 You are listening to the world's number one fitness, health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Now we are in the month of December. A lot of people start to think about fitness this month. We have the holidays, we tend to overeat. Not a lot of activity going on. Right around the time January kicks in, people really start to flood the gyms or start working out. So what we wanted to do is we wanted to address all of you who are just getting started. Maybe you used to work out in the past but you haven't done it for a long time. Or maybe you've never really worked out in a structured, consistent way. This episode is for you. We cover all of it from beginning to end. Now, as you're listening to the episode, you're getting good information. If you want something really specific, something that really spells it out for you. If you're listening and you're thinking, look, I just wanna be able to open up a workout and follow along and do exactly what it says because I'm having challenges putting this together. I wanna take out all the guesswork. We have a beginner weightlifting bundle which is a bunch of programs designed to be used specifically by beginners, okay? This bundle includes three programs. It includes access to a private forum so you have support with other fitness-minded people. It's discounted heavily. Learn a little bit about it. Go to our site mapsdecember.com. Check it out for yourself. See what it's all about. Listen to the episode. If at the end of the episode you decide this is something you wanna sign up for, it's very easy to sign up. You get lifetime access. Then all you have to do is go to your computer, click on the button. There's your workout for the day. All the programs done together will give you about nine months all planned out. Again, that's at mapsdecember.com. By the way, this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Chili. Now they make devices that go over your bed. These are actually pads, water-cooled pads that go over your mattress under your sheets that cool or warm your bed. You program them to warm them or cool them to your desired temperature. Some of these even come with two sides. So your spouse can have a totally different temperature than you, again, it's water-cooled so there's no EMFs, there's no wires in the pad. And it can really cool your bed down a lot. I think it gets it down to in the 50s, for example. Or you can warm it way up if you like a warm, toasty bed. Now because you listen to Mind Pump, you get 22% off their products. Go check them out. Go to chilitechnology.com, that's C-H-I-L-I, technology.com forward slash mind pump. Then use the code PUMP22, that's P-U-M-P-2-2 for 22% off. Hey, I got something for us to do today. I think that would be kind of fun, right? Challenge our trainer brains here. Since we're coming up on the new year. Oh, this is a big time in fitness. Yeah, right, so this is around the corner is New Year's resolution, which every year, weight loss and fitness is in the top three, at least. And there's always a just herd of people that come into the gym. Massive influx. Right, yep. And so the momentum wave. What I'd like to challenge us with is let's build the ideal programming for a person coming in, a beginner that is coming in to get personal training from when he goes. Now, what I know is we're gonna have to challenge ourselves a bit here because there's a lot of things we know that are individualized. But let's try and think of the most common avatar. I think that's fair. I think that's fair because I would say a good 70 to 80% of the beginners that you would see are people who just are just getting started as part of the New Year's resolution. There's a lot of similarities among them. Right, I can think of posture stuff and chronic pain thing. Exactly. Goals are very, very simple. Exactly, and it's important. It's so important when you're a beginner. It's so important to start on the right foot to start off the right way because that can really set the tone. If you start off the wrong way, you can, you run a high risk of a couple different things. Either injury, too much pain, or you get results initially and then you plateau so hard that you just lose all inspiration to work out because oh, it's two months later, my body stopped responding. I forget where the, I can't remember the stat, what the number was, but it was a pretty high percentage of people that get started on their fitness journey in January that end up injuring themselves within the first eight weeks. It's very high, I know most stop. I mean, look, I managed gyms for decades and every January, we would see a 60 to 100% increase in traffic and new people coming in interested in joining and by March or April, they were pretty much gone. It was back to normal. So you see this huge wave, January, February was big too. By March, it took a big dip and then by April, it was like we're done. And really, I think there's two things that attribute to that the most, which one, the injury thing, getting hurt because that's really discouraging obviously when you first start off. And then the other is the hard plateaus which you alluded to because, and that has a lot to do with how you come out the gates, having to plan. Getting started the right way and planning out, kind of having the idea of how you're gonna progress through your programming, your workout makes a huge, huge difference. And when I made this a priority in the gyms that I managed with the trainers that I worked with when we laid a lot of this out, the success rate went through the roof with the people that came into the facility. I think that's a great idea, Adam. Let's cover all of that. Let's start with how they get started. Couch to gym, almost like that couch to 4K or whatever that was, marathon. Oh yeah, that's great. Okay, so number one, the way you start is not by just jumping into a workout. You wanna start with a self-assessment. An assessment tells you a lot about what exercises to focus on and which ones that you should not focus on. As a trainer, there were many tests that we did on people to identify movement patterns that means the way your body's moving, to identify muscle imbalances that would tell us some muscles are not as strong as they should be or others are too strong for the weak muscles. We would identify maybe points of pain. And then that would help us start off with the right kind of workout because although all exercises have value, some exercises are wrong for certain people and are right for other people. This is a big thing. Like a pull down, for example, could be a great back exercise for someone. For someone else, it could actually increase the risk of shoulder injury. This is such an important point to really individualize the experience and make it more effective. The thing is there's lots of momentum and there's lots of hype kind of going into this and there's lots of plans out there that are just sort of straightforward, like plug and play, but if you don't really understand what you're bringing in with your patterns and with your current status in terms of your strength and your joint stability, you're gonna be running into some problems, some big problems down the road. Now, do you guys remember some of the hurdles though with clients like they came in like this? So they just come in the new year and they're 20, 30 pounds overweight or they've fallen off the gym and they lost a bunch of muscle and now they wanna get back into building muscle again. And then here you are as a trainer doing this squat assessment, windmill assessment type of deal and telling them that we need to work on this and we need to work on that, but they're like, I wanna just lose weight. I just wanna build muscle. Did you guys remember overcoming that? Oh yeah, oh yeah, that's your job. Part of your job as a trainer is to really educate and inform the client because they come in with a, they're unconsciously incompetent about what it really takes to accomplish their goals in a safe way and a fast way and also most importantly in a sustainable way. You know, they find in studies that the obesity epidemic kind of looks like this. People gain a little bit of weight throughout the year. They gain most of their weight in the holiday season and then they don't lose it. So after one year, two year, three years, four years, 10 years of holidays like that, now they're 30, 40 pounds overweight. So they come in with this conception of, okay, I'm here, I wanna lose all the weight, I wanna get great results, I just wanna bust my butt and then I'll be good. It doesn't work that way. So a good trainer really communicates, okay, here's how we're gonna start, here's how we're gonna continue and the assessment is so important for this. Well, and too, I think it's just human psychology to kind of revert back to what your abilities used to be and you don't really look at yourself any differently. Even though you've been doing different things for the past even few years, sometimes, like a lot of clients I would have initially would think that all these abilities for explosive movement and all that was gonna be able to come right back and this was something that never left and it's hard. It's a ego check a lot of times initially to reveal. Oh yeah, the whole, I used to do, I used to work out this way all the time. And more to that point, Justin is like, a lot of times they come in and it's, oh, I wanna look the way I used to look or I wanna move the way I used to move. And if it's been years and sometimes decades since they had been training and then they're coming in to work out, there's a lot of stuff that's happened to their body since then that needs to be addressed. I mean, if you were a, say a collegiate level football player in primo shape for most of your young adulthood and then you get a job, you become an engineer and then you sit at a desk all day long and I get you three, five years later after being an engineer who's now out of shape and you now want me to get you back in shape and you are still connected to the, you know, Justin in college, the way I moved, the way I played, the way I looked and what you don't realize is there's been things that you've done behaviorally around food, around movement, around sitting and posture stuff that I have to address. If I'm a good coach, if I'm a good trainer, sure I can get you back into running 40s, I can get you back into doing some of those things, but I'm doing you a disservice if I also don't help you address all the other things that are happening. Yeah, so now to be fair assessments that trainers will do, good trainers will do, they're very individual and they're, to be quite honest, too complex for the average person to do on their own. If you don't have a training background, if you don't have an education in exercise and movement, it's not gonna do you any good to do a lot of these complex assessments. So I'm gonna simplify it. I'm gonna give you one simple general assessment. It's not perfect, but it's way better than just walking into the gym or just starting a workout. And I think the best one to pick for people is posture. I think this is a great one, because it does tell you a lot about where you should start and exercises you should maybe focus on and which ones you shouldn't focus on. And I think we should talk about the most common deviations, posture deviations that we would see in clients. I'll start with one that I probably saw in eight or nine out of 10 clients. I would even venture to say today, if I were to do this on, especially in the San Francisco San Jose Bay area, I would guess it would probably be 100% of the people that don't work out that would have this particular posture deviation. It's known as forward shoulder, okay? Forward shoulder looks the way that it sounds, okay? Your shoulders kinda roll forward. By the way, when you do this posture assessment, stand up tall, barefoot, and just stand comfortably. Don't try to stand straight, don't try and do anything. Your posture that you're assessing is your natural posture. So just stand up straight comfortably, have somebody take a picture of you from the front, the side, and the back so that you can kind of identify what we're about to talk about. And again, the most common one, forward shoulder, that's the shoulders rolling forward. If that is part of your posture deviation, which it probably is, it usually means you have a weakness in the muscles of the mid-back, the muscles that pull the shoulder blades back. They're weak probably because you sit in front of a computer at a desk or in front of your phone so the shoulders are constantly rounded. Those muscles in the mid-back are not working a lot and so they just get weak over time and so this develops into your posture. I feel like, can I lump that into just, can we say upper cross syndrome because forward head is directly, it's tied into that and it's as common, if not more uncommon. And that's where the head jets forward, right? Especially with computers and phones today, I think I see that as much, if not more, than what I see with the forward shoulders and they both, I think, are paired together. Now, earlier I talked about exercises that are good for some people and bad for others. Here's a good example. If you have forward shoulder, okay, doing lots of pull-down movements, like a cable pull-down, or even going out and trying to do lots of pull-ups, because you may lack the strength in the mid-back, you're gonna actually encourage your body to have worse forward shoulder. You're gonna pull yourself up, shoulders gonna round forward and you're gonna encourage or increase the risk of shoulder pain. In that person, I would not do those exercises, the exercise I would. Or even bench press. I mean, at some point, just being in the wrong position before you even start to do, certain lifts that are pretty common will add up a lot of unnecessary stress and tension in the joint, which is, this is definitely one you need to identify early to catch it. So you can strengthen where you need to strengthen and pull your body back into optimal alignment. Optimal alignment allows your joints to function the way they need. The best exercise for forward shoulder, general exercise, is a row of some type. So this could be a band row. This could be a cable row. This could be a dumbbell row. But essentially what you wanna do is you wanna focus on not necessarily pulling the weight up, that's part of the movement, but you wanna focus on the shoulder blades coming back and together. You wanna imagine that there's a pencil in the middle of your back and you're trying to pinch and grab it with your shoulder blades and also be careful not to shrug your shoulders. Oftentimes people with forward shoulder, when they tell their shoulders to pull back because those muscles are so weak, they instinctively shrug their shoulders. By the way, if you have forward shoulder, you probably also feel neck tension. So if I'm ringing some bells with you right now, this is probably an issue for you. So two things I wanna add to that. What this looks like in a program or workout, right? So if you're coming to the gym, is I'm addressing corrective stuff first and with lightweight. So seated row I think is a great exercise to address forward shoulder. But when I do it, I'm not doing it like a strength training exercise, right? Meaning- You're not going heavy over it. Right, so you're, and I would have to repeat this to clients when we're doing corrective work. When we're doing corrective work, it's about the movement and what we're trying to fix more than it is about, oh, you're this strong. Oh, next week you're this much stronger. Oh, this next week you're as strong on this. It's more about the movement. And so I'm gonna teach this client a seated row with really, really lightweight for them. And I'm gonna put a lot of emphasis on the retracting, the pencil squeezing part that Sal's talking about. I'm gonna have them squeeze, hold for like five seconds. Emphasize it with the isometric hold. And I use that a lot of times just for them to connect to that and really feel what that feels like. So that mind-muscle connection, what you hear about, this is really essential in this beginning journey to really understand technique, but also understand your body and what you need to do to be able to get in this position. You may be thinking, well, why can't I go a little heavy? I can do the exercise. It's super easy. Why not just go a little harder? Well, here's why. When you have an imbalance or a weakness, once you start to go a little too hard, your body's gonna move the way it always moves. You're not gonna be able to activate those weak muscles. Your body's gonna pick and choose the way that you can move to move the weight the best way that you can do it. And that means the way you've always been doing it. If you do a row to strengthen your mid-back and you go too heavy, you'll actually row with forward shoulder. You'll actually make forward shoulder even worse. So I'm gonna give you an analogy, so this kind of makes sense. If you learn how to type on your computer with just your index fingers, right? The hunt and peck method. And that's how you've typed for the last five years. And then someone comes and tries to teach you to do the correct way to type. And you practice the correct way to type for 30 minutes. And then they say, I'll give you 50 bucks if you could type over faster than 50 words a minute. Guess which way you're gonna pick? The hunt and peck method. Because that's the way you've practiced for so long. When you push the speed, you're gonna wanna go the way you use faster with the slow way than you would be with the fast way. Until you learn the fast way. And then you can far surpass the slow way. So this is why correctional exercise needs to be done light and focus on the squeeze and the form and the isometric portion. Also back to Justin's point, which is he brought up the bench press thing, right? So this is where this also becomes very important is that there's exercises that lend themselves better when you are in the proper posture. Well, all exercises lend themselves better in proper posture, but are really important, right? So when we do a bench press, one of the most common things when I would train clients is they have a hard time feeling it in their chest. The reason why a large percentage of these clients had a hard time feeling it in their chest is because of the starting position, because they get in the bench press and they don't realize their posture that they are already in this rounded shoulder position. And so when you're in that position and then you perform the movement and even to the untrained eye, you'll look at the movement and it looks right. It looked, they're moving the bar up and down, they're balanced, it doesn't look like they're cheating anything, they're not using any leverage. They're just pushing it up and down and it looks like it's okay, but you have to be able to really look at their shoulder girdle and look and see if they're able to keep their shoulders retracted while they're also pressing. And because it's a pressing movement, which causes the shoulders and the arms and everything to come forward, it's even harder to think about staying in that retracted position. So this becomes even more important when I'm dealing with somebody who has upper cross syndrome, rounded shoulders, is that I got a prime with that movement. I got to do that seated row before I ever teach that bench press. And I may even, like Justin said earlier, avoid it because it's so difficult for them to stay in that position. Me just bench pressing because I think it's a grip, because we talk about that as one of the big movements. We say the benefits of it all the time, they may listen to mind pump, they hear that, they go, oh, I should bench press. Mind pump says it's one of the main exercises. But if you are doing it incorrectly, you're only going to make things more difficult for you down the road. And so, and if your main goal is health and strength and fat loss, I may avoid that movement at first until you get that connection down that you understand that, oh, when I bench press, I can't allow my shoulders to keep collapsing and rolling forward, because then I end up pushing with my shoulders and my triceps and not with my chest. Right, so the next posture deviation that is probably almost as common, I wouldn't say it's as common, but it's almost as common as forward shoulder is known as an anterior pelvic tilt. So if you're listening, you're confused, what does that mean? Literally your butt sticks out, right? So if you were to look at your posture sideways, it gives you an arch. You have an arch in your low back and your butt is sticking out. Now this typically means that there's some weakness in your core, a tightness in your low back, maybe your hip flexors a little bit tight. Now it's important that you, if you see this, that you do the right exercises, because again, if you do the wrong exercises, you could potentially make this worse. An exercise, if you have this particular posture and then you go do, I don't know, back extensions, for example, and you don't really work on correcting this, you could cause yourself some low back pain. You may find low back pain when you do a squat because your back is so strongly arched. You may be someone, in fact, this may ring some bells where your back gets really kind of tight and fatigued when you're driving for a long time in your car. Yeah, especially if you notice that you need to wedge a pillow back there, a lumbopillow, which is something I worked through with my mom. It was very much. That's a good one. Yeah, apparent that there was a disconnection there. And this is one of those things, you can train your way back to good connectivity with the core to be able to stabilize your spine and your back and everything like it should, but it's gonna take some work. I address this in the number one viral video that we have on YouTube. If you look up in Mind Pump TV or just literally in YouTube, but in Mind Pump, make your butt grow. And even though that is specific to making your butt grow, the movements that I teach in there are addressing this. So part of the reason why some people are challenged with feeling their butt in exercises that they're supposed to feel it in their butt and they feel it more in their quads is because of this posture issue. Because they have an anterior pelvic tilt, they are quad dominant. When you have the stick your butt out look that Sal's talking about, you carry your weight over the top on your hip flexors and your quads. So then when you go to perform exercises like squats, lunges, step ups, these exercises that should get a lot of glute involvement, they don't get a lot of glute involvement. The quads take over because of the posture. So even though that video I made was designed to help people with their butt, it's really is what I'm helping you with is your posture deviation. You've got this anterior pelvic tilt. I'm trying to help fix that, getting your glutes more involved in movements where they should be. You end up over-reliant on the wrong muscles. Right, right. Two other exercises that are good for this, done properly, a physio ball crunch can be really good. You can find that on the Mind Pump YouTube channel as well. We'll make sure by the way we link this, all of these in the show notes. I believe that's mindpumppodcast.com. So you'll be able to click on the links and watch these, watch us teach you these exercises. And then there's another movement called the Hip Flexor Deactivator Crunch. This is one of my favorites for working on anterior pelvic tilt. Cause what it's doing is it's strengthening the core without overworking the hip flexors. Here's the interesting thing, right? You have anterior pelvic tilt. You don't know what it's called, but that's what you got. And you got back pain and you go to the doctor and the doctor says, strengthen your core. So you go do a bunch of ab exercises and what ends up happening. Your low back hurts even more. Like what's going on? The doctor said I need to strengthen my core, but I do leg raises and I do those exercises and my back hurts even more. This is because your hip flexors are doing all of the movement and your abs are really playing second fiddle. Your core muscles are weak, your hip flexors are tight and strong, too strong for your core, what we call stability. So you wanna teach the core to be stronger without the hip flexors taking over. Those videos will help you with that and they'll help a lot with the pain. And you want, and here's the other thing too, Adam talked about priming earlier. By the way, priming refers to doing specific exercises before your workout so that working with your particular posture issues, when you move into your workout, they're not becoming a problem. A great way to prime if you have an anterior pelvic tilt before you do like leg exercise, especially lower body exercises or dead lifts or other really effective movements is to do the hip flexor deactivator exercise that you'll see in that video that's linked in the show. One of the things that I used to have to overcome too with clients and I wanna make this clear is that they come in and they wanna do all these crazy exercises or get to their goal as fast as possible. And then here they get, you know, trainer Adam is taking them through these corrective movements that are light and boring and we're priming. But what you need to understand is if your body is moving incorrectly performing what it's considered the greatest exercises, say squatting or whatever like that. If it's moving incorrectly, you're getting less benefits from it. Or no benefit. All right, so by getting you to move better, even though I'm having you do these little, what you might think are boring exercises, the whole experience is gonna benefit 10 feet. That's right, it will only accelerate your results and aside from what we're talking about with posture and pain and of course those are the all the main reasons the trainer and us all want their clients to do that. But it also will accelerate your fat loss and your muscle building goals too. So even though it may not feel like it because it seems so simple and basic and you're not sweating and it's not, you're not like sore from these movements, but priming the body correctly so that when you go do these big movements, your body is moving and more optimally, you'll get more results from it. Yeah, doing things the right way gets you there faster. Doing them the wrong way, even if it feels like you're more sore or sweaty or it's harder, won't get you there any faster and usually gets you there a lot slower or not there at all. Now the next step, right? So you did the self-assessment, we identified two common deviations. So now you got some ideas on what to work on there. So now you're like, okay, I'm ready to do start with my workout. You wanna start with stability first. Stability means you're tight, you're balanced. You don't feel like you're gonna drop a dumbbell on your head. You feel like when you're standing and doing exercise, you're feeling very, very stable. You wanna start with stability because if you have poor stability, you cannot progress. Poor stability is the foundation for everything else. You're not gonna be able to go hard or heavy or push yourself when you have poor stability. I wish I realized this earlier, even myself training that the more stable my joints were, the more access I had to strength. Our body is capable of a lot of strength but it limits that because of the instability in the joint. And this is something if we address this right away and then we start building upon that, the strength compounds significantly. Oh, it's interesting. When you first start working out, this is what you may feel. You may go and lift a weight and it's gonna feel shaky or your arm is gonna kind of move in funny ways with the dumbbell when you hold it over your head or when I was, the way I used to describe it as a kid is it felt like my muscles were laughing. Like I'd press a bar up and they'd be like, why can't I push it smoothly? This feels so shaky and so weird. It's unfamiliar really. You're unstable and you have to train through that and teach your body to become stable. One of my favorite tools for teaching clients to become more stable or their bodies to become more stable is to use dumbbells. Dumbbells, you have to balance them. You push a dumbbell overhead. You need to be very strong, straight and stable. If you go heavier than your stability allows, you'll feel it, the hand will wait, will move all over the place. You'll feel like you're gonna drop it. I love dumbbells for this purpose alone because it naturally controls the amount of weight people use. This is also why I like the physio ball. And this is where I use the physio ball. The reason why this is the natural progression is that if we are working on posture and trying to get you more aligned before you go into these movements, when we add in a stability component into your training, I'm also working on posture. So in order for you to stabilize and balance, you need to have good posture. So, and I love using the physio ball because it's an external tool to help give you the feedback on that. So like for example- It challenges it. Right, so let's say I have somebody I'm working on upper cross syndrome and they weren't ready for a barbell bench press yet because they kept running, but now we've done some good work on their posture. They're starting to get the retract thing and they're starting to work on some core and the lower cross syndrome stuff. And so I put them on a stability ball now and now they can kind of get, and what's great about that is the stability ball, I'm gonna have them engage their hips. So they're having to stabilize their posture while also performing this movement. So I'm getting the benefits of working their chest out. In addition to that, I'm also working on the stability and the posture which is running off of what we started with. Yeah, so the stability ball, physio ball, swiss ball, it's a big, right, inflated ball. I think everybody knows what that is now, but sit on one. Just sit on one versus sitting on a couch or a chair. You're not gonna be able to slouch like you can in a chair. You have to sit up tall and you have to have your feet planted and you have to engage your muscles differently to prevent yourself from rolling in one way or another. So exercises on a stability ball or a physio ball is excellent to work on stability. It's an excellent way to teach you how to become stable so you can progress later on to the more challenging stuff. Well, and yeah, and to this sort of phase point, like tempo is the utmost importance in terms of going slow and really owning the technique of it first before we really try to stress the body in different ways through altering that tempo with speed. I just like to take everybody to slow down and really understand the mechanics of the lift but also understand like how your body needs to adjust, which muscles need to kind of stabilize and activate through these exercises. Just going slow from the beginning is such a better method. Well, this is also where the logic came from on how I taught a bicep curl. Now you guys remember the video that- The controversial one? Yes, that I did on YouTube, right? It's another one of the most viewed videos that we have on there. And it is controversial. Like you got a bunch of people that were of course that were talking shit about it, but this is where this stem from. What I started to realize was I had these clients that had poor posture, they didn't have good stability, they didn't have good core strength, and then I try and teach the most basic dumbbell bicep curl, which you would think is like one of the most easiest movements to teach somebody. And they would be rocking their elbows and they would be swinging their arms and arching their low back and they would be kind of all over the place. And then I'd grab the dumbbells as a young trainer and it'd be like, no, like this, you know? Or that I'd go over there and I'd like move their shoulders. Do as I do. And I just, I couldn't get them to keep themselves in good posture while also trying to curl. And then I realized what the stability ball was doing, right? And how that would force them into good posture. Sal made the point of try sitting on a stability ball and doing an overhead press without having good posture. It forces you into that. So that's where I started to do this split stance with my clients. I said, okay, we're gonna balance on one foot. So I allow them to get in that split stance, the back foot's on their toe. So they're really off kilter. But what I noticed was, as soon as I made them kind of balance, it would force them upright. They would stand up tall, their core would naturally activate. In fact, right after I'd get them in that position, I would go to touch their belly, but I'm like, do you feel your stomach is slightly drawn in? That's your core right now activating and actually is like working like a vacuum around your spine to hold you in this posture. Then I'd hand them the dumbbells and then I'd show them how to perform the curl. And then all of a sudden they were magically in this great form. And it was putting that emphasis on the stability first and then teach the movement. And then what you see is the mechanics end up being a lot better. Right, and back to Justin's point, it slowed them down. Slow is important with stability. Slow is better than fast here, okay? Slow, controlled. It should take you three seconds to lift the weight and at least four seconds to put it down. Do everything slow like that. You won't need a lot of weight. Focus on stability, use the physio ball. That is the best way to start. And for most beginners, you're looking at training this way for maybe two to three months. And by the way, within that two to three month period, you're building muscle, you're burning body fat. Like stuff is- Oh, you're still moving forward. Stuff is happening, your body is changing. Now after you move past that point, then things get really exciting. This is what I really like to have fun with a lot of clients. Now we get to focus on building overall strength. Now why is that important? Okay, well if you wanna build muscle, it's obvious. You wanna build overall strength because that builds the most muscle. What if you just wanna burn body fat? Focusing on overall strength has the, by far, the most profound positive effect on your metabolism. If you get stronger overall in a big way, you're gonna burn more calories all the time. Just sitting there. And remember, there's two ways you can burn calories. One is your body's metabolism burns calories. The other way is to go out and move more to burn those calories. One of them takes a lot of work. It's very manual and it makes you sweat and it's hard and it takes time. The other one happens regardless. Regardless that you wanna go bake cookies with your kids. You wanna sit in front of the TV, you're at work. If you have a fashion metabolism, you're burning more calories all the time. If you do it the manual way, well that means you gotta go take 30, 40 minutes aside to go to try to burn these calories. Building overall strength builds muscle and also boosts the metabolism. This is when you start to lift with the good compound movements, the barbell exercises, your barbell squats, your barbell deadlifts, your bench presses, your overhead presses, your rows. You get strong with those. You start to see your body shape, male or female. It'll shape in a very positive way and you'll see a huge improvement with your metabolism. And resist the temptation to wanna do all the creative, fun, gimmicky shit. And I'm guilty of a trainer of doing this early on in my career, right? Of wanting to wow my clients by teaching them something so unique and creative and different that they've never seen or done to try and impress them. But when it comes to getting you the best results and what is the ideal way you should go, this is where we're at. We should be in these compound lifts. We should be trying to get at those and we should be drilling that home, doing them over and over and over and getting better and getting better at them versus, oh, new workout. Let's throw some new creative, cool exercises that are unique and different at my client trying to confuse the muscle. Yeah, do all these machines and do all these weird exercises. Don't do them. They don't give you nearly the same impact as these compound basic movements and getting stronger at them. And this is a very, very fun time. This is when results start to really speed up. If you train your body properly, by the way, results look like a snowball rolling down a hill. It starts to build up momentum and the snowball gets bigger and faster and bigger and faster. And this is when things really start to speed up. Yeah, it's a much louder signal now that we're teaching our body. There's a lot of demand. This environment has changed. So therefore our composition has to change. We have to build muscle to be able to resist these forces now that are much more intensive. And in order to even get there, we had to get stable. We had to make sure all of our joints were nice and stable and prepared properly to now add this load to it and add more of this intensity because it's very demanding on the ball. Especially if you want the best results and you don't wanna injure yourself, steps one and two are necessary before we get here. That's all I was just gonna say. Because someone listening might be like, oh, that's the fast part? Yeah, let me get there. I'm gonna jump into that. It won't be the fast part if you just jump into it. Then you'll just hit a brick wall. Big temptation to do that. You'll hit a brick wall. You gotta do the stuff that we said first. But once you get here, things really start to kick into gear. As you get stronger with those lifts, I mean, you add 15 or 20 pounds to your barbell squat, your butt's gonna look totally different. You can add 10 pounds to your overhead press, your shoulders and arms start to look different for example. This is where you can focus on intensity a little bit now. You can go in that you've set the stage. You've done your assessment. You've done a couple months of stability training. Now you can start to get in and start to push things a little bit. This is when it really starts to get fun and things really, really start to change. Now, I would also like to talk about some of these struggles that beginners encounter. One of the biggest struggles that I would see, aside from what we said earlier, which was the risk of injury and the fact that they plateau, if you're doing what we're saying, you're gonna avoid those two things, but there's still another big hurdle and that's this. When you first get started on a fitness journey, you do build a lot of momentum. And sometimes when that momentum is stopped, whether it's because something happened, you're on vacation, you don't have access to a gym, you have, time is getting really tight, the kids are happening, you got your work and you're like, I can't, I don't have the time to drive the gym workout and then drive back. I only have time to work out. This really can screw people up because once they miss a couple of workouts, in my experience, it's hard to get them going. So you definitely wanna have a plan for when you don't have access to equipment. You wanna have a plan for when you're somewhere without a gym, somewhere without dumbbells, or you have a limited time, you wanna have a plan. What kind of workouts can I do when that happens? There's two things that I think that really helped that. The first thing is not overextending yourself on the commitment to the gym in the first place. So gym routines that ask you to be in the gym five to seven days a week because you think that you're gonna get to your results faster, not a great idea for that reason right there. It is very difficult for the average person to be consistent long-term five to seven days a week. So finding a plan that is more realistic effort, you can always add days later. So finding a plan that is more like two to three days a week to start off with and building upon it. That's perfect. Yeah, I've seen more people be demoralized by missing a few days in the week and then thinking, well, I can't do this, I can't do any of it in stopping. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing is to have a body weight type of routine, a routine that you can do at your house, a routine that you can do in a hotel room that you can do when you're traveling in the airport, anywhere you could think of, something that you can just train your entire body without any equipment or any weights. Having something like that at your disposal gets you out of that like, oh, I need to be in the gym and it's okay. It's okay to be strength training, running like a maps and a ball type of routine three days a week in the gym. And then all of a sudden you take off for a week for Christmas and you're at a cabin or a hotel somewhere. There's nothing wrong with you switching to a body weight routine for that week. Now the important thing is to have it a planned out already, okay? Be prepared before that happens. What you don't want to do is be caught off guard. Like you had, oh, I meant to go work out but things got hectic. I only have 45 minutes, I'm at home. I don't have equipment or whatever. I don't know what to do. Okay, so you want to have a plan ahead of time. Here's another amazing tool, resistance bands. I love resistance bands because they're easy to travel with. They fit in a purse. And you can do lots of exercises with them. Most resistance bands these days. You take three in your purse, right? Most resistance bands have attachments in your door. You can put them in your doorway. You can do pretty much any exercise you can do with a machine. You can do with resistance bands. So, and it's a very inexpensive investment. So I recommend that just to keep you consistent. That way, if you, again, if you don't have access to equipment or you have tons of time, you're still going to be able to- You need flexibility so you don't miss a beat. Now the other thing that I see that trips people up when I'm first getting a client like this is their support system. And whether that is the support system that they have at home, very, and I know you guys- This is huge. I know you guys can agree with this, right? Like someone who has a spouse who is not on board with your new health and fitness journey. Very hard. Extremely difficult to keep that client going. It really, really is. And even if you do, having a community or a support system that is moving in the same direction or cares about health and fitness as you do or as you do now, I think is extremely important for long-term sense. It's not something that I thought a lot about early on. Early on in my career, it wasn't like you didn't come up in our national certifications, our books of learning how to train people. It didn't come up that that was such an important piece. It was just over time training so many people and realizing, wow, if I had a client that had a spouse who wasn't on the same page nutritionally and exercise-wise, almost always they fell off if they didn't have some sort of a community. Right, so you could do this with a friend. You don't even have to work out necessarily together, but you just communicate and they're doing their own thing. You're doing your own thing. These days, online communities are wonderful. You can go online, talk to groups, ask questions, especially because you're new and you're getting started in this. You're gonna wanna ask questions. Hey, look, I'm doing this barbell squat. I noticed this thing. What do you guys think about my form or whatever? This is actually an important thing. Like Adam said, I didn't realize this until later on, but once I put this together, it made a huge difference with my clients. So there you have it, okay? You start out with a self-assessment. We give you a general one. You start with stability. You move to overall strength. That's when you increase the intensity. Make sure you have a plan for when things don't go the way you want them to go so you can still get your workout in and then connect with the community. Now, if you want something more specific, if you want this all planned out and mapped out for you, this month we have a bundle of workout programs, actually cover all this. So we talked about the self-assessment portion. We have a program called Maps Prime. It's way more specific and individualized than just posture. In Maps Prime, there's a compass test that takes your body through three movements and really helps you identify and individualize correctional exercise. So it's very specific to you. Then we talked about stability, training through stability. We have a program called Maps Starter. Maps Starter literally is an entire workout designed with dumbbells and physio balls to help people build stability and strength through stability. Then we talked about building overall strength. Maps Anabolic is our most popular workout program. It focuses on those really effective lifts. When you follow Maps Anabolic over a few months, you will build tremendous strength. You will see your metabolism speed up. Then we have a program called Maps Anywhere. Maps Anywhere is all workouts, just body weight or band based. You need no equipment whatsoever and you could do these again anywhere. That's why it's called Maps Anywhere. And then finally, we talked about having that support system. We have a private forum called the Mind Pump Private Forum. There's I think 3,000 people on there, all fitness enthusiasts, all listen to the podcast. You can literally go in there, ask questions, comment on other people's questions and just get that support system that you need to stay consistent, especially in that initial six to nine month period, which by the way, all these workouts that come with this bundle takes you through for about nine months or so. Oh and by the way, myself, Adam and Justin also are on the forum answering questions and interacting with people. And that's included in this bundle. And what we did with this bundle and we did this as a special for December to help people get started in January is we've taken the price of all these programs and cut them down tremendously. Once you enroll, you have lifetime access. To learn more about this, go to mapsdecember.com. Again, that's mapsdecember.com. You know, if you wanna maximize muscle growth, some cardiovascular help will help with that. I don't want people going the opposite direction and think I do no cardio because I wanna build the most muscle. Cardiovascular capacity and health will contribute to muscle growth for most people as well. That's true, but I also wanna challenge that a little bit too though. Well, I mean.