2925: How To Get Faster and More Powerful without Getting Hurt

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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 health, fitness, and entertainment podcast ever Approaching half a billion downloads It's true This is Mind Pump Today's episode we talk about how to get faster and more powerful without getting hurt. By the way, right now you could buy MAPS Performance and MAPS Symmetry for the price of one. It's a BOGO. Buy one, get one free. And this is true for the top 10 MAPS programs. Go to mapsbogo.com. Now this episode is brought to you by a sponsor, Z-Biotics. So Z-Biotics is a genetically modified probiotic. Okay, so it's live bacteria. It's a probiotic. You drink it.

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3:07Adam Schafer:Look, being able to use your gym strength in the real world makes life awesome, but sometimes gym strength doesn't translate and may actually make you more prone to injury. Today, we're going to show you how to have real-world strength, speed, and power without hurting yourself. We're going to talk about how to get faster and more powerful without getting hurt. Let's get to it. Yeah, this is a good topic because everybody goes to the gym to look better. Just to be honest, that's the number one goal. but being more fit without that fitness really translating to the real world is a travesty. To take it a step further, you can train yourself in the gym in a way to where you're consistent, you're improving in the gym, but you actually increase your risk of injury because the kind of strength that you're building doesn't translate to how strength tends to get applied in the real world.

4:08Adam Schafer:and this can be a real problem. It's really frustrating, by the way, for people. This is like, you know, you work out all the time, then you go to the park, you throw a Frisbee or a baseball, shoulder hurts, or you go play a pickup game of basketball. You haven't played basketball in a few years and you hurt something. And it's like, what the heck, man? I work out in the gym all the time. I'm strong. I feel like I'm fit, but it's just not translating. Or worse, I've had clients like this, where they go reach down to pick up a shampoo bottle or they grab their kid and they throw their back out.

4:38Adam Schafer:And this is a real thing. And this is not – really, this has to do with how you train. There is a way to train that will not just give you great results in terms of how you look, but it'll improve your real-world fitness. It'll improve your quality of life because you can play more and do all those things in the real world without hurting yourself.

4:59Justin Andrews:Dude, this has been like my soapbox forever. And really, it's mainly just people don't really consider the fact that how you train does affect how you function and where that strength applies. And you can look great and you can look awesome but be dysfunctional. And it's going to be problematic down the road. It's going to increase in terms of tightness and pain. And it all can be avoided. And you can live in both worlds. You can have that aesthetic physique that's something that's desirable. But also, too, you just have to consider we have to implement ways where you're going to train your joints correctly.

5:43Justin Andrews:So that way they get exposure to these angles. And you get strong in these angles. And you're able to avoid long-term pain discomfort.

5:53Sal Di Stefano:I feel like this is one of my biggest regrets in the last decade is being so hyper-focused on strength and aesthetics that I've neglected so much of this. And I feel like a lot of that was made really obvious in the last couple of years because I've had so many injuries. I've had so many injuries doing – I was doing sport, so it wasn't like I was picking up a shampoo bottle. but uh i'd gotten so strong um in the sagittal plane that i had neglected a lot of my training to bulletproof uh those joints and uh get strong in uh multiple directions and then when i go do something that i've loved to do my whole life because i played that sport as a kid or wakeboarded behind a boat.

6:46Sal Di Stefano:I had all these injuries and I know exactly why I know. And I, you know, I think this is even worse. I've, I've made this case in the podcast before that I almost think, cause I have, I have buddies of mine that we're all the same age and we all grew up doing these things and they have gotten hurt less doing some of this stuff and I'm the fitness guy. and so it's like extra frustrating for me yet i mean they don't do anything for strength training so they didn't get like really strong in a certain direction and so i almost feel like uh i've i've done more harm than good in some areas by getting so strong in one direction it's like i built up all this horsepower in this uh in this car you know i built i built the engine potential to exceed the threshold is a lot higher and so but i didn't do enough work on reinforcing the suspension and the frame and everything else and so my my brain says oh i'm strong enough and capable to do all these things and uh i go to do it and i'm explosive and then that's where stuff

7:58Adam Schafer:went wrong it's so funny i had a buddy you just made me remember this long time ago he bought It was like one of those pickup trucks from the 80s that people tend to soup up to make really fast. I'm not super familiar with cars, but he bought a truck that oftentimes people will use to drag race. And what he did is he made it really – he put an engine in there that was really, really powerful. But he didn't reinforce the frame, and he twisted the frame. He took off all that horsepower, hit the frame. The frame wasn't strong enough to support it. And it literally twisted the frame of the car to the point where he had to go in.

8:33Adam Schafer:Too much torque. And spend all this money on repairing and then reinforcing. And, you know, you mentioned joints. It's not just your joints. It's also your muscles. This is where it gets really weird, right? So your muscles can get really strong in a particular way, but not have the ability to decelerate or relax when they need to or contract quickly. and this can increase your risk of injury for like pulls and strains or tears that happened to me. So, uh, and like you, Adam, this is a huge regret for me. I think part of it is I took for granted when I was younger. Um, I wasn't a big sports guy.

9:09Adam Schafer:I did, you know, judo wrestling, that kind of stuff. But if I ever wanted to do something, I just kind of pick it up when I was younger. And then as an adult, you don't really have tons of opportunities unless you go out and do it. So I just didn't do it for a while. Um, but I've been lifting weight this whole time. Um, and I was in Hawaii and my daughter, my 16 year old daughter who plays, uh, uh, she was playing soccer at the time, wanted to race me. And we took off once and I beat her, but she's like, let's go. I'll go even faster. So the second time around, I said, I'm going to go as fast as I can.

9:37Adam Schafer:And I tore my hamstring. Now keep in mind, I'm a guy that could deadlift 600 pounds, meaning my hamstrings are tremendously strong because hamstrings are one of the main muscles in a deadlift. It's a posterior chain exercise. And yet running for less than 50 yards, I tore my hamstring. How is that even possible? Well, it's possible because I'm generating all this force. And when I extend my leg, my hamstring doesn't know how to relax fast enough to allow my leg to come forward. And so it would remain tight. I kick my leg forward, hamstring, tore. And this is really frustrating, again, coming from someone who's the gym guy, who's the fitness guy.

10:17Adam Schafer:And it's 100 % a result of my lack of training properly. And now here's the kicker. Had I trained properly, which now I'm starting to incorporate, but had I trained properly, I would have compromised zero aesthetics. This is where I think the challenge or where the confusion comes from. People think that in order to train for your gym strength to translate into the real world, well, now I'm going to compromise aesthetics. So I got to move away from the exercises that make me look good or give me the shape I want because I had to focus on this quote-unquote functional correctional stuff. And so, okay, fine, I'm going to sacrifice some aesthetics for performance.

10:56Adam Schafer:Not true. Not true at all. Now, you could train pure performance, which is not even what we're talking about. What we're going to talk about is how you could train the way you train, but inject and implement styles of training that'll make your gym strength real-world strength. That'll make it so that when you go in the real world, you can do the things that you want to be able to do and not hurt yourself where you're actually strong in the real sense. There's two main pieces. I'll say two or three main keys to training this way. And these are the three things that people lack in their training.

11:35Adam Schafer:Traditional strength training traditionally stays away from three things. Some of them, they stay away from more than others. One of them is explosive training. You find almost no explosive style training in traditional strength training routines. Explosive training, all it's trying to do is get you to take your strength and be able to move it quickly. Which by the way, in the real world, there's two ways you're going to use your strength. One is the traditional kind of grinding. I'm picking up the couch. The other one is, oh, my kid's running across the street. I got to grab them real fast. Or something's falling off the shelf.

12:10Adam Schafer:I got to

12:10Justin Andrews:You don't need a lot of load to produce that type of training.

12:13Adam Schafer:So it's speed strength. And then, you know, from an athlete's perspective, speed strength is what really matters. It matters the most in athletics. But it also matters a lot in the real world. The second thing that is often neglected is unilateral training. When you see unilateral training, so unilateral training for people who aren't familiar is where I'm training one arm or one leg at a time. So bilateral is both arms or both legs. Unilateral is one arm or one leg. So an example of bilateral would be for upper body would be like a bench press. Unilateral would be like a one arm dumbbell chest press.

12:45Adam Schafer:Okay. When you see unilateral training in traditional strength training, it's always thrown in as an afterthought. It's not really a focus of training. And unilateral training is a remarkable way of identifying, isolating, and correcting imbalances between the right and left side. It's a really, it's an awesome way. actually it's a very easy way to do something to do correctional exercise you don't even need to know much about correctional exercise but doing focused uh you know blocks of training on unilateral training will oftentimes solve many of those issues um and then uh so you have explosive training unilateral training and then the third thing that is neglected are is training in different planes so adam mentioned something uh that you know coaches and trainers refer to as a sagittal plane Sagittal plane is like your deadlift, your squat, you know, things in front of you.

13:35Adam Schafer:But there's also - Forward and back. There's also, you know, moving laterally. There's rotating and twisting. And very few exercises that we do strengthen our bodies, especially laterally. Like think about how many lateral exercises that you'll find in traditional strength training workouts. Very little. Not a lot. Rotation. Rotation is often, the extent of rotation in programs is typically like an oblique exercise. and you'll do it once a week, maybe. A lot of people even skip that and you're doing a couple sets. So when you're, those three things, when you lack those three things, what happens is you become really good at this one expression of strength, but you lack being able to move quickly.

14:17Adam Schafer:You lack balance between the right and left side and you lack being able to move in different planes. And so when you go in the real world, okay, think about the real world. How many times do you need to express strength quickly? Well, anytime you play any kind of a game with anyone, you're going to have to express speed. Think about when you have to express strength unilaterally. All the time. All the time. One leg is forward while one leg is back, or you're holding something with one hand or whatever. All the time. Now think about all the times you're caught off guard and you have to move laterally or rotate.

14:49Adam Schafer:All the time. So what happens is you create this huge gap between those things and your traditional strength training, and you become fit and prone to injury. This is a terrible place to be. Fit and prone to injuries. Very frustrating. If you're listening to this, you've probably experienced this where you're just befuddled. What happened to me? I thought I was strong. I thought I was fit. How did I hurt myself playing a silly game of basketball or throwing the baseball with my kid or going for a light jog? What is going on here? What's happening here is that discrepancy.

15:19Sal Di Stefano:Well, this is why if you've listened long enough or listened to when we answer live callers, we almost always, at least I'd say once a batch to somebody. 25 % of the time. Yeah, we are recommending that somebody, at least once a year, you are running a symmetry or a performance type of a program within the rotation of whatever your goal is. So I don't care if you're a power lifter. I don't care if you're a bodybuilder, if you're an athlete, if you're just looking for aesthetics, longevity, the whole array, it doesn't matter that everybody should be running at least one of those programs per year just to keep that in balance.

16:00Sal Di Stefano:Totally. Because it's that important to real life. And if you go so hard in one direction performance-wise as far as strength, just getting really strong, or you just want to look really good, you neglect this stuff. And then, again, a perfect example of then you are at even a greater risk. Then it doesn't take much, and you get hurt doing something so simple that you take for granted that's just like oh man i've done this gotten behind a boat in wake for thousands of times and to get hurt at such a simple thing i wasn't doing anything crazy you know to add to that adam you even start to get and i'm sure people listening can identify with this

16:40Adam Schafer:if you're gym strong but you don't but you lack in those areas you have a false sense of confidence

16:45Sal Di Stefano:no that's exactly what it is it's a huge false sense of confidence i'm like because from an endurance perspective and just an overall strength because there's obviously there's a strength component to there too. Just to, if anyone's ever just held onto a rope behind the boat, that takes good isometric strength to do that. And your legs are in a slight bend. So it takes some quad strength to do it. So that I'm good there, you know? And so I look at my peers, my buddies who haven't been doing that much. I'm like, oh, I can do this. And I've done it, like I said, a thousand times. So in my head, I have this false confidence of, oh, I'm strong, more strong than the group that's with me done this a bunch of times so i'm overly confident and then that's all what it took was just an explosive movement that my body wasn't able to decelerate fast enough and controlled and then pop there goes my pec minor yeah i guess even

17:36Justin Andrews:another angle to this and i um would just bring this up a lot of times i'm trying to sell this you know to uh regular gym goers who just love power lifting and they love bodybuilding But to really focus on multiple planes and to find these unique exercises that will actually enhance your stability within those bilateral lifts. It's unbelievable what kind of performance output and how much more force you can produce when your body is super stable. And you're only going to provide that if you give it the right stimulus where it's overcoming rotational forces. It's overcoming lateral forces. That becomes obsolete.

18:16Justin Andrews:so now you can just anchor your body and really express that ultimate amount of force. And this is something I learned late in the game that really translated to these enormous PR bumps.

18:29Adam Schafer:Oh, no. We have a friend. I won't say his name, but we have a friend who's one of the world's best lifetime natural deadlifters and had suffered from repeated back injuries, which is not uncommon when you're pulling 600, 700 pounds. off the ground and he had to do some correctional exercise, uh, to solve some of the issues. And one of the movements that he did, one of the staple movements was tube walking. You'll see power lifters tube walk all the time. Why are they tube walking? It's a, it's a light resistance. Seems silly.

19:04Justin Andrews:Yeah.

19:04Adam Schafer:Because they lack lateral stability. The reason why they're hurting themselves has to do with lateral stability. Now you could solve that or never have that happen, I should say, by training that way right off the gate. Cycle it in. Meaning, I'll put it differently. The number one thing that gets in the way of a fitness fanatic's fitness goals. So somebody who's consistent, somebody who never misses the gym. What's the number one thing that gets in the way? Injury. Injury sucks. You hurt yourself. Ah, I can't work out. I can't be consistent. I can't train. The ultimate setback. That's right. And the injury happens because there's a lack in stability.

19:41Adam Schafer:There's a lack in performance in a direction that you just don't have. And so injury is there. And again, I want to be very clear. Training in the way that we're about to talk about does not take away from aesthetics. If we actually look at the big picture, it contributes to aesthetics. And now you've reduced injury time. You've reduced, I can't go to the gym. That time goes away. You're not, it's not compromising your current training. It's adding to enhancing your current training. So even if your goal is aesthetics, Don't neglect this. Now, if your goal is to, you know, improve your athletic performance and your goal is to go out and be strong out in the world, just like you were in the gym, you're definitely going to live here.

20:24Adam Schafer:100%, 100%. So here's the first thing. First things first. Do a full cycle of unilateral training. Not I throw in a unilateral exercise at the end of my leg workout or the end of my back workout or I throw it in here and there. No, no, no. Make it a focus. make it a focus for like eight weeks for eight weeks this is how i'm training and if most people if if people did this every single year like you said adam regardless of the goal if you did unilateral training for six to eight weeks every single year you would see a dramatic decrease in injury and an improvement in performance in the gym very very few people including myself until