 some of the best approaches to keeping your fitness. Now, a big part of it we just said is how you go into it. So make sure you have an effective, efficient, effective and efficient, okay, because effectiveness in the way that we describe it is you get good results for the time that you spend doing it. Effective doesn't mean that you do just crazy amounts of time to get small results, but rather less time to get more results. Now, if you love working out and all that stuff, that's fine. But again, we're looking at being able to maintain, right? So an effective and efficient workout and in nutrition, that is something that's balanced and sustainable. So once you've kind of got that, and you've got your summer body or whatever, how do you want to maintain it for the rest of the summer? By the way, we're doing this for summer because we're in the summer, but it is funny. I do know people who have gotten in shape ready for summer by the end of summer, they're out of shape because what they did to get there. Believe it or not, the hard part about getting in shape for summer is not the getting in shape part. The hard part is maintaining it after summer is over. A lot of people lose weight and get in shape. Most people gain it right back and get back out of shape. What's the statistics on that? I think that it's not just summer either. It's like what percentage of people put the weight back on that they lost? 85%. Is it 85? I knew it was 80s, especially over the winter. I mean, in those months, I always see that trend of packing it on and then hustling to get it off before summer. Yeah, in the first year. I bet you if we followed most people for five years, that number would go up to 90%. Very few people have long-term success when it comes to fitness. And that's the real challenge. The challenge is not how to lose weight and how to get in shape. The challenge is how to maintain it. That's the real challenge because so many people do it every year. Nobody's able to maintain it. Do you think that highlights the method that they went about getting there? Totally. Of the 80s, let's say 82%. Because of course, in that number is something tragic happen. Someone passed away and so you fell off. Something like that, right? So there's got to be a percentage of those people where something uncontrollable or unforeseen happened in their life that dramatically changed or shifted and so then they fell off the wagon a little bit. But what percentage of that 85% do you think is that because they actually went about it completely wrong? Oh, majority. I think that's a great point that you bring up is how you go into it has a huge influence as to your ability to maintain or sustain it, right? So if your approach, for example, to exercise is to do it in a way that's so ineffective that it requires six days a week of dedication. If your approach to nutrition is so unsustainable that you literally have to count everything that goes in your mouth or that you have to eat the same thing every day or worse, you rely on shakes or pre-made meals, the odds of your long term success are super low because it's just not maintainable unless you want to live like that for the rest of your life, which most people just don't want to do. Well, everybody says that you remember getting these clients too, right? Like, I don't care. I just, what does it take? Yeah, I've got Vegas. I've got a wedding. I've got a birthday. Like they have this thing, right? And it's like, I'll figure all that stuff out or I don't care what happens to me afterwards. So whatever it takes, what's the fastest best thing I can do to get me to this point. And they don't realize like, yeah, if you really knew how much more you were going to put on and how hard it would be to maintain afterwards, I think you would, you probably, because they don't think that, right? No, this is misconception that once you get to the destination, you're just going to ride it out from there. And like, how you got there, you know, regardless of what you do, like if I'm in, if I lost all this body fat, all this weight, I'm going to be able to kind of continue those habits and keep myself in that good shape because of all the hard work I put into it. Now, the interesting part about what you're saying right now is that if you, if you did it the right way, maintaining is actually relatively easy. It's 100%. It's much easier to maintain than it is to, to grow, build muscle, burn a button, lose all the body fat. Studies show this from a, from a just a time perspective. It's like one ninth the volume is required to keep the muscle that took you to build it in the first place. So statistically, you're absolutely right. If you do it right, look, we all learn how to do this with our clients took us a long time, right, to, to figure this out. But once we got this down, the maintaining part became easy for my clients. It was, it was, it was a PCK because we did it right. We set ourselves up the right way. That's it. But that's everything because the other, the alternative to that is how extreme those decisions were going into it then that are unsustainable. It's damn near impossible to maintain. Well, the complete opposite is true. If you do it the wrong way, it's tremendously harder to maintain it than it is to actually achieve it. So that's the interesting part is like, if you go about it the wrong way, I mean, it's kind of like the money thing, right? If you build wealth through years and years of education, hard work, living below your means, investing wisely, sacrifice, all these things, if you build wealth that way over probably decades to get to that level, then sustaining it is actually relatively easy because you've built so many great behaviors around in that. If you somebody who got lucky, you won the lotto or you inherited millions of dollars and then instantly you were a wealthy person overnight. How hard is it to keep that money? Even to put it even differently, if the way you build your wealth is about working 16 hours a day, seven days a week, at some point, you got to stop, right? If you don't set yourself up. You know what's interesting is that I can't think of another, I don't know, market or place where people say, I don't care about after I just want to get it real quick. Like imagine you went and bought a car and you're like, yeah, that's the model I want. They're like, okay, it's going to take us three months to build it out the way you want it. Like, no, no, no, make it done in a week. What's going to fall apart? I don't care. I'll worry about that after I want it done in a week, right? Imagine doing that with a house. I feel like I've seen a show like that. You guys remember that one show? It was like Pimp My Ride. It was just these unreasonable timelines like these celebrities would throw them and they, of course, they'd pull it off or whatever, but I remember reading stories about things just falling apart and just, that's the thing. You put that kind of pressure and demand and you give it like an unsustainable type of beginning to it. It's just going to implode. Yes. So we should talk about like some of the best approaches to keeping your fitness. Now, a big part of it we just said is how you go into it. So make sure you have an effective, efficient, effective and efficient, okay? Because effectiveness in the way that we describe it is you get good results for the time that you spend doing it. Effective doesn't mean that you do just crazy amounts of time to get small results, but rather less time to get more results. Now, if you love working out and all that stuff, that's fine. But again, we're looking at being able to maintain, right? So an effective and efficient workout and in nutrition, that is something that's balanced and sustainable. So once you've kind of got that and you've got your summer body or whatever, how do you want to maintain it for the rest of the summer? By the way, we're doing this for summer because we're in the summer. But it is funny. I do know people who have gotten in shape ready for summer by the end of summer out of shape because what they did to get there was hard to maintain. Well, it's especially says that, I mean, they're also probably on the beach and partying and doing that stuff. So it comes back hard fast. I had a buddy who was like, man, I'm shredded for like the first three weeks summer. And then after that, it's gone. It's like, you know, cracks me up. So boom, what's up, everybody? It's mind pump time. You know, we're the best fitness podcast in the universe. Uh, we actually held a vote here in the studio and we won. We beat everybody. Anyway, here's the giveaway for today. Maps anabolic and the no BS six pack formula, the original maps workout programs. Maps anabolic, great for building muscle, burning body fat. The no BS six pack formula gets those core muscles to be visible even at higher body fat percentages. So here's how you can win. Leave a comment below in the first 24 hours that we drop this episode, subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications, do all those things. And if we like your comment, we'll notify you. They'll get free access to a maps anabolic and the no BS six pack formula. Now for everyone else, because we talk about those programs in this episode and how great they are, check this out. If you just want to sign up right now, if you go to mapsjuly.com, you can get maps anabolic plus, plus the no BS six pack formula, both of them together for one payment of $59.99. That's more than 50% off the retail price. Okay. So again, maps anabolic, no BS six pack formula, both of them total $59.99 only at mapsjuly.com. All right. Here comes the show. So here's a few things that you could do. Number one is instead of doing a body part split routine, this is where you do, you know, chest on one day and back on another day and shoulders on another day, do three full body workouts. And there's a few different reasons why this is superior. But one of them, I think the most important reason is if you do miss a workout, you're not missing the same body part all the time. Or, you know, you're still, if you miss one workout, you still hit your whole body twice in that week versus a five day split where if you do miss a workout tends to be the body part you don't necessarily like to work out. And then you're not going to hit that again for the next week. And it ends up becoming a big problem. You know, full body workouts are very forgiving. You miss one workout, that's okay. In fact, what I've done is I've just increased the intensity of the other two workouts and hadn't skipped a beat at all and continued to progress. It's funny because they this isn't brought up. So when they compare full body versus split routines, it's if so long as the volume is the same, like the frequency of right, it ends up being like pretty close, right? It's not huge. But to me, that's not even the argument here. I guess like is full, like full body is already a little bit more superior, but it's not that much to where it's like, oh, if you prefer split, then go for split. But the main reason why I always push clients in the direction of the full body is for what you just said, you know, in my experience, I've got hundreds for sure, you know, by proxy thousands of people and collectively thousands of people that we've trained what on one hand, I can count how many clients made a whole year of like consistency of not missing, you know, several, several days or several weeks in the, in the month or the year of like working out. I mean, I know myself, I'm a fitness fanatic and I miss days all the time. And I think that's where this really carries the most weight. It's like, in reality, yeah, you might say, Oh, I'm never going to miss because you're focused right now or you have a stretch of time where you don't have to be anywhere. But between getting sick and traveling and work life and family and all those other things like that, the inevitable is going to happen and you're not going to be and it's so nice to know that, you know, if I had a week where it was so overwhelming that I only got to the gym one time or maybe two times, I still got enough volume in there to actually at least maintain and not go backwards on my physique. Right. Right. Yeah. This is a big one. And then there's, there's another part that I like about this, which is when you're training your whole body two or three days a week, you tend to pick the most effective exercises for each body part and you're less likely to do this when you're doing all that volume for that body part and one workout. So I'll give you an example. Let's say today's leg day and you're on a split and you're going to do 15 sets. Okay. 15 sets for your leg. So the first three or four sets is barbell squats, very effective, incredible exercise. Right. The next exercise, maybe do a few sets of, you know, Romanian deadlifts, another great exercise, but then you're fatigued and you're tired. The next few exercises or a couple of exercises become the less effective ones, leg extensions and, you know, leg curls and that kind of stuff. Right. If I'm instead hitting my legs in full body workouts and I'm doing a Monday, Wednesday, Friday routine, and at the meaning I'm doing five sets each day. So still 15 sets, I'm much more likely to pick those really effective exercise. I'm not so fatigued halfway through that I have to pick these far less effective exercises. So what ends up happening over the course of a year, if you look at somebody's routine, who does full body, when you look at the course of a year, will you end up seeing or more sets of squats, deadlifts, presses, rows, like all these really effective exercises and less sets of less effective exercises, less bang for your butt. Well, and I just found personally between me and my clients to move into more to full body workouts. They just got better at a lot of those exercises because you're, you're repeating a lot of these exercises throughout the week instead of just like main, like let's say it's legs and it's just the once a week that we're hitting legs and we're just overwhelming the legs, but we're not practicing it as frequently. And that's something that was played a, played a major factor for them to feel more confident going into some of the compound list, especially, but then also like reaping the rewards of that because now your body is more proficient in it. And also to your hitting those body parts multiple times per week. You know, there's something that you didn't highlight in here that full body routines ended up teaching me that I found a lot of value from coming from somebody who used to do body part splits all the time. I recently talked about kind of falling off a little bit then getting back into a swing of things and then going and doing like two sets. I did two sets of lunges just the other day. And I was really sore from it. And I was just from two sets in the past. I don't think there had ever been a time in my split routine life that I went to the gym and only did two sets on a muscle group. If I was doing a split, I was doing a minimum of like four to six exercises or sets for a body part because that's just, I thought I was wasting my time to only do two sets of something like that. So it taught me a big lesson on like how little I can do of an exercise and actually continue, can see continued progress in it. So it actually taught me to scale back the intensity, which was really difficult for me to do as a body part split guy for so long. And since a lot of people do gravitate towards the body part splits and we're constantly talking about trying to do as little as possible to elicit the most amount of change, that is a constant lesson that I'm not only trying to continue to learn for myself, but I'm constantly trying to teach other people. Running a full body routine kind of forces you in that direction because you can't do five, six sets of every muscle group because you'll be there for four hours inside the gym. You only got enough time to maybe do two or three sets per muscle group because you're doing a full body routine. So you have to kind of spread out like that. And what you find is like you actually get a pretty damn good workout, even in just those two sets for that muscle. You're right. Even a, even a basic split, like upper, lower, upper, lower, which is a pretty big split. Most split split body parts up even more than that. You're still in the gym four days. You could do a full body workout and do two days and do the same volume, same frequency, same frequency of training, only two days. So you're less likely to have to miss workouts. You're more likely to be consistent and consistency is key when it comes to maintaining your progress. It's a big one. And then back to what you said, Justin, which, you know, this can't be understated. The frequency of practice of these complex exercises, you know, you can derive way more benefit of an exercise if you can perform it really well. How do you perform it really well? Well, it's a skill, right? There's a skill to squatting and pressing and rowing and pull-ups and all that stuff. So if you're practicing it frequently, two or three days a week versus just once a week, even if the volume is controlled for, you're just practicing it more often and you're going to derive more benefit out of it. And so what you end up seeing, especially with beginners and people who are intermediate, is if faster, the learning curve is much shorter and it happens much quicker and then they derive benefit, you know, in a much faster, much faster. All right. The next one, this one's really important and that is to phase your training. Okay. What does that mean by phasing your training? It means you want to change your workout in the sense of you're doing maybe different reps, different rest periods, maybe a different tempo with, you know, how you're lifting the weight versus, you know, slow versus fast. This is important because it keeps your body progressing, you know, a certain amount of adaptation. It really is adapting to the specifics of the kind of workout. So in other words, if somebody trains for a full year doing a bench press and they're always aiming for five reps, if you compared that person to a person who did bench press where they did three or four weeks of five reps, but then they did three or four weeks of 12 reps and then three or four weeks of let's say 15 to 20 reps and then they'll throw on some supersets. At the end of that year, you're going to see more consistent progress from the person who's moving in and out and less injury. That's another thing. You'll see less injury as well. And you'll notice this, if you ever phase your workout for anyone's ever done this, and all of our maps programs do this, map center ball, the first one has phasing like this, what you'll find is that first week or two of a new phase, it's like your body just responds to this new stimulus. Yeah. And it's cool because there's not, there's a whole bunch of acute variables that you can mess around with, but you don't really necessarily need to throw all that exercise list out and start over with a whole new set. You can manipulate a lot of the same exercises with just reps, with just tempo, with just rest periods, for instance, and you can provide your body with a whole new challenge that it's now going to have to respond to. And the best part of that is what a lot of people experience if they stayed in that same routine for too long. Inevitably, you just feel this plateau, this lull that I'm not really getting that kind of same response that my body was when I was first starting out. I love this point for this specific conversation about getting shredded for like, or getting in shape for like, you know, the summer, and then maintaining it because what happens right now is people sign up for these challenges that are like these 30 days, 60 day type challenges, or they go do some extreme thing to get themselves in shape. And some of them actually have some success with it, right? Some of them are like super dedicated, they don't miss the 75 days, they do something every single day, and they're super dialed in with their diet. And so they see they get themselves in pretty good shape during that time. And then what ends up happening, they think that this is how they're going to maintain it going forward like that, and they're still following the same routine. And they're not phasing, they're not changing up the rest periods, they're not changing up their tempo, they're not changing up the programming or exercises at all. They think, oh, that got me in great shape to get here. And so, and I'm guilty of this, I mean, most of my workout career lifting, I would get caught doing this, I would, I would change up my training, switch it up as far as whether it be a major thing, like, okay, now I'm going to start focusing on heavy weight and low reps, I would do that for an extended period of time, see great results. And then I would marry it. And then I'd find myself doing it for a year, two years later, before I wake up and go, Oh, I need to move out of this, move out of that. And then Oh, the new thing shows me all this, then I get stuck in that for a year, took me a long time to realize, Oh, it's not the sets, it's not the reps on this thing. It's the idea of me phasing in and out of this, and that it sends like a new, it's like a novel stimulus to the body for it to adapt and change. Yeah, by the way, when you phase your workouts, you want to do this before you hit a plateau. That's ideal. What you don't want to do is wait for your body to stop progressing and for you to hit a plateau and then try to phase, because now you're kind of behind the eight ball. And you often have to include what's called a deload week, if that happens where you take a week off or make it easy so you're can get back into it. What you want to do is you want to phase out of a style of training when you're progressing or when towards the end of that, right? So before we plateau, what does that look like? Usually around three to four weeks. Usually every three to four weeks, you want to change the phase of your workout. And the best ways to change the phasing are your reps, your tempo and your rest period, not the exercises. Now I'm not saying don't change the exercises because that's also important, but you probably don't want to change radically change your exercises every three to four weeks. It's a good idea to stay with a lot of similar exercise, especially the most important exercises like squats and deadlifts and presses and rows, but change the reps up every three to four weeks. So you could bench press, for example, every, you know, three days a week for chest for 12 weeks. But in that is three weeks of low reps, higher, you know, longer rest period and three weeks of moderate reps with moderate rest period and three weeks and maybe super sets with short rest period, right? Get your body to continue practice that skill of pressing, but phase it enough so that it becomes a new stimulus. So I hope that makes sense to people because a lot of times people think, oh, cool. That means they got to radically change my workout every three weeks. Now, probably not a good idea. Too much change isn't great either. So stick to the reps, the sets and the rest period and the tempo, tempo meaning how fast or slow you move the weight. That's how you want to phase. And then every two or three months, then you probably want to change the exercises, you know, kind of works out that way. All right, here's the next one. Slowly increase your calories. Okay, why am I saying this? Because once you've gotten yourself to a particular leanness, like, oh, I'm ready for summer. I'm, you know, 10% body fat or if you're a guy or if you're a girl, 17% body fat, I look really good. What you want to do now is you want to slowly reverse out of that. So you don't get that metabolic adaptation slow down and also so that you don't end up with this rebound at the end where what a lot of people do is they'll try to maintain that 10% with the real low calories it took to get them there. And then summer's over, the pressure of looking good on the beaches over, and they go way in the opposite direction. We actually have studies that show that extreme cutting followed by extreme bulking meaning really low calories and then a rebound with a lot of high calories actually adds the number of fat cells to your body. Meaning, which your body doesn't always do this, by the way, this is only a few times in life when your body adds fat cells. But if it does it through this process, it'll make getting leaner so much harder the next time around. Well, you have to understand that when you started cutting for summer, that's all catabolic. So even though you may think the way you look afterwards, because you leaned out, that you built muscle, because you look, and you might be getting compliments from people going like, Oh my God, you look buff or you look so muscular, how do you, boy, you look bigger. I remember that thinking that was so crazy to me when I lost 20 something pounds like before a show, people be like, Damn, you got big. I'm like, well, actually, not really. I lost 20 pounds, probably a couple pounds of muscle along the way. And that's not a place I want to be long term. So yeah, I cut my calories like crazy, but I'm in a catabolic state. So I'm not building muscle, even though I'm lifting weights, I'm lifting weights to hold on to all the work that I did before. And I'm trying to shed body fat. So part of wanting to reverse diet and come out of that. So after I get to that, obtain that for that summer look, I want to make sure I start to increase calories. And I want to get back to building muscle and building my metabolism because I don't want to be at that calorie place for a long period of time because most people in order to get shredded for summertime are eating in a restricted amount of calories that they don't like doing in the winter time and other times of the year. And if you stay there for too long to your point, the body just adapts to that. And now when I get to winter time and the holidays and all those high calorie times, it's going to be really, really tough to maintain that. Well, it's interesting. I remember you bringing up some of the competitors where they would apply the same formula over and over again to where they're physique, it was that much more difficult for them to then shed the extra bit of body fat. Well, even just your average person that I know, yo-yo diets, right? And I never had a way of explaining why they just don't look as good the next time they applied it around. And then the time after that and the time after that. And so to know that they actually like gain more fat cells is pretty crazy. I used to get people, I would get clients that came to me and were so frustrated. I remember I had this one young lady and she goes, you know, to get ready for my first show, she was a figure competitor. She says, I had to do an hour of cardio every day. And I had to eat X amount of calories every day for my second show to get into the same shape. I had to add 30 minutes more of cardio every single day for my next show. I had to, and each time it was like harder and harder. She's like, I can't figure out what's going on. And we talked about this and she did, she would rebound so hard afterwards. Really, what you're trying to do with the reverse diet here is set yourself up for maintenance. What you don't want to do is like what we talked about earlier, get there and then worry about it afterwards. You know, what's so crazy about that story you're sharing because it is so true and very popular in space is that's so ass backwards. The more you've been training, the longer you've been training, it should get easier and easier for you. I mean, we talk about that all the time on the show. One of the advantages of us being older and have been lifting for so long, it's actually a lot easier for me to whip myself into shape because over years and years I've built this frame of way more muscle mass on it. But if you're always into these cuts and then you yo-yo, you spring out of it really hard, then you go back to cutting really hard, then you spring out of it, you don't feel that. You feel like it's a monster. It's really hard to get depth because you're adding those fat cells every time you yo-yo out. So you may get that much more difficult to shred back down and you just keep, you're doing the same thing over and over. Look, to use the investment analogy, initially it may take you working 12 to 14 hours a day to make a certain amount of money, but if you're smart and you invest it and that money starts making money for you, the idea is over time, you work less and less and less and less and make more and more and more and more. If you do it right and reverse dieting, a good slow reverse diet is part of it, it becomes easier later on. Not harder. If it gets harder for you each time, you're doing something wrong. Now how slow do you do a reverse diet? I like to tell people to increase their calories by about 100 calories a day, 150 calories a day, maintain that for a while, see how the body responds, and some people can do that for a couple weeks. And what you mean just to make it clear, sorry to interrupt you, but you have to, because some people hear that and we get confused. It doesn't mean you go up 100 more every single day. You mean increases. No, no, once. Yeah. So you go, someone who's say cut down, we use say to 1500 calories and now we're reverse dieting out, you're saying going from 1500 to now they stay at 1600 calories. For like a week or two. Yes. See how they feel and then bump it up again and then see how they feel. And then if they see lots of weight gain, hold it there for a while. But this slow process gets the metabolism to respond. Usually we'll put on muscle and then you'll be in a position to maintain because you'll be able to eat more calories and stay the same leanness. Because it's for most humans, it's much easier to maintain when you have a fast metabolism than it is when you have a slower metabolism. Well, and if you've done a really good job of doing what you guys said on the previous points of phasing your program and changing out of it, your body is getting a new stimulus right now. So those additional calories should get should get partitioned over to building more muscle, which take us to the next one, which is to keep your protein intake high. You know, they've done some very interesting studies on people who are bed ridden people who've had surgeries where they can't walk or move. And a high protein diet is better at reducing muscle loss. Okay. These are people who aren't even working out. So if you keep your protein intake high throughout the summer, even if you work out less, okay, even if you're not training as much, you're more likely to maintain what you have than if you keep your protein and take low. So prioritize protein in your diet. It's one of the best things you could do to maintain muscle. And I tell people this, uh, when they get, when they're injured, they have surgeries, I get messages from people and they're like, you know, I broke my arm. I don't want to lose too much muscle. What do I do? And I say, well, diet wise, keep your protein and take high. And if you want to cut your calories in other ways, that's fine, but a high protein diet, even if the calories are controlled, in other words, a 2000 calorie diet versus a 2000 calorie diet, one high protein, one moderate or low protein, the higher protein diet is much more likely to build or maintain muscle versus the other ones. Well, I like this too. Again, for the, the, you know, beach body, summer talk again, because what ends up happening a lot of times is client gets all shredded for their summer and summer normally means drinking bad food, going out, you know, that, which is a lot of carbohydrates, a lot of sugar, a lot of alcohol, things like that. And if I can tell a client like, okay, I know it's summer vacation, I'm not going to tell my client like, you don't get to have any alcohol, you know, or don't enjoy any dessert. Like that's not a good trait. But if I just go, hey, listen, all I really want you to do on vacation still just stick with our protein intake that I've had you at. I've given you a goal of hitting 160 for your body weight. Like all I want you to do is maintain, enjoy yourself. I know you're going to have some drinks. I know you're going to have some desserts and you're going to do some of those things, but at least set yourself a goal every single day to make sure you hit your protein intake. It'll blow you away. How many people have a better time maintaining their weight like that, just by that simple thing and not telling them they can't have those other things, but just go target your protein. I had a client once and this isn't ideal, okay, but for them, this was the best of their situation. They went on vacation and they're like, dude, it's going to be really hard because this was a young man and he was eating, it was something like 160 grams of protein a day, which is a decent amount. That's a decent amount of protein for somebody. And he's like, man, it's going to be really hard. Like I'm on vacation, we're traveling, we're going to be doing all this hiking and stuff, like to stop and eat like 40 grams of protein each meal. It's going to be really hard to say, all right, let's do this. Bring your protein shake with you and just make sure you hit your protein targets by adding the shake. And he did and he was blown away by how well he was able to maintain his physique. So that's one way you can do it. Not ideal, we always recommend whole foods, but that's just one way you could do it. So you may be asking what's high protein? Okay, they say high protein diet, what is that? It's about 0.7 grams to one gram of protein per pound of body weight. Now, if you're obese, you want to use lean body mass, but let's say you're a 100 pound female, then you're looking at 70 grams to 100 grams of protein. If you're a 150 pound person, I don't know, 100 to 150 grams of protein or 120 to 150. That's essentially where you want to be at. I like to tell people to aim for one gram of protein for per pound of body weight because you're most likely going to miss that, in which case you'll fall down to the 0.7 grams per pound of body weight. All right, so the next one, this one because we're talking about the summer and we're talking about the beach, what, first of all, let me ask you guys this, what body part, if I was talking about the beach in summertime, what muscle group is most, I guess, representative of a summer body? Abs. Abs, right? 100%. Abs. I was going to say biceps though. That's also a beach muscle. But a lot of people don't realize this, but your abs are muscles just like any other muscle, meaning if you want them to show, if you want them to be pronounced, you build them just like any other muscle. Now it still surprises me to this day when I look at workout programs and I look at reps and exercises that recommend for chest and back and shoulders and legs, I get to abs and it's like 50 reps. Yeah, they never face it the same way. 100 reps, it's always high reps. Yeah, nobody would do that to build a better butt or build a more defined back, right? Maybe crappy programs, but even the best programs, they'll do these ridiculous rep ranges for abs. They're training them for stamina and endurance, which is fine if that's what you want, but if you want abs to show, you want to build them and that's high tension exercises. Strength training. Yes, it's exercise where you do like 10 reps, but they're slow and they're hard and you're building the abs. Now why is this a good thing for summer? The bigger, more developed your abs are, the more body fat you can hold and have a six pack. This is the bottom line. So this is more of an appearance thing, but you could go to the beach and look, I have visible abs now at 12% body fat. When I was younger, I used to have to get down to 8% body fat for visible abs because I built my abs, right? So it is interesting because that's one of those body parts you just don't really think about progressively overloading or like adding some kind of like load or resistance to it. Because I think that there's no like real, besides holding something heavy or holding something heavy with your legs, it feels like there's a disconnect there and the machines are kind of funky for it. So to really focus on that is like, well, I'm going to lower my reps down and then also if there's a way that I can increase the resistance by maybe the angle of it, get gravitational forces working against me, maybe hold something heavy. Like once I figured that out and my clients figured that out, like in terms of building and like getting more pronounced abs, it was amazing. Oh, I'm going to blame the doctors. I want to blame the doctors. The same thing, the same doctors that tell you don't squat, don't deadlift. Deadlifting is dangerous and risky for your back. At least that's what I remember most of my clients that I would introduce low reps and heavy weight ab training to was the fear of it being dangerous. I heard that don't go heavy for your abs because you could hurt your back. So I think to me that was what I remember hearing. And so that was so prevalent in the medical community and recommendation from doctors to these clients that I think that it just became the norm and trainers didn't know how to overcome that argument from a doctor, a doctor telling them don't go heavy on your abs. And so it's like, okay, well, we know we need to do our abs. So we'll just do everybody these little crunches and bicycle kicks for a thousand repetitions or whatever. No, first off, look, any exercise performed incorrectly is dangerous. Any exercise performed correctly is safe. Okay. Now, when we say low reps for abs, what you don't want to do is automatically go to the gym, get on a physio ball and grab a 50 pound dumbbell and go do physio ball crunches. I'll tell you what right now, I could take 10 fit people, people who work out all the time, have them sit on a physio ball with no weight, just have them extend their arms overhead so it's a long lever, have them go full extension to full contraction and you'll see people fail at 12 to 15 reps. Okay. It's high tension. I was even sooner than that. Maybe even sooner, right? It's high tension, not necessarily high weight. It's all about the tension. Okay. So leg raises, most people do leg raises wrong. They're just doing their hip flexors. If you really curl your body up at the top of the leg raise, very few people could do more than eight good reps with a really good controlled, slow leg raise. So it's about the tension, just like it is for the biceps or the chest or any of the body part, just like people know, just throwing weight on a shoulder press and having crappy form isn't going to build your shoulders more. You still need good form and good technique. The abs, they flex the spine and they extend at the spine, right? So that's what you're working and you use high tension exercises. Go slow, full range of motion, decline sit-ups really good. If you do them really slow and do them right, very few people can do them fully though because they're not strong enough. Physio ball crunches, I swear to God. Physio ball crunches with full extension, full squeeze with the hips up, right? Maintaining up hips up at the top. It's a hard exercise, a high tension exercise and you will build the muscles of your core so they're more visible. This is actually, this was the core of the no BS six pack formula. When I created that program, that's what I wrote it about and it's funny people write back all the time like, dude, I can't believe it. You know, my body fats at this percent, I still see my abs now. Like what's going on? Like you built them. I would say that physio ball crunches and then like a slight incline reverse crunch. Oh yeah. Like slow and controlled and rolling your spine up like you're saying. You could take five, five of those real slow. Like where you roll all the way up and then you resist on the way back down and stretch it all out and then come all the way back up. You do five of those slow and controlled. So I'm so glad you brought that up because I know when you think we say, you know, train your abs heavy and hard or whatever they think right away. Like, oh, okay. Well, then I'm going to do, I used to do, you know, a hundred crunches with just my body weight. Now I'm going to go get a hundred pound, you know, dumbbell and set it on my chest and then try and do it. You just end up straining your neck or your hip flexors on that where it's like, no, just you slowing down the movement and focus on the mechanics of it. So you actually activate more muscle fibers within that exercise. Yeah. Look, I, to this day, I do long lever physio ball crunches, one of my favorite core exercises. And I do like 10 to 12 reps and I have pretty strong apps, but I do it slow. I fully extend over the physio ball. So we get that full extension. I come up, I squeeze real hard. I keep my hips up. So I'm not rocking on the physio ball. Versus the people you see in the gym on the physio ball and they're doing the hunt. People are always surprised how difficult that is. Once you do it right, it's amazing. It's like, it's pretty intense. Well, you brought, you brought up the leg raise. That's such a, you know, I remember clients to get outside like, Oh, I could do 20 leg raises now. They're like swinging their legs. So I'd rather see you do three of those like slow and controlled and rolling your entire spine up than for you to swing 20 of them. You're going to get way more out of it if you actually do it that way. Right. Remember the hip flexors flex your, you at the hips, it's the abs flex you at the spine. So it's very big. It looks similar to the untrained eye, but it's very different. All right. This last one is great for maintaining especially when you're not working out and that's trigger sessions. So triggers, what is a trigger session? Trigger sessions were first introduced in maps and a ball. It's the first maps program that we created and a trigger session essentially is a eight to 10 minute light workout with resistance bands where the goal is to get a little bit of a pump. So if you've never had a pump before basically you feel the blood engorge the muscle a little bit, you get a little tight, you feel a little bit of a burn and that's it. It's not meant to be an intense workout or a hard workout, but it is meant to be done frequently meaning if I can't make it to the gym all week or for the next two weeks some on vacation, I could take some bands and twice a day or three times a day, do this eight minute little pumping workout with my bands. It maintains muscle like you won't believe it's pretty remarkable. Now if you throw it on top of your workout and you're doing your full body heavy workouts, many trigger sessions, well now you have the beauty of maps on a ball this is where people really see some some crazy muscle gains. This is something that you know it really I don't think I introduced it into my life until we all got first met and got together almost eight years ago and it's been like a little secret weapon for me because again in the past I used to think if oh if I don't have like a full hour routine if I don't really get after it in the gym then it's a waste of time and it's like man how many just having some bands and literally getting a little 10, 12 minute trigger session pump like how much won better I feel so I always notice the super charge as far as energy and stuff which that just for life reasons is great and then also how well it maintains the muscle that I've already built to my body you can get a nice little workout with those bands and so and it's it's so easy there's there's no excuse I can take it anywhere with me anywhere there's a doorway with our band I can hook them up on the doorway and get a quick little pump and at least be able to maintain the muscle that I built over all these years of lifting and for me when I'm on summer or you're on traveling like this is where this comes into play I remember I had a cousin who this is when we were younger so we're like 17 and we did follow body parts split right so you'd hit each body part once a week and he was really focused on building his calves he had really high calf muscles and he's really focused on building them well anyway that summer he went on vacation to visit family in Europe so and he didn't work out in the gym however he walked a lot because in Europe especially in these old countries you're not going to drive much so he worked out hard tried to build his muscles tried to build his calves because he was embarrassed he had small calves or whatever goes to Europe and was in Italy I believe for two months comes back measured his calves they grew a quarter of an inch and he was like huh how is this possible you were walking you were essentially doing trigger sessions all day long and your calves grew from doing that versus the once a week you know have your workouts you're doing in the gym just the thing you're just reiterating that signal you're keeping it alive and to Adam's point my favorite part about trigger sessions is just how much energy you can kind of generate from if you do it right like initially when I was doing trigger sessions was adding too much intensity and then it was like it actually took away a little bit from the energy that you would receive as a result but once I figured that out it was like I mean it's like a cup of coffee you just feel like okay I can keep going in your body just it stimulated just enough to where it's like let's keep moving it provides that I want to keep moving kind of feeling yeah totally so and if you're trying to figure out the best way to use trigger sessions a couple different ways to do it one way would be to do like an exercise for four or five body parts and just kind of go through them will take you about eight to ten minutes get kind of again low intensity get a pump that's kind of what you're looking for or you can use trigger sessions to hit weak body parts so if you're like I really want to develop my butt or I really want to develop my shoulders you could take some bands and two or three times a day on the off days meaning if you work out your shoulders heavy today then don't do them that day but do them on the days in between you do like five minutes of shoulder raises get a little bit of a pump it actually speeds up recovery that's the crazy part if you do this right you'll recover faster active recovery yeah it's not like you're adding stress to the body it actually helps facilitate recovery which is pretty interesting all right so here's what we did right so we're talking about the ways to maintain a beach body I talked about phasing full body we talk about trigger sessions talk about building your abs here's what we're going to do we took maps and a ballik which is the original maps program which has all the stuff that we talked about and the no BS six pack formula each one of those maps and a ballik retails for over 117 dollars I think the no BS six pack formula is pretty close to that as well we're going to combine them together and right now we're going to do both of them for $59.99 so you can get for one payment of $59.99 you'll get maps and a ballik and the no BS six pack formula and they're actually designed to be worked together so you'll have your full body maps and a ballik workout your core workout and in between you do trigger sessions and it works out really well together that's how I specifically design them so if you're interested in this summer special go to mapsjuly.com so mapsjuly.com and you can get again maps and a ballik plus the no BS six pack formula for only total $59.99 also if you want free information from us go to mindpumpfree.com and check out our guides and you can also find us on social media Justin is on Instagram at Mind Pump Justin Adam is on Instagram at Mind Pump Adam and you can find me on Twitter at Mind Pump Sal how do I incorporate cardio and not lose muscle seeing people do this before where they'll start to lose the sharpness of their muscles or they'll start to lose the sculpt a little bit and that's disheartening but if you do it right then you minimize that muscle loss or that metabolism slowdown in fact if you do it right you can actually speed up your metabolism at the same time that you build stamina and endurance you just have to be able to kind of program it properly and the way to program it improperly is just go do it as much cardio as you can for as long as you can right