 In this episode of Mind Pump, the world's top fitness, health and entertainment podcast, we answer fitness and health questions. And these are asked by listeners to actually go to our Instagram page, Mind Pump Media. They go under the qua meme. They post the question. We pick four of them and then we answer them. But the way we open the episode is talking about current events. We mentioned studies, we talk about our workouts. Sometimes we mention our sponsors. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give you a breakdown of this entire episode. Now the first 45 minutes is that intro portion that I just talked about. We started by talking about Greg Glassman. This was the guy that founded CrossFit, got himself into a lot of trouble for some insensitive tweets. And now has stepped down as the CEO of CrossFit. This is huge. Then we talked about farmer walks. This is an exercise a lot of people don't do because it doesn't work a specific body part, but whoa, the benefits you can get from doing this exercise. Then we talked about doing one exercise for a lot of sets versus doing a lot of exercises for few sets. So we talk about the benefits of that. Then we talked about blood type. Believe it or not, a certain blood type may actually have some protective mechanisms against- Talk about the negative, ow! Against the COVID and the coronavirus. Then we talked about asymptomatic transmission of COVID or as the World Health Organization now just said, that might actually be rare, which means we were locked up for no reason. Then we talked about the year 2020. What a great year it's been. Big fart noise. Which led us to talking about knowledge versus wisdom, what the difference is. Then Adam brought up a book that he's been reading, Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Canemann. Sounds like a very interesting book. And then Justin talked about drinking alcohol and how- Cheers. It calms him down sometimes and how we use z-biotics before we drink because the genetically modified bacteria in z-biotics, patented, breaks down some of the negative byproducts of alcohol. So you drink and the next day you don't feel like a turd. Anyway, z-biotics is one of our sponsors. You can get a discount if you go to zbiotics, that's the letter Z-B-I-O-T-I-C-S.com forward slash mind pump, you get 10% off your first order. And by the way, you can go there and just try three bottles. And I'm telling you right now, it will literally blow your mind at how effective it is at preventing the negative next day effects from alcohol. Then we got into the fitness questions. Here's the first one. This person wants to know if stomach vacuums are an effective core exercise. So we talk about stomach vacuums and their value. The next question, this person says, look, I'm trying to gain strength. Is it beneficial to stay in the three to five rep range for all the lifts or just for the main lifts of the workout? The next question, this person wants to know what popular exercises we think are a total waste of time. So we talk about exercises we think should not exist. And the final question, this person's been following our blogs and our information. By the way, if you go to the mind pump media page, there's lots of written information on exercise and fitness, good stuff. But they wanna know why some of our articles say things like the best ways for women to lose weight or how to eat if you're an ectomorph because it seems to counter our message. And so we explain a little bit about how we're using effective marketing to give people good information. We're sneaky. Also, we're in June, that means it's summertime. That means most of you are interested in probably burning body fat and getting leaner. So we decided to put our most effective fat burning and calorie burning program on sale. It's 50% off. The program is maps hit. Now hit stands for high intensity interval training. It's very effective at burning lots of calories in a short period of time. It's a short program, six week long. If you combine it with good nutrition, you will see significant fat loss in your body. It's done with weights so that you don't lose muscle. If you enroll in the program, you get all the exercise demos and videos and exercise, basically everything you need to follow the program. So here's how you get the 50% off. Go to mapshit.com, that's M-A-P-S-H-I-I-T.com and then use the code HIT50, that's H-I-I-T-5-0, no space for the discount. Can you do the, like the news thing? Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Breaking news, great glassman steps down from CrossFit. Wow. Did I not call that? I feel like I called that in the last podcast. You did, I think, were you the first one to call it? Yes. You were? I was. Dude, he's, I mean it makes sense. Yeah, that's like really the only move they had left. Yeah. To save some kind of face for the brand. It is, it is bad. Did you, now I went through and I read everything that he said and it was definitely insensitive, but wow, the reaction was strong. Yeah, and that's just kind of the state, the high alertness, like everybody's just so, like, feminist. You know what it reminds me of? Did you guys ever, I don't know, maybe you have Justin because your kids are getting older. What's that, what are those books like of the fifth grader or something about the fifth grader where he talks about growing up and being a kid in elementary school and then there's like a piece of old cheese on the black top and in the stories, if somebody touches the cheese, they have the cheese touch and nobody wants to go around them. What? Nobody wants to touch. It's a funny book, right? No, no, I haven't seen that. It's a great book for kids. You had me at cheese. Yeah. No, I haven't seen that. So I feel like Greg Glassman has the cheese touch right now. You know what I'm saying? I feel like in the story he touched the cheese, everybody just fucking ran. He touched the cheese. Yes. He's got cooties. Yeah. Nobody wants to go out. Bro, he got cooties, don't get near me. Yeah, what's the deal? So, oh, so speaking of gyms, I'm getting messages from people who are saying that they're going to their gyms and they're packed. That's what I'm hearing too. They're packed and nobody gives a shit about the regulations. They're just in there working out. I've heard the same thing. I love it. I mean, a part of me loves that. Well, it makes me happy because, being fit and healthy is so important for your health. It's so important for your health. What's ETA for Santa Clara? What are we, I mean, I see boarded up fucking gyms still, right? What's going on with us? I have no idea. You don't know? We're slow-motion. California's really dragging their feet on this whole thing. Well, the cases are spiking in California, mostly in LA. I know in Santa Clara we're actually doing pretty good. I know, that's why I'm wondering when or why have we not opened up our gyms here? I think that there's a criteria that they follow that hasn't been met. I don't know what that criteria is or even if it's realistic. What I find interesting is the, how much fear there was around people getting together. Don't have more than 10 people together. You can't go to church. You can't do anything. Everybody be, don't do it. It's so hypocritical. And then mass protests and they're like, this is cool. Let's all do this. And nobody's like really. Not even like just smashed into each other. And they're still keeping everything closed even though they allow, not saying that they shouldn't allow it. I'm just saying. No, but I don't know. Yeah, it is, it's weird. Yeah, like you said, with churches not even be able to meet up or I actually saw like a church where their members were outside and they were all like kind of spaced out but they were still trying to make it happen which is good to see. Yeah, well for some people that's a very important part of their life. And I think, you know. Community matters, man. We should be free enough to decide that for ourselves. I was reading the article that you sent over last night, Sal. I thought that was pretty funny was the halt on Hollywood right now with films related to cops and that they want them to stop all production. Oh my God. Stop all production on any movies or series that are being shot currently right now. It was an opinion article. And to rethink the message. So the TV show cops pulled off the air after I don't know how many years of being on the air. That's one of the longest running shows ever. Yes. Pulled off the air. I didn't know that. And then that was an opinion article in the Washington Times, okay. And it was calling for eliminating all movies and TV shows that have to do with police, which. Yeah, that's the article right there. Shut down all police movies and TV shows now. Yeah. Wow. What a dumb like extreme Marxist reaction. Don't people have no history? You know what's in the market? Okay, so there's a playbook by the way for Marxism. Part of it is erasing, not just erasing history but eliminating and creating more propaganda by eliminating things you disagree with completely. And this is kind of along those lines. Like what would get rid of all cop shows to do? It would do nothing. There's way worse TV out there. It's like really? Dude, we have TV shows and movies that show rape and children getting hurt and like terrible stuff. But cops, fuck it, we got it. Well, we learn from history. How do we learn if we're gonna like erase everything? Oh dude, you ever look at those, you ever see those old photos from the Soviet Union and from Nazi regimes where they would have like, so in the Soviet Union, what they used to do is if there was like somebody in the party or someone that they needed to eliminate, not only would they kill them, but then they'd go back and edit out the person's photos out of every picture that existed with them, take them out of existence as if they never existed at all. They used to do this. Yeah, dude, so if you're like a political enemy in the Soviet Union and they killed you, they would eliminate any mention of it. They would wipe you from history completely. Like you never existed at all. Wow. That's fucking crazy. Wow. Isn't that crazy? That is crazy. Dude, you're looking fit these days. What's happening? I'm a fitness guy, actually. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. No, what's going on? He's probably his under leggings. Well, I mean, you look fast. Under leggings. His long underwear? Yeah, yeah. I appreciate that though, so I don't see any ball hanging. Well, today I have plans to do a Turkish getup, so I'm in my kind of workout attire for our, we, you know, one of the things we, I think we went with like the most affordable or cheap grass when we first built this thing out. It fucking hurts. Oh, it tears you the fuck up, dude. So, and it's like 97 degrees DA. I didn't want to wear pads, so I'm wearing, you know, my long underwear, like you said, so I can protect my knees when I'm training today. Do you feel like better performance from having tight, long underwear on? You know what? I actually do like to squat it. I don't know if you've ever done that before. That's why I'm saying it. Yeah, you know, it does, it does, because they're so tight. The compression shorts is what Sal's talking about for people in compression pants. I do like, I do like the feeling of them when I'm heavy squatting. That's not the purpose of why I'm wearing them today. I'm wearing them today like I just told you, is if I'm doing walking lunges, Turkish get it. If I'm doing anything on our grass, I got to either be in pants or gonna do something for like my knees or just tears them, tears them up. Dude, one of my, it's not very good. Razor blade, yeah. One thing I used to do when I was younger, when I thought bench press was like the be all end all, I had to get stronger my bench press. I would always wear a slightly too tight t-shirt on bench day. I bet it felt good though. Yeah. It did. I had this one shirt that I always wore. I mean, it's like sleeves or knee wraps. I mean, similar concept, right? It was cotton. It's not really that big of a deal, but I did it. Dude, you know what I'm falling in love with right now? Farmer walks. Farmer walks. The best. Heavy farmer walks are making my arms grow. No joke. Just the heavy tension and holding them and then having to stay steady and- Not all the extra calories you're eating. Yeah. Yeah. That's not part of it. That's nothing to do with it too. No, you know, between farmer walks and then also like I've been, again, doing more. This has motivated me to do more work outside of my house. And so I've been, you know, doing a lot of digging and like moving of dirt with a wheelbarrow. I forgot how like taxing that is. I was like, God, man, I'm turning into a little bitch. Why? I get so exhausted after I'm done. I'm just like, oh, I need to rest. Dude, manual labor is no joke. Yeah, it's totally different. So right now, so Jessica went to go visit her mom in Nevada, right? So it's just me and the kids. During the day, my dad right now is, he's helping some people do some work in his backyard and kind of building out a patio or whatever. So my dad's like, hey, do you wanna take your son over here and he can help me throughout the day? And I'm like, absolutely. Because my kids, you know, I mean, partly it's my fault, but I don't do a lot of manual labor. So my kids have no experience with real manual labor. So I'm like, this is gonna be a good time. Yeah. So I brought my son over and my son's a hard worker. He'll help you, he'll work. He's not lazy, he's just not used to it, right? So I took him over there and I'm texting my mom and she's like, oh, he's really working hard. I said, yeah, and she goes, yeah, she goes, but it's funny because my dad has been working hard labor since he was nine. He's got arthritis up and down in his spine. He's got achy joints because of it. But he's got a motor. Well, oh dude. So she's like, your son will sit down, your son will sit down on the chair to take a break and then I'll tease him about it and he'll be like, your grandfather's still going. He'll stand up like, oh crap. So after they were done, right? I go there to grab them, it was like 4 p.m. And my son comes inside and I can just look at his face. He's tired. Bro, he fell asleep on the couch for like two hours, dude. I was done. This morning he woke up and he was all sore. Like, it's all weak, dude. See, it makes him appreciate. What are they building? What are they doing? So my parents' house in the back, they had a patio that my dad had originally built years ago when I was a kid. But it was time to redo it and he wanted to extend it and make it even bigger. So big planks of redwood and you gotta tear it down and do the whole thing. And so he's out there doing it and my son's out there trying to help and it's just crack. And then my daughter, my mom, because my daughter was there and she's only 10 so she can't help too much with my dad. So she was, my mom was teaching her how to make some of her favorite dishes. So my 10 year old, she knows how to make pasta with pesto. She was telling me all about it. She's making banana bread. And I'm like, yeah, this is great. It's better than school. When you send your son over there to do something like that, is that like a, you tell him, I just want you to go do this? Or do you incentivize him? Like, nothing. No, what? Yeah, no. Child labor. No, no, no. It needs to work. You know what? I talk about, I say, I love it when you guys contribute to the family. And I think it gives them a sense of, a little bit of a sense of pride. And, you know, I understand paying kids to do certain things. That's also a valuable lesson, but I don't want it to replace contributing and helping the family. Just to help. Yeah. Yeah, no, I get it. That's why I was just curious. I'm curious to how you presented it to him, right? Cause not every kid, you know, on a summer break or whatever wants to go help grandpa. Then they just turn into a little turd that's just like always expecting money for their efforts of everything. Yeah, that's, I'm always like balancing that out and trying to see if, you know, cause I do want to like incentivize them every now and then be like, you know, like this, if you do this for me, you know, you can earn 10, 15 bucks, whatever. And then, you know, have them actually like be incentivized by that. But other times I'm just like, hey, you got to do this because you're part of the family. Now have you got with lessons like that? Cause I know you both have implemented things like that. Is there a clear distinction between the two of them, the two kids, because you both have two on who's like the better saver and who's like just as soon as they make any money, do they spend it right away? Oh, that's a great question. You know what, both of my kids are pretty good about saving their money. They're pretty good. Like I'll say, hey, did you want to take your money to the store to buy it? No, I'm going to save a little bit more to buy something else. So that's a good question. Yeah, I think it will ever, he would like to spend it right away. I mean, that was like the initial reaction from him. Like when you get, yeah, and then he'd want to go buy some useless piece of plastic from like the dollar stores and, you know, bullshit. And then later on he started to see his brother and like how he was like saving it and stacking it up. And like he was- Then buy some cool. Yeah, and he's just like, oh wow, I need more, I need more. And he's the one actually asking me for more jobs because he's trying to catch up to his brother. It's a totally competitive thing. So that's cool. Yeah, so that's started to take off. Yeah, it's a great experiences or such a great way to learn for kids. I mean, you know, working with my dad, I didn't, I took it for granted as a kid, of course, because you just, oh, gotta wake up early in the summertime. That means they gotta wake up at five a.m. to go help dad work or whatever. And, you know, I was the guy that would clean his tool because, you know, he works with mud and concrete and cement and all that stuff. So, you know, if you get some dirty, I have to go out and spray with those. So it's like six, seven a.m. You know, and we'd be up in the city when it's for whatever reason, always freezing in the summer. And I, ah, my hands are, and then I have to carry things for them. And I kind of hated it, but looking back, a lot of my attitude towards work and, you know, some of the mental toughness that I think I'm gonna have. The character in grit. 100%. Yeah, those are such undervalued characteristics these days. You could tell when people don't have it, when they work and they just are, you know, for lack of a better term, wimps. Yes. You know what I mean? Absolutely. I remember I had a trainer once, and this was a wonderful lesson for the rest of my trainers, where, you know, you manage a gym and part of your job as a trainer, this is my personal opinion, but I think it happens to be right. Part of your job is also taking care of the gym. That's the equipment. That's your equipment. It's not just the porter's job to clean stuff. You as a trainer, this is the equipment you're using, you need to take pride in it. And so I had a trainer actually tell me that, like, I'm a trainer, I'm not here to clean stuff. And I said, wow, that's awesome. So you can go ahead and leave now. And go work somewhere else. I'm not gonna contribute. Yeah, yeah. I'm above that. Hey, one more thing too, about the workout that I had this morning, every once in a while I throw this, you guys ever do this where you're supposed to do, let's say 10 sets for a body part, like 10 sets for chest, but instead of doing three or four exercises, just do all exercises. I love to do that. Isn't that great? I love to do that. Yeah, I get such a good feel from that. Yeah, it's just like one of those things where it's just easy on your mind. It's like, I'm just focused on this. And I think that's an element too to working out. We talk about it every now and then in terms of the mindset going into a workout, that's a great way to really like focus in on one specific thing and then kind of bring that element back into the other types of workouts. Yeah, I noticed when I do that, like the first couple sets, by the third set, I'm actually stronger than the first tip, top couple. And then I get stronger, stronger. And then by the sixth set, I start to get fatigued and come down. And then the way I feel the next day is that there's a distinct feeling in my body. And I get really, really strong at that exercise when I practice it that way. So not saying it's the only way to work out, but it's one I think a lot of us, you know, tend to forget or whatever. Yeah. I read some good news, well at least for me. Oh good, I like good news. So this was, I talked about this a while ago. There were some speculations that certain blood types protect people from severe symptoms of COVID. Oh, is that true? More evidence. Really? Yes, type O. So type O blood may actually provide some protection against the coronavirus. Now is this just like a correlation they've made because statistically type O people have less deaths in comparison to other blood types or like how, I mean. They're all asymptomatic. No, well, there's a few now studies that they've done that keep pointing to that. And that's not the first time. I mean, blood types can definitely affect how your body reacts to certain diseases. So it's not like it's, you know, radically new or whatever. But yeah, apparently it's got, now I've also reading articles that are saying that the COVID or coronavirus is a blood vessel disease. Not like, not necessarily a respiratory disease. Oh, interesting. Because what they're finding is high instances of strokes and young people. Wow. Have you guys heard of the symptoms that some kids typically don't get symptoms? But when they do, they get this weird like swelling and redness in their hands and feet and in their face and eyes. They think a lot of the issues that some, so our friend, Dr. Jolene Brighton, when she got it, I haven't talked to her about this, but she would post about it. Her lungs were perfectly fine. They x-rayed them, no problems with the lungs, but she still had super low blood oxygen levels. So it all points to that this may be more of a blood vessel type disease and a circulatory disease than it is a respiratory disease. And they also, yeah, like eliminate, like the ventilators used to be like this high priority that we needed all these, and then all of a sudden, like they weren't using them in treatment. Yeah, I think when you get on a ventilator, the chance of dying is even high. It's like 80% percent. Yeah, like it was doing, yeah, the more harm than good. Crazy, right? Yeah, crazy. It was just weird. And then did you guys see the statement from the World Health Organization that's causing all the controversy? Yeah. They're saying that asymptomatic transmission of COVID is rare. So in other words, unless you're actively sick and have a fever, the statement was that you're probably not gonna get it from someone who's not showing any symptoms. So this whole idea of quarantine for two weeks is kind of silly then. Totally. Wow. Totally. So basically if you're sick, you should stay inside. Right. But if you're not, you probably shouldn't worry. It's kind of like normal rules. Yeah. It's like, can we go back to those? Yeah. You know, like, holy shit. Isn't that wild? Yeah. That that's kind of... I haven't even been following it at all. I mean, obviously, I forgot about that one. When the protests hit, it kind of just like disappeared on the news. Is it resurfacing? I mean, are we hearing more and more? I mean, cases are spiking right now, right? In some places, overall, they're still going down. But in some places, we're seeing, you know, some spiking. I can't help but like think. I was like thinking about just all the crazy madness that's happened this year, like, so far. And like, I remember we were up in Tahoe, you know, kind of springing in the new year. And the very first day, like, I almost killed myself. Oh, that's when you blasted your head on the sky. Yeah, I did. And it just went almost unconscious. Like, had this throbbing pain, like, for the next few days. And I'm like, am I in a simulation? Am I in a different reality now? Every, ever since then, the whole year. Ever since then, dude. And then Kobe died on my birthday. And like, there was wildfires in Australia that almost like burned the entire continent, you know? And then like the COVID, like, you know, Trump, like, I guess, you know, like his impeachment, you know, got disbanded, whatever. It was just like all these events, like just stacked, like back to back to back to back and then riots. And then here we are. What if, okay, I'm not trying to freak you out, but what if you didn't actually wake up? What if you hit the ice? And right now you're in a coma. You're dreaming this whole fucking thing. And then you're gonna wake up soon and Adam and Doug and I- It's like the pinch test. Like you'd think that like, I feel pain. I don't know, man. You know what I mean? I don't know. And what if we're standing over you, you'll wake up. You guys, you've been out for 24 hours. This whole thing happened. I'm just making all this up. It's all in my mind. Screw you. Get me out of your crazy coma. I don't like this reality. Sometimes I wanna go back. Sometimes I think it's, is it really that crazy? Or is it just the way news travels today compared to what it did just a decade ago? I mean- I think it's both. You think so? Yeah, I think that the part of the craziness is that news travels hella fast. That's what I mean. I feel like, you know, if we were to go back, like if we had like all the events- The news is the virus. Like the events that you just listed, fair, right? Those are all crazy things that are happening in 2020. But if you were to like chart them all out and then just go back a decade or two decades ago and pick a random year, would there be as many weird, crazy, shitty things that were happening in the world, we just are able to get access to it so much faster and inundated with news. How often do we make a rate? How often do we make things worse because of our just tremendous fear and hype and panic? 100%. Yeah. Well- Most people get their news from like Twitter now, dude. 280 characters. How the hell do you explain like unqualified people that haven't done any research that just throws shit out there and everybody breaks out? I love when we're like in a debate, like my buddies and I and my buddy sends a tweet over. Like- To add evidence? Yeah, this is your evidence? Cause so and so tweeted like- Date line. Really? Yeah. Dude, do you guys have a family member or friend who's the one that like when something happens in the world they obsess over it and text, text, text, text, text and freak out? Yes. That's what social media highlights. Those people who normally, in regular life, so here's normally what would happen. There's like a million chicken littles out there. Yeah, I have a group of friends, right? And there's the one person where something happens and they just obsess about it and eventually what ends up happening you just stop hanging out with them. You're like, ah, whatever, that guy's there. They're freaking out, I can't be around this too much. Too toxic for me. Well, that's what social media is. Those are the people that are crushing on social media. They have, you know what I'm saying? They'll say the scary thing and then it made me think a lot today about- Yeah, they get rewarded for it. So it made me think a lot today about the difference between knowledge and wisdom and we're in an interesting time. We have never in human history, ever, have we ever had this much access and this easy access to information at all. You know, when I was a kid, if you wanted to learn something, you had to go to the library and even there you were limited to how many books that that library had on whatever you're trying to learn. Well, right now I could literally, on my phone, which most people have, most people nowadays have a phone with access to the internet, I can go on there and not only can I access books on what I wanna learn about, I can access all the books, all of them, ever that have ever been written. So we have this incredible access to information which gives us knowledge, but it doesn't give us any wisdom at all. So I think a lot of the stuff that we're seeing is the consequences of knowledge without wisdom because wisdom, you need to have knowledge to be wise, but wisdom doesn't just come from information, it also comes from experience, it comes from listening to people who have wisdom. Spiritual practices are, I mean, that's where we historically humans have learned wisdom. And so I think a lot of this stuff that we see, and here's the deal, what is a lot of knowledge without wisdom turned into? It's like narcissism, it's self-importance. You know what it reminds me of? Okay, we all went through this. Every person in this room did. When you're growing up and you're a kid, right, you don't know much, you're just a kid. But at some point, you actually start to learn a lot of information, but you still have very little experience. Those are your teenage years. How do teenagers behave? They behave erratically. Like nothing's gonna happen to them. They behave erratically, they have outbursts, because they have a lot of information, all of a sudden they know stuff, but they have zero wisdom. So they say shit like, whatever mom and dad, I'm gonna move out, I can take care of myself. I know how much jobs pay. I know how much it costs to rent an apartment. I'm gonna, you know, that kind of shit. And you're like, you have no idea. They pissed me off, I'm gonna break his window. Well, someone like Daniel Cayman, which is a book I'm reading right now, Think Fast and Slow would, I don't know if he would disagree with you, but I think he would present it differently, right? So the way he presents it in the book, which he's absolutely brilliant, psychologist and economist and won the Nobel Prize. And he talks about how our brain operates on two different systems. And it alludes to what you're talking about right now. And it's not so much the difference of knowledge and wisdom, but more so, what operating system are you using when you make decisions? And most of us are working in that fast. And which is thing that our brain is naturally doing just on its own, like on auto. It'd be based off of our experiences, the things that we see that we take in really quick. And then you have this natural- It's just like predictive algorithms. It's like thrown at. And it takes a lot of self-awareness to be able to switch from that operating system to the more logical one, which is slow in process. The same thing that you would do to solve a problem. Like if I threw a multiplication problem at you, even one that's like 17 times 20. Okay, now, right now, when I say that number to you guys, if you're trying to figure that out, your brain automatically starts to switch over to the logical side. It starts to remember, when you learn multiplication in your head, you're starting to break that down, but it's a longer, slower process. That's the logical system in your brain. Then you have the other one, which is more reactive, which is like driving. Like you don't think about, oh, you gotta take this turn right now. You gotta think, how do I do that? You just do that. And so when we react to things in news, or we react to things that we're learning, a lot of times we're operating in that first system where we just, based off of our experiences, based off of what we've seen before, based off of the information that we've read before, our brain says, this is the answer. And it just, it will just guesstimate and it'll go in that direction. And it takes a ton of discipline and self-awareness to know, er, pump your brakes. How do I switch my brain over into the logical side? And most people just don't operate that way. Most people don't use that unless they absolutely have to use that. And the skill is when you have issues or things that are heightened or a lot of risk, right? With you saying something or doing something, being able to stop and not allow that first system to take over and to switch over into the second one. Well, it's hard too in these days where you get rewarded for like your first knee jerk reaction. You know, like you get all these people on your side, you know, for just like reacting and saying something that's gonna be- And the theory behind that is that they're, that's because everybody's operating in that system. And so it just confirms all their bites. Correctly, yeah. They all feel the same emotional reaction. They all saw the same thing. And so therefore they all coinc, right away jump to it. And so if you come out and react to that, tons of people jump on board right away because they feel the same way too. It completely eliminates the logical side out. Dude, this is why- Snaps out all that train of thought. This is why my absolute favorite demographic of people to train were people in advanced age. Now I'm not saying all people in advanced age are wise and self-aware, but a much larger percentage of them are versus younger people. And when I would train them, I would ask them questions. And you know, this is because over time, what you learn as a trainer and got one of the best lessons I ever learned as a trainer was how effective it was to listen because as I listened, I was better, I was more effective with my clients in terms of getting them to eat properly and getting them to train properly. I learned that through years of trial and error. And so without realizing it, I adopted this full, both of you guys have talked about this too. I adopted this philosophy of listening and that allowed me, when I would train older people, I would talk about a subject. You know, you talk to your clients all the time and with older clients, oftentimes the rest periods are longer, so there's more conversation. And I'd ask them things just to have good conversation. And because I learned to listen because I wanted to be an effective trainer, you know, indirectly or as a side effect, I would get this incredible wisdom. And so I talked to them about, and I started to realize why older people move slower. That's not necessarily because they can't move fast. That's sometimes the case. But if you really observe older wise people, they talk a little slower, they let things process, and it's not because they're slower, it's because they're wiser. No, they've learned to switch that other operating system. And many times what that is too is just as default because they've learned through experience, operating in the other system so much has not served them well. Reacting and just saying how they feel, even if they do feel that way, a lot of times may have got them in trouble. And so years and years and years or decades and decades of learning that, they start to wise up to your point and they get wisdom and they just go, okay, I may feel this way when Sal asked me that question because of all these reasons, but before I just react and say what I'm going to say, I'm going to switch out of that system, think logically, listen to everything he's having to say, process it. Yeah, process everything and then present my information. Dude, it reminds me, okay so, and I'll just take it back to fitness again. Think of the inexperienced trainer versus the experienced trainer. Somebody walks up to them and says, hey, I want to lose body fat, I want to do it, my goal is 30 pounds. The weight loss, the inexperienced trainer is like, no problem, we're going to cut your cardio, we're going to increase cardio, we're going to cut your calories, here's what we're going to, the experienced trainer is going to say, well here, let me ask you more questions or they'll answer a question by saying, well, it depends, it depends on the context, it depends on your history, it depends on how, because as an experienced trainer, you understand that the answer isn't just X or Y, almost never is it just X or Y, because of the experience you gain working with people and I swear, man, we are literally suffering the consequences right now. Really, look at the way people are reacting to, look at the way people react to anything. It's with a high level of arrogance and narcissism, a very low level of wisdom. Look at the way science sometimes is applied. Science is, I mean, one of the most effective ways to gain knowledge doesn't lack, or it lacks wisdom though, it's not supposed to have lots of wisdom, it's just supposed to provide lots of facts and knowledge, and this is why you get scientists who just do stuff without really thinking, should I, is this wise and what are the other implications? There's unintended consequences. That should be a conversation in any direction, is like, if I'm presenting this, what are the unintended consequences as a result of pushing this forward? It's just like the slowing down process is so necessary and that's why there used to be a council about that, like ethical practices within science and medicine and things like that. Nobody fucking talks about that anymore. It's just what can we do? Where can we go with this? Yeah, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got in terms of relationships was from an older client who'd been married for, I don't remember how many years, was decades, right? And they said, and we were talking about having issues and arguing with your spouse and back and forth and they said, what is your goal when you argue or have a conflict with your significant other? Is it to win or is it to become closer and work it out? And I'm like, well, what do you mean? They say, okay, well, you could win. There's a way to win an argument, but then what you're left with is an angry, resentful, distanced partner. The other option is to find out how to become closer and that may actually mean that you don't necessarily win the argument. Or agree even. Or agree. And I thought, wow, that's totally true because there are ways of arguing that will make you win an argument, but then what have you won? That's not much of an epiphany for you because this is actually when I get interviewed and one of the most common, the number one question I get asked when interviewed is how the hell do the four of us all work together? How did you have four type A alpha personality, entrepreneurs and then four get together and then not have conflict? And that's the reason why is because even when we have our most heated conversations, is the desired outcome is to draw closer together and to win collectively, not when the argument individually, I don't care if I'm more right or you're more right in the situation. I don't give a shit about that. I care that we learn together, we get closer to the right answer. And if that means your way was the more right way or mine, that doesn't matter. It's irrelevant. You know what that means? What that means is sometimes you have to go against your feelings. Do you know how fucking hard that is? I don't think people realize that because sometimes your feelings tell you, no, push back, no, you gotta win. No, that person said that hurtful thing, you gotta say something hurtful back. So what you literally have to do is you have to go against your feelings, which is hard. That's so hard because you're literally sitting there going against your feelings and it doesn't feel right because your feelings make you wanna do something. And when you go with your feelings, man, the surge that that provides, like the overall consuming feeling of a yes. The first step in that is recognizing that you have a bias that we all do and it's impossible to eliminate. Totally impossible. So that's the mistake that we make. We see this a lot going on right now, like that you're going to, like we're trying to eliminate bias. Like you can't, you have it, you have it. Everybody has it. Recognizing it and then switching over to the other system and thinking logically about it is the key and accepting and being okay with IM bias because these are my experiences. It's not your fault. That's the way the brain operates. It works that way. If it's been in situation one, situation two, situation three and all three of those situations have shown you something, your brain then downloads that information and that it's reality. So the key is to be able to know like, okay, no matter if we're going back and forth and I passionately disagree with you because of my experiences or how my brain is operating is recognizing that I automatically have a bias and can I logically think to see your side of this and then come together on something? And like you said, my goal is to come closer to an understanding and understand that I have a bias so do you, but I want to learn yours. I want to learn why your brain operates. Everybody has a different journey and it all started in a completely different spot on the map. And so it's like, it's really important to understand that everybody has a different perspective and how can we understand those perspectives a little bit more clearly. It absolutely and realize that when your feelings are heightened is when you are most easily manipulated and influenced most easily. It is very hard to trick or manipulate or fool somebody who's calm, collected and listening. It's very hard. It's super easy to do it to someone that's pissed off, afraid, especially people who are afraid. Oh boy. You can't see the gorilla on the basketball court. That's a great video. Yeah, that's exactly what we're talking about right now. I mean, the research on that's incredible. If you tell and that the example they're showing is that if the brain is focused in this area, right? And more often than not, it's working that first system. It's emotionally reacting, so it's in this. Something to be in your sight, you can be looking at it and still not see it. That's so fascinating. Again, and you're right because what your mind is doing constantly is it's creating a hallucination. It's interpreting signals and giving you what it thinks you need to see. It's filtering and making it easier. Yeah, and that's, here's the other thing too, is we can't eschew human behavior. We can't throw it out and think that we can, all of a sudden, completely change everything and organize things in ways that are like, I'll give you an example. One of the main reasons why those Marxist philosophies have such a terrible track record, by the way, it's 100% fail record throughout all of history. One of the reasons why it's so terrible is because it is completely opposite of human nature. What they try to do is they try to say, everybody needs to have equal result and we'll use all the force we possibly can to make this happen. It results in destruction. Now, what is human nature? Well, human nature is choices. Every time you make a choice, you are deciding something is better than the other thing. You're driving your car, you take a right. Why don't you take a left? Going right is better. You put on a shirt. Why'd you put that shirt on? Not the other one, because that shirt was better. So what does that look like? What does that ultimately look like? Well, it ultimately looks like we value certain things more than other things and we value people that give us or provide things more than other people. Now, what does that ultimately mean? Let's go down all the way down the line. It means that some people are gonna have more and are gonna be more valued than other people. Human nature, we're not hive mind, we're not bees and ants. We're humans, so that's the way it works. So let's stop forcing so hard or trying to force human nature to be different because it results in something terrible. Rather, we should understand it. Celebrate the differences. Understand it, work together. That's really the only way we've ever been able to progress. Well, you can't eliminate that because it's instinctual and it serves its purpose, right? Going back to explaining again, the system one and system two. It's like you need those quick. If you were always- It's all part of who we are. Oh yeah, and if you were always operating in two, you would never get anything done. If every decision you had to make, putting on a t-shirt, taking a left turn, right? Yeah, it was a slow process and you had to think about it and break it all down all the time. You would never get anywhere in life. So you rely on both of these systems. And so the idea is knowing that when you're at the greatest risk and you naturally are going to go to your instinctual side, how do I stop that? Because it's a high risk because this could be very damaging. Like for example, we'll go back to how we started this conversation with Glassman. Glassman did an instinctual knee jerk reaction. He was operating in system one, said some shit, right? That was high stakes because he just lost his company over it. That was a bad decision by operating in system one when he should have stuck in to paused and thought in system two- How are they gonna interpret this? Exactly, and that's why one of my favorite lessons ever in life and in business was learning desired outcome. And I try and teach this to anybody that I'm working with or developing. And that's like before you say, do or react to anything, especially when the stakes are high, is to always, no matter what it is. I'm talking about a conversation with your spouse, talking about having one with an employee, anything that has got a high risk behind it is what is my desired outcome? What do I want to happen from this? And a lot of times if you play out what you're thinking you wanna say or what you're thinking what you wanna do, many times it doesn't lead to your desired outcome. And you know that, you just don't stop to think about that. Like, oh, this is how I feel. So I'm gonna say this, okay, what is your desired outcome? Do you want X, Y and Z to happen? Because, and is that the greatest path to get there? Many times when you can ask somebody to ask themselves that, they will go, oh, you know what, you're right. If I do say that, and if this is my true desired outcome, I want this to happen. Do you know how many times I've changed my mind or changed my reaction based off of that? Every single time, almost every time I have a reaction and I stop and I ask myself that, it turns into, oh yeah, I guess you probably shouldn't say it that way. You know, there is a, there are some remedies to some of the downfalls of these systems. One of them is to understand individualism and to discard most forms of collectivism. Now what does that mean? That means that generalizing there's some value to it, but you always want to, when you look at people, you always want to look at them as an individual. Does that person represent a bunch of people or just themselves? Are there actions talking about them or does it represent a bunch of people? And at the end of the day, look, the smallest of all minorities is the individual. So if you can go down to that point and protect that and look at that, you'll protect every other group or minority or whatever. How about stressful conversations this way? All these conversations are so, are you guys finding yourselves drinking more and using more? Justin, for sure. I'm, I'm not the big... You're gonna roll me, right? Well, I'm not, I mean, you know me, I go to the grass, you know what I'm saying? That's my direction. So if I... Did you just say grass? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't heard it called grass. That's like such a 70, yeah man, go to the grass. That's the way, that's the direction I'm going. That settles me down more than having a drink or two, but Justin, I think would always go that way. Or I mean, am I right or not? No, no, you're not wrong. Yeah, I mean, I've definitely like upped my intake a bit and it's just mainly to take the edge off a bit, like just, it's just this overwhelming feeling that I'm just trying to kind of like, you know, wipe that out of my system, that energy just trying to like just chill and kind of get myself back to, you know, like homeostasis. But it's one of those things I'm monitoring because I could find myself, ooh, that does help to kind of take the edge off but then I'm like a little excessive on the weekend. No, I was gonna ask if you and Courtney kind of have, because one of the things I do notice about you, Justin, you're really good, like, well, I guess it's really good but it's a pain in the ass when I'm trying to get a hold of you. After we leave work around four or five by that time, you're normally pretty disconnected. I can rely on Doug, Doug's pretty much, he's there till midnight or one with me so he'll respond to the thread. Sal's hit or miss, you're pretty consistently not. Do you have like a routine that you have set up like as far as like, I just completely detach and decompress, like what does it look like? Yeah, I do, I've been really trying to make that a priority and I think everybody kind of needs to step back and kind of figure out like where their priorities lie. And for me, I've just noticed that I was on this pattern of checking my phone and then really just diving into all these like excess things that I need to accomplish and always, you know, not really like prioritizing throughout my day where I could accomplish it then versus when I get home and then I would just like kind of put it off and then take it all in and that would interrupt my time with my family and my conversations would be terrible with my wife and then my kids would be showing me things. I would just, you know, acknowledge but wouldn't, I wasn't present enough to really like see what was right in front of me and that really frustrated me. What a good man, that's very, very, very smart. You know, you talked about drinking, I have to address this. So one of our sponsors, Zbiotic, right? For listeners, no, no, Zbiotic is this probiotic that's designed to, you drink it before you drink alcohol. It's amazing. And it can, in the bacteria in this particular product actually eats or helps degrade or break down some of the negative byproducts of alcohol. So like you don't feel so crappy the next day and it's actually crazy, crazy effective. And one of the reasons why it's effective and this is the messages I've been getting is because they took a normal bacteria, the same bacteria you'll find in like Nato, which is a type of fermented soy, and they genetically modified it. So actually went in there and they modified the bacteria to when it's doing its job to produce this enzyme that breaks down the negative byproducts of alcohol. So you can't find any bacteria that does this. It's only when they genetically modified this particular bacteria. So people are like, oh my God, genetically modified this. Our one GMO product. Yeah, no, you know what, this is what I wanna bring up. My beef with GMOs isn't necessarily the GMO product itself. And this is not true for Zebotics. Zebotics doesn't use glyphosates or other shit like that. But when you have GMO like plants off, it's not the GMO plant itself, it's not the GMO corn that might be showing problems. It's the fact that that corn was modified to accept tons of herbicide. And it's the herbicide that the residue of that that may cause issues for people. So Zebotics doesn't, they don't spray anything with herbicide, there's no pesticide. It's just the bacteria, but it has been modified to produce an enzyme. It's very specific just to this product because again, it's their patented product that actually breaks down the byproducts of alcohol. And you, if you tend to like I do, feel crappy the day after drinking, this stuff is like magic. Well, I've done my own little experiments with it. I brought a few home for me and Courtney and you do the tampon thing that people are doing that's all that's popular right now. What the hell is that? Dude, okay, so yeah, I heard about this. This was some, it was even kids. It was like boys were doing this, right? At some school where they would take tampons that would put like rubbing alcohol and soak it in it and then they'd stick it up their butt and get fucking drunk. Wow, loaded. I feel like you'd have to get drunk first. That doesn't sound like a sober idea. I know, like who's the friend that started? Hey guys, like I got this idea. Or friend that helps you. I was like, wait a minute, guy. Hey, what did I say earlier about teenagers? Knowledge, no wisdom. You know what I mean? Well, operating that first system. Think about the things we used to smoke, you know, like banana peels and like dumb shit. I'm telling you, some kid with lots of knowledge is like, hey, you know you can get drunk through your rectal cavity. And he's like, we could just do this and then no wisdom, you know what I mean? I blame Jackass for that, right? That's where they've got popular. Before that, I had never even heard of anybody trying. I feel like that would burn the hell out of your butt. Oh yeah. I mean, that's right up there with huff and paint chips. You know, like that's stupid. Yeah. First question is from black t-shirt seven. Are stomach vacuums an effective ab exercise? Will they help make your belly flatter as some claim? Oh, the good old vacuum pose. Sure they will. Well, they're not an ab exercise, so let's be clear. You don't take a vacuum and put it on your stomach. No, don't do that. No, so it's not an ab exercise. So the abs, they attach at the pelvis, they attach up at the rib cage. And when the abs contract, they bring the rib cage closer to the pelvis, like a crunch. The muscles that you're working, when you suck in your stomach, that's what a vacuum pose is, right? So it's like, imagine you're at the beach and somebody attractive walks by and you want to make your stomach look flatter. So what do you do? You suck in your belly button a little bit. That's called the transverse abdominis, the TVA. And that muscle literally is like your body's weight belt. It literally cinches in and is like a brace. So if you've ever worn a weight belt and you wonder why it makes you feel more stable, it's because it's increasing core stability. Well, the TVA on its own will do that and it does it by pulling in. So if you make that muscle stronger, yes, it can, especially if you have a weak one, it can shrink your waist. A really weak TVA aside from producing low back problems and stability issues, remember you're standing. So gravity's pushing your organs down and then they're gonna kind of come out. And so strengthening the TVA kind of brings everything tighter. And I've actually measured this with clients. Typically I would have a client lose a quarter to a half inch around their waist when they would practice effective vacuum poses without getting any leaner. It was all because they got strong in that area. Women post pregnancy, this is a very important exercise for you because when you're pregnant, the TVA muscles, they stretch and atrophy to make room for baby. And when you're done and you have your baby, if you don't target this muscle, doesn't have a good reason to get tight again. This was one of those I had to explain a lot, especially with women who had just had a kid and came back and were really trying to get that flatness of the stomach again and were doing crunches for days and just didn't understand why didn't have the same response. And so to be able to regain that connectivity to the TVA makes a massive difference. And it is something that you can work on and reconnect and rebuild and get stronger again. Well, this is also a great time to point out how stupid corsets are too and waist trainers, right? So we haven't talked about those in a long time. I know that I think I saw a question not that long ago and we're like, oh wow, we haven't addressed that in a while. But when you wear those corsets or waist trainers, this is what you atrophy. I mean, you are creating an artificial TVA in a sense, drawing in your stomach. The problem with that is you weaken those muscles by wearing some of that. And same thing goes for the guys that love to wear their weight belt the entire time they work out, like all the time. Like it's not a good idea to do that. You wanna be able to train those muscles that draw the stomach in, not just for aesthetic reasons so you look cooler or look better or flatter stomach, but because that's your support system. I mean, I think it's 28 or 32 different muscles internally that it's made up of that wraps around the spine and works as a vacuum around the spine to support it. If you wear a corset or these waist trainers or even your belt tight all the time while you're working out, you start to weaken those muscles arguably some of the most important muscles in the entire body. It's so absolutely ridiculous. Yeah, absolutely. And it's not even just weakening. You wear a belt. You actually teach your core muscles to do the opposite. Of what they do normally because they push out against the belt. So the belt provides that stability. But when you don't wear a belt, the more effective way to build stability or the effective way to do it naturally is for things to kind of draw in and tighten up. It's funny because vacuum poses used to be very big part of bodybuilding in the early days. Bodybuilders would get on stage and they'd suck in their midsection and show their rib cage and how small their waist was. Yeah, you don't see that much anymore. Is that not like part of their pose? They're bringing it back in the new division, the classic posing. Yeah, so it's... Did you practice these when you competed? I did, but not like on stage, right? So like part of men's physique that it's not like a staple pose, but I understood the value of it, to be able to make... Because when I'm up there, like I'm keeping my core drawn in the entire time. And that takes... The more you practice that, the more natural it becomes to do that. So if I do a good job of training that, the transverse abdominis to be able to draw in like that and make my waist look smaller, that's only gonna make me be able to present better on stage because then I can keep that drawn in and tight while I'm also flexing my shoulders and my back and doing all my other poses. So I practiced it. It wasn't part of my routine as far as my posing routine, but it was absolutely part of my training routine. Yeah, if you wanna look at like a cool bodybuilding vacuum pose, just Google Frank Zane vacuum pose. He had this famous one with his arms behind his head and it was actually quite impressive. Next question is from Shrump836. When trying to gain strength, is it beneficial to stay in the three to five rep range for all of your lifts or just the core lifts? Okay, so let's assume that you're phasing your workouts. Okay, so let's assume that you go three to five reps, but then after a little while, you might go to higher reps so that you can not allow your body to plateau. The low rep ranges are good for maximal strength. Not all exercises though, lend themselves well to really low reps. So what I mean by that is like deadlift, bench press, squat, overhead press, those work really well for like the three to five rep range. Yeah, isolation exercises, not so much. Like curls and laterals and leg extensions and stuff like that. You lend themselves well because the, not saying that you can't do this, but most people lack the control, the stability and the form to be able to produce a good technique with heavy weight with like a lateral. If you do like three reps with a lateral, it ends up looking like a clean. Well, last time we talked about this like a year or two ago and a lot of people had confused a lot of people because then they thought that like we're saying that there's no value at all in doing like six reps of a bicep curl or doing some of these isolation exercises. There is value in it, but the point that you're trying to make is exactly that is most people when you're doing something like a lateral raise or doing a small isolation movement, you can't help but allow the dominant muscles to take over when you lift a really, really heavy load. So you just got to find, I think the key is finding a heavy enough load that you can still maintain and be in control. The problem is what people end up doing is they go to a heavy enough low that they can still perform the movement, but what ends up happening in the movement, they end the bigger muscles take over. I love to talk about the rear delts with this. This is like one of the things that I struggled with for a long, long time. And so I saw a lot of like competitors that I'd be helping with. When they go to train rear delts, it's really hard to not let your upper back take over the movement. The upper back is a much bigger, stronger, dominant part of your body than the little rear delts is. And so here you are trying to do a rear del exercise and the macho kid in me would want to keep increasing weight, keep increasing weight, but then now it's turned into a back exercise and it's not really a rear delt exercise. That doesn't mean that lifting heavy for my rear delts is bad or isn't a good idea. It's that when most people go heavy on those small isolation movements, they can't help themselves, but to allow their bigger, more dominant muscles to take over. So if you are gonna load those isolation exercises, you gotta be careful with can I perform the exercise or can I keep the movement focused on that small muscle the entire time? Cause you can load it just fine and find a really challenging five to six reps with those isolation exercises, but you can't let yourself get caught up and oh, I can add 10 more, 15 more pounds just cause the body can actually use some body English to get it through. Does that make sense? It makes perfect sense. And I rarely go lower than five or six reps for isolation exercises. Rarely. Like I'll do singles all the time for bench press, squat, deadlift, overhead press. No problem. I almost never do a curl for one or a lateral for one. It just doesn't lend itself well. Not saying you can't, but you gotta really, I mean, you gotta be perfect form. Without compensating at all. I mean, it's just difficult. I get what you're saying. I think there's a way to do it in terms of like picking the right load, but in terms of like, isolation exercise, the best value to those typically is a higher rep range. Well, we just gotta remember that. And it's funny cause in the intro we talked about the brain. The brain operates the same way as the body does. It's lazy by nature. So it is always gonna take the easiest path. So if you do a movement and you are trying to do it to work a small muscle, the body doesn't work that way. It's going to use everything it can to help efficiency. Yeah, exactly. It wants to be efficient. It's lazy by nature. And so you've gotta be at a pretty advanced lifter to be able to take a movement that is for a very small muscle and it's an isolation exercise and load it really heavy. And that's the reason why on the show we typically tell people not to do that. And that's what happened last, we had this conversation a year ago and then we got all these people that wanna come on and debate over. And it's like, nobody here is saying that you can't load an isolation exercise heavy and get benefit from it. It's that the average person doesn't know how to delineate from their body being lazy and taking the easy path versus the right one that's gonna give them the best bang for their buck. Next question is from Andrew Beth. In each of your opinions, which popular exercise movements do you think are actually useless and a waste of time? You know, I'll tell you why this is a tough question because in the right context with the right application, all exercises have value. So I'm gonna kind of change it a little bit because if it's done the right way for the right person, the right context, any exercise can have value. So let's talk about popular exercises that most people get no value out of because it's the wrong context and the wrong application, right? I think a lot of these machines a lot of times for most people tend to be a waste of time. The inner and outer thigh machine or whatever you wanna call them, the bad girl, good girl machine. That's the first one that comes in mind for me. Yeah, oftentimes people, they're using them wrong, they don't need to use them, the context. It's just, you're kind of wasting 15 minutes sitting on that machine. There's things that are way, way more effective for your body. Yeah, I've heard some people try and argue it in terms of rehab, like to get the knee to track better, there's an exception to every rule, right? Exactly, that's how to bring that up. Right, no, it's a great point and there's not a single exercise that we can name that somebody can come back and argue and say, what about this situation? Well, yeah, that situation. But so I'm gonna try and pick something that I see a lot and I would say is a waste of time for probably 90% of the people that I see doing it. And it's like butt kickbacks. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so glute kickbacks or what, butt kickbacks, whatever you want, very, very popular exercise. People do them all the time in the gym. They do them because you can feel it in your butt, but I see them doing it, you know, 15, 30 plus reps of this all day long. That exercise is probably one of the biggest waste of time that I see most people doing. You get far more benefits doing a loaded exercise for the glutes like a hip thrust or like a squat or like a sumo deadlift. Those, if you wanna grow your butt and you're doing cable kickbacks and that's like a staple in your routine, unless you are literally using it as a primer before you go into one of those big lifts that I just named, it's damn near a waste of time. I don't know how popular, but I've seen this in every gym and it insults me every single time I see it. And that's, you know, over at the assisted pull ups and then pushing their foot down against the, yeah, against the weight that's supposed to then elevate you up and relieve you of your body weight on some level, but they're using it to just push and extend their leg down. I wanna slap you in the face. It's like a single leg press that they're using it for. Yeah, it's not even that. Straight down. Single leg press is way better. No, no, no, it's like they're doing an extremely ineffective version. Ineffective, yeah, I just, I can't even wrap my brain, hurts my brain and I just want everybody to stop doing that. Yeah, I agree with you on that. I think that one's a terrible one. What's that one chest press? It's like a chest press where they'll squeeze a plate and then they'll press it. Oh, the Sven press. Sven. Sven. Okay, Sven press has some applications sometimes. 99% of the people I see doing it, I don't understand why. It's a total waste of your time. You're squeezing your chest. You don't need to press anything to do that. You can just push your hands together. It reminds me of cry to kid part two, right? Where he's like doing his little like, meditate and then he breaks the glass or ice. Yeah, ice, my bad. Next question is from Areson Driscoll. You've talked about how some trendy ideas are actually BS, such as women's specific workouts and diets, yet the Mind Pump blog posts lately tend to be titled along the lines of best ways for women to lose weight, how to eat if you are an ectomorph, et cetera. Is this just for marketing or has your opinion changed? Oh, the beautiful dance that we have to find. So I picked this specifically so I could kind of break down the strategy. So the overarching reason why we do Mind Pump, the main purpose behind it is to counter all the bad information that's out there and provide good, accurate, actually helpful information. As trainers, we saw how damaging the fitness space can be because it is, it's full of just a lot of terrible stuff. We also come to it as people working out ourselves when we were kids. We saw how much damage it did to our clients. So we wanted to beat it. Now here's the problem. The problem isn't because there isn't good information that's out there. There's always been good fitness information. The problem is nobody reads it or looks at it because they don't get any attention. They suck at it. They suck at the marketing piece. They suck at the getting out there and getting people to pay attention. So in order to beat people, we have to beat them with fire. We have to fight fire with fire. So if we do a post that says best ways for women to lose weight, you better believe in the blog we're gonna break down how there really is no difference between men and women. We're gonna educate you. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to use marketing. Proven tactics that work. To get people's attention so that then we can deliver the right information. This is a very, very effective strategy and I don't think we could beat the excellent marketers out there unless we get people's attention and we have to. Well, this is unintentionally turning into a similar conversation for me at least that this is an example again of system one and system two and then while the brain works is everybody who sees these ads, if we were to come at them logically, asking them to operate in system two in a Facebook ad, nobody would click on it. Very small percentage of people would see that come in their feed and then their brain switch over to that logical way of thinking. It doesn't resonate. It doesn't and so the idea is for them is to catch them in that first systematic part of the brain where they are just reactive. Oh my God, I wanna lose weight. Oh my God, I need to do this. And so they- She looks like me. And then in the blog or in the episode we get them to switch over into the second system where they can think logically about it but we can't do that in a quick snippet that's five seconds in their feed. You gotta, we gotta play to the knowing that that's the way the brain operates and that that's what's gonna get their attention. Then when they grab it, they download it, then we can get them to switch over into the other one and think logically about the information. So I'll give you guys, I'll give you a great example of how I've used this in the past. So in the past, I would communicate to clients who all they care about is how they look, all they're focused on is losing weight, all they care about is what's in front of the mirror. Now as a trainer, I understood that this was a problem because when you're driven by that, you end up having unhealthy behaviors. You end up eating in a particular way that's damaging, you end up training yourself in a way that's punishing yourself and you get this on the wagon, off the wagon type of behavior. So what I wanted to communicate to people is, look, rather than focusing on how you look, let's focus on how you feel, let's focus on your health, let's focus on taking care of yourself instead of hating yourself. Now that's all logical. You can't do that day one though. No, it's all logical, but it's not gonna come across, I'm not gonna be effective to someone who just wants to look a particular way. So what I did is I changed how I communicated a little bit and this is what I said. Well, you can definitely focus on how you look, but here's what'll happen. If you focus on how you look, your eating habits and your exercise routines will eventually make you look bad because you're not really listening to your body. If you focus on your health and how you feel, the side effect of that is you'll look better. Now what did I do? I took with the person, and by the way, that's all true, I'm not lying. I took what that person was most motivated by and I used it to get them to understand how to do the right stuff. Now here's what ends up happening. I get the person who, all they care about is how they look. They're listening to me because I convinced them that if they listen to their body, take care of themselves, they'll look better anyway. Through the process, they start to realize this is the better way to be. I actually should care about myself. I actually should listen to my body. So when we're looking at the fitness space, it's like, okay, how do I take eyes off of that terrible individual over there who's promoting horrible, unhealthy behaviors? How do I get people to go from there to what we're saying? It's like, how do I beat the person that says lose 30 pounds in 30 days? Do I say, hey, lose 30 pounds in 12 months? Like, that's not gonna work. It just isn't gonna work. So I gotta fight fire with fire, bring them over and then use effective communication to communicate what's really good for you, what really is gonna work. And I tell you what, it's the reason why Mind Pump has achieved the level of success that it's achieved is because we're getting good at that strategy. Look, Mind Pump is recorded on video as well as audio. So if you like listening to our podcast, try watching the podcast. Go to YouTube, Mind Pump podcast. It's our channel. Every episode is video recorded, and it's easier to share that way as well. Also, if you wanna communicate with us and you have any questions or opinions or you just wanna tell Justin he's handsome, you can find us on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin. You can find me at Mind Pump Sal. Adam at Mind Pump Adam. Oh, and by the way, Doug has a page, Mind Pump Doug. And he posts all the behind the scenes podcasting stuff. So all you tech people out there that wanna learn the ins and outs of podcasting, go check out Doug. There's your guru. At Mind Pump Doug.