 In this episode of Mime Pump, we talk about how to start your fitness and fat loss journey, and we break it down into five easy steps. Look, we literally created this episode for people to share with friends and family members that need to get started, or want to get started with fitness or fat loss, or on a health and fitness journey. If you're a fitness enthusiast, and you're listening to our podcast, and you want to send a podcast to somebody to help them get started, this is the one. This is probably our most shareable episode. This is probably one of our most valuable episodes for you to give to people, to get them going. We're talking to the average person who's interested in getting started. So we listed five of the most important, easy to start steps for fitness and fat loss. Now, this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Chili. Now, Chili makes chili pads and rulers, which are products that cool or warm your bed. You use this water-cooled technology, put it right on top of your mattress, underneath the covers or whatever, and you can set the temperature to cool your bed down or warm it up so you get amazing sleep. It also has two sides to it. So if you live with your spouse and your wife or your husband likes the bed to be a different temperature, their side can be controlled independently from yours. Now, because you listen to Mind Pump, you do get a big discount. So here's what you do. You go to chilitechnology.com that C-H-I-L-I technology.com forward slash Mind Pump, use the code on the page and get between 15 to 25% off their products. One more thing I'd like to mention, if you're listening to this podcast and you're just getting started, and you want more personal attention, you want more instruction, you want to see how exercises are broken down, you want a workout that's more personalized, go to mapsfitnessproducts.com. We've created many, many different workout programs for different people. One of the best maps program that we have for people who are just getting started is called Maps Starter. Go check it out. All you need to follow that program is a pair of dumbbells and a physio ball. But we have lots of programs on there, including those that are for advanced trainees, advanced fitness enthusiasts. Again, you can find all of those at mapsfitnessproducts.com. So this morning, I'm having a conversation with Jerry, who, you know, has just started with us in the last couple of months. And I always like talking to someone like her. And what I mean by someone like her is it's really a general population. She reminds me of just the average client that I would have that comes in and asks questions about health and fitness related. She's not a hard core, you know, gym goer, fitness person, but curious, interested in eating better and exercising and has a family, has a lot going on, works a lot. Like, and, you know, one of the things when we first got started with Mind Pump, we talked a lot about this, right? Like when we came into the space, in particular podcasting, we felt it was a bit of an echo chamber that it was a lot of our peers speaking to our peers, like, you know, talking about things that, you know, hardcore fitness people are wanting to know what's the new cutting edge science and breaking down, you know, modalities and the latest greatest study that just came out and what's new here. And, you know, and really, when we all talked to like, when we first met, you know, over six years ago, we all said like, those are not the people I train, that maybe represents 1% of the people that I used to train. And really, the majority don't give a shit like that. They just want to know, you know, what are the most basic things that I can do to get started, to make a change in my life, to be healthier, to be fitter. And I don't want all the crazy details. And so I was asking her, you know, now that you're listening to the show, I said, are there some, some things that you would like to hear that you've heard us talk about? And she was sharing some things that she's heard recently. And she says, you know, I'd really like something that's just like geared around, you know, how do you start like, what are like, whether it be nutrition or exercise, like brand new, just like, I'm going to start my fitness, where do I start, or what should I do to kick it off and start. And I said, Oh, it's a good idea. We've done something similar to that. But we haven't organized a single topic episode in a while centered around that. No, that's great because it's, first of all, that's most people, right? That's most people when we talk a majority of people, it is when you're talking about things like the obesity epidemic, or you're talking about health epidemics or chronic health issues, what you're talking about are the average person, you're not talking about fitness fanatics and enthusiasts. And they're the ones that also get marketed to heavily and they get and they get communicated the wrong information. A lot of the myths and around fitness and nutrition start because marketers target these general population people and they just tell them the wrong stuff because it's catchy or whatever. And it fails. Obviously people, people every single year, everyday people, every year start a workout program of some sort, start a dietary change of some sort and fails. I think I think the fail rate is something like 90%. So it's really important to not just figure out, you know, that okay, we're communicating to the average person, but also what are the things that they can do that will help them the most? And how can we communicate it in ways that are simple, easy to understand? Because one, something, this is kind of happens when you're in fitness is you forget that you start to lose touch with that, you know, because you, you understand things differently. You talk about things a little differently and you forget that the people who are trying to help, you got to, you got to bring it to a different level and communicate it in a way that makes sense and tell them the biggest bang for the buck changes they can make that are simple because that's the most, those are the things that are most likely that they'll stick to and that'll produce the best results. This is also massively important for us. I mean, to revisit these types of topics because, you know, we need to sort of evaluate what seems to be common and common knowledge to us. Like it really still isn't to the high majority of people out there. And I think something like this, like a topic like this is also good for people I've been listening to us for a long period of time, but also want to relay the information to, you know, a family member or a friend, but they're like, wait a minute, how much of this can I, you know, pass on without like overwhelming them with a lot of stuff? Totally. So I want to, I want to start with like the, the most simple, basic, but also biggest bang for your buck changes that you can make to get started on a fitness and health journey. You know, what are the, what are the simple basic changes that you can do that don't require lots of knowledge, lots of work from, you know, from a technical standpoint, things that you can do right now that will make the biggest change for you in starting your fitness journey. And the most important part of this conversation I think is that, you know, and I can't remember when I first said this, but I like repeating it because I think it's a good, a good statement for, for most people to hear and that's, you know, we don't have a weight loss pro, a weight loss problem in this country. People, millions of people lose weight every year. The problem is that everybody ends up gaining it all back, you know, a high majority, 80 plus percent of those people gain all that back and some, and I think a lot of that has to do with over complicating this process versus, you know, as a good coach or good trainer knows the desired outcome is that I get my client to make fundamental change in their life forever. And so, you know, getting into all the nuances of, of training and exercise and, and nutrition and cardio and, and going so deep, even if the, if someone is, you know, smart enough to disseminate all that information, many times it's not something that they can implement into their life long term. And so giving somebody like five basic things, which is what we'll do today, that you can start to implement into your life that can make a fundamental change forever. And a good goal when we go over these five is to be targeting all five of those and making them a part of your lifestyle forever, and at least attempting multiple of them and never stopping. In fact, if all you ever did was the five steps we're about to talk about, you're, you're going to be 85% of the way there. You'll be very sad. Most people will be very happy and satisfied with the results that they get and how they feel and the improvements in their health and fitness. If all you ever did are the following five steps that we're going to talk about right now. So the first one, and this is the big one. And it's funny because I've talked about this one for a long time. I know you guys have two, but we now have studies to support just how powerful this first step is. And that is to avoid heavily processed foods. Now, heavily processed foods are foods that we tend to find in wrappers or bags or boxes. They have long shelf lives. They have large ingredient lists. These are engineered foods. Now on by themselves are not inherently unhealthy, although most heavily processed foods are less healthy than whole foods. But that's not really the problem here because could you find foods that are more processed that are technically healthier? You could, but here's the big issue. Heavily processed foods are engineered and most of the science and engineering that goes into these foods is designed to get them to get you to eat more of this particular food. It's called hyper palatability. Okay. And this is what food manufacturers and companies aim for when they make processed foods. And they're so good at it that it sure as hell makes people overeat. In fact, it's funny that we've had this debate for a long time. What caused the obesity epidemic? And at first it was like, oh, we're moving less. That's the big problem. And then it was, no, it must be fat. We're eating too much fat. And then no, it's too much carbs. The reality is, although the lack of activity and the overeating more carbs and fats might have contributed, those aren't the real problem. The real issue is that our diets went from largely whole natural foods and whole natural foods are just foods with one or two ingredients like a banana. What's the ingredients of a banana? Banana, right? Meat, eggs, milk, vegetables, even rice, those types of things are whole and natural. Our American diet went from primarily eating a majority of our diet with whole natural foods to a transition where most of our foods were heavily processed. In fact, if you match the market penetration of heavily processed foods and you take that chart, what percentage of Americans ate heavily processed foods and what percentage of our diet made up of, you can literally place it over a chart of obesity and it matches it 100%. And the reason is these foods make you eat more. And we now have studies that show, and these are really good studies, by the way. The problem with food studies in the past is they are survey-based epidemiology-type studies where people will fill out a survey and talk about what they, and those are just classically inaccurate. People often, yeah, they overreport, underreport. You don't have people in the lab, you're not watching exactly what they do. Well, here's what they did with some of these studies with heavily processed foods. They literally took groups of people, put them in a laboratory, so everything was controlled. They could watch everything. They gave one group full and free access to whole natural foods. They took another group and they gave them full and free access to heavily processed foods and they controlled the macros, macros being proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. They made it similar. Okay, so that wouldn't be the, they could control that factor. And then they said, just eat until you're full, and then when you're not full, stop eating. And that's it, just continuing. And then the best part about this is they did that for a while, then they switched the groups. So now they took the same group that was in the whole natural foods, put them in the processed foods and vice versa. And they've done several studies like this. And what they find is on average, when people eat heavily processed foods, they eat 500 more calories a day automatically. 500 calories is not a little. It adds up quick. That is a lot. In fact, you know, and it's not perfect math, but technically, that's like a pound of body fat a week or so that you could gain from. In fact, when I put someone, when I, when someone's cutting their calories, 500 is a lot to cut from your diet. And these people were not, they were not trying to diet. They weren't trying to watch what they're eating. They were just eating until they felt satisfied. And that's how powerful these foods are. So inadvertently, when you avoid heavily processed foods, you naturally eat more appropriately. You naturally reduce your calories. One of the reasons why I love this as a first piece of advice for somebody is I, of course, if someone hired me, I like them to download an app and track their food so I can be very precise about all of this. And I could teach them macros. But when I'm just talking, when we're talking to the masses, right, or like this, maybe this podcast gets shared with somebody's mom who's not really into fitness and is not going to go weigh and track their food, which is a lot more people than the other side, right? There's a lot more people that will not put them. In fact, this is actually one of my tricks that I do within my own family, right? So being a fitness guy, of course, anytime I'm at a family event or talking to any family members, everybody wants me to tell them the diet. Well, one of my ways of getting out of that, because I know that if I spend time doing that with everybody, I'll write 100 diets and nobody will follow them. One of my ways of getting out of it is I tell them, like, listen, if you put the work in and you track your food for a week, I will sit down and evaluate it. And like 90% of them never do that. So the truth is, I know that most people won't do that. And my thing back to the family is like, listen, if you can't commit to just tracking for a week, I'm not going to sit down and formulate a meal plan for you, you're never going to follow, right? But the truth is this simple advice, and this came for me way later. I didn't do this early on. I mean, very early on, we used to have software that would print off, you know, you put in somebody's weight and their goal and their activity level. And then they'd get, they'd fill out this chart of like foods I like, foods I don't like. And then this, you know, would spit out this meal plan. It was always so weird too, it was just like, but it was the perfect balance of macros for what this person should have. Nobody ever stuck to that. Maybe 1% would be crazy enough to like follow that to a T. And later on, I realized, wow, if I told someone to just eliminate processed foods and eat whole foods, it was so simple for them that just naturally by doing that, they would probably reduce their calorie intake by 500. Another reason why I love this so much is because most people struggle with their relationship with food. There's this, I can't, I can't have type of thing. And when you tell someone they can't have it, they're enticed to want to do it more, or they feel like they're sacrificing so much because you, you told them as a trainer, like you can't have this, you can't have that versus, hey, eat as much as you want. If it's whole foods, go to town. Like if you're hungry, go eat, just stick to that one thing. Just simply doing that gives them the freedom of, oh, wow, I'm not on a restricted diet. My trainer's not telling me I get away or measure my food or I can't have these things. I just got to stay in this category, which is massive, by the way, hundreds and hundreds of foods following the whole food category. So they have all kinds of options, and I'm not telling them to get a restrict. But what I know is, and we knew this before those studies came out, right? These studies are relatively new. We had pieced this together before that, wow, when people eat all these packaged foods, they just naturally eat more. So if I just tell them, don't do that, but go ahead and eat what you want, boy, it made a huge difference. It's natural. It's really strange. I remember when I started to do this the first time, and I would have clients just avoid those foods, and you just watch them get leaner. You know what they would say to me? It's so funny because you don't realize that this is what's happening to you. You really don't. They would come to me, and they'd say things like, I don't realize processed foods were making me gain so much. They thought there was something magical about the fact that they were eating whole natural foods versus processed foods, and that processed foods somehow magically promoted body fat. They thought, I didn't realize that that made me gain so much weight, and it wasn't necessarily that. You don't realize that eating these foods just makes you eat more. It masks the signal for you to stop eating a lot of times too. And I had talked to my dad about this. He's going through this process right now, and he lost a good 18 pounds over the last few months of just seeking whole foods, not even replacing or avoiding all these things or being perfect. Yeah, just his mindset. It's like a treasure hunt for him. He's trying to go find these things that I'm telling him to include and to put into the diet. And so it becomes more of a psychological mindset, and this is something that I think is it's way more effective. Unfortunately, I didn't have this way of training people to weigh later on in my career, just like you guys, but it was like so much more effective because now you're not punishing. You're not hammering yourself. You're not leading with that energy. You're focusing on things that are going to benefit my health, and I want to go get those things. Yes, and I'll give you an example of this. So this little mind game for you, right? So imagine if I gave you four or five potatoes and you boil them and we skin them, and you didn't put anything on them. There's plain potatoes boiled, no salt, no butter, no nothing, and you had to sit down and you had to eat all four or five potatoes, right? Most people listening right now would be like, that would be tough. Like four or five plain potatoes. Oh, I'd gag, probably after third one, I'd be so stuffed, it'd be so difficult to eat them. Well, here's an interesting contrast. If I gave you a large bag of potato chips, you'd be able to eat the whole thing. Most of us would be able to eat the whole thing. That large bag of potato chips has four or five potatoes in it. That's how many potatoes are in a bag, a normal bag of chips. Here's the crazier part. You ate more calories with that bag. So not only were you able to eat the four or five potatoes, but they were in oil fried with salt. So you actually ate more because it was processed. This is the trick that this food plays on your body. It literally overrides or changes the level at which you start to feel satisfied with food because people realize that this is the narrative that's been pushed for a long time that, oh, humans were, for most of human history, we evolved in food with scarce. So we became these eating machines where if you just put food in front of us, we'll just eat the hell out of it because we evolved in scarcity. That's not true. Eating too much would have killed you in the past just like it will today either through digestive issues or gagging or whatever. You have something called palate fatigue. You start to feel satisfied. Part of that is how much volume is in your gut. Part of it are the hormones and chemicals that are released, but it's much more complex than that, which is why you can eat more calories with a bag of potato chips than you can with plain potatoes before you start to feel like you can't eat anymore. Heavily processed foods have billions and billions of dollars of research that goes into making them as effective as possible as doing this. So if you just eat heavily processed foods, you're going to eat more. If you avoid them, you will naturally eat less. That's just the bottom line. So to that point, I have a hack for clients that I used to give, right? So now personally, I prefer to eliminate all these foods in my house. So it's just not there as an option for me. One more step. Right, exactly. One more step. I'm not going to get in. I'm not going to be at nine o'clock watching Netflix and go like, Oh, I want ice cream or I want to pack a potato chips that I don't have it in my house and go, I'm going to drive the grocery store. Go get it. If you do, you deserve it. Right. So I think that's first. But the reality is this, there's a lot of clients that I've trained that they have, they have kids that have snacks in there. They've got a spouse who isn't following a diet. And so the stuff is in the house. And again, I like to go with the angle of, okay, instead of telling them they can't have this. I say, listen, again, if you're sitting there, okay, and you're ready, you know, you're eating your Netflix and there's a bag of potato chips on the counter and it feels like it's calling your name. Again, instead of telling a client like, no way, you can't have that. I say, listen, go eat the whole foods first. If you still feel like you want it or you need it afterwards, then give yourself a ration of it. And the truth is what happens a lot, I just did this to myself. Okay. So even though I normally don't keep things in my house that are like this, I mentioned on a podcast recently, after doing a Q&A a week or two ago, that I bought some thrifty ice cream and I've been like, you know, trying to challenge myself like, how long can I keep this in the freezer and discipline myself to not do that. So I play even 20 years in this space, I still have to play these same mental games with myself. I'm sitting down, this is last night, no joke, I'm sitting down, we're watching Netflix, we're watching a show right now. And oh, man, I get up and I'm like, oh, that ice cream sounds so good. And I know I didn't train, I didn't train that day. And I'm like, you know, I haven't really earned the right to over consume calories like that. You know what I need to do? Like, I have leftovers, I already had stuff to already had veal and a whole wheat pasta that was already Tupperware'd out from the previous night of dinner. Like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go over and I'm going to have my whole food meal. And then if I still feel like I'm craving the ice cream, sure, shit, I go over eat that, I'm satisfied, don't even think twice about the ice cream. So if you are somebody who lives in a house where you've got these things, one, I always recommend that you get it out because it's that much easier. But if it's going to be in there, you can't control that you live with other people that are going to bring it into the house anyways, then don't again, don't tell yourself you can't have these things. Go make yourself go eat something that's whole food first and you'll be amazed by how it will suppress that feeling of craving for that. Totally. Just that one step will bring your body weight down to a more healthy natural body weight probably won't make you shred it. You're not going to get a six pack from just avoiding heavily processed foods, but you're not going to be 30 pounds overweight. It's going to lay the foundation. It definitely does. And it's an easy step. It's very easy and it doesn't limit you with your whole foods, eat as much as you want. And part of that is also not drinking processed beverages, not drinking juices and sodas and calories. And one way you can do that, similar to what Adam said, is to aim for a water target for most people that's anywhere between half a gallon to a gallon a day. Justin, I know you did the math with bottles of water. Yeah. So it's like seven and a half if for your average like Dasani water bottle, like a plastic water bottle. I just thought that that's something that I know a lot of people will go to the gas station or they'll go to Costco. A lot of people still drink out of plastic water bottles. And so just if you want to make a goal of a gallon, it would look something like seven and a half of those. Excellent. Now the second step is also an easy step and makes a big impact is to try to hit your protein target. Okay, so an easy way to figure out your protein target is to take your body weight and eat about half of your body weight to about your body weight in grams of protein. So there's your range right there, right? So about half to your body weight, if you weigh 150 pounds, you're anywhere between 75 to 150 grams of protein. And really throughout the day, just try to hit that number. Now here's why that's important. There's a few different reasons. Number one, protein is the most satiety inducing macronutrient, meaning out of carbs, proteins and fats, proteins are the ones that satisfy the appetite the most that tend to make us eat less when we eat a lot of protein. The second reason why it's important is protein is slightly thermogenic, meaning it burns a little bit more calories than carbs and fats. It also greatly improves your ability to build muscle and improve your performance. And when we get into the later steps that include exercise, if you eat a diet that's relatively high in protein, like I just said, you're just going to respond well with the muscle training, you're going to respond better. Well, I like I like this advice too because unless you're somebody, the only the only exception I have to this rule is if you said to me that I love meat and I eat lots of meat every single day, most people grossly under eat protein, most people, unless you're that person, unless you're that person that knows like, Oh man, I'm out on me and meet three to four servings easily every single day consistently. Plus I love eggs and dairy like no problems. If you're that person, you're probably, this is probably something that you're getting close to or hitting, but you'd be surprised how many people think they eat a lot of protein and then they start tracking and they're grossly under consuming. And so I'll take a step further than what you said. So I like to teach clients to get after that after every every meal they build around the protein. So it's like, Hey, it's breakfast, which is hard for breakfast, by the way, because breakfast tends to be like the cereals and oatmeal and the things like that that are high carb and sugary type of stuff to start your day off with. So when you start any meal, look to attack the protein first, consume that first before you make your way over the carbohydrates. So I like protein, fats first, and then you eat your carbohydrates. If you do it the other way around, it can be really difficult to hit those protein. It actually works perfectly with the first step, which was, you know, avoid heavily processed foods. When you're trying to hit your protein targets, you tend to aim naturally towards more unprocessed. Because those are the best sources, right? Versions of food, you know, I mean, there are some processed versions of protein. I mean, you can technically have protein bars, you could powders. Yeah, you know, beef jerky might be considered protein, although I've never met anybody that over eight, you know, on a regular basis beef jerky or salami, those are technically processed. But for the most part, protein sources tend to be whole foods anyway. In fact, when you look at the average person's diet, they are predominantly heavy, heavily processed foods. But the foods that tend to not be processed are protein sources. So when you look at the average person's diet, they might have eggs, they might have milk, they might have ground beef or steak in there. Those are the unprocessed, you know, foods. So when you aim for protein, it does marry very well with the first step, which was avoid heavily processed foods. If you aim for that first, you tend to have these meals that are built around whole natural foods. Well, I also like, again, this very generic, you know, half your body weight to your body weight number, because where the people that are most affected by this, when Sal alluded to the, you know, the other steps when we get into training, the people that are most effective negatively from not hitting their protein intake, it's because they're grossly under consuming on a regular basis. Low protein for one day is not a big deal. But if you're consistently under, you're under consuming that half of your body weight and protein, almost every which by the way, a large percentage of clients that I track their food would do. And then you're also strength training. You may not be building muscle at the rate you like, or maybe not much at all. And just kind of spinning your wheels. And many times that was a plateau breaker. Many times I would assess somebody's diet and go, man, part of the reason why we're not building muscle right now is you can't string three days in a row of hitting your targets. You have three days, three, two days good. And then you have two days that are bad and it averages out to be under that, that number that we need to be at. So I like just this generic advice of a half their body weight to their body weight, because you'll see all kinds of information on the internet. I mean, we even have we have a macro calculator. If you want to get precise and you want to know exactly what you have, how much you need to be in taking to maximize building muscle, we have a free calculator online that you can use to calculate that out. But again, when we are speaking to your mom, you know, when we're speaking to the masses, you know, something that simple of just listen, you know how much you weigh, target half of that in grams of protein for your day or up to your body weight and shoot for that every single day. That's right. Now, why is it important to build muscle? That's going to lead us to the third step here. Well, that's because muscle is a very active tissue. It burns lots of calories. It sculpts your body. It makes you feel tight and strong and mobile. It doesn't take up much space gaining a few pounds of muscle. You would not look bigger, but you would feel tighter. But the biggest reason is because it speeds up your metabolism. Look, the biggest problem that we're tackling here with the average person is this weight gain, this obesity epidemic. Having a faster metabolism means you can eat more and still be lean. And it's very, it's very advantageous in modern societies to have a faster metabolism. You want a faster metabolism. Building muscle does that. So the next step is revolved around building muscle. And we're going to make it as simple as possible. I want to give you the four exercises that are the most effective at developing a balanced body at building muscle, building strength. Now, are there other exercises with lots of value? Absolutely. Is this the perfect workout? Is this like following a maps program where one of our maps program was all detailed out and we have phases and we tell you specifics and it's a 12-week course and a lot of stuff? No. But this is meant to be simple. It's meant to be easy and simple. And so we picked... Yet effective. Yet effective. The four most basic, simple, yet effective exercises that you can do to speed up your metabolism and build muscle. And so we're going to start with the first one, which is squats. Squats are very functional for the body. In fact, we did a whole episode on why everybody should squat. It's a very, very effective exercise, phenomenal for the lower body. If you do it with a barbell, it even strengthens your posture in the upper body. If you do it just your body weight, it's mainly in the legs. It's probably the best lower body exercise you can do. The next exercise would be to press something overhead and with a nice full extension, meaning you're nice and tall. So you could do this with a medicine ball. You could do this with dumbbells, bands. You could use a bag of rice. You could use your kid even just press them straight up above your head. Nice and tall. That works the shoulders. Helps your posture. It works your arms. The next exercise would be a row. Bands are great at doing rows. Bands, you can find them very inexpensive and you can... They typically come with an attachment where you put them right in the door. Rowing strengthens the mid-back, fixes your posture. It works the arms. The next exercise is a push-up and there's a million and one variations of doing a push-up or a bench press or some kind of a press like that. Those four exercises done a couple days a week, two days a week or three days a week, about maybe 10, 15 reps for each of them. You have covered pretty much your whole body. And if you brace your core while you do the squats and overhead presses and push-ups, yes, you're also working the core in a way that stabilizes your body. But that's it, just those four exercises. Literally, that's your workout. There's lots of people I know that are listening and thinking that it's not very much. If you're an advanced lifter, you're right, it's not very much. But again, talking to your mom and getting her to do this two to three times a week and each of these exercises doing two to three sets for 10 to 15 reps consistently, two to three times a week, for a month. I tell you, if you followed all these steps for a month, I guarantee that they would see a significant change in their body, in their body fat, in their muscle, everything just by following that consistently. And there's going to be a wide spectrum of abilities out there, especially something like the squat. And what you got to kind of relay is that everybody can sit down in a chair, I would hope. And so that could be like your standard in terms of a squat is just getting up and down out of your chair. And that's like as very simple as you can start using whatever ability you have to get up and down out of your chair to really start to strengthen and promote that within your legs and progress from there. And we do have a lot of videos with these very specific exercises about how to regress or progress these types of movements. So yes, it seems very similar, or I'm sorry, simple to us, but also for your aunt, your grandma, your dad, you know, somebody else in your family or friend that maybe has restrictions, there's ways to really implement this in a safe and reasonable manner. So we don't lose our, you know, intermediate to advanced listeners, though, this has tremendous value even for you, because most people fall off for a few weeks or a month. And I talk about this all the time. One of the biggest mistakes I made as a trainer forever, and I still to this day do this. If I've been inconsistent and found falling off the wagon for a couple of weeks or a month, and I come back in the gym, I always overreach. I always want to go back to where I was and I train way more than I need to. So even somebody who is intermediate to advanced who's been off for a while and just getting back to the gym, following something like this for 30 days. And like Justin said, you can progress it. So obviously if you're an advanced lifter, you can squat over 300 pounds and you've just been off for a few weeks to a month. It doesn't mean you need to regress all the way back to a body weight squat. Just do a lighter barbell squat for someone like that. But each one of those movements, the squat, the overhead press, the row and the pushup, like or a pushing exercise, all of those can be progressed for somebody intermediate or advanced. Oh, I'll tell you what, you can do this whole workout for a year, just add weight as you get stronger or add reps and your body will continue to progress in fact. One of our more popular programs, maps and a ball is definitely more complex and there's more exercises in it, but it's centered around these four exercises and people who are advanced get tremendous results from we pick the best exercises. So these, these four, this is your core, these four, you can do them in ways that are easier. You know, like Justin said, with the squat, you can sit down and stand up or you can go to a barbell squat, throw some weight on there and then do squats like this. You can literally follow this workout for a while, but if you're just getting started, just do it with body weight, do it with bands, do it in your home and just practice two to three days a week. And just do that with those first two steps. You should get some really good results. Now the fourth step, this one involves just increasing daily activity. Now one of the big mistakes that I think people make when trying to introduce cardiovascular workouts or activity into the routine is they schedule it out like it's a whole other workout, you know, like they think, okay, now I got to do 30 minutes or an hour of cardio at the end of their day or the very beginning. Exactly. Okay. Here's what I'm going to do every day. I'm going to wake up 30 minutes early so I could do a 30 minute walk or a 30 minute cycle. So the problem with that is you are adding it to your life. It's a new thing on your schedule. It's a new thing you got to worry about and nothing necessarily wrong with that. It's just the amount of people that are likely to stay consistent doing it that way is much lower than what I'm about to say. So one of the more effective things you can do to improve your activity is to attach extra activity to your daily rituals. Okay. So attach it to things that you do anyway because you're going to do those things anyway. Well, by the way, there's research to support this. 100%. There's research to support that when you attach it to already a current habit brushing your teeth and eating, okay, which everybody does every single day, it's much more likely that you're going to be consistent with it versus adding it somewhere else into your day that isn't part of every routine. Oh, this is why supplement companies will tell you, they'll sell supplements to take before you work out or right when you wake up or right before you go to bed because they know that if they attach it to a daily ritual, you're more likely to take that supplement. So here's an easy one. It's just super easy. Okay. You're going to probably eat like most people anywhere between two to four meals a day, probably like most people, you'll eat three. Right. So the average person eats breakfast, lunch and dinner. Well, here's what you do. Walk 10 minutes after every meal. That's it. You eat breakfast, go for a 10 minute walk. You eat lunch, go for a 10 minute walk. You eat dinner, go for a 10 minute walk. Guess what you just did. 30 minutes of walking. Easy way to increase activity and also, you know, promote good digestion, which is something that I think a lot of people don't even really consider that. And what, you know, that all builds up towards the end of the night. It starts affecting your sleep and then all kinds of things happen as a result. It's a 10 minutes. It's 10 minutes at a time. I mean, that is, that sounds so easy, right? It doesn't sound over overbearing. It's not too much time. It's like, I got 10 minutes after breakfast. I'll just go around the block a couple of times and do that breakfast, lunch and dinner that equals 30 minutes. It does improve your digestion. Here's another side effect of it. And this, again, they've done behavioral studies on this. When people know that they're going to walk for 10 minutes after their meal, they're more likely to pick meals that are healthier. This is a wonderful side effect from something so simple as that, is that when you know, oh, after I eat this, whatever, I'm going to do a 10 minute walk, you're just more likely to want to pick foods that are probably a little bit better for you. This one's super easy. And I'm telling you, it makes a huge difference. It doesn't sound like much, but imagine if you did 30 minutes of additional walking every single day. Well, it's easier to build on. So, I mean, I like this again, even for my advanced people. So this was something later on as I started to train more and more like competitors. So people that are dieting to get on stage and build incredible physiques. And kind of the norm in that space is for coaches to prescribe, you know, these 30 minute hour bouts of cardio. And I just think even for that person, even the disciplined person that has a stage date they have to get on and that's going to fall their routine, I've always taught my clients to have just behaviors. Like, listen, right now you're not walking for 10 minutes after. And then I just build on that. For them, we obviously have to keep peaking, right? So we have to keep progressing week over week over week for a show. So it starts off at a 10 minute walk, then goes to a 15 minute walk, then goes to a 20 minute walk. But I slowly do that because what I find is after the show, after they've reached their goal and they look amazing, instead of them rebounding hard and cutting out that one hour cardio in the morning and one hour cardio in the evening, they've built these routines of walking afterwards. Most of them don't stop. They keep the walking up or maybe they just go from, you know, 20 minutes of walking after the meal down to 10 and it's not as drastic as cutting out that hour of cardio in the morning and the hour of cardio at night. Well, I mean it's as easy as this even. If you're not doing this at all, if you're not doing any walking at all, five minutes after each meal. It's 15 minutes of additional activity that you literally weren't doing before. So it's a super easy step to improve or increase your activity, improve your digestion and the side effect also being probably more likely to eat a healthier meal. The last step, this one's also very important. It sounds simple, so we'll get into the basic, to the nuts and bolts of it, but it's get good sleep, okay? Having good sleep has been shown in many, many, many studies to improve your hormone profile, to reduce cravings, to improve your body's adaptive abilities, meaning you build more muscle, more strength, you're less likely to store body fat. Even when calories are controlled, people who lose sleep tend to store more body fat and build less muscle. People who have good sleep tend to do the opposite, great build more muscle, burn more body fat. So you want to make good sleep a priority, but now we should probably get into the details. Well, yeah, I think the first step in the conversation I have when I talk to people about this is, and I don't remember, again, where I first heard somebody talk about this, but this is where the light bulb went off for me, is that it's so interesting how we have ritualized a morning routine almost everybody has. Again, everyone's there a little bit different, but for the most part, everyone probably goes to the bathroom, they probably shower, they probably brush their teeth, they probably eat or drink something. It's always in the same order. Right, it's in a very similar order, it's always timed out about the same, you get up at the same, like it's crazy how much of a ritual we all have for our morning routine to start your day and how few of people have a similar type of a routine just in their day. And the reality is that the time that we are sleeping is far more important, how you set that up than how you set your day up. Oh yeah, it is. You know, it's you getting ready for bed and having quality sleep is far more important than the way you get up and start your day. You could shoot up first thing in the morning or take an hour to get up and the effects on that hormonally, the effects on that for your day and the success and for your fat loss and building muscle is nowhere near how important it is for you to set up your night before you go into bed and sleep. It is, we expect to have good sleep by hustling all day long, watching TV, electronics are on, bright lights are on, and then it's time to go to bed and then we go hit the pillow and we shut the lights off. That's it. And we expect our brain to just process into this awesome deep sleep. It doesn't happen. It actually takes about an hour or two for the brain to wind down for the, your brain to perceive the fact that the lights are off. Maybe it's now time to go to sleep. So even if you go to bed and give yourself eight hours, if you go straight to bed with no routine ahead of time to set yourself up, you're actually probably getting closer to seven or six and a half hours because you went from bright lights and everything going on to straight to bed. So set yourself up with a sleep routine. I like to give people about an hour. So about an hour before you turn lights down or off, you go, or you go by candlelight or you wear blue light blocking glasses, which allow you to block some of the blue light that tells your brain to stay awake. Don't eat anything about an hour before bed because your, your internal digestive organs also have a circadian rhythm. So they'll manage your temperature, manage your, yes, we'll get a big one for me. Absolutely. Here's the other part. Make, go to have a bedtime. So this makes it, this makes it a big impact. Go to bed at the same time every night, wake up the same time every morning, go to bed at the same time. This is a big one. So 10 o'clock I'm in bed. This is my structural nine o'clock. I start my sleep routine. Then Adam mentioned, manage the temperature. This one's a huge one. You want to have a cool room. So this means either with your AC or keeping the window open or there's products in the market that actually cool the mattress. We work with a company called Chili Pad that does that really, really well. Those things get people to sleep faster. This is proven by studies and deeper and better stages of sleep for longer. Which is also great that there's technology out there now where you can kind of, you know, you have separate temperatures because I know like people with significant others like we're not always on the same climate. And so this is one of those things to consider too, you know, how you get to sleep. Like I personally need that cool temperature for me to get that deep, deep sleep. Yeah. So I've done this with clients where I'll have them do is say, okay, we're going to pick at bedtime. So we go to bed always at the same time. So we can wake up at the same time every morning and we'll have a sleep routine and we'll do all this stuff and not change anything else. This is how powerful it is. We'll not change anything else. And I'll see their bodies lose body fat and I'll see them get stronger in the gym. And they're not consciously changing anything else. Now what really happens is besides the hormonal positive hormonal effects, good sleep changes your behaviors. Like I said earlier, it changes your cravings, how you eat, it changes your activity levels. You'll find that you'll naturally move more because you have more energy because you're getting better sleep. Your body will recover better and recuperate better because you get better sleep. So this one is a huge one and it's one that a lot of people miss, mainly because electronic use. So we have it so close to bedtime. We don't manage the temperature of our rooms very, very well. And we just don't take it seriously. Like Adam said earlier, there's no routine. There's nothing. You just It's funny how much we emphasize the beginning of your day being so important. And like half the people are fighting what they did the night before to then create that and try to gain that momentum at the very beginning of their day to be productive and all these things. When if you address your sleep, like how much easier that process. Well, the truth is, I know we all go by this 24 hour clock, but really setting up your morning routine really starts in the evening. It does the day before. Right. If you, if you want to have a productive, full of energy, good solid day, the number one thing that will affect that above all whatever routines you do, brushing, pooping, eating a certain thing, meditating, whatever could you cool, you know, shower all these cool hacks that everybody has for your morning. Really, all of that doesn't matter if you have shit sleep going into all that. So the real setup for the morning routine is actually the night routine and just nobody puts any effort towards that. Complete completely. So, so there you have it. There's five steps right there and in a hundred percent, if the average person whose goals is to achieve a healthy and relatively fit body, most people's goals are not to get on stage and flex their biceps and have a six pack. Most people don't care about. They just want to be fit. They want to be healthy. They want to be at a healthy body weight. They want to fit into their normal clothes. They want to be mobile. They want to feel good. All of those things. And this is, I'm not making this up. This is a hundred percent true. All those things I just said can be accomplished literally if you just did the five steps that we just listed right now and you did them consistently. If all you did was avoid heavily processed foods only drank water. Make sure you hate your protein intake. Did those four exercises that we talked about? Watch all the health markers and everything change. That's it. Do those four exercises that we talked about two to three days a week. Your squats, presses, your overhead presses, your rows and your in your push-ups or bench presses. Walk for 10 minutes after every meal and then make sure you prioritize sleep. If you just did those things right there, most people listening right now will be very, very satisfied, more than satisfied with the results that they got. Look, Mind Pump is recorded on video and audio. If you like listening to the podcast, you'll love looking at our faces. Just go to YouTube, Mind Pump Podcast. You can also find all of us on Instagram. You can find Doug, the producer at Mind Pump Doug. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin. You can find me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam. Send this to your mom. Home from school and we used to walk and we're just like, we have money that we just earned from random things. And it's like, when you're a kid, you just think of whatever sounds awesome at the time. And so yeah, we bought one of those Pillsbury Doughboy rolls. Like it was like a huge thing. We would try and finish the whole thing before we get home.