 In this episode of Mind Pump, we answer fitness and health questions. We actually answer four of them, but the first half of this episode is our introductory conversation where we catch up with each other, what happened over the weekend or the previous week. Big things for you, Sal. We talk about our sponsors, we mention studies, typically that revolve around fitness and health, but sometimes revolve around other topics we're interested in. Oh, by the way, before this episode begins, we are having a massive Valentine's Day apparel sale starts the 7th of February, ends on the 14th of February. All men's and women's shirts are a full 25% off. Oh yeah. All right, so here's what we talked about in this episode of Mind Pump. We start out by mentioning my wedding. That's right, I got married again. Very, very happy, very good times. I had a very busy week, so we talked about that for a second. Adam brought up how he's going to start selling Magic Spoon cereal on the secondary market, apparently. Brilliant idea, Adam. Their blueberry flavor has been out for a little while. It tastes amazing, but they have other flavors like chocolate, fruit loop type flavor. They have cinnamon, cinnamon, sugar flavors. They have frosted flavors. Anyway, Magic Spoon is a cereal. It's like a kid's cereal, but for fitness fanatics. Okay, so here's why it's like a kid's cereal because it tastes like kid's cereal. Here's why it's for fitness fanatics. It's high protein, amazing macros. No joke, a normal bowl of this cereal will give you something like 30 grams of high quality whey protein, and again, it tastes like you're a kid. It's amazing. We have a hookup. It doesn't taste like kids. For you. Here's how you get the Mind Pump discount. Go to magicspoon.com forward slash mind pump, and you'll get free shipping and a 100% happiness guarantee. By the way, if you go to magicspoon.com forward slash mind pump, you get an automatic discount applied. It's only for our audience. Then we talked about Justin's birthday and aging. He turned 40, doesn't look a day over 50. Yeah. We talked about getting workouts in at home with kids. Adam's finding it difficult to be consistent going to the gym because he's got a little baby. We talked about how having a home gym makes that a lot easier. Justin, for example, has an at home gym by PRX. PRX has the best fitness equipment you'll find for at home gyms. They have these squat racks that fold into the wall. No joke. They're very stable. They fold right into the wall. There's an adjustable bench. They have barbells, dumbbells, all kinds of other equipment for some of the best at home equipment you'll find anywhere. And of course, we have a mind pump discount with PRX. Here it is. If you go to prxperformance.com, so that's the letter P, the letter R, the letter xperformance.com forward slash mind pump and use the promo code mind pump, you'll get 5% off and a free NAPS Prime program. Go check them out. Then Justin brought up a cool fact about chimps. Yeah, fun fact. He's getting into the cool science stuff. I talked about Neil deGrasse Tyson. He made a statement about Americans and our science and technology knowledge. That was totally wrong. You're wrong, bro. I talked about a study on how low fat diets may cause low testosterone in men. And then we gave a shout out to one of our listeners, Brett Edelman. He hit two PRs, squats and deadlifts from following MAPS Power Lift. This is our power lifting program. You can find at mapsfitnessproducts.com. Then we got into the fitness questions. Here's what we answered. The first question, can you build your physique, specifically your legs with just free weights? We talk all about free weights and why that's kind of all you need. Nothing wrong with machines, but boy, free weights. They do everything beautiful for you. So much better. Next question, this person says, look, I'm not that sore a day or two after my workouts. What does that mean? Does that mean I'm not working hard enough? No, it means you're doing a good job and we explain why. The next question, this person says, is it okay to skip trigger sessions if you're feeling sore or tired from a previous workout? Trigger sessions are a specific type of workout found only in MAPS and Ebola. They're very light, low intensity sessions designed to get your body to improve faster. Make sure you listen to that part of the episode. We kind of break down what they are and why they're good for your body when you're sore. And the final question, this person says, look, there's benefits to switching up your workout routines. What about your diet? Should I switch up my diet? Are there any benefits to this? So we talk all about that in that part of the episode. Also this month, all month long, MAPS split is 50% off. Now MAPS split is a body part split, bodybuilding and physique and bikini competitor inspired workout program. So this is a great workout if your goals are to shape, sculpt and build your body. So if you go to the gym specifically to change how your body looks, if you wanna shape and build muscle, if you wanna be able to target specific muscles, this is a phenomenal program. When you enroll in MAPS split, you get the full workout sent to you, but you also have a place where you can access the exercises, video exercise demos, blueprints, basically everything you need to follow the program and do the exercises the right way. All right, so here's how you get your 50% off discount. Go to mapssplit.com, that's M-A-P-S-S-P-L-I-T.com and use the code split50, that's S-P-L-I-T-5-0, no space for the discount. And it's t-shirt time. Ah, shit, you know it's my favorite time of the week. We have three big winners this week, two for iTunes, one for Facebook. The winners for iTunes are Julia Lea-Lea, Leonam Five, and for Facebook we have Alexander Ebbler. Lea-lea-lea-lea-lea. What else are there? Good job, Justin. All of you are winners, and the name I just read to iTunes at mindpumpmedia.com, include your shirt size, your shipping address, and we'll get that shirt right out to you. If you didn't hear your name, you're all losers. Everybody else is losers. Losers. Lea-lea-lea-lea-lea-lea-lea. Lea-lea-lea-lea-lea-lea-lea. Lea-lea-lea-lea-lea-lea-lea-lea. Lea-lea-lea-lea-lea-lea. I am exhausted. You know how after a weekend, you're supposed to feel relaxed? Charged. Yep, not this guy. No, I had a- Wedding time or what? Action packed. Honeymoon. Weekend. Full of honeymoon in. Yeah. Getting action, doing action. No, no, no, I got my birthday, then got married, I'll tell you guys about that, then it was Jessica's birthday, then my dad, father, daughter dance, then my son had a robot, all, robotics tournament, all in a row. Yeah, tell the audience how you didn't even invite Justin South or Justin Doug. We told them about the base camp announcement. I mean, this kind of said it all. Yeah, no, it was, just so you guys know it, you guys will be in my wedding. I want you guys to be in my wedding. Thanks Adam. Just so you guys know, you guys are invited to be in my wedding. We didn't invite anybody, not even my parents. We'll be wearing Jordans. Nobody came. It was just my kids. It was just my kids, Jessica and I, we went up to San Francisco City Hall, which by the way, have you guys been there? San Francisco City Hall? It's gorgeous. Why they're not San Jose? I know. Because San Jose City Hall looks like crap. It does. San Francisco City Hall is extremely, I got married. It's picture. Wait, what, thanks. Did you hear that? I did. Oh, San Jose. That was like the sneaky, I told you guys the story, right? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's different though, because you had a wedding. Yeah, yeah, I had a wedding after that. That was the, hey, let's get a, let's do the quick and dirty. Yeah, exactly. What was your, remind me again, was it because of parents and living together? A little loophole with the old insurance thing. Oh, okay. That's what I was, okay. Surgery and, yeah. Allegedly. That's how Justin's able to live here in the state. That's when this B-stacks gave you the ulcer, right? Yeah, man. No, it was a tuber. Oh, you should remember that, Adam. Your recommendation gave me back. Well, I got number one in the company though, a few times. Right? Had it been worth it. Worth the trade. No, San Francisco City Hall, gorgeous. So we go up there with the kids and did the whole wedding dress and we all dressed up for it and just had, it was such a special, it's so crazy because, you know, when you do your vows and the guy, whoever, the guy getting married or whatever. Oh, you guys exchange vows even, huh? No, just the ones that the guy tells you to say or whatever. Okay, not like break your own. No, no, no. But this is my second time getting married and it's such a crazy difference because the first time it was like, oh, this is what we have to do. This time there was like real meaning behind what I was doing. I mean, we were looking at each other and this I'd never experienced this before. Everything else disappeared and we were just, it was just her and I. And it's like, you know, we said our promises and our vows and it was just, it was incredible. So romantic. It was very- Did you have a little like pool just filling up? A little bit. A little bit for real. Yeah, I did cry. I swear to God, I was close. I came close to my, I can't talk too much. Did you really? Yeah, I came close. Yeah. I just repressed the shit out of that. Oh yeah, I've only seen Justin cry one time. It was- And we see him cry? That was awkward. It was, it was, he wasn't sober. I was not. It was a floodgate. When did we cry? When did you cry? I don't remember. I wasn't there. Was I there? Was I there? How are you gonna bring this up? Was I there? Inpenetrable, otherwise. I don't remember that. I remember that. You're somewhere else. It's nothing. It was a touching moment just between Justin and I. What? Nobody else was there. We shared something. I missed you crying. Yeah, we hugged and everything. Yeah, man. Yeah. You weren't a part of the conversation, don't worry. He almost cried when he got really high that one time. Yeah. He could scream. That's what it takes, though. He was this close, dude. That's literally what it takes. He could get it out of me. He was so mad he was gonna cry. I was. I was like, I get angry about that. Stop making fun of me. That's so funny. But dude, you know what was amazing about this was, where my kids, they were so excited and my daughter was acting. You know the, what is it, the maid of honor? Yeah. Walks around, adjusts the dress for the pictures and kind of holds this and takes care of that? My daughter totally did all that. She stepped up and was super excited. That's awesome. It was so. And then we had dinner at Epic Steakhouse. Have you guys been there in San Francisco? No. So good. Oh, the steak there were incredible. Steak, lobster, bone marrow. Did you stay at the night? Stay at the night? No, we came back. You came home? Oh, okay. No, no, we came back that night. So it was a lot of fun. So I did that, which was amazing. And then for your honeymoon, you did a robotics tournament? No, honeymoon's coming out. That makes sense. Yeah, I don't know why. We're not that nerdy. Oh my gosh, it's turning me on. No, we did, the day after was the father-daughter dance that I do every year with my daughter, which was just a complete blast. Dancing all night with my little girl. Just, she was hugging me, telling me how much she loves me. It's such a great, great time. Now we've been together for five years. So this is the fourth time out of five. We've seen you do this. Yeah, so I've gone every year since she started preschool, except for one year when I fucked up. Remember that? You had to buy Disney Land. You had to buy Disney Land. I booked a vacation, didn't realize it was on the same date, and took her to Disneyland for a couple of days to make up for it. But no, that was good. And then the robotics tournament was, dude, robotics tournaments at this level are crazy. These kids are building machines, insane machines from scratch. Doing complex tasks. Yeah, the competition was, and I don't know all the rules, but they had to stack blocks for speed and then they could interfere with each other. Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that. Well, they could interfere. They can. There's like designated areas you can't, but if they're outside of that, you could fucking block them and do weird shit. Yeah, it looked like they had different colored blocks. I didn't know if that played into it in terms of stacking your color versus somebody else's. Yes, I don't 100% get the rules, but you can get two points per block if they're all the same color, if something else happens or whatever. So they're doing that and I'm surrounded by all these tech robotics kids and it's just, I'm looking at them all and I'm watching them, thinking to myself, I wonder how these guys are gonna be leaders of tech industry. Well, don't, I mean. I'm being cool to them. Was it just just me? Hey, remember me. What do they call them? Meets, tournaments? Like are they always? It's a tournament. It's a tournament. Is it always a tournament? Yes, so they'll compete. So this one, if they did well on this one, then they moved to a higher competition. I believe it would be state competition. Then you do well there, then you go national and then you go world. Yeah, so my brother-in-law, he's like an engineer and he was telling me like Lego does a lot of the robotics tournaments through the schools too. Was this part of that? No, so Lego's younger kids. Lego goes up to eighth grade. After that, then you don't use Legos anymore. You build them. Now it's NASA. Yeah. No, you are. It's like steel and they like weld it. Oh, and it was cool to see the different designs. Although there was one design that you could tell that was super common because it was very effective, but there were little differences in the designs of how they would put them together. They're using controllers, so they're all, you know, wireless and stuff. And yeah, it was really fun. It's really cool. So I imagine that they build towards a meet and it probably, so it's like one meet probably every month or two. There's several tournaments throughout the year. There's like a season. Not a lot though, right? Like I would think- I don't know. And do they build a new robot for every tournament or is it the same robot they keep refining? It depends on the tournament itself. So if it's the same like style tournament where you're stacking blocks, then you can bring the same robot to each of the tournaments, maybe tweak it a little bit or whatever each time. If it's a different competition, then you're probably gonna wanna build a different robot. So- But how long does it take them to put? Like I saw the robot, they're pretty, I mean massive. They're big. They got all kinds of detail to them. They're fast. How long do these kids work on building something like that? So they built this one since the, they built it at the beginning of the year. So they started working on this one at the beginning of the year. And you know how they start building them? They use computer models first. So they'll use a computer model, build it there- Like a CAD program or something? Yeah, I have no idea. But they, so my son was explaining to me that they build it on the computer, test it out there, then they build the actual model and then they test it out and then they, and then that's it. They use that one or if it doesn't work, they'll go back and change it or whatever. It's really cool. I just remembered, I took a whole robotics class in high school. I totally forgot about it. When you went to high school? Yeah. Wow. Really? Yeah, but it was nothing like this. Like all we learned was like hydraulics, CAD programs. Like that's what Justin said that and it sparked a memory for me. I had completely forgotten that we did this. So back when I was in high school, that was the extent of robotics was like you, I didn't even think I took a class like I did. I took a metal shop and wood shop and all that. And like metal shop was cool because you'd weld and you actually like would build. I built like a few different things. We actually would fashion our own screwdrivers and I built like a hammer and then I did a barbecue box and all kinds of like random things. But it was like just cool because you're doing it all with your hands and you just don't get that kind of experience. And it was totally an elective. So I don't even think they have that program anymore. No, it's cool. And it's cool to see the type of kids that are here. They're obviously a bunch of tech and math nerds, like big time nerds, but super smart, friendly. Their parents are all, I was probably the only non-tech parent there. You know what I mean? Like the parent, you can see the parents know what's going on and I'm sitting there like, yeah, I know Instagram. I'm a fitness guy. I do Instagram. You know what I'm saying? I know how to DM real well. Yeah. I know how to activate your biceps. Yeah. You know, on an exercise, but I don't know what's going on. Totally. With the machine. Hey, so I've got this new business plan that I'm going to do. I ordered my magic spoon cereal this weekend and again, Blueberry's out. So right now I'm checking back every single day. Dang, I was just about to order some. Until it comes in and I'm going to buy, because this is, I don't know how many times now I've gone to order and Blueberry is always sold out. Blueberry's the words out, dude. I just haven't been aggressive about it. So I'm going to every day I'm going to buy and then I'm going to sell it online for double the price. You're going to do the little secondary market? Yeah. Little secondary market. I mean they can't be mad at that. Like it's the demands there, they're selling out. Yeah, why not? It's just like they- Just scalping them. Exactly. That's probably not the thing to say. Is that illegal, Doug? Can I scalp cereal? No, you can sell them on eBay. Boy, I don't know. I think you can sell them on eBay, right? I think you can. Sure. People do that with stuff all the time. Like sneakers, it's popular. Sneaker sell out, they resell them online. Oh yeah, there's a market for that now. Yeah, there's a whole lot. So why can't I do that with cereal? I think you probably can do it. You can probably make a pretty penny off the Blueberry. I remember watching that with supplements. I remember when the over the counter designer steroids supplements- And they would get pulled. They got pulled because- They'd be double the price. Oh dude, you'd go on eBay and they'd be selling a bottle of SuperDraw for 250 bucks and kids were just buying it like crazy. Wow. Because it was all steroids. So it made sense. No steroids and magic spoon. Yeah, not yet. Just high quality protein. Right. You're not gonna get the same gains as you would get with anabolic. I mean, the fruity and the blueberry are the two that I love. So I mean, they were still the fruity ones left that I ordered two boxes of that, but- Yeah. Now how often are you eating it? Oh, I eat it pretty regularly right now. Really? Oh, between Katrina and I, one of us is having a bowl probably every night or day. Oh, sure. I typically eat it on the weekends, yeah. I dig in with the kids. The macros are great. And it takes, for my, I have a sweet tooth. I've talked about that many times, right? That, you know, so I feel like I'm getting a treat and it's got 30 grams of protein in it. The calories aren't that high. Carbs are low, like- Yeah. It's like a guilt-free treat for me. It's like my favorite thing to do on a day, like give you, instead of a shake, a protein shake, like I would have a protein shake at the end of the night. If I'm low protein- It's way more fun than a shake. Of course. It's surreal. Well, yeah, I feel a little, because my youngest doesn't eat a whole lot of protein and meat to begin with. And so it's like, I feel like a little bit, you know, like, have given him that, at least I'm like, somewhat contributing to his protein, you know? Because he really, like, I have to like, you know, make sure he eats meat, like all the time. Same thing with my daughter. My daughter does- It's frustrating. My daughter does not gravitate to protein whatsoever. She's like a, it's either carbohydrate, or it's more carbohydrates. Yeah, or more. Yeah, so what I have to do with her is I have to give her protein first and be like, well, if you don't finish this, you can't have- Yeah, I started doing that too, yeah. You can't have your carbs. It's funny, when we did the father-daughter dance, we had dinner before. So her friend, you know, we meet up with their friends and the dads or whatever and we all had dinner at a restaurant and they bring out the bread, right? And normally what I do with the bread basket is I'll allow, I'll tell the kids, you can have one and then I'll tell the waiter, waitress, take the bread away because what ends up happening with kids is this. They eat the whole basket. They eat a whole basket of bread, then the food comes and they barely eat it. And I just get enraged because I bought- That doesn't just happen to kids. That happens to grown-ups too. That happens to all of us. I mean, that's why like the appetizer thing is hilarious. Like, if we go to a, you know when I tend to do that? When we're eating like B minus C food. If I'm at a restaurant and I'm like, whatever, appetizer, whatever is before, then I'll eat. But if we're eating like a $50 steak, nothing is worse than filling up on fucking cheap-ass bread. Your $50 steak comes out. If I'm a little uncertain about the entree, yeah, I'm definitely loading up on appetizers. It was funny watching my daughter because it was, you know, it's a special day. So I'm not gonna tell her, don't eat whatever I'm saying, eat whatever you want. So the bread comes out and this is what she does. She gets the piece of bread and she's, how much can I have? I'm like, just whatever, enjoy yourself. It's a special day. Okay, she gets it and she smells it first. That's gonna embarrass you in front of other parents. Jesus Christ, you feed your kid guy? The look on her face, you know what I mean? Like, oh, sweet Jesus, I missed you. She touches him and she eats it and I'm like, oh my God. Oh man. What is going on? The other parents are all looking at you like, Jesus Christ. Of course, I'm, I don't eat bread ever. So, you know, it's probably, it's like totally novel now. And of course I'm the fitness guy, right? So they're looking at me like, this guy starves as kid. She's like touching and smelling the bread before she eats it. What the hell's going on? I missed you so much. Justin, how do you feel, bro? Cause I know you're 40. Oh yeah, I'm feeling, dude, I feel great, man. I don't know all the hypes about, you know? Like, I think like, it's weird because 40 like now feels, it just feels like 30 or like whatever, you know? Stop fucking lying. I'm serious. Fucking guy, let's go for a run after this then. Yeah, no, I'm not doing that. Yeah, I'm not gonna do that. You see he held it back for it. It feels like 30 or 20 and he stopped. No, it doesn't feel like 20 at all. Yeah, no. No, I mean the, you know, the waking up in the, you know, the different noises that come out on my mouth and all that kind of stuff are different. And so, you know, there's differences for sure. But I don't know. To me, like, I don't know. I used to think of 40 being really old, like with my parents and everybody else. And like, I knew that was the 40 was like over the hill was the big thing back in the day. But I just don't see that anymore. I feel like, like my dad's 73, he's still pretty mobile. Like, I mean, he's out of shape and everything. But I feel like we've kind of moved forward a bit more and we've kind of moved that number up a bit because of medical advances in the day. You're so right. I was talking to my parents about this last night. And my, of course, my parents are immigrants right from Sicily. And my dad now is 60, he's in his early 60s. And he goes, he goes, it's so funny. He goes, you see someone today who's 50. He goes, it doesn't look like they used to look. He goes, when I was a kid in Sicily, when you saw a 50 year old, it was like crushed. They were old as fuck. Like they had like the humpback. And they're like, oh, yeah, like, oh, back on the day. When I, you know, and he's like, you see a 50 year old now and they look phenomenal in comparison. He's like, because back then they used to bust their ass, working. He was telling me that they would, he would go to the, to the square, the town square. That's usually what people would do at night. And he'd see men, he'd see men walking with their hands behind their backs, almost perpendicular to the floor. They would be so bent over from their backs being so fucked in their fifties. And he says, because they've been, you know, working in the dirt since they were seven years old, he goes, they're back with stuck, like we have super common. Form that way for sure. Oh, he said it was super common. I was in a text thread this weekend with my two best friends, the ones that have the kids that are a year and a year and a half older than mine. And, you know, we were going back and forth and one of them sends a message that says, I think we did this all wrong. And we're both the other two of us are like, what do you mean? Have you done the math on, you know, when our kids are like gonna be in their early teens, you know, 12, 13 years old, like you ain't gonna be fucking running around with them. And I said, you know what, fuck you two guys. Like that's it. That's my motivation to stay fit and healthy into my fifties and sixties. Like you fuckers are already waving the white flag right now. No, dude, that's why I keep rotating my shoulders. Like every day I'm doing that, like imagine when you can't throw a ball anymore. Right? Like that's horrible thought for me. Dude, I'll tell you what the pluses are of being an older parent, okay? Number one is patience. This is a big one. Right, that's huge. Okay, so here's your evidence right now. If you're listening right now and you're thinking, what do you mean by that? Okay, if you have kids and your parents, okay, who are now grandparents, watch your kids, tell me you're not blown away by the patience that your parents all of a sudden display. My dad, my dad used to lose his shit. Over the heater, right? You turned the heater up on a degree of fucking. Where's the fucking remote? Oh, I remember my dad would punch the dinner table. Now I'm watching my, his grand kid like slap him in the face and my dad laugh. I'm like, what is going on? Who is this man? If I slapped my dad when I was a kid, it would have been terrible. My mom ball, oh, it's okay. The kids are screaming, but they're having fun or what I'm like, who are you? They're just older. They're just older, they have more patience. So an older parent, yeah, you know an older parent, you have more patience, you're smarter, you're less likely to do stupid shit. But yeah, you're older. You're a lot more patient, which a part that I think people don't think about either. You're extremely more patient with your partner too. Of course. And your relationship and you have no idea how much that forms that little kid's brain when they're three, five, seven years old growing up. And you know, like Katrina and I are very aware of that. Like we had a disagreement yesterday, but having Max in the room, how we handle that is like we were already good, you know, with that, with communication. Having our son in the room, it's like this whole new like smiling at each other. And we're like. We're going to talk about this over in the corner. Like really? Did you just say that to me right now? You listen to the bedroom. But you're so patient about it. Where my parents were fucking throwing frying pans at each other. You know what I'm saying? I'm like ducking as a kid. Like so, you know, those things like, that really matters and that really makes it big. And then you're also. And financial stability. Exactly, as you say. You're probably in a better place financially. And so this, again, another example, and this actually what stirred it up was, you know, we had just, we paid for two nights at, we went to sanctuary again, paid for the nanny. Because then Katrina came over the top of me, surprised us with refuge and massages all day long. And I was kind of getting on tour about spending the extra money. So that was what it was all about. And at the end of the day, like when we all settled everything, I'm like, listen, I'm really not, like it's not like it's a big deal. It's not like we can't afford to do that. I just, right now I told her 2020, I'm like really aggressively saving. So I'm making all these sacrifices. I already paid for an expensive two days for us to go get away at the beach and everything like that. So I had already kind of justified that. Like without you communicating the extra, you know, 300 or $400 that we spent, I was like, okay, I probably wouldn't have done that. You know, so, you know, that was the conversation that we're having back and forth. But, and I was frustrated inside, but the way we communicate that in front of the kid is totally different. But, and at the end of the day, it did none of it matter because we can afford to do it. We're okay. It doesn't put us in a hardship. You know, when you're young, when you have kids in your 20s, man, that is hard. It's hard financially. It's very difficult. You're just probably starting your career. You're not making a ton. Now there's of course advantages to being younger. You have a lot of energy. You're healthy, you know, in terms of your odds of having a healthy child physically or a little bit higher. But if you take care of yourself, boy, that makes a big difference. And then for dads, you know, for fathers being older isn't nearly as big of a deal. If you're an older mom, you know, it's difficult. Like you have, I know some women that had kids in their late 30s or early 40s even, that can be pretty challenging on the body. But for a man, I mean, it's just, I think it's the same, it's the same theory though, even with them. I mean, Katrina's an example of that. She's 39, you know. But fit and healthy. Exactly. Fit and healthy with body bounced right back right away. Totally. Her energy levels are fine. Oh, she looks amazing. She looks like she didn't even have a kid. Right. So I mean, I think that, you know, the biggest thing that she's having challenge, I get people to ask all the time. So I should share more for her journey. The hardest thing that she's having, like with breastfeeding, like the stats on that is definitely got to be close to right. Would they say, how many calories you burn more by breastfeeding? She can't keep weight on her. Really? Yeah, so her, That's not what Courtney wants to. Yeah, her big thing that frustrates her is her shape to her body. She's not as muscular as she's used to being. So she feels, but she's lean as shit. She's leaner than what she was before she, before we even had Max. So body fat wise, she's phenomenal and she's in good shape. Yeah, it's when she stops breastfeeding that it'll go back. What she's having a hard time is building muscle. She's having a hard time with packing the muscle on and normal, and part that's twofold, right? So one, breastfeeding, she's burning so many calories, she can't hardly keep up and she's moving around with the kid all the time. Yeah, she's producing. Think about it, you're making protein shakes out of your body. Right, yeah. Of course it's gonna be hard to build, dude. No, it's insane. It takes a lot of resources. She eats too. She's putting down food right now. She's keeping up with me. Is she eating a lot of steak, red meat? Yeah. Oh, good thing. And her diet's been dialed this entire time. So that's part of why she looks so good. The hardest thing for her is the consistency of lifting. And when I say things like that, like for us, that means there's sporadic weeks where we only get one lift and like we never don't lift. Like it's happening. But for us, if we're lifting one to three times in a week, that's really low frequency for both her and I. That's the hardest thing about parenting, it's been that, it's been. And the joke in our house is like, one of us has to represent, you know, like so we make this like Ro Chambeau, who's going to the gym. It's like someone's got to stay home and watch Max right now. Like one of us gets our work out. And I'm like, listen, I've, you know, I'm the guy who's on media. Dude, do you see now, but do you see now the value in having a home gym? When now that you have a gym? Oh, I tell you what, if. Cause then you got, what you do is you put your boy right in the play pan right there and just do your thing. 100%, I mean, the next house, like we're looking right now and the next house will have to have at least a three car garage because I want to convert one of the stalls into an at home gym. Just having a kid, like there's already been many times where her and I, if that was the case, it would be so easy for her to go downstairs. Can you watch the baby? Cause we already kind of do it. We have a rower and we have kettlebell, but that gets lame after a while. Two fucking pieces of equipment. Like you can do that so often before you're just like, okay, I'm over, I want to lift, I want to squat, I want to dead lift, I want to do those things. So, you know, having like an at home gym, that's mandatory. And in the technology with at home gyms, obviously our sponsor PRX is a good example of this. It's way different than it used to be. Now you have racks that fold into the wall. You have, you know, great barbells and dumbbells and, you know, great equipment where back in the day it took up a lot of space cause a cage didn't fold into the wall. So it's like you're just taking up a shit ton of space. Weights weren't as great or whatever, you know? I'm so excited to showcase what we're building at Tahoe right now because it's, you guys know that next week it all comes in, right? Oh, all the equipment there we go. Yeah, orders in, it'll be there when I'm there for that week, it's supposed to get shipped in. Oh my gosh, I'm so excited. I know, so we went bananas with all their stuff. So we're going to have a full on. Yeah, that'll be a good display piece. Yeah, so I'm super pumped at it. No, I just love it too, cause the kids, there's something to be said about them just watching you work out. You don't have to say anything, dude. You know, like I just like pick up the weights or I'll start squatting, I'll start benching and they'll kind of walk in, walk through and they're just curious, what's dad doing? You know? What a good point that I didn't even think about. Oh dude, listen, you guys 100%, I started lifting weights consistently at 14, of course I was driven to whatever, but I started because I had a weight set in the back. My dad had a weight set. Had he not had a weight set, I would have started much later 100% because who's going to take me to the gym? How am I going to get there or whatever? No, totally. It makes a big difference. And now that I think about it, that's exactly we started because my friends, dad had a garage gym and that's how we started lifting on his equipment when we were in seventh and eighth grade. You get that confidence too because you've seen it, you watch it. You know, I'll teach them, I'll teach them little things here and there. I'm not like trying to create a program for them or anything. It's just like their curiosity sparks more conversations. And that's to me, that's one of the best ways to get them involved in it is not to force it on them. So I was so funny. Yes, 100%. I'm already thinking like this, right? So I told Katrina yesterday, we just got back from my nephew playing basketball and it sparked this like thing in me right away. I was like, oh my God, I told him next year I'd volunteer for assistant coaching and like now I have this desire to do it, which never had any desire to do anything like that. And I told Katrina yesterday, I'm like, hey, I want the nanny this week to push the baby down to the park and you and I are going to go play ball. Just you and I are going to play ball and he's going to sit and watch. Like, that's a priority of mine because I just want him to see mom and dad playing because I feel like if he's around it enough, I don't have to force it on him and say you play or want, you're like, hey, do you want to like just seeing us do it? Full mode, dude. Yeah, yeah. They want to know. Because that makes sense with the lifting. Yeah, and what you don't want to do is you don't want to cause the reverse, because I have friends whose dads pushed him so hard to do a sport or something and they hated it. And then as soon as they got old enough to say no, they never, I have a, my ex-brother-in-law could have been a phenomenal, I guarantee you would have made at least the college level with soccer, but because his dad pushed him so hard, when he got old enough to, when you get to the teens that you can kind of say no and push back, he stopped playing. Never wanted to play. I was worried about that. That's why I didn't like sign up for coaching right away, but I've actually found that coaching has helped tremendously just because proximity, me being there, teaching the other kids and he watches me teach them. And he's like, oh, my dad knows things. And he's like more receptive to listening to me. Otherwise it's just dad saying things. Oh, I love it. And you know, here's the other thing too. I have trained, when I had my wellness studio, because it was mine, right? I owned it so I could make the rules in there. And I trained a lot of pregnant mothers and mothers who then had young infant babies. They never stopped at workouts. And one of the reasons why they never stopped at workouts is because they could bring in their baby in the little carrier or whatever. And me as the trainer would swing the carrier, hold the baby, feed them while mom worked out was a huge value. You have a home gym, right? It's not hard. You could easily go in there with your significant other and here hold the baby. And then, okay, now you do a set. I'll hold the baby. You don't even have to take, you can literally work out together. That's, I mean, I don't know if you, here we have to come down here. So there's a little bit of an inconvenience there, but that's how we do it now. Like Katrina and I come to the gym, if you haven't seen us already, that's what we do is we come down here. And typically what I like to do is I like to have started my workout and get a head start. So I've got like a bulk of it done. And then she comes and then I'm kind of like relieving her while she's getting sets in and we're kind of going back and forth while we're- Now think about the, what kind of an environment that creates. When I used to do this with my clients with their kids, their kids developed such a good relate cause then I would train the mom for, you know, the next five or six years. So now this infant that I'm rocking and playing with, you know, is three years old, four years old, five years old. By the time they get a little older, I'm setting up a little obstacle courses where they're playing while mom's working out. They have a different association with the gym. To them, the gym is a fun place. It's a part of life. Mom is happy, you know, whatever, or mom and dad are having a good time, or hanging out. And it dramatically increases the odds that your kid later on will make the choice. Cause that's what ideal, right? The ideal thing is that your kid chooses to make fitness a part of the life, you know? And it's hard not to push them, but that's what you want. You want them to be like, hey, I want to do that. Cause then the odds that they'll stay consistent are much, much higher. Here's a fun fact. It probably doesn't relate to any of that. Well, actually it does relate to this on some level. It's about chimps though. So yeah, no, I was watching this documentary. This guy had been following chimps like, I don't know what the famous one was before that, that had given us all this information about, you know, some of their characteristics that were unique and everything else. But this is a new one that I never had heard of before. Like that they had documented these chimps, like with their behavior, they were starting to put rocks like on the back of their head and like on their back and they carry it with them. And then they're just, they even would like end up sleeping with these rocks or sticks. And like these were all like the baby chimps. So these are the baby chimps that had like showed this behavior and they're like, they're trying to figure out what these sticks or these like totems were signifying to them and like why they had, you know, brought them with them. Is it like a doll or a toy to them? Yeah. So literally they were coddling it like a little baby. They were like mimicking what their mom was doing with them with the rock and with the stick. And like this is a whole like human characteristic thing. They didn't even, you know, notice before that they were doing it. Dude, chimps are interesting. Do you know how violent they are? Oh yeah. They'll shred faces off. Oh, have you seen the videos of what they'll have like a chimp gang, right? So it's like a bunch of younger, you know, adult kind of adult but younger chimp males that represent one tribe and they'll go to another area with another chimp group or whatever. And then they'll go to war and they will destroy the other side. Well, you guys, do you both have Disney Plus? I do. So you should watch the, I forget what Chimp wanted, what it's called, the title of it is, but I told you that Disney does like a different version of like what's the other one that we all watch on Netflix that Planet Earth, right? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a different, like they tell a story and they give names to all the like animals. And they, and so what I thought was fascinating is the hierarchy that they naturally are born into where they have, they all live in this like massive tree and you know, both could be born around the same time. Like they were showing like these female chimps how they are with each other. And if one, they had the five that have like the rich class and they get to be on the top branches and they have others that come and groom them and they just lay there and the other female chimps are grooming them and taking care of their nails and their hair. Yeah, and if the other one tries to climb up they whooped their shit out. Yeah, kick her off the branch and she's got to stay down below and get the scraps that fall down that that's all she gets for her and her baby. And so they automatically fall into this hierarchy and then they treat each other like that. It's fucking wow. Monkeys are, you know what my favorite monkeys are? They're the, I don't remember what they're called, but they're, no, no, no, not the sex fueled the nobos. The, they're these monkeys, they're in Japan, they're in the mountains of Japan freezing in the snow. So these are like snow monkeys and they go in and they do like, they're like natural jacuzes. They're like springs that are hot. And they'll chill, have you seen pictures? Yeah. They'll chill in these hot jacuzes in the snow. Look at these bright pink faces and white fur. Dude, there they are, look at it. They look like old men. Yeah, they make these faces. Just chillin' and anyways, watching one documentary of them and there was like this one monkey that was trying to get into the jacuzes. I saw that, they kept throwing them out. Yeah, like, no dude, you're not allowed. You're not allowed. So they're just kind of watching. Yeah, and there's a bunch of them and they're just chillin' like, yeah, we're chillin'. Those are hot springs right there, they're in? Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, and look at their faces. They look like little old men. They do, dude. They look pretty hilarious. They don't do anything but chillin' there, see? It's a little spa time. Isn't that great? That is funny. Anyway, dude, I got into, I've been doing this more and more lately. I haven't done this in a long time. I took a break from it, but I think I'm back to being an asshole on social media. Yes, he's back. I went on Facebook and you know how I belong to these groups and they post things and talk about whatever? Yeah, last time we got ripped by vegans. Yeah, anyway, so I belong to all these different groups. There was a science group that posted this article that showed a quote from Neil, what's his name? Neil deGrasse Tyson. Yeah, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Anyway, smart dude, obviously brilliant scientist, but something he said that was really stupid that annoyed the shit out of me. And so I had to go on there and say my two cents. And basically what he says in this article is that scientific illiteracy threatens the United States and he talks about how the US, the average person doesn't know science, doesn't know math, we're so dumb, we're way behind other countries. China's test scores are kicking our ass or whatever. So I went on there and I said, okay, first off, surveys, these are surveys. You're asking average people, go to China, ask the average person. You'll get people that believe in crazy gods and mythology. You'll get people who believe everything their government tells them because it's a communist country. You're gonna get lots of different things. Test scores from schools, okay, does that have a lot of importance? Well, let's look at the result of that. America innovates at the highest level in science, technology and medicine by far. There's not even close to a competition with other countries. So I said, look at the results and we went back and forth and I said, okay, I don't care. Not to mention they're a state-driven country which like, who's to say that they're not manipulating numbers. And again, look at America. America innovates in tech, science and medicine, better than any country in the world and it's a reflection of our culture which values independent thought. It values risk taking. Our country values risk taking more than other countries. So lots of people take chances. So obviously we're doing something right. So it was a nice back and forth. I was gonna say, did you get people firing back? Oh yeah, there were people, they were saying like, oh, there's people who are those flat earthers and I'm like, there's idiots everywhere. Yeah, news flash. We just tend to get broadcasted because we're America, so everybody thinks that whatever. But I said, look at our innovation. Well, yeah, I saw a stat on that one. Well, we have like 15 of the top like 25 companies in the world that started here. Like you look at all the Netflix's, the Airbnb's, our Teslas, the Googles, Facebook, Amazon, AirBike. Yeah, dude, and you look at the companies that are like similar or trying that they're nowhere near. They're reaching nowhere near the amount of people. No, the amount of capital that's invested into innovation, because innovation requires a great deal of risk, right? When you're innovating, you're literally trying to do something that no one else has. That means there's a high risk of failure. The most capital that's invested in innovation, by far, even if you do a per capita statistic, is in this country. And again, I think it's the culture. We value risk taking and individual thought and ideas and we're a melting pot. We have a lot of different ideas. We tend, we tolerate different ideas better than anyone else, not perfect. And so that was the argument. So I'd love to, I wish I could message Neil DeGrasse, Tyson, and tell him, yeah, don't say things that are not true. Sure, you can look at test scores and all that stuff, but we're still crushing people. Have we thought to have him on the show? I would love to. He's been on a few of our friends' podcasts that somebody I haven't even thought to reach out to. I would love to, yeah. I would love to. I mean, otherwise he's a great conversation, yeah. Otherwise, I'm a huge fan of him. So anyway, along those lines, looking up more interesting studies, another study came out that linked low-fat diets to low testosterone in men. So this study showed that men who diet by going low fat notice a measurable drop in testosterone. And when they increase their fat back up, their testosterone levels go back up. And they did control for calories because cutting calories can have that effect on men regardless, but going low-fat seems to have a more negative effect on testosterone. This makes sense. Low-fat is an essential macronutrient, and it's used in making some of these important chemicals and compounds in the body that lead to hormones. So if you're a man and you're trying to diet and get leaner, I would suggest testing your testosterone to see if you start to notice declines and then maybe going lower carb, higher fat to see if you can kind of offset that a little bit. I wanted to do a shout-out to one of our listeners, Brett Edelman. So shared, I got this in my, it's tough, right? So obviously we don't get to open and get to all of the DMs anymore. But occasionally I come across like one like this that I'm like, you know what? I want to start highlighting is I get these all the time and I don't share them. And man, I was impressed. And now we've had PowerLift out long enough so people are finishing and coming through and like going to their first meet. Oh, Maps PowerLift? Yeah, and so he went through Maps PowerLift. Dude's only 24 years old and he hit in both his deadlift and a squat, PRs at his most recent meet. So he squatted 570, he benched 290, he said he missed 305, which would have put him over the 1500 total. And how much does he weigh? 190, what was he, 196. Wow. Yeah, so 196 pounds, 24 years old, putting up 570 on a squat, 618 on a deadlift and then 290 on his bench. Holy Toledo. I know, right? Yeah, we can't be making, we need to start making programs not as effective. It's way stronger than us. It's happening. No! What's going on here? We gave it all away. Powerlifting competitions are, you know, motivating yourself by entering into a competition usually doesn't result in long-term success, but I do like Powerlifting competitions because it changes the focus, especially for women. I actually love Powerlifting competitions for women because it takes their focus off of how their body looks to how their body performs. And for a lot of the female clients I've worked with, it was a great step towards having a better relationship with exercise. And here's the thing, I don't think you need to, I think if you can go into like a MAPS Powerlift program, like that has enough value in itself. Like you don't have to actually go to a meet and compete and like compare yourself. But train like you're going to. Right, exactly. Just the training that way, I think it has a ton of value for both men and women, especially if you come from the camp of being mostly focused on aesthetics and wanting to lose fat or you don't like the way you look. It does teach you a lot just about like ignoring a lot of that stuff and focus just on the numbers because the value that that has. And the irony of that is when you learn that discipline to not stress so much about what's going on with body fat percentage or the scale weight and just focus on your results and how much weight you're lifting, the carryover of muscle and metabolism and everything like that. Well, it's just funny too. I was listening to one of Joe Rogan's latest podcasts. He was interviewing this like astronaut, one of the leads for SpaceX and how they're innovating in like, I guess a lot of these other companies like Boeing and all these other companies, they're planning to like launch this year at some point, like this whole program. But he was talking about how they're, the way that they train has changed dramatically. They used to have a machine that only did, you could do like a ton of volume in terms of reps, but like the actual load wasn't like a whole lot. And then so they flipped that and they made the machine that they had in space. So it's like very much high load, low reps and they were able to maintain their muscle and their bone density unlike anything previously they've done before. Of course, it's confirmation. How annoying, totally. How annoying though, all NASA had to do was consult with a few experienced trainers. With my punk, yeah. Yeah, like. Go on NASA. Like we're right here dude. I could have told you that 20 years ago, you know what I mean? But of course if you want to, because one of that's the biggest challenge, one of the biggest challenges with astronauts going in space and staying out there. Oh, bro, big time, big time. Well, when you think about it from a muscular standpoint, you're in like your entire body's in a cast because there's zero gravity. That's right. So there's no. Stabular system and all that gets really messed up when you come back. Oh, a lot of stuff gets fucked up. But definitely they lose muscle. They lose bone density. Then they come back and it's not a good situation. So it's really important. This is like a big thing for them. How do we prevent the atrophy that happens in space and heavy resistance training is the best thing by far superior. Now the other part is I don't, they don't say they do this, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did put astronauts on testosterone at the same time. Yeah, I know. They wouldn't advertise that, but I'm sure that's part of the protocol. Well, that would make total sense. It would make total sense because the health effects of going zero gravity are very detrimental. Very bad, yeah. Yeah, our human body did not evolve in that environment and it can have some catastrophic. Well, what was interesting was too, he brought up this point that I thought was a cool idea. Like he was like, I was literally like evolving to where like a fish, you know, where they're getting less dense in terms of their bone density. But if I were to stay in space, like my body's adapting to that environment. So it's like, you know, you're shedding a lot of the mass or whatever because you don't have those gravitational forces or anything. And it's like, what would we actually turn into? You know, if you stayed up there that whole time without grabbing. We would look like skinny with speech. Like with, yeah. Like the aliens that you think that be well, people think aliens look like, right? With the big eyes and the head and little small. Skinny arms. Yeah, long skinny fingers. Like all the blood you're pumping is pumping into your head for the most part. So it's like, he said the first time he woke up in space, like the next morning, it felt like he had been stand, like doing a handstand all night. So his face is all puffy and all the blood was in his head, you know. Maybe this is where all these alien drawings came from. Maybe it's just somebody who got stuck in space like a long time ago. Yeah, he's making perfect sense now. Well, that is one of the theories. One of the theories is. Oh, is it? One of the theories is that alien visitations are. Just some dude who got stuck a long time ago. They're just humans from the future. That are visiting us from the future to observe us and watch us. I think that theory I also like that there's sort of some bio, like robotic, like some kind of, you know, they're not actually human. There's some kind of artificial like form. Well, there's, what is that called? The Fermini paradox, which is why hasn't life found us and why haven't we found life yet? If there is life out there. And they're basically like saying, well, it must be way less than we think or maybe we're all that there is. Kind of crazy, right? Well, let's end there. First question is from Jay Kendall, 503. Can you build your physique specifically your legs with just free weights? I slowly trained in my garage with a wide variety of barbells, plates, dumbbells, and a few other non-machine items. Are you kidding? Oh. I mean, nothing's gonna build your legs. It's a real question. Nothing's gonna build your legs more than those things right there. Doing barbell back squats, front squats, surger squats, doing Bulgarian split-stand squats with dumbbells, lunges. Stiff-legged deadlifts. Deadlift. Oh my God, yeah. I worked out entirely, exclusively with free weights for 14 years. When I had my wellness studio, I had a cable machine in there that I would use occasionally, but I had a rat. I mean, it was a small studio for personal training clients. So we didn't have tons of equipment. And if you had, you've seen studios like this because really, really good trainers typically don't use a lot of machines. They'll use body weight exercises, maybe physio balls, bands, because the best exercises are not ones that are limited to the shape of a machine because a machine, there's nothing wrong with machines, okay? But one of the big drawbacks to machines is that they're designed for an average person. So someone moves a little differently. They're shorter, they're taller. They don't typically work. Now, free weights form to the person. And of course, the best exercises that are out there are free weight exercises. And I don't miss machines. If I do use machines, it's because I'm going to a gym and it's something different. Well, that's just the one thing is the education, you know, and like learning the moves. And so it does take a little bit of that. And that's why, you know, trainers are around. And I prefer trainers to stick with free weights because like people need to learn these things and learn these exercises, how they're gonna benefit their body the most. Like machines are pretty straightforward. I mean, they got like three picks and like you just kind of form your body into some of these, like the leg extension and, you know, like leg curl. And so that's probably what I'm just assuming that they're used to those types of, you know, equipment and things to use for their legs. But there's a whole host of exercise out there. The truth is though, and this is the thing why I always try and teach or stress to new beginners is that what makes free weights, the benefits and the results is because it is difficult because it's difficult to get good at squatting. It's difficult to get good at a deadlift. Like, and it's that because of that is part of why you get such great results. Now we talk about the science and the studies part we'll talk about all about how much muscle activation and load. And yeah, okay, that's all true too. But really it's the novelty of the exercise and why when you switch a program or you do something completely different why the body responds so well. So doing exercises that are really difficult to get well and it takes months and months and sometimes years for people to perfect that your body is adapting and changing that whole process where get in a leg press machine or get in a leg extension machine and you could take the most novice person and put them in that and within two weeks, they get it. You know what I'm saying? It's not like it's difficult for them to do it. Well, that's great and all yeah. And for, we can show with Eastern machines how much muscle is being activated and oh, can they do? Yeah, yeah. But there's also something to be said about that neuromuscular adaptation that happens and occurs that is pretty much your body's adapted to that part. I just love, it's the barbells and dumbbells are the original first fitness equipment that was ever invented and used. Until this day, hundreds of years later or a hundred years later, it's still the best. Free weights are still the best. There is no machine that can do what a barbell can do. I literally can take a barbell and I could write down hundreds of exercises that you could do with it. Machines typically do one thing, one exercise or maybe two, a cable even which has the most versatility of all equipment still can't match what a barbell, a single barbell can do. If you have a home gym and you have a cage, you have a barbell, dumbbells and an adjustable bench, you're done. Like you can do everything with that. You can do almost anything you want. You can develop the most amazing physique ever with just that equipment. In fact, that's what I prefer. That's what I still to this day, majority of my exercises revolve around those pieces of equipment right there. And the cool thing is today, nowadays, equipment, I mean, I talked about this earlier in the intro, at home gym equipment used to be terrible. I mean, your choices when you were, when I was younger, the choices for at home equipment were sand filled plastic weights or I had to buy commercial equipment which was super expensive and it took up a ton of space. Nowadays, you have things like companies like PRX which you got a cage that folds in the wall just as sturdy and good as any commercial equipment. Barbells and dumbbells are really, really good quality. Nowadays, plates are really good quality, adjustable bench are good quality. Boy, you could do a ton. And I'll tell you what, this is the other part. If you ask experienced trainers, coaches and strength coaches, what are the top 10 best, most effective overall muscle building, strength building, just functional strength building? They'll be all barbell dumbbells? Mostly, right? I'm sure there'll be a few machines in there towards the bottom, but at least 70%, if not more of the equipment that will be listed in that top 10 will consist of something you do with a freeway. So you've got the best exercises at your fingertips. You definitely don't need lots of machines. The only machine I would ever add to a home gym honestly would be a cable, some kind of a cable machine. And why? Because a cable machine is more like freeweights than it is like machines because of its versatility, because you're not stuck into a path or a form. Right. Next question is from Haley Phillips 34. I'm not feeling very sore a day or two after I go to the gym. Does that mean I'm not working out hard enough? Should I increase my rep ranges or weight? I remember when I thought soreness was a good indicator of workouts. In fact, that was the... I think we've all been there. I remember the first time I read that it was actually a sign of overtraining and it just shattered my paradigm. I mean, because up until that point, that was what I was always seeking. And if I didn't get sore, I was disappointed in the workout and can thought of it as something that was... It's almost worthless. Right, that's how, that was the attitude until I read that. I believe it was an article that, back when I was going through my NASM, I think they had shared it. And I had read that and I thought, what? It's actually a sign of overtraining. And so... It's a more accurate sign of that than it is of a good workout. It's a terrible... It doesn't tell you at all if your workout was good or not. I'll take it a step further. I didn't make the best gains of my life until I stopped getting sore. Okay, so before that point, every workout, one of the main goals was, can I make myself really, really sore for the next few days? And if I didn't, I'd go back to the drawing board and try to figure out a way to get myself really sore. My best gains came from when I stopped getting sore. I wouldn't get sore from my workouts and I was getting the best gains ever and it was because I figured out exactly what you said, Adam. Now, I also want to be clear that I'm sore today. I overreached. And so that's how I look at it now is I overreached a little bit. In a perfect world for myself when I'm trying to gauge like how hard I push myself or how much volume I should be doing because that's changes, right? Like your consistency. The workout I did that got me really sore right now is mainly because I've been really inconsistent the last four weeks or so ever since I got sick. So I overreached. Normally when I'm in a rhythm and I've been training very consistently, I don't overreach like that. So what I'm looking at is, can I add volume either through lifting more weight by increasing the weights that I'm lifting or increase intensity within the workout without getting sore? That is a win all the way. If I know that, hey, this workout, I did more today than I did the previous workout like this or I lifted more on my bench or I lifted more on my squat than I did the previous time and I don't get sore, that's a fuck. That is a, right? That's like when you hit a baseball and you hit right on the fucking, right where you're supposed to, the sweet spot and it feels effortlessly in the ball sales versus when you muscle it and it gets out in the outfield. I think there's degrees too. You know, there's degrees of like, I feel tight and a little bit restricted versus like, I feel like, you know, like I can't even lift my arms. You know, like there's been degrees of where I've like crushed myself and like, I know too, this is where it's crucial in the very beginning. If you're a beginner and you're working with a trainer, you're just doing this on your own and you're trying to get the most out of it and where, you know, you feel that soreness is kind of normal, like the first few weeks, you're gonna, you're gonna feel like a different tightness, a different stimulus and that's okay. If you're going, if you're exceeding that to where it's like pain and like it's hard to get out of bed and like, you know, that's definitely not a place that's optimal. You could draw a very clear, now that I think about it, you could draw a very clear line in my career as a trainer that will tell you on one end of that line, I was not a good trainer. On the other end of that line, I was a really good trainer. This is actually, now that I think about it, probably one of the best metrics for me in terms of gauging how good I was. And here's what it is. Before that line, when I would ask a client, you know, they would, I'd train them, I'd take them through a session and I'd see them for the next workout a few days later in the following week. Ask if they were sore. I'd say, hey, how sore were you? And if they said to me, oh my gosh, I could barely move, couldn't even brush my teeth. I used to think to myself like, yes, we did a good job. Now, on the other side of the line, when I became a good trainer, if the client said to me, I kind of felt it a little bit, but not much. Oh, we did a great job. We did a good workout. Let's stay there. Totally different. On one end, I was a terrible trainer. On the other end, I became a very successful trainer. I preferred, actually, the goal was for my client to not feel sore, but rather feel, maybe a little bit like they worked out, like, oh, I could kind of feel the muscle. If they're not sore and you're adding weight to the bar, you are fucking winning. Oh, that's 100, that's the best. Yes, if you are adding weight to the bar and or able to increase intensity in the workout, and you are not getting super sore from that, you are fucking winning. Totally, totally. Body is adapting, getting stronger, building muscle. It's happening. Totally. That's the sweet spot. And of course, when you're trying to hit that, you tend to sometimes flirt with the overreaching a little bit and that's your kind of gauge of, okay, like the way I'm reflecting on my workout on Saturday that hindered me lifting on Sunday because I overreached and I'm really sore still today is I went, fuck, I could have eliminated that exercise or I could have stopped at two sets instead of doing four sets. Like that's how my brain is working because I did way more than I needed to to get my body to start to adapt and change. So I'm always searching for that. But the next workout, I wanna make sure that I stretch myself a tiny bit and then not get as sore. If I can do that, boy, you're winning right there. That's what you're looking for. It's funny, like I don't really get sore from workouts anymore. I get sore from yard work. That kills me, dude. I was helping my dad the other day, move some log rounds and it's just awkward sizes and you know, you're leaning over a lot and of course you're trying to like max exert to be able to get things going and man, just killed myself. Well, that's because your goal isn't to work out. Your goal was to get done with the job. I gotta, yeah, I don't care how much it hurts, I gotta finish the job. A workout's goal is not, it's funny, when you're working out, you're not like building anything or moving anything. You're picking up weights and putting them down. The goal is to get your body to progress and soreness does not indicate a great workout. Quite the contrary, if you're really, really sore, it indicates you had a bad workout. Whoa, that's what, we had a great discussion. So this person, if you're, if you didn't listen to the episode we did with Max Marzo, he got into this and he actually talked, I forget what he uses a term. There's like a minimal effective dose. There's a maximal effective dose. There's a minimal dose that where it starts to take away from your progress. Right. Yeah. And yeah, I forgot what he called it. Yeah, there comes a point where even if you're getting sore, sure it doesn't mean, you can still progress. Cause there's obviously some, there's definitely people listening right now. They're like, Dutch bullshit, I'm sore all the time and my body looks great. Yes, there's a point though when the returns on it are starting to diminish and you're doing more and you wouldn't, and you're not getting anymore had you have done less. And that's the point. And I also would challenge them and say, okay, fine. You get really sore and you're making progress. Try not getting so sore. You're still gonna make progress. And watch your progress accelerate. You'll actually get better progress. Even better, yeah. That's right. Next question is from Mae Punk. Is it okay to skip trigger sessions if you are feeling sore or tired from a previous workout? That's actually the time you should do them. Oh my gosh. Yeah, exactly. So if you don't know what a trigger session is, these are very short, but very frequent sessions that you do typically with bands where you're targeting specific muscles, getting a little bit of a pump, feeling a little bit of a burn, maybe eight minute long session and then you stop and you typically do these on your off days. Trigger sessions are phenomenal when you're sore or when you're tired. If anything, they speed up, recover. In fact, when I'm in a situation like Adam's describing where you said you worked out and you're super sore, you might have overdone it, one of the best things to do is to do some trigger sessions, get your body to recover faster. It's one of the absolute best things you can do when you're feeling that way. And you know, it's funny, we know this instinctually. Like think of the last time your legs got really, really sore and then you had to get up and maybe ride a bike or stretch a little bit. How do you feel right afterwards? Soreness dissipates a little bit. You feel a little bit better. I learned this lesson the first time I figured this out a little bit was I was, I wanna say I was 16 and I had worked out my biceps really, really hard and I was super, super sore in my biceps as before I understood overtraining really well. And I had just bought myself a BMX bike and my cousin had gotten one too. So him and I would work out together. So the day before we hammered our biceps, the day after we're like, hey, let's take our bikes out and let's go practice bunny hopping over things. And you guys know bunny hopping, you have to pull up on the handlebars as part of a bunny hop, especially when you don't know how to bunny hop, you pull way too hard as you learn, right? So I remember we went out and we were practicing and I'm pulling on this handlebar over and over again. I remember thinking like, I just, I wasted my bicep workout. I shouldn't be doing this on my biceps. I should just let them rest. And I remember that the day after my soreness was gone and I actually felt like I built a little bit of muscle. I started to piece that together like, huh, it was the extra movement that got the recovery. You know, I mean, I think this is when trigger sessions have the most value. I really do. I mean, it's not that they're great by themselves without being sore. But I think the truth is when you're always trying to hit that sweet spot, you tend to be overreaching a little bit most of the time. And one of the, I think the, and we know this as trainers and coaches. And then one of the things that I think has made the trigger sessions so beneficial is cause it facilitates recovery and speeds that process up. I mean, so Sunday I was supposed to go lift again and I was supposed to do squats. I mean, I was so damn sore that it impeded that. But instead what I ended up doing was mobility and triggers, did body weight squats. I want to get that blood and oxygen moving through my body and pumping that through. That'll help facilitate recovery even faster. I feel better today because of that. But I think that's where, I think trigger sessions sometimes people, they go at it the same way. I think a lot of them go at workouts. They think you need to- Too hard. Yeah, too hard. It's literally, you are- It's not supposed to damage you. You're just trying to pump blood in the muscle. Take a, pick the band that is not really hard for you to do 15 to 20 reps. You should be able to easily do 15, 20 reps. We're using biceps as an example. You just want to get a little bit of a pump. Yeah, that's it. Three sets of 15 to 20 reps with an easy band. And then move to another muscle like that. That's it, I'm done. I'm done with my trigger. Yeah, the thing that you, this might illustrate a little bit better, but I think we tend to confuse recovery and adaptation. We think of the same thing. So when you cause damage with a workout, your body recovers from the damage and then simultaneously often or sometimes afterwards, it also tries to adapt. So recovering would be like, I cut my hand and my skin heals. Adaptation would be my skin grows a callus to prevent a cut from happening again in that same spot. So those can happen simultaneously. Now if you train really, really hard or too hard and you're really sore, your body's probably trying to adapt, but it's also trying to recover. Recovery tends to be the priority. Well, what ends up happening oftentimes is you worked out too hard, recovery takes far longer than the adaptation. Adaptation happened, but now adaptation's there and your body doesn't keep the callus for very long. If there's not a good signal being sent, it'll take it back down. So you might have gained a little bit, but then you lost because your body's just recovering. You could have had the next workout that just cut off that callus. Right, and so the trigger session causes no damage. What it does is speeds up recovery, but it does send a small adaptation signal. Or if anything, it strengthens the adaptation signal that you sent before. This is why trigger sessions are so exceptional for exactly what this person's talking about. When you feel like you might have overdone it, do some light trigger sessions on that body part. Oh, and this has tons of value for someone who doesn't even have our programs. So if you don't have any fucking clue that we're talking about right now with trigger sessions and how- It's in maps and a baller. Yeah, right, it's in our program, but if you don't, an easy way to explain it to somebody who's following something else or doing their own workouts, you get, let's keep using the, we'll use bicep and legs, right? My legs sore, your bicep sore. You do some air squats, for 20 reps, just body weight. And you do three sets of that for, you know, 15, 20 reps with like maybe 30 seconds in between. That'll pump my quads up. That's all I, that's it. That's all I need to do. And do that like two or three times that day. Yeah, that's it. Two or three times a day, that takes me a couple of minutes to do the squats. And then I do some band, grab some bands and do 15 to 20 reps, three sets with 30 seconds to rest in between, get a pump in my biceps, done with that. You do that a couple of times a day on the muscle group that's really sore and watch how much faster you recover and you feel from that. Next question is from It's Not Easy Being Green. Just like there are benefits to switching up your workout routine, are there any benefits to switching up your diet? If so, what would that look like? How often would you change your diet and any pitfalls to avoid? I 100% believe this. I 100% believe this. Not Easy Being Green. Thanks. That's my voice, isn't it? No problem. Okay, so I'll talk about the psychological benefits before we can get into the physiological, potential physiological benefits. Psychologically, I think it's a brilliant thing to change up your diet. I think one of the biggest culprits or one of the biggest reasons why people have a tough time eating healthy or why people tend to binge is because they stay so rigid in one particular way of eating. For example, this is just an example, but let's say your keto. So your keto diet means super, super low carbohydrates, high fat, moderate to maybe higher protein. That means I'm avoiding carbohydrates all the time. This person right here is primed for a binge. The second they go off, they go way the fuck off. They're just not used to eating different foods. It doesn't mimic real life either, real life. And humans probably evolved eating a lot of the same foods, but it was a seasonal change, right? It was like wintertime, you're probably only eating meat. Spring, things are growing. Maybe I'm eating more plants, summer. And so the foods would change as the seasons would change. So humans, I think we just operate better with a little bit more variety than the rigid, like I eat, these are my macros, this is what I eat all the time. You see some bodybuilders, bodybuilders eat the same foods every single day and just notorious. I think that, I think there's no doubt the psychological argument is not only there, but it's extremely strong. I think the real question for me that I have is, is the physiological as strong as the psychological in the situation? And I believe there's a lot of unknowns in this area still. Like we are still learning so much about the gut. And it just makes total sense to me when we talk about every other system of the body, why would we not think that our digestive system adapts similarly? Why would we not think that? Every other system has an adaptation process and gets used to whatever it is that you're throwing at on a consistent basis. So if you eat the same way, you hit the same amount of grams of carbs, proteins and fats on a very regular basis because you're following the same dry plan all the time, why would you not think that our body would become adapted to that? And if we're trying to create change, it makes a lot of sense to me. This is why I love to mess around with all this. When I teach clients, I used to, they would all, every client always, oh, have you heard about the ketogenic diet? Oh, have you heard about this? Have you heard about that? Absolutely, we're gonna go through it all. Like I wanna teach my clients all of it and then as we're going through it, talk about the benefits, what they're feeling, whether it's pro or con, this is why you're feeling that way, because you're eating this way and to teach them how to take the tools from all of these different diets. Because the reason why all of them are successful is because they're lower calorie. I mean, bottom line, like the real science that supports why any of the diets are really, really successful is because they're all designed to restrict calories. We restrict calories, we lose body fat. So then it's really just about starting to look at all the other signals that when you eat this way, how do you feel? Like, do you sleep better? Do you have better energy? Are you sharper? Okay, so you like those benefits. Oh, but you start to notice that on Saturdays, I like this type of diet. For example, for me, I like to run on a weekend. I like to run a higher fat lower car because I tend to be lazier. I tend to watch more TV or be sitting around or sleeping in. And what I have found from doing ketogenic or running a high fat diet is, wow, it just curbs my appetite. I mean, I can eat a really high fat breakfast and then I'm good all day till dinner time. And I'll do that on a Saturday. I'm not running a specific diet. I've just learned from running so many different diets how that works really well for my lifestyle there. When I have a hard workout, I wanna carve up. Like, so I think there's a lot of value in people going through all these different types of diets but not stopping there and not attaching it just to their muscle building or weight loss journey. There's many other things that food provides for us and really learning to unpack what you're enjoying, what you like, what benefits that you see from it. And it's okay, muscle building and fat loss can be one of those, but they're not the only ones. And so make the connection to all of those and then learn how to implement all of those different aspects. I'm sure at some point, yeah, we're gonna find like there's a lot of parallels between exercise and nutrition. And it's just nutrition, it's so complex because there's other things going on like autoimmune things, things that are underneath the surface that we're just now discovering of how to treat. And I think that that puts a whole nother host of variables about what specifically will match you for the moment and then how long do I stay in that protocol? What's the time length of that? There's not enough science, I think. And so we're really relying on anecdotal evidence out there. Yeah, evidence out there, yeah. Absolutely, and okay, so that's 100% true. A lot of it's gonna be listening to your body. You're not gonna know what affects your body until or how something affects your body until you kind of go through it. Once you start to figure it out, like I know, for example, for myself, I know when to change my diet depending on what I'm looking to do. If I'm looking for me personally to be sharp mentally, I tend to go much lower carbohydrate, higher fat. If I'm looking for strength in performance in the gym, I'll eat more carbohydrates. I know how I feel when it's time to eat more fish. I know how I feel when it's time to eat more beef or more greens. And also look at the nutrient profiles of these foods. Like if I say right now, omega-3 fatty acids, we all think fish, because fish is a rich source. Certain types of fish are rich sorts of omega-3 fatty acids. If I say creatine, natural creatine in food, or if I say lots of B vitamins, we might think red meat, for example. If I say lots of fiber, then you might be thinking more plant-based foods because animal-based foods typically don't contain any fiber. So there's lots of different nutrients and components into all of these foods, and I think that they'll all benefit you. The odds that you'll have a nutrient deficiency start to go up when your diet becomes more and more the same all the time. Because if you look at a diet, for example, that's just keto or just paleo or just vegan, you'll find that they have a tendency to lack certain nutrients depending on the variety of the food in there. But if you mix it up a little bit, the odds are that you're gonna cover all of your bases. This is why you see people who will follow a diet and they'll feel great for two or three years and then they start to feel like shit and then realize, oh, I have nutrient deficiencies because I ate only this for so long and I lacked these nutrients that were found in other foods that I didn't eat before. Now from an evolutionary standpoint, humans were opportunistic 100%. If there was something there that we could eat, we ate it. We didn't understand agriculture until far later, so we weren't planting things. So we either killed things, pulled them out of the ocean, ate bugs and ate the plants that grew around us. That meant and we moved, right? We were a hunter-gatherers. We literally moved and traveled. That's why humans are all over the earth. We traveled all over the world trying to find things to eat, which meant our diets consistently and constantly changed depending on the season, where we near an ocean or a lake, are we inland, are we in the mountains, are we closer to a desert? So the human body seems to do well with a certain type of variety. Now the other part of the question is how often would you change your diet? I don't have any science that supports any particular timeframe. This is my own personal opinion and it's a bit of a guess, but I'm basing it off of just how we probably evolved. And I would say evolve your diet or change your diet seasonally would probably be best. How, what does that look like? Okay, eat the fruits and vegetables that tend to be in season for the area that you live in. So you have your summer fruits and vegetables in your spring and winter fruits and vegetables. Meats tend to eat meat throughout the whole year, but I do like to eat more fish in the summer. And I just picture, and this is again, there's no studies that support this, but I think to myself like, oh, we'd probably fish more likely to fish when it's not freezing outside or whatever. So that's how soon and often I would say to change, but definitely I've seen value. I like the idea of every two to three months less, I don't try as hard to match seasons. I mean, we live in a really nice time now where strawberries are in season 12 months out of the year. Oranges year round. Right, so although that's probably not how we originally evolved, we have that access. So I just like to throw a curve ball at my body every probably three months or so and switch it up. And so, and we used to share probably on the podcast a lot more. I think we should try and be better about just kind of sharing what we're doing now because I know these guys, I'm meeting with them all the time. So I know, Sal, are you off keto? Are you still running keto? I went off for a few days. Now I'm gonna go back on, but I do that. Right, exactly. And you'll hear that all of a sudden. I have tacos. One guy will be fasting. One guy will be running keto or paleo, or one guy will be doing high carb or carb cycling. So we're always kind of intermittently changing. But that's the message that I think we've been trying to get across in this podcast since the beginning is that we don't subscribe to one single diet whatsoever. I think that's silly. I think that's also one of the challenges with the show and programs and everything like that is people always want us to tell them what to do. One definitive way. Yeah, they want us to tell them how to eat. And the reason why we've avoided that for so long is because it is so individualized. And we do recommend that you do all these different ways of eating to figure yourself out. And to do that for one person, the amount of time that would consume for me to do that is unreal. So you gotta- It takes a long time and a lot of information just to do it, help one person- One person. Let alone a whole audience of people. It's like when you work with people for 10 plus years on a consistent basis, you work with hundreds of them or you work through maybe thousands by proxy, let's say you have people who work with other people and you manage them. One thing becomes very, very clear after about 10 years and it's just in your face. You can't deny it. There's a massive individual variance. Yeah, and you've seen every rule broken. I've seen them all. I remember years ago thinking I was so anti-vegan. I thought nobody could ever do well vegan. And then I had a client that legit just was healthiest and did best vegan. I've met people on the opposite end of the scale who just do best eating carnivore, which is insane. All they eat is meat. That sounds crazy. Nope, I've legit met people who do best that way. And so I know those are the two extremes. Most people are somewhere in the middle. I've also seen people do really well one way and then three years later, doesn't work well for them. We gotta change it because circumstances change. The body changes. So the individual variance cannot be overstated. And that I think is one of the main benefits of cycling through different ways of eating. And with that, go to mindpumpfree.com and download all of our guides, resources and books. They're all totally free. You can also find us all on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin. You can find me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam.