 Bam, we're back and I'm back with the loud intros. Thanks everybody for telling me you liked those. All right, ready for the giveaway? This giveaway is insane. Here's what you can win if you enter into this contest. By the way, here's how you enter. Leave a comment in the first 24 hours that we drop this episode. Make it a good comment. Subscribe to this channel, turn on your notifications. If we pick your comment, here's what you win. You ready? Maps Prime, Maps Power Lift, Maps Performance, and Maps Hit. All those programs you'll get free access to. Now why are we giving away all those programs? Because in today's episode, we talk about athletic performance, and we've actually created a bundle with all those programs and discounted them tremendously. Each one of those programs is roughly 100 to $150 each. Here's what we're doing. We put them all together in an extreme athlete bundle. You can get them all right now for $149.99. So it's $149.99. It's a very limited offer just with this podcast. If you're interested, head over to mapsextreme.com. So again, that's mapsextreme.com and get yourself signed up. All right, enjoy the show. Here's something that's interesting. This is connected to what we're about to talk about. Some of the best results I ever got with my personal workouts, and definitely with my clients, definitely with my clients, was when the focus was entirely on performance, how you perform, how strong you are, how well you move. In fact, this was a technique that I used often, especially in the back half of my career when I really figured this out. If I got a client that wanted to lose weight or sculpt their body, build this, build that, look a certain way, I would say, you know what? Let's do this for the next three months. We're not gonna focus on the scale. We're not gonna focus on the mirror. I just wanna improve your performance. At the end of that three month period, then we'll assess your appearance and I'll make this guarantee right here. If we improve your performance, you're gonna be very happy with the way you look. And it was a game changer. I was late to the party on this one. I wish that somebody would have taught me this early on in my career, because it made a tremendous difference on the consistency that my clients would have with their training program when I got them to shift away from the mirror and scale. Now I was trying to do that, but I didn't think until later on to like shift it over in the performance direction. It was just, oh, you know, stop paying attention to the scale so much, but then they still, you know, they would, you know? And what I wasn't doing early on, even though I knew it was a bad idea to focus on the scale and the mirror, I wasn't giving them the performance metrics to look at. Once I started to do that, then it gave them something that they could be encouraged about and they could focus in on versus me just saying, no, don't pay attention to the mirror, don't pay attention to the scale because you tell them that and I had nothing else for them to focus on. They're still gonna go focus on that. Well, performance is objective. That's the big key, right? It's like, I mean, how subjective is appearance? It's so subjective. Oh, I look good. I don't look good. I don't know. How many times have you said this about yourself and then five years later, see a picture of yourself and you go, actually, I looked a lot better than I thought. Performance is very objective. And this is important to us, a very important key. All of our, what guides us to what we consider to be aesthetic, right? The things that we think look good, the only reason why we think they look good is because it evolved as a signal to explain performance. Like why is a man with wide shoulders and a smaller waist and a muscular upper body it considered attractive? Because what that meant was performance. He could move. He was strong. His testosterone levels were high. Why is it historically a hip to waist ratio is a particular number on women. Why is that considered attractive across all cultures regardless of weight? Why is that considered attractive? Because that points to performance, childbirth, health, does she have a good fatty acid profile? Is she healthy essentially? So all of the stuff that we tend to aim towards in the fitness space, especially popular fitness media actually originates from performance and well-trained athletes look good as a side effect. And more often than not they look good. And more often than not they look better than people who only focus on looks and pay no attention to performance. How interesting is that? It's so much better psychological practice and behavioral practice is just a healthier way to approach it in terms of finding value from those metrics and seeing that actually happen as opposed to just all the nuances of seeing how your body's shifting almost on a daily basis based on what you're consuming or the mood you're in. It's just like it's too much emphasis on looks, whereas once you start really getting more involved in the performance side and you get the quality of your movement and there's just a lot of different motivating drivers there that can carry you further than just the day-to-day, am I looking good today? Am I not looking good today? No, there is another side to this coin though and that I would caution anybody that's listening right now because we're promoting this idea of the benefits of training more like an athlete or thinking like that towards performance. But I also think that, and maybe this is why I didn't focus on this. I also saw a problem with clients that would open up magazine articles and their favorite NFL wide receiver or The Rock or some, I don't know, some person that they aspire to be like that's athletic and then their workout is in the magazine and so they go and they follow this and it rarely ever is actually a really good programmed routine, it's something that's got plyometrics and explosive movements and weird exercises they've never done before and they're like, oh my Odell Beckham does this, I'm gonna start doing this now. And so I would be challenged with that with those people that are drawn to training like an athlete but then also haven't done the prerequisites to train that way so. There's two components, two things that we need to address here. If you're training, if you're a coach and you're training a specific athlete, the training is very specific to the person and the sport, okay? So athletic training for a football player is gonna look different than athletic training for a swimmer or an endurance runner or a cyclist or a baseball player, right? It's gonna look different. What we're talking about here and that's got lots of value by the way. So if you wanna train for a specific sport and you're a high performing athlete then you wanna train specifically for that sport. What we're talking about is general athletic training. So the average person who's like, man I like to move well, I like to be fast, strong, I like to feel good and then the side effect of that is, man I look really good, I look really balanced and I move really well. That's general athletic training versus kind of that specific that you're talking about. And we could do a podcast on like, how to train for football, how to train for baseball. But I think in this episode what we're gonna talk about is general athletic training, the components of it, the factors that you wanna pay attention to that will benefit you regardless of what your goals are. Yeah, but that's my point that I'm trying to make is that exactly that, that the general population tends to do this. The general population who isn't- They make the wrong decision. They're not a wide receiver for the, they're not even probably a football player but they just love watching football and that's their favorite football player so therefore they go do it. It's rarely, I'm not talking about the kid who is in college and he's been training his whole career and he's a football player and he sees what a football player is doing so therefore he goes and mimics it. I'm talking about the weekend warrior who's watching football or watching these athletes and then goes, man they're motivated temporarily by this. Which is a good point to bring up because a lot of those workouts are even more risk. There's more risk involved, there's more detriment because of the explosive nature of them because athletics really, you do express very fast twitch explosive movements that you have to be able to control your body at an even higher level than say, some of these crazy workouts we've seen with bodybuilders where it's just like a ton of volume and it's a lot of pumping exercise, a lot of like really hard muscular, hypertrophy type based workouts but I caution that because even more so requires the prerequisites of movement and the ability to stabilize and control your joints before adding on that type of exercise. Well look, the bottom line is this and we talk about this all the time. If this is a lifelong endeavor for you, if you want to look good and be fit and be lean and you don't just want to do it for a short period of time, you're not just trying to get in shape and then get out of shape and gain the weight back and whatever, you're like, look, I want to do this, I want to do it right and I want to be able to maintain this forever. There's value in all these modalities, there's value in bodybuilding style training, we've done episodes on that, there's value in athletic based training, there's value in strength based or powerlifting style training and that's the key here and what we're talking about right now is the value in training like an athlete and that value will carry over and I don't care what your goal is, it's gonna carry over and it's gonna make you, even if you just care about how you look, training this way will make you look better versus never training like this. Oh, 100% but there still is in order of an operation, like your point with bodybuilding, how many people, and I know we're talking about sports performance type of training today but when you look at it, people make the same mistake in the bodybuilding community. You see your favorite bodybuilder in a magazine and you see his workouts and you go do that and just cause you want to be like one or aspire to be like one, you skip all the other things that you should do before getting into that routine and you'll be far better and you'll get more results faster if you follow the right order of operation. There's nothing, no difference in training like an athlete. If you want to train like an athlete and just cause you're a weekend warrior or the average joe, doesn't mean that you can't work towards that, being a general population, but that's totally fine and a great goal to have I think but there's still an order of operation. You don't just throw that person into this, what an NFL player is doing right now for training camp right away but you could work up to that if you really wanted to regardless of your football but you got to go through the right prerequisites first and order of operation and training to maximize your benefits and also protect you from the highest amount of risk. Now the goal of training like an athlete is this, it puts you in your body, you own your body, you can move in different ways and you own all that movement. It can be laterally, it can be forward, it can be up down, you're strong, you know your capabilities and your capacity and you can reach the maximum potential of your body whenever you want. So that's what it feels like when you train this way. You feel stable, strong, secure, you move well and you can call upon your body to do lots of different things but this begins with the right mindset. It's a very different mindset when you go into the gym or your garage or you're working at home when you're training like an athlete versus just training to look a particular way. Essentially it's this, you're not training for show, you're only training for go. Now again, remember this, when you train for go and you accomplish a great deal of that, the show part becomes the side effect, right? But that's the mentality. So when you go to the gym, rather than thinking I'm gonna sculpt my quads like this or I'm gonna develop this part or piece of my back, you're going in there. And by the way, training for go doesn't just mean strength, but that's part of it. It doesn't just mean speed, that's part of it, right? It's all things tied to performance. So I can literally go to the gym and say today my goal is to squat better than I did before or squat stronger or heavier than I did before, right? It could be I'm gonna do an overhead press and my extension's gonna be even better. Or normally when I do overhead carries I feel strained in my low back. Today my goal is to be able to do this and feel no strain in my low back. That's what I mean by train for show. You're going in there and you're trying to aim for these objective measures that have everything to do with performance. Yeah, and I would even argue that the most important even over strength would be movement quality. If you look at the highest athletes when they're coaches and the technology that they have to analyze a pitcher as a pitcher throws the ball. I mean, they're looking at, it was from what, 12 o'clock to six o'clock is his arm going, is he internally rotating too much? And they're not going like, hey, throw it harder next time. It's very mechanical. Yeah, they're not throwing harder next time or do 50 more reps. They're adjusting every little detail about the movement knowing that that will get more out of the movement, right, more results from that. So the same concept is that that's the way you want to go into these workouts. When you look at, oh, today is squats or oh, today is whatever, shoulder press doesn't matter what movement we're doing. You know, less of you worrying about looking at your shoulders. Yeah, it's a lot more intentional, you know, the approach to a lot of these movements. And again, and we kind of throw out their practice as being like one of the best examples of approaching workouts is we get the opportunity to take some of these common exercises and practice them and get better at them specifically in terms of how I'm performing that exercise, not necessarily just am I able to get through the workout or am I able to load more weight? It really, what was the quality of it? You know, how did I feel my way through it? Like where did the breakdown occur? You know, how can I improve that? So it's just like really taking a microscope back in and looking at the quality of how everything, you know, came together inside that workout. I remember when we wrote Maps Performance and one of the things that I would get is messages all the time is like, you know, how do I know what weight to choose? Or should I feel like I can do this and I can go heavier if I go there? I'm like, stop worrying about that so much and make the movement perfect. You've got a model on video there and I'd rather see you execute that movement with absolute perfection. No swaying to the left or right. No inability to get full extension or not being able to reach full depth. Like I care more about that than you, okay, hey, next week we add five or 10 more pounds to the bar. And so you just like to your mindset point, Sal, you have to go into the workout with that. Like you are, it's almost like an art. Like you want to make this workout look so perfect. And then you go. Over the amount of reps. Yeah, and think of it this way, right? Exercises all have a value. And in order to maximize the value of an exercise to really get everything that it can offer you, your form and technique and control has to be really good. So you could do a barbell squat and let's say the max potential of a squat is 100. And because your technique and form and control aren't great, you're only ever gonna get 50, no matter what, no matter how much you squat, no matter how often you squat, no matter how much weight you add on the squat bar, you're only gonna get 50 versus maximizing the technique, the skill and the control of it where you can now maximize the potential of that squat, which is tremendous. So to use another example, right? If you're a boxer, the result of your punch or at least what you're looking for is to knock someone out. So I want to be able to throw a punch and the goal is to knock someone out. And so you could take two boxers and one guy could just lift weights and get as strong as possible, never perfect throwing a punch. The other guy can practice throwing a punch. Guess who's gonna punch harder, right? Guess what the result is gonna be from the person who practiced the punch versus the guy that just lifts weights and builds muscle. So you wanna maximize what all these exercises can do for your body. You wanna get really good at them. And that's what we mean when we say don't train for show, train for go. When you're going into the gym, this is the mindset. I wanna do this better. I wanna get better at the skill. Now, what's the carryover? Let's say you're not looking to be an athlete all the time, but this is something you're including in your workout routine. You're doing this for a six month period or a three month period. And then you go back to your other training. Oh my gosh, the carryover is tremendous. It's absolutely, I don't care if you want a body build later on when you maximize now the effectiveness of each of those exercises that you can do anyway when you go body build. Now when you go do your body building routine, it just, you build muscle so much easier. Yeah, I don't know that like the parallel for me, I always go back to musicians and if I was to kind of compare it to a symphony where you have a collection of all these different instruments and it's very beneficial to hyper focus on one of those instruments to make sure that the sound quality and everything is at its upmost, at its best versus, but how does that play into the entire symphony? How does that overall sound, how's that quality? And so like in terms of performance, I look at it more as a symphony of like how all these parts are moving together in unison and what that's producing. Yeah, so beautiful. So let's talk about the foundational kind of physical pursuit. We've talked about this in the past and that really is strength. Now, why is that called the foundational physical? Well, first of all, does that mean it's the only thing you should focus on? No. But when we say foundation and what we mean is generally speaking, all things being equal if you get stronger, the other physical pursuits tend to improve. So if you talk about speed, if you talk about explosiveness, if you talk about stability, even endurance, if you get stronger, all of those things tend to improve. So this is a very important thing to understand. So one component, and I probably have to sell this the least, I think people listening right now, probably most people are interested in strength as a performance metric, but if that particular metric right there will contribute to all the others. So for example, a program that seems to be very specific like MAPS PowerLift, well, let's use that as an example, right? MAPS PowerLift is obviously, PowerLift is in the name, it's to train somebody for a powerlifting meet. Now, if that's all you ever do, that's fine, but if you use that in combination with other types of workout programs to train like an athlete, what MAPS PowerLift will give you, for example, is this incredible base of strength. You've got this kind of low gear. When I say strength in this context, I mean that low gear grinding strength because later on we're going to talk about other types of strength, but if you could build your strength capacity, squat, deadlift, overhead press, bench press, you know, those kinds of movements, you're going to see carry over into your other, you know, athletic pursuits. Maybe one of the most underrated programs that we have for an athlete, because most athletes would think of things that are more like explosive, dynamic, different planes, and you think, oh my God, powerlifting is like five exercises, sagittal plane, how, that's not an athlete. Like I don't want to do that, but to your point you're making right now, the amount of strength that you're going to build through that program, and that's why, you know, the idea is that that's just part of the program. That's a phase, right? A part, a portion of it, we are going to focus purely on getting as strong as you can in these major lifts that are then going to carry over into your athletic performance. I think it's just not one of the ones that someone would think would attribute to a lot of their athletic performance that I think would tremendously. Yeah, especially when we're talking about general athletic performance. Like when I would train clients who were, they weren't like hardcore athletes, like they're not collegiate, you know, competitive athletes, but rather they're like, I like to run in marathons, or I like to do a triathlon, or I like to do these races on the weekend, and I like to train for one. It's really interesting, I get these clients and, you know, sometimes it's hard to focus on tons of metrics, especially when they give me a short period of time, like, hey, I have 60 days, I'm gonna do this marathon, like how can you help me improve my performance? Sometimes all I would do is I would just get them stronger out of squat. Like, all right, we're just gonna get you strong. And then next thing you know, I remember one lady in particular, she was really into marathon, she liked to do two or three a year. This was her thing. She never really did proper resistance training. She hired me as a referral. She gave me 60 days, she was gonna do the New York Marathon, which is a big one. And she said, I wanna get faster, I've been stuck at this time, and I just like, I go around this time, it's like, I don't, I can't really beat it. All I did was get her stronger at squats. I mean, that was the main thing I focused on, squats and deadlifts. And she shaved a tremendous amount of time off of her run, and she couldn't believe that strength would do that. I'm like, well, of course, you're gonna fatigue far, it's gonna take you much longer to fatigue when you're really strong, especially when you start out the race, so it made a big difference. And I know, I'm probably the one that refers to generating force the most, because in biomechanics, this is something they talk about a lot about, how can I improve my ability to generate more force? It's all related to strength. And strength is that building block that you need, that's the very first element that you need to then push you towards maximizing all other pursuits. Now, that being said, it's a part of this training routine. You do not wanna get stuck in this one dimension, right? The sagittal plane of always training. Or just strength. Yeah, because then it could be detrimental, right? So there's ways to use this to where it'll add tremendous value, and then there's ways where this could set you back if you get stuck training like this. So it's very important that we also express your body in different planes of motion too. Very important, the best athletes in the world are not one dimensional, especially when you consider, what was that show on Netflix that you kept talking about Adam and then I finally watched the episode about Caitlyn Jenner. Oh yeah, untold stories. Untold stories. So I highly recommend it, it's on Netflix and it's the story of Caitlyn Jenner and she goes back to when she was Bruce Jenner and she was the gold, she wins the gold medal in the Decathlon in the Olympics and we beat the Soviet Union. It was a great story, Bruce Jenner at the time was like this huge American hero. There's all these home videos of Bruce Jenner doing back flips, skiing on one foot, water skiing on one foot, riding a bike, lifting weights. One thing you noticed about Bruce Jenner was he was just like super well rounded, almost looked like he could do anything. He was not one dimensional at all. There were so many dimensions to his athletic performance and of course if you look at the Decathlon competition, it does incorporate strength, power, endurance, that kind of stuff all in one. So when we're talking about not being one dimensional literally it means you want your body to be able to perform in many different ways. Speed, endurance, you wanna have that athleticism to move in different directions and be stable. So if you're one dimensional strength, you take someone that only does powerlifting, you get them to try to move fast laterally and they'll hurt themselves. Just throw a ball. Well even then you get like super specialized and focused. You're gonna get really good at that quickly and that's gonna be something that you hone in on but at the same time there's a limitation to that. And in terms of like how I've heard it described from a lot of world-class strength coaches, the exposure to a lot more variables allows your body to adapt and react to them and become a better athlete like for a longer period of time versus getting really, really good but with few variables involved. Yeah, so like for example, at MAPS Performance when we created that program one big component of it was proprioceptive ability and to be able to move in different planes of motion. So you had exercises that were more traditional like your squats and your presses but you had exercises that incorporated lots of rotation, lots of lateral movement. Contralateral movement. Contralateral movement, bilateral movements and bilateral meaning one leg or one arm at a time, contralateral meaning the opposite arm, opposite leg and movements that combined a few of these different things, right? So what do you get from doing that? You get a body that communicates very well with itself and you're in your body. So think about this for a second. Think about the exercises that you're really good at that you practice all the time. Then think of doing something that you never practice. All of a sudden you suck. All of a sudden it's like you're in your body when you do the thing that you practice all the time. Then you do this other thing that you never train. This happened to me like a couple months ago. I went to go do some lateral leg, excuse me, sled drag. So I went to go drag the sled laterally and I was like tripping over my feet. I had to have Justin kind of help me with that technique. I was like a baby deer, you know, just being born. Like I don't know how to do this. Just unfamiliar, yeah. Totally unfamiliar because I was not privy in this particular dimension. Now what are the visual effects of being multi-dimensional with your, being able to express your athletic ability? A very balanced symmetrical physique. Think of the muscles that you don't develop because you don't move in a particular way, right? Think of the muscles that get neglected because you don't rotate in a particular way. It's all those areas start to get developed and you start to get this really nice kind of balanced physique. Now also think about this. If let's say you're somebody that's stuck at a particular exercise and you're like, ah, my deadlifts been stuck at this weight forever or for whatever reason, I've never been able to bench press more than this. What may be preventing you from moving forward is all the stuff that I'm talking about. Your body naturally has these safeguards that are in you that will stop your body from generating more force, lifting more weight or progressing any more forward because it detects risk of injury. You can only throw a ball as fast as your body thinks you can handle, essentially. You can only lift as much as your body thinks you can handle. And maybe the reason why you can't is because you're so one-dimensional. You lack that lateral stability and you go for a heavy squat and your body's like, this is about as much as we're gonna allow you lift because if you shift to the side, you're gonna hurt yourself. Do you think the benefits of training this way is more neuromuscular than it is actually muscular? Do you think that like the communication part of all this is as far as it's carryover into athletic performance? Dude, huge. I'll give you a huge, I'm not gonna call anybody out, but there's a person that we know, we're friends with, very muscular, extremely strong person. And they posted a video. And then doing a lunch? Yes, now this person, again, I don't wanna call him out because I think they're an incredible, for their specific sport, incredible athlete, but this person could squat world record weights. And they went to do some lunges, which is a split stance exercise, right? And you could see, I mean, they were using a weight that I could lift, which, and I'm nowhere near as strong as this person, and you could see the instability because they don't have the neuromuscular connection. They have the muscle, the muscle's there, right? But they can't turn it on, they can't control it. And I think that's the important point to make is people, obviously, general population people are hearing words like bilateral, unilateral, contralateral, and they're going, okay, what's all, and you're saying opposite arm, opposite leg, moving, so then they're going, okay, well, what's the point? Why wouldn't I just train that leg, train that arm, train that leg, train that arm? Like, why am I doing these opposite things? And I think that- Well, here, can you pat your head by yourself? Yeah. Can you rub your tummy in a circle by itself, yeah? Do both at the same time? Right. All of a sudden, it's like really weird, we've all done that in school. It's a new variable, yeah. Because it's doing a few things at the same time requires a different level of neuromuscular communication and control and training in multi-dimensions is what creates this. Which, and this is such an important attribute when moving or being like an athlete, right? Athletics is so reactive and it is so dimensional and you have to be able to get the entire body. I mean, if you're running on a soccer field and you're running for the ball and all of a sudden someone kicks at the opposite direction, the ability for you to cut and go back the other direction, I mean, that is a lot of that is the communication of your brain to all these different limbs, to all coordinate with each other to your symphony part or analogy to go back the other direction super fast, like you could have the strongest leg in the world and you're not gonna be able to do that. You need to be able to rotate while simultaneously anti-rotating your lower half of your body or vice versa or allow for more fluid movement so that way I could propel a baseball while the rest of my body is super tight and rigid. And so it's just, it sounds very complicated. I mean, our bodies are complicated. At the end of the day, there's a lot of tasks that we're asking our body to produce at once. And to oversimplify it is difficult but there is a way to be able to simplify this down to what are those elements involved in improving performance of the overall body? Well, this is how you know when you have a good coach too that it is considering all these things when writing a program. I've seen trainers before write programs for athletes and it's just a bunch of plyometric work. It's just a bunch of explosive circuit training type of stuff that they think, oh, because they need a gas tank, they need to build strength. Let's combine all these strength exercises in a circuit that's athletic training. You know, that's how I think a lot of, there's a lot of athletes that were adopting in schools that were adopting CrossFit. You know, thinking that this is the best thing for these athletes because they're getting strong and they're working on endurance at the same time. You're literally doing another sport to get good at your sport. That's what that is. CrossFit is a sport. No, you're right, you're right. So I'm gonna train. It's like, I wanna get better at football so I'm gonna go play soccer. Will I get some benefit, a little bit, but I'd be better off if I trained my body for football. That's what they were doing when they were doing CrossFit. No, totally. I'm gonna follow another sport. I'll give you my personal experience with this because I personally have no interests in playing traditional sports. I really could care less if I go to the park. I rarely ever will take a baseball or football to the park when I go with my kids. We'll do other things. I could really care less, but here's where I get the benefit. So I love traditional resistance training exercises. I love squatting. I love deadlifting. I love pressing and rowing. And sometimes I get so caught up in these lifts that I neglect other dimensions. And every once in a while I have to remind myself, like, oh yeah, I should probably focus on that a little bit. And sometimes the reminder is pain. Other times it's a really hard plateau. But more recently, I'd say probably over the last, well, not now, because now I've kind of taken care of it, but about a year ago it was pain. Like I would squat heavy and deadlift heavy. And I just, you know, my SI joint on my low back would kind of bother me a little bit. I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on. And so I said, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna do all split stance unilateral exercises. I'm gonna throw in some lateral stuff. And I'm only gonna do that for a little while and see what happens. First off, my body started to look better. I actually started to develop more balance in the way my body looked. And then about six months later, when I went back to my bilateral exercises, right, my legs are together, my arms are together, more traditional exercises, I found out I was stronger. Like this was, it was great. Like I could squat and I'm like, oh my gosh, I feel so stable in my squat. My body's developing really well. So that's the, that's the carryover for somebody who really could care less about playing sports just wants to look good. Believe me, this will make you look better if you focus on this. Well now you're kind of alluding to like the next point which is, you know, addressing weak links. So I think that's another thing that's really important as far as prerequisites before we start training explosive movements. If you have somebody who's got this, you know, excessive internal rotation of the hip on your left side, but the right side's completely normal. And then you go ask that person to explosive jump boxes. What you're asking for is a potential injury. At the bare minimum, even if they don't get injured, they're not gonna get the most out of that movement. And they're not gonna be able to train to be like an athlete if they're performing that way. So you first then have to unpack what's going on with the movement. Where's the disconnect? Yes, right. And then address the weak link so everything is firing properly and we're getting the most out of all those muscles. By the way, the term weak link, I know we throw that around a lot and people kind of know what it means, but here's what it literally is where it came from, right? Think of a chain and think of a chain that is towing something really heavy. That entire chain is only as strong as the weakest link on there. It's not as strong as the strongest. It's as strong as the weakest. If that link breaks, it doesn't matter that the other links can handle way more weight. Makes no difference. The chain broke, it's no longer functional. This is what we mean by taking care of weak links. So your performance could be an oftentimes, I don't wanna say could be, I'll say oftentimes if not most of the time, your performance is not hindered by your inability to generate maximum force or your big muscles can't, no, no, it's usually something else that is getting in the way. Like, you know, your bench press isn't going up. Not because your chest isn't big enough or your shoulders and triceps aren't big enough, but maybe because the stabilizers in your shoulders can't support that weight. So you just, you get your chest as big as you want. It ain't gonna allow you to lift more legs. A lot of times, you know, your average gym person loses sight of that because it's fun because you see numbers going up and you're getting better at certain lifts and everything's going great muscularly. However, you're still getting aches, you're still getting pains, you know, you sort of hit a wall and a plateau a lot of times with some of these lifts and you're just wondering why. But when you get back into the performance side and you start focusing on the movement, it really reveals itself as far as any restriction or pain or something that's not contributing properly, that's the weak link. That's what we need to really focus on to then go back and then propel those lifts even more. And this was really the inspiration behind Maps Prime. I mean, and we've talked a bunch on the show about this being our personal favorite because I think it took the most skill for us to do that. It's like, okay, how do we take a program that someone who wants to train like an athlete can take it and apply it to the routine? Somebody who wants to lose 30 pounds of fat, take it and apply it to the routine? How does somebody wants to build 15 pounds of muscle? How do we address weak links in everybody? Yeah, exactly. How do we address weak links in every single person and then give them something that would compliment any routine they would possibly do and then also yet individualize it for everybody so they could figure that out. So, and that's really the beauty of Prime. If you haven't gone to the free webinar that Justin did, it's absolutely free. He takes you through the three zones that we do in Maps Prime so you can get an idea. And the idea of this is that you go through the test, you figure out what your weak links are, you get the exercises that are supposed to address that and help that and that you build that into your routine. So that becomes a part of your routine as you're going through that regardless if you're training like an athlete or somebody who just wants to lose weight. Yeah, no, and you know what's funny? Of all the, it's the one we're most proud of, right? It's also the least sexy, right? So when I talk about any other workout program, it's like build muscle, boost your metabolism, burn body fat, get stronger, get faster. What's Maps Prime do? It solves your weak links, help you with mobility and everybody's like, whatever. You know what's funny? By far, it's the program that gives us the most positive comments. By far. And here's the part that's the most, I think, revealing. It comes from bodybuilders, strongmen, powerlifters. We have endurance athletes. We have specific athletes. Crossfitters, even. It's the one where, you know, Maps, one of our bodybuilding programs, like Maps Aesthetic or something, I'm gonna get a lot of people interested in bodybuilding who are gonna comment on that. Maps Prime, I get people from everywhere telling us that they couldn't believe how big of an impact it has had on their particular goals. Weak links get in the way of performance, movement, they cause injury, they increase the risk of injury, and they get in the way of you developing the body that you want. I'm telling you right now, you know, in fact, lagging body parts. And limits your full potential. Another word for weak links, by the way, can also be lagging body parts. Like if you may think to yourself like, oh man, I really wanna develop my butt or I really want my hamstrings to look better because my quads overpower them. Like what you're actually probably looking at is a form of a weak link. You're looking at probably a muscle you to have poor connection over. And if you really wanna get those muscles to catch up, the first step is to not make it a weak link anymore, get your body to communicate to it properly so you could fire that muscle the way you want so it could develop. So this is where, again, when we created Maps Prime, that was the goal. And like Adam said, it's literally something you can add to any program. So it doesn't matter what your goal is, you do this kind of exercises or these kind of training on top of it and you'll see better results. Now the next part, and this is also very important, especially for athletics, is to have a bit of a gas tank. Most athletic performance requires you to repeat your performance. You need to be able to repeat what you just did a minute ago or maybe continuously repeat it. It's not just one time and then you're done. Although some sports like that most are not like that. A bigger gas tank literally means you can repeat your max performance again. So it's like you exert yourself, you deplete the gas and it comes back. It's really about how quickly you can recover. I mean, that's what separates some of the best athletes in the world from just your average athletes is their incredible ability to not only perform at that highest peak performance, but to be able to replicate that very quickly right after that and have that type of gas tank and endurance within the allotted amount of time of the game. So this is a very important factor when thinking about athletes. Now I'm gonna tie this back to the very first point which was the mindset one too because this becomes really important here. Like a lot of people understand like, of course if you're an athlete you need to build stamina. Of course that's why people gravitated towards things like CrossFit because it builds tremendous stamina on it. But the general population that tries to train like an athlete that hears that or tries to apply that, where they miss is the breakdown in form over I'm just trying to build my thing. It's all about fatigue. That's right. And so I wanna caution anybody that is listening right now that when you hear that and let's say you're going through like a performance, mass performance actually has a portion of it that is endurance based, right? So to build your stamina. So the final phase is a lot of this. But I would be happier to see a client who maybe didn't increase their speed on the treadmill or get it something done faster. I would rather see them perform it under fatigue with beautiful form still. So when that breaks down that's where you gotta learn to kind of shut down. Does that make sense? Absolutely. Yeah well this goes back to our original point in the beginning where we're trying to focus more on the intention and the quality of the movement. Not just getting through the workout. Not just getting through the reps. It really is at its utmost importance to understand where that breakdown occurs and that's when the quality of your form breaks down. Well okay here's the bottom line. If it's just about fatigue it doesn't matter what exercises you do. I hate to break it to you. You don't need fancy exercises. You could do jumping jacks and it will give you the same benefits as you doing shitty form on six other exercises. It doesn't matter what you do if your technique and form is out the window. Okay but if your technique and form is good now you're gonna reap tremendous benefits from training to get a better gas tank. Now it makes sense why you would do a lunge in this particular movement. Why you would do a press. Why you would do something that included some rotation or some kind of a split stand squat. Now it makes sense but if it's just about fatigue and form is out the window I've seen so many trainers do this in gyms. I see them taking through their clients through. By the way this is how high intensity interval training got bastardized. Here's what happened okay. High intensity interval training originated as a form of athletic training to improve stamina and improve form and technique under fatigue. This is how it got invented. Now how it got bastardized is a study came out that showed that it was a great fat burner. So next thing you know everybody's like cool I'm just gonna do this to burn body fat and I'm just gonna, and the goal is just to sweat and get as tired as possible. Quick easy fat burning. And hit training became garbage. It absolutely became garbage. Nobody does it right. It's a waste of time. You might as well again you don't need your trainer to do this. Just go at home and run in place. You'll get the same benefits. Real high intensity interval training. Real hit training. It combines the right exercises. So programming matters. Uses resistance as a way to augment. It's not just about moving around in circles and doing a bunch of activity but rather incorporating some kind of strength training into this because you wanna have strength while you build this gas tank. And there's an emphasis on form and technique which means although the goal is to push that capacity it's also to rest when appropriate because when form goes out the window, you're done. Stop for a second and let's try again. I have a visual that comes to mind that I saw not that long ago with my nephew's basketball team. And the desired outcome right of this exercise that they're doing is to get the kids to learn to get in that perfect defensive stance. So they're down in like this 90 degree like, you know, been at 90 degree and sitting in a defensive stance but then they have to throw the ball back and forth the coaches are going back and forth and they're doing it for time. And the problem with that is they're focused on the time and getting the kids to do that and they're working on pushing them through fatigue. But what you notice starts to happen is about 15 seconds in the kids are starting to round their back their asses start coming up but they're still doing the exercise. It doesn't matter. It now defeats the purpose of why they are putting the- Not reinforcing bad patterns. That's right. They're trying to train these kids to sit comfortably in this defensive stance that their legs are probably burning like crazy and you, as soon as they break that the exercise needs to be over. So- Yeah, because when you teach passing from a bad position, you're wasting your time. And that's exactly what you're doing by pushing through that. And that's the same thing that happens when you go in and you train these exercises as soon as you start to break down form but you keep pushing through in pursuit of building your gas tank or stamina you defeat the purpose of that movement. You take it to that fatigue exhaustion and where that fatigue exhaustion sets in is the breakdown of form. Not when you can't move anymore. And I think there is a lot of people that don't grasp that. You see a lot of coaches- There's a big misconception around that. Big time. Look, training your body wrong is not great. It's not great to train your body really wrong. So it's really important to do it right even if you're training to improve your stamina which requires that you push into some fatigue that you feel some of that burn that you're gonna be a little bit gassed out. Even if you do that, you still need to place an emphasis on technique and form and you still need to have proper exercise programming. If anything, I'll even make the argument that that kind of training, that high intensity interval training requires more special emphasis on programming than other kinds of workouts because you get away with less. You get away with less. You have a smaller margin of error when you're doing hit training and you do oftentimes with other types of training. Well, there's a reason why it was one of the last programs we developed. 100%. It's why it's the only program that has a warning on it is because of that. And we know how popular it is too. And it, yes. Came out with that. It was a number, it still is. I think it still holds the record for a launch. Our marketing team would have loved to have had us release it sooner, but we didn't want to. No, we won a prerequisite first. Yeah, we knew it would sell more but it was like that we have to teach the audience how to train their body properly before we just throw them at the routine that everybody wants to do. And that's the unfortunate part. And we can't control every single person that bought and followed that program. But the truth is, I know for sure there's people that bought that program and we're doing it and not following all these things that we're saying right now. And that's just important. Now here's a wonderful side effect of hit training. So I'm gonna sell it a little bit. It does burn a lot of body fat. In a short period of time, it's an incredible fat burner. But only is effective in that way if you do it the way we're talking. Otherwise, again, it really doesn't matter what exercises you do. All right, lastly, let's talk about the ultimate expression of physical performance, right? This is what makes athletic, sports athletic. This is the athletic part of it, right? Explosive. Is fast strength, explosive strength. Now, why is that the ultimate expression? Because it requires ultimate control. It's one thing to move with maximal force slowly. That takes some skill and you definitely don't want to hurt yourself. But now do it as fast as you can. You better control the movement because that's where shit happens. But that's also, again, the ultimate expression of athleticism. If you're strong and fast, what was that quote? I think it might have been, what was Mike Tyson's first coach, D'Amato or I don't remember his name. I think he said, fast and strong equals dangerous. Like if you're fast and strong, oh boy, now you gotta watch out. Now what's the benefit to the average person listening to get fast and strong? Oh yeah, your everyday life is... Okay, to be dangerous. That's a good attribute. You are dangerous, but also everyday life becomes risk-free. Think about that, right? You're walking on the street. Oh, your foot goes off the curb. You're okay. Your kid falls. Gotta catch what's happened to me the other day. In fact, my son was playing on the couch and I was watching him and his dad instinct kicks in. My wife watched it, which was great because I got to show off a little bit. He goes and he almost falls headfirst off the couch and I boom with one hand caught him. I mean, that right there, those kinds of things in everyday life. Oh, it prepares you for those variables that inevitably are gonna come your way. That's just it. Like you're gonna slip in the shower. You're gonna reach back really quickly. Like anytime something that has some kind of emergency involved in it, like it's gonna be super fast and you wanna make sure that you don't like just rip your arm out of socket. Well, and if you don't train this, you lose this. And I... You totally lose it. If you've been listening to the podcast long enough, if you heard me share the thing it was last year, maybe a little bit before last year when I talked about this. And it was just simply because I had not had a lot of explosive training in my routine for a long time. I consider myself a, you know, weekend warrior type athlete. So I'm pretty athletic and can do this stuff. And I remember jumping out of the back of my truck just second nature because I've done that a thousand times before but I hadn't done that in a really long time nor had I trained anything explosive. And I have the leg strength I was squatting 400 pounds or so around that time. And I jumped out and I thought my knees were going to explode when I landed on the ground. And it scared me for a minute. And what scared me about it was that, wow, this is something that I just naturally reacted and did because I thought I could do it. Because you remember, right? You jumped out of the back. Yeah, exactly. And so I didn't, but because I stopped training that ability for my body to be expressed that way, it definitely caught me off guard. And then what did I do the very next day in the gym? I was training those movements again. Also, I mean the top two reasons why people work out anyway, right? Number one, you want to look good. That's the most common for sure. But the second one is you want to feel good. And I'm going to tell you something right now. There's been times in my life like when I was very heavy into judo and wrestling where I was doing lots of explosive training, okay? That's the best I ever felt my entire life just in everyday life. When you're moving and walking and doing stuff and you've got that capability to be explosive, I don't need to be explosive but everything else is easy. That's like super effortless. And I feel like I can just jump out of my clothes if I want at any moment because I have that speed. All that restless energy I've found is just gone. Towards the end of the day too, I sleep better. Sometimes just expressing your body at that type of capacity, it just really does, it calms you down. Totally. So the value of training like an athlete is tremendous for anybody regardless of what your goals are. Now here's what we did with this particular episode because we named so many of our programs and if you got each of them individually, I think we named MAPS Prime, we named MAPS Powerlift, MAPS Performance, MAPS Hit. If you got all those individually, you're looking at, I don't know, $600 or $500, something like that. So here's what we did. We actually put them together just for this episode. So this is not something that we do ever. This is just specifically for this particular episode in what's called the Extreme Athlete Bundle. So what you get is lifetime access to MAPS Prime, MAPS Powerlift, MAPS Performance, MAPS Hit. This is how much you get them all for, okay? One payment of $149.99. So it's a huge, huge discount for all of these particular programs. And again, you get lifetime access. If you're interested in this, go to mapsextreme.com. That's M-A-P-S extreme.com. Look, if you like our information, head over to mindpumpfree.com, check out all of our free guides. Also you can find us all on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin, me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam. Thank you.