 If you follow the right workout, you'll get incredible progress, great results, especially when you combine it with a good diet and lifestyle. Unfortunately, if you follow a bad workout, it can be equally as negative. In today's episode, we're going to talk about the five signs you're doing the wrong workout. Yeah. You know, before we get into, I guess, the signs, generally speaking, there are good and bad workouts, meaning there's some workouts that's bad for everybody. Bad workout programming, these are all exercises. It's just terrible. And generally speaking, there are things that should be found in good workouts, but the reason why I'm making this point is even good workouts can be bad if they're used by the wrong person. In other words, the workout has to be good, but it also has to be appropriate for the person using it. Otherwise, it's just like a bad workout. Well, I'll add to that, too. Sometimes, too, a bad workout still can be effective, too, even though it's not optimal or ideal. Which is misleading, right? Right. In the short term, for sure. Yeah. There's also that. I mean, if somebody, this is one of the, I think, the greatest challenges of getting people to understand this is if you were eating terrible, not exercising, and then you go do almost anything physical where you're moving the body, regardless if it's ideal for you or not, and you reduce calories or cut out all this bad shit in your life, like, you're going to see positive change in the right direction. So convincing somebody or explaining to somebody that this may not be the best choice for you or ideal for you sometimes is difficult, especially when they're in the middle of those results. Like, you have to, I can catch that person after they've come back and they've been like, okay, yeah, they've plateaued or they've injured themselves and or they're just, they're metabolically just destroyed. Like if something bad has happened, then it's like, okay, my eyes are open now, but finding them in the middle of that is tough sometimes. That's a good point. So we should define good workouts, I guess. Good workouts. First off, there's not going to be any good workout no matter how good it is. That's always going to be good for you. So that's number one. So as the context of your life changes, as lifestyle factors change, which they will, even if everything stays the same, you still age. So that changes. As your life changes, a workout that might be right for you now may no longer be right for you. So good workouts are ones that, that fit you, fit your lifestyle and are appropriate for you. So you feel good on them. You get good progress, that kind of stuff. And again, the wrong application or the wrong workout for you, even if it's good for someone else, because this is another challenge. Like you could have a friend who's falling a workout getting phenomenal results and be like, well, it is a good workout. My friend does it and they get good results. Let me just apply it to myself. If it's wrong for you, then it's bad across the board. Right. You know, bottom line. So good workouts always have good workout exercise programming, meaning good workouts understand sequences of exercises, sets and reps and how they work and play with each other. They understand, you know, micro cycles, meso cycles. They understand phasing, you know, periodization would be another term for that. So good workouts understand good workout programming. Programming is just how you put things together and lay it out. Right. Bad workouts. It's just, they just slap a bunch of exercises together and you're just moving. Good workouts tend to use good exercises for the, for the goal. Generally speaking, good exercises tend to be the ones you hear about a lot, squats and deadlifts and rows and presses, what they would call the kind of basic compound lifts. Although if you're following a correctional exercise workout, you'll see a lot of other types of exercises, but they use good exercises as the point. There's always a focus on good form and technique right away. If you're following a workout program that places other things ahead of technique, like intensity or speed or, you know, reps right away, you know, that's a red flag. This is not a good workout. And they always, the good workouts understand proper progressive overload. They understand how to take you from here to there and get you to progress. Well, to your earlier point, though, too, I think there is a responsibility on the person embarking on this, this fitness journey of finding the right appropriate workout. You have to take real inventory and accountability for the amount of stress that you have going on in your life, the kind of schedule you have, the amount of sleep you're getting, the type of routine like nutrition that you're consuming to be able to find the right dose. And this is something I don't think a lot of people even realize. That's a huge part of it in terms of being able to match you with that right good workout. So you could say all these things in terms of what a great workout consists of. But again, you could apply it to the wrong person when you're not, you know, taking that sort of accountability. I would go as far to say that it's minimally adosed. I think that like you say all the time, Sal, that it's not what your body can handle. It's what's optimal for it. And I think we misunderstand that all the time. I think people look at a workout program and they think or a workout period and they think that when they leave it, they should feel exhausted and beat up and just like walk out of the gym just feeling like I crushed it. And it's not true at all. Like a proper workout should be minimally dose. I should feel I should get enough of a workout that I send a signal for my body to adapt and change and respond to that and walk out feeling good. If I come walking out where I felt destroyed and I'm doing what just what my body can handle, it is not what's optimal. To use another example, it's like medicine, right? Like your doctor gives you a prescription and the dose is the dose that helps you with the symptoms you're handling. If you go beyond that dose and you tell the doctor, hey, give me the most my body can handle. Like what's the most of this drug I could take and not die, right? That would be above and beyond what's optimal. And obviously what'll happen is you'll get terrible side effects and you'll go you're not going to move faster in the right direction. You actually move slower in the right direction. So doing what you can tolerate is way over here. Doing what's optimal is way over here. So what you can tolerate is not optimal. You've gone above and beyond what's optimal and now you're just hammering your body and asking for more recovery, more reserves and less of a focus on adaptation because now the focus on healing and recovering. And so what ends up happening with that is you just you get sore and you beat yourself up and then you start to feel better and you go beat yourself up again. You never progress. This is when people get confused, right? Because they're like, my God, I'm working out so hard. Why am I not progressing the way I should? It's because you're doing what you can tolerate. Not what is optimal. Today's giveaway is Maps Aesthetic. To enter to win, leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop it. Subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. If you win, we'll let you know in the comment section. This episode was brought to you by one of our sponsors, Interest Skincare. So these are peptide-based products that regrow hair. So you can put it on your scalp, regrow hair or you can put some of their peptide products on your face to make your skin look younger. This is cutting edge science. This is no joke. Check them out, get 10% off. Go to intereskincare.com. That's E-N-T-E-R-A skincare.com forward slash M-P-M and then use the code M-P-M for 10% off your order or 10% off your first month of a subscription. Also, this month's sale maps anywhere maps hit both 50% off. If you're interested, just click on the link at the top of the description below. All right, back to the show. So the first point or flag or sign that you're following the wrong workout is you're just not progressing or getting stronger performance-wise. Notice I said performance-wise. If I say you aren't progressing and people see weight on the scale go down or up, they may think that they're progressing. Okay, news flash. If your goal is to lose weight and you lose weight on the scale, you could also be going backwards because you could be losing muscle. You could be over-training. You could be underfeeding yourself beyond what your body would consider optimal. So the scale isn't what I'm looking at when I'm looking at the workout. Now the scale, diet and stuff like that in combination with the workout starts to move when everything's right. But when it comes to just judging the workout what you should see is progress in your performance and my stronger, can I do more reps? Do I have more stamina, more endurance, more mobility? If you're not progressing in any of those things especially if it's like the first three or four years of your workout, you know, journey, it's not a good workout. You have to see progress. Wouldn't you say that this is probably the first sign? Like we normally see this before you see the other signs. Yeah, where they just stop progressing. Yeah, because I think that most people will stick to the same way or not see progress with their body and continue to do that until the other signs start to kick in, right? I think that this, one of the first signs and a good trainer. I mean, if we've done our job really well when we're training somebody is to foresee where these, cause plateaus are natural and normal. It's part of, that's part of the process is for us to have these, it's not like this perfect linear like, oh, we're just better, better, better, better, better every single week. So if we do our job really well we know the common pitfalls and things that cause people to hit these plateaus and are constantly trying to stay one step ahead of that. So if you've been in a plateau and you've been at a plateau for weeks or months at a time, that's not a good sign. No, and I'm glad you said it cause one of the biggest travesties of the health and fitness space is we've divorced performance from aesthetics. In other words, somebody will see that their weight isn't going up on the bar or the dumbbells or they're not doing more reps or they don't have more stamina or they don't improve in mobility. But if they see the scale moving in a direction they like, then they think they're progressing because that's what progress is defined as. No, if you are not improving in performance something's wrong with your workout. Now, of course, there's caveats here, right? If you've been working out for a very long time you're not going to see progress in your performance all the time, right? If that were the case, then, you know, by this point I'd be able to, you know, bench press a car. So that's not the case. But in the first few years especially relatively consistently, like you said Adam it's not linear, right? But relatively consistently on a monthly basis you should be able to see that you're improving that you're getting stronger that your fitness is improving. That is a sign that you're moving in the right direction. If you've plateaued or worse go backwards which is oftentimes what people will do is they'll go to the gym and beat themselves up too much and slowly get weaker and reduce stamina and can't figure out what's going on. That is like one of the biggest red flags that the workout is wrong. As a trainer this is how unless I was training someone super advanced for years and years and years or we've been training for a long time when I would have a client in that first three year period like that was the first sign we got to change the workout. Like I'm seeing your plateau and you blend plateauing for a while. I know I need to change the workout because it's not working for you anymore. Well strength really is the only indication that all factors, all systems are working and operating effectively and efficiently. Like you're doing all the right things. You can't really increase strength when you know there's a massive deficit and sleep or it's really hard to really it's possible with newbie gains who like you know I'm saying like I made the first month but consistently your point is right. It's really really difficult to see strength gains and then have not have everything lined up. That's why we lean on that. Totally. The next point and you said this earlier Adam is you feel worse after your workout than you did before your workout or you just feel worse generally. So this is like yeah I've been following this workout for three months but my knee hurts a lot and my back is bothering me. My God I'm exhausted. I have to go to bed early. I have no energy. I need more coffee to keep myself up. Like this is or even more if you before you get to that point you go into your workout and after you're done you have no energy to do anything else. Like if you finish it now if you're in a competition that's different. If you're in a actual competition where you're pushing yourself you're going to feel worse afterwards right. You go do a marathon or you go do some hardcore you know jujitsu competition or something like that. Like that's different but your workouts after your workout your normal workouts you should feel energized and better than you did going into them. If you feel worse then it was inappropriate. It was wrong and if you feel generally worse not just the mirror or the scale again but you know joints and how you feel and the beat all that stuff then the workout might be wrong. It usually is. This is an important one to hammer home and maybe that's because I'm biased because I feel like I struggled with this for a very long time so much that I still have to remind myself of this. I had this habit of feeling like I really need to feel like I got after it in a workout in order to feel like I had a good workout and it's taken me a really long time to find that balance if that's not true at all. In fact if I did a really good job I have a nice workout I walk out of the gym or walk out of the lift and go oh I feel really good I could do more. Yeah and I just that's it's taking time to make that connection and it's still taking time to still not revert back to that those behaviors of pushing to where you're at exhaustion or failure or feeling like you need to crush it or out of breath in a workout and I think that a lot of people still tend to gravitate to this way and I think it's misleading because it does give that that cortisol dump and that adrenaline rush and you feel like a sense of accomplishment a sense of accomplishment because you overcame this really hard workout and it's tough to convince someone that that oh that wasn't a successful workout that you overdid that we would have far better off maybe doing 50% of that and you would have seen as much if not more results you know we've been such this weird trap like especially coaches in the athletic world where they try to simulate somewhat of like the competition gameplay and so it's like what you can endure is really what we need to mimic and you know what's nice is that there's there's coaches out there like Brian Kula and sorts and to Franco's and everybody else that are really paying attention more to to the stress management and finding they could squeeze so much performance potential out of athletes when the dose is just right and when they're they're performing without you know as much fatigue if any and this is totally a paradigm-shifting thing that you know athletes can become even greater if they they walk out of these workouts you know where they're energized and they're coming back you know with this kind of refreshment now do you think that's been perpetuated because in the athletic world there is some benefit to prep mentally for pushing beyond yeah and so discipline right and so because of that I think this is carried on for so long in the athletic world and then I think that's also what is bleed bleed it over into the general population idolize that's right yeah or you see these awesome athletes who look amazing do these amazing feats on the on the court or in the field or whatever and you go oh my God I want to look like that I want to move like that oh that's how he trains oh I should train this way and for that person it's even further from the truth right the athlete at least is getting some sort of you know mindset benefit from that because they actually got to go out and overcome and perform these moments of feeling exhausted and still keep pushing where the average person who's a weekend warrior or doesn't even play any sports that's training that way it couldn't be it couldn't be the more terrible for that yeah but well now I mean especially now in sports coaches get it they're starting to get it and you're seeing better and better performance slowly as a result I mean look in extreme cases if you look at like high-level operative training like Navy SEAL training they're not training them to get them in shape like Navy SEAL training is not like we're going to get these guys in shape Navy SEAL training is let's weed out the people who are aren't mentally tough mentally tough how can we stay calm under extreme stress trust me at the end of of their training at the end of the test they're not more fit than they were going in if anything they're less fit less able they just with they just endure right so you don't want to feel that way with your workouts I remember for me I remember I used to say this I'm going to war so I used to talk about my workouts I'm going to go to war with it I used to say that I remember the the first one of the first times I saw significant gains aside from those early days when you're getting those newbie gains and figuring these out I remember you know I've long plateau and I remember someone telling me like don't train to failure on your reps like stop like two reps short of failure watch what happens you remember the first time I did it I got stronger week over week I don't remember how many weeks in a row and it was like a light bulb like okay where else am I doing this and luckily as a trainer I was better with my clients and myself so I was I the I even I tested it simply because I saw that it was true for my clients I never trained clients like a train myself because at least I saw my clients this isn't working we get a scale back for some reason it applied to myself until much later all right the third sign that you're doing the wrong workout is just joint pain like you like some muscle pain is normal a little bit of soreness is normal that'll happen with a workout too much soreness not a good thing joint pain should not happen so what that means is either you're doing the you're you're doing the wrong workout for your body so you can even do a good workout for one that's written properly but if you can't perform the exercise with good mobility control and stability and you start to notice joint pain it's the wrong workout for you even if it has the best exercises even if the best coach put it together if you start to develop joint pain you got to figure that out don't just push yourself or even sometimes you're sort of overriding and you're working out with momentum because the intensity demand is is so high but you're at that point you're resting on the joint you know in certain positions and you're not muscularly stabilizing properly and so you're not taking that extra bit of emphasis on staying tight and being focused you're kind of just getting through the workout I'm glad you went that direction with this point because the first thing that came to mind when you had written this down was I actually see this a lot of times from a good program just a good program done applied poorly poorly or done too long yeah so like this this is something that still happens to me in in my career today right I'd like to think that every program or every workout I do is pretty expertly programmed I'd like to think that at least right but there's times where I find myself like oh shit here's where good programming in the sense of you know order order of operation exercise selection amount of sets and reps all that is perfect but I've been staying in this phase of training or this plane of motion for too long of a period of time and now this expertly programmed program that I've been following is no longer ideal for my body that's really tough this is most common in in my opinion in the the person that gravitates towards the power lifting community and the like that way cause they they want to train those big they know the big lifts are some of the best movements they the best bang for your buck the best results and all aspects but then they they fail to focus on things like range of motion like multiple training in multiple planes stuff like that that are so important or just moving away from those exercises that you've been doing so consistently pushing PRs and that is to me this is where the joints really start talking yeah what happens in that case that's a great point Adam is that you you can move in a particular plane of motion with an exercise and you get really strong and you just stay in it for so long that the muscles and your body's ability stabilize you in that position or that if you move a half a degree outside of perfect form which is going to happen sometimes your body can't deal with it because and this one kind of movement that you move just a little bit boom you slightest rotation the slightest lateral stability component there just completely you built that you built the fastest drag car out there and now you want to go perform on a race course right where you have to take turns and or you or you just didn't you just didn't reinforce the body and you hit the gas and it twist the whole frame into into pieces because of the torque like you can totally do this I I do this all the time I have I've had to back out of exercises and work on stabilizing and lateral movements and rotation because I'll see that my 400 pound or whatever lift that I'm doing yeah I could do the lift but my body's talking to me so there are other things I need to train before I continue to push in this direction this is when the right workout becomes wrong well and this is also why you know the order of the programs that we designed why performance was the second program to follow up maps and a ball it was the if somebody was following maps and a ball and seeing tremendous results they asked us can I run it again we were almost certainly so yeah again but sooner or later those joints are going to start to talk to you and that you need to address the mobility stuff the different planes of movement and that's why that that has to be there because sooner or later I don't care how effective that incredible program is for you you're going to need to address some of those things and so it's so important that for the person who is following good programming or seen great results and their joints are starting to talk to them that this is typically what the sign is is that you've been focused so heavily in one plane of motion that your body's starting to let you know and that the idea is to hear or pay attention to that making an effort to move in the other direction do something that your body needs don't think of it as oh I'm going to take this massive step back or oh now I'm going to train this way I'm going to step forward yes because what will eventually happen is that those that that signal will get so loud an injury normally happens first time I saw this I was a young kid I think I was 19 or 20 and I was trying to get my bench I don't remember what the number was was trying to hit some big number and I remember my shoulder kept hurting and I just couldn't figure out what was going on I perfect my technique and I learned by the power from power lifters how to do it right but it just kept and I remember I saw I had in a magazine for something called a shoulder horn it's a really rudimentary you know rotator cuff you know external rotation right and I'm like and it said on the ad very effective ad add 10 pounds to your bench in a week or something like that so of course I'm a kid I'm like done I bought it and I remember I did a few wraps I had like five pound dumbbells and I could feel like oh that's where my shoulder hurts it's and then I went bench press and I did add 10 pounds of my lift and like a week that was the first time I was like okay now you have to explain that to the audience why why one that ad was brilliant because they know there's tons of people out there like you that just bench presses bench press and and does no sort of movements to stabilize that joint at all and having any sort of instability in a in a floating joint like that when you go to do heavy moving horizontal press is going to limit your strength right and so they knew okay we just teach these people this little dumb exercise that's going to give them some sort of stability in that joint then they're going to see this increase and it was effective and they probably sold a ton of those because of that yeah so I mean when you're moving in a particular plane like there's that movement that you're looking for and in the case of a bench press I'm trying to press away from my chest but there are muscles that are preventing my upper arm from twisting from rotating it's to prevent my shoulder blade from doing funny things from hiking or going down or whatever have to have enough strength to support the power that I could generate moving forward and what happens is you get away with it for so long until the strength that you've generated that you've built moving in one direction is now overcome your body's ability to stabilize and that's when you start to get those nagging joint pain and injuries it's like what's going on why does my knee hurt why is my back always hurting I'm doing the right exercises and it's like your programming is wrong the workout is wrong for your body even though it might have been the right workout for a long time this now workout next is this one's one of my favorites is an over emphasis on intensity if you're following a workout and the goal of the workout is to beat you up make you sweat give you the hardest workout of your life you'll see that like this burn tons of calories of any workout emphasizes how many calories you burn or whatever and how hard it is and the names of these workouts often will say you know something like that in there then you know that this workout is is not effective intensity is a factor okay it's a factor it's that you can use and manipulate to give yourself better results but it's not the factor it's not the only factor it's not a button that you can keep hitting and if used inappropriately almost nothing will get your body to stop its progress faster than misapplying intensity or over applying intensity in fact over applying intensity I would say is one of the number one reasons why people don't get good results with their workout it's a tool and it's like nitrous and and that's why sparingly the reason why it gets overly used is because it is it can be very effective when applied correctly but because it's like one of those things that you do hit a button you can do you see an instant response of oh wow I just got stronger oh wow look at that what ends up happening is people are constantly slapping that button and then you're just just like you would to a motor if you had nitrous and you constantly we're hitting the nitrous button every time you took off from a stop sign that engine ain't lasted but a couple weeks and you're gonna be done with that or you're gonna have to repair and replace a bunch of parts on there the same thing goes with intensity in your workout it's like yes it is a tool it can be effective but boy it's one of those things that you want to you want to use it very judiciously and you can actually see incredible results and never really push this to its limits that's the part that I think is so important that I didn't always fully grasp because I read all the same studies that talk about intensity and failure training and things like that and the benefits of it and so I adopted so much of that that became all of my workout every time I did any exercise I always ended on going to failure yeah well I think there's this big misconception that people have about like how you actually grow muscle you know in recovery in general like people are just confused by the fact that you actually need recovery for all these things to happen that you want right and it's yes the exercise of vital component to that but that's just the stimulus that's what's you know you're you're teaching your body okay there's demand here and this is the environment I'm in but now I need to build and the building process is all within the recovery yeah well I mean you know to take it a step further recovery we could break that down into two main things which is healing and adaptation and often times both kind of happen simultaneously but healing is not the same thing as adaptation healing is just recovering or healing from the damage adaptation is above and beyond that recovery it's above and beyond healing so it's like if I scrape my skin and I rub off that top layer healing would be replacing the top layer adaptation would be adding another layer in pursuit of of developing a callus so if you damage muscle let's say with the workout you have to heal from that that means getting back to baseline the adaptation then is above and beyond that that's when I get stronger if you over emphasize or over apply intensity again this is very individual because what's too much intensity for one person could be the right amount for another person it could be too little for another person and you would be surprised at how little intensity you need to move your body forward it's basically more than you used to how how great of a variance that is from each individual and at what part of your at what time in your life yeah and what's happening I mean you know if your sleep is a different you are that's this is this one this one is a moving target because even it's never the same it isn't it's never the same and it's always changing and there's so many other variables that play a role in it like you you may be the type of person who could handle all this intensity and you're like yeah that is me but I'll tell you right now if you're if you're a under-caloried and you haven't rested very well for two days you're no longer that person that work out I don't give a shit if you you were last week you aren't now because the two days that you had of poor poor sleep and not enough nutrition like you're no longer that and learning to understand that this is a moving target that you're always trying to get it as close to optimal as possible is so important because if you think you're you can apply the same intensity every single week every single year of your life like you're in the wrong way my goal with my clients towards back half of my career when I started getting really good as a trainer was I would want to see them smiling happy feeling good when they left the work that's how I knew the intensity was right if I hit a workout where I'm looking at my client and I'm like oh man we're only 40 minutes into this they look like they're dying oops we went way too crawling and puking yeah no we went too hard this was this was too much of of an over emphasis on intensity all right the last one and this is a big one because this one kind of connected to the to the the second point where we said you kind of generally feel worse but this one gets affected almost immediately if you do the wrong workout your sleep will get worse typically so that's this a big there's a bigger picture here which is if you follow the right workout most things in your life should improve your attitude should feel better energy should get better libido should get better and sleep should get better if your workout is not so good you'll start to notice other things in your life get worse and the first thing that tends to get worse sleep so if you're one of those people that's like man I had a hard workout and then it's like how did you sleep that night well I was exhausted but restless like I I had terrible sleep I'm not sleeping good that's a sign that the workout is probably too much for your body it's probably the wrong workout your sleep should improve pretty quickly or stay the same but definitely usually improve if you're following the right workout it's also so important to what we're just talking about with the intensity because they they go hand in hand you have to learn to be able to ebb and flow with the amount of sleep and the quality of sleep that you're getting with the amount of intensity and I just don't think that we put enough emphasis on in fact I would make the argument that most people that think that they need to train really really hard if they put that effort that they put towards the intensity in their workout towards getting great night sleep they would see more results more adaptation more growth more change in their body by putting that sort of effort into their sleep and not even worrying about how hard they're training inside the gym that's how crazy backwards I feel like we have it as a society I would a hundred percent agree with that look if you like the show we have a guide for you that can teach you about peptides peptides new science GOP one agonist or big category of peptides but there's lots of peptides that are ones that help you speed up recovery ones that improve or boost growth hormone help you sleep better et cetera et cetera check out our free peptide guide at mp at mine pump free dot com so it's a peptide guide mine pump free dot com you can also find all of us on social media I'm Justin Adam is on Instagram at mine pump Adam and you can find me at mine pump media on Instagram