 In this episode of Mind Pump the World's Top Fitness, Health, and Entertainment podcast, we talk all about the number one foundational physical pursuit, strength. Strength is one of the most important things you can focus on when you're working out in the gym. It doesn't matter what your goal is if you're trying to burn body fat, if you're trying to build muscle, sculpt your body. If your strength is going up, that means good news. It's objective, it means things are working. So in this episode we give you the eight ways that you can boost your strength fast. We talk about everything from priming to programming, mobility, we talk about food, we talk about exercises and which ones to do, we talk about how to change the resistance, we talk about training to failure. I mean we go through all of it, break it down for you. If you listen to this episode and you apply what we talk about, you will get stronger. Now this episode is brought to you by our sponsor ForSigmatic. Now ForSigmatic is a fascinating company. They specialize in medicinal, adaptogenic mushrooms. What are those things? Well these are mushrooms that have been used for thousands of years that help your body adapt to stress. In other words, taking some of these products may help your body adapt to strength training. It may help you improve your stamina and your endurance. Now one of my favorite products from ForSigmatic is cordyceps. I love taking cordyceps before my workouts, especially before my long and arduous workouts. I have more stamina, I get much better pumps. Studies show that cordyceps improves ATP production and muscles. ATP is one of the main sources of muscle energy, but they have lots of other products. Lion's Mane for example is a mushroom that helps with cognitive function. So if you're somebody that likes to be smart and sharp, you can try Lion's Mane. Now ForSigmatic is special because they have a dual extraction process, meaning you get all of the awesome stuff from each of the products and not just a little bit because they use either hot or cold. With ForSigmatic, they extract everything two different ways. I think they're the only company that does that. And because you listen to Mind Pump, you get 15% off any of their products. So listen in, go to ForSigmatic.com that's F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com forward slash mind pump, use the code Mind Pump at checkout for 15% off. Also this month, MAPS hit is 50% off. So hit stands for high intensity interval training. This is a fat burning program, ladies and gentlemen. This program was designed to burn the maximum amount of body fat in a short period of time. Now it is advanced, so it's not for beginners. And you should not be following this program all the time. It's a six week program, six weeks burn lots of body fat, lots of calories after that phase out and do another MAPS program. Anyhow, it's half off. So here's how you get the discount. Just go to mapshit.com that's M-A-P-S-H-I-I-T.com and use the code hit 50. That's H-I-I-T-5-0, no space for the discount. What do you guys think is one of the most important metrics that you can measure? I'll tell you. Strength, duh. Wow. Good job, Justin. I know. You're going to hijack that, dude. It's because, huh? I mean, it's obvious. No, it's true. Strength. I think if you're training, when you're training a client, it's the one thing that if it improves, it's almost always a good sign. And if it improves, and you're getting leaner, if you're trying to build muscle, if you're trying to improve mobility, whatever the goal is, if you're stronger in a real way, what I mean by real is you're not like cheating to lift more weight or using, you know, a weight belt all of a sudden, now you can lift more weight, but you're actually legitimately stronger. That's always, always good news. Yeah, things are working. It's not biased either, right? When you, subjective. Yeah. And when you look at things like the scale and the mirror, which we've talked, and we've talked about this on the show at Nazium, I mean, it's one of the worst things that you can do as a trainer, as a coach, is to utilize that as your main guiding tool for a client is looking at the scale or looking at the mirror because there is, there's too many variables that come into play and that can mess with somebody's head and it is a much better pathway to just measure strength because if we are getting stronger, we know that our programming is in line at least bare minimum. Yeah. There's a good chance our diet's probably better also and we're seeing results. We're getting, we're building muscle. Yep. It's objective. You are, you are, and this is, this is when I used to train kids, this was my favorite thing to communicate, you know, when I'd have them come in and I would always write down how many reps they did or how much weight they lifted and I'd make sure that to show them. So I made a big deal about it. Then they'd come in the following week and inevitably, you know, they're a little bit stronger and then they'd tell them your body's not the same bodies it was last week. It is different. You did one more rep or you lifted five more pounds. You have improved objectively because you're right. You use the mirror, the mirror lies to you or at least our perception of what we see in the mirror lies to us. I mean, how many times have you had a client that, you know, they'll look at an old picture of themselves and they'll be like, man, I can't believe I used to think I was fat, you know, and because they, your perception can be so skewed, but strength is objective and it's almost always good news. In fact, I can't even think of when it would be bad news unless your goal was to get weaker. I can't think of a time when getting stronger would not be considered a great news. And what's the byproduct of having a stronger body? It looks better. That's just the, it inevitably happens. It looks better. It moves better. It functions better. It serves you better. So you have more abilities. You can do more things. Because strength is objective and because increasing your strength typically means that you are on the path to building more muscle, on the path to speeding up your metabolism, or at least not the metabolism, not slowing down. Let's say you're dieting. Let's say you're, you're cutting body fat. One of the biggest problems with that is metabolism starts to adapt and starts to slow down. This is why it gets harder and harder over time and why people tend to gain the weight back. One of the reasons why. When strength goes up, that's a good sign. It means your metabolism is probably not slowing down. If you're getting stronger, it means that your hormones are probably balanced or closer to being balanced. It means that, you know, sleep may be good. It means that your health, if your health is poor, you're not going to get stronger. So now that we've really made the case for strength and that it's so important, I think that's the one thing you should almost always pay attention to and focus on. Yeah, we're all saying all the positive things too. There's also the other side of that, which is if you're not seeing strength gains, there's also things to probably be looking at. There's many times where people are working hard in the gym, they're sweating, and they're following something consistently, and they feel like they're doing really well, but their strength has either stayed the same or in some cases even declining. And so part of the thing about, you know, going after what you want to talk about today, which is like all the different ways to improve strength, this is also ways for you to assess and look at what you're currently doing, if you're not seeing strength gains. So here's some great tips on how to improve strength gains, but also here's some areas you should look into if you're not seeing strength gains. Right, and then these are in no specific, necessarily no specific order, but these are things that you can focus on that will improve your strength gains. So if you're getting stronger now, and you're listening to the podcast, these things will get you there a little bit faster, likely if you're not getting stronger, these things can definitely get you to get stronger. And again, I want to emphasize this, doesn't matter if your goal is fat loss, sculpting, shaping, toning, building, it really doesn't matter what your fitness goal is, improving your strength in real ways is good for all of those goals. And remember strength is the foundational physical pursuit. Good strength gives you more endurance, gives you more stamina, more agility, more power. So if you're an athlete, and you improve your strength appropriately and properly, and you continue to practice your skills and do all that stuff. So it's not like you cut other things out, but you actually improve your strength on top of what you're doing, you're going to perform better. Okay, so the first thing I want to the first tip I think is proper priming. Now this one I didn't get until much later on in my career. I remember the first time I kind of figured this out. When I was a kid, lifting weights, it's not this is not such a big deal these days, still kind of is but not as big as when I was a kid. But when I was a kid, especially if you're a guy, the one lift that everybody measured their performance by was the bench press. Yeah, nobody cared about anything else. It was like bench bro. Yeah. So oh, you work out how much do you but nobody cared how much you overhead press nobody cared. Nobody even knew how much they dead lifted squats didn't mean anything. Why did it why did that? Where did that come from? Because I remember being a kid who knew nothing about really working out at all. But that was like the my first experience. Yeah, I remember I was in high school. And my buddy Ryan his dad had a little gym set up in the garage. And all we did was bench we did a little bit of arm stuff to but it was all that all we cared about was out of the three of us who could bench more. That's probably why because back then it was it was only the bench with that little attachment that you could put the barbell on you didn't have like a squat rack like nobody really had all that set up at their house. And so like I remember going to people's houses in their outdoor in their backyard. That's what they had they had, you know, a bench and they had dumbbells and that was it. So it almost became like the standard of well how much weight can you stack on there? Dude, it was totally the standard. It was how you measured how awesome you were with your friends, how effective your work. I was all about bench press. Who was the strongest, right? Like whoever had the most bench we just assumed that he's stronger. You're the strongest. Yeah, overall. So here I am as a kid bench pressing and I'm really focused on getting that weight to go up because of course I think it's the most important thing in the world. So I'm pushing and pushing and I got stuck. And I remember what number I got stuck at. I think it was like, I don't remember, it was 600. I'm just kidding. It was like 200. 225. It was 200 something and I'm young at this point and I couldn't get the bar to move anymore. Couldn't figure out what was going on. And I'm reading muscle and fitness and or flex magazine, one of those two. And at the back of it, there's a picture of a dude with his arms up at like 90 degrees with this like plastic thing supporting his arms and it was called the shoulder horn. That was the name of the device. What? And it was just, it was used to strengthen the muscles of the rotator cuff. And so the guy's holding dumbbells and his arms are externally rotated up and down. Yes. And his arms are sitting in this blue device that held his arms up. It was called the shoulder horn. Now here's why it caught my attention. Brilliant marketing and true marketing. It actually said in there a guaranteed way to get your bench press to go up. So I was like, huh, and I didn't care about shoulder mobility. I didn't care about priming. I didn't care about anything. Oh, there it is right there. Oh, now I remember this. That's a picture of it right there. Oh, I remember this. I remember. Yeah, people in gym. That's it. Right. So I thought, oh, this gets my bench press to go up. Now being the, you know, the person I am, I learned how it worked, saved some money and just duplicated the exercise at home by putting my arm up on a bench or whatever. So I practiced this exercise right before I did a bench press. I didn't understand really that I was going to be strengthening muscles or whatever. I just thought, because the way the ad looked, that if you do this right before you bench, you're stronger. Okay. This is my first experience with priming. Didn't that know I was priming? Didn't know any of that stuff. My first experience. So I do it. I do this movement in my backyard with my arms and I kind of feel a weird burn on my shoulder. Can't figure out what's going on. I go to bench press and I broke my plateau. I actually added five pounds to my bench press. Simply from doing that was totally blown away. That became a trick that I would use as a trainer later on when clients would come in and want to increase their bench. I'd have them prime the rotator cuff, then we do a bench and lo and behold, they were stronger. Because you have a more stable shoulder joint to work with. And that's, that's a huge component to working out that I think a lot of people just don't even realize as part of the process, especially when you do compound lifts where you do have to stabilize all the rest of the limbs and the joints of your body, even going in to performing the exercise. So it's something to really consider is to wake up those muscles that are going to add in more stability to the joint that you're really working on. I remember, Sal, my first experience of priming and again, like you, not knowing what I was doing. And so when I first started getting the lifting, it was all about a split, right? You just chest day, back day, arm day, and I did that for years. And one day, my buddy, and he must have been reading one of the popular magazines and he says, you know, let's, let's combine these muscle groups together and let's do, let's do chest and back together. And we started with back. Now, in theory, I'm thinking, okay, we, I was used to doing just chest all by itself. I'm now going to exercise my back first. I'm going to be sweaty and tired a little bit. So when I get to chest, I'm probably not going to be very strong. And so in my head, I was already working up to be prepared for that. But I had one of the best bench days I ever had in my life, because we did back first. Now, as a kid, that didn't, it just didn't compute to me. I didn't understand it. Now, later on, I get what I did, what ended up happening was I primed all my back muscles. I got them in a position that hold my shoulder girdle in the correct position. So I would bench with better form and technique. And as a result of that, I had one of my best chest lifts I've ever had in my life. Yes. And now you may be wondering, how is that possible? Did you build more muscle in that short period of time? No, your body has safeguards that prevents you from lifting more weight if it senses that you're unstable or you may hurt yourself. Okay. If I put knee wraps on my knees before I squat, I am going to squat 10 to 15 more pounds than without the knee wraps. Now, why? What are the knee wraps doing? Now, there's a little bit of spring that the knee wraps provide, but is it adding 15 pounds to my squat? No, what it's doing is it's sending a signal to my body, my central nervous system, which communicates to my muscles that says it's a little safer to exert more power. That's right. So proper priming before your workout. And by the way, this is an important point to make with priming. It needs to be individualized. Now, I just so happened to prime my rotator cuff, which is what I needed. You know, Adam just so happened to prime his back before benching, which is just exactly what he needed. You have to prime your body appropriately. But if you do it, you're going to exert more strength and power. Now, how does that translate into real strength and power later on? Well, now you're lifting better. You're going to build more muscle, you use more tension, and you get better results. Proper priming is a very, very fast and easy way to lift more weight. I look at it as a leak. This is, you know, somewhere in your body in the kinetic chain where there's where there's a leak of potential performance. So if my joint is just a little bit unstable, and that's sending feedback immediately to my body, I am not going to be able to utilize that amount of force that I can generate. And so the more I can then, you know, provide that feedback and really get access to more stability in that joint, it's going to send that back. I'm going to be able to unleash a lot more force to output, which then again, that translates to strength. And I know this is a little bit more on, you know, the physics end of it. But if people could realize that you can generate a lot of force, it's just a matter of, you know, how you distribute it and how effectively I can stabilize my body to use it. Oh, totally. I mean, you fire a bullet down a gun, if there's a hole in the barrel, that gun ain't going to go as fast because the energy is going to get dispersed somewhere else. So priming makes a huge difference. The next one, I'll tell another story to illustrate this next one, which has to do with your programming, change up your programming. Now, when I was younger, again, I'm reading the magazines, I'm reading the mass building tips and flex magazine, I'm reading how to gain maximum size and Ironman. And all of them say lift weights for low reps, all of them, six wraps, five wraps, heavy weight. That's the only way to build mass. Now I'm a skinny kid. I'm a hard gainer, right? The classic ectomorph. And all I wanted to do was gain size. I could care less about six pack abs. I could care less about definition in my body. I wanted size. So I didn't do anything other than what the magazine said would build size of my body, which was super low reps, heavy, heavy, heavy weight. Now, doing this after a while, I just stopped working. Nothing was working anymore. Now I blame my genetics. I thought it was my genes. I thought to myself, oh, this is because I'm just naturally skinny and I don't respond like everyone else. Then I read this, this, uh, this article, but I can't remember the name of the bodybuilder, but he advocated for doing 15 to 20 reps and he looked phenomenal. Of course, as a kid, all the evidence I needed was someone looking buffed, which is I thought they knew what they were talking about. So I, I read this article like the way the guy's physique looked. I think in the article he talked about how he was skinny growing up. So I thought, oh, this might work for me. I gave it a shot, blew my mind because I went from six reps to 15 reps. My strength and muscle went through the roof. Very, very simple change in programming. And it's because my body had gotten so used to a particular stress. It no longer needed or thought it needed to adapt to it. It just didn't respond to it anymore. So I changed the stress, changed the stimulus, and my body changed. And it was all about changing my exercise programming. I remember learning that lesson with like every, every part too, like everything from tempo to rest periods to, I mean, and I think it took almost all of those before it like came full circle for me that like, oh, I get it. This is because each time as a young kid, it was like, I had the exact same story as you. I was, you know, following all the lift heavy weight to build muscle. I'd been training in the six rep range for like two, three years straight. Some big buff trainer guy tells me to lift 15 reps. I do it. It blows my mind. I get all these strength gains. I pack on some muscle. So then I'm convinced it's the high reps, right? That's the answer. Yeah. So it took me a few times of like changing all those variables within my programming to realize like, oh, the real answer is I need to be consistently moving my programming around and not allowing my body to get too adapted to this same exact way of lifting for too long. And so that is definitely one of those paradigm shattering moments in my fitness career of piecing all that together. And this, even though we, we put this as number two, this tends to be one of the go to things when somebody has got a hard plateau and they come to me and they're like, Adam, I'm, I'm being consistent. I'm doing this. I'm doing that. And they seem to be doing a lot of the right things. One of the first things that I always just, you know, switch their programming up, I ask, what are you currently doing right now? And then to show them the greatest change, I typically take them on the other end of the spectrum wherever they may be, whether they be somebody who leans more towards the, you know, high reps, super setting, low rest period type of person, or they're on the other end of the spectrum, like I was three minute rest periods, six reps and really heavy. I normally like to send them on the other end of the spectrum that normally shows them like, well, what a change that can be. Now, programming represents all of the things that make up your workout. So Adam named a bunch of them, right? The tempo. So how fast or slow you lift the weight? How many reps you do? We talked about that one. How many sets that you do? The exercises that you do, the exercise order that you do, the body parts that you work together, what days you work out, you can even change the time of day of your workout. And that's a small factor, but believe or not, sometimes just changing that gets things to move a little bit. The reason why we have, by the way, so many different maps programs, although each one of them, you know, has a particular avatar like this person's, you know, interested in athletic performance, this person's interested in bodybuilding, whatever the reality is, most of you will get great results if you go through all of them. And the reason why you get the best results long term, I'm talking about long term, the reason why you get the best results long term going through all of them, because all of them change your programming, they all get your body to move forward by using different stimulus each time. So changing your program, if you're stuck at a plateau with your strength, sometimes all you need to do is change up a fat one or two things in your exercise programming, and then you start to see things move again. And to add to that point, something, a mistake that I think I made for a long time is, okay, all this came together for me. And then I became the guy who showed up the gym and just changed it up every day all the time. So no structure. Right, with no real structure or rhyme or reason, in fact, the rhyme or reason behind it was, you know, I'll never duplicate the same workout. I want my body to constantly be guessing, right? The muscle confusion idea. And it's not that that is bad. It's just less ideal. And it's not very methodical. You'd be far better off with being more structured about how you change your routine. So I know there's people that are, and the reason why I want to make that point is because I know there's people listening that are probably like me, where they're like, Oh, I always change up my programming. I'm always, you know, just yesterday I did high reps and I did this and today I'm doing this. And so in their head, okay, they're doing, they're changing their exercises, they're changing all these things up, but they're not doing it in any sort of order or it's really tough to measure and track your results that you're getting from the change. Now, specificity still applies. And I mean, this is something that can't be ignored. And this is something that the body responds according to the amount of stimulus that it's trying to understand. It's trying to like learn this language, this way to move to, to effectively produce what you're trying to get out of it. And so you have to allow for enough time for your body really to respond and react. And then you then look about staying ahead of the plateau that's inevitably going to occur once you start to fully adapt to that. Yeah, you gotta have a program before we can change it, in other words. So the next one, this one is funny. It's a lot of times people don't think about how mobility affects their strength. When they think mobility, people think flexibility, lack of pain. But the reality is better mobility makes it so that you can lift more weight it makes it so that you're much stronger. So it's like, it's like rolling on a skateboard with nice greased up polyurethane wheels versus rolling on a skateboard like one of those old school ones with metal wheels and it gets stuck on the on the on the little rocks, you're gonna go faster with the skateboard that's got the oiled up polyurethane wheels that don't stop when they hit a rock and they just go real, real smooth. Mobility or good mobility allows you to generate that smooth force. It allows you to go through your squat. Your body doesn't pick up. Oh pain signal. Oh, we need to kind of reduce strength here because there's a little bit of danger. Oh, we're unstable. Think about it this way. If you're when you're lifting something up in a straight line, if your body moves one way or another too much, now you're exerting force trying to control that way. Good mobility gives you the best possible way to exert that that force and that turns into real gains, real strength. Well, not only that, it's also increased range of motion, right, which is that's just like comparing it to a golf swing or a baseball swing. What do you think is going to be better for distance on hitting a ball if you have a half swing or a full swing? Think of it like that. And so and it's not that you can't hit a ball forward and actually make progress with a half swing. Yeah, sure you can, but you're not maximizing your benefits by increasing your mobility, you're increasing your range of motion, which then will increase your strength. Well, also like these exercises have a very specific technique where you want to place your body in specific angles to give you optimal force output. And so to be able to produce that, you have to have the mobility, the familiarity in that position to where you can now have access to strength in that range of motion. And I think with mobility, a lot of people do get that confused a lot with flexibility, but what we're talking about is access to strength in an extended range of motion. So this to me should have been number two, just because it goes, it's hand in hand with stability, mobility and stability. I mean, that's that's like the two shared similar qualities, but also like are equally important in terms of being able to provide proper technique and then stabilize that technique as you're going through it. Right. And you guys are talking about, you know, we're talking about strength right now, right? We're not just talking about how much weight you can lift. We're also talking about how broad that strength range is. So what I mean by that is, you know, which person has better strength, the person that can half squat 300 pounds or the person that can full squat 300 pounds, right? You want a broad range of strength. When the person who can full squat 300 pounds adds 50 pounds to a squat, he or she is going to build more muscle than the person that adds 50 pounds to the half squat, because that 50 pounds that they've added is over a larger range of motion. That broad range strength is what produces the best results improving your mobility improves all of that. Now, so, so I'll give you an example, right? I've worked with clients where they can't go below parallel with a barbell squat. And let's say that they're stuck at 150 pounds for 10 repetitions. Now I could add weight to their squat and keep the range of motion the same, or I can work on the mobility. Now 150 pounds, they can squat two inches below parallel. Did they get stronger? Yes, they did. They use the same amount of weight as before, but they went two inches lower with better control. That is more strength. So working on mobility, and it's funny, you know, with this whole shutdown thing that's happened with COVID and all that stuff, we've been preaching mobility because mobility work doesn't require any equipment, usually just requires your body. And we have a program called Maps Prime Pro that works a lot on mobility. And we've had people who are strength athletes who are like, I can't, I don't have access to a gym. So they've been focusing on mobility for like six weeks. And I'm now getting reports from them coming back and they're like, I wouldn't, I did not believe it. But I went back to the gym and two, two or three weeks after I got back to the gym, not only am I at where I was before in terms of strength, I'm going past where I was before. And it's all because I had better mobility because I had no choice but to focus on it. So mobility is very, very important for strength. Now the next one, this one is one that I've had to communicate more often to female clients than to male clients. This one was sometimes going to be a difficult one to convince a female client to do, but they're always very happy when they finally agree and follow through. Increase your calories, bump your calories. Sometimes your strength gains aren't coming, not because your workout isn't good, not because you don't have a good, you know, program or, you know, not priming properly, but because you're not fueling your body with enough of the building blocks that your body needs to build strength. And again, I'll use my female, I had one client in particular that's popping in mind. I remember she very consistent. She was very, very consistent with her workouts, showed up to every session, also worked out on her own, really, really, really got into it, loved being lean. She would walk around at about 15% body fat, which for a woman is exceptionally lean. It's pretty lean. She's got like strided arms and you can pretty much see her midsection, her abs or whatnot. And she just, you know, she loved being lean, but she also wanted to get strong. And I had finally convinced her, we've been working out for a while that strength is important. She kind of liked getting stronger. She was totally stuck. And I said, listen, you're lean, let's bump your calories. Oh, I don't want to get anybody fast. I said, don't worry. Let's bump your calories and let's watch what happens. And I finally convinced her, she bumped her calories. I think we bumped her up like 250 calories. Strength went through the roof. She gained muscle. Her body fat percentage went down. Now, why did it go down? Not because she lost body fat, but because her weight went up in muscle mass. And so the same amount of body fat she had before now was a lower percentage of her overall body. And at that point, she was convinced then she was okay with bumping her calories. She liked the strength and she liked the curves and the muscle she built from it. Bumping calories is a, is something that oftentimes needs to be communicated to people because they're afraid of gaining body fat. But when you bump your calories, especially if you really, really well and you're working out well, sometimes that's the one piece that's missing that will give you the strength. Well, this is, this is paired with, you know, I mentioned that one of my favorite go-tos is the changing the program, right? There's one of the easiest things I can do is assess what somebody is currently doing, change their programming up. If I pair that with bumping calories, this is like the go-to move. If you, if you're somebody who's been following a certain routine, you've been stuck at a strength plateau, you haven't broke through it. Switching programming and boosting calories at the same time, one of the quickest, easiest ways to show somebody strength gains. And I feel like we have had this discussion more often than not. And I think it's because we've talked about it is possible still to build strength in a calorie deficit. If a client comes, they haven't been lifting weights at all. I introduced them into a training program, even though their main goal may be to lose body fat. And so we're in somewhat of a caloric deficit. They can see strength gains, but eventually that ends up the body adapts and they hit a plateau. And muscle, we talk about this all the time, is an expensive tissue. So you're, you're expending, you're spending money, but then you're not reinvesting or putting money back in the savings account. And that's what you need to do in order sometimes to see the strength continue to go up is simply just bumping the calories. And it doesn't take a lot. You know, just evaluate where you currently are and give yourself a boost or do like a, like what we encourage people to do a lot, which are these mini cuts and mini bulks, you know, just run a calorie surplus for two or three weeks while also changing up your programming at the same time. And more often than not, you'll see a nice surge in strength just from those two things alone. Totally. Now the next one is also very important. And this one, I, it took me a while to really figure this out. I used to always think growing up and probably in the, I'd say the first, at least the first half of my career as a personal trainer, I thought strength was just brute muscle force. I thought your big muscles, you know, generate more force and that's what makes you stronger. I had no idea that strength was as much of a skill as it was just having bigger muscles. Now I, it's funny because I learned this lesson or I didn't learn this lesson, but I observed this over and over and over again with my dad. My dad, you know, he's not a huge guy, physically very, very strong. And we would, I would go to work with him in the summer as a kid. And he would, for fun at lunchtime, he'd do things like he'd lift up a sledge hammer, you know, one handed at the, with the extended at the handle, or he'd do these things with shovels and I'd try them out and I couldn't figure out what's going on. Why can't I do this? I lift weights. I think I'm, I can lift more than my dad. Why can't I do this? And it didn't occur to me that he had the skill of doing those things because he'd practice them so often. Sometimes, especially if you want to get specifically stronger in a lift, especially if you just want to get stronger and like bench press, squat and deadlift, maybe you're a power lifter, just performing those things better will make you stronger. And the way you do that, the best way to do that is to practice them often, practice them frequently. I had a trainer that worked for me once who he, I would see him do this in between clients sometimes. He'd train a client and then, you know, client would be gone if you have 10 minutes. He'd load the bar up with two or three plates and he'd do like five reps on the bench. He'd put it up and then he'd go train a client. He'd do this throughout the whole day. And I remember thinking, what a waste of time. He's not going, he's not like working out hard. He's not getting a good pump or a good sweat. But yet this dude's bench was like through the roof. And he told me, you got to practice, just practice the lift. So when you do this, you don't want to do this with super, I mean, I'll give you another example. You want to get good at pull-ups, practice doing one or two pull-ups, you know, a few times a day. Let's say you can only do five pull-ups. Don't do five pull-ups every time. Do one or two. Just practice it throughout the day. Watch what happens. That frequent practice of the exercise gets you so good at it that you get stronger at that particular lift. Yeah. I remember being in the gym, you know, and I consider myself pretty strong. And I've worked on barbell training pretty much my entire sports career and coming into a gym where they're lifting with kettlebells. And this is like the first time that I really started to pay attention to how different that was, how different of a load that was going to overhead press, because one of my friends could press like 115-pound kettlebell. And I'm like, well, he's not like that much stronger than me at any other lift. Like I'm actually stronger than him at bench press. I'm stronger than him at overhead press, you know, with the barbell. But it just baffled me. I just couldn't wrap my brain around why I was having such a hard time lifting, you know, this object that felt like just a lead cannonball. And it literally just amounted to the amount of times that I had to practice that specific lift in my body to respond accordingly, stabilize, you know, my joint and perform it correctly to where then I started to feel really capable, really capable. And my body felt comfortable, you know, pressing that weight. And before you know it, you know, a couple of months later, I could then attempt the same amount of weight and it was just a matter of time. So yeah, it's it really amounts to the amount of times that you put effort and concentration and practice around these techniques. It seems silly to me how long this one came for me. Like it took a long time before I piece it. And the reason why it seems silly to me is because like Justin, I played sports a lot growing up. And there was tons of examples of this around me in sports. I would never think that shooting a basketball for two hours one day is better than me shooting a basketball for 20 or 30 minutes every single day or every other day is good. Or, you know, I wouldn't go swing a bat as hard as I possibly can for one hour and then not do it again for another week before I do it. And to think I would make great improvements on that. So why is it so different? I think I just separated exercise from like skilled type sports, but yet bench, squat, deadlift over these are high skill movements, just like these athletic movements that I would practice in sports all the time to get good at it. Or like the analogy I think Sal, you've used before with language, we would never try and try and learn and cram a language in one sitting. It would be far better off from breaking it up in doses and becoming more frequent with it. And that's how the body learns. And all of that ends up contributing into your performance inside the gym. So it's baffles me how long this took me to really realize this. But boy was this a game changer when I started to stop. And for me, it was like squatting. Like, I dreaded leg day, but part of why I dreaded leg day because leg day was an hour and a half workout in the gym that I just hammered the shit out of myself. And then I wouldn't have any desire to want to do it again because I'd be sore all week long and I was almost threw up in that workout. And so I never really got that much better at squatting until I pulled the load off. I dropped, I reduced the volume significantly. I reduced the intensity. And then I started to just approach it like, Hey, you know what, I'm going to try and get good at squatting, forget the weight, forget trying to be the strongest guy in the gym or trying to pack on a ton of muscle. Let me first just see if I can get good at this movement. And then I could start to really start to apply the weight and the training. Yeah, you ever see, I mean, it's a massive stark difference for me to see somebody that's going through an exercise like a squat and it looks effortless versus somebody who's like really trying to struggle and keep everything together. And you know, you just see immediately where there's a performance loss and technique is so much of a higher importance than people realize. And this is why you see like Olympic lifting, why some of the best in the world, it looks like they just threw the weight up there and it barely even they barely even struggled through it. It's because they've mastered that technique at such a high level. It's a skill. It's the old man's strength. This is what old man's strength is, you know, when you got your, your, your 50 year old, you know, dad wrestling is 18 year old son, they're both the same body weight. But for whatever reason, 50 year old dad is man handling them and he can't figure it out. And they call it old man strength. Well, it's because he's been in that body a lot longer. It's just got more skill knows a lot more than you exactly. So practice frequently, some of these main lifts to improve your strength in them. Now, when you're practicing them frequently, that also means you have to reduce the intensity a little bit. You can't hammer these exercises every single day. That'll cause you to over train. Now the next one, this one was something that I didn't apply until probably seven years ago. So much later into my lifting career, this one I learned from some of the best power lifters in the world. It's variable resistance. I never understood this before. I saw pictures of lifters with chains attached to the bar. And I thought, I thought it was just, you know, I thought they were just trying to look cool. Oh, they got chains on it. So it looks real tough for videos. I didn't pay attention. I didn't really think about it. I would just see a picture and I didn't really care. I didn't understand the strength curve. I didn't get it. I just didn't even think about it, right? Anyway, you know, I don't know, seven or eight years ago, I'm, I'm, you know, going through, I think it was powerlifting USA or something like that. And they were, I was watching lifters use resistance bands. And I thought, bands, you just, why don't you just use weights, put the more weight on it? Why would you add a band? It made no sense to me. And then it clicked. I thought, wait a minute, when you're squatting with weight and a band on the bar, attach the bar bands, the resistance increases as they stretch out. So the squat at the bottom is lighter, heavier at the top. Since I'm stronger at the top and weaker at the bottom, the band will match my natural strength curve. And then I thought, that's how chains work. As I'm squatting or benching with the chain, as I lower the weight, each link hits the ground, meaning it's taking weight off the bar. And as I lift, each link comes off the ground, meaning I'm adding weight to the bar and it's matching my natural strength curve. We all have this, right? When you're doing an overhead press, you're probably weakest at the bottom, strongest at the top, same thing with a squat or whatever. Variable resistance trains you within your strength curve, because oftentimes, you're limited by the weakest part of that lift. If your max squat is 300 pounds, it's not because your body can only lift 300 pounds throughout the whole squat. It's because at the weakest part of your squat, that's the most you can lift. And you know this, you get down on a squat, and you're like, oh, your struggle. Then you move up past the point, then you come up a little easier. What if you could stress the stronger parts with more weight and the harder parts with lighter weight so that you give your body, you work with your body's strength curve? That's variable resistance. It's a very, very powerful tool. It's the reason why some powerlifting, West Side Barbell became so dominant in strength sports. It was, this is one of the main reasons right here. There is an order for me personally of how I apply these eight different techniques and tips that we're giving right now. This is one I love to use for my advanced people. Somebody who understands programming really well, they're eating in a calorie surplus, they've addressed priming, they've done a lot of these things, and yet they've been lifting for a long time and have been stuck in the strength, in the same strength. I love using tools like chains and bands for the advanced lifter. It seems like the proper order of operation for me as a coach and as a trainer. I want to address the ones that we've talked about first because I think those are bigger rocks. Yeah, those are major movers. But then this is great for my advanced lifters that have never utilized a tool like this, and we get questions a lot. What do you guys think about chains? What do you guys think about bands? And this is it. Here's your answer. I think they're incredible. They're incredible tools. It's not just to look cool while you're lifting. It's a great way to break through a plateau if you've been stuck at the same strength area for a while now or even decreasing is to use a tool like this. But again, I'm going to reiterate, I think it's important that you address a lot of the ones that we did first that we just talked about before you move on to this one. Yeah. Now chains are a little bit more stressful in the body with bands. That's my own personal experience. But both of them have their own values. So I like using both of them quite a bit. Adam's 100% right though. It is more of an advanced technique because if your strength isn't going up and you're advanced, that's when you need to kind of get a little bit more creative to, you know, it's harder to get someone to go from a 300 to 350 pound squat than it is to get someone to go from 100 to 150. So sometimes that variable resistance can definitely do the trick. Now the next one, this one right here was controversial when we first started Mind Pump. It's not as controversial today. And I think it's because studies now are supporting what we've learned through decades of training clients. Lifting to failure oftentimes results in less strength gains, oftentimes results in slower progress. This one took me forever. It's not, this isn't an automatic thought for me, you know, growing up working out. I always thought the harder I worked out the better. Yeah. It just wasn't intuitive. What do you mean? Don't work out as hard and I'll get better results. That makes no sense. Yeah. This one fires up all the fitness junkies too. Oh, yeah. Because there's a lot of, there's a lot of research to support some of the benefits of going to failure. And I don't, and your point I know you're making right now is not to discredit that it doesn't have value and doesn't have a place. It just happens to be in my opinion, and I think you guys agree, one of the most abused tools towards building strength so abused that it ends up hurting most people that are trying to utilize it much like myself as a trainer. I mean, as a trainer and a kid that was lifting for a long time because I read the same studies that supported, oh wow, training to failure can help increase strength gains. So then what did I do? Every exercise, every set, every workout, you know, calling over a spotter to take it to failure and hammering every muscle, every single workout, and that ended up resulting in harder plateaus. Oh yeah, just stopping my sets short of failure, I added so much weight to the bar. This was in my 30s. It took me that long to figure this out. Stopping, and I did this because I read old school muscle building books. Books, I mean, these are books from like 1901, 1906, 1920 something. These are books. This is before steroids, right, before creatine. And one thing I noticed with all these old time strongman was all of them said the same thing. They all said, don't lift. They didn't use the word to failure. They said, don't lift to maximum fatigue. Always stop when you think you could do a few more. And I noticed all these books said the same thing. And I looked at these guys and like, man, you know, like somebody who was Eugene Sandow, he did a one arm bent press with 350 pounds. The guy was 185 pounds. That's incredible strength. So I said, let me give this a shot. I'm not going to failure for the next couple of weeks. What's the worst can happen, right? If I start to lose some gains and I'll just go to failure again and get them back instantly got stronger instantly. Literally, I stopped my rep, my sets about two reps before failure. And right away, I saw strength gains in all my major lifts. And till this day, I go to failure maybe if I'm feeling really good once a week, usually twice a month. That's about as much a failure as I go. Yeah. And it's not saying to be complacent and to just, you know, lift weights that aren't really going to challenge you. And I think this is also a misconception. You know, I still get a lot in terms of like, not trying to put maximal effort into my lifts and in the gym. There's a place for that. There's this whole balance and relationship between optimizing, adapting, optimizing, adapting. I want to put enough stress and stimulus so that my body now has to respond to this environment that's going to, you know, create this opportunity for growth. And so like, that's really what we're playing with to maximize our time in the gym and our training sessions is to find that optimal dose. And, you know, once you start getting in that frame of mind, it's going to take your training to ultimately all new heights and get you away from this trap of just hammering your body to ultimate, you know, fatigue and then you're just trying to recover from that forever. A lot of these variables pair really well together too. So when I think of teaching somebody about the benefits of not training to failure, I also like to teach the same lesson about frequency because typically the person who likes to go to train to failure every workout or when they're done with it, whatever muscle group they're doing, they're also the same people that can't run back the next day or two days later and train that muscle group again because it's so sore from that workout. So I'm normally trying to preach the same message of both those variables to the same person. So I like to do both those together. I like to look at someone's programming and see, oh wow, you're only squatting one day or two day a week. I'm going to move this person to three day a week, but I'm also going to adjust your intensity. One of the quickest and easiest ways I can adjust intensity is by teaching these people to get back off the failure training so much that I say, listen, and I used to say leave two in the tank. That's what I would tell a client. Like leave two in the tank. You can still get two more performed. I don't care. Stop it right there and just stick, just trust the process. I'm going to increase your frequency because now instead of squatting two days a week, you're going to be doing it three days a week or whatever muscle group we're talking about and back off on that. The two of those coupled together, I think, really, really match well and tend to speak to the same person. Totally. Now the last one I learned from two sources. One were power lifters and then the other one was something called German volume. I think it was called German volume training. You guys ever hear of that? GVT. So I read an article in one of the muscle building magazines as a kid and in it was this article about something called German volume training and they had a picture of this big German bodybuilder. So of course it must be effective, right? And in it, instead of doing, you know, for shoulders instead of doing like three different or four different exercises for three sets each, it was one exercise for 10 sets. So instead of doing overhead press, laterals, rear laterals, front raises, it was overhead press for 10 sets. Just do the whole, the whole time. That's all you're doing. I thought that's interesting and I did it and it worked. I got really, really strong at those lifts. Now I forgot all about this. I went back to my old way of doing a bunch of different exercises all the time and then I started reading up on power lifters. Power lifters notoriously do very few exercises, but they do a lot of sets of those very few exercises. So I thought to myself, let me give this a shot. Sure enough, rather than doing, you know, squats and leg extensions and leg curls and all these other leg exercises, I just did a lot of barbell squats. I did a lot of them. I tried it out, see what happened. I got the biggest strength gains from doing that that I've gotten up until that point from changing anything else. So rather than going to the gym and you know you're going to do 15 total sets for a body part and you're going to do five different exercises, try cutting those 15 sets into two exercises. Do a lot of sets of just two exercises, watch what happens. Well, this is why frequency is king. I mean, this just speaks to the same point that we were making about frequency of training a, you know, squat, you know, multiple times per week. This is just frequency within a workout. So that's the only real, that's the difference. It's you're getting more practice. You're practicing these skills. Holding it in on that signal. Right. You're practicing these skilled movements more and more. You're going to get better at it. You get better at it. It's going to result in more results, more muscle, more strength. And so it really is a similar tip as the other one. It's just, this is also how you can increase frequency of an exercise within a workout. So not only within a workout, but then also throughout the week, probably arguably one of the best things I ever personally did was that because for the longest time, I was in the camp of the hammering at one time as hard as I could in the week. And then being done with it, moving on, frequency has always been king for me. Excellent. So there you go. Those are your eight important tips to boost your strength fast. Try them out. Let us know what you think you can find us on Instagram. Justin's at Mind Pump. Justin, I'm at Mind Pump Sal, Adam at Mind Pump Adam. Also, you can watch this podcast on YouTube. We're not just in your ears. We're also going to be in your eyes. Check us out on YouTube. We're in your tears. Mind Pump podcast. Then you can see how handsome Justin really is and find out why he's the fan favorite. I'm not making this up. You got to go to YouTube. Check it out. Love you guys.