Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2372: Five Steps to a Faster Metabolism

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

Defining what metabolism means? (1:50) The complexity of our metabolism. (3:18) Survive and thrive. (6:25) Why a fast metabolism is an advantage in a modern society. (9:24) 5 Steps to a Faster Metabolism #1 - Strength train. (13:47) #2 - Eat more protein and food. (19:49) #3 - Get good sleep. (25:19) #4 - Balance hormones. (27:27) #5 - Walk after meals. (32:14) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Eight Sleep for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump Listeners! ** Use code MINDPUMP to get $350 off Pod 4 Ultra. Currently ship to United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia ** July Promotion: MAPS Split | Sexy Athlete Bundle 50% off! ** Code JULY50 at checkout ** Mind Pump Apperal 4th of July sale is live! Get 25% off Freedom tee, Rebellion tee, and Freedom flag. Our equipment and other apparel will be 20% off.  This includes Tees, the Love Yourself Collection, Socks, Headbands, and Kitchen items.  Mind Pump # 1547: The Hidden Benefits Of Lifting Weights The Myth of Optimal Protein Intake – Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump # 1345: 6 Ways To Optimize Sleep For Faster Muscle Gain And Fat Loss Mind Pump # 2245: Fix Your Sleep & Balance Your Hormones With Dr. Kirk Parsley Mind Pump Hormones Facebook Private Forum TRANSCEND your goals! Telehealth Provider • Physician Directed GET YOUR PERSONALIZED TREATMENT PLAN! Hormone Replacement Therapy, Cognitive Function, Sleep & Fatigue, Athletic Performance and MORE. Their online process and medical experts make it simple to find out what’s right for you. 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. Today's episode, we teach you how to boost or speed up your metabolism. This is real deal stuff. Get your body to more burn more calories on its own. Makes it easier for you to stay lean.

It keeps you healthier. So when you're surrounded by tasty food, like most people who are listening to this podcast. Now this episode was brought to you by a sponsor, eight sleep. This is the most advanced sleep system you'll find anywhere. So it cools and warms your bed, tracks your sleep. It adjusts according to your sleep habits to individualize how well it can help you sleep. Literally uses AI. By the way, they have a new product called the Pod 4 Ultra that also helps you stop snoring. I'm not making this up.

Go check this company out. This is by far the most advanced and successful company out. This is by far the most advanced and successful sleep system any of us have ever tried. If you go to 8sleep.com, so 8 spell it out, E-I-G-H-T sleep.com forward slash mind pump on that link. If you use the code mind pump you'll get $350 off the pod for Ultra. By the way they ship to the US, Canada, the UK, Europe and Australia. also we got a sale this month Maps split half off and the sexy athlete bundle of programs also half off if you're interested go to Maps Fitness products calm Then use the code July 50 for that discount. All right, here comes a show In today's episode, we're going to talk about how you can make your metabolism

Faster in other words burn more calories all the time. Let's get into it. All right this is a good topic. Everybody wants a fast metabolism. Yeah. But first we should kind of define, loosely define what metabolism means. So if you were to look up metabolism, mammalian metabolism, it would say something like it's a chemical process that converts Your food and drinks into energy for your body. It's actually very complex It's the second most complex thing that we've ever brain universe got its metabolism The brain and the metabolism the two most complex things is very very complex And it can change in the sense that you can,

there are things you can do that will make your metabolism require more energy and there are things that you can do that will cause your metabolism to require less energy. When we say slow metabolism or when people refer to a metabolism as being slow, they're talking about as a metabolism that doesn't need a lot of energy. You could also call it an efficient metabolism. Fast metabolism is the opposite, right?

It requires more energy to sustain itself. And this is also a natural adaptation. And a fast metabolism is most likely or most definitely beneficial in the modern world. Whereas in the past, it was a slow metabolism. You wanted a metabolism that didn't burn a lot of calories thousands of years ago because that meant you could survive on less. Well today, you want to be able to burn more calories

because, well, there's food everywhere. What would you say, is that your, because it was more than 13 second elevator pitch there, what is the main reason for our metabolism is purely just to survive, right? It's adapting to whatever it is that we're throwing at it in order for it to conserve energy, right? It's just, this is how you, anytime you drink water,

you eat. Efficiently distribute energy. Yeah, anytime you eat or drink water, that's the process that you're, you know, you eat a steak or a potato or a fruit. Um, how does that get turned into life sustaining energy? How does, how does it get turned into energy

that fuels your cells and all of the hormones and chemical processes that allow you to live? That's all metabolism is. Although it is, again, like I said, it's very, very complicated. Um, it's a quite complicated process. That's really all it is. It's not just that it's very, very complicated. Um, it's a quite complicated process. That's really all it is. It's not just that it's a complicated process.

It's also that so many other things influence it too. Because it's so complicated. Right. Absolutely. So, and I think this is the part where I think where people, um, you know, they, there's this idea that, um, you have a fast or metabolism. And it's like, well, sure. At any given period of time, almost anyone could actually say that, that they have a fast or a slow metabolism.

It's constantly moving and adapting and literally day by day. Now it's not moving from a, you know, resting metabolic rate of 2000, one day than the next day, it's 4's 4000. But it's always adapting to the stresses and the signals that we get from our body on a daily. And everything from hormones to sleep to outside stress to physical stress to internal stress to- Tissue demands. Yeah, tissue demands, intensity of workouts to, I mean,

the foods that we are eating, the lack of foods that we're eating, I mean, there's so many variables that come in here, but I think the idea or the desired outcome of this episode is to give people maybe the biggest rocks that move it in the most advantageous way, would you say? Yeah, yeah, by the way, you know, the reason why

your metallism adapts is the goal of the adaptation is for your body's energy requirements. And we'll measure energy here in calories. So calories are, people know what calories are with food. It's really just a unit of energy. Okay. How do you measure how much energy is in this particular food versus that particular food?

We count it as calories. Your metabolism is always adapting, trying to change your energy requirements based off of all of the- Environmental stimulus. All of the stimuli and signaling that it's getting, right? So, you know- It's trying to be optimal in whatever you're presenting it in terms of, yeah, where you're currently living, like what kind of demands you have based on

how much food you need and how much activity you're providing, uh, your body. And so, yeah, we're, this always points back to the fact that we're such adaptation machines, like we're, we're all these things adjust based off of what, you know, we're, we're constantly facing every day in terms of challenges. Yeah.

There's, there's really in this priority, right, if you were to think about it, right, besides converting food and drink into energy, it's like the first priority of metabolism is for you to survive, okay? So how do we keep you surviving? Well, if your energy intake is low, it wouldn't survive very long

if your metabolism was really high in that scenario because you're burning a lot of energy, but you're only taking in this much energy, you're going to eventually consume yourself. You don't have enough energy coming in to sustain that burn. So your metabolism will try to adapt to meet the new, um, you know, energy intake. So survive is first. Second is thrive. Thrive meaning, okay, if we got survival down, a metabolism will adapt to

help you thrive, meaning it can, metabolic health means when people refer to having good metabolic health means it can convert food very easily or readily into different forms of energy. Your cells are fueled properly. The mitochondria of the cells produce ATP glycogen is Converted from glucose or sugars or carbohydrates and your body can develop can use ketones if need be from fats Essentially your metabolism when it's when it's trying to help you thrive is this trying to make you better at whatever It is you're telling it you need to get better at, but survive is number one.

Meaning if everything's going haywire, your metabolism, your body is like survive first. So you do everything wrong. It doesn't care about thriving. It's not going to care about making you as energetic and awesome as possible. It's like, how do we survive in this scenario? So to give an extreme example, you know,

there's been studies on POWs, right? Prisoners of war who were kept in camps and fed very, very little and their metabolisms, they definitely weren't thriving. They became very skinny, anemic and sick, but many of them survived, uh, because their metabolisms was able to prioritize things for vital functions. It's like, okay, we're not gonna keep you strong We're not gonna keep you sharp your organs work

But here your heart's gonna keep bump, you know moving and your liver is gonna still kind of operate Isn't there a isn't there a Guinness World Record for the guy who went to like a year or longer of not eating? Yeah, yeah, he was obese very obese individual that didn't eat the entire year. Right. Right. And he just drank coffee. Yeah. Yeah. And his, his body consumed itself. By the way, that's, that's what happens when you lose body fat. When you lose body fat, um, your body is using stored energy.

That's what body fat is. It's like a bank account. Uh, so if you have a lot of body fat on your body, it's because your body said, Hey, we got all this extra energy coming in. We're not burning it or using it. But what are we going to do with it? Well, your body doesn't just, doesn't just evaporate. It stores that energy.

So now you have stored energy, which can come in handy during times of famine or stress. Obviously a lot of us don't live in famine in modern society, so then that becomes a problem in and of itself. But there are things you can do to manipulate metabolism to move in the direction that you want. Now I said earlier that a fast metabolism is an advantage in a modern society. Well, here's why.

When you eat a diet, if you burn the calories or you use the calories or the energy that you consume and you use it all, the negative effects of food, even from sugar or unhealthy fats or processed foods or whatever, when your body burns it off, a lot, most of the negative aspects of that food disappear because you've burned it off. You've used it for energy. This is why you'll see sometimes, and these are really frustrating to me because they don't paint the whole picture. They're not 100% accurate with the context, but you'll see some food scientists will say something like, I'm going to prove to you that you can eat fast food and be healthy.

I'm just going to go on a pure fast food diet and I'm going to lose 30 pounds and all my blood markers are going to improve. And they'll do that. They'll control their calories very strictly. They'll eat a Big Mac or whatever and chicken nuggets and just keep everything low and then they'll come back and say, look, I lost 30 pounds eating garbage food and look, my blood lipids got better. That's because when you burn off what you consume, uh, you, all the potential

negative effects that come from your food are almost, they don't completely disappear, but you get rid of a lot of it. Now that's not the whole story because what you eat also determines how you feel, um, and it alters behaviors, which is very important. But the point I'm making is a fast metabolism is an advantage in a modern society because we're surrounded by so much food. So you want a metabolism that allows you to move around in this world where food is everywhere, right?

Now, again, thousands of years ago, you don't want to walk around with fast metabolism because it was hard to find food. If you're a hunter gatherer, you ain't going to find, you're not going to find 3000 calories, I mean, 2000 calories a day of energy, unless you're a very, very, very successful hunter, it's not going to happen. So, slow metabolism was an asset in the past, whereas today a slow metabolism is a detriment because now it's really easy when you have a slow metabolism to go over that.

And I said earlier, if you burn more calories than you take in, a lot of the negative effects of food disappear. Well, here's the flip of that. You can eat the best, healthiest diet in the world with organic balanced proteins, fats and carbs and fruits and vegetables and whatever. But if you constantly eat more than you burn, you will see negative effects. You will still see negative effects from it because your, your body is storing

more energy than you're burning and that can cause negative effects. You know, this highlights to one of the, the pet peeves I've always had about our space, in particular the fitness influencer, right? The person on Instagram that, you know, has most of their photos of them in phenomenal shape, they're ripped, they're jacked, and they're highlighting their metabolic flexibility, their ability to have donuts before workout or gummy bears afterwards and they eat out and they're in and out meals and they're sharing this that it's about having balance. And it's like why I don't like that message is because they send that when, and then the people that are following and

aspiring to be like them are in a place of where they don't have metabolic flexibility, where their metabolism is adapted to be extremely slow based off of their lean mass, based off of their lifestyle, based off of their hormone profile, all these things that we talk about. And then they see this image of this guy or girl who looks a particular way that they want to look and they see the way they get to eat and think to themselves, well, you can't eat that formula. Yeah.

Why can't I eat that way too? Or I'm going to try and eat that way and have this flexibility with the food choices. And it's like, what you don't understand is that you haven't built that yet. Now, the cool part is that hopefully we can get to a place where we do build your metabolism to where you can have some of that metabolic flexibility.

But you first have to build the metabolism. First, we have to build enough lean body mass. We have to change some of our, our, our eating habits and behaviors. We have to get your, your hormone profile. We have to get your sleep in order. All of these things that play into the metabolism, we have to first figure out that equation before we decide, Oh, we're going to introduce all these different high calorie, hyper palatable foods. If we're going to be successful.

Now step one is, and, uh, you know, I'm going to switch the order here a little bit cause it's a little wrong on the notes, but step one for somebody who's like, I want a faster metabolism, but I want a metabolism that burns more calories. I want to be able to eat more and still get leaner. Step one is to strength train. You need to send, by the way, what we're going to talk about today, some of these are essential to be done together because strength training by itself is not a guarantee to speed up metabolism. And we'll get to why in just a bit here, but strength training is number one because that sends the signal, a very strong signal to the body, if done properly, that says,

hey, let's increase the amount of this expensive tissue or let's add more of this lean body mass, which incidentally also burns a lot of calories. Like muscle costs a lot of energy. Muscle is very active. When you use it, it flexes, it contracts. Even to maintain it requires more calories. For example, muscle requires many more calories on a pound-for-pound basis than body fat will or even some of your organs. Muscle is very metabolically expensive and active. So your body, now here's what's interesting about that, right? Remember, your metabolism is designed to make you survive and then thrive. If your body, now here's what's interesting about that, right? Remember your metabolism is designed to make you survive and then thrive.

If your body doesn't think you need muscle, you're not going to have it because it's expensive. There's no reason to have this costly tissue unless your body's like, oh, we need this costly tissue because three days a week we're lifting heavy things. Like obviously we need to have it. The demand is there.

Right. This is why this is, you could take the biggest, strongest person and have them be bedridden for two weeks and you will be shocked at how much muscle they lose by being bedridden. You send zero signal to your body that you need muscle. That muscle gets pared down really fast. In fact, if you've ever broken a limb, you know what I'm talking about. You take that cast off a few weeks later and you look down.

It's a cast of size. Oh, it's actually, I mean, it happened to me when I dislocated my knee as a kid and I had to wear this straight brace. So it wasn't a cast, but it was still a straight brace. And I remember taking it off and it was only a few weeks. I took it off and I was still trying to walk on it. So I wasn't even better in, I remember taking it off and I got, I gasped. I looked down at my femur and my muscles were completely gone

My knee was bigger than the top of my leg and I freaked out and that's just because my body's like we don't need this It's expensive. It's like having a bill, you know An expensive bill like it's like hey, honey Why are we spending all this money to potentially have air conditioning where we're not using it? Let's just cut that service out when we need it, we'll pay for it. But right now let's not use it. That's what happens, uh, with your body lifting weights tells your body we need strength, obviously we're lifting heavy things.

So you've got to send that signal first. Another way to look at it in a way I explained to my clients is let's pretend your metabolic rate is at 2,000 calories and anything that you eat beyond 2,000 calories and you don't utilize your body then is going to store for later energy which gets stored as body fat. If I send the signal by lifting weights to build muscle what ends up happening with those additional calories, so let's say I eat 2100 calories, a portion, if not all of those calories that I eat over 2000 now gets partitioned over to recovery and building muscle. That's right.

That's a huge difference. That's why this is so important is like, if I'm going to eat above what my body needs in order for me to survive, it's going to get stored as, as body fat, unless I have sent a signal for my body to build muscle, it's going to get stored as body fat, unless I have sent a signal for my body to build muscle. It then will use those calories, partition it over to recovering and building muscle. And that's why it's so advantageous to be doing both of these paired together. By the way, this is why strength training in a head to head competition with other

forms of exercise that burn more calories, right? If you go for an hour run, which running does not tell your body to build muscle, uh, not maybe sprinting might, but not like long distance running. You do an hour long distance run, you're burning way more calories than if you do an hour of weights in the gym, traditional weights, right? Where you do 10 reps and you rest for two minutes, do another set. You burn way more calories running. Yet when you look at the comp, then compared head to head from a fat loss perspective,

in studies, we'll show this, we've seen this for decades in the gyms we ran, but the studies show this now. The strength training burns more pure body fat and results in a metabolic adaptation in the positive, not in the negative. Whereas the other form of exercise, cardio, running, oftentimes results in a slowing of the metabolism through muscle loss because the body is like, oh we're burning a lot of calories but we know it need a lot of strength. Let's cut calories where we can since we don't need strength. Let's pair muscle down. This is why weight loss with that form of exercise tends to come

from about 30 to 40 percent depending on which study you look at comes from muscle strength training is imperative for the speeding up of the metabolism. I mean I would argue too like how we strength train is so important too because if you are especially if you're trying to do this at calorie maintenance or a deficit and you decide you're going to pick up something you go from a sedentary lifestyle you know you want to lose weight and so you decide you're going to pick up something, you go from a sedentary lifestyle, you know, you want to lose weight. And so you decide you're going to pick up a strength training modality like CrossFit or Orange Theory or this circuit training based type of training is yeah, and you are also living in this core deficit, it then starts to look more like cardio and running. And so even though we're telling you that lifting weights is the way to build your metabolism, how you lift weights in the, in this situation is extremely

important. Let me be clear. Has to be anaerobic. Thank you. Let me be very clear. Just cause you have weights doesn't mean you're lifting weights. So it's bodybuilding style training, power lifting style training, strength training style training, where the goal is to get stronger.

That's what sends a signal to build muscle. That is imperative for a program built around speeding up the metabolism. Now, second is also very important because you can send the signal to build muscle, but now your body needs the nutrients to do so. The building blocks. In particular protein and some additional calories. Okay. So if your calories are super low and you're

lifting weights, even though your body may get the signal to build muscle, it's looking around going, there's no building blocks. What do we use? Yeah. You just sent the plans to build a new house. With no material. No materials whatsoever.

No two by fours. No hammers. So the workers are sitting around like twiddling their thumbs. It's all theoretical. Yeah. So along with strength training, no hammers. So the workers are sitting around like, twiddling their thumbs. It's all theoretical. Yeah, so along with strength training, increase your protein.

Now here's what's interesting about protein. By itself, even if you don't strength train, now this is a minimal effect, but it's still important to consider, even if you don't strength train, eating a high protein diet has been shown to boost metabolic rate, and it has been shown to even stimulate a little bit of muscle growth, even

than someone who is sedentary. All right. What's high protein? About 0.6 grams per pound of body weight up to about a gram per pound of body weight. We always tell people to aim for a gram per pound of target body weight. So look at yourself and say, how much do I want to

weigh? 130 pounds, 200 pounds, 115 pounds. Take that and convert it to grams. I'm going to eat 130 grams or 115 grams or 200 grams of protein a day. If you do that in combination with good appropriate strength training, I can't, by the way, stress that enough. Strength training has to be done well and appropriate, not just hard. That doesn't mean appropriate.

Appropriate means effective. If you do that in combination with appropriate strength training, you will move in the direction of building muscle and that speeds up the metabolism very, very consistently. Now, would you guys say, at least in my experience, I think this is true, the most challenging part about this point that we're making and why I want to hammer this home is the inconsistency of that. Yeah. So it's like people are like, okay, I get it. Protein is to build muscle. I need to do that. Okay, I get it. The guys are telling me I want to weigh 130, so I need about 130 grams. And they might track once or twice and they go like, okay, kind of get what that is. And then they just go

about it. And then when I have somebody actually write everything down and we look at a snapshot of say two weeks, it's like oh great, you hit your protein intake twice and then every other time we were at 70% or 60%, sometimes 30% of what you need every day. So what is happening when somebody occasionally hits their protein intake but does not consistently hit that protein while also strength training? Think of it as the average.

Think of it as the average and the more sporadic it is the less effective it is even if the average is okay meaning You can have a ton of protein on Monday No protein all week long and that average will matter less than if it's relatively consistent, but it's the average so Try you got to hit it every single day It's not as intuitive people think they're like what their idea of protein in terms of grams of protein in some meals or like even in like deli meat or what that's providing them is, is very, uh, shockingly lower than I

think they realize. Um, and so I think that, you know, not actually being super intentional about it and understanding the amount of grams, um, and repeating that, uh, for, for a pretty substantial amount of time. So that way you build that habit. I think if they skip the part where you have to build that habit and you have to really pay attention to what specific foods actually provide you with that level of grams of protein

for your daily intake. I mean, it's, it's challenging. I'll give you a number right here. If you're a petite person and your goal body weight is a hundred pounds, which is lighter than most people who are listening to this right now. So I'm just going to use that example. A someone whose goal body weighs a hundred pounds needs to consume about six ounces of meat three times a day.

Six ounces of meat. So three times. Weigh it out and look at it yourself. That's like a, most people will eat six ounces of meat once a day and that's it. You have to add it all up. Or they'll have a little bit of cheese and one egg there or whatever. No, no, six ounces three times a day to hit 100.

You wanna go to 150, if your target body weight's 150 pounds, well now it's a lot more than that. Do the math. One egg has six grams of protein only. If your target body weight is 150 pounds, well now it's a lot more than that. Do the math. One egg has six grams of protein only. If your target body weight is 100 pounds, you need to eat 33 grams of protein from eggs. Well that's five eggs or six eggs. How many people eat five or six eggs for breakfast? So it's a lot harder than you think. Yeah I'm gonna stick with the building the house analogy since

we went there and imagine that framing up and building a perfect, beautiful house is the definition of you building the perfect, beautiful metabolism for your body. And you inconsistently hitting protein intake is like you've got all the plans, you know what you need as far as the tools and the two by fours, and then they deliver the wood and half of it's short. Some of it's one third. Some of it's cut off.

It's like, and then you're trying to frame up and build this house with not all the pieces. Structural. Yeah. Oh no, I need this piece of wood. Exactly. And it's like, okay, you might get by of having some frame up or some structure of a house, but

you're not going to build that, that beautiful metabolism that we're all chasing to have that is that gives you all this metabolic flexibility. And so the importance of you hitting that protein and take consistently is so important to us framing up this metabolism. Oh, it'll double your results. Going from minimal protein to high protein.

Okay, that's how big of a difference it is. Next up is to get good sleep. Almost nothing will hammer your metabolic rate like the stress of lack of sleep and it is a stress. Lack of sleep historically, this is the theory around it, but historically probably meant you were up looking for food and you can't find any or you're scared because it's predators. Your body is going to be in the conserve and store energy phase. Okay, literally there, there was a study that where they took groups of people and

they were calorie controlled in a deficit, meaning they put them both on a diet, same calories, one group had good sleep. The other group had bad sleep. The group that had good sleep, calories are the same in everything, lost twice as much body fat. The group that had bad sleep lost twice as

much muscle. So sleep is very important because poor sleep will tell your body we've got to store as much energy as possible, in other words, aka body fat, and we need to conserve as much energy as possible. Good sleep tells your body we don't need to do that so we're chill and you combine that with lifting weights properly and eating more protein and now you have the environment for a metabolism that's going to boost. It's also when all the contractors, framers are doing the work.

That's when they go to work. They go to work at night when you're sleeping. That's what's going on. So like we got all the material, we got the parts, we understand how we need the protein intake, so we got all the right size 2x4s and then doing it with no sleep is like doing it with no workers. Like that's when they work. They work when you sleep. Yes. And I've literally had, you know, when I really figured this out as a trainer, I've literally had clients only fix their sleep. And we saw a body fat percentage change. Well, using that, continuing down that analogy path or metaphor, we're going to go like,

it's like to build this beautiful house of metabolism. It happens at night and it requires 12 framers. And you having broken sleep or inconsistent sleep is like using one guy. It's like you and the power of you focusing on the sleep is the difference if you got one guy going to work building up this metabolism versus you got 12 guys that are going to work every single night.

And so, and that's how much it can accelerate or slow down this process for you. Right, now the next one is to balance hormones. Now the reason why this one's there is, well there's two reasons. One, if you do the first three things that we said, you know, eat more protein, of course in combination with a good diet, get good sleep, lift weights,

that tends to naturally balance hormones out. When your body is primed to build muscle, it's told to build muscle, it's fueled to build muscle and you get good sleep. What your body does is it organizes its hormones in a muscle building profile. There is a muscle building hormone profile. There's a fat storing muscle profile. There's a stress muscle, excuse me, hormone profile, right? The hormone profile that promotes muscle,

it typically looks like more testosterone and growth hormone, you have insulin sensitivity, your cortisol levels are appropriate, meaning they're high in the morning, they drop down at night, estrogen and progesterone are balanced out. So the first three things we said, if done properly, tends to balance out hormones.

Now, the second part of this is if you're doing those things and you're like, what is going on? And you do know that you're training properly. Let's say you're following a MAPS program. So you know it's a good workout. You know your diet's good. You're tracking it. You're following it.

You know your sleep is good. You're like this might, I don't know what is happening with my body. And you have other signs that point to hormone imbalance, maybe like a low libido, low drive or energy or hair and skin that don't look so good. Then you can get your hormones checked and a hormone imbalance that can be, that needs to be fixed medically will make a profound impact on your

metabolism, like low thyroid. Yeah. For example, yeah, it can have a big impact on your body, on your metabolism, uh, low testosterone can have a big impact on, on your metabolism. Low testosterone can have a big impact on your metabolism. So balancing out your hormones, the reason why it's down the list is because typically we do the first three things balance out but if it's not working out especially if you're older, let's say over the age of 40, then you can look at your hormones.

Those who are testing, yeah, like really comes into play but like you said usually takes care of itself. You're doing all the right Habits you're getting the right sleep. You're getting the right stimulus, you know physically But if there's still something off, I mean, yeah It's so helpful to get like a blood panel to really, you know peer in a little bit more and to see if there is that Deficit there like I know for my wife This was a big, you know game changing once she figured out that it was her thyroid

that was really the issue. And then once, getting the proper medication, it really helped to kickstart everything again. I really like talking about this one because this is one of the things that has evolved and changed for me as a trainer over decades. Like this is an area where I didn't fully understand as a young trainer. And as I got older I realized how

how much of a role your hormones and your have them being balanced plays a significant role in the the results or the lack of results that we get and I look back and I think God shame on me because This this is a factor at, at, with anybody, any sex at any age, but it tends to be more common in advanced aged overweight clients, which is a majority of what we trained when I think back to what the, the, the demographic of clientele, it was a middle-aged woman that was trying to lose 20 to 30 pounds. And a lot of times, one of the challenges,

if not multiple challenges, lie within a hormonal imbalance. And trying to lose weight and diet and strength training while also having this out of balance really makes that exhausting and challenging and frustrating for the client. And so I personally, you know, if my clients have got the ability to go get blood work done, I want that done immediately. Because the conversation I'm having with them as we go through this process, if their hormones are not balanced

and they're are out of whack, or we need something like thyroid, or we got testosterone in the floor, or our progesterone or estrogen is off. Like I really want a lot of the conversation, a lot of our focus into optimizing that. And if we need Western medicine to step in and support that, then it's something that we

want to talk about because otherwise somebody trying all these other things and not having success with it because that their hormone profile is so out of whack, it really can turn somebody off from the message that we're presenting with all the food and exercise and everything like that. Well, I mean the data, like a man with low testosterone versus a man with high testosterone,

all else being the same, significant reduction of body fat and gain in muscle. So it's very important, but you definitely see this as something you get tested with a doctor. We have partners at mphormones.com and you can go and order yourself a test to see kind of where you're at. Now, lastly, speaking of hormones, you might've heard how important it is to have insulin sensitivity, meaning when your body secretes insulin, your body

uptakes that glucose and the sugar or the glucose isn't just floating in your bloodstream, right? When that gets really bad, that turns into diabetes. But before you get diabetes, you get this kind of metabolic dysfunction. And this does promote kind of this fat storage type of an environment. It's also anti-muscle building. Um, one of the best ways, besides strength training, that's the best way, but besides that, one of the best ways to improve insulin sensitivity, uh, or

improve your body's ability to uptake that glucose and turn it into energy. It's to simply walk after eating, like a 10 minute walk after eating, literally contracting, relaxing of muscles. It's like, imagine these, they're like sponges sucking up that blood sugar and storing it as glycogen and it's profound. I mean the studies show this that when you do like a short 10-minute walk after eating you get these really nice improvements in blood sugar. It's really easy. It's like a five or ten minute walk. In fact there was a study where people just did little calf raises in their chair. I mean you

get up and walk and you saw an improvement. So it's a very simple easy thing to do to just move a little bit post-meal. Yeah. If you can peer into ways to help the digestive system. And I think that if there's ways that we can address each kind of system of the body and enhance them, this is one of those where if you can put attention to it and you just ate a meal and now I go walk. I'm getting everything moving. I'm getting everything contracting and it just helps tremendously. So there's not issues later on, especially to interrupt sleep. And I know for me, this is huge in that regard because when I go to sleep at night, if I

haven't properly digested food, it comes back to haunt me, interrupts my sleep. I'm in this sort of vicious loop of now. Um, I'm also like trying to recover from the night before from not getting enough sleep. So there's a whole downstream effect to that. I mean, there's a lot of other little things like chewing your food and extra amount, you know, that, that helps a bit with the digestive process, but like these little tiny hacks that you can add in to make behaviors go so far

It also helps facilitate and speed up recovery You know part of the recovery process is getting these The nutrients oxygen blood to your muscles that you have sent a signal to grow and build One of the ways to help facilitate that and speed that up is through movement. More movement, more blood flow, more oxygen, more nutrients moving throughout the body. I also come from a place of if you don't use it, you lose it. So we live in a time where we're all very sedentary, where we go to work, we sit at our desk, we come home, we sit in our car, we drive home, we sit at our table or we sit on our couch and it's like, and we're just, we're not utilizing all these muscles.

And so one, I want my clients to use it. Two, the digestive process. You know, three, it helps facilitate recovery. And four, it's one of the easiest ways to create movement activity exercise, even though it's a low level exercise in people's lives, they can consistently do till the day they die. Like this is something that my 80, 90 year old clients could instantly start to implement for the most part, right?

Unless I had a client that was handicapped or debilitated by some, for something other than that, this is something I can implement right away and is sustainable for most people. And so incorporating walks after meals for all the reasons you guys said and what I talked about is just an easy way just to create movement in these people. And this is something we're trying to change

and shift behaviorally forever for them if they're gonna have a healthy metabolism. There you have it, lift weights, eat more protein, get good sleep, watch your hormones, and walk for a little bit after your meals. Look, if you like this episode, we have a free peptide guide that breaks down peptides, what they do, what they don't do, and which ones are right for you. Also we have partners at NPHormones.com that can help you with your hormones and with peptides.

And finally, you can find all of us on social media. Justin is at Mind Pumped Justin on Instagram. I'm at Mind Pumped with Stefano. Adam is at Mind Pump just on Instagram. I'm at Mind Pump with Stefano. Adam is at Mind Pump. Oh and by the way that peptide guide you can find for free at mindpumpfree.com. 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 Super Bundle at mindpumpmedia.com. The RGB Super Bundle includes maps anabolic,

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