 In this episode of Mind Pump, your favorite fitness health and entertainment podcast, we talk about a portion of your workout that you're probably neglecting. We're talking about the warmup. Now a lot of people warm up because they think it reduces risk of injury. That's true, but that's the minimum that a good proper warmup can do for you. Most people don't know this, but if you apply the right movements in your warmup, you can actually dramatically improve the effectiveness of your workout. Not just reduce your risk of injury, but rather improve your body's ability to build muscle and then through the building muscle process, faster fat loss because of the faster metabolism. So this is a very, very big thing. Now in the episode, we tell you what to do. We actually give you takeaways on how you can apply this to yourself so you can spend seven to 10 minutes properly warming up to make your workouts more effective. But within the episode, we talk about self-assessments. We talk about movements and we realize, look, a lot of you might not know where to go from there, what that looks like. So what we did is we put together a free self-assessment priming course. This is where Justin actually teaches you how to self-assess your own body and then he shows you movements that you can do before your workout to make your workouts much more effective. It's a free, totally free webinar. It's online. You'll see Justin taking Doug through the assessments and exercises. You get to see Doug struggling. It's a great time. The site you go to is mapsprimewebinar.com. There's no limit to how many people can sign up because it's online. The last time we did one of these, it was extremely popular. We had over 7,000 people attend a single class. Again, it's mapsprimewebinar.com. Go there, sign up, learn how to do the self-assessment process, learn how to apply the right movements to your body before your workout to get greater ranges of motion, activate more muscle fibers, build more muscle. Again, it's totally free. And by the way, if you show up to the live classes, because there are replays. So once you sign up, you get the free class sent to you as well. But if you show up to the live classes, Adam, Justin, myself and Doug will actually be online live answering questions. Any questions you have about what you're seeing in the webinar. Again, that's mapsprimewebinar.com. Also, this episode is brought to you by Legion. Now, Legion is one of our favorite companies that produces performance enhancing supplements. Now, one of the products that we like the most from Legion is Pulse. Pulse is their pre-workout supplement. Now, I know a lot of you love having your pre-workout supplements with caffeine. Gives you a little bit of boost, makes you feel more awake and alert for your workouts. I totally get that. The Pulse is more than just caffeine. There's other ingredients in there that are actually backed by Scientific Study to improve athletic performance. That's the thing we like about Legion. They only put things in their products that are backed by Scientific Study. Now, Pulse comes in two types, right? There's different flavors, but there's two types of Pulse. There's the one with stimulant, so the one's with caffeine, and then they have the non-stimulant version that doesn't have any caffeine. That's the one that I like to use. I personally don't like to use caffeine every time I work out. I like to stay sensitive to caffeine. The way I do that is I only use it a few days a week for my heavy workouts. On my easier workouts, I stay away from it, and it just gives me the power that I get from caffeine because I don't take it so often. So what I do is I alternate between regular Pulse and stimulant-free Pulse for my workouts. Now, Legion has lots of different performance-enhancing supplements. Again, all of them backed by scientific study doesn't put any fluff or crap. All of his stuff is tested by third-party testing. He flavors his products without artificial sweeteners. Legion is owned by our good friend, Mike Matthews. The dude has lots of integrity, knows what he's talking about, so we started working with them, and because we're sponsored by Legion, you, as a mind-pump listener, get 20% off your first order of any Legion products. And if you're a returning customer of Legion, you get double rewards points for using the mind-pump code. So here's what you do. Go to bylegion.com, that's B-U-Y-L-E-G-I-O-N.com forward slash mind-pump, and then use the code mind-pump at checkout, 20% off if it fits your first order, or double rewards points if you're an existing customer. You know, one of the things that I think are one of the most underrated things in fitness and workouts. Like one of the things that people just don't, nobody really pays attention to. I don't think anybody thinks it's super important. That is the opposite of all that. Like this is one of those myths that if people just understood how inaccurate their thoughts were around it, it can make tremendous gains with their current workouts. I think it revolves around the warm-up. Well, I know I was terrible as a trainer here. And I know for sure those trainers that are listening that are guilty of this, because I know I did. I'm pretty sure Justin, because he worked for me, so I remember seeing him. I was too, for a lot of my career. And the kind of the normal client that comes in, after you've done your thing with them, you figure out their goals, they're set up for you for the next three, six months, whatever. You wanna get into it. The first session is, after you've done your assessment and everything like that with them, the first thing is you tell them to warm up. And ideally you tell them to do it on their own time. So if you have an appointment with me at three o'clock at 2.45, you're on the treadmill or the elliptical, and you are quote unquote warming up before, you see me. And I did this for years. For years, that was what ever- I did 10 minutes on the elliptical. Yeah, every trainer was taught to do this. And in fact, if I'm being completely honest too, there was a side of me that used to even make clients if they showed up just on time. You got to my appointment at three. Oh, we gotta warm up. Get over there and go first 15 minutes or over there on the- So I can eat my protein bar? It's true though, right? And I know there's fucking trainers on here listening right now that are just as guilty. And the truth is it really did little to nothing for any of my clients. And then it evolved to like foam rolling, right? Cause then I started to understand the importance of foam rolling and what a difference that can make. So it was like, okay. And then I felt like I was a better trainer than when I was by just throwing them on the elliptical. But even then, nowhere near how I get somebody ready for a workout today. Yeah, if I did spend any time warming up my clients, it was very much similar to what I did for athletics where it's almost that mentality of like, okay, now go run some laps and come back and we'll do just, you know, some, I don't know, some like calisthenics, we'll do some jumping jacks or we'll like, you know, take your arm and do some static stretches for your shoulder and like just some like willy nilly kind of stuff to get everything sort of loose. And that was the extent of what a warm-up looked like. The way that we warmed up in school and PE was static stretching, lots of static stretching. So your warm-up consisted of hamstring stretch, quad stretch, side bends, like, and there were just these long static stretches. And I remember as a trainer, this was still encouraged. It was still encouraged that you do these static stretches. And then studies started to come out and they actually showed, I remember this because, and it wasn't in the 90s, this happened in the 90s, studies came out and blew everyone's minds because the studies didn't just show that static stretching before your workout. Had detriment to your performance. That's what I'm saying. It didn't just show that it didn't really do much. Studies came out, because everybody's waiting for these studies, like, oh, it's gonna show that it reduces risk of injury, improves performance. And then some people were like, well, at the very least it's gonna show it doesn't do much at all. Studies came out and showed it did the opposite. It actually increased risk of injury and decreased performance. And I remember this was like a huge deal. They thought this was a mistake. There's no way this could be true. How could warming up make you hurt yourself more than not warming up? And it was because they didn't understand that how you warm up makes all the difference in the world. Now, why did the static stretching do this? I mean, we can get deeper into this later in the episode, but to make a long story short, static stretching literally sends the wrong signal. Your warm up has to send the right signal. That's the big difference. And that was the first hint that I got as a trainer that the warm up was more than just moving. There had to be some purpose behind it. I vividly remember when I learned this because at this time, I had my two younger, my younger brother and my younger sister who were in sports and they were like in their early teens and I had found out that this was like big news for me as a trainer, like, oh my God, like for the longest time, this is what we've been telling people to do. And I remember watching them like get ready for playing sports. And that's where it's like the most dangerous or the worst. Cause it's explosive. Yeah. And they would all be sitting in that. And that was like, and they were playing soccer and basketball and stuff like that back then. And I'd go to their games and I'd watch their, their pre warm up before the game. And I remember like going, like cringing, going, oh my God, like that's the worst thing they could be doing. Like they don't know yet. Like in that, that took a long time, I think before. And you could probably make the case and argue that still today. I mean, I still go, I still go to some sporting events. If unless you're at a very high level, some coaches are just like pass down information and knowledge. All of the little kids coaches do. Yes. It's, it's every level. It's, it's even in the NFL and some, you know, I've seen certain warmups like still look like that same protocol of just like, let's, let's move the muscle. Let's, let's sit down and let's static stretch and let's prep our, our, our body, you know, for all this explosive movement. And it's just, it's cringe worthy to me. It's something that I really, I really, if I had time would love to address this specifically for sports, cause there's so far behind. Well, look, here's, here's the breakdown, right? When we think of workouts, luckily people are starting to understand now that the workout, how the workout is designed, how it's programmed, the exercises, the sets, the reps, the intention, the tempo, like everything that goes into a workout is known as it's programming. And the programming has to send the right signal for whatever your goal is. So if I have a really well-programmed endurance workout, that's not the right workout program for someone who wants to build strength and muscle and vice versa, right? The workout has to be specific and it has to be programmed to send the right signal. Well, your warm-up has to do the same thing. So why is static stretching, why do we know now that static stretching can actually cause increased risk of injury and decreased performance? Here's the signal that it sends. If you've ever done any static stretching, you know that if you hold a stretch for 20, 30 seconds or longer, that you start to get greater ranges of motion, okay? So if I'm stretching my hamstrings are super tight, if I hold the stretch long enough, I start to get looser and looser. Now is that because my muscles are lengthening or getting longer in the sense that the attachments are changing? No. Is that because I'm making my muscles more pliable? Like you warm rubber up in the sun and it gets more pliable? No, that's not what's happening either. What's happening is my central nervous system- Says relax. Says relax. The central nervous system is what tells muscles how much they can stretch, how hard they can contract. Basically it's the control center. Your muscles are dumb. It's like your car, okay? Your cars are like, my car is like muscle. Without me in the driver's seat, my car does nothing. It doesn't know where to go, how to turn, how fast to go. None of that stuff, it just sits there, right? Well, your muscles are the same thing. So when you do a static stretch, what it does is it sends a signal to the central nervous system that says, at first it says, oh, hold on a second. Then you hold it long enough and the CNS says, okay, let's chill out a little bit. But here's the problem. What you don't want when you go into explosive, when into explosive movements or into a workout is a central nervous system that says, we're gonna chill. If anything, now you've lost strength and stability. You've actually lost mobility because you're more lax and this is how injuries can happen. So if you have stretch your hamstrings really, really good and then you go do sprints, you increase your risk of hamstring pulls because of the static stretching. So the warmup has to send the right signal and the right signal makes the workout effective, more effective, the wrong signal can make the workout less effective or in worst case scenarios, actually dangerous. It's not only that, it's also learning to stretch with purpose. A lot of times we do the standard things. If you see somebody, how often do you see somebody on the treadmill? They grab their ankle, they stretch the quad, they throw their arm across their chest and stretch the tricep in the shoulder. It's like, there's these standard stretches that we've been doing forever, which is ridiculous because they're not individualized for the person. And it's like, a lot of people are stretching muscles that aren't even beneficial to what they're about to go do, which completely defeats the purpose. So even if you're following old ways of getting ready to warm up, you're doing it, not only are you doing something that is less beneficial for the purposes that you're saying right now, Sal, but many times people aren't even stretching the right muscles. No, and warmups have become so bastardized that if I saw somebody warming up properly, and we're gonna describe that in this episode, we're gonna break it down for you, okay? But if somebody, if the average person or even the average new trainer saw someone warming up properly, they wouldn't consider it warming up. They'd say, oh, that person looks like they're doing some interesting exercises. What we would consider warming up would be, what we just talked about, static stretching on a piece of cardio equipment, jumping in place. It's been completely bastardized, which is why I now prefer to use the term priming. I use the word priming because warmup now means something different. Unless I can change everybody's mind, it's been too long, it's been decades now of what we consider to be warmups. That's all wrong, that doesn't benefit anybody. Proper warmups I now call priming. The reason why we labeled it that way is because it looks very different from what we used to consider warming up. So when we use the word priming on the podcast, what we're referring to is a proper, targeted, individualized, performance enhancing, massively injury preventing type of warmup. That's what priming actually is. So you need to ask yourself the following questions. What should your warmup do for you? Why am I warming up in the first place? The absolute bare minimum, the very, very minimum thing that your warmup should do for you is reduce your risk of injury. And I think people understand that. If you ask people, why do you warm up? They say, oh, so I don't hurt myself. That'll be the top answer every time. Well, yeah, but the top answer and theory behind the way we used to warm up before is because you're getting, like you said, like getting the muscles warm and pliable, like rubber in the sun. And that's why we're doing this. That's not true at all. Like if we're doing proper priming or warming up to get ready for a workout, what is going to help prevent injury is getting better recruitment patterns. Getting better control, better control and better stability where you need it. That's right, that's right, because that's really what it's all about. So if your muscle, if you look at your arm, right, you have your bicep and your triceps. So the biceps, the muscle you flex when you curl your arm, the triceps on the back of the arm. So they're opposing muscles. If I flex my bicep, my tricep has to relax to allow that to happen. If I flex my tricep, my bicep has to relax. Now, if I go and I do a quick punch where I'm using my tricep extending my arm and my bicep doesn't relax appropriately to allow that to happen, I could pull my bicep muscle, okay? That doesn't, it's not because the muscle, my bicep muscle isn't pliable enough, like a piece of rubber. It's because the central nervous system isn't sending the right signal. I'm not getting a good recruitment pattern. I should, my CNS should be able to know that I'm exploding with the tricep and relax the bicep enough to not let it pull but keep it active enough so that it doesn't have my arm hyperextend because that's to support my elbow. So that's what we're talking about when we're talking about recruitment patterns. Part of what we're talking about is allowing that to happen. That's why hamstring pulls happen so often because people have such strong quads and the hamstring to quad balance in the way that they work is a little off and so one of the muscles is gonna get injured in one common one is hamstrings. Right, and that's why you really wanna consider hamstrings. Like if that's a thing, if you're running and you wanna decelerate, let's wake them up to stabilize you properly and get that involved in your movements going into the actual event. Absolutely, so at the very, very least a good warmup should prevent, or any warmup should prevent risk of injury but that's like, gosh, that's like saying at the very least, my car should drive. Okay, that's nice. So you have a car that takes you from point A to point B but let's take it a step further. Most people have a car that doesn't just drive, it's got air conditioning in there, heater, it's comfortable to sit in, it's safe, it's got airbags, all that stuff. So let's talk about the next levels, okay? Prevent risk of injury, great. That's absolute base minimum but what else can a good warmup or proper priming session do? It can improve your results not just by reducing risk of injury but by actually improving the benefits that your exercises provide your body. Now how does it do this? There's a few different ways. One of the ways that proper priming helps your body is by giving you longer ranges of motion that you have control over. So remember I said control, it's not just greater ranges of motion, it's greater ranges of motion that I'm connected to. We all know, and this is confirmed by studies and also our own experience, that a full range of motion exercise will give you more gains, so more muscle, more strength, or broader strength I should say, and indirectly more fat loss because of that than a shorter range of motion. Everybody knows this, a half bench is not gonna be as good as a full bench for developing my chest, shoulders, and triceps, right? So how do we get a greater range of motion that we have better control over? That's with proper priming and here's a funny thing, it actually now, long term, you can make tremendous gains in this. Can you make immediate gains in a range of motion that you have control over? Absolutely. In fact, in fact, we did a webinar that I think is gonna be out by the time this episode is released and what's the site? Is it mapsprimewebinar.com? mapsprimewebinar.com. Okay, so Justin teaches a priming class, so he teaches how to prime your body. He actually takes Doug through movements, watch Doug's controlled range of motion before and after priming immediately. I'm not talking about months, I like Doug practice his exercise. He literally did a movement, then Justin took him through a priming movement, then he took him through the same movement again and you see this incredible change in his controlled range of motion. It's crazy, cause a lot of times like it seems like magic to me, even as a trainer to see what kind of unlocks. Once people really understand the concept of being able to increase that muscle tension that provides the support system. So now I'm telling my body that these joints and these certain parts of my body that I really need to be stable while I'm producing this type of force and movement, they're covered, they're accounted for. Now that feedback comes back to my central nervous system and it allows me now to produce more range of motion and stronger range of motion. Well, when you talk about stabilized joints and more range of motion, I love to use like for clients like the analogies of like sports and a baseball swing and a golf swing. And those both require a lot of rotational power and strength and good range of motion through that, right? And you can take somebody, you can take a batter or you can take a golf swing and you can actually improve their distance right away just by increasing their rotational range of motion and control with their joints right in one workout. Then that to me is like one of the coolest ways to show somebody who's playing like a sport that requires something like that. And you could take them and take them through priming mobility work right before they go and do batting practice or go hit the golf balls. You can show them like, okay, go hit the ball a bunch of times without doing anything. Okay, now take them over, do those exercises I taught you. Now go back. You didn't change their swing. You didn't teach them any new mechanics. You didn't do anything, but improve their range of motion and their joint stability in that range of motion and then let them go do their thing again and watch the distance they get. That same thing translate into the gym. If you have a poor range of motion or good joint control when you're doing a squat, low back hurts, you can't get past 90 degrees and you have an issue, you're only gonna get so much gains from squatting that way. You take that same person and Justin did this with Doug, you open their hips up, you give them a greater range of motion, you give them greater control in that range of motion, you go back, you do a squat and you get an extra three or four inches in your squat and better control. So less pain, more range of motion, more muscle, more gains. Well, I look at this and again, I know we throw the car analogy out there quite a bit, but for me, the more stable I have my car, like think of it like the gas pedal, like I have acceleration where I can add acceleration and then I could back off acceleration where I have more control over that now. So like if I don't have that kind of control, I can only press so hard before my tire starts spinning out and this allows me to gain more traction, this allows me to then really accelerate when I need to back off. Like I just have control over my body more. Yeah, 100%. So you don't even have to, even let's say you have great range of motion, let's say you're like, I don't need to go deeper on my squats, I don't need to go deeper on my bench press, my overhead presses, my range of motion is pretty full. Even if that's all true for you, proper priming will activate more muscle fibers within the range of motion that you're training in. It's still, what it does is it ensures that you're gaining the maximum amount of points from that exercise. So if a barbell squat is worth 100 points, if you do it the best way you could possibly do it, proper priming means you're gonna squeeze out or get close to all those points. Without proper priming, you're not gonna achieve the most you can out of those exercises. So literally, this is no joke now. Proper, 10 minutes of really good priming, individualized priming before, I don't care what workout you do. You could take your workout, I'm plateauing, my workout, I'm not progressing. You might not even need to change your workout, just prime properly. Now go do the same workout and watch what happens. All of a sudden, you start to get better results. And with that, by the way, this is proven with athletic performance. They show that proper warmup, I'm putting in quotations here, before a batter swings a bat. If they do it right, they swing faster and they hit harder. They've proven this in time and time again. And they know this with athletes. Again, this is true with your workouts. And muscle fibers, man, the more muscle fibers you recruit, the higher your potential for building muscle, even if the exercise is the same. And sometimes you can't even tell the difference. Sometimes you can look at somebody and you can't really tell. The form looks almost identical. But what you don't know is intrinsically, they've got better central nervous system activation, more muscle fiber recruitment. They've got better muscle fiber recruitment patterns, and therefore they're gonna get better results. Proper priming for me, I mean, I remember when I first kind of stumbled upon this. There was a period where I was really trying to see how high I could get my squat and my deadlift and my bench press. And I was stuck with my squat for a little while. So I started reading powerlifting books and I started researching a little bit. And I started learning about box squats. Now for me, sitting back in a squat was kind of hard. And I was also at the very bottom, I had a difficult time. So I realized when I would do box squats, where I actually sit on a box and then stand up, I realized that it really helped me feel better with my squats. So what I started doing is I started doing one or two sets of box squats before my traditional squats. Now this isn't gonna work for everybody. For my individual body, this was a really good priming session. So I started doing box squat, one or two sets, then go to my traditional barbell squats. The weight went through the roof. I was at, I added weight immediately from doing that cause I was more connected to the barbell. Cause you're at the bottom of your squat and you have no momentum and you need, it's vital for you to recruit all the necessary muscle fibers to get you out of the most difficult part of that lift. Let's use, I really like your point analogy. Let's use it, let's stay there and let's talk about the person who has got good mobility and has really good form and why priming is so important to this person. And I'm gonna use your point analogy Sal because I think it works really good here. And how is this going to really accelerate your gains in your training? You don't have any of these problems and you're not aches and pains. You feel like you've got good form in all the exercise we're talking about. But I'm still telling you that this person can greatly benefit and the way I'll explain that is through the point system like you said Sal. When we get into a squat bench press, overhead press, a major lift like that and you get into the first set. Set one, you get like 70 points. Set two, you get like 80 points. Set three, you get like 90 points and by set four or so is when you get maximum. And what that is, is it's taking that much time for the body to really figure out to recruit all the fibers- To learn the movement. To learn the movement and get the most out of it. So sets one, two and three, you're not getting the max benefits. That's why most people say like on set three or four they feel the best of that. Well that's because the first couple was literally the body warming up and kind of priming itself because you didn't do that before you worked out. And so you're not getting the max points where if you set yourself up priming correctly you get right into those max points on sets one and two. And when you do an entire hour workout that starts to really add up. That's just one workout. You do that for every wasted energy that way. No, you start to accumulate way more points for the work that you're doing. I like that analogy because I know there's somebody who's listening right now and they're like, well, you know- I don't have pain. Yeah, priming is for people that just get risk to get injury and I've got good form already so it's not really something that I should waste my- And I'm telling you no. In fact, someone like you will benefit even more because you guys will be able to get into it even faster. You're getting straight performance. Right. You're getting straight perform- Look, we know that not all exercises are created equal. Some exercises are more effective than other exercises when you combine them head to head. But even if we stay within the same exercise are all squats created equal? Of course not. Even the ones you do yourself, think back to your workouts. Are there sets that feel more effective and better than other sets? What if you could make more of your sets feel like the good ones and way less of the sets feel like the bad ones? That's what proper priming does. What if your whole workout could feel that way? When you get into the workout and every set feels connected? Woo, I could feel the muscle. Oh, I could feel my chest. Wow, I could feel my back. Oh my God, I feel like I'm really strong and stable right now. What if those workouts were the common ones instead of the, man, you know, Thursday's workout was really good but Friday, I just couldn't get into it. I felt kind of stead and feel connected. Priming ensures, helps ensure that you get those better workouts. So again, not all exercises are created equal but even the exercise itself, not all sets are created equal make the sets do the most work for you with proper priming. And it's interesting. I mean, an entire industry popped up to try and get people to feel that like through pre-workouts and through stimulating the CNS by, you know, charging, you know, your central nervous system going into the workouts. So you feel like, wow, like I have all this access to, you know, like I can, I can recruit muscles. I'm like very stimulated and jacked right now. You can get that same feeling by priming properly and being able to do that even more efficiently and effectively and direct it where it needs to go. Oh dude, combine proper priming with a pre-workout and watch what happens. Oh yeah. Now your CNS is on fire. A lot of what we're talking about is the physiology of all this, right? But there's also the mental aspect. There's also just the getting into the right, the frame of mind going into this. And that's one of the great perks of that of taking yourself from driving to the gym or if you have your own garage and you go to your garage, you are just either with your kids messing around, doing something or you're just at work and your mind is all set on this other thing or other stuff and then you get into the gym, you know, getting into that mental space of waking up the muscles and getting better connected to all these things you're about to call on and get the most out of them, doing a priming session for 10 minutes before you get into your workout, how beneficial that is for the mental shift too. Now here's the thing, you know, you might be thinking, well yeah, I do, you know, I do a few sets of warm up before I get into my exercise and that helps me connect more to the exercise. It helps me loosen up and I feel what's going on and, you know, I feel better. I'm after about three or four warm up sets of squats, I can get into my heavy squats and I feel pretty good. That's true. In fact, three or four warm up sets before an exercise is superior to the warm ups that I did as a kid, which was static stretching and, you know, walking on a treadmill test step. You're absolutely right. But it's inferior to individualized priming, okay? Doing a few warm up sets of an exercise does help your body get ready for that exercise to a good degree. But what it doesn't do is it doesn't target what your individual body needs to prime on because you can be somebody who has poor internal hip rotation. You could be somebody that has poor ankle mobility and activation. You could be somebody that has forward shoulder. You could be somebody that has bad scapular activation. Each person will benefit more from having an individualized priming session than just doing a few warm up sets of the exercise they're about to do. Well, you're not fixing the hitch in your giddy up. You ever heard that like where someone's running and you're like, he's got a hitch in his run, you know, there's something wrong with it? You just running more or jogging before you run doesn't fix the hitch. And you have that when you work out. So you could do, let's say squat, okay? You could do just three sets of lightweight before. And yeah, it'll help warm up. It'll help weight things up, but it doesn't fix the hitch. It doesn't fix. Your body's still gonna work hard to try and compensate for where there's lack of stability. It's gonna take the easiest path. It's always gonna take the easiest path. And most times with people because of our posture and the things that we do all day long, the easiest path is not always the best path for their movement. And yes, you could warm the body up. You can wake some muscles up by doing a set or two before you do it, but you don't fix the hitch. You don't fix what is causing the breakdown of the movement or what's not allowing you to move optimally. So by you priming for your body and your hitch, that is gonna get so much more than just doing a set or two before you go into the exercise. Oh yeah, I mean, if you think that Justin, Adam and myself all have the same priming session at your mind. I mean, we could do the same workout. In fact, when we work out, sometimes we do the same exact workout, but how we prime is very different. So the way that Justin squats, Adam squats and I squat, we all have our own individual areas that we need to prime our own hitches. Our own hitches. And then we get into the exercise and then we might do one or two warm upsets and get real heavy or whatever, but it's the priming has to be individualized. So step number one, to prime your body properly, you have to learn how to self-assess. This is very important because self-assessing allows you to individualize your priming session. It allows you to individualize it because without the individualization, all you have now is a warm up. Now this is one of the most difficult things and one of the things that I'm most proud of that we did. And I'm so excited that Justin put this together for all of you to watch for free and walk you through because- He's going to do a self, you are going to do a self-assessment on the webinar. We're going to teach you how to do that. And this is something that when we came together and we wanted to create this, we were like, okay, how do we do something that we know is going to be extremely effective for the masses, but then digestible that my mom could pick it up and figure out how to assess herself and then apply this to her workout without having a professional tell her exactly what to do. No small task, by the way. No, this is something that we've all, in our own experiences, we've tried to kind of narrow it down to the most effective moves that cover a lot of area and a lot of joints and coming down to like, because I've gone through a lot of different methods. So there's lots of different ways out there, like FMS and different tests that you can do for self-assessment. It is very complex. Well, most of those are geared towards the coach. Yes. Right? Like when you look at, and by the way, FMS is incredible. And I think- Oh yeah, if you take that whole, if you spend $1,000, $2,000, I don't know how many thousands of dollars, go through the course, learn how to do this complex assessment like a coach, it's gonna definitely benefit you. It's just not realistic for the average person. Well, yeah, the average person is not gonna invest that kind of money in that, nor a lot of people are gonna go through it and it's gonna go over their head. It's overkill. Yeah, and so our goal was, okay, how do we take all of our knowledge from going through things like that and our experience and then break down what we think are the most common offenders and the thing that will give the greatest bang for your buck for the average consumer to be able to, and then also the trainer who's coming up can utilize too. If you're a brand new trainer and you don't have FMS and you haven't gone through some of these courses that are like really rigorous type of assessments, how can you take something and apply it to everyone? One of the best things you could do as a trainer is to simplify things. Not complicate things, simplify. I remember we had Joe DeFranco on who I consider to be one of the best trainers there is out there just from a trainer's perspective. Definitely. The dude is brilliant. And we were talking about heart rate variability and oh, that can tell you if you should work out hard or not and how do you figure that? Well, you take your pulse and you do this mathematical equate. Very complex. You know what he said? He said, oh, I have people squeeze a gripper. I measure their strength. I get an average. If they're this much below it, I know we should go easy because that's their CNS is being, if it's this much above it, then I know we can go really hard. And I thought, why is it so brilliant? Is it because it's more accurate than the heart rate variability test? No, it's right around as accurate. Why is it more brilliant? It's simple. You understand it right away. It's simple. You can ease it and you can apply it. People can do it. So when we went out to create Maps Prime, we're like, how in the hell do we teach people how to self assess? These are people who have no training experience. It needs to be simple. It has to identify issues throughout the whole body. We actually, when we created Maps Prime, we were stuck on that problem for two days. Oh yeah. Just getting people to understand their body more, I just feel like that was such an issue for me coming into personal training. I just had no idea that people just didn't even realize they were moving certain ways. And then I had to show them and be a coach like just to show them, hey, you're not really able to produce this movement the way that I'm trying to demonstrate to you. And how can I get you closer to that? Yeah. So what we did is we put together three movements that covers the whole body. And we broke the body up into zones. Actually, if you go to Maps Prime webinar, Justin teaches these three movements. You do them at home. They're self-assessment. And they teach you to identify what areas you need to focus on. Now, if you don't have that, self-assessment can, and now this is not gonna be nearly as effective, but it's way better than just doing a plain warmup. What areas of your body are you not as active in? Do you notice that your shoulders roll forward? Okay, part of your priming might wanna be activating the muscles that pull the shoulders back. Do you have anterior pelvic tilt? That means your butt sticks out. So you have that kind of sway back look, which is quite common. Okay, let's activate the muscles that pull the hips and rotate them forward so I get a little bit of better posture. Basically, that's what you're doing when you're priming. You wanna self-assess, identify the movement issues in your body, and then you move to step two, which is pick movements that activate. Pick movements that correct and activate, not static stretching, not passive stretching, activate. You wanna turn things on, not turn things off. Well, I remember how we came about these three zones too. We sat down and we just started, everyone started like riding all of the, all the issues that you have came across, you know, start riding all the different, you know, the knees collapsing, the feet pronating, the, you know, the hips locking up, the frozen shoulders, the forward heads. Yeah, the inability to rotate, left to right. We just started listing all the things that we came across in our two decades of experience of the type of clients that we had trained. And then we figured out, okay, we need to have a test that would express all of these issues. Like if this is what we've seen in those 20 years of the most common issues of people, we need to simplify it with, you know, one, two, or three tests that would express those issues so then that those people then have a guide on what they should do to address those issues. Right, and the problem was this, was the typical assessment that a trainer does is I look at my client, I do my complicated assessment, and then I identify some movement issues and then I connect them to muscles that are not, you know, turned on and we gotta activate those and all that stuff. Okay, how do you do that with the average person? So instead of saying, hey, if you notice this small movement problem, it was pass or fail. If you do this test and you do it well and you're connected and it's easy, you pass. If anything under that is a fail, and if it fails because it's attributed to this zone of your body, then we are gonna give you some really good general priming movements that will activate the areas that are preventing you from performing this particular test. So we just simplified the hell out of it but kept it extremely effective. We tried to simplify it to where, you know, like can you place the back of your hand on the wall with your elbows on the wall, with your head on the wall, all these points of contact down the list. If there's any deviation, if there's any sway away from that, that's a fail. It's very simple, it's very straightforward. It's can I do this or can I not do this? And let's do these exercises to help unlock the potential for that. Come back, let's see how effective that is. Right, so I'll give you an example, right? So let's say you have a very common, so you have forward shoulder, super, super common nowadays because we're on computers, everything's in front of us. And that literally looks the way that it sounds. Forward shoulder means the shoulders kind of round forward. So now let's say I'm training you and you've got really bad forward shoulder and I wanna do a bench press. And I know that if the shoulder blades don't pinch back and you're not able to stick your chest out and stabilize your shoulder girdle, we're gonna have potential shoulder problems. We're not gonna activate the chest very well. We're not gonna build as much strength as much. I'm gonna limit what the bench press can do. So how an easy way to prime this person would be like a cable row. And all I'm gonna do is not work out with the cable row, but rather really focus on opposing that forward shoulder, squeezing the shoulder blades back, sinking them down, activating the muscles that put you in a good position to bench press. Then we go bench press, you're connected now. Now when I tell the person pinch your shoulder blades down and back, hold this position. They're there and then as they fatigue, they're less likely to move out of that position because as you fatigue, your body starts to revert back. But because we prime properly, your bench press- Reducing risk of injury, maximizing performance, just like that. I'm glad you picked that one because that's a, this is a common one that I know anybody who's like 35 and above can relate to this is there's those days where you go to bench press and your shoulder hurts. Or you feel this pinch. Right in the front of your shoulder too. Right, you feel this pinch in your shoulder or you hear a clicking sound. And what that is is the shoulder is not tracking optimally. And it's not 90% of the time it's for that reason that Sal just talked about is you're not able to retract and depress the shoulders and keep them in that stable position while you also bench press. By priming the exercise that Sal just talked about that wakes those muscles up that are responsible for keeping the shoulder girdle in that position. So now when you do, and I love the bend, this is one of my favorite. When I figured all this out, I would love having a client, we go to bench and they would complain to that. Like out of my feeling in my shoulder or I feel this clicking or it bothers me then I could take them right over to a seated row super lightweight. I would get them to retract, squeeze just like you're saying hold it for five seconds so they can feel it. And then I would let them tell them like, okay now that you feel that I want you to think about holding that position while we go bench then take them right over to the bench. It's like magic. And they'd be like, oh my God, it's gone. Well that's because the shoulder wasn't tracking properly. Now that's just one example, right? Of one exercise on how another priming movement can totally improve that. Now somebody can work through that. Now you might be listening going, well my shoulder doesn't really hurt but I do feel it feels weird when I do that. Okay, well if it feels weird, you're getting 70 points. You're not getting 100. You're not getting anywhere near that because you're not moving optimally. And so even if you're somebody who's listening that isn't I'm dealing with pain, you're also not moving the best you can to get the most results from that exercise. Yeah, God I remember piecing all of this together as a trainer later in my career. And the value that I brought, I tell you what, if you're a trainer and you're listening and you don't understand proper priming, oh my God, you are missing out on so much value. I remember when I started to piece this together I would, the clients, they would have paid me three times as much as they could. This was my number one selling point. The number one thing I did as a trainer that would sell clients on training was this. Once this was pieced together. You can show somebody in real time, oh that hurts right there. Let me show you something over here for 60 seconds. Now let me bring it back. Oh it doesn't hurt anymore. I'm a wizard now, 150 bucks an hour, no problem. I'm gonna pay you because you know, the value was tremendous. I remember doing this with, I mean I would have a client for example who would do maybe like a Romanian deadlift and they'd be like, oh my low back and I kind of feel like it's shearing in my low back. And I'd watch them and say, okay this person has a really strong anterior pelvic tilt. Then I'd put them on the floor, we'd do pelvic tilts and I'd squeeze their abs just to activate the opposing side so they could really stabilize that form. Then we go back and do the Romanian deadlift. Oh it's gone. Wow my back doesn't hurt anymore. What's, oh my God I could really feel how effective this is. That's what proper priming can do for you. So once you do the self-assessment and you've identified your movement pattern issues and what happens to you, then you've picked your movements and we suggest you pick anywhere between three to five priming movements. Sometimes two if you're really good right. Two to five really good priming movements. Then you do them and your priming session will last you seven to 15 minutes. That's about it and trust, believe me, this will, that's seven to 15 minutes will make the next 45 to an hour and a half that you do in the gym far more effective. But that's it, seven to 15 minutes of proper individualized priming for your body makes the workout far, far more effective and more connected and you see that in real time. This is what I love about priming so much. This is not one of the, I know a lot of times we say on the podcast, takes time, be patient, you know, go in there, train, stay disciplined. Proper priming, I'm gonna, I will say this with full confidence. You'll need it right away. Immediately. This is something that, that yeah, you don't need to wait months to follow. I mean, you know, MAPS Prime has a 30 day money back guarantee. It doesn't need 30 days. Try it one time, one time and you'll know for sure, oh, this is a game changer for me because you just primed, you know, totally properly. Now there's another part to this that's even worse than warming up that people completely ignore 100% which is the post priming or the cool down. Now, I don't like the word cool down because that insinuates just letting my body cool down and somehow that's- It's kind of walking back on the treadmill. Yeah, like I need to do that. Like why do I need that? I'm not gonna work out anymore. What's the value and benefit of that? Well, this is where, this is where actually static stretching does come in. Yes. Because we talked about how that's a terrible way to start your workout that doesn't all of a sudden get rid of all the science that supported the benefits of static stretching, right? That still stands, right? There still are benefits to static stretching for somebody but when you do it is really, really important and this is where it belongs. Right, do it at the end of your workout. You're done with your, at the end of your workout is when you, when it's okay to tell your central nervous system to relax. In fact, your CNS should be amped during your workout and it should be relaxed for your recovery. If you keep your CNS amped all the time, you're gonna have a tough time recovering. In fact, you'll be stressed. That's what, that's a stress. Right, you want that stress state. Yeah, you know that you go, you go, I was thinking of parasympathetic, but parasympathetics where you're, you know, you're gonna start calming down your central nervous system again. And that's really where like all the, the great gains come from is when you can get yourself to calm down and then recover. The recovery process is a vital part of the entire workout. That's right. Static stretch, the muscles that you know that you have tight, the ones that you maybe thought you should have done at the beginning of the workout when you were warming up the wrong way. Now is the time to do it. So if you have really tight hamstrings, you wanna improve a little bit of range of motion, tight hips, your chest is tight, whatever. Now you start doing some static stretching at the end of the workout when the muscles are pumped, when you're done. In fact, bodybuilders have identified that static stretching at the end of the workout. They call intracet stretching sometimes, or at the end of the workout. It actually leads to muscle gains. It actually done the right way, can actually send, not a big, it's not a big muscle building signal, but it's a small one. And because it doesn't cause any damage, you can, you can, it's like adding the cherry on top. You just built this amazing Sunday, which is this workout muscle building signal. You prime properly, you did a phenomenal workout. Now you add the little cherry on top with the proper post priming, which includes static stretching. And then the other thing that I think has tremendous value, which is foam rolling. Foam rolling has tremendous, tremendous value. Sometimes foam rolling has value before your workout. That's depends on the individual. Always has a value at the end of your workout. Well, I think we should elaborate a little bit more on something that Justin just glazed right over, which is talking about sympathetic and parasympathetic. I think that's important because, again, talking about the person who maybe moves optimally as a high performer and again, maybe not sold on the idea that these things are so important to them. What you don't understand is that when, when we are in a sympathetic state with our, think of it like this way, like you are hyperactive and awake or hyperactive and ready to go and then you're relaxed and like when we're sleeping, right? That's when the recovery process starts. If you have the ability to get yourself in that state where you are ready to recover, that it's only gonna give you that much more recovery time. So most people, they get amped up for the gym. You're still amped for like the next hour or two hours. You're not, your body hasn't calmed all the way back down. And it's not just calming the whole body down. That's important. It's also targeting the muscles that you want to, because all of us have muscles that are just generally a bit too tight. So I'll give you an example. A common one with clients would be their upper traps. This is just a common, typically this comes from forward shoulder. They have bad stability in the mid-back. So their neck gets tight when they're stressed or when they're working on their computer and they can't figure out what's going on. So at the end of the workout, knowing that their traps tend to be tight, that's when I send this signal to the central nervous system that says specifically, hey, let's relax a little extra on these muscles right here. Let's send a signal specifically to these muscles that are tight in this particular person to chill out just a little bit more. So what does this do? Well, this means that those muscles who tend to be tight now are less tight, less sore the day after the workout. And when we go back into the workout again with our priming, those muscles are less of an issue. So think about it this way, right? You have a target. You have a target sitting in front of you and in the center of the target is all the results that you want. Like you want muscle gain or I wanna add 40 pounds on my bench press or I'm looking to get lean or whatever. That's the center. And the further out I get from the center, the less results I'm gonna get. Now I have a bow and arrow and I'm shooting the arrow at it. Well, the priming session aims the arrow. The workout carries the arrow to the target and then the post primer, make sure it hits the target perfectly. Post priming or cool down is also very important. Doesn't take long by the way. You're looking at maybe another five to 10 minutes but it also can make a big difference. Now I will be honest, not as important as the priming session before the workout, but it's still something that if you add and you do them both, watch what happens to your workout. And it's really to pay attention through your workout. Like what was restrictive for you and what wasn't allowing you to perform the most optimally through these movements and that's what we're wanting to address and specifically target at the end of the workout to try and relax to then promote better movement going forward. Right, right, right. Now, here's another piece to this. Let's say you go and you work out and you're doing the self-assessment test and you're priming properly and you're working out and you're getting better each time. And you should, if you do good priming session each time, those issues that plague you become smaller and smaller issues over time. So let's say they're big issues. They're really bad issues. You got to prime hard every time and you're like, I want to make this go a little bit faster or this issue is big enough to where, priming before helps, but I want this issue to be gone a little bit faster and I just want to get rid of it. Well, now you add in some correctional exercise. This is where the correctional exercise component of your workout really makes a big difference. So again, if you have the, if your forward shoulder so bad, right, you do your primer and it makes a big difference, but you're like, oh, it's so bad. I want this to be a little bit better. I suggest that you do some specific correctional exercise for that particular area another time during the week, different, separate from your workout where you're actually doing a workout to correct your movement patterns. And I wanted to throw that in there because I want people to know that sometimes it takes more attention than just priming. Well, that kind of goes in line with something that I wanted to mention too that we didn't talk about, that when I think about clients, in fact, one of the clients that I'm helping right now that I have her do because she has exactly that, she has this forward shoulder, she's on the computer all the time. And so I, the exercises, the priming movements that I have her do before we train, I also ask her to do throughout the day. Oh, beautiful. So, you know, band pull-aparts and rubber band rows are what we're trying to do to address this upper cross syndrome that she has going on. And that of course is something that's important before she gets into the lift for all the reasons that we've made the case for when it comes to priming. But I also know that I've only got her for that one hour that she trains, then the other 23 hours a day, she's working against me. She's going back into that rounded position, she's doing the computer work all day long. And so I've encouraged her, okay, listen, at every hour, at the top of the hour, when you know you're gonna sit on the computer for an extended period of time, four hours or more through the day, at the hour, every hour, I want you to take just two minutes of your time and do two or three rounds of those two priming exercises that I've taught you to do before you warm up. And now it's correctional. And now it's a correctional type of exercise. So even though she's not getting ready to go lift and we're not trying to optimize her, getting the most results, I'm also still trying to work on something and combat what she's doing on a daily basis through these priming movements. And you can't do too much of it. When we're trying to correct a poor neurological recruitment pattern, you can't do it enough. So I get this question, I got this a lot after the Prime Pro webinar. I'd get these DMs of, okay, Adam, that wasn't fantastic. Oh my God, made a world of a difference. How much can I do with this? Often should I do it. How often should I do it? As much as you can. All the time. You can't do enough of it because the reason why it felt so good and it helped you so much is because you were so broken down in all these other areas and it felt so amazing after you did it. Well, you need to do more of it. And the things that you do on a regular basis is what's causing you to feel that low back pain, the shoulder issues, the neck issues. And so when I teach you these priming movements that you get to see help you right away inside the gym, don't stop there. Make these a part of your lifestyle and continue to do them throughout the day every single day. No, but I'll tell you what, at the very, very least, this is my own estimation, my own personal experience training clients and myself, just doing a proper pre and post-priming session improves the effectiveness of my own personal workouts and my clients, it's even more. I'm just talking about myself, by at least 10%, you think that's not that much. That's huge. That is huge. 10% improvement over your current workouts is like night and day in terms of the results, the strength and the progress that you make. Now, of course, Maps Prime has all the stuff in there, but I think you've got some takeaways with this episode to where you can start to take it a little bit more seriously and realize that what you do before your workout can make a huge, huge difference. And of course, here's the other thing. Because we talked about, there's one part in this episode that's a little bit more difficult to explain, it's the self-assessment portion. So we did a webinar, Maps Prime webinar, it's free. It doesn't cost you anything. It's literally a class, okay? It's a free class taught by Justin. You go on there, watch what he does. He takes you through and coaches you through the self-assessment, and then we wanted to add even more value. We give you one movement that correlates to each assessment. So if you do bad with the first assessment, he then shows you an exercise that you can do that help with that. And then you get a chance to reassess yourself real quick just to see what a big difference it makes. And when you go to that website to register, you'll see that Doug will have, I think we're gonna do three times that this will be going live or we'll be active on there answering questions and helping people. Even if you can't make that time, still register because you automatically get emailed a replay. And that was a question last time that everybody was concerned about. They said, oh, Adam, it was always during my time that I was working so I couldn't attend. The only thing you miss out by not being at the live event is the live action between Sal, Justin, me, and Doug will be on there. We're gonna be answering all your questions and talking to you. So that's the only thing you miss out on. You still get all the great free information. If you register, it'll get automatically emailed to you. So make sure you go to that website, register. You'll get this no matter what. Again, so it's mapsprimewebinar.com. There's no limit to how many people can sign up it's online. So we hope to see you there. Also, you can find us all on Instagram if you wanna follow us all individually. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin. You can find me at Mind Pump Sal. Adam at Mind Pump Adam. And Doug has an Instagram page too. All behind the scenes here with the podcast including the recording equipment and what he does to edit us. You can find him at Mind Pump Doug.