Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2440: If You Want to Build 10 lbs of Lean Muscle Before Winter Without Gaining Fat Do These 5 Things

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

If You Want to Build (10) lbs. Of Lean Muscle Before Winter Without Gaining Fat, Do These (5) Things How realistic is this goal? (1:14) Building muscle is a slow process. Consistency is key. (5:39) If You Want to Build (10) lbs. Of Lean Muscle Before Winter Without Gaining Fat, Do these (5) Things. #1 - Lift weights 3 days a week. (9:11) #2 - Squat, deadlift, bench press, and overhead press weekly. (14:17) #3 - Eat your target weight in grams of protein. (20:02) #4 - Sleep for 8 hours every night. (23:36) #5 - Avoid heavily processed foods. (25:49) Should I also track calories? (28:10) What supplements should I take? (30:01) Should I include cardio? (31:18) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Vuori Clothing for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! ** No code to receive 20% off your first order. ** October Promotion: MAPS Muscle Mommy 50% off! ** Code OCTOBER50 at checkout ** Building Muscle with Adam Schafer – Mind Pump TV The No BS Guide To Getting Jacked, Burning Fat & Staying Lean | Adam Schafer (Mind Pump) Mind Pump #1830: Five Steps to Determine Your ideal Caloric Intake Mind Pump #1345: 6 Ways to Optimize Sleep for Faster Muscle Gain and Fat Loss Mind Pump #2437: What Happens to Your Body When You Quit Ultra-Processed Foods for 30 Days Mind Pump #2432: The Truth About Essential Amino Acids with Angelo Keely Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources People Mentioned Doug Bopst (@dougbopst) Instagram  

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump, 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, if you want to build 10 pounds

of lean muscle before winter without gaining body fat, do the following five things and we give them to you and we break them down. It's a lot of fun. This episode is brought to you by a sponsor, Viori. Viori clothing is the best athleisure wear. It's comfortable, it looks good, it feels good, it lasts a long time. You know who they are because they've exploded, they've blown up. Anyway, we can give you 20% off. Go to VioriClClothing.com that's V-U-O-R-I clothing.com forward slash mind pump that link will hook you up with 20% off

your order also this month's workout program sale maps muscle mommy 50% off again it's muscle mommy's for women I want to build muscle boost your metabolism build some curves be strong strong. If you're interested, go to MAPSFitnessProducts.com and then use the code October 50 for that discount. All right, here comes the show. If you want to gain 10 pounds of lean muscle before winter, without gaining a single pound of body fat, do the next five things. Wait a second. Before you drop these five here,

let's first talk about how realistic this goal is and what percentage, what factors, before we sell everybody on the idea that they could build 10 pounds of muscle with no fat. No, so, okay, so when this episode airs. Very, very difficult to do, I just wanna point point that out. So winter is coming. Technically December 21st. So winter technically starts December 21st. This episode will air. Is that really when winter officially starts? Yes. I didn't know that. That's the winter solstice, is that what they call it?

I believe so, yeah. And this episode's gonna air on October 6th, so that gives people 76 days, okay? So essentially two and a little over two and a half months to build 10, by the way, 10 pounds of lean body mass is very, is visible. I mean, you can see and feel that, you know, people have gained 10 pounds on the scale, but it's water and body fat. But lean muscle, I mean, for most men, to give you guys an example, this would translate different to women because they have different, you know, where they hold their muscle tends to be different. But typically for a man to add a full inch to his arms, then he

needs to gain about 10 pounds of lean muscle. So this is a good, like this is a pretty damn good goal. Is it realistic? I'd say for the right person who's super consistent, this can happen. Does that mean everyone can do this? No. But I think if you follow the steps we're gonna go through, you're gonna build some lean muscle without getting body fat. It's pretty similar. I know we kind of touched on this when we were talking about the Goldilocks zone and like how like all these factors pretty much have to align perfectly. But if you've been consistent and you've been pretty dedicated already and in the gym also

with your eating habits, you can just crank a few of these knobs and get pretty far. There's some examples of where I think this is easier than other examples. For example, someone going through what I'm going through right now would be somebody who would be a great candidate. Like someone who had muscle loss. Yeah, which believe it or not is probably more people. Now obviously I lost a lot right saying that at one point just five six years ago I had 50 more pounds of muscle on me is a big that's a huge difference. Probably not a lot of people can say that they lost that much muscle.

But a lot of people that have trained consistently in the past, go through periods of time where they fall off on and off the wagon. And so if you're somebody who's decided you're motivated before the holiday season, like, hey, I'm going to get back on my game here, and you've lifted in the past, you have more of an advantage doing this than say somebody who's been consistent for the last year, nonstop been doing everything nutritionally. They are going to have a harder time. And it's not impossible, but they're going to have a harder time

accomplishing versus the person who has already built regaining. Yeah. Regaining muscle happens, regaining. Regaining muscle happens a lot faster. I'd say the second, of course, men. Men are going to build more body mass faster. Number one, we're primed to do so, more so than women. And number two, we also just have a larger frame,

which takes us to the next one, which is people with a larger frame are gonna have, it's gonna be easier for them to gain 10 pounds of muscle on the scale because they're just bigger, just much bigger people. And then of course, there are genetic differences between individuals and most people are somewhere in the middle. So if you were to look at the range of muscle building, let's say genetics, these are the two extremes over here is like, you know, muscle wasting disease type genetics over

here is like pro bodybuilders. If you go in the middle of the middle, that's where most people are. Most people are in the middle of the middle. Some people more towards bodybuilders, some people more towards the other end. Um, and the more you are towards genetically gifted, the easier this is going to be. And I haven't run into honestly, super genetically gifted in the 25 plus years I've been in the space, but when I have been around them, you can tell. So if this is you, if you're like guessing, I think I might have those muscle building genes.

You don't even need this episode. But you know if this is you. And again, I got to say this again, building muscle is a game of grams. What I mean by that is before you gain a pound of body fat, you have to gain grams and ounces. Muscle is a slow process. Muscle gain is a slow process. Now, why am I saying this? Because consistency is what puts you in the positive when it comes to building muscle because your body is pretty much almost always either positive with muscle building or negative with muscle building. Now if you build no muscle it's because the positive balanced out with the negative but for the most part your body's either in positive protein synthesis or negative protein synthesis and what makes you

build muscle is when you're positive more often than negative. What makes you lose muscles when you're in the negative more often positive. So the more consistent you are with what we're about to say, the more likely you are to be more in the positive more often of the time. I think part of this is kind of a great conversation because it's a topic that I've been trying to talk about with my whole journey right now is this, what we call this Goldilocks zone. with my whole journey right now is this what we call this Goldilocks zone. And I explain that

it looks like when you when you zoom out at 30 days and 30 days has gone by and I've added five pounds of muscle and I've lost five pounds of fat, it looks like I built muscle and lost body fat at the same time. But that's not really what happened. That's what it looks like when you zoom out and you look at 30 days. What is more likely or what happened is there's periods of times in that 30 days where my body is anabolic and then there's times when it's catabolic. Building or losing. Because I'm hovering around the maintenance calories so closely, it's dipping in and out of that so much and it's never extremely swinging one way or another.

And why that's so good to not extremely swing one or the other is if you are trying to build muscle and you extremely swing on the pro positive calories to be anabolic, you risk potentially some of those calories being partitioned over to building to adding body fat. Right. Because you swung so hard. Same thing is true the opposite way. If you're in a cut and you're trying to reduce calories to lose body fat and you swing too hard, you potentially pare down muscle. And so the Goldilocks zone is when we are hovering around maintenance so close that when we zoom out in 30 days, it looks like we built muscle and lost body fat at the exact same time. But really what happened was you were constantly moving in and out of this, I'm either anabolic or catabolic, and it's so close to where you need to be maintenance that you don't ever

risk losing muscle when you're catabolic and you don't ever risk adding body fat when you're anabolic. Now, the reason why this is so hard is because it's hard to be consistently accurate, but we'll give you some tips, we're gonna get to that. So it's just hard to be consistently accurate, but also because there is a small anabolic effect from eating more calories than your body needs to build muscle.

In other words, gaining some body fat sometimes also helps you build some muscle. Why does that make this difficult? Because if you do more than you need and then you notice more muscle but you gain some body fat, you might be like, who cares? I'm going to keep moving in that direction. But we're going to talk about how to do this without gaining body fat, which is much more of a science and requires much more discipline. And, and it requires again, dogged consistency, like ridiculous,

ridiculous consistency. All right. So step one, obviously you want to build muscle. You want to build 10 pounds of muscle. You need to lift weights, but we're going to give you the recipe for lifting weights, the split that works best for 85 to 90 percent of people watching listening to this right now which is a three day a week full body workout routine. Monday, Wednesday, Friday you work the whole body each of

those days. For most people this routine will build more muscle, more strength than any other split that you're ever going to try. And if you're listening, like, well, I got to be in the gym more than that. You don't. This routine right here, in fact, built some of the most impressive physiques before anabolic steroids were really ever a thing. Back in the day, you're looking at John Grimick and Steve Reeves and those guys, back when most of them didn't even know what anabolic steroids were,

they were impressively built and incredibly strong. This is how they all lifted weights. It wasn't until later where the, in my opinion, the addition of anabolic steroids and be able to stay anabolic all the time and this crazy recovery where bodybuilders increased the volume so dramatically they had to split the body up into body parts. So for most people this is the this three day week split Monday, Wednesday, Friday is going to pay is going to build the most muscle. I think there's multiple factors to that right? Like so there's easier it's easier to program in these compound lifts I think in that sort of structure. It's easier to get like the right balance of volume

and the right amount of recovery in between for your body to actually adapt, which is a major factor. A lot of people don't really consider the fact that you need that extra amount of time for your body to fully recover so that way you're actually building. You're not just recovering from the insult that you've provided your body. Such a huge point, Justin. Probably the most important point talking about why a three-day

routine because in my experience, clients that are motivated to move the needle this fast are also motivated to do more thinking they're going to get more in return and Because we are hovering around this maintenance slash little deficit minus little surplus You want to send just the right signal to the body? You do not want to be hammering it so hard that you're stuck in this recovery trap and your body's never Adapting and building muscle that's a for sure recipe for you to stall and plateau and not see the results And I think in my experience, most people that are highly motivated to see results and see them as fast as possible, tend to overdo it more than they tend to not do enough. I think that's the most common thing you see.

The most correlated aspect of physical performance that is most strongly connected to muscle growth. In other words, if you were to examine human performance and you were to pick an attribute of performance that was most closely connected to muscle growth, I mean head and shoulders above all the others would be strength. Nothing translates to muscle like building strength or training when you're strong. That's the other part of this. Right?

So where am I going? Well, if you train your whole body, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, let's, let's just talk about legs. If you did three sets of legs on Monday, three sets of legs on Wednesday and three sets of legs on Friday, you're going to be lifting heavier each of those workouts. And if you did nine sets on Monday, if you did all nine sets on Monday, you're going to be lifting heavier each of those workouts than if you did nine sets on Monday. If you did all nine sets on Monday, because fatigue kicks in and sets in, you're now working more on endurance and stamina and less on pure strength. So that alone makes a big difference. Plus you're also

practicing the lifts more often. You're more likely to do the best exercises because you have the strength and energy to do them and because there's data that supports this but it's still murky but again you ask strength coaches they'll back me up on this. If you take the total volume but divide up that volume over multiple workouts versus doing it all in one it seems to send a louder muscle building signal probably because that muscle building signal is being sent three times that week versus just once. Yeah I think that makes a big difference. I think that you're, especially if you're a natural athlete, I think that you are taking advantage of keeping that signal high because what is it, 24 to, I mean 48 to 72 hours before that signal kind of starts to dip back down. And so if you're the person that does this upper body split or you do this one muscle

or one muscle group per week and you hammer it, well sure, you get a big loud signal for the first two days and then it really starts to dip off and come back down. And then you don't have anything that's saying, oh, go build muscle on my legs for another four days until you hit it again versus dividing that up over three days in a week. It's like, just as that starts to dip back down, you hit it again. And just as it starts to dip down and you hit it again. And I think that frequency, not to mention, you also choose way better exercises that are going to build more muscle.

Let's talk about that, right? So when it comes to, now there's a lot, a lot, a lot of strength training or resistance training exercises and all of them have some value in the right application but we're talking about just building muscle. This episode is about gaining 10 pounds of muscle in like 76 days right? When it comes to building muscle not all exercises are equal, not even close. So the exercises that you should be doing on a weekly basis in these workouts, maybe not in every workout, but at least once in each of these workouts, should

be the ones that build the most muscle. The exercise I'm about to list will build more muscle than the next 15 exercises combined. That's how powerful of muscle build these are. So the first one is the barbell squat, then you have the deadlift, the bench press, and the overhead press. And you could probably throw in a barbell row with that as well. Those exercises just build, in fact if you just did those five exercises including the row, you build lots of muscle. In fact, a lot of people would be great just doing those exercises alone. I don't know if you heard the clip. I just did an interview with Doug Bobst. We both did. And he was asking for like this advice for, you know, in regards to like the obesity epidemic. And I said, you know what's crazy is if you literally took two pieces of advice, one of them was following a

whole food diet was one piece of ice. The second piece of ice was literally take these five exercises and just practice them. I said two times a week. Like we're obviously talking about optimal building more muscle, burning more body fat and a certain period of time. So this is why three times a week makes sense for this person. But we would literally solve the obesity epidemic if everybody just did that. Like literally eat as much as you want, so long as it's whole foods, and literally just do these five lifts, practice these five lifts two times a week

and you would be blown away at what an incredible, healthy, strong, you're not gonna go win a bodybuilding show, but you most certainly will build an impressive, strong, healthy physique just literally practicing. It's foundational, I mean this is where, I mean it's kind of funny because I was fortunate to have a weight training class when I was in high school and we focused just on these lifts and,

you know, broke them down because they're, each part of these lifts have, has its own unique sort of attribute to them that you have to like learn the skill of it. You have to learn and really break it down but then we get away from it and we try to add on more and we try to add all these different variations and you know different machines and different things to target different muscles of our body, but You always come back to it because it it's the one that that keeps Consistently building and moving the needle. I wish that I had a story like that. Part of why I'm so passionate about this conversation was because I'm on the other side.

I made the mistake for over a decade of being the guy who was doing all the creative silly exercises, avoiding the big five. I might have bench pressed here and there. Maybe occasionally did like a shoulder press more often, not a bodybuilder, military type press. Sometimes I rode, but I was doing all the machines, all the creative stuff and I was, I was not doing the squat, the deadlift, the overhead press like consistently. deadlift, the overhead press, like consistently. And I look back now and I look back how hard and consistent and how much I trained in my early twenties to the amount that I have to train to build a better, to build a better physique at older in age with way less effort by just

focusing on those lifts. It makes me so angry that I didn't either I didn't listen or I didn't have the right person communicating to that to me when I was in my 20s because I didn't do that. I totally missed out on those early gains had I just focused on those lifts. Now just some personal experience with this. I, you know, when I released, was training a lot of clients,

there was a period of time there when I got a decent amount of clients that were men in their 20s that wanted to build muscle. I trained one dude and then he recommended his friend and next you know I'm training like the six guys. Now the thing about it was that they all worked out. So none of them were complete beginners. They all lifted weights, they all worked out, they all trained the whole body. And what I did was I gave them good workout programming. They all followed split. So we went three days a week.

And then I had them do the exercises that I said, uh, very consistently. And none of them did them consistently. Definitely not a squat or deadlift. Some of them, they all bench pressed, overhead press. They didn't do a full range of motion. Barbell row, they never did. Squat and deadlift, they never did. I can tell you exactly how much of a difference in muscle mass, just

doing these exercises did for them. It was on average seven pounds. On average seven pounds of lean body mass each one of these guys gained and it was mainly from getting strong at these exercises. Myself, when I was a freshman in high school and working out, the year between freshman and sophomore year, I gained so much muscle because I met a group of powerlifters that and by that by that back then I was training my whole body wasn't like I avoided legs and I'd use leg press and hack squat leg extensions leg curls and I did all the you know cable rows and that kind of stuff But these guys taught me primarily had a bench press and deadlift and I gained as I mean as a kid

I gained almost 15 pounds of muscle or or or weight I should say on the scale. Some of it was body fat but most of it was muscle and I got really strong at squats and deadlifts. So these exercises you want to talk about packing on muscle. If you miss these exercises you're not going to build as much muscle. It's a lot of signal you'd be able to provide. Yes. Like hands down. Yes. Next up is to eat your target body weight in grams of protein. So if you want to gain 10 pounds of lean body mass that is your target in grams of protein. In other words if you're 150 pounds and you want to weigh 160 because you want to gain 10 pounds of muscle you need to eat 160 grams of protein every single

day. Do not miss this at all. Now this one alone makes a tremendous difference and I would see people gain muscle just from bumping their protein. In fact, a lot of people experience this by taking a protein shake, believing the shake has something magical, when in reality was just you increase your protein. I mean I attribute the entire protein shake market to this. The reason why it's so popular and it's been a staple in so many people's lives when it comes to their fitness journey is because you do see a significant difference on it.

And it's not the magic in the shake. It's that most people miss their protein intake so much that simply adding a 30 gram protein shake to diet Significantly improves the result, but I would definitely take it a step further and say track and make sure that I mean I'm going through this process again I don't know how many times I've done this in my career Where I go back to kind of tracking to get an idea where I'm at and I am where I go back to kind of tracking to get an idea where I'm at. And I am trying with all my might to hit protein.

I think about it. And then when I go to bed, I'm thinking about tomorrow morning, I'm gonna eat this and then I'm gonna eat that. Like I'm like prioritizing it that much. And I still fall short on many days. So, and if you were to ask me probably, 10, 15 years ago,

if I were to assess the way I was eating, if I was considered that high, I would say, oh man, it's high protein. I'm eating four or five times a day and there's always a big piece of meat involved in it or eggs. I'm eating a lot of protein. But when you actually measure it out and track, a lot of times you might be eating enough protein to be survive and be considered okay and hitting with your bare essentials. But there's a difference between the bare essentials protein and then there's a difference to maximal benefits for building muscle.

And it's closer to that one to one that you're talking about, which I would venture to say 90% of the people that think they're hitting that or not hitting that? No, in fact, I bet you right now, if you're listening to this and you already strength training and it's not a terrible workout, and you're doing your workouts and stuff, and you start tracking and you know that you're not hitting this number, just doing this, not even following the other steps, not even do the other stuff I said,

just hitting your protein targets, you'll see a nice three to five pound gain in lean body man. Profound. Just from doing that alone. Yeah. That's how big of a difference. Now, you want this to come, if it can, from whole natural foods, because that's also important,

and also start your day off with high protein, because it is very hard to hit this protein target, especially because it's going to be 10 grams above what your current body weight is. This is a difficult one one and it becomes impossible. You know, if like me, I'll try and eat 200 grams of protein or more in a day, if I don't have 50 grams of protein for breakfast, it's not happening. Yeah, you literally have to train yourself

to do what you're saying, seek it out. It's not intuitive because first of all, it's like satiating, which is already like a signal in your body, like I'm good, everything's fine, and literally have to go beyond that to be able to get, especially in a condensed window like this, we're trying to optimize, like it's a huge importance

to give you those building materials. Totally, now next up is to every night, and again, this has to be consistent, get eight hours of good sleep every single night. Sleep is where the majority of the repair and growth occurs. Not only that, but suboptimal sleep is a fantastic way to take your hormone profile and make it one that is pro-fat gain and anti-muscle gain.

Lack of sleep makes your body not want to build muscle and it makes your body want to gain body fat. There was an interesting study I've quoted a few times where they took two groups of people put them on the same calorie restricted diet so they all ate in the calorie deficit. Okay? It was all controlled. The difference was one group got bad sleep the other group got great sleep. The group that got bad sleep, here's a you know here's the funny thing they all lost the same amount of weight but The group that got bad sleep, here's a funny thing. They all lost the same amount of weight. But the group that got bad sleep lost twice as much muscle of the weight that they lost.

Because it literally primes your body to tear down or tear, break down this very active tissue because lack of sleep is stressful. Let me tell you the most common mistakes that you will see, and these will be people that are hitting protein and training hard. I can't tell you the first tip where we talk about lifting weights three times a week, how often I see this. The over application of intensity and volume, so they're training four, five, six days a week, hoping they're going to get the results faster, paired with not getting adequate sleep and recovery and repair. The combination of the two of those is one of the most frustrating things that lead to plateaus with so many people because they're like, man, I'm hitting protein, man, I'm training good exercises, I don't get it, I'm training five days a week. But their sleep is shit and they're over applying intensity and that is a recipe for you not seeing results.

And it's so hard for people to wrap their brain around because they know, oh, I know protein's important. Oh, I know I gotta go to the gym consistently. I'm doing that. Oh, I'm doing those extra. They're doing a lot of the right things, but that sleep and recovery goes so hand in hand with the amount of training, volume and intensity

that you apply. And if those are off, you could be perfect everywhere else and you're not gonna see the results that you apply and if those are off you could be perfect everywhere else and you're not going to see the results that you want to see. 100%. All right last and this one really that I'm about to say speaks to the and not gain any body fat part of what I said the beginning episode which is avoid heavily processed foods. If your diet is made up of heavily processed foods you will overeat okay. They are processed foods you will overeat. They are engineered to make you overeat. There's lots of time and money that's

been invested in developing these foods to make them so that you overeat them and you're not going to win. You're not going to be able to eat the appropriate amount to build muscle and not gain body fat. So if you simply avoided heavily processed foods and hit the protein targets and everything else we said, the odds that you'll gain muscle and it's gonna be lean with no body fat is high. If you include heavily processed foods, the odds that you'll gain muscle and fat becomes very high. The thing that I love about this tip or that I find interesting and this is my personal

journey and then with clients is that if I have a client who is not excited about weighing and measuring every bit of everything that they consume and tracking it like to a T, if they just ate whole foods, listened to their body when it's hungry, fed it every time it felt that way, but just made a choice to eat whole foods and eat the protein first, it would solve this. I didn't have to have them weigh track of the night. If you're somebody that has a really hard time eating whole foods and processed foods makes its way into your diet more often than not, then it becomes paramount that you weigh and track everything. Because you will overeat otherwise. You will, because they are engineered to do that that and if you listen to those same signals that will guide you in the right direction with whole foods, it will certainly send you in the wrong direction with processed foods. And I just want to make that clear because I don't want to demonize processed foods. I utilize processed foods all the time. Greek yogurt is considered that. I eat that every single night, but I'm also tracking diligently. And I also understand that these processed foods can send that signal for me to want to eat more food.

And so you have to understand that we're not demonizing that and saying you can't have processed foods. We're just saying that if you do avoid them, it makes this so much easier for your success. If you choose to include them a lot, you got to be really careful about making sure you're staying right around that maintenance, the slight surplus, or that can get out of control really fast. Totally. All right, do you have questions, Doug? First one is, should I track calories as well? Okay, tracking calories will get you much more specific, and what that would look like is you would track for a week, you would get what you're averaging, and then you would add maybe 400 calories above that while hitting the protein targets to do that. I think

that would make it more likely that you hit this target and goal, but I think if you just hit your protein targets and don't try to avoid eating anything except for heavily processed foods, in other words don't be like, I'm hitting my protein but I'm avoiding carbs, or I'm not gonna eat, then if you're eating the protein, not trying to avoid food, eat when you're hungry, stick to whole foods, I think you'll be okay. If I have the option, if a client asks me, like do you want me to track, and I say,

will you track everything, and they say yeah, then I say yes. The reason why you hear us give advice the way we give advice is we recognize that a majority of people won't. A advice is we recognize that a majority of people won't. A majority of people or a majority of people will say they will and then they don't. And so we've had to figure out from years and years of experience training these people

that say they will and then don't, how do I get them to get the results they want knowing that they're not going to do some things that would really help me out like tracking Therefore you hear these tips like avoid the heavily processed food Just focus on the protein and that's gonna help pretty much most people get there But man if I got an option if you're willing to track and and do that then absolutely more data that we have I mean, I would say that goes with testing your body fat first I would say that would be tracking your steps. Man, the more you're willing to track,

the easier it's going to be for us to make adjustments along the way. But I think the idea of this episode was to give you guys some takeaways that if you just did this, you should be able to get these results from that. Next question is, what supplements should I take? Oh, creatine for sure. Creatine for sure. Whether you want to build muscle, burn body fat, improve

your health, but you will build more muscle on creatine. Your muscles will be more hydrated, better pumped, they're gonna be stronger, and it seems to contribute to faster muscle building. I'm gonna add EAAs to that now because this person is, we already know that they're gonna be catabolic at some times

because they're hovering around close to maintenance to a deficit sometimes because they're trying to reduce body fat and build muscle. So I think the benefits of having that just simply as a just in case you have days where you don't. Now if you're listening to this and you're like your goal protein is 150 and you crush 180 to 200 a day, okay well then maybe this is not the supplement for you. But if you know you're somebody who has to really go after the protein to hit your protein targets and you know that you miss sometimes, then I now believe that having those EAAs by your side would be very beneficial. Yeah and then next would be protein powder. If it's very hard for you to hit your protein targets,

then a protein powder can be quite valuable. But you don't have to take any of the stuff that we said. You could do without those things, but they can help. It's mainly for convenience, and so make sure you're on target. Next question is, should I include cardio? No, no, no. Cardio isn't gonna really help you build muscle.

Unless your cardiovascular fitness is holding you back from doing your strength training exercise. Like if you're, if your cardio is so bad that you can't do more than three reps of a squat cause you're out of breath, then you probably want to incorporate some cardio. That being said for everybody else, just walk every day, walk every day. It's good for your health. Yeah. Um, it's, it's good for your health. It's a great activity, helps facilitate recovery.

But like traditional forms of cardio aren't muscle building and they would just be taking away from the recovery reserves that we need for building muscle. I'm glad you brought that. I honestly would have said no, just out of this jump. But like in that situation,

if you're the type of person that will always do low reps and will have a lot of rest periods already established and then want to switch, which again, I don't know if this really made it on there, but switching your focus training wise will help create a new stimulus. So to be able to kind of switch into higher reps, that's kind of where too you can look at that as another way of adding a bit of cardio. Yeah, I would strongly say no.

Just because the title of this episode is like the goal is to build 10 pounds of muscle as fast as we possibly can. The only benefit you can make the case for with me on where cardio helps is if you can't do more than 10 reps of squats because your endurance sucks so bad. But then even then, I would make the argument of, okay, let's go build that endurance through lifting weights. Get it through the reps. And get it through the reps. And so versus, because doing traditional cardio where you're actually running or elevating the heart rate to the cardio threshold is catabolic. It's not pro building muscle. It's

not ideal for this person and their specific goal in this short period of time. That is not me saying that cardio isn't extremely beneficial and healthy and good for this. If the person was, I want to be healthy, the most healthy I can be in the next four weeks, or the goal was, hey, I want to lose 10 pounds of body fat the fastest I possibly can. OK, well then you would hear me communicate this differently, because then it's a different goal. But if the goal is build maximal muscle

in a short period of time, then most people this is not going to help our cause. It's why too, if you're following along the series that I'm doing right now, because the main goal is for me to build as much muscle as I can right now to build my metabolism naturally before I introduce any cardio like you don't see me doing any of that for that exact reason. Awesome look if you like the show come find us on Instagram Justin is that mind pump Justin I'm at mind pump to Stefano and Adam's at mind pump. Thank you for listening to mind pump if your goal is

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