 Talk about the best way to activate muscles that may be weaker than others or activate muscles that may be weak links for you. There is no better method. If you wanna activate your glutes because they don't develop when you do squats, isometrics, you wanna activate your chest because it's not developing like your shoulders and triceps, isometrics. It's a phenomenal training method that nobody uses ever, ever. And so this is something that's very, this is one of the answers to this problem. And in terms of programming, start your workouts off with them or do entire cycles. I suggest people try a two or three week cycle of isometric training and then go back to your training and see what happens. Oh boy, this giveaway is exciting. We released a brand new maps program, maps symmetry. And one of you is gonna get it for free. Symmetry and balance, they are essential for a body that looks amazing and moves well. 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So here's how you can win free access to maps symmetry and get free access to those two ebooks. Leave a comment below. Let us know what you think of the show, say something cool. Also subscribe to this channel, turn on your notifications. If you do all those things and if we like your comment, we'll notify you and you'll get them all for free. Now everyone else, this is the launch of maps symmetry. It's going to retail for $177 and each of those ebooks are going to retail for $47 each, but because this is a launch, it's on sale right now at discount for the next seven days. So this promotion is going to end next Sunday so you can get maps symmetry and you get the two ebooks for $97. Okay, so one time payment, 97 bucks and you get all of it, the ebooks and the program. All you gotta do is go to mapssymetry.com and then use the code SYM50 for the discount. All right, here comes the show. You know what's interesting is when you look at studies of what people consider eye appealing or attractive. First off, typically what we find something that looks good, there's a connection to better health or better physical performance where there's roots to it, evolutionary roots. But here's what's interesting. If you look at standards across the world and they've done studies on this, there's not a lot of commonalities. There definitely is a eye in the beauties in the eye of the beholder type of thing going on. But there are some consistencies and one consistency across the world is symmetry. Have you ever seen? Especially with faces. Do you guys see those studies? And you see this in ancient sculptures as well. Like they stand out when they get it just right, when it's like perfectly symmetrical. It really stands out. There's a mathematical equation for it, for beauty. I've seen it before. And it has to do with the symmetry. How the distance between the eyes, the nose to the lips, all of it. Yeah, well symmetry in particular just means each side matches perfectly. And that's really what it is. The mathematical equation is how even everything is separated from each other is the quote unquote would define beauty. Yeah, so what they do when they find these commonalities is they say, okay, how is this connect to health? Like what does this mean? Why is this universal attraction to this particular trait? Well, one is it demonstrates healthy genes. So lots of asymmetry means there's some, typically means there's some genetic issues going on. So that's on the extreme end, right? But we also find symmetry attractive in muscular development, movement. When we look at movement and consider movement to be beautiful or flowing or attractive versus movement that maybe looks clunky or not so attractive, we typically find our irregularities or asymmetries. Symmetry is very important for athletic performance. So when you're doing an explosive movement or running or twisting and you have a discrepancy between one side of the other, now there are sports where asymmetries are part of the, I guess, part of the formula, like if you're a pitcher, right? Or if you always swing in one direction, you start to find asymmetries. But for the most part, if one leg pushes off at 2% more power than the other leg when I'm running, my body has to compensate. And usually what it does is doesn't reduce all my power by 2%, there's a larger decrease to buffer against things like injury, right? So there's a big reason why symmetry is so attractive and it's because it's connected to health and connected to performance. And then the bodybuilding, for example, bodybuilding, not necessarily a sport we would consider to healthy, but the judging criteria is based off of what people would label as aesthetics or how good someone looks. And I know it's extreme now, but those are all extreme versions of some root truth. And one of the number one things that bodybuilders and physique competitors and bikini competitors get judged on is symmetry. You have to have really good symmetry and lots of really huge muscular ripped, shredded looking people will lose to other people who have superior symmetry because this doesn't look as good. I mean, that's an, it is an extreme analogy, but the truth is it's a great way to highlight your point. And I remember firsthand, like seeing this, it would be, you'd see somebody backstage and they'd have like, you know, just this massive impressive chest or like the biggest shoulders you've ever seen. And initially you think like, oh, because he's got this muscle that is like so pronounced or like, you know, bigger than you've ever seen before, he's probably gonna do really good in the show. And many times I would see those guys not even place very well. And you don't notice it until you're sitting kind of out, like where the judges are and looking up at stage and you're comparing all the physiques. And a guy that would be much smaller than this guy would place so much better, but it's because it was more like appealing to the eye. Having seen a balanced physique looks better than overly impressive individual muscles. It's just, it looks better. And I know it's subjective, but it's really, it's a- Well, there's a reason why something looks better. Now we've distorted it because obviously in modern times we distort everything that we find to be attractive. But, you know, you mentioned balance. And I want to talk about balance because in bodybuilding, balance refers to like does the upper body match the lower body? Does the chest match the back? Symmetry would be right to left. But in reality, in the real world, balance and symmetry kind of same thing, right? Do you, like for example, if you could gain 20 pounds on your upper body but lose 10 pounds on your legs or, you know, or keep your legs the way they are or vice versa, you know, most people wouldn't want to do something like that because it just wouldn't make them look good. Maybe they think, yeah, it would. But when you see that in real life, it just doesn't look as good. And then if you, have you guys ever noticed like, you ever watched somebody who maybe standing still looks impressive, but then they start to move. And I don't know what words we use to describe it, like awkward or clunky. There's not symmetrical movement. Yes, yes. Yeah, well that, the point in terms of like from a performance perspective, if I'm a competitor, I'm looking for the side they favor. I'm looking for the tendencies. I'm looking for the patterns. And it's very visibly obvious, especially for the competitors, not so much the athlete that's actually displaying those skills because we just fall into our strengths. Our patterns, where our go-to that we're hardwired, to basically like lean upon. And so we all have sort of this slight discrepancy that we're always trying to reconcile. But when it's like, very much more extreme or obvious, it definitely takes away from your performance on the field. Were there examples of that that you remember like in basketball, right? So in football for you, but in basketball. So it would be great. You play in a new team. You've never played them before. And right away, like one of the things that you communicate to your other teammates when you see it is a guy that favors his left hand over his, yeah, because then you completely shift the way you defend them because you know they favor that side so much that going the other direction is awkward, uncomfortable. And it's not, so it's a disadvantage. So a lot of times you almost completely open up and give them their side, you know, they're less dominant and you shut off the other side so that you really funnel them in the direction that you know that they're less dominant. Bro, you can bring up all kinds of different sport examples. I mean, just for football, we look and break down film especially with the running backs and say I'm looking at it from a perspective of a linebacker where I'm looking at how heavy they are on their hand, you know, how heavy they are to one side if their shoulders shift a bit, you know, what their first step usually consists of, you know, how they rotate their body. Like all these things are tells for me to then plan and strategize like my next move. Yeah, you know, in boxing, there's even boxers that won't fight South Paws because they just, it throws everything off for them because they're so good at fighting people who are right-handed. In jiu-jitsu, I lost the tournament because I, you know, at the level I got to, when you get to a really good level, you develop lots of symmetry. You're able to pass the guard on both sides, defend both sides very well, but up until that point, you get really good on one side and you're kind of good on the other side but there's a discrepancy. So what happened to me, I got attacked on a side that I rarely ever get attacked on and threw me off and I totally lost. But even beyond that, right, even beyond the strategies, just having, like, you know, here's the thing, like when you work out a lot with barbells and barbells are amazing because they build lots of strength, lots of muscle. But if you're off just a little bit, if your right arm is pushing 2% more than your left arm, you're not gonna notice on the lift, you're not gonna see it. Like if I press up, unless it's obvious, it's gonna be really hard to tell, even hard, it's even hard for really experienced coaches. Like I can, I'd have to look at someone and really pay attention to notice those small differences. If it's glaring, it's obvious, but sometimes it's really hard to see. And what ends up happening is, okay, if I do that exercise once, not a big deal. But if I train that way for years and years and years, it starts to, I start to develop bigger and bigger imbalances. You know, injury risk goes up quite a bit. I don't develop my body to its full potential because what happens is my body, in order to protect itself, doesn't just limit the arm that's stronger so that it matches the other arm. It doesn't teach the other arm to push harder. It limits everything beyond that because it has to create a buffer. And so you're actually never able to reach your full potential because of a one or 2% difference. And I use a small percentage. It's usually more like 5% to 10%. Do you guys remember when you first experienced this as a lifter yourself? Like, I think everybody has this, you know, in some more extreme than others. But I remember first getting into lifting and when I would bench my left side. So my shoulder on my left side would act, no, it would roll forward a little bit. So I would roll this forward and put, and I'm exaggerating for people can see on the camera or whatever. But I would roll this shoulder forward. And so it would cause the bar to lift faster on the left side and it would be dipped and lagging on the right side. And I was aware of it and I would try and just mentally try and fix it. But the problem was the way I was, I was unable to keep my shoulder in a retracted position on that left side. At this time, I'm so young, like, you know, this is me at 17, 18, 19 years old. And so I'm not like, I don't have a good understanding of anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, any of that stuff yet, I'm still learning all this stuff. So you had your frame push on the other side. Yeah, so I had a frame like hold it down. But, you know, I really, I was aware of it, but I pretty much didn't do anything to correct it and fix it. So I trained for years that way. Well, when I got to be in my early 20s, I was very insecure about my chest because it was totally visible. I had developed the right side way more cause my form was strict and right on the right side cause I stayed retracted. The side that I was rolling forward and pushing up faster, I was getting more development in my shoulder and my chest was really weak. So you could literally see a difference. Now it took years of me just kind of like thinking I was working at it or ignoring it. And before I really noticed a physical difference. Two things I want to comment on that. One is when you have a visible difference in symmetry or balance, like my quads way overpower my glutes or my biceps don't balance out with my triceps or my chest in my back or right to left, like you said Adam, by the time you have a visual difference. The functional difference has already been there for a long time. It doesn't show up visually until the functional difference has been trained for a long time. And the second thing, and this is why I said your friend pushed your shoulder down cause I've heard you tell that story before. Oftentimes we try to fix imbalances through force. What actually happened when one shoulder rolled forward and your friends pushed down on it is you actually added resistance to the shitty form. You actually made the imbalance worse. I remember doing this with clients as an early trainer, not knowing any better. I had a client who was squatting and her knees would cave in. So what I did is I put a medicine ball between her knees so they wouldn't cave in. But all that does is it provides something for her to push her knees again. Right, squeeze in more. And actually, so it corrected the form, the way it looked while she was doing it cause the ball was there. But in reality, I was actually making that imbalance worse. What I should have done is put bands around her knees have her push in the opposite direction, right? So I noticed it for myself, Adam, when I did dumbbell training. So when I started working out and I started really lifting, I got some good advice for some power lifters and I stuck to mostly barbells, mostly barbells all the time. Didn't do lots of dumbbells. Also because I would work out at home a lot and my gym set at home was the dumbbells were the adjustable ones, which kind of painted the ass or whatever. So I'd do laterals and stuff like that and curls, but I didn't do a lot of chest presses and overhead presses was always with barbells. Remember doing lifts in the gym and I'd get the dumbbells up and I'd be able to get one up but I couldn't get the other one up with the first rep. Or if I started to fail, the form was way off and you couldn't tell with the barbell, but with the dumbbell you totally could tell. That was when I first got that, oh crap, like there's a difference. Well, mine wasn't very visibly obvious until I actually got injured. And this was later my career for football in my tour of my MCL and I just didn't have that kind of stability and control anymore surrounding the knee, which then- On that side in particular. On my right side, yeah. So everything compensated, the hypercompensated as a result of that, which then affected the way that I was explosive off my first step. I couldn't jump as well on my right leg. You know, just these little subtle compensations over time really added up to where it went all the way up into my hips and then you'd see my hips shift when I would squat and then it would create back problems. And so it was really one of those things that just was sort of, I didn't address it in the correct way. And then it was something that was always battling until I finally figured out later. I'm glad you brought that up because this is probably what was more common as a trainer to see, like with clients. And I remember too, like after I'd seen this enough times and I got really good at pointing it out, it was, you know, you would always impress clients by doing like an assessment with them. And a common deviation you see is like an asymmetrical shift like you're kind of referring to. So somebody who will, when they squat down, their hips shift over to one side more than the other. More often than not, when you have somebody, especially with a very dramatic one like that, at some point in their life, they had an injury on their knee, hip, ankle, you know, something on that left side of their lower body that when they rehabbed and came back to training, they didn't realize, but subconsciously, the brain was like timid to put all the weight and force on the side that had been injured. So naturally, the body kind of shifts away and says like, oh, I'm not sure we're ready for that. And what happens is it's so subtle when you first do it. This is why too, I'm like, I'm very critical of physical therapists that don't help clients see this from the very beginning because you start to build these bad patterns. And then now this person, when they squat, kind of for the rest of their life. They end up strengthening it. Yeah, they end up strengthening that other side and then it just becomes natural for them to shift. And it's all subconscious and they don't even realize it. Until they have somebody assess them like a trainer. So rehab is like getting the full range of motion back, getting some stability and stuff, but full rehab really is getting it back to where it was before and to mirror the other side because a small difference turns into one that you end up strengthening over time. What you train, you make stronger. So if you're training with a slight difference, you end up strengthening that difference over time. And this is why past injuries 10 years ago, now that they're healed, everything's fine. But now I have this one muscle or this area that doesn't seem to seem to match. Now just to sell this a little harder for people watching right now who really don't care too much about, you know, function and performance, although you should. Visually speaking, it just means you don't look as good as you could because some muscles develop well, others don't. And you have this kind of imbalance and you're trying to pick up these weak areas and why doesn't this muscle develop like these other muscles and what's going on? I'm training it, but it's just not developing. I know we've done episodes on it before, but I think we're gonna get a little deeper into this one and how you can really balance things out, how you can really improve that symmetry and balance for the most aesthetic version of yourself, but also the best performing version of yourself because it gets in the way big time. What would you say in your time competing Adam would be some of those muscle groups that people struggled with having a lagging body part? Well, calves are very normal because they have poor connections to calves. Chest is actually very common, in fact, and that's both in the competitive world and then just general population. Learning to fire the chest properly, like the biomechanics in the chest is not a very natural thing to do. We just, when you tell someone, if you were to stand up and just tell someone to shove you, they don't think to retract, to press shoulders and then shove and really engage the chest, which they should because they'll get more power that way. And by the way, somebody who is really good at that, like you're in football players that train bench pressing with that, that's where a lot of that power is they have ability to set themselves in that position to do that. The average person, they don't, they just naturally roll and push forward, so you would still see that even in the competitive world. So some people have really underdeveloped chest, overdeveloped shoulders, or and would also contributes to the imbalance in the arms, then they have these like massive triceps. So massive triceps and delts, but then like a flatter chest. I mean, I've seen everything. I've seen every muscle group and every individual is different because if you've had injuries or you've had, if you've had, and I hate saying bad posture, but poor or less favorable posture for developing muscles evenly, then everyone could be different where that is, everything from top to bottom. Totally. So let's talk about the, I guess the steps to addressing this and to really developing better symmetry and balance in your body. Now we have to start with something that has nothing to do with training and has everything to do with diet, which is you need to be able to eat to build. Now, why are we starting here? Because how you train, the signal that you send doesn't matter if your body doesn't have the building blocks to do so. Because developing symmetry is essentially developing muscle and strength in a symmetrical way or in a way that improves your symmetry. But at the core of it, it's building. And without those building blocks, if your metabolism is hammered, if you've dieted your body over and over again, over time, so the point where you gain weight on eating very little calories, it can be really hard to do this because your body is just, your metabolism becomes so efficient and it's scared to make itself burn more calories. So the first step is to eat to build. Or if you have one of those metabolisms where you've just hammered it, reverse diet so that you can get your body in the position to build. Because if you don't do this, all the training and all the exercise and all the activation of muscles and strength isn't going to work. It's not going to do anything without that happening. Well, when you're saying, when we're building symmetry, you're building muscle. In order to build muscle, you need to be in a calorie surplus. It's just that simple. And so if you're catabolic, meaning that we're breaking down, and the goal is to build muscle so we have more symmetry, more balance, they're just conflicting signals. So I think getting yourself and getting your metabolism in a healthy place, or i.e. being in a caloric surplus is just ideal if this is the desired outcome. Yeah, now reverse dieting, there's a lot that goes to it, too much for this episode. We've actually done individual episodes on this particular topic. So I'll make sure that we try to link it. In the show notes, if you want a little bit more depth, we also have an ebook on reverse dieting that kind of breaks down what to do where you can learn how to reverse diet. But to give you kind of the gist of it, essentially what you would do is you would find out what your maintenance calories are. So however many calories you eat to maintain your body. And then what you do is you slowly increase those calories over time. So it could be as little as adding 50 calories to your maintenance or as high as eating three or 400 calories or maybe even 500 calories to your maintenance. And you do this over a weekly basis. So not like daily, not like you add 500 today and then another 500 tomorrow, but you would add, let's say, 100 calories to your maintenance this week and then you're doing your training and you're seeing favorable results in your building strength. And if you don't gain any weight or you don't gain lots of weight, then the next week you add another 100 calories. It's a slow increase of calories over time, which fuels and feeds the body. It's the building blocks. Builds muscle, speeds up your metabolism, it speeds your metabolism up. A successful reverse diet will result in some muscle gain without any fat loss or little, excuse me, without any fat gain or very, very little fat gain, okay? And this depends on the individual and how bad or I should say slow the metabolism in is, but that's in a nutshell what reverse dieting would do. So anytime you're trying to build anything, performance, strength or muscle or if you're trying to speed the metabolism up, this has to be the foundation because without this then the body doesn't have the fuel that it needs. So I mean, that's the foundation for nutrition. Obviously I think that's important that you at least address that or cover that, but the thing I'm most excited to talk about is the foundation of what training should look like for somebody like this. That's the fun stuff. And this was something that I didn't have this tool till later on, like I didn't understand how to use isometrics for somebody like this and God, I know I would have been able to help so many more people had I utilized this more because there were so many practical places for me to use it for clients and I just didn't know how to apply it. And to me, when you're talking about getting a muscle to fire, working on symmetry and balance also preventing risk or other potential injuries, I don't think there is a better way than to start with laying a foundation with isometrics. Yeah, it's unfortunate. It's like I could go back in time and like work with some of these clients that really struggled with a lot of poor connection issues or discrepancies from right to left. It's, you know, in terms of like slowing down and all that, like I was great at that, but like knowing that isometrics is the most effective way to build strength, like the quickest way possible and to get that hyper connection to the muscles and really hone in on that recruitment process. I mean, there's really no better methods. So to apply that, you know, in the very beginning to be able to establish that strong connection again, it's so much better to build off. Yeah, so I'm gonna back up a little bit, right? So just kind of explain if you don't know what isometrics are. And isometric is a muscle contraction where you're not moving forward or back. You're not contracting and you're not relaxing. In other words, if I just flex my bicep, that's an isometric contraction. If I curl my bicep, that's a concentric contraction. Yeah, if I lower a weight with control, that's an eccentric contraction. So isometrics would be like me pushing against the wall. It's not moving, my body's not moving. Nothing's moving, but I'm pushing as hard as I can versus a bench press, which the weight would move. Now Justin said something and he said it quickly and I wanna emphasize this. He said, it's the fastest way to gain strength. Okay, this is true. Look up the studies on strength gain. Isometric training, the strength gains you get with isometrics training happen faster, faster. It's furiously fast in comparison to concentric or eccentric training. Okay, so the question is, why doesn't everybody just do isometrics? Well, there's a caveat here. The gains happen very quickly, but then they plateau very quickly. But there's something there that we can use. In other words, we can use isometrics to connect to muscles, fire more muscle fibers and kickstart weaker muscle groups or muscle groups. It's the canling to the fire. It is. So here's, there's some interesting, there's some very sad stories in the world of fitness. I'm gonna start with one that has nothing to do with this just to illustrate my point. Barbell squats, deadlifts were a staple of strength training for a long time. Bodybuilders and strength athletes were like, these are the best exercises. They build so much strength. Then they fell out of favor. They fell out of favor so bad that when I was a trainer in the late 90s, in a gym, in a big gym, I'm talking about 30,000, 40,000 square foot or even 50,000 square foot gyms. Some of these I grand opened myself. I would have one squat rack and the squat rack would have dust on it. Nobody would use it. Now it's come full circle because that old wisdom has been relearned and people have said, oh my God, these are exceptionally effective exercises. Why the hell did we throw these out? Okay, there's another sad story and it has to do with isometrics. In the early days of strength training, isometrics was a staple. Strongman, strength athletes, isometrics was a foundational, fundamental part of their training. If you look at Soviet era champion weight lifters. Now this is during the period where the Soviet Union was not just winning gold medals and weightlifting, they were crushing the world. And we couldn't figure it out. By the way, when Soviet Union fell apart, a lot of the coaches came over here and went to other parts of the world and everybody learned their secrets and part of it was utilizing isometrics. Now there were other things as well but isometrics was a big part of it. It's exceptionally effective and for some reason fell out of favor. Why? You can't build machines around isometrics too much. It maybe doesn't look as sexy, maybe requires more coaching. It's totally not sexy. You need very little. You need a wall, a floor. You don't need a fancy crumb in dumbbells. Or a bar that's fixed. Yeah, you really don't need anything. I really think that's the reason why it fell out of favor. Was it just when the, you know, you start getting in the 50s, 60s and 70s and this is where like marketing like really started to happen and there's nothing sexy and sellable about it. I really believe that's why it fell out of favor because anybody who's been training for a really long time understands some of these principles that's just not popular for general population. And they don't know how to program it. Where do I put this in my workout? That's because nobody's done it. So like find me an isometrics, you know, programmed workout. Good luck. You're not gonna find one, right? Now, you know, here's another thing about isometrics. Isometric contractions, intense ones activate more muscle fibers than the other contractions do in a big way. Now you think why? Why is that, why does that happen? Cause when you're pushing against an immovable object your body will recruit muscle fibers and then nothing happens. Uh-oh, we're not moving the object. Recruit more. Uh-oh, nothing's happening. Ratchet it up. Recruit more. You recruit more muscle fibers with isometric contractions far more than you do with concentric and eccentric even at very high intensities. So knowing the strength gains happen quick they require very little equipment. There's no movement, okay, required an isometric attraction and it activates the most muscle fibers. Talk about the best way to activate muscles that may be weaker than others or activate muscles that may be weak links for you. There is no better method. If you wanna activate your glutes because they don't develop when you do squats, isometrics. You wanna activate your chest because it's not developing like your shoulders and triceps, isometrics. It's a phenomenal training method that nobody uses ever, ever. And so this is something that's very, this is one of the answers to this problem. And in terms of programming, start your workouts off with them or do entire cycles. I suggest people try a two or three week cycle of isometric training and then go back to your training and see what happens. Well, and if you think about just exercises in general, you need a specific amount of force to be able to get that initial lift off. And then the rest, you don't really need to use quite as much muscle recruitment and force behind it. So with isometrics, like you're just stuck in that first part recruiting and then you gotta, it's pretty much endless with how much effort and force you can produce within that. That's why you get strong so quickly because your CNS learns how to ramp up. I wanna defend some people because I do, there are some people that use isometrics. They just don't know that how they're using them or really why they're using them. I saw it was common in bodybuilding. Oh, posing. Yeah, practicing. There's actually a lot of bodybuilding routines that encourage the bodybuilders to flex and pose between sets and things. And so they don't, and it ends up turning into more of like a visual thing of looking at yourself and getting better at presenting your muscles. But there's actually real benefit there when it comes to getting better connectivity to those muscles and because you're doing an isometric contraction when you do that. I tell you what, if you have a weak body part, a stubborn body part, it's probably a body part. You also have tough time flexing really hard. Yep. Okay, just to give you an example of an illustration of what I'm talking about. Now there's much more. Obviously we could go into, we could have the entire episode talking about how to incorporate isometrics, isometric exercise, all that stuff. We've done some videos on some isometric stuff on Mind Pump TV channel that's on YouTube. So maybe we'll link a couple. We also have an e-book on isometrics that kind of breaks down the history and how to incorporate it and whatnot. But nonetheless, we just know that when it comes to building symmetry, turning on muscles that don't fire as well. It's a foundation. You utilize isometrics, especially in the beginning of your training. It makes a huge difference. Okay, so now we're gonna move to the more obvious stuff. If my right and my left aren't balanced out or if I wanna train them in a way where I can start to see if there's imbalances, because sometimes they're hard to see, one of the best ways you could do is with unilateral training. Unilateral training is exceptional at doing this. Okay, so unilateral training means instead of doing both arms or both legs, I'm doing one arm or one leg at a time. Back to bodybuilders, Adam. Bodybuilders are so concerned with training and developing a balanced symmetrical physique because they get judged so heavily on it. They do an exceptional amount of unilateral exercises, more than any strength athlete. In fact, most strength athletes do very little unless they're doing rehab or their coaches are really smart and they see imbalances. But bodybuilders love doing, they'll even do curls one arm at a time, right? Because they know that they can connect more or get a better pump and that kind of stuff. I don't think this is actually as obvious as you just alluded to. I think that when I, at least not in the general population, like when I'd have a client that had an imbalance like that and like maybe I picked them up after they had already attempted to do themself, kind of the common theme or the most common thing I would see is people would just do more work on that weaker side. Yeah, that's true. That's the wrong approach. Yeah, their approach to it is not like, oh, I'm gonna do unilateral training now going forward. I'm gonna start with the weaker side until it catches up. There's this idea like, oh, my left side's really weak so I'm just gonna do more work with my left side. And then all they end up doing is getting over-trained on that side and they never really balance their body out. So I actually don't think it's as obvious as you think it is. I think most people need to be kind of told like, okay, what exactly is unilateral training? Why would we use it for this? And then also how do we do it? Because there's also a wrong and a right way to do unilateral training when you have lagging body parts. Yeah, you're right. So just doing more work for a lagging body part, that could be part of the formula, but if there's a poor connection, poor recruitment pattern, it's not gonna make that big of a difference, right? So you gotta get those things first. So with unilateral training, essentially like, and there's a lot of different ways to do it. So like if I did a dumbbell chest press, if I push both dumbbells at the same time, there's a unilateral component, but it's not really considered unilateral training until I'm just doing one arm at a time. And there's a couple of different ways to do this. One way would be to support one dumbbell with an isometric contraction at the bottom. So I'm not resting it on my body. I'm actually supporting it while the other one presses and then I alternate or holding it at the top with an isometric contraction while one presses. And then another level would be no dumbbell on one side, stabilizing my body and doing one dumbbell and pressing. So those are all different types of unilateral training. And the key here is very important is to allow the weak or lagging side to dictate the weight and the reps. So that means your stronger side is gonna be doing an easier workout. Now, why would we do an easier workout on the stronger side? Because if we allow the stronger side to dictate, which is what everybody does, think about it. The few unilateral exercises that people do, like a dumbbell row, that's a common one, everybody does a dumbbell row, which side do you always start with? They always start with the strong side. Almost always the strong side. And that ends up dictating how many reps you do with the other side. So what ends up happening is I do 10 reps with my right stronger arm, my left arm, I get to nine, the 10th one, the form is a little off because I gotta do 10 reps because my strong side did 10 reps. In reality, what it should have been, I start on my left side, only can do nine reps a perfect form. Now I just stop at nine reps with the other arm. And what it does is, because what happens if you train with the high intensity with the stronger side, they both might get stronger but you maintain the gap of asymmetry, right? The right goes up and the left goes up but they maintain the gap. What we're trying to do is slow down the development of the stronger side and speed up the development of the weaker side to get them to match so you develop symmetry. Well, and back to the original kind of conversation in the beginning where we're talking about barbell training is very, very difficult to see the discrepancies from right to left. If you're not unilateral training and there is a bit of thought out there that you can correct form and then it's sort of gonna take care of itself eventually if you just get better at the technique and without actually addressing your right to left side discrepancies. So this is one of those things where, I differ in that train of thought. I really feel strongly that focusing on exposing any kind of like imbalance or strength discrepancy from right to left should be addressed and it's gonna benefit you even longer term than the other approach. The key, the next key is you kind of alluded to it, Val and I think it's so important is that you control and like this is a, when you're training like this, this is, if it was ever really, it's always important, but if it was ever extremely important, right? Like to not like push the weight and try and max lift or train to failure. Like this is where I want my clients to really back off the weight. And you know, when you're doing that weaker side, right? When we're training unilateral, I'm watching the form. And the minute form starts to break down, we are cutting it off. So you said you do nine, well, it's nine perfect, right? Like if you could have squeezed out 10 or 11, we're not doing 10 or 11 on that weaker side. Those two shitty reps are gonna make things worse. That's right. We're gonna do nine perfect. And the minute I can feel that perfect pattern or form is coming, it's breaking down, I shut down and then the other side, the dominant side matches that. So the control and form is everything. That's how you kill bad habits. Yeah, here's a tip that I was gonna say is you wanna create not just perfect form, mirror form. What does that mean? That means if you saw me with my right arm, it should be a mirror of my left arm or vice versa when I'm doing the lift. So another tip is you could record yourself doing certain exercises because you may feel, and I've done this to myself and it was actually quite illuminating, I felt like my right and left were equal and they felt pretty similar in strength and form, recorded myself and I noticed that my left shoulder literally, I mean it was up by maybe a quarter inch higher than my right and I literally, I watched it, I drew a line in the middle and I looked and I'm like, holy cow, it's off by just a tiny bit. So what you want is you wanna create mirror form and you have to do exceptionally controlled form in order to do that. Momentum is the enemy of symmetry, okay? It's the enemy of symmetry training because sometimes it's so subconscious you don't even notice. The slightest bit of momentum, think about it this way. Most people don't have, there's definitely people watching who have glaring asymmetry issues, right? They're like, oh yeah, there's a huge difference between my right and leg and oh yeah, my hips really move to the right and when I bench press I notice the bar really twisting. Most people are not like that though. Most people have a 3% or 4% asymmetry. You're not gonna be able to tell very easily with that. It's not super easy to see that but is it, does it have an impact on your symmetry in terms of how you look? It will, especially over the years. Does it have an impact on your performance? It definitely will. So you wanna watch, make sure it's mirror form and have everything controlled and perfect so that you can make up the difference and you can see that with the unilateral training. You tend to be able to see that with unilateral training and especially in how it feels and there's one more thing I wanna comment on which is really interesting. Look at the amount of weight you can lift with both arms. Look at the amount of weight you can lift with one arm. First off, it's never half that amount and that's understandable. Like if you could deadlift 400 pounds or let's say you could press 200 pounds, you're not gonna be able to press 100 with one hand usually. Usually it's less than that but it shouldn't be way less. Like you shouldn't be able to overhead press 200 pounds but only overhead press 30 pound dumbbells for the same amount of reps. That's a very big difference. And so what happens when you train unilaterally and you bring that up, what do you think happens to your bilateral lifting? Oh my God, it goes to the roof. One of the best ways to get through sticking points is to get stronger in the unilateral stuff and then go back to your bilateral meaning both arms are both legs and it's like a whole another level of stability and strength. Well, and it's a psychological discipline going in because you gotta have the right intent going in. I think a lot of people get deterred by this style of training because they think they're regressing. Like now I'm coming back, I'm using less weight and it's a frustration element in there that you really have to overcome when in fact it's gonna benefit you the most to really, but you have to make sure you check yourself coming in with the right intent and to really do the appropriate amount of weight and start with the weaker side and be very intentional about your form. To add to that, slow the tempo. I talk about this on the show all the time that rarely ever do we see anybody doing a true four second negative or eccentric portion of the exercise, at least that. I mean, it's like this, right? So if I did a press, right? It'd be one, two, three, one, two, three, four. Like that looks ridiculously slow because nobody does that. That's what we're talking about. And it can even be slower. I mean, that's when I'm talking to a client that I'm training this way that we're trying to balance things out. I am not concerned at all about it being week two or three or four and we haven't moved up five or 10 pounds on the dumbbell, right? I care more about how perfect is that left side looking to the right side. And the way I do that is by cutting the weight way down, slowing the tempo down and putting so much emphasis on that. Like you said, mirroring the other side, that is way more of a win than if we just added five or 10 more pounds. Okay, here's another, just a hammer at home, okay? Your body does an exceptional job at learning how to be most efficient with the tools that it's given, okay? So if I have a torn soleus muscle, which is one of my calf muscles, my body's gonna run in a way that makes me the fastest considering I have a torn soleus. And that becomes my new pattern, okay? To use another example that people might understand, if you type with your two index fingers, right? You never learn how to type and you got pretty fast with it. And then you're like, you know what? I know that if I learn how to type properly, I'll eventually be way faster than I am now with my two index fingers. And then you got trained on it, but instead of training you on slowing down and learning how to type, they still gave you a limit. No, you gotta be as fast as you were before. You'll never learn. You'll always revert back to your old pattern because that's your fast pattern. So what happens when you don't go slow is you go back to your old pattern and you don't realize it. Your body recruits the way it always does. It moves in the most efficient way possible. So you have to slow way down. You have to go lighter in order to change the recruitment pattern because the second you go outside of that it goes too fast. You have to be conscious, not subconscious. Super, super conscious. It's really, really hard. Now once you do that and then you strengthen that, guess what? That becomes your new pattern because that is a more efficient because your body will choose to move symmetrically so long it has the strength to do so, but first you have to build that strength. And then now is the time where we go to bilateral training and now we try and see how it's expressing itself. That's when you then you go back to your bilateral and then you're blown away. Like you've done a cycle, right? Where you did like single leg deadlift for a while and then back to your normal deadlift. Oh yeah, incredible. And by the way, when you do this, go back to bilateral training. I'm not trying to think of, oh, what was the greatest PR I ever did? It's like, I want to think about how I feel going into the movement. And one of the things that you will notice when you've trained unilateral for an extended period of time, right? For a full like cycle. And then you come back to bilateral training is how stable you feel this. You just feel so on your leg exercise. You feel so grounded for your upper body exercise. You feel in such control and you can generate more power, especially when you've done it right and you've included isometrics in there. I mean, it's so good. And I feel like so few people actually run through like a full cycle of this where they're incorporating isometrics, unilateral training, stick to it consistently, avoid the bilateral stuff for a while. And then after you've ran a few months of training this way, okay, now let's go see if I go to do my bilateral movements if I can actually feel my body expressing. Now I can spread and distribute the load, you know, towards that other side, a bit more, think about how much more strength that's gonna apply to your overall amount. Yeah, I did that for, I mean, if you listen to the podcast for the last year, you know this, I stopped barbell squatting because I was developing, it became an obvious discrepancy that wasn't so obvious until it got too bad. And I had to stop barbell squatting and all I did were all unilateral stuff. So I did different versions of lunges, Bulgarian splits that squats, single leg deadlifts, I did single leg squats and I did them for, I don't know how long was it that I did that, like four months, five months of just pure for lower body unilateral training. The only thing I did that, well it's not even bilateral, I did sled work, which can be considered unilateral to some extent, right? So I did that, went back to squatting, here's the crazy thing, lost no strength and then broke past my old plateaus. So I was stuck at like squatting with 335 to 350, but then it would hurt. I got up to 405 within two months after doing just unilateral training. Why? Because I solved all those problems. I felt so much stable and so much stronger. So yeah, after you're done with a cycle of unilateral training, go back to your heavy barbell, you know, five by five type program, your barbell type based routines, go back to something like that, watch what happens because not only did you not lose strength, you'll feel more stable, but then the strength gains come on real fast because you don't have the things that are holding you back that you had before, you've kind of solved those things. And then the last step is this, repeat the cycle. This is a wonderful cycle of, cause then you can stick to the bilateral training, eventually you'll start to develop maybe some imbalances, then you go back and you repeat the cycle again. You get this kind of nice perpetual motion of progress and balance. And then what you develop is this really beautiful aesthetic balanced physique without weak body parts, without imbalances that moves and feels really well. Now here's the thing, right? Unilateral training, we have yet to find a very well-programmed workout program that incorporates unilateral training, okay? It's usually thrown in to programs as single exercises or maybe three or four exercises, but not like as the focus, right? Not as the focus of balancing the body out. So, and it can be a bit complex. We've talked on the show about programming and all the things that go into programming and exercise order and reps and how to place the right things where. So that can be quite complex. I mean, it was one of the number one things that I mean that we've needed to address for a while. When we started doing the live Q and A's. We're like constantly trying to recommend unilateral training, but we didn't have anybody to. I don't know how many times we'd have to say that to somebody, well, what you should do is regress back down, switch to unilateral training for a while. Like how do I program it? Yeah, so I think this has been a need for quite some time. Yeah, so what we did, if you want it all put together for you, and we haven't launched a new maps program in a long time. Definitely not one that caters to our core like fitness fanatic audience. What we've done is we created a brand new maps program called Maps Symmetry, which incorporates these unilateral training cycles. It's got isometric phase in it because that's obviously very important. It also takes and borrows some of the value that you get from maps in a ballock. It's got trigger sessions in some of the phases. It's got mobility sessions that you find in math performance in some of the phases. And it has focus sessions from Maps Aesthetic in some of the phases. A four phase program, it's a long program because this is the type of results you get with a unilateral based symmetry based program. They last for a long time. You can keep pushing it and keep getting success and results. By the way, the last phase of this program is a five by five programmed bilateral barbell based workout. So at the very end... You have to show off all the hard work going in. At the very end, that's what you end up feeling. Now there's more, okay? So we talked about, because this was a big deal. We talked about this and said, we wanna set people up really well. That's when the conversation came up about feeding the body properly. That's been an issue in the past. We've had people comment and say, hey, I'm following your program. I don't know what's happening. Most more often than not, it's women. And then we'll ask them questions about their diet. We're like, okay, you're not feeding yourself properly. So we have a, I said earlier, a reverse dieting e-book that is gonna be included in the launch of Maps Symmetry. We also have a isometrics e-book that we're selling separately, but we're including it with the launch of Maps Symmetry. This is the official launch. Maps Symmetry is gonna retail for $177, but we're launching it right now at $97, which means you get full access to Maps Symmetry, plus you get the free reverse dieting 101 e-book and the free isometrics. The legit books, by the way, they're not just like a list of items. This is a very comprehensive book. Although after launch, we'll sell it. So just so you know, Maps Symmetry will be retailing $177. The reverse dieting 101 e-book will be $47, and the isometrics e-book will be $47. But right now you get the Maps Symmetry, isometrics e-book, reverse dieting 101. All of that is gonna be $97, which is gonna be the launch. And the launch, Doug, when does the end? 17th. Okay, so it's gonna be essentially, I think a week, right? So on the 17th, this particular launch will end and then everything goes back up to retail. Now, if you don't wanna buy a program, we do have show notes with other episodes and videos that can definitely help you. It's just gonna take you a little time to put things together and kind of program it for yourself. But if you wanna follow a comprehensive workout where it's all in there, so we have the video demos, the exercises. There's coaching, so I give you some coaching, tell you how to replace certain exercises if you only have a home gym, talk about tempo and how to make muscles fire, better and that stuff. That's all included in this, okay? So the website for all of this is mapssymetry.com. So there's two Ss, M-A-P-S, and then S again for symmetry. So mapssymetry.com and the code for all of this, the free eBooks and the discount is SYM50. So SYM50 and you get that all hooked up. And then of course all of our programs come with a 30-day money back guarantee. So if you do this, you sign up, it's not for me, just return it and you get all of your money back 100% with no questions asked. So there you have it. Look, if you wanna learn more about the information that we give out for free, you can go to mindpumpfree.com and if you wanna find us on social media, you can find Justin on Instagram at Mind Pump Justin, Adam is on Instagram at Mind Pump Adam and you can find me on Twitter at Mind Pump Sal.