Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1532: How to Become the Strongest Guy (or Gal) in Your Local Gym

Episode Date: April 15, 2021

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin break down six things you can do to build more strength. The transformation Adam experienced focusing on strength and the mistakes made only training for aesthetics. (1:50) The beauty of strength. (7:34) Don’t fall victim to subpar programming. (10:18) 6 Ways to Become the Strongest Guy (or Gal) in Your Local Gym. #1 – Master the technique of the 5 big lifts. (12:51) #2 – Learn how to manipulate intensity. (17:45) #3 – Know how to phase your training. (27:16) #4 – Eat more to get stronger. (33:20) #5 – Increase your stabilization. (40:00) #6 – Prime your body consistently and properly before your workouts. (45:22) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Vuori Clothing for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! FLASH SALE: MAPS Power Bundle! Why Resistance Training is the Best Form of Exercise – Mind Pump Blog Stop Working Out And Start Practicing - Mind Pump Media Resistance Training for Beginners – Mind Pump Blog The Most Overlooked Muscle Building Principle – Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump #1512: The Value Of Following A Workout Program Sore muscles…what does it mean? - Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump # Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth: 1282: The #1 Key To Consistently Building Muscle & Strength (Avoid Plateaus!) How Phasing Your Workouts Leads to Consistent Plateau Free Workouts – Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump #1320: How To Eat To Build Muscle & Burn Fat MAPS Macro Calculator Mind Pump #1530: Why Warm-Ups Are A Waste Of Time MAPS Prime Webinar MAPS Prime Pro Webinar 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 just found the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pup, right? In today's episode, we talk about how to become the strongest person in your gym. Now, why is this important? Well, first of all, it's cool to be the strongest person in your gym. Now, why is this important? Well, first of all, it's cool to be the strongest person.

But also, if you're strong, you'll probably also look amazing. You've got good muscle, it helps speed up the metabolism to get lean. You look amazing. Getting strong is really fun and it's really great. In this episode, we talk about the things you should do to get yourself as strong as possible,

especially in the big five lifts. Now, this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Viori. Viori makes the best athletes you'll find anywhere. I love their clothing, especially their Sunday joggers. Very comfortable. They look nice. They last a long time, and Viori has a lifetime guarantee on everything.

Go check them out and get the MindPump discount. Go to vjouricloathing.com, that's vuori, clothing.com, forward slash MindPump, and then use the code MindPump for 20% off. Also, in this episode, you're here is talking a lot about strength. So here's what we did. We took our two best programs for strength,

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Justin, I'm going to need your full attention. This is going to be a topic that Sal won't be able to help us out that much. Okay. I got you. Well, I mean, he's going to have some really good book knowledge that he can share with us. But I really want to talk about being the strongest guy in the job. Come on, bro. You definitely know a lot. Yes, that's true. You know, if we were building the, the, uh, a program, the strongest, the first structuring, some bullet points for, you know, a, a young man right now that's, that came

to you. And I'm sure we all had a client like this and said, man, I, I'm aspire to be, I want to be the strongest young lady, true. Yeah. I get Dan's from women from a club. No, true, very, very true. Both sexes, but I had a lot of young, this was more common with the young, young men that I would get that would come in and say to me

that I want to be the strongest dude in the gym. I want to walk in and just own. Yeah, and how would you train me? What does that look like? So although Sal won't be able to help out too much. Just try to. Stop. Oh. Do you want to stop? No. You know what, the irony, the irony what you're saying.

No, little anecdote. No, no, no, no, no, no, all joking aside, the irony is that of the three of us, you were the least interested. You're the least interested. In strength, right? That's very, very true. I actually did not ever train for strength

until we all met. Yeah, so and this is good because we all worked out for a long time and I, for me, strength was always very important. I love strength. I still do. It's one of my favorite things to train for just then of course being the athlete and strength is a physical pursuit. So if you want to get better at sports, yeah, you get stronger. Adam was always more of the aesthetic guy, want to look good or whatever

competed on stage as a physique competitor. And so you worked out for a long time without ever focusing on strength. And then you threw it in. And the reason why this is so good is because it's great to hear from you what benefits you got from focusing on strength. How did you translate it then to pursue your strength? Yeah, because I focused on it from day one, but you did it later and you got to see the

incredible transformation. No, totally. And truth be told, I'm teasing Sal. I'm not the strongest one out of us I'm like mediocre at all lifts. That's kind of what's happened to me, right? And probably for the reasons you're saying, you know for most of my career I did not pursue strength. I was in fact I used to Pride myself on saying that I was all show and no go go. You know, it was like, I used to, would you say, when I take my shirt off, girls not gonna ask me how much I've been. Yeah, that's why I used to say,

I mean, Justin, I know I've said that to Justin, at least a handful of times when he worked for me way back when, because he was very strength focused. It blew my mind, I'm like, what? Yeah. He seemed like that. Yeah, and I was like, dude, I mean, it's tell me, I'm like, how many girls know

how much you bench press or squat they do. That's just as all old of them. And it's a first thing I was like that. Yeah, I was like, dude, I mean, tell me, I'm like, how many girls know how much you bench press or squat I do, that's just as all of them. And it's a first place to them. And mind you, I mean, I'm 20 years old, right? And so that's a lot of my focus is around gaining girls attention. So of course, my goals have changed and I've gotten older. But you're right.

It's really cool to see that because, I mean, I started working out young, but I always love strength. So I didn't get to see the discrepancy that you got to see that because I mean I started working out young but I always love strength. So I didn't get to see the discrepancy that you got to see because you trained for a while without focusing on that. Then you did later and I mean let's talk about what that did for your body. Well first let's talk about why I did it and the mistakes in that right. You know even being a trainer right so I would consider myself fairly knowledgeable even in my 20s, at that time probably five or six national certifications.

I had a few years experience under my belt, worked around a lot of knowledgeable people. But I fell into that trap of thinking that if I wanted to build an aesthetic physique that training in singles, doubles, triples, even five by five blocks. I mean, that's all comes from the strength community. That's, and I had no desire to be a power lifter

and Olympic lifter that didn't even appeal to me whatsoever. I just wanted to build it. So I really just avoided that. I avoided it because I didn't identify with the people that spoke to that way of training for so long. And that was a massive mistake. And I didn't learn that mistake really, how much of a mistake that was

until we all got together. And it was you guys who kept pushing me in the direction of like, yeah, you don't ever train in singles or triples or you don't ever run a five by five block or one of you ever, like you guys could have asked me my deadlift, my squat and my bench press, what my max was and I could tell you, I don't know.

I had never at that point, this is true story. Maybe when I was like a young teenage boy, we tried to see how much we'd lift. But once I learned that that wasn't very beneficial for my pursuit, I never maxed out. In fact, I would tell clients that it was really not a good idea for most people. There was high risk and most people get injured. You're not going to see a lot of benefits from doing it.

But I didn't realize how much it could help with my aesthetic pursuit. You guys really helped me bring that all together when we, and it was almost by accident because my goals were shifting. I had already competed and made my way up the level. And I was kind of on my way out of that. But yet there was some areas I wanted to work on. And in particular, it was my back. You know, my back was something that in men's physique, if you have a really big, wide,

impressive, thick back with a little waist, which I have naturally a little waist. And so if you can build this really dominant back, it really win shows. It really does. You turn around and you can tell, and I know this now, I learned this going through this, you can really tell what guys are deadlifting and lifting heavy by just the density of their back and the size of it. And that was something that came on really fast for me when I started training for strength. Yeah, strength is, I've always loved strength mainly because I come from a family that loves strength. My dad was a very strong guy and he would always do these feats of strength. He worked

in construction. You know, he would tell stories of his dad and his grandfather. And so I always valued being really strong. So right away when I started working out, I lifted and I liked to see how much I could lift. And it was something that was important to me. I liked to look good, but I also really loved. In fact, I probably like being strong even more than I like the aesthetics. But you know, here's the beauty of strength.

When you get stronger, you're probably doing most things right. You really are. I mean, if the scale moves five pounds up or down, it could be good, it could be bad. We don't know what's going on. It's objective, it's not subjective. It's very objective at the very base prime level.

And muscle does a lot more. It's very metabolically active and all that stuff. But it's very simple, base level. Mus muscle does a lot more. It's very metabolically active and all that stuff. But it's very simple, base level muscle moves things. And in getting stronger means your muscles are either firing better or they're building more. So it's one of those two. So strength is this it's one of the best things you could possibly pursue in order to improve your physique. And I loved more than anything. I loved getting clients who were the average person to focus on strength, especially women, mainly because, I know you said this earlier, Adam,

how guys, if anyone's gonna be more focused on how much they can lift in the gym with the guy, and if anybody's gonna be afraid of lifting heavy, because they're afraid of getting bulky, right? Cause they've been told this stupid life forever, it's gonna be women. So I would get these female clients, we're like, oh, you know, I wanna lose weight,

I want better curve, I want a nicer butt, I want nicer hamstrings, and I'm talking them into doing sets of three and four and powerlifting movements, and we're gonna deadlift and squat, and luckily I'm very convincing, and they would trust me, and then their bodies would just transform us immediately.

Blow them away. They've never had any exposure to that type of training advice. To love that too, because you know, in my background, it was very much, I would look at the person wherever sport I was playing, who's the best. And I would always be competitive amongst myself to aspire to be better and to be on that same level. And so when we started to get bigger and I got into high school and we started lifting weights, it was that same energy I brought into the weight room.

And I would look around and see who's the one doing the most weight for bench press. Who's the one doing the most weight for squat, for deadlift, for whatever it was, I was always trying to push myself to see where my threshold lie, my peak performance lied. And that was something that I always tried to challenge myself to get better at. So you alluded to something else

that reminds me of the mistake I made too. When you just care about looking a certain way, leaning out, having some muscle mass on you, you can actually get away with some subpar programming. And I think I felt victim of this, of thinking that I was programming really well, and because I wasn't measuring strength as an indicator of, oh, I'm doing a good job of that.

And all I cared about was the way I look, which we know a lot of that has to do with diet. And so I didn't realize how much more my programming could improve until I started to use strength as a way to measure that. And that made a huge difference in also how I wrote post. Oh, yeah. I mean, look, I'll tell you what,

when we first started Mind Pump, the one of the areas of the fitness space that was wide open was workout programming, 99% of it out there was complete garbage. The 1% of workout programming that's good was strength athlete workout program. Powerlifting. It was powerlifting, Olympic lifting, strong man training,

anything where they're programming workouts for athletes to compete and they have to objectively be stronger. They always have the best programming. Bodybuilding programming, often terrible. A lot of it depends on genetics and if they're taking animal steroids and all that kind of stuff.

And diet. But if you get stronger, you're probably doing a lot of things right. And I'll tell you what right now, if you want to build muscle, there is nothing that's more guaranteed than getting stronger that'll get you more muscle. Nothing, there's nothing you could possibly do that'll, if you consistently, you can definitely get stronger without building more muscle.

But if you consistently get stronger over time, it's the most guaranteed way you have of building muscles. There's nothing else that will ensure that you're going to put muscle on your body, speed up your metabolism, balance out your hormones. If you have hormone issues, if you're a woman and you have hormone and balance issues, if you're a man and your testosterone levels are low, if you have good workout program and you find yourself getting consistently stronger,

that's going to have the best impact on those things. So it's one of the most important things to measure and to watch for all people who work out regardless of your goal. It's again, it's extremely important. It's very protective, prevents you from getting injured, and it'll tell you, look, if you have poor sleep and a poor diet, if your workout program is off, like you're not gonna get stronger. So to get stronger, a lot of things have to be done right. You know, when we were structuring this episode with the, you know, the six most important points

to becoming the strongest guy in the gym, right? I'm really glad that we started with this first one. You know, the very first one to me is the most important because if I was a young guy and I got the information that you guys are presenting right now, I'm not sure I would have applied it correctly. I would hear, oh, get stronger, because I do remember, just go heavier.

Is that what you're saying? I do remember a small point in my, because when I was like before, I became a trainer and started really reading anything. And most of my fitness knowledge came from like magazines. You know, they were saying, you know, lift heavy, six reps. And I did a lot of the six rep training.

Form was terrible though. It was all about can I lift more weight and I was sacrificing my technique just to try and add weight. And I realized that it didn't benefit me that much. It wasn't until I lightened the load, worked on my technique, and I saw greater gains. This is what kept me from ever going back to that direction was because I saw huge benefits. It wasn't there also the factor of compound lifts, like the big five lifts. That really wasn't something that introduced to later.

And I know a lot of friends of mine even would go into gyms and be a lot more comfortable with the machines and that's where they would stay. And it's just like, it seemed like the a backloaded squad or barbell lifts were, you know, a little bit too dangerous. They just didn't know the mechanics of it, you know, and they didn't know how to perform it properly.

So they just decided to avoid it. Right, so strength just decided to avoid it. Right. Strength is pretty specific, meaning if you get really strong at one thing, all the strength that you gain definitely goes to that one thing, and then you'll get some carryover to other things. Some exercises give you more carryover to other things than others, so to give you an example, if you added a hundred pounds to your leg press, you would get less carry over to lunges, squats,

sprints, leg extensions, then you would if you added a hundred pounds to your barbell squat, right? So the five big lifts, when we mentioned the five big lifts, what we're talking about are the exercises that are the best ones to get stronger at because they give you the most carryover to everything else. And as a side effect, build the most muscle and burn the most body fat. So, you know, you got your obviously your big three powerlifting movements, where you're deadlift, your bench press, your, you know, your squat. But then you have your overhead press, which is another phenomenal exercise. And then you can throw in like a row.

That's probably a barbell row that you might want to throw in there. Now you do those exercises and you get stronger at those, you'll see a lot more carryover than if you focused on getting stronger on any other five exercise. Okay, and I have to again go back to my point I was trying to make was that the key to that is practicing those lifts often. Yes, and by practice it doesn't mean I'm always trying to add weight to the barbell, mastering the technique. Because as a young man that I'm hearing this, I would be like, you know, okay, so those are the five lifts.

Just push weight. Yeah, just push weight, push weight. And I wouldn't, which is strange because I have an athletic background and I know better in sports that like you don't go after it like that. If you hit a ball, if you're swinging a bat and you have shitty form, you're coaches are going to tell you to swing harder.

That's right. They're going to fix your technique. That's right. And yet we do labs before you do dunks. That's right. And yet we apply training sometimes, not like this. You know, we just start adding load where if you treat it the same way of getting good at another skill like the ones you just alluded to,

you'll see huge benefit and carry over. So that is the foundation is, okay, here's my core five lifts. And the goal is to get good at the movement. Not yet, your goal isn't yet to get really strong or add a ton of way to it. Get good at the movement. Get really, really good and efficient at it. And then you start to load. The key is this, is the word practice. Don't work out, practice the lifts often, right? So,

go into the gym and do squats often, and treat it like Adam said, like a skill. You're practicing the skill, you're practicing the skill. In fact, if you look at old Soviet era training and they had some of the best studies back in those days for strength, you would see these athletes, they would go in and they would train with, I don't know, 50% of their max and they would practice them all the time and they would do the same reps all the time.

And then at the end of like 30 days, they would add weight. Even though they could have added weight earlier, they didn't add weight for 30 days, but the jumps and strength were significant. Because what you're trying to do is you're trying to learn the skill, because a lot of strength is the skill, and when you have the skill, when the skill is good, the strength gains you get are phenomenal and they're safe, and they build the most muscle. When your skill is bad, you limit the strength, you limit the muscle building, and you increase the risk of injury.

Well, and this speaks to the second point, which is learning how to manipulate intensity. Yes. When you are practicing, you are not going at 100%. You're not running. If you do that, that's where injury occurs, that's where the fallout is. That's where your technique goes. That's right. And so, you got to learn how to manipulate the intensity level.

And there is a time in place. Okay, there's a time in place to challenge that, right? To take an exercise or something to failure. But it's way less than the average kid thinks. It's, I mean, that was a big mistake that I made was I can't remember this. It was probably some article I read in a magazine or somewhere or being told from somebody who I thought was,

you know, very knowledgeable and weightlifting that going to failure would stimulates all this extra growth. Then what happened? Kid like me, here's that information. Failure all the time. Now every workout, the train to failure all the time. Yes. It's funny about that.

The study's now confirmed exactly what you're saying. That failure is not effective at building more muscle and strength. Intensity is important. You should definitely get close to failure for some of your lifts, but don't go too failure. It's actually detrimental for most people. Then manipulate your intensity in the sense that, because I used to think if it wasn't super hard, then it was wasting my time. If I went to the gym, and if I'm not going hard, then why am I doing this?

It's not doing any benefit. That's actually not true. You also are sending a strength and muscle building signal with a much lower intensity. In fact, here's the biggest difference, by the way, with strength athlete programming, which we already said was superior to body building type programming.

There's something to learn from both, but the programming itself is often superior with strength athletes, because again, they have the objective measure of strength. Here's the big difference. They manipulate the strength athlete training, manipulates intensity, and they're very good at. In fact, you'll often see, for example, yes, if you follow, for example, one of our strength programs, Maps Power Lift, you'll see in there percentages.

And those percentages are help you modify intensity. Other programs will use like RPE or whatever, right? In bodybuilding training that doesn't exist, it's like go to failure, go to failure, go to failure. And this just isn't as effective for most, especially for most natural lifters or the average person, which is 99.9% of everybody listening. So manipulating intensity is very important

when you're practicing your lifts often. I'll give you a simple example. Let's say you wanna get really good at a squat. You could actually squat four or five days a week and you'll get strong really fast. However, you cannot squat hard four or five days a week and that happened. You squat hard four or five days a week.

Not only will you not get strong, you'll get weaker and you'll actually start to overtrain very little. Well, this is also the value of actually following a structured program from a coach or somebody who really knows what they're doing because, as a young man that's learning all this information and ambitious and incoming in the gym and I'm motivated or I'm hyped up because of whatever

I just watched before I came in there, I just took my pre-workout and so I'm hyped up because of whatever I just watched before I came in there, I just took my pre-workout and so I'm all amped. Sometimes you don't do a very good job of objectively looking at this yourself, right? Like you get caught up in the moment, the energy, or maybe you're working out with your buddy, right, how many times have you done this?

Training with your buddy, you know what you're supposed to be doing now. This is why I don't like training partners. I know a lot of people talk about the benefits of training partners. This is one of the reasons why I don't like training partners. I know a lot of people talk about the benefits of training partners. This is one of the reasons why I don't like training partners is because nobody knows better than you if that's probably either falling a program

or should be following some sort of routine where you're manipulating intensity, what your lifts should look like that day. This is why we don't work out together. Yet with all the knowledge in this room and expertise and how much we enjoy being in the gym together, when we train, we train separately because you guys don't know what I need to do intensity-wise

and I know myself well enough that if I hop in with Sal and I know, okay, last squat session, I went really hard over reach today, I need to be more focused on mobility type training back off and he's feeling it because he just had a Great rest day before his legs are fully recovered and he wants to push it It's real hard for me to go. Oh, I'm gonna go ahead and take two of those plates on something and speaking to you know The type of person that would be attracted to this type of conversation, right?

I don't want to be the biggest I want to be the you know the strongest guy in the gym Strongest girl, whatever like the hardest thing to do is to apply that kind of discipline when you're getting into your list not to overdo it and to find that right and correct dose. And honestly, that's one of those things as a coach that more times than not, I'm pulling somebody back from that energy that they're just trying to smash everything.

It's always that, okay, here's the thing. There's really like, I mean, we could kind of defy this in two types of categories of people that go to the gym. There's a people that openly admit, I hate coming here, I don't like exercise. Everything feels like it hurts. They wanna be out of there as soon as possible. It's a different conversation.

Right, that person that I'm trying to motivate them to stretch themselves and to get comfortable being in these intense type of situations and trying to stretch their capacity. Then there's the other group of people. They like to work out, they love it, they feel good when they train. And somebody who says, I wanna be the strongest person in the gym.

Is that? And those people, those are the ones I always have to pull back. Now, think of it this way, okay? Think of it this way. Forget the gym for a second. And all right, now we're talking about you wanna be the strongest person in? Think of it this way. Forget the gym for a second. I know right now we're talking about, you wanna be the strongest person in the gym.

If you're listening, forget that for a second. Imagine if the goal was to be the best soccer player on the field or the best baseball player on the field or the best basketball player on the court. You would not go and practice your techniques with full intensity all the time. That wouldn't make you the best. You would practice the technique, full intensity all the time. That wouldn't make you the best. You would practice the technique, the technique, the technique.

And then occasionally, you'd go hard, you play a game, which is pretty important. You would go perform. You would not just go as hard as you possibly could all the time. If you did, it would be the wrong strategy. There's no coach in the world that would coach anybody to be good doing it that way. The goal is the same here.

You want to be the strongest person in the gym. You practice the lifts often, and then you manipulate your intensity. So what does this look like? Okay, well, what this looks like is, sometimes you're training really, really hard. Most of the time it's moderate, and sometimes it's easy. And that's how it looks through your workout.

Now, if this is confusing, of course, you could follow pre-written workouts that do all this for you, but that's the idea. That'll get you there so much faster. I didn't hit any of my strength goals till much later. And I love strength. I said in the beginning of the episode, I was super focused on strength as a kid, but I was always stuck at certain numbers

until I figured this out as an adult and then manipulated my intensity and practice my lifts often and then everything went through the room. Well, part of what feeds into this though is this myth, right? Of you have to be sore in order for your body to be sending the signal to build muscle. Right, because that means you worked.

Right, and that was, again, another mistake that I made is in fact, I didn't think I had a good workout unless I felt really sore the next day. And I think a lot of people go down that path. And so when they're training and they're going like, oh, I can tell that this is a pretty easy, I'm not gonna be sore from this. And that's where they start flirting with pushing beyond

where they should probably go for that workout because they think they're not gonna be sore enough from it and then they're not gonna get the max benefits from it. And it's completely the opposite. No, what's funny is, later on in my personal training career, when I was actually good at what I was doing, my goal was my clients to never get sore.

I'd never want to get sore. In fact, when they would come in and I'd say, hey, how did you feel about the last workout? Oh, man, I was really sore. I knew I overdid the intensity for their training session. We overdid the volume. We need to scale back. back now early on in my career Well far less successful with clients getting good results. I soreness was the goal. Did you get so less work? No, I didn't all right

We're gonna make you soar this time That's exactly where that saying comes from is cuz someone a client would come in and say that and then they hear me go Oh damn too much and then they go no, no, it feels good. It feels good I feel good was a good workout and be like no, that's not our goal. My goal is actually do as little as possible to elicit the most amount of change. Yes, okay, so you have to understand this with the body. The body, when you're doing the training session, whatever your goal is, the goal is to obviously improve

your body, and that's an adaptation process, right? So getting stronger is your body's a way to adapt so that what you're doing is not causing stress on your body. So if you bench press a hundred pounds, and that's really hard and stressful for your body, and then your body gets stronger, so you can bench press 200 pounds. 100 pounds no longer causes any problems.

Of course, then you add weight and then you continue the cycle. Now the problem is when you do your training, because you're stressing the body, you do cause a little bit of damage. Now if the damage is too much, your body only is going to heal. It's not going to adapt. Adapting, getting stronger, burning body fat, you know, building muscle, adapting is separate

from healing. Healing is just getting you back to where you were before. Adapting is on top of that. Well, if you're hammering yourself all the time, beating yourself up and you're always sore, your body needs the heel. It can't even think about adapting. And so, by the way, if this is you, this is what it looks like for you. This is you, and this might ring a bell, right?

You work out really hard. You get really sore. The soreness goes away. You go back to the gym and you do it again. And you never get stronger. Nothing ever changes. What you're literally doing is damaging and healing, damaging and healing and you're never improving.

You're stuck on the... You're stuck on a hamster wheel. There's another thing that feeds right into that, which is the next point is knowing how to phase your training because part of what can cause this kind of recovery trap is you go and you have a routine that you love to do You love training this way and you love beating yourself because you feel the intensity when you work out and you know it gets you So all time no doubt it worked the first time that's right

So you just keep you get stuck in this phase or this this way of training for long periods on this is my My biggest bone that I have to pick with a lot of these, you know, niche, like gyms that are like these group training where they have like a template that they follow, like all the time they're kind of rotating through. It's like, initially when you go do that stuff, of course the body responds. It's novel to the body.

So the body goes, oh wow, this is new. We've burned some body fat, we built some muscle, I get a little stronger, but then it doesn't take very long for the body to get completely adapted to that, and then the progress to start to slow to a complete stop. Right, so to give you an example, and this might be the sound at first a little contrary, but, you know, okay, so we've just talked,

we've been talking now in the episode, low reps, that's what gets you stronger. I love low repetitions, and I'll never forget when I really figured out how to phase was I did low reps all the time. And I was stuck. I don't remember what weight I was stuck at with my deadlift squat and all that.

But I was stuck and I plateaued. I switched to going to much higher reps. I started doing sets of 15. You know what happened? I got stronger with my low reps because I phased into a different style of training which got my body to respond. Here's the beauty of getting stronger within a particular range. Anywhere between one rep, I'd say 30 reps.

All those rep ranges actually contribute to each of those rep ranges. In other words, if you get stronger at doing 20 reps of your squat, you're going to get some strength at your one rep of squat. If you get stronger at your one rep of squat, you're going to get stronger with your 20 reps of squat. So they communicate with each other. So phasing into different training styles and rep ranges and rest periods within reason is going to progress you much faster even with your maximal strength. So you have to train. In fact, if you train specifically one way all the time, it's almost a guaranteed way of hitting a hard plateau

and your body not progressing at all. And I think the key of phasing it really well is kind of knowing when to transition and doing it soon enough that you don't. Before you plateau. Yeah, before you stall out, before you plateau, before the joints start talking to you, before you start to even see sometimes regression

in your guys' strides. Well, this is a very tough one, and this is why it's very valuable to follow a program specifically to tell you in, because a lot of times your body does finally respond and get very good at what you're doing. And so then, you know, that brings all this new energy, which then you want to then test yourself even more,

and keep that energy going into maxing out and PRing. You may be in that phase a bit too long to where now you're going to have a downward effect. The best way to bust out of plat, I see all these workout programs and people posting on social media and it's like, how to break out of a plateau, how to get your body to respond again. The best way to break out of a plateau is to never hit the plateau in the first place. Avoid it before you get to it

because once you hit a plateau, you gotta back out of it before you can progress and that takes more time. It's better to move into a new phase before the plateau hits, that way you can get your body to progress, continuously progress, at least at a much more consistent point. You say that so you can get your body to progress, continuously progress, at least that a much more consistent one.

You say that so easily, but I tell you what. That is one of the most difficult things still to this day. I'll admit, I'm sure the two of you are the same way too. Because it's hard, because a lot of times, so we know most of our programs are phased in anywhere between like a three and a five week range right So that's kind of every three to five weeks you move into a new phase That's right So that's and that's most all the research points in that range is that's where that's where it's

I know obviously there's always an individual variance, but for most people they'll get the most benefit by Transitioning into another phase now what happens a lot of times is I'm on my the we're on like maps in a block I'm on phase you know I'm on the last week of phase one. And I know I'm getting ready to transition into the next phase. And I just hit a PR, right? You know, I don't want to not do that again next week. I want to see how strong I am again, because maybe I'll go even further and maybe you will. But that's the discipline of knowing that, okay, great.

I'm getting great gains right now. I can't fall in love with this way of training. It's time to transition myself out and move to another phase. And that's how you avoid the pluses. Plus it's tough to jump into a phase that's maybe not your favorite or it's something like, you feel like you're starting over again. Of course, well. That's exactly what it feels like.

Yeah, so, I mean, in anything, right? Nobody likes to continuously be a beginner. And so that's one of those things that it does require a lot of discipline, but it helps a lot to have that structure it out for you so you don't have to be completely like, that's the only way to do it. And for me, the only way that I effectively

phase my workouts is if I follow a written program. If I listen to my body, I get trapped. And what add up to the whole thing. Well, you just said, you just said something that's trapped. And what Adam said, you just trick yourself. You just said something that's really important. Like you said, you feel like you're a beginner. We've talked about on the show before, if you've been listening for a long time,

that there's these thing called newbie games. Oh, the beginner games. Yeah. And they come on fast and strong. When you've never done any of this stuff and you start training, it's like one of my favorite clients to teach because the gains come on like crazy.

They get stronger, very fast. That's right. Now, after you've been lifting for a really long time, you're in pursuit of that. Even though it's really hard to find because you've been lifting and you've done a lot of things, you want your mining for it. So exactly, you were trying to look for that.

And one of the ways to do that is to phase into a place where you're uncomfortable to train a way that you don't like to train. You're a bodybuilder guy all the time, go train like a strong man or a power lifter. Okay, if you're a functional person all the time, go try doing like a bodybuilding type. If you're always bodybuilding,

go try to train functional. Those things, you will feel like a beginner again, and that's where those new beginnings start to come on. Yeah, now the next thing is diet related, and diet does play a big role in getting stronger. And the people that I would work with, who oftentimes were more challenged by this than others, were women.

It was very difficult to get women to eat more to get stronger because most of my female clients' goals were to get leaner. So like, nah, I don't want to eat more. I'm trying to get leaner, even though I like getting stronger and I can see what it's doing in my body. I don't want to eat, and I tell them, listen, if we eat more and we fuel the strength even more,

you're gonna get leaner on accident in a very effective way because of muscles. Build more. If you wanna get stronger, you have to eat also to get stronger. It's very difficult to consistently get stronger by eating in a calorie deficit or by eating in a diet that is restrictive

of any of the macros. So I'm talking to people who like to reduce or eliminate carbohydrates. It's gonna be very hard to get as strong as you can without eating those carbohydrates. Now, I do wanna say there is a individual variance. If your diet is the one that you need to eat because it makes you the healthiest, for example,

that's that you have a very reactive body to, let's say you be a carnivore diet. It's a very extremely restrictive diet. You just eat meat. And the reason why you just eat meat is if you eat anything else, you get autoimmune flare ups. Well, for you, carnivore diet's gonna be the diet that's gonna make you the strongest.

Otherwise, if you're otherwise okay with most foods, a diet that contains proteins, high protein, fat, and carbohydrates in a surplus, so your calories are above what you're burning, that's the best diet for strength. You got a fuel to strength, just like you have to fuel muscle. I think of it like a high performance car.

And the micro and macro nutrients are just like all your levels, whether it be your oil, your gas, your air pressure, your timing belt. You want all of those all your levels, you know, whether it be your oil, your gas, your air pressure, your timing belt, like, you want all of those at optimal levels. And if they're all, if you're running and you have low tire pressure, you have low fuel, you have low oil, does it mean that car won't go? No, you could get it to go,

but it's gonna perform at its highest level. There's no way it's gonna perform at its highest level without having all those at optimal levels. Nutrition is the same thing when your pursuit is to get stronger and build more muscle, you want those filled up. It requires energy. So, don't deprive it of that. And I think that's something a lot of people don't really consider that. If you really think of it as fuel going into your workouts and what you're trying to do and accomplish and build, you need the materials to build.

Now, that being said, don't eat like an asshole. No. Okay, because you're no you can get carried away. This is it. Well here's another another mistake again as a as a young kid that wanted to be strong, wanted to be buff right that I you know and I hear get it. I'm never forget this statement.

I walked into a gold gym when I was I think 17. I bet I could predict I heard the same thing. I walk in and it was me and my buddy were getting a gym membership and I you know they ask you what are your goals, you know, I and I literally think I said something Like this. I want to be the buff is strongest guy in the gym or whatever. So what does he do? He over the loudspeaker calls that guy, you know, he works for them, you know, and this dude was Troy Yeah, it was it was something like no, I'm gonna make it Shocker gonna. Yeah, it was shocker Troy or some shit like that Right and he's got the push cut everything he comes and he's got the fanny pack and he walked and this dude is just something like that. I'm gonna make you a chocolate. He's a chocolate guy. Yeah, it was chocolate Troy or some shit like that. Right.

And he's got the butch cut, everything. He comes in, he's got the fanny pack and he walks. And this dude is just, he's just jacked. And he sits down in front of me and he says, if you want to look like a bull, you got to eat like a bull. And that's some kind of graph. Right wall.

Right wall. Right, literally as a kid, and then he went on to explain, all the crazy shakes and drinks and food and pile and calories on. And that's exactly what I went and did. I mean, what I took from that was I just got to eat everything.

Yeah, you can tell you're sick. Yes, right. Eat everything inside and that is just as counterproductive as like the person who's overtraining like crazy. It's the same thing. You'll see some results. You'll see the scale go up and gains,

but it'll be minimal if you're just piling a bunch. I heard this, I don't know if you guys ever heard this, but I heard this bullshit statement. There's no such thing as over training, just under eating. I was like, oh, okay, so I guess I just gotta eat more food. That's still very, that's still very prevalent in this space.

Terrible, stupid advice. No, no, you definitely need to eat in a surplus, and here's a deal. There are definitely exceptions to the rule, but you're not gonna be your strongest if you're shredded. You're just not. You're not going to be, it's very difficult to be shredded. And what I say shredded, I don't mean lean. You could be lean and be very strong. I mean shredded, like you're a guy, single-digit body fat of a female, you know, the mid to low teens body fat. It's going to be very

hard to be really strong and be that lean. Typically, your body fat percentage needs to be somewhere in the middle, so for a guy anywhere between 10 to 16%, which by the way, that's a good body fat range. 10% you still could see your abs 15, 16%. You might not have a six pack, but you got a flat midsection roughly. You're going to be pretty strong in that range. That's a good healthy range. For a woman, you're looking at the high teens, low 20s, still lean, in fact most women are very happy at that body fat percentage, they've got nice curves,

they're tight, they're not flabby or whatever. But if you're a woman and you're trying to get down to 12% body fat and be very, very strong, it's very, very hard. Eating in a surplus does fuel strength. You could definitely get carried away and there are diminishing returns. So this is why you see sometimes really, really overweight power lifters and strength athletes. And that's because for them, they don't care about the diminishing

returns. If they need to gain 50 pounds to add 10 pounds to the bar, they're not in a weight class or they're in the super heavy weight class where they can get as heavy as they want. It doesn't matter. But for most of us, you know, gaining 50 pounds of body fat to add five or 10 pounds of the bar is not worth it. But yes, but for most of us, you know, gaining 50 pounds of body fat to add five or 10 pounds of the bar is not worth it. But yes, eating in a surplus, not avoiding macro nutrients. You've got to have your carbohydrates, your fats, and definitely your proteins.

That's the way to fuel strength. If you don't eat enough, it can be very, very hard to get strong consistently. And simple advice where to start is to target the protein. I find in my experience the most common is that, especially as a young kid who's trying to eat like crazy, when I started to actually really track my food,

I was eating a lot of calories, but I was not getting a lot of quality protein. I was eating a lot of carbohydrates, French fries and milkshakes and candy, and anything I ice cream, anything I can get my hands on, and sure the calories were up there, but I wasn't even hitting like my protein intake. So, my advice when I get somebody who wants to get strong, wants to build muscle, it's like the first place to start is make sure you hit those protein intake. So figure out what your body needs, and we have a macro calculator

that's on our website that's free. What's a, what, what's a macro? Is that what is mapsmacro.com? So go to mapsmacro.com, get an idea of where your kind of macro nutrients should be. I always suggest targeting going after the protein first and then you can kind of pile on the other calories afterwards.

Now here's another one, the next point. And this one, you start to see pop up more with people as they become more experienced. So they, they start out, they're working out, they're following good, maybe some halfway decent programming, they're training consistently, they're manipulating intensity properly, they're eating good, they're getting stronger, stronger, stronger, then they start to hit plateaus and it's hard to figure out why. Why am I stuck at this weight with bench press? Or why can't I overhead press any more weight? And oftentimes it's because they have neglected

the muscles that stabilize the body. So your body has, it's very interesting, has safety mechanisms in place to help prevent itself from getting injured. And one of those is if your body senses that the weight that you can move is too much weight for you to stabilize or puts you at too high of a risk of injury,

it's not gonna allow your central nervous system to output the juice needed to lift that weight. So for example, if your overhead press is stuck at 150 pounds, but the reality is your shoulders and triceps can press 180 pounds, but your body realizes that your rotator cuff and your shoulder stabilizer, your mobility,

and your core stabilization isn't allowing you to press any more than 150. You might be stuck at 150 pounds. And by the way, for those of you right now who are listening who are like, ah, that doesn't make any sense, just try this. Go test your overhead press, and then put on a weight belt and test your overhead press.

The weight belt has nothing to do with your shoulders and your arms. All it's doing is stabilizing your core and you'll find that because you have increased stabilization, you can actually live a way. Well, fun. Yeah, totally. I used to do this to my clients a lot of times where I'd have them do a one arm overhead press, one time with just, you know, a regular kind of a loose position, obviously in good posture and everything, but then the second rep,

I wanted them to make a fist with their other hand. And then squeeze and really contract their abs and everything else in their body at the same time and then press and just see how much more strength that you can output just with that one move. Well, another story that highlights this really well, Sal, you have to share it. You've shared it in the story on the show multiple times

before and that's the bench press plateau that you were on for many years before you purchased the shoulder horn. Yeah, no, I was, I don't remember what the way it was, but I was stuck in my bench press for a long time and I couldn't figure it out, couldn't figure it out and a trainer actually told me that they got their bench press to go up by using this device and it was, back then it was in the back of the body building magazines and now when he told me that they got their bench press to go up by using this device.

And it was back then, it was in the back of the bodybuilding magazines. And now when he directed you that, sorry, when you directed that, were you aware it was a stability issue at this time when he's telling you, or you just thought, oh, do this thing and then it'll... No idea.

It wasn't till later. And until he said it, and then I thought to myself, huh, maybe it's because I can't stabilize the weight. I was at least open enough to consider that. And of course, when you're a kid and you've got the strong guy telling you to do something, you don't even have to necessarily understand. You're just going to do what they tell you, right?

And so I saw the device and I saw what the movement was. I didn't buy the device, I actually just mimicked it at the gym. And my strength went up immediately because I was able to strengthen some of the muscles that stabilized my upper arm in particular the infraspinatus and supraspinatus. I saw my strength, I added five or 10 pounds literally that week from doing such a silly exercise with like a five pound dumbbell

because of stabilization. I've had this with clients where their squat is stuck and then we do some isometrics where we strengthen their legs ability to abduck. And next thing you know, we add five or ten pounds. Your limiting factors are the weak links in the chain and oftentimes it's these, your ability is stabilized in support the way. Well, and it's important that the body has that mechanism. I mean, that saves you from a lot of injury and pain down the road. It's just, you have to acknowledge what your body's actually,

what that signal is, is telling you and you have to be able to find your way into those types of moves where, okay, those specific stabilizing muscles I haven't been utilizing and I haven't been focusing on, you know, when I do, it's really gonna contribute to the overall. Well, I saw this with single-lay deadlifts, and the way it contributed to my bilateral deadlifts, right?

So, I got really into this, you know, dumbbell single-lay deadlift, because it was hard. It was really difficult. I remember the first time I did it, it was already hard just to balance. It's hard to balance on that one leg to hinge at the hips, much less holding any heavy weight, my hands. And I remember I made it a goal.

I could I get up to where I was doing holding on to 100 pound dumbbells plus with one leg and doing this with good form. And I did and I remember watching that progression. First of all, go back to our last point. It was hard. It was uncomfortable. It was difficult for us. But I was I think I started with 20 pound dumbbells, but it was awesome because every week it went from 20 to 30. It was not over. Yes, it was new. My body hadn't and I was getting better and better and better. Next thing you know, I'm able to do this with 100 pound dumbbells. Then I go back to doing regular deadlifts and oh my god, I felt so connected, so much

stronger and stable from doing that. So it has tons of, tons of carry over to the big lifts. Yeah, I mean, okay, here's another silly example, but imagine your, your max squat. Now imagine you're doing this, but you're standing on really, really squishy fat pillows while you're trying to squat this way. You're not going to be able to do it because the lack of stabilization of the pillows is going to make you not be able to lift. Well, that's what happens to your body when your stabilizing muscles can't support what

you're doing, which takes us to the next point, which is to prime your body consistently and properly before your workouts. Priming partially takes care of the stabilization issue because proper priming highlights stabilization issues, but proper priming also does much more. It also turns on the central nervous system in a way that allows you to access the CNS for maximal strength. And this is a big difference. And again, for people who are like, how big of a difference does this make? Here's a simple example.

You could test people without caffeine and then give them caffeine and you'll see a 5% increase in strength just from giving them some caffeine. What did the caffeine do? Did it make their muscles grow? No, the caffeine turned on the CNS a little bit more, allowed them to fire a little bit more effectively. So while you're weaker, when you're tired, proper priming, which you spend about 10 minutes

before your workouts doing this, that's what proper priming does. Well, and this can be a very nuanced, long conversation. So Mattel and Andrew to reference this episode where we just recently did on why working or why warmups are a waste of time. Right, we just talked about this. And we went really in deep about what priming is,

how to do it, how not to do it, what it looks like. We have two webinars that are free, where Justin takes you through the Maps Prime webinar. I take you through the Prime Pro webinar and I highly recommend that you take, it's free. It's absolutely free. So one is MapsPrimeWebinar.com and then the other one is PrimeProWebinar.com. Right. And they're absolutely free, extremely valuable, because here's the thing too.

We talked about it on that episode. I didn't tell you guys this. Afterwards, we had a bunch of people DM me and I don't know if you saw some of the tags of people that were going through with the webinar. And I got a flood of DMs. People going, I'm so glad you pointed me that because they owned Prime and Prime Pro already.

But because I take you through and you take people through, you see the intent of how you need to do this. It's not you don't just go through the motions. There has to be an intent involved with every single movement that you when you do this in order to get the maximum benefits so that when you go to do your workout and when you do it right, we talked about this on that other episode. That's what's beautiful about this. I love teaching people how to prime properly because the workout, the very next workout that you go into where you did a good job of priming quickly, you will feel and see a difference immediately.

You will. Proper priming, in fact, people typically are stronger right away from proper priming because their muscles are firing more efficiently and effectively. Well, I like to look at it too, as ways of teaching the body how to anchor itself in certain unstable situations and environments. So, you know, if I have load that I'm dropping

at a part of my body where the rest of my body needs to really ground itself. I need to be able to keep everything from going off the bench. Or, you know, I might be in a single loaded position where the other part of my body, I really need to figure out how to squeeze and ground and anchor myself.

You know, primate is like that, but finding that stable position, it's about finding that stable position in whatever you're doing. Yeah, to give you a simple example, if let's say you wanna increase your bench press, and in your bench press, and in your particular case, the problem is the anchoring at the bottom of the bench where

your shoulders are pinned back and you've got this real tight upper back and your lats are activated. And if you ever talk to PowerLifters, they'll tell you to activate your lats when you bench press. And let's say you have an issue with that. Well, believe it or not, performing proper rows before you bench press will actually help you bench press, more weight, more effectively.

It's one simple example. I know in our program maps, Power Lift, we actually put priming before a lot of the lifts to help people out. Well, and you have to explain, too, to people, why that's a problem, right? So you picked a perfect one, because I think that's like 99% of everybody.

Like we almost everybody has some somewhat of four shoulders, right? Because we do everything in front of us. So it's very, very common, just a matter of how bad it is for you. And I remember, and I remember this as a trainer for a long time, bench press is one of the hardest things to teach somebody. If you don't understand biomechanics, you know.

It's not a simple exercise. No, it's not at all. And you're working against most people's deviation, right? So most people have this forward shoulder and in order to maximize the bench press to get the most out of it, to load it, to work the chest the best, you need to be in a retracted and depressed position

with the shoulders. And what happens with everybody is everybody's naturally here and forward. So if you just get under a bar and start benching, you're already one, the shoulder's very unstable, and it's rolled forward. So the triceps, the arms, the shoulders take over the movement, and you feel very little. Especially if you're telling them to push and it's hard, and they're trying to move the weight forward, and then you see them do this with their shoulders. And it sets you up for injury. So priming that person properly before the lift turns those other stabilizing muscles on

and is more likely to keep them in proper positions. For a couple of different reasons. One, it actually turns the muscles on. And two, it also allows them to feel with that proper position. That's right. Feels like. Now, I know we're all going to get a lot of messages on, you know, what work out plans people can follow that are going to help. And the programs that we have that are best suited for strength are map strong and maps power lift. But what we're going to

do is we're going to offer a limited time kind of a flash sale because of this episode, because we don't like to give people tons of advice and then leave people hanging who actually want to follow something structured. So we're putting both of them massive sales. You can actually get maps strong and maps power lift. It's called the power bundle. Here's the total for both. One payment, $79.99. So it's a huge discount.

You can find it at mapspowerbundle.com and this promotion ends April 19th. Look, if you like the podcast, you like our information, go check out all of our free stuff at map, excuse me, mind pump free.com. You can also find all of us on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin, me at Mind Pump Salon, Adam at Mind Pump Adam. 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 MindPumpMedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballac, maps 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's butt 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

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