 In this episode of Mind Pump the World's Top Fitness Health and Entertainment Podcast, we talk about the single most effective at-home workout tool, suspension trainers. We talk all about why they're so damn effective and versatile for building muscle, burning body fat, and sculpting your body. They take a very, very little space and there's almost an endless supply of exercise variety and you can train with them at any level. It's one of the only tools I know of where a beginner, all the way to someone who's advanced, can get an appropriate, effective workout. Now this episode is brought to you by our sponsor ForSigmatic. Now ForSigmatic makes some of the best supplements around. They specialize in mushroom-based supplements. One of my favorite products from ForSigmatic is their Cordyceps product. It's the highest quality Cordyceps product that I've found. There's a dual extraction process that gets all of the good stuff out of the Cordyceps to deliver it to your body. Now when I take Cordyceps, here's what I notice. More stamina in my workouts for long, hard workouts. I notice better acclimation to heat. So if I work out in the heat, I just feel like I can keep going. I don't get tired as often. My recovery is better and Cordyceps has also been shown to raise low testosterone levels in men. It's a supplement that's been used for hundreds of years, if not thousands, by people in eastern countries. And again, it's a very effective supplement, but you got to get good quality. ForSigmatic hands down has the best quality that I've ever seen. And because you listen to Mind Pump, you get 15% off your order of any of their products. So just go check out what they have on their site. ForSigmatic.com. That's F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com forward slash Mind Pump. Also, in this episode, I said we would be talking about suspension training. It's all of its benefits. We're also launching a brand new MAPS workout program called MAPS suspension. This is an entire workout program all around suspension trainers. So you could do this workout anywhere, outdoors, at home, at the gym. You need no other equipment. That's it, suspension trainer. And you work out your entire body from head to toe, build muscle, burn body fat, speed up your metabolism. This whole program gives all of that to you, workout demos, so you can see how the exercises are performed. We tell you how many reps, how many sets, how to progress your body, everything. It's a full MAPS program. And because it's a brand new launch, we're offering it with a coupon code for $20 off. Here's what you got to do if you want to get the discount or check out the program. Go to maps suspension.com. That's M-A-P-S-S-U-S-P-E-N-S-I-O-N.com. And then use this code for $20 off. Suspension 20. That's S-U-S-P-E-N-S-I-O-N-2-0 for that discount. Hey, a lot of people are working out at home. One of the most effective at home workout tools, single workout tools, like one thing, has to be suspension training. It has to be one of the most effective ways you could work out just at home with minimal equipment. I think it was Justin who got me into this. I don't remember who introduced it to me first, but I know you were on a hardcore kick for a while there. I know I'd seen it, and obviously before the suspension trainers got popular, rings were around well before that, right? Yeah, those were first. Rings were, so I looked at the history of it with Justin just recently. So Olympic rings are the ones obviously the gymnasts use and train on. And I would say the rings probably produced some of the most muscular bodies that you'll ever see in the Olympics. I've worked with gymnasts before, male gymnasts and trainers, and they have obviously phenomenal upper body strength and conditioning. And it's because they use these rings when they lift their body weight and do these incredible positions and exercise and movements, and it develops their bodies tremendously. But that's been used for a while. Yeah, I don't know if they call it isokinetics, but there's a term for it that basically, I mean, your muscles are so tense like in an isometric contraction, but you're also moving through really challenging points of leverage. So the rings are just one of the most grueling body weight tools that you could possibly do. And you could just see, based off of their physique, what it's done for all these athletes. Well, what I definitely know, whether it was you who introduced it to me or not, I definitely did not have all the exercises down and movements until I met you. I didn't realize what you could do with it. Like when I remember first seeing it. There's literally thousands of exercises. Oh, so many things that you can do with it. And it's so versatile that you don't have to have anything but a tree, a bar of, I mean, you can latch it on to anything to do a full body routine. I went through a stint where I was, I just found the value of it with my clients because you know, there's, there's lots of ways that you can kind of progress people with weights. And I just found not only is it, you know, so versatile and has all these options, but it's like a really safe way to get started for a beginner because you're really utilizing your own body weight, you're becoming more aware of what your body is capable of and figuring out how to stabilize yourself, which I find the most important part of the very beginning of your training process. Yeah. Well, don't fool yourself. It's also a tool that is extremely valuable for the very advanced. Absolutely. There's exercises and movements and leverages that you can use with suspension trainers. That'll challenge the strongest lifter that you know, because of the fact of how you use leverage, you know, when you look at old, so I love looking at or reading about the history of gyms, right? And there's, you can find online pictures of some of the first gymnasiums. By the way, gym is short for gymnasiums. They used to be called gymnasiums. And some of the first ones were on the east coast of the US. If we talk about the first ones here in the US, and you're looking at the mid to late 1800s, and you'll see these old pictures in there. And what the whole gym consists of literally was rings, which is, you know, like a suspension trainer, rings, bars, ladders, ropes, and like maybe a couple kettlebells. And that's how they would all, that's how they exercise their entire body. Lots of it was geared around climbing and using your body and figuring out, you know, what muscles you could use to then get you through these type of obstacles and things as well. But yeah, a lot of it was body weight based, which was very interesting. Yeah, the Olympic rings were, they think were borrowed off of the Roman rings that had been used for 2000 years as a method for training and strengthening the body. Gladiators probably utilize them to train their bodies. Soldiers obviously use them to train their bodies. So this type of apparatus has been around for a long time. Now why that's a valuable piece of knowledge is because it has a long pedigree in history of being effective. So like when it comes to fitness and look, I've only been in, you look at all the, however long humans have purposely exercised their bodies, right? I've only been doing it professionally for, you know, 22 or 23 years. That's nothing in when you look at the grand scheme of things. However, in the last 23 years, I have seen countless fitness tools and modalities be introduced to the market and then totally go and gone. They don't stand the test of time. So when you look at a piece of equipment like a dumbbell or a kettlebell or a barbell or rings like suspension trainers and you see that they've been around for a long time, you know that they work because they would have fallen out of favor a long time ago. So that's why that's an important thing to understand. I remember when they got really popular with my staff, right? It was because as a trainer, when you're working in a big box gym, one of the most challenging things that you have is that most clients want to train around the same time. They want to come in at the peak hours in the morning or the peak hours in the evening. And when you've got a staff of 15 to 20 trainers and you have this gym that's getting thousands of workouts, like, man, it's really tough sometimes when you ride a routine, like, okay, I want to go to bench. I want to go to squat. I want to do this. And there's only, you know, two squat racks. There's only two bench, you know, benches. And, you know, what do you do when you have somebody that's on that and you don't want to stop your clients paying for your time? And so trainers have to get creative. They have to like, okay, and this is what makes a really good trainer, the trainer that has a blueprint or a plan of an idea of like what they want to train, but then they're able to adjust based off of, you know, what's available to them. And when I started to get really good at using this tool, I started to realize like, man, I could just take this in a corner and latch it to a bar, latch it to something. And back then we had the little eye hooks inside the gym, so you could latch it to one of these. And I don't have to leave. I could literally do my clients entire workout in this little, you know, six by six square the entire time and give them an incredible workout. And so it got really, really popular amongst my trainers, just for that reason alone, that they could give them this incredibly effective workout with minimally in no equipment and no space really. That was what was so great. Yeah. So my personal experience with, uh, with suspension trainers, besides watching trainers using them in the gym with their clients and myself using them with clients, I never followed like a full on, I'm going to do this workout for the next three weeks type of deal with just suspension trainers or anything like that. Until I went traveling, we were in a small town in, uh, Italy. And I did not, I know they had a gym there, so I expected to be able to work out at the gym, but it was in August. And for whatever reason, the gym was closed all month, all month, the whole month of August. And they do that in Italy. Yeah. They do that in small towns in Italy, which I was like, this is, this has been furiating, but I didn't have open. I didn't have a car. The furthest, uh, the closest gym that was open would have been, uh, you know, an hour and a half walk, which just, you know, you're on vacation, you're with family, just not feasible. So I had bands with me and I had a suspension trainer with me. And at first I did body weight and band stuff and that kind, I did that and that was cool. But then I pulled out the suspension trainer. And for the last, I'd say a week and a half or two weeks, all I did was suspension trainer exercises. And I viewed it as a substitute like, okay, I don't have access to the gym. This is just a substitute. So whatever, better than nothing. I was surprised because I actually, uh, not only was it a good substitute, but I actually got a lot of benefit from it. And I know this because when I came back, uh, home and opened my studio back up and started working out in my own gym, I felt really good with the weights. Actually, I didn't, not only did I not regress, which is always your fear, right? If you're really into fitness, you always worry, oh, I'm going to regress because I'm missing my traditional workout. Not only did I not regress, but actually progressed, um, in certain lifts and how I felt with certain things, um, from using it. So that was my own personal like, like light bulb moment. Like, oh, this is, this is not like a, uh, just a cheap versatile substitute to weights. This, uh, has value on its own. This has tremendous value on its own and working out just with this can actually provide you with tremendous benefit. Yeah. And I've spoke a bit to, you know, this kind of experimental year that I had because I had been barbell training for so long, uh, for sports and getting myself prepared. And, um, my only method of operation was always to add as much weight as possible. And if I didn't, I felt like I was, I was slipping back and I was, I was not doing well with my training. So that was my only gauge in metric that I was going by. And I just want, I just saw this come out, this tool, uh, you know, suspension trainer that I had saw one of my friends had picked up. And this is a very new, uh, you know, just came out. And so we really didn't know all the moves for it yet. And so this is a totally experimental time where, uh, you know, my friend and I, who was also a trainer, we just started kind of working with it coming up with moves, you know, watching videos of like what other people have come up with. And, uh, you, we just like this whole new world sort of just opened up in terms of, uh, you know, effective exercises, but also teaching type exercises and then super intense exercises that we'd come up with to where it progressed to where I would take, you know, this suspension strap and then, uh, we would master all these moves and then we'd work our way up to like Olympic rings to where we could start doing stuff like some, you know, shitty versions of what Jim Jim gymnast were doing. Uh, and, uh, it was just like a totally new thing where my body, uh, reacted to it. I built muscle. I came back and then barbell trained after that. And I had so much more control and stability. It was unreal. Well, you can make a case that it's the single most effective tool that you could use. I mean, even like what we, we've made cases for like, okay, the barbell, right? Because we talk so much about barbell this, but one of the things with a barbell is that you also got to have a bunch of weights to like really make it effective. Like just a barbell by itself. Yeah. You could do a lot of great movements and exercise with it, but it's really tough to progress a barbell without having a bunch of plates that you're going to load it with to progress the workout where you're using leverage in your body weight with this thing. And so it's actually just by itself. Yeah. By itself, you could make the case that it's even more versatile than a, than a barbell or a pair of dumbbells. It has the same, um, it has the same versatility in terms of exercise selection that you would find with, uh, like a pair of dumbbells, which is saying a lot. There is no other piece of equipment that you could say that about, but with suspension trainers, the amount of exercises that you could do with them is almost limitless. You can't say that about almost any other piece of exercise equipment. Now in terms of versatility, here's what makes them superior, believe it or not, like what Adam's saying to dumbbells and barbells. Um, it, it's easy to move with, it's easy to bring and it's easy to do anywhere. So if I'm, you know, in my car traveling or carrying a 45 pound barbell or if I'm going to bring that with you on the plane or I'm in a small apartment, let's say I'm in a small apartment and like I can't have a 250 pound or 300 pound barbell or 50 pound dumbbells and put them in there. Sometimes you can't do that, but with suspension trainers, which on their own way, what a pound, not even you fold them up, you can fit them in any nice little ball, luggage. All you need is an anchor point, which any door, uh, will give you that or anything you can hang it over will give you that. Now that's it. Now the whole world is open, uh, with exercise. And this is a big deal, especially if you're somebody that, you know, time is of the essence. So you have kids, you have a job. It's hard to make time to go to the gym and that stuff. Or right now you're not going to the gym either because you're afraid of exposing yourself to a lot of people or your gyms are still closed, like they are here in California. So it's like, okay, what's the one thing I can get? What's the one thing that I can use that will, will satisfy all my, my strength training needs that doesn't take up a lot of space, uh, gives me incredible exercise selection, doesn't, you know, bang up the floors suspension trainer. I can't think of something else that really competes on all of those levels. Like a, you know, like a suspension trainer. The other thing is that it's, uh, it's this, this is also what it has in common with free weights is it's easily modified for different levels. It's the one piece of equipment that I can start a brand new client on and I can train a very advanced client on and give them both, uh, great, appropriate workouts because of the way you, you, you adjust the leverage because of the positioning of the arms and all that stuff. I can do, I would use suspension trainers with my elderly clients and then I'd use it with, you know, the occasional athlete that I would train and they would equally get great work. Well, a pushup is like an example of like what you're, you know, how many times did you have a client that couldn't even do like a regular pushup? And that's an exercise. That's like a staple movement that you want to see if every client can do. And, you know, I remember having, you know, older clients that I'd have to do like pushups off a wall, just pushing their body weight off a wall. But I, I didn't have everything in between, which was always frustrating. Right? You have like my, my client, when I first, you know, I first get them, they can't do a pushup on the ground. And so I'm like having to use a Smith machine to kind of angle it where you can really like modify it perfect for the person. Inch by inch. Yeah, inch by inch by just simply walking out like one more step or stepping back in one more step to make it either easier or more difficult for whatever client that you're training. I love that. And there's that little element of instability that they have to overcome initially, which, you know, you're not going to get from those solid surfaces. So that's another key factor that they don't even realize they're working on this joint stability, where when the body feels more stable around the joints, it allows you to apply more force, which makes you stronger. And this is this is one of those like important facts to build off of. So if you can establish that right away, and then graduate that incrementally, it's invaluable for a trainer not let alone like somebody that's just kind of getting started. And then you can just go to a level of extreme that you can really like get adventurous with it. Yeah, I used to love suspension trainers for working on posture. What a great tool for posture because you're having someone straighten their body out, you adjust the leverage so that it's appropriate so that the person can get into that shoulder retracted, you know, good posture position while their body is straight. And they're using and moving their body weight and then they can hold it at the top and typically what I do is have a client move up to the top, I'd correct their posture up there and hold them have them squeeze, come back down. Now if you adjust the leverage, now it becomes a more of a back building exercise, I can make the leverage so that you are doing a heavy row with your body, squeezing and working the mid back and upper back muscles. I mean, that's just an example of how I can modify the same exercise with the same tool to do different things. Well, another way like so the squat was a favorite for mine just because like most clients that would come in and had issues were usually that they're really forward leaning and they had all these, you know, forward issues where I could, they felt imbalanced every time they go to squat, you know, their heels would raise or they're trying to lean as far forward as they can to maintain that balance as their hips drop down. Well, now we provide a tool for them to feel secure and they can allow them to provide depth so they feel comfort in that position and we start working on, you know, countering that balance, lightening the amount of reliance that they have on the straps to guide them into that position. So it was a great tool to kind of progress your way through squats, single leg squats and get real crazy. What a great point. I actually forgot that I used to use it like that all the time. You know, when you get clients, yeah, when you get clients that struggle with breaking 90 degrees and they think they can't go beyond that because their balance falls off, giving them that tool just to get them down in that position, say, look, you have the mobility to get down here, you just haven't figured out how to control your body to get in this position and getting them comfortable by holding onto the strap was a great way to teach squatting and then sing and for sure pistol squats. That's like, I think one of the best best progressive way to do it or Cossack squats, a lot of people have issues with that lateral, you know, drop. Same thing. You can hold on and bring it down. There was also the myth around suspension trainers that you can't work or isolate like arm muscles with it. It's all compound movements, which first off isn't a bad thing. Compound moves were the best. But I'm going to tell you right now, some of the highest tension bicep and tricep exercises you'll do will be with a suspension trainer. Try leveraging your body and doing a curl with a suspension trainer and tell me that you don't get the craziest bicep pump and workout that you've ever gotten. Same thing with a, you know, a skull crusher or, you know, I used to love doing this with a skull crusher. So the triceps got two attachments. And when you're on the bench and you do a skull crusher, elbow stays in position, you extend the elbows and the arms and bring them back down, do it with the suspension trainer, come all the way down, then bring your elbow up by your head and then bring them back down and then do the skull crusher. That's working the long head of the tricep. Like you've never worked it before. Now you could try doing this with the barbell where you're laying on the bench, you bring the barbell down and kind of bring the elbows back and then swing them forward and come up. And that's one way of doing it. Try doing it with a suspension trainer and tell me you didn't get the craziest tricep, you know, pump and workout you've ever gotten your entire life. Oh yeah. And if you think back to like our other program, like our prime program where we're, we're, you know, testing out all these, you know, things going on with your upper body, especially too, with like maintaining these contact points and even getting mobility in your shoulders and getting your, you know, everything to respond, you know, appropriately, this is such a great bridge like to use alongside the train to get your body to respond the way it should by adding just your own leverage and body weight to get you there. Yeah. And here's the thing. So when you're doing exercises, we've talked about this before, but not in super depth, you can categorize exercises, most of them into kind of two categories, open chain and closed chain movements. So a closed chain would be where you're, you're basically moving your body and open chain will be where you're moving your body part or moving the weight. So like a curl would be open chain. It's my hand that's moving holding the weight. A closed chain version of that would be doing a suspension trainer curl. So I'm curling my body towards the equipment and working the bicep. Closed train chain movements have tremendous value. And oftentimes when we work out in the gym, we don't do a lot of those. We do mostly open chain movements. I'll give you an example of a closed chain movement that most people are familiar with. That is exceptional. Like a, like a barbell squat, barbell squat or your body weight squat. Your feet are staying in position. Your body is what's moving. And that is a phenomenal strength and muscle building exercise. Closed chain movements are exceptional at making you functional because it's teaching you how to move your body around in space, right? This is a skill. So this is why a gymnast who, let's say you take a gymnast who's equally as muscular as a natural bodybuilder and a lot of gymnasts look like natural bodybuilders. If you put them together and had them move around in real life and move over things and climb over things or whatever, the gymnast is going to take the amateur, you know, bodybuilder to school. They just know how to move their bodies, even though they may look both muscular and they may both look similar. The functionality that you get from closed chain movements is superior. And all the movements with suspension chainers, or most of them I should say, are closed chain. You're bringing your body forward and back and manipulating your body around in space. And this is amazing, especially if you never train this way. If you never train this way, and then you go and switch from your traditional machines and dumbbells and that kind of stuff and move to these closed chain exercises, watch how your body responds. Even for example, I'm talking about like the skull crusher on the, you know, with the suspension trainer versus a skull crusher with barbell. Technically, you're like, Oh, it's the same movement. It's not because one is moving the barbell. The other is moving your body. You get used to doing one a long time, switch to the other one, watch what happens. Well, also to like think about now limiting a bench or something like your body's resting on that is providing the stability. You really have to be aware of how to brace properly and how to be able to protect your spine, how to be able to keep your body from moving and turning and twisting while you're trying to, you know, accomplish this movement that you have in front of you. And so it just it helps you to be more aware of how to make these little micro adjustments as you're going through these movements, which is again, you could attribute that to like athletic type movements, functional movements, but in general, you're just strong in these type of movements because now you can adjust it and brace and keep stabilized while also like working on your strength. Well, back to Sal's point, this is, this is conversation is extremely important for your advanced lifters. I know this is like one of those tools that if you're like, you know, you're a heavy deadlifter and squatter, you look at like a strap or bands is ridiculous. But one of the hardest things when you've been training for a really long time is to seek out novel things is to find things that your body is not used to and already adapt to training. And it is so different that that stimulus is going to get you to see change in your body that a lot of people when you've been lifting for a long period of time, you've kind of done a lot of things already. And so every time you kind of rotate your sets and wraps and exercise, you don't see those big leaps that you made when you were first starting to train. This is one of the greatest ways to do that because very few people utilize it as a primary tool to train. So even if you're somebody who's an advanced lifter and you could deadlift and squat and bench press, you know, 200, 400 pounds, and you're thinking, oh, my body weight, that's so light, but it's more so, it's so novel and different for all the things that we're talking about. It's one of the best ways for you to kickstart seeing change in your body again. Totally. And again, like I'll use the just to hammer home the whole thing about closed chain movements. So I think I don't need to make the argument that a squat is going to produce better muscle and more functional strength than a leg press, right? Or a hack squat, hack squat. Well, or no, hack squat, we won't count that. Let's talk about a leg press because you're moving your feet rather than your body, right? Let's say both of them increase in 50 pounds. I added 50 pounds to my squat, I added 50 pounds to my leg press. Even this 50 pounds of my squat versus 100 pounds to my leg press, which one is going to translate into more strength in the real world. Any athletic coach, anybody who's been working out for a long time will tell you it's the squat. Part of that is because it is a closed chain movement. These are some of the benefits that you get from working with suspension trainers. And if you haven't done a whole cycle of suspension training, in other words, rather than throwing in a few exercises with a suspension trainer, rather than doing that, following an entire cycle of this is what I'm going to focus on for the next two months or three months. Try it out, watch what happens, and you'll see some of these benefits. Well, Justin alluded to the importance of the core, right? And like being supported on a bench when we train and exercise. This was something that I found was extremely important with any of like my novice lifters is getting them to learn how to pay attention to their entire body when you do an exercise. And that's one of the drawbacks of using barbells, dumbbells, and machines inside of a gym is you're always on this bench. You're always laying down on a bench or sitting in a chair or you're in these fixed positions. And people aren't really aware of their entire body while they're trying to do the movement. They're just thinking, oh, this is a tricep exercise. I'm in a tricep machine. And all I'm thinking about is extending the elbow, extending the elbow, or same thing for every other muscle group that we're trying to work versus when you do movements like this, you have to be completely aware of your entire body and you have to stabilize with your core. No matter what, I don't care if you're doing a bicep exercise for it. If you're doing a chest, a back row, you have to be completely aware of the entire body. And that just gets you connected and introduced to that. And a lot of people don't do that when you're always lying on a bench or sitting in machines to exercise. This is how your body evolved or was created to move, by the way. Your body does not move well in isolation. It does a very damn good. In fact, this is your default. So think about why it's so hard to isolate a muscle with weights, especially when it's getting hard, right? Especially when the reps are getting difficult. And even though you're trying with everything you can to not let this happen, sometimes it still happens. Other muscles help out. Your body moves. You use a little bit of body English. Things tense up. Try doing a single arm concentration curl to failure without tensing up any other part of your body. Almost impossible. This is how your body naturally moves. It does not like to move in isolation. It likes to move in unison. It likes to move with sequences. It likes to move all together. So when you're using a suspension trainer, this is exactly what you're doing. You're allowing your body to move the way that it's supposed to move, and then you're getting it good at moving that way. Now, one of the main areas that tends to be a weak link in a lot of people that you really, that really stands out when you use a suspension trainer a lot is your core, core stability, because so many exercises are designed in the gym to disinvolve the core because it is a weakest link. We're going to disinvolve it so I can do my shoulders or I can do my quads or my hamstrings or my glutes. Well, because of that, it becomes kind of a weak link. You start training with a suspension trainer. One of the first things you'll notice is I didn't do any specific core training, but my core really felt that entire workout because your core now is your weakest link and it needs to catch up to be able to support everything else. The side effect of that, one of my favorites is a very well-developed core, like a very nice, structured, defined, and strong core from working your back, chest, arms, shoulders, and legs because it needs to be strong. I had many clients that would notice that their back pain would go away and they couldn't figure out why. Like what are we doing at them that are, my back pain has been eliminated and it's because of exactly that. A lot of times you get low back pain when, especially when it's just chronic, you didn't have an acute injury that happened to it, you just have chronic low back pain. A lot of that has to do with just the lack of core strength that you have to support your spine. Those core muscles, they wrap around the spine like a vacuum and when they're strong and tight, they support the spine well. When they're weak, you put a lot of stress on it all the time and so just by us training that, I'd get clients that'd be like, Adam, I don't know what we're doing but my low back isn't bothering me anymore and I don't feel like you're doing anything to address it. I don't understand and then I'd have to explain that to them. It's all we're training this way. You just, you're not used to engaging in working your core. We train a whole hour like this three, four times a week, then you go about your day and you're holding in and you're stabilizing. You don't even realize you're doing that now. Yeah. Well, what I like to always bring up is sort of in the athletic realm, what makes an athlete so amazing is the ability not to just generate force to be able to be super explosive, but also be able to control that at the highest level. So if I'm producing this movement, I have to be able to react and then be able to bring back to homeostasis, bring myself back to this control. And this is another one of these tools that really highlights and emphasizes this because, you know, there's elements of rotation. Your body just naturally wants to kind of lean towards the side that it's most comfortable. And you notice this, even with just a stabilized lift, like a bench press, for instance, like everybody knows like the, you know, the one side for me, it was like, I would lean a little bit to the right side and then I put more pressure and then I'm trying to get that last dig. If I'm going with a heavy weight or if I'm, you know, and I'm rotating slightly or if I'm doing a dead lift and, you know, you notice like one side's coming up a little bit versus the other. And so just the ability to stabilize, you know, my hips or stabilize my shoulders in place so they don't rotate when I don't want them to is such, you know, a massive thing to consider. Anti-rotation. I mean, so a big part of the, your core's function is to produce movement. So like a crunch or a sit-up or twisting, okay, that's a movement that it's doing intentionally. I'm trying to twist. I'm trying to crunch. But there's another part that a lot of people don't realize, which is anti-rotation or preventing rotation or preventing too much movement. This is the stability part, right? So why is that important? Well, if my body can only, you know, if my core is good at making itself move but bad at preventing itself from moving, that's injury waiting to happen. You want a core that when you need it to be is rigid and strong and prevents rotation, prevents movement. This is called anti-rotation. So an example of that would be, you know, like I'm doing a modified push-up on the suspension trainer, one arm is extended out, one arm is close to my body. Well, my body is naturally going to want to rotate and twist to one side because the leverage is different on one side of the other. But I want to stay straight. The movement requires me to stay straight, not let my body twist. What is my core doing? Anti-rotation. It's stabilizing and holding that position. One of my favorite exercises for that and to teach was the single arm row with the TRs for that. You had to keep their, you keep their body in a squared position to the strap and then you're doing a single arm row. The body naturally wants to flop open and you have to keep that stable. So there's a great anti-rotational exercise. But if you talk about anti-rotation, you have to talk about the benefits of the rotational part of it too. The number one thing that I've used a suspension trainer more than anything else for, I love the I and W exercises for external rotation in the shoulder. There's just not a lot of exercises and moves. And what I love about it is the point that we made earlier is I have to stabilize my entire core and spine while I'm also addressing my upper cross syndrome. So since that's so prevalent in almost everybody that we train, they've got these rounded forward shoulders. Yeah, I can do all these exercises on the bench on a cable machine. But what ends up happening is the rest of their spine deviates because they're so focused on the shoulder internally or externally rotating. When I do the eyes and the Ws and I put emphasis on them staying stable and rigid while also addressing this, boy, does that really carry over into real life when they're trying to fix their posture. I've used it for that more than anything else and warm up almost all my upper body with that. It's body awareness. It really helps a lot with body awareness. It's like trying to teach a boxer to throw a punch, but you never use the whole body. Let's just focus on the arm movement and then, okay, put the arm down. Now let's just focus on the hips and let's just, rather than having the whole body move together, what this kind of training encourages, what suspension training encourages is body awareness. So yes, I'm working on shoulder stability, but while I'm working on shoulder stability, I'm also learning how to stabilize my body, keep myself in good position because in the real world, that's how you have to stabilize your shoulder. You never have to stabilize your shoulder in the real world in isolation where the rest of your body is locked in because you're on a chair or whatever, and so now I'm doing, it doesn't work that way. It's like I reached back to grab the seat belt or I threw a Frisbee or I called a cab or whatever. Your whole body's involved. You need to have that kind of body awareness to stabilize your body. The more familiar you can get your body to these uncomfortable positions and to kind of these different ranges of motion that you don't come across on a daily basis, like the moment you do have that, where you're reaching back or you slip in the shower or something like your body has to react and respond right away. If it's not familiar with it, there's a high probability that an injury is going to occur. So this is another great way to sort of bulletproof yourself from injury. Oh, the joint stability you get from training this way is exceptional. Look, there's a lot of muscles, small muscles that are involved in stabilizing your joints or in protecting you from injury that don't necessarily, or oftentimes I should say, aren't up to par with these other big muscles that you continue to develop. Okay, so I'll give you a great example, and maybe this happened to you, maybe as a listener. You do heavy barbell rows, pull-ups, bench presses, incline presses, overhead presses, and you're good at them. You're really good at them in the gym. You're strong bench press, strong rows, strong overhead presses, and then you go and maybe you're playing around with your friend and you decide to throw a baseball. And you wonder why your shoulder's so damn sore. Why is my shoulder sore? I'm strong, I'm fit, my shoulder hurts like crazy. It's because there are muscles that are not being challenged properly to stabilize. So now you have all this force that you can generate because your strong pecs and shoulders and lats and all that stuff, but you don't have good stabilizers. Well, guess what? Those stabilizers are your weakest link, and that's why you end up hurting yourself. It's not because you're not fit, it's because your muscles don't match. Your stabilizers don't match these big prime movers. When you're moving your entire body with exercises that you find in suspension training type training, you can't help but strengthen the stabilizers appropriately. They have to in order to support you through the movement. The irony of that is actually that person is actually more susceptible than the person who's deconditioned and doesn't exercise. That's the funny thing, isn't it? And that's as hard for people to wrap their brain around. It's so strong in one direction. Exactly. You see yourself as somebody strong because all the what you just said, oh, I overhead press a hundred and seven pounds, I do this, I do that, I work out every single day. Why the shit couldn't I throw a baseball to my son, you know, 10 yards away without hurting my shoulder. And they're more simply, they have so much strength and power in some of the muscles, but they haven't addressed all the stability ones. So there's more of a discrepancy there versus somebody who's just deconditioned. They never work out, they never do anything. They pick up a ball, they throw it, they're less likely to get injured than the person who's been training in a single plane all the time, getting really, really strong, but not addressing all the stabilizers. I know some people think that sounds crazy, but let me put it in a different example. Imagine you had like a four cylinder, you know, 1994 Honda Civic four cylinder and you take that exact body and you put on a thousand horsepower diesel, you know, engine in there, right? You're going to suspension would fall right on an axle is an axle is going to snap in half, right? Now we wouldn't have happened with the four cylinder engine to force it. We could run it all day long. You're never going to snap an axle or do something create or twist the frame. You know, that's not going to happen. You put a thousand horsepower on that thing, you're twisting the frame. Now here's to take it even a step further, even though your body allows these muscles to get strong and big, while these stabilizing muscles don't catch up, there still is a limiting factor. Believe it or not, your body will only ever build as much muscle as it thinks it safely can do. So you're still, even if you don't go and throw a baseball or a Frisbee, believe it or not, by, by not having this, the proper stability, you're still limiting your strength. I learned this personally as a kid, trying to get a high bench press number. Bench press was the big exercise. This is when you use the, what's your name? Shoulder horn, the shoulder horn. I remember doing something stupid like that, increasing my shoulder stability. Did nothing else. My bench press went up 15 pounds. I was stuck at the same weight forever, went up 15 pounds. I remember showing my friends same thing, five pounds, 10 pounds, 15 pounds, just from strengthening the stabilizer. And then the result of that was I was able to bench more weight and then build more, you know, better chest and more delts and all that kind of stuff. So that stability is extremely important. You can't help but strengthen those muscles when you're doing exercises with a suspension train. I'll give you one more silly example. Okay. Silly example. You could have someone that's got great chest press on a bench, watch them do a push-up, which is a closed chain movement and watch how their core starts to compromise their strength. Even though it's their shoulders and triceps and chest seem strong, before you know it, their butt starts to arch, they feel in the low back, maybe the hips sag a little bit. Why? Because that part of their body can't keep up with the other part of the body. When you're training with a suspension trainer, naturally the whole body is going to match. You're naturally going to have things catch up and need to catch up. What do you think that's going to do for your gains when you cycle out of a two or three month suspension training cycle and then go back to barbells and dumbbells? It's very similar. I mean, we're always highlighting the importance of mobility training to incorporate in your routine. And especially if you're lifting heavy constantly, you got to address the joints and keep the joints healthy so they can stabilize properly to account for all this force you're applying because the weakest link is going to be at the joint. And so we got to keep those things to be able to react and respond appropriately. This is such a tool that has very similar benefits to mobility training and you're able to provide all these other types of exercises that you could do in between. I look at it as another way to incorporate. So if you've been doing barbell or dumbbell training forever or with weights, to interrupt that, to really address all these stabilizers and make sure that your body now can be reinforced. Think about reinforcing your body to then progress. Well, one of my favorite parts about it is we talk about the benefit to this and I think the suspension trainer is one of the best tools for this and that's unilateral training because everything you do is unilateral. Right. Because the straps are independent, you get all these benefits of training unilaterally, which people don't do enough. And because it has the ability, like we talked earlier about regressing and progressing, that's one of the things that's hard about unilateral training for some people. Some people can't do a Bulgarian split squat or they can't do some of these unilateral movements. It's just really challenging for them. You can regress it for someone to do that. And then you're always on almost every single body part. You can do a unilateral movement with the suspension trainer because the straps are independent. Oh, everything you do, you have two handles and each one of them move all over the place. It's going to highlight your weaknesses from right to left. You're going to see it right away. You're going to see it when you start to fatigue and your body wants to twist in one direction or wow, my right arm wants to be close to my body. My left arm wants to be further away from my body. What's going on? You may think you're balanced. Try training in this fashion and watch what happens. And so you end up, now what does this unilateral emphasis start to do? Brings up weak body parts, stabilizes and strengthens your body and sets you up for better gains. There are studies that show that when one side of your body is weak and one side is strong, it actually limits the strength that you can gain overall. The overall potential. Yeah, your body thrives on balance. Now, I know that this is more of a systemic thing that happens in the body, but it does thrive on balance. A guy who, for example, only works out his upper body, never works out his legs, will not build as much muscle in his upper body as a guy that builds his legs and his upper body. And we've known this. We've shown this in studies that there's a systemic muscle building effect that happens from training the entire body, training with suspension trainers and their emphasis on unilateral balance and stability really does send that loud systemic muscle building signal, which brings me to the last point. They're excellent at building muscle, excellent at building muscle. This was surprising to me when I first started using these with clients and with myself. I was familiar. I think it's obvious for a trainer to see the mobility and the stability in the core training aspects. It's obvious if you look at it, you say, oh yeah, for sure. I can see that we're, that person's building good mobility, good stability. Their core is very active. That's really cool. But does it really build a lot of muscle? Yeah, it does. Absolutely. For muscles, you wouldn't even expect hamstrings. Do a hamstring curl on a suspension trainer and tell me your hamstrings don't blow up from that. Glute exercises. Do glute hip thrusts or bridges, single leg or both legs on a suspension trainer. Tell me your butt doesn't just get the craziest pump and development. Arms. Arms was one that really blew me away. Like I've been saying throughout the whole podcast, doing exercise for biceps and triceps on that were at par, or maybe even superior to certain barbell and dumbbell exercises. Shoulders, that's a big one. People are like, well, what am I going to get for my, try doing some, there's, first of all, there's like a hundred shoulder exercises you could do with suspension trainers. Watch how your delts develop when you're using suspension trainers. It is a phenomenal bodybuilding tool just to build up your body. Well, I think, you know, the people that are familiar with suspension trainers have seen a lot of moves and they seen a lot of videos and things that, you know, they try and emulate it. And they're like, oh, that looks like a cool move. I'm just going to see if I can, you know, do that. But it's not really, they haven't really gone through a real program in terms of, you know, progressing them and intensifying those exercises and body parts to gradually bring them up, which, which your muscles respond to, but then we build on that. So it's really important that you have structure when using a tool like this. I'm glad you brought that point up because this was my favorite part about creating the program was that was exactly my experience when it first came out was it, it was like one of those things where the most creative and unique exercises you could do, everybody was just kind of throwing the whole kitchen. It's so novel. Yes. It's, oh, look, you could do this and look at this crazy movement. And it was all about that. It reminded me of the wave of functional training that happened to us. Forget programming, just throwing. Right, you know, oh, it's just balancing on everything and jumping around and doing weird stuff. It reminded me of that. And I was originally turned off by it because of that, because it turned into a thing of how creative can I get? And I'm going like, it doesn't matter how creative it is if it's not, if it's not as useful or it's not as effective. But a lot of that was just nobody was programming it really well. They were just throwing out all these creative neat exercises that that were challenging that you could do, which is great. That just is to the point that we talk about you could regress and progress things a lot with this tool. But the reality of it, I haven't seen anybody put together like a really solid program for the average person to go through and progress and progressively overload their body in it. Yes, it makes a big difference. So it's like, okay, there's 101 different chest exercises, right? Does that mean you just throw them in a workout and you're going to get as good of results as a well programmed workout that puts them in the best order, combines the right exercises, reps and sets? Of course not. Programming is what makes our programs so popular. The exercises in most of our programs, many of them are ones that people are very familiar with. It's just how we put them together, sets, reps, how you put the weeks together and the days together and the exercises and what order and what emphasis, that's what makes them so effective. I have yet to see anybody do that with a full suspension trainer workout where somebody took all these exercises and did just throw them in and be like, here's some back exercises for back. Here's some leg ones for leg and what who somebody looked at it like they were programming an excellent full-on workout. That's what we did when we put together our map suspension program is we actually took these workouts, these exercises and put it into a well planned program all the way from beginning to end, phased through so that your body progresses as you go through the program. It's a suspension-only workout program. This was also created to address what we felt was one of the biggest needs that we had heard in the last two or three months from all of our trainers. A lot of trainers have been messaging us, what do I do right now? My gym is closed down. I don't know if I should leave careers or there's opportunities for me to pivot and do something else in the space. This is an opportunity right here. This was really popular when I was running boot camps is to get eight or 10 of these suspension trainers and then run groups outdoor where everybody can be spaced six feet apart or more from each other. You go to some park or some high school or something and you strap it to the goalpost or you strap it to some tree and you get a little camp running with five to 10 people at a time where you're charging a little bit less than what you would for one-on-one private training but enough or more than what you would be making per hour if you were training a client and you take them outdoors and you give them an incredible workout and we've laid it all out so you could run it like a pro and my suggestion to the trainers that have been messaging us is I would sell like the way we have structured the program is that would be an X amount a week program for your boot camp or whatever you want to call it your outdoor training for your clients and I would package it like that. This is an incredible tool for all the coaches out there that have been asking this. Yeah a suspension trainer I would say is probably the single most valuable piece of equipment for the private traveling trainer. I can't think of a single piece of equipment that is superior by itself you could drive to somebody's house or meet them at the park and give them exceptional workouts endlessly for years and years without needing anything else and clients appreciate it because it's a lot of fun and it's different and of course the results that people get from it like all the stuff that we've been talking about in this entire episode so look we put together and have released a brand new maps program I actually haven't released a maps program in a long time this one is maps suspension it's the entire program the entire workout from beginning to end is with suspension trainers that's it that's all you need is a pair of suspension trainers and you can train and build and sculpt your entire body because it's a new release we have a launch special on it so what you got to do if you if you're interested in this and again everything spelled out so we have the the exercise video demos in there so when you click on an exercise Justin is demonstrating how to do it properly and perfectly it tells you how many reps how many sets everything that you need to know to follow this entire program so what you got to do is you go to maps suspension dot com that's M-A-P-S-S-U-S-P-E-N-S-I-O-N dot com and then use the code suspension 20 that's S-U-S-P-E-N-S-I-O-N two zero that'll give you $20 off the program so you get $20 off for the brand new launch and this program will not be going on sale for very very long time because it is a brand new program also when you get the program for first time for you know first come first serve first come we will get a discount code sent to you in your email for a suspension trainer you actually be able to buy one for 47 bucks from us with the discount code that's as long as supplies last and I know good suspension trainers online can cost as much as 180 bucks so that's a pretty good pretty good deal also mine pump is recorded on video as well as audio come check us out on youtube mine pump podcast and finally if you have any questions for us and you want to talk to us individually you can find us on instagram you can find Justin at mine pump Justin me at mine pump Sal and Adam at mine pump Adam