Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2027: How to Improve Your Squat, Bench, and Deadlift Strength

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin cover six steps to improving your strength in the big lifts. One of the single most effective things you can do to change the appearance of your body is to simply get stronger at the bench press, the squat, and the deadlift. (1:28) There are VERY few exercises that have such broad carry-over to other exercises than the Big 3. (5:21) The biggest limiting factor when it comes to developing a nice physique and body. (10:39) The importance of having your muscles work in sync. (12:41) Six Ways to Improve Your Squat, Bench, and Deadlift Strength. #1 - Practice each movement often. (19:40) #2 - Focus on the movement NOT on muscles. (23:42) #3 - Prime properly to summon max CNS power. (27:42) #4 - Don’t neglect mobility. Instability causes plateaus and injury. (37:45) #5 - Include hypertrophy work. (41:28) #6 - Follow good programming. (43:38) Related Links/Products Mentioned Special Promotion: MAPS Powerlift 50% off! **Code POWER50 at checkout** For a very limited time Equi.life is offering the first 500 Mind Pump Listeners your Inflammation Score Test completely FREE! (Just pay shipping & handling)  Fire up your Central Nervous System to maximize Muscular Adaptation – Mind Pump Blog Stop Working Out And Start Practicing – Mind Pump Blog ‎Iron Path on the App Store Adam Schafer Back Development Deadlifts Post Adam Schafer Priming Instagram Post Mind Pump #1765: Bodybuilding Vs. Powerlifting With Ben Pollack Mind Pump Free Resources          Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube People Mentioned Jeremy Buendia (@jeremy_buendia)  Instagram Ben Pollack, Ph.D. (@phdeadlift) 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 Today's episode. Get your bench press, your squat, and your deadlift through the roof, by the way, because we're talking about those lifts, if you're interested, we have created a specific program

for those lifts, it's called Maps Power Lift, and because we are doing this special episode, Mass Power Lift will be 50% off for a limited time. So if you're interested, go to mapspowerlift.com and then use the code Power50 for the 50% off discount. Now, this episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors. Dr. Stephen Cabral and his team are offering an inflammation test.

This is phenomenal, right? If you have proper amounts of inflammation, you build more muscle, burn more body fat, and you feel good, but if your inflammation is off, you feel stiff, irritable, depressed, you got poor sleep, your skin looks bad. How do you know what's going on? You can take a very simple inflammation test.

If you're interested, go to stevencobrawl.com-inflamation. Steven is spelled S-T-E-P-H-E-N, then C-A-B-R-A-L.com-forge-lash-inflamation. By the way, the test is totally free. They'll send you the test for free. All you gotta do is pay for shipping and handling. All right, here comes the show. One of the single most effective things you can do

to change the appearance of your body and the positive is to simply get stronger at the bench press, the squat, and the deadlift. So today's episode, we're gonna talk about those three lifts and specifically how you get stronger at those three lifts. Those three lifts are known as the big three. The three heavy hitters. The big three for a reason.

I almost feel like we have to hammer this more than usual. I was just on Instagram yesterday and two different poaches. Coaches in our network and circle of friends are making posts about you don't need to about, you don't need to squat, you don't need to deadlift, you don't need to bench press. And I really, I hate that message.

And it's not that, it's not true. Like, of course, you could take those three exercises out and you could actually do other things and build a great physique, but it brings so much value. Not just what it can do for the metabolism and sculpting your body, but even just the pursuit of trying to get good at those movements have tremendous value. Yeah, it's like, look, you don't need to use a shovel to dig a hole.

You could definitely use a spoon, but one of them is going to get there faster. With these exercises, especially squat and deadlift, especially those two, getting the kind of results that most people are looking for when they work out where they develop muscle, they sculpt their body, speed up the metabolism, which helps with fat burning. It's very hard to replace those exercises with three other exercises. You can maybe do it with 10 or 15 other exercises, but then you've obviously got the limitation of things like recovery and time.

But when it comes to paying for your buck, there's almost no comparison. There's a reason why they're known as the big three. There's a reason why those exercises are preferred by strength athletes in many different sports, both in bodybuilding, which is presentation sport, bodybuilders, especially when they first start out, do those exercises quite a bit. Power lifters, obviously, that's their competition. Strong men, competitions, Olympic lifters will do these exercises, even though they don't

compete with those exercises. Coaches who coach athletes, football coaches and basketball and baseball coaches will incorporate these exercises in their routines. They just have tremendous, tremendous value. And especially when you're somebody who has worked out for less than a couple of years, like gaining 50 pounds on your bench press or your deadlift or your squat, you're going to see really, really significant changes in the way you look from doing those things. And the carryover for functionality is massive. So it's just, to me, it's stupid when people try, and I know what they're doing, what they're

trying to do, and one of the hacks for getting attention on social media is to take a popular notion and try to find a way to counter it because then people are like, oh, what's this thing that? I hear such good things about these exercises. Here's this person saying, I don't have to do them, so it gets through your attention.

Well, but yeah, I mean, these exercises are hard, and I think that's just something that's always like pretty obvious for people when they step into it. They're simple, very simple type of exercises and movements, but there's a lot of room for improving on the technique and sharpening. A lot of little nuances that go into it that help. You see it almost immediately once you really sharpen certain types of techniques and you get into these exercises with all of these different angles of how I can improve.

And you see what that does in terms of how it translates to every other exercises. This is like these exercises specifically have the most carryover. They do. One of my favorite examples is a personal example. When we started the podcast, Adam was still an active professional IFBB physique competitor, so he was at a very high level. And physique has nothing to do with how much you can lift. It's literally your on stage and they're judging your physique. Okay.

And up until that point, Adam didn't do lots of dead lifts. He'd done them in workouts, but your heart will ever do them in your workouts. And then we started the podcast. There was a whole period there where all of us got competitive with each other. And we want to see how good we could deadlift. And I'll let you tell the story

because I remember when you came back after doing this and you were like, it's so weird. I can row more, I can do more pull ups, I can do all this other stuff, and I stopped doing those. Yeah, no, at one point, I can do more pull-ups, I can do all this other stuff and I stop doing those. Yeah, no, I was at one point I was primarily doing just dead lifting. I mean, really started to approach like my programming, like, okay, the goal was to catch Sal and dead lifting. At that point, you were dead lifting so much more weight than I was and I was like, well, I've actually never tried to apply myself and see if I could get really

that strong in it. And I remember in order to do that, I had to eliminate a lot of the other stuff that I was doing because I was focusing so much on either deadlifting, it's like traditional conventional deadlifts or all the variations and other things that I could do to complement the deadlift. That was the focus. That was the main focus. So there was things like the seated row.

I was still doing some lap pull down and things like that that I hadn't done in there, even like lying leg curls. I'd stopped doing stuff like that. And it blew my mind on eliminating those exercises in my routine for nearly a year, and then returning back to them and PRing all of them. I mean, lifetime PR. Like that's a, we talk on the show a time about how difficult it is to see, you know,

like big strength leaps in any of the exercises that we do because we've been training for so long. Yeah, you were already advanced, like you were the beginner. Yeah, so, I've been doing those movements for a very long time and have incrementally gotten a little stronger over years and years of lying leg curls and seated row. And then I get this deadlift. And I think my deadlift, I think when I first started,

I was literally deadlifting 200 and something pounds. I mean, that's basically about where I was at and worked my way all the way up to 550. And once I got to that point and I returned back to these exercises, that's the only time that's ever happened by the way in my life where I've eliminated a specific movement and for something else and then returned back to that movement and it was actually stronger. That's never happened. I've never stopped doing an exercise, did other exercises, came back to that movement, and it was actually stronger. That's never happened. I've never stopped doing an exercise,

did other exercises, came back to it, and I was significantly stronger. It just, it doesn't make a lot of sense, or it's just not common that you would do that, or you would leave anything, because the body is very specific the way it adapts to movements. And I know that and I understand that.

So I wasn't expecting to get under the seated row or get under the lying leg curls and be able to move the weight up to significantly higher than I've had without doing it at least for a while. And so that was and then visually what I had seen. I mean, I wish I had it. I got to find it somewhere. I know we've posted a long time ago on this show. So those that have been listening have already heard and seen the story, but you know, there's a very clear difference in the

development of my back. And by the way, you bringing that up reminds me, I was just watching Jeremy Buendia who is the ex. I think he's what for five time Mr. Olympia for Men's physique. And he's now, he's like barefoot squatting, barbell, deadlifting, deadlifting. And it's so bigger than he's ever. Oh, bro, he looks insane. Yeah. He, he, I don't know if he's going to go into classic or what, but and he had, obviously he had a champion physique already and has had one, you know, four or five championships already in, in IFBB. And so he looked good already. But his size, what he looks like now is he's already,

and it's only, I've been watching him do this for maybe the last year and a half, two years. I can't remember precisely, but he's now reintroduced those movements that were not a part of his training, and you're just seeing his body. And that was what I experienced. I'd already been in advanced lifter.

I diluted and squatted sporadically in my routine, but it was never a cornerstone of my routine. When we got together, it was when I started to train that way. And the leap that my physique had in that short amount of time was unprecedented. Yeah, and to be clear, this doesn't mean that other exercises don't have value. This doesn't mean that other exercises don't have value, this doesn't mean that that's what you should do necessarily. All this is highlighting is a

personal experience that shows that, and I've seen this, by the way, with client after client after client after client. Some of them advanced, most of them beginners, where I would just say, hey, let's just get you strong at this. And then you'd see this crazy carryover to other stuff. That's what this is highlighting. What it's highlighting is there's very few exercises and movements that have such a broad range of carryover to other exercises. What does this mean? This means that these exercises are extremely efficient and effective.

Why is that important? Because the limiting factor, the biggest limiting factor when it comes to developing a nice physique and body is your ability to recover and the amount of time that you have. Those are the two biggest limiting factors. If you had unlimited recovery, then it wouldn't matter. You would just do all the exercises. You go to the gym and you'd have a list of 200 exercises and you do every single one and you'd be totally fine.

But you can't because you're limited by your body's ability to recover. Anybody who knows anything about exercise, especially strength training, we'll tell you that. The second is limited time. You can't just work out all the time. You just can't, most people can't, right? So you're gonna go to the gym

and you're gonna get in there three days a week, okay? Four days a week or two days a week or one day a week. Well, we want efficiency and effectiveness. That's what we want. And what you get with the bench press and especially the squat and the deadlift is something that's so efficient and so effective that they literally take the place of many times, take the place of lots of other exercises. And this is why gaining, you know, 50 pounds on a squat or 50 pounds on a deadlift looks way different in the mirror than gaining 50 pounds on a leg press or a hack squat or a pulldown or a cable row, right? It just looks way different in the mirror. And then for athletes, for athletes, oh my gosh, you know, when I competed as a grappler in judo and jujitsu,

if I got stronger in my deadlift, I could feel it on the mats, 100%. I got stronger in other exercises, and maybe sometimes I did, sometimes I didn't. But when my deadlift was up, if I got a hold of you, you're gonna get some frequent flyer miles because I was a lot stronger. So it's just, these are exercises that have a lot of that carryover, have a lot of that

power. So it makes a lot of sense. Regardless of what your goals are, you don't have to do this all the time, but definitely do a cycle, a nice block of just trying to get stronger at these lifts. Well, what I like about these specific exercises too is it highlights how important it is to have that synchronicity between all of your muscles and have everything working. With these compound movements, you have to be able to communicate all the way from your fingertips to your toes.

You have to be able to have that kind of control and be able to summon that kind of force from your body. So this really teaches you to be able to even summon force. You're not. So your body is limited by its weaknesses, especially around the joints. And so to be able to kind of figure out this process of how to generate more force, this is this is what these specific exercises are very, very good at because there's no way around it. You're either going to get stronger at them by being able to master that process or

it's going to crush you. What you're pointing out or you're talking about is the value these exercises have in regards to your central nervous system. This is also why one of my favorite things that Sal has ever said on the show was the analogy that he gave with, you know, speakers in the amplifier being your central nervous system and your speakers being the muscles and how important that is, and anybody understands how, you know, an amplifier works for speakers,

you can have massive speakers, but you have a really weak amplifier, you never get the full potential. The speakers are wasted way so to speak. Yeah, that's right. And in fact, most people that understand the amplifier and speakers would make the case that the amplifier is the most important piece because with that, you can get so much more and you can continue to get bigger and bigger speakers.

So, and when you, I think of these movements, one of the simplest way that I could explain it to a client is that by us training and getting good at these movements, we are investing in a better amplifier. Totally. We are upgrading here. And, and it's potential increases. And by the way, all exercises contribute to that, but none of them contribute at the level that those exercises. So if I have the ability to back to your other analogy

with the spoon and the tractor or whatever being a shovel or whatever to dig a hole or whatever, like that just did. Like yes, those other exercises are other ways to improve your central nervous system to improve your speakers, but you're not going to improve them nowhere near as much as you can with the squat, the deadlift and bench. And so, and a lot of that has to do

with the reason why most people don't do it, which is the difficulty of it. Because it's hard, it has a longer process to get adapted to. So it takes me, like you do a bicep curl, it doesn't take very long for your body to figure out how to do that movement really well. And then you progressively overload it, add some weight to it, and then it adapts to that relatively quick.

Man, you could be at the same weight of squatting for like six months, and the body still adapting from that. And it's because of the difficulty and the nuance of that movement, because there's so much going on when you talk about the communication to all the muscles synchronizing everything together. And that's a good thing. So the fact that it's difficult and it takes us a long time to get good at it and adapt to it

is also means that we can reap benefits from it for a lot longer than other exercises. Yeah, just one thing to pile on to all of this is an example of like, let's say you're bench pressing and there's just a little bit of a shift You're not bracing Good enough. You're not anchoring your body down good enough. You're not going to be able to Create that kind of loud amplitude right from your from your amp Like it's not going to be able to give you that as much as you would. Once you learn that process of being able to really tighten all those other supporting

muscles to be able to keep your body stable and secure, now I can lift a lot more weight. Here's a good example for someone. Someone explained it to me this years ago, Powerlifter explained it to me this way, and it was like, it made total sense. It's not, and the reason it, this conversation started was because I didn't understand why grounding my legs and using leg drive would help my bench press. I was a kid, and this powerlifter was trying to teach me how to get a better bench press, to develop better chest and shoulders and triceps.

And he says, drive it to the floor with your legs. What do the legs have to do with a bench press? My legs do nothing. This is a chest exercise. This is a chest exercise. Hold me, I put my legs on the floor. What do the legs have to do with a bench press? My legs do nothing. Hold me, you know, I put my legs on the floor like what are they doing? And he says here try this out. And he says, out squeeze your right hand as hard as you can, but keep the rest of your body totally relaxed, including your face. So everything else has to be totally dead, but just squeeze your hand as hard as you can. And I did. And he says now squeeze your hand as hard as you can, but go ahead and

tense up the rest of your body. He goes, you notice the difference? I said, yeah, I get squeezed way harder. In fact, you do this naturally. You try and squeeze something as hard as you can. You'll notice the rest of your body turns, the harder you push that you achieve, the more you activate the rest of your body.

Why is that? The central nervous system fires more juice when it's firing, oh, when the whole thing is firing. If I'm firing to my hand It'll only power up with so much juice. If I fire up to the whole body It's gonna fire up more not just because it's firing the whole body more, but it's also firing more to my hand What these movements do because they utilize so many muscles because they require stability and balance because a squat requires you to also have a tight upper back and grip and core. Because a bench press requires you to drive your feet

into the floor and a deadlift requires you to grip your hands real tight, stay straight and strong, brace your core, your calves, your ankles, your knees, your hips. It is training your CNS. This carryover goes to every other exercise because when your amp is better, here's what happens.

So using the amp on the speaker analogy, imagine now that the speaker had the ability to adapt to the amplifier. Imagine you have this super intelligent AI speaker and the speaker adapts to the amplifier. So if the amplifier gives just enough juice to the speaker, speakers are going to stay the same size. But imagine if the amplifier fires more juice than to the speaker, speakers are going to stay the same size. But imagine if the amplifier fires more juice into that speaker and the speaker is like, uh-oh, we need to become bigger to handle the juice

that the amplifier is putting out. Guess what happens? Your speaker then adapts and grows. This is what happens to your muscles. If your CNS is firing more effectively and efficiently, your muscles adapt by growing and by building. So you're not just stronger in the gym, which is great.

A lot of people just want to get stronger too, but your muscles also adapt to this. Now there's value and bodybuilding training. There's value and figuring out how to connect to individual muscles. There's value in all that stuff. But today's episode, not about that. Today's episode, what I'm trying to convince people of

is I don't care what your goal is. I don't care if it's fat loss. I don't care if it's aesthetics., I don't care if it's aesthetics, and definitely if you're interested in powerlifting, then you're gonna want to listen. But I don't care what your goal is, if you go through a nice block of just getting stronger at these lifts,

you'll see improvements regardless of what your goals are. Even just athletic performance. Oh, it's awesome. That's right. So, let's start with the first important tip with getting a better bench press squat and deadlift,

which is this. This may sound obvious, but you need to practice each movement often. Practice each movement often. Why? Because a lot of strength has to do with your ability to perform a movement with good efficiency and good skill. Strength is as much a skill as it is

as much muscles moving things. Okay, if you practice something more often, you get better at that and you're able to lift more weight and then the adaptations happen faster. So to use a different example, it would be like trying to throw a baseball faster by not practicing throwing a baseball, by just working on the muscles that contribute to throwing a baseball. So imagine if you had two people and one guy's like, I'm just gonna work on all the muscles that are involved with throwing a baseball.

So I'm just gonna build those. And the other guy's like, I'm gonna do that, but I'm also gonna practice throwing. So I could get better at throwing and better technique. Who's gonna end up throwing the baseball faster at the end of that experiment, right? So practice the movements often because if you get better at the movements, you get stronger

at the movements, then you build more muscle and you see better results. This is also the answer for the people that are that were listening to the first part of our rant here and going like, well, I can't do those movements or I, you know, I, every time I do it, I hurt myself from not like part of doing these movements isn't necessarily always just loading the bar up and then squatting and squat more and squat more and squat more. We said practice. Yeah, it's, you know, you can be your body weight. It could be just the bar and you're not loading very much at all.

It could be, you know, doing it and then videoing it and then critiquing what's going wrong with it. It could be hiring a coach or someone to help you get good at just that one movement. It could be noticing and realizing, oh, wow, like I have really poor ankle mobility. So then you're doing a lot of combat stretch. Maybe it's stuff that your hips are really tight and they bother you. So you're doing 90 90 stuff. So you're doing all these things to compliment doing the squat and practicing and getting good at it. Just like you wouldn't any sport. Like you wouldn't just go and expect to play at an NBA level game right away and just play with the players.

And without ever having learned how to dribble a ball or shoot it or do any of the skills that set you up for success. Right. No, to kind of add on to that analogy with practicing, like even yes, the individual part of it, like if you're looking at it as I have these, you know, different components of what makes

a baseball throw effective. And I'm not like in a train each one of my muscles individually for that, but also to be able to, let's say I have a couple players playing together. Let's say they're trying to turn a double play. You need to practice with the team. You need to practice with the other players. So, your other muscles being the other players in order to be effective and be able to really pull off the technique and sharpen the technique is to be able to run those drills constantly with everybody together contributing. Yeah. It's so cool to how, you know, I doing this for 20 something years. Yeah, yesterday I left it and I squatted and I've been inconsistent for the last couple of weeks.

And so I know I didn't need very much intensity to send a signal right to my body to adapt. And what I love about the squat is like, I could barely load the bar yesterday and just took my time and worked on my technique and the way my hips were opening up, how it was coming out of the hole, how it was dropping down into the squat.

I mean, I'm just, I'm so sore from such a, I can't do that with any other movement. I can't like come in and do a bicep curls and like, oh, I'm just going to work on the technique. Yeah, with like 10 pounds today, I won't even feel it. You're getting nothing out of it. I'm getting nothing out of it. But squat is the squat, the deadlift, but won't even feel it. You're getting nothing out of it. I'll get nothing out of it. But squat, the deadlift, the bit these movements are so technical, even after all these years of doing it,

all it takes is me being away for a little bit and I could barely load the bar and just be a technique day and get tremendous benefit from that. That's what's so special about those movements. Yep, all right, so number two is to focus on the movement and not on the muscles. All right, so that sounds weird, right?

Muscles are moving the bar. What do you mean don't focus on the muscles? Okay, there's a time and a place when you're training your body and you're trying to hit your quads, when you do an exercise or your lats, when you're doing an exercise or your pecs or your delts. That's bodybuilding training that also has value.

But with this specific topic of getting stronger at these lifts, don't worry about what muscles are activating and where you feel it. Practice the movement. Focus on maximizing the movement. So when you get into your squat, who cares where you feel it, unless of course, something's hurting and not feeling right,

in which case, definitely pay attention. But if you're doing the movement, make sure you perfect the movement itself, and don't worry about the muscles that you're using. So how can I maximize efficiency and effectiveness with the bench press so that it feels the best and I can lift the most weight? How can I practice my deadlift

so that it feels the tightest, the smoothest, there's no leaking energy, and I can lift the most weight. Same thing with the squat. There's a couple of things with that in terms of like shifting instead of trying to feel your way through the muscle and just focusing on the movement. So the bar path and to be able to kind of create the most optimal alignment and path. And any kind of stray away from that is going to be a leak of Performance and to also be able to Prevent your body from shifting and and and stop it from rotating and you know

these are all considerations especially you know with performance and athletes and athletes that You know this is this is a totally different mindset so coming in with a different mindset instead of, you know, trying to highlight certain muscle groups and really be able to feel them contributing, it's more about like the control of the movement where you want everything to end up when you need to add and intensify the amount of effort

you're putting into that movement. So it's just a completely different mindset shift. One of the best tools I've ever seen in regards to what we're talking about right now is an app called Iron Path. I just think that I wish this was around when I first was kind of coming up and it completely highlights what we're talking about right now, which is just focusing on the movement, especially when we talk about the deadlift and the squat, and those movements are so technical and to have this,

and what it is, if you've never seen this app, it's a free app, download it, I think it's a must-have, you set your phone up, you record yourself, doing your deadlift or squat, and it actually tracks the bar path. It draws a line, right? So in the video, you see me deadlift, and it has this little,

you know, hopefully it's not squiggly, hopefully it's as straight as possible and it's following the same path. But what you see is it actually, there's a lot of this kind of forward and back or what about that. That's all leaks and power. Yes, right. And and and it gives you something instead of caring about how much weight you're loading on it is a put enough weight on there that you can feel, feel the movement and then perfect that and get so good at it that you could get it to be perfect without you having to record and critique and go back and forth. That's using something, a tool like that, I think is so valuable. I'm going to use an analogy so people understand we talk about power leaks, right? So imagine you're blowing into a straw and at the end of the straw is like a spit watch, right? Remember when you used to shoot spit wads across the room, so you're blowing into a straw, and at the end of the straw is like a spit wad, right?

Remember when you used to shoot spit wads across the room, so you've got like a piece of paper at the end. And the goal is to blow into straw as hard as you can to shoot that spit wad out, right? But now imagine the straw has got holes along the sides of it, like it's a flute. And you blow in it real hard, not a lot of power is gonna get to that spit wad.

Now I'm gonna be able to generate a lot of force. Now imagine if you seal those holes up, there's zero leakage, you'll blow on the straw and all that force goes through the straw to the spit-wad. Now you've generated a tremendous amount of power. So this is what practicing the movements does. Is you able to maximize where your strength and power goes, minimize any leakages and power. Control and direct it. That's right.

All right. Number three is prime properly to help you summon Max Central Nervous System power. All right, what the hell does that mean? I'll give you guys, I'll tell a story of the first time I ever experienced what the hell this was for myself. So years ago, now when we were kids

growing up in the 90s, the exercise that everybody compared strength over was the bench press. This was the lift. So if you worked out and your buddies found out that you worked out, nobody cared about anything but the bench. How much did you bench? That was a test of strength. So, bench mark was also associated with that? That's like came from somewhere else. No, that's interesting. Yeah, that is interesting. What has that come from, Doug? Yeah, that's the bench mark. I don't know. I am. Let's look it up and see, because that's

interesting. But anyway, I was the exercise. So, you know, like all kids in the 90s who worked out, I focused a lot on the bench press, because this is what people were gonna ask me about. And I got stuck, I don't remember what the weight was, I got stuck out, but I just couldn't lift anymore, couldn't figure out what the hell's going on. I had this, just, it just wasn't working.

And then I was reading a muscle magazine, and back in those days, I might have been a flex magazine or something, and there was something and they're called a shoulder horn. I think they still sell it. By the way, this is a not ideal way to prime, but it was priming nonetheless. It was better than anything I'd ever done before, right?

So I look at this article, and it says, increase the strength of your bench press by strengthening your rotator cuff muscles, okay? And I said, huh, I mean, I'm willing to give it a shot. And, you know, being a kid and I had a job and money to spend and anything that would make me stronger build muscle, I bought. So I said, let me give it a shot. So I bought this shoulder horn thing and you stick your arms in it and you could see next

here. Yeah, you do this external rotation with dumbbells. And I did it right before I went into a bench press. I grabbed a couple of five pound dumbbells, did some reps and said, oh, I kind of feel that in the shoulder area. That's weird. I got on the bench press, hit a PR, a 10 pound PR. And I said, what the, I did an exercise that immediately made me stronger.

And now the reason why that's crazy is because, as many people know, when you do an exercise, you send a signal for your body to build muscle and strength. You don't build muscle right there. It takes days, it takes weeks for that to happen. And yet, I did a few reps with the shoulder horn right before, right before I bench pressed, and I was stronger. And I realized in that moment, there's something happening with the way that my body's communicating

when I press the bar up. There's something happening. And in that case, what happened with me was, it allowed my body to feel safer by priming certain muscles, which specifically for me, it turned out, were not great at stabilizing, because I'd never trained them before. And so my body didn't allow me to be stronger than it was. It didn't feel very safe.

What I did is I secure area around the bone socket. That's it. So I primed by activating them with my CNS. Now my body can connect to them. I can connect to them. Then I went to the bench for S Boom, hit a 10 pound PR. So priming properly. Now that was a crappy way to prime. I'm going to be quite honest. It just so happened to work for me because it was specific to me. But if you prime properly, you really prime properly according to specific lifts, according to your body, you're gonna be able to summon more strength in your lifts and you're gonna be breakthrough plateaus.

You're gonna be able to lift more weight and build more muscle by doing a proper priming session, five to 10 minutes before your lifts than you will if you don't. Now this has been, or this has become a bit controversial. So I'd like to hear how you guys would communicate to somebody who tries to make the case that, well, you don't really need to prime. You just need to, yeah, warm up, practice the movement.

If you practice the movement enough, then your body will organize itself for you to get the most out of your lips. And this whole priming is a bunch of woo-woo mobility bullshit that all these gum be dudes do. And it's a waste of your time. I mean, this is a, so I bring that up because we first talked about the movement.

I said that's happening right now in our space or against the squat bench and deadlift and telling people that you don't need to do it. This is another movement that's happened in our space, or against the squat bench and deadlift and telling people that you don't need to do it. This is another movement that's happened in our space because, and I understand why it happens, right? We, nobody was addressing these things in the past. We learned some new science, we figure some things out, we then start to apply it, then somebody takes it

to the extreme version of it, and then that's all they're doing is a bunch of priming mobility stuff and they're afraid to lift a barbell. And the truth is, I think that the right answer is somewhere in the middle of this. And I think you're seeing the community that's pushing back on the mobility gum be guys and saying that this is a waste of time.

Yeah, look, here's my counter to that. You'll notice something in common with all these people who may say priming before bench deadlift and squat. What you'll notice is they're all advanced and they're all really strong, okay? Is that mean you shouldn't listen to them? No, but here's why you shouldn't listen to them with this

because you take an advanced strong power lifter or an advanced strong person who knows how to deadlift squat and bench a lot Watch them warm up their bench. They're deadlift in the squat and guess what they know how to do They know how to prime their body by warming up with the exact same movement They're about to go heavy with you watch them do a bench press. It's intuitive to them and that's right When you watch them warm up with the bench press what they're doing is they're priming all the muscles that need to be primed You watch them activate their scapula tighten up up their body, tighten up their lats, tighten up their hips, drive with their legs, push the bar forward, they're just getting

the bar and warm up. Now the average person who's not advanced, who doesn't understand how to do this, they're going to warm up and it's not going to give them the same thing as priming. What priming does for the average person for most people is it targets those areas, allows them to connect to those areas. Teaches you had to do those. That's right. That's 100% right,

because I could do the same thing. Look, I could deadlift and do a warmup set with a deadlift and prime my body with a deadlift. I know what to feel. I know where to get tight. I know where I feel. I'm just... You have to learn what optimal posture is first.

Right. And the thing is, our joints are set up for optimal ranges of motion where you will apply that kind of pressure and force. You have to be able to put your body in that position and get your secondary muscles to activate and to be able to respond and to be able to secure those joints when you need them to. That's a whole process you have to learn.

And so, yes, you have to be able to segment that, especially if you're not getting them to respond properly. So, priming is where we take that time, that a lot of time to really teach and educate those joints what to do before we get into these compound lifts, where everything is happening at once. And, you know, if that doesn't happen, we're gonna have a leak in that performance,

and also that could be something that's a detriment later that might lead injury. I'm so glad you guys went that direction to explain it, because if you ever watch me warm up or prime before I train now, it doesn't look like what it looked like when I first went on my mobility kick. And even somebody as advanced and understanding how to connect all the muscles,

I went through this training process of becoming kind of this mobility guy where I was doing all the common movements to get connected to my hips and my ankles and my shoulders and practice them religiously and I had a certain order I would do all them in. And now, and then I've seen, and then I've reaped all the benefits of how much that has helped

my movement, especially in like the squat and the overhead press and bench press. Now, because I have learned to connect to all that, I understand the limiting factors when I go into, let's say, a bench press. I know what muscles need to be woken up and prime. I can now sit and I have a video video if you go far enough back on my Instagram and I literally combine all of my priming and one thing. So I get down in this really deep squat and I get close to the squat rack

and I do these band pull apart. But while I'm doing all at once, I'm driving my knees over my toes, I'm pushing my knees out and connecting to my hips, I'm pulling my shoulder blades up and posturing up my chest and I'm doing a band pull apart. And so I'm literally, I have now gotten rid of the combat stretch, the 90, 90, like all those movements and I've combined it into one thing and I can met, but even as advanced as I am, it took me years of of to build that. of practicing all these mobility priming drills

that we have created in like, let's say, a prime or prime pro, and then I've learned which ones really give me the biggest bank for my buck for these big movements. That's why this message is so powerful because it's coming from some of the strongest people in our space. But watch some of the strongest people in our space

warm up with a bench press, a deadlift in squat, and they do the bench press, deadlift in squat to warm up for those heavy lifts. Their warmups are better than most people's priming sessions, because they know how to squeeze what, how to feel what, how to connect to what. They've developed that skill. 90% of you watching this right now, and more, probably 95% of you, need to prime.

And if you prime properly, you'll see your lifts go through the roof. And don't be naive to think that just because you've been lifting for a decade, as I was. You can't learn. Yeah, that you cannot, that you cannot, you cannot get, no, they've been benching deadlifting squatting high performance for years and years and years.

That's right. So that, and that's what I'm saying is that like you have somebody like myself who has been lifting for a very long time, I understand how to squat and deadlift very well, but it wasn't until I really went on that mobility kick and started to address all my leaks, all the where my leaks and my performance were, and then realized, oh, when I address this, this, and this,

I'm way better connected. My bar path is way better. I'm getting the most out of it. Okay, now I know what that feels like because I've practiced it for a year now consistently damn near every day. Now I can go in and I know exactly how to kind of wake up all those muscles before I go into. Now the irony is these same people who do this as soon as they get injured or as soon as they find a little bit of pain, they go through sessions of what they call correctional exercise, but it's basically. They're like hurry up and let's get out of this face.

That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. They're gonna play those kind of things. Which brings us to the next thing, which is don't neglect mobility. Why? but it's basically, they're like hurry up and let's get out of this face. That's right. That's right. They're gonna play those characters. Which brings us to the next thing, which is don't neglect mobility. Why? Mobility work. Look, if you have instability, you will plateau with strength. Your body has these safety mechanisms where it allows you to lift as much as it thinks

you can lift safely. Okay. Not as much as you're capable of. Those are actually two different things. So we've all heard the story of the, did the stressed mom whose kid is pinned under a burning car and she somehow was able to lift the car off her baby. These are real stories, by the way, look them up. Maybe you've experienced this yourself

where you did some feet of strength that you didn't think was possible because you were scared or there was some danger. What the hell happened? Well, your safety mechanisms were overridden by your body saying or your brain saying, hey, fine, let's get hurt because this is a dangerous situation. Let's override these safety mechanisms.

So these safety mechanisms exist. And if you have any instability, your strength isn't gonna go anywhere. You might be able to squat more weight, but if your body like, your knee is not very stable there or your ankle is not very stable or there's going to be an injury here with your core or with your low back, it's going to prevent you from doing so. And if you push past that, if you continue to try, eventually, you hurt yourself. And of course, I don't need to make the argument that injury will stop your straight gains

Right in their track which this happens to power lifters all my god all the freaking time and so same injuries by the way, they'll have the same injury over and over again This is one of my favorite parts about collaborating on this when we when we wrote maps power lift like I always love bringing in somebody else who we have a lot of respect for in the space as far as their experience and their knowledge. And here we bring in Ben Pollock, who is an incredible powerlifter, very, very intelligent to PhD. And our, I think one of our biggest contributions to that collaboration was this part, because

even though I don't have a lot of experience going to Meets and pull an 800 pound deadlifts, what I do have a lot of experiences helping coaching and working around and with a lot of athletes that have trained in bodybuilding and power lifting. And one of the most common things you see are these reoccurring injuries due to no never addressing these issues that they have and just working through it and just grinding through the process and then until eventually the body breaks.

And so this was a contribution of ours when we did this was like, this was a non-negotiable like, we're going to address this. This isn't, yes, the program is written to get the most amount of strength out of all these lives, but we also want to address one of the number one problems that we had all seen as coaches for two decades from powerlifting athletes. And this isn't passive flexibility. This isn't something that's taken away from performance and numbers and pursuits of maximal effort.

It actually increases, which is hilarious to me. And this is a concept that I've been trying to drill into athlete's heads. You know, ever since we started Mind Pump, if we address mobility, this is an actual strength issue. If I don't have strength to support around my joint, I'm limited to the amount of force I can produce. To address that and also have that longevity in your. I mean, it's a great combo. It's sort of like kills two birds.

Yeah, if you're trying to get as strong as possible and you're seeing strength progress rapidly and you neglect mobility, you're gonna hurt yourself. It's just a matter of time before that happens. So, and or plateau real hard, right? So mobility needs to be a part of every routine, especially though, especially though, when your goal is to push maximum weight.

Next up is to include some hypertrophy work. So you want to include, if you're doing a block of a strength phase where you're like, I want to just get stronger at these three big lifts, you also want to include muscle building type of work or hypertrophy type work. Now what's the difference between the two? Well hypertrophy works more like bodybuilding. Higher reps, we're working more in the pump, we're trying to develop certain muscles. Now why is that? Well, we use the amp and the speaker analogy.

Well, the speaker plays a role in that as well. Bigger muscles can fire harder and can lift more weight. Now power lifters, learn this eventually. For a long time there, for decades, power lifters like, I'm not gonna do any bodybuilding style work And then power lifters realize if their biceps got bigger they could deadlift more it's true because people were tearing the biceps So hypertrophy work should play a role in this type of training now It's not the main role right the main thing that we're looking for a strength here

But it does play a role in getting you stronger at these lifts So you want to include some hypertrophy work. Yeah, not to mention a limiting factor is always fatigue and to address that with hypertrophy will also help in terms of like being able to endure through some of those grinding sessions that you're going through with power. This was something that I think

that Ben Polk understood really well. It's like one of my favorite things about him was if you watch his program, which by the way he's toggled back and forth between bodybuilding and powerlifting because he's seen so much value of the bodybuilding training how it's carried over into his powerlifting. And like you said, a lot of the for many decades, the powerlifting community has carried nothing about how they look. I mean, normally when you, if you ask somebody off the street, you know, what a powerlifter looks like,

they envision this like big old dude with the big old beer belly with that. That's a big old building. Yeah, kind of a strong man kind of look to their physique because they don't care about how they look, but the value of building muscle, not just learning how to pull or push as much weight as you possibly can, is got massive carryover, one of the things right away. And we know this from programming,

we understand that piece of it. And so when we partnered up with him to write that program, it was cool to see that that was something that he had already figured out himself and told us something we saw at ION. All right, last up is the follow-good program. And this may seem obvious, right? You want to have a good, regardless of what your goals are. But when it comes to strength, programming is either good or terrible. And luckily, some of the best programming that exists that's out there revolves around the strength sports,

powerlifting and Olympic lifting routines. If you go online right now and you look up workouts, just look up workouts. Look up fat loss workouts. 98% of them are gonna be complete garbage. Look up muscle building workouts. I wanna build nice looking muscles or whatever. 80 something percent of them are gonna be complete garbage.

Look up accepted power lifting routines and Olympic routines accepted by in terms of the ones that people know, like, you know, Wendler or, you know, there's Olympic lifting routines that are out there that are really good. Look, some of these routines up and what you'll find is a lot of them are pretty good. Now, why is that?

Because you either put up or you shut up when it comes to this one. Yeah, one of those is completely subjective. The other one is 100% of it. You either get stronger or you don't. Yeah. So when it comes to getting stronger, it's, you'll get away with less of the,

go to the gym and just do stuff. You need to have really, really good programming to do so. And luckily for people, there's a lot of really great programs out there. Now we wrote a program called Maps Power Lift, which was designed specifically for people who like to work out, who've never really or haven't trained in powerlifting for any length of period of time. And I mean proper powerlifting, not just like, oh yeah, I've tried to get stronger, but rather, I've never really followed or maybe once or twice a quality specific powerlifting, not just like, oh yeah, I've tried to get stronger, but rather I've never really followed or maybe once or twice a quality specific powerlifting routine.

We created a program called Mass Powerlift that lays it all out for you, breaks it all down for you to get you specifically stronger at those three lifts. And because of this specific episode, we put it half off for everybody. Now just because you may not be someone who's interested in powerlifting, this is what you'll hear us on our question, live questions when we, many times recommend or give this program away to people because we know how much they'll benefit from it,

even if it's just a normal. Well, from a tablet and boost the level of mental health. That's a lot of person. How many times do we have somebody who is obsessed with their food and the diet and the way they look? Like one of the first things we tell them to do is to get away from that, focus on a metric like just getting stronger.

And so, running a program that really just focuses on four or five of the big main lifts and really drills at home has tremendous value no matter what you're pursuit of. So if you've never ran a powerlifting program for like three months, stint before, not just doing some of those exercises, but actually programming to get specifically stronger in those lives, this is a must at least once in your training life. That's right. So if you're interested, we're putting a 50% off

specifically because of this episode, you can find it at mapspowerlift.com, but you have to use the code Power50 for the discount. Look, if you like this show, we also have some free stuff, more free stuff, go to mindpumpfree.com. You can also find all of us on Instagram. So Justin is at Mind Pump Justin.

Adam is at Mind Pump Adam, and you can find me at Mind Pump, Distefinale. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at MindPumpMedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballad, maps performance, and maps aesthetic.

Nine months of phased, expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs. With detailed workout blueprints in over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having South Adam and Justin as your own personal trainer's butt at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money 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. This is Mindbomb.