2637: The Best Supplement + Workout Program Combos for Results

0:00Hey, Chicagoland! The Wayfair store is in your neighborhood at Edens Plaza in Wilmette. Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals, and even open the refrigerators. Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget. Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza in Wilmette.

0:27Adam Schafer:Wayfair, every style, every home In an effort to lower beef prices, 300 ,000 metric tons of foreign ground beef are entering the U.S. market without the normal tariff. The craziest part? When that beef reaches grocery store shelves, you'll have no way of knowing it came from another country. And where your beef comes from matters. Because if there's no accountability in sourcing, there can't be transparency in quality. At Good Ranchers, we partner exclusively with local farms and ranches where quality is the standard, not the exception. Every cut of our beef, chicken, pork, and wild-caught seafood is 100 % American-born, raised, and harvested right here in the USA.

1:05And for a limited time, you can get$123 off when you start a plan. That's$41 off each of your first three orders, totaling in$123 off. Visit GoodRanchers.com to claim this offer today. Good Ranchers.com. American meat delivered.

1:48Adam Schafer:By the way, this episode is brought to you by a sponsor from our place. Look, here's the deal, and this is becoming quite evident. We are exposed to forever chemicals on a crazy basis. What are forever chemicals? These are chemicals that stay in your body and have hormone-like effects causing all kinds of different problems. One of the worst offenders is cookware. You get the stuff, you're eating it. You don't even realize you're eating it. Well, there's a company called From Our Place that makes cookware that has no forever chemicals. I've switched out all my cookware with From Our Place to lower my exposure to these damaging chemicals.

2:25Adam Schafer:By the way, if you go to fromourplace.com, use the code MINDPUMP. You get 10 % off. You also have a 100-day trial with free shipping in return. So try it out for yourself and see how much you like their stuff. By the way, in today's episode, we talk about a lot of different programs that we recommend. Each one of the programs that we mentioned is 50 % off for this episode only. you can find them at maps fitness products.com but you have to use the code stack all right here we go let's talk about the summer stack the best supplement and workout program combos for different goals all the popular goals that people have what supplements you take and of course most importantly what's the workout gonna look like oh okay give me jacked and tan sal so

3:10Sal Di Stefano:should we go so maybe instead of going one by one and somebody who's listening has no idea that number seven is their goal. Maybe list off all the goals real quick.

3:18Adam Schafer:We're going to talk about all the common goals, right? We're going to talk about building muscle, so maximum muscle mass, targeted sculpting. So this is kind of like building, but to a lower degree, but just more specific, right? I want to build my chest. I want to build my butt. Weak body part type stuff, right? We're going to talk about mobility, improved movement, reduced joint pain, flexibility. We're talking about athletic performance, stress reduction. This is a big one. What should I do for being overstressed? If you're overstressed, your body doesn't get results at all. And then, of course, fat loss.

3:51Adam Schafer:Fat loss being the number one goal people have when they start working out. So we are going to start with muscle mass. By the way, the supplement recommendations are based off of what the best data that we have shows. So we're not going to go – we're not going to recommend anything that doesn't have good data supporting it. And what I mean by that is – It's too exotic either, yeah. Yeah, what I mean by that is the data needs to show end result, not just like there's an increase in this marker or decrease in that marker, but do people actually see more muscle, better athletic performance, better mobility, fat loss, not just fat oxidation or muscle protein synthesis, which can lead to some of those goals, but doesn't necessarily tend to pan out sometimes.

4:38Adam Schafer:And so I think it's important to parse out. So we're going to talk about the stuff that has been shown in the data, actually do something or at least contribute to the goals that we're going to talk about.

4:46Sal Di Stefano:I actually really like this conversation because I don't know about you guys, but at this time of the year, the family text messages start to kick up. Summertime. And they look just like this. They look like, hey, Adam, I want to do whatever said goal is. And almost all these goals, I've heard all of them, of course. and then after I tell them like which one of our programs or the way that you should train or the whatever the very next follow-up question they go is well what supplements should I get yeah and so I actually think this is actually a good idea that I think that this could be something that us or listeners who have family members that get this question a lot will be a quick easy easy dirty way to get to that answer of like and when I and and I like the way you organized even the supplements because i tend to always downplay that part to my family is just like listen you know you don't really need any but they always go well i know that i know what you say about supplements but since this is my goal what which ones would you take or whatever and so then i go well then i'm going to take this and that for those for these reasons and then we're going to

5:50Adam Schafer:recommend uh as part of this is like workout plans like what the what are the best workout plans that we have for these specific goals based off of both our experience but also the reviews that we get from, we've had tens of thousands of people follow our programs. We have a really good idea now of which ones people continue to report back and say, well, that program was really great for this particular goal. So we're going to start with muscle mass, gaining muscle. Now I do want to say you want to gain muscle. Nothing we're going to say here will work unless you eat enough food and protein and calories to make that happen.

6:25Adam Schafer:and get enough rest recovery. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you don't have the adequate nutrients to build new tissue, it's just not going to happen. Not going to happen. So that's a period.

6:35Sal Di Stefano:Well, I mean, I think this is part of why you have whey protein as one of the recommended supplements on here is that we know, and if you've been listening to the podcast for very long, we talk about how common it was that somebody was grossly under eating protein. And not from the point of unhealthy, they're going to die because they're not eating enough protein. But if you're going to build muscle, you want to speed your metabolism. There is a difference. There's an optimal range of protein. And so one of the first things I always had to do, male or female, was bump their protein intake. And most people struggled doing that through whole foods.

7:08Sal Di Stefano:And so this is where like a way protein shake came in handy was I could immediately bump their protein by, say, 50 grams just by saying, hey, change nothing. Just add a 50-gram shake every day. And I'm already going to start to move them in the right directions in regards to building muscle.

7:23Adam Schafer:This is why, so look, at the end of the day, here's what the optimal protein, this is what the data shows for protein intake and building muscle. It's, it's, and we're going to round it up a bit, but it's about one gram of protein per pound of target body weight. The data on this is clear. Like if you eat that versus half of that or less, everything else being the same, you'll build more muscle. That's very, very clear. Now, to what you're saying, Adam, the studies on whey protein are amazing in the sense that people will add 40 grams of whey protein to their daily life, people who work out, and they build more muscle.

7:56Adam Schafer:Now, why is that? Because nobody's hitting the protein targets. It helps with that. Now, if you're hitting your protein targets, then adding whey protein isn't probably going to make that big of a difference. But, again, in the studies, what they show is they take a bunch of people who work out, and all they do is they say add a 40-gram shake of protein, of whey protein, to your diet. And then let's come, let's measure you in three months and see what happened and compare you to a control group who has a placebo and the whey protein group built more muscle and got stronger. Both of these are complimentary for that.

8:24I mean, creatine, whey protein, both of them. I mean, it's like, it's hard to get a lot of creatine from red meat. And so, you know, this is another thing. You want to bump that up a bit more. They found over time, even like increasing the amount has provided different benefits even for your brain. So it's a valuable supplement on its own.

8:45Sal Di Stefano:Well, going back to what this is like for me with my family and recommending, it's a little bit harder for me to get my family to adhere to a specific diet where I tell them to eat all these things. Whereas I know that they're all under eating enough protein in order to build muscle. And so simply just recommending the way shake is an easy thing. That's it. Just add it. And why I like this is because I've learned over time, just so not to waste my own time and their time, is like, let me give them the thing. Here's the program. Here's the one or two supplements, I think, that move the needle the most for your specific goal.

9:23Sal Di Stefano:Go do that and then report back to me. And so that gives them something to go work on. I know if they go apply those one or two things that they're already going to see good change. Now, then if they continue to do that, I can get more granular with the diet and other things that are helpful. but this right here would give them structure a lot of times and easy. It's easy. It's one step. That's right. Follow this program, eat a, have a weight protein shake, have some creatine, and then you're going to start to build.

9:46Adam Schafer:And you guys are mentioning the other one, which is creatine. Creatine for building muscle is the king. It's the king of supplements. And that's not better than diet, not better than exercise, but in terms of non, you know, diet based type supplements, creatine will build more muscle. It will make you stronger. It does. You do gain more lean body mass. you do have improved performance in the gym. And now to what you, Justin was saying, you know, when creatine first came out in the nineties, it was like this huge, like, Oh my gosh, this is something actually builds muscle. That's all we thought it did.

10:18Adam Schafer:We now know it creatine to be this longevity supplement is health supplement. It's great for your, for, for bone health. It's great for your brain health. It's great for your organs. It's actually a healthy supplement, but it's the best. It still is one of the best supplements for muscle mass. So if you add for most people listening, if you add whey protein and you add creatine and you're working out, you're going to get better results. Now, as far as workouts are concerned, the king of all of our programs when it comes to muscle mass, kind of across the board, generally speaking, is MAPS anabolic.

10:49Adam Schafer:It still is. It's still the most popular. It's still the one that people will write in about and say, oh my God, I followed all your programs. MAPS anabolic, we released that nine years ago. Secret sauce is phase one. That's it. And it builds great muscle. It's a two or three day a week, full body routine focuses on the big compound lifts. There's different rep ranges in each of the phases. And it is a, it is an incredible muscle built to the point where, um, again, tooting, tooting our own horn here, but people get stuck in maps on a bullet cause they fall in love with the muscle, which I don't think this is a program to do over and over and over and over and over again, because it doesn't train different planes of motion.

11:29Adam Schafer:doesn't have a lot of rotation. There's no or very little unilateral work, but for muscle mass. Oh yeah. Like three months, maps, anabolic protein, creatine, eat your calories, get good sleep. You're going to build muscle on that, uh, that program. Next up we have targeted sculpting. Okay. Targeted sculpting is, uh, I want my body to have a symmetrical look. I want to have balance to my body. This is the beauty of muscle building. Bodybuilders talk about symmetry and balance, right? So when a bodybuilder goes on stage, the one with the most muscle isn't the one that wins. It's the one that looks the best who also has a lot of muscle.

12:10Adam Schafer:Now, what supplements are good for that? Well, it's the same ones that we just talked about that build muscle, because when you're trying to develop symmetry, what you're trying to do is develop and build weaker body parts to create this kind of aesthetic look. Creatine and whey protein are kings in this category, but I'll add one more because targeted sculpting oftentimes isn't this big calorie surplus. I'm not looking for maximum muscle mass. I'm looking for shape. So I don't want to just gain a bunch of muscle while also potentially additionally gaining body fat because I'm in this huge surplus.

12:42Adam Schafer:I want to kind of shape and sculpt my body. Essential amino acids here are quite valuable. Essential amino acids in studies have been shown, especially in calorie restricted diets to do a phenomenal job of preserving muscle. Now the question is why essential amino acids? Why not just more protein? It's fewer calories. So essential amino acids have some calories, but you know, 16 grams of essential amino acids is going to be less calories than 40 grams of whey protein. So it allows people to fall into more of an appropriate caloric intake.

13:14Sal Di Stefano:I also love this recommendation because when I get a family member, client, friend, whatever, that wants to do this goal, I tend to recommend eating in a maintenance calories. Now, so the audience understands, maintenance is never true maintenance. Maintenance means I'm keeping you at a caloric intake that you're constantly dipping in and out of a surplus and a deficit. There's moments of time in the day when you're a little bit in a deficit. There's moments of the time of the day where you're a little bit in a surplus. And over the scope of the entire month, that's what we're looking at. We're looking at moments in time.

13:48Sal Di Stefano:And hopefully, if we did a good job of being at your maintenance, there's an equal amount of time that you're in a surplus that you are in a deficit.

13:54Adam Schafer:It's much more precision-based.

13:55Sal Di Stefano:Right. It's much more, which this is where the amino acids come into play as, I think, a cool recommendation for an extra supplement. It's not a have to. It's not a must. But it's like, we know that because we're keeping calories right at that maintenance, there's going to be periods of time when you're in a deficit and because you're in a deficit by taking that we we lower the chances of you risking any sort of muscle loss in those calorie deficits and so we maximize the ability of being able to keep the calories low without losing any sort of muscle in pursuit of balancing the body yeah i like that yeah yeah and by the way with creatine

14:29Adam Schafer:we didn't talk about dosages five to ten grams a day uh is what's been used traditionally but now like what Justin said, the data showing up to 20 grams a day divided up in multiple doses has brain health effects. But for muscle, about five to 10 grams a day. For whey protein, 30 to 50 grams a day is great for most people. And essential amino acids, you're looking at anywhere between 10 to 16 grams a day. And again, that in the data has been shown. By the way, essential amino acids are the amino acids that your body can't produce. So your body can actually make certain amino acids, but there's some that you need to consume.

15:04Adam Schafer:If you don't consume them, you're dead, right? You're going to perish. So you're not taking complete proteins when you're taking essential amino acids. You're only taking the essential ones that your body can't make. And that has this really great muscle preserving effect, especially in calorie restriction. Now, as far as programs are concerned for this kind of targeted sculpting and balancing, MAP Symmetry. MAP Symmetry is the one program that we have. And I think it's the, it's the only program that I know of. I'm sure there's some that are out there, but I I've yet to see a program that's mostly unilateral focused.

15:38Right.

15:38Adam Schafer:So with map symmetry, the most of the phases, except for the last part, everything you're doing is unilateral. You're training one side at a time. And this has this really profound effect, uh, on balancing the body out. One of my favorite things about having a large audience, having people follow our programs is when people write in and tell us what's happened. And we had people, there were many people that send in their DEXA scans. This was crazy. This is cool. And these were people who were already trained. So it makes it even more remarkable. They send us their DEXA scan. And what DEXA scan does is it can scan lean body mass, fat mass, bone mass, but it gets very detailed.

16:17Adam Schafer:It could show lean body mass in your right arm versus your left arm, your right leg versus your left leg. It could show not just total mass, muscle or lean body mass, like a typical or traditional body fat test would do, but rather where is your lean body mass? And then how does it change? And here's what happened with these people. They would send us their DEXA scans. By the way, if you do a DEXA scan, one side is never identical to the other. There's always gonna be a little bit of a difference. It's just the way it is. But these people were sending it in. They were gaining muscle, but where they gained the muscle was crazy.

16:49Adam Schafer:They didn't gain the muscle on both sides. They gained it on the side that was smaller than the other side. And they maintained on the other side. Right. So someone will come back and be like, I gained three pounds of lean body mass, but look where it went. It went to my right quad, which is slightly smaller than my left quad. It went to my right delt, which is slightly smaller than my left delt. And we've seen enough of these DEXA scans to where we're like, wow, this is pretty remarkable. So unilateral training, like whole cycles of it, right? Not just like, oh, I do an exercise here or there, but like whole phases of unilateral training.

17:22allows you the opportunity to address all these compensations and that's right and it's really hard to to see it if you don't uh train that way for that amount of time where you go through a full cycle of like really trying to um you know build and develop that that weaker uh muscle and and to to really address the fact that you know you're you're actually lifting for the movement to produce the movement but you're not really like building up that muscle look if you've been

17:49Adam Schafer:training for a long time and you're doing traditional exercises, you have no, even if you're strong and you're balanced compared to the average person, if you're lifting weights and you've been doing it for a year, two years longer, you're far more balanced than the average person. The average person is way stronger on their dominant side than their left side. Okay. Average person lifts weights is far more balanced. But even if this is you, when you're using barbells and even if you're using dumbbells, but you're doing them at the same time, which is not really unilateral training, your body can compensate in ways that even for a trained, experienced trainer like me, I can't see.

18:23Adam Schafer:I can't see this. But when I go to pure unilateral training, things start to become more evident. The body picks it up and adapts, and you build muscle where you need it. And so that's what develops this kind of targeted sculpting effect. So creatine, whey protein, essential amino acids, map symmetry, that's what's going to do it for that. Then we have mobility. The ability for your body to move through different ranges of motion, the extensibility of muscles, your pain that you have in your joints. A lot of this can be worked on or controlled through the manipulation or should I say the management of your inflammatory signaling systems.

19:05Adam Schafer:If your inflammatory system is healthy, this isn't an issue. Most people don't necessarily have a healthy inflammatory system. And a lot of that has to do with the fatty acid intake that we have. So in modern Western societies, our omega-6 fatty acid intake is much higher than it should be. So we have kind of this Attawak inflammatory system, and this produces inflammation. Omega-3 fatty acids in studies, omega-3 fatty acids are essential, but for the typical westerner supplementing with them reduces inflammation and you see this yeah with clients and their diet when they actually clean up a lot of their diet some of the joint pain actually absolves that's right yeah as a result of just lowering the inflammation so sometimes it could be dysfunction and you know the training habits but for the most part too like diet plays a role as well it's one of the best studies for people with arthritis and rheumatoid arthritis.

19:59Adam Schafer:Meta analysis done in 2017 showed marked improvements from about one to three grams a day of essential, of omega-3 fatty acids. So it's great. And even healthy people, right? Even if you're healthy and you're fit and you eat a healthy diet, I mean, we've had - Yeah. What's the stats? Like 60 % of people are deficient? Yeah. We're just not getting enough. And supplement, like one to three grams a day is not it's easy it's easy to supplement with within two weeks uh you start to see improvements uh in mobility so you might not even feel pain but we'll notice as you can go a little deeper restriction in your squats yeah you get you know you warm up a little faster it's an easy it's a healthy supplement so that's the number one uh supplement this is great this is uh i mean this is my mother