The best time of the day to eat a high protein meal is breakfast time in the morning. High protein breakfast helps regulate insulin and blood sugar throughout the day, helps control your appetite throughout the day and is great for muscle recovery. It also helps you hit your protein targets because when you get behind the eight ball as the day goes on it's really hard to hit those targets especially if you need to eat a high protein diet. Is there is that a generic tip that you came up with or is there actually research support that it's yeah no lots of research so lots of studies showing that if you start the day with protein the ups and downs you get in blood sugar regardless of what you eat so if you eat high sugar later whatever the ups and downs are more are blunted in comparison to how they would be had you started the day with a high sugar high carbohydrate meal or no meal whatsoever so what it does is it helps regulate blood sugar throughout the day regardless of what you eat now why is that important because blood sugar highs and lows definitely contribute to behaviors that can like for example energy levels for sure energy levels irritability cravings and hunger so when you control those you're you're in a better place to make better food choices so that's one of the main reasons then of course protein yeah not to mention it's hard to get protein at the end of the day like if you're behind you know to get it in early you have a lot better chance of hitting your targets yeah and it's also I mean it really produces great satiety you know I've been working with my cousin and he's been having me do like his macros and stuff and I told you guys about this right I'm having him track a couple things and all I did was tell him try to hit 200 grams of protein a day he's he's a big dude about 215 and now the two weeks is up I had him do this for two weeks we tracked his body weight this whole time he got lean or any built muscle and he didn't do anything else he wasn't trying to eat less he wasn't trying to do anything else all he was doing is trying to hit 200 grams and he told me goes it's really hard to hit 200 grams a day and it makes me feel like not hungry and I said that's that's the whole point but he has to start his day with like 40 grams 40 grams at least otherwise you screw yeah I mean to me when I think of back on like all the the little hacks that were like somewhat basic that I implemented into my life that made a big impact on whatever my fitness goals were for sure the the dinner one that I talk about where I say you know plan your your your dinner that most people do that's kind of centered around for the most part like a meat right like a meat heavy type of dinner and just keep you know a good portion of that for breakfast and just add eggs eggs and cheese to it and have protein scramble yeah you got this protein scramble in the morning that's you know 40 50 grams of protein and it sets the tone for the day aside from the benefits of what it does for behaviors around cravings which to me is just like a side benefit my main reason for implementing that had nothing to do with that it was like man I struggled like he did to hit 200 something grams of protein every day if I did not actively go after 40 to 50 grams right out the gates otherwise I found myself at noon one two o'clock going oh shit I've had 10 grams of protein and I got a hundred ninety more on the next you know five to eight hours like that's tough to do right especially if you're eating you know relatively healthy and clean it's really tough one of the big challenges with breakfast is that breakfast tends to be the meal that's the most rushed right so if you think of lunch we tend to have a lunch break if dinner we're home we could take our time breakfast it's like get up I got a little bit of time got to go to work got to take the kids to school so the problem the challenge with a high protein breakfast is that protein you have to cook it it's not like in a box of cereal or whatever for the most yeah but we have situation okay we have like the creatures a habit like they're we're just gonna say their oatmeal's got 30 something grams I actually think that the challenge is more just around the marketing we've marketed to people at breakfast is this you know cereal waffle pancake car bloated meal yeah and even like the most breakfast food is like that is got some source of good protein or be a good choice be eggs and you know me eggs it takes to get 40 50 grams I ate eight eight eggs every day to hit yeah and that's just not you most people don't do that you're a bit of an anomaly if especially if you carve out the bodybuilding community outside of that I don't know anyway like there's no average American I'm like hey what do you have a breakfast like 12 eggs yeah nobody says that no so it's most people are eating regular oatmeal or they're you know eating cereal or they're having pancakes or they're having waffles all these are super and that's why I was gonna say because yes you could have a protein shake but then some people are like but I want to eat something I don't just want to have a protein shake creatures of habits great because it's oatmeal with 30 grams of protein so you literally fiber too yeah yeah fiber it's got probiotics right right buddy so you literally just you know I like the maple one whatever the maple I don't know I think the flavor is just maple add water or almond milk and then there you go and sometimes I'll do two of them I'll do two of them give me 60 grams of protein and good complex carbohydrates that I haven't done I haven't doubled it it's one's been enough for me I mean it's one it's it's good it's pretty dense too it's just one packet of yeah I know one of them one of them feels good I haven't done two yet I wonder how two would sit with me if easy to digest yeah well because it's the he uses the vegan protein in there right so I mean I'm sure that I would digest a lot better than like no doubling up of way yeah it's no problem you know speaking of eggs so I go to the grocery store yesterday this whole egg shortage thing is pretty pretty unnerving for me did you see Justin's meat yeah I just saw it I was in the restroom I started laughing oh dude I saw it oh you did not go there you did not go there yeah I'm going there I'm gonna throttle down was that a listener that sent it to you yes I love our audience dude that you know the coolest maybe the coolest thing about reaching it's fun the size that we have is that we have gathered enough thousands of people that are like-minded and so I don't even have to scour the internet sometimes for such good stuff they just I just open my dms and back back when I used to be on Instagram such a privilege people ask me where I used to get my memes I didn't have to find me no I know you had like four or five dudes that were like just hit cinema by the way I may be able to get back on Instagram we don't know what's gonna happen but I might be able to get back on I don't please I don't believe and if that happens oh what do you guys think if I get back on because I'm not going to start a new count but let's say they let me back on uh how long do you think it would take for me to get kicked off again well it depends are you gonna how hard are you gonna go out of the game yeah you know like are you gonna Twitter it I mean the way you did your your being I mean I imagine it won't be long before they get rid of you again so if you go that route um you know I the you know the thing that I think is most interesting to me about that whole situation is actually the how insignificant it is I mean kudos to the the model the business model that we built because obviously nine ten years ago even before mine pump existed you know I turned on YouTube and Instagram and Facebook with the intent of building a business around it and of course if I'm building a business around it I would think that it would require that monster to keep going to I had like a hundred something thousand followers and I was pretty active yeah for sure I they booted me and it really didn't touch the business yeah and I think if you own a business that you need you should set it up that way to where one leg of the business doesn't especially in social media because they control it right you don't own your content on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or whatever they do and that's a dangerous position yeah I think that's probably one of the biggest mistakes I see young entrepreneurs make right now is and it's tough because I get it right so one of the advice is I give around building a social media brand is to find which medium works best for you or do you do you say short and witty things go to Twitter if you like imagery and stuff like that go to Instagram if you like long form podcasts I mean long form written stuff do Facebook or do blogs like or sub stack a lot of people doing stuff yeah or you like talking for a long period of time do podcasts or YouTube and so what ends up happening is people move into one of those to have success and then they kind of just neither neglect the other ones and not realize the value I remember hearing Gary v years ago and I just think it's he's looked at social media as as acquiring real estate and that you want to have some sort of real it doesn't mean that you can't have a bulk of your investing in one state or in one type of product like say you know duplexes you have mostly there but to diversify amongst all of them in case we have like what happened to you were like you know your Instagram also gets shut down imagine if the entire business was attached to your Instagram I had a I had a buddy who was doing Facebook ads for his company and he went from making here's just another example you don't have to get kicked off he was making $700,000 a year in revenue from his Facebook account with ads they changed the algorithm he went from making 700 to 70 overnight overnight overnight I've heard a lot of those cases it's that's frightening it's just putting too much giving too much of your power away to someone else back back to the play by their rules back to the eggs I wanted I wanted to bring this up so because here's what's happening I don't know if it's happening everywhere but it's happening around here I go to the grocery store I walk in there's eggs and there's a sign that says only two items per customer so they're rationing eggs so people don't have me eight every morning yeah so I'm gonna have to go every day I was gonna say like what does that look like so you know when new people start shaming you I eat I don't throw away I'm gonna start start shaming you yeah somebody else is starving of eggs I would yeah right yeah I would try shaming me for eating eggs so the egg hoarder and show me your grocery cart no but here's what's dumb about this okay they're doing I know why they're doing this because they are trying to limit the amount of how the price fluctuates and how expensive they're gonna get yeah this is why that's dumb in their short term they think they're helping people but in reality what they're doing is they're not allowing the pricing signals to accurately reflect the supply and demand now why is that important because if we let the egg prices reflect the true supply and people buy them and then they run out and then the prices go up even more and then people buy them and then run out the prices go up even more that sends a very powerful signal to suppliers to make more and produce more eggs and more suppliers will enter into the market so if we let the prices accurately reflect what's going on we'll get the supply up faster than if we ration them this is just you know how okay so when I walk and I see them like oh this is so dumb people can't see beyond just the price point yeah you know I know so that's where we're at wanting to piss off Sal piss off do something with the free market right that shakes up the free market somewhere especially when that takes yeah now you're getting into my space it makes me so I'm an egg eater hey everybody welcome back here's the giveaway for today's episode maps anabolic a very popular maps workout program here's how you can enter to win leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop this episode also subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications if you win we'll let you know in the comments okay we won't let you know anywhere else just in the comments that's how you know you won also we have these three bundles going on right now each one of them gives you up to nine months of planned workouts so nine months long and they're all three hundred dollars or more off huge promotion because it's January so you want to take advantage of this if you're interested just click on the link at the top of the description below all right here comes a show dude I got it did you oh you guys didn't see this so I'm surprised you guys didn't see the she didn't tag anybody but which is probably why so in our forum one of our forum members very fit young lady followed map symmetry and she did dexa scans before and then two months later so 60 days okay this is all map symmetry so she followed map symmetry nothing else really changed diet was the same everything was pretty good she gained three pounds of muscle lost eight pounds of body fat which is great but here's the real cool thing you guys have done dexa scans before have you yes okay so dexa scan will show um you know like lean body mass on one side versus the other side yeah so to give you an example her left leg had 18.7 pounds of lean body mass her right leg had 19.2 pounds of lean body mass after map symmetry the left leg 19.1 pounds of lean body mass the right leg 19.2 almost became completely balanced wow same thing happened to her arm sick where the arms went from the left being smaller than the right after map symmetry right and left were identical so it literally balanced out her right and left as evidenced by did you see that the Doug I was trying to find out the form I wanted to see an example did you see a Doug yeah I don't her name is Amber Horton and she's in our private forum she posted what a cool way to yeah assess that I do I encourage people if you have if you have access to the dexa scans the only thing that'll show oh you pulled it up there Doug what what does the right uh the right the left arm I kind of cut it off did it show there that's uh that's Andrew not Andrew sorry six pounds of lean body mass on the left arm six point three on the right arm after map symmetry six point three six point three so everything literally balanced out that's cool you know it's cool 18.7 19.2 then 9.1 19.1 now how big of a difference you think this will make on things like barbell squats deadlifts bench press right of course yeah you're much more balanced like your outputs gonna be louder because it's like you know you're getting it from both sides equally now here's something else about this that's that dawned on me when I saw this because she's obviously very fit she's not a beginner so she she's gonna look like that because she did map symmetry she's already really fit and you'll see if you watch this on youtube we'll post her picture but here's what's interesting after a certain point when you've been working out for a while it's really hard to build muscle this is in a phenomenal way to uh basically introduce novelty and bring up a weak body part and then just add muscle to your body had she not followed map symmetry she would not have built as much muscle because her body was already so accustomed to doing things bilaterally you know what I'm saying yeah so because she did the unilateral training and the way we design map symmetry is really bringing balance between the right and left because she did that and it was so novel not only did she balance right and left out she also built more muscle had she not done that at all had she followed some other program even one of our other program right she would have kept prioritizing the same way she'd lived which one would build up the stronger side and not necessarily get that kind of game isn't that awesome yeah yeah I didn't even see if anybody's following map symmetry try that go get a desk to sand before and after and see how balanced out it makes the right and left and then of course aesthetically speaking when things are more balanced um we all know that symmetry well we don't all know but science shows that symmetry is a very strong predictor of what you know people would consider beauty right or aesthetics so it really balances out the body yeah remarkably isn't that cool wow that's really cool yeah I thought that was uh that was pretty rad dude um did you guys see so okay I'm not sure of you are familiar with this one guy who got like a viral video out there he was a homeless guy his name was Kai I'm Kai Kai can I get spelling for straight out of dogtown KAI um he's famous for I guess like Kai the homeless guy yeah he Kai the homeless guy he was um he had this interview and um was I guess his his famous catchphrase was like smash smash smash smash smash smash and he was on like Jimmy Kimmel show and all this stuff because he saved some lady uh that was um I guess getting like um abuse or something from this guy the story is crazy it goes back to like show you like how as as media picks up on these kind of like viral sensation people like they don't do a lot of good investigation and homework on the actual character of the person first uh and so it unfolds later and you start to find out like what a absolute creep this guy was oh really yeah and like how so so everybody was like Kai's great yeah originally he was like in a van with this guy who I guess so the narrative was like he this guy in this van this um hit uh some some other guys this black guy and then it kind of made it like a um like a racial thing like he was like targeting like this this black guy and trying to to hurt him with with the van and then gets out and then um this lady comes over to help seeing things that's just an accident and then the guy gets out and and starts attacking the lady uh that's trying to help and then Kai the homeless guy that's in the car gets out and then like he has a hatchet on him and so then he hits the blunt side of the hatchet on top of the guy's head like twice and then turns it and hits it with the other side which then leaves like a gouge in the guy's head anyway the guy goes to the hospital all this stuff the the media picks it up is like this heroic story right like like Kai like saying this lady hold on that was the good thing I mean he defended her but holy shit he used exactly exactly right so so a little bit of a red flag like a little violent you know like he's got a little bit of violent tendencies here he just swept over because yeah whatever they just wanted to create and run with that can you be pulling up some articles from me or something like this why he's talking about this yeah so it's really a fascinating um human psychology kind of like documentary it goes through this whole thing of like uh how he just was this crazy rambunctious kid who would like so you get one story from one person that was like his mom was abusive by locking him in his room and uh and then her story is that he was so unpredictable and crazy that she had to lock him in the room otherwise he was going to hurt himself and other people and so it's like he's a convicted murderer yeah oh and he's a hitchhiker not a not a bum he's not homeless oh he's a hitchhiker whatever that was the that was like the title of like it was Kai the homeless guy but yeah he's he's a hitchhiker wow okay so it still makes sense so he's just he's probably he's a nomad right but he's a nomadic yeah he's not like he's right right right where was this out of jesson uh la i believe and was the this is like a net they did like a netflix documentary on it yeah uh yeah so the netflix documentary gets into all the details and everything but i just i thought it was crazy because it's like he's this viral sensation and then like and everybody was gonna pay him so much money to be like interviewed and all the stuff and half the story is just all these like networks trying to get him and he wouldn't like agree to it and then finally one person can find him because he's like this uh nomadic hitchhiker guy that like nobody could find and so this this guy like that was his uh like like had some connection to like a Jimmy Kimmel show finally gets him and then gets him on the show and then uh later on like his rise to fame just like completely i'm always super skeptical of of so i i think it's so interesting how we um you know glorify the famous actors and actresses and you're we're quick to jump on because it makes a good story it's like oh my god or even like when people ask me questions about like you know you know what athletes do you admire or what you know it's like right there's i just i don't admire athletes i mean i i respect and think it's amazing what they do i don't by any means for their athletic skill yeah i don't think anything from from what they do on the court i think it's uh you know like michael jordan is that's where i get my how to be a better father yeah like i don't admire him right like i respect his game and i'm like wow that's crazy that's so sick like that's cool but i don't because of that what his his discipline to become great at a sport or great at acting or fill in the blank i don't all sudden translate into like i should admire this person you know or i should emulate it also does who they are as a person because they have this one characteristic yeah and it doesn't mean they're great anything else right so i mean they have one great it is great characteristic that made them like stand out from everybody else but they could be terrible at all these other things so you know how how weird is it that a few like a i don't know i don't know six decades ago or so it was not uncommon for people to hitch rides i know like people used to hitch hike all the time oh yeah all the time you know it's funny about that too is like we didn't have like that immediate information access either like i guarantee it was way more dangerous than they way more they presented it back even in the 70s right that's like the start of all the serial killers it was so accepted this is real now this is a toy that was so dangerous they created a toy in the 60s i don't remember the name of it maybe duck could find it but literally a kid would fill out a form with their name and their address and whatever and they'd leave it somewhere and people would the toy essentially was that it hitchhiked all the way back to you so you'd travel somewhere drop it off and then people would pick it up and oh i'm going in that direction and they pass it along and then maybe you come and get it and be like oh it came back to me and then parents realized this is my kid's name and address so that was a real thing yes look that up what is that i didn't even know that was the kids hitchhiking toy i mean i i think i've told you guys before in high school it was is tommy here i got your toy hey tommy yeah when we were in high school a common prank we used to do is uh because it was that common that there was always a hitchhiker in town always like all through high school you every day you saw at least one that's how common it was it was that common and i don't know if that's because where i grew up oakdale was this like commuter town where like it's the last main stop before i never really saw much before you go to yosemite or if you could be going the other direction before you go to the bay area it's like this first one so i think a lot of people would hitchhike from there um so in high school it was it was just like a common prank that you you see one and then you you pull over like 50 yards up and you hey come on and you get them to run and then you take off it's like a stupid high school kid thing you know right of course hilarious to get him like they'd be running with their bags and shit falling and so that come on all excited yeah that's so mean i mean it's not if they were a serial killer right if you have a different view on it if there's a good chance one of them was a serial killer that we statistically speaking yeah i did it that much that we for sure sped off on at least one serial killer i'm trying to find it because i'm trying to find the name of the toy i'm helping you look here so either so so you're in this situation right so either the hitchhiker because usually they're armed right so this guy had uh an axe right had a hatchet on him right or you're the driver that has like a gun or like whatever in there and it's like what are the motivations of both parties you know they're coming into that situation it's just like it's all bad oh that's yeah but you know what else what other toy was totally changed you guys ever try to buy a slinky it's not at all the same what like the latest ones there's they're plastic metal because they don't make the real heavy metal like amazing ones that we have but is there any other logic other than it's cheap no it's because the metal was people kids would wrap around each other's necks is that why yeah no bro you can't buy i know i'm not disagreeing you can't buy but i would think it's because it's expensive i think the metal was sharp and kids were hurting each other because i'm pretty sure my brother said that to me i don't know i'm still trying to find his hitchhiker thing it's it he's made up two things today in the center already it's real things it's real i bet andrew find it it's an old toy i want to say from the 60s or 70s i didn't cancel i've never heard that yeah no no so the original slinkies are like heavy and i know i know because you watch them go the stairs and they so i would imagine the plastic one won't even know they don't i've actually i've actually tried to use the plot they suck they totally they don't have enough yeah it's like what's the point they still make metal see yeah well go find one of the somewhere i couldn't find it's where's the money bro it's because they're amazon it's because they're cheap well i went i went to the plastic because that that much metal compared to that much plastic is nothing now it's like sense on i was like oh this will be fun and i'm like look at this is not going to be fun this is stupid did you find his game i'd be pointing to the second thing you made up no i found the slinkies so now it's like science tools or whatever that's oh the original you gotta buy the original that is stupid okay so well give it is it he's you're not gonna let him lie twice in a podcast are you find it find the other one so well keep looking i couldn't find it two lies in one podcast we might have to go to the dark west that one i couldn't i couldn't find it anyway speaking of homeless people did you guys see that that viral clip yeah that viral clip of that that store owner in san francisco oh i was gonna bring that up okay so that was on my notes yeah oh so they talked about that um on the olympic yeah that's why it was on my notes can you hear about this no no tell me there's this art gallery owner it's a small business and just you know how san francisco is lately it's just the homeless people camp out anywhere and the police can't do anything about it and yeah they just kind of take doing drugs so this person's business is just tanking which first of all owning a business storefront in san francisco anyway is like you're probably going to fail it's hard yeah but now on top of it they have she's got this this business owner has homeless people camped out in front can't do anything about it can't get rid of them so the viral video is them coming out with a water hose and spraying oh i saw it blast the guys blasting the land i mean the guys on all in i mean sal obviously presented it to support our argument um for sure the way he presented it it was presented different on the other the way it was presented on the all-in podcast i mean that you're spring jason yeah cal canis presented it who's a bit of the you know the the woke one of the four of them and he presented is like never is it okay to like spray a homeless person i can't believe he did that and then the other guys think they had a nice little debate and conversation about it like but if there was a poo on you well that's i mean that's the other guys were like well you know what we don't know is what how did it escalate to that i mean do you think the store owner just walked out and saw a homeless guy on the curb and then just started blasting him or had there been a series of altercations and conversations and please leave my store and hey i'll shit on i'll shit on the front of your door if i want like you don't know what was said and who's in the right or wrong in that situation i don't know if i'd go out and like i don't know how i'd react if i had a small business with someone i think that's mean or whatever i don't think that's cool either oh i know for sure i would do that if that person escalated it in other ways too because you're not gonna what you're not gonna do is beat him up no right so like if if literally if he won't move he shit in front of like as a f you like if i said please move away from my store like your people are afraid to come in because you're you're camping on the floor in front of my store and he didn't and then i asked again and he goes i'll shit in front of your door then he shits in front of my door i would absolutely spray his ass with a hose yeah that's a likely scenario i mean i unfortunately like i used to be very like i'm gonna help and like do whatever i can and you know when you live in it it's it gives you a completely different perspective well you you think about your family you think about your own business and then you really and you're also it's also frustrating because what they need is mental health services that's what needs to help with drug abuse well there's the majority of them that's the compassionate less of like down and out and more of mental illness a hundred percent that's the compassionate argument there because right because even even the statement i said i would absolutely spray him if they did x y and z i mean does that story change if they're like crazy if they're crazy right and they're mentally ill and i do that right i don't know i think when you're in that situation you if i if i were to escalate it to that point i probably i probably tried other ways first you know to get the person to do it and then they have escalated to a point where i can't take it to that level because i'll be a really bad person if i get physical yeah it's a touchy touchy subject for people that are on the outside especially because like too i've seen businesses decimated downtown sanikers because people would literally vandalize every single day every single day yeah and like go through the trash and then like like put their shit and smear it on their windows and like just like abhorrent stuff this is a it's a mental health and drug abuse crisis that's being politicized as a housing shortage no and a job health shortage it's not it's not shortage of jobs it's not that there's a shortage of housing it's that they that there's lots of mental illness and then the and especially in san francisco the ease of access to some of these drugs in fact they will give you drugs they will they they will put you in an area and they'll give you a supply of drugs and money madness and so you'll actually there's actually people in the view and and they'll take them down on social media but the interviews if you see them before they get taken down are these homeless people like oh yeah like why would i leave they i get free drugs i get money to buy food there's no stipulation they're not saying hey you can't do drugs here if we feed you or whatever so um there's an issue there and i think they need to be put in mental health services i wouldn't mind paying for that at all right because that would help the issue otherwise we're stuck with this like what do you do harvest and agree yeah that's the only solution i see and it's just really that everything i've seen personally and like everybody lives within the proximity of it it's like it's just it's not there's not a lot of them looking for aid and help to get on their feet or anything which is what you would hope you're not in the right state of mind so to ask them if you're if you're if you're in that place if you've ever dealt with somebody like a friend or family member that's really addicted to substances or is just not all there they don't want help or they don't even know that they need help or yeah they think you're crazy so it's like what do you do what do you do at that point right so it's a tough yeah really really tough situation uh anyway i was reading this article on at home workouts and the pandemic which now we've obviously been out of it for a little while but during that period of time a lot of people obviously started working out at home they recently did another survey of these people the majority of them 60 something percent say i'm going to continue just to work out at home and not go back to the gyms i mean it happened to me remember if you remember oh you were against it i was i was uh totally you know what i did it just conditioned me and i said uh at this point and i i still stand by the original things that i said about why i like going to the gym the truth is it forced me to figure out what it was like to not have that and so i've learned to focus on the aspects i like about have just working out at home convenience yeah you know and so now i'm like well you know like where i'm at in my life right now if i was like competing for a show okay it would be a different story i would need that external motivation and the hype of someone else training near me and like i don't give a shit you know or i'd want the diversity of all the different machines like that with my prx setup i mean i got everything that i need to keep a healthy strong fit physique and so it's like and i and ever since especially since we've done maps 15 and stuff like that i've really kind of adopted this i'm in a really different place lifting wise in my life than i've ever been it's it's been solely motivated off of how i look for most of my life and i really say fatherhood has really shifted that more than anything although it's already after bodybuilding i really wanted to get away from that because i got really tired of being like you know pigeonholed into being the bodybuilder guy so there was a part of me that like revolted you guys think of being objectified for your life i did not get i didn't like being so sexy i didn't know not that at all that part i liked i did not get i did not like it i did not like being labeled though as like the bodybuilder guy because it's just not who i was and so i think it started there and then the pandemic fatherhood all kind of pushed me into this different direction and now you know my training truly is to compliment my my life versus like this thing that i was doing for such a long time to obtain kind of a look now you knew logically that the tons of variety at the gym with all the different machines all that stuff you knew logically because we would talk about this that it really wouldn't make a difference in terms of what kind of results you can get on stuff but now that you're doing it and you're working out because what do you have you have a prx rack barbell weights dumbbells adjustable bench right easy crowbar and stuff like that basic home gym stuff yeah yeah yeah now that you have that and you're going through it like is anything surprising you about how like you don't need tons of things or whatever well because you knew it already well you know what it what is what is interesting and so i think the biggest thing that i that i noticed is this okay so let's say i went to the gym and it was an unmotivated day and i think you can relate to this because i think we've talked about this before unmotivated or just not feeling great and so that might be a day where i spend 50 minutes of like machine stuff oh i see how getting a little pump and so that calling work out that obviously doesn't happen now so if i have an unmotivated day i'll actually probably train less time but i'll do one or two very effective movements i will deadlift or i will so the efficiency is much higher yeah so it's actually kind of interesting the like what happens now like the if i drove to the gym and i did not want to be there and i got there i stay there still for an hour yeah but then the the way i mosey around the gym the exercises that i choose or you know cable stuff just sit on a machine yeah yeah just kind of but get a little pump and then feel like okay i did the work today's i didn't i did not not go where now i won't stay in my garage gym for an hour just this just because i went there i'll be like i am not i don't feel like it today but you know what i can do three sets of squats yeah and i'll then i'll make this commitment that i'm only gonna do that and then i'll go do that many times that leads to another exercise or two or like more of a routine like maps 15 looks like and i end up doing that and i find that i'm i'm getting probably better benefits because of so crazy the extra exercise selection which nothing i could have i don't think i could have foreseen that until i just kind of went through it and then being totally honest with myself and removing it and going like okay what are the pros and cons of of this you know having just this prx situation at home and not getting the gym like i i i know that i admittedly like and think is superior i i have found that there's benefits that i didn't think i was going to see from having the i've noticed the same it's very much more of an efficiency thing like in that environment because it's like i'd if you're in the actual like commercial gym it is it's nice to kind of just drift around and like try all the different types of machines or do things you like wouldn't typically do but for me and like my home gym it's like okay i'm here usually is like a five by five or like i'm just doing the compound lifts and i'm out you know it's like i'm i'm not like no fluff like my workout time has gone almost in half it's like 30 minutes or it's the 15 minute protocol have you guys try you guys haven't tried the all-day workout yet right where were you i've done so i haven't done exactly like a protocol like you have but already a few times katrina and i have done these like we go up three three to four ten minute bouts isn't it wild yeah no i mean i love it that's what i mean like it's my way of training is really it's very unstructured in the sense that i'm not like following this protocol of this is what exercise i do on these days and rest periods and this that it's like i have more of this attitude of i understand very much so the value of all these movements and sometimes i only commit to going in and doing that one movement and what that leads to many times either me staying in there longer doing more or i felt so good the rest of my days energized i find another 10 minute break i come back in do another movement and then go back to my day do my thing come back do another movement people need to try this if you have a home gym this is hard to do with a gym gym but if you have a home gym what i would do is every other hour i would do like three sets of two exercises and they were big gross motor movement movement so like squats and bench press and i would do that every other hour starting at 9 a.m and i would stop somewhere around 4 or 5 p.m and i'd feed myself in between make sure i have protein carbs the whole deal the intensity was moderate so i wasn't hammering myself the total volume that i would add up of squats and bench press for example and that's in that scenario was so much higher than i would ever do during a regular workout because it was so spread out i didn't feel nearly the fatigue that i should have and some weird things would happen i would get stronger halfway through which is weird after three or four of them i was like i all of a sudden got hella stronger and then the days afterwards i felt like it's that feeling you get when you do like a new super effective routine where you could tell like oh i think i built something where i it's really wild i i if you have all day and you have a home gym you got to try it out really crazy do you think there's a little bit of a a biased for us because we have so many years of experience in lifting that you know that's and maybe if i was like a 20 year old with only a couple maybe a year let's say under my belt of lifting and i was following a similar protocol that i kind of do right now which is like i said this you know end to do an exercise out and do you think that because i've spent so much time under the iron i've built so much muscle over the years that that's all it takes is a couple big gross motor movements and it kind of wakes up my entire cns and my all my muscles and it's like oh we remember this and then it comes back on faster i mean that would be true with any routine but i you know i'll make this argue but i mean that's i'm saying that because of that i i see even more value from that and maybe when i'm 20 i'd be like this isn't doing anything you know what i'll make this argument imagine all of us were training a kind of a relatively new 20 year old kid maybe some athletic background but no strength training now imagine doing an hour workout with them versus three 20 minute workout spread out morning afternoon evening same volume same everything do you think you would be able to get more out of the three 20 minute workouts or out of the one 60 minute workout yeah three 20 yeah so that's how i feel too i feel like fatigue because fatigue is a strength and muscle building killer this is why when you that's why you rest between sets that's why you so i feel like you probably would get better results performance would be way better the only reason why nobody works out that way is it's extremely inconvenient nobody wants to work out three or four times that's why i say take a day you have a home gym and then experiment take the day off and be like i'm going to do this all day and in between i'll eat and watch tv that's what i would do and i did it a few times with jessica and it was it was crazy you know speed of that you see the i don't know who shared it i saw it on social media it's making its rounds right now uh and of course it's how this this is how this stupid game works you know in the last i would say year or two i mean we were talking about cold immersion and cryotherapy you know when we first started this thing eight years ago but it seems like it's become very popular in the last year to two years and so like everybody's ice bathing now right like everybody is uh in the fitness space and then the only people that are not are the people that are taking the counter stance on it and so there's now that wave of people that are trying to take a stance against it and either one minimize the value of it or two even trying to take a stance on how it's uh impeding on recovery and stuff have you seen the yeah like there was this one just and shared with me where this they were trying to say they were comparing active recovery to cold water immersion which i think is an unfair comparison nothing nothing is going to substitute or nothing that we know of will substitute things like active recovery or like strength training for example uh occlusion training or bfr blood flow restrictive training it builds muscle really lightweight will it replace traditional strength training no i think it's an interesting thing you can add to your current team so i think cold water therapy i don't use it for recovery no i don't think that's a good way to use it unless you're an athlete that's like at the limit and you're doing double days or you have to double days exactly yeah exactly you're gonna play in the morning play again in the afternoon and you want it you got to be able to perform again that's different but for most people cold water therapy forget the recovery benefits it's for immune boosting it's to help help regulate your central nervous system it's for the energy boost you're using it wrong in my opinion if you're doing it for the recovery oh yeah it's reminded me a lot of like fasting and yes you know and like how people are totally looking at my loss and yeah it's the total wrong way to to really like put a lens on it because there's so many health benefits to cold water immersion like for overall uh health and immunity and um you know just like a lot of of other like holistic health benefit other than just like gaining muscle and so like if you're just like a bro that just wants to build muscle by all means necessary those are really the ones that will pay attention to a study like that and then be like oh well this is like completely worthless yeah yeah well it's it's such a good analogy to compare it to the fasting thing because I think both those things have become popular for the wrong reasons yeah like fasting became popular for the weight loss benefits but if you've listened to us talk about it for a long time it's not the benefits at all same thing for the cold immersion cold immersion has become popular for its recovery you know and stuff like that and what athletes have used it in sports for so long but that's never been the reason why we share and talk about it and so it's funny that the the angles that people will try and take to be you know counter are the wrong ones in my opinion it's just like well I mean I guess you can you can make that argument as far as it hindering recovery because I can I by the way too I could argue with the other way too you can argue it both ways because you could argue that it may it may dampen the the recovery process by doing it right after but if it also boosts your immunity makes you feel better potentially helps you sleep later on that night as those overall healthier person yeah right so I'll use it I'll use an analogy okay so NSAIDs right non-steroidal anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen right that blocks to an extent the inflammatory process obviously they're anti-inflammatories but it blocks the the inflammatory process that leads to muscle growth in other words if you work out and then take a bunch of ibuprofen after you're going to blunt somewhat the muscle building process so then you got the meat heads or like never take ibuprofen whatever okay well what if you got a really bad headache and you're going to bed and you can't sleep and you're like forget it I'm not taking ibuprofen so I'm just not going to sleep and where do you recover the most sleep yeah so so that you got to weigh it out that's right and so then maybe taking it will help you sleep which is going to outweigh the whatever potential you know muscle building signal blunting effects of the NSAID right dude nuance is just too hard right I think that's what it is yeah you know what if it can't fit in a caveman just can't fit in a TikTok video get rid of it booga booga muscle just fucking idiots any chance to make fun of the body building easy you asshole I'm just like I get just cringe dude it's hard for me I'm sorry hey that tell you guys I don't know if I brought this up on a previous podcast that tell you guys about what I read this article about neanderthals and homo sapiens did I bring that up before no did you talk about I don't know I don't think so started let me hear it okay so you know how like most humans have some neanderthal DNA so they'll test there's some some regions of the world where they don't find any but in many parts especially in Europe when they'll test our DNA they'll see that there's some neanderthal DNA so they know that you know that our ancestors and neanderthals because they're they're due to different they did the dirty they're different species of you know homo erectus or whatever right of primates that they at some points mated and then for some reason the neanderthals went extinct and there's a lot of theories as to why the neanderthals went extinct first off they thought oh well we're so much smarter but the reality is there's lots of evidence that they were very complex they were intelligent they developed tools so they were pretty smart themselves so they're like okay well like what was it were we better hunters well there's evidence that there were very successful hunters they were quite strong actually sturdier than than we were so there's this new theory that I read so when a male neanderthal because they look at the DNA right if a male neanderthal mates with a female homo sapien that they can't have a baby it doesn't work but if a male homo sapien mates with a female neanderthal she can get pregnant so they think what happened was homo sapiens were taken over their trials bred them yeah just taking their chicks and just breeding yeah outbred them so basically we just had made a bunch of how do you how do you make peace with like stacking theories on theories on theories to come I mean we just talked the other day as I'm talking I'm looking at your face because you know you know okay and I'm and let me make this clear how do they know I read all these same things so I mean I just we just we just that's the way to approach it it's fun it's fun to try and take wild fucking gas and and and say maybe this maybe that but it's like it has something to do with the Y chromosome we just talked about we just talked about DNA that we share with certain animals and digestive systems that are completely opposite of other and it's like we make these like oh there's a there's a fraction of this DNA that we share with this therefore we probably fucked all of them and like out of competition and then then probably this happened and then that happened it's like whoa dude like where did we get all of that from because we have a tiny strand of DNA that we share with that but then we we totally is don't science version of like demons banging seriously the people you know it's fun this is a part of people I mean I grew up the the in a hardcore religious home right so I understand I understand the knock on on that right I but this is the knock I have on scientism is that people adopt these ideas and theories and are so staunch about it because it's science-based and it's like you're no different than the religious fanatic when you talk like that do you not hear that yeah no I know when people get all like like uh like sure about it no that's that's what happened but well we know I know you're not like that came up with our ideas hilarious to me because it's not science because what we're doing is we're speculating and creating narratives for things that we weren't there to actually prove and and on that fact like that we actually do prove the science like say it's like um what do you call that kind of science it's geological kind of science like so you get like dr robert shock right that goes to uh the sphinx and and proves that there was water erosion water erosion and it gets like acclaimed by all the rest of the geologic scientists like and he gets an award and everything but egyptologists but like historians they all call him a quack in that like because they don't want to change the narrative that they've created already these jobs because they've already attached so many layers of theories on it and you that's the human if you should rub that theory it's like oh fuck that unravels all these other yeah just well yeah you know how long ago egypt was had that had water like that way before the egyptians so then if that's water that's like the the the oldest thing the sphinx they think that's like the oldest thing uh visibly like uh uh stash that we have yeah so so basically if that's water erosion and it's true then the sphinx existed there before the egyptians yes did anything maybe they found it and that's why they built exactly they built their civilization around it look at adam right now and then probably why they worshiped them as gods yeah we'll go back to teppy fucked up everything for them too because it's like it just predates everything they had even before that so it's like what do you how do you reconcile i mean i think my my point of like even challenging or saying or questioning any of that it's not that like i'm not like necessarily arguing or debating that that's not potentially true it's just that you know it's so interesting to me i find it interesting the especially in the science community obviously i'm in a lot of that right so i see in here and it's and coming from somebody who was from a very religious background i see so many parallels and it's and the irony is how how staunch each of them are about each other and this is like how how much alike because it's a reflection of your own behaviors yes you don't like your bad behaviors so to project that on other people two things have you ever seen the meme that someone made that said if scientists used bones of common animals and put them together the way that we did with dinosaurs this is what we think they would look like you ever seen that so they take like elephant bones or like a bird and because we don't know what dinosaurs look like we guess yeah what they look could have been covered in feathers and colorful hilarious so you'll see that's great animals you know of yeah like oh that's so that's them like recreating what they look like yeah so that's hilarious so okay so i've heard of that before here's here's uh just to back up kind of what you're saying adam so obviously our expert you know field of expertise is health and fitness you the science space when it comes to nutrition has been off so many times and yet they were so sure that they were right yeah it's ridiculous now we now have a food pyramid did you guys see this thank you for bringing this up they this is absurd they are they created an algorithm or they're created a way to rank foods in terms of healthiness quote unquote healthiness and according to the way that they rank foods fruit loops is healthier than steak okay or eggs so immediately healthier throw it out okay so i i shared with you guys already if you haven't looked at it um i haven't read the full article so i don't have a very strong position either way on this but there's a doctor who i don't like actually he's annoying yeah he is very annoying but he's gonna shout out it'll be our shout out for today yeah i just i just i whether he thinks he's helping or not i mean first of all if you wear a lab coat and a stethoscope on tick talk videos you automatically should get slapped in my opinion just i don't we should do i don't give a fuck how smart you are if you have to wear a lab coat and a stethoscope in your tick talk videos can we you should get slapped videos with this with the with like a stopwatch hanging around our neck and a dumbbell on our shoulder it would be like me it would be like me holding my bodybuilding trophy while i'm talking outside like so this is how you carve so i go you know i'm saying just hold it you know i'm saying like cradle every time i talk on the podcast like what are you doing i don't look nothing this is just i conveniently hold this it's weird this is a hangout big video so he what he in his defense probably his tinder profile yeah he's got his stethoscope yeah for sure it is for sure it is yeah now that i'm done punking him let me give him his flowers i he did go in there and explain that it's being this joe rogan and everybody's taking it out of context because when you actually go in and read the actual paper what people are it's uh they they they took it category by category so it's not literally steak is technically healthier than it's got a better rating this in that category sure so in and that's what it and so there's just saturated fat is the category for that is that what they know they create their their standards watch the watch the video i sent over to you unless duck and we watch the food is very complex however this is actually quite simple okay i'm gonna say it right here right now here's your food pyramid whole natural foods processed foods that's it if you if you avoid processed foods and you eat pretty much almost all of your food comes from whole natural sources you will solve 90 percent of your dietary problems that is it right there why you don't overeat you're gonna eat nutrient dense type foods they're produced more satiety it's just and it's very simple that's it right there whole natural foods processed foods if you avoid those you're fine these food pyramids that they make are so silly where they put well we know we know that that will never be a popular because the amount of money oh my god it's all in processed foods yeah i mean when you when you look at like people like lobbyists and so i don't mean you gotta think like pharmaceutical number one and then what i would think that processed foods has got to be up there in the top three or five just look at your kids cafeteria yeah i mean they're they're not gonna let good and so and i think you brought that point up justin so let's play the other side that you know everybody has misinterpreted this article the other day if it can be misinterpreted that easy from a bunch it's the institutions now that that go off of the standards and so my my buck to the system is always like where that ends up and that ends up in our kids and ends up in our education system it ends up like it is just all misinformation and it just leads people straight confused yeah everybody confused all right i want to give a shout out so people watching right now on youtube are probably wondering why we slowly started to look like werewolves and why now we look we look good again yeah teen wolf yeah it's because we have so vicky for one week vicky she owns faded barbershop uh in san jose and morgan hill she's exceptional with what she decides ever she yeah she hooks us up makes us look uh not like like homeless werewolves um and so that's why we look good but that's who i want to give a shout out on instagram at uh faded barbershop i want to give her a shout out because she i think you i think her shout out should come with a asterisk or like a well no no buyer be follower beware is her barbershop that she oh you're doing the barbershop not her personal barbershop because she goes she goes kind of hard bro she goes kind of hard on the on the instagram too well i think she's been shadow man at least four or five times and so vicky vicky gave her last fuck a long time ago yeah that's why we love her though for sure and when you guys go in the shop she's the sweetest person too she gets us a lot when people come to the shop and she doesn't know till way later that they are they came from mind pump so make sure you say hi to her yeah yeah yeah say what's up to her and say you listen to mind pump hey check this out there's a company we'll work with called paleo valley they make paleo inspired supplements one of my favorites is their bone broth protein they have a chocolate flavored bone broth protein that i swore to god tastes like chocolate donuts it's the best tasting literally the best tasting protein powder i've ever had and because it's bone broth it's super easy to digest like i could take high doses of this protein and have zero gut issues total no gut issues whatsoever with it so anyway go check this company out check out their products go to paleo valley dot com forward slash mind pump then use the code mind pump 15 for 15% off your order all right here comes the show our first caller is jordan from california jordan what's happening man how can we help you hey guys it's super cool to meet you uh big fan listen for like just about a year now um but yeah my buddies are gonna be a gel i got to meet uh tiny beard and the gang so pretty neat yeah man um but yeah uh for real though you guys have been great like i've only been working out for about a year though but found you guys pretty early on so it's been huge help and i feel like i've kind of missed a lot of the uh ways you could go wrong when starting out so big thank you to you guys awesome cool thanks man yep i'll give you a little bit of background so like i said i started working out it's almost it'll almost be a year middle of February would be a year um i when i started i was a 165 and i'm 62 so pretty pretty skinny and i did a bulk to 196 and then finish that because i was about as big as i wanted to be at that point and then i was gonna lean out so i started to cut about three months ago and i've lost i'm right well right now i'm 184 and i've been losing about a pound a week which i've heard is pretty is that kind of the benchmark or whatnot but uh i don't feel like i've been any leaner like i'm just losing weight but not seeing any getting any more lean so i just wonder what i'm doing wrong this is such a classic um do you remember we talked about that we've talked about this before uh i don't know if we've talked on the show or not as much but uh it's such a a mind fuck when you shift from you know bulking to leaning out and that first you know even couple months like you just feel smaller you do you and let me explain what's going on right so you come on you you you're in a high calorie diet right before this so you're your glycogen levels are your stores are filled out so your muscle bellies are filled out you got all these extra calories that means your body's holding on to more water you've got more carbohydrates in you and so you you're filled out and then you make this transition like okay i'm gonna go on this cut and the first thing that really goes is all that glycogen and water and so that gets pulled out and what it actually makes you look like is it looks like you lost muscle size and so it's it's a bit of this mind fuck of like oh my god i'm not and you don't see your abs popping anymore what you see is like your arms look smaller your legs look smaller and so you think oh my god this sucks like i go on this cut and by the way this is super common for lean guys who want to build muscle they go on the bulk and they go on the cut and it's the reason why a lot of them can't stick with the cut and and this was me for a decade plus is i'd go on a cut for a minute just like you're right right now and then i'd be like fuck this like i'm i'm not getting any leaner i'm just getting smaller i'd rather be a little fatter with more muscle and so you go back the other direction it's part of the process and is and let me tell you it's one of them for me it was one of the most difficult things i had the discipline to stay consistent with the eating and the training it was the psychological part of it would it would fuck with my insecurity of being the small guy but trust the process you just got to stick it you guys stay the course and then you'll start to see as as the weeks go on you will start to drop body fat you will and you will lean out and you will go through a little period of feeling like the small guy again because you've got that in your head because you're probably worse in your guy trying to build and build muscle but it's very very common what you're going through right now so i have a question you went you gained about 30 pounds when you did your bulk originally this was over one course of a year no so that was so like when i first started i had no idea what i was doing like i just had a workout plan from a friend of a friend and it was like just a normal bro split right so i went did that for like two weeks and i was like oh i just had like a feeling i was doing something wrong and then i just kind of like stumble on you guys and i was like oh i need to be eating more and i need to be probably doing full body so i got anabolic but i didn't start actually eating on a bulk until like a month so it's been probably like i did a bulk for about seven months i would okay so 30 pounds 30 pounds in seven to eight months i did incredible any body fat testing during this period of time do you know how much lean body mass it is no i i wish i did but i didn't even know about that before like i was total total new like never done anything before okay so that's a lot in a in a short period of time so it's likely you gain muscle and body fat um unless you have like this really amazing muscle building genetics i would guess out of that 30 pounds it's probably half and half yeah so you know 15 muscle 15 pounds of body fat um when you're trying to cut and you're trying to go down it's important to do body fat testing because of the mind games it could play with you that one of the questions i have is during this cut are you weaker or if you are how much weaker are you in the gym no nothing has changed really okay my squat my squat has gone down like like 10 pounds from normally i'm in aesthetic right now but i just finished the last one i finished was a symmetry okay so that's a good that's a good sign yeah if your strength is isn't hasn't really gone down much especially coming from that much weight yeah and you lost 11 pounds yeah you're moving in the right direction one pound a week strength is maintaining somewhat for the most part i i'm literally doing all right i literally think this is psychological yeah it is it's it's you gotta stick to the cut yeah for me the first when i would do these big bulks and i would cut the first three to four percent body fat i couldn't even tell it just felt like i was getting smaller yeah it wasn't like a weaker yeah so it wasn't until i got to like 11 percent that i could be like oh i can see what's going on once i get to 10 percent then i'd be motivated by the definition that i would see in the gym but until i got there it was like i'm just gonna wear sweaters and t-shirts because i because the way i would feel would be like i'm wasting my time and so i never really did a an effective cut for a long time i'd never really pushed it to see how lean i could get until i was much older you know that's you know that's what a lot of the the body like a lot of us that competed this is actually part of the strategy you and you might if you know anybody that has this we'll we'll go in all hooded out like that and part of that is at least for me this was the psychology of that is like i don't even want to i don't even want to get distracted by the way i look because i know my own insecurities of being a small guy and if i'm looking in the mirror and i'm comparing myself this week in this cut to what i was looking like like just say four weeks ago when i was in the bulk i know i like the bigger thicker version of me because i was the skinny guy who always wanted to be but i know but i know i need to lean out so i just so i would cover up in a hoodie and stay that way and so i don't even look at my look at myself while i'm training i just focus on the training focus on the diet focus on the training and then when i say sows point then you get to a point where you start to get really leaner than you've ever been like when you start to hit levels of leanness that you've never seen on yourself then it's remotivating to peel down to the t-shirt again and see like see the vascularity i think you got bigger yeah and then that that's the part that will trip you out if you if you stay the course stick with the process get is get leaner than you've ever been in your life and then watch the people come to you and go like bro you got huge oh my god what did you do it's a trip because and you're going to go like what i was 196 and now i'm like 175 and you guys are saying i'm bigger like i'm not bigger but you you will look bigger because you've you've leaned out i mean this has always been a deterrent for me to cut and i remember you having to walk me through that uh you know process and talking about like being flat and then also being filled up and that whole thing and i was like completely oblivious being from the performance end of things so it's totally a psychological game yeah i think you're probably going to end up around 175 to 178 with a with a nice lean physique that's probably where you're going to end up if i had to guess because you haven't tested your body fat this is a guess but you i would i would put money on on around 175 178 with like you know decent definition where you could you could see visible abs okay that's so i'm not too far off hopefully i'll be just a little bit longer yeah i was that sorry that but that's what i was worried about because i didn't know like if there was a point of when you've been in a cut for too long like if there's a spot when you should just say like i'm doing something wrong like i shouldn't my body shouldn't be in a cut for this long or if that was just something i was making up if if you if you're continuing to lean out and and maintain strength for the most part because it's actually very normal to lose strength so don't even trip out if you lose a little bit of strength yeah that's from law like less glycogen less energy yeah so it's very common to lose some strength so if you if you if you lose just a little bit of strength and you're continuing to lean out i would i would push it until i'm all the way as lean as i want to get right so if you start to feel really weak tired um over trained achy then you could do like a mini bulk kind of rejuvenate yourself watch your intensity your workouts yeah even like a week a week of just a surplus is enough to then go right back to the cut so sometimes i'll do that like let's say you've been in a cut for a while and even even if you're just tired of eating that way and you miss a good workout of feel and feel like throwing a week where you're like in a surplus of calories and you should shoot back and then go right back to the cut again you can do that too but literally what you what you're describing to me i can relate so much to as far as it's it's a psychological game and when i think back to my journey of competing that was the hardest part about competing not my program design not following the meal was the the mental game of being a guy who his whole life identified as the skinny kid who was who wanted to be big i finally got kind of thick and big and now here i am cutting it all away it would it was a mind fuck and so trust the process you'll be very happy if you if you stick it with it and don't let your mind play those games the next 10 pounds you lose if you do it right is going to be this will be the fun 10 pounds in terms of what you look at what you see in the mirror that first 10 pounds you just feel smaller next the next the next 10 you're going to start to see the definition in the mirror and it'll feel a little different yeah it'd be more moving awesome yeah adam what you said that's like exactly how i'm feeling right now like whatever you yeah that's it yeah same no totally totally can relate bro you're doing good stick you're doing actually doing killer when you think about what you put on so you're kicking ass bro yeah test your body fat though too because that'll that'll give you more of an accurate gauge yeah yeah i just ordered a body fat copper but i wish i did at the beginning but i had one super quick will follow up it's for mostly for justin i'm looking at doing performance next but i'm worried about not having the because i know you said something about mace bells and some like other different types of training but that my gym doesn't have like anything real like fancy i don't know what equipment i would need oh yeah make sure i could do it all yeah they're not included in in maps performance that's something like in terms of like incorporating stuff like that in indian clubs you know for the mobility sessions i think that's cool and it's a great idea uh but really what you all you need is um squat rack barbells dumb bells the only thing uh that's a little bit different you need a landmine kind of setup and if you don't you can kind of you know make shift one like put it barbell in the corner and kind of go in that direction but uh you know it's recommended that you get like a landmine for that that's the only thing right yeah that's the only thing really yeah performance was designed for the typical gym yeah oh okay perfect yeah you should be good yep all right man thanks for calling all right keep us posted yeah thank you guys you guys thank you guys so much hi man hi brother you oh you know what i should you know what i should have said is uh you know it's really beneficial for the mind games that happen with a cut with somebody who doesn't like to feel smaller carb cycling carb cycling helps a lot because it'll give you days of hot you know more glycogen more water in your muscles and then you'll look in the mirror and you'll feel pumped up and you'll be like okay you know i think i'm moving in the right direction do you remember what i told you that what i used to do with this so i used to uh so i have admittedly on the show i talk about how i'm i'm so inconsistent with supplements i really um there's it's i'm just not good at like consistently taking supplements plus i know like how how small of a difference it makes to take the supplements i focused i tend to focus on the food diet all the things that are in the training that's way more important right so the most consistent i ever was with creatine was during this time so i used creatine and like and water loading in a cut for the psychological reason yeah so because and and i think because i don't consistently use it using it during the cut i thought it'll offset some of those water and then and then i also started to make it a goal to pound like a half a gallon before i went into my workout and so it would give me this fuller look and that really helped me get through this kind of phase that he's at right now because it's crazy how it's it's it's just like when you take somebody who's always been overweight right and do a bulk and they and they fill out a little bit and then they feel like oh my god i'm going the wrong direction yeah i'm getting that yeah it's no different for me oh to address to the last question i forget to mention also kettlebells are recommended highly you can get away with dumbbells but definitely a good one next caller is james from arizona james what's happening hey guys how's it going what's up man hey so first off like everybody else just say thanks for everything you guys do and all the honest good quality content you guys put out there um made a huge impact in my life personally because of you guys i switched up everything in school and i'm a dietetic student now trying to be a dietitian and i'm actually in the level one cohort with nci hell yeah so we actually talked sal and i talked at the end of 2022 on that last coach's call and i asked you like a similar question about wildland firefighters it was more about business but this is more about exercise so okay yeah so a little bit of background on me i am a dog much from alaska in the winter time and then a wildland firefighter in arizona in the summertime so for me as far as like seasons of life go we're kind of coming up on the pre-season of fire so the season starts to peak up and ramp up in may but between now and then it's like february march and april this is kind of like the pre-season time so my big question to you guys was what is the best way to program for wildland firefighters between now and then so we got about three months did we did we cover this in the episode where we did um first responder yeah first responder similar we did yeah somewhat similar we did an episode on this and kind of talked about the considerations for workouts you know uh because we're talking to you and we're not speaking generally um i'm going to need a little bit more information so for you what are areas of your fitness that you think you um can improve upon in relation to this in other words when you're out there fighting fires and dog mushing where what where do you feel you're weak do you feel stamina strength stability do you get injured like what are the things you need to focus on yeah so i do remember the episode you guys are talking about and i do remember that for first responder specifically you guys recommended strong um for us and for me like i'm programming for other guys too okay because i've been doing it for a few seasons so they kind of let that let me do that with nci i kind of got some of the nutrition stuff down um but where we see guys lacking that come in like the new guys it's really just on like the the stamina of like we could take anywhere from you know 25 to 50 000 steps in a day um depending on the fire and that could go on for two weeks straight um every single day okay so a lot of the time is just getting the guys having the the the ability to take that many steps with that amount of weight anywhere from like 45 to 60 pounds and stuff so usually we see guys coming in and they're lacking in those areas usually the hiking areas yeah a lot like work capacity yeah that's strong for sure okay so generally speaking um what you would do is you would have your off season then pre-season then in season okay so like with any athlete off season you typically are trying to build a really strong basin foundation this is where you're looking to maximize strength maximize mobility maximize performance okay but strength is a big one here so it's like let's get strong let's get really strong pre-season we're now moving more we're moving closer towards what the work is going to look like so you're probably in this point going to back off on the strength focus and focus more on stamina and endurance and then in season is all about recovery and injury prevention so when you go off season it's in the gym it's heavy you're doing some stuff that's similar to what you do in season but really you're trying to just get stronger okay when you're pre-season then your training looks a lot like what your work so your training and practicing with a a rut you know your rucking if that's very similar to what your your your work looks like your training for stamina you may be doing things like circuits you're basically trying to get your fitness capacity to match what's going to be required then when you're in when you're actually in the season it's mobility it's recovery it's active recovery and you're not trying to improve anything one of the biggest mistakes people make is they try to get more fit with their workouts in season what they need to do is try to maximize recovery repair and injury prevention that'll keep your performance higher than trying to improve your performance that sounds kind of weird but that's exactly what happens that way so that's generally speaking now what can make up those workouts well a lot of things you know off season strength you know power lift anabolic split might even kind of fall strong as good in there you know when you're pre-season now you're looking more like performance or cardio or something like that then when you're you're actually in season now it's like prime pro you know it's mobility it's it's active recovery type of stuff so i like strong leading up i like where he's at right now in pre-season cardio and actually all the places that we have recommended to do cardio i would pick specific things to what he's training for so so for example in cardio we program the weight training to compliment all this endurance training and the endurance training we give people kind of this flexibility do you want to row one day do you want to run like so i would literally take that programming and i think the the amount of volume around the the weights is perfect for where you're currently at and then i would modify all the cardio to more specific things that you think will carry over to your everyday life like back to salis point throwing on a backpack a 50 pound backpack and doing you know stairs for you know a half hour hour i'll be doing things like that that we're going to emulate the closest thing that i'm going to get out there and do in real world and then i like i said i like yeah i like strong before and i like that performance i can see the i know justin will probably go that way because of the rotational mobility stuff that's involved in there i definitely would for sure pull mobility stuff in season from from performance also because it's a seasonal build up i think that because off season it was a real big structure to maps performance i i could make an argument for what adam sain in terms of like starting cardio or even starting performance then cardio then uh map strong uh so i think map strong is like the pinnacle of kind of where you want to be in terms of overall volume and work capacity uh so to build and establish that like foundational strength first this is my argument for mass performance first you know going through that specifically laid out like phase one's very much of a building foundational strength you know you get that multi-planar movement established you get that endurance like a speed power and then we get into power and then that kind of leads naturally into then focusing directly on cardiovascular which is you know sounds like that's like a big priority for everybody coming in yeah yeah i think i think the thing you want to consider the most is that um what you don't want to do the closer you get to the season is do most of your training in the gym yeah okay because i don't need to tell you this but for other people listening there's a lot of skill involved in the activities that you do as a firefighter out in the wild now i don't mean just the the the skill with you know handling you know putting out fires and stuff but there's a lot of skill involved with hiking through the mountains and moving through brush and you know you know all that other stuff and you can't you can't perfectly mimic that in the gym you'll get some carryover but you can be fit as hell in the gym you go out and into the into the mountains and try and fight fires and you're going to beat yourself up because you don't know how to move uh properly so what you don't want to do is a big mistake a lot of people make is they do all their workouts in the gym when what they need to do as they get closer to season is is go out and do what the season's going to look like so that's one of the biggest things to consider and then again i'm going to make this point again if you took two groups of people and one group in season was trying to improve performance the other group was just trying to prevent injury and facilitate recovery the group that facilitated recovery and prevented injury is going to perform better and that sounds kind of funny but they're going to end up with less longer less injuries they're going to last longer and their performance will actually be better so consider that as well let's a couple james how many what programs do you have of the ones we we listed i have strong and i mean i have pretty much everything except cardio okay so let's let's send you cardio over and then i know we threw all kinds of shit at you right there but i think the original like simple advice that sal was giving about like what preseason what in season and then what offseason looks like and because you have a background in this and you have knowledge around it you literally could take those those pro those programs performance strong and cardio and kind of mold you know more specific to you and your guys right um i do have one more question though i've been meaning to ask one of my firefighter buddies what is it called what's the um is it like a competition you guys do i see every once in a while and then you see but sometimes go viral videos of the like firefighters that run up the stairs yes were they run up the ladders helifast like is their name yeah yeah so that's not so there's a big difference between like structure firefighters and wildland firefighters yeah okay so that's more the structure side so structure dudes like they're the guys you see in town um like fire medical guys wildland dudes are the guys with like the you know the green trucks and the yellow shirts and stuff like that and you rarely ever see us because we're in the woods and so yeah you guys don't use like we don't use like i can't say you wanted the last time i used the ladder you know we use the spikes you guys are like spikes right you guys are put the spikes on yeah yeah so like you guys you guys are probably you guys are probably seen around up in truckie um california gets real busy like the season can go that's just in arizona the season's like may until when monsoon's hit like july maybe early august but after that we'll get assigned over in you know montana or california and california usually is like october to as late as december like in 2020 um like it gets real busy but so you guys have probably seen us around um but yeah that that ladder stuff is more the the structure guys so we we can spend the assignments look like 16 hours a day for two weeks straight so you do the 16 hours a day but you're working the entire time and you're away from home the two weeks straight and then you come home for two mandatory paid days off and then you go back out again for two weeks and you could do that really for the entire season like we i've gone 72 days straight getting paid before holy salito maniac you know you're you're constantly gone and moving around and stuff so yeah there's a lot of recovery facilitating recovery and preventing injury is going to be by i wouldn't do any additional workouts honestly yeah so i didn't ask you about the in season specifically because i figured you guys would i figured you like i've been listening to you guys for a couple years and you would agree all i have right now i'm for the end season essentially was doing polling like two maybe two mobility sessions from performance a week and then doing four like prime prime pro sessions and stuff like that with the guys and just doing that so that's a week i love that bro sleep yeah and focusing on on optimizing uh sleep will be really yeah you guys probably know how to use chainsaws and and axes and stuff like that really well because you have to right yeah what does a dog musher do by the way i mean i know what that looks like but what is that as a job are you traveling are you taking people from place to place i go to Alaska from like i'm going up February and march um and i run sprint dog so most people know about the iditarod which is like the long distance race it's a thousand miles um and that one is like eight they do it in eight to ten days so the dogs are running over a hundred miles every day um and they're to their VO two max i run sprint dogs which do 18 to 27 ish miles a day three to seven days in a row and their VO two max is 240 to 300 like they're ridiculously fat and they're and they like have no they recover super quickly and they're just incredible athletes so those are the guys those are the dogs that i run and we run so cool i'm just an amateur dude so i run like four to six dogs but you'll have folks running 18 to 22 dogs wow and what is what are you doing are you are you delivering mail or medical supplies like what's the work uh some folks do that like some folks still use them in the villages so like most of Alaska you can't get to by the highway system so they still use sled dogs and stuff to you know deliver mail or medical supplies and stuff like that but most of us race so we have um like races throughout January to April and we just go around the state and we just um like ours looked from love like we have one coming up that's i want to say it's three days and it's from my class specifically it's like four miles the first two days and six miles the last day and they time that there's a racing so it's it's purely sport for you then yeah yeah okay okay and it's easier for me because i don't have as many dogs so it's easier for me to just be flexible and like fly around and do things i want so i can have the the seasons because i also climb and stuff too um and i'm learning how to ice climb so like doing all that stuff it's like it's just it's a lot better with a small group of dogs what's that thing he's missing like alex right uh the the rock climber guy who needs needs like crazy adrenaline just that oh yeah but there's what you look up uh so the ice climbing there's a i'm sure you've seen it but the alpinist on netflix yeah yeah that's crazy that guy's saying like he uh or he wasn't saying yeah but he um like that guy alex honnold in there calls that guy crazy because he's like out soloing these crazy mountain peaks and stuff like that but it's like i don't plan on doing that like that movie doesn't make me want to go free solo stuff but the lifestyle is really cool yeah so with nci like those are the clients that i really am stoked to work with are the dudes that live in regular lifestyles like me oh cool it's like who the guys i'm working with is an olympic level speed climber you know so like it's just uh those are the clients that i'm i'm super stoked to work with yeah hey james are you are you in our forum uh no i'm not you are now yeah we're gonna put you in the forum you'd be a great person to be in there too because yeah yeah so i can't wait to hear how everything goes for you man stay in touch with us all right thanks for calling in yeah thanks guys be sure to find yourself in Alaska feel free to come up and take a dog tour we will we will appreciate that yeah trust me the only one to take you i would i would do that i would do that i would look off here bro you wouldn't do that yes you would not go in the middle of the snow in the middle of the wilderness it's just dogs he's riding that he's driving the dog that's got my coat you gotta hold on to his waist i'm saying like having 12 olympic athletes pull you around i'll get you back on this dude adam adam doesn't want to go camping as long as you can get him a nice car as long as you get me as i as long as you get me to my nice ass cabin i'm with my fire and am i my yeah we have a lot on the property and everything there we go there we go i'm good bro thanks you out there see you jane all right thanks guys i appreciate it bro how when was the last time we got out man lead so hard yeah that's just bro you know hey hey homeboy i'll chill works you know 72 days straight and then it was in his off season or his his vacationing it's in Alaska i love it true outdoorsman there's definition of like alpha do you guys remember when you figure that out with athletes though did you have to figure that out with yourself with your own training first or because i figured i that took me a long time because i would continuously train athletes and myself like i'm trying to improve performance in season and just oh yeah yeah you try to improve in season yeah i know well that's a very common thing coaches like getting that conundrum it's like you know they're getting all this like great performance how can we maximize and it's like you gotta realize that you're keeping it yeah keeping it intact is everything i actually think this is um you know credit joe de franco i think joe was the the person who i probably started to find around around this time in my life when i was starting to figure out the the like good protocol for athletes because there really wasn't a lot out there no there wasn't a lot of good information void yeah very bodybuilding training very very much i mean that's the reason why too i always i always talk and pump the tires of um are a paul fabrics because it just it didn't exist there's just not a lot of it even today there's i mean i a lot thinner than i would have thought you know yeah it's even in this internet world there's there's a there's a handful of really good sports performance coaches that are online that i feel that are accessible like those guys our next caller is ej from illinois ej how you doing by the way i think we might have the wrong question up there dug are you you're ej and you're almost 52 years old is that correct yes what in the hell are you doing yeah yeah um you know i think that it's some good genes probably and um good living not perfect not perfect no injections but um try and just try and you know just doing the best i can okay you're winning i don't remember anybody like 20 years younger than me so all right so what's your question yeah now that we're done flirting what's your question yeah i'm kind of doing this on behalf of so many people like me that i'm working with right now so like you said i'm almost 52 um i'm metabolically healthy i weigh about 114 115 foot two um i am a health coach so i kind of do things fairly right i did lose a lot of my fitness level though from about 46 to 51 because i felt so fragile um perimenopause just like ate me alive and in that time i just couldn't do what i used to do and i had to kind of get used to a new version of myself um i've been slowly building back my fitness in the last year and i do feel somewhat better but my sleep is still elusive and um i do all that crap right too and it's still tough just with perimenopause and hormones um that said my recovery always stinks as well because of my sleep situation um and i actually am one of those people that works out like i like myself not like i'm punishing myself i started with maps um performance and i really like the mobility part of it but shifted into maps 15 advanced because my kids keep me busy and i just needed to compress the time i do do other mobility work too but my question is pretty simple at my age and for women like me who can't even work out around their cycles because we don't know when the hell they are at this rate um can we really build muscle what is possible for me at this stage oh yeah yeah well so it so if i'm talking to a woman who's 52 who just started working out you know recently or within the last couple years the potential to build muscle is huge now i'm an unchanged muscle right like i've been working out since i was 25 and i was super fit and not anymore yeah so well i'm gonna disagree with you because you look super you're the most fit looking 52 or whatever i've ever met but but because you've been working out for so long um you're gonna be working a lot with things like muscle memory now you you might be able to go to gain some of the muscle back that you might have lost it sounds like you said you might have lost some muscle but to to perform and build beyond what you've done in the past might be kind of tough because you've been doing this for so long and this is tough ej because i find myself in this position as well i know the guys do as well we're you know we're we're about 10 years younger than you but we've been working out for a long time and you know am i gonna get am i gonna hit new levels that i've never hit before you know for the over the next 10 years probably not however a more fair comparison would be if you were to compare and i don't recommend this but look at your peers your your light years different from other women in your age group in terms of fitness appearance health and that kind of stuff so the game now is less about hitting new new goals and records and more about maintaining more about trying to keep your your fitness that's not to say we can lost those because maintaining where i am now is a struggle if i could get back to us five years ago am i am is that a pipe dream no i think really like can't get you know i know it's it's possible but i do want to say this of when i think back of all uh the challenges i had with different types of clients for sure like a client that is going through or gone through menopause is one of the most difficult times for me to help like her build muscle it's just you you have to be you have to be at one of the greatest disadvantages of progressing physique so the thing that i'd have to communicate is and remind my my clients that we're going through this is the to have compassion for yourself especially someone like you who has you know if you think this is not very fit i imagine you looked crazy uh in your 30s or 20s so you got to get that out of your head of comparing yourself i've tried to de-identify with it and let it go and that's why i'm here because i thought i have to figure out but it doesn't but it doesn't mean that you can't get a lot of that i i do believe you can yeah because that muscle memory is real yeah and you've been training for so long you've probably experienced a great deal of muscle hyper hyperplasia you know studies on people like you people have been working out for a long time first off the amount of volume and training that's required to keep what you've built is really small and the amount of training is required to get back if you did lose anything it's also very small so this is going to be a game of what's the appropriate dose how do i manipulate my training properly yes yeah i love that she's on map 15 i love i think map 15 is great for you i would like to see what we could do about your sleep now you said you're doing all the things to try to improve your sleep yeah and i do it all right to the point that um i've been chasing it for years literally and i'm trying to sit in a different energy with it and reaching out so again i'm a functional medicine health coach so i have like all these clinicians that i can work with and i'm supplemented beautifully i'm on the right herbs my nutrition is dialed in now i did screw up i did not eat enough protein last year and i'm super aware of that which was working against my goals that said you do get less hungry as you get older it's just crazy so eating 100 grams of protein or 110 grams of protein that's a lot so i'm even supplementing essential amino acids to to fill in right like i have all the tools available with nutrition i have all the tools available with sleep and i'm still feeling like so many people out there like me feel ej have you tried like bi phasic sleeping or trying to make up for it a little bit in the middle of the day get into that's a great question i just had been into that a couple months ago because i thought i cannot keep trying for this when it's just not possible and i've been chasing it for so long so yeah i have been doing that i have been trying to roll with my own rhythms more it's really hard when you have a teenager right like oh jeez i mean you guys all have littler kids i think wait one of you has an older kid i have two teenagers so i okay yeah so like my body wants to sleep from nine until four that's happy like that's great you can't do that that doesn't work with kids so my sleep has really been off since i had kids and my oldest is almost 15 years old um i am trying to figure out a way to i've just pushed it and i've pushed it with hormones i've pushed it with melatonin and a sleep specialist i've really yeah so this is interesting so there's some evidence and this is more and i've seen some articles this is a lot of speculation but there's some evidence that bi phasic sleeping right so what am i referring to sleeping the majority of your hours at night but then you get naps in the day and that's where you get your cumulative kind of sleep there's some evidence that that that becomes more appropriate as we age especially for women so there's some theories around why women go through menopause at all because men can stay basically fertile essentially right uh theoretically until the day we die women at some point stop being able to have children and so scientists have tried to come up with reasons as to why like why is that what's what's going on and the best theories are that the role of the grandmother is very important in society and tribes and her ability is to wake up in the middle of night by the way this happens to women when they have kids too before they go through menopause anybody who's had a child will know women will tell you they don't sleep like they used to at night and this is a natural thing they need to be on high alert they need to be able to hear almost anything because a crying kid in the middle of the night's a dinner bell for predators yep so so the bi phasic sleeping probably applies more to women and probably applies especially to women who have gone through menopause or perimenopause so you if possible at all could you find a time in the middle of day where you can do like an hour nap because that might be it that might be what you need i i try at first of all i need to get a pod in the back of my house that i can just go to and sleep in like and i'm not even kidding anymore um like that's like some soundproof pod my family teases me about it that would be ideal that said um when i watch my sleep when i'm napping because i do try to pay attention with devices it's still just light sleep and it does help i'm not gonna say it doesn't help it helps but um in my room and my deep sleep isn't terrible right as long as i go to bed early enough yeah it might i might be looking for too much out of that nap right like i feel like yeah i might be looking for too much yeah your expectations are high on it yeah and also depending on how consistently you do it there's some evidence that shows that the more consistently you do it the better your body gets at getting into or or reaping benefits from those naps the other thing i want to ask you and you probably know this you've worked with functional Madison practitioners and you've got lots of experience with you you avoid all stimulants right or do you take caffeine still so the only thing that i do in the morning is i am pretty attached to my uh jasmine green tea okay and when i say in the morning i it's usually at six a.m i do have about 12 ounces and i am a slow caffeine metabolizer i've had all the dna oh and too so i that is i feel like i have given up alcohol i've given up everything you know what i mean and so that is ej try try getting okay so i i feel you you really think that that that little bit yes because she's a slow caffeine metabolizer too i am and i know that i've seen it on paper that means that the half life so for people to understand that that means the half life of caffeine for her is longer so it's going to stretch out and still be somewhat active in her system when she's trying to nap okay for example might not affect us nice i would say is it's going to affect the nap i don't think it affects my nighttime as much but if i do i really and you're right that's a great i never even thought about it in that way i need to pay to do it with i need to hope damn like what's left well i do want to circle back on something that you already said and you know um it be the the consistency around uh a higher protein diet while your strength especially someone who's built as much muscle as you have in the past that could be part of the missing piece of why you're not getting it back as fast as you want is if you're inconsistently hitting those protein intakes that can make a big difference and i know you already said you know i did now i have been and i'm a tracker i've been tracking food for years um honestly i did for a year and half i played i shouldn't say i played i was in ketosis but in a very Mediterranean style vegetable heavy but not enough protein i could only max out at about 78 grams and um obviously i was working against myself the reason i did it though is because i felt like i couldn't educate anyone else about it if i had an experiment experimented with it yeah and let me tell you it works for satiety for women who are hungry man it works yeah but i need a hundred i'm shooting for 110 i try to get about 90 grams of animal protein yeah and then um i will supplement with some some great essential amino acids and i will and i do eat plant protein obviously too but i don't really count it per se trying to hit that 90 to 100 of animal is that the right i love that i would i would look there's two there's a few things i would try and i think that these might make the biggest difference one is and i know this is gonna suck but i would eliminate caffeine in the morning so you could try caffeine free green tea um if you need if you because because there's also the ritual of drinking you know the green tea in the morning so i would i would eliminate caffeine if you find that you still need a little bit of you know something you could try rhodiola for some people i think that i do take that every morning um and i know combined with the caffeine that definitely affecting the naps right because rhodiola is yeah so i put that and then but dump the caffeine and yes so i would do that first then the second thing i would do is i would try to go in a bulk and because uh that especially in women being i did i did do that okay i did that for about four months i pushed my calories when i was keto though so it was a bulk at a max of not the same yeah no not the same so so the carbs carbohydrates especially in women a lack of carbohydrates can cause changes in catecholamines and neurotransmitters like serotonin which you know a little bit of an imbalance there can cause sleep issues as well so yeah it looks really good to me right now i'm not gonna lie so so i would try i would try no caffeine i would try a bulk with carbohydrates you don't have to go crazy but you don't go keto but what does that mean to you i usually am only at about 30 or 40 grams oh yeah i bring double it at least double or triple it you know so what do you have to eat that much food anyway like i you know there is that i have hit that point then like i will stand at the counter and think i literally cannot put any more food in my mouth ej this is when hyper palatable type foods can become valuable now i'm not necessarily telling you to eat garbage i never eat those yeah so i'm not necessarily saying eat garbage but now this is when you could start to play with foods that you're like oh this tastes really good i like the way that this you know like i wouldn't recommend this to most people but you know like fruit juice is not is an okay way to add a whole banana maybe you are you know there you go you know you can make yourself a smoothie so i would play with some hyper palatable foods i would i would go into a surplus i would eliminate caffeine and then see what happens with that nap in the middle of the day have you ever done a stint of powerlifting like a longer extended amounts of rest periods um if you call that few years that i felt like garbage that maybe so i was working out and i definitely not a person that is i'm not into cardio um i don't work to increase my cortisol at all i literally try to stay as parasympathetic as i can even with workouts um that said i played around with that i do right now even have to take two days off at a time what are you saying in terms of rest period are you saying weeks oh no i'm talking about within the workout you mean between and and really trying to maximize your intensity of the lifts in terms of the load is concerned and i know like i like you doing mass 15 because of the maintenance right now and like your phase of life and everything and i think that makes sense but in terms of stress in the system and and creating something where you're focused on more like optimizing muscle gain and like to sound bulk and all that and pairing the two together you know might just a stint of that like a month you know two months of it might moderate moderate intensity low reps would be a break for your body if you're doing the eight to twelve rest periods then in between sets yeah that's three minutes three minutes longer yeah all right like a minute yeah all right i can definitely do that that'll take a little bit of self-control practice to do it but i can definitely that that's good though if you say that's a good sign uh the justin's on the right hitting the right direction if you say that would take a lot of self-control which means you probably don't ever really train in the three minute rest period so there's some there's some value there for you yeah there's some value there i like i know it's argus at this phase it's like you gotta like really like consider so many different things that tighten and screw because you've had so much experience ej i have so i have some experience with what you're talking about where i couldn't figure out what the hell was wrong on my sleep and i did everything i couldn't figure it out for me it was simply i was doing too much volume on my workouts and i didn't realize that that had that big of an impact that dropped the volume my sleep got greater this may be something simple like the you know 30 40 milligrams of caffeine you have in the morning i mean it could be that it could be that simple so i i feel like there's something that you just haven't done yet starting is gonna make that'll make the biggest impact i work out the floor the nap after the nap do you think that makes a difference yes but if it's too close if it's before the nap too close to the nap you're not going to be able to sleep so if it's like you work out and then and then you go 30 minutes an hour later you want to go take a nap you might not be able to i mean i would i would recommend playing with that like i mean we can have some general advice for you but i think there's going to be enough of a variance you know with the individual on how they would feel i don't think i personally if i'm gonna if i know i'm gonna do like try and do a nap at noon or one i can't train in the morning i've got to that's gotta be because i if i lift if i lift after you know three o'clock in the afternoon it affects my workout or my night my nighttime sleep so it's i i have to have that's most people yeah i have to have a pretty big break there so i mean play with it go do want do some with before and do some after and and see how you feel all right yeah all right i appreciate that i felt like i'm glad you guys said that you think maps 15 and i am doing the i played around with the first one but i have stuck with the advanced um that seemed the closest to me to a workout for someone like me and i've even kind of recommended that to people so um i appreciate that the feedback you're giving me yeah no that's a great choice let's put her in the forum if you're not in our forum i'd love to have you in there ej i'd like to follow up and see what's going you know see how you feel i'm not i can do that all right we're gonna put you in for so many people like me that are floundering i'm sorry she she's i feel like there's a lot for me to even offer other people and something like that that are floundering like i am oh this is selfish i want you in the forum because i think you're gonna benefit the other members in there yeah i also want to hear how you do but i think you're you'd be a valuable yeah i appreciate that you're on yourself yeah you're doing great by the way thank you i and i feel like i am i just i just it's been a tough road letting go of who i was and and inviting in who i am and trying to find like where i am in that process you just need you just need you just need a couple young handsome guys to pump your tires a little bit that's all you know it's going to be so it's and you have lives that are not where i am yet so this is gonna be helpful even for them when your wives end up here it's it's a lot you know we carry these kids we grow these kids we have kids and then here we are and it's it's a lot yep no 100% yeah thanks thanks for calling in i appreciate you all thank you already thank you take care that has to be the the the the hardest clients oh hardest clients oh i oh this is trying to figure that out if there was yeah if there was ever um because it's like are you doing this yes you're doing that yeah so you do this yeah probably honestly i'm gonna tell you guys right now i bet you i will bet this and i hope she follows up with us that a bulk with some carbs and a and eliminate caffeine will make a huge impact yeah there was a few things that i caught there one she she knew that she under consumed protein okay so and if you're trying to get back the muscle that you had at your your peak and in your fifties and you're already fighting gets hormones i find that that's going to be crucial that she stays that consistently the fact that she did make the point when justin mentioned the long rest periods of three minutes she was like oh wow she made a big deal that that was gonna take a lot of mental which tell what signals to me that she moves kind of quick through her workouts yeah if that would if that's gonna require discipline so there's there's definitely value there and then your point about bulking and the cutting i mean there's some stuff there even though she's checking a lot of the boxes i mean that was a part that was so hard as a as a coach and trainer with a client like this that i would i get lost sometimes i feel like we were we were doing a lot of the right things and just not you know what happens what's common with somebody who's a fitness fanatic the place that they refuse to look at or the place that they really don't want to look at is usually where the answer is and you can see when she talked about her green tea in the morning like this is the last thing that i you know the very last thing well you hit it you hit it too because she knows she's tested for it and she's she's seen it yeah so she's not unaware you know no no and i'm i i've seen it make a huge difference a lot i i don't i don't think i'm a slow metabolizer of caffeine but i definitely metabolize slower than let's say like you guys and i can see i take my caffeine early in the morning too and i see a difference when it's above like 250 milligrams for my night sleep so i wouldn't be surprised if that had a big impact our next caller is shane from new york shane what's happening how can we help you man not much not much guys i hope you're all doing well could could go on for forever i've been a listener since 2016 and you guys have done a ton to change my relationship to food exercise i mean genuinely just have improved my life by a lot so wanted to just say thank you first of all and appreciate everything you guys do i recognize your name for sure i know we've chatted before probably on instagram yeah i dm you on instagram every now and then awesome so yeah i um i don't really know you know what necessarily like what the question is going to be here i might just look be looking for encouragement more than anything but as i just kind of reference i've been lifting for a long time i was a competitive powerlifter in high school so i've been lifting heavy weights for about 15 years and got really big this summer was really strong and in a really good groove and eating a lot making gains in all my big lifts and unfortunately injured a disc deadlifting to the extent like i couldn't walk sit for a long time so ended up in the er which you know eventually led to seeing an orthopedic surgeon and had a microdysctomy surgery in september of this year so not sure if any of you have had clients that have dealt with something like that but essentially for six weeks of recovery felt very easily pt was getting better and better and unfortunately injured myself again and for the next month was trying to rehab it but ended up in surgery again so i've had two surgeries on my spine in the last three months outlook for lifting in the future is obviously quite different now so just was wondering like if you guys have had any clients first of all have surgery similar to that and understanding like you guys are not doctors or pts and i'll obviously listen to my doctor's advice on all this stuff but just curious if you guys have had anyone go through something like that adam i know you had the acl surgery so just kind of like dealing with some body images as soon as i see my body change and kind of trying to think of like what stuff in the future might be helpful um or even now like while i can't be in the gym ways that maybe you guys have shifted your mindset yeah situations like this uh so you i don't actually share all of it on the podcast because i don't think we've ever gone too deep on so many injuries but yeah i actually this is how this is and literally it's around around the same time frame as far as what how old i was so it started i think 28 was the first one so i actually tore acl mcl mcl then i then i got a level three sprain and the next season right when i came back and because i wasn't going to hang it up yet i bet the sprain was even worse oh the level three sprains were nasty so i got a level three sprain on the right ankle uh the next season you know rehab all that stuff that denied i'm coming back again next season i roll the other ankle with a level three sprain same thing again i'm still coming back the next season when i when i blew the achilles and the achilles was the final like okay i get the sign okay someone's trying to give me a sign here that it's time to start focusing more on health than maybe i'll just slow down a little bit on trying to be the buff guy also playing basketball which was not a good good idea so yeah i think this is kind of because you can definitely still be hella strong hella fit but you have reached a level probably with lifting uh that's a elite and you still want to get after it that way and you're getting in a place in your life where maybe your priorities are starting to shift and so um it's a very common transition that we all go through we all go through to different ages it's not like oh this happens at 30 i mean some people it gets prolonged till 40 something some people it happens as early in their late 20s for me it was around this time in my life and i was stubborn and resisted it for a while and then i just learned to take my competitive mindset and shift it to other things and if you've been listening for seven years like you said you probably remember this was when i became the mobility guy you know i was like totally not a and it was hard the originally i mean i made it i made it seem like it wasn't that difficult but the the most difficult part was not the gym work it was the the mental side you know of of not being the super buff strong or basketball player guy and now i'm this you know guy that i used to make fun of the yogi mobility dude so shane shane the micro uh dysectomy you got the same procedure twice and was it on the same disc or different yeah yeah l5 s1 and um yeah revision dysectomy about three months later on christmas eve this year so i'm about four weeks out from that so that's sometimes they call that like a micro decompression and so so for people don't know you have a herniated disc they go in and they alleviate some of that by taking off some of the disc or or you know they shave it they shave the essentially so but it happened twice same disc so whatever's causing it is kind of still there now i've trained people who've had this procedure i've trained people that you know a lot worse than this and you could totally you could totally rehab to the point where this is no longer an issue but it's going to take some time there's some there's some compensations that you've probably created and there's probably some imbalances that you have you haven't been able to identify first off i would say this um you like to work out you like to lift weights i would definitely train more like a bodybuilder for a while than like a powerlifter i wouldn't train at all like a powerlifter for a long time bodybuilding the classic bodybuilding i'm not talking about ronnie colman bodybuilding because he did a lot of powerlifting but like you know dexter jackson bodybuilding like there's a reason why dexter jackson is you know it's almost 60 and he's never had an injury he's still bodybuilds right bodybuilding is very much focusing on the muscle the weight doesn't matter focus on the pump the squeeze there's a lot of longevity and that kind of training and the reason why i'm i'm saying this to you is because it's still fun you're still building muscle so it's not like this huge switch where you're like oh my god i'm not even lifting weights in a fun way anymore so i would focus more on bodybuilding i think a program like map symmetry would be phenomenal for a lot of training would be huge to stick with that yeah you might have uh you know an imbalance between the right and left that's causing some of this issue or some imbalances in the in you know how your muscles fire um symmetry is phenomenal uh at at highlighting those types of things i would do map symmetry and i would avoid the five by five phase at the end in fact i would have you do map symmetry probably two times in a row and then do more bodybuilding style training and then see how you feel after that and then as far as your your lump you know your your spine is concerned i would do box squats i would avoid traditional barbell squats i would do box squats real controlled real slow real stable so real control don't don't just drop on the box that'll hurt your spine but slowly control the pause on the box stand back up i would do squats like that for a while and then i would do trap bar deadlifts for your deadlifts for a little while train like a bodybuilder but let's start with map symmetry i think map symmetry will be per and you'll build muscle you'll get great if anything you might even get to the point where you're stronger than you were before because you you you've solved some of these issues i anticipate and that's really like i would steer you in the unilateral training for a really long time yeah as much as like you can stomach in terms of like shifting your entire mindset in that direction and just really just paying attention to every little shift of your body every little compensation that's creeping up and stop and and really just you know regain focus control and and bracing and and really just pay attention to all that stuff like exclusively yes it's going to get mundane if you just go in the mobility direction and i get that i mean that's obviously something's going to benefit you but in terms of strength training and like really like just you know focusing in and harnessing that ability for your body to just maintain this really solid rigid position i think will will benefit you long term to get back to a position where you're like i feel like strong and powerful again shane what was your what was your your pr a deadlift what were you pulling gosh guys i mean like you know it really went up a lot this summer so i hurt myself pulling about 495 and i was just in in demon mode after a breakup this summer kind of thing so yeah i feel like the the maps programs kept me injury free for a long time cycling throughout and just got a little bit ahead of myself this summer probably on a day i shouldn't have been in the gym after traveling so you're getting to five plates so here's what happens muscle and balances when you're strong are really hard to identify because you've built patterns and you've strengthened those patterns to the point where you could pull almost 500 pounds so symmetry is going to highlight that it's going to open you're going to see differences in how you move right to left weaknesses stability issues stamina fatigue allow the weaker side to dictate how many reps and what the weight you use don't let the stronger side dictate that and watch what happens watch what happens you're going to have to avoid bilateral training and heavy training for a while because when you train heavy your body's going to do what it does best to lift heavy which is whatever the hell you were doing before whatever imbalances or issues that you had before that's your default pattern and it's it's going to be hard for you to identify it if you continue to train that way because that's the best way that you move to lift that weight you're going to have to back off for a while and re and develop brand new patterns and the best way to do that is going to be bilateral unilateral training yeah i like the idea of actually running symmetry and aesthetic and split but when you run aesthetic and split actually pulling out the exercises like the traditional deadlift or the squat and replacing it with unilateral work so literally you could follow the program to t but just when it calls for a barbell back squat you go do bulgarian split squat i would go symmetry twice i would go two rounds of symmetry and i would avoid three phases not the four i would avoid the the last phase and i would do that twice before moving to a bodybuilding time you know type of and then even when you go to the bodybuilding run like i said yep do still do you where we call for a lot of bilateral stuff like this the barbell back squat or deadlift you switch it out to unilateral stuff do bulgarian split squat do single leg deadlift um and but you could still run the the nuts and bolts of the program i think you get a lot of value from that yeah don't get discouraged because this is actually you're if you do this right you're going to be stronger than you were before because you got as strong as you could with whatever imbalance that you had and and and and you kept that that imbalance and go away if you if for anybody who's listening if you have an injury that you then have again the exact same injury that root issue is still there so you hit a wall and the way you hit a wall is your body got hurt this is a recruitment issue so if we if we figure that out which i think symmetry will do for you not only will you not hit that wall again but you're gonna go past you're gonna go be able to go past it so this is actually this could definitely turn into a good thing especially at your age you haven't even hit your the the age at which you can hit your max lifts so you got some time this will be a lot of fun do you have some old man still got the old man strength yeah yeah you got more time for that do you have symmetry by the way i do not have symmetry no we'll send that to you shane awesome amazing guys i guess like saw one one more quick question if i could do you recall you you mentioned you worked with someone with a micro-dyskectomy do you remember like roughly how long after they were starting to get back into stuff and of course i'll run this all by my doctor but i'm just curious your experience you know the i've so i had two people who i worked with but they were not 30 year old you know people who could pull five plates they were you know they were in the 40s they were athletic and um it took let me think one person it took us about six months the other person took maybe nine months or longer but we got them they were better afterwards they got them better the key the key for you shane is going to and i love the advice of the you know lift like a bodybuilder like you really need you need to have the approach of of just not caring about the load i mean if something it feels light to you slow the tempo down more like that feel the muscle you with your amount of muscle your youth on your side as soon as the doctor clears you to go you're gonna be fine you're gonna be just but you have to approach it with that mentality and don't don't get caught up with oh man i was doing this much before like you don't even think like that it's think like a bodybuilder slow the tempo