 Our first caller is Louise from Florida Louise. What's up, man? How can we help you? either guys so I'm actually calling because I needed your help with something I Form first of all, I want to thank you guys for everything that you do I actually formed part of the coach the coaches Group with NCI and mine pump and I'm really grateful for everything that you guys have brought to To the table in the in the last couple of sessions Now my question basically is regarding my own personal fitness journey, so I'm a really big fan of advanced calisthenics and gymnastics So I started off with gymnastics learning handstands front levers back levers iron cross all these more advanced technical moves But I'm also a fan of aesthetic So it was very hard for me at the start trying to combine these because I would basically do a body building routine every single day With a calisthenics gymnastics routine and my body just really took a toll Everything changed once I started using anabolic and instead of the trigger sessions I did light calisthenics handstand skill sets in my days off and it all was very Beneficient very helpful and I was able to get both the aesthetics and the skill improvements with calisthenics Now my problem is now. I'm done now that I'm done with anabolic I want to go into more of a strong man or a powerlifting type of program But I'm not too sure how to incorporate Calisthenics with that because I also don't want to lose the abilities and the skills with all these gymnastic movements How would you guys approach that? Yeah, that's a great question. Really good question first off Thanks for for for saying what you did about NCI. That's been a really good experience for us working with Great coaches and you know, we've gotten great feedback from it. So I appreciate that now Here's a deal with what you're talking about You want to understand or consider that learning a skill Takes a lot more effort and practice than maintaining a skill. So for example, so maybe a silly example But I think it illustrates what I'm saying Learning how to ride a bike takes a lot of practice and a lot of effort and then keeping the skill of riding a bike For the most part if you write it here in there, you'll probably keep it now You're talking about as you know calisthenics at a pretty high level But it also sounds like you've been doing them for a very long time. I think if you want to maintain your ability Just practice it on a regular basis that don't do it as a workout But rather just on a daily basis Practice the skills that you don't want to lose and that should be enough to prevent you from losing those abilities too much Now you won't be as good as you would be if you Train them hard all the time but if you're doing like power lift or strong and then you're practicing the calisthenics on a daily basis when I say practice I mean literally it's not a workout. You're practicing the skill. You're getting up on the bar You're making sure you could still do the movement. I think if you do that on a regular basis along with Strong or maps power lift. I think you should probably be okay. I I actually really like how you're doing this I mean, I think this is probably the right direction that it I mean It all matters to like how much of the genastic skills that you still want to be good at right? And I think if you want to keep them at the level that you're at which just sounds like a pretty high level I think your strategy is actually pretty good And what's kind of neat about all the programs is most all that at least all the ones I can think of right now top of my head We've built them with these, you know, you have your foundational days And then you have these, you know and strong for example their work sessions And so I would just drop my work sessions and I would do my calisthenics there instead so you could follow strong and basically do the same thing that you did with anabolic and I think you would see great success I mean, I love what you do and by the way too Okay, and I would love to see you do strong and do that But when we wrote these programs, we did write them to where you could run it back So you don't necessarily have to I know obviously it's Financially beneficial for all of us for you to go through every single program But the truth is they've been programmed in a manner that you could run anabolic multiple times You know one after one after another and be fine because of the way that we phased it So nothing wrong with how you how you're training right now at all But if you do want to move into something more like strong or power lift I would just take the off days and I would incorporate my gymnastics. Yeah, again, I want to echo that You know in terms of like how you're structuring it. I like However, I wanted to kind of pose another sort of option Only because I know some of these movements are like super intense, right? So a lot of a lot of times they they devote all of your effort your body gets really taxed sounds like you got Taxed doing it that way What if you flipped that right? So you take anabolic and you do the trigger sessions in between your skills only because if that's your goal at the time So you can kind of you know really hyper focus on You know building up that skill, but also like getting the recovery the the hypertrophy benefits of the trigger sessions in between You know trying that as well if if that's a little bit less taxing, you know more moderate intensity You know giving that a go. Yeah I think the bottom line to understand and you know, this is a coach working with clients What they do the most of is where they're gonna gain most of their I guess benefits or results, right? So if you do if if endurance training takes up the majority of your time then most of your Progress is gonna be connected to endurance if most of your training is you know devoted to strength or power or Hypertrophy that's where you're gonna see most of your of your results So if you want to continue to improve at calisthenics You're probably gonna have to make that the cornerstone of your workout but if your goal is to Improve your aesthetics more than your calisthenics skill But you just want to be able to maintain some of those foundational skills Then the path that you're on is is I am I in my opinion perfect, you know you follow one of our programs and then just practice those calisthenics on a regular basis because it's the practice that Maintains the skill now if you want to get better at it. It's not necessarily gonna work But honestly if you're if you're good enough at those calisthenics to the point where you could a few times a day Hop up and practice a few moves, you know Get on a handstand and hold that and come down nothing too super intense But just practice it throughout the day just doing that your skill will probably maintain pretty well But that's there's always a give-and-take with training always He could do a 2-1 also like with like anabolic the way that's structured You could go with two two days of foundational one day of gymnastics and then actually do the trigger sessions, right? Right, so there's I mean for sure that where you're the what you're doing I think is is great and you can play with that and I think and you could actually Change throughout the program as you're going through like if you feel like okay I'm doing more than enough gymnastics you could scale that back to Sal's point and do more of the bodybuilding stuff So I mean I think you actually get the concept and I think that almost every program we have is Very easy for you to just drop a day of Strength training because most the program the only thing that would the program I would tell you not to do with what you're doing is split because split we break up the body parts and then it's so bodybuilding Focus doesn't give you too much. Yeah, and you're also going to end up sacrificing a muscle group If you do that where all the other programs are mostly full body So you can literally drop one of the full body days off and do a full gym Well, even yeah performance was really set up So you have those you know core foundational days, but in between is mobility But you know, there's room there to add in your skills So you maintain those skills for your specific sport and you just want to structure it in a way where it's kind of moderate To low intensity, but you're drilling You know those skills so if you can do that within the gymnastic realm, you know That's totally not one more thing to keep mind of Luis if you're building muscle and gaining weight that will make your calisthenics More challenging and it will likely reduce your skill because you know when you're lifting weights if you get bigger You're fine. It isn't really changing anything, but when you're lifting your body Now you've just made that exercise more challenging and the shape of your body has changed and the leverages have changed a little bit So keep that all in mind, but it's it's not that big of a deal You could always go back to what you were doing before if you really miss easy to lose muscle I wanted to really thank you guys one of the great benefits I got from doing antibiotics and the skills Days on my days off was that exactly that my weight was basically around the same I was eating a pretty high amount of calories, but my body composition completely changed I think I benefited so much from that that routine because before before tackling and doing antibiotics I was doing basically what Adam was just saying I was doing a Bodybuilding routine five six times a day and on those same days where I would work out I would do a 30 45 minute much skill session and my body was just hurting. Yeah too much By the way, when you say antibiotics just for the listener. He's he's talking about maps and a ball Like you're on steroids when you run that program That's why it's named maps and a bollocks. So think thanks Louis. By the way, do you have maps strong or maps power left? Do you have you the one of those programs? I? Don't have a strong How is how's this split on strong? Is it similar to anabolic? Yeah, like a three-day a week. Yep. Yep very similar So we'll send it over. We'll send that over to you. Thanks for calling awesome. Oh, thanks guys. No problem You on the inside guy Yeah, I really enjoy these coaches and trainers that we get to You know I when we all ran gyms and stuff it was one of my favorite things to do was to train Coaches and trainers and you know, it's we haven't done that obviously because we have a podcast So it's great to do this and work with people on the front line I actually enjoy that more than training That was why I was saying why I was quick to take the fitness manager role was I was actually kind of burnt out of training Clients ten clients a day was excited to actually train professionals. So for most of my career That's what I spent most my time doing was actually coaches Yeah, but you know again It's like when you design your routine a big mistake is to try to do everything so you can get everything and lose nothing And you are going to over tax your body and you'll end up with less of everything Your best bet is to prioritize one type of goal Make that the cornerstone your routine and then supplement that and then it may change and that's okay Yeah, and fluctuate it like so like do a different focus for a while and then come back to it You know the main goal that you have but you know that way you keep from plateauing. I love what he's doing though I mean, I think his strategy. Well, he's obviously a trainer. He knows he has an idea Yeah, no, I mean when he was laying out what he had done is great structure. Yeah, no There's nothing and there's nothing wrong. That's why I wanted to say too There's nothing wrong with you running if like you got shredded you look awesome You could still do your calisthenics. You're living the program. Fuck you could run it back But I'm glad you brought up the point to that, you know He's gonna lose something if he keeps building right because it sounds like he still wants to keep building Oh, you try try doing a you know, uh handstands and you know iron cross or whatever the stuff He was it with when your legs got bigger? Well, we got to grow with it with your skills You know, we talked so much about the whole, you know Astagrass and then the you know squat and scroll thing like as I get bigger and bigger It becomes really difficult for me to sit comfortably down in that position. So there's definitely a sweet spot of Getting bigger and still keeping my mobility. You know, yeah, Justin's astagrass squats are like so short range of motion now because his cakes are just Yeah, it's easy