 In this episode of Mind Pump, we cover the five most important resistance training principles. You can even call these the five commandments of resistance training. If you want to use resistance, whether it's weights, machines, or body weight to shape and sculpt your body, build muscle, burn body fat, you won't want to miss this episode. We talk about the most important things you need to consider in order to get great results. Now this episode is brought to you by Legion. Legion is one of our sponsors and they produce incredible muscle building and fat burning type supplements. All of these products are scientifically backed with scientifically backed ingredients and doses. In other words, oftentimes you get a supplement and it has lots of ingredients in there that promise to do certain things. Legion only includes ingredients that actually have real clinical data supporting them and at the doses that were used in the studies. 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Or you can get double rewards points if you're an existing customer of Legion. Here's how you get that. Go to buy legion. That's B-U-Y-L-E-G-I-O-N dot com forward slash mind pump and use the code mind pump for that 20% off discount at checkout. Also, this month, all month long, MAPS split is 50% off. Now MAPS split is our advanced resistance training program. It's six days a week in the gym. If you love working out, you want great results. You want something that's a little advanced and hardcore. MAPS split is an amazing program. It's half off. Here's how you get the discount. Go to MAPS split.com. That's M-A-P-S-S-P-L-I-T dot com and use the code split 50. That's S-P-L-I-T-5-0. No space for the discount. I want to talk about our favorite subject ever. What's that? To talk about. I want to talk about resistance training. No, not aliens. Fine. That's next episode. I want to talk about the most important resistance training principles. The things that are the most important to consider when you're following a resistance training routine. Like the 10 commandments? Something like that, but I think there's less than 10. There's part of it, five. Something like that. Okay. We're going to condense it for everybody. Now, I think it's important. Cut out the fluff. I think it's important we define resistance training a little bit, because although it used to blow me away, it definitely makes sense that people would come to me and I talk about resistance training and say, well, doesn't my uphill walking count? Doesn't my water aerobics count? Because I am using resistance. It's my body weight. And the answer is no. That's not what we're talking about when we're talking about resistance training. Resistance training is using outside resistance, which can include your body weight with the desired result of building muscle and doing so in a way that does build muscle. Walking, yes, you are carrying your body weight. For example, that is some resistance, but walking doesn't really build any muscle. I mean, we're resisting gravity. So it really is the five principles that constitute resistance training for building muscle. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That's really what we're talking about because you're right. Technically, if you're waving your arms in a pool, there's resistance happening, it's considered resistance training. If you're walking up a hill, there is resistance of your body weight when you walk up the hill. But the form or modality in which you do it or the manner in which you do it doesn't constitute it as a very successful way to build muscle. So what are the principles of resistance training to build muscle, to speed up your metabolism, to burn body fat? Focus on that muscle building. And that's a very important component to consider because resistance training, if you consider exercises like tools and those tools being very, just like any other tool, they're good for specific functions and they can be used for other things, but they're really good at one thing. For example, if I have a screwdriver, a screwdriver does a very good job at screwing screws into the wall. Can I use a screwdriver to pry nails out of the wall to clean your toenails? Can I use it to hammer things into the wall? I guess you could, but it's not going to be very good at those things. It's really good for what it was designed to be used for, which is purpose. That's right. Resistance training does one thing exceptionally well and it can be used for other things, but it really does one thing better than anything else and this is the way it should be used and that is to build muscle, build muscle and get stronger. Now I would also add body fat on that, but the way it burns body fat is not as direct as like cardiovascular activity. It doesn't burn as many calories as cardio, but because you build muscle and speed up your metabolism, you are now dealing with a faster metabolism, which makes fat loss much easier. It's a very effective fat loss tool because of that. Resistance training, it's excellent at building muscle, so that's the way it should primarily be used. The things that we're going to talk about that are important for resistance training are going to be focused around that, but remember getting stronger properly, you're also going to get great fat burning benefits, lots of muscle preserving benefits, especially if you're on a calorie deficit diet, you're going to get stronger. That's the side effect of it. Mobility, you'll get great mobility from resistance training if you do it right because strength is a very important component of mobility. Lack of strength is one of the main reasons why people lack mobility. Like for example, if you have trouble squatting down to the floor if it fall or your hips start to hurt or you can't reach straight up above your head, it's lack of mobility and oftentimes it's because you just don't have the strength to stabilize in those ranges of motion. Over dominant strength and under developed strength creates imbalance, which then creates another type of problem, so it's all about how you apply it properly. Totally, totally. Well, this topic is a bit nuanced, and so I think it's important too to know that there's many variables and there's things that we probably won't address or touch on that are probably also important, but we sat down and came together with a list of what we thought were the five most important principles when actually working towards resistance training. Now the main ways you can do resistance training, so long as you have sufficient resistance, there's a lot of different ways. You can use body weight, you can use a variety of different weights, free weights, dumbbells, barbells, kettlebells, you can use machines, cables, rubber bands, heavy resistance bands, chains, anything that gives you a sufficient amount of resistance for the purpose of building muscle will qualify for resistance training, although of course we're pretty partial to the free weights just because they have the most versatility. They just see this overall more effective, but that doesn't mean that you don't want to do the other stuff too. All of those things are resistance training. All right, so what do you guys think? Number one, the most important, one of the most important principles in my opinion would be to do the right exercises. I think this is such a big one. Not just do them, but also practice them consistently. Yes. Because right away, what you're going to get is the portion of people that are like, I can't squat, I have bad knees or it hurts or whatever limiting factor from doing a movement that is so valuable like the squat or the deadlift. Unfortunately, there's this movement right now in the training space too to just tell people, oh, it's okay. There's other great exercises and people that are telling you that the squat is the king of exercises, the hack squat can be just as good and they make cases for why those other movements are so valuable. But my argument back to that is what my experience, the percentage of people that couldn't squat or deadlift wasn't necessarily because they couldn't squat or deadlift. It was because they had issues they needed to address and get to the bottom of what was limiting them from being able to squat or deadlift and they just didn't have the form and technique down. And it's a very difficult exercise to get good at. But that's also what makes it so extremely valuable. That's what makes it the king of exercises because you can get in a hack squat and we can compare studies of why how a hack squat activates the quads and you can show bodybuilders it'll show oh my god, I built just as much muscle. Well, that's great. I'm also thinking about the average person, I can just throw anybody in a hack squat, throw some weight on and get them up and down on the machine and get them to do it and they get a great workout. That's phenomenal. But that same person, it may take me months, maybe even years to get that same client really good at barbell squatting and there's value to that. Huge value. In fact, if you were to compare the results somebody got from an easy exercise like a leg press to one that's more complex and difficult like a squat. In the first four weeks a beginner, first let's say four to 12 weeks, a beginner might get more benefits and gains from the leg press. But that's because of the learning curve that you talked about. Once they are able to do a proper squat, the squat starts to blow away the leg press in terms of in terms of results. Well, resistance training is essential because if you look at our lifestyle today, we've already done a really good job of making everything else really easy and accessible and convenient. The reason why we're going back to actually putting our body through this type of stress and applying load to my bodies because our body needs this. It needs this to thrive and to be strong. There's lots of exercises out there that could be easier, that could be more convenient, that they've created machines that have sort of been able to form into where I can lay down and I could sort of get through the reps. But there's intention and there's reasons why we focus on certain exercises like the squat, the deadlift, the bench press. And yes, they're not the most comfortable and easily accessible. There's a learning curve, there's things, there's technique, there's things you need to learn to apply properly, but that's what is important. That's why you need to do it. If we all agree that the general goal of resistance training should be to build muscle and strength, since that's what it's really good for. And I say general because of course you could go off and do correctional exercise and mobility work and that kind of stuff. But overall, generally speaking, resistance training's goal is to build muscle. I can now list and create a hierarchy of exercises of which ones build the most muscle and the most strength. One of the greatest worst myths in resistance training is that there isn't a hierarchy of exercises, that one exercise isn't better than the other. Oh, those both work your arms, they're both equivalent, they're just different. Or they'll both work your shoulders, they're both equivalent. Not true at all. There is a clear hierarchy of exercises, generally speaking, the most effective exercise in resistance training known to man from a muscle building, strength building perspective, even if your goal isn't to build big muscles, even if you're, let's say you're a woman listening right now and your goal is to get as lean as possible, you still want to use resistance training and try and maximize the muscle building effect because it'll maximize the fat burning effect, it'll minimize the muscle loss that happens from dieting. And I have yet to ever meet anybody who does one workout, wakes up the next day with too much muscle, just doesn't happen. So in other words, what's going to happen is you're going to get your goal faster. At some point, if you ever get to this point where, and again, I've never encountered anybody like this, you get to the point where like, wow, that's enough muscle, I don't want any more shape, sculptor muscle, then you can start to move down the hierarchy and do the less effective exercises. But to get to your goal, you want to look at the hierarchy. What's at the top of the hierarchy? We talked about the barbell squat. Easily one of the most effective lower body and total body exercises that exist. The deadlift is also right up there, whether it's sumo or conventional, or even I would even put trap bar and let's controversial, but I would even put that there. The deadlifts are phenomenal exercises. Then you have your rows, your barbell rows, your dumbbell rows, phenomenal exercises. Then we have your presses. You have your horizontal presses, like your bench presses, your overhead presses, and then you have your overhead presses. Those are the most effective exercise. I can keep going down the list. Then you have your lunges and split stance exercises, and then we have more of your isolation exercises. But honestly, those ones that just named right there are the most effective ones. Those ones you should practice. That's your core. Consistently, constantly, often, practice them. And I want to reiterate that part of the value and what makes them better than this argument of these other exercises that people say activate just as much muscle or could build just as much muscle in this six-week study, part of the greatest value of those movements that you just listed is the difficulty of it and the percentage of people that can't do it very well right out the gates. And it bothers their back. It bothers their knees. And instead of completely just avoiding the movement, I'm not saying to push through it and ignore it. Try and figure out why it is. Address it. When you squat, my knees always bother me. Okay, it's not because squats are inherently bad for your knees. That's not why it is. There's something going on with your body that is causing that, that now you're squatting with a barbell on your back. It's exaggerating it, and it's making it very obvious to you. It's there. It was there before you started squatting. Address it. Get to the bottom of it. This was the motivation behind programs like Maps Prime and Maps Prime Pro was to help people with this. Because we understand that the average person who squats and just feels it in their knees or their back, they go, Oh God, that hurts. Squats are bad for me. No, no, no, no, no. Let's assess it and figure it out. It's not again, the barbell squat is not inherently bad. Why is this fundamental movement and squatting is a fundamental human movement? Why does this fundamental movement hurt me? Just like if walking hurt you or sitting hurt you. Right. Did you stop? Do you stop walking just because walking starts bothering you? Yeah, you would ask the question, okay, why is it that this fundamental human movement hurts me? Figure that out, fix it so that I can do this fundamental movement and utilize the power of some of the most effective, again, exercises ever known to man. I used to love one of my favorite things about being a trainer was when I was able to look at a client, a potential client. So a new client would come to me and I used to like it when I would get an experienced potential client. So somebody would come to me, talk to me about wanting to hire me and I'd ask them always, do you work out now? What's your routine look like? What's your exercise system? Like, Oh, I've been working out four days a week for the last five years consistently. Then they would hand me their routine. I used to love this because I would look at their workout routine and I would see no deadlifts, no squats, and I knew right away that I was going to blow their mind. I knew right away like, Oh, I don't have to change anything except have you squat and deadlift. And I've had this happen several times, right? Have experienced clients come to me, show me their routine. I don't see two or three of these fundamental movements. I'll ask them, why aren't you deadlifting? Oh, my back. I'm worried or whatever. No problem. We'll make sure you can do this properly. Then I would train them and I would blow their minds. I would blow their minds with the progress and results that they would get. Doug was a good example when Doug hired me years ago. He definitely hugged you. He gave me a hug too. Doug is a big hugger. Doug the hug. When Doug hired me years ago, one of the reasons why Doug hired me besides the obvious, you know, I want to build muscle, a lot of stuff, he had a bad back. And guess what exercise we got really good at? The deadlift. We got good at the deadlift. It's like the bursitis in my hips and my low back. Nothing cured that more than getting good at squatting. The work that I had to put into mobility and mobilizing my hips and my ankle mobility is what ended up alleviating all the pain I had in my low back and my hips. And that's just, we're just an example. I know that's my story. Everybody has something similar. And that is the real value. And that's where the people, and we have friends, we have very intelligent trainer friends and coaches of ours that kind of promote a different message because they come from a purely muscle building perspective and they like to compare and share the studies of, oh, look, if this person squatted, this person did hack squat, look at what all the, okay, well, that's what we're looking at too is behaviors. I'm not just talking and speaking to the comparing two exercises, the amount of work and effort it takes to get good at squatting, what you have to do, the prerequisites that you have to do, there is tremendous value. That's the learning process. Well, and stable joints, right? You know, like, what are we teaching your body? Besides muscle building, which is definitely a vital component to that. But now, how do we support that? Can I function properly in everyday life? Can I do things athletically? Can I move my body appropriately? And that all, you know, definitely resides around how good my joints function and strength is a huge part of that. Right. And now, think of it this way, right? Think, imagine if you had a task and the task was to dig, you know, 10 underground pools. So you had to go and dig lots and lots of dirt for 10 underground pools. And your two options of tools were a regular shovel. So you have to do it by hand or a backhoe. But you don't know how to do a backhoe. You've never operated one before. Would you take the time to learn to use that backhoe so that you could dig the holes in a week instead of a year? You certainly would if you know the next 40 years of your life, you'd be digging pools. That's exactly correct. So these, the exercises that I listed are the right exercises. Do them. And if you can't get yourself to be able to do them, of course, there's exceptions to the rules. Some of you will never be able to do some of these exercises. That percentage is so small. Very small. Most of you listening will be able to do these exercises if you practice them, do them right, do the exercises that allow you to do these particular movements and practice them constantly. These exercises should be in regular rotation in your workout program, regardless of what the program looks like and with the reps and all that other stuff. Now that takes us to the next thing, which is just as important, which is use proper technique and exercise with bad technique is not that exercise anymore. It changed it. If I'm telling you barbell squats are phenomenal and you're doing terrible form, you're not doing barbell squats, you're doing something else and you're not reaping the benefits, not to mention the risk of injury. Form is more important than anything else and it doesn't matter if your goal is to shape and sculpt your body, build maximal strength. Form is imperative because it does a couple different things. One, it develops your body in a very, this is now, this is a very cosmetic point here, but it does develop your body aesthetically. If I do lots of exercises the wrong way, I'm more likely to develop a weird looking not well put together body. We've all seen these people in the gym where they have some muscles underdeveloped, others overdeveloped. They might have lots of muscle, but they just don't look put together right. Watch them do all their exercises and you'll notice that they move in a particular pattern that's caused a lot of the way that they look. So that's number one. Number two, reduces, dramatically reduces your risk of injury. When I, you know, for a deadlift, for example, a deadlift done properly with good stability and good control, very safe. It's a very, very safe exercise. If I deviate off of that just a little bit, I went from safe to dangerous really, really quick. And I think it's important. This is why we started with, you know, your six or five or six exercises, you know, that are the most important ones to start with. Those are your staple exercises that are pretty much standardized in terms of mechanics. And yes, there are limb lengths and there are, you know, individual variances that apply to these exercises, but the overall form of them are very teachable. And, you know, it's very important to learn that through this technique, so that way, you know, you're deviating from that form. And then you can understand, okay, this is why I tend to feel tightness and pain certain places. And then I can kind of refer back how to fix these things and then apply proper form, which then I'm going to gain, you know, the intended results from those exercises. You know, as we're going through these, I can't help it, certain modalities pop up in my mind that did a really good job of this. Like, for example, the first one, Sal mentioned all those exercises and I can't help but think about CrossFit. You know, CrossFit did one of the things that they did really well. I know we hammered them a lot on the show and we pick on them, but one of the things they did extremely well was they brought these movements back into favor. They picked most of the best exercises. They did. They did an incredible job of picking the best exercises and that and then they bastardized them. And this is what this is also, well, this is why it's number one on our list and why it's so important is because they could have shit programming and all the other stuff. And it's still changing so many people's lives and so many people love it because it's giving so many people results because the main factor is the shows how effective they were. Exactly. That's. And so I think about that. And then we go to the second one and we're talking about proper technique. I can't help but think and vision visualize Olympic lifters. And and if you've ever seen Olympic lifter train one, I think it's important that anybody everybody listening to this right now at least takes the time to YouTube this and watch a little bit of watching a Olympic lifter, not their compete at the, you know, their highest level expression and, you know, risking possibly failing. Look at the way they train and what will the the load that they use the amount of repetitions at the same movement patterns over and they're so technical to how the wrist flips and moves the timing of the barbell with it, the hips in sync with the the arms like the attention to detail with technique. And then you see the some of the strongest human beings are these people. They they're 150 pounds and they're not the biggest, you know, people, they're not the big monsters you see on Instagram. They're the ones. I mean, it's a great example of what the ultimate perfection of technique looks like when it's all in sync and it's in harmony. And you really refine that that that process to its fullest degree. You can lift a lot of weight and you can do it like masterfully. And that and that they they're their effort or their emphasis on technique wasted energy is so is so high with that modality that you see that the result of that you see the greatest expression of strength that we see in human beings. And that is the main core principle of what makes them that way is the effort towards technique. This is why this is the second of the five commandments. Yes, it's because that's how powerful that is. If you put that much energy and effort into your technique and form, your look, you can look at that expression is that we see this in Olympic well, bad technique can make an exercise entirely ineffective for the target goal. Good technique is what makes it effective. That's the absolute key. I used to love as a trainer walking around the gym. This is when I worked in big boxes. And one of my favorite ways to, to talk to somebody, a potential client and blow their mind was to watch them do an exercise and go over and tweak their form just a little bit and blow their mind. You know, they're doing lat pull downs and you know, shoulders are caving forward and they're doing the whole thing. And I just, Oh, no, no, do this, Mrs. Johnson, pull your chest up, squeeze your shoulders back. Let's do a couple reps like this. Then they should let the bar open. They would look at me and go, Oh my gosh, that and you can feel good technique. By the way, good technique, you can feel just like you can feel bad technique. But if you've never really had good technique, you don't necessarily know the difference. Your joints just kind of slide right in perfect position in place. And it's definitely a feeling your body, you know, tells you gives you feedback. In fact, this is one of the number one, from a trainer's perspective, when you're training clients, this is one of the number one things that you're responsible for is to ensure that your client uses proper technique. In fact, it's such a basic component of being a successful trainer. Nobody even talks about it. One of my greatest pet peeves as a manager, leading trainers is would be that would be seeing trainers that are like standing still in one position, looking down at their clipboard or whatever and not constantly moving around, touching your client, adjusting, speaking to the movement because of how important the formative and really that in my opinion is one of the most valuable things as a trainer that you can give to a client is that you are supposed to be a movement specialist at what level or degree that depends on your education and experience. But you are supposed to be a movement specialist. Most people hiring you are completely novice to that. So you're spending again, giving everything you got to the technique to teach that the value of that is incredible. And I used to walk up and slap trainers. So you can only see so much as a client, like, you know, you could see your body do things, but you can't see your body from multiple angles, you know, as much as like, that's why mirrors are in the gyms. That's why, you know, that there is emphasis on that. But, you know, to have a coach see lots of different things that you may not have been aware of is extremely valuable. So when you're working out your focus, a lot of your focus is on your technique. Am I using the full range of motion? Am I feeling it in the target areas? Does it feel good and comfortable? Do I feel solid and stable? Your goal should not be just to get the reps out. That's one of the biggest mistakes people make is that they go follow a program. Oh, it says I need to do 10 reps of lunges. It says I need to do 15 reps overhead presses. And they're just counting the reps. One, two, three. They're not focusing on every single rep. They're not focusing on the technique. Huge mistake. And it's one of the biggest killers of progress and results. Well, if you, if you literally go down the order that we're listing these right now and just think, okay, we're only on number two right now, right? We did the first one talking about the exercises, just somebody committing the rest of your life to doing those movements alone, right? The value that you're going to get is tremendous when it comes to building strength and sculpting your physique just by itself. Then the next layer to that is the attention to detail on the proper technique of doing that and putting such an effort like an Olympic lifter at it that you care so much to just impact and perfect the form, the form, the form, the form, better. I'm better and better at the movement. Just those two principles alone, how much value the average person would get from that. And then the third one, we move into get stronger. Oh yeah. Oh, that's the, I mean, that's, if there's ever was one singular goal of resistance training that will produce all the results you're looking for, it's just to get stronger. Now, I know this one sounds silly because a lot of people listening to it will duh, you know, that's why I'm lifting weights. It's not a duh. I can't tell you how many times I worked with clients who use the same weight for years. Yeah. The same exercise is the same weight. And I know this because they'd come hire me and they'd say, oh, I'm following this routine. I'd say, well, show me your routine. I go over here. I put it on 15 pounds. I go over here. I put it on 20 pounds. What do you mean you put it on 15 pounds? Oh, that's just the weight that I do. I do 15 reps. I've always done that. How long do you, oh, I grab the five pound dumbbells. That's what I always use. Your body will not progress unless you use progressive resistance. Your body has no reason to progress unless you use progressive resistance. By the way, this principle was observed a very, very long time ago by, I believe it was Milo, which was the bull, right? Yes. This is the famous, you know, story of the bull where the boy carried the calf up the hill every single day as the calf grew. The boy became stronger. And now it's not a true story, but it illustrates to get visual. Yes, it illustrates how we understood that you have to apply progressing levels of stress and intensity on your body to continue to progress. Because if I lift 10 pounds today, and it's hard, my body's going to have a nice reason to progress. If I lift it again tomorrow, and it's easy, I'm only ever going to be as strong as I ever asked my body to be. So it's never going to progress unless I add more weight. I do what's called progressive overload, which is one of the core, obviously the core principles of resistance training. So when you go to the gym, now if you're super advanced, you've been lifting weights for years and years and years. This becomes much more difficult. Obviously you can't get stronger indefinitely, I wish. I think by now my deadlift would be over 7,000 pounds. Doesn't work that way. Of course, there's limitations, but your goal should always be to see if you can remember follow the first two principles, right exercise, proper technique. The goal should be, can I get myself to use proper technique and lift more weight and get stronger? Each time you get stronger, here's something to consider. Even if you can't tell in the mirror, even if you don't look like you changed so much, if you did two more reps or you added five pounds, you changed. Something about you in your body changed. You are not the same human on a fundamental level. You have more muscle fibers, better use of your muscles, you're stronger, you are different, you have improved. And I know you say this because you want to warn people on how slow the process is towards the reality of all of them are, though, even. I mean, talking about squatting and getting good and deadlifting, getting good at the technique, like, I'm 20 years into this game and I still don't have a beautiful squat and deadlift. It's pretty good. You know what I'm saying? That's where it's at. And that's years and years of dedication and working on it. That's just part of the process. It takes a long time. And the same thing goes for- And you progress the whole time, by the way. Right. So don't get discouraged. It's not like it takes 20 years and then you notice results. No. The whole time. Yeah. And the whole time you do, and the whole time, part of the whole time when you say that, though, it looks like this. You know, wow, three, four weeks in a row of just great results. I'm seeing gains. Oh, wow. One week I went backwards for a little bit. Oh, and then I took- I took one step back after I took five forward. I took one back. It's not- And then you take another two, three, four. It's just- That's the process. It's not this, like, perfect linear growth of strength or better form. It's a consistent focus and mindset that you apply every time you're going to the gym and you're just checking back in with it all the time. Am I- Is my squat getting better than what it was six months ago? Or is it about the same? Or is it getting worse? Am I getting a little bit stronger than what I was just like six months ago? Or am I staying the same? And if I'm not, there's an area that I need to address in my resistance training. Now, a good tip with this particular principle is to track the weight that you're using with your exercises. Now, don't get obsessed. Because if you get obsessed, you may push more weight than your technique will allow and you can cause problems. But track, and it's important because then you can see trends and you can see, am I getting stronger? Look back about six weeks. Like Adam says, oh, wow, I lifted 10 more pounds. You know, it's funny about this one. People, I think, oftentimes think that getting stronger is something that athletes and strength athletes and bodybuilders really need to focus on. The funny thing is when I would train the hardcore athletes, yes, I was focused on getting stronger, but I didn't make it a huge focus because they knew to do that already. The people I really focused on getting stronger were my everyday average people. People who came in are like, hey, I want to lose tons of weight. No problem. We're going to make you stronger. Hey, I want to get my back pain to go away. No problem. We're going to get you stronger. And we would focus on it. And all the results that they would see came from the result of getting stronger. It's like getting stronger is a prerequisite to all those other results and goals that they had, whether it was burning body fat, feeling better, not having pain, better mobility. It was about getting stronger. And it's measurable. And it doesn't always, like to Adam's point of it, not being linear. There's hacks that we found in terms of different focuses of where to get stronger, where there's deficits in my body that needs attention then to bring it up. And this isn't always like movement in front of me and behind me. This is also moving left to right. This is also a rotational movement. These are all things to consider that you can actually add load to and build and develop strength. Yes. Now, with getting stronger, this is something that's interesting about it. And I can't really think of too many other things that are in the same category, like gaining weight or losing weight can be good or bad news, right? You can gain body fat, you can lose muscle. Stronger is always good. Always. I don't care what your goal is. I don't care if your goal is fat loss. I don't care if your goal is mobility, just overall health and fitness. I don't care if you're in a calorie deficit or in a calorie surplus. When you're working out and you're stronger, good news always. And it's always good for all the goals that you have. It's the number one thing you should aim for with resistance training. Now part of getting stronger too and consistently seeing strength gains, one of the most important keys to that is understanding the appropriate dose of intensity and frequency. I'm so glad you said appropriate. So glad you said appropriate because intensity is important because you have to train intense enough to give your body a reason to build muscle to adapt. You have to create the environment. Has to, right? So remember, getting stronger, building muscle, getting your body change, it's an adaptation process. It's really no different than any other adaptation process in the body. If you write a lot, if you use your right hand to write a lot, you may notice that you have a callus on one of your fingers where you always press with the pencil or the pen. Now that's an adaptation by your body to allow you to continue to do what you do and to do it better. Your body is trying to get better. The reason why I did that was because of the stress of the pencil or the pen on your finger. At some point the callus isn't going to grow anymore because it now has met the demands of the stress. Okay. So when I'm trying to build muscle, get stronger, burn body fat, get more fit. I have to train intensely enough to give my body a reason to adapt. If I train too hard, just like if I apply too much pressure on my finger, I'm going to break down the callus and hurt myself and prevent myself from adapting. If I apply too much intensity, I overcome and overwhelm my body's ability to adapt. I don't build muscle. My body's only worried about healing. It's only worried about, oh, we got to heal from this intensity. This is why intensity needs to be appropriate because you can train with too little intensity. That's not going to get your results. You can train with too much intensity. That's also not going to get results. It has to be appropriate. So let's use an example. If I have a beginner, couch potato, never works out. Doesn't take much intensity, does it? No. I'm going to do a few sets of squats and I don't need to get them to train to failure. They don't need to feel this massive burn in their legs. I don't need to make them throw up. It just needs to be more intensity than their body's used to. That's going to be enough to get their body to change. Now, what if I take an advanced lifter? Let's say I take somebody who works out really, really hard and has been doing so for 10 years. The level of intensity that I need to apply on that individual to get their body to adapt further is far, far higher. So that's why this is so important. It has to be appropriate. You also talked about frequency. Frequency is how often you train. This is the same thing. The same rules apply here. If I train too often with too much intensity, not a good thing. Now, intensity and frequency, those are related, aren't they? Well, this is also in poor people that have listened to me for this, you know, a thousand plus episodes. I've heard this at a nauseam. I'll constantly repeat it because I think of this because this is definitely one of, in my opinion, for sure, the top five commandments and strength training. And I always say that, you know, we're always shooting to do as little as possible to elicit the most amount of change. Now, sometimes people hear that and I think they interpret that as like, oh, I don't push hard. You don't have to try that hard. Just to save time. Right. I've been labeled as team no sweat or like I don't push myself. Like, no, absolutely. I understand the value of intensity and pushing and stretching myself. We've addressed that already in these five commandments. But I'll tell you right now that what I've seen in my experience, not only with myself, but with the hundreds and by proxy thousands of clients is the over application of that message is because intensity is what helps us progressively overload and adapt and grow and keep changing. People push all their, all their eggs in that basket. And what ends up happening is you over do it. And so if I want to see consistent as linear progress as I can, even though it's impossible, but if I want to see his consistent change in my physique or consistent growth or consistent strength building, then my goal always is to do just the, just enough, just enough intensity. Right dose. Yeah, just and that's why I love the, the old calf and bull analogy because, you know, if he walked that bull up the hill, every single thing, that bull wasn't gaining a pound a day. He was gaining like a half a pound a day. That's it. But he's, he's progressively overloading. He's overloading increasing intensity, but just a little bit, just another rep, just another pound, just a little bit each time. So it doesn't feel like he's killing himself every time. But before you know it, he's carrying a bull that's 500 pounds heavier than what it was before. The same mindset needs to come in when you're, when you're training. No, 100% and using the least amount, doing the least amount of work to elicit the most amount of change gets you the fastest results. You have to add that part because again, I think people think, okay, fine. There's the least amount of effort to produce the most amount of results. But if I add a little bit more effort, I'll get there faster. You won't actually what Adam's talking about is the perfect dose. That's the perfect dose. The perfect dose is the least amount to get the most change. That's another word for the right amount. That's another word for perfect. Here's another example of adaptation to get you to kind of, to help you wrap your mind around what this really means. And I've used this analogy before. I like this analogy. I haven't used it in a while. If you, if you look at how your skin adapts to sunlight, your skin gets darker and tans. This is an adaptation process. The reason why your skin gets darker is so that your body can resist damage from ultraviolet rays better. So if you go outside in your pale and you get a little bit of sun, your skin gets darker. Next time you go outside, the same level level of exposure will cause cause less damage. Now, what if I'm pale and I go outside and I just bake in the sun for three hours? Yeah, you get, you get lobstered out with me. Am I, am I going to get there faster? Am I going to get a better tan? No. I'm going to just burn myself. I'm going to scab up, blister up. My skin will heal. Guess what? New skin is going to come out. It's going to be the pale skin is going to come back. It's not going to be tan skin because I overdid it. Resistance training is no different. If you want to scab up your body, so to speak, with too much intensity, you're, what's going to happen is you're just going to heal and you're not going to, you're not going to progress. So you want to apply the right amount of intensity and the right amount of intensity is a little bit more than you used to. Okay. Again, so if you're a hardcore trainer, you're going to have to use a lot of intensity. If you're a beginner, it's not going to take much. This is not a common message out there either because it's, it's so much more attractive to just do more, to work harder, harder, harder, harder. And that's, that's definitely like everywhere in the marketing, every, everything you see on Instagram, everything you like, you've been told if you've played any sports or anything else, it's always about working harder, but you know, there's a way to do it where, you know, you hit that, you hit that, that perfect hum where your body is in sync and, and you know, you're actually progressing forward and you're not just, you know, beating yourself up to where now the next day it is, it is revolving around me just healing in order to get my body to produce that same type of result I put into the workout previously. I want to make it clear that this also applies though to the advanced person. Because here's the thing, most people are not like Sal. Okay, Sal falls in a 1% of the 1% of, I started work lifting at 15 years old and I've literally taken three days off my entire life. Okay, not only are you experienced and you've been trained for that, right? The amount of time away from the iron is, is so, most people I would think are probably more, I mean, I know Justin, Doug, myself probably fall more in this category of like, yeah, you know, there's times when we're on a nice hot streak and I'm consistently hitting the gym five to seven days a week. And then there's other times in my life where it's sparse. I might go a week I didn't train. I might only train one day or two days. And I treat myself like a fucking beginner when I come back in the gym. You see me doing body weight stuff, you see me cutting it to only two sets. Why? Because I, my body is not adapted to that volume that you're training that Sal is training at right now because he hasn't taken a break in forever. So I know that even though I'm an advanced lifter, I've been doing this for a very long time, just the fact that my, my volume or my, the last couple of weeks I've been inconsistent, that isn't, it's amazing how fast you reset that. So when I come back in the gym again, I'm back to kind of square one in essence. And the body adapts both directions. So if you stop training your body adapts downward and then less intensity is required to get it to move back up, which is exactly what you're talking about. Here's a good rule of thumb. Okay. You should finish your workout with good energy. What I mean by that is at the end of your workout, you should feel energized. You should not feel like you beat the crap out of yourself or you're crawling out of the gym. That means you did too much. You also should not have crippling soreness after your workout. A little bit of soreness is fine. Ideally you'd have almost unnoticeable soreness. So you're a little bit sore, but you almost don't notice it. That's the right amount of soreness. If you're super, super sore or just touching the muscle hurts or you're, it's impeding your ability to walk. You overreached. You overdid it. You did too much and you're actually slowing down your progress. All right. So the last one sounds like it counters the first one. The first one was do the right exercises, do them consistently, do them constantly, put them in rotation. Well, now what I'm about to say sounds like it counters it, which is throw the monkey wrench in it. Seek novelty. Novelty is phenomenal for the body to get it to change. Now you can still do the same exercises or put those core, but there's a lot of other exercises you can throw in there. And then there's a lot of factors you can say there's a lot of things that we can manipulate to make something feel novel. I'll give you an example. Right now I'm helping out like my brother-in-law. He is super strong. He'd love, I mean, he thinks that five reps is high reps. Like he loves to lift heavy ass weight and he's good. And I'm making him go through one of our programs right now. And he is like eight reps to him is dying. And I'm saying, dude, it's, this is going to be awesome for you because he hasn't lifted this way in years. Now he's still doing dead lifts. I still go, the program, he's following the powerlifting program right now. So he's mainly doing what he likes to do always. But I know, I've seen his training forever, and he literally has been lifting singles, doubles and triples and maybe the occasional five rep day for like years. And he's not trained out of that. So I don't need to tell him, stop deadlifting, squatting and change it to machine exercises or do these other things to make it novel. I can make it novel simply by manipulating his sets and repetitions. And that will be incredibly novel for him enough to send a new stimulus and change and adapt. Oh, it's amazing how much novelty has an effect on the body. Like what Adam's talking about training in the same rep range all the time. And then all of a sudden you train, change, train, excuse me, the different rep range. You'll, you'll get, you'll notice right away your body starts to respond again and makes a huge, huge difference. In fact, if you look at, I don't know how many maps programs do we have? How many workout programs? We have 12, 13, 13. So we have 13 fitness programs, all of them for different goals. Some of them for getting you to train like a strong man, that kind of training, others like to train for obstacle course racing, traditional muscle building, body building, powerlifting, huge variety of different programs. You want to know what all of them have in common? They all cycle you through a certain level of novelty. Every single one changes reps, changes sets, and also mixes in different exercises. Now, why do we do that in every single program? Why is that important? Whether or not you're training for obstacle course racing, or you want to train to be a power lifter, or you want to train to be an athlete or a bodybuilder? Because it gets your body to progress. One of the fastest, easiest ways, I'll tell you something, here's a secret. One of the easiest ways to get your body to stop progressing, do the same thing all the time. Don't change anything at all. By the way, one of our earlier components here, getting stronger, adding weight, that's another way of adding novelty, isn't it? That's another easy way to add novelty simply by going heavier. But there are many other ways. Here's the first one, repetition. We just touched on this. Doing a different rep range. The low rep range, typically I'll count one to five reps. I'll consider low, maybe six reps. Then you have the moderate rep range, eight to 12. Then you can go higher, 15 to 20 or 25 reps. All of those rep ranges build muscle. All of those rep ranges produce results. All of those rep ranges are the most effective when they're new. They're least effective when you've been doing them for maybe more than five or six weeks. To that point, we have to address the studies that confuse everybody because if you take a six-week study to show which rep range builds the most muscle, we know that it's eight to 12. That's only in the case where we're talking about all the same people starting from the same point. That's not our audience. There's millions of people in all millions of different places right now. The thing that's going to get your body to build the most muscle is the one that's most novel. If you were the power lifter and you owned like my brother-in-law who never lifts more than three reps, guess what I knew? 12 to 20 reps was going to give him the greatest change. If you're the high repetition, pylometric, low rest periods, superset everything, 15, 20, 30 reps, all like a circuit type of training, guess what's going to build the most muscle on you? One to five reps. The thing that is most novel to your body is what's going to give you the greatest change. Now, keep in mind, this doesn't mean, because I know people are listening, cool, I'm going to change everything all the time. No, no, no. There needs to be a level of structure. You have to allow your body enough time to reap the benefits of the new novel stimulus. What I mean by that is the very first time you go, if you're a one to five lifter, the very first time you try 20 rep squats, you're not going to be very good at them. Because you're not very good at them, you're not going to reap all the benefits until you start to get good enough to really maximize them, which may take you two to three weeks. So typically, rep ranges, I like to encourage people to train in an absolute minimum of two weeks, but generally around three to five weeks, about three to five weeks, train in a range, then move out of it, and you'll get that novelty. Well, that reminds me of another study that ends up confusing everyone, because they did a study where they compared somebody who did the same rep range for like six weeks, then another group did, they changed the rep range every two to four weeks, and then they did somebody who, every workout, they changed the rep range. And what they saw was the person that changed their rep range, every single workout got about the same, or maybe even a little bit tiny better than the person that is- About equivalent. Right. The person that was rotating every two to four weeks, like you're saying. Now, here's the difference so that that study does not take into account. And that is the psychological piece. One of the things, because I was notorious for being the person who used to change up his exercises, change up his sets reps all the time like that, constantly giving muscle confusion. I came from that place, right? Trying to- Everything was novel. Every time I worked out, that was the best thing for me. Now, the problem with that is that there's such an individual variance with all of us genetically, and how we respond to certain exercises, rep ranges, and weight, and we're all unique. It's hard for you to measure what is really benefiting you. And this is that, this is the moldability for you is, as you start to learn your body more and more, you start to learn what things serve you more than others, and that's where you customize it. That even- I can't give you that answer. Only you can find that out for yourself. That holy shit. Every time I transition into high reps, I pack on this of great amount of muscle. Well, if that's the case, you might be somebody who stretches it for an extra week because of that, or you might cycle back to that more often. Or maybe you're the person who's, you know what, I rarely ever get any results when I go that. It's very minimal, but boy, when I go down to that one to five rep range, holy shit, do I see major change. You can't figure that out and measure it unless you're consistent for a few weeks to see that. Totally. That's the problem with that study. The other thing too is the mental state of going into the workout. It's a very different mental state when you're going to work out and you're going to do sets of four reps versus when I'm going there to do sets of 20. It's a different mental state, a different type of control, different things to focus on, and switching in and out of that mental state throughout the whole week. I can do it because I'm very experienced. Average person doesn't do it very well. I like to take clients, have them train in a rep range, in a focus, three weeks get good at it, then we change. You can see, you know, measurably like, okay, I just added another five pounds to this lift. Like that's something tangible that you can take with you going forward. And then yeah, you have enough time to assess all that going into a totally different concept, totally different focus. But for that, you got to do the same thing. You got to really like measure it out. Right. Now the other way you can change novelty is the amount of sets that you do. Not just that you can do total sets. So today's chest day and normally I do three sets. Now I'm doing five sets or normally I do five. Now I'm doing three. That's one way to change novelty. But the way I like to change novelty is by the amount changing the amount of sets per exercise, but keeping the total sets the same. This is another great way to do it. So I may go into a workout and know that I'm going to do six sets for my chest. I might go in there and do six sets of bench press, just bench press, just get really, really good at the bench press. Or I might do three different exercises, two sets each, same amount of sets, but now I've got way more exercises and it's totally novel. So sets is another way to manipulate the novelty of your workout. One of the last way of course is changing exercises. This one is paramount. Now we did list some of the most important exercises that you can do. Those should probably always be in rotation, but those shouldn't be the only exercises that you do. There's lots of, I mean we said barbell squats, one of the best lower body exercises. Should you only squat? No. There's, I could list 50. You can focus completely on unilateral training. Well, not only that, but the amount of, I think those core exercises should always be in your routine. And by that, it doesn't mean exactly a back barbell squat. It could be a front squat. Oh, right, right, right. So the variation of those, those are the core and then all the variations of that should never leave your workout. No, like an overhead press or dumbbell overhead press. Right, exactly. That should always be in there. You should never eliminate the bench press. It might not be a barbell bench press. It might be an incline bench barbell bench press. It might be a dumbbell bench press. Those are the same movement you're just changing the tool that you're using. A barbell squat, a squat, should be in there, whether it be a goblet, whether it be a zurcher, whether it be a front, whether it be a back, whether it be a high bar, whether it be a single leg squat, whether it be a Bulgarian split squat. I mean, there's, but heaven forbid, you go do a workout. I mean, this is, talk about a crappy workout and go spin and then you see this a lot. Leg extensions, leg press, and then some other leg curl. Yeah, leg curl or hip adductor machine and then you leave and you do that type of exercise, that terrible, like to miss out on the one of the best movements and all the variations of it. It would be just doing yourself such a disservice of your training. Yeah, there's actually two other acute variables that we didn't discuss with this, which actually like goes hand in hand with the novelty side of things, which are tempo and rest. Oh yeah. And really just reason why I bring that up is because you can manipulate something as simple as how slowly you go through the exercise itself or you break it down within each part of that lift. So if I'm pressing something off my chest and I'm doing that a little bit quicker, but then I'm lowering the bar to my chest slower, that just created a different stimulus for my body to react to. Oh no, what a great point. Very, very good point. It's actually, I love to do this. This is such a great easy way to do this. Sal talks about, and which I also like too, you know, where you have six sets, total sets you're going to do and then you just play with what exercise is that you do that with but I love what you're saying too, Justin. It's something that I do all the time where my routine looks exactly the same, but boy, can you make a routine way different by just, and I love speaking to this because it's an area that I never see people mess and manipulate. Nobody ever changes this. Tempo. Yeah. So forgotten thing. Yeah. If you watch somebody bench press and you've seen that same person bench press for three years, they bench press the same way for three years. Like they literally are perfecting their technique just so they can lift more weight, but it's like, hey, sometimes go into the bench press and fuck with your tempo. So it weighed down. Go six seconds on the negative. Really, really, really slow. And boy, does that change that exercise big time as far as making it novel for your body to create a new stimulus to grow and change, and you're not having to do anything crazy and wild and different, just messing with the tempo. And then you mentioned rest periods. This one's a big one. And I like this one because the studies will tell you, if you go online right now and look up, what's the best rep, excuse me, what's the best rest period for building muscle and building strength? And it's going to say over two minutes. It's going to say, study show, if you rest two minutes in between sets, you build more muscle and more strength. Now, this is true in a short period of time, but again, if you adapt to it, your body will stop responding like it used to. Take that same person. And I've done this with many, many powerlifting base clients where they rest two or three minutes and I cut the rest down to a minute or 45 seconds. Sure, they have to go much lighter. All of a sudden, they get a crazy pump and their body responds again. Bodybuilders are actually pretty good at this. Bodybuilders do mess with tempos a little bit more than other strength athletes. And I think it's because they notice the difference in muscle shape and pump. No, I mean, I told you that when we came up with these five principles, I literally can see a modality for each one of these categories. And I would say, number five, seeking novelty. This is one of the things bodybuilders are probably the best at. They lean heavy on that. And we see the greatest expression of that. Look how much they can morph and change their body. Better than any sport we talked about, better than any Crossfitter, better than any strongman, better than any Olympic lifter. A bodybuilder can manipulate the way their body looks aesthetically better than anybody else on the earth. And part of the reason why, the main reason why that is, is this area right here. They are extremely good at seeking novelty. You'll see body, and that's where a lot of these crazy weird side chest press exercise came from. A little too far. They're just experimenting. That's an expression of them taking it too far. But as far as understanding the importance of novelty and changing sets and reps and exercises. Bodybuilders, I would say, are the best at this. And we see the greatest expression in their body change. Now for rest periods, you can rest too little and you can rest too long. Typically, you don't want to rest any less than 30 seconds in between your sets. And you typically don't want to go any longer than three or four minutes. Now I know there's some strength athletes that can go as long as six, seven, eight, nine, 10 minutes. They're very advanced. They're lifting ridiculously insane amounts of weight. But for most of you listening, use that as your range. I gave you a range for reps. This is your range for rest periods. 30 seconds, it would be the shortest, the longest, about three minutes. Play with that. Literally, go into your gym, do the same workout, change your rest periods. And I know people listening who are doing the longer rest periods, they're going to be like, oh, if I go short, I'm really going to feel it. The reverse is also very, very true. If you're one of those like pump seekers who loves to go 30 seconds and get the crazy pump, try resting two minutes. Do the same exercises. Try resting two minutes. Watch what happens to your body. That change is a big enough novelty effect that it can cause your body to start adapting and building again. And with that, go to mindpumpfree.com and download all of our guides, resources and books. They're all totally free. You can also find the three of us on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin. You can find me at Mind Pump Salon Adam at Mind Pump Adam.