Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2095: How to Smash Through a Strength Plateau

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin cover five ways to to break through a strength plateau.  Why strength is an amazing thing to chase. (3:24) How we tend to get stuck on three specific lifts. (7:35) Five Ways to Smash Through a Strength Plateau. #1 - Fix your diet. (9:36) #2 - Fix your sleep. (15:26) #3 - STABILIZE (heavy carries). (25:13) #4 - Strengthen weak links (different exercises). (32:36) #5 - Improve your work capacity (High reps, work session type workouts). (37:16) Related Links/Products Mentioned Special Promotion: MAPS Strong 50% off **Code GETSTRONG at checkout** For Mind Pump listeners only, join IHP and Equilife for 2 full days of live exhibitions, inspiring keynote discussions, and engaging expert panels at The Reimagining Health Summit on October 12-13 in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Visit here and use code MINDPUMP to get $100 off! June Promotion: MAPS Cardio or Summer Shredded Bundle or the Bikini Bundle 50% off! **Code JUNE50 at checkout** The Myth of Optimal Protein Intake Mind Pump #1220: The 4 Best Sources Of Protein Dr. Cabral – Heart Rate Variability & Sleep Mind Pump #1770: How Sleep Helps Your Muscles Recover And Grow How to Build a Strong Core with Kettlebell Farmers Walk – Mind Pump TV Improve Your Overhead Press & Build Your Shoulders with Unilateral Kettlebell Carries – Mind Pump TV Build Your Legs with the Zercher Squat - YouTube How To Improve YOUR Work Capacity (6 MOVEMENTS) | MIND PUMP COUNTRY STRONG?? Increase YOUR Work Capacity (2 EXERCISES) Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources People Mentioned Dr. Stephen Cabral (@stephencabral) Instagram

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind, pop, mind, pop with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump, right? In today's episode, we talk about how to smash through a strength plateau. Have you been stuck at the numbers you're lifting now for a while? Well, in this episode, we tell you how to break through those plateaus and get new PRs.

If you follow our advice, it will work. Now, because this episode is talking about strength to celebrate, we're putting maps strong, 50% off. It's a very popular strength building program. You can get it half off right now. Check this out. Go to mapsstrong.com and use the coupon code get strong for the 50% off discount. This episode is brought to you by a sponsor. Right now, our friends, Dr. Cabral and his functional medicine team is hosting a health summit. So Dr. Cabral and Equalife are gonna be having a health summit for two full days of live exhibitions.

This is happening in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, October 12th to the 13th. In this you're gonna learn all kinds of interesting stuff about health, functional health. These are Ted style talks, there's live Q&As, there's health tech devices, and some other surprises. They'll be talking about cognitive function, biohacking, breathwork, EMF, emotional release, psychology, exercise, gut health, holistic dentistry, hormones, longevity, mental health,

mold, self-sustainability, skinned, everything having to do with health. You can learn. There's a lot of networking opportunities. By the way, there's going to be will be 16 world renowned speakers at this event. Tickets are selling fast. Hopefully, they're still available when this airs, if they are, here's what you get them, reimagining health event.com. So reimagining health event.com and then use the code, mind pump and get $100 off access with a ticket. All right, here comes the show.

Getting stronger. This is something that almost all of us should go after. Why it's an incredible metric. It tells you a lot about what you're doing. Mostly that you're doing a lot of things. Right, here's the challenge though. Strength, plateaus are inevitable. So in today's episode, we're gonna talk about

how to break through those plateaus or even better avoid them all together. All right, let's talk about strength boys. On my favorite topics. I know. Strength. Well, I also like the chatting about breaking through plateaus because even, I mean, this is, this gets, this is one of the things about exercise, they actually get harder, I feel like, because as you continue to try different things and you've been lifting for a very long time and you start to kind of peek out on a lot of stuff. Strength is one of the things that you tend to peek out on sooner than later when comparison

like maybe like aesthetics. Like I feel like I can continue to sculpt and build a physique for a really long time. You relatively quick, you get to your max strength. The thing is hard to keep seeing gains after. Well, in the beginning, almost anything you do and will make you stronger, so one of those, you don't hurt yourself. Right, they come on fast and furious early.

Yeah. And then it's like so incremental after that. Yeah, and it's just, you know, it's inevitable that at some point, you're going to plateau or your gains will slow down, right? We can't progress forever with strength. Right. But here's, I think we should back up and talk a little bit

about why it's such a great thing to chase. Whether you want to lose weight, or of course, gain weight, or of course, build muscle or improve your health, strength is amazing for a lot of different reasons. One, it's objective. You're the stronger you're not. So aesthetics is typically what people chase on the exercise, right?

Changing the way they look. The problem with that is it's not objective, it's subjective. And, you know, lighting and water retention and how you feel about yourself and your mood and all that stuff, you know, and what you've looked at all day, I mean, that can influence whether or not you feel like you look good or not. Whereas if I add five pounds to the bar, I added five pounds to the bar. There's no arguing what just happened. It's also, if you're getting stronger, this doesn't guarantee that everything you're doing is right,

you're doing is right, but it means that most of the big things are not done wrong. Like you can't get stronger and have a, you know, eat too little, you can't really get stronger and have an unhealthy lifestyle for too long or have a crappy workout. Well, that's just too long, right?

Because you could kind of get away with some of these other kind of behaviors for a while and kind of push through and be like really mentally disciplined through it, but it's the great indication of if everything is stacked together nicely and is working synergistically. That's where you see the real strength gains kind of explode is when you're getting adequate sleep and recovery and you're eating the foods that are benefiting

and fueling your muscle building. And all of these things are accounted for and your programming is great and you're hitting on all cylinders, that's where strength is really one of those best indicators. So that is, okay, so that's how I use it, because you mentioned most people, you know, are chasing aesthetics, which was what my pursuit was most of my career lifting. I never planned we were training.

Right, I cared more about how I looked and I really cared about weight on the bar. But where I did care about weight on the bar or where I did care about getting strong was as a reflection of my programming. That was because here's the thing, I know I can follow a shitty program right now and get ripped. Yeah, I can, if I die it correctly and just lift weights, even if it's poorly programmed, I'll get ripped. I can do that. But if I want the maximum results from my programming

and the way my physique will look, I want to have great programming paired with my great diet. Well, how do I know that if I can get ripped from even a shitty program? Well, the way I know is if I am seeing strength gains in progress on weight on the bar in there, then that's my indicator like, okay, I'm maxing that out over there.

I'm getting with the most I can get out of that. So then I know I'm doing the diet thing, right? Because I'm leaning out and I'm seeing the progress in my physique. But then I'm also seeing results in the strength gains in the gym. So then I know that my program is on point. So I'm maximizing the benefits.

Yeah, I mean, as a trainer, someone could lose weight, as a client could lose weight, but is it fat, is it muscle, is it water? What does that mean? Does that mean that you're eating two little nutrients or is everything right? And there's a lot of guests,

there's a lot of guessing in that, right? Or you have to dig deeper to really figure out what's going on. When my client would get stronger, they got stronger. It was always great news. It was undeniable. It was always my favorite thing. And then here's the other part.

If you get stronger and you consistently get stronger, you're gonna build muscle. I mean, there's no doubt about it. Like you can get stronger without building more muscle by improving your central nervous system function, right? The way your muscle's fire, by having better techniques, you can maximize leverage. You could do those things, and that often happens as part of the strength gains.

But if you do it over and over and over again, eventually you just build muscle. And then for people who want to lose body fat, building muscles is wonderful because you're going to burn more calories on your own. It makes fat loss a lot easier, especially maintaining fat loss. It makes a lot easier, especially maintaining fat loss, it makes a lot easier. So strength is just, regardless of what your goal is, like this is at the top of the list of things you should pay attention to, for sure,

and for the reasons that we just said. Now, one thing to express with this is, because some people, when they look at strength, and I get this for specific types of athletes, like if you're a power lifter, Olympic lifter, then I get that. But types of athletes. Like if you're a power lifter, Olympic lifter, then I get that. But for everybody else who wants to improve their physique, you know, who wants to become stronger, build muscle, burn body, all that stuff, getting stronger is getting stronger.

So what do I mean by that? Well, sometimes people will plateau in a lift, but they'll get stronger in like four other lifts and they'll focus on the plateau with a single lift. And I understand that, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that, especially if you're an athlete and you have to get that particular lift up, you're a power lifter,

well you're squat deadlift and bench press matter most. But for the average person, don't pay too much attention to the one lift or two lifts that you're not necessarily going up on when you're going up on all these other lifts because it just means you're moving forward and eventually usually not always but usually what that means is you're going to go up in that one lift that you plateaued in. So I want to paint that picture for people because we tend to get stuck on just specific lifts and they tend to be the

big three or four if you add overhead press. There's value in that we've talked about that many times but it's not the BL end all, because you can get stronger in lots of other areas without necessarily getting stronger in those lifts, you're still progressing, you're still moving forward. I feel like there's a balance there that the body's just like a lot smarter than we give it credit for.

In terms of like allowing you to generate more force and specific movements that, you know, maybe there's, you know, some holes in terms of like stability or in terms of like support or secondary muscle groups that, you know, need to contribute a bit more. And it's, you know, we just want to, we're just so mentally focused on this one live. Why can't I get better at this lift? When in fact, you do those other accessory type lifts and things where it's, I'm still getting strength, I'm still moving the needle forward

Eventually once I am able to get stronger and more supported in my entire body's framework now I come back and it locks it for me. Well, there's definitely stuff that we know that we would address in the programming to break through these strength Plateaus, but there's also outside things other than that. And let's start in that direction. Like, what do you think right out the bat, outside of programming, like how we would change that, is like a number one thing that you would go to to help someone break through a plate? Yeah, besides programming, diet is gotta be up there, right? Yeah.

And it's typically, most overlooks especially in the athletic community. Yeah, yeah, you exactly, right? It's typically not eating enough and not eating enough protein. It's typically what, or even sometimes not enough fat, right, essential fats, but usually it's protein and calories. And I would see this more often, I think, with female clients where they do have good programming. They're not getting stronger.

We look at their diet and it's like you're eating 13-year calories. You're not fueling your body enough, your central nervous system is not gonna fire with more power because you don't have enough energy there, and your muscles aren't gonna build because we don't have the building blocks. So you've plateaued because of your diet, not necessarily because of your program.

And again, it's usually not enough protein, not enough calories. It can be carbs, too, though. For an example, that is what happened in the CrossFit community when it was heavy into paleo and you have a lot of these athletes that are training at such high work volume that they needed that.

Their body just was not operating, and they were not responding because they were not fueling their body enough with enough carbohydrate. So there are examples of where carbs can be the missingly, but I would say I would agree with you that. Most of the time, it was clients either one, like we just had somebody to call her recently,

who was a body builder, great physique and stuff like that. And when we assessed his fat, I remember you did the math on it, like, oh my God, his, I mean, he was, he's in the fore now. And he is, he even with him bumping his grams of fat, he still was under by 40 grams a day of what he, where he should be. And so it's like, man, you need to get your, your healthy fats up. But I would say most common for me was, was enough protein. Yeah. Just because that, that's so essential to the body, especially when it comes to recovery and building muscle, if, if you're not consistently giving it enough of that while you are pushing,

trying to get strength gains, many times that's the limiting factors because you're just not giving the body the building blocks to keep adding and building muscle on your body. And the good news is with protein is we have a lot of studies on it. We have so many studies that it's pretty well established what that number is in terms of grams of protein for maximum strength and muscle gain. And it's right around a gram of protein per pound of body weight, maybe a little less in the studies, but I typically we tend to tell people to aim for a gram because you tend to fall just a bit short of that.

For somebody who's really overweight, eat a gram of protein per pound of target body weight, only because it's typically based around lean body mass. So if you're a 200 pound guy, you're relatively lean, aim for 200 grams, right? You're a 130 pound female normal body weight for you, 130 grams. Let's say you're a 200 pound female, but your target body weight's 140 pounds. Well, aim for about 140 grams of protein, 200 might be too much. But that's basically it, right?

Hit those protein targets. It's hard to do because it does produce a lot of satiety. By the way, whole foods, make it come from whole foods. That's your best bet. If you miss protein patterns or find, but ideally you want it to come from whole foods. And then enough calories. You can eat enough protein and not have enough calories in which case the protein is not

doing what it's supposed to because your body is using it for energy or for other purposes. And then essential nutrients, fats and proteins are essential, but then there's also nutrients that you could be nutrient deficient in that will limit your strength gains. If you're nutrient deficient, let's say vitamin D or magnesium or zinc or whatever, things that are essential, not having enough of that can also limit your gains. Then you mentioned carbs. Look, I tell you, you don't need carbs, they're not essential, but I have yet to find, well, I mean, I've found some people, but for the most part, people don't get maximum strength gains

on a super low or no carbohydrate diet. There's always exceptions, and I would say, it's more than exceptions, it's probably like a 20%. So that's a significant number, but it's not a lot. So if you're like with the super low carb diet, and you're like, well, I'm getting protein, I'm getting essential fats, my diet's good. Try bumping your carbs, see what happens.

Yeah, for me, it was always that. So I fall in this category. You know, I just would, when I come into showtime and I'd start carb cycling and it'd be in a calorie deficit, it was just guaranteed. I'm going to be losing strength. It just happens. And so, and I've tried, we've done keto and I've done some low carb dieting and stuff. And I just don't progress the same way. I need that fuel to fill those workouts. There's another piece to the diet that we didn't mention that I've watched firsthand you experience especially with us in the last eight years and that's just your gut health being. Oh, yeah, absolutely. You know, you get if you are constantly eating foods that do not agree with you whether you think they do or don't and you you're inflamed, and your body is constantly trying

to fight that, it's really tough to be building strength and seeing gains in the gym while it's being, like a lot of your body's focus and energy is being prioritized to healing the gut. Oh, listen, it's 12 pound difference. For me, almost 12 pound difference, the lean body mass on my gut is good versus when it's not. You don't absorb enough nutrients,

you don't have the energy, your hormones are thrown off, it's a constant stress signal to your body, so exercise being another stress means you can't tolerate as much exercise. It's just your gut health is absolute paramount. So you could be doing all the right stuff, technically with proteins, carbs, fats, and calories. Right, your digestion's off, like everything's,

yeah, everything's gonna go lower in performance and that leads directly into your sleep, which is the next one as well. Because, in terms of gut health and all that and your body fighting internally there, that's something that I had to really address. If I'm not, first of all, yes, maybe I am synthesizing and maybe utilizing nutrients, but then towards the end of the night, how I would get this reaction from those types of foods and would trickle into my REM sleep.

Now I'm not fully recovered, and then this is like that vicious kind of snowball effect where I'm taking that in with me into the next day's workout, and then on top of that, then it just compiles over and over. Nothing will hammer your life a bit more than just chronically having terrible sleep. It'll take away your cognitive performance.

It'll give you, it'll make you feel depressed, so it affects your moods. For man, it'll lower testosterone. It'll raise cortisol, both men and women, growth hormone is totally thrown off, and your strength is gonna be gone. You're just not gonna be strong. Now initially, one night of bad sleep,

you might come back and feel fine, cause you get all those stress hormones which will still be some energy. It's gonna be so bad sleep. But yeah, over time, it's just, you are not gonna build more muscle. Look, here's a deal. Like, we evolved for the most part

in an environment that's very different than when we live now. And for the most part, if you were getting bad sleep, it meant you didn't, you were not safe, and it meant you didn't have enough food. So your body is getting this stress signal. And that what happens when your body's under lots of stress. It doesn't want to have more muscle,

which costs more calories, which is more energy. It's like, why are we, why are we, why are we, why are we, we're old onto this? Yeah, let's, let's, let's make our body more efficient because right now, stress is high and we don't, we don't want to, to have to burn too many calories. So no, we're not gonna build more muscle.

And so you're gonna be playing this game with your body if your sleep is bad, where you tell your body to build muscle and get stronger, and your body's fighting you, and I'm gonna tell you something right now, you'll lose. That battle, you're not gonna win. You can fight all you want, and eventually, not only will you not get stronger,

you'll get hurt, and then other issues will creep up. I read something on our friend, Dr. Cabral's page today that I was unaware of, or I didn't know, regarding heart rate variability. Heart rate HRV is one of the tools that most professional athletes use to gauge their readiness to perform in the gym and they will change that based off of how low that HRV score is. And he said that the number one thing to improve your HRV score is actually not eating

three to four hours before you go to sleep. I did not know that. Yeah, you know why that is? Why? your HRV score is actually not eating three to four hours before you go to sleep. I did not know that. Yeah, you know why that is? Why? You're, so we all know about light on the circadian rhythm. So if you're around bright light, your brain, your body perceives it as the sun being up.

So it doesn't prepare itself for sleep. So this is why studies will show being in some dark, wearing blue light blocking glasses, for example, or dimming the lights a couple hours before bed. You sleep better, a pretty small ralatonin, more growth hormone, better REM sleep, because your body, your brain needs time to prepare for sleep then when you go to lay down and go to sleep.

Now it's ready, versus bright lights, turn them off, hit the sack. It's gonna give you, it's gonna take an hour for your brain to even perceive what's going on and then whatever. So that's circadian rhythm from light. You also have a circadian rhythm from light. You also have a circadian rhythm from your gut.

So when you give yourself food, your gut perceives it as being daytime. And it's going to affect your digestion negatively and affect your sleep. Historically, we were never eating in the dark. No, right. No, no, no, you're not going to have, you're not going to be eating food and cooking food. Like we're super vulnerable in the dark. This is a time when predators are out. What we did is we did everything when the sun was up.

As it went down, we went to safety. That's all going our cave and protect ourselves and whatever and get some sleep. So you have a circadian rhythm with your gut just like you do with your eyes. And when you feed yourself at night right before bed, it takes, you're gonna pre-sless melatonin, worse REM sleep,

restful sleep, less recuperative sleep. And then not to mention this, part of digestion, there's definitely things going on in your gut that digest food, but part of it is local motion helps with it. So walking, there's muscles that pass through the gut, or around the gut, things like the so-as muscle that helps food move.

Plus you're standing upright, right? There's a reason why your anus is at the bottom and your mouth is at the top because gravity makes food go down. When now you ate and you're laying horizontally, that definitely affects digestion. Plus your body shuts down or most healthy bodies will shut down digestion when you're sleeping

because it doesn't make sense for you to wake up five times a night to use the bathroom It actually releases hormones to To make you urinate less and it slows down digestion to so you don't have to go to the bathroom So eating right before bed is a number one way easy way imagine the Imagine the assault the average person is probably putting on themselves They have no idea like that. How many people lie on the couch or lay in bed streaming netflix or binge watching netflix?

Eating what they eat food. And it's not even healthy food. Even if it was healthy, you know what I'm saying? Just eating, laying in bed and watching and watching streaming, you know, and binge watching television at night. It's like, and then you're wondering why your, your games are stalled and it's like, these are one of the, one of the easiest ways

that you can break through. So it sticks all that shit. I used to laugh at, so I had a wellness studio and in my wellness studio, I just for 13 years. And in there I had this woman that was, I mean, I guess you could classify, she was a physical therapist by trade, but she did functional medicine training.

She took all these courses. Anyway, I would listen to her talk to her clients. And in the early days, I'd hear her talk about sleep. And I, you know, I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't let her see it, whatever, because she worked there. And I respected her, but I'd roll my eyes like, that's not like really, she's not losing,

she's not holding on to 10 pounds, because her sleep is poor. And she would tell these people, oh, listen, we gotta fix your sleep. That's why you're, you're not able to lose that last 10 pounds. Or, you know, the reason why you feel crappy while we're working out is because you're not

optimizing your sleep and I'd sit and I'd be like, oh my God, whatever, her clients lack her, whatever. But then over the years, I would see what happened with these people and they'd come in, and at first I was in disbelief, they'd walk in, be like, oh my God, you're so right. I fixed my sleep, I can't believe I'm losing weight. And I'd be like, it's because that's not why,

it's because you're working out, it's because you're eating better or whatever. And I went up earlier. But eventually, I started hearing this enough and I started seeing a client, and I care about people. I want to help people. And I never got the first time I did this on a client.

I had a client, same thing, struggling, whatever. This executive woman, also a mom, and I said, let's do this, let's start with this. I want you to create a sleep routine, keep a journal. We're gonna keep track of this. And let's see if we can optimize your sleep. And sure as fuck, she lost weight. And our gains, we're going crazy in the gym.

And it was just from that. And then I was sold. Well, it's the compounding effects that also happen from it too, that like so many downstream effects. So that's the part, that's what I should say, downstream, not compounding. The downstream effects that happen from it's very similar

to what we just talked about recently when we talked about like adding calories into a diet or adding protein to a diet who's trying to lose weight and the scientific community is like, oh, that's bullshit, you know what I'm saying? But it's not just because they do that it's because they eat food that satiates them, it's that they hit their protein intake.

They end up leaving less calories. The same thing goes for sleep, like you prioritize sleep and then, oh, guess what, you have energy in the day. So then you're more productive, you move more, you take more steps. Your hormones balance out. Your hormones balance out, so what? You have energy in the day. So then you're more productive, you move more, you take more steps. Your hormones balance out. Your hormones balance out. So you don't have these weird cortisol spikes.

So you're not craving weird foods. You make better food choices. You have more energy. So then you end up going to the gym. You have a better workout, you have more energy in your workout. And it's like, all those things are all affected from that.

And so yeah, there's not this direct, like, oh, having a bad night of sleep doesn't put five pounds of body fat on you. Like there's not this direct like, oh, having a bad night of sleep doesn't put five pounds of body fat on you. Like there's not this direct correlation to that. What it is is that it's the downstream effects that happen by either getting good sleep or bad sleep. And as coaches and trainers, I can start to try and focus on all the nuance differences

of training and diets of that. Or I can find big rocks like this that I could tell my clients like, hey, we're not gonna really focus too much yet on diet or your training. All I want you to do is prioritize sleep. What I know from experience is, oh, when they do that, they're more likely to do this. They're more likely to do less likely to do that and like this and all that is what that is.

You're going to see all that from all those different ways of capturing, like stress, like so the HRV angle, right? You see the readiness because, you know, your heart rate's gonna have these irregular patterns when you're under more state of stress. And so it's like, you know, if you're not getting that adequate sleep recovery, and you're going back into your workouts, you can actually crank that intensity up a little bit,

which is gonna push you a little further in gaining more strength as a result, because now you can actually recover, and you're not just adding more stress in your bucket. Here's how important sleep is because we talk about like three main pillars. It's more complicated than this, but there's three main pillars, right? Activity, diet, and sleep. Those are the three main pillars. Which one will kill you faster if you avoid it completely?

Food, activity, or sleep? Sleep. If you got zero sleep within, I don't know if it's something like within a week or two weeks or maybe 30 days of the most, you're dead. You can go longer without food and you can go much longer without activity. That's just how important sleep is for your health.

So fixing your sleep means this. Going to bed at the same time every night, waking up at the same time every morning that way you don't have jet lag on Mondays. One hour before bed, prepare for bed by turning the lights down, creating a sleep routine. Don't eat anything two hours before bed, making sure your room is super dark

or wearing an eye mask, keeping it cool. And that's it. Those things right there are covering most things and most people will get dramatic improvements so sleep if they do that on a regular basis on a consistent basis. Okay, so we cover the the big rocks that are outside of programming. Now I'll talk about programming things to help break through. Yeah, so number three most important when I see somebody who's been working out for a long time and they're

they're hitting a strength plateau is their body is not able to stabilize the heavy weight that they're moving. Okay, I remember the first time I ran into this personally as a kid, and I say as a kid I was a teenager, and this is a silly example, but it was the most I'd ever done in terms of addressing a weakness. I was, I don't remember what the number was, but I was stuck on my bench press,

what in going up wasn't moving, and when I was a kid, bench press was the number was, but I was stuck on my bench press. What in going up wasn't moving. And when I was a kid, bench press was the exercise. Nobody cared about anything else. It was all about how much you could bench. And I remember seeing an ad, I've talked about this so many times in the show. Yeah, there was an ad for this thing called a shoulder horn

and it works to rotate or cuff. And the way I got sold was there were like quotes in there. My bench press went up 20 pounds. I was like, oh, let me try, at least it was in that expensive. I worked, so I'm like, I'll buy this. I tried it. I worked on my external rotators, right? And my bench press literally went up 10 pounds almost instantly. I was plateaued forever. And that's when I realized,

like, oh, the stabilizing muscles just weren't strong. My body didn't feel safe to let me lift more because the stabilizers wouldn't allow me to. And by strengthening the stabilizers, I could lift more. So stabilization is off, listen, you're only as strong as your... How stable you are. As stable as you are, and stabilization exercises and movements

have such tremendous carryover. One of my favorite, now mobility work helps do this, but one of my favorite ways to improve stabilization and improve central nervous system output and power, heavy carries. Heavy carries are phenomenal for this. The first time I ever did this on my own was after I met you guys, and Justin would talk about overhead carries all the time.

He has, Justin has this incredible overhead press, very strong, and he's like, oh, one of the best things you could do is just big game Change yeah, hold the kettlebell above your head pack your shoulder right stand nice and tall and walk and try and stabilize I'm like well if it works for Justin I'm gonna give this shot and I saw my strength gains go up within a couple weeks I was like holy cow that was the the and I'd been working out for decades, right? This is amazing the second time I saw this was when I did our program map strong. Map strong, a farmer walks is one of the exercises

that's in there and you do that on a regular bay, and it pretty consistent. And I got to like almost a, it was almost a 475 pound farmer walk where I just, and I just felt like everything was just tight and strong. I could feel all my weak links having to stabilize. My deadlift went up, my overhead press went up, my curls, all these exercises that I didn't even

think we connected went up because I practiced these heavy carries. Just keeping your spine stacked, like keeping your joints where they need to be in the most optimal position, like in your muscles need to be a part of that process. So if you're not using your rotators at all, like in you're not strengthening them, as you're just strengthening your major muscle groups, you know, you're

doing yourself a disservice because the thing is like your body, again, it's going to limit you. Has these natural limiters, these governors, we call it the overbearing mother. And you need to almost, you need to quiet and calm the overbearing mother. And to be able to do that, you have to focus intimately on some of those little things where this is gonna help kind of educate and direct those muscles to kick in at the right opportune time and so walking and doing carries, this is a whole nother dimension to lifting weights

because now, yes, you pick the weights up, but now you get a move with it. You're adding locomotion, which adds all these variables from lateral forces, rotational forces. And if you don't have that down yet, it's going to get exposed. And those are those little nuance things when you're doing an actual compound lift that are going to come about that sets you, it totally causes a leak in your overall performance. That's the key right there to me. It's very obvious to me when you unpack that. Like when you think of like,

you always do a squat or a deadlift. Like you have all these links up there, like everything from your hips to your core, to your shoulder, all of these things that have to work synergistically together to make that lift work. And if you're not strong and stable and rigid in all of those links, in order to do that lift, you may be able to perform it still, but there's leakage. If there's any sort of instability, yeah, there's exactly. And so there's a hole in the bucket.

And so what I love about heavy carries, it connects you from your fingertips to your neck down to your toes. And you, you, you, you couple that with walking and moving and everything is having to fire synergistically together. You bring that into a lift, like an overhead press, like a squat, like a deadlift. And now you've taught your body to communicate better to it and you've gotten strong and stable on that. and there's left There's less leakage in that lift and you're inevitably going to be able to lift more. Here's how I like to communicate to it

Imagine if you had a straw that you had to blow through to produce power But now imagine that there's a couple holes in the side of that straw only so much powers and come out You plug those holes and you're gonna generate more force only so much power's gonna come out. You plug those holes and you're gonna generate more force. This is what happens when you have power leakage because you're not able to stabilize the lift. You're not able to strengthen the stable, the stable as you support that heavy lift.

You use the word limiters, right? It's really like this. It's like a car that's got 600 horsepower, but it has protective limiters on there that only allows you to get to 500 horsepower. Because the manufacturer said, yeah, it's got 600 horsepower, but anything above 500, and we didn't create this engine to be able to handle that, and you're going to blow something. But let's say you go and you reinforce the engine. Now you're able to release or take off that

limiter. There's no more rev limiter. There's no more speed limiter. Now you got 600 horsepower. Okay, Olympic weightlifters are an example of this. Olympic weightlifters, they can generate almost all the force that they can generate because their body feels safe doing so. Most people, most untrained people can really only generate something like 60% of the real force they can generate because their body doesn't let them. And sometimes you can get that extra strength

if you're super scared or super mad or defending yourself as well. You hear the stories of the mom that lift the car off, you know, the burning car off their kid, is that, you know, under extreme duress, your body, yeah, it takes off those, because it's like, all right, it's worth it to hurt yourself.

But anyway, you're in the gym and your limiters are weak stabilizers. Well, heavy carries. I mean, you would a great way of explaining it. Like holding something overhead or holding something at your sides or on top here and then walking. Now you're adding movement. Now there's a little bit of sway, there's a little bit of whatever and you got to stay strong and stable. Like you want to talk about a way to strengthen your stabilizers without having to figure out what to target specifically

or whatever. I mean, it's a great way to do that. And heavy carries are incredible. The biggest carryover I see with the heavy carries are with squats and deadlifts. That's where I see and standing overhead presses I see. Yeah, those big movements. Those big movements were all of those links have to communicate together. It's like trying to hit a baseball with a water noodle, which is a baseball bat. I mean, think about that, right?

I mean, that's what it is. Is you have all this leakage that's coming out and you can have all the force in the world trying to swing at it, but if there's a breakdown and all those links or those links are weakened unstable, let's see how far you get that baseball. Yeah, which brings us to the next point, which is now we're worked on stabilizing.

Well, what's a great way to strengthen weak links? Well, one way is great way to strengthen weaklings? Well, one way is to get real specific. You work with a strength, you know, expert who can break down your lift and get real individualized with exactly what you need in your weaklings. But here's another easy general way that a lot of coaches and trainers might not even communicate, which is doing different exercises, different exercises that are often similar to the ones that you plateau in. I'm going to give a great example.

When you do a deadlift, deadlift is a very, very incredible exercise. Whole body exercise, great back builder, great way to build strength. We love it. It's in almost every one of our programs. When you do a deadlift, there is a particular type of tension that's creating the upper mid-back. And whenever you strengthen something with this isometric type of tension that's creating the upper mid-back. And whenever you strengthen something with like this kind of, you know, isometric type of contraction, there's some carryover to outside of that position. In other words, if I strengthen my bicep here

in this contracted position, I get some carryover to some extension and some more contraction. But not all the way, right? It's not all the way like a full range of motion. Well, here's a great way to strengthen your deadlift by working on some of those muscles that are involved in different lengths, a zircher deadlift or a zircher squat. Why? Try holding something with your elbows underneath the hooks, you know, the bar on the hooks of your elbows, and you have more of a rounded upper back. I'm not talking about a rounded lower back, that's not good, but the upper back, the shoulder blades

round a little bit, like you're hugging something, right? Then you lift in that position, and all of a sudden those muscles have to stabilize in a more lengthened position that they may be used to when you're doing a deadlift. Now when you pull that deadlift, oh my God, I feel stronger and more stable.

Like, zircher lifts, zircher deadlift, zircher squats, they fell out of favor a long time ago. Those are great examples of people like, why do that? Why do a zircher squat? Why do a zircher deadlift when Zurcher squats, they fell out of favor a long time ago. Those are great examples of people like, why do that? Why do a Zurcher squat? Why do a Zurcher deadlift when I could do a front squat? When I could do a regular deadlift? That's why.

Pick another exercise where you do, maybe heavy sandbag carries or where you're lifting like an atlas stone. But otherwise, by the way, this is my strong men do Zurcher squats in deadlift because they lift atlas, don't they have to do that round of back things. At some point, it's just weird to me that at some point,

we decided that we needed to move more robotically. And we needed to have sharp 90-degree angles for everything and make sure that our spine was always stacked. And just eliminating the fact that you are going to lift a really heavy bag of cement or dog food or couch. And the weight is gonna shift on you at that point and this is not controlled. This is not just nice, equally balanced plates

in a barbell always that I can just kind of pick up and have control over and I know what to expect. So to me, it's just very much more of like, this is overall real-world strength in different environments, different variables that are thrown at you. So to be able to train your body adequately for those types of variables is going to make you overall stronger. Yeah. The only thing I really have to add to this point is my own personal experience. What I have continued to learn is like every time I add a novel exercise into my routine, something that I suck at, I'm not good at, and then I pursue getting good at that. It always carries over to my other life. I always see this strength gain in my other big lifts because I started to train something

that I was uncomfortable doing. I wasn't good at it. I mean, I'll never forget, and this was way lay. This was not when, around the compete time was when I started to really focus on Bulgarian split-cloths, and I avoided them for so long, because I hated them so much.

Putting all this energy towards getting really good at that one, then you went back to a bilateral back squat. Holy shit, it was like, I felt so much more stable. I got stronger. I hit PR. So a lot of times just seeking out these novel movements that may not be popular on Instagram, what everybody else is doing. And pursuing getting good at them, you'll be blown away at the carryover it will have in these other traditional movements. That's right. Another one with, you know, in terms of weak links, is sometimes, oftentimes you don't involve power training in our workouts.

It's all strength, kind of grinding lifts, but there's no speed involved. Now, I know that you have to be careful with speed. There's more moving parts. There's higher risk of injury. So there are exercises you could do that are far less risky, that allows you to evolve a little bit of speed But strength and then the ability to contract and display that strength with speed It can't it contributes to strength overall. So that's just one more thing to add to this All right, lastly

Here's one that you know that I think is missing often because when we look at strength We often look at strengths like super one-dimensionally. How much can lift right now and then you're done, okay? But real strength, real strength has some stamina involved, right? Like, you go do anything, any kind of work or job or chore or you go grapple or you do something like strength, it's great, but if it doesn't last longer than five seconds, it's like a wasted time. Now I'm not talking about long distance endurance, so I'm not talking about being in a long distance runner

or whatever, I get that, that's a totally different stamina. But there's also something called strength stamina. We talk about it as work capacity, your ability to display strength repeatedly. By the way, you know, who does this very well? A popular, there's a class of athletes, very popular, one of the most popular sports in the world, definitely the most popular sport I would say in America. Football. Football players have work capacity. Why? Because they go play one, you know, you know, it's first down, it display explosive power. Then they got, you know, how long do they have between the next down?

And then they got to do it again. Like the team that could do that repeatedly over and over is hard to deal with for two hours. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's not like consistent. It's not like they're playing soccer or the constantly running, but they have to be strong repeatedly

over and over, that's work capacity. Well, I was just thinking of them or sort of everyday average person kind of example, like if you're moving, like you're moving furniture, for instance, and like something that's like super heavy. Yeah, I can muster enough force and generate enough to like lift something up, but now to like move with it and like keep holding onto it

and just endure that strength and hold on to that type of force that I produced just to pick it up and hold it. Now you have to maintain that and move it over here. It's just to be able to increase that ability, like gives you so much versatility. Yeah, I have such a love, hate relationship with this plateau breaker because I know how effective it is, and dread it so much because it's hard.

It's so hard. I did hard. It's so hard. I did this. It really is, really. So I had been pretty consistent with my training lately and stuff like that, and I should have, and what I haven't done in a long time is like, when was the last time I did 20 reps on a flat bench press? Like, it just never do that.

Never program that I never do that. And I have to humble myself and bring all the way down to 135 in order to complete three sets of that to do that, I never program that, I never do that. And I have to humble myself and bring all the way down to 135 in order to complete three sets of that to do that. But oh my God, does my body feel it the next day? It feels like it was the first day hitting chest again and I haven't done it in so long. It's just like, I'm so glad you said 20 reps because body built, people are like,

oh, work capacity, whatever, I just want to build an amazing physique. Bodybuilders have known this for a long time. Bodybuilders have been advocating for sets of 20 reps for a long time for building incredible sets and giant sets and triceps. That's work capacity, ladies and gentlemen, that is not just high reps. That's what we're talking about. That's part of what we're talking about. Another way to do it is to shorten rest periods, to do exercise that just require more out of you. By the way, there's another athlete that has to work on all these things. It's just strong man competitors, right? Strong man and strong women competitors, they need to have this because they have to display strength,

but they all stuff to display a little bit of athleticism with it. So unlike powerlifting, where it's like one rap, one rap, one rap, one rap, move quickly. They're like lift this heavy round atleast stone and then lift another one that's even heavier. And then lift another one that's even, now the events aren't long,

it's not like they're doing you know crazy endurance work But it's you know you look at a strong man competitor a strong woman competitor Tell me they don't have a lot of muscle like that's definitely a strengths board and work capacity is all of that and if that in fact If you've plateaued and this goes to the people who are only concerned about strength and all they ever do is train and the low Repranges and all they ever do is rest three to five minutes in between sets. Do a block of where you're improving your work capacity with 20 reps or exercises that require more strength.

Damn, then go back to your training, watch what happens. Yeah, what's their limiting factor is fatigue. You know, once you get to that point where you've gotten really strong, but now like I'm getting to the same like the third set, let's say, and I'm trying to produce the same amount of force, but I'm too tired, I'm too 15. My muscles are done. Like if I could build up my gas tank to give me more,

when I'm in, you know, that third set, then that's a whole other thing I can pull from. Well, and the main takeaway from this episode I really feel like is for the the listener that is in a plateau that's struggling right now with breaking through a plateau And then to go through these five things and and check the boxes of like man Have I if I really checked my diet and made sure I'm hitting my protein take or or dove into my gut health and and see that okay Am I actually putting some sort of a sleep routine of have I really maximize that go through that? When was the last time I did something like heavy farmer carries or overhead carries

or worked on some like strong stabilization type movements like that? When was the last time that I put a novel exercise into my routine and got good at it like a zircher or a Turkish get up or a movement that's unconventional like that and really worked at it. And then lastly, when was the last time that you pushed like work capacity? When was the last time you did 20 reps of squats or 20 reps of bench press? If you haven't done any of those things and you're in a plateau like start prioritizing some of those things and watch you break that plateau. Totally.

Okay, so here's what we did. We have a program called MAP Strong. We created it with a world's strongest man competitor Robert Obers because we want to pull from that type of training to create a program that will make you strong overall strong and this is a great plateau buster for lots of people because the emphasis isn't necessarily squats deadlifts and bench presses They're in there, but the emphasis is on overall body just strength. It's one of our most popular programs,

and because we did this episode, what we did is we made that program 50% off, so you can get it half off right now if you go to mapsstrong.com, so MAPS, STROMG.com, and then use the coupon code getstrong for the 50% off discount. Also, if you wanna follow some of our workouts, but you don't want to enroll one of our programs

for under $5 a month, you can go to MindPump Media on Instagram and enroll for basically get a new workout every single week. You get a new workout every week. It's less than $5 a month. It's MindPump Media on Instagram. Thank you for listening to MindPump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy on Instagram. aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels,

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