Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1617: How to Maintain a Bikini Body Year-Round

Episode Date: August 12, 2021

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin four steps to developing and maintaining a healthy and attractive bikini body. How to obtain a ‘beach body’ that is healthy, and people can look too. (2:13) The importance of chasing health and the different metrics of attraction for women. (3:36) Hip to waist ratio. (8:19) Posterior chain development. (9:30) Well-defined shoulders. (14:28) Strong core. (15:13) How to Maintain a Bikini Body Year-Round. Step #1 – Address your Posture and use appropriate Priming. (20:09) Step #2 – Build muscle through proper resistance training. (29:00) Step #3 – Develop a healthy relationship with food. (35:09) Step #4 – Train your core correctly. (44:11) Related Links/Products Mentioned Special Promotion: Bikini Bundle 50% off!  **Promo code “BIKINI50” at checkout** Visit Chili for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! Waist‐to‐Hip Ratio across Cultures: Trade‐Offs between Androgen‐ and Estrogen‐Dependent Traits Sleepy Butt Syndrome is Why Your Butt Won’t Grow – Mind Pump Blog Why Your Butt Won't Grow: 3 Exercises to Wake Up Your Sleepy Butt – Mind Pump TV 3 Best Secrets - How To Make Your Butt Grow (AVOID MISTAKES!) | MIND PUMP TV MAPS Prime Webinar How Your Genetics Influence Your Muscle Building Potential – Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump #1305: Five Steps To Intuitive Eating Shrink Your Waist with Stomach Vacuums | MIND PUMP TV 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, MIND, with your hosts. Salta Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump, right? In today's episode, we talk about building and maintaining a bikini body. Now, to be clear, if you put a bikini on your body, you have a bikini body. Now to be clear, if you put a bikini on your body, you have a bikini body. So what we're really talking about

are the areas that people or women in particular wanna develop, focus on, how to make your body look healthy, fit, and aesthetic so that it looks good with minimal clothing. That's essentially what this episode is about. Now this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Chile. Chile makes products that warm or cool your bed using water,

so very, very low EMF, very quiet, and it's very effective. In fact, they have products that can warm or cool, both sides of the bed independently. So if you like to go to bed and have a perfect temperature to give you better sleep, look at their products. Go head over to chileysleep.com that's CHILI sleep.com forward slash mind pump. And on that site, you will see an exclusive offer for mind pump listeners. Also,

in this episode, you're here us referring to a few of our programs, you hear us talk about maps prime, maps aesthetic, or intuitive nutrition guide, and the no BS 6-pack formula. All of them combined are actually perfect for everything we're talking about in this episode, which is how to develop a perfect bikini body. We call this the bikini bundle, and here's what we're going to do right now for this episode. We're going to put all of those together in a bundle and we're going to make them discounted and then we're going to take an additional 50% off. So the bikini bundle already discounted. You can take an additional 50% off. This is a huge promotion.

Head over to maps fitnessproducts.com. Find the bikini bundle, and then use the code bikini50. That's bikini 50 with no space for that discount. I think it's important to express this before we get into this topic, but obviously, MindPump Media is a, is a, what, fitness, no.

No, with that out, okay. MindPump Media is a fitness and health company, and we have different aspects and parts of the company and one part of our company is our marketing team and they're constantly talking to us about things that they think our audience or the market really wants to hear and we often give them push back. And this is one of those things that they constantly tell us and I think there's definitely value in communicating this and of course we'll do it the right

way because that's what we do. But they tell they they how many times have they said to us do an episode on how to build and develop and maintain a bikini body. Yeah, like a body. Now here's the pushback. Okay, the truth is this like a bikini body is a body with a bikini on it. That's the truth. You have a bikini on your body? You have a bikini body. Sure. But I think what they mean is, or at least what people mean when they ask about this, is, beach ready.

Yeah, like how can I get the kind of body that I feel good about displaying, one that's healthy, one that looks attractive and aesthetic. So let's focus on that, right? What are the things that make up, you know, quote unquote, bikini body, or things that make someone look or appear more physically attractive to other people or feel attractive themselves?

Well, one of the first points that I think you have to address or say, and you say it on the podcast all the time, that a healthy body looks good. Yes. So even though you might have this lofty, aesthetic goal or aspiring to look like maybe a bikini model or a cover of a magazine type of a person, the way to keep it long term is to do it the healthy way. I could get anybody lean down for a bikini or a certain size by starving their body and over training them for a extended period of time and they'll achieve this weight or desired size in the waist but the reality of that is that's not healthy nor is it sustainable so Not only do we want to achieve this or this is an okay goal for somebody to have

But I think the the way you go about it is so important because the huge point, I mean, you're gonna get, from all these different magazines and different publications, you're gonna get the opposite, you're gonna get the quick way to get there. And that's, you know, what people are, the consumers are looking for that too, which is a really hard thing to combat initially.

But what we're trying to communicate here today is really like there's a way to achieve a healthy version of that and something that will last, but it does take some preparation. By the way, they lie to you when they say this is the fast way to do it. It's actually not, there is no faster way to do it other than the right way to do it. The faster way to do it actually results in worse results, worse outcomes. Also, it's important to know that health looks amazing

in person, always looks attractive in person. So you can try to fake and falsify and force your body through unhealthy methods to accomplish what you think may be attractive, but the healthy version of you probably will look better anyway. So even at the end of the day, if you don't even care, and you just want to look good, you know, because here's a deal. The roots of everything that we try to aim for to look more attractive, the roots of it are all based on your health. Why do we find certain things in the opposite sex or even the same sex

attractive is because it comes from a health that displays virality, so your virile, your healthy, you can produce healthy offspring, you look like someone you want to be around, right? So you're displaying kind of this good posture and health and we'll get into all the details. So health looks really good, chasing, looking really good, oftentimes doesn't result in good health, which then makes you not look good as well. So health is the goal, right? So we're gonna talk about, you know,

some of those things here. Well, one of the things you talk about a lot about, and do you know, I mean, I've heard you say it, but I don't know if you actually know what the ratio is, but one of the ways they've defined that is or by attraction and the hip to waste ratio. Yeah, you know, it's interesting.

So they do these studies on, so what you'll find in different cultures are different size preferences. So we're talking about in specifically females, right? So in some countries, what's considered attractive by both men and women in terms of women, can be thinner or heavier depending on the different culture. And if we look at what was depicted as attractive historically, for example, if you go back to the 1950s versus maybe the 90s, for example, so-

Change substantially. Yeah, it's much thinner, right? What was considered in the 1950s was attractive mainstream media was 30 pounds heavier than maybe- But there's something they shared in common. Right, and so scientists, what they did is they said, okay, obviously there's social and cultural pressures, but there has to be biological roots to this because, you know, obviously we're driven by our genes in some way.

What's in common, and what they found was regardless of the weight of the model or the people that we consider attractive in the 1950s and the 1990s or today, or in China versus in Russia versus in Africa or in North America, is this hip to waist ratio, which is 0.7. So what you do with this is you divide, I believe you divide the hips to the waist and it's 0.7 is the number you're looking for. I think that's the order of finding this ratio. And then they said, okay, why is this 0.7 considered attractive across cultures all over the world?

And they found that women who have this particular ratio tend to have better health and have healthier offspring and more successful childbirth. So again, this point to this biological health routes that tend to make us so wild to me that there's like this subconsciously you're driven by that and you don't even realize that. Isn't that cool? Yeah. Very, very interesting, right? So there's some other stuff. Okay, hip to waist ratio. Since we started there, let's talk about that for a second, how do we accomplish or get closer to this ratio of hip to waist? Well, you have a relatively lean physique, essentially, is what's gonna cause this.

And this is also for men. There's a there's a waist to shoulder ratio. I don't know what that number is that women find attractive and it's easier to get to it when you're relatively lean. So now I say relatively or healthy lean because getting too lean starts to look unhealthy and although you can airbrush that on too lean starts to look unhealthy. And although you can airbrush that on pictures to make it look okay, if you've ever seen someone that is unhealthy lean in person, you know it doesn't look,

there's something about it that's not attractive. And again, it's because it doesn't display good health. For women, the body fat percentage that tends to fall on this range is like 15 to 27% usually around there right we usually don't see health decline with body fat percentage of women until they start to kind of go past you know 30% so Doug what was the the what is that shoulder to waste for a man that they found 1.6 yeah 1.6 so 1.6 very interesting and then there was a you know chest that have bicep to

forearm ratio and pretty cool what what they found in some of these studies. So relatively lean, what's another one? Posterior chain development. That's something that is considered attractive in women. Why? Why would we think that? Posterior chain is like hamstrings, glutes, back. This is my opinion. When those muscles are well developed,

you probably can move and perform well, and you're probably or devoid of a lot of pain. I think it has a little bit to do that, and also another, I think, factor that plays a role here, which is posture. So I think the posterior chain is just, I think both men and women, it's overlooked. We'd see everything, we look at everything in front of you,

look at the mirror, and you see all the muscles in front of you, very few people are looking back and checking on the backside, you can't see it when you work out, it's harder for a lot of people to activate and train. So I think in general, focusing on the post year chain brings anybody, male or female, their body up. Now, as a coach, when I was training bikini athletes,

this was the number one focus. Almost every female that I train, when we assess their physique and decided to get ready for a show, almost always the focus was, rear delts, glutes, hamstrings, those were normally the muscles that I needed to bring up to compliment their front side. And I think it's true even with men.

So even though we're talking primarily to women right now, I think generally speaking, one of the areas that I used to say it with men, the back, like a back won the show. A guy who had a very developed back would always end up beating out the guy that maybe had a little bit better front side. And I think that judges would lean that way because it was more impressive because less people developed that.

Yeah, I think it just takes more intention because we do everything in front of us. And so it's just like putting more attention to the posterior chain, it definitely sets you apart and it stands out. And I think that that became a desirable feature. Besides the fact of the hip ratio, which you would naturally see

like a wider hip kind of, you know, with larger glutes, and that would be something a signal that you would see that would show, like a healthy body. Well, and back to my posture point, too. If you have got great chest and shoulders and quads, and you're just, all these, the muscles in the front are developed more, then it takes the body and kind of rounds it forward and creates, even if, and we've seen this in both men and women. You've seen people that are in great shape, they got muscle, they're lean, and they're muscular.

They don't look right. But they don't look good. And I've taken clients completely out of shape, right? And stood them upright, right? So I'd stand them in front of a mirror. Oh, the same thing. And I would take them and I'd pull their shoulders back and have them draw on their core and stand up tall

and tuck their chin and then say, look at that. Look how in that little pooch is gone, right? Just because they're in nice and upright. They immediately, they look like they lost 15 to 20 pounds and look better without losing anything, training, or doing anything just simply by getting them to stand up. Right? So the focus and the emphasis on the post-ear chain, I think does wonders for helping somebody just stand upright

with good posture with when we're talking about building that bikini look or bikini body aesthetically. And when you're weak because of an activity, which is very common these days, those are the muscles that tend to atrophy the most. Because again, we do everything in front of our bodies. We sit in chairs, we rarely ever squat. We rarely use or activate those muscles.

Low back pain and injury is so common because the posterior chain in particular, also because of the core tends to be weak. So when they're developed, it demonstrates health, mobility, strength, performance. And here's another one, you know. Women like to use the term curves. I want to have nice looking curves. Curves come from muscle, they do. This is, of course, having good, healthy body fat percentages as well. If you have a decent body fat percentage, that's healthy, again, like in that 20% range,

maybe a little less, maybe a little more, but you also have developed posterior chain muscles. Now you have curves. Now you've got the butt, you've got the hamstring curve, you've got the good posture. It's the muscle that really develops. What I like to call is to tell my clients, firm curves. You want firm curves.

You don't just want curves, but you want curves that look tight and firm. That comes from muscles. So those muscles from an aesthetic standpoint, but also from a health standpoint, should be a focus in terms of the bikini body. Oh, I used to tell my clients that struggle with building a butt or wanted a better butt that the development of the hamstring will really bring out the development of your glutes.

I know, right. The curve of that and the way it tucks underneath the glutes like that makes the glutes look better just by developing the hamstrings. It reminds me a lot when I talk to my guys about developing their arms and they're so focused on bicep and triceps. And listen, you develop your shoulders really well and watch how much better your bicep and your triceps looks. Very, very similar with my female clients when we were talking about bikini competitors,

getting their glutes to look better, I would put a lot of emphasis on the hamstrings because it makes it accentuates it just like the shoulders do for the arms. And speaking of shoulders, it's true for women too. Oftentimes women will want these kind of sculpted looking arms. Shoulders really make that come out. It's not, I mean, you definitely work your biceps and triceps, but you don't need a lot of muscle on your arms when your shoulders are really well developed and strong. It makes the whole arm look lean and sculpted.

It also what accentuates that hourglass look. So if you build good delts on you, it'll make that shoulder to waist ratio look even more dramatic, which is when you're trying to build that aesthetic physique, especially on the competitive level, like you want to see that drastic difference. Building those shoulders will create an even larger discrepancy between the waist and

the shoulders. That's true. Now, the other one, let's talk about core for a second. And I know this is both for men and women, but especially for women, they were discouraged from really training their core to develop the muscles. It was all about doing millions of reps and sculpt it, but you don't wanna build your abs. Very squeeze.

Yeah, you don't wanna build your obliques, okay. This is one good thing that I noticed from the popularity of CrossFit. There's other good things too, this is some bad stuff too, we've talked about before, but one of the good things was they were actually displaying women who had well-developed core muscles.

Like you could see their obliques, you could see their abs, and it was great because women were like, I like that, I like the way that looks. Well-developed core muscles look healthy, therefore they look good. When you see that in public, someone's wearing a bathing suit,

and you can see their midsection, and it's not just flat, but rather developed, it makes a tremendous impact. It really, really looks good. Now I do wanna say something though about that and it's not just flat, but rather developed, it makes a tremendous impact. It really, really looks good. Now, I do wanna say something though about that because I do think it's normalized it for more women that it looks good to have a strong core

and I think CrossFit's a good reason for that. But I also think that there's a lot of women that see that and go like, I don't wanna look like that and I wanna make something clear because a lot of women that see that and go like, I don't wanna look like that. And I wanna make something clear because a lot of your high level CrossFit athletes that have these obliques, they had that square kind of frame going, that's what makes them a good deadlifter. And overhead presser, like having a good solid wide core

is less advantageous for getting on stage and competing as a bikini athlete because you want that tiny little waist and the wider shoulders, but for a crossfit competitor to lift a lot of weight over your head or pick it up off the ground, it's more advantageous to have a wider waist. So Crossfit didn't do that to those girls.

Crossfit didn't make those girls more boxy or wider. What it did is it just showed what night, what developed core looks like. Now your structure can deter, like your hip width and all that, we'll just say. But if you have well developed core muscles, and your waist is the same size,

you just develop the muscle, which is what'll end up happening, like you make your waist bigger, very hard to make your waist bigger with muscle around your waist, but when they're developed, and you have your body fat percentage is healthy, so you can kind of see it, it looks really good.

Rather than just having a waist, that's, you know, with a flat stomach, having some muscle that's visible, it just looks really good. Well, not only that, but it also feeds back into one of the first things that points that we made, which is posture. Yes. It's what reinforces that. You know, one of my, I used to do this little posture check with clients with their hands by their side, they go in front out, retract, and then I'd tell them

to hold that position. And all it was was like this little test to get clients to hold them, to put them into perfect posture. And one of the things I would do right afterwards is I'd walk over to their belly button. I'd say, you notice how you're drawing, and what it does, when you get in a good posture, your core draws in to hold your spine upright. And so it naturally draws in and is activated. And I say, you feel that. I say, well, that's your core activating right now to hold you upright in good posture.

So yeah, the first thing is to address posture, try and get you into that good position, teach you what muscles we should develop to get that way. The next step is to develop a very strong core to keep it and hold in that position. Now, you know, I know this is going to sound like a broken record, but the best form of exercise to shape and sculpt the body like a sculptor. What I mean by that is, if you want to develop your body in specific ways, if you want to be able to say, I want to develop this more, I want to shape this more, I want this to look a particular way.

The best form of exercise for that is resistance training or strength training because you can target specific areas of your body. Unlike other forms of exercise which are general, they definitely have value as well, but they generally work the body. If you want to specifically develop and work the body, like a sculptoror like your piece of marble and you're saying develop this work here shape there Resistance drinks phenomenal because I can choose More exercises to work this area and I can avoid other exercises because maybe I don't want to develop this area So that's going to be the primary form of exercise that you use to develop a bikini body also second speeds up the metabolism

Which makes it much easier to be lean and stay lean. Now, this is a definitive difference in programming too. So there are ways. So yes, it's great. If you're just focused on strength training or you mentioned CrossFit or something in that regard where they're throwing the whole kitchen sink at you, you can be very intentional about bringing

very specific muscle groups up and to be able to hyper focus on those muscle groups, to develop them and sculpt and shape them to really be more pronounced. And that's the beauty of resistance training is that it's very moldable towards your goals, but if that's your goal, there's a very specific intentional way to address that. Yes, okay, so let's start with, let's a very specific intentional way to address that.

Yes. Okay, so let's start with, let's give people steps, right? So step number one, we talked about posture. That's gotta be number one. There's a reason why... Foundation. Yeah, there's a reason why for trainers and coaches, posture tends to be one of the initial assessments.

You get a client, there's different assessments that you tend to do and they can differ from place to place, but there's often some kind of a posture assessment because the way that you naturally hold your posture, this is very different than the way you try to hold your posture. It's not like, all right, hold posture and you're trying to make it perfect. Just how you stand naturally. That can lead us to realize, oh, some muscles are not as strong as they need to be. Other muscles are a little bit tight.

If we adjust some of these discrepancies and help move your posture into a better category, we tend to balance the body out a little bit. So that's got to be one of the first things is look at your posture and address that and figure out what you need to do to get better posture. Well, it's also important because if you don't address it first, it's only going to be that much harder later. So you can get a lean muscular body without addressing posture. I mean, you could lose body fat, build muscle on a frame,

and not address posture. That's absolutely possible. But what ends up happening is now you got this person who's lean and ripped and they have shitty posture. Right. And then if you decide, oh now I wanna go fix that or work on that, you've already reinforced all those bad patterns so bad

that to go back and counter that, it's 10 times harder. So laying a solid foundation by addressing the imbalances by working on posture first is setting you up for long-term success. Yeah, in fact, just to go further on that, you end up adding armor to your bad posture is what you do. So if you have bad posture and you don't address it and you strengthen your body,

you strengthen the bad posture, actually making it harder to correct, increasing risk of injury, and reducing your aesthetic potential. So that's what we're talking about here. If you address your posture first, you've increased your aesthetic potential. In other words, you've increased the potential at which you can look good as you start to develop the

body. And a lot of times, I'll see, you know, the posture is being affected because they're wanting to portray certain curves that maybe they haven't developed enough yet musculos. Oh, like Lordosis? Right. Lordosis where you see the Instagram sort of pose where, you know, in order to make accentuate their glutes more, they have to get into this sort of bad posture position, which then take that into a resistance training situation, what that does to the lower back, and then adding more stress in that direction.

So to be able to build off of good posture is essential going into it. You also make it very difficult to develop the muscles that you want to develop because of these bad patterns. And I don't think anymore. What's in a very common one that you see all the time is the sleepy butt syndrome. You've got a client who squats, dead left, does all these movements that are important for the glutes but then their quads just keep developing.

So they just keep getting bigger and bigger muscles but then the muscle that they're really trying to develop isn't growing at all. And that's because of the poor posture, poor recruitment pattern that they didn't address earlier on. Yeah, so that's what you want to do. You want to be able to wake. Oftentimes, the muscles and areas your body that are hard to develop is because you're... Just for lack of a better term, okay? So all you you you science nerds watching this. Yes, you are connected to your muscle, you know, all the muscles

are connected, it's not like you're paralyzed, but we do use this term in training where you just lack connection to some of these muscles. What that essentially means is, like if I'm like Adam's example of the squat, when I'm doing a squat, there's a lot of muscles that are involved and they have to work in unison and there's a specific pattern in which they use. And to just give you general numbers, let's say your quads are doing 60% of the work, your hamstrings are doing 20% of the work,

and your glutes are doing 20% of the work, which one of those muscles is gonna develop the most from squats, right? The quads. Well, what if you want the glutes to develop more? Well, we have to find a way to transfer that load to the glutes by waking them up and teaching them to fire better when we do squats.

And priming is how you do this. Priming is a way of warming up or essentially starting your workout by activating those target muscles so that when you go do these other exercises, you can really feel them work. So waking up sleepy muscles should be part of the initial, like how you get started with your workouts. Otherwise, it makes it much, much more difficult. By the way, Maps Prime does this very well. So the program that we have where you go in and you help target and work on these areas. But we do have videos on our YouTube channel showing some primers I use something I use prime all the time with my bikini competitors all the time because when you're trying

to sculpt the body, like you're trying to target specific areas, that can be very challenging for the average person. Absolutely. We take for granted that we've been doing this for over 20 years and so asking you to flex your shoulder or your quad or your glute or your hamstring, like you can do it like that. Most people are not like that. And if you want to develop a specific area or a specific muscle on your body, you've got to can do it like that. Most people are not like that. And if you wanna develop a specific area, or a specific muscle on your body,

you've gotta be able to do that. You gotta be able to connect right to it and fire it. And it's just difficult for a lot of people, especially if that was an area that's been underdeveloped for a long time, because that's probably the reason why it's underdeveloped. So, priming it and teaching them, neurologically, how to connect and fire better

before they go into these workouts is huge to building in the static state. And it encourages perfect form. You know, exercises are only as good as you can perform them. So you can take the best exercises in the world, the ones that provide the biggest bang for your buck that give you the most value, that give you the best results, or that you've read, give you the best results. But that's the potential of the exercise.

If your form isn't perfect, if you're not connecting well during that exercise, you're not gonna gain any of that potential. To give you an example of what we're talking about, this is a very simple one. Let's say, this is a common one, right? Let's say you have forward shoulder. So your shoulders tend to round four.

I'm exaggerating, most people don't look like this, but forward shoulder, I think you've seen it before. Maybe you have it yourself very common. The shoulders tend to round forward. Okay. So let's say the reason why your shoulders round forward, the most common reason is those muscles of the mid back that retract the shoulder blades, retract the scapula and kind of depress them and pull them down or weak or at least they're too weak to support that good posture. So now you're gonna go into your workout and you're gonna do barbell rows or lap pull downs or something,

but you haven't addressed that forward shoulder. What I'm gonna end up doing with my rows or my pull downs is I'm gonna make that forward shoulder even worse. How would I prime that to get better activation so I can do those exercises and get better, perfect, more perfect form. An easy way to do this would be like a prone cobra, right? So a prone cobra,

the whole goal of a prone cobra is exactly what I said, scapular retraction. So bringing the shoulder blades back and then depressing them. And there's usually no resistance that's done with this. You're using no weight. So if I do this at the beginning of the workout and really focus on feeling those mid-back muscles that promote that good posture and I can connect to them. And then I go do my rows or my pull downs. Now my form is different, now I'm achieving perfect form and I'm strengthening better posture,

which of course leads to your better tennis. And you're getting better tennis. That's more valuable at that exercise now. Absolutely. The other thing is to correct imbalances. Now this is a really big one. If your right leg and your left leg are not exactly the same strength,

or you can't balance as good on either one of them, if your right arm and your left arm have a big discrepancy in strength, if when you do an exercise, you notice you shift. Yeah, some asymmetry going on. Like one side comes up versus the other, it's kind of lagging behind. You know, all of these things we see all the time

when people are doing squats or our specific exercise. Yeah. Symmetry is very important in aesthetics. They show this in facial aesthetics and the aninbody aesthetics, right? Does the right match the left? Does the top look proportional to the bottom? It's hard to accomplish symmetry when you have lots of imbalances, right? So proper priming and correctional exercise helps you train

with better balance and symmetry. So when you do start to develop your body, you're really getting a nice looking physique from doing them. And I would say this is something anywhere between five to 15 minutes, probably on the high end that you spend doing this before you get into your training. Exactly. This becomes once you figure out what areas we need to address, that's obviously what prime is all about, right?

When you go through it, it is assessing you, figuring out. And by the way, if you have no clue what we're talking about, it's the first time you've ever tuned in to Mind Pump, Justin did a free webinar on Maps Prime to take people through. He literally takes you through the exercise. Yeah, three tests, a very, very simple straightforward test, but yeah, you're able to kind of pinpoint, you know, what part of your body isn't probably functioning like it should. That's right. That's right.

That's right. So, that's the MAPS Prime webinar dot com. It's completely free. So, if this is all foreign to you, what we're talking about, I highly recommend going through that. Yeah, very, very good. All right, the next thing that you really want to focus on is to build muscle. Now, I know some women are listening to this saying, I don't want to get too big.

Don't worry. You won't get too big. I promise you, building muscle is a hard, slow process. But here I'll make a statement right now, right? So if you're watching this show or listening to the podcast and you're a female, and if I could magically add five pounds of muscle to your body, especially to the areas you wanna focus on, if I can make you gain five pounds of muscle,

I guarantee if you looked in the mirror, took your clothes off, looked in the mirror, you would look better. That's what muscle does to your body. It sculpts you. It, you know, this is a term I hate using because it doesn't really mean anything, but I think people have their own meaning to it.

They tones your body. It makes you look better, and it speeds up your metabolism. Building muscle has this tremendous effect on your metabolism to where you burn more calories. In fact, if you're getting leaner and building muscle, at least maintaining muscle through this process of trying to build, at the end of your fat loss journey, you could end up in a position,

and I've done this many times, where you're eating more food to maintain a leaner body, versus what tends to happen with a lot of people, is they lose weight, get leaner, and then you have to eat a lot less to maintain their new body. Which one of those is more sustainable? Eating more or eating less, right? Obviously, the answer is quite obvious.

So you wanna focus on building muscle, how do you do that? You get less, right? Obviously the answer is quite obvious. So you want to focus on building muscle. How do you do that? You get stronger, right? Get stronger, especially at those compound lifts, your barbell squats, your barbell dead lifts, your presses, your rows, your overhead presses, get really strong at those lifts. Those are the ones that are going to give you the most results. More so than almost any other exercise. I always think of it like, I'm usually tell clients that when we're building muscle, we're sculptor-whose, because everyone has this look they want, right? Everybody comes to you and they're like,

I wanna look like this, or I mean, I mean, clients bring you a picture of them. I wanna look like her, I wanna look this, and I would tell them that we're gonna go through this building phase of just focusing on building muscle. I know that you see this lean little bikini and that's what you wanna look like right now, but I'm telling you, if we wanna sculpt down

to look like this, what you can't see is the amount of muscle that this girl probably put on her body before she got down to this physique. Totally. And so what I wanna do is I wanna stack all that clay on you so that when we chisel down that we can sculpt and build this physique that you want to versus Where you're currently at right now where you haven't gone through a proper muscle building program where you've tried to build

Add strength and muscle to your body and then you think that we're just gonna sculpt a physique like that It doesn't work that way that person to get that body that has that symmetry that has that balance that even your attracted to because you look at it You're like oh my god, that has that balance, that even you're attracted to, because you look at it and you're like, oh my God, that's beautiful. It's all the things that Sal was talking about earlier about the hip to waist ratio. You see that subconsciously and you're attracted to that. But that person probably, most people, yes, there are genetic freaks,

but most people worked for that. Most people built this muscular physique and then chiseled down to have this more aesthetically pleasing. And not to mention, again, I have to say this again, it speeds up your metabolism, which makes it way, way, way easier to maintain. And, you know, here's the problem when you don't focus on building, you might get smaller, but you, you, you'll likely end up a smaller, same flabbyness slower metabolism version of yourself.

So yes, you're smaller, your body fat percentage is the same, which means you're the same flabbyness, right? So nothing's changed except you're smaller, but now you also have a slower metabolism, terrible position to be in and impossible to sustain. Yeah, and this kind of bleeds into like the next point a bit, but like it provides flexibility. So you know, when you do find yourself on the weekends or at somebody's house or you're celebrating some event or a birthday or anything where it's like, I want to have a bit and indulge a bit and have some cake or I want to have something that is off of my pretty restrictive

diet, you can do that and you can live your life, and your body's not gonna be affected too much because your metabolism is super healthy and raging. Well, this is also where you get to manipulate what you were given as far as your genetics. Yes. So in order to, like, so if you are, what makes somebody have a bubbly butt versus a flat butt has everything to do with the origin and assertion of the muscle, right?

Those are things you cannot change. But that doesn't mean you can't take somebody who genetically has a flat butt has everything to do with the origin insertion of the muscle, right? Those are things you cannot change. But that doesn't mean you can't take somebody who genetically has a flat butt because of the long origin insertion and create the illusion of a bubbly or a rounder butt by developing the hamstrings, developing the glutes. Sure. To do that. And this is the sculpting building part right here. This is going back to my analogy of you're stacking on the clay.

This is what I loved about the way we design maps aesthetic. It emulated what I would do when I was getting ready for a show, is I would look at, okay, this is what the judges said. I don't have enough shoulders, my butt's not big enough, whatever muscles that I needed to develop, that's where I stack the clay on. So I go back to a building routine.

I'll apply the frequency there. And then I would focus on specific muscle groups. That's where I'd the clay on. So I go back to a building routine, and then I would focus on specific muscle groups. That's where I'd stack more the clay on before I'd carve back down to start to manipulate and change the way that my physique looks. Right, so here's the great thing, is that you can manipulate your workouts. And actually, this is, again,

this is a feature of Maps aesthetic, you can manipulate your workouts so that you do more for the areas that you want to develop more and less for the areas you're not as concerned about. This is the individualization aspect that is so powerful of good resistance training. If I have naturally narrow shoulders as a man and I want to have wide looking shoulders, I can focus on developing my delts and that's going to go a long way at making me look wider in my shoulders, right?

If I have a butt that isn't round, I can develop that more. If my quads are overpowering to my hamstrings, what can I do? I can take away quadricep work and add hamstring work. So this is an important aspect of individualizing your workout to make your body look more aesthetic. Now, let's get to the nutrition aspect because that's very,

very important. And Justin mentioned having that flexibility because you have a faster metabolism. That is key, by the way. That'll make any nutrition, any diet, any attempt at eating in a way that gets you leaner way easier, okay? It's way easier to get lean and maintain a lean body when you're burning 3,000 calories a day and when I say burning I don't mean manually burning like I have to go move It's automatic, but rather my metabolism is burning it because I've got good muscle and I'm healthy It's easier to do it at 3,000 calories than it is to do it at 2,000 calories. Duh Super easy. By the way, I've done this all of us have done this with clients time and time again where I've actually got them leaner

and got their metabolism speed up. So that's number one. But here's number two, this is very, very important. You wanna, whatever you do with your nutrition has to be sustainable. And the only way to do that is to develop a good healthy relationship with food. It is not sustainable if you view eating healthy

as restrictive or as a punishment or as temporary. In other words, I'm gonna do this diet for the next three months, and then when I get my goal, I'm gonna go off. It's not gonna work, it just won't work that way. And oftentimes you end up in a worse position afterwards. Whatever you do with nutrition, you have to maintain and continue to do, and the key is to have a healthy,

balanced relationship with nutrition. So that, for the most part, I eat in ways that facilitate a healthy physical body, and it doesn't feel restrictive, it doesn't feel like a punishment, it's actually something that I enjoy and I wanna do. And then occasionally, when I wanna value food for its taste, for its enjoyment, or for connection, or when I have a beer with my buddies, or when I have a slice of

birthday cake, because it's my friend's, you know, daughter's birthday, or whatever, I can do it, and I have a healthy relationship, so it doesn't lead to this off the wagon mentality where I binge, where instead of having one slice of cake, I have five. Right. Well, this is the difference of having a bikini, getting a bikini body and keeping a bikini body. Right, I mean, you can follow a very rigid diet. In fact, you could probably Google and find one online that's calorie restrictive, that will lean you out

and get you down to a certain place. But the idea of this episode was to teach people and give people the tools to not only get themself in that kind of shape, but maintain it for the rest of their life. And the secret to that is in the relationship with the food. Totally. And that starts immediately.

You start building that now. And a lot of clients sometimes would go, oh, just get me there, then I'll figure it out. That's a recipe for disaster. Fail. The same way you build your body, you also got to start building the relationship with nutrition right away too.

If this is something that you want to maintain for the rest of your life, and it isn't just simply a goal for Vegas in three to six months, it's that I wanna get in some really good shape, and I wanna be able to keep it that way for the rest of my life. Yeah, you know what used to trick me out about this, is it's like you go to the beach,

and what is the beach typically associated with, right? You're there with your friends, you're there with your family, you're not there to just walk around and display yourself, you're really with your family, you're not there to just walk around and display yourself. You're really there to have fun. Oftentimes you bring beers, potato chips, some, you know, I like to bring watermelon, sandwiches, hot dogs, burger, and we're playing music, we're having a lot of fun. My God, if your relationship to food is orthorexic, right?

What is orthorexic? Everything has to be perfect. My diet has to be perfectly healthy. I have to eat the right amount of grams of proteins, fats and carbs, and if I go off of it, it stresses me out. Fine, you did that, and you accomplished this great bikini body. Now you're at the beach with your friends, and everybody's enjoying themselves.

You have any fun with it. And you're miserable. Nobody likes you. No, secretly nobody likes you. You might envy your body and look at you. Nobody likes you. You like friends like this. They might envy your body and look at you. Nobody likes you. You like friends like this. Yeah, exactly.

You're sitting there and you're like, oh, everybody's looking at me. What am I doing? Oh, I can't enjoy myself. It's so defeats the entire purpose. Okay, so what are the roots of a healthy relationship with food versus one that aren't? They're behavior-based, not mechanically-based. In other words, it's not necessarily the steps and what I need to eat specifically, but rather, how do I work with my behaviors so that they

lead to better relationship to food? So I'll give you one easy example. Okay. We all have those foods that tend to push us over the edge a little bit. Some people call them trigger foods. Mine is potato chips. If there's potato chips in my house, I'm probably gonna eat a lot of them. And oftentimes I'll eat all of them all at once. I just love them. They're hyper palatable. It's very hard for me to control myself.

I tend to lose myself into the enjoyment of eating the bag of potato chips. Now does that mean I don't ever eat potato chips? No, I just don't have them in the house. Do I tell myself I can't have potato chips? No, I just don't have them in the house. Do I tell myself I can't have potato chips? No, I also don't do that. This is what I tell myself. If I really want potato chips,

I'll drive the store and buy myself a single serving of potato chips. Now, what have I done there? All I've done is I've injected a barrier between me and the potato chips, something that gives me time to pause. Okay, so I don't say I can't have them. I say to myself, if I want them,

I'll drive to the store and buy myself a single serving, so like a little bag of potato chips. What is this lead to? Well, when I get that craving and I really want them, and I go, okay, I gotta drive. And by the way, the grocery store for me is literally half a mile away, so it's like a long drive. But now I'm gonna get in the car, I'm gonna drive over there, I'm gonna pick them out, grocery store for me is, it's literally half a mile away, so it's like a long drive. But now I'm gonna get in the car,

I'm gonna drive over there, I'm gonna pick them out, I'm gonna pay for, all it does is it gives me space. It gives me space and then I ask myself, do I really want them that bad? You can't just mindlessly indulge, right? Yes, yes, yes. Again, and I know that each person has sort of that food group that's, you know,

beckons them, it calls them, you know, and for me, it's cookies or whatever it is, you know, like that's something that I them, it calls them, you know, and for me it's cookies or whatever it is, you know, like that's something that I know if it is in the house and I'm in that sort of mood, I want to get it in quick and I don't really want people to see me doing it either. Absolutely. And that's another thing, it's sort of this hidden, you know, like habit thing that you have, but yeah, to create sort of some space with that so you can kind of breathe

and figure out, you out, is it really worth it? Is this really what I want right now? If it is, go get it. If it's not, let's just relax. Yes, and here's another one. And studies show this that people, when they're distracted, will consume 15 to 25% more calories.

So what does that mean to be distracted? Eating in front of the TV, eating, looking at my phone, going on social media, eating while working, or being on my computer. That alone leads to eating more. So here's a secret. Don't tell yourself, eat less, don't tell yourself you can't eat this. Just do this. When I eat, here's a rule. No phone, no TV, no distractions. I just sit here and I eat my meal by itself that will lead to you reducing your calories. Behavior based, that's a behavior based model. Versus the law.

I think that this was the real motivation behind when we wrote the Intuitive Guide was we recognize that this was something that, you know, we could say all these things real easily, but get people to actually practice this. There's some steps to get there. Yes. Many people are still in the very beginning phase of like understanding what a protein

carb, a fat is, their calorie intake, what maintenance level looks like. There is, I want to point out, there is a lot of importance to figuring that part out, but that's a phase, just like our training phase is, that's a phase of your relationship with food. You eventually want to move out of that into this intuitive way of eating. And I do think there's steps and there's things, there's hacks like you're mentioning right now to be better at it. But it is something that you eventually want to move into.

And yes, it's normal to start in the county calories and weighing and measuring food initially. But the ultimate goal, if you want to sustain this long term, is to move out of that into a more intuitive way. Yeah, one more takeaway. I'll just one more takeaway, just so people have something. If they don't have the intuitive guide, something they could take with themselves to help them out. Here's another one. If you are motivated to change your diet

because you're focused on how much you hate the way you look, in essence, you don't like your body, and that's your motivation. You will eventually fall off and you'll fall off in a big way because when it's motivated by that self-hate or it's motivated by that, I don't like my body, it's gross or whatever words or internal words that you use, now your nutrition is a punishment. I am eating this way because I'm not attractive. I'm eating this way because I hate the way I look. And nobody wants to punish themselves forever.

At some point, you'll rebel from yourself, and that's where that binging comes from. That's where people are like, man, I was Google my diet. And then I went and, you know, I got a pizza and I was just gonna have one slice and I ended up eating seven slices, and I got so stuffed, I got sick and you think yourself, well why would you eat so much?

One slice should have done it. Why you rebelled because the way you were eating before was a form of self hate. So this is a very easy one. Remind yourself that you're taking care of yourself when you're eating healthy. Not because you hate yourself and you hate your body, but rather my I deserve to be healthy.

My body deserves to be taken care of. It's a totally different mindset and it does lead to better behaviors. All right, I wanna touch again on core training because I think this is an important point and I still have to make it time and time again because people still get confused on how to train their core properly.

To develop nice looking core muscles, it's the same strategy that you use to develop a nice looking butt or nice looking hamstrings or a great back or great shoulders. You build it. You got to build the muscles of the core. What are the staples of building muscle? You want to use sufficient resistance. In other words, it has to be good tension. So if I'm doing 70 reps of fast-paced ab exercises or bicycle kicks or whatever, not enough resistance and tension to really develop the muscles in any effective way. I want to be in that, you know, 8 to 20 rep range

with enough resistance to where it feels like strength training. That's what's going to get the muscles of the abs, the obliques to develop. By the way, one more muscle you wanna focus on that shrinks the core is our vacuums, called vacuums. It strengthens the TVA muscles that pull in the core muscles. And you wanna also use tension with that, really drive it in. And there's a, I'm sure we can link a video to

where we demonstrated that, but that'll help shrink and tighten the core. But don't be afraid of training your abs and your obliques like you're trying to build them. That's what's gonna make them develop and look the best, the fastest. And you'll see them even at higher body fat percentages. Yeah, and when you really hone in on that technique

to hyperconnect to your abdominals and your core and midsection, it's a completely different experience than just kind of banging out a ton of reps and trying to fatigue that muscle group. You can really start to feel the difference when you start adding even gravitational forces, not even to load yet, which eventually you can work your way to actually loading some of these exercises so you can build and develop those muscles just like any other muscle group, but definitely being able to get in the proper form and technique will get you results even quicker than just banging out a bunch of reps. Well, I want to connect this back to core and posture, again, too, because like we talked earlier,

core and priming, right, or priming, excuse me, and posture, sorry, connect the core to that. So when you are set up with good posture, you're also get your core and those muscles to develop, better, where this is very common. Like we'd see a lower cross syndrome where somebody goes into doing core exercises or ab exercises exercises and they just

fill it in their hip flexors and they can't seem to fill it in their abs because they're not working their abs. So this is why the beginning of this conversation started in the priming and posture place because that's also important if you want to develop a strong core. Now I know you address that in no BS6 pack abs you get into like the hip flexor deactivator and making sure that you're firing your core properly. But that's probably one of the most common things that I would have with clients

that I struggle with developing the core is actually not being able to fire it properly. Yeah, people confuse bending the body in half with working the abs. You can do that at the hips, which is often what people do. And that's all hip flexors. The abs really bend you at the lumbar spine, right?

So imagine the abs attached at the ribcage, the bottom of the ribcage and the pelvis, and when they contract they bring the ribcage closer to the pelvis. What they don't do is bend your hips forward. That's hip flexors. Now when I said tension and resistance, for most people this means no weight, this just means slow, full range of motion, exercises, like a physiological crunch. Doing a physiological crunch properly for most people is enough resistance to build the abs. In fact, even for me, all I have to do

is lengthen the lever, I just stick my arms out over my head and keep them like that. That's enough resistance for me to do, maybe 20 reps max and really get my abs to fire. So develop and build those muscles and then you'll have that kind of core to do maybe 20 reps max and really get my abs to fire. So develop and build those muscles and then you'll have that kind of core that creates that illusion of that hip to waist ratio and really gives you those aesthetics and also of course protects the spine and contributes to good posture.

Look, if you like our information, you'll love MindPumpFree.com. We have tons of free guides that will help you develop your body, burn body fat. We even have guides for personal trainers. Again, it's mindpumpfree.com. You can also find the three of us on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin, me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam. See you at the beach. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump.

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