Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2920: How Women Over 30 Can Lose Fat and Build the Body They Actually Want

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

MAPS BOGO: https://mapsbogo.com Buy one get one free — mix and match any of the top 10 most popular programs (Anabolic, Aesthetic, Performance, 15 Minutes, Anywhere, Symmetry, Starter, Muscle Mommy, Powerlift, 40+) for $157.   In this episode the guys break down exactly how women over 30 can lose fat and build the body they actually want. They cover why the methods that worked in your 20s are no longer effective, why life stress is actually the biggest enemy (not age), and why building muscle and getting stronger is the single thing that changes everything. They walk through the three key steps — feeding the gains with whole foods and enough calories, making strength the goal rather than the scale or the mirror, and replacing cardio with walking — and back it all up with real client stories including a woman running 25 miles a week and lifting 5 days a week who was stuck at 24% body fat, and how Adam helped Katrina achieve the best body of her life eating 700-800 more calories than ever while doing zero cardio.   MAPS BOGO: https://mapsbogo.com Recommended combo for this episode: MAPS Muscle Mommy followed by MAPS Powerlift — buy one get one free for $157.   SPONSORS   Rho Nutrition (liposomal NAD+ and Glutathione): https://www.rhonutrition.com/discount/MINDPUMP Code: MINDPUMP for 20% off everything. Liposomal delivery means it actually absorbs vs. standard capsules.   LINKS   Mind Pump Store: https://mindpumpstore.com Maps Fitness Products: https://mapsfitnessproducts.com Instagram: @mindpumpmedia   SPOTIFY TIMESTAMPS   0:00 - Intro 2:18 - How women over 30 can lose fat and build the body they actually want 2:37 - Why the old methods stopped working — it's not age, it's accumulated stress 4:40 - The real enemy: more stress, more responsibilities, less time and worse sleep 7:14 - Why the methods that worked in your 20s were never actually effective long term 11:02 - The one thing that makes the biggest difference — building muscle and getting stronger 13:48 - Why muscle shifts your metabolism, hormones and insulin sensitivity in your favor 16:03 - Step 1: Feed the gains — why eating more whole food is non-negotiable 20:47 - Step 2: Make strength your goal — the specific lifts that move the needle most 22:25 - Step 3: No cardio — why walking beats running for body composition 24:39 - Why walking beats cardio for women managing high stress loads 25:36 - Client story: woman running 25 miles a week, stuck at 24% body fat — what happened next 27:35 - Katrina's story — best body of her life on zero cardio and 700 more calories a day 30:32 - MAPS Muscle Mommy and MAPS Powerlift — the best 6-month combo for this approach

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 history. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, we talk about how women over 30 can lose fat and build the body they actually want. Look, we also have a buy one, get one free happening with Maps programs.

top 10 most popular maps programs. Maps Anabolic, aesthetic performance, 15 minutes anywhere. Symmetry, starter, muscle mommy, power lift, and 40 plus. Buy one, get one free at Mapsbogo.com. Now, this episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, Roe Nutrition. So check this out. NAD naturally declines with age. This is slower recovery, brain fog, you get less drive.

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That's R-H-O-nutrition.com slash discount slash mind pump. Use the code mind pump for 20% off. 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 mindpumpstore.com. I'm talking right now, hit pause, head on over to mindpustore.com. That's it.

Enjoy the rest of the show. It's commonly noted by clients we've trained in the past that when they get over 30, it's harder to lose fat and build the body they actually want. This was most echoed by our female clients. So that's what we're going to talk about today, how women over 30 can lose fat, build the body they actually want. We're going to give you the steps today. Let's go.

This is always a tough one to communicate because there's a lot of truth to, you know, as you get over 30, over 40, like the challenges that are. But it has less to do with the age and I think it has more to do with the time at which we didn't do certain things. Patterns you've established. Yeah, patterns or how many times I have yo-yo dieted or at this point in my life, I'm less resilient than I was in my 20s hormone issue. There's so many other things. And it's less to do with it's an age. But it's communicated like it's an age thing. It's like, oh, when you get to a certain age,

all these things are exponentially more difficult. It's like, well, there's some truth to that. But then it's less to do with the number and more to do with all these other things. Yeah. Yeah. And just to encourage people, you can get phenomenal results in your 30s

when it comes to fitness if you do it right. So if you do it right, everything comes together, everything works. your body moves the way you wanted to. You build muscle in a metabolism. You burn body fat. It all works. But here's the challenge.

The challenge is, this is what we've heard, how many times have you guys heard this, right? It used to feel a lot easier. Yeah. Right? The old ways that I used to get in shape

aren't working anymore. What is going on? Yeah. And that can be really frustrating and confusing, especially if you have, you know, quote, unquote, gotten into shape many times in your 20s and suddenly the formula that you have applied,

maybe two times or three times in the past, that works so well for you, suddenly it feels like it's doing nothing. And so this is very frustrating. It's very, very difficult and confusing. But once you understand what's going on, it's not so confusing. And that's,

I think it's important that we kind of demystify what's happening. And so does age play a role? Of course it does, but it's not the main player in what's going on. Now, yes, hormone changes can start to happen in the 30s, especially as we get towards a later 30s. But here's what's really contributing most to this struggle. Number one, life is different oftentimes, right? You have more stress, more responsibilities, and time is more precious now than it was when you were in the 20s.

A woman in her 30s probably has a job. she's out of school. Maybe she has a kid or two, a mortgage. She's in a long-term relationship or married. Whereas in her 20s, the responsibilities were basically about herself. Maybe you went to school, but that was kind of it. If I wanted to sleep in, I could. I didn't have a kid that I was responsible for. And I didn't have all these other responsibilities. And although time was still precious, it wasn't as precious as it is now because I didn't have to divide my time so much between all these other responsibilities. And you got to factor that and all those new stresses responsibilities

because even, you know, making it a bit more challenging to even consistently go to the gym, but also to get sleep, which sleep in itself is really where, you know, you're going to get all the results. You're going to get, you know, the hormone balance. You're going to get a lot of these benefits. And that's just one of those big factors that really shrinks as you, of all the things you just listed,

do you think there's a bigger culprit of all, like which one's the greatest culprit of all of them? I mean, generally stress. More specifically. Because all of them. Responsibilities. All of them feed into that, right? Like all the extra responsibilities causes higher stress, right?

And so the poor sleep, higher, like all those things. I think that, so I think that's literally the first. Because even though time, as we get older with more responsibilities, we have families, jobs, careers, all these things, you are limited to time. the amount of time required to build a healthy fit physique isn't that much. No. And so I don't think, if you do it wrong, right. Oh, yeah, of course.

So I don't think that was the, even though that's a challenge, I don't think that was like number one challenge, right? Well, no, but let me, let me be more clear. The ways that you got in shape in your 20s, although they may have quote unquote worked, although I have challenged that, because the way I define if something works is it sticks. Yeah, sustainable. Yeah, so like as a trainer as a coach,

you know, success, part of success is getting to your goal or getting results. That's part of it. That's not the full thing. The full thing includes maintaining. Okay. So if somebody ever comes to me, and again, this is, I'm coming from a trainer's perspective. As someone comes to me and says, oh, my God, I used to do this. There's this method that I use.

It works every time. I get in great shape. What happened? Why did stop? Why did you stop doing it? So it didn't work. It didn't work because you weren't able to maintain it. And then people will say, well, it's me that wasn't able to maintain it.

It's like, doesn't matter. it didn't work. So I'll challenge that. The other part all challenge is that the method was still ineffective. The difference was you didn't have so much stress compiling on your body, so you got away with it. And the second part was you could devote a lot of time to wasted energy working out. I could throw more stress on myself and do more workouts and sleep in when I need to, when I go to bed late, because my time isn't as divided. That's why that plays so much of a bigger role. Yeah.

Is, you know, in my 20s, if I go to bed late, late, well, you know, Saturday, guess what? I could sleep in as long as I want to take naps if I want to. You know, when you have responsibilities, especially if you have kids, you know, here's the thing about having kids. You can go to bed as late as you want. They'll wake up at the same time every morning. And so you don't get to sleep in. Your kids wake up and you got to be up. And the old ways that you were you were using before, they were working in part, maybe they got you the results, but you weren't able to maintain them. but they got you some results, not because it was effective,

but in spite of the fact that they weren't effective. Why? Because you could add a bunch of stress on your body with the wrong. Here's the deal with exercise. Exercise is a stress on the body. That's what gets your body to change from the exercise. Your body's trying to adapt and become more resilient. But there's a limited capacity your body has to deal with stretch.

Once you overcome that capacity, you're screwed. Like, there's no adaptation. You're just surviving. And this is what it probably feels like right now. What it probably feels like right now is you're doing the old. stuff and it just feels like you're surviving. I'm getting sore. I'm sweating. But why isn't my body responding? Your body's not responding because it doesn't have the capacity to adapt to that stress like it used to because you have so much other stress on your body. I don't think you

could stress enough that it wasn't effective because how many times have you heard, you know, that one summer I followed that Atkins diet and I lost 30 pounds. Or when I was, when I was training for that marathon back in, you know, 05, I was in the best of the best. I was in the best of the day. I was, shape of my life. It's like they will connect the best shape or the most weight they lost as a success, even though it only lasted a small semester of their life.

And so it's like it wasn't effective. Because it wasn't sustainable. Like you weren't going to be running marathons every other month or for the rest of your life. You weren't going to be following Atkins forever. And so even though it gave you a temporary result in the positive direction, it wasn't effective. I think that doesn't register for a lot of clients at first because they still harken back to that

that feeling or that moment in time. And so in their head, it was like, oh, that worked. It's like, no, it didn't work. You lost, you know, 30 or 50 pounds during that one time. And then you put it all back on and some. So it wasn't effective. And so getting them to understand that, like, we don't want to go back that way and it wasn't effective. It's sometimes really difficult. There is a far more effective way that is. also far more likely to be sustainable by you. And this is what we got really good at doing with our clients. Because here's the deal.

The vast majority of clients that we trained who were women were over 30. So a majority of our experience in training women was in training women who were over the age of 30. For a couple reasons, one of them being when people typically have expendable income and can actually afford to hire a trainer. You're in your 20s, you know, you might be you might be strapped for cash and paying $100 a session to work with a trainer, that's not going to happen. But now you're 35, you've got a family, you've got a job. You're like, man, this isn't working anymore.

Let me hire a professional, see what happens. I'm going to tell you right now, we solved this problem. And I'm going to tell you the one thing that made the biggest difference. The one thing that made the biggest difference was getting my female clients to focus on getting stronger and build muscle. This was the big difference. Now, this was a big difference because, and you might hear now, and this is more common now to hear why this is an effective strategy.

But a lot of my clients, when they were in their 20s, the strategy had nothing to do with getting stronger and building muscle. It had everything to do was trying to burn as many calories and move as much as possible. Yeah. It was just let me sweat and move like crazy. Yeah. And the goal was to get skinny. To get skinny. I mean, that was like a, that was a common thing you would hear.

That's right. And oftentimes this is what a young woman's goal is. It's like just shrink, just shrink, shrink, shrink. And this strategy is a very difficult strategy. building muscle and getting stronger leverages your body to be able to do a lot of the work for you. Okay, that's why this is so effective. Because if I have a female client who's 35 years old who gained, you know, eight pounds of muscle, okay, first off, she looks better. Her butt's rounder.

Her arms are more sculpted. Her legs feel tighter. Her core feels tighter. She's heavier on the scale, but everything feels tighter and actually looks better. But that eight pounds of muscle has now leveraged the metabolic rate in a direction where her body now burns more calories on its own. She actually has a faster metabolism. She also has a body that's more likely to have a favorable hormone profile. You have better insulin sensitivity, which does play a role in things like estrogen and progesterone.

And muscle, when you build muscle or strengthen muscle, you increase androgen receptor density. So testosterone is a hormone that women have, just like men. They just have a lower amount, but it's just as important for women as it is for men. In fact, low testosterone women, same symptoms that low testosterone men produces. Low motivation, low muscle, more fat gain, low libido, low energy, right? So when we build muscle, we increase androgen receptor density. These are the receptors that testosterone attaches to. So now whatever testosterone I have is more effective.

It's got more places to attach to and become active. at. And so what I've done by building muscles, I've shifted my body in a way that makes it easier to get lean, easier to maintain. And it's a, by the way, here's the best part about building muscle doesn't require days and hours in the gym, like trying to burn calories. Trying to burn calories means I got to do stuff all the time. Building muscle is I got to do a workout, send the signal, let my body build. And so that's the biggest. That was the one thing that made the biggest difference. The difficulty was convincing my clients initially to trust me through this process.

But once they did, and they saw the result of the hamster wheel. It was over. Well, part of that challenge is getting them away from using the scale as the metric to define their success or not. And what's cool today, I feel like it's a lot easier today than it was 20 years ago. Because today, I can tell a client easily on their phone, they can get on it. And I can go, okay, let's not change your weight at all. So you don't like that you're at 175 or whatever your weight is.

I want you to type in, show me a body at 19, a female body at 19% at 180 pounds, and then show me one at 35%. And look at both at 185 pounds and put those pictures next to you. So different. Crazy different. Yes. And so you can illustrate really quickly how irrelevant the scale is. And it's like, we don't want to just lose weight on the scale.

Like, we need to get that out of our heads that you need to be a certain weight on the scale. I can show you radically different body types or bodies. the way they look at literally every weight number, 120, 1.30, 140, 1, 40, like, all the way up. Like, it can show you radically different bodies based off of how much lean body mass they have. And the pursuit of that is through building muscle and strength. Yes.

And so that's why that needs to be the North Star and not this arbitrary number on the scale that you've attached to, this is what I like the look is. It's like, no, let me tell you, you can not even move on the scale and look radically different. So to put it differently, or to put it plainly, if you're listening right now and you're trying to build the body you want, you're trying to get leaner, you want to look fit, here's a goal. Build muscle and get stronger. That's your goal.

It will leverage things in a direction that makes it a lot easier. It will boost your metabolic rate. It'll make getting leaner easier, meaning you can eat more food and maintain a leaner body. And you look great. And here's the best part you feel great. Ladies, muscle feels really good on your body. You move better. Your joints feel better.

You've got more energy. The testosterone that you currently have becomes more potent because of the androgen receptor density. So your libido goes up. You've got more drive. This is the strategy. And I'm going to tell you right now, if you're listening, you're like, I'm kind of scared. What you're doing isn't working.

Why not try something totally different? Yeah. I mean, you're setting yourself up for sustainability, for the longevity, through this whole process, I think, too. Of course, you know, not everybody's going to think really long-term about, you know, fitness and training that, you know, into their 80s. But what this is setting you up for is, you know, you're avoiding osteoporosis. You're setting yourself up for abilities later on in life that you're going to benefit from.

Oh, gosh. I'll tell you what. Listen, we managed gyms for years. I'm going to say something. I know you guys know exactly what I'm talking about. The women in the gyms that I managed in the. 60s that were cardio fanatics versus the women in their 60s that were strength training fanatics. Completely different.

The difference in the way they looked was radical. Radical. I mean, the lifting fanatics looked younger, had better skin. You could look this up. Strength training stimulates muscle protein synthesis, but it also stimulates whole body protein synthesis. It's the soundly youth. They look different. They felt different.

They had better hormones. I mean, both groups were better than people who did nothing. but the strength training, oh boy, did it make a big difference? Okay, so you're listening. You've completely sold me on this is the path. What are the actionable steps that I take? And in the most simple, basic way, like, what do I do? Number one, you got to feed the gains.

And I use the word gains on purpose because that's a scary word. But you need to feed the muscle. We're trying to add active calorie burning tissue to the body. And you can't do that if you're eating. too little. Okay. So this isn't going to work if you're eating almost nothing every single day. You need to eat your target body weight in protein, in grams of protein. Make sure you eat whole natural foods and feed yourself in a way to what it looks like essentially is this. I'm going to eat when I'm hungry. I'm sticking whole natural foods. I'm not trying to under eat and I'm going to

feed the gains. I'm going to feed the muscle gains. And I said this is number one because this is the hardest part because I can convince people in this category. I can give it's women in this category to lift weights far easier than I can to get them to feed the hospital. That's the harder part. It sounds counterproductive when I'm hung up on I need to go down. That's right. When I've come to you and I've hired you

and I said, Sal, I'm uncomfortable where I'm at, I don't like this weight. I want to lose 30 or 40 pounds, whatever the number is. And then you did your spiel you just did for the last 10 minutes to me. And I'm like, okay, I'm bought in. I'm I need to get strong. I need to build muscle. What's step one? And you're like,

feed the gains. And I'm like, okay, you lost me again. No way. Like, I told you how you heard me. I want to go down again.

And then I feel like this is the part where we're having to circle that way. If you feed the gains with garbage food, heavily processed food, junk food, yes, you're going to gain tons of body fat. If you feed the gains

with whole natural foods and you hit your target body weight and grams of protein, not only will you be fine, but you will get body composition changed to this process, meaning you'll get leaner as you build muscle.

And this is a necessary evil because we can lift all the weights we want, but if we live in a caloric deficit and we don't feed the body what it needs to build muscle, you won't build muscle. So you can have the best strength training program, have the best trainer in the world taking you through it. But if you don't fuel the body properly, you don't give it enough calories and you're always under on calories. You're not going to build muscle. Some of the best results I ever got with my female clients were the female clients that They hired me.

I trained them. We're doing the strength training. They're really resistant when it comes to the diet. Really resistant with nutrition. Really resistant. Restricting. God, I don't want to eat more. Finally, I convinced them go up 500 calories.

Go up 500 calories and watch what happens. And within weeks, they're blown away by how they feel. Within months, they look in the mirror and they're like, this is wild. I'm eating more food and I'm leaner. I'm like, yeah, you built muscle. So you need to feed the gains. But again, you will not eat so much food. that you gain a bunch of body fat, so long as you stick to whole natural foods.

Whole natural foods produce a natural satiety that will match what your body generally needs. When you eat a lot of heavily processed foods, junk food, fast food, candy, then yes, you will totally overeat and gain a bunch of body fat, but that's because those foods are designed to make you overeat. So your body's systems of satiety are totally thrown off with those things. But if it's whole natural foods, feed the gains. The next thing is this. Your goal is strength.

Your goal of strength. Your goal is not to look different in the mirror. Your goal is not to get leaner. Your goal is in anything else, it's to get stronger. Now, here's what's crazy about what I'm saying. If you get stronger, you're sticking to whole natural foods and you consistently get stronger, all the stuff that you're looking for, the changes in the way you look, body composition, shape, sculpt, follows. It all follows.

More efficiently as well. That's right. It follows it consistently. Now, would you say, to even simplify that, to focus on a handful of lifts that you want to get stronger in? versus just kind of like trying to do all the things and say it. Yes. And here's why. So it's great.

Okay. It's great to get stronger at, you know, hip abduction or a lateral raise or a tricep press down. Nothing wrong with that. Getting stronger is always awesome. But getting stronger at certain exercises just means a lot more. It means a lot more in terms of metabolic rate, muscle gain, return on investment. Okay.

So getting stronger, for example, at a barbell squat means a lot more than getting stronger at a leg extension, for example. Both work the legs. One of them is working a lot more than just the quads. The hamstrings, the glutes. More muscles involved, more of a loud signal. Yes. And so the typical exercises that really mean the most.

And there's quite a few of these, but the ones that really mean a lot that you get stronger at are things like dead lifts, bench press, squats, overhead presses, rows. Like you get stronger at those lifts. It means a lot in terms of the visible results that you're looking for. Right. Here's the last one, and this is where it gets crazy. I don't want you to do any cardio, all right? I don't want you to do any cardio.

Now, look. This is where we get contentious. You get so much pushback. Now, here's a deal. There's nothing wrong with cardio per se. If you want endurance and stamina, this is the way you should exercise. But here's a deal. When we're dealing with adding stress to the body,

and we're also dealing with a lifestyle where I've already got lots of compounding stress, I'm going to leave the stress when it comes to exercise to the thing that's moving the needle the most. If we're going to add stress to the body, I'm going to focus on the thing that's going to change the way it look the fastest, which is the strength training. So I don't want to add additional stress from cardio. Now, again, if your goals are athletic, you want stamina, you want endurance, nothing wrong with it, but you've got to understand when you add more stress from intense cardio,

you've got to take away from the strength training. You can't just throw stuff on top of stuff because then nothing happens. Well, this is a best use's case. The best use for cardio, it's a tool at the end of the day, is to increase endurance and stamina capacity. So in that regard, like Carter is amazing for that. And I know people enjoy doing it, so there's nothing wrong with that.

However, if we're talking about fat loss and body composition changes, there's another tool that's way better than that and that's strength training. That's right. And then we also, like eventually, like if I had a client that's telling me, like I want to do it or I love to do it or I like to do it,

which first of all, I would always challenge that too. Like, do you really love doing it? Or is it because, again, you've attached that to some sort of like result that you've had before. We can use that as a tool later on. Like it's like, okay, don't worry. That's, that's a, it can be something that we use in the future.

But initially right now, when we're trying to build the metabolism, scold the body, build muscle and manage stress. Yeah, and manage stress. And like right now, this is not the ideal tool for this situation. Let's use the ideal tool for the situation. Let's build that metabolism. Let's drop some body fat. Let's get to a place where we have some consistency.

We've built some strength. then maybe later on we can start to add that into your routine and you've got this beautiful balance. Yeah. And so again, a lot of this has to do with managing stress on the body. And so if when we're adding stress with exercise, I want to be judicious with what exercise I pick. And if the goal is body composition change, then I'm going to place that in the strength training bucket. And I'm not going to use cardio. Now, here's a deal. Does that mean we want you to be seditor? Does that mean you lift weights, you know, three days a week and then the rest of the week you do nothing? No, daily activity is very good for you.

It's going to enhance and accelerate these results. We just don't want daily activity that adds to stress. In fact, I would love you to move in a way that's recuperative and rejuvenating. And you know what the best form of movement for that is? Walking. Yep. Walking. So here's what you're going to do.

On every other day, you know, you lift weights. And then in terms of daily activity, try to hit eight to 10,000 steps a day, which is really no small fee. If you have a desk job, it actually requires you to kind of get up a move. quite a bit, but eight to 10,000 steps day in and day out is a great way to get that extra activity. Combine that with the strength training and you're totally crushing. This makes, this reminds me. There's so many client examples I have of this, but my favorite client examples are not women who hired me. I love training all the people that I trained, but the ones that stand out were the ones that were already working out, we're already doing everything they

thought they were doing right. And then they hired me. And they came to me because they were frustrated. There was one woman I can remember specifically who was running like crazy and strength training. So she was lifting weights four or five days a week, plus she was running about 25 miles a week. Okay. So those two things. Plus her calories were in the sub two thousands. The fact that she was able to survive on that, it's pretty remarkable. But that's what she did. And I remember she hired me because her body fat percentage was stuck in the mid-20s. And she's like, you know, I'm running like crazy. I lift weights all the time. How is it that I'm like at 24 or 25%? Shouldn't I be like 19% body fat? She's like, what do I need to do? Do I need to do more working out? Do I need to cut my calories

even more? I'm like, listen, if you cut your calories more, you're going to lose weight, but it's going to be muscle. Your body fat percentage will go up. And if you try to work out more, you're going to over-train yourself more. And at some point, you're going to hit a wall and your hormones are going to crash. And it's going to be terrible. And she was already telling me, I'm feeling fatigued. I'm already feeling burned out. What do I got to do? So we cut her running. way down. Initially, I went from, was like 20 to 25 miles a week, all the way down to five, because I couldn't cut it all the way out. She was attached to it. So I cut it down to five. Cut her strength training down to two days a week. And I took her calories up by 400 calories.

Anyway, over the course of eight months, this woman went to zero running, just walking, because she realized she didn't really love running as much she thought she did. I think she was doing it because she thought it was keeping the weight off. So she cut that out, started hiking and walking. She was still pretty active. Strength training with me between two days. days a week, one day a week on her own. So three days a week total. Her calories got all the way up to almost 3,000 calories a day. She was walking around 18% body fat. And she was just remark on how easy it felt. She's like, this is the weirdest thing. I always thought I had this crazy slow metabolism. I always thought that I was just destined to never get as lean as I thought I should

be. She's like, this feels genuinely easy. It's like we shifted things in a direction to make it easier. Well, I mean, one of my favorite stories to share is Katrina. And not just because she's my wife. It's also one of the last people that I really helped like this. I mean, I was on my way out. We were already into mind pump and doing that when our building towards this when I finally started to help her. We'd already been dating for years at that time. Three, five years we'd been together. And she just, she had her own thing. She was always an athlete. So her way of maintaining in shape was she'd allow herself to ebb and flow between 10 to 15 pounds when she started to push up that 15 extra pounds that she didn't like.

She kicked up her running like crazy. She, every time she lifted weights, it was pliometric style from the way she trained, like as an athlete. And so her approach towards weightlifting was high intensity, low rest period, circuit type training and lots of running. And she'd shed those 15 to 20 pounds, whatever it was. And I watched her do that through, you know, years of being together. Never said anything to her because I'm not going to tell her what to do.

You know, it's like if that's how you like getting in and out of shape. She had watched me enough times, you know, control my, my body composition and never do any cardio. And obviously when I started to get ready to compete was when she saw it at an extreme level. And she finally looked at me. He said, okay, throw my hands up. You take control. And I was like, okay, sorry. Cut out cardio completely.

Reduce the amount of strain training she doesn't. Reduce the intensity she does. Increased rest periods and increased food. And at the end of this, she had the best body she's ever had, doing zero cardio, eating seven, 800 more calories than she's ever eaten before. And not only that, we saw all kinds of health maker. I don't talk this that much on the podcast about this, but, you know, she had, she had stuff with, like, acne that always bothered her, that riddled her. She had all kinds of, she saw her. Her hormones, power.

She saw her skin get better. She saw all this other stuff get better. Her hair, nails, all kinds of things that improved in addition to. And I remember her afterwards being like, I can't believe I've gone this long and had no idea how much easier it was. And she was the same way too where I love to run. I used to say, I used to love to run. But it's like, again, attached to the result of that. She used to know that if I trained really hard like this and ran like really crazy, I could shed these 15 pounds.

And that had proven to work for her for so many times that she had attached. Until she tried the right way. Until she tried the right way and realized, oh, my God. this is way more fun to be able to lift weights, half as intense as far as the amount of her circuit type training that she was doing, no running whatsoever, and being able to eat more food. And then also be able to say,

I have the best body I've ever had. Like, that was such a cool thing to watch. So here's what we have. So we're having a buy one, get one free with MAPS programs right now. And this is the best combo for what we're talking about right now. So if you're listening to this, you're like, I want to do that, I want to build a muscle, I want to boost my metabolic rate.

I want to do it the right way. Here's the combination. We have a program called MuscleMami. You do that first, about three months long. Then you follow it up with MAP's power lift, which is literally about getting strong with your squat, your deadlift, and your bench, which is another three months. So this is a six-month course with both programs. It's buy one, get one free. By the way, the buy one, get one-free applies to our top 10 most popular programs, which includes MAPS, Anabolic, Esthetic, Performance, 15 Minutes, Anywhere, Symmetry, Starter, MuscleMummy, Power, Power,

lift and 40 plus. So if you're interested, go to mapsbogo.com. Also, you can find us on Instagram. It's Mind Pump Media. We'll see you there. 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.

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