Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2387: How Much Should You Really Workout?

Episode Date: July 25, 2024

How Much Should You Really Workout? The misconception around how much exercise you need to do to optimize your body’s progress. (2:07) Why does exercise, if done properly, build muscle? (5:05) “The goal is to do as little as possible, to elicit the most amount of change.” (11:38) How Much Should You Really Workout and Things to Consider? #1 - How often do you currently work out? (17:54) #2 – How good is your sleep? (20:31) #3 – How is your stress? (23:21) #3 - How is your diet? (26:19) What Does a Good Exercise Routine Look Like for the Average Person? #1 – General activity: Walk more. (32:32) #2 – Structured workout: Strength training (15-20 min. 5 days a week or 2 workouts a week to build. Half of that to maintain.) (36:02) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Entera Skincare for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! ** Promo code MPM at checkout for 10% off their order or 10% off their first month of a subscribe-and-save. ** Special Promotion: MAPS 15 50% off! ** Code MAPS15 at checkout ** Mind Pump #1897: Why Phasing Your Workouts Is So Important & How To Properly Switch It Up MP Holistic Health Mind Pump #2187: Why Building Muscle Is More Important Than Losing Fat With Dr. Gabrielle Lyon What is NEAT and Why Should You Care About it? - Mind Pump Media Mind Pump #1712: How To Get A Friend Or Family Member Started With Resistance Training Mind Pump #1835: Why Resistance Training Is The Best Form Of Exercise For Fat Loss And Overall Health Mind Pump #2112: Is 15 Minutes Enough Time For An Effective Workout? Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources

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You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, we're gonna tackle the question, how much exercise do you really need? How much should you really work out? Now this episode is brought to you by a sponsor in? Terra they use peptide science if you've been hearing about peptides

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We have a program called Maps 15 minutes that's based off of this. For this episode only it's 50% off. So we're gonna make it half off. If you're interested go to maps15minutes.com. By the way 15 is the number 15 so maps15minutes.com and then use the code maps15. That'll give you 50% off. Alright, here comes the show. Alright, look the average person simply doesn't exercise enough but here's another truth. People that start working out often make this mistake. They work out too much.

It's totally true. Look, we answer live callers all the time here on the podcast and often times, more often than not, we have to tell people to scale down their training in order to get better results. So in today's episode, we're gonna talk about how much you actually need to work out. What is the right amount of working out

to get the best results? This is a really great topic. I'm assuming this came from our customer service team. It did. Okay. Yeah, I meet with them once a week and what they do is, so the purpose of the meeting is to get a, kind of keep my finger on the pulse of what the average listener, what kind of questions they have, what they're looking for, and what often pops up is that a person will either get one of our programs and say, you know what? I want to trade this in for something with more because this doesn't have enough.

And then, you know, my customer service team will tell me the person's background and I'll say, wow, that was definitely appropriate for them. They're like, yeah, I got to convince them otherwise. It just, it just comes up so often that people overdo it. And so I said, you know what, uh, we should do an episode on this. Cause there's so much misunderstanding around how much exercise you need to do to really optimize your body's progress and how it's sometimes more is just more or worse or detrimental. Or, yeah, or detrimental. So yeah, that's the thing. It's, it doesn't seem logical in that regard because of we've talked about this

all the time about, you know, having a hard work ethic and applying that towards your job or anything else, any kind of pursuit you're doing, but the, the human body is, is very adaptive and there's a right dose for that to optimize your results. Yes, such a much needed conversation or lengthy conversation for a single point or topic. Challenging though, very curious to see how we navigate this because the hardest part about it is we obviously understand that we're speaking to a large audience of people. And I can think of a scenario where I need somebody to scale back volume in their training. Um, and then in another example of where they need to scale up volume

or another example where they need to stay right where they're at, and that avatar could look exactly the same as far as on the outside, right? The age, goal, body fat percentage, even experience, that could all be the same, and I can see a scenario where I tell that person, stay the course, you're perfect right there, or we need to cut back on some of your volume or it's time for us to ramp it up a little bit. So that's what makes this really, really individual. I would say let's consider the average person,

the typical person that would use the higher S as trainers, right? Cause you know, our expertise or I should I say most of our experience was in training, um, everyday people. So people had jobs and families who, you know, working out wasn't their life and they were not, you know, going to become fitness professionals. So the average person who's got all these responsibilities, I think we want to kind of consider that general idea of an individual and speak to them. But, you know, before we get into it, it is important to explain why your body changes in the first place with exercise.

Like why does exercise, if done properly, why does it build muscle? Why does it burn body fat? Why does it improve my health? Why does it change the way I look or improve my performance? And to put it plainly, all of those things that I just mentioned are adaptations to stress. So your body, whenever you stress yourself out with a stressor, your body, so long as it's within

the realms of its capability, aims to adapt to that so that that stressor is no longer a stressor. Right? So if doing 10 body weight squats is a stressor for my body, my body will adapt and strengthen itself so that if I did 10 body weight squats again, it's not going to be a stressor anymore. It's routine now.

And this is why then you would add more reps or you would add weight or make the workout more difficult. So understanding this, now you start to kind of see why more isn't better. Because if you overwhelm your body's ability to adapt by just damaging or causing too much stress, none of those adaptations will occur. You'll be overwhelmed. Your body won't be able to progress. And so what this looks like is a lot of work adaptations will occur. You'll be overwhelmed. Your body won't be able to progress.

And so what this looks like is a lot of work with no progress. What this looks like is a lot of sweat, a lot of soreness, a lot of exhausting workouts and progress that doesn't seem to match the effort. And now the problem with this, like you said, Justin, is for a lot of other endeavors, it just means you work harder. But in this one, working harder would make things happen even slower or stop or go backwards. Right.

So it's very important to understand the right dose when it comes to exercise. And a big, big, big piece of the misunderstanding is the workouts that we tend to see on, that you almost always see on social media or media in general, are not the workouts that would be appropriate for most people. Why? Because they're not fun. They tend to be boring.

They don't look exciting. The workouts we tend to see are the ones performed by advanced athletes or people who dedicate their lives to fitness, like bodybuilders, fitness competitors, people who are fitness professionals who literally take their entire day and their life and organize it around their ability to work out and maximize that and they've been doing it for years. So when you look at their workouts and you go, man I want to look like that person so I need to work out the way they're working out right now. Couldn't be further from the truth.

If you did that, nothing would happen to you. You'd probably go backwards. But, but that's the idea that we have of what a good workout is. If we saw just everyday average appropriate workouts advertised, it would look very different. It's hard to parse out to like, sometimes there's that appeal, like of the discipline of it, uh, and I don't that appeal like of the discipline of it. And I don't want to give up the discipline of it. And if you were to

corner this individual and ask them like, well don't you want to do what you know is best to get you those results, to get to that desired outcome? And sometimes you know surprisingly the answer would be like, no I want to keep this discipline and I want to keep this discipline, and I want to keep this routine, and I want to make... It almost becomes like an optic thing. I want people to see me do this. I want to be able to talk about doing this all the time, which is an interesting behavioral thing. But what we're trying to explain is, for your average person out there, it's really astonishing how much less you have to do

in terms of moving the needle. I've always really alight your tanning analogy, even though it's obviously an oversimplification of what's going on with exercise and that as, but as far as the body's ability to adapt to a stress, it's a really good example of how easily you can overdo it, underdo it, and that there isn't, there's an optimal sweet time. And then there's a very wide range

of an individual variance. I think tanning from the sun and sitting out in it has a lot of variables. You're gonna be like, do you regularly already sit in the sun or do you never sit in the sun? Right? Do you, are, do you, are you already dark completed or are you pale like Justin? Like, are you, are you somebody who has been, you know,

never do, never in or never outside. And then also in the first time you want to do it, you want to spend an hour in the sun, like, and is there a better way? I just like that. It's a great analogy for a lot of different reasons because number one, it does exemplify what you're saying. time you want to do it, you want to spend an hour in the sun, and is there a better way? I just like that. It's a great analogy for a lot of different reasons because number one, it does exemplify what you're saying. If your goal is to get a nice tan and you want to get it in a quick and efficient way, there's a right dose of sunlight. Any less than that would happen

slower. Any more than that, and you would just cause more damage and your body can recover from and tan from. And if you push it too far, you just get a sunburn. And if you get a sunburn, you don't get a tan any faster. Anybody who's ever had a sunburn will tell you, you don't get a tan. It's the whole process. Right, but there's more, right? It connects even more because there's more to benefit

than, there's more benefits from going to the sun than getting a tan. That's right. There's also the enjoyment of the sun. There's vitamin D, the warmth, you know, maybe you're enjoying yourself. So this is true for exercise as well. There's lots of benefits to being active. One of them are the physical changes that you see in your body. One of them is the aesthetics, the fat loss, the muscle building, the

athletic performance enhancement. The other one is just moving and it's good for you or meeting up with people. And so I don't want to discredit that as well, but in today's episode, I think it's important that we focus on what's the right dose or for most people that'll just get them the best physiological results. And then if they want to do more or they want to enjoy themselves being active, there's nothing wrong with that. But I think, I think of a lot of people understood this, they would actually, they would look at their current routine and

be like, okay, well I don't actually enjoy beating the crap out of myself and barely moving the needle. I think I want to start doing this. Well there's also a way to stay super active without like, you know, regressing. Right. And so that's kind of something else we're trying to convey, is depending on your goal, you can maintain a really active lifestyle, we're just trying to aid and support that with the right adequate amount of dose.

Resistance training. You also, you have to help me, I say it on the podcast all the time, and this is a perfect opportunity to really unpack it for the audience, which is the, you've heard me repeat it probably 100 times plus now, which is the goal is to do as little as possible to elicit the most amount of change.

Like, why is that true? Why is it true that we wanna do as little as possible to elicit the amount of change? Like, why not do a little more than that? Why is it not better for me to do more if I can get possibly more out of it? And what I would start by saying is that we can always keep adding more volume and more intensity.

It's in fact, and going back to the tanning analogy, it's like you getting out and getting five minutes of sunlight may not get you the exact dark color that you want, but it's gonna head you and you're gonna go in the right direction. You most certainly aren't gonna- It's not gonna set you back. It's not gonna set you back,

which I think is the challenge that most people have when they pursue their fitness goal, is they decide, I have this goal, which typically is not a short-term goal. It's a long-term, I need to lose 15, 20 pounds. I wanna add all this muscle. I wanna run faster, jump higher. It's a goal that takes time.

And then they right away go into applying too much volume or too much intensity. And why that's so bad is because now that we've overreached like that, now our body's playing catch up and trying to recover, and I'm not reaping any of the benefits of all that extra work where I'm way better off doing as little as possible to elicit some sort of change. And then it's always like, okay, I could do a little bit

more, it looks like my body responded well, I could do a little bit more. It looks like my body responded well. I could do a little bit more. Well, the quote is do the least amount of work to elicit the most amount of change, to put it differently, the perfect dose is what you're talking about. It's the perfect dose. So if you were to look at it, if you were to look at a chart, if I were to make it kind of a graph here, on the very left, left would be no exercise at all. You're doing nothing.

On the very right would be the absolute most amount of exercise that your body can tolerate before it becomes dangerous. Okay. So that's the graph. The somewhere in the middle is the perfect dose. Going closer to the most you could tolerate doesn't get you there any faster. If anything, if anything gets you there slower, each time you move away from perfect, either to the left or to the right, each time you move away from

what is considered perfect, you get results slower. If you move towards the right a little bit and you keep moving in that direction, you compromise your body's ability to adapt because now your body's just concerned with, with healing. And I don't want to make this point. Healing and recovery is not the same as adaptation. And people confuse it too. They think, you got to focus on recovery.

You got to focus recovery. Yes, this is true. But healing would be like me scratching my skin and then my skin healing the damage. Adaptation would be my body then adding extra layers of skin to develop a callus. So healing is getting me back to where I was. So I exercise and I cause a little bit of damage. My body recovers and brings me back to where I was. So I exercise and I cause a little bit of damage. My body recovers and brings me back to where I was. Adaptation now is taking me to another level. And so if I push beyond what's ideal, my body can't, it's not going to care as much about

adaptation because healing is the number one priority. If you damage your body with stress or you apply stress on your body, rule number one is survive the stress. Rule number two is or priority number two is heal from the damage. Then priority three is adaptation. The reason why it's in those in that order is because if it it can't possibly concern itself with adapting if you didn't survive definitely and if you didn't recover, how can you adapt? How can you get stronger if the damage is still there or how can you get faster or whatever? Right? So that's the important thing to understand because what people tend to do is they tend

to skip over. This is whenever, anytime anybody starts on a workout routine, they're excited, they're motivated. This is part of the problem is that we, we enter into it with a motivated state of mind. I've never had anybody come in to buy a membership in a gym that I managed after the new year, right? You get all these new year people that want to start working out.

Everybody knows that. Gyms are at least 50% more people come in to work out right around in January. So I've never had somebody come in in January and say, hey, you know what? I'm getting started, it's a New Year's resolution, I haven't worked out for five years, I'd like to come one or two days a week.

Never, it's almost always, I'm on it now. All right, five days a week, let's do this, I wanna go all out. It's like, okay, you went from zero to five, you've skipped over ideal, and you are gonna go towards what you can maybe tolerate, or even beyond that. Yeah, but let me hammer home,

sticking to that analogy that you're using with that spectrum, why this is so important to lean towards the left of that line is, like you said, there's perfect down the middle, right? Being in the middle and anything to the left or the right equals less results than the most you can get. The difference though, between being to the right of that line versus the left is the right actually risk you going backwards, losing possible muscle, you not seeing results, you plateauing.

The way to the being to the left of that line actually doesn't risk that. No, you still have to go backwards. You may not have progressed as fast as you could have, but at least you didn't go backwards because you didn't overreach and sacrifice anything. So that's why you will always hear us convey that message. It's why we get teased on this podcast, oh, those guys are for beginners or oh, those guys aren't for me. It's like, no, yes, we are.

It's that this stands for somebody who's been doing this for 10 years or somebody who's been just getting started in this. There is an optimal place for you to be. And using Sal's analogy of the spectrum, anything left or right of that does result in less results than the most you can get. But the difference between being to the right and the left is being to the right actually could set you backwards.

Being to the left won't set you backwards, it just means it's a little bit slower. It's like getting playing blackjack and you got 19 sitting in front of you and you hit, Oh, now I'm out. You just overshot and you're completely out. Uh, that's what a lot of people do when they go to exercise. So now the question might be, uh, well, what's the right amount then? Like what's the right amount for me?

How do I know what the right amount is? And so on. Well, there's things that can, a few things that you need to consider in order to make this decision and know where to start. And then we'll kind of walk you through, uh, where to go from after you start. Right. But first off, start out with how often do you currently exercise? This is an important question.

If the answer is I don't, it takes more than nothing to get your body to progress. That's right. That's it. That's right. Okay. So that's where we're at. If every single day you do zero pushups, let's, you takes more than nothing to get your body to progress. That's right. That's it. That's right. Okay, so if every single day you do zero pushups,

you just do, you know, how many pushups you've done in the last year, zero, cool. If you did one today, that would move you forward. It's one more than you normally would do, literally. Now that might not be the perfect amount. You might need more than one to get faster results, but one is more than zero, and one will get you some adaptation. Moving in the right direction.

That's literally, by the way, this isn't, I'm not just making this up. I'm not being silly here. I mean, there are studies that show that a 15 to 30 second isometric contraction, not even a rep, just a hold, right? A 15 to 30 second isometric contraction, twice a week, one, twice a week, in a four week or six week period, you see strength increases. Now they took sedentary individuals who didn't exercise at all, but they saw strength increases because it was an isometric contraction they don't do. So that's just to hammer home here. The amount of exercise you

need to apply to your body if you're doing zero is just more than you're currently doing. There is no such thing as too little, but there's definitely such a thing as too much, as long as it's more than you're currently doing. And again, I'm illustrating this so people kind of get the picture like, okay, this kind of makes sense. And I used to surprise people all the time, you know, when I, uh, owned a studio years ago and people would hire me, I would start them out with very little exercise. Now, back in the day, when I did not understand this as a trainer, my goal was to get them in as much as possible right out the gates.

What's the most you can come in? What's the most amount of exercise and activity? Can we fit in to your schedule? Towards the end, when I became good at what I did, I was like, I'm going to do the least amount and we're going to get results and you're going to feel it. And it's going to feel easy and it's going to be easy to develop. And then there's a whole, there's a whole, I mean, we can go into all the, the psychology about this as well. It sucks to go all in, get some results and then plateau and then be like,

I'm already working out as much as my schedule allow. I got some results for three months and now nothing versus I started once a week. I started seeing results. I feel good. I can, I got, I can add more if I want to. It's a much better approach for longevity in terms of consistency as well. But you got to ask your question yourself, that question, how often do you currently work out? And if it's zero, you don't need that much to get to next. Next is your sleep.

How good is your sleep? Because exercise is a stress on the body, your body has to deal with that stress in the context of all the stress that you deal with. So all stress on your body, lack of sleep, stress, you know, just a stressful day, poor diet, we're going to get into all this stuff, right? You know, if you're exposed to environmental toxins, if you have hormone issues, if you're sick, whatever, these are all stresses on the body, meaning the amount of stress your body can handle on top of that, starts to change dramatically. If your sleep is not good, in some cases,

you shouldn't add any exercise. I mean, if you're a new parent, and you're averaging four or five hours of sleep every single night, and you come to me and you say, hey, I just had a baby, how old's your baby? Three months old, how's your sleep? We're not sleeping at all, but I wanna start working out. I don't think you should.

You can't handle, in fact, if we started exercising now, you'd probably get sick. So sleep, if your sleep is great, that means you can use more exercise. If your sleep isn't so good, I would start there. And start to nail that down. And this is something that it's important that you pay attention to, because as you get

more experience in lifting, you have to learn how to eventually modify this almost on a week to week basis. Because at one point, you figure out, okay, I figured out this is about the optimal place for me. Three days, full body workout. I go on two one hour long walks out of the week and this is just, and I do my mobility and stuff. This is like the perfect amount of exercise. Okay, well, that is the perfect amount of exercise at this current state or stage of your life.

Then you have a baby and all of a sudden you're not sleeping at all. That now changes. So understanding that this sleep thing also adds a- It's moving. It's moving. Constantly. And you got to be able to adjust with that. And so back to my point of, you know, that optimal

line, you talk about being left or right of that. Why I also like to just, to, to flirt with being on the left side more than flirting with the right side is because of this variable right here, because maybe you think, Oh yeah, I know, right. The most optimal amount for me. And then you just didn't get quite as good asleep. Well, oh yeah, I know, right, the most optimal amount for me, and then you just didn't get quite as good of sleep. Well, now it moved more to the left is where optimal is.

And so again, if you're always flirting with over the line to the right, and then you also add in, oh, and this just happened to be a bad night of sleep before I go do it, now you really pushed beyond that limit. So that's why I'm always communicating to the client that like, Hey man, if we, if we're doing more than what we did last week or the month before, we're doing great. I know you think you can do more or you can tolerate more, but you're moving along, we're progressing and we're doing more than we were last month.

There's no reason to rush that. I think it's hard for people. A lot of times the quantify stress, especially if it's like psychological, if it's relationship stress, if it's, uh, you know, work stress, uh, stuff that's not physical because I think everybody has this idea that it's, it's more physical stress that we're trying to recover from in order to be optimal and progress forward.

All of that matters. And, and that this is just something that, um, you know, that, and this is why we, we tend to lean a little bit more towards, let's figure out like if all these environmental factors have changed, if you change work, if you're in a new school, if you have a new relationship or something else is happening at the home,

let's bring the intensity down just a bit and then let's see where that puts us because that dose now, the right optimal amount, has probably changed. And we need to adjust. To your point, such a great point, Justin. You know, I talk on the podcast about my favorite client or the clients that I tend to gravitate towards

were the type A, high-performing CEO CEO executive type of people. And one of the most challenging things for me to solve was they were executing the diet, they were executing the exercise portion, everything perfect. And yet we were at these hard plateaus. Took me years of experience before I started to piece together like, oh shit, their level of mental stress from their work is so high and heavy for them. And even my three day a week workout and little diet that I have them on is just too much for where they're currently at. And because I'm going, they're in an office all day. They're not physically

doing something laborious. I'm not overstressing the taxing the body physically. I was totally underestimating the power of the mental stress on the body and it's bought and the body physically, I was totally underestimating the power of the mental stress on the body and it's bought and the body's ability to adapt to the physical stress. And so that point is so important and I think you're right I think that we we always think of the physical stresses when you're talking about exercise adaptation and people discount how much marital issues, issues with your kids, issues at work, play a factor in that total bucket of stress and how much it could push you over.

It's so, I mean, it's crazy to even think about, but I could beat the crap out of somebody with a four hour workout and I would not cause the same amount of stress as if they got a phone call that their kid died in a car accident or something like that. It ravages, it has the ability to ravage your body. Anyway, the point that we're trying to make is it's all stress. It's all stress. Think of it all under this one category and exercise is in there as well.

If you're already at your limit and you know this about yourself, you have very little capacity to add extra stress to your life and your body will not progress as a result. Now if your stress is good and managed and you feel good legitimately, now you have a higher capacity for work volume. Same thing with diet. Diet's another one, right? Diet, if you have a poor diet, especially if you lack nutrients, especially if you lack essential nutrients like micronutrients, vitamins and minerals or macronutrients like proteins or fats which are both essential, you're good luck trying to recover from even the easiest

workout. If your body's lacking things that it absolutely needs to function, it's not even going to think about adapting. It's not going to think about going above and beyond because it's barely holding itself together. And believe me, this is more common than you think. I would have people come in and this was more common with women, they would come in and they'd hire me. We'd look at their diet and we figure out that

their hair was falling out and that they had all this because their fat intake wasn't high enough or their protein, like you're barely hitting essential protein, we'd bump that up and then all like magic, all of a sudden they can handle workouts. Whereas before the workouts would just absolutely crush them. You have to also understand, okay, we just went on kind of a tangent about stress and the different, the physical, the mental type of stress,

being in a calorie deficit for an extended period of time is also a stress to the body. That's right. It is. And so one of the biggest mistakes, to me, I think this was one of my biggest advantages of competing at the professional level in men's physique was even at that level of experience with these competitors, it was probably the biggest mistakes I saw across the board, which was these guys would go on these diets for extended periods of time, 8, 12, sometimes 16 weeks in these cuts. And they are ramping up cardio and ramping up intensity as

they get to the show because they are looking at it as like, I've got 10 more weeks, I got eight more weeks. And they're wanting to push the intensity to get to this physique that they want on stage. And it used to baffle me because I knew, I know how the body adapts. I understand how stress works the body. I understand that I already put all this hard work into building the muscle. Now here I am getting ready for the show.

I'm in a calorie deficit, so I'm definitely stressing the body out. I don't want to, I got to be very careful with that line in the middle, that optimal line we're talking about, because if I push too much and I'm going to be keep flirting with over that, I'm going to keep sacrificing muscle on the way. And I'm going to, I'm going to end up losing all the hard work that I put in the months before building that. And that's an extreme example of competitors, but this happens every day to the

average person who doesn't even realize they're doing it too. You bring me to an important point Adam that I'm going to make right now. An overstressed body is, it wants to be under muscled and over fat. So a body that has a lot of stress, it wants an insurance policy against potential famine. Remember stress historically meant no resources.

So when you're under a lot of stress, your body actually organizes its hormones and it organizes its metabolism in a way to where it wants to store body fat. It also organizes those same things to pair muscle down because muscle in comparison to body fat is expensive, requires resources. So in your high stress situation, strength and muscle go down and body fat wants to go up, especially as a percentage of your body weight. So then the reason why I'm saying this is to sell

even harder to somebody, you push beyond what's ideal, you'll make it harder to build muscle and burn body fat. And if you go too far, look, I'll tell you a story. I've told this story before. I had a woman that I trained one time, it was the first time I experienced this, where she did a lot of things right, but we couldn't figure out what was going on. And this is early days. So early days as a trainer, I thought the more the merrier.

And she was running, I don't remember how many days a week, four days a week. She was training with me three days a week. She was a high powered executive. And she was so perfect with everything, with her diet, that she got a certain level of fitness that was pretty good. But there was like this, I don't remember what it was like 12 or 13 pounds of body fat that just was stuck and she dropped her calories, it wouldn't go anywhere and every time she dropped her calories, she'd just lose muscle,

not the body fat. Couldn't figure out what the hell was going on. And I had a coworker that I worked with who was more on the functional medicine side. At the time functional medicine wasn't really a thing. This was the late 90s but this individual was ahead of the curve and I remember them saying she's too stressed. And they sold it to me. They literally explained the way I just explained it and said body wants to store body fat and they want to lose muscle. So I convinced this woman to cut out most of her running and replace it with a form of yoga called yin yoga.

For anybody who's ever done yin yoga, you burn zero calories when you do yin yoga. It's not power yoga. It's not flow. It's literally you get into a yoga pose and you hold it for three minutes on the floor and you focus on your breath. It's like super relaxing. You burn more calories on a really mild stroll. Okay, so it's not a calorie burner. And we did this and I convinced my client. I said, let's give it a shot. Let's see what happens. Cutting out running, burning less calories.

Here's what ended up happening. First of all, she started feeling better. She started feeling better. She's like, wow, I feel better. I'm going to continue doing this. Then I noticed her strength going up in the gym. Wow, I'm getting stronger. What's going on? Then I tested her body fat. I don't remember how much longer and it started going down. She started losing the body fat that was so difficult for her to get rid of by working out less.

Why? Because her body is she's not working with her body, not against it. So the point of this is again doing more than is necessary won't get you there any faster for sure and if you push it hard enough it'll not only get you there slower probably take things away from you. So let's talk a little bit about what would now again there's a massive individual variance here okay so forgive us because we're not talking to an individual but we're going to generalize here what a good general exercise routine looks like for the average person that would give them what most people are looking for. They want good muscle shape and strength. They want to have decent mobility and good health. Not

trying to get shredded, not trying to look like a bodybuilder but rather I want to look like I work out and I want to be fit and healthy and I want it to fit my lifestyle. And this is something I'm going to do long-term. And so here's what it's going to look like. First let's start with just general activity. This was something that I think all of us in here scoffed at in the early days as personal trainers. Huge mistake.

We totally directed people the wrong way. Now looking back, I'm like, man, this was a huge mistake and that is one of the best things you could do every single day, just for activity is to walk more. Yeah. There is absolutely nothing. Structured walks. There is nothing better for your health, uh, in

terms of just daily activity than trying to walk. And there's a few reasons. It's a low skill activity. Your risk, your chance of injury, either repetitive injury or acute injury is very low. Most people can walk. So I'm not telling people to run who don't run or cycle who don't cycle.

It's also super convenient. I'm not telling people to go power walk. I'm literally saying walk throughout the day. And then I tend to attach this to a breakfast, lunch, and dinner and make it like a 10 or 15 minute walk after breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And the health benefits of this are profound and it's easy to stay consistent because it's a few short walks. Inconsistent, repeated movement creates momentum.

It's a recipe for success. Improves digestion. It also is something that is not only burning calories, okay, but it's also something that's recuperative. Yes. So something that you can do that's recuperative for the body and also helps you with your total calorie expenditure for the day, improves digestion. There's so many. And walking tends to reduce stress.

So this is, I'm glad you went this way too, because one of the ways that I would guide clients that were wanting to do more, and I didn't think they needed to do anymore, but I also wanted to encourage them for more activity. I almost always would default to just adding Watt. So I had a client, I'm training them two days a week. I think as a trainer, this is probably optimal where we need to be stress-wise for them. They're just getting really started. We're seeing results. I haven't seen any plateaus, but they're like, Adam, I want to do more. I want to do more. I would normally encourage walk.

This is like my favorite way to like, because that is, it has so many positive benefits for that person being like moving in the direction they want to move without risking us potentially tipping over the other side of that line. So to me, this is, which is why I think it's funny to look back and think of your problem. Yeah, how wrong we were. Yeah, how wrong, we used to scoff at somebody that would is why I think it's funny to look back and think of your problem. How wrong we were.

Yeah, how wrong. I used to scoff at somebody that would say that when now it becomes not only the first thing that I normally recommended, but also my default go-to when somebody is thinking I want to do more. And I think we're in that sweet spot as far as the, you know, sending a signal to build muscle. I will normally add days of, you know, 20 minute hour long walks before I decide let's train another day of lifting weights

or let's add another set or exercise to the day that we're already training. That's what I'll do. And we're not talking about a hardcore power walk. It's a stroll. You're going to walk. And it's also anti-stress. So walking and movement in this fashion

doesn't really stress the body unless you're super, super, super sedentary and you actually don't get up off the couch, this could be like a hard workout on its own, on its own, but for the average person, this is anti-stress. In fact, when I would recommend this sometimes to clients as ways to de-stress from work. They had very high stress jobs. I used to tell people, break up your day by doing a few 10 minute walks.

And they'd be like, my God, my God, it makes such a big difference. Because just the way it activates the brain and some of the anti-stress. Outside of your brain and into your body. I think a lot of times people just don't give themselves that opportunity to really feel their way through this movement and use their body. Now let's get to the actual structured workouts. This is where we get to strength training. Now the reason why we talk about strength training

as the structured workout is because in comparison to all of the forms of exercise, strength training requires the least amount of time investment to give you the most results by far. There's no form of exercise that will produce aesthetic visible changes in your body like strength training and a time-for-time basis. It just doesn't, there's nothing comes close to the effectiveness of strength training to sculpt and shape the body

because of its muscle building effect. Muscle is protective. Building muscle doesn't require a lot of volume. In fact, the data on it is actually remarkable. Every time I read studies on how little strength training you need. It still continues to blow me away. In fact, I saw one that talked about how much strength training you need to not lose muscle. So every decade, as you get older, you lose, I forgot what, a certain percentage of muscle mass and strength. And the study said something like once every two weeks or

something like that, like one strength training workout, very basic every two or three weeks would prevent that. So you need very little, but ideally for most people, the number that I'm going to give that gives people a lot of room. In other words, they could start as beginners with this and progress quite a bit without having to add more workouts is, and I'm going to give my traditional answer and then I'm going to give my new answer, which is more recent, but my traditional answer was about two days a week.

Two strength training workouts a week, full body, about 45 minutes each. You could go really far with that with strength, muscle, and fitness. In fact, I remember when Doug, Doug is our producer, he hired me years ago. Fitness, he had a background in fitness, hired me. I convinced him to only train twice a week with me and we got him to a 405 pound deadlift. And shredded. Andlift. And shredded. And shredded. And shredded. Yeah, in his late, it was late 40s I believe at the time.

Just from two workouts a week with me, and on his own he was doing things like walking. I like when you share that story about Doug too, because Doug is an example of somebody who had been working out for a very long time, read all the magazines, tried all the supplements, tried all the different splits, done all those things like that.

And I know that sometimes this conversation for some reason gets lost with people that have been lifting for five or 10 years. They think they're beyond this conversation and they figured this piece out. And it's like, no, I can't stress enough to you how many people have shared the same journey as Doug where they have been spinning their tires

For 10 15 20 years in their lifting career And it's because they have never truly figured out that optimal dose for them And then when they do and they unlock that the potential is crazy And I mean if you've been listening to us for a long time You've seen those pictures of what Doug Doug looked like at his late forties and what he was doing performance wise. Not only was he performing in the gym and super strong, but he also was shredded too, so the average person may not believe this, but I guarantee you two days a week of a full body routine or a five day, 15 minute type of routine.

Second part. And that's something new for me that I recommend now because you could do two 45 minute workouts a week or you could do five 15 to 20 minute workouts a week where you're doing like one or two strength training exercises. Now the reason why we advocate for that now is because it tends to promote a more consistent behavior. It's actually easier to get somebody to do one to two strength training exercises most days than it is to get them to do 45 minutes twice a week.

So from a consistency perspective, that 15 minute workout where you do a couple strength training exercise and you're done, you're 15 minutes a day, okay. That equals the same general volume as the two workouts a week But people tend to be more consistent with it And if they miss a workout they miss 15 minutes not 45 minutes and it tends to produce better results From a strength training perspective now. Here's just some more personal anecdote We created a program called maps 15 based off of this model adam was experimenting With training this way and he kept coming in every day.

You guys, this is blowing me away. Can't believe how great I feel. This is blowing me away. I applied a similar style of training, cut my volume way down and I hit a PR and deadlifts that I had to hit originally in my early thirties. I hit it at 40 years in my forties. Um, it works and it's feels easier, even though the total volume is the same as the two longer workouts, because it's just a couple,

it's just a couple of exercises a day for the average person. If the average person, you know, five days a week did just two appropriate strength training exercises, they could go very far with how their body progresses and how, and the type of results that they get. I believe it's called the Dunning-Kruger effect where it's the more you know how you realize like the less you know, the less you know. And it's really like, that's why this isn't just for beginners what we're talking about. This is something that a lot of advanced lifters, they'll get through the grind of

realizing that they've been way over doing it and they're going to regress and find out how optimal that is for them specifically. And it's just, it's always a humbling effect, but it's something to consider. Yeah. It's amazing. In fact, uh, you know, how long has it been since we launched mass 15? It's been a little while now. Yeah. It was right after Max was born. Oh. Yeah, so it's like four years. Does that sound right, Doug? Four years? That sounds long.

One of our most popular programs and one of the most talked about programs by people who have experience. We get messages from people with that program who've been working out for years and years and years and thought, oh, I just did this because I just wanted a break or I just went whatever. And they're like, I'm progressing faster than I have ever or in a long time. I didn't know this could happen. That's the power of appropriate application of strength training. Now again, we're not saying don't be active every day.

Daily activity is important, but when it comes to structured strength training very little is needed to progress. Then remember this, if you're spending 15 to 20 minutes a day doing strength training and you're like I want to do more, if you're stronger you are doing more. This is where people need to understand adding more workouts or more volume that doesn't have to happen until much later. You could simply add weight to the bar and guess what you've just done? Progressed your workout and added more. By the way with Maps 15 minutes because of this episode, we're gonna give you half off just for this episode. So if you want to get a program like that laid out for you where you do a couple exercises a day to kind of experience what we're talking about. You go to maps, 15 minutes.com and then use the code maps 15.

That gives you 50% off. Also, you can find us on Instagram. Justin is that mind pump Justin. I'm at mind pump to Stefano and Adam's at mind pump. Adam, 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, maps performance, and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal, Adam, and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks feels and performs. With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos the RGB Super Bundle is like having Sal, Adam and Justin as your own

personal trainers but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Super Bundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at mindpumpmedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a 5-star rating and review on iTunes and by introducing MindPump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support, and until next time, this is MindPump.