2692: Want to Look Better? The Secret to a Sculpted Body

0:00Justin Andrews:This is summer at its peak. Whole Foods Market Summer Fruit Fest is your invitation to eat the season. Fresh, organic, and bursting with flavor. Start your day with peaches and organic blueberries and yogurt. Build a grazing board with fresh fruit, prosciutto, and artisanal cheese. Then fire up the grill with no antibiotics ever proteins and fresh produce. Savor the season. Shop Summer Fruit Fest at Whole Foods Market. If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump. Mind Pump. With your hosts, Sal DiStefano, Adam Schafer, and Justin Andrews.

0:38Adam Schafer:You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, we're going to talk about why performance training is the key. This is the key to a chiseled physique. Everybody's doing it wrong. They're focused on the wrong things. We're going to talk about why performance will get you there. Now, this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Element. This is an electrolyte powder with no artificial sweeteners, no sugar, the right amount of sodium to actually make a difference. It's delicious, and it'll fuel your workouts. I love the pumps I get because of the sodium in LMNT.

1:13Adam Schafer:Anyway, go to drinklmnt.com forward slash mind pump. You'll get a free sample pack of their most popular drink mix flavors with any purchase. Also, this episode, flash sale, MAPS Performance, half off right now. Head over to mapsperformance.com, use the code ATHLETE50, get 50 % off.

1:31Justin Andrews:All right, real quick, if you love us like we love you, why not show up by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs, or training gear over at mindpumpstore.com? I'm talking right now. Hit pause, head on over to mindpumpstore.com. That's it. Enjoy the rest of the show.

1:47Adam Schafer:You want a chiseled physique. You want to look amazing. You want to have sculpt and shape and muscle and leanness. Here's the key. Performance training. No joke. Nothing is more correlated to looking amazing than moving amazing. Performance is the key. We're going to get into it. And why if you chase this, you're going to look the way you want. Move good, look good. That's it. 100%. Look good while moving. This is an interesting conversation because we often, good job with the joke. we often chase uh the look we we chase the body that we want and when we ask people what body do you want what they refer to is the way it looks right yeah somebody hires you as a trainer we know this what are your fitness goals the top goals are always uh appearance related and i get

2:37Sal Di Stefano:that i mean it it's always that right i'm trying to think of a time that somebody hired me and i asked that question and they said oh i want to move really well i don't know if i've ever heard

2:47Justin Andrews:that no it's no one percent i mean i might have come across it but it is not i mean i can't not

2:52Sal Di Stefano:i imagine i've had somebody but like i can't i can't pinpoint a story to share with you where

2:58Adam Schafer:i remember that i remember there was a couple times where someone said specifically a performance goal like a couple i remember getting excited because it's so rare so different they came in

3:07Sal Di Stefano:they said we want to get strong yes oh wow yes and it was like really exciting like oh that and pain

3:12Justin Andrews:I think I've had that.

3:13Sal Di Stefano:Pain, I get that. Pain is total. That's a major motivator.

3:16Adam Schafer:Yeah, because that's a reminder every day.

3:19Sal Di Stefano:But I have to say, I'm pretty sure even all the pain people went like this. Like, I really want to get rid of that low back pain, but I'd love to. Get rid of this pooch. Yes.

3:26Adam Schafer:I think almost always there's a and also with the pain. Right. And so, and I get that, right? I get that because the visual representation of health is what we're all after. Not necessarily health. Not necessarily performance. But here's the kicker. Here's the trick or the hack or the secret is that if you focus on performance, you're going to move in the right direction. If this is your North Star, and we'll talk about what we mean by performance, right? If that's your North Star with your fitness journey, you're more likely to move in the right direction, less likely to move in the wrong direction.

4:02Adam Schafer:And this is even true with diet in relation to this particular goal. Now, on the flip side, if this goal that you have is a visual goal or how you want to look or an aesthetic goal, and that's your North Star, I mean, I don't have to say this to you guys, but to people listening, more often than not, if that's your North Star without guidance, you're not working with a good coach or trainer who understands better, you're more likely to move in the wrong direction. You're more likely to do things that sacrifice performance, oftentimes sacrifice health, in pursuit of a look. And now here's the crappy part of that.

4:39Adam Schafer:You don't even get the look, right? If your performance declines, your health, especially if your health declines, you don't get that look that you're looking for. And I think this is one of the, this is like the crux of why people have trouble getting to their fitness goals and staying at their fitness goals because they're focusing on the side effect and not on the main thing, not the root. And at the root of aesthetics is a body that moves well, a body that's strong, a body that can perform. Healthy, thriving, and performing. That's right. That's right. And so again, and I'll say this as a trainer, good trainers know this.

5:14Adam Schafer:If a trainer is listening right now, you know exactly what I'm talking about. A client hires you with an aesthetic goal, which is most clients. You know what you track. You don't track their aesthetics. That's what they track. What you track is strength, stamina, mobility, endurance, how well they can move in different directions. Stability. Stability. This is what you're paying attention to. Now, why are you paying attention to this? Well, one, you have integrity. You want your client to be healthy and move well. But two, this is what will produce what they want, what they're after. And a good trainer has to communicate this along the way.

5:49Adam Schafer:And I wish people really understood this because, again, if your performance is improving, you're moving in the right direction. It's just what's happening.

5:58Sal Di Stefano:Well, I think this would keep a much higher percentage of people continuing on if they focused on this because many times you will start to see a lot of these things move in the right direction with appropriate programming well before you'll see the aesthetic part. And this doesn't require the diet to be perfect to move this needle in the right direction. I can improve stability, mobility, strength, some of these markers with a client who still hasn't wrestled with their diet issues or still hadn't hit their macros and haven't figured that out or still having some issues with getting a grip on that.

6:34Sal Di Stefano:And so if we were focused on that, even though maybe we're not doing the best with the diet, you would still be very optimistic because you're like, hey, I'm moving in the right direction.

6:42Justin Andrews:Yeah. And I think a clear example of that in in terms of the difference of it is like, if I've been in a calorie deficit for so long, because I'm so sure that I don't want to gain body fat. Like I just want to stay there, but I'm still training and I'm still kind of putting effort in the gym. My energy sucks. My workout sucks. Like I'm not paying attention to any of those performance metrics of me moving forward at all, but I'm making sure that I'm staying under, you know, this calorie amount to keep my body weight as such. Like I'm in a terrible place.

7:12Adam Schafer:Right. And again, now just to add to that, If your North Star is performance, and we'll get to what we mean by performance because it is a holistic approach. If your North Star is performance and you're making adjustments to your diet to improve your performance, the adjustments you'll make are typically the better adjustments. And if they're not, you'll know it, right? You'll know it. You'll see it. If you're like, I need more stamina. Yeah. Okay, what's happening with my diet? I'm not feeding myself enough. Maybe I'm not eating enough carbohydrates. Maybe my fat intake is too low because any one of those things can contribute to reduce performance.

7:45Adam Schafer:So you start making these adjustments and then you notice improved stamina. This is the right direction. Okay, now I want to get stronger. What are the changes I need to make to my diet? Versus, you know, there's things I can do on my diet that can just make me lose water. I can lose weight on the scale. That can give me a false signal. I'm moving in the right direction. Meanwhile, I'm weaker. I don't feel as good. I can't tell you how many clients hired me and were so blinded by the false signals of the mirror and the scale. So much so that they totally sacrificed. It determined everything. They sacrificed performance and they sacrificed their health in pursuit of this sign that is meant to be the side effect.

8:26Adam Schafer:And I'll word it differently. A body that can perform well, okay? A body that performs well typically looks good. Oh, yeah. It typically looks good. So chasing this or using this as your gauge is phenomenal. And you've heard us, if you listen to the show, you know that we like to point to strength and strength is an incredible metric, especially for the first few years of training. But when we're talking about performance, we're talking about broad spectrum, holistic performance. We're talking about all of the metrics of physical fitness because they all help balance things out. Because you could also get very narrow in scope with just like endurance or just strength.

9:06Adam Schafer:But when you're looking at overall, and what we're going to do is we're going to break down all the different attributes and metrics of performance that you can measure. And when you're looking at all of them, along with your workout programming and adjusting accordingly, you're moving in the right direction and you will. This is not like a maybe. You will look better as you do this.

9:29Sal Di Stefano:Well, you made a point in an earlier episode that if you look at it holistically, all the different pursuits of performance, they have natural checks and balances to them. Because you can become obsessive about a single performance metric or number, and that can lead to chronic pain or bad habits, bad behaviors. But if you look at it holistically at all the things, they do have natural limiters or they have natural checks and balances. And so I think that's such a good way to look at it. And so much better for long-term health and keeping people consistent would be to reframe their goal around stuff.

10:05Sal Di Stefano:It's also psychologically too.

10:08Adam Schafer:Totally. And it's also this, like from a health perspective, uh, the, the things that correlate best to longevity and health, if you were to look at, uh, okay, what are the, what are the correlates? What are the metrics that I can measure that will directly tell me whether or not my longevity and my health are doing well, the best ones are all performance-based. The famous one that now medical community talks about quite a bit is a grip strength test. So you can predict all-cause mortality better with a simple grip strength test than you can with almost any other single metric. Now, what's so special about grip strength?

10:48Adam Schafer:Nothing specifically about grip strength except that it's a proxy for overall body strength. So when someone's strong with that performance metric, we see longevity. Now, what if we threw in there stamina? What if we threw in there mobility? What if we threw in there your ability to have a reactional ability, explosive power, which everybody needs a little bit? If you throw that all in there, what you have is a healthy person with great longevity. And I'll put it differently. If you took two groups of people, 50 here and 50 here, and this group over here, we're just going to make you fit. We're not going to worry about anything else.

11:25I don't care about body fat percentage.

11:27Adam Schafer:I don't care about the scale. I don't care about how you look. The goal is at the end of this one-year experiment, we want to dramatically improve your performance. And then this group over here, all you guys are going to focus on is trying to look better in the mirror. So your workouts, your diet, all that stuff, it's all focused on what you see on the mirror. Over here, it's all about performance. At the end of the year, guess who looks the best? Yeah. The performance group. So this is one of the best ways to measure your progress, to gauge your progress, and to make adjustments in your programming, meaning your workouts, and your diet.

12:01Adam Schafer:So what we're going to do is we're going to go through what performance looks like and why each of the attributes that we're going to talk about are so important and what they contribute to in terms of aesthetics. Because here's what we're going to do right now. Our job is to sell you the right thing because I know it's easy to sell you. You're going to look good. every other moron in the fitness industry does that. We're going to try and sell you the right thing and we're trying to sell it more effectively. And here's how. So we'll start with the first one, which is multi-plane movement ability.

12:29Adam Schafer:Let's explain what that means. So multi-planar movement means I have good movement and stability forward and back side to side, and I can rotate. Okay. So I'm not just strong and fast going forward and back. I'm also strong and fast going laterally. I can also twist. I can also move on one leg or one hand. I have this ability to kind of move in different directions. And sometimes what you'll see with athletes, bodybuilders are a good example, where they just want to develop a particular look is that they miss out on multi-planar movement. So they oftentimes don't have good rotation, good lateral ability.

13:08Adam Schafer:Powerlifters sometimes you'll see this, or oftentimes you'll see this as well. If you have good multi-planar movement ability, here's what you accomplish from a look perspective, balance and symmetry. That's it. Balance and symmetry. So balance refers to how balanced your body looks, right? Does your legs and your upper body match? Do you look like you're balanced? You're well developed all the way up and down. That's balance. Symmetry is right to left. Well, if you're good at moving in all these different directions, everything's developed. Yeah. And if you're not good at moving all these different directions and you focus on getting better at them, you'll develop better balance and symmetry.

13:46Sal Di Stefano:Well, balance in this situation also includes stability.

13:50Adam Schafer:Yes.

13:50Sal Di Stefano:The ability to move in different planes challenges those joints to stabilize as you move left or right or rotationally. And that ability to stabilize, anti-rotate, do all those things also creates balance and balance in the joint and stability, which is also important and comes from the multi-plane movements. And I remember when this really hit for me because early on in my career, this wasn't a part of my programming. And I remember having clients who I would have considered really fit and healthy, getting injured, not working out with me, but doing some of the most basic stuff back at home. And looking back, I take full responsibility for that as the person who was guiding them through their fitness journey, that I was not addressing a lot of these things that we're talking about today because I was so focus myself on what they're telling me.

14:42Sal Di Stefano:I just want to lose weight, Adam. I just want to look good. And so everything was around macros, weight loss, building muscle, but not also thinking about the other component of the performance piece, which gives them stability, which it gives them the ability to reach back and feed their kid in the backseat or pull something, a weed out of the ground or pick up the shampoo, rotate and pick up the shampoo bottle. And that's what was so crazy was here were these clients that I got up to 200 and something pounds deadlifting, but then they hurt themselves picking a shampoo bottle up out of the shower was like what but it was because i neglected this in the programming that's right it's also meanted strength yes how i like to

15:19Justin Andrews:picture that and instead of like integrated strength where it's complementing big motor movements and so um i think that uh a lot of times like people can get really focused on body parts individually. And I understand that because it might be a glaring thing. I want to build and develop this. When in fact, you start integrating these types of movements in a broader scale, it balances it out. Also expresses end range strengths, which you build and develop muscles even fuller than you could by isolating them.