Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1260: 7 Male Fitness Myths That Slow Your Gains

Episode Date: March 30, 2020

In this episode, Sal, Adam & Justin discuss seven common beliefs that men have about fitness that are impeding their success. Challenging and explaining the 7 biggest male fitness myths. (4:35) #1 �� You must lift heavy to get big. (7:50) #2 - Training to failure is necessary for your body to respond. (16:32) #3 - Intensity is king. (28:29) #4 - You need to eat big to get big. (38:25) #5 – Taking steroids guarantees muscle. (47:20) #6 - The biggest guys in the gym must know the most. (56:57) #7 - Some movements are for women and don’t benefit men. (1:03:23) Related Links/Products Mentioned March Promotion: MAPS Powerlift ½ off! **Code “POWER50” at checkout** Special Promotion: MAPS Anywhere ½ off!! **Code “WHITE50” at checkout** Visit Everly Well for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Code “mindpump” at checkout** Mind Pump 001: Female Fitness Myths Exposed! Mind Pump 1077: The 7 Deadly Fitness Lies Sold to Women Mind Pump 1067: The 5 Biggest Lies in Fitness BUILDING MUSCLE: Is There REALLY A Best Rep Range? - Mind Pump TV Which Is Better: Low Reps Or High Reps? - Mind Pump Blog Mike Mentzer Heavy Duty Benefits Of Going To Failure Periodically – Mind Pump Is repetition failure critical for the development of muscle hypertrophy and strength? Mind Pump 1240: The Muscle Building & Fat Burning Effects of Oly Lifting With Sonny Webster Overtraining Is KILLING Your Gains! (How Much Is Too Much?) | Mind Pump TV The Breakdown Recovery Trap, Why You Aren't Progressing – Mind Pump Mind Pump 907: Cory Schlesinger Fundamental Nutrition Tips For Building Muscle (Free Hardgainer Guide) Are athletes really getting faster, better, stronger? - Ted Talk Pumping Iron Is Mobility Important For Working Out? - Mind Pump Media Mind Pump Free Resources  People Mentioned Cory Schlesinger (@schlesstrength)  Instagram Arnold Schwarzenegger (@schwarzenegger)  Instagram

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind up, mind up with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. In this episode of Mind Plum, look, I'm still on quarantine. We probably have one or two more episodes like this, so I'm calling in while Adam and Justin and Doug are in the studio, but we're still delivering the best fitness podcasts in the world. And today's episode, we decided to tackle

the seven biggest male fitness myths. Now, we've done the female fitness myths. In fact, that's one of our most popular episodes of all time. But I can't believe we've never actually tackled the fitness myths that men fall for. So luckily for you, we did it today. So we talk about the biggest myths that men tend to fall for. Like you need to lift heavy to get big. That's one of them.

Train to failure is necessary. Intensity is king. You need to eat big to get big. Steroids, guarantees muscle. The biggest guys in the gym know the most. And you know, some movements are for women and they have no benefit for men. So we tackle those things in this episode and we talk about the truths around them, like what really does work because those myths are all totally false. Now this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Everly Well. Now you might have heard of Everly Well

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anabolic muscle building hormone in your system. So, Everly Well is one of our sponsors. They are sponsoring this episode and because you're a mind pump listener, you get 25% off. Here's how you get that discount. Go to EverlyWell.com. That's EV eveerlywell.com. Use the code MindPump and you'll get 25% off any of their tests. Also, 48 hours left for our Maps Anywhere 50% off sale. You only have two days left. Now Maps Anywhere is an athome workout program that requires very minimal equipment. All you need are exercise bands, so resistance bands, broomsticks, or a PVC pipe, and a bullet bar.

And that's it. You get a phenomenal workout without a gym. And most gyms are closed right now. We know that's happening. You're at home. You don't know what to do. Follow this program and get the best results you've ever had. This is a very, very effective program. It's a very popular program. And again, it's 50% off.

Here's how you get the half-off discount before the sale ends. Go to mapswhites.com. That's M-A-P-S-W-H-I-T-E. dot com and use the code white 50 that's w h i t e five zero no space for the discount one of our early episodes that we did a while ago well jeez when we first started and then we did another episode that was similar to it got lots and lots of traction in fact it was one of our first like big downloaded podcast episodes are like was like number three, right? Yes. No, it was the first episode. It was the first one. Yeah, yeah.

No. Female fitness myths was one of the most popular episodes, so popular that I remember about two or three years later, we redid it again. And the irony of this, and we were, the four of us were talking today, was that we did that for female fitness mess twice. We never did it for men and we never addressed the big mess for men and I think

that's a really cool topic that I don't think a lot of people talk about because I think most guys that go to the gym seem to think they know it all. Yes, which is why I think we should do this episode. Let's call you out, bro. Well, I tell you what, I mean, I fell for a lot of myths around training. And there were the myths that were directed towards men. We're men are just as susceptible to some of the misinformation and lies that come out of the fitness space.

Now, the myths that tended to be directed towards women were designed to kind of get women to work out and to make them not afraid of weights and stuff like that. The ones that tend to be directed to men tend to be driven by this like macho kill yourself at all costs, type of drive. And we succumb to it because we think more is better, harder is better. And I find that a lot of the myths surrounding training for men kind of revolve around that attitude, you know. And like I said, I fell for every single

one that I could think of. I think that's so important to note when we go through these two. This is not the three of us piling on all the the bros or the guys in the gym and this is not to hate on people. It's literally everything that we sat down when we were taking the notes on this, I was like, oh yeah, oh yeah, I did that one. Right. So I think it's coming from a place of compassion and hopefully saving a lot of time

in years, potentially, off of some of your training because I wish somebody would have shared this information with me when I was 20 years old, so I didn't spend years and years of spinning my wheels on a lot of these points. shared this information with me when I was 20 years old so I didn't spend years and years of spinning my wheels on a lot of these points. Totally. And why do we want to cover these? Well, we're covering the myths that are considered common knowledge, that are considered truths, because there's a lot of lies that are spouted by people in the fitness space. But there's only a few of them that are almost like, not challenged, like they're considered to be truths.

And so those are the ones that we're gonna tackle in this episode. And it's important to tackle them because the following myths not only will prevent you from progressing, but because they're believed to be so true, if you do what I did, which is just hard to headedly stick to them because I thought that they were the truth, you can cause yourself to go backwards, hurt yourself, cause injuries, and maybe even think that

you just weren't made for this because it's not working for you. When you say that to, it makes me kind of like unpack and think about like the differences between the myths for women and the myths for men. And it almost seems like I felt like the women's myths that we did were like just blatant lies and terrible or made up words, just fucking lies completely. With the men, a lot of the myths are rooted in truth. And I think that's what also makes them so tough and why so many people still

fall in it. Like for example, like the very first one that comes to mind is like you must live heavy to get big. And there's some truth to that, right? There's, I mean, if you lift heavy, it's going to stimulate muscle growth. But I and this one's near and dear to me because this was one of the first, like, the first bit of any science I applied to my training was I read an article that, you know, said that if you wanted to grow and build massive arms, I needed to lift in the sixth rep range and lower. It was not, it was in higher rep ranges were for toning or lean muscles. And at that time, I was a very skinny kid. So anything in the lean direction did not sound appealing to me. I wanted

to grow. I wanted to get big. And therefore, I spent several years lifting in the, you in the four to six rep range forever. And your body stalled. That did the same thing. And part of this was fueled by my machismo. I wanted to be strong. So I'm going to push as much weight as possible. I sacrificed form. I sacrificed range of motion,

both of which are directly connected to building muscle. Your form and your range of motion both have a major impact on how much muscle you can build, but if you believe that you have to lift heavy to get big, the first, the, the first two things that are going to go out the window, if you live and die by that is your form, right, in your range of motion. Yeah. two things that are going to go out the window if you live and die by that is your form and your range of motion. I totally remember vividly, it's a competitive thing. It's this ego thing already established

when you're around a bunch of other guys and you're lifting weights. You want to tackle it just like you're competing. You want to one up the guy next to you. And it's just something that a lot of guys share that sort of sentiment as they go into the gym and they're working out. They want to kind of compare themselves to everybody else in the gym. And what they see somebody else lifting may be way out of reach for them initially, but it's something you can ramp up to. And there's a really smart way to attack that process. So there is some truth in lifting heavier weights, but the way that a lot of guys initially tackle that is way off, if not detrimental to them progressing forward.

Yeah, the reality is all rep ranges, build muscle, all of them do, every single one of them, up into maybe 30 reps even, which is pretty damn high, all of them will build muscle. It's really more about the type of tension that you place on the muscle and whether or not the rep range or the exercise is the right stimulus for your body. So what I mean by that is, if I'm, if I only ever always train with heavy rate and low reps, the second I move to lighter weight and higher reps, it's a brand new stimulus and my body's gonna respond tremendously. Oh, this was my biggest gains.

My biggest gains in my 20s came from this exact point you're making right now because I had already been on that two to three years in a row of lifting at six rep range. I do I remember this too. This was advice from a trainer, some trainer at this local gym that I was at. He was jacked. I asked him how I build muscle and he asked me about what I was doing. He told me to lift lightweight 15, 20 reps.

And I thought he was crazy. And he said, trust me, just do it. And I did. And I grew like I had grown in since the previous two or three years, and it blew my mind, completely shattered my paradigm. That same thing happened to me. I was, you know, I started training real young at 14.

And, you know, of course, like I said, I believed that you have to lift heavy to get big. I thought that was the rule of all rules. And two years after lifting, I'd made some gains. I'm a teenage boy. I'm feeding my body like crazy, and I'm still consistent. But I just wasn't progressing very quickly.

It was a real slow grind. I thought I was a super hard gainer. Then I bought a Flex magazine. I used to read all the bodybuilding magazines. And there was an article in there about Surge Nubray. I don't know if you guys know who he is. But he was a bodybuilder who was very competitive in the 70s. In fact, if you watch Pumping Iron, Surgeon Abray takes, I think,

third second place to Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1974 Mystery Olympia. He's well known for having one of the most aesthetic physics of all time. And I read his routine, and this guy was training in the like 15 rep range just just just this higher reps And I thought, you know, let me give this a shot I've been working out long enough at this point to be pretty frustrated

And so what I did was is I lowered the weight Instinctually I went deeper with my range of motion And I focused on the muscle this just happened instinctually right because I can go because I'm going lighter I can have a better range of motion and just like you at them it was the fastest change my body had seen

ever since the very beginning when i started working out now of course if i had stuck with that rep range for the rest of my life i would have also seen my gains come to a grinding hall well didn't it didn't i mean didn't you do that that's what i did i. I mean, I, I, this because I was still young and naive at this point. I'm, I'm attributing it to the lightweight high reps. My body hadn't done it. So, oh, I'm now I stayed in that for years later.

And it wasn't again until I changed, changed that up again. Did I realize like it's not the magic is not in how many reps you're doing. It's in once I, once my body adapts to that rep range, moving out of that is the key. It's not so much the six reps, the 10 reps, the 15 to 20 reps. It's I've been following this rep range

for more than four to six weeks by now, which is about the most you want to push a rep range, staying consistent with it before you move out of it, and the real reason why I was growing had nothing to do with the heavy weight, the lightweight, the reps. It had to do with I was changing the stimulus and realize it took me another probably two or three years before I piece this together and it really started to sharpen the way I was programming for myself and phasing in and out of the rep ranges.

Yes, a weight and a rep range for an exercise is most valuable when it's new or almost new. So what I mean by that is if you start training a brand new rep range today, the most gains you're going to get from it are going to be the next few weeks. Okay, that's where you're going to get the most benefit. That same rep range becomes less and less valuable, the longer you've been doing it. So after a few weeks, if you stick to it long enough, after five weeks, six weeks, ten weeks, you know, months, that rep range loses so much value and this is true for all the rep ranges including the heavy heavy rep ranges. Now what are the problems besides you

know you're body not progressing because you stay in a rep range for too long or a low rep range for too long. The other problem is this heavy resistance training with low reps really really hard in the joints. It's just more more that there's a greater risk on your joints than there is with lighter rep ranges. Well, this is why they get the bad rap, right? This is what scares some people ways because they hear there's enough stories of someone hurting their back from lifting heavy squats or, you know, their knees are bad now because of all the heavy weight they lifted.

Everyone's got a grandparent or a father that they've heard that story from. And that's what it comes from. It's not that the heavy weight they lifted. Everyone's got a grandparent or a father that they've heard that story from. And that's what it comes from. It's not that the heavy weight did it. It's more than likely a lot of those people that were training heavy were falling into this myth where they were always training like this. And they weren't giving the joints and ligaments some break from that heavy load all the time.

And this can cause those aches and pains that are nagging for years later. And people think it had to do with just them lifting heavy weight. Well, the reality of it was they weren't taking care of their body and learning to phase and move out of it. Absolutely. So lifting heavy definitely has some value. Like you said, Adam, there's some truth to it.

But it's not the be all end all, and if it does become that for you, you are going to severely hamper your ability to progress. Now, the next one is one that I took me forever to figure this one out. This was probably, in terms of training, I would say the one that took me the longest to finally realize was full of crap. And it's because this one is so ingrained in the resistance training world and the muscle building world.

Actually, it's ingrained in the athletic world. It's big time in sports too. Oh, all sports, and that's the no pain, no gain, beast mode or that you need to train to failure in order to get your body to respond. I remember the first time I learned what failure was. It was real early on because it's one of the first things you learn and what do they say?

Arnold says in pumping iron, for example, it's the very last rep that causes the muscles to grow. That last rep that you can barely move, Mike Menser wrote a whole book called Heavy Duty where he talked about going to failure as being the switch that signaled muscles to grow. You read about people who are training hard and working hard and it's this very honorable thing to see people push themselves to the absolute limit to where they can't move anymore and there's a little bit of that, you know, bravado and a little bit of that celebration around it.

And, you know, here you are, you're guy and you want to work out and you want to earn your muscle. And so you go to the gym and you're like, I'm going to force my body to grow. I'm going to force my body to change. And failure is as far as you can go. Failure literally means I'm lifting a weight until I can't lift it anymore, at least not with good form, or as most people interpret it, can't lift it at all. There's nothing else beyond failure,

although there are things like force reps and that kind of stuff, if you really wanna get crazy. But failure is it, right? That's like the end of the road. So that must mean I've hit the target. Like if I go to failure, that means I've hit the switch and my body knows it better grow,

or I'm gonna punish it again. Well, talking about being honorable, and this is something that it's a mindset the switch and my body knows it better grow or I'm going to punish it again. Yeah. Well, talking about being honorable and this is something that it's a mindset that that's why this myth is so hard to dispel for people because it's something that has benefited multiple athletes in their mindset when they're competing. And this is something you're going to face all this adversity in life, right? And so it's to power through it and to sort of bear down and and overcome whatever's in front of you. I mean, this is a sentiment that everybody can kind of get behind right away. It's very motivating. It's very sexy and flashy. And it's something that has, you know,

initially it works, right? Like being able to, you know, test yourself, pass your limits, it's gonna produce something, but how long is that really gonna work for you? And people have a hard time, you know, being able to think differently and to think, you know, maybe my body, maybe there's a right dose for this that I can actually apply to my body in a more effective way.

And that's a really hard self for somebody that's been powering their way through these workouts. Well, at the risk of what though, right? This is also a situation where you brought up earlier about form and technique. The problem when most people go to failure, they don't even fail correctly. When they train to failure, they push until their body can't move anymore and long before that, or at least a rep or two before that,

their form is already breaking down. And most people that are training are training to change their body aesthetically. There's obviously a portion of people that are here for performance. And those that are there for performance, I can make a case for occasionally training to failure for sure, for the exact point that Justin made. But the average person who is trying to build and sculpt and shape a body through losing

body fat and building muscle the most effective way possible, well, the moment that you stop utilizing the main muscle that you're trying to work at that point and you allow the rest of your body to jump in to help it, you kind of defeat the purpose of what you're really trying to accomplish in the gym. Unless you're that athlete who is training mindset that day, unless your goal is, I am trying to break through a mental plateau and I'm going to push myself to my limits. Sure, there's a place for that. But for the average gym goer who's trying to train

shape and sculpt the body uh... it really doesn't up it doesn't apply to this person now and you know luckily you know recently more recently i'd say over the night over the last five years they've actually done studies comparing training to failure to not training to failure. Now, it is important to understand that, you know, there is a level of intensity that you wanna hit when you work out, but going to failure,

studies show consistently now is too much. It actually produces less results, less strength and builds less muscle. So it's not even equal. Okay, now, how hard should you work out? In my experience, stop about one to two reps before failure. Stop just short of that, and then watch what happens. And I remember the first time I did this, I was in my 20s.

That's how long it took me. I was in my 20s, and's how long it took me, I was in my 20s and I'm working out in my studio and I wanted, I was trying to train my body more frequently but I just couldn't recover enough and I thought to myself, you know what, I'm going to lower the intensity and just see what happens, you know, what the hell, I'm going to give it a week and if it doesn't work, I'll just go back to killing myself by going to failure. And I'll never forget, I didn't go to failure. The very next workout, I was stronger. And then the very next workout, I was stronger again.

That's all I did. All I did was go from train to failure on every single set to stopping about two rep short and my body responded like crazy. Now the irony of this is is I had been training clients already for at least seven years at this point. I almost never trained my clients to failure. Do you know why? Because the few times I did, they wouldn't progress.

So I never trained my clients to failure, which is so funny. If you're a trainer and you're listening, you know exactly what I'm talking about, we tend to train our clients better than we train ourselves because we're more objective. And I never almost never trained my clients to failure, which is too much. For some reason, I thought, that didn't apply to me.

I thought, oh, well, the body building magazine say, go to failure. So I'm just going to keep doing that. But the minute I stopped, my body started progressing. And again, the studies support this 100%. Every single time they do a study on this this they find that training to failure has almost little to no value And in fact actually reduces somebody's progress. It actually was slow it down not to mention about training clients this way I remember you know scheduling the next session and and what a you know what you had to overcome in terms of like the soreness and You know the like what kind of performance they were

able to apply in that workout. It was always like a lot more challenging to create a workout for them after a really hammering to failure type leg day, for instance. So just, you know, applying that concept of two one to two rep short, I myself found a lot of benefit just in terms of applying more frequency to my workouts and having more effective workouts going forward after that. Well, we see this science applied in the best programming in the world,

which we've discussed before. And that's in powerlifting. I mean, powerlifting has some of the best pro and Olympic lifting both. Both Olympic lifting and powerlifting have some of the best programming in the world when you look at the way they approach their programming, unlike anybody else that they actually figure out a percentage of max that you should be training at and you're supposed to, the whole program is designed of never maxing out or never pushing yourself to absolute

failure. That's where you peak the ideas that you build up to this crescendo at the end where then you can go all out at a meet and lift the most weight you've ever lifted in your life before. But the training that leads up to that and the strength building and muscle building that leads up to that is all programming that's done

short of failure. And the only difference that when we tell people leave two in the tank is it's done, short of failure. And the only difference that when we tell people, leave two in the tank, is it's just, we've left it that way for the average listener because very few people on here are gonna figure out their one rep max and then multiply what 75% is and then figure out how many repetitions is that out of their 10 rep max.

Like, it's just much easier to coach to, hey, leave two in the tank. If you know you could have at least got another one or two stop right like, it's just much easier to coach to, hey, leave two in the tank. If you know, if you know you could have at least got another one or two, stop right there, that's, don't take it all the way to failure. That's our way of gauging people at the 75 to 85% intensity. It's just easier for the average person to consume that, but the benefits in it, like, again, I guess the science behind it that's applied in where we see it express the best is in both power lifting and Olympic lifting.

And it's one of those ones that, you know, it took me a while also to figure out, but again, once I trained that way, was another one of those paradigm shattering moments where the gains started to come on again. Totally. I, you get to remember that resistance training or exercise in general, it's, it sends a signal that tells your body to adapt. And the reason why it adapts and gets stronger is so that the next time around, the same

insult, the same stress, isn't causing the same amount of damage. So your body's literally trying to become more resilient towards the stressors. And this is true for every adaptation system in the body. And I've used this example before and I love it. It's like, you know, when you go out to the sun and you expose your bare skin to the sun, the UV rays cause a little bit of damage. Your skin gets darker to try to adapt to the sunlight so that you can stay out there for the same amount of time and not cause any damage. Now what's going to give you a better tan if I go outside and I sit in

this, under the sun to failure and let the sun just burn the shit out of me or if I go out there, I expose myself to the right dose of sunlight, go back inside and I repeat that the next day. Which one is going to produce better results? It's the same thing with resistance training. And failure is too much intensity for most people, most of the time. Something that you should use sparingly. I wanna address all the intensity monsters that tout the studies that support training a failure too.

And this is what the audience needs to know. If you follow your favorite Instagram dude that you know is just a monster and lifts looks like he lifts to failure every time he trains and so you follow that and he touts all the studies that support the muscle growth benefits from failure. The point that we're making right now that I think is so important is that I don't recall a male client of mine that I ever trained that was had a problem taking it to failure. Yeah.

It's like it's built in us men already to like Justin alluded to earlier, but the competitive side to us, the intensity, the overcoming adversity, like the warrior side comes out. And so it's very natural once you get any male into lifting that they naturally gravitate towards that. So it's not that there isn't any sort of benefit to ever going to failure.

It's that a majority of people one don't do it correctly and then two abuse it. And those people, which is almost everybody listening here now, would benefit far more greatly if they train with two reps in the tank. That's right. You talked about intensity, so I'm going to go with that one next, because I think more broadly, we can apply, we can talk about the myth that more is better, more that intensity

is king. This is another big one, and this is something that we tend to apply to a lot of things in life where we think, you know, if five is good, then ten is better. You know, so if I, if I'm, my body's seeing good results right now and I'm doing, you know, fifteen sets for my chest, well, if I do thirty sets, then I'm going to double the progress. I'm going to speed things up because I'm doing more. My body is going to respond faster. Nothing can be further from the truth. It's like medicine.

Think about it this way, okay? You have, you know, you take a prescription. You need some antibiotics and you've got, you know, you've got strep throat or something like that. So the doctor gives you antibiotics. Are you going to get better faster if you take five times a dose of antibiotics? Probably not.

You're probably gonna get really sick and hurt yourself. There's definitely a right dose when it comes to exercise. And the right dose means you're gonna get the best results from that. Not that it's the right dose because it's the least amount or the right dose because we're trying to save time. The right dose literally is the dose that will give you the most results. That's actually the science behind weightlifting. There is an actual science, anatomy

and physiology. Everybody can acknowledge that as science, but the problem is, there's no real collective science that everybody agrees upon in terms of lifting weights. A lot of it is built off of strength coaches for very specific populations or bodybuilding, and it's all got sort of distorted over the years, but really there is a science to this. And this is something that if people really paid enough attention to this and really applied these concepts correctly, the fact that there's the perfect dose

for you intensity-wise, it's gonna make a massive difference in your training. Well, to that point, this intensity is also what feeds the overtraining monster or what we call the recovery trap, which we've mentioned on this podcast many times. And again, this was another area where that was paradigm shattering for me through my lifting career. And it was around, and it's perfect to follow this point

up with the failure training because it was, this is when this started to come together for me. Obviously, if I was going two reps short of failure, I'm backing off of my intensity inside of my workouts. What I had noticed right away was I wasn't getting as sore as much, and before that, I used to attribute my gains or my success in the gym based off of how sore I was in the next workout.

And so that's where the intensity just fed right into that. Well, once I started to back off the failure training and back off the intensity, I started to realize I wasn't getting a sore anymore. But then what ended up happening was I started putting more gains on, and one of the things I noticed right away was when I go into my next workout the next day or two days later, I wouldn't be so damn sore that it wouldn't hinder that workout. And so I'd feel fresh and be able to get after

the weights. And so I was able to apply a higher intensity without it being perceived as high because I was better recovered if that makes sense. That makes total sense. This one really feeds into the male ego. I mean, I'm going to be quite honest. I would go to the gym with my cousins or my friends and I would lose sight, totally lose sight of the whole reason why I'm there. You got to ask yourself, why am I going to the gym in the first place? Am I going here to beat myself up and see how hard I can work out today?

Is that the goal? Or is the goal to get my body to change and respond, get my body to move in a favorable direction? Okay. So if your goal is to go to the gym and just beat the crap out of yourself, well that's easy. You don't need any exercise programming, you don't need special technique, just go to the gym and go nuts. And I used to do that, go with my cousins to the gym and I just would go as hard as possible. Let's see how, you know, who can get the, who can be the last person to throw up. Let's see who could be the first person or the last

person to quit. And we would just go nuts and we would brag about it and you'd have this whole like, yeah, man, that strip set you did, you dropped the weight, it was crazy, I threw it up afterwards, it was so good. Meanwhile, not progressing, meanwhile, not building muscle, not getting stronger. And boy, that loses, it's fluster real quick. It's fun, maybe one of the points. Maybe you can even real quick. Like it's fun. Maybe one side.

Maybe one side. Yeah. Yeah. And that turned into CrossFit. Yeah. It's one of those things. It's just it won't go away because it's the competitive side of it. Like there's always this tendency to try and marry the two things together. The competitive sports angle and the weightlifting angle.

And then, you know, there's this justification later, this is the best way to train, nor did gain muscle and all this. And it just starts to completely throw the science out to the wayside. And that's why I give these type of modalities a hard time because I felt susceptible to this completely.

I mean, I was the one in the gym lifting as much as I possibly could every single workout because my friend was right there trying to do the same thing to me and it was back and forth and back and forth and you know and there's There's a point when you're younger where you can you know, you're a little more resilient You can bounce back and you can hammer yourself and you know, you can kind of come back But I was just maintaining I was never progressing. I was just got to a point where I was nice and strong, but I was never as strong as I was once I gave myself proper rest and recovery and dropped my intensity down

quite a bit. Well, I think this is really common and why I think you fell for this probably the longest Justin is because of your athletic background. And of all the places that I think that training this way, this intensely, more often than not, has the most value is on like a football field. You know, when so much of the game is that the mental side

of being able to sustain the punishment and mentally persevere and push through, there's a lot of carryover that way for athletes. And this is as a trainer, this is was the client that I always struggled with getting them to back off the intensity because they had that athletic background, which was made it great for teaching form and technique and pushing them, but it was a monster to try to get them to back off the intensity and trust that, hey, listen, less may actually be more for us in this situation because of

that athletic background. And so if you're listening right now and you're a current athlete, okay, there's some value to training this way because there's some carryover to the mental discipline that it gives you by training this way, but if you're somebody who is an ex-athlete or not an athlete at all, then this doesn't apply to you. Well, I'll even say this, if you're an athlete and you want to train and test and push your mental capacity,

do it on the field, the gym should be relegated to getting your body to progress, respond, to get stronger, to correct muscle and balance as prevent injury. The place you test yourself is on the field at practice. That's when you push the first off, if you're playing football or you're a wrestler, you want to push your mental capacity while doing the sport itself. Okay, because you can build all kinds of mental toughness in the gym, but then go on the mat under a really strong wrestler.

Totally different. Totally different. Totally different. So if you want to test your in train or mental and your coaches are already doing this to you, I guarantee it, you don't need to do this to yourself even more. You're going to go out, you're going to practice, and they're're gonna beat the crap out of you, and part of what they're training is that mental capacity. But as far as the gym is concerned, use weights for what they're best for,

which is to make you stronger, make you more stable, prevent injury, and you gotta do it the right way, because if you push yourself on the field, and you push yourself in the gym at that extreme level, you're just asking for trouble, 100%. You remember the interview that we did with Corey Sustinger, I love that there was communication,

he, him as the strength coach at that time for Stanford and then the basketball coach, and you know, they had all the great, you know, tech stuff that actually would, you know, measure their HRV and see their reps, their stress. All the accumulated stress for them. Yeah, and he would actually modify and adjust his weightlifting based off of how hard they got pushed inside their practice.

So just to show you that the most elite athletes are onto this. They know this. It's the average gym goer or the average. We can warrior athlete that is still falling susceptible to this. And it's normally like I said, the client that I had, it's the X athlete, they're in their 30s now, but they train like an athlete all the way into their 20s. And so they're still applying that mentality in their weightlifting now. It takes a long time.

World class coaches know this as fact. And they apply this to their athletes and they preserve their athletes. Their athletes have more longevity in their pursuits of being great for longer. And so it takes a while to make its way down to the general population to then adopt these concepts. But this is why we're bringing it up. There's a better way to do it. And if you guys listen and start applying these concepts, you'll think us. Right. Now, the next one probably did the most damage to me

than all the other ones that I can think of. And that's the mentality that you have to eat big to get big, that if you're not gaining muscle, all you gotta do is eat. It's the fun way to do it for sure. Just eat more food. I don't know, it's only fun if you're the kid who is just the fact that it could be told true. If you're a skinny man, I know Sal can relate to me on this one.

I spent many of nights, you know, with two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and a 800 calorie gainer shake and like, you know, sucking it down and like looking at the second sandwich, like, I can't do this. So it could definitely be miserable too, trying to do that. And I know there's definitely kids out there or young adults out there that can relate to this that are struggling to build muscle and where they put all their energy and effort

is just constantly just stuffing their face all the time. So I'm with you, Sal, on this. This was a tough one for me to learn to get through and more. So I'm with you, Sal, and this was a tough one for me to learn to get through. And more than likely, I'm probably paying for some of the internal gut damage that I did from all those years of doing this. Oh, yeah.

I remember hearing, and I heard this more than once. I still hear it today, sometimes that there's no such thing as over-training, only under-eating. Yeah. Probably the dumbest, most damaging myth of all time because if you're like me, who was skinny, and I'm not progressing, well the answer is eat more food. And I would literally force feed myself. I would make shakes with chicken breast. I blend in the blender with milk and eggs and all kinds of crazy stuff.

I would set the alarm to wake me up at 3 a.m. so I could drink a weight gainer. I wouldn't even drink water throughout the day. I would just drink milk and weight gainers, train gain weight. And what I ended up gaining was a lot of body fat. Now, there is some truth that, you know, you need to eat more calories in your burning to build muscle. You need to give your body the building blocks to build muscle. But it's not as much as you think. You don't need to pound 10,000 calories to gain muscle. In fact, if you if you have a pretty efficient body and you gain a pound of muscle in a week, which by the way is a lot, one pound of lean muscle in a week is really, really good. But if you gain a pound of muscle in a week, which by the way is a lot. One pound of lean muscle in a week is really, really good. But if you gain a pound of muscle in a week, that's maybe a grand total of an additional

300 calories total, total for the whole week. Divide that up over the over seven days and what are you looking at? Nothing really. It's not that much. The key really is to send the right signal. If your body wants to build muscle, then it's going to build muscle as long as you give it adequate amounts of food. If your body doesn't want to build muscle, you can feed it as much as you want. Nothing's going to happen.

You know what this reminds me of? This reminds me of the old advice that was given to women for, I don't know, I think it was like a decade where in order to prevent osteoporosis, women were told to take a ton of calcium. And what they found was that supplementing with all this calcium, they were actually getting calcium deposits in their arteries and increasing the risk of heart disease and it wasn't doing anything to strengthen their bones. And the reason why it wasn't doing anything, although calcium is a very important component of strengthening bone, was that there was no signal to build bone.

These women were sedentary. They weren't sending any signal to the body that says we need to get stronger bones. They're just providing the body with extra calcium. And the extra calcium wasn't going anywhere. Well, if your workout isn't stimulating muscle growth and you're just force feeding yourself, you're just going to get fat or you're not going to build any more muscle and maybe cause yourself some digestive issues like like I did with myself. Well, I was surprised

in the competitive world how prevalent this still is. I mean, this was one of the things after a couple shows, I realized that I was going to have an advantage because I recognized a lot of my peers that were doing show after show after show after show were bringing kind of the same physique. They could get lean, you know, they knew how to cut calories,

get on cardio for days and restrict, right? And train hard and burn a bunch to get shredded to present a lean physique. But every time they came on stage about the same weight, about the same bound of lean body mass, and they would go on these bulks for, you know, six to 12 weeks, sometimes longer, and, you know, pack on 30 pounds, 40 pounds, and then shred down for a show and then show up with the same physique. And it's partly because all those extra calories they were doing, yeah, that was helping them put weight on, but unfortunately their programming was so poor that it wasn't sending a signal to add any more muscle.

Their body had already adapted to that training routine they've been doing. They'd fallen into some of the similar mess that we were talking about earlier and their physiques weren't progressing. They were still they're getting shredded and they were getting big and bulky and then coming down but they they weren't adding lean body mass show over show or year over year and that was a major advantage that I had and I didn't know I had that until I was recognizing the the shows and the guys showing up the same ones that I was at and For presenting the same physique is the last time I'd seen them I'll tell you a story that I don't think I've ever told on the show it was hilarious at one point

Uh, in my 20s, you know, I'd been working out for a while. I was 200 pounds at about 10% body fat Which is not bad, you know, I don't have a huge frame Pretty muscular that puts my lean body mass about 180 pounds. And I remember I read some stupid article where the hammer just home, eat big or go home. There's no such thing as over training, just under eating. You know, you get big, you got to eat like, eat as big as you want to be type of deal. So I'll never forget this statement. If I want to look I'll never forget this trainer telling me this. I was 21 years old looking at well

I think the second gym membership I ever got at golds gym and me and my little skinny basketball best friend sitting down And he this guy big old steroid guy walks over This is if you want to look like a bull you got to eat like a bull That's weird. That's forever fucking that was cemented in my brain row for the next 10 years and I Well, you'll love this right so I'm in again. I'm in my early 20s and I'm 200 pounds 10% body fat. Just pretty, you know, pretty good. I've been working out for a while or whatever I'm pretty strong and I'm like, okay, that's it. I'm on a mission now. That's it. I'm going to, I'm just going to eat all the time. Like, I'm just going to eat tons of calories I'm going to put on muscle and I did. And I got my

weight up to 220 pounds at games 20 pounds on the scale. And I was so proud of myself that I gained 20 pounds, right? So then I call over one of my trainers that worked for me and I'm like, hey, you know Can I do a body fat percentage test? I want to see how much lean body mass I gain you know much lean body mass I gain hardly anything one pound I gain one one pound my body fat went from 10% to 18% I gain 20 pounds and I gain one and you know How it is with with the caliper that could have been one pound of poop or water in my body. Yeah, and I remember thinking oh my god I stuffed my face I lost my abs and I gained body fat This is time to have a gay body fat so now I'm gonna cut down what it was such a

And I open and why this is so and for the guys that are, are gonna let this go in one ear and out the other, why this is, is, is gonna screw you too, is when you put on 20 to 30 pounds in the winter bulk or whatever kind of bulk you're running, and then you go back the other direction, when you run a cut for a long period of time, if you've, if you've put 20, like your example, you put 20 pounds on one pound of it being the muscle,

19 pounds being a fat, now to lose that 20 pound, lose that 19 pounds of fat, you put 20 pounds on one pound of it being the muscle, 19 pounds being a fat. Now to lose that 19 pounds of fat, you gotta stay in a calorie deficit and burn more. Your body will end up pairing down probably at least a pound or two muscle on the way. You just gotta account for that. Like when I used to bulk and I put on some lean mass, I knew that when I got cut for a show that it was inevitable, I was probably gonna still lose a pound or two muscle on the way down

I mean, it's that close of a science and the leaner you get the harder it is for you to retain that muscle So I always had to account that I'm probably gonna still lose a pound or two So if you spent you know a whole winter bulking to get 20 pounds on and you only really added one or two pounds of muscle And then you go to cut that fat off You end up losing Yeah, you put on yeah, you end up in a worse position pounds of muscle and then you go to cut that fat off. You end up losing. You lose it. Yeah, you put on it. Yeah, you end up in a worse position than what you were before you even started the book.

Yeah, you just become an expert at gaining losing fat. You haven't said anything to your muscle. No, I'll tell you another story for the next one that, it was really hard for me to accept this one as truth until I saw it, you know, applied to about a few people. So at one point, I was managing Big Box Gems. I decided to leave. So I go down to the Palm Springs area and I buy some ownership of a gem with my partner.

So now we're down Southern California, whatever. I got all these trainers working for me. I recruited the sales guy that used to work for me at 24th in this. I'm not going to say his name. And so they started working for me. Now I had this trainer that, you know, because Palm Desert is down in Palm Springs and Palm Desert areas down by, you know, Mexico. I had this trainer that would drive down to Mexico and come back with like all these steroids, right? Yeah, so and so we had all this access to anabolic steroids or the sales guy that worked for me I had known him for a while. He'd been lifting weights for a long time

Nothing impressive didn't really have that much of an impressive physique his workouts for crap his diet was crap, but whatever and He's like, oh man. Finally I'm going to be able to do my first cycle of steroids. And I remember he bought testosterone and this veterinary version of like decka and all these injectable steroids. And he's like, oh this is going to be crazy. And I remember thinking, I was jealous and I remember thinking like, oh this guy's going to look, he's going to look like a pro bodybuilder like 12 weeks like this is going to be crazy. And I remember thinking, I was jealous, and I remember thinking, like, oh, this guy's going to look, he's going to look like a pro bodybuilder, like 12 weeks, like, this is going to be crazy. And I remember him taking all these steroids, and he, he did get stronger on the gym,

but his body barely changed. His workouts were so shitty. He still had a shitty diet. He didn't really change it. You know what it looked like? It looked like he took maybe Craya Teen and kind of got a little bloated, and he was stronger on the gym. Lost a little bit of hair, got some acne. And it was like, what the hell's going on?

And I remember, another trainer did the same thing. He went on a crazy cycle and he gained like five pounds of muscle, which isn't that much. And that brings me to this next myth that you're going to, you know, if you took steroids, you're just going to, just like, like, imagine it's like a guarantee. This one stings for me a little bit. And so this one's, this one's close to home for me a lot because not only did, did I learn the hard way,

but I've also probably done some serious, Dan, well, I know I've done damage to my natural testosterone levels because of this. And you know, forever have been, you know, working towards bringing those up naturally. And this was in my early 20s, I got to be maybe 23 at this time. And struggling, skinny kids still trying to build muscle, already been lifting at this time, about four years and I'm a trainer by this time and there's a

massive bodybuilder guy that's a trainer with me and He looks phenomenal and I looked to him for advice and he basically tells me oh you got it You got to get some juice, you know, you got to run some steroids. That's what you have right? I mean and at that and that point it was very easy to convince me that that's what was missing. Right? At that point in my trainer career, you know, I had some certifications under my belt. I've got some years of experience of lifting. I've got some years experience teaching. I think I know it all.

And I am 100% believe at this time in my career that the difference between the guys and the covers of Muscle Magazine or Men's Health even and me are that they have steroids and I don't. You know, other than that, I've got everything else I thought dialed and I was completely wrong and I remember the stack that he put me on it was ECOPOIS, Cessonon and Test and it was like a 900 something dollar, it was a bunch of money.

I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I let him write my whole stack and cycle for me, and I follow it like an idiot. And I mean, I was the strongest I'd ever been. I mean, every time I went to the gym, I was stronger and stronger and stronger, but I was also getting skinnier, I was getting leaner, and I couldn't figure it out. Like, I just could not put on any weight.

I wasn't putting any weight on. I was only getting stronger, and I remember at the end of this whole entire cycle, I think I put a total of about five pounds on, which was probably mostly water, because as soon as I came off of it, I went right back to where I was before. And that just devastated me because like I've had, we've had many kids probably ask us this on the show before about, you know, what if I just run one cycle? You know, if I run one cycle to help me put on my, put on some muscle mass and then I'll go back to being natural for that. Like, can I keep that muscle? And that was kind of my idea. I was like, okay, I don't really want to do steroids, but I'm going to need to do it to get to a certain muscle mass size.

And then I'll be natural from there. And it was one of the most deflating situations for me ever in my lifting career was to take all this stuff, to feel strong as an ox and a gym while I was on it. But then at the end of all of it, I didn't add any more muscle onto my body, and that was infuriating. Oh, totally.

And I wanna be clear, steroids definitely have an effect. It definitely can work, but by themselves, they don't do a lot. You're gonna notice an increase in libido, oilier skin, some hair loss, maybe some increases in strength, but it's not going to do much if it's not paired with an excellent workout routine and a good diet. If you have a shitty workout routine, you go on steroids, you're not going to get much out of them. They're not a miracle drug where you just take them and then you blow up.

And the guys that you see that are massive, lots and lots of muscle who are on steroids, they've been taking steroids for a very, very, very long time. And they've been following, you know, good routines for very, very long times. It is not a, it is absolutely not a guarantee for muscle. And I remember watching my buddy go on the cycle and, you know, I thought, oh, he's going to pass me up or whatever. Didn't even come close. And I remember thinking, this is terrible. Like, what's going on here? Yeah, what's the point at that point? Yeah, like, what's the whole point behind all of this stuff?

You know, there was that one video, that one TED talk that we saw where that guy was breaking down how athletes have over the years broken records and how we all think it's due to steroids. Demonstration. And he really broke sports. Yeah, he really broke it down to the fact that athletes are just, you know, there's the democratization of it where we rather than looking for a general athlete now, we look

for an athlete that's specifically good for particular sports and the technology of the equipment, the tracks, the shoes, the bike, that kind of stuff, really is attributed to most of the progress. What you see at the top of the food chain when it comes to athletes are hard training, very consistent, and extreme genetic anomalies. These people are just genetic freaks. It's not the steroids. You can take all the steroids in the world

And if you're just a regular person you'll be nowhere near What a professional athlete would be like or a professional body I could take all the steroids in the world and I wouldn't even come close to You know Ronnie Coleman or Phil Heath Those guys get a fact that genetics all kinds of other factors in there I mean it still does have a very potent effect You're getting facts, all kinds of other factors in there. I mean, it still does have a very potent effect beyond the fact that it's not like you're gonna take it

and nothing's gonna happen. I mean, this is why it's a banned substance in sports. It's something that is actually proven to help enhance the muscle building process, but it has to be done right. It's amazing how much it has to be done right. It's amazing how much it has to be done right. That one time wasn't the last time I did a cycle. I did many cycles after that attempting

to apply new methods thinking that, oh, and of course I did what probably a lot of people do in this path of, oh, it must have been the stack I took. I should try something else. So cycling through all the different types of testosterone and amounts that I was doing. I then began trying to troubleshoot and figure that out. And that must have been the reason why.

And the reality of it was, I just wasn't there yet. I wasn't there yet in my programming. I wasn't there yet on my nutrition. I wasn't there yet on my nutrition. And I thought so. That's the crazy part. And I think why I'm so passionate about having conversations like this is this was my career. I'm working towards being a personal trainer. I'm studying. I have the certifications. I'm teaching other people. I'm supposed to be very knowledgeable in this area. I think I know a lot or know it all at this point and yet This is an area that I was completely wrong and didn't realize how much more had to do with genetics Diet and programming and yeah if genetics diet and programming in place and you throw steroids on that

Oh my god Well, that's what you see when you see a professional bodybuilder or guys that look like this or look like they could be a professional bodybuilder And if they don't do it those guys have figured out all those other things in in addition to the steroids It wasn't the steroids that made them look like that and I think that's a major myth That a lot of people think and I fell for early on was oh i just need that and then that's going to take me there it's not that magical it's not at all now you take the average person you put them on steroids and they're going to be like what's not like this is this isn't what i thought it would be at all no now that takes me to the next one which uh... this

one's a tough one to explain because instinctually it seems like it would be totally true. This is the myth that the biggest, strongest, most muscular guy in the gym must know the most. They must know all the right information and that's the person that you need to go to for advice on training. And I get it, it's intuitive. You want to, you want to figure something out, you want to ask somebody that looks like they've figured it out themselves. And, you know, when you're a big muscular guy in the gym, you look like

you know what you're talking about. Obviously, I mean, look at the guys' arms and legs and look how strong they are. That person really knows what they're talking about. Sometimes that's true. A lot of times it's not's not oftentimes the biggest guy in the gym knows the least When it comes to training because oftentimes the biggest guy in the gym was born the biggest guy in the gym All right, you know, it's like the guy with the big calves never did the calf races The guy with the biggest cat It's always the guy that was born with them for sure, but I mean this one's this one's totally true. Like I remember you know I'd have trainers that

work for me in the gyms. I remember this one guy that worked from his porter. He wasn't even a trainer and the dude's arms were 18 inches you know super skull crushers with two twenty five you put two plates on a barbell and do school crushers and i'd watch this guy work out and his workouts were crap he would just go do random exercises and sets and then i'd watch his diet and he would have like to you he didn't make a lot of money so he would have like two cheeseburgers or lunch

he come in have a pop-tart'd have a cup of noodle for dinner. And I remember thinking, like, what the, you know, would it really what it was? I mean, his brother was a D1 football player. Really what it was was this guy had insane muscle building genetics. I mean, with his crappy training and diet, he was far beyond what I was with everything being perfectly dialed in. He didn't have a lot of great information. He just had, except his parents give him all the information that he needed with his genetics.

Yeah, right. I think we see examples of this all over like social media. You know, the most popular people are in the fitness community are the super buff incredible. And both this is male and female that have these incredible physiques and not to take credit from them like they don't work hard in the gym, but a lot of them could have almost done anything in the gym and would have looked really good. There's just some people that were meant to lift weights.

They have a very, you know, the, there's some auto type, the mess home or like where, you know, they put on muscle pretty easy, they can lose body fat, relatively easy. Uh, and they just, they were built to build muscle. They, they touch away and, and we've all had these clients. If you're a trainer and you're listening, you know, you've had clients that are just hyper responders, you know, they, you, you put them on a routine and like week over a week, they're just seeing gains and change. And it's amazing. And you know, those guys in the gym

that have those incredible physiques a lot of times, this is it. Or they've just figured out what works really well for them. And for them, you know, eating this certain way and training at this time and this hard and following this type of a workout program has just built the best physique for them ever. And they've been, and what we've talked about,

and we haven't addressed today, of all the things that are important, consistency is gonna win over everything. You know, we've taught, Sal, you've said this many times, what is it, an inferior program will superior when done consistently, right? Yeah, it's better than better programming when it's inconsistent.

Yeah. So if you know, a lot of times those physiques just speak to their consistency, you know, they've been lifting for 20 years in the gym and they're like, yeah, I've had three days off. You know, and so yeah, they have these great physical put. Does that mean that the advice or the information that they have for you and what you're trying to do more often than not it's it's not going to apply to that person because most people that are average body types and they're trying to work towards a goal have totally different problems or issues with seeing their results than that guy has ever had in his life.

Yeah, and it's no you're 100% right. There's such a big variance between individuals in terms of what is the right dose, what is the right exercises, how to apply the right exercises, what's the right diet, what types of foods they should eat, very different from person to person.

This is why the people with the best, most valuable information for you are people who have experience working with a wide variety of people. That's where you want to get your information. You want to get your information from the guy or girl who's trained, you know, a hundred everyday people or people that are a lot like you because they have experience working with so many different individuals that they're going to be able to give you and provide you the best information. One of the number one lessons you learn as a personal trainer is that, you know, not everything works for some people and for other people

doesn't work at all. And so you train one person and a routine, an application of diet and whatever works exceptionally well, then you apply to the next person, it's terrible. I feel like a half of personal training is detective work. And really, it's been able to tune in to what they respond to the best based off of every workout, every week after that of like what they've been eating and how we can adjust and tweak and modify things. And the closer you get to honing into that frequency, that very specific blueprint for that

one person, that's when they really take off. And unfortunately, you don't really get that right away. When you get that right away, they tend to be those hyper responders. They tend to be those kinds of people that you can almost throw anything at and they're going to start getting muscle. But for the average person, it tends to be in my experience. It takes a lot more time to unlock that. Now, the last one is, I would say, and I'm glad we left it last, because I would

say that this one is the most recent for me. And I think that I think that just has a lot to do with youth. And when you're young, you are more resilient and can get away with more shit. And I avoided the, you know, exercises that were, you know, deemed woman's exercises. And that encompasses everything from hip thrust to lunges, to, you know, mobility work, yoga stretching, all the things that as a young, you know, testosterone-filled boy who wants to build muscle, had no, I didn't have time for that shit. Yeah. Uh, and famine in for me. And that,

and that probably stuck with me, uh, through most all of my 20s. And it probably wasn't till I was closer to 30 and had already had, uh, knee surgery, uh, and, you know, the aches and pains were starting to creep up. And I think that's what originally drove me in this direction to start digging a little deeper into these tedious what I thought were girly movements that I wasn't doing and started applying that. But again, like everything else that we keep talking about,

applying that. But again, like everything else that we keep talking about, once I did the carryover that I saw into my physique, into how I felt, my strength, my overall energy, and everything improved when I threw out that myth. It's so funny to me because, you know, as guys, we can sometimes be predictable, right? So we'll think something is, you know, oh, that's for girls or that's for women. You know, I'm not gonna do that. It's not, it has no value. And then some like, you know,

superhero guy or strong dude does it. And then all of a sudden, all the guys think it's okay now. Like I'll give you a couple of examples. Arnold Schwarzenegger, right? You know, seven-time Mr. Olympia and in bodybuilding posing is a big part of competition your ability to present your body well he signed up for ballet ballet classes you can actually see this in pumping iron and everybody build her after that did it everybody

builder after that all of a sudden everybody's going to ballet classes to learn how to be a better poser. I'll give you another example. When I first started working out, lunges was considered a female exercise. I don't know a single guy that would do a lunge. A lunge was a sculpting exercise. Oh, don't waste your time on that.

That's so stupid, whatever. Well, fast forward, Ronnie Coleman, doing walking lunges in the parking lot of the you know the gym that he would work out in Texas. And of course Ronnie Coleman had the most insane looking legs and glutes and he was you know the winning it most winning it's bodybuilder or Mr. Olympia of all time. Next thing you know I'm saying dudes do walking lunges all over the place. Now all of a sudden, it's this amazing phenomenal mass building muscle with the exercise.

The funny thing is split stance squats and lunges done by weight lifters forever. Weight lifters who are hoisting 500 pounds above their head have been doing that exercise forever, but nobody was paying attention to them. As soon as Ronnie Coleman does it, all of a sudden, oh, that's not really anymore. That's something that we should all do. It's so silly to me. In my opinion, one of the real marks of, when people say, what does it mean to be a man or what does it mean, whatever, it's not being afraid to try new things and to see if it

works and not care what everybody else thinks. And here's the thing, yoga, mobility work, those things have tremendous value for everybody. I don't care if you're a male or female. If your goal is to build muscle, if your goal is to improve your physique and your fitness, then you better do those mobility movements, those exercises that maybe don't seem as cool because the carryover is absolutely massive. So to me, this one's just so funny to me. It's like the exercises don't have a gender, you know?

It's funny, dude. And I could totally take myself back to when I was playing sports and when I was like trying to be a Mr. Tough Cool guy. You never wanted to admit when you're hurt either, right? Like, this is a problem too. I think a lot of men's like, don't want to go to the doctor. They don't want to get checked out.

They don't want to, like, you don't want to have somebody assess like your weaknesses or, you know, something that I can work on that looks silly that will actually make everything perform better if it looks silly. Like, you just like ignore it. make everything perform better if it looks silly. You just ignore it. And it's this sort of I can work through the pain. It's just gonna kind of take care of itself, but this is a kind of a mentality.

A lot of me, my friends shared growing up. And so taking that into training was just naturally, well, if I have a shoulder pain or whatever, maybe I'll just lighten the weight for a bit, but it's gonna work itself out. It's gonna work its way out. And it took me a long time to naturally like, well, if I have a shoulder pain or whatever, maybe I'll just lighten the weight for a bit, but it's going to work itself out. It's going to work its way out. And it took me a long time to really like put my ego aside and start really understanding that, oh, wow, when I actually put attention to really good, solid priming type warm-up

before I get to heavy lifting, It makes a massive difference in performance. I feel stable, I feel connected, I feel so many more improvements when I'm actually lifting heavy weight. So if I started to look at it more as a performance enhancement, as opposed to like I'm trying to mend something that's weak or failing.

Well, the irony in cell you said it,, the exercise doesn't know the difference between gender. And the irony of this is that men would benefit from this probably more than most of my women clients. If I look back at all the different people that I train and I separate men and women and we're talking about flexibility and mobility and having good range of motion. My men were far more limited than most of my women when I first got them. So the irony of this point is that,

yeah, it doesn't know the difference in gender, but I'll tell you right now that most men listening are gonna probably benefit from this advice more than even women would, just because most most men are stubborn most men are falling in the other mess lifting heavy short and range of motion up tight low backs tight hips and they got all this all this shit going on and like Justin was saying don't want to go to the doctor don't want to tell anybody about it want to just work through the pain and really what it is is they they've got issues, joint mobility issues that they need to address.

And if they would really just take the time to do these boring ass little exercises to get you primed and ready to go before you lift, you would then see what a difference it makes in your overall relief of pain, your overall strength, your ability to move through a greater range of motion, which then in turn builds more muscle. Like the benefits are tremendous, but it's one of those things. Again, of all the things we've talked about, this one took the longest for me.

And probably because of the stubbornness and there's not a bunch of science and research to say that doing mobility exercises will build more muscle than lifting six reps or 12 reps or intensity or all the other things that we tend to focus on. But what I didn't realize was how much my lack of mobility was really hindering my overall performance and results. And it wasn't until I started to apply that and see the carryover from applying that that

I really just was mind blowing for me. Yeah, totally. There are no, you know, male or female exercises or techniques. There are some that are better than others, and then there are ones that are right for you and ones that are not right for you. And that's it. That's the bottom line. And with that, go to mindpumpfree.com, download all of our guides, resources and books. They're

all totally free. You can also find your three favorite podcasts, those of all time on Instagram. You can find Justin at MindPump Justin. You can find me at MindPumpSale and Adam at MindPump Adam. Thank you for listening to MindPump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at MindPumpMedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballad, maps performance and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased, expert exercise programming designed by Sal, Adam and Justin to systematically

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