EP 122: Sane Fitness: A No-Shame Approach | Sal Di Stefano

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi, welcome to another episode of the Radical Responsibility podcast. My name is Fleet Ball. I'm your host and I'm excited to share with you my latest episode with fitness expert Sal DeStefano, co founder of the Maps fitness program and Mind Pump Media, an incredibly popular media platform, but also an incredibly popular podcast. I love that Sal Di Stefano, who comes from a really hardcore fitness background and had his own ups and downs where he kind of pushed himself so hard that he kind of had his own crash and learned the hard way that pushing ourselves that hard is not really ideal for fitness. And we actually explore the fact that you could be really ripped and really buff and not be that healthy. Now, there's nothing wrong with getting ripped, but what is really the underlying state of health and wellness? And he really has a completely no shame approach to fitness. So he's a hardcore fitness guy that understands physiology and fitness very deeply in many, many different systems and has developed his own system. But what I really love about it is, is he brings this completely no shame approach to looking at how we can improve our fitness and our health, which we're all concerned about. So I'm really excited for you to learn more about Sal DeStefano and mind pump Media.

Enjoy. Welcome, Sal.

Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

We're really happy to have you from Mind Pump Media. So I'm going to tell our audience just a little bit about you and then we'll just roll into the conversation. Sound good?

Perfect.

Great. So Sal is co founder of the Maps fitness program and Mind Pump Media, a platform offering science based fitness knowledge and programs. He's also one of the co hosts of the very popular Mind Pump podcast. At the age of 18, Sal's passion for the art and science of resistance training was so consuming, he decided to make it a profession and became a personal trainer. By 19, he was managing health clubs and by 22, he owned his own gym. After 17 years as a personal trainer, he has now dedicated himself to bringing science and truth to the fitness industry.

So I really want to get into your story here and I looked at your bio on the website and it was kind of an encapsulated version of your story and I just think it's such a great story for this summit. Right? Because just ordinary people going after their Dreams. Right. And so I really like to start there and go back as far as you want. But I know in your bio you referenced being a 14 year old skinny kid lifting up his first weight and where it developed there. And then you had some major setbacks, but you didn't let that stop you. And so let's hear your story.

Yeah, I got started personally in fitness. I think a lot of the ways that most people get started in fitness, there were things about myself I did not like and I had some insecurities and I decided I wanted to do something about it. And I was a 14 year old kid, I was a bit young, but luckily my dad had a weight set, a pretty rudimentary weight set in the backyard and got the clearance from my parents, begged them to let me work out and they finally said sure. And I went back there and I started to work out. I fell in love with it right away. I think it was the empowering effects of exercise. Exercise and fitness is a very basic yet powerful form of personal development. I didn't know this as a kid. All I knew was I could initiate change in myself through exercise and through hard work. I'm much more of a bookworm than an athlete. And so when I started working out, I read everything I possibly could on exercise, nutrition, even started reading books on chemistry so I could learn about supplements. And it was just something that I absolutely loved. At the age of 18, I was old enough to become a personal trainer. Walked into a gym, introduced myself to the manager, got hired, and it was the first time in my life I really felt like I was doing what I was supposed to do. I fell in love with it, combined my two favorite things, which were exercise and people. And that's what you end up doing as a personal trainer. Now, through the years of training people and really wanting to help them and also training myself, you really start to progress and change your views of fitness or how you apply it to yourself. As I said earlier, I started out because I was insecure about my body. But eventually I realized through training other people. I think sometimes if there's any trainers watching this right now, or coaches, I think they can relate to what I'm talking about. You tend to coach and train other people better than you train yourself. It's harder to self reflect at times. So working with other people, I really started to realize that going into self improvement from a position of self hate, which really is what it boils down to I hate my body, I hate that I'm skinny, or I hate that I'M fat or don't like the way I look. Although that can initially get someone started, it's not a long term approach. At some point I think we, without realizing, get sick of hating ourselves and so we stop the whole process. And that's evidenced by the common things people say when they stop exercising and eating right, which is, I just want to live my life. Why did you stop working out? Why did you stop eating healthy? I just want to enjoy my life. Well, of course it's not enjoyable because you're coming from a place of self hate. So through this process of training people, I started to really, because I really wanted to help people. That was the big thing. And little by little, I started to realize that the approach I had come in with wasn't effective. I mean, sure, I could get people to lose weight and get stronger and improve their health in the short term, but if I was being quite honest with myself in the long term, I was failing. Many of these people fell into the normal statistic of 80 to 90% of people who start a fitness program or try to change their diet end up going back to how they were living before. And that was true for my clients as well. As soon as they weren't working with me, right back to what they were doing before. And so if I was being honest, I wasn't doing a good job. I wasn't helping people achieve a lifelong relationship with health, fitness and wellness. So I started to realize that really it was the root driver was wrong. And I figured out that if you go into exercise, if you go into nutrition or improving your health from a standpoint of self care, from a standpoint of self love, rather than going to the gym and saying I need to work out because I hate the way I look, instead going to the gym and saying, right now my body reflects the fact that I haven't taken care of myself very well. I haven't been very kind to myself. So now I'm going to go and I'm going to take care of myself. I'm going to treat myself like someone who's worthy of being taken care of. That standpoint leads to a much more successful leading to a lifelong relationship with exercise and fitness. Now, currently.

Let me just interrupt you there for a moment. I just really want to land this point because, and I didn't really, I hadn't heard this much of your message before, but this is so perfectly in line with the message that we're trying to deliver overall with the summit. You know, as I said before, so many of us Kind of get into some kind of self improvement out of either some kind of self hatred or just a sense of unworthiness or not being okay or not being enough. The way we are and our feeling is that all of our efforts need to be grounded in self love and self kindness. And then we can just tap into our natural. It's like any life form. We're here to thrive and evolve and grow. And if we nurture ourselves the same way, we might take care of a beautiful houseplant or something, we will thrive and grow. But it's reversing that psychology that I think gets in the way and really stops most people from all the different improvement regimens they get into because they're grounded in that self hatred unworthiness. I just really wanted to land that because that's just exactly what we're trying to deliver here.

Yeah, no, yeah, it's a very important point. In fact, that's what we communicate quite a bit on our podcast. You know, my co hosts are also have also lots of experience as trainers. In fact, now we're at the point now where we all have over two decades of experience working with people. And it actually takes a long time to figure this out. Really does. Especially when you go into fitness because you yourself want to hate the way you look, right? But after a while when you're helping people, you start to kind of piece this together. I'll give you some more examples. This might actually resonate with some of the people watching right now. Think of the last time you tried to go on a diet, okay?

You cut out. Let's say you cut out sugar or you cut out sweets and you're a month into it and you're being really good and strict with yourself. And you go over someone's house, let's say you go visit with a friend and your friend brings out a plate of cookies that they just baked earlier with their kids. And they say, hey, would you like a cookie? And you respond and say, no, I can't. I can't have a cookie. Okay, that doesn't sound very like a big deal to say that, but let's dive a little deeper. First off, what do you mean you can't have a cookie? Of course you can. Who is preventing you? The tyrannical version of yourself that you created to punish yourself. So when you're going into this with self hate, what ends up happening is you actually divide yourself into maybe a parental tyrannical figure and the child that needs to be told what to do. So you say to yourself, I can't have that cooking now that doesn't last very long. Nobody likes to be, you know, oppressed for very long. At some point you rebel. Which by the way, this is why when people go off a diet, they don't just go off the diet, they actually go in the reverse direction in a very big way. This is what you start to see, the binging, right? So instead of having one cookie, they have a whole box of cookies because they're rebelling the same way a child may rebel. Now if you went into it from a standpoint of self care and the person brought out a plate of cookies, you may say to the person, no thanks, I don't want any cookies, I don't want a cookie. Or you may say to yourself, sure, I'll have a cookie, I think I'll enjoy that one right now. This is where natural balance comes into play. So this is a very, very important thing to focus on. Because without this, all of the mechanical, all of the factors, the mechanical factors of exercise and diet really don't matter. It doesn't matter if you've got the perfect workout and the perfect diet, if subconsciously it's a punishment, if subconsciously it's restrictive because it'll never last. It's impossible.

Absolutely.

In fact, the only people that are consistent who come from a place of self hate are also unhealthy people. These are fanatics. Orthorexia as an eating disorder, I see quite a bit in the fitness space. So this is an important place to start from. If you start from this place.

Then the journey becomes much more balanced. If you have a day where you're not so kind to yourself, if you have a day where you come home from work and you're stressed out, you had an argument with your boss and you end up self medicating with a bowl of ice cream, well afterwards it's not this.

I hate myself. I can't believe I did that. It becomes more of a, you had a tough day and you self medicated a little bit and I have a little bit empathy for you. You know what I'm going to do tomorrow? Tomorrow I'm going to go to the gym and I think I'm going to train in a way that's going to help me relax. Somebody who hates themselves might say, you know what I'm going to do tomorrow? I'm going to go to the gym and burn as many calories as possible. Exercise becomes a punishment.

You're going to punish yourself.

Yeah, correct. So this is a very important and by the way, I also want to make this.

I also need to illuminate this part of this. Self care and self love.

Being honest is a part of this. And what I mean by that is, I think sometimes people confuse that with. Because I'll say to them, well, you need to take care of yourself. And they'll say, but I am overweight. Okay? You can objectively say to yourself, there are parts of my physical body or there are reflections of my old lifestyle that I can see in my physical body that need to be worked on. That's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. You may have fat on your body, but you are not fat. That's not who you are, for example. So you can be objective. You can look in the mirror, you can say, I can see that I've been living a life where I haven't been too kind to myself. And I can see it physically or I can feel it emotionally or mentally. And then you move forward and you treat yourself like somebody you care about.

This is just so important. I mean, this is really the critical psychology of personal evolution. And in my work I use Stephen Carbon's drama triangle a lot where we get into drama with others and ourselves around the victim, personal persecutor, rescuer, and we do that with ourselves, right? So we self medicate and rescue and then we beat ourselves up and persecute ourselves and we play the victim beside, well, I can't have that cake because my tyrannical persecutor won't let me have the cake or whatever. And we're just endlessly hooked into that drama. And the only way out of that is through reasonable self care and self kindness and then getting into our adult and being objective. Right, exactly what you're talking about. And it's absolutely the critical psychology of genuine personal evolution. And it's exactly what gets in everybody's way when we come at it from this, from this notion of self improvement, like I'm not enough, but if I can use my kind of angry parent to beat myself up enough, maybe I'll be okay, you know? And it just never works. Never works.

No, it doesn't work. And you know, to give another example, because I think it's really important to give lots of examples and come at it from different angles because it needs to click. I think once it clicks, then it can be quite transforming. Someone might confuse self care with indulgence, right? They may say, oh, I love myself, I'm just going to just eat all this pleasurable hedonistic food, or I'M not going to succumb my physical body to any type of stress or strenuous workout because I love myself. So I'm just going to lay on the couch and okay, let's just pretend you're taking care of your child so you have a kid that you love and care for. And I say this because parents, this really resonates with parents. And your kid comes up to you and says, hey dad, can I eat five cookies? You'll probably say no because you love them, you care about them. You might say yes to a cookie here and there, but you also probably will, for the most part, have them eat a healthy, balanced meal. Well, what if your kid comes to you and says, I just want to sit on the couch and play video games all day long. I don't want to do anything else. You might say, well, no, that's not. I care about you and I want you to do things that are going to help you. It's okay to play video games sometimes, but we also need to do things that take care of you. So discipline and oftentimes not indulging is a part of taking care of yourself. And taking care of yourself is not easy or I shouldn't say, is not expedient, but it is very meaningful and it does give you a lot of sense of purpose. And when you start to, by the way, this is a skill that you develop. So I want people to understand this doesn't happen overnight. If you start to practice this, just like any skill, you get better at better. And you had sent something earlier about people making New Year's resolutions and falling off the wagon. This might have been off the air, but that comes from falling in love with the feeling of motivation and feeling inspired. And there's nothing wrong with feeling motivated and inspired, but that is not a permanent state of being. The skill of discipline and self care is what continues those practices. And it is a skill just like any skill, like swinging a baseball bat, throwing a baseball or whatever. If you practice it and start off where you're at. By the way, don't start too far above. I'm not going to. If I first learn how to play baseball, I'm not going to go play a game with a bunch of pros. I'm going to learn the basics and I'm going to start very slow, start slow, build the skill, they build on top of them. But once you have this skill and once self care becomes automatic now you have a balanced lifelong relationship with fitness and health.

Yeah, absolutely. In my experience, you know, when we move beyond that initial motivation and inspiration.

For whatever kind of personal evolution that we're focused on. You know, whether it's our health and well being or physical fitness or our spiritual path, meditating more, becoming a better business person, improving our relationships. It's becoming a practitioner of personal evolution where we actually sort of fall in love with the practice itself. Which doesn't mean we're going to love every workout, we're going to love every day, but we do begin to kind of love being in discipline. We just become. That gives tremendous meaning to my life that I have regimens I do every day. It gives me confidence, it gives me a sense of self efficacy. And I just feel good to be in some. Like my life is training. So if I feel like I'm in training, there's something about we kind of fall in love with that. Does that resonate with you?

Oh, no, that's a very, very important point that you make there. First off, all of the real benefits, all of the real value that comes from.

Any goal, whether it be fitness or anything else, really doesn't come from the goal itself, but rather the journey.

You could be dropped off on the top of Mount Everest and you will have nowhere near the development or value that you would have gotten had you climbed the mountain. And in reference to what you said about falling in love with discipline, the man who is in love with the discipline of taking a step every single day will walk much further than the man who falls in love with the goal of getting to a destination. So.

If you fall in love with the discipline.

And the skill of discipline, then you're less likely to fall off the wagon. You're less likely to not eat healthy, not exercise and those kinds of things. If you fall in love with the goal, if all you think about is the goal, I got to lose 15 pounds, okay? I can't remember the name of it. There's actually a psychological. There's a phrase in psychology for this where people will think of a goal like, I need to win an Olympic gold medal or I need to write a bestseller, you know, we interviewed Mark Manson, who's the author of the Subtle Art of Not Giving an F, right?

Giving an F. Yeah.

And he told us how depressed he got after his book became a bestseller because he had focused so strongly on I need to get a bestseller. He got to that point and then now what? What do I do now? So forget the goals, although goals are important measures and there's nothing wrong with having goals. But don't. That is not the focus the focus is the journey. The focus is the discipline. And if you do that, think about it this way. If you love taking care of yourself through eating in a way that's balanced and healthy, that's what you love. You love that. Are you ever going to have a problem with doing those things? Of course not. So this is true for exercise as well.

That's really great. And, you know, there is an interesting balance there because goals can be very helpful. And we're teleological beings. We can't really do that which we can't envision. We step into that which we can envision. So sometimes having a clear place that we envision, a clear goal can be a real driver. Although, as you said in Mark Manson's case, and I hadn't heard that story from him, you know, some people will drive themselves to incredible accomplishments, but they're not really healthy. They're not taking care of themselves, and they're paying the cost of the shadow side of that. But it still, it can be healthy to have those goals and have kind of a relentless pursuit. But if you don't fall in love with the journey itself, there's something that's not going to be healthy and deep about it in the long run. I think somehow it's that balance. It was a book I fell in love with early on in my life by George Leonard called Mastery. And he was a newspaper reporter that got into aikido late, I think in his 50s. And he just fell in love with Discipline. And his book was all about mastery. Not as a goal that you get to, but it's just like an. It's a spirit and an ethos, and it's just a quality that you love just being in his process of continually cultivating mastery in whatever you're doing. And he actually fell in love with the discipline. And, you know, he became a black belt, Nikita. But that was kind of beside the point. He actually was just in love with the process itself.

Exactly. It is all about the journey. And so if you wake up each day and you say to yourself, in a very true and honest sense.

How can I take care of myself today? What do I need to be taken care of? More often than not, you'll make the right decision, and Balance naturally falls into that. So if you. To use more examples in my space, which is fitness and nutrition, I may be at a holiday party. And there's my aunt I haven't seen for a year. I haven't seen her since last year. And she made her homemade lasagna that she Makes once a year. And yes, I'm a fitness and health guy, but at that moment, what's healthy for me is bonding with my aunt over her homemade lasagna. And so that's what I'm going to do at that moment. And that's healthy for me. Now, most of the time, it probably means eating things that are physiologically healthy for me, balancing out my calories and proteins and fats and carbs and eating foods that nourish my body. That's what it usually means. But at other times, it means enjoying a couple glasses of wine with my wife. And so this is the balance that everybody is, I think, yearning for. Now, is this approach going to make you look like a shredded bodybuilder? No, no. That's a very unhealthy. By the way, it's not a balanced approach to get there. That's also a problem. I think sometimes people, they idolize unhealthy images. But what you will accomplish with that, quite honestly, is a relatively. Okay. And I'm saying this just to sell people now because this is an important aspect of trying to communicate what I'm saying. What you'll accomplish through this approach is a relatively strong, fit, mobile, and relatively lean body. You will literally look physically. You will be a representation of balance and health, which looks phenomenal, looks really good.

I always tell people I'm completely ripped under a slightly protective outer layer.

So from what I read your story, you. You had your own setback, your own physical and health setback, and you really had to shift your approach. You were already successful, but then you got into a real physical setback. Could you share something about that?

Yeah, absolutely. So in my early 30s, I owned a wellness facility. And I had owned it at this point for about seven or eight years. And I was, at this point in my life, I was very much the stereotypical fitness trainer. So I knew biomechanics, I knew exercise. I knew how to build muscle, burn calories. I knew macronutrients, protein, fat and carbs and calories and that kind of stuff. So that was me. And I still trained myself in a way to build muscle and look a particular way. I still had that insecurity. I still was driven by those feelings. Now in my facility, thankfully, looking back, I'll pat myself on the back here for a second. I did at least have people in my facility that were good in other aspects of wellness. So the goal with my wellness facility was to offer a space where I could have multiple and different modalities surrounding wellness. So I had Acupuncturists. I had somebody that did hormone and gut testing. I had physical therapy. I had bodywork specialists in there. So although I never personally utilized their services, and I didn't quite understand how, you know, the value that they really provided, I at least saw that they could provide value for my customers. So thankfully, I had those people in my facility, and I learned a little bit from them, but I was still in my own. In my own space, right? So in my early 30s, here I am, this protective armor of muscle, still this kind of hardcore fitness trainer or whatever, and ignoring the signals that my body had been telling me for years, where I had over trained and over supplemented and overfed and did all that stuff. And my body just revolted on me. I started to develop pretty severe gut issues, and they got so bad that within about 45 days or so, I lost almost 15 pounds of lean body mass, which hit me right in my ego. I'm a muscle guy, I'm a strong fitness guy, and there goes 15 pounds of muscle. Nothing I can do about it. And I think I'm eating healthy. I got the right amount of protein. I've got the right amount of fat, carbs. I'm working out all the time. What the hell's going on? I go to the doctor and they do their testing. Of course they can't figure out what's going on. Western medicine does some things very well, but it does some other things not so well. Chronic health issues being the one, some of the stuff that they're not too good at. And so they couldn't figure out what was going on. At one point, I thought I may have an autoimmune issue like Crohn's. Couldn't figure out what was going on. And I was very desperate. I felt terrible, absolutely terrible. And so, out of desperation, I sat down with some of my staff, who, at this point, I was good friends with, and I threw in the towel. I actually called in a meeting with them, and I said, you guys know what I've been dealing with. You can see how terrible I'm feeling. None of my knowledge, none of what I thought would help is doing anything for me. I'm getting worse. I will do whatever you guys tell me.

I had a bodywork specialist who also is an expert in meditation. I had someone who did gut testing, hormone testing, had my acupuncturist. And I said, I'll do whatever you guys tell me. I give in. I can't do this anymore. And I had to make a mental switch in order to do this. And the mental switch was I could no longer focus on my appearance. I could no longer be driven by my aesthetics or my physique. There's no way that would work. In order for me to give up control and be open enough to do what these people would recommend, I had to give up on that. And this is something I learned to do with clients who, when I would have clients, for example, that had a past history of body obsession, at this point, I had worked with quite a few people who had histories with bulimia and anorexia, and I trained them and worked with counselors. And one effective strategy from a fitness perspective was to take that obsessive focus and shift it to something a little bit healthier. So I go, I'd shift it from body image to performance. So now that we're just going to focus on how strong you can get, it was a very effective first step. So I said, okay, I'm going to focus my obsessive behaviors of how I look and how strong I am to my health. Now I am completely focused on being healthy. I don't care what I look like in the mirror. In fact, I'm not even going to pay attention to myself in the mirror. I'm just focused on health. And so I did. I did exactly what they told me. I mean, make a long story short, I identified food intolerance issues. I did.

Some treatments for sibo, some herbal treatments for sibo. I started more of a spiritual practice that reduced the intensity and volume of my workouts, focused more on sleep, and did all of this. And it was a long process. After about a year, I was really feeling much better. I had made some tremendous changes in how I felt. I no longer had these gut issues, although my gut was still sensitive. It was much better. I felt much better. Health felt good. And I was at one of their houses. We were all hanging out together, and we were hanging out in the pool. And I had excused myself to use the restroom, and I had walked into the bathroom, and in their bathroom, they had several mirrors on the wall. And I caught a glimpse of a reflection of a reflection of myself. And so the strange thing happened, right For a split second, I didn't recognize that it was me. For a split second, I really was truly objective in terms of how I looked. It looked like someone else. And then a second later, I realized it was me. But in that split second, I had this very powerful, life changing realization. I had looked better than I had ever looked before.

By focusing on my health and not by focusing on my looks. It was crazy. Up until this point, I completely, I ignored my appearance in the mirror. I had to do that. It was the only way for me to make that shift. And so for the first time, I actually paid attention to how I looked. And I really couldn't believe that I looked so much better. And my focus was never, at this point, I had not focused on my appearance at all. It was all about my health. And it was pretty life changing. Now, the voice and message that my audience hears on my podcast really came from that learning period. That's how I communicate. A lot of what I talk about now was through that period. So one of the things I say on my podcast a lot is that if you chase appearance and aesthetics, you'll get a little bit of it, but your health will suffer. And eventually when your health suffers enough, you'll lose your appearance and aesthetics. If you chase health, you'll gain a great deal of health. And the side effect of that is you'll look really good.

And so that's that whole period there for me.

Wow, that's such an important message and a powerful message. Thank you so much. So let's talk a little bit about your MAPS approach to fitness. I assume that's an acronym and we all know there's a lot of noise out in the fitness world and it can be very confusing what approaches to take. And a lot of it is glad grounded in appealing to people's sense of unworthiness and then these unrealistic body type images and so forth. So I assume MAPS is an answer to that and a science based approach to fitness. So could you talk a little bit about that approach?

Yes, absolutely. So MAPS stands for Muscular Adaptation Programming System. Now what I talked about earlier, about the roots of why we get into self improvement through fitness and health, that's a lot of self work that people will have to focus on. So you got to go into any fitness program. I don't care what it is. Whether you do the ones that I've designed or you do others, your chances of success are much higher if you go into it with that standpoint. Now, MAPS programs are the structure in programming, the exercises, the sets and reps, and what you actually do. And from a physiological standpoint, what is most effective. Okay, when I designed the first MAPS program and subsequent MAPS programs, we have quite a bit now, each one designed for different goals and different people.

Every time we design a program, the idea is to consider the current context of modern life. The average person that's going into this program. So I'm not necessarily. Although we do have very advanced extreme workout programs, especially the first ones we have, and most of the programs we have, I'm thinking to myself, somebody who wants to improve their health, they're not a fitness fanatic. They're not, you know, this is not what defines them. But they do want to feel better and improve their health. And let's consider the context of modern life. So let me illustrate that first, just so this all makes sense. Modern life is very busy and hectic, but also very sedentary. Okay? So our time is filled up with more stuff. I mean, our work now comes with us everywhere we go. Your phone is there, your emails are there. Our parents are far more involved in children's activities. When I was a kid, you just went outside and played. Now we schedule play dates. That means parents need to be involved.

We're just busy. Our time is occupied. So we don't have a whole lot of space in our schedule necessarily. And that's combined with a high level of inactivity. We have done an effective job, quite an amazing job of innovating to the point where we don't have to exert ourselves physically at all. Most people wake up in the morning, you know, eat breakfast, walk to their car, drive to work, sit down at work all day, drive home, come home, sit down on their couch. And so we just don't move a lot. So we're sedentary, we're busy. And then there's another factor that really defines modern life. Food is plentiful, cheap, it's everywhere. And our markets have done a phenomenal job of giving us everything we desire with food. So what we have is hyper palatable.

Foods that really satisfy our hedonistic desires. So sitting on my couch, I can crave sweet or salty or Indian food or Chinese food or Italian food or whatever. And I can get it. In fact, I can get it delivered to my door.

Exactly.

Okay? And we're at the point now, this has happened now long enough. Right now we're at least a couple generations into this, where the market for food is largely target. It's largely designed around one value that food provides, because food provides lots of different values, but the one value we value the most is how pleasurable is this food to eat. So if you're sitting around with your friends and you're talking about getting lunch, it's usually, what do I feel like eating? What's going to be the most enjoyable to eat? So we tend to eat that way. So lots of food, very cheap all of it tastes really good, very busy and we don't move. So that's the context. Now let's look at exercise.

The goal of exercise should be exercise should be a tool used to improve the quality of your life. And in the context of modern life, we want to use exercise to train your body to buffer against all those things that I just talked about. We need to buffer against those challenges that we're being presented with. Okay? One of the best ways to do that today is to teach your body to have a faster metabolism, to teach your body to burn more calories on its own. Now, historically speaking, if I go back a thousand years, this is probably not a great strategy. If I'm a hunter gatherer, I don't necessarily want a red hot burning metabolism because food is pretty scarce. So it's not a good idea. But if I'm John Smith and I sit on my couch all day long and food is really tasty, well, if I can burn more calories, I'm going to get away with a lot more. In fact, when you look at studies on things like sugar, saturated fat, and other things that can potentially be unhealthy in your diet.

The impact of those things changes quite a bit when the calories that come in either match the calories that you burn or a bit lower. In fact, a high sugar diet has far less damage on your body when your calories are low than when they're high. If you eat more calories than you burn and you have high sugar, all kinds of problems happen. If your sugar's high but your calories are lower than when you burn, a lot of those problems tend to disappear, right? So one of the best ways to buffer against that is to have a faster metabolism.

We also want to buffer against the sedentary aspect of our lives because we don't move, we become immobile. Hundreds of years ago, pain came from too much activity, back breaking labor. Somebody had a bad back. If somebody had bad knees, it was probably because they were beating their bodies up endlessly, day after day for 12 hours just to survive. Today the odds are if you live in a modern society, if you have a bad back or you have bad knees, it's due to inactivity. Your body is inactive and your joints are not moving optimally and you're weak and weakness leads to immobility and you start to develop problems. There's also these other problems that didn't necessarily exist a while ago that are problems of modern life. Bone loss, osteoporosis in women, sometimes in Men, this is the result of inactivity, hormone imbalances due to inactivity. Men's testosterone levels, for example, have been declining now for decades. This is the result of, partially the result of inactivity, estrogen and progesterone imbalances in women. Inactivity with high stress, kind of moderate to high stress, consistent lifestyle. So considering all those things, considering that we also don't have much time, what's the best approach? Well, there's two ways we can view exercise from this standpoint. One way is I'm going to try and burn as many calories as I can while I'm exercising. Now, that's okay, but here's the problem with that. That takes a lot of time. I got to do it every day. Every day I have to find a way to burn an additional 5 or 600 calories, which, by the way, is hard work. Okay? A 500 burning for the most. If you ever use cardio machines at the gym and it tells you how many calories you burned, you can throw that number away. That's a fake. That's an advertising number. The reality is, most people, it would take them about an hour and a half of hard exercise to burn about 500 calories. Okay, for most people, so it's an hour and a half a day to burn 500 calories a day. That's a lot of work. And by the way, eating 500 calories is quite easy. I could do that in less than five minutes. Okay? So the calorie burn approach, with the limited amount of time that we have, the amount of work that it takes isn't the best. There's also something else, though, that goes into that. The types of workouts that burn the most calories tend to be cardiovascular based, right? So running, if I go outside and run, or if I do this super vigorous elliptical workout or this one hour intense spin cycle class, I'll burn more calories during the workout. And yes, this is true. But there's another part that we need to consider. Exercise trains your body to adapt in ways that make it better at that particular type of activity. Our bodies adapt. That's what they do. So if I'm training my body with lots of high calorie burning cardiovascular activity, my body, first of all says we need to get better at endurance. I need more stamina and endurance. Your body does not need strength, lots of strength to do this. It just needs stamina and endurance simultaneously. Your body says we're burning lots of calories. We need to become more efficient during this activity, in fact, if. If you did an hour of cycling today and you did it over the course of a year, we would find that your body would actually burn less calories over the course of a year because your body just becomes more efficient. It's adapting. It's trying to become better at what it's doing. So I don't need much strength. I need to become more efficient. And so what you start to actually do to your body, believe it or not, is you start to slow your metabolism down. Now, this isn't inherently wrong. There's nothing inherently bad about this. This is an adaptation that happens. But in the context of modern life, this is terrible. Now you're doing an hour of intense cardiovascular activity every single day. And it works for three months, and then it stops working. And now, just to maintain your metabolic rate, you got to keep it going, you stop. You got to slow our metabolism down. You've slowed your metabolism down. In fact, there was a very interesting study done years ago, very, very well done study on modern hunter gatherers. There's the Hadza tribe. These are, for all intents and purposes, they live the way that we think we lived thousands of years ago. And scientists went to study this tribe, and one thing that they did is they said, we want to see how many calories they're burning every single day. Because they're so active, they're moving all over the place. They're walking, they're jogging, they're gathering food. So they tested their burn and their metabolic rate through some pretty sophisticated methods. And they actually were shocked to find that the Hadza tribesmen burned not that many more calories than the average couch potato in Western countries. And that's just because their bodies had adapted. Right? If a Hadza Tribesman was burning 6,000 calories a day, they would die because they couldn't gather or hunt 6,000 calories every single day. Okay, so the Maps workout programs are designed for the context of modern life, which is, let's say you have two days a week. And in my experience as a trainer, by the way, I only ever ask people to do about one or two days a week of resistance training or exercise. This is what I'm looking for because usually this fits most people's schedules. Now, here's the deal. When they're consistent with that, over time, they tend to find more activity, time for activity later on. But I usually get people to commit to that because it's realistic and it's going to give them more bang for their buck if done properly. So the MAPS workout programs are designed to work with the context of modern life, which is minimal time, speed up your metabolism. Can we get your metabolism to burn more calories on its own? So now, through training properly sitting on your couch like you normally do, or sitting at your desk at work like you normally do, your body now is burning 300, 400, 500, 600 more calories a day on its own. You have achieved a fascia metabolism. This is a huge insurance. Now the process of getting there really is through sending the signal to the body that says we need strength and we need muscle. Okay? Strength and muscle teach your body to become less efficient with calories, to burn more calories. Now here's a nice side effect of that training to build strength and muscle, you end up developing a more sculpted physique, you end up developing better posture, you end up developing better mobility. Because lack of mobility issues these days are due to weakness, they're not due to overuse. So you have better mobility in men. Resistance training reliably raises testosterone in women when it's applied properly, balances out estrogen and progesterone, and is the most effective thing to counter osteoporosis. And when we're talking about things like insulin resistance, Alzheimer's resistance training, through building muscle, which muscle is a phenomenal tissue for insulin sensitivity, you offset those things. So the MAPS training programs are designed with those things in mind.

Wow. So. Well, you just explained a lot of the results I've had in my experience with cardiovascular exercise over the years. And.

I'm actually want to ask some questions about myself and what I'm doing here as offering myself a little bit of a guinea pig an example. But first of all, you're really moving into what my next question was is term. We hear a lot about these days biohacking and it seems like you're getting into the real knowledge about the body to move to well being and fitness in the most efficient ways. And also I'm curious if you customize these MAPS programs around gender. I'm clearly a lot of women. I mean I think we have a lot of women on this summit and which is wonderful. And you know, women tend to gravitate towards yoga and Pilates and things like that all there are certain a lot of women that do weight training and even bodybuilding. Right. But so how do you find in terms of working with both men and women? I mean, I know your podcast is for guys. Is it you mainly have a male audience or do you offer a lot of programming with women as well?

No, Actually, our audience is very evenly split, men and women. One of the worst things that the fitness industry has done is they've stereotyped resistance training as a man, as a male exercise. And part of the problem was the popularity of bodybuilders like Arnold Schwarzenegger that presented this almost unachieved, this very distorted view of resistance training. Now, first of all, I can train a woman like a bodybuilder for her entire life, and she'll look nothing like a bodybuilder ever. In order to look like that, you have to have the one in a million genetics. And you also typically will take anabolic steroids. Not going to happen. Don't worry about that. In fact, what'll end up happening, you'll just have more shape and firmness to your body. So resistance training suitable for everybody. And women really love resistance training for many different reasons, one of them being they feel strong. And it's very empowering for women to feel strength. This is what I've heard from my female clients. Like, wow, I. I lifted my luggage in the overhead compartment, and I never felt so secure in my body. So that's a great thing. Also, the shape and curve that I think women.

From a visual standpoint, tend to want comes from developing muscle. So nice glutes, hamstrings, nice posture, nice arms. That comes from muscle that does not necessarily just come from skinny or.

So resistance training, extremely appropriate for everybody. You will not look. You're not going to work out and look like a bodybuilder the next day. It's not going to happen. And even if you were the one in a million women that do develop muscle very quickly still doesn't happen the day, the next day. What will end up happening is you'll get to a point where you say, this is about as toned and sculpted as I want to get, in which case you start to scale back your workouts. The workouts that we have are not gender specific because there really are no differences in men and women in training. The differences are in the individual. So if I were to create a program that were different or tailored, it really boils down to the individual.

Men and women may have different goals. Men may say they want to develop their chest more, women may say they want to develop their glutes more. But really, in terms of training the body, one of the most effective exercises for the lower body is a barbell squat. Whether you're a man or a woman, one of the best exercises for the upper body may be an overhead press. Doesn't matter if you're a male or a woman, in fact. And again, this is one just really a sore point for me and my co hosts. Women have been heavily marketed to and lied to, more so than even men from the fitness space. In fact, the programs that are advertised to women, this is a workout just for women, are actually the least effective programs. In fact, if you want to buy a program and you go in the traditional mainstream of fitness and you're a woman, you're going to get better results if you buy the program that's advertised to men. For women, what they tend to do is they tend to say we're going to use really lightweight and you're going to do 50 reps. And then they'll use things, they'll say things like, you're not going to build muscle, you're going to develop long lean muscles. Which is all marketing jargon. Muscles don't lengthen or shorten, by the way. You're born with the length of your muscle. They just develop or they shrink. Toned, for example, is a made up word. Your muscles don't tone, they build or they shrink. And when they build to a small degree, they feel more firm. So you're better off actually going for the male advertised programs. But yeah, our programs, male, female, doesn't matter. They're going to give you great results. Of course, we designed them for the masses, so I can't individualize each and every one, but your best bet would be to buy the one that you think fits more, what you're going to enjoy doing and your current fitness, level of fitness. So if you're a beginner, you may want to start with one of our beginner programs like Maps Starter. If you're, you know, have some experience with resistance training, then you could do something like Maps Anabolic. If you're athletically minded and you have fun with your workouts and you really like the functional aspect and you may do more of a MAPS performance and so forth.

That's great, really helpful. So let me use myself as an example for a moment. I'm 71 and I'm really interested in health and fitness because at my age life is not very forgiving. You don't take care of the body, you know it really quickly. I was an athlete when I was young. Swimming and a bit of track football, but mostly swimming and water polo were my primary sports. And that was a long time ago. I've got two artificial knees which I'm very grateful for. I went through the work of getting that and rehabbing. I worked at it really hard. And so I've got two really good knees now and I can hike and do all that kind of stuff, but I'm really busy, I'm super busy. And so I have the excuse why I don't have the time to go to a gym and do all that. So I've been building a home gym and you know, so I've got a weight bench, I've got a stationary bike, I've got a dips thing, I've got a heavy bag, I've got, you know, different barbells, hand weights and so forth. And you know, I've been trying to develop a bit of routine, but what I often do is, you know, anytime I come, that's out of my basement where my studio is where I'm right now. So I come down, I look, I just go over and do some dips, I go over and lift some few weights or I keep some barbells upstairs. I got a, I got a break between, between calls, I go list some weights, I do some weights, I do this. And I'm sure that's not in a very efficient approach. And I try to do a little bit of that every day. It sounds like from what you're saying, I'd be better off having a well designed, scientifically designed regimen that I even do two days a week. So just give me your thoughts on that. And especially since what I'm mostly interested, I mean, I want to look good, feel good, feel healthy. I want to feel healthy. But also I really want energy. I'm very busy, I'm entrepreneurial, I need the energy. I want to have the energy for my business and for my friends and for my family and so forth.

Yeah, no, actually the approach you have is the best for longevity. So you're actually doing a great job. In fact.

When I say two workouts a week, remember I'm talking to the person who just. Making time to dedicate to exercise is very difficult. This doesn't mean that daily activity has no value. Daily activity has all the value, especially when you're looking at longevity. Now the key is if you want to make daily activity a part of your life, is to literally make it a part of your life. So rather than saying I'm going to go every day and do 45 minutes of structured exercise every single day, a better approach would be to say after breakfast, lunch and dinner, I do a 15 minute walk. You're more likely to be consistent with that. It's very important because.

A subpar written program done consistently will give you better results than a excellent written program that you're doing consistently. Okay, so consistency is very important here. So daily activity, very important. In fact, when I would train my clients, walking was the form of daily activity that I would often recommend. It's easy, everybody knows how to do it. And I would often recommend that they do it after some kind of ritual that they already do. And usually it was breakfast, lunch and dinner. Now, for someone like yourself, I would say continue doing what you're doing. If you're looking for more energy, more strength, you probably do great by adding literally one traditional resistance training workout a week that would take you about 45 minutes. Just add that to what you're currently doing. And really all you would need to do is go into your home gym and do three to five, maybe three to five, probably four very basic gross motor movement compound exercises. So you might want to go in there and do one day a barbell squat, a barbell bench press, a barbell row and an overhead press. And then that's it for that day. You don't want to train to failure. So your goal isn't to lift until you can't move the weight anymore, but rather get close to it and stop. So about maybe 2 reps before. This is a much better approach. It gives you much more consistent results. And then maybe the next time you go in there, you pick another four gross motor movements. I'm going to do some weighted lunges, I'm going to do some push ups, I'm going to do a pull up, I'm going to do a reverse crunch or something like that. And the goal is to do straight sets. Remember, we're trying to train for strength. We're trying to build muscle, speed up the metabolism. So what you would do is you would do one set of, let's say 10 repetitions of an exercise. At that moderate, high intensity, but not extreme, you would rest for about a minute. And the reason why you want to do that is you want to allow the body to rebuild its ATP, which is a form of muscle energy. And once it's rebuilt, you train it again. Remember, you're training for strength. You're not necessarily training for endurance or stamina. And that's it. And that 1:45 minute four exercise workout a week in combination to what you're doing, you would see tremendous benefit.

Well, that's really doable and that's really good news and inspiring. A couple of things you said, I have actually heard and read even I think I heard this recently, that doing reps to Failure. It's those last couple reps pushing to failure where you get the most benefit. And you're saying quite the opposite here.

Yeah, no, nonsense. Yeah. So going to failure. So you're not just training your muscles when you're working out, you're also training your central nervous system. And exercise is a stress on the body, okay? Applied properly, it's a good stress. The stress is the reason why the body adapts in the first place. It gets stronger because it wants to get, it doesn't want to be under the same amount of stress that it was before. And then you end up adding weight or doing more reps. And so you continue to appropriately stress the body. But the central nervous system adapts as well when you exercise and the central nervous system, you want to think of it this way, right? So muscles would be like speakers. Central nervous system would be the amplifier. Okay? So the amplifier sends the signal to the speakers. The speakers project out the sound. You could have the biggest, most powerful speakers in the world, but if you had a terrible amplifier, you'd get very little sound out of that speaker. Training to failure is too much stress and intensity for the central nervous system. So although the muscles could probably handle it okay, the central nervous system doesn't do a good job of handling that kind of training, especially when it's done frequently. And so what ends up happening is you end up getting diminishing returns, you end up not progressing. Your best bet or the most the best approach. You definitely want to train with intensity. But don't lift until you can't move it anymore. Stop about two a rep, two to three reps before that. So if I know I could do 10 max out, I stop at 7. Here's another thing. Treat exercise as practice, not as a workout. So let me explain what I mean. If I get under a barbell to do barbell squats, my goal is not to beat up my legs to get sore. My goal is to do perfect squats. I want to keep getting good at squats. This is the best approach for long term success. The best approach. I will always train myself appropriately if I do it this way. If I train myself to beat up my legs, I'll overdo it at some point, or I'll hurt myself at some point and my form will be sacrificed at some point. So treat exercises like practice. In fact, this is the reason why runners or running causes so many injuries. It's one of the most injury prone forms of exercise that exists. And it's because the average person doesn't know how to run properly. We stopped running since we were kids. So then we're 30 and we decide we're going to go put on some shoes and go run. But rather than think to ourselves, I'm going to go and learn how to run and perfect it. We think, I'm going to run until I can't breathe anymore because I'm doing this as a workout. And then they hurt themselves because their technique is wrong or whatever. So treat the exercise like practice. Do it frequently, and you'll get those good, consistent results throughout your life.

Wow. These are really great distinctions. Really important. I'm just so excited about this conversation and being able to bring this really practical information with these key distinctions to our audience. So I have one question, maybe a little bit off topic, but this summit is really about people actualizing their lives. For a lot of people, it's about, you know, how do you go out and start a business, or how do you create more abundance in your life? Or, you know, and, you know, you've created a very successful business in partnership with three other guys. And I just wonder what, what is your, you know, so much of the model is the solo founder, the solo CEO. Get out there, you know, and, and, and you created this with, with partners. And I wonder what that journey has been like for you in terms of, of taking a collaborative partnership approach to building a successful business. I know I could be a big.

Subject, but that's actually a very, very good question. I think when you view a business partnership, you have to look at it the same way you would look at a marriage. Okay. When you are married, they say, talk to anybody who's been married for years and they'll tell you it's work. And what they mean by it's work is that you're always working and growing with each other. The goal is to work together. The goal isn't. For example, this was a great lesson I learned years ago, getting into arguments with my wife. Sometimes the goal is to win the argument, and sometimes winning the argument is actually losing. Because now I might have won the argument, but now she hates me and our relationship suffers. So maybe I'll just take a step back. And the relationship is the goal, right? So in business, when you work with partners, it is a marriage. And so just like when you get married, you want to pick people who share your same core values. This is very important. Core values are things that you don't compromise on. Everything else I can compromise on, but I have certain core values that I just don't compromise on. And so the partners I work with, we all share the same core values. One of them is integrity. All of us, integrity and authenticity is extremely important. So important, in fact, that we would sacrifice our business to maintain our integrity and authenticity. And I know that sounds cool, in fact, that's kind of a hip thing to say now nowadays. But let me tell you, in the fitness and health space, integrity and authenticity is hard to find. If you're a fitness expert and you are running a business and a supplement company comes to you and says, we're going to pay you $5,000 to talk about our fat burner.

And you're going to be honest, what you're honestly going to say is, fat burners don't work. Those are, you know, that's all false advertising. They're not effective. I'm not going to sell you a product that's difficult to do if you're, if you're, if you're driven by money and not by integrity. Honesty is very difficult to do in the fitness space, at least from a revenue generating standpoint. But all me and my co hosts and my partners, we all came from a training background. We all trained people for decades and we love fitness, we love people. And so for us, it was like, look, it may work, it may not work, but we're not going to lie, we're just going to tell the truth no matter what. Now, it just so happened to work great for us. So that's one aspect of our core values. Another core value that we have is we're not. None of us desire to be in the limelight. None of us desire fame. None of us need to buy expensive things for ourselves. In fact, we would prefer to reinvest in the business, grow in the business and find ways of reaching more people. This is very important. If one of my partners wanted to just pay themselves and buy nice cars and stuff like that, it'd be very difficult. We would fight quite a bit. But we all have that core value. All of us also have the core value of looking at the, the pinnacle value, which is help as many people as possible through our message. And so when we sit down and we argue ways of doing that, at the very end of it, if I'm wrong but the approach that we're going with is the right approach, then that's okay. I'm okay with that because I don't care if I'm right or wrong, really. I want to do the best. So that's the key. And that's difficult. And just like being married, it's a challenge. So I'd say if you pick a partner, you definitely want to look at those things. What are your core values? Find someone who shares those core values that you can't compromise on, because if somebody doesn't share those, you're going to be in a tough situation.

Well, that's really great. I mean, we could situate this conversation on so many of the different days of the summit because it applies to so many different dimensions and you know what you're talking about there. It could apply the same principles we've been talking about. Relationship. Whether it's our primary relationship or our business partnerships and relationships, it's a practice. And if we embrace the practice and love the practice.

Then the relationship is going to flower. Right. It's going to flourish.

Correct.

This has been incredibly valuable. So how can people find out more about the Maps approach and about your podcast?

So the podcast is Mind Pump. You can find us on pretty much any platform that does podcasts. We're also on YouTube. The podcast combines fitness, health and entertainment. We also know that just talking about fitness isn't going to reach as many people as possible. So we try to make the podcast also entertaining. So many of our episodes we talk about current events, our lives, we tell fun stories, we have a great time. And in the back half of our episodes we answer fitness questions and we get into the nitty gritty. So find us on any platform, listen to us. That's where you'll get most of the best information. We also have blogs, we have a YouTube channel with exercises that we teach. You can find all that under mind pump. Mindpumpmedia.com would be the website. And then if you want to learn specifically about the workout programs themselves, you would go to maps fitnessproducts.com great.

Wonderful. Well, we'll put all that information with your bio on the summit so people can find out all that. And this has just been a great conversation and I've really enjoyed it. And I certainly know I'm going to keep pursuing your work and taking advantage because there's such beautiful alignment between this approach to fitness and health. I mean, I don't know whether I heard you say this in something I read. I heard somebody else say it recently that you can be fit, physically fit in a sense of muscle and so forth and not be very healthy.

And you can have a sense of well being and not be super fit. So it's integrating the two together.

Oh, I'll tell you what, and this is just if anybody's watching this who works in the fitness space in a gym as a trainer or an instructor, they know exactly what I'm talking about. Remember, I've trained, I don't know, probably thousands of people, either directly or by proxy through other trainers in the gyms that I've owned of just everyday people. And I've also worked with people who work in fitness. Okay. The worst relationships with body image, with nutrition and with fitness you will find in the fitness space. The worst obsessions, the most unhealthy eating behaviors you will find in the fitness space. Oftentimes what you see does not reflect, at least in the fitness space, what's actually going on underneath. So, yeah, that doesn't tell the whole story. And real health and balance doesn't tend to look extreme. It looks good, it looks healthy. It's vibrant. The extreme depictions we see of fitness, the shredded look, the exaggerated proportions, that really isn't a reflection of inner health. And if you pursue that.

You will find yourself in an unhealthy place. And I need to say that because I think the people in my space tend to get idolized as the best examples of health and many of them should not be.

Wow, this is great. Such a powerful message. Well, thank you so much and wish you all the best and can't wait for our audience to watching this and hearing this conversation and then have the opportunity to follow up and learn more about your work.

Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you.

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