Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1352: The Muscle Building & Fat Burning Advantages of Training Like an Athlete

Episode Date: August 6, 2020

In this episode, Sal, Adam & Justin discuss how training like an athlete not only improves your movement and performance but can help you build a better body. That time Sal built muscle in his biceps through a different type of stimulus. (2:51) Mind Pump Realizations: It’s not just resistance training that builds muscle. (5:19) Translating athletic movements to build a body that can do more functional things. (8:09) How you can fool yourself into a lull that you have this great fitness level. (11:44) There is an aesthetic to moving well. (15:44) Shattering the paradigm of the gym vs the real world. (17:30) The misconceptions of training like an athlete. (19:11) Why you SHOULD train like an athlete. (20:10) #1 – The novelty aspect of it. (21:28) #2 – The increase in durability. (34:07) #3 – The mobility factor. (38:15) #4 – Gaining control through explosive movements done correctly. (42:32) Related Links/Products Mentioned August Promotion: MAPS Performance ½ off!! **Promo code “GREEN50” at checkout** Hardgainer Webinar Visit ZBiotics for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! Stop Working Out And Start Practicing - Mind Pump Media Fire up your Central Nervous System to maximize Muscular Adaptation – Mind Pump Blog Why Mobility Is So Important For Being Healthy – Mind Pump Blog What is the First Step to Better Mobility? - Mind Pump Blog Is Mobility Important For Working Out? - Mind Pump Blog Post-Activation Potentiation | Science for Sport Mind Pump Podcast - YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources People Mentioned Katie Ledecky (@katieledecky)  Instagram Paul J. Fabritz (@pjfperformance)  Instagram

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. Salta Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. Hey, before this episode of Mind Pump starts, I want to let everybody know that we are... We have a hard-gainer webinar that is live right now. This is a class where I talk to people who have difficulty building muscle, men and women. It's a free class. I'm gonna teach you all about the techniques

and things you can do to get your body to finally respond. The place you go to is hardgainerwebinar.com. Now in this episode of Mind Pump, let me remind you by the way, we're the top fitness, and entertainment podcast. We talk all about the muscle building and fat burning advantages of training like an athlete. Now, you don't have to go play sports

to get those benefits. I'm talking about your gym training or at home training. There are methods and techniques you can borrow from athletes to add to your traditional routine to get your body to really ramp up its results. And so we break that all down in this episode. Now this episode is brought to you by our sponsor Zbiotics. So Zbiotics is a genetically modified bacteria supplement.

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Hey, did I ever tell you about the time I accidentally built muscle in my biceps? No, this is true. Funny hopping. Whoops. Yeah, I did. It's exactly what it is. I, when I was told that story so many times,

at least four. Well, I think it's relevant with the topic, and it was a bit of a game changer for me. So I was 16, maybe just turned 16. I'd already been lifting weights for two years. I started at the age of 14, super consistent, did everything I possibly could, whatever, and did all the exercises, right?

Curls for the, for arms, all the versions of curls of that stuff, definitely wanted bigger arms because of course, you know, it's 14 year old boy or whatever. Yeah, that's important. And two years later, I get a BMX bike. My cousin got a BMX bike. He had a Harro, I had a Mungus, remember those?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, good times. And to learn how to bunny hop, you know, you pull up on the handlebars. And if you don't know what you're doing, you're just pulling like crazy with your arms. Well, him and I went writing our BMX's every single day for the first week. And I was just yanking on the handlebars, trying to get myself to learn how to bunny hop. And now I kept meticulous measurements at that point. I was always measuring my arms, see if they change or whatever, super into working out.

You just carry one of those little like tape measures in your pocket. Didn't carry seven. But I had it at home, and in fact I kept everything in a binder. And I thought to myself that I would lose muscle because I was doing all this, you know, bike riding. None of it was lifting weights, right?

Riding my bike for hours a day, jumping things, whatever, burning too many calories. I'm like, oh, I'm gonna lose muscle. So I was always tracking. I gained a quarter inch of my arms, which is a lot. And I couldn't figure out what it was until I realized that it was from the yanking on the handlebars.

It was through a totally different type of stimulus that I actually got my biceps to grow. And that was my first time really understanding that movement or athletic type endeavors have on their own, even when you're comparing them to resistance training, traditional resistance training, have some pretty tremendous potential muscle building qualities.

I think we need to get you another story for that analogy. That's the only athletic story out here. Is that what it does? It does matter that male carrier calf guys. No, I feel like we need another analogy. No, no, I mean, I noticed that with... No, it works there, though. I have one that I haven't shared on the podcast

for that exact example. I remember when my buddies and I started getting into Hill Sprints. We were training for basketball and we had this little hill that wasn't very long. And we would go over there and do 20 of these things where we'd spread up, walk down, spread up, walk down. And I remember as a bi-product seeing my,

or a side effect, I've seen my quads that developed more than I had seen them previously with the training that I've been doing. Now, mind you, I was leg pressing and leg extensions. All the exercises that are damn near worthless to me developing my legs at that point in my life. But I remember doing the Hillsprints for no intention of building my legs and seeing me gain size on that was like, oh, this is crazy.

I wouldn't have thought that us in my mind, I'm thinking we're doing cardio and working on explosive training, but stuff for basketball, not thinking, oh, can I develop and build my quads? That blew my mind. Yeah. Have you guys ever did jump rope for longer than a few times or whatever? Oh, yes.

So jump rope for me was definitely a go-to. And I remember when I signed up for Moitai and I was like going through trying to like learn all the techniques and the concepts about like kicking the bag and we would warm up with jump ropes for a good 10 solid minutes and then sometimes 50 minutes and it was just like, oh my god, the shins like splints and like I had to work my way through that to really like build up some kind of a callus to this. And I mean we did with barefoot too and so we're like jumping. So if you missed, you missed and it hurt, you know, you'd slam with these leather ropes, but man, it it again, like and I know you guys make fun of me because I just was gifted calves or whatever,

but that was something that got affected immediately. My calves grew in size, and then, you know, the kicking aspect was completely new because that was like a completely different stimulus of me having now, you know, power throw my leg into the bag and that require all these muscles and this fast twitch movement I wasn't used to. And so my leg just blew up as a result.

Yeah, something similar happened to me with jumping rope. I only did about six months of boxing training with a friend of mine and that's how he had me warm up. He'd do five to 10 minutes. By the way, five minutes of jumping rope. In a row. Yeah, if you've never done it before, it's pretty hard.

And the same thing, I always train my calves, try to get them to grow. and I saw some really significant gains from jumping grow. And really the message of this is that it's not just resistance training that builds muscle, definitely not just resistance training that burns body fat, including some of the stuff makes a big difference. And I've seen that with myself and with clients.

Well, we all gave examples of how athletic training has promoted muscle growth when we weren't expecting it. But there's also the fat burning side of that that we're talking about today too, that one of the things that I do love playing sports for is that when you're into the sport and you like playing basketball or swimming or tennis or whatever it is, the time flies and the amount of movement and calorie expenditure that you get from it, that was always my preferred source of cardio.

I just never got into, until competing at least, I should say, got into like getting on a treadmill and just going for a half hour hour just to burn calories. It was like, well, I love to play basketball. And when I'm playing a game, I'm not like, it's not hard for me to push my body to burn a bunch of calories I'm playing.

And that in itself would end up burning a bunch of calories and helping me lean out and lose body fat. Oh yeah, that was one of my favorite aspects of sport because you just get so into it, and you push yourself just because you're following the game, you're trying to contribute, and after the game's over, that's really where it all kind of sets in, and you're like, wow,

oh man, I'm beat, I'm fatigued, but you could really push yourself to levels. A lot of times, further than you would if you're consciously going through it. Right, but it doesn't just mean that you need to play a sport to get some of these benefits. You can actually translate some of it to exercises in the gym, or at least the way you apply

certain exercises, or even movements that are traditionally considered athletic movements in the gym that you wouldn't necessarily see somebody who's interested in body sculpting or body building or body shaping to do, which is too bad because I think they miss out on some of these, some of the tremendous benefits you can get without even having to go play the sport just by, by training in the gym like you're going to if that makes any sense. Yeah, well, just like building a body that has potential to do more things.

You know, there's lots of different activities or like life things that present themselves to you as you're going through and picking things up or trying to make your way up like an insane amount of stairs and there's just a lot of that. And if you're not training your body to be able to adapt to these different scenarios, I feel like you're really missing out on its true potential. Well, I remember I shared maybe about, I don't know, six months to a year ago,

when I jumped out of the out of my truck and my truck's lifted, right? So it was a little bit of a ways down that I'm like a normal truck. And I remember feeling like my knees are gonna explode and going like, and that was like a huge wake up moment for myself that wow, I haven't really been training explosively or athletically in a while, been so focused on bodybuilding that I almost lost that skill.

And yet here, and this is also, we always talk about how we were better trainers for our clients than we were training ourselves. And this is an example of me doing this. Like, you know, I was neglecting something that I saw so valuable in my clients. I wasn't doing for myself. And, you know, something as simple as a jump box, just because your client is trying to build 10 pounds of muscle

or they're leatling out a little bit, there still is value to exercises like that for real life situations that happen. And I'm not even 40 years old yet and I felt that, yeah, and I remember training clients on exercises like that, just the importance of being able to jump up onto a box or to jump down from a box and land. Well, a good point to make, and this is an important one, is that you can perform well in the gym with traditional exercises.

You can build a body and a physique that, while stationary, looks like it can perform well and move well, and all of that be completely false. I have, many, many times, have seen people hurt themselves and even felt this myself, even though I'm consistent with the gym, I'm lifting weights, I'm working out, you know, doing very simple things like throwing a frisbee with their kid or a football at the beach or oh, my kid's about to step into the street. I got to take four quick steps to go grab them or almost losing my balance, got to catch myself with a fast movement. four quick steps to go grab them, or almost losing my balance got to catch myself

with a fast movement. And you can really fool yourself. You can fool yourself into a low of believing that you have this great fitness level. And then something that's out of your, that's not in your normal textbook. And what I mean by that is you train your body in a particular way,

and then you go on the real world and you have to move or do something that's not like you practice and train all the time. And all of a sudden you realize, oh my gosh, I am not as strong or as fit as I think I am. How is it that I hurt myself? You know, I could deadlift all this weight, and yet when I twist, and when I lifted and twisted

to move this box, I felt a pop in my low back. This is real stuff and here's the funny thing. Often times, you make yourself more prone to injury because what ends up happening is you develop a body that does have a lot of strength and muscle. But you also have safeguards that are not so strong, not so stable, so then you generate this power. For example, if you never practice anything

that's even remotely athletic in the gym, everything is very traditional, nothing necessarily wrong with that. But now you've built big quads, big glutes, a strong, big muscular back, then you're outside with your kid, your kid runs at the street, you take a quick couple sidesteps to grab your kid, but because you have so much

twist. Yeah, because you have so much muscle, you generate more force moving in that direction, terrible safeguards of stability, and you're more prone to injury as a result, which is, it sounds paradoxical, but it's actually true in many cases. It's pretty funny. I immediately think of when I got into personal training and I was learning from everybody because it was a very new thing for me and I was very impressed with everybody's

knowledge and like how they trained themselves, they trained other people. And then we had a company a softball game. And I watched these incredibly fit trainers try to swing and throw a baseball, probably fit trainers, try to swing and throw a baseball, swing a bat and throw a baseball. And it was insanely bad. I just couldn't believe it. I'm like, you guys have amazing abilities, but it was all very specific to the gym and moving weight in front of them behind them. And it's very, very little lateral type movement, very literal coordination overall, which was very enlightening to me.

It was something I wouldn't even have considered. Well, that's the reality is that most, your most popular exercises that people do in the gym is in the same plane. And in real life, it's never like that. In real life, you were using all the planes of motion and like your analogy, so you give with your kid. It's like, I always give the analogy of analogy, sell it, you give with your kid. It's like, I always give the analogy of the, you know, you picking up the 50 pound bag of dog food

or a bag of cement or something that you, you know, you just, when you do it, whenever you've ever seen somebody pick a bag of dog food up and they get into great squat form, you know, with feet about shoulder width apart, they drop down to 90 degrees, they pick it up right. I just grab it. No, you lean over or you twist and rotate to grab it,

probably shifting your weight on one side, you're rotating through the trunk, you have a hinge over and you grab it. And if you haven't been training that way with weights inside the gym, that's when you're most prone to get injured doing something like that. Yep, totally, totally true. And there's also the aesthetics,

we talk about aesthetics in terms of how someone looks, but there is an aesthetic to moving well, to having good movement. And you know it when you see it, if you go to a gym and you see the big muscular guy and he moves around and looks, this is where the whole muscle bound, you know, stiff, that lifting weights creates, you know, stiffness, that's where it kind of comes from.

It's that you train your body to move a particular way in them and you walk and do stuff, you just don't seem to have good fluid aesthetic movement. And you don't have to be a good athlete necessarily because here's the thing, you may be listening and thinking, well, I'm not like like me, I don't really have any interest in playing too many other sports. Besides the occasional, you know, go to the park and play with the kids. And my favorite sports were things like Brazilian Jitsu and wrestling and judo and that kind of stuff. But I'm not going to do a lot of that, not too many people to practice with or whatever. Not that big of a deal. But there are tremendous benefits still. But even if your goal isn't to be great at sports,

if your goal is just to build muscle, burn, body fat, and do it in a more effective way, there are lots of things you can learn from training in the gym with some of those goals for a phase or for a series of phases that'll benefit you tremendously, regardless of whether or not you want to go. I just think to that You can tell right away whether the movement itself is effortless for somebody and I don't think people like put a lot of weight in that direction

a lot of times but They have trained their body in such a way that it responds immediately to doing certain things and that's a very valuable asset to have. Go. Absolutely, no, absolutely. Again, you want, there's this kind of false comparison. And I get it, I get it a little bit. And that's the whole like, you know,

the gym versus the real world. Or these exercises build muscle, these exercises really are just for movement and for athletes. It's like you draw a line between them. When you're looking at your development long-term and your goal, if you're listening right now, your goal is both to get good, effective results now, but also be not just maintain them, but continue your progress. Get your body to continue your progress.

You got to get rid of that paradigm. It's not the gym versus the real world. It's not functional versus, you know, traditional. It's really what, what can I take from all of that that's going to benefit me. And if I combine it in the right way, I'm going to get the best of all of those worlds. Yeah, Justin, to your point about like beautiful movement, you can tell when somebody does it like seamlessly. Did you guys see the, you know, Katie Ladecki,

the Olympic swimmer do that thing where she swam in the pool with a balancing chocolate milk on her head? Oh, that's just pointing that out to me. Yeah, that was amazing. That's incredible. I know that the technique can form to do that. Well, her arms, she was, you know, freestyle swimming and every time she came around with her arm hurt, she was perfectly, like, perfect. So still that the chocolate milk, the glass of chocolate

milk on her head in the pool, did not spill. That was a perfect example in the Olympic level. Like, we see, like, very, like, clear signs of somebody who's mastered that one specific, you know, collective amount of movements it takes to perform these things. And it's, they've refined it down to like the, oh, science. Now, that's a perfect transition at a point that I want to make that there's this misconception, though, about training like an athlete, right? We see these amazing bodies and these amazing feats. And then we try to take something that you see them doing and then emulate it yourself inside the gym.

And there's other things that you have to take an account that you have to understand when an athlete is training. So many sports are also trying to accomplish endurance. They're also trying to push the limits of their body being fatigued while they're also trying to perform these movements that they will have to do in a sport where that isn't exactly your desired outcome as an average gym goer who's trying

to reap some of the benefits of moving in all these different planes, right? Is I want to be able to be functional, be controlled, and protect myself, and be strong in the real world. But at the same time too, not at the expense of potentially injuring myself, trying to accomplish what these athletes are doing inside their workout too. So there's kind of a fine line in programming on how to do this correctly. No, totally. And I think it's important that we talk about the benefits of training like an athlete,

at least through phases for the average person. So if you're listening right now, odds are you're not somebody who's competing in or actively competing in a sport. Okay. Most people aren't doing that, but if you're listening, you're probably a fitness enthusiast. You're concerned about being fit and healthy. You like to work out and you like to work out for the benefits of improving your fitness, building muscle, burning body fat.

So what I want to do is I want to talk about what we can borrow from that world, why sometimes those movements get us regular people who aren't competing to build more muscle and burn more body fat versus when we don't take advantage of some of those things. And why you should actually? Why you should, why everybody should, at the very least, go through a two to three-month period

in the year where you incorporate some of these movements and design your program around them, you will get better results, even if you could care less about moving better or whatever. If you just go, it's just a burn more body fat, just to build more muscle and develop a more aesthetic physique, this will still benefit you. The first main reason, and this one is the one that for me was a selling point with some of these athletic functional type movements or more athletic based movements,

is the novelty aspect of it. Now, this is something that we've known for a long time. Novelty with resistance training or with exercise, if done properly, gets the body to respond very quickly. I'll give you a simple, a very, very simple example, okay? And I'll use two movements that have nothing to do with what we're talking about. I'll use them basic movements.

Let's say you always do barbell curls for your biceps. That's all you ever do, and this is what you do all the time. Simply switching from barbell to say preacher curls, you'll notice in a very quick short period of time, initially, that your by-steps will change and grow and respond. The loudest signal you can get from an exercise, often times, is when you're in that initial stage of your body learning that exercise. Okay, so like, if I'm just learning how to squat,

like you take somebody who's never done a barbell squat, and we finally get to the point where their mobility is good and they can go through a good range of motion. Boy, those initial strength gains and muscle gains are going to get are ridiculous. They can't possibly continue and they don't, of course, but that novelty factor is very important. So if all of your exercises are in this one plane of movement, whether it's your bench press, your rows, your squats, your overhead press, it's all in front or in back you, there's no rotation. You're one dimensional. There's no, yeah. You start to move that stuff around a little bit, add some different planes. That novelty gets you sparks new growth

and muscle. I thought he was going to say BMX bunny hops for the vice-separate. Try doing that for now, man. Yeah. But the other thing is that it's fun. Like that was one of the things that I love, but here's the thing though, and here's the fine line with it, being fun and how you should approach this, is when you start doing athletic training, instead of being focused on how many I can do

or how high I can jump, be more focused on the movement of it. The skill. Yes, the skill, the movement, the beauty of perfecting the form and the technique opposed adding more weight, getting faster, doing more of them, which was what tends to happen, right? We see, like, let's use jump boxes for an example.

Somebody who learns how to do that real quick, we're raising the, how high they have to jump, we're doing as many of them as we possibly can until they're fatigued, versus perfecting the way you take off, perfecting the way that you land, and making the movement look really pretty. Ice skaters, another example, like going side to side, a lot of times you see people training this,

and you see them doing it to fatigue. Instead of doing, you know, half the repetitions and really paying attention to each time you do it, the way you explode off, the way you land, the way you're, where your hands are in position, how you stabilize your torso and your upper body, like get into the details of the movement while you're doing things with it and make fun of it. Yeah, I think, I mean, that's a big component is to really like focus in on the technique. There's a lot of novelty there. There's a lot of novelty in these athletic movements and I think people will reap the benefits because it's just so outside of their norm. But this is also an opportunity, which it does provide a bit of humility.

So the biggest barrier I think people face when they look at trying to train differently is the fact they're not gonna be very good at it initially. And really, that's the opportunity where you're gonna see the most growth. And this is like in any direction in terms of, you have a preference of something, you know, like you've been working on this this way

of training for so long, you're getting good, you're getting better at it, and you're comfortable. So once you get that comfortable kind of feeling, it's even more of an opportunity time to jump into something where you can learn in a totally different skill that you haven't been trying to master. Yeah, something that I borrowed heavily as a trainer, both for myself and for clients,

is the technique emphasis. So, like, for example, when I was competing in judo as a kid and a teenager, I would practice to throw, let's say it was Uchi-Mata, right? I was one of my favorite throws. And what I would do is I'd try to do it harder. And I'd pull and twist harder. And my coach would say, slow down, it's technique, your technique, it's all about technique.

Do it slower, don't pull as hard, get your technique down. Once your technique is perfect, then you can pull and do all the stuff as hard as you want. But until then, it's not gonna be effective. Now, working out in the gym oftentimes is the opposite. You go to work out in the gym to do an exercise that can

overhead press. People don't think to themselves, make this technique perfect. They think I gotta get my shoulder sore and tired. So I'm gonna go as hard as possible. It would be like me doing judo, thinking to myself, I don't care if I learn how to do judo, well, I just want to get tired. Yeah.

That's what it gets to start. I just want to roll around and try hard. And now here's a funny thing, okay? And you might think it's obvious for something like judo. Of course, you need technique, or you're gonna throw someone. Here's a deal with exercise, same thing. If the technique is good, the exercise gives you

all the benefits. If the technique is bad, you don't get much of the benefits. Like I could power a throw in judo. And if the guys weaker than me and I'm lucky, I might throw him, but I'm not gonna be nearly as effective as when my technique is on point. Yeah, and I mean, if you can really like sit back and think about all the different exercises

you're doing at the gym, and just think about where the weight is. If you're moving it in front of you, if you're focusing on what's behind you, lots of these machines, especially, are all geared towards just what's in front and what's behind you. And we just get stuck in a rut of all these types of exercises that just place you, place all this emphasis in the front and back, and are there opportunities for you to twist, and to move side to side? There's very little unless you're super intentional about it.

Speaking of which in in you know, maps, performance, which is a you know athletic-minded training program, there's a Multi-planar lunch. Is that the name of it in the program? In lunge matrix. Lunge matrix. Okay. So lunge matrix. This is a leg exercise That is using multiple planes rather than your traditional forward or backstep lunge. And it's so funny, that's the one I think we get the most comments on from people because-

So outside the norm. They're brutal. If you've never done a multiplayer matrix type lunge like we have in the program and you've only ever done squats and front squats and that kind of stuff, it's hard, it is brutal, it is difficult. Here's what I end up getting from people, right?

They'll DM me first, they'll be like, dude, I just started math performance. What the hell were you guys thinking with this matric lunge, they're nasty, they're hard, and this is what I always say to them, wait. DM me in six weeks, just DM me in six weeks, let me know what happened to your muscularity or lower body. And eight at a ten times, sometimes they don't respond at all, but a lot of them do and tell me you were right, my leg gains

are crazy. My legs are developed more, they look more balanced. And really it was that novelty of working in these different planes, which athletic focus training, not necessarily playing sport, but again, athletic focus training in the gym definitely prioritizes, whereas traditional resistance training does not. There's also the CNS benefit that you're getting from that also. I mean, you are forcing the body to like communicate the entire body to communicate because you're challenging it in different planes versus doing something very forward.

I mean, any of you right now could do a forward lunge with your eyes closed, not thinking about, but try doing those matriculances without focusing on every step that you do. And that's just because you're not used to doing that. Therefore, it forces the body to really completely communicate to every aspect, every limb while you're doing it in order to perform it correctly. So there's benefits like that too that we don't talk about. We always talk about, you know, not a lot of people address the benefits of training

the CNS. Oh, you're CNS responds before your muscles do. We know that in studies. You develop new pathways, neural pathways, before muscle develops. It's those neural pathways that allow or send this signal to build muscles. So it's a very important aspect of training. Here's one of the biggest things I learned from observing athletes and how they trained.

They did something very different from bodybuilders. Now I'm not saying that it's better than bodybuilders. Again, there's value in both. And here's why you should never get stuck in just one. Athletes train movements. They don't train muscle. Very, very different from bodybuilding style training. And again, they both have their value.

I'm not saying one's better than the other. But if you always train muscle and don't think about movement, you are missing out. So I'll give you an example. We'll use an extreme example. I'll use a barbell athlete. I won't even use an athlete that doesn't use barbells in their sport let's talk about olympic lifting for a second

an olympic lifter uh... it trains far more like an athlete than a bodybuilder uh... then they train like a bodybuild even though they're using barbells when you watch it uh... olympic athlete uh... excuse me olympic lifter do a clean for example they're not thinking biceps, calves, traps. They're not thinking anything. They're thinking movement.

Here's another one, a power lifter. Now a power lifter does traditional strength training movements, but they don't think to themselves quads, hamstrings, glutes, when they squat. They think movement, how can I get my body to move in the best way possible, the most efficient way possible, both the minimize risk of injury and the maximize performance in the gym.

This was a game changer for me, game changer. Again, not because it's better, but because it's different. And when I would go to the gym and I go through certain phases, I stopped worrying about feeling muscles necessarily, and it was really about perfecting the movement and getting good at the movement. And here's a side effect of that. I built more muscle, built more muscle,

burn more body fat. This is a big, big part of the process. When you guys are remembered training clients that you get, and let's say they had and worked out in 20 years of their life, they're in their late 40s or 50s, but they had a athletic career. I could always tell those clients when when I went to teach them, even a movement that was

new to them, because this goes back to the CNS, is they have done such a good job of learning that communication to all of their limbs and their body. Even though it's been dormant for them for 20 years, when you ask them to perform this new movement, they automatically go to that default of thinking like an athlete. And it was always easier as a coach to get them to perform the exercises better because they thought more like an athlete. This is where I actually struggled a lot as a coach because I have an athletic background. And so I would get excited when I had a client that did have a bit of an athletic background

because it was more of a mirror. So I could show something and then they would see that and they could actually replicate that versus somebody that hasn't been training a lot of movement-focused exercises. It had a really hard time organizing their body in such a way to really match what I was trying to get them to do. It was very foreign to them.

So that was a very glaring difference that I saw right out of the gates. Yeah, I mean, remember, you know, training with, you know, athleticism in your mind in the gym is really about performance. It's really not about how you look necessarily. But here's a thing, and we've said this on the podcast before about nutrition,

if I eat in a way to be healthy, the side effect of that is I'm leaner and I get great results, and if I just focus on how I look, oftentimes I'll eat in a way that won't even benefit my health, which then won't benefit the way I look. Well, if you train in the gym or at home in a way to think of performance, I need to be able to move better, twist better, move laterally better, have better mobility. The side effect of that always is you look better. You look better as a result.

Now if you only ever focus on how you look, eventually what might end up happening, which happens to a lot of people that I know, is you actually start to move worse because you're not focused on things like mobility and full range of motion and multi-plane or movements. And then because you start to move worse over time, you actually start to lose the ability to build muscle and look aesthetic because next thing you know, I can't deadlift. Next thing you know, I can't overhead press.

Now I start to eliminate exercises because I can't handle them. My body just can't move really, really well. Now, here's another one that I think is really important that sometimes people forget. And that's the durability you get from this kind of training. I talked about the matrix lunges in mass performance. There's other movements in mass performance that always cracked me up to because people will be like, I had to use 20% weight. But I don't use because I just I can't, I'm so I get exhausted. They're very, very difficult. And I always say the same thing that I still tell the other guy, which is weight watch what

happens to your durability and your ability to continue to work out. Some of these exercises are like a long continuous movement. And I think people are that that's something else that kind of pops up a lot in terms of like the differences of exercises because you're organizing and using your entire body for some of these. Like you wouldn't be doing if you're just focusing on a certain body part. And I forget, yeah, one of them where I have you

lunging back and then coming up and then pressing as you're coming back to full extension. And that one is always a killer for people that always come back with it. Well, when I think of durability too, like the first thing that comes in mind it reminds me of like, and I know Sal, you've shared this story because you've done this

with your dad, I think Justin, you too. Like I remember like shoveling cement, right? At, or you know, moving it around in the wheelbarrow and then throwing it in and filling in like a big, you know, area, right? All day long. And when you think about durability and training and the benefits of that and how it carries over into real life,

never in real life do you do something like this? 15 reps, then you rest. And then you're done and then you go ahead. Could you imagine if your dad looked over at you, would you shoveled 15 and then you stopped for a minute and a half and then you shoveled 15? How many more reps? Yeah, exactly.

No one ever does that. You don't sweep the garage and you're sweeping and then you're still relevant minute and a half and then you shovel 15. How many more reps? Yeah, exactly. No one ever does that. You don't sweep the garage and you're sweeping and then you're still relevant. Right, they are relevant. And this is where it has such huge carryover into real life is you train that durability so that when those times do come in that you can last. Because one of the things that we find is

when we're doing a movement, especially a foreign movement, like shoveling cement for the first time ever, you do that and then you fatigue and then that's where the body starts to cheat and that's where injury starts to happen. Yes, I mixed cement with my grandfather came to visit. I was 16 years old, my grandfather was in his late 60s

at this point I think, and he came to work with my dad and I and we were mixing cement back and forth. And you know how you get the big tub of cement. So one guy's on one end, you're on the other end, and you got the big hoe, and you're doing the mixing, and then you pass it to the other guy, and he makes it as a, I'm 16,

I've been working out for two years, I'm full of piss and vinegar, I thought, and it's 100 degrees outside, I was in the summer, no school, and I'm mixing my side, and I pass it to my grandfather, and I do 20 minutes in, I'm like, I'm dead,

I'm almost dead and my grandfather's whistling. He's whistling while he's doing this, and it was that durability. Now, how can durability benefit the average person who's just looking to develop a nice looking physique who really doesn't care about having that kind of stamina because they have an office job or whatever? Well, here's the thing, your capacity to withstand

punishment in the gym, your capacity to add volume, your ability to recover is very closely tied to your durability. Now, how is this gonna benefit? Well, think about it. If you can add more exercises and work out harder and your body can handle it, you will progress faster. So durability is a very important aspect of your ability,

of your body's ability to adapt because over time, you should be able to scale, you'll work out stuff. You don't wanna hit a wall where you just can't handle any more volume or training. There is a way to get your body to do that. And part of that is you borrow from the way that athletes train and the way they train the gym.

Yeah, and a lot of that, you know, going back to like new stimulus and novelty is the fact that your heart rate just skyrockets, right? Because you're just unfamiliar with it. And so like, you really feel like a cardio element to just doing something that's like that much, that your body has to be able to learn how to react to. And so to kind of be able to work through that,

then carries over to where your body will have, you know, the ability to kind of be able to work through that, then carries over to where your body will have, you know, the ability to now calm down and be able to work your way through a lot of these, like, tough scenarios you put in. Yeah. The next one is one of my favorites, which is just the mobility factor. This is one that I think you can make a case for this being number one, or if that's a liquid novelty. Oh, easily.

Well, I mean, just your ability to control full ranges of motion and have stability in them, or even improve or increase your range of motion. Look, we have studies that are conclusive on this. A full curl will build your biceps more than a half curl, a full squat will give you more overall strength and muscle gains than a half squat. This is true for all movements.

Longer, fuller ranges of motion from beginning to end, it gets more muscle fibers to stimulate and it causes more overall strength and muscle gain. But what prevents you from doing this isn't, oh, it hurts or whatever. It's your lack of mobility, it's the lack of control through full range of motion and training to improve your mobility

will improve your ability to reap the benefits of some amazing exercises. It addresses the areas you're most vulnerable. Like so where you're in terms of like whatever movement you're in and you have this range where you're comfortable and your body responds and protects you and you know you can get out of it where I add mobility elements I'm going to press that a little bit further and and really get my body to understand how it's supposed to react, what's supposed to tighten up, what's supposed to get loose in order to get me back to position where I'm fully stable?

Well, what comes of mind for me, in fact, I had this conversation this weekend. So this weekend I was with my dad and my sister and all the little kids. And I have my sister's husband and I have my dad's wife. His wife is in her late 60s and my sister's husband's in his 30s. And he was asking me about dealing with knee pain and she just had two hip surgeries.

And I hopped down in my squat and scroll position and it talked to them about the benefits of just being able to do this. I said, and one of the things that carry over is we talk a lot about building muscle and why that's so great, taking it through full range of motion. But I think the closest thing for me, or what I think is so important that I speak to when I'm talking to people like that, is just what, when you look at like the hip and the shoulder, it's such a complex joint that many people just limit the range of motion early in life. Very, very early in life, we stop taking things in full extension above our head.

Really early in life, we stop sitting our ass all the way down and asking our hips to completely open up and come, and because you limit that, what ends up happening over time is the body starts to overcompensate, and then when you ask it to go a little bit deeper than normal, or you actually have to reach above over your head, this is where you start to have pain and injury.

And in my case, I had bursitis in my hips, which was like a night, someone's sticking a blade right in the side of my hip. And it completely went away when I started to address my ankle and hip mobility and allow myself to get all the way down this deep squat. It is now eliminated that as a problem for me. I don't even have to address it. I don't got a foam roll. I can deal with any of that just because I'm keeping my hips

healthy and always taking them through its full range of motion and the same thing goes for your shoulders. Yeah, well side effect wise, how squats affects your gains now. Right. Now that you have better mobility. Right. You know, you're building more muscle. And actually, you know, what you're saying is so true, it's to blow me away when I would train clients

and they couldn't reach straight up over their head. I never knew that that was something a skill that you could lose, but all skills you eventually lose if you stop practicing them. And this is even true, even if you're active in the gym, there's a lot of different ways that you're just not moving because you're always sticking with the traditional lifts. And again, there's nothing necessarily wrong with the traditional lifts. I love them. And if you're not going to be an athlete and play in a sport, they should be the majority of what you do. But the fact that you, if you're avoiding all these other movements, you're

going to lose those skills. And when you throw them in, you get the great benefits and of course the side effects of that again, are more muscle building and more fat loss. Here's the last one and this one's a big one. And this one talks to both our stories, Adam. And I think even yours too, Justin, about the jump rope, which is explosive movements. You know, I'm gonna add a little disclaimer here. Explosive movements need to know, and you know, I'm gonna call, add a little disclaimer here,

explosive movements need to be done correctly, okay? Just jumping up and down off a bench or whatever, that doesn't necessarily mean you're training explosivity. You may just be doing that to fatigue, in which case you're just training stamina. Real explosive training is not to fatigue. You're training your body to exert maximal force with good technique. So what that typically looks like and using the jumping on a bench example, that would be to jump as hard as you can on a bench

step down rest weight Set yourself up and then explode and do it again and once you start to feel fatigue You take your break or you stop. stop, because you're not getting those benefits. And I also think like the other component to that, as you're learning how to maximally exert, you know, true amount of force in these exercise, like a jump or a box jump,

you also need to, you know, put that as much emphasis on being able to control and decelerate your body and bring yourself back under full control as well, which is not highlighted a lot in these hype videos in a lot of marketing efforts out there in terms of these exciting workouts that everybody's promoting in terms of it. It's really like an ass kicking experience to start training for power, but really the emphasis needs to be just as heightened on being able to control your body and be able to manage that. The athletes that I think of that come to mind right away when talking about this is

I envision a picture and like a golfer. If you've ever seen somebody train a pitcher or a golf swing, you'll see that much of the practice is around the technique of that. They're not giving everything they possibly can right away. They're first improving the technique, and on top of that, they're resting a good amount of time between each one of those repetitions. That like a pitcher gets, you know, as many balls and throws him as fast and as hard as they can with no respiration, he takes one and you repetitions. It's not like a pitcher gets as many balls and throws them as fast and as hard as they can.

Exactly. With no respire, he takes one and you see him. Balls in his mid. He's getting the right grip on the ball. He's paying attention to where his stance is. He's got the wind up trying to replicate the same movements every time. He whips it and then it all resets again. It's probably a good 30 seconds to a minute and a half before he even does the next rep.

The same thing goes for a golfer. Golfer doesn't take the golf club, swing it as hard as they possibly can, and then another ball, then another ball, then another ball. There is a long period between each one of those explosive movements, where all they're really focusing on is the technique of it,

before they even consider giving their max effort into it. And that same detail needs to be applied to when you're doing movements in the gym that are trying to replicate explosive movements. Yeah, the goal is to train your body to exert mass, maximal force and also to do it with good control, explosive movement without control equals injury every single time. So you want to practice both of them. But really it's about teaching your body to explode. How much how quickly can I get this power to

exert? And if you're fatigued, you're not training that anymore. You're no longer training or practicing that. All you're training of practicing is a stamina. Well, going back to kind of like the Olympic lifter, right? Like it is the movement. But also it's it's being able to apply the maximum amount of force where it's most optimal. This is a high level understanding of your body to be able to get to a point where I can actually produce even more power when I need it, but also then go through the movement to create something that's even more effective,

performance wise, and you're ever able to do just working on strength. This topic also reminds me of how I found Paul Fabbard, who's a friend of ours, PJ Performance, who's like massive and huge now. But I found him on Instagram years and years ago, when I think he only had like 10,000 or so followers and what I was drawn to was the emphasis that he was placing on his

basketball athletes with deceleration and the changing of direction and the way they were training. I just hadn't seen anybody really put a lot of focus on it and the importance of that and how you do that. It's one of those overlooked aspects in explosive training. We talk all about the explosiveness and how high can I get and how strong and how much power, but also how quickly that you regain control right after that is as important to that. And I think that's a missed opportunity for people that are trying to practice training like an athlete.

Oh, dude. How do people hurt their arm or their shoulder when they throw a football or baseball at the beach? It's not because they threw it too hard. It's because they threw it too hard for their ability to control the deceleration. Right.

It's the decelerating aspect of it that caused the injury. And so it's just as important. Here's the other way, reason why it's important. Your body has natural safeguards. Your strength is always limited by your body's perception of how much strength it can exert. If your total strength or power output is 100, but your body thinks you're only safe enough to exert 50, how much you're going to exert 50.

That's why that's also very important. Hence the need for mobility. This is where that helps to you put more emphasis there. It's gonna unlock even more potential. Now I do wanna say this about explosive training. There is a way, you need to train, if you've never trained this way, it's important to train your abilities up to that point.

There is a sequence of ways to train, to get to the point where now explosive training makes sense. The only program that we have that really emphasizes an entire phase on explosive training, on building power is Maps performance, but it's at the end. It's at the end when you follow some of the other phases and done some of the other exercises that we've programmed,

then you can get to the point now where you can really reap the benefits of explosive type movements. And by the way, we talk about building muscle and when you look at muscle and you look at the breakdown of muscles, and if I was to simplify it, you could really break down muscles into two types of muscle fibers. It's more complex than this, but just for the sake of this podcast, we'll make it very simple. The fast twitch muscle fibers are the ones that build. Those are the ones that have the greatest capacity for size. And they are the explosive fibers. Nothing gets fast twitch

muscle fibers to respond or turn on like explosive movement, not even heavy movement. Although heavy movement heavily does work, the fast twitch muscle fibers, explosive movements, turn them on like crazy. In fact, Soviet coaches understood this and would have athletes do an explosive movement paired with a slower movement, both resistance training wise, just to turn those fast twitch muscle fibers on. I think the term for that was a post activation, potentiation. So fast twitch muscle fibers, you want wanna get those things to turn on, so you can go do your body building movements

and you can develop more. Train explosively through a phase. Now I know I mentioned math performance a few times in this episode, that's because that is our muscle building fat burning program that takes and borrows from athletic training so that you can reap all those benefits. And this month is August, which means map performance is the program that's on sale.

It's half off. So if you want to get the program, have it all mapped out for you, all written out for you, so you don't have to do all the guesswork. Just get math performance and follow it. It's half off. Here's how you get that program in the discount. Go to mapscreen.com. That's MAPS-G-R-E discount. Go to mapsgreen.com, that's MAPS,

g-r-e-n, e-n.com, and then use the code green50, that's g-r-e-n, five zero without a space. Also, mine pump is recorded on video as well as audio, so if you want to watch us and listen to us, check us out on YouTube. Oh, by the way, maps performance has an at-home mod for it. You only need a dumbbell a couple dumbbells to follow this whole program Yeah, if you have a full equipped home dream that's great too

But if you just have dumbbells, you can follow the full maps performance program again You can find that at mapsgreen.com code green 50 Thank you for listening to mine pump 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 ballac, maps for performance, and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs. With detailed workout blueprints in over 200 videos,

the RGB Superbundle is like having Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money bag guarantee, and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at MindPumpMedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review on iTunes and by introducing MindPump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support, and until next time, this is Mind Pump.