Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1915: How to Re-Ignite Your Metabolism

Episode Date: October 3, 2022

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin cover eight ways to kick-start your metabolism. One of the MOST effective things you can do for sustainable fat loss and health in the modern world is to SPEED UP your metabolism! (1:40) The complexity of the metabolism. (3:59)   Eight Ways to Re-Ignite Your Metabolism.   #1 - Train to build muscle. (11:00) #2 - Best exercises are big compound lifts. (14:46) #3 - Use strength as the metric. (19:05) #4 - Feed your body to fuel muscle and strength. (21:13) #5 - Slowly increase calories as the body adapts. (23:17) #6 - Prioritize protein. (32:40) #7 - Use cardio for health, not for calorie burn. (36:31) #8 - Prioritize good sleep. (40:29) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit ZBiotics for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! Limited Time Promotion: Metabolism Boost Bundle MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Powerlift, and Reverse Dieting 101. We are offering all three for the low price of $99.99! Mind Pump #1835: Why Resistance Training Is The Best Form Of Exercise For Fat Loss And Overall Health How Do I Know if my Metabolism is Slow? - Mind Pump Blog How To Boost Your Metabolism The Right Way! (FAT LOSS!) | Mind Pump TV Mind Pump #1830: Five Steps To Determine Your Ideal Caloric Intake The Myth of Optimal Protein Intake – Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump #1845: How To Do Cardio & Not Lose Muscle Mind Pump #1345: 6 Ways To Optimize Sleep For Faster Muscle Gain And Fat Loss Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources People Mentioned Melissa Wolf (@meliwolf) Instagram

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind, hop, mind, hop with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most influential fitness health and entertainment podcast in the world. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode we talk about boosting your metabolism,

the specific steps you could do to teach your body to burn more calories on its own. Now, right now what we did is we put together a bundle of programs and guides, specifically for boosting metabolism. It includes two workout programs, maps and a ball, and maps power lift, which are excellent for boosting metabolism.

And then we put reverse dieting 101 in there. This is a guide teaching you how to reverse diet. In other words, slowly increase your calories to fuel the metabolism boosting effects of your workouts. All three together right now, $99.99. This is savings of over $220. You can find this bundle at maps October.com. Now, this episode is also brought to you

by one of our sponsors, Zbiotics. So Zbiotics is the world's first genetically modified probiotic drink designed to help break down some of the negative byproducts of alcohol consumption. So you drink Zbiotics, then you drink your normal drinks with your friends, and you feel way better. Go check this company out. There's no one out there like it. It's not herbs, not vitamins.

It's a patented probiot a probiotic, okay? It's patented, it's genetic modified. You won't find it anywhere else. Go to zbiotics.com, the ZB-I-O-T-I-C-S.com, forward slash mine pump, then use the code, mine pump 2.2 for 10% off your order. All right, here comes the show. One of the most effective things you could do

for sustainable fat loss and health in the modern world is to speed up your metabolism and yes you can affect your metabolism through lifestyle, exercise, nutrition and habits. So do that. It's one of the most effective strategies. One of my favorite things about doing this episode is that I think a lot of things that we're going to cover seem a little counterintuitive. And it took me a while to get to this point to where I think that this is like the most concise bits of information that I would provide for a client

who comes in with a quote unquote slow metabolism or struggled with weight loss for a really long time. And then we begin to list out all the things that like we're going to focus on in the next six months to a year. And it just looks so different than what it used to look like when I was an early trainer. And so I think this is a really not only valuable episode, but also one that I think I've had to say over and over and over to really drill at home and for people to actually take the advice.

So, yeah, I think strategy. I think most people's ideas of you know, burning calories and raising your metabolism are all through like manual means and don't really realize there's like a way to build your metabolism towards an automatic thing where you end up getting you know, more calories just burning through building, you know, and building muscle. Well, I think that a lot of people don't realize exactly what's going on when you reduce calories and you increase cardiovascular activity. I think the general consensus is that

that's healthy and good for you. Most people eat too much food, most people don't get enough exercise. And there's truth to that. Hey, cutting back food and doing cardio is good. And anybody that says otherwise just sounds ridiculous. And so I think that's why this information seems a little counterintuitive and why I feel like I have to repeat it all the time,

but it is the things that will cover are so true and so important to the person who is struggling with fat loss or just overall weight loss and they've gone through the yo-yo dieting in the past and they can't seem to figure it out, but yet they're not picking up on this very important point we're trying to make right now. Well, we have to start with this. First off, metabolism, it's a series of processes that control how your body creates and uses energy. It's very complex, actually very complex system.

It's one of the most complex things that we've identified. And one that we don't fully understand, you know, you talk about the brain, the metabolism, the universe, or like the three most complicated things that we've studied. How it adapts, how it works, how it gets affected.

So it is quite complex, but for the sake of this particular episode, we're referring to just how many calories your body burns, okay? So we don't need to go into the details specifically on what's going on. We're talking about how many calories your body burns on a regular basis. Now it is true that generally eating less and moving more is healthy for you, but we got to break that down a little bit, okay? Eating less than what, right? Eating less, what does that mean?

It means eating less or eating around the amount that you're burning. Eating more than you're burning is not healthy in the long term, definitely not. This is what causes obesity. This is what causes lots of problems. So you have this equation here where you have how many calories you can burn,

how many calories can you eat? If you raise the calories burned, that means you can raise the amount of calories that you eat, and you're gonna still have health benefits. In other words, if a person's body burns 4,000 calories a day, and they 3,500 calories, they're gonna have very different effects than somebody whose body burns 2,000 calories who also eats 3,500 calories, right? Very different health effects. And so when we look at this, we have to look at this in the context of what's going on right now. I wanna add to that point too,

because that example you just gave right away, someone was saying, oh, someone who's got all this muscle, you could actually have two people that weigh the same on the scale and have that sort of thing. That's the part that's so fascinating, is that you automatically assume, like I think the visual that someone gets, oh someone burns 3500 calories,

they see this like athletic muscular body, and then oh somebody's only burning, say 1500 calories, oh they must be this really out of shape, deconditioned person. It's like you could actually have two people, let's say they stood on the scale and actually weighed exactly the same, say 205 pounds, and a 205 pound person,

that person, there's potential for a 205 pound person to be burning 4,000 calories, their metabolism, burning 4,000 calories a day, and that same 205 person has potential of only being able to burn like 1,500 or 12,000. Yeah, so this is important to understand because when we talk about the process of boosting metabolism, we're always going to talk about building muscle. And then you'll get the people that'll come on and say, well, studies show that a pound of muscle only burns X amount more calories, it's not a huge impact.

Okay, now that's true. However, what Adam's talking about is true, and we need to account for that, which is, your current metabolism with your current lean body mass. Okay, so gain muscle, lose muscle, none of that. It's the same. You have a potential, and your body can adapt within a range Meaning it could become more or less efficient now building muscle does speed up the metabolism just because it's more active tissue

Requiring more calories to maintain so that's the most important part here However, there's also that the the efficiency factor that we need to consider and there's other factors that will make your body or factor that we need to consider. And there's other factors that will make your body or behaviors that should say that will make your body more or less efficient. What we're looking for in modern societies is a less efficient metabolism, one that just burns lots of energy.

Now this is different than what we might have wanted 10,000 years ago when food was scarce. When food was scarce, you don't want to fast metabolism. You just can't find food. You want to metabolism. You want to metabolism. That's thrifty, right? Well, today, if you live in America, you want to fast metabolism. You just can't find food. You want a metabolism. You want a metabolism. That's thrifty, right? Well, today, if you live in America, you want a fast metabolism. It's a buffer. It's a buffer against easily accessible, hyper-palatable food. It's a buffer against inactivity. It's a buffer against

all these different things. So somebody today with a fast metabolism is much more likely to be healthy than someone with a slow metabolism versus 10,000 years ago when it was the reverse. And there are things you could do to impact your body's natural ability. And that's what we're talking about here. Your body's natural ability to burn calories. In other words, how many calories your body burns on its own? Not just you having to move. Well, that's why we don't call it like a broken metabolism, right?

Yes, it's really doing what it's supposed to be doing. It's just a way that we're trying to kind of hack into that to benefit us in this environment versus what you're describing before where food was scarce. And we had to keep all the reserves of energy that we possibly could. I also want to reiterate too that we don't know everything

about it yet. I mean, there's something that we've all talked about, both on air and off air, that we've seen firsthand an experience, you know, through the three of us, hundreds of clients, maybe thousands of clients that we've combined, we've trained, right? And how many times have you got that client who, you know, felt like they were gaining weight

on 12 to 1300 calories? And you put just five to eight pounds of muscle on her, and now she's eating 2,300 calories. And you put just five to eight pounds of muscle on her, and now she's eating 2,500 calories. Like this dramatic swing that doesn't make complete sense. At least we don't have the science yet to support it, because what the science says is like, it shouldn't be that many more calories. But I know of her effect.

I've seen it change hundreds of lives by doing that. And it doesn't quite add up to what the science says on far as what the metabolism should do. We see it all the time, but even look, it also consider this, even small boosts in your metabolism make a big difference, right? If you could right now speed up your metabolism by 150 calories a day, it doesn't sound like much, 150 calories, like what is that? But you add that up over the course of a month, two months, a year, two, three years. You're looking at 10, 15, 20, 30 pounds of potential body fat over the course of that period

of time. So, even small boost your metabolism can have profound effects. I mean, 150 calories, that's like a 40, 40 minute walk, right? So it'd be like walking 40 minutes extra every single day, but you boost your metabolism. Now, I'm using a small number. Now, what I've done with people is minimum, I could get people's metabolism go up by at least a few hundred, and oftentimes as much as 800,

I've seen people's metabolism boost by a thousand. It could be pretty profound, and it just makes fat loss and health and fitness much more sustainable or flexibility. Yeah, like, you know, how great would it be if you could eat more and be leaner, right? That allows you the ability to live in the world and to eat and enjoy yourself sometimes.

And that have to be so strict. Now, you can be super strict if you want and be crazy about counting calories. But the approach that I've seen that works is, let's give somebody a larger buffer. Let's get their metabolism to burn more calories, because I know that they're gonna have the occasional meal that's high in calories,

they're gonna have that dinner on the weekend or they're gonna go on vacation. And I don't wanna see them rebound. I wanna see them be able to burn it off just on their own. And there is a predictable way to do this, and that's what we're gonna go over right now. It's literally if you follow these steps and you're patient with it,

you will get a metabolism that burns more calories. Now the exact amount of more calories you'll burn, that's up to a lot of different factors, including genetics, body size, and so on. But you will see a boost in your body's metabolic rate if you do the following. So let's start with the first one, which is your exercise regime.

So when you look at your whole health regime, and you're like, okay, I want to lose weight, I want to be healthy, I want to be fit, and we're talking about boosting metabolism. The exercise portion should be primarily focused on building muscle. That should be the foundation of your routine, because nothing will boost your metabolism more on its own than having more active muscle.

Muscle's expensive, it costs a lot of energy. Now the brain burns more calories and muscle in a pound for pound basis, but you can't build your brain necessarily, right? But you can build muscle. So building muscle is one of the most effective strategies to boost your metabolism. So do you look at your workout?

Look at what you're doing and say, is this workout muscle building or is it endurance building or is it flexibility building or is it? So the cornerstone, the focus should be on muscle building if you want to fasten down with them. So not circuit training. Correct. Not signing up for a race, not some athletic class. Not running, not cycling, not orange theory. Yeah.

Not any of that stuff. It's literally strength training. It's lifting weights, right? The stuff that builds muscle and strength. So it's going to look a lot differently than what you're marketed to the most for burning calories. By the way, this would be the recommendation, regardless of what you knew about this person's history, almost always, right? So, no matter what. But what's interesting about this is the people that tend to fall in this trap of having struggling with the yo-yo dieting and losing the weight and being stuck here all

the time, happen to be the people that tend to not train this way too. So you kind of get a double benefit. You get the benefit of, this is what they should be doing anyways to help speed the metabolism. You also get the novelty benefit of, oh, I'm the type of person that loves the circuit class, or I love to train like an athlete, or I love to sign up for a marathon when I try and get it in shape.

And so, you not only get a benefit of, like, this is one of the ideal ways for you to train to build a faster metabolism, but you also get the benefits of it because it's so novel for that person. Yeah. So, think of it this way. Now, someone may be listening to, like, God, circuit training burns so many calories, though. Running burns so many calories.

It's true. If you run for an hour, you're going to burn a lot more calories than if you lift weights to build muscle, okay? That's a fact. However, lifting weights to build muscle is like taking money and investing it and then allowing that money to make money for you. So think of it this way. You could take a job where you make a lot per hour

or you could take a job where you make a little less per hour. However, you also get stock options and you know for a fact that this company is growing and going to go public, that's the difference. The difference is we're taking our training and we're gearing it towards investment. Can I get my metabolism to boost more so it burns more in its own versus,

let me try and burn this all my own. By the way, if you're not trying to train to build muscle and you're just burning a lot of calories, your body is a phenomenal way of adapting to that because your body is always trying to conserve energy. So if I just burn a lot of calories without a signal to build muscle, I will burn a lot of calories initially, but over time my body is going to figure out ways to slow its own metabolism down to make me more efficient. And one of the main ways it does this is to actually get ways to slow its own metabolism down to make me more efficient.

And one of the main ways it does this is to actually get you to lose muscle. This is why studies will show diet, so people cut their calories plus lots of cardio, which is not strength training, right? It's not muscle building, but it is a lot of calorie burning. They'll see weight loss, but a chunk of that weight loss is muscle.

How did that happen? Your body didn't burn the muscle off. Your body said, hey, we're burning a lot of calories. We don't need a lot of strength. So let's become better at this activity by burning less calories. And so it actually starts to adapt. Efficiency. Yes, when you train for muscle, your body is saying, well, we're not burning a lot of calories. We're not even worried about that. In fact, well, we need is more strength. We need more muscle. Keep packing it on. And when you combine it with the rest, we're going to talk about, that's how you get the fascinotalvism.

Let's talk about the exercises, right? So, building muscle training for muscle building is traditional strength training for the most part, like bodybuilders or power lifters or strength athletes. That's how you want to work out. But what about the exercises? What exercises are going to give you the most bang for your buck, especially if you're somebody that's only going to work out two or three days a week. Well, the evidence is clear, it's the big compound lifts.

It's the big gross motor movements, the barbell exercises, a barbell squat, a barbell bench press, a deadlift, a row, overhead press, these exercises, just for the time spent doing them, gives you the most in terms of metabolites and boosting, the most in terms of muscle building. It would require a lot of exercises combined

equal the muscle building effect of just one of those exercises. And when it comes in terms of time and recovery ability and all that stuff, it just makes sense to do the one, the exercises that give you the most bang for your body. Yeah, because there are multi-joint compound lifts, it's gonna require so much more output

in your bodies, you can have the work that much harder to produce, you know, strengths for these types of lifts. And so the demand of those alone, it's gonna move you so much further than a lot of these other exercises out there, you know, that may be promoted a lot as like hypertrophy or like building muscle. Really, the most demanding, the largest signal you can produce through those,

you know, barbell lifts where it's like heavy emphasis on all these muscle groups having to work together. That's really what it's about. Well, when we also said that, you know, the manual burn is less important, but what's nice about building a routine that's around these compound lives is you actually burn a ton of calories. So even though it's less of a priority to burn a bunch of calories in your workout, now you're talking about a weight training routine that actually rivals running in some of these circuit training classes.

You put somebody in a orange theory circuit class or somebody who just is running a circuit or athletic training with plow, matron and stuff, and you give me somebody and I do a bunch of squats, deadlifts, overhead pressing, bench press for an hour with like tied on my rest periods, like being sticking to the actual true rest periods and going all the way through.

You'd be surprised how close the calorie burn is. It won't be that crazy significant of a difference. Well, the way I like to look at it like this, just really simplify it. I could do a curl for my biceps, and I'll build my biceps, right? And the biceps are a muscle on the top of my arm, and it's kind of a small muscle,

or I could do a pull-up. A pull-up is also working the biceps, but it's also working all my back muscles, right? My lats, my rhomboids, there's a little bit of trapezius activity. So I'm working more muscles in that same period of time. You do three sets of curls, I do three sets of pull-ups. We both worked our biceps, but I also worked all this other stuff. And so it's just an efficient, effective way to train to send

the loudest muscle-building signal. The other person doing just the curls would have to add other exercises to hit all those other muscles, which is fine if you want to spend- There's a lot more volume. to send the loudest muscle building signal. The other person doing just the curls would have to add other exercises to hit all those other muscles, which is fine if you want to spend. There's a lot more volume. It does, it requires a lot more volume, and then you run into, you know,

this is more complex getting into the weeds, but you run into more adaptation issues. Is it too much volume? How much training am I doing? You know, strength training really is about sending the signal and then leaving it alone. It's like giving the body a reason to build muscle, and then that's it because the,

what you get out of it is not while you do it. Unlike calorie burning type workouts, like cardio, the value is in the cardio itself unless you're trying to build endurance, which here we're talking about boosting metabolism. When it comes to metabolism boosting, it doesn't happen in the workout with strain training. It happens after through the adaptation.

And so these big compound lifts just do the most. I mean, how many exercises would it take, you know, single joint exercises would take to really have the same effect as a barbell squat? I've had to put together like five, five or six, yeah. Six different exercises. And at least half hamstring, quad, low back, upper back,

core, yeah, core, yeah, no way. Right. So you want to, basically what you want to do is you want to, your routine should be centered around these big compound lifts, getting strong at them. And then if you want to add other extra stuff, you could definitely do that. But again, the foundation should be building muscle and the foundation within that foundation should be these compound lifts. Well, and the next point is to focus

on getting strong in those lifts. That's the best metric for this. I am just get strong, get good at them. That's all I'm thinking about. I'm training this person, we're trying to, and that's what's crazy about this when you think about it, is you also got a picture of this client. His client is really overweight,

they've struggled with weight loss their whole life. They come to you and they're like, Adam, I just want to lose as much weight as I possibly can. Can you please help me out, I've struggled with my whole life? And I'm like, all right, we're going to get strong. That's a hard conversation. It's a tough conversation to have with someone

that's in that place. That's not how they're thinking. They're thinking, we got to burn this off, we got to melt this off, I got to sacrifice, they got a hole, they got to cut back calories. And you're kind of like, no, you know what? I'm going to keep you fed and we're going to, we're going to get strong right now.

Just trust me, that's what we want to do. So I mean, I just want to make that point that I understand if this resonates with you that you've struggled with weight loss in the past, you've Vio Eude back and forth and you can't seem to get to that goal weight or whatever you have. This is the major mental hurdle piece right here, this part where it does, you don't seem to get to that goal weight or whatever you have. This is the major mental hurdle piece right here, this part where it does,

you don't see what a strength has to do with fat loss. Right. You don't realize that. But what strength, the reason why it's such an incredible metric is if you get stronger, if you're getting stronger, it relatively consistently over time, you can pretty much guarantee that your metabolism is probably boosting at the same time. Yeah. It's one of those physical pursuits that as it improves, you can pretty much guarantee that your metabolism is probably boosting at the same time.

It's one of those physical pursuits that as it improves, it probably means the metabolism boosting as well. This is not true of other physical pursuits. If you increase your flexibility or your stamina over time, that does not mean your metabolism is getting faster or hotter, right? But strength typically means that.

So the best metric when it comes to boosting metabolism to measure, if you just use a single metric of strength, am I getting stronger? Yes, I'm going to write it. The best metric for realizing that you have everything in the right direction in terms of hormones being balanced, in terms of recovery, and in terms of you being able to have and see real progression because everything else doesn't really work. You know, if you have any of those components out of order, out of balance, you're not gonna see a lot of strength gains as a result.

Well, it also goes hand in hand with the next point, which is making sure that you feed the body what it needs in order to build this muscle. Yes. Because if I ever see anybody fall short here, they figured out they're like, okay, okay, I get it. We need to build them, it's how we need to build this muscle. Yes. Because if I ever see anybody fall short here, they figured out they're like, okay, okay, I get it. We need to build them. It's how we need to build some muscle.

So we need to lift heavy. I'm with you. But then they just struggle with nutrition piece. There's still like, I was eating jack in the box. Also, I'm cutting all that out and now they're eating chicken salads and they're like eating twice a day. So they cut their calories low. So yes, they reduced their calories.

And then they're not seeing the strength gains like we want to see inside the gym and then I come back and I find out later on. It's like, oh, well, that's because you took our calories from 4,000 calories to 1,200 calories because you're afraid to eat when I need you to eat. You're not going to build tissue out of nowhere. You need building materials aren't there? No, you have to fuel the butt. So there's two things that are happening. One is a strength training, ascending a signal to build muscle and build strength. Two, the way that you eat also sends a signal. And that signal can say, we can build this muscle, we can afford to build this muscle, we

can afford to have a fascia metabolism because we have the food. Or it can say, you know, I know you're trying to get stronger, but we don't got enough calories, we don't got enough food. So we're not going to do that. We're not going to build muscle, we're not gonna build strength, we're gonna keep things as efficient as possible because the calories are too low. So you have to do both.

You have to not only build strength and build muscle, but you also have to feed yourself at least enough to allow that to happen. Now this doesn't necessarily mean you go crazy with your food intake, but you got to fuel those things, right? So if you send the signal to build muscle, imagine a bunch of workers, right? You got a bunch of workers and you're like, here's the instructions, build the house. And they're like, all right, where's the bricks?

Oh, there's no bricks. You can't build a house. So you got to provide the materials as well by feeding your body. Because if you cut your calories too low while strength training, it's not going to work. It's just not going to work. They're conflicting signals and the boost in the metabolism that you're expecting, even though your strength training is just simply not going to happen. So feed your body to fuel, muscle, and strength. And I think we can get a little deeper into that, right? Yeah. So the next thing is

to slowly increase calories as the body adapts. So we're feeding the body. So you may be wondering, well, what does that look like? How many calories? What am I gonna do here? One of the best things to do is to first off figure out how many calories you're eating just to maintain your body weight. Easy way to do this is to track. So take your normal food and take over the next couple weeks,

write it down or enter into an app, they make wonderful, super convenient apps now. And once you figure out how many calories you're generally eating and to maintain your body weight, that's your starting point. Then you start the strength training, and then what you do is you slowly, very slowly, bump those calories up just a little bit.

And at first I like to not bump the calories. I like to wait for the strengthings that happen a little bit, and then I bump the calories. But what I don't do is cut the calories with the strength training. I keep them the same at first, and then I bump the cows. But what I don't do is cut the calories with the strength training. I keep them the same at first, and then I start to bump them. Yeah, I normally don't have to do much of adjusting calorie-wise as first.

It's really just kind of switching the macros when I do, when I assess a diet first. So let's take the example. I don't know I use an extreme analogy of somebody who's eating fast food all day, but typically there's some unhealthy or poor choices in our nutrition when we're way overweight, right?

So, I literally look at their average caloric intake for a week, and then I just make sure that we're hitting protein targets and we're making better food choices, but we're keeping the calories about the same. I don't really want to cut. I don't really need to add anything quite yet. I'm just going to say, because what I find almost always is they're lacking a macro nutrient. We're not getting enough healthy fats, we're not getting enough protein, we're eating too much sugar, we're not getting enough fiber, yeah, we never eat vegetables. So there's always a handful of things that I know that we could be adding to

the diet or making better. And so I just simply go like, okay, let's keep your calories about the same. But then, you know, instead of this meal and this meal that you normally would do here, like I prefer you eat this, this, and so on. So let's add this in here and let's add that in there. And then just let, and then watch how the body responds. And many times you will see the client get a little stronger, lean out a little bit, and you're not even having to adjust calories

in any direction. What that usually looks like is, I'm stronger in the gym, so I can, I'm lifting, you know, 10 or 15 or 20 pounds more on some of those big lifts that we talked about. My weight hasn't moved on the scale, but I do notice that my clothes are starting to fit differently. Now, when I would have clients,

I could do body fat tests so I could tell them exactly what was happening. And usually what I would see during this initial period of time was a transfer or a change in body composition, I should say, right? Body fat went down, muscle went up. And it usually is about the same. In other words, they gained two pounds of muscle,

lost two pounds of body fat, something along those lines. So the scale hasn't changed, although we have more muscle as body fat, meaning they have a faster metabolism, they're stronger, and they're smaller. This is another important point to make here, is that muscle is dense in comparison to fat. It takes up something a little bit more than three-fourths of the space that body

fat will take up. So if you lost 15 pounds of body fat and replaced it with 15 pounds of muscle, you would weigh the same, but you would lose almost a quarter of the size on your body. You would be smaller, even the scale said exactly the same. You'd be smaller. And so what you should expect, if you're not doing body fat tests and stuff, is like, okay, I'm stronger. My body feels tighter, and my clothes fit a little differently.

And men usually look like a waist is a little looser. And women same thing. You also may notice as a woman that around the butt might feel a little tighter. Don't freak out. It's because your butt is probably building. And I want to say that because sometimes people freak out. I thought you said I was going to get smaller. Well, the butt's a muscle. It tends to lift and build a little bit. And then you may get comments. This is my favorite part. When clients would do this and they wouldn't change on

the scale so they're weight would stay the same for the first couple months. They come to me like, you know, it's weird style. People keep asking me how much weight I've lost. You guys ever have clients. Not only that, but I'm so glad you said this because this isn't an area that is really challenging also to overcome. You tell a client to increase calories, you tell them to focus on building strength, and not only maybe there's a scale

and not moving the direction they want, but then they also start filling out their clothes and their clothes are tighter. But I promise it'll look better on you. And so that's the part that's really tough because we associate where we're at, if we look good on you. And so that's a part that's really tough because we associate like where we're at, like if we look good or we don't look good, sometimes how our clothes is fitting.

And it's like you get a girl who all sudden, her thighs and her butt and her jeans is filling out and it's tighter and she was asking you to lose weight and she might start freaking out. It's her colombo. Yeah, but now her butt's sitting up two more inches and she has defined hamstrings when she didn't have before coming in you. it's like so you have to understand there is this kind of sculpting process that happens

Yes, and it's a slow gradual process and just because the pants are fitting tighter Doesn't necessarily mean you're going the wrong direction in fact that may mean you're doing incredible right now Especially if you can be objective and go you know what what, actually, if I compared this picture of me today versus the picture just two weeks ago, I know the scale is saying the same, or even I'm up two pounds, but I think I do look a little bit better here than I did two weeks ago. And you should be able to see that,

especially in a two weeks time. Oh, yeah, I mean, I still love it. Clients would come to me and say that they're like, oh, it's weird. People are asking me how much weight I've lost, and I'm only lost a pound on the scale. And it's really weird before I lose 10 pounds and nobody noticed like when you look different,

your body is holding less body fat, it's got more muscle, muscle looks very good. I mean, a 150 pound female at 20% body fat versus a 150 pound female at 32% body fat, same height and everything. If you saw them stand next to each other would look dramatically different. Dramatically different. You could do this with a 200 pound male as well.

They would look dramatically different. So unless you're, it weight is important to some extent, but nobody walks around with a scale. Nobody really cares. It's really about how you feel, of course, how you look, your health, and body fat just takes up a lot of space. And, you know, unless it's, once it gets a past certain points, doesn't look good. Muscle looks really good, it's tight and sculpted. And so in these initial stages of boosting metabolism, I want everybody, I want to be very clear,

in the initial stages, you should expect to not lose any weight. You should expect to look and feel different, but you should not expect to lose any weight. You should expect to be stronger and start to see the initial effects of the metabolism boosting. Now, what would you say the difference would be between that like a reverse diet,

where somebody's trying to come out of like a quote unquote broken metabolism or they went on this extreme diet, it's pretty much the same protocol to get back, right? It's the same protocol and we would in fact, although we would keep the calories roughly the same to start with, we would reverse them at some point, meaning slowly increase, that's what I mentioned early, you slowly increase the calories to fuel the metabolism. So someone may be wondering, how do I know when to stop?

Like when do I stop this reverse diet period? When do I, when do I start to really focus on the fat loss? Well, it's different from person to person, but typically I tell someone, when you get to the point where you feel like you're eating a lot of food and you feel really good and you feel like you could cut your food and be okay. At that point, then we cut the calories, you've got the muscle, you've got the metabolism,

and the fat loss happens. And I'll say this, I've seen this happen, I mean, a lot of times, many times. I would say at least half the times I've trained people where they'll lose 20, 30 pounds, and at the end of the process eat as much or more at the end of that weight loss process than they did going into it. You can't say that about traditional just cutting calories and trying to.

Oh, definitely. I did this even with somebody who's healthy and in shape. So this doesn't apply just to a broken metabolism or just someone trying to lose weight. I mean, I remember when I was training Melissa for her bikini competition. Right. I mean, I remember when I was training Melissa for her bikini competition. And when I first got her, her calories were around 1800 or 1900 to keep herself relatively. She was great. She was in good shape. She wasn't bikini ready, but she was in good shape. And I said, I first want to ramp your metabolism up before we get into prep. So we trained for the three to four months before. And the goal was to just get her

colarcan take as high as we possibly could, maintaining her, you know, weight and body about where it's at so that when we decided to go into a cut, we have all this room. And what ended up happening was we ramped her all the way up to I think 27 or 200 calories. That's almost a thousand. So when she was in peak week, she was eating at what she was when my first got her. So think about that. And that's extreme diet. Yeah, that's yeah, that was the on stage extreme. The lowest of low weeks and hardest for most people is that final week going to stage. And that's what she was eating on a normal week when I got a whole of room we first started. So this idea and concept isn't only for someone who has a broken metabolism

or someone who has yo-yo dieted back and forth or someone who just wants to lose 50 to 100 pounds. I mean, you could take this this really for me, it's that do you want more metabolic flexibility? Do you want the ability to have a burger and fries every once in a while and not feel like it sticks right to you? To feel like you can enjoy a night with a glass of wine and eating out and not feel like all that gets stuck to you. And so that's why to your point, Sal, there is such a huge variant.

And so that's exactly how I ask clients to go, well, where would you like to be? You know, it's not for me to decide just because you are so tall and you weigh so much that, oh, you should have a metabolism that burns X amount of calories. It's like, listen, if you feel very satisfied and you like the amount of calories you eat and it gives you some freedom to, you know,

eat out every once in a while and maintain your, then you're fine. But if you go, man Adam, I feel like I can't get away with anything. And I eat so tight and clean. And if I eat one bad thing, well, that's the case, then this is for you. Even if you are considered a quote-unquote fit person.

Yes. Now, the next point in this has to do with nutrition also is to prioritize protein. So protein Number one a high protein diet when I say high protein It's about point six to a gram of protein per pound of body weight in normal weight individuals So take your body weight and a little more than half your body weight up to your body weight in grams of protein is what you're aiming for the higher amount Tends to work better. So I said 0.6 to one, closer to one tends to work better in my experience. But it builds more muscle, which boosts the metabolism.

It also on its own has more of what's called a thermogenic effect, meaning a gram of protein actually burns more calories than a gram of carbs or a gram of fat. So protein also has this effect where it burns more calories on it. It's nominal, it's not a huge effect, but over time it makes a difference. And then here's the third reason why I like prioritizing protein.

It's very satiating. It's very, very satiating. So when you're eating a high protein diet, especially at the end when you've lost the weight and everything, high protein tends to make you feel more satisfied, more balanced energy. You maintain more of the muscle. So when you're doing this kind of reverse diet process

through strength and combined with strength training, prioritize protein. What does that look like? Every meal, make sure you eat the protein first, figure out how much protein you need for the day, divide it by your meals, eat that first, they need everything else, and the rest typically takes care of the meal.

I find this even more important than the whole calorie thing, even though I understand that if we're in a deficit, we're going to lose it, if we're in a surplus, we're going to gain, and that's that's the something we're not breaking those laws, right, of physics. But I definitely think that for the average person, just learning how to focus on hitting what your protein intake, your daily protein intake, should be in order to build muscle. That by itself and just focusing on it, it kind of takes care of a lot of things. It does. If it's whole foods, you'll typically get the calories.

It's hard to do. It really is. For most people, it is hard to consistently get enough protein and day in and day out for the optimal amount. So ideal amount of protein that you are to build muscle consistently do that. And if you do that, I think I feel like the other things kind of take care of them. So it's interesting because it's so satiating. It's it's easier to like eat less, but but if you're not seeking proteins, it because it's so satisfying, it's easy to not eat it.

If you're eating everything else with it, that makes sense. Right. Yeah. No, no. But if you eat the protein first, you're going to build more muscle, you're going to get more of what you need, and you're going to feel better from a satiety standpoint, especially at the end when you finally do cut your calories after this process of boosting your metabolism. We say this a lot, and I want to add to this, because I think this is important is that like, to me, it's not only do you eat protein first, but it has to be protein in there. In other words, like I brought up the other day when we were talking about some more conversation.

And so let's say, oh, they guys say eat protein first, they have their breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and they always make sure to eat their protein in that order. But then they have these snacks in between. Oh, grapes here, and some almonds there. And it's like, what ends up happening is they tend to mostly snack on carbs or fat, like an almond or with that.

And you end up hitting your calorie budget for the day and still don't hit your protein intake because your three small meals only had 30 grams of peace, which is 90 total grams of protein. And your body needs, let's say, let's, for arguments, like 180. And then you feel the rest of your calories up with the grapes, the almonds and some, what we would call healthy snacks, but because you weren't protein focused, you ended up still hitting your calorie intake

and not getting enough protein. So it's like, everything needs to be protein focused. If you're gonna have a snack, then I'm thinking, okay, I need to get my majority of protein first, and then I can have those almonds with it, or I can have those grapes with it, not them by themselves, or else what ends up happening is you kind of grades all day and you end up hitting

your caloric intake, you can't do any more and then you're short on protein. That's super common. Yep, all right, so this next one, this is probably the more controversial part of this, which is to use cardio for health during this period, but not for the calorie burn. Okay, so what do I mean by that?

Well, movement's good for you. And cardiovascular activity does have health benefits. And studies will show that the best health benefits you'll get out of exercise is a combination of strength training and cardiovascular training. Now, if you had to pick one over the other, strength training beats out cardio, we've done many episodes on this. But ideally, you want to do a little bit of both. And in this particular scenario with boosting metabolism, the focus should be strength training.

And cardio should be kind of like this added part. And really just for health. And if ideally, if we're doing it for health, it's walking. Really, it's about going for walks during the day. Now, if you want more stamina, you could push the stamina a little bit. But the problem with using cardio for the calorie burn is when I push cardio to burn calories,

I'm telling my body to become more efficient with calories. I'm telling my body, I don't want a lot of muscle because I don't want a lot of, burn a lot of calories, I want endurance, I don't need so much strength. And so what happens is you'll get less of that muscle building. So if you're training to build muscle and you're also training hard to burn lots of calories with cardio, you'll get less muscle as a result of that and less of a metabolism. It's always walking for me. Unlast, the only exception to the rule for me is if that's a client who has some sort of a routine

that they've always done, I'll give you an example, my brother-in-law is a diehard downhill mountain biker. It's very intense, burns a ton of calories, very very endurance stamina-based, and he rides twice on the weekends. For so two days of these like three hour rides, but he does that year round. Non-stop doesn't matter if he's fat, skinny, on his workout program, not on his workout program. So it's a passion for him.

Yeah, so I'm gonna build that. So insert paddle boarding, insert, running for an hour on the weekends, insert your favorite class, you always do, like if it is something you love to do, regardless of your body composition, and it's a passion for you, or you know, you play pick up basketball, you know, three times a week or like that, then I'm not going to, I'm not going to tell them they can't do that because that's something that they love to do, and then it's got other benefits just for each side's calorie and even the health benefits

of what it does for your heart. So those people, everybody else, if we're starting on the 13, I do not want any of that type. All I want is walking. You feel like you normally wouldn't get out and you feel good on your diet and you're happy. You're doing this new weight routine and you don't want to just sit around watch TV.

Okay, go for a walk. Go for a hike, go move around, go to a park, go to a zoo, go walk around for a while. I'm all for that. Don't go get on a treadmill and kick ass for an hour because that is not going to help us in our pursuit, even though you may think that. Because that whole math thing's a trap when you especially start associating those calories

with like a meal that you just had. And you start looking at how many calories you can then transfer over on the treadmill to sort of absolve you of those calories. That's just a warrior never going to win. Yeah, think of it this way. I'm going to oversimplify. So I know it's not this simple, so everybody relax. But let's say you're looking at you're doing this and you're like, wow, my body now

is burning 2300 calories a day. If I just got on that treadmill and ran as hard as I could for an hour, I could make it burning 2300 calories a day. If I just got on that treadmill and ran as hard as I could for an hour, I could make it like 2600 calories a day. So that's what I'm gonna do. And initially that's what'll happen. You'll burn an extra whatever, 300 calories or so. But then what happens, your body starts to adapt

towards stamina and endurance. And it starts to slow some metabolism down. Eventually, you're back down to burning 2300 calories or less, with doing the extra running on the treadmill. So now you're back down to burning 2300 calories or less, with doing the extra running on the treadmill. So now you're doing more work to get the same or worse results. So if you want to boost your metabolism, don't do cardio for the calorie burn. Do it for health, which is totally fine, but don't worry about the calorie burn. Our goal is to boost your metabolism. Our goal is not to get you to burn more calories manually and do a lot

more work. Remember, we're looking at sustainability, we're looking at fat loss forever, not just in the short term. All right, the last one, and this was very important because this could definitely throw a wrench in the whole machine, which is to prioritize good sleep. So poor sleep is a tremendous stress on the body. And just because of the way we evolved,

when we were under chronic stress, it was probably due to the fact that we couldn't find calories. So the two types of stress that we'll typically encounter is acute. Something happened right now. Car almost hit me. It's gone.

Oh, let me calm down now. I'm safe. The other one is this kind of chronic stress. You know, stuff that kind of sticks with you and stays with you. Poor sleep wears on your body and it's chronic. It causes stress to happen throughout the day. Changes hormone profiles.

It's just this chronic level of stress. And what your body tends to do under chronic stress is it tends to try to protect itself. And the way it protects itself is it says, hey, let's burn less calories. Gotta keep it safe. We don't know what could happen. Food might not be here.

Hey, let's store more body fat. Hey, let's lower these hormones that tend to speed up the metabolism, like testosterone and growth hormone. Let's raise these other hormones that'll help us store more body fat and kind of give us temporary energy, things like cortisol, and let's not have a faster metabolism. So good sleep is important because bad sleep will ruin everything that we just talked about. Yeah, I'm glad you added this one in the list because if there's ever somebody who I feel like is doing all the things you're telling them and then they're still not seeing the results

This has been the culprit. Yes. They're like, I'm doing this. I'm dying. I'm trying to say and we're like we're both like scratching our head Because at this point they haven't admitted to me like I have terrible sleep at night or I stress all night long We're at this there like that hadn't came up yet, right? We haven't had to worry about all the things we can do about it. And this person is piling more onto their already super stressful and non-sleeping nights that I'm not aware of at this point yet. And this is normally when this comes out.

It's like, are you sure you're doing this? You're doing that, you're doing this, you're doing that and then it's normally like, well then how's your sleeping? Oh, that's fucked up. I don't know. You're like, oh, okay, well there, you're doing that, and then it's normally like, well then how's your sleeping? Oh, well that's fucked up. I don't know. You're like, oh okay, well there, there might never fully recover.

I mean your body's just never in that place. I used to have clients, this was like that one last piece that was actually turned out to be a massive piece in the whole puzzle. Like, you know, nutrition dialed, like a workouts around point, everything, but was getting woken up many times in the middle of the night for phone calls and things overseas.

And it's just like battling that and carrying that same stress all day long. It just affected a snowball effect to everything else. Yeah, I mean, it affects behaviors too. It affects cravings, it affects your moods, it affects muscle building, it makes all the, it makes the other things all harder. Not only does it not help them and potentially hinder them

it'll make them impossible. It'll make them possible. I had a guy, I had a client once that, like you were saying Adam was doing everything right, finally we tackled a sleep. When we, when he really took sleep seriously, and we really got, and it took us a little while, took us a few months to really figure this out.

He did a sleep study and worked with a doctor and we figured it out. He lost, I mean, 10 pounds of body fat and gained 10 pounds of muscle. It was crazy. We were doing all the same stuff. The only difference was he finally got a sleep down. And it made such, and remember, he was going to this doctor,

they were also looking at his hormone. Everything changed just from sleep. So I had to include this because if this is off, you could strengthen with the best programs, you could eat great protein, you could have the right cardio for health, you could feed your body appropriately, do all the right stuff, this is gonna, it'll just, how we cut the workouts in half

with my client after we had realized that was the biggest culprit, and then you just focus on sleeping, it was like this completely transformative thing, just unlocked. And I know it's sleep that we're pointing right now, but I think that this could almost include like your overall just stress bucket, right?

So maybe you get okay sleep or it's not the worst sleep ever and so you don't think that's the culprit, but then you have this like, you know, crazy marriage, you hate your boss, like you just got all this other stress going on in your life. A lot of times in my experience, when a client is doing most,

if not all the things you're telling them to do, and their body still is not responding, a lot of times that is just, we are over, the body is just feeling attacked for long. You gotta remember that even this working out and dieting stuff is a stress on the body. So if your bucket was already full when you came to me, and then I added to it, even if it's things that are quote unquote healthy for you, right?

Exercise, right? Eating better. It will sometimes completely stall your progress because your body is just too overwhelmed and reducing and cutting back on a lot of things is actually the simplest thing. Well, think of it this way, right? If you, if the economy looks like it's going terrible, what are people gonna do? Save their money, not spend a lot of cut their bills, is what your body does with calories. If it starts to feel lots of stress, it'll try to save calories,

try to store more of them, and it'll reduce how many calories you put out. So it'll actually slow your metabolism down. In fact, losing sleep when the fastest way to slow your metabolism down. So it's a very important one. Now we just went over exercise, nutrition, how to kind of do a reverse diet.

But you may be wondering, how do I do those things more specifically? What does the specific workout look like? What does reverse dieting look like, specifically for someone like myself? So here's what we did. We put together a metabolism boosting bundle that includes maps in a ballic maps power lift and the reverse dieting guide Okay, so reverse dieting 101 so everything's in there for you all you have to do is follow it and you do all of the things

You'll be able to accomplish all the things that we talked about now all of them together All of them together right now is $99.99 which is gonna save you over All of them together right now is $99.99, which is gonna save you over $220. And that is just for what's going on right now. And you can find that at maps October.com. Also, if you like our podcast and you want more free stuff, you wanna get more free stuff from us. Go to maps, excuse me, mindpumpfree.com.

That's where we have all of our free guides that can help you with almost any health or fitness goal. You can also find us on social media. Justin is' us on Instagram at my pump Justin, Adam is on Instagram at my pump Adam and you can find me on Twitter at my pump self. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at MindPumpMedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a 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 sour, animal, and justine 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

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