Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2510: Building Fitness Habits That Actually Stick in 2025

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

Building Fitness Habits that Actually Stick in 2025 Shaming is a TERRIBLE way to get anybody to stay consistent. (1:21) The data around why people fail to reach their fitness goals. (3:30) Big reasons people fail: Too much too soon. (8:15) Not strength training. (17:06) Using exhaustion, soreness, and intensity as gauges of a good workout. (25:21) Focusing on the scale (instead of performance). (33:18) Not having a plan. (36:23) Questions:  How should I start with strength training? (39:23) What about cardio? (40:57) What supplements should I take? (42:25) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Legion Athletics for the exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! ** Code MINDPUMP for 20% off your first order (new customers) and double rewards points for existing customers. ** Special Promotion: MAPS Starter HALF off! ** Code START2025 at checkout! ** Why your New Year's resolution to go to the gym will fail Mind Pump #1522: How To Stay Consistent With Your Diet & Workout Mind Pump #1835: Why Resistance Training Is the Best Form of Exercise for Fat Loss and Overall Health Workout Because You Love Yourself Not Because You Hate Yourself – Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump #2320: Throw Away the Scale! Mind Pump #2402: The 5 Reasons Why Walking is King for Fat Loss (Burn More Fat than Running & How to Do it Correctly) Mind Pump #2162: The Best Supplements You Can Take for Building Muscle, Performance & Health Mind Pump #2497: The Amazing & Weird Side Effects of Creatine 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 Pup. Today's episode, we talk about how you can stay consistent for 2025. Perhaps you're just getting started on your fitness journey. It's a new year, very popular for people to get into shape or try to get into shape at the beginning of the year,

but so many people fail. Today's episode, we give you the ways to stay consistent. We train people for two and a half decades. We know what works. Now this episode was brought to you by a sponsor, Legion. Legion makes some of the best supplements for fitness and health, fat loss and muscle building. And if you go through our link, you'll get yourself a discount. Go to buylegion.com. That's B-U-Y-L-E-G-I-O-N.com forward slash mind pump.

Use the code MINDPUMP. Get 20% off your first order or double rewards points. Also in today's episode, we talk about a program called Maps Starter. It's a great workout program for beginners. Because of this episode it's 50% off so if you're interested in that go to mapsstarter.com use the code START2025 for the 50% off discount. Alright here comes the show. It's a new year the problem the challenge is not getting started. Millions of Americans get started every single year. The real challenge is sticking with it. Why does everybody fail and what can you do about it? That's what we're talking about in today's episode.

Can we first start by addressing this interesting new movement this year in the fitness space where there's a bit of shaming going on. Have you seen that? No. There's a lot of companies right now that are jumping on this. I saw Equinox has marketing around this, which I thought was really interesting. What are they shaming?

People for quitting. Basically a lot of them. Yeah, that works. Yeah. So a lot of the marketing right now, they're not the only ones, they were just the most recent one that I had seen. I had seen a few.

I've seen some trainers that have been promoting this too. And it's this idea of like, don't be like everyone else. Don't be a squitter. I mean Equinox came out as far as saying that they weren't going to sell any memberships until a certain date. We're not letting anybody in that's a New Year's resolution goal and then going to quit. So real interesting type of marketing.

That's a new tactic. It's all, I mean, they're still just trying to capture the motivation that happens at the beginning of the year. They're trying to just capture onto that wave. I mean, it is a real thing. By the way, shame is a terrible way to get anybody to stay consistent with anything, with any habit. I know. By the way, shame is a terrible way to get anybody to stay consistent with anything, with any habit. In fact, shame is a very important part of the formula that causes people to relapse into bad habits.

That's a fact. So whether it's eating too much or drinking alcohol or drugs or not exercising, I mean, all of us have experienced this. You try to accomplish something, you fail at it, then you pile on the shame and you reach for that thing that you always reach for when you don't the shame and you reach for that thing that you always reach for when you don't feel good, which is whatever that bad behavior is. So terrible. And on the positive note, you know, this, even though a lot of people do fail, do fall off,

there is a percentage of people that this is when it happened for them. This was the time, this was the year, this was the, you know, it many times before and then finally this is the year that they got started and stuck with it and I do think that there are some common reasons why people don't. I think that's probably the most important thing. Yeah, let's talk about that and talk about what people can do to become a part of the statistics of the people that maintain and succeed.

So the start of the year is a huge explosion of activity for gyms. Gyms will see typically on average a 40% increase in gym traffic. Now we all worked in the gym industry for a long time and it was so different. Like by the second or third week of January because the first week of January really is a an extension of December if you work in the gym it's just it's the same it's not really it doesn't really pick up on my dead all of a sudden it's almost like overnight by the second or third week it just gets crazy people who've had memberships who don't use it all of a

sudden start using the gym again and then you get tons of interest in people coming in wanting to get memberships, wanting to get in shape. Um, there's interesting data around this. 80% of people when surveyed have a new year's resolution and the majority of those resolutions revolve around losing weight and fitness. So most people have a new year's resolution because the calendar said New Year. And the number one resolution is always and has been for as long as we've been surveying these things revolving around fitness.

Now the data around that actually pulled up some interesting data on what that looks like. So one out of 10 people said that their resolution lasted a month. 21% reported two months, 22% reported three months, 13% said their resolution lasted four months. Only 1% said they lasted for 11 or 12 months. So most people make it past a month essentially. And it's really, they start to fall out, fall off about month three or four. And that's all what we notice, right? So January gets crazy, March starts to die down and gets back to normal. And they're just white knuckling their way through the whole experience. I mean, that's really what's driving them is that initial momentum and I can, I can

make it, I can make it, I can make it. And that's really what they're living off of. Yeah. And as trainers and gym managers, we actually played a role in a lot of these people failing because you get this huge influx of people, this highly motivated state of mind that people would come in with, either they were just sick and tired of feeling whatever or they felt guilty from the holidays. This is the year I change everything. And as a gym manager or as a trainer, I would try to capture this momentum and I thought, well, if we do everything

all at once, that's going to be the best bet. So we actually encouraged the behaviors that tend to lead to failure without even realizing it. And I thought, well, if I do everything right and I give them all the answers and we do everything all at once, then maybe I can show them results and that'll keep them coming. Yeah, never work I think that was that was the the thought is that urgency is because you have them for this brief moment You know that it's probably not gonna last and so you're trying your best to show them some some glimpses of success and some

You know some movement there in terms of like their goal But yeah, we're us setting them up in that direction just, it leads for such a short path. Yeah, we're definitely guilty of being a big part of the problem for sure. And I don't know how much of it, I wanna believe that most of it was coming from a good place, right?

I wanna believe that most of it was I wanted to show my clients results and so at that point in my career I thought the more we did the faster we would see results. I'm sure a lot of that was heavily motivated too by my desire to keep my book full and if you show them results they'd most likely resign and so I probably wasn't thinking about the longevity of that client and you know where will they be in two three years? All I cared was how quick can I show these people results?

so they continue with me and I've got a full book and took me a long time to Realize that even though I wouldn't show them the results as fast By doing it the right way that I'm more likely to not only show them better long-term results But also would end up keeping them. I think that was a mistake I made as a trainer was thinking that if I didn't show them these, these quick results, they would fire me and go to somebody else, or they, they would, they would quit and not

show, show up and keep going. Uh, but I think that's because I didn't, I didn't have the words to communicate what was happening. I don't understand how to explain to them why it wasn't a good idea that we do all these things. While they're heavily motivated in telling me I want to do all these things. Yeah, who am I to tell them no? Right.

Yeah, I think, I mean you can boil this down to people do, the number one reason why people can't stick with their new fitness habit is they do too much too soon. They go in all at once and there's even some incentives, of course these exist, from people on the fitness side of capturing that revenue. You get somebody who comes in who's like,

yes, I wanna get in shape, I wanna lose 40 pounds. And you're talking about personal training, like yes, I'm gonna get a trainer. And you're like, well, how many days a week can you come to the gym? Five days a week, done. Five days a week of sessions and you sell this big package of training.

And what you've actually done is set them up for failure. When you look at the data on big behavior changes, regardless of what they are, and here we're talking about a lifestyle change that involves exercising regularly, that involves changing your diet and your lifestyle to become more fit and healthy, which by the way, just a little side note, is a big deal. That's not just a small little change. This is potentially a big deal. This is changing quite a few things. If you do

that all at once, the odds of success are extremely small. And this is true for any behavior, any behavior that you try to adopt that is drastically different from the ones you're doing now, the odds of success that it's going to stick around diminish as the motivation starts to diminish, which always happens. The only time the data shows that this sticks around is in the rare, rare occasion of an epiphany which almost never happens. An epiphany is, you'll know you had an epiphany, like you had a heart attack and you almost died and you're surrounded by

your kids and your deathbed and then you come to life and you're like, I'm changing everything. Those almost never happen. By the way, that often doesn't even cause an epiphany. I had many times members who, you know, gym members who came in after severe health cares who still went all in all at once and ended up stopping. So too much too soon is setting yourself up for failure. And if you got to understand that the default is you're gonna stop.

So if you look at the data, consider that the odds are you're not going to be able to continue this. So make that the number one consideration, not how fast I can get results, not what is the best, most effective workout. None of that. You got to look at it and say, the number one thing I need to consider is can I stick with this? Is this something I can do for the rest of my life? can I stick with this? Is this something I can do for the rest of my life? So instead of going too much too soon, you're better off going small and slow. Taking one small step at a time. I mean this is the origin of the goal is to do as little as possible to elicit the most amount of change. I know our audience is probably

tired of hearing me say that, but part of why I repeated it so many times is because I feel like it's, I still have to continue to drill that into people. I mean, I have family and friends of mine that have known me for a very long time. I've been saying that for a very long time, and yet I still find myself repeating that saying because here they are, beginning of the year, all fired up and motivated, and I hear about all the things they're doing, all the things they bought, all the things they're investing in, all the changes they're making and it's just like, whoa, what are you doing? You weren't doing any of that stuff just two months ago. How about we just stop that one thing, you know, or just add that one thing and then let's get some momentum, get some wins, get some change, adaptation, and then, oh, we'll add a little bit more to that and

build some momentum. But for some reason, even though the statistics point, I'm pretty sure most people are aware of that. We just think that we're special. Yeah, that's the one impulse that gets celebrated so much, you know, in society. It's like, you know, I'm so motivated and I want to take it all on and like that's it's a discipline to really kind of taper that and be realistic with that because it's it's a good feeling because like I'm going to conquer all these things and I'm going to take this all on and people don't really want to stop that momentum because they see that at least it's going in towards a positive thing but it's going to be short-lived if we don't really you know apply the discipline. It's so freeing though, once you figure this out. You know how freeing it is to know like,

and I've talked about this too, I fall on and off all the time where I'm consistent for a while, then I'm not so consistent. And figuring this piece out and allowing yourself this, you know what, I haven't really done anything for like a month or so, like if I just get in and do one exercise, that's a start in the right direction.

Yeah. Like it is so much easier for me to jump start back up again. When I allow, I give myself that permission and get better results, and I get better results that way. And it's like, Oh, it's not that hard to commit to just that. Like I haven't really done anything. So me going for a walk every day for a half hour, cutting out the sodas or that thing that I know I shouldn't be doing is not a lot to commit to. And I can start doing that right now and I'll already start to feel better and see a little bit of a difference.

Like, man, that's actually a really, once people get that through their head and realize that's a better approach, like, oh, that's not that hard to get started. No. So what you need to do is consider when you're making your first step is consider How you feel when you're in a not motivated or unmotivated state of mind because right now You might be listening to this. It's January beginning of the year You're probably motivated. It's probably how you found this episode. You found this episode. She's like I'm gonna do this Oh, look, this is talking about sticking with it. I've tried this many times before I failed Let me see what the tips are.

And while you're listening, you're motivated. You're listening to a fitness and health podcast and you're getting good information. Yeah, I wanna do this, I'm gonna do this. Now consider yourself in an unmotivated state of mind. Is what you're about to do, are the steps you're going to take, ones that you can maintain in that state of mind.

So what you do essentially is you take a step and then ask yourself Can I maintain this forever and will I be able to maintain this in an unmotivated state of mind? That's the step that you take that one right there and it really doesn't matter What that step is maybe that step is literally I'm going to walk for five minutes after breakfast and lunch I'm gonna start there or maybe that step is I'm gonna to walk for five minutes after breakfast and lunch. I'm going to start there. Or maybe that step is I'm going to go to the gym one day a week. Cause I know for sure, I feel confident for sure, I can at least make it to the gym one day a week for the rest of my life. When I'm, I know right now I'm motivated and I feel like I want to go every day.

But when I'm unmotivated, do I think I can make it one day a week? I think I can. That's where I'm going to start. That's where you start. Then what you do is you stay there until it feels like it's a part of your life. Until it feels like a habit. It's something you do like brushing your teeth or whatever. It's just something you do. Then you do that again. All right, what's another step I can take that is realistic for the rest of my life? Something that I know I can maintain in an unmotivated state of mind and the cool thing about this is Each one of those steps the the space in between them gets shorter as you build upon

In other words that first step between the first and second step may take might take you a few months You might only go once a week for three months But then you take another step and you go two days a week or you add something with diet Each time you take a step the distance between them gets smaller and each step tends to get bigger as you build upon it So it is a snowball effect, but this approach is far more likely To help you stay consistent. It's far more likely to be sustainable than Capturing the motivation that you have now and saying i'm going to do as much as I can and I'm motivated and excited about it.

You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of when you get newlyweds, when you look at the data on pre-marital counseling, one of the things that they'll explain to them is you're not gonna feel like this for the rest of your, your whole marriage is not gonna feel like you right now. Right now you couldn't imagine being apart. Right now you guys are looking at each other saying,

oh my god. That's where the term the honeymoon phase. Yeah, the honeymoon phase. It's when this is over that the challenges start to happen and so that's what they tend to counsel them on. This, the way you feel right now will go away. How do we keep you to continue going? How do we keep these fitness goals

something that you desire and something you were able to contribute to. And you've got to start with small steps, not too much, which by the way, the way that the body adapts to fitness, the way that the body gets stronger, more fit, the way the body gets leaner, it actually works better to take small steps anyway. Two large of steps. You can overdo it. You can overdo it. You often do overdo it and people do see results overdoing it, it's not because they're doing so much. Short-lived though.

It's short-lived and it's in spite of the fact that they're overdoing. In fact, a good trainer, a very good experienced coach or trainer will pull you back when you approach them with this motivation and say no no no you're not working out at all right now you want to come four days a week? Way too much. Let's start maybe once or twice a week. The second biggest reason why I think I see people fail is also neglecting strain training and pursuing the calorie burn approach.

Signing up for some, you know, group X class, signing up for a marathon or a Spartan race, or, you know, picking up running every single day or going to some class that's centered around sweating and burn cycling. Like they go after the burn a bunch of calorie approach. They switched the, they went from holiday eating sweets and overeating and drinking and enjoying themselves to cut all the drinking, eating bad food off, eating clean and let's go burn. Like Frazee is.

Run everything. Has to be the number one strategy that fails that people attempt to do at this time. Well, there's two reasons for that. One is the calorie burn that you get from exercise really isn't that much. That's just a fact, right? So the amount of calories that you burn

while you're moving, although you're sweating and it's much more than when you're sitting down, it's not that much. An hour of hard workouts, regardless of what your cardio machine says, because those things lie, they actually will tell you you're burning twice as many calories as you are, you're burning maybe four or 500 calories, maybe 700 if you're lucky. That's very easy to cover with food and the body adapts by learning how to burn less calories with that type of activity. What you want to do is you want to incorporate strength training. Now why?

You're building lean tissue, you're building muscle. Muscle burns more calories on its own so you get a little bit of a metabolism boost. It also improves insulin sensitivity. It sets you up for better success later on. Now the data on this is quite clear. Strength training in combination with diet results in more fat loss than in other forms of exercise in combination with diet. Strength training needs to be the cornerstone of your routine if you're looking to improve your health, your fitness, and if you want fat loss, not just weight loss, but actual fat loss. And strength training is phenomenal because you can watch yourself get stronger

and you can see that you're doing a good job. It's not just based off of how fatigued you are. So strength training needs to be the crux. The other amazing thing about strength training is you don't need to do much of it. One day a week for a beginner is enough to elicit incredible changes in strength. I can actually stay one day a week for a long time with somebody before ever having to add an extra day. Other forms of exercise tend to require more to see the same kind of results. The data again is quite clear that strength training is probably the most valuable form

of exercise if you only had to pick one. And because you're building yourself up too, like a lot of times, you know, people don't realize what that does in terms of your motivation, your consistency as well. So to be able to, you know, still be fed, but I'm building my muscle tissue, you know, provides more strength. It actually like promotes more movement in general as a byproduct of that. And it's something too, that now you have all these new abilities that you can build upon. And it's just so much easier for you to kind of like progressively overload that versus like I'm going straight calorie burn phase, like that is like a downward spiral

to get you to a point where you feel super depleted and super energy deprived. I wish we had a good visual for someone to see like comparing five sets of squats one time a week to somebody who goes out and goes for these runs and burns all these calories. And you, and let's say that one, you have one person, right, decides, I'm gonna go burn like crazy.

They're gonna do the three to five day a week spin classing and doing that approach. And this other person's, I'm gonna listen to these mind pump guys and I'm gonna do this real slow, very slow methodical approach and I'm just gonna squat five times, once a week, and every week I'm gonna try and get a little bit stronger. We should run our own study.

It would be a really cool experiment to show people. Way less work and better results. Way, way, way less work, right? Especially if you, like, when you look at, after say, two months The amount of time that one person spent at those spinning classes or running and the amount of time that person that who just did Five sets of squats one day a week the ROI that that's what I mean by the visual I wish you could see the visual the ROI on those two things if you went after and then you went forward three months

This person only did one day a week Lifted five sets of squats, slowly got stronger week over week, adding a little bit of weight to the bar. This person took Spain class three times a week, every week consistently for the next three months. Let's see where those two people end up. Guarantee you that person. Let's just say all diet stuff is the same, equal. The person who did those squatting would be so much further ahead than that other person. And feel better too. Strength training is, it builds the body up.

It's pro-youthful hormone profile because of the way that it affects insulin sensitivity, the way that it increases androgen receptor density, meaning your body's anabolic hormones now have more places to attach to, so your testosterone becomes more effective, both for men and women. It's important in women as well. It's rejuvenating. By the way, this is less and less becoming a secret. It used to be, we used to have to really preach this, but we're seeing now women

adopt strength training at incredible rates because they're trying it, they're doing it, and they're coming back saying, I feel better, I'm leaner, I'm doing less work, I can eat more food, I look better. I'm leaner. I'm doing less work. I can eat more food. I look better. This is a much more effective way of exercise. Strength training should be the foundation of your routine. Now there's benefits to all form of exercise. If you have a preference, you love running, you love cycling, it's your favorite thing to do, then go for it. But if you're listening to this, you're getting started, you want the minimal time to produce maximal results, then do strength training.

By the way, can I call something out of that, what you just said too, because I know we say that to protect ourselves from the amount of people that, I love to run and like, I never want to discourage somebody who's listening to this show and has been running for the last decade and it's a part of their life and they love doing it. But I can't tell you how many times someone sat across the desk from me who needs to lose 30 to 50 pounds

and then they tell me that they're going to go about it running because they love running. And my response back to that person is you wouldn't be in this situation right now if you loved running. If you actually loved it and did it consistently, but instead you haven't done it for years or decades and you're telling me that this is the modality that you want to choose to get in shape and I'm trying to tell you it's probably not a good strategy and you've probably already proven to yourself you're not going to do it forever. That's the person that I think is so important to address because if you already like running and doing those things-

You're probably, you're doing it now. You're doing it. You're doing it now. You're already doing it. You're not doing it just start in January, but there's a lot of people that say that shit and then they, and every January they're saying that shit again. And it's like, no, you don't because you haven't actually done it for an entire year. You do it for a short season.

You lose a few pounds. You attach the losing the few pounds to getting ready for that run that you like to do as your favorite way to get in shape. And it's like, no, it's not keeping you in shape. And it wasn't successful because you lost weight before because you gained it back. It's only successful if it's something that's maintainable. That you do, regardless. By the way, strength training, when we talk about strength training, it's not just working

out with weights. Strength training, it's working out with resistance, which can be weights, it could be machines, it could be body weight, it could be bands, any way to build strength and muscle. So it's not circuit training, it's not group exercise, it's not going from one machine to another with no rest.

It looks and is a lot like traditional bodybuilding. You do a set of 10 reps, it's hard, you rest for two minutes, you repeat the set. That's the strength training that we're talking about. That's what produces the type of results that we're talking about. It's traditional strength training.

It is not just working out with weights because you could use weights and do lots of different activities but it would not be strength training at all. That's F45, that's orange theory, that's what you see with all of these. It's not the tool, it's the way right? Because I could do use no weight, no weights, no machines whatsoever, use body weight and make it strength training and I can also use barbells and dumbbells and turn it into a circuit training class which has nothing to do with strength training. Next, this is a big mistake and I think this the reason why this one's a is so common is is precisely because when people first get started part of the motivation is their I don't know for lack of a better term

self-discussed with how far they've come or how where they're at now and they're like I want to get out of this. So what they do is they use exhaustion, soreness, intensity. Like the harder the workout is the more of a punishment it is, the more grueling it is, the more it feels like I survived then that means it's a good workout. That means it was a I'm doing a great job and I think people there's two reasons why people do this because by the way that's a terrible gauge of whether or not you had a good workout. The people that work out, that should work out,

where it looks like they're surviving, are extremely fit, high level, incredible. Like typically athletes, or people who've been training for so long and so consistently, that this is their fitness level. Very few people should train like this. And even those people don't train like this often. They do it in season.

Okay. In seasons, in short spurts. In competitions. The reason why this attracts people is number one, I think people think they'll get better results the more they beat themselves up. So if I just, if I could just kill myself in the gym, I'm going to get results even faster. So that's one reason.

The second reason is it does feel cathartic initially because of this self loathing, this self disgust, this oh my God, I'm fat or I'm, I don't look good or I hate the way I fit in my clothes and so I'm going to go to the gym and beat the crap out of myself. And it's cathartic to beat this person up who has let themselves go, you know, so, so far, or let themselves get to this place. And so you leave the gym. I'll never forget when,

when this really dawned on me as a trainer, you know, I had a new member and they signed up and I saw them the next day and they finished a crazy workout class and they came out and they're sitting on the bench and I could look like they were going to throw up. And I said, Hey, how was the workout? And he, you know, the guy puts up his finger,

like, I can't talk right now. And he's kind of breathing. And so I'm standing there waiting for him, waiting for him. And then he finally says, man, it was awesome. It was awesome. And I'm like, are you okay? And he's like, I don't, I think I'm going to have

to sit here for a little while and got a little dizzy. And he's like, but that was great. And I remember thinking like, what, when is that ever great where you feel like that? Like, when is that ever great? Um, it was great to him because he hated himself. That's why he did this workout. And of course he thought he was doing an effective job. That's not how the body works. The body adapts to stress but if the stress is

too high it will overcome your body's ability to adapt. Your body's just gonna worry about healing and this is when people hurt themselves or they just over train. They overdo it and their body plateaus so hard. This is where you see those people in the gym that seem to sweat their butts off, work real hard, can't seem to figure out how to lose that last 15 pounds, what's going on, your body is frozen in time because the stress is too much for your body to adapt to. So if you're not doing anything now,

a little bit more than you're doing is enough to elicit change, that's it. Any more than that is more than is required and will probably set you back. There's also a third example or third person that's addicted to that or that, and that's the cortisol junkie. Those are also some of the hardest people to convince that this is not the best strategy either because they swear they feel better. It's exhilarating.

Yes. I mean, I remember having a really tough time convincing clients that were beating themselves up like that because they didn't see it as beating themselves up. They looked at it, I pushed really hard and oh my God, I feel so good afterwards. They weren't grasping or wanting to throw a friar. There's that example of the self-loathing, beat themselves up, punish themselves. People, then there's the people that are really just addicted to the cortisol dump and actually swear that they feel better after the workout

because of that. And those people are really hard to convince this is not ideal for them. Now the reason why cortisol, cortisol does feel good by the way, a lot of people don't realize this, cortisol is a stress hormone and it's designed to release energy to get you out of a stressful situation. Sure energy in the morning too. Yeah and yeah it's supposed to be high in the morning, right, because that's what wakes you up. But if cortisol is high for too long, it burns muscle or pairs muscle down,

it encourages visceral fat storage, it's inflammatory. We know this now, it's all marketed, right? People understand this now. Too much cortisol all the time, not good for you. But if you get a little squirt of it with a hard, crazy, beat myself up workout in the short term, oh, not good for you. But if you get a little squirt of it with a hard, crazy, beat myself up workout in the short term, oh I'm alive again and then it goes away and then I'm alive again and it goes away. No, no, no. Don't use exhaustion, soreness

and intensity as gauges of a good workout. Here's what you should use as a gauge of a good workout. Is your fitness improving? Are you stronger? Are you more fit? Do you feel better? Do you feel more energy? You should feel better at the end of your workout than you did at the beginning. You should not feel like you survived. So I'll repeat that. At the end of your workout, if you don't feel like you have more energy and

vigor than you did at the beginning, you overdid it literally. And people are so confused by this. They think, wait a minute, I should have more energy and more vigor at the end of my workout? Well maybe I didn't work out hard enough. No. You should leave the gym feeling like I'm gonna tackle the day or I feel so great. You should not leave the workout being like, I need to go sit on the couch. I survived. Or I need to, yeah, I'm gonna drive home, my legs are gonna be shaking and when I get home I'm gonna get in a hot bath and I'm gonna go to bed No too much

You should feel better at the end of the workout if you feel better at the end of your workout and you're seeing yourself slowly Progress each time especially with strength you are moving in the right direction Yeah, I mean this this is it it's funny because I think back and I totally had that martyr syndrome Yeah, I just wanted to crush and bury myself and walk. I could barely even walk in a few days. I think about how ineffective that was and just how much further I could have got. Performance wise and strength wise, even playing athletics, it was just astonishing to me.

But finally working through that psychology and being on the other side of it, it's like, it's amazing how easy it is once you subscribe to that and you realize like I could put this effort in, I could feel better after my workout and then I could come back and I could do the same thing. And then you're just building and building and building. Well, bringing up your story, Justin, I think is so important because when I think of the clients that were really hard to convince, I think of the cortisol junkie and then I think of the ex-ath really hard to convince, I think of the cortisol junkie, and then I think of the, the ex athlete.

And, and there's a reason why someone like yourself, uh, even fell into that trap it's because it served you in sports, you know, especially a sport like football, you're competing with, you are supposed to play game day. You're supposed to push until you almost die. You want every last ounce out of you. There's a, there's a reason to push beyond what the body needs. There's that mental fortitude is an important attribute to successful athletes. And so through your athletic career, that way of training has served you, even though you probably admit you could probably have done it still better

and a better approach knowing what you know now. But even then, there's at least some benefit to training an athlete to those, pure exhaustion like that, because it translates into game time. In the pursuit of health and fitness, longevity, building muscle, burning body fat, it has no place. It's separate. It has no place.

But convincing an athlete that training that way has served them for so long is really difficult to do. I think those are the two hardest clients I ever had. The cortisol junkie, which was my, you know, my mom's that love the group X classes like crazy because they get that dump, right, and that relief. And then my ex-athletes, that that's how they did things their entire life, and so how dare this young 20-year-old trainer convince them that this is not a good approach. Yeah, I mean, there's a whole belief like that. Like people will watch Navy SEAL training and be like, man, that's, those guys are getting fit. No, Navy SEALs are fit when they get into

BUD's training. All they're testing is their mental fortitude. They're not trying to get them fit. They're just seeing who can last. Let's see who's going to break. 100%. The next thing that people do that really messes them up is they focus on the scale. Oh the pesky scale. What the weight on the scale says is telling me whether or not I'm doing a good job. All the scale tells you is mass, total mass. Bone, muscle, skin, body fat,

water, hair. Like that's what it tells you is mass. In other words if you lose a limb the weight on the scale goes down. Is that a good thing? No, you lost a limb, right? You can lose muscle and people often think, oh this is great, I'm losing weight, even though they're fatter as a percentage of their body weight because they lost muscle. The scale lies so much to people that people will, they will judge their entire plan based on what the scale says and ignore how they feel. I've had clients, I've had people in my gyms who feel terrible but will tell me that they're

successful because the scale is going down. Or people who feel amazing, they're stronger, they're leaner, their body fat percentage is lower but then they go on the scale and the scale hasn't moved. Crushes them. And they're, oh my God, this is a total dismal failure. I think the best, I know, I don't think, the best gauge of whether or not you're moving in the right direction, especially, especially

when you first get started, has nothing to do with scale. Strength. Everything to do with performance. Are you more fit? Are you stronger in particular? If you're getting stronger, congratulations, you are moving in the right direction. It's actually kind of crazy when you think about

how irrelevant the scale is to body composition, that we even use it as a tool. Yeah, body fat percentage. It's so irrelevant. I mean, how many times have you either personally yourself or taken a client and completely changed the way they look, perform, move, and feel and the scale not go in any direction or go the opposite direction they thought

they wanted to go. So it's so irrelevant. You can take somebody who's completely deconditioned out of shape and they not move a pound up or down on the scale and completely change that person's body composition. If you looked at a picture of a 6 foot, 200 pound man at 25% body fat and put it next to a picture of that same man, 200 pounds, 10% body fat, they would look radically different. Radically different. Radically. 25% he's got a belly, he's soft, he looks flabby. 10% he's got a six pack, he's got delts, he's got muscle. You take a 130 pound female at 35% body fat and put her next to the same picture of her same body weight, 20% body fat, radically different.

So the scale, it just tells you total body mass. Unless you're going to use it with a body fat test to see where lean body mass is or whatever, throw that thing away. In fact, for the first three months of your workout, of your fitness journey, you shouldn't weigh yourself at all because it's going to actually discourage you from doing the right thing. Don't use a scale, use performance. If you're stronger, you're moving in the right direction.

If you're not getting stronger, then we need to look at what's going on here. Which takes us to the last part, which is this. This is the biggest mistake. You don't have a plan. Your plan consists of I'm going to work out. Yeah. There's a lot that can happen within a workout that can determine success or failure.

You need to have a plan in terms of what I'm going to do, what works, what doesn't work exercises are not just the means to an end. The exercises themselves all have specific values. The order in which you do the exercises, the way you apply the exercises, the rep ranges, the tempos, the sets, all those things go into a formula known as workout programming. Workout programming makes a massive, massive difference on whether or not your body progresses or not. I mean, I've taken-

Exponentially more effective. How many clients did you guys take on that worked out? They were already working out, they hired you, all you did was change the workout programming. In fact, that's the main thing we do, change the work and then boom, tremendous results. You get the argument like it's better than nothing. Like if I start going to the gym and I'm just kind of figuring it out or using machines and just kind of, you know, like freelancing it versus really knowing specifically there's, here's the exercises to, you know, work my muscles.

I need to work for this day and here's the rest periods and here's the amount of reps and sets and, um, you know, it's all dialed in, it's all done. Uh, and, and you can actually track and see how this progression occurs versus winging it. You know, you're kind of out there on a limb, especially at the beginning. Because definitely at the beginning, what can happen too, like the scale can lie to you, your programming can lie to you. Cause if you haven't done shit for however many months, eat crappy. And then all of a sudden you decide the new year comes around.

Yeah, you'll see something and you're not, and you have it. And you can, so you could have a terrible workout program and still see some results when you've come from doing nothing at all. When you make diet changes and you start creating activity in your lifestyle, that already is going to elicit change. So what is deceiving, that's right. And then that hard plateau hits and you don't know what to do, especially when you really mis-gaged and you overdid, which is what most people do. So having a plan of this is how I should methodically scale is so important at the very beginning. Otherwise you're led to believe what you're doing in the gym is working for you when

it really isn't. That's why we created, we have a program called MAP, we have a lot of fitness programs, we created one called MAP Starter which is specifically for people getting started. It's literally a plan to take you from doing nothing to now incorporating strength training and doing it in the right way so you get the best possible results. So that program right there is the one we recommend that people get started with and because of this episode it's half off. It's mapstarter.com with the code START2025 and you can get it half off. Very small investments, very inexpensive,

but it's a plan. You get the exercises, you know when to do them, how many reps. It's all laid out for you. There's demos, the whole deal. So do that one. With that we do have some questions. laid out for you. There's demos, the whole deal. So do that one. With that we do have some questions. How should I start with strength training? Start slow, Maps Starter is a great program. So just to give you a little bit more detail, Maps Starter takes into account that you either haven't worked out in a while or you've never done strength training before. It incorporates exercises that teach you how to strength train, build the techniques involved in strength training, because strength training exercises are skills, right?

So presses and rows and squats. The skills of stability. And it uses, we use a stability ball in many of the exercises in starter to teach you how to engage your core, how to have proper posture and technique. You build upon this program, by the way. This is a three month program. After this, you have a nice solid foundation to move into more advanced.

Do not make the mistake that so many people do with this program is they think, oh, it's not enough. If you have not been training or you have never trained and you're getting started right now at the new year, this is enough. In fact, it's what you should start with. And then you'll build your way into maps, anabolic, and some of the other programs that we have later on map starter is perfect for that. I mean, I remember when I had to tell Katrina this after pregnancy, and she

wanted to get back into things and it's been what I have six months or whatever. They make her take off. And then she was getting back or six weeks getting back to getting started. And she's like, this is so basic and easy, huh? It's enough. You haven't been doing anything for the last six weeks. Trust me, this is enough. This is enough and you're going to see change in results. Be patient and then sure as shit be patient. She sees the results and then she's good to go for MAPS and a blogger for that. So do not make

the mistake of thinking it's not enough. What about cardio? Cardio there's nothing wrong with it. Great way to improve your health. But yes, I'll say this, if you're just getting started, here's how you incorporate movement. Walk every day. How do I walk every day? Well, you could schedule 30 minute walks every day or the best way to do this. Increase activity.

Do 10 minute walks after breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The effect on blood sugar levels, insulin sensitivity and health are profound from that simple way of applying walking. 10 minutes, breakfast, lunch sensitivity and health are profound from that simple way of applying walking. Ten minutes breakfast, lunch and dinner. It's already attached to something you do anyway which is eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. It's ten minutes. You don't need to change into workout clothes or anything. And ten minutes after breakfast, lunch and dinner is more effective than an hour done separately. In other words, half as much done because it's

postprandial. Right after you eat it does a, has again, profound effects on insulin sensitivity. So it's very, very good for health. That's the best way to start. I either love habit stacking and doing the 10 minute method like that, or the other thing I like is clients that like to have a set time and routine that they always go to the gym. So you're there five, six days a week that that's my time. You do your map starter program on the days

that don't call for the strength training, you walk on the treadmill. So if you like that, because I like that also, where someone's like, hey, this is my time. Every day at 8 a.m., I'm at the gym or whatever it is, and yet that day doesn't call for strength training because you did it the day before. 20, 30 minutes.

Yeah, then 20, 30 minutes or even an hour of walking you know, that every single day. What supplements should I take? So multivitamin is probably a good place for most people to start if you're lacking a an essential nutrient that could have pretty Pretty big impact on your overall health and how you feel and nutrient deficiencies are relatively common Believe or not vitamin D and magnesium and zinc in particular so multivitamin and then from there cretin. Cretin has profound health and longevity benefits it builds muscle and strength and it indirectly helps burn body fat through the muscle building process. It's good for the brain, it's good for the

skin, it's the most studied supplement in history, it's extremely safe unless you're told explicitly by your nephrologist not to take creatine which is rare. That's the supplement I recommend everybody. It's a longevity health supplement. It used to be just for bodybuilding because it does make you stronger, help build muscle, but all the data now is showing, man, this is a very, very good supplement to take for health. So if you're just getting started, I'm gonna suggest that you get a full panel

and get your blood work and see where you're potentially deficient in, because nothing will make as big of a difference as supplementing for what you're deficient in. I've never met a client one that isn't deficient in vitamin D magnesium iron something So finding out what you're lacking Is what I think everybody should do at some point is to make that investment get that find out what that is

So you learn about yourself and you and you actually supplement for those things And this second thing I would say probably to invest in is that the second most important thing is a protein powder And that's not because I think you, everybody should just take a protein powder. It's that I've yet to meet anybody that hits their, their protein targets consistently. And so having a supplement like that ready to go for the days that you miss your protein targets or about to miss your protein targets, I think that's something that is extremely valuable.

And above all other supplements, you making sure you hit your protein intake will give you will give you more ROI than any other supplement you'll find on the market. Agreed and again the program that we have for beginners is MAPS Starter. It's half off for this episode. You can find it at mapsstarter.com use the code START2025 for the 50% off discount. Also you can find us on Instagram. Justin is at Mind Pump. Justin I'm at Mind Pump to on Instagram. Justin is at Mind Pump. Justin, I'm at Mind Pump to Stefan Oh, and Adam is at Mind Pump. 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.

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