Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2012: Building the Perfect Workout Program to Hit Your Goals

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

In this episode Sal, Adam, Justin & Doug cover the birth and philosophy of MAPS Anabolic on its ten year anniversary. How the idea came for MAPS Anabolic. (2:04) Trusting the process. (6:46) How athletes trained before steroids. (7:53) Signaling to the body to build muscle. (12:27) Breaking the trends and getting back to basics. (15:32) How money and marketing bastardized the fitness industry. (23:32) A PSA to all trainers and coaches. (29:51) The BIG challenge with selling the program. (32:22) The idea behind the philosophy of MAPS. (41:13) The next level to being a great trainer. (44:52) Related Links/Products Mentioned For Mind Pump Listeners on February 20th, the Nutritional Coaching Institute is hosting their iMPACT and iNCOME Bootcamp. To learn more and sign up, visit here. February Promotion: MAPS Performance, MAPS Aesthetic, and MAPS HIIT are all 50% off! **Code FEB50 at checkout** The Effects of Supraphysiologic Doses of Testosterone on Muscle Size and Strength in Normal Men The Pump: Ego Booster or Muscle Builder? Mind Pump #1827: The 3 Best Rep Ranges To Build Muscle & Burn Fat The Resistance Training Revolution – Book by Sal Di Stefano Starting Strength Mind Pump #1082: The Truth About Beachbody® The Breakdown Recovery Trap, Why You Aren’t Progressing – Mind Pump Blog Muscle Adaptation vs. Muscle Recovery – Mind Pump Blog Sore muscles…what does it mean? – Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump Free Resources   Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube People Mentioned Layne Norton, Ph.D. (@biolayne) Instagram  

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Alright, this is the anniversary for us. Ten years since we created maps and a ball. It's pretty exciting.

By the way, there's some cool stuff to come. Just hang tight. We got some new stuff for you anyway. In today's episode, we talk about how the idea started, what made maps so different, the philosophies behind it. These are things you can apply to your own training, how Doug and I met, how we became partners and then how Mind Pump kind of started. Pretty cool episode.

And this episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, NCI, and they're doing something really cool. So NCI is a coaching institute. So they help coaches and trainers become better and more successful coaches and trainers. And right now on February 20th, the NCI facility. So nutritional coaching institute is hosting. They're impacting income boot camp. It's free. It's five days long.

They'll teach you how to get your first or next five clients how to make your first $10,000. And I had to leave your nine to five job in 90 days. It's totally free. So this is really cool. Take advantage of this. Literally attend, watch, and learn. Go to nciminepump.com forward slash bootcamp. Also, we got a sale going on right now. Three maps programs are on sale. Maps performance, maps aesthetic, and maps hit all 50% off.

If you're interested, go to mapsfitinistproducts.com and then use the coupon code FEB50 for the 50% off. If you're interested, go to mapsfitinusproducts.com and then use the coupon code F-E-B-50 for the 50% off discount. All right, here comes a show. All right, in today's episode, we're going to talk about why maps training programs has been consistently ranked as the most effective training programs out there. I like that. I like that better. I like that better. It's much better. All right. So I so hurt people. I guess we're going to talk about, I guess, the kind of how it all started in what makes the maps programs what they are. Because we have now, we've got tens and thousands of people who've followed the programs. There's a lot of, we talked about this early on, but we've been on air now almost eight years, so we really haven't talked about the deal.

Well, you see, I mean, how is this for you right now? But we've been on air now almost eight years. So we really haven't talked about kind of the deal. Well, you see, I mean, how is this for you right now? You and Doug, right? To think about this, that literally right about 10 years ago, you and him, you were training him, you were working on writing this up. He was testing probably some of the philosophy around it. And you were applying some of the things

that you were coming up with to your clients at time. Have you wrapped your brain around that? That's 10-year anniversary right now? It's been, yeah, man. It's pretty cool. It went by fast, huh, Doug? Too fast. It went by super fast. Does it feel like that long ago? Like, both. It feels like a long time ago. You know what? I feel like when I see old videos, then I go, yeah, it wasn't long ago. But it also feels like it went by, it's like having a kid, like your kid grows up and you're like, oh my god, where'd the time go?

It went by so fast, but so back then, I had a wellness studio. So we did personal training and I had massage therapist there, acupuncturist, people that helped with nutrition, all that stuff. And that's when Doug came in and Doug hired me as his trainer. And now leading up to that point, I had been training people for probably 12 years or so.

So I've been doing it for over a decade. And I was always a student, you know, like you guys, right? A student of a fitness, right? Learning about how things didn't, you know, people did things in the past and what works and what doesn't work. I started training Doug, and Doug had a lot of experience with exercise. He was by no means a beginner.

He had been working out for a long time. He'd follow bodybuilding routines, and he was a bit of a student of the game as well. He came to me because he was referred to me by his chiropractor. Through training Doug, he saw like this really rapid transformation. And how long into our, I guess our relationship was that you approached me. I wish I could remember the exact amount of time, but I would say within the first year, year and a half. Yeah. Oh, so you guys have been training for a while.

For a while. Yeah. Yeah, so I basically, I took some time to see what was actually going to happen as far as the workouts were concerned. I'm sure you were skeptical because of your experience of lifting over the last, what, previous two decades? Yes. So, I had experience working out.

Of course, I had a lot of frustrations working out over the years. And the philosophy that Sal was putting forth was certainly counter to a lot of the things I'd read in the bus and fitness magazines. But again, my experience was such that I had tried all kinds of different things and I hadn't seen the success. I wanted and I was very open to a different approach or different philosophy because obviously if what you're doing is not working,

something's got to change. And so I just, you know, I stood back and just went through the work out with Sal and saw the benefits. And little by little, I started thinking, well, you know, this is something that we should be sharing with other people because it's been game changing for me. Why shouldn't we get this out there? Because most of the information I'd been seeing had been really kind of counter to what Sal was putting out there. How many weeks did it were you into the program

before you kind of had that epiphany? And we're like, wow, this is different, but also super effective in comparison what I've done before. Well, even during the first month, I started seeing some real changes. So I started out and I gained a lot of strength. I started putting on size and I go, okay,

something's working here. So now you're committed. I mean, yeah, I'm committed. And I paid for I think 10 sessions originally. It was your first package. And then he had another package which was 40 sessions. So I- Nice bump sell.

Very nice, yeah. So I poted up the money for that, which was not it was not cheap. Now he was expensive. But I figured, well, you know, once I'm into it, I want to get the benefit. So I'm going to go all in. And so I did that. And then I actually, I think I purchased that

package at least once or twice after that as well. But sometime I think during that towards the end of that first after that as well. But sometime I think during that, towards the end of that first package, the 40s package, I said, I really wanna do something with this guy. So be honest, all these years now we've been together, you pretty much control most of our money.

Have you skimmed most of that money back that you gave to Sal? Yeah, pretty much, let's do this. Let's do this. Let's do this. Here's that first in the game? I remember the first time I really had to convince. So Doug was like the perfect client.

So you guys have done this. I'm sure you've experienced this. You have that one client that at first are skeptical, but then you show them. And then they're like, okay, cool. Let's just, I'll go along and follow what you say. And then it becomes a great relationship to get great results. So he was like the perfect client in that sense. And the first thing I had to convince Doug of was to only work out twice a week. Yeah. That in fact, when he hired me after when he was

hiring me, he wanted to come four days a week. So him and I started talking, he already bought the training and he wanted to do like three or four days a week. And I said, no, no, no, we're going to do two days a week to start with and He had to convince them of it, but you know within a few weeks. You knew okay. This is you know, this is working I'm that speaks to your integrity too because Justin would have sold him on the four times a week You know walked with him on the other two days or so Hard to believe that twice a week was gonna do the trick. I really did But I looked at Sal I looked at Sal, I looked at myself and I go, well, this guy might know something, you know?

So I trusted the process. And he got great, obviously he got great results from it, but towards probably that second or third package that you had done with me, Doug came to me and he says, you know, Sal goes, I have some internet marketing experience. He wasn't an internet marketer. He sold insurance. But he says, I have some experience.

If you ever want to put something together that you want it, that we can sell online, he goes, I'll do that with you. And I had nothing at that point. I didn't really have an idea of what to sell. I'd always thought about writing a book, but I thought, you know, what would that look like, you know, digitally or whatever. And so I took him, what he said, and it thought, what would that look like digitally or whatever? And so I took him, what he said, and it just kind of stayed in the back of my mind

and I went home and it was probably... This is like 2012, 2011, 2013, around there, what time is this? Like your life? Yeah, I would say this was either at the end of 2012 or the beginning of 2013. Okay. Now consider up into this point, at this point,

I had already learned a lot about training and had figured out that a lot of the stuff that I thought was effective wasn't. I do things like, I had probably a few years before this, I really got into learning about how athletes trained before steroids even became a thing, how before supplements became a thing. And this was something that was of interest to me because I knew that anabolic steroids changed how the body responded to exercise. I said, you know, back in the day before that even existed,

they had to train the way that my clients trained, the way that I was training naturally. And there has to be, if they trained differently, then it's because they were natural. So let me see what they did. And when I look back there were so many different things that they did that people didn't do anymore. So up into this point I had kind of figured some of that stuff out. But anyway, he came up to me and said, hey, if you have an idea, I'd love to work with you on it. We could sell it online. And it was probably a week later.

And I went home that night, maybe a week later, I was up late reading. And I would do this sometimes. Sometimes I'd stay up late and I'd read whatever. You guys know, I'll get into something. And I'll just start, you know, kind of go and crazy on it. And I was reading the New England Journal of Medicine. And there was a study that I've quoted many times

on the podcast on, it was a really interesting study. They took groups of men and they compared each group of men to each other on muscle building. And the groups were broken up into natural with strength training, anabolic steroids with weight training, anabolic steroids, no weight training, so just sedentary and then just seditary.

So seditary seditary with steroids, steroids in training and then training naturally. And the results of that blew me away because I did not expect to see what I saw. Well, one in particular, right? Because you obviously, you knew that the steroids and working out was going to be the biggest. Of course.

Like I'm like, they're going to build the most muscle. It's out was gonna be the biggest. Of course. I'm like, they're gonna build the most muscle. It's a unique study, by the way. Very interesting. Yeah. The one that blew me away, because I would have thought second place would have been the natural lifting group. So the group that was natural lifting,

they've gotta build the second most amount of muscle, but it wasn't. It was the steroid group that didn't lift weights. Now, it was a short study. I think it was, I don't know, I wanna say 16 weeks, but in that 16 week period, the steroid group that didn't lift built a little bit more muscle than the natural group

that lifted. And I thought this is insane. The first thing I had was, wow, steroids are really powerful. But then what came to me after that, and I was literally up till 3am thinking about this. And this is when I started writing out the first maps program. As I said, you know what's crazy about this isn't the fact that the steroid group that didn't lift built the most muscle. It's that my previous ideas of how we built muscle is not complete.

of how we built muscle is not complete. So the thought process then was, in order to build muscle, you damaged the muscle with exercise, the body heals, and then adapts. Therefore, to that point, the thought process, I think, for all of us at that point in our lives was like, okay, the more damage I do, the better off I'm gonna be, because then I have louder muscle to say no. The quicker healing to whatever damage you do. Yeah, there was that, but there was also that I had completely ignored that there could be potentially any other muscle building signals. It was damage and that was it.

There's no other signals that send the body receives that says build muscle. Well in this study, clearly there was no damage. There was a hormonal signal, which was the steroids, right? They gave them testosterone. So I thought to myself, and this is why I was up till two or three a.m. that night, I thought, I wonder what other signals tell the body to build muscle that have nothing to do with damage. Like what other signaling systems tell the body to build muscle? So then I was on the internet going crazy and thinking of experience, my experiences with clients and family members. One that popped up immediately was, and again,

I've talked about this before, at least a hundred times in the show, is I had, you know, I have a lot of blue collar workers in my family. I have plumbers and, you know, tile setters, construction workers, and, you know, tile setters, construction workers, male carriers, and none of them work out, but they all had muscular body parts that correlated or corresponded to the activity that they did. So like the male carriers in my family all had these really muscular forms, male, excuse me, calves, male and female,

all had really muscular calves. And the plumbers in my family, these muscular forms, you know, and I'm like, they're not, when you're a plumber or a mechanic or a male carrier, you might cause a little muscle damage at first, but these people have been doing it for 20, 30 years, you know, they're all in the 50s and 60s. That damage stops.

They're like, they're walking more or cranking on things that are harder. After the first couple months, the body's adapted, and that's it. Why are these male carriers calves? And then literally, their calves look like bodybuilder calves, or like, I have an uncle who's in forms or like this. And he was a mechanic, and I thought, or plumber,

and I thought, the damage stopped. What is telling these body parts to continue to grow? And I'm like, there's still some signaling going on, even though there's no damage. Even though there's no damage, there's some signaling going on. So that was like, one like clue that I had. Yes. So you basically had your slip in the shower

flex capacitor moment. Yeah. And it was capacitor moment. Yeah. And it was like signals. Yeah, some like muscle signals. Something in all this different stuff. So I'm like, okay, there's damage. That's a real one. Then there's this like low level frequent signaling system, you know, which I ended up, you

know, figuring out it's kind of like mechanical signaling. Then there's the pump. The pump can actually induce muscle growth itself. then there's the pump. The pump can actually induce muscle growth itself. So there's another one. So then I thought, I'm going to create a program that utilizes all these different signaling systems and puts them together in a way to where the body's constantly getting a signal to build muscle because the challenge with damage is always recovery. You can only damage so much. And then the limiting factor is otherwise, if recovery wasn't an issue, I could just go work

out for six hours in a row and beat the crap out of myself and I'd get better results. And so that's how literally the first MOPE maps program was created. And I remember the day after that Doug comes in in to train with me and I'm old tires, I was up all night and I'm like, I got something, dude. I said, I wrote up a program and we tested it, I had clients test it. And then how long after writing it, testing it with Doug, implementing it with other,

because this is about the same time when you and I start to start to talk too, because you had already kind of tested it on clients. In fact, you guys started to create some of the promo stuff on it. Yeah. Like, how long was that like applying it to the other, the trainers, starting to create the, the promo stuff on it?

Months. It was probably, I would say like a five or six month period, because Doug was first. And Doug had already been working out with me in a similar way, but then I had him apply things like trigger sessions and you know, we did a little bit more phasing. And then I had a client, Jim, good friend of mine. He tested it. Then I had home area, you know, her.

She used to work for for both of us. So I had all kinds of different friends tested, experienced beginner. And I had them report back, you know, tell me what you feel, what you notice. And everybody was reporting back like, wow, this is really crazy, like I'm getting really good results, this is wild. And that's then Doug started putting together. Now at the time, I didn't know,

I knew nothing of internet marketing sales, I had no idea you could put a program online, do all that stuff and Doug's like, yeah, we're gonna put you on video, you're gonna talk to a camera, do the whole thing. Yeah, I'm surprised you guys didn't go to the DVD route. That was kind of like, you know, almost in that era. There wasn't a lot of programs on that era too.

It was like, you had like the infomercials and you had a bit of beach body and maybe some like bodybuilder programs like I'd seen, but not a whole lot of quality fitness programs. I don't know. Well, when he tells this story, one of the things that, I try and challenge myself to think, like, man, I wonder if you would have sent me over when Doug sent over the promo video that Doug made, if that would have been hyping up

like a typical online type of program, like in it didn't have the philosophy, like what was that, that was your guys' anabolic signaling program, you know what I'm talking about, right? That's like a 30 minute video muscle switch. Yeah, the muscle switch. So you got to share a clip of that for this podcast

because when I, yeah, but when you sent it over to me, really you just to share a clip of that for this podcast because when I, when I, yeah, but when you sent it over to me, or really you just wanted my opinion on it, like, hey, what do you think of this promo video? And what I, what I'm, the exercise that I try and do with myself regarding this is, you know, what a mind pump has happened had it not aligned with what at the same time was happening in my life

as far as programming. Because for most of my lifting career and training career teaching other people, I fell in the trap of creative workouts and you know, you like just hammering the clients and volume and intensity and I was very much so like in that space for almost a decade. And I was on my way out of that. Like I had started to finally realize like This was not the answer of one I had applied that same philosophy you did to Doug to myself like reducing the amount of and then saw I got bigger than I ever got

I thought oh this is wild like more doesn't always mean more results And I was starting to train my clients in these full-body routines and simplify the programming. And so I was just coming into that, like really fresh into that for the last, like say six months of my training career. And when I saw that, that is what hit home for me, was like, it was very counter to the trends. Yes, this is not trendy. This is the opposite way,

and it's right in line with what took me my, you know, at this point, my entire career to figure out. And that's what made me pick the phone up and go, let's meet. Otherwise, I would have just given you like, oh yeah, cool bro. Yeah, I like it, you know, it's neat, but it, but it, it, it, it prompted me to like, hey, let's meet. We need to all get together and talk because I don't, there's nothing out there that I see that is presenting this message this way. And it took, and I'm in the space and it took me 10 years to get here.

So imagine how many people that we could really help by putting this out there. Well, I thought the same thing. Well, my career too was like, even after I left 24 and kind of went and did things on my own, I was still kind of like experimenting with a lot of the trends in the fitness industry and like trying to train people with all this functional training and you know single arm, single leg stuff and

all this nonsense. And then I made it to the gym where I was around really high level trainers and sports specific type trainers. And so it just really kind of brought things right back to the basics. Like here's what you know, you've known this before, but you just rush your clients through all of this. And this is really the meat of what we need to focus on. And that had, that program had a lot of that in it,

in terms of like just focusing on how to build muscles. The beauty is in the simplicity of it. Yeah, well, so, you know, and you got to, I mean, you got to kind of go back and think about why training got to that point. Because at that point, we're talking 10 plus years ago, the most common strength training programs were like these body parts split, one body part a day, high volume type of deal,

beat the crap out of yourself, 50 different angles, you know, on whatever. And you gotta think to yourself like why that happened. It's not that those don't work. They do, but a lot of the information on how to build muscle and train with weights, it been disseminated from the bodybuilding space. And bodybuilders for decades were, first off, bodybuilders are at that level, have very little

in common with the average person. They're just genetically, they're just very different. They're, it's like being seven feet tall, they're just genetically gifted. So what does that mean? That means that when they send a muscle building signal to their body, the average person, that signal may last 24 to 48 hours.

For these people, that signal lasts a week or two, okay? Because they're just, their bodies primed to build muscle. Then on top of it, they're all pharmaceutical enhanced, and that means they have this constant loud hormonal signal that's going on in their body all the time. And so they're the ones that are telling people how to work out. The problem is the average person is nothing in common

with this person genetically and is in pharmaceutical enhanced and they're trying to follow these routines and they're not working now if you go back At the turn of the century early 1900s late 1800s These I mean you're talking about tremendous feats of strength from these strong men and strong women right and they were muscular and they were doing crazy Things and if you look at their training they all trained full body. They all trained three days a week they all Train in a similar way and and people, it's funny.

When we look back, we tend to think people are stupid. So we look back, oh, they didn't know we think back then. No, no, no, they were wise. They did what worked. And by the way, the only way they made money back then was they didn't have social media. They couldn't promote themselves in either way.

Then going and challenging other strong men on stage, this is how they made money. So you had to put up or shut up. Then you also look at the studies on strength sports, like Olympic weightlifting. Olympic weightlifting has more science put into it than bodybuilding does because it's been funded by countries. It's the Soviet Union for a long time. This is the way that they showed their power.

And so you look at the science there there and there's a lot of science there that didn't match what we were being told, you know, worked. So there's a lot of the information there. And then the other thing is this is that you look, you guys are both really good trainers, really, really good trainers. What made you guys good? You did it for a long time and you cared. Because if you care about your clients and you do it long enough, eventually, I don't care how hard-headed you are, how big your ego is. Eventually, you ask yourself the same question. Why is it this working? Why am I not seeing results on my clients? Let me try this. Let me try that. So it's like all these different roads, they all go to the truth. That's

why when you saw what I said. It's true at all. That's true. Yeah, so that's why when you guys saw what I sent, it wasn't like new information. It was like, that's what I'm figuring. Well, it was, in my opinion, it was the money and the marketing that bastardized the fitness industry. Because can you imagine opening up a Flex Magazine

2015, 20 years ago and seeing you know, seeing, you know, Ronnie Coleman or Arnold in the middle of it like that and their workout routine was as boring as Maps and Aboli. Like you would not sell anything. What sold was, you know, the tricep, bicep blaster workout with cluster sets and drop sets and pyramids and this unique exercise hanging upside down and that was what sold magazines.

That's what grabbed attention. And if you had the the shit that works really well, that is that everybody's known about for a hundred years, it wouldn't sell. It wouldn't be popular. It wouldn't be new. It wouldn't be unique, which by the way is the same trap that all the trainers inside the gyms fell into. We fell on the same trap on selling our clients,

on buying more training from us. If I told my clients, hey, we need a squat, overhead press, bench press, they looked at, that's basically what we're gonna do for the next six months to a year or so, and I'm gonna get you great results. I wouldn't have been able to resize my clients. Instead, it was next week, I'm gonna show you

something new you've never done before. Or wait till you feel this workout I got coming. And on the other side of that, you brought up the bodybuilding side, but in Justin's world, I think was simultaneously the birth of sports performance, plyometrics, stability, training, functional type of shit was all coming on the scene hard. Then you got the hardcore bodybuilding scene. The two of them, and again, money and marketing, what was cool and the money and the marketing side on that, like, oh man, seeing somebody jump and stabilize on one leg and jump through

all these weird hoops and spin and twist and like balance on a stability ball with a squat bar, you know, on your back, like that stuff became so attractive to people and trainers and clients that it dominated the space. And we all fell for, we all fell right into it. I'm guilty of going down the same path and pursuit of filling my client book up instead of focusing on what was really giving my clients.

So I mean, we all remember people doing tricep press downs while standing on dynodiscs. Yeah? What it was? I heard people doing it. Yeah? What are people doing? Oh, what we're doing. Yeah, everything was balancing and whatever. And that's when the functional, you know,

when it got crazy in that way. And what happens, you ain't never ignoring what actually produces the best results. Instead, you're like entertaining your clients with what's new and what's different. Or reinforcing the terrible idea that the more sore you get, the more painful this is, the more you feel like you're gonna throw up,

that means we're doing something good. And especially when a client comes to you because they hate themselves, it's actually quite therapeutic. Like, oh, I hate, I'm so fat, I can't stand myself. And then you train at the point where they feel like they're gonna throw up and it's cathartic. Yeah, that's what I get. That's what I deserve.

I need to beat it up. You know, how many times you get a client come up to you and say, oh, I need to, why do you want to hire a trainer? Because I need someone to whip me into shape. Yeah. Like what? I won't train myself that hard. Yeah, it's a lot.

Just don't have the discipline. Yeah, dude. So, absolutely. Another thing that is that now, and it's funny too, because we're talking, you know, this was over a decade ago. Now it's almost like this is silly to even say, but this wasn't silly back then Just 10 years ago wasn't silly to say that all rep ranges build muscle You got into debates and arguments with people. It was this rep ranges the best. No that rep ranges the best And I just looked at things and said,

okay, look, power lifters are big and strong. If low rep ranges don't build muscle, why the hell do the power lifters look the way they do? And then I said, high rep ranges build muscle too. I know bodybuilders that train in the 20 rep range. Again, marketing. It's too nuanced to say that. It's much easier on a sales funnel or an infomercial

to say, these reps are for this. These reps are for that. Or these reps are for this body type. It's so much easier to sell that idea than to say something as vague as, all rep ranges, build muscle and lose body fat. Okay, well then what's your kind of confuse the muscle? Yeah, yeah.

And then you can get away with all of them at once. Yeah, or how about this? Like, okay, here's two strength athletes, body builders, beat the crap out of a muscle, leave it alone for a week so it can grow. Olympic weight lifters, practice these movements every day, the same movements every single day. How the heck can those both coincide?

You got hyper frequent Olympic lifters who practice movements on a daily basis for hours, okay? Olympic weight lifters will train two or three times in a day doing practicing snatches and cleans, and you got bodybuilders over here who are like, I only do curls on Tuesday, and I beat the crap out of my biceps And I leave them alone for the whole week like could it be could it be possible? This is this is what would go through my head could it be possible that there's truth in both of them and that if we

Understood that there's truth in both of them could we use what's true in a way to where the average person Could utilize the benefits of both and the answer of course is yes could we use what's true in a way to where the average person could utilize the benefits of both? And the answer, of course, is yes. Yes, there is truth in both of them. And so this is what I started to apply with clients to with myself. And this is what you guys figured out on your own.

Because like I said, look, you train people long enough you're gonna figure this out. It was funny because even in the world that I was sort of training out of, I was getting made fun of for doing bench press in squats because of all of the functional split stance movements. Like there was this whole movement on basically like Bulgarians squat, split squats or lunges.

And that was like, you know, how, you would basically load that as heavy as you could and that was the best way to do that for athletes because of the fact that you're primarily on the field are gonna be in a split stance. And so this whole philosophy around it, which, I mean, you can make an argument, but for me, it was always, I wanna build and establish

that fundamental strength and I wanna, I can load it the most effective way with a barbell. I get strongest doing that, but then I also move out of that and do both. And so it's like, it's not one or the other. It's both. Well, the truth is that, you know, when you, and it's funny,

because when we get like a trainer, who's been a trainer for a really long time, and they hear some of the maps philosophy or hear the way we talk about exercise, they're never impressed. It was like, oh yeah, I know, I know that's obvious. Know that, but nobody has been promoting. Wasn't promoting that, at least not back there.

Nobody applied it. Nobody applied it. 10 years ago, it's always been known, especially if you'd been a trainer for an extended period of time. You knew that this is the nuts and bolts of training, but nobody was applying it because it wasn't what sold. I mean, at the end of the day, most all trainers, whether you are online, virtually, or in-person,

have to feed their families and have a business and keep clients coming in, and that wasn't what was best to keep clients coming. That's the truth. Now, the reality of that is that, yes, it is, because if you stick to good programming, you get a greater percentage of people, way more results, you teach them the fundamentals that they can now carry on forever. And then eventually that comes back to you in referrals

and the reputation that you have, but it's hard to see that when you're in it, right? When you're in it, when you're in the end of it, and you got monthly goals, I gotta sell this much to make this much money. And what's a quick way to do that? Oh, a quick way to do that is just like what all the marketers have done,

which is sell you on simple quick ideas that speak to you so I can keep you coming back versus thinking what is probably really best for these clients? Now, I obviously know you guys now, so I know the answer to this, but even before I knew you guys, I could have made this prediction

that our careers all fall the same path. Initially, you're really good at getting clients, selling them training. They stick around for three to six months, you'll lose them, and then you gotta get new clients, and you're really good at getting new clients. But then what that eventually morphed into as you got good, and did exactly what you said at them,

is clients would stay with you for years. I bet you the last five years of your guys' career, you probably cycled through almost no clients. You had the same clients, they stuck with you the whole time. But the first five years, you probably trained 100 people or more because of that idea that you had to show them different things and get them crazy sore and supers. So there's a huge myth with trainers, which is that you need to show them different things and get them crazy sore and supers. So there's a huge myth with trainers,

which is that you need to entertain your client that way or show them weird shit all the time. The reality is no, you just need to be able to communicate it well, but train them in the most effective ways possible. They don't go anywhere. They stay with you forever and you end up becoming far more successful. Speaking of selling the program,

that's where the big challenge was, because when it's not sexy. Well, when I wrote it out, so here's what I understood about myself, because I was a huge consumer of fitness. I knew that I would buy something if the person explained it to me, did a good job selling it,

but also had some kind of perceived authority. So if it was somebody who I was like, oh, yeah, that person has got some authority. And then they did a good job selling it. I would buy it. Regardless if it looked sexier or not, I would at least consider it. So I'm like, okay, I can explain it well. And that was the video I sent you out of them to review because I knew you had a really good background in fitness

sales. So I said, we sent you the sales video so you could give me some critique on it. But the other part was authority. That was where the challenge was. I remember Doug and I talked about that and we're like, well, how do we build authority? I'm like, well, the only way I know to build authority in the fitness space is to look more jack than anybody else. I'm like, that's not going to happen. Like I could get, like I got shredded, but I wasn't like, you put

me up against on Instagram or at the time in the magazines. No one's going to look at me twice. I don't look like any of these people. So I said, maybe I'll write a book like, how am I going to build this authority? And then we talked about maybe doing a podcast. I thought podcasting would be good because it was long form because I don't wanna use my body to sell anything. I couldn't compete with the people that were out there plus I don't wanna do it that way.

I wanted to be able to talk and explain and build a phantasm. It was created yesterday. Yes, exactly. So that's when we got on the phone at them and we met and then it was like, oh yeah, we gotta do a podcast, because it's long form, and knowing what we know about fitness,

it's unfortunately often sold in short form, which includes a picture and a before and after and a couple taglines, but real fitness, long term success requires long form. How do I know this? How many times, how long did it take you guys to sell your clients to make real changes? Like sometimes years of training them.

Well, to that point, you know that had a lot to do. Obviously with our strategy of not actually selling the program when it was ready to sell. That's right. I mean, when the podcast has started, we are on episode one, the natural progression, I think, for somebody in the space would have been to promote the program that we had to sell. And we did it. We sought out to go prove to people that we could help them for free and change their lives and make an impact on them by giving them free advice and building that authority, building that trust,

building that loyalty, and then we would be able to offer something up to sale, but we had it all along. But thank God we had the experience that we had to know that, to know the importance of, we needed to help these people, we need to show these people first before we try and convince them,

especially since we were trying to convince them to do something that they were gonna look at and go like, oh, Ben, squat, deadlift, overhead prize, come on. Where's the secrets at? Where's the stuff that I didn't know that I'm supposed to do at? And so we had to first build that trust through the show. Think of it this way, right?

If you look at different pastries, if I you if you look at you know different pastries Uh, if I just looked at the ingredients of the different pastries the ingredients will all look the same eggs flour sugar water whatever So that's what you see when you look in a good program versus a bad program except sometimes bad programs have weird ingredients Otherwise, it's like oh, that's basic. It's not that. It's how they're put together That's where programming comes into play the The programming is how much of each, when of each, how do you utilize each and how do you put them in the right sequence? Like when you're making a dish, there's a time when you add the sugar and there's a perfect amount of sugar. You don't just throw it in the beginning, for example, you would throw it at a particular time

or when you would first, you know, do the garlic or whatever, right? So programming is what makes all those ingredients become a super effective program. So you can't look at a program like I know these exercises. Oh look, I understand rep ranges, you know, that's not what makes a program effective,

what makes it effective. And by the way, I wanna be real clear like, you know, that's not what makes a program effective, what makes it effective. And by the way, I want to be real clear, like, you know, there were a couple programs at the time that were really good. And they had, they had gained popularity through forums. At this time, the internet, the fitness space forums were becoming a thing. And the, what I thought was cool about forums was that forums, you had regular people sharing information. There was no marketing. It was all just honesty. And so like starting strength, starting strength had nothing. They had no real marketing, no whatever. But it blew up because people were like, Hey, this real basic sounding program is actually

well. No, that was some of the best. You know, it was competing with beachbody and bodybuilding.com at the time, which was really tough, which by the way, the success in those two companies was completely around the marketing side. Yes. They would create stuff and then have just a good looking body and attach it to this workout that they would offer. Just to get free traffic to their website so they can then pedal supplements to them. That was the model that they had really, really, really, they had done really well.

And beach body, same thing marketed to a demographic or a person attached a sexy body to it. And it was all around the marketing and sales, not only effectiveness of the program, which there's a reason why those were, you know, one of them was what, a $500 million company, they're $4 billion is they were great at marketing, not so great as, which I get this all the time, right? When people ask, they're just talking to my aunt and uncle last night, we're, you know, we've got a chance to hang out with all you guys and, you know,

asking origin story type of stuff. I like, did you imagine it would ever be like this big? And I said, you know, it's crazy, and maybe it's a little bit of the narcissism in all of us. 100% we did. But the truth is this, it's not because I thought I was so great or I think that you guys were, what I knew was that there was companies out there,

like BodyBillion.com and BeachBody, which were massive companies, that there are main nuts and bolts of it was them showing and teaching these exercises and programs that were to be honest Subpar at best and that some of them downright crap. Yeah, a lot of them telling I was trying to give them some respect Because they you know there are some and bodybuilding a calm there was some like there was the lane Norton's in there and stuff like that That they were still producing so I don't want to like completely shit on bodybuilding.com, but for the most part, most of them were very subpar

or on your point with beach body shit. And what we had to offer, I knew was incredibly, I think what I could have wrote in my 20s would have been better than a lot of that stuff. Well, we had finally come together at this point and realized was this was extremely valuable. And if we could just get get to a fraction of those people, I knew that we would be able to help most all

of us. I think that's why it was easy to get behind it and to your point about programming and how, you know, it's all about, you know, the structure of the sequencing, the thought behind the actual person experiencing the workout itself. We went through the actual training of it in terms of being with vast numbers of people taking them through that entire process and this is where you see a disconnect with industries like producing actors to kind of like portray this stuff. There's just this massive disconnect from your everyday average consumer.

And so to then take sort of that blueprint that was constructed in anabolic and then deconstruct it and be like, here's the elements of it and here's why this works. And then now apply a lot of the concepts of how, you know, I used to train clients, I used to train clients, I used to like prepare for a bodybuilding show, how we used to train clients, I used to train clients, so we used to prepare for a bodybuilding show, how we used to prepare for getting ready for the off season. All of these factors now made sense in terms of how we can take that same elemental blueprint and then build upon it.

Yeah, the irony you said about bodybuilding.com is the forums of bodybuilding.com or what got a lot of the truth out there. You talked about Lane Norton. That's how Lane became Lane. It was in the forums, the free forums of Bodybuilding.com, starting strength blew up, which is a great, you know, basic program. It's better than 99% of the strength training programs out there were through the forums, five

by five. So basic. So whatever were through the forums, five by five. So basic, so whatever. Came through the forums. And that's where you would read this kind of stuff, and this is where I would be like, oh, like old time strength training. And here was, you know, here's the, really the gist of it.

The gist of it is this, and it's more complicated than this, but this is really kind of what it boils down to. If you're trying to build muscle and you want all of the benefits of building muscle, this fast metabolism, it's easier to get leaner, sculpt the body, look good, or whatever. If you want to build muscle, the muscle building signal needs to be more consistent than the muscle breakdown signal. That's it. Okay. My body needs to be told or want to build muscle more often than a brakes muscle down because you're never stable.

Your body's never not doing anything. There's this false belief that you just maintain. No maintenance is when building and breaking down are balanced. If they're equal, then you don't, you build and you break down. You're building and break down and you stay the same. If you want to build, then you have to build more, then you break down. You're building breakdown, you stay the same. If you wanna build, then you have to build more, then you break down. If you wanna lose muscle and you need to break down,

more than you build. So once you understand this and you look at studies on muscle protein synthesis, which they can actually measure to a decent degree when your body's building muscles through the signal called muscle protein synthesis. And they can test, you do squats, let's test them, your muscle protein synthesis, it's elevated.

How long does this they elevated for? Oh wow, two to three days max. Then it goes down, but wait a minute, the person's still sore, it doesn't matter. They're still sore. Muscle building signal's gone. In fact, two days after, it's gone. It starts to go below baseline.

This is why people work out, get sore, recover, quote unquote, go back to the gym, do the same thing, but never progress because they're breaking down as much as they're building. So the goal, the idea, the whole, if you really want to boil it down to the most simple terms, the idea behind maps, the philosophy of maps is, can we keep that muscle building signal elevated more often than the breakdown signal? That's all it is. The, again, the problem was, I can send a muscle building signal

through damaging muscle, but then recovery gets in the way. I can't just keep doing that. So now, it's up for two or three days, it's going down, do I beat the crap out of the body? Real hard, I can't because if I do that, recovery says no. Sorry, we're not even gonna build, we're just gonna heal. We just gotta heal.

This is why you'll get sore and your soreness goes away, but you go back to the gym, nothing happens. What happened? Your body just healed. Adaptation is different than healing. Adaptation is above healing. Healing, and then it's like I scratch my hand, my skin heals, and if I do it right, then I'll develop a slight callus,

and over time I develop a callus. That's the muscle-building process. So the idea with MAPs and Obolic was, which was the first one, and with all the MAPs programs is, can we get the signal to stay throughout the whole week, even though recovery's happening, even though all these other things are happening and the the answer to that is yes

You definitely can't which is why people then when we finally launched maps at a bulk which was a year after we did Mind pump and the goal with mind pump was like you said Adam was Can we give people a lot of good information? Can we build authority? Well people believe us? And at that point, if that all works out, then we'll say here's a program that we have.

Now you can buy, because we had the program done. The program was done. It was ready to go. The digital part was set up, the videos were done. We did no other work. When we had it ready for a year, we didn't launch it for a year, because we want to approve to our audience, A, the videos were done. We did no other work. When we had it ready for a year, we didn't launch it for a year

because we want to approve to our audience, A, that we have integrity. So we're not just trying to sell you something. And B, we know what we're talking about. Do you remember whose idea it was out of you too? Because you actually didn't even use the term that stuck with me forever. And why I love that video so much,

because it really hit home for me when I watched it It's the scene where you guys show the bear trap and you talk about the muscle recovery trap You say the muscle recovery trap. Yep, and that That clip of that 20-minute video or what do I thought hit home for me so much that I was like oh my god like How many of my clients have got stuck in this how How long have I got stuck in this exact situation? So focused on doing damage to see how much results I can get, yet never letting my body get enough recovery, adequate rest, adequate nutrition to actually build and adapt.

I was so focused on the damage part, I wasn't focused on the adaptation process. That part of that clip, I remember sticking to me so much, do you remember if it was a term you came up with and then you came up with the like the visual of it or did you put together a term? You remember how that came together? So Sal came up with the term, I just put the visual behind it. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So because that was a powerful moment in that for me. So one thing that I learned as a trainer, I know you guys did as well, is you could understand the idea and what works, but what makes you effective as a trainer is you have to say it in a way, sometimes you have to say it 5,000 different times in different ways, but at some point you're saying a way to where the client goes, oh, that makes so much sense, because I could say all day long, like, oh, you know, you damage the muscle, and then it needs to heal, but then recovery,

and that's the recovery, but then adaptation happens after that. And the person can hear you and be like, oh, yeah, that kind of makes sense. And then, you know, one day, and I use this with clients, one day I say, hey, look, I don't want you to get stuck in the breakdown recovery trap,

and clients will be like, huh? What's that? I'll be like, well, it's when you break down a muscle, you let it recover, you break it down again, you let it recover, you break it down again, you let it recover, you break it down again, but no actual muscle growth or changes happens. It's just break down recover, break down recover, and it's a trap. It's a hamster wheel.

You're just running on the same hamster wheel. Once I was able to say it that way, it really resonated with clients. So when I told Doug that, Doug's like, oh yeah, perfect. And he came up with the picture of the bear trap. Yeah, you know, even though I had come to that conclusion understood that I had never heard it communicate that way. That one, I remember that one in the AMP story,

I always shared that you shared first that those two were things that I understood but still had yet to put like eloquent words to how to explain. Cause you're always looking as a trainer. You can read all the PubMed studies you want and apply all the science. And then the next level to be a good trainer,

first obviously is to acquire that knowledge, but then how do you translate that to the average person so that they have that aha moment. And that to me, I'm always seeking that, right? Even to this day, I'm always looking for better ways to communicate the things that I've learned through my experience and reading. And I had come to that conclusion around how I should train

because I was training myself that way now, but still getting that point across to a client, so they understood what they were doing. I was like, oh man, I was a powerful way to do that. Tell me that didn't resonate with you as a kid. I would do the same thing. I'd go hammer my whatever my legs and then I because it's like I thought that recovery meant adaptation That's what I thought I thought recovery is the adaptation process I'd hammer my legs and then I'd be so afraid to do anything I'll go like that like this. Yeah, I'd sit on I'd sit on the couch and watch TV. You be like, oh let them grow

Yeah, you know and then you And then you end up injuring yourself at some point for something else and you have to wear a brace or whatever. You lose muscle hull a fast. Like, this doesn't make sense. Like just sitting there, that sends a signal to the body that shouldn't, not just not build muscle,

that it should get rid of muscle. So what's going on here? And yes, I get sore and the soreness goes away, but then I go work out again, and I'm not stronger. It's gotta be something else. And it's because adaptation happens somewhat separately. They tend to happen at the same time, similarly, but they're different.

And I learn this through even my own training. Like how many times has this happened? You guys probably later in your career, where you use a little sore, but you train the same movement or muscle, and then you still build muscle and get stronger, even though the soreness is still kind of there. And then you kind of figure it like, oh, this is, hmm, yeah. Soreness is really not what I thought it was, and recovery might not be necessarily, you

know, part of this whole adaptation thing. So, and I really, again, the key is what you do is you look at, and you guys do the same thing, and all trainers, any coach or trainer has been doing this for a long time. This is exactly what you do, so I know it'll resonate, is you look at the problem, you look at the potential solutions, and then you look at the roadblocks with that solution, and you say to yourself, how can I move around those roadblocks? What are ways that I could either train or rep ranges

or how can I utilize intensities that gets around this problem right here? And then eventually what happens, you end up building this formula of ways to do so. And then of course when you train people, it's very individualized. So it's a little different from person to person, but you end up with this kind of basic road map, if you will, where, okay, this is how it works.

And so that's really the whole idea. And now we're coming up on, this is the 10-year anniversary, and like I said, it came by real fast. I'm excited for the cake smash that Justin says you're going to do in your face when you're not ready to do it So happy 10-year anniversary. That's what the actual cake is. Let's see what you're talking about. 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 Mind Pump Media dot com. For more information, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at MindPumpMedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballac, maps for formants, 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 and over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having sour, animal, and Justin as your own personal trainer's butt at a fraction of the

price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at MindPumpMedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five star rating and review on iTunes and by introducing MindPump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support, and until next time, this is MindPump.