Avoid cardio until it's necessary, save that tool. First of all, it's a short-lived tool, okay? Lots of cardio to get really shredded, doesn't work very, in fact, a lot of people get shredded in spite of the fact that doing just tons of cardio for 12 weeks or whatever. Save it, do everything with diet and strength training. And then the last couple of weeks, if you want to throw it in, you can, and you can squeeze off a little bit of body fat. But if you make this part of your long-term routine, what you're doing is you're countering that muscle-building signal that we're trying to do with strength training through this I need endurance type of a signal, which really only encourages the muscle-pairdown process. So what you want to do is you want to save it until, and I remember you, Adam, when you competed, I think you did it the last two weeks, was it? The longest I've ever done cardio is four weeks, and most often it was two. So it's, if you have a coach and they have you doing cardio for 12 weeks leading into a show, you should fire a coach. All right, you're all here because you want to get super shredded. We're going to get to the episode in just a second, but first I'm going to give away a program. Maps PowerLift, okay? That's the program I'm giving away in today's episode. Here's how you can win. Leave a comment in the first 24 hours that we drop this episode. Subscribe to this channel, turn on notifications, do all those things. If we like your comment, we'll notify you and you'll get free access to Maps PowerLift. One more thing, we're running a sale right now on a Maps Program Bundle and on a Maps Program, okay? So an individual program and a bundle of programs. Here's what they are. The bundle is called the Shredded Summer Bundle. This is Maps Aesthetic, Maps Hit, Maps Prime, the Intuitive Nutrition Guide, all those things discounted and then we took an additional 50% off. The individual program that's on sale is Maps Hit. Hit of course is high intensity interval training. That program by itself is 50% off. So if you're interested, go to mapsfitnessproducts.com and then use the code June 50 for that 50% off discount, all right? Here comes the show. Sal, you were doing something, we were getting ready to start podcasting the other day and I saw you eating in the front and I've watched you over the last few months, some of the best shape you've ever been in.  And I got to thinking, you know what? Like, you were talking about the level that you're at right now as far as where you're at in the diet.  This would be a really, I hope, cool episode where people will appreciate because there is a difference with kind of getting in shape and being healthy and even losing some body fat and then taking it to an extreme level of single digit body fat. Yes. So there's some different rules that apply and I think there's just a different mindset that you have to have to take it to where you're kind of going right now. It's very different. It's very different. Like being lean is healthy, being shredded is not. So it's a different mindset, it's a different approach. Of course, there's a genetic variance. Some people could be much leaner than other people and still maintain good health. But what you have to do, at least for me, and I can be very specific because as an individual, I can give you more exact numbers. But what you have to do to get lean and what you have to do to get shredded or get down to single digit body fat for a man and for women, it's typically the low teens or maybe 10% even. It's so psychologically different and it feels so different that it warrants an episode, I think. I think you're right. Well, you've been going now for a while now, really consistent. It's probably the most consistent I've seen you on diet and training for a while. You've been in great shape. At what point did that, did you start to notice it? Because obviously, again, you're in good shape right now, but I know you made the mental switch, like, okay, I'm gonna get really shredded for this video shoot that we're gonna do. When did that kind of tip you at like, oh man, I forgot what it's like to go here? Yeah, I've been below like 7% body fat a couple of times before. And each time I remember, it's like for me, once I hit about, I wanna say 8%, then it starts to feel kind of different. And I noticed that my hot and cold tolerance changed. So like, I'll sweat, you know, sometimes I'm cold, so it kind of throws it off. My sleep is a little different. The cravings are a whole another level. So, and I remember this from before, like the leaner I get, like the closer I get down to five or 4% even, I'll start to have dreams about food. And it's like really weird, right? You remember those? I do. I have never in my life- Yeah, when you dream- Drammed about food until I dieted that hard. And it's like I'm dreaming about like fruit. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, like just so weird, right? It's unhealthy psychologically and physically, especially for long periods of time because it's, you know, consistency is great. Obsession, not so much. But when you get to this, when you're getting to this type of level, you have to be obsessive about it because it's so- We don't talk about this a lot because I think that we highlight that it's not a healthy place for most people to be. That being said, do you recognize that there are some positive healthy benefits from pushing yourself to that extreme? Yeah, I mean, if you go into it, the right mindset, because I don't think it's great for everybody, but I think when you do it, and you've talked about this too, you really figure things out. You become more in tune with your body. You know how it reacts to certain things. And when you do a certain level of hard or challenge, then the easier levels feel much easier, right? So like maintaining 10% body fat, which is good lean for a man. I mean, you have kind of visible abs and you can maintain that in a healthy way with good consistency. That becomes a lot easier when you've played the game of getting down to 5% body fat, which is like a whole another ball. Is it almost like your muscles and your receptors? They're just so oversaturated with food and calories and the overconsumption that most of us do. And you just ring everything out.  What is it that you think that makes us become so in tune when you get down that level? Yeah, that's a good question. You know what it is. I remember when you were competing, you would talk about this too.  Like 12 to 15% is a good athletic body fat percentage. Some people can carry leaner, but that's pretty good. If you go from 12 to 13%, you can't tell. Like you can't tell in the mirror, right? You go from 5 to 6% is a big difference because that 1% is 5% of your body fat, right? So I think the changes are so visible. Like I can tell from day to day, if I do one thing that's a little different, just by the way I look and feel versus before, where I know if I have a burger, that's not gonna show up, doesn't make that bigger.  And so it just makes you very sensitive, I think. Yeah, I think it makes you sensitive to the things that you can see visually and then also how you feel. That was something that surprised me that I wasn't anticipating going into it, is that I would, once you started getting down to the low single digits, I would eat a meal and I could see the difference on my body, I could feel the way my body responded to the food, like it was really, really weird. What was your line?  Like what percentage? 6, 7%, right around there. Yeah, and obviously becomes more dramatic as I got lower, right?  It was going into the national show. I was 3.2% with two weeks to go and the final two weeks is a pretty hard cut. So I imagine I got another percent down or so, maybe more the final two weeks.  But I started, yeah, oh yeah.  It looks like I gained another half percent body fat, which you can tell when you're that lean, it's really weird. I think it's important too, before we get into this, that this isn't like something you should pursue if you're still dealing with, and most people are, relationship issues with food, relationship issues with exercise, because you'll create a crazy rebound. Even if you do accomplish this and you don't have those things dialed in, you're gonna rebound in a very negative way. Well, this is why we don't recommend competing for most people. I mean, I get so many people that ask me questions. This is all performance driven. Totally. You need to have that. I mean, I'm lucky that I got into the sport of bodybuilding when I was 30 and I'd already been a trainer for 10 years. Oh, good point. And so I had already worked through a lot of my insecurities around food and exercise and the way I look, my body image issues. Like, I think that's so important that you've kind of worked through all that stuff before you go do something at the competitive level. Even if you're not getting on stage, I think dieting to this level is competitive. So I know there's a lot of controversy around calling bodybuilding a sport or not, but when I think of it as a sport, I think of just the competitive nature of what you're doing. You're pushing your body beyond healthy limits, which is kind of all sports, right? You are always, you're pushing those boundaries of what can my body do when I push it to the ultimate level? Totally. Healthy is balanced. Extreme is never balanced.  You're trading in longevity and health and balance for extreme performance. And I think there's value in that in many cases, but you've got to identify if it's right for you and if it's going to result in way worse outcomes. You know, one of the first things I think that's important to understand when you do this is that you have to go into it recognizing that it's temporary. Now, why is this important? Because if you don't, because I've seen this many times, people will get shredded and then they're obsessively shredded forever or they try to stay there forever.  The negative health consequences can be quite nasty in men and women from hormonal issues to immune issues. You can start to see some really, really bad health issues from trying to maintain a shredded physique. So you have to go into it, saying my goal is to get the sling, but it's going to be temporary. And then what that does is also allows you to come up with a back out plan. How do I back out of that? That's the part that I think is, so that is something I learned the hard way. So I was so obsessed with the competitive side of getting lean in the show and everything that I actually wasn't thinking about a backup plan, like, okay, when the show is over, like I wasn't even thinking about that yet. And even I, when I got out of the show, knowing better, binged that first time. The first time, like, you know, because I did it, right? I made the show and I'm like, oh, I got down. Celebrate. And I was so low calorie. I was so lean. It was easy to justify all the junk and all the calories that I was taking on after.  And so you start to kind of play this game like, oh, I can get away with this. Like it's okay. And then before you know it, you've done a week or two of eating like this and the body fat. We did an episode with Lane Norton a couple of years ago where we talked about when you do this, this is when your body adds fat cells at like a rapid rate. So it's really dangerous to do that. This is very important point to make. So, and I've, by the way, I've witnessed female competitors gain 20 pounds in under a month.  I've seen guys gain 30 pounds in a month from this rebound. So your body doesn't add the number of fat cells except for a few times in your life. Tuberty, I believe the third trimester of pregnancy can do this.   However, it's been observed, and this is the way you're referring to, when people do extreme dieting where their body is like, because make no mistake, you get down to single-digit body fat, it's starving. Your body's like, we're starving right now, okay? You get down that lean, your body turns into something different. And then when you refeed so much with excessive calories, your body has to, it adapts by improving its ability to capture calories. And the way it does so, and we've observed this now in studies, is it adds the number of fat cells. What does that mean? That means the next time you try to get lean, it's harder. So in the only like community I think we could point to where we could see this happening is the extreme bodybuilding in physique competitor category of athletes, where you'll see them competing and then they'll talk about how it's harder for them to get sharp. Like I can't get sharp like I used to and I used to be able to get, this worked for me before, but it's not working again. And why is my body not responding the way it used to? Your body's literally learning how to capture energy more efficiently and by adding fat cells. So you can cause yourself a lot of problems by doing this, not to mention just the health issues. Cause the first time I did that, where I got down to like 4%, I think it was, and then I did the same thing. Oh, it wrecked me. My gut. It really wrecked my gut.  And I imagine the same thing happened to you just instead of it being on the physical or visual side, you probably felt okay.  After my gut healed, I was like, oh, I think I'm gonna keep pushing it. And then it just, it's not good. So you have to have that back out plan, but part of that is recognizing this is temporary.  Okay, so if I get down to 4%, then what I'll do is I'll give myself a month or two to allow myself to creep back up to 10%. So it's kind of a slow crawl instead of being like, let's see how fast I can get this weight back on my body. Now, knowing you guys have both kind of gone through this process. I know this isn't on the list or anything, but in terms of like getting down as low as you possibly can, like have the first attempt that you did, did you notice that, I mean, you lost a good amount of muscle with it? Like you just, we're just dieting as hard as possible, just mentally, like you're trying your best to just like really cut calories, but maybe didn't do as good a job at preserving muscle. The name of the game is keeping muscle. It's not burning body fat.  But then they keep pushing, they lose weight on the scale, but their body fat percentage doesn't budge anymore. They're like, what's going on? I've lost another five pounds. It's cause you lost muscle and fat. Because right now what you're happening is you're just making yourself smaller. You see this happen at higher body fat percentages too, but when you get lean, the leaner you get, the more your body is trying to figure out a way to survive off these fewer calories and one of the ways it does- Find the energy. And one of the ways it does is it pairs muscle down. So the name of the game is can I, I got to keep this muscle at all costs. Otherwise it's a, forget it. That's a really good question, Justin, because I'm guilty of that even though I knew better, right?  Like I wanted to be so lean that, and I didn't want the day to come or even the week leading up and go, oh my God, I haven't leaned out enough. And everybody was telling me up to that point that when you get on stage like that, like what will be more important than me having five or 10 more pounds of muscle that is that I'm two to 3% lower in body fat. So I probably took that and went too obsessive in the cutting the very first show, which I mean, I did okay. I placed in the top five, but I didn't, that wasn't my first show that I won. It wasn't until I started to kind of calm down a little bit and it took that first time of really dieting the extreme to know what I could do. I mean, I had never, I'd never dieted like that. And so part of this too is like learning the timing and like, oh, when I move these levers, my body does this or it takes this long to react. And so that was a bit challenging for me the very first time. But I think after that first show, I learned a lot of lessons. One was the reversing out one, two, what you're saying right now with like pushing that hard when I really didn't need to and probably sacrificing muscle when I didn't need to. So, which probably fed into the bad rebound so bad too.  So I inevitably slowed my metabolism down. And then I went the reverse and went gangbusters on food afterwards and then put on a lot of body fat. I would say one of the biggest differences and here's how it, here's a, you know, one of the ways that this can be unhealthy longterm is when you're getting to single-digit body fat, you're not just consistent, you're obsessively consistent.  Most people want to look that way and that's still very lean. But most people can do that by being consistent, I don't know, 85% of time, right? 85% of time, you're consistent. The other 15% of time, you're not going way off the rails but you're have some balance in your life, okay? To get down to single-digit body fat, you gotta be consistent 100% of time. Like, not one meal. Full-time commitment. Not one bag of chips, not two cookies. Like, I mean, and yes, you could try to make up for it with other things but good luck trying to play that game. You have to be obsessively, ridiculously consistent. And I remember this the first time I did this where I was trying to get below 6% and I couldn't, I couldn't figure out what was going on and really it was just, oh, I have to be perfect all the time and then the extra one, two percent. No flexibility at all. None, it's psychologically not a great place to be with.  Bullseye. And then think of you trying to shoot at that.  But if you're trying to hit that, that single digit body fat or low. Oh, the smallest degree.  Which is, I always have that conversation with clients that say they want this look and it's like, do you really, because the sacrifice, the relentless commitment that it's going to take to get to that, you know, and it's unfortunate because we use this for advertising and we celebrate these bodies. I'm so glad you said this, we glorify this unhealthy unbalanced credit. That's right. And it is unfortunate and it's appealing, right? It looks amazing, it looks cool, right? So many people think they want that, but they don't recognize the obsessiveness that it takes to kind of get to that level and the amount of sacrifice that you have to do to get there.  Okay, it's less pounds of body fat. So to go from 5% to 6%, it's just a little bit.  Ooh, I went up a percent. Like you can get away with way more higher body fat percentages with that. And in the reverse too, you get a man at 20% body fat, he goes to 19% body fat, you can't tell. You go from 5% to 4% and it looks really different, you know? So you have to be obsessively, obsessively consistent and that is just not healthy long-term. You don't want to live there, but in the short-term, understand that, all right? This is my goal, I want to do this. I have to, and I think there's benefit, again, for the right people to learn to have that kind of discipline regardless of whether it's business or fitness or sports, to be able to be that kind of dogged consistency. Well, that's another one of my favorite parts about doing that is I think that there's a lot of parallels in other aspects of your life. And I think a lot of reasons why people fail at business, I think a lot of reasons why people fail at reaching certain goals is they just don't have the tenacity and consistency in what they do. A lot of people attempting almost anything that's hard, do it for a while, fall down a couple of times and then that's it. And this is one of those examples of you just have to be just relentless and consistent and just most people don't have the gumption to stick with it. Now, I know there's people out there, the IIFYM crowd, right?  You can be flexible with your diet. No, no, no, you're still obsessive with your calories, your proteins, fats and carbs, even in that. So if you're getting down to single-digit body fat, even if you do an IIFYM approach, which I don't encourage, even for this, I don't encourage because good luck swinging and having these different foods and not messing with your hunger and your cravings and ramping anything up. Oh, forget it. If I could fit a pop tart into my diet and make the macros count, I still wouldn't because that pop tart would literally screw me up for two days and that's another thing too. If I eat something that is palatable in that way, my cravings are ramped up for 24 hours at least and it makes it much more challenging. But even that crowd, you still have to be obsessively consistent. They still have to hit their perfect numbers of macros every single day. All right, here's the next one. You'll notice a lot of bodybuilders and competitors will do carb cycling with their diet. Now, on its face, if your calories are the same and your protein is good and consistent, do you need to cycle carbs? No, you don't necessarily, but here's why it works psychologically. First off, proteins and fats are essential, meaning you have to consume them in order to survive. And because your calories are so low, I don't like cutting the ones out that are essential. I like to cut the ones out that are non-essential because I can get away with being too low on them. I can't get away with being too low on protein or fat. Then my health really starts to decline and then forget everything, right? So that's why I like cycling carbs.  So I give myself, and I'll balance out the calories with this, but I give myself some days when my carbohydrates are higher and that gives me those better workouts and it keeps me in the game. Otherwise it's like this grueling, why am I doing this and my workouts kind of suck. I never carb cycle until it came time to get ready for a show. That was the first time I ever even mess with that. And I actually fell in love with the process of utilizing that as a tool. I think for a couple of reasons. One, the energy going into a workout, right? I can manipulate like, oh, I've got a leg day tomorrow so I'm gonna try and time it with loading my carbs up. Also, the psychological part of not every day being exactly the same.  You start to look forward to it. Yeah. You just base it on your movement for the most part with your carb intake.  So over the course of a week, let's say my goal is to have my calories at 2,200 calories but I'm gonna have some days where I am having 2,700 calories. Some at 19. Yeah, some at, so. And really the way I'm manipulating those calories is through carbohydrate intake. And the other reason why I really like it is because when you get really consistent with figuring out what your body needs protein and fat-wise, like it's a little bit harder to come by and to get after that than it is carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are so easy to come by and find. It's also really easily to manipulate up and down. So I like being very consistent with my fat and protein sources and staying dialed in on that, making sure, okay, this meal's got this many ounces. Okay, I'm good there. And then the only thing that I'm really messing with and a lot of times it's, okay, so it's either white rice, sweet potato, yams, quinoa. These are like the go-to staple carbs that I'm using. And all I'm doing is going like, oh, on these days, I'm getting every meal is getting a cup of rice. On these other deals, other days, I'm getting two cups of rice. On other days, I'm skipping every meal and getting no carb in that meal. So I can easily keep it very consistent and just play with something that's very measurable, like rice or sweet potato. And it just made the dieting aspect really consistent and easy for me. And then also not so laborious of the same thing. It's all psychological. It really is because it does that for me too.  I've been feeling kind of flat. Let me have a higher carb day today so that tomorrow I go into it and have a better workout psychologically that helps me out. Carbs also for me at least, well, actually studies show this for most people. They're just the least satiety inducing macronutrient, meaning proteins and fats will make you feel more satisfied for longer than carbohydrates will. So bumping my carbs, even though my calories go up, I notice my appetite goes up. Even though it's a higher calorie day, I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm starting to go hungry. And going low calorie all the time, or being consistent, like you said, feels laborious. It's psychologically laborious. Having these ups and downs, like, oh, today's a low calorie day. I could deal with that knowing that in two days. I have a higher calorie day with more carbohydrates. The next one is you gotta keep your protein and take high. High protein is important for most goals. It helps with fat loss. It helps with muscle building. It's great for satiety. This becomes really important when you're playing this game because the game is don't lose muscle, and studies will show this. Yeah, lose muscle as much as possible. Oh, when they control calories, protein intakes high, even though the calories are the same, you lose less muscle. It also helps a lot with satiety, a lot. Like, if my protein intake, if I eat 2,000 calories on this day and 2,000 calories on this day, but this day is 220 grams of protein, this day is 120 grams of protein, I guarantee you, even though the calories are the same, the 120-gram protein day, I'm way hungrier. Well, the extreme version, being the carnivore diet, I experienced that in terms of the calories being so much lower, and it was easy for me to maintain, for the most part. So that strategy of intake and a lot more protein will help, I'm assuming, in this direction. Well, I just think too that, in general, like most clients, under-consume protein, not talking about the bodybuilders and the people that over-consume, which is a very small percentage of people, most people don't consume enough protein as is, and then they're going into a diet where they're trying to get shredded and they're just cutting calories. What ends up happening is they go super low on protein also.  The very first thing I told her to do was to pick up her intensity on our training and make sure you are tracking your protein, your hitting protein. We're sitting there, okay, last night, we're watching a movie, she decided to have one of those, like, you know, 100-calorie popcorn snacks or whatever, and she's snacking on it and she's inputting her food.  She's like, I missed my protein intake by 20 grams. So what you should have done is not had that bowl of that popcorn, you should have got one of our protein bars that we have in the closet that has 20 grams of protein and that should have been your snack and choice. Now, from a calorie perspective, she's okay. She's not gonna put on body fat from there and it may help her drop a little bit on the scale still but then she also missed her protein. She starts to string enough of those days together and your body will start to pare down muscle because it's not being fed what it needs to sustain it. This is very common when people are cutting. So it's making this mistake of not being dialed in and tracking their protein while they're also in a deficit and then at the end of their, oh, I lost my 20 pounds and they find out that 10 of it was muscle and 10 of it was fat, they're like, what the fuck? Well, that's why, because you were so concentrating on cutting that you weren't paying attention to your protein intake. I mean, along those lines, like I just had breakfast right now, what did I have? Steak and eggs and nothing else, right? Why? Because that keeps me satisfied. Otherwise I'm sitting here podcasting and I'm thinking about food and miserable. Yeah, so it really is satiating. Now, if I had the same amount of calories, but less protein and I had sourdough bread and fruit. Well, no, I love that you brought that up because what most people would do right there is, okay, so, and that was probably, I don't know, 400, 500 calorie low for you, okay? Somebody else, and you're big, so just not a good example, but let's say you have half of that for a female, right? 200-something calories, but it's all coming from eggs and steak. The common choice for somebody at breakfast is like a thing of oatmeal, which is lean and it's got lots of fiber, and so we just talk about all the benefits of it, but then it's all carbohydrate.  So that's why I love a meal like that. Like one of my favorite things to recommend to people for, especially in this case where we're dieting and is saving the, because everybody seems to do fine with making meat as the primary part of your dinner, is saving that to carry over into breakfast. And I don't know if that's where you got yours or not, but that's like a staple move for me. Throw that in your scramble. Yeah, so like last night we had Bison and Brussels sprouts, I'm not dieting right now. If I was dieting though, that would be the start breakfast. It would be like Bison and eggs. I would just take some of the Bison and then I would have one or two eggs with it, and now that becomes my breakfast. Now I kickstart my day with 40 grams of protein right out the gates, and it's low carbohydrate and not a lot of calories, so I'm staying low on my calories, but I'm also being mindful of making sure my protein is high. Yes, also working with Nutrisense, right? So this is a continual glucose monitor company. You wear this device, it measures your glucose levels, throughout the day you work with the nutritionist, the whole deal, see how your body responds. The number one way that you control your blood glucose from spiking and dropping, and you don't want that, right?  One of the number one ways that they see in all people helping to flatten that out is to eat your protein first.  It flattens it out. So a high protein meal controls hunger through many different mechanisms. One of them is controlling that glucose, those ups and downs. All right, so the next one, this one I think is really important because when people get into this like, I gotta get shredded phase, they start to turn all their workouts into calorie burning workout, or at least that's the mentality. Yeah, they wanna burn everything now on top of also like cutting down instead of like, really preserving what muscle they have by strength training, which is a completely different protocol. Yeah, lift weights and your goal is still to try to build muscle. Now, are you gonna build muscle going from 9% to 6% body fat?  But the better you train in that direction, the less likely you are to lose muscle, which again, that's the name of the game. So you wanna lift weights for strength and for muscle. That's the goal. And remember, weights are phenomenal at doing that. Now you use weights, you can do conditioning, you can do performance, that's totally fine. But when we're talking about getting shredded, you want that muscle building signal to be effective because the more your body believes that it needs the muscle, the less likely it is to pair it down. Cause right now what your body's doing is it's weighing things out. Like, oh, energy intake is very low.  Okay, we need, imagine if your brain, your body had like these workers in there, like, all right, everybody, you're having a meeting. Look, energy's low, stores are low.  We need to spend less money. So your body's like, we need to pair muscle down. We need to make sure that we're not burning as many calories. But then someone speaks up and says, hey, hold on a second, but we need this muscle really bad.   Like we can't cut these right now. We need this really bad. You're like, okay, well, let's keep going. So you have to send that signal effectively. So you have to lift weights and tell your body build muscle, build strength. It takes a lot of mental discipline though. This is something Katrina and I were also having a conversation about. So we want to diet like we were trying to lose, but I want you to lift as if we were trying to gain, right? So I want the intensity there. I want us to be focused on strength. You're trying to get stronger. But the reality is, I know that I have you in a caloric deficit and you're probably not going to get stronger. In fact, you may see your strength decrease. So here's where the mental challenge is, is that you know you're going into the workouts with the attitude of I'm trying to get stronger. So the lifting intensity is there. You're trying to push the weight. You're trying to be strong. But I also know that I'm not fueling my body, you know, adequate calories to gain. So then what ends up happening a lot of times is you see the bench press decrease. You see the deadlift go down. You see the squat go down.  It's okay. It's okay that I'm not going to be at my peak strength, but this is what's good for optimal results for me. This sending that signal to your points out is going to hang on to all that muscle that I worked so hard to build, but I don't want to get caught in the trap of expecting that. Oh, I'm lifting this way. Therefore I should feel like I'm getting, or get stronger every week. Yeah. So I'll give you a little bit of my strategy just cause I think this help, this will help, right? So what I try to do is I try to time all my best muscle building, you know, techniques right when I'm hitting this point with my diet and nutrition. Cause I'm really trying to be as effective as possible at preventing muscle loss. So what do I do? This is when I change the phase of my training because I know that that novelty sends a better muscle building signal. Also, I time it so that the phase that I go into the changing of my workout signaling also coincides with the kind, the phase of training that I know my body tends to respond to best anyway. So for me personally, if you have any of our maps programs, maps anabolic phase one, okay? That's a strength, low rep, you know, you're doing fewer exercises, lots of sets per exercise. You're really focusing on these gross motor movements. For me, if all things being equal, okay? All phases being novel, all that stuff, I build the most in that phase. Now for you, it may be, you know, eight to 12 reps, it may be super sets, whatever. Save that phase for when you go into this. For me, I literally waited. And now what am I doing right now? Three full body workouts. I'm going my reps are five, four, six, longer rest periods, cause that's my best phase. And I saved it. I saved it to keep it novel to maximize muscle or to minimize muscle loss. So that's one tip you can do. So that's part of what I'm saying when I say, lift weights for strength and muscle. Change your phase so that you have something novel and save that style of training, the one that you respond best to for this period of time. I love that. And I'll take it a step further, right? So I typically train like a maps aesthetic, maps anabolic, maps PED, all the other bodybuilder stuff, right? That's what I fall in love with the most. On the options, more functional performance, that, that direction, I'm going to go the body sculpting type of direction. I know that's my MO. So when I switched to like a diet where I know this is I'm playing this mental game, not only do I like to change the phase, I'll change the whole programming, like to something like strong, which is something that is super novel. It's very different for me or even performance, right? These, it's got so many different exercises, like a the reverse lunge to a mind press. Like I have no, I don't have a PR on that cause I never did it long enough consistently to like get really, really strong in it. So I don't have this preconceived number in my head that, oh, I'm weaker here. I don't know. Like I have no idea what my reverse lunge to a press on a landmine is. I have no idea what my max Zercher squat is. I have no idea what my max circus press is. So I love switching to a program that is so different than has so many exercises that I just normally don't really do that. So when I'm doing it and I'm probably weak because I'm low calorie, I don't recognize it.  It's like, I don't even know what my best circus press is. So I love to not only change the phase, but I love to even switch the programming up when I go into a really strict diet because then I don't have all these numbers. What you'll notice is a theme here, which is we're managing the psychological effects of this more than anything because that's the part that'll screw you up. To me, that's what inspired this episode was that, yes, when we are trying to lose 50 pounds of body fat, there's a lot of mental games involved, but there's a lot of fundamental macros and strength training and make sure you do this, make sure you do that. When you start to get really, really shredded, I think that 90% of it becomes mental. Well, do you think that that's probably why your typical person when they're cutting down is drawn more towards doing weights, like a cardio version of weights, like a more circuit style training because it's like you get in sort of these rhythms when you're doing cardio where you're doing a lot of reps, but you're just having to get through it in sweat. And so it's like it's less mentally taxing as you're going through it. I think that's not what draws people to that. I think what draws most people to that is that we are still so hung up on the calorie burn. Yes. Well, yeah, maximizing everything at once.  Yeah, and I think that what most people do is they, okay, I've made this shift. I'm cutting calories. I want to burn and move. And so they take that mindset into their weight training. And so all of a sudden the pace picks up and they want to do circuits. And I don't think they're thinking that logical, like what you're alluding to. I think it's just straight up. I'm going to try and burn as much as I can. And now they're doing longer workouts. They're adding things afterwards. They're doing the battle ropes. I'm melting fat. Yeah, no, I think that's something that we get. And we promote that stuff through all these fitness tools and trackers and orange theories. We get bonus points for hitting the zone. And I just think that we've ingrained that in most people's minds that like, oh, you got to burn, eat less, burn more. You know, the irony is that those kind of workouts are effective for like two or three weeks. That's it, right? Two or three weeks. In fact, that takes us to the next one, which is avoid cardio until it's necessary. There you go. Save that tool. First of all, it's a short-lived tool, okay? Lots of cardio to get really shredded. Doesn't work very, in fact, a lot of people get shredded in spite of the fact that doing just tons of cardio for 12 weeks or whatever. Save it, do everything with diet and strength training. And then the last couple of weeks, if you want to throw it in, you can and you can squeeze off a little bit of body fat. But if you make this part of your long-term routine, what you're doing is you're countering that muscle-building signal that we're trying to do with strength training through this I need endurance type of a signal, which really only encourages the muscle-pairdown process. So what you want to do is you want to save it until, and I remember you, Adam, when you competed, I think you did it the last two weeks, was it? The longest I've ever done cardio is four weeks. And most often it was two. So it's, if you have a coach and they have you doing cardio for 12 weeks leading into a show, you should fire your coach.  Oh boy, we're going to get some negative comments. Most coaches do that. And it's just a, it's a terrible... Yeah, they typically go from 30 minutes a day to 60 minutes a day to 90 minutes a day. Yeah, they just keep ramping it up and ramping it up and wrapping it up. And by the way, it goes all the way back to the very first point that you made about having a plan when you come out of it.  Oh my God. You've now got this person adapted to doing, you know, five to seven hours of this cardio on the stair master every single day and starting their body to 1500 calories. They're not going to maintain that unless you absolutely love the stair master. It'll take you three months to back out of the cardio alone. Yeah, no. Not to mention the calories. Exactly. So, and not only that too, like I want to teach my client. So if we're getting shredded, right? And I want to teach them how can we manipulate your calories to lean out without us messing with any additional calorie burn like cardio first. That doesn't mean we won't use it, but let's first figure that out. Can we manipulate that? And here's the thing. If you're at a place metabolism wise where reducing your calories by 200 to 500 calories it puts you in an unhealthy place calorie wise you have no business trying to get shredded. Oh, what a great point. What a great point. No business. Yeah, I will not. So like, you know, I'm not right now away about, I don't know, 210 maybe. I wouldn't do this if my calories ended up below, you know, 2,300 calories, 2,400 calories. I wouldn't do this. That's going to be way too low for me. First, I've seen women at 800 calories on top of all the training that they're doing. I've seen guys at 1,500. And the reason why that is, is because they make this decision whether it be getting ready for a show or they just want to get shredded for the summer that they want to get shredded and they haven't first built a healthy metabolism. And their metabolism is at a place where 1,800 calories maintains where they're at and then they want to get shredded. And the move for that person is not start cutting add cardio right there. It's, we need to build the metabolism up so that when we do start to calorie restrict, you're still in a healthy place halfway through this cut.   You should first work on building a healthy metabolism before you even, and show or body fibers. I know I keep saying show because I know there's a lot of people who are listening that don't care about a show or get shredded. You have no business trying to get shredded, single digit body fat, or get ready for a show if you're in a place where you're 12 weeks or more out and you're already having to cut less than 2,800 calories.  You're setting yourself up for some really, really bad failure later on.  Yeah, I've worked with people where it's taken us six months a year to get them to recover from this process. Like, you know, you don't wanna put yourself in that situation so you could look shredded for a week, right, it's not worth it. And that's if you can get to that point of looking shredded, a lot of people end up doing this and end up just getting smaller, losing muscle along the process. So, all right, here's the next one. And this one is an interesting one because all of us deal with cravings, okay? So cravings are usually motivated or driven by emotion or context, you know, I'm out with my friends or I'm happy or I'm anxious or I'm sad. So I crave or I'm bored, right? So I have these cravings and then there's hunger. Hunger is totally different and hunger feels it's much more, it's with you all the time. It's much stronger. It's a more primitive driving feeling. And if you've ever done a fast for like 48 or 72 hours, you know what that feels like. It's very different from cravings. Like, here's the difference. Cravings is this, Justin and I are about to go to lunch. Justin's like, hey, what do you wanna have for lunch? Uh, you know, Mexican food. Nah, I'm not really in the mood for me. Oh, what about pizza? Yeah, let's get pizza. Here's what hunger feels like. You know what hunger looks like? Celery sticks. That's hella good. I don't care. I'm serious, that's how I describe it to someone. Like you're not hungry if you want a certain food. Oh yeah. When you're hungry, everything sounds good. Anything, anything that's healthy. Most people haven't ever experienced that. I agree. Real hunger and it's, yeah, and it's just because of that point. Like if you haven't gone 48 hours, 72 hours without food, it's really hard to compare the two. Yeah, if you say I'm hungry, I really want this. It's like, nah, if you're hungry, I'll take anything. Anything. Anything. Even foods you don't traditionally like. That's so true. So here's what I'm about to say. When you start to get down to single digit body fat, you gotta learn to accept that you're gonna live with hunger. It's literally this thing that's with you all day long to the point where, you know, and I'm not quite there, I could feel it right now, but I know in the next couple of weeks I'm gonna feel it where you gotta leave the room when there's certain kinds of foods or you get mad at your partner. Why did you open that in front of me? Don't eat that next to me. Like it's really weird. It's very, again, it's an unhealthy place to be. That's why you don't wanna live in this space, but you have to accept that you're gonna kind of feel uncomfortable most of the time. Like when you're sleeping, I don't, okay, cravings, well, maybe people have cravings like this. It never happened to me where I wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. I don't think, oh man, I wanna go downstairs and get, it never happens to me until I get down to like seven, six percent body fat. I'll literally wake up, go to the bathroom and be like, man, I wanna eat an apple.  Well, talking about hunger and or cravings, one of the things that I didn't realize until pushing myself to this level was how much my sleep impacted this. Oh yeah. So I never drew that conclusion of, oh wow. It's fueled to the fire, man.  I couldn't sleep. 2, 3 in the morning before I finally fall asleep and then back up in the day. So terrible sleep. Man, the next day, oh, I just wanted everything bad. Like junk food just sounded so good to me and it took a few times of having those nights that were really bad sleep followed by those days. And what made me realize is is because I was being so consistent during those times. This is again, another one of the benefits of being so dialed and so consistent. You start to pick up on these things that if my diet was like this all the time, it would be really hard to measure that and be like, oh, was it because of my bad night sleep or am I just wanting the ice cream because I had ice cream yesterday and now I'm craving it again or is it because I have some sort of correlation with what I'm doing. And so it's really tough when you're inconsistent but when you're so consistent with your diet, you start to pick up on these little subtle things. This was something that I had never noticed in my life until I got really consistent with the diet and I was like, all of a sudden have a night like that and be like, that's so weird. I've had no problem eating these same meals for the last month, but now all of a sudden I want all this bad stuff.  And again, you're living with hunger all the time and these things will just ramp it up. And so now you gotta really white knuckle it even more. But here's the other part of that. When you're getting this lean, you are stressing your body out. This is another level of stress.  And this is where you see people on their quest to getting shredded for either a competition or a photo shoot, maybe they're going to Vegas, who knows? And they get sick. It's like, oh my God, I always get sick once I start to get lean. In fact, it's so common for people when they start to get to this point where they get a cold or they get whatever. So you have to have your sleep and your stress levels also be very well managed and consistent because you already are at that line. You don't have any room for any additional stress to tip your body over. It's way better to be antisocial at this point and just really consider all those factors that you need to be as low stress as possible. You need to get that sleep. So if this is your priority, you're gonna have to create almost this bubble that you have to just stay in for it. Yeah, and this is why I'm like, you don't want to live here. I don't understand how people can do that. I don't know. I don't get it. It's just a dysfunctional way of living all the time and it's just, literally you have no room. Who wants to live their life without having any room for any additional stress? Life doesn't work that way, right? So unless you structure and plan your life to this bubble, like you said, in which case now what are you doing? You're cutting out social events. You're cutting out conversations you need to have with your spouse and you're disconnecting from- But that's what it takes. Yeah, so- You have to get there. But yeah, you need to keep stress and sleep totally consistent and in check. All right, here's the next one. And I remember the first time I got down to really lean body fat percentage. This used to mess with me, which was water, water retention. Like if you hold a couple pounds of water and you're 11% body fat, nobody can tell. You get down to 5% body fat. You hold two or three pounds of water. It looks like you gain at one, 2% of body fat and that can really mess with your head.  This is the single, I love this point of all the points we've made so far. This one, I think, made me a better coach from competing to, took me to another level that I didn't see coming either. And that was being able to communicate this to my clients that are even 25, 30% body fat. Oh, because of the scale. Because of the scale and even the mirror, right? Like you get bloated from a meal that your body reacts to or you intake, X amount more sodium or X amount more carbohydrates. For every three ounces of carbohydrates you take in, your body holds three ounces of water. So if you had a day where you're higher carb and you had a couple extra glasses of water, I mean, you could really look different in the mirror. Your scale could go up one or two pounds and yet be perfect. I mean, you could be literally dialed the way I want you to be eating and training but yet see this go in the opposite direction than you think you wanted to. And what happens is you pivot and you change. You're overcorrect. So, and the only reason why I figured this all out and can communicate was because I was so dialed, I was tracking, I was doing the math. So I like, I know I'm sitting here going like, okay, I'm moving this. That water, sodium. Yeah, I'm tracking everything. So I know that like I should be getting better and better and better every single day. Yeah, sure you have some slowdown and a little bit of plateaus but I definitely shouldn't go worse or go the other direction. It just mathematically is impossible. I know what I'm doing. And I would actually have these days where all of a sudden I go up and then I'd be like, what scratch in my head? And the only thing that made sense was like, and that's how I learned like how many, how much water pairs with carbohydrates and sodium. Like I started like going in and like figuring out like, why is this, why is this happening to me? I'm dialed. This shouldn't be happening to me. But then it opened my eyes like, oh my God, how often did this happen? I wish I had this information when I was a trainer in my twenties because how many times did I put a client on a diet and then them following it supposedly to a T and then them come back to me and they freak out because the scale went up a couple pounds and then me going, even as a trainer going, oh shit, it shouldn't be going up. Okay, well then let's cut this out then or let's pick up some cardio 30 minutes and actually being a bad coach and adjusting because I see this little bit of a water fluctuation not knowing better. So this of all the things that I learned going through competing like this was one of my favorite things that I took away from it because it has given me the tools to communicate that to clients even at a higher body fat percentage that may not, to your point, I know what you're making like, it's not a huge difference. It's a huge difference at 5%.  I mean, that's the reason why- You look so different. Yeah, you look different. I mean, you could lose a show because of that. If I don't go in or just the right amount of water in my body, right?  I'll lose places in a show. So it's that, it'll be that dial that somebody at 13, 14%, maybe not so much but even them will see a little bit of a difference or see the scale. Yes, and speaking of scale, remember that the scale lies because when you're trying to get leaner obviously the goal is to get the scale number to go down but I've gotten leaner with the scale number going up in the past like where I was over dieting, over training I changed things a little bit. I saw myself go up two or three pounds on the scale over the course of three, four weeks. I look in the mirror, I'm like, man, I look way leaner.   Cause I gained a couple pounds of muscle.  If you gain 10 pounds of muscle and on your body you always had 30 pounds of body fat. So, and that didn't change that stayed 30 pounds of body fat but you gain 10 pounds of muscle that 30 pounds of body fat is a smaller percentage of your total body weight. I also think it's one of the healthiest and best places you can be metabolically when you're trying to lose body fat. If I can, which is always the goal for me for somebody who's trying to lose weight whether we're trying to lose 30 to 40 pounds or we're just trying to shred down the last five or 10 I would love to see us kind of stay the same on the scale for as long as we can. Like so obviously- At some point. Yeah, somebody has to lose 50, 100 pounds. The scale is eventually going to come down but to be honest I actually don't want to see that initially. I want to see us kind of hover around the scale weight but I know that if we're feeding ourselves properly we're strength training we're a little bit in a caloric deficit. Hopefully I'm having this beautiful exchange, right? Your body's got this new stimulus so maybe it is stimulating a little bit of muscle growth and then we're also in a calorie deficit so I know we're losing body fat so we have this nice little even exchange. It's a really good place to be metabolically versus, you know, cutting the calories are crazy moving the movement like crazy and then also the scale goes down 10 pounds you think because your ultimate goal is to lose 30 that's a good sign but metabolically it's not a good sign. Yeah, so the scale is a tool but you have to combine it with all the other metrics so scale, performance, strength, photos by the way we didn't include this but I like photos because, well for me personally because the reason why I'm doing this is because I'm going to be on camera so it really doesn't matter what the numbers say if I look better I look better and when you do that you make sure you take your pictures the same place, same lighting, same food same time of day, whatever same thing in the mirror so you can see these subtle differences I think this wasn't on the list but I think that's an important, you know one way to track kind of how you're doing so you can put things kind of side to side circumference, you know, that'd be another one but you want to add all this up to give yourself more of a complete picture the scale by itself just tells you body weight and, you know, if you got your leg amputated your weight went down but that's not the kind of weight you'd want to lose Alright, lastly, here's where supplements supplements are not super important depending on the context or situation they're never really that important whole natural foods will do everything that you need however, when you reduce your calories you're also reducing your nutrient intake when you're increasing your strength you may actually be increasing your nutrient requirements how do we make that work? I'm eating less calories which means I'm getting less nutrients but my nutrient requirements may be going up because I'm training more and I have a higher stress on my body supplements is where supplements can come and play a vital role, right? If I'm not getting enough of my B vitamins and, you know, my minerals because my food intake is so low and it's hard for me to manage everything on top of those micronutrients well now I could take a supplement and make up the difference creatine, love creatine all the time I really love it when my calories are down cause when my calories down my meat intake is down too even though my protein's high it's still lower than it is when I'm eating more calories which means I'm getting less creatine from food so then I introduce that creatine so this is where supplements I think can play an important role and this is where I like to supplement with, you know, micronutrients to make sure I think this is, I mean what I need I'm the most consistent with when you talk to the day I don't know if there was off air on there or not but I was joking about how like I have to add that the pill bottle right that I have to have now just to do all the Dr. Cabral supplements and everything I'm really I'm actually really bad about being consistent about taking supplements the most consistent I am is when I'm on like a really dramatic cut like this because I just know I'm like obviously I'm cutting a ton of stuff out of my diet the likelihood that I'm hitting all my micronutrient targets is probably not likely and that's just one more thing that I think can benefit me and help me and then the other thing that we just don't talk about as a supplement but it is a supplement is a protein powder oh yeah that's right protein powder and bars like this is where convenient yeah I mean I was just talking about how Katrina like this is an example of where I mean of course it would be great for her to go cook, you know four and a half ounces of steak but at 10 o'clock at night we're watching TV and stuff like that she's under on her protein intake she's snacking on a hundred calorie popcorn instead of that you should have had the protein bar or should have had a quick way shake or something so here's where I use that's where I really start to use that is when I'm cutting calories I notice I already have a hard time hitting protein intake as it is when I'm cutting calories it's even harder I look at the end of my day and that's kind of what decides what I'm going to do is my final meal slash snack whatever you want to call that last thing that I consume before I go to bed is me adding up everything and going oh wow you know today either today I hit everything so I'm cool I don't have to eat anything or I maybe I'll snack on some some nuts to give me a little bit of satiety and feel better before I go to bed or oh shit I'm low on protein here I'm going to blend up a shake yeah because in with whole natural foods it's it's hard to get just protein without other macronutrients I mean you can do with egg whites and chicken breast but then the convenience becomes an issue and also maybe it's not palatable protein shakes can be I mean they can be pretty at this point they're tasty when you're dieting like this at this point a shake is like a treat very easy protein so I totally agree with you I like what I like to do is I like to have lean sources of protein saved in the fridge so like chicken breast shredded in the fridge and what I do I can throw salsa on it which adds negligible amount of calories and I can snack on that but a shake is like exactly at the end of the day is for me too it's like okay it's you know eight o'clock at night I'm not going to go I don't want to eat anything before bed that's going to take more time to digest throw in a shake and there's my extra 20 grams of protein it's got almost no carbohydrates and no fats now I know we didn't go into specifics about how to cut you know how many calories a couple of the rules that apply to somebody who is going from a man who's going from 20% body fat to 15% so 20% is kind of high 15% is pretty healthy the rules that apply to that person are the same as all the same that go from 10% to 5% the difference is everything that we talked about no the reason why I think we did this episode it was to highlight that the real thing that happens that's different right here is the mental game yes the mental game gets way tougher in my opinion because there's a lot of things that are deceiving there's a lot of things that take a lot more consistency a discipline sacrifice like that's really the only difference between getting to 10% and then getting down to like 3% totally the same like you said the all the same rule apply for the person who is morbidly obese trying to get down as the person who is 10% getting down like the only difference is the psychological discipline and the ridiculous unhealthy obsessive consistency with the whole thing look if you like Mind Pump go to mindpumpfree.com and check out our guides we have guides that can help you with almost any health or fitness goal you can also find all of us on social media so Justin is on Instagram at Mind Pump Justin you can find 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