2936: If You Love Working Out, You Probably Need to Hear This

15:30Sal Di Stefano:Right. That's what I'm wondering. Is there a type of avatar that tends to fall into this trap? of course like a person who oh yeah gets all that admiration for the first time in their life like wow i've never they receive all these compliments now this is who i am they they are the most confident they've ever been because they feel really good about their body like you know and that's what i mean is like maybe when i was going through more of an impressionable time of my life and then that was formed it would have been a harder pull um because it's hard sometimes i know i can talk about this because i've had so many clients and so i can i can relate to the clients to talk about it, but I didn't experience this personally.

16:05Sal Di Stefano:Personally, it was, couldn't wait to not do all the -

16:08Adam Schafer:Well, you know what's interesting for me? Because I've gone through lots of cycles of this process. This can still be a struggle for me, but it's not like it used to be. I'm definitely better, much more self-aware around it, but it still can become, can be a struggle for me. But one of the ways that I noticed, or one of the differences that I noticed for myself with this was when I used to go out with friends and family, what people used to point out or mention was just how disciplined and strict I was when we would go out or do things. They noticed that when we'd order food or we'd go to the movies or it was a holiday, how Sal ate specifically away and didn't miss workouts.

16:43Adam Schafer:And I identify with that. Like, it's cool, yeah. You're going to point out the fact that I don't eat candy at the movies. You're going to point out the fact that at the celebration, I'm not doing these things. Like, yeah, that's because I'm disciplined. I identified with it. Here's what's funny. Here's what's different now. Now, when I do certain things or I celebrate, people are shocked that I'm having a piece of cake.

17:00Justin Andrews:Yeah.

17:00Adam Schafer:And they'll say, I thought you were a fitness guy. What are you doing eating a piece of cake? I thought you were a fitness guy. I'm like, yeah, I'm at a birthday. I'm at a birthday. We're celebrating someone's birthday. I'll have a piece of cake. Or I'll go to the movies, which I don't do every week. Once a month or less, I'll go to the movies. And they'll notice I'm buying some candy to eat. And I went with a buddy of mine not that long ago. And I remember him looking at me. I'm having gummy bears. And he's looking at me like, what's this guy doing? And so he thought, he said, man, you work out so much that you could just eat this stuff all the time, right?

17:26Adam Schafer:I'm like, actually, I almost never do. But I'm at the movies. and it's, you know, kind of hanging out with you. And it's organic. And it's okay. But, you know, it's okay. It's not a big deal. But it's a totally different experience. Whereas before, I was never flexible. And I sacrificed things that were much more important than, you know, me being perfect with my workouts. You know, I sacrificed the celebration of the birthday. I sacrificed the meal that someone might have made because I got to be on this strict regimen, you know. So here's the next one. You're super lean all the time. Now, yes, there are those people out there that this is, they've got those genetics that allows them to walk around shredded all the time.

18:08Adam Schafer:This is extremely rare, everybody. Okay. Very rare. This is like less than 1 % of the population who seem to somehow walk around super lean. Everybody else, if you're a woman and you're walking and you're a fitness fanatic and you're walking around in the teens all the time. You've never, you've been in the 16 % body fat range for years, or you're that dude that's always at 9 % body fat for years and years and years. You got to eat more and move less, dude. Here's, here's your evidence. When you look at maximum fitness performance, endurance, strength, stamina, generally speaking, body fat percentages are higher.

18:44Adam Schafer:Women don't, aren't 15%. They're typically 20%. Men are typically 15%, not 9%. Why? Because you need body fat. You need some body fat for health and longevity. You can't be shredded all the time. This is really evident sometimes in our callers. Well, we'll get, especially female callers will call in asking us why they can't build a butt or why they can't improve their, their deadlift. And they'll tell us their DEXA scan and it's 15%. Say, how long you been 15 %? Oh, you know, the last eight years. Okay. You need to gain some body fat. That's your problem. You're not eating enough. You know, that's the challenge.

19:15Sal Di Stefano:Remind me. I don't want to hijack where you're going right now, but we did, Corinne did her next Texas scan. So I have a lot to share to this point. Because it's just, it's given me even more insight in regards to what you're talking about right now. And I want to be able to share, I hope she doesn't mind that I share the numbers and some of that, because I think they're important to highlight the point that you're making right now and how detrimental it can be if you don't get out of that place. Because then you get stuck in this place where your body won't respond and then your bone density goes down and all the other things that happen with that.

19:52Sal Di Stefano:And so, um, yeah, I have an update, uh, for the audience that's been asking and waiting for like some of the things that we've been doing and a lot more, uh, what more we have to do to get to where we want to be for sure.

20:02Justin Andrews:Yeah. That's good. Yeah. Well, I mean, too, a lot of times people are in that comparison trap where it's like a social media thing. It looks like these people are lean year round and it looks like it's very much a perception thing where you could take a lot of pictures and you could go through phases where you're that lean but you want to portray yourself as always this lean person um so i mean it's it's again like that that could also be you know in itself it's very you know alluring and it's something that like people want to like have goals towards but you know to maintain that is you're just not in a

20:38Sal Di Stefano:healthy place well this to sal's point about that's one percent of the population and then i'd say then because right now so many more people see that to your point because uh 15 percent or is bullshit you know 20 percent or whatever like the one percent it actually could like maintain yeah there's a very small percentage that actually do maintain it and it's actually okay you know that that the genetic anomalies right and then there's a whole bunch of people that fake it by taking a bunch of photos at a certain amount of time and then dripping it over the year that make people believe that they're maintained that way.

21:14Sal Di Stefano:So for the average person who's tuning into Instagram and YouTube and the social media world, they have no idea that what's going on there, that there's one, a very small percentage of people that can and should even be able to maintain that. And then there's this large percentage of these people that act like they're that 1 % and they're not even really that 1%. They're just staging photos in one month and then dripping it throughout

21:38Adam Schafer:the year well what's funny too is uh you get this really strange perception uh drift where you think you look best shredded uh whereas gaining four or five percent body fat actually makes you look a lot better this is true for both men and women especially women but uh even true for men like you know i could get down to seven percent and be shredded when i get my body fat up to 11 12 my wife will tell me you look much better you never liked what i look like on stage

22:06Sal Di Stefano:She hated that like the last month. Like the dead look. Oh, yeah, yeah.

22:09Adam Schafer:Yeah, and you'll see this with women. They'll walk around 15%, 16 % and just gaining 4 % or 5 % body fat. They look good. You know what it is? They look healthier because they are healthier.

22:18Sal Di Stefano:You know what's funny is that, you know, the old saying, the camera adds 10 pounds or whatever. It only looks okay or good on a picture. That's it. In a picture or on camera.

22:29Adam Schafer:In a fitness context.

22:30Sal Di Stefano:Yes. In real life, it doesn't look good. No, yeah. It looks emaciated. Which is funny because I think that's the part where people get misled is they look back at this picture and they're like, oh, that looks so. But it's like, no, in real life, it doesn't look that good. It actually looks better for you to be a little bit softer.

22:44Adam Schafer:Here's another one. You haven't improved objective performance in a long time. This is a sign you're working out too much and you're not eating enough. It's like, has your strength really gone up? Has your stamina gone up? Or are you kind of staying the same while you're eating low calorie and making every single workout? In fact, oftentimes with a client, all I would do is bump their calories and suddenly they're hitting PRs. I'd have them bump their calories 700. I'd say, all right, fine. Keep training like you are, even though it's too much. Let's have you eat 700 more calories. And they come back and like, oh my God, I added 30 pounds to my squat.

23:19Adam Schafer:It's like, well, yeah. Oh my God, my energy's through the roof. What's going on? I'm sleeping good again. What's happening? You're not redlining everything. You're just eating more. And that's, you know, your performance isn't a perfect metric, but it is an objective metric. Looking in the mirror and judging how you look, there's so much subjective quality of that where you can really fool yourself. You can even be fooled by other people. You can be in a fitness fanatic circle of people that will tell you how awesome you look even though you're unhealthy. But strength, that's objective. You either lift more or you don't.

23:52Adam Schafer:Stamina, that's objective. You either are able to do more or not. And when those haven't improved in a long time, you may just need to eat more. That'll make the difference. And then here's the final one. It's not joyful. this is not a joyful thing for you it's not and i'm going to be clear your life isn't more joyful if your life if your joyful aspects of your life are your workouts and everything else is not joyful uh then the workout is no longer serving yeah and that's a big problem 100 i mean

24:21Sal Di Stefano:i think that's actually more common than not i think a lot of people uh talk about their workouts as their escape yeah from the rest of their life yeah that's their that's their place where uh yeah i mean then it's good for that but you're using it a lot of times or at least in my experience

24:35Adam Schafer:with clients you've turned your workout into a drug yeah they're running away yeah totally yeah they're medicating with it 100 100 i want to ask you adam because you mentioned off air and i didn't ask you because i want to save it for the show that you were using uh you were sauteing your mushrooms in the oh yeah power place pan yeah yeah are you using the the the one it's called i don't remember what it's called it's like the multi-functional pan it's the one that you can do all kinds of things ceramic or which one it's so yes i think so because chemical

25:01Sal Di Stefano:it's the it's the giant tan colored ones and i think it has the ceramic coating it has the coating on the bottom where you literally just run water on it and everything wipes right off of it um yeah no i was actually talking with doug because uh i've i've gotten my sauteing my mushrooms and onions from watching doug and i went down this rabbit hole last weekend and i'm just like you know what like i love mushrooms so much i want to like look up some other recipes and how i can improve i love mushrooms oh dude i'm gonna make you some bomb love i took like another level of like my mushroom game came up yeah i just i you know i'm not a cook by any means what'd you say he's a fun guy dad jokes are heavy yeah the ceramic non-stick is the called the always pan the always that's the one i knew it uh so you know what's interesting so here's what i

25:52Adam Schafer:want to bring up so mushrooms have this unique ability of absorbing anything that they come and contact you both when they grow but also when you cook them this is why they taste so good like whatever you saute them in to kind of absorb the flavor yeah which also uh to the our place so our place uses um what are they called uh forever chemical free pan so it's non-stick but it doesn't have the forever chemicals in there if you saute onions excuse me mushrooms in a pan with chemicals I didn't even think about that. It'll absorb more chemicals than anything else. What a good point. So all foods will pick up those forever chemicals, but mushrooms are like sponges.

26:31Adam Schafer:Oh, yeah. What a good point. Yeah, you'll get a really high concentration. So especially if you cook something like a mushroom, you want a forever chemical-free pan to cook them. What a good point.

26:41Sal Di Stefano:Yeah, I didn't realize how much I was overcooking them before. Because they tasted so good still, because to your point, if you saute them in garlic and ghee or butter or whatever, that it's hard for them to taste bad yeah but my texture was off and i thought it wasn't right and i learned a lot about like at what temperature that i i cook them and then when do i see like season them i thought i can just season them right away you don't do that because then it pulls everything out too early like so i've figured out how to do them a lot better and i've now it's like

27:10Adam Schafer:the third time i've cooked them you guys are two you and doug are like two of the best like male

27:13Sal Di Stefano:like cooks i would not put me in that category doug could cook i have a few things i like to do You know what it is? Well, you're both passionate about it. So just recently for me, in the last, I don't know how many years of my life, maybe the last five. Yeah. Maybe five. I like, I - You're really into it. I never was into it. You know what it is? You're old. Yeah. That's definitely something to do with it. That's a guy. That's an old guy's face. It's definitely something to do with it. But, you know, I've really – I think this kind of harkens back to when I shared the story about Katrina and I, you know, me getting frustrated with, like, the house not being so clean.

27:54Sal Di Stefano:And, like, then we, like, had this – I had this epiphany of, like, I care so much about that. Like, why am I getting frustrated with her?

28:02Adam Schafer:Your epiphany is this old clean house.

28:03Sal Di Stefano:Yeah. So that's what it was like – because here's the thing. I have a wife that's, like, it's not like she's lazy. She's over there doing laundry and taking care of my son.

28:11Adam Schafer:She's very good at what she's good at, too. She organizes everything. That's right. Exactly.

28:14Sal Di Stefano:And she has this incredible strength. So why am I beating her up on the one thing that she just is not as – she doesn't care as much as I do. So I had that epiphany. This was back when we lived in Marina. So I don't know how many years, like seven years ago or whatever. And I just started – I do that every single night, like clockwork, while she's getting our son together. And what has happened in the last few years, and what came of that, to how I'm tying this all together, is that it became enjoyable.

28:39Adam Schafer:something that was because now you're not feeling like you're you're you're doing it at a choice

28:43Sal Di Stefano:yes yeah dude isn't that huge and i'm playing music and it becomes this uh my alone time and i'm alone i don't i don't my phone's not because my hands are working so i'm like no phone so it's like an hour an hour hour and a half of just like in my thoughts doing what i'm doing and so it's become this i've that is i've i experienced that there first and thought wow something that i considered a chore that i hated or pissed me off we get into fights whatever whatever you want to say uh has now turned into this thing that i really like to do i'm like that's interesting i wonder what other aspects of my life are like that and i'd say cooking was kind of like a chore from i've always been able to kind of do it but i'm not in the mood to do it i'm pretty i was always really kind of simple like you just forming grill shit whatever look at things like protein carbs yeah yeah exactly it was like it was it means to an end type of deal and i thought well what if I started to kind of get into it and take my time and like, you know, do everything slow.

29:40Sal Di Stefano:And so I've actually learned and I've, over the last couple of years I've started to enjoy that. I've enjoyed the walk away and it's me in the kitchen for two hours and I'm doing my thing. And that's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So it's kind of,

29:55Adam Schafer:yeah. Cause you and Doug, I've had, I've had some of the best like steaks and meals around steaks that I've ever had with you guys for sure. Yeah.

30:02Sal Di Stefano:Yeah. I think he's way more of a cook than I am.

30:05Adam Schafer:Doug's been doing it for a while. He's been into cooking for a long time. Yeah, probably like 50 years or so. At least. At least. Maybe 60 almost.

30:13Sal Di Stefano:Back when they just come from fire.

30:15Justin Andrews:No, my grandma and I used to cook together. Really?

30:17Sal Di Stefano:Really? Yeah. Now, okay, so that's interesting. So I'm curious. Do you think that's where your passion came from? And did you start doing it even in your 20s? Or when did you really start?

30:27Justin Andrews:I really started when I was, I was very interested in food and cooking when I was even 10 years old.

30:32Adam Schafer:Oh, wow. This is a thing for you.

30:34Justin Andrews:It's been a thing. For me, I love food to start off. I love food, but I'm also fascinated on how certain flavors are achieved. So I've had like these lifelong pursuits for various types of foods to cook. One is pizza. I always wanted to make an incredible pizza and I just could never figure it out.

30:54Sal Di Stefano:Does he know what you did? Does he know what you did?

30:56Justin Andrews:So I ended up hiring a pizza coach. A pizza coach? Yes. Do you guys know this?

31:01Sal Di Stefano:They make pizza coaches?

31:02Justin Andrews:Well, no, this guy, his name is Luigi. He's from Positano. Of course. Okay.

31:07Sal Di Stefano:It was right away you'd know he's awesome.

31:09Justin Andrews:So I have pursued the perfect pizza for years, and I just could not figure it out. And then I discovered at one point, okay, you have to have the right oven. It has to be hot enough, right? But even then, I just couldn't get the right, what do you call it, gluten structure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to have that perfect crust, right? and I just couldn't figure out why that was. So I was at this pop-up pizza place in the Campbell Farmer's Market. Okay. And this guy, Luigi, I tried his pizza and I go, this is amazing. So I talked to him and he goes, yeah, I'll come and I'll teach you. So I paid for him to come out.

31:42Justin Andrews:He brought all his dough and then he taught me how to make it. But one of the things I discovered is I had this mixer. I had a Viking mixer. I figured, oh, this is a good mixer. It's Viking, good brand. But the problem was it goes around. They call it, I think, a orbital mixer. It's like the KitchenAid or whatever else. But it just bangs the dough on the side of the bowl. So you need an actual true spiral mixer. It has like a steel bar in the middle and then it wraps the dough. So it's the way it mixes it with the air and everything. The way it needs it, right? Yeah. So you have to have proper gluten development to get the proper crust.

32:16Justin Andrews:And I just could never get that, even though I made decent pizzas, right? And so I ended up buying one of these mixers. It's an Italian mixer. It's 88 pounds. This is massive. This is like a commercial thing. Anyway, I've hired him four times, maybe five. He's come over to my house, and we just keep working on my pizza skills. And I'll say I'm pretty darn good now. Now, what about throwing it in the air? Is that a thing? I think that's more of an American thing. Oh, really? If you look at the Neapolitan-style dough. So I make kind of authentic, I would say authentic, Neapolitan style. Yeah. So from the South, Napoli, right?

32:55Justin Andrews:Yeah, yeah. And it's different than some of these other, like your New York pizzas. That's American. That's American. Yeah. And so the dough is, yeah, it doesn't really do well by throwing it up. I'm sure you can. Oh, I see. But no, it's more you stretch it by hand. That's awesome. Yeah. So you're going to have a silver? Yeah. No, when I have the new place, I'm going to have it. Dude. You have to.

33:17Sal Di Stefano:I mean, you would totally, you're going to build an oven outside eventually. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

33:22Justin Andrews:I mean, that's how fun.

33:23Adam Schafer:Wood fire.

33:24Justin Andrews:But anyway, that was like a lifelong passion. But there's other foods I've been trying to make my entire life and have learned little by little.

33:31Sal Di Stefano:Well, your Thai dishes are fire. Yeah. So good.

33:34Justin Andrews:That was actually, learning how to cook Thai food was because I moved to Japan and I was such a Thai food fanatic. And I couldn't find any Thai restaurants to go to. So I learned how to cook it. Oh, so you had to make yourself. Yeah.

33:46Sal Di Stefano:Oh, that's cool. So anyway, I'm definitely not on that guy's level.

33:49Adam Schafer:No, but like I said, you guys are both into it.

33:51Sal Di Stefano:Well, you know what my favorite thing is, though, is that because everyone's all into their things and stuff like that, is like that's where Doug will shell out money. Oh, yeah, because he loves it. Yeah, yeah. I don't even want to know how much that mixer costs you. Yeah, he acts all quiet about that stuff like that, and I know I get railed for being the guy. He's, oh, this is the Ferrari of mixers. Yeah, yeah, exactly. He's definitely got the Ferrari of mixers and his espresso machine. I remember his espresso machine he bought. I wanted to get Courtney when he was in the house. Yeah, yeah. I'm cool.

34:15Sal Di Stefano:spicy yeah there's definitely we have a 90 dollar espresso machine at home we might have an amazon

34:19Adam Schafer:it breaks every once in a while just get another one i swear to god it's literally 90 bucks all the time so wow that's great dude i gotta tell you guys about this uh this incredible oh wait

34:30Sal Di Stefano:wait before before you go i don't want to go too far from uh your fitness topic because i think it's oh yeah okay go sorry bring it back yeah i want to bring it back to that because i think since the audience that is tuning in for that and wants to hear i think it's important so So we've been on Corinne's journey for quite some time now.

34:48Adam Schafer:She's one of our top trainers here.

34:49Sal Di Stefano:Yes, yes. And she falls in this category of somebody who has stayed in that teen lean for a very, very long time and has competed at the high level and has struggled to add muscle to put weight on. And remember, we did the first Texas scan, and it came back that we put nothing but body fat on. which was super discouraging.

35:15Adam Schafer:Although I want to say in that period of time, if you haven't listened, her strength went through the roof. PR cities. She needed to gain body fat. Sometimes that has to happen. You have to gain body fat.

35:27Sal Di Stefano:So that, so the, and if just to recap for people that didn't catch the, the beginning of that story and what you're alluding to, the reason why I even had her DEXA scan, typically with a client like that, I wouldn't even a DEXA scan, but I got anxious because we were hitting crazy PR. She was having 30 pounds to lift. In everything. In squatting and hip thrusting and just, and we had been doing that for like months. I'm like, oh, hell yeah. And the weight on her scale, like we put on like 10, 15 pounds on the scale. So I'm like, hell yeah. So excited. But according to the DEXA, should we get this report back?

35:59Sal Di Stefano:And it's no muscle, all body fat. And still takes her to like the, I want to say we were at 19%. Yeah, she's still shredded. She's still lean. Still super, super lean. And I remember telling her that, You know, you are at a place where you're going to have to have a higher body fat percentage to put muscle on. Your body doesn't feel safe adding more muscle right now, speeding your metabolism up any faster. We're going to have to get. And I am Matt and what I'm learning even with her is as long as I've been doing this and have had clients like this before. she's probably one of the the the um clients that i that i've had that has kept their their body fat percentage this low for very long and training this hard for as long as i have and so it's been this interesting you know even challenge for me to see what's happening and so we did a dexa it's been it's been a while and she'd been asking for it and i said okay we'll do it i said but i don't care what it says you can't let it stay on track yeah we gotta stay on track and stuff like that and so we are now uh weight wise a total of we're about i think 17 pounds heavier than she's ever been right now so 15 17 pounds heavier and uh we did the scan and both uh bone density went up and we added and we added two and a half pounds of muscle all right and so the bone density one was important yeah we still went up body fat percentage okay so we still uh went up more body fat than we did muscle.

37:31Sal Di Stefano:And what it really highlighted for me is that your body is just now entering where it's starting to feel a little safe to do that. And, you know -

37:40Adam Schafer:And by the way, if you guys saw her, she looks amazing. If you saw her -

37:43Sal Di Stefano:I get compliments all the time.

37:45Adam Schafer:She looks amazing. Yeah, yeah, no, she looks - She looks healthy, strong, fit. I mean, she looks great.

37:50Sal Di Stefano:And I love that she's been open and talking about her journey and sharing as she's gone through because I think she's helping so many other ladies that have like struggled with this. Because she needed a break. I want to keep going, right? And so the whole goal is eventually to get back on stage again. And here we are, peak weight for her right now, right? And I see how her body's responding. And she's like, can we cut now? And I said, only if you feel like you need a break. I said, but what I've learned from being with you this long now, and now that I see where we're at, this is where I want you to hit stage at.

38:27Sal Di Stefano:So you feel the biggest you've ever felt and you don't like where you're at. I'm telling you that we've got to go another 15 pounds. So we can cut down to this. So we can cut down to this because this is where your body needs to be. And now granted, we'll put muscle, we'll put body fat on, we'll come back down and you'll have more muscle at this weight. And so you'll be a leaner. But I can tell based off of the results we were getting from this that we needed to get your body fat percentage higher in order for you to start seeing muscle. And we could still afford to even go a little bit higher.

38:59Sal Di Stefano:And we have got to get comfortable with what you consider a fluffy look, even though I think you look incredible.

39:04Adam Schafer:There's three things here that are working in her favor. One, she's a coach and she coaches a lot of people who struggle with this. And so she speaks to it very well. She's an excellent coach because she herself experiences the challenges. Two, she's working with you and you're obviously a good coach. You've been doing this for a long time, one of the best, but you're also her boss and somebody that she respects because I don't know, I can't imagine how difficult it would be for her to work with any other coach and have Dexa scans show just gaining body fat and being like, I'm out. This isn't working.

39:41Adam Schafer:Abandon it. But because it's you and she trusts you and she works for you and because she coaches other people, I think that's keeping her on track because that's tough. Oh, yeah. That'd be really hard I mean, I know they're being vulnerable to totally huge.

39:53Sal Di Stefano:I mean, I feel for her when you get that because inside everything I want her to see is just put on the PRs that are happening, the effort to to put it to eat the calories we're eating to do all the things we're doing. But, you know, the reason why I wanted to bring it up today is what you brought up today is because it just highlights that when you if you've been in that place and I guess and you can communicate this maybe better than me. but the best way I can communicate this is that you have been so lean, borderline unhealthy lean for so long and pushing the body training-wise. And so now you start feeding it and you're starting to train and you're starting to get strong.

40:30Sal Di Stefano:So the body wants to get strong because it's been dying to have those extra calories. But it also still doesn't feel safe to add a fast tissue, a tissue that is going to require more calories. And so it's saying we're going to put body fat on. Let's do the safe thing. Yeah, we're going to continue to put body fat on until we feel that we're in a place that's safe enough to add this higher metabolic tissue onto your body. And so, yes, and that's been a lot of the conversation is like, hey, if you really want to put this muscle on, and by the way, this applies to even someone who's not trying to compete.

41:07Sal Di Stefano:If you are a female and you've just kept yourself lean for so long and you know you want to build a butt and you want to build your arm, or whatever the body parts that you want to build, but you struggle with the phase that it may be necessary for you to go to in order to get that butt, to build those arms, whatever it is once you build, you have to get comfortable being fluffy for a little bit.

41:30Adam Schafer:Which is funny because she's not fluffy at all. Right, right. But they will feel it. That's right.

41:34Sal Di Stefano:That's why I'm using that term because I think she looks, to me, the best I've ever seen her right now. Like incredible. But in her eyes, using her words, fat, fluffy, filter. tear it like so but i get it and so i know that there's a lot of women that can relate to that feeling but you simultaneously say things like i want to build my butt i want to build my arm and it's just like you know what you got it and this is uh this is for both sexes but it's extremely

42:00Adam Schafer:important for women it's much more common in women yes for sure very very much 100 well good job dude i'm really proud of her for doing that awesome to watch all right so uh this weekend let me tell you guys about this this incredible experience i had this weekend so i don't know if you guys remember when i so i go down to la here and there to get on some shows and there was this pod there's this podcast down my buddy dave has it it's called um street gospel and so he'll have like uh rappers graffiti artists fighters but it's also kind of faith-based uh he was a fan of the show invited me down i went down there great guy he's the guy that sent that that um oh yeah yeah that the bat with the spiraled you know whatever because he's like also a fan of movies oh that's cool uh yeah so anyway cool guy walking dead walking dead right so anyway he sends me a clip of this uh pastor that was on uh his show and he said hey check this guy out and right away i noticed the guy's cauliflower ear because you know i knew i did jiu-jitsu so oh he's a jiu-jitsu guy i don't know what about what it was about what he said but i reached out to the guy the pastor name is troy troy fink and i sent him a dm hey man i love your stuff and he's like dude i love your stuff i've been following mind pump for a long time so we message each other a couple times he goes hey dude i'm doing this like this men's uh retreat um in a few weeks i'd love for you to come and um totally out of character for me i mean it's up in the mountains you're sleeping in a dorm room there's like it's like totally like you guys know me you guys know that it's nothing okay so but for whatever reason you're not mr adventure no dude not even close right but for whatever reason i felt kind of convicted i knew nothing of what was happening there except for i had this feeling message the guy so i said yeah dude i think i'd love to go and uh right out the gates two people came to mind for me that i'd want to bring it was dylan and josh so i messaged hey guys want to come with me both of them like yeah let's go so the three of us go we drive down to this place called pinecrest pinecrest yes you know where that is down by la oh not that it's like the mountains by la okay so it's like six hour drive right so it's all the way up there

44:02Sal Di Stefano:or down there I should say so the three of us is it near bear no idea I have no what's the lake

44:08Adam Schafer:that's up there no idea bro I have no I didn't know this place existed so anyway we drive over there and it's a group it's he so Troy started a church uh he's been a pastor for a while but he started a church a year ago in his home he did a bible study and the bible study grew and he decided to put together this retreat and so I didn't know any of this stuff I just found this out while we got there so we get there and it's a men's retreat with just all these dudes from different churches he seems to really attract a lot of guys that have been lost for a while so we get there and it was it was great dude it's this incredible experience part of it was for me was cool that i was in this in this very uncomfortable situation like i like i said we slept in these these like dorm style rooms with like no mattress no ac yeah dude the whole thing There's no shower or bathroom in there.

45:02Adam Schafer:Oh, yeah, dude. You guys know me, so. But I did it. And we hung out there. Dylan and Josh got baptized, which was really cool, which was actually interesting for me because they both decided to do it. And it got me super emotional. So I'm sitting there crying while these guys are doing their thing. And it was just great experience meeting these guys and hearing some of these testimonies. He's like, he had this one guy go up who, you know, he's now been sober for a while, but he had gotten so bad. He had lost everything. His house, his family, he was a heroin addict, tried to kill himself many, many times by overdosing.

45:39Adam Schafer:And, you know, comes to Jesus and ends up, you know, cleaning himself up. And now they're going to start some program for people who need help. And so it was a really great experience the whole time.

45:49Sal Di Stefano:So tell me how does this relate to you not being fat? Huh?

45:57Adam Schafer:He sees it in your face. You got to talk about what happened.

46:01Sal Di Stefano:You came in today and I'm like, bro, you are, the inflammation is so down. It's very, very obvious to me. And so I don't know what you did, but you did something. Fasting all weekend.

46:12Adam Schafer:Well, the food, I don't want to say, okay, so the food was like, you know, it was like you're eating kind of buffet food and it's not much and you're kind of limited to what they made. Sure. So I just didn't eat a lot. That's all. So that's why when I came in, you said you looked like, I'm like,

46:25Sal Di Stefano:why didn't I eat much, dude? Yeah, it really brought down a lot of information. Yeah. It was very limited.

46:29Adam Schafer:So I had like fruit and meat. Yeah. Because the other options were like macaroni. Yeah, it brought your calories way down. Yeah, dude. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, dude.

46:37Sal Di Stefano:You look really good right now. Oh, I appreciate it. And I'm sure you've seen it in me because you've made comments before. It's like, you don't really notice it until you just like, I'm so used to seeing you all the time and then I see you come in and I'm like, oh my God, bro, you look like you leaned way out. Yeah, it's a lot of... All chiseled out your face. Oh, wow. Yeah. Cool. I'll stick to it. Yeah, yeah. Maybe your face is starting to look like my face.

47:00Adam Schafer:Spiritually healthy, bro. Yeah. But it was a really... Was that all weekend? It was all weekend, bro. Oh, wow. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Oh, wow. I didn't even know

47:11Sal Di Stefano:you were doing that. Yeah, yeah. I had no idea.

47:13Adam Schafer:Yeah, I just went up there. Like I said, it was kind of like a...

47:14Sal Di Stefano:Did you guys shoot any content or no?

47:15Adam Schafer:No, no. I mean, I have clips and it's up to Josh and Dylan if they're okay with it. We could post their baptisms, which is kind of cool. But it was, no, it was kind of on a whim. I didn't know Troy at all. Didn't know anybody there at all. But I ended up talking with Troy. He's a really, really great dude. He really loves people a lot. And he's got this, it seems like he's got this, because of that, he attracts people who've been lost for a long time. and they feel like they're coming in, they're not getting looked down on, they're not being judged. And it was just one, it's just great environment of men coming together and worshiping.

47:53Adam Schafer:It was really, really cool. Really good experience.

47:55Sal Di Stefano:What'd you do this weekend besides fight over door handles? What?

48:00Justin Andrews:Yeah, there's just been like little scuffles. I mean, we're, what door, what? You told me a story. You put him on blast right now. Yeah, I mean, Courtney gets in fights over the dumbest things, you know, and it's like really, we're both up here. we're just like redlining a lot with like fixing things and and constantly trying to prep like we just put our house back on the market and so it's like stressful yeah stressful and it anyways we yeah we got into it a bit but uh uh like i i i didn't really do anything crazy i went to the pool uh with some of my friends and um we uh my my kid actually watched the odyssey again i wanted to talked about this oh so who watched it so um ever watch i actually watched it with my boys when i

48:44Sal Di Stefano:was in atlanta i went back saw it twice it was so good so you guys liked it that much yes i think

48:50Justin Andrews:it's one of the best movies so boring bro so here here's i'll watch it again i'm open to watching yes but let me let me preface this because i think i found somebody that will help you like oh okay like i could see it from a different perspective because so jonathan pagia i actually found like he did a really good commentary on this love him um and he breaks down a lot of mythology and he gets into the nitty-gritty of the detail of the story and everything and like what like Christopher Nolan actually changed and kind of altered and honestly I think you're Trojan horse dude what do you mean meaning the entire packaging and the exterior of the movie was uh basically to appease uh you know him being able to get awards him being able to sell it to that you know kind of like hollywood and i got caught up in that yeah and it really like everything he he he put in a lot of really good story writing um that leads back it harkens back to a lot of like old uh stories that they're about like finding yourself and about like you know taking that that journey to get like save like a lot of the hero's journey kind of like um stories out there that are like really compelling.

50:05Justin Andrews:So a lot of it was like trickster. So the whole movie itself is like the theme of it really is like, you know, being able to, to do like a, a kind of swap out, like a, like a trick. And so even in the beginning, like he's teaching him how to fight by opening himself up a little bit more vulnerable. And so they come into attack and then he can make his move. And so that's really the, the theme of the whole movie and like how he's trying to kind of portray and he swapped out the transgender character. Everybody thought he was Achilles, but it's actually this other, like, yeah, less insignificant in like wrote in this whole, but, but it's really interesting for him to break down because, uh, so basically they, like he replaced, uh, the other kid that was supposed to go to war to, to Troy.

50:56Justin Andrews:Uh, and so like there was this whole like underlying message with that. Even using a transgender person in replacement of an actual man. And so anyway, if you look at it from a meta perspective. I'm not sophisticated enough. It's, dude. I'm going to send you the breakdown, and I won't get into more of the details.

51:20Sal Di Stefano:He said to me, it was good.

51:22Adam Schafer:Literally for me, I didn't care about that. It was literally boring. It was so boring. What? That's crazy, dude. Too much story, I think, right? Well, maybe I don't watch it long enough. We laughed with the Cyclops part. By the time we got there, I'm like, this is killing me. And the Cyclops didn't keep you engaged? I mean, a little bit. What? Yeah.

51:41Sal Di Stefano:I mean, now I know why you got blasted on Twitter, bro. Sure. That is why. Because all of my - I had a lot of people agree with me, by the way, too. Hey, all of my - Yeah, I mean, there's been opposite takes, but there's a pool of idiots everywhere. You know what I'm saying? That are getting - I was, dude. So that means nothing on Twitter. all the real life it was a masterpiece I haven't but all of my friends when you told me they were all they were like we gotta go see this together and I'm like oh Sal said it's terrible they're like what all of everyone I know

52:11Adam Schafer:is amazing well I can't wait to see what you guys think what you and Doug think

52:13Sal Di Stefano:well yeah I'll go see it but Justin was like this wasn't just a good movie he's like one of the best movies I've ever seen

52:19Justin Andrews:I was going in like oh this movie's gonna suck you know and I was like we need to kill time maybe that's why you liked it because I made you think it sucks well I did say that to him too and I stuck it out to be fair, it was a little slow building in the beginning and you're just kind of okay, where are we going?

52:35Sal Di Stefano:Every three and a half hour movie.

52:36Justin Andrews:But yeah, it's a three hour movie to the point where, I don't know, I was like super engaged. It's been a long time since I've watched the movie and I felt like every emotion and I felt like I was scared in that cave. Were you sober? I was sober, bro. You didn't see it in IMAX. I don't know. You got to hear all the sounds and like, dude, I could go off on it. I mean, I'm going to,

53:02Sal Di Stefano:I'll watch it again. I'll try it. I'm definitely going to go watch it though. I'll watch it again. Yeah. It was, I was just like, what?

53:08Justin Andrews:I was just so confused when I left the theater. Cause I was like, I didn't watch the whole thing. I told you I left. Bro,

53:14Sal Di Stefano:that's the part that I can't wrap my brain around is from, I can count on one hand how many times I've walked out of a theater. And it's definitely not five. It's like three. I almost never did. Maybe two or three in my life, bro. 45 years, three movies I've walked out of? That made one of those three? That to me is like, it has to be a shitty movie to walk out.

53:36Justin Andrews:The Hills Have Eyes. I walked out of that movie, but that was just because it was so grotesque and awful.

53:41Adam Schafer:Well, I'm not a movie critic. Don't take my advice on that. But yeah, I'll try it again, dude. We'll see. Maybe it got good after I left. Yeah. You know what I mean? I think so. You haven't seen it yet, have you?

53:55Justin Andrews:I haven't seen it yet. I want to see it, but three hours is daunting.

53:59Sal Di Stefano:Doug and I are like tiptoeing because of you guys. I know.

54:02Justin Andrews:I had all this time to kill, so that's really the only reason why we went.

54:06Adam Schafer:But it was just like so mind-blowing to me.

54:08Sal Di Stefano:It was like I didn't expect that at all.

54:09Adam Schafer:Well, to be fair, when it comes to movies, opinions on movies, Justin and I oftentimes agree, sometimes disagree. But we are probably the most different from both you and Doug.

54:20Sal Di Stefano:Oh, yeah.

54:20Adam Schafer:That's why I thought. Because there are movies that he loves, that you guys like, blah. And same with me. like I'll stand on this lonely island over here dude I think it was so amazing I think you guys will be the tiebreakers but I'll watch it again I'll give it another shot well my I'm open my I

54:32Sal Di Stefano:have a couple buddies uh and I definitely and I have my my my suspect like one of my best friends he is very and I don't know which one of you two you would fall in this category but like you know just the blow him up shoot him up whatever like doesn't have to have a good plot to it I don't I don't do that I can't do that so he I mean so it's like oh him my that's how my my brother-in-law is like that too so like when they recommend movies like i know what i'm going into right like so but then i have my buddy uh my childhood buddy goes all the way back to fourth grade and him and i are we we used to collect movies when we were little so we when we for cassettes back in the day and uh we were really into movies and we used to critique them and talk about them on time and that was our thing and so we and we loved finding like movies that a lot of people may not know about that were really good hidden gems and so yeah we like stuff like that and he was like it was epic dude i don't know what south he's like south is freaking crazy wow so okay yeah so it was enough that him and then justin tell me that was enough for okay i need to go watch it yeah yeah yeah okay all right you guys can watch man i had another ghost experience

55:32Justin Andrews:what what is that what do you mean ghost yeah so i told you the previous you remember when like the when i was sitting in the live or the dining room and then like one of the chairs that caught fire yes yeah it was super bro at that house again the same house yeah wait a minute same house

55:48Sal Di Stefano:yeah this is your new house that's why i haven't sold yet yeah yeah maybe that

55:55Adam Schafer:disclosure it's haunted you're gonna be living with somebody else people might actually want i was gonna say that might be a selling point yeah this house is haunted baby dude but i mean

56:03Justin Andrews:i wouldn't have thought anything of it because i thought it was probably because i was just in the house alone with everett and uh this is the middle of the day everybody was gone like i think courtney was taking uh even the gymnastics and i was like just tired and decided to lay down and i was like kind of taking a a nap and i was like half awake half asleep and then i just hear this like it it was almost like a a whining but it was like a almost a yodel it was like you're like like that yeah like and i was and i'm like i'm like everett what do you do like what's going on here and like nothing i get nothing from him it keeps going and then it goes away uh and i get up and i'm like oh that's really weird it woke me up and so i'm kind of getting myself together and i go into everett's room like hey man like what what what was all that and he's like what the yodeling and i'm like yeah what like what was all that and he's like i don't know it wasn't me and then no like no and then so i'm like sometimes we catch noises coming up from the school because we're kind of like we're up a bit higher and like down below us is a um a frisbee golf course and so some people like kind of go through there they make noise whatever i'm like ah it must have been something like that but it literally sounded like it was in the house like wailing noises like and we're just like dude this is creepy dude and he's still tripping on it isn't

57:28Adam Schafer:that a common thing that people will say that ghosts will make that sound isn't that a like a common thing yeah i think well you know when like when you see ghosts in cartoons isn't that what they yeah look it up dog uh doug sorry dog look it up dog look it up bro google that yeah yeah uh look up uh the ghosts what is it what do they do moaning sounds is that common or wailing or wailing yeah because they're like the banshee you know like they bring that up a lot so what'd you do just go back to bed or did you like no i got up and i was walking her out was it in the middle of the night how late was it no this is right in the middle of the day uh yeah and it was when i was sleeping oh look at this is telling you it was the wind and weather or the house moving so maybe maybe that's what it was dude yeah except it sounded like a human yeah that's creepy dude so you just say go back to bed or what no dude i got up and was active and

58:22Justin Andrews:and uh cleaned the house whatever i don't know i was like not gonna go back to sleep oh that's

58:27Adam Schafer:creepy dude that's super i'm out of there bro i'm out of there yeah no thank you had some fun fun stuff i'm gonna change the subject and get to talks about supplements here for a second you know there's some data that suggests that the higher higher protein intake so we talk about one gram of protein per pound of body weight even higher amounts may be even more beneficial for uh people who want to build even more muscle i thought i've seen a cut i thought i've seen

58:53Sal Di Stefano:Lane do a breakdown that they're on the studies as high as 1.5. Yeah.

58:59Adam Schafer:So what I was going to say is this may be why, because I always hit one gram of protein per pound of body weight. I almost never go over that. So I'm eating about 220 grams of protein a day. More than that is insane, right? It's like, I'd have to eat a ton, but I do notice, uh, I seem to notice benefits when I'm consistent with, uh, Keon's, um, essential amino acids. So I eat so much protein, adding the essential amino acids, I still notice some benefit. And it might be that. That might be the reason that even more essential amino acids than what I thought was a lot might be beneficial.

59:32Sal Di Stefano:Well, I did. When we did, it's been now two years since I documented that whole cut that I did on the YouTube channel. And one of the things I did was use those essential amino acids during that process. and I still hit my protein intake. I still was hitting over one, but I was doing that in addition to that. You noticed it. Well, yeah, I had the DEXA scan come back. It was one of the first DEXA scans I've ever done and not lost any muscle. Yeah. So to be in a cut, you typically expect to lose a little bit. Always. Yeah, and so, you know, obviously the game has always been, you know, can I cut just the right amount and minimize how little amount of muscle.

1:00:15Sal Di Stefano:That was the first time I did a cut like that and didn't lose any muscle. So that was a big selling point for me. I know we did the episode.

1:00:22Adam Schafer:Were you doing it in between meals or with meals? In between. Yeah.

1:00:25Sal Di Stefano:Yeah. So I would literally take seven, like three times a day between meals. So I'd do a meal and then I had one here. I had them in my gym bag and I had them next to my bed. So I could just grab them. And then I would literally just, after I had a meal, it'd been an hour or so, I'd reach over, grab, take seven of them, go back to my day, eat. Dude, again, seven. So between every meal, I'd have seven.

1:00:51Adam Schafer:Yeah, I'm sold on that. I'm sold on it. But remember, for anybody listening, if you take essential amino acid supplements, they have to be high in leucine, very high in leucine. That's the key. If leucine is low, then it's like you got to take twice as much. Don't even mess around.

1:01:04Justin Andrews:It makes a lot of sense in a cut to supplement with that too. But what you're saying, even on a high protein, you're going to get benefit. Yeah.

1:01:12Adam Schafer:One other thing I want to touch on is just how good you guys look with the new lighting. I'm looking at your TV over there. Yes, dude.

1:01:17Sal Di Stefano:Dude, fist bump. This whole time, everybody thought Justin and I were sixes.

1:01:22Adam Schafer:You guys are solid sevens.

1:01:23Sal Di Stefano:We're like a solid seven and a half now, dude. Solid seven and a half now.

1:01:27Adam Schafer:And that's because of the lighting, right? We got, what is this, movie lighting? Is that what we did? I actually had, somebody's client called me a snack.

1:01:33Justin Andrews:A snack? Whoa, bro. Whoa. I'm a snack. That's a big snack. I'm like a bag of Doritos.

1:01:40Sal Di Stefano:Still be getting that in your mid-40s? It's not bad, dog. It's not bad.

1:01:44Justin Andrews:Well, because, yeah, I guess they don't watch the show or anything, and then it was like, you know, it's a video. And then they put it on? Yeah, yeah. He's pretty funny.

1:01:52Adam Schafer:I would agree. You are a snack for sure. 100%. Thanks. Yeah. Adam's a meal. Yeah, he's a full meal. Stay dinner.

1:01:59Sal Di Stefano:Somebody, I did a video. I was doing weighted pull-ups, and I videoed it. That's since I'd never videoed my workouts, right? And I was like, oh, I'm in here. I was working out. And I was like. You need evidence? Just want to make sure everybody knows I still train every once in a while. one set that's it that's all you'd see that's it for the day yep uh but i was doing that and

1:02:20Adam Schafer:somebody's comment like not bad for a biggish guy yeah it's a weird compliment you know i mean

1:02:27Sal Di Stefano:biggish that's good you know i'm back to that uh i actually really uh i hadn't done that in a while i've now done it it's been i think this is the third time or so trying to get up there i want to see how heavy i was doing uh the 60 pound kettlebell wow dude um how many reps i got five and then of course the one bro that's good the one i recorded got four but the one that's what made me i was like oh i should record this i haven't done this weight oh that's good it was

1:02:53Adam Schafer:it was good because what do you weigh right now 220 230 218 wow yeah yeah that's pretty good yeah

1:02:59Sal Di Stefano:yeah yeah i'm down i outweigh you i feel like a big yeah i've been down i've been down you He's a freaking balloon. Ever since you - Were you tipping the scale 270? Damn, bro. He's not a snack dog. Yeah, that's a full meal right there, bro. He's a hearty meal. That's a full meal. If he's a snack, he's keto.

1:03:18Adam Schafer:Yeah,

1:03:20Justin Andrews:for sure. Yeah, no, I've been down -

1:03:23Sal Di Stefano:I mean, ever since you made the comment about my inflammation has been down. Remember when I was complaining about all that? Yeah, yeah, it's all better. Yeah, all better. All better. Yeah, all better. It's been gone. I've been, I mean, just full transparency. I've been utilizing Trisepetide on a microdose and it's made a big difference for me

1:03:38Adam Schafer:I know we joke about this about our cumulative body weight always staying the same when one person loses somebody else gains I think it's true somebody needs to do it

1:03:51Sal Di Stefano:I'm willing to bet we never go within about 5 pounds probably when we first started the show

1:03:57Adam Schafer:I wasn't very heavy at all but you were jacked And right now, you're lighter. Oh, yeah. Justin's heavy cakes. Yeah, yeah.

1:04:06Justin Andrews:So I think he went through maybe two times where I even cared. I was like 215 or something. He's like the normal kind of bad.

1:04:19Sal Di Stefano:And then you and I fluctuate. Because you.

1:04:21Justin Andrews:A bunch of flex capacitors. Yeah.

1:04:23Sal Di Stefano:I mean, I've been as light as 198, 200.

1:04:29Adam Schafer:While on the show?

1:04:30Sal Di Stefano:Yeah.

1:04:31Adam Schafer:Yeah. I was 195, I think.

1:04:33Sal Di Stefano:Yeah, and then as high as like 240. So I've like gone. I got up to 230. Yeah, yeah. So you and I fluctuate the most, and he kind of stays around the same. How light were you when you did your transformation? Yeah, I was like 215. You got down to 215?

1:04:46Adam Schafer:Yeah.

1:04:47Sal Di Stefano:Wow, dude. Well, that's actually not that light. Not that far off. It's not that light, but it's. Well, for him, I felt real like. I mean, he's heavy, right? 230 is a heavier weight for you, right?

1:04:54Adam Schafer:230 or higher than 230? Are you higher than 230?

1:04:56Justin Andrews:I've been higher, but I'm 230 right now. Yeah.

1:04:59Adam Schafer:Yeah. But you hold weight well, dude. You're supposed to be thick. All your tits and ass. It's your butt and boobs. It's all your tits and ass. It looks so good on you. That's why he put together that new program. I can't tell anybody what it is, but it's kind of similar. There's a part of it. There's a category. The thick with a couple of sleeves. Don't give it away. That's always been me. Good stuff.

1:05:23Justin Andrews:Anyways.

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1:05:59Adam Schafer:You won't be disappointed. They will work better than anything you've ever tried before. And here's what we got going on right now. We took our top 10 most popular maps programs and we did a buy one, get one free. So buy any one of them, get the other one for free. And it's only for the top 10 most popular ones. It's happening right now. So if you want to take the leap, you want to try a maps program, or you already have maps programs, you want to take advantage of this promotion, go to mapsbogo.com. Back to the show. our first caller is paul from ontario what's up paul how you doing paul happening man hey guys how you doing good good how can we help you good uh first of all i wanted to say thank you guys for

1:06:36Justin Andrews:everything you do the information you share and the uh no bs approach it's very much appreciated and uh start this off by saying sal congrats on your whole journey with uh christianity and walking in faith i think that's pretty incredible and really cool that a couple big badass fellas like yourselves are into that. Thank you so much. Thank you.

1:06:56Adam Schafer:How can we help you, dude?

1:06:58Justin Andrews:Questions for you is just to keep it as simple and quick as possible, gentlemen. I'm a 41-year-old career firefighter out of Kingston, Ontario. And for the average guy, just wants to look good for his wife, perform for his career, and be healthy for his kids. There's a lot of contradiction between workouts and what would be best kind of split, whether be whole body split three days a week um power lifting a few times a week with kind of conditioning on the side what would be your your advice to a fella just trying to perform better look decent

1:07:33Sal Di Stefano:and limited equipment what's your what's your schedule like uh are you like uh 10 on certain days off what's it what's it look like right now so it's 24 hours on 48 off okay but i fill some

1:07:45Justin Andrews:of my time on my days off with working side jobs as well. And, uh, yeah, but obviously fitness and health is quite a priority in my life for, for my family and my career. So. That's good.

1:07:57Adam Schafer:Yeah. The, the, the biggest consideration, uh, with firefighters and there's other workers that would fall in this category is stress management. Now, when I say that people oftentimes think about like stressful situations at home, I mean, like, like all the things that can, that your body would deem as a stress and then try to adapt to, which includes exercise. So whenever we're introducing a form of exercise, something consistent with a firefighter, for example, the biggest consideration is stress. And because of your schedule, uh, your sleep on a semi-regular basis is not great. That's right.

1:08:35Adam Schafer:Okay. So this does not mean you can't work out. It just means we need to consider that as a top consideration whenever we're introducing an additional stress like exercise. The best consistent form of schedule with workout with a firefighter, what we have found and what I found in the past is like a MAPS 15 protocol. Now that doesn't mean you can't add other things when you feel really good, like maybe some cardiovascular conditioning or something outdoor. But when it comes to strength training the maps 15 protocol would be what would give you the it would give you the best results you get the most strength and the best results from something like that now there's all there's a we have a lot of maps 15 style programs if i were to pick one that would give you the best bang for your buck uh for your job for maybe some of the demands that can happen as a firefighter i would look at something like maps 15 performance performance okay because it's got an athletic uh bent to it and so that's it's not just about you know building muscle although it is it's also about like moving well um and having some athleticism and so that would be your base routine that'd be the routine that you would do consistently and then what you would do is you would you could add conditioning and stuff like that when you feel like you're feeling great

1:09:55Sal Di Stefano:maybe two days a week right two days a week of some sort of conditioning on the days that are most conducive would be more than enough.

1:10:02Adam Schafer:Yeah. And, and really you gotta, you gotta look at it and here's the challenge. The challenge is, is this what I can tolerate or is this ideal? So the tendency for, um, you know, for people like yourself, emergency workers and people that work in kind of high stress jobs that include high stress situations is that they tend to push exercise to the taller, like what I can tolerate, what's the most I can tolerate. right um and that's not going to give you the best uh results do you do you use um aura or whoop or

1:10:34Sal Di Stefano:anything to kind of track and monitor your sleep at all no sir nothing like that at all it's probably a worthwhile investment i've had a lot of success with my clients uh that have schedules like yours because uh you know guys like you we what we have a tendency to do is probably push it on times when we probably shouldn't um and so i would have you on a rec like okay we run mass 15 we have two days of the cardiovascular training. And then how I would dictate how intense your workouts look like would be based off of the data we're getting and how you feel from your sleep. So for example, the last two days, you scored 80-plus on your Oura Ring or whatever just for using hypothetical numbers.

1:11:12Sal Di Stefano:And now I'd be like, all right, Paul, we can get after it today in your workout. Or let's say rough two days in a row. A lot of work stuff. You had two 60s. and I'm like, hey, today you go through the workout, but go through the motions. You're not pushing weight hard. Just lift in moderate weight to easy for you and then get some good rest. So I would use a tool like that. Now you can go off of how you feel. I think that's most important, but I do like having an extra data point that we can pull from and be like, hey, you feel good. Numbers are saying it's all good. Let's get after the workout today.

1:11:46Sal Di Stefano:Or it's like, hey, man, we've had two bad days in a row of sleep. that's when your highest risk for injury is uh this is not the most optimal time for you to get after your workout today we just kind of go go through the motion here's why what adam is saying

1:11:58Adam Schafer:is so important i've trained first responders and you just have it you guys just have a tendency to perceive uh fatigue or stress differently very differently you're supposed to that's what makes you good at your job so i would have first responders and i'd be like hey how do you feel and it's always like i'm good i'm fine i'm good yeah no i feel great let's go i know we'd say listen to your body but you're like bro you scored a 50 two days in a row in sleep you can't be good so objective data could be really helpful because anybody okay i'm gonna listen to the data versus like my own you know perception yeah or a ring or whoop or something like that would actually make

1:12:30Justin Andrews:sense because it'll give you like a definitive sort of uh gauge of what that looks like but

1:12:35Sal Di Stefano:that's what the protocol would look like would be maps 15 performance two days of car same thing goes with cardio too like let's say it's a day where we had bad sleep and it's also your it's the day you're supposed to do some of your cardiovascular training, that would be like a low-level cardio. I'd say do an hour of light jog instead of doing, like, intervals or sprints. And then maybe it's a day where you've got great rest. Hey, this might be the day that we do some interval sprints and kind of push the cardio. So literally I'm using that data and how you feel to gauge the intensity, but the protocol looks like a MAPS 15 performance with two days of that.

1:13:06Adam Schafer:And keep in mind, like, whatever routine you're doing, if it gives you more energy throughout the day, it's working. Yeah, that's the gauge. If you feel kind of fried or like, oh, man, I'm recovering, you know, I'm kind of whatever, it's too much. No matter what it is. No matter what it is.

1:13:24Justin Andrews:That's perfect. We have two buddies of ours that go to the same gym as us in Cornwall here, Justin and Jesse Coleman. These guys are probably the best shape out of everybody in the gym, and they push your workouts like nobody I've ever met before. They tell everybody about your workouts. They're all rad on. That's cool.

1:13:43Adam Schafer:That's great.

1:13:43Justin Andrews:Do you take supplements, Paul? I do. I take a multivitamin, fish oil, magnesium, D3, just basic stuff, protein, creatine.

1:13:52Adam Schafer:Good. How much creatine do you take?

1:13:54Justin Andrews:Right now, it's funny. We just picked some up this morning. I was telling my daughter anywhere more than 10 grams a day.

1:14:01Adam Schafer:So I'm doing about the same. Someone like you, you could push 10 to 15 a day. Totally. In divided doses. It's a cognitive benefit. Yeah, it makes a big difference for sleep issues, sleep deprivation issues. Yep. Yeah.

1:14:13Sal Di Stefano:we'll send over a maps performance out to you. So we'll send over a maps 15 performance, follow that. Like we're talking. And yeah, I think you're going to love it, dude. I definitely will do.

1:14:22Justin Andrews:I'll, I'll take all the advice. I'll, I'll take the workout and I'll, I'll have at her and I'll reach out to you guys and let you know how everything's going. Awesome, man. Say hi to your friends.

1:14:30Adam Schafer:I think we should, Justin and Jesse say hi to them for us. Yeah, we'll do. Thank you. Thank you. Have you, you guys have trained first responders? Yeah. Yeah. Lots of them. Yep. It's just, it's all about the schedules.

1:14:43Sal Di Stefano:it's all about stress management stress and they are there are somebody who i would i would like if he's my client i'd make him get an aura ring because of what you said yep because some people can uh you can trust their hey i've but those guys have been trained this i would throw them the category of my military guys my pro athlete guys uh they just have yeah yeah exactly they reframe crazy yeah their perception of stress lack of sleep is just way the hell off different And so for someone like that, I'd be like, hey, how do you feel? And then also let's look at the data. And it's like, hey, I know you think you feel okay, but data's telling us you've had two, three days in a row of really bad sleep.

1:15:23Sal Di Stefano:We're going to do the workout today, but it's going to look real modern. And then other times it's like, hey, I'm feeling great. And you got great sleep. Let's get after it.

1:15:30Justin Andrews:Our next caller is Ryan from Ohio. Hi, Ryan. Hi, Ryan. Hi. This is kind of crazy.

1:15:38Adam Schafer:Thanks for calling in. How can we help you?

1:15:40Justin Andrews:um so if you don't mind i'll read from my things so i don't lose focus um i'm a 36 year old female five foot three currently 197 pounds and i'm getting married next july my goal is fat loss um i've only ever used the scale and i've always wanted a healthier bmi and honestly my wedding dress is my main driving factor right now i'm actually too nervous to even try one on for fear of how it'll fit and how I'll feel in it. I've been listening to you guys, I put a few weeks, but it's been a couple months now. And after a rough stretch that got me thinking more carefully about how I approach this. Some quick background about myself.

1:16:25Justin Andrews:I've done CrossFit in the past, 2016 to 2022, cycled through keto, 75 hard, calorie tracking on and off since 2009. and this past year went deep into extended fasting, mostly 24-hour OMAD, up to 74 hours once, alongside starting then tapering off of an SSRI. The fasting caught up with me, and I had a few fainting and blood sugar crash episodes that scared me and my fiance enough that I stopped. I'm a high school teacher, and I devote most of my summers to a solid routine and schedule, but once school starts back, the stress takes over and I lose momentum, especially going into the holidays too.

1:17:07Justin Andrews:I have a garage gym and a new online trainer. He's a family member, newly certified. I put that he gave me a five-day PPL, but it's actually three days of PPL and two days of movement. So like a bike, rower, just some sweat. And I've now been getting 9 ,000 plus steps a day. He gave me macro targets, but my fiance thinks that I should be doing more cardio and eating more carbs and less protein because I have since went up a pant size and that kind of drove me to sending this email to you guys. The macros I've been given is 2 ,000 calories, 150 grams of protein, 205 carbs, 65 grams of fat. Just wondering if that's right for my goals.

1:17:53Justin Andrews:I've genuinely never approached this any other way than straight caloric deficit, and that's probably been my problem. I don't have any other frame of reference for bulk versus cut versus maintenance phases. I've never really looked into how to apply those or how to think about a new timeline or pacing toward my wedding. It's going to be in July of next year. So what I'd love your take on is how would you evaluate whether those macros I've been given make sense for someone with my past and my goals? what's a realistic and sustainable timeline for my wedding date a year out and how phases like bulk cut maintenance should factor in for someone like me.

1:18:32Justin Andrews:My experience has always been eat less, move more and fall off the wagon under stress. So I love your perspective on that. And I just want to say thank you for this show. It's generally part of what pushed me to slow down and think about things differently. I have not went the cardio route this summer, which is a first.

1:18:51Sal Di Stefano:yeah ryan uh congratulations first of all congratulations and uh we got plenty of time

1:18:56Adam Schafer:yeah i was just that's a good thing yeah i'm so happy you called in yes uh and we have a lot of time which is great it's very challenging when someone says i'm getting married in two months yeah yeah i know i'm worried about that so we're gonna do this the right way okay so let me ask you specifically is it okay if i ask you some more questions oh yeah i wrote down my answers

1:19:17Justin Andrews:because I just, I knew I'd be so nervous and I wanted to make sure I had a good train of thought. Yeah, yeah, no worries.

1:19:22Adam Schafer:And it's, yeah, I get you being nervous. And just remember we were trainers for a long time and we're trainers, we do the show, but really we're trainers at heart. So this is what we love doing the most. Okay, so what would you say is your specific goal? Let's paint a clear picture. So you're getting married in July. What is it that you want to accomplish by them?

1:19:41Justin Andrews:I ultimately keep telling people I want to look and feel the best I've ever felt. And I feel like I've always said that. And yet I'm always trying this and trying that to the point of like, I don't know if I give up too soon, if it's my consistency that's not on point. I know when I was doing CrossFit, I could go six days a week, but my diet wasn't dialed in. Or I'd have my diet dialed in, but my exercise wasn't, or strength goals in that matter. But I don't mind getting stronger and feeling better. I would love my clothes to fit better, to be honest with you. And I think that's what's holding me back right now is, you know, putting so much time and energy into this and not feeling like I'm seeing results.

1:20:34Justin Andrews:I've been listening to you guys enough to hear about like body fat percentages. So I scheduled an in-body scan for Friday. So that's coming up. So I think I'm going to try and use that as tracking instead of the bathroom scale. Okay. That's good.

1:20:51Adam Schafer:So let me try to paraphrase a little bit, and you let me know if I'm on point or off. Okay, so by July of next year, you want to look healthy. You want to feel healthy. You want to get rid of this kind of confusion around what it was you've done in the past and why it didn't work. Right. And is it a consistency issue? Sustainable. Or was it the method? Like, I want to do this essentially the right way. Would you say that that's – okay. You're on it. Can you give me something objective by July just so I can kind of help plan this out for you? So feel healthy, look healthy. Do you have a weight goal?

1:21:24Adam Schafer:Do you have a size goal?

1:21:25Justin Andrews:I would love to, to lose a couple of pants sizes. I would love to, to not be the weight that I'm at. I feel it at five, three, you know, I've heard callers call in and you know, they're 130 pounds and I'm pushing 200. And I just, I fear that like, you know, you say when you're strength training to feed yourself and eat more calories, I'm almost afraid that like, I'm going to be stuck at this like bulkier size or like, I don't know how to shrink down, I guess.

1:21:58Adam Schafer:Yeah, but everything you're feeling is super normal. You feel like almost every client I ever met when they first came to me, hire me. I like to have an objective number because this helps me paint a picture a little bit better. Okay, so I heard you say -

1:22:10Justin Andrews:Okay, 150 would be great.

1:22:11Adam Schafer:Okay, cool. Okay, so let's take about 45 pounds.

1:22:14Justin Andrews:Yeah.

1:22:15Adam Schafer:So 45 pounds of loss. Can I throw some things in there? Like get stronger, more energy, more fit. Okay. We got plenty of time. Here's what it would look like. Okay. Now there's, of course, because you're an individual, uh, there's, you know, I'm going to give you kind of general, but every individual is a little bit different, kind of what this looks like. And the, and the, the big difference between people is how this affects them mentally. because it is hard. It is not easy. Doing this the right way is very difficult. Let me explain why. Okay. Because you're giving us a great timeline, the focus initially is on giving you a quote unquote healthy metabolic rate.

1:22:55Adam Schafer:I want to get your metabolism to burn more calories on its own. That's going to set us up for effective, sustainable fat loss later. Okay. Because if we do this the old way where you go move as much as you can and you eat as little as you can, here's what ends up happening. The body adapts its metabolic weight downward to match the caloric intake. So you're moving like crazy. And initially you'll see some weight loss on the scale, but then you plateau real hard. And then you're in this position where you're like, okay, I'm working out five days a week. I'm starving. I really, I kind of don't feel good.

1:23:32Adam Schafer:I've lost some weight, but I I'm like burnt out. So I'm doing all this stuff. And now I, nothing's happening. What do I do? Work out more? Do I eat less? And so you go down this unsustainable spiral where eventually what it ends up turning into is, uh, I don't want to do this anymore. This sucks. And you give up. Uh, and if that sounds familiar, uh, then you're in a good company because that's how everybody approaches this. Now on the flip side, when you do this, right, here's what it feels like, and I'm going to tell you what's hard about it, okay? What it feels like is I'm getting stronger. I'm building muscle.

1:24:06Adam Schafer:I'm eating a little more. I'm feeding myself. I have more energy. I'm sleeping better. My libido is higher. The scale isn't moving. Okay, what's going on? Why isn't the scale moving? And then a good coach is going to say, hey, look, we're moving in the right direction. Don't worry. We're in the build phase. We're going to set you up for the cut later. then when you're ready when we have when you have a metabolic rate that gives us runway meaning i've got your body burning so many calories on its own that i can cut your calories and you're not in this place where you're eating nothing okay i'd like to get you to a place where 2 000 calories is a deficit that's your deficit that's your diet then you see body fat come off your body and you've got sculpt and shape and strength.

1:24:53Adam Schafer:And by the way, that requires less effort in the gym than trying to manually burn calories on your own. Getting your body to burn more calories on its own is a much easier, it's like putting money in an account that earns money on its own versus you having to work every hour for every dollar that you want to earn. So that's the setup and then the cut. Now, in between that, there are interruptions that tend to happen. So, okay, I'm a little, like if you're my client, what'll probably happen through the kind of reverse diet build phase is you're going to probably, you know, text me and say things like, what's going on?

1:25:28Adam Schafer:I need to see the scale move. And I'm going to say, okay, fine. I'll give you a couple of weeks of cut so I can show you some movement, but then we're going to go back on the reverse. And so it's going to be some coaching through that process, but that's what it kind of looks like. It's more of a snowball effect versus the old way of doing it where you get this quick drop off in this hard plateau and then it doesn't work. So there's a little bit more patience involved and it feels different. It's also very scary, Ryan, because you're used to restricting yourself to see anything happen. And now you're trying to nourish yourself.

1:25:58Adam Schafer:And that's going to make you be like, I'm going to gain all this weight. What's going to happen? I'm going to get all this body fat type of deal.

1:26:03Sal Di Stefano:The exciting part about this is that the psychological part is difficult. The workouts and the eating part is actually easier than what you've done before. It's not 75 hard. It is not CrossFit. It is not eating once a day. It is far more balanced. You should feel good. You should feel good energy. You should feel strength. You should sleep well. It'll be all the things Sal was talking about and take way less effort. It should not feel like you went from not doing much cardiovascular work and steps and not really lifting weights to all of a sudden And now you're doing five, six days of all these things.

1:26:41Sal Di Stefano:And every day getting on, like, it shouldn't look like that. It should like this beautiful, gradual introduction of we now do this. Okay, we've been doing that for a while, getting stronger. Okay, we're now going to add a little bit of this. It should be this beautiful dance and feel good along the way, not extreme. It does not, for as much time we have and what you're trying to do, which is very realistic, we've got plenty of time to do this perfect and right.

1:27:07Adam Schafer:Ryan, can I ask you a stupid question? Okay. When you, let's say by July, you lose the weight, you feel great. You get married. Do you want to gain the weight back?

1:27:21Justin Andrews:I honestly think that family planning would be in our future. So yes, in some regards, but not in.

1:27:29Adam Schafer:aside from gaining healthy body, baby weight and having a baby, do you want to like, do you want to get married? You're fit and then just stop everything. And it become like, no, I mean,

1:27:44Justin Andrews:I've invested quite a bit of money in my garage gym and I, I enjoy it. I just always felt like I wasn't doing enough. Kind of like that mentality, like go hard, go hard. Like it's almost hard, like to take a rest a day. I mean, someone would have to literally tell me you need to not do something today or just go for a walk. I I'm the type of person that's like, I'm in it, but like, I also need to see results or else I start flipping out and, um, it is mental. It is definitely, that's the coaching part.

1:28:14Sal Di Stefano:That's why the coaching part is huge.

1:28:17Adam Schafer:If you, so here's the thing. So the goal is, and I know it's a stupid question because I know what the answer was going to be is to get you to a place where you feel great, you look great, and it's sustainable. This is now part of your lifestyle. It's part of your family's lifestyle, but you're not doing five, six days away. Here's the deal. You're not a fitness fanatic. 99.9 % of people are not like fitness fanatics work in fitness. Uh, the average person fitness isn't their life. It makes their life better. And so what you don't want to do is, is, is come up with a routine that's so ineffective, so inefficient, that you're devoting all this time in the gym and you're beating the crap out of yourself, here's the problem.

1:28:56Adam Schafer:A lot of people equate soreness, pain, and sweat to effectiveness. Those are not markers of an effective workout. I mean, if that was an effective workout, you could just do jumping jacks in place as fast as you could until you couldn't breathe anymore, and then congratulations, you had a great workout. it's not how it works there's a science behind it and when you do it right your body works for you here's what it's going to feel like and you're the you're my favorite you're one of my favorite people to work with because here's what happens when you're doing it right you're going to come back to me and go this is weird easy i'm my body's responding and i feel like i'm doing nothing that's that's the response that tends to happen because of the ways that you've done it before which is like the wrong way which means you're just busting your butt and starving yourself type of deal so So there's two options I'm going to give you, okay?

1:29:45Adam Schafer:One is far more guaranteed to provide success than the other, but I'll give you a couple options. So option one, I'm going to give you a free program. You can follow it. Listen to our podcast for nutrition advice and stuff like that. Try to piece it together. I don't think, I looked at your macros, nothing necessarily wrong with them, but it would be like bringing your car to somebody and saying, hey, what's wrong with it? The mechanic doesn't even look at the car to tell. So I don't know what you were doing before. I don't know how your body's responding. And so I don't know if that's what your coach did, if they had you track and count and they went off.

1:30:19Adam Schafer:I don't know any of that. It doesn't look bad on the surface, but I don't know if it's right or wrong for you. But I could send you a workout that I think would be a great place to start. Second option is I could set you up for a call with one of my coaches that I know is good because we hire them ourselves. And then if it works out, you could work with them for nine months to a year, have them take you all the way to your wedding and set you up. and essentially they're going to coach you the whole time. The whole time you're with them. That's definitely the turnkey. They're modifying everything.

1:30:48Adam Schafer:The workout is individualized. The nutrition is individualized. Every time you struggle, you're challenged. You text them, you message them, and they work with you the entire way through. And I'm very proud of our coaches. We're very, very difficult on how we hire people, but they're excellent. So if you want, I can set you up with a call with a coach. Either way, I'm going to send you a free program regardless of what you decide to do.

1:31:08Sal Di Stefano:Just to add some more clarity to what Sal is saying around the diet part. Right now, I'm not sure, again, what the trainer's goal is right now, but the goal should be to reverse diet right now. So I'm not sure if he or she put you on this thinking that and added the steps and the activity and everything is like, let's start getting cut and leaning out. If that was their strategy, it's the wrong strategy right now. So I'm not sure if that's... The strategy right now should be to reverse diet. We're trying to build right now. We're trying to build some strength. You have plenty of time to cut. We're going to like cutting is way down the road.

1:31:45Sal Di Stefano:Right now we're building and you cannot build in a calorie deficit. So you can, you're not going to build muscle on a calorie. I don't care how much weights you lift. If you don't feed the body what it needs to build muscle, it won't build muscle. So that should be the focus right now is let's build, let's build a muscle. Let's build muscle. Let's get strong. Let's feed your body what it needs to do that. And then when we get our calories to a place, and let's say somewhere it's going to be like 2 ,800 calories, where you're not gaining weight on the scale, you feel strong, workouts are great, then we stair step down and cut.

1:32:17Sal Di Stefano:Then we start adding steps. We start adding cardio. That's when we start. But that's way down the road. Right now we build the metabolism up. We build that engine so it's working for you. So that's what Sal's not sure about, if that's what the trainer was setting you up for right now. that you may have been so low at calories that 2 ,000 calories is a reverse diet for you. I don't know. But if that feels like a cut, that's not where we would put you to start you off. Just add a credit.

1:32:44Justin Andrews:I honestly don't know either. I know that last year I wasn't eating breakfast or lunches. It was pretty much I'd get home three or four and I'd have a pretty big sustainable meal. And I've always used like real food. I follow like an online, they send a meal prep thing every Sunday and I cook and I make stuff at home. So it's never been like, you know, ready-made processed food. It's been real food, but it's just probably not been enough food. And so I think that that's what happened is I fasted for so long and my body started sending me red flags like, yo, you're starving us. And I think now I'm like in that, I keep, people keep telling me it's water retention or this and that, but really I think that my body's just holding on to something out of safety.

1:33:37Justin Andrews:So I'm not really sure.

1:33:39Adam Schafer:It could be.

1:33:40Justin Andrews:That's, I think, part of the confusion.

1:33:42Adam Schafer:It totally could be, Ryan. All you need, you're actually, all you need is really good guidance through this process. That's all you need.

1:33:49Sal Di Stefano:You're set up nice. You got a home gym. You got meals being prepped for you. You eat whole foods. there's no reason we don't crush your goals out the park just so you know by the way i don't think

1:33:59Adam Schafer:this is a lack of discipline no it was just unsustainable yeah yeah i don't think it's a lack of discipline i don't think it's a lack of focus in fact you would do really well if you gave the focus to someone else if you outsourced it and you said hey coach let me know what to do and then trust the process and here's what it'll feel like when you do it the right way first off probably don't weigh yourself okay because that's going to mess with your head uh but what it'll feel like is you're just initially going to feel better. You're just like, man, I got good energy. Okay. I got, I added 10 pounds to my, you know, my squat.

1:34:31Adam Schafer:I'm feeling good. I got more energy at work. My libido's up like, okay, this is cool. My body doesn't look like it's changing yet. Although your fiance will probably say something like you look a little firmer or, Hey, are you losing weight? You're like, I don't know if I am. And so that's going to be what it's going to feel like before you start to see the radical changes in the mirror. You're just going to start to feel better from doing that. But I really good coaching. I think you would do really well with through this process and it would set you up for, for the rest of your life.

1:34:59Justin Andrews:Just hearing you guys say these things, it's kind of reassurance. I think I needed to hear it. You know, I guess I'd been getting mixed messages from so many different sources and, and not sure what was best for me and confusion along with the scale not moving. But I hope that when I get the in-body scan, I can check it every quarter or so many months.

1:35:26Sal Di Stefano:Exactly. No, that would be good. A coach would use that. Honestly, I would use it and not even let you see it. I'd say, go get the in-body scan. I want to see it. I'll be the one that will dictate where we go from here just because I don't want none of that stuff to mess with your head. But it is a good data point for us. But like Sal said, the things that we're really focused on right now, energy, strength, you will feel like you'll feel like your body's firming up. And that's why you stay away from the scale, because the scale could easily shoot up five pounds and you actually felt and look better until you got on the scale and you saw that number.

1:35:57Sal Di Stefano:So like, that's why we will tell somebody like you, like, don't look at that right now, because you'll get like this husband will say a compliment. You'll feel you'll feel tighter. You'll feel stronger. But man, I feel good. Then you get on the scale and scale. It went up five pounds. And then you go like, oh, my God, you feel like a failure. Then all of a sudden your attitude changes. It's like, what? And then that's where people course correct. Then they freak out. They start changing. When in reality, they were heading right where I want them to head. That was perfect, but they got in their own way.

1:36:21Adam Schafer:So I think MAPS Enabolic would be a good program for you. I would do pre-phase for about four weeks, and then I would move into phase one and go from there. I like walking. You said 9 ,000 steps a day. That's perfectly fine. That's great. and if you're open to just having a call with one of our coaches who I can vouch for, I can make sure I set something up for you and you can get on the phone and you can get in a more detailed conversation with them about some of this stuff.

1:36:49Justin Andrews:Sure, I'm open to anything really at this point.

1:36:52Adam Schafer:Awesome, and thanks for listening. Keep listening. We talk about this stuff all the time and listen to the callers. You're going to hear a lot of callers who sound similar to you and a lot of similar advice you'll hear. Yep.

1:37:03Justin Andrews:And I just need to shout out my best friend, amanda she had purchased muscle mommy from you guys and she was the one that told me to give you a listen so awesome thank you guys see you later so uh yeah she's uh very typical very common i'm

1:37:17Adam Schafer:so glad she's calling us yes right now there's plenty of time doable very doable very doable if she's with one of our i'll say this right now if she works with one of our coaches through that entire process her success rate is all but guaranteed for sure so hard if something

1:37:31Sal Di Stefano:crazy happens it's all but guaranteed yeah i hope you know she's already i need guidance though Well, not just any guidance too, though. No. A brand new trainer to take your food. I know, dude. That's the thing.

1:37:42Adam Schafer:The diet, I don't know how they set up the calories and macros, but what it sounds to me. It sounds like he put her on thinking that's a cut. Or it's like a standard 2 ,000 calories. Like that's what the RDA says, 2 ,000 calories. I'm guessing, but that's what it sounds like that they did.

1:37:57Sal Di Stefano:I mean, regardless of whether, how, the goal should be from here is to add calories. Let's get you strong.

1:38:03Adam Schafer:Yeah. Let's get her strong. Let's get her feeling good, which is going to trip her out. She's probably never felt that through working out. And let's set this up. And we have plenty of time. Our next caller is Melissa from Nebraska. Hi, Melissa. Hello.

1:38:16Justin Andrews:Hi, guys. How are you? Thank you for having me on. I'm doing great. And it's great to be here. Well, I'll do the same thing everyone does. I'm going to read my question. It's changed just a little bit. But I started my road back to fitness in September of 2025. I'm 43, 5 '4". I started at well over 300 pounds. Everything was difficult. Everything health was starting to plummet. So I was pre-diabetic and sleep apnea and high blood pressure and just everything was bad. I decided I was done living that way, 100 % still feel that way. So to date, I've lost 60 pounds, significantly stronger. I started with about 87 pounds of lean muscle mass.

1:39:03Justin Andrews:I still have about 80 pounds of lean muscle mass. Um, body fat has gone down about 7%. Um, so I'm no longer pre-diabetic and blood pressure is normal and no sleep apnea. So out of the woods, so to speak, that's been great. That's incredible. Incredible. And to,

1:39:18Sal Di Stefano:just so you know, to be down, uh, that many pounds and only lose that much muscle is incredible. The ratio. So you did a, you did a good job, obviously of strength training, eating protein like you're supposed to. So well, well done. Very good.

1:39:31Justin Andrews:Thank you. Thank you. It's been, this is by far the best way that I've ever tried to get, get in shape. You've heard all the stories. I tried to do it the wrong way. Many times, this has been awesome. So I worked with a trainer, a fantastic trainer for about six months and working with him. I lost about 14 pounds before. And I just, it was really struggled to get nutrition under wraps. So I started on a GLP-1 in January. And my plan all along was, you know, short term. I didn't want to be on it long term. I was just trying to get, you know, the right habits put in place. So I was on two and a half milligrams of that bound for pretty much the whole time.

1:40:08Justin Andrews:I went up to five milligrams for about six weeks. My initial question, I was really struggling with, you know, when do I taper off of the med? Because I still have about, you know, 60 pounds left to go. I still have a lot of weight left to lose. and so about a week after I submitted my question I just kind of get angry and I said I don't want to do it anymore so I just skipped it and I thought I'll do two weeks and then two weeks went by and I kept feeling good it's been about a month and I've kept feeling good I'm down about three pounds since then and I think the hunger that I have is what you're supposed to feel it It hasn't been, you know, wicked cravings or anything like that.

1:40:46So my question now is, what is your advice to go from here?

1:40:53Justin Andrews:You know, knowing your background with peptides, like, is there anything that I need to look out for in terms of microdosing or, you know, I don't want to hit a wall and, you know, relapse or anything. And then I guess just a little bit on training. I've fallen in love with strength training. So I do that three or four days a week. I'm on phase three of MAPS anabolic, which I've loved. So my lifts are bench about 120, deadlift about 215, and squat 205. Overhead press. I got cocky on this one. I was at 95 pounds, but I could only get up to like three or four reps. So that one's tougher. And I'm about 2 ,200 probably calories a day on average at about 180 grams of protein.

1:41:37Justin Andrews:and then on off days I try to do very very very basic Pilates and yoga and then just walking and pool stuff on my off days so I guess my question is on the GLP1 side what should I watch out for or plan for or do anything with and then on the training side knowing that I still have a lot to go what are the guardrails I guess I should keep myself in

1:42:01Sal Di Stefano:Melissa you are doing great you did a great job the way you're handling this Great job. Really good.

1:42:07Adam Schafer:What, uh, you mind if I ask you some more questions? Sure. Yeah. What, what, what's the difference now? Uh, or let me, let me ask you this differently before you started on this journey. Uh, what were the things that got you to where you were? Cause that's going to help me.

1:42:20Justin Andrews:Yeah. Uh, well, you know, I, I, uh, I tried keto before and, you know, I'd lose a bunch of pounds and gain it all back and my mood was terrible. And, you know, I would try to, you know, do all kinds of cardio, which I hate and I'm really bad at. And, you know, I just I guess I had the same mindset that a lot of people did is that's what you had to do to get in shape. And I'd always been kind of naturally strong when I was afraid of, you know, looking manly or whatever. So I thought that, well, I have to do cardio and like just nothing worked. and I got myself to a point where like I just kept hitting brick wall after brick wall and I just kind of gave up and I poured all of my focus and attention on career you know and like I sit at a desk and I stare at a computer and that only works for so long until you just I just hit a wall I said I'm gonna kill myself if I keep living like this it's not good and like my I have two little nephews they're seven and four and one day they said Aunt Melissa will you come on the floor and play with us.

1:43:25Justin Andrews:They're playing with cars or whatever. And I had to ask them to move the cars up to the coffee table because it was too hard for me to get up and down off the floor. And I was like, this is not how I am. Not how I want to live. Not how I want to show up for these boys. So yeah, I guess just long story short, I think I have kind of the same trajectory as a lot of people did until I just, I had to wake up or it wasn't going to go well.

1:43:48Adam Schafer:Yeah. And I'm glad you're starting to, you're, you're, you're kind of on this journey and doing what seems to be a lot of the right thing. You're kicking ass right now.

1:43:54Sal Di Stefano:I would love to coach. I want to, I want to coach you. I want to take, I want to take you the rest of the way. You're doing so good and you're set up so nice. I would love for you to work with our team. You just, you're, you're set up beautifully right now. You've done such a good job. The fact that you've come off this GLP one for a whole month and you didn't, what happens to a lot of people after about two, two weeks, the appetite starts to kick back up and then people go off the rails and bad habits. So the fact that you've been able to keep that in check is huge. Just so you know, too, though, there's nothing we've had.

1:44:27Sal Di Stefano:I've had this with clients where we're off for a while, then we use it. We bring it back in and we micro dose it for a little bit. So there's it's not that's not a failure to do that if we find it necessary to do that at one point. But the fact that you've done this already, love that you have leaned into getting strong and that that is your strength. That is going to be the thing that is your saving grace. The fact that you are naturally strong and I would lean you more into that is like, let's keep getting strong and building more muscle right now. And I think you're ready for that. I think we're ready to build for a little bit before we come back down again.

1:44:59Adam Schafer:That would be the approach. Now in the past, had you lost weight before and gained a back when you had gone?

1:45:05Justin Andrews:Yeah, I lost about 60 pounds doing keto, but it was really fast loss. And then I gained probably 80 back. It was really rapid.

1:45:14Adam Schafer:Typical. That typically happens or something like that. If you could put yourself in the mindset of when you had done this in the past, let's say in the beginning when it's going great, did you feel motivated? Did it feel like, yeah, I think I'm doing this right before things started changing?

1:45:28Justin Andrews:Not, not really. I think I had, you know, the initial excitement of awesome. I'm losing weight. That's really cool. And I'm going to ignore the fact that my breath is bad and I feel miserable.

1:45:41Sal Di Stefano:It's awful.

1:45:43Justin Andrews:But I, you know, and like in high school, I was super athletic, but you know, strength training for women was never really a thing. Like you'd go in and use a few machines in the weight room. I'd never, ever tried, you know, strength training the way I'm doing it now. And I think that's for me, the biggest game changer.

1:45:59Adam Schafer:Good, good. Yeah. The reason why I'm asking this question is because when you, if we do this the right way, obviously it's more effective, it's more sustainable. You feel better. It doesn't feel like you're, you're, you know, slamming yourself up against the wall. That being said, if we do this right, we're going to be doing this for hopefully the rest of your life, right? So you'll have some kind of exercise the rest of your life and nutrition habits and lifestyle is really changes, but life changes through that process. And there are going to be periods of time in life. This is just what happens to everyone where you're not going to feel so happy about it.

1:46:33Adam Schafer:You're not going to feel so motivated because I don't know, work or life or stress, or now you've been doing it for a while and doesn't seem as exciting. And so that's when things start to get really challenging. Uh, it's not challenging when you love it because challenging when you start to not like it so much. And so what a good coach is going to do is going to move you through that process. The coach's goal is to get you to your, your results. But the main goal for the coach is, can I get Melissa to be able to do this for the rest of her life? That's what, that's what a good coach is going to really do.

1:47:04Adam Schafer:And you're, you're starting to do things the right way. The, the, the way, the things that I'll caution you on is jumping in with this great mood, great attitude and doing everything. Like, man, I'm active every day. I'm doing maps andabolic and I'm doing Pilates and I'm doing yoga. And because, uh, there's nothing wrong with it. Even if it's appropriate, there's nothing wrong with it, except it's a lot. It's a lot more than maybe what you were doing before.

1:47:29Justin Andrews:Right.

1:47:31Adam Schafer:And so what can happen is you go through one of those tough bouts of life that we all do like oh my god i'm gonna you know five days a week i gotta do this thing and then you skip two or three days you start to feel like a failure and you're like you know i don't want to do this anymore uh i can't maintain this uh and then you stop and so what we want to do is we want to avoid uh that old cycle so whatever you decide to add or do you got to go into it with the mentality of is this something i can maintain for the rest of my life even in those periods of time when i'm not going to want to that's more important than let's see how much I can get done right now.

1:48:05Adam Schafer:Great. That makes sense. Yeah. Now a good coach is going to take you through that process and you're actually in a great place to work. Great place. With a really, really good coach who's going to work you through this entire process. As far as GLP is concerned, it has profound effects on appetite, but it also changes neural pathways because old behaviors aren't practiced while you're on it. So although hunger may come back, It may not feel like it used to. Now, that doesn't mean you can't go back to where you were before because oftentimes we will reach out for food because we're hungry, but also because we're stressed or also because we're bored.

1:48:40Adam Schafer:And then you can rebuild those old neural pathways. And so what Adam said is very common. You get back on. The GLP, work through that again, come back off. And it sometimes takes two or three cycles before you're like, I'm totally off. But the question of where – because I read your email and part of your question was where should I invest my finances? is the most uh effective thing you could do is work with a good coach more effective than a glp more effective than anything else is working with a good coach who's going to be able to work you through this entire process and get you there so that's that's the most valuable thing you can

1:49:13Sal Di Stefano:invest in for sure and if you do end up having to do glp one again we'll save you some money going through a different route than what you're probably going through right now you're probably

1:49:21Justin Andrews:paying top dollar yeah direct and it's so expensive yeah we'll we'll help you we'll help

1:49:27Sal Di Stefano:you through that process.

1:49:28Adam Schafer:Yeah, because it looks like you were using the brand name, not the compound pharmacy. Compounded is less.

1:49:32Sal Di Stefano:Yeah, weightless. Same compound. And better. You can adjust the dose. You can titrate it. Yeah, so better. Okay.

1:49:38Justin Andrews:Sounds good.

1:49:39Sal Di Stefano:Yeah.

1:49:40Justin Andrews:Other questions, like guardrails for calorie, am I in the right spot? About 2 ,200.

1:49:46Sal Di Stefano:You are right now. What our coach would do with you, though, is reverse diet you from here. So that you would actually start to build those calories. Especially if you told me, too, you already see the appetite is naturally coming up is a good sign if we make the right choices with food. So I'm just using hypothetical numbers so you get kind of an idea what the vision looks like. It would look like we start ramping these calories up. We get it closer to 2 ,800 calories and then bring you back down again. And then we do that. And what will happen is weight loss right now will plateau a little bit.

1:50:15Sal Di Stefano:If we do this correctly, strength will go up. So you start feeling good in the gym. Scale weight is kind of staying the same, but you're eating more. You're feeling stronger. we get our calories up there then i go okay let's take them down we take them down weight starts dropping off the scale again we do that for a while then we're going to reverse kind of play in that game uh do that for a while weight comes down then we reverse back up again come back down it's just and we should see this beautiful over the next nine months to a year of just you continue to get stronger and better shape and not a lot of crazy like you're already doing plenty of activity so there there does this in i don't need you to do more of more stuff it's more of the right balance and focus and and consistency and then also being there for you in those moments and times where we don't feel as motivated and coaching you through that process because that's where the the curve

1:51:05Adam Schafer:ball and change yeah and i'll give you a few rules with diet that'll help uh besides counting macros calories a few rules whole natural foods if you just avoid heavily processed foods stick to whole natural foods, make sure you have, it's protein centric. So aim for high protein, eat the protein first. Uh, then that right there is a real nice natural guardrail to going way off the deep end. That's it. Uh, and what helps a lot with that, Melissa is, is, is meal prepping. Yep. Meal prepping helps a lot. Yeah.

1:51:35Justin Andrews:It must have been helpful. Yeah. It takes the guesswork out of it.

1:51:37Adam Schafer:Yeah. Cause it's a lot easier to be like, I'm hungry. Okay. I can eat. I'm gonna eat this whole natural meal versus I can't eat anything or I'm counting my calories, but what's in there is hyper palatable processed foods, which make the appetite go even higher. Yeah. It's what I did

1:51:52Justin Andrews:before. My snack would be a whole meal of just junk and it's more. So, okay. All right. That's awesome. Um, I just, I want to say thank you guys. I've been listening to you since I started this whole process and, uh, you reinforced some good decisions and you kept me from making some really foolish ones. So, uh, I tell everybody just, you know, dial in, listen to these guys. They know what they're talking about. So thank you. Really appreciate it.

1:52:16Adam Schafer:If you're open, I can have one of my coaches call you. You could talk to them about what it looks like to work with a mind pump coach. There's two options. One is a much less, a lower investment than the other, um, because we, we created it particularly to help make it more affordable. So there are a couple options, but at the very least you can ask some questions.

1:52:32Justin Andrews:Sure. Love to have a chat with them. Yeah. I hope,

1:52:35Sal Di Stefano:I hope we add you to the family because it's going to be fun to watch this process for the next year. You're doing great.

1:52:39Justin Andrews:Awesome. All right. Thanks guys. Really appreciate it.

1:52:42Sal Di Stefano:You got it.

1:52:42Justin Andrews:All right.

1:52:42Adam Schafer:Thanks. Bye-bye. Well, I'm glad she's a great job. Yeah. She's great job. She's approaching it the right way. The challenge is going to be, because I can hear it in her voice. She's like, I feel good. I'm motivated. Let's do this. The challenge is always adding, throwing way too many things at herself because she feels good about it. She wants to do a lot more movement or something else to add. And then the inevitable will happen. She's not going to have that same feeling, and then it's like, now I'm done. Or I can't do this anymore, and I can't maintain it. And so that's really the challenge.

1:53:12Adam Schafer:But if she's working with one of our coaches, I am confident. I hope she does.

1:53:17Sal Di Stefano:I mean, I love getting a hold of somebody like this where she's at. She's in such a good place. She did such a good job already. I mean, I knew it as soon as I saw the 60 pounds down and only 7 pounds loss of muscle. because it's it's hard to drop that much weight and in the time that she did from september to now and not lose some muscle i mean so the our goal is always to hold on and obviously perfect is lose 60 and you know lose no but that is very difficult well i'm just gonna say this on a glp

1:53:44Adam Schafer:you see across the board it's about a 30 to 40 percent uh lean body mass loss so 60 pounds would have looked like 20 pounds that's right of lean body mass not to mention of that seven pounds I don't know how she tested her body fat, but most ways of measuring count fluid as lean body mass. It's nonfat mass.

1:54:02Sal Di Stefano:Right. So that could be she's down water weight, too. That's right.

1:54:05Adam Schafer:So she probably, and if she got stronger, which she said she did, I'm like, I'm confident she lost a little to no muscle. She had an exit plan and everything.

1:54:12Justin Andrews:It was GLP-1. It was perfect.

1:54:14Sal Di Stefano:Great numbers, too, already on bench squat, overhead prep. I mean, she's strong, and she's doing that on, like, 2 ,000 calories or 22. We start to reverse.

1:54:22Adam Schafer:Mass anabolic.

1:54:22Sal Di Stefano:Man, we start to reverse diet her and get her really strong. That metabolism is going to be roaring. And then she's just going to see the weight loss. Keep coming.

1:54:30Justin Andrews:She'll be great. Our next caller is Meredith from Texas. Meredith. Meredith. Hey, hey. How are you?

1:54:35Sal Di Stefano:We got you.

1:54:36Justin Andrews:Oh, thank you. Sorry about that. It's all right.

1:54:39Adam Schafer:Hey, no, I'm glad you called back. I was looking forward to talking with you. How can we help you?

1:54:43Justin Andrews:Well, first of all, I want to, like everybody else, just give a big shout out and thank you. because you guys have just really been such a, you know, a great just part of my life. That's all.

1:54:57Adam Schafer:Thank you. Thank you.

1:54:58Justin Andrews:Okay. I'm just going to read my, read my question. My name is Meredith. I've been married for 24 years. I'm a mom of three teenagers. I've been a personal trainer for over 20 years. I've been a listener since 2017. OG. All right. Thanks to y 'all. I've really built the body into the body that I've wanted. September 29th, 2023, when I thought I was in the best shape of my life, I was 44 years old and had a grand mal seizure. I was taken to the ER when they diagnosed me with metastatic stage four metastatic melanoma of the brain. I underwent emergency brain surgery to remove the cancerous tumor that they could operate on, But I also had another one that I was sent to MD Anderson for immunotherapy.

1:55:50Justin Andrews:But the immunotherapy triggered encephalitis. I was hospitalized for 12 days with severe inflammation on my brain. Praise God, I was able to come home, but it was the hardest time of my life. I didn't know my name. I hallucinated. I hardly knew who my family was. I couldn't be left alone. this also triggered over a dozen seizures very serious seizures for two over two years I'm so grateful to say now that I am cancer-free seizure-free and I'm working my way back into the gym praise God awesome man so here's my question as experienced coaches how would you program strength, muscle, and conditioning for someone like me whose biggest limitation is not necessarily my muscles, but it's a recovering brain and nervous system, what would you prioritize to maximize performance without overwhelming the nervous system?

1:56:56Justin Andrews:I think this could really help not just me, but anyone from recovering from brain injuries, neurological conditions, and or cancer treatments. Thank you so much for all that y 'all do.

1:57:12Adam Schafer:Oh, Meredith, God bless you. Thanks for calling in. Tell me about not overwhelming your CNS. Like what does that feel like when that starts to get overwhelmed? And what are the things that make it feel that tend to push it in that direction?

1:57:27Justin Andrews:When I get my heart rate up, of course, getting my heart rate up really sends my central nervous system into kind of that fight or flight, real shaky. I've come so far though. And I keep trying to give myself grace because I couldn't even lift a bar when I first got back into the gym. I tried to lift a dumbbell, couldn't lift a dumbbell. So I went down to bands and I started with bands and I've, I've, I've successfully finished performance and I'm not where I was, of course, but I'm just trying to find my new norm.

1:58:09Adam Schafer:Okay. How thin is the line between, like, is it very thin between like, this is my workout and if I just go just a little too far, I start to get this bad reaction. Is that what that feels like?

1:58:20Justin Andrews:Yes. Okay. Exactly.

1:58:22Adam Schafer:Okay. But you've been progressing this whole time.

1:58:25Justin Andrews:I am. Yes.

1:58:26Adam Schafer:Excellent. So my advice is going to sound a little generic, but your focus is going to be on range of motion technique. You're going to slow breathe through the workout. I also think turning the lights down or being in a semi-dark room while doing it. So what we're trying to do is minimize stimulus. Long rest periods. Okay. Long rest periods. And I like stability-based movements for you. Yeah.

1:58:51Justin Andrews:Where you got to really focus.

1:58:52Adam Schafer:So like physio ball exercises, unilateral type exercises, and the focus is on the technique more than anything. And then when it feels like you've way surpassed the resistance that you're using, then you move up the weight. In other words, typically when we're not dealing with a very sensitive central nervous system, if you feel like you can add weight, you add weight. But what I would do with someone like you is we wouldn't add weight until it's like, this is so easy. Then I'd add weight.

1:59:20Justin Andrews:Have you worked with a suspension trainer much? I do. It's boring. just being honest well i mean that's fair that's fair i mean there is ways to intensify i just think that the stability component to that and the focus on your body um positioning uh would be really helpful to build off of that obviously getting to the weights is going to be you know more interesting uh but i i do think a good period that you could really kind of focus down on that and like take your time and you know really pay attention to your breathing and like where you're squeezing, where you're feeling is going to make a big difference.

1:59:59Adam Schafer:Yes. So it's going to feel like while you're doing your sets, you're trying to keep your, um, your, your, your CNS down. So while you're doing the sets here, it's very controlled, very keep it calm. Yes. It's not like the traditional strength training and you drive. Like what we're trying to do is we're trying to keep things relaxed as we add a little bit of stress on the body to set the adaptation in motion for strength. The fact that you're getting stronger, it, it, great sign. Yeah. Yes. That's an excellent sign. You're moving in the right direction. Are you doing anything that helps, uh, bring the CNS down?

2:00:36Adam Schafer:Are you doing anything that feels recuperative or rejuvenating for yourself?

2:00:42Justin Andrews:Um, walking is huge. Um, walking, sleeping a lot more. I've never been a good sleeper so I've really prioritized my sleep um you know I have low blood sugar so I have had to probably eat every couple of you know few hours and I make sure it's protein and fat is my my main goal okay do you I I was doing a lot of yoga and slow breathing yes um yeah i i kind of got away from that um but i can i think you know incorporating that

2:01:17Sal Di Stefano:again would probably be yes treat yourself some massages i was just gonna say that massage therapy for something like you calm that central nervous relax especially foot massage so yeah so

2:01:28Adam Schafer:you know we went through a period my wife went through a period uh after we had our son it was It's a very traumatic birth process. And she was in a place where her CNS would get, it was like a trip wire. Like once it went off, she was in this kind of fight or flight state. And it was like she couldn't apply intensity. And one thing that we found that to this day now, I make sure she does this because it increases her resilience for everything else. So that's the way you want to look at it is because sometimes a little guilt could set in, especially for a mom. It's like, oh, I'm doing this thing when I should be doing these other things that I'm doing.

2:02:02Adam Schafer:and I was like, you know, I got to take care of all these other, and I explained to my wife, and she now gets it, when you do this thing, it increases your, it improves your resilience for everything else, so here's what she does, she goes to the mall, we have a mall that's not too far from us, and they have foot massages there, and she sits down, she gets her feet rubbed, which for her, brings everything down quite a bit, and then for her, she reads her Bible, which also is a very meditative process for her, and when she does this once a week, and sometimes I make her go more because something stressful happened or, you know, something in the family.

2:02:35Adam Schafer:And she comes back and it's like her stress bucket grew. It increases her resilience. And so that's something that I would recommend to you as well. If that's something that you enjoy, I'm not a massage person, but if that's something where you could sit down for 30 minutes, it almost recharges your batteries a little bit and you can sit and read. And what it'll do is it'll improve your body's ability to adapt to your exercise and make you more resilient for other things. So, cause when you're looking at health, like, like a big health sphere, what we tend to do, especially as trainers is we got workouts and diet, and then we don't count anything else.

2:03:09Adam Schafer:And then sometimes we get smarter and we throw in sleep, but nothing else counts. And it's like, no, no, sometimes massage or meditation is part of the formula because it actually, it helps everything else. So I don't know if that resonates with you, but.

2:03:24Justin Andrews:No, I do. I love that, Sal. I have been super consistent now that I can. I used to not be able to listen or read. Now I've been able to get outside every morning. I put my feet in the grass and I open up my Bible.

2:03:43Adam Schafer:Oh, wonderful.

2:03:44Justin Andrews:And I spend a good 20 minutes before anybody's awake and I have my quiet time and that's how I start my mornings. Oh, that's wonderful.

2:03:53Adam Schafer:Yeah. I think you're doing Great. And I'd love to send you some, I'd love to send you a program that you could pull from. But really it's going to be, which it sounds like you kind of figured out. You just kind of go real slow and your body progresses and you got to be very careful of pushing too hard.

2:04:09Justin Andrews:It's such a hard thing to do because I'd say I'm, I'm a recovering hit, you know, addict and CrossFit addict. So it's been a challenge to get to that place of it's okay not to work out every day to slow down.

2:04:34Adam Schafer:Yeah. And just so you know, you might already know this, but let's say, okay, moderate intensity, right? We'll say moderate intensity, low reps at moderate intensity is less of a stress on the body than high reps at moderate intensity.

2:04:47Justin Andrews:Okay.

2:04:48Adam Schafer:Okay. So if I'm keeping my intensity like on a scale of one to 10, I'm keeping it a seven, let's say five reps at a seven is less stressful on my CMS than 15 reps at a seven.

2:05:00Justin Andrews:Yeah. Okay.

2:05:01Adam Schafer:So, so, cause people, when I say low reps to people who are trying to manage stress, uh, they're like, wait a minute, low reps. I'm going real heavy. I'm driving. I'm pushing real hard. It's like, no, no, no, no. We're keeping the intensity moderate. We're just doing low reps at a moderate intensity. So what it might look like for you is a set of five reps for squat, but it's not five reps with something you could barely do six or seven with it's five reps with something you do 10 reps with.

2:05:26Justin Andrews:Okay. That's easier on the body.

2:05:28Adam Schafer:That's easier on the body than doing a set of 10 reps with something you could do 20 with. For example, higher reps, stress the body a little bit more than lower reps too. When the intensity is the same.

2:05:37Justin Andrews:I love that. I love that. Yeah. I don't, I don't think of it that way. So. Yeah. No.

2:05:41Adam Schafer:And then, uh, you probably train your clients on physio balls. I'm sure you've used them before.

2:05:46Justin Andrews:Yes.

2:05:47Adam Schafer:Physio balls will be good for you right now. Okay. So like instead of sitting on a bench to do a shoulder press, sit on a physio ball. It's just going to help you maintain balance and it'll help check the amount of resistance that you're using.

2:05:57Justin Andrews:Awesome. Awesome. I'm not back to training clients just yet. I will tell you all though, it has been such a gift because I have an elderly couple that I work with just once a week. and they have been such a blessing to be able to help them sit and stand. That's so great. And that's been a huge blessing for not, I mean, they tell me that I'm helping them, but honestly, they're helping me so much because of just trying to find that confidence again to get back to where I can be, where I love to be.

2:06:38Adam Schafer:Oh, that's so awesome. That's great. So good. That's so awesome. This is great. This is great, Meredith.

2:06:44Justin Andrews:Well, so what program would you recommend? Like I said, I mean, I love all of y 'all's programs. Like I said, I did finish performance and I went to start strong. Just because I'm frustrated, I want to get strong.

2:07:01Adam Schafer:So those are all probably more volume than I would want you to do. Okay. I like our MAPS 15 protocols. I like math 15 symmetry, you know, math 15 symmetry would probably be good. I like that protocol. That doesn't mean you can't be active on top of it and do, you know, yoga or walking or hiking, but a little bit every day is probably going to give you better results than some of our more traditional programs.

2:07:28Justin Andrews:Okay. All right.

2:07:30Adam Schafer:Yeah. Do you have any of our math 15 programs?

2:07:32Justin Andrews:I don't, I don't.

2:07:34Sal Di Stefano:I'll send you 15 symmetry.

2:07:35Adam Schafer:Yeah. Let's let's, let me set you up for the next, let's see. These are what? Three months. Let me set you up for the next nine months. Let's set her two more 15s. I'll send you the original Mass 15, Mass 15 symmetry, Mass 15 performance. Follow them one after another.

2:07:48Justin Andrews:Thank you. Thank you so much.

2:07:50Adam Schafer:Yeah, you got it.

2:07:52Sal Di Stefano:You're all set, Meredith. Yeah, you're good.

2:07:55Justin Andrews:Yeah, big shout out to Doug.

2:07:57Sal Di Stefano:Thank you for – I know we never see him on camera,

2:08:00Justin Andrews:but I love hearing about him and his flute collection.

2:08:05Adam Schafer:Big flute guy. big flute guy if you ever come if you ever come out to california come visit us please yes

2:08:13Justin Andrews:absolutely y 'all y 'all mean a lot to me and i i talk to my husband about y 'all all the time and he's always like okay what are the mind pump guys today

2:08:26Sal Di Stefano:god bless you thank you so much for calling yes you have a good day yeah okay y 'all too

2:08:32Adam Schafer:bye i mean tremendous success considering what you've been oh man oh yeah tremendous success yeah i've i've trained clients where their their cns was uh like a like a tripwire you know i had one guy that i trained when i'd have to schedule him when no one else was there yeah we turn off all the lights music all lights yes we turn off the music we'd go train in the corner and and eventually we got on the point where he could come in lights were on people are working out but This is all he could, his body could handle because even if I did a light workout, the lights, the music and the people would like get his body, uh, over amped and it just wasn't well, it didn't work.

2:09:09Adam Schafer:And so we had to gradually move them up. But the fact that she's already improved so much is such a good sign. Look, if you like mind pump, come find us on Instagram. It's mind pump. Thank you for listening to mind pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy

2:09:22Justin Andrews:and maximize your overall performance. Check out our discounted RGB Super Bundle at mindpumpmedia.com. The RGB Super Bundle includes MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, and MAPS Aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal, Adam, and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs. With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, The RGB Super Bundle is like having Sal, Adam, and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Super Bundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at mindpumpmedia.com.

2:10:07Justin Andrews:If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review on iTunes, and by introducing Mind Pump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support, and until next time, this is Mind Pump.