Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1447: How to Start Your Fitness Journey

Episode Date: December 17, 2020

In this episode, Sal, Adam & Justin break down five steps to starting your fitness journey.  The importance of having ideal programming for creating that ‘momentum wave’ heading into the new year. (2:55) How to Start Your Fitness Journey. (6:01) #1 – Conduct Self-Assessment. (6:10) Address Most Common Posture Deviations. (10:47) Upper Cross Syndrome. (11:39) Anterior Pelvic Tilt. (19:38) #2 - Stability First. (25:24) #3 – Build Overall Strength. (31:56) #4 – Have a Plan to Stay Consistent Long-Term. (35:45) #5 – Have a Strong Support System. (39:02) 3 MAPS Bundles to kickstart your health and fitness journey. (41:00) Related Links/Products Mentioned December Special: 3 MAPS Bundles for your level of fitness! Visit ChiliPad for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! MAPS Prime Webinar How to Fix Rounded Shoulders (GONE IN 4 STEPS!) | MIND PUMP Correcting Upper Cross Syndrome to Improve Posture & Health- Intro How to Fix Anterior Pelvic Tilt (BECAUSE SIT HAPPENS!) | MIND PUMP 3 Best Secrets - How To Make Your Butt Grow (AVOID MISTAKES!) | MIND PUMP The (2) BEST Ab Exercises You’re NOT Doing Properly (STRONG CORE) | MIND PUMP Mind Pump #1287: Why The Stability Ball Belongs In Your Workout Routine The ONLY Way You Should Be Doing Dumbbell Bicep Curls! The Best Form of Exercise – Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump #1347: How To Modify Your Gym Workout For Home Mind Pump #1380: The 10 Best Resistance Band Exercises 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. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You are listening to the world's number one fitness health entertainment podcast. This is MindPump. Now, we are in the month of December. A lot of people start to think about fitness this month. We have the holidays. We tend to overeat. Not a lot of activity going on. Right around the time January kicks in,

people really start to flood the gyms or start working out. So what we wanted to do is we wanted to address all of you who are just getting started. Maybe you used to work out in the past, but you haven't done it for a long time, or maybe you've never really worked out in a structured, consistent way. This episode is for you. We cover all of it from beginning to end. Now, as you're listening to the episode, you're getting good information.

If you want something really specific, something that really spells it out for you. If you're listening and you're thinking, look, I just wanna be able to open up a workout and follow along and do exactly what it says because I'm having a challenge just putting this together. I don't want to take out all the guesswork. We have a beginner weightlifting bundle, which is a bunch of programs designed to be used

specifically by beginners. This bundle includes three programs. It includes access to a private forum, so you have support with other fitness-minded people. It's discounted heavily. Learn a little bit about it. Go to our site, mapsdicember.com. Check it out for yourself.

See what it's all about. Listen to the episode. If at the end of the episode you decide this is something you wanna sign up for, it's very easy to sign up. You get lifetime access. Then all you have to do is go to your computer, click on the button, there's your workout for the day.

All the programs done together will give you about nine months all planned out. Again, that's at maps, December.com. By the way, this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Chile. Now they make devices that go over your bed. These are actually pads, water cooled pads that go over your mattress under your sheets

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Hey, I got something for us to do today. I think that would be kind of fun, right? Challenge our trainer brains here since you're coming up on the new year. Oh, this is a big time in fitness. Yeah, right. So this is around the corner is New Year's resolution, which every year, weight loss and fitness is in the top three, at least. And there's always a just, you know,

herd of people that come into the gym. Massive influx, right? And so the momentum wave, what I'd like to challenge us with is let's build the ideal programming for a person coming in, a beginner that is coming in to get personal training for when he goes, now what I know is we're going to have to challenge ourselves a bit here because there's a lot of things we know that are individualized, but let's try and think of the most common avatar. I think that's fair. I think that's fair because I would say a good 70 to 80% of the beginners

that you would see or people who are just getting started as part of their new year's resolution, there's a lot of similarities among them. Right, I can think of posture stuff and chronic pain thing. Exactly. Goals are very, very simple. Exactly. And it's important, it's so important when you're a beginner. It's so important to start on the right foot, to start off the right way, because that can really set the tone. If you start off the wrong way, you can, you run a high risk of a couple of different

things. you can, you run a high risk of a couple different things, either injury, too much pain, or you get results initially, and then you plateau so hard that you're, you just lose all inspiration to work out because almost two months later, my body stopped responding. I forget what, where the, I can't remember the stat, what the number was, but it was a, it was a pretty high percentage of people that get started on their fitness journey in January that it ended up injuring themselves within the first eight weeks. It's very high.

I know most stop. I mean, look, I manage gyms for decades and every January, we would see a 60 to 100% increase in traffic and new people coming in interested in joining. And by March or April, they were pretty much gone. It was back to normal. So you see this huge wave January February was big too. By March it took a big dip and then by April it was like, really I think there's two things that attribute to that the most.

So which won the injury thing getting, because that's really discouraging, obviously, when you first start off. And then the other is the hard plateaus, which you alluded to, because, and that has a lot to do with how you come out of the gates. Having a plan. Getting started the right way and planning out, kind of having the idea of how you're gonna progress

through your programming, your workout, makes it from a huge, huge difference. And when I made this a priority in the gyms that I managed with the trainers that I worked with, when we laid a lot of this out, the success rate went through the roof with the people that came into the facility. So I think that's a great idea, Adam.

Let's cover all of that. Let's start with how they get started. Yeah. Couch to gym, almost like that. Couch to 4K or whatever that was. Yes, oh yeah, that's great. Okay, so number one, the way you start is not by just jumping into a workout.

You want to start with a self-assessment. An assessment tells you a lot about what exercises to focus on and which ones that you should not focus on. As a trainer, there were many tests that we did on people to identify movement patterns, that means the way your body's moving, to identify muscle imbalances, that would tell us some muscles are not as strong

as they should be, or others are too strong for the weak muscles. We would identify maybe points of pain. And then that would help us start off with the right kind of workout, because although all exercises have value, some exercises are wrong for certain people and are right for other people. This is a big thing. Like a lap pull down, for example, could be a great

back exercise for someone. For someone else, it could actually increase the risk of shoulder injuries. This is such an important point to really individualize the experience and make it more effective. The thing is, there's lots of momentum and there's lots of hype going into this. There's lots of plans out there that are just sort of straightforward, like plug and play. But if you don't really understand what you're bringing in, you know, with your patterns and with your current status in terms of your strength and your joint stability, you know, you're going to be running into some problems, some big problems down the road. Now, do you guys remember some of the hurdles, though, with clients like that

came in like this? So they just come in the new year and they're 20, 30 pounds overweight or they fall off the gym and they lost a bunch of muscle and now they want to get back into building muscle again. And then here you are as a trainer doing this squat assessment, windmill assessment, type of deal, and telling them that we need to work on this and we need to work on that, but they're like, I want to just, I want to just lose weight. I just want to build muscle. Did you guys, you guys remember overcomment? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That's that's your job. Part of your job as a trainer is to really educate and inform the client because they come in with the, they're

unconsciously incompetent about what it really takes to accomplish their goals in a safe way and a fast way, and also, most importantly, in a sustainable way. You know, they find in studies that the obesity epidemic kinda looks like this. People gain a little bit of weight throughout the year. They gain most of their weight in the holiday season and then they don't lose it. So after one year, two year, three years, four years,

10 years of holidays like that, now they're 30, 40 pounds overweight. So they come in with this conception, okay, I'm here, I want to lose all the weight, I want to get great results, I just want to bust my butt and then I'll be good. It doesn't work that way. So a good trainer really communicates, okay, here's how we're going to start, here's how we're going to continue. And the assessment is so important for this. Well, in two, I think it's just human psychology to kind of revert back to what your abilities used to be, and you don't really look at yourself any differently, even though you've been doing different things for the past even few years, sometimes, like, a lot of clients

I would have, would have initially would think that all these abilities for explosive movement and all that was gonna be able to come right back. And this was something that never left. And it's hard, it's a hard, it's a ego check a lot of times initially to reveal. Oh yeah, the whole I used to do, I used to work out this way all the time.

Right, yeah, yeah. And more to that point, Justin, is like, a lot of times they come in and it's, oh, I want to look the way I used to look or I want to move the way I used to move. And, you know, if it's been years and sometimes decades since they had been training and then they're coming in to work out,

there's a lot of stuff that's happened to their body since then that needs to be addressed. Totally. I mean, if you were a, you say a collegiate level football player and primo shape for most of your young adulthood, and then you get a job. You become an engineer and then you sit at a desk all day long and I get you three, five years later

after being an engineer who's now out of shape and you now want me to get you back in shape and you are still connected to the, you know, Justin in college, the way I moved, the way I played, the way I looked and the way I played, the way I looked, and what you don't realize is there's been things that you've done, behaviorally around food, around movement, around sitting,

and posture stuff that I have to address. If I'm a good coach, if I'm a good trainer, sure I can get you back into running 40s, I can get you back into doing some of those things, but I'm doing you a disservice, if I also don't help you address all the other things that are happening. Yeah, so now to be fair assessments that trainers will do, good trainers will do, they're very individual and they're To be quite honest, too complex for the average person to do on their own. If you don't have a training background, if you don't have an education

In exercise and movement, it's not gonna do you any good to do a lot of these complex assessments. So I'm going to simplify it. I'm going to give you a one simple general assessment. It's not perfect but it's way better than just walking into the gym or just starting to work out. And I think the best one to pick for people is posture. I think this is a great one because it does tell you a lot about where you should start and exercises you should maybe focus on and which ones you shouldn't focus on. And I think we should talk about the most common deviations,

posture deviations that we would see in clients. I'll start with one that I probably saw in eight or nine out of 10 clients. I would even venture to say today, if I were to do this on, especially in the San Francisco San Jose Bay area, I would guess it would probably be 100% of the people that don't work out, that would have this particular posture deviation.

It's known as forward shoulder, okay. Forward shoulder looks the way that it sounds, okay. Your shoulders kinda roll forward. By the way, when you do this posture assessment, stand up tall, barefoot, and just stand comfortably. Don't try to stand straight. Don't try and do any of that. Your posture is that your assessing is your natural posture. So just stand up straight comfortably. Have somebody take a picture of you from the front, the side, and the back so that you can kind of identify what we're about to talk about. And again, the most common one, forward shoulder, that's the

shoulders rolling forward. If that is part of your posture deviation, which it probably is, it usually means you have a weakness in the muscles of the mid back, the muscles that pull the shoulder blades back. They're weak probably because you sit in in front of a computer at a desk or in front of your phone, so the shoulders are constantly rounded, those muscles in the mid-back are not working a lot, and so they just get weak over time and so this develops into your posture. I feel like, can I lump that into just, can we say, upper cross syndrome because forward head is directly tied into that.

It's tied into that and it's as common if not more in common. That's where the head just forward. Right, especially with computers and phones today, I think I see that as much if not more than what I see with the forward shoulders and they both, I think, are paired together. Now, earlier I talked about exercises that are good for some people and bad for others. Here's a good example. If you have forward shoulder, doing? Doing lots of pull down movements, like a cable pull down,

or even going out and trying to do lots of pull ups, because you may lack the strength in the mid back, you're gonna actually encourage your body to have worse forward shoulder. You're gonna pull yourself up, shoulders gonna round forward, and you're gonna encourage, or increase the risk of shoulder pain. In that person, I would not do those exercises, the exercise.

Even bench press. I mean, at some point, just being in the wrong position before you even start to do certain lifts that are pretty common will add up a lot of unnecessary stress and tension in the joint, which is this is definitely one you need to identify early to catch it. So you can strengthen where you need to strengthen and pull your body back into optimal alignment, optimal alignment allows your joints to function the way they need. The best exercise for forward shoulder general exercise is a row of some type. So this could be a band row, this could be a cable row, this could be a dumbbell row.

But essentially what you want do is you wanna focus on not necessarily pulling the weight up, that's part of the movement, but you wanna focus on the shoulder blades coming back and together. You wanna imagine that there's a pencil in the middle of your back and you're trying to pinch and grab it with your shoulder blades.

And also be careful not to shrug your shoulders. Oftentimes people with forward shoulder, when they tell their shoulders to pull back because those muscles are so weak, they instinctively shrug their shoulders. By the way, if you have forward shoulder, you probably also feel neck tension. So, if I'm ringing some bells with you right now, this is probably an issue for you. So, two things I want to add to that, what this looks like in a program or workout, right? So, if you're coming to the gym, is I'm addressing corrective stuff first and with lightweight.

So C2RO I think is a great exercise to address forward shoulder. But when I do it, I'm not doing it like a strength training exercise, right? Meaning, you're not going heavy on. Right, so you're, and I would have to repeat this to clients when we're doing corrective work. When we're doing corrective work,

it's about the movement and what we're trying to fix. More than it is about, oh, you're this strong, oh, next week you're this much stronger, oh, this next week you're stronger than this, it's more about the movement. And so I'm gonna teach this client a seated row with really, really lightweight for them. And I'm gonna put a lot of emphasis

on the retracting, the pencil squeezing part that South-Symeow, I'm gonna have them squeeze, hold for like five seconds. And emphasize it with the isometric hold. And I use that a lot of times just for them to connect to that and really feel what that feels like. So that mind muscle connection when you hear about this is really essential

in this beginning journey to really understand like technique, but also understand your body and what you need to do to be able to get into this. You may be thinking, well, why can't I go a little heavy? I can do the exercise, it's super easy. Why not just go a little harder?

Well, here's why. When you have an imbalance or weakness, once you start to go a little too hard, your body's gonna move the way it always moves. You're not gonna be able to activate those weak muscles. You're gonna hard, your body's gonna move the way it always moves. You're not gonna be able to activate those weak muscles. Your body's gonna pick and choose the way that you can move to move the weight, the best way that you can do it.

And that means the way you've always been doing it. If you do a row to strengthen your mid back and you go too heavy, you'll actually row with forward shoulder. You'll actually make forward shoulder even worse. So I'm going to give you an analogy, so this kind of makes sense. If you've learned how to type on your computer

with just your index fingers, right, the hunt and peck method, and that's how you've typed for the last five years, and then someone comes and tries to teach you to do the correct way to type, and you practice the correct way to type for 30 minutes, and then they say, I'll give you 50 bucks if you could type over faster than 50 words a minute. Guess which way you're gonna pick, the hunt and pick method,

because that's the way you've practiced for so long. When you push the speed, you're gonna wanna go the way you, you're faster with the slow way than you would be with the fast way. Until you learn the fast way, and then you can far surpass the slow way. So this is why correctional exercise needs to be done light and focus on the squeeze and

the form and the isometric portion. Also back to Justin's point, which is he brought up the bench press thing, right? So this is where this also becomes very important, is that there's exercises that lend themselves better when you are in the proper possible, all exercises lend themselves better in proper posture, but are really important, right? So when you, we do a bench press, one of the most common things when I would train clients is they have a hard time feeling it in their chest.

The reason why a large percentage of these clients had a hard time feeling it in their chest is because of the starting position, because they get in the bench press, and they don't realize their posture, that they are already in this rounded shoulder position. And so when you're in that position and then you perform the movement and even to the untrained eye, you'll look at the movement and it looks right.

They're moving the bar up and down. They're balanced. It doesn't look like they're cheating anything. They're not using any leverage. They're just pushing it up and down and it looks like it's okay. But you have to be able to really look at their shoulder girdle and look and see if they're able to keep their shoulders retracted while they're also pressing. And because it's a pressing movement, which causes the shoulders and the arms and everything

to come forward, it's even harder to think about staying in that retracted position. So this becomes even more important when I'm dealing with somebody who has upper cross syndrome rounded shoulders is that I got a prime with that movement. I got to do that seated row before I ever teach that bench press. And I may even like Justin said earlier, avoid it because it's so difficult for them to stay in that position. Me just bench pressing because I think it's a because we talk about that as one of the big movements, right? We say the benefits of it all the time. They may listen to my pump. They hear that. They go, Oh, I should bench press. My pump says it's one of the main exercises. But if you are doing it incorrectly, you're only going to make

things more difficult for you down the road. And so, and if your main goal is health and strength and fat loss, I may avoid that movement at first until you get that connection down that you understand that, oh, when I bench press, I can't allow my shoulders to keep collapsing and rolling forward, because then I end up pushing with my shoulders and my triceps and not with my chest.

Right, so the next posture deviation that is probably almost as common, I wouldn't say it's as common, but almost as common as forward shoulder, is known as an anterior pelvic tilt. So if you're listening to your confuse, what does that mean? Literally your butt sticks out, right?

So if you were to look at your posture sideways, you have an arch in your low back and your butt is sticking out. Now this typically means that there's some weakness in your core, a tightness in your low back, maybe your hip flexors a little bit tight. Now it's important that you, if you see this, that you do the right exercises, because again, if you do the wrong exercises, you could potentially make this worse.

And if you have this particular posture, and then you go do, I don't know, back extensions, for example, and you don't really work on correcting this, you could cause yourself some low back pain. You may find low back pain when you do a squat because your back is so strong, large. You may be someone, in fact, this may ring some bells, where your back gets really kind of tight and fatigued when you're driving for a long time in your car.

Yeah, especially if you notice that you need to wedge a pillow back there, a limbo pillow, which is something I worked through with my mom. It was very much. It's a good one. Yeah, apparent that there was there was a disconnection there. And this is this is one of those things you can train your way back to good connectivity with the core to be able to stabilize, you know, your spine and your back and everything like it should, but it's going to take some work. Yeah, I address this in the number one viral video that we have on YouTube.

So if you look up in Mind Pump TV, or just literally in YouTube, but in Mind Pump, make your butt grow. And even though that is specific to making your butt grow, the movements that I teach in there are addressing this. So part of the reason why some people are challenged with feeling their butt and exercises that they're supposed to feel it in their butt and they feel it more in their quads is because of this posture issue.

Because they have an anterior pelvic tilt, they are quad dominant. And when you have the stick your butt out look that Sal's talking about, you carry your weight over the top on your hip flexors and your quads. and what it, when you have the stick your butt out look that South's talking about, you carry your weight over the top on your hip flexors and your quads. So then when you go to perform exercises like squats, lunges, step ups, these exercises that should get a lot of glute involvement, they don't get a lot of glute involvement.

The quads take over because of the posture. So even though that video I made was designed to help people with their butt, it's really, is what I'm helping you with is your posture deviation. You've got this anterior pelvic tilt. I'm trying to help fix that, getting your glutes more involved in movements where they should be.

You end up over reliant on the wrong muscles. Right, right. Two other exercises that are good for this, done properly, a physio ball crunch, can be really good. You can find that on the Mind Pump YouTube channel as well. We'll make sure, by the way, we link this, all of these in the show notes. I believe that's MindPumpPodcast.com. So you'll be able to click on the links and watch these, watch us teach you these exercises. And then there's another movement called the hip flexor deactivator crunch. This is one of my favorites for working

on anterior pelvic tilt. Because what it's doing is it's strengthening the core without overworking the hip flexors. Here's the interesting thing, right? You have anterior pelvic tilt. You don't know what it's called, but that's what you got. And you got back pain and you go to the doctor and the doctor says, strengthen your core.

So you go do a bunch of ab exercises and what ends up happening? Your low back hurts even more. Like, what's going on? The doctor said I need to strengthen my core, but I do leg raises and I do as exercises, and my back hurts even more. This is because your hip flexors are doing all of the movement

and your abs are really playing second fiddle. Your core muscles are weak, your hip flexors are tight and strong, too strong for your core, what we call stability. So you wanna teach the core to be stronger without the hip flexors taking over. Those videos will help you with that and they'll help a lot with the pain.

And you want, and here's the other thing too, Adam talked about priming earlier. By the way, priming refers to doing specific exercises before your workout, so that, you know, working with your particular posture issues, when you move into your workout, they're not becoming a problem. A great way to prime if you have an anterior pelvic tilt before you do

like leg exercise, especially lower body exercises or dead lifts or other really effective movements is to do the hip flexor deactivator exercise that you'll see in the video. That's linked in the show. One of the things I used to have to overcome too with clients and I want to make this clear is that you know they come in and they want to do all these, you know, crazy exercises or get to their goals as fast as possible. And then here they get, you know, trainer Adam is taking them through these corrective movements that are light and boring and we're priming. But what you need to understand is if your body is moving incorrectly, performing what it's considered the greatest exercises, a squatting or whatever that. If it's moving incorrectly,

you're getting less benefits from it. Or no benefit. Or right. So by getting you to move better, even though I'm having you do these little what you might think are boring exercises. The whole experience is going to benefit 10-feet. That's right.

It will only accelerate your results and aside from what we're talking about with posture and pain. And of course course those are the all the main reasons the trainer and us all want their clients to do that. But it also will accelerate your fat loss and your muscle building goals too. So even though it may not feel like it because it seems so simple and basic and you're not sweating and it's not you're not like sore from these movements, but priming the body correctly so that when you go do these big movements, your body is moving and more optimally, you'll get more results from it. Yeah, doing things the right way gets you there faster, doing them the wrong way, even

if it feels like you're more sore or sweaty or it's harder, won't get you there any faster and usually gets you there a lot slower or not there at all. Now the next step, right? So you did the self-assessment, we identified two common deviations. So now you got some ideas on what to work on there. So now you're like, okay, I'm ready to do start with my workout. You want to start with stability first. Stability means you're tight, you're balanced, you don't feel like you're going to drop a dumbbell on your head, you feel like you're standing into an exercise, you're feeling very, very stable.

You wanna start with stability, because if you have poor stability, you cannot progress. Poor stability is the foundation for everything else. You're not gonna be able to go hard or heavy or push yourself when you have poor stability. I wish I realized this earlier, even myself training, that the more stable my joints were, the more access I had to strength,

our body is capable of a lot of strength, but it limits that because of the instability in the joint. And this is something, if we address this right away, and then we start building upon that, the strength compounds significantly. Oh, it's interesting. When you first start working out, this is what you may feel.

You may go and lift a weight, and it's going to feel shaky or your arm is going to kind of move in funny ways with the dumbbell when you hold it over your head. Or when I was, you know, way I used to describe it as a kid, is it felt like my muscles were laughing, like I'd press a bar up and they did it, did it, did it, did it, and I'd be like, why can't I push it smoothly? This feels so shaking and so weird. It's unfamiliar, really.

You're unstable and you have to train through that and teach your body to become stable. One of my favorite tools for teaching clients to become more stable, or their bodies to become more stable, is to use dumbbells. Dumbbells, you have to balance them. You push a dumbbell overhead. You need to be very strong, straight and stable.

If you go heavier than your stability allows, you'll feel it, the hand will move all over the place, you'll feel like you're going to drop it. I love dumbbells for this purpose alone because it naturally controls the amount of weight people use. This is also why I like the physio ball. And this is where I use the physio ball. The reason why this is the natural progression is that if we are working on posture and trying to get you more aligned before you go into these movements. When we add in a stability component

into your training, I'm also working on posture. So in order for you to stabilize and balance, you need to have good posture. So, and I love using the physio ball because it's an external tool to help give you the feedback on that. So example, the challenges. Right. Let's say I have somebody I'm working on up across syndrome and they weren't ready

for a barbell bench press yet because they kept voting. But now we've done some good work on their posture. They're starting to get the retract thing and they're starting to work on some core and the lower cross syndrome stuff. I put them on a stability ball now. Now they can kind of get, and what's great about that is the stability ball I'm gonna have them engage their hips so they're having to stabilize their posture while also Performing this movement so I'm getting the benefits of working their chest out in addition to that

I'm also working on the stability in the posture, which is running off of what we started with Yeah, so the stability ball, physio ball Swiss ball. It's a big right inflated ball I think everybody knows what that is now, but sit on one. Just sit on one versus sitting on a couch or a chair. You're not gonna be able to slouch like you can in a chair. You have to sit up tall and you have to have your feet planted and you have to engage your muscles differently

to prevent yourself from rolling in one way or another. So exercises on a stability ball or a physioball is excellent to work on stability. It's an excellent way to teach you how to become stable so you could progress later on to the more challenging stuff. Well, and yeah, and into this sort of phase point, like tempo is up the utmost importance in terms of going slow and really owning the technique of it. First, before we really tried to stress the body in different ways through You know altering that tempo with speed

I just like to take everybody to slow down and really understand the mechanics of the lift But also understand like how your body needs to adjust which muscles need to kind of stabilize and activate Through these exercises just going slow from the beginning is such a better method. Well, this is also where the logic came from on how I taught a bicep curl. Now, you guys remember the video that... The controversial one? Yes, that I did on YouTube, right?

It's another one of the most viewed videos that we have on there. And it is controversial. Like, you got a bunch of people that were, of course, that were talking shit about it. But this is where this stem from. What I started to realize was I had these clients that had poor posture, they didn't have good stability,

they didn't have good core strength. And then I try and teach the most basic dumbbell bison curl, which you would think is like one of the most easiest movements to teach somebody. And they would be rocking their elbows and they would be swinging their arms and arching their low back, and they would be kind of all over the place.

And then I'd grab the dumbbells as a young trainer and be like, no, like this, you know? Or then I'd go over there and I'd like move their shoulders. Cheers, I do. Yeah, and I just couldn't get them to keep themselves in good posture while also trying to curl. And then I realized what the stability ball was doing, right? And how that would force them into good posture.

So I made the point of try sitting on a stability ball and doing an overhead press without having good posture. It forces you into that. So that's where I started to do this split stance with my clients. I said, okay, we're gonna balance on one foot. So I allow them to get in that split stance, the back foot's on their toe.

So they're really off-kilter. But what I noticed was, as soon as I made them kind of balance, it would force them upright. They would stand up tall. Their core would naturally activate. In fact, right after I'd get them in that position, I would go to touch their belly button. I'm like, do you feel your stomach is slightly drawn in?

That's your core right now, activating. And actually is like working like a vacuum around your spine to hold you in this posture. Then I'd hand on the dumbbells, and then I'd show them how to perform the curl, and then also they were magically in this great form, and it was putting that emphasis on the stability first, and then teach the movement, and then what you see is the mechanics

end up being a lot more. Right, and back to Justin's point, it slowed them down. Slow is important with stability. Slow is better than fast here, okay? Slow, controlled, it should take you three seconds to lift the weight and at least four seconds to put it down. Do everything slow like that.

You won't need a lot of weight, focus on stability, use the physio ball, that is the best way to start. And for most beginners, you're looking at training this way for maybe two to three months. And by the way, within that two to three month period, you're building muscle, you're burning body fat, like stuff is still moving forward. Stuff is happening, your body is changing.

Now after you move past that point, then things get really exciting. This is what I really like to have fun with a lot of clients. Now we get to focus on building overall strength. Now why is that important? Okay, well if you want to build muscle it's obvious. You want to build overall strength because that builds the most muscle. What if

you just want to burn body fat? Focusing on overall strength has the, by far the most profound positive effect on your metabolism. If you get stronger overall in a big way, you're going to burn more calories all the time just sitting there. And remember there's two ways you can burn calories. One is your body's metabolism burns calories. The other way is to go out and move more to burn those calories. One of them takes a lot of work, it's very manual,

and it makes you sweat and it's hard and it takes time. The other one happens regardless. Regardless, you wanna go big cookies with your kids, you wanna sit in front of the TV, you're at work. If you have a faster metabolism, you're burning more calories all the time. If you do it the manual way, well that means you got to go take 30, 40 minutes aside to go to try to burn these calories. Building overall strength, builds muscle, and also boost the metabolism.

This is when you start to lift with the good, you know, compound movements, the barbell exercises, your barbell squats, your barbell deadlifts, your bench presses, your overhead presses, your rows, you get strong with those, you start to see your body shape, male or female, it'll shape in a very positive way, and you'll see a huge improvement with yourself. And resist the temptation to wanna do all the creative, fun gimmicky shit.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm guilty of a trainer of doing this early on in my career, right? Of wanting to wow my clients by teaching them something so unique and creative and different that they've never seen or done to try and impress them. But when it comes to getting you the best results and what is the ideal way you should go, this is where we're at. We should be in these compound lifts.

We should be trying to get rid of those, and we should be drilling that home, doing them over and over and over and getting better and getting better at them versus, oh, new workout, let's throw some new creative cool exercises that are unique and different at my client trying to confuse the muscle. Yeah, do all these machines and do all these weird exercises. Don't do them, they don't give you nearly the same impact

as these compound basic movements and getting stronger at them. And this is a very, very fun time. Okay. This is when results start to really speed up. If you train your body properly, by the way, results look like a snowball rolling down a hill. It starts to build up momentum and the snowball gets bigger and faster and bigger and faster. And this is when things really start to go. Yeah, it's a much louder signal now that we're teaching our body. There's a lot of demand. This environment is changed.

So therefore our composition has to change. We have to build muscle to be able to resist these forces now that are much more intensive. And in order to even get there, we had to get stable. We had to make sure all of our joints were nice and stable and prepared properly to now add this load to it and add more of this intensity because it's very demanding on the bottom.

Especially if you want the best results and you don't wanna end yourself steps one and two were necessary before we get here. That's what I was just gonna say, because someone listening may be like, oh, that's the fast part. Yeah, let me get there. I'm gonna jump into that.

It won't be the fast part if you just jump into it. Then you'll just hit a big temptation to do that. You'll hit a brick wall. You gotta do the stuff that we said first, but once you get here, things really start to kick into gear as you get stronger with those lifts. I mean, you add 15 or 20 pounds to your barbell squat.

Your butt's gonna look totally different. You can add 10 pounds to your overhead press. Your shoulders and arms start to look different, for example, this is where you can focus on intensity a little bit now. Now you can go in that you've set the stage, you've done your assessment, you've done a couple months of stability training.

Now you can start to get in and start to push things a little bit. This is when it really starts to get fun and things really, really start to change. Now, I would also like to talk about some of these struggles that beginners encounter. One of the biggest struggles that I would see, aside from what we said earlier,

which was the risk of injury and the fact that they plateau, if you're doing what we're saying, you're gonna avoid those two things, but there's still another big hurdle, and that's this. When you first get started on a fitness journey, you do build a lot of momentum. And sometimes when that momentum is stopped, whether it's because something happened,

you're on vacation, you don't have access to a gym, you have time is getting really tight, the kids are, you know, happening, you got your work, and you're like, I can't, I don't have the time to drive the gym workout, and then drive back, I only have time to work out. It, this I can't, I don't have the time to drive the gym workout and then drive back. I only have time to work out. This really can screw people up because once they miss a couple workouts, it's, in my

experience, it's hard to get them going. So you definitely want to have a plan for when you don't have access to equipment. You want to have a plan for when you're somewhere without a gym, somewhere without dumbbells, or you have a limited time, you want to have a plan. What kind of workouts can I do when that happens? There's two things that I think that really helped that. The first thing is not overextending yourself on the commitment to the gym in the first place.

So gym routines that ask you to be the gym five to seven days a week because you think that you're gonna get to your results faster, not a great idea for that reason right there. It is very difficult for the average person to be consistent long-term five to seven days a week. So finding a plan that is more realistic effort, you can always add days later. So finding a plan that is more like two to three days a week to start off with and building

upon it. That's perfect. Yeah, I've seen more people be demoralized by missing a few days in the week and then like thinking, well, I can't do this, so I can't do any of it. Right. Exactly. And stopping. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing is to have a body weight type of routine, a routine that you can do at your house, a routine that you can do in a hotel room that you can do when you're traveling in the airport anywhere you could think of, something that you can just train your entire body

without any equipment or any weights. Having something like that at your disposal gets you out of that like, oh, I need to be in the gym and it's okay. It's okay to be strength training, running like a MAPs and a ball of type of routine, three days a week in the gym, and then all of a sudden you take off for a week for Christmas

and you're at a cabin or a hotel somewhere, there's nothing wrong with you switching to a bodyweight routine for that week. Now, the important thing is to have it planned out already. Be prepared before that happens. What you don't want to do is be caught off guard. I meant to go work out, but things got hectic.

I only have 45 minutes. I'm at home. I don't have equipment or whatever. I don't know what to do. So you want to have a plan ahead of time. Here's another amazing tool, Resistance Bands. I love Resistance Bands because they're easy to travel with. They fit in a purse and you can do lots of exercises with them.

Most Resistance Bands these days, most Resistance Bands have attachments in your door. You can put them in your doorway. You can do pretty much any exercise you can do with the machine, you can do the resistance band, so it's a very inexpensive investment, so I recommend that just to keep you consistent, that way if you, again, if you don't have access to equipment or you have tons of time, you're still gonna be able to-

You need flexibility so you don't miss a beat. Now the other thing that I see that trips people up when I'm first getting a client like this is their support system. And whether that is the support system that they have at home, I know you guys can agree with this, right? Someone who has a spouse who is not on board with your new health and fitness journey, extremely difficult to keep that client going.

It really, really is. And even if you do having a community or support system that is moving in the same direction or cares about health and fitness as you do or as you do now, I think is extremely important for long-term sense. It's not something that I thought a lot about early on. Early on in my career, it wasn't like you didn't come up in our national certifications, our books of learning, learning how to train people.

It didn't come up that that was such an important piece. It was just over time, training so many people and realizing, wow, if I had a client that had a spouse who wasn't on the same page nutritionally and exercise-wise, almost always they fell off if they didn't have some sort of a community. Right, so you could do this with a friend, you don't even have to work out necessarily together,

but you just communicate and they're doing the own thing, you're doing your own thing. These days, online communities are wonderful, you can go online, talk to groups, ask questions, especially because you're new and you're getting started in this, you're gonna wanna ask questions, hey look, I'm doing this barbell squat, I noticed this thing.

What do you guys think about my form or whatever? This is actually an important thing. Like Adam said, I didn't realize this until later on, but once I put this together, it made a huge difference with my clients. So there you have it, okay? You start out with a self-assessment. We gave you a general one.

You start with stability. You move to overall strength. That's when you increase the intensity. Make sure you have a plan for when things don't go the way you want them to go, so you can still get your workout in and then connect with the community. Now if you want something more specific, if you want this all planned out and mapped out for you, this month we have a bundle of workout programs actually cover all this. So we talked about the self-assessment portion. We have a program called Maps Prime.

It's way more specific and individualized than just posture. In Maps Prime, there's a compass test that takes your body through three movements and really helps you identify and individualize correctional exercise. So it's very specific to you. Then we talked about stability, training through stability. We have a program called Maps Starter. Maps Starter literally is an entire workout designed with dumbbells and physio balls

to help people build stability and strength through stability. Then we talked about building overall strength. Maps andabolic is our most popular workout program. It focuses on those really effective lifts. When you follow Maps and Obolic over a few months, you will build tremendous strength. You will see your metabolism speed up. Then we have a program called Maps Anywhere. Maps Anywhere is all workouts, just body weight or band based. You need no equipment, whatsoever. And you could do these again,, that's why it's called maps anywhere.

And then finally, we talked about having that support system. We have a private forum called the Mind Pump Private Forum. There's I think 3,000 people on there, all fitness enthusiasts, all this in the podcast. You can literally go in there, ask questions, comment on other people's questions, and just get that support system that you need to stay consistent, especially in that initial six

to nine month period, which by the way, all these workouts that come with this bundle takes you through for about nine months or so. Oh, and by the way, myself, Adam and Justin, also are on the forum, answering questions, and interacting with people. And that's included in this bundle. And what we did with this bundle, we did this is a special for December to help people get started in January is we've

taken the price of all these programs and cut them down tremendously once you enroll you have lifetime access to learn more about this go to maps December dot com again that's maps December dot com thank you for listening to mine pump 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 Mind Pump Media dot com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballad, 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.