 Our next caller is Jacqueline from Washington. Hey Jacqueline, how can we help you? Hi, real quick, I just want to say thank you so much to all of you just for providing such incredible content. You all have just deeply impacted my health and wellness more than you can imagine. So thank you. Oh, thank you guys so much. My question is, I've been training consistently for about four or five years except for some part of COVID. But when I say consistently, I mean that I've been training my legs consistently because that's where I have a harder time just gaining muscle mass on my lower body. And so I definitely prioritize my leg days. I train my upper body maybe once or twice a month and actually feel really happy. That's the weird part. Like I feel really happy with the amount of muscle mass that I have on my upper body, but less happy with my strength. So I know I need to be more consistent with my upper body training, but because I know how easily I gain mass on my upper body, I feel for lack of a better word intimidated because I don't want to get too bulky. And I think thord bulky. But so have you ever helped anybody kind of get past that mental hurdle? And if you have, what helped? Yeah, no. It's actually super common. It is. That's a great question. So tip it with women, you'll see, you know, I don't want to work out my shoulders. I don't want to work out my back or my chest with guys. You'll see, I don't want to work out my legs because I don't care. I'm going to, I'm going to ask you a question, Jacqueline. So I'd like you to be totally honest. What is the number one motivation for you working out? Is it just the way you look? Cause I hear you talking about bulk and the way you look and the muscle. Is that the primary motivation for you? I think my overall motivation is that I just want to be confident. I want to be confident overall. Yes. That's how I look, but overall the strength. I, I think that a lot of confidence does come with how much I can lift. Okay. Or when, when that was at my peak before COVID. Okay, Jacqueline. So, okay. So again, I'm going to ask you again because if, if strength and confidence were the, your number one motivators, I don't think we'd be having this conversation because obviously working out provides a lot of different things. And most people, okay, I don't want you to feel bad. Most people work out because they want to change how they look. And that kind of dictates what they do in the gym. Strength. If your goal was just strength, then, you know, the comments wouldn't be, I'm afraid of getting bulky or I don't work out my upper body. Is this resonating with you? Yeah, somewhat. Okay. So, so a couple of things that can help you. All right. Number one, the road of focusing on how you look. There's nothing necessarily wrong with starting that way. But if you stay on that road, it will lead you in directions that eventually will start to take away how you look. And what I mean by that is the decisions that we make, that tend to be driven by appearance oftentimes. And right now you're, you're pretty young. I think, I think you, did you, I think you told us, you've been working out for a little while. You look like you're in your, in your 20s. 26. 26. If you continue down that path, eventually you'll start to hit some roadblocks and you'll start to actually lose the way you look. You see this in both men and women. So that's number one. Focusing on your whole body will actually contribute to your appearance, especially in the long-term, in a good way. But you can't go at it by just appearance. You have to focus on the mobility, the strength, the performance, and the health. And then the second part is that the body really has these interesting mechanisms, these safety mechanisms where it will only allow parts of your body to get so strong and developed in relationship to other parts of your body. It actually tries to maintain at least some semblance of balance. So like for guys who never work out their legs and they just want to get bigger arms, sometimes what they need to do to get bigger arms is to work out their legs. And vice versa. If you're having issues developing muscles in your legs, but your upper body strength is very low, believe it or not, your body may actually prevent you from reaching your full potential because it senses this big imbalance between your upper and lower body. Well, you'll lean out more for sure. 100% you'll lean out more by starting to build muscle in your upper body because you never do that. You train your legs so frequently that they're probably adapted to a lot of the training that you do. So when you actually switch over to doing more upper body, you're going to see the benefits of getting leaner in addition to building some muscle. Now, there's also this part too. I mean, I've trained clients that very similar. Our legs is the area that we needed the most work on. And her upper body looked pretty phenomenal already. Great shoulders, great arms. And so the frequency of upper body training was a lot less. I'm just training her legs two, three times a week. Upper body, we just did one time per week just to kind of maintain because she was very happy with where her physique is. So this is a back and forth between you and I. Hopefully, I'm able to convince you that, okay, doing it one time a week, we're going to see some great benefits from it. We're not going to overtrain it to where you're going to see this crazy development. It's hard to build tons of muscle as it is. One time a week is not going to do that to your upper body. A lot of times you see yourself different than other people. So that's the other thing I would challenge too is, are you the one who thinks that you are looking bulky when you lift your body or other people saying that to you? And have you ever asked somebody else who you trust their opinion and they go, actually, you look really good? That would be the other thing that I would challenge. But there's nothing wrong with having a body part that you feel is dominant already on your body and in your case, upper body and doing less frequency than the rest. I mean, if it's your body, if you like the way you look and feel, but then if you say to Sal that, okay, I want to be stronger in its confidence and it's not really so much about my aesthetics and how I look, well, then I would challenge you back again why aren't we training this once a week? Yeah, and you know, that's a great point, Adam. I mean, you don't need to train it as much as your lower body, but you should do something for it, just to maintain strength, mobility and function. And you don't need to attack it hard in the gym like you might do your lower body, but at the very least train it so that it's stable and strong. Otherwise, you know, like I said, that imbalance will get worse and worse. Even if you don't look imbalanced, a huge strength imbalance can cause some serious problems. Well, part also, like so, the client that I'm thinking about a very specific client would train for a long time and she didn't like the way that her legs look, like they, you know, she wanted to change the way the legs look so much and she wasn't doing much upper body and what I explained to her too is that, listen, you got to understand that if your body is so adapted to all this lower body training and you haven't done any upper body training, as soon as we start putting some focus there, you're going to build a little bit of muscle, that's going to speed your training up the legs and the legs will look even better. And I bet it did. Yeah, absolutely. So there's that to consider too. Okay. All right. Is that help you a little bit? It does. It does. It does because I guess it kind of gives me that motivation with all of your eyes' background and experience with working with different kinds of people and just, like, I know I need to do it, right? But it's just that mental, like, hurdle of, like, getting past it. Well, are you driven more towards, you know, working your lower body because you don't like the way your lower body looks so much or are you avoiding the upper body because you feel like you're, I mean, what is it that's really keeping you in that direction? I feel like we're kind of going back and forth on what is it that's driving you? I don't feel like the truth has fully came out yet. And maybe it's something that I'm also kind of thinking about too. I think that with my legs, like, it just makes me feel confident that I can be strong. But of course, there's that part of me that absolutely wants to develop them even more. Right now, I train them maybe three, three and a half times a week, just depending when I can get into the gym. But with my upper body, I just, I see, like, just how much, like, I just already feel like I don't want to add more mass on my upper body with the couple of upper body training days that I do already do. So that's where I'm a little confused myself. Well, keep in mind, what I'm telling you is that because you don't train it that often, the minute you start training it, you will build muscle, which will then hopefully speed your metabolism up, help you lean out. Which, which body fat takes up a lot more space than muscle does. So, you know, if you gained a pound, even a, even a, I mean, two pounds of muscle on your upper body would be a lot for a female. And you can't even tell. But if you, if you lost two pounds of body fat from your upper body, gained two pounds of muscle, you'd be smaller on your upper body because fat takes up so much more space. And then, back to your strength comment. Look, if somebody is strong in their upper body, but weak in their lower body or the reverse, somebody is strong in their lower body and weak in their upper body, guess what they are? They're weak. They don't have good strength. Your strength doesn't translate into the real world. So it doesn't matter, you know, if you're a man and you don't work out your legs and you've got a big back and chest and you bench press and row a lot. In the real world, when you go move a couch or go do something you're weak and the same is true for you, you may have strong legs. But if your upper body is not strong, then you're not really strong. Well, I wanted to ask you, have you done any kind of functional strength training? No, I don't think I have. Yeah, I just, I feel like there's just way too much in terms of, like, being fixated on your body parts and, you know, what's going up, what's going down. Like, have you ever just, like, thrown all of that out and just tried to master movements and, you know, work on skills and, you know, go in that direction? I think that'd be a healthy practice for you. Yeah, I I definitely have tried or wanted to just because I know that I've noticed a lot of tightness in certain areas of my body, too. So if we if we were to give you maps performance, would you follow it for us? Yeah. Oh, absolutely. You guys are like my bigger brothers. Okay. Then this is what we're going to do. And we're going to ask you to check back in with us. So we're going to set you up with maps performance. Doug, we'll hook you up for free. And then I want you to follow that program, follow it to a T and then follow back up with us afterwards with your experience. Yeah, let us know how it all went. Okay, I will. All right. Perfect. Thank you, Jacqueline. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's a tough conversation when you're talking and this is, again, super common. Yeah, it's very common. I don't want to put her on the spot maker feel bad. This is most people I would work with in the first six months I train them. They don't, they were, it's all about appearance and it's very hard to transition their state of mind or their motivation or what's driving them. But it is important to do that. You get stuck on that and you can hear when she's talking. She wants to believe that strength and confidence are drivers. But the truth is it's not. The truth is it's about how she looks. Well, yeah, because there's this fear that you start touching weights in the upper body and it's going to bulk her up, you know? I challenge that all day long. I know. I don't see it. You almost never see that. And sometimes it's just part of the process, right? I mean, if you go and you get a bunch of blood and fluid rushed in those muscles, it's going to fill up and it's going to tighten your shirts up and so it's that initial feeling and illusion that's created when you first do it and that's enough. I mean, it's the same issue that we've talked about and shared with our own issues of I used to freak out if I didn't eat and a pound went down the scale as a skinny kid. Totally. Really, I was not getting skinny. I wasn't losing muscle, but in my head I was because I got on the scale and the next day I was down two or three pounds and that was the driver on what made the decisions both nutritionally and how I exercised. It took me a long time to break through that. This is the same thing. It's just the opposite. It's her upper body and she doesn't want to get big from lifting her upper body. She just may need like this psychological shift, you know, something to kind of release her. Well, I loved your suggestion of I mean that would be perfect. And performance is great because performance has got a lot of great lower body stuff that's going to challenge her. Totally different. Right, but at the same time too, it'll also challenge her upper body. She touched on mobility so I thought that was a great recommendation. Right, and I'll say this for the vast majority of people I mean 90-something percent of people if you trained in a way that was good for your body, you trained the whole body, you were relatively lean and healthy, you would look in proportion. It's very rare for somebody to do that for a while and to still look out of proportion. It's not common. A healthy body to somebody else, when you look at them you'd say, wow, that person looks very balanced. Sometimes to ourselves though you know I'm happy you said that, Adam to her when you said, you know, do you really think you see yourself objectively. To ourselves we made these glaring, you know problems in our body, but the reality is you look pretty damn good. Right, I mean that's what I would challenge too. I bet you she starts lifting her body and she gets compliments. Oh yeah.