Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1982: Why You Need to Prioritize Lifting Weights in 2023

Episode Date: January 5, 2023

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin why lifting weights is the number one activity to focus on in 2023. Why strength training is the superior form of exercise. (1:49) Why do people struggle with consistency? (4:45) Be realistic about how often you can consistently exercise for the rest of your life. (8:37) The problems with goal setting. (10:40) The most important factor to consider is how your workout tells your body to adapt. (16:42)   The Main Adaptations of Lifting.   #1- Lift weights and burn more calories. (23:20) #2 - Build a better hormone profile. (27:03) #3 - Get your caloric maintenance up by strength training. (28:45) #4 – Best for the modern lifestyle. (30:27) #5 - Requires less time in the gym. (32:54) #6 - Easier to maintain. (35:27) #7 - Brain and heart protection. (37:34) #8 - Muscle memory. (38:48) The best exercises, rep ranges, and intensity levels. (42:08) Where to start for each fitness level. (48:28) Related Links/Products Mentioned Special Promotion: MAPS Anabolic 50% off! **Promo code ANABOLIC23 at checkout** Visit Seed for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Promo code MINDPUMP at checkout for 15% off your first month’s supply of Seed’s DS-01™ Daily Synbiotic** Mind Pump #1835: Why Resistance Training Is The Best Form Of Exercise For Fat Loss And Overall Health Workout Because You Love Yourself Not Because You Hate Yourself – Mind Pump Blog The Key to Fitness Success is Self-Love – Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump #1965: How To Break Bad Habits With James Clear Mind Pump #1915: How To Re-Ignite Your Metabolism Energy expenditure and activity among Hadza hunter-gatherers Mind Pump #1612: Everything You Need To Know About Sets, Reps & Rest Periods How Phasing Your Workouts Leads to Consistent Plateau Free Workouts Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources People Mentioned James Clear (@JamesClear) Twitter

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pup, right? In today's episode, we talk about why you need to prioritize lifting weights in 2023. Why that is the best form of exercise for fat loss, health, consistency, you name it. We break it down and explain it to you. Why it's such a great form of exercise.

By the way, in this episode, you're just talking about sets and wraps and exercises and why, if you want it all mapped out for you and planned out for you with the exercises and demos and sets and wraps, everything set up for you. We have a program called Maps and Obolic. It's the most appropriate for most people. If you go to mapsfitinistproducts.com, you can get it for 50% off with the code, Anabolic

23. So, Anabolic 23 at mapsfitinistproducts.com for maps and a ball. Now, this episode is brought to you by a sponsor, Seed. This is, by far, the world's best probiotic. It is literally like if you use a probiotic, try seed, you'll see and feel a tremendous difference. And part of it is because of the capsule that they put the probiotic in.

Nobody else has a capsule like this that actually delivers the probiotics to the helpful tissues where you need it. Anyway, go check this company out. Go to seed.com-flour-slash-mind-pump. Use the code MindPump and get 20% off your first month of seeds daily, symbiotic. All right, here comes the show.

Look, there's a lot of different ways to exercise, but one of them reigns supreme for most people. So today we're gonna talk about why you should start lifting weights in 2023. Oh, I know. Let's talk about why this is probably one of the best prescriptions, I would say, in terms of exercise. Are you gonna say probably, those people, I think you could say it is, right?

Well, here's why I'll say sometimes it isn't. Like the form of exercise you're gonna do is always gonna be the best versus the ones you're not gonna do. So if you just hate it like so much, if you just are super passionate about another form of exercising, you'll be consistent. Well, the one you do is always gonna be better

than the one you don't do. So that being said, if you're not necessarily partial, and if you're doing this mainly for the results and the benefits that you're going to get from it, then I think we can make a very compelling data driven and experienced driven case for why strength training is just so superior. You know, even though I agree with you with that statement, there is a part of that, and we say it, I know we say it, about consistency and it's important that you want to do it.

The only reason why I don't like that message is because there's a lot of people, and including myself at one point in my life, that are addicted to training a certain way for the wrong reasons. And so they may be consistent with it, but then it technically is not necessarily the healthiest things. Not benefiting them for that long. Right. Right. Like, let's say like the runner, right? Like the marathon runner who is

like addicted to the dopamine hits from the long runs and needs to have a competition in order to exercise. And so they've justified these constantly race after race after race. And if they're either racing, they're eating better and they're exercising like crazy. If they're not, then they're way off the other direction. How about somebody who's like the bodybuilder guy or girl who's massively insecure about the way they look? And so pouring themselves into competitions drives them to be consistent with their working out because they're insecure about their bodies. So, I caution that statement sometimes, even though it is true that the consistency

of you working out is important. And we've said before that inferior program done consistently is better than a superior program done inconsistently, but also you need a little bit of self awareness around what's the driving mechanism of why you gravitate towards that way of training. I definitely prefer that people move and I'm glad that that's like a first step. You know, if it's something you enjoy and it's going to get you up and about moving your body, but what's going to benefit you the longest? And I think that

it needs to be promoted so that way it's at least a thought for them that if I get into resistance training, this is something that's going to benefit my body, the longest out of any other activity that I'm going to be a part of just so they know that. Yeah, we're assuming that you're going to have a relatively healthy relationship with the form of exercise that you pick, because you're right, Adam. If it's an unhealthy relationship, then I guess that negates exactly totally negates what I said. Well, I guess the top of mind for me right now, I actually have a phone call. I got to return

to my brother-in-law, my sister Cassie, right? She reached out and said, hey, Tom, actually, he reached out to and said, hey, your sister is super anti having me go do cross. And I was going to sign up to this class. I'm going to do it again. And you know, he's, you guys know, Tom, he's like the downhill mountain bike guy. And like, we, you know, the best he ever felt and looked was when my sister had convinced them to run maps, anabolic one time per week. Yeah.

Full body workout. She goes, he was the healthiest he'd ever been, he'd looked the best he'd ever looked, and he just kind of fell off eventually of it. And then now he's, you know, remotivated again the end of the year's coming, he's put on a little bit of body fat. It's winter time,

so he's not doing as much downhill mountain biking. And so he gravitates towards the CrossFit. Now what I know about my brother is that he has this kind of, you know, masochist mentality when it comes to training. He likes to punish himself and get after it. He likes the competitive nature of like, and he overdoes it. Right.

And so here's an ex, and in his eyes, he's like, this is what will help me be more consistent. But what I think is like, well, is it really or will be consistent for a while? Then you eventually fall off of it and then you won't do it again. And you know, what I know what I'm going to end up talking to him is I'm going to end up pushing him in that direction. Again, I'm like, Hey, why don't you, what I'll do is I'll set him up and ask him, well, what are your goals? What do you want? And what do you want out of this?

Yeah. And when you're soaring tired, or you want to like feel good and get results and be consistent. That's right. Forever. Not like for a period. Well, you're right, because that only lasts for so long. You eventually burn yourself out, or you get injured. And you know, most people, however, I'll say struggle with consistency because workouts are not their life. Their workouts, the way that they look at workouts is to improve the quality of their life. So it isn't their life. They're not this crazy fitness fanatic.

The average person who is going to pick up exercise in January of 2023 or the beginning of the year is they're thinking more like, I want to improve my health or I want to lose weight or I want to feel better. They're not thinking, this is gonna become my life. I'm gonna become a fanatic. They're like, okay, I wanna do this, but here's why. I wanna lose weight, I wanna feel better, I'm gonna be able to play with my kids,

I'm gonna be more productive at work, I'm gonna leave the pain. And those are the people that we're talking about. And what you need to consider is that when you're, if that's you, right, if that's you, and you're looking at workouts and you're thinking, okay, I wanna do this because I wanna lose weight, I wanna feel good, you should definitely pick the form of exercise that gives you the most

for the time spent doing it, okay? If you're not like, you just love working out for the sake of it, you love beating yourself up, you're not a personal trainer, you don't work in a gym, you're not a fitness fanatic, a fitness influencer, or whatever, you're just, I just wanna do this because I wanna feel better, wanna lose weight, whatever, then it makes sense to pick the form of exercise

that is going to give you the most. It's gonna give you the most bang for your buck. It's gonna make it easier to stay consistent because you're not gonna feel like you're on a hamster wheel. This is what can happen when you pick the wrong form of exercise where you're on this hamster wheel and you may get these initial results and then you plateau so hard and then you ask yourself,

why am I doing this? Why am I sweating and beating myself up? I feel like there's no direction. I, my body stopped progressing. This isn't worth it. This isn't worth the time. I mean, I guess I could go more and go five or six days a week, but I have a life, I have kids, I have a job,

and I don't think that that's realistic for me forever. In fact, that's very important. We need to get into that, which is, be very realistic with how often you can consistently exercise for the rest of your life. You have to do that because the fail rate, what I mean by the fail rate is a drop-off rate, is so high, you're almost guaranteed to drop off if you don't consider this right here.

So that means if you're not exercising now or you're super spotty or inconsistent with it, what is probably unrealistic is to say 2023, I'm going to work out five days a week. I'm going to just start going to the gym five days a week. Are you really? You might be able to do that for a few months, but the fail rate with that is north of 85 to 90%. By the way, we manage gyms for years, big box gyms.

These are gyms for years, big box gyms. So these are gyms for average person, okay? And the crowd that we would get in January was 50 to 100% larger than the average crowd in the gym. And that crowd disappeared, come March. Come March, gone, you're right back to normal. It's like, it's expected. This is just what happens in the fitness space. By the way, the gyms have learned how to capitalize on this. And they've come

up with ways to continue to keep the revenue by membership, by making members so cheap that people are like, I don't want to cancel this $10 a month membership, this $5 a month membership. This is actually the strategy because this is what happens. What we're going to talk about today is how to prevent that from happening for you. Don't be that statistic where you start and then stop. And again, the first thing you want to consider is, I'm going to be realistic. I'm not doing anything now. What's realistic for me two days a week? I think two days a week is realistic or maybe three days a week. More than that, forget about it. I'm going

to tell you right now, I did a really good job of getting people to be consistent as a trainer in the back half of my career. And the best I got out of the average person was about two or three days a week of consistency. Past that, it was fitness fanatics or people who became trainers. So if you're thinking you're gonna do five, six days a week or whatever, and this isn't your passion, you can forget about it. So two, three days a week is what we're working on. Do you think this is unique to fitness or do you think this is like human behavior and just goal setting in general? Like because when I think about like

You know if I was going to set a goal to read more I Wouldn't I wouldn't be Silly enough to set a goal of like I'm gonna read a book a day like you know, it's like okay I'm like heartily reading it all to think that I'm gonna read a book a day would be an absurd goal. Even if I could keep that pace for a month, it's like realistically, if it hasn't been a part of my lifestyle for most of my life, what would make me think that I could do something like that? Nothing works that way.

So my massive overcorrection. So my question to you guys is then, do you think that this absurd approach to goal setting and training and working out is unique to fitness, or do you think this is human behavior across all goals? It's across all goals. What happens is we tend, and the reason why it happens so often in fitness is we get this like spark of motivation, you know, because, oh my God, I ate so much during the holidays or, oh my God, I'm so fat or that's it. I'm going to change something. And because we're motivated,

we will always, you will always overestimate your ability in a state of motivation. You will never be realistic. So you have to understand this. By the way, when you look at how fundamental changes are made, lifelong changes are made in your behaviors, there's two ways that they happen. There's two ways. One of them is the way that it happens, 99% of the time, then there's 1% of the time that forget about it, but it can happen.

The first way is slow and steady, small changes, adapt to that small change, make the next one, and it happens over a period of time. That is the strategy, the successful strategy, to make big changes over time that stick forever. The second 1% of the time is in epiphany, and people think they're gonna have an epiphany, and they think when they're motivated, that's in epiphany.

It's so rare, it's so rare in fact, that the person who has the heart attack or is told that they're motivated, that's an epiphany. It's so rare. It's so rare in fact that the person who has the heart attack or is told that they're gonna die, often we'll start exercising and stop. If that doesn't work for them, it ain't gonna work for you right now. I'm sure you know. Well, to back to the human behavioral thing,

it's the difference between whether it's positively driven or negatively driven. Huge. And so, you know, you think about, even if you get a comment, just one comment out of like a thousand comments, it's negative, you hyper focus on that, you obsess over it.

It's like the only thing you wake up and you think about these negative things. And so it's just logical that you would just overly focus on this one goal and do too much of it all at once. Yeah. And in terms of like being methodical and pragmatic and like taking it step by step,

like to have a positively driven outlook towards this goal, I think it would be much more easily adapted if you had that kind of talent. That's an interesting thought. Like I wonder if there's any research to back that up, right? are easily adapted if you had that kind of talent. That's an interesting thought. I wonder if there's any research to back that up. If you said a goal, like you love to say all time, say I'll take care of yourself because you love yourself,

not because you hate yourself. If you said a goal based on a place of positivity and not hating yourself or resentment or insecurity, are you more likely to set a more realistic goal versus if it came from, oh, somebody called me stupid, therefore I'm gonna try and read a book every single day.

Or if someone called me fat, so then I'm gonna hit the gym seven days a week. Versus, this year, I wanna be a better reader. So I'm gonna try and pick up a book more often. I'm going to, I'm going to take care of my health a little bit more. Are you more likely to set, I mean, this would be such, this would have been a great question, ask James Clear,

when we had him on here. I feel like that's kind of a lot of what his research was going on. Well, think about it this way, when you're, when you're positive, when you're saying, I want to, I want to take care of myself versus I'm fat and I'm, you know, I'm unattractive or whatever, right? You are more kind to yourself, and when you're kind, you're gonna be more realistic.

When you're negative, it's like, I'm gonna throw everything but the kitchen sink it myself. I gotta get out of this state of mind. And by the way, I know negative self-talk, negative state of mind is a powerful short-term motivator, but it's an impossible long-term motivator because nobody wants to feel that way forever. This is why people stop working out and stop eating healthy and they'll tell people around them

the reason why they stopped is because they wanted to enjoy their life. Why did you stop working out? Oh, I just want to enjoy my life. I just want to like, you know, like, what if you really break that down, that's crazy because being fit and healthy dramatically improves the quality of your life.

But why do these people feel? Everything. There's nothing that'll improve everything as much as improving your health. Yet these people stopped because they wanted to enjoy their life. Why? Because they were negative the entire time going into it.

They were exercised as a punishment, diet into it. They were exercise was a punishment, diet was restrictive, and this is why the rebellion, when they go off, it's not like somebody goes on a diet and then goes back to how they're reading before, they go on a diet and they rebel. It's not like, oh, I'm gonna go back to eating a couple cookies, it's like eight-th of a whole box.

Let's go the other direction completely. Yeah, because they rebelled against this feeling of self hate. So that's really, really important to consider. And oftentimes this initial motivation at the beginning of the year comes from negativity, feeling gross, feeling inadequate, feeling fat, whatever. Really what you need to do is say, you know, I deserve to be cared for. I'm going to go to the gym and I'm going to take care of myself. I'm going to eat in a way that cares for me. And then you're more kind, just like if you have a child that you're trying to help, you're going to be more kind with the changes, because you're going to understand, like these are

big changes, let's start small. Let's take this one step at a time. You're going to be a little bit more forgiving versus like, you hate the kid, you're like, no, you're doing all this stuff right now. And if you don't, you're going to be punished, you know, type of deal. So when you look at exercise and you consider all of its values, the most important factor that you want to consider is how the form of exercise tells your body to adapt. Now, why is this important? Because the adaptations are what stick around

all the time. And the adaptations, you got to ask yourself, what do these adaptations mean? And because they stick around all the time, it's not different, it's really not that much different than investing money versus working hourly for more money. Like I can make more money by working more or I can make more money by making my money work for me. Well, when you look at adaptations, look at it that way. How does this form of exercise tell my body to adapt? What does that mean when I'm not exercising? Not while I'm exercising, but when I'm not exercising because you will spend more time not exercising than you will exercise. Even if you work out 70s a week, even if you work out an hour, 70s a week, there's still way more time you're not working out than working out. And by the way, I don't recommend you work out 70s a week.

So you want to consider what do these adaptations mean when I'm not working out? And are those adaptations contributing in positive, helpful ways to the goals that I'm looking for? Explain that deeper for somebody like explain, like in terms of here's like three or four of the most common modalities that people will choose say in the next month, right? So the starting this new year, there's going to be a flood of all types of month, right? So, starting this new year, there's gonna be a flood of all types of exercising, right? That's gonna happen. Everything from group training to yoga studios,

to CrossFit gyms, to commercial gyms, to running, signing up for marathons, to tough mud. I mean, you name it, everything's gonna get increased. So, explain in layman's terms, what you mean by the adaptations of that. So what are you by me choosing say marathon running, what is it that I'm sending? And if I choose wait, what am I sending? So explain the adaptations are as you do a form of exercise, you get better at it. And the reason why you get better at it is because your body adapts and molds

itself to become better at the stress that you're introducing your body. So if you try to run and you don't run, you'll find running down the street to be kind of exhausting. But as you continue to practice it, now you can run a block, two blocks a mile, two miles and so on. When you're working out with weights, you'll find you might be able to only lift, you know, 20 pounds above your head, and it's going to be very challenging.

But eventually you'll be able to do 30 pounds, 40 pounds and so on. Okay, you do yoga. Positions are going to be very difficult, but eventually you'll be able to do 30 pounds, 40 pounds and so on. You do yoga positions are going to be very difficult, but then you'll find they'll get easier and you'll be able to get into more challenging positions. So what your body is doing is it's adapting to the form of exercise. You've got to ask yourself what those adaptations mean. So I'm going to back up a little bit because the main goal, the number one goal I should say, the most common goal that people have is to lose weight. We are in this obesity epidemic.

We don't need to get too deep into it, but everybody knows about it. More and more people are overweight and obesity contributes to just this umbrella of health issues. So if you're obese, your risk of heart diseases up, your risk of cancer goes up, your risk of depression, anxiety, mental fog, poor sleep, low libido, like obesity contributes to a lot of poor health outcomes. And lots of people want to lose weight

because lots of people are overweight. Modern life just, it's just really geared towards making us overweight. So there's definitely some truth to the following statement, okay? There's definitely some truth to the following statement. Okay, the more calories you burn, the easier it is to lose weight. Okay, there's lots of, there's truth in this and here's why. When the calories you burn is higher than the calories you take in, your body has to make up the difference by burning calories off your body and ideally it comes from body fat. Okay, so that's true. Now here's what we messed up. We looked at exercise and we said,

well, if calories burned is important, and if we can get you to burn more calories and it's more likely that you're not gonna be obese, well then I guess the most effective form of exercise is the one that burns the most calories. And that sounds logical, but here's the problem. It disregards the adaptations, meaning it disregards

that that can change and you can, through adaptations, make your body or teach your body to burn less or more calories on its own. Not while you're doing the exercise, but on its own. So let's go back to now what you said Adam about running, right, running marathons. If you're trying to get better at running, the main adaptations are endurance and stamina

and efficiency. Your body is trying to become a more efficient, long distance running machine. Now it is true that while you run, you burn a lot of calories per hour. So you do an hour of running, you're going to burn more calories running in an hour, then you will do, you know, doing any other form of exercise pretty much, including strength training. So you do burn more calories while you're doing it. But the adaptations that you're telling your body slowly teach your body to become more efficient and running, and they slowly teaches your body to burn less calories. And it does this through a few different ways, but one of the primary ways it does this is it actually teaches your body to pair muscle down. Why? Because muscle is very caloricly expensive. It's looking at overall weight. It burns lots of calories. So when you look at studies on weight loss, when people die at plus run, almost 50% of the

weight people lose comes from muscle. Why is that happening? Because your body is always being, it's always saying to itself, especially if you're burning lots of calories manually, it's like, okay, how can we balance this calories in versus calories out? This endurance activity doesn't require lots of strength. Long distance running doesn't require lots of strength. The muscle is expensive. We can become better running machines if we burn less calories. So you start to pair muscle down. So you've probably experienced this before. You've done lots of running to try to lose weight and you lose that initial 10 pounds right away. And then all of a sudden, seems to slow down and stop.

And then you're stuck and you're like, okay, what do I do now? Like, I guess I should run more or eat less or eat less. And then that next five pounds come off. And then you're stuck again. And they're like, okay, I guess I could run more. And eat less. Now if you follow that to its conclusion, you're left in this position where you're running all the time and you're eating very little. And if you think that that's maintainable for the average person, you're fooling yourself.

It's very hard to maintain. And that's one of the main reasons why people drop off. Besides the main reason why they work out, the motivation factor, it's, man, I'm doing six days a week of running. I'm meeting 1500 calories a day or 1200 calories a day. I still have like 15 pounds of lose. It's not coming off. It's not a comfortable place to be. This sucks. Like unless you look slow running and you would do it no matter what, like you're going to stop. All right. Let's look at strength training. Let's compare strength training to this. Now, strength training doesn't burn a lot of calories

while you're doing it. That's true. However, the adaptations that it induces in the body are remarkable. So what strength training does is it tells you about you get stronger. That's a main adaptation. If you lift weights and you do it in a way to build muscle,

you do it in a way to get stronger. And I'm saying that because you can lift weights in a way to where it's just cardio with weights. What does that look like? Circuit training, going from exercise to exercise, doing classes with dumbbells, like that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about traditional strength training.

I'm trying to get stronger. I'm trying to be able to lift more weight. I'm trying to be able to do more repetitions. I'm resting in between sets with my workouts. And why that is is you're sending a signal to the body that it's like, hey, this meat wagon is gonna make me lift these heavy things every week. I better get good at it.

In order to get good at it, I need more muscle, especially if you progressively overload. You keep slowly increasing more weight and more weight. The body keeps going like, oh shit, we need more muscle. We need more muscle. We need more muscle. And then you hope that those calories that you're consuming get partitioned over into building more muscle, we need more muscle, and then you hope that those calories that you're consuming get partitioned over

into building more muscle. And you actually build, you actually teach your body indirectly through gaining strength to burn more calories. Your body at this point, because of the stress of strength training, because when you work out with weights or any workout, right? Any workouts of stress, that's why you adapt. But while you're working out with the weights,

your body's like, we need to get stronger. And yes, we're gonna burn more calories, but we're willing to sacrifice that because what this person needs or what we need, obviously, is to get stronger. So the side effect, one of the big side effects of strength training is a faster metabolism. If you look at data where people lift weights and then try to die it to lose weight, the muscle

loss is almost zero, or especially in the beginning, you actually see a gain in muscle with the burn in body fat. So if you lose 10 pounds, 10 pounds of body fat versus the previous example, 10 pounds, four of it was muscle, six of it was body fat. Now, why is this important? Well the muscle burns more calories. By the way, the weight loss, the fat loss, I should say, I don't like to say weight

because I could cut my arm off a loose weight, right? We're talking about the right kind of weight. The fat loss that happens with strength training looks in feels very different than the fat loss that occurs with, let's say, lots of cardio. Cardio looks like this initial weight loss, hard plateau, maybe a little bit more by adding more hard plateau. Eventually, it's like, this is too crazy.

I can't maintain this. With strength training, it actually starts off a lot slower because it takes a second for the metabolism to kick up. But then you start to notice this kind of snowball effect as the metabolism really starts to kick in. Now, let me give you an example of what I'm talking about, just to kind of snowball effect as the metabolism really starts to kick in. Now let me give you an example of what I'm talking about just to kind of illustrate this. Let's say you run for an hour. You're the average person will burn, I don't know, 500 calories while doing that run. Some people

less, a lot of people think, oh, you know, I can burn a thousand. I mean, most people burn about 500 calories going for a run for about an hour. So 500 calories during that run. And let's say you run, I don't know, four days a week. All right, do the math. So it's 2,000 calories a week that you're burning extra through having to go out and run. Now, could you speed up your metabolism to where it burns an extra 400 calories on its own?

Yes, I do. We've done this time and time again with clients, except here's a difference. It's another four to 500 calories a day every day, seven days a week. So now I'm going 3,500 calories extra a week because it's happened every day and it doesn't require me to go burn them off manually.

So it doesn't take a genius to see just how much more sustainable this approach is. And there's a lot more to this, by the way. What are my other favorite points to talk about with strength training is what it does to your hormones. This is a big deal that a lot of people really don't realize. And again, this is all backed up by data. Your hormones adapt to strength training by organizing themselves to help you build muscle. What does a muscle building

hormone profile look like? That's what you want to build muscle. What does a muscle building hormone profile look like? That's what you wanna ask yourself. What does a hormone profile that is organized to build muscle? What does that look like? You know what that looks like? It looks like the hormone profile you had when you were 21 years old.

Think about when you built muscle without even working out or when you just got stronger. Or whatever. It's when you're young. It's a youthful hormone profile. Now in contrast to that, let's say you're exercising in a way that is telling your body to pair muscle down. Your body will organize its hormones in a way to do so.

What does a hormone profile that is pairing muscle down look like? Not like a youthful one. It looks like one you probably don't want. Cortisol is high, growth hormone is depressed, and men testosterone is lower, and women we see estrogen, your progesterone, or off stress. Because if your body's trying to pair muscle down,

it's not going to give you a muscle building a hormone profile. Your body's like, I want to lose muscle, trying to get better at this activity. Let's create a hormone profile that does body's like, I wanna lose muscle, we're trying to get better at this activity. Let's create a hormone profile that does that versus again with strength training, let's create a hormone profile that builds muscle. So, I mean, just, by the way,

there's a lot of reasons we can get into, but just those two things alone, you can kinda see why, wow, this is like a super effective way to work out. And it doesn't require me to go to the gym every single day. Well, and when we're talking about the average person, I would say one of the other main points to make

is the metabolic flexibility that you create for yourself by strength training versus the cardio example that you gave. Because in reality, everybody is gonna eat neurotic the entire year where you weigh and track everything. We're gonna have holidays, you're gonna have birthdays. And so when you build a faster metabolism, when you get in that situation where,

oh, kinda eight out of balance a little bit this weekend or had some drinks, the amount of that that ends up getting stuck to your body and converting into fat is a much lower percentage when you've built your metabolism up through strength training versus the person that just burns, burns, burns, burns all time. Those same people are the people that feel like man if I eat off my diet just a slightest bit and it just sticks to me. I've had a client tell you that where they're like man out of my fill like I eat really really good but then I just and that's because their metabolism

is so slow that the percentage of a you know snickers bar that's 300 calories is a large percentage of their total calorie maintenance. And so if we can get that caloric maintenance up by strength training, then when you have those mishaps, when you have those days where you eat off the diet, 300 calories is a much smaller percentage of your calorie maintenance. So you don't put on as much body fat.

Totally. And I want to be very clear, all forms of exercise have value, so I don't wanna turn this into a like, don't do anything else, type of deal. All I'm saying is, if you're being realistic with yourself and you're gonna work out two or three days a week, consistently because you're not a fitness fanatic, you probably just wanna pick the one

that's the most effective. And most people are not gonna do two or three or four different forms of exercise. They don't have the time, they don't want to make the time. They're going to pick one. But just to hammer this home even more, this is all by the way, it's all backed up by data, not just our experience, although we experienced this time and time again, managing gyms and training clients, but there was this just remarkable study. I've brought up so many times on our podcasts, but scientists went and studied a modern hunter gatherer tribe

known as the Hodza tribe. So they live the way humans lived, you know, pre-agricultural revolution, okay? They hunt and they gather. And for all intents and purposes, they are far more active than the average Western couch potato. So just to kind of explain what they do, like gathering requires movement. Even

when they sit, they sit actively in a squat, when they hunt, they'll stock prey, throw something at it, it gets hit, then they chase it down till it bleeds out or gets exhausted, then they drag it back, like they're moving a lot. And so scientists went down and said, we wonder how many calories these tribes people are burning. And they did this really sophisticated testing. And what they found was that the modern hodza tribes people burned on an individual basis right around the same amount of calories as the average Western couch potato. So John, who drives the work, sits at a desk, comes home,

takes 3,000 steps a day, watches TV, burns right around the say, a amount of calories or similar amount of calories to the hot said tribesmen who's hunting and gathering and has no electronics and isn't watching TV and all that stuff. And you think, well, how is that possible? Well, here's why we evolved our metabolism is evolved to become efficient with that kind of activity, because tribes tribes people lots of their activities is cardio-based type activity. Why is that the case? Because if our bodies

allowed us to burn 6,000 calories a day through activity, we would we would have never survived You know hard it is to come across energy and calories in nature. So our bodies adapt strength training is The reverse of that. It's the form of exercise for the modern lifestyle because the modern person doesn't eat a hunter-gatherer diet, doesn't move all the time. We have food everywhere, it's super palatable, super accessible. We sit down a lot. So a faster metabolism, that might be a liability for a hunter-gatherer, but a faster metabolism for a modern person is an asset.

You want a faster metabolism protects you against becoming obese and all of the health issues that come from that. All right. So, let's talk about some other of the benefits that you get with strength training. One of my favorites is it requires less time in the gym because the main adeptation, excuse me, the main benefit of strength training is the adaptation, not the calories burned while you do it. I don't have to keep going to the gym every day to try and burn these calories manually. All I got to do is effectively send this good, effective muscle building, metabolism boosting

signal, and then allow the adaptations to occur. The adaptations don't happen during the workout. They happen after the workout, in between the workouts during the recovery period. So the average person can very effectively affect muscle building strength and metabolism through working out two days a week or three days a week. When the main value of your exercise

is calories burned while you do it, when you don't do it, there's no value, you gotta do it all the time, which makes it very, very hard to stay consistent. Well, and I wanna go back to the point you made earlier, we're not advocating for someone not to do other, like cardiovascular training, not to do yoga, not to listings, but if I'm setting my goals with my client

for 2023 and we're planning out the year, I want to start by planning for the thing that is gonna give us the biggest bang for our buck and as little as possible to elicit the most amount of change, which is that strength training one to two times a week. It's not a lot to get my clients going. Now what I know as a coach that my desired outcome is to eventually introduce some cardio, more walking,

yoga, maybe some mobility work, maybe some meditation. I mean, that is like, that's where we want to go. But if I'm like, all I got to work with is one to two hours a week. What do I do with this person to start right now, changing their body composition in the positive direction faster and better than any other way, well that would be strength training now. And then as we build that momentum, then I start to encourage them to start to add the other forms of exercise that will benefit. Yeah, the perfect routine includes lots of different forms of exercise. We're just trying to make this as efficient, effective, and realistic as possible. You're trying to get people wins. That's it, because we've been doing this for a long time.

We know how important it is that you get your client wins and you make their life easier towards their fat loss goal. And by building their metabolism, by committing them to less at first and getting them consistent building behaviors, then you start to add all the bells and whistles and all the other things that are going to enhance. You know, one of my other favorite benefits of strength training

is it's easier to maintain. What do I mean by that? If you look at all the adaptations that you can get from exercise, like stamina, flexibility, agility, strength, the one that takes the longest to leave your body when you stop exercising a strength. Strength actually sticks around. Now eventually, it goes away.

That's what I was saying. That's saying the old man's strength comes through. That's what it was. Eventually, it'll go away. You stop working out and eventually, you'll get weaker. But if you're lifting weights and you're strong and you don't work out for a month and you go back to the gym, you'll probably be able to lift close to what you lifted before. You stop running, and you go try and run a month later,

you like when you went way back, right? You stop stretching, you lose lots of flexibility. Strength sticks around quite effectively, quite well. So you get away with missing workouts more than you would with other forms of exercise. And then we have the muscle memory part, which is just crazy. Yeah, it's the most protective thing you can do for your body. I mean, the difference being there's other forms of training and you can build stamina

and you can build endurance through cardiovascular training, but with strength training, you're affecting all the systems. You're actually building. You're building not just muscles that you see in the exterior, but you're affecting all the systems. You're actually building. You're building not just muscles that you see in the exterior, but you're also building support and protective qualities around your vital organs. You're building and building strength and support around the bones, the ligaments

that help to provide that stability around joints. So, you know, less likelihood of injuries occurring. You're building and strengthen immune system, cognitive abilities with your brain is getting effect to that. So if you just look through all the systems of the body, strength training has a massive impact across the board. It's a pro-positive tissue form of exercise. It's main adaptation is to add this tissue called muscle,

which has all these incredible downstream effects. That's like the main thing that it does. You're talking about all the other organs. Let's talk about the brain for a second. One of the main contributors to cognitive decline is insulin insensitivity, right? Or as our bodies become less sensitive to insulin, and we need more and more insulin, as we start to develop glucose and tolerance, I mean, Alzheimer's and dementia, some researchers

call them type three diabetes, okay? The most effective way to positively affect your insulin levels and your blood sugar levels is to simply add muscle. They have studies where they have the severe leobies And they have them lose no weight. They don't have them do anything but build a little bit of muscle and they see significant improvements Why one of the storage areas of the body where you store carbohydrates and sugars is muscle now the main area is the liver but muscle store glycogen as well They're also very insulin sensitive so you really develop this

muscle store glycogen as well. They're also very insulin sensitive. So you really develop this insulin sensitive body simply by adding muscle and it's very brain protective. You want to talk about heart health. People are like, oh, I heard of the forms of exercise or phenomenal for the heart. Studies show strength training to be as effective as other forms of exercise for heart health,

probably because it's easier to stay lean and probably because of those insulin sensitizing effects that we're talking about. So it's really pretty awesome. Earlier I said muscle memory. I wanna go back to that because this is pretty awesome. Muscle memory is pretty rad. When you build muscle the first time, it could take a while.

When you build it the second, third, and fourth time, it comes back really fast. So what I mean by that is if you gained 10 pounds of lean body mass and let's say it took you a year to do that and your metabolism was roaring and you've got this extra 10 pounds of muscle and you feel tight and sculpted. And then for whatever reason,

you stop working out for six months and you lose all 10 pounds of it. And then you're like, you know, I'm gonna get back into working out and you go back to lift, you'll gain those 10 pounds in like a month and a half. It comes back so fast. For anybody who's ever experienced this

when they've broken a bone, you know what I'm talking about. Like if you've ever had your leg or arm in a cast, and then you take the cast off, and you notice like the muscle is gone, how fast does that muscle come back? Super fast. This is an adaptation, evolutionary, protective mechanism in the body.

So when you're working out with weights and you're building muscle, not only is it stick around longer, but it comes back faster when you do lose it. This muscle memory is a very, very real thing. And again, there's lots of studies to my favorite thing about getting older. It's my favorite thing about being getting older and having strength train for two decades now is that, you know, I think of strength training is like investing at a very young age. It's nice because if you were consistent early on investing, you can be a little frivolous and make not the best financial decisions and blow money a little bit more as you get older

because you did such a good job investing early. You can get away with more. I think the same thing is with strength training. If you do a good job of being consistent and building muscle over years and years and years, when you get older, there is this flexibility that you have that is greater than what it was when I was in my 20s. It's one of my favorite parts about it is that, man, it's so much easier for me to turn my physique around or to get into better shape because of that muscle memory, all the time under the iron over all those years.

So studies actually, they've done studies on this and they found that you need about, there's different studies, but between one fifth to one ninth of the work to keep muscle and strength that it took to build it. Like tell me another form of exercise that lets you do that. We're working out a certain amount. You cut it down to a fifth or a ninth and you keep most of all of whatever you had. That doesn't happen with other forms of exercise, with strength training that does happen. And this basically, what all this does is it makes it this incredible form of exercise for modern life where you've got a lot of food around you, faster metabolism. We need a faster metabolism.

Our life is sedatory, which tends to tell our hormones to take a dump. Well, strength training tells our hormones to stay youthful. It improves brain health and insulin sensitivity, like diabetes, insulin's insensitivity, glucose issues, that's another massive epidemic. And it requires less time. It is true that we're extremely sedentary, but it's also true that we're extremely busy. We actually pack our schedules more now

than we ever did before, even though we don't move much. In fact, if you have kids, you know this, like when I was a kid, we'd just go on play. Now you want your kids to play you get a schedule appointments for everything. So our day and our appointments follow us on our phones and emails. So you want a form of exercise,

you don't have to do a lot of, again, to get a massive return. Okay, so now that we've made the case for strength training, hopefully we've convinced you, okay, this is the form of exercise I want to start, then you're probably wondering, well, okay, what does it look like? How do I start?

Do I just go and, you know, just lift heavy stuff? Well, not necessarily. There are exercises that are way more effective than others. There are different rep ranges, each one of them does different things for you. And then there's an appropriate intensity and amount of time that you need to work out to give you the best results. And we've covered this in depth on other podcasts, but we should loosely kind of talk to people about, let's start with the best exercises, the best bang for your bucks exercises.

You're big five, you know what I'm saying? I'm poundless. Yeah, so compound lifts are, otherwise known as gross motor movements, utilize multiple joints in the body and their big movements, rather than like small movements. So like a small movement would be like a curl, like I'm just using my elbow.

A bigger movement would be like a pullup, where I'm not only bending my elbow, but I'm also bending my shoulders, and I'm also lifting more weight. So some of the best exercises that just give you, like the exercises I'm about to list, give you the benefits of like, if you took 10 or 15 other exercises

and combine them together. So they just give you a lot for a few sets versus you'd have to take like five or 10 other exercises and combine them just equal what they do. And they're the following. Squatting, so squatting movements, they can be done with a barbell or body weight or dumbbells, but squatting, overhead pressing,

rowing, bench pressing, those are kind of the big movements that you wanna do. And then you want maybe some rotation in there for balance. Now of course, there's lots of different strength training exercises. One of the things I love so much about strength training is that it's super individualizable, so you can target sculpt your body

if you want to build some areas and shape some areas. And there's lots of exercises for different parts of your body. But those movements right there are the best ones, and you should practice those exercises, or I should say prioritize those exercises in your workouts. Well part of what makes them the best is because they build the most total muscle. Yeah, there's like there's a there's this argument in our in our space right now amongst the

professionals of like you know, oh when I'm trying to build just my quads squats aren't the best that there's you know, hack squats or leg extensions target the quads better. But when you are when you are trying to build a metabolism and you're trying to set your, you're trying to lay a solid foundation, right? Long term, what we're talking about in this episode. The value of doing a compound lifts that the amount of muscle you build total on your body

is so much more than exercises that target one specific muscle. Yeah, well look, I could do three sets of squats, which effectively works the quadriceps, the glutes and the hamstrings, or I could do three sets of leg extensions for my quads, three sets of leg curls for my hamstrings, and three sets of donkey kickbacks for my glutes.

Nine sets versus three sets, and I'll argue by the way that the three sets of squats is still gonna be more effective. Well, I would argue you left out a lot of other things. Yeah, you say core shoulders. Core shoulders. Core shoulders. Upper back.

Like, yeah, there's absolutely. That's, and you gotta count that because even though. Because those are all working. That's right, even though it's not like a direct, hard core exercise, the core is having to work. Therefore, more calories will be burned. More muscle have been built. Like so, the overall, having to work. Therefore, more calories will be burned, more muscle have been built. Like so, the overall, and when the case we're trying to make

is doing the least amount in the gym to get the most results and starting you off in the right direction for the new year, like that's the type of, you wanna build your routine around those movements. We can talk about adding stuff later on, but the core should be around that. Yes. Now let's talk about rep ranges. Well, how many reps should I do? Reps 1 to like 25, all build muscle. There's value in all these different rep ranges. So then you

may wonder, well, which one do I pick? Do all of them. You want to work in all of them. And ideally, what you do is you would focus in a range for a certain period of time because different ranges require different mental approach. They feel different. Like if I'm doing sets of four reps, feels very different on the body, different preparation. It's a totally different workout than what I'm doing sets of, you know, 20 reps, right? So ideally what you would do is a few weeks within a certain rep range and then transition to another three weeks of a different rep range. This also helps the adaptation process continue to happen because the body does very well at adapting to what you do, meaning once it adapts and it's kind of hard to squeeze out any more

results. One of the easiest ways to get the body to progress again is to move to something different, which one of the easiest ways to do that is to move to a different rep range. So you definitely want to phase your workouts with rep ranges. That's a real important thing. And then the other one is intensity. Intensity does not need to be this crazy like I'm crawling out of the gym intensity.

You want to train hard, but don't train to where you're lifting away until you can't lift it anymore. You want to train appropriately. Two intents overcomes your body's ability to adapt. Your body just worries about healing. And then what that looks like, by the way, this is how you know that that's happening to you. As you work out real hard, you get really sore,

soreness goes away, you work out really hard, you get sore, soreness goes away. Meanwhile, you're not getting stronger, meanwhile, you're not building muscle. All your body is doing is healing. There's no adaptation happening. If you're picking the right intensity, you know it's working because I'm getting stronger on a relatively consistent basis. I could lift a little more or I feel more stable

or I can do another rep every time I work out. That's when you know you're moving in the way. The more honest you are with your abilities going into this, like do you have any real experience doing this before or do you not? If you don't, it's always better, less is more and also to be able to maybe increase the amount of reps so you can get the practice in. So you really familiarize yourself with these types of movements. And then you can gradually increase weight and lower the reps and kind of experiment with that.

If you're a more experienced lifter, if you haven't gone out of a certain rep range in a long time, you know, now's the time to shift it up and change that. So you get a new stimulus, so your body responds appropriately to that, but really to approach it and do that honestly and know exactly kind of like where you're starting from. Yeah, definitely. You mentioned the main lifts, the rep ranges, the intensity. Obviously, we would lean towards a full body routine.

Now, depending on who you're talking to and where and where start, let's say this person's getting started in January to be consistent and they haven't been consistent Where are you recommending the full one on one to three is obvious right? I think the the program the best fits this is like maps and a ball of the way that's structured now Pretend you're having a conversation with somebody who are you recommending starting just one day a week Who are you recommending just two days a week and Who are you recommending just two days a week? And who would you say start three days a week of this full body routine that we just described? So you could go really far with three days a week,

meaning you could be very advanced in training. I often train three days a week because there's a lot you could do in that workout. So I would say if you're a beginner to intermediate, then you're looking at one or two days a week, two days a week probably being appropriate for most people. If you're more advanced, you've been working out for a little while, three full body workouts a week.

Like I said, you could go really far with that. I mean, old time bodybuilders, this is how they used to train, three days a week full body. So you can go really far with that. Now, we have lots of free information. We have thousands and thousands of hours of podcasts where we go deeper to help you kind of figure out what this workout will look like. But if you want it to be written out for you, simplified, here's the exercise, here's the rep ranges, here's what the form

looks like. You can watch a video, watch someone demo it. The program is Maps and a Ballock. That's the program we tend to start people out on. If you're a complete beginner, start in phase one, if you've got some lifting experience, you can, excuse me, pre-phase, if you're a complete beginner. If you've got some experience, starting phase one, there's three phases past pre-phase. So you can either go pre-phase, phase one, phase two, phase three, or start in phase one, go to two and three. So the program is between nine to 12 weeks long depending on where you start. And because we're doing this episode to help people get started, we're going to make maps and a ball of half off. So we'll take the total price, cut it in half. So if this

is something you want to learn more about or you want to sign up, you go to maps fitness products.com, find Maps and Obolic and then use the code, and Obolic 23. So, and Obolic 23, and that'll give you 50% off this particular program. Look, if you like our show, you can also go to mindpumpfree.com and find more free our show, you can also go to MindPumpFree.com and find more free information. And you can also find all of us on social media. So Justin is on Instagram at MindPump. Justin, Adam is on Instagram at MindPump.com

and you can find me on Twitter at MindPump.com. Thank you for listening to MindPump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at MindPumpMedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballac, maps performance and maps aesthetic, nine months of phased, expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin

to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs. With detailed workout blueprints in over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having Sal and an adjustment as your own personal trainer's butt at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money bag guarantee and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at MindPumpMedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five star rating and review on iTunes and by introducing MindPump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support and until next time, this is MindPump.

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