Amen, amen. God is good and all the time, we're glad to have you with us this morning. Welcome to the Hungrujian Church. We believe that God, like our sisters shared and said, that God is still in the business of healing. God is still in the business of delivering. God is still in the business of setting people free, blessing people and giving away out where there is no way. Do you believe in the Church? If you believe, put your hands for mighty God in this place. We believe that God has called us, us as a church and us as individuals to reach out to the world. And we believe that the vision that God has given us to the church, thousands locally and millions globally, that we will see people being saved by dozens running to the altar, call every single service, people being saved in home groups, people being saved through a power of evangelism as we go out on the streets and minister and show love to people. And we believe that God is going to do a great and mighty thing. And we're going to change our city for Christ, amen. And you and I will be a partaker of it, whether doing home groups, whether doing host groups, whether going out with a group to do a power of evangelism. We're going to make a difference in our city in Jesus mighty name, Amen Church. As well as thousands, thousands locally and millions globally through our social media, we see a great impact, people just receiving blessing through the messages, through the worship, through many different testimonies that are being posted. People are commenting back, sending prayer requests, sending their testimonies, sharing that when they watch the live stream, they believe together, they pray together through the screen and they receive healing and touch from God. God is doing something great church. God is on the move in this place and we are a part of it. We are a part of this vision.  But for this vision to go forward, in order for us to feel this vision, we got to be a church that prays, amen. That's why every single morning the door is open at 5 a.m. every single morning. I mean from Monday through Friday on Saturday and Sunday we give God a break. But on Monday through Friday at 5 a.m. the door is open for prayer. We have a lot of people that come before they go to work. They stop by here and they pray for an hour, for half an hour, whatever the time is, allows them 8 o'clock interns come and from 8 to 9, 9, 30, we have a group of interns of 35, 40 people coming and praying here. So whatever your times allow, you can come here, pray. If you're not able to come here and pray throughout the week, pray at home. But we have to, Bible says that we, the church will be called the house of prayer. And if we're going to see this move of God, if we're going to see miracles like these and more of them, we got to be a house of prayer. We got to pray because prayer opens heavens, because prayer gives license for God's angels, for his spirit to move. Just like sin gives a right to Satan to access your life, to destroy, to kill, steal and destroy. So is prayer gives a visa to heavenly angels to come and intervene on earth. And that's why we believe strongly and we're going to pray and we're going to be praying even more. On Friday night we have a Friday night vigil starting at 9 p.m. We pray, we intercede last Friday night. There was a lot of people. It was just fire. How many were here last Friday night? There was just a fire of God and we were interceding and praying for a city, for the vision. As well as Alex is leading an intercession group and it gets posted on Slack when they meet. They meet couple times a week here, they come and pray. We're just going to be a prayerful church, a men's church. A church, a person that prays is a person that doesn't sin. A person that sins is a person that won't pray. So if you want to sin less, pray more. Amen church. Amen, amen, amen. We have a monthly prayer line today where people come from different places, different parts. People fly in to receive prayer and touch from God. And today at the end of the service we're going to join them together, church, as we're going to pray for them. And we believe that the distance is not a barrier. We believe that God's anointing will not escape their case. And each person that came here with their need, they will receive God's touch in Jesus' mighty name. Amen church. Right now I want you to open with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 1 and verse 9. And today I titled my message Faithful God. And I'm just going to share a few thoughts from my personal meditation of the last couple of weeks and just the things that God put in my heart. So let's read 1 Corinthians chapter 1 verse 9. God who has called you into the fellowship with His Son Jesus Christ, our Lord, is faithful. Say faithful. Say faithful. Our God is faithful. I believe that every Christian should have a revelation and should know about God who is faithful. Because if you don't understand the faithfulness of God it's going to be really hard for you to have a relationship with God. Because faithfulness makes trust possible and trust makes relationship possible. Without faithfulness you have no trust and without trust you can't have a relationship. So if you want to have a relationship with Jesus, if you want to have a relationship with God you have to know that He is faithful, that He is not going to abandon you. He won't leave you. He won't forsake you. He'll be there for you. That He is watching over you. That He is God who is faithful. And that's why Apostle Paul that he writes to Corinthians. He insures them. He says He has called you into fellowship with His Son Jesus Christ. And He underlines that He is faithful. See faithfulness nowadays is very rare commodity. We look today in our society and we look today at what's going on in the world, what's going on in America, what's going on in relationships. And we can see that faithfulness is something that's been lost throughout time. People are less faithful to each other, less faithful in marriage and relationships. People are less faithful in friendships. People are less faithful to their country. We see that this liberalism and this social kind of environment that we're growing up in, especially the younger generation, the example of faithfulness has been lost. And a lot of times when we go through experiences in our lives, when we live and a father leaves the home, we see no faithfulness there. When we live in our lives and friends backstab us, friends leave us and we go through many experiences of unfaithfulness in our lives, that begins to shape our mindset, that begins to shape our world view. And many times we take that mindset and that world view and we bring it into our relationship with God and we struggle in our relationship with God. We struggle to pray. We struggle to find pleasure in prayer because prayer becomes a religious routine, prayer becomes something that the church says that we should do, but it lacks meaning to us, because we don't understand the faithfulness of God. And many times because of, especially if we haven't seen or been demonstrated the faithfulness of parents, of father, mother in our home, a lot of times we take that mindset and we bring it into our relationship with God and we struggle to relate to God and have fellowship with Him, like Apostle Paul says. See, word faithfulness means steadfastness, firmness, fidelity. An opposite of it too for us to better understand this word. Opposite is ever-changing and wishy-washy. And sometimes we pray to God and we stand on a promise and we pray and it doesn't come to pass and we think that God changed because something didn't happen in our life because we prayed for something. We begin to doubt God's faithfulness and God's love towards us. But regardless of how we think and how we view and what our experience with faithfulness, God always remains faithful. He always remains faithful. Sometimes we go through situations in our life, sometimes we pray for certain things, whether they happen or don't happen or they happen differently. Only God knows the reason why and how it happened and we know that all things work together for good, for those that love Him. And at the end when we go through things, we might not understand when we're going through it, but when we come out of it on the other side, we see His faithfulness. First thing that I want you to write it down is that your relationship with God is as good as your revelation of God's faithfulness. Like I already mentioned that faithfulness makes trust possible. And when you have trust, you can have a relationship. No relationship is possible without trust. There is no relationship possible between husband and wife without trust. No relationship possible in friendship without trust. If you don't know whether the person is going to be there for you or not, you can't open up yourself to them. You're just going to stay on acquaintances level and you can't move forward unless you know the character of a person that they're trustworthy. So in order for us to have a better relationship, greater relationship with God, we must understand that God is trustworthy. In a Bible, God made covenant with men 277 times. And 277 times He remained faithful to those covenants. Even when the other side was unfaithful or faithless. God promised to Israel the land that He's given to Abraham. He made covenant with Abraham about the land of Israel. And even though the nation of Israel ceased existing and they scattered, for almost 2,000 years they were not existent. God still was faithful in 1948 to bring them together and establish a nation of Israel.  That shows that even if decades go by, centuries go by, God says, I am still faithful. Even if my own people abandon me and leave me behind. If we look and study a relationship of David. You know, David from the Bible, he fascinates me. He is my favorite character, I love, maybe because he was a musician, he was worshipper and had something that I love to do. I don't know what it is about David, but David is my favorite character. And when I read, I'm reading through Psalms again. And when I read David and when I read his Psalms, when I read his life, Psalms is practically like a diary of David. He kind of documents everything he's going through in his life and he puts it in a song type of a thing. And when I read his Psalms, and I get amazed, amazed how much David speaks of his faithfulness.  You know, this is against me and this person is against me and these terrible things are happening.  He's like, wait, hold on. So are you rescued or are you in trouble? Which one it is, David? Because you can't be at the same time. But David had this such a deep trust in God that he will never forsaken him. He will never leave him. He said, yes, I know I'm still in pain. Yes, I know I'm still suffering. Yes, I know I'm still being persecuted by my enemy, but I'm rescued. Why? Because I trust you. Because I know you're faithful. It's as good as done. Your faithfulness is as good as it's done. That's why David was able to firmly confess in Psalm 23, he says, though I walk through the valleys of shadow of death, I know you are with me. And then he says that I'm going through all these things that you put a table before my enemy.  David had a great relationship with God. No wonder God called him a man after his own heart. No wonder God, despite of David's mistakes, despite the fact that David killed somebody, an innocent person, despite that David had different kind of troubles in his life and messed up plenty of times, less than actually sold it. But God still dared to call him a man after his own heart. And I truly believe it's because David had just unbelievable trust in God. He just had unbelievable trust in God's character, had his faithfulness, and God never failed him. Not even once. Another person, let's put our hands together for Jesus. Another person that comes to my mind immediately is Job. Job, the Bible says, God said about him that he was a righteous man. And Job worshipped God every morning and brought sacrifices. He prayed. Job was an honorable man in his society. He took care of the people around him. And Job was an incredible man. And this terrible thing happens to him. Here's Job.  He prayed for his children. He covered his children in prayer every morning. He prayed and asked God for forgiveness for anything that he's done. I mean, he pleased God with everything that he did. And all of a sudden, it looks like in a moment of his life God failed him. It looks like in a moment of his life, everything, every prayer that he prayed. Everything that he feared in his life that he would not come upon him. Everything that he asked God not to happen to him. At one moment in his life, it seems like the bottom fell off from underneath of him. And everything came crashing down.  I can't even imagine a pain a parent can go through losing all your children all at once. No comfort. His friends can't even comfort. And his wife turns against him.   You know, sometimes when you have a pain and when you go through a dark season, even though it could be a day too, it could be a week, but it seems like months and years. We read, there's few chapters of his suffering, but I can only imagine how long it felt and how difficult and the thoughts he had to wrestle with. At the end of all of this, he stands and he says, and he declares that my Redeemer lives. My Redeemer lives. Sometimes when you read it, it's just like, yes, he's our Redeemer.  What he was saying is that I know even at this point, God still can restore me. I know even at this point, God can still restore my family. He can still restore my business. He can still restore my fields. He can restore my flocks. He can restore my marriage. Even at this point of death, he is my Redeemer. That's what he declared. And as we read through the story of Job, we see that God comes to his rescue eventually. He reveals his purpose to him and God comes around and gives him double of everything that he had and blesses him. Until this day, Job is still considered the richest man in the Middle East. And there's some pretty wealthy people in Middle East today. And his legacy stands true as a man of faith. Today we refer to Job as a man that persevered through trouble and received his reward. But even in those moments of pain, even in those moments where his body was aching, in the moments when his family was shattered and destroyed, in the moments where people turned against him, where enemies took hold of every possession that he had. Even in those moments, he still had trust in God's faithfulness and declared, My Redeemer lives. Let's put our hands together for such a man of faith. You know that God commanded many scriptures in the Bible, many places in the Bible, God commanded his people to set up memorials or to do things in remembrance. Why did God ask when children of Israel crossed the river of Jordan? And God said to Joshua, Make sure that you take 12 stones from the middle of the river, you set up a memorial. What did he say to do so that the next generations and that people that will come and ask is what is this monument, what is this memorial for? That you can tell them what I did for you in Egypt. Pretty much what he's saying is this. So you can tell them of my faithfulness. This memorial will signify, this memorial will stand here to say that God was faithful when he spoke and said to our Father Abraham that he's going to take us out of this land of Egypt and he's going to lead us through and he's going to bring us to the land of milk and honey. That memorial signified God's faithfulness. In a New Testament, Jesus is about to go on the cross and he's with his disciples and he begins to wash his, wash their feet and he does the communion with them and he says, do this in remembrance of me. He was saying is that do this in remembrance of my faithfulness to the human, to the humanity, to the humankind. I told, I said that I'm going to bring a redemption. The whole New Testament and the sacrifices, the temple was signifying of the coming of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God that's going to take and wipe our sins forever. What he was saying is that do this in remembrance of me is that when you do this, remember of my faithfulness to you. Remember of my, that I did and I fulfilled and I finished what I said, what I promised I was going to do to you. What I was going to do for you. In 1 John chapter 1, 9 it says, if we confess our sin, he is faithful and just to forgive our sins and purify us from unrighteousness. When he said do this in remembrance of me, what he was saying is that I'm faithful to forgive every sin. He was saying I'm faithful to heal you because by stripes I'm healed. What he was saying is that do this in remembrance of me is I am faithful to break every chain and every yoke of your life. When he was saying do this in remembrance of me, he was saying that I became poor so that you can be enriched through my poverty. I am faithful to you in Jesus' name. If we want to have a strong relationship with God, we have to have a revelation of God's faithfulness towards us. Point number two, I want you to write it down, is don't focus on your faithfulness to God but rather fix your eyes on his faithfulness to you. Many people struggle in their relationship with God and I'll be honest with you, I struggled in my relationship with God for many years because there were things that I was struggling with, there were sins that I was trying to overcome. There were certain habits that I knew that God wasn't pleased with, that he wasn't happy with and I was trying to wrestle with him and sometimes we all are prone to mistakes and sins in our life, right? And sometimes what we do is we take our eyes off of his faithfulness towards us and we begin to focus on our faithfulness towards God. We begin to focus on the things that we do for God, we begin to focus on how good we are with God and our relationship begins to struggle, we begin to walk in condemnation and shame because we know we're not good enough, we know we fail him daily and then sometimes we hear these things preachers say from the pulpit saying that if you sin, every time you sin you crucify Jesus again and again and then we have this image, especially if you watch the Passion of the Christ these horrific images, the things that you do every single time to Jesus that you sin you have no boldness to come to him, you have no boldness to come to the cross you have no boldness to have a fellowship with him because every time you focus on your faithfulness, instead of faithfulness of God you will struggle in your relationship with God, you will struggle to walk with God every time you focus on how much you prayed, a whole lack of prayer how much you read, how much you fasted or lack of it any time you focus on what you did for God, how much you gave you will struggle in your relationship with God you have to fix your eyes on Jesus You have to fix your eyes on his faithfulness towards you. You have to fix your eyes on what he has done on the cross for you and receive the grace of salvation and know that he is faithful to help you go through every challenge in life and help you to overcome every sin that torments you in Jesus' name. Amen Church. See the problem with Old Testament is in the Old Testament God made a covenant with men. In the Old Testament, Old Testament is about God making covenant with men. The problem with that is, the problem was never with God. God always remained faithful at everything that he did. The problem was with humanity. We were faulty. We were broken. We were not faithful to God. And we see throughout the story of starting from the garden, from the garden and how Adam and Eve they were unfaithful to God, continuing all throughout the story of Israel. And we see how how Israel was just not faithful to God. And that's the problem with an Old Testament is that God, the problem with it is the human factor. The problem is our faithfulness, which is not good. And we see that God, he already knew that that's gonna be the problem. He came and he, that's not the glory of God, that's the plains people. And so God the Father and all his wisdom, he devised this plan. He sent Jesus Christ down on earth. I want you to listen to this carefully because it's gonna set some of you free from walking under the guilt and condemnation. The difference between New Testament and Old Testament is that in the New Testament God sends his son down on this earth. So Jesus being fully God and being fully men comes on earth and he spills his blood, which Bible says is a new covenant and now God is in covenant with God. God is in covenant with himself and God can never be unfaithful. God can never make a mistake. God can never lie. He's always faithful. So now we being as his creation, we being, when we receive Jesus Christ, we are united with Christ and we are in that covenant and even though sometimes we fall short, we unfaithful, but because we're in Jesus, we're still in that covenant because Jesus remains always faithful. He covers our sin. He covers our mistakes. So I want you to let go of every guilt and every condemnation that you might be walking in and receive the grace that we have in Jesus, the perfection that we have in Jesus and enjoy like we read for First Corinthians. Enjoy the fellowship with God because he sees you as faithful. He sees you as perfect. He sees you covered in Jesus' name. Amen Church. Let's put our hands together for Jesus. We're under a new covenant, under a better covenant and today we can come boldly before the throne of grace to retain mercy and grace in the time of need. Amen Church. So don't walk under guilt and condemnation. Walk in boldness. Anytime you come in prayer, if something is not in it, there is a sin in your life. You ask God for forgiveness and quickly declare that I'm covered and I am in Jesus Christ and now I can ask boldly whatever I need. Amen Church. And last thing that I want to encourage you with is learn God's faithfulness. Yes, learn God's faithfulness. The way, the three things, and I quickly just gonna go through it, the three things we can, in Isaiah 46.9 I says this, remember the former things of old, for I am God and there is no other. I am God and there is none like me. Do you know that, just a quick thing, do you know that only in Christianity God declares himself faithful, no other religion and no other God declares themselves faithful to the humankind, unconditionally faithful. Only in Christianity God declares himself, says whatever you do I'm faithful. I'm consistent, you can trust me, I do not change. Three things that will help us to learn about God's faithfulness. Number one is his word. Study his faithfulness in his word. Study his faithfulness. Go through the, read the Bible. That's why it's important to read the Bible. When you read the Bible it's not just a history book. It's not just some deep theology. It's when you read the stories and you hear, you read the pages in the lives of people where they were facing trouble and God came through. When there was struggling and God came through. When there was a problem and God showed himself faithful. You read through the Bible. You read through the stories. You don't just read it as a history. You learn God's faithfulness. And you say if God did it for David, if God did it for Job, if God did it for Ruth, if God did it for this person and that person and the other. He can do it for me. You begin to study the word. You get into the word and you learn that God is faithful because if you, if you don't have a revelation, if you don't know his faithfulness, you won't be able to trust him. If you can't trust him, how can you fellowship with him? How can you have a relationship with him? You have to get into God's word. Get into God's word. Come on, say to your neighbor, get into God's word. Number two, look at his faithfulness in other people's lives. This is the reason why we share testimonies. We take a significant time in our church to always share testimonies, to always set up monuments of God's faithfulness, to always share that God is faithful because if you will be convinced that God is faithful, you will have a faith to believe for your situation. If you will be convinced that God is faithful in your business, you will have faith to believe for God in your business. If you believe that God is faithful to heal you, you have faith and believe for healing. If you are convinced and you trust God that he is a deliverer, you have faith to believe for your freedom. A quick story from my personal life, about four or five years ago, I was going through this personal struggle, especially in the area of finances, and I was working with God through this issue, and it was quite a bit of a process, and the things that I was frustrated was is that every time I would pray for something, it wouldn't happen in the area of finances. Actually, as a matter of fact, I prayed very, very little, especially when it comes to businesses. I had multiple businesses. I had different things that were going on, different projects. I prayed very, actually very little for my financial life, and every time I prayed, I kind of felt awkward. It's just like I didn't feel right about asking God about it or praying. I don't know why, what was it, and I would take scriptures and I would quote, you know, in prayer or just confession. It just wasn't sitting right with me, and one time I was praying and asking God, I said, God, I don't know, maybe, I don't know what's going on, but I just, in this area, I'm struggling. I'll be honest with, I was just honest with God, and so God began to deal with me in different issues, and he began to peel me like an onion layer by layer, and then got me to the point where I had to look honest at myself in this area, particular area of finances, and I had to say to myself, God already knew it. God, I don't trust you with this area. That's why I work really, really hard, and I pray barely anything about it. That's why I trust, I trust in my strength, and I remember many times, even my my dad or pastor, senior pastor, bring up different testimonies about these people's getting breakthrough and this and this, and I only almost kind of look scornful upon it. I'm like, yeah, that's just for lazy people type of a thing, because I didn't trust God would find it. I almost find it repelling watching testimonies of breakthrough and prosperity, and I said, God, but why? And I began to look back in my personal life, and we come from family of missionaries, and we come from a family of missionaries, and when we are missionaries in Russia, we live the very poor life, poor life, and any money that would get small amounts of money that we would get, good portion of it would go to do evangelistic events, to buy pamphlets, to buy this for the church, to buy this, and we lived a poor life, and constantly I remember borrowing and all this stuff, and I hated borrowing so bad down to my gods. I just hated that. I hated that feeling. I felt like I was inferior. I felt like I felt like a second-class citizen. I could never have what other people have, and it's all because we're doing God's work. So as you see God, and prosperity kind of wasn't going together, because of that for many years, I kind of was built a resentment, and when people even talked about it, I didn't know God knew it, but it came to the place where I had to be brutally honest with myself, and I said God, I'm sorry, but I just don't trust you with this area, and I'll do it on my own, but I want to trust him. And these are the things that I'm telling you. This is how I began to restore myself and restore God's faithfulness in this area of my life. I begin to say, God, I want to trust you, but at this point I can't, because of all these negative experiences, because of all this unfaithfulness that I've seen in this area, and I begin to study his word, and I begin to read it like I was reading it for the first time, and asking God, I want to know that you're faithful in this area, in the area of finance. I would pick out special stories from the Bible, of financial breakthroughs, of just miracles happening, the story of multiplication of bread, and fish, and all these things. I would study, I picked up a book that talked about Jewish history and Jewish cultures, and why they were so successful, and why there were just people that were blessed by God. I begin to study how they view God, how they saw God, and I begin to renew my mind in this area that God is faithful, and God slowly but surely begin to show one thing after another in this area, providing and showing, and doing different miracles. The second thing that I started doing is I start looking up testimonies, the testimonies that my dad was bugging me with, you know, I decided to start watching them. I started looking at them, where God was doing incredible test things, cancellation of that, just spontaneous out of nowhere, miracle money, the things that appeared in the, in the money that appeared in the account, people that just gave generous gifts, and these are that, and I started building my faith, I started building my faith, I started listening to business, Christian business people that were sharing different ways, how God came through, how God gave them idea, their business exploded, I started listening to people that their careers took off because of, because God touched it, because God was involved in it, and I began to build my life, build my, build my archives of testimonies, and I started trusting God in this area, and from that moment I began to see how God began to work in my life in the area of finances, then, then fast forward few years later, God began to open doors that I didn't even think I could ever have in my life, flying on private jets with people, consulting, and just having, having these doors that are open, and I'm like, my God, sometimes I sit the other time, when I was, we were flying to Dubai, and I'm sitting there with all these people, I mean, they're talking, they're talking about a hundred million dollars, like it's a hundred dollars, and I'm like sitting there, and I'm thinking to myself, my God, what am I doing here? What, what is this madness? What, how do I even relate to such a people? You know, I just went shopping, it's 400,000, I'm like, whoa, that's a really nice house where I'll come from, and so, and so, and, and, and I'm thinking like God, how, how did that, how did that happen, and I can't think, I can't, but to think about that moments God said, let me prove you my faithfulness in this area, and I thank God, and I thank God that God is faithful, and I can surely tell you today, stand before him, and I can tell you that God is faithful in this area, and a third point is meditate on his faithfulness in your life. When God begins to give you small victories in certain areas, and he shows you faithful, grab on to it like the, the, the last, the last breath of air, grab on to it like it's your saving, life-saving jacket, hold on to it, because what you meditate on, you're gonna multiply, it's gonna multiply in your life, you're gonna be building faith, see every miracle that God gives is like an apple, you eat the apple, you enjoy the benefit of the miracle, but there's seeds in there, and those seeds are the, for your, for your faith building, you take those seeds and you plant it so you can have another apple, another miracle, and then the mother of miracles in your future, you continue to build that, that trust and faithfulness in God, meditate, set up personal memorials, whether it's in diary that you write, I write every breakthrough that God gives me, every blessing that God gives me, I document it, and I do it so that when I do it low times in my life, I have a safety net, I can open it up and read it and say God was faithful here, he was faithful here, he was faithful here, he brought me through here, he silenced my enemy here, I can trust him again, I can trust him again, so the next time you find yourself in trouble, you say, I can trust him again, and he's gonna come through in Jesus' name, 2nd Thessalonians 3 3, but the Lord is faithful, he will establish you and guard you against the ill one, he's faithful, God is faithful and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, 1 Corinthians 10, 13, his mercies are new every morning, and his faithfulness last a lifetime, Hebrews 10 23, let us behold fast, fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. Thank you for watching this content, I hope this was a blessing to you, if you're like me and you like to click on things, click on this, subscribe to our channel, and the content will come to you every time we post it, and remember the best is yet to come.


Well it's another rainy day here and today I'm thinking about some of the obstacles to really getting started on the path of self-development and living the life that I want. And I can think that one of the big things for me is simply that to face the truth it's really ugly and as much as I always wanted to see myself as somebody who could face the truth you know no matter what and you know don't sugarcoat it give me the blunt truth that's always been my ideal but when it comes to the truth about ourselves all the worst aspects of ourselves that's when the truth becomes the most difficult to take. So even for people that love the truth and love facing difficult truths in principle to face the real truth about ourselves is essentially everything that you don't want to think about everything that you don't want to acknowledge that's what it is.   What bothers some people may not bother you but what other people don't mind it may be the thing that really bugs you and we will do almost anything it seems to avoid facing these worst details. We simply don't want to believe it and if we're seemingly forced into believing it by the evidence of our lives then often we will try to avoid it in any way simply escaping this is one of the big drivers for escapism is simply I don't want to face is this truth. So it's almost like an automatic defense that we have to simply not go there. All the things that I mean of course when it comes to social interaction these are all the things that you would never say to somebody under any normal circumstances you know pointing out somebody's weak points or their their worst failings this is what we don't do because it's so sensitive so hurtful and yet it seems like facing these things is a big step towards being ready to change being able to see what's there and simply accept that it is true to be able to face the ugliness of our own worst faults once we do that then we are able to do something about it to say okay yes me at my worst this is me at my worst this is the picture of me at the lowest I can be just like we have the sort of ideal image of ourselves or the beautiful perfect image of us at our best we can have the counterpart to that the image of ourselves at our worst and if you describe it you describe somebody else's picture it'd be like okay but when it comes to yourself we each have those things that are just pushing those buttons and if we can draw that picture be willing to press all our own buttons if we can do that then we have a sense of where things are there's something very freeing about that to simply say okay this is me at my worst it's pretty bad pretty ugly but it's not so terrible and it is finite it's not infinitely bad this is me at my worst these are my weak points these are my failings now I can begin to do something to change them in my case a big part of it was this feeling of being weak and lazy a lot of my worst points I'm weak lazy hiding from life and these these qualities are difficult for me to accept but when I was able to simply accept okay that is my worst qualities of course going into all kinds of detail that this you don't need to go into that publicly but we all have this is the list of all the worst things about ourselves when I was able to make that list and simply accept this is what's wrong with me this is the worst I was able to kind of relax into it in a way where I just kind of stopped trying to pretend that wasn't true it's all all the energy the effort that would need to go into bending the truth oh it's not really like that and oh it's not so bad and oh really it's counterbalanced by this and that and really that's just a perspective you can look at it another way all that inner effort that went into changing how I looked at that and not looking at it in that way that energy was all suddenly freed it's like okay I can simply accept it when we accept things that we don't like it frees up energy to be actually able to do useful things with and so I remember that it was about four years ago that I had this state of mind of really just like accepting this idea of me being a very weak and lazy person and then that is where it started to lead into okay what I need to do is start exercising because that covers weakness and laziness right there exercise it seems to be the thing to do it is you know from everything that I hear it seems like this will start things moving in a good direction so that was the very beginning of me starting to exercise and of course physical exercise is only one part of that there's the whole shift in mindset which has been the whole journey that I'm still on but my thought for today is simply that all the worst things about ourselves the ugly picture none of us want to face it but if we can face it we then have we can then be ready to make things better


In this episode of Mind Pump the World's Top Ranked Fitness, Health, and Entertainment podcast, we talk about why everybody should exercise. Now, if you're a fitness fanatic, you might think to yourself, well, duh, everybody should exercise, but believe it or not, only 22% of Americans exercise regularly. The rest of them don't, and they need to be convinced. This is a great episode to share with friends or family who need to get started, who you think need to get started with an exercise routine. So we listed 10 scientifically proven reasons why everyone should exercise. You'll love this episode.  Now, Zbiotics is the world's first genetically modified probiotic supplement. So it's the first one that's modified to literally help you break down the wasteful byproducts of alcohol consumption. In other words, you drink Zbiotics, then you drink alcohol. The probiotics produce enzymes that break down the negative byproducts of alcohol, meaning you wake up the next day and you feel way better. In fact, me and my co-host tested this out ourselves. We did a drinking game, took Zbiotics beforehand. I fully expected to feel dead the next day. And remarkably, I felt pretty damn good. The stuff is weird. It really does work. No joke. And because you listen to Mind Pump, you get a discount. Here's what you do. Go to Zbiotics.com. That's Z-B-I-O-T-I-C-S.com forward slash Mind Pump.  Also, I want to let you guys know that we create fitness programs that help people achieve amazing levels of fitness. Build muscle, burn body fat, speed up their metabolism. Well, this month, we took two of our most popular programs, MAPS Anabolic, a full-body workout program, and the No BS Six Pack Formula, which is our AB and core training program, both very, very popular. We combined them both and slashed the price. Okay? So normally, you'd enroll in both of them. It would come out to like $170 or $180. Right now, you get both lifetime access for one payment of $59.95. That's it. Get MAPS Anabolic and the No BS Six Pack Formula for $59.99. Just go to MAPSOctober.com. That's M-A-P-S-October.com. Justin, you were doing some Googling. I'm a big Googler. What were you Googling? Yeah, I was just looking up. I'm trying to see what your average person is looking up in terms of fitness-related topics or just help and advice in terms of anything health-related. So one of the main things that stood out to me was what are the benefits of exercising at all?  Why should they exercise? What are the benefits to it? That's good. And I think we should probably clarify the difference between exercise and being active. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's really important because there's definitely benefits to just moving and being active. But what we're talking about is a little bit more structured, a little bit more individualized. It's exercise. Exercise being something that you, because being active is very important, but exercise is also important where you actually have something planned. You know what you're doing. You train your individual body specifically for things that you want to focus on and work on for yourself. Well, when Justin first said this to me, I thought, oh, that's been silly. Like, why, you know, like we're too vague. Yeah, right. But when I think about like the clients that I had and their family members and stuff, you know, we all know that what the statistics are as far as like how obesity is on the rise. And there's a lot of people that are really out of shape.  You know, they make better food choices.  They don't care much about aesthetics. And they just want to be healthy. And they've done that through basically making good food choices and staying active to your point, Sal. But don't really exercise. And what is the case for that person and why they should exercise? Well, actually, it's funny because we do get stuck in a little bit of a bubble, right? Because when I hear, you know, like, hey, we should do a podcast about why everyone should exercise, I think. Why? Everybody knows you should exercise. But I just looked it up. So statistically speaking, under 25% of Americans meet the recommended amount of daily activity. So we're not even talking about actual structured exercise, but rather just being active, right? That's under 20 something percent. A smaller percentage of that or a percentage of that small percentage number of those people are actually doing exercise or actually working out. So you're absolutely right, Adam. The vast majority of people in America, not to mention the world, you do need to make the case for them why they should, why should you exercise? What are the benefits? What are the costs of not doing it? Why is this so important? Well, also, it reminds me of when we were researching apps and we were researching ways to, you know, make an experience for somebody who wouldn't normally just get up and move around. Like the big emphasis in the tech world is really about just getting people to stand more. That's what they've reduced it down to just because even, even just because of the modern comforts and the way that like work is structured, like sitting down. It's so easy. It's so accessible. You really have to go out of your way to, you know, just stand and move around and walk. And so they're trying to really focus just on the very simplistic things of how often are you walking? Like how often are you standing? And then they're gauging those as metrics. But now we're not even really at the point of bringing exercise in that conversation, which I feel is even more of a crucial step to then, you know, making their lives even that much more optimized. Yeah. Well, life in modern societies is sedentary. We've designed it this way. We used to suffer from pain and problems and health issues related to, you know, not having maybe enough nutrition or enough food and being and life being too hard, you know, washing clothes. I remember one year as a kid, I went to visit family in Sicily and my grandmother and remember this is they're not very, you know, well off. They're in Sicily and she had this old, like water bin with the what is it called the rack that you scrub clothes on with the soap or whatever the washboard. And I said, what is this? I don't know anything. And she said, oh, this is how we used to wash clothes. So I had her show me washing clothes took up a lot of time and energy and it was a lot of energy. I couldn't believe how physical that kind just washing clothes was. Everything was like that. Everything we did was very physical, very active, hard. And so we suffered a lot of issues from this, a lot of pain, a lot of posture issues, people with humpbacks and people with injuries and joint inflammation as a result of really, really hard labor. So we solved a lot of that. But now we have the opposite problem or consequences from the opposite, which is if you just go about your daily life in modern societies, you are lucky if you get a few thousand steps a day, not even talking about hard physical movement or activity, just steps, a few thousand.  We literally sit down most of the day.  It's like damage control, but it's not anywhere near optimal, not even close. Yeah, it's still like really reinforcing this reactive mentality. And I think that, you know, that's, that's one of those things where if I'm, if I'm just doing my normal everyday thing, it's, it really takes an extra step, which a lot of people just, they don't really want to consider doing more to what they already feel might be a bit challenging for them.  Well, we've speculated that this is the reason of the rise of interest in obstacle course racing. When we've talked about this, I think that people subconsciously know this. Like I don't, I think there's a large portion of people that sign up for these races, and they don't realize what it is that draws them to that.   You're paying to do it. Yeah. And, and so I do think that it's, it's, it's in us, right? To gravitate towards these things, because we, we subconsciously know that it's beneficial for us. And I think that is a reason why we see a rise in these obstacle course racing, all the different organizations that are out there is, I think deep down, people do know this. It's just, we have to make that case for the average person that maybe looks at themself in the mirror, and they don't think themselves is really overweight. They feel all right. The doctor's not telling them they have to do anything extra. They manage maybe their calories. And so they assume, why do I need to exercise? Why do I need to spend hours in my day doing exercises in a gym or outside with, I think that I'm healthy, right? Yeah. Yeah. And you know, there's a saying in advertising, and I promise this applies to what we're talking about, but there's a saying in advertising where you want to get to a point where you're trading dimes for quarters, meaning I want to spend $1,000 on advertising. And if I can make $1,500 for every $1,000 I invest in advertising, well, now I can grow my business and whatever, right? With exercise, it's kind of like that. The time that you spend on exercising, you get back in terms of quality of life in terms of length of life, you live longer, you live better, and you get more out of things and you get better experiences out of the things that you do. So it is a very worthwhile investment because there is some time that you need to invest in exercising, but it is trading dimes for quarters. So what we're going to do is we're going to go through 10 scientifically proven benefits of structure to exercise. These are benefits that we're not speculating as trainers that these are proven beyond a shadow of a doubt have been shown to get these kinds of benefits from structured exercise. Now, the first one, this is an interesting one because for a long time we observed this, but there wasn't any studies to support this. And that is that exercise generally makes you happy. It generally improves your mood. We now have studies to show that exercise done properly is as effective in the moderate term as SSRI antidepressant drugs for treating mild to moderate, which is the most common forms of depression. Now, these same studies show that exercise is probably better for the long term because you just continue to improve. That's for treating mild to moderate forms of depression, but if you're just average, you don't necessarily suffer from depression, studies also show that structured exercise improves your outlook on life. And this is why this is number one in this list that we're going to go through, how you perceive everything around you changes everything. If your day in your life doesn't change at all, but you now are happier in it, you now perceive it as better, your entire life has changed. You know what I'm saying? What's that saying? Like rather than trying to carpet the world, put carpets on the bottom of your feet, right? So rather than trying to change your whole life to make yourself feel better, why not just make yourself feel better? And then your whole life is now totally different. Now, on a physiological point, what's going on? Is it the blood, oxygen, nutrients that's being circulated through the body? Is it the serotonin? Like what is causing us to actually chemically feel happier? Well, exercise does increase the production of norepinephrine, epinephrine, catecholamines. It changes the brain to perceive and handle stress and anxiety better. So literally, as you exercise, they've done studies that show that the structure of the brain changes so that you perceive stress and anxiety differently, and they become far less stressful and anxious. Is that the body's ability to adapt to this stress? You're putting this out, you're putting this stress on the body by exercising. It then gets better and adapts to it. Therefore, it will make all stress easier for you to handle. Yes. Your body literally, just like your muscles grow from exercise, and we'll get into that as well, you literally are training your body to feel happier. This is why, in study after study after study, exercise is the most consistent thing you can do to improve your mood. There is nothing that consistently across the board, children, men, women, old, young, disabled or able-bodied, exercise improved. If it's done properly and appropriately, it's a real important thing that you need to say, it improves basically how you perceive everything. It literally makes you happy. It seems that when you hone in on that balance with the body's required, energy-wise and expenditure-wise, the body rewards itself with chemicals, it rewards, it elevates your mood. If you look at your body as this machine that has all these inner workings, that has this hydraulic system in it, it has all these plumbing that needs to, you need to supply the right work for everything to come in and out properly, and your body will respond accordingly and reward you for using it. Well, your body is the filter that receives the signals from the world, perceives them, that includes your brain, and if it's healthy, think about it this way. Here's an extreme example. Think of when you're sick. How often are you happy when you're sick? You tend to feel a little bit more depressed and down because you physically feel depressed and down. They both affect each other. Right. Exercise physically makes your body feel better, which then mentally makes you feel, and emotionally makes you more likely to experience happiness. What they find is that people who exercise regularly perceive happiness to be stronger, or feelings that aren't like happiness to be stronger, and perceive negative emotions to be weaker. So things that normally would make me feel really anxious or sad now make me feel less so because I exercise regularly. Now, the next one, this is one that a lot of people are familiar with, but exercise, regular exercise, especially resistance training, makes fat loss a lot easier. In fact, we now have lots of studies that show that just diet alone is a terrible way to burn mostly body fat.   Well, this also goes back to discerning between just activity and exercise because one is more beneficial towards actually building muscle, which then if we are able to build more muscle on our body, then it becomes even more easy to shuttle and utilize this fat storage appropriately. Well, it also gives you a lot more flexibility in your diet and now, right? During these times when the average person is extremely sedentary, when we have all kinds of food that can be delivered to us, most people that are even contemplating whether they should or should not exercise probably indulge in things like wine or desserts or things that they enjoy that are pleasurable that most of us like. And when you exercise, it gives you a lot more flexibility to have these things occasionally into your diet versus I don't want to exercise. So I have to have this very regimen way of eating all the time to maintain a healthy weight. Right. And when you do reduce your calories, if you don't send a signal to your body that says you need muscle, what your body tries to do is slow its metabolism down to meet the calories that you're eating.  That's typically the ratio of weight loss. So you lost 10 pounds, five fat, five muscle, and now the amount of food that you're eating that caused the weight losses, now the amount of food you need to eat to maintain because your metabolism has now slowed down. So if you've ever gone on a diet and said to yourself, I can't wait for this diet to be over because I'm eating so little, this can be very difficult to maintain. Well, guess what?  And that's a very difficult situation to be in. Structured exercise, in particular resistance training, will speed up a metabolism by 300 calories as much as 1,000 or 1,500. I've seen people's metabolism go way up from resistance training. So now here you are leaner and you can eat more. Now to maintain your leaner body, you can eat more. That's a much easier, better position to be in long term. The next one, again, this one seems obvious, but a lot of people don't realize this, but exercise, and again, specifically resistance training, phenomenal for muscle, excellent for bones. Now let's talk about muscle for a second. Muscle, your body views your muscle primarily to get you to move around and to perform the daily tasks that you need to perform. Your body will never make you stronger than it thinks you need to be. That's a waste of energy, right? Muscle burns a lot of calories and we evolved for the most part where we didn't have lots of food. So your body fights having more muscle unless it thinks it needs to. Like why would I think about it this way? Your body isn't going to make you have a higher metabolism or have a higher liability with calories unless it's something that it thinks is going to be beneficial. And working out sends that signal that tells the body we need more muscle. So now you have more muscle, which improves mobility, decreases your risk of injury, protects you against things like diabetes. You have better blood sugar control. And then because muscle connects the bone or attaches a bone, you have stronger bones. And we are in a bit of an epidemic of osteopenia and osteoporosis. It's still climbing, especially in women. Resistance training or exercise, structured exercise is the only thing to consistently reverse that trend. This is a good place to talk about that where you start with that too, right? So again, if you're one of those people that is listening to this and debating whether you should exercise or not exercise, I think one of the common mistakes that I have found with this person who now decides, okay, let's say they go through all these 10 points here. Okay, I'm sold. I'm exercising now. And they think they got to go into this crazy routine or program. If you weren't doing very much exercise or any at all to begin with, just simply doing a day or two in the week of exercise is already going to start to send a signal to the body that it needs to build some muscle and getting the benefits of fat loss and speeding metabolism like the point Sal is making right now. So starting off slow, but yet being consistent is far better off than you throwing a ton of it at your body right away and less likely to continue it on. No, do it the right way. That's why I keep saying appropriate exercise, the appropriate amount of exercise is what's going to give you all these benefits that we're talking about going too hard or too long for your individual body. Remember, it's all for you, right? So don't look at someone else and say what, you know, I'm going to do what they're doing, because it seems you've working for them. If it's wrong for you, you're not going to get a lot of these benefits. Now the next one is interesting because and I remember, you know, talking to one of my uncles about this one a long time ago and he's like, this doesn't make any sense, but exercise actually increases your energy levels, which is if you think about it kind of doesn't make sense because you think, how can making myself tired, sweating and working out give me more energy? You know, it's like weird energy physics, the more energy I burn, the more energy I have that doesn't make any sense. Well, it is totally true study support this 100% across the board. But here's how it works, very similar to how the body builds muscle when you're exercising. Your body will only give you the amount of muscle that you need, that it thinks you need. So if you're lifting weights, you'll have more muscle. If you're not lifting weights, you'll be weaker. Okay, your body's only going to produce the amount of energy that things you need. So if you sit around all day long and you're not active and you're not exercising or working out, your body's only going to produce so much energy. You don't need much energy because you just sit around all day long. If you do structured exercise, structured workouts, well now your body's like we need to produce more energy. We need to produce more energy because the demands on us are much higher. Well, yeah, I'm trying to like think of how I can relate this to somebody who just thinks about their job, just thinks about, you know, managing their home life and everything else is sort of in between. Well, if you just think of your work and let's say you're starting a new job or like a new focus within that job, and there's a learning curve to that. And what you have to do is immerse yourself in that and learn each part of the steps so you can get more efficient at that, but also you're stretching yourself. So like, let's say the work speed, I have to get something turned in like quicker, and I have to get better at the way that I manage my time and my efforts, you know, in my job to produce this result. You know, you got to think of training your body to be able to stretch your capacity a bit more, to be able to achieve that part where now I have more energy because I've been training my body to try to stretch itself to gain more access to it. I also think it's a bit of a momentum builder. Like it took me a long time to really start to notice this in my own behaviors, right? So obviously there's many days when I come home and I haven't worked out. Like I don't work out every single day and I noticed there's this, this direct correlation with the days that I exercise and the days that I don't. And that's this is when I come home and it's been a long day at work, we sit in here on the podcast, we're on computers on our phones all day. And then I come home from a normal day and I haven't exercised. I have this tendency to want to continue sitting the rest of the day.  Well, I have a three level house plus a garage and he does four levels, right? And she'll say something like get something in the garage. And I'm like, ugh, I grumble to get up to go down four flights of stairs as if it's like so much work for me to go down there. You know, it takes me a whole two and a half minutes to do it at most, right? Yeah. And then I then I recognize the days where I get exercised and I come in and I almost feel guilty for sitting down. I don't want to sit down. My body wants to keep moving and keep working. And I, you know, something like she asked the same type of a question like that where she needs something downstairs and I just fly downstairs and grab it and run back up or I find myself coming behind her and helping out and doing chores around the house because I feel productive. I already exercised for the day. My energy levels are up and it tends to promote more movement through the day. It took me a long time to connect those dots, but most people that I've shared that with and told them to watch and evaluate that in their own lives have found the exact same thing too. When you get that exercise in, it tends to promote more energy and more movement through the rest of the day. Well, I'm back to your previous point before this about like the right dose, about not like overdoing it. There is a way to provide stimulus to your body to exercise in a way where you don't get insanely exhausted, where you feel like you're so sore. And I know that's a big deterrent for a lot of people are new to working out. They think immediately I'm going to get incredibly sore. I don't like that feeling and so why should I do that? Well, there's a way to do that where you provide just enough stimulus to the muscles where they're going to respond and actually it's going to elevate your energy levels. Yeah, you should feel good after working out. You should finish your workout and feel really good, calm, have good energy. You should not feel like you need to go lay down on the couch and take an app. You probably overdid it. But again, it's literally like this. Look, if you a few days a week are lifting 100 or 200 pounds, and your body gets strong to be able to do that, how easy is it going to be to lift your kid, you know, who weighs 25 pounds? How easy is it going to be for you to lift the bag of dog food that's 15 pounds, right? If you are expending energy through exercise and your body is adapting and getting better at that so that you can do an hour workout, how good are you going to feel when you just need to walk to your desk and sit at your computer and focus on your computer screen, right? Your body is producing the amount of energy that it thinks you need to be active. And at the moment, you don't need to be active, but you've got all this extra energy. So exercise consistently done properly increases energy levels and obviously who couldn't want more energy. The next one, this is a big one for modern societies because although we've solved a lot of, you know, acute health issues, we've seen the rise of chronic health issues. So now we see people with diabetes on the rise. That's a chronic health issue. We have autoimmune issues are on the rise, Alzheimer's, dementia on the rise, all these chronic health issues and really our current medicine has a tough time treating. You know, we can kind of handle the symptoms, but we can't cure them. You know, it's not like you take antibiotics for an infection and it's gone. You're kind of managing the symptoms. Well, exercise, structured exercise has been shown across the board to reduce the risk of all of these chronic diseases. In some cases has been shown to reverse them. You know, I've worked with clients who were just became diabetic and came and hired me. And then for all intents and purposes, doctors said, well, it looks like you're not diabetic anymore. Let's just keep doing what you're doing. So because of the way it strengthens the body improves its health, the chronic disease risk dramatically lowers. Now, do you think a lot of that has to do too with just the partitioning of calories? Because most people in modern society tend to over-consume a majority of the time, even if you're pretty good with your diet and kind of balance it out through the week and have some lower calorie days. For the most part, most people are over-consuming. And then the fact that you're exercising those calories instead of getting stored as body fat or slowing things up or contributing to the chronic disease, it's now being partitioned over for energy, fuel, and resources maybe to hang on to muscle. Well, you're going to be leaner. It's easier to stay lean. You have more muscle. Muscle increases insulin sensitivity, which is great for preventing diabetes and Alzheimer's. You have a better inflammatory response in the body, which can help with lots of autoimmune issues. Of course, your outlook changes. Your mental state can even affect your body's risk of getting chronic diseases. I mean, across the board, again, studies show that one of the best things you could do, for example, to reduce risk of all cause mortality or all these chronic health issues is just to have structured workouts really beyond a shadow of a doubt. It's been proven time and time again. The next one, this is an interesting one, but there's a lot of science that supports this as well, and that's that it can help skin health. Now, like the energy one that we talked about, you think to yourself, well, I know working out makes you sweat. It produces free radicals. Like how is that supposed to help skin? Well, if you do it right, your body starts to also produce more antioxidants. It starts to produce better compounds for your skin. It also balances out hormones. And so exercise has been shown in studies to positively influence someone's skin the way it looks and the way it feels. Now, is this another one of those cases where the amount and the intensity that you do it is important? It's got to be appropriate, right? So like overdoing it, it may not be very healthy for the skin, but the right dosage of exercise can be extremely healthy. Absolutely. Because if you get in that rut of just thinking that running or walking or like repetitive patterns is going to solve a lot of these issues, you may actually be creating more issues down the road in terms of utilizing your oxygen and circulation effectively. Well, that's the reason why I brought it up, because the first thing that came to mind when you said that Sal was that I was picturing somebody who was like a marathon runner, and I don't think they have great skin. No, many times they don't. Now, you have to consider if you overdo it, you're going to get, you're not going to get a lot of these things that we're talking about. And then of course, there's also consider somebody who trains a lot outdoors may get more sun exposure, more wind exposure. So you can't, it's a hard thing to compare. But when they control for all these factors, and they look at appropriate levels of exercise, you tend to see across the board improvements in skin as well. Skin just looks more supple, less wrinkled. It's healthier, skin cancer rates go down from being from exercising.  Now the next one, this one's also real important, especially we have an because we have an aging population here in America. Structured exercise is amazing for the brain. It's incredible for the brain. There's all kinds of cognitive benefits that they've shown and just the retention and memory and just improvements on focus, especially I think focus was the big one that you know, I was researching in terms of like exercise, helping to promote that's that's one of the the biggest things we're fighting right now is like where our focus lies. We're so distractible today with all the technologies and things in front of us to be able to really hone in and focus and get your body to exercise and get all this out so we can remain in that state is highly beneficial for all across the board in terms of home, life, work, life, etc. Yeah, well your brain utilizes, you know, sugar for energies to run, utilizes other forms of energy too, but it also utilizes sugars. And when your brain has trouble utilizing the sugar, it, you know, some scientists call it type three diabetes, also known as things like Alzheimer's or dementia. In fact, when you take someone who's got Alzheimer's and you put them on a ketogenic diet, sometimes they see improvements in performance because the brain now is operating with less sugar. Now that's more of a bandaid than anything. But how about increasing your insulin sensitivity so that doesn't happen in the first place? Well, exercise does that, especially when you build muscle, right? The more muscle you have, the better your body responds to sugar and the more sensitive it becomes to insulin. Exercise also causes spikes in brain-derived neurotropic factor. This is like miracle growth for the brain. And in older populations, they show that regular exercise maintains hippocampus size and strength and health, which is great for things like memory. Well, what about just the communication factor? I mean, before you wiggle your fingers or stand or sit or do any sort of movement, the very first thing that initially happens is you get a signal from the brain, that communication for those fingers to move or for those legs to contract, like, you know, just exercising is improving that connection and improving that communication. And the lack of it, just like muscle, it'll atrophy itself. So, you know, think of it that way too. I want to continue to strengthen that communication to all parts of my body. And that's what you start to see. That's the first thing that starts to go when you see people age.  It first starts with the lack of communication. Yeah, the more neural connections you make, the stronger the brain. Exactly. Oh, yeah. If you stopped moving your legs, the parts of the brain that control the legs start to atrophy, they start to shrink. We know now that the initial strength gains that you get from resistance training don't come from bigger muscles, but rather they come from improved central nervous system communication. You actually get growth of the central nervous system, all the connections of the neurons and the things that tell the body to move. Moving with resistance training in particular, moving in different directions, doing different exercises, works on your brain's proprioceptive ability. This is knowing where your body is in space. What you don't train or what you don't exercise, you tend to lose that whole, that old adage, you know, what does it lose it or no, what is it? You don't use it, you lose it. There you go. Use it or use it or lose it, right? Totally true.  Well, we see examples of this when someone's been like in a cast, right?  It feels very strange. It feels very strange and foreign. And that's just a small window of like, say, three months or six months that you were casted up, that all of a sudden it's like this, it's like learning to walk again or to move these fingers. That's a small window. Imagine over years and years and years of you stopping that communication to certain parts of the body or certain movements that the body should be able to do, you will start to lose that. Yeah. And, you know, studies will show that older populations that when they are bedridden for whatever reason, let's say they break a leg or a hip and they're in bed, you see mental decline really ramp up and accelerate. We forget that the brain is a part of the body, by the way. So, whatever makes the body healthy tends to make the brain healthy as well. It's all connected. I mean, we got to treat the body. It's a holistic perspective. The brain, the body inseparable. You need both and you need them both to be healthy. So they both need to be challenged to strengthen the entire body. Right. Another one is sleep. Exercise gives you deeper and better sleep. Part of the reason is because sleep is a recuperative recovery process. A lot of healing and recovery happens when you sleep. Well, exercise for all of its benefits, it is a stress on the body. In fact, that's why the body gets better and healthier is because it adapts to the stress. But when you provide the stress to your body, it also ramps up its ability to recover and recuperate. So you'll find that when you're active and you exercise, you go to bed, you sleep harder, deeper and more sound. Don't let you feel a lot of people just don't deplete themselves of these glycogen stores. They don't ever get to the point where you get exhausted. How much better you sleep as a result of that actually like expending that energy and not keeping all that pent-up energy inside. It provides a lot more restless sleep for me when I don't expend that energy. Well, Sal, you always like to talk about how we evolve. Like, do you think this is part of like how it sets your circadian rhythm even? Like, you get outside, you get sunlight, it tells the body naturally, oh, it's daytime. You do activity for hundreds of thousands of years. We were very active and physical throughout the whole day. Then the sun goes down and you're exhausted. You moved all day long. You were out in the sun. Now sun goes down. You've stopped all this movement so that then you sleep really well. I always notice when I get a good training session in, I get outdoors. That night I always sleep better than a day where I've been under fluorescent lights all day long and doing exercise. Yeah. Something that happens to the body when you go to sleep is your body temperature drops a little bit. This is part of the process. In fact, if it doesn't do this well, you typically have a tough time going to sleep. Well, increasing your body temperature during the day through exercise, study shows, improves your body's ability to reduce its body temperature at night. So it actually sets you up for better sleep in the evening. Some studies show a 65% improvement across the board. So 65% improvement across the board in sleep for people who just add a little bit of structured exercise. So if you have issues with sleep, one of the first things you could do is try doing a little bit of exercise during the day and then watch what happens. The next one, this one's a big one. Exercising reduces pain, especially nowadays. Most of the pain that we see nowadays in modern societies is the result of poor movement patterns, is the result of being inactive, of having muscle weakness, of having poor mobility. So exercise directly results in solving the root causes of a lot of problems that cause pain. In fact, if you have pain that's chronic and you go to the doctor and the doctor sends you to the physical therapist, the physical therapist doesn't have you lay down and go to sleep, they have you exercise. Well, it's one of the best things you could do for pain. This is also what makes the case of the difference between just being active and then actually exercising. Because you got to remember that if you consider yourself an active person, the body is still going to take the path with least resistance. So it's still going to figure out the easiest way for you to get by your day. So you can be an active person, but still not challenging range of motion, challenging muscles that need to be firing on a regular basis. So there's the difference between being active and then actually actively going to exercise the body and challenge it to where it adapts and builds muscle. Well, there's also somebody who has back pain because they have a weak core and tight hip flexors because of a weakness, right? That person is going to do different exercises than someone who has a back pain, has back pain because their back is weak, right? Both have back pain. Both do different forms of exercise. One of the wonderful things about exercise and one of the big differences between exercise and act and just being active is that exercise is targeted. So if I train myself, I can target my areas of pain and figure out why I have pain, train myself appropriately versus someone else who has maybe even similar pain, but coming from different areas. Just being active isn't going to solve the root cause nearly as well as having something structured, which exercise does. That's why again, physical therapy consists of targeted exercise. Right, it's specific. It addresses the weakness and that's what exercise provides, which then provides that stability and security your body needs to then maintain or regain abilities you used to have. Otherwise, it's a downward spiral. Once you lose an ability and you just go about doing activities, you're going to avoid the activities that aggravate the pain, which then just, I mean, compounds after that. Yeah. Now the next one's a funny one because I remember training clients as a trainer, as an early trainer, and I would start to get this comment, especially from my older clients. And it started to become real consistent. And I started to think, oh, this is after about three months of exercise, I can pretty much predict that I'm going to hear this from my older clients. And oftentimes they were embarrassed to bring it up or they would bring it up kind of in a sideways kind of way. Like they'd come up to me and say, you know, Sal, we've been working out now for a few months, a couple of days a week. And I'm noticing I have more energy. And then they look at me funny. And I say, Oh, like really revved up. Yeah. Oh, so you just feel more energized. Yeah. But I also noticed like a more like youthful feeling. I'm like, Oh, you can move better. Like, no, no, no, no, no, you're not getting this. Yeah.  And they'll be like, Yeah, yeah, I'm a little embarrassed. But yeah. And I would hear that kind of across the board that their sex life would improve.  And it does this through a few different ways. Number one, it makes you healthier.  If it, excuse me, an unhealthy body doesn't want to do that. And if a healthy kind of wants to do that improves your hormone profiles. There's also this mental psychological effect with just looking better. You know, when I'm you're improving yourself. Yeah. When I'm feeling strong and muscular and relatively lean, you know, I want to take my clothes off more, I feel better about myself, feel more confident.  I feel like the confidence one is so big here when you're talking about sex too. Because I think just the things that you can do with exercise that's related to better posture and the way you carry yourself, that has a lot to do with just your everyday confidence and other aspects of life. But it really bleeds into this side. I think a lot of times when people have troubles either in their marriage or relationship or just with sex or intercourse in general, this is one of the areas that they just lack the confidence. One of the best things that you can do to sort of build that confidence is exercise, is addressing posture stuff. You start to carry yourself a lot more confidently. It just bleeds into the bedroom. It's more attractive and you could totally tell that by posture alone, which if you're not actively working on yourself and working on exercises specifically to keep you in that upright position, just looking at you is going to be less appealing to your partner. Yeah, I actually found a list of studies that are really interesting. There's one study that showed a group of women in their 40s observed that they experienced orgasms more frequently when they incorporated strenuous exercise like resistance training into their lifestyle. Another study, group of 178 healthy men reported that more exercise hours per week, those that exercise more per week had higher sexual function scores. Another one showed that a simple routine, that's just silly, but a simple routine of walking helped improve 41 men improve their erectile dysfunction symptoms by 71 percent. There's more, there's like an endless number of studies here that I could pull from, but exercise does a great job at improving your sex, not just through feeling better, but also the drive to have sex. If you feel like you have less motivation to have sex, exercise tends to improve that.  When that drops, oftentimes there's a lot of things underlying the reason why it went down. So for all those reasons, again, there's way more than that. I mean, I could, we could literally make a list that's 100 long. Here's a top 10. These are the top 10 and these are the 10 that are proven beyond a shadow of a doubt by scientific study, by many, many studies to prove that exercise positively influences the 10 things that we just listened, listed. Now, Mind Pump is recorded on video as well as audio. So if you want to watch the podcast, come check us out on YouTube. You can also find all of us on Instagram. You can find Doug, the producer at Mind Pump Doug. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin. You can find me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam. Usually if you're sore for longer than a couple of days, like two days, I would say more than that, you're probably overdid it. If your soreness is impeding your performance in your next workout, you probably overdid it. If it's sore to the touch, rather than like, it's okay to get sore to where you have to stretch the muscle.


Hello Seekers of Knowledge, I am Kim, and this is a spoiler-free review of Nixia by Scott. Oh, I have to look. Rankin? Convenient. His website is itspronounced rankin.com. It's very helpful, thank you! This book is published by Crown Books for Young Readers and is coming to you September 2017. Trigger warnings for this book. There's vomiting. It is not graphic, but it is frequent. There's loss of violence and there is character death. So if you have a tendency to get attached to people, maybe don't read this book. It's supposed to be heartbreaking and I personally enjoy having my heart broken, but if that's not your cup of tea, I understand. Okay, let me see if I can summarize this. There's a lot going on in this book, and I guarantee that anything I summarize here will not be the extent of it. Just forewarning, yeah. Okay, here we go. The Bapal Corporation has accepted 10 candidates onto Genesis 11, a sci-fi year spaceship that has ever sci-fied before. Genesis 11 will take a year-long journey to a habitable planet called Eden in order to mine a new form of matter called Nixia. The 10 candidates must compete for their places because only eight will be making the final drop. The catch? All candidates need to be under 18. The native life forms of Eden appropriately called Adamites abhor adults and honor children.  But there are things Babelcorp doesn't want anyone thinking too hard about. One of them is this. Nixia is a lot more than it seems. Our protagonist Emmett, a young black man from Detroit, has to fight through a year of grueling tests in order to earn his place on Eden. This book had a lot of great quotes, but I picked this one. Babel might have all the keys, but they don't know what they're keeping in the cage. I like the way this book is written because the narration changes as our protagonist changes. It's first-person. It starts with this very colloquial American slang, um, office and dap kind of stuff. And so essentially everybody's forced into a very academic style of English because, first of all, they're learning a lot. And second of all, only a few people actually speak English. Um, the way they do it with this book is people wear a mask made out of Nixia, which was invented by Babelcorp, and will translate any language that you speak into the language that a person who is also wearing the mask can understand and hear it, and vice versa, which I think is just really cool. So that's the middle, is this very academic form of English, so he's left behind a lot of his slang. And then towards the end, it's even discussed, the ten candidates begin to build their own slang that is appropriate for their current surroundings, which is a spaceship. So it's incredibly appropriate, and I just really love that attention to linguistic detail. Like, well done! Well done! The other element about that that I really find very interesting is that since not everyone is hearing English, that means that instead of one English dialect that was created on this spaceship, in fact, you have ten dialects in ten different languages. I mean, I don't know how to say fathom in Mandarin Chinese, but the Nixia mask does, and therefore this technology has helped to integrate people and create new language in every language. I love this! Linguistic Nerd Fest concluded, I promise. Emmett is a conscious young man. He notices things, but he does not dwell on them. He just saves them for later. Nonetheless, he's very instinctual and action-based.  I am so happy about the quality of parenting that this young man is receiving, because so often our classic male protagonist in sci-fi has parents that are dead, parents that are absent, or if they're present, they're abusive. All this to elevate the dark, brooding, emotionally constipated, toxically masculine is toxically a word? Hey, Siri, define toxically. Siri says it is a word. Thanks, Siri. My pleasure. As always. I like The Dark Knight as much as the next girl, but we can all agree that wandering around with that much man pain is just unhealthy, not to mention annoying. Emmett's dad has some wonderful words of wisdom to help his son keep his head on straight during this year-long crucible. He's encouraged to look at the whole picture to remember that the difference between right and wrong is not always clear, that people make mistakes, that the only thing that you can control is yourself, and that no one is perfect. Throughout the book, Emmett struggles with his anger. He has recurring dreams about black holes, and sometimes in his mind refers to himself as the destroyer.   And his self-control makes him powerful. He also makes friends with his sweet-mate Kaya. She's a Japanese strategist of the First Order, and she has this insatiable need to know what's going on behind the curtain of Babelcourt. She declares the very first day that she cannot come home to more competition, and she makes an alliance with Emmett. They are open with each other, their rooms are safe zone, and they become family.  Ugh. Okay, moving on. Characters! This book is incredibly diverse. Like, so diverse. I cannot even... I don't think a word exists for how diverse this is. Emmett, young black male protag, Kaya from Japan, Bilal from Palestine, the West Bank. He is just too nice. He's just too nice. Katsu, the big Japanese guy with the smart mouth.  There's Jazzy, or Jasmine, a blonde pageant girl from Memphis with a cool head under pressure. Azima from Kenya, she is fiercely independent and indomitable with spear. Jamie, our only white guy who is from Switzerland, is a Dora, a Brazilian girl, and her boyfriend, Rothe, both of them play their cards very close to the chest. And that's just the competitors! There's also Defoe, one of the CEOs of Babelcourt. He's an older black man with a withered arm. And yes, that one kind of smacks of disability coding as villainy, so I guess point against. And then Kaya and Emmett's assistant slash psychologist named Vandermere, who's Dutch. As for the plot, there's not really much that I can say that I haven't already said, but you should know. Defoe's rather twisty. He runs the tests and just know that whenever Emmett starts to get comfortable, the rules are about to change. Overall, I give this book 4.5 out of 5 stars. It is a great beginning to a trilogy. If you're fans of Ender's Game or The Hunger Games, you will probably love this book as much as I did. If you are looking for an own voices, sci-fi, coming of age adventure, with some shadowy corporation action and a dash of really, just really excellent parenting, try this book. It comes out in September of 2017 and apparently it's available for pre-order now. I fully expect each and every one of you that reads this book in September to tell me what you think, because there are some serious spoilers. I just, I'm discovering that this is actually a downside of reading arcs. Like, okay, yeah, you get to you get to read the book first, but there's no one to talk to about it and it gives me feels. Okay, feels aside though, let me know what you think. I just, that's all I'll say now. Moving past it. You know, I'm gonna make my roommate read this book. She still has to get through thickest thieves, which I'm also, by the way, forcing her to read. When she does, then, then I'll make her read this book and then I'll have someone to talk to about it. My plan is genius. Alright, I will see you next time around. Bye.