If you look at the list of benefits that exercise provides, like look at the mental and emotional and psychological benefits. There are some physical reasons why or physiological reasons why you may get that like endorphin release and better dopamine and serotonin, all great. However, the a big chunk of the reason why you feel so much better is the struggle. Yeah. And it's empowering and I'm doing something and it's working and then I can't, oh, this isn't working. Let me figure it out. Let me do it again. It's that growth process. You can overcome challenges. You are not going to be able to mimic that with a pill. It's just not going to happen. Based off of that, it's a very scary thought that we could even potentially. All right. Here's some good news and some bad news. Let's start with the good news first. Scientists keep getting closer to designing exercise in a pill. Here's the bad news. You're not going to get nearly the same benefits you get from exercise, even if the pill makes you fitter, leaner and stronger. So I wanted to bring this up because I just read an article that they keep getting closer to a literal burpees, a drug that you take that can elicit the adaptation responses in the body that exercise does. Now they're only testing on animals, but it's pretty remarkable. However, I want people to, I don't want people to get excited, too excited, because when you look at the benefits, the list of the benefits of exercise, only a fraction of them will be accomplished with a pill, even if it gives you all the physical benefit. I don't even think we're going to get there. Do you really believe we're going to get there? I think the complexity of that is insane.  And even those are they're not magical.  You still have to put the word. The only way you get strong is through the struggle. Yeah. And how do you get strong by eliminating all the struggle and and food? So food plays obviously a massive role with it, plus the actual stimulus of the exercise, right? So how do you even? So I think they'll eventually be able to mimic the stimulus. But what they'll never be able to mimic with a pill, because why? Because it is a signaling process and they will look. They are going to eventually. Well, that's what they say. The sauna emulates, right? It's somewhat some very low form of exercise, but it's still your body. It's still but it still requires you go in and kind of go through it. And it's all still really minimal. Just like I was talking about, like the clombuterols and anabolic steroids. That makes a big difference, right? Someone utilizing things like that with exercise and diet, but you it's still really small in comparison to the diet and exercise part. Yeah, no, it'll get it'll get I think it'll get there. I think they're going to identify all the the signaling processes that get the physical adaptations, the physiological physical adaptations. But what they won't do, and here's the complexity part that you're talking about, what they're not going to get. Because if you look at the list of benefits exercise provides, like look at the mental and emotional and psychological benefits. There are some physical reasons why or physiological reasons why you may get that like endorphin release and better dopamine and serotonin. All great. However, the a big chunk of the reason why you feel so much better is the struggle. Yeah. And it's empowering and I'm doing something and it's working and then I can't. Oh, this isn't working. Let me figure it out. Let me do it again. It's that growth process. You can overcome challenges. You are not going to be able to mimic that with a pill. It's just not going to happen. Based off of that, it's a very scary thought that we could even potentially you're right, because people are going to think, I mean, imagine what we're seeing right now with the rise of depression and suicide right now, imagine if everybody could just take that pill and have that and think that that was going to provide happiness for them. How much worse it will be. To me, it looks just like this, like a science fiction movie where you're in this like pond, you have like a electro stimulus to keep your muscles basically stimulated. So that way, like, let's say we're just now logged into the metaverse. And so now everything's in there and I took this pill. And so like it's regulating, you know, body fat, giving me stimulus when I need it for my muscles. Like you could literally just be. So now that seems zombie. That seems more realistic to me, paired with your idea of a pill.  No, no, of course.  Like without some sort of like external stimulus. Yeah, where if Justin is what Justin's point is like hooking into a pod that you get this like stimulus and then you're also getting the pill that I don't passively receiving this kind of like. And you wake up just jacked. Yeah, I don't I don't kind of cool muscle. I don't think I don't think the calorie. I don't think you're going to take a pill and then your body's going to burn more calories. But I do think that the pill can stimulate the responses to do things like speed up the metabolism, lower your appetite. You know, here's a deal. Yeah, but you can simulate good feelings or you could get good feelings from drugs to you could take a drug and feel, oh, my God, I feel so good. Is that the same thing as let's say a spiritual practice or being with your kids and experiencing joy that way? It's not. So you can you can mimic the feelings of love with drugs. You could take a drug and make you feel the feelings of love. Is it the same thing? Well, yeah. So you take a drug that get mimics you potentially building up, but you don't actually build or burn. So I mean, the idea that you're we're going to have something that you could take and then it will actually build muscle. But I just can't. I don't see that not without some sort of external stimulus. Yeah, I think they'll be able to do it that. But I don't think they'll never be able to get you to actually go through the process or to figure that way that part out with a pill because that's the only way that it works. You have to go through the process. Unless we like the matrix where I could plug my brain into something and then learn things and figure it out. It's going to go against our makeup, our genetic makeup, our wiring, our drive to to move and to be this sort of like machine. Like I think that there's going to be a lot of advancements. Like I was looking into the exoskeletons and everything else. Like we're already like building these attachments to kind of take replaced limb strength. So like who knows if we even like there's going to be people that don't really care about like being strong or having like an able body because like we could just so end up making it. What? Okay. So then are you do you lean more towards that we're going to go in that direction where people have all these like mechanical parts and you're half human, half robot or that we're going to plug into a metaverse because they're two totally different. Yeah. Or do you think they're both kind of I think it's probably a combination of the two. I'm convinced it's the plug in because it solves the the fat loss body image stuff. If you go plugged into a virtual world and you can create this character who could basically go around and do all the things that you could do in real life, you know, I think that that's more likely to happen than us getting to the science of a pill that actually because you won't care about that anymore. It'll solve the the looks aspect of it, but not the health part.  I'm not talking about solving a problem. I'm talking about what we're more likely to go towards and what humans are going to gravitate towards. I think the I think where we're moving with the metaverse is more likely to happen sooner and faster for people than the pill that you're alluding to right now. I think so.  Well, they'll care just because they're health will be bad. Well, here's what I think is going to happen. What? Yeah. What? They don't care. Who cares that their health is bad? Do you know that? We didn't care. I just read this statistic.  I just read this crazy statistic. This is fascinating to me. Okay, people that go in and have like, like almost died from like a heart attack or like anything like something that they could and it's induced because of, you know, poor diet, lack of exercise. And the doctor says, there's no nothing that can solve this other than changing your habits and behaviors. You know what percentage do? It's still very small. 90% don't change anything. That's crazy. And they know, bro, they almost died. That's the epiphany part that people wait for. They wait for an epiphany, but epiphanies don't even happen when people literally almost die or kill someone. Drunk bottom, yeah. There's alcoholics who will crash into someone, kill them, come out of jail, whatever, and still become alcoholics. So yeah, waiting for an epiphany is not going to work. And we talk about this on the show all the time. There's a process of developing behaviors and discipline. It's a learning process and it takes a while and no pills going to do that. And then as far as metaverse kind of stuff is concerned, I think, you know, it's interesting when you look at the science on happiness, like real happiness, joy and contentment and purpose, struggle is a very important part of it. And there are lots of pieces that don't make sense. Like why would challenge and struggle and hardship be a part of having to be happy? Well, you know, figure that out, right? It forces purpose. I think so. It forces purpose. I think so. If there's struggle, it forces you to have to overcome and that in itself gives you purpose.  Purpose to live. And people don't want that. Right. They don't want that. But it's better than being purposeless. Oh, I agree. It's better than then floating around with no purpose whatsoever, because everything is so easy and you don't need purpose. The fact that you have to overcome struggle forces us into purpose. You know what's funny is that, I mean, from an evolutionary standpoint, of course you could go the spiritual standpoint, right? We're all meant to grow and that's part of growth. And then there's the evolutionary standpoint, which is we evolved to gain purpose from challenge and struggle because it was so a part of nature. Like there's no way to avoid challenge and struggle. So we evolved to find purpose in it so that it became a part of who we were. So as we continue to modify our environments with technology and whatever, make things easier and easier and easier, that part of us is still there. I always think it's interesting, you just did something that I think is always really funny to me that people do is this need that we need to separate evolution and spiritual. Like why can't what you just say like be both? I agree. But it really is to make one half of the group feel good and the other half of the group feel good. I agree. It's like, what are the possibilities of both? Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think it's so wild. Here's why I agree with that because what we're learning right now is that we can't eliminate struggle and challenge. It's possible. We can solve every problem. And you don't, if people are like, oh, that's not true. Look at this, the suicide rate among wealthy popular celebrities. People who have everything that you think that you want, you know, sex, drugs and fame and love and by the way, the power to not do all those things where there's people going like, well, that's not happiness, sex, drugs, but they also have the power and the flexibility to not have all that stuff. It's interesting. It's like that, you know, it's funny. The movie, The Matrix was so, it's so embroiled and very interesting philosophy like the scene where they're breaking into Morpheus's mind when he's in The Matrix and he's in that chair. And Agent Smith says, you know, well, the first matrix that we designed was a perfect utopia, but your feeble human mind couldn't accept it and we lost whole crops. So we had to mimic, you know, the nineties of your civilization or whatever so that you guys could accept it or whatever. And I thought, wow, that is brilliant because that's exactly what would happen. That was exactly what I think would happen if we, you know, we're gonna- The unfortunate part though is I think that we're still so drawn to having things easier. Welcome back to the best fitness podcast ever, ever invented. It'll be, nobody will ever beat us, okay? We had this discussion earlier and we decided no one's ever gonna be better than Mind Pump. I'm gonna give away your back and I'm gonna give away a program because we love you so much. We're gonna give away Maps Anabolic for free, but you gotta do the following and you gotta win. Leave a comment below in the first 24 hours that we drop this episode. Subscribe to this channel, turn on notifications, do all those things. If we like your comment, we'll notify you and you'll get free access to Maps Anabolic. Also, we got a sale going on right now. The RGB bundle is 50% off.  All of that together 50% off or you just wanna get one program, Maps Suspension, this is a suspension trainer program, that individual program is 50% off. So if you're interested, go to mapsfitnessproducts.com and then use the code July 50, July 5th 0th, no space for that amazing discount. All right, here comes the show. You know that I'm listening to this book that I thought was really interesting stat too that you guys would find. So this book's called Never Split the Difference and it's about an FBI negotiator and like just the negotiating tactics and stuff like that, it's really interesting. One of the things they do is they- What a stressful job. Oh my God, can you imagine? And to get into like the FBI schooling, you have to first do like, or they don't have to, they recommend that you do like a suicide hotline first. And so- That's good training I guess. Oh, of course.  Like you're just, it's dragging on. So your goal is actually obviously to help these people and then move on. But one of the things I thought was interesting and it fits into the metaverse talk is the percentage of people that call in the suicide hotline, what percentage of them do you think are actually suicidal? Like actually suicidal? Yeah, it's a suicide hotline. I'd say like 5%. No, come on bro, it's a suicide hotline. Well, then I'm gonna go 40%. Like actually gonna carry through or- Yeah, it's 40%. It's 40%. So what are the 60%? 60% are just energy vampires. And in fact, they have rules that they can only call once a day because people call every day. Because it's a free person to talk to. It's a free person who by the way has got professional negotiating skills that has tactical empathy, knows how to talk to you really well. And so they get this rewarding feeling from talking and engaging and interacting with someone because they're probably socially awkward and depressed and scared to be out in the real world. So they call in and 60% of these people that way that are just, they just wanna talk to the- Wow. Somebody that really actively listening. You know, that's a huge thing that is a need for a lot of people. There's a deficit there. I couldn't imagine testing that out either. Hey, hello, suicide hotline. Yeah, no, I don't wanna commit suicide but I just had an argument with my life and so I just, what do you think? Is she right or am I right? In the book it talks about how common it is that people will be like, yeah, this is Chris and I haven't used my one time of calling today. I mean, they're so- Wow, I didn't know that. I either did not. I thought it was so fascinating. I thought you guys would thought that was interesting. That is really, really interesting. I know, isn't it? Well, here's another one that's really interesting, okay? What have we been taught? All of our years of sales experience and I think that everybody in here is pretty good at this. What are you taught to get a lot of, right? To get people to buy or to- Information. No, no, no, what else? What are you- A yes. Little yeses. Yeah, little yeses. A no is a better strategy.  Cause you want them to say no to suicide, maybe. Well, no, forget suicide. We're talking about sales. Oh. In sales in general. The power of allowing somebody to say no leaves them in control of the conversation still. Getting a quick- So you think they're driving- Getting a quick yes many times can completely be a false yes, a counterfeit yes. Oh, sure. Because someone feels- I know what that feels like. You totally do. And I know if you heard- You're getting pushed into it. If you heard the way he explains actually going after a no, you would go home. And this is in the book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh. Yeah, yeah, super. What's it called again? Never Split the Difference. Interesting. And his, a lot of what's really interesting is I talked about this book, another book last year or something like that. I think I told you guys about it. Daniel Kahneman or Kahneman, I don't know how to pronounce his last name. He's a Nobel Prize winning economist, behavioral psychologist who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow. He won his Nobel Prize off of the learning about how the, I told you guys how the brain it has two different ways of thinking or like the fast- The two hemispheres? Yeah, faster, no faster slow. Oh, right, right, right. The way you, your animal instinct is you're fast and then you're slow as you're more cognitive and critical thinking. A lot of the theories and everything that is this book is based off of come came from that research. So it was, then I found that out later of being inside. Dude, you just reminded me of, so I've been reading a book. I'm only maybe a third of the way, or a fourth of the way through but it's called The Body Keeps a Score. It's a heavy book. It's about trauma and PTSD and how it affects the brain and the body and how these memories are stored in the body. Why it's so hard to process them. But in the beginning, it kind of goes through the history which a lot of this came from, a lot of the study on this originated with soldiers returning from war.  So soldiers would come back from World War I, World War II and they weren't treating them at all properly. In fact, oftentimes they were kind of pushed away. They only had one. It was like shell shock. Was that World War I? World War I, yeah, we're, because they were in the trenches and they'd constantly get bombed and so they'd get the ground would shake and they didn't know when the next one was coming. Yeah. They'd get tremors. They'd get tremors all the time. They call that shell shock. Really heavy but fascinating book. Like one thing that he talks about in there about with soldiers, which I've heard this before but he tells a specific story.  I totally agree. And he goes, that's a part of it. He goes, but another part of it, the part that's very challenging to overcome. That's what you did. Is what the soldier does in war and how they can't reconcile it with who they are. So he tells a story of this guy in Vietnam where, you know, Vietnam was a really tough war because we didn't have a clear necessarily line or enemy and they would go out on patrols constantly. And the enemies often look like villagers and you don't know what the, anyway, this guy's going through and he tells a story how this guy was like a football captain, valedictorian, like great attitude, joined the military because his dad and his grandfather and his great grandfather were always in the military. And he's on this patrol. They get ambushed and loses all his friends.   And that's what torments him. Is he can't reconcile what he did in that state. And the guy says that it's so hard that some of these guys don't even remember it or can't remember it. It's so painful that it's literally, it's been compartmentalized in place. But the problem is you can't process that you'd be capable of something. And the problem is, is it's stored. That memory, that pain or whatever, stored in the body. So you're, you know, he'll be talking to his kids and then he'll just fly into a rage and doesn't connect the two. Couldn't figure out why he was, temper was the way it was or why he can't sleep at night. So crazy. He's super sad. Like, I mean, I was listening to Tim Kennedy podcast. He was talking about like how under reported these suicides are, you know, with people coming back. And it's to the point where it's so many that like they don't want those numbers really to, they don't want to alarm everybody. You know, more soldiers die from suicide than from war right now in the U.S. It's so sad. It's brutal. It's crazy. You know, you're talking about anger. You just reminded me of something else that was in the book that I thought was really fascinating that was counterintuitive too, is that when you have, when you encounter somebody in sales in general or in conversation, right, that is just came off of like a fight or an argument or that there is actually a lot of power in your negotiating and your ability to close them than if they were just in a normal mood. So why is that? Which is what we would, is counter what we would believe. Like, if you just had somebody who had a lot of, like, they were fighting or arguing so with that, like, you're like, bad mood. Yeah, bad mood, right? I don't want to walk in and try and disclose it, but there's actually, there's an advantage for you actually in that situation. And that's because of using tactical empathy, knowing that they are that way, they subconsciously are actually looking for someone to be empathetic to what they just went through. So although there's very sensitive, so what you say and how you approach them is very important because if you go in there and you add to that stress, then it ends up blowing up your face, which is why we've always thought to, oh, avoid that situation. That's not the time to go in and try and get some to buy or do something. But if you do a really good job of actually listening and understanding and being empathetic to what they just went through and disarm them, then you actually have an advantage. I feel like that's where I got all my lifers that you would throw at me. Totally. I was the most difficult person causing a total scene and Adam would be like, hey, I got one for you over here. It's true. I mean, sometimes those people, they just want to be heard. Of course. And if you can do a good job of doing that, you disarm them and then now you have this huge, actually advantage in the art of persuasion and the conversation. Justin's like, I totally understand that you have a terrible relationship with your daughter that's really sad. And speaking of which, exercise is a really good way to solve that, which is why 20 sessions is 20 seconds. We'll get you set up. We'll get you set up. It's a great deal. 5% off. Dude, so I wanted to talk about, you're going to be so excited right now, Adam. Oh my God. I know, this is a topic you really love. We'll talk about sneakers, tennis shoes. What? I know. You want to talk about sneakers. I know. I don't know. Did you see Adam's shoes today? Well, that's what prompted this, right? So first life he walks in, and those you said are the Jordan 4s. I've commented on those before because I remember those. I remember kids wearing those in school. Specifically, I remember the netting or whatever on the side. They didn't have bright yellow back then. No, they were red, I think. We're black and red. Anyway, so I remembered something. So two things. One, I watched some of the NBA finals. I never watched basketball. But one thing that I noticed, and I talked to you about it, Adam, which I thought was fascinating, was the difference in the shoes that they wear today versus in the 90s. Oh, I forgot about when you brought this up. I'm so glad you brought this up because we never talked about it on the show. No, so in the 90s, when I was a kid and when basketball shoes were a big thing, it was all about high tops. High tops, lots of stability, pumps, tighten around your ankle, whatever. I'm looking at all these guys playing basketball now, and they're all like mid, you know, there's no free ankles. Mid or low? Yeah, or low, no quote, unquote, ankle support. And you explained this because they realized the lack of mobility. I actually didn't explain it. I actually challenged you as trainers because the same thing that went through my head. So I remember this transition. And I remember scratching my head. I was already training clients. So this is like, I don't know, it was probably a decade ago when you really started to see this transition. And I was like, what? But then it dawned on me. I'm like, oh, I know why. So I asked you guys, and you guys actually nailed it right away. It's funny that we all just adopted that as the norm, as kids watching them play basketball, that oh yeah, high tops for ankle support. It was just like, we just accepted it. But after I know you guys experienced with training and the importance of foot strength and ankle strength and mobility in the ankle and how important that is to protecting the foot and ankle, I knew you guys would know. And I said, well, what do you guys think? And you both were like, well, I would think they're ankle mobility and strength. Well, basketball is dynamic. It's not like you're deadlifting where you wear a belt and just move.  You want more mobility, flexibility. And of course you have to have the strength to support that. You support it, but like you do that intrinsically. So the only time they will, and you'll still will see them occasionally now is, I shouldn't say it all the time. Yes. Yeah, that makes sense. Right?  That makes sense. Then they'll strap up, they'll put an ankle brace in there and they'll even have like a high shoe or whatever like that. So you saw Curry actually do that in the finals. He went from his lows. He rolled his ankle. I can't remember what game it was. And then after that, he put his like. I would like to see the numbers on ankle injuries and knee injuries if they're more or less. I know. It'd be interesting. Oh, it's bro, it's the NBA. They for sure have got the statistics on that, which is why it probably became like it overnight. Seemed like it was. They're always looking to profit and an injured athlete loses you money. Yeah. Yeah. Most injuries I've seen and been apart, even my own injury was like, I didn't have that free range of motion to work with it. It's stuck. Like my foot was stuck in a fixed position and then the rest of my body was still traveling with that momentum and then boom. Well, you know what? I'm even more stressed. More curious about it is who is responsible for influencing the NBA like that. There had to have been a very smart coach or trainer. Like who are the first ones? Yeah. Somebody, because this is what happened. We've talked about this on air before. It's like we assume that because it's the NBA, the NFL, that they have to have the best trainers and coaches. But for the longest time, they didn't. They're getting there. Yeah. It's definitely getting, it's way different today than it was 20 years ago. But 20 years ago, they did not have the most of them. There's just our buddy. Yeah. It was somebody's uncle, cousin, nephew, or whatever like that that's getting in. They got, went to school, went through the proper chains and it has their degree now. And so now they're qualified to be the trainer of this team. But the stuff that they were implementing back then was still archaic. Well, what's interesting is you can see somebody like a PJF or PFJ. What's the PJ? Paul Fabbridge. Paul Fabbridge, he will make more money just doing independently and not like he could easily be. He's turned down.  He's had the opportunity to work with NBA teams and assist them. He'll just work with them individually like players. Yes. Well, for decades, didn't basketball players wear these, chucks, low-rise? Originally, yes. I mean, there's nothing. This is like about as minimal as you get. They would do that or they'd do the high-top version of that. But yeah. So it would be interesting, Breen, since you brought that point up, is I wonder if... If it will keep going in that direction. Well, no, back then, if they had a lot of the studies around ankles and knee injuries and started to compare it to, say, the 80s and 90s with all the high-tops. And maybe they saw a huge spike and somebody pieced it together. Well, what's interesting, so do you guys... OK, you guys obviously remember when the whole barefoot running thing became a thing, right? And it came from researchers going to other parts of the world where there are some cultures where running is a part of the culture to the point where they'll run into their 70s, 80s, and 90s. Barefoot, right? Like, can you... And they run barefoot or with almost nothing. Yeah. And what the researchers did is they filmed the running from the side and from the front to identify if there were any differences. And there sure are. When you run barefoot, naturally, not now. Like, if you're used to running in shoes now, go try... You try to run barefoot, you're going to hurt yourself because you're used to not doing it that way.   And it's actually the best shock absorber you can use. Today, what we do, or for a long time, is we put tons of padding and stuff on the shoe on the heel to try and make it softer. And we actually teach ourselves to hit heel first, which eliminates the shock absorbing ability and intricacies of the foot and the muscles of the foot and the ankle. So these researchers are like, this is how we're supposed to run.  It's going to take you a long time to learn the other way. So it is really interesting. I wonder if it's going to go in that direction. It's weird because it's sort of like, I mean, you've seen how conditioned athletes have gotten over there just because of the shoes that they grew up with and how they have the elevated heel support already and they've always been used to that.  I'd like have to teach this to death to a lot of these athletes on how to like be more active and mobile and be ready in a ready position because, you know, being on your heels, you're dead. You're dead in the water on the field. Yeah, you're going to get pushed over.  Yeah, you know what else I thought of? So in the 90s, there was this trend of like shoe technology, I put in quotations. It was all about selling the shoe based off of the newest air or gas or whatever in there to make you jump higher. And then I remembered, and I had it wrong when I told you guys, it was Carl Malone's LA gear catapult, that was the shoe. Do you remember that? You remember that? Do you remember catapults? You were so close, you did a Patrick Ewing you did a Patrick Ewing reference and said, wow. That was Carl Malone, BK Knights. It was LA gear catapult and the commercial. I remember this as a kid, because it closed me as a kid, I watched the commercial. It shows like the foot in the ground and there's a catapult in there. It had like forward fraying. Do you know that has to be one of the biggest flops on one of the biggest names in sports for a shoe? It was. It was it? Yes, it was. I know it. But I bet you now, if you have a pair now that are like in good condition, novelty, oh man, yeah, there's got to be somebody out there once. I bet you. I bet you. Isn't that interesting?  But I swear to God, the time that I put him, keeping him barefoot for so long, he didn't go through that typical toddler falling over phase that like every kid goes through. And I swear I attributed it to his foot strength and stability of keeping him barefoot. So we keep Aurelius, try to keep him barefoot as long as often as appropriately possible, meaning obviously if we're outside and it looks like the ground might be a little whatever, put shoes on. But usually we keep him barefoot. He's way better balanced, barefoot, because he's mostly barefoot. You put shoes on him and you can see, you can see he's trying to feel the ground. I know that. So Max is the only time Max has scuffed his knees has been when he's wearing shoes and he's going to run and you can see that he still hasn't adapted to the shoes. And I was explaining that to family and they're like, well, see, now we're going to fall the rest of his life for a term, so I said, no, eventually he will get really good at walking his shoes. But I care more that he has foot strength and ankle mobility and that ability to control himself. Articulate his toe. Yes, and you'll see him like he's wild, bro. He'll be sitting down and he always is comfortable in that deep, squatted position. That's how he plays and reads and sits. And you can see he'll naturally does this with his toes while he's doing something. That's so great. I know. So, I mean, of course I have one kid and so I know it's not. No, no, that's legit. I got an argument with some older relatives because they told me, aren't you going to get supportive shoes for Aurelius?  I'm like, no, I don't want that. And I'm trying to explain to them, we get in this big old debate and I finally am just like, yeah, okay, and I just stopped the conversation. But that's exactly, that was the thought process. So no wonder we wake up, we get older and we have all these weird foot issues. Well, speaking of training, I've been getting a lot of emails lately, actually from parents, which is pretty cool. From the football team? Football team and also from just doing that podcast with DeFranco that because we talked a little bit about nutrition, but a lot about training, but mainly just like that difficulty of getting enough protein and adequate protein to these athletes. And I told my story on the show a bunch of times about how I was like rewarding these kids with like magic spoon.  I'd be eating a huge bowl of cereal. And it's like to have an option of like loading them up with more protein because the thing is to my household was with two boys. And just to keep up with the meat demands for two boys, dude, that gets expensive, really fast.  Because they just need help with, you know, being able to supply them with enough of this for their training. If I had magic spoon as a kid, are you kidding me right now? I could have a bowl of 30 grams of protein in a bowl of cereal. I was doing it anyway. I was, except I was eating sugar, smacks, pops and lucky charms, which is not or pouring. Like all the shit, I just like Cheerios and I take a scoop of whey protein and put it in. Did you do that? Oh, I did stuff like that. So disgusting when I got into lifting weights, the things that I would do to get protein because I was out now. I was not your typical 15 year old kid. I was like, you know, obsessed. I would make chicken breast, two to fish shakes in a blender. Oh, that's so gross. Got to get it down. That's so good. Yeah, you should see my mom was like, she got a big old fight with me once. I had to hide and do it. No one's around. Drink it real quick. Did you make one of those shit? No, mom. I didn't do that. I mean, we talk about, like obviously it's a process food, right? And we always talk about like the idea of getting whole foods. And so sometimes I think people get the wrong message when we talk about. You got to work with what you got to work with. Yeah, exactly.  Like 100%, I'm going to push my clients always to a whole natural food. You have to consider always. First of all, don't make. Teenagers. Come on, this is a different story. I said this last time. What is it? Don't make good the enemy of perfect, right? So you do this all the time. Perfect, the enemy of good. Perfect, the enemy of good. OK, I said it backwards again. That's a very important thing to do because there's ideal. And then there's, OK, what do we actually deal with? So I'll give you guys a great example. Organic is another example. We talk about this all the time about the, I mean. There's a hierarchy. Yeah. Organic is down here. At the top is calories, then macros, then food quality. OK, that's the hierarchy. So if you're about food quality, but you don't pay attention to the other stuff, although food quality contributes to those, and it's more complex in the way I'm making a sound right now. But if you eat too much, even if the food quality is great, which can happen, it doesn't matter. You're just your health is lower. Well, yeah, it's like, it's like, you know, eating all organic and grass-fed meats and but yet drinking a liter of Pepsi every single day. Yeah. It's like being over calories by. Or drinking a liter of organic Pepsi. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Organic. The organic candy always cracks me up. That's it. I eat that. You know why I do that? Hey, it's subconscious. I kind of make you feel a little better. No, you know why I do it? I swear to God, this is why I do it.  But the reason why I do it is I want to give my money to companies that are going in that direction. Anyway, that's fine. And you're right. Makes me feel a little better. And they know that. So that's why they do that. They know that. We'll make this for sale. Candy gummy bears. So speaking of which about, you know, perfect the enemy of good and whatever. Government's great at this. Government's great at passing laws that feel good and never considering the potential unintended consequences. So here's one of the dumbest things that is coming out now. So they are pushing a policy right now. And I would love to you guys's feedback what you think could potentially happen from this. They are pushing a policy right now to mandate that cigarettes have low amounts of nicotine. So they're going to give them a cap and make it very low that cigarettes will now have way less nicotine. Because, of course, nicotine is the pleasurable part of cigarettes. It's also the part that, you know, we know what'll make it addictive. And so they're like, hey, here's the deal. We're going to help people not smoke. It's bad for you. We're going to pass a law. All cigarettes need to be low nicotine. Any thoughts on what's going to happen? Yeah, now we're going to have a bigger black market, just like we do in cannabis.  And the whole idea that we have all these cannabis clubs is, oh, we're moving in this direction.  We put the prices through the roof. And so it still drives a black market because people are going to say the concept. But what's going to happen as a result of that? That's what you always have to think. Not to mention you're not addressing the issue. The issue is not like the amount of nicotine in cigarettes that's the problem. That's not the root cause of what causes these people to keep. They've got something else that they're escaping from or they want. And you find another problem. Neumonipulating that is not going to. And here's the shitty part. Let me talk about politics. What will happen is they'll show the decrease in purchases because now people aren't going the legal route. But then they're doing it in a black market, which they can't track it. So they're going to probably make the case for it's working. Let me rephrase this because there's another thing that I think you guys, that's going to be more obvious. Imagine, and by the way, I do want to say this, nicotine is not harmful. Yes, it's addictive like caffeine is, but it's actually not harmful.  Yeah, tobacco contains it. It contains it. Yeah, so let me rephrase this and let me see what you got because you guys like coffee a lot. You love coffee.  Now, let's say the typical cup of coffee has got 100 milligrams of caffeine. I'll just use an arbitrary number. And the government says, hey, here's what we're going to do. We're going to mandate that a cup of coffee can have no more than 20 milligrams of caffeine. I'll just drink double now. There you go. Five cups. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you think people are going to do with cigarettes now? Buy more cigarettes. They're going to smoke way more cigarettes. Hey, how gangster would this be if Philip Morris is like behind the scenes of lobbying for this to happen? That would be the biggest. Oh, so you can sell more cigarettes? Yes. I wouldn't be surprised. How gangster would that be if it was I wouldn't be surprised. I would not be surprised. I had an idea for the government to post it like that. Didn't they show that they funded the campaigns for the anti-tabacco campaigns? Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. Because if you've ever seen that movie, it's a good show. Thank you for smoking. Thank you for smoking. Yeah, yeah, they talk about that. And I would not be surprised if it was a lobbyist from that represents the Philip Morris that got the government to go in that direction to make everybody think that we're actually trying to help people when in reality we know it's only going to double our cigarette sales. Well, what's going to happen is. Mastermind manipulation. Yeah, I know this for a fact. People are going to smoke more cigarettes. Oh, this one only gave me so much. I only felt this much. Let me smoke another two. Now you've got three or four times the carcinogens and the nicotine, which didn't hurt you. Yes, it's the addictive thing, but it didn't hurt you physically or cause cancer. That's the part that we're regulating. It's ridiculous.  And then the black market, absolutely. There's already black markets for cigarettes in states that where they're highly taxed. Is it still like that? I know New York, New York used to be like that. Is it still like that? Yeah, you go, remember that one guy, what was the name? That gentleman that he ended up getting taken down by police for selling loose cigarettes. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Ended up suffocating as a result for selling loose cigarettes. Ridiculous.   And then here's the other thing. Because it's a nicotine regulation, here's why I think what you said might be absolutely correct with Philip Morris. Because it's a nicotine regulation, you know who's going to get hit hard from this? Vape companies in jewel. Which cigarette companies, it's direct competition. Yeah, they may be trying to eliminate their competition. Correct.  Are we wearing tin foil hats or are we like right on the mark? I think we're right on the mark. I kind of feel like we're on the mark with this one. We're at 100%. It's just money. Yeah, dude. We'll see if it passes. Follow the money. It's like, yeah, I know, it's over. It's like when they passed, remember that, my favorite one is when Congress passed, like the, I don't remember what it was called, but it was to make school lunches healthier. Oh yeah, then the pizza, because the pizza counts as the sauce. The sauce counts as the vegetable. Yes. They're like, it has to have a vegetable. And then the freaking, the pizza lobby or whoever, lobby's like, well, tomato sauce, tomatoes. People wonder why we're skeptical. They wonder. Yeah, we got our pizza, it's got vegetables in it.  How are gas prices over at your place right now? Are you seeing an increase still? I think it's, I peaked at seven, seven, three. Yeah, it's like seven, did you see that? The prophecy fulfilled itself, seven, 11. You're not selling gas for seven, 11? Oh my God, so funny. I did not see that mean, it's hilarious. I mean, it's pretty much up there for premium. You know, you're getting like seven, 11, seven, 12. Was it Andrew that was telling us the clip from, what's the Will Smith one? Were the everything, like the apocalypse happens and everything like that? Oh, yeah. I am legend. Yeah, I am legend. Was it Andrew that was telling us that the gas prices in there? Are the ones that we have now? No, or lower. So even the apocalypse happened. Zombie apocalypse. We just bypassed the apocalypse. That's what we did. Keep her gas, everybody. Hey, speaking of cool, I don't know, conspiracy-ish stuff. Do you know what they're studying a lot right now for its effects, positive effects on COVID? Canabinoids. Canabinoids, the things that- What is cannabis? Wins again. What is cannabis not good for? Been trying to say this for a long time. So CBD in particular, and other cannabinoids, CBD and other cannabinoids in particular are being shown in animal studies to prevent the COVID virus from getting into your cells. So not just like, not just like, oh, it helps with the inflammation, it's like which I'll get to, but actually potentially preventing you from catching it in the first place. These are animal studies, of course, so take it with a grain of salt, but very fascinating. And then THC, they did a mouse study and it prevented the cytokine storm that causes death. So all the animals in the THC study, none of them died from COVID, whereas the ones that were the controls, you saw a few of them die. So is it like the same mechanism, like you take zinc and it kind of replaces a molecule so it kind of blocks it? Is that- Oh, not quite. I think, not like that, but something a little different. I think CBD has to do with the, God, now I can't remember, there's a receptor, alpha receptor, I can't remember the name of it in the cells that allow you to uptake it. And children have less of it, which is why they get a lower response, but apparently it helps block that or prevent the COVID virus from attaching and replicating or whatever. And then all the cannabinoids have this kind of systemically anti-inflammatory effect or inflammatory regulating effect. Which we knew that, yeah. So that's a study that just came out or? There's a lot now that are coming. So if you Google like CBD and COVID or THC and COVID, you'll pull up all these different studies that show this. Now, obviously this is gonna lead to one of our sponsors, Ned, not saying take Ned for COVID, but what you do see with Ned or with cannabinoids is this long kind of well-regulated inflammatory response. That's what you tend to see with people. So when people use it, and that's the messages I get and that's what I noticed too. Is that people just generally feel a more appropriate levels of inflammation. I say appropriate because you could take a strong anti-inflammatory like Advil or Ibuprofen, which tampers down inflammation, but it does it indiscriminately, meaning that you lose some of the potential benefits of inflammation because it's a signaling process, but cannabinoids don't seem to do that. So it regulates inflammation like a light dimmer switch on your light switch, allowing your body to have appropriate levels of inflammation. It seems to have a positive impact on like every part of your body. That's why I feel like it's why it's so popular right now. And because we didn't have a lot of research and studies around it and now all of that's coming. So it almost feels like every... What kind of works with a lot of different things. That's what I mean. There's an adaptogen. It's like it kind of helps the, what do you call that, a thermostat or not a thermostat like a... A dimmer switch? Yeah, like it just helps to kind of mitigate like the highs and then the lows. Immunomodulator. So what they find in studies is people with autoimmune issues have a good response. So hyperimmune system. And then they show in studies with people with a low immune response, people with like HIV and cancer, you get a boost of immune function. Speaking of which, did you know the first study on cannabis that showed anti-cancer effects? There's lots of them now that show anti-cancer effects. But the first one that showed that, potentially showed that was a government funded study. And I think it was... It was the 70s, right? The 70s, 74, I want to say. And the government funded a study to show... Do they keep it classified? Well, here's what they did. This is true, it's not a conspiracy. They wanted to show that, oh, for sure marijuana causes lung cancer. As the study was progressing, there was a slight protective effect. They shut it down and classified it. Nobody can find out about this. Done, yeah. Whoops. This doesn't help our initiative, you know? Isn't that a good time?  I know. I watched... You guys ever watched Brock Lesnar in college when he wrestled? He was a beast. You want to talk about... He was just as big. He was... Like if this was 10,000 years ago, he would be the guy on the horse. You said him... With the horn helmet, just killing people. His forehead would knock people out. He was in college, a monster. I watched his championship match, we'll put it in the show notes or we'll put it up here. He was so jacked and crazy strong-looking. I can't even believe that humans like that exist. He's Viking DNA, for sure. I remember watching his first fights in the UFC and him not having any real mixed martial arts skills at all, but still winning fights.  He's that exception to the rule where you talk about like, weight doesn't matter if you have someone who's extremely skilled and this like that. There's a point where... Well, he was a collegiate wrestler, but he didn't have, you're right, no MMA skills. Oh, yeah, no. And what was that match? He held someone down, he just pinned them basically. Yeah, just kept beating them up. Hammer fisting them to death. And they just couldn't do anything about it. He just ground and pounded them until they submitted. Just a monster.  Yeah, he's fast. Did he play football too? I don't know, dude. I thought he played college football or almost made it pro too, I thought. Yeah, I don't know about football. I definitely know he was like national champion wrestler at Minnesota. So how old are you when you're, he's got to, he had to be like 21. Like 21 years old, right? 22, when he was in college and he wrestled. Oh yeah. In his early 20s at the latest. Yeah, yeah. You imagine me in a 21 year old that looked like that? And be like, okay. I wonder what his parents look like. I know, right? Yeah, but it's always some anomaly where the parents were like five, three and like 180, and then they had that. You know what I'm saying? Like what the fuck? They were pulling up to see me play football, dude. Played for the Vikings. Yes, he played professional football. Wow. Yeah, he was, he's just a super athlete, bro. Yeah. Just a super human. Just a phenom. Insane. That just goes to show you the wide spectrum of genetics that existed in humans, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I don't think he actually made the team. He didn't make the team. Yeah, he wasn't like a main player with that.  Speaking of like ridiculous athletes, I also watched highlight videos of Bo Jackson. That guy was insane. Oh, well now you're talking. He was the first to, he was the first to go to football for athletes, right? Yeah, football and baseball. I'd argue the best athlete of all time. I would agree. Have you ever watched his documentary on like how his, his personality is? And like, he's, oh dude, he's so like chill. Really? Yeah, yeah, there's a really good 30 for 30 on him.  And now that you are bringing that up, you should go down the rabbit hole and watch his 30 for 30. Was that the one where they should, like when he grew up and kids threw rocks at him and he'd like run away? I think so. Yeah. I think that's in there.  You know, it's crazy about that. I was like, he is so gifted and he really didn't try that hard. You know, it's, I wonder if in many of these situations, if you grew up with someone like this, everybody just knew, right? Cause he must have stood out. Like he stood out in professional school. Oh, 100%. He must have been in high school, it must have been a joke. Once I make it to the elite level, you see it real young. I have a, I have on Katrina's side, she has a nephew that, and I only get to see him every once in a while. And I remember seeing him when he was like, I want to say he was seven or nine. He was under 10. And he was throwing, and he's now in like a traveling baseball team. Like he's really, really good. And I remember seeing him like seven or nine years old. Throw to my other nephew who was in high school, playing high school baseball at that time. They were playing this game that baseball players play, where you stand across from each other. And if you throw it as hard as fast as you can, right at their face, it's like three points. And then I forget how the point system works. And you play it. I forget, I'm sure some baseball player will tell me the name of the game. I forget what it's called. So it's 21? Yeah, so 21, right? And that's, it's three points when you hit straight on, right? Okay. So, and you were supposed to be whipping it at each other as hard as you can.  And you could just see it. He's throwing and moving like a collegiate level adult at nine years old, dude, insane. You just know. And then of course I've watched him over the last 10 years progress in the game, but you can see it like. Bro, there's this kid named Danny Mix. When we were in like Little League, who's left-handed pitcher, I thought for sure he's gonna be the next Randy Johnson. Like, he was probably throwing like 70 miles an hour, but you know how close you are. You know, at that level, like the mound is really close. So it literally felt like 90 to 100 mile an hour ball coming at you. And he would brush everybody back and everybody was just terrified. He struck everybody out. Nobody hit him. You ever seen a top level, found something that surprised me. I saw a college, I actually trained a D1 softball player. So girl, right? And I always thought softball, I know they throw it fast, but how fast do you possibly throw it? Dude, I saw her pitch that thing. I'm like, that's a big-ass ball going real fast. That was pretty remarkable. Well, they've compared like, because the, like Justin's talking about the mound length is a difference, it makes a huge difference. There's more time when you're in professional. So when you see 103 miles an hour and you compare it to like a Little League doing 77 or a softball, let's say 60 or something like that, like they're comparable. I don't know what the exact calculations are, but it's not fair to compare a 60 mile an hour softball. Softball pitch, yeah. So I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't compare the two softball. Now they say that pitching softball, that the way that they do it underhand is much easier on the body than it's supposed to be biomechanically. It's supposed to be better for the shoulder. Is that what they say? Yeah. I mean, that's what they purport. But I, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what the long-term effects of- I would imagine the bicep and the bicep tendon would be- It looks like a lot of force. I mean, they definitely generate a ton of force by doing that.  My brother-in-law, he has a little girl.  She's a little kid and she makes videos on his phone. And I'm like, if don't let her get on YouTube because she'll get famous right away. You can see it early. She's young. She's a little, like, I don't know how old is she. She's gotta be six, maybe. And she's like, hey, welcome to my channel. All right, today here's what we're making. And I'm looking at this, I'm like, dude, your daughter's super charismatic, bro. You better keep your eyes on her, you know? Crazy. Foster it. All right, check this out. 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My main goal is to build muscle, burn fat, be as lean as possible. I'm eating super clean. I follow your guys friend, Max Lugabeer. I follow all of his nutrition advice. I read Genius Foods a couple of months ago. It changed my life. Then I started listening to his podcast. I came across a couple of episodes of Sal as the guest and got turned on to mind pump. After listening to y'all and hearing about full body workouts, I started doing that. So now I train weight with weights, three days a week doing total body workouts. I do jiu-jitsu three days a week. My day off, I stay active. I walk for about a half an hour. Every day I do 20 push-ups every two hours. That's seven days a week. So what I've been doing as far as nutrition-wise, I've been intermittent fasting, with the fasting lasting for 20 hours, four hour feeding, eating two meals a day. All of my foods are very nutrient dense. I pretty much, I eat all of the Genius Foods. My question is, does my body absorb and use all of the nutrients the same way in those four hours eating only twice? I said, would I already eat three or four meals a day over say, you know, an eight to 10 hour window as opposed to what I've heard? It does, but that's not what I'm concerned about. Yeah, generally it does, but more frequent protein feedings may have some benefit, but I know where Adam's going. I think you're doing way too much. Yeah, for how little you're feeding too. Yeah, you throw in everything but the kitchen sink at yourself. So fasting can cause additional stress on the body in the right context. Then you're doing jiu-jitsu, which I did jiu-jitsu for a long time. I know how strenuous and challenging that is. So you're doing that three days a week, plus you're lifting three days a week, plus you're doing push-ups every two hours. Every couple hours. Way too much, way too much on your body. So however you're progressing now or maybe you've plateaued, you could be progressing a lot faster if you scaled things back. So let me ask you a question. What's more important to you, the strength training or the jiu-jitsu? Cause I'm gonna give you some recommendations, but I wanna make sure it's based on what you wanna do. Strength training. Okay, so I would go two days a week of strength training and one or two days a week of jiu-jitsu, okay? Not three days and three, that's way too much. So two days of strength, one or two days of jiu-jitsu. So bring that down. So now you're working out four days a week. Push-ups every other hour. You know, I would say if the intensity is really low, that's fine. In other words, if you can pump out 20 reps and it's like a piece of cake, there's nothing wrong with that. But if it feels like you're working out, way too much. I have no problem with every couple hours you're doing some kind of movement, but it's gotta be really easy. Feel like you could do it with your eyes closed type of intensity. So that'll just facilitate recovery. Otherwise, way too much working out. Fasting, nothing necessarily wrong with that so long as you're getting the right amount of nutrients and so long as you're not exhibiting any signs of stress from that much fasting. So what does that look like? It looks like your energy starts to dip. You get really fatigued. Your hot, cold tolerance starts to change. You find yourself colder than normal. Or when you go out in the sun, it seems more unbearable than it normally would. If you're noticing those things, then what I would do is I would have, make sure you eat a higher fat, higher protein breakfast and then eat a couple more meals. I mean, we worked with Dr. Cabral recently who's a great functional medicine practitioner. He recommended that Justin start eating breakfast specifically because of some of the stuff that he noticed.  Oh, it's been a game changer. Yeah, because being for, this is a couple of years of skipping breakfast. So it's not like something I just did for a while and then stopped. This became a behavioral habit of mine, which definitely affected my stress levels and then also to, that carried into the workout. So what you don't think might be a stressor that is then adding to your bucket of stress, you have to kind of account and have inventory of all these things. And whether or not your recovery then is adequate enough in terms of like, now I need to figure out how to raise up my recovery. And a lot of times what that means is, I have to either reduce all these crazy strenuous activities or I have to then fuel my body and give it the nutrients and things that I need as I first wake up. It was a big deal for me in terms of like, having that type of energy and fuel for me first thing in the morning. Philip, have you actually wrote down and tracked what you're consuming? You have a four hour eating window, so you're only eating once or twice.  Have you tracked that to see what you're doing consistently? Yes, sir, yes sir. Yeah, down to the macros every single day. Pretty much eat the same thing every single day. So I'm about 16, not much either, 1,650 gallons. I'm trying to cut down. Yeah.  There's a jujitsu competition in November. I'm sure, don't mind, no, I don't know. You know, I'm trying to get down to 175 and be around that weight class.  I promise you that. You could actually do a lot less work and stress on your body and get there a lot easier than what you're doing right now. So if you're only eating 1,600 calories, I'm assuming you're probably under eating 180 grams of protein every day too. 165. Okay, so that's not bad. So if you're at least hitting the protein there, but that low of calories, that much work you're doing, yeah, six foot tall, 185, 1600 calories with all that work. Your body is, you're really teaching your body to store. Your body's trying to be as efficient as possible because you're not feeding it much for a guy your size, plus all that activity. So I would do what I said with the workout. By the way, if you have a competition in jujitsu, you can flip what I said. You could do three days a week of jujitsu, one day a week of strength training. If you want to really do well in the jujitsu competition, that'll serve you better. But I would increase your food intake and I would do it by eating breakfast. Throw a 300 calorie breakfast in the morning, fat and protein breakfast. It will kind of keep your blood sugar stabilized, give you some more, it's a little bit more calories and go from there. But right now, you got nowhere to go. You want to get lean or what are you gonna do? Cut your calories more, work out even more, you're screwed, right?   Oh hell, that's weird. That's really low, right? You should be, I mean, if everything was working the way that I would want it, a guy your size doing six days a week of exercise. 26, 28 hundred calories. Yeah, he'd be close to 3000 calories, right? So consider that. So start scaling it back, bump up your calories, eat a breakfast, a high fat, high protein breakfast will set you up, you'll feel good, you'll have good energy. And then the workout, you could either do, like I said, two days a week of strength training and one or two days a week of jujitsu, or if you want to win this competition, I'd flip it, go three days of jujitsu, one day of strength training and do a full body workout. How long do we have till the competition? So the competition is in November, and it's more of a, I mean, I'm into it, but it's more of a fun thing with my brothers. I'm taking it seriously, but I'm more serious about getting my body right. So that's good news, because that's plenty of time to reverse you out. Since I didn't know if it was like four weeks away or something, because I was like, oh shit, four weeks away, you got to get down to 175. I don't know what we're telling you. November, we're good. Yeah, no, we got plenty of time. So what you should do right now is don't be hung up so much on the scale. Start to increase the calories like Sal was saying, scale back the amount of volume that you're training and let your body recover a little bit, let your metabolism recover a little bit and build that up. I'd really like you to be in a place of, eventually, not right away, but north of 2,400 calories before I start to cut you for the jujitsu thing. And by the way, that would be the goal. The goal that you and I would have is, okay, let's try and gain as little on the scale as possible. So I want you to hover around 185, 190. I don't want you to go much higher than that. Let's slowly try to increase calories week over week in increments of about 200 calories or so, focus on getting strong and just kind of keep, and get those calories to where hopefully coming into end of October, I've got you at about 2,400 plus calories. And then I can restrict calories for the final couple of weeks, heading into your jujitsu tournament and you'll lean right out. Yeah, and we'll notice right away, Philip, by doing this, is you're just gonna see yourself get stronger in the gym. That's the first thing you're gonna, if you do this within a week or two, you'll notice the weights go up. You'll start to feel a lot stronger. That's a good sign. So pay attention to that. Okay. Now let me ask you something. My schedule, Monday through Friday, I work out at 4 a.m. I gotta be up early. So eat breakfast in that hour before I work out? No, afterwards. Yeah, right after. Afterwards, okay. By the way, you're just adding more to this stress bucket by the more story you tell here.  Is that next? What time do you have, do you have nine kids? I go to sleep at like eight o'clock in the morning. Do you have nine kids too? What else you got going on, bro? We need to find, you got a lot on your plate, dude. You got a lot. I know it, man. It's a lot. It's a lot. No, you said you go to bed at eight o'clock every night? Yeah, Chris, man, I'm laying down about 6.45 over each night. That's good. Okay, that's good. No, no, no, that's good. You're doing that right. All right, man. Well, good. Well, yeah, do what we said. I think it'll be totally fine. Your body's gonna respond really, really well.  Are you in our private forum yet? So that's social media, right? Yeah, are you not on social media? I'm not on any social media, man. Oh, that's nice, man. It's the healthiest thing you're doing right now. Yeah. Good for you, man. At least there's that. Yeah, it's good for you. Well, make sure you check back in with us while you're doing that. What do we have? He's on Anabolic right now. Are you following Maps Anabolic? What's your program? No, so that's what I was, that's what I was, I haven't got a Maps program yet. I'm listening to you guys probably a month and a half. And I just went, I've been going off what you, what y'all been saying. I haven't, I'm not following the program. All right. I'm gonna send you Maps Anabolic. Yeah, send you Maps Anabolic. That's your program. Okay. And dude, I saw, actually it's on my screen right now. It says two to three gym sessions per week. So do the two. Do the two, and then the two, Jiu-Jitsu. Two to three, Jiu-Jitsu, and then you'll be set. Yep. And then the trigger sessions. You're kind of doing that. Yeah, you can do that with your push-ups. You're kind of doing that with your push-ups, but you can replace the push-ups with trigger sessions. And the program will explain it to you. Throw some bands in there, yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I got some bands. Good deal. Yeah, follow that. Increase those calories. Bump those calories up a couple hundred. And let's see, and then focus on getting strong. It's gonna make a world of difference, dude. Yeah. So a couple hundred per week or so. Yeah, so, or a couple hundred. So like right now, what do we say you're at 1600? So right away... 1650, and I just got done eating. I'm done like for the day. I mean...  Yeah, so like a nice scramble in the morning, you know? You got your, that'll give you the extra 200 to 300 calories right out the gates. Yeah. Okay. So bump that up, run that for at least a week or two. You know, see how you feel. So long as we don't see a major jump on the scale, the next week throw in another 200 after that. So follow that for at least a week or two. Really pay attention to how you feel energy-wise, strength. Make sure you're not seeing like a dramatic swing on the scale. So long as you don't see yourself shoot up beyond five pounds on the scale, I'd increase you again another 200 calories on top of that. So within a month, we're up to like 2200 or so calories, hopefully. Okay. Cool? Sounds good. I appreciate you guys for real, man. Right on, man. This is Bailey. Ah, thank you. Awesome, appreciate it. Appreciate the support, Phillip. Thanks guys. It's, as he was going, I was like, I wake up at this time. I do push-ups every other hour. You're the tally monster. I do this, I'm like, oh my gosh, there's all kinds of stuff that you're adding up. You know, what this really points to is the will that some people have.  And you could tell by the way he's talking, like he is doing everything that he has learned so far because he's excited about it. And you know, we've seen some weight loss, right? But man, you're doing a lot of work, but it's not necessarily benefiting him. No, you got to be effective. You want to be effective. You don't want to just spin your tires in the dirt because you're not going anywhere. And then eventually you set yourself up for a really, really tough time to maintain. And oftentimes people fail because of that. Well, the truth is, and I think it's the message that we're always trying to convey on the show is that it doesn't have to be this hard. It doesn't. I mean, it's more about having the right balance. And I think he is doing a lot of things. He's trying a lot, right? He's doing everything Max is telling him. He's doing the fasting like crazy. He's training. He's training consistently. He's doing jiu-jitsu. He's doing trigger sessions throughout the day. I mean, he's got a lot he's doing right now.  If he was fed, it would be different. If he said he was eating 2,800 calories and he was doing all those things, still overtraining, still more than what he needs to do. Not as big of an emergency. But not as big of a deal. Yeah, exactly. We still have lots of room we could play with, but that low of calories for his size, his activity level, he's got to come the other way. Our next caller is Dom from Texas. Dom, what's happening? How can we help you? How's it going, guys? Very good, yeah. Good, good.  I've followed you guys pretty extensively for the last year and a half or so. And just want to say, I know Adam, you'll appreciate this, but go Warriors. How about those guys? Oh yeah, buddy. Absolutely. Yeah, that was a shocking one, but love to see it for the guys. But perfect. So yeah, a little bit about me. I'm living in Austin now. My background from, I guess, a physical standpoint is I played college baseball. And then to be honest, kind of let myself go afterwards. In the last couple of years, I've had a pretty big lifestyle change. I ended up getting up to around, I'm 5'11", for reference, and played around 250. So I've always been a bigger dude and got up to around like 295. And then in January, 2020, kind of flipped a switch. And in October, so about 10 months in, I had lost 100 pounds and got down to like 195. And then at that point, honestly it was kind of around the same time I started listening to y'all and realized that I was doing some stuff right, but during the progress, or during the process, I've done a lot of things wrong. And your guys' show has given me a lot of insight. It's like what was a direct cause of what I was feeling and kind of all the symptoms of like, I basically ran myself into the ground for 10 months. And that's kind of how I lost the weight and was eating in a deficit for like honestly like a year and a half. So I had a lot of the side effects from that. But my question to y'all wasn't really regarding, you know, weight loss or anything. It was more kind of specific. And so basically last December, I injured my back deadlifting, nothing really serious. I kind of just felt a pop and ended up going to like a chiropractor. And he had said that it was chocked it up to like a sprain. And about two months after I was moving moving normally, kind of all my range of motion back was lifting pretty heavy in most exercises, except for deadlift, but that really wasn't like a performance block. It was more of a mental block. So like fast forward to now and I'm as strong as I've ever been in every lift except for deadlift. Again, the deadlift has always been my best lift. When I played baseball, I could pull 500 pounds. I'd rep out 405. And since then I haven't gone above 285. And it's not like 285 is a weight that I struggle with when I do it.   But I realized that I don't necessarily have to lift super heavy in order to see the results. But my main question really is what are y'all's opinions on different deadlift variations? Specifically conventional trap bar or sumo, like is one form safer than the other? And will I, or will I see the same benefits from using one variation over the other? Fun question. Yeah, good question. By the way, great mustache. Yeah. I had it before top gun, so don't get any ideas. Okay, so all deadlift variations are safe when performed correctly. So really the question is which deadlift variations require the most skill, right? That's where the risk comes from is some require more skill than others. A trap bar deadlift is probably the easiest to perform. It requires the least amount of skill to perform. Therefore, you're more likely to do it properly and less likely to hurt yourself. A conventional deadlift and a sumo deadlift depends on who I'm talking to, but both of them are relatively high skill. How do you get back into it? I'll give you an exercise I'm gonna recommend that I think will be phenomenal for you to focus on that's gonna lead to a very balanced, strong, stable deadlift, single leg deadlift. So on the days when you would normally deadlift, grab yourself a pair of dumbbells, try to balance on one leg, and practice single leg deadlifting, and do this for like two months. Give yourself eight weeks to get really strong with a single leg deadlift. Then go back to deadlifting, whatever preferred variation you like, conventional sumo or trap, and then notice how you feel. That may help you with the mental part because you're gonna feel very stable. I've done this before and it makes a very big difference in how I feel when I pull the weight off. I feel so stable and so safe because I got better at the single leg deadlift. And many times when you feel or hear a pop like that, especially when you're lifting really heavy in the deadlift, it has something to do with something, an instability from left to right, right? So like you have a weakness, one side's a little more dominant than the other. There's a discrepancy somewhere. And yeah, there's a little bit of a discrepancy there. You're loading really heavy and that little bit of a tweak in that movement is all it took for that pop to happen. And so Sal's advice is brilliant and this is what I would totally do if I was training you is we would just set a goal of like, we're gonna get hella good at the single leg deadlift. And let me tell you, so if you go back far enough on my Instagram, you can scroll down where I went on a kick for the same reason, by the way. I was progressing really fast in deadlift. It was back in the days when I was chasing Sal. I kind of tweaked my back a little bit and instead of going right back to going heavy deadlift, I went back, I went to single deadlift. And I think I had to start, I wanna say with like 40 or 50 pound dumbbells, balancing it was really hard just to do a few of those, worked my way up to where I was hanging on to 100 pound dumbbells on each side. Then after that went back to bilateral. So both feet on the ground, deadlifting and felt so stable and strong. So set a goal for yourself to get really good at the single leg deadlift. It's gonna take a little bit of time. It's stability wise, you're gonna have to regress all the way down. But what's cool, if you've never done this before, you'll progress fast. I went from 40 pound dumbbells to 100 pound dumbbells and like over the course of a month and a half. So really quick, you'll get strong there because it's probably very novel. And you probably haven't done it. And even this injury too, well your recruitment patterns are gonna change a bit just from that. So the hesitancy, psychologically, obviously you might feel that, but also too like your body is gonna recruit a little bit differently. And this is why too, like I was gonna point you into map symmetry. Do you have map symmetry? Okay. No, I don't. Okay, we'll definitely get you map symmetry because there's gonna be a lot of those little inconsistencies and balances, discrepancies that you're gonna find, like Adam was talking about left to right or just a weakness in terms of like, a loss of recruitment in certain movements and certain like staple things that you've been doing just because your body is a very protective body when I'm trying to think of the word. Yeah, well I was trying to prevent injury. Engine. Yeah, I was trying to prevent injury. No, I think symmetry is a great program to follow. When you do the single leg deadlift start, you're gonna see there's definitely gonna be a discrepancy left to right. One side you'll have way more stability and balancing control and better form. The other side will probably be a little off, super normal.  The side that you struggle with the stability and wherever your form breaks down. So even if you've got the strength to do more reps, but wherever your form breaks down on that unstable, that weak side, stop it there and mirror it on the opposite side. Don't let yourself be tempted to do more on the dominant side or don't start the exercise on the dominant side. Always start on the weak side first and then allow the dominant side to mirror whatever you could do on the weak side. The weak side is gonna dictate how many reps and what the weight is. Are you familiar with the windmill exercise? Is that not with dumbbells like a shoulder exercise, right? Well, you can use dumbbells, you could just do it with your body. So Justin did a webinar, I think it's, is it MAPS Prime webinar? In there he demonstrates a windmill test, but you can do it as an exercise. I've found that for people who hurt their backs deadlifting, the windmill is a wonderful exercise that helps correct some of those issues because it oftentimes comes from like the QL muscle is where you get an imbalance or the rotational stability is a little off.  I love that. Okay, and in terms of the single leg, is it more of like, it's like a single leg RDL type deadlift? Go on my, do you have Instagram? Yeah, I follow you, I'll just follow you. It's not that far, it's scroll down. There's bend in the knee, you're bending the knee like you would with a deadlift. So it's not an RDL, it's a deadlift. Oh, I see, I think, yeah, okay. And I remember what you're, I've seen it on there, I know what you're talking about now. Okay, yeah, because I do, that's kind of the one thing I resorted to was the single leg stuff, especially because I did notice almost right away, I'm a big golfer, so when I tried to reintroduce, like I couldn't swing a golf club really for like a month. So when I brought that back, I definitely noticed certain tension on one side of the body, even just like walking around. So I introduced more single leg stuff, like cack squats and just more lunges. And I probably should do them more, I don't do them every leg day, but I definitely should make them more consistent because I just like the way I feel when I do them more, but I do have sort of a, one thing I'm trying to overcome is the mental aspect of, like I said, I had pretty much run myself into the ground. And at that point I was doing something literally seven days a week. I was in between jobs, so I was working at a golf course where I was getting roughly in a day, like 15 to 17,000 steps, and I was running like four or five miles a day and lifting, so I was super active and then I switched jobs. And now I have like this mental block to where I, like before I had no problem getting every exercise I wanted to in a week because I was working out seven days a week, whereas like now I've cut it back, just listening to your podcast, I cut it back to five and I probably could cut it back a little more even, but yeah, it's like that's just something I'm trying to overcome, but definitely need to get more of that isolated stuff, isolated exercises into my regimen. Well, now you have a program, so map symmetry is all laid out, follow it. Follow it to a T. So you can just follow it and you'll be set. Perfect, and I did just have one more kind of, I feel like it could be a pretty simple answer, but it's regarding like y'all's opinion. I know you guys have your thoughts on like cardio and how it's can be detrimental to building muscle, and I totally agree. Like I said, after running for a while, when James did open back up in California, I was, got me in a really dark place because I was the weakest I had been in maybe 10 years. So that was definitely one of those things I mentioned kind of helped me realize why I was being that way, but just had a question, is like sprinting or say like high intensity cardio as denture metal, the muscle building in the same way that like extensive cardio is, like if I just did like sprints or I have a buddy who, he's actually a firefighter and I just sent him the clip of yours on the two podcasts to go about the firefighter training. So he gave that a listen, but he's like a big like Peloton guy. He loves the high intensity ones, but he also wants to be one of your programs. So I was saying like how detrimental is like the short burst cardio compared to like long distance cardio? Well, here's the deal, okay? If either one is appropriate, then they're both gonna be okay. The hit training now hit style cardio is more anaerobic, but if you throw that on top of a routine and it pushes you into too much exercise over training, it's gonna do the same thing. It's not gonna be good. So, and then the other thing is hit cardio, it requires a lot more stability and skill and mobility. So if you don't run very well, slow for long distances, sprinting you're gonna run even worse and you're going hard and fast and so you'll hurt yourself. So those are things that pay attention to, but if you wanna throw in some cardio and it's appropriate, I think two or three days a week of 15 minutes of hit cardio is perfectly fine. And choose a method that for you doesn't require a ton of skill. Like if you feel more confident doing sprints on a bike, then you can do that and you'll get great results. It doesn't have to be on a treadmill. Okay, perfect. Yeah, I get most of my cardio nowadays from golfer just walks with my girlfriend. So I'm gonna get dumb. I'm gonna guess it was your QL. I'm gonna guess it was your QL because- Especially now that you said you have a golf swing, you have dominant with one side. So Sal's earlier advice with windmills is essential, especially doing it with the other side that you don't rotate. Yes, yes, yes. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. And I played baseball my whole life too. So all of my turn is pretty much right to left. Yeah, so getting into my left hip is essential. By the way, go to that webinar that Justin did that we just recommended. Go to that webinar, watch it.  I would do it every day. Oh yeah. For you golf, yeah. Okay. As much as you, like you cannot do enough of that because you are so dominant one side. That'll really help prime your body before you go into golfing all day long or definitely working out.  More to the right or the left. Is that correct? To be honest, I don't really remember where I felt the pop. I just remember the pressure being kind of on my right side afterwards. It sounds like QL. I'm just, I mean, this is just me over the, over the air diagnosing, I'd have to do more stuff. But it sounds like QL, especially with your baseball and golf.  I'm like, like I said, I'm like in lower body, really anything that requires load on my back or heavy leg stuff. Like I'm as strong as I've ever been right now. And that's, so I don't really, I think it's a lot of it is the mental block, but definitely think the symmetry stuff is gonna help also. Excellent. All right, man. Well, thanks for calling in. Perfect. Yeah, I appreciate y'all. Thank you again for what you do and have a good rest of your day. Take it easy, Dom.  Really bad. It ruins a lot. You know what else we could have recommended were suitcase carries. It's like walking with a dumbbell on one side, maintaining stability. Anti-rotational stuff would be great for him too. Like, I mean, there's a lot of stuff that you could, we could go down there. That makes so much sense now, like being so right side dominant in that rotational movement. It really is, you know, over the years and how long he's been doing that. It has to play a massive factor in his imbalances. He gets good at the windmill and gets good at single leg deadlifts. He's gonna see tremors. Those two alone, just get good at doing them. When did we drop symmetry? It's been enough, because I'm getting DMs now from people who've been following it. So it's been long enough, right? Where people have been able to follow for a few months.  I think the unilateral training, the focus on that and balancing right to left, so valuable for probably everybody. Not just this guy, but probably everybody. Our next caller is Lorette from Pennsylvania. Hey, Lorette, how can we help you? Hi, just wanna say hello to Sal and Adam and Justin. It's been a pleasure listening to your podcast. I have been seeing my personal trainer now for about two months and I'm following the maps anabolic. I'm on phase three and she gives me a lot of heavy weights. She just piles on and piles on to the point where she is assisting me with all of my lifts. And I kinda wanna know am I going in the right direction having her assist me with these lifts or should I be trying to convince her more of trying to have me lift within the weights that's gonna be easiest for me to get the 12 to 15 repetitions with that 30 second rest period. She says, no, just go heavy. The whole idea is to make it burn, go heavy. So I just wanna get your tape on things. So Lorette, let me get this straight. She's literally helping you lift the weight because it's too heavy for you. Oh, she's literally helping me lift the weight. We have, I have to do barbell curls and she'll get under the barbell and help me lift. And I can't get, maybe I can do one repetition but she's helping me. And if I'm doing any type of cable work she'll like stand behind me earlier because I had a session this morning and it's the cable chest press we're standing. She's behind me pulling the cable so that I can squeeze to get my workout in. She's too involved. I just, I kind of feel like I need to be doing the work myself and working my way to lifting those weights. Lorette, you're absolutely correct. Yeah, your intuition is right here. Yeah, so okay, so sometimes I tell people, hey, tell your trainer this and tell him that and then sometimes there's just, I, you need to fire this trainer. If they're doing all of this, yeah, if they're doing this. That's my question, should I fire my trainer? Yeah, you need to. We gotta find you some of these. They're not a good trainer because I would literally have to coach this trainer for a while. Well, I will, I will, it's nice that she's letting you run MAPS anabolic because some trainers are so adamant about not running somebody else's program. But she's not running MAPS anabolic. Nowhere in MAPS anabolic. She's doing heavy MAPS anabolic. Yeah, nowhere in the program does it say, have someone do forced reps. How did that go down? Did you twist her arm to let you follow it? How did, how did that, I'm curious to how that went down. No, she, she was very receptive to following MAPS anabolic but she piles on. We don't just start with 12 pounds.  Every, every exercise there's a pyramid. I'm not starting with one weight to try and get all of the reps in. You know, we're doing 25. We're gonna move to 30. Then we go to 35. She says, it's gotta burn. You have to push yourself. You have to push yourself. Like, okay, and then that's not what the guys say. You know what, you know what's funny? I'm gonna make a guess here. This trainer is either a new trainer or one of those old school trainers. She's young, she's very young. You need to get a new trainer. Sorry, sorry. That's right. I mean, here's the thing. Okay, so it wouldn't be bad. It wouldn't be bad if she was spotting maybe the last rep or two or something. Okay, here's the thing. When I was, when I was training clients, I would pick a weight that would challenge you that you could probably do close to, if not for sure, on your own, the say the 15 reps. And as soon as I saw my client's form maybe sort of deviate, I would get under the bar and guide the weight so they could keep that rhythm going. But if you're struggling by rep three, if it's already hard for you at rep three and she's having to help you all the way to 15, that's way too heavy. Yeah, and to be honest with you, towards the end of my career when I got really good, if I saw a client's form break down and they didn't complete the reps that we were aiming for, I would go lighter. Yeah, I would go lighter. So she's training you too hard. The intensity is too high. And it's a recipe for disaster.  I've been asking her, can we just lower the intensity a little bit? She says, no, no, we have to go hard. We have to go hard. And she's really, we have to go hard. We have to go hard. She's drinking her rocks down before she's training you. Yeah, I mean, so I will say on a positive side I have been training with her for a month. And during that time, my muscle mass has increased by 2%. My fat percentage has gone down by 2%. And I've gained two pounds. So I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but. Well, Lorraine, before you trained with her, were you doing a lot of exercise or was this kind of your, were you just getting started with her? No, I, you know, I have been exercising. My journey started about 28 years ago, but over COVID, that's when everything went haywire. So I'm back in the gym now that gyms are open and just trying to get back into the flow of exercising. But I was doing it on my own. And I thought that I needed someone to push me more. And that's why I was in a personal training. So you improved in spite of the terrible training that she's giving you.  And that plus, were you an athlete in the past? You said you worked out for a long time. I did, yeah, and just, but, you know, I'm an older person, I have to say, but yeah, I did. I started and, you know, I was at 15%. This was in my late to early 30s up into my 40s. And, you know, it's been really difficult, change of life, COVID, all of that. And it all hit me two years ago. So I'm trying to, you know, improve a little bit and see if I can get my strength back. Sleep's been difficult, so, but it's getting better. So I'm happy about that, but I'm really being taken through the ringer with my workouts, with my trainer. As much as I love her, I think she's trying to kill me, but I'm not in any pain or anything like that. So as long as I'm not dying, maybe it's okay, but I really, really wanted to, I mean, I can do it at home. I really can't, I have barbells, but I do miss. No, Laura, I would, it's too hard and it's heading in the wrong direction. It's only been a month, so you're getting away with it. But it's not gonna end well, so I would definitely change directions. And then here's a piece of advice for hiring a trainer, and this is for you and for anybody else watching this. Do not hire a trainer to push you. That's the wrong reason.  You don't need a drill sergeant to hammer you all the time. First of all, it's a very ineffective, long-term approach.  So if you do hire another trainer, look at them like a guide. Is this the person that's gonna guide me to developing this lifelong relationship with exercise where it's appropriate and effective forever? Not, is this person gonna push me to my absolute limits in a short period of time? That's the wrong person. I don't mind a trainer for the accountability piece, but not to put, right? So because I get that part, right? Like I'm like that. Like I know if I invest my money into something, I'm gonna show up, right? I don't know if you're like that or not, but that's how I, I'm like, if I spent $1,000 on this personal trainer, I'm not gonna miss that appointment because I wanna lose my money. I don't mind that. I get that. There's, there's, I think there's value in having an accountability piece, but hiring someone to like push you like that, you just showing up and going through maps in a ball. It's gonna do the work. Honestly, the things that you and I would be communicating if you were climbing, especially since you had a shift in change since COVID, like your, what's your work-life balance? I'd be talking about sleep. I'd be talking about the things actually outside the gym that's going on in your life. How's our balance nutritionally? How's our stress levels? Like that's the type of stuff. I mean, what you're gonna do in the gym, I think that's the mistake that a lot of like clients would think is that it's such a small portion of, of your life of- It's a fraction of the day.  It's all the other things. And so you and I really, why we'd be going through maps in a ball like, and we'd be talking the whole time. Yeah, you would be able to talk to me in rest periods and I'd be asking you questions about your week and what's going on and like- You'd be a guide. I would be diving into that stuff. That's a good coach will do that with you, especially if you've got maps in a ball. You've already got a great program. So you don't even need the trainer to write a great program for you got that. I'd be diving into the other stuff with you. So if you are gonna seek out another coach, look for someone who's gonna look into that, your stuff outside of the gym because you've got the program already. Okay, very good. And I think the last part of my question had to do with just how crowded the gyms are. We spend a lot of time walking around the gym trying to find all of the equipment we're looking for. There's a lot of times when the squat racks are full and we have to go somewhere else and then we can't find a cable machine, we can't find. So I don't get my whole workout in and then I find the second half of the workout I have to do when I go home. So I'm looking for some alternatives for those exercises I can't do when the gym is full. And then I'm also thinking about just going back home. I don't have a rack to do to put the barbell on but I do have two barbells and plates and things like that and dumbbells, kettlebells, all of the stretchy bands. Well, Lorette, Lorette Maps and a Bollock in the program when you open it, there's a dumbbells-only version in there. So what I would do at the gym is when you're trying to work out and all the racks are taken, do the dumbbells-only version of that exercise. Or you can always find a pair of dumbbells. Or train at home. Or train at home, as she's saying. Yeah, I mean, if you train at home. But I mean, you can always find a pair of dumbbells that'll work for all these. So there are options.  I don't have this exercise. Find the dumbbells-only version of it. Lorette, are you? Well, now that's when the dumbbell area is completely full and the ladies have, and the ladies and the guys, they have maybe two or three sets of dumbbells at their bench. Good old gym life. So I'm talking about, Jess, it's just. Primetime hours in the gym. I have to run through the gym. Yeah, I feel that for sure. Lorette, are you on Facebook? I am, yes. Let's add you to the forum. I'd love to be able to stay in touch with you as you're going through this process. And so the guys and I are- I love that. Yeah, we're gonna add you to the forum. So you're in there. Okay. Any more questions that you have going through this process, just tag us. And we'll help guide you through this, so. All right, I really appreciate it, guys. Thank you so much and congratulations to a great job you do with your program and your podcast. Thank you, I appreciate it. I'm starting from the very beginning. You guys are hilarious. Oh God, oh God. We were rough back then.  I have episode 868, so. Oh my God. So when you don't have a new episode, I just go back to all of your older versions. We have extra love, we have extra love for people that have- I'm stuck around. Yeah, God bless you. Yes, I really enjoy it. You're our people for sure. Thank you so much, Lorette. Thank you so much, guys. Take care. You got it. Yeah, go on. Bye bye. Man, I can't believe trainers still do that. Of course, in 100%- Trainers working out- You know it's a new one because if it was an old stubborn one, they would have never let her run at maps in a ball. That's true. Oh, good point. She's young and new enough to be like, oh, okay, cool. Yeah, we'll do that. But we'll add to it. Sure, but- I'll make it crazy hard. Intense hype. Oh my God. It's even all the reps for her. I had a trainer like that that worked for me and she did a good job getting clients. And I remember I had to have a tough conversation with her.  She's like, well, people always sign up with me. I said, and then they leave. They burn out. And so I had to keep having this conversation. And then it became so obvious to her. She said, you know what? I think you're right. I need to kind of scale it back. Her thought process was, well, it's intensity. This is what workouts are about. They got to be strong. It's not me. It's them. It's their discipline. And I'm like, no, it's not working. Listen, the most important part, this is for our audience is listening right now. The most important, when hiring a trainer or working out, the most important part is good programming. Once you have good programming, just following it to you. There's no need, the overhype on the intensity thing that you see on social media. I need my trainer to push me. You don't need that.  Absolutely. You show up to the gym three days a week. You follow maps and a blog.  You just follow that program to a tee. And then you focus on all the other things that are going on in your life. You'll see so much more results than trying to think that it's all in that hour, that hour that you're in the gym. If I could just do more or hit it harder or go to failure or increase my intensity, but then you neglect all the other stuff, good luck. Yep. Our next caller is Skye. Skye, what's happening? How can we help you? So, hi guys, first of all. So I've been a trainer for about three weeks now. And well, last time I talked to you guys, I was still doing my school for training. So that's awesome that I got certified and got hired and stuff. So the first week I shadowed some trainers and I noticed that nobody had a written workout for their clients. Nobody really wrote down what their clients reps were or their sets or what weight they're using. So I was just wondering how important it is to track your clients workouts before they come in and then while you're working out with them also. Okay, so tracking workouts, I think it's important to an extent. It's important because you wanna be able to look back and you wanna show the client progress. Sometimes a client will be like, oh, am I doing better? And then you can show them and say, actually you did two more reps, you added weight, you're doing this different, that different. So that's where the importance is. But what some trainers do is they get so hung up on tracking all the details of the workout that they become so focused on progressing performance that they don't pay attention to other things. Cause progress with performance, strength, reps, that kind of stuff, it's not linear. In the beginning it is, but eventually it kind of waivers and if you train someone for three, four, five years, they're not gonna keep getting stronger.  So that would be the thing I'd pay attention to, okay? So yeah, you can track that stuff but don't let it be the be all end all.  Like those are the other things that you wanna pay attention to as well. I think it's especially important for new trainers. And I think it's a discipline that they should show professionalism by really caring by doing the work in terms of like being able to see patterns, be able to understand your client on that level and keep track and be able to refer to them later on. But as you grow and develop more as a trainer, you start to see these patterns automatically and you start to really peer into more of the behaviors that they're presenting and how to kind of move and do subtle things that will move the needle quite substantially more. But I still think this is one of those, this is one of those sort of pillars in the beginning that is just a discipline that's just a good practice. So you're able to understand people's individual variances and needs more specifically by writing down that data and not just winging it. I think if you were to look at probably all of us, if you were to peer in when we first started as trainers, I'm pretty certain that you would have caught all of us with clipboards, tracking. If you were to catch, if one of us were to train a client right now, you probably wouldn't see that. And that's just because years and years of understanding what Sal was talking about, like, okay, yeah, it's good to have this data so I get an idea when I see certain things, like, oh, wow, all these numbers are going down. That's a sign of this or that. You have to learn all that. Once you learn all that, then you see the cues on people because you've done it for so long. So when I was coaching, when I had trainers working underneath me, I would want that when they're first starting off. And the only other time I'd probably get onto a trainer who wasn't tracking like that is if I felt like they looked distracted while my client was training with them. That's the other thing that, the nice thing about carrying a clipboard and writing down, they look attentive where some trainers get lazy and they don't have a clipboard, they don't have a stopwatch, they're not really watching class form. They're sipping on their Starbucks or looking at the cute girl that walked by and it's like, that looks awful.  So then I got a problem with it. But if you've been doing this for long enough, like I wouldn't expect that, I didn't expect that from, I would never, when Justin worked for me, he had already been training a long time. I wouldn't come over to him and be like, hey, where's your clipboard? Why don't you write these stats down? I trust his ability to be able to guide his clients. But he was also very attentive with his clients. If he was leaning on the machine, sipping on a latte, I'd have a different conversation with him. Yeah, since you're new too, and I know you're mirroring or kind of following around other trainers, find the trainer that you admire the most, that you think is the most successful, both in terms of client satisfaction and business, and pay attention to what they're doing that you think is working. That's a really, really great way to learn. It doesn't mean you have to do everything that they do. In fact, they probably do stuff that doesn't work as well, but pay attention and say, what are they doing that's working? What are some of the things that makes this trainer successful with their clients? And it might just be that they can change their personality based on the client, or that they tend to be in a great mood, or that they have great record keeping. Pay attention to those things because that'll really help guide you. And you're also gonna see opportunities where you can sort of fill a lot of those gaps and where you don't see trainers doing certain things you think might help in terms of adding value. And your clients are gonna see that. And potential clients are gonna see what you do differently. And so I was always looking at what they weren't doing and what I could improve upon and show the level of service I could present that would just blow everybody else out of the door. And that's how I got most of my business. I 100% agree with that. I'm reading right now the whole question that you sent over and I see the angle you're coming from. That's how I would actually reframe the way you're looking at this.  They don't do a good job. Be like, oh yeah, there's a lot of opportunity for me to blow all these guys away because they're not doing it. For me, I came in, I had no education. I was going through my first national certification. I was only 19, just barely turned internal, 20 years old. So everybody was smarter and more experienced than I was. Yet within three months, I was the top trainer. And it was because of these types of things. Nobody was paying attention to their client. Nobody had energy when they were with them.  It was like, I saw all these opportunities on how to be more professional, more enjoyable trainer. And I wasn't even as good. They were all better than I was, but they were dropping the ball on so many things that I saw that were easy. It didn't take more education for me to show up on time. It didn't take more education or experience for me to be more in tune to my client while I was training them.  You'd be undeniable, totally. Because I'll tell you what, you go to Justin after he left 24-hour fitness, he went over to a private facility and they were all elite trainers. Talk about that's a worse situation for a new trainer because it's intimidating. You look at there and everybody, they're checking all the boxes. They're smart, they're warming up correctly. They're all on time. They're great at marketing themselves already.  I'm like, yeah, real soon here, I'm gonna be the top dog. Skye, do you have a Maps Prime and Prime Pro? Because those are really valuable programs for trainers. I do, so don't yell at me. Ah, not another one. I love that. Well, good job, Skye. Appreciate it, good luck. Good luck being a good trainer. Hey, and show them what time it is. Hey, I guarantee there's a probably a huge opportunity right there with Prime and Prime Pro. I bet very few people prime their clients before they work out. Take it through assessments, that's a huge differentiating factor. Can I ask one more question? Yeah, you can. So I've been having some trouble with the new clients that I'm getting about the balance between letting them kind of do what they want with the workout and them not really listening to what I have to say. So like, a goal would be strength and they kind of try to turn the work out into a body pump and I tell them how important the rest is. That's a confidence thing, Skye. It's common with new trainers. It is, but here's the thing though. This is also the motivation behind why we started this. I don't know if you followed. You know that we have a Mind Pump Clips YouTube channel? So it is, so we have three channels on YouTube and we just started the Mind Pump Clips where we break up these short things where, and I bet we've already covered this. Andrew, maybe Andrew can look for it while we're talking right now, but send a client us talking about it. You don't even need to, when I was in your spot when I was just coming up, one of the things I did really good was where I recognized, man, I didn't have the words to articulate this, but I knew someone who did and I wasn't afraid to use their, if I respected their opinion and like their knowledge, their experience, use us like that, send the clip to them. And if you're not getting through to them- Or watch it and learn how to communicate those things. Of course, you obviously are going to have to watch it yourself to find the clip, right? So, and that's how you'll learn though is you listen to us talk about it and explain it enough times. You'll start to put it in your own words, but don't hesitate to use all this free material that we're giving you guys as coaches and trainers.  Let them communicate what I'm trying to say to her. Yeah, but the confidence thing's a big one, Sky, because these people hire you and what they want from a trainer is they want the trainer to tell them the path and what they need to do, okay? And there's a line here, right? You don't wanna be a dictator, but at the same time, you gotta be confident. So, I've never had a client question me when I say, hey, come here, we're doing this exercise. Like, okay, I'll follow you. I wanna do 50 reps. No, no, no, we're gonna do five. And then we do it. Well, why are we doing five? And then I'll explain. Like, when they feel confident because you're confident, they'll do what you say.  So, you gotta be, you're the leader, you're the coach. You tell, and you can say that, by the way. When they do this and they push back, say, look, John, you hired me because you want me to guide you. You gotta do what I say. You gotta trust me and I promise you won't, I will never have to ask for you again to trust me if you just trust me this one time. Like, you gotta be confident like that because then the person's gonna wanna follow you. Nobody follows somebody that doesn't look like they wanna lead, right? So, that's the confidence you have to display. And look, you're the trainer. So, you gotta put that out there and then you're not gonna get those questions. That's really easily said by somebody who's very confident and has no problem talking to, though, okay? So, don't be afraid. I didn't say it's easy, but that's what you gotta do. Yeah, you'll get there. It's okay for you to utilize people like us until you build that confidence or while you build that confidence. Oh, that'll help because it's gonna give you the information that you're trying for sure. That's right, and that's exactly how I built my business was I didn't have the words yet. I didn't have the education yet. I didn't have the experience yet. I got it by leaning on people that I knew that were more experienced, more intelligent than I was. Listened and read and paid attention. And when I ran into situations like this where I couldn't get through to a client that I couldn't articulate what I was trying to get across, I would find it. And I'd sent back then, there wasn't YouTube videos I was sending, I'm sending like articles, you know? Read this article with it to explain what I'm trying to communicate to them, why I want them to do this. So, utilize this like that. It'll help build that confidence. All right. All right, thanks for calling in, Skye. Thank you guys so much for everything. Good luck. Thank you. Man, that's so common with young trainers or new trainers.  Look, what do you want to do? And they're like, well, I don't know.   You tell me, dude, you're the guy. So, you got to put that out as a trainer when you're training your clients. You have to put out there that you're going to do my workout. You hired me for it, and you got to be OK saying that. What's the worst possible thing that's going to happen? What's the client going to do? You still look strong by having, by knowing somebody in your network that has answers. That's right, and referring. Because you still have the answer. You're just directing it. Yeah, but the thing that I can totally relate to this, because I actually trained like, where I was at, I trained like a lot of engineers and really brilliant people. Rockets, I had rocket scientists.  And they want, sometimes, they want you to explain the detail. Not just tell me what to do. They want, why? Why, Adam, am I having to? Why do you want me to rest for two minutes when I'm not sweating very much? And I didn't have the words yet. Yeah, you got to have the information. So, I had the confidence. I had the confidence to say, we're going to do this. And I would do that. But then I'd get pushed back sometimes by these very intelligent people. When I wasn't there yet, that would go, well, why are we doing this? Why aren't I doing this instead? And then I'd be like, ah. Right, right, right. And so I can relate to not having the words. She doesn't strike me as a not-a-confident person, even the way she wrote her question and the way she's talking. I don't think she's not confident. But when you're that early on in your career, sometimes you don't have the words to explain while you're telling them. Well, knowledge contributes to confidence. Because then you know you have answers. So that's definitely a big component. She put the hustle on the education piece. Yeah. Just keep gathering information and data and like sign up for courses. And well, yeah, that's a good point. I mean, we've gone over a lot of almost everything.   A podcast. Yeah, 99% of the time it will pop up. You will find something. And then listen. Listen and learn right there. And then utilize that as a way to communicate those until you find the words and the confidence to be able to have to have that conversation. Look, if you like our show, head over to mindpumpfree.com. Check out our guides. We have guides that can help you with almost any health or fitness goal. You can also find all of us on social media. So Justin is on Instagram at Mind Pump. Justin, Adam is on Instagram on Mind Pump. Adam, and you can find me on Twitter at Mind Pump Sal. How do I incorporate cardio and not lose muscle? I've seen people do this before where they'll start to lose the sharpness of their muscles or they'll start to lose the sculpt a little bit. And that's disheartening. But if you do it right, then you minimize that muscle loss or that metabolism slow down. In fact, if you do it right, you can actually speed up your metabolism at the same time that you build stamina and endurance. You just have to be able to kind of program it properly. And the way to program it improperly is just go do it as much cardio as you can for as long as you can. Right.