Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1487: The Best Way for First Responders to Stay in Shape

Episode Date: February 11, 2021

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin cover four key ways for first responders to stay in shape. Huge shout out to our first responders! (2:27) Breaking down the mentality of this group of people and how they may be affecting their gains. (3:05) Four Ways for First Responders to Stay in Shape. #1 – Concentrate on full-body strength training. (11:50) #2 – Focus on compound lifts. (17:48) #3 – Work on mobility. (24:27) #4 – Maintain stamina and durability. (31:00) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit ZBiotics for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! Special Promotion (Ends Feb. 15th, 2021): First Responders Bundle Body Part Split vs. Whole Body Workout: Which Is Best? - Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump TV – YouTube Compound Exercises Vs. Isolation Exercises – Mind Pump Blog Why Mobility Is So Important For Being Healthy – Mind Pump Blog Priming Your Body Before and After Workouts – Mind Pump Blog How To Improve YOUR Work Capacity (6 MOVEMENTS) | MIND PUMP COUNTRY STRONG?? Increase YOUR Work Capacity (2 EXERCISES) | MIND PUMP 5 Exercises For HUGE Forearms & A STRONGER Grip (FREE Big Arms Guide) - Mind Pump 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 and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pup. Now, in today's episode, we talk to a special segment of our audience. First responders, you guys are awesome. You're bad asses. You're the ones first on the scene,

dealing with the crazy stuff. You have special demands that you place on your body and you need to train in a very unique way to improve your movement, to improve the way you do a job, to prevent the common injuries that plague first responders. So in today's episode, we talk about how to construct and put together a routine that'll benefit you specifically. Now, this episode is brought to you by our sponsor,

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Don't forget to use the code, by the way, mind-pump. Also, all you first responders, if you enjoyed this episode, we put together a first responder bundle, which includes our workout programs that will most help you. This bundle includes maps prime, maps performance, maps strong, and maps OCR. All of these

designed to help you do your job better. Now normally if you get all these programs, which by the way will give you about nine months of exercise programming, maybe even more. It will cost you over $500. But the first responder bundle special puts all of them at $159.99. So $159.99 and you get all those special programs. Plus 30-day money back guarantee. Go check them out. Go to mapsresponder.com. That's M-A-P-S responder.com.

And by the way, this promotion ends February 15th at midnight. So go check it out and sign up soon. We're gonna be talking about first responders but before we kind of get into you know they're training and the things that the challenges that the face and what that all looks like, I want to thank them because that is a tough job. Showing up first when shit goes down is insane. I have a friend who's a police officer and I guess you could put them in this same category. And when I hang out with them,

I have them tell me stories. And I'm always just like, how do you go to sleep when you go home? Like how do you deal with that? And then imagine EMTs and firefighters and just you just have to be made of something different to kind of handle that. You know?

There are more difficult clients to help too because of their schedule because of the high stress totally the long hours the crazy schedule that they have I've trained a lot of firefighters a lot of nurses a lot of ER nurses Police officers like and they're they run like crazy schedules and they have very, very stressful jobs, right? So that always presents a challenge when writing a program, when putting together nutrition for them, and it's not a lack of Discipline or consistency from them because they all tend to have that I feel like it's it's never what I've always had to do is kind of help Help them find that right balance for for work, what they're currently doing. Yeah, it's really stress management.

I mean, it's a big part of it because you're bringing a lot of that, higher adrenaline back home with them and then how can they sort of turn that down a bit and then how do we work in with their schedule and then how do they also implement fitness and everything else properly? Yeah, and you said stress management. I think when you say stress management, with their schedule and how do they also implement fitness and everything else properly. Yeah.

And you said stress management. I think a lot of, I think when you say stress management, people assume it means meditating and doing that kind of stuff, which is part of stress management. But there's another part of stress management, which is anything that is a stress on the body, you have to understand that they all pile up in the same bucket, right? So lack of sleep, stress and anxiety from work or from life, illness, workouts, right? Workouts are a stress. So when you're training your body, and if you're a first responder, you for sure have to train your body for a couple different reasons. One, prevent injury, injury rates actually quite high and first responders.

And two, to perform what you need to do, you have to be able to perform your job, which at times can be very demanding, but you have to manage this exercise stress on the body because they have so much other stress in their job and because their sleep is often so inconsistent. So, I'm glad you're bringing that up because that was always a challenge, right?

Cause I recall having clients that would say, like, I don't have any stress, like, I love my job. So you can love your job and love what you do and don't feel like you have the stress because you think like everyone like thinks stress and they think like you have a bad boss or your home life is so bad. Or you hate it.

Right, exactly. So it's stressful. It doesn't, that's not right at all. A lack of sleep is stressing your body out. A adrenaline rush, right? If you've got to save somebody's life and even if you love that, right, you enjoy it and it's so rewarding when you do. It still affects you.

It's still high stress. It is. I mean, the body doesn't know the difference. The body recognizes it the same way that if you were completely stressed, now that you get to get across. Yes, now liking your stress means that it might have less of a mental impact,

but the physical impact is actually quite similar. So to give you an example, I love working out. It's one of my favorite things to do. Can I work out too much and put too much stress on my body? Of course. Absolutely, right? You love sunbathing, so you don't feel negative about laying out the sun.

Can you do that too much and cause your body too much stress? So it isn't, and I'm glad you brought that up. And I'm glad you said that's a great point because oftentimes people will think the stress means that they feel negative about it. So they're like, well, it's not stress to me because I love the excitement. I love that it's unpredictable. I love that crazy stuff happens. Still, it's stressed on the body and your workouts,

you have to take that into account. We have to take that into account. Not to mention, for most of these clients, not everybody, I know of overgeneralization to say all, but most of these clients that I would train that were first responders, they also have that mentality where they can switch it on and just grind and go,

because they have that, they work a 16 hour shift or three days in a row, they work with like no sleep. And so because they have that, they sometimes will transfer that same thought process or mentality going into training. Totally. And that's where it's hard because you had to teach them that, listen, that's a great discipline, right?

To have that, you have that ability to get after it, but if we're gonna train your body to respond and to change or to do what you wanted to do, we need to work with it. And if you're getting after it at work like that and you got a lot of stress going on, and then you go in the gym and your workout reflects that type of high stress training. We're not gonna see the results that you want to,

so we gotta learn to kind of have an effort. You want the fitness to benefit your body. You wanna like find that right dose that will complement, you know, true change in a muscle building pathway, versus just adding more stress onto the pile, which your body's gonna end up fighting itself at that point.

Yeah, the dose has to be appropriate. Actually, it doesn't matter who you're talking about, right? It can be anybody. The dose has to be appropriate. The appropriate dose of exercise, the appropriate application of exercise is going to maximize your results. Anything outside of that, anything outside of that,

whether it's less than the appropriate dose or too much of the dose is gonna result in reduced results. And if you go the further away you move from the appropriate dose for you, the less results you get, and in fact, if you continue to push outside of that, you'll start to get not just diminishing returns, but negative returns.

And I've actually seen this in people who are in jobs like this. I've also trained people in this category, and I've seen them. You're right, that they tend to apply that same... They're drawn to it. Right, and so then they do that with their workouts, and they're like, why am I feeling worse? Why is my strength going down? Yeah, and it's hard, too.

A lot of times, because of the schedule, they're're really tired and they're just trying to catch up on sleep or that this is a consideration of even training, it seems like it's taken away from their rest time. And so to be able to fit that in is really challenging but you have to approach it with a completely different mindset. Well, it reminds me a lot of training like X athletes. They have that similar mindset going into the way they work out. My best friend's wife is a nurse.

And she works the crazy 16 hours and super disciplined. And she's drawn to the orange theories, the soul cycles, the peloton, the running marathons. And I've known her for a long, long time. My best friend and I go way back and they've been married for a long time and so she's always you know She live with me at 1.2 is it went back when I was a trainer So she's always reaching out and asking me nutrition questions and exercise questions And I'm always having a teller. I'm like, Janet you you're so drawn to this way of training And I know you like it because you get the adrenaline rush similar to probably what you get when you're saving somebody's life inside the hospital.

But you need to understand that that's not what's best for your body and it's so hard to get her out of that mindset and get her into this, you know, slower reps, longer rest periods, let's build strength, let's work on mobility. Hey, actually, you know what? This is the next day after you ran three, 16s in a row. How about we do something more recuperative? Let's actually just do all

mobility today or stretching work or maybe sauna or meditation today. And then the next, after you've gotten a full days of rest, then we'll go after a good strength day the next day after that. So, I'm always having to communicate that to her. Yeah. And again, if you do everything right, your body moves forward, it responds and you feel phenomenal. You know, that feeling of that, that, you know, stress feeling, right? Because you have an elevation in cortisol, you have adrenaline that increases.

It actually feels good. It does. It's supposed to, by the way, cortisol is not a bad, a hormon, everybody says, oh, cortisol is bad. No, it's not, it's not bad, it's useful. And when cortisol's high, your body utilizes more energy, you get that fight or flight response, which is actually very useful when you need it, right?

It also feels good. By the way, when people go on certain corticosteroids, which are similar to Cortezone, because it's anti-inflammatory, you'll hear them say, oh my gosh, I have so much energy, I feel so good. And lots of, but also over time, if it's high all the time, itammatory, you'll hear them say, oh my gosh, I have so much energy, I feel so good. You know, and a lot of stuff. But also over time, if it's high all the time, it starts to break things down,

it starts to degrade things, it actually starts to promote fat storage, this indirect way of telling your body to store more calories because you're so stressed all the time. So if you're one of these people always in the state and you feel good, how do you elicit that state when you go to the gym? Well, you just hammer the hell out of yourself, right? And in the meantime, in the short term, oh, I feel good all how do you elicit that state when you go to the gym? Well, you just hammer the hell out of yourself, right?

And in the meantime, in the short term, oh, I feel good all of a sudden. You know, I love those spin classes. I love that super intense stuff, makes me feel good. And then of course, a couple of hours later, they feel like garbage again, and they try to go and try to get that hit of drug again, that cortisol hit or whatever again.

So you need to train appropriately, and there are unique challenges to people who are first responders. And that's a big one. That is a very big one. Yeah, and it's really important that you consider like strength training because there are so many examples and Courtney used to work in the ER

sometimes she'd float over there but also just in her own job. Like the most common injury was a lower back injury and this is just moving patients and dead weight and being in that sort of position where you're leaning over and you're picking things up in front of you that are very heavy. And there's gonna be a lot of those opportunities,

especially when you're responding and somebody's passed out or whatever. Like you've got to make sure that you have the proper mechanics and the strength to produce the right thing. Do you know that it was actually first responders that helped me unlock the secrets of full body training? Because I had to learn to adjust

what my programming at the time, which looked very bodybuilder-ish. I used to use to run splits with my clients. It was whether it'd be a two-part or a three-part or a one- body part split. That's pretty much how I wrote programs for the first four or five years of training. But I kept running into this issue

when I was training the firefighters or ER nurses that would run these 16s or three days in a row or five on, four off. Like I was like, shit, this messes up my programming. All of a sudden they're going great and then it would break it up. And now we don't hit shoulders for a week and a half because they have to take these days off.

And so the only answer to that was, you know, what I need to start doing is I need to start looking into like training full body. And up into that point, I really didn't dabble that much in it. And that was, and that funny part is they saw amazing results from this. And of course, it still took me like another three,

four years before it like fully registered for me. But this was the beginning of me starting to train my clients full body more often than I would do. So they don't have to live in the gym. This solves a lot of the issues to the schedule. And if they miss a day or two, it's not a big deal. A week never goes by that at least everything doesn't get hit because we run a full body routine.

It allows for flexibility. Yes. So if you're working a full body routine. It allows for flexibility. Yes. It totally does. So if you're working your full body and your schedule gets crazy or oh my gosh, I need to get some sleep, you know you're going to hit every body part a couple days a week, at least, right? If you're doing a split four days a week and you miss one day, I didn't get to work out my back.

Oh no, I missed my shoulders this week. And over the course of a year, you actually start to, you see, if you look at someone's schedule of course a month or a year, that you miss a lot. There's a lot of imbalance in the way you're training. But if it's full body,

it doesn't even have to be set schedule. In fact, this is how I would train first responders. I wouldn't tell them you have to come Monday, Wednesday, Friday because their schedule will change so often. It would be more like when you come in, we're going to train your whole body. Right. And it would usually turn into two or three days a week, a full body, which incidentally works best for most people anyway.

Right. Right. It's optimal. It's optimal anyway. So it's a great way to keep yourself consistent in your workouts. Now here's another piece of it, right? Full body encourages, because sometimes people think, oh my god, full body, that's like, I'm gonna hammer myself. No, it doesn't. If you do it

properly, full body workouts encourage you to train with more appropriate intensity, because you're doing, let's say one typical full body workout would be one exercise per body part, let's say three sets each, right? You're not gonna go to failure on squats because you have to train your whole body. So actually naturally, it starts to encourage this kind of appropriate use of intensity. And it feels very invigorating, it feels really good. You can get away with a two day week routine full body

and do just fine. In fact, when I train Doug, I train him twice a week full body. He's not a first responder, it's just how I train him twice a week full body. He's not a first responder. It's just how I trained him. For actually the first year we worked out and got tremendous results. Most people do. So if you're a first responder, you are far better off setting yourself with just a full body routine.

So when you can make it to the gym, you're doing an exercise per body part in your whole workout. It also opens the door for them to extend this workout into like one long. So this would happen sometimes, right? So let's say I've got a first responder and this is their off time. And so we have a great three day week of training. And we hit our full body.

We have our very similar like anabolic the way we split up the sets and reps. And then the next week comes, and they're like, Adam, I'm running five straight or something. What do I do? So then all we would do is say, hey, listen, I want you to rest and recover the day after

that long work week. I want you to make sure you get recovery. Then the day after that, your second day that you have off, we're gonna run a full body, but then I'm going to let you do eight sets of this and 10 sets of this and 12 sets of that. And it will end up being an hour and a half,

two hour workout that they'd have, but that's okay because that's how we designed it. And then the next week after that, or two weeks later, we're back to the three or two, it just allows a lot more flexibility for me to coach them and keep their volume of training up and adjust it on the fly based off of their ever changing schedule.

It's the most flexible way to train. And you know, here, and there's also, there's a psychological component here, because I don't care who you are. I don't care how much you love to work out. You probably have body parts that you enjoy training more than others, or to put it differently.

There's definitely some body parts you don't like to train, like you like to train the other body parts. When you follow a body part split, and you have a stressful job that can make you exhausted, it's really easy to skip that body part, right? If you're a woman, in my experience it was the arm workouts that you tend to, oh today's just arms, I'm gonna take today off. For guys it was legs, like, oh legs, I'm gonna go back up. I'll do it tomorrow when it's chest, type it in. When it's full body, it's full body.

You don't mistrain the whole body and that balance is very important when you train your body, especially with the injury rate that you see with full body. You don't miss train the whole body. And that balance is very important when you train your body, especially with the injury rate that you see with. Oh yeah, and plus two, like when it's leg day or something like that where it's like more intense. A lot of times you can overreach. And you know, and this sort of helps to manage that a bit better because you know, like there's gonna be another workout that's gonna be very similar.

We're gonna hit the same group again. And so you're mindful of that carrying that into your other workouts. Totally. The other thing that you should do when you work out, and I recommend this for most people, right, especially if you're a first responder, is the focus on compound lifts because the functionality of the strength that you get in the gym is means it's something different for you than it does to the, you know, the desk, the person that works at a desk in front of a computer. You work in front of a computer on a desk, you're, when it comes to functional strength, you know, it's not that important. Like, you're not going to test your body on a daily basis. I mean,

you know, you might lift a box of files, you know, once a month, but that's about it. Otherwise, you're clicking your mouse and typing on a keyboard. If you're a first responder, not only are you testing your body, it's extremely unpredictable. You're lifting people, moving objects, you're twisting, you're turning, you're bending, you're stepping back, stepping up, moving over, things that may be uneven or unbalanced. You need your strength to translate to what you're doing in your job. Compound lifts do this, okay? Isolation movements do this far less, right?

So, you know, if you wanna work out your biceps, a pull-up is gonna be way more applicable to your job than doing barbell curls. I feel like you need to break that down and simplify that even more because you're saying things like compound lives, isolation, functional, which are all fitness terms. Like, what does that mean to a person

that's just getting into exercise? And here's you saying that, like, what the fuck does that mean to them? Is it what kind of exercises are you talking about? Yeah, think of it like really using your stabilizing muscles versus not. So if I'm in an isolated type of an exercise, a lot of the machines will take that role. They will allow you to place your arms down and you don't have to hold your arms up in

certain positions like a curl, for instance. And that's something that the machine now takes that role. Whereas if you're standing up, now I have to stabilize my body. I have to make sure everything is bracing properly and protecting my joints. So that's something that has value in terms of functional strength. Yeah, to put it plainly, compound lifts

utilize more than one joint in your body. It's typically has to find, but they're just big movements. So a leg extension would be working out my legs, but I'm in a chair and I'm just using my knees. A squat is also working my legs, but I'm bending my knees, my hips, my ankles, my back, I have weight on my back.

So it's a bigger movement. It's a gross motor, so it's a gross motor movement, meaning I'm using a lot of different muscles in mimics real movement. And they tend to be free weight, right? They tend to not be in machines. motor, motor is a gross motor movement, meaning I'm using a lot of different muscles and mimics real movement. And they tend to be free weight, right? They tend to not be in machines.

Compound lifts can be done in machines, but the free weight ones are even more functional because obviously if you're helping someone lift someone, do it, you know, something in the real world, it's probably not on a track or attached to a cable. It's probably free, you know, like a free weight would be. So compound lifts are what a majority of your workout should look like. So did you guys have favorite exercises or in favorite compound lifts that you like to teach?

Oh, I overhead press. So I overhead press is great for first responders. I'd get them good at dead lifts. I'd get them really good at squats. I'd get them really good at rows. I'd get them really good at rows. Turkish get up. Turkish get up. A zircher squats, dead lifts.

Those movements I think are like, oh, a zircher is great, right? For functionality because you care if you're holding someone close to your body in front of you. Yeah, I like Turkish get, because here's the thing, it's about organizing your body. It's about having full control of your body. And I think that people like,

don't really consider that a lot with training. There's a way that you can communicate better throughout your body. And I think that's super valuable if somebody like a first responder. Well, we have a couple of friends that, you know, we, that tease the whole, I've seen them tease the zertra squad.

I've seen them tease the, you know,, I've seen them tease the Turkish get up. But here is a classic example of where I would argue this and I would say that this is where it has tremendous value because it's very specific to the client. You're talking about first responding, to tell them about people that are gonna potentially be picking people up off the ground or grabbing heavy things and moving them.

Something moves away from them, it's pulling their body out of position. They have to be able to get back to stabilize it. Right. And so getting that person to be able to squat 600 pounds in the sagittal plane is less valuable to me than them being able to control like a 50 pound kettlebell over their head while they do a Turkish get up.

To me, that's more, that will have more carryover into the things that they will be doing in real life than them just heavy loading something. And so this is where this, I think these types of movements have tremendous value. It's the dessert churns, how you echo that, right? Like, how often are you gonna be grabbing things and picking things up in front of you

if you're a first-est runner, most all the time? And how many exercises in the gym have you doing that? There's not a lot of exercises where you load the front of your body and you're holding on to something while you squat or lunge your hinge. Yeah, heavy farmer walks are probably good too. You need to have a pretty strong grip and stabilization, stabilize your spine while you have load on your body. These are the kinds of exercises you should focus on. Now here's the other side of this. This is a cool side of this. All those exercises are also the best at building nice physique.

So, these are side-effect of doing all those compound lifts besides being functional work is your body actually visibly starts to change. And the reason why I'm saying that, I know first responders are also interested in looking good, right? Those are also the most effective exercises for making your body look good.

I'm glad you brought that up because that was another hurdle I remember having a lot. Because I'd have, especially my firefighters, my firefighter guys that I train would be like, they want to look jacked, I want to look this certain way. You're like, man, you're already a firefighter. We got a calendar coming out. Yeah, totally.

I totally have buddies that like that. So I like that you brought that up because there's this idea that if I have you doing Turkish get-ups or search your lunges or something that you are not gonna get jacked to look awesome doing those exercises. They build tremendous muscle burn a ton of body fat too. Those are great exercises,

but they also have more carryover into what you're gonna be doing at work all day. So I remember having to communicate that all the time because they see magazines, they see bodybuilders, they see the routines that they are, and they're like, I want that physique. It's like, listen, we can build a physique like that. Maybe not like to a bodybuilder who's on stage,

but you can have an amazing looking aesthetic physique, but still do these functional type movements that are not your traditional bodybuilder exercises, and I remember having to communicate that a lot. Totally. Now, here's one of the challenges, right? With being a first responder, somebody has this kind of a demanding job. Is that in your job, most often,

the movements that you have to do, the things that you have to do with your body are not good form movements. What I mean by that, they don't tend to resemble perfect form in the gym with an exercise. It can be very unexpected, you know? Deadlift is in front of me, and I'm lifting the weight up off the floor,

but what if I'm lifting something, and I can't do it right in front of me? There's something in the way, and I gotta twist and move to the side. What if I'm lifting something that's in balance? Yes. Or what if I have to reach up over something? Or the weight moves.

Or the weight moves, right? Or I'm reaching up over something on my toes, and I'm kind something that's imbalance, or would have to reach up over something, or the weight moves, right? Or I'm reaching up over something on my toes and I'm kind of twisting, right? So how in the hell can I prepare my body to be strong and stable in almost an infinite possibilities of unexpected movements, right? One thing you could do is you can go in the gym and construct a fire scene

and try to strengthen your body in that, but that's not going to work very well, right? Because like I said, there's infinite possibilities. Here's the better strategy. The better strategy is to work on mobility. In fact, mobility training should be the priority for people and jobs like this. Now, to explain what mobility is, I don't just mean a range of motion. I don't just mean you're flexible. That's part of mobility. Part of mobility is having good flexibility,

but the other part of mobility is just as important which is to have stability and strength within that range of motion. So to give you an example, I have an infant son, he's not even four months old, I could probably put him in the splits, right? So he's flexible, he's a baby, he's totally flexible. But is he stable in that position? Can he hold himself? If I put any weight on him, even his body weight in a split position, he might risk actually

dislocating your joint or injuring himself or a tip over, right? So you need the flexibility, but what you all what you need even more is stability and strength and all the ranges of motion that your joint can provide. That way, when you're in a situation where you have to reach real quick or twist and bend, you're not just able to get in that position because you're flexible, but you're also able to stabilize and prevent injury because the injury rate is very high with first responders.

That's usually due to slips, falls, or it's due to lifting or moving something that causes you to pull something in your back is actually one more common place. The truth is, this is true for everybody, but it's just exaggerated with first responders. It's really true for everybody. Because, yeah, because of how often they're doing

these things, right? I mean, don't you guys remember with clients, the injuries were never, I was deadliftin' 400 pounds out of me yesterday and I tweaked my back. It was. He's in the shower. Yeah. I was in the shower picking up a shampoo bottle or I was reaching back to grab my kid, you know, was doing, you know, spilling something

in the back of the car or I had to move real quick because my kid almost fell down the steps. It's always like something like that, right? Nothing crazy, heavy or challenging. They just had to move dynamically in a way that they haven't been training, and then they get hurt. Now, those are random accidents with normal people,

and that's why they should train that. When you're talking about first responders, that's like every day of their life. That shit's happening where they gotta pick somebody up and move them from a bed to another bed or grab and catch somebody or carry somebody like, so it's just, I mean, it's just, it 10x exaggerated that these people have to be doing. To echo that in the mobility talk.

What that provides is just to get the body to be familiar, to familiarize yourself in these different positions. And so to be able to react properly is everything. It's going to help you from preventing these injuries, but also it's gonna provide that strength when you need it. So if my body's in kind of a weird position, you know, it's better to be able to, you know, have some familiarity there

to be able to get yourself out properly safely. Yeah, injuries happen when you move outside of your body's control and capacity. I know that sounds obvious, but here's what's not so obvious. You can be really strong and injure yourself doing something that seems easy, like Adam was saying, turning in the car to grab your kid, or you moved a little too fast, laterally.

The reason why they injured themselves doing those things is because it was outside of their own body's capability, in essence, they didn't control that movement. They didn't own that movement. That's the only time you hurt yourself. I don't train it. Right. So, if you own lots of ranges of motion, if you own lots of possible movements through

mobility, as well mobility movements and exercise and practice actually does, you're shrinking the possibility of injuring yourself. You're actually making that possibility smaller and smaller and smaller. And to give you another example, some of the most injury prone people I've ever met in my entire life were really strong bodybuilder types. Oh, yeah. Very muscular, very strong, could bench press over 300 pounds, can squat a lot of capacity for strength, but you know, just a little angle difference and then boom.

Oh, totally. I happened to a friend of mine years ago. He's a big, strong bodybuilder and we were walking and he stepped off the step, didn't realize that his step was going to go off the step. Step down, boom, hurt his back. Just from doing that, here's a guy that could deadlift almost 600 pounds and he stepped off the step

and hurt himself. And it was only because it was outside of his body's capability. In fact, getting really strong sometimes can make it even worse because you move stronger with more force outside of that capability and cause problems. Mobility work helps to erase that. And if you're a first responder, this should be a priority. Mobility work should be a part of your routine.

Especially and also priming, right? So setting your workouts up, so that's also really important. So you have somebody who's in a job where whether they're sitting or they're standing still in a position all the time or they're always bending over a certain way. If you go right into a workout without setting your joints up, setting your body up, priming your body for that workout, you end up just tightening, tightening, tightening, tightening, tightening, and that also increases the risk of injury. So mobility work, you want to be doing on the off days of training or integrating that sum throughout your day.

And then making sure when you go into your training session, priming the body correctly and getting it set to have a successful workout. So priming is like warming up before you work out. But specific way more targeted and way more effective. The aim isn't just to reduce injury in your workout, but rather increase the effectiveness of the exercise you're doing by turning on your muscles and ways that allow them to fire more effective. Facing your joints in favorable positions. So that way, you know, you're going to perform at your best.

Absolutely. Now, here's the next thing. And this is extremely important because what is most demanding, from the first responders that I know, it usually looks like this, that their job is quiet and dead or extreme. There's only two things, and when they're extreme, they get tested for hours and hours and hours, and what you need for that is a lot of stamina and a lot of durability. You know, it's one thing to be strong for 30 minutes or for three minutes.

It's another thing to be able to maintain your performance when you're in a situation that is three hours or four hours or 24 hours. You know, here in California, we had fires that were just raging months ago, and some of those firefighters were out there for days doing stuff. And you need stamina and durability to in order to perform that without destroying your body. Well, here's another example of training somebody for their specific needs, right? So that message would be counter to the most ideal way

to put on the most muscle on this client. Well, okay, that's important, right? We wanna build muscle. I know this client wants to look a certain way too, but I also have to take into consideration that they have times with their job where they are gonna have to go for three hours straight. And so I wanna make sure that I program stamina

and their interability into their program design for that specific reason knowing that it's going. That doesn't apply to everybody all the time. If I have a client comes in and they want to build all this muscle, they don't have a job like that. That's a component that might get left out. But because this person is going to be having to tap into that on a regular basis, and I care about their wellbeing in addition to building muscle for them, I'm gonna build that into the pro. Right, and here's a difference between what we're talking about, stamina and durability versus endurance. Endurance would be like lung capacity,

would be running from long distance, slow paces, which is very, that's not what it looks like for a first responder typically. Typically what they're doing is either, like's not what it looks like for a first responder typically. Typically what they're doing is they're either like, like we talked about the firefighters are hiking for hours. They're carrying really heavy stuff. They're carrying heavy things, your hands get beat up because you're holding tools

or you're manipulating things, or you have to push things away, you know, throughout the hours that you're doing stuff, or you're carrying people. It's a durability, you have carrying people, it's durability, you have to be tough in your body, different than like I can just run for six miles. I like durability as the term also like work capacity.

And that's just really like we're trying to build the gas tank that fuels the machine. And so that's something, we just wanna have more ability to keep going and keep working through a lot of the load that you're carrying. You know, the another thing too, when you're talking about durability as one of the limiting factors

or most common limiting factor that I would see with clients is their grip and hand strength. 100%. So I'm always making sure that I'm programming that in there. It's just one of those overlook things that you wouldn't think that that's that important But because a lot of the jobs Require good grip strength and when you're doing something when you're carrying a body for distance or you're lugging gear Like you're saying for over a mountain like the bit not only do you have to be durable and be able to get through there

But you also need to be hold on to stuff and so grip strength becomes really important The two things you need durability and the most are core durability because your core starts to fail, especially if you're carrying things for long distances or whatever. And then like you said, Adam, your hands, it's your insurance, your core,

that you're protecting your spine. Right, right, right. But if you can't hold on to something, here's the other side, the other part of the hand one. You can't hold on to something, you can't lift it. I'm okay, how strong your legs are, how strong your back is.

If you can't hold on, you are done. And you can't do the work. You would be surprised at how many people that work out in the gym on a regular basis, whose hand strength is not matched to strength of their back or their legs. In fact, it's so common there's lifting tools that help people with that.

They wrist straps, for example, or straps, a very, very common tool that a lot of regular lifters use all the time because their hands just can't match the strength and here is an example. So we've debated this actually a lot, because I use straps, although I haven't used them in a long time, I have used straps in my workouts. Here's an example, though, where even somebody like me

who is a fan of that as a tool here and there, this is where this person cannot be in my program. I'm like, no, because I don't care if you can get 50 more pounds on your deadlift if you can't hold on to the bar because that doesn't make sense for what we're doing. It doesn't translate.

Yeah, I don't get, if talking to a body builder who's trying to build a specific part and develop something, okay, you can make that case to me, or that makes sense. But if you're somebody like this where your grip strength is, it could be a major limiting factor and you've been able to perform your job, I don't give a shit if you can't lift 50 more pounds. And you could if you had straps on your hand, I need to get your grip strength stronger.

Absolutely. So the four things you want to consider for your routine, if you are a first responder, or even if you're trying to become a first responder, just the recap, you want to do full body workouts, you want to focus on those compound lifts, you want to definitely do mobility work, and you want to work on durability and stamina. So here's what we did, right? So we have workout programs that address all the things that we just talked about. There's a few in particular.

There's Maps Prime. We talked earlier about priming your body. There's also a correctional component to that. Maps Performance is our athletic-based training program. Maps strong. You are going to do a lot of weird and odd and different lifts to give you that kind of functional strength. And then Maps OCR, which was designed for obstacle course racers, but you want to talk about

durability, that program develops durability. And what we've done is we put them all together for a limited time in a first responder bundle. Normally if you put all those programs together, it retails over $500. What we've done for you guys is we've made it $159.99 and you can get all those programs. It all included in there and of course there's a 30-day money back guarantee. Just go check that out on our site, mapsresponder.com. That's M-A-P-S, responder.com. By the way, this all ends February 15th.

That'll be the last day that we're offering this special bundle for first responders. Thank you for listening to Mind 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 Mind Pump Media.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 trainer, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money-back 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!