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The second program on sale is MAPS Split and the bundle that's on sale is the Bikini bundle. You can find all of them at mapsfitnessproducts.com. You just gotta use the code spring break. What do you guys think is the biggest mistake that almost everybody makes when they decide they are going to start their fat loss challenge? Oh jeez. Biggest mistake? They go too hard. Yeah. I mean there's a handful that come to mind, but what do you think are the biggest mistakes? There's two general ways you can approach fat loss through exercise. One, which is what most people do, which is wrong, is the burn calories while I exercise approach. The other approach, which less people take, which is the right approach, is the training a way that it makes my body adapt so that it burns more calories on its own approach. So one of them looks like lots of cardio, lots of circuit training, lots of that kind of stuff. And calorie restriction. Yeah. And the other one looks like lifting weights and getting stronger. That's the biggest mistake I see, because when you approach things from a I'm going to burn calories perspective, you will lose. There's no one succeeds at that long term. And this to me is one of the biggest issues I have with the fitness community always touting the law of thermodynamics. We know this, that we know this is true. Calories in versus out. Right. And it's a fact, it's a law. And in order to lose weight, you need to eat less or exercise more than what you consume. So that is a fact. But it's not the whole story. And the reason why I don't like promoting that message as true as it is, is it's more nuanced than that. And the average person that doesn't really follow fitness or read fitness studies, they hear or they know that, hey, it's new year. It's put on X amount of pounds this last year, I need to start losing weight. And I'm familiar with the idea that I need to burn more calories than I consume in order to lose weight. I think your average person, they really just attribute their fat loss with weight loss. Like those are, those are two things that are, you know, like when they're going to pursue this, they're looking at the scale, they're looking at what's going to lose me the weight, the most efficient, effective way, the quickest. And so typically that'll just go towards the circuit training route and the, the restricting calorie route all at the same time. Yeah. Well, the problem is, is okay. So the law of thermodynamics still applies, right? So yes, in order to lose weight, you have to burn more calories than you take in or to put it differently, take in less calories than you burn. But I think people forget that your body burns calories just existing, right? So you have a metabolism that exists to convert food into energy or to be used to, for functions, right? To keep you alive, to keep your brain working, to maintain or build muscle, all those different things. Yes, you can burn more calories through movement. But for most people, the majority of the calories that they burn is really their metabolism supporting their body. Exercise isn't just about burning calories. It also gets your body better at whatever form of exercise you do the most. That's known as adaptation. I feel like you need to go a little bit further though into what you just said, because you just went over it real quick. And I think this is an area that I'd have to explain to clients a lot, right? That the exercise portion of your day is a very, very small fraction of the total amount of calories that most people's bodies burn. Right. Your body at rest burns more calories than you'll burn in, you know, two hours or three hours of exercise even, right? So what you want, really, what you want to do is you want to teach your body to burn more calories on its own, since your body's burning calories on its own all the time. Anyway, if you approach it from the calorie burn perspective, where I'm going to move more to burn more calories, yes, you'll burn more calories. The problem is the forms of exercise that burn the most calories while you do them, tell the body to become efficient at calorie burn. You actually teach your body to burn less calories over time. So to give you an example, there's two studies that point to this crazy fact. One, and this is one that I've pointed to many times. In fact, I pointed to this study in the Resistance Training Revolution. It's the Hodgson Tribe. You guys have heard of me talking about them before. The Hodgson Tribe is a modern hunter gatherer society. And scientists went to study them to see how many calories they burned on a daily basis. Total calories. So that includes activity, that includes metabolism, everything. And they theorize that it's got to be astronomical because of the amount they're moving around. Right, because they're way more active than the average, you know, Western or the average European or average American, right? Because they're hunting and gathering. They're not sitting and watching TV. They're not on their computer moving all day. They're moving way more than the average person. And so they thought we're going to see huge calorie burns in comparison. And what they found was shocking. They burned about the same amount of calories, maybe a little bit more, but it was nowhere near what they thought that they would be burning. Now, at further examination, it makes perfect sense. It makes no sense from an evolutionary standpoint that your body would burn 7,000 calories a day if you're a hunter gatherer because 7,000 calories is hard to find in nature. Okay, I know now it's easy. I could find 7,000 calories in five minutes, easy, right? But if you're living in nature, you don't have agriculture. So you're a hunter gatherer, not growing crops. You're not, you don't have a grocery store. You're the only things that you're eating are things that you kill, which the truth is, it's very hard to kill things. They're animals evolved to get away from getting killed. It's not easy. So things that you kill or things that you find naturally growing nuts, seeds, fruits, and vegetables, which, you know, if you walk around in the wilderness, you won't run into an apple tree. I mean, ever, you might once and they'll be like two apples on it. And that's it. So calories are hard to come by. So the body through thousands of years evolved when you're doing certain types of activity to become very efficient to start to burn less and less calories so that you can survive. So, so this is what they found with the Hodza tribe. They also found this in the Amazon where they studied children that grew up in these tribes in the Amazon, they're reactive and compared them to more modern living children. And they found that although the modern living children were fatter, they burned roughly the same amount of calories. The reason why they're fatter was because they just ate a lot. Okay, I was just gonna, that was what I was gonna ask you is I'm assuming that because if you look at the Hodza tribe and you see they're not fat, they're not eating much either. So, okay, that's just it is even though their metabolism is slow, it's not that their metabolism is roaring, their metabolism has slowed down significantly because of all the movement, they still eat very minimal and compared to the average American. Yeah. So think of it this way. So let's look at the most common form of exercise that most people will do in effort to burn lots of calories running. That's the most common relatively, but it's misleadingly easy. It's not actually easy. By the way, running is very complex why people hurt themselves all the time, but people think it's easy. So they, because they think put some shoes on and go outside and run. If you go online and you look up, how many calories do I burn in an hour of running and you compare it to pretty much any other form of, you know, traditional exercise, it crushes them, right? You burn more calories running than you do anything else. So people think, what a great idea. Okay, so when you go running, your lungs burn, you know, your legs get tired and your body says, all right, I got to get good at this stress. I got to get good at this activity. What do you need to be good at long distance running? If you're going to go run four miles, five miles or whatever, not a lot of muscle. You don't need strength. You need a little bit of strength, but really what you need mostly is endurance. Your body too much muscle probably is inefficient because lots of muscle burns lots of calories. So it would be like having a dragster, but you're driving 150 miles every day at, you know, five miles an hour. It makes no sense. If your car could adapt, it would go from dragster to a hybrid engine or to a one-cylinder engine. Would it make any sense to have this huge powerful engine to do, you know, this long distance all the time? So your body starts to adapt and you end up slowing your metabolism down. By the way, you don't burn a ton of calories, even though it's more calories than other forms of exercise, still not a lot. Go run for an hour. You're going to burn, what, 400 calories? Most people, your treadmill is lying to you, by the way. If you're like, oh, my treadmill says I've been 800 calories. No, no, no, they put fake numbers in there. You're really burning like 400 calories for an hour run. That's a lot of work for 400 calories, which is nothing. I could, 400 calories I could consume in three minutes, no problem. Well, this also used to baffle me as a trainer. I would see group X instructors that were, you know, overweight that were like really getting after it in, in teaching multiple classes the day, doing step aerobics and crushing it and sweating like profusely. But I would just never really see any change in their physique. And I didn't really see like any weight loss occur. And I mean, it speaks a lot to really adapting and getting good at the movements that you're promoting continuously. Anybody who's worked in the gym for a long time knows this is that you'll see you'll have these regulars that come in who use your Stairmaster, the treadmill, the elliptical on a regular basis. And you'll see that their bodies just don't change. Many of them are still overweight. And this is just, they're using the wrong form of exercise. They're not, they're also probably not watching the nutrition. We'll get to that. Yeah, we'll get to that. But they're doing the wrong form of exercise to get lean. Yes, it burns a lot of calories, but it teaches your body to burn less calories. And it's a very inefficient, labor intensive way of doing it. It's the wrong approach for most people. You know, the group X trainers, Justin, that's actually, I started to train a lot of them towards the end of my career. Because I got good at it. I got good at figuring out what was going on with them. And I got known in like our area. And so I actually ended up coaching and training a lot of these group X instructors, because you're exactly right. It was actually more rare to find a really fit group X instructor, right? I would say the majority actually were, you know, 15, 20, 30 pounds overweight from where they'd like to be. And they were all just baffled. Like, this makes no sense to me, I'm doing this four hours of teaching this high, and they're doing the class with people, sweating like crazy. Great stamina, great endurance. Yeah. And then they would sit down with me. And they'd show me their diet. And I'd see that they don't eat that bad either with their food choices, weren't that bad. But they had slowed their metabolism down so much that all it takes. And that's the thing that you got to understand about what we're talking about right now, right? Because you absolutely could go from not dieting whatsoever, then all sudden restricting calories and lose initial weight. You know, if you weren't exercising, you're eating, eating poorly, and then you decide to go on a calorie restricted diet, and then you start running, you will initially lose weight. You'll see that. The problem is that once the metabolism does adapt and it does slow down, then and modern life kicks in for all of us, which means, you know, once a month, you go to the movies, or every once in a while, you'd have a dinner. You're trying to be a normal person. Yeah. You have a dinner date with your, you know, your husband or wife, and you decide, or you decide to have dessert. Dessert, finally. Yeah, a holiday, a birthday, all these normal ass things that happen, and you decide you want to just barely enjoy yourself one day, you feel like it all sticks to you. Well, the reason why it feels like it all sticks to you is because you've taken your metabolism that let's just say it was burning, you know, on average, 2,200 to 2,400 calories a day, slowed it all the way down to 1,300 to 1,500 calories a day. So then when you go have a cake piece of cake or the extra large popcorn that's five or 700 calories, it's literally a third of your total intake that you can get away with. Right. It's okay. So here's the comparison, right? So let's imagine you're, you open a business and you build houses and you could either build all the houses yourself or train people who work for you to build these houses so that you can sit at the office and just make more appointments. Which strategy is going to result in a faster growing business? Which result, which one's going to result in more houses being built? You want to build a metabolism through exercise by looking at exercise, not as a calorie burn. Forget that. Forget the calories you burn while you exercise, not much anyway. That's a waste of time. Rather, look at exercise as what adaptations is this exercise causing? What is this type of exercise teaching my body to do? And through that, is my body becoming a better, more effective fat burning machine? Now, you know, studies are, by the way, studies are quite clear. And this is what we observed as trainers, but studies are pretty clear. When they do studies on diet by itself, people lose weight. It's almost half muscle, half fat. This is a fact. So someone loses 20 pounds through diet, 10 pounds or so, eight to 10 pounds muscle, and the rest is fat. When people add diet plus cardio, more muscle is lost, believe it or not. They lose about, they lose a little more weight, but they actually lose more muscle. When you have diet plus resistance training, no muscle is lost, or if the diet is good with high protein and it's good resistance training routine, oftentimes you see muscle gain. Now, why is this important? What if you might be listening right now and you're thinking yourself like, I don't care if I lose half muscle, at least lose the fat, and I'm going to get, I'm going to lose weight on the scale. Well, here's what happens, okay? If you lose 10 pounds, half as muscle, half as fat, you're just the smaller, flabby version of yourself. You didn't change anything other than the fact that you're lighter on the scale, but your body fat percentage is exactly the same. So if you see like, for example, a guy like me, I'm about six foot, I don't know how much I weigh around, about 214 pounds. I could look very different at 20 something percent body fat than the, I don't know what I'm at right now, 11 or 12% body fat that I'm at right now. And most people don't, they focus on the scale, but the reality is they want to look lean, and they want to be sculpted, and they want to have good shape. It's not necessarily the weight, it's that they want to look and feel a particular way, and you need to pick the right exercise approach to do that. Do you guys remember this transition that you went through as a trainer when you started to piece this together? It was a major hurdle. I had a really hard time. I mean, I still remember like vivid conversations with sitting with somebody sitting across from me, and they were, you know, 100, 200 pounds overweight and me sitting in the, me, by the way, I'm trying to sell this person personal training. They come to me, they're like, I want to, I need a personal trainer. I've got this much of a budget, like it's like, you know, as a trainer, you're like, Oh, this is great, lay down client coming in. It's an emotional buy. They're, they're so ready with all this momentum to really get going and lose this weight right away. Right. And so of course, part of the presentation, they want to hear what are you going to do for me? What's the plan? How fast am I going to lose it? Right, right. And then my response, you know, when I, once I figured all this out, like midway through my career, I'd say things like, well, you know, we're actually not going to get, we're not going to focus on your 100 pounds right now. What I actually want to do is actually start to introduce more food into your diet. And you try telling somebody who's 100 and something pounds overweight that you need to introduce more food into their diet. This is why you ended up becoming such a good communicator for a long time. You're right. Because you better believe I walked to the first 10 of those people. I was going to say, I've had a few people get up and they went down the street. Yeah. They wanted their fix. They want to hear somebody say, I'm going to, I'm going to call you at five o'clock in the morning and I'm going to ride your ass and I'm going to text you. I'm going to yell at you the whole time you're doing the workout. And I'm going to push you and motivate you and inspire you. They want to out source motivation. Yeah. They want to, they want to inspire you to get to your goal through, through motivation. And that's cause that's what I did too. I did the same thing early on in my career, thinking that I was really helping these people. But in reality, even if I got them to their 20, 30 pounds weight loss goal, I knew that it was going to be a losing battle, that they wouldn't be able to maintain that because I didn't give them the right proper tools to maintain for the rest of their life. So here's one of the other challenges with this. It's not just that people think calorie burn and, you know, they think resistance training is just building. So why would I want to do that and want to lose weight? That's one challenge. But here's the other challenge. If you go try it out, they both give you results, but the results feel very different. When you do lots of cardio or burn calorie burning workouts in combination with diet, the weight loss starts quickly, right? Initially you lose weight very, very quickly. Then it stops and plateaus and then you're in this really bad position. Now when you do it with resistance training, the results actually start slower. But like a snowball, it builds up speed and then you lose faster and faster and faster. And then where you end up is much easier to maintain. People who try this, they say, I don't know what you're talking about. I jumped on the treadmill five days a week and I reduced my calories and I've already lost 10 pounds. It's only a month. I've lost 10 pounds. So you're totally wrong. That's how it works. The way it works is initially you lose a lot of weight very quickly, muscle fat, boom, boom. Then because of the adaptation, because your metabolism adapts, now your body is reliant on the cardio that you're doing and the low calories you're doing, now they match, you're stuck. I lost that first 10 pounds. Now I'm stuck. Now you're in this position. This is a terrible position to be in. And I'm sure people listening have done this themselves. Now you're in this position. I have to do more cardio and cut my calories even more. Okay. I guess I'll do that. And then they, oh, another five pounds come off. Now it's stuck. Oh shit. Okay. I got to do more and cut more. And then here's the worst part. Oh, cool. I'm at my goal. Uh, when can I stop doing seven days a week of exercise that is almost impossible for me to maintain because I'm not an exercise fanatic and I have a normal life? And when can I eat more than 1300 calories a day because that's nothing. You're stuck. Now on the flip, when you're doing proper resistance training, which builds the metabolism, builds muscle, burns the machine, builds the machinery that burns calories. And through the process of getting stronger, tells your body to become a less efficient with calories. By the way, this is why the math, you get these academics, right? Oh, actually a pound of muscle only burns this much. It's that's not a hundred percent how it works. Also sending the signal to your body to get stronger and build muscle also causes mechanisms to become less efficient with calories because your body can actually become more or less efficient with the same lean body mass. So you're lifting weights, you're building your muscle, you're building metabolism, you're eating a high protein diet, you're not cutting as strongly as you would with the other option. The weight loss is slow. In fact, at first you might not lose any weight because you build muscle and burn body fat. So maybe the scale says the same, but reality, you lost four pounds of fat, gained four pounds of muscle. But then like an incredible snowball, I used to love doing this at train clients, usually it was like month three or four. They'd come to me and be like, um, my appetite is raging. I'm eating more. How the hell am I getting leaner? That's what he used to tell me. How am I getting leaner, Sal? I used to love that when we'd finally get there. I'd be like, okay, now I know you'll do everything I tell you because you trust me. And now I've shown you the magic of what the right way of training can do. You have the two hurdles for those two examples. So you have, you have the person that you're adding a bit of food, maybe introducing more whole foods. And then, uh, you know, the, in terms of like just resistance training, you're going to add a little bit of, of, of size. And so, you know, it might be a bit alarming for them when they have weight loss goal where now they feel like, you know, I feel like my body's growing a little bit, but they don't realize how much stronger they feel, how much more energy they have, like a lot of other indications that they should focus on. Whereas on the flip side of that, you get the initial like, oh my God, I'm losing weight and I feel lighter and I feel more mobile, this and that. But then, you know, the strength is just not there. The, you know, the weakness, the fatigue is, is going to start setting in really. Well, this is where I always like to use the, or share the, you know, biggest loser stats with these clients. Because, uh, you know, obviously the biggest loser doesn't promote those stats. They don't share that. You have to go digging on the internet to go find out exactly the success rate of these clients. I mean, they, they show you the whole transformation on the, the show, and they don't show you where these people are two, three years from now. And 80% plus of those people put all that weight back on and some. And the reason why is because what they did to get there was just not sustainable. Reducing the calories that much, moving as much as they are every single day, multiple times a day, like nobody lives a life where they can do that. And the few percentage like we have, we have, we have a friend in particular that has, that was on the biggest loser show and she lost a ton of weight and she's still in really good shape right now. But if you ever watch how she has to train in order to do that, it's, most people would never do that. Most people are not going to do an hour of cardio in addition to weights with cardio every single day and restrict. Like it just eventually that person cracks. Eventually that person wants to be somewhat normal and take some weeks off or eat a little bit out of the, you know, the diet that they're on or not do cardio every single day for an hour of the stair master. And it's just, when you look at the average person, you know, that we dealt with, I'm always trying to find the easiest way for me to get them where they want to need to be. And it's not always the fastest way and that's just not appealing to the average person. No. And you know, the statistics on that, Adam, are 90% fail rate. So 90% of people who approach weight loss through just cutting calories and doing lots of activity every single day, it's a fail rate of about 90%. Part of it is as your calories drop, drop, drop, drop, you're stuck in this position where I'm eating very few calories in a world where food and calories are very easy to come by. And the only reason why I think it's not 100% is because 10% are just neurotic. 10% are unhealthy in a different way. Right, exactly. I think 10%, it's like the competitive thing, right? One of the things that I found out about competitors was, you know, assuming I thought they were going to be the smartest people nutritionally and training wise. No, what I found was that they were some of the most disciplined people. They had the ability to eat chicken asparagus and white rice five times a day for three, yeah, indefinitely for three years straight without a break. Like that's what it proves. It doesn't prove that this is healthy or ideal. It just proves there are a percentage of neurotic people that have a switch that they can hit and they can do that. Now, this is the beauty, part of the beauty of resistance training. And one of the things I focused on in the resistance training revolution is this, in order to get good, generally good results from resistance training from a muscle building, strength building, metabolism boosting standpoint, for the average person, you are looking at two days a week of resistance training. I mean, I can train the average. In fact, most of my clients, I trained twice a week. In fact, Doug, when Doug hired me and Doug was not a beginner by any stretch of the imagination, been working out for years or whatever, Doug had over-trained and done all these crazy workouts, comes to me and I literally said to him, we're going to go two days a week full body. That's all we're going to do. And of course you saw the best results of his life. Now Doug works out much more often, but this is years later after years and years and years of training that way and he's quite the fitness fanatic. Obviously he works in the fitness space now, but most of my clients two days a week. Now you do cardio for an hour twice a week. You're burning nothing. You're burning 800 calories a week. That's maybe, that's like 100 calories more a day. Nothing. Lift weights twice a week properly and over time you could teach your body to burn 500, 600, 800 more calories a day, every single day on its own. You know, I have many, many stories of personal examples, but I'll just tell you one. My wife, when I, so my wife Jessica, she's a trainer herself, very fit, but when she, back in the day, when she was younger, she had gained a lot of weight. She grew up with no dietary restrictions, ate a lot of, you know, bad food or whatever, got very overweight, lost it on her own the wrong way. She would run every single day, cut her calories, run, cut her calories. She got to the point where she was running every day, every single day, twice a day and her calories were 1200 and she was at the point where if she ate anything over 1200 calories, she would gain weight. And so she thought she had a terrible, she had terrible genetics. I am destined to be overweight. My genetics are terrible. In order for me to maintain my body, I got to put all this crazy work in and I got to eat nothing, anything over that and I gained weight. Well, she got into fitness, started lifting weights, but still did it the wrong way. Lots of circuits, lots of crazy, you know, basically cardio with weights. Then I meet her and when I meet her, she's working out with lots of crazy circuit type training. She got her calories up to about 1300 or so, but she's still doing these insane workouts. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. We're going to get you strong. You're going to, we're going to slowly increase your calories and over time, here's what's going to happen. We're going to get your metabolism really fast and it's going to feel really weird because you're going to eat way more than you ever, than you ever have or have in a long time and you're not going to gain any weight. And she said, okay, she trusted me. We worked out and, you know, I think it was like a year or two later, she's lifting weights three or four days a week. She's eating 22, 2300 calories. And she, I remember we'd have these conversations. She's like, this is really weird, Sal. She's like, I just don't, she's like, I have a fast metabolism. I thought I had terrible genetics. I thought I had the genetics of someone who had to be overweight. She goes, I now feel like my genetics are the opposite. I have this super fast metabolism. I'm like, well, you, you, you changed it through pushing the right adaptations through proper resistance training. Don't you feel like as a coach, you're always trying to, you know, explain to people delayed gratification. Like you're always trying to promote it somehow and like try and present it in a different way so they can kind of buy into it. But really that's what it's about. It's like, you know, it's really about building your body up. So it works for you instead of you fighting your body the whole week through. I just know this is such a hard message to get across because like your story, Sal, I mean, I've got a ton of client stories, but I mean, Katrina was the same way. I mean, Katrina and I have been together now for 10 and a half years and the first three to four, we never trained or talked about training really at all. Like we did our own thing because she came from a, you know, collegiate level athlete who had had personal trainers and they were like everything was based around endurance was, and so everything she did if she was lifting weights, it was always in a circuit. It was always done after a 30 minute hard bout of cardio fall by another 30 minute hard bout of cardio afterwards. She would run five miles and this is, and when she was doing all of that, that's what kind of maintained her level of fitness where, you know, she had relatively good body fat percentage. She, you know, liked where she was shape wise, but boy, if she came off that, if she was not training that way, the weight would pile on really quick for her and I'd watch her kind of do this and, you know, I never said, ever said anything to her. I allowed her to come to me because I knew better. Cause you're a wise guy, wise man. Been in enough relationships where I've tried to say something, right? So yeah, I don't say anything to her. I just kind of let her do her thing and hey, who am I to say that, you know, I think it's silly that she runs for five miles. She likes doing it and she enjoyed doing it with her best friend, Everett. And so they would do this all the time and it was right before we started, I got into competing. Right before I started getting competing was when I made the first big transformation and she was tripping out like, cause she's, she was doing the cooking and the grocery shopping and watching the training and everything like that and was watching how rapid my, my body was changing. And I remember her, that was when she came to me and she goes, okay, I'm ready for you to, to tell me what to do. And the first thing I said, I said, okay, no more running. All we're going to, same exact, exact information that you were presenting to Jessica, none of this circuit training bullshit. You're going to lift heavy. You're going to rest two minutes between sets. We're going to try and see how heavy we get your squat, your dead lift up, your overhead press. Let's really focus on that. And I'm going to start to push your calories. And I, she got to a place. Now, when she was running and doing all stuff, she was around 1500, 1600 calories. She got to a place where she could eat 2800 calories and not run dude. And on top of that, the part that I think she would made her really fall in love with it was the, what she was able to make her body look like from weight training. Cause that's another thing too. When you kind of just use cardio and calorie restriction as a target sculptor body, you can't sculpt. No, you, you can, you can get rid of some body fat and you can look leaner, skinnier, but you don't look more shapely. You don't look tighter. You don't look more quote unquote tone. And when I started introducing the, the strength training to her and lifting weights, oh my God, she was like, I cannot believe how much better my body looks with no running and eating more calories. And she was forever changed. Now, besides that sounding awesome to people who are like, Oh my God, I can eat more and it's, and I have to do as much, you know, effort in the gym at as much time. Besides that, it's just more sustainable because let's be honest, look, unless you work in the fitness industry and you're a maniac about fitness, most people are busy. They don't want to, they can't work out all the time. They just can't do it. So what they're, and realistically, you're probably looking at for the average person two or three days a week of consistency. In my experience, with the average people that I trained, I knew if I did a good job, and I mean, I did a really good job, that I would be able to get them to stay consistent with about two or three days a week of exercise, and they would be able to maintain that forever, which is great, by the way, that's great. But two or three days a week of exercise, it needs to be done in an effective way and in a way that teaches the body to burn more calories, because then the rest of their life was again surrounded by food. They're busy, but inactive, and it maintained a lean, healthy physique. And again, look at all the health problems that are associated with some of the stuff. You want the best protection against insulin resistance? Try muscle. Muscle is phenomenal. It's a very insulin sensitive tissue. It really helps your body utilize sugar. There's nothing better than muscle. In fact, when I trained clients who were pre-diabetic, if I got them to gain five pounds of muscle and we did it the right way, their doctors were always blown away by the numbers that they would see. And of course, the reason why I'm talking about insulin sensitivity goes right along with obesity. So I'd like to give some specific advice knowing that it's a bit generic, right? So we know that there's such an individual variance amongst everybody, even if you're everyone, even if I got 10 people and all their goals are to lose 100 pounds, they're all going to be different. And I'm going to have to do some different things. But there are some general rules and general things that I would say to these people. And so the first thing that I would always start off with is adding to their diet and targeting protein. Almost always when I had somebody in this case, it was under-consuming protein and they weren't getting enough whole foods in the diet. And instead of telling them they can't have calories and let's restrict your calories, I would assess the diet and look at what they're eating and I would find something, whether it be fiber or fruit or chicken or steak or fish or something that I know that was a good whole nutritious meal. And I would start to add that into the diet. That would be one of the first things I would do. Yeah, because that naturally gets them to eat less heavily processed foods. And then a high protein diet is just, this is now established, it builds more muscle, burns more body fat and it's more satiating, much more satiating. You eat a high protein diet, a 2,000 calorie diet that's high in protein versus a 2,000 calorie diet that's low in protein. The high protein one, you're way less hunger cravings, you're way less like it overall. Yeah, that was the biggest thing with clients that they actually appreciated because when you do add in a bit more protein, the hardest part about dieting is that like that feeling of hunger and that the cravings and everything else that you're fighting the entire time through. But this is basically a hack to be able to have you feel like you're fed and you don't have quite as many calories involved. The next thing that I'm going to tell them is I want to start to create some good habits that I think that we can build that can be sustainable. So I'm going to introduce first some walking. And I want to do it for, and this is where there's a lot of variance here depending on who I'm talking to. If I got somebody who's an absolute couch potato and they walk less than 2,000 steps a day, a 20 minute walk in a day is already a dramatic shift in the right direction. So versus maybe there's somebody who's already kind of walking, you know, throughout the day, maybe they hit four or 5,000 steps. And so maybe I want them to walk for 45 minutes to an hour every single day. Yeah. Now someone listening might be like, well, you just said cardio isn't the no, no, no, I want to be very clear. Activity is still good for you. Right. So you still want to be active. Just don't rely on it to make you lose weight because you're burning calories. No, you want to do things that you can see yourself doing forever. And you got to be honest with yourself. Adam, can I see myself going for three, 10 minute walks every day for the rest of my life? Yeah, breakfast, lunch, dinner. Or do I see myself getting on a stair master for 30 minutes straight, drenched in sweat? Just, I mean, it's your way out. Right. And I think most people would agree that, you know, building three, 10 minute walks into your day for the rest of your life is way more realistic than committing to I'm going to get on that bike that stair master or the treadmill for 30 minutes of intense cardio. And so that's one of the first places. I want to, I want to get this person moving. Yeah. Now the next thing is to focus on the metric of strength. Are you getting stronger in your lifts? Are you able to add more weight to the bar or to the dumbbell or to the machine? Or are you able to do more reps? Why is this so good? Because if you're getting stronger, you're probably doing a lot of things right. Right. If you're losing weight and getting stronger, you're doing most things right. That is a wonderful, that's the, that's my favorite thing to see. Right. If I have a client who the scale is going down and they just added five pounds to their squat or to their deadlift, we are in a beautiful place because I know that they either gain muscle or at the very least maintain muscle while burning body fat. Something I want to add to that that I'm also going to tell this person is whatever they tell me that they can commit to per week, I'm going to undercut them. Yeah. So if they go, Adam, I got, I've got four days or five days or six days carved out that I could weight train. I'm not even going to let them do that. In fact, I'm looking at somewhere between one to three tops. I do, even if they've got the four to five days. You're thinking long-term. Exactly. And I, so that, that just tells me as a coach, so it's like, oh, that's good to know that I've got somebody who's willing to work five or six days. So as we potentially, which we will not potentially, we will absolutely hit plateaus at one point. I know I have some tools in my tool belt that I can pull out. I can go, okay, let's add a day, another day of walking or another day of, you know, strength training to help break you through this plateau. So whatever they're, they're, they're telling me they're going to commit to, I'm going to come under that. So it's, we build that. That took me a long time to figure out. The reason why you do that as a trainer is because typically when people work with you or hire you, they're coming from a place of high motivation. So they haven't worked out in a long time or maybe ever. They just hired you. So they just gave you $500 or $1,000 for 10 sessions or whatever. And they're like, okay, five days a week, let's do this. I'm here for five. And you know, they're coming from a place of high motivation, which is not going to last. Nobody ever stays super motivated all the time. It goes up and down. So then you, you, the trainer's job was to make it realistic. And so I would do the same thing. They would say to me, I could commit to five days a week, but we'll do two. Let's start with two. And then if you're begging me to do more at some point, then we could always add more, but let's start with two. And let me show you what I can do with your body with only two days a week. So that's a perfect, beautiful advice. The other thing I would say is in terms of the exercises, focus on compound lifts really. Don't do, you know, the isolation movement. Don't do the machine stuff. Focus on the big lifts. Why? Because they're the most effective at doing the things that we just talked about earlier in this podcast, like build your metabolism, build muscle, build strength. A, you know, a barbell squat is going to boost your metabolism and give you more results than a leg extension will or than a donkey kickback will, right? A pullup is going to give you way more results than a bicep curl. We'll give you, for example, you know, shoulder press way more than a machine lateral or whatever. Focus on compound lifts. In fact, for most of my, again, average clients, for most of my everyday clients that just wanted to be relatively lean, healthy fit with something that was maintainable, sustainable, I would say 95% of the routines were compound lifts. I would do isolation movements for correctional exercise. Well, this also speaks to like the time crunch. Like people, I mean, that's the biggest hurt a lot of times. I don't have all this time to accomplish all these things. Well, you know, you have to include the most effective exercises in there that put the most demand on your body to overcome. This is where compound lifts shine over anything else. I'll take this challenge all day long. You follow the five big lifts that we're talking about two times a week. That's it. Walking 30 minutes a day, five days a week. You only got to do seven, five days a week and adding a nutritious meal, a whole food meal to your day, every single day, and follow that and focus on building strength, trying to get stronger at those five lifts. And that's all you focus on for 30 to 60 days. I guarantee this person who's trying to lose 50, 100 plus pounds, where they will be in a month to two months compared to where they started, will be way different and way better of a position than the same person who goes, I'm going to cut my calories, start running every single day. They may look on the scale different, okay? So be prepared for that. On the scale, if we're just measuring weight, the person who cut calories and ran every single day for 30 days may have five to 10 pounds more off them, maybe. And they may think that they're way ahead of the other person. But if you measure their body fat percentage, you're able to check where their metabolism is currently at. The other person I guarantee is much further along than you think. Absolutely. Because where do you want to be? Do you want to be in a position that requires you to move a lot all the time and eat a little all the time just to lose weight or maintain? Or would you like to be in a position that requires much less time, right? A couple days a week and also a position that allows you to end up eating more over time while getting leaner? I mean, I think the answer is totally obvious. The other thing too is make sure you do straight sets. In other words, train like a bodybuilder. You do your set, your rest, you do your set, your rest. In fact, the rest period is just as important as the lifting period. You need to rest because that rest allows, without getting too complicated into the mechanics of how the body builds muscle and strength, it allows your body to use the type of energy that promotes muscle and strength. If you don't rest, then you're promoting endurance, which does the opposite of what you're looking to do. Well, did you give examples for this in the book, right? I did. I did. I gave workouts and I talked about sets and reps. There's actually three different types of workouts in there. One that requires just bands, one that's just dumbbells, and then one that's a full home gym so that people could follow the routine. And of course, you can progress through them and you learn. You learn how to train your body through following these routines. Full body workouts are best in this scenario. You're working out two or three days a week. Just train your whole body. Go in the gym and start with the big muscle group. All right. Here's my leg exercise. Okay. Here's my back exercise. Here's my chest exercise. Here's my shoulder exercise. And then I'm done. And if you want to throw in some curls and some triceps and some extra ab work or whatever, you can totally do that. Try these things out. Approach your fat loss from this perspective. How can I teach my body to burn this body fat for me? Because I don't want to do this myself. It's a lot of work, takes a lot of time, and I'm probably going to fail through that manual approach. How can I train my body to become a fat burning machine? Look, if you would like to check out this book that I wrote that talks a lot about this and more, you can go to the resistance training revolution.com. It's available right now for pre order will be released in about a month. You can also find all of us on social media. You can find Justin on Instagram at mine pump Justin, you can find me at mine pump Sal and Adam at mine pump Adam. I do have this train that at some point, modern medicine, when they recommend you go exercise, they say, we want you to go do resistance strength, which by the way, can be performed with your body can be performed with bands. Of course, you can use weights or machines. By the way, in the book, I put workouts in there as well actually put programs in there.