2737: The ULTIMATE GAINZGIVING (Stay on Track Through The Holidays) | Mind Pump 2737

0:00If 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 Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, let's turn Thanksgiving into Gainsgiving. We give you the steps to maximize this wonderful holiday to build muscle. Get yourself strong fast. This episode is brought to you by a sponsor, Protein Pretzels. These are delicious pretzels that have over 25 grams of protein per little bag. This is the highest protein little snack I've ever seen.

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1:56There'll be$5 items as well. Sale will be from November 20th through November 30th. Go check it out at mindpumpstore.com. All right, everybody. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, but what if we could make it Gainsgiving? Yes. We're going to give you tips on how you can make this holiday one that turns into incredible progress, muscle, and gains. Maximize those meals and the time with your family in a way that makes all fitness fanatics super happy. So we're going to break it down for you. Let's do it. I like this idea. Yeah. This came from some of the ways that I would organize Thanksgiving when I was younger and try to, and really here's the idea.

2:38First of all, it's fun. So, you know, little disclaimer, if this is taking away from your enjoyment from your family, don't do this. I'm glad you said that. Yeah. So that's number one, right? So, you know, holidays with your family, connecting with other people is very healthy, very good for you. It's very valuable. it's more valuable than whatever gains you could do in a single day by far that being said if this is like this will be fun especially if you can shake it up especially if you could do this with family or members or friends who are visiting so you may be hosting thanksgiving or you may have flown somewhere and there you have cousins or aunt uncle or whatever who's also into fitness you'd be like hey tomorrow yeah do you want to do this thing with me throughout the day let's let's I heard this episode.

3:22Avoid the political conversations. Yeah, that would be the ultimate is to be able to get your family on board doing this together. Totally, totally. And you guys know this. I do, after Thanksgiving, I do a post-Thanksgiving workout with my family that's now, I think, where we're moving into the 15th year. And it's just become this great ritual with my family. It's very connecting. So again, the idea here is, can we take Thanksgiving and make it even more awesome for somebody. You already got a crazy feast. Let's put it to work now. So it starts off in the morning. So the morning of Thanksgiving, have a good hard workout.

4:01And in fact, what we're going to try and do is set ourselves up to be able to utilize all the extra food that we're going to potentially be eating later. All the extra macronutrients, proteins, fats, carbs, and calories. You've probably heard, or maybe you haven't heard this, but there's a saying in bodybuilding, it's not true, but there's some truth, there's some elements of truth in it, which say there's no such thing as overtraining, there's only under-eating. You've heard that before. That's not completely true. You could eat as much as you want and you can still overtrain. However, oftentimes there's some truth in this where if you up the volume, you up the intensity.

4:41So long as you feed yourself well. That's right. Then your body's able to adapt to it. And so the idea with this morning workout, the morning of Thanksgiving, is to add a little volume. If your normal workout is 20 sets or 15 sets, add three or four extra sets. Add a little intensity. Make this a harder, little bit of a longer workout to set yourself up for all those wonderful meals that you're going to have. Now, would you suggest full body, though, here? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, let's take advantage of hitting every muscle group good and hard so that all those extra calories go to that. Just because there's a - Don't avoid legs.

5:22Well, there's this. There is, you know, you can only - we're going to increase volume or intensity, right? And so a single muscle group or one or two muscles can only handle so much of that versus I can spread that out over my entire body. So I would imagine my body could maximize a higher calorie intake if I do an equal amount of damage over the whole body versus all that same amount of intensity driven towards two or three muscles. Yeah, so there's a couple points too around that. One, when you look at the data on continual glucose monitors, you'll see that really hard, large muscle group or full body workouts early in the day control blood sugar better than other types of workouts.

6:09So intense workouts and workouts that are using large muscle groups earlier have a greater effect on blood sugar, regardless of what you eat later versus, you know, smaller body parts or less intense workouts. Okay. So all workouts are great, but if you want to maximize that insulin sensitizing effect, you want to get the glycogen in your muscles, you want to just maximize the anabolic effect, all that stuff, then you're looking at working the whole body. The second part is that there's this systemic effect that happens from strength training. That's also, it's additive to the acute effect, right?

6:43So the acute effect or localized effect would be like I work my bicep out and the muscle building effect goes to my bicep. But there's actually a systemic effect that happens throughout the whole body. In fact, you look at the, there's some really interesting studies where people will wear a cast on one arm and then just work out the arm that's not casted. And the arm that has the cast on when they compare against controls loses less muscle versus other people who do nothing. So working out your right arm actually sends a little bit of a signal to the left arm. We see this with large muscle groups.

7:17You work out your legs. Again, this is another saying in bodybuilding that sometimes if you want to get bigger arms, you have to get your legs bigger or do squats, right? And people are like, how's that possible? There is a systemic effect that happens. So you send this really nice, big, loud anabolic signal with a hard, full body workout in the morning to set yourself up for later on. now is there a you know a time in the morning that you think matters like is this getting up earlier than you used to or is this just typically most people are gonna have the day off right so it's not like uh you you have to do this necessarily before work uh do you suggest getting a good full night's rest the night before and then going about this or do you know start your day off early at five six in the morning and go do this no if you don't wake up at five don't wake up at five tomorrow i'm out if you want a terrible workout do that or if you want to fall asleep on the couch.

8:08So get a good night's rest before when you wake up. And work out at a reasonable time, whatever that is for you. For some people, that's earlier than others, but that doesn't make a difference. After your workout, go on a nice long walk. Again, what we're trying to do now at this point is add just some activity. What tends to happen when we get to Thanksgiving is a lot of eating and sitting. And we'll have a walk later, which we'll get to. There's also another bodybuilder theory, and you can poke holes in it, but I've always used this and it's whether it's just a psychological thing that's helped me do this justify or to continue to do this after they say that on average, that we deplete our glycogen stores by like 80 % from a hard workout and they're not fully depleted, but a bit of activity, like a long walk afterwards.

8:56Squeezes it out. Yeah. Squeezes out the last bit of it. In other words, draining your, your gas tanks that we're going to end up filling up. And so there's also probably some value there of fully depleting. Yeah, either you could say it like that or just the fact that you're moving more, just the fact that you're burning more calories. Personally, I mean, there might be some truth to that, although I've seen a lot of people debate that. I honestly think it's just, I don't know, I know me. I know when Thanksgiving, the actual time of the celebration comes, I'm not moving. Yeah, I'm just very sedentary.

9:29Yeah. You see your family, you sit on the couch, you get up to eat, you drink. Watch football. watch football. It's like you're just not moving. So I like to get that activity going earlier in the day. And we'll do some more later in the day. Otherwise you get way behind. That's right. And then now have your small shake, have a protein shake with some fruit to give you some proteins and carbohydrates just to give you a little bit of recovery. But you're not eating much because you're going to save that for the Thanksgiving meal. Now if you want to eat a bunch of food before Thanksgiving, sure.

10:04I don't know why you'd want to ruin the opportunity to have more food at Thanksgiving. Yeah, this is kind of the point here. But just a shake with some fruit and just leave it. I love this strategy right here of like still giving your body, because at the end of the day, it's still hard to get a high protein intake. That's right. So even with a big turkey Thanksgiving, it's still hard to hit, say, like a guy like me, 200 plus grams of protein. So making sure I get like a whey shake with either water or almond milk in it right here. 50 grams of protein. Yeah. Boom. Yeah, something easy like that.

10:36Or like, yeah, or Paleo Valley bone broth, something that like I can do, I can really push the protein and not a lot of calories that I can slam would be like a perfect thing to have right here. Yes. Now comes the biggest part of this, which is the Thanksgiving meal. This is where people really, from a fitness perspective, I want to be clear, right? From an enjoying yourself with your family perspective, connecting with other people perspective, if you're doing those things, there's no mistakes, okay? Now, of course, people could go crazy with food. It could be all about the food. You could harm yourself or treat yourself poorly with food.

11:08We've talked about that in lots of episodes. But when it comes to connecting with people, this doesn't matter. But from a fitness perspective, I'm going to give you guys, or we're going to talk about some tips with your Thanksgiving meal. And it starts with loading up on the protein first. There's so many different great dishes at Thanksgiving. Thankfully, no pun intended, one of the main dishes at Thanksgiving is a protein dish. You got turkey. Yeah. Go get that first. before you get all the other stuff and end up with a low protein, high calorie meal. Or ham if you're weird. Yeah, I'll eat a lot of ham too.

11:40I'll add that if you're setting out to do this as it's the first time you've ever done this, I would grab the largest serving of ham and turkey that I've ever done before. Because even when you go hard and heavy here, it's still going to be hard to get. I mean, the amount of grams of protein that's really maximized this day is going to be a lot. In fact, we'll probably, I know you didn't put in the notes, but I'd probably even suggest ending the night with another protein shake because even if we're staying low calorie in the morning, most of our calories are going to come from this massive meal right here.

12:13And if you're going to enjoy some things like stuffing or mashed potatoes at all, even then it's going to be tough to get more than a pound of meat in you. And a pound of meat still is probably going to be low protein for people for an entire day. Good point. So go for the meat. Go hard. Go hard with the meat. If you're in a bulk, eat your starches next. If you're not, eat your vegetables next. And then follow it up with the rest. And eat until you're satisfied. Notice how I said satisfied and not stuffed. There's a difference. There's a saying. I want to ask Doug this. Isn't there a saying in Japan where it's like, eat until you're 80 % full or something like that?

12:51Yeah, I think it's hari hachibu, which means 80 % of your stomach is filled. Okay, I love that because it's a nice visual. I can picture what that would feel like to eat. Yeah. Until I'm like 80 % of the way full. Where this goes wrong, and I've done this so many times, like you eat until you're uncomfortable. Yeah. Which actually ruins the family time. So the button under your pants pops off. Yeah, and then you're sitting on the couch, and then you got to take a nap, and you're not really hanging out with anybody or talking with anyway. So eat until you're satisfied and eat in that order. And now you've given yourself a nice, enjoyable, anabolic meal.

13:28Do you guys have any other favorite dishes besides turkey that you like to throw in this? Stuffing. That's great. Do you guys do the rice stuffing or bread? Bread stuffing in the turkey. Yeah, that's great. Potatoes. I always request bacon. It's not typical, but I make that. Just a plate of bacon? Yeah, just make sure, give me some more protein of some sort. The bacon comes on our green beans at our house. Oh, see? Yeah, it's bacon-wrapped cream beans. There you go. Yeah, yeah, so you would like that. I get it as a side, and then I'll just add it in, but yeah. We have Italian dishes that we throw in there, So pasta al forno is in there typically.

14:04It's not like lasagna. It's similar to lasagna, but not the same. And then we typically will have some kind of potato dish, lots of vegetable dishes. I'm not a fan of the marshmallow or anything, so I typically stay away from that kind of stuff. Sweet potato is so good, doesn't it? I only like three things. And then at the very end, then go ahead and eat your desserts. But I like to do this. This is a little game I would play with myself back in the day. is I'd have a dessert and then if I wanted to eat more, I'd go back to the turkey. And I would give myself permission to have more pie, more cookies, whatever, if I went and had a little bit more turkey.

14:37Because Thanksgiving's a long meal, right? It's not like just an hour. We're typically there for the whole day or whatever. And so I'll typically go back. And this is where I can hit my protein targets because I've eaten it two or three times. Well, I looked at your notes. One of the things I was going to suggest is if you don't go huge on the protein, I'll do it twice, the same dish. You know what I'm saying? And like two big turkey and whatever servings over the course of like three, four hours. By the way, what's cool about this too, because some people are afraid of gaining body fat, and it's not going to happen in a day.

15:06It's definitely not if you have a hard workout like that and you walk and you do that. At least a good portion of those calories are going to go to recovery and building. And this is the part too that I go. To put on a pound of body fat, I'm not going to say it's impossible. a day but boy is it close to close to impossible you'd have to eat uh i mean again this isn't it's not that specific but 3 500 more calories than you're making egregious yeah so if you eat intentional if you eat in a normal day 2 000 calories just give you an easy number you'd have to eat 5 500 calories for the extra calories and the average person that can can only or normally eats 2 000 that's their maintenance has a very difficult time and then now here's where it gets complicated you had a hard workout yes you sent a muscle building signal a lot of that's going to go to muscle that's always been my experience yes with stuff like this especially with just one day where people tend to mess up is then they save all the desserts and stuff one thing i do like about thanksgiving usually we'll eat early a lot earlier like instead of at night yeah we'll eat during the middle of the days which helps me digest us too we have like a one o 'clock eating So yeah, where people mess up is they don't move and then they load up on nothing but carbs and they have a serving of turkey.

16:27If like all you did was a nice portion of eight to 10 ounces of turkey and then the rest is nothing but carbs, dessert, and you didn't work out and you didn't walk, that's where you go wrong. You underate on protein. You over consumed on sweets and carbohydrates and you didn't send a muscle building signal. like it's the trifecta that makes you feel or look like the next day. Like, Oh my God, I put on. And especially if you do the workout in the morning with a family member, this becomes a fun holiday thing, which takes us to another walk, which is, this is a staple. Now this has now become somewhat of a ritual.

17:00My family, my family does this too. It's great. Yeah. After you're done eating, help clean up a little bit or before you guys clean up and say, Hey, let's all go on a walk. And everybody loves this. It's so funny. The first time I did this, I thought it would just be me and my cousins. And next thing you know, like everybody likes to do this because we're all together. This isn't a workout. It's movement, but it's very connecting. Yeah. And it also helps with digestion, helps with blood sugar. And it's good for you. And so, and everybody I've introduced this one thing to, the walk after meals, years later comes back and says, that was a great.

17:36Everybody, you know, what's cool is that everybody I've introduced to, same thing where they They anticipated it was just going to be them and maybe one family member. And they're always pleasantly surprised by how many people join them. Everybody. I mean, I was too. I thought like when I did this with Katrina's family, I thought it'll probably just be me, maybe me and Katrina that do it. I was like, oh, wow. Like more than half of the family like joined me for it. I was like, oh, that's cool. I was like, a lot of people will enjoy this process. And it is. It's a great time to connect. And it feels so much better just after you've ate that big of a meal to move.

18:04Now, later in the day when you have some time, if you have some bands, do little trigger sessions for your weak body parts. Give yourself a little pump. Trigger sessions are super, like kind of, they're like moderate intensity little pump sessions. Trigger sessions are found in MAPS Anabolic, our flagship workout program. It's a great way to facilitate recovery. And it also sends kind of this little muscle building signal. And I love to have people focus on their target body parts. You know, if it's your glutes or if it's your lats or your delts, you could do a few rounds get a little bit of a pump.

18:39And what's cool about this is after a big sodium-laden meal, like Thanksgiving tends to be, you get a crazy pump with these little trigger sessions, which are a lot of fun. And then before you go to bed, I like what you said, Adam. I didn't add that, but I like that. Have a protein shake if you missed, if you didn't hit your up. If you didn't have two big Thanksgiving turkey meals in that day and you only had one, and then I think you're probably going to need a protein shake at the end of the day. Yes. And then here's a little tip that helps with sleep. So you've probably heard people say, avoid electronics before bed, make sure your room is cool and dark.

19:20And that's all true. A lot of people don't realize that really deep, calm, static stretching is one of the best ways to get your central nervous system to relax. Okay. Parasympathetic. Yes. So here's how static stretching work. So a static stretch is like the classic stretch, right? I'm going to stretch my hamstring. So I go down and touch my toes and I hold it for like a minute. What you'll notice when you do a static stretch is you slowly in the actual stretch itself become more flexible. So when you go to stretch your, let's say you're going to stretch your hamstrings, you're on the floor, let's say it's pancake, your legs are out and you're trying to stretch forward.

19:56What you'll notice is 30 seconds in, you get a little deeper. You wait another 30 seconds, another little deeper, another 30 seconds. You do this for two minutes and you've added a range your motion here's what happens this is why you get more flexible in the stretch your muscles didn't suddenly become more pliable uh your central nervous system released its grip yep because the softened its governing that's right so a long by the way you have to breathe through this because if you do a static stretch by holding your breath which a lot of people do where they're like you're actually sending two signals to the central nervous system that conflict the stretch is saying relax the holding my breath is saying don't relax so it's not nearly as effective.

20:35So breathe through it. The loosening of the muscles that you'll experience is actually central nervous system calming down. You would be shocked. The people who've never done this before do this for 10 to 15 minutes before bed. And it greatly contributes to restful sleep because of what it does to the central nervous system. And I say this because you want to have a nice restful sleep after this wonderful gainsgiving now i i want you to i know this episode's titles gainsgiving and the whole point of this was to give all this great advice around somebody who wants to optimize the day for lifting and gaining but let's say you're the first time you ever heard us talk and you found this podcast one of the things that we talk a lot about is the value of relationships and how that trumps how we look and our gains.

21:28And so what would you think? Like, I'm not going to go, I'm probably not going to train. I'm probably going to take this day. It's the one time of the year I get with all of my family in the same place. We'll probably end up watching a lot of football. Is it more a mindful thing? Like, and, and, and maybe choose to eat the protein. Like what does the advice kind of look like for somebody who accepts that? I'm not, I'm not, I'm not trying to make gains today, but I also am not also trying to put on a bunch of weight or feel terrible the next day. How does this advice kind of mold or change a little bit?

22:01Gosh, it sounds simple and it sounds stupid, but try it, is eat slowly and enjoy every bite. What tends to happen with meals like this is we eat so quickly, we're thinking about the bite that's on our fork and not the one that's actually in our mouth or what we can eat next. And what this does is it creates this kind of eating, kind of binge frenzy where we're eating faster than we normally do. And this is where we go beyond, above and beyond what's appropriate. We're actually not reading our body signals well. And it's not as connecting because I'm sitting here with my family. Yeah. And what I'm doing is eating this food very quickly rather than slowly savoring it, put your fork down, taste the food, talk to the people around you.

22:47that's how you maximize a holiday is it's about the people and it's also about the food i want to be clear food is a great way to connect with people food isn't just fuel you'll hear fitness fitness uh you know influencers say that all the time food is fuel yes but it's not just fuel that's stupid that's so inaccurate food is a lot of things it's not just fuel one of the one of the things that food does very well is it connects people and brings them together but it's not connecting when it's me in an eye on an island at the table scarfing this food down as fast as i can uh while i'm around you know people that i should be connecting with so eat slowly yeah i love the idea of eating slowly i love the idea of like trying to shut it down in the moment when you feel that 80 too right like it's like you got all day you can come back for seconds and thirds if you want to like instead of making this because i'm i'm uh you know notorious for this going and like building this massive plate, you know what I'm saying?

23:41Like as if it's going to run out, you know what I'm saying? We cook three turkeys, there's pounds of stuff. It's like, it ain't going to run out. You know what I'm saying? This is, there'll be enough leftovers for everybody in the family takes. So it's like, yeah, I do that. You know, and it's like, you know, what I should do is use the advice you said, huge serving of protein, mostly vegetables, a little bit of a starch, and then eat it slowly. And then, you know what? I'm 80 % full. I'm going to chill out and just talk with my family, hang out for a while. maybe I'll be hungry in another hour or two and I'm gonna go repeat that meal so I think just being mindful of that uh and it be and and remembering what this is all about uh connecting with family doing that I think the walk is such an easy one too that it doesn't require they want some movement yeah it doesn't require a lot of effort um because there's been years where we have I have worked out and I haven't worked out but it's been really easy for me to just after after that normally we have good weather around that time and walk outside for the depends on family too like if i'm at my wife's family or my family and it's you can kind of determine a little more when it's your family and so sometimes you're locked in and but like i make sure to just walk around and just completely cruise around go in the backyard you know throw the ball around but just just to remain up and moving and less like just sedentary you know it's you know it's funny too you'll hear people this is not this wasn't uh in our notes but you'll hear people talk about uh oh you know political conversations he did conversations my uncle said this my aunt said that here's a little tip for people uh keep at the top of your mind connection okay so i want to connect with people now you can't control other people but you can direct the conversations oh yeah and the way you direct the conversations is you ask questions and here here's a question i've done this before and it's so remarkable how it gets people to open up and connect is ask people how they met you know aunt jenny how did you meet how did you fall in love with and then have them tell the story, which you probably haven't heard before.

25:34And before you know it, people are sharing wonderful connecting conversations. This is especially valuable when your uncle is talking about how much he loves or hates Trump or whatever. Let him say his thing and be like, you know what, I don't know how you met so-and-so or how did you get into college or what was it like when you were growing up? These are great connecting conversations that bring people together rather than bring us apart. Well, yeah, it's on three atlas. I don't know how you guys do it, but the way we set the tone for that in our family is that everyone will get their dish and then we'll stand around the table.

26:05We first say a prayer and then each person goes around and says what they're thankful for before we sit down. That's wonderful. And so when you do that, it just, it kind of sets the tone for a conversation like that, I feel like, because it doesn't ever seem to go that way, even though a lot of us in the family have differing political views and things. And so I think doing that before we sit down and do that always sends us, I think, set the tone. Awesome. All right, Mind Pump family, happy Thanksgiving. If you like the show, come find us on Instagram. We'll see you at Mind Pump Media. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump.

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