Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1600: How to Train When Recovering from an Injury

Episode Date: July 19, 2021

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin outline four steps to take when getting back into training when recovering from an injury or a layoff. How do I get started back into training after an injury, pregnancy, or long layoff? (2:25) Step 1: Concentrate on Stability and Connection. (6:09) Step 2: Prime your body back into proper alignment. (20:51) Step 3: Practice Correctional Exercises frequently. (32:06) Step 4: Re-focus on the skill of the basic exercises. (41:13) Related Links/Products Mentioned Special Promotion: Safe Start Bundle (MAPS Starter, MAPS Prime/Prime Pro, and MAPS Anabolic) for the low price of $149.99 Visit Paleo Valley for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Code “Mindpump15” at checkout for 15% discount** Is Inactivity the Leading Cause of Chronic Pain? - Mind Pump Blog How to Get Back on the Fitness Wagon After a Hiatus – Mind Pump Blog How to Get Back on Track with Your Fitness After Having a Baby – Mind Pump Blog Getting Back in Shape After Having a Baby - Don't be Hard on Yourself – Mind Pump Blog Is Warming Up Before A Workout Necessary? - Mind Pump Blog MAPS Prime Webinar Fighting Chronic Back Pain with Mobility Exercises – Mind Pump Blog 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 Pump. Alright, so in today's episode, we're going to talk about how to get back into training, either if you've been injured or you've had a long layoff or let's say you had a baby, like how do you get back

into working out and then how big of a difference does this make in terms of the quickness and speed at which you progress, get back to where you were before, maybe even surpass where you were before. So in this episode, we talk all about that and we walk you through step by step, the things you should focus on to getting yourself back to where you were before and beyond. Now, this episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Paleo Valley. They have some great products. Our favorites are their grass-fed meat sticks. They're delicious. They're grass-fed. It's the best jerky type product I've had anywhere great macros They also have a supplement that's called organ complex. It's organ meats in capsule form

So if you like to get the nutritional value of eating things like spleen, heart, kidney and liver But you don't like the way they taste like most people try organ complex Capsules anyhow go check them out and because you to Mind Pump, you actually have 15% off their products. Head over to paleovali.com, forward slash Mind Pump. Just use the code Mind Pump 15, that's Mind Pump 15, 4, that 15% off. Also, in this episode, we do talk about several programs that are very applicable to this episode. So we talk about Maps Starter, Maps Prime, Maps Prime Pro,

and Maps at a Ballack. Now each one of those programs on their own is over $100. So that's close to $500 or more for all those programs. But right now you can get all of them together. Every single one, Starter Prime Prime Pro, Maps at a Ballack, all all for 149.99. In other words, you pay 149.99. So $149.99 and you get access to all those programs for life. Go check them out. This is a very, very short time offer just for this episode. Head over to mapsjuly.com. Again, that's M-A-P-S-J-L-I-D-A-C-M. You know, one of the most frustrating things in fitness has got to be, and it's also one of the things I get some of the most questions on consistently, is like, how to start back up with training after either an injury or pregnancy or a long layoff. Like where do I go, where do I start?

How do I get myself back into it? Because, and the reason why it's such a challenge, of course, if you're injured, it's like, okay, well, I just had surgery or I just healed from the cindry. How do I prevent that from happening again? Other times, it's, you know, I can't just jump into what I was doing before, or I did jump into what I was doing before and I quick to realize Yeah, that it was not a good idea. I love this conversation

In fact, I think this is the what the third or fourth time that our our marketing team has told us that they want a hair Conversation about something specifically based off of their research and what they've heard people and asking and emailing and they've put together This and I don't think that we've ever talked specifically to this. And obviously we have to do the best that we can to speak in general because if we were re-having a specific injury, there's obviously a very specific exercises. But in general, there are some rules and principles

that you kind of follow as a coach and a trainer when you get somebody who is recently coming off an injury or a surgery and how do you start them and what is that progression kind of look like and so I don't think we've actually outlined an episode that kind of covers this. Yeah, no, it's a good topic. I think it's an important one because so many mistakes are made at this point. I can think back to the few times that I've been injured or had to not work out. I'm normally extremely consistent, but the two times I can think of off the top of the head one was I had shoulder surgery. So on my left shoulder, I had my AC joint resected, so they had to actually remove some of it. And that was a healing process. And I remember the challenge of going back into the gym and working out because part of you,

and this is also, by the way, this is a challenge that trainers ran into when you train ex athletes. You remember vividly your fitness and your capabilities. So you have this kind of skewed concept of what going easy is going to be like. You overestimate like, oh, well, you know, normally I'm up with this weight. Yes.

So this is easy. I'll just do this. And I made big mistakes doing that, which took me so much longer to recover and get back to where I was going. I really feel like there's two major categories of people in this situation, right, that have been injured. Either one, your experience knowledgeable, and you have an understanding of this,

and you have a tendency to do too much, which is what you're a duty to, or be your the person who's absolutely clueless. You completely rely on or terrified to get back to it. Right, exactly. And so you will avoid things, because what happens is you go through rehab, and normally rehab is very, very basic

to just get you back, right? They don't, their goal is range of motion. That's it, right. And many times you don't get back to optimal range of motion. Many times they put you in a little circuit with six or eight other people inside the room and you're doing some very generic basic exercises. And there's not a lot of emphasis on detail

and range of motion and form and technique. And it's really just, let's get this joint moving again and so they can go back and do basic functions and get back to real life and then from there you have to go figure it out and this is many times where this fell in our lap and you get this person who now just had this you know a knee surgery or shoulder surgery like you're talking about or back surgery and you know now I get this client, where do I start them and what does that look like? And the first thing that always comes to mind

is stability and connection. Like we've talked about this before, when you break and let's say you're arm and it's casted up for months at a time or whatever, and then they break it and they open it up, but you notice two things right away. One, there's obviously this massive atrophy that's happened, like your arm or your leg, whatever it was cast.

It was gone. Just gone away. And even the ability to move those muscles in that area, all of a sudden feels so weird, almost feels unfamiliar. Like wiggling your fingers, feels so weird or flexing your quad after it's been, you're like, whoa, this feels, I don't feel connected. You are, okay, so you're hinting at or alluding to

the big thing you need to focus on. So I think a lot of us, when we see an injury and we see that it's healed, we think, oh, the muscle is healed, the tendon is no longer torn, the bone is healed. So now all I gotta do do is just kind of go easy and start working out and everything should be okay. Okay, so what happens when you're injured

and you immobilize something or you can't move it or you're not moving it like you used to, you don't just lose muscle, you don't just lose strength, you don't just lose, you know, maybe even bone density and that kind of stuff after a long period of time, you also lose neural connections. You actually lose the ability to connect and control this muscle. So let me give you an example. Maybe you've never been injured or ever been

in this situation, but maybe you've had a long layoff. So you worked out consistently for a year, you took three months off, you go back to the gym, and you get back under the bench press or the leg press or the squat. And you notice right away, you're shaky. You ever notice that? Like, you take time off and normally when you're pressed, it's real smooth, but then all of a sudden it's like, t-t-t-t-t-t. It's like, what is going on? Why am I...

All of a sudden, yeah, my body's unfamiliar with this movement. I've done a million times. Yeah, it's like your muscles are laughing or something. I remember as a kid, I'd be like, this is so weird. And what it is is you've lost that ability to really connect and control that muscle. You have to have that first before you can progress to anything else. That is the most important adaptation because if you push beyond that capability, what you'll end up doing is creating this really bad imbalance and movement pattern issue, which will then

make the injury come back in a hurry. You end up and you see this all the time, people end up creating these compensatory patterns as a result of being immobilized and having something that maybe they can't place as much pressure on one foot or the certain ranges of motion going left to right, some of their joints are going to be susceptible to wanting to not stabilize the way they used to. So you feel your way through a lot of these movements, but a lot of times you're trying to blow right past it and get back to who you used to be and lift the way it used to

be, do the kind of rigorous activity, you're capable of previously, but if not addressed and not focused on through this transition, could create some real problems down the road. Well, my very unscientific way of explaining this, ticklites would be like this, it'd be like, okay, if you had an injury, okay, somewhere with a B, the knee, arm, whatever,

and it's in mobile, right? It gets injured, you're not using it anymore. You tear your ACL, your MCL, or you break your forearm, you're not using it anymore. So it's in mobile, cast it up, or in a brace, or on the crutches, or in a wheelchair. What ends up happening is the brain stops sending neurons there, like it was before. So, and I'd use a number like this just for the sake the sake of explaining this I'd say so when you go to wiggle your fingers like this your brain sends a hundred neurons over there to move it and that's what it requires to do this activity. Well, once it gets casted up and it's no longer moving like that, what the brain does is it repriortizes those elsewhere.

It says okay. It ruins that area. That's right. It says, oh, we're not having to do this anymore. We no longer doing that. The body, wasting energy. That's right. It's wasted. So we're going to send those other places and prune it

to your point and stop doing that. And so then you get uncasted or you are now out of rehab and it's time to start exercising again. You don't automatically just go from zero to 100 neurons back to 100 neurons firing there. I have to retrain that mental connection first there to reprioritize that neurological connection to get there. And that part is so crucial to the recovery process.

Yes, because when you're telling your body to do something, it understands movement, not necessarily connection to the muscles. And so to the point we were saying earlier, if you don't learn how to stabilize and connect, you're going to develop these compensatory systems, where other muscles are doing more work, or you're moving, your leverages are changing and moving. And then if you push past that and you keep working out, now you strengthen this bad movement pattern. That's not ideal, which makes it so much harder to correct in the future. You know, I remember one client in particular

that I worked with. She was a D1 soccer player. In fact, she was an alternate for the national women's soccer team. So like super athlete. And she hired me and I trained her for a while. And she was very, very fit. She's one of those clients that she could pretty much

do anything that I would tell her to do. She was just a gifted athlete. And I trained her about two or three days a week with resistance training. And then she got pregnant. And as she got pregnant, of course, your body changes. And at some point, you're not able to engage your core like you could before. Now, before she was pregnant, you know, she had like almost a six pack, super tight. We did all this core exercise.

She loved working out her core very connected very strong once we got in the third trimester, which is three months long and leaning up to that even there's changes in connection because of the growing baby. But especially in the third trimester because she was so small her belly started really stretch out and we just you can't connect to those muscles like you could before. We couldn't do sit-ups, we couldn't do crunches, we couldn't do ball slams, could do some rotation, but that really got limited to and then she had the baby And we had to wait for a while she had to see section so we had to wait for a while and then I remember when she came back She was so like oh, I can't wait to work core right so here's a girl that we used to do active planks with a weighted vest in Perfect form right and I took her and I said okay, here's what we're gonna do

I'm gonna have you do planks off of your knee and I said, okay, here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna have you do planks off of your knee and I'm gonna stand behind you and support you. And she looked at me like, why? I could do all kinds of stuff. I said, okay, you sure about that? Let's get on the floor and try it out. And she was like, this is so weird.

She's, I can't activate my core. I can't turn it on. I said try doing a vacuum. She's like, I can't, I can't pull it in. I can't turn it on. I said try doing a vacuum. She's like, I can't, I can't pull it in. I said before we do exercises, we have to re-learn, teach your body how to connect to those muscles again. If we don't do that, everything else we do,

not only is a waste of time, but will become very detrimental. So the first thing you should focus on when coming out of a layoff or an injury is to stabilize and connect. How is that different than traditional strength training? It's slower.

Much slower. It's more deliberate. And oftentimes you want to use something that encourages connection like a fisiobal. This is where fisiobal or Swiss ball training is tremendously valuable. Well, this was the idea of map starter when we created it, right? Obviously, we were thinking in mind the client who is their first time in the gym or de-conditioned and or somebody who could be an advanced client

who's been injured or had surgery and is now returning back to the gym. The same principles apply to both those people. If you're somebody who's never really lifted weights, you also don't have a great... Stay away from connections. That's right. You also do not have a good mind muscle connection

to everything in your case. So that person is not connected to almost everything. Someone who's been injured is probably very disconnected to the area where they are injured. So the same principles apply of the stabilization and connection, and that's really the foundation of that. And I think a lot of people that we talk to through the podcast, they avoid that program

because it looks too easy or basic or, oh, I've lifted before for years. And so they think that, oh, I shouldn't start there. Give me the other program that looks fancy or looks more difficult. Because you don't identify with it. You know, especially if you've done it before and you're familiar with working out and

you have experienced it to be able to, you know, humble yourself and take pride and ego out of it and go where you really need to go. That's a hard step. But honestly, that's one of those programs like it addresses all of those things immediately that you need to focus on, which is being able to recruit where you need to recruit more efficiently again and to be able to reconnect and places you in these unstable type environments with like the stability ball or these type of moves that are a little bit more focused on balance and being able to ground yourself properly. But that's what you need to build back upon to get you into the kind of shape

that you were going in before you got injured. Listen, I've been training for 20 years, and still, when I've been off for a couple weeks or for sure a month or longer, I go back to many of the principles that were written in that program. So maybe it doesn't look identical to all of it, but I recognize that, listen,

there's no need for me to lift like MAPSANabolic or MAPS aesthetic if I haven't trained in a month. If I haven't trained in a month, these same principles apply to me. I still get that same shaky feeling if I haven't been doing a movement because I've lost that.

I've been more sedentary. I haven't been training inside the gym. And so there's no reason for me to skip that foundation, even with someone who's an advanced lifter like myself. Right, and it's not just that you're preventing injury again, or that you're preventing muscle imbalances, which can cause pain, those are all true. You're laying a foundation.

Or even that, right? Here's the selling point. You get there faster. I'm telling you the truth. You don't get there faster if you skip the selling point. You get there faster. I'm telling you, you don't get there faster if you skip this step. You actually get there slower. So if your goal is, I wanna get back in shape, strong, fit, whatever, as effectively and fast as like,

it's possible, then you have to do this step. Skipping this step means you will take much longer, even if you don't injure yourself, even if you're lucky enough to not hurt yourself, skipping this will slow you down so much it's going to take you much longer. I'll use a silly example, all right. Let's compare two exercises. Let's compare a seated dumbbell shoulder press on a bench. So the bench is set up so that it's supporting my back and my, I'm sitting on it versus sitting on a stability ball and doing a shoulder press, right? Obviously, I'm not can use nearly as much weight on a stability ball. It would be stupid too.

It's not a heavy exercise. I'm sitting on a squishy ball. It requires me to stand upright. It requires me to activate my core. It requires me to balance and ground my feet. This is very different than driving into the floor with a shoulder press when I'm on a bench. I can't do that on a ball, throw myself off, or lose my balance. I have to balance how I ground. I also have to press balanced. If one is off, I'm rolling off the ball.

It's very, very challenging. And I have to slow down. So what is this doing? This is making me, or forcing me, to connect and stabilize to this down. So what is this doing? This is making me or forcing me to connect and stabilize to this exercise. If I skip this step and I go on a bench, I'm going to rely on the bench, I'm just going to lift weight. I think I'm going to be doing okay. And again, risk of injury goes up and it actually takes me longer to progress.

There's literally no way you can rush through those exercises. Which is the actual brilliance of it. It's just because that's a natural tendency, a lot of people have when you're really motivated. I really want to get back to good shape. I want to get strong again, but kind of going through. That sounds boring. Doing all these connection, mobility type exercises can seem like really arduous. When in fact, if you do something like that

worth the stability ball, you are fighting it the whole time and you're trying to maintain position and grounding and you're getting a lot of incredibly challenging intense work, but it's all still centered around that stability focus. Yes, and I want to be, again, I want to add more to this. So let's say I injured my shoulder, and now it's healed, and the range of motion is good, and I got clearance to work out, right?

It's not just connecting to the shoulder. So you got to understand the body is very complex. It doesn't think of itself as separate parts, right? It doesn't think itself as arm and shoulder or whatever. It's all one, it's body. Okay. So not only do I have to connect to my arm being able to do the shoulder press, I have to connect to this movement and to my core and to my legs and to my back.

It's relearning how to use this area that it's very disconnected to, but not just that. It's also relearning how to use it while everything else is supporting it. So this is why you don't go in a machine and lock yourself in position and rehab your arm. And why that will be less effective than sitting on something like a stability ball, going slow, stabilizing, and connecting. When you do that, the whole body has to kind of rehab. By the way, this is why they show studies, just kind of take a little left turn.

They'll have studies where they'll have someone immobilize one arm, so they'll simulate a broken arm. And then they'll have half the people train one arm, the arm that's not immobilized, and half the people not train either arm. And you know what they find? The people that train one arm actually lose less muscle from the arm that's immobilized.

Why? Because the whole body is connected and it communicates. So that's why stability and connection is a whole body thing. It's not really just an isolated, this is the area, I hurt my knee, let me connect to the quad and the hamstring, it's how do I connect to the whole body while I connect? Here's another example.

Look at a dumbbell row, right? Traditional dumbbell row, if you don't have connection or stability issues, your knee is on the bench, hand is on the bench, you got good posture, you're rowing the way, you're doing great, right? But if you have connection and stability issues because you haven't worked out for a while, either because you're ill, injured or whatever,

well try this instead. Bend over, place one hand on a physio ball instead. Now I'm supporting myself with a physio ball, but what does it require me to do? I have to be very balanced in order to perform this rope. I can't put too much pressure on that arm. I'm asking to send you. I can't, I can't put too much pressure on my arm,

and in fact, I have to keep stability in that supportive arm just like I have with the rolling arm and in my core and balance my feet. And I'm telling you, if you start with stabilization and connection, you will get back to where you were before much, much faster. Now, there's another part to that or another thing that you need to do.

And it's not necessarily in a different order. In fact, I think you do this simultaneously. And that is priming for the body. So before you go into work, now think of somebody too, like who had their arm in a sling, right? So you got your arm in a sling because it was broken or whatever,

and then you finally get it out and you're able to go back to rehab and stuff. The problem is you're in this kind of rolled position and in an awkward non anatomical position of the body, and then you're gonna go into exercising. The body doesn't just go snap back into perfect posture, you've got to relearn that on a neurological level also. And so knowing how to prime the body in specific areas

to get you back into that neutral spinal limit, then you go into your stability type of training, that is the ideal situation for that client. Yeah, so priming is different than a warmup, but you can think of it like a warmup in the sense that it's done for 10 minutes or so before you work out. Pretty workout, so when you get to the gym

instead of walking on the treadmill or doing static stretches or, I don't know, looking on your phone for 10 minutes as you warm up, you do priming, you prime your body. So what is priming do? It prepares your body for 10 minutes as you warm up, you do priming, you prime your body. So what is priming do? It prepares your body for more connection through movements that require no resistance. They're all intrinsic, most of them are intrinsic, right? So a 90, 90 for example, on the ground might be used to prime my hips in a particular way,

a combat stretch might be a way to prime my ankle mobility prior to a workout. I may do movements for my scapula or my shoulders to prime them before I go into maybe overhead presses or forward presses or maybe even rows. By the way, here's something that's very important with priming. Priming needs to be individualized. So what I mean by that is you want to prime your body for the areas and things that your body needs to be primed for. Priming for other things won't hurt you, but it can be a total waste of time. Like, Justin and I would prime our workouts

probably very different. If I prime my workouts like Justin, I would get very little value compared to the value he would get because our bodies are different. Yeah, and I do like to think of it in terms of placing your body back in the most optimal alignment and positions for joint function. You'll notice individually where that happens, and it occurs. A lot of times you'll notice that more so when you're fatiguing in your workouts or just

trying to carry yourself throughout the day and maintain good posture, what tends to occur. And for the majority of people, a lot of times it's kind of coming for everything's making its way forward. So my head's coming forward, my shoulders are coming forward. I'm in this kind of forward crouching position. I'm reaching for everything in front of me. I mean, this is typical because of the lifestyle that everybody's sort of had to accommodate

to now with work and being at a desk. And so a lot of these things tend to show up as taking you out of optimal alignment, which is what we really want to address that before we now add load and stress to the body, which will exaggerate those types of dysfunctions even further, which leads to injury. And this is the real motivation behind Maps Prime. And how do you do this in a way that is as individualized as possible, but helping potentially millions? I mean, that was, and again, probably why, and we've said this before, why we're probably

most proud of that program, because of the difficulty it was to, how do we make this general enough that the average person can be in a situation like this and go like, I don't know what to prime. I know I've been hurt, I know I'm not moving up the place on myself, but, and you're telling me that, Sal says that his is completely different than Justin Amnwell,

how do I can't tell how they should... So, what does that look like? And that's where the assessment came, right? Where we do the three zone assessment, we broke the body up, we divided it in three areas, we looked at some of the most important basic functions that everybody's body should be capable of doing, most certainly be able to do

if you're going to go perform exercises and movements, and then a very simple pass or fail. Not of trying to measure and get every percentage or what's worse or better, it's just you can either do it or you can't do it optimally. If you can't do it optimally, there's an area that we need to address and work on. And again, looking at areas that we saw

as the most ideal functions that everybody's body should be able to do. Yeah, by the way, in Maps Prime, we include what are called fortification workouts for really bad trouble areas. So where you can do specific workouts for certain areas of the body that you may have challenges with. Yeah, and that was another thing back to the whole, you go to physical therapy and they sort of try to just regain range of motion.

Where's the bridge? That's something that we tried to create to help the transition process of, well, I don't know if I'm really ready to start adding weights back in the routine, but I definitely want to keep working at getting stronger at this new range of motion. That's something to focus on, is those fortifications. Yeah. Think about this way to simplify for people who don't have prime, right? So you're going to the gym, you had a shoulder injury,

it got worked on, you're going, the first exercise you're gonna do, you know, you listen to the podcast, you're like, okay, I'm gonna do a stability ball, overhead press. But the problem is because your shoulder was immobilized for a little while, the scapula doesn't really, you know, externally rotate or depress really smoothly on one side.

And so you're like, okay, it so takes you four sets of doing this overhead press on a physiabol to start to feel it right. Or maybe you don't. And you're like, oh, God, no matter what I do, it doesn't feel right, right? Clicking sounds. Yeah, so stuff, so. Proper priming, again, it's like a warmup, but the way you're warming up is specific. So in this case, you might do some wall circles or some scapular circles.

And what you're essentially doing is you're getting the movement and you're connecting to the movement a little bit. So you're saying, okay, you're getting the shoulder ready to move in this position, because when you overhead press, using the shoulder it is an example, there's a lot of moving parts. It's not just the arm that comes up. It's not

just the major move. Is this a supporting cast to stabilize? Yes. And so the priming sets me up. So when I jump in, the first set that I do is already functional. It's already working. Now, why is it so important? Is it just because it cuts down time on your work out? Well, that's part of it. But here's the real value. Let's say I go in and it takes me five sets to get my shoulder and sometimes never, by the way. So if you're experienced, you might be able to figure out, it doesn't feel right and start to move, right? But let's say it takes you five sets, right? You just did five sets of strengthening a bad recruitment pattern. So keep that in mind. If you took you five sets to start to feel normal,

those were all five, not just wasted sets, but five sets that actually trained something wrong. So why not go into it moving right, right away so you don't start to do that? Because I can't stress this enough. It may be hard to go back to the gym when you're not connected to your muscles when you have, you know, when things are weak. I promise you, it's harder. I have more challenges training people who are fit with bad

movement patterns who have them so solidified. They've built so much armor and strength around a bad recruitment pattern that we have to back out for a long time. It's like, I think there's a quote from Bruce Lee where it says, you know, he could teach someone who doesn't, who's never done any martial arts had to kick easier than to teach a black belt who knows how to kick the wrong way because they've learned it so the wrong way so many times getting them to relearn it is a big pain in the butt. So priming does that. It sets you up for your stabilization and connection work out. So right away, you're training the right movement pattern. It also helps prevent some long-term issues

that tend to happen from injury also. So this is something that, okay, low back injury is one of the most common injuries, right? I think it's up there with the top two or three. It's gotta be number one. Yeah, I think it is, right? So I think it's number one, two or three, right? It's definitely one of the most common things.

I think we've seen it a lot. And everything from bulge discs, to throwing backs out, to straining muscles in your low back. But what ends up happening is somebody hurts this low back. And then they become immobile. They're either bedridden,

or they can't really move or do anything for weeks, sometimes months at a time. And then they decide to get back into training. And then because maybe the low back is healed or feels better. And then they start to do exercises. And all the exercises that I'm doing is end up hurting the low back more. And they're confused confused and I think it's because they have a week back and a lot of it

More often than not actually has to do with like what was going on with their hips because they were in mobile and they weren't doing Anything they weren't training their hips in this dynamic ability that they have to do they lost it They've lost that neurological connection that we're talking about. So they're not distributing the load and the force to the other major muscles that contribute to that. That's right. And the body is so resilient and amazing. And it will get, so that person could go and squat or launch or do an exercise.

So it'll get you through the world. It'll get through it. But what will end up happening is the body will overcompensate in other areas, most likely the low back. And now the low back is on fire when you try to do these basic leg exercise and movements because you've lost that good connection to good range of motion and mobility in the hips. And it actually isn't the low back.

It's because when you got hurt in your low back, you stopped moving around, you stopped using the hips the way they're supposed to. They've now lost that net, they've pruned that neurological connection, there are reprioritized to other parts of the body, and then you go, okay, I'm better, let's go back to moving again, and the hips go like, oh, we don't know

how to move like that anymore, and then the low back goes, don't worry, we'll help you out, and then you go, fuck, that hurts, that bothers me, and I have a bad back, it's like, no, it's not because you have a bad back. Yes, you hurt your back. Yes, maybe you had a bulge disc. But what's happened is you've become in mobile. You've lost that neurological connection to those hips

and the ability for them to internally, externally rotate like they should. And now the rest of your body is overcompensating to try and help you out. And so this is the real value to me when I think of priming for someone isn't just getting you ready, set up for the workout,

getting you to do, move optimally, but it's also to prevent this future chronic pain that comes from injury. Yeah, I tell you what, if you're listening to Adam and you're like, I don't know, man, is that really what's happening? Try this out,

but take one foot and put in a quarter inch rise in your soul. Just lift one foot and put in a quarter inch rise in your souls. Just lift one foot, a quarter of an inch, and then walk around. Oh, God, don't do that. And then tell me, and then tell me how you, you wouldn't even notice a quarter inch, you might not even notice right away. You just walk around, but it kind of feels the same. Tell me how your back feels by the end of the day. You'll start to feel pain because of the compensations that are going on. And that's such a small little thing that again

You might not even notice when you put it inside your shoe So that's kind of what Adam's talking about when you're immobile. It's not just your back that's injured Everything else is not moving and it's important to get them to move properly So when you get into the workout you're again, you're training those those proper recruitment patterns So things improve much faster. Okay, so another aspect is correctional exercise. Now, the reason why this is different, then what we're talking about, although stabilizing,

connecting, priming, technically is all correctional, in the sense that it's getting you to move better, correctional exercise, more specifically, is treated very differently. In this case, right? So let's say you're doing your stabilization connection workouts, you're in the gym, you're training your major muscle groups, you're doing them in a way where you're stabilizing

connecting, you might be in the gym three days a week, maybe four days a week max doing this, right? So you're spending 45 minutes to an hour doing these exercises. Correctional exercise is very different. It's short and super frequent. Super frequent. You're doing 10 to 15 minutes twice a day,

every single day. This will get you to recover and to improve so fast. This is probably one of the most valuable things that you could do. Now, why is correctional exercise not as long, not as intense but so frequent? Couple of reasons. One, when you're correcting something,

if I apply too much intensity and too much load, my body's gonna move the way that is more optimal for itself, which means it's gonna avoid what I'm trying to train. So if I have a weak area or a weak movement pattern, it's gonna skirt around that because there's too much load. My body's like, just move the weight, don't worry about this, whatever. And that's just what your body does, right? So we can't go super hard, super intense or super long.

Now why so frequent? Correctional exercise literally is teaching new movement patterns. Why have to do that more than the old movement patterns? And the old movement patterns I'm doing all the time. If I'm walking a particular, I remember when I years ago I had my knee in a brace, it was straight because I dislocated my kneecap, and I walked in the brace so that I actually could walk in it, but one leg was straight. So I was walking kind of funny, right? And I did this for like, it was like two months. When I took the brace off, I had this weird movement pattern that I had learned over a two month period. And so I literally had to consciously walk a particular way and I had to weird movement pattern that I had learned over a two month period. And so I literally had to consciously walk a particular way

and I had to do it more than walking the other way in order to learn this new, you know, this better recruitment pattern. So correctional exercise needs to be done this way. You find the right exercise for, let's say you have, let's say you have an ankle injury. Let's say you twisted your ankle and you heard it. So now it's healed, but now that it's healed,

your ankle mobility, your functional ankle mobility, meaning it may be able to move the way it did before, but it doesn't have strength like it used to, so the mobility's kind of not the same. So you wanna strengthen it. You wanna get it back to what it was before. Well, twice a day for 10 minutes, do something like a combat stretch,

where you're connecting to this new range emotion and do it very frequently. What you'll find is in very short period of time, you'll get back to where you were before by doing this kind of practice. I know I'm going to start to sound like a damn commercial here, but this is also the motivation behind Prime Pro and the reason why we went and looked at all the major joints in the body to give people this direction. How do I know? You bring up the, oh, I hurt my ankle, but is it, how do I know it's not working properly?

I can walk, I can run, I can do all these exercises, but how do I know that I've lost maybe the range of motion in one ankle and not the other? And how do I know that that's limiting me from potentially squatting really well? Or how do I know that that's causing issues in the rest of my body? Well, that was the idea behind that how do we simplify this? So you can go through and you can test each joint and again a very simple pass or fail either You can move the ankle and it's full or inch of motion or you can't and a lot of times and what we're really looking for So you know as a coach right because nobody perfect, and very few people are extremely mobile

in all their joints, I'm really looking for discrepancies from left to right. Those are gonna be, when it comes to chronic pain and rehabbing somebody, the things that were there's major discrepancy from left to right. That's gonna cause the biggest issue. If you have somebody who just rolled their ankle

to your point cell, and they can do the test, and they would say they rolled their right ankle, right? And they do the test for their left ankle and their knee can pass their toes three inches. And then they go to do their right one that was injured and it can't even get to the toes. That person, when they squat, I don't even need to see their squat and I can tell you what's going to happen when they break 90 degrees. When they break 90 degrees, their hips are going to shift over to the side that has more range of motion,

and that's gonna distribute the weight all the way over to that opposite side. You're gonna get low back pain, gonna get issues in your knee and your hips on the other side. So that's why this is so important, and this is how you figure this out, as you go through all these major joints,

you test them, and as a a consumer or an average listener, not a coach, a coach, hopefully we're training or helping to see the thing, but as an average person, going through this, this is what you're looking for. You're looking to see, is there a major discrepancy from right to left, and I'm looking for the grossest offenders, and then I'm gonna go after that, and then I'm gonna do exactly what you said, Salah, I'm gonna do it as much as possible. I'm gonna for the grossest offenders, and then I'm gonna go after that, and then I'm gonna do exactly what you said, Sal,

is I'm gonna do as much as possible. I'm gonna focus on that side with the most discrepancy, and try and catch it up to where it has an equal amount of range of motion as the other one, so my body is balanced when it moves. Now, yeah, a lot of the focus for this, it requires a completely different mindset. And you've brought up

frequency, but also intention is at the YUP most priority with this entire process because you can go through these movements and see, you know, watch a video and kind of look and see where you want to be or like where your limitations are, but you really need to feel your way through this and be able to squeeze and activate these muscles and feel that contraction because that's really what is going to start allowing that signal to come back to the brain that, oh, this is, this joint supported now. This joint support, I feel supported, it feels like things are responding.

And so now that's when all of a sudden you get this breakthrough where your body starts to actually have that automatic response it used to have for very specific types of movements where you had limitations before. So it's all about that effort and that intention going into these types of corrective exercises that will help really move you forward and progress you quite substantially. I'm so glad you brought that up because when I think about the number one mistake that people make when they go through this program is they do it with the wrong intent. It's just going to move me.

That's right. And what you have to understand about that is going back to the thing we keep talking about with the neurological connection. When you've been injured, the brain says, stop right there because we could get hurt. And you've trained that new pattern to only allow that joint to go right there because it's afraid it's going to hurt if you go any further than that. So when you're trying to regain that new range of motion or find that range of motion that you used to have, there's an intensity and there's an intention behind

that. And basically, 100%. And by the way, this was the motivation to the free webinar that we produced to help people through this because one of the number one things that we got back from people who had Prime Pro was just they weren't certain how to use it or how to do it And so we created the the Prime Pro webinar that's absolutely free I take you through some of my favorite movements from Prime Pro and the most important thing for you to watch for in that video Is me talking to you through the exercises and the intent that you should have while you're doing it

Otherwise, you just kind of passively go through these movements like a stretch and you never regain that range of motion. Yeah, it's prime pro webinar dot com, by the way. So I'll tell you a story. So I remember I had a client once who got a hernia and he had to have the hernia repaired. So as he had a repaired, obviously, he's not engaging his core. He's keeping it from engaging on purpose. I remember when he fully healed, he started to develop low back pain. And one of his SI joints started to feel pain, a little bit low back pain, up a little higher as well.

And so all I did was I said, okay, here's what we're gonna practice. Here's a correctional exercise. And this was appropriate for him. I had him do lying pelvic tilts. Essentially you land your back, knees bent, feet on the floor, and you pelvic tilt and essentially activate you land your back, knees bent, feet on the floor, and you pelvic tilt and essentially activate the cores, what's happening.

And I'm moving back and forth, going from anterior to posterior pelvic tilt. So it's like I'm arching and then flattening my lower back. And it was hard for him to do at first, but I told him I want you to do 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes at night. So essentially you're going to do like, you know, 20 reps and rest a little bit and 20 reps and rest a little bit until 10 minutes is up and then do it again in the evening and then let's see what happens.

Within one week, the back pain was gone and within one week we were ready to progress to more challenging core stability type exercises, but it was because he did it frequently. And it was very good about it. He did it twice a day, like I told him, every single day and that back pain was gone But that's what you have that's how you have to treat correctional exercise if you really want it to work

Okay, so I'm sure people now are wondering what do I do then once I get stable? I get connected. I did the correctional exercises. I'm priming properly. I think I'm ready now To start to really get strong and build back your base. And build, yes, focus on the basics. Re-focus on the skill of the basic exercises, your squats, your overhead presses, your barbell rows, your bench presses, your dead lifts,

like those exercises, although they're not, all the exercises you should ever do for your entire life, they are the ones that give you the most bang for your buck, both in terms of muscle and overall strength and overall functional strength. Now, of course, adding other exercises later is gonna give you much, much better results, but initially, focus on those basics

and get strong with those basics. That's when things really start to take off in terms of muscle gain and performance. Which is a very maps and a ball of type of foundational program. Now, what would you say is the time frame that the average, not obviously this is very individualized based off the injury that somebody had, somebody who broke their back or their arm versus somebody who strained a ligament or something, you may see a difference in time frame to get here. What would you suggest to somebody or how would you tell them to gauge, are you ready to move into MAPSAN a ball now, and how long would you run through starter and using

prime and prime pro? What's kind of a generic answer? Yeah, I would make sure obviously that the joint is responding and stabilized and that's something that you feel like, okay, I am able-bodied again. Like I feel like I can do most exercises but I don't necessarily feel strong in them. So there's a difference in that. It's not that I'm on my way back to whatever. It used to be it's more that I just feel like I can actually apply pressure now to susceptible

areas of my body that I've been working my way back up with all this corrective work. So do you feel pain free? Yeah. Do you feel connected to basic movements? And do you feel like you can do basic movements now with some load. Typically, what you're looking at for most people is anywhere between 30 to 90 days, of course, it could be longer depending on the injury, but in my experience, it's usually around a month to three months before you really start to get into those compound, basic, heavy lifts again. By the way, I want to be clear too.

When you're focusing on stabilizing and connecting and priming correctional exercise, you are still building muscles. I want people to know that. You could still get in shape doing this. Yeah, so it's not like, oh gosh, I have to do this for 60 days. And my body is gonna look exactly the same at the end of 60 days.

I'm so glad you said that because I think that's one of the misconceptions about doing rehab or priming or mobility work is people also assume that it's like oh I have to postpone my goals of looking better or feeling better I have to just worry about fixing myself when no you can actually do both at the same time yeah your body as you're progressing as you're getting more connected as you're getting those neurological connections then you start to build muscle you start to build strength your body starts to look good

then when you move into the traditional lifting, which should look like this, and yes, this is very much like MAP center ball. It should look like this. Two or three days a week, full body. Each workout is starting with the big muscle groups or moving down to the smaller muscle groups by the end of the workout.

And you are focusing on those big compound, barbell, dumbbell, type lifts for the most part. So once you get to the point where you're 30 days in or 60 days in, you're like, okay, I'm ready for these compound lifts, you've built some muscle, you've built some strength, now things really start to take off. Now let's say you avoid all that. Let's say you don't follow the protocol, you don't stabilize, you don't connect, you don't do the correctional work,

you just jump into dead lifts and squats and rows. Are you going to get there any faster? No, you'll actually get there much slower. So don't fool yourself and think that there's a shortcut here. There isn't, there's only one way to get there and that's the way that we're explaining. Anything else is going to result in subpar results or subpar performance or returns. But once you do it and you do it right, you will be surprised. I mean, like I said, I told the story about my shoulder and when I had shoulder surgery, I mean, I kind of learned my lesson. I took a couple steps back and then I took my time.

And then the doctor was shocked at how fast my body was able to respond and get strong. But I had to learn my lesson first. I definitely pushed a little too hard. Well, there's also too, like going through that process of like, oh my god, like it set me back so much, but then the one time I really focused on adding more support around my shoulder, I had the same kind of limitations.

When I would bench press, I would go back in, do all that work and find out, oh my god, I just passed through where I normally would plateau. Yes, yes. And it's like, I would go back in, do all that work, and find out, oh my God, I just passed through where I normally would plateau. Yes. And it's like, I have even more support. My shoulder, therefore, my body was like, oh, I can produce more force. Yes.

And I got stronger. You don't want to be this person, okay? You don't want to be this person who's like, oh yeah, you know, I used to be really strong and stuff, and then I injured my knee, I had surgery on it, and I get back into working out, but I always have a bad knee now, or I always got this bad shoulder now. That'll happen if you don't do this right. Like this is so important to do this process

so that whatever you injured, doesn't become a permanent pain in the ass, because it can be. I tell you what, I have to people in the gym that I would talk to when I'd manage gyms. They had this chronic pain, and about half of them was from an injury that healed, it healed, but the pain kind of stuck around. Like, oh, my bag now they're working around it or they're getting some kind of like, you

know, AIDS, you know, like some kind of like sleeves or things to deal with, how they have to sort of immobilize it. It's so funny that we're having this conversation because I know Katrina will be listening to this episode in a couple of days and when she's listening to this episode, she's gonna be kind of shaking her head, like freaking Adam, right? So she had surgery a couple of months back and she was out for six weeks.

So she was completely immobilized, no training whatsoever and recovering from the surgery, doctor's orders, no weight training, no nothing for at least six weeks. And then she was back to training. And she's, of course, asking me, you know, what does that look like? And it sounds a lot like what we're talking about right now,

a lot of prime, a lot of prime pro and starter. And, you know, it wasn't but a couple of weeks into starter that she was like, hey, I'm feeling a lot better. Like, can I skip to Annabelle right now? I said, no, why would you want to skip to Annabelle? She goes, because I feel better. I feel good right now. She goes, I'm doing really good.

And I feel better. I feel connected to my core again. And I think I can go there and so that. And I go, are you seeing progress from being an starter right now? Are you stronger this week than you were last week? Do you feel like your body's changing from the previous week? She goes, yeah, I said, then why would you do that? Why?

If you're doing less right now, okay? And you're not pushing as hard as you know, you'll be pushing when you get into anabolic and you're seeing progress in your physique. You feel your strength is going up, you feel your body is changing and you're improving and you're not plateauing, why would you do that? Write it out, write it out.

And we had this conversation for literally like four of the six weeks of the of the program that fall Because yeah because when you're somebody like her or us who's been lifting for a long time You have this tendency to want a heart because like you hurry up and get back I want I'm glad you pointed that out that it is not a shortcut and that's why I kept trying to tell her It's like you are not gonna get to your ultimate goal Which is this the body you're trying to get back to, any faster by skipping to anabolic.

If you are getting the results from starter and prime and prime pro right now by doing those movements, ride that wave. Not only is it safer and smarter for you to that way, but you're actually progressing perfect and you're only setting up a stronger better foundation for when you ramp it up good in Ambulance. Plus, let's say what caused your injury was not a freak accident. So you didn't get hit by a car, you didn't fall off a ladder.

But rather, your knee's been bothering you for a while and then it's just too painful and you have surgery. Or you did something that seems mundane. I was running at the park, I turned, boom, I hurt my hip or my knee and what's going on. Oftentimes, it's movement pattern issues and imbalances that led to that injury, okay? This is your opportunity, not just to rehab

the specific injury, but rather correct the issues that led to that injury in the first place, right? If you don't make that conscious effort, then you may heal your knee or your elbow, your shoulder or your back, but you never fixed because the problem that happened in the first place. What do you think is going to happen soon? You can go right back to where you were before.

So you do all those things, then you get into the basic lifts, going into it stable, strong, devoid of major muscle imbalances or bad recruitment patterns. And here's what'll happen. You're gonna get strong, linearly, smoothly, consistently, and your body's gonna build muscle, and it's gonna feel like you're on turbo. It's gonna feel, I hate to use this word, but it's gonna feel effortless. What I mean by effortless is when you hit it right, your body just progresses, and you actually start to ask yourself like, wow, this is weird. Why am I feeling so good? Just working.

Yeah, normally I have to push so much harder to get these kind of results. It's because you did everything right. You taught your body the right way. You prioritized the right things. And now, not only are you going to get there faster, then you would had you not done these things, but you'll surpass, oftentimes surpass, where you were before or cure or fix

what caused the injury to happen in the first place. Look, if you like mind pumps information, you got to head over to mindpumpfree.com. We have tons of guides there to help you with everything from building muscle, burning body fat, getting a better squat. We even have guides for personal trainers. There's like 15 guides, all free, mindpumpfree.com. You can also find all of us on Instagram, so you can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin,

me and Mind Pump Sal, Adam at Mind Pump Atom. One more thing, we talked about several programs in this episode, what we've done is we've bundled them all together for a huge discount. So normally each program can run you well over $100, each individual one. Well, we talked about, maps prime, maps prime pro starter, maps in a ball,

you get all four for $149 in 99 cents, and that's it. And the website to get those or to learn more is mapsjuly.com. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at mindpumpmedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballad, 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-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 MindPump.

We thank you for your support and until next time, this is Mindbump.