Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1312: Eight Ways to Boost Strength Fast

Episode Date: June 11, 2020

In this episode, Sal, Adam & Justin reveal eight concrete steps you can take to increase your strength quickly. If you’re getting stronger, it’s always good news. (3:27) Eight ways to improve your strength gains. (6:50) #1 - Proper Priming. (8:48) #2 – Change up your Programming. (16:35) #3 – Increase your Mobility. (23:06) #4 – Bump up your Calories. (27:45) #5 – Practice the Skill frequently. (31:18) #6 - Variable Resistance. (38:21) #7 – STOP training to failure. (42:26) #8 – Frequency is King! (47:26) Related Links/Products Mentioned June Promotion: MAPS HIIT ½ off! **Promo code “HIIT50” at checkout** Visit Four Sigmatic for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Code “mindpump” at checkout Mind Pump #1057: How To Get Stronger For Fat Loss & Muscle Building Exercise For More Than Just Aesthetics – Mind Pump Blog Is Warming Up Before A Workout Necessary? - Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump #1095: How To Break Through A Plateau How Phasing Your Workouts Leads to Consistent Plateau Free Workouts – Mind Pump Blog Will Implementing Mobility Exercises Help Increase My Muscle Mass? - Mind Pump Blog Is Mobility Important For Working Out? - Mind Pump Blog Stop Working Out And Start Practicing – Mind Pump Blog 3 Tips for Better Muscle Growth – Mind Pump Blog Are You Spending Hours in the Gym and Still Not Putting on Muscle? - Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump Podcast - YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND with your hosts. Saldas Defano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. In this episode of Mind Pump the World's Top, Fitness, Health, and Entertainment podcast, we talk all about the number one foundational physical pursuit, strength. Strength is one of the most important things you can focus on when you're working out in the gym. Doesn't matter what your goal is,

if you're trying to burn body fat, if you're trying to build muscles, sculpt your body. If your strength is going up, that means good news. It's objective, it means things are working. So in this episode, we give you the eight ways that you can boost your strength fast. We talk about everything from priming to programming, mobility, we talk about food, we talk about exercises

and which ones to do, we talk about how to change the resistance, we talk about training to failure. I mean, we go through all of it, break it down for you. If you listen to this episode and you apply what we talk about, you will get stronger. Now this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, ForSigmatic.

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that's F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com, 4-slash MindPump, use the code, MindPumpet checkout for 15% off. Also, this month, Maps hit is 50% off so hit stands for high intensity interval training This is a fat burning program ladies and gentlemen this program was designed to burn the maximum amount of body fat in a short period of time Now is it it is advanced? So it's not for beginners and you should not be following this program all the time It's a six-week program,

six weeks, burn lots of body fat, lots of calories. After that, phase out and do another maps program. Anyhow, it's half off. So here's how you get the discount. Just go to mapshit.com. That's MAPSHIT.com and use the code hit50. That's H-I-I-T-5-0, no space for the discount. What do you guys think is one of the most important metrics that you can measure in terms of your strength? Wow, good job, Justin. What you gotta hijack that, dude? It's because, huh?

I mean, it's obvious. No, it's true, strength. I think if you're training, when you're training a client, it's the one thing that if it improves, it's almost always a good sign. And if it improves and you're getting leaner, if you're trying to build muscle, if you're trying to improve mobility,

whatever the goal is, if you're stronger in a real way, what I mean by real is you're not cheating to lift more weight or using a weight belt all of a sudden, that you can lift more weight real is you're not like cheating to lift more weight or using, you know, a weight belt all of a sudden that you can lift more weight, but you're actually legitimately stronger. That's always, always good news. Yeah, sons are working. It's not bias either. Right? When you, when you, objective, yeah, and when you look at things like the scale and the mirror, which we've talked, and we've talked about this on the show at Nazim. I mean, it's one of the worst

things that you can do as a trainer, as a coach, is to utilize that as your main guiding tool for a client, is looking at the scale or looking at the mirror, because there is, there's too many variables that come into play and that can mess with somebody's head, and it is a much better pathway to just measure strength, because if we are getting stronger, we know that our programming is in line at least bare minimum.

There's a good chance our diets probably better also, and we're seeing results, we're building muscle. Yep, it's objective. You are, and this is, when I used to train kids, this was my favorite thing to communicate, you know, when I'd have them come in, and I would always write down how many reps they did, or how much weight they lifted,

and I'd make sure that to show them So I made a big deal about it then they come in the following week and Inevitably, you know, they're a little bit stronger and then I'd tell them Your body's not the same bodies it was last week. It is different. You did one more rep or you lifted five more pounds You have improved Objectively because you're right use the mirror The mirror lies to you or at least our perception of what the mirror, the mirror lies to you, or at least our perception of what we see in the mirror lies to us.

I mean, how many times have you had a client that, you know, they'll look at an old picture of themselves and they'll be like, man, I can't believe I used to think I was fat, you know, and because your perception can be so skewed, but strength is objective and it's almost always good news. In fact, I can't even think of when it would be bad news, unless your goal was to get weaker, I can't think of a time when getting stronger would not be considered a great news.

What's the byproduct of having a stronger body? It looks better. That's just the, it inevitably happens. It looks better, it moves better, it functions better, it serves you better, so you have more abilities, you can do more things. Because strength is objective, and you have more abilities, you can do more things. Because strength is objective, and because increasing your strength,

typically means that you are on the path to building more muscle, on the path to speeding up your metabolism, or at least not, the metabolism not slowing down, let's say you're dieting, let's say you're cutting body fat. One of the biggest problems with that is, metabolism starts to adapt and starts to slow down. This white gets harder and harder over time

and why people tend to get the way back. One of the reasons why. When one strength goes up, that's a good sign. It means your metabolism's probably not slowing down. If you're getting stronger, it means that your hormones are probably balanced or closer to being balanced. It means that sleep may be good. It means that your health, if your health is poor,

you're not gonna get stronger. So now that we've really made the case for strength and that it's so important, I think that's the one thing you should almost always pay attention to and focus on. Yeah, we're all saying all the positive things too. There's also the other side of that, which is if you're not seeing strength gains,

there's also things to probably be looking at. There's many times where people are working hard in the gym, they're sweating and they're following something consistently and they feel like they're doing really well, but their strength is either stayed the same or in some cases even declining. And so part of the thing about going after what you want to talk about today, which is like all the different ways to improve strength. This is also ways for you to assess and look at what you're currently doing if you're not seeing strength gains.

So here's some great tips on how to improve strength gains, but also here's some areas you should look into if you're not seeing strength gains. Right. And then these are in no specific, necessarily no specific order. But these are things that you can focus on that will improve your strength gains. So if you're getting stronger now and you're listening to the podcast, these things will get you there a little bit faster likely. If you're not getting stronger, these things can definitely get you to get stronger.

And again, I want to emphasize this. Doesn't matter if your goal is fat loss, sculpting, shaping, toning, building. It really doesn't matter what your fitness goal is, improving your strength in real ways is good for all of those goals. And remember, strength is the foundational physical pursuit. Good strength gives you more endurance, gives you more stamina, more agility, more power. So if you're an athlete

and you improve your strength appropriately and properly and you continue to practice your skills and do all that stuff. So it's not like you cut out of the things out, but you actually improved your strength on top of what you're doing, you're gonna perform better. Okay, so the first thing I wanna, the first tip I think is proper priming. Now this one, I didn't get until much later on in my career. I remember the first time I kind of figured this out. When I was a kid, lifting weights,

it's not, this is not such a big deal these days. It's still kind of is, but not as big as when I was a kid. But when I was a kid, especially if you're a guy, the one lift that everybody measured their performance by was the bench press. Yeah. Nobody cared about anything else. It was like, yeah, so you work out how much do you, but nobody cared how much you overhead press, nobody cared. Nobody even knew how much they did lifted. Squats didn't mean anything. Why did that come from? Because I remember being a kid who knew nothing

about really working out at all. But that was like my first experience, but I remember I was in high school. And my buddy Ryan, his dad had a little gym set up in the garage and all we did was bench. We did a little bit of armed stuff too. But it was all we cared about was out of the three of us who could bench more.

That's probably why because back then, it was only the bench with that little attachment that you could put the barbell on. You didn't have a squat rack. Nobody really had all that setup at their house. And so I remember going to people's houses and their outdoor and their backyard. That's what they had. They had, you know, a bench and they had dumbbells. And that was it. So it almost became like the standard of, well, how, how much weight

can stack on there? Dude, it was totally the standard. It was how you measured how awesome you were with your friends, how effective your work. I was all about bench press. Yeah. Who is the strongest, right? Like whoever had the most bench, we just assume that he's stronger. You're the strongest. So, overall. So here I am as a kid, bench pressing, and I'm really focused on getting that weight to go up

because of course I think it's the most important thing in the world. So I'm pushing and pushing, and I got stuck. And I remember what number I got stuck at. I think it was like, I don't remember, 600 times. I was like, 200, 275. It was 200 something. And I'm young at this point, and I couldn't get the bar

to move anymore, couldn't figure out what was going on. And I'm reading muscle and fitness, and, or Flex Magazine, one of those two. And at the back of it, there's a picture of a dude with his arms up at like 90 degrees with this like plastic thing supporting his arms, and it was called the shoulder horn. It was the name of the device. What?

And it was used to strengthen the muscles of the rotator cuff. And so the guy is holding dumbbells and his arms are... Oh, it externally rotated up and down. Yes. And his arms are sitting in this blue device that held his arms up. That's true in that, yeah. It was called the shoulder horn. Now, here's why I caught my attention, brilliant marketing and true marketing.

It actually said in there, guaranteed way to get your bench press to go up. So I was like, I don't care about shoulder mobility, I don't care about priming, I don't care about anything. Oh, there it is. Oh, now I remember this. That's a picture of it right there.

Oh, I remember this now, guys. I remember it. Yeah, people in gym, that's it. Right, so I thought, oh, this gets my bench press to go up. Now, being the person I am, I learned how it worked, saved some money and just duplicated the exercise at home by putting my arm up on a bench or whatever.

So I practiced this exercise right before I did a bench press. I didn't understand really that I was gonna be strengthening muscles or whatever. I just thought, because the way the ad looked, that if you do this right before you bench, you're stronger, okay? This is my first experience with priming. Didn't that know I was priming? Didn't know any of that stuff.

My first experience. So I do it. I do this movement in my backyard with my arms and I kind of feel a weird burn on my shoulder. Can't figure out what's going on. I go to bench press and I broke my plateau. I actually added five pounds to my bench press. Simply from doing that was totally blown away. That became a trick that I would use as a

trainer later on. When clients would come in and want to increase their bench, I'd have them prime the rotator cuff, then we'd do a bench and low and behold, they were strong. Because you have a more stable, shorter joint to work with. Yes. And that's a huge component to working out that I think a lot of people just don't even realize as part of the process. Especially when you do compound lifts where you do have to stabilize all the rest of the limbs and the joints of your body even going in to performing the exercise. So it's something to really consider is to wake up those muscles that are gonna

like add in more stability to the joint that you're really working on. I remember, Sal, my first experience of priming, and again, like you, not knowing what I was doing. And so when I first started getting lifting, it was all about split, right? You just Chess Day, Back Day, Arm Day, did that for years.? You just chest day, back day, arm day, did that for years.

And one day my buddy, and he must have been reading of one of the popular magazines, and he says, you know, let's combine these muscle groups together and let's do chest and back together. And we started with back. Now, in theory, I'm thinking, okay, I was used to doing just chest all by itself. I'm now going to exercise my back first. I'm going to be sweaty and tired a little bit. So when I get to chest, I'm

probably not going to be very strong. And so in my head, I was already working up to be prepared for that. But I had one of the best bench days I ever had in my life, because we did back first. Now, as a kid, that didn't, it just didn't compute to me. I didn't understand it. Now, later a kid, that didn't just didn't compute to me. I didn't understand it. Now, later on, I get what I did, what ended up happening was, I primed all my back muscles. I got them in a position that hold my shoulder girdle in the correct position. So, I would bench with better form and technique. And as a result of that, I had one of my best chest lifts I've ever had

in my life. Yes. And now, you may be wondering, how is that possible? Did you build more muscle in that short period of time? No, your body has safeguards that prevents you from lifting more weight if it senses that you're unstable or you may hurt yourself, okay? If I put knee wraps on my knees before I squat, I am going to squat 10 to 15 more pounds than without the knee wraps.

Now why? What are the knee wraps doing? Now there's a little bit of than without the knee wraps. Now why? What are the knee wraps doing? Now there's a little bit of spring that the knee wraps provide, but is it adding 15 pounds on my squat? No. What it's doing is it's sending a signal to my body, my central nervous system, which communicates to my muscles that says, it's a little safer to exert more power. That's right.

So proper priming before your workout, and by the way, this is an important point to make with priming. It needs to be individualized. Now, I just so happen to prime my rotator cuff, which is what I needed. Adam just so happen to prime his back before benching, which is just exactly what he needed. You have to prime your body appropriately. But if you do it, you're going to exert more strength and power.

Now, how does that translate into real strength and power later on? Well, now you're lifting better. You're going to build more muscle. You use more tension and you get better results. Proper priming is a very, very fast and easy way to lift more weight. I look at it as a leak. This is, you know, somewhere in your body in the kinetic chain where there's a leak of potential performance.

So if my joint is just a little bit unstable, and that's sending feedback immediately to my body, I am not going to be able to utilize that amount of force that I can generate. And so the more I can then provide that feedback and really get access to more stability in that joint, it's gonna send that back, I'm gonna be able to unleash a lot more force to output,

which then again, that translates to strength. And I know this is a little bit more on, you know, the physics end of it, but if people could realize that you can generate a lot of force, it's just a matter of, you know, how you distribute it and how effectively I can stabilize my body to use it. Oh, totally.

I mean, you fire a bullet down a gun if there's a hole in the barrel, that gun ain't going to go as fast because the energy is going to get dispersed somewhere else. So priming makes a huge difference. The next one, I'll tell another story to illustrate this next one, which it has to do with you programming. Change up your programming. Now when I was younger, again, I'm reading the magazines. I'm reading the mass building

tips in Flex Magazine, I'm reading how to gain maximum size and Ironman, and all of them say lift weights for low reps, all of them, six reps, five reps, heavy weight, that's the only way to build mass. Now I'm a skinny kid, I'm a hard gainer, right? I'm the classic Ectomorph. And all I want to do is gain size. I could care less about six pack abs. I could care less about definition in my body. I wanted size. So I didn't do anything other than what the magazine said would build size in my body, which was super low reps, heavy, heavy, heavy weight. Now, doing this after a while, you just stop working. Nothing was working more. Now I blame my genetics.

I thought it was my genes. I thought to myself, oh, this is because I'm just naturally skinny and I don't respond like everyone else. Then I read this article, but I can't remember the name of the body builder, but he advocated for doing 15 to 20 reps and he looked phenomenal. Of course, as a kid, all the evidence I needed was someone looking buffed, which gives a thought.

Then you went there a timeout. So I read this article, like the way the guys physique looked. I think in the article, he talked about how he was skinny growing up. So I thought, oh, this might work for me. I gave it a shot. Blue my mind, because I went from six reps to 15 reps, my strength and muscle went through the roof. Very, very simple change in programming, and it's because my body had gotten so used to

a particular stress, it no longer needed or thought it needed to adapt to it. It just didn't respond to it anymore, so I changed the stress, changed the stimulus, and my body changed, and it was all about changing my exercise programming. I remember learning that lesson with like every part too, like everything from, you know, tempo to rest periods to, I mean, and I think it took almost all of those

before it came full circle for me that like, oh, I get it. This is, because each time as a young kid, it was like, I had the exact same story as you. I was, you know, falling all the left heavyweight to build muscle I'd been do training in the sixth rep range for like two three years straight some big buff trainer guy Tells me to lift 15 reps. I do it. It blows my mind. I get all these strength gains I pack on some muscle so then I'm convinced it's the high reps right that's the answer

Yeah, yeah, so it took me a few times of like changing all those variables within my programming to realize like, oh, the real answer is I need to be consistently moving my programming around and not allowing my body to get too adapted to this same exact way of lifting for too long. And so that is definitely one of those paradigm shattering moments in my fitness career of piecing all that together. And this, even though we put this as number two, this tends to be one of the go to things when somebody has got a hard plateau and they come to me and they're like, Adam, I'm being consistent, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. And they seem to be doing a lot of the right things. One of the first things that I always just,

you know, switched their programming up, I ask, what are you currently doing right now? And then to show them the greatest change, I typically take them on the other end of the spectrum wherever they may be, whether they be somebody who leans more towards the high-wraps, supersetting, low rest period type of person or they're on the other end of the spectrum, like I was three minute rest periods, six reps and really heavy. I normally like to send them on the other end of the spectrum. That normally shows them like, well, what a change that can be. Now programming represents all of the things that make up your workout. So Adam named a bunch of them, right? The tempo. So how fast or slow you lift the

weight? How many reps you do? We talked about that one. How many sets that you do? The exercises that you do, the exercise order that you do, the body parts that you work together, what days you work out, you can even change the time of day of your workout. And that's a small factor, but believe it or not, sometimes just changing that gets things to move a little bit.

The reason why we have, by the way, so many different maps, programs, although each one of them has a particular avatar like this person's, you know, interested in athletic performance, this person's interested in bodybuilding, whatever, the reality is, most of you will get great results if you go through all of them. And the reason why you get the best results long term, I'm talking about long term, the reason why you get the best results long term going through all of them, because all of them change your programming. They all get your body to move forward

by using different stimulus each time. So changing your program, if you're stuck at a plateau with your strength, sometimes all you need to do is change up a fat one or two things in your exercise programming, and then you start to see things move again. And to add to that point, something that a mistake that I think I made for a long time is,

okay, all this came together for me. And then I became the guy who showed up the gym and just changed it up every day all the time. So, no structure. Right, with no real structure or rhyme or reason, just in fact, the rhyme or reason behind it was, you know, I'll never duplicate the same workout. I want my body to constantly be guessing, right?

And the muscle confusion idea. And it's not that that is bad. It's just less ideal. And it's not very methodical. You'd be far better off with being more structured about how you change your routine. So I know there's people that are, and the reason why I wanna make that point is,

because I know there's people listening that are probably like me, where they're like, oh, I always change up my program. I'm always, you know, just yesterday I did high reps, and I did this, and today I'm doing this. And so in their head, okay, they're changing, their exercises, they're changing all these things up, but they're not doing it in any sort of order,

or it's really tough to measure and track your results that you're getting from the change. Now, specificity still applies. I mean, this is something that can't be ignored and this is something that the body responds according to the amount of stimulus that it's trying to understand. It's trying to like learn this language, this way to move, to effectively produce what you're trying to get out of it. And so you have to allow for enough time

for your body really to respond and react. And then you then look about staying ahead of the plateau that's inevitably going to occur once you start to fully adapt to that. Yeah, you're gonna have a program before you can change it, in another word. So the next one, this one, it's funny. A lot of times people don't think about how mobility affects their strength.

When they think mobility, people think flexibility, lack of pain, but the reality is better mobility makes it so that you can lift more weight. It makes it so that you're much stronger. So it's like rolling on a skateboard with nice, grease-up polyurethane wheels versus rolling on a skateboard, like one of those old-school ones with metal wheels and it gets stuck on the little rocks.

You're gonna go faster with the skateboard that's got the oiled up polyurethane wheels that don't stop when they hit a rock and they just go real, real smooth mobility or good mobility allows you to generate that smooth force. It allows you to go through your squat, your body doesn't pick up, uh oh, pain signal, uh oh, we need to kind of reduce strength here

because there's a little bit of danger. Uh oh, we're unstable. Think about it this way. If you're, when you're lifting something up in a straight line, if your body moves one way or another too much, now you're exerting force trying to control that way. Good mobility gives you the best possible way to exert that force.

And that turns into real gains, real strength. Well, not only that, it's also increased range of motion, right? Which is, that's just like comparing it to a galsling or a baseball swing. What do you think is going to be better for distance on hitting a ball if you have a half swing or a full swing? Think of it like that. And so, and it's not that you can't hit a ball forward and actually make progress with a half swing. Yeah, sure you can, but you're not maximizing your benefits by increasing your mobility, you're increasing your range of motion, which then will increase your strength.

Well, also, like these exercises have a very specific technique where you want to place your body in specific angles to give you optimal force output. And so to be able to produce that, you have to have the mobility, the familiarity in that position to where you can now have access to strength in that range of motion. And I think mobility, a lot of people do get that confused a lot with flexibility, but what we're talking about is access to strength in an extended range of motion. So to me, it should have been number two, just because it goes, it's hand in hand with stability, mobility, and stability.

I mean, that's like the two shared similar qualities, but also are equally important in terms of being able to provide proper technique and then stabilize that technique as you're going through it. Right, and you guys are talking about, we're talking about strength right now, right? We're not just talking about how much weight you can lift. We're also talking about how broad that strength range is. So what I mean by that is, you know, which

person has better strength, the person that can half squat 300 pounds or the person that can full squat 300 pounds, right? You want a broad range of strength. When the person who can full squat 300 pounds adds 50 pounds to a squat, he or she is gonna build more muscle than the person that adds 50 pounds to the half squat. Because that 50 pounds that they've added is over a larger range of motion. That broad range strength is what produces the best results

improving your mobility improves all of that. Now, so I'll give you an example, right? I've worked with clients where they can't go below parallel with the barbell squat. And let's say that they're stuck at 150 pounds for 10 repetitions. Now I could add weight to their squat and keep their range of motion the same.

Or I can work on the mobility. Now 150 pounds, they can squat two inches below parallel. Did they get stronger? Yes, they did. They used the same amount of weight as before, but they went two inches lower with better control. That is more strength. So working on mobility, and it's funny, you know,

with this whole shutdown thing that's happened with COVID and all that stuff, we've been preaching mobility, because mobility work doesn't require any equipment, usually just requires your body. And we have a program called Maps Prime Pro that works a lot on mobility and we've had people who are strength athletes who are like, I don't have access to a gym. So they've been focusing on mobility for like six weeks. And I'm now getting reports from them coming back and they're like I wouldn't I did not believe it but I went back to the gym and two or three

weeks after I got back to the gym not only am I at where I was before in terms of strength I'm going past where I was before and it's all because I had better mobility because I had no choice but to focus on it. So mobility is very very important for strength. Now the next one, this one is one that I've had to communicate more often to female clients than to male clients. This one was sometimes can be a difficult one to convince a female client to do, but they're always very happy when they finally agree and follow through. Increase your calories.

Bump your calories. Sometimes your strength gains aren't coming, not because your workout isn't good, not because you don't have a good program or you're not priming properly, but because you're not fueling your body with enough of the building blocks that your body needs to build strength.

And again, I'll use my female, I had one client in particular that's popping in mind. I remember she, very consistent. She was very, very consistent with her workouts, showed up every session, also worked out on her own, really, really, really got into it. Loved being lean, she would walk around at about 15% body fat, which for a woman is exceptionally lean.

It's pretty lean. She's got like strided arms, and you can pretty much see her midsection, her abs or whatnot. And she just, you know, she loved being lean. But she also wanted to get strong. You know, I had finally convinced her we'd been working out for a while. That strength is important. She kind of liked getting stronger. She was totally stuck and I said, listen, you're lean.

Let's bump your calories. Oh, I don't want to get anybody fat. I said, don't worry. Let's bump your calories and let's watch what happens. And I finally convinced her, she bumped her calories. I think we bumped her up like 250 calories. Strength went through the roof. She gained muscle.

Her body fat percentage went down. Now why did go down? Not because she lost body fat, but because her weight went up in muscle mass. And so the same amount of body fat she had before now was a lower percentage of her overall body. And at that point, she was convinced. Then she was okay with bumping her calories.

She liked the strength, and she liked the curves, and the muscle she built from it. Bumping calories is something that oftentimes needs to be communicated to people because they're afraid of gaining body fat. But when you bump your calories, especially if you really, really well, and you're working out well,

sometimes that's the one piece that's missing that will give you the strength. Well, this is paired with, I mentioned that one of my favorite go-to's is the changing the program, right? There's one of the easiest things I can do is assess what somebody is currently doing, change their programming up.

If I pair that with bumping calories, this is like the go-to move. If you're somebody who's been following a certain routine, you've been stuck at a strength plateau, you haven't broke through it, switching programming and boosting calories the same time, one of the quickest, easiest ways to show somebody strength gains.

And I feel like we have had this discussion more often than not. And I think it's because we've talked about, it is possible still to build strength in a calorie deficit. If a client comes, they haven't been lifting weights at all. I introduced them into a training program, even though their main goal may be to lose body fat and so we're in somewhat of a caloric deficit, they can see strength gains.

But eventually that ends up, the body adapts and they hit a plateau. And muscle we talk about this all the time is an expensive tissue. So you're, you're expending, you're spending money, but then you're not reinvesting or putting money back in the savings account. And that's what you need to do in order sometimes to see the strength continue to go up. It's simply just bumping the calories. And it doesn't take a lot, you know, just evaluate where you currently are and give yourself a boost or do like a like what we encourage people to do a lot, which are these

mini cuts and mini bulks. Just run a calorie surplus for two or three weeks while also changing up your programming at the same time and more often than not, you'll see a nice surge in strength just from those two things alone. Now, the next one is also very important and this one, it took me a while to really figure this out. I used to always think growing up and probably in the, I'd say the first, at least the first half of my career as a personal trainer,

I thought strength was just brute muscle force. I thought your big muscles generate more force and that's what makes you stronger. I had no idea that strength was as much of a skill as it was just having bigger muscles. Now, it's funny because I learned this lesson or I didn't learn this lesson, but I observed this over and over and over again with my dad.

My dad, you know, he's not a huge guy, physically very, very strong, and we would, I would go to work with him in the summer as a kid and He would for fun at lunchtime. He'd do things. I could lift up a sledgehammer You know one handed at the with the extended at the handle or he'd do these things with shovels and I'd try them out I couldn't figure out what was going on. Why can't I do this? I lift weights. I think I'm I can lift more than my dad Why can't I do this and it didn't occur to me that he had the skill of doing those things because he practiced them so often. Sometimes, especially if you want to get specifically stronger in the lift, especially if you just want to get stronger

like bench press, squat, and deadlift, maybe you're a powerlifter, just performing those things better will make you stronger. And the way you do that, the best way to do that is to practice them often. Practice them frequently. That are training that work from me once, who I would see him do this in between clients sometimes. He'd train a client and then you know, a client would be gone if you have 10 minutes. He'd load the bar up with two or three plates and he'd do like five reps on the bench. He'd put it up and then he'd go train a client. He'd do this throughout the whole day and I remember thinking, what a waste of time.

He's not going, he's not like working out hard, he's not getting a good pump or a good sweat. But yet this dude's bench was like through the roof and he told me, he got to practice, just practice lifts. So when you do this, you don't wanna do this with super, I mean, I'll give you another example, you wanna get good at pull-ups, practice doing one or two pull-ups, you know, a few times a day. Let's You want to get good at pull-ups? Practice doing one or two pull-ups a few times a day.

Let's say you can only do five pull-ups. Don't do five pull-ups every time. Do one or two. Just practice it throughout the day. Watch what happens. That frequent practice of the exercise gets you so good at it that you get stronger at that particular level.

Yeah, I remember being in the gym, and I consider myself pretty strong. And I've worked on barbell training pretty much my entire sports career and coming into a gym where they're lifting with kettlebells. And this is like the first time that I really started to pay attention to how different that was, how different of a load that was going to overhead press, because one of my friends could press like 115 pound kettlebell, and I'm like, well, he's not that much stronger than me at any

other lift. I'm actually stronger than him at bench press. I'm stronger than him at overhead press, you know, with the barbell, but it just baffled me. I just couldn't wrap my brain around why I was having such a hard time lifting, you know, this object that felt like just a lead canon ball. And it literally just amounted to the amount of times that I had to practice that specific lift and my body to respond accordingly, stabilize, you know, my joint and perform it correctly

to where then I started to feel really capable, really capable and my body felt comfortable, you know, pressing that weight. And before you know it, you know, a couple of months later, I could then attempt the same amount of weight and it was just a matter of time. So yeah, it really amounts to the amount of times that you put effort and concentration

and practice around these techniques. It seems silly to me how long this one came for me. Like it took a long time before I peace it. And the reason why it seemed silly to me is because like Justin, I played sports a lot growing up and there was tons of examples of this around me in sports. I would never think that shooting a basketball for two hours one day is better than me shooting

a basketball for 20 or 30 minutes every single day or every other day is good. Or, you know, I wouldn't go swing a bat as hard as I possibly can for one hour and then not do it again for another week before I do it and to think I would make great improvements on that. So why is it so different? I think I just separated exercise from like skilled type sports, but yet bench squat deadlift over it. These are high skill movements, just like these athletic movements that I would practice in sports all time to get good at

it. Or like the analogy I think Sal, you've used before with language. We would never try and we'll try and learn and cram a language in one sitting. It would be far better off from breaking it up in doses and becoming more frequent with it. And that's how the body learns and all of that ends up contributing into your performance inside the gym. So it's baffles me how long this took me to really realize this. But boy, was this a game changer when I started to stop and for me it was like squatting like I dreaded leg day, but part of why I dreaded leg day because leg day was an hour and a half work out in the gym that I just hammered the shit out of myself and then I wouldn't have any desire to want to do it again because I'd be sore all week long and I was almost threw up in that workout and so I never really got that much better at squatting. Until I pulled

the load off, I dropped, I reduced the volume significantly, I reduced the intensity, and then I started to just approach it like, hey, you know what, I'm going to try and get good at squatting. Forget the weight, forget trying to be the strongest guy in the gym or trying to pack on a ton of muscle. Let me first just see if I can get good at this movement and then I could start to really start to apply The weight and the training. Yeah, you ever see I mean it's a massive stark difference for me to see somebody that's going through an Exercise like a squat and it looks effortless versus somebody who's like really trying to struggle and keep everything together and You know, you just see immediately where there's a performance loss. And technique is so much of a higher importance than people realize.

And this is why you see like Olympic lifting, why some of the best in the world, it looks like they just threw the weight up there and barely even struggled through it. It's because they've mastered that technique at such a high level. It's a skill. It's the old man's strength. This is what old man's strength is. When you've got your 50 year old dad wrestling is 18 year old son, they're both the same body weight.

But for whatever reason, 50 year old dad is man handling him and he can't figure it out and they call it old man's strength. Well, because he's been in that body a lot longer. It's just got more skill. It knows a lot more than you. Exactly. So practice frequently, some of these main lifts to improve your strength in them. Now, when you're practicing them frequently,

that also means you have to reduce the intensity a little bit. You can't hammer these exercises every single day. That'll cause you to over train. Now, the next one, this one was something that I didn't apply until probably seven years ago. So much later into my lifting career, this one I learned from some of the best power lifters in the world, it's variable resistance.

I never understood this before. I saw pictures of lifters with chains attached to the bar and I thought it was just, you know, I thought they were just trying to look cool. Like, oh, they got chains on it. So he looks real tough. Good for videos. No, I didn't pay attention. I didn't really think about it.

I would just see a picture and I didn't really care. I didn't understand a strength curve when I saw all that. I didn't get it. I just didn't even think about it, right? Anyway, you know, I don't know, seven or eight years ago, I'm, you know, going through,

I think was powerlifting USA or something like that. And they were, I was watching lifters use resistance bands, and I thought, bands, why don't you just use weights? Put more weight on it. Why would you add a band? It made no sense to me. And then it clicked. I thought, wait a minute.

When you're squatting with weight and a band on the bar attached to the bar, bands, the resistance increases as they stretch out. So the squat at the bottom is lighter, heavier at the top, since I'm stronger at the bar, bands, the resistance increases as they stretch out. So the squat at the bottom is lighter, heavier at the top. Since I'm stronger at the top and weaker at the bottom, the band will match my natural strength curve. And then I thought, that's how chains work. As I'm squatting or benching with the chain, as I lower the weight, each link hits the ground, meaning it's taking weight off the bar. And as I lift, each link comes off the ground, meaning I'm adding weight to the

bar and it's matching my natural strength. We all have this, right? When you're doing it overhead press, you're probably weakest at the bottom, strongest at the top, same thing with a squat or whatever. Variable resistance trains you within your strength curve. Cause oftentimes you're limited by the weakest part of that lift. You, if your max squat is 300 pounds, it's not because your body can only lift 300 pounds

throughout the whole squat. It's because at the weakest part of your squat, that's the most you can lift. And you know this, you get down in a squat and you're, you're a struggle. Then you move up, pass the point, then you come up a little easier. What if you could stress the stronger parts with more weight

and the harder parts with lighter weight so that you give your body, you work with your body strength curve? That's variable resistance. It's a very, very powerful tool. It's the reason why some power left the West Side barbell became so dominant in strength sports. It was, this is one of the main reasons, right?

There is an order for me personally of how I apply these these eight different You know techniques and tips that we're giving right now This is one I love to use for my advanced people definitely somebody who understands programming really well They're eating in a calorie surplus. They've addressed priming. They've done mode They've done a lot of these things and yet they're they've been lifting for a long time and have been stuck in this strength, in the same strength, I love using tools like chains and bands for the advanced lifter. It just, it seems like the proper order of operation for me as a coach and as a trainer,

I want to address the ones that we've talked about first because I think those are bigger rocks. It's a major move. But then this is great for my advanced lifters that have never utilized a tool like this, and we get questions a lot. What do you guys think about change? What do you guys think about bands? And this is it.

Here's your answer. They're incredible. They're incredible tools. It's not just a look cool while you're lifting. It's a great way to break through a plateau if you've been stuck at the same strength area for a while now, or even decreasing is to use a tool like this. But again, I'm going to reiterate, I think it's important that you address a lot of the

ones that we did first that we just talked about before you move on to this one. Yeah. Now, chains are a little bit more stressful in the body with bands. That's my own personal experience, but both of them have their own value. So I like using both of them quite a bit. Adam's 100% right though. It is more of an advanced technique because if your strength isn't going up and you're advanced,

that's when you need to kind of get a little bit more creative to get, you know, it's harder to get someone to go from a 300 to 350 pound squat, then it is to get someone to go from 100 to 150. So sometimes that variable resistance can definitely do the trick. Now the next one, this one right here was controversial when we first started Mind Pump.

It's not as controversial today, and I think it's because studies now are supporting what we've learned through decades of training clients. Lifting to failure, oftentimes results in less strength gains, oftentimes results in slower progress. This one took me forever. It's not, this isn't an automatic thought for me, growing up working out.

I always thought the harder I worked out, the better. It just wasn't intuitive. What do you mean, don't work out as hard and I'll get better results? That makes no sense. I'm in deep programs. Yeah, this one fires up all the fitness junkies, too. Oh yeah.

Because there's a lot of research to support some of the benefits of going to failure. And I don't, and your point I know you're making right now is not to discredit that it doesn't have value and doesn't have a place. It just happens to be in my opinion, and I think you guys agree, one of the most abused tools,

towards building strength, so abused that it ends up hurting most people that are trying to utilize it, much like myself as a trainer. I mean, as a trainer and a kid that was lifting for a long time, because I read the same studies that supported, oh wow, training to failure can help increase strength gains.

So then what did I do? Every exercise, every set, every workout, you know, calling over a spotter to take it to failure and hammering every muscle, every single workout, and that ended up resulting in harder plateaus. Oh yeah, just stopping my sets short of failure. I added so much weight to the bar. This was in my 30s. It took me that long to figure this out. Stopping, and I did this because I read old school muscle building books. Books, I mean, these are books from like 1901, 1906, 1920,

something. These are books. This is before steroids, right? Before creatine. And one thing I noticed with all these old time strongmen was all of them said the same thing. They all said, don't lift. They didn't use the word to failure. They all said don't lift, they didn't use the word to failure.

They said don't lift to maximum fatigue. Always stop when you think you could do a few more. And I noticed all these books said the same thing and I looked at these guys and I'm like, man, you know, like somebody who was Eugene Sandow, he did a one-arm bent press with 350 pounds. The guy was 185 pounds. That's incredible strength.

So I said, let me give this a shot. I'm not going to failure for the next couple of weeks, what's the worst can happen, right? If I start to lose some gains and I'll just go to failure again and get them back. Instantly got stronger. Instantly, literally, I stopped my rep, my sets, about two reps before failure.

And right away, I saw strength gains in all my major lifts. And till this day, I go to failure maybe, if I'm feeling really good once a week, usually twice a month. That's about as much as a failure as I go. Yeah, and it's not saying to be complacent and to just lift weights that aren't really gonna challenge you. And I think this is also a misconception.

I still get a lot in terms of not trying to put maximal effort into my lifts and in the gym. There's a place for that. There's this whole balance and relationship between optimizing, adapting, optimizing, adapting. I wanna put enough stress and stimulus so that my body now has to respond to this environment that's gonna create this opportunity for growth.

And so that's really what we're playing with to maximize our time in the gym and our training sessions is to find that optimal dose. And once you start getting in that frame of mind, it's gonna take your training to ultimately all new heights and get you away from this trap of just hammering your body to ultimate fatigue and then you're just trying to recover from that forever. A lot of these variables pair really well together too.

So when I think of teaching somebody about the benefits of not training to failure, I also like to teach the same lesson about frequency because typically the person who likes to go to train to failure every workout or when they're done with it, whatever muscle group they're doing, they're also the same people that can't run back the next day or two days later and train that muscle group again because it's so sore from that workout. So I'm normally trying to preach the same message of both those variables to the same person. So I like to do both those together.

I like to look at someone's programming and see, oh wow, you're only squatting one day or two day a week. I'm gonna move this person to three day a week, but I'm also going to adjust your intensity. One of the quickest and easiest ways I can adjust intensity is by teaching these people to back off the failure training so much that I say, listen, and I used to say

leaf two in the tank, that's what I would tell a client. Like, leaf two in the tank. You can still get two more performed. I don't care, and I used to say leaf two in the tank, that's what I would tell a client. Like, leaf two in the tank. You can still get two more performed. I don't care, stop it right there, and just stick, just trust the process. I'm gonna increase your frequency, because now instead of squatting two days a week, you're gonna be doing it three days a week,

or whatever muscle group we're talking about, and back off on that, the two of those coupled together, I think, really, really match well, and tend to speak to the same person. Totally. Now, the last one I learned from two sources, one were power lifters, and then the other one was something called German volume training. You guys ever hear of that? GVT. Yeah. So, I read an article in one of the Muscle Building magazines as a kid, and it was this article about something called German volume training, and they had a picture of this big German bodybuilder

So of course it must be effective, right? And in it instead of doing, you know, for shoulders instead of doing like Three different or four different exercises for three sets it each it was one exercise for ten sets So instead of doing overhead press, laterals, rear laterals, front raises, it was overhead press for 10 sets, just do the whole time that's all you're doing. I thought that's interesting. And I did it, and it worked. I got really, really strong at those lifts.

Now I forgot all about this. I went back to my old way of doing a bunch of different exercises all the time. And then I started reading up on powerlifters. Powerlifters notoriously do very few exercises, but they do a lot of sets of those very few exercises. So I thought to myself, let me give this a shot. Sure enough, rather than doing squats and leg extensions

and leg curls and all these other leg exercises, I just did a lot of barbell squats. I did a lot of them. I tried it out, see what happened. I got the biggest strength gains from doing that that I'd gotten up until that point from changing anything else. So rather than going to the gym and you know you're going to do 15 total sets for a body part and you're going to do five different exercises, try cutting those 15 sets into two exercises. Do

a lot of sets of just two exercises and watch what happens. Well, this is why frequency is king. I mean, this just speaks to the same point that we are making about frequency of training a squat, multiple times per week. This is just frequency within a workout. Yeah. So that's the only real, that's the difference. It's you're getting more practice.

You're practicing these skills. Holding in on that signal. Right, you're practicing these skilled movements more and more. You're gonna get better at it. You get better at it. It's gonna result in more results, more muscle, more strength. And so it really is a similar tip as the other one. It's just, this is also how you can increase frequency

of an exercise within a workout. So not only within a workout, but then also throughout the week, probably arguably one of the best things I ever personally did was that because for the longest time, I was in the camp of the hammering at one time as hard as I could in the week and then being done with it moving on. Frequency has always been king for me. Excellent. So there you go.

Those are your eight important tips to boost your strength fast. Try them out. Let us know what you think. You can find us on Instagram, Justin's at Mind Pump. Justin, I'm at Mind Pump. Sal, Adam at Mind Pump. Adam, also you can watch this podcast on YouTube. We're not just in your ears.

We're also gonna be in your eyes. Check us out on YouTube. We're in your tears. Mind Pump podcast. Then you can see how handsome Justin really is and find out why he's the fan favorite. I'm not making this up. You gotta go to YouTube, check it out.

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