 Our first caller is Amber from California. Amber, you must be pretty. I see Doug getting nervous over there in his chair. He's squirming over there and forgetting what he's supposed to say, huh? Geez. Hey, Fullerton. Cal State Fullerton. That's where Katrina went to college. Me too. Oh, no way. What year? Let's see. I graduated in 05. Okay. Wow. You guys would be pretty close. She might have been a senior. She played basketball there. She won a full ride basketball. Oh, cool. I was a kinesiology major there. So I'm sure we crossed paths at some point. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's great. Awesome. What's your question? How can we help you? So I completed maps anabolic and was about finished with maps performance when I had a pretty significant change to my schedule. This was about eight weeks ago. And since then I've worked out maybe like a handful of times and totally gave in to all of the holiday food and treats. My schedule now is back to normal. And so I'm planning on cleaning up my diet. And I'd like to really just focus on gaining strength. I was able to grab maps power life in the recent sale and was thinking of either starting that or maybe purchasing maps strong and trying that out. But my question is since I've lost some muscle mass and gained some body fat over the past eight weeks, would it be better to run something like maps anabolic first to maybe lose some of the fluff that I gained? Or should I just jump straight into a strength specific program? I love this question and such a smart question because we talk about this on the show, right? Where things happen and heavily you fall off or we have the holidays and you miss the gym for two or three weeks. And one of the things that I know, even as a trainer, I would make this mistake of wanting to kind of pick up right where I left off. And always talk about on the show that the goal is always to do as little as possible to elicit the most amount of change and hopping into a program that might have a lot of volume, then let's say like a maps anabolic is unnecessary to start seeing results again. So personally, I have a tendency to want to do exactly with what you're asking, jump into like a strong or go right into a power lift and kind of pick up where I left off. But the reality is I could probably scale all the way back to a maps anabolic pre-phase or phase one and get just as good of results and then eventually progress to one of those programs. Amber, you said you took eight weeks off essentially, so two months? Yeah. You know, here's the thing that, and this just can't be overstated, right? So when you take time, obviously you've got muscle memory going on, you've worked out a lot before. So your body's going to respond faster than someone who's a complete beginner. So that's the good news. The bad news is when somebody takes time off after having been consistent, your mental image of your body's capacity and even your pain tolerance are somewhat unchanged from when you were working out consistently. So you'll go into the gym and you'll work out at an intensity that's a little lower than before and be like, okay, I think that was enough. And then you'll realize, you know, a day or two later that you overdid it. Going too hard or applying too much intensity or too much volume doesn't get you there any faster. In fact, it actually gets you there slower. Okay, so the right amount of volume and the right amount of intensity will get you there the fastest. And so my advice to you is to do less than even you think you should do. It's actually a better place to start. It's harder to overdo it and then backtrack than it is to do a little too little. And after the first few days say, you know what, I think that was too little. I'm going to add a little bit more and kind of play it by ear. Now, soreness isn't a great indicator of a good workout, but it is a okay indicator of whether or not you did too much. So the goal should be to feel a little bit of soreness or no soreness from your workout. So use that as your gauge. Do your workout. Maps, anabolic pre-phase is a great way to jump back into the workout. And you're feeling a little bit of soreness or not, you know, not any soreness at all. You're on the right track. After about a week of pre-phase, then I would say you can move into maybe a maps, anabolic phase one or even a phase two for a week or so. I would say probably two or three weeks and you'll be back to being able to go at a higher intensity and higher volume and then transition you think over into power lift or strong lift. I love power lift though right now if your goal is to build strength right now. Totally. How were your results when you did maps, anabolic? Really good. Yeah. I definitely saw a change. And so it was pretty easy to transition over into maps performance also. So I was excited for that. But I've just, I've always really focused on just getting like the lean, you know, like muscles, but I've never focused on strength. And so that's something that I thought would be a good change for this year. Oh yeah. That's why I wanted to try power lift or strong. No, excellent. That's a great way to go. So thank you very much for your question. Thank you. Thanks Amber. You know, I love. Smart question. Very good question. And in my experience when women focus just on strength, they get. It warms me up inside. Yeah. It really does. And they get such phenomenal results. Yeah. And they're always so shocked, right? That their curves are good and that they're. Well, we just need more of that. Yeah. We need more of that to kind of change the landscape and get that to be the focus. I think it's such a great thing for women to really like find their way to strength. Well, forget that she's a woman. I think it's great that she asks a question like that because I think this is something that took me years in my career to finally figure out because I would always overreach because inside you said it perfectly like your, your body's not there, but your mind still is, you know, two months ago, isn't that long ago? So you feel like, and if you'd been really consistent, right? She'd ran all the way through anabolic. She'd gone through performance. So you're talking, she's got six months of consistency. She's probably feeling herself. She probably feels strong. She's mobile. And then you take, you know, eight weeks off, it's almost, almost like starting back on square one, but your brain still thinks like, I can't be that far from there because I was so consistent. And so we always have this tendency to your mind plays tricks. Right. Jump into kind of where you were before. And the reality is, you know, a two week maps preface type of a program is going to get you just as much of results with at least less effort. And then you can build upon that to get back in. Good rule of thumb, I would say this is different from person to person. However much time you took off, usually it takes about a third of that time to get back to kind of where you were before. So if you took off, let's say nine weeks, give yourself about three weeks to kind of get back to where you were before. That's kind of a rule of thumb. It could be as high as half the time, depending on how long the time was that you've been off and your genetics and all that stuff.