Transform Your Body with These Science-Backed Fitness Tips

26:15It's not just about the fitness, it's the functionality, it's the performance. He's got both in the bag. He knows his stuff. And I'm talking about the one and only Jay Faruja. Now, even though Jay might scare you to maybe cross over to the other side of the street, he's one of the kindest, smartest, greatest people that I know. And he's so giving with his time and with his wisdom. And in this segment, he's going to be sharing why most people waste valuable time and energy warming up incorrectly. This changed the game for me. Immediate gains I saw firsthand when I started to warm up like Jay and what Jay advises for his clients.

26:59He's going to be sharing the truth about the amount of volume that you need to implement to build muscle and change your body faster. And he's also going to be sharing the top three leg exercises to get the biggest benefit in the shortest amount of time. Enjoy this next segment from the incredible Jay Ferruja. Talk a little bit more about junk volume and also start off by talking about how much volume do we ideally need to target to build muscle, maintain our muscle, and also stay relatively lean. So it's a complicated answer and it becomes increasingly difficult to give a clear answer on that just because of all the research we have now and just the individual kind of differences between people.

27:50And so we used to look at weekly training volume, which I think is still a good metric. But it really kind of comes down to how much volume you do today in today's workout will determine how much you can do 48, 72, 96 hours later. And so I like to look at, there's a few ways to break it down. Like you can look at per workout, how many total sets should you do? That's an easy way to measure volume. So I generally keep most of my clients in anywhere between eight total work sets and about 15, 16. That's it. Now, most people go to the gym, they probably do exponentially more than that. They're probably doing 20, 30 sets.

28:27So we'll look at that. So general, eight to 12 for most of my guys. And then we look at also body parts specific, right? So generally, like there's been meta analysis multiple over the last few years where they study, they look at people doing five sets per body part per week versus 10 versus 15 versus 20. They make the most gains in the five to 10 range. There's some crazy outlandish studies where they'll the more volume, the better. But then if you if what you look at with those is the rest periods, this is kind of crazy. It's hard to even wrap your head around. If you have short rest periods, because each set is less efficient, you need way more volume.

29:04But if you're resting three minutes between sets, then you're fully recovered, you don't need as much volume. So it seems to be for most people, that's why I like to look at studies, but also like to base it on 30 years worth of experience that I have and then talk to other people who have that kind of experience too. We know that the sweet spot's right around six to 10 sets per week per body part. Now, you can do all 10 of those sets on Monday, or you could do three, three, four on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. There's different ways to break it up. But it's not that easy though. That's the thing.

29:38And that's where it gets a little complicated. And then we also have like, this creates fatigue too. So going back, so let's say I go to the gym right now, I do eight sets of chest. That's my whole workout, eight sets of chest. That will create more fatigue for me tomorrow than if I went to the gym and did eight sets, but did two sets of back, two sets of chest, two sets of eyes, two sets of tries, because I won't have as much soreness and muscle damage. So soreness and muscle damage creates fatigue. So now tomorrow's workout is going to suffer more if I just did eight sets of chest. See what I'm saying?

30:08Of course. So, so you, ideally you want to break up the volume and do a little bit less. You don't want to cause all that inflammation and all that fatigue, right? So that's where it gets a little tricky to give a super strict kind of, you know, straight answer. It really depends on the individual. I would say for most people do less, like I start most people out on a full body workout, either three days a week or every other day, I actually prefer every other day. When you're doing that, you really want to start at baseline, which is one set, which is crazy. You do a few warm upsets, you do one hard set for body for each body, chest shoulders back legs you know whatever and then we assess volume and how much you can recover from and then we'll push it up a little bit when you do it that way the strength gains are insane like you'll gain strength most of my guys like dude it's like i'm on steroids these strength gains are crazy now where where we get more complex is certain muscles take longer to recover so you might be able to run that for like let's say six eight ten weeks and everything is skyrocketing but chest always is the slowest pressing people are like yo i'm stalled out i'm pressing.

31:10Pressing universally stalls out the fastest. Pecs are just easily damaged and they're hard to recover. Hamstrings probably second or tied, depending on the individual. Hamstrings get damaged very easily. They recover slowly. So that's why it's hard because it's like individual muscle. It's like, and then what are you doing? Right? So if you're doing a bunch of, like, for example, if you do three sets of a standing leg curl, which trains the hamstring in the shortened position, that's exponentially easier to recover from than if you did three sets of stiff legged deadlift that trains the hamstring in the lengthened position now we're gonna have a ton of soreness muscle damage and fatigue whereas with the standing leg curl we're gonna have no muscle soreness no muscle damage so very little fatigue right so you might be able to do more so all these things have to be taken into account which is like it gets very complex i like to simplify things but if we're really talking you know like really dialing it in it is like rocket science yeah yeah literally and we're the rocket yeah you know yeah and this this is such an important thing you mentioned the rest time like this is something that we don't really consider and a lot of these studies and and one of the ones that i saw recently a big meta-analysis looking at the amount of volume to get in we're recommending 60 to 90 seconds between sets but you had to do more volume over the week you gotta do more sets so it's just less efficient yeah but you can come into it with the mindset of like, I have less time in the gym, so I need to move faster.

32:33Right. And so you can have that mindset, but also you could be like, I have to do less sets if I'm taking more time in between sets. So it's just a different way of looking at it. Either way, you can get an efficient, kind of much shorter workout than what we've been programmed to think about. And I know you've done this, you've seen this, you see guys that are in there for two hours, you know, like literally it's been many times over the years, I go to the gym and somebody's already in their workout and I finished my workout and they're still going. Yeah. You know, and they're just like, and, and, you know, usually some, you know, sometimes like older, you know, uh, and they're just like, you know, I just got my first hour in, you know, about to get into the hour two, you know, just like, you know, more power to you, man.

33:15Yeah. You know? So it's just, again, it's changing our mindset because also, and this isn't to take away something else, which is important, which is the joy part of it too, because this individual, this is a big part of his enjoyment being there at the gym. And so what we're talking about, by the way, we're talking about efficiency and getting in the best shape of your life and transforming your body. And so one of the takeaways now is again, having less sets, right? So let's actually, can you detail, like explain a little bit more for us what we mean by volume? Like, what does that mean? I mean, the easiest way is just the number of sets you're doing for a body part or muscle group.

33:55And then you asked before about junk volume. So that would be what I would describe as junk volume would be any, for the most part, any sets 15 reps and above. That's really junk volume. Now guys are our age, 50, 60 might say, well, I can't do the exercise unless I do 15 to 20 or my joints kill. If that's truly the case, then yes, true. You should do that many reps. But I would say to that person, hey, let's try to find a similar movement that fits you well. It doesn't hurt your knees, your elbows or whatever. If you can do that safely, then we can bring the reps down to a more productive rep range.

34:29It doesn't cause as much fatigue, right? Some people just be like, oh, I can't squat unless I do 30 reps. I'm like, yeah, okay, but maybe let's play around. There's some machines. Maybe there's a different variation of a squat that you can do. you'd have to be really banged up not to be able to do something in an 8 to 12 range. So it would be things over 15 reps I would call junk volume for the most part. There's always exceptions. Sets that are further than two reps from failure I would consider junk volume because then you're just not stimulating any gains really. It's kind of a warm-up set.

34:59And then excess warm-ups are things that I think are junk volume too. And even fitness pros and influencers don't know this when I train together, I'm like, how do you not know how to warm up properly? Nobody knows how to warm up properly the way the way I think you should warm up, which reduces a lot of fatigue. So most people will go in, and they'll do let's say they're let's just say they're going to bench press, right? They'll do 10 or 12 reps, put on more weight to 10 or 12 reps, put on more and keep getting up until they're working weight or top weight or whatever. What I would advise most people to do is go in first set, maybe do eight to 10.

35:32But you want to do the least amount you're only trying to prepare yourself for the work sets so then i might do five to eight then i might do three reps and then one one one now late now if you're moving let's say from your first pressing exercise if you're moving to a second pressing exercise you're already warmed up but most people will do that again 10 10 10 it's like that's not doing anything it's just causing fatigue and it's a complete waste of time so then what i would do is if we're going to the second exercise i might literally just do one to three reps just that you can call them feeder sets just feeling it out whatever you just kind of train your nervous system for a slightly different move like if you're doing an incline press into a flat press so a lot of people just waste time and do junk volume with with uh their warm-up sets like if i'm on a machine that's selectorized with the pin right i'll do i'll sit there and do all my instead of doing 10 i'll do five move the pin down three move the pin down two move the pin down one do the pin down one one one because i'm pretty strong so i might be doing the stack on that but i'm not going to do a set of 10 walk around to another set of 10.

36:31I'll just get the entire warm up done and maybe do 15 reps going all the way down the stack in 30 seconds. Then I'll rest two or three minutes before I start my work set. So that's what I mean by people warming up incorrectly. It's just creating fatigue. And then what that does too is your main set, your money set that you're actually going to stimulate hypertrophy with the weights going to be so much less because you created all that fatigue and just wasted all that energy, you know, especially again, if you're over 40, 50 or whatever, you don't have the energy that you had when you were 20 you know so i want to ask you about this as well when it comes to the splits that we're doing right you mentioned full body every other day and obviously there's a lot of ways to a lot of paths to the goal and you mentioned you know we can get all of those uh sets in the volume on a certain body part in one day right and that's one of the kind of standard things it's like national chest day yeah leg day and just split it up.

37:24But I don't think you get the touch points to keep that really good hypertrophy and your nervous system kind of trained without having those touch points more frequently. And that's just something that I found out. It took me so long to get that because I would. I'd go to the gym and obliterate my legs, be sore for five days and then two days off and then I'm back to blowing my legs up again. But what about a split where we do the kind of classic split where we You got a push day, pull day, legs, maybe a rest day, or just repeat. What about a framework like that? Yeah, like you mentioned, there's so many.

38:01And what you said before was true. So personal preference and enjoyment does weigh into that. Like you might say on paper, hey, a once a week split is no good. But if you love it, then it's great, right? So that's something to really consider. The other thing I would say is most of the time I start people with more frequency, right? Like I said, like full body, the next split would be upper lower. Or you could do, we tend to be married to more traditional splits like full body, upper, lower, push, pull legs. But I split things up in ways that I've never seen before that just kind of makes sense to me based on what I was talking about before, like individual body parts recovery.

38:37So at the end of, let's say, a pull day, I might, if someone wants to do a four-day body part split, right? Like it says they're going to push, pull, legs, arms. Now, I want to get more than once a week frequency. So at the end of the pull day, maybe we'll add in some leg extensions. So now in addition to that leg day, they're getting a second time on legs, but they're not obliterating the legs, right? And then on the arm day, we're hitting some dips or close grips. So now we're getting chest a second time. And then the leg day, maybe we'll throw in a row at the end. So we're getting back a second time.

39:05So you could still do a traditional bodybuilding split, but increase the frequency. And then again, that's individual, you know, maybe what's your priority? If it's shoulders, maybe we'll add more frequency for shoulders, back, you know, same thing. But I tend to stick with really upper, lower or full body most of the time for most people. But you can even do things like push, pull, legs. And for whatever reason, most people think you can only do push, pull, legs once a week, meaning Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or six days a week, Monday through Saturday. But you can do it the way I like to do it is push, pull, off, legs, off, repeat.

39:40So then it's once every five days. Or you could do two on, one off. So push, pull, off, legs, push, and continue to do that way. So it's more frequency. What you can also do is, let's say you decide, I want to bring up my biceps. Normally, you'd only do curls on the pull day, but I throw those rules out. So you might do push, pull, off. Now we do biceps first on leg day because it's your priority. So we get them on the pull day indirectly with all the rows and the pull downs, and we get them directly fresh at the beginning of the leg day. And you could do that with other body parts that are too.

40:13You know, just prioritize them where you want to put them. So there's a lot of ways, non-traditional ways to do splits that I think are really effective. And then again, it's just like, we assess how does the person feel? How much fatigue are you getting? How much soreness are you getting? And what are your results like? And how much are you enjoying it? You know? Yeah. Now you also mentioned, and this is awesome, by the way, you also mentioned how far we want to go in that set, right? You mentioned after getting past generally 15 reps. And again, this there's, there's situations for that, you know, maybe you want to train endurance in some kind of way, you know, to be able to do a bunch of muscle ups, you know, I don't know, you're doing a movie with Tom Cruise or something, you need to do some wild stuff.

40:56But in general, again, if we're looking at what's most effective, we're not getting that high in our rep range, but how far do we want to go? And so my question is, do we want to go to a place where we are at complete muscle failure, right? So how, how, how do we know that our set is the right number of reps? Right. So to produce hypertrophy, to elicit hypertrophy, you want to have really high levels of intramuscular force production. You want to be recruiting those fast twitch fibers. So you do that with heavy loads, generally in a five to eight, five to 10 range. And then you want to be close to failure.

41:38Now, how do you know what failure is? You have to train to failure on a lot of things for a while. And then you know what it is, because there's been studies and just real world experience where people think they're at failure. And they're actually five to seven reps from failure. So it's like, that was a complete that was a warm upset. That was a complete waste of time. And even myself, I've done that. And after training for 30 years, like sometimes if I'm just by myself, I'll be like, I think I have a pretty good gauge of what one rep in reserve is. And I'm like, I don't know, maybe and then I'll get an extra three reps sometimes like, geez, you know, so you really sometimes you have to push to failure.

42:13I don't recommend doing it all the time. That's why but I do like lower volume. One of the benefits of lower volume is you can train harder. And I like to train hard. If I had to leave a bunch of reps in the tank, it would just not be enjoyable for me whatsoever. So lower volume, I tend to train. I tend to work with a lot of type A guys. It's always been that way for 30 years, competitive athletes, now WWE guys, and then just guys our age who are just type A hustlers, right? So they want to train hard. So then again, volume should be lower because you can't train super hard and do a ton of sets, right?

42:43You're just gonna be burnt out all the time. So get to know what failure feels like on all the exercises you're doing, and then leave about one to two reps in the tank, generally one in the tank for the most part. There is a significant difference. Let's say you do 12 sets. If you did those 12 sets to failure, and then next week you did those 12 sets, but you left one rep in the tank, you'll feel the difference in terms of fatigue throughout the week and also your progressive overload, which is the fundamental main rule we want to be following to make any progress, is you'll get significantly better gains.

43:16Each week that you hit that particular workout, you'll go up more and more and faster than if you hit failure on every set. Okay. Now, what about the variety of exercises, right? If we're talking about, let's just talk about back, right? We're training our back, you know, with a lot of trainers, you know, it's a mindset of like, I got to keep my client interested, you know, got to keep mixing it up. Yeah. So what is your perspective on the variety of exercises and how frequently you're changing the exercise you're doing. Yeah. So I used to do that where I would try to entertain clients years ago, but I found that what's entertaining is actually making progress and getting stronger and seeing numbers go up.

43:57I like that more. My clients like that more. So I think too much variety is no good. And so we started talking about fatigue. Too much variety causes too much fatigue. Because if I go in, let's say my workouts, five exercises, if I've been doing those five exercises for weeks in a row, I don't have the CNS demands of having to learn in the coordination demands of having to learn that new movement. Even if it's a movement you've been doing for 20 years, it's still when you do it for the first time in, let's say, six to eight weeks, you're kind of adapting, figuring things out. So it's more nervous.

44:27It's more CNS fatigue if I go in and do five different movements all the time, just a variety like the old - Central nervous system. Yes. Yep. And so it's just more demanding. So you're going to increase more fatigue, and then it's really hard to track progressive overload. And progressive overload, some people could argue, oh, you don't have to go up every workout, and you don't, but it's the only legit measure we have to know is your programming good is it working because if you're going up and wait that's black and white we know if you're just like oh i feel good i'm getting a pump it's like yeah but that's abstract that doesn't tell us anything but if you're able to press 100 today then you go up to 102 and a half and then 105 and we see it going up and then it plateaus then it goes up okay now we know it's working then we can we can say like hey man let's pull out one set here.

45:14Let's stop one rep short of failure here. Then it becomes like a science experiment versus just guesswork. We're just throwing things against the wall and hoping they work, you know? Now with this said, which exercises are best? Now I know this is tough, all right? But maybe this is even a little selfish, all right? So let's talk about training legs. And the reason this matters, thank goodness there's been like a paradigm shift in training legs, all right? There's been a lot of lollipop people walking around, you know, where leg day has been skipped many a time. And so, but there's so much metabolic benefit, performance, power.

45:53There's so many remarkable and vital reasons to train your legs. So I want to ask you, if I had to, like, life or death three best leg exercises all right and for and again keep in mind as well this can be of course for everybody but specifically for people who are over 40 okay what do you think i would say some type of knee flexion so that could be some type of leg curl but what what are the three best i don't want to some type what's the best we just want to build the biggest legs we can without wrecking your joints with feeling good yes okay so a seated leg curl okay i i personally like a glute ham race for variety and because you just feel good like your knees hips and back feel great it's a body weight exercise but it's really hard to do most division one athletes can't even do one rep so we're just going picking one i'm picking a really well-designed seated leg curl the reason a seated is better than a lying and a standing is because the seated trains the length in position see if i'm here and my leg straight out it's training from a stretch position which generally if you're looking at exercises and ranking them in a hypertrophy perspective you want to train the stretch position and the mid-range the shortened position doesn't really matter that much that's why like a leg extension is just icing icing on the cake so i'm gonna go seated leg curl some type of squat variation now this is where we it's hard to pick one because everybody's so different what kills your knees my knees might feel great someone else like yeah so it's gonna be some type of squat um if i had to pick one i would say generally most people can do a safety bar squat especially if we add a little heel wedge because most people don't have the ankle mobility to do it perfectly so if i had to pick one that would be it a safety bar squat with either a 10 or 15 degree wedge safety bar what is that the safety bar is the bar with the pad and the shoulder thing that comes here so what that it's a it's a back squat bar but it has a piece in the front exactly so you can have your the benefit is really for shoulder health is if you get older and you're tighter sometimes it's hard you don't have the external rotation to get back here and then all of a sudden you're kind of hurting your shoulders on leg day which makes no sense so then you go press the next day you're like why are my shoulders stiff from leg day right it doesn't make sense so and it does you tend to be able to stay upright a little bit more there's some things uh some benefits so a seated leg curl a safety bar squat with heels elevated and then some you got to do some type of single leg thing so that's if i had to just pick one of course there's all different split squat variations there's walking lunges i would go with a rear foot elevated split squat those would be those would be the three isn't there another name for that bulgarian split the bulgarian split squat yes yeah the last time i trained with luca okay you know we did that as well and there's so many different variation of that too you know obviously you can do a weighted you could you know uh do one hand with the way one hand here one hand here two hands safety bar regular bar i mean there's a million ways to do it if for the purpose of this exercise that you challenged me i had to do one i would have it with stability because we're looking at hypertrophy so without stability you're going to have less force production less intermuscular force production so if i'm having to balance now if i hold that dumbbell in one hand on my rear leg and i hold on to the upright of the power rack I'm going to get a greater hypertrophy stimulus out of that.

49:20If you're an athlete and you're just training stability and whatever, fine. But if we're just looking at hypertrophy, I'm going to grab on. And anytime I increase the stability of an exercise, it's better for hypertrophy. Now, that doesn't mean you just do machines because then you walk around like Frankenstein. But, you know, you prioritize some things. Got a quick break coming up. We'll be right back. This episode is brought to you by the incredible team at Organifi and their phenomenal superfood blends. Not only does their best-selling green juice blend have the most powerful green superfoods, it also has a therapeutic amount of ashwagandha.

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51:33And now back to the show. We've got one more expert in store for you in this summer's not over fitness compilation. And this is going to be a good one. Our next expert has another 30 years of experience in this field. He's a bestselling author and he's part of one of the biggest fitness podcasts on planet Earth. I'm talking about the one and only Sal DiStefano. And in this segment, he's going to be talking about sometimes the brutal honesty about why cardio is ineffective for fat loss. If we're looking for fat loss and that body transformation, cardio is probably not going to be the place that our attention needs to be pointed.

52:16He's going to be talking about why weight loss plateaus happen in the first place and what we can do to circumvent that. And lastly, he's going to be sharing his secret sauce when it comes to the ideal frequency for training specific muscle groups. Enjoy this segment with the one and only Sal DiStefano. So I do want to start off by being very clear because I don't want to send the wrong message. Cardiovascular activity or exercise is good for you. All activity done properly and applied appropriately is going to improve your health. the challenge or the problem is when people make cardiovascular activity the cornerstone of a fat loss routine.

52:57So they don't go into it saying, I just want to improve my health and gain more stamina. They say, I want to lose 30 pounds. Let me pick this form of exercise and make this the cornerstone of my routine. And it's just, it's a terribly ineffective form of exercise for that, for a few different reasons. I think first though we need to start with why that's typically chosen as the frontline form of exercise because if you talk to the average person and you say hey what's the best form of exercise for fat loss they're probably going to pick a form of cardio right they'll say running or cycling or swimming or something along those lines and it really goes back to this which there's there's truth to this but it's just oversimplification to this model of of weight loss that we've understood for decades now right and the model is that you need to to burn more calories than you take in, or put differently, take in less calories than you burn.

53:50And you create that energy imbalance, and then that's how you lose weight, which is true. It's much more complex than that, but there's truth to that. So then what they've done, and we won't talk about the food part yet, we can talk about that later. Let's look at the calorie burn part, right? When they say, okay, we need to burn more calories, what they did is they looked at all forms of activity, and they've ranked them in terms of how many calories you burn while you do them. So this is how people will typically rank the value of different forms of exercise. They'll say, how many calories does that burn in an hour?

54:20That's more effective than that one over there because it burns more calories. And that's wrong because it ignores the real most important factor to consider with exercise, which is how does this form of exercise get my body to adapt? And then what does that mean? Because that's what we really want to focus on. So why should we not look at calories burned while we exercise? Well, number one, it's not a lot. So even if you did an hour of cardio every single day vigorously, average person is going to burn maybe 250 to 300 calories doing that. By the way, those cardio machines at the gym will lie to you.

54:54So you'll do an elliptical and it'll tell you burn 800 calories. They make those numbers up, I think, to get people to buy those machines. Average person, 250 to 300 calories. And it's a very manual way of doing so. It takes a lot of work. I'm dedicating an hour of strenuous activity to burn this 250 to 300 calories. But that's not it. That's not all. That form of exercise induces adaptations in the body that eventually get my body to learn how to burn less calories. So initially, I'm burning more calories by doing that. But because that form of exercise requires little strength, it really doesn't require much strength to do long distance jogging or cycling or swimming or an elliptical.

55:37It does require a lot of stamina. and because it is calorie, I guess, intensive for the time being done, your body adapts to try to become better at it or more efficient at it. So to use an analogy, it would be like owning a very advanced AI car that adapted to your driving habits. So imagine if you own this car and you drove 350 miles every day at 40 miles an hour. How would this car adapt? Well, it would become a one-cylinder engine, would burn very, very little gasoline or become battery operated, become very efficient with energy. Right. And so this is what your body ends up doing. You end up paring muscle down in order to become more efficient and have better capacity for the stamina, require less energy to do these types of activities.

56:24So over time, what you see is you'll initially see a weight loss, then the body adapts to become better. And then you get this real strong plateau. And by the way, that initial weight loss and studies will show this. a nice chunk of that comes from muscle. Now, you're not burning the muscle. Your body's just adapting and paring the muscle down. So you end up with a slower metabolism, which is why when people do that, they initially lose weight, they plateau. And then to continue losing weight, they have to do more cardio or cut their calories even more. And that road leads to something that's just not sustainable.

56:59You know, I'm eating 1 ,600 calories, 1 ,500 calories or less a day. I'm doing an hour of cardio five or six days a week. I've only lost 15 of the 30 pounds I want to lose. This is not sustainable for most people. So instead, what we need to do is we need to look at exercise and say, which form of exercise induces the adaptations that will make my body want to burn more calories on its own? It doesn't require me to go and try and move. Which one's going to end up with or help me end up with a sustainable body where I can maintain this with less work and stay leaner easier? And the answer to that is strength training, resistance training.

57:37It's by far the most effective form of exercise for fat loss. And what you're saying is incredibly logical. You know, we're looking at adaptation, what type of adaptation for our bodies, for our metabolism, for our hormones, are we really looking to create? But this isn't regularly talked about. It's more... And I love this. You just literally brought it up, which is we're looking specifically at calories burned doing the thing. Yeah. Versus when we're doing resistance training and not having that hyper-focused kind of tunnel vision on that one thing, looking at the metabolic changes, which we're going to talk about.

58:13But I want to lean into this a little bit more because essentially when you talked about that adaptation, when doing a lot of cardio, you're creating a body that gets very good at doing a lot of cardio. Yeah. So let's extrapolate that a little bit more. Yeah, you know, there was a study that was done that I remember when I first saw really confirmed what those of us in the gym and fitness industry have known for a long time. I've been in gyms professionally for over two decades. And we would refer to members who would come in and jump on the Stairmaster and the treadmill day in and day out as cardio bunnies.

58:49And very typical, they would kind of skinny, you know, excuse the term skinny fat, right? They would lose a lot of muscle. Body fat percentage would be kind of high. And they'd be kind of stuck in this kind of plateau. And sometimes they'd come and talk to me as a gym manager. Why isn't this working? What's going on? I'm coming in every single day. And we saw that all the time. Well, there was a study that was done on a modern hunter-gatherer tribe called the Hadza. So they live the way that humans probably lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. So no modern technology, no modern agriculture.

59:23They hunt their food. They gather very active in comparison to the average Western couch potato. Okay. And scientists went down there and with some really sophisticated testing, were able to test their metabolisms. How many calories are these Hadzat tribes people burning every single day? Now, the results were remarkable. What they found was that these Hadzat tribes people burned generally the same amount of calories as the average Western couch potato. So at first you think to yourself, how's this possible? They're moving all the time. I mean, the way you hunt as a hunter gatherer is you stalk your prey, you throw something at it, you injure it, and then you run after it for, you know, 10 miles till it gets exhausted.

1:00:05And then you bring it back. It's like, how are they burning as many calories as, you know, John who sits on his couch and watches TV and has a desk job. But if you really think about it, it makes perfect sense. If our bodies didn't adapt to become more efficient with that type of activity, there's way humans would have survived. It's very hard to come across calories in nature. You know, if we were burning 8 ,000 calories a day because we were running after prey and gathering food, we just, we wouldn't have made it. So that type of activity teaches our bodies to become very, very efficient. There's also studies done on contestants from The Biggest Loser.

1:00:43I don't know if you're familiar with that show. So this show, by the way, any trainer who's been a trainer for a long period of time, that show is like the bane of fitness. You watch it and you're like, man, they do everything wrong. But they beat these people up. They have them run like crazy. They use weights like cardio. So they make them do circuits and they restrict their calories. They lose tons and tons of weight. And then afterwards, there was a study that followed them. And it found that, well, weight gain was quite common. And those that were able to maintain the weight loss were eating something like 1300 calories a day and active all the time.

1:01:13That's unsustainable for most people, especially when you consider modern life where food is everywhere. It's easily accessible. It's very challenging. Getting an hour of exercise every day, for people like me, I'm a fitness fanatic. It's hard to keep me out of the gym. But the average person, if we can convince the average person to work out twice a week consistently, we've done a phenomenal job. And we're probably not going to get much more than that. So it's just an unsustainable approach. And so those adaptations lend themselves well to the activity that you're trying to do. You become more efficient with calories.

1:01:47You burn less while you're doing it. Your body pairs muscle down. It organizes its hormones in a way to do so. And you become a more efficient calorie storing machine in contrast to strength training in which you don't burn a ton of calories while you strength train, but the adaptations, the muscle building process, even just the signaling of building muscle, you don't have to build a ton of muscle. Just telling your body, we need more muscle and feeding your body appropriately. your body becomes less efficient with calories. You see yourself, your metabolism start to actually speed up. And the result of that, which I experienced time and time again as a trainer, is I'd get clients to lose weight over time.

1:02:26At the end of their, you know, quote unquote, weight loss journey, or when we hit their goal, they're eating more than they did when they started. Now that's sustainable, you know. Imagine if I could snap my fingers and make everybody be able to burn, you know, 800 more calories a day. I would solve a lot of the obesity epidemic. just from doing that. So that's, yeah, that's the big focus of that particular form of exercise and why it's failed, why it just doesn't work for so many people. Wow, that's powerful. And the thing is too, number one, what I really admire about you is we have this clinical data, yes, check, but you also have this real world experience in working with all these people and being able to see this firsthand.

1:03:07And we cannot negate this. Like it's one of the most important things in the human experience, you know, this quote, anecdotal data. Like, you see this firsthand and say something that's so kind of counterintuitive in how we're trained. Somebody's eating more calories at the end, they've reached their weight loss goals, and they're actually being able to eat more. Like, that doesn't make sense. Because again, if you see the suffering that people have had to undertake doing The Biggest Loser, where they have to maintain this incredibly low amount of, like, that should be relegated to like an eight-year-old, Right?

1:03:39For the rest of their life and keep exercising their face off in order to maintain that weight loss. Yeah, you know, you talked about, you mentioned clinical data. You know, the studies now, finally, are supporting what I'm saying. There's a lot of studies now. A lot now. But if you go back, when I started in fitness over two decades ago, there were none on strength training. All the studies that were done on exercise to look at the benefits of exercise on health and fat loss and cognitive function, we're all cardiovascular based. Part of that is because it's probably, it's a lot easier to get a hamster run on a hamster wheel than it is to get a hamster lift weights.

1:04:13So animal studies are easy with cardio. It's also, you need to know a little bit about strength training to study strength training with subjects versus, hey, let's just have people run or cycle, and then we'll look at the effects. So all the studies done, you know, two decades ago were done on athletic performance. So strength training, great for explosive power, great for strength, you know, good for football players or baseball players. But we didn't have any that studied strength training for cognitive function, blood lipids, fat loss, heart health. But we have them now. And the data now is very clear.

1:04:52Strength training is the most effective form of exercise for pure fat loss. So when I say fat loss, by the way, I'm not talking about weight loss, because you could lose 20 pounds, half of it can be muscle, and you end up just being a smaller slower metabolism, same flabbiness version of yourself, right? Resistance training leads to pure fat loss. And in most cases, you get some muscle gain with that, which we could talk about. Some people are afraid of that. They think, oh, if I gain muscle, I'm going to look bulky and big. Not true. You're just much more sculpted and have a better shape to your body.

1:05:23Studies on heart health show that strength training is at least as beneficial as cardiovascular exercise for heart health. Now, of course, the best combination, again, I want to be clear, the best forms or way to work out if you have the time and you are dedicated is to combine a lot of different forms of exercise. But we're talking head to head and I'm also talking to again the average person that's probably only going to do a couple days a week of exercise consistently, right? Cognitive function, here's where it gets really interesting. There was a study out of Sydney, Australia that looked at strength training and Alzheimer's and it was the only, this is one of the only times we've ever seen a non-medical intervention slow down and stop the progression of the beta amyloid plaques that lead to or at least contribute to the symptoms of Alzheimer's.

1:06:10How is that possible? Probably, and this is a really interesting point here, probably because one of the most effective ways to improve insulin sensitivity is to simply build muscle. And Alzheimer's and dementia, some researchers will even refer to as type 3 diabetes. You'll see that there's something connected there where, and this is why when you put people on Alzheimer's on a ketogenic diet, you tend to see some improvements because there's a dysfunction there with utilizing glucose for energy. So you improve insulin sensitivity, you tend to improve cognitive function. Well, you gain a little bit of muscle and you see tremendous improvements in insulin sensitivity.

1:06:50There's studies on severely obese individuals where they don't even have them lose weight. They just have them gain a little bit of muscle. And you see these great improvements in blood sugar and insulin. Muscle is very insulin sensitive. It's also one of the ways we store glycogen, which is made from carbohydrates. So you got your liver that stores glycogen, and then you got your muscle. So you get more muscle, you have more ability to store, becomes more sensitive to it. Insulin is a very anabolic hormone. It actually contributes to muscle growth if you do it right. So, and there's, again, there's so much more, but we now finally have studies coming out that are showing like, wait a minute.

1:07:28One of my favorites is the strength studies that show how a simple strength test, like a grip test, that simple test right there will predict all cause mortality better than almost any other single metric. So like you can compare it to cholesterol or blood pressure or other metrics in a grip test is more accurate in terms of all-cause mortality. So strength is very important for longevity. Muscle is very protective. And thankfully now we're having the studies. And I named the book, The Resistance Training Revolution. I think the revolution is gonna happen anyway. I think we're already starting to move in that direction because the data now is finally starting to confirm what those of us in fitness have seen for decades now.

1:08:11Awesome, awesome. So a little bit more advanced question, that adaptation, just say somebody's skilled, They've already, you know, they've practiced. They've got that under their belt. And, you know, maybe they're, you know, lifting certain muscle groups in a day. How many times should they be targeting that particular muscle group? So, for example, if it is chest and shoulders, should we be going, you know, twice a week or maybe a following week or longer? What does that look like? So, they've done a lot of studies on this. And the ideal frequency of training body parts is probably around three.

1:08:48Okay, so each body part you want to train about three days a week. Now, how can you do this? There's a lot of different ways to do this. You could do a body part split where you're training three body parts on this day, three body parts on that day, another three, and then over the course of a week, you've done everything three times. I personally have seen by far the most success, not just with myself but with the people I've trained, by just training full body. So you go to the gym two days a week, three days a week, just train your whole body. Start with the larger body parts. so legs then go to back and chest shoulders arms and then maybe finish with your core um but that'll do that'll do everything for you i also like full body workouts because the when you send a muscle building signal um most of it is localized so if i work out my bicep most of the muscle building signal goes to my bicep but there's also systemic effect that happens so like there's really cool studies where um someone will have an arm that's incapacitated and then they'll work out the other arm and they actually lose less muscle from the arm that's incapacitated right because it's this kind of systemic effect whole body workouts send this really nice systemic muscle building effect for people so i've just seen better results with full body workouts with most people the people that benefit from the body part splits are typically so advanced that the amount of training that they would have to do with a full body workout would just make the workout inconvenient It would be a two-and-a-half-hour workout because they do so much per area, in which case it makes sense to split the body up.

1:10:17But most people, full body. Great, great. So this paradigm of having the leg day once a week, that's not going to be ideal. No. When you send the muscle-building signal, we know that when they've done this in studies, we see the muscle-building signal rise very quickly, peak, and then drop very quickly after about 48 to 72 hours. even if you're still recovering. Remember, the adaptation signal is different, right? So even if you're still sore, that muscle protein synthesis signal peaks and then drops. So you probably want to hit the same body part at least three or four days later, not a whole week later, in which case you'll get some muscle building effect, but you'll miss out on quite a bit.

1:11:01Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode today. I hope that you got a lot of value out of this. Apply, apply, apply. I know you got a variety of different insights and tips, but most importantly, just take something and put it into practice for yourself. Utilizing the knowledge of these incredible experts. We're talking about these are historical people. All right. They know a thing or 3000 and they've really given you some of their best insights. This isn't complex. It really boils down to practicality and most importantly just getting in there and testing using that end of one experiment to find out what works best for you applying some of these insights getting that physical feedback but i'm telling you chances are you apply a couple of these strategies you're going to see an incredible transformation in your physical fitness if you enjoyed this please share it out with your friends and family you can share it on social media you can send this directly from the podcast app that you're listening on as somebody that you care about share the fitness inspiration We got some incredible masterclasses and world-class guests coming your way very, very soon.

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