 Are you ready for the best fitness and health and lifestyle tips Mind Pump has ever given? You're gonna love today's episode. We give you 21 of the best tips of all time. Also, we're gonna give away a program because we're giving people. So today's program giveaway is Maps Performance. Here's how you can win. Leave a comment below in the first 24 hours that we dropped this episode and leave a comment. Tell us the best tip that you got from Mind Pump, one that is not listed in today's episode. So let us know what you think, subscribe to this channel, turn on your notifications. If we pick your comment, we'll notify you and you'll get free access to Maps Performance. Also, we're running a promotion right now. We took Maps and Ebola combined it with the no BS six pack formula. It made a baby, it is great, it's a bundle and here's the price, $59.99 to get access to both programs for life. If you wanna sign up, head over to mapsoctober.com. All right, here comes the show. Hey, you guys, do you guys see that post in the forum, the private forum of our, like, the fans' favorite tips we ever gave up like that? Yes, it was so good. No, no, I wanna do a whole thing. I told Doug that the other day. I said, man, those tips were, I mean, some of them were like really, really good tips. I think there's, and some I forgot. Some were super random and specific, the stories we brought up. And it was interesting to see the, like a lot, obviously in our forum, you know, they posted and then you see a ton of likes on certain ones. So certain ones, like, really impacted actually a lot of people. Yeah, so we took out the 21 that got the most likes and this was basically put together by our forum, by the private forum. Yeah, mostly people that have probably listened to almost every episode over the last six years or whatever. Exactly. All right, so let's start with the first one. And the first one, and what they listed was full body workouts. This was a big one for me way back in the day when I realized that training my whole body three days a week was more effective than doing the classic body part split where I'd do chest one day, back one day, shoulders one day. And there's a couple reasons why. One is you constantly focus on the best exercises. You tend to do the big mover exercises. It's more frequency per body part. And then here's a big one. Adam talks about this all the time. If you miss a workout, it's okay because you've already hit the whole body a couple of days that week. That to me, it tends to be, because when I think back to the things that I was notorious for when, you know, training and missing days or whatever is, and I know that I'm not alone here. You know, you fall off for a couple of weeks, you get busy, you go on vacation, whatever your excuse is, and you don't train for a while. And when you start back, where do you start? In a split. Your favorite body part. Yeah, your favorite body part. You always start on your favorite body part. And if you're like, I'm not really feeling like going to the gym today. Well, what day is that? It's the day you don't like doing. And so over time that compounds and it makes a difference. And so when you're doing a full body routine, you know, you miss a day, you miss everything equally. When you start back up, you start back equally on everything. Well, this was game changer for me because I actually enjoyed training legs finally. Yeah. Because before that, it's like you hyper-focus on your legs. That's another good point. And it would just, oh, I would dread those days, those are the days preceding leg days, especially. Well, this is the way all strength athletes and bodybuilders worked out before things got crazy with anabolic hormones and stuff. And so this is where I got the inspiration I saw. Like, man, they all worked full body three days a week. They all looked incredible. This is even before supplements were around and they were incredibly strong. And I tried it and it worked and it was superior. And this was kind of the cornerstone of MAPS anabolic, the first MAPS program. Well, and this way of training also feeds into the second tip, which is stopping two to three reps short of failure. And because I was training so frequently and I was hitting every muscle group two to three times a week, I got better at, okay, I don't have to go so hard because in two days I'm gonna hit buys and tries again or shoulders again or whatever exercise I was doing. Where in the past, it was possibly one day a week I was hitting a body part. So I felt, oh, I need to hammer it. I need to hammer it so hard because I'm not gonna revisit again for another seven days. We've had the show now on for about six to seven years, I'd say six and a half years and some of this stuff was blasphemy. Telling people not to lift to failure seven years ago was blasphemy. People actually hammered us over it. Now you, of course, one of my favorite moments in our entire career was when studies came out to confirm what we said. They started comparing going to failure to not going to failure and what did they find? Not going to failure typically results in better results for people. Doesn't fry the body too much. Doesn't hammer the central nervous system too much. And again, I experienced this with myself. When I stopped short of failure, I would improve when I would always hammer intensity, my body would plateau. This completely shattered my entire focus of training because I've been drilled by all coaches I've ever had that it's like, go hard or go home. It was all about intensity. It was all about how much you could put into those workouts that you would get, the results because of the amount of effort. So I just always attributed it to the amount of intensity I could apply in every single workout. There's a lot smarter way to do it and this was a complete game changer for me. Well, I'm so glad the research came out to support that doing two to three reps short of failure was superior than always training to failure. But I always knew as a trainer that this was a better strategy for my clients when it came to form and technique. Because when it came to form and technique, I was really strict to my clients, right? And so I wasn't concerned about training to failure hardly at all with them. And so I already kind of trained them that way. And it was something that I personally needed to adopt better in my own training. So I was probably abusing the training to failure until we started to learn more that, oh, this is not the best way to train all the time. Yeah, and you know, make no mistake, you're still training intensely. You're just not abusing intensity. And for most people going to failure is just too much. Most of the time. Now the next one, this one was a big one because I was under the impression for years that you train a muscle and then you leave it alone completely in order to let it recover. In fact, I used to work out, then I'd go home and be like, don't do anything. Let the muscle grow. Lift your legs up on the couch and just sit there suspending. And recover. This is false. One of the best ways to recover a muscle, unless you're like in RABDO or you're like, you need to go to the hospital. The best way to get your body to recover faster and more efficiently is to continue kind of moving it. So like your legs are really sore, you wanna get them to recover. Do some really light exercise and stretching for it. Go for a light bike ride. Go for some walks. And you'll find that your muscles actually recover faster than if you left them alone completely. In fact, leaving a muscle alone completely is one of the fastest way to get to atrophy to where you actually start to lose muscle. You know, I've never shared this story on the podcast but sharing these old tips is taking me down memory lane. And it reminds me. So when I first moved to San Jose, I was 20 years old. Got a membership 24 fitness. When I start working as a personal trainer and I so much adopted that philosophy that you're talking about right now to the point where I lived across the street from the gym, right? That I worked at and lived with my grandma. I would go to the gym and I would just hammer myself. And I was so in the mindset of like, I wanna move as little as possible because I don't wanna have to eat any more extra calories. And I wanna get the most out of my recovery from the work I just did. And I remember I'd come home and I would like lay on my bed and my grandma would be like, are you okay? I'm like, yeah, no, I'm fine. I'm just gonna move from it. She's like, do you want anything? Yeah, could you bring me? I would stay laying in my bed waiting for my grandma to bring me food so I could eat it. I would just get up just to eat and then lay back down. I literally was so concerned about not moving because I didn't wanna burn any extra calories. And little did I know how much more muscle I would build if I would actually just do these kind of micro mini sessions or what we call trigger sessions in MAPS anabolic and what it would do for facilitating recovery. It would speed up my recovery process and I built more muscle. But I was so caught in the mind instead of hammering the muscle so hard and then letting it rest for seven days. I wish I pieced this together as a kid because I'd go to work in the summers with my dad as a kid and I would get so upset. So I'm like, oh man, I'm not gonna build as much muscle as I could if I'm not, because it was physical labor. I was shoveling cement and mixing cement and sand and carrying buckets. But every summer after I'd work with them, I noticed, especially my forearms and my biceps, we kind of build faster from carrying everything. Never pieced it together though. Took me so long to put that together. But movement is great for recovery. Not moving at all, not great for most recovery. Of course, unless you're ill or it's so extreme that you might need medical attention. Now here's another one. And this one's not fitness, but it was a game changer for me, Adam. I remember you brought this up on a podcast and you talked about doing the dishes and sorting the silverware in the dishwasher before you wash them. So you put your forks in one, your spoon in another one. They all have their individual slots. And then when you put it away, it's really easy. And I remember thinking like, wait a minute, that might make sense. Why don't I do that? And I did it, and it was so much faster. This one cracked me up when I had forgot about this. Like we talked about it a long time ago on the podcast and I don't even remember the context that came out. I think it was me talking about how different Katrina and I are the way we do something or some shit. And what was funny was I saw this post. I was laughing at how many people liked that comment and comment. I think this was actually the number one tip of all the tips that we gave from the mind pump podcast. It was the silverware tip. And then to hear you and Doug both go, dude, that was actually, I changed the way I did that. And I had, we had never talked about that outside of that podcast. Of all the tips you've given. Yeah, that's what I'm known for. I'm known for the silverware tip for getting science or programming or nutrition or anything like that. This is called like a life hack at this point, right? It was though. It was a, and I wish I could give the credit to whoever it was that taught me or told me first, but afterwards to me it was like, why would you never do that? We're just, we just kind of- Bro, I used to mix them all together. And then the right, putting them away was the biggest pain in the ass. Yeah, you hate it. And I remember like getting the dishes out and dreading the silverware portion of it because it's like, oh, it sucks. Takes forever to do that, but it's so much faster. Absolutely. All right, so here's another one that, this one's more, now this was a fitness one and this was also quite impactful. And it's the do what you're not doing advice that we give. Now, what this is referring to is the novelty effect that exercise, specific exercises may have or rep ranges or rest periods or just workout programming will have on your body. This is why we phase our workouts. You get stuck in a particular type of programming for too long, it stops to work. In fact, most things work in fitness. Most things don't work all the time. You need to switch things up. So doing what you're not doing would essentially be something like this. Somebody who is doing, you know, sets of five reps and has been working out that way for six months and says, hey, how do I get my body to get out of this plateau? Then I may say something like do 15 reps, do what you're not doing and then watch what happens to your body. Well, this just comes up so often because it's indicative of human nature, right? Like we just like tend to fall into patterns and things that we enjoy. And then we inevitably hit this sort of wall where it's not working quite as well as it was in the beginning. And these questions always come up because you fall in love with fitness for certain reasons because you see success and you see results and you identify those things with certain exercises, certain way of doing those exercises. And so it's just funny because us talking to clients all the time, we would have these conversations constantly to try and get them to step out again of their comfort zone and then they would see a whole new level of growth and growth is that whole process of stepping outside of your comfort zone. And so this just kind of speaks to that. This was, this was a trainer hack of mine right here. This was something that I remember very vividly like getting somebody walking up to me on the floor when I was with a client or busy or doing something. And they always ask a question like what's the best exercise for this or what's the best piece of cardio equipment or what's the best. And my quick answer to that without trying to get break everything down and get scientific about it, I would simply look back at the person and say well what are you doing right now? And then they would say whatever it was they're doing I said go do this now. And they would be like wait, how do I heard this is better? No, you've been doing this, you never do that. This is now the best thing for you to do. So obviously there's a lot more nuance to it than just that, but that was the quick answer to help somebody break a plateau or see more results in the direction that they were trying to go was simply recommending something I knew they weren't doing. Yeah, what's funny about this is that as a kid working out, I would switch to a new workout program or book that I read. I'd get, oh my God, my body's responding then I'd marry it. And it took me so long to realize this. Like oh it's about low volume and high intensity. Oh no no it's about high volume and lower intensity. Oh it's about higher reps. Oh it's about lower reps. All of it. Well this is how we get all the camps. All the different modalities. Everybody gets entrenched in these ways of doing it and they fight over it because it was so impactful for them and then they don't wanna admit that there's other ways to skin the cat. That's such a good point and I feel you need to attach that to this tip is that it's not the thing that I have you switched to that is so magical. It's not. Yeah it's that it's new which means it too will be just like the last thing you were doing after you've been doing it for six to eight weeks and you get at it. So the understanding that it's the novelty like you said to it it's not that that's the best exercise for your abs or that's the best form of cardio. It's that you've been doing this X for so long that definitely Y is better for you because you've adapted to this. But when you go do Y and it changes your body better than or more than you ever have in your life before don't fall in love with Y and it now becomes the default. It's that the same rule will apply again when you ask me that question six weeks later. Yeah this next one which is basically labeled as practiced and get good at lifts. This particular tip came to me years ago when I witnessed people running. I was going for a hike and I saw people running and as a trainer it's very challenging or it's actually difficult for me to not notice people's biomechanics. I noticed everybody had some kind of issue right. This person's feet are pronating. Oh my God this person's feet are supinating. Their pelvic tilt is you know anterior this person's got poor upper body you know stability and I noticed all these things and I thought gosh man all these people are gonna hurt themselves. They're not gonna get great results for running and then somebody passed me who ran beautifully and I thought why is it that nobody runs really well and then I dawned on me. People are running as a workout and don't realize it's a skill. Nobody goes and practices how to run. They think I'm gonna start running to burn calories so I'm just gonna do it until I get tired. A lot of people do this with exercise as well. They say to themselves I'm gonna go work out my legs. I'm gonna go work out my shoulders. I'm gonna work on my chest rather than thinking that the squat or the bench press or the row or the overhead press they're all skills and if you get better at those skills you're gonna reap more benefit. And so rather than working out all the time sometimes go and just practice learning and perfecting the skill of each exercise. Well this is one of those things that's just over time has really irked me in terms of how people view workouts, right? It's there's this common thought that like you just need to get through the workout and then it's like you check off for the day. Like I did it, I completed it, I endured my way through that. Instead of taking real intention and focus and trying to get what the actual exercise is promoting and gaining the value of that through practicing the skill of it and getting better at that in order to train your body to respond the way you want and get stronger too. And like, you know, you're going in there to achieve something, right? You're not just going in there to get through some sort of some sort of gauntlet that you're trying to endure. Yeah, this really came together for me when I started to study and watch strength athletes. Because I mean, when you look at their programming most of their programming is practice based. It's not hitting PRs or really pushing the weight. They're practicing the movement and they're doing it, their intensity level is very moderate to low most of the time. And I remember thinking like, oh my God, this is you're talking about some of the strongest people in the world and this is how they train their body. I know the benefits of getting strong just for the average person for that's looking for overall health, longevity, building muscle, burning body fat. So why are we not trading that same way for people that have goals like that inside the gym? That was the first thing that kind of aha moment for me to start to apply it that way. Not to mention it puts a lot of emphasis on the mechanics of the movement than it does like you were saying, Justin, the punishment or getting through it, the sweat, the burn and focusing on that, which that's splitting hairs as far as how beneficial that is to you but getting really good at a movement. Well, that could be huge. Well, here's a good comparison, right? If you're trying to throw a football as far as possible, a large portion of your training is gonna be on technique, the technique of throwing the football. I know I'm stronger than most high school quarterbacks. I cannot throw a football as hard or as far I should say as most high school quarterbacks. Is it because I'm not as strong as them? As them? No, it's because they have better technique. Okay, what's the goal of an exercise? It's to build muscle, improve strength, mobility, burn body fat. The better your technique is and the better your skill is at that exercise, just like with football, the further it's gonna go for you, the more you're gonna get out of that exercise. And you're right, strength athletes do this all the time because it's a very objective sport. You either lift more weight or you don't other than, you know, not unlike bodybuilding where you look a particular way, which, boy, genetics plays such a massive role. Not to say that genetics don't play a role in strength but when it comes to strength, it's about how much you lift. And if you look at Olympic lifters, they practice, practice, practice, often and frequently to develop that skill. If you took two, and I'll make this claim all day long, you take two groups of people and you follow them for five years and one group goes to the gym to hammer body parts and the other group goes to the gym to perfect their skill at exercises at the end of five years all day long. The perfecting skill group will have better results, less injury and much more quality of enjoyment of the workout. So that's a very, very important one. All right, here's a, here's another one. And this one, sometimes we get mislabeled which is, you know, stop doing so much cardio. Now, what we aren't saying is that cardio is bad for you. Cardio is not a, you know, not a great form of exercise. It doesn't have value. All forms of exercise done properly and appropriately will bring you benefit. The reason why we talk about cardio sometimes in this way is because people believe cardio to be the number one form of exercise for fat loss or weight loss, that is totally false. It's actually a terrible way to try to approach fat loss and weight loss and it can actually result in your body, usually, paring muscle down and slowing your metabolism down which makes then long-term success all but impossible. Well, I just remember the hardest clients for me to help as a trainer was not the client who was, you know, 100 pounds overweight, ate, you know, fast food, sat on the couch and did nothing all day long and then now they came to see me and changed their life. That client actually was pretty easy. You know, get them eating the correct foods, get them moving a little bit and their body would just respond and then we would be building muscle, burning fat and the clients that were fucking really hard to help were the clients that came in and saw me and they needed to lose weight and they had tried so many things on their own and their ways of trying things included reducing calories and doing high-intensity classes or cardio to get there. And what I got a hold of them, they would look at me and say, Adam, I need to lose 50 pounds and here's what I'm eating. And when I look at it, I'm like, that's all you're eating and you're doing all this cardio and we're here still, that person had schooled. They're in a hole. Yeah, they're in such a hole with their metabolism that I'd have to spend the next six months not getting them much results as far as fat loss but just rebuilding their metabolism so that we can then lose weight and then they can maintain it and keep it off. So that's why I think all of us hammer cardio so much because that is a very common scenario if you're a trainer. If you've been training long enough, this is actually, I would argue a bulk or a majority of your client falls in this category. So you'll wonder why we hammer that shit so hard because it was probably one of the number one things that made it difficult for me helping people out. Yeah, it's really hard because I look at it very much in the same light as like crash dieting in the sense that you see results from it like and you see sort of this like your body definitely changes, you lose overall weight and they come in with like, well, this worked for me. Like this worked. I got down a couple of dress sizes, weight on my scale went down and they have like this sort of success story but like then they can't keep it. They can't keep that off. They can't, they have no more energy. Like they're in this whole, like you said and like to be able to tell them now that we need to rebuild and work on that specifically and not do what they thought in their mind led them towards success is a whole challenge in front of us as coaches to deal with. Yeah, now cardio training's got health benefits and if it's applied and used appropriately for the right person, it's got tremendous benefits across the board but it's a terrible cornerstone of your workout if your goal is fat loss, it's not good. It's actually we'll shoot you in the foot. The best form of exercise, if your goal is fat loss is resistance training, all other things being equal. And now that brings us to the next one which is about reverse dieting. Now this is not something that we invented however, this is something that we talk about a lot because one of the best strategies for long-term success is to build up your metabolism. Is to end up with a metabolism that's faster at the end of your fat loss journey than it was when you went into your fat loss journey. Part of that is what's called a reverse diet, right? I start lifting weights, the goal is to build muscle boost my metabolism in order to fuel that extra muscle building. I also have to feed my body appropriately and through that process I build this roaring metabolism to where I lose 30 pounds but now at the end of my 30 pound weight loss I'm eating more than I did when I first went in and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how much more sustainable that is than the opposite than losing 30 pounds and ending up with a very slow metabolism. Yeah, no, this goes hand in hand with what we just talked about. This became a necessary tool for me to have as a coach like how do I do this? And I failed for a long time because I didn't understand reverse dieting as a young trainer and I think how I finally came to this and we didn't call it reverse dieting back then. I know it's been labeled as that but it wasn't until someone made it very clear what was going on with their metabolism and because I used to think clients were lying. That was like, I used to really think that my client, oh, she's got to be lying. She's telling me she's 100 pounds overweight and she's telling me she's eating 50. This is a law of physics. Yeah, that's how I figured this. This is impossible. There's no way this lady is eating only 1500 calories and she's 100 pounds and she's lying to me. But no, you absolutely can't especially if you've destroyed your metabolism through and I shouldn't say destroy because it's doing what it's supposed to be doing. It's adaptive. Yeah, it's adapted to you exercising like crazy and eating very little. So now that's where we're at right now. So you had to figure this out. And I'm talking about an extreme situation but this is actually kind of where I start almost everybody. It's rare that I don't reverse diet someone first no matter what their goal is. Normally when I get somebody, they've done enough of dieting on their own up and down and so that when we first assess kind of like their size or body type their goal and where their calories are almost always I have to do some sort of reside. I don't care if it's male, female, build muscle goal, burn body fat, maintain health but almost always I have some sort of a reverse diet protocol to start somebody off because enough people have tried exercising and dieting on their own and they've done it so poorly because they've taken the old adage of eat less, move more and that's the way you get results and they've taken that to an extreme that their body's adapted and slowed the metabolism down but I now have to reverse diet them out. Now this next one, another non-fitness tip. I think this one also came from you Adam. And this is one I haven't done because I refuse to do it. However, I will admit there's some brilliance in this which is you say one time you told a story about how and in the middle of the night when you get up to go pee and the lights or you don't want to turn the lights on and you don't want to miss, you don't want to pee off the side of the toilet and whatever you sit down when you pee. A lot of people loved that one for them. They thought that was so great. Can we please give me the credit for the science ones too? Because at the end of this podcast people are gonna be like, wait a second. So the tips that were Adams were the forks and that no, there was some fucking other ones in there that were science related that were my great domestic tips. Or my tips. This one Justin and I just refuse. We refuse to subscribe, but that's okay. I think this came from at an early age I had my own place and having probably a girlfriend at the time that we split cleaning and keeping the house clean together and the times that I even had to clean my own toilet. And I remember going like, God damn man, I just cleaned this thing last week and there's spots all over the side of it, this and that. No matter how much I try to aim perfectly and shake not too hard so it doesn't go flying anywhere. It's inevitable. You're a hard shaker. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did, you know. So that, and then of course at nighttime you're half asleep and flipping a light on wakes you up and so you don't wanna wake up and so the idea of going in and sitting down. I mean, I will give you credit. In this, I just made the sure look, it's not on the list, but like the wet wipes. Okay, instead of just the toilet bearer, I think that should have been on there instead of this. Was that not in the game changer? I didn't see it. You know what, that was when you said so early on in the podcast. I think people forgot about it, but honestly, I've forever since like had that in the bathroom and another non-science. I'm telling you, bro, you've changed my life. You're the life hacker, bro, just a movie along. All right, so next one, this is a fitness one again and this is where we talk about priming and mobility. You know, I don't wanna take the credit for this in terms of, you know, Mind Pump taking the credit. This was hammered into us as coaches and trainers because we trained a lot of everyday regular people and most of them came to us deconditioned and most of them came to us and couldn't do the most basic exercises with good form. It's the unsexy stuff. And we were taught, you gotta get them to move well before you do these exercises because if you don't, they'll injure themselves. And so we just always started there and I always saw such tremendous value in doing this and then I would apply it to my more advanced clients which was more rare. Usually clients came to us who were, you know, kind of like I said, everyday people and then I applied it to myself and all it does, it improves the quality of your movement and proves your ability to connect to your muscles. This is how you squeeze out more out of your exercises by working on your connection and your mobility. This is what priming is. This is what we talk about when we talk about mobility. I mean, I got really, really into this and mainly because I, again, I saw the value personally when I decided to put a lot more focus on a lot of these mobility moves and what that did in terms of just my overall athleticism improved but really just like the reduction of pain and joint pain specifically. I just would notice that, yes, I would be getting stronger in the gym and I could lift quite a bit on, you know, the bar but I would always end up hitting this wall and I would get to a point where my joints would just start to scream at me louder and louder and louder to where I would think that inevitably have to start reducing weight and kind of start the process all over again and see if I can get past that this time around instead of really focusing on the stability and mobility of my joints and reinforcing that more. And so, you know, taking my time through that and then also working with clients because that's the other part about, I think, trainers and coaches is a lot of times we're so much better with applying these things with our clients and with our own bodies in the way that we train because, you know, for some reason we think we're impenetrable, you know, towards this. So it was just so substantially different in terms of, you know, my overall performance increase but also just, you know, everyday life was just so much better because I was like pain free. Yeah, I can give credit here for someone. I mean, Dr. Justin Brink. There you go. Who is a DPT movement specialist who really blew my mind in this arena. Like I was familiar with priming and mobility stuff but it wasn't until he applied it to me and saw, like one, I saw how poorly I moved and didn't really, I never really was assessed like that. Like I'd never had, we always did like your generic squat assessment and posture. Yeah, real basic stuff. And for the most part I've always thought I had pretty good posture. I thought I had pretty good joint mobility. Like I thought I was pretty okay until he broke me down and when he broke me down and showed me where all the breakdown was in my movement and then never putting me on a table and adjusting me like so many chiropractors do, he just assessed the moving and then taught me how to prime. Oh my God, like it completely changed the way I thought about training and even preparing for training. And so, you know, even though I was familiar with it before, I've got to give him credit for the one who really solidified that for me. And then obviously that's why we designed priming, prime pro with him. Yeah, just real quick, if you don't even know what priming is, it's like, you know, you warm up before your workouts and then it helps you move better and it reduces injury. Priming is much more specific to your body. What parts of my body do I need to get to fire better? What areas do I need to get dynamically warm so that I can perform this particular exercise for how I move. If my shoulders roll forward, I may need to prime by bringing my shoulders back with a particular exercise. If I have an anterior pelvic tilt or a posterior pelvic tilt where my butt sticks out or it tucks under, there's different priming movements for each one of those types of posture to make me better at, you know, for example, squats, right? So priming is individualized warm-ups. They improve the performance of your workouts and make your workouts far more effective. That's essentially what they're all about. Now, the next one, many cuts and many bulks. You know, the first time I really figured this out was when I realized that the best period of time whenever you're cutting your calories and noticing fat loss tends to happen in the beginning. It's towards the end of the cut that you start to notice a lot of strength loss and muscle loss. And the same thing was true for a bulk. I'd bump my calories and go above my caloric maintenance. And it was that first few weeks where I get stronger and, oh my God, I'm not gaining body fat, I'm just gaining muscle. It was after that when I started to notice diminishing returns and just started gaining body fat. And so what I started doing with myself and my clients was what if we shortened these? Instead of doing a 12-week bulk period, what if I did three weeks of bulking and interrupted it with a week of maybe a little cut and then went back to bulking? Would I end up better off at the end of the 12 weeks with more muscle gain and less fat gain? And sure enough, that's what ended up happening. This is kind of like that novelty thing that we talked about, do what you're not doing. There is a novel effect when you cut calories or when you bump calories to where you get the most benefit and also psychologically, of course, staying on a cut for a long period or on a bulk for a long period without interrupting it with the opposite, boy, can that get tedious. Yeah, I understood this philosophy earlier but I didn't really apply it to myself until competing. When I competed and time was crucial, right? Like timing was crucial and everything I was trying to do was the fastest, most effective, was the first time I really was measured about this. In the past, I would know, oh, I've been bulking for long enough. I shouldn't be bulking too long, let me transition out but never where I was super methodical about it. I was for competing and it does, it makes a huge difference. It makes a huge difference when you switch back and forth and both goals. So it doesn't matter if your goal is fat loss or your goal is building muscle, switching out of the diet that you should be kind of following for that and go in the opposite direction for a short period of time. So the mini cut version or the mini bulk version of that interrupts that and I think it is that novelty that the body was getting so used to being overfed all the time that you gotta think that it starts to adapt to this and whatever all the mechanisms that slow that process down or whatever, switching gears and going the opposite direction seems to reignite that and then going back to what you were doing. I've just found tremendous success with that while I was competing and then forever I've taught other people to do it that way. Yeah, it's very parallel I think to what we found with training as well, like there's a sweet spot to maximizing your benefits in certain phases and the same thing with like eating. It's like you wanna maximize those benefits and you wanna be disciplined enough to move on in order to keep challenging your body so that way you keep progressing as opposed to just sort of stringing it out of it too long. Yeah and the studies by the way support this. You can look up studies on diet breaks and they find better results, less muscle loss, more fat loss in dieting and I don't know if they've done these on bulking but I'm sure if they did they would find similar, more muscle gain, less fat gain with bulks. All right, so this next one was really, for me at least, it was my way of selling my clients on doing the right thing. One of the things that I had to figure out as a trainer was how do I sell the right thing better than the bad guys sell the wrong thing? Like how do I convince this person in front of me to stop focusing so much on how they look and focus on their health? Like health is not sexy. Everybody says they wanna be healthy but most people don't sign up at the gym and start working out because they think to themselves, I wanna improve my health and vitality. Most people do it because they wanna look better. They wanna burn body fat. They wanna look hotter in the skirt or better in their t-shirt or they wanna look better at the beach. Most people don't really think too much about really maximizing their health and it's just the true thing. And so I was like how do I talk to my clients about getting healthy, this person that just wants to look better? And this is it right here. It was this line right here which was, and this is very true, if you focus on your health, the aesthetics will follow. If you only focus on aesthetics, not only will your health start to decline but then of course because you're unhealthy, your aesthetics will also start to decline and this is very true. If you think of yourself as being healthy and imagine what would you look like if you were healthy in the truest sense, you're probably gonna look pretty damn good. You're gonna look pretty aesthetic. You're gonna be relatively lean, have good strength, good muscle, move well and be attractive. Aesthetics follows good health. Good health does not always follow aesthetics. The misconception is that you can't pinpoint a lot of times like why somebody looks so radiant and so good and it's because their health is just so vibrant and so that is sexy. I think people wanna achieve whatever it is like somebody they know has but a lot of times they go towards that based upon aesthetic goals or some of the more surface things that they notice but what they really don't pick up on are all those other indicators of health. I wish that I had your silver tongue, Sal, when I had pieces together because I had put this together with my clients that I needed to get them to shift and focus on health and not the scale and the mirror. So I have been saying that to clients for a very long time. I had never sold it the way you do. I knew the first person that I ever heard position it that way and I thought it was brilliant because I had known from the previous training before we all met that oh, if I could get my clients to think about their skin, their hair, their mood, their energy, their sleep, their sex drive and get them to connect the dots to all these other things and attributes that they get from training and exercising and dieting then I can get them to not worry so much if the scale goes up one pound or down one pound or they wake up one morning and they feel a little bloated or bad lighting that day or they have one bad off day of eating and not spiral out of control. If I could just get them to focus on all that, then I know that they're more likely to be consistent and not worry about all the little ups and downs of what they look like visually or what the scale says to them but I had never heard anybody communicate it that well before and I do think that you were the first person that I know that had ever said it like that and it's very, very true that you can chase aesthetics all day long and it doesn't necessarily mean you'll be healthy and in fact, I remember that being so confirmed when I got into the competing space and met all these competitors who I just assumed would be some of the healthiest people I've ever met in my life and in fact, the opposite was true some of them were the most unhealthy people I'd ever met in my life just because they looked great didn't mean they were taking care of their health. And the worst part is if they continue to pursue that if they continue to ignore health and always go after aesthetics, the ironies, they lose the aesthetics as their health starts to decline and that's a selling point to a kid who doesn't care about health and just wants to look good and that's what makes it so effective. The next one is eat for how foods make you feel so I'm gonna get a little bit more specific because most people, all people eat for the way foods make them feel but they only focus on one feeling which is the enjoyment and palatability of the food nobody really connects to all the other ways that foods make you feel and so they're ignorant to them and so when they rank foods or they make food choices it tends to be about, well, you know what do you wanna eat for lunch? Well, I don't know, let me try Mexican let me try pizza, let me try and they think to themselves which one's gonna taste the best? Which one's gonna give me the most hedonistic feelings? Now there's nothing wrong with that by the way there's value in enjoying those hedonistic feelings that you get when you eat food but you can't just concentrate on that if you do, you'll end up obese, unhealthy, inflamed with chronic illness and with a bad relationship to food what we have to start to do is connect other dots to food and when you do that you'll actually start to crave these things and I found this for myself when I had all my terrible gut issues in my early 30s I was forced to focus on this I was completely forced to focus on this and I started to figure out the foods that helped my gut and then made me feel good and then later on when I would go traveling and for example, lots of vegetables well cooked were very important for me to have good gut health one when you travel it's hard to get lots of well cooked vegetables, right? It's hard to get them so when I come home I'd have a craving for a bowl of boiled broccoli or spinach which doesn't taste very good it's not very palatable those foods that taste way better than that and yet I crave these foods because I connected them to how I felt and it wasn't just again, the palatability so this is very important and you can do this to yourself and if you practice this you'll find eating healthy becomes enjoyable Well that's the key word is practice it's not easy, it takes training just like anything else we're mentioning and this is something that I personally had to work on quite a bit with changing the associations around food too and there's really being a little more self aware as to why you're seeking out certain types of foods and then figuring out when I do eat these foods can I trace back as to which foods were involved in proceeding the way that I feel right now this moment and to be able to track and trace that it takes a bit of work and discipline but once you can start to go through that process you realize that's where you find those healthy foods that really do help with digestion or they really help with I sleep better when I consume these types of foods or I feel like my workouts I perform a lot better because I'm introducing these foods instead of always kind of leaning on that taste, pleasure and all those types of signals Well this one goes hand in hand with the last tip so many times when you say the statement chase health and aesthetics will follow the next follow up question that you always get is well what does chasing health look like and how is it so different than aesthetics well this is what that is it's learning to connect the dots to all these other health markers skin, hair, mood, sex drive, all the things that I was talking about so they go hand in hand if you understand that and if you can get a client to focus on it then the aesthetic part will follow but this is what we mean by pay attention to how the foods make you feel Yeah this is how I got myself to enjoy fish I hated fish growing up couldn't stand fish growing up and then I learned about the health benefits and said let me give it another shot let me pay attention to how I feel and I went on vacation I was in southern Italy lots of great fish places to eat there and I started kind of eating more and more and I noticed my joints felt good my digestion felt good once I connected those two I created this subconscious connection between the two now I can actually enjoy eating fish and I swear to God I hated fish before that so it's really really interesting all right the next one is focus on the big rocks what does that mean there are things that have big impacts on your lifestyle and the quality of life and your health and your fitness and then there are things that have small impacts on those things we tend to get caught up in the small things because it's the small things that the supplement companies and the fitness industry can typically sell you right so what are the small things make sure you have protein right after your workout incidentally I make this protein shake that's really convenient or you know here's a slow digesting protein over a fast digesting protein make sure you eat super fast digesting carbs instead of complex carbs post workout you know this one's a little higher in the leucine leucine is an amino acid that triggers muscle growth and here's a fat burner that shows and studies to increase fat oxidation or whatever and we focus on all these little things and we forget that 99% of your results come from basic exercises practiced appropriately done properly good programming decent nutrition don't overeat get good macros kind of avoid heavily processed foods get good sleep that's like 99% of all your results and the rest all that other stuff honestly don't even focus on it if you don't do the big things first yeah well you said that perfect there's not anything to add to that that's literally the whole point of this I use that one all the time as you get people who ask questions about the latest supplement or this new study that came out that's that this edges this out but instead of doing it this way to do it that way you know estrogens out there I gotta get them all out of there and I'm like listen if you're not checking the boxes that you just listed right now if there's no reason for you to worry about that one thing go visit one of the big rocks first and get and by the way even people that are quote unquote checking the boxes still probably have room to improve the big rocks right so maybe you get you consider yourself a good sleeper but you really haven't put together a sleep routine or really made an effort to actually prepare yourself before to go to bed and try to optimize it well go optimize your sleep before you look for the latest supplement or the new cutting edge science that says this edges this out and so I think that the big rocks are everything not only should you have to check all the boxes but then you should go back and revisit am I optimizing all those boxes before you even get into a little nuance do all that before you worry about EMF exposure yeah it's actually I think it was one of you guys that said it was like trying to get your car to go faster and spending your money on the spoiler in the in the racing sticker on the side yes and then it really amounts to stickers exactly all right so this next one is about women and bulking okay the word bulking just the word bulk you never would want to say that to a potential client or a potential new member that's a female because bulk what do you mean bulking this is and so women never they never try or typically don't go into a caloric surplus to try to build muscle and boost the metabolism because God forbid I gain a pound on the scale it's all about losing this is terrible because there's a lot of benefits to going to a caloric surplus namely building muscle getting stronger getting your hormones to balance out and boosting your metabolism so we did an episode telling women you need to bulk and here's why and here's the benefits and man it went crazy because women never hear that message it's something they're never told I think this one and this isn't on the list but this goes hand in hand women bulking and then women strength training five by five heavy lifting yeah the deal right so and I think the reason why it's so impactful is because this is this is kind of common knowledge for how we train men forever it's just for some reason we've decided that oh it's not for women shouldn't bulk or women don't need to lift heavy but you do light reps a thousand times yeah but the fact is that they benefit just as much as men benefit from doing those things but the reason why I think that was such a a sought after or powerful tip for so many people is because that's not what's being communicated right and advertising and things like that still so it's still not common knowledge that that is the same for women that they get tremendous benefit from going on a bulk they get tremendous benefit from lifting really heavy so us coming out and I believe that was actually one of our first episodes where we addressed things like this was I think one of the most impactful things that we've ever said but the truth is it's it's not anything revolutionary or that we made up or we created it's just something that's basic science yeah when you're trying to build muscles same rules apply you know and it's just like it's just not advertised at all or marketed you know to women like it should it's this should be a movement to help women really build a physique that they want you know in the appropriate way so this is something we had to bring to the surface now the next tip just says it depends now what is that I love this yeah how is that a tip well okay here's how you always know a good coach or as your trainer versus a bad one when you ask them a question hey what's the best exercise for my legs or what's the best form of cardio or what's the best food to eat to build muscle and they answer you with it depends you know you're talking to someone who knows what they're talking about now they're considering the individual that's right there's so many things that you need to consider before you could ever get the best answer for yourself for example someone says what's the best form of cardio for me I'm going to ask what form of cardio do you enjoy the most why is that important because the one you enjoy is probably the one you're going to be most likely to do consistently if someone says to me hey what's the best rep range to build muscle well I'm going to ask you well what's the rep range that you train in the most because that's going to determine the next answer I give you and it's typically going to be the different one the one that you're not doing right now which actually goes back to one of our other tips so it depends is very important because a lot of things depend on the context the individual their goals their fitness history their psychology what they enjoy what they don't enjoy all that matters before we can give the best answer so this was another hack that I figured out early on in my career I became a fitness manager pretty early so for most of the career I was training trainers and running a club and so I had a ton of members that would always talk to me and one of the most common questions is how do I know which trainer is better or how do I know it's a good trainer it was like if they answer if she or he answers it depends first before they answer your question that's a sign of a good coach if they give you an answer right away to your direct question like you said what's the best exercise for this what's the best food for this what's the best this for that and they respond with an answer without asking you more questions first and then saying depends yeah that's how you know you don't have a good trainer and that's also how you know you probably have a really good one is if they start with that because it is it's so important to get other information before you recommend anything now the next one is it says I don't have to train six days a week to see results I'll take it even a step further six days a week of training is too much for optimal results for most people this is just true now I think we believe that more is better because that's what's popularized that's what's sexy when you see the super fit whatever you know influencer on social media smarters yeah they talk about all the crazy workouts and what they do by the way what you need to understand is most of these influencers are part of what's called fitness entertainment or fitness media and you better believe if they show you their workout they're going to show you the craziest hardest workout that they ever do and they probably will add a little bit to it because why would I tell you that I did three sets of squats and three sets of rows right I'm going to tell you I did the craziest workout possible because that's what's really why you see fake weights why would those even exist otherwise that's right no the truth is the optimal dose for you which is has to be appropriate for your body your body's ability to recover your current fitness level that's what's going to get you to the fastest any more than that will get you there slower and less than that will get you there slower and six days a week of training tends to be too much for most people that's some that's someone who's real advanced who's really built themselves up to a certain level that's the person that might want to train that much this was up there with one of the biggest tips or game changers for me because I kind of you know applied training the same way I applied almost anything anything else I do just more more is better work harder at it like that's the answer to more results or getting better at something and even though there's a sliver of truth of that in this situation it's normally counter productive for many people and I fell into that trap for many years training six seven days a week even double days just piling on more and more and more to try and get there and I'll never forget one of the things that completely catapulted my my gains was actually pulling back like three days out of there so I remember I can't remember what I was reading or when it was but I do remember this was in my mid 20s and I was in the heart of this you know I was playing basketball I was playing I was doing snowboarding and wakeboarding and I was training seven days a week and I wanted to build muscle and I just it was I was at a hard plateau and I was like couldn't wasn't an exercise I couldn't change anything to do that and I can't remember I remember reading about like volume and over over application of intensity and I remember going like okay well I've never actually tried to do less what would happen if I scale back to three days a week and I swear I added like 10 to 15 and at that point in my life like it was really hard to get a couple pounds and to see like 10, 15 pounds come on I went holy shit this is crazy I'm doing less and I'm building more muscle but is it's a balance it's not as simple as the more you put in the more you get out with this which is how we kind of approach everything else and that's the problem and that's also why I think this tip is so powerful of people because I'm pretty sure a lot of people approach their their health and fitness the same way it's very similar to me with our leave tune the tank sort of advice and in that you know just the common thought is that always more is better more is better more intensity you know more volume all this more is better stuff you start to realize that it's dose dependent so there's there is the sort of perfect dose the amount of stimulus that your body is going to have the best chance of growing in adapting towards and so it's that's where the science is in fitness and I think that people a lot of times don't realize there's a legitimate scientific process to this and the closer we get to that the more success you're going to you know reap yeah and to be clear I mean if you're a beginner like two days a week we'll get you the best results to start honest to god two or three days a week maybe and there's a long way to go with that before you add an extra day all right here's another one right quit measuring your success by the scale now I love this one because when I do I use this as a sales technique when I would get someone to get a new membership they would talk about how they want to lose 10 pounds so bad and you know that's all that matters and I'd say well we could cut your leg off and you would lose 10 pounds but that's not really the kind of weight that you want to lose and you'd see them laugh but I think I'd make my point which is the weight on the scale I mean it's one that's one metric that you can use to measure but what is that weight made up of that makes a bigger difference like if you see a 200 pound six foot male at 10 percent body fat or a 200 pound six foot male at 25 percent body fat they look very very different and they have very very different health and performance yet they weigh the same the 25 percent body fat guy he's gonna be much bigger in the waist he's gonna much bigger jeans he has to wear not gonna be as healthy or as fit the 10 percent body fat person have a six pack small tight waist feel really good this is true for women as well I know you know I've had female trainers work for me five one 135 pounds you know but lean and people thought they weighed 100 pounds because how can they only how can they weigh 135 they look like they're wearing 90 pounds or 100 pounds are so small I said well muscles very dense and the scale tells you some of the story but it doesn't tell you anywhere near the whole story it's not just that it's also how much our bodies can change the look and the scale can change hour by hour and day by day it's it can flood I mean stress stress will change the way your body holds on to waters you had a rough day at work yet your diet was perfect you trained but had a really stressful day either at home or work and all of a sudden your body will hold on and retain water and all of a sudden you'll look bloated or fat but you didn't get fat all you did was hold on to some water you might had that day decided to eat you know a couple handfuls of sunflower seeds and season your food or ate out twice and you normally don't eat out at all and now you've you know taken in double to triple your sodium intake and now your body holds on to more you might have been 50 to 60 grams more carbs that day and so your body holds more you might have drank two or three more glasses and all of those things and I'm talking and you could fluctuate to nine pounds that's how crazy it was and I'm 200 something pounds so obviously if you're 130 pound person you're probably not going to fluctuate nine but someone my size as fluctuated as high as nine pounds through the night and that wasn't me gaining or losing fat or muscle that was just a fluctuation of water and that makes a big difference on the scale and how you look in the mirror so being attached to the ebb and flow of the scale and how that changes terrible can really throw you off on what you're doing because what I would see would happen is and many people who are guilty of this they're doing some they're doing the right thing they're doing a great job and then they have exactly what I said a stressful day a little bit more sodium drink a little bit more water some of that and all of a sudden the scale goes up two pounds and their goal was to go down and what do they do they over correct now now they go oh shit I was overeating or I didn't do enough cardio so they wrap up cardio cut calories yet they were right on target they had no idea I'll never forget having clients and typically this will be female clients that would say this they'd go they have to cancel workouts for the week because they'd get the stomach flu right stomach virus then they'd come back and they'd say oh I had the stomach but you know what the good news is I lost 10 pounds and they were all happy about it because they had a stomach virus it's like probably 10 pounds of muscle and it's probably going to come right back because they tied their success to the scale and again it's one metric there's many many metrics you should pay attention to and if it's just a scale it will lead you in the wrong direction all right here's the next one again a non-fitness one there's a story behind this and it says don't buy a horse for your family if you can't afford it oh dude wisdom do you remember where this where this came from well of course yeah no of course I remember this is you making fun of me right here because people are aware of me sharing my childhood before of having electricity out living in nine different homes being evicted before I know what food stamps look like yada yada yada and I've also shared other stories about us having a ranch and having horses and I remember you called me out one day and said wait a second I thought you guys didn't have money I thought you have horses who has a horses are expensive they're expensive to buy they're expensive to fee and said yeah well this shows you the relationship that my family had with money growing up right so yeah no I think that's what's the electricity turned out well we got Bessie or whatever we had a feed boomer last night that's why so that's why we didn't have dinner tonight yeah so I think that's the advice is here is that well you know here's how I'll tie it into like a real advice because I think it's silly but I think that financial health is really important too totally we talk about stress and people don't really talk about how important it has it is to have a good relationship with money now because of how I grew up it definitely I swung the complete opposite direction which doesn't mean that I necessarily had a good relationship either with money it wasn't until almost 30 years old that I kind of find balance with my relationship with money and I think a lot of people's relationship with money is out of whack they don't they have a very poor relationship so I do think there is tremendous value in looking into that if you're somebody who's never really analyzed or been self-aware about you know what is my connection to money and my relationship to it do you hoard it do you blow it do you flaunt it like all these things are signs of your relationship with it and assessing that so important like financial health is skills it's skills and discipline like I have like I have friends that I know are often in financial trouble I know often they've had to got evicted or they've had to sell their car or things got repowed and you see the gifts that they get their kids and each other for Christmas and I'm like you bought your kid you know the new xbox and three game like that's like $800 or $1,000 like what are you doing and it's just it's poor financial health right it's not really you know having a good connection to money and it's just results in poor health and that often results in a lot of problems all right so the next one fall in love with the process so here's here's where I'll go with that right so if you have two people and one person is just in love with walking itself they just love taking step after step and the other person really is in love with getting to a particular destination which person is going to walk farther in their life right the person that loves the process now how do we apply this to exercise imagine if you enjoyed the process of eating healthy imagine if you enjoyed the process of training your body you would never have to worry about reaching a goal or hitting a new PR or hitting a body fat percentage it would happen as a result of loving the process and it wouldn't be nearly as much of a struggle is if you're like my goal is lose 15 pounds and then you get there like all right what do I do now my goal is to you know gain 20 pounds on my squat and you do that and they go all right what do I do now the process is everything if you love the process the goals hit themselves yeah because a lot of times the opposite is like I'm so fixated on this goal that I'm going to ignore that you know there's certain things I'm doing right now I just really can't stand like I have this just view of you know getting up early in the morning like you know beating myself up it's like all of these negative associations involved with the process but you know for you know a pretty long amount of time you could sort of go through that and push like you know push through all the pain and you know honestly that's the majority of the message that we see all over the place on Instagram and we see it you know from all these influencers out there you know the 5 a.m. club you know like defeat your inner bench or whatever they call it these days and to be honest that is such I mean inevitably you're gonna you're gonna get so fed up with that process that you're gonna fall off and then it becomes this on off relationship of you know wagon and off the wagon well this this is the exact way to break the on and off cycle right so that's exactly what I was gonna say was that you you know most everybody falls in this trap of on and off the wagon and that's because they're so focused on the goal either one they fall off the wagon because it's so hard and they never reach their goal or two they reach their goal and then they're like okay what do I do now or I'm over it and they stop so to break that on and off the wagon thing is to is to fall fall in love with the process I mean I think of the same thing it's funny that we just recently we just talked about financial health and money the same process happened for me with my relate I was so focused on a dollar amount I'll never forget reaching that dollar amount I got there oh I got my the amount of money I knew I needed to be happy and what happened I was fucking miserable it was the worst worst time of my life how crazy is that it was like my whole life I was driving towards this when I stopped focusing on the actual money and focus more on like what is my why and the process and relationship building and the things that I what do I want to do regardless if I get paid or not get paid well guess what happened the most money ever in my life ends up happening so that's the same concept I think happens with your health and fitness journey when you when you get out out of this oh I need to have this goal this destination to get to versus learning to like love all the things that come from the process of exercise and working out then you break that on and off cycle and you fall and the irony of that guess what will probably follow after that yeah absolutely now the last one focus on strength now why do we say focus on strength so much is that the most important or the only metric you should measure no of course not but here's why strength is so great it's objective the problem with a lot of other metrics especially the mirror and how you look is it's so subjective and we fool ourselves so much and this happens to all of us I mean I love I love doing this with family members where they'll look at like we'll look at old family photos and they'll look at the picture and be like oh my god I looked so good back then and then I'll remind them yeah back then you used to say how bad you looked and you'd see their face like I guess I did like what's you know this is it's really weird I thought I looked terrible I looked so good it's all subject most of the things that we tend to measure and follow with exercise are these subjective things strength is objective and here's the other thing about strength if you're getting stronger you're probably doing a lot of things right it's hard to get clicking yes it's hard to get stronger and do a lot of things wrong it's very very challenging so if you're in the gym you're working out and like wow I did another rep wow I added five pounds you can pat yourself on the back because you're probably doing a lot of the right stuff and you're probably putting it together in the right way it's also the gateway of breaking that that bad relationship with the mirror and the scale so this is the advice I think that we all give when if if it's the same you know all of us got the same our question from a client about oh my god I'm so worried about the you know the scale was up down blah blah blah this that I know exactly what both of you would say the same thing that I would say that client is throw away the scale stop worrying about that all we're going to worry about is getting stronger right now so even though client comes in and says all they care about is I want to look this way or I want to be here I want to be here I want to weigh this much or I want to look like this old picture of me or like that I know exactly how the the two of you advise the same thing that I would advise is just by hearing that I know right away I need to break that person from that that relationship that they have and then I need to get them focused on on something that is more objective and then put them over on focusing on strength and I know that that stuff will come later this this first I first figured this out years ago I trained a therapist and then she loved my training so much that she referred to me a patient of hers with her permission of course who is a recovering anorexic and so we I had the opportunity to train this person and work with the therapist on the training and I remember the therapist telling me no scale no mirror no body fat percentage testing because this this person it'll it'll set them back and they're they have a bad relationship with their body and I thought to myself and I said you know what I'm going to focus on I'm going to focus on them just getting stronger and the therapist said yeah I love that let's do that and it worked it worked so well this client enjoyed working out focused on getting stronger and it encouraged them to eat more develop a different relationship with food it's this again it's a subjective metric and again if you're getting stronger you're probably doing a lot of things right look if you like our information head over to mindpumpfree.com and check out our guides we have guides that can help you build muscle or burn body fat or get a better relationship with food or improve your health again it's mindpumpfree.com you can also find all of us on Instagram so Justin is at Mind Pump Justin I'm at Mind Pump Salon Adam is at Mind Pump Adam