 In this episode of Mind Pump the World's Top Fitness, Health, and Entertainment Podcast, we talk about the most important thing you can work on to accomplish your fitness goals. The most important thing, we talk about your mindset. Now, what we do is we actually break it down into five key components. There are literally five ways you can change your mindset for incredible success. And we give you the counters, we give you the mindsets that most people have, and the mindset that you need for long-term success. Now, this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Legion. Now, Legion makes some of the best performance enhancing supplements you'll find anywhere. They have amazing protein powders, they sell creatine supplements, pre-workout supplements, and much more. Now, the reason why we work with Legion is they're transparent on their labels. They tell you exactly what's in the bottle. Everything is third party tested, no artificial sweeteners. 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All you have to do is want to get really strong and develop a good amount of muscle and boost your metabolism. That's what happens with this program. There are a lot of unconventional exercises and techniques in this program, so it's not like your traditional bodybuilding workout. It might be just what your body needs to get back on track. Again, it's 50% off. Here's how you get that discount. Go to mapsstrong.com, that's M-A-P-S-S-T-R-O-N-G.com and use the code Strong50, that's S-T-R-O-N-G-5-0, no space for the discount. Easily the most important thing, the most important factor, this took me a little while to figure out, too, as a trainer. Is that your wearing pants? No. The most important, the most important factor for success, probably for any success, but we're talking about fitness. That you wear pants. For fitness, again, no, you can do it without pants, is mindset. It's all mindset. That's pretty important, too. I mean, you have the road map that you take, there's the tools and the ways that you train your body and how you feed yourself and the different techniques and the knowledge that comes along with that. That's all so important, but it's not even close to as important as mindset. I've witnessed clients with far less knowledge and even far less instruction do much better than other clients who had less of that stuff, but just had the right mindset and attitude. I do think that there's a bit of a misconception out there, and I know I believe this when I was younger, that mindset is like, you just have it. You're just born with a mindset or whatever. That's a practice. You could totally develop it and completely practice it. I remember clients early on that I would get, and I didn't realize till later how important this would become when I would interview or talk to a potential client on evaluating, do they have the right mindset for us to have success? At the beginning, as a trainer, you take on anybody and everybody. Yeah, anybody and everybody. Yeah, negative, positive. Doesn't matter. It's like, if you're willing to train with me, I need hours to fill and practice. You take everybody on. Later on in your career, you start to become a little more picky about what clients you choose to work with, and this was one of the things that I would absolutely pass on somebody if I thought they didn't have the right mindset, because I knew if you went into this with me already either negative, skeptical, you were going to challenge everything that I was going to teach you and show you. I knew that the likelihood of us having any sort of success was really low, and you're a direct reflection of my skill set as a coach and a trainer. Yeah, well, that's the thing. I think this really kind of highlights where you are as a trainer in terms of how seasoned you are, like how you can recognize how to deal with somebody coming in with a certain type of an attitude, with they already have an expectation they're coming in with either just completely pouring into that expectation or steering it and guiding them and presenting things one at a time that you're not going to overwhelm them. You're just going to present them exactly what they need to hear and exactly what they need to do for that moment. Yeah, well, what's funny is that the most successful trainers, and as measured by the long-term success that they provide their clients, so I think a lot of times people think a successful trainer takes a client, gets them to lose weight or whatever, and then that's successful. No, a truly successful trainer is one that, yes, helps them do that, but then that person never gains the weight back or never goes back to where they were before. They've progressed, they've done it in a permanent way, and then they can maintain it on their own. They don't necessarily need a trainer to work with all the time. The big difference is, and this was even with myself, later on in my career, I stopped training so much on technique and form and what you're doing. That's all important, but I placed more of my focus on working and training the mindset of my client, and I became far more successful with my clients. There's a big, I guess, misunderstanding or misconception with the right mindset for fitness success, and the fitness industry does a phenomenal job of perpetuating this misconception, actually make you believe that this falsity, and that is that the right mindset is the hyper-motivated, super type A, like I'm going to just do everything to get to my goal type of deal, that is actually not the winning mindset. That'll give you some short-term success, don't get me wrong, but that's not the right mindset, but the fitness industry actually markets to that. They market to that. If you have this bout of motivation, then they capture you and they really don't care about your long-term success, and so we constantly think that people who have success in fitness are people who are just motivated, for example, all the time. Well, it's great when you do get a client like that. It's fun. It's like, wow, they're really picking up on what I teach them, they're applying all these techniques, and they're kind of taking this home with them and doing all the work themselves. That's great, and every now and then, you'll get one of those types of clients and it'll be great, but for me, I had to learn how to kind of pull myself back because even for me as a new trainer, I was always trying to then get somebody through these workouts, get somebody through all these exercises to make sure they got value from me. My value was in the fact that I could put them through these workouts and I keep progressing them forward. Instead of what I learned later on, it's about explaining everything and really educating the client through the whole process so they can really understand what we're trying to accomplish and then they can then apply it themselves, which is going to carry them even further. Right, so I'll start with one that I remember when this occurred to me, it was like one of those epiphanies that you have where you're just like, oh, this makes perfect sense. I was hiking up in the hills one day, years ago, and I'm hiking these hills and a few runners would run past me or running towards me and passing me in the opposite direction. I'm a trainer, I understand biomechanics and movement, and I'm sure you guys do this as well. When you see people doing something, it's hard for you not to identify movement pattern issues and muscle imbalances. It's just the way that we're trained. I'm seeing these runners and every single one of them had just horrible mechanics. I was seeing pronating ankles or knees caving in and just forward shoulder and just all these different things that I know cause injuries and problems. I'm also familiar with how running causes injuries every single year. It's one of the number one causes of movement related issues in America is actually people running. I'm watching these people run and I'm like, gosh, man, this is terrible. Why are they doing this? Then it dawned on me. When people think to themselves, I'm going to go run. The goal is not I'm going to go learn how to run well. The goal is I'm going to run until I get really tired. When someone says I want to lose weight, let me go run. They're thinking I'm going to run until I get really tired. It has nothing to do with the form or technique. Then I took that and applied it to the most effective form of exercise, especially in modern times, which is resistance training. And I thought, how many people go to the gym and think to themselves, I'm going to get my quads and my glutes really sore rather than thinking I'm going to go perfect the technique of these movements that then result in well-developed quads, well-developed glutes. Well, I think that's how most people head to the gym. I mean, I did for many years is you associate sweat and soreness and how difficult and failure in the gym as a good workout. So I think many people look at their workout as, I mean, remember clients, how many clients did you guys have that would tell you, I could have done more or I can still have time. Can we do more? Or they would come in after you told them not to. You say, this is your routine three days a week. I just get insecure about that. Like, oh, man, I drill hard enough. I know. And it would have put you in a weird position as a trainer because you see your client coming in extra days after you've told them not to. And then you feel like, God, do I literally have to crush this person in their workout just to get them to listen to me and not show up? And even though I know that's not what's best. It's such a widely believed myth. It's a totally what. So let me ask you guys, I already know the answer, but I'll ask you guys anyways, is resistance training, especially the most effective exercises like squats and deadlifts and overhead presses and rows and all that stuff, do those require a certain level of skill? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Right. So now let's take this and let's just move this focus from resistance training. And let's move it to something else that's physical that requires skill basketball. Okay. Imagine if you went out to play basketball, never played it before. And rather than learning how to dribble, learning how to shoot, learning how to move and run with the ball, you just go as hard as you possibly can. Because you're thinking, I'm just going to get a workout. You're not not only are you going to be ineffective, you're probably going to hurt yourself. And there's a limit to the effectiveness of the workout of basketball. When you don't understand the technique, you don't understand how to dribble, you don't understand how to move properly. Well, the same thing is true for exercise in the gym or at your house. Look at it as a skill. So rather than going to the gym to hammer a muscle, think to yourself, I'm going to go practice a skill. Now both of those train your body, both of those give you a good workout, but they both result in a difference in terms of results, especially long term. Going to the gym to just try to work out, much higher risk of injury. You're gauging your success based off of soreness, which is terrible. If you go there to treat the exercise like a skill, you're training properly, your technique is good, risk of injury is much lower. And you end up getting better and better at the skill of those exercises, which then gives you better results as a result of that. I've always liked thinking of exercises like that as I'm practicing a skill and sharpening a skill, especially with that analogy, thinking that game day is something that you're leaning up to. Even throughout the week, if I'm playing a sport, I'm practicing and sharpening my skills to improve and then display those skills come the event. I'm not trying to play the event every single time I'm there practicing. So that intensity is something that you've got to pay attention to. It really is going to benefit you way more substantially if you think of it more as I'm sharpening my skill, I'm honing in, I'm frequently doing these movements at maybe a lower intensity, but your body is going to respond so much better if you have that mentality. One of the things I think that's really challenging, and I don't know if you noticed this, Sal sent over this episode idea, this morning, like, Hey, let's do this episode on mindset, and he wrote out some notes on it. And there's a common theme on the five keys to having the right mindset that you wrote out. And you'll notice there's a pattern and we're talking right now about the difference between practicing versus working out. But if you go down the list of the five that you listed off that we're going to go over, they all actually provide results. It's just one of them is short term results, and the other is long term results. And that's the part that is deceiving for a lot of people having the wrong mindset going into working out and exercise is, you know, if you do, you know, go balls to the wall into the gym, and you weren't training at all, your body will, it's novel, it will change, it will adapt. Better than nothing. Right. You'll burn calories, you're lifting weights, you weren't lifting before, you might build a little bit of muscle. And so you may, you may actually get this false signal that you are doing the right thing. And there's a common theme amongst all these other ones that we're about to cover. They're all like that. Every one of them, the wrong mindset leads to short term results, leads to results. You're still going to get results with it. They're just short term. And then the opposite side, the right mindset, you get not only the short term results, but you get the long term. Right. And the other part too is that doing it the wrong way doesn't give you faster short term results also. Right. So that's the other thing to consider, because you may be thinking, well, I don't, you know, right now I just want fast, I just want fast results. So I'll worry about long term later on. You'll still, you'll still get there faster by having the right mindset, going to the gym and practicing movements rather than going to the gym with the mentality of just sweat, burn calories and get sore is going to give you better results all the way around. First off, the way you develop your body is going to become more balanced. You're going to be able to squeeze out the, the true potential of some of these amazing exercises. And you, of course, you're not going to hit a hard plateau, because a poorly done squat done with high intensity is not going to give you nearly as good a results as a well performed squat at a low intensity. No joke. You can work out hard, do it wrong. You're not going to get as far as if you do it right, but do it easier. No joke. So this mindset is also something that believe it or not, when you go to the gym, you're going to enjoy yourself a little bit more because you don't feel like you're, you're dying every time. Oh yeah. You don't want to collect all these bad habits along the way. I mean, what's the point of that? You're going to find yourself, maybe you get, you know, your, your physique is going to change. You know, you get all these false signals that, you know, progress is happening. But now you're going to have to undo all these learned habits that you've just established, trying so hard to get there quickly. And so we're just trying to kind of, you know, step back and really assess what kind of plan you have in place that's going to, you know, be something that's sustainable. Right. So lesson one is practice movement. Practice. Don't go to the gym looking for a good or hard workout. Go to the gym looking to practice movement. Get better at the scale of exercise. Now the next one, this one was a really big, this one's a really big one. I think this is the root of, of a really good mindset when it comes to fitness. And that's the difference between training and eating because you care about yourself. So you're trying to take care of yourself in a genuine way versus doing those things because you hate yourself or hate the way that you look. Now both of them can definitely motivate you, but only one of them motivates you forever. And only one of them points you usually in the right direction with what you do in the gym and how you feed yourself. Now the self-hate model is the most common reason why people work out. I know this is what started me working out in the gym. I had to change it eventually, but this is what got me in. You're like driven by shame. Yeah. Like I don't like the way I look. I hate this. I hate my body or I hate this body fat or, you know, I hate my arms or whatever. So now you're going to go to the gym and you're going to essentially punish yourself. And motivating yourself with hate is a terrible long-term approach, mainly because nobody wants to hate themselves for too long. It's exhausting. At some point you get over it, right? The person who is motivated by self-hate eventually hits this point. And maybe if you're listening, you've done this yourself, you might get to the point where you're like, you know what? I don't want to do this anymore. I just want to enjoy life. Have you ever heard that before? Yeah. Now how is it that bettering yourself and feeling better, improving your health is not enjoying life? Because the mentality behind it was self-hate. You were hating yourself the entire time. You know, a good example of this would be somebody who goes to the gym, maybe let's say the night before they didn't get good sleep. A good example is all of us. You know what I'm saying? Like this is one of the hardest ones, I think. And you know, I know you threw it in second. It probably belongs either one or last, right? To make the point across that, you know, most people listening right now are motivated to get to the gym because there's something they don't like about themselves. They just look at the mirror and like, ugh, I hate that thing. And it hates a strong word because I don't think I ever hated myself. And so there's probably people listening right now that are like, oh, that's not me. I don't hate myself. But if you look deeper into your motivation and why you're going to the gym, most of the time it's because you want to change something about yourself. You're unhappy with the extra 20 pounds you're carrying. You're unhappy with the way your clothes are fitting. You're unhappy with the way your face looks. You're unhappy with the way your butt looks. You're unhappy with all these things. And again, like I mentioned before, that may be enough to get you motivated and moving in short term results. But if this is going to be a lifestyle, a change for the rest of your life, you have to have a different relationship with exercise. It has to be coming from a place of self-care and self-love. And the beauty is when you piece that all together, it does make exercise a lot more enjoyable. Yeah, it feels a lot less like work. And I think that's one of the biggest deterrents from progress for people where you sort of hit a wall and then people just lose that momentum. I think before that, when you're hating yourself and you're really wanting to change and change and you get to a certain place where you do get exhausted. You get exhausted by trying to feed into that energy, where when you reframe it, and it's just something that is benefiting you, you notice your energy spikes, your strength increases, your better sleep, you start looking into all these other things that are happening and really focus on the positive aspects to it, it becomes way more enjoyable. And it's something that you want to incorporate that in your lifestyle. It's not just work that you got to put in. Yeah, it's funny. I don't know what the name of it is, but there's this psychological phenomena where people who love doing something, once it becomes their job, they stop enjoying what they're doing. You can read cases about this. People are like, oh, I love playing baseball and they become a professional baseball player and they stop losing the passion of love for the sport because it becomes like a job. It's like a chore. Yeah, so think to yourself, what is exercise to someone who hates their body? Punishment. What is food to somebody that hates their body? Restriction and punishment. Now, what is exercise to somebody who cares about themselves who's doing this because they want to they want to take care of themselves? It's self-care. Same thing with food. Nutrients. It's self-care. Think about this and this is funny too. We treat our dog so much better than we treat ourselves. Imagine if you had a dog that gained a little bit of weight, would you think to yourself, I hate that dog. I hate the way it looks. I'm going to run this down. Oh, man, I got to take care of this dog a little bit better. Let me do the right things for this dog to make sure that they now this is extremely important because it motivates your decisions. Somebody who hates themselves or hates the way they look because they're 20 pounds or 30 pounds overweight, their workouts are going to be inappropriately intense when they finally go to the gym. Oftentimes, they're going to push themselves harder than they need to because they can't stand the way that they look. Now, somebody who wants to take care of themselves, it's going to train themselves much more appropriately. Much, much more appropriately. Which is hard to get out of because you're going into the gym. It's almost therapy because it feels like you're exercising this out of your body, this negativity, like I'm just getting rid of it. It's something that you want to keep feeding into. I've been there before where I just want to beat myself up and feel better about myself. Let me give you another example. You're at your friend's house and you just had dinner and you're at this moment, you're on a diet. You hate your body. You're like, oh, I'm disgusted. I need to lose weight. So now you're at your friend's house, you're eating dinner. You did a good job with your portion control. Then they bring out dessert. It's an apple pie or something. And they, hey, would you like a slice of apple pie? This is what the person who hates themselves, this is their response. No, I can't have any right now. The person who takes, who cares about themselves will respond like this. I don't want any. I don't want any right now. Now let's break that down real quick. Let's break that down for a second, right? The person who hates their body and is motivated by that, and they say, I can't, who is telling them that they can't? Who is the person that is forcing them to not eat the pie? They are. They've literally constructed a dictator, a separate part of themselves. They get the little angel and devil on their shoulder like, it's like they're a bad kid and they have this parent that's like, no, you can't. So they respond and say, no, I can't, I can't have that. That doesn't feel good. In fact, if you do that long enough, you end up reacting because remember, you're playing the role of both the dictator and the rebellious kid. Eventually the kid doesn't want to be tyrannized. And what happens? They rebel. And what does rebellion look like? It doesn't look like one piece of pie. Looks like a whole pie. You go way off. Now the person who's doing this because they care about themselves, when they get offered that pie, they say, no, I don't want it. Now this person identifies that the pie will taste good, that they're going to enjoy it. So it's not that they think to themselves like, that's not going to taste good. They know it's going to taste good. They just want to take care of themselves. So the real answer is, I don't want it. Now maybe in the future, they do have a piece of pie, but it's not this binge rebellion because they've been tyrannized for so long. It also becomes a part of self-care. Maybe weeks from now, when they've been doing really well, they get offered that piece of pie and they think to themselves, wow, I've been really taking care of myself. And right now I want to enjoy a piece of pie. Not a big deal. Yeah, I want a piece of pie. And they have it. So this mindset, this part of mindset with fitness and nutrition is crucial. You have to come at it from a point of self-care. Well, Justin alluded to, I think, the most important part. And that's like starting to make the connection on what exercise does for you aside from the way you look or the scale. And this is why all of us talk about how we're not big fans of clients coming in and using the scale or body fat percentage or the way they look as their main driver towards their goal. Because we know that, again, that's a short-term answer to their solution. And the clients that end up long-term seeing the results or changing their lifestyle forever are the ones that start to make the connection. And I'll give you an example, like a recent example for me that I still continue to make these connections. So even though I feel I have a very good relationship with exercise and I'm not doing it just to look a certain way, I'm always reminding myself of why I love exercise and how it just makes everything in life better. I've made that connection. Like, you know, Katrina and I were having a one-year-old right now, anybody who has a child can relate to this real quickly. Your life can become raising your kid and all about that. And you lose side of each other and taking care of each other because it's all now about this child. And, you know, we try our best to make sure that we're always thinking about that, that we have to be really strong and taking care of each other and not losing sight of that. And that's what will make us great parents. And, you know, Katrina works hard. She works hard all day long and she carries the main load of taking care of Max out of the two of us for sure. And so, you know, there's areas where I know that I can support and help her. And there's times when I know I'm really good at it and there's times when I'm not very good at it. And there's just a recent connection I've made. Every single time that I get a good training session, and my lift is normally sometime between noon and three, every time I get a good lift in, when I come home, I'm a different person. Like, I'm happier. Because I just got a lift, my adrenaline's still going and I have energy and I come into the house and I straighten up or I go grab Max and I take her away from him or I go do the dishes behind her. Like, and I just, I naturally do that. And if I come home and it's a day where maybe I missed a workout or even I missed a few days, I'm tired. I'm lethargic. And I actually go straight for the couch and, you know, are on my computer and I sit down and I'm not motivated. That's a connection that I've recently made. And that's just another thing that reminds me of why training and exercise is so important to me because it makes me a better husband. It makes me a better partner. What does it say? Movement creates movement or movement spawns movement. That's, it's totally something that I've noticed myself if I don't have a regular routine of getting that in and feeling that de-stressing effect that it has. And it also charges you in terms of like energy, just, you know, you're going to come in flat. And that's, that is the most crucial part of the day is when you come home. And that's one of those things. You don't realize that until, you know, you have a family or you have a significant other and you're, you know, you're coming in. As you're walking in, that sets the tone for the whole rest of the day. It reminds me, remember that the Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan conversation. We spend so much time planning these awesome vacations, but if you add it up every morning you spent with your spouse and kids, that would, you know, there's way more time. Oh yeah, just the first 10 minutes. He's actually talking about the first 10 minutes that you come home from work. Right. You know, and the way you greet your kid makes such a difference. Yeah. Huge. Yeah. We put no, we put very little energy into thinking about how important that is, yet we'll do, you know, hours and hours more of that than we ever will spending on vacation. That's right. That's right. So, so, you know, you wouldn't notice all those amazing benefits if it was always from a point of self-hate, because the only things you notice when you hate yourself is, am I getting leaner? Am I getting, am I building more muscle? Do I look different? You're not noticing all those amazing other benefits when you're coming from a point of self-care. The next one, this one's a big one, and this one probably took me the longest to realize, or at least to coach, to clients, which is the difference between motivation and discipline. Motivation, you know, everybody's always looking to get motivated. They're looking for that spark of motivation. I understand this. When we feel motivated, we do everything. There's nothing we can't do. It does help, you know, that little spark. It is. And motivation is a wonderful feeling. It's a wonderful feeling, like happiness. Like, I wish I could be happy all the time, too. Okay, just fleeting. That's the problem. But it's a feeling. And eventually, it goes away. And if I, you know, if the cornerstone of what gets me going in the gym is how motivated I am, I'm screwed. And, you know, if I need to be motivated to always eat right, I'm screwed. Because once that feeling goes away, then I'm in a bad position. Instead, we should focus on discipline. Now, here's the good news about discipline. Discipline is a skill. Unlike a feeling that I have to, like, try to make happen, but other feelings come. Skills you can practice, build upon, and get really good at them. And discipline is one of them. Discipline says you work out even if you don't feel motivated. Discipline says you eat right, even if you don't have that great spark of motivation. Discipline is what gets you to go to work every day. It's what gets you to brush your teeth. You can apply that to exercise, but you do need to develop it as a skill. One of the best ways to do this that I found is to start with, first off, you got to take yourself out of the motivated mind when you do this. Set yourself a goal. Set yourself something that you can do realistically. But also make sure that you're not in that super motivated state of mind when you're doing it or ask yourself, is this realistic when I'm not motivated? Because, you know, I've worked with clients and they're in that motivated state of mind. And you say, Hey, what's realistic for you? Like four days a week, five days a week, you know? And I'm like, are you sure? Like, yeah, totally. It's because they're in that motivated state of mind. So ask yourself, what can I do to get me towards my fitness and health goals? What's a step that I can take that is challenging, but also totally realistic for my normal state of mind? Something that I know I can maintain forever. This is kind of funny, but my, my coach used to call it putting hay in the barn. And really, it's, it's, it's every time you're putting hay in the barn, this is something that you're going to reap, you know, later, but you just got to keep putting hay in the barn, even when it's grueling, even when it's, you know, shitty outside, you're, you're stacking hay in the barn, you're going to benefit from it later. This is something that, you know, I've tried to apply to where really I just look at things as these are all patterns. I want to set all these good patterns. This, this creates this discipline to where it almost like it, it, it goes into my subconscious to where I don't have to necessarily think so much about it anymore because it's just something I do. It's not something that I need to feel a certain feeling anymore. I have to, I don't have to reach for that feeling. I just, it's just something that I do. Well, discipline, the discipline is what creates habits when motivation doesn't exist. So it's necessary. If you're going to create a habit or change your lifestyle or make a lifestyle change or behavioral, behavioral change for the rest of your life, discipline is necessary. You, motivation, we can ride that way. And again, going back to the theme that I said, I noticed when you sent these oversiles, they're all, I mean, motivation is enough to get you hyped maybe for a few weeks, maybe even a few months, maybe get a wedding coming up in three or six months. And you've never been so motivated before than other than your wedding pictures or maybe your first Vegas trip for a birthday or something. And so you're more motivated than you've ever been to get ready for this. But eventually that trip is over. Eventually that wedding date happens and then what do you have left? And you no longer have that motivation. And, you know, this is also one of those things that leads to really bad habits. Like, and I know you guys have trained people like this. I mean, I've trained clients that they have to be registered for a marathon or registered for an OCR race or registered for some sort of a car or challenging somebody at work, like they rely on some sort of competitive event in order just to motivate them to go to the gym. And then what ends up happening is you end up the rest of your life always having to sign yourself up for these events. And you play the yo-yo thing all the time. You're, when you're on it, when you're getting ready for an event, you're, you're good, you're disciplined. And then when you hit the event, then it's over again. Yeah. Motivation is, you know, here's the thing. I've never had to, I know, I've never had a client struggle with the workouts and nutrition when they were motivated. Right? That's, that's easy. Right. That's a piece of cake. It's all the other states of mind that we get into. It's all the other moods and feelings that we get into that are challenging. And so you start with a small goal, something that is realistic, but still a little bit challenging. It needs to be a little challenging, otherwise it's worthless. It's not going to have any meaning. And then you do that. And that's it. That's it. Just do that. Once that becomes second nature, once it starts to become a part of your routine and you're like, this is easy. It's no longer challenging, then you add something else. Now here's the key. You have to be brutally honest with yourself, because sometimes people are not honest with themselves. What is realistic to you can sometimes, don't judge it, because sometimes people will say, gosh, if I'm really honest, realistic to me is eating one serving of vegetables a day. That's the only thing I could do in my diet if I'm being realistic. But that's not enough. I got to do more. No, no, no. Start with what is realistic. I've had clients who literally started 30 minutes of exercise a week. That was it. That was challenging for them, but it was also realistic simultaneously. We started with that. You know what happened to those people two years later? They were working out three, four days a week. They build on that. Totally. Well, this feeds perfectly into the fourth one that you listed, which is consistency over perfection. And this is something that actually is probably one of the ones that took me longer of the five we're talking about to really piece together. I used to be an all-or-nothing person, for sure. I used to be, if I wasn't dialed nutritionally, if I wasn't consistent, I knew I wasn't going to be able to hit my workouts five, seven days a week, then I was like, F at all. I'll get to it. Yeah, I'm not going to do any of it. Not worth it. Yeah, it's not worth it, because I'm not going to see hardly any results. So why do anything? And that's completely changed. And I'm so the opposite in the spectrum. In fact, there are many times when I go to work out and I just do some squats or I just do some mobility work. I just do something to be consistent. I do something to consistently do something that's loving myself, that's taking care of myself. And that's where that, when that mindset shifted, that was necessary first to really start to piece this together that that was more important, that I just stayed consistent with always doing something that is serving or taking care of myself. And sometimes that isn't going to the gym and having the perfect workout or having a super hard workout. Sometimes that's meditation or going for a really long walk or hike with my partner. So I think that is something that it took me a long time of working out before I started to piece that together. And it does, again, it changes the whole mindset. A workout that's subpar, but that's done consistently, it's always going to outperform a amazing workout that's done inconsistently. That's just the bottom line. You will do better and go further. If you're consistent, even if the workouts aren't perfect, even if they're not hard, even if you're not going after it, you'll do far better if you're just consistent versus it has to be absolutely perfect. Because here's the bottom line, nothing is ever always perfect. And if you rely on the perfect model, no, I'm not, I'm only gonna go to the gym if I can really get after or I'm only gonna do it if I can be serious about everything. You'll be on and off your entire life. And that results, and of course, worse results that provides worse results than just being consistent. There were periods in my life where I'd go work out and I'm talking like months, maybe there's challenging things happening in my life, maybe years even, where I'm going to the gym and none of the workouts are even close to perfect. Most of them are kind of crappy or mediocre at best, but I kept going and I kept going and I kept going. Was I better off doing that than if I had said screw it? I'm gonna wait till things get better and go perfect? Absolutely. Consistency is key. Don't judge the perfection of the things that you're doing. Just try to be consistent and show up. It also builds momentum. Oh, and maintains it. Right, which is so key to long-term success too is just having that momentum. Sometimes when you get down and out, it's really easy for the momentum to go the other direction and putting a lot of pressure on yourself to having to go to the gym and have this perfect workout or following this routine that you were supposed to do. That pressure, and a lot of times when you're not feeling into it, you end up saying, I'm not gonna do it at all versus just, hey, I'm gonna be consistent about always going to the gym on these days. Even if I'm not feeling up to it, doesn't mean this has to be a 90% hardcore workout. Maybe it's the day where I take it easy and get in there. That momentum wave isn't just gonna magically come back. I found opportunities of me just being in there and starting to slowly do exercises and just be in the gym or wherever it is that I'm working out. It really starts to kind of build that up again slowly, slowly, and then it comes back. It's just one of those things that you just got to relieve a lot of that pressure that initially most people have for these types of workouts. Totally. Now, the last one to me, this one's somewhat related to the self-care versus self-hate switch and mindset, but it's a little bit different. That's the mindset of I'm chasing health, I'm chasing good health with my workouts on my diet versus I'm chasing looks or aesthetics, where everything I'm doing is to improve the way I look versus improve the way I feel or my health. Now, here's why chasing health is superior. If you are optimally healthy, you're gonna look pretty good. If you chase looks and your health starts to suffer, guess what else goes away? Your looks. Believe it or not, chasing looks actually gives you less of them, maybe not in the short term. Well, not only that, but it definitely doesn't long term. You could also look really good and not necessarily be really healthy. That's what I mean, but eventually your health catches up with you. I mean, that's the deceiving part, right? Then that's what we see right now in social media. We see all these bodies and physiques that, and this was one of the things that blew me away when I got into competing. I mean, I was just so appalled by how many people that I was talking to behind the stage that just really had no real understanding of nutrition, diet, and exercise. What they did do really well was they were disciplined and they could stick to whatever our coach told them. If it was starve your body for 10 to 12 weeks, so eat low, low calorie, do tons of cardio, be willing to take XYZ drugs, they were good at that. They were good at those things, but what I realized was, man, these aren't healthy bodies that are doing this, yet the masses look up to you. These are the people that are in cover of magazines or have millions of followers on Instagram. We're all seeking them for advice, but in reality, they still haven't pieced this together yet that if you really chase the health thing, and if you get really, really good at becoming a healthy person, as a side effect, you end up looking really good. Well, we forget why we think things look good to begin with. When you look at a man or a woman and there are attractive physical features about them, if you break down why we consider them attractive, evolutionarily speaking, there's signals that signify health. That's what you're looking for. A man with a tight waist and maybe you can see his abs and wider shoulders, that signified high testosterone and somebody who could probably run and hunt and provide and protect. When you look at a female with nice fat distribution, good mobility, that looks like someone that you can have children with, somebody that has free of disease. But we've taken this to the extreme. Now we go after the signals, but not the root. If you're healthy, and think about this for a second, you actually close your eyes and imagine this. Just imagine a truly healthy person, both on the inside and out. What is that person going to look like? They're going to look pretty damn good. And so this is the thing that you need to focus on and understand. And the reason why I sell it this way, by the way, is because selling health to someone who only cares about looks is impossible. But if I can tell them that you're going to look better as a result of it, then I can get through to a lot of them. By the way, that's true. I'm not making that up. I also think that they're psychologically healthy. It's a healthier way to carry yourself, not being so obsessed about how you look all the time. It turns into a neurotic type of a situation where you'll see the different types of eating disorders that result of it. You'll see the punishing yourself aspects creep in. It's just too much focus on your identity of your physical self versus the whole body as a whole. Getting yourself outside of that and then just focusing on these other metrics and things of strength, of mobility, of able-bodied type of features. It's so relieving psychologically. I also think this gets a little bit easier as you age. I think this is really challenging to piece this together when you're in your teens and you're 20. You don't learn it when you age. You're going to be forced to learn this. That's what I think. I'll give you an example. Last night, I left to the grocery store and I told the guys, I'm going to go pick up a dessert. We trained hard yesterday. We moved like crazy. I mean, I must have took 20,000-plus steps. We ate good. I'm like, I'm going to go give myself a dessert. I said, hey, does anybody want anything? Most half the room, I think passed on it. I went and got ice cream. I love ice cream. I haven't had it in a long time. When I go to serve it to myself, old me can sit down and crush a whole tub of that. Every bit, if I was basing it off of calories in versus calories out, I could actually afford, maybe not have the whole tub, but I could have had quite a bit. That actually had nothing to do with the decision of how small of a portion I had. How small of a portion I had had everything to do with how I was going to feel after the fact. It took me a long time to make that connection. It took me a very long time to make the connection of when I ate these certain foods that are not, quote, unquote, good or healthy for me, that are less healthy, how do I feel afterwards? Does it give me a headache? Does it make me shit myself? Do I get poor sleep from it? Do I feel bloated the next day? All those things, it took me years to start to connect all those dots. Now when I make these healthier choices, I didn't decide on how much ice cream I was going to eat last night because I was like, oh, why not see my abs? Will I get a little fat tomorrow or a pudgy? No, that's not what made me decide I'm going to have a little mug of ice cream. It was because I knew I could probably eat a little mug of it, satisfy that craving that I was having, but then also not just tear my gut up and feel miserable. And so I was too busy having schmores. Yeah. Well, you know, think about this way, if the millions of Americans that fail at diets and exercise every year, if they all said to themselves, you know what, I'm not going to go on a diet, but I really need to get healthy. I'm just going to get healthy. How much better do you think their success would be? Right? It'd be, you would see far higher success rates. So all the things that we covered today, if you change these things, I'm not exaggerating. I know we sell fitness programs and workout programs and we construct them and try and make them as effective as possible. But here's the truth. If you just do what we said right now, you're there. No joke. You're totally fine. It doesn't matter what you do. It'll all unfold in front of you. It totally will all unfold for you. Mindset is by far the most important thing. Look, we record the podcast on video as well as audio. So if you want to watch us and listen to us, go to YouTube, Mind Pump podcast. Also, check out all of our free guides. We have guides on everything from fat loss to developing parts of your body. That's all at mindpumpfree.com. And finally, you can find us on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin, me at Mind Pump Sal, and Adam at Mind Pump Adam.