2865: Hit PRs Doing Less & Lifting Smarter

0:00Justin Andrews:I'm Jake Stouck, co-founder and CEO of Serval. We built Serval to automate the IT work that slows companies down. Onboarding, password resets, access to applications, my laptop stopped working. While employees wait for help, their real work is put on hold. IT desperately wants to automate this work, and that's why they need Serval. You just tell Serval what you want to automate in plain English, and it's built. No drag-and-drop workflows, no expensive consultants. Employees get unblocked and IT teams go from drowning in tickets to building what actually matters. With Serval, IT becomes the AI engine powering the entire company.

0:39Justin Andrews:This is a new way to run IT. We guarantee you'll automate 50 % of all tickets and we'll prove it to you in a free four-week pilot. Go to serval.com slash listen. That's S-E-R-V-A-L dot com slash listen.

1:00Justin Andrews: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.

1:13Adam Schafer:You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today, we're going to talk about how you can hit PRs from doing less and lifting smarter. 80 % of you will probably respond exceptionally well to what we're talking about in today's episode. By the way, all MAPS programs right now, all of them, because of Memorial Day, are 40 % off right now. Go to mapsfitnessproducts.com. Use the code Memorial Day 50. Sorry, Memorial Day 40. So that's Memorial Day 40. That'll get you the 40 % off all MAPS programs. This episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Z-Biotics.

1:48Adam Schafer:This is a pre-alcohol drink, so you have it before you drink. and it's a probiotic that has been genetically modified. It's patented, so nobody else has this. It breaks down acetaldehyde in the gut. What is that? It's one of the negative byproducts of alcohol consumption. Now, normally, your liver breaks down all the acetaldehyde, but some of it gets released in your gut, and when that happens, it goes to your bloodstream, and it does all kinds of bad things to your body. Well, when I have Z-Biotics, before I drink, I feel way better the next day. You got to try it out. It really does work. Go to zbiotics.com.

2:21Adam Schafer:That's Z-B-I-O-T-I-C-S.com forward slash MindPump26. Use the code MindPump26. That'll get you 15 % off.

2:30Justin 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.

2:44Adam Schafer:There's almost nothing as exciting as hitting a new PR in the gym. You added weight to your deadlift, your squat, your bench, your overhead press. It means you're moving in the right direction. Today, we're going to talk about how you can hit PRs doing less and by lifting smarter. By the way, this works for almost everybody watching. Let's get to it. Oh, the irony. Yes. So I'm going to start by reading some feedback from one of our listeners who followed one of our MAPS 15 style programs. So this is MAPS 15 Power Lift. Was this the one left in the forum? This was in the forum. Nice. And I'm going to read this just because we've had similar experiences.

3:25Adam Schafer:But this was somebody who had done other programs before, done our traditional power lift program, and had heard us talk about how these short daily workouts could be really effective. So if people aren't familiar, the Mass 15 style workout programs, you're doing essentially, well, Mass 15 power lift, you're doing two or one lift a day, every day. Yep. But so rather than working out three days a week or so, you're going every day, but you're doing about one or two lifts. And this is what this person said. They said, that's a wrap. I finished MAPS 15 Power Lift, and they were right. I hit PRs in each phase.

4:02Adam Schafer:It has probably replaced Power Lift as my favorite program. And Power Lift is our traditional power lifting program.

4:08Justin Andrews:Which we've gotten great feedback from as well. That's right. Yeah. That's right. That's so fascinating to me. And it just goes to show, like, sometimes when you reduce volume, it's like it unlocks a whole other potential.

4:19Adam Schafer:It does. And I had a similar experience about three, I think it was three years ago. Was that when we had the original MAPS 15 program? It was about three years ago. Longer than that. Maybe four? Yeah. It was inspired by after having Max. I had Max. Okay. Max was going to turn seven in July.

4:36Sal Di Stefano:So the very first one was probably five, six years ago.

4:39Adam Schafer:I know I was in my 40s. So I want to say I was 42, if I'm not mistaken. and uh obviously i know what i'm doing but working out forever um and uh i had a a pr all-time lifetime pr in the deadlift of 600 pounds which i did in my early 30s i want to say um it was just a number that i had hit once and uh had chased it a little bit after that but would would slow down because i'd either feel like i'd start to hurt myself or it's just a big number to chase well Well, we had come out with MAPS 15, and Adam had shared his experience with just a few lifts every day or a couple lifts every day rather than the longer workouts.

5:18Adam Schafer:So I started experimenting with it without the intention of hitting a PR. I just wanted to see, and if you go back on some of our podcasts.

5:25Sal Di Stefano:You just didn't want to lose by going on it because I know that was your concern. It was like you'd built your training volume up so high. That's right. That it was like, man, am I going to lose gains or lose strength by going in a PR?

5:35Adam Schafer:I had no intentions of trying to hit a PR. It was literally, let's see how little I could do and maintain, maintain my strength, maintain my muscle. To my surprise, even though we promote this to listeners all the time, I was getting stronger and stronger and stronger. And within, I think it was like 70 days, it wasn't even three months. It was like less than three months. I pulled 605 pounds at 42 years old and I was sold. This style of training can not just be good enough, but can actually be superior.

6:06Sal Di Stefano:Do you think this has more to do with the bias of the podcast and the type of listener that listens? And what I'm speaking to is like, because we've had tremendous response from all the 15 programs, just how many people are telling stories just like that. It's completely surprised that they got stronger doing less. Do you attribute that more to the bias of the listener that we probably have a lot of people that are fitness fanatics and are probably teetering in the overtraining place? or do you think it has more to do with just kind of the era that we're in now with the constant level of stress and poor sleep and the iPhone and just politics bullshit?

6:46Sal Di Stefano:It's got to factor in. Yeah. Which one do you think is more of the factor here?

6:51Adam Schafer:I think it's the second one because I was thinking a lot about this in preparation for this episode. And I know I can find lots of data on strength training for strength in particular. There's actually good studies on this. The Olympic lifters have been, this has been studied for a long time with Olympic lifters. Power lifters have been around long enough now where we have pretty good ideas of what really work. We've got decades of training and decades of data around this. But the problem is when you look at that, you're dealing with a population of people where that's just all they do. That's all they do.

7:29Adam Schafer:They don't have normal lives. These are people who are highly trained.

7:33Justin Andrews:It's all scheduled around that.

7:34Adam Schafer:Everything's scheduled around that. They don't have, you know, a lot of them do have jobs, but this is like, this is their life focus. Because we're looking at it, like I said, a subset of people. Whereas the average person, like you said, Adam, you know, they have jobs, they have kids. They're not getting perfect sleep every single night. They're not eating perfect all the time, but they like to work out. And I think when they apply those strategies, they quickly burn out. or they just, they see results, but they don't realize that it's more than what is necessary, which means it's not the best for them.

8:05Adam Schafer:So that's what I think would happen. I think a lot of our listeners are everyday people and when they buy in, because we have to really push them, this is something we have to sell really hard. It's really hard to believe. People follow it and they come back and they're like, not only did it work, not only was it great, but it actually got stronger than I'd been before following such little.

8:23Justin Andrews:Yeah, it really just kind of points back Back to the principle of specificity. It's like I think we overlook that a lot when we're pursuing specific goals and trying to get strength PRs. And we're just trying to kind of balance that with overall fitness and overall muscle gain and leanness. And the more we can narrow it down to getting better at that very intentional movement, like this is that movement I want to improve. I want to get better at this skill. it takes a lot of practice and when it takes a lot of practice we have to make room for that and we have to create space and so i think reducing it down to just like two exercises and then really hyper focusing on that it allows the body to really shine in that i feel like you just recently

9:12Sal Di Stefano:got another lesson of that when you were chasing the the overhead press pr oh yeah it totally like

9:17Justin Andrews:makes me think of that because i wanted to make sure my whole body was strong and at first so it would probably be like the first month and month and a half. I feel like I was a bit off target and really just trying to kind of reinforce my joints and make sure that like my whole body was at like a better output when I would come in and lift. And then when I started to really just like chop it down to what mattered, you know, I was left with about 15 minutes and then all of it was like warm up leading into that 15 minutes of actual work. And it was like, duh, like I just focused on this one left.

9:53Justin Andrews:and then something to complement it, my body started to get the recovery and I just started to put up better numbers.

9:59Adam Schafer:And your strength went through the roof. Through the roof. Yeah, so people need to realize, this is just, people don't understand this, that getting strong or hitting a PR in a lift or a lift is a skill. There are muscles involved, of course, but a lot of it is a skill. So I'll use a different example because I think people can understand this, okay? Throwing a baseball as far as you can, you gotta have strong muscles. You got to have fast muscles. You got to, you know, stronger muscles are better when throwing a baseball far. But if you have bad skill, you're not going to throw very far. I'm a pretty strong guy.

10:33Adam Schafer:I've been working out for a long time, got a little muscle mass. I cannot throw a third of the distance that a high school baseball player could throw who's skinny, who outweigh by, you know, 80 pounds. Because he's got the skill of throwing the ball. Lifting is a lot of that is a skill. Now, yes, muscles are involved and bigger muscles contract harder, but the way your muscles work together, the way that they contract together and stabilize and how the central nervous system organizes everything is what gives you that strength. And practicing fewer exercises and movements allows you to really hone in and develop that skill of the lift.

11:14Adam Schafer:And doing short daily workouts gets rid of all the fluff. When you're looking at it and you're going, okay, what can I cut off? What can I cut away? You're left with the ones that are really important. Then when you just practice those, and there's more that goes to this, by the way, suddenly you get really good at those lifts that you're trying to practice.

11:29Justin Andrews:And you're recovered to where your next workout, you're actually putting out really good performance again. Your force output is really high because you're fully recovered and replenished. And I think that, too, the consistency, I mean, you can kind of list out. there's a lot more benefits when you're really trying to maximize that skill.

11:50Sal Di Stefano:You have to speak to though, how this fits into building muscle and looking better, right? Because I understood this logically, even as a young trainer, but still fell in the trap of not pursuing and chasing strength and PRs because I was like, all I care about is how I look. And I missed out on a lot of gains and I missed out on building a lot more muscle because I didn't pursue this. I was so focused on hypertrophy and the pump and training that way because I don't care if I bench press 315. I just care if my chest looks good. And so you have to – and again, even everything you guys are talking about, I understood logically as a young trainer but still didn't pursue that because that didn't speak to me.

12:34Sal Di Stefano:Like, oh, I don't care if I hit PRs. And I understand that. I understand squatting and bench pressing is a skill, but I don't ever care to be the best at that. All I care about is – But because of that, I missed out on it. You have to explain how it plays into hypertrophy and how you look.

12:48Adam Schafer:So strength is strongly correlated to muscle size. In other words, the stronger you get tends to point to building more muscle. Now, the bigger you get, the less this becomes a correlate. But especially for the first, let's say, three years of your strength training, the best way to build muscle is to get stronger. Nothing comes close to getting, you know, adding 30 pounds to your squat or, you know, 20 pounds to your overhead press. Like you add weight to the bar, especially for the first three years, you're building more muscle. Now, later on when you're more advanced, it's less of a correlate.

13:23Adam Schafer:However, I will say this. If you've been training for years and you've gotten to a place where you stopped seeing how strong you can get, and it's been a long time. It's been five years. Five years of me actually training to see how strong I can get. Go train to try to get stronger. watch what happens to your gains you're going to unlock some serious muscle growth because it's been so long since you've even even tried this yeah i mean this was me that was exactly what

13:46Sal Di Stefano:what happened to me there's the another way to explain too is just your your the skill part also part of what makes you lift more and get stronger at the skill part is your ability to recruit muscle more efficiently your ability to recruit more muscle fibers efficiently also then translates into building more muscle too. That's right. And so that was the part that I think I was missing. I was missing that, you know, hey, yeah, you may not care, Adam, that you're ever going to have a 400-plus-pound squat, but if you get good enough to where you can do that, you can recruit more muscle fibers, recruiting more muscle fibers.

14:21Sal Di Stefano:Increase your recruitment potential. Well, yes. Capacity increases. Exactly. Will then result in you being able to build more muscle. And so I missed that understanding because I still looked at it like, oh, I don't care about PR.

14:33Adam Schafer:There's also this, that there's this U-shaped curve when it comes to the dose of strength training that you apply at your body when it comes to strength and or building muscle. So what I mean by that is, you know, no stimulation, no muscle, some stimulation, some muscle, the perfect stimulation, the most muscle and strength. Then if you add more to that, then you go down the slope again and you start to lose potential gains in both strength and muscle. So I think a lot of times people confuse strength training with activity or exercise. So it is important to exercise or to be active every day.

15:13Adam Schafer:So sometimes people look at this and they go, well, okay, I want to do one or two lifts a day. Yeah, like that's all you're moving. That's all I'm going to do. I need more for health. Well, you do need more for health.