to give you the 25s. Let's be honest, it's more than you need. I was teasing them like, well, I guess let's keep stacking 25s on the bar. No big deal. They handled it and they're shipping me the 55s and everything, but yeah, I finally got everything set up on the cinder block wall. This time was a cinder block wall, which I was a little bit like nervous about because I hadn't done it before. I'd done it on studs before and then I did it in here. Wait, so how do you do it? You have to first pre-drill on them. You pre-drill and then you get a real specific type of anchor bolt to basically has like, I don't want to describe that. Like a thread in there. Yeah, it's like a thread and then it like, it sinks it in real tight. So it's a pretty secure anchored in. Bro, that's got a situation. Solid. Solid as hell. Yeah. Oh wow, really? Super solid. Better than in here, you think? Better than in here and that's why I'm always like, don't rip those weights off super fast because it's because of the, these walls are like aluminum studs that are hollow. And so there's just not a lot of security there to begin with because these are for retail stores. Like they don't put a lot of effort in the materials. Justin could run through this wall easily. Yeah. However sad. I would like to see that. You could run through most walls with this one. But I'm so excited because I finally have a pull-up bar. My other one didn't have a pull-up bar on it. So did you get the bigger one? Is it the same one as this one out here? The same one is out here. I love this one. Just orange, you know. And it looks cool. And I got two weight trees, you know, hanging up. Everything's on the wall. I have the dip bars. I have actually have this cool landmine attachment they have now that you can put on the wall. And so I'm starting to do a lot of this landmine universe and stuff. Wait, they have a landmine attachment that goes in the wall? Yeah. So I just shove it into the wall and then go to town. Oh, wow. So I don't have to set it up or put it on the rack or anything. Is it positioned for, could you do a T-bar row on it too? Or is it too high? Of course. Yeah. Really? I need to find an attachment. I was actually thinking about that. I'd love to do T-bar rows again. Yeah, you know what I use for, so I do a T-bar at home. I just take the bar bell. I do old school. I just put it in the corner of the wall. But I get the V-bar and just put it around the bar. You know, so like the pull-down V-bar. Oh, right, right, right. Yeah, so I just put it around. And you just put it around. Or I get the rope and I put it around if I want to get a greater range of motion. But the attachment's probably way better. Yeah, I was going back and forth with the bench because they actually now have one of those fold-down ones from the wall. Like we have in here it's, at first it was just, I have the fold-down. We were beta testing it. I have the fold-down at my house. You do? Mm-hmm. Oh, for the incline? Not the incline one. I don't have that one yet. I had the flat one. Yeah, so I had the flat one previous to that. Oh, okay, you had that one. And so this one I actually got the free-standing one that's got incline just because I didn't have a whole lot of wall space left with everything I bought. So yeah, but yeah, so it's all set up, man. It's ready to go. So I know you obviously could probably pay it in full. You probably did. But did you consider financing it? Because I know they have such a cool financing deal. Yeah, I did. I actually financed mine. I did finance the first one. Oh, you did, okay. Not this one. Oh, okay. This one I just went for it. Oh, really? Both of you guys financed it? Yeah, I know you're like the opposite of that stuff. But you know what? That's not smart money, especially with inflation and everything. It's actually pretty smart to lock in low interest rates right now. That's kind of what I was thinking. Yeah, it's super cheap. I mean, I looked at it like gym membership, right? It's like I would be like, I now have made this transition. I'm no longer working out in gyms. I'm gonna move into training at home. And so what would my gym memberships cost? I mean, I think it's less than what my gym memberships combined would be. So it was like, and I don't, so I never felt like I skipped to be, although I think I'm still paying for some gym memberships. Are you still? Yeah, I think so. I think I got it with a billet. You just ain't got rid of all of them, yeah? You just love the industry so much. I do, that's how I'm gonna look at it. Like I'm just trying to help out, you know? I don't want to see them. Yeah, support them. Yeah, no matter what the gym industry for me is like, that's my people, man. So whenever I hear about a gym like going under or I don't know why, it always makes me sad. Well, you know what always happens to me is like, because I've been in these phases where I decide either I'm gonna switch to another gym or I'm gonna cancel that one is I like, I would go down. This is what would happen to me. Oh, you know what? I've talked about on the show, it reminded me I'm gonna cancel my gym and then all of a sudden I'm gonna be like, you know, I really want to go down and use, you know, club sports sauna. And I'm like, damn it, I just canceled. Then I go down and I have to re-sign and do the whole thing over again. Just because I'm in this. How many times have you canceled the re-sign? Dude, I've done that so many times. So many times with gyms. Both are the golds, the club sport and the 24 hour fitness. I have canceled and re-signed back up at least on each one of those, at least three to four times on each one. Wow. Now, do you have the 24 hour fitness, those original like $49 a year after you prepaid? No, I have a- Or was it the family and friends? Yeah, no, I don't even have a really good deal. I'm actually paying like normal, which is ironic because we worked there and I could have got like a smoking deal. See, I just to show you, when I had that deal a long time ago but I've canceled it and re-signed up so many times that I'm just whatever the normal, I pay like $60 something a month because I have all club super sport access for 24 and then I pay 100 and I wanna say 20 or 50 for the club sport, which is like the spa one that we do. And then I pay another- So like 20 something, 100 bucks a year? And then another 34 or $39 for the, all the golds one. Someone needs to make a meme with that. I'm like just like holding money and it's on fire. You know what I mean? No, I mean, if you find value in it, I mean, that's the thing. Well, what'll happen is I'll go down and I'll use one of them or I'll wanna use it and I'll make son of a bitch, you know? I did it all in that trap for a while because of the old man gyms that you want, like just the sauna and like some of the nice amenities, but you don't really get it. Cause I don't know, I still look for that kind of stuff. Like it's relaxing to me. I like being around that. But at the same time, I've gotten used to the home gym for all the, you know, the meat and potatoes. How funny is that, right? As I've gotten older, like when I was a kid, I gave a shit about the locker room or you know, steam and sauna, like whatever. Now I go in a, do you guys have? Yeah. I go look in the locker room like, oh, it looks nice. Look, eucalyptus oil in there. That's a clean shower. I think I'd like this. Well, I know what happened. And I've caught myself doing this as we gotten older. It's like, I'll go, like, I gotta go to the gym today and I'll go do, I'm not really feeling it today. So I go do like two or three things and then I'm in the sauna for the next hour. Yeah. Oh yeah, dude. If they had racket ball, I'd be like, oh, into that, dude. I'm full old man right now. And then I found myself, I haven't done it a while, obviously because they had shut it down and I said, forget it and I canceled. But I found myself like, am I that old guy in the locker room that walks around naked? Cause I'd go in the sauna and then, you know, I'm hot. I don't really care anymore. I'm just going to walk over there and what, and then there's like other people in the locker room like, I'm that dude now. I better cover myself up, dude. Put your foot up on the bench, just, yeah. Speaking of being an old guy. I need to air out. Speaking of the old guy, I have a random question for you guys. Do you guys have, have you guys written wills? So I have a trust that you just wrote. I had a trust, which basically is, you know, what did you leave me? Similar. No, nothing. I was just, I was reading this article and actually like from ages 18 to 36, some young age, there's been like a 18% increase of people writing their wills at that age, just a younger demographic of people that are now writing wills at a much younger age than before. I just thought that was interesting. Cause you know, I'm 40 and I haven't written a will. So I was just, I was curious if you guys were doing it. And then also if you had any sort of speculation on why. Well, especially if you're not married. I don't want the state to own anything that after I'm gone. Especially if you're not married. So let's say you're not married and you're, you know, you got your girlfriend and whatever you have kids and you die, she doesn't necessarily get your stuff. And if your child is under 18, I believe it goes to a state arbitrator, if I'm not mistaken. And then it goes through the state and it's a pain in the ass. Yeah. So that's what it will become. It's hard for them to get it. But if you have a spouse that automatically goes to them unless you don't want it to. Or if you have like children from previous marriages, then it's probably good to have a will because then they can start to fight over what's going on. Or if you're old and you have all these kids. So my, I have an aunt that's worked in the banking industry forever. And she's told me, she goes, you would not believe what money does to families. Like, like the patriarch and matriarch pass away and all their kids, they have five kids take each other to court and just are vicious with each other and whatever. And I can't even, it's like terrible. She tells me stories. People are always surprised at that, but I'm not. I mean, almost every family has the one brother or the one sister, right? Who like, you got like five siblings and then like, there's one or two that just don't have their shit together. And what they see is that opportunity and they're entitled to. Piranhas. Well, they just, they don't have any money and they haven't maybe done very well for themselves. And then all of a sudden mom and dad leave a house that's worth a million dollars. That's a quarter million dollars to say whatever in their name. And they're like, and then maybe the other siblings are established, have their own houses and they'd rather keep the house. But you don't deserve it or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't mean. So I have a friend, I have a friend who's family. So this happened to somebody they knew, right? Where the parents died, they were older. And one of the kids was their full-time caretaker and had a job, but also took care of them for like the last, I don't know, four years of their life. So the last three or four years of your life as you get older, they can be rough, right? You need someone to help you get up, go to the bathroom, bathe, feed them, do all that stuff. So this, their child, their daughter did all this for like four years. The parents told the kids verbally, hey, listen, so-and-so's been taking care of us for the last four years. I would like them to have this much more when we pass away, verbally. They died because there was no contract. They went to court and fought over it. And I'm like, what a bunch of pieces of garbage, you know? And then there was one kid who like never visited, never called the parents, didn't give a crap. All of a sudden they come out of the woodworks. Ah, I deserve a full quarter of all that or whatever. That's why stuff like that happens. Yeah, but why do you think there's an, I mean, 18% increase in that is like a lot. That's a big percentage, you know? Getting close to a quarter of all said- That's a good question. I don't know what's going on. Like what would all of a sudden- Promoted that. Especially when we're, go ahead. Perhaps it's the coronavirus. All the fear. People are feeling like maybe I'm, you know, mortal at this point. That's a good point. Just more fear, right? Yeah, I think so. And in my comment on wills, I mean, I'm not an expert on this, but a living trust is going to be a better option than a will. Because a will, I believe, actually goes through probate as well, which involves the state. And that's exactly what you don't want involved. Yeah. And usually you write that up after your trust anyway. Yeah, so they're- So what's the point of even having a will than if you have a trust? Well, the will will be part of the trust. Yeah, exactly. It's all kind of incorporated. Isn't that great? And they go through like, yeah, if you have kids, like who's going to take care of them and you have to like, you know, delineate that. Otherwise, yeah, the state gets involved and they have to like figure it out. So you have to like, yeah, you have to talk about all the morbid things and get that all covered. I'd say just stay close, you know, be good to your kids and have a good relationship with them so they don't have to deal with all this afterwards. I still don't think it would matter. I really don't. I mean, we've talked about this because Katrina's mom has two houses and you know, she's getting older, right? And they have four kids. And one of the houses, like she just finished the backyard, like the house. This is the house where we all come to and like every holiday and she's built it and just is great for holding and hosting everybody. She's even like, did like a little memorial thing in the concrete in the back for Troy. And you know, the idea is that this house stays in the family and we don't sell it or whatever. But you have, you know, two of her siblings that are just not as established as the other two are. And so two of them would be like, yeah, it's not a big deal. They have their own houses. They have their own investments to make the money. The other two might be like, I need the money. Yeah, but then the other two, I don't know where they'll be at in 10 or 20 years from now. And like if they really, really need the money and some might move out of state. And then it's like, let's say they move to, you know, another state far away. It's like, why would I have this house just sitting there that I never come back and use and visit? And so even though they're all very tight and good, like that will create a interesting conversation. Like, well, that's, yeah, I mean, that's what you have to all outline. But actually the house that we bought, they went, that was sort of the circumstance was there was like one or two people in the family right now. And they all wanted to keep it in the family, but there was like one or two that voted no, like we need, you know, we need the money or we need to sell and so then they all went through this. And I think that's why it took extra long because they had to kind of like work all that out. And then they ended up put it on the market and then we ended up, you know, taking the opportunity. Right, so I mean, even if you have good, like you're in good standings with your siblings, I could see that. I mean, I could even, I could understand even if I, like let's say I was the person who moved far away and we never used that house. It's like, well, what is the point of it staying there if I'll never go back there and never use it? I'm getting no, and just because my siblings want to use it and that's it. You're right, it could, you know, it reminds me of your like, how many movie plots have been like this where there's like a, like someone dies a rich, but then they all have to go watch a video. And this person's like, if you're watching this video, why died? And I'll give you $10 million, but first, you know, and there's like some. Like every murder mystery. That's always about somebody like, you know, cashing on life insurance, that's how I do it. I'll give you $2 million, I want to get the estate money. But you have to get your biology. You have to answer these 17 personal questions about me. Yeah. To get you to the second stage. It's like the old guy, like what was it, what was it, Ann and Nicole Smith or something like that, where you get like the new like super hot, like young wife of like the, the old guy. She married that nine year old guy. Yeah. And everybody in the family is just like, ah, I did like everything was like allotted to her and not the family. That happened in my family. So my dad, but my dad, my dad, my stepdad right remarried and he remarried to a lady who I want to say is like, and I don't want to get this wrong and insult her. It's like 15 years, maybe 20 years older than him. Like, so, and yeah, right. And he's older, right? So that she's definitely quite a bit older than he is. And she has like three kids and she's really wealthy. Like she's set and like, they like hate him. Of course. He hasn't done anything. You know what I'm saying? He's like a real nice guy. Yeah, you know what, you know what my stepdad, dude, he's like a super nice guy, you know what I'm saying? But they like just hate him because he's, here's this young guy who's marrying. I mean, it's just, it's, you don't see it as, it's not as common as the reverse of that. But yeah, he's definitely being treated that way from her, her, your kids because she's worth all this money. And here comes, and my stepdad doesn't really bring a lot to the table at all financially. So they look at it like, oh, who's this dude who's sliding in at this point in her life who doesn't have anything really financially is now what can be entitled to all her stuff. You know what though? The bottom line is, it's like, it's that person's money. So it's up to them to make bad decisions. That's right, that's her attitude. Fuck them, it's my money. You know what I'm saying? I could give it all to my own team. I could give it all to my own team. I got pulled back into Tiger King just because, I mean this is all that kind of like drama and like the white trash sort of like illegal zoo world or whatever. Like it was just, I was like, I gave up on it because it was all just like a recap the first episode. That's why I didn't even watch it. You told me that. Yeah, and so I guess like around the fourth or fifth episode, I think there's only like five or six episodes. Like it gets into like other stuff that like, you're like, oh my God, it like took total like left turn. So there was more parties involved. So like, so you know how Joe Exotic actually got into prison? Do you remember, if you remember like they did, he plotted against Carol Baskin to kill, right? It basically like the guy that he was working with. There's like a record of him saying that, right? From Vegas, you know, the guy that came in to help him out as a benefactor. Turns out he's a total slime ball or whatever. Like so I guess, so they basically like planted him with the idea and then he like proposes it to like his other worker. And then like they set him up with the FBI. So it goes further and they have like recordings with the FBI basically like this guy from Vegas like recorded the FBI conversation that he had saying that he could get his employee to basically set up Joe to- Is that an entrapment? Yes, yes. And so anyway, they all go through these affidavits and they come back and like acknowledge that. But then his employee, and I'm sorry for not, you know, remembering all our names and this is confusing, but the employee that basically was like hated Joe the whole time and like was setting him up comes out and feels guilty about this whole thing. And he's like, well basically in spoiler, like we were setting Joe up, like we were gonna kill Joe. And like here's how we're gonna do it. And it was like exactly how they basically outlined how they wanted to kill Carol Baskin, but it was really originally Joe. And so he like announces this whole thing in court and like, so there's this whole like retrial now or they're gonna see if they're gonna let Joe off with a lesser sentence. And then they just leave it at that. And there's like, there's a couple other plot twists. They're setting it up for part three. Yeah, dude. So now it's all about the- They all deserve each other. Dude, it's just like, yeah, it's- Do you remember what's the time? It's like Jerry Springer. What's his sentence? Do you remember how long his sentence was? It was like for eight years or something, something like that. But so he's served two. And then so, yeah, it's, I guess it was interesting enough to have like plot twists and there's more of them, but it's really, you know, just more Jerry Springer actually. More of the same, right? More of the same of these characters just behaving super badly. And this one guy was, oh my God. Oh, 22 years he was, he was- Oh, 22, oh, it was way off. What a weird, that whole thing was so weird to me how he was able to lure people in and then they'd stick around. And like, because he had tigers, I guess money and drugs. I guess that's all you need. The whole thing, yeah. I mean, that's not that weird. I got tigers for money. People get lured in for a lot less. I mean, that guy from Vegas was doing it to get girls too? Yeah, him and his wife would like lure in, like they would, they called it like code 69 and they would look for like a hot girl that would come to the zoo and then his wife would go approach her and then pull her back to pet the tigers and then they'd all do like a weird like orgy. Wow. Like dude, what, like what world is this? I liked my favorite were the, were Joe's like boyfriends and husbands. You know what I mean? They're like, I'm not gay. I'm not even gay man, but $20, $20. Hey, really, what are you gonna do? Matt's the hell of a drug. Yeah, yeah, that's the real thing right there. Oh dude. Wow. The ultimate bamboozle. What a commercial for Matt though, huh? Joe's not, he's a charismatic dude. It's so awesome, it'll make you do shit you don't even wanna do. I like it, you know? Serious. Wow. Hey, so this is a total terrible transition out of this but I was reading this other article on like the top polluters in the world. You know what industry, the second highest industry when it comes to polluting the earth is? No, is this, by the way, are they not putting in the militaries of the world? Does that count as all of this? Or is that, are they market industries? Yeah, market industries. Okay, because I know the militaries pollute by far. And what is the, what goes, what's umbrella underneath the military? Oh man, all the jets and planes and rockets and it's like. This was just like, this is like market industries. I don't know which one. Take a guess, you guys have a guess? So what would be one of the highest? I saw the notes, so I know what the answer is. Oh, you did, I didn't know you saw it. Yeah, but I had no idea. The fashion industry. What? Yeah. Okay, I would be guessing. It's clothes, just the amount of clothes that we buy and then just throw away. It's really massive factories that person. Yeah, so there's this huge movement on, and it was popular when we were kids like to go to second hand stores and stuff. So I was watching, I was listening to that other podcast that I like right now this week in startups and he was interviewing one of these founders, this new company called Wear Loom. And I thought it was actually really brilliant, especially after I heard all these statistics. One, I didn't know that they were like a top polluter. And then there's obviously a movement for people to go green and reduce their carbon footprint. And so second hand stores are becoming more and more popular again. And basically what their app does is aggregate all of the different ones into one single location. So if you're somebody who's looking for used Jordans, instead of you having to go to eBay and to The Good Will and all these different locations and places where you try. Storefronts for those? Yeah, instead of, no, no, no, it's a centralized app. So it's basically, think about like the Amazon for second hand stuff. Or like eBay or something like that. Yeah, well the eBay's in there, right? So they aggregate all of that so you can just go to one place and shop for second hand clothes. Oh wow. So you just thought that was brilliant with the, one, knowing that I didn't know that it was like a top polluter like that. And then it was that second hand stores is already like a popular thing. Like there's a lot of high, and it goes high end too, right? So you can get, there's a lot of people that buy like Louis Vuitton purses second and third time handed down. I see, I can see that a lot. Like the whole shoe thing to me, I'm just like, unless you're like some weirdo with like a shoe sniffing fetish, like why would you buy somebody else's shoes? You realize you're talking to Adam's listening to us right now. Well, there's a lot of people that, I'm just saying. Well, there's a lot of people that would buy the shoes I'm wearing right now, right? So I could actually wear these for the next year or two and I could sell them. Season them a little bit. I mean, you might, yeah, exactly. You might get a guy just. Well, what you, I mean, you get less money for them the more worn they are, right? So you, the idea is- It depends on what article clothing. And what kind of people you're selling to, but typically, right, you want, you want them- That's just where my mind goes. They can sell for millions. Yeah. Well, I mean, I've always thought, the secondhand thing was always weird to me. Like I've never been a big secondhand guy, but I remember when we were kids, that was a popular thing for people to wear secondhand clothes. Well, I did that with hats, you know, it was just weird. Like when my friend would be done with his hat, we'd like switch hats and then we'd trade and it was like a trading thing. That's how you get likes. I was just gonna say, it's funny you say that because you're probably more likely to catch some shit that way than with fucking socks shoes. Probably. Yeah, definitely. It didn't smell as bad. We'd share combs and toothbrushes and deodorant. You'd share underwear. You'd swap underwear. He'd use one side of the toilet paper and he'd use the other side. You know, we like- You guys didn't? That's my new podcast. People always ask what podcasts listening to. And that's the host from all in, doesn't it? Yes, that's how I went down the rabbit hole. By the way, did you know that podcast in such a short period of time is now one of the top podcasts? Yeah, like he's been announcing the last couple shows. They did a really good job. They're really good. They're really smart and they're really entertaining. And you're looking at, you're gonna get inside information on investments in very applicable ways. I haven't found anywhere else. Yeah, no, I love it. So the host, Jason Calcanis, I think is how you say his name, he is also a host of another. So before all in, he had this week in startups. So he was podcasting before the all in podcast. And he's also got an investment fund. And what he does is he basically brings on the companies that he's investing in and his group is investing in. And he does these like short little interviews. So it's kind of cool. It's interesting to me right now because obviously we're getting an angel investing but then it's also interesting because I like to hear these cool pitches on new companies that are like starting off like that Cafe X one. Like you heard about that one, right? I did. Yeah, I don't think I talked about on the show but I was telling you off air, like it's the robotic like coffee makers or coffee machines where basically it picks up your phone when it's your phone is 90 seconds away from it. So as you're driving to it, it knows what your order is, gets it ready. You'll get your coffee in way less time and it's like two bucks and it's all automated. Well, like the two most high, the highest expenses for Starbucks is real estate and employees. So the coffee and all that stuff is very, the overhead on that's very, very low. So that's not the highest thing is so if you can eliminate the real estate piece and the person doing it, you could reduce the cup of coffee in half. So it's half the price for the cup of coffee faster as good. Like, I mean, that's gonna be amazing. Yeah. I think it's brilliant. I mean, it just eliminates the cool part of like. For sure. Well, just like your technical order that you want everybody to hear. So Sal brought up that, that was his point, right? He goes, oh, I wonder if it'll, his initial reaction to it was, I wonder if it will do that good because a lot of people go to the coffee shop for the experience, they pull their laptops out and there's definitely, that's a new thing in culture in the last decade or two, right? That's become popular to do that. But that is not. I mean, that part annoys me. I was actually saying that sarcastically, you know, like you're behind somebody at Starbucks and they have like the two sugar pumps and then this and then it's like, it's so neurotic. Half foam, two and a half pumps. Oh, I thought you were alluding to the people that want to congregate in the place and actually, because that. Well, there's a big part of it too. Because you will lose that. But I mean, I think that's such a small percentage of people that buy coffee every day. There's only so many people hanging out here. Yeah, there's a market for faster, tastes good. Yeah, sure. So it's still gotta be good. Yeah, that market is 80 plus percent in my opinion because you know, 80% of the people are not hanging out at Starbucks. Most of them are going down there. They're buying. We're already addicts, we just want convenience. Yeah. Yeah, speed. I want my drugs faster. And they're saying like two bucks. So the cups that would be four or five bucks talking about it being $2, so it being faster. And then imagine them being in like, like if you're in a downtown area, like kind of where we're near, like they would be in, you know, almost every corner in somebody's office building or whatever. So just like how they have like red box or whatever for DVDs, you'd have these coffee machines that you would go into the. I think there's a market for it. Oh, I think there's. I definitely think there's a market for it. A massive market for it. And that same robot can wash your dishes and then eat it. Oh, shit, it's happening. Now you're getting out of control. Oh, I can't wait till that happens. That's a huge step though. You know what? They're gonna be like, first robot does, you know, heart surgery and he's like not doing dishes. You know, that's gonna be out in the whole time. Meanwhile, China was taking people to space that were just random people. Just so you guys know. China? Yeah, yeah, they did. I believe everything China said. I'm just gonna tell you right now. Everything they say. I don't think China said it. I think we reported on it, but that's happening so. I believe us just a little bit more that we say. All right, so I wanna talk about something on the show now. I think it's appropriate. So I'm getting a lot of comments from people about whether or not I'm on TRT and you know, because I'm looking different these days. So I wanna talk a little bit about my process and kind of what's happening. So I know you guys know. Intervention? No. I gotta get all serious for a second. No, this, okay, so I wanna tell the audience because I feel like it's important. This is something that we've been talking about for a while and it's also just, I just feel like it's appropriate because of all the questions that I've been getting. So I don't know, about maybe 10 months ago or so. That's been that long? Maybe, maybe eight months. Yeah, only it's been 10 months. Yeah, maybe less. I don't know the exact. Six to eight, I would say. Maybe six to eight months. Okay, so it feels like a while. There were, we've been talking a lot to different hormone therapy clinics and stuff. Well, ever since I got into it. Yes. And the main reason was because of Adam's, because of what you did, right? You were on antibiotics for a while when you competed, went off, tried to get your normal, your testosterone up to normal levels. You did that for like two years. And so we're like, this would be a good partnership. A lot of people ask questions about this. So anyway, there was this local clinic. It's not the one we're working with now and I'll get into that. But they offered free blood testing to everybody. So I know at the time, you were like, I'm gonna go get tested. Hey, you know, Sal, we should go, you know, if you want it's free or whatever. And at the time, I thought, no, waste the time. I don't need to get my hormones checked. My libido is fine. Well, especially since what, less than a year ago, we had that at home test and you were like through the roof. No, it was more than that. It was like two years ago. Oh, was that one? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I want to get into that too, because that's a little annoying. But anyway, one of them number one, I guess effects of low testosterone is libido drop. And if it's below a certain amount, they'll say it's almost like everybody will have this really poor libido and issues with that, right? And my libido was fine. So I thought, man, it's kind of a waste of time, whatever. Anyway, it changed my mind. I'm like, all right, I'll go get tested. And I went and got tested with Adam and I got my results back. So this was again, like eight months ago or so. And my levels, and this is 100% true, came back not just low, they came back lower than, and a general practitioner would have recommended that I take testosterone. So I came back at 260. Well, you were lower than me. I was lower than you were. Yeah. So, and if you're watching and listening to this, you're probably- I'm too mind-boggling for all of us here and knowing how dialed you've been in the last few years. So now, and I'm gonna go into why, I didn't talk about this right out the gates, but first of all, it's very depressing for me because I super, and anybody will tell you it was me super consistent with my training, my diet, my sleep, my supplements. It's a passion of mine. I'm maybe even neurotic about it. So everything's perfect and dialed in. My number came back at 260, which basically means if I increase my testosterone by 50%, which ain't gonna happen cause I was already doing everything, red light, I was doing everything, that it would still be low. So I remember I called Jessica and I was super depressed about it. And I'm like, this is bullshit. And then everything kind of started to make sense. I'm like, you know, for the last few years, I have not felt like myself at all. I've been feeling low drive. I've needed more sleep. My body does not respond. My gut health has gotten kind of worse, you know, on and off. Again, the libido part didn't make any sense to me. Well, my libido's okay, but then I compared it to how it used to be. And I just naturally have a very high libido. So I'm like, I guess it is kind of low compared to what it was before. So I talked to the doctor back and forth and the reason why I think mine came back low was in my 20s. This is back in the early 2000s. And I've talked about this on the show. There were, and there are outright steroids, but they were over the counter and they marketed them as pro hormones. So they went under the brands like Superdraw, Methylone, Testosterone, Hallidraw. And these are all active oral steroids that were, they weren't banned because the legislation of the time was written specifically for known and approved antibiotics steroids and testosterone. So they were able to sell them over the counter. So I was buying them and I was taking them, you know, on and off and I think that's probably what caused me, once I hit 40 to really have this dip or like I said, the last few years have this low testosterone. So anyway, I thought, I said, okay, I'm gonna try it. I don't wanna tell anybody. My family doesn't know. So this is one of the reasons why I haven't talked about it on the show. The only people that knew was Jessica, my close, close family didn't tell my parents don't know. You know, my kids don't know. Didn't wanna tell anybody. And I wanted to see, you know, what the difference was. And so we started working with regenerative sport and medicine. The doctors there are extremely knowledgeable. I was not impressed at all with the previous people. When I feel like I know more than the person who's prescribing me medications, then I don't feel confident. I've had this with cannabis. We've had people. You guys can say it's very similar to that experience. Yes, we had a person on the show a long time ago. Actually, we didn't even air the episode who was a cannabis expert. And Adam and I were both like, we know more than you do, we can't air this episode. So anyway, this other place I was not impressed with, neither was Adam. We talked to regenerative sport and medicine and they were obviously, they know their shit. And I asked them, I said, why was my libido kind of normal? And he said, well, he goes, there's a lot of things affect libido, not just testosterone. He goes, but what about these things? He's like, are you, you know, do you gain body fat really easily? I'm like, yeah, naturally ectomorph shredded. All of a sudden it's like, store more body fat, more pain, super tired. And I asked him about gut health and he said there could be an effect with gut health as well, especially as low as I was. So I didn't want to tell anybody, I wanted to go on and I wanted to wait. And to go from, and remember, keep in mind, before I talk about my experience with this, I want everybody to know, I was dialed going into this. So it wasn't, I didn't, I wasn't like shitty exercise, poor diet, whatever. I was, everything was dialed always, low testosterone. So then I got my testosterone up to the upper normal limits. And it's, to say it's life changing is an understatement for me. It was like my quality of life completely changed. And the difference in physical difference for me is about, and I tested this, it's about 13 to 14 pounds of lean body mass and about five to seven pounds of body fat. So I dropped, doing the same stuff, training, eating, all that stuff. The only difference now is I'm eating more because my lean body mass has gone up. 13 pound lean body mass and I dropped about five to seven pounds of body fat. How long did it take for you to kind of feel that difference in the workouts and then probably pretty quick going? Yeah, in terms of your body responding. So, and I didn't know, and this is what made me really pissed off. What made me really upset was A, it was a kick to the groin because I had everything set up. So to see my levels come back so low and then to talk to the doctor and they told me literally, your levels are, they're below 300 which is outside the range. And that means you'll have negative health effects as a result of it. So you'd have increased risk of heart disease and Alzheimer's, all that stuff. So you guys know, that's a big deal for me. So I was like, shit, okay. And then the thing that, I forgot the direction, I was gonna go with that. But anyway, oh, here's what really pissed me off. We did those at home tests. And I had a couple, I had a few. You were hella high. One of them was really high. One of them was normal. One of them said you were like beyond high. Super low on those home tests. So what the hell, right? Like why would it say that? And I'm wondering if it's user error, I'm doing it at home. How, and look, you talk to the hormone doctors, they'll tell you don't, like you have to do blood tests. So I think that this is kind of proving. Well, the worst part about that more than anything else was that because you were normal and high on both the testings that you did, that you just, it didn't even, you didn't, why I- I didn't know what the hell was going on. Like why do I feel so fine? It was useful to me because I was so low. It's what triggered, okay, I need to go get my blood work done now. Like this test is saying that I'm really low. So I could see where some people found value and things like that. If it showed you were really low. But man, how shitty is that for somebody who gets tested as normal or high? And so then they don't go and further investigate what potentially could be wrong. Yeah, all the signs, if this is hindsight, all the signs were there, minus the libido part. And that's the part that I kept fooling myself. But man, my energy, my drive, I just didn't feel like myself. I had to really tune everything in with supple. I mean, everything perfect just to make myself kind of feel like okay. So that, you know, that's very interesting. As far as how I felt, I must be very sensitive to testosterone or I just had been low for so long because within the first, I'd say three or four weeks, the first thing I noticed was my libido went ridiculous. So it was like, and then I'm like, oh yeah, this is what I... That's why you kept coming after me. It was like, Justin, you're looking good. Well, I want to add some stuff to this conversation. One, I think it's really funny that it's so taboo to talk about or it's a big deal. I mean, I've been on the train of telling people what's up since the beginning. I also was that way with marijuana well before anybody was. And I see it, it's a good comparison because I see the same trajectory happening with hormone therapy as I did with cannabis. And this is part of the reason why we partnered with them business-wise. I think five, 10 years from now, it's gonna be very... Just as like we see people are talking about cannabis all the time, you see the clinics all over the place because it's not so taboo anymore. I think you're gonna see the same thing with hormone therapy as we get older, 40 and beyond. To me, and Joe Rogan's really good about this. He talks openly about his therapy and just... And I was just listening to talk about it again about like, you know, he's like, of course I would. I'm in my forties. No, he's just fifties now. Yeah, well, yeah. When he started, I think he was in his forties, you know, and my levels are lower than me. And if I can take a therapy and have a doctor manage my blood work every month to two months and check up and keep all my levels optimal and it's affordable for me, like why the fuck would I not? The quality of life thing and testosterone levels are dropping regardless. This is the thing, they're going down across the board. There's a lot of things you could do to raise your levels, but there's something else that's going on. This has been well documented. And then, you know, like my history in my 20s, I think definitely played a big role in... Well, I'm not finished telling you what I wanted to interrupt here is because I'm talking about the business side of this and where we're going with this and why I really wanted us to partner with someone because I do think that this is the future and you're going to see more and more people that are going to look for this. And I think it's important that instead of you going out and doing the mistake that I made, which is trying to become your own doctor and giving it to yourself and buying on the black market to save a couple bucks and... Right, trying to find the cheaper sources out there. Yeah, yeah, 100%. You know, that's why we want... And one of the things too, I love the way we have structured this. So some of the audience, we've only mentioned it once, the audience may not know this, but we have a private forum that is a Mind Pump Hormones and both Dr. Todd and Dr. Ran come on there twice a month and do a live Q&A. And we had the first one just a couple of weeks ago and it was incredible. Dr. Ran was on there for like two hours. Dude, he went off. Oh, he must have answered 100 questions. The thread was going like crazy, just tremendous value that you... Show me where you can get this, all right? And this is something free that we are doing for our audience that you guys can join in there. And then you have Dr. Todd in there every day. So if you have questions that you write in there and he's interacting, just the value of that to educate people on potentially whether they need it or not for themselves and what they're not doing is just telling people, oh, go take testosterone. It's like, let's look at all these potential markers. What are some of the things that we can do to do it naturally first? No, it's not about haphazardly putting... It doesn't work that way. No. It's all medical. And I do wanna address the whole like, it's like this miracle thing that you're gonna do and voila, you're gonna get all these incredible effects or whatever. For me personally, I was dialed in with everything forever since I was a child. And the only difference was I went from, obviously from testosterone that was super low to now in the upper normal range. And so that was kind of a missing piece for me, but I'd always been consistent. What I don't want people to think is that they're gonna go and it's gonna solve other problems. They're not gonna need to work out. They're not gonna need to eat right. That's not true. That's not the case at all. It's all makes a big difference. You gotta do all that stuff. So you're not gonna like do it in them all the time. Our message doesn't change. It's been the same one. Even when we work with supplement companies, it doesn't mean that we would recommend people take supplements over whole foods. The all natural way is going to be the better approach always. And that's why it was actually three years that I was off of testosterone because for three years, I tried to do it as best as I could myself. And so I wanted to let me exhaust every resource that I have naturally to see if I can bring this up to a healthy level. And it just got to a place where, and I was similar, I was in the 200s. And the best I could get it up to was about 400 and something, which was better than what I was, but still didn't feel great. I still, I had lost that motivation to come and drive, to go to the gym. I had noticed by that I actually was affected libido-wise. So I noticed a huge difference in my libido. And after all that time of working on it, I couldn't get it back up any higher than that. And I didn't feel good. And so I was like, okay, all right. Well, I'm 40 years old. I don't have a problem with doing this now. And so I'm for that. And I'm 100% for educating other people on it because more often, I didn't realize how much I would get DMs around this. When I started talking about the testosterone thing, I get so many messages. And I don't feel comfortable telling people this is not my expertise. Like, yeah, I have experience. You just tell them your own personal. Yeah, and then that's all. But that doesn't help people out that much either because it's so individualized. I have some questions because it's been so stigmatized. And also, there's just people that have their own ideas of what that entails. And it's totally not accurate information. It's not easily accessible. Whereas now, the education piece is everything to be able to bring that clarity so you know if it's a right option for you. Yeah, well, that was even for me, the stigma. Even I felt crushed when I got my test results back and I talked to the doctors. I'm like, this is ridiculous. I'm doing everything. I felt that stigma. Like why am I a fitness guy? I'm a health guy. Like how could this be possible? And of course, I mean, I guess it could make sense if you add all the other stuff up, but still. And yeah, you're right, it's stigmatized. If you're doing things and you're healthy and if it's your thyroid, there's no stigma, right? Oh, my thyroid is low and then you give you thyroid. Oh, I'm much better. Insulin, obviously. Hormone, by the way. You don't understand that. Yeah, insulin, there's no stigma, right? Estrogen, progesterone, no stigma. Testosterone, because if you take ridiculous amounts of it, you have this performance enhancing drug, it's been stigmatized. Hormone therapy's not that, by the way. They will not, they're not gonna give you bodybuilder, it doesn't work that way. They will take your levels and bring them up to the, you know, when you start to feel good, which is typically in the upper normal range or whatever and it's different from person to person. And that's pretty much it. And I'll tell you what, and I've told you guys this and, you know, this is the truth, the physical effects, cool. That's great, it's fun. I don't care about that. As much as I care about, boy, do I feel different. Like I felt way more energy, way less irritable, tired, my drive came back. I felt like my old self again, which is kind of the best words that I can use to describe. So, and again, because we're always as transparent as possible to our audience, you know, and we've talked about this for a while and I told you guys, and so the audience knows, I told the guys, I don't wanna say anything yet. I wanna hold off, my family doesn't know yet, let me wait and I don't know how I feel about it, whatever, and I'm private about certain things. But I wanna be very transparent. So that's, you know, that's been my experience and that's kind of what's going on. And if you're doing things and you can't figure out what that was going on and you work with your doctor, like Western medicine is not the solution for everything, but for some things, it definitely makes a huge difference. Doug, when is the next talk? When is Dr. Todd talking on the forum? Yeah, that's, I believe Monday the 20th. Oh, this Monday coming up. 5 p.m. Pacific. So yeah, so at 5 p.m. Pacific standard time inside the forum, you guys can ask Mind Pump forums, you can, Mind Pump forum, you can join. And then it's also on replay, right? So we leave it up there, so if you can't make it. What's the name of the forum, Doug? Is it Mind Pump Hormones, I believe? No, Mind Pump Hormones. It's Mind Pump Hormones. It's a Facebook group. Yeah. So just go to the Facebook Request Access and we'll let you in. And now the previous Q&A that Dr. Rand did. It's still there. You can watch the replay. The whole thing. So all two hours of it. Yes. You can watch it. And look, here's the, I get so many DMs, it's hard to answer them all, but if you have any questions, and you wanna ask me my personal experience or whatever you can DM me, I'll try to get to them. But that's it. And so the audience knows too, like this is how we, those that have been around for a very long time, this is how we started our original forum. So I don't know how long it'll stay free. We'll do it for free as long as we can. But obviously the bigger it gets, the more things that we add, the more services we have to pay other people to manage it, take care of it. So eventually it may get to a place where we have to charge for access to it because we're paying others to manage it and run it. But for now it's, you got free access to it. So I would take advantage of it. If you're listening right now and you're not in there, you should be in there. Hey, real quick, I hope you're enjoying the podcast. Look, go check out one of our partners, Pathwater. So they make water that comes in these aluminum can bottles that are fully recyclable, but here's the best part. I can, when I'm done with it, I can reuse this bottle as many times as I want. And the water costs about the same as their competitors. Way better for the environment, better for you. They're reusable, we love them. That's why we're working with them. Go check them out, get a discount. So head over to drinkpath.com. Use the code MINDPUMPING at 10% off your purchase. All right, here comes the rest of the show. Our first caller is Andrew from New York. Hey, what's up Andrew? How come help you? Hey guys, thanks for taking my call today. You got it, man. Yeah. I got my question for you is regarding intensity. Before I ask, I'll give you a little background. So I've been lifting consistently for about 20 years, but also did quite a bit of running over those years. For the past three years, I've stopped running altogether to focus on building muscle. And since focusing on building muscle, I've been running a number of different programs. And what I'm finding is I'll start each program with moderate intensity in week one. And then I'll be increasing intensity throughout the program. And by around week four, I feel like I'm making good progress, but start to feel some pain in my joints. And the pain isn't so bad that I couldn't continue with the program. But what I usually do is just hop to the next program to be safe. But what I'm feeling is I could be building some more muscle if I continued beyond week four of the program. At the time I submitted the question, I was on week four of a modified five by five type program, making some really good progress. And again, starting to feel some pain in my shoulders and hips. My question for you guys is, is it normal to start feeling a little bit of moderate pain as you progress throughout a program and build intensity? Or if not, I'd be interested in your recommendation on how to fix this problem. Yeah, good question. Yeah. So I would use icy hot and Bengay. Stupid. Just rub it all over. No, you know, here's the deal. This is actually the... Very common. Well, this is the one, I love five by five routines, right? And obviously that looks very similar to our first phase of MAPS and Ebola, but there's a reason why we phase you out of that after four weeks. So that's the flaw, I think, in running a five by five type of routine consistently. Because some people will make the case it's a great routine just to continue on and you build a lot of muscle, a lot of strength. But this is exactly what I would see happen with clients is, if I kept them in this five by five type of a phase for longer than about four or five weeks, this is the most common feedback that I would get from my clients is they would start to feel, you know, some achiness in their knees and their elbows and sometimes their hips and we would phase them into another. And this is part of why we write the MAPS programs like this where we don't keep you in that phase much longer than three to four weeks. Andrew, one of the reasons why this happens isn't necessarily because a five by five program isn't effective or somehow flawed in terms of building muscle and strength. It's really effective at building muscle and strength, but here's what happens, right? You do the same movements over and over again. So you're limited on your movements. Now, here's the plus side of that. The skill of strength improves tremendously. So you're doing a lot of squatting, a lot of deadlift, a lot of pressing, you're practicing them often and you're gonna get really strong at them. And because you get really strong at them, you build a lot of muscle, but then the weak links start to show themselves a little bit and you need to strengthen and work on the supporting structures in order to support this newfound strength in muscle. And so if your technique is off, let's say your technique is off by such a small degree that even a relatively experienced trainer won't necessarily see any issues with your form, even though it looks okay because it's off just a little bit and you're adding 10 pounds, 15 pounds of lift and you're doing the same motion repetitively, it starts to add up and you start to feel the pain and the joints and the areas where the stability may be lacking a little bit. So this is one reason why mobility work is so important. Now I will caution you, don't do mobility work and then stop just because you feel better. When you're feeling the pain, that's already, now you're kind of a little too late. Now you're a little bit behind the eight ball and you have to lay off on the intensity, scale down the volume, deload week, do mobility, now I feel better, now I can jump back on. It's gotta be a part of your regular routine, otherwise you're gonna keep doing this two steps forward, two steps back, types of a situation. So you got, and I know mobility, when we do mobility work and correctional work, we're like, oh, I'm not adding a lot of weight to a bar, I don't seem to be building a lot of muscle. But if you really look at it long term, you end up with more strength and more muscle because you don't run into these problems that you're running into. So if you're doing, let's say, a four day a week, five by five type of routine, I would do concentrated mobility work at least twice a week and then on the other days priming before your workouts, proper priming. Yeah, that was the direction I was gonna go as well. However, I was gonna ask you too, like if you were to kind of transition to a different program, what that looked like, cause one thing too that I would consider is just moving in different planes and directions. So that's really what you're trying to accomplish while doing these mobility moves is still reinforcing that basically being able to keep everything stable around the joints and those secondary muscles to get strengthened up to be able to contribute and maintain the joints positioning as you're increasing the amount of force production because as you're going through five by five as you realize you get a lot stronger and you get a lot stronger in that direction but now any little micro angle that pulls you out whether it's a rotationally or whether it's side to side, your body's gonna compensate and overcompensate and then this is where a lot of injuries result. You guys gotta remember that we have this rapidly growing audience, especially on the YouTube channel of flux of new people that are listening every single day and this is a perfect opportunity to talk about why we wrote the programs the way we did and in the order that we did. Like a common question is why not maps anabolic forever or why not maps aesthetic right after maps anabolic? Like we wrote them in this order for a reason for this exact reason right here. So you have somebody who is running a five by five type routine which is very similar to like a maps anabolic type of philosophy, right? The big lifts you're mostly in the sagittal plane incredible foundational program to build muscle and strength and your metabolism. That's why anabolic is the first one but when we talked about what the second program would be this is the reason why is because yes that program is incredible for doing all those things but then the limiting factor is exactly what we're addressing right now. That is why maps performance is what we thought was the most ideal follow-up program to maps anabolic. Otherwise you're just gonna keep hitting walls. One more thing Andrew is that muscles get stronger faster than ligaments and tendons and connective tissue do. Okay so if you add 30 pounds to a lift the connective tissue and the ligaments and all the supporting structures don't gain that same strength at the same speed or time. It takes a little bit longer to build that type of strength. So if you're seeing these rapid strength gains and you're not focusing on good technique, form, mobility, lateral movement, stability and allowing these connective tissues kind of catch up a little bit you'll start to run into a lot of these problems. I love strength with my workouts absolutely love it. I run into the exact same problem you're talking about every single I would run into this often where okay here we go squats, I'm getting near my all-time best now I'm starting to feel my hip or wow my deadlift's doing real quick oh there goes my SI joint I'm starting to feel it again. And so unless you wanna keep doing this back and forth type of thing you gotta make mobility and a priority and you gotta train in other planes so I would recommend Andrew and I don't know what you're doing now but if you don't have maps performance that would be the program I would do 100% and you're not gonna lose gains by the way you're gonna get more gains because now you're reinforcing a lot of those weak areas. Doug give the man the program. Does that make sense Andrew? Do you have maps performance? I do I picked up the RGB bundle and I did run performance earlier this year I loved it. Is that something I should come back to every now and again? Yes. I would do it after every two or three months like heavy strength muscle building cycle. And then come right back to your yeah your strength cycle. Well I mean if he's got the RGB then what's beautiful is I would run it in that order so it was designed to go red, green, black so go ahead. Red, green, black just over and over again. Yeah keep running over and if you still and if you're getting tremendous value from performance in the mobility days this is where we all this is also why we have the show and why we have the forum is to help people modify. So if this is like a consistent problem with you there is nothing that says you can't when you get into anabolic or aesthetic take things from the mobility days and build those into the program. Yeah swap out the trigger sessions or the focus session for mobility days nothing wrong with that. A lot of times that's what clients will find is they got so much value from performance in the mobility days that they're like Adam is there anything wrong with me putting that in my trigger days or my focus days on those other programs and say absolutely not. That's why we teach it this way so people can modify it for their lifestyle. So I would recommend that you build those mobility days into the other programs even though we didn't do it for you. Now Andrew you said your number one goal is to build right now. Are you at all interested in cutting at any point? I've actually never gone on a cut. I consider myself a hard gainer so I'm always trying to be in a surplus. I would like to continue to build at this point. Okay and here's why I asked that. I was guessing that that's what you were gonna say. So there's a psychological piece here that we need to talk about right. So I'm like you, I'm a hard gainer my whole life and if I could I would probably wanna be in a bulk-ish most of the time just psychologically speaking. But I think that there's real value in going in a very, very mild cut when you're training in a program that is more like maps performance or something mobility focused. Not necessarily because the mild cut or maybe even maintenance is great for those goals but rather when I know that my calories are slightly low I'm less concerned about the fact that I'm not lifting as much on the bar. Does that make sense? That definitely makes sense. Not only that but also if you're getting these signals from your body that are telling you that you're achy like this one of the quick ways that actually a lot of times will help clients is just putting them in a calorie deficit for a week or two because- Inflammation goes up. Yeah, inflammation will go down right away, right? If you're in a surplus all the time and you're lifting heavy all the time that's very, very common and just simply actually aside from programming let's say we stayed in the same program a lot of times I'll take a client who's maybe loving the program and the results from it and say, hey, let's actually just do a little mini cut for a week or two, let's drop your calories below maintenance and keep following the program. Who cares if the weight goes down strength-wise? A little bit, I'm not worried about that but talk to me about how your aches and pains feel and sometimes that alone will actually start to eliminate the pain. Yeah and when you go back to your bulk you'll be really responsive. In fact, I'm gonna be more specific. When you do mass performance I want you to eat at maintenance or slightly below maintenance or slightly above maintenance. Kind of hover around there. Get out of the bulk and go maintenance slightly below and then every once in a while go slightly above. That way you're out of your head. You're not worrying about the weight too much. Inflammation is gonna come down when you're done with mass performance everything feels good. The lateral movement feels good. Rotational movement feels good. Mobility feels good. Then you go into like mass aesthetic throw the bulk on, watch how great your body responds. That sounds like a good plan. Do you mind if I have one follow-up question? Yeah, sure. So I actually did decide to continue on with the five by five after I submitted the question and strained my peck pretty bad. So I'll be rehabbing for the next few weeks. Once I get back into lifting would you have any recommendations for how I might modify performance with the strength in my chest again? I'm sure I'll have some weakness there. Yeah, I would just listen to your body. So follow the program and go much lighter with the exercises that you need to and just focus on range of motion and just listen to your body. That would be the best advice that I could give. You said it's a strain, right? Not like a tear? Yeah, not torn from the tendon, just a strain. Yeah, and I tell you, look, what we're saying is obviously true, right? If you don't really incorporate different planes of movement and mobility you're gonna make gains and you're gonna lose gains because of what just happened. You're gonna keep doing this back and forth and that sucks. It's a pain in the ass. It's much better. It's almost like the tortoise versus the hair fable, right? The tortoise wins the race because they're consistent and the hair loses because they go real fast and they stop and kind of lose their perspective. I might pull some of the barbell stuff out and replace it with dumbbells. Yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah, pull the barbell pressing stuff out and just replace it with dumbbells. That'll help you out. Hey, thanks, guys. I really appreciate the advice there. No problem, man. Thanks for calling in. Yep, thank you guys. Thanks. Yeah, that's a real comment. I mean, that's me. Well, this is why I wanted you guys to remember that, right? Right now, there's probably 10,000 people that have never heard us talk about our programs or whatever like that. We have no interest in getting somebody great results in a short period of time and then forgetting about them. Our interest is great results all the time. We want lifelong... Keep thinking ahead. Yes, it's okay, great. You got great results in two months and then you hurt yourself. That's not what I'm looking for. I want people to feel good and move through different planes and continue to progress forever. And really with minimal plateaus or injuries or none would be ideal. Well, you have to know too, like performance is one of our programs that is grossly underrated because if you're somebody who's focused on mainly strength and the way you look, you tend to go like, ah, I like anabolic or aesthetic or these other, and you skip that program. But there is a very specific reason why we made it the second program is because exactly this. Is because there's a large portion of our clientele that would be pursuing these goals and they would neglect that type of programming and we know that's what should be inserted right there for a majority of people. That's what I was gonna say. It highlights what's neglected in your current program and most people that are in the gym like it just won't come up with a lot of these type of movements in their routine because it really goes outside of that perspective. Yeah, and I'll tell you, I'll be honest with you. If I had to pick, and this is not true, this is general, right? But if I had to pick one maps program that would benefit the majority of the people watching and listening, regardless of their goal, cutting, bulking, looking good, and I'm talking long term, it'd be maps performing. Yeah, and if you had to stay in one forever, if you had to stay in one of our programs forever, you were probably the safest running that one the longest. With the most consistent long term. Yes. Yes, totally. Our next caller is Zaneb from Germany. Zaneb, how can we help you? Hi guys, how are you all doing? Good, we're great, how are you? I'm doing very well, thank you. First of all, thank you so much for this amazing podcast. Listening to you guys is literally the highlight of my day, so thank you so much for having me today. To give you some context, 21, and I just got back to weightlifting three months ago and I've been consistently following a PPL split because I'm still excited to go back to training and hitting the gym five or six times a week and I made significant progress in just three months when it comes to muscle gain. Maybe, I don't know, because I have genetic potential or muscle memory from previous training, but lately I haven't been able to progress with my squats. So I increased the weights for my accessory movements but my squats are stalled. The only explanations that I could come up with is that my upper body is not as developed and strong as it should be to handle the weight anymore for my squats. So my question is how do you deal with stalls on compound movements when accessory movements are progressing or also later, do you guys have any advice on correcting strength and balances between the upper and lower body? Can I ask you where your nutrition is right now and where it's been? Okay, I'm currently eating intuitively. I have celiac disease and I have so many allergies so my diet is pretty restricted. My protein is high, my carbs are a bit low because I don't tolerate grains and stuff so I don't have that in my diet. Yeah, so it's pretty much just whole foods and like meats, organ meats and some vegetables that I can tolerate, some fruits, that's it, yeah. Yeah, have you, just for the gut stuff, have you gotten tested for SIBO by the way? No. Okay, I would recommend that you find yourself a good gastro doctor and ask them for a SIBO test, that small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. It's common with people who have kind of intolerances to grains, it's very treatable and it can make a huge difference. I'm somebody that has done this and it makes a big difference for me but let's talk about the question, right? You're talking about squats. There could be so many reasons why your squats are not progressing so I'm gonna ask you a few more questions, just get a little bit more information. What are the rep ranges that you're training in? How often are you squatting and what other auxiliary lower body movements are you doing? So my rep ranges are between six to eight, five sets, five working sets. Yeah, I think I'm trying to focus on my form so I don't wanna compromise the form. So once I feel like I don't have a good form, I just stop immediately and I'm squatting twice a week and with some variations, squat variations on the third day sometimes. Are you doing split stance exercises like lunges and Bulgarian? What about hip thrust? Yeah, I have thrust. Okay, so it could be that you might need to change your program. Yeah, how long have you been running that? Six to eight reps, how long? Three months, no. There you go. I would change that. I would definitely change that rep range. You might need to go through a few weeks of a higher rep range. I would love to see her do anabolic and start in phase three. Yeah, that could be really good. Have you followed any of the maps programs? No. Okay, we'll send you maps anabolic and you might wanna start in phase three and then go backwards, phase three, two and one. Do the three foundational workouts a week and then do the trigger sessions on the off days. But it's typical that your body will stall in a lift after about eight to 12 weeks is usually when you'll start to see if plateaus are gonna happen, they'll start to happen around there. Changing the rep ranges is a really easy way to get things moving again. Like if we got you to focus on 15 to 20 reps, you're gonna have to go way lighter. It's gonna be really exhausting. But after about four weeks of doing that, you're gonna feel like you're getting good stamina and strength, then you can go back to the lower rep ranges. And then within a couple of weeks, you'll probably start to see the weight move back up. Now, as you stall, did you notice any real sticking points in the lift that were obvious or is this more just, you know, you got fatigued during your sets? I just get so fatigued, yeah. Okay, yeah, so that advice would apply. Yeah, I'll go even further, like I would love to see you run maps anabolic, which we'll send that over to you in the order sal set. So start in phase three, go to two, then go to one. Then I would love to see you follow that up with maps performance, run it in the orders design and then follow that up with maps power lift. If we're talking about getting yourself a badass squat, I'm hearing what you're telling me right now where you're kind of stuck in a plateau and how you've been training, that order of programs, watch where your squat is at in three months. And she's a college student. Why don't we give her all three of those? So that's maps anabolic, performance and power lift. You're gonna be set, actually. So the advice we're giving you, you don't even have to remember it, just follow the programs the way that we're explaining and you should see your body really start to progress pretty consistently. Yeah, right out the gates, we're gonna switch you to a total different rep range by going to anabolic, phase three, first two, then one. So that'll be good for you right away. And then we'll address some mobility, unilateral work and performance, which is gonna, so initially, maybe you won't see the squat go way up right then. You may, but you may just hover around, just taking care of the body like you need to. And then when you go into maps power lift. Then you'll start to break some PRs. And then you're gonna start to hit PRs. Just make sure you keep us informed when you hit that 400 pound squat. That's right. What are you squatting right now, by the way? Fingers crossed for that. Thank you so much, guys. No problem, Zanyi, real quick. What are you squatting right now just for out of curiosity? 50 kilograms. Okay, so like 120 pounds. Yeah, that's excellent. How much do you weigh? Around 145. That's really good for, yeah, that's really good for six to eight reps. Yeah, I think we'll be able to get your squat 30, 40 pounds higher within that period of time. So let's see what happens. I hope so. Yeah, fingers crossed. Yeah, excellent. All right, cool. Let us know what happens, okay? Okay, thank you so much, guys. Have a great day. You too. Thank you. I love the international callers. Yeah, they similar to the kind of the last caller, you know, is stuck in that, you know, five by five or low rep range for an extended period of time. You know, when you're so hung up on being strong, this is the, I think this is the Achilles heel to chasing strength. We always talk about how- Totally. Why you should do that. 100%. It is good for people that have body image issues and stuff like that, but this is the Achilles heel to chasing strength is you get so hung up on adding weight to the bar and it gets exciting when you do that, right? You keep getting stronger and stronger that you stick in that routine too long. And then the last thing you wanna do is go like, oh, I've been crushing five by five. Oh, and now I gotta do 15 reps and I gotta cut my weight- Yeah, my weight's down by 50%. This is, by the way, this is the Achilles heel of any program that works. You do something that works really well for three months. You are stubborn to move out of it. Oh yeah, you don't wanna leave. No. Because it's working. And then when it doesn't work, it's panicked. So yeah, you just gotta stay ahead of it. Yeah, I used to stay in a plateau for like four weeks before I'd finally get it for my fixed goal. That's just time to move. I would be longer than that. It would be longer than that. I would stay in the same program and training modality way too long. Really? Yeah, and that's why I think we're so adamant about talking to that. Because I think, you know, here we are trainers. We have the knowledge, the information, yet even we're guilty of doing this. So you know most people are. You get a little bit of momentum and seeing results. You like it, you enjoy it, and then you just stay in that phase of that routine just way too long. All right, our next caller is Elliot from California. Elliot, what's up, man? How can we help you? Well, I've got a question about testosterone levels. It's kind of a lengthy one. So if I start rambling, feel free to cut me off. But I recently got lab work done and my test levels came back at 320 nanograms per deciliter. For reference, I'm 25. I train regularly. I eat fairly clean and I get about seven and a half to eight and a half hours of sleep. My general practitioner says I should focus less on the numbers, more on the symptoms. This is difficult for me though, because that's more qualitative than quantitative. That being said, couple symptoms are lower libido than years of recent past. Body fat and strength are both going up gradually. To me, this is kind of a paradox. I get incredibly tired early in the day, usually I'm asleep by 8.30. But again, it's hard for me to tell if these are true symptoms though, due to not having an accurate way to measure over time. And then on the quantitative side of things, I've looked at a few studies, but not many stratified data by age, which kind of sucks. I found one study that took a convenient sample of 10,000 men. And from that, I fall around in the bottom decil. Being someone who likes to optimize things as much as I do, hearing that I'm in that bottom decil, this age sucks. If you were in my shoes, is there anything you would do to get your test levels up? Or do you think being on the lower end of normal is adequate and thanks again? Yeah, and that's a good question. What a nice way to present that question. Yeah, thank you for all that information. First off, I do want to be clear, none of us are hormone experts or doctors. So we're going to talk from the fitness and health. Oh, I am. I'm just hormonal sometimes, that's all. So things that can typically affect testosterone, not enough fat consumption, calories too low, lack of sleep, stress. There can be environmental factors. Testosterone levels have been declining generally in men for a while now. I mean, I tested very low about six months ago myself, but I'm not 25. So again, speaking just from my experience, at your age, first off, what I would do if you're looking for advice on hormones is I would go to a specialist, right? So your general practitioner has very minimal knowledge when it comes to hormones, especially testosterone. Testosterone's been demonized for so long that doctors are just, they tend to stay away from it. That being said though, his GP gave, I think, pretty good advice to him, which is don't focus so much on the number and focus on the symptoms, which is the same thing that Dr. Ran would say to him too. They do, but here's the thing. 320 is you're right above what's considered the bottom part of the range. Right, so he may not, the GP may not recommend testosterone. But also because of your age, so there may be other things you can do to jumpstart your testosterone both behaviorally and maybe, you know, medicinally. There may be things that you can use to kind of jumpstart them. If I were you, I would, and I wish I did this earlier, I would go and speak to a expert in this particular space. We work with Regenerative Sport and Medicine. They're really good. I think the website is mphormones.com. So you can go on there, set up an appointment and talk to them and see what's going on. Elliot, are you in our forum yet? I'm not in the forum now. It's free, at least for now it's free. And it's unbelievably valuable. In fact, Dr. Ran spoke for the first time. So what we set up with them, this is for our audience, because this is becoming such a popular question, we set up a free private forum for people that have questions around hormones twice a month. Dr. Rand or Dr. Todd get on there and do live Q and A's. We keep them recorded on there so you could actually go on there right now and watch the last one. He went for two hours answering questions and very, very detailed. And the more information you can provide them, like that question was so good. If you gave him like that exact question, he would be able to give even better advice than what we could give you. And I'm with Sal, I recommend that you go talk to somebody like that who is an expert in that field and can answer all your questions and potential concerns. So go take advantage of that. And if you guys are listening to the podcast right now and you have similar questions around this, this is why we created this forum is so you guys can get this free information. Yeah, and it's much more complicated too than, and this is what I've just learned in the last few months. It's more complicated than just the total testosterone. Free testosterone is more important. And then there's androgen receptor density, like some, you could have one guy with a number of testosterone that's lower than another guy, but he feels so much better because he has more androgen receptors that are available for that testosterone. So that's why they say focus on the symptoms. Let's talk about the stuff that we now can advise you on. Okay, so let's talk about your workouts for a second. Let's start there. What do your workouts look like? How many days a week are you lifting? How many days a week are you doing cardio? What does that look like? Right, so lifting four to six days a week and a modified push pull legs routine and cardio. I know you guys are gonna yell at me for this one, but only a couple of times a month and that'd just be either stair master or walking at an incline for about 30 minutes. You said a couple of times a month? Yeah, yeah, not a lot. That's fine, I don't care about that. So, okay, so let's have you lift full body three days a week. Let's go there, okay, that's- Yeah, give him anabolic. Yeah, I'm gonna give you a maps anabolic, follow that program. Three day a week, two to three day a week full body workout in my experience with the clients that I have worked on who have monitored their hormone levels. Typically is the most effective at getting testosterone levels to move up. Now, here's some good news. In my experience, I've worked with clients who've had low testosterone or low-ish testosterone and through lifestyle we've been able to get it to improve by a good 30 to 50%. So that's a pretty big jump. Yeah, that's huge. From where you're at now. So that's something you could do. And then you could also try things that are a little bit more fringe, like red light therapy. There's definitely science that supports that. If you're not getting enough sunlight, especially, that's something to consider. You could get, I don't know if you got your vitamin D levels tested. If that's low, then you're testosterone. I'm taking D3 and zinc to try to supplement that as is. Okay, good. Supplementally, herbs that can help. Ashwagandha has been shown to raise testosterone and men with low testosterone spit temporary though. It's not this like long-term permanent effect. But for workouts, I would start there. I would go away from the four, six days a week, go three days a week full body. That at the very least, even if your testosterone levels don't, go up, it'll work better with what you're working with. So you'll see probably better gains anyway. And then talk to a hormone expert. It's like, if I had really, really, if I needed knee surgery, I wouldn't go to my general practitioner for that. I would go to a specific surgeon that focuses on the knees. So don't rely on your general practitioner what comes to hormone advice. Again, especially testosterone, so demonized. They're so afraid of even learning about how to utilize testosterone with people that need it, that the information you're gonna get is gonna be, is not gonna be very good. But in terms of our wheelhouse, if you're checking all the boxes of lifting weights and getting adequate rest, getting adequate sleep, you're getting sunlight, your nutrition's dialed in, those are the things that you can manage and see where that leads you. You're still struggling. Definitely go seek a specialist at that point. Yeah, but we're gonna give you maps and a ball look for free. And get in that form, Elliot. What we'll do, appreciate that, guys. One final question on, apart from the three days of lifting, is there cardio strategy that you would recommend most or program? I mean, if you're looking for lots of endurance and stamina, yeah, you probably wanna do it a few days a week. If that's not really that important for you, I would just monitor your just daily activity. Well, how active are you at work? Stead and Terry, sitting in front of the four screens all day. Okay, so it probably helps. Yeah, if you went on a walk for 15 minutes after breakfast, lunch and dinner, that would be enough. That would be good enough. Okay, good enough. Thanks for all the input. No problem, man. Thanks for calling. All right, take care. You know, I don't wanna get on a soapbox here, but it is- What you're going to? Yeah, I am. Anyway, just getting grants. Did you see how he did that right there? I don't wanna do this, but I'm going to. Hold. This hormone issue in men is starting to get to a really interesting place. Bro, it blew me away when I first started talking about on the show, the amount of DMs that I was getting from 20-year-olds. And these weren't just kids that are like looking to take steroids. These are kids that Witten got their blood work done, was concerned about how low they are. And I did not see this when we were in gyms. When we were training in gyms, this was not a common question. This has become one of the number one questions I'm having with people in my DMs right now. And I would have never seen that coming. This is not our opinion, by the way. This is well documented. We've documented this now since the 19, I think 70s, this gradual and consistent decline. So it's much more common. So what does this mean for you? It's accelerated. What does this mean for you if you're watching or listening? If you have symptoms of low testosterone out of nowhere and it's not going away and you're doing all the good, the right stuff, then you might wanna talk to a specialist and at least get tested and see what's going on. Now, here's the other side of that. If you're listening and you feel great and you have no symptoms, I think it's still a good idea to get tested so you have a baseline. Because let's say you're feeling good, everything's great, you get tested, your test comes back, it's, you know, let's say 700 nanograms per deciliter and you're like, okay, awesome. And then let's say 10 years later, you feel like total garbage can't figure it out, you go get tested, it comes back at 350, you know. Oh, that's really low for me. I tested before at 700. So it's a good, I wish I got those baselines when I was in my 20s. I told you that Katrina's mom made all of her kids do that. I thought it was like one of the smartest things. So smart. And she said, when you guys, and they tell, like do it when you feel great. Don't go, don't go wait to go get tested. Because you don't know what the, what it compares to. If you are a person who's like, oh, I'm fine, I'm optimal. Okay, if you're fine and you're optimal, go get your blood work done. So you have a baseline to refer back to because in 10 years from now, when the inevitable happens and you're not perfect, you can now give that to your therapist and say, listen, this is where I felt amazing. This is where my levels were and where am I at now and how can we get my, get me to there? Yeah, and the part to me that was really revealing when you really learn and dive into this is again, the stigma around testosterone. Like if your thyroid is borderline and you have all the symptoms of low thyroid, doctors are typically okay with giving you a little thyroid. If you're, obviously if insulin's down, they're gonna give you insulin or estrogen or progesterone. They tend to be pretty open to that. But testosterone has been so demonized, which is interesting because it's one of the safest hormones that you could administer. It's so demonized, they're so afraid. So even if you're like 1.1 above the lowest measure on that scale, they're really reluctant to talk about it. That's because nobody goes and takes 10x the thyroid medication. That's why. That's exactly, if people were taking 10x thyroid medication. You mean like as a performance enhancing drug? Yeah, that's 100% potential for abuse. Yeah, exactly. The potential for abuse is extremely high when it comes to testosterone. But you know what, even along those lines, if you took 10x of any hormone, that's what I'm my point. You would kill yourself. That's my point. My point is if you were, it gets demonized, but the irony of that is something like thyroid medication, which is readily prescribed all the time, if someone went out and did 4x that, and so that all the fear around testosterone is the 4x, 10x. That's right. If your doctor gives you your testosterone and you says, hey, take 200 milligrams a week and you go take 1,000, you now fall in a different category. But if you stick to what he tells you, it's just as safe as a thyroid. But it's hard to hear this from young men because that's a really tough situation. But there are other alternatives. I have had clients in their 20s like this and they didn't want to go on testosterone. And so what they did is they went on other medications to kind of jumpstart testosterone along with some lifestyle changes and they actually had some pretty good stuff. Well, I don't think if you're in your 20s, I don't think your first or even second or even third option should be testosterone. You should try and look at all the other things that are affecting it first. Otherwise you're just masking the root cause of why you have that. You could be, if you're not naturally producing it at that point. I mean, that's something that should be a little bit alarming. Right. Our next caller is Mack from Indiana. Mack, what's happening? Hey guys, how you doing? Good. So I had some, I was looking for some advice on how to combat the feeling of not doing enough in the gym. So some context, just started MAPS Aesthetic and or not just started getting through phase two here. And on these focus sessions days on my smaller muscle groups like triceps and traps, I feel like I'm just not doing enough during my time in the gym. So tell me, Mack, a little bit about your athletic background that I know you have. Yeah, so I was a D1 swimmer in college, just recently graduated in May. So I'm very much accustomed to the 20 hours of, 20 hours a week of working out. It's like six days a week, two hours of practice. Yeah, I've trained a couple highly competitive swimmers. I had no, when I first started training one years ago, I had no idea the amount of frequency and volume of training at that level. It was twice a day, right? You did like twice a day for hours. Just in the morning. Yeah, I mean, it'd be, yeah, it'd be a double, probably twice, maybe three times a week. I mean, just a lot of volume. Yeah, okay, so let's unpack this for a second, okay? What do you mean when you say that you feel like you're not doing enough, or let's say you feel unsatisfied? Like, what do you mean by that exactly? Like, if I, like, if I'm doing triceps, it just feels like only doing three exercises of three sets just isn't enough, I guess. Like, I just don't feel like I've done anything. What does enough feel like to you? A little bit sore, maybe not like too sore, but, you know, I guess just satisfied with it. I get like, I feel like I've done a good work and I've put the work in, I guess, but like with. But what does that feel like? So this is important that we- I know what Sal's fishing for right now. Well, I'm not even fishing. I just want to know what you mean because- Oh, you're fishing. Yeah, because I want to know what it feels like to you. And maybe you don't even, maybe you haven't even put words to this, but this is really important to break down because there's an upper limit to how much exercise your body can tolerate. And then there's the best amount that's going to get you the best results. And they're not the same. So there's a volume and intensity and a frequency that's going to give you the best results. And then up above and beyond that is what you can tolerate. And you get diminishing returns, but you can tolerate it, you can get away with it. And so I need to know what feeling you're looking for because if it's, you know, this is important because if you feel like, you know, I just, I feel like I can do more. Well, that just means that you're used to training your upper limit of tolerance, not optimal, not optimum for results. Nothing necessarily wrong with that if you're willing to trade results in progress for that feeling. Well, also keep in mind too, when you're a competitive swimmer, you're trying to get great at this sport, right? Like you're not trying to build the most muscle or burn the most body fat. So if you're approaching weight training with that same idea, well, yeah, we could totally scale up the volume of how much exercise you're doing if you just want to get better at exercising. But I'm assuming that you have goals like I want to build some muscle, I want to be stronger, I want to lose body fat. Like if you have goals like that, it's there's a much more scientific approach to how you do that and what's optimal for your body to see the most amount of results versus how much can I actually do in a workout that I'll actually be able to tolerate like Sal Saint, those are different things. And when I train highly competitive people, it's really hard for them to make that switch because that's how they have approached training for their sport for so many years and probably had success if you made it to D1. So you've learned to do that and push yourself to that level. But when you're actually training to build muscle or to build strength or to lose body fat, it's a total different approach than just how much can I do? Now, where's your intensity gauge through these sets? Like are you placing more demand on the load and after you're done, you feel unsat... Like it feels hard on your way through but you just feel unsatisfied because you don't have that sore feeling after you get through your sets. Yeah, I'm putting more emphasis on the total reps. So I'm trying to hit that 20 rep range on these focus sessions. You know what, Mac? Started to interrupt. Okay, so here's one of the challenges. I'm gonna go through this because this might be something that you're thinking. If not, definitely people watching in the same position as you are thinking this. You competed at a very high level and you trained with an extreme volume. And so the argument tends to come back and say, well, if it doesn't work, then why was I training so much and competing at such a high level? Well, here's why. Okay, here's why swimmers and divers and gymnasts in particular train so much. Now, you don't see football players doing that kind of volume of training. It's different. But you see highly skilled sports do incredible amounts of volume and frequency. And here's why. Let me ask you a question, Mac. You obviously know how to swim very well. How much of a difference does perfect technique make in your speed when you're swimming? Everything. That's everything, right? You can have somebody who's less perfect but way more powerful and they'll get creamed by the guy next to them who's got the most perfect technique with their swim, right? This is true for diving and gymnastics as well. Now, that volume and frequency and training, the reason why they're training you to the point that you can maximally tolerate is because what they're really looking for is perfection and technique and execution. And the more you practice, the better your execution gets. Even if you sacrifice a little bit of strength and recovery and stamina, that's worth it because it's all about skill and technique. Now, when you're working out, Adam said something great. You want to be the best at working out, well, then just go ahead and do as much as you could possibly tolerate. But if you're looking for strength, aesthetics, mobility, muscle building, fat loss, you're gonna have to change your mentality. It is not the same mental state as the D1 competitive swimmer that you were before. Now, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try and help you here because it's hard to get out of that. So here's some advice. When you're in there doing your focus sessions, do your focus session. When you're done with it, do something else. You don't have to leave the gym. Why not do more mobility work or technique work or skill work or stretching or other types of activity that can help facilitate recovery, can improve maybe your skill or work on mobility. But what I don't want you to do is keep lifting weights because it's just gonna take, again, unless you don't care about the results as much, then I'd say go and push yourself until you hit that limit. But if you really care about results, don't do more, but you can do other things that can help out. And to be honest, Mac, and I don't know if you started here, but already, like what we've learned about you already, and if you were an actual client, I would actually make your ass do maps and a ball, which would really fucking drive you crazy. This is where I would have gone. Yeah, one to five rep range to really shake it up because this is a completely different pursuit. And you have to kind of, I mean, this is a very challenging mental task in front of you is to really kind of shift that attention into what builds you the most strength and not necessarily what you're used to in terms of the feel of this physical activity. Yeah, and you know what's funny? The Irony Mac is that Maps Aesthetic is one of our higher volume programs. Yeah, that's why I said it. Yeah, that's why I picked it out there. Oh, yeah. I know that's why I picked it. That's like nothing for you. So it's like, you gotta do something different. Yeah, I know that's why you picked it. Are you in our private forum? No, I'm not. Okay, you're gonna need coaching. This is not, okay, the hardest people I ever trained were people like you. So, and it's hard because you have that mentality, it's there, it was really effective for you. It's gonna be really hard to get out of that. So I'm gonna bring you in our private forum, give us updates, tag us and give us updates so that we can keep talking sense into you because you're gonna keep veering into the slain. It's just gonna keep happening, I promise you. Yeah, I would love to see you. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I would love to see you. Why don't we give him Maps Anabolic too because I'd actually like to see him do Maps Anabolic as much as it'll drive him crazy. And the thing that I, if you were my client- I might be too much of a jump. That's right though. And if you were a client of mine and I was talking to you today, I would actually be making- It's good medicine. I'd want you to do long rest periods and we would just like, I'd make you sit down and you'd be chalking up and we'd be talking about the squad. I'm like, oh yeah, that looked really good last time. Now next time and like really analyzing your movement and technique. He's just gonna be sweating because he's so antsy. Yeah, and making you sit and rest for those full three minutes. He'd fire you and hire the CrossFit coach or whatever and all the circus and shit. But I would, I would make you do that and let's just focus on getting stronger and stronger and giving yourself these long adequate rests. And I know it would drive you crazy but I know it's what's best for you and that if I could get you to commit for a couple months of trusting me, I think that once you saw the strength gains and the muscle that would start to come on your body, I think that I could get you bought in. But it's breaking that, those old behaviors that made you such a great swimmer. You don't wanna be just great at working out. I think you wanna probably build muscle or get stronger, those things are probably where you're, I'm assuming, right? I mean, I guess we should clarify that. Okay, okay, yeah. Mac, when you were competitive, so were you more of a sprinter, medium distance or long distance? No, I was the distance kid. You were the distance kid. Now nonetheless, I'm gonna say this. If you got to D1 for any sport, you've got better genetics than 99% of anybody watching this. If you do everything right with what we're saying, you're gonna get amazing results. So if your results are lackluster, you're probably overdoing it. That's what I'm gonna guess. You're probably overdoing it. And I would say, what I would get my competitive athletes do is to just, let's channel that crazy discipline that you have and attention to detail to other things like the diet. Like let's get like really crazy about really tracking the food and paying attention to how your body and strength is changing and like shift that and mobility. Like get really good at mobility moves. Maybe take something from like our maps performance program and like practice mobility moves and get really good at that. Like find other areas that you can get hyper focused on and take that competitive mind of yours and channel it where it's going to benefit you. Channeling that into more volume and intensity and training is only going to hinder you. So that you've got to shift away from and find something else to focus it on. Yeah, we look forward to seeing you in the forum, Mac. Gotcha. Right on, man. Awesome. Thanks for calling in. Yeah, I appreciate it. Yep. And in another life, Adam was a D1 swimmer. Remember that time we went to the pool and he did really well against it. You know, I'm telling the truth now. There are obviously general categories of clients that we've worked with. The most challenging were these, especially when they were only like five to 10 years out, highly competitive college athletes. For sure. Because they're successful. It was so hard to get them to pull back. It was easier to get the couch potato to start moving than it was to get that person to pull back because they have another gear. They're very comfortable in that gear. It brought them success. And I like to explain the whole thing about skill and technique because certain sports, the goal is to push you to your absolute limits because it's about practicing this. Like you look at a diver, they're going to practice as much as their bodies can handle because every little, you know, if you're off just a little bit, you're not going to be as good. It's not about getting a stronger, you know, improved performance. They're refining, they're sharpening. You know, that's definitely part of the process, practicing these moves and really getting really good at it. And so that's the difference, right? Is to be really good at all these exercises. But like if you want to make a substantial change, you have to really do something different than you've been doing the whole time. Yeah, totally. Look, if you like Mind Pump, you'll love MindPumpFree.com. Head over there and check out all of our free guides. We have guides that can help you with all of your fitness goals. You can also find the three of us on Instagram. So Justin is at Mind Pump, Justin. I'm at Mind Pump Sal and Adam is at Mind Pump, Adam.