Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2355: How to Safely Increase Your Summer Workouts Intensity

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

Understanding what programming entails. (1:38) Intensity is the easiest metric to accelerate results, but also the quickest way to overtrain. (2:24) The misconception that people know what they are capable of doing. (5:06) The magic in how you manipulate intensity. (5:48) Six Factors to Focus on to Safely Increase Your Summer Workouts Intensity. #1 - Increasing intensity judiciously. (8:26) #2 - Applying increases for short periods of time (2-4 weeks). (11:18) #3 - Sleep and diet must be on point. (13:52) #4 - Free weights vs machine/compound vs isolation. (16:46) #5 - Intensity up/volume down. (19:16) #6 - Priming properly before intense workouts. (22:20) Related Links/Products Mentioned Special Promotion: MAPS HIIT or Prime Pro Bundle half off **Code SAFETY50 at checkout ** Visit Vuori Clothing for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! ** No code to receive 20% off your first order. ** June Promotion: MAPS 15 Minutes | Bikini Bundle | Shredded Summer Bundle 50% off! ** Code JUNE50 at checkout ** Why Your Tempo Matters When You Workout! – Mind Pump TV Mind Pump #1345: 6 Ways To Optimize Sleep For Faster Muscle Gain And Fat Loss MAPS Prime Pro Webinar Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump with your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. In today's episode, we talk about how to safely increase the intensity of your summer workouts to get better results. We actually give you six things to focus on with this. By the way, because of this episode, and we're talking about intensity,

we're talking about getting results in a short period of time. MAPS HIIT is one of our most popular high intensity programs. Actually HIIT stands for high intensity interval training. MAPS HIIT will be 50% off with this episode. We also put our Prime Pro bundle 50% off to help you warm up properly, prime your body properly, so you don't hurt yourself. So you can find those both at mapsfitnessproducts.com,

but you have to use the code SAFETY50. Now this episode was brought to you by a sponsor, Viori. Viori makes athleisure wear that is comfortable, it looks good, it lasts a long time. You already know who they are, right? They're all over the place now. Incredible stuff. Some of the best looking athleisure wear

you'll find anywhere. And if you use our link, you'll get 20% off. Go to Vioriclothing.com. That's V-U-O-R-I, clothing.com, forward slash mind pump. All right, here comes the show. All right, it's common knowledge that one of the ways to ramp up results, get faster fat loss, see more results in the mirror,

is to work out harder. This is true, however, you can definitely do it wrong and go backwards. That's what we're going to talk about in today's episode, how to ramp up the intensity the right way to get the best results. Yeah. I mean, this is definitely the go-to for anybody on Instagram promoting fitness and getting a lot of awesome results, which you can get awesome results, but there's definitely caveats to ramping up your intensity. Yes, it's one of the components of workout programming. So a lot of people might not understand like what programming entails, but programming is literally all of the components that make your workout

your workout. So it's like the exercises, the reps, the sets, the tempo, the intensity, the frequency, and then there's, there's other factors to look into. We don't have to get into all of the complexity because workout programming can be quite complex. Intensity is the sexiest though, Sal. It's well, it's the button everybody wants to hit, right? It's the, I'll just do what I'm doing and do it harder. and everybody wants to hit, right? It's the, I'll just do what I'm doing and do it harder.

Now it's true that increasing intensity is one of the fastest, if done properly, it's one of the fastest ways to get faster results. It's one of the easiest ways I should say, or simplest ways to get faster results, totally true. It's also, however, one of the easiest ways to over train. When you look at frequency, meaning how often you work out, volume, how often you work out volume, how long

you work out and intensity, which is how hard you work out intensity will over train you the fastest. I mean, I could take somebody and I can over train them in 10 minutes by making them do something so intense, um, that they can't move anymore volume and frequency, not so much. So intensity, although it's a, it's one of those factors that you can, you know, you can manipulate to maximize results. It's also one you need to be very careful for.

And it's the one that's most likely, I would say in my experience, I love your opinion on this, Justin, it's the one that's most likely overdone. Yeah, I would say it's, it's overdone the most just because I think it's so easy to, and quick in terms of like, if I want to add more load, that's going to be more intense. If I want to move faster, that's going to be more intense. It's, it doesn't really take a lot to like increase that intensity. Whereas volume, something like, you know,

is you're going to take a little bit longer to get through the sets, get through the reps. And it's not something that creeps up on you quite as fast as, as intensity does, uh, and also too with intensity, there's just that fine line of where, uh, you know, it could really get away from you to, to where you could get injured and there's all these other sorts of risks, uh, involved with cranking the intensity up versus some of the other metrics. Yeah.

And just a side note, if you do more than is necessary to set the wheels in motion, to get your body to adapt, right? Adaptation meaning building muscle, burning body fat, getting stronger, more stamina and endurance, right? If you do more than is necessary to get that to move forward, what starts to happen is you start to compromise your body's ability to recover and adapt. Meaning even if there is a 2% increase in, let's say the signal that your body gets to build muscle with a 10% increase in intensity, it may, and it typically does come alongside a 15% reduction in recovery or whatever. So then that 2% increase in the signal

is not only not effective, it's actually a negative when you count the fact that you can't recover as fast. So that's what we're talking about when we're talking about overtraining. It's doing more than is necessary to elicit the maximum results. Anything over that, and now you're slowing things down, and if you go even too far,

you actually start to go backwards. Well, I also think it's elusive. I think that people have this misconception about what they're capable of doing going into the workout in terms of what they've been able to do in the past. But let's say now there's been months in between, there's been years in between, your body's at a different state

in terms of what it can tolerate. And I think that this is where it gets, um, it gets away from you pretty quickly when you start to realize that, Oh, wow, my, my body's not performing quite like it used to, uh, and you feel like you should be able to do this. And so you kind of power through it, but, uh, in a sense you should have gone a lot less and scaled back, uh, going into that workout. Yeah. You know, what's interesting too, Justin is, especially when you look at high level, uh, strength coaches, you know, I would, I would say the best workout programming, um, you got to

give it to strength coaches, right? Because they're, it's their pay or if they succeed or not is determined by performance improvements. Not just looking better in the mirror because you can kind of mess around with that with diet and stuff, but rather are my athletes faster or stronger? Is my powerlifting athlete lifting more? My Olympic athlete lifting more? If they are, then my programming is on point. If they're not, then I got to look at my programming. When you look at high level strength coaches, they are, then my programming is on point. If they're not, then I got to look at my programming. When you look at high level strength coaches, they are experts at managing intensity.

Now there's of course the exercises and again, the frequency and the sets and the reps, but really the magic is in this really powerful factor called intensity, which if you manipulate it right, you can really get exceptional results. If you misuse intensity though, it's like a nuke. Like you place it in the wrong place, you blow everything up and you start going backwards. So how you manipulate intensity is so, so important. And this is an important conversation because especially now that summer is

here, essentially, this is what people tend to do. They tend to say, oh no, I'm gonna take my shirt off or I'm gonna be in a bikini. Let's just ramp up intensity and let's just do it across the board. And then their body actually starts to regress, it starts to plateau and they can't figure out what's going on. And then what they do is reach for intensity again.

Well, maybe I need to work out even harder. And then you start spinning your tires in the dirt and then you either quit or you hurt yourself, which tends to be safe. I do. Do you want to go ahead and do the quote, Adam's quote for him? The least amount of work to elicit the most amount of change. Yeah.

And this is why he says all the time and why that holds true is, you know, especially looking at intensity. Um, it's better to have that mindset and approach going into it because we have to find that right dose. We have to find the right intensity. And if you do that with the intention of really like squeezing that threshold, like you're a lot more likely to over exceed that threshold than you are to build upon that and have something to gauge that going into the next workout, you might have actually like got to the point where you have to actually recover even more so it affects your next workout substantially.

Yeah. Now you're looking at your whole program and you're now going backwards. Or you're doing more work for the same results, which in my opinion is also going backwards. I'd say the first thing to focus on when you're looking at increasing the intensity, because again, I want to be very clear. If you do this right, it's the fastest way to get results in a short period of time is to manipulate intensity. It's not a forever thing. You can't keep doing this forever, but in a short period of time, you'll get great results if you do this right. And the first thing to focus on is on increasing

intensity judiciously, meaning here's what people tend to do. Let's say you work out four days a week and you train with a certain level of intensity. Let's say on a scale of one to 10, you train at a seven, okay. Meaning your, your, your, your perceived exertion or perceived intensity is a seven.

And then you're like, oh my God, summer's coming up. So then you make every workout a 10, every workout. You don't take that, like some workouts and say, you know, I'm always at a seven on everything. So what I'm gonna do is once a week, I'm gonna be at a 10. Once a week, I'm gonna be at an eight. And then the other two days a week,

I'm gonna be back at a seven. It's like, no, everything hard all the time now because they don't increase it judiciously. They take it and they hammer it towards everything. There's nothing that'll get you to over train faster than jacking up your intensity across the board all the way across and without doing it judiciously. It's like a very quick way to get your body to plateau. So you want to look at your routine, your workout, and if you increase the

intensity in one workout over what you did before in that one workout, then you've done it, you've already increased the intensity. Just incremental. Incremental. Yeah, just small steps, and then reassess that going into your next workout. But yeah, there's also other ways to manipulate that. So it's not always based around load, which I think that a lot of people kind of get stuck with that idea that the only way to increase these exercises, uh, intensities to just add

more weight where, you know, we can mess with the tempo, we can mess, uh, with the velocity, we can mess, you know, with other factors, Rest periods that we can shorten that. Yeah. So now the demand's a little more intense and it's also a safer way to approach it. Yeah. And I mean, taking it another step further, I can't even go back and regress as much as this. I work out four days a week. Seven is the intensity on a scale of one to 10. I'm just going to go two exercises in my workouts up to a 10 and then the rest is a seven. So let's say typically do five exercises in your workout and you stop, you know,

two or three reps short of failure, um, with those typically you could say, you know what, with this one exercise, I'm going to go to failure with this one set. And so you're, in other words, judiciously meaning you imply you increase the intensity very carefully in one or two parts. And then wait and see what happens. Doing it all, all at once is again, it's a fast track to no Gainesville. It's a fast track towards getting no results. So be very judicious with that increase in intensity.

The next point is that these increases in intensity should be done for short periods of time. And this took me so long to learn with my body because what I would always do is I would get, I'd start to feel good, I'm getting good sleep, I'm on a good diet, everything feels good, and I'd be like, you know what, I'm gonna go for it. And then I would do that, I would jack up the intensity of my workouts and I'd get faster results,

I'd get stronger, oh my God, this is working. But then what would happen is rather than doing it for two or three weeks and then backing off is I would do it until it was obvious that I was going backwards. It's like, I, I, I got stronger for two or three weeks in a row and I kept going, Oh, I didn't get stronger this week. All right, I'm going to try again real hard. Oh, not getting stronger. Keep going real hard. Now I'm going backwards. What the hell's happening? Right. I didn't, I didn't cut it short. I went way past its

exploration. Well, it's hard because it's somewhat addictive because you're like, wow, I just cranked up the intensity and it's working, you know, and I am getting stronger. And, um, but there is that, that moment where it, it, it fades. Like you're not going to have that same awesome results. Uh, you know, if you extend that out, that out past that sort of window. And so to be ahead of that is to be smarter in your training and to realize that this is a major factor in terms of gaining results, but we have to be smart about planning ahead and then moving on in order to maintain those effects you just received. You know, this made me think of? I got an analogy.

I hope this works, Justin. I hope this works and you appreciate this. It's like you're playing a racing game, a video game with a car, and you're on a track, and you have three boosts that you could do, right? Where you hit a special button, you get a boost of power, a turbo. But don't use them all up at once,

because then you run out. And use it at the right time when you're on the track. In other words, don't use it on the turn or you'll just go off the track. You wait till you're on the straightaway to use the boost. And then when you're doing the turns, you slow down and then you got the straightaway. So this is how you should use intensity. If you look at your whole year's worth of training, most of it is going around those turns and you're cruising and then you get those straightaways and that's

when you hit the intensity button. That's why it should be for short periods of time. So typically I'll recommend and I used to recommend to clients, and this is not what I do with myself. When I ramp up the intensity, it's typically for two to four weeks at a time. And then I back off for a good two to four weeks and then do it again. That step ladder approach produces far better results in both the short term and the long term. Then hitting the intensity until the signs are so obvious that I need

a break that I actually have to take a week off. The next point is when you're ramping up anything in your workout, especially intensity, make sure your sleep and diet are on point because your body's ability to tolerate stress is greatly, greatly dictated by the overall stress in your life and your life, which includes things like sleep, diet, stress, lifestyle. In other words, if I'm working out this hard, I have to make sure that the rest of my life is going to allow me to work out this hard or this much harder.

So what you don't want to do is I'm going to ramp up the intensity during a period of time when my sleep is bad or during a period of time. You just got a new job. Yes. Yes. Or my diet's bad, not doing well. Finals at school. Yeah.

Or I'm cutting so much that my calories are so low. Now I'm going to beat myself up. So you, what you want to do when you do something like this is you want to make sure everything is lined up so that that increased intensity doesn't become overwhelming on the body. And you see this now with, even with, with athletes, you're starting to see this with athletes where coaches are training athletes and they're like, okay, this is what, this is when the workouts are getting the hardest, get good sleep, get good, die.

I know you coached your athletes around this as well, where you really made sure that they ate and got good sleep. Oh, it's such a priority. Yeah. Especially if you are in that point where we're testing, we're pressing, we're cranking that intensity up, like all the other emphasis outside of training has to be on rest, recovery, sleep, uh, eating proper, like whole foods that are going to nourish and also help to rebuild and restore

energy going into the workouts coming up. Because we have to plan it going into not just this workout that we're trying to accomplish for the day, but it's this whole cycle of intensity that we have to maintain and manage. And the only way to do that is to make sure we really emphasize sleep and recovery. Yeah, the way I like to look at it is the harder your workouts go, the harder or more focus you need to put on your ability to recover. So if I'm placing a lot of focus

on the intensity of my workouts, that'll only work if I can place an equal amount of intensity and focus on my ability to recover on my sleep and my diet. If I don't do that, then what happens is I overwhelm my body's ability to deal with this additional intensity. And then again, I go backwards and there's almost nothing more frustrating in the world than working out harder and getting worse results. That's like, uh, not only is it a waste of time, it feels like a waste of time.

It's disheartening. And I would argue it's one of the number one reasons why people stop working out because they start to feel like their investment is not giving them any returns. It's like, Oh my God, I'm, I'm training so hard. What's the point? Yeah, I'm working so hard and I'm not like, I'm not receiving those type of gains I was hoping for. Right. Now something else to consider when you're doing, especially with strength training,

when you're increasing the intensity is that the recovery demands of different exercises and methods or tools of resistance, increasing the intensity on those, each one of those has a different demand on the body's ability to recover. Okay, so to give an example, generally speaking, harder workouts with free weights will require more recovery than harder workouts with machines. Okay, so to give an example, if I were to go to failure on barbell squats, that would equal failure on probably two lower body exercises combined. In other words, I can handle more intensity with machines than I can with free weights and that has to do with just the fact that free weights require stability and balance.

They tend to beat up the body more. Um, so you do less of them to get the same result type of deal. This is why you tend to hear us talk about how we favor free weights. Same thing for compound lifts versus isolation lifts, right? Uh, reverse grip pull-ups or supinated grip pull-ups. Um, if I go to failure on that, that is going to hammer my body more than going to failure on curls. So compound lifts are just damage the body more, require more

recovery than isolation lifts. So consider this when you look at your workout and you're saying, okay, I'm going to apply more. So for example, if I'm looking at my workout and I'm going to do three compound lifts, two of them are free weights, one is machine. Then I'm going to do, you know, three isolation lifts. And I'm like, okay, um, I'm going to up my intensity. Well, here's my choices.

One of my compound free weight lifts I can make harder, or I can make two of the isolation lifts harder, or I could make the machine one, a compound lift. And one of the isolate, you have Or I could make the machine one compound lift and one of the isolate. You have to consider the exercises themselves and what they do to the body when you bump up a tendency. They're not all created equal. It's almost like where you allocate that intensified energy. Yes.

You know, and yeah, so there, the central nervous system is gonna get taxed a lot more with free weights, especially compound lifts and free weights. Totally. And so to, which, but they're so beneficial and you get so much bang for your buck with those lifts that you do want to consider that. But, uh, the rest of your workout should reflect maybe a little bit less of the intense, uh, energy in that direction. But if you structure your workout where it's like, okay, well there's other ones, single joint lifts and some machines in there,

we can crank that intensity. We can add, um, you know, more exercises that we intensify because you know, overall we're not going to get quite as taxed. Totally. Uh, the next thing to consider is that intensity and volume. So intensity is how hard, remember your workout volume is the total amount of work that you do in your workout. They should be inversely related. In other words, the harder I work out, the longer I can't work out.

Okay. I think that makes sense, right? Think about running, right? The harder you sprint, the shorter the distance you can run. The, if I run at a low intensity pace, I can run much further. The same thing should be true with your strength training. When you ramp up the intensity, you probably should start to bring the volume down or to put differently, the most intense free weight, sorry, the

most intense strength training workouts tend to be the shortest and the less, the least intense strength training workouts tend to be the longest. What you don't want to do. And here's where everybody screws up, is they people ramp up the intensity and the volume at the same time. Yeah. Summers here I'm not gonna just work out order. We gotta do it all at once. I'm also gonna work out much longer and this is again this is a fast track towards no results. So you got to look at those. Frequency I would put in the volume camp as well especially if you especially if you look at, like, if you count it towards your total volume, uh, for the week.

Although I will say with frequency, frequency is pretty interesting because when you bring the intensity down low enough, you could work out very, very frequent. This, by the way, just highlights just how impactful intensity is, um, on the body. I remember as a trainer, when this first occurred to me, it's really started to make sense because when I was an early trainer, I over applied intensity. I think most trainers do, right? You just beat everybody up.

And then I started to realize like, man, I could, if I drop the intensity, I can train people a lot more appropriately and they'll get better results. And then I remember this one trainer gave me this great example. He said, he said, you know, intensity over trains people faster than anything. And I looked at him and said, what are you talking about? He goes, if I took someone off the street right now, I could make them work out too hard really, really quickly faster than I can make them work out too long and faster than I can do too much frequency that'll overwhelm the body.

And I thought, holy cow, that's totally true. So yeah, when you ramp, when you bring that intensity up, bring the volume down and I tend to, you know, uh, when I do this, I like failure for me is typically one third of the total volumes. What I'll end up doing. If I start to go to failure, I cut out two thirds of the volume. Well, it's interesting. We, you know, you kind of brought up, uh, even with, um, strength athletes and,

um, you know, like old Soviet kind of studies we refer to every now and then like how they used to train and frequency is a major part of that. Like because it's, it's a high skill, like, so these Olympic lifts are very high skill, uh, so you need a lot of practice. And so you need to add frequency as a major factor there. However, intensity, you know, to be used would interrupt that process and they'll be able to test themselves out and see how strong they're actually getting. And so you want to be able to press on intensity, but it's good.

Even in that situation, it's even shorter window of intensity because of the fact that, you know, frequency is such like intensity really doesn't match well with frequency. No, especially not with volume. And lastly, I'll say this, is that the harder a workout is, the more likely you are, or should I say the risk of injury goes up with the intensity. Okay. Why is that? Well, if you have trouble maintaining good form with low intensity, you could basically

throw your form out the window when things get really hard. Form breaks down under fatigue. This is just a fact. Everybody knows this. Any technique that you do, uh, you could write with a pencil. If I fatigue your hand enough, your handwriting goes out the window. Fatigue is the enemy of form. That's right.

So when your intensity goes through the roof, then your deviations of form and technique and stability start to become more and more of a challenge. And injury starts to go up. This is one of the biggest, I would say, factors to consider when you're ramping up the intensity. Besides recovery, which is what we've been talking about, is risk of injury. This is why priming is so, if you're going to do a really hard workout, where you're going to really exert yourself. Priming becomes absolutely crucial because priming will help ensure proper connection to ranges of

motion that you're going to be in. It's going to ensure stability. It's going to ensure or help ensure better recruitment patterns while you're doing those exercises because it's, you want to have a higher level of care going into an intense workout than you would, and I don't think I need to make this case too much. Right? It's like, you know, go for a leisure leisure stroll or go sprinting as hard

as you can, which one is more likely to hurt you. Yeah. Right. So prime properly. Yeah. And I mean, this, this kind of also points back to, you know, the also ramping up recovery, ramping up, you know, the good quality food that you're eating in between.

Well, we need to also like overemphasize the fact that, yeah, we have to set ourselves up for the best quality recruitment patterns we can apply into the workout because the margin of error is definitely decreased once we crank our intensity level up. And so we don't want any leak in performance, even if it's just a performance perspective,

but also too, whenever fatigue sets in, form starts to crumble and to be able to maintain that and maintain that good postural positions and biomechanics, it starts with the setup and priming yourself appropriately. Yeah. So to give like a very simple example, a bench press, we'll use a bench press as an example. Very important for shoulder health and a bench press to keep your shoulder blades pressed down and back. So you want to have kind of your shoulder blades pinned back and you want them depressed. This is like the bench press position. You want a nice, strong chest out,

slight arch in the low back, hips down the bench. And you wanna maintain this shoulder, this tight shoulder position as you bench. Well, if you're somebody that lacks a little shoulder stability, let's say you have forward shoulder, priming for that particular individual would involve some shoulder mobility,

maybe some prone Cobra or some basic rows, just to get the feel of what the shoulders should feel like when they're pinned down and back. Now what happens when I'm in that bench press position, I'm much better connected to that proper and stable position and now what I can do is I can push intensity within good form because when I deviate out of it, it becomes apparent. That's what priming does. Priming makes bad technique or bad movement more apparent so you could stop the set or correct. That's what priming, so a lot of people confuse priming and say, oh, well, what do you mean it warms up or reconnects? All your muscles are connected or whatever.

No, no, no, no. It's literally like getting used to the movement. It's like doing a dance move before- It's sequencing it properly. That's right. And so then when you move outside of it a couple degrees, you can tell, like, uh-uh, no, my shoulder's supposed to be right here.

This is how, because I've primed properly. And so now your risk of injury goes down versus just jumping under the bar, not getting that prime or that warmup, or even doing a general warmup, right? A generic general warmup where you can't, I mean, how many times have you trained a client where you go up to them and go, okay, your left shoulder's raised up or here

tilts your hips away. They don't even know. They don't even know that they're outside of proper form. They're just pushing and it's the priming that helps, helps put them in that position, helps the bad position or moving outside of that position become apparent and that lowers the risk of injury. So it's extremely important that you prime properly before hard workouts. Look, because of this episode, because we're talking about doing this for summer, here's what we did. We took

one of our most intense workout programs, MAPS-HIT. HIT stands for High Intensity Interval Training and we made it 50% off for this episode. We also made our Prime Pro Bundle that includes two of our priming programs that teach you how to prime different areas of body Based on how your body moves. That's also 50% off so you can find those both at mapsfitnessproducts.com But you have to use this code and this code is only for this episode Safety 50 so safety 50 at mapsfitnessproducts.com We'll give you 50 hours off again maps Maps Hit or the Prime Pro Bundle. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump.

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