 Our next caller is Emma Louise from the UK. Hey Emma, how can we help you? Hey, so I'm from the UK, like I'm from Belgium, but I'm living now in the UK and so all the gyms are closed right now. And so I'm into prolifting and my question is, how can I still both strength and gain muscle mass without like no gym and only with a few dumbbells? How heavy a dumbbells do we have? Only 25 pounds. Okay, so great question. All right, there's a couple of things here. Number one, especially when you're talking about powerlifting, because strength is also so much of a skill, you're not able to practice your barbell squat, your bench press, your deadlift. No matter what, you're going to lose some strength in those lifts, but that's okay because it does come back very quickly. Now, I have spoken to a few powerlifters who are in a similar situation here in the States when their gyms shut down, and I was able to convince them to focus entirely on mobility while they were unable to go to a gym. And here's what happened to them. Okay, when they got back to the gym, and it was about eight weeks or so, six to eight weeks, that they focused primarily on mobility, and they did some body weight exercises as well. When they went back to the gym, as expected, they did lose some strength. However, the strength came back very quickly, and because they were more stable and had better mobility, they surpassed their previous personal best lifts in a relatively short period of time. So it actually was a blessing in disguise. In fact, one of them actually said that to me. He said this was a blessing in disguise, and he compared it to pulling an arrow back and then launching it. He's like, I had to take a few steps back, but now I'm further than I would have been had I not focused on mobility during this time when I had no access to a gym. Not only that, you have the opportunity to do a lot of single leg unilateral work right here. I mean, this 25 pound dumbbells do some, you know, single leg squats or deadlifts with that, and those will be really, really challenging. So there's some Bulgarian split stance. There's a lot of things that you can still do to build strength, even with a pair of 25 pound dumbbells. That's 50 pounds plus your body weight doing one leg, one leg exercises, I think would do you really well. Adding that with what Sal's saying with mobility, I think you could actually come back to the gym, not losing much strength at all. Okay, so like using those 25 pound dumbbells to like still try to like gain other like mobility and stuff like that. Yeah, so you could do you could do single leg deadlifts. You can do a lot of stuff like Adam was mentioned unilateral work. So, you know, you're going to find discrepancies between one side versus the other and usually that's just a lack of stability. This is something that a lot of powerlifters don't address because you get into the I'm trying to gain strength and trying to add load consistently and progressively get stronger and stronger. Meanwhile, like that puts a lot more stress on the joints and the joints, you know, are the body recognizes whether or not you have any kind of weakness or instability and so you have a threshold. You're only going to get so far. And so this is an opportunity like they mentioned to really, you know, hone in laser in and address these things by just purely focusing on that for a bit. And you can you can slow down your reps. So go very, very slow to increase the intensity of the exercise make it feel more difficult. You can do one arm one leg exercises and then mobility. I'm going to stress that really do, you know, two, three times a day 1510 to 15 minutes work on mobility exercises. Emma, do you have access to maps prime pro because I feel like that would help you the most. No, because like now I don't really have like enough money to wait now because my job closed because of the COVID. Okay. Okay, we're going to give you maps prime pro for free. So you're going to have access to it. As soon as we get off the phone here, Doug will send that over to you shortly afterwards. Go in maps prime pro and do about 10 to 15 minutes of mobility exercises for your for different parts of your body, maybe a couple times a day and focus on that for now when you go back to the gym. And in a short period of time, you'll gain your strength back, but then you'll notice that you'll probably surpass where you were before. That's amazing. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. No problem, Emma. You know, you would be surprised how strong you could get with a pair of 25 pounds. That's 50 pounds. 50 pounds even for a dude is a good amount of weight to build some strength with. If you're doing everything one legged, one legged deadlifts, one pistol squats, Bulgarian split stance squats. There's a lot of movements that you can do to still get strong. It just depends on how far along somebody is in powerlifting. If they're pretty competitive, just not practicing the specific exercise, you'll notice a decrease in strength. But that doesn't mean you're not strong. It just means you lost some of the skill because you have to practice the skill of a lift over and over again to get really good at it. But what you're saying is very true. You get strong at these single leg exercises. She'll go back to her squat and she may notice that it's not where it was because she hasn't squatted in a while with the barbell. But then she'll find that she'll surpass it. Well, even, and I didn't bring this up, but like moving in different planes. So a lot of times you get very fixated on the sagittal plane in front and behind without any rotation, any side to side movement. That's something that too. You could fill a lot of gaps by really focusing in on that while you have the time.