 Are you over 35 and trying to figure out how to get your body to respond the same way it did when you were in your 20s? Watch this. Our next caller is Nicholas from Massachusetts. What's up Nicholas? How can we help you? Hey, so the question I submitted to you guys was, how do you know when you've reached your genetic growth potential? And a very vague question, but based on maybe your age and training style. Oh, that's a, I have no idea. That's a tough one, Nick. How long you've been working out consistently for and how old are you? This sounds like a Facebook formula. What your favorite color tells you about your genetic potential? Yeah. So how long have you been training consistently and how old are you? 38. I started lifting when I was in my second grade with my dad. My dad was a runner, Olympic alternative. And he got me into running and lifting really early. Once I hit 18, I took my first basics for lifting, like a fundamental class in college. And then from 18 to now, I've lifted consistently, doing a bunch of different ways of lifting. When I lived in New York, I was doing a strongman training with some strongmen. I worked out with that at a local gym. I've been doing martial arts for probably about 15 years now. And in between all that, I just, I'm basically trying to build my body up to be more durable and stronger and faster. That's great. Well, okay. So we have a website. It's got a muscular potential calculator. I'm going to get the actual website for Doug. It's mapsmacro.com. Oh, mapsmacro.com. It's one of the links on there. Yeah, there's a link on there to figure out your muscular potential. It's a pretty generic good formula. It's generic. And they based it off of the top natural bodybuilders and the sizes of their wrists and their ankles. And so it's super, super general. But, you know, here's a deal. I mean, it's hard to say, you've been doing this for a long time. And I know why you're asking this question, right? You're motivated by changes in your body. You want to look forward to new things. You know, I'm sure at this point with being the fact that you've been doing martial arts for a long time, you've been working out for a long time, you probably love the process, right? I'm assuming you love the process of exercise regardless of the results. Listen, listen, Sal. The answer is way easier than that. If you haven't ran through every maps program at least twice, there's still potential. Yeah, there you go. 10% more. If you haven't done every one of those at least twice, there's still room, brother. Yeah. No, I mean, but you get what I'm saying, right, Nick? If you love the process, that's where you end up. Once you start to get older and you've been doing this for a long time, I've been doing it a long time, too. I'm at the point now where I love, look, I love making gains in strength. I love seeing my body change. Am I going to beat my best all-time PRs? Can I? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. But I love the process so much. I'm never going to stop. And then if you need that motivation, I suggest you try this. This is a fun little trick. Maybe not good to do all the time. This might be my ego talking. But compare yourself to your 38-year-old friends that haven't worked out. And wait, watch as you guys get older, how much further apart you get from them in terms of how you look and your feel and performance and health. So that's the real value. So you might even start declining once you hit your mid-40s in comparison to where you were in your mid-30s. But compare yourself to other people in their mid-40s. It's going to, you're going to look like you're from a different planet. Well, have you actually hit a wall right now? Is that what's spurring this question? Yeah, so I've hit a wall. Pre-COVID, I was doing a training routine where I would pick basically the big five lifts. And I would do 10 sets of about maybe 70% to 80% of my one rep max. I would knock out three or four reps and then I'd go immediately into another big lift for three to four reps, catch my breath, go back. And I would do that 10 times, I'd do 10 sets of that for each one of the lifts. It was a pretty intense workout. Most of the time I needed a spotter based on the weight I'm doing and how many sets. And I was seeing good results. COVID hit and I was remanded to lifting in my basement with basically just a rack and a bar. Still got a lot of work done. But since probably last year, I can't basically put any more weight on the bar. If I do it incrementally, then I find that the weight drops back down. I'm not able to hit that lift for another couple of weeks, maybe a month. A lot of different programs I've been involved in trying to increase strength and endurance as far as lifting. And my weight has stayed pretty much consistent. I've eaten more, I've eaten less. Weight's not really getting above 190 and I'm six feet tall. Stuck at 190, about 10 to 11% body fat. I know there's other factors like I got my testosterone levels tested. I am low. I don't sleep enough. I know that with shift work and call outs and over times, two kids, hobbies. I'm getting about six hours of sleep maybe a night. It was four. So I'm working up from four. Well, that's just that's a big one. A lot of demand. In conjunction with that type of a workout, there might be a little demanding. There might be a nice little tweak right there in itself. So just hearing you say that now, knowing that you're already kind of stressing yourself a little bit with the kids in the sleep because we know what that's like. And then in addition to that, your training routine is pretty damn intense. Sal says this really well where he tells people what your body can tolerate and what's ideal for it are two different things. So you may have trained yourself to be able to tolerate or handle that much intensity in your workout, but your body may be trying to tell you that this is not what's ideal for it to continue to see progress. So that would be something right away. I know I made the joke about running through every maps program twice before you hit your muscle potential. It's a little bit of a joke. But out of seriousness, have you actually kind of gone through and looked at our programs? Are there any of them that you've ran before or any of them that interest you? Because I have an idea on which one I'd like to see you run. You guys always talk about the maps anabolic. And I started reading through them a couple of nights ago. I've looked at them. I actually changed my training routine recently because I figured I was overtraining. So I started backing off on the weight. So one day a week, I'm doing high reps, big five. Then I'll take a day off to do some cardio stretch. I go to physical therapy for my back. Then the next day I'll hit like a medium eight to 12 reps of like 60, 70, maybe up to 80%. And then one day a week after another break day, I will go back to lifting heavy and trying to get closer to my 90% one rep max. I've taken the number of sets down. I've focused a lot more on warm-up work and just basically going through the movement of the lift to make sure that my movement is consistent no matter how much weight I'm doing. And I've been trying to do that and still no movement. But I'd have to look at your routines a little bit more in depth. And I mentioned in the email that I paid for online programs. I did the Julian Smith one. Did that for about a year or two. It was just way too much volume. A ton of volume. So I'm in the gym for two and a half, three hours doing the workout. So here's something that's two things. First off, if your testosterone is low, hormone therapy for me at least was completely... I mean, I gained 12 pounds of lean body mass because mine was low too. Brought it up to the normal high. It was a game changer. But here's the second part. And this is something that's interesting for those of us that have been working out for many, many years. You're getting close to 40. And I've actually started to really piece this together even for myself. And if you look at studies actually kind of show this, you need less volume, less frequency and less intensity as you get older to get the same... Less is more at this point. The same results. Yeah. So I lift hard four days a week now. I was a five and six day a week kind of guy before. Now I could tolerate it if I did it now, but I wouldn't be progressing as well as I am right now. So especially with muscle memory and especially with your past. So because you've been training for so long, less actually starts to get you better results as you start to get older. So I would back way down and start there on the intensity. You're trying to hit like 90% of your one rep max. I would go way less than that. And really feel like the two reps short of failure. I don't know if like you're going... Like you said, you had a spotter. So that's another thing is like you might be going too close to failure to where it affects the workouts preceding that. So you should be able to get into the following workouts energized and feeling like your body is responding even more. So you can build upon that versus being so hammered that your body feels like it's grinding its way through. So here's my prescription and where I was heading. Okay. We'll give you maps and a ball. So I'm going to have Doug send that over to you. Start there. When you train that to make sure you leave two reps in the tank, right? Two in the tank. Don't train to failure. You don't need a spotter. You don't even need to go to failure yourself. So leave two reps in the tank on all the exercises. After that go to performance and then strong. So that if I had a hold of you, you were a client of mine, I would convince you to back. And while we're backing off too, I would be talking to you about your sleep routine and maybe getting your blood work done. And by the way too, we have a free hormones forum. So you can join it for free. We have doctors that go in there and speak twice a month. That's totally free to you. You can ask them questions. It's amazing. So if you're not taking advantage of that, take advantage of that. It's mine. Can I sign up for it? Oh, you did. Perfect. Okay. Good. Good. So make sure you're taking advantage of that. Talking to those guys, they're brilliant when it comes to talking about hormones. So that's what I would do. I would back you and it's a three day a week type of program. It's full body. I would be really pushing you not to push beyond what it's programmed in there and really focus on our sleep. Make sure we're dialing in there, getting yourself adequate rest. And then from there, move to like a performance. I think you'll enjoy the performance of a training. You'll benefit from the mobility work. And then I think strong. I think you would really like. I don't know how much you've done. A lot of the unconventional type of lifts. But I love to send that program to people that have been training consistently in the kind of bodybuilder style. It's very posterior chain heavy, which is awesome. Yeah. And it's so unique, right? There's a lot of movements in there that, you know, even if you've been lifting a long time that you've never really trained. There are a lot of people that say like, Oh yeah, I do circus presses all the time, you know, or, you know, sandbag carries. That's a normal part of my routine. So it's got a lot of unconventional lifts in there that, you know, that's another thing that might shake up a little bit, breaking us through that plateau is just is focusing on a new adaptation. Okay. Sounds like solid advice. Excellent. So we'll send that program over to you. And then again, keep what I said in mind. And you will, you may find that less as you get older, starts to behave in the ways that your old workouts did with more. Your body may respond much better. I'm finding this out right now for myself. And it's very different than how I responded 10 years ago. So give that a shot. Okay. So less. Yep. All right. Thanks for calling in. All right. Thanks for having me. No problem. Yeah. It's weird. It is very strange. Like, you know, I cut, I went down from six days a week to five days a week, got a little bit better progress, then went from five to four with an added mobility day. So I have one day where I do kind of mobility and, you know, little core work or whatever. Yeah. And I'm getting great results. And you'll find that, especially if you worked out in the past, that you've got this base that's kind of following you, you need less to get better results. And it just, as you age, it's just kind of just the way it is. Honestly, I think that people just don't realize how much stress they're, they're, you know, accumulating throughout the day. And that, whether that be work stress, you know, relationship stress, like lack of sleep stress, like, I feel like there's just a lot more responsibilities. There's a lot more demand on adults, you know, as they go forward. They don't really like put that in comparison to physical stress. That's, I mean, I'm with you on that. I think it's less about the age and it's more so that you've been redlining your whole life and you don't even know it and you don't even realize it. Then all of a sudden you get older and it kind of forces you. Yeah. What was your biggest worry when you were 25, right? Yeah. And where are we going Saturday? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know? Yeah, so, yeah. And you've just been, you've been, you've been burning the candle at both ends. And then finally, something forces you to back off a little bit. And then all of a sudden you realize, oh, shit, my body's responding so well. It's just tough because, especially if you've been working out for a long time, you think you know, right, what works for you, but the context has changed. Well, what you say, what you say, I think it's so good, which is the, you know, understanding that what you tolerate and what is best or ideal or optimal for gains is different. Yep. That can't be said enough. Like that, that it's all dose dependent. I don't, I don't, I definitely didn't think that way as a, even as a young trainer. No, it was all about the max I could tolerate. Yeah. If I could do, if I wasn't sore enough or I could handle another set or another, because everything that you see, especially on social media is promoting that the, the all out intensity and the more and the push, the drive, the motivation. So it's, it makes you think that I gotta do more or I can do more, I can do more. And it's like, no, there's, there's an amount that your body can tolerate. And then there's amount that is optimal for the best results. And so, and they're not the same at all. And figuring that out for yourself is very difficult, especially I think when we're younger and we're kind of figuring our whole way out and figuring out how to program and train and diet. And it's obvious when his, his, uh, he's at a hard plateau. His sleep is terrible and his hormones. I mean, how many more signs do you need that you're, you're overdoing it? It's like, that's for sure. And it's hard. You take someone, what do you say, like two years old, he's been training with his dad? To a second grade. Yeah. So he's, he's like, he's been, he's been an athletic person his whole entire life. So he has that kind of athletic mind. I mean, he did what his dad was an Olympic alternate. So you know, I mean, He's got good genetics for athletics. And you know, there's, and he's got that probably a competitive aspect, the way he approaches everything. So, you know, telling that guy that, yo, you're five, six day a week, I want you to train twice a week. I mean, that's really, I would take him all the way back down to two or three less. Yeah. Hey, if you enjoyed that clip, you can find the full episode here, or you can find other clips over here and be sure to subscribe.