Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2730: The Best Workout Program For Busy Women

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

MAPS 15 MUSCLE MOMMY Defining 'Muscle Mommy.' (2:13) Why women need to understand the benefit and power of PROPER strength training. (3:50) The myths preached to women surrounding strength training. (7:07) Cut the cardio, lift heavy, eat more, and LOSE body fat. (8:55) Muscle adds shape. (12:26) Building muscle balances your hormones. (13:09) Breaking down the MAPS 15 Muscle Mommy protocol. (15:00) What to expect when you follow GOOD strength training programming. (22:18) 60% off today! (25:15) Related Links/Products Mentioned Defining 'Muscle Mommy.' (2:13) Why women need to understand the benefit and power of PROPER strength training. (3:50) The myths preached to women surrounding strength training. (7:07) Cut the cardio, lift heavy, eat more, and LOSE body fat. (8:55) Muscle adds shape. (12:26) Building muscle balances your hormones. (13:09) Breaking down the MAPS 15 Muscle Mommy protocol. (15:00) What to expect when you follow GOOD strength training programming. (22:18) 60% off today! (25:15) Related Links/Products Mentioned Special Promotion: MAPS 15 Muscle Mommy 60% off! **Code BLACKFRIDAY at checkout ** Visit MASSZYMES by biOptimizers for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Code MINDPUMP10 at checkout for 25% off any order. ** BLACK FRIDAY SALE: 60% off ALL Programs, Guides, and MODs **Code BLACKFRIDAY at checkout** Mind Pump Store Muscle Mommy Movement Mind Pump #2345: The Muscle Mommy Revolution Mind Pump #2567: Women Who Lift: Breaking Myths and Building Muscle Mind Pump #2690: The NEW DIET Everyone Is Using For Fat Loss Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources People Mentioned Dr. Gabrielle Lyon (@drgabriellelyon) 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 in the world. This is Mind Pump. Right today, new program we're launching right now for ladies. Maps 15, muscle, mommy. If you're interested in strength, muscle, sculpt.

If you want a faster metabolism, if you want to eat more and be leaner, you want to have a round butt, nice back. This is the program for you. 15 minutes a day. It's two lifts a day. Yes, this is traditional strength training. Two lifts a day. And you'll get incredible results. And because this is in the middle of Black Friday, you get it for 60% off.

You go to 15 Musclemommi.com. That's 15 Musclemommi.com. Use the code Black Friday for 60% off. That means it's 51 bucks. and you get the full program. This episode is brought to you by a sponsor. Mass Zimes, these are digestive enzymes. Help you break down your food.

Less bloat, better digestion. Get those proteins, fats, and carbs to the places they need to go. Go to masszimes.com. That's M-A-S-Z-Y-M-E-S dot com forward slash mind pump. Of course, it's Black Friday for them as well. So everything is on discount 25% off. Last time, Maps MuscleMommy 15. It's 15 musclemommy.com.

Use the code Black Friday. By the way, every purchase enters you into a contest. Two people are going to get a one week free vacation at the Mind Pump Park City House, plus $1,000 to travel. 15 people are going to get personal training for three months by our coaches. And 10 people are going to have the chance to hang out here at Mind Pump for a full day. And you get to hang out with our fitness director. He's our top trainer.

So you can ask him any questions. Last time, 15 musclemami.com. Use the code Black Friday. All right, real quick, if you love us like we love you, why not show it by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs, or training gear over at mindpump store.com. I'm talking right now, hit pause, head on over to mindpumpstor.com.

That's it. Enjoy the rest of the show. You asked for it. Here it is our program, MAPS muscle mommy, easily the most popular MAPS program we've released in a long time. Here's what we did. We created a. a MAPS muscle mommy 15 version.

What does that mean? You work out 15 minutes a day. Now you can become a muscle mommy with minimal time invested. We're going to talk about the program and how you can get a body that you want. A muscle mommy body is only 15 minutes a day. Basically, we combined the two most popular programs in the last probably two years.

Yeah. Well, let's smash them together. Let's take a step back. So someone tuning in right now might not know what's going. Okay, so muscle mommy is a term. that it's online and women use it to... You don't have to be a mommy. No, no, no, no.

It's just, it's women who want to build muscle. Yeah, who want to get stronger and who want that kind of a sculpted physique. I'm glad you brought this up because there was a bit of a pushback and backlash. We had people that felt excluded because they're not a mom that they couldn't buy the program

and it has nothing to do. I know it's called muscle mommy, but it's a term deemed for just women in general that want to build muscle. There's young girls that are teenagers that don't even have that. In fact, I believe the young girls that don't have kids started the term. That was the term. Yeah.

That's where it came across for us. We were, I remember we were interviewing and had multiple live callers call in. Someone said that. I want to be a muscle model. Yeah, a couple of them did. And they were young girls that didn't have kids. And so it's not a term that you means you have to have kids in order to follow it. No.

And what's cool about this, just again, to take a step back is what's really, fun for us. We've been doing this for a long time, right? So we were training people in gyms. I mean, I started in the late 90s. Okay, so it's been a long time. It's a, it's been a long time where we've seen the trends in the fitness industry. And for decades, I mean, even when we first started the podcast, this was like a focus. It was like, women need to understand the benefit and power of proper strength training. Because for a long time, women have been marketed to and lied to, essentially, by our industry, that they need to work out a particular way to accomplish a body that you can only really get through proper strength training. And so what a lot of women

thought was, I don't want to lift weights. I don't want to build. I don't want to get big and bulky. That's not what happens. In other words, if you want a body that's shaped and sculpted, you know, round glutes, good posture, nice arms, you want to be relatively lean, you want to be functional, the best way to accomplish this is with traditional strength training. And for a long time, this was a big conversation. With a lot of my clients, this was a conversation when I would run seminars and my gyms. This was a very popular topic on the podcast for a long time. It was an uphill battle.

I mean, uphill battle. Yeah, there was a lot of convincing that needed to be done, especially with clients when they'd first come in and you'd introduce them to strength training. And the perception was, oh, man, I don't want to train like a guy. like I want to look a certain way and so yeah I had to talk them out of it. It's not just that we also had to overcome because, okay, so you're taking us all the way back to like late 90s where it was like almost

taboo or like you just didn't talk about lifting heavy weights with a lot of, we were trying to communicate that but it wasn't very popular. And then even when it became popular, the type of exercise programming that was done for women was terrible. Yeah.

They, you know, lightweight, lots of reps, these isolation exercises. It was just terrible as far. And so we had to also overcome that. So it was the first, I mean, we've been doing this for long enough that we were doing it before it was popular at all. And then when it became kind of popular, it was these terrible programs, these circuit-based type stuff like isolation exercises. And I only feel like it's been a short period. a time, I'd say in the last five, maybe, maybe eight years longest, maybe, you know, that we've made it really popular.

And we've attributed a lot of that to CrossFit. I think CrossFit did a really good job of getting women to deadlift and squat and do these incredible movements that build and sculpt the physique that really started to introduce to the masses of those movements. But we had been screaming from the rooftops for a long time. That's what we were training our clients. So if I had a client who hired me, I took them through those movements.

But when you looked at everybody else that was training in the gym or what was online or was in the magazines for the workouts, it was a lot of these crappy isolation, circuit training classes, types of routines for women to build muscle. And it's just a terrible strategy. Let's quickly touch on the myths around strength training. Like myth number one,

I'm going to get really big. First of all, building muscle is hard. It's slow. And you could train like a bodybuilding. for years and 99.99% of women would never look anything like a bodybuilder. They would actually get a very sculpted shape physique that they think that they would accomplish doing a lot of cardio for. That's what they think. If I run, this is what I'm going to look like. No, actually, you have to lift weights to look that way. So the fear was, I'm going to get all this muscle.

Number two, well, let me focus on building after I lose a bunch of body fat. Well, building muscle helps with fat loss a lot. It speeds up the metabolism. In other words, it makes you burn more calories at rest. Who doesn't want to do that, right? It also shapes the body. I could target, focus, what I want to develop. So even if your body fat percentage didn't go down, which it would, but if it didn't,

you look leaner because your body has better shape. So those are the two big myths. And another one is that, well, let me just eat as little as possible, which is also a big myth. You have to fuel the muscle growth to call it. all the things that you're looking for. So this was a really difficult discussion to have because it's still counter to the messaging

that had been out for so long. But I think I know now that women are figuring this out. Now when I go through fitness media, you're seeing a lot of female trainers saying, no, this is the way you need to train. And now people are figuring this out. And why are they figuring this out? Because they're trying it.

And once you try it and you do it right, you never go back because suddenly I'm doing a little bit of work and I'm getting great results. Whereas before, I felt like I was working out all the time. I was sweating my butt off. I was barely eating anything. And it just, I would just plateau and not get great results. By the way, backing up to the metabolism boosting effect of muscle building,

if you build muscle and get stronger and you follow good traditional strength training programming and you fuel that with a, you know, nutrition that is sufficient, enough calories and protein, when you do it that way, your metabolism is starting. to boost, and it boosts in big ways. I mean, really big ways. Like, it wasn't uncommon for me to take a female client and get their metabolic rate to go up by 800 calories. Like, that's a pretty normal amount of calories that I would be able to take the

typical woman who was used to restricting and trying to run her butt off. It wasn't hard to get her metabolic rate to go up by about 800 calories. 800 calories, everybody, every day. It's a lot more room for flexibility. that your body's just going to burn on its own is a lot. You know how much cardio? You know how much you have to run to burn 800 calories? That's my favorite comment and review of the muscle mommy program has been the women that

say that they want to lose 10, 20, 30 pounds of body fat and have cut out cardio, increased calories and are leaner than they've ever been. Right. Which is so cool. And I remember this when, I've told this story, if you've listened long enough, when Katrina and I first started dating, you know, she ex-athlet background, collegiate level basketball player, had trainers before, but a lot of it was like endurance, stamina training, explosive plyometrics.

And, you know, her method of getting in shape or losing weight was, you know, cut out the pizza, run tons of miles. And she kind of did that, you know, you back. And for the first, like, three to four years of our relationship, that was kind of like her way of kind of maintaining her weight. and I remember when she finally let me get a hold of her diet and her training. And it took that long of her watching me to trust me to tell her something that was so counterintuitive to everything that she had known, seen, or done in the past. And I remember the disbelief of, okay, I want you to cut out all that running and cardio.

We're going to eat more. We're going to focus on getting high protein. And then I want you to lift heavy and get strong, long rest periods, no service. circuit stuff, no running. And I remember her looking at me like, this is crazy. This is not going to work. And then fast forward, you know, months later, her going like, oh, my God, I've never, like, trained at, in her eyes at a lower intensity because she wasn't doing circuits and sweating like crazy and done no running whatsoever to have the body that I have right now and eating the amount of food that I'm eating. More. Yeah, more than she's ever been. And what's been so nice is once she

made that switch to maintain a healthy fit physique now, you know, I would tell you, I've been with her for 16 years now, her out of shape or her worst shape today, even post-kid, is the, is better shape than the best shape of her method of, you know, getting in shape in the past. And it just blows her mind. And that's a testament to all the muscle that she's built on her body and how much that impacts your metabolism, your metabolic flexibility, the ability for you to kind of go up and calories and down in calories yet still maintain a physique. Also, what muscle looks like on the body, how much denser and shapely it is compared to body fat, like completely changed her physique and her diet for the rest of her life. Yeah, you mentioned dense. So a pound of muscle will take up

a little bit more than about three-fourths of the space of body fat. So in other words, if you lost 10 pounds of body fat but gained 10 pounds of muscle, although the scale would register the same, you would lose about almost a fourth of the size on your body. But also it adds shape, right? Because muscle, when you build muscle, it's not on your belly,

it's not on the areas that you want to lose body fat. It's on the areas you want it. It's not a blob anymore. No, it's on your hamstrings and your glutes and your upper back and your shoulders. And so it just looks very different. And then again, so much easier with the fast metabolism. It also is great for your hormones, everybody.

Like muscle is metabolically active. So I have to, this is part of this story that I actually, I'm glad you went this direction because I've shared Katrina's story probably many times on the podcast over the years. But one of the things that, I mean, you know, I hope she doesn't get mad at me, but that she was always having a hard time with was she had back acne before. And when she got her, got built all that muscle, it must have balanced her hormones out in a way that it went away for the rest of her life.

And I think that just is from the probably over training, underfeeding the body, what it needs, probably had enough of an imbalance hormonal for her. That's how her body was responding with the acne, getting her, her muscle built, getting the protein intake, balanced out more like that, balanced was wrong, went away for the rest of her life and never had an issue with that. Yeah, and this is pretty well documented. And what's cool about this now, we have doctors like Dr. Gabriel Lyon, who talks about this all the time, just the benefits of building muscle and how it's such a healthy tissue. But it's very insulin sensitive. So you build, I mean, you don't have to build a ton of muscle, by the way. You have three, four pounds of muscle on your body.

You'll look different, feel different, great metabolism. But your insulin sensitivity goes through the roof, which is great, makes you feel good. And then there's downstream effects of that. It helps balance out estrogen and progesterone. your body increases androgen receptor density. So you get more receptors for the testosterone that you have. And yes, ladies, testosterone is in your body as well. It's just as important for you as it is for man.

It's just less. But now that testosterone has more places to attach to. So you get more of the testosterone benefits, what does that look like? Higher libido, more energy, more drive, better focus. So building muscle is the name of the game. And then here's the other side of it. amazing. Building muscle properly doesn't require a lot of time in the gym.

It's a phenomenal form of exercise for modern life because, well, first off, modern life is hectic and busy and you have all these responsibilities. Can't live in the gym. So what can I possibly do? That's going to give me this great effect. Well, strength training just sends a stimulus. Like if you send the right stimulus, you leave it alone. The body does the rest. That's what ends up happening. Other forms of exercise, the adaptations follow as well. but a lot of the benefits are because I'm doing the work. I have to work the calories off. They have to move, move, move.

With strength training, it's like I do the workout, I'm done. Then my body starts to change and shape through this adaptation. And again, from an aesthetic perspective, muscle is very aesthetic on both men and women. Of course, men carry more muscle, a lot more muscle than women do. But when women have more muscle, they just look shapely and healthy. And strength training is the fastest way to do this. So I guess the follow-up question to this is, well, how much strength training do I need? Not a ton.

Yeah. Not a ton. In fact, it's less than you think effective strength training, you don't need a lot at all. So Adam mentioned our other very popular program called Maps 15. Maps 15, if you listen to the podcast, you've heard us talk about this. It is 15 minutes a day. So six to seven days a week, you're doing two exercises a day. So rather than doing two or three hour workouts,

in the gym, you're doing two lifts every day, which you take about 15 minutes. Number one, it's easier to stay consistent with a routine like that. So I don't know about you guys, but I know that it's easier for me to carve out 15 or 20 minutes a day than it is for me to carve out a full hour,

two or three days a week. Number two, it encourages consistency because it's a daily habit. And number three, if I miss a workout or two, I didn't miss training a whole area of my body. So if I'm doing 15 to 20 minutes a day, you know, six or seven days a week and I miss two workouts, I didn't miss a ton. I really didn't miss a ton. So it just works from a consistency perspective.

And so what we did is we took muscle mommy, which was strength training designed for what women typically are looking for. So what do I mean by that? There's more glute focus. There's more back and posture focus. And there's more dealt focus and a little bit less focus on the areas that women aren't so interested in. So what does that typically look like, just to give you like a basic example. If there's a day where you're working your chest and shoulders,

general strength training methodology would have you hit chest first, shoulders. Because women generally more interested in their shoulders, you'll hit your shoulders first, hit your chest second, because women are typically interested more in dealt development than they are in chest development. There's more glute focus, more lower body focus, generally with this strength training program. So we took the muscle mommy programming that was so popular. And what we did is we plugged it into a 15 to 20 minute a day muscle mommy 15 protocol.

So you're doing two lifts a day and you're getting phenomenal results. You get really good at these lifts, which is another byproduct. It's an interesting thing where you cut out a lot of that excessive amount of volume when you have this long workout. You know you have all these other exercises to accomplish. Well, now you can really center yourself around these two exercises, squeeze out the maximum potential. them work on getting better and improving on those exercises, recover that much more effectively, not have any fatigue be involved for the most part. So the one thing, too, I think with a lot of my female clients, like there was a little bit

of an adversion to adding an increasing load and weight, where now if there's just two exercises that are main focus, it's like, you know, we have that opportunity to be diligent and really focus on how can we squeeze our maximum potential out of this and how can we, you know, increase the weight and feel comfortable and confident in that. And I really think the 15 works great for that. You know, I'm going to add a fourth point, Sal, that I think I've really come to realize throughout this last 10 years that we've been running the podcast more so than I think I ever realized as a personal trainer. And I don't know if that's just because of the sheer volume of people that we help now and get to talk to you because we get so many callers and we help

so many people online. And so I get to talk to a lot more people or have things changed that much in the last couple decades. But it does seem like 15, Maps 15, Muscle Mommy 15, that type of protocol seems to be a much more appropriate amount of volume for so many people. I mean, when you go, if you just go, I mean, we had live callers earlier today. Stress must be a factor. And we almost. And we almost. always recommend somebody reducing their volume, go follow our math 15 type of a protocol. And, you know, is that just because are women working more today? Are they carrying more stress than what they did before? I mean, just in general, I feel like, I feel like that's something,

I mean, we're doing more. I know what all the, what all the studies say. Like, we do more today with our time than what we did just 20, 30 years ago. And so is that causing this kind of low level stress all the time that people are hitting plateaus when they're trying to go in and crush it in the gym all the time with these hour-long workouts. I think that's part of it. I think the other part of it is we've overestimated for a long time, including us, on just how much strength training you need to produce the result that you're looking for. And to be quite honest, you guys, the clients that we trained, if you looked at the total volume we did with them, it breaks down about the same. Like when I trained female clients and got great results,

it was just spread out. It was just spread out. Now, when I trained clients, you don't train clients every day for 15 or 20 minutes. That's not how personal training works. They would come see me twice a week. And it was typically 45 minutes of strength training, 15 minutes of maybe some mobility. So it's two days a week of strength training. If I looked at the volume that I did with my female clients that got great results that were consistent, and I took that total workload and spread it out over the whole week, it looks like. Maps 15. It looks just like that.

And we figure this out as trainers, because when you're training people for a long time, I mean, you can have all kinds of ideas on what's effective. But if you train people for 20 years, you figure out what's effective. And little by little by little over the years of training people, I realized I was just doing too much, too much, too much. And I eventually scaled it down and kind of found this perfect dose.

Now the data actually supports us now. Now we see studies on how much strength training you actually need. and you're going to, you don't need a lot to elicit great results. In fact, doing more than what is going to elicit results, oftentimes when you combine it with the fact that these aren't just, you know, these aren't people that have nothing else to do. They have jobs and lives and kids and other things going on. Many people having hormone issues on top of it that if I do more than is necessary,

it actually stresses the body out more. So the result of that is kind of fatigue, soreness, plateau. Plateau, like, I'm not getting stronger. So here's what happens when you follow. This is what happens when you follow good strength training. Unless you've been doing this consistently for five years and you're experienced and you're dialed in, if this is what it should feel like, it should feel like you get stronger pretty consistently. That's it.

Literally, you're going to the gym and relatively regularly, you're getting stronger. And you'll get stronger for like a few years. Like this is what it looks like. It's totally, this is a very conservative thing that I'm about to say right now. But if you haven't followed good strength training program for a while, you're just getting into it or you're doing something, but it doesn't look like strength training. You're like, I'm going to try this. And you feed yourself properly.

You got to add that, right? You got to feed yourself properly. So you have to give yourself sufficient calories and protein. Because another challenge is someone will follow a program like this, but they're taking two little calories, not enough protein. You have to feed the body to see the strength gains. It is totally within the realm of expected that at the beginning of the year versus the end of the year following a program, you'll double your strength. Double your, so whatever you started with with your deadlift or your squat, you could pretty much expect to do twice as much by the end of the year.

That, when you get stronger, you're building muscle. It's pretty much guaranteed you're building muscle. Now there's a lot of, it's more complex than that, but it's the strongest corlet. So in other words, if you followed a program like this and fed yourself properly, You can expect to get stronger, stronger, stronger, stronger, pretty consistently. Maybe not week over week, but pretty consistently. And if you feed yourself properly, what it looks like is your body's shape starts to change. And before you ever lose a pound on the scale, people are going to comment on how much weight it looks like you lost.

This is how you know you're moving in the right direction. This was a comment, a very common comment that I'll get from my female clients, like month two or three of training with me. They're like, you know, I only lost five pounds on the scale, but everybody thinks I lost like 15 pounds. what's going on. Like you look different. You've built some muscle burn some body fat. And then as the muscle builds, the metabolism boosts, fat loss becomes way, way easier. So that's what you can expect with good workout programming. And I know it sounds like a lot of people like 15 minutes. Yeah, it's it's six days a week or seven. There's a seventh optional day. And you're doing these lifts and you can expect to get stronger. Now, you're going to also want to be active on your own. Now, what does that look like? I don't

know, 8,000 steps a day. That's about it. So make sure you walk throughout the day. Hit your target body weight in protein. Eat it first. Follow this program. It will blow your mind at how effective it is. And it's not going to feel like you're beating the crap out of yourself.

It's not going to feel like you're fatigued and you're killing yourself and I'm sore all the time. What it's going to feel like is, oh, my God, I have more energy. And, oh, I'm doing this exercise again that I did last week. Whoa. I think I could do five more pounds. What's going on? I'll tell you what's going on. You're getting in shape.

and it's working. So that's what this program is. It's, it's, it's, it's MAPS muscle mommy, 15. And because we're in the middle of a Black Friday sale, we typically don't launch a new program during our Black Friday sale because that means it has to be 60% off. We're going to do that right now. So you can get Maps 15 muscle mommy for 60% off, 51 bucks.

51 bucks gives you the full program. By the way, what's included in this are supplement recommendations that are specific to women. and nutrition guidance. So we're going to add some stuff in there about like protein and how to kind of reverse diet and all that stuff. And so here's what you do. If this is something you're interested and you want this,

you want the 60% off, you go to 15 musclemommi.com. So that's 15 musclemami.com. You put the code Black Friday. Boom. You got the full program. $51. It's launched right now.

Let's do it. 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 Superbundle at Mind Pumpmedia.com. The RGB Superbundle 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 Superbundle is like having, Sal, Adam, and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can get it now, plus other

valuable free resources at Mind Pumpmedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review on iTunes, and by introducing Mind Pump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support, and until next time, this is Mind Pump. Thank you.