Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1362: What You Can Learn About Building Muscle from Inmates, Gymnasts and Sprinters
Episode Date: August 20, 2020In this episode, Sal, Adam & Justin discuss what you can learn about building muscle from prison inmates, gymnasts, and sprinters. How there is a lot to learn about building muscle from other modalit...ies. (4:10) The biggest mistake you can make in fitness. (11:15) Evolve or die. (14:05) What you can learn about muscle building from prison inmates. (17:25) Utilize extreme frequency. (19:07) Creativity. (25:36) Forced discipline. (29:25) What you can learn about muscle building from gymnasts. (31:57) The use of high-tension isometrics. (32:07) Don’t workout, practice. (40:49) Address mobility and full range of motion. (45:20) What you can learn about muscle building from sprinters. (49:55) Train explosively. (50:29) Apply long rest periods. (58:40) The benefits and values of MAPS Programs. (59:55) Related Links/Products Mentioned August Promotion: MAPS Performance ½ off!! **Promo code “GREEN50” at checkout** New Program: MAPS Suspension Visit PRx Performance for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Code “mindpump” at checkout** Mind Pump #1110: Doug Bopst- From Felony To Fitness To Free Velodrome Supertraining (book) The Most Overlooked Muscle Building Principle – Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump #1295: Four Ways To Get A Stubborn Body Part To Improve Stop Working Out And Start Practicing – Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump #1352: The Muscle Building & Fat Burning Advantages Of Training Like An Athlete Mind Pump Podcast - YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources People Mentioned Doug Bopst (@dougbopst) Instagram Max Schmarzo (ATC/CSCS/MS) (@strong_by_science) Instagram
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If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go.
MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts.
Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews.
In this episode of Mind Pumped the Worlds, number one, fitness health and entertainment podcast,
we talk about the things you can learn from other people in fitness.
And these are people who don't necessarily work out to look better, but rather they work
out either to perform better in a particular sport, or they work out under conditions that
are placed upon them.
There are things you can learn from the people we're going to talk about in today's episode
that you can apply to your own workouts to get your body to respond like never before. So in this episode, we cover three specific types of individuals and we cover the things
that they do that we can all learn from.
We start out by talking about inmates, people who are locked up in prison, who develop
phenomenal physiques, how do they do it, what can we learn from then and apply to our training.
Then we cover gymnasts.
Gymnasts have some of the most muscular,
balanced bodies you'll find anywhere,
aside from bodybuilders.
And they don't even care about bodybuilding.
It's a side effect of their sport.
Now, when we talk about gymnasts,
we do mention some exercises and stuff
that they do on rings.
If you like training that way,
and you want to utilize ring style type training,
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And in the final group, we talk about our sprinters. Sprinters are extremely muscular. And
when you compare them to other runners,
you can see a stark difference.
Compare a runner, a sprinter,
to a long distance runner, for example.
Looks like you're talking about two different species of humans
when you compare them side by side.
So we talk about what sprinters do that we can all learn from.
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physics, because I think sometimes in the fitness space, especially if you're like, oh, I just
want to, you know, I want to change my body, I want to look good, I want to build muscle,
I want to burn body fat.
We only look at other people who are only interested in doing that, and we forget to look at some of the things
we can learn from modalities that produce that
as a side effect.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, I mean, if you think about it right away,
what comes to mind in a gymnast is probably the epitome
of the most fit-looking athlete I could potentially
come up with.
Yeah, gymnast is one inmates, people in prison.
This is another one.
I know people.
Their sport is to survive.
That's because I'm not sure they fall
into the sport category, but they definitely do.
A lifestyle, right?
Right, right, yeah.
It's also a lifestyle.
But what I mean by that is they're not a body builder.
They're not Olympic lifters.
They're not power lifters.
You know what I'm saying?
It's like, what are they doing?
What are they doing there?
What's so different about what they do in there that produces those types of results?
Sprinters is another one.
These are people that run.
I mean, short distances, but they run.
And when you look at sprinters, even if you look at like decent high school sprinters,
and then of course, college and higher levels levels. The muscularity they present is tremendous.
There's a lot we can learn from why they produce the physics that they produce
and how they're able to produce the physics that they produce.
I like, I mean, I like that you picked inmate sprinters and gymnasts because
they're all really, really different and they all, and by the way,
there's, there's exceptions to the role always.
And of course, right.
So there's not all inmates come out jacked.
Right.
Not all sprinters look jacked also, not all gymnasts too,
but there seems to be a common theme
amongst all three of these categories of people.
And there's different reasons why all of them come out
or look really fit from their sport that they're doing that.
I think it's important to talk about what is it specifically because I think sometimes people just think that like,
oh, if I train like a sprinter, then I'll look just like a sprinter.
And there's other factors that come into play.
There's specific things that they're doing that are giving them those look, and there's things that you can incorporate
into your programming that can obtain
similar type of results.
Oh, completely.
Again, if you look at them, especially in the case
of gymnasts and sprinters, their goal is
to get muscular, they can care less.
Their goal is to produce performance,
is to win at their sport.
Now as far as the inmates are concerned, their goal is to build muscle and strength.
However, in many prisons today, most prisons, in fact, they don't even have access to weights.
They removed the weights.
They used to, right?
They used to have access to, you know, barbells and dumbbells, but then, you know, it proved
to be a little dangerous.
I think some of them were being used as weapons
and they thought, hey, we don't want these,
these, you know, men to get buffed.
So let's take the weights out.
Funny thing is, they're still getting buffed.
Still happening.
Yeah.
I can't remember.
When we had our friend Doug Bob's on here,
did he, did he have weights or did he own,
he didn't either, huh?
No, they don't.
It's been California for sure.
And in many, many prisons, they don't have weights.
But it's, this is a cool thing.
This is something that really took my game
to the next level as a personal trainer,
is I started to look outside of the traditional spaces
for fitness, basically for fitness knowledge
and for hacks or for techniques.
You know, it started with bodybuilders with me
Then that was an easy transition to power lifters
And then it kind of stayed there for a while and then I like oh wait Olympic lifters
What can I learn from them? What can I learn from kettlebell people who train with kettlebells?
Mm-hmm
And then I started to really spread it out and say okay, what can I learn from people that don't necessarily use weights?
But seem to produce incredible physiques?
What are they doing that sometimes we maybe forget
or don't utilize in our traditional training?
How can I incorporate that in my training?
How can I incorporate that in my clients training
to amplify the results that they do?
Yeah, I know a lot of people have watched the Olympics
and they have watched certain events.
What's the one with the cyclist that's sprint?
Oh, with the circle.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Have you seen their legs?
Yeah, so you see, they're specimens.
Their quads are bigger than what we called quadsilla.
The guy that was in, lived in the gym
and was just always doing leg extensions know, doing leg extensions and like,
was had pride in his cause.
They totally dwarfed, you know, those legs that I saw.
Yeah, a great fact.
If you want, you can literally Google
a cyclist sprinters leg.
A velodrome.
Velodrome, is that it's called?
Oh, okay.
And you'll see like, it's cartoonish.
They literally look like a pro bodybuilder leg.
It may be bigger.
And they do some weights,
you know, I know kind of somewhat how they train.
But mainly what they do is sprint on a bike.
And they produce these tremendous muscular legs.
I know a lot of it has to do genetics,
but you could have those genetics.
And I'll tell you what, if they swam,
they would not produce that kind of muscle in their legs.
And I'm sorry.
Justin, are you the one that always touts the super training book?
Yeah, right?
So I don't know,
do you guys see the posts that our friend,
Max Marzo posted today, strong by science?
No, not today.
So he shared a graph from there
that I think is relates to this conversation.
I actually reposted it and shared it in my story
because I thought it was so good.
And you may be listening right now going like,
well, I have no desire to, well,
one, I have no desire to go to prison. So I'm going to be an inmate to a terrible reason
to be a prisoner. I don't want to be a jack. Right. I don't want to be a gymnast either.
And I'd have no desire to be a sprinter. But that's not the point of this conversation.
It's the takeaway, some of the things that are important and how do you apply those tools
in your training? And basically the graph that he shared was kind of the adaptation curve
that we see over the course of two to four weeks, four to six weeks, six to 12 weeks in
your training. And you know what I think everybody has learned, even if you aren't familiar
with a lot of the sciences, you know, man, after a few months of training, the results really
slow down tremendously. And that's where progressive overload, understanding the importance of different modalities,
different types of training.
This is where this knowledge is extremely valuable,
even to the average person who's just listening
and wants to lose 30 pounds of fat,
or just wants to build 15 pounds of muscle,
or just cares about the way they look,
the things that we will talk about
with these three different types of training
is the philosophies that are within them are very important to grasp so you can then take
from them and apply it into your training.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make in fitness and nutrition as well as becoming
dogmatic and religious about your style of training.
This happened, here's a good example of why this is a bad thing.
For a long time, this is what the martial arts world was like.
For a long time, the martial arts world was,
you either trained like a boxer or you did Taekwondo
or Kung Fu or Kempo or Judo or whatever, and that's all you did Taekwondo, or Kung Fu, or Kempo, or Judo, or whatever.
And that's all you did.
And what happened in the martial art world
was lots of comparisons and who would win against who,
and which martial art is superior.
And there were very few people, there were people,
but there were very few people who were saying,
why don't we take the best of each
since we wanna become the most effective at fighting or defending ourselves? Why don't we learn the best of each since we want to become the most effective
at fighting or defending ourselves?
Why don't we learn from each one of them?
What they each do exceptionally well
and see how to combine them.
Bruce Lee is a famous example of someone who talked
a lot about this.
In fact, if you read his book, The Tow of Jit Kendo,
you'll see that he talks about the footwork and boxing
and some of the moves and some of the grappling arts
like judo and wrestling.
In fact, he was shunned by the...
He pissed everybody off by the community.
He did. He was.
And then what caused this all to change was we had this competition called the ultimate fighting
championship. And early on it was martial art versus martial art, no rules.
And that totally formed and shifted people.
And now, mixed martial arts is a martial art.
And I can make a very strong argument
that the best fighter, if we were to compare a fighter
against the fighter, would be a mixed martial artist
against any pure style,
because the mixed martial artist is well-rounded.
And so when it comes to training your body,
or eating in a particular way,
you make a huge mistake if you stick in one
and constantly compare your modality to the others
and close your mind to the fact that there may be some things
you can learn from these element modalities.
Now it's easy to do that with all the barbell
and dumbbell and resistance training modalities,
although that was hard too.
I remember we first started the podcast.
It was trying to convince bodybuilders
why they should try powerlifting and why Olympic lifters
should try bodybuilding and vice versa.
Why should you functional exercises?
That was like a big argument.
I think now it's becoming more accepted
that there's value in all of them,
even if you just wanna build a amazing looking physique.
But now we're gonna take it a step further and say,
okay, here's a few areas that we've identified
that we can learn from.
Everybody listening right now,
you can learn a thing or two about how to build your body
from inmates, gymnasts, and sprinters.
There are things that they do that we don't necessarily do
with our training traditionally,
that if we did implement some of that stuff,
you would see changes to your body.
I love that analogy, Sal, too, because there's also, too, the importance of how you train
that way.
So I think we, from that statement, we can agree that the best fighter would be an MMA
far.
Somebody who has multiple modalities, but how does that person go about training for
all those?
They wouldn't just throw in everything at one time.
There's actually a
methodical approach on how you get great at each one of those, and this is very similar
to training the body. So if you're, you know, and it's not just you want to get good at
being a gymnast or really good at being a sprinter, it's the results that you get from
these adaptations. Well, I like to think of, you guys know, George
St. Pierre as one of the greatest of all
time, and why he was so great was because he kept evolving.
He kept evolving his skill set, and he would master certain things, and he'd bring in a
boxing element.
He'd bring in, he'd just work in gymnastics.
He'd, to work on his balance and his coordination and control, and, you know, and then he'd, he'd
try and master like certain elements, and then he'd try and master certain elements
and then incorporate that into the next fight.
So they just didn't know what they were gonna come up against.
And I think he's just a great example
because he's so humble in his approach
to learning these concepts and being able to extract
that actually apply them appropriately in his fight.
Super open.
And now here's the thing with training.
If you, there's a small percentage
of those of you listening right now that are ultra specialized, like there's a small percentage of
you that just want to be powerlifter, is it a powerlifting or just want to be bodybuilders because
you want to compete in bodybuilding or just want to do, you know, Olympic lifting. There's a small
percentage of you, but even to you guys, I'll say this, you can learn a thing or two from the other modalities
to amplify your specialization.
For example, let's say you're just a power lifter.
All you care about is competing well
on the bench, deadlift and squat.
You don't wanna get on stage and pose like a bodybuilder.
You don't care about, you know, doing an Olympic lift.
You don't care about that stuff.
You just wanna be good at powerlifting.
Could you become a better powerlifter
by incorporating a little bit of body building,
a little bit of mobility and functional movement,
or maybe a little bit about what we're gonna talk about
in today's podcast, you can.
Now, the vast majority of you listening
are not super hyper specialized in your approach.
Most of you listening just want the most fit body you can produce.
You want to have the best looking, balanced body.
Most people listening are after that, in which case, this is even more important.
Look at all of these things that we're going to talk about today and other things that
you can find on your own and what you'll end up developing is a very balanced aesthetic
physique.
Now, I know bodybuilding is oftentimes tied to aesthetics,
but the truth is in real life,
aesthetics isn't bodybuilding.
Most bodybuilders look awkward,
and most people would not consider them to be aesthetic,
except for the extreme people out there.
Aesthetics typically is something
that includes a lot of balance, good movement.
It's something that the average person would look at
and be like, man, that looks phenomenal.
It looks really fit, really healthy.
I think that's what I want to look like.
And so understanding all the different benefits you can get from lots of different modalities,
whether it be sports or a lifestyle, is key and crucial to that.
And that's why I think this is an important, you know, episode to do for people listening
right now.
Now, let's start with the first one,
the first category that we mentioned,
not really a sport, but more of a condition or a lifestyle.
Not a lifestyle that's necessarily chosen.
Not ideal.
But one that seems to produce some very interesting results
in terms of physique, but also under very interesting circumstance.
In fact, the circumstances,
the extreme circumstances.
The circumstances in this category
are what have produced some of these things
that I think we can learn from.
In other words,
they forced certain situations to happen.
And because of the fact that these people
don't have a lot of control over what's happening to them
because of a crime they committed or whatever, that they figured out ways around it and then there's
things to learn from that. Yeah, you got to think of their schedule, like it's regiment. Every single
day has things ahead of them where they know they have to be in a certain place so they have
these short windows. And so how do they maximize those short windows if they're trying to build up their body for protection
to feel like they're strong and they can carry themselves
that way throughout the day.
And so they've maximized, learned how to maximize
those short windows as much as possible.
And so that's one thing for sure.
Do you think that, I mean, I think it's one of those things
that just kind of happen by accident, right?
Like, I mean, I think it started. I don't think like the guy who went to prison goes like,
oh, I understand the science behind frequency and the importance of it. I think it's more like I'm bored to
rival. I'm bored to death in this in the cell all day long, you know,
May's well get Jack, what I'm doing it. And then as a side effect, I think you end up seeing these
these phenomenal results from it.
And I think the first point you're making is frequency.
100% when I've talked to people who have been to prison for long periods of time and train their
bodies, they say that exactly what you're saying, Adam, that the circumstances force them to
figure out ways to structure their day, add a little bit of purpose and meaning to their day,
how do you pass the time?
You know, otherwise you're just there
and it's every day is what you're doing time.
Right, and so here's one thing that they do
that I think we can all learn from.
In fact, this is one of the things that inspired
trigger sessions that we put in Maps and Abolic,
is that they don't just use frequency,
they use extreme frequency.
So here's what I mean by that.
Typically, frequency works really great.
If you worked out twice a day,
let's say you did an hour workout once a day,
or a third to 30 minute workouts in a day,
the two 30 minute workouts will probably produce
better results for a lot of people.
We've seen this with cardio,
we've seen this with resistance training.
Inmates take this to a whole
another level. They'll do things like do 10 push-ups every 30 minutes, you know. So at
the end of the day, they've done 240 or 300 push-ups throughout the whole day. And it's literally,
oh, it's 10 o'clock, 10 push-ups, and they get up and then, oh, it's 10 30, no matter what they're
doing. They're volumes, goes through the roof. They'll stop and do 10 push-ups,
or they'll stop and do 10 body rows,
or something like that.
They utilize extreme frequency, extreme practice
throughout the entire day.
And that, I think, is one of the main reasons
why they build the physics that they end up building.
That example you're using right now, too.
It can be that basic, right?
I think sometimes people hear that and they go like,
well, I don't have time to go to the gym four times
or five times a day to do a training session.
It can be as simple as jumping up,
and we talk about this with pull ups all the time.
So it's like one of those things where people always ask us,
how do I get better at pull ups?
One of the best ways to do it is,
do one to three of them, 10 times a day.
Every time you walk by the pull-up part, do it.
Or every time get to, every hour, get down and do 20 push-ups
or whatever, there's ways to get these incredible results
without having to drive your ass to the gym
and spend 30 minutes to an hour of a workout.
Well, that's the biggest monster, right?
Is the time commitment.
And I think that, I mean, that's the biggest pushback
when we get clients initially is, how do I fit this in?
I only have maybe the short window of an hour,
and that's all I can devote to this.
Well, think about now splitting into those chunks of like 10 minute intervals
where I could just do something as simple as like body weight squats or pushups
or lunges or something where it's just constantly sending that signal to the body
that I'm gonna get stronger.
And some people think that's silly.
Oh, 10 squats.
You know, what's that good?
Or I can do 60 pushups.
The hell's 10 pushups gonna do?
It does something, no joke.
Again, I witnessed this in blue collar workers
in my family.
I must have told a story, at least a hundred,
or maybe even 300 times on the podcast.
But, you know, I had family members
that were mechanics and plumbers.
None of them are working their forearms and hands to failure.
They've been doing it for decades, you know?
Maybe the first that impede with their work.
Yeah, maybe the first few months, the hands got sore,
but after that it was the same stuff over and over again.
They're not working out, but these guys had
ridiculous hands and forearms, like just muscular,
like they would, they belong to amateur bodybuilders,
and they didn't work out.
They didn't know exercise.
Their diets were terrible.
They were usually overweight, but they had these crazy forms.
Look at, the next time you see your, your, your male carrier,
the next time you see your male carrier in your neighborhood,
look at their whole body and then look at their calves.
I guarantee you, they will have calves that don't match the rest of the body.
I guarantee you, they'll have muscular calves.
Why?
They're walking 50,000 steps a day or more,
just as part of their job.
Now, you think their calves are getting a hard workout
every time they do that?
Of course not.
They've been doing it for 10, 15, 20 years.
At that point, you know, for them, it's like breathing.
And yet, why are their calves developing so much?
It's that frequent signal that they're sending
throughout the day.
And you can do it as simple as this.
I've tested this on myself.
I've gotten hand grippers, and I'll have a,
I actually have one in the studio.
Usually it's with me.
And while we're podcasting and working,
every so often, I don't even track it.
I just pick it up and I squeeze it 10 times.
I'm not working out and I squeeze it no time.
And I notice when I do that,
and I do it consistently throughout the day,
I don't get sore, I don't get crazy,
but I do notice when I go deadlift,
or go do a pull up, or go workout,
my hands are like, you know, it's like 30% stronger.
It's that big of a difference.
I love this conversation around inmates right now,
because it feels on par with probably how a lot of people feel.
Yeah, so maybe you're not in actual prison right now, but a lot of people
probably feel that way without having access to their gym and their normal routine and
being kind of stuck at home, I feel like I've applied these principles more in the last
three months than I probably ever have.
And I'm really enjoying that.
I'm enjoying when we're up in Tahoe and we have our little gym set up inside the garage.
I'll just go in and I'll do three sets of deadlifts that I'm done for now.
Then I go back later on and go do three sets of pull-ups.
Then I come back later on and do some strap work with the suspension trainer.
It breaks up the day.
At the end of the day, when I calculate all the sets and total volume, I've done more
than what I've done sometimes in a really hard one hour workout
that I've dripped all day long
and it just breaks the day up.
Nice.
Totally.
Now one of the side effects of doing this,
and you don't have to do it every hour or whatever,
you could do it four or five times.
The trigger sessions, I recommend people do three a day,
or you can have fun with it
and do a little something every hour.
Here's some of the side effects of that.
You get, you have incredible alertness and focus
throughout the day.
You don't get those energy dips.
No joke, you start to feel tired,
go do 10 body weight squats, a couple pushups,
stand up and it feels like you had a small cup of coffee
each time.
It improves my productivity.
When I do stuff like this on a regular basis,
I'm more productive with work, movement promotes movement.
It does.
Now how can you utilize this yourself?
Here's an easy way to do it.
Pick a weak body part.
This is a great way to bring up a weak body part.
If your shoulders are lagging,
or your calves are lagging, hamstrings, whatever,
maybe do something like this.
Every hour, every other hour,
you do a few reps for that body part.
The key here is not to beat the crap out of that body part.
You're not doing a workout each time.
You're just doing some reps,
you know, super frequently throughout the day.
Now there's another part to this
that we can learn a lot from inmates.
And that's their creativity.
They are extremely creative with how-
What they can do with toothbrushes.
This is amazing. Oh, you know what? That's I make shakes out of them. I don't know where
your mind's going. No, that's actually true. When I was in high school, we had a police officer
come to do a presentation and he had this class case and he showed us all the stuff that
all the different shivs that they make.
Oh, all the shanks they make out of cardboard and toothpaste and toothbrushes and tattoo,
they make tattoo machines and like cassette players and all this stuff.
They're explaining me creative.
Obviously you're locked in a cage and you have nothing to do but think all day long, but
in terms of exercises.
Yeah, they apply the same creativity in that direction.
Very, very creative.
Now this I think is applicable to today.
Like you said, Adam, a lot of people still aren't going to the gym
or their gyms are still closed.
They're limited by their equipment.
You can get really creative with very minimal or no equipment.
You can utilize things around your house in different places.
You can hang your body. You can do things around your house in different places, you can hang your body,
you can do a curl, a million and one different ways,
whether you're changing the tempo or the squeeze
or the hand position or how you rotate your elbows
or where your elbows are positioned.
I'm just talking about curls,
which is a super basic exercise.
Creativity is another reason why I think
they do build their physics the way I think.
Yeah, and really thinking about angles and different ways to promote intensity in these exercises.
So using walls and using ways to progress, like say a push up to start walking now up the
wall.
So now you have even more intense gravitational forces coming down to where you can end
up, you know, bringing your legs over your head and do enhanced end pushups.
And there's a whole way to progress a lot of very simple moves
that if you're confined to a certain amount of space
and equipment, it does require you to really come up
with creative solutions for that.
Well, inmates are an example of how much we
over complicate resistance training.
All resistance training. Totally.
All resistance training is flexion of the muscles with some sort of resistance.
Yeah.
So, if you understand how to flex your bicep, flex your tricep, flex your shoulders, flex
your quads.
If you know how to flex all those muscles, all you're trying to do is create some sort
of resistance with that.
It can be isometric.
You can use your body weight.
You can do all kinds of different things.
And it doesn't have to look like what we see inside of a gym
when we walk in, we look at all these machines
and barbells and dumbbells,
all you are needing to do is create some sort of resistance
and flexing the muscle, that's it,
and you've got resistance training.
And because it's creative and different,
it's a new stimulus, it's novel,
you're gonna see some great change.
There's a couple of things that seem to be common.
When I, like I said, I've interviewed and talked to
a few people who have been locked up
for longer periods of time.
Couple of ways they, and this was a big question for me.
How do you get creative if you don't have weights
to produce more resistance?
One way they do it is they break,
rep ranges of motion up.
So what I mean by that is,
you know what a full pushup looks like, right?
So what they may do is they may go down
to the bottom of a pushup and do a bunch of reps
just for the first four inches.
Then they'll do another more, you know,
bunch of reps at the next four inches and so on.
So they're breaking up the range of motion
into small ranges of motion to increase the tension.
The other way they do it is by slowing reps down
or by speeding them up,
doing an explosive push-up for example,
or doing a very, very slow, high tension push-ups.
Just lots of creativity around basic simple exercises
will give you the variety that you get
in a big gym almost with lots of equipment,
but you're doing the same exercise.
Here's another thing that they do,
that's kind of forced upon them,
but this cannot be overstated.
They go to bed and they wake up at the same time,
every single day.
They don't have a choice.
That's, they go to bed at the same time,
they wake up at the same time, they all get.
You know, you can resist it all you want,
but after months and years,
you're getting eight hours or nine hours of sleep
every single night. Every single night, you're doing eight hours or nine hours of sleep every single night.
That's it.
Every single night, you're doing that.
This is probably the Achilles heel for most clients.
Totally.
Is the rest, right?
A lot of people have the discipline or the motivation
to want to change their physique or do something different
or work out, but then they have this crazy lifestyle
or inconsistent lifestyle where, and I'm just as guilty of this.
Last night I was up till two in the morning
thinking and riding and doing shit,
and that's not normal.
And then I'll have another night where I'm in bed
by 930 or 10.
And so I know that inconsistency is not ideal
for maximizing my sleep and recovery.
And like you said, Sally,
these guys are forced into a routine. And
one of the side effects of that is they probably end up getting incredible consistent sleep,
which is only going to aid in their recovery.
Well, you know, a while ago, we were speculating on why body, pro bodybuilders who've been
training forever on tons of, you know, steroids and all that stuff, hit a plateau and then
go to the Middle East.
What country was that that they went to?
Dubai, right?
Dubai and gain like 20 pounds of muscle.
Do you know how hard it is to gain five pounds of muscle when you're already extremely advanced?
They'd go there and gain 20 pounds of muscle and we couldn't figure out what was going
on.
We thought maybe there was some new drug or whatever.
Then we talked to bodybuilders in the know and they said, no, they just go there.
They have nothing to do.
They eat, they train, and they sleep.
Yeah, and emphasis on the sleep.
That was the big one. Like, you get lots of consistent sleep. Go to bed at the same time.
Wake up at the same time. And their bodies just built lots of muscle. I've done this with
clients where we change nothing. We change nothing about their workout, change nothing about
their diet. All we did was emphasize sleep. And low and behold, like magic, fat comes off their
body, they start to sculpt and shape or build or strength goes up just from doing that one
thing right there.
And in fact, when I did talk to the people that I know who've been in prison about what
they did over there, aside from the extreme frequency, that was the big one.
They said, you know what, our diets aren't that great.
We don't get a lot of protein,
but we train really frequently,
and we get good sleep every single night.
We got nothing better to do, we go to bed,
we have to go to bed a certain time.
Two major factors.
Exactly, two major factors.
Let's talk about gymnasts now, right?
Gymnists have some incredibly impressive physics
on their body, and the way they train
is relatively unique. One thing
that I noticed with gymnast that they utilize more than almost any other athlete or person
who trains their body that I can think of is that use a lot of high tension isometrics.
A lot of their competitive moves and positions require that. Like if you get up on the rings,
you can't be wobbling and moving all over the place.
Of course, we all know that the famous pose
that they do, they're real difficult iron cross, right?
Is that what they call it?
That is a tension pose.
When they get on the palmle horse,
they have to learn how to hold themselves up
for long periods of time before they do anything else.
When they're holding onto the rings,
they have to be able to grip and tighten intense their body.
And everything's about tension.
If you look at a gymnast, the way they get scored
is it's not just the movements,
it's how nice their body looks.
It's how graceful it is.
It's how pointed the toes are,
how straight the legs are, how straight the elbows are,
how well they're able to hold their position
while they're swinging or moving their body.
That's all isometrics, that's all tension
and most training programs, the vast majority,
don't even mention isometrics, not even in there.
There's such the best example of pure control
over one's body and mastery over technique for movements
and it's such a high skill sport
that it's hard to really break down every little thing
that they do in their training,
but a lot of it, like you said,
is that that high control of in range of motion strength.
And this is something that you don't find
in a lot of other training modalities.
And that's one specific differentiating factor
is they've really put in the time to then expand upon
the types of movements their body can produce.
And so teaching the body to just get comfortable with it,
but then really progressively overloading to where
they can do things that your average person just can't.
So we mentioned gymnasts the other day on a podcast and actually had somebody ask me,
like, you know, I heard you guys talking about the benefits of isometrics and I just don't
understand how something like that can build so much muscle.
And the way I explained it, and you guys can add to this what you guys think, but the way
I explained it to this kid that was asking me this was like, and I use the analoged at Sal uses all the time that I love,
which is the amplifier is your CNS,
and then your speakers are your muscles.
And we always talk about how we develop muscles
and build muscles, but we don't spend a lot of time
talking about the central nervous system.
And I can't think of a better way to train the central nervous system. And I can't think of a better way to train the central
nervous system than high tension, isometrics because when you are tensing up your entire body like
that, that you're developing the communication to all of your muscles, all in your body, all
simultaneously, and as tense as you possibly can. That is one of the best ways that you could potentially
build your CNS, build your amplifier
that then can output into the muscle.
So I would attribute that to being one of the main reasons
why they can develop so much muscle
is the communication that they're developing
through their scene.
It's the ability to summon all the soldiers
to do the work for you.
Right.
You know, and that's such a component people just don't understand
that you don't have to add like an extreme amount of load
to be able to get a mastery over that.
And they're an example of that where they're really using
bodyweight techniques, but this is all coming from within.
This is that intrinsic, which is kind of esoteric
on some level, we're trying to explain this, but you can really squeeze and connect and recruit
even more muscle fibers to get involved in every lift.
It's the central nervous system that fires muscle fibers. It's the central nervous system
that tells your body how many muscle fibers it should activate. And the amount of muscle fibers. It's the central nervous system that tells your body how many muscle fibers
it should activate. The amount of muscle fibers that you can summon is largely determined
by how effective your central nervous system is at talking to your muscles. I'll give you
a couple examples. Think back. If you've been lifting weights for a while, think back to
when you first started working out, or think back to when the last time you took a long
break was, and you got under the barbell,
and you were gonna do a bench press.
Remember how shaky it felt?
It felt like, almost like your muscles were laughing.
That's how I remember, that's my best way of explaining it.
Like, you don't have a good connection,
so you try to do a rep and it's like,
da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da,
absolutely.
That's your central nervous system,
not being very well connected.
Your muscle fibers aren't gonna activate very well.
Your muscles aren't gonna grow very well. Remember, muscles are dumb. They don't do anything on the realm. They have to be
turned on. Think about it. Here's another way. If you've ever met anybody who has a, who's had
nerve damage to a particular muscle or part of their body, how does that muscle look? Completely
atrophied. It's disconnected. The body, because the central nervous system is not attached or
connected to that area or that body, that part of the body, the the central nervous system is not attached or connected to that area, or
that part of the body, the body then atrophies the muscle.
We have no use for it.
Muscles are what adapt and grow, and part of the way they grow is by what kind of signal
they're receiving from the central nervous system, and high tension isometrics turns things
on like you would not believe.
Here's one of the other benefits of it.
And it sucks because for some reason, isometrics,
people don't include that as a muscle building technique,
which is silly.
It'd be like me saying right now,
only do the positive portion of a lift,
and never do the negative, or only do the negative,
never do the positive.
You're missing out on a huge component.
It's a tough sell because it's really hard,
and it's not like super fun and exciting.
It builds muscle just like the other types of muscle contractions and the better you
get at them, the better you're going to build muscle.
Here's my favorite part about it.
Isometrics don't damage muscle as much.
Yes, it's very safe.
So it's a great way to, you can literally take your routine, throw some isometrics in,
you don't necessarily have to worry about over training, you're just going to get extra
results. So I always like finding ways that I can teach a client or show them something so they
can feel what I'm trying to explain right now.
Because what we just talked about can be very nuanced for the average lifter who doesn't
care that much about the science, they just want the damn results.
And so I'm always as a trainer thinking of like, how can I like get them to feel what I'm trying to explain to them? So a common area that
is really unstable in people and we you have lots of issues as a trainer is shoulders.
Shoulders can be very unstable and you know, clicking, feeling and little chronic pain
they have there or just feel weak when they first get into their shoulder workouts. And
so it takes three or four sets before they really feel like they're getting in the groove.
Something that I would do with a client to explain this, the benefits of like a high tension,
isometric exercises, I would find a weight that is really hard for them to press, you know,
two or three times above their head.
So it's a heavy load and get them to press it and lock out above their head.
And just hold and hold.
And just hold that. a heavy load and get them to press it and lock out above their head and hold.
And just hold that.
And when you're holding it, you are literally thinking about everything from your feet,
all the way up to your fingertips, the entire body being engaged, the glutes being engaged,
to keep your hips underneath you and the shoulders nice and stacked, the chin's tucked,
and you're just holding the isometric hold for as long as you can and start your shoulder
workout with something like that,
and then go into your shoulder press, your raises,
and stuff like that, and pay attention
to how your shoulders feel.
Oh, you'll feel strong.
You'll feel stable, and you'll feel right in the groove
to go lift, and I used to love to show this,
to show the value of what we're talking about right now.
Yeah, great ways to implement isometrics are carries, all kinds of carries, overhead carries,
suitcase carries, farmer walks.
But you want to work with isometrics through different ranges of motion.
So Adam just talked about end range of motion, right?
My arms are straight up above my head.
You can also bring dumbbells down like you're beginning a shoulder press and hold there.
Right.
Because yes, because isometrics, there is a carryover
to range the motion outside of what you're doing,
but most of the benefit is in that range of motion you're doing.
Here's an application for the person who just wants
to get strong right a particular lift.
Identify the weak point of that range of motion.
Let's say it's bench press and you find that once you come
two inches off your chest, it's hard to move the weight.
Once you go back, once you go over another four inches, now it's hard to move the weight. Once you go over another four inches,
now it's easier to lift.
So there's this like four inch window
where you're just not that strong.
That's where you do your isometrics.
Get underneath a bar, put the safeties up,
put the barbell under the safeties,
so that the bar is where you're weak,
push up against the safeties,
create tension there, do it for 10, 15 seconds,
and then rest and treat it like a workout.
And then watch what happens to your progress.
Here's the other thing about gymnasts
that I really like a lot,
is that they don't work out, they practice.
This is a very interesting distinction
when it comes to training.
And this is one that took me a long time to understand.
Every time I went to the gym and I thought to myself,
today I'm working my chest or my back or my legs, me a long time to understand. Every time I went to the gym and I thought to myself, today
I'm working my chest or my back or my legs, the focus was feeling that body part and
hammering that body part. The focus wasn't practicing lifts that train that body part.
It's very, very different. Practice means I'm going to get good at that exercise. Training
means I'm just getting the body part to feel fatigued and sore and pumped. Now, gymnasts
don't go to practice in their gymnasium and they don't go to think to themselves, I'm just getting the body part to feel fatigued and sore and pumped. Now gymnasts don't go to practice in their gymnasium
and they don't go to think to themselves,
I'm gonna work out my chest shoulders and triceps.
They think I need to perfect my position
at the top of the rings,
or I need to perfect the iron cross,
I need to perfect how I pummel on the pummel horse
or whatever.
How can I get up higher in that position?
More explosively quickly, but then be able to now stabilize it as smooth as possible.
So all those little nuances, they're paying attention to where, you know, the joints compensate or something happens where, you know,
the movement overall just doesn't look as seamless as it could be. And so all those things are taken into account when they're going up and they're performing these.
Right, and now practice looks like this.
I'm practicing perfect technique
and I'm getting technique better.
You can't do that when you're super fatigued, can you?
Right, so as gymnasts is not going in there
and saying, I'm gonna do this over and over
until I can't move anymore
because then all your practicing is crappy.
Bad form.
Crapie form. So they practice, practice, all you're practicing is crappy. Bad form. Crapie form.
So they practice, practice, practice.
My form is starting to get sloppy.
They jump off, then they wait.
They rest.
That's the thing.
There's a lot more rest involved in this style of training than people realize.
It has to be perfect every time, and if it's not, they're aspiring for their next movement
to be perfect.
So, the amount of rest is really to then recoup all of that
so they don't have any elements of a team.
Well, one of the greatest expressions
that we see of this besides gymnast
is your Olympic lifters.
And if you've ever trained with another...
They've never lived to film.
They never do.
It's very, very rare that they're ever even touching
their max load or closer max load.
Most of their training is just practice.
And when you go to practice, it is a mindset thing.
Like you're a loody to sell.
It's not, I'm going to train legs today
and I'm thinking about getting my legs sore.
It's, I'm gonna squat today.
And today, I want my squat to look better
than it would look the last time I squat.
So the way you move is so important.
And you're more focused on the movement of
the exercise than you are actually the load of the exercise. That's how 80, 90% of your
training should look is focused on the training of these movements before always thinking about
the load.
Right. Now fatiguing a muscle, getting it pumped and doing a lot of stuff. Yes, that's
important. But here's how important practicing lifts is and I'll make this argument all day long
If you were to just be able to split yourself into two twins everything identical
One of you went to the gym and just hammered muscles the other one went to the gym and practice lifts
Let's just let's say it's legs one of you goes to the gym and hammeres your legs when they do leg your leg work out
The other one goes to gym and just tries to get really good at squats or really good at front squats or other leg exercises. Over the course of a year or two years or
three years, do you know who's going to have better develop legs? The person who practices.
No joke. I'll make that argument all day long. It's the person that practices. I remember
first witnessing this myself. I remember there was a trainer that worked for me and him
and I were similar in build, but the guy just bench pressed like a tremendous amount of weight.
I remember what he lifted, but it was, he was just so strong.
And I remember thinking like, oh, how does he lift things so much weight?
And then I realized in between clients, because he would train clients all day long.
In between clients, he'd load up three plates or two plates on the bar.
He'd get underneath and he'd practice really good technique, rack it up,
take the weights off and then go train exactly. So all day he's practicing this lift never really training to fatigue not getting himself sore
But holy cow his body got extremely developed and he was really really strong at that particular lift
So trade and this is true for most people. I'll say this if all of you ever if all you guys ever do is
Go to the gym to practice the most important exercises, you're like 95% of the way there.
No joke, it is, yeah, sure, you wanna feel muscle squeeze,
you wanna do that stuff, there's definitely value in that.
But the practice element, boy, can we learn from gym-ness
in this particular regard?
It's gonna benefit your tremendous.
The other thing they do really well is they address mobility,
full range of motion.
Totally.
Probably, I'd say, gymnasts above almost,
them and Olympic lifters, when you look at the way
that they take the body through its fullest range of motion.
And, you know, this is kind of counter
for the bodybuilding community.
The bodybuilding community has been, you know,
pushing the shorter wraps and the whole time under tension
is what we're trying to accomplish the entire time,
missing out on the
benefits of learning to take the muscle through its fullest range of motion.
And the best part about that is not only do they get all these great muscle building
effects, but when you talk about like joint health and joint stability and protecting
yourself from injury, man, these are some of the most resilient bodies that you'll see
out there.
Oh yeah.
And remember mobility isn't just range of motion.
Mobility means you control a large range of motion.
You're strong throughout the range of motion.
So like the difference between a gymnast and let's say somebody that's really flexible
is that a gymnast is also flexible, but they're training under tension throughout that range of motion.
So they're strong through their flexibility.
Somebody just really flexible,
sure they could do the splits
and they could do all kinds of, you know,
ranges of motion, but they're weak in it.
That causes problems.
Gymnists are strong through ranges of motion.
Now, what does this mean for you?
Well, the larger range of motion you have control over,
the less risk of injury,
but also the more muscle fibers you activate
and the more muscle you build.
Studies are pretty conclusive on this.
A full range of motion done well squat builds more muscle than a half range of motion done
well squat.
And again, to point out, it is a sport.
And so that when they get into certain end ranges of motion and they're putting an extreme
amount of intensity and tension, like there's potential for injury because they're so far out of the normal spectrum of range
of motion for your average person.
This is the ultimate expression of that being a sport, but we could take elements of that
and create a little less extreme version of what they've created in terms of the range
of motion.
If I could get my shoulder to now get a little bit further back under control, be able to
hold weight comfortably in that and be able to control that.
That's going to benefit everything I do in terms of a regular barbell lift.
I'm going to have a lot more control and stability,
which then is gonna allow my body to produce more force to provide strength. This is one of my
favorite parts about the newest program that we just released, the suspension trainer. In fact,
my sister was just texting me last night and she's gone through her first week and she's like, oh my God, like my body has never felt so good.
And it's those straps allow you to take your body and with different angles so you can
regress it for whatever level you're at because obviously doing an iron cross and some
of these, I'm sure there's people listening right now that are going.
Yeah, well that's, yeah, this is great guys, but I'm 50 years old. I'm never going to do the iron cross on rings or do full pull ups on there or dips off
the rings and the things that's probably going through their head right now.
But there's ways to take what we're talking about and regress that.
The suspension trainer is a great example of that.
You have these straps would create an unstable environment very similar
to like what rings or pulmahorse or some of these things that you're talking about would
do.
And then yet you can regress it so somebody who's 70, 80 years old can do a push up with
these straps and it's relatively easy enough for them to control their body weight, but
then take it through its fullest deepest range of motion and force you because it's unstable to have control of it to South's point and you take
it through and the benefits of that.
I mean, I love it.
I love hearing my sister who goes through everything that we ever release and I always
inched to her.
She resembles the average client that I would have.
And so I love hearing feedback like that and she's like totally blown away by the suspension
trainer because of that.
She's like, I didn't the suspension trainer because of that.
She's like, I didn't think that this would be a side effect of this is that my body,
my joints, my back, my shoulders feeling better than it's ever felt before just from
the first week of training.
Oh, totally.
You know, so what's the real takeaway here?
The takeaway is go lighter so that you can get a better range of motion.
That's basically what it boils down, is rather than trying to go heavier
with your range of motion.
See if you can go lighter and challenge your range of motion
so you can expand upon it,
activate more muscle fibers and get better results.
That, lastly, let's talk about sprinters.
Now sprinters, in my opinion,
have some of the most impressive physics at the highest level.
If you look at a Olympic level sprinters,
they look almost like if they wanted to become bodybuilders,
they could with like six months of training,
just from their build and their physique,
even the long leaner looking ones, like Usain Bolt,
you look at his legs, you look at his shoulders and his arms,
and he's built a lot of muscle and accident,
just from training the way he does to become a better sprinter. One of the main takeaways that
you'll get from sprinters is that they train explosively, fast twitch muscle fibers. There's
almost no way to activate fast twitch muscle fibers better than with explosive movements.
Even movements that look slow in grinding, applied explosively, activate
more fast switch muscle fiber.
So what I mean by that is, and of course this is all, you know, considering you have good
technique and good control, okay.
Let's say you're doing a heavy barbell squat, let's say you're, you know, 200 pounds of
the bar and that's heavy for you, but you got good control on everything.
So you go down to the bottom and you come up in a, in a control fashion or you go down
to the bottom and then you try to explode up. Now because it's
heavy, when you look at the squat, you're not moving very fast, but the intention is
explosive. Studies show that explosive intentions build more muscle fiber, bigger muscles by
activating more fast switch muscle fibers.
That's the component. That's right. And I think that that gets, you know, missed,
well, I think people don't understand like how,
moving a barbell with speed is a completely different experience
than, you know, just loading it heavily
and trying to grind your way up, you know,
with a lot of weight.
Moving it with speed, it provides a completely different
stimulus to the muscles to respond
to now.
The thing though is that this is like sort of the top.
This is the peak of your training experience.
This is one of those things.
We always bring this up sort of at the end of all these things where we're talking about
stabilization, we're talking about supporting the joint, making sure all the movement is
nice and fluid and controlled.
And your control has to be at mastery level
to then get you to this point where now I can open it up.
I'm opening up the throttle for as fast as I can possibly move,
which then gets your muscles to really grow,
but you just gotta really make sure
that you have everything supported.
I'm so glad you brought that point up because that was what I was going to say.
I'm glad too.
I don't know if we even made a point to organize this where this was last,
but it should be in the order of things that we're talking about.
Because I'd hate for someone to hear this.
We talk about all the benefits that the spreaders get for explosiveness.
And you have a beginner lifter that decides, oh, I'm going to do explosive
squats when you have terrible squats to start with.
That's right.
You know, work on all the other things we've talked about, like isometric slowing the tempo
down and the, you know, tension type movements, perfecting, practicing, all those things should
come first.
And then explosiveness is the greatest expression of all that together.
Like that's when you get that,
and that's how you progress it.
This is when we go back to the inmates.
Like how do the inmates keep getting creative
and keep progressing?
Well, the pinnacle of that would be this part,
the explosiveness, the explosive pushups,
the explosive squats, those metrics.
Yeah, the plyometric type of stuff that we see abuse
so often, there is value to it,
but we talk about it being abused because people highlight the benefits of it like we are right now. And then all
of a sudden, you have your average person who goes the gym inconsistently wants to jump
all the way to that because they hear all these great benefits from it. But there's an
order of operation. You want to spend the time, you know, building these stable joints,
building the strength, building this control, practicing these movements.
And then when you get really good at that, this is a great way to progress.
That's why this is the last phase of maps performance.
When you follow maps performance, you go through different phases.
And the last one is utilizing explosive movements to build explosivity and to build muscle fiber.
You know, here's a thing about explosive movements.
Studies show that it literally unlocks muscle growth
that you could not tap into with traditional lifting.
This is on advanced lifters.
They'll show with advanced lifters
who've been lifting a long time
that by applying explosive movements properly,
they unlock a new potential for muscle growth.
And there's lots of studies on this.
There's post-activation potentiation studies.
There's studies on athletes who don't necessarily need
explosive power, but they utilize it
to get their muscles to respond again.
There's also a specific way to apply it, by the way.
In order to get good, or to utilize the benefits,
or get the benefits of explosive
movements, they have to be done explosively. I know that sounds funny, you're probably
thinking, well, no duh, obviously. No, no, no, think, okay, this is the deal here. You
can't do explosive movements when you're tired, fatigued, sore. It doesn't work that
way. So in other words, when you do a traditional, for example, set of squats or bench press,
you go to a certain level of fatigue.
If you're training explosively, you stop way before that.
The minute the set stops becoming explosive,
the set is done.
Because every other rep after that is no longer training
the explosive movement portion.
It's no longer making you more explosive.
So it literally is,
so when you look at a sprinter sprint,
they're doing it not to fatigue,
they're exploding, then they're walking back carefully,
they're doing a little bit of dynamic stretching,
they're getting their heart rate to come back,
down, they wait a second,
and then when they feel like they can be explosive again,
they sprint again.
It's not like sprint, sprint, sprint,
because then it just turns into long distance running.
Not only that, you'll actually see,
so if you ever watched, you know,
by and by no means am I a coach for sprinters, but I've watched high level coaches coach sprinters and they
will actually break up the explosive movement. So if you'll see them who practice the takeoff,
yeah, you know, you know, 50 different times with it, right off the block, with a minute rest plus
between each one, long respiratory, and it'll be, you know, they're coming off the block with a minute rest plus between each one, long rest period of, and it'll be,
you know, you're coming off the block
and they are critiquing the head position
where the hand pulls through, and then it's just,
they take off and then they stop.
Because everywhere, where's the leak of power?
Right.
Yeah, the whole thing needs to be explosive.
And you take off to the end.
And we can take, we can take from that
and apply that in our resistance training.
You don't, the whole movement sometimes can be broken down in segments and perfected.
Similar to what you were talking about with attention stuff with the bench press and things
like that, is look at the movement, again, practicing movements, look at it and the parts
of it and become hypercritical of a part of it.
Now think about extracting some of the components from the gymnast.
How they do this extreme isometric tension.
So if I'm on the block and I'm trying to get the maximizing
the most power in that moment,
I'm going to get my body organized in such a way
that I'm anchoring everything into the ground.
I'm driving all of that tension that I'm creating internally
and I'm forcing it down to my feet.
Now once I get it there, I'm thinking about my technique of getting everything organized
to then get triple extension and throw everything out there as quick as possible.
And then now you're in a position where my performance has just increased tenfold because
I've applied these previous principles to this power movement.
I can always tell when I see,
and it's very, very rare to see this,
when someone has been coached like this,
and they're doing like a box jump or something,
and you'll watch them,
like they'll do one box jump,
and they'll literally be like two, three minutes in between,
and you'll see them positioning their feet,
bending at the knee just the exact angle
they want trying to replicate what they did before.
And it's like there's literally,
there's more time put into preparing the body
to take off for that one jump
than there is the amount of times
they're jumping in the workout.
And so that's something that you can learn
from these high level sprinters
that get this incredible results
is don't have
hazardly go after some of the things they're doing and just think that you all I'm just
going to go explosively in a workout one day break it down to that level and be that critical
of every piece of the movement and that's where you get that real great benefit and that's
also how you're safe and you protect yourself when you're doing these.
My favorite tool for explosive training
is resistance bands.
Love resistance bands for this,
like getting into a chest press
with a heavy resistance band
and boom, exploding, holding that position,
bringing them back down, letting go of the bands,
resting for a second, and then repeating,
which brings me to another point, long rest periods.
Sprinters don't go and sprint again,
unless they're ready to explode again.
And this is definitely something you can learn from. Now, there is benefit to training with
shorter-rest periods. You get a better pump and all that stuff. But that also doesn't
mean that you don't get benefit from doing long-rest periods to where each set, you're fresh
and ready to apply yourself. In fact, absolutely. In fact, one way you can apply this is rather than doing this crazy amount of volume sets
and reps in your workout, you're going in, you're picking two exercises and you're resting
three minutes in between sets, but those sets are very, you're applying yourself.
You're really driving through, you're really feeling the muscles contract, you're making
them really, really count.
And studies do show that this approach does build a lot of strength
and a lot of muscle. I do think it's something we can learn.
And this is a workout. It can be a workout. I think we get so caught up in that our workouts
have to be like this, you know, long old thing where we do seven, ten different exercises.
Like, sometimes a great workout can be exactly that. I'm going to pick one, maybe two movements,
tops, and the whole hour, I'm gonna break down that entire movement
and focus on all these little new ones that master.
Oh, huge.
Absolutely.
Now, here's the thing.
You find all of these principles in the maps programs,
and I think this is what makes them so damn effective,
is that through our experience training,
lots and lots of people, years and years and years,
especially if you have a passion for training.
If you're a trainer listening,
you know exactly what I'm talking about.
If you have a passion for really getting people,
the results that they want, really getting them to do them
for themselves, to do this long term,
to do it with the least amount of work,
because that's important.
When you're training average people,
it's important to give them maximum benefit
and minimal amount of time
because time is a difficult one for a lot of people
when they have a job and kids and all that of the stuff.
Is you really start to figure out what really works.
So one of the things you'll find in mass programming
is frequency is a huge factor that we always consider.
Most maps programs are full body workouts.
Most maps programs also have
frequency builders within them, whether it's a mobility session like you find in maps
performance or trigger sessions and maps in a ball like a focus sessions in maps aesthetic
or flow sessions and hit or whatever. Frequency is super, super important. What do you find
in common with the inmates, gymnasts and sprinters? They train very frequently. The sprinter
doesn't go sprint real hard once a week
and then leave, they're doing it throughout the whole week.
The gymnast isn't practicing to failure once a week.
They're doing it every single day.
Same thing with the inmate.
The next one is intensity is judiciously applied.
In fitness, I think you just intensity has been like,
it's like the one that we just keep hammering.
Oh, if something's not working, just go harder.
Oh, if it's just apply more intensity, just go harder.
No, intensity is a factor.
It's something to be played with,
just like frequency, just like sets,
just like reps or exercises.
You can't just squeeze that one all the time.
You run out of juice.
So intensity is important, but it must be applied judiciously.
So if you're doing tons and tons of frequency,
does that mean you go balls of the wall
every single time?
Of course not, doesn't work that way.
In fact, the frequency loses its value.
The other thing is our focus on the most effective exercises.
Just look at gymnast sprinters and inmates
do very little isolation movements.
The inmates, because they don't have access
to anything that gives them isolation movements, gymnast could care less about isolation movements. The inmates, because they don't have access to anything that gives them isolation movements,
gymnasts could care less about isolation movements, and so could sprinters. Almost everything they do is full body, almost everything they do is a compound movement, and those
those exercises just produce the best results. One compound exercise is as good as the next five isolation movements combined in terms of producing results. Now you touched on all the different programs where we've taken these phases.
If I had to pick, I would say both maps performance and the suspension training program probably
incorporate more than any other program, the stuff that we're talking about today.
I would agree, maps performance in particular, what's its emphasis on the explosive component at the end of the program, to the
way we utilize compound lifts, to the way we throw in lots of frequency, both with the
foundational workouts and the mobility sessions that are done.
I mean, with maps, performance, you're doing three longer traditional workouts in the sense
of the time, but then you're throwing in another two to three other mobility sessions,
which are really shorter and working the muscles differently to throw in that frequency.
So that's what you get with all of those programs. And for yourself, do not be close-minded.
Be open-minded. Look at different modalities. Learn what you can pick up from each one,
apply it to yourself, and this is really the key to longevity in terms of both progress results,
but also just in making things fun,
because it is fun to try different things.
And with that look, mine pump is recorded on video
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